Taken out of context, I can understand how that plea might trigger thoughts of collapsed mines, bombed out apartment buildings, avalanches or any number of natural and man… er, human made catastrophes. You could add car crashes to the list, strokes, falls off ladders, the tally goes on.
That’s not what I intended, though, lounging in one of the blue plastic Cape Cod chairs out on our back deck, watching the progress of another home run for God arcing through the infinity of blue sky over Mount Brenton.
“You weren’t thinking at all!” was how Ashley put it. “You scared the crap out of me!”
Actually, I’d been thinking about a lot of things, before Plato came along and jumped onto my lap. Good thoughts, mostly, about how lucky I am to be living my retirement era in Chemainus. As suburbs go, Cook street rates pretty good. It’s got a crime rate that flat lines somewhere near zero, there’s not a single traffic light in town, strangers wave and say hello on the street and in the aisles of the Country Grocer store, and it’s located in the mild temperate zone of Southeast Vancouver Island—accurately fabled as a bit of paradise afloat on the Salish Sea.
There’s some irredeemably grouchy types who grumble in their coffee mugs down at Nic’s Café that the best thing about Muraltown is it’s within easy driving distance of Nanaimo in one direction, Victoria in the other. I say to them: If you can afford a patch of turf in either of those two places bigger than a dish cloth, go for it. I’m happy where I am.
I was especially happy to be out on the back deck that day.
Not that I don’t like company. I do. And I really like Serena, even if she is smarter than me and can’t help delving excitedly into the details about her research into ‘mitochondrial DNA and the role it plays in aging and degenerative diseases’. She’s ‘good people’, our niece. And my wife’s good people too. But put them in the same room, and you might as well stick your head inside a beehive, the way they natter. A quiet guy like me can’t get a word—or even a thought—in edgewise.
That’s why I retreated out onto the back deck. Once they’d talked their ways through the agony of childbirth, how to get your lemon poppyseed muffins out of the tray, the best deals to be had at the hospital auxiliary thrift shop, and so on, I decided it was time to take out the recycling and stop off on the way back for a snooze in the waning light of a balmy spring afternoon, while they continued with the task of sorting through the family photo albums.
“Oh look, there’s you uncle Martin, fifty pound lighter, with hair and no wrinkles!” “Aw! There’s Panda. Remember the time he ate your socks and we had to watch like expectant parents for him to poop them out.” “Auntie Ash, you were such a hippie. I love that dress, and the army boots are ever so chic! Ha, ha, ha!” “The Half-Lemon! Oh My God, we actually drove around in a yellow VW beetle? Look at the price of gas… 48 cents a gallon! Christ, they don’t even mint pennies anymore, and gas is measured out by the litre.”
Even though I was happy for them, I have to admit to being pinpricked by envy, watching Ash and Serena babble on like partners at a quilting bee. I’m not a feminist or anything, but I was thinking, if more men could get themselves into that head space, there’d be fewer Putins in the world, and the people of Ukraine might not be suffering through a senseless armageddon, watching their cities getting pummelled into dust like 21st Century Sodoms and Gomorrahs. I’m ashamed of my male gender sometimes. Wish I could have a bit less Y in my jeans and a bit more ‘Why?’ in my brain.
We have strange thoughts in that fantastical zone between awake and asleep. There I was, reclining in the Cape Cod chair out on the back deck, the brilliant sunshine lighting up the inside of my eyelids like lava lamps when, plop, Plato landed on my lap.
Cat’s paws are the closest thing I can imagine to an angel alighting… until they begin kneading that is, their claws tugging at your clothing and pricking your skin. Plato circled round for a couple of laps, like he was tamping down the grass under a tree on his vast savanna, then settled in and started purring. I sat perfectly still, trying to make my bony thighs soft as down filled cushions. The rumble of his contentment echoed through me. You have to feel a cat’s purr to really appreciate it, let it permeate consciousness.
Please understand, Plato is not a lap cat. He’s aloof, a strutter through our lives, more likely to show you the pink petunia when you make a move to pat him than to rub up against your leg. Usually he stumps off like you’re beneath his dignity. Ash and I are lap-cat-people, though, yearning for that mystical connection between cat’s fur and human skin, and that reassuring deep vibrato of feline contentment. He was deigning to settle onto my lap for a snooze that afternoon. But lap time with Plato? It’s like cuddling a land mine. Don’t touch, don’t move, don’t even breathe, or he’ll be off.
Ash and I share the joys of those moments as if we’d experienced a second coming. I often wonder what it is we’re missing in our lives, that we hanker so desperately after our cat’s erratic affection? We have each other, isn’t that enough? Our death-defying circle of friends? Our kids, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, our dog Sophie, neighbours who wave hello wherever we go in Muraltown? Isn’t that enough?
Not unless Plato loves us back, I guess.
How could I be so selfish as to not share that glorious interlude with Ash? So, risking all, I slipped my fingers like a bomb disposal expert into the hip pocket of my ever tightening jeans, pinched the top of my mobile and slid it ever so gingerly out from under Plato. He was still purring when the phone came to life and I pointed it at him in camera mode. His enlarged rump filled the bottom of my frame; my hiking boots—propped on the deck table—the top.
‘Click’ went the camera. Plato purred on. I dared not breathe a sigh of relief.
Kids can thumb in a text quicker than ‘u or i’ can let go a fart. I punched my mobile’s runes the same way you’d poke at an elevator button, my pudgy index finger hitting the wrong key half the time, so that I’d have to go back and try again, and again, hissing like a kettle too long on the hob. But eventually I got the message into the allotted space beneath the distorted image of Plato on my lap, then zip, off it went.
‘Help! I can’t move my legs!’ it said.
Panic is instantaneous contagion. It zaps the collective consciousness of a room like the sudden glare of a flood light. It’s another sort of bomb, its shockwaves radiating out into the neural network, forcing adrenaline to squirt like juice from a squeeze bottle into the guts of its infected tribe. On the one hand, panic gets us moving before the bus runs us over; on the other, it doesn’t give us time to think. The autonomic nervous system kicks in and we get jerked around like puppets. If we’re lucky enough to survive, we analyze ‘the event’ after the fact, picking apart the threads of mayhem.
My theory is we’re predisposed to panic. The Doomsday Clock is always ticking closer and closer to midnight, shaving off half the remaining time, then half again, until the calculus of destruction tells us there’s nothing, no measurable allotment of milliseconds left between us and…
Duck, cover and hold! We don’t want to hear that bomb go off!
Ash, for example, is predisposed by images of me snacking on potato chips and sneaking chocolate bars, munching toward the imminent possibility of a heart attack; she has witnessed my shuffle-footed stumbling often enough to anticipate my tumbling down any convenient flight of stairs; tick, tick, tick, the clock keeps blinking, until…
‘Bing!’ The text message slid into the corner of her screen, minus the cute, explanatory photo of Plato snuggled in my lap. It shouted: “Help! I can’t move my legs!”
So there I sat, swaddled in the joy of Plato’s fidgety affection, while Ash and Serena dashed about the house looking for the corner I had collapsed into, or the staircase I’d toppled down, expecting to find me dead, my finger still touching the screen after I’d shot off my desperate expiring plea for assistance…
“You scared the crap out of me!” Ash shouted without preamble once they’d zeroed in on the back deck. She slapped me on the shoulder hard enough to bruise, maybe even trigger some kind of cardiac event. “Serena was about to dial 911!”
“It was an accident!” I protested. “There was supposed to be a picture…”
“You’re the accident,” she shook her head. Case closed; sentencing to be announced over dinner and executed over some indeterminate length of future time.
Thoroughly harangued, I was left standing on the deck by my two saviours, who marched back into the house through the sliding door, shaking their heads, words like ‘inconsiderate’ and ‘stupid’ reverberating in their wake. I turned round, and looked wistfully at Plato, inscrutable as ever, purring away on the Cape Cod chair.
“You little shit,” I said. “I really do love you.”
It was like stepping into a time tunnel and heading back more than 50 years, walking down that long corridor; passing students chatting, laughing, hurrying heads-down between classes; then up the stairs and into Room 215, where he was expected to share his observations as an author and sometime poet.
He stepped over the threshold with a sense of foreboding. An eerie premonition that, despite the sameness of it all, everything had changed in the half century since he’d celebrated his graduation from St. Laurent High School back in 1969… and awakened the next morning to a splitting hangover.
My hair has greyed, skin wrinkled, reflexes slowed and primal urges waned, he thought. My kids have grown up, and I’ve become a grandfather… I’m history.
While the students settled in and Ms. Drury introduced him, he realized there’s nothing like making a presentation to a Grade 12 English class to remind you just how ancient you have become. How irrelevant!
Unlike indigenous peoples, North Americans of European extraction – the majority in Room 215 – don’t really have a tradition of cherishing the wisdom of their ‘elders’. To them senior citizens are alien creatures, apparitions from the world of rotary phones, black and white TV, Underwood typewriters, cursive script and cheap gasoline.
Generation Pre, he figured. As in ‘pre anything digital or online’.
A Google reference had informed him that he’d be addressing students of Generation Z, ‘our first true generation of digital natives,’ according to the write up. ‘Born into a technological world, information has been placed at their fingertips and social media use has become the norm.’ The article was titled ‘Gen Z and Gen Alpha in the Classroom: The Importance of Digital Learning’. It ran under a photo of a girl wearing a pair of virtual reality goggles, her hands reaching out to touch something he couldn’t see or even imagine.
He considered it an iconic portrayal, troubling with its certainty that two beings can exist in the same space, at the same time, and yet be on entirely different planets. My version of Room 215 might just as well be off Platform 2153/4, he thought. An utterly alternate reality.
Buck up! he rallied. Don’t be pathetic.
And so began his laboriously prepared presentation. Later, he would describe the episode to Maria as, Sort of like being a fly, droning around in a room, looking for a place to land. “I’m still laughing at myself.”
When she consoled him, he shook his head. “They were being honest, hon, not rude. And I learned more in that hour or so than I care to admit.”
“Like what?”
“That even when kids are smiling and nodding at my rambling, for them it’s like talking to someone who’s dialled the wrong number, long distance, from another world.”
“I’m with them on that one,” she joked, and they had a good laugh.
Thankfully the session had ended on a high note, he remembered. They had a brief conversation about how authors deal with rejection, which he morphed into an oblique commentary on his then-and-there. “I referred back to comments I’d made earlier about the writers’ vocation of ‘experiencing and expressing life’, and his belief in the personal importance of the literary cycle… “How that gives you the strength to push through and carry on,” he explained.
“Then, when Ms. Drury said thanks as I was packing up my books and papers, the students gave me a fulsome applause!”
“You’re sure it wasn’t just because you were leaving?”
He ignored the quip.
