The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “I’m struck by how aware and engaged with the world Jake is,” Aiden said to Saurette on the phone. “He’s one of the most conscious individuals in my acquaintance. And let’s be frank – what informed person isn’t anxious these days?”

  “Suicidal ideation is not the hallmark of a healthy individual.”

  “No, of course. But still,” Aiden couldn’t resist adding, “I don’t suppose we’d diagnose tornado anxiety in someone watching a funnel cloud move in his direction.”

  “Well, that’s the standard line of the so-called green bloggers,” Saurette said.

  Aiden deserved that. He had actually lifted the tornado argument from a blog. He tries not to hold his embarrassment in that moment against Peter Saurette. He can only assume that, for his part, the guy feels diminished. At one time he led people along the path to self-knowledge; he watched with knowing eyes while they confronted their terror and loss and the spectres of their parents. He was once a shaman of the underworld. And then, Aiden thinks as he rides the elevator up to his office, Doctor Peter Saurette became an agent for Big Pharma.

  Defrag, when he comes in, does not look well. Aiden can read the signs: his cautious movements, as if he’s trying to fend off nausea. “Sorry about the last session,” he says. “Bill me anyway.”

  “I intend to,” Aiden says. “So, what was up?”

  “I was a little under the weather.” Defrag sits with his hands dangling between his knees. “Under the weather.” He repeats the phrase thoughtfully. He looks thinner than ever. He lives on air.

  “Are you eating?” Aiden asks.

  “I’m eating.”

  “What did you eat this morning?”

  “I ate a bowl of oats.” He looks like Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aiden always thinks: a long, keen face and dark eyes, a hank of dark hair. Counter, original, spare, strange.

  “Not bad,” Aiden says. “Tell me about the day you missed your session. What happened?”

  “I went to work,” Defrag says. “But I couldn’t work. And then I went home.”

  “Some days it’s not even worth chewing through the restraints,” Aiden says, and Defrag grins, recognizing the reference. When he first came to therapy, he’d have these bad days periodically, like waking up with the flu, and he could never pinpoint a cause. For weeks he’d live an ordinary, productive, middle-class life, and then suddenly he’d be too sick to move. He’d lie curled up in bed, dizzy, panicked, disoriented, as though his inner ear was out of whack. For no reason at all. They don’t bother with that narrative anymore.

  “What did you read that morning?” Aiden asks.

  “I guess it was reports on the UN climate summit,” Defrag says.

  “I missed them,” Aiden says.

  “Yeah, well, they were on page eight.” Defrag laughs.

  “So what went down?”

  Defrag tells him. He outlines the whole thing passionately and efficiently – he’s clearly gone over it a thousand times in his mind. Aiden, listening, is ashamed. Unevolved people in power, he thinks. We’re all bozos on this bus. He deals with it himself by not staying up on the news, but Defrag has never cultivated the protective layers that most people count on.

  Defrag’s previous counsellor (an MSW Saurette referred Defrag to) gave him a relaxation CD of birdsong. Brain-imaging technology has shown that birdsong promotes a sense of well-being, she explained. It’s evolutionary: if the birds are singing, no predators are prowling the forest. Defrag lay on his bed and identified the silvery scraps of song in his headphones. The Acadian flycatcher – endangered. The black-capped vireo – endangered. Kirtland’s warbler – only two hundred left. “Maybe you’d do better with whale music,” the counsellor said when he brought back the CD. Laughter shook Defrag when he told Aiden. His chest is a cage full of unruly laughs just dying to get out.

  “Who do you talk to about the things that worry you?” Aiden asked at the time. “Among your friends. Your colleagues at work.”

  “Nobody wants to talk about it. Why would they?”

  “I have this sort of issue with my wife,” Aiden said. “When I mention climate change, she says, ‘Please. You think the gods are punishing you personally?’ ”

  He rarely mentions his family in this office, but with Defrag, establishing trust was huge. Aiden found himself encouraging a kind of double thinking that would let Defrag acknowledge and process his fears while still finding ways to live a reasonably contented life. “As if” thinking, you might call it: live as if catastrophe is not just around the corner. Most people are extremely good at this. He also encouraged Defrag to join a group of like-minded individuals, an environmental lobby group, but it was all kids and he couldn’t deal with it.

  Frankly, Aiden is as close to a like-minded individual as Jake Peloquin is likely to find. “One organism, one vote,” Aiden said during a session early on, and Defrag’s expression sharpened. A couple of minutes later, Defrag dropped in “Clone me, Doctor Memory.” Aiden hadn’t run into anyone who knew Firesign Theatre since his buddy Glen died – it was like a Masonic handshake. They’ve never acknowledged it; they just drop a line now and then. It’s the sort of humour you need headphones and a thousand wasted nights to get into.

  Defrag wraps up his report on the UN climate summit. They sit without speaking while a string quartet drifts in from the waiting room. “You know,” Defrag says, “I used to think the waiting was the hard part, back in the seventies, when we were all first getting the picture. I used to think it was worse when you knew this was coming but nobody else could see it. I figured an abstract horror was worse than a real horror.”

  “Only in the movies, I guess,” Aiden says.

  Defrag shifts in his chair as if his bones are hurting. “How was your Christmas?” he asks.

  “Complicated,” Aiden says. The kettle is boiling and he gets up to make coffee. He wants badly to tell Defrag about Sylvie – it would be a relief to talk about it with someone who gets what it means to him – and while he waits for the French press to do its thing, he arms himself against the impulse. He pours the coffee and hands Defrag a mug. “We were planning a trip to France for this spring, but it’s off. I wasn’t that keen anyway. I think my flying days are over. I just don’t know how to break that to my wife.”

  “Oh, come on,” Defrag says. “Jumbo jets are mass transit.” He opens the trapdoor and lets a few peals of laughter escape.

  Aiden’s about to shift back to the bout of anxiety Defrag had before Christmas when Defrag asks, with genuine interest, “So why did you cancel?”

  And he tells him. “We found out our daughter is pregnant. She’s due in April. She’s nineteen. Nothing planned about it – she’s in a new relationship, they’re both students.” Defrag, about to take a sip of his coffee, holds the mug still. “You know, it’s interesting,” Aiden says. “I was turning into a bit of a misanthrope, but it looks as though I’m invested for another generation. Suddenly I find myself having to believe in the future.”

  “Didn’t your daughter already do that for you?”

  Aiden has to think for a minute. “I wasn’t so afraid for Sylvie. I guess because I thought she would live in a world I knew. I knew it was liveable, at least for people like us. I don’t know that for this baby.”

  Defrag drops his eyes, but not before Aiden sees the consternation in them. Freud had his reasons for putting his patients on a couch, with the therapist well out of sight behind them.

  At SERC they’re developing guidelines for implementing a new HPV program. The whole administrative staff is involved, so at the end of the meeting, while they’re packing up, Liz sees her chance and asks for a personal moment. The instant their heads swivel curiously towards her, she’s unnerved. Oh, how tense she sounds, how brittle. But she gets out the news and then launches into a little discourse about women trapped by oral contraceptives that mask the signs of pregnancy. “The best-laid plans …” she says flatly in conclusion.

  She can tell they’re taken aback �
� by her manner, no doubt, as much as by the news. All the same, they’re lovely. This is all in a day’s work for them, after all. They make kind suggestions, they joke about bringing their knitting to staff meetings. “And how are you, Liz?” they ask. Then everybody settles back into the routine of the morning, and Liz walks to her office, replaying the scene in her mind, scanning it for telltale exchanges of private glances. They can’t all be entirely devoid of schadenfreude, can they?

  A portrait of Margaret Sanger hangs on the exposed brick wall across from Liz’s desk, posed with one finger pressed to her carotid artery as though she’s checking her own pulse. When Liz was named director, she redid the office and took down the portrait. Didn’t Sanger once speak at a Ku Klux Klan rally? Didn’t she talk about “human weeds”? But everybody in the office flipped out. So muttering, “Choose your battles,” Liz hung the picture back up. It’s true that when she first learned about Sanger, while she was doing her public admin. degree, she was galvanized. “A woman’s duty is to look the whole world in the face with a go-to-hell look in her eyes” – that was her motto. Liz thought of those words often during her early days at SERC, when she was so out of her depth. During that long uphill climb to confidence, which involved a very expensive business wardrobe.

