Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  The station nurses barely blinked when I signed him out. We took the elevator down instead of up and he changed into Ian’s things before we got to the ground floor. I told him I wanted him to be my eyes and ears. I had to clarify that my eyes and ears would still be involved. “On your meds,” I told him, “you’re the clearest-thinking person I think I know.” He’d taken a half dose of his Seroquel for a few days and stockpiled the rest so he’d be covered for the trip. He seemed pretty steady to me, but I’d also seen him at his worst.

  I booked an 11 a.m. flight, to keep a low profile. We rested on the benches in Terminal 3 outside the fast-food joints. Jimmy slept; I sat absolutely still with my eyes staved open while the clock on the opposite wall marked time in slower and slower increments. I spent every minute fearing we’d be discovered.

  WE SIT SHIVERING together in the back seat of the cab from the airfield. It’s fifteen degrees colder here than it was at home and Jimmy doesn’t have an ounce of fat on him. I’ve reserved us a B&B in the town, but I don’t plan to check in until after we go to the festival. We’re travelling light. Jimmy has the clothes on his back and a twenty-dollar bill I gave him in case we get separated. I have my knapsack.

  The festival’s on provincial land and there are three trail-heads leaving from three different parking lots, depending on which direction you’re coming from. There’s a road in, but only for service vehicles. Part of the fun is walking in, so the website claimed, but I want to get there.

  Four inches of snow blanket the fields north of the Westmuir Memorial Airfield. Snow-capped corn stubble sticks up. “Why’d you bring those shoes?” I ask Jimmy, noting for the first time that he’s wearing a pair of crummy Keds. “You’re going to freeze in those.”

  “I’ve spent half my life in the cold,” he tells me. “It keeps me focused.”

  His jacket is better, although not by much. I grabbed a fleece from his room that he must have found in a charity pile because it hangs off him, but the combination should keep him warm if we walk fast enough. For his sake, I hope the path is already well stomped.

  Our driver finds the packed and silent lot at the junction of Highways 91 and 121 and drops us after charging me $62.50 of my last eighty bucks. At least we’re warm. When the sound of his motor vanishes, we’re alone with about fifty cars, most of them with an accumulation of snow on their windshields. We’re the stragglers. A colourful festival placard marks the trailhead to take. I put Jimmy on the path in front of me and follow him in.

  We can’t see beyond twenty metres, so thick are the trunks below treeshadow. This part of the forest is mainly pines, some of them towering. I keep my eye on Jimmy’s back as he trudges forward, his head lowered to keep the cold air out of his face. Where the sun comes through in little spotlights, the snow has melted to a muddy slurry and his Keds shimmy on the slicker patches. A frozen mitten clings to a tree.

  The trail thins and climbs a ledge over the forest floor. Wet leaf litter and slush make it difficult to keep my balance, but Jimmy’s inner mountain goat is showing. While I’m stepping carefully with my arms out to my sides like a tightrope walker, his long legs keep a clockwork pace. “Slow down,” I call to him.

  “Keep up,” he says.

  “Trail’s only six kilometres, Jimmy. We don’t have to rush.”

  “I don’t walk slow, don’t know how. Six k in the cold is like ten in the heat. Don’t fall behind.” That’s the last thing he says to me. He even seems to step up his pace. Maybe he’s making a run for it, a real escape. But why stage a break when you’re about to be released? My intention is to get him back before nightfall, but the room in Brigham is there if we need it. I don’t want his unauthorized furlough to get him into too much trouble.

  A light snow falls. I check my phone for a signal and there’s a sliver. I look for where I am on the phone’s map: a blue bead beats in a featureless green landscape some distance away from Highway 41. The trails don’t show on the map, nor in satellite view. Cold flakes blot the screen.

  The snow is starting to fill the footprints of those who walked in before us. The sky is bright, and the low sun against empty branches strikes them in silhouette. From one angle, they join together in an endless black calligraphy.

