M. Girard stood at the foot of his bed. Though his face was in shadow, Liam recognized the man by his distinctive fawn-coloured spats. M. Gi-rard told him he should not leave Paris. Liam began to tell M. Girard that he did intend to return when he was able, but then he could not remember the French for “convalescent home.” Maison d’Infirme? M. Girard was not patient. He told Liam that if he left now, whatever slight talent he had would be lost to lazy habits and bad taste. Liam tried to explain that he had not the money, having lost his patron after their contracted year, but M. Girard said that money should not be an object, and himself, he would work as a dishwasher before he sacrificed whatever small gifts he had to bourgeois pretension.
Great artists are never so middle class, he said that last day. They are better than that.
“There is a letter from your mother, Corporal Manley, would you like to hear it?”
Liam looked past the VAD in her winged cap for M. Girard, who had gone.
They were always singing. On the troop train from Étaples it was “If You Want the Sergeant Major” and the ubiquitous “Tipperary.” They kept it up until they detrained just before midnight, and stood around with tin cups of tea that steamed in the yellow lamplight. He’d looked up from the gravel platform and seen a blistered red sky to the east, rising like a false dawn. It was April. A wet breeze smelled like daffodils. Leaving the station, he saw bunches of King Alfreds as big as his fist, behind a row of white painted stones. Then they were off, down the white road in the moonlight, and there were poplar trees like in the songs he sang about France.
Somewhere near the forward ranks they started, and his mob picked it up. At first he couldn’t make out the words. The melody was “Auld Lang Syne.” Liam was in full kit, among bulky figures in greatcoats, and their tramp tramp tramp steady as a metronome: We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here. They had joyful voices and shouted into the countryside. Some were pleasant, even, he thought, though he heard an awkward shift from chest to head tones. Awkwardness did not matter, he reminded himself: they are interested in being heard.
The farmyards dropped behind them. Now there were stumped trees, burnt churches, earthworks. Liam looked away, up to where the moon emerged from the clouds, almost blue. It dazzled him. As it always seemed in moonlight, the world was changed, the earth conscious beneath his feet, the trees about to speak. They groaned, he thought, those that still stood beside their broken companions, shifted in the earth as though to uproot themselves and make their escape. When he glanced to either side, he was sure there were bodies—or things like bodies, once bodies, about to stand up and lumber toward him—looming and fading as they passed, dark shapes in the larger darkness.
He has a letter in his pocket, from his mother. She is very proud of her own laddie. She and Ella will send him socks and chocolate.
The last rise, the long white roadway turning to mud under their tramp tramp tramp. As they reached the low summit, the first thing he saw was the dead thing, a fallen hobby horse with legs stiff as sticks, spilling grey wool guts onto the mud.
He stripped naked and dropped his tunic in the corner of his billet. He bathed. Once in bed he drifted nearly to sleep, but then perceived a smell, a disgusting mingling of sweat and shit and wet wool, and more than anything, dead things rotting. He could not sleep for the smell. He got up to search for the source, planning how delicately he would draw the housewife’s attention to it—“Madam!” he would begin—but then he traced the scent to the tunic he dropped. He picked it up, and the smell was suddenly so terrible, he dropped it out the window, not liking that it was his own self he smelled.
He wished morphine did not make him smell things like the stink of that tunic. The smell, sometimes, of hay lying in the fields. They marched through hayfields in summer, French ones that should be picturesque, like in songs, but only filled him with fear. When he first arrived, he’d sing, in his mind, Oh the moonlight’s fair tonight along the Wabash through the fields there comes the breath of new mown hay, but that had quickly ended.
Sometime after that, Liam was running. He was halfway down the ward before he woke up. As he ran, he came down hard on his left leg, which was bad. His lungs hurt, too, and he thought afterward, it was the pain that woke him more than his fear. At the time, he knew only that he had seen something in the darkness above his cot and it was behind him now, and that his escape lay someplace before: the huge window at the end of the ward and down into the street. He was nearly at the window, when he began to wonder if the plan was excessive. That was also when he heard his own voice shouting.