  She stands for a minute eye to eye with the Sanger, and then she goes to her computer and pulls up the forms for the annual staff performance assessments. By the end of the day she has a schedule posted, not something she usually manages this early in the year. It’s a way of having an in-depth conversation with each of her staff, she explains to Aiden over supper. Building relationships. “And of course,” he says, finishing the thought, “there is no better way to remind people, I am your boss.”

  But during these private meetings that take up a big chunk of January, Liz can’t help but wonder if she’s overplayed her hand. It strikes her that some staff members are nicer than usual, which of course indicates pity. And one or two are terribly passive-aggressive – Karen Kemelmen, for instance. The session starts off genially enough, Karen dressed up for the occasion in a new teal shift and leaping in to finish Liz’s sentences with eager little laughs. But when Liz moves on to Karen’s lateness and all the unauthorized time off she’s taken, Karen immediately launches into long confidences about the trials of living with a bipolar husband. “You know what I mean?” she asks three times a minute in her ridiculous Marilyn Monroe voice. Then she assumes an expression of innocence and concern and goes in for the kill. “Once your grandchild is born, Liz, and your daughter is struggling to look after a tiny baby, you will see how hard it is to keep regular hours. Especially if, God forbid, there are complications. With either of them. You know what I mean?”

  “Thankfully, you don’t have to manage my work performance,” Liz says. “It’s the board that does that.”

  After Karen leaves, she sits at her desk with her chin in her hand. The phone rings and she ignores it. No doubt Karen deserves sympathy, but on the other hand she’s an aggravating and ignorant woman who will exploit every advantage. What does she see when she turns her pale eyes (eerie eyes, like a husky’s) on Liz? She sees something she can get at. She doesn’t know what it is, but she’s discovered that it’s there.

  Liz rouses herself and reaches into her bag for her lunch pack. She can feel a tension headache gathering at the base of her skull. She is going to have to make yoga work for her.

  There’s an afternoon class she likes. It’s small, and the teacher, a guy named Cam, has a mild, humorous manner and ordinary articulation. That afternoon will be devoted to “breath work.” Even the words are strange, Liz thinks, sitting cross-legged on her mat, although her breathing has never been totally unconscious since synchro.

  They breathe in downward dog, they breathe with their legs up the wall. They feather their breath to the rhythm of Cam’s voice. “Be fully in the moment,” a gentle, toneless reminder. Liz closes her eyes against the fluorescent lights. Sylvie will have to learn controlled breathing for the delivery, she thinks. Not that she herself found it a big help. She can still see Sylvie on the ultrasound table, her face scared and intent. “Acknowledge your thoughts and let them go, a bird flying across the sky.” She pulls the air into her hands as instructed; she pulls the air into her feet; she tries to tune in to which is her dominant nostril.

  Then the lights are turned low and they’re in savasana. “Close your eyes. You don’t need your eyes to look inward.” And she’s standing in a doorway with Krzysztof’s hand on the small of her back. In a beautiful old kitchen a woman with platinum hair is making coq au vin with organic rabbit, slicing carrots with the precision of a French chef. She lifts a face full of thoughtless high spirits towards Liz. Pink chunks of rabbit spit in the skillet, and Liz feels the hand – brash, cold, relentless – slipping under her waistband, below the elastic of her panties.

  “Use your inhalation to pull back your rogue thoughts.” Liz is prone in a dim room where twenty strangers lie in a posture that simulates their deaths. Her breath lifts her and drops her back, lifts her and drops her, and Cam’s voice grows faint. She is only her breath. And then his voice is gone, and she’s gone, just a frail shell abandoned on the mat.

  She may have been hyperventilating, she may have had one of those highs people have when they choke themselves on purpose. But when the lights come up and she surfaces again into the dim room, she understands that yoga is the answer to everything.

