by Méira Cook
“Since I am already in the sky,” he told me.
“Give your Cloth God my regards,” I teased him. He said he would and I was thankful for no further pieties.
We parted on the most amiable terms. Which seems like a good place to end, my darling. On terms: the most amiable of which I offer you. Goodbye, Max. Don’t let the moon break your heart.
Zero Visibility
Fourteen
Out of Time
When Max opens his eyes all he sees is stock footage: snow falling, temperatures falling, night falling. Snow and the intervals between snow. Faster and faster, like a film sped up over time. Blurred wings, wind, wind-back. Sun dogs snapping at the horizon. Stars whirling in the darkness. When the film comes to the end of the reel, he sits up, trembling, to find himself on Magnolia Street.
Max hunches up, his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. Who is he? What is he doing here? Why, why? His family is dead, that much is certain. How can he go on without them? It doesn’t seem possible. But why does his knee still ache, why is he so cold? How can these chafing pains exist alongside the towering loss of everyone he loves? He longs to pray but he can remember nothing: no praise, no song, no psalm, no plea. Not even the words to the mourner’s prayer he once knew.
One day, for no reason that he can imagine, he is able to struggle up off the sidewalk. Brush himself down and gingerly put his weight on his knee. Then he begins to walk, limping and cold, turning down the streets of strange and familiar neighbourhoods where dog owners are yanked along on their taut leashes and stroller-pushing mothers dawdle about their weekday mornings, wheels spinning. It’s all so beautiful, this broken, breathing world! He forgets himself and stops to pet a beagle, compliment a mother on her crimson-cheeked snow dolly. The mother ignores him, the baby sleeps on. Even the dog steps through him. And suddenly he is nothing again, as thin and vacant as the prairie air.
At night he dosses down beneath Railway Bridge. The river ice creaks and the trains rattle through the night. High above the river, the railway tracks, the bridge, an electric crucifix clicks on in the sky, a broken promise of resurrection. The homeless congregate beneath the shadowy struts of the old footbridge. Fires are lit, thin and insufficient, and the men in their greasy coats huddle around them, paddling their hands. Max peers into the turned-away faces trying to make out a comrade, a familiar. He’s looking for someone, a young woman, a girl he once knew. He’s waiting for something, but damned if he knows what it is.
In the morning Max gets up again and hobbles away. He walks to ease his broken heart, to heal his pain. He walks to catch up with his family who seem to recede with every step he takes. They are unreachable now, as far away as the painted figures on some vast allegorical canvas. Breughel’s Icarus, he thinks, who rose and fell while a doughty peasant tilled the soil in the foreground and the sea flowed impassively onward. According to Williams, according to Auden. When bereft, Max retreats to the aesthetic position and death, it seems, hasn’t robbed him of this pointless knack.
“Maggie, Maggie, star of my firmament. Love of my life,” he mourns.
Far away his children call out to one another. He can barely hear them. They ripple and waver like mirages. His boys!
“Wait for me,” Max calls, breaking into an awkward, limping run.
But they can’t hear him and when he puts out his hands to touch them, they disappear. This mourning, this yearning — it’s more than he can bear. Ah, grief! They’d once had a nodding acquaintance, just a polite how d’you do and a tip of the hat brim. Now grief has put a firm arm around his shoulders. Hello, old friend, old pal, old buddy, old chum.
Grief is the winter static in the air and the way his skin twitches in response. It’s the nail on blackboard screech of packed snow underfoot and the shuffle of crows in the trees. Grief is the yolky, over-easy sun that slops across the horizon. It’s the old woman at the bus stop halved by her dowager’s hump, and the kids in hoodies who elbow her aside, and the kindly social worker type who takes her firmly by the elbow. Watch the sidewalk, dearie.
In all this time, forty-five years next month, Max has failed to notice the great rusty clank of life that surrounds him. Now everything is too bright, too noisy, everything trails its own chain. At the busy intersection of Harrow and Rue he grasps a pensioner by the elbow and tries to escort him across the street. But the old man just stands there, leaning on his walker, his jacket unbuttoned and his laces untied. Again and again, Max tries to help the fellow who gazes listlessly into space, his trembling frame resistant.
