All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  If I had the wings of an angel,

  over these prison walls I would fly,

  I’d fly to the arms of my poor darling,

  and there…

  He moved close to himself in the mirror and curled his lip with contempt. “You’re a coward,” he said and then lay down and fell asleep on their bed. In the morning he dressed with care, putting on an expensive Egyptian-cotton shirt and camel-hair jacket. He went out into the bright noon hour and found he was relieved to be walking again with a sudden jaunt in his stride, downtown among the crowds. He began to sing: I’ll take you home again, Kathleen… But then he grew suddenly wary and stopped singing, trying to make sure he heard himself before he spoke out loud. He kept looking for himself in store windows to see if he was singing or talking at the top of his voice.

  In the Hudson’s Bay underground shopping mall, he came to a halt so abruptly that an old woman was unable to avoid bumping into him and spilled her bag of toiletries. He didn’t notice. He stared at a portly black man standing by the checkout counter. The black man was talking into a cellphone, and farther along the mall, another man had a cellular phone close to his cheek. Willard realized that for weeks he’d seen people all over the city talking and nodding into phones and no one paid any attention to them. “Nobody knows who they’re talking to,” he cried. “Maybe they’re not talking to anyone,” and the old woman, picking up her rolls of Downy Soft toilet paper scattered around his feet, looked up and said, “You’re not only rude, you’re crazy,” but he hurried off.

  At Rogers Sound Systems a young salesman, with a Jamaican accent Willard had trouble understanding, tried to interest him in the latest models of cellphones. Willard was surprised at how compact the phones were. When the salesman said, “Look, this one even has its own built-in flashlight,” Willard said, “A phone is a phone. How complicated can that be?” The salesman shrugged. “In that case, we have older models on sale, half price.”

  Willard bought one of the sale-price models. When the salesman tried to advise him, saying, “About all those old-fangled buttons, man—” Willard cut him short with, “Never mind. I think I can figure out a phone.” He strode out of the store and set out for home, eager to get talking to Kate.

  As soon as he got to the footbridge he tapped a green button and, holding the phone close to his ear like an old walkie-talkie, began telling Kate a joke he’d heard many years ago: “How these two old ladies had promised each other that the first one to die would come back and tell the other what Heaven was like, so after Sadie died Sophie waited and waited, and just when she gave up, Sadie appeared in a halo of light and Sophie said, You came back, so what’s it like? And Sadie said, You get up in the morning and eat and then you have sex, and then it’s sex before breakfast and afterwards sex, and before lunch and then lunch and more sex and sex before a snack before goodnight and then sex, and Sophie said, Sadie… Sadie, this is Heaven! But Sadie said: Heaven, who’s in heaven. I’m a rabbit in Wisconsin.” He laughed and laughed but with the phone tucked against his cheek, so that no one paid any attention to him. “Oh, I’m in fine fettle,” he said. “This walking clears the lungs.”

  Willard stood on the footbridge over the ravine. He had never stopped to look down into the ravine before. He’d always been in a hurry to get home, his head tucked into his shoulder against the wind. He was surprised at how deep the ravine actually was, and how dense and lush the trees and bush were. The city itself was flat, all the streets laid out in a severe military grid, but here was the ravine, and of course there were ravines like this one that ran all through the city, deep, dark, mysterious places, running like lush green wounds through the concrete, the cement surfaces, and he felt sheepish. “All these years, and I’ve never been down in the ravines. Who knows what goes on down there. Can you imagine that, Kate?” He began to walk slowly home. He looked up and down the street. “All this is beginning to trouble me. Everything’s beginning to trouble me,” he said. “Everything seems to be only the surface of things. Everything is not where it’s supposed to be. I mean, Abraham was always Abraham, some kind of old desert chieftain from around the River Jordan, but that’s probably not true. All the actual references that I can find say he lived in Heran, in Anatolia, and that’s a place in southern Turkey, close to where Genesis says Noah’s ark ended up, settled on Mount Ararat, and that’s not in Jordan, that’s in eastern Turkey. The whole thing seems more and more like a Turkish story, a Turkish delight,” and he laughed and quickened his pace, “because Abraham’s descendant, a man called Dodanim, became the Dodecanese Islands, and a guy named Kittim is really Kriti, which is Crete, and Javan is really the Aegean, and Ashkenaz… Everyone knows the Ashkenazi are from north of the Danube. The whole thing, the whole story, took place somewhere else farther north. It’s not a desert story at all, that’s why the Jews weren’t seen in Egypt…they weren’t there, they were out on the edge of the world.”

