by Michael Helm
When he returned to the couch, she took a sip, then put her drink on the floor and went off to the bathroom without even asking directions. He marvelled at her underplayed theatrics. The manipulation of him, body and mind. The timing, the way the talking prepared for his question – she’d been waiting for it – the question for the silence, the floating in strange empty space. He felt he’d been led into a trap, bent inward. The silence now was liquid. The past had been returning in waves. All these dead little worlds exerted a drag. You don’t see your life as a shape, don’t really believe it has wholeness, until a certain age, a certain break of luck, good or bad, that allows you to see a kind of ending. The ending can come at any stage, and after it, you just float for years towards your death like so much space junk destined for burning re-entry.
Circling thought. The spacecraft carried him back to the hurricane’s eye on Saturn, and because it had been Kim who’d sent him there, he’d seen the thing, unnamed, unnameable, looking out at him. Kim must have seen it too, and known whom it was watching. And now it seemed that Rosemary’s turbulences had something in common with his own. Different fears stirred by the same shapes. Maybe she feared her convictions, or feared for them. He feared for himself in having none. The two fears this close together could kick up a real storm.
“I should be going, Harold.” She stood behind him.
“Please. At least finish your drink.”
He turned and gestured to the couch rather than the drink. She sat beside him again, and now he was helpless. In one of her last emails, Connie had quoted Thoreau on the “awful ferity” of virtuous people and lovers. He hadn’t understood it at the time but now it seemed to describe Rosemary and him. Though he was not her lover. He was the man watching at her windows, wondering at shadows.
Astonishing, all he’d squandered over the years.
She began to tell him about her conversion and what seemed to be going on in her when she first met Father André Rowe. She stressed that her spirit was prepared, and if it hadn’t been Father André it would have been another, though at the time she didn’t see this. As she spoke, her voice caught Harold, convinced him, though he knew he’d not stay convinced. He thought of it, her voice, as what it was, a physical thing born upon the metaphysical, the resonant workings of breath and belief. And if she stopped her voice now, it would be her body that would have him. If she would have him. He’d been the same fool all his life.
She believed in the resurrection, she said, not only because the Bible told her so but because the world was old enough to contain it.
“To have needed the resurrection, and still need it, and to contain it. When we think about the resurrection, really think about it, we can feel just how old things are, all creation.” She straightened her legs and crossed her ankles. Harold took in her calves and feet and thought of depictions of the Prophet on the cross. “The resurrection is eternal.”
“I’m familiar with the idea.”
“And so is the moment before the resurrection, when everything was at stake. That’s eternal, too. Everything’s always at stake, Harold.”
She made creation sound consoling, as if it weren’t a bad job from the outset. He pictured a long-abandoned, listing farmhouse on some unknown bald prairie, he and his father looking out from the bed of a passing train. Anything might have gone on inside the house, anything still could, but one more hard winter or one bitter wind, and that would be the end of it. Never more to contain a thing.
He wanted the words to stop now. Simple contact. His emotions were boyish, most of them.
When he reached out for her she stood and picked up her bag, and when he stood she made for the door. He caught her there, and turned her towards him. He kissed her, and she received it, but there was no desire returned, only mercy. She tilted her forehead into his neck. She might have tried to change him, to remake him into something more. She’d been tempted to come his way – that’s what he wanted to think – but then had seen he was too far out. And he was too old to have seduced her. The wrong face, wrong body, wrong words.
“Such a good soldier,” he said, pulling her close. She put her palms on his chest and slowly, easily pushed him away. The end.
“The young man who lives with you,” he found himself saying, “Who is he?”
There was a moment of surprise in her expression and then a distance he knew he would never close.
“Stay away from me, Harold.”
And then she turned to the door, and the door made light, and she left.