“I suspect it was in recognition of a determined effort by someone hopelessly out of his depth. Appreciation for his refusal to give up – like cheering on a water buffalo who’s blundered in a pit of quicksand.
“I do believe they were telling me to keep trying.”
Not that they’d want me to book another performance before the end of their last year in high school, he thought. But perhaps to inflict myself on the Generation Alphas, who will soon be occupying their seats in Room 215… or is it 2153/4?
“I have to say, daunting as it remains, the thought of having another go appeals to me,” he admitted to Maria. “And I sort of hope I’m invited!”
They hugged, then got on with the business of preparing dinner.
Toward the end of our session Dr. Nolan said, “It would help if we knew what your daily routines and rituals are, Bob. Don’t you think?”
He has a way of doing that… inviting me to approve every next step in our ‘journey’ so it will be my fault as much as his if we get lost in the metaphorical forest or I walk off a cliff. I suppose I could have said, ‘No way. I’m paying you to get me out of this mess!’ But that’s not how things work.
Besides, I’m not paying him; my boss is. It’s one of the ‘employee benefits’ we lucky clones at college receive for dedicating our souls eight hours a day to the education of a cadre of snotty rich kids. ‘Education?’ That’s a laugh. I could just as easily teach a bunch of baboons the intricacies and nuances of English Literature.
The ‘mess’ I’m talking about occurred three months ago, when I shoved Lenny Hertz and he tripped over the coffee table in the staff room. He bruised his elbow, a small price to pay for his crude arrogance. I apologized and helped him up, but he lodged a complaint anyway and the verdict turned out to be anger management counselling with Dr. Nolan.
It’s my penchant for ritual that got me into trouble, he believes… or rather, he’s nudging me toward that belief. The sessions last an hour, the conclusions marked by his hummingbird alarm. When the hummingbird zooms through the room – an audio avatar emitted by an app on his iPhone – we are supposed to sum up our day’s progress, and prepare for the next session. Dr. Nolan always smiles when the hummingbird hovers, as if he’s imagining it landing on his shoulder.
I hate the hummingbird, because it reminds me where I’m at, and why, and what we’ve talked about during the last hour. I imagine it hovering next to my ear, sticking its pointy beak inside, and sucking all the private nectar out of my brain.
The objective of my ‘conversations’ with Doc Nolan is for me to become aware of the ‘detonators’ that caused me to shove Hertz, and to be able to ‘defuse’ the situation when – not if – it recurs. His logic goes something like this: I am ritual bound; my rituals are sacred; if anyone makes fun of my rituals, anger builds; if, like Hertz, they don’t stop making fun when I signal my displeasure, I am likely to explode.
My theory is much shorter: Hertz is an asshole.
Doc Nolan says we have to ‘unwrap’ the meaning of words like that. They are the labels we slap onto our ‘perceived enemies’ to avoid having to them becoming real people. “What you have to do, Bob, is become aware of the human beings who have become the antagonists in your life’s stories, and deal with them on a mature level.
“Make yourself bigger than them, then invite them to grow up with you.”
In our fist sessions Doc Nolan and I reconstructed the day leading up to the staff room incident. In retrospect he forgave me. Said I’m not alone, when it comes to living by rituals. “Everybody has ‘em,” he proclaimed. “We like to think of ourselves as ‘free spirits’ and ‘spontaneous’, that’s how the marketeers portray us, but truth is, as soon as we start analyzing our lives we find they are made up of routines, which are actually the stem cells of ritual.”
That assurance in place, he said: “Describe a typical morning, Bob.”
Anger management training is not so much an exercise in healing as a perverted form of punishment, it occurred to me in that moment. For session after session you are forced to decide between the truth, or denial, or silence, or a lie. And you realize gradually that you’re not going to shove dickhead Hertz next time, because you’ll have to go through this kind of counselling torture again, and again… that you’d rather leave him to his smug taunting and go put your fist through a bathroom mirror or something…
“Bob?” Doc Nolan coached.
The first thing I do in the morning is look at Maria, lying next to me, and thank her for being there, and hope I will be able to make her happy. I have to confess, I’m not the best of husbands. I’m boring, I know. And weird in so many ways. And resentful of Maria’s interminable efforts to ‘liven me up’ and get me ‘eating healthy.’ The least I can do is love her, and renew my vow to make her smile, keep my love from becoming threadbare.
“And after that?” Doc Nolan prodded, murmuring in that tone counsellors have mastered, a subtle frequency that sounds like benediction emanating from somewhere deep inside your own brain.
Lordy, I found myself mocking. If only I had a couch to lie on.
“Bob?”
“After that, I hang ten and stretch for the sky.”
“Hang ten?”
I sit on the edge of our mattress, a gigantic aerial raft of memory foam, my tootsies dangling like pulled roots seeking ground, my crown expanding toward the overarching light. And there, in equipoise between being and not, I imagine the dawn of another day.
“You do this every day?”
I have to admit, his surprise gave me a fillip of pleasure. The thought of my own counsellor thinking of me as a nut case made me feel special. I pictured him at his next mind-benders’ convention, offering me up a an example of weird and wonderful that would surely outdo the tales of his colleagues…
And my feet hadn’t yet touched the floor.
“Then what?”
The rites of brushing teeth, letting out the cat, shuffling into the kitchen and getting the coffee brewing seemed hardly worth mentioning, although none of them are routine, now I think about it. Routine is the things that happen on autopilot. You’re not actually there. I’m a priest at my bathroom sink ablutions; a prophet, sending Rusty out into his dangerous world; a saint, counting scoops into the French press for the coffee I’ll offer Maria in bed. But Doc Nolan wouldn’t appreciate that. Those daily chores are too ordinary to parlay into anything verging on madness. Quirky, perhaps, but in unexceptional ways.
What he was really rooting around for, like an earthworm in my gut, were the five affirmations, and that clumsy ballet I perform in their honour every day, when I think no one’s watching… Maria excepted. She has intruded on my ritual often enough to know about it. We laugh when she refers to it as the platypus’s dance of the sugar plum faery; laugh even harder when I accuse her of being unkind to platypuses.
“The five affirmations?”
Value Life; Complete the Circle; Give with Joy & Grace; Receive with Gratitude and Appreciation; Experience and Express the Tetrahedron. I sometimes wish I was a hologram so I could enact those things with the fluid movement they deserve, a whirlwind of flashing light, limbs spiralling like constellations, toes and head axles of a universe without boundaries.
But I’m only human, and Hertz caught me unawares, doing my clumsy dance in tune with the final chant of the fifth affirmation. I was balanced on one foot, the other leg stretched out behind me, arms reaching toward the horizon to give and receive. Spirit is the fourth corner of The Tetrahedron, and I was lost in its meanings, so immersed that I didn’t notice Hertz suddenly there, behind me in the staff room.
I knew Dr. Nolan couldn’t possibly understand. At best he could misunderstand and misrepresent. “Spirit consists of four definitions that are beyond comprehension,” I explained.
“Go on.”
“Infinity, Eternity, Omniscience, Omnipotence.”
“God?” he guessed.
“Not God,” I corrected.
“What then?”
“Not God,” I repeated.
I admit it was wrong for me to have shoved Hertz, even though it wasn’t really much more than a nudge, which he exaggerated into something more dramatic. But the idea of Not God next to the reality of Hertz was just too much for me to take. I confess, I wanted his smug, leering face out of my sight and I won’t forgive myself for that, even though it wasn’t a sin, it was just being stupid.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
The earliest evidence of my existence isn’t preserved as a proper memory. It’s been reconstructed based on family photos, blurry black and whites captured by an Eastman Kodak ‘Hawkeye’.
Dad’s never in those seminal shots because he’s the guy working the camera, and I don’t figure in many or them either because my older brothers Frank and Kevin were the stars along with my sister Natalie.
There’s one of me in a baby carriage, parked on a sidewalk, my face wrinkled and scrunched up like I’m getting ready to howl. If I try really hard, I can imagine Dad hunched over the view finder, divining just the right moment to trigger the shutter and capture another chemically rendered pattern of light for posterity… this one of his prune-faced youngest.
What was going on inside his head? I wonder. What sequence in the charged neural plasma determined the exact moment the hologram of me got burned into the photo emulsion? And what was mother thinking when she scribed on the flip side of that archival image: “Arthur in his carriage at Portage la Prairie.”
Then there’s a shot of us kids and Mum posed in front of the family Christmas tree, taken in some living-room I can’t for the life of me remember. Frank and Kevin are playing with their shiny-new truck and grader; Natalie looks petulant and pouty, as if she already knows Santa’s never going to bring her exactly what she wants; Mum looks like she’s staring into the headlight of an oncoming car. I’m toddling in front of the montage, slightly to the side, looking doubtful – as if I haven’t yet figured out who this guy Santa really is, and why I’m getting presents and having my picture taken in his name.
Dad wasn’t much of a family man back then. I suspect he took the photo as a form of misrepresentation. But since the Hawkeye didn’t have a timer, he couldn’t insert himself into the happy montage – could only claim that he’d been there in absentia. How would he have fit in anyway: still young enough not to have succumbed entirely to the dreariness and pettiness of it all… to believe if you drank hard enough and laughed loud enough, maybe things would turn out alright. If he could have swapped himself into the scene quicker than the speed of light, I think he would have struck an intrepid explorer’s pose, looking over the top of the camera’s infallible lens into a future none of us could either foresee or forestall.
The first shot I can actually remember being in with Dad was taken on the edge of the Atlantic. The family trekked to Sydney every summer, our pilgrimage to Dad’s ancestral home. Our favourite destination from there was Kennington Cove, about an hour south, just past Louisbourg. To us kids the waves rushed in like liquid mountains, as if the God we still believed in had grabbed the far edge of the flat world and was shaking it like a sheet. Frank, Kevin and Natalie would have been out there in the surf, but I was too young. So I ended up in Dad’s arms. Mum must have snapped the picture.
His right arm is wrapped around me. I’m clinging to him and squirming at the same time, my left hand planted on his neck. It’s hard to tell if Dad is really aware of me or if he’s successfully ignoring my struggles, but I like to think we’re connected somehow. He is aware of the camera all right, striking a relaxed pose, leaning against a boulder, the ocean roiling in the background, hissing up and down the strand.
That photo sucks me in like the Atlantic’s undertow. Whenever I see it I am suddenly there, at Kennington Cove; held tight in my father’s arms; my chubby baby’s hand splayed against his neck and cheek. I mustn’t forget that. Despite everything else that would happen, I have to recall the tight muscles of his neck, the rough stubble of his cheek, him peering ahead as if there might be something dangerous, lurking out there on the bluffs, me fascinated by the breakers collapsing onto the beach behind, where Frank, Kevin and Natalie frolicked.
