What It Takes to Be Human

by Marilyn Bowering

  I’ve always made the best of things, and even when relations between me and Georgina are strained, I take care of my birds. The squabs started leaving their nests nearly three weeks ago. Pete Cooper complained that they should have been killed before they were fully feathered, but I explained to Dr. Frank that we needed to see the entire first batch through. We had no way of predicting the survival rate. As it turns out, we lost three of the ten through accidents—two were pecked to death by the adult pigeons and one became caught in the larger mesh netting I used at first: I’ve learned from my mistakes, and they won’t happen again. The remaining pigeons, those that mate, we can add to our breeding stock. The next fledglings will have to be killed and dressed, but I’m prepared for that. It is part of the deal I struck with Dr. Frank.

  Georgina’s progress with her flock is proceeding more or less in step with mine, although she is a little behind. This week I showed her how to let the pigeons leave the loft through a small slot, and then try to get back in as she tempts them with grain. We have to be careful with the training as I do not, as yet, have Dr. Frank’s direct permission for the undertaking. I’m not sure, in fact, that he understands that my stock is homing pigeons at all! He’s so taken up with the dairy and the prospect of fresh cream and prize cheeses that he just lets me get on with it. Even better, he keeps Pete Cooper and his helpers on the hop.

  Georgina urges me to be careful: Since she’s become involved with the admiral, she’s taken to saying that I should learn to accept things as they are. I don’t like this “wise counsel” of hers: It doesn’t suit. It’s as if she’s trying out a set of views, not hers. Is this the Georgina who rowed out in the dark to save me in the inlet? Is this she who bulldozed her way into the asylum on movie night? Who moved mountains to inveigle Dr. Love into my treatment? I understand that life hasn’t been kind to George and, at the moment, she’s in retreat. I am patient with her, but I reply, always, when she resorts to these platitudes, that we must resist what is and exchange it for something better. How else would humanity have progressed from the caves? I think to myself that her son, Brentwood, would have been appalled at her talk: He died trying to stop Hitler and Mussolini and the Japanese emperor from enslaving us. Would she have had him give up? I don’t say this, of course: Where Brentwood is concerned, and Georgina’s grief, it is better to let sleeping dogs lie.

  —

  It’s just like old times! Dr. Frank summons me to his office and from there we walk together to the East Wing and through the pea green and dirty white corridors. I think I’m fine—it’s not a problem to be going to treatment because I’ve done this several times before. I’m sure of it—until he’s opening the door ahead of me. It’s dark inside, the heavy green curtains are already drawn. I start to sweat, my breathing quickens. “Now, now, Sandy, it’s all right,” Dr. Frank says, surprised at my gasping. “We’re all old friends here.” He switches on a lamp beside the bed and I see waiting for me—just as he has indicated—old friends. The nice nurse and—surprise!—Dr. Love.

  “Dr. Love!” I cry, and step forward to shake his hand. “What are you doing here?”

  “Come now, Sandy,” he says, and lays a kindly hand on my shoulder. “Did you really think I’d forgotten you?”

  No. Not forgotten exactly. But I’d imagined I’d dropped from his radar. There are plenty of people in need in the world and not so very many Dr. Loves.

  “It’s so very good to see you!” I’d like to embrace him. Tears gush. He lays a gentling hand on my shoulder. I wipe my face with my sleeve.

  “And you,” he says.

  The nurse begins the familiar preparations. I note the orderly tray of vials, needles, swabs and tourniquets; the oxygen cylinder tucked behind Dr. Frank’s chair. Dr. Love leads me to the bed, his hand under my elbow.

  “You know how this goes, don’t you, Sandy?”

  “Yes, sir, I do.”

  “The drug will help us help you,” he says, as if I hadn’t answered. As if it’s he and not I who needs assurance. “We think, Dr. Frank and I do, that it’s time to finish with this neurosis of yours and be done with it. I’ve heard good things about how you’re doing.”

  “Yes, Dr. Love. Things are going well. There’s the pigeons, and I have plans….”

