Asylum

by André Alexis

  Walter:

  (pause) So…have you lived in Ottawa long?

  or

  Walter:

  (pause) So…do you like this bar?

  or

  Walter:

  (pause) So…are you interested in philosophy?

  or

  Walter:

  (pause) So…what do you do?

  Woman drinks up, politely declines more alcohol, and moves on. There is the sound of laughter, conversation, music, and the cheerful clink of glass. It is early. Through a window, the sky in the distance is pink and orange beneath its blue hood.

  Curtain.

  Some of the conversations went on beyond this point, but not many, and their chief parasites were boredom and inattention. The woman would look away, and Walter would look away, and closeness would come only with the unstated, but mutually felt, desire for flight.

  Walter had wide experience with rejection. He had heard everything from the horrified “No!” to the more restrained “No, thank you,” but nothing had disturbed him as much as did this trailing off of conversation. It made him feel dishonest, sidewinding, and foolish.

  In November, a woman at the Penguin Café asked

  – Are you trying to pick me up?

  – No, not at all, he said.

  – Then, fuck off.

  Which he did. He got up and left, convinced she was right, that he was no longer fit company for a woman, that if it came to loathing, it was just as well to loathe the old version of himself, a version lacking all virtue save concupiscence and honesty. So, that very evening, November 10, he had abandoned his search for the so-called Feminine. Wherever it was, if it was, it was unattainable by Walter Barnes. He had given three weeks of his life to a diverting idea. No one could say he hadn’t looked. He had been faithful to the idea, but there was nothing to show for it. So, he returned to his old ways. Beginning at the bottom of Elgin Street, walking up the east side to the National Arts Centre, he solicited every unaccompanied woman he saw. When this proved unproductive, he crossed to the west side of Elgin and, going south, propositioned the women in that sector. And, when this was equally unsuccessful, he walked to Bank, along Gladstone, and, from Gladstone to Rideau, east side, west side, north and south, he did the same. Three hours and some forty propositions later, Walter was as alone as when he’d started. It had been an unsatisfying evening, but he’d had such evenings before, hadn’t he? He returned home, exhausted by the pilgrimage, ribs aching, but satisfied that he had returned to a life he knew, to a purpose whose point was a known pleasure.

  On the following night, the end was the same: solitude.

  For four weeks, every Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, he had gone out and come home, and there had been not one woman to accept his proposition. Not even close. None bothered to look at him twice and, worse, none had even bothered to insult him. He had, apparently, in some mysterious way, ceased to exist. How had that happened? It wasn’t as if he’d lost his technique. He’d had no technique to speak of, or none he could recall. A proposition was advanced, an answer given. It was as simple as that. It had been simple. It would be simple again. It was a matter of time.

  Ah, but it wasn’t simple.

  Whereas, previously, he had been unselfconscious in his propositions, a charming presence, amusing, the kind of man you couldn’t imagine suffering from rejection, there was now a vulnerability to him, the kind of desperation that might have worked if he were twenty but which, in a forty-year-old, suggested a complicated history and, really, if all you wanted was sex, it was the kind of vulnerability that put a damper on the whole thing.

  Nor was there comfort in the idea that his bad luck would pass, in time. In fact, it didn’t help to think about time at all. Years, moments, months ago, he had been a dissolute and unhappy man. He himself had hoped for change, but now that change had come, he looked desperately for a way back. He modified his approach. He said “please” and “would you mind.” He bowed. He smiled. He spoke louder. He spoke more softly. But even he could see there was no dignity in his approach. It all meant too much to him. The women walked on, pulling their coats closer about them.

  Why hadn’t he just paid for intercourse, then? He had, on Christmas Eve, having convinced himself it was only a matter of “priming the pump.” On Christmas Eve, an evening during which, traditionally, he could look forward to multiple partners (so many women in the city needing warmth for the holiday), he had walked up and down Elgin, along Rideau, in and around the Market. He’d spent hours walking, his voice hoarse, no nearer success than he had been for the past three months. It was then he decided to seek professional comfort.

  But everything had gone wrong. It was a Monday. The foyer to the apartment building on Waller was dim, and when he pushed the buzzer for number 157, it took forever for the madam to answer, and when she did it was clear she’d been drinking. He had to repeat his name into the little silver grill and shout the password

  – Abdul sent me

  several times before she buzzed him through.

  He found his way to the elevator, by the light of the exit sign, only to discover the elevator was not working. He walked up a flight of stairs, a little frightened by the dark and by the smell of industrial cleaner. There was no light in the hallway, either, but a woman was waiting for him at the door to 157.

  – What took you so long? she asked

  and then, before he could speak, she added, peevishly

  – Don’t you have anywhere else to go?

  Confused, Walter said

  – No…I’m sorry

  and she pulled him to her, holding his face in her bosom.

  – Poor boy, she said. It’s such a sad time of year, isn’t it? You come right in. We’ll fix you up.