And the children he fails to catch! The boys who tumble on outdoor rinks, hockey sticks flying, the school kids he rushes after to tie flapping scarves around their necks. The missing children he fails to recover, the heroin babies twitching in their hospital basinets, the teenage runaways hitchhiking out on the highway, begging for a ride. The murdered girls settling at the bottom of the river, their hearts like stones. All the children he can’t catch as they fall out of burning houses, as they are borne away on cresting rivers, broken-hearted and pillaged and lost.
But Max can’t catch anyone. Can’t throw himself between a collapsed vein and a syringe, can’t stop a bullet or a knife from tearing open the city’s tender throat. Can’t open up the river, can’t turn back the current, can’t set a net wide and fine enough to recover what’s been lost. God knows he tries.
All night the river creaks like a door. When Max wakes the next morning he is covered in drifts of snow. The homeless men sleeping beside him are also covered in snow. They look like ghosts.
In the morning the ghost men are sociable, he’s found. They help one another brush snow off their shoulders and chat about a possible spring flood. Some say yes, some say no. Some say dollars to donuts, some say don’t bet your shirt on it, pal. Yup, nope. Maybe, couldn’t say. One thing, when it comes it’s gonna be a doozy! The city, looped in its curly rivers, is vulnerable to flooding.
Max sets off as he does every morning, neither buoyant nor resilient. His knee aches and the cold has made a nest in his bones. He’s lost his bearings again. These days he can’t even find his way back to Magnolia Street. Also, as puzzling as it seems, he suspects he’s being followed by a crow. An ugly black creature, more unkempt than your average crow, more disreputable. It bundles itself from branch to branch as he walks, shaking down feathers and snow, trying to shit on his head. Cawing insults in a rhyming singsong. Get out the door! Don’t be a bore! You’ve broken the law!
But when Max picks up his pace the crow falls behind, too weary to keep up with him, although he can still hear its insults fading into the distance. Caw! Claw! Craw! When the terrible creature is out of sight, he slows down again because of his gammy leg. What a pair they are! Rotten and the Gimp. That night he hears a train clattering toward him from two provinces away. It’s coming out of the west, which is the future, the about to happen, the nearly there.
Max finds himself unexpectedly weary, immune to spring fever. That darn crow appears to be following wherever he goes, choleric and impatient.
“Taking your own sweet time, eh?” the crow complains.
Can time be sweet? Max wonders. He picks up his pace and usually manages to throw off the crow by the time he reaches his park bench. He’s taken to sitting outside the high school, watching the passing throng, hoping for a glimpse of his boy. Not counting on it. Lately the students all seem restless and exhausted. Winter-pale some of them, with dark smudges beneath eyes that look as if they’ve been put there with sooty fingers.
Elsewhere in the city, householders look out on their greening lawns and joyfully sharpen the blades of their mowers. One day in early summer, Max strolls through the old neighbourhood in his grubby, post-winter coat to find that every storm window in every house, up and down the block, has been taken down and replaced with screens. That evening the fat smell of barbecued meat wafts through the streets.
Soon after, they begin dragging the Red again, searching for the remains of the women and girls who’ve disappeared over the years. The river isn’t always the culprit, but it has its guilty secrets. The ranks of the disappeared had to reach a critical mass, the waters rising over what had displaced them, before enough people would believe the ones who wanted to bring their children home. For years the authorities refused to believe that the women had really disappeared, and then they refused to believe they were important enough to be missed. Now lack of belief hangs heavy on the city’s conscience.
School is out for the summer, the kids dispersing. Max sees groups of them outside the 7-Eleven or hanging around neglected parks. But it’s astonishing how few there are. Where have all the children gone? He spends his nights under Railway Bridge and his days on the banks of the Red, watching the boats move with the swift-flowing current, imagining their cruel hooks dragging beneath the surface of the river.