  Goethe’s twin appeared on a forest path, dressed in grey and gold. He’d been on horseback, much more romantic than skidding through mud at the end of winter, abandoned by an undermedicated mental patient, on the way to meet one’s doppelganger in the middle of a forest. I ask myself: Do I really want to go to the end of this path? Don’t I know that when I get there, everything could change? Have I seen my family for the last time? Have I seen my home, the ever-protean multropolis of Toronto, for the last time? Goethe: This strange illusion in some measure calmed me at the moment of parting. He’d been going to see his beloved Frederica one last time. Did he see her, though? How did he know that his galloping doppelganger hadn’t already replaced Frederica with her likeness, and that this likeness in turn would be replaced by another copy and another and another, in an ever-blooming cycle of selves, none of whom was the woman he loved?

  The way forward is swallowed again and again in dark green, like a shadow galloping ahead of itself. How I’d miss this world.

  —

  Under my feet, new flakes are falling on a pristine layer of snow. Mine are the only footprints now. I hunt around looking for the path.

  “Jimmy! Jimmy, can you hear me?” The tree trunks chop my voice into clatter. “Jimmy, where are you? I’ve lost the trail…”

  He’s too far ahead. He’ll come back. I have to stop and catch my breath. I clear a boulder of snow and get one of the six-dollar granola bars I bought at Pearson out of the knapsack. Greek-yogurt-dipped almond crunch. I flash on the throbbing blue dot on my phone, seeing it in my mind’s eye, and make a decision to destroy it. I could be leaving electronic breadcrumbs. I put it down on the boulder and find a fist-sized rock to smash it with.

  But I hesitate. What if I need to be found? I turn it off instead and put it away.

  The underbrush crackles about a hundred metres from me. “Jimmy? Is that you?”

  Break’s over! I jump up and start walking again, keeping the sun on my left. North.

  Large, shadowy wings skid across the tree trunks.

  THE SPICEBOX AIR is heavy with oxygen. I can’t find the path. I go toward an open area and the forest gives onto a small grassland with a patch of dead trees in the middle. Denuded pine, stripped to the trunks. It looks like a quiver of lightning bolts. I walk through the middle of the clutch, wondering how it came to be these pines grew here alone and then died. Forests are constantly digesting. I could lie down in this patch and let the grasses return me to the earth.

  Fairy tales are suited to forests. If you go in far enough, you might come upon the ways things aren’t. Trees older than Confederation growing out of decomposed stumps ten feet wide. The girl in the red shoes has to travel in deep to find the woodsman who can free her from her cursèd dancing. Almost every Grimm hero suffers into the forest at some point. Do they ever learn, the Hansels, the Gretels?

  Death feels like a fairy tale you never get to hear the ending of. It seems impossible that something of me will not survive it. What if I disappear almost completely, but almost? What might remain? Maybe a few flickerings of consciousness dimmed to their pilot lights but still viable, like sourdough starter, each bit irradiated with a tiny scrap of inner life. I recall Cullen’s description of the transmission layer. There could be an ocean of raw consciousness waiting to get into the game. And while the saltings of what was once your semi-coherent self drift around inside this ocean, you have a long dream, and that’s death. You see no faces but the seasons pass. There’s no language except chemical reaction. No self, but mood, a universal roomtone, a vibration with intent milling itself from stellar debris. The Horsehead Nebula is a tantrum. The “Assassin” supernovae are regret.

  High overhead, a bird tries to match its song to another’s. Chiddiu
p chee chiddi chiddi, it says. Far away comes chiddi chiddi chee.

  —

  On the other side of the clearing is a river clogged with snow and ice. The water moves under it making water sounds, but muffled. After another five hundred metres, the river is pinched off altogether and vanishes beneath the forest floor. Sugar maples reclaim the space where the river had been, and in another clearing—a bare spot of dirt and snow surrounded by enormous trees—I come upon Jimmy. He sits above me on a boulder the size of a school bus, smoking a joint. “Oh, thanks for waiting for me!” I say. “I got totally lost!”

  “The trail led you right here,” he says, and I look down and see I’m in other people’s footprints again. “Come up. I can see the lakes we saw from the airplane. Follow the break in the path to your left.”

