On our final night, Cara and I go up to the dome car to capture a few glimpses of the beautiful snowcapped peaks and sprawling wilderness. In the morning, we will arrive at Vancouver’s Pacific Central Station.
We are silent, watching the sun fade behind the black mountains while the sky blushes itself deeper shades of violet. We sit close to one another in the deep west of our country. Even without looking I can feel her there. I look over occasionally and she smiles that honest smile. There is sorrow but also great joy in it.
Hours pass as we talk about our hopes for the future and laugh about how cynical we are with the world. How realistic yet blithe. With Cara, the silver linings have never been far away. In the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if things will be different now. If we’ll stay in touch the way I’ve longed to. I realize that isn’t entirely up to me. My life now is hard and permeable, like sandstone that can hold up structures but crumbles beneath rushing water. The fading sunlight somehow makes this all the more apparent. I can’t be fixed, but feeling her here with me … She gives me a hint of healing.
After a short stop in Kamloops, the landscape now consumed with night, we sit in silence. The sounds of the train are rhythmic. A melody, a lullaby. The interior lights are dim. We are together in our last hours of travel and I will remember this moment.
Cara speaks in a voice as gentle as the first night, but less urgent. “Andy, