Army of the Brave and Accidental

by Alex Boyd

  5: Tomas

  Childhood is the pool that holds all your secrets, and yet you can’t see to the bottom. I never adopted religion, but I found reverence among candles and a choir on Christmas Eve. The hard line of religion was different. It appeared in the form of a truck parked on my street handing out comic books about Christ with a huge splash of blood from the hand as he is crucified. I was too shy to approach the truck, but another kid went out to ask, “Can I have one for my friend?” and an arm reached out to provide it.

  My mother regularly took me places and in subtle ways taught me reverence without getting too specific about the lesson. It didn’t matter if it was Algonquin Park—we went there every summer—or the choir on Christmas Eve, I always assumed the idea was to know there are things greater than yourself, and that in some way I should be there for the world, not just that the world is there for me. As a city boy, it had always meant a completely different experience to drive north into the country, catching sight of a pickup with a bumper sticker that read truth not tolerance. And you just know he’s got a monopoly on the truth, that guy. The bumper stickers for sale at the general store in Kaladar, Ontario read, missing your cat? look under my tires. I still remember the sign posted on personal property: this is our land, back off government. You don’t even need to talk to someone to know you’re somewhere different.

  It was a curious thing to get a ticket in the mail for a flight to North Bay, and directions to a retirement home apparently purchased under my name. I had to think about what to do, though on some level I knew curiosity would win out.

  Seeing the ticket brought back memories of going up north as a child, that peculiar open defiance of authority although people were frequently pleasant in person. As for myself, I had a certain amount of faith in authority, but only a certain amount. I didn’t ultimately believe if a new and deadly virus came along I could just barricade myself in my house and discover a cure. We need government sometimes. At the same time, it took them months to determine that sending people back cured a terminal illness. And then the information wasn’t immediately made public.

  Suddenly, a terminal illness didn’t take people away through death, but through passage into a new life. And then the rumours came that those wealthy enough could buy their ways back to live in peaceful times of their choice, and more environmentally stable times, quietly finishing their lives decades earlier, sometimes even in the same place they’d always lived. Never mind time-travelling assassins, the past was now a commodity. Maybe the end comes whenever you lose perspective, and the order of things. Most of us live in cities long enough to start thinking it’s the beginning and end of everything, reaching around for something more meaningful only after the occasional disaster.

  I had enjoyed camping in Algonquin as a child. There were always the unfortunate signs, the results of a path cut into the wilderness—a snake crushed on a dirt road, changing positions each time a car passed over it like a restless sleeper—but we did it to go home with a fragment of that peace in each of us, the sound of loons shivering across the water as a canoe dissects the lake. The sight of the rushes sticking out of the water near its edge like quivers of arrows, dragonflies the size of my thumb. The cliffs of the Barron Canyon Trail looking out on miles of pines determined enough to grow on hillsides and even down sharp cliff edges toward the water because life will be where it must.

  6: Tomas

  North Bay had a mounted jet on display—interesting, but it would’ve been even more interesting if it hung straight down like an animal in a butcher shop. It was a curious and pleasant thing to see so much openness. I was a creature of downtown Toronto, where the sky is accompanied by the hard, reflective mountain range of skyscrapers. Here I could see a Starbucks and other chain stores scattered around like Christmas ornaments without a tree. It’s good to remember many people live in more open spaces, and can probably breathe more deeply.

  Sometimes I’d just walk the streets in Toronto, or duck into the subway to watch people. At rush hour they’d cluster and scatter over and over again, odd patterns of people that passed by unnoticed. Chewing gum makes anyone look like an idiot cow. People would push and shove and take my faith away, and then one kind gesture would renew it again. I rode subway trains torn between contempt for people—all their fluttering, muttering and racing for doors—and a strange admiration for this poorly trained army, their defective but endlessly renewable charge, the wave of people that dig in every day but are sent home drowsy, clinging lightly to briefcases and bags, trying to manage a life in the off-hours.

  I felt some envy for people who lived in a less constraining city like Montreal where the sky wasn’t a set of ribbons, and where it seemed easier to pass a cathedral or somewhere else with some emotional space. Even getting outside the downtown core of Toronto helped, and I eventually settled near High Park.

  My instructions directed me to Matthew and Helen in a North Bay residence for seniors. I couldn’t remember them, but they were apparently old friends of my father. They were fixed in seats next to each other for hours at a time, both white and brittle things in a sparse cafeteria. They spoke slowly and pinched the air with small gestures. He said, “There were many problems with the experiments, with sending people back. Some people didn’t arrive at the proper destinations.”

  His head nodded a moment before he continued. “Once travel started, it took a particular kind of concentration to fight the currents. People fell out of it, like someone falling off the back of a bumpy wagon. People were lost in time. Not all of them, but certainly some of them. I fell back a number of times and then stopped completely. Tried speaking to the media about it but they walked away thinking I was an eccentric old man. If someone were to return, I mean … find their way back still in the freshness of youth, people would have to listen, wouldn’t they?”

