by André Alexis
– I’m looking for Mr. Andrews, said Baddeley.
– He not heah, said the woman.
– Can you tell me where I could find him?
– He at hospital.
– At the Toronto Western?
– He at hospital.
The woman looked at him and he looked at her.
– Thank you, he said.
This little scene was repeated half a dozen times over the weeks that followed. Baddeley would knock — early in the morning, mostly, hoping to catch Andrews before he set off to find “inspiration.” The door would be partially opened, and he would be told that Mr. Andrews was “at hospital.” He would then go to the Toronto Western and wander the halls looking for Andrews.
Baddeley expected that, at some point, he would knock at the door and find Andrews at home. He was prepared to be patient. But as it happened, the next time he saw Avery Andrews Baddeley did not recognize the man. Andrews recognized him.
It was the evening of November 22nd and Baddeley was at the Toronto Western. He had walked about the wards with diminishing conviction. He’d been buttonholed by a number of insistently helpful nurses and he was on his way out when, as he passed through a waiting room, a man in a wheelchair caught his attention, held eye contact then signalled to him with the wave of a hand.
The man was bald, the freckles on his head “fresh”, as if splattered from a pen with beige ink. He was almost swallowed by his blue-striped pyjamas and, incongruously, a yellow cardigan. It was the cardigan, of course, that jogged something in Baddeley’s memory, so that he was thinking of Avery Andrews before he actually recognized the man. Andrews was unhealthily thin, cadaverous. His fingers were still elegant but the skin on his hand was almost translucent, the veins along the back of his hands a vivid blue. His eyes, which had always seemed recessed, now glimmered as though they were shining at the end of a dark tunnel.
Yes, this was Avery Andrews and, in a word, the man looked to be on his last legs.
– How strange to see you, Andrews said
or, rather, Andrews managed to say. No sooner were the words out than he began to cough, grimacing at each shudder of his chest, struggling to quell his body’s insubordination.
– How strange, he said again. I didn’t think you’d come. Please forgive me for how I behaved. I wasn’t myself.
Again Andrews began to cough. A nurse approached them. – Everything all right? she asked.
– Yes, said Andrews. This is my friend.
– Friend or not, said the nurse, I think it’s time you were back in your room.
Andrews held on to Baddeley’s wrist. His grip was not strong.
– It isn’t good for you to get excited, Mr. Andrews, but visiting hours are still on. You can go on talking in your room.
It was distressing to watch Avery Andrews as he was helped into his hospital bed. His limbs looked as though they might snap under the slightest pressure. It hurt to watch him stand up. (His body was so wasted it was easily supported by the sticks that were his legs.) More distressing still was the ginger hair on the back of his legs. Baddeley turned away until Andrews was tucked under the sheets and the nurse had asked if he wanted morphine and then, having inserted the drip, went off to other beds.
– I don’t have much time, said Andrews. I want to tell you something, before the morphine kicks in. I was like you, but not like you. When I went to see Margaret Laurence, she recognized me immediately. And she knew what I was. I loved fiction more than I loved people. I still do. When I pushed her from the ferry, it was because she wanted to die and because I knew her art would live on in me. I see, now, that you don’t love the art deeply enough, Alexander. You’re too attached to me personally. I should have known, when you left that manuscript in my living room.
– Did you read it? asked Baddeley.
– I read as much of it as I could, son. You have everything wrong. You made me sound deep and heroic, but I’m none of the things you admire. I’m nothing. What you really admire is the Master’s voice. For years, it’s all I wanted to hear, too, but now I’ve had enough. I wanted you to end my servitude, like I ended Margaret’s. I should have gotten to know you first. But I suppose things have worked out as they were meant to.
– What do you mean? asked Baddeley.
– You’ll seek Him out, now, won’t you?
– I don’t think so, said Baddeley. I was looking for you.
Andrews grew visibly upset, but the morphine had begun to work and it was as if his emotions were passing through a kind of screen.
