A Question of Perspective

A Question of Perspective

            I’m a star junkie. Not the stars you see in the movies or read about in tabloids, as in “movie star,” but the kind you see when you look up at the night sky. White dwarfs and red giants – who would have thought that outer space would be inhabited by dwarves and giants?

            I’m fascinated by them, by their shapes and sizes, by their names. Names like Betelgeuse, Alderbaran, Sirius, names heavy with history, dense with myth, names as thick and viscous as honey.

            It wasn’t always this way. For a long time I had no interest in them.

            My father is an astronomer. When I was growing up he was in school for a long time. I was seven the year he got his Ph D. He went through university on the GI bill and made extra money working summers for an electronics company. I think he assembled transistors for TVs in the days before microchips. The company he worked for is still in business — I saw its name in big, bold letters in the yellow pages last year when I was trying to get the thermostat on my kiln fixed.

            For twenty years he worked at a university teaching and doing research. He was a professor at a medium-sized university in a medium-sized city. A couple of years ago he retired.

            I’ve never been in the building where his office and lab were located, although I’ve seen it from a distance. It’s a plain cylindrical concrete structure, devoid of decoration, that stands ten stories tall in the middle of a flat field. It isn’t connected to any other building and its smooth surface is broken only here and there by rectangular windows that seem to have been added randomly as an afterthought. The building is self-contained and inscrutable.

            At the top of the building is a telescope, housed in a room with a convex roof. When the telescope is in use, the roof retracts to reveal the sky. I know it’s often cold in there; the atmosphere in the room is kept the same temperature as the atmosphere outside the building so heat waves won’t rise off the surrounding material and distort what the telescope is observing. I also know you sit in a little cage to view through the telescope and that computers, not people, do most of the viewing these days.

            I pick up this information in different places, on TV mostly, not from my father. He never talked about his work. When we were young and asked him about it, he’d make some dismissive remark and change the subject. I got the impression he felt we wouldn’t be able to understand what he was talking about.

            My boyfriend Ron likes TV shows with a scientific bent. He’ll sit on the couch in the living room for hours watching documentaries about animals, ocean currents, climate change. He knows more about the sex life of whales than he does about our sex life I sometimes think. Me, I phase out after half an hour. I can muster only so much interest in the dietary habits of raptors, and if I have to watch one more show about any kind of insect I am going to invest in a big can of bug spray, no matter how toxic it is for the environment. But it was, obliquely, Ron and his TV tastes that got me hooked on stars, so I give him credit.

            When I was a kid stars were never those tidy, five-pointed shapes you cut out of yellow construction paper to put on top of the pine tree in the living room at Christmas. That sort of ignorance was a luxury my father was not willing to indulge. He set us straight about stars and planets as fast as he could.

            I remember a night when I was about eight years old. We had moved again. It seemed we moved all the time. In retrospect, my parents were probably constantly in search of a cheap apartment large enough to house two adults and three growing children, but I didn’t know that at the time. I only knew I kept leaving friends behind.

            One night my father took mom, me and my two sisters up onto the roof of our new apartment building. When we stepped out into the night my eyes were flooded by darkness and for a moment I was blind. A chilly autumn breeze made me shiver and underfoot, pebbles embedded in the tar of the roof made walking barefoot uncomfortable.

            It was the first time I had ever been up so high at night and as my eyes adjusted I was surprised at the number of lights below us. Streetlights glowed, car lights scooted along streets, across the street the gas station’s big illuminated sign threw a glaze of green light onto the faces of people walking past.

            It seemed odd to me that all these lights made the night seem darker, not lighter. Their brilliance made the surrounding sky black, but when I looked directly above me, away from the lights, the sky was deep blue, not black; it seemed to move towards me and away at the same time.

            Above me I saw stars that were no colour I could name, a sound instead of a colour — high-pitched, at the upper level of human hearing. Their flickering reminded me of still water disturbed by winds or by deeper currents of moving water.

            My father stood beside us, one hand on my shoulder. He was pointing at the sky, naming names. “There’s Polaris, the North Star,” he said. “That group of stars is the Pleiades. Venus over there isn’t a star, it’s a planet. There’s the Big Dipper.”

            My eyes follow his hand as it sweeps through the air but I can’t tell which stars he is talking about, there are so many and they seem so randomly placed.

            He keeps talking and pointing. He tells us the distance from the earth to the sun is 93,000,000 miles, the distance from our sun to the closest star — a number too big to mean anything to me — from our galaxy to the nearest galaxy, until my head spins. He tells us how hot the stars are, how cold the empty reaches of space between them. He talks in millions and billions.

            I can’t imagine a million, and even if I could, what would it matter? A mile is far to me; it takes a boringly long time to walk from our new apartment to the library a mile away. Multiply that by a million? Stretch that boredom from here to Sirius? It’s impossible for me to imagine. I am cold now, here, wearing my olive-green sweater with the wool worn into little balls at the wrists and waist — how to imagine the frigid expanse of outer space?

            Still he talks, trying to explain things that feel too big for my head. Whatever he’s talking about is obliterated by the masses of stars up there, distant, haphazard, unconnected. The numbers he rattles off spin, make me feel dizzy.

            “Look,” he says suddenly, jabbing at the sky. I do. I feel as though I’m falling into a wide, dark, bottomless pool.

            After this, staring at stars gave me vertigo. I preferred to be earthbound. I cultivated common sense and was pleased to overhear someone say about me, “She’s so down to earth.” I’d had enough of speculation and abstraction. I wanted my world to be concrete. When my father rattled off numbers and theories at dinner I tuned out. I’d squirm in my chair and poke patterns into the soft pine dining room table with the tines of my fork until my mother glanced over and told me to stop.

            In high school I gravitated to subjects that had clear right and wrong answers: math, accounting. The tactile pleased and reassured me.

            After high school I went to art school where I would sit in the cafeteria and draw charts in my sketchbook of the course my life would take. I broke the process down into steps and numbered each step. Then I drew small circles around the numbers and leaned back in my chair, satisfied with the direction my life was taking.

            Eventually I became a potter. I hoisted bags of silica, kaolin, and cobalt around. I wedged clay, set it on the wheel and formed it into pots. I lifted trays of pitchers, mugs and plates in and out of the kiln. I developed muscles, grew solid. I avoided abstraction and became an empiricist; what I could touch, I trusted. If I did look skyward it was to gauge the weather; firing a kiln on a humid day yields different results than firing on a dry day does.

            I enjoyed the feeling of my strength and the idea that, just as I could shape pots from clay, I could fashion my life as I saw fit.

            I learned facts. A potter needs to know facts. The relative hardness of certain substances, for example, and the melting points of different materials. To my mind, facts were small firm nuggets of reality to build my world with. I held them tight, they served as ballast to stabilize me. I liked tables, charts and graphs, information laid out neatly in visual blocks, specific information, limited and organized.

            For the same reasons I like facts, charts and graphs, I liked Ron. He sold computers, a nice, straightforward job. He seemed anchored and steady. His choice of TV programs recommended him immediately. We did not go to bars or movies as many couples do when they are first getting acquainted; we watched Jacques Cousteau specials on TV and went to museums. Ron liked paleontology, but even that field was too hypothetical for my taste — too much theorizing and guessing involved, too many gaps that needed filling, not enough verifiable information to fill them. I preferred geology. The rocks were there, layer on layer, palpable and material, no guessing required. Iron is iron, it is never granite. No gaps, either, otherwise the Grand Canyon would tumble into the Colorado.

            Ron and I lived together for three years before we bought our house, a small, two-storey, wood-frame farmhouse not far from where my father lived. It needed serious work. We found it at the end of a winter, took possession in spring, dismantled it through the summer, and partially reconstructed it during the fall. By the time the next winter rolled around most of the largest cracks had been sealed, but not, as we discovered when the cold east wind blew, all of them.

            My studio was a small sunroom off the kitchen. It wasn’t insulated and although it caught the morning sun, when winter came and the winds buffeted against its walls the room was cold. I glued half-inch Styrofoam to the walls and moved in a small electric heater, but my efforts amounted to almost nothing. Cold seeped in through a bank of windows in one wall and around an outside door in the other.

            I began to wear a sweater to work in there but I was still cold. I tried a windbreaker, but that didn’t do the job, either. Finally I bought a parka to wear. Wrapped in my olive drab coat with fake fur trim on the hood, I’d run hot water into my throwing bowl and waddle out to the studio. During the winter I took a break every hour, went into the kitchen to have a cup of coffee and thaw myself out.

            The cold caused problems with the clay. Cold, it was stiff and difficult to manipulate. If I worked too long my hands became numb from the chill and grew clumsy, so that I ruined perfectly good pieces. The parka cut down on my mobility and on top of it all, our electricity bills were staggering. I struggled on anyway. People had worked through worse, I told myself, and I was not going to be defeated by a mere drop in temperature.

            One night in mid-October Ron appeared in the doorway. “There’s a show on about astronomy,” he said.

            “That’s nice.” I was concentrating on a lump of clay spinning in front of me.

            I’ve already finished most of my Christmas stock. I made it during summer, now it is packed in boxes that can be stowed in my VW Rabbit. From this point until the end of December I’ll drive from one drafty community centre to another to hawk my wares. I’ll set up my booth, smile at passersby, subsist largely on stale donuts and rot gut coffee standard at these affairs and — I hope — earn sixty percent of my annual income.

            But this year my large decorative platters with slip-trailed paintings of fish in the middle have turned out to be a hit. I’ve already sold most of them, so tonight I’m making more, but it’s not going well. There are times like this, occasionally, when I’m out of rhythm with the clay, or the clay is uncooperative. It doesn’t centre on the wheel, the forms wobble off-balance, or if they pull out, they do it too quickly and the walls are uneven and fragile.

            Eventually I manage to pull out a platter, but the edges crumble and fray into ribbons in my hands. Finally I shut off the wheel, shuck off my coat and shoes, and head into the kitchen, closing the door behind me. I cross to the sink, wash the clay off my hands and gouge it out from under my fingernails. Then I wander into the living room.

            The lights are off and the TV is on as I come through the doorway into the room. Ron’s horizontal on the couch; I can’t see his face. All I see is the TV screen vivid with motion. Liquid light flows from the screen, glazing the walls and floor. The surfaces that face the TV are brilliant, all the rest dissolve into gradations of grey and black. Only where light meets matter are objects in the room actual, all else fades into intangibility.

            A man’s voice, rich and plausible, rolls out of the TV. On screen a shot of the sun fades into blackness then, pinprick by pinprick, dots of light appear on the screen: stars in the night sky. “The building blocks of the universe,” the voice intones.

            The voice rolls on, explaining, discussing, weighing. Images jostle on screen but I am intent on an inner picture: I see a great fountain spilling stars and planets into the black void of the unformed universe. In my imagination the fountain is made of many tiers which diminish in size as the fountain ascends. Stars and planets fly out from the top of it in a spume of foam, and tumble away through pathless space.

            Ron looks up. “How’d it go?”

            I shrug off the question and we talk about other things.

            A year earlier my mother had died. She had been sick for years so her death shouldn’t have been a surprise, but it was. My father especially seemed stunned by it, which was unexpected since he had cared for her through her decline so he, more than the rest of us, knew how ill she was.

            Before this I had interpreted his reserve as preoccupation. He was thinking about abstruse matters, uninterested in unimportant details of day-to-day life. Now it seemed as if he thought of one thing constantly, something close at hand, heavy and wearing, that he worried at the way a dog worries at a wound.

            The summer after my mother’s death he went on vacation by himself. When he returned he handed me a box. “Here,” he said.

            I opened the box and found, nestled in the tissue paper, rocks, pebbles, really, the sort of thing I might find if I stepped out the back door and scrabbled in the dirt. “To match the rocks in my head?” I asked jokingly.

            “I picked them up at the bottom of the Grand Canyon,” he said. “I thought you might like them.”

            “Thanks,” I said. Rocks, I thought. Great. Wondering if there was a secret meaning to the pebbles in my hand.

