by Nino Ricci
When Verne had finished his last exam he invited me to go downtown to a place he knew, a college of some sort, where we could pick up some dope. We took the Steeles bus to the subway, then rode down to Bloor and across. At Bloor there was a palpable sense of the nearness of Christmas, people milling on the platform clutching shopping bags and parcels and Christmas carols playing tinnily over the loudspeakers.
We emerged finally into the slushy wet of Bloor Street, coming a little farther west to what seemed an apartment building, tall and plain and new like the buildings at Centennial, of the same grey concrete. A forecourt in front held the huge huddled statue of a man or boy, two leather-jacketed men loitering idly in the shadow of it, eyeing us as we approached, both holding German shepherds like extensions of themselves at the ends of short leashes.
“We’re just here to see a friend,” Verne said to them. “Tom, on the third.”
And one of them looked us up and down with a kind of bored amusement, then nodded us through.
Inside, the building lost all trace of the grey conformity of its exterior. There was a large, careful mural in the lobby, portraits in different hands of various musicians from the sixties; but beside it someone had spray-painted LONG LIVE ELVIS in a crude fluorescent pink. The surrounding walls, the elevator doors, were thick with similar graffiti, much of it indecipherable or merely random slashes and swirls of colour. There was an air to everything of prematurely decayed newness, the carpeting worn and spotted with burns, the ceiling tiles stained and pitted. In a corner, amidst cigarette butts and paper scraps, was what looked like the hardened stool of a dog or child.
We waited at the elevators for several minutes.
“Let’s walk,” Verne said finally.
We went up a dim stairwell to the third floor and came into a long corridor, at one end of it a small child sitting naked on the floor fumbling with a set of large coloured rings. As we watched, a woman emerged from an open doorway nearby dressed only in a flowered sarong, breasts and belly exposed, and bent to pick up the child, her breasts swaying. She caught sight of us as she turned and stared at us indifferently an instant, then disappeared again through her doorway.
“This place is wild,” Verne said.
Verne knocked on a door toward the other end of the corridor and was answered by a tall, muscular man in jeans and a brown leather vest, his hair tied back in a long pony-tail like an Indian’s.
“Verne, my good man.” His voice had the hint of an American drawl. “It’s been a long time.”
He shook Verne’s hand firmly, seeming to distinguish himself from the decay of his surroundings by his air of robust well-being. But when Verne introduced us his energy closed me out, remaining fixed on Verne as if I weren’t there.
“Another one of your converts?”
We passed through a large, gloomy living room or common room of some sort, the windows papered over with newsprint and the furnishings sparse and institutional and worn. From a corner another German shepherd lay glaring at us out of a wicker crib, his low growl rumbling like distant thunder.
“What’s with all the dogs?” Verne said.
Tom grinned.
“How long has it been since you’ve been down here, my son? There’s nothing like a German shepherd to prevent the in-fil-tration of criminal elements.”
But his humour seemed oddly cryptic and private.
He led us down a dim hallway and into a room at the end of it whose door-frame was edged with strips of foam, the door closing behind us with a soft hiss of forced air like a hermetic seal. Inside was a desk with a scale on it, a bed, a few bookshelves; on one wall hung a mask in dark wood, African or Indian, its face contorted into what seemed a shout or a scream. Tom opened a cabinet to reveal a phalanx of sleek stereo components, setting an album rolling on the turntable there with a reflexive efficiency; and then with the same instinctiveness he pulled a baggie from a drawer and began to roll a joint.
There was a bookshelf near where I’d sat, and I began to look through it idly, the titles there as cryptic as Tom’s humour.
“I see this one reads,” Tom said to Verne. “I thought that was going out of style these days.”
“Yeah, Vic’s a real brain.”
But I couldn’t have said how Verne had formed that impression of me.
We smoked a few minutes in silence, Tom meanwhile measuring out baggies of dope on his scale. Stoned, I felt a heightened sense of menace, from Tom, from the dogs, from the building’s otherworldliness. There was something here I couldn’t quite make sense of, some former fundamental upheaval and then its falling away.
Before handing us our bags Tom pulled a vial from a drawer and knocked two tiny pills from it into his palm.
“Purple microdot,” he said to Verne. “On the house. A little Christmas gift.”
He wrapped the pills in a piece of foil and dropped them into one of the bags.
“I dunno, I’m not really into that stuff,” Verne said. “Why don’t you give them to Vic?”
Tom shrugged.
“Suit yourself. Just don’t accuse me of corrupting our youth.”
He handed the baggie to me and took the money I offered him.
“Take it easy on that stuff, my boy,” he said, speaking directly to me for the first time.
Outside the cold had turned cutting with the approach of night.
“Can you believe that place?” Verne said. “It was different before when it was just students and that. Christ, did you get a load of those dogs?”
But I had the sense we’d been diminished somehow by our visit, carrying on in our own small delinquencies with no project beyond the simplest one of getting stoned. I wondered now what had ever connected me to Verne, how we’d spent so many hours in this illusion of shared purpose, how I’d imagined him so much on the inside of things when in the end his life was as small as my own. And yet there was a kind of perfection to him, to his generosity, his essential normalcy, and I would have given anything to live as he did, with his sense of being at home in the world.