He thought he might also be tangled in his bedclothes, which made him stumble on the linoleum. That might have been what made the pain in his left leg so bad. It was hard to tell, what with the noise and the urge to run, find the window, break it and leap, hit the pavement and across the city in strides so long that the time suspended between footfalls felt like flight. At the end of the long ward, he leaned on the casement’s sill, felt the pain in his throat and knew with his waking mind that he still shouted, though he could not yet find the mechanism that would stop it. He fumbled through the Venetians for the latch, but found none, and in his frustration he tangled his hands in the blinds and hauled. Something broke. His feet slid on the enamelled metal, and now he hurt in more places than before, his palms and his knuckles.
Before he put his fist through the window, as he had intended, and climbed onto the ledge to leap two storeys to the sidewalk, he paused and posed himself a small, cool question: Are you sure this is real? It was a question he had not thought to ask for some time. As he struck the glass with the base of his palm and then his fist, the thought resolved a little further and he managed to stop his fist from swinging. He turned to look down the ward and saw the others struggling up; they stared at him, unafraid, irritated.
In that first moment of full consciousness, he felt like an electrically resuscitated corpse.
“What?” he heard. “Goddamn Manley again.” The blinds on the left side of the window hung from the frame by one nail. The others lay in his hands and around his feet. He still gripped them; when he forced his fingers to uncurl, the slats fell and rang on the linoleum.
“Just Manley! Everyone, it’s only Manley, not the goddamn Hun,” that from the man in the next cot. “Only Goddamn Manley!”
Goddamn Manley was the closest thing he had to a nickname in the hospital.
But there was still the far end of the ward, and his bed where the dark thing crouched. He should be brave and turn to look, knowing that if he stared at the thing long enough, he would find it was not a monster, but his blue silk dressing gown hanging on the back of his chair. The one he found out (too late) the lads hated for reasons he did not understand. But he could not look, and therefore could not make the dark thing resolve back into something ordinary. He leaned instead against the window and looked down to the street where the lamps were bright and yellow. People passed, couples arm in arm like they’d been out to a show. Not late then, maybe a little before midnight.
Then a surge of yellow light close by, and he saw that his right hand was covered in blood and there were bloody prints on the glass. One of the double doors down the end was open and there was a VAD; he didn’t know her at first. She was silhouetted, the winged cap and skirt kicking out behind her as she ran toward him. In the new light he saw blood on the white blinds, too, and on his pyjamas.
He heard mumbled complaints and curses: “Sister, sister—get him out of here, would you? Some of us need to sleep.”
“Sorry, everyone,” he said, confusedly, “sorry.” He kept his eyes away from the wall beside his bed. He kept his eyes away from those who were watching the VAD lead him from the ward. He leaned on her all the way to the little office where she sat up nights, waiting just for him, he sometimes thought, for just this nightly disaster.
Once he was fully conscious, there were the lungs to worry about, and the left leg that throbbed dully and in
cessantly. Often Sister reminded him of his improvement, but on these nights he forget everything but the wheeze, and the slime he disgorged hourly from some deep, wet place inside, and that spattered the sleeve of his tunic.
Because just that moment he wasn’t better: each heartbeat felt like a detonation behind his ribs, that filled his vision with black, and sounded in his ears like the enemy’s approaching bombardment. He sat at the table, hands on knees, his spine and ribs caved protectively around the mass of sodden, swollen tissue that had once been a set of working lungs. He could not quite believe that some time, long ago, he had breathed without thought or care, and his eyes had not pulsed.
The VAD (it was Annie, he realized, whom they called Sister Flynn to be correct, who was nice and sometimes went to the shows and told him what she heard) cut the white gauze bandage and tied it at his knuckles. Behind her, the kettle sang on its spirit lamp. They knew the routine well now, and she set the white enamel bowl in front of him and handed him a towel. She filled the bowl from her kettle, and added eucalyptus and he leaned forward into the steam, with the towel hooded over his head.