            What with the craft shows, I didn’t have much time to buy Christmas presents. A couple of days before Christmas I was in a bookstore looking for something on recombinant DNA — a little light reading for Ron — when I found myself in the astronomy section poring over books. I found one that came with a make-your-own constellation kit, star shapes cut out of phosphorescent paper that had adhesive backing, and a map of the night sky to help lay out the constellations.

            I bought the book and left the store. When Ron came home from work that evening he found me in my studio, balanced on a chair, a star in my outstretched hand as I tried to decide exactly where to stick it.

            “Maddie?” He sounded tentative.

            I unsquinted my eyes to focus on him. “What’s up?” he asked, glancing around the room at the detritus of starts, star maps, coffee cups.

            “I’m working on Cassiopeia.”

            He glanced at the wall. “Oh,” he said. “Well, good.” He paused as if he was waiting for me to say more. When I didn’t, he continued, “I’ll call you when dinner’s ready.”

            The next week I bought a telescope and set it up in our bedroom on the second floor. When he sees it, Ron says, “In our bedroom?”

            “It’s the best place.”

            “What is all this anyway?” he asks. “Constellations on the walls and ceilings, now a telescope. Why?”

            I shrugged. “I just thought it was interesting.”

My Christmas sales are good. I decide I can take about a month off before I have to start getting ready for the summer craft shows.

One afternoon I’m in the kitchen making pastry — the oven is on, the air is warm — when I hear a knock at the front door. I walk down the hall, wiping flour off my hands with a red and white dishtowel.

            I open the door and for a split-second find myself facing a white-haired stranger. The moment passes; I recognize my father.

            “Oh,” I say. “Hi.”

            “I was in the neighbourhood,” he says.

            “Come on in. Want a cup of coffee?”

            He follows me down the hall, sits at the kitchen table and takes the coffee I set in front of him. “I’m just rolling out a crust.” He nods and leans back. Quiet settles.

            “What’s this on the wall?” he asks.

            “Constellations.”

            “So I see,” he says. “A hobby of Ron’s?”

            “No, I put them up.”

            “Oh.” He pauses. “I didn’t know you were interested in that kind of thing.”

            “I didn’t know until recently myself.” I stop fiddling with the pastry and turn around, leaning against the counter. “It’s interesting, all that stuff. The Big Bang — one minute nothing, the next, everything; entropy — the idea everything just gets more and more chaotic — ”

            “I’m not sure that’s strictly what entropy’s about,” he says.

            “Well, anyway,” I say, sitting across the table from him. “There are things I find it hard to wrap my head around, the randomness of things, and the enormity. It makes stuff — people’s lives — seem negligible.” Although I don’t phrase it that way I realize I am asking him a question.

            My father sits looking at the stars on the wall for a while. After a few minutes he says carefully, “I don’t accept that. I don’t believe life is negligible.” He pauses. “It’s a question of perspective.”

            I begin to ask him what he means by this but Ron comes home in a burst of noise and activity. The two of them settle into conversation about DNA. I go back to making dinner.

            Later that night, after dinner, after the dishes have been washed, I put on my clay-encrusted parka and go outside. I walk to the top of the small hill that rises behind the house. It’s late winter, there’s still snow on the ground but the earth feels yielding underfoot, as if some of the groundfrost is already seeping away. In the air is the flat, clean smell of winter but below that runs a dark undertone that hints at mud, rain, and seeds blindly sending out white shoots into the black, moist soil.

            Standing on the hill I consider what my father said: a question of perspective. Perspective, I think, depends on where you stand and it determines your relation to what you’re looking at.

            I remember how I had opened the door earlier to find a stranger on the porch. For an instant I’d thought, “Who’s this?” but before I had even finished framing the thought, recognition, like a camera focusing, made his face familiar. Of course, I said to myself, Dad.

            Still — there was that tremor of uncertainty when he was still a stranger, when what I saw were white hair, a lined face, an old man.

            In art school, before I made the decision to immerse myself in clay, I took a course in architectural rendering. We did perspective drawings; a flat horizon with a vanishing point, scratchy lines radiating from it, these are what I remember.

            But it occurs to me now that perspective is more than simply a technique for charting the gradations of distance and diminishment.

            Above me are the stars. I know they are huge balls of burning gas, eons away from where I stand. The light from them is pale and watery, but it’s enough to see by. However randomly and intangibly, I am linked to those distant stars by that light. This is perspective, too, then — understanding the net of connections that binds and sustains us. Impalpable as time, it is somehow satisfying. A good place to begin.

Melanie Dugan

1991

A Map of the Human Heart

 She met her husband the first time at night, in a hospital emergency room. Maybe that’s why, she thinks, the image she has of him is layered with shadows.

            Right ventricle, left ventricle, right atrium, left atrium. Early on Ross drew and labeled a diagram of the human heart for her. “My beat,” he grinned. He wanted her to see what he spent his days doing. The terms sounded like a litany. She tucked the drawing in the top drawer of her bedside table.

            “I’m a heart man.” He says this on occasion, at parties where he is guaranteed an audience of people who haven’t heard the line before and who laugh appreciatively at a doctor not taking himself too seriously.

            She has heard the jokes and stories so often she might expect to be irritated or bored by them, but she isn’t. She’s fond of them. The way he flourishes the same old phrases, angling for laughter and approval reveals a vulnerability, a side of his character different from his crisp, efficient professional self. When he trots out one of his jokes or stories she wants to protect him.

Hearts are his business. Ross is a cardiologist. From early morning until quitting time — sometimes late at night — he examines people’s hearts. Using a battery of arcane instruments and tests, he measures their performances and records their idiosyncrasies.

            From a group of electrocardiograms — to her eyes unintelligible squiggles on red graph paper — he can differentiate between the tracings made by old hearts and the ones made by young hearts.

            He tells a story about visiting a remote rural hospital. He was examining a male patient and asked for the man’s cardiogram. A flurry of activity followed and a strip of ECG paper was pressed into Ross’s hand. He read it and shook his head. “This is an older person’s ECG,” he’d said. Embarrassed, the hospital staff had admitted they had misplaced the man’s chart.

            Ross always tells this story in a self-deprecating way, almost as if he’s apologizing for his skill. In fact, she knows he takes great pride in his ability to decipher information and symptoms, he enjoys figuring out what’s wrong.

            The party is winding down, which is just as well. She hadn’t wanted to come, but Ross had said, “It’ll be good for you — for us,” he’d amended quickly. “We can’t stay home all the time.” She had capitulated, and here they are in this stuffy room, surrounded by people full of empty conversation.

            No, she’s being unfair. Her irritation is a result of fatigue. She’s tired. So is Ross. She can see how pale he is, especially around his eyes. He’s unhappy, too. It’s there in the way he only half-listens to people, flashing them a quick grin that fades almost immediately.

            Ellen takes a deep breath and watches him for a while. Then she sets down her wine glass and slips down the hallway and through the front door. She’ll walk home, it’s not far, just a few blocks. The cool night air will clear her head. She feels jumbled up after talking to so many people.

            Lately it’s as if she has lost a layer of herself, as though a protective outer skin has been peeled away. She used to know exactly who she was and what she thought. She had been able to handle anyone and everyone. She dealt with them all at work — the screamers, the bullies, the whiners — none of them threw her. Whatever the problem was, it was theirs, not hers. She had been firmly encased in her own skin, separate and impenetrable.

            Not any more. These days when she talks to people she often has trouble following what they’re saying because she is overwhelmed by the feelings that seem to radiate off them, like sound waves, setting up interference, so it’s hard to determine what the person really wants to communicate. One woman at the party tonight was going on about how happy she was her divorce had finally come through but all Ellen could hear was the throb of sadness in the woman’s voice, all she could see were the bruised shadows under her eyes.

            It’s good to be out here, alone. The sky is a deep velvety purple, the colour of a ripe plum, barely lighter than the black shadows of trees and houses around her. The moon is a silver coin climbing above the horizon. There is the merest hint of a breeze, just enough to stir the uppermost leaves of the trees, and the smell of sun-warmed grass rises through the dark air. Across the street two teenage boys are walking in the opposite direction; their words and laughter are sudden explosions in the night’s calm.

It was on a night like this that hearts brought her and Ross together, her heart specifically.

            She woke up alone in her apartment in the middle of the night with a sense that something was wrong. She lay in bed listening — had the sound of an intruder in her apartment disturbed her? She couldn’t hear anything, but gradually she became aware of a drumming in her ears. Not an external sound, but an internal one. She realized her heart was racing, thudding as if she had just finished running a race. She turned on the light and took her pulse. 140 beats a minute. It seemed high. She lay back, waiting for her heart to quiet but it didn’t. Instead, she felt a heavy weight pressing on her chest.

            She climbed out of bed, feeling breathless, and called a cab.

            She was surprised how crowded the emergency room was at 2 a.m. on a Wednesday night. Just inside the entrance an adolescent girl sat in a wheelchair surrounded by a clutch of friends who talked in agitated whispers while the girl spoke into a cellphone. A few rows away an elderly woman sat alone holding a large plastic bag full of pill bottles. An older couple — man and wife, Ellen guessed — sat together a few seats away. Occasionally the woman patted the man’s hand. At the far end of the room a man paced and pulled at his hair.

            Ellen took a chair and waited until her name was called. The nurse motioned her into a small cubicle with beige carpeting. Its walls were made of clear plexiglass. Ellen could see out to the waiting area but the plexiglass seemed to swallow noise. Compared to the waiting room, the cubicle where she now sat was quiet. It gave Ellen an odd, suspended feeling to sit in the silence, as if what was happening wasn’t really happeneing, as if she was watching it a TV program with the sound turned off, something that didn’t really involve her — she could get up and go get a snack if she wanted to, walk away from it all.

            The nurse clipped what looked like a plastic clothespin to the tip of Ellen’s right index finger and wrapped a blood pressure cuff around her arm. Ellen sat listening to the beep beep of the monitor while the nurse took her name and symptoms and entered them on a computer.

            Once, the nurse glanced up at the monitor and made some notes. Then she removed the clothespin, slipped a plastic bracelet around Ellen’s wrist and led her through swinging doors. She had Ellen lie on a hospital bed and pulled a curtain around the bed. The curtain rings jingled merrily as the nurse carved this little room out of the larger one. Then the nurse hooked her up to another monitor and disappeared through the curtains.

            After a while a young man appeared. “I’m Dr. Richards, the resident,” he told Ellen. “I just want to ask you a few things.” She nodded. Keeping his eye on the monitor, Dr. Richards rapped out the questions briskly. No, she didn’t smoke. No, she wasn’t taking any drugs — no prescription drugs, either.

            When the questions were finished he gave her a quick nod and left. The curtain flickered as he walked away. Ellen shifted on the bed. Twice while she lay there she felt the odd clutching sensation in her chest that signaled the onset of another episode. She twisted around to see the monitor, but it was out of sight.

            As suddenly as he had disappeared, Dr. Richards was back, this time with someone in tow. “This is Dr. Keenan,” he said. “The cardiologist.”

            Dr. Keenan asked her what the problem was. They sat there — the walls of cloth useful for keeping out what? not the sounds of other people; she caught tatters of phrases — “… musko-skeletal” drifted past, she heard the rattle of gurneys and someone’s constant cough. It felt, she told him, like a bird was trapped in her chest beating its wings, trying to get out.

            He sat across from her and she watched him write on her chart. She noted his hands — his long, nicely-shaped fingers, his square palms — hands that looked strong and competent. She saw the way his black hair curled against the collar of his white shirt, felt the cool dryness of his hands as he took some blood, recognized, even in her anxious state, the flashes of humour that punctuated his comments. For some reason these reassured her.

            He took her to another room and hooked her up to an ECG machine. In a minute long, narrow piece of paper with a fluttering red line spooled out of it. Then he had her walk on a treadmill, a tip-tilty device that speeded up the longer she was on it. After that he asked her to sit down and talked to her about beats per minute, workload and fibrillations.

            He told her that for reasons he couldn’t identify her heart was racing. “If it were irregular there’d be something to be concerned about, but it’s regular, so I’m not worried.” He went on to say there were other tests he could order but he didn’t expect they would reveal any problems. She was young, female, there was no family history of heart disease, no sign of trauma. “All strong contraindications,” he said.