  The living room was lit by candles. It was small but, at the far end, almost too big for the room, stood a Christmas tree that looked gloomy in the low light. On Walter’s left, against the wall, there was a large sofa on which three women sat. They were dressed in negligees (red, green, white) and they were all of them blonde. More than that it was difficult to make out, because the shadows moved over their faces and throats like dark hands. On the other side of the room was a long, narrow table on which most of the candles stood, along with a two-four of 50, an ice bucket, and a row of plump, red velvet Christmas stockings.

  – You want a drink?

  the madam asked, not unkindly.

  – No, thank you said Walter.

  – Only ten bucks

  she said, a little more insistent. And then

  – It’s Christmas, mister. And the girls can’t drink unless someone buys them one.

  Walter took forty dollars from his pocket.

  – Will this do? he asked.

  – Aren’t you going to have one? she said.

  – I’m allergic, he answered.

  – Well, isn’t that something

  she said

  – Isn’t that something, girls?

  – Sure, said one of the women on the sofa.

  And Walter chose her.

  It isn’t quite right to say Walter did not enjoy having sex with the woman. The bedroom was illuminated by guttering candles on top a chest of drawers. The room smelled of potpourri. The woman’s breath smelled of mint and, though she didn’t usually do this, she said, she washed his penis for him, with a cloth and water from the ewer and bowl on the night table.

  He heard more than he saw: voices from the other room, the rustle of bedsheets, the ploopf of a pillow falling to the floor, and, once they’d begun, the sounds she made: a kind of deep hissing, followed by the words

&n
bsp; – My, my, my…my my…

  Even after his vision adjusted to the light, Walter could not see her clearly. He was between her and the candles, so her face, for instance, was a hundred faces: young, old, soft, hard, beautiful, ugly. Yet, in some respects, it was not dark enough. After they’d been at it for half an hour or so, and she’d begun to lose interest, and she’d given up stroking him or biting his nipples, and he’d closed his eyes, the better to feel himself inside of her, he opened his eyes and saw her as she put her hands under her arms and then took them out to smell her own sweat.

  It was the kind of thing that made you think.

  Not that this put him off at all. He closed his eyes, to spare her any embarrassment, and came when he wanted to, because his body wanted to and it had been through this so many times it knew what it wanted, whatever happened, but…for the first time in his life, he had an orgasm that was not pleasant. Naturally, he’d had all manner of orgasms in his life, from those that made you feel you were a different life form to those no more intense than tea on a sunny day. But this was different. It wasn’t even on the scale. He was so distant from his own pleasure, it was as if he’d had someone else’s orgasm and, to his own surprise, he began to weep.

  Seeing that Walter was crying, the woman was most confused and embarrassed. With feeling, she said

  – Don’t worry, Tiger, you didn’t go over time.

  Walter waved his hand in front of his face, dried his eyes, and got dressed. The woman looked at him as she washed herself.

  – I didn’t know men were so sensitive, she said.

  – It’s nothing, he answered.

  He left his money with the madam, who said

  – Thanks

  and he was all right until he hit the hallway when, as suddenly as before, he began to weep, but, with no one there to see him, it was worse. He sat in the stairwell, in near darkness, and cried for all he was worth.

  If there was a reason to live, he could not find it.

  And, being a reasonable man at the end of reason, feeling no love for the man he’d become, nor serious longing for the man he’d been, terrified by the prospect of a life in which he, his body, and his emotions were mutually estranged and…what else? oh, yes…seeing no hope for himself in the world, Walter Barnes decided to commit suicide.

  The decision was accompanied by relief and, like finding the obvious answer to a subtle question, a delight in both the problem and its solution, in his life and its end. It seemed to him that he’d been on this course for years, that if he’d opened his eyes sooner he might have come to this years ago, when he was more equipped for death: younger, less confused by what he didn’t know, having fewer responsibilities, undaunted by failure – failure of the means, that is. He now knew enough about poisons and firearms to worry that, instead of death, he would find only hospitals and/or a coma. When it came down to it though, he found it surprisingly easy to decide on how he wanted to go. He would throw himself into the Ottawa River. He chose the river because it was winter and, though he imagined he’d have no difficulty drowning, the cold would kill him if he found it difficult to persuade himself to go under.

  The emotional preparation was straight forward: he “forgave” everyone who had in any way wronged him, anyone for whom he felt resentment or anger, from his mother to Paul Dylan. He forgave them easily, because he saw they were only stations on a road whose end had been there from the moment he’d first drawn breath. There was something suspiciously deterministic about his forgiving, as if those who’d hurt him had had no choice, just as he had no choice but to forgive. His “forgiveness” was more like the closing of a door, but it didn’t matter. First, because he knew that men have their deaths, whatever their attitudes. Second, because he couldn’t remember why determinism was wrong, couldn’t even recall the arguments against it. Anyway, Philosophy was only a school for death and it all came to the same thing in the end: words, words, words, and then nothing. More complicated were the straightforward matters. He made detailed notes on his curriculum, for whoever it was would take over his classes. (How sad, after the dean had graciously allowed him to return to his classes after a month’s leave, that he would abandon everything for good.) He cleaned his house from top to bottom, as if he were only going to Toronto, say, for a few weeks. He took special care of his houseplants, pulling back dead leaves, fertilizing those that needed fertilizing. He cancelled the telephone, the cable, the credit cards, and his subscriptions to the Citizen, the New York Review of Books, Mind, Critique, and L’Ange. He packed up his books. He put his clothes in carefully labelled boxes, arranged the boxes neatly in his closets, and threw away all of his shoes, save those he would wear to the river.

