by Bruce Meyer
The officer looked in my car. I was ashamed of the empty coffee cups I’d tossed in the back.
“I’m letting you off with a warning this time because you’ve got a clean record. Just make sure you slow down and be respectful of the safety of others.”
I was going to get off scot free when the bad voice inside me had to chirp up — and I hate that part of myself because I know it is the aspect of my personality that always wants to push things just a little bit too far.
“Glad I made your day, officer. You’d have had nothing to do if I hadn’t been over the limit.”
That almost cost me one hundred dollars. I made a point never to joke with an officer of the law again, even if she was holding my hands admiringly.
The policewoman put me on hold and went away to look for my paperwork. When she returned, she told me I had a doppelganger, a dark creature from the lagoon of the stars that had presided over my birth and my shadow’s. I started wondering who that person was and what he had done that was so awful.
Stars are tricky. I read the horoscopes every day. I read them late in the day so I can fact-check to see if they were correct or not. I have an astrologer friend in New York who tells me that my playful cynicism is insulting to his art, but nonetheless I never want to bet on a horse until it has crossed the finish line. But the dark stars from the day I was born troubled me.
Whoever it was, we shared the same birthday. Given that we both started from the same point in time — the same day and even the same hour — what had made his life so different from mine? Nature versus nurture?
I stared out the window in front of my desk for several hours one afternoon and thought about birthdays. I was thinking about my childhood. It had been a very happy childhood. The birthday parties were special.
My birthday was the one day of the year I was permitted to have soft drinks. One of my friends figured out a way to blow Coca Cola out his nose, and the party came to a halt as my mother scolded us for getting soft drinks on the dining room carpet. The cakes, the candles I blew out in one breath, they were happy memories. Even when I was uncertain about life, the happiness of those days sustained me like a birthday cake of endless corner pieces. Those parties were expressions of the love that had shaped my early years. My mother went to a lot of trouble and maintained grace under fire even when things did not work out as she had planned.
I dropped by my mother’s place to change some light bulbs for her. She told me what the day I was born had been like. It was the first warm day of the year. The temperature soared from a late-winter chill to a balmy, humid morning when the grass turned green within an hour, and the buds on the forsythia cracked open like popcorn kernels.
“The day you were born,” she said as she set her cup down in the saucer — we were always the kind of family that used cups and saucers because such things transformed daily life into small rituals — “it was so hot in my maternity room that the nurses brought in bowls of ice and set fans in front of them to cool me down. My blood pressure went way up. The doctor was worried you wouldn’t make it. You were born at a quarter to four, and you looked like a wizened old man with the cares of the world on his shoulders. As soon as they let me stand up and get out of bed, it was early evening by then, I held you up to the window that looked across University Avenue to a long-gone dead-end street called Ord Street. There was an old black wrought iron fence separating the street from the busy avenue, and all your cousins were lined up there with your aunts and uncles to see the baby high up in a window on the fifth floor. I don’t think they saw more than the blanket, but they all started waving their arms. They’d made cards saying: ‘Welcome to our family.’”
“Do you recall any of the other mothers there at the same time? Were you comparing notes with them or just hanging out and talking about motherhood and stuff?”
“How would I remember? Darling, that was over half a century ago. Jennifer McBain gave birth to her daughter Maureen the same day, at around the same time. You were both christened together, and you used to play together when you were small.”
“Yes, I remember her. She was a very beautiful girl. We liked to hold hands as we swung back and forth on the horses of my swing set. I always let her have the white horse because I liked her so much.”
“Sad,” said my mother. “Maureen died of cancer last year. The sad thing was that she had become a doctor and was an important cancer researcher. I thought I’d told you. I guess I didn’t.”
She was about to stir a drop of milk into the new cup she’d poured herself but stopped with the cream jug poised above the cup.
“There were mothers all over the place. That was during the Baby Boom. You couldn’t walk down a hallway at feeding time without bumping into carts and carts of babies. I don’t know how they got all the babies to their correct mothers, but I always knew that you were mine. You looked just like your father, only rounder and more serious. The others cried, but you were pretty good. So was Maureen. Jennifer and I both said how lucky we were. By the time you were ready to go home you didn’t look like a sad balloon with the air let out of it anymore.”
“I’m curious because I’m trying to find out who else was born in the hospital on my birthday. I’m unnerved by the fact that there’s this person out there who arrived in the world in the same place and at the same time as me. He’s held up my background check and probably a few banks as well. We should, according to the laws of destiny, share the same path because we share the same stars, but his life has been far different from mine. He is a criminal.”
She said: “Dear, the fault is not in our stars but in ourselves. I wouldn’t bother. It’s like your adopted cousin who went looking for her birth father and got a very unhappy story. Whoever he is, he is nothing to you. I’d stay clear of him.”