            In an off-hand way he asked about her job. She explained she worked at a publishing house.

            “Lots of deadlines?” he asked.

            “This is the worst time of year,” she nodded. A book was coming out next week, and one the week after; there were press releases to write and send out, interviews to schedule. “You can’t see my desk at the office,” she said ruefully. “And it all had to be finished yesterday.”

            It was late, the middle of the night. There was a small rectangular window lying on its side set high in the wall. Through it she could see the sky, an inky expanse. The room they were sitting in felt like an island of light in the dark. She felt comfortable and safe.

            “I know you’d like a definitive answer,” he said, “but all I can tell you is that everything seems to be ticking along just fine. If you can reduce the pressure you’re under at work, that’s the place to start. I’m sending you home, but if the symptoms persist, come back.” He stood. She understood the examination was over.

            A little more than a week later she was doing what he had suggested, lowering the pressure. It was a Sunday morning and she had strolled over to the town’s only magazine shop for an espresso and a gossip magazine.

            The town was small enough that their meeting, although not inevitable, was not unlikely. With two magazines tucked under her arm, she stepped back to scan the offerings on the lowest shelf, and stepped firmly on someone’s foot. She turned and found herself apologizing to Dr. Keenan. With his white hospital coat replaced by jeans and a sweatshirt she was surprised by how young he looked,. “Sorry,” she said.

            “How’s the heart?” he asked, smiling back.

            Their courtship went smoothly. Ross was goofy and funny, in private he was more engaged and playful than the calm, slightly distant man she had met in the emergency room.

            After they were married she would watch him surreptitiously while he read the morning paper. She wondered if people fell in love because their hearts beat in synch, day and night, through the months and years, two hearts moving to the same rhythm. Maybe people fell out of love when they lost that shared tempo. Could you get it back if that happened?

            Ross looked up from what he was reading and caught her speculative gaze. “What?” he asked.

            She smiled, shook her head, brushed his question away. “Nothing,” she said. “Work.”

            Initially she was interested in his work. The language he used when he discussed it was dense and arcane: tachycardia, bradycardia, ischemia, infarct — words that sounded exotic and vaguely threatening. “Semi-lunar valve,” he said once over the phone, and she pictured a ghostly light flickering on and off in someone’s chest. He mentioned atrial complexes; the words conjured up the image of an invasive knotted plant sending choking tendrils into the dark cavities of a person’s body.

            Gradually, though, she withdrew and stopped asking questions. She didn’t want to know too much about the physical workings of the heart, didn’t want to know everything that could go wrong with it. She didn’t want to know just how contingent and unlikely her own good health was. The more she knew about the heart, the more capacious and baffling it became.

            She had an ultrasound of her heart once. Lying on the table as the technician ran the probe over her chest she saw, projected on a television-sized screen, the image of her heart beating. For some reason, it unnerved her, the way it contracted and expanded tirelessly with no apparent thought or effort on her part. If it wasn’t up to her to keep it beating, how would she be able to start it up again if it ever stopped?
            After a while she began to wonder how Ross did it, examined hearts day in and out — weakened hearts, damaged hearts, malformed hearts. How did he carry on so blithely? Didn’t he look at these hearts and know that one day his own heart might stutter and fall out of rhythm or suffer the same damage his patients’ had? Did he imagine his heart was immune to the wear and tear of time? It seemed to her he lacked a sense skepticism or doubt that most other people had. She asked herself if he suffered from a failure of imagination.

            The more she knew, the more she wondered how you guarded against illness and time. Were there any defenses against the unexpected and irrevocable?

            They had been married about a year when Ellen became pregnant. It was a strange state. Before this, time had seemed to move in a straight line from the past through the present to the future, punctuated by events, one incident always leading to another. Now time was like a river that had overflowed its banks. Day flowed into day; changes that she had no control over reshaped her body and her life. She floated languidly above the invisible currents that coursed beneath the surface. So that, when something changed, when the child inside slowed its movements, she felt like she was waking from a dream.

            She sat in a white room, her eyes dazzled by the brightness as they were sometimes stung when she stepped from darkness into light.

            Ross sat beside her. Across from them, behind a large, shiny desk, sat a doctor, a specialist her obstetrician had referred her to. The specialist was an older man with a vaguely European accent who reminded her of nothing so much as a handsome rabbit.

            He spoke quietly and she had the impression his comments were directed to Ross, not her. “… we’ll have to wait,” he was saying. “It’s too early for a conclusive diagnosis.” The rabbit doctor flashed her what she was sure he thought was a reassuring smile. “We’ll just keep a close eye on the situation and see how it develops.”

            He stood; she and Ross stood. They all shook hands across the shiny desk. There was a convivial atmosphere that couldn’t mask the sense of dread that welled up inside her.

            She and Ross left the office. Ross walked beside her, talking and talking, “… so it may be something fairly minor, a virus, or an infection that might respond to antibiotics.” He went on and on. She could barely hear him, she was so intent on trying to sense what was happening to the child inside her.

            He talked about the baby all the way home. He continued to talk about it that night until bedtime, and the next morning at breakfast. She tuned him out; his voice became a vague irritation droning in the background.

            Her pregnancy continued, but the prognosis didn’t improve. There was something wrong with her baby.

            At first she was treated with the automatic cheerfulness the medical profession adopts towards those it suspects are worrying needlessly. When that changed, when the doctors she saw no longer tried to soothe her or lift her spirits, she understood hope was fading.

            One day her pregnancy ended. She went into labour; she knew immediately what it was, this deep, inevitable clenching and unclenching, and the baby was born.

            They — the nurses, the doctors, the crowd of anonymous faces around her — rushed her baby away from her. A girl, she gathered from a hushed exchange she could barely make sense of, born dead, whisked away from her almost noiselessly in a dry rush of whispering voices.

            “I need to see her,” Ellen said.

            “No, no,” they told her, solicitous, calming. “You don’t want to.”

            She ignored them. “I have to see her,” she said, unyielding. There was, she knew, an acknowledgement she must make.

            They brought the baby to her. She looked at the small body that bore no obvious blemish, at the tiny perfect fingers and toes, at the eyes closed as if in sleep. She reached out and touched her daughter’s cheek. It was still warm. Then she turned away.

            Later, after she had been moved into her hospital room, Ross came and sat by the bed. He seemed dazed and lost. His words tumbled out in a rush. “They’re not sure what caused it,” he said. “It may have happened in the first trimester. They’re sure it wasn’t a virus. They say the chances of it occurring again are remote…” He continued, worrying at the subject interminably.

Ellen understood that this incessant talk gave him something like comfort, but she wished he would stop. Finally a nurse came to pull the curtain around her bed. She suggested Ellen might be tired. Ross focused on her as if he was waking up, as if he was surprised to see her there. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes. Of course.” He stood, kissed her, and left. Ellen tried not to think of him returning to their dark, empty house and lying down to sleep on their bed, alone.

            Released from hospital, she was sent home to rest. At first life continued as usual. What happened had happened, she told herself; it was not to be understood, it was just to be endured.

            Suddenly, a week later, grief assaulted her, slammed against her like a wall of water. The depth of it, the breadth of it, were staggering. It seeped into everything; it was in the landscape around her, the air she breathed, the food she ate. It sank into her skin and permeated her bones.

            She was out shopping one morning when she ran into a woman she knew. She tried to meet the woman’s pleasantries with the right responses. Struggling against overwhelming numbness, Ellen tried to put words together, to build sentences, to bridge the space she saw gaping between herself and this other person. The effort was enormous; sweat beaded her forehead, it trickled down her back. Yet even as they talked, she couldn’t care, couldn’t care what her friend had to say. None of it mattered, all of it was trivial.

            “My heart is breaking,” she told herself. This is the name she gave to her pain. “How can I go on?”

            But she did. Lying in bed at night with Ross sleeping beside her she listened to the blood pounding in her ears hour after hour. It amazed her how, despite everything, her lungs kept emptying and filling, her heart continued to count out the passing moments.

            She is at her own front door. Around her the night is soft and cool. Her key creaks in the lock. She goes inside without turning on the light and kicks off her shoes. Then she makes her way upstairs to the bedroom at the end of the hall. Her bare feet make no sound on the carpeted floor.

            She sits on the side of the bed. She wishes Ross could cure the ache that has settled in her chest, but instead they seem to be two strangers stumbling through an unnamed place, where words like hope and happiness have no currency.

            She opens the drawer of her night table and takes out the drawing he made three years ago. She smoothes the square of paper open, runs the tip of her finger over the lines he drew and reads the words printed there.

            “A map of the human heart,” she recalls him saying, full of youthful confidence.

            She assumed he knew the terrain he mapped. Now she knows neither of them did. She is stumbling through a landscape, unmapped and uninhabited, that she can only dimly make out, a place she knows she will never wholly understand.

            She hears the front door open and close downstairs. “Ellen?” His voice sounds tentative. It rises to her through the gathering darkness, a wisp of smoke. After a moment’s silence he calls again. “Ellen?”

Melanie Dugan

1998

Shadows Like Birds, Lights Like Jewels

Shadows Like Birds, Lights Like Jewels

            Here is a photo of my mother lounging with the sultry grace of a movie starlet. The harsh, insistently sensual cupid bow mouth drawn in red, as was the fashion in those days, is at odds with the laughter in her eyes and the insouciant flip of her left shoulder. Her legs are bent just so (there are little crescents of shadow behind her knees) and her feet are tucked to one side, out of view of the camera.

            Thirteen years later, when I buy my first bikini, she will rewrite her own history. “I can’t see why you bought that. I never liked them. They’re so vulgar,” she will say. In the photo her bikini is brief and polka-dotted. She is very daring.

            Behind her, blurry and out-of-focus, is the palm tree that stood in the front yard of the house where she grew up. I recognize its massive cylindrical trunk. One autumn while we are visiting her mother, my grandmother, the tree will tip over in a hurricane, and plop to the ground without much effect, narrowly missing my grandmother’s house, its enormous but shallow root ball an ineffective anchor against the driving wind.

            The next day I will stand at the front gate as a bright yellow hydraulic shovel and an earth mover dismantle the tree. My grandmother, a collection of bony angles and frizzy hair, is somehow heartened by this disaster. She rushes downstairs before she has even put in her dentures. Smelling of lavender, she stands beside me and we watch the machines pull and tug at the fallen tree. “Look at that,” she says in a high, brittle voice. Her bright excitement at the drama, and the sharpened angle of her chin, her lips receding into her surprisingly empty mouth will be etched clearly in my memory.

            Behind the palm tree, behind my mother in the photo, a mass of bougainvillea splashes across the wall that surrounds my grandmother’s house. In the photo discrete blooms on the vine are illegible but I recognize the cloud of colour. This is a hot climate, southern California; beaches bake; palm trees — unlikely sentinels that look shabby and ratty by the end of June — line the streets.

            My father, transplanted from the east, will tell me later how exotic it all seemed to him when he first arrived, the heavy matted carpets of flowers, the dry heat so different from the muggy humidity he was accustomed to. My mother, a native, is unimpressed. To her, familiar with these langorous scents and colours, it is the idea of snow that possesses her imagination. She has heard stories from her father who spent years in Canada. Two decades after this photo is taken, when she has lived in the northeast for a dozen years, winter’s first snowfall will still transfix her. But now, before the snow, before my father’s appearance, she lounges in the sun.

            She squints against the light. When a breeze moves the leaves on the banana tree, which is in front of her, out of the camera’s range, shadows flutter across her dazzled eyes, shadows like birds. The shadows make her think of the nuns at the convent school she attended, their dark billowing habits. Stern, harsh, austere, they always frightened her a bit. They knew so clearly what was right and what was wrong. She is sure they would think it is wrong of her to be wearing this bikini, that they would tell her bikinis incite lust in men. She imagines how the nuns would look if they saw her now, their eyes blank, their mouths straight and pinched. The thought of their disapprobation cheers her, she tilts her chin up pugnaciously.