  The well-worn trail—people have been walking in this forest for thousands of years—brings me into the trees and onto the backside of the rock, which rises in long, broken chunks to where Jimmy sits. “It looks like someone hacked the forest in half.”

  “It’s a fault line. Look down.”

  His legs dangle over the edge and I lean out to see what he means. It’s not a boulder but a stone wall. The cliff and the ground were once level. Near the cleft, the ground is warmer, and in the snowmelt there’s an ecology of flowers and fronds and moving water. “This is the high point above the bay. It has drawing power.” He puffs on the joint, but it’s out. He tries to light it again with a little yellow Bic.

  “I think I can help you there.” I pass him the matchbook from Steele’s Tavern, the one with Ingrid’s secret name written in Shoshana’s hand. “Keep it.”

  He puffs a lungful of creamy smoke.

  “You want some?”

  “No. I need a clear head. Where are your meds?”

  He shows me the joint. “I fed them to the toads.” He directs my attention to the forest floor and I realize what I thought were little orange flowers are Jimmy’s Seroquels. I don’t see any toads.

  “What the hell are you thinking?”

  “I don’t want them. I’m straighter on pot.”

  “Whatever. You’re an adult, I’m not going to fight with you. Just don’t leave me behind again.”

  “I thought you might have some deep thoughts if the trees closed in on you. You might figure out what you’re here for.”

  “Don’t be my guru, eh? Just make sure I don’t get eaten by bears, and watch my back at the festival. I know what I’m here for.”

  “You gonna share?”

  “I’m going to ask her how she knows August Morbier, and depending on the look on her face, I’m either going to kill her or we’ll go home.”

  “Which do you rather?”

  “To go home. And know it’s home.”

  He looks skyward and his pupils almost vanish into his head. “I’m glad one of us has a plan.”

  “Go get your pills. Stay sharp.”

  “Medication dulls my receptivity to intersticial wavelengths,” he says.

  “I don’t care what that means. Do you know how to get to the festival from here or not?”

  He stands at the edge of rock and takes a survey. “Yes,” he says. He takes us down the ridge, back to the forest floor, and finds the path. In places it’s only wide enough for one and he goes in front again, but he allows me to keep up. When the clearing is well behind us, the trees crowd in. In some places, there’s no sky.

  It smells loamy—rotten-sweet with notes of wet cardboard. Being dwarfed by so many things this close together makes a person feel they’re being watched. But what kind of mind is watching in the forest? If Jimmy’s being directed by voices—and clearly he is—there are plenty in these winds to pick up on.

  Then there’s a sound in the distance—a flock of pigeons taking off? Or the wind bashing the branches back and forth? Surrender! I feel like running for cover.

  But it’s applause…

  THE FIRST SIGHT of the festival is an autumnal wall of striped tent filling the distance, with holes in it for trees. That’s where the applause is coming from. We’re approaching it from the rear. Canvas sheets in orange, tan, and red rise into the canopy and wrap around to the left and right.

  We continue our circumnavigation of the structure, and as we go, voices come through in one place, the sound of flatware and glasses in another. Finally we see where the people are, coming and going from the mouth of what is two-thirds of a giant yurt rigged in and around the oaks. The opening makes it look like a head with the face taken off. Inside is a honeycomb of spaces on different levels within the trees, most of them facing east, toward the entrance where we stand. They’re performance spaces, a bar and a restaurant, with a swept forest floor temporarily spread with bar tables and chairs, like a piazza, but with mature trees in it. There must be three hundred people inside, drawn there like they were to Bellevue Square. It’s hung with coloured lanterns. Even Jimmy says wow. The existence of this place and its scale makes it hard to know where to look. Once we’ve reached the middle, I can place the feeling. This is what it’s like when you enter a great museum and stand in the foyer. You shrink and expand all at once. It’s a pull focus.

