Kimura looked up at the roof of his apartment building, yellow brick obelisk, blue sky, cirrus clouds catching the sun.
As he was making his way back to the patio and inside to the elevator, he heard the throaty roar of the boat’s engine gunning in reverse. Kimura pressed the button to the elevator, briefly tempted to take the stairs but knowing he’d never make it up seven flights. He felt he was a clearheaded doctor acting in an emergency. The sight of his friend, a friend whom he’d loved and whom perhaps he’d betrayed, this would wait to be understood later. Suicide is a mystery never to be fully unfolded. But why did Emmett come here to die?
The elevator doors opened. There, coming out, was one of the oddest-looking men Dr. Kimura had ever seen.
The sun was low in the sky. Bright light struck off the river and shattered on the tile and chrome of the foyer where Kimura stood while the man scurried out of the elevator. How like a rabbit, Kimura thought. I should follow.
A small man with anaemic skin and pink teary eyes, he almost knocked Kimura off his crutches on his way out. The Rabbit must have thought that the elevator had stopped at the lobby and was confused to find himself at the lower level accessing the underground garage on one side and the patio doors on the other, leading out to the garden built there for the shared enjoyment of the residents. The Rabbit made a fussy movement toward the patio, pivoted, and scuttled toward the doors to the garage.
“Those are locked,” Kimura told him, getting into the elevator. He held the door open. “You’ll have to exit at L.”
So the little man returned and said nothing of thanks or greeting while the elevator rose again, and at the lobby he hustled off blindly into the glaring sun reflecting from the tall glass windows of Dr. Kimura’s apartment building.
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Dr. Kimura didn’t move out of his penthouse, as people expected him to do. He found the view exquisite, eloquent, and secretive. The private Dr. Kimura didn’t give up his penthouse. But he seemed to age quickly, and he retired from practising medicine to focus on importing anaesthetic equipment from Ohio with his friend, Robert Morton, who returned to his position with the RCMP, leaving the daily business in Kimura’s capable hands.
Kimura found solace in his efforts to help the boy, James, and his elegant mother settle in Ottawa. He felt himself their guardian, their protector, and this was a source of great comfort to him.
The placid, duplicitous scenery intrigued Kimura more than ever before. He loved his winter view of the icy river and the frozen garden, the snowy hyphens of its iron railing. It kept his lost friend Emmett in mind, ever present.
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Years later, at Robert Morton’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, Kimura rose unsteadily (due to drink; his knee had been replaced) to make a toast. “To Robert and his wonderful wife, Maxine, lovelier than ever,” he said. “May we never forget all that we can never really understand. May we always honour the Maxine,” and here he laughed at himself, “the maxim — that the only thing we know is love. And sometimes, my good friends, we must struggle with ourselves to know even that.
“Love is the light by which we discover our way. Love,” Dr. Kimura said, “is information.” And then, seeing the indulgence in the smiles on Robert Morton’s adult children’s faces as they stared into the bubbles of their champagne, Dr. Kimura sat down.
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Blue Sea Lake, 1964
Lenore slid the canoe down the sloping granite shore, put one long leg in the bow, and shoved off. She sat in the bow because it’s easier to steer from there when you’re alone. The morning was calm, the water glassy, doubling the shoreline in perfect reflection, the aspen and poplar in full leaf. Late summer, when the season was nearly turning. She paddled out toward the reef. A seagull was sunning itself there while a cormorant drifted nearby. The seagull lifted off when she approached. But the cormorant stayed, undulating its snaky black neck.
Lennie let the canoe drift, the current turning her toward the cottage. She saw her mother come outside, cross the lawn to the shore, and sit on the rocks there. Over the water, they were aware, one of the other. Nearly two years since her father’s death.
Her mother laughed the other day. Then covered her mouth with her hand. She didn’t want to be happy, but happiness wanted her.
Her father could only tell her about hope. How all his mistakes had been made out of a wish to be good. He was hungry for something, always hungry. People must be crazy, dreaming themselves up. It made them dangerous, even when they didn’t think they were. Then they were sorry.
In his letter, given to her by Mr. Morton that day, her father wrote, “To protect you from myself, I have pretended to be an aspect of you.”
Lenore has decided that she’s going to be an actress. She thinks that this is the kindest way to live, to give people something to believe in for a little while. She would be an actress and an artist and go to Japan with her brother, James, and they would look after each other.
Her mother was leaving the shore now and walking away. Lennie saw that she was carrying her camera. This was the first time she’d touched it since Dad died. It meant that Lennie was freer than she’d been yesterday. Some people have to work so hard even to pretend to be someone.
Everyone already lives inside her. It makes her ache with sorrow, but Lennie will accommodate the whole world. She can do this without even trying very hard. Because she has talent. She knows she does.
You just have to breathe, breathe in the ocean of air. Because higher than air, we’re infinite. And to be infinite is to be all the people, those who were here and are now gone, those who are not you, and all the people you are, from the moment you’re born till the day you die, all those hungry creations combined into one great white noise. But infinity hurts in the human heart. Her father is nearly two years gone. Lennie knows that, all along, even since the very beginning when light was first invented, time’s passing has been our blessing. Time was created to ease our pain. The cormorant suddenly opens and spreads its slate black wings, and lake water sprays like shattered crystals in the sun. Here is perfection.