  He was so out of breath from talking and walking at the same time that he had to stop walking. He had a cramp in his wrist from clutching the cellphone to his cheek. He was relieved. There was no one on his street of tree-shaded homes. He put the phone in his jacket pocket. Then he suddenly shuddered and choked back tears. All his talk, he felt, was wasted. He was alone. He was alone in a well of silence. “Jesus,” he said, “even Sadie came back and said something.” He felt abandoned, he wanted to hear what Kate thought of all his talk, all his daring insights. A man coming around the corner with his dog on a leash hesitated because Willard looked so frantic, but Willard shouted, “And a good day to you.” The man hurried on.

  Around noon on Easter Sunday, Willard put on a lightweight tweed suit that he hadn’t worn for years. He went across the footbridge and strode along Bloor Street, revelling in the strong sunlight. He hadn’t been out of the house for days because he’d been working in his study on several cuneiform texts. He’d hardly eaten. He’d done very little talking to Kate, but now he felt fresh and bold and self-confident as he walked among well-dressed women.

  “It’s a wonderful day,” he said to Kate, holding the phone close. “And I’ve got wonderful news. I’ve finally figured this thing out, yes ma’am… The answer’s right there in what looks like a contradiction that’s built in at the beginning, right there at the start of Genesis, where God says he’s made man in his own image, and then, in the second chapter, there’s no one around. Everything’s empty. So whoever he’d made has flown the coop.”

  As the red light changed to green at Church Street, he stepped off the curb, saying, “The whole place is empty, man is gone, and what that means is that for nearly a million years, man trekked around chasing animals, naming them, hunting them, but suddenly he got smart. Ten thousand years ago he got smart. He wanted a garden. And a closed garden is something you’ve got to cultivate. And man shows up in Genesis again, and he was Cain the cultivator, who’d taken off from the old happy grazing grounds of Eden to work the earth in a new place, the new civilization where there was nothing. That’s what the new Eden was, not a paradise of two witless souls lying around under an apple tree, but Cain, the tattooed man who had the courage to build a closed garden, a city out there on the edge of the world. Cain the civilized man, the marked man…” and Willard raised his arms, facing into the sun. The women in their Easter outfits shied away from him. “That’s when man became magnificent, Kate. That’s when he went into the dark to create his own world, to create himself. That’s the first time he had the guts to take his own word for everything.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” a tall, lean woman with big owl glasses said. “Oh yes.” She was smiling eagerly. He quickly brought the phone closer to his ear. He wanted to be left alone. He wanted Kate. He waved the woman with the owl glasses away and as he did so, his thumb slipped onto a red button. He had never pressed the red button before, but now he suddenly heard Kate. She was calling him. “Willard, Willard, what’s been the matter with you?”

  “It’s you!”

  “Of
course it’s me.”

  “I knew you were there. I knew it,” he cried triumphantly.

  “You knew? You knew where I was!”

  “No. Where are you?” he whispered, stepping through a crowd of women on the sidewalk.

  “I’m here. Right where I said I would be. I’ve been screaming at you for weeks, and you didn’t hear a word.”

  “I never dreamed that all I had to do was touch the other button. I never pushed it. I never heard you.”

  “But I heard you,” Kate said. “Can you imagine what it’s been like listening and listening and I couldn’t say a word…”

  “But I never thought…” he said.

  “That’s all you’ve been doing, Willard,” she said, calming down. “Thinking.”

  “I’ve been talking to you.”

  “A blue streak, I’d say.”

  “Don’t be upset,” he said.

  “I have a right to be upset,” she said. “Sitting here like a dumb bunny for weeks.”

  “Never mind,” he said.

  “I mind. And locking our bedroom door, that did not help. I was yelling so loud at you I thought I would die. I was hoarse for two days, I lost my voice.”

  His thumb was aching from pushing back and forth. “We’re just wasting time talking like this,” he said.

  “Time is not my problem,” she said.

  “I have been dying to know for weeks what you think.”

  “What I really think?”

  “Yes.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.”

  “I think you are,” and she paused, and then with quiet gravity, “simply magnificent. I can’t imagine living without you. I hang on every word.”

  “You do?”

  “I would never lie to you.”

  “Thank God you’re still alive,” he said.

  “Nobody wants to die,” she said.

  A KISS IS STILL A KISS

  An old blind man shuffled his feet under a chokecherry tree, trying to get out of the shade of the tree, tapping his white cane as he hunted for the sun, for a warm bench in the park where other men lay sprawled asleep on the grass, their hats in the crook of their arms and empty beer cans between their legs. A seagull stood close to the sleeping men. Another perched on one leg on the stone sill of a large display window across the road from the park. The window was on the ground floor of the Household Trust Tower. It was noon and a woman sat at a carillon inside the window, and because there were speakers in the high branches of the trees in the park, the old man could hear her playing. He sang the words as he tapped his cane:

  You must remember this,

  A kiss is still a kiss…

  He kept tapping until he began to feel strong heat on the back of his neck, sunlight by a bench at the foot of a two-storey wall that had been painted to portray ochre fields and green foothills, clouds and white birds, and leaping out of the sky was a rainbow that fell to root behind a bench where a young woman sat alone, her face tilted to the sun, alone until a young man sat down beside her. He was in his late twenties. He wore a black felt hat and had gathered his long black hair into a tooled silver clasp at the back of his neck.