In the old neighbourhood the cankerworms trapeze through a green cathedral of elms. The air is choral with bees. Peonies zoom up out of the earth and burst into messy, tissue paper blooms. Limping through the streets in the staleness of late afternoon, Max can hear the snick-snick of sprinklers in backyards, the neighbours calling to one another from their front porches. Each day is a gift, another gold coin falling from the sky. The trick is to shore up the coins for the dark winter months ahead but no one has figured out how to hoard time. In summer the city goes a little crazy, turns grasshopper-ish and devil-may-care.
Can time be sweet? he wonders again.
One day the colour drains abruptly from the world. The trees dim and the grass turns to stubble. It’s as if a fuse has blown. He’s never noticed this strange waning moment between the thick impasto of late summer and the thin, crinkly goldleaf of fall. It’s an in-between time with a colour all its own to match a season that smells of rotting crabapples and new pencils and the white paint they use to mark up the high school football field. The scoreboard reads: “Welcome Back Students. Let’s Make Every Day Count!”
Time slows, sweetens. Max returns to his bench outside the high school.
In late fall the rivers begin to freeze, the water thickening and the current growing sluggish. They have to dock the dragging boats for the winter. Max watches the men winch a motorboat out of the Red, the muddy river water streaming down its sides. A woman sits on the bank with her head in her hands, weeping. With some difficulty Max kneels down beside her and puts an arm around her shoulders. She doesn’t even bother to shrug him off. Overhead the alchemical winter sun turns the water metallic. He stays with her while the men secure the boat on a flatbed trailer.
When the woman leaves, Max remains on the banks of the Red, weeping. He has finally realized that his family is gone. What’s more, he hasn’t lost them in some apocalyptic spasm of the world’s casual malevolence. He hasn’t lost them at all. And if he hasn’t lost them then he will never find them. No, he is the one who is lost, lost forever in the impossible translation from flesh into spirit. He can never go home again, not ever.
It’s getting colder, the terrible unrequited cold that yields only when the first snow falls. Max knows he has to keep moving. He’s stopped fighting the crow by now; they’ve reached a détente. The creature is his companion, more or less. He can swear it’s trying to tell him something in the insinuating, slightly deranged language of crows.
You stick in my craw! Face like a slammed door! Mind like an open jaw! That’s the kind of thing the crow screeches but it isn’t necessarily what the creature means, Max reckons. Because you can only use the words you’ve been given — even a crow, even a rotten, stinking crow — and if the words aren’t what you intended, well you’re shit out of luck, pal. It’s complicated.
One day the first mitten pops up on a fencepost, a small red mitten some toddler has flung down in stroller-bound rage. After that they begin appearing all over the city, a blizzard of mittens and gloves, knitted scarves, little hats, little socks. Max seems to remember that it’s the custom, when one comes across these lost articles, to hang them from a prominent place — a fencepost or a mailbox, the low-hanging branch of a tree — so that their owner can retrieve them. Here on the Prairies folks are respectful of other people’s possessions.
These quiet winter courtesies lift his spirits and he roams the streets with a purpose now, his eyes searching.
For one whole year Max has risen at first light and made his way to the house on Magnolia Street. He limps along the river, traverses a couple of neighbourhoods, shortcuts through the grounds of Ridgehaven High, across Grover Park Fields and the Legion Hall parking lot, turns down one tree-named street and then another, and there it is finally, his house, still shuttered against the early morning light. The house blurs in and out of focus as if Max is crying. He’s not, though. He hasn’t wept since that day on the banks of the Red. Whether through temperament (stoic) or circumstance (death), he finds that he can’t cry anymore, although he would like to, if only to skim off some of the grief that slops around inside him.