            Unaware that at the marine base across the street my father is spending his days marching in formation, polishing his boots and rifle.

            She stretches out in front of the house her father built, a house of dark, polished wood surfaces and floors covered by red ceramic Mexican tiles. He paid for the house with money he made prospecting for gold in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, in Canada. It is not clear that he ever found any gold; it’s just as likely he won the money gambling. “Colder than hell,” he would say of Prince Albert. And his wife, my grandmother, would hiss, “Samuel,” at him. Not because she objected to the topic of conversation — although Prince Albert was rarely discussed since he had been married to someone else at the time — but because of the hell.

            “But that cold money landed me here,” he would laugh. “In the sun.” Then he would rub his shiny bald head and suck on his pipe, an amused expression on his face. As if he suspected all this warm weather was just a Chinook, and any minute the cold could move in again.

            However he came by it, my grandfather was better at making money than at keeping it. By the time my mother lounges in this photo half the servants have been let go, half the rooms in the house have been shut up, the furniture muffled under heavy sheets to keep off the dust. The gardener was let go several months ago and purslane has invaded the alyssum my grandmother plants in the back yard each year. It does not entirely rout the alyssum, though. On hot mornings my mother and grandmother eat their breakfast on the patio. Mother breathes in the sharp smell of the small, white flowers. My grandfather, dead for five years, doesn’t know about the purslane, the darkened rooms, has no ideas about the economies his widow practices.

            He doesn’t know how she worries, how anxiety pitches her voice high and sharp, like a complaint. Constantly, it seems to my mother living in that house, she hears about the high cost of things — the car they drive only on Sunday (to church), clothes, maintaining the house — until my mother measures each mouthful of food she eats, estimating how much it costs. She thinks her life will be like this endlessly, economizing, weighing, scrimping. The thought makes her tired.

            But today, as she poses for the camera, my mother looks carefree. In this photo I don’t exist yet, won’t arrive for another year and a half. Just my mother, smiling at the camera, is.

            It’s the weekend. She has two days off from her job as a social worker. She stretches out on the grass and does not think about the places she visits during the week, where she is required to check under beds and in closets for extra pairs of shoes — men’s shoes. She likes the people she meets through her job, mothers most of them, young Black women with several children and no apparent husband.

            The apartments these women live in frighten her sometimes. They are appalling. Wallpaper droops from the walls in great curling sheets, broken windows are stopped up with cardboard. Once she saw a child who had scraped plaster off a bare wall and eaten it — the child gave her a small, milky smile.

            She knows these people think she’s rich, with her camel hair coat and her correct grammar. They treat her with a distant civility, as if she’s a foreigner who doesn’t understand their language or customs. Mistakes she makes are tolerated. They have no idea how ephemeral her affluence is. She watches them closely to see how they do it, to catch the details of their survival. She wonders if she could be as gracious in their situation.

            But sometimes she senses something that makes her uneasy, something like a smouldering heat that hasn’t ignited into flame. A year or two after men walk on the moon she will see this part of the city explode in rage and destruction. She will shake her head to think she walked down those streets alone, went into those dark doorways. She’ll wonder whether, if she had said something differently, if she had done something differently, things might have been otherwise. She will put a name to the wave she felt rising around her, see that it was anger, and ask herself if she could have seen what was happening more clearly, if she could have read the clues more accurately.

            But today, the day of the photo, she doesn’t think about these things. She shifts a bit because the grass she’s lying on prickles, grass as foreign to this semi-desert as my grandfather was; grass irrigated by water diverted from rivers whose headwaters rise from lakes almost as distant and cold as Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She doesn’t think about the water or the rivers or the cold. She thinks about the party tonight. Her two girlfriends will pick her up in a blue Studebaker.

            They arrive at five. Unknown to my grandmother a bottle of wine is concealed in the trunk of the car, a squat, graceless bottle of bitter red.

            Emptied, a bottle like this will serve as a candle holder in countless student apartments. My father and mother will have one, too. I remember picking at globs of hardened wax, an archaeology of wax, frozen on the side of the bottle. I remember the furniture. It was, I recognize now, the furniture of students: wood-crates covered with brightly-coloured cloth, a table jerry-rigged from a door. The desperate ingenuity of poverty. I also remember the celebratory flourishes my mother created: a splash of colour on one wall to make a dull room vibrant, a spray of flowers in a jar highlighted by sunlight falling through a window.

            My mother isn’t thinking about the wine. As she reclines on the grass she is imagining the night ahead. The three of them — Sylvia, Sydney and my mother — will drive, laughing, out to another friend’s house that sits on a rise of hill beyond the city. Here, the four of them will drink wine, smoke marijuana — she knows the nuns would disapprove — and look out across the bay spread before them at the lights of boats and houses wavering on the water. “Lights like jewels,” she will tell me twenty years later.

            But she is not there yet. She is still lounging. In the photo the smoothness of her skin is breathtaking. (By the time she enters my memory there is a fine web of lines on each temple and a sharp crease on either side of her mouth.) A thread of song runs through her mind, “Moon River,” or “Black Is the Colour of My True Love’s Hair” — something current, vaguely melancholy, vaguely romantic.

            Later she will sing these songs and others while she works around the house. She will scrub the kitchen floor to “Marezy Doats” and vacuum the living room to “Oklahoma.” While she nurses my sister she will hum “Rock-a-bye Your Baby to a Dixie Melody.” I will grow up with Broadway tunes echoing in my ears. Years later I will come across the orangey technicolour films that featured these songs. Their hopeful optimism is my mother’s — it shines like a new, untarnished copper penny.

            She is poised, waiting for the shutter to snap. She doesn’t know about me or her mother’s dentures. She doesn’t know about her own faulty genes which will bring her, forty-three years later, to a nursing home in the middle of winter, and to the blank, white landscape of complete forgetfulness — the lights like jewels extinguished, the smell of alyssum evaporated.

            For now, the moment is completely hers. She tips back, carelessly, recklessly, on one elbow and turns toward the camera, smiling. In a moment my father will step off the streetcar that stops in front of her house. He will see her stretched out on the grass. Her laughter will shimmer across the lawn to him. And, with an inflection that sounds slightly foreign to my mother — his words stretched into a drawl, his phrases more formal than she is used to — he will step forward and take the liberty, if he might, of introducing himself.

1999

Ordinary Miracles

Ordinary Miracles

            Across the street I see her wrapped in a bolt of flame. Blue as a ribbon of unclouded sky, it circles and caresses her but she does not burn. The edges of the flame curl into luminous red and yellow tendrils that snake out around her, and crackle and snap like the small explosions popcorn makes in a hot pot. Shadows dance on the grey aluminum siding of the house behind her.

            “Louisa.” The word bursts from me involuntarily. Her hand flutters in a wave, but she makes no other sign, gives no indication that something unusual is happening. As always, her characteristic expression of mild confusion has a childish quality, exaggerated perhaps by her round cheeks and the slightly squashed proportions of her face. Maybe she doesn’t know, hasn’t noticed, she is consumed by fire.

            I wave back, smile with as much friendliness as our acquaintance requires — she lives across the street and a block to the east from me — and keep walking. Through the neighbourhood that showed so much promise when Eliot and I bought our house here after the war. But instead of moving upscale, as we anticipated, it has remained steadfastly working class.

            Sometimes we discussed moving, buying a smaller house in a better part of town, but Eliot’s salary as a grade-school teacher never expanded enough to accommodate our plans, so we stayed here, where shabby, dented, multicoloured houses cling to the side of a steep hill. Some structures have a better foothold than others; the less successful ones gradually slide down the slope. With a sigh, foundations ease and walls shiver, wallpaper buckles, cracks spider up walls and across ceilings. I sometimes wonder what trickles down the hill besides garden sheds, trees, and silt.

            Imagine, I say to myself half a block further on as I pass the house that lost its front porch to fire last week, dark and dusty shadows of flame still visible on the white clapboard. I saw a glow, heard a murmur that ran the length of the block like tongues of light licking through dried grass, and finally the fire trucks came, sirens blaring. Imagine — Louisa!

            As I balance on the curb waiting to cross the street the road in front of me seems to waver for an instant. Small grey and blue and umber pebbles embedded in the surface sway. A dizzy spell, perhaps, or will the road part in front of me as the sea did before Moses and the Israelites, toss the pebbles and the bright, shining vehicles that rush over them upward, arcing through the day’s clear air? I look again; the road is still, traffic thins. I cross the street.

            It’s amazing, my thoughts still on Louisa, amazing where you stumble on miracles. Never where they might be expected, in the vaulting hollow shadows of a church or the determined discomfort of a pew. I know, I’ve put in my time on bended knees, forehead pressed against my gathered hands, thoughts whittled to a fine, direct pointedness. “Lord, please grant me this ….” I have prayed, and watched new wrinkles pucker across my knuckles while waiting for my prayers to be answered, reading in the wrinkles’ patterns the passage of time.

            In church even God seems muted and subdued. No rods slithering into serpents these days, no loaves dividing parthenogenetically to feed the necessary hungry. Sanctity’s weight and seriousness leaching all likelihood of miracles from the words of the scripture.

            Church miracles aren’t what I’m thinking of, nor the minor ordinary felicities that pass for miraculous nowadays: retrieving a pair of matched socks from the dryer, knowing with unwavering certainty who is on the other end of the phone line before they speak. These do not qualify.

            I mean the sort of thing that sends a jolt of electricity along your nerves, perms your hair, and casts the world anew. So that everywhere your eyes rest there is the soft sheen of inviolability.

            Like Eliot catching lightning. Six different times he was almost struck by it. He would come home from a golf game shaking his head. “This close,” he would say, holding up his right hand, only the width of a shadow between thumb and forefinger. “This close.”

            Then he would tell me how it had happened; caught suddenly in a downpour he would huddle beneath a tree with his golf buddies and watch rain fall silver through the air, the greensward ebbing away from beneath his feet as gently as the tide easing out. Then there would be a crack, and beside him, “This close,” a hole in the earth, charred grass, and the smell of burning.

            But I hardly expected after forty-three years of marriage that one summer Sunday while he was wrestling with weeds in the back yard that light would flow to him from the ice-blue sky and he would reach out and catch it.

            I heard a snap like brittle wood splintering, then a flight of song spun through the air. Peering through the kitchen window I saw Eliot’s figure cut through the cloudless expanse of the sky like a comet’s tail.

            I hurried out to where he lay supine. In his right hand he held a butter knife, in his left hand the fruits of his labours. Dandelions, goose grass, and creeping Charlie had fallen in a surprising halo around his head. Wiping my hands on a terry dishcloth — I had been washing the lunch dishes — I bent over him. “Eliot,” I said. “Eliot.”

            His eyes opened as quickly as that. His gaze pierced me, some of the electricity caught there. Sparks shot from his eyes.

            He smiled at me, that diffident, somewhat shy smile. When he opened his mouth, the amalgam fillings in his teeth were black singularities on gleaming white enamel. Song burst forth, wave on wave of benediction and praise. I had never heard such sounds. My legs crumpled beneath me, I was on my knees beside him, the terrycloth wound tight in my hands. After a moment I had to stop up my ears. I couldn’t stand it any more, the promises and prophecies spilling out of him. When I unlocked my ears his mouth was a black hole, silence absorbing sound. He lay motionless.

            I understand how Eliot could have been a vessel of holiness. For sixty-eight years he lived in the world, and on the day he died he was as trusting as a four-year-old. He refused to believe anyone would actively cause another person grief, nor did he bring pain to another if he could help it.

            But Louisa? Whose whole existence is unmitigatedly a testament to all that it parochial and trivial? Bingo is her catechism, Elvis Presley her patron saint. Her conversation is a distillation of gossip and hearsay.

            She claims to be husbandless, but I have inadvertently seen her wrapped in someone’s arms. I turned my eyes away from that dark space where the white flesh of her skin burned, though not before a tremor ran down my spine.

            Corpulent is an accurate description of her, her skin rolls and puckers with joy, with zest, with abandon. She is flesh incarnate. In summer it gathers above the waistband of her shorts and flows over her knees in waves.

