She lowered her hand from her mouth, turned. Then she was running, to her car, lurching on her sneakers in the illumination from the distant headlight, into her seat, where she slammed the door and locked it shut. She fastened her seatbelt, turned the key in the ignition, took a long look at the dashboard of her parents’ 1980 Impala, then slumped over the steering wheel and wept.
When Emily worked up the nerve to tell Cedric that it was finally and definitively over, she’d only found enough courage to do it over the phone. She told him that they’d never exactly been a perfect match, that it was probably time he moved on, found someone better. It was for the best, she promised; he would see that in time. She hurriedly hung up.
Two days later she found the letter in her mailbox, pleading, endorsed with a time and date, his summons to a parley. And one she had to show for. She owed the man that much.
When Cedric emerged from the stairwell he was in a rush that appeared authentic enough, checking the time on his cellphone, narrowly bumping into one of the closed parasols on the patio. She wondered what had set him back, though wasn’t about to ask. She intended this to be over quickly, to get to the point, and to cause as little a scene as possible.
“I’m so sorry I’m late,” Cedric said, kissing his hello as if he were in Quebec, something she’d initiated once when he’d tried to sloppily kiss her goodbye on the mouth in public. “I had a noon hour of . . . complications.” He settled into his seat, looked her over. “How are you?” he asked with sincerity.
Emily shrugged. “Okay. Fine.” But now that he was there, she felt more uneasy than she had expected and looked around the patio as if for something that she’d misplaced, finding only a nick in the table’s surface that begged picking at with her fingernail. She was trying to remember the order of what she wanted to say, the carefully worded sentences that she’d prepared. A policeman’s siren started up nearby, gave out two long howls, then ceased.
“Look,” she began, “I wanted to tell you that I’m really . . . sorry about the way things have . . .” But when she met his eyes, Emily cut herself short.
Cedric didn’t look right. There was something odd in his smile, something strange in the way he was sitting there.
“You know what, Emily?” He swallowed. “There’s no real reason to talk. I know what you’re gonna say. I’ve heard it before, believe me. And I just . . . don’t really want to waste this time with words. I think I just wanna—I don’t know—take it in, I guess. Look at you. I haven’t seen you in a long, long time, Em. Ages.”
Emily tried to say something, but he stopped her, holding up his hand like a traffic cop, long-arming the words that were trying to get across without the appropriate signet. The gesture annoyed her, but she strained to let it go, to let him have it, what he was asking for, a minute of quiet. So she sat back and watched the curious grin on his face, watched him fixating on different aspects of her body, on her fingers, her knuckles, her throat, the tiny studs of her earrings, her cheekbones, her breasts held tight beneath her blouse, her too-broad shoulders, her blocky arms, the way her rib cage rose and fell with her breathing, lingering at her wrists, his eyes focusing as if he could see the eight delicate bones that floated beneath the skin there. Until, believing it to be enough, she stood from her chair and placed a hand on his shoulder as she passed. “Take care of yourself.”
Cedric clung on to her hand, smelled it, ran a slow thumb over one of her nails, inspecting the half-moon of a lunula, then looked at another, as if to compare, and finally released his grip. She could feel him watching her until she’d stepped into the stairwell and was out of sight.
At her recital later that afternoon there wasn’t much of a turnout, a meagre audience of a few family members and the usual enthusiast couples, sitting in sporadic clumps, elderly and skeptical. There was, however, a husband and wife that kept catching Emily’s eye, a Japanese couple who could have been anywhere between the ages of sixty-five and ninety. Neither of them were reading the program, both of them staring forward impartially, at the musicians, or in their direction anyway. The woman’s eyes were deeply rimmed with crow’s feet, decades of wind and sun folded into her skin, making her expression both wise and sad.
At one point, the woman noticed a piece of lint on her husband’s sweater. She reached over and pinched it from the fabric, holding out her hand and rubbing her fingers together until she was sure it had dropped to the floor at her feet, her hand returning to her husband’s shoulder to smooth over the spot where the lint had been, once, twice with the flat of her palm, which rolled off and folded neatly into her other hand that was resting on her lap. While she did this, her husband had continued to watch the stage without sentiment, half-staring at Emily as she tightened the horsehair of her bow and turned the page of her sheet music.
She would spend the night thinking of them both, picturing their faces, guessing at the decades spent between them, envisioning the one simple act over and over, unable to sleep.
( x )
Finally “hometown” had come to mean only weddings or
funerals, the usual faces mingling around either chairbacks
or tombstones. September this time, yellowing cottonwoods
frothing in the breeze, the hearse an oblong mirror
reflecting rows of satin flowers in plastic vases, dandelions
wilting from tin cans. It’s a family plot, paid for in advance, blank
rectangles in the headstones, unengraved but already written
in stone. A Cessna drowned out the eulogy, and after the minister
had to compete with a woodpecker, plocking his way to a grub.
We stand amid wind damage, offerings of leaves untimely plucked
from their branches, grass clippings drifting the fringes of graves,
urns emptied of their Styrofoam-based bouquets, pulped like
confetti that’s thrown to hail a new and momentous beginning.
