Seated once more on the sofa, I cut through the tape and brown paper. Out came a thick manuscript. The sight of it angered me. Right when my own work lay stagnant, someone, I guessed, was offering me their masterpiece, and either asking me to edit it or to recognize its perfection and write a blurb, a glowing endorsement that would connect their novel with my name and achievements. A letter lay on top.
September 8
Dear Daisy Harding,
I admire your work. I apologize for imposing. You did not ask for this manuscript but I am hoping you will read a few pages. Should this novel meet with your approval, I would be grateful if you would consider sending it to a publisher in whom you trust. The work should be attributed to F. H. Homsi. I am not F. H. Homsi but you could be F. H. Homsi, if you like. Every novel requires an author. As F. H. Homsi, you could become this work’s protector and bask in any praise the book may receive, without interfering in the career of Daisy Harding. I’ll refrain from saying more. Every novel must speak for itself. If this one requires editing, you will proceed, I’m sure, with the same balance of rigour and intuition that you would exercise were this work your own. I’m sure that I am placing F. H. Homsi’s novel in trustworthy hands. I trust few people. You I trust, because of your writing.
Respectfully,
Clara Hodgkins
I read the letter a second time, turned it over, examining it for stains or other clues to the environment that had inspired it. I folded and unfolded the letter, and read it again. The title page of the manuscript announced Don’t Get Me Wrong/La Tafhamni Ghalat. I opened my laptop. In the blink of an eye, Google informed me that ‘La Tafhamni Ghalat’ is Arabic for ‘Don’t get me wrong.’
Forty pages into the manuscript, I stopped to catch my breath. The voice telling the story was dark and disturbing. Not a word was out of place. At times the prose succumbed to incoherence with a disquieting urgency. These passages of impenetrability felt essential. An arresting image realigned my perceptions in every paragraph. That such acrobatic weaving of oblique imagery and narrative tension could be sustained from beginning to end seemed unlikely. I continued to read. Several hours later (how many?) I set the manuscript aside and hopped, pushing my metal walker, to the kitchen for a glass of water. A joke was being played at my expense. In how many languages, in how many countries, had this prize-winning experimental novel already been sold? Clara Hodgkins, if she existed, could not have written such a brilliant book. Was I jealous? Yes. Were there flaws? Yes, but few. They could be corrected. Did a real F. H. Homsi exist? The manuscript told the tale of a young woman, a Syrian refugee, and her descent into madness upon arriving in Toronto. As Kamar’s mind unravels, those who have planned to help her become overwhelmed and step away. She is left to fend for herself, increasingly unable to do so. Two Syrian folk tales surface in her memory and impose upon her. They both nourish and further unhinge her.
Seated on my sofa, poking about the internet, I stumbled onto the Facebook page of Fahid H. Homsi of Montreal, took note of his existence, then changed paths and located two elderly women, both named Clara Hodgkins, both living in the United States, one in Wisconsin, the other in Texas, neither of them likely to have left a parcel on my front porch. Had a digital version of Clara Hodgkins’s manuscript, and her letter, arrived in my email box, I would have deleted her offerings without opening them, exhausted by the daily deluge and fearing a virus. But this was different, two hundred pages of print, wrapped in brown paper, hand-delivered, my name on the outside in a round, youthful script at odds with the darkness of the parcel’s content. Paragraph after paragraph of unnerving, gouging, carefully crafted prose. I sent Fahid H. Homsi a message by way of Facebook, asking if he were the author of a novel titled Don’t Get Me Wrong. Within a matter of minutes his answer arrived. He wished he were, but no, he’d never written a novel.
I returned to the manuscript, reread key passages. It seduced me again. It made me weep. In an early scene, Kamar recalls a leg landing on the sidewalk in front of her. It is her cousin’s leg. The rest of him has been tossed onto the hood of a car. But the passages that fascinated and devastated me the most came later. It was the crumbling of language, the chaos of Kamar’s mind, allowed to spill onto the page, that moved me to tears. Glimmers of meaning flitted, just out of reach. I read slowly, extending my experience of her undoing. The prose wrapped itself around me. I licked myself clean of a delicious sorrow. I’d arrived at the end, and lay on my sofa, stripped of present, past, and future. I slept. When I woke it was night, and moments from the book were falling like leaves, covering me.