            While I was walking down the street that day — on my way to the bank, so it would have been after ten o’clock on a weekday, and Louisa still in a bathrobe, long after her children must have left for school — I saw her entwined with a man, their limbs as tangled as kudzu. I couldn’t see into the shadows where the two of them lingered just within the barely-open front door of her house. A glimpse, a breath, I looked away and the moment passed.

            Still, the white expanse of Louisa’s flesh, the shudder of movement stayed with me. Standing in line at the bank, my deposit slip carefully filled out, I saw her luminous thigh, felt her skin yielding and soft as bread dough, soft as water, and the word carnal came to me. I shivered and pushed the sensation away.

            And once, at a Ladies’ Auxiliary Benefit for hungry children, she cornered me, her face bright with revelation. A paper plate piled high with cocktail sausages, potato salad, fried chicken balanced in one hand, she chewed on something tucked in her cheek as she talked to me. Her earrings and necklace were shiny, purple plastic, the same shade exactly as the pantsuit she wore. Her children tore around the room shrieking and throwing bread rolls.

            “Did you know,” she breathed, “that Walt Disney was frozen when he died and when they find a cure for cancer they’ll melt him and fix him up?” What could I say to this? I smiled with as much civility as I could muster. Imagine, I murmured.

            “Yes,” she nodded. Too late I realized my error. Like flame blooming on top of a struck match, her conversation ignited, metastasized.

            To stop myself from saying something rude I focused on the bright pinpricks of oil that dotted the pores of her nose, the lines of lipstick that had smudged into the grooves of her front teeth, the dark hairs bristling along her upper lip.

            I know for a fact that all her living room furniture is sheathed in plastic, and that her children are feral, raised on TV and instant noodle dinners. Their skin has taken on the carroty hue of the cheese powder. How can she, mired as she is in superstition and credulity, how can she be a conduit for holiness?

            I walk through the parking lot of the local grocery store thinking about this question. As I approach the store, two glass doors slide open; I enter the store and am embraced by cool air.

            Since Eliot’s passing I shop less frequently and always in the middle of the day. I don’t want the worry of young thugs lurking behind bushes at night waiting to snatch my malnourished purse. I don’t want to run the risk of a broken hip, a hospital stay, lying flat on a bed while fluid osmoses into my lungs and life ebbs out. When I mentioned this to Louisa once — how did it slip out? — her round face folded horizontally into a smile, she opened her mouth and let loose a braying laugh. “I don’t think you need to worry about that,” she said. “An old war horse like you.”

            Since Eliot’s death the days loom longer. Bridge games and afternoon teas have fallen off. I still receive invitations, but I have lost the ability to concentrate. I lose hands even if I hold all the trump cards. I lose track of someone’s niece halfway through a circuitous story. “Pardon?” I say vaguely and watch a chill settle on the narrator’s face.

            Inside the grocery store I pause for a moment. The cool air of the air conditioning makes my head swim after the heat outside. I shop here because it’s a short walk from my home. Before Eliot died, we would drive across town to a larger, newer supermarket, one with wide, welcoming aisles and a staggering selection. There were delicacies like raspberry vinegar, rosewater, and foods that sound like methods of space travel: tofu and quark.

            This is a less flamboyant store; the food here is more utilitarian. Beneath other odours there is always the faint smell of rotting vegetables. Louisa shops here, too. I have seen her barreling along with two or three of her children dangling from the shopping cart, their hair uncombed, their clothes grimy. They quarreled and squirmed, reaching out to grab, and sometimes drop, packages, tins and boxes.

            The only shopping cart I can locate has a spastic wheel that wobbles crazily. I have to bear down hard to keep it from veering left or right. Up the aisles I trundle past disposable diapers, TV dinners, boxes of neon-coloured cereals. Tuneless music drifts through the air. In one aisle a jar of mustard has fallen and shattered; a bright yellow sun blooms on the speckled floor amid shimmering chips of glass.

            The image of the sun brings Eliot to mind; I picture where he must surely be, basking in the Glory of God, a radiance of almost solar intensity. Suddenly a familiar voice invades the scene — Louisa. A broad smile splits her face. Hiya, Eliot. She slaps him heartily on the back. How ya doing?

            Well, hello Mrs. Roberts, he says, sounding pleased to see her.

            Want a cig? On her T-shirt sprawls the message: Angels do it divinely, written in pink, flowery letters. She pulls out a pack of cigarettes, slips it open and holds it out to him.

Thank you, he says. They light up and settle back on the puffy clouds that serve as chairs.

            No. Standing in the condiments aisle the impulse to cry out is overwhelming. Eliot — your asthma!

            How did Louisa get into my daydream I wonder, just as the shopping cart’s broken wheel swerves abruptly, jerks me out of my reverie and almost carries my groceries into a tower of mayonnaise topped by a sign: Today’s Special, $1.89. I stop for a moment to right the cart and get my bearings. Ahead of me is the produce section. Something for a fruit salad I decide and maneuver the cart past the dairy section, towards the mounds of strawberries, the pyramids of oranges.

            I pick up a cool McIntosh apple and cradle it in my palm, debating how many to buy. While I stand lost in thought Louisa’s face swims up towards me and stares out from the apple’s gleaming surface. Riveted, I return her gaze. Why you? I demand.

            She doesn’t answer. For several seconds I stand staring, but nothing more happens. I’m on the point of returning the apple to the pile when she smiles at me, a smile as beautiful and effortless as rainbow-coloured clouds of gas spreading across the surface of a puddle, a smile of utter acceptance.

            It’s easy for you to smile, I think bitterly. You’ve got Eliot all tied up for eternity. And what am I left with? I’m left with standards — never talk with your mouth full, always say please and thank-you. I did what I thought was required, I say to her. I followed the rules and what did it get me? My husband dead, my life destroyed. While you, who wouldn’t know sterling from plate, a venial from a mortal sin, you stand in the street swathed in grace and utterly oblivious. Why?

            Then I notice small glints of light. Drops of condensation on the apple? I rub it against my sleeve, but when I look again the points of brilliance are still there. I peer closer and see they are paths of light running down Louisa’s face, tears streaming over her cheeks like flame shooting along a trail of spilled lighter fluid.

            Suddenly an ache grips me on the right side, just below my ribcage. I put down the apple and walk away from the grocery cart, leaving it stranded in the middle of the aisle.

            When I step out of the store, a cloud of humidity, like a second layer of clothing, settles on me. My face, my arms, my legs are wrapped in heat.

            I walk slowly through the parking lot and cross the street. At the corner I find myself following the cracked, pitted sidewalk that leads to Louisa’s house. As I mount the wooden steps to her door, they creak and shift beneath me. The blue paint on the house is blistered and peeling. I knock three times.

            Louisa opens the door. Her face looks puffy and fragile, as if she has just woken up or has been crying. For an instant her expression is blank, then a flash of puzzlement flits through her eyes. If she were to ask me what I was doing here I wouldn’t be able to answer. But she doesn’t ask, she smiles and steps back into the darkness.

            I follow her down a long, shadowed hallway towards a rectangle of light. The squabble of children’s voices swims toward us through the dim air.

            The kitchen’s sudden light dazzles me. Leaning against the doorframe I pause to let my eyes adjust, and for a moment the three children who are playing in one corner of the room fall silent; their expressions wary, they stare at me.

            Louisa drops into a chair, its seat and back covered in red vinyl that has split and  been patched with duct tape, its legs curved bars of chrome, like chairs I have seen in cheap restaurants. With her foot, she nudges another chair away from the table for me. The grey linoleum floor is chipped and stained. I think of my own gleaming, waxed floor, of my spotless, echoing, empty kitchen.

            In the centre of the table sits a large, dented saucepan. Louisa nods for me to sit down and spoons something from the pot into a chipped white plastic bowl that she pushes across the table to me.

            I glance at her. Tongues of flame dance around her head, her shoulders, fainter and more delicate than the blaze this morning. I hear the full, fat sound that drops of water make when they explode on a hot surface. She smiles again, a crooked, off-centre smile, and begins to spoon food into her mouth.

            Across the room the children start to bicker again, their voices swirling up like song. The bowl in front of me holds a lump of porridgey noodles covered with clotted orange-coloured cheese sauce. I understand the throb in my side is hunger. I pick up the spoon and eat.

Melanie Dugan

1993

Hejira

Hejira

            I dream of vast horizons: exact, flawless, straighter than any natural thing. I dream of seamless skies, luminous clouds, shimmering fields, and distances that retreat into infinity.

            I listen for sounds so faint they have traveled inches, miles, light years to reach my ears. Sounds as familiar as the wind rubbing leaves together on autumn trees, the dry bark of a dog, the prolonged twang of a cicada. Sounds foreign to me now.

            My dreams carry me into landscapes bereft of people and machines, populated only by silence and the blank, immediate awareness of animals.

            The door swings open, I pass through, it sighs shut behind me. The babble outside — people’s voices, cars idling, planes accelerating for take-off — is silenced. Within the glass walls of the airport all is cool, all is muted.

            On the slick marble floor my shoes go click, click, click, sharp sounds of punctuation and purpose. In my left hand is a suitcase, a bag hangs from my right shoulder. In it I carry notebooks, pencils, a diary, maps. In my imagination I am already across the ocean, anticipating the crush of descent, the trip completed.

            Past the porters, the money changers, I stride through the building which is as large as a stadium, as grandiose as a museum.

            Further along, the walls converge and the path in front of me narrows. I glance at my watch: 5:43 p.m.; my plane leaves at 8.

            I feel light, buoyant as I move through the terminal. Glancing around at the vacu-formed plastic chairs and the gleaming chrome tables it seems to me the place is nearly empty. Straight on I walk, towards the white rectangular booth where a man sits, slightly elevated, so that when he says, “Passport, please,” to the person ahead of me, his eyes flick down in a manner that seems dismissive.

            A curt nod and it’s my turn. My hand moves to the breast pocket of my suit. Reaching for passport and papers, it closes on … nothing. Identification, wallet, visa — all gone. The man in the booth shakes his head, his face grim and humourless. Possessed of the heavy neutrality of civil servants, weighed down by memos, rules, regulations, more difficult to shift than belief, he is immoveable.

            I make phone calls, send messages, but as the hours stretch into days, the calls go unanswered, the messages aren’t acknowledged. Perhaps, it occurs to me, the messages are intercepted, the phone calls cut off.

            Time gapes. I sit, suitcase on the floor between my feet, and think backwards instant by instant. Did someone brush against me in the airport, pick my pocket? No, there wasn’t time. Did I leave my passport and wallet in the taxi? As I climbed out of the taxi I remember glancing back and in my mind’s eye I see the taxi’s scarred red vinyl seat staring back at me, empty. Maybe the hotel room? But I went over it before I checked out; anything left in that generic space would have caught my eye.

            Panic thickens my blood, twists my stomach. How can I get out of here? Weeks stretch in front of me. What will I do? Where will I sleep, what will I eat?

            In time my suitcase becomes a makeshift pillow. I doze in fits and starts. Inevitably I wake up, still here, in this place delimited by seamless walls, weightless ceilings, this place of concrete and steel. I start to forget I have lived anywhere else — amnesia induced by vending machines, plastic-wrapped food, muzak. It seems as though I have always lived among these aisles of chairs, these acres of waiting areas. Listened, waking and sleeping, to the droning, carefully modulated, muffled, incomprehensible voices that float anonymously through the air.

            I forget that the desiccated tomato, sliced and wedged between two pieces of slightly stale white bread, ever swelled and blushed in the sun. I forget the tomato stems are tough and fibrous as hemp, how the leaves prick your skin when you reach in to pick one. I grab firmly and tug until it snaps free. When I pull it from the tangle of leaves and shadows it is plump, soft and red. I offer my prize for inspection; her hair falls in a shimmering curtain.

            The end of summer, heat weighs the day down, pulling it towards sunset. In the corner of the yard a birch tree bends under the burden of the heat, its leaves still. A sprinkler coughs in the next yard and drops of water, as round, silver, and singular as drops of mercury, shoot through the air. People inhabit shadows, their voices distant murmurs. The smells of burning charcoal and cut grass hang in the air. My daughter, her yellow hair a shining echo of the sun, digs tunnels and riverbeds in the mud of the backyard and sends nasturtium leaves sailing away on the water.