Marian had gone to bed. Kim was eating coffee yoghurt in the kitchen, sitting on a stool at the island, looking at The Guardian. From Donald’s study, through the half-closed door, the CBC show Ideas had just finished up a three-part series on some thick-accented theories about global consciousness, the breakfast topic for the past two mornings. It was his habit to turn the radio off at the end of the show – she’d always liked that Donald wanted to sit with things, even when they were the wrong things – so when the weather and then the news came on, she assumed he’d fallen asleep in his desk chair, another of his habits.
Even before the newsreader got to the story, something in his voice – or was it the way it was coming to her, half-heard in her distraction? - promised a small completion. She lifted her head for a moment, then looked down and began reading again about war, and to her awareness under the newsprint came the radio story in fragments. The reader said a break in an unsolved murder and the words unknown victim and steel waste container. More than three weeks ago, he said, and on the weekend in Vancouver a man arrested in connection and she turned now and listened, catching up, as the reporter in Vancouver, a woman, took the story from there.
The name of the accused was Dwight Myron Lane. He had stolen four cans of pears from a supermarket and the security people had called the police, who searched him and found a folded-up poster of the police sketch of the dead girl, and the Toronto phone number of what turned out to be a recently shut-down massage parlour. Within the hour, Toronto police were questioning the former owner, who claimed not to have known of the murder or the sketch but admitted it looked like a girl he’d employed. Her name was Anna Huard. Her adoptive parents in Saskatoon hadn’t heard from her in months, which was not unusual, they said. Forensics had determined that the unknown woman was of mixed race. Anna was part native Canadian.
Dwight Myron Lane, she knew, somehow, had nothing to do with her. Whoever he was, he’d never touched her.
She called Harold, she wanted to tell him, but it rang through to the machine and she hung up. She went into the study and there was Donald asleep in his chair with his hands folded on his small belly. He might have been praying. He opened his eyes when she turned off the radio but he was still swimming towards consciousness and for two or three seconds he looked terrified.
“I came in to turn off the radio. Sorry.”
He looked out the window into the dark. “What’s it doing out there?”
“Nothing much. There were storms to the north but they missed us.”
He barely nodded. “A small story on page seven today,” he said. “More evidence that we’re past the tipping point with climate change. Apocalypse is assured.”
“They run that news once a week.”
“It’s just the first phase, they say. From here on it’s hell all over.” He ran a hand through his hair and then fell still.
“You want some tea?” Kim asked.
“We can’t travel like we used to. And the best places have all changed for the worse. We’d be better off under a single potentate who’d turn us all back into peasant farmers.”
“Jesus, Donald, what’s gotten into you?” She had the odd feeling that he was addressing someone other than her. There were ghosts with him. She thought it best to assert the Kim he knew. “The only hope now is, we’ll all go to war and wipe each other out without much nuclear or biological ravaging.”
“But then the next malign thing would heave over the horizon.”<
br />
“I wish we shared happier perspectives.”
He looked at her and she saw that the terror had not entirely subsided.
“We’d think we were rid of us,” he said. “But then we’d appear again.”
His eyes welled up. She’d never seen him cry, and she thought she should come forward but he turned his back to her in his chair and waved her away.
She went out to the porch. So she would get through Marian’s last months better than Donald. She’d never really thought about what would become of him, and he must have felt the disregard. She wondered what could be done for the man.
Empty street, without breezes, a sky without cloud or stars, washed in the city lights. She conjured the deep country, an unpaved road under constellations. She tried to hold the place pure, but then the interference set in, Donald in his study asleep in his chair like Greg in one of his rockers. She hadn’t thought of Greg in a while, not even alone in bed. He’d kept in touch through one-line emails – the last one informed her that the number of refugees abroad who’d applied to come to Canada was now 700,000 – and one long, newsy phone call, after which she felt she knew him better for having been undistracted by his physical presence. Rather than give away anything of himself he’d told tales about secretly detained terrorist suspects, Russian mobsters who made charity donations, Sudanese refugees starving in a far-off desert, visa disputes at the U.S. border, the wiretaps on his office phone, a whole construction site worth of Portuguese men deported, a program to help undocumented street people, a pro-choice song thrown in at a fundraiser to the bafflement of Catholic new Canadians. The stories weren’t elided. He wasn’t manic. And he modulated precisely between irony, ardency, humour. But it came to her that he was, in fact, a mess.