“He may be nothing to me except that the system I live in and work in and live by thought we might be the same person. People change their names. They can’t change the day they were born. That’s their launching point. Like satellites. Once their orbit is set, that’s the way they have to go, or at least that’s what astrologers say. I want to make sure I’m not like him.”
She shook her head. “Darling, you’re about as far away from that kind of life as a person can be. You’ve turned out fine. You’ve made your own orbit.”
But I refused to heed her advice. I sat down in the city library and began to scan through the cards of microfiche. They were brittle black sheets with constellations of tiny white windows across them. Each window was a page of a newspaper, and each card held pages and pages of information about things that were important one particular day, and were now forgotten. Daily news. One evening edition from the month before my birth began to crumble as I laid it gently on the bed of the reader and slid the card beneath the enormous eye of the machine.
There were ads for chesterfields, half page displays of refrigerators. There were news items about “Eisenhower says this,” and “St. Laurent says that.” It all gave me a ‘hell if I know’ feeling as I realized I had lived my life in a state of historical amnesia to the minutiae of daily facts, facts that didn’t matter to me. If I had to write a test on what had happened in my life, I would probably fail.
So, why was I looking for a person who only shared one coincidental moment with me, and probably nothing more? Was life the moment, or the sum of all moments lived? Was it the event, or the ability to outgrow or outlive an event? I looked at the smudged and faded images and realized I was older than I ever thought I was. I had led a happy life, but I wanted a clear view of a future I never wanted to give up on. I was an idiot abroad. Happiness had blinded me to time.
After about half an hour of searching, I found it. There it was, in both the Telegram and the Star. My arrival in the world was announced by a small statement that could fit under my thumb. A person gets sucked into believing the great illusion of life, namely that one should go out with far more column space than they got when they came in. Beneath my name I saw Maureen
McBain’s.
I remembered her hair. It was beautiful hair. She didn’t come into the world with it. In my mind, aside for what else she accomplished, she had made wonderful hair for herself.
Some of the babies had been born at other hospitals. I could eliminate them from my list. There were two others that seemed to fit the description. Boys. Thomas David Cross and Michael Benjamin Thorley. I wrote down their names. On my laptop I searched their names.
Cross had been killed in a car accident. His obituary spoke of how he had been a teacher. He had worked for an international relief organization in Africa. He had come home, raised a family, and been a high school teacher. His community honoured him for his service. The story of his life talked about what a good person he was.
I felt relieved.
Just reading his story inspired me. This was someone I should have known. His students and everyone who knew him mourned him deeply. He had made a difference to the world. I wish I could have been like him, just as I wished I could have been like Maureen McBain when I thought about our play time together as kids and the research work she had done.
What was troubling was that people born on my day, at about my time, were not doing so well. We were just two of four now. They were mortal. I was mortal. Here I was looking back upon the first, important moment of my life, a moment I could not remember, and death walks into my imagination and has a seat in the chair in front of me. Life up to that point had been an always. Now it became a matter of for the time being. Thank you, Cross. I know you didn’t mean to leave me with that.
Thorley wasn’t on Canada 411 where lists of telephone numbers of everyone in the country are arranged alphabetically, so I Googled him.
There he was in numerous newspaper accounts. He had his column space, but at a price that others paid.
He was incarcerated in Millhaven Maximum Security Detention Centre — a euphemism for hard time — about a hundred miles east of the city. He’d done terrible things. There was an article about him robbing a senior when he was sixteen. He had knocked the old man down, taken his wallet, and even when the old guy pleaded, he had grabbed the man’s watch. It had been a gift from the senior’s father. Thorley didn’t take it. He’d smashed it in front of the old man before beating him up.
Parole. Maybe someone thought his life would change. It didn’t.
He’d gone back to jail a second, third, and fourth time.
Repeat offender.
He’d murdered his mother.
Dangerous offender.
He was freed again. His last crime was the murder of a child. I felt sick to my stomach.
My mother had quoted Shakespeare’s line about the fault being not in our stars but in ourselves. I wondered about how true that might be as I stared out the window on the east-bound Lakeshore train.
I was on my way to meet this dark shadow with whom I had nothing in common except a warm spring day long ago.
I went because I wanted to prove to my friend in New York that he was wrong about the stars shaping us and making us who we are.
I wanted to satisfy myself that even though people are born at the same time and in the same place they are born different, that our paths only crossed once — in those hospital corridors where our mothers sweated and pushed on a hot spring afternoon because they were caught in the beautiful cycle of life. I wanted to assure myself that Maureen whom I had known, and Tom Cross whom I wish I had known, were their own people who made the world what they wanted it to be. I wanted to assure myself I was my own person.
I am tall and thin. I’m growing thinner, gaunter, every day because of my diabetes. I walk several miles a day to please a doctor who told me I could beat the sugar sickness if I lost more weight. My hair is thick. My body, the carriage of the mind and soul, is still in pretty good shape. I want to shape my own ends.