            But this memory, which may be an illusion, is certainly a luxury here, where people come and go endlessly. Time is a formality that has been dispensed with. There is no lull, no period set aside for eating or sleeping. There is only the constant stream of people; the sounds of their steps is a supplication, a prayer for a better life. They believe that the last place can be shucked off, left behind like an old skin, that a finer, newer place waits for them at the end of the trajectory they’re traveling.

            I hear some of their stories, tales of displacement and destruction. I hear them again and again, until where I am — this location of dislocation — seems more certain and permanent than anywhere else in the world.

            “On the third day the pirates threw my father and brother into the sea,” a girl tells me. Slender as grass, she has skin the colour of weak tea. Her long black hair is impassive as still water. “The sharks ate them.”

            “My son disappeared.” The girl is gone, in her place sits an old woman, her skin webbed with lines and cracked as earth in a dry riverbed. Her voice is the wind that sighs through the Andes. “When the village priest began to ask questions, he, too, disappeared.”

            There are so many people here, so many stories that sometimes I think I’m dreaming them. I dream the people moving along corridors carrying their baggage — their bundles, pouches, furoshiki — and heavier than their possessions, their stories. They have escaped from where they were, hoping to leave behind pain and danger. But after they have worn out the shirts and pants they wear now, their saris and sarongs, they will still be carrying their stories and memories, longer and more complex.

            During the times I dream these people I can’t conjure up my daughter. In this place she is as unlikely as sunlight at midnight, or hope in the midst of despair.

            Things change, things disappear. I realize I haven’t seen my suitcase for days. I don’t know when it vanished. I can’t remember the last time I set my weight against it to heft it from a chair.

            I recall some of the clothes that were in it. I would open it surreptitiously sometimes and pass my hands over the fine cotton shirts, the cashmere sweaters.

            But those clothes are gone. Now I wear left-overs and cast-offs, jeans, a t-shirt, a sweatshirt. You might see me on many streets in towns and cities around world. I have been absorbed by the ubiquitous, the democracy of dress has made me invisible.

            Maybe some of the people who pass through here have taken my suitcase and clothes. Once that idea would have bothered me.

            My former life dissolves, floats away from me in pieces as the contents of my suitcase are borne away from me on the river that flows through here, carrying these people past me. The shirts I once owned, the pants, bob on the water, colourful shapes shrinking as they retreat into the distance.

Occasionally I receive letters from my family. Passing strangers hand me envelopes with my name scrawled on the front. The envelopes, when they arrive, are grey and creased from having passed through many hands.

It happens suddenly, when I’m least expecting it. Intent on a meal or a conversation, I will be surprised to find a person standing in front of me, someone I’ve never met, with an envelope in their hands. Some of these people meet my eyes, smile, and hand me the envelope. Others avert their glance, avoid meeting mine, and push the envelope at me as if they are angry or frightened.

They wear many different kinds of clothing. One woman was wrapped in a kimono, one man wore tattered jeans and a t-shirt that had save the whales printed on it. Some are adults, some are children. They speak to me in light, chattering languages, or heavy guttural ones. A few laugh as they hand me the envelope.

I don’t know how they get the envelope. This has never been explained to me.

I don’t open the letter immediately when I get it. Instead, I imagine what is inside, a page of lined paper folded three times, scrawled over with loopy writing.

My daughter bends over a pad of paper, her blonde hair falls down, shielding her face. She turns once in a while to talk to someone out of sight. Then there is a hand on her shoulder, a head of dark hair beside hers. They both read what she has written, a finger points here, follows a line and taps on the page there.

When I read the letter what I want to know isn’t in it. I want to know how they look in the morning, asleep. But who can tell me that? I remember my daughter sleeping, pink cheeks, her hair tumbling in an indecipherable script around her head. And the other — my mind pulls away. It is too painful. To consider how things might be I am forced to admit what they are not. Loss does not exist until absence is acknowledged.

Instead, I am told about matters of importance, so out-of-the-ordinary that I can’t put them in context, they mean so little to me. Or I am offered pallid reassurances: “We miss you, we think about you all the time.”

This isn’t what I want to read. I want to know what the first thing was they saw when they woke up in the morning, what the weather was like, the colour of the sunlight that morning, the sounds of their voices. How can they describe what the house smells like? But that is just what I want to know. When I breathe those mingled smells of coffee, toast, and them I know exactly where on the planet I am. Like a salmon, I could find my way home by sense of smell.

Tell me inconsequentials I want to demand. But I don’t write back because I suspect that if I did the letters would be confiscated; read by strangers who have enough information about me already — dates, amounts, conversations. I don’t want to reveal anything more.

There are days I become convinced that the letters I receive are fabrications, that a man sits in a wood-panelled room and writes them. The rest of the time I accept them for what they seem to be — bulletins from a distant place, a world I used to inhabit.

Sex rears its head. Where? In washrooms, behind heavy doors marked “Employees Only,” beneath deserted counters. The episodes are quick and fleeting, an intensity of sensation. I think of nothing.

So many variations: the smells of skin, of sweat; the sounds of pleasure, pain, perhaps of loss; the flavour of lips, tongues, hair; the textures soft or rough, resistant or yielding. They all melt into one experience: hunger, then cessation. It’s as if, when I haven’t been touched for weeks, I begin to dissolve. A gust of wind could whip through these aisles, upsetting papers, kidnapping conversations, and carry me away.

I search for someone who, touching me, will confirm my existence, re-invent my skin. Contained, I take form. I discover myself at the ends of others’ fingertips, or wrapped in their arms. Their flesh, their breath, their wounds affirm my own.

A can of soda being opened — a sudden pop and then the hiss of escaping air.

For a year I have lived here, stranded in an airport, audience to the passing world.

At one time I spent my days listening for the pop that would signal my release, that would indicate my words had reached the right ear. I imagined the grim man in the white booth nodding at me, saying, “You are free to go.”

For months I spent each day waiting in an excess of patience. At night I dreamed of empty spaces, but no more.

Now I watch the people — the people who were invisible to me when I first arrived here. I watch those who walk with the sharp intensity of purpose, and those who drift along hoping to travel through unnoticed. There are those who stagger under their burdens, and those who are cautious and wary.

I begin to recognize the people I couldn’t see before. I hear their words in my mouth, words strung into stories that flow through me to other people. Stories offered in comfort or to reassure. I see them wearing my clothes. I wrap myself in their serapes.

Their memories melt into mine. I disappear into the people who were invisible to me in the past.

And at night silence opens around me, no longer the voice of emptiness. Now I dream of the passage of swallows, black silhouettes as they swerve and loop through the singing sky. Their flight describes what is denied me, and in it I read my deliverance.

Melanie Dugan

1992

Half Life: Notes from a Pandemic

Half Life: Notes from a Pandemic

1. During that time we were always waiting. Nothing much happened, but everything happened.

            Maybe I was more attuned to what was unfolding when it started than I might otherwise have been because nine months earlier my father had died and loss had taken up residence in my life. I was familiar with the shape of it, which was absence, and its weight.

            The crisis came slowly, with whispers of a distant illness. The rumours were infrequent low-level sound bites of information; they came from far away, a foreign place, so what could they possibly matter to us? There was that disturbing video of the doctor sweating and gasping for breath, but we went about our lives.

            Gradually there were more eruptions of news, louder, closer, increasingly frequent, so that suddenly — standing in the grocery store with a package of spaghetti in our hands, or sitting at the computer at work one day, or on the phone with a friend — there was a wildfire in front of us and all around us. It seemed to come out of nowhere and then it was everywhere.

            It was early spring, a cool spring, less overcast than spring had been in recent years, but also chillier. Near the equinox. A time when the year hung in the balance, teeter-tottered, transitioning from one season to the next: everything in flux. The yellow winter aconite was in bloom, with its delicate, frilly leaves, crocuses, galanthus, scilla, a little later chionodoxa, puschkinia. Later still species tulip. Forsythia bushes put out small, tentative blooms. Buds appeared on trees. The silver maples dropped their buds, a red carpet on the sidewalk. And still the snow silted down some days, slow, steady, silent. Or there was a storm, grey rain sheeting down, water churning in the gutters, the sump pump humming in the cellar. We wondered: would we get four inches of water the basement again? Sunny the next day, with a brisk, cold breeze. The season could not commit.

            So we stayed inside, on the advice of those who had information. And when we went outside to walk the dog it was quiet — there were fewer cars, buses, trucks, or planes — except for the low-level hum of anxiety that thrummed everywhere, all the time, a constant background soundtrack to our days and nights.

            We stayed inside mostly. Except when we didn’t. Taking walks was important we were told.

We stayed inside and worked. Or didn’t.

            We got up early, or we got up late. It was hard to tell. No matter when we got up we felt vaguely fatigued. Not tired, exactly, but worn. As if we were thinning out, taking up less space than usual, as if we were gradually disappearing, bleaching away.

            We lived in our sweats, unless we dressed up because standards had to be maintained.

            The snow tires stayed on. We read an article that said it was no big deal.

            We forgot what day of the week it was and had to trust that our computers weren’t lying to us.

            It took an enormous amount of effort to begin what we needed to do: turn on the computer, log on, click, click, click. It took an enormous amount of energy not to do what we shouldn’t do: one more cookie wouldn’t make that much difference; one more silly cat meme wouldn’t take up that much time.

            We ate too much. We didn’t eat enough. We slept too much. We didn’t sleep enough. We slept all night, like the dead. We woke up at 2 or 3 or 4 in the morning and the first thing our mind went to, like iron flings flying to a magnet, was what was happening in the larger world we had exiled ourselves from. We learned that others woke up then, too, and we considered arranging a conference call so we could all worry together, but it was too much trouble, so we just lay in bed, our minds spinning, and stared at the ceiling, or at the alarm clock’s illuminated face. We learned that the dog snored.

            Spring carried on, and on our walks — twice-daily, sometimes thrice-daily — we noticed the yellow daffodil blooms beginning to emerge from their sheath of green leaves. Dog owners and mothers pushing infants in strollers were the other people we encountered on our walks.

            Wildlife seemed to reclaim the silent streets. Raccoons appeared, furry mountain-shaped creatures skittering up the driveway, scaling the maple tree by the kitchen door, a mother and kit, speaking to each other in low warbles, hanging over the edge of the fence and eyeing the emerging tulips until I spoke to them sharply. They looked at me neutrally and sauntered off along the fence, picking their way delicately on long, narrow feet that looked like flexible spatulas, in no hurry, pointedly in no hurry. Birds sang and called, and they sounded louder than usual, we thought, because of everything else being quiet. There was a report of a coyote a street over. Someone saw a red fox.

            Nightly, the numbers on the TV, on the radio, accumulated, debris left behind by the virus, flotsam tossed from a sinking ship. The moon moved from waxing to full to waning, became a slender silver fingernail floating in the sky. Newscasters recited the rising tide of death in funereal tones as the moon ebbed.

            We did not listen to the resident of the White House because nothing he said had any meaning. He said “beautiful” as people died, their lungs shredded by the virus, alone in their apartment, or alone in a hospital room surrounded by healthcare workers wrapped in robes, N95 masks, Hazmat suits, strangers who could not touch or comfort them. He said “perfect” as people’s lives collapsed, their livelihoods evaporated, their families fragmented.

            And what he really meant, he didn’t say. He didn’t say, “Your lives are nothing to me. I’m only interested in the stock market’s upward trajectory.” His meaning was obscene.

He lived in a separate place, surrounded by ghosts and wraiths. There was nothing in his world except his own image, reflected back to him on and on into infinity. He performed regularly in an echo chamber.  

          Things were different. Things were the same.

          There were shortages. Some of the shortages made sense: hand sanitizer, bleach wipes. Some didn’t: toilet paper, yeast.

          At first there was confusion at the grocery store: sanitize or not? Direct traffic or not? But rituals developed. We were good at creating rituals. Early hours were set aside for the elderly and vulnerable; this way they could shop in a store that had been cleaned overnight, this way they were able to avoid crowds.

