AWOL

by Jennifer Barclay

  God, I think. Buddha. Jesus Christ. Even Allah lives in this city. At five o’clock—or was it four?—I awoke to the cries of the muezzin calling the faithful to worship. The darkness in my narrow room was like heavy blue water. Where on earth was I? I had no idea, just a heart beating very hard, legs tangled in starched sheets. A nightmare hovered in the ebb of the unconscious, but the muezzin washed it away. I lay there, rocked by the swell of voices; the sound was dream-laden, disturbing, verging on chaotic. Or grief-stricken.

  Very slowly, I understood. Oh, yes, here I am. Mandalay. The mosque in the next street. Prayers as deep as ocean pouring out the doors. The men were chanting in Arabic.

  But it is Burmese I am trying to learn now.

  Broken heaven, broken earth. Broken country.

  And, God, I learn so slowly.

  Karen Connelly is the author of six books of poetry and non-fiction. She is presently working on a novel and a collection of essays about the revolutionary politics of Burma and the Thai-Burmese border. Her work has been honoured with the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and the Air Canada Award. Her books are published in several countries and languages.

  020Departure Point: Italy

  WITH MY LITTLE EYE

  Tony Burgess

  And the first thing to me was the smell. What you usually smell in airports, waiting in line with your boarding pass and carry-on, is carpets, I think. That’s what you smell, and occasionally the insides of other people, something you get used to, the roaming valves of strangers warming your arms and face, eventually comforting you.

  But now I smell something stranger. Four people are in front of me, three behind, Rachel beside me. Something prickly. I lean back, then forward; it’s not me. I wave the bottom of my coat around Rachel’s back; not her. But definitely sweat, acrid, a bit burning, not new sweat, not coat sweat, no: this has been on a body for a long, long time. Clothes have been changed deeply by it. I lean back again. It’s there behind me somewhere, and I step forward, but this smell is ancient enough, evolved enough, to leave its host from time to time, to move away, rotate on its own, enjoy itself, I imagine, like all fiends in mid-air must. I don’t think it’s a man’s smell, but that’s just speculation. I furtively glance at faces. A bearded, balding man. Eyes like a scientist, he’s dying to talk. Not him. A Goth couple. Actually, he looks like one of the Corrs. No, nothing cleaner than a Goth. A nun in front of him. Ditto.

  We move onto the plane. Lots of hollow plastic, the familiar certainty of catastrophe. Then after that we sit, death maybe comes later, but I’ve dealt with it already, I passed on somewhere back there and now it’s just a smooth flight—the funny suspicion I have as I look at the vapour below that I probably never existed anyway, not in the proper sense, not the way people think I did. Rachel sleeps and I pray for her because in all likelihood she does exist. I change while I nap, I am a kite or a bird or a ghost, but she cannot change, she is Rachel, in great peril, thousands of feet above the earth. What was I thinking?

  You play with magazines, people smiling, jewels on wrists, half of Kevin Costner’s face over the high bun of hair in front, the normal life you like—people in trousers, suits all reading together, mostly Harry Potter, shoes removed and placed under the seat ahead, maybe the little bombs that you’ve heard about—the fool with the plastic explosives disrupting a flight with requests for matches, cursing the pack he’s been using, tossing itty-bitty deadheads on the floor. And now flying homeward over the Italian Alps, you trigger memories of Italian art, well, not quite proper memories, more like a richly chiaroscuroed mucous plug planted in the centre of your head, but in there, somewhere, are thousands of baroque masterpieces. Again, you become aware of a little snarl under your nose. That stench. That foul biting beak pecking upward at you. Then you realize what it is. Beside you. It is the nun. The nun. We must look closer.

  Her habit is white with blue stripes, familiar-looking. The fringes are soiled, the sleeves are isobars of yellow and body grey. This nun is filthy.

  Her little hands come up and waggle across her dinner, she mutters something to the sticky piece of chicken, lifts a cup of water to her lips.