  “You’re ready to face the world, are you, Sandy?”

  “I am. I’m ready.” I sit on the edge of the bed and wipe my hands dry on the sheet.

  “Fully ready, Sandy?” Dr. Frank pipes up. He moves his notebook from the seat of the chair so he can sit. “Prepared, now, to face a world that includes your parents? You’d be ready to stand up to them?”

  This shocks me, although I try not to show it. I slap on a silly grin. My parents! He hasn’t mentioned my seeing them since when I first arrived here and he told me he’d protect me from their visits. Their prying and pushing and wheedling. Their pulling the strings of my feelings. I’d almost grown to think that they didn’t exist except when I thought of them. I haven’t missed them. I have no longing for a mother, no need for a father—I was done with that long ago. Why should these strangers be allowed back in my life? Nothing good can come of it. I’m drenched in sweat, and I recall in harsh flashes of thought what I went through the last time in this room. The recollection of my separation from my beloved Heather. The brutish punishment of a bloody circumcision—engineered by those so-called parents! The fact that this act had shown they couldn’t be my true parents at all, whatever Dr. Frank thought. My mouth warps under the strain of the grin. I open it to call for my lost mother—she who had held me safely in her lap to read to me, sing to me, give me comfort. And my father—the one who had taken me with him to his work, given me my own set of miniature tools with which to mimic his labours, my hands dipping into and out of buckets of water and sand. I grieve for whatever terrible fate these good people have suffered. My mouth is open, but I’m silent.

  “Sandy?” Dr. Love says. “Can we count on you?”

  I close my eyes. I hold the sorrow of the child I was in my hands. It’s a multi-coloured ball. No, it’s a ball and chain. Fetters. Prison. An asylum for the criminally insane.

  Tears wash my cheeks in a sudden spill. I want to plead with Dr. Love to stop this at once. I can’t bear it. I open my eyes.

  The nurse, who is once more sunburned, fresh and ripe as approaching harvest, helps me lie back. Her nose, cheeks and forehead are rosy and freckled. She has even toasted the tips of her ears where they peep though her dark hair. Her arms and hands are shiny and pink-skinned against her white uniform. She gives me the pill that means I won’t drift off to sleep instead of facing hard reality. She ties the tourniquet around my arm. I watch the glances—bright as sunbeams—that zing back and forth between her and Dr. Frank. They’re in love! How well Dr. Frank looks! He’s tanned, too; his skin fits him: He’s wearing a new shirt and tie.

  Fear for myself, love for him and all he’s done for me, contend.

  I glance at Dr. Love. He hasn’t trimmed his beard recently, harsh lines of fatigue show in his face; and his clothes—always of good quality—look slept in. Who is he saving day and night? What life and death matters weigh him down? What, in reality, do I know of either of these men?

  The nurse slips the needle into my vein and waits for the signal to open the valve. Sandy! I say to myself. Quick, remember what you’ve learned! All depends on it!

  I’ve learned that men who suffer may be good or bad.

  I’ve learned that appearances don’t tell you everything.

  I’ve learned that love is complicated: Sometimes it includes lies and betrayal.

  I’ve learned that in all matters of love, including the love of animals, you have to give before you receive.

  I’ve learned that everyone is human. The Chinese, the Russians, the Germans—everyone.

  Except for those who are not. Like Pete Cooper, or Attendant John in the East Wing, and the substitutes who take over the personalities of those who care for us and use their shapes and
minds for evil purposes.

  What about the substitutes, Sandy? What do you really think of them now? Wasn’t that the easy way out, the old way?

  The bite of the drug is under my tongue; my eyes drop into the other world that waits for me. I hear Dr. Love say as I’m counting backwards…ten…nine…eight…under Dr. Frank’s direction, “Now, Sandy, Dr. Frank has filled me in on your other sessions. In those you went far back in time, into your life as a child. This time, we want you to stay with us, allow yourself to travel back only a little. Can you do that? We’ve cut the dosage back, it will feel different, you’ll be more in control.” I nod. “Where are you now?”