          Now we waited patiently in line outside the store, the way we had previously waited to get into a popular show, movie, concert, or museum exhibit, with resignation. On entering the designated door, we offered our hands up to be anointed with sanitizing spray. Then we continued inside to collect a sanitized grocery cart. There were arrows, made of colourful tape, stuck to the floor telling us which way to go. Many people obeyed them. The people who didn’t, oddly, were often the people in the most vulnerable groups: older people, frail people. They had their reasons, we decided.

          Going grocery shopping became like planning a military campaign: what would we need in two weeks (the next specified pick-up time slot)? What would we have run out of by then? What was essential? What could we trim from our usual shopping list?

Sometimes there were tussles in the aisles over the last package of toilet paper, the final carton of eggs.

At the check-outs there were large circles taped to the floor with instructions printed on them directing customers to practice social distancing (an oxymoron if there ever was one). Some stores skipped the circles and simply taped off six-foot intervals where customers could wait until it was their turn at the cash. Some people took the intervals seriously and kept their distance; other people took the intervals more as a suggestion and nudged closer to those in front of them.

Overnight, Plexiglass barriers appeared between cashiers and customers. Cashiers wore disposable gloves. Between each customer, the cashiers spritzed any available surface — weigh scales, debit pad, conveyor belt — with sanitizing spray and rubbed each down with quick, fierce movements, as if they were angry. Maybe they were.

Or customers used self-check-outs, bagging their own goods while unconsciously scratching their faces or rubbing their eyes, some with gloved hands.

It all went like clockwork. Or as close to clockwork at humans can achieve, which means there were stutters, gridlock, carts bumped, glares exchanged, apologies offered, confusion. On the way out of the store there was another spritz with sanitizer. Finally we loaded the groceries in the car and drove home on nearly empty streets.

          We went to the bank. The door was shut, and behind it, beyond the notice taped to the glass, three staff huddled, all women. The most senior — small, round, anxious, a worried sparrow of a woman with round glasses and an uncertain smile — said, we can’t let you in. It’s too small in here for us to practice social distancing. You’ll have to go to the other branch. We explained our Personal ID number had quit working for some reason. There was a hurried conference carried on in urgent whispers. Could we slip the card under the door and they’d help reset the PIN? It didn’t seem to occur to them that the virus could sneak in on the card. The card was passed, the PIN reset, we went on our way. All three waved good-bye from the other side of the door. 

2.

Our neighbour immediately to the north texted us: Our neighbour Leo, Katherine’s son, was taken away in an ambulance. They were giving him chest compressions.

          Katherine was our immediate behind-hand neighbour. Leo lived in a tiny house between Katherine’s house and the other neighbour, the one who had texted us. Leo was maybe 28 or 29, married, with a young son. Too young for a heart attack, a later text said.

          His wife was there when they took him. He looked grey. Definitely unconscious.

          Later: There are people with candles in front of Katherine’s house.

          I think Leo has died.

          We stopped. We thought: the virus? Suddenly it was very important to let the kids know where our wills were, contact information: the lawyer, the financial guy.

          How could he have caught it, we wondered. We weren’t sure what his job was. We weren’t sure he had died. We waited. It was as if the world around us had suddenly grown sharper and clearer than it had been. We decided we wouldn’t think about Leo, but then found ourselves thinking about him, wondering what had happened. Would he come back?

          The next day another friend emailed: I am sad to let you know Katherine’s son Leo passed away yesterday. It was sudden and acute. The cause is unknown.

          We texted: Thank you for letting us know. That is so hard.

          We texted Katherine: We are so sorry to hear about Leo’s death. We cannot imagine the pain. Tell us if there’s anything we can do. What more could we say? What more could we do? Any words or actions seemed inconsequential when weighed against what she had lost.

          She replied, Thank you.

          We left a loaf of fresh-baked bread on her front porch wrapped in several shopping bags so the squirrels wouldn’t eat it before she got it. Someone we didn’t know set up a dinner rota and we signed on.

          The next evening 20 or so of us gathered at seven in a loose group in front of her house, all of us six feet apart, each holding a candle. The sky was still bright. We recognized some of Katherine’s co-workers, some neighbours, her friends, her late son’s friends. There were a few people we didn’t know. We stood chatting quietly on the sidewalks, in the middle of the street. Her neighbour across the road came out and stood on her porch with us. We said how hard this must be for Katherine, how brutal.

          Katherine came out on her front porch to thank us. She was tall, with white hair and pale skin. A spasm of pain contorted her face part way through what she was saying. She had to stop. She was like a statue of grief carved out of marble. Someone seeing her 2,000 years ago would know what her expression meant. Someone from far away would understand. She hugged her other son and wept. Shortly, they both went inside. We stood in silence, our candles growing brighter as the sun set and the silhouettes of the houses and trees around us grew darker. It was very beautiful and moving, the darkness and the silence and the people just standing there with no noise.

          After a while a couple of us looked around, moved restlessly. Then the rest of us began to shake ourselves as if we were waking up from sleep, and we left singly, or in a group, walking off into the dark.

3.

          A man in Arizona ate a chemical used to clean fish tanks and died. He had confused it with a drug that had a similar-sounding name and was rumoured by certain people — non-experts — to be useful for staving off the virus.

          “I saw it on the back shelf and thought, ‘Hey, isn’t that the stuff they’re talking about on TV?’” he said. It wasn’t.

          Other bad decisions were made. The number of traffic accidents went down; the number of speeding tickets went up.

          One of us developed a sore throat. Of course the first thought was: virus? A flare of fear. Suddenly all the symptoms seemed very near. The person with the sore throat breathed deeply; did their lungs hurt? It was difficult to tell. Perhaps. Was there a fever? Possibly. Aches and pains? Plausibly.

          But then the sneezing started, and the scratchy eyes, and we realized it was allergy season. Not the virus.

          A young woman from Texas declared the virus a hoax, shared a post on her Facebook page from a right-wing website, “This is what the beginning of socialism looks like! You don’t need hand sanitizer…You need common sense, a sense of direction, faith, a will to fight, and of course guns!”

Her obituary noted she was always the centre of fun, a loving wife, a devoted mother, a loyal and faithful friend, loved and missed by her husband, their two sons, and many friends.

          We thought about the emptiness her death would leave in those lives.

4.

          The strangeness of those days can’t be exaggerated, or their normalcy. Every time we turned around there was something we couldn’t believe, except it was true and documented. People were kind, people were stupid in the same proportions they probably always had been; it was only the exceptional nature of this time that magnified their kindness or stupidity. Kindness when the stakes were high seemed saintly; stupidity when the stakes were high seemed criminal.

We felt like travellers in a foreign land, a foreign land where they spoke the same language we did, ate the same food we did, watched the same TV shows we did, a foreign land that looked exactly like where we lived, except —

We gardened. Our gardens were tidier than they ever had been or would be.

Our houses were clean, too — they would never be so clean again (who in their usual life has time to dust the basement?), but no one would ever see them in this pristine state.

Our doorknobs were disinfected regularly. We had the most sanitary doorknobs in history.

We baked. The internet flooded with sourdough recipes, no-knead bread recipes, unleavened bread recipes, cakes, cookies, complex and abstruse recipes.

We ran into a friend in a distant park. We had driven there for a change of scenery, to walk along the lake’s shoreline. In the time it took us to drive there, the weather changed. When we arrived the day was windy, overcast, and cold, so we only took a short walk.

We came around a corner and there was our friend throwing a ball for his two dogs. He was very tall and very thin. He said he was there because he couldn’t walk his two dogs in the parks near his house. “They come up and tell me to leave,” he said.

“What are you up to?” we asked.

“Baking,” he said, and laughed. “If I see another cake, I’ll throw up.” He lobbed the ball and his dogs raced after it, barking. When we came back from our walk ten minutes later he was gone.

We forgot to look before crossing the street.

For the first time ever we read the Sunday newspaper, all five pounds of it, from beginning to end, even the business section, which turned out to be quite interesting.

          Were our dreams different? We read an article that said, yes, people were having more vivid dreams. It said four times as many people googled “why am I having weird dreams” than usual. Many people were having bug dreams.

          In the article it said that research had discovered officers held by the Nazis in POW camps where they were adequately fed and relatively safe (no torture), but whose freedom of movement was curtailed and their social interactions limited, had more boring dreams “on most dimensions” than was the norm. Their dreams had less good luck and friendliness, but also less violence, failure, and loss. They dreamed more about the families they had grown up with, and about the places where they had lived as children.  And food. They dreamed about food deeply and rapturously. And escape. But escape posits there being some other place to escape to, and where could we dream of escaping to when the whole world was locked down?

          Someone stole the welcome mat off our front porch.

         People could no longer read books. They said they couldn’t concentrate that long.

All that some people could do was read books.

          Bus drivers were heroes. Retail workers were heroes. Healthcare workers were heroes. We stood on our porches at 7:30 at night and banged pots to show our appreciation. Or hung brightly-coloured ribbons on the fences around hospitals, long-term care facilities, and clinics, with messages that said, “Thank you.” We waved buses through intersections and then waved at the drivers as they sped past.

          The rich retreated to their aeries. Some reported how they were faring, self-isolating on their yachts, until someone pointed out to them the inappropriateness of this statement when people were losing their jobs, their houses, their lives. We were surprised they needed to have this pointed out.

          South of the border the idea of “opening the country” was mooted at the highest levels, as if the country was a door that had slammed shut and all that was required were the correct words — “open sesame” — and all would return to how it had been before.

          Pundits, politicians, captains of industry talked, quantifying the value people’s lives versus getting the economy “back on track.” A politician from Texas assured us that old people (“lots of grandparents” — he was one) would be willing to die to “save the economy” for the sake of the grandchildren. We wondered who he thought the economy was made of, if not people, and if those people died where would be the economy he was so determined to “save”?  It was puzzling.

          Skies cleared. Lakes and rivers cleared.

There were photos of New Delhi. The photos were split in half. It looked like someone had taken a cloth and wiped the grime off one side of a dirty window: on the left was pre-virus New Delhi, polluted and grey, the buildings blurry in the smog; on the right was new New Delhi, the air clean, the buildings’ details picked out clearly in the bright sunlight. There were satellite images of China; in the pre-virus image an ugly yellow mass covered Beijing and metastasized over the surrounding area, post-virus the yellow mass was gone.

Where we were, the birds returned from the south, honking and squawking as they flew overhead. A Cooper’s Hawk took up residence in the small park across the street. Beyond its sharp kri-kri-kri cries, we found evidence of its presence in the solitary pigeon wings we discovered left on the ground that we had to grab before our dog could get to them, lunging toward them, pulling his leash taut. To him, they were like finding a Montreal smoked meat sandwich would be to us.   

          Conspiracy theories were pandemic. It was the Chinese. It was 5G. It was bats. It was the CIA. It was contrails. It was in the water.

          We had our own theories.

          We were told, variously, that we’d be o.k. if we gargled with liquid silver, if we were covered in Jesus’s blood (which, by this time, was about 2000 years old, give or take, so had probably dried up and blown away; AB or AB+ it had been determined), if we believed, if we trusted.

          When we went outside our problems seemed no less real, just smaller and less pressing.

          We did everything together, from the time we got up in the morning until we lay down, sighing, in bed at night. Sometimes one of us took a walk alone, but we were together most of the day most of the days.

          We were home so much the dog self-isolated upstairs, but when we went out for a couple of hours he’d be waiting — anxiously, it seemed to us, although we knew we shouldn’t anthropomorphize — at the door when we returned.

          Sometimes we glared at each other across the dining room table, irritated by the other’s constant presence. Other times we laughed simultaneously at an odd turn of phrase on the radio.

We wondered what it would be like after this, when we reverted more closely to how we used to live, leaving for work at different times, travelling separately, living our separate lives. Would it feel odd, unmoored?

          There was less garbage in the streets. There were more ducks in the parks, in church yards, and outside the coffee shop at Princess and Clergy.