Family photos are counterfeit memories, reproductions of light that has long-since been absorbed by the landscape or bled off into unalterable dimensions of space. We preserve them in battered valises, in dusty attics, in houses moved away from long ago. They never get thrown out; instead, we simply leave them behind for someone else to deal with. They molder away in dark attics, forever waiting to be discovered. Like crematory urns, they become repositories that reassure us simply by existing.
It’s the images never taken that define us – the photos not allowed.
I don’t remember a single photo of Mum and Dad holding hands. There’s a picture somewhere of Mum sitting on a grassy slope, her skirt hiked up above her shapely thighs. She looks directly into the camera, laughing at the man who would be her husband. On the back, in her neat script: “Taken near London, during the war.”
Odd, we still call it that: ‘The War.’ As if applying the title to any other of the murderous cataclysms that have bloodied and tortured the planet in the last six decades would be a misuse of language. Ten billion lifetimes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki supposedly put a full-stop to hostilities, and we still look back on that global paroxysm as present and playing itself out in the here-and-now.
I can’t be sure why there are no photos in our family albums of Mum and Dad holding hands. Never really thought much about it. I have a slight aversion to hand-holding myself – as if it’s a species of weakness, an act of self-delusion, like offering a stuffed toy to someone waiting in line, patting him on the back and saying: “It’s okay kid, everything’s going to be just fine.”
There are other pictures of Mum and Dad during the war: the one taken on their wedding day, Dad in uniform, clowning around, making a face, his hat turned sideways on his head, Mum laughing, leaning into him, his arm around her shoulder; My sister in a pram, somewhere in London, the lineaments of our shared genetic code showing clearly, even then, in her frown.
But there’s not a single image that breaches the unofficial secrets act. Not one that breaks the unspoken code adopted by sane men whose job it was to fly over the blighted, blasted cities of Europe and drop pulverizing incendiaries onto the innocents below: children, women, men. Dad never talked about it, so I invented that period of his life – his hands gripping controls, nudging throttles, easing the lumbering bird of vengeance up into the sky.
I once asked him to accompany me to the Royal Canadian Air Force museum, where the preserved carcass of a Lancaster bomber sits on display, as if it were some breed of mechanical pterodactyl. He avoided the topic at first, then turned me down flat. Mum said he was afraid he might have forgotten too much about those times, what it was like to fly those ancient machines and might have been embarrassed.
I think it was because he didn’t want toremember.
So I only get to imagine the photo I might have taken of him in front of the clattering bird he had once flown on its metal wings, me behind the camera, Dad looking impossibly old and feeble, but heroic just the same. I only get to remember that touristy shot as it might have been, an explicit moment where – with the click of a shutter – we got to forgive each other our complicities, our sins, our armageddons.
At Dad’s funeral they couldn’t get the hands right. The way they were arranged on his chest, against the blue serge of his blazer, under the Royal Canadian Air Force crest, was… and there’s no other language for it… fake, grotesque.
Rigor mortis sets in about 12 hours after death. The muscles tighten around the bone, jerking the limbs into a sort of fist, which is unable to let go because the enzymes that normally complete the cycle of clutching and releasing are no longer being produced by the body. It remains in that state about 48 hours, then as decomposition sets in, the body relaxes, accepting – it would seem – that it has truly died. Dad’s hands never did relax, so the mortician arranged them as best he could, the fingers meshed like cogs in a gear-train.
His face looked almost normal. You could tell there was something unnatural about it, like it might have belonged in a wax museum, but at least you could imagine it once having been alive. The hands are what I remember, though, the message they conveyed in their involuntary language of signs.
I didn’t say it out loud, of course – not right away – and can’t determine to this day if the thought was true – I mean sincere in all its dimensions, down to the place where sole meets concrete reality. But it was the best I could come up with on the spot, and even though I didn’t voice the sentiment right off, she heard me. That’s the trick I believe: Think things before speaking. Sometimes keep them as thoughts forever because you’re bashful, perhaps. Or maybe because the person you’re interested in is perfect and you could only detract from that by wheedle-wording your way into their affections.
I had instinctively done an up and down of the sandals’ occupant – that checkout-scan we males of the species do when attracted by something potentially sexual in our peripheral vision. But it was her footwear – and I must confess, her feet –my roving eyes locked onto.
Her toenails were painted pink!
Not gaudily, in that slapdash way you sometimes see and feel embarrassed about – usually for bubblegum teens. The polish had been applied with artistry. Details like that say something, don’t they? She had a conception of self that was bold and subtle, I figured.
So maybe I was indulging just a little. But it’s okay to try and fathom why someone’s special isn’t it? And at first, we have to draw assumptions from observations as seemingly insignificant as pedicure, don’t we? You’re a liar if you say no. The forensics of love are based upon minute chips of evidence, hinting at theories made up as we go.
To me the convex surfaces of her nails were intriguing as conch shells turned inside-out. Can you imagine such a thing? My eyes stuck on the tops of her toes for a breath or two then – without my thinking, without conscious intent – zoomed in on her sandals, recording every facet of those elegant slippers.
Even as my eyes went about their rogue’s work, though, part of me realized there was nothing so very remarkable about Gloria’s sandals… aside from the fact that she was in them. I can think of a thousand movie stars and a thousand more princesses who would have turned up their noses, if asked to wriggle their dainty nether digits into such a pair of Walmart flip-flops. But on Gloria’s feet! Oh my!
“Oh my!” as grandmother would cry when occasion warranted. Of course, her delight was usually over events as homey as cherry pie coming out of the oven, or particularly brilliant works of crayon art, not over anything so exotic as the footgear of a complete stranger. For grandmother agape wasn’t so much about miracles as discovering the miraculous in everyday things – about seeing through the veil of ordinary and triggering suspirations as emphatic as a last-gasp.
By the way, mentioning Gloria’s name right now makes everything from here-on-in non-sequitur. I didn’t know her name at this point in the story. True, I was cultivating an intimate relationship with the bone structure and musculature of her feet, the same way Toto might have got to know Dorothy before they ventured into Oz. But that’s not the same as knowing a body’s name, is it? Love works backwards. We fall into it then double back, tracking down the meanings and consequences of ’til death do us part.
I’ve broken sequence because I can’t bear talking about Gloria as ‘her’ or ‘she’. I have to give a name to those theoretical references. So I have christened her even though a name at that point would have been as naively symbolic as graffiti sprayed anonymously on whitewashed stucco, or rote declarations carved into the trunks of trees or the planks of park benches. At that point in our relationship her name would have been a catch-all of fantasies. A concatenation of dark eyes, long black hair… an aura you could best see through eyes half-closed.
In truth, if Gloria had dematerialized before I got a chance to talk to her – whisked out of her sandals by powers unknown into some sci-fi Nirvana beyond the frequencies of daytime TV – nothing would have seemed remarkable about her footwear left on the corner of Quadra and Hillside. Other than the fact the sandals were there – placed carefully on the cracked concrete as if the intersection were a portico into some alternative dimension, and she had been called away suddenly. Barefoot.
The thing about Gloria is she even stands with her shoes neatly placed, and she never just kicks her footgear off. She’s neat that way. Fastidious. It makes me laugh. And because of her, I place my work boots carefully on the mat inside the vestibule door, too – toes pointing toward the wall, heels knocked together. She’s aware of details like that, so it pains me to bring disorder into our lives, especially when it’s so easy to do things right.
There’s meaning to the precise placement feet on a sidewalk; someone needs to see that. Imagine yourself in the presence of a goddess. You’ve been schlepping your way through life down at the pit, a latter-day Sisyphus crunching stones into various grades of gravel, then suddenly she’s there, and you know sheis a goddess, that she already knows everything she needs to. What do you say to her? What’s your conversation starter?
In a way, Gloria was aware of every rhinestone glued to those bargain basement sandals of hers. Not individually, of course, but as elements of a sensory field, if you will. I wondered which tiny mirror I might have been reflected in, standing beside her, my bike held between us like a barrier. What did she think of this guy? Of his long hair and never-quite-matured beard, his knobby tired bike? She hadn’t even glanced my way – a sensible rebuke. But I did want her to appreciate the nobility of my feelings… that if the sun could be positioned just-so behind me, I would glow, too, with my own halo effect.
I glimpsed her profile, then surveyed the intersection for clues. Perhaps there were points of convergence, shards of data that proved we dwelt in overlapping dimensions. Which of the drab architectural features could I point to and say, There, that’s us. The San Remo Market Deli & Café? The Salvation Army Community & Family Centre, across Hillside? The Money Mart (real people fast cash) diagonally opposite? The Sally Ann thrift store on the west side of Quadra? The garbage receptacles, and bike racks at every corner to dispose of stuff we no longer valued and lock up the things we did?
We were none of that, and perhaps – without knowing it – denial was the point of convergence I had in mind.
“Nice sandals!” I said.
No kidding! I said it out loud. Breathlessly. Disguised as a brash joke, because any second now the light on Quadra would wink green and the little silhouette that says walk would let her get away, and I couldn’t let that happen without at least a memory of me – strange and deformed as it might seem – hankering after her. Things had spiralled into a place where an inkling of madness is the only reasonable state of mind – not stark raving lunacy, but a sort of emotional Pi, never quite defined, always panicked by another incremental digit of yearning.
If only we had it in us to feel that way about every living thing, we would truly be incarnations of our imagined gods.
The light changed. Gloria stepped off the sidewalk into the intersection. I walked beside her, thinking: This is it. It’s finished. She still hadn’t glanced at me. I studied her profile for signs. She wasn’t ready to offer any – and how could I blame her? But I took comfort in the fact that we were walking in the same direction – that the imagined pat of her sandals on the pavement didn’t seem hurried or doubtful. She was willing to abide my company to that extent at least.
Gloria strode on, back straight, black pantaloons fluttering in the breeze, pleated jacket conforming precisely to her slight, angular build. Did I imagine it, the faintest hint of a smile turning up her lips? I’m not sure, but the words rushed out of me anyway when I saw what I took to be a cue, as if I’d waiting to blurt my intentions for just-about-ever. “Maybe you won’t take it wrong if I walk with you a-ways?”
Creep! Is that what she was thinking? She stopped, looked straight at me, her head swivelling round like a security camera on a pole, eyes locking on. This is it, I thought. It’s finished.
Then she smiled and laughed out loud, and… Oh my God!
We plan on having kids someday, but there’s still lots of time to think about how I might answer, if one of the little rascals ever asks, when they’ve attained the age of reason, or at least a mature state of curiosity: “Hey, Dad, how did you and Mom first meet and fall in love?”
Perhaps if I framed it as a joke, I could admit to my temporary state of foot-fetishism at the corner of Hillside and Quadra while I was on my way to the pit and Gloria off to her studio. Or maybe I could fast-forward to our first date, on the evening of that first day, at Caffé Fantastico just a couple of blocks away from our point of departure… I paid; Gloria objected; we laughed at the clumsiness of it all… our perfectly memorable ineptitudes.