He counted one. Another breath ended short and that was two. In the half-light beneath the towel, he saw that his fingers were white and purple where they curled over the edges of the bowl, like a dead man’s hands. Though he tried very hard to be good and calm and still, and count breaths the way they told him to, he thought very clearly and coolly in a voice like the one that had stopped him breaking the window, I’m going to die like this. And with that thought, black and gold sparks swarmed again in his eyes, clearer than anything real he could see in the dim light. He would die crouched over a white enamel bowl full of warm water, with a hard, immoveable thing in his chest like an unexploded shell. It was true. It was not the thing in the dark above his bed that he should run from, but the white enamel bowl and his own scarified lungs. He knew it so clearly that he drew another breath to say it aloud for the first time, and make Sister Flynn hear him when he said it, and admit that he was good as dead.
He felt a small hand on the back of his neck. Her palm was calloused and dry; her rough skin caught his hair as she stroked his head. She leaned over him and whispered through the towel, close enough that he felt her arm’s slight weight on his shoulder. “Breathe, Corporal Manley,” she said, her voice low and close, as though she’d just awakened, too. “We know you must be still.” The scarred thing inside did not respond at first to the sound of her voice. Then he drew another breath. Out. In. She breathed with him: Out. In. He felt her chest rise against his arm, then fall again. She seemed to speak, and at the time he was sure she said, “If you panic, Liam, it will get worse. You’ll strangle. We mustn’t panic. We must remember to breathe.” But afterward he didn’t think so. She never called him Liam.
When the water cooled, he raised his head and looked again at his bloodless fingers pressed into the table on either side of the bowl. He dried his face on the towel. Sister had a fresh kettle in her hands and another one already over the lamp. She was watching him, her eyes dark and smudged all around with purple. There were tired lines between her nose and mouth.
“Where is Doctor Beach, Sister?” he asked.
“We’ll call him if this doesn’t work,” she said. She pushed the fresh bowl toward him. He tried to smile at her, and she managed to smile back. She waited, sitting across the table, through the rest of the night, as she had done the week before, and the week before that. She sat with him until Doctor Beach arrived in the examining room, smelling of the cold air in the street and his morning cigar.
MORE TIME PASSES FOR LIAM
Despite a decade of relentless movement from little big-time to little little-time, the world continued to shrink. Sometimes when he was sick, Liam suspected that what was before him at that moment—the sink in the corner of the room, the narrow window, the narrow bed—comprised the whole universe, and that depths he had once thought illimitable were now bound by the thin walls of a hotel room outside Mexico City, in 1939. This new conviction reversed the feeling he had once known of doors flickering open before him. If they had opened, they only led to where he now stood with the ivory-handled razor in his right hand and the fingertips of his left hand brushing the sink, before the mirror into which he must stoop to look.
And when he was really ill, the world grew even smaller: margined by his own body, with no opened doors and only his unbreachable skin, and the sound of his lungs in decline as he drew each breath and released it, drew and released. On these sorts of days, the razor hung from his right hand for a long time, while he leaned on the edge of the sink with his left and meant to pick up the soap and begin lathering his cheeks. But there were stars in his eyes when he moved too quickly, and the scar tissue in his lungs held shut each little alveolus, just as the puckered skin of his left thigh pulled tight and shone when he bent his knee.
He had once thought that a song so called him from himself that he leapt up through the top of his skull. He might have thought pain cracked him open and that he had spilled out the crack, and when he ran in the grip of a dream, he might think he had outrun his ruined body, and found the way outside. Even when he came inside a woman in the dark and could not see her face, but spilled irresistibly into her, he had only, really, remained as he was, the size of his own expanded lungs at their greatest capacity, a shape circumscribed by scar tissue. It was not the shape he wished it to be. Sometimes he thought that if he could find Mario O’Mara’s tailor’s records, he could compare those numbers to his own measurements, and so know the precise distance—a quarter inch? an eighth?—between his voice and O’Mara’s.