Notes and Acknowledgements
Thanks to Peter Wakayama and Ken Noma for meeting with me when I was first researching this novel, and similarly Dylan MacNeil and Chris Baker. Many thanks to my friends who read earlier drafts — Dan Diamond, Jacky Sawatzky, Glenn Buhr, and Catherine Hunter. To the people at Prairie Fire Magazine, live long and prosper.
I am grateful to the Manitoba Arts Council, the Winnipeg Arts Council, and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support during the writing of Mr. Jones. To the University of Winnipeg, my affection and gratitude.
Thank you Goose Lane Editions; you are the best. Thank you Heather Sangster. And I’m so very grateful to the gifted editor, Bethany Gibson, who rode through all the dust storms, corralling the strays. Any errors in these pages are mine alone.
An excerpt of Mr. Jones in different form appeared in Prairie Fire Magazine Vol. 30, No. 1.
These are some of the writers and their books that have helped me in writing Mr. Jones:
Roger Bowen. Innocence is not Enough: The Life and Death of Herbert Norman. Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, 1986.
Ian Buruma. Inventing Japan: 1853-1964. New York: The Modern Library, 2004.
John Hersey. Hiroshima. New York: Knopf, 1946. (And my thanks to Steve Rothman, who made his 1997 background essay, “The Publication of ‘Hiroshima’ in The New Yorker,” available on the internet.)
William Manchester. American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964. Toronto: Little, Brown and Company, 1978.
Gary Marcuse and Reg Whitaker. Cold War Canada: The Making of a National Insecurity State, 1945-1957. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994.
Knowlton Nash. Kennedy and Diefenbaker: Fear and Loathing Across the Undefended Border. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1990.
Kim Philby. My Silent War: The Autobiography of a Spy. New York: The Modern Library, 1968, 2002.
Charles Taylor. Sno
w Job: Canada, the United States and Vietnam (1954 to 1973). Toronto: Anansi, 1974.
Specifics
The epigraph is from Bob Dylan’s song, “Ballad of a Thin Man.” Copyright © 1965 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1993 by Special Rider Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission.
Pages 13 and 97: the references are to John Hersey’s Hiroshima.
Page 35: Leonard is quoting from Walter Benjamin’s essay, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskov.” Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Copyright © 1955 by Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt A.M. English translation copyright © 1968 and renewed 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Page 42: Leonard is quoting from Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra: the “Midnight Song,” or “The Intoxicated Song.”
Pages 36 and 46: Karl Marx’s famous aphorism is from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. (1852) New York: International Publishers, 1963. Marx wrote: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” And, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
Page 42: Rachel quotes (vaguely) from Marx, The German Ideology.
The song on page 66 is “The Preacher and the Slave” by Joe Hill, 1911.
On page 89, Suzanne quotes a line from the film Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (with a screenplay by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler), 1944.
Pages 106 and 388: In his essay called “The Perversion of Human Needs” Karl Marx wrote:
Alienation is apparent not only in the fact that my means of life belong to someone else, that my desires are the unattainable possession of someone else, but that everything is something different from itself, that my activity is something else, and finally (and this is also the case for the capitalist) that an inhuman power rules over everything. There is a kind of wealth which is inactive, prodigal and devoted to pleasure, the beneficiary of which behaves as an ephemeral, aimlessly active individual who regards the slave labor of others, human blood and sweat, as the prey of his cupidity and sees mankind, and himself, as a sacrificial and superfluous being. Thus he acquires a contempt for mankind, expressed in the form of arrogance and the squandering of resources which would support a hundred human lives, and also in the form of the infamous illusion that his unbridled extravagance and endless unproductive consumption is a condition for the labor and subsistence of others. He regards the realization of the essential powers of man only as the realization of his own disorderly life, his whims and his capricious bizarre ideas.
(Written in1844. Weird emphasis his.)
Published in Marx’s Concept of Man. Copyright © Erich Fromm and TB Bottomore (trans.), 1972, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.
Pages 126-127: MacArthur’s admiration of Napoleon, Genghis Khan, Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and expressions of fear of “communistic slavery” are variations of William Manchester’s quotations of MacArthur in his biography, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964.
Author photo by Jay Gaune
MARGARET SWEATMAN is a novelist, playwright, and singer-lyricist. She is the author of four previously published novels, Fox, Sam & Angie, When Alice Lay Down with Peter, and The Players, for which she has won the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the Carol Shields Winnipeg Award, and the McNally Robinson Book of the Year.
Sweatman’s plays have been produced by Prairie Theatre Exchange, Popular Theatre Alliance, and the Guelph Spring Festival. She has performed with her own Broken Songs Band and with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestra, and the National Academy Orchestra. With her husband, composer Glenn Buhr, Sweatman won a 2006 Genie Award for Best Song in Canadian Film.
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