  She might be African, but quite light-skinned, large hooded eyes, very large like a big-eye painting in a motel room, or the catacomb painting of the Donna Velata, giant abstract hands bending up in a dark space. I turn away and try to reassess the smell, factoring in the source. If your father smells bad because he’s dying it’s different than if the big guy at Buns Master stinks as he pushes bread across the desk toward you. Same stink maybe, different set of reactions. Usually stink is bad. It means … what? Negligence. Physical or mental illness. Poor upbringing.

  So here’s this nun gesturing over the entree, waving the funk all up and down my face. And I think either she’s poor or sick or something sickish, like neglect. Or is this stink a message-filled aura, the way a spouse wears a wedding ring, this radiant and anti-social emanation her I-married-Jesus effluent? This, I decide, as I pull my forked chicken toward me through her smell, is really all right. I turn to her when she’s done whipping up the air and has settled into eating her bird and I wink, a kind of I-smell-ya-and-it-smells-good-to-me wink. She responds with a smile plump with chicken, her fingers and shoulders bunched around her, like a little girl. Mischief there. I lean closer, letting our elbows touch; she trusts this and I put more weight there, so does she.

  Her head. I can see a crease around her mouth that wasn’t there before. I can tell she’s trying desperately to have something to say. I think that she has decided she likes me, all my sniffing and leaning and looking deserves something from her, conversation. She looks straight into my face, pauses, then wiggles her eyes nervously, her smile still big. I translate it this way: “Everything’s crazy. Everything’s good.”

  Her face shifts. If her mouth were a hand it would hold up a finger: “Wait a second. I have something for you.”

  Her arms leap over her tray as she dives her hands down in the tough pocket on the back of the seat in front of her. The yellow-grey sleeves soaking up mushroom sauce and tea. She holds up a card. Eyes sparkle. A little girl’s muscle in her voice.

  “Excuse me.”

  We both pause, sniff a bit, wondering if “excuse me” is right, then simultaneously shake, a little anyway-whatever tremor between us.

  I say, “Yes?”

  She holds the card at the corners with the thumb and forefinger of each hand.

  “Do you have a landing card?” She’s holding up a perfume sample from the enRoute magazine. I’m momentarily confused, then realize this is a symbol. I smile and nod, and start foraging in my seat pouch.

  “Where did you get it? I mean, did you have it when you came on board or did … do I …? I mean should I have one?”

  I don’t find it.

  “People come from all over the world for these.”

  I say “shit” under my breath and she laughs. “You have to ask a stewardess … steward. Uh … they’re not called that any more … what’s the word?”

  I am really upset that I can’t remember. The only thing I can think to say is “shit,” but I don’t think it should be a running joke.

  She knows what I mean, thanks me and leans into the aisle to attract one.

  I feel self-conscious that I am waiting for the nun to return to the conversation. I push back in my seat, away from the half-eaten food on the tray. Rachel’s reading. The plane is a long curtain pulled across her.

  I feel the stinky nun’s elbow again, this time she pushes, dropping my forearm out from under me. I turn and smile, exhaling lightly through my nostrils.

  “I can’t seem to get her attention.”

  “The flight attendant?”

  That’s the right word, and she flies past us, swinging a towel that touches everybody’s shoulders up the aisle. I return my elbow and send it into the nun’s ribs.

  “Trip her.”

  She laughs suddenly, an e
motion inside suddenly out, then turns to me. Not just turns, but seems to rotate in her tiny seat to face me.

  Pause. There is a mighty excitement in her. In me a sudden Italian memory—a white bridge—and I realize it’s a cliché from Andrew Cunanan’s Florentine diary. Who is this stinking nun, really?

  What follows is spoken with a single flash of feeling, manic and childlike. I have the sensation that her dirty little hands are touching my face.

