A Feast of Brief Hopes

by Bruce Meyer

  A Feast of Brief Hopes

  Essential Prose Series 144

  Guernica Editions Inc. acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. The Ontario Arts Council is an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada.

  A Feast of Brief Hopes

  Bruce Meyer

  Copyright © 2018, Bruce Meyer and Guernica Editions Inc.

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Michael Mirolla, editor

  David Moratto, Interior and cover design

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  First edition.

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  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2017955485

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Meyer, Bruce, 1957-, author

  A feast of brief hopes / Bruce Meyer. -- First edition.

  (Essential prose series ; 144)

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77183-240-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77183-241-0

  (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77183-242-7 (Kindle)

  I. Title. II. Series: Essential prose series ; 144

  PS8576.E93F43 2018C813’.54C2017-906455-XC2017-906456-8

  Wisdom has built her house,

  She has hewn out her seven pillars;

  She has prepared her food, she has mixed her wine;

  She has also set her table;

  She has sent out her maidens, she calls

  From the tops of the heights of the city:

  “Whoever is naive, let him turn in here!”

  To him who lacks understanding she says,

  “Come, eat of my food

  And drink of the wine I have mixed.

  Forsake your folly and live …”

  —Proverbs 9:1–6

  Contents

  Long Shot

  Girl in the Blue Skirt

  When Everything Changed

  With My Hat On

  A Feast of Brief Hopes

  The Day I Was Born

  Instruction

  Elsie

  Mercury Row

  The Good Old Days

  Visitors

  The Cards in Her Hand

  Catchers

  Chance

  T & C

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Long Shot

  They’d changed. A group of my former professors had invited me back to give the annual alumni lecture. There was a fragility to them that I hadn’t remembered from my days as a grad student. They’d grown older. Some of my favourites had passed away. The city where I had spent my doctoral years was still an industrial town. I knew I was back in my old stomping grounds as I approached the bridge that spanned the harbour. The shock of nostalgia comes when things, preserved as they were, no longer seem familiar.

  As we finished lunch I was invited to visit the anatomy lab by the chair, Bob Thurson. The idea made me feel ill.

  We walked the length of the campus to the science building. All the way there, my host spoke to me about how much he admired Rilke and how he was moved when he read my discussion of the poet in my most recent book. “I love what Rilke said about nightmares and monsters,” he said with his head turned to me face on. The sidewalk was heaved and uneven because it was late March, and I was afraid I would make a misstep. He noticed that I was wary of my balance. “Ear trouble?” he asked.

  I said: “Yes. It runs in the family.”

  “I will show you where the problem is,” he said, nodding and making a mental note of what he would demonstrate for me.

  “You know,” he added after a moment of reflection, “life is an incredible thing. We’re all incredible things, machines, biological units … whatever you want to call them. Did you know that over ninety percent of all conceptions spontaneously abort themselves? There is a code to life. Everything has to play by life’s rules or life doesn’t work. Most of the time a woman isn’t even aware that she has passed off a conception that was not working by the rules. You, me, the folks we just had lunch with — we’re all long shots that came through. Ever bet on the ponies?”

  I said: “Yes. I like to play long shots, and most of the time I never win.” I thought of the Kentucky Derby a few years back when a big long shot surprised everyone and came in by a nose. A friend of mine won a bundle that day because, like me, he is a poet who can’t get beyond the poetry of life.

  “Everything works by the rules,” Thurson repeated.

  In the lab, students were seated at benches along the outer walls. Some were probing pieces of pink, rubbery material in trays of liquid. Others were turning over grey and brownish-red objects in their hands and talking to each other.

  We took off our coats in Thurson’s office. A glass wall separated us from the lab, but we could observe everything that was going on among the students with their specimens. The benches in the middle of the room were stacked with cubes of plastic and inside the cubes there were blue, yellow, and orange objects floating in translucent space. Eyeballs stared back at us. Ears floated and appeared to be listening, and a severed nose looked as if it was about to inhale.

  Thurson handed me a white lab coat just like the ones the students were wearing, and I did up the front buttons. As I buttoned it, I remembered I was wearing my best tie. I tucked it inside my shirt. I was afraid it would get splattered in anatomy.

  He told me to grab a pair of rubber gloves as we entered the lab. I fought and tugged before they snapped into place around my fingers.

  Our first stop was a white plastic dish pan like the kind my wife and I used every night to do the pots that were too greasy to put in the dishwasher. The room stank of formaldehyde which smells a bit like dishwater before the rosy sunlight smell goes out of it. It is a smell just sour enough to be unpleasant and just sweet enough to remind one of summer.

  “Don’t you just love the aroma of the place,” Thurson said, beaming. “I smell that every day of my week. It locks in freshness.”