In the morning, I rang up Ralph Nguyen and asked him how I should respond to the person who’d left the parcel. I read him Clara Hodgkins’s request, and told him that her manuscript was brilliant.
‘It’s good, eh?’
‘Astounding. Or I think so.’
‘Maybe that’s why Clara Hodgkins chose you to give it to.’
‘Either Clara’s not Clara but a friend of mine, or she’s Clara and I don’t know her.’
‘Do you have a hunch?’
‘Let’s say the source of this gift is a friend.’
‘Okay.’
‘A friend, testing to see if I am willing to try and pass off someone else’s work as my own?’
‘They’ve given you a work already published, but little known? They are joking, or they really want to make a fool out of you. Are your friends nasty?’
‘Nobody I know is cruel. I don’t think I’m hated. Besides, I typed up several pages and submitted them to the plagiarism site, Turnitin.com. Nothing. It’s unlike anything else.’
‘Clara Hodgkins may be a stranger presenting you with a chance to become famous. Famous, so long as you stay in disguise.’
‘But why me and not her? She could pretend to be F. H. Homsi.’
‘Exactly.’
‘I think she knows how good the manuscript is.’
‘Maybe she found it on a park bench and doesn’t dare send it out, in case the real author catches on. She wants to use you.’
‘No. I don’t feel used.’
‘Okay, let’s say that this Clara Whoever is morbidly afraid of publishers and publicity but wants her work to live the life it deserves. She trusts you because she admires your books. With each that she’s read her trust in you has grown.’
‘If she wrote it…’
‘Then?’
‘I could be F. H. Homsi for her.’
‘If she found the manuscript, then its real author, who lost it, has another copy on a USB key and has already submitted the work to an excited editor who has made an offer. The real author is signing a book contract as we speak.’
‘I need to meet with Clara Hodgkins. Agreed?’
‘That, or do nothing.’
Maurice
I badly want to leave the earth, but for me it’s not about speed. I can do with minimal speed, just enough to keep me up there. Skydivers! I am not one of them.
‘In a belly-to-earth position, meaning face down, a skydiver reaches terminal velocity at about 195 km/h. Fold in his or her limbs and the diver’s terminal velocity will accelerate to 320 km/h, approaching that of a peregrine falcon descending upon its prey. Fire a bullet (size 30-06) straight up into the air, and as it returns to earth it too will attain a terminal velocity of 320 km/h, according to a 1920 U.S. Army Ordinance Study.’ Wikipedia.
When I was fifteen I built a hang-glider. Julia remembers that contraption. I threw myself off the top of steep hills and cliffs every chance I got. Dangling in my harness, I’d shift the angle of my wings in response to the air’s quietest whisperings, and I belonged. At last I belonged. Then I broke my arm. My mother passed a law against leaping into voids. In my dreams I continued to fly. It took all my concentration, every ounce of my will, as I aimed for the open kitchen window, then soared into the immensity, voyaging above the city, kept aloft by desire, fuelled by intense loneliness. My goal was to escape the weight of my family’s wealth, our name,
and my father’s countless admirers.
Ten years ago I built an ultralight. Two wings, two suspended seats, three wheels, a frame of extreme lightness and strength, also a small engine, fed through a tube from a plastic tank full of gasoline. This potentially explosive tank is located above my head and that of anyone foolish enough to fly with me. ‘You’ll probably want to wear this,’ I told Julia, handing her a helmet, the one time she went up with me. ‘Not because it will do you any good if we crash, but because the engine makes a lot of noise. You’ll be less bothered by the loudness.’ We rolled out into the field, both of us staring straight ahead. The field had been given a clean shave, its grass reduced to stubble. Every bump in the dirt jolted our frame. We rose into the air.
