Maria, Aaron, Laurence, Cathy, PI Pirelli… Crystal Doer…
Crystal Doer?
He hadn’t known any of these people two weeks ago; now they crowded his thoughts.
Victor closed his eyes, relaxed.
“Crystal Doer?”
She drew closer, a shadow taking shape within his darkened room. He half expected her to materialize in the midair between him and the billowing curtains, or to hear her voice threaded into the night sounds of the city. Could she be alive? Out there, after all these years? Her parents still hoped. She’s run away, they kept telling themselves. Someday she would come to terms with her demons, then she’ll come home.
She’ll phone from a town at the end of a long dirt road where the nightly entertainment is watching the Northern Lights. “Mom!” she’ll say. “Dad! Can you forgive me?” And they won’t even say a word. They’ll just cry, longing to hold their babe in their arms, to splice together the severed ligaments of their crippled lives.
Yeah, and now for the sappy music and credits, Victor objected…
You cannot have a name!
“What?”
The voice had no locus. It simply materialized inside and outside him and one and the same instant.
He says you can’t. So I’m going to call you Emanon – noname in reverse – because if you say something backward it makes no sense, yet it exists. I’ll still be obeying, but I will have a sound that means you and ‘not you’ at the same time. Do you understand?
If I even thought of a name like Billy, or Jake he’d know it. Even thinking about thinking it is dangerous. He senses disobedience the same way a hyena sniffs out molecules of sweat. You must never reveal your secret no-name to him. He’ll beat me and you within an inch of our lives if he ever finds out.
“Who is he?”
She didn’t answer. Her spirit faded, a weak signal obscured by the shifting electromagnetism of the city.
“Who is he?” Victor shouted after her, but she was gone.
He stared into the misshapen gloom of his bedroom. Am I going crazy? Had he become a medium for the long-lost spirit of Crystal Doer? Was he infatuated with a decades old photo of a dead girl?
Victor kicked the sheets away, freeing himself from their tangles and rolling out of bed. The room had become a locus of insanity, a place where reason wobbled, flew apart, the shrapnel of what had been tearing into the gauzy fabric of reality. He wrapped himself in his housecoat and padded down the hall. The inky well of False Creek, its shores encrusted with the garish phosphorescence of the city, came into view through his patio window. He stared down at his chosen world. At first nothing seemed out of place. Granville Island, the Granville Street Bridge, Burrard Bridge, all the meaningful structures that triangulated his sense of who and where he was remained in place. But…
You’re out there, aren’t you?
Crystal didn’t respond. Quiescent now, she’d become a presence perfectly merged into the dark interstices of his universe. When you speak, you become a point of absolute being; but your silence is everywhere.
He’d never thought such a thing, this connection to a certainty beyond belief. Crystal Doer’s spirit had broken free from the black holes of time and space, and he was the only human being in the universe equipped to pick up the irregular pulse of her background signal. She cried out for…
“Justice,” he pronounced, aware of the sliding door’s glass vibrating in harmony to the word. The world as he knew it was imploding, everything bending and buckling under the influence of an irrational new gravity.
Funny, how it seems like – no matter how long you’ve been away – you’ve never really left as soon as you return and cross the threshold into that familiar place called home.
Diana and I pulled into the drive at 3298 Cook Street Oct. 11, after catching the 3:15pm sailing from Tsawwassen to Duke point. Our son Ian greeted us, along with Sophie, our retriever, who has been hoarding all our shoes and slippers since we left as placeboes for our real essence. We waved hello to our neighbours across the street, but warned of our ‘radioactive’ state and promised to catch up once we’re fully recovered.
We’ll process our tsunami of cross-Canada memories and impressions in the coming weeks, but for the moment it feels good to simply be in the centre of gravity exerted by the place that is truly our own.
We’ve put off this final Realta Road 2022 update because we didn’t want people to know we were back right away. It’s taken a couple of days to feel we’re recovered enough from our illness. Our COVID tests came up negative, so we’re guessing it was an especially virulent flu… whatever it is, we don’t want to pass on.
Now that we’ve discovered so many amazing aspects to this country called Canada, we’ll have to rediscover Chemainus and see how everything fits into our new perspective. In that sense, the place we call ‘home’ is a sort of touch stone that we come back to again and again as we plan our next excursions out onto Realta Road.
(PS: One of Ian’s friends, whom I will never forgive, pointed out that the name of our RV is ‘Rialta’ not ‘Realta’. As far as I’m concerned some mistakes were simply meant to be, and our imagination on ramp merges onto Realta Road.)
We enjoyed a brisk walk around the Grand Bay West loop in Port aux Basques yesterday afternoon. It was a cloudy, blustery day… more like the kind of weather I’d imagined on this rugged coast. Wherever we go in this region I see the elements of land, sea and air in contention, each asserting its own power. The wind drives on the sea, which surges into the land, and we puny mortals are caught up in the midst of it all.
The sandy beaches at Grand Bay West were deserted, the colourful chairs in disarray, as if they had been abandoned suddenly. In the centre of the loop, an antique harrow atop a hayfield hill, a seeming testament to the challenges of farming in Newfoundland.
Now we’re aboard the Blue Puttees, lurching our way toward North Sydney and the recommenced start of our trip back to the West Coast. We first tried booking our return crossing for Monday, Sept.12, but couldn’t get a spot until Thursday, Sept. 15. That sailing was cancelled due to high winds, and we couldn’t get another booking until today. We’ve lost a full week and will have to redo our travel plans if we want to be back in Chemainus by the third week in October.