  He reached into the dish pan and pulled out a cold, grey tangle of worried matter that held together in his fingers.

  “Hold out your hands.”

  I cupped my hands the way I held them in church when I lined up for a wafer from the priest. It was a fresh brain.

  He drew a long pencil from the breast pocket of his lab coat and started to point out the various features. “The frontal lobe … and this is the pituitary … and here’s why you get ice cream headaches as the referred sensation travels up the nerves from the mouth … and here is why you suffer from migraines.”

  I was holding in my hand not only a human brain, but everything the brain’s owner had known. I wondered if it still contained all its experience — the joy and nervous fear of the first time the person made love, the memory of streets it had known, the tide lines of conversations, and dreams it had made for itself when it was dead to the world in sleep but still part of life.

 
And was it part of life now?

  Was it aware I was holding it?

  Could it be thinking?

  I thought better than to ask him these questions, but there was one thing I wanted answered.

  I said: “Where do our dreams come from?”

  He smiled. “I could say they come from somewhere beyond us, but that’s not true. They come from this part at the back.”

  I imagined someone sitting in their own brain, as if they were seated in the last row of an empty movie theatre and trying to make out the details on a distant screen as the images flashed out of sequence and the dreamer tried to make a story of them.

  “Would they still be there, in there?” I asked.

  “Ah, no, no, we don’t ask such questions in here. This is a place of science. You’ll have to take that one back to the English or Psychology departments. And even they won’t have an answer.”

  “Just testing,” I said.

  “Test all you want. What we want to know is how things work.”

  I laid the brain back in its bath. It almost floated for a moment, and I felt, though I could not say I knew, that it wanted to come back into consciousness before it was submerged again.

  We turned and on the counter behind us was a blue, yellow, and red bonsai encased in Lucite. “These are the blood vessels of the brain. The red ones are blood in and the blue ones are blood out.”

  “What are the yellow ones for?”

  “Those are the vessels that feed the nerves.”

  I said: “How did you make this?”

  “We took a brain just like the one you held. We shot latex into the arteries, and when the latex dried we submerged the brain in a bath of acid. The tissue melted away leaving only this beautiful structure.”

  It reminded me of lone oaks I passed in farmers’ fields each winter morning on my way to work, an outline of branches and twigs casting a shadow in the drifting snow of the dawn’s light. This arbor vita of stems and branches had lost all the dreams and thoughts that had once inhabited it. That upset me.

  “It is sort of sad,” I said.

  “There is no room for sadness here. We are clinical. We are objective and detached. That’s the difference between the sciences and the arts.”

  “Does it ever get lonely, I mean, just thinking about everything from a distance even when you are up close to it?”

  He laughed. “No. That’s when we turn to you guys. That’s when we read poetry. Love poetry. The poetry of the soul.”

  “Ah, so you do believe in the soul.”

  “Only in poetry.”

  Our next stop on the tour was another counter where a human head, in Lucite of course, had been sawn in half.

  Thurson said: “I understand you have sinus problems,” which I do, and I nodded. He showed me the sinus cavities. He explained what the doctor had done when he straightened my deviated septum. I saw the tongue still bedded in the mouth as if it wanted to speak. I was fascinated.

  Then he turned the half head around.

  I said: “My God, that’s my old super! I knew him! His name was Bill Howard. On summer evenings when I was writing my thesis, I used to join him up on the roof of our apartment building. We’d sit up there, have beers, watch the sunset, and stare beyond the steel mills and smoky factories, beyond the harbour and the bridge. He said he was leaving his body to science, and here he is.”

  My host’s face turned red, and he closed his eyes. “You have just committed the absolute sin of anatomical studies. You have personified a specimen. You have not only told me his name, you have given me his life story. Now, I can’t use him to teach because I will look upon this head as the person you describe and not as an intricate piece of biological marvel. We’re going to have to get another head now. Do you know what you’ve done? I’m going to ask you to go into my office, take off the coat, throw the gloves in the yellow hazardous waste bin, and leave immediately.”

  I apologized to Thurson, but I had crossed the anatomical Rubicon, and I did as he asked, grabbed my coat and walked off to the library.

  I saw my breath in front of me as I hurried along the slightly jumbled and slanting slabs of sidewalk that would be torn up by the spring and put back together in their correct, level, pattern. I knew the story would get around before evening about me being tossed from the lab. I felt embarrassed, but the questions would not go away.

  I thought about Bill Howard.

  Bill had led a rough life. He smoked because he said it was one of the things he did best. Cancer killed him.

  We sat on a wide strip of metal flashing with our backs against the housing of the building’s A/C unit. Every now and then, the motor would spring to life, shooting a column of hot air above us, and we’d feel the vibration through our spines, and look at the beers propped on our knees, and watch how the meniscus of our brews danced in the brown bottles.

  He would turn to me and say things such as: “Yep, it’s a hard life.”

  Off in the distance, ships were passing in and out of the harbour beneath the black bridge that spanned the passageway. Transport trucks flowed over the arch from one side to the other, and the sunset, in one rare moment on a good evening, would poke through the spans and struts and break the sunlight into an intricate web on the bay.

  “That’s life for you,” Bill said as he pointed to the pattern with the lit tip of his cigarette.

  Bill turned away from me. His eyes searched for something in the distance. I remember his profile.

  The stars were just appearing in the dark side of the sky, but the afterglow was alive. A warm wind caught his curly grey hair. The hair and its curls remained part of him, even in death.

  The last time we sat up there and put back a few beers, I looked at him in profile and I knew he was holding that moment in his mind because that was the day the doctors told him he did not have long to live.

  He flicked his cigarette ash onto the pebble and tar surface of the roof, and said: “You know there’s stuff that never leaves you. You keep it right up here.” And he touched his index finger to his temple. “Right up here. You remember nights like this.” And we clinked our beer bottles.

  And as I looked inside his head, he was more than a piece of anatomy. He was a long shot that had come in. I mean, what are the chances of finding an old friend, or at least the part of him I remembered, in a maze of scattered and dismembered pieces? What are the odds? If they are terrible, I’d probably bet on them.

  Students in the lab stared into their microscopes, or turned over hearts and minds, to ask the same questions Dante, Rilke, and my friend the long-shot bettor asked when he put his ten dollars down at the window. What do I believe? I’m not sure, but I’ll bet on it.

  I had looked inside Bill Howard’s mind. In there, in the winding grey matter channels, I wondered if there were still flashes of his wife and his daughters smiling at him just before he lost consciousness in the cancer ward, the cigarettes he had lit as he sat on the roof after long, hot summer days of vacuuming hallways and cutting the grass and bushes around the apartment’s street-front.

  I admit it is a stupid idea, but there, inside the store rooms and closets of his brain, I thought I could see the image of my former self sitting beside him. I was looking where Bill was pointing beyond the towers, steel mills, and factories to an ore freighter riding high and empty toward a vanishing point in the afterglow.

  “Do you see it?” he says. “That one, almost gone?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Yes, I can.”

  Girl in the Blue Skirt

  When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet. I was not a very good one when I tried, and my appearance said everything unpoetic that could be imagined. But I tried. I sent my work to little literary magazines where other struggling poets announced their presence to a world that never read little literary magazines. In the back of one I saw a notice that a woman in London Ontario was starting a chapbook press and was looking for work by new poets. I sent her some of my poems, and soon she wr
ote back to me a very kind letter that she would publish my first cry of presence in the literary world, a little collection of poems I had titled Tongue Twisted.

  When the book was finally finished, the publisher, a tall, blond English woman named Sheila, asked me to come down from Toronto to give a reading to a poetry club in a library basement in London. Sheila was a very pleasant person to whom life had not been kind, yet she bore her sadness with elegance and charm, and she collected young poets with a motherly care. I was invited to sleep on her living room sofa and after the reading we would go to the home of a famous poet for a party he was throwing. He had read my little book and wanted to meet me.

  The party was in a large old house on Wendat Street not far from the university campus where the host was a professor. The walls were painted in a variety of bright colours which made some of the professors appear even drabber than they must have seemed in class. A small, bespectacled, moustached man with a soft voice and a pale brown cardigan noticed me standing in a corner with a bewildered look on my face and came up and introduced himself. “Hi. I’m the host here, I think. I’m Jared Rooney but just call me Jary. And you are?”

  “Delighted to meet you,” I replied in somewhat of a state of awe. I had studied his work in my English classes and suddenly the poet had leapt off the page. I forgot to say my name but added: “I wrote Tongue Twisted that Sheila launched tonight at the library.”

  “I’ve read it. Very good work. I wanted to be there but as you can see …” and he pointed his hand with the glass at the gathering. “Come into the dining room and get a drink.”

  As we entered the dining room someone grabbed Jary by the arm and shuffled him off but not before he called over his shoulder: “Help yourself. We’ll talk in a little while.”

  I stood perusing the table and the array of drinks and snacks laid out when a painting over the buffet caught my eye. It was a large canvas, slightly abstract but with a tremendous energy about the brush work. A cow was jumping over the moon but as it passed the craters and seas the animal was transformed into a blazing meteor. The comet that the cow became reminded me of objects I had seen in the prints of William Blake. A balding, grey-haired man with a very rumpled corduroy jacket and a large, full glass of something amber in his hand came up and stood next to me as we stared at the canvas.