To be honest, I was amazed she showed up at all, or that I’d asked her to, when we parted ways that morning, me pedalling down Bay Street, heading for the pit; her, carrying on up Quadra. Gloria walks without making a sound, it’s like she rolls the soles of her feet through each step, feeling the ground beneath her, sensing its contours, its tilt, its flaws and fractures. Silence is what she leaves behind when she walks away from you or out of a room. Don’t get me wrong, she’s not an angel or anything, and I’m not a worshiper. But that silence she leaves in her wake? Your instinct is to fill it with thoughts of her.
The circular patio table we chose on the sidewalk outside Caffé Fantastico had a rippled glass top, so I could still make out Gloria’s feet after we sat down. They became a point of reference – their muscular arch, perfectly articulated toes and meticulously painted nails a sort of permissible zone of psychic gravity, which assured me the rest of her was still there, that she was real in an incomprehensible way… there’s a difference between comprehending someone and figuring them out, I think. Comprehending is like hugging your partner, knowing you’ll always be wondering how amazing she is; figuring her out is like taking her apart so you can adjust the mechanics of her soul – like tuning a bicycle.
A lot of my friends have got round to asking me – in one way or another – why I majored in philosophy at UVic. They don’t come right out and say: “Hey, you could be doing a hell of a lot better than crunching gravel down at the pit, if only you’d go into law or something, or maybe take a few more PSYCH courses, get a master’s? Get into counselling? Or teaching? Heck, why not try for a PhD in something or other; you’ve got the smarts.” And maybe they’re right; maybe I will someday. But all that misses the point – the vanishing point of our existence, you might say. I can’t map things out in a straight line, like I was crow flying from here to there, and happened to land on a lamppost in the epicentre of Nirvana. Life doesn’t move in straight lines or elegant curves that can be described by some sort of derived calculus.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I took philosophy so I could understand the meaning of Gloria’s feet, seen through the rippled glass of a patio table. Intimacy is the sudden awareness that your partner is too beautiful to take in at a glance, that you have to look away, take time to grow-yourself into it, expand your ability to appreciate every facet of her being… now there’s a word that takes me back to the Big Bang of prenatal existence.
There’s a theory I call bracketed infinity. Choose any points as your arbitrary beginning and end, and the information you would need to decode the significant events between will be infinite. We divvy up experiences as if life had a shutter speed and we can string moments together like the frames in a movie. But that’s not how things really work…
Get it?
Can’t say as I’ve figured it out yet myself, so you’re smarter than me if you have. All I know is, when I wake up beside Gloria, and we smile, my future, past and present areright now.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Feet First in Love There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
It’s impossible for me not to anthropomorphize the hummingbirds that hover around our balcony feeder, sipping nectar… after all, I’m only human
Anony Mouse
“Grampa?”
“Yes, hon?”
“Where do all the dead birds fall?”
We were walking hand-in-hand along the gravel path between Porter’s Farm and the suburban fringe of Chemainus when Amelia asked me that. The sun’s rays warmed us with dappled light; a small herd of cows and their calves gazed at us from under the shade of their cedar tree; a rufous sided towhee chided from inside the bordering blackberry bush… “Kreeek! Kreeek! Kreeek!”
I didn’t know what to say, so parried with, “What do you think happens to them, dear?”
She looked at me not quite disdainfully, but in that precocious, knowing way of hers. Teasingly. Amelia is not one to honour the twisted ways of wisdom. In her world, Grampas must be challenged. She knows exactly what’s going on when an old man answers a question with a question, and was going to make me squirm.
If someone else had accompanied us on that walk, I could have deflected her curiosity their way, broadened the shoulders of responsibility. But we were alone, Amelia and I. We’d walked all the way from the Campbell family’s ‘West Coast Terminus’ to ‘the bench’ up in Wu’laam Wood, Amelia skipping and jumping over the roots and ruts that bisect the path, me tripping over them and grinding my teeth, trying hard not to curse out loud.
The Bench was where Amelia’s great-grandad, Eleanor’s father, went to sit and think. It’s most probably where he formulated his final, inevitable conclusion, alone, the detritus of innumerable falls littering the forest floor around him, compacted into its very soil. Frank was a walking-talking contradiction. He loved the forest, but not the tangle of roots and branches that burrow and stretch into its earth and sky. His future – ours too – was planned and measured inch by inch, all its precedents and possibilities accounted for so that the bonsai of existence made some sort of sense besides tortured beauty.
“Grampa!” Amelia pouted.
I gave her my best impression of a baffled look.
“Where do they fall?”
“Who?”
“The dead birds!” she tugged, insisting I smarten up and stop procrastinating.
My own grandfather, Hollis Henderson, would have had an answer. “Down the cat’s gullet,” he might have said. Or “Into the hunter’s sack.”
And if you questioned his no nonsense logic concerning falling birds, he’d have another example to share, and another. “But, Grampa, there’s millions of birds, and they all die, don’t they? And I hardly ever see a dead bird when I’m walking around.”
“Chickens in the pot,” he might say. Or “Hawk’s got the chicks.” Or “Hit by cars.” Or “Fell into the forest where you’d never see ‘em. Froze to death on the wing.” Grampa Hollis could think up as many millions of ways a bird might die as there are dead birds to ask about. “But it all amounts to the same thing,” he’d say. “Their hearts stop beating and that’s the end of ‘em.”
Maybe I was asking the wrong question? But Grampa Hollis was long gone before I could figure out the right one, and Gramma Henderson, too, buried by his side just a few blocks away from the Campbell family’s ‘East Coast Terminus’ in Sydney, Nova Scotia.
We have a bird feeder hanging from a branch of the vine maple out in our front yard. Every morning I shuffle out in my rubber sandals and dump a measuring cup of ‘Festi-Vol’ bird seed into it, then clang shut the lid and hang it back up. Dark eyed juncos, black capped chickadees, sparrows, stellar’s jays, doves, robins, flickers, wrens, they flit and flutter about nervously, balancing hunger, fear and aggression in their intricate avian ballet. And from the gutter over our front balcony we hang a feeder topped up with sugar nectar for the hummers to sip.
I try not to, but can’t help anthropomorphizing our ‘feathered friends’. Never mind that they’re jostling for position, that they hunt and kill, bicker and bluff, I still smile stupidly every time… thinking them ‘sweet’ and ‘cheerful’. My drinking buddy Greg has an antidote for my doting: “Imagine those suckers big as dinosaurs, say big as your lovey-dovey friend tyrannosaurus rex, and you’ll get over your infantile fancies mate,” he says. “They’d swallow you like a beetle or feed you live to their ravenous chicks.”
Which sort of puts things into perspective. “Like, how often do you see a dead worm, or ant, or deer, or rabbit, or raccoon my friend. Almost never, with the exception of road-kill, of course, when we blundering humans smush them with our tires, and are too stupid to stop and gather up the guts for our cooking pots… collateral damage, if we think of them at all, that’s how we do it.”
I like Greg. We get together once a week or so at the Horseshoe Pub and bend our elbows.
“I know where all the dead birds fall,” Amelia piped up.
“Oh?”
She smiled primly. It was my turn to wait for an answer.
“Well?” I nudged.
“We don’t see them because they fall up instead of down,” she pronounced.
“Ah!” I agreed, wondering, if that were true, why ostriches decided to give up flying?
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Where do all the Dead Birds Fall? There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
University was wasted on me, pretty much, but one thing I did learn was how to throw together a pretty mean Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie. That was my specialty, laid claim to as my signature dessert on the potluck circuit.
For those who’ve never tasted one, Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie can only be described in superlatives: scoop the concentrated flavour from a can of Eagle Brand sweetened, condensed milk into a bowl; add a squeeze or two of lemon from one of those plastic bulbs, shaped like the real thing; glop the whole concoction into a pre-baked Graham Cracker crust; top with canned cherries – glossy-red as Marilyn Monroe’s lips; shove your culinary creation into the fridge (not the oven, stupid) et Voila!
In my day that passed for an enlightened-male version of ‘adept in the kitchen’, that and – when occasion warranted – an easy-bake lasagna. Whenever I got invited to a potluck, and on the odd occasion even when I hadn’t been, I would bring along an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie – usually one whipped up fresh that very afternoon.
Between potlucks I lived pretty much on coffee, Kraft Dinner and cognac – the three essentials of a wannabe bohemian diet. I rarely entertained. People would drop by, we’d sit around and ‘rap’ aimlessly, maybe eat out if we could scrape together enough moolah… but entertaining, I had learned after a couple of awkward experiments, was out of the question. My place was too small.
The kitchenette gave way with no clear demarcation to a combined dining-living-bed-study room. The bathroom, located at the other end of the kitchenette, just past the stove, I shared with Chloe, a second-year anthropology student, who rented the suite opposite mine. Instead of being fitted with locks, the bathroom doors – one on each side, opening outward – were secured when ‘in-use’ by a hawser, hooked to mine on one end, hers on the other… pretty much a failsafe system unless you both happened to be groping your way to the toilet at the exact same 3 a.m. instant to piss or puke or whatever.
Our experiences in student digs eventually coagulated into my dissertation on the nebulous quality of privacy, which I described as ‘a state defined by the negative space surrounding it, and the intrusions that ultimately destroy it, friends being the worst culprits…’ To that I would add, ‘…inconsiderate friends, who have confirmed me in the belief that the very notion of friendship is, in the end, self-contradictory…’ a sort of agreement intended to make pleasant the mutual annihilation we all engage in, trying – and inevitably failing – to achieve reconciliation en route to the ultimate vanishing point that is our common destiny.
As for society, that’s nothing but friendship writ large, riddled with lies and steeped in deception. At least with friends-in-the-flesh the possibility of innocence and occasional respite exists, something society does not permit. Even so, the likelihood of betrayal can only be avoided in the illusion of an afterlife, never in the here-and-now. In the here-and-now it’s quite likely better and certainly more productive to have more enemies than friends.
Chloe was one of the few exceptions to that somewhat skewed description of human relations. It’s hard not to be intimate – in a friendly way – when your bathroom doors are connected by an umbilicus of rope.
But I must continue to digress. Let’s take the sanctum sanctorum of dreamless sleep as an example of how evanescent the state of untroubled inner repose really is. Dreamless sleep can be exploded at any moment by: a telephone’s alarmed ringing; the fat guy next door firing up his flatulent Harley; the dog jumping up on the bed and scratching his fleas; a terrorist attack; the sudden manifestation of an uncalled for dream about things as impossible as they are horrific, or embarrassing, or both; the sensation of choking on your own vomit (which unfortunately did not awaken Father when his time came, a fact Mother interprets as divine retribution, even though she doesn’t believe in ‘all that crap’ about God).
There’s any number of irruptions that can burst the sanctuary of dreamless sleep. My favourite is Chloe spooning close, her familiar forearm and hand cradled in my waist.
As a for-instance from my BC (Before Chloe) past, I was wakened one morning to the sound of workmen jack hammering cobbles in the courtyard below my University Boulevard digs. Normally I would have accepted this intrusion with the intense equanimity of a Zen master, aware that the stings, itches and bites of existence are mere illusions within the equipoise of my standing cosmic wave. But I had a fucking hangover to sleep off and their harsh rattling reminded me painfully of the fact, so I jumped out of bed, marched over to the kitchen window and bellowed “Fuck you!” into the irritated dawn, then slammed the casement shut. The glass shattered, cascading into the netherworld, adding an ethereal, tinkling contrapuntal to the gruff laughter of the crew down there.
As another for instance, take the ever present threat of Aphrodite, of her bare footed dance and its accompanying music, insinuating itself into the folds of dreamless sleep. If you’ve never seen her, if you’ve only ever been enticed by her cheap, designer avatars, you won’t have a clue what I’m talking about. That’s okay, Mac. I don’t mind being considered crazy; quite the opposite… what scares me is the likelihood of becoming sane. Aphrodite is a sigh, a scent, a brilliance in your neurones, the antithesis of sleep. She has the peculiar and deeply disturbing quality of being able to awaken you even in moments when you think you’re already fully awake.
Janice, although less annoyingly intense than a pack of Neanderthals with jack hammers, and not exactly Aphrodite in the flesh, did invade my private space with her peculiar charms. The jangle of her bangles aroused me in waking and sleeping moments; I sensed the swaying of her hips the same way a shark feels the throbbing of a ship’s engines propagating through ocean undercurrents from miles away. She was enrolled in the same 100-level Sociology course as me. Turned out she lived just a couple of blocks away with a friend, and that the two of them were having a little get-together, and of course I was welcome… they’d heard about my Cherry-O-Cheese Pie, and asked me to ‘bake’ one for them.
It shouldn’t have been so easy. I remember thinking: There should have been some reticence shown by one or the other of us, even if the invite didn’t signify anything other than friendliness, politeness, perhaps even a wretched variant of pity. That I desired Janice on a visceral level couldn’t be denied, which in my case meant a form of atonement was required, a spark to ignite the sex laden vapour swelling dangerously inside my skull, into a poetic vision.
That she had responded to my incipient urge could reasonably have been predicted under the first law of sexual thermodynamics, which states: Chemistry asserts itself no matter how awkward the circumstance, and in inverse proportion to human resistance – all we can do is learn to manage its chain reactions with some degree of decorum and grace. Aplomb, I think it’s called. I would eventually do a dissertation on the relationship between misogyny and a pathological fear in some men of Aphrodite’s power. I got a fucking F for that effort, I think because my professor – a woman – felt it inappropriate for a being with a penis to express that kind of view.
Janice and her friend Corinne co-existed in a space not much bigger than my own, but with the addition of a bedroom, separated from the dining-living-study room by a tie-dyed silk curtain. “Whoever gets tired first, or needs some privacy, gets the bedroom; the survivor sleeps on the futon,” Janice said, patting the cushion between us. Aside from this musical-beds arrangement their mode of living seemed similar to my own.
The evening began with the two of them making a fuss over their new friend, then teasing me about my dessert offering – an anticipated segment of the Cherry-O-Cheese Pie ceremony was the amused commentary it invariably drew from hosts and fellow guests alike. Wisecracks about its caloric content, diabetic tendencies, and the level of culinary skill required to ‘bake’ it were de rigueur and I received them graciously, overplaying my hapless bachelor role shamelessly. I hadn’t cottoned on yet to the fact that savvy women – the kind of women I liked – might amuse themselves with a kitchen bumbler, but the day was dawning when they’d only get serious with a guy who could actually cook, or offer the reciprocity of dining out… frequently and preferably expensively.
Even before I knew I was serious, my romantic inclinations toward Janice had flopped, which tinged her acceptance later that evening of an invitation to dinner at my place with a hint of malicious treachery.
The centrepiece of their soiree was a chocolate fondue, which Corinne set on the table ceremoniously. I found fondue etiquette amusing. It evoked the image of a polite tribe, stabbing cubes of pineapple and wedges of strawberry with forks the length of surrogate spears then popping the boiled victims of their civilized savagery into their mouths between words, in the midst of sentences. These morsels they washed down with quaffs of wine, gulps of beer, or sips of coffee for the abstemious.
Conversation raged. “What’s your major?” “Did you catch the Joni Mitchell concert?” “He’s such an idiot, I hate his classes!” “Where did you get that scarf? It’s beautiful!” The dinner party babble drifted in and out of consciousness, filling the interstices between Janice and me, helping us ignore the tension. We chatted with each other, flitted about, engaging others, but no matter where in the room we were, we remained moths, locked in each other’s brilliance… or so I thought. Problem was we’d got beyond small talk too quickly and now things were getting awkward. The urgency of the situation couldn’t be broached around a fondue pot with a paper plate of no-bake cherry cheese pie balanced on your knees.
“Got to go,” I said right after dessert.
Janice looked surprised.
Who can say what triggers the question – what precise balance of mental and emotional self-delusion results in a positive read, leading to the conclusion that a woman is receptive. I’m not an expert in such things. I don’t have cause, or the need to brag. All I know is the moment seemed right, so before Janice’s look of surprise at my sudden departure morphed into a frown, I invited her to dinner at my place, then waited for her response with the unwavering anticipation of a male praying mantis.
She looked even more surprised, her eyes widening like a cat’s. She could simply have declined – mid-terms, fatigue, a previous engagement, no reason at all – but instead she said: “Sure, do you mind if I bring a friend?”
“Corinne?”
“No, he couldn’t make it tonight. His name is Paul, I think you’ll like him.”
~~~
The thing about Cherry-O-Cheese Pie was its simplicity. Everything needed to make one was listed on the labels of select tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk. Mother stapled one of those labels to a page in the scrapbook where she collected her recipes – in a manner of speaking, she passed it on to me. I say “in a manner of speaking” because she still keeps that scrapbook on its shelf in the cupboard above the stove – the one where you can only fit odds and ends because the oven hood’s ventilating duct takes up almost all the room, and because the cupboard’s hard to reach, especially when you’re five-foot-four in circumference as well as height. Before Dad finally did get driven out of the house, to the room he rented on the other side of town, he took to calling Mum ‘the human beach ball’. Never to her face – except that one time – but for the benefit of us boys.
I suppose what he was trying to do in his underhanded way was warn us against the hardships of marrying the likes of our own mother – perhaps against the institution of marriage in any of its various forms, unless you happened to be such a prude that you considered it a pre or post-requisite to the ‘sex act’ in any of its diverse forms. “Jerking off; no hands” was my father’s final word on the subject, a pronouncement he also avoided repeating in front of Mother.
She never gave me her archetypical version of the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie recipe but did pick through the tins of Eagle Brand sweetened condensed milk, stacked on the shelf at Steinberg’s, and find a label with the recipe on it. “Here,” she said, plunking it down on the kitchen table during one of my visits home. “You’ve seen me make it often enough, all you have to do is follow the instructions. You can’t go wrong.”
Mother was right, too, as she usually is when it comes to things that simply require doing: washing a floor; hanging laundry to dry; picking kale from the back garden; making an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie; taking out the trash. If Mum ever had an imagination, she got over it young, like so many other things children of the Great Depression had to cure themselves of at an early age. Dad used to talk about the Depression as if it was a thing of the past, only existing in faulty memories (‘brains like scratched records’, was how he put it) and dusty photo albums; Mum perpetuated it, lived it, the Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie fitting in as an ‘affordable luxury’ for us kids.
~~~
Funny, no matter how often I see a recipe I can never remember what goes into the bowls or in what order to coagulate into a Cherry-O-Cheese Pie. Mum never has to thumb through her book of favourite recipes; she just needs to know it’s up there in her cupboard, the yellowing formula for cherry cheese pie pressed between its pages, to carry out the Cherry-O instructions perfectly every time. I never got round to it, but did think of doing a dissertation on The Sanctity of Belief, inspired by Mum’s unerring certainty when it came to Cherry-O-Cheese Pie.
My shortcoming in that regard might possibly be considered an excuse for knocking on my side of Chloe’s bathroom door the day after Janice accepted my invitation to dinner – if, in fact, an excuse was needed. Maybe I really didn’t have all the ingredients it took to make an Eagle Brand cherry cheese pie in my cupboard.
“Hello?” Chloe said.
“Hi Chlo, mind if I disturb you?”
She laughed, just like always when I used that line, the same way a car starts when you twist the key in the ignition, so I pushed the door open and stuck my head into her kitchen.
“I’ve got company coming over tonight and I’m making cheese pie and lasagna,” I said.
The layout of Chloe’s apartment mirrored mine, but that’s where the similarity ended. She kept her place organized and tidy: pots and pans hung on pegs beneath the cupboard opposite; the sink standing empty, a washcloth folded neatly over its faucet; the linoleum countertops uncluttered and wiped clean.
Pictures hung in groupings on every available surface. In the kitchen, beyond the pots and pans, a collection of food and farm images: still lifes of fruit and vegetables; a medieval feast; Third-World farmers scratching at baked hardpan with sticks; a woman’s glossed lips about to kiss the rim of a steaming latte cup.
The dining-living-bed-study room’s south wall featured landscapes: a vineyard sunning on a steep Italian hillside; a lighthouse standing guard on a windswept British Columbia coast; a ruined stone cottage in the Peak District of England’s Midlands… scenes where only the evidence of human habitation remained, the occupiers of the land having been vaporized or beamed up en mass to some undisclosed Nirvana in somebody else’s dream. Chloe said she wanted to go to all the places on her walls.
The east and north walls, which bracketed her sofa-bed, formed a sort of shrine to the world’s religions: a poster of Salvador Dali’s Christ floating horizontally into the vortex of gravity; a gaudy bas-relief Krishna, seated on what looked to be a rustic throne, raising his pipe to his blue lips; Buddha, cross-legged, hands folded into his lap, above what would be the head of Chloe’s bed if the sofa was unfolded; Shiva dancing on the scattered bones of New York City’s Wall Street; Venus emerging from the Aegean Sea on her clamshell.
“So who’s coming over?” Chloe asked.
I stepped from the bathroom into the kitchen. She sat at the dining room table, surrounded by piles of books, a binder opened in front of her. Chloe peered out from the encircling literature as if it was a fortress, she being the guardian of its secrets.
“A friend I met in Sociology class the other day and her boyfriend.”
Chloe raised her eyebrows and smiled inscrutably – one of those smiles that might have said, I know something about you that you don’t… or then again, might have signified, I want you to think I know something about you that you don’t. The older I get, the more I’ve learned to love that enigmatic smile of hers. I see it all the time – am caught off guard by haunting memories when she’s not around – as if we were embracing, and she was smiling over my shoulder, her sigh a whisper in my ear, a sound imbued with deeper meaning than words can ever tell.
“Would you like to join us?” I asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“Yes!”
Her smile broadened into something more emphatic. I blushed. Could tell she knew everything – every fucking thing!
“Sure,” she said. Easy as that, as if neither of us had ever entertained a moment’s hesitation or tinge of doubt… as if there had never been a need for me to think up a hypothetical missing ingredient – the additive that was supposed to make my dinner with Janice and her beau complete.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Cheese Pie with Cherries on Top. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
A little bit of me was relieved when Andy passed. I know that doesn’t sound too terrible, that anyone with half-a-heart listening to this confession would say, “Tsk, tsk, don’t be so hard on yourself, dear. It’s only natural.”
And that’s true.
Just the same I can’t forgive myself. And whenever I remember Andy that little pinprick of guilt punctures the membrane of my widow’s sorrow, letting the infection in again.
There is no immunity. I can’t go to Doctor Nahar and say, I’m feeling sick at heart. Do you have something for that? She might, of course. But nothing that would help the real, unaltered me deal with Andy’s memory.
I’ll be on the Number 75 from Saanichton heading downtown and, before I can even see it, I feel the immense weight of Victoria City Hall, where Andy worked thirty-five years. That damned building sits like God’s paperweight dead centre on my map of the world, an immovable, irreducible pile of brick and mortar.
It’s a mausoleum. Some days I am troubled by an urge to get off the bus and go pick up some flowers to lay on its front steps. Not a wreath, or anything maudlin like that. Something less mournfully symbolic… perhaps I could gather a bunch of red hot pokers from our garden before going to work.
I sit on the left side of the bus, if I can, so as not to actually see the ornate heritage facade of Victoria City Hall when I pass by. But that’s almost worse. Instead of seeing it out there as something I will leave behind, I resurrect it in my mind, brick by brick, kilogram by kilogram.
Even as memory it has an inertia so great that – if you demolished it, or bombed it, the dead weight of its rubble would continue pulling everything down with an inexorable, accumulating momentum toward a point of final, absolute stasis.
Going home, I could catch the 75 just past the bifurcation of Douglas and Blanshard, near the northwest corner of Beacon Hill Park. But I always walk the extra block or so to the Government Street terminus by the Legislature. It just seems more official there, like a place where buses are meant to actually arrive and congregate and pick people up to take them places.
Andy used to tease me about that, called me a worrywart. And I enjoyed his teasing. We were nothing, if not an ordinary couple, punched belatedly out of the 1950s, post-war mold when all around us 1970s couples were rebelling against everything we stood for.
Or as Lorraine once put it, in that inimitable way of hers: “You two were cupcakes born into the age of granola bars.” Andy laughed so hard when she said it that Lorraine had to leave the room in a huff. She even shouted an obscenity, something about us “never fucking getting it”.
I suppose that’s true.
Anyway, by the time the Number 75 rounds the corner of Superior and Douglas, lumbering north toward my hometown stop an hour away at Brentwood Bay, I can already feel the gravitational force of City Hall warping my perceptions – like that diagram of Einstein’s theory of relativity creating its vortex in the ‘space-time continuum.’
Neither of us ever questioned Andy’s three-and-a-half decades in the Finance Department. Why should we have? He made good money, had incomparable benefits, and was low enough in the order of things that he needn’t think too much about ‘the job’ when he wasn’t actually at it.
I remember being surprised at his retirement dinner by the genuine fondness people showed Andy – I might even go so far as to call it affection. I knew so little about his work and the people he worked with that it came as something of a revelation when his secretary Alisha – well not his secretary, actually, but a clerk who seems to have adopted him… when Alisha actually cried, forcing me to console her with a hug and pat on the back. “He’s just such a wonderful, gentle man,” she quavered. “He makes everyone smile. Now we’re all going to be glum and business-like.”
Soppy as this scene played out, Alisha spoke the truth. Andy was a gentle man. So I was surprised when she didn’t show up at his memorial service. I could almost hear him forgiving her for forgetting him barely two years into his retirement. “Maybe she just couldn’t face up to it, dear,” I can hear him murmuring, soothingly, helping me get over the insult.
All I have left now is his pension; cancer took the rest of him.
How Andy and I ended up together I’ll never know. How we didn’t end up hating each other – like Lorraine and what’s-his-name (as she calls her ex) – is an even greater mystery. We should have fought, but never did; should have been a pressure-cooker stewing its poisonous brew of hatred and resentment, but weren’t. Somehow Andy tricked me into putting all that aside and laughing, like there was nothing wrong.
Now, of course, I’m left wondering what I could have been if we hadn’t laughed so much.
When the kids come into the school each day, they hang their backpacks and jackets up on the cloakroom hooks. On rainy, winter days especially I can’t help thinking of their colourful rain slickers and jackets as cheerful mementoes of who they are, and could be, if we’d only let them. I secretly celebrate recess and lunch times, when they pull their slickers and jackets back on and run outside to play.
When he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just a year after he retired we tried not to interpret it as a cruel joke. The deal was, you put in your years, built up your pension, then spent the rest of your evenings on the back porch, shlurping wine and watching replays of Sunset in the Garden of Eden. Or maybe you went on a cruise, or rented a villa in Belize, or took up pickle ball. You sure has hell didn’t expect spend your retirement measuring out your time like cards played off a stacked deck.
We knew he was done. Put on a brave face. But couldn’t help hoping for some kind of miracle, the same way a hungry dog sits by the table, pleading for a scrap to fall off your fork.
Dr. Harmon couldn’t give us anything better than palliative aspirations, though. “With treatment you can have some good years, Andy,” was the best he could do. I suppose he didn’t have the heart to admit the only denomination of time he could pluralize would be months. Nor did he have the stomach to spell out the balancing act we’d have to engage in between the quality of life remaining and the benefits of surgery, radiation, chemo and so on. Who would?
Andy laughed.
He laughed!
And for the first time in our forty years I was infuriated by that laughter of his – as if my blood had been transfused with naphtha and his faux jollity was the lethal, blundering spark that set me off. My whole being erupted – an utterly incomprehensible and confounding rage that turned everything to ashes in an instant… no survivors.
I had to get out of there because it wasn’t right, wasn’t fair for me to be so outraged and I didn’t want Andy to figure out it was anger he was seeing, not remorse or mourning. I walked. All the way down to the public marina and a little terraced bench on Angler’s Lane that looks out over Saanich Inlet. I let the ocean breeze console me, as if my skin was permeable as an angel’s.
Andy never asked where I’d been. But he knew, and forgave everything he did know… as always. And I forgave him his forgiving. He didn’t laugh, and I couldn’t help loving him, the same way a family of refugees loves… longingly, for what’s been irrevocably lost.
* * *
Andy was handy – a trite moniker fitted together as aptly and tightly as the bonds of his genetic code. I sometimes think his mother and father must have deciphered his peculiar talents through a mystical parental forensic, which guided them toward an appropriate baptismal. As Andy put it, he was a ‘hammer and nails’ kind of guy… when he wasn’t at his desk job.
It was Lorraine, the saucy teen, who dubbed him “Mr. Prefix”, that is: “The guy who fixes things before they’re even broken.” Andy never stopped laughing at the label. He even made up a little plaque in his workshop that he took into The Hall and put on his desk. “Mr. Prefix,” it said. “Getting it right before it gets wrong.” It’s in a box in the basement along with all the other stuff he brought back when he finally retired.
But after his diagnosis – or AD as we put it – Handy Andy’s endearing hobby transmogrified into something like obsession. His scraping and banging and wrenching and painting and muttering and mumbling acquired a desperate tempo inversely proportional to his physical strength – his ability to carry on. He became a latter-day Noah, trying to cobble together his ark in a single afternoon – in every single, single afternoon that remained to him.
We could do nothing but watch in anguish and offer hints, which he never even heard let alone heeded, that perhaps he should slow down, that everything was fine. But I dared not push or show impatience. It was, after all, the end of his life, not mine – or as he once put it: “I’m about to become a human-been, my love. There’s chores need doing.” It was more than chores, though.
How do you build an ark? And why? I mean, even if your bloody vessel is watertight, how can you be sure you’ll get every plant, animal and insect on board to repopulate the shore you’re going to wash up on? And what makes you believe there’s even a world needs repopulating – or that the one you’re leaving isn’t entirely healed before you’ve even breathed last. There’s an existential conundrum for you!
***
Heading home, past the layer-cake architecture of City Hall, the traffic usually thins on Douglas – at least in my direction – and the Number 75 accelerates. The built form flattens out, the crystalline structures of downtown – such as it is in Victoria – giving way to the stucco and parking lot topography of suburbia, then finally to the rural stretches of Saanich.
Country air is easier to breathe. I know that’s silly to say, but I swear, city air has a density and texture I can feel in my lungs and taste at the back of my throat. Dr. Caruthers says the pressure I feel in my chest and the queasy sensation in my gut is anxiety. He prescribed pills to make the symptoms go away, but I’ve left the prescription unfilled because I have this feeling the symptoms are really Andy’s spirit inside me, communing in the only way open to him.
Ridiculous! I know. Especially for one who would be branded atheist by most believers. But I’ve become something of a spiritual crackpot since Andy’s passing. I notice things I didn’t before.
For instance, there’s a similarity of design and purpose between coffins and boats. They both convey people and things from one world to another. In a coffin, of course, the words ‘people’ and ‘things’ merge – or you could say coffins convey people’s remains as things. In boats people and things are usually distinct entities – that is, if you exclude slave and – arguably – bride ships.
I would never had discovered the symbolic connection between coffins and boats if I hadn’t been so intensely aware of Andy’s carport carpenter’s hands at work during those last sad, desperate months. His final project was a hand-made front door. This after he had all the windows replaced with ‘more efficient’ triple glazed panes; supervised the digging up and replacing of the perimeter drain tile, which had been damaged by the invasive roots of our cedar hedge; cut a balcony – unfortunately reminiscent of a widow’s watch – into the sloped section of roof off our second-floor master bedroom; replaced our fence…!
The litany of his projects exhausts me. But he always had ‘just one more’ in mind.
He said the front door wasn’t ‘grand’ enough.
God, I still cringe when I remember my slightly miffed retort. “Which way don’t you like it, dear, coming in or going out?” I said, the idiocy, the insensitivity of my comment sinking in like bad perfume. Even Andy was shocked, for a moment, then he laughed, and we hugged, the oranges from a spilled bag of groceries rolling around on the foyer floor.
That was the moment I knew, really knew he was dying, and I would miss his corny jokes, and our ordinary life together, and that laughing is as close to crying as written words are to the page. That was when I realized ‘goodbye’ is not really a word at all… it’s a definition that eludes comprehension.