You had to love a man in the right kind of trouble.
By the time she went back in, Donald had gone to bed. He’d made the tea himself and had left a cup out for her, sitting atop a note that read, “Sorry. Bad dreams.”
She folded the clothes heaped in the laundry basket. She set the coffee maker for the morning and laid out Marian’s next pills, closed the curtains in the living room and turned off the lights, and made her way to her bedroom.
For a long time before sleep came she lay awake in the dark and thought of her father, and then said a sort of prayer for Anna Huard.
7
He’d slept sober. Since the morning Kim had sprung Santiago on him and then called him a liar, he’d entered an odd state, swinging between dread and a calm so deep that it bordered on elation. He couldn’t decide which mood was warranted, and which the emotional figment of a mind made unknown to itself from a life of dedicated self-distraction. If dissociation were a paying talent he’d own half the city. Whatever was happening to him, he wanted to give it time. It was important that he not get ahead of himself, as he had with Rosemary, and not let Kim push him into places he wasn’t ready to go. He hadn’t replied to her last email. Yesterday someone called up from the lobby but he hadn’t answered in case it was her. Now she’d left a message saying she’d come by this afternoon to see if he was in. Within minutes of picking it up he had packed a lunch and was heading for the country.
An hour later he was in the woods of a conservation area, watching his footing as he descended into a gorge beneath a pounding waterfall. The world changed from old oaks, maples, and beech trees with their wrinkled grey elephant skins, to pines and huge boulders, erratics, he thought they were called, happy with the word. It felt good to be alone in an otherwise wordless, alien place. Kim had brought him here once, knowing that the loud falls and rapids would prevent him from entering into some palaver about history or education, or some other misconceived fathering strategy. That afternoon with her had been happy, but was now a little indistinct, as if the actual fraught waters had joined their own and carried them off, and there was no one moment of regret or shame that might have lodged in his cortex. The memory of their hike came and went, and he might have been left in the present moment, but instead he was vaulted further back, to the British Columbia landscapes of his boyhood with his father. There were plenty of jagged memories from his transient days, but at least he had once been comfortable in the so-called natural world. He was someone very different now.
He walked on, stopping to look at deer tracks, the light on the ridge above him. He found the tiny, perfect skull of what might have been a squirrel, lying on pine straw, its lower mandible still attached. The half-exposed root system of a black locust on a slope so steep that the tree seemed suspended by its very age. Such isolation, empty of people or event. Anything could happen to a person down here and no one would find you. He followed the river for another half-hour until it calmed and then he took lunch, a peameal bacon sandwich, sitting on the small log of a tree counterpoised by the taller one whose fall had broken it off and crashed to rest extending over the water to the other side. Nothing had ever been cleaned up here. It wasn’t clear how anyone would go about it.
In her message she’d said the dumpster girl had been identified. Her name was Anna and the police had caught her killer. He was not Kim’s attacker, she said. What she hadn’t said, though he understood, was that it was her letter, not the attacker, that she wanted to discuss. His worst hour, not her own. She was certain he’d had such an hour. He didn’t know what had given it away.
He saw something approaching through the woods, at speed. As he dismounted the log the shape emerged as a large dog, what looked like a Lab-shepherd cross, more black than tan. It stopped at about ten feet and its ears shot up, alert. After a second or two it began to bark at him. Harold squatted down, holding the remains of his sandwich, saying, “Here you go,” and the dog quieted and came forward, wagging but cautious. Despite itself, it couldn’t close the last few feet.
The dog’s name turned out to be Josef, with an f, Harold guessed, given that the owners who finally appeared had Czech accents. They were in their forties, he thought, dressed almost identically in what must have been the latest in outdoor gear, narrow brown shorts with a slight synthetic sheen. There were reflective tabs on their expensive-looking boots.