  “With the rabbits,” I say. “They’re so soft to touch.” My fingers make little stroking movements, but it’s only the blanket under my fingers.

  “A little farther,” Dr. Love says. “Tell us how you came to be here at Colquitz.”

  “In a car.”

  A chair scrapes nosily. That’ll be Dr. Frank. “Of course you came in a car. We want to know why. None of your nonsense now, Sandy.”

  “From the boat.”

  “You jumped from the ferry, you were rescued,” Dr. Love says. “By your friend, wasn’t it?”

  Then I’m on the ferry and in the water and…Shit! Shit! There’s such pressure to tell them all that happened. I’m swimming towards the landing lights, then scooped away by the current and then by the great dragon of the deep, she who inhabits the origins of time, without whom I would have died, and then—zoom—I’m on that sandy island shore my hands on the heaving sides of the ancient sea creature and there slips from her underside, new as dawn, wet, raw, copper-eyed, the miracle, the sea serpent’s infant, and I’m there at the beginning of all things, and I can’t think of it, mustn’t allow myself to, in case I let it out….

  Dr. Frank’s impatience rescues me. He whispers, Don’t get him started on Jones-Murray!

  Dr. Love says, “Before the ferry.”

  “The police brought me…”

  “Even earlier. You were with your father and mother in the family car; you had driven from Victoria that night, isn’t that right? It’s the Sunday war is declared. You’ve told us before. This time tell us exactly what you see.”

  I could say Alan Macaulay’s ghost has made an unexpected appearance, winking from the corner of the narcosynthesis room at my fluttering eyelids, but I don’t. I’ve sent him on and I don’t want him back, even as an ally.

  I’m just home from university and a stint in air cadet camp. My parents know nothing about this. They’ve picked me up from the bus station in Victoria. I smell the familiar odour of hot tires and stamped metal from the machine shop out back. The sleeves of Mother’s tooheavy coat hang to her bitten fingernails. When she looms towards me, arms out, I cough into my handkerchief. “Hay fever,” I say, and give my nose a blow. My nostrils sting with bus diesel. I’m holding on—as if I could grasp them—to the pictures I have in my mind of what I’ve just left: green and gold fields, skies burnt rust with sun; the glider that I train on ready and waiting at the flying club airfield. Me, at the controls, flying, in swoops and swings through rushing air. My father avoids my eyes, says, “You’ll come to the mission with us, we can talk on the drive home.”

  We get into the Studebaker for the short run to the waterfront. The back seat is covered with a canvas tarpaulin. I shift the pile of buckets and trowels. The rest of the car is clean, spruced up for my father’s Sunday evening preaching. I lean out the window: dusk and the heavy smog from the gorge mill, and the salt and salmon tang of the wharves, in layers over the quiet: Everyone’s at home, except for a handful of government workers, summoned by the emergency, cutting through the streets towards the legislative buildings, briefcases important with papers. The street corners bristle with the stark cries of the news hawkers: War! War! War!

  My heart hammers with excitement. Now! My life is about to begin now! But I can wait a few days and endure the passage of my parents’ obligatory company, and then I’m free.

  There’s a feeling of deep unease. It’s there through the entire service my father conducts in the waterfront mission in Victoria. It’s there in the pump-organ squawks my mother wheezes from the organ. In the stink of cheap liquor and smell of damp musty suits that cling to the men who have to listen to this rubbish before they can get a coffee and sandwich. In the hope that flares, like damp matches being struck again and again, in the eyes of the younger men who are thinking perhaps that this war means an end to the waiting, the hopelessness, breadlines and pity. War means jobs and money and everyone pitching in. Doesn’t it?

  The drive after the mission service is silent and slow. The general tension in the air coalesces around my father and his sourceless anger. Sweat runs down the back of my mother’s neck from beneath the thin colourless knot of her bun, and into the collar of her dress: not a flowered summer dress, like girls and women—even farmwives—wear in Saskatchewan, but a dress like a shroud. Purple crepe. Ugly. Her rank sweat. Her sharp unprettiness.