I rode back to Mersea the next day on the bus. There was a changeover in London from the express to the local, and I had time to go down a sidestreet near the station and smoke a joint. Afterwards I caught a glimpse of myself in the station window, long-haired and bearded and stoned, and panicked suddenly at what I’d become; and back on the bus, single-minded with urgency, I pulled my razor and foam from my suitcase and locked myself in the windowless stench of the washroom to shave, bracing myself against the bus’s bumps and swerves like an astronaut fighting weightlessness. My beard came away in small creamy tufts I had to wash from my razor with each stroke, careful and methodical and slow; I watched my face, my older, younger self, emerging in the mirror like an image slowly brightening in a Polaroid, felt the same sense of some strange temporal leap, of hovering briefly over the chasm that divided present from past.
When I emerged, my face raw, it was twilight already, the bus gliding through a shadowy dreamscape of barren trees and flat, greying snow-puddled fields. An older woman in an overcoat and flowered dress had been waiting to use the washroom, sitting tentative in a seat near the washroom door; she averted her eyes when I passed as if ashamed to be discovered there, waiting. There were a half a dozen or so other passengers, a few older people up toward the front, a young woman, two long-haired teenagers in back – it struck me how little I could say about them finally, where they came from, what they thought. I had lived in this flat countryside for most of my life but still entered it now like a stranger, knew little more about the lives unfolding here, on this darkening bus, in the one-store towns, behind the farmhouse windows we passed along the highway’s gloom, than if I were entering for the first time into a foreign country.
I drifted near sleep in my seat, lulled by the warmth seeping up from the heating vents, by the last mellow lingering of my stone. I remembered a television show I’d seen once where a man fell asleep on a train and awoke to find it had stopped at a
town in the past, Willoughby, light-filled and rustic, remembered how the show had filled me with boyish hopefulness. At the end, when the man decided to get off the train, to step into his dream, we discovered he’d hurled himself to his death; but in the dream, in the past, he’d walked on into town as if his death had been merely a shifting off of his other life, the small token price of his entry to a world more familiar even than home.
XIX
My father picked me up at the bus station. I felt awkward at finding him waiting there, hunched against the cold at the side of his car like a footman. Some lightness, the anticipation of greeting, seemed to fall away from him at once when he saw me.
“Come nu bum, with your hair like that.” And already I’d ruined things, could hear in his tone his lost good intentions, his desire, his inability, to get along with me.
We held a gathering at our house on Christmas Eve. A tinselly Christmas tree had been set up in a corner of the living room but there were no presents beneath it, only a plastic manger scene with a tiny cloth-diapered Jesus laid amidst bits of varnished straw.
“Oh, mascalzone!” Gelsomina said. She had three children now, had put on weight and carried herself with a smooth adultness, aggressively good-humoured. “You look like a Beatle with that hair.”
But there was a wariness in people, a forced friendliness I felt deadened in the face of. I tried to bring up the person in me who’d fit in with them but couldn’t find the right gesture or word that might conjure him, even speaking Italian seeming to require a hopeless exertion, my mouth resisting it like a lie.
“Come va, up there in Toronto?”
“Okay, I guess.”
And though I wanted to despise them all I knew I was the one who was lacking, that I’d found no better world to put against their own.
On Christmas morning my father gave me a cheque for five hundred dollars.
“And if you ever come back with your hair like that you can sleep on the street.”
I thought of returning the cheque but couldn’t muster the strength, the outrage, to do so, could see only how far from the point my father was, how he’d misunderstood, how above all he wanted only to be good to me, for me to allow that. In the end I locked myself in the bathroom and cut my hair, Aunt Teresa joking afterwards that the cut had cost my father five hundred dollars.
“Next time he’ll come home with a beard on top of it, and it’ll cost you a thousand.”
“Sì, we’ll see about that.”
But my father had darkened with emotion at Aunt Teresa’s teasing, seemed as afflicted by my capitulation to him as he might have been by my continued resistance.
It seemed pointless now to have come home at all. I’d imagined some vague pleasure in returning, some coming back to myself, yet felt now unsolid as air, without contours. I called no one, could think of no one from high school I wanted to see, instead sitting holed up in front of the television till late into night like someone in hiding. During the days I worked with Rocco and Domenic on the farm – we were steaming the greenhouses to prepare them for the winter crop, spreading long plastic strips down their lengths that blistered like heaving monsters as the steam fed under them. But our conversation was stilted like that of strangers, dwindling finally to silence as the hours of work wore away the obligation we’d felt to speak.
The Sunday after Christmas I visited Rita. I’d bought her a gift, a portable radio, what I’d imagined appropriate for someone approaching her teens.
“That was very thoughtful,” Mrs. Amherst said, but she took it up along with its wrappings almost at once after Rita had opened it and disappeared with it into the basement.
I was left alone with Rita in the living room, sitting across from her like a suitor. I could hear television sounds from the rec room, sensed Elena silently watching there.
“How’s school?”
“Okay, I guess.”