– You must look for him, Andrews said. You must. I can’t leave until I know you will. He appears to any number of artists, but this identity of His is unique. This line is ... our line is ...
Anxious to calm the poor man, Baddeley said
– All right. I’ll look for him. I promise.
– But the thing to remember, said Andrews, the thing is ... He’s not always Himself. After all these years, I think I’m entitled to say that. There have been times when I’m certain God is not sane. He says there’s no difference between sane and insane, but there is. You’ll feel the difference, and you’ll have to forgive Him. I don’t think He can help Himself.
– I’m sorry, said Baddeley. But I don’t know what you’re talking about.
– You’ll see things you don’t want to see. He can’t help it. Forgive Him or you’ll end up as unhappy as I was. As we’ve all been. Listen, I sold the house. I’m sorry. I thought you were gone for good. You’ll need somewhere to live ...
Andrews was now visibly too drug-clouded to go on talking. He could not keep his eyes open. He had spent all his energy on their conversation.
– Come back tomorrow, he managed.
He then grasped at Baddeley’s arm, some important thing on his mind.
– I know ..., he said. I know ...
But he could not finish his thought. He fell back onto the bed, mumbling.
As Baddeley looked down at Andrews’ face, it occurred to him that, at the best of times, his relations with other people were tricky. Even so, this bond with Avery Andrews was baffling. He had sought Andrews out. He had discovered an unstable man. And now, the man was dying. Why should it be his duty to watch the gyroscope fall?
And yet, Baddeley felt compelled to return. He was fascinated by the spectacle of Andrews’ death, saddened that (so it seemed) he alone would be with Andrews in this most private of moments. As well, he felt a certain pride that he should have been chosen to be with Andrews at the end. The encounter would almost certainly inform the next draft of Time and Mr. Andrews, a book he swore he would finish, despite Andrews’ disappointing words.
The following morning, however, all was changed. At the reception desk, Baddeley was told that “Mr. Andrews” had died during the night. He had died peacefully, “in his sleep.”
– I see, said Baddeley. Thank you.
The nurse, struck that her words had been taken with such equanimity, said
– Would you like to see the body? I don’t think it’s been taken from the room yet.
Not knowing what else to say under the circumstances and feeling that the nurse was doing her best to grant him some sort of favour, Baddeley said “thank you” and was directed to room 88a, the room in which he’d last seen Andrews alive.
It would be difficult to exaggerate Baddeley’s confusion as he entered 88A. Without transition or warning, he found himself in the ward of Avery Andrews’ god. The windows looked back from Lake Ontario at the room in which Baddeley now stood. The perspective made him ill. There were four beds in the room. In each of the beds was what looked to be a brilliant approximation of the human: flesh tones perfect, the postures natural, the eyes glinting as if moistened by tear ducts. But the mannequins — there’s no other word for them — were all unmoving. One of them was in the image of Avery Andrews, another looked like Lucius Annaeus Seneca, and a third resembled Saint Teresa as Bernini had fashioned her: ecstatic.
Badde
ley heard the word
– Welcome.
It came from the fourth mannequin, the one closest to the window. It “came from” the mannequin in the way a ventriloquist’s voice “comes from” a dummy. The voice was in Baddeley’s mind and his attention was somehow drawn to the mannequin nearest the window.
– Don’t look at me for too long, said the voice. It’s best if you look at the floor.
More to himself than not, Baddeley said
– All this is impossible. I must be dreaming.
– Since you don’t know where you are, how can it matter if you’re awake?
– It matters to me, said Baddeley. I don’t want to be insane.
– I understand, said the voice. And I sympathize.
And God entered Baddeley’s consciousness. Time stood still. The room broke the bounds of the building that held it, expanding to encompass all that Baddeley knew of the world. In an instant, he was “beside himself,” he and his world detached from each other and, alienated, he was filled with the exhilaration that accompanies new or unexpected views. (Baddeley assumed the vantage was God-given or god-like or god-angled. On this occasion, what he experienced was too bright and glorious to be anything but divine.)
