Missed Connections

by Brian Francis

  * * *

  —

  In the late summer of 2019, I travelled to my hometown of Sarnia. I don’t go back very often. I don’t have much reason to, with no family and very few friends living there now, and nowhere to really visit except for the cemetery where my dad is buried. Even that seemed like a pointless destination at times, driving all that way to stand at a flat marker in the ground. I knew my dad would tell me not to bother.

  “Save your gas, Brian,” he’d say.

  I had also planned to visit my mom. She was eighty-five years old, now living in the same city where I had gone to university, and she was waiting for test results. Her doctor thought she had lymphoma. My mom thought the doctor was full of beans. She believed doctors schemed with one another to send patients on endless rounds of specialty tests. That was how they made money, she theorized.

  “I feel perfectly fine,” she told me. “I eat good. I sleep good. My poops are normal.”

  My sisters and I knew she likely had cancer. The urgency of her tests seemed to affirm that. But she was convinced that the swollen gland in her neck was the result of the air conditioning blowing on a particular patch of skin while she sat in her power lift recliner, watching her morning talk shows.

  “I put a towel on my neck now,” she told me, as if that was the solution everyone had been looking for.

  I don’t believe in being the bearer of bad news, so I went along with my mom’s theories. At some point, you have to stop reasoning with the elderly. It’s too exhausting otherwise. And what was wrong with helping someone carve out some comfort? What was the harm of a drop of delusion in the onslaught of unrelenting reality? I’d been an expert at that, after all. I understood the importance, the necessity, of creating an inner alternate universe. Besides, nothing I could say would prevent her from having cancer.

  “The towel might do the trick,” I said.

  “I think so,” she replied with a nod.

  I was going to visit so I could provide her with some distraction. We’d go to the shopping mall. Pick up a few things at the drugstore. She’d bring a handwritten list to be checked off as we made our way along the aisles: Kleenex. Hand soap. Polident. Afterwards, we’d go for dinner.

  “My treat,” she insisted. “I haven’t taken my son out in a long time.”

  I told my mom I’d be at her retirement residence in the early afternoon. I hadn’t told her about my plans to go to Sarnia in the morning. She would have questioned why or wanted to come along. She would have told me to go to the cemetery or to drive by our old house and report on whether the new owners were taking good care of it. Already I’d have obligations, and I didn’t want obligations. I wanted the time for myself. I had already mapped out my route, planning to turn early off the 402 and then take Highway 22 the rest of the way, a stretch of asphalt that never seems to change, in spite of the years, with its farmhouses, abandoned gas stations, the flat concrete blocks that served as the only remnants of a motel that had once provided rest for people between their destinations.

  It was August, and summer was winding down. The farmers’ markets were filled with corn, cantaloupes, and tomatoes. The mornings were becoming greyer, the shadows longer. There’s a beautiful finality about August, don’t you think? All you can try to do is hold on to the pieces for as long as you can before they fade away.

  As luck would have it, Highway 22 was closed for construction the day of my visit and I had to take the 402 all the way to Sarnia. I was disappointed, of course. Already the morning I’d planned so carefully was unravelling around me.

  When I arrived in Sarnia, I drove around the residential streets. The familiar houses didn’t look much different. Older, a little more slanted. Smaller. That’s the feeling I always get when I’m back home. There’s the version of your hometown that resides in your visual memory, the one that pops into your head in the course of a workday or that you conjure at night as you try to fall asleep, mapping out routes, testing yourself on the names of streets that were once as familiar to you as family. But the real, three-dimensional version never quite matches. Streets look tinier. Narrower. Everything feels more closed in. It’s easy for me to feel like a stranger.

  I visited the cemetery next. Correction: I stopped off at the dollar store first to buy a new arrangement of fake flowers. A word to the wise: Never get a marker with a vase. The imagined emptiness of that vase will haunt you, especially when you live three hours away. You’ll see it in your mind, not only on spring days full of blossoms but also under the blanket of summer’s humidity and the crisp rustlings of autumn afternoons and on numbing winter nights.

  As expected, the flowers in the vase at my dad’s marker had blown away. A year had already passed since my last visit. I stuck the new flowers inside and hoped they’d last longer. I stared down at the marker, at the letters of my dad’s name, the numbers that signalled his birth and death.

  It had been almost twenty years since he passed away from cancer. A brain tumour, at the age of seventy. I was thirty at the time, an adult in some ways, but still very much a child.

  My dad had always been there as a protector, someone to rescue me when my car broke down on the 401 or to offer advice, even if I didn’t always take it. And when it came time to help him, there was so little I could offer. All I could do was watch this man of precision, the man who had built the picket fence around our backyard, fall apart, piece by piece. First he lost the ability to speak. Then he lost his vision in one eye. Then the use of his one arm, followed by his leg. I saw the cruelty of his disease, its indifference. My dad hadn’t deserved this. But the tumour didn’t care about the kind of person he was, the fences he’d built in the name of protecting his children, or that he’d only retired from a lifetime of shift work just five years earlier.