Pedal-switch stepped on, the hydraulic lift lowered the coffin into
its green-carpeted enclave, basement floor in an elevator with no
doors to slide open, no pre-recorded voice to say you’ve arrived.
I try to sort out the complications of what I feel, coming back
to this place where everything seems to have shrunk, except
the trees and clouds and graveyards, which have swollen,
and wonder why it doesn’t feel like I feel much at all;
watching the autumn gathering of robins hop between
the columns of burial plaques, stopping to tilt their heads,
cupping an ear to the ground as if listening for the
wriggling fingers of the past, but hearing only worms.
Melissa and her cross-country co-pilot counted backwards from their first day of classes to figure out that they had two days to spare on their road trip, which they planned on spending with worthy detours and extra sights. Annette offered once again to check out the town where Melissa was born, where it even sounded like she might have some family—on her dad’s side anyway. But with the mention of her father, Melissa found herself feeling more drawn away from the place than to it and had bent over the map to find something else of interest nearby. (It was amazing to her how even the allusion to the existence of her father could change her mood for the worse, find her clenching her teeth and sighing, shaking her head in silence.) She soon found something of greater interest only an hour away, a provincial park with the attention-grabbing name of Writing-on-Stone, just along the American border.
They turned onto the network of secondary highways and township roads, Melissa fixated on the landscape again. Cows stepping amid their respective bevy of cowbirds (who skittered as attentive as underlings in wait at their beck and call), bovines chewing cud with a boredom that spoke of either pompous royalty or an exhaustive dimwittedness. The Mormon church spires spearing into the sky from every cluster of buildings big enough to name itself on the map, their pinnacles pointing up at the cir
rus clouds, prairie plumes trailing a comb of white like ancient eyelashes dragging across a firmament iris, the dome of which was always stretching wider, more awake, attentive, scrutinizing the oil pumps in the abandoned distance below, those oblivious mule heads nodding sleepily at the ground, metronomes keeping time just to forget the hours they were leaving behind.
December 16, 2004
Hanif Khaled was lost. The hospital he was in, Montreal’s Royal Victoria, was modelled after the one in Edinburgh, where the Scots had apparently been captivated with the idea of labyrinthine corridors, with a complex network of wards, wings, and divisions that was entirely mazelike. Hanif, in his third year of medical school at McGill, was doing his clerkship there, and that morning, with a short break between two of his lectures, he’d decided to nip a few floors up and get the results of a test he’d given to one of his patients the day before. He soon found himself in a wing he hadn’t even known existed. To get to his second lecture from there, he opted for a clever shortcut, which only turned out to be a wasteful detour. Now he was pushing to be on time, walking fast, holding the strap of his backpack tight over his right shoulder, trying to keep it from bouncing noisily. He turned down a long hallway where two patients in baby-blue gowns were pushing their IV poles, shuffling gingerly, an exposed slice of freckled skin running down their backs. He could hear that there was a cluster of elevators farther along the hallway, their bells dinging on arrival, doors sliding open with a clattering grumble, where medical staff and visitors filed out of them, likely dispersing as they always did, with either hesitation or purpose and nothing in-between. He decided he would make his way there, thinking he might fair better on a different floor.
Once at the elevators, Hanif pressed both the up and down buttons, not quite sure which he was going to take. Absorbed in his own predicament, he was startled when a woman, also waiting for the elevator and standing behind him, tapped him on the shoulder. “Pardon me, doctor,” she began, waiting for Hanif to turn around. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?”
Hanif was caught off guard. “Uhhh . . .” He glanced at a clock opposite the elevator doors—the same as every clock in the hospital, displaying the same time to every one of its hidden corners, plain white circles pinned against the intricate patterns of ornamental stone. This one was relaying to Hanif that he didn’t have time to chat. “In fact-uhhh,” he’d said, “I’m hactually not a docter. I’m a mediquel student. So . . .”
There was a disharmonious ding at his back, followed by the elevator doors heaving open. “I am . . . I am very sorrie,” said Hanif, quickly stepping into the elevator, still facing the woman, “but I really avv to . . . I avv a . . .” He pointed to the floor, insinuating that he had urgent business to attend to in a lower ward.
The woman was staring at him pleadingly, clearly distressed. She had apparently had a very serious question to ask him. The doors slid closed between them. Instead of descending, the elevator began to climb.
Hanif sighed. He’d been given looks like this before, looks that, for him, managed to highlight the complications of how and why he’d chosen to study medicine in the first place. Looks that brought him back to an argument he’d had with his father, on the day he’d graduated from CEGEP at the top of the dean’s list. Though Hanif had appreciated his father’s confidence in him, he insisted he just didn’t have what it took to be a doctor: detesting even the smallest levels of stress, functioning horribly in the mornings, and loving his easy schedule, a daily planner with enough empty slots to cram his demanding social life around. Nor, he’d added, did he have the drive, interest, or discipline to pursue it. Sorry, Yaba.