For weeks we watched him work on that damned door with his saws, chisels, planes, mallets.
“What’s it going to be?” I asked.
He scratched his scalp – close shaved ever since his first round of chemo. “Don’t know,” he said.
“But…”
“I’m following the grain, hon. We’ll see where it takes us.”
I understood then that his work on this planet was well and truly finished, and that this last project was all about him, and me in him, and Lorraine out of me and him, and Bryson out of Lorraine and What’s-his-name and me and him – that in fact, this was a door never meant to be walked through… you were meant to be on both sides at the same time.
It was time for my Andy to leave – that was obvious as cliché.
You have to understand, he’d had never carved anything in his life before. He’d always bought his newel posts, panels and fixtures ready-made from Home Depot or Ikea or whatever. So, encouraging as I tried to be, I dreaded what I might be left with after this, his first ‘artsy’ endeavour.
“Burn it if you don’t like it,” he said, sensing the weight of my anguish. “Honest, love, I mean it. I won’t miss it when I’m gone.”
***
I never had Andy’s door installed, but I didn’t burn it either. Instead I had it set up on a two sided pedestal-stoop (I have no other word for it) in the far corner of our back yard, underneath our giant cedar tree. Lorraine of course had an opinion on the subject: “What, are you crazy, Mum?” she wanted to know. “Who’s going to see it there?”
I still don’t have an answer.
The outer edge of Andy’s door begins as a river rising up from the lower left corner – or the right, if you happen to be standing on the other side. It flows round the panel, transforming itself into a serpent whose head swims in its own current where the circle – if you can call it that – completes. Inside this encircling form is the iconic scene of Eve handing Adam the apple.
Is it her apple? His? Theirs? I can’t say for sure. It doesn’t need saying. All that matters is: It’s an apple.
***
I always get off the Number 75 on Wallace, just past Marchant, then walk up to the Fairway Market at West Saanich Road and wait for Lorraine under the red awning at the store’s entrance, or sometimes I go in and do a little shopping. She pulls up, I get into her SUV, and off we go, back home. She decided to live with me instead of moving into the house she appropriated from What’s-his-name after an ugly, protracted legal battle… he really is an ass-hole.
Bryson is always in his car seat behind us. He says “Hi Nan.” – sometimes brightly, sometimes grumpily, sometimes sleepily… but always in some manner of speaking. And that’s enough, isn’t it? He’ll know what to think of me when the time comes. As for Andy, I don’t think Bryson will remember him at all, except as someone he sees in our family photos albums.
~ The End~
Hope you enjoyed Ways of Parting. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
It would be interesting to meet W someday, but it’s never going to happen.
He was young, that much I could tell. Our vocal cords get flabby as men age and a sort of flubber distorts our speech. Women’s talk becomes brittle and harsh, an irritating scratchiness transforming their soothing vibrato into the cackling of old crones. I think of young voices as new fiddles for God to play on.
Not that I believe in God, but Heshe’s a superlative metaphor I can’t resist, a word stuck in my lexicon like a rock in the rapids. I don’t even wish for a God, but if I did Heshe would have to be genuinely loving – a concoction of the infinite, eternal and omniscient that did’t threaten with plagues or force me to choose between Hisher versions of fanciful heavens or lurid hells.
Have you ever noticed that customer service representatives are invariably young. Who wants to listen to a fiddle with slack strings or scratchy old 78 records? You’re listening in the future tense when you talk to a customer service representative; you are the past tense… a crotchety old geezer who stumbles over cracks in his sidewalks.
I had time to think about God, while I was waiting for W in the on-hold purgatory of the company that manufactures my fancy new printer. Heshe infused my thoughts, despite the holding tank’s distracting muzak and periodic reminders that a customer service agent would ‘soon take’ my call.
What would any God I could create look like? What would Heshe expect of me? And what could I expect of Himher in return? I can’t imagine myself in Hisher place on the throne of glory. Can only conceive of God as the stirring timbre of harmonized human voices, triumphantly singing the Hallelujah Chorus. That – for me – the crescendo of belief; everything else is distortion, detraction, ritual.
If I was God, I’d strive to be like a cat lover, who knows his companion is going to scratch from time to time and piss in his shoes, but who can’t help laughing as he gently coaxes his wayward charge toward saintliness. I wouldn’t want to be a Putin-type-God, that’s for sure: bombing my designated Sodoms and Gomorrahs, crushing innocents under the flattened debris of their own homes, shops and hospitals…
Sometimes it disgusts me, being human. I want to shower under a nozzle of concentrated bleach.
If Heshe did exist, would God have a customer service line? Would long distance charges apply? Would it be ‘members only’, a club you’d have to register for online? Would Heshe offer trial periods from time to time – or perhaps periods free from being tried: ‘Get a week of salvation for FREE; then pay a small monthly fee for your patch of eternity!”
Any 21st Century God must have call-in and complaint desks, I figure. What would I gripe about on the Holy Hotline?…
~~~
“Hello,” the angelic representative might introduce hisherself cheerfully, after I’d listened to heavenly muzak for three-quarters of an eternity. “How may I help you?”
“Holy shit! I hardly know where to begin!”
“Sorry, I don’t recognize that word, ‘shit’. There’s no such a thing in my vocabulary.”
“Oh! I forgot. Angels don’t eat, do they? So you guys don’t do do-do.”
“Can you describe the nature of your problem in more polite terms, please?”
“Holy crap!… That’s sort of like ‘shit’ with the stink extracted… You’ll have to excuse me for being human. In my quadrant of the universe things do stink, and pinch, and get pretty vulgar…”
“Please! Describe the nature of your problem.”
“Well, to begin with, there’s this guy, sleeps in my parking stall downstairs. His shopping cart and tent make it impossible for me to park my car.”
“I’m not empowered to intervene in parking disputes, sir.”
“It’s not about the parking. I don’t give a flying… crap about the parking! He can camp out in the underground as long as he wants as far as I’m concerned. But it’s cold down there, and it looks like he hasn’t eaten in weeks, and he’s filthy… I want to scratch like a flea bitten mutt every time I see him.”
“Do you know his name?”
“Huh?”
“I have to check to see if he’s a member.”
“No! I don’t know the guy’s name, for chrissakes…”
“Sir, I must caution you. Taking the Lord’s name in vain is not permitted on the Holy Hotline. Our client services manual clearly stipulates that a complainant must be cautioned if he blasphemes, and disconnected if he persists.”
“Okay! Okay! I’m sorry. But I assume the guy’s a member. I see him out on the corner of Fort and Douglas streets sometimes with a great big placard says “REPENT BEFORE YOUR TIME ARRIVES. DOOMSDAY STARTS AT TEN PAST FIVE!”
“Do you have a date to go with that inscription?”
“Huh?”
“Does his placard say which day in the Gregorian Calendar Armageddon is scheduled to commence?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Well, if he has the correct date he’s one of ours.”
“Huh?”
“Only a true saint would know the correct Doomsday date. If he’s got it wrong, or hasn’t included it in his message, he’s almost certainly a fraud, a demon, or possessed.”
“Does he have the right time?”
“I’m not permitted to reveal that information.”
“Oh! Well, let’s just say for the sake of argument that he does know the right date? Could you do anything for him then?”
“If he had the right date, he would automatically be inscribed as a life member.”
“So, if that’s the case, what could you do for him?”
“Nothing more would need doing in such a case. He would already be fully supported and sustained by the Department of Saints and Martyrs.”
“But he looks like a skin and bones in a ragbag, for Christ… opher Robin’s sake.”
“Saints need trials and tribulations to validate their claims, sir. Would you like an opportunity to explore the joys and benefits of sainthood?”
“What?”
“Would you like to be a saint yourself? We have a brochure I could sent you.”
“No, that’s not possible.”
“Why not? All it takes is a will to be perfected through mortal suffering.”
“No way! My ex needs me to be an asshole, and my son needs me to be an imperfect but loving father. I’m not cut out for sainthood, and certainly not for martyrdom.”
“Perhaps, then, you would like to contribute to our PLEASE DONATE TO MAKE A SAINT fund? It’s the next best thing to the real thing.”
“Not right now, thanks. I’m here to complain, remember.”
“Is there any other matter I can help you with?”
“Yeah! This guy Putin. Can you zap him with a gigavolt bolt of lightening or something. Him and his 80,000 thugs chanting about the glories of ravaging a nation and murdering innocent civilians? Kids, expectant mothers, seniors!”
“Putin? Is that his surname or or given name?”
“Surname. His given name is World’s-Biggest-Asshole!”
“Sorry, sir, but we don’t have ‘World’s-Biggest-Asshole’ in our name dictionary. Not even under the male category.”
“Vladimir! His first name is Vladimir for Jiminy Cricket’s sake.”
“Thank you, sir. Excuse me for a moment while I see if he’s in The Book.”
“The Book?”
“The Book of Members, sir.”
“What if he’s not in the Book of Members?”
“Then he’s likely in the other book.”
“What other book?”
“The Book of Those Who Have No Names.”
“If they have no names, how are they listed in the book.”
“They aren’t listed, sir; they are erased.”
“But if they aren’t recorded first, how to they get erased?”
“They’re names are erased before they are even given. Before the beginning of time. They have been erased for all eternity.”
“So what’s between the covers of this Book of Those Who Have No Names.”
“Empty pages.”
“Empty pages? How many empty pages?”
“Oh, innumerable empty pages, sir. That volume is much thicker than the Book of Members.”
“So which book is Putin in?”
“I’ve scanned both; he’s not in either.”
“But, doesn’t that mean he’s in The Book of Those Who Have No Names?”
“Not necessarily.”
“Duh! Excuse me for being a stupid mortal, but isn’t this an either/or kind of proposition: either you’re in the Good Book – so to speak; or you’ve been erased from the Bad Book? Right?”
“There’s a third book, sir.”
“A third book?”
“Yes. It contains the names of those who’s names shall not be spoken.”
“How do I find out if Vlad The Wannabe Great is in that book?”
“Those who dare to speak the names of those whose names shall not be spoken work in a different department, sir. Shall I transfer your call.”
“No, thank you.”
“Is there anything else I can help you with today?”
“No. I think I’m beyond help. Goodbye…”
“Before you go, may ask you to give me a favourable rating in the text that will be sent to you after this call is ended?”
“You’re an Angel, for… goodness sake. What kind of rating do you need from me?”
“Striving for perfection is part of being perfect, sir. Thank you for using the Holy Hotline.”
~~~
Like I said, I’ve never heard the flub or cackle of an aged voice on any help line I’ve ever called. But call centre voices aren’t typically human either, are they? W’s voice, for instance, hadn’t been altered by age; it had been dampened by design. A little mind experiment helped me understand the process.
Imagine yourself seated in the exact centre of a stark room, a large computer screen on a stand in front of you. In the centre of the screen, your face in real time; top left, a monitor that shows your heart rate and other vital signs; top right, measurements of the pitch and volume of your voice; lower left, an instant transcription of your every word, with approved terms coloured green, acceptable yak black, unacceptable blazoned red; lower right, instructions and an overall rating of your performance as a Consumer Services Representative.
That’s the set up.
A simulated call comes in over a loudspeaker, and I respond: “Hello,” I say. “My name’s Bob. How can I help you today…”
A beep sounds, the word ‘can’ flashes red and is replaced by the less assertive ‘may’ in green. The client must always believe he’s making his own choices.
“You can help me by sending someone round to pick up this shitty printer you’ve sold me, and by giving me my money back, plus damages for wait time!” the client yells.
The heart gage nudges up to 200, and my respiratory rate quickens to 20 as my adrenal gland squirts cortisol and adrenaline into my bloodstream. A beep sounds, and a message comes up in the instruction box. “Elevated anxiety levels,” it says. “Breathe slowly. be calm.”
“Oh. Sorry to hear that, sir. Can you tell me what’s wrong with the printer?”
“Beep! Beep! Beep!” The control panels go crazy. “Never suggest there’s a problem with our product!” the command voice thunders. My blasphemous ‘…what’s wrong with our printer…’ flashes in throbbing red letters, the sacrilegious response replaced in bright green with: “Oh. Sorry to hear that, sir. Can you tell me what kind of problem you are experiencing with your printer…”
~~~
“It won’t print,” I complained to W.
I’d anticipated an inhuman interaction, its every nuance controlled by some heartless bastard who gazed down at the world and its working schleps from the remote pinnacle of a meticulously disinfected and ordered office tower. That’s the distance between heaven and hell, you see. Heaven is a corner suite on the 99th floor; hell the sweatshop down in the basement, where people are plugged in and connected like bits of binary in a code driven solely – and soullessly – by markers of efficiency and profitability…
“Phone number?”
No kidding! Those were W’s first words. A confirmation that went beyond even my grimmest customer services scenario. Brusqueness bordering on rude, not sycophancy, was the tone of this interface. Not “Hello”, not even a phoney greeting like “Welcome, we’re here to help you.” Just “Phone Number?” demanded in a voice that would make Hal the Computer sound ebullient by comparison.
My world slewed and I thought: If I’m trying to build a bridge between me and this guy, it ain’t going to happen. It’s going to be skewed more than a couple of centimetres off centre, and somebody’s going to have to take the blame. Hackles raised, I spat out the ten demanded digits…
“Name?”, W demanded, then when he learned I wasn’t a registered account holder: “Address… Postal Code… Email address…,” all in that flat monotone perfected by customs agents…
“What’s your problem?”
I explained that I’d upgraded my operating system so I could install his company’s software to manage my new laser printer, the ‘deluxe model’ being hyped on their website. But, that done, my email program wouldn’t work. I’d fixed that, but then my printer icon disappeared again, and my word processing program became unstable. So I fixed that, and my email stopped working… and so on.
W was the last link in a lengthy chain that supposedly led from the hell of computer dysfunction to that Nirvana where I could actually print a fucking page and send an email… I bore with him.
Every relationship has an identifiable pattern. W’s job was to uncorrupt my computerized, workaday world by linking my computer to something called a ‘server’ in a stable network. Apparently millions of other frustrated clients were demanding the same. W knew all about my problem…
That was the prequel to our relationship.
“What kind of operating system are you using?”
“I’m on a Mac.”
“Thought so,” W said disdainfully. “Have you contacted them?”
“They told me to contact you.”
My first computer was a Tandy portable. I had only worked on typewrites up to then, bashing out stories on half-sheets of newsprint. My editor would then shuffle the pages into a sequence he felt best made them news, mark them up and pass them along to The Courier’s typesetter, Maria, the goddess of the Compugraphic.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a luddite. But there was something satisfying to the process of hammering out stories direct to paper on a machine that never, ever broke down – no matter how hard you pounded the keys – then handing them off to someone else for proofing and inputting, while you got on with your next story. If nobody had invented anything else, I’d still be happy with the bash and dash mode of getting words into print. But along came Tandy, and after that the Macs… And now, four decades later, we’re all expected to be ‘multi-media journalists’, monkeying around with our mobiles, getting news clips and soundbites for our eEditions, while the real news gets away from us and fascists like Putin can claim images of a pregnant woman dying after a maternity hospital has been bombed are ‘fake news’…
“There’s nothing wrong with your printer app,” W pronounced.
Exasperation is a state of mind closely related to panic, except it triggers fight rather than flight. With difficulty – and in my oh-so-Canadian way – I restrained the impulse to somehow reach down the telephone line, out the mouthpiece of W’s headset, and grab him by the throat. Instead, I reminded him as clearly and precisely as I could that my email wasn’t working if my printer was…
“I can’t send anything,” I said in that clipped voice of inhibited rage.
You can put your shoes on the wrong feet, but you can’t put them on backwards, my old man used to say. Translation: If I’m not understanding a situation, it’s not necessarily because I’m stupid. More likely I’ve missed a nuance; or I’ve been in too much of a hurry; or it’s not my job to know how the engine works, I just need to know how to turn the friggin’ key in the ignition… I detected a gloating undertone in the pattern of W’s speech that suggested I had in fact put my shoes on backwards.
W described the difference between my Mac’s email client (an interface, designed to make the business of sending and receiving emailing ‘look pretty’), and the spinal, hard-wired core of the Internet, which sends messages through the atmosphere and receives them in the same instant…
Imagine hitting a home run, and being in the stands to catch it – the hitting and catching not taking place through a continuum of time and space, but occurring simultaneously – and you have a glimmering of the Internet’s geeky priests’ power to fuck-up your thought processes. I’d had enough!
“What’s your name,” I demanded, interrupting his lecture.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like your tone and I’m going to complain.”
“Sure,” W obliged, giving me his employee number. “Do you want me to end this session?”
“No! I want you to fix my problem. I’ll complain later.”
If he hung up, I figured I could add that to the litany I intended to paste him with. Perhaps the anonymous bastard up there in his posh, sanitized office Nirvana would see a brief flash out on the internet’s fringe when my flame arrived. Maybe, in his complex spreadsheet of profit and loss, human dignity would get a column of its own that could be sorted and searched as if it somehow mattered.
Then it zapped me, my moment of revelation. I suddenly understood the big shot’s strategy, up there smiling smugly, looking down on all us ordinary folk from the 99th percentile. W wasn’t really there to help me; he was there to absorb my hate. If he fixed my problem, so much the better, but if the problem couldn’t be fixed, I’d pin all my frustrations and anger on the customer services rep. Being hated was part of W’s schtick.
For his part W didn’t so much as sigh in reaction to my threat. His response came across as a gigantic, invisible shrug. I suddenly became aware of other voices in the customer services background, the white noise of an immense bureaucracy designed not so much to help people with their problems as to absorb and deflect them, triaging complainants into those worth dealing with; and those best written off.
To his credit W plodded on. He got me to download a program that allowed him to take control of my Mac’s operating system.
“Take your hand off the mouse,” he instructed.
He had become a ghost inside my OS – whether malignant or benevolent remained to be seen. The cursor jumped around the screen, code magically filled in required preference settings, test emails accumulated in my outbox. I watched. Could almost hear him thinking.
When I entered my late teens, Dad bought me a wrist watch – a Timex with analog arms and a little square that told you the date, but which had to be adjusted for any months that didn’t have the requisite 31 days. You had to wind the thing up to make it go… a hint from Dad, perhaps, that he wanted me to get over my daydreaming ways and take responsibility for my time on earth, for the realpolitik of daily existence.
My brother, who has a bit of the mad scientist in his genome and was ADD before that diagnosis existed, took this symbolic gift – this tribute to nascent manhood… er, personhood – and disassembled it on the workbench in our basement. What remained was a collection of cogs, springs and tiny screws spread out on the wooden bench top. I should have killed him, or been killed in the attempt, but it wasn’t long before we were absorbed in the utterly hopeless challenge of trying to reverse the process of taking apart my timepiece by putting it back together again. We found ourselves enjoying each other’s company in a way only brothers can.
W hovered the mouse over the various options: Incoming Mail Server; Outgoing Mail Server (STMP). He twiddled, tweaked, saved, then created another ‘test’ email… and got another infuriating dropdown box that said my server could not be found, did I want to “Cancel”, “Try Later” or “Try Again”… and again, and again.
“These are not your real email settings,” W reminded me. “They are the settings of your Mac’s interface.”
But something in his geeky-priest demeanour had changed. He was thinking out loud, as if I was looking over his shoulder at a problem we might be able to resolve together. Port, SSL, he clicked and fiddled with things I didn’t understand. Paused, hovering the cursor over decisions that needed to be made. He sighed, relieving his frustration…
“This is my first day back,” he said distractedly.
“Pardon?”
“I’ve been off sick. The flu. I was scared shitless it might be COVID. It wasn’t, but I still shouldn’t really be here at all.”
As he talked, he continued making adjustments… saving… hitting the send button on yet another test email, which stubbornly refused to fly from my Outbox. For a good three-quarters of an hour he tried and tried – even though he’d warned earlier there were limits as to how long a session could remain open.
W has three kids. His wife works as a practical nurse. They both do shift work.
I told him about my status as an ex hubby, and imperfect dad. We had a laugh.
Friends and colleagues of mine had been down with the flu. The first question anyone asks these days, when they sneeze or cough is: Do I have it? Am I going to end up dying in a hospital bed with a trachea tube rammed down why throat?
Did W’s coifed and deodorized boss up in his office tower know W had come down with the flu? That W has a family? That W and his wife barely get a chance to kiss each other Hello-Goodbye in their frantic comings and goings from their two bedroom flat? Or is the big boss too busy calculating the profitable angles to the COVID pandemic to make room for human Being on his spreadsheets?
Whoosh! A test email flew the coop.
“It’s gone!” I whooped.
W said nothing, but I knew he was smiling.
A few hours later I got round to responding to the automated message that landed in my Inbox. It asked if I had been satisfied or dissatisfied with my ‘customer service experience’, and if ‘my problem’ had been resolved.
I checked ‘satisfied’ and ‘resolved’ because they were the only options the man looking out his 99th floor window allowed, other than the implied ‘unsatisfied’ and ‘unresolved’. Then I punched ‘Send’.
‘Thank you!” a responding email zipped into my inbox. The message contained a slick photo of what I took to be a customer service representative, represented by a male model, smiling happily and waving at me from my computer screen. He was positioned on the corner of a desk, a window behind him overlooking a blurred-focus image of somebody’s downtown. It wasn’t W, but a part of me wished W could be faked well enough to be that real.
~ The End ~
Hope you enjoyed Customer Service. There’s more in The Feel of Gravity collection.