  What I’d witnessed of my father’s decline reminded me of how insubstantial we are, these lives that we hold dear, the people we keep close. Our only armour is the refusal to forget what we’ve lost, to fight as hard as we can to never let those memories dissolve into the abyss.

  After I left the cemetery, I drove downtown and parked my car. I went to the public library. I hadn’t been there for years, not since the time of card catalogues and overhead light fixtures that reminded me of aluminum ice cube trays. The library had modernized, though, as it needed to. The card catalogues were gone, replaced with computers. A renovation of some kind was going on. A couple of fans were blowing cool air. I went to the children’s area, which seemed, more or less, the same as I remembered. Then I went to the stacks to look for my novels. My second book was there, wrapped in plastic, looking faded and old. But not the first book, the one set in Sarnia. Maybe it had been checked out by a local queer youth, someone wanting to see their experiences in their hometown reflected. But maybe not. Sometimes, I feel that my books are considered smaller, or niche, because they explore the lives of gay characters and gay themes. I tell myself to not take this personally, that it’s just my ego talking. Still, it’s hard to shake the suspicion that my work gets minimized when placed alongside other books perceived to deal with broader and more important themes. But my book was old, I reminded myself as I left. Fifteen years had gone by since its publication. And, at some point, most books die.

  After I left, I walked to the Eaton Centre, even though it hasn’t been called that for years. It’s since been renamed Bayside Centre, but I’ll never think of it as that. I wanted to marvel at its vacancy again, its desertedness, like a scene from one of those zombie movies where everyone gets eaten except for a handful of tough-talking survivors. I used to love going to the Eaton Centre. There was a feeling to it, an allure of grandeur, that you didn’t get at Lambton Mall, which was on the other side of the city, with its Woolco and Canadian Tire. The Eaton Centre represented sophistication. The possibility of a life larger than the one you were living.

  I roamed around, trying to remember the sequence of the stores. The
re was the Thrifty’s where I bought a pair of pleated jeans with pleather belt hoops and accents on the pockets. (It was a look that had its moment in the eighties.) The W.H. Smith store where I purchased joke books to memorize in an effort to keep my classmates from noticing that I was overweight. The Le Château where I’d purchased a black double-breasted suit, the same one I’d be crowned in as the runner-up prom king.

  But none of those stores existed anymore, at least not in this mall. Their windows had been papered over, their interiors sealed off to my eyes.

  A few relics were still standing, though. The big brass clock that wasn’t working. The fountain, which, surprisingly, was. And as I walked along, I wondered what would eventually happen to the Eaton Centre. It would never be a mall again, that much was clear. Would it be torn down? Would it be replaced? Or would it be allowed to slowly decompose, like the Titanic at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean?

  I walked around a little more, but I was losing time. I had to be at my mom’s by one or else she’d start to worry. But there was just enough time for me to take the Indian Road overpass, to the pipeline where my dad had worked and where I had worked in the summers the years I was in university.

  The land around the pumping station is dominated by massive drums filled with crude oil. It’s a wonder to me that I used to climb to the top of these tanks, and sometimes down inside them when they were empty. Each tank had a floating roof, and to walk across that roof as it warbled and buckled under my workboots—the cold, enveloping darkness of the thick black liquid just a few feet beneath me—was unsettling.

  There was no climbing up tanks that day, nor would I ever do that again. But I pulled my car over to take a few pictures. The oil drums, once pristine and gleaming white, were now showing signs of rust.

  Before I could take any photos, a work truck pulled up and a man stepped out. It was someone I had known many years ago, someone who had worked with my dad. It took him a few seconds, but he recognized me, and we exchanged small talk through the chain-link fence between us. He told me he was going to retire. He had worked for the pipeline for forty years. Things were not the same, he said, referring, I suppose, to the rusted tanks.

  He asked about my family. Then he asked about my writing. I told him my third book was coming out in another month, but that I was still working full-time. Writing hadn’t been enough to earn a living.

  “I think we all knew that,” he said. “Even if you didn’t.”

  The way he said it, it was as if he was continuing a conversation I hadn’t been a part of. Had my dad discussed my writing with him? The likelihood of my not earning money? It made me feel stupid, as though my foolishness were laid out, exposed for anyone to peruse and reject, like items at a flea market.

  It wasn’t long before I was back on the highway, driving to my waiting mom, leaving that morning and all of its events, both random and not, behind. And yet, not behind. The morning was still there with me, in the car, and would stay with me, taking on a shape in the days ahead. I knew there was a good chance I’d likely forget this day entirely in a few years: the dollar-store flowers, my missing library book, the empty mall, my dad’s co-worker, my embarrassment. I’d lose the memory of the day.

  Unless, I thought. Unless I write it down.