          There were videos of people in foreign cities singing beautifully on their balconies: soaring opera, stirring songs. There was a video of one country’s air force pilots flying in formation to a rousing soundtrack. We did not sing on our front porch. It would only have made things worse.

When we ran into people we knew on our walks, we all shook our heads and said, “Strange times,” in subdued voices, not quite smiling.

          Dentist appointments were cancelled. Mammograms were cancelled. Hernia appointments were cancelled. Driving classes were cancelled.

Restaurants closed. Cinemas closed. Theatres closed. Festivals were cancelled. Book stores delivered.

          We didn’t think about after because we read (in two different places) a story told by a man who had been a prisoner during a war. We forgot which war.

          The man said that when he was a prisoner there were other men, prisoners in the same camp, who would say, “The war will be over by Easter.” Then, when the war wasn’t over by Easter, they’d say, “The war will be over by Labour Day.” When it wasn’t over by Labour Day, they’d say, “It’ll be over by Christmas.” When Christmas came and went and the war raged on, they died of disappointment.

          He, on the other hand, didn’t think in those terms. He knew the war would end, but he didn’t tease himself by setting a date. He just got through each day as it came. It was better not to be disappointed, he said.

          So we resolved not to talk about after. Except sometimes we slipped and said, “When this is over — ” but then we’d catch ourselves and stop. This was not the new normal: this was the new now.

          They closed the park across the street. Signs appeared one morning, stuck into the newly-thawed ground on slender metal legs, like the signs candidates sprinkle around during elections. They said, “Stay safe. Stay home.” We thought it would have been more effective if the sentences had been reversed: “Stay home. Stay safe.” But no one had asked us.

          Someone from the City came and wrapped yellow caution tape around the swings, the slide, the jungle gym. They did this invisibly. It seemed to happen between one breath and the next.

          Anyone could have torn down the caution tape. It was thin and flimsy. But no one did. It stayed there for weeks, fluttering in the slightest wind.  Sometimes a teenager on a skateboard rattled along the asphalt path that ran around the perimeter of the park, otherwise everyone followed orders. Except for dog walkers and mothers pushing infants in strollers. But no one could blame them.

          Time went fast: was it really a whole month since Linda in Admin had shared pictures of her new grandson with us on her phone? We remembered standing in a circle, elbow to elbow, peering at the tiny screen and knew we would not be comfortable doing that now.

          Time went slowly: Was it only two days since we’d applied for the emergency relief benefit?

          At night, when we walked the dog there were lights on in every single house we passed.

5.

          It was a sunny day, harsh in its brightness, two weeks after Leo, one week after our friend who would throw up at another cake. We ran into a friend walking her dog in the park.

          “Gerald has left me,” she said from six feet away, in an even tone, airily, we thought, almost off-handedly. A statement of fact, not feeling.

          “Oh, no,” we cried. “That’s too bad.” We meant it. They were both nice, smart people, thoughtful and interesting. “Because of — ” we held up our hands — the empty park, the silence — this?

          “I think it exacerbated it,” she said. Her dog was tugging on its leash, pulling her away from us, her right arm extended straight out. She gave the leash a jerk, corrected course. “He left me last year for three days.”

          Oh, we thought. Last year? Three days?

          “He’s gone to Joffrey’s.” A friend of theirs, an acquaintance of ours. “Joffrey went to the city to live with his girlfriend when this all started. Gerald is staying at his apartment.”

“Ah.”
“Gerald has a dark side.”

“Yes,” we agreed. “There is a lot unsaid about him, in interactions. We like Gerald,” we rushed to add, because we did, but we had already recognized this aspect of his character. He is a musician. Musicians are like this. “How are you?” we asked.

          She shrugged. “Good days, bad days. I slept last night — seven hours! He left last week and I’ve only been sleeping for three or four hours, but last night I slept for seven hours. I felt tireder when I woke up than when I only slept for three or four hours.” Her dog pulled again, investigating an interesting smell. She stumbled sideways. “And now I have to go teach 200 people remotely.” She worked at the university.

          “When it’s warmer — ” A stiff breeze had sprung up during the conversation and the day had grown chilly — “come over. We’ll sit in the back yard, six feet apart, and have gin and tonics.”

          She shrugged. Her dog pulled her again.

          “Are you o.k.?” we asked.

          “Managing,” she said, as the dog continued to pull her farther away.

          “Bye,” we waved.

          She waved back.

          We walked home. In her manner, she seemed disconnected from what had happened, as if she was separate from her words, the experience, floating off to one side. Was it that she wasn’t connected, we wondered, or was it — we glanced around: the vacant street, the lack of traffic, the lack of people — all of this? Just last year she and Gerald had been discussing a wedding, shutting down the short dead-end street they lived on, a marquee, games for friends’ children.

6.

We saw footage on the news, which we watched on our laptop, of people in another country sitting in 5-mile-long traffic jams to get supplies from food banks. One car after another, and people sitting on the roofs of their motionless cars. We read statistics about food banks. How much they had spent last year during this period, how much more they were spending now. How many people they had served last year, how many more they were serving this year. We read about a single father who had left work early, picked up his three young daughters, and driven to the food bank. By the time he got there, the food bank was empty. He had to turn around empty-handed and drive home. We thought about how hungry those little girls would be.

          When we walked around the neighbourhood there were pieces of white 8 ½ by 11-inch paper taped up on people’s front windows with riddles on them printed by hand: “What runs around the yard without moving?” A fence, we thought, feeling secretly proud of guessing the answer. “I am a word with six letters. Take away one and 12 are left.” There were also drawings made by kids, and small heart-shaped notes: “Thank you health care workers” written by adults. We wondered, would health care workers stroll down this narrow, empty street? We decided it was the thought that counted.

          News outlets, suspecting that we were not feeling anxious enough, ran articles reminding us that climate change and global warming were still threats. Where we lived, spring was cooler than normal

          We weren’t supposed to wear masks; they wouldn’t help and health care workers needed all the masks. Then we were supposed to wear masks because they helped slow the spread of the virus. On Facebook someone posted an animation made by some scientific organization with those odd, smooth, human-like figures that science videos often use — facial features and gender characteristics sanded away — that in fact look like aliens, which showed what happened when people coughed or sneezed. The clouds of droplets that resulted were quite pretty. We decided 6 feet was a reasonable distance. We also learned empirically that wearing the masks fogged up our glasses, introducing new risks into our lives, and that after a while the masks smelled unpleasant. But we wore them anyway.

          There was a shortage of masks for healthcare workers. Yet here was a picture of a legislator, showing up for a vote to lift shelter-in-place orders, wearing a hard-to-find N95 mask. Upside down. “You couldn’t write this stuff,” we said to each other, shaking our heads.

          The price of oil dropped below $0. “Does this mean they’re going to pay us to fill up our cars?” a friend quipped.

          One of us developed a cough. One of the symptoms of the virus was a dry cough. The rest of us listened to the coughing person. “Wet cough,” we decided. “Good thing, too. If it had been a dry cough we’d have put a tarp down in the back yard and pitched a tent for you to stay in.” The coughing person was not amused.

          People in that other country began to demonstrate against the shelter-in-place orders. These protests were referred to as disturbances. We watched them, shrunk small on the computer screen. We found we were leaning back, putting distance between us and the groups of people on the screen. We were looking at the screen sideways, as if that meant our contact with the screen was more limited, as if that meant our contact with those people was more limited.

          It was a sunny day where the protesters were and we were a bit jealous because it had been a cool, rainy week where we were and it would have been nice to be able to stand outside in the sun in dark glasses and shorts the way they were. We would have lasted three minutes outside if we’d tried that on our front porch. 

          The protesters seemed to be charged with anger. It seemed to flood through them, making their voices roar. They held up handmade signs that said, “stop the quarantine start work,” “my constitutional rights are essential,” “give me liberty or give me covid-19,” “live free or die in lockdown” and “I want a haircut.”  No matter where the protests were, the signs all said more or less the same things, word for word.

          We thought the choices weren’t quite so black and white, that there might be a middle ground. It wasn’t just a matter of totally shut or totally open. There were degrees.

We were uncomfortable watching the protesters stand so close together. We didn’t understand why they were so angry that people were trying to protect them from getting sick. We decided they didn’t see it that way. Five days later there was a spike in cases in the state where the protests had occurred.

          We stopped listening to the radio. We stopped reading the news. We stopped watching on the laptop. It was a constant barrage of numbers (either increasing alarmingly — the number of cases and deaths — or decreasing alarmingly — the economy). And when we bumped into the news, we ran the risk of encountering the one who’d been asleep at the wheel, who had made a bad situation lethal, and who now spent most of his energy and time denying responsibility and trying to shift blame elsewhere. Meanwhile, people continued to die.

          He decided to close the borders against “the Invisible Enemy.” He seemed oblivious to the fact that the enemy had already made it through the door.

7.

We texted and emailed people. We did this in concentric circles: first we contacted family, then close friends. Some lived far away. It was reassuring to hear they were all right. It also gave us a chance to think about the last time we’d seen them, out there in the country, away from all this. It was kind of like taking a short vacation to think of the trees and brush and chipmunks and sometimes bears. Then we moved on to the next ring and emailed those friends to ask, “How are you?”

One friend wrote back to tell us that shortly before all this began she had fallen and broken a bone in her foot. She’d had an operation to pin the bone, but there had been complications so, two days before lockdown began, she’d been in hospital again, having a second operation. They kept her overnight for observation and during the night she got out of bed, fell, broke another bone in her foot, and hit her head.

She sounded quite jolly reporting she was now house-bound, crawling from one room to another as needed, and experiencing concussion symptoms. The upside of all of this was that it made it a lot easier to shelter-in-place because she couldn’t get outside anyway, and less stimulation and more sleeping was good for concussion recovery.

We had zoom meetings. We struggled to get the program up and running. Our children told us, in tired, patient voices, which button to push, not to make the password too complex. Sometimes we got visuals and no sound; sometimes we got sound and no visuals. Sometimes one or the other of sound or visuals would blink on and off. Eventually we got both.

It was good to see whomever we were talking to, although sometimes it was confusing: Who was that person wrapped in a towel walking through the room behind them? And: Oh, here’s the dog. People often seemed to be looking down, their faces at an odd angle. Or they were dark, indeterminate shapes in front of a bright, sunny window. Oh, we thought, that’s a nice couch, or, that wallpaper is awful.

There was the half-second lag problem. Someone’s mouth would start moving, but we didn’t hear the words until half a second later, and sometimes their voice would be faint for reasons we couldn’t know and some of the sentence would go missing. We’d have to try and figure out what we’d missed. Then the person’s mouth would stop but the words kept coming. When was it o.k. to respond? We talked over each other. Some of us, aware of the geographical distance between everyone, spoke too loudly, shouted, almost. Our children — tired, patient — explained that was unnecessary. We should just talk in a normal tone.

We heard about zoom bombing, people who hacked into zoom meetings to show porn or to troll, but we never experienced it. Some of us felt this might have spiced things up.

It was good to see people, and to see they were all right. There was often an awkward 20 or 30 seconds of silence at the end of the meeting before one of us said, “Well, I guess that’s it. Next week?” When we waved good bye our hands were blurs on the screen.

8.

          A co-worker who had been pregnant when lockdown began posted on the digital staff newsletter that her daughter had been born. There was a picture of her baby asleep beside her on her hospital bed wrapped in a blue and red striped flannel blanket. The baby’s right hand peeked out beside her cheek, four fingers unfurled. She was the standard beautiful baby: snub nose, perfect complexion. Her date of birth and her weight were duly noted. The baby looked peaceful, calm, fine.

          Across the street, as we read this news, one of the signs announcing the park closure bounced in a stiff wind. The sun was shining and sometimes, as the sign moved up and down, sunlight reflected off the sign and flashed into our eyes, some kind of indecipherable Morse code message. 

9.

Before, there had been stories with beginnings, middles, and endings, and when we read them or watched them or listened to them we began at the start and were always in motion, moving from the beginning to the end. But now the stories had stopped. Except the ones that hadn’t.

          We were waiting. Everything was going to happen.

April 2020