  “I am seeing my family for the first time in ten years. I’m only allowed one visit every ten years. I’m preparing the canonization of Mother Teresa in Rome and I have to do certain things. Some of them who are standing down there right now I have never met and most of them, my parents, my sisters, I will never see them again. I’m very nervous, I’m very afraid. One time I get, just this once and I don’t know what to … you and your wife are my only travelling companions and I will pray for you every day and night for the rest of my life. It’s something I have to do. I have brought special prayers for you and her. And I started them a while ago. I don’t even think I need a landing card. They are down there. All of them.”

  Her eyes are huge and I can see yellow jelly holding on to the white.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t usually talk. I think you think …” She laughs, unable to finish or maybe she doesn’t like the phrase “I think you think.”

  “The canonization of Mother Teresa.” I kind of go “phew” and touch a wet carrot with my baby finger. “How do you get to do that?”

  “I was in her order in Calcutta.”

  Full stop. Something unprotected, like pride.

  “Wow.”

  Of course, the white and blue habit, that’s where I’d seen it. She goes quiet. I turn to Rachel and try to whisper, putting my words carefully onto the page she’s reading.

  “We’re getting prayed about over here …”

  Rachel leans forward, smiles at the nun.

  The nun looks as if someone famous has just acknowledged her.

  She pulls up a small oily bag. And pours four little oval pendants into her palm.

  “People come from all over the world for these. They were laid on her tomb and blessed by the order.”

  They look like bugs in her hand. Like little Dali ants.

  “And these two are for my mother and father.” She returns two to the small bag.

  “And these two are for you.”

  She abruptly pushes them into my hand, almost dropping them in the transfer. Then straightens up frantically.

  She looks afraid of Rachel and me now, because we don’t know what to say.

  Rachel reaches across and covers the nun’s hand with her own.

  I look down and roll my super religious icon end over end.

  Rachel has a nice deep voice when she thanks her. The nun gives out a dreamy little hmmmm song to herself.

  “They’re down there right now.”

  Standing in a group. Looking at the red arrivals and the blue departures.

  “I’ll never see them again.”

  I close my eyes and sniff hard to collect her beneath my face, a march of nerves inside me. The smell is awful; burning and offensive. I feel angry and the memory I make is of a foolish woman, her head tilted like a dog, looking out the back window.

  A shivering daughter with the heart of a slave. Does that sound bad? I’m so tired. It’s been a long trip and I’ve spent so much money. It sounds like I don’t even like her, but I do. I do. It’s just that I can’t remember a single painting, a single statue, nothing, just her, on my shirt on my pants on my hands.

  Tony Burgess is a writer from Wasaga Beach. He has published several novels about life in small-town Ontario.

  021Destination: U.S.A.

  THE LAST HIPPIE

  James Grainger

  Every evening I played a game as I walked down to Commercial Drive. Across the Burrard Inlet the lights in the houses on the north shore and up Grouse Mountain were coming on. I had two minutes to think up a metaphor to describe the lights or I had to take a quarter out of my pocket and throw it down a sewer from a distance of three feet.

  The first night the lights were votive candles on an altar. Later they became holes in the mountain letting out fairy light; then a blanket of stars; then a landing strip designed to confuse pilots. Tonight the air was hazy, and the lights became the torches of angry North Vancouverites climbing the mountain to finally murder the monster in Frankenstein’s castle.

  Gary, dragging a hockey bag and couple of suitcases—his worldly possessions pared down to a greatest-hits collection of books, clothes and cassettes—would be getting off the Greyhound bus from Toronto tomorrow. He would quote a line from On the Road, a book we’d outgrown years before but which still clung to us by threads of irony, and I would tell him about my new but still larval life in Vancouver, about this new man I’d become, a sober man who read in cafés and wrote apologetic letters to ex-lovers. And he would laugh and laugh.