While he was inhabited by the sacred — if “sacred” is what it was — Baddeley knew what he wanted to say. That is, he knew what he wanted to write. Words tumbled from him in paragraphs; a novel came to being within his imagination. Along with the ecstasy of suddenly knowing the words he needed, however, there was an anxiety that he might not manage to keep these words, to remember them when it came time to write them down. So that, at the moment of deepest inspiration, Baddeley also felt anguish at the thought of how much he might lose.
Moments, minutes, hours after the Lord had taken him over, His presence withdrew. It did not vanish entirely but, all the same, the withdrawal brought agony.
– Stay, Baddeley pleaded.
– I cannot, said the Lord.
And He withdrew as time returned and the room retreated into itself, its only bed occupied by the remains of Avery Andrews; the only living presence that of Alexander Baddeley himself.
On first encountering this “being,” Baddeley had assumed it was an aspect of Andrews’ madness — a delusion so powerful it could be parcelled and shared. After this communion, he understood why Andrews had come to think it was sacred. What he could not see was how Andrews had thought of the spirit as in any way “insane.” Nothing that could lead a man to such heights could be considered anything but miraculous. Literally miraculous, as far as Baddeley was concerned. He had been mired in a longing to express himself. He had not managed a single good line of poetry. But after this moment in the hospital he was charged with words. Having paid his final respects to Avery Andrews, Baddeley returned to his apartment on Runnymede and began writing. For five days he worked without eating, stopping only for water, coffee or the Allen’s apple juice he had in his fridge. He wrote the first chapters of a novel called Home is the Parakeet, a novel that existed fully formed in his imagination or, rather, half-formed like one of the statues left unfinished by Michelangelo, so that, for Baddeley, all was there. It was now only a matter of helping the thing from its integument.
(Home is the Parakeet’s macabre first paragraph ...
The black-garbed soldiers, perhaps thirty in all, were preparing for a final assault on what was left of the village: two farms housing three dozen women and children, who were equipped with a couple of hunting rifles and almost no ammunition. One soldier guided a muzzled alligator on a leash. Several others heated their bayonets with acetylene torches. They formed a merry bunch, laughing as they set off.
is now, of course, among the best known passages of Canadian prose.)
And yet, when the first chapters were written, Baddeley was uncertain about how to go on. He was overwhelmed by the number of roads his novel could take. Worse, it no longer seemed to him that his novel meant any one thing. No, his narrative of a man who returns from the Second World War traumatized at having witnessed the slaughter for food of exotic birds in a bird sanctuary now meant innumerable things. In his mind, Home is the Parakeet was a metaphor for everything from the struggle between man and nature to the nightmare of colonialism.
He went back to the Western.
This visit was much like the previous. Though God was not in 88A, Baddeley found the right room easily. Using only an instinct he did not know he possessed, he pushed open a door in the prenatal ward and found himself in what he now thought of as the “customary” place. And God — or whatever it was — overtook him at once. At once he was in the presence of God’s vision which was also, for a time, his own: like a single image printed on two transparencies that are then overlaid, one atop the other. And when his time with “God” ended, Baddeley was both exhausted and wide awake.
(An unexpected gift: at times like this — after an encounter with “God” — he found himself susceptible to the city. Walking home from the hospital, the city seemed to have awakened with him. It was like dawn in the arms of someone he loved. It wasn’t just a matter of the usual attractions: the lake, its beaches, the quiet of Mount Pleasant. No, in these moods, Baddeley loved every aspect of Toronto: the light of day, the washed-out blue of its sky, the breath one drew halfway up the hill that lounged against High Park, the sounds of voices echoing voices, the plain streets that led to avenues along which the houses were simple and true, and lanes that led past parks that flared as one passed them, leaving their impression of green and red and grey, the coloured metal of jungle gyms, swings and slides.)
He returned to his basement on Runnymede and, after eating a cheese sandwich, a handful of cherries, and a small container of vanilla-and-honey yoghurt, Baddeley went back to his novel, certain of the path he wanted to take, unconcerned as to whether it was the “right” path or not. Days passed and he wrote in peace, unafraid of losing his way.