On evenings when he was well enough, he walked the streets as quickly as he was able and found reprieve in the illusion of movement. It was a relief he thought he had once found in music, before this late illness had weakened him. Standing before his sink, he could not properly remember those times, but thought they must once have been. They had long since been replaced by other things, like women, and the few short, scripted hours between chance meeting and assignation. He left quickly afterward, out of remembered fastidiousness and the red flush of shame. Once he had tried to ask forgiveness. He remembered a woman, a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, her large, blue-white breasts spilling out of a cheap red silk wrap. How she had looked in the lamplight with deep lines etched by the shadows of her nose and her brow, one hand raised to pull at the ring in her ear. The other arm crossed over her stomach, holding shut the robe that shone wetly and quivered with each breath, the rolls on her stomach pressing against the silk. She had smiled at him.
He had opened his mouth. “I’m sorry,” he had said, wondering how it was that a moment ago he had cried out and clung to her and kissed her. She seemed unkissable now. She had gone on smiling, one hand tugging the gold ring, the other holding shut the robe, as though she had not been naked in the lamplight ten minutes before.
“I’m sorry,” he had said again. She had laughed and rolled her eyes, as though to say I know you. He wondered if it were a little bit like forgiveness, that dismissal, but still it was dreadful that he was one of the men—the many men? he did not like to guess—at whom she shook her head as though saying, I know you. He could not bear to think he was that kind, whatever it was, and he said again, “I’m sorry.”
She dropped the gold earring, and reached toward him where he sat half-dressed on the bed. She caught the back of his neck and held him between her fingers. “You should at least say thank you. I would rather hear thank you any day.” One leg slid behind him, so he could feel her warm inner thigh.
He did not speak.
“Thank you,” she said, her other leg warming his chest, and he felt her through the fabric of robe. “Thank you.”
The scene was not repeated. He left the room, in whichever city it had been. Somewhere south, in California; he could not remember. It shocked him that he could not remember the breadth of his travels or the names of towns, only that the girl in cheap red silk had shaken he
r head and smiled.
AND LET THE REST OF THE WORLD GO BY
Trump Davis and his Western Gentlemen were one of those shabby little dance bands who cluttered up the western provinces, playing holiday camps and hotels in summer, trailing through small towns in winter. Liam never knew who mentioned his name to Trump, but sometimes he suspected Goshawk. By whatever chance, a letter waited for him at General Delivery in Winnipeg whose blotted, badly formed sentences were signed by a man who identified himself as Trump’s agent. The agent mentioned that he had heard Liam’s work the previous year at the Palm Court Charity Tea in Calgary, and it had recently been suggested that he would make a classy addition to The Western Gentlemen. The letter-writer actually wrote “classy,” and went on to suggest that Liam might join them in Nelson for a short tour of dancehalls in the province’s interior, culminating in three nights at the Vimy Memorial Hall in Chilliwack.
The agent—Liam suspected it was Trump himself—had included a flier for an earlier performance. Their signature song was, unhappily, “And Let the Rest of the World Go By.”
When Liam received the letter, he had been tired a long time, and now in a persistent way, with a weight that seemed new, though he could not quite remember a time when it had not accompanied him. His breath often faltered during long sustains, and he had re-ordered his repertoire to avoid moments that tested his limits, or required such concentration.
Once installed as a Western Gentleman, Liam was not surprised to discover that he was no crooner. It took only three weeks, long enough to get him into one of the western-style suits—lurid houndstooth top-stitched in white, with a string tie—abandoned by an earlier member of about his height, and to put him on stage before the largest audience he’d seen in years. He was introduced to and forgot the names of twelve other Western Gentlemen.
He did not know that his third night in Chilliwack was his last as a Western Gentleman until the end of the final set, when girls in short skirts and boys in uniform shuffled around the floor and he sang Trump’s signature song. Or rather, he sang his own signature song: We’ll find perfect peace where joys never cease somewhere beneath the starry sky we’ll build a sweet little nest somewhere in the west and let the rest of the world go by.
The Paradise Engine Page 24