Hanif’s father, Fineas, had disagreed. But he’d promised he would respect his son’s decision, that he would support him in whatever he chose as an occupation, even if it happened to be the wrong one. Fineas himself was a doctor, and he and his wife, Nadia, had immigrated from Egypt, fled what had become a police state, just for the welfare and future prospects of their only son. But Fineas was also a man of his word, and through the years he never once said to Hanif that he’d settled to be less than what he had the potential to become. Though he believed that that was exactly what his son had done, and sat in the background, quietly, thinking it—watching Hanif’s graduation as a physiotherapist three years later, watching his amateur downhill ski races throughout university, the slideshows of his California road trips, the unravelling of his car, toilet-papered again by his prankster friends—thinking it.
Hanif had coasted through a carefree decade as a physiotherapist, working at a chic sports-injury clinic in downtown Montreal. But nearing the end of that decade, he became aware of a nameless cerebral appetite. It was the kind of thing that felt like it had been quietly building for years and would no longer be sated by just another good book or weekend road trip. He was missing something, a challenge or test to pit himself against. Not knowing what else to do with it, he picked up a program for continuing education at McGill and browsed the course titles for night classes. Why not, he thought to himself, choosing the very first thing that stuck out for him, an introduction to Arabic: elementary reading, writing, and speaking. On the first evening there, he was asked the inevitable question, the teacher simply wanting to know why everyone had decided to take her course. The responses went around the room in a semicircle, creeping through the desk arrangement, and every answer to Hanif sounded more impressive than the next, the bar being raised incrementally until it was at the redhead boy beside him, who looked to be about twenty. “I just feel,” the near-teenager said, “that, as of late, the Arabic world has become the scapegoat of choice in Western society, and I guess I’d just like to understand their culture a bit more, to maybe help curb that, uhm, tendency.” The room nodded in thoughtful accord before shifting to Hanif, who looked to be more of an Arab than anyone in the room.
“And how about you?” asked the teacher, though ostensibly already knowing the answer—like others that were staring at him with discerning looks.
Hanif adjusted his sitting position, readjusted it. “I-ehh . . . don’t know. Was just . . . interested.”
In the fall of 2000, Hanif got a phone call from his mother, asking if he wouldn’t mind coming along while Fineas had some tests done. She was afraid of the specialist jargon and terminology they would use while speaking to a fellow physician, and she hoped Hanif would be able to translate what was being said into palatable French. When Hanif asked what kind of specialist they were going to see, she said she imagined it had something to do with optometry. Fineas had been seeing double for a week now. Though he’d been complaining about peculiar smells around the house as well, like heated rubber tires in the kitchen. Hanif noted the dates, hung up the phone, and felt the blood drain from his face.
They found the tumours quickly enough but couldn’t do much about them. They were small, and they were many. Hanif asked the different oncologists pointed questions, and hearing the ring of some kind of clinical training they would give him in-depth descriptions, justifications, and methodological reasons why it was impossible to operate, and that they would just have to see how he responded to chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and perhaps radiosurgery. In addition they would have to keep a close eye on the building pressure in his skull and be ready to take measures to curtail the effects, which were only sure to get worse. Whenever Fineas was informed of a change in his prognosis, he would let out a measured sigh. Nadia would ask him if he was all right. At which he would smile, say nothing.
The burgeoning cancer changed him in unexpected ways. He soon lost the patience he was known for, became easily annoyed, even spiteful, said things that a father never should. Like the evening he pulled Hanif closer and murmured into his face that Hanif, who’d been gifted enough to become a surgeon, was wasting his life massaging shoulders. Hanif pulled himself away, flung his father’s hand off him, and called him a petty old man. They were words he didn’t regret.
Five months later, Fineas was only speaking in Ar
abic. No one knew if this was a choice or a necessity, in the way that nobody knew how his experience of the world was changing as his neurons crammed ever tighter. Hanif understood enough of what was being said, either due to the course he’d taken or having picked some of the language up passively, overhearing his parents’ arguments and endearments while living under their roof for twenty-three years. It was a foreign tongue that he had been around all his life; he was just never spoken to in Arabic, his parents probably imagining that he would integrate into Canadian society more easily that way, be better off not knowing it, richer.
As Fineas deteriorated, he was shifted around to different floors in different hospitals, corresponding to the complications that arose in his condition. After one of his moves, Nadia went home to get a few more of his things, personal effects that she brought into his room, set along the windowsills and bedside tables, things he never noticed were there. Hanif went to pick up his mother, arriving earlier than he’d said he would, only to find her with her forehead to the floor, standing up with the mechanicalness of ritual.
“Beh, que-ce que tu fais là?” He asked her what she was doing accusingly, because he knew.
She was unembarrassed. She not only admitted that she was praying but motioned for him to come and stand beside her, gesturing that he should join in. She could teach him, she’d offered, if he wanted, and added that his pronunciation in Arabic (at least in the few words she’d heard him say) was excellent. He would sound just like the calming Imams in the mosques of her youth. Come on, she encouraged, there was no reason to be ashamed.
Believing Cedric Page 22