It was on his next visit to the Toronto Western that things grew more complicated. He had no trouble finding the room, and no sooner did he enter than God entered his being. But whereas his previous communions had been a pure ecstasy, this one was disturbing. While under God’s influence, Baddeley suddenly experienced — as precisely as if he were actually there — a child being eaten by an alligator. He saw, felt, and heard. He imagined himself splattered with the blood that erupted from the child’s mouth, his own shirt wet. He experienced both the child’s terror and the happy patience of the alligator. He heard the child’s last words
– I’ll tell mom! I’ll tell!
and tasted, along with the alligator, the gaminess of the prey, the copper-salt taste of its blood. He shared the creature’s satisfaction at biting down hard, and for what seemed hours, Baddeley felt in equal measure the rightness of terror and the justice of hunger. He enjoyed the sweetness of human flesh. He experienced unspeakable fear and a savage complacency. His soul was torn in two and, finally, he cried out for mercy.
As soon as he cried out, Baddeley was brought back to himself. He was not brought back to the “real” world, however. He was once again in the ward with the mannequins. The three he could look at with impunity were comfortingly familiar. They were all versions of Anna Akhmatova, young and beautiful, middle-aged and sensual, old and dignified. The mannequin he was not meant to look at spoke.
– You mustn’t cry out, it said. You must learn to bear it as I do. There was no malice or unkindness. The words were said and then, in an instant, Baddeley was in a service elevator going down to where the ambulances came in.
To Baddeley’s surprise, the character of his communion did not seem to affect the inspiration that followed. If anything, this disturbing episode was more inspiring than the ones that had preceded it. Baddeley set about writing as soon as he entered his apartment. He spent weeks immersed in the world of Parakeet. He resented anything that took him away from the work: eating, sleeping, washing. And yet, he felt a curious distance from the novel. For all the passion and dedicat
ion and inspiration that went into it, Home is the Parakeet seemed not to belong to him. Yes, he recognized the various bits of his life and thinking distributed through the work, but they were not the novel’s raison d’être. Insofar as the work had, for Baddeley, a raison d’être, it was in the images and feelings that flooded from his imagination, a glorious release he could share with no one. In the end, the work was nothing but a shrine to his solitude.
(Why was he writing a novel, anyway? It had never been his ambition to write fiction.)
Baddeley began to understand what it was that had driven Avery Andrews to live away from the world. How had Andrews managed to spend so many years — so many decades — with the astounding visions and the inescapable solitude?
In fact, he came to appreciate Andrews’ plight even more deeply in the year that followed. Home is the Parakeet was published, an event that should have brought him joy. In his previous life — that is, in his life before Avery Andrews — he’d imagined the moments of publication (the launch, the pleasure of meeting other writers, the admiration of strangers) as pure joy. But the launch of Parakeet was nothing like pleasure. It was dull and insignificant. It took place in a room filled with people he did not know, who did not know him. The food on offer was tasteless; his own nerves dulled the acuity of his senses. And beyond all that there was a feeling of fraudulence. He had not written the novel. He did not like novels. The thing had been given to him by a being whose only interest was in the supposed peace the invasion of Baddeley’s psyche brought to it. A more hollow event than a book launch Baddeley could not imagine.
That is, he could not imagine anything more hollow until reviewers — and, to an extent, the public — decided they liked his book very much. Home is the Parakeet was, for the most part, warmly received. Baddeley had not been known as a novelist, so there were envious critics who would have preferred to knock him down a notch. But none could do so without ignoring the flagrant fact that something interesting was up with the novel. Yes, of course, a handful of reviewers stared down their own doubts, in order to deliver to the public a disdain they assumed, as Baddeley had once assumed, was what the public needed most. But few listened to them, save for readers who did not like novels in any case. Outdoing its publisher’s expectations, Parakeet was what is called a bestseller. It was bought in great numbers and read by almost half of those who bought it.