He makes his way to Magnolia Street every day, waiting. The house blurs in and out of focus. Max slumps on the pavement, despondent. Maggie opens the door and strides out. A hard bright light surrounds her. Max winces, his eyes watering in pain. Maggie stands on the sidewalk, crackling like fire. He can smell the burn coming off her; he can already see the flames licking at her legs. The heat radiating from her could boil snow, turn ice to steam, melt the fillings from his teeth. She jangles her house keys, winds her scarf around her neck, stamps her feet to get them started. Then she turns on her heel and strides down the street, a woman in flames. Max watches her leave him until she is nothing but a wisp of smoke in the distance.
He watches her leave him again and again. Death, a continuous loop on a blooper reel of unbearable moments or some damn day he’s fallen into that’s closed over his head like water. Now he can’t get out of it, he’s lost the knack, and the only woman who could ever talk sense into him bursts into flame every morning. Oh Maggie May, he mourns. Star of my firmament. Love of my life.
After Maggie leaves, the day stalls, turns over a couple of times, then finally catches. Cars hawk into the raw air, blinking red-eyed before reversing down back lanes and alleyways. The school bus turns into Magnolia Street and comes to a halt outside Max’s house, flaps out its stop sign and hisses pneumatically until his son’s vast backpack emerges and walks itself down the front path on spindly denim legs. His youngest, his Lazarus. The boy is tall and growth-spurt skinny, with the long-distance gaze of wary adolescence.
Max worries, belatedly, about the heaviness of the backpack, the curvature of his son’s still-growing spine, the possibility of scoliosis and hernias and compacted discs. Bad posture, even. The boy’s head and hands are usually bare, his parka always seems to be hanging open.
Lazar, Lazar, thinks Max, hastening across the icy sidewalk.
He kneels in the path before his son, yanks at the uneven edges of the parka as he tries to align the zipper’s metal teeth. Vaguely, he remembers kneeling in front of another young person, trying to wrangle a winter jacket into submission. But that was long ago and in another country.
The boy drops his backpack and roots about, searching for his front door key. Max takes the opportunity to investigate his son’s pockets, digging for the gloves or toque that might lie neglected within. Their proximity is heady; Lazar smells unexpectedly of fried onions and toothpaste. Max bends closer, gets a whiff of chemical sweetness, a harsh note of strawberry-frosted Pop-Tart added to the bouquet of early-morning boy. With eyes sharpened by yearning, he notices that the hair at the back of Lazar’s head is awry and stand up-ish. Stricken, he puts out his big hand to smooth down his son’s cowlick.
But Max can’t find a toque or gloves, and he’s not having much luck at zipping the kid’s parka. The edges of the grimy ski jacket jerk from his grasp as Lazar launches into his backpack. Fi
nally, Max discovers the house key in his son’s jean pocket and hauls it out. Look! The boy ignores his father, thrusting his whole head into the opening of his backpack.
“Look!” Max shouts, tapping the key smartly against the cold metallic air.
The boy looks up. He looks through him, his father, as if Max is not there. As if he is a ghost.
The school bus has been tutting against the sidewalk all this time. Evidently the bus driver has lost patience with all this disarray, with tardiness and confusion and what appears to be an altercation between a boy and his backpack. He leans on his horn until the street unzips into the two flapping halves of a ski jacket snagging crazily in the wind.
“Coming!” Lazar yells. He scrambles to his feet, shoving things — stuff — ring binders and pens, his phone, a dirty nylon wallet, crumpled pages from a math sheet, a Salinger paperback, into the backpack. “Coming!” he yells, because the bus driver is still leaning on his horn, all his gimcrack patience through thousands of school days of bad morning smells and terrible afternoon noises and picking gum off the bottom of his shoe every evening at the depot has given way to fury.
Lazar scrambles up, hoists his backpack over his shoulder, and lumbers after the school bus that is either peeling away, or pretending to peel away, from the curb. At the last possible moment, the bus driver slows down, cranks open the door, and allows Lazar to haul himself aboard, but Max can still see the man gesticulating, flailing his hands and punching the air. He imagines he can hear the snarl of the driver’s invective as the bus pulls away and disappears down the street.