  It might have taken even him longer than it had, if there had been any particular goodbyes to make, but, after prolonged and careful consideration, he chose to make none. Instead, he spent weeks trying to write the perfect letter of farewell, settling, finally, on a fastidiously brief note that he left on his kitchen table:

  To whom it may concern,

  I have drowned myself.

  Yours,

  Walter Barnes

  and he dated it:

  February 24, 1985

  On the night of the 24th, he ate his favourite meal (bacon, eggs, Spam, and toast) at eight o’clock, then dressed warmly and put on his mittens, because it was cold, and walked a final time along his favourite street (Elgin) to the river. It was a cloudless night; the stars in the sky, a meaningless plethora, mimicked by the lights of Earth. The snow had been cleared from the pavement and there were soft, white ridges by the side of the street.

  Sunday: little traffic, the side streets empty and quiet. Inside of him, there was a kind of muffled turbulence, like a fairground (with its Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and screaming patrons) heard from a distance. He was conscious of an excitement, somewhere, but he was not part of it.

  And how short Elgin was, though it was as long as Bank Street in his imagination: from Catherine to the War Memorial, walking slowly, it took only thirty-five minutes. Yet it was interminable, when you considered each of the streets and each of their vistas (Argyle, Gladstone, Frank, Somerset, Cooper), each with its own significance. As he walked along, certain sharp details returned to him, details he had struggled to recall only a month before: a woman in a white coat who lived on MacLaren, a woman with a lisp who looked down whenever she spoke, a woman so inebriated she’d said yes to his proposition while holding on to the mailbox, as if the mailbox had propositioned her. He had been thoughtless, to forget so much. A woman, a woman, a woman. His time on Earth was measured out in women. Time itself was a woman.

  At Sparks Street, he tried to decide where he should go to jump. He didn’t want to fall on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. He walked east along Rideau, then retraced his steps. He wanted to drown. Best would be to jump from the Alexandra Bridge, but he wanted to see the river first, so, for the first time in years, he walked behind the Parliament Buildings and stood by the railing to look at the river and at Hull. The river was black and wide, but there was a shelf of ice and snow along the shore beneath him. The black water moved quickly and whirled as it approached the bridge from which he would jump. The city on the other shore, Hull, was a pattern of lights and tall buildings in outline. Above it, the stars, all of them bright, and a scimitar moon.

  No, there was no pattern and the moon was not a scimitar. On the other shore and in the sky, there was only the nothing that could be turned into whatever one wanted: teeth, a scimitar, talcum powder, a bear, a sea monster. It was beguiling, but it was nothing. He supposed there were men and women who could turn phenomena into whatever they wanted, who lived in worlds of their own making, like building a bridge as you crossed it, and he wondered, briefly, what that might be like. He had never managed to turn the world into a place hospitable to him. At best, he had managed to forget, to put a veil between himself an
d the inevitable indifference of the universe.

  No, there was no use speculating. Having seen the emptiness for what it was, there was no escape for Walter Barnes. Besides, it was cold, and there was no point wasting his final moments in useless rumination. He curled his fingers up in his mittens, put his hands in his pockets, and made for the bridge.

  And for the first time in years, he stopped thinking.

  {18}

  NORWAY

  As badly as things were going for Walter, they were not going much better for Paul Dylan. In the five months since he’d given Walter a thrashing, Paul had been anxious and resentful. Anxious, because he feared the consequences of his violence. Though he hadn’t tried to discover how much damage he’d inflicted, he judged Barnes’ pain by his own. He had broken a finger on Barnes’ face. After five months, his hand still ached.

  He felt anxious, also, because he’d administered the thrashing so publicly, he would not be able to hide, if there were legal consequences. There had been witnesses and, for months, he felt as if he were being watched: an excruciating self-consciousness. Naturally, he kept the details of the incident to himself, pretending, when he spoke to other Fortnightly members that he was sad for Walter, pretending, when Louise told him of Walter’s state, that he was “deeply distressed” by the news. “Deeply distressed”? That sounded so like a novel, Louise looked at him to make sure he wasn’t pulling her leg. He’d assured her that he had, himself, visited Walter in hospital, and how sad it had been to see the man in such a…state.

  Paul continued attending Fortnightly evenings, relieved that Walter seemed to have quit the club cold. (To his surprise, the others seemed to miss Walter’s participation. Why should they do that? Hadn’t Walter been pedantic and dull? Really, when he thought about it, he had done the Fortnightly a service.) He lived his life as if there were nothing wrong, but for five months he was as resentful as he was anxious. He was resentful, principally, because of the emotional torment he endured. He was convinced he’d done the right thing. In fact, it seemed to him he had been kind or, if not kind, at least restrained.