I know when I’ve separated from the ground because suddenly I am travelling through smoothness. We, the ultralight and I, advance so slowly I have no sensation of being propelled from A to B. It is an experience without glory. That’s partly what I love, the absence of glory. I look down. A few minutes ago, A was a line of trees at the edge of a field and B the opposite side of the same field. Now, B is behind us, and we – the wings, the engine, and I – are headed for C, therefore we are moving.
It is rare that I take a passenger along. Julia came that once, but the slowness disappointed her. Today I cannot fly, as there is too much wind. I’ve arranged to meet Julia for coffee.
Daisy
During the day I tolerate the leg. At night, I fly Air Transat. I travel, unable to sleep, my bed as uncomfortable as a seat on a discount aircraft. Hour upon hour, I toss and turn without destination. Morning brings the relief of hobbling to the kitchen and igniting the blue flame beneath the kettle, of hopping to the sofa and sitting there, fully upright, drinking a cup of tea, while people appear out on the sidewalk. They are newly emerged from the darkness, as I am; they walk along the street, and many of them climb into their cars and drive away, but others continue on foot, and when they have all moved out of sight, the houses and the old school converted into an arts centre remain. The rows of front porches, the windows and doors, and the steps leading up to these, all have been altered or replaced by different owners over the years, the result discordant, as if a record were being played at the wrong speed.
I sit amidst my books and turn on my laptop. Messages have poured in. An old interview, shot in black and white, offers Luis Buñuel, who explains that if you fall asleep in bed while smoking, the cigarette may extinguish itself or set fire to the bed. The cigarette could do either, and Doubt is the cigarette. Doubt sets everything on fire or it does nothing, states Buñuel, unclasping his large hands.
Today, mid-morning, I taped to the outside of my front door an envelope upon which I’d written in big letters the name Clara Hodgkins. There is no guarantee that she’ll return to my front porch, but I suspect that she wants a response. She’s left no ordinary means of contacting her, no email address, or street number, or phone number.
My response reads:
September 12
Dear Clara Hodgkins,
Thank you for your kind words regarding my books. I have read Don’t Get Me Wrong, and love it. Are you the author of this manuscript? If you are, I would like to meet with you to discuss the work and to talk about what role I might play in placing the manuscript in the hands of an appropriate publisher. I feel strongly that this work deserves to be published, and I thank you for giving me the opportunity to read it, whatever the outcome of our exchange. I should make clear that if you are not the author, if this is a found manuscript or one given to you by someone else, then I cannot see how I could proceed without written permission to do so from the author of the work. I assume that the pseudonym F. H. Homsi is your invention? Should you wish to meet, may I propose Clafouti, a small bakery/café on Queen Street West, facing Trinity Bellwoods Park? I could meet you there next Tuesday at 4 p.m.
Regards,
Daisy Harding.
At noon, Ralph dropped by with a jar of cold soup and a salad for two. He let himself in using the key from under the mat.
‘The letter taped to your door, you put it there and you want it there, I’m guessing?’ he asked, poking his head into the living room.
‘Yes. If it says Clara Hodgkins, I do.’
‘It does.’
‘Good. Tell me how you are, dear Ralph.’
‘Not good. There’s been a minor flood.’
His voice sounded delicate and weary, as if he were made of smoke, as if he were being exhaled by a presence larger than either of us, a presence balancing a cigarette between two immense fingers. Ralph slipped into the kitchen to get forks and spoons, two bowls and two plates.
‘Where is the flood?’ I called from the sofa.
‘At work.’ His words floated back to me. ‘A pipe burst, two computers got soaked. I’ve successfully retrieved nearly everything from the hard drives. It took me all night.’
He brought in the tray and set it on the low, oval coffee table.
‘But the main server,’ he explained. ‘If it had gone, there was no backup. Six years’ worth of budgets and other records, and no secondary storage system ever put in place. I start trembling just thinking about it.’
He passed me my soup, his hand unsteady.