  Tonight I was looking for an old hippie named Danny, one of the few Vancouverites I’d met since arriving. The acquaintanceship was part of a new resolution to widen my social world beyond the cliques of expatriate Torontonians who crowded the Italian coffee bars along Commercial Drive. All conversations there led back to the favoured scapegoat, Toronto, inevitably described as shallow, greedy, grasping—a “city of rats” was my favourite. When pressed to describe their new home city, the exiles resorted to a hazier spectrum of cliché. Vancouver was integrated, laid-back, holistic—character traits that formed a composite sketch of the sandal-wearing person they all hoped to become. This was my Vancouver, then: a low-rent Edwardian sanitarium where the disillusioned intelligentsia came to take the cure and write fractured free verse. The hippies couldn’t offer much worse, I figured.

  I found Danny outside the food co-op, sitting at one of the wicker patio tables with a few younger hippies. Danny liked to play the part of elder statesman to folks passing through on their way to the Gulf Islands. But his alcohol-ruddied cheeks, the sour smell of the van he lived in and his open lust for very young women rendered him a kind of anti-prophet, his life story—especially the pivotal rejection of a career in academia for a three-year acid binge on Vancouver Island—a cautionary tale. The younger hippies weren’t here to hang out with Danny. Like me, they were looking to score a ride down to an annual barter fair in Washington state.

  Like many drug casualties, Danny’s ability to detect condescension had expanded in direct proportion to the withering of his other mental functions; one wrong gesture or tone, and Gary and I would be out of a spot in the van.

  “I got arrested for impaired driving this morning,” he told me.

  “I thought your licence was already suspended.”

  “I was just sitting in the goddamned van feeding my puppies and the fucking cops busted me!”

  Everybody else was clearly drained of outrage. I feigned shock and gained Danny’s full attention.

  “I thought they were going to try and take my puppies away, so I said, ‘I’d rather have six puppies than a hundred pigs!’ They fucking beat the shit out of me!” He suddenly leaned toward the girl on his left, giving her the full blast of his breath. “They beat me in forced confinement.” The memory of a 1970s feminist consciousness-raising session seemed to waft up in him. “I know what it’s like to be raped. I know what it’s like to be a woman!”

  “Great, but are you going to be able to get across the border with that ID?” she asked.

  He pulled back from the repelled bonding moment. “Oh yeah, I got it made in my brother’s name. His record’s clean. He’s a Mormon.” He pulled out a generic ID card.

  “My name’s Dave. That’s my brother’s name. Your buddy’s gonna have to do a lot of driving.”

  Gary immediately assumed the role of long-suffering rationalist to Danny’s drunken stoner in the sitcom episode that was our drive to the border. Gary was driving. Danny was in the passenger seat hoarding the map, drunk on a magnum of ho
memade wine. We’d gotten lost three times while driving out to the suburbs to drop off Danny’s puppies at his Mormon brother’s house. Whenever Gary suggested that I be given the map, Danny would sneer and say, “This isn’t Toronto.” After that, Gary started repeating the last few words of Danny’s sentences:

  “Okay, now turn left at that variety store.”

  “At that variety store, yup.”

  “There should be a laundromat up here, eh.”

  “A laundromat, sure.”

  As we neared the border, Danny stuffed himself with peanut butter sandwiches to take the smell of alcohol off his breath.

  “And remember, my name’s Dave.”

  “Can you tell me three more times so I can dream about it tonight?”

  “And the name of the guy who owns the van is Russell Cop. Like ‘police-cop.’”

  “I thought it was your van.”

  “It is, but I never changed the papers. So Russell Cop is the owner of the van, right. He went tree planting and lent us his van.”

  “Everyone get ready for a cavity search!”

  “Listen to the Toronto fucking comedian.”

  I eventually convinced Danny to let Charmagne drive across the border. She was a nineteen-year-old tree planter and had the kind of cherubic features that authority figures want to protect and/or molest. The guard never asked who owned the van.

  There were yellow ribbons tied on the trees in America, though the Gulf War had ended months earlier. The ribbons were still bright and untattered, like roses that grow in winter in a fairy tale, or a saint’s relics, impervious to rot. Flags as big as Buicks hung from poles carefully set at the same noble tilt as the raising of Old Glory at Iwo Jima.