  I glimpsed a thin hand brush me and saw Helen wanted to speak. I leaned in to listen. With the larger ideas out of the way, she wanted to speak of more personal details. “Matthew had a brother,” she said. “His name was Ackerley and he was among the lost, passing sideways through his own life.” This made very little sense to me, so I asked her to explain. She sighed as though I were dense but smiled politely. “Matthew didn’t get to his destination, where he was supposed to live with Ackerley, so we hired an investigator to look into it.”

  Another resident was stacking and fussing with plates not far away. I leaned in again to listen. “In the darkness and deep snow, he found himself outside a farmhouse owned by his wife’s family. He’d spent many pleasant evenings there relaxing with her. He trudged happily through deep snow and pulled at the door but found it locked. Wanting out of the cold he went around the house knocking on windows, waving and moving on. By the time he’d come around to the door again, it opened and he was shot point-blank by another man—the man that had been her boyfriend twenty years earlier.”

  But most riveting to me was the scrap of information they had about my father. Matthew had heard that Oliver had lived somewhere in Scotland with a woman named Calandra.

  7: Oliver

  I’d never been to Manhattan back when I had my life, so it wasn’t an unpleasant surprise to discover that’s where I was the third time I fell back a few years. Slightly dazed, the first thing I did was step out of the pedestrian lane on the Brooklyn Bridge so that a cyclist had to brake. I said sorry but he just shook his head and rode on with me pegged. I went to the invisible scarf of smog on the observation deck of the Empire State Building, the fleets of hesitating cabs below no bigger than yellow candy bars on a rack.

  New York is the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim, a saxophone player in Central Park and a fat man kissing ketchup off his hand in Battery Park with the statue in the distance. The square in front of Rockefeller Center looked like the ring on a rich man’s hand, and so much of Times Square asked for your attention that none of it got any. The people were fascinatin
g contradictions: parts of the city had the urgency of a cigarette on a bed, and yet three times as I stood looking at a map someone stopped to ask if I needed help. I watched a fit young businessman remove the top half of his suit and start a workout on a side street, and another man do contortions for spare change. A dumpy, middle-aged man glanced at me and narrowed his eyes. As he walked by, he held up a cigarette in one hand and a bottle of Coke in the other, moving his lips from one to the other, both held a few inches from his face.

  There were people living out of shopping carts and rich old ladies with makeup caked on their faces as they walked tiny dogs. Whole groups of people at intersections were shuffled like a deck of cards and sent to another part of the city. On the subway people would make announcements that they were victims of domestic abuse and weren’t proud to beg but needed to support a child, and they moved through the train with a hat. I watched a few guys quickly set up inside the doors and play drums between stops.

  In the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine, you can find Poets Corner with an Elizabeth Bishop quote: All the untidy activity continues, awful but cheerful. I met Carl, a thin man who came in with a face the colour of ash and asked if I was a priest because I happened to be standing calmly with my hands behind my back. He’d lost his wife and daughter in an accident that spit them out of the car side by side on the road like a couple of factory items. He did most of the talking, but it was nice to be near another human soul and slowly, he began letting me say things.

  Although he always spoke gruffly and was the sort of guy that said “spook” instead of “black man,” I became his friend because I thought I could help him and because I didn’t have any friends. He was the sort of man you could tell not to use a word like “spook” and he’d stop, rub his chin and say, “Yeah, yeah I guess.” I trusted his loyalty, felt he’d never hurt anyone, and he was good enough to give me a couch in his simple apartment. He read voraciously but seemed to file the books away in his memory without impact, like photographs in an album he had no intention of reopening. I found several odd jobs and settled into an apartment of my own. One evening as we sat with coffee he suddenly asked, “What was the first book that really grabbed your nuts?” I thought about it and replied something about Lord of the Flies in high school.

  8: Oliver

  I’m losing Penelope. The memories of my old life are like a collection of islands, and every time I move on, it’s as though the water level is higher. Maybe this was part of the design, to dull pain and allow for new lives in new locations. So, I’m writing things down: that we made love in a cemetery at night, the feel of the grass, and her body above me. In a discussion she said, “I think you’re confusing your ideas,” and folded her arms. I thought she was so smug I began childishly interrupting her. I want to keep her. I want the memories of her fanned before me so I can select from them.

  Strolling around with Carl, we stopped at a sidewalk café and I suddenly noticed summer had given way to fall. I sometimes grew tired of Carl, but he was loyal like a dog. I began to see, depressingly, that it might take me years to get back home. Sitting outside in the summer I’d written feverishly in my notebook about Penelope, flipping to the back to make notes about my childhood, my foundation. My feeling was that if Penelope was drifting away, perhaps the rest of me would too and I’d lose my very identity. As a child I walked to school sometimes with a girl from my street named Emily and made her slow down or go ahead of me as we approached the school so that I wouldn’t be seen arriving with a girl. Why did I do that?