The woman said Josef’s name and he came immediately. When he arrived before her she batted him sharply on the nose and he dropped to his belly.
“Sorry,” said the man.
As a boy Harold had once made the mistake of laughing, though briefly, quietly, at the sight of a fat woman attempting to board a passenger train. His father, sitting beside him on the platform, had wheeled and struck him with an open hand hard across the face. It had happened just once. Once was enough. Harold had always reminded himself that he’d been hit in a time and place when such occurrences were accepted. Though no one now would think so, in the context of its time, the blow was not out of place. He had deserved it.
“Nothing to apologize for,” said Harold. It wasn’t true, he thought. “At least not to me.”
The woman said, “I instruct him in a way that he understands.”
“You instruct him on the snout,” he said mildly.
“It’s for his own good,” said the man. He seemed sympathetic to all sides.
The couple moved on without further acknowledging him. Josef looked back once, presumably in regret, until the woman whistled and he straightened up, face forward, and kept to her heel as they disappeared around a bend. Harold had borrowed the disapproval from Kim, and had voiced it on her behalf. On a downtown street he’d once seen her reprimand a smartly dressed young man wearing the rectangular glasses of a Belgian film critic. He’d pinched the ear of his husky and set off an argument about dog training. Kim told him people ought to have to pass tests before owning a dog. The man doubted she could teach a dog to sit. He said he knew the type and he was serious, how would she do it? “You want the answer?” she asked. “You get down on your back and play with the animal until you’re both exhausted.” The man laughed. “What kind of answer is that?” “The answer is screw the question.” In Kim’s life, the answer had
often been screw the question.
The ridge now cast a shadow over the gorge. It was time to go home.
The ascent left him breathless and a little high. Back in the car, it was as if he was back in time, stuporous in the worst days of the estrangements. When he’d returned to Marian and Kim after four months of silence in ’95, he walked around afraid to show himself, feeling their judgment and his own.
He must have seemed, must still seem, to be harbouring something. They were right about that, his family. But his secret was love. He was paralyzed with love, speechless with love. He cowered under the magnitude of his love. His love was the one sure thing in his life, though it was beyond him, beyond his expression, and anyway, he had grown superstitious, knowing there was still a chance it might be returned to him if only he didn’t say something to extinguish the possibility.
He wanted to remind Kim that people are more than the sum of their experiences. He reminded himself that, given the attack, it was natural that she’d have these bouts of distrust. He didn’t know how to help her, other than to be patient, and let her call him a liar if that’s what she needed.
The light through the windshield was streaming with inclemencies, he couldn’t stay with his thoughts a breath further, but then did so.
I’m alone, he thought.
Then said, “We’re alone.”
He’d stood her up without so much as a note and she’d gone to the research library and lost herself in study. At home now she found her old running bra and sweatshirt and sweatpants and expensive ridiculous cross-trainers and they still fit her, and as had been her habit, she made a point of avoiding mirrors on her way out of the house, into stride.
This was part of her resolve, a half-hour of open fleeing. She liked to imagine she was sweating away some poison and today the poison she settled on was her mother’s pain. This morning Marian hadn’t come out of her room when Kim made breakfast, on the cusp of another bad day, and had finished her lunch and was sleeping again when Kim returned. A few blocks on she concentrated on letting go of other disturbances. A bird dead under a window, dismal events picked up in passing. Like this she would detox her system and then swear off the daily news for a week or two, running, melting away the verb-mangling sportscasts, rooftop weathermen, vapid celebrity junkies, maybe even the murders and wars. For a week she’d carried around the high school yearbook shots of the lead local terror suspects who wanted to blow up buildings and behead parliamentarians. They were late teens, mostly, and not prepossessing in appearance. She’d been troubled by one in particular who was just plain downright ugly, and she wondered if his ugliness had worked upon him, and of course it had. All young men were stupid and impressionable, their imaginations full of cartoons and dirty pictures, and nothing was real to them like it was to everyone else, except the physical facts, like if they were thought attractive or ugly by whatever the dominant standard. That much they could figure out.