But already I could feel the familiar deadness in my voice.
“I guess you’re in grade seven this year.”
“Yeah, Mrs. Miller, what a drag, she’s so strict.”
We talked a few minutes and then she grew restive, shifted in her seat, pulled down the hem of her dress, shifted again. She seemed burdened, evasive, seemed to sense some expectation in me she couldn’t meet.
“So I guess I’ll see you again at Easter or something. I just wanted to bring your present.”
“Thank you.”
At home I lay on my bed in a kind of stupor, tried to read, decided to take a bath. For a long time I lay perfectly still in the water, letting it smooth out till it held the pale inertness of my body like glass.
I decided to take the morning bus to Toronto the next day, New Year’s Eve.
“Ma come,” my father said, irritated, thinking perhaps I only wanted to get out of work on the farm. “I can’t believe school is starting already.”
“I have some work I have to finish.”
And in the morning we parted as darkly as we’d met, only the silent ride to the station and then I was gone.
I arrived back at the residence in mid-afternoon. The building was deserted, the halls empty, the cafeteria closed. I walked through an arctic cold to a mall near the campus and bought some lunch meat and bread at the Dominion store there, but back in my room left the food in its bag and smoked a joint instead, then smoked a second one.
Afterwards I went to the common room to put my food in the fridge there and watch TV. But some of the Chinese students had gathered there to cook supper, come out of the shadowy existence they’d had during term to take over the common room now like squatters, the air bright with cooking sounds as I came in and with the quick lilting tones of their conversation. At the sight of me there was a hush as if they’d been caught out in some embarrassment or crime; I put my food in the fridge, then retreated at once to my room.
I decided to drop one of the hits of acid I’d got from Tom. When after fifteen minutes or so I felt nothing I dropped the second one as well; and then almost imperceptibly my blood began to quicken. There was a hum in my teeth like the metallic aftertaste of electricity: it promised some slow revelation if I would wait for it, the gradual unfolding of each tiny path and step that led on to the end of things.
I put on my coat and went outside, walking through a blanket of unbroken snow toward the tiny lake at the front of the residence, the cold splitting like water to let me pass. On the lake the ice groaned beneath its cover as I walked, cracks splintering away from each step – I imagined following their jagged progress, imagined being the thin nothing of a crack as it shot through the ice. Then in the centre of the lake I lay down spread-eagled in the snow, staring up into the star-spattered dark of the sky. The snow seemed neither hot nor cold, the sky neither empty nor full. I closed my eyes, floating, and remembered a poem from high school about an old Indian woman left to die in the cold, remembered the teacher describing the slow dreamy warmth of freezing to death.
I lay with eyes closed for a long time, bits of my body seeming to fall away like breakage from an ice floe. Then there were sounds, dream noises; from somewhere a light winked over me.
“Are you all right, son?”
I sat up. There was a man with a flashlight standing at a distance.
“It’s just the snow,” I said.
“What’s that?”
A security guard. I grew aware of where I was, the snowy bushes around the lake, the looming shapes of the university, buildings beyond.
“I just came out for a walk,” I called out, too loud perhaps and yet lucid, pleased for an instant at this picture of reasonableness I’d presented.
“I think you’d better be getting back inside now.”
I slept in the next day, New Year’s, until three. My head felt blasted, hollowed out; I imagined it blown apart like John Kennedy’s, the back of it scooped out like so much meat and bone. I needed to eat but lacked the will to, nibbling on some of the food I’d left in the common room but then smoking a join
t and passing the rest of the day in stoned half-awareness in front of the common room TV. A couple of the Chinese students came in at one point but at the sight of me simply removed some food from the fridge and retreated. I wished they’d return with their cooking sounds and talk, imagined them taking me in as in some Christmas story about the sudden unexpected brightening of a life at the brink of despair.
The next day I decided to go downtown to buy more acid from Tom, the prospect of a goal heartening me. But when I reached Tom’s building there was a crowd gathered in front: someone had jumped. The body still lay there on the pavement, lumped like a sack in the circle of space enclosed by the crowd – a woman perhaps, or a girl, though someone had draped a parka over her and only the back of the head showed, a mat of black hair with a line of pale scalp at the parting. A smudge of blood had coloured the pavement near the head, frugally though, hardly visible against the pavement’s wet brown.
There was a strange tension in the crowd, a muted, gloomy excitement.
“There’s one or two every New Year’s,” someone said.
This was not how I’d imagined it, at once so mundane and so chilling, the crowd, the strange tension, the body crumpled anonymous on the pavement as in a scene from a movie, as unreal, as distant from me, as that. Yet she had had a life as I did, had moved, thought, been human, and still had managed to cross the gap that kept the thought from the act, been able to open the window, to lift herself over the sill.
The police came, then an ambulance.
“Just move along, folks, the show’s over.”
I walked away from the building toward downtown. It had begun to snow, the flakes swirling in the halos of streetlights in the twilight chill; I wanted only to be warm, inside, alone. I stopped to eat at a Harvey’s, the man in the booth beside me unfolding a wrinkled picture of Jesus, smoothing it meticulously, carefully folding it again.