  * * *

  —

  There are very specific things that I remember from my childhood, isolated moments when no one was present except for me. I’m the lone keeper of those memories: Playing with my Star Wars figurines in elaborately planned-out plots that had nothing to do with outer space. The sound of my bedroom window fan on summer nights. The metallic smell of the furnace as the heat rolled up through the vents for the first time in the fall. My small silver Christmas tree with the blue mini lights that I set up in my bedroom during the holidays. I’d lie in my bed with all the other lights off, staring at it and thinking it was the most beautiful thing ever.

  These are the memories that I hold inside. And now, I guess, they’re extended to you, Indecipherable. But it’s so hard to articulate the feelings that those memories conjure. They’re so personal, shaped by my own life, by the purposes that they served and continue to serve. When I go, these solitary memories will go with me. I often think one of my final thoughts will be of that silver Christmas tree. That wouldn’t be such a bad way to go, would it? Seeing those twinkling blue lights one last time before they turn off for good?

  Yet it’s the loss of the shared memories that bothers me most, especially when those memories involve people who are no longer here.

  I remember my dad taking me into the backyard one night to look at the man in the moon. I remember, or I think I remember, the two of us on the back step and my dad kneeling behind me, his arm stretched out over my shoulder, finger pointing towards the moon. The moon was humongous in the sky and hovered brightly just above the feathery tops of the pine trees in our neighbour’s yard.

  I have the memory of a figure of a man wearing a hat and carrying a bucket, who appeared to be running. It was very clear to me that’s what I saw, but that couldn’t actually be possible, because a quick scan of the internet will show you what the man in the moon is supposed to look like. And it looks nothing like what I remember seeing that night.

  So did I actually see what I remember seeing? Or did I make up something in the years since? Maybe I saw nothing that night. Maybe it was just a big moon—which it was. I do remember that. And you can’t deny the presence of the moon.

  What’s significant about that night isn’t the man in the moon or what I thought I saw. It’s the memory of my dad pointing the moon out to me, the memory of that back doorstep, the shadowed fence posts surrounding our yard, the pine trees, the feeling of his body behind me.

  This memory has become increasingly important to me in the years since my dad’s death because I’m the only one left to remember it. If I forget, that memory will disappear forever. And my dad, there on that night, he will disappear, too. But if I keep that memory alive, if I keep conjuring it and thinking about that moon, I keep him alive.

  I keep us together.

  And maybe that’s why I hang on to the physical objects that I do. The unflattering photographs. The buttons. The bits and pieces whose value is to be found not in what they are but in what they represent.

  And maybe that’s what these letters, my responses to these thirteen strangers, have really been about. If I take the time to record my life, to give it shape, I take back the memory. And all the things I feared I’d lost in my small life, I find again.

  * * *

  —

  Would you believe I finally found the ad, Indecipherable? After two weeks of searching and eye strain, I came across it. My response to you, with my coded phone number, had run earlier than I initially thought and appeared the week before I started my search. It read:

  To Whom It May Concern: LTC QMVV. Brian

  I can’t tell you what it meant to finally find the ad. It was evidence of my past. Of my life. I had gone on a mission to prove something, and there it was, undeniable, in grainy black letters against a glowing screen. Looking at that ad felt eerie, as though I’d been searching in dark waters, uncertain I’d ever find it, and then, suddenly, in the distance, I started to make out the shape of the bow, the rusting hull. Something that had been abandoned for all these years had now been reclaimed.

  But what did it ultimately prove?

  You never called. At least, not that I know of. Or maybe you did call and said you’d call back and never did. Or one of my roommates forgot to give me the message. These sorts of things happen even now. Who knows how much of our lives are decided by missed connections?

  But your phone call wasn’t the point. And I think I understand now why I held on to these letters from strangers and why I decided to answer them all these years later. You helped me reclaim the pieces of myself that I thought I had lost but were always here, ju
st below the surface.

  You and all the other men who wrote me letters gave me back the moon.

  After I found my response to you, I marked down the date and wording on a scrap piece of paper. I wound the microfiche back into its roll, placed it inside its labelled box, and set it back into its sequence in the metal filing cabinet. I closed the drawer. It’s still there and will be there long after I’m gone. This is comforting to me, even though no one will ever know what that ad meant or the story behind it.

  There are things we hold on to and things we let go of, and there are details of our lives that have disappeared without our even realizing it. But that doesn’t always mean those details are gone forever. Maybe they’re just waiting to be taken out from their cardboard box. Maybe they’re just waiting to be discovered again.

  Sincerely,

  I’m writing to you from the year 2021. I know that must sound awfully futuristic, but you’ll be surprised to hear I’m not wearing a silver pantsuit. Right now, I’m dressed in plaid pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt, sitting at the old dining room table that you refinished when you were a teenager. So even if you assume the future might be all lightboards and teleporting, it’s not. There are still trees and apartment buildings and convenience stores. Still heartache and joy and people trying to make sense of their lives.

  And yet, some pretty significant changes have happened to you. Before I get to that, I want to tell you a couple of things that should hopefully set your whirling mind at ease.