  I decided any friend of mine who came over to play should receive a bonus, and selected a handful of toys to give away when the time came. I thought it was an expert program to increase my popularity, but as I stood at the door saying goodbye to Emily, about to pass along a gift, my mother came swooping down to sharply explain, “Your friends are your friends because they like you.” It was rare for her to lose her temper—most of my memories of her are of gentleness. When I was a toddler, she whittled my blue security blanket away by cutting off a strip at a time rather than taking it from me suddenly at once. It seemed like a good plan at the time, but she ultimately felt bad seeing me clinging to the only blue strip that remained.

  I was the sensitive kid crying all the way to kindergarten on the first day, and nearly cried years later when she gently broke the news—as though there had been a death in the family—that Santa wasn’t real, that he was only a symbol for goodness, the spirit of giving. Once, I sat in the back seat of a car about to go catch a film with some neighbours, and had to leave one of my mother’s meals sitting unfinished. It suddenly struck me that she wouldn’t always be there to cook these meals, and that I’d miss them someday. The whole concept of change and loss flooded me and I burst out crying, the father next door wondering what on earth was upsetting me. I wrote these memories down in the back of the journal and was tempted to tell them to Carl, but he tended only to listen carefully, nod and say little in return.

  The next time everything began folding up and I felt myself beginning to fall again, I was on the sidewalk with Carl. Turning to him, I grabbed him by both arms and dug my fingers into his jacket. He looked confused but began to understand I was taking him with me and simply said, “Oh,” as the drunk woozy feeling and shift in time hit him. Some part of me must have recognized I might need an army to get home and could build one from all the people lost to small corners of time.

  9: Carl

  Oliver talked too much, but I give credit where credit is due, and it’s also fair to say he stood by his opinions and could explain them. Suddenly he grabs me like a lover and it’s like falling off a cliff edge through life itself, trying for some measure of control by reaching for platforms of significant moments—the way you’d grab at outcrops on your way down a cliff.

  And then I was standing on an incline listening to the gentle sounds of cowbells in the distance, mingled with the French language. We were in a town in the French Alps. We simply stood for a while inhaling the air. I would have to say it was refreshing to see humanity did not dominate the landscape, the small towns on other mountainsides spreading out like fireworks—a few short, clear lines in a handful of directions. With a little embarrassment we recognized we were pretty much in the side yard of a home owned by an elderly man. He emerged to stand in the doorway of his patio and look at us while his five dogs—all named after various nearby summits, we would later learn—pushed to get around him for a few seconds like something struggling to be born. As soon as they could, they shot in our direction, but he called them off.

  He asked what we wanted and Oliver spoke enough French to converse with him. It turns out he was the local vet and worked in the town centre down a long, curving road. He seemed agreeable enough, and as I followed the conversation I kept looking up at the gathering clouds. I could tell it had stormed already once tonight and now the air felt loaded with the threat of more rain. Trees swayed, and as drops of rain began to arrive a tall man moved in a straight line down the road, and people moved with purpose like beads sorted on an abacus.

  The man said his name was Julien and shook our hands. Perhaps in some way it helped that I kept looking at the sky because he ushered us inside to make tea and wait out the storm. He stayed in a manse attached to a church where the archbishop had lived, and he was alone. His wife was gone and his son had grown up and gone off to work as a doctor in Paris. He took us up the worn stone steps to a cluttered study that was glassed in on two sides, saying this was always the best way to view a storm. We watched it descend before it finally burst and thrashed at the windows while mist and cloud rolled in to cover every nearby mountaintop. It’s a simple thing to say, but it may have been the most impressive storm I’ve ever seen. There are not many moments in life that make you feel like the hand of God is trying to find you.

  The clutter of the office reminded me of a summer day not long after I’d graduated college and moved out on my own for the first
time. My grandmother had died, and I was spending every Sunday helping my family clean out her home. A few weeks let loose a wave of garbage bags sent to the corner, furniture lifted to other homes and boxes of old photos lost in the shuffle. I’d overslept to discover my answering machine had recorded a call my brother made to see if I was coming. The recording went on minutes beyond his message to pick up the tick of an old clock, a crash and someone asking, “You okay?” I heard something like, “I can’t even get the lid off,” and my sister saying, “Carl might.” My brother asked, “You don’t want that trophy to keep? Winner!” and then, “Anything to do with food I think we should throw out, unless it’s like … canned.” Long minutes of hissing silence and rustling and then, “I’ll put it by the card table,” and “Garbage goes in bags not boxes, right?”

  Julien let us stay, and it was a pleasant place. We made dinner together slowly every night as there was little else to demand our time. After a few glasses of wine one night, Julien commented that his son—the doctor—wanted to save the world but didn’t send him a birthday card. And just as quickly he dismissed the thought with a wave of his hand in the air, changing the subject to his dogs. My favourite of his dogs was the brown one, a female, at first because I could tell it apart from all the black ones, but later for other reasons. Somehow it was the one that was both sad and pleasant; it was something in the eyes.