  “You’re looking good,” he said to the girl. She was wearing high-top black policeman’s boots and a mottled battle-fatigue jacket that bore a hand-stitched patch over her heart: May The Baby Jesus Open Your Mind And Shut Your Mouth. Her head was shaved clean except for a hedge of yellow hair and she had braces on her teeth.

  “You some kind of Indian?” he asked.

  “No way,” she said. “No Indian looks like this.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “You a doper?” she asked.

  “Nope,” he said.

  “Only a doper would figure me for a Indian. I don’t look nothing like those guys sleeping on the lawn.”

  “Right.”

  “Fucking right,” she said, and tilted her face to the sun again.

  “This park’s a good place for punks, eh?”

  “Whatever you say, man,” she said.

  “You a punker?”

  “Get real,” she said and closed her eyes.

  Hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, he said, “You mind what I wanta ask you?”

  “Talk’s cheap, man.”

  “How come you got those Tinkertoy tracks on your teeth?”

  “My braces?”

  “Yeah.”

  “My old boyfriend, he figured they were prime, man, so prime he got himself some braces, too. He don’t need no braces. He don’t need nothing. He got himself beautiful teeth. He don’t care about nothing. He’s just doing what he does.”

  “What’s he do?”

  “He don’t really do nothing.”

  “Me, too,” he said. “Not if I can help it.”

  “Perfect,” she said.

  “What’s your name?”

  “I don’t deal in names, man. Not with strangers.”

  “What kinda paranoid is that?”

  “The right kind, man. The right kind because I got the fucking facts.”

  “So tell me your name, for a fact.”

  “What for?”

  “For nothing. I can’t talk to nobody that’s got no name.”

  “I ain’t nobody.”

  “Right.”

  “Cindy,” she said. “Cindy Wichita.”

  “That ain’t a name, that’s a town.”

  “I can’t help that, man. How can I help that?”

  “That’s a town in the movies.”

  “I ain’t no movie, man. No way. No stupid movie is happening inside my head. If you’re so smart, what’s yours?”

  “Abner,” he said. “Abner Deerchild.”

  “Fucking unreal,” she said. “Absolutely fucking unreal.”

  “What?”

  “You got a Indian name.”

  “Right.”

  “You panhandling or you on the pogey?”

  “I just kinda steal, you know, like I steal what I can.”

  “Like, you’re a real thief?”

  “I just look out for myself.”

  “Keep your eyes open.”

  “Right.”

  “So don’t fuck my head, man,” she said.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know, like, suddenly we’re talking to each other, so just don’t do it.”

  “Okay.”

  “So what’s with you? How come you sit down beside me, like outta the blue?”

  “Nothing. Nothing I’d want to say right out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Not right out.”

  “Why not?”

  “You might get mad.”

  “Big deal.”

  “I better not.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’d like to fuck you.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I’m not trying to be funny.”

  “Yeah, so why not?”

  “Because I’m not.”

  “So why you want to fuck me?”

  “You got great hair.”

  She laughed. “There’s some dudes,” she said, “some dudes who lose their lunch looking at my hair. Lose their fucking lunch. Freak out, they freak out. That’s what everybody is, scared shitless of their own shadow and they figure right off the bat that I’m their shadow.” She opened a canvas sack beside her on the bench and pulled out a floppy leather-bound book. She put it on her knee. “Check it out. This here, that’s my grandmother’s Bible.”

  “Bibles weird me out,” he said.

  “Bibles are the word.”

  “They still weird me out.”

  “This here’s the light,” she said, tapping the book cover with her finger. “When you got the light, when you got the blessed fucking light beaming on you, you don’t get so scared of your shadow, you don’t get so scared in the dark.”

  “The dark don’t scare me.” He smoothed the nap of the crown of his hat with the flat of his hand, straightened the
orange feather in the black suede band, and settled the hat on his lap.

  “I don’t scare,” he said again, leaning back and stretching his long legs and crossing his leather cowboy boots.

  “Everybody’s scared,” she said.

  “Not this dude.”

  “Sure you ain’t a dope head?”

  “No way. I got my shit in gear.”

  “You carrying some shit?”

  “Naw.”

  “Know where I can get some?” she asked.

  “I told you, I don’t do dope.”

  “You ain’t never done dope?”

  “I done dope, every dickhead’s done dope, but I don’t do no dope now.”