‘Who should have made sure there was backup?’
‘Me.’
‘Who’d have been responsible if everything had been lost?’
‘Me.’
‘Ah. I see.’
‘Yes.
‘And? You did nothing to prevent this because…?’
He leaned forward, eyes alert, a nihilistic amusement occluding his fear.
‘When they hired me, nothing was in place. I kept intending to create a backup system, but it repeatedly slipped to the bottom of my list. There was always a deadline, another urgency. You know how it is? You’re running up a mountain, and the summit turns out not to be the summit, so you keep running, and now you are too high and the little stones under your feet start slipping, and the sun is setting and you hope you will wake up soon. Creating a backup system, as well as getting all the rest done, I’ll be working crazy hours. Let’s not talk about me. How’s the pirate limb?’
‘Hard to say. Presumably healing. It’s not causing me much pain and nothing’s trickling out, and the foot stops swelling when I pump it back and forth.’
I pumped the foot to demonstrate.
‘Looks like you’re trying to stop your car on black ice.’
‘I am.’
‘Aren’t we all?’
He set down his empty soup bowl and contemplated me.
‘But how are you, Daisy? I mean, how are you really? I expected you to go out of your mind with boredom, but look at you.’
I returned Ralph’s inquisitive gaze. I think that’s what I did. I rarely know what my face expresses. As for the words that come out of my mouth, they feel even less reliable. For better or worse, this is what I told him:
‘I like being confined. I don’t want to go out. There’s so much to see when you can’t move. Light shifts, patterns form and dissolve on indoors walls, outdoors a bending branch suggests the presence of wind, a car drives off, a person who walks by has decided to wear a green sun hat and black shorts today. When, by necessity, you do move to a new room or to a different spot in the same room, a great weight hangs and swings with you. Furthermore, each time you undertake to voyage across a room, the weight and shape of any additional object that you try to carry with you must be given your full consideration as it may alter your equilibrium. Remaining upright is your goal. If you fall, the world will come to an end. The sound of air being released by a vent in the floor or of water flowing from the kitchen tap – these become large happenings, and time slows down.’
‘Ah, I see.’
‘But there have been days, recently, when the sky looked very alluring, and I felt these three rooms shrinking, and I did want to drag myself out the front door on my bum and down the stairs on my bum, and then what?’
He leaned closer, and the story he told me was one that I too had heard on the morning news:
The police ordered a man to drop his weapon. He was standing in the stairwell of the subsidized housing complex where he lived. It was a building that provides apartments for people suffering from trauma. He was holding a hammer. A few days earlier he’d graduated from a community college as a certified builder. Soon he would earn a better wage and soon he would send more money back to his wife and children, and soon they would be allowed to join him in this new country of opportunity. Soon. Not too soon but soon. Meantime, he’d gone upstairs to ask his neighbour to turn down her radio, and he took his hammer with him when he went to discuss his unhappiness and frustration. His anger, and his size, and his hammer frightened her, so she slid her telephone from her pocket and called the police. A friend of his, hearing the altercation, came down the hall to speak to him, and he followed his friend’s lulling voice out into the hall. The two of them stood talking in the stairwell, while the radio in the woman’s apartment continued to vomit its chatter and music, and he hungered to make a loud noise, a noise that would carry, a noise capable of silencing the radio, so he brought his hammer down on the metal railing of the stairwell, and he did so repeatedly. He was listening to the sound that his hammer made, he was feeling the whacking reverberate through his body, when a female police officer followed by a male police officer came running up the stairs. They stopped a few feet below him. They stood in their uniforms and ordered him: ‘Drop your weapon.’ He held on to his hammer and did nothing because he could not decide what to do or to say, his head full of hammering, chatter, and music, sadness also, and anger, and yes, he did feel fear but of the wrong sort, the sort that makes you hold on to your hammer instead of dropping it. How can you choose what sort of fear to feel? They repeated their command: ‘Drop your weapon.’ He failed to drop his hammer. The male police officer shot him dead.
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