  Steady, Sandy, Dr. Love says.

  The road, once we’re away from the town, curves north through steep blue rock cuts: I open the window to smell the baked forest, the reek of drying streams, exposed alluvia, bird bones and fish bones: the secrets of wood and creek bed revealed by the season; then the leaked and drained odour of mud flats as we climb the dirt road of the Malahat as it rises along the border of the inlet. Up and up until we glimpse the scattered lights across the water where there are farms and the rare houses of the rich; where—though I do not know it yet—Georgina’s father lives.

  For God’s sake, don’t let him get started, Dr. Frank says.

  To pass the time, I make a list of the houses in which we’ve lived, and say goodbye to each. The first, in Langford, where there were farms and hedges of bramble and roses and where I met my sweet Heather; then, in exile, the move to a two-storey duplex on the fringes of the naval base where my father picked up extra work at the dockyard and from where I walked to school through a daily shower of stones thrown by bullies; and yet, even there, in my childish suffering, I discovered a secret path to the sea and the bracing sight of ships riding high on a glitter of waves, and kept close to myself the knowledge that in the wide world in which I felt so alone, I wasn’t, for somewhere there was Heather: And what can separate us from love?

  For a while, after a failed attempt to start his own church and a fall into debt, my father took a job as a watchman on industrial land: We lived in a nearby apartment over a grocery store. From my room, at the back, I could see the high, black fuel storage towers that belonged to the oil companies and knew that my father climbed their ladders and walkways every day, naked to fate, and I hoped…

  Hoped for what, Sandy?

  Hoped for an end, that’s all, to the steady slippage of my parents’ prospects and God’s “testing time.”

  Throughout the moves (now I’m bored with the counting) there were annual summer trips up and down the island to rural settlements, villages with a mill or a mine and a union hall where my father would preach, my mother pass the collection plate, and I would stand on the platform with a grin pasted on my face, and play hymns on the accordion. Later on came the building of the Bible camp beside the lake and the hours I spent on the plank benches of the tabernacle I’d helped to construct, stirring my toes in sawdust. Sometimes, at the camp, I slept outdoors, under the stars. I could place my sleeping bag where I liked and spend the night in contemplation of the heavens—not Heaven—but the deeper mysteries of the planets and constellations. It was on that land that my parents now lived in a winterized cottage.

  Wherever we’d lived, there was the constant embarrassment of wearing old clothes to school and having bad skin from a monotonous diet and being taken, door to door, to “witness” for the Lord, despite the fact I didn’t believe a word of it.

  So, you’re a snob now, Sandy, are you? Dr. Frank says. Ashamed of your family and of being poor? You managed to get yourself to college
! Something must have worked for you!

  And so goodbye, once and for all, to a life that cycled between the stations of my parents’ lives. A triangle, these days, of the Victoria Lighthouse Mission and the premises of villagers and farmers where my father does his plastering work, and the lakeside camp and cottage.

  My mother, in the front seat, gargles a wet cough as we turn from the main road onto the lake road. We chutter along, the tires crunch on gravel, the headlights cast weak piss spots on a grim slice of white road. She hums under her breath, her fingers rustle a packet of mints as she passes them to my father. The air grows heavy round his loud sucking, he smells more than ever of earth and fox; the heat and anger of him balloon.

  The cough must have been a signal, for he begins to speak. His voice twitches quickly into the cadences of the pulpit as he embroiders the theme of my failings. Primarily, there’s the waste of my education, paid for out of his savings and from the collection plate of his congregations—and by me! I’ve worked for it, gone harvesting, laboured on the roads, won scholarships. He’s learned I’ve left Damascus Road College and all prospects of entering the ministry, for the company of atheists at the university! Words, phrases, whole sentences and paragraphs spew from the cabinet of mimicry that suffices for his mind. “You’re a sinner and a liar, wallowing in whoredom and fornication.” I pay no attention. Through the window, I catch a glimpse of a pale doe and its speckled fawns at the roadside waiting for us to pass.