  Jimmy hands me a program. It’s on recycled leaf paper. It crinkles like leaves in my hand. “Your friend is being interviewed right now. Look.” He shows me her name in the program. “Now where is the Algonquin Room?” He cranes his head over the crowd and points out a ground-level area where people are filling chairs. It’s a large space with a raised stage at the front of it, complete with a black backdrop and a red velvet curtain, which is open and sleekly shining. “You better go. They’re going to start.”

  “Stay here,” I tell him. “I’ll catch up with you afterwards, okay? Like in an hour? And Jimmy. Listen, don’t talk to anyone about anything. Just keep to yourself.”

  “I’m here to make sure you don’t get into trouble.”

  “I’m not going to get into trouble. You’re the one off his meds. Just keep saying that to yourself—I’m off my meds—before you make any decisions.”

  “You doubt me.”

  “I do,” I say quietly. “You doubt yourself all the time, though, so you should be used to it. I wouldn’t have wanted anyone else for the job, okay? What if we land on that?”

  “Do you doubt yourself?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Because what if she’s lured you out here?”

  “Then she’s lured you, too.”

  —

  It’s on the dot of four now and the sun is deep in the sky behind the festival tent. The canvas has been taking on deeper hues; what were panels of drab autumnal colours have lit up warm and glowing behind the stages. Crosshatching the colourful stripes are the rectilinear shadows of the burr oaks.

  I catch up with the back of the crowd looking for seats. It’s much warmer here, among other bodies. The stage is set with two comfy-looking chairs, two microphone stands, and a small white table with two bottles of water on it. I need to install myself where she won’t see me, and I find a good seat—in the corner, behind a man who is tall seated—when a young woman I’ve never seen before takes my elbow and steers me away.

  “There you are,” she says. She’s got a complicated badge holder dangling from her neck, a Bluetooth thing in her ear, and a bulging binder under her arm. “I got her,” she says to no one.

  “What are you doing? I want to listen.”

  She gives me a hard but somehow comical stare. “You can listen later. First you have to talk. Come on. They weren’t even aware you were a lost lamb!”

  Right, she thinks I’m her. A cop pokes his face into a curtained-off area, then swings our way. “Okay, let’s go,” I say.

  I follow her inside a network of passageways clogged with people trying to get from one part of the immense backstage area to the other. I see waiters and people wearing headsets, everyone ID-badged but me. Up ahead, my rustler is saying hello to people or expressing herself into the wide open to the listener in her e
ar. “I’m just about to point her to it.” She cups a hand over her microphone. “Did you sign a waiver?”

  “I—”

  “Never mind. We put one in the welcome kit, but I always carry extras.”

  She finds another waiver in her binder and folds it neatly in three before handing it over to me. “Okay, this is it. Feel along the black cloth until you see the light from the stage. Someone will send you on when Linda is ready.”

  “Okay!” I give her a big thumbs-up.

  I duck into a break in the passage and emerge into a small area that, apart from a variety of tree trunks, is empty. There are some cracked and crushed plastic cups underfoot, some of which have red wine in them from, I presume, a backstage toast. What do they say to writers? Break a spine?

  The audience I’d been about to join is amurmur some distance ahead, and I carry on through a door in a plywood barrier beyond the abandoned party space. It’s suddenly much darker, although my eyes adjust and I make out some plywood set pieces—a rainbow leaning against a Doric column made of cardboard and plaster. Worktables are scattered where they fit and taped cables come down a couple of the trunks and terminate at a bank of generators. Rows of human faces are visible through a break in the black backdrop.

  A woman stands in the wings, clasping a folder in her hands, and now I can make out the mixing guy at his bank of computers. I have to wonder if they’re really waiting for me, but I know that my Ingrid—their Inger—is standing in the other wings, waiting for her cue before she walks onstage. Stage lights turn the gap in the curtain blinding white. The lady with the folder steps forward and there’s applause.

  I creep to the backdrop and stand behind it, my nose touching the noise-dampening cloth. I’m close enough that my peripheral vision is in darkness. I imagine I can see through the barrier and that I am looking directly at the two water bottles on the round white table.