And that time in Palm Springs with Emma, my wife, both of us twenty-nine years old. I don’t recognise myself. Equally unfamiliar is Emma’s patience and gentleness. Also palm trees in scrub desert. What are we? All clues gone. Washed away by flash flood. It is her first time in the States and she wears a black leather jacket over a red shirt, blue jeans, shades, tan desert boots. I like to see her like this in the foyer of the hotel, braver than everybody. And the taste of metal in my mouth is from my poor large intestine, husband of lung who was a friend to me through youth and all my smoking years, and it’s only that some are faithful, some are not, as Emma herself told me often.
“We don’t belong here,” she said.
Upstairs in our room I read The Inferno out loud, “And I, condemned with them am Jacopo Rusticucci, whose fierce / Wife more than anything brought me wretchedness,” and pulled down Emma’s jeans, tied her to the bed, hands and feet, loose knots. We’d been doing this for years. Outside the motel room they were putting up a sign in the desert but it was too dark to read the words. At the height of my orgasm I saw a sheep in a green field, a standing ewe with a lamb. Tears were not far away. We were not lost, just disoriented. A cigarette would fix us up.
“You’re still hard,” Emma said. “What will you do?”
“Get me a coffee at the Burger King. What about you?”
“Sure. And some food. Hey!”
“What?”
“Untie me, okay?”
When I got back she had worked herself loose. She stood at the window looking through the sheers, her eyes half closed and wearing a little frown.
“What kept you?” she said.
“This.” I fed her a chip.
“Such a connoisseur.”
“But I’m not a bureaucrat.”
“You could be really something.”
“O yes.” I fed her another chip.
“My shoulders ache. Looks hot out there.”
“It is hot.”
“What’s the matter?”
“O Jesus.”
The soldier had a swarthy complexion, short thick black hair and beard, a thrusting chin. He was no more than twenty-two or three, five-nine, a couple hundred pounds. Clearly ready for someone like me. I remember all this, every detail.
“Keep backing up,” he said, or said with his weapon.
What’s the name of the city? Is this Baghdad or Palm Springs? Is it 1991 or 2003?
. . . an invasion, artillery, planes — a fire breaks out, men smash a ground-floor window, beat down the door. What resistance can I offer? Emma tries to calm me with her eyes as the soldiers, laughing, drag me outside and bundle me into a truck. We drive through the desert. The wind blows hard. They throw me on the ground.
And here we are again, Emma tied to the hotel bed, me alone on the packed dirt, having crossed a boundary so far beyond the shores of this island that it scares me. I’m a coward in my guts and heart. I can’t tell my daddy I’m going to die. I stood under an oak in the rain when I was a child. Every drop that fell from a leaf was someone’s last moment. I went to the hospital and my mother was gone. Of course we want to know what’s at the end, but must we lose track of death over and over and keep silent about this amazing life? There are only two images really; all’s reducible to an adult carrying a child or a child playing with an animal. Of course we want to know what’s behind the image, what’s missing.
“Why are you tied up like that?”
“It’s what we did. We both liked it.”
Unimaginable. I pick a stone from the desert floor. The stone holds the night’s chill. Come with me into the sunshine. There’s something I want to say to you.
“Why are you tied up?”
How can this be, that the family ends and no one is left? Impossible! A moment ago I found a clutch of matches in my pocket and it reminded me of coming in from the cold after burning trash in the barrel. Of course it’s too late. Each flame makes a fire. They seem like small animals, blind and forgotten. The wood splintery, the top red as a heart. Sulphur smell. Strange, the forgotten things we find in pockets when nothing matters.
Five
We eat potatoes and squash and Dad polishes off two pieces of chocolate cake while I do the dishes, then I help him from the kitchen to his chair in the living room where I glimpse the two of us in the black uncurtained window perform the slow pirouette that gets him installed.
“Chan or Bond?”
“Chan.”
“Good.”
Woke up this morning holding myself, arms round my chest, heartbroken. On the machine a message from a neighbour who wants an acupressure session. Went for a walk, not far along the road, and stopped at the mouth of the driveway where a fridge, once the centre of some kitchen keeping decay at bay, was open to invasion by leaves blown from the alders. In the wind dry leaves rustled on shelves and grates. Dog looks up at me, as if to say, What now? He eats a blade of grass that tastes of no one he knows or recognises. He’s thin and I’m thin. An old telephone pole is fastened to a new one with an iron bar. The dirt track, vivid green down the middle, curves to the right. I’m most taken this morning by a red rose on a bush under a split-leaf maple in front of the big sleeping house. In such a house nothing is missing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the following magazines and their editors for first publishing these stories: Quarry Magazine for “Mercenary”, “Red Clay”, and “Twenty Nights in Northeast Africa”; Event Magazine for “Canaries Sing in Russian Airspace”; Prism international for “Train”, “Olive Oyl Drives Home”, “Shoelaces”, “Grandad’s Shawl”, and Frozen Carp”; Grain Magazine for “Brick and Rivet and Lime” (formerly “A Simple Death”) and “Parallel Rivers”; Capilano Review for “Keypunch”; Canadian Fiction Magazine for “Jane Hart’s Airband”; The Fiddlehead for “Dickie Bomford’s Grasping Arms”; Dandelion Magazine for “It is after all winter”; The Malahat Review for “Buzzing in A” and “That Time in Palm Springs”. “Train” was anthologized in Prism international 25 Year Retrospective and in Metavisions (Quadrant Editions, ed. Geoff Hancock). “Frozen Carp” was anthologized in RipRap (Banff Centre Press, eds. Edna Alford, Don McKey, Rhea Tregebov).
I want especially to thank Seán Virgo for his companionship and his skillful nightwork in carrying this book to its final form.
Michael Kenyon is the author of eleven books of poetry and fiction. The Beautiful Children won the 2010 ReLit Award for best novel. Other work has been shortlisted for the ReLit Award, the Commonwealth Writers Prize, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Baxter Hathaway Prize (Cornell) in fiction, The Malahat Review Novella Prize, Prism international’s fiction contest (won twice), and the Journey Prize. He divides his week between Pender Island and Vancouver.
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