  On Skype Noah is familiar but different, like the digitally aged kids on posters at the bus depot. “Thanks for the email,” Sylvie says. What he sent her was a Charles Darwin quote. She printed it in a big font and hung it on her wall, and she angles her laptop to show him. WHAT A WONDROUS PROBLEM IT IS, WHAT A PLAY OF FORCES, DETERMINING THE KINDS AND PROPORTIONS OF EACH PLANT IN A SQUARE YARD OF TURF. “I love it! He’s talking about permaculture, the way all the plants support each other, and what he says – it’s exactly what botany field school is. You are assigned one square metre of ground and you identify every single organism in it.”

  “I know,” Noah says.

  They used to play in Mary Magdalene’s garden. Sylvie showed him how to pinch the throat of a snapdragon and make it open its jaws. And then he showed her something even cooler: a plant that curled its little leaves up over your finger when you touched it. Mimosa, it was called, and it moved like that to shake off insects or to freak out grazing herbivores. Even as a kid he knew the evolutionary reason.

  “I never paid any attention to plants until I started playing with you,” Sylvie says.

  “Well, what were you – five? You used to play outside in your pyjamas.”

  “I did?”

  “Yeah. They had owls on them.”

  He’s got an eidetic memory, this guy. “Stop showing off,” she says.

  He shrugs. “Anyway, I hope you can still do field school.”

  “Yeah, so do I.”

  They stare at each other a minute. “Show me your room,” she says.

  He picks up his laptop and gives her a tour. It is sickeningly neat. “What’s that? Hanging from the bookshelf.”

  He turns his head to look. “Oh. It’s armour, scale armour. I brought it from home. I guess I just wanted something to make my room feel familiar.” He swivels his laptop around and moves it closer. She sees the beautiful sleeve he wore in the picture, its overlapping silver leaves.

  “It’s not for falconry?”

  “No, it’s battle gear. Falconers wear leather gauntlets.”

  “Where’d you get it?”

  “Krzysztof gave it to me,” he says off camera. “It was from a movie. It was when he and my mom first got together, and I really liked it. I wore it a lot when I was a kid. You have to wear a thick shirt under it, or a jacket. It’ll scratch your arm to hell.”

  The room revolves and Noah is back. Tears sting Sylvie’s eyes. There are forces at play in the world that she knows nothing about.

  “So, how are you feeling?” he asks.

/>   “I’m okay.”

  “Like, how are things changing for you? Do you feel like you used to feel?”

  This is why she likes him: when he finally gets around to talking, he asks questions. Many guys do not.

  “I feel tired. And sort of fired up at the same time. It’s weird. I’ll be falling asleep in class and I’ll feel the baby kicking me in the kidneys – like, pay attention! Anyway. When is the deadline for the Lake Malawi program?”

  “End of February.”

  “You’re still going to apply, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to, but it doesn’t seem right.” In the Skype shadows she sees a reminder of his face when his eyes were black from the playground swing, back when he was Sparky.

  “Noah,” she says, “I didn’t get to say this when you were here at Christmas, but I want to tell you how sorry I am. I know this doesn’t fit with your plans or your values. It doesn’t fit with mine either. But for you it was a clearer thing not to have children – you signed the VHEMT pledge and everything.”

  Strong feelings pass over his face but she can’t quite make out what they are. “Well, I guess any time a guy goes off without a condom, he’s responsible for what happens,” he says at last.

  She feels tears stinging again, because this is an insult to her trustworthiness. But what can she say? She did let him down.

  After a minute he says, “There’s nothing we can do about it now.”

  “Maybe it was meant to be.”

  “No, I don’t think you can say that about anything. Meant to be, in what deity’s mind? It’s just a natural thing. It’s just a biological consequence of the way we are, and we have to find the best way to live with it. The least damaging way. VHEMT is one way to live out your values, but there are other ways. Like, there’s a guy in my building who’s taken a vow to own only one hundred things for the rest of his life. So he really thinks about it before he takes on anything new.”

  It’s awesome that there might be a right way to do this! Sylvie looks at his serious, shadowy face with gratitude. She’s been looking after him for years – in a certain way she has – and he has proved himself to be the kind of person it was worthwhile to protect.