A door opened behind the glass wall. Out walked a man who was nothing like me. His arms were covered in bad tattoos. He was taller than me. Heavy-set. Bald. He was the cliché inmate, and something in me was glad that he was.
We didn’t share the same hair colour, or shape of nose, or eyes. His hands were swollen, maybe from fighting, maybe from high blood pressure. The knuckles looked like walnuts. We didn’t walk the same way, or sit down and rest our hands or elbows on the countertop the same way. I stared at him and he wouldn’t make eye contact with me.
He said: “Who the fuck are you and what do you want?”
I told him the story. I told him the reason I had come to see him. We shared coincidental moments of birth. Had the stars made us different? What had been the point in his life where he turned on people to hurt them? Did the universe in which we are just mere specks of life make any difference to who we are?
At first he tried to follow my monologue. He even tried to mouth the words I was saying as if he had trouble taking it all in. Once or twice he nodded, and I thought, yes, I am getting through to him, but then I knew I lost him. He had me figured for a head case.
I had told him about the miracle of the day we were born, how the forsythia all over the city had sprung with a great shout of yellow to proclaim life.
He looked at me as if I had just spoken an ancient language and he didn’t catch a word.
“Fuck you,” he said, and stood up and left. The door closed behind him and the matter was settled.
Okay, I thought, as I sat there for a moment and collected my thoughts. I probably am some kind of looney he spotted me for. What else did I expect? What was I looking for?
Maybe he might have told me his life story, but why should he? I meant nothing to him. His life was his, and mine was mine.
I realized I was a complete ass. I’d come all the way to his jail because I wanted to know, to know for certain, that he was not me. Telling him about my life ticked him off. I don’t blame him. Happiness can make a person insensitive. My Mom was right. I should have left it all alone.
He was not even my bad shadow. The two of us had gone our separate ways from the one moment we had in common.
I rode the westbound train back to the city, and the sunset glowed orange with the last life of the day still ahead of me. The first evening stars appeared over the lake. I turned around in my seat and looked at what my journey was leaving behind.
If I ever wrote my life story it would contain that moment. The eastern sky had become ink-blue, and its darkness receded into the past.
Instruction
You will be seated in a small, dark box for the final act of your passage into a new name. A voice will come to you out of the darkness and ask you questions you might not be able to answer in daylight. That is why it will be dark.
Are you prepared to walk into a place deep inside you did not know was there until now, and where even you have avoided going for fear of the answers you might find there? You may have lived your entire life without knowing that place is inside you.
You will find yourself in the death that has always been inside you. Is it merely a closet where you have hidden things that you promised yourself you would deal with someday, if you had the time?
Are you prepared to walk into the centre of your being and its darkness and find the answers there?
Do you have the power within yourself to let that place speak for you?
That is how the process ends. You will need to remind yourself how it all began and why you undertook the journey to such a dark place.
The first step in the process of becoming a new person, of possessing that new name, is just as hard. Are you aware of the step you are about to undertake? Think carefully. You will be told it is a step not to be taken lightly. If you answer yes, then you will be asked why you want to undertake the process.
You may be aware of the hardness of the oak seat beneath you. You will hear the chirping sparrows in the ivy that partially covers the leaded windows of the room. You may notice the peculiar silver light of an early autumn afternoon that wants to fill the room. Will you notice the ticking clock atop the oak
roll top desk? Are you aware that those seconds are precious, that they measure not only time but your life, and what you do with your body, your actions, your words, and your thoughts? You might look at the bone-handle magnifying glass resting on a pile of papers, and be fascinated by the silver reflection and the curved eye that stares at the ceiling. You do not have long to consider the question you have been asked. The heart knows what it knows, and you must speak from the heart.
Were you not expecting the question? You may not have a ready answer. That is fine. You should be aware that answers can be complex. You will be permitted to explain just how complex it is. You may tell a story to describe what you feel at the core of your answer. Stories are fine. Most people come to the first answer by way of experience. Something has touched them or spoken to them. Most people have a reason for coming to be asked the questions.
If you answer yes, the man seated opposite to you will say a silent prayer to himself. He will be pleased. You must understand that there is no easy road here. Your answer, if it is positive and thoughtful, suggests that there is some larger presence involved in your decision.
Do you have a story? If yes, you will be asked to tell it. You do.
You were walking along a small street in a prairie town late one hot afternoon when you met your first questioner. He was wearing a white, open-collar shirt. You have just come from the edge of the town where you leaned on the fence and looked into the distance where the flat fields and the enormous sky made you feel very small and lost in the way you tried to touch something other than the fence post and its wire. When you tried, you could not. You could see a city in the distance, but it seemed as near as the town’s graveyard you walked to last evening thinking it was far away. You learned very quickly that there is no perspective on the prairie. Everything is near and everything is far at the same time.