We were docked in an unofficial pullover near Keys Provincial Park, east of Thunder Bay. All was calm, except for the muffled sound of traffic passing by on Highway 17, until one utility truck, then another and another, passed by the Realta, heading for a bigger cleared area behind us, where they parked in a row. At first we thought they might be workers preparing to do some maintenance on the nearby bridge, then – because of the methodical way they went about their business – that they might be a rescue crew, looking for some poor soul who had fallen into the adjacent ravine. We were confirmed in this guess by the sudden whump, whump, whump of a helicopter that landed in the clearing, one that had a basket on the side used for carrying stretchers.
Ever the reporter, I grabbed my camera, jumped out of the Realta, and started taking pictures.
Turns out the operation was not search and rescue, but a maintenance crew doing work on the nearby transmission lines. Fascinated, I recorded as best I could, as the chopper ferried workers and equipment up to the tower, edged up to the metal arms so the men could climb off, then lowered the materials and equipment they needed to effect repairs. It was an amazing operation, carried out with military teamwork and precision, and an exciting event on our Realta Road.
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.
What is gravity? When you think on it for a second, that’s not such a simple question, because we don’t really know what gravity is, only how it affects us and the things around us.
So what is TheFeel of Gravity?
What we experience throughout our lives are consequences and effects: the pressure of the earth on the soles of our feet; the resistance of our bodies to getting up when we’re tired or injured; the refusal of heavy objects to being lifted or budged.
But these things aren’t gravity itself, the force that holds the earth in orbit around our sun and impels parachutists in free-fall to terminal velocity… Our emotional and intellectual responses are consequential, too.
Gravity exerts its ubiquitous pull on every cell of our bodies, every moment of every day from birth to death; then it flattens the very dust of our having been into the sedimentary layers of geology and archeology.
What are the spiritual forces that draw us together, tear us apart? What is love? What is hatred?
Gravity is always and forever, yet we only become aware of its influence in moments of change, crisis or conscious reflection. That’s what The Feel of Gravity is all about.
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A recent Facebook conversation triggered by the graphic above has shed some light on why I am a spiritual existentialist, and what that means. Before the concluding reply below, I had described my daily morning mediation, which includes a vow to ‘value life’…
‘Value life’ is an interesting ethical statement, one I affirm daily, even though it inevitably and immediately leads to contradiction. To live, I must kill. How can I square that with my ideal of valuing life?
I think that’s pertinent to the original question: What are the limits of comprehension? Try as I might, I can’t round that square ethical peg. I have to decide, and reaffirm my beliefs in spite of uncertainty. That tension between believing and knowing keeps us questioning and reevaluating who, what and why we are. It’s the essence of existentialism.
My spiritual self is always looking into the world and saying there’s more to life than I’ve learned and experienced so far. There’s a love that’s larger then what I can conceive, an idea grander than anything I can imagine, a sensation more vibrant than anything I’ve felt.
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This morning’s sun dawned on me, a bleed of light in the ambient air, impressing with its metaphor of glory.
And I asked: Is this the shining way… the path?
And I asked: How many dawns have bathed me in their blare of blinding light?
And I say: Dawning’s beyond conception.
I don’t remember my mother’s face, from that first day she held me swaddled in her arms. My earliest memories are assembled pastiches retrieved from jumbled collections, fading images in forgotten albums... Brothers, sister and me in defining moments picked from the scrabble of growing up... Growing old.
And I ask: Is this the past I wanted? My only possible inception?
And I say: Their love was good enough to endure a lifetime.
And what of my own sons, misunderstanding, misunderstood, good as me at finding fault? Is their's a future untold, stories in the making, or a history already that I’m to blame for?
In the midst of this day’s dawning a flight of geese honked and gabbled up our street; our suspiring phalanx of cedars, arbutus, and Douglas fir stood firm, and jagged against the sky; a frog croaked in the yard, awakening my admiration for ants, and beetles… and lowly worms.
My morning mantra harkened, urged me to complete The Circle…
‘We are defined by what we are-not As much as by Who we think we-are,’
The moment I sense my self I disappear, become part of the very nature that shapes my solitude... my joy, my fear.
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LitHits are snippets of prose and poetry. They can be stand alone provocations, collaborations, or excerpts from longer works that encapsulate completely an insight or feeling. Got a LitHit in you? Want to get it out there? Send it my way…
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You've heard about the water wheel, has Chemainus in such a flap? Well, now the truth has been revealed... what turns its forward back.
The culprit's name is Flibber T, that's Flibber T Gibbet for long. He's the one you're gonna see if you listen to this, my song.
Oh Flibber T, Oh Flibber T You're such a curious fellow, your cap's as red as red can be and your shoes are bright, bright yellow
Flibber T is a naughty elf, as naughty as naughty can be. Never thinks of anyone else, out on his troubling sprees.
Turning clockwise the other way for unbelieving eyes is just the sort of trick he'll play to shock, and tease, and surprise.
But when it comes to elfish kind you've gotta believe to see you have to alter your state of mind with the likes of Flibber T.
Oh Flibber T, Oh Flibber T You're such a curious fellow, your cap's as red as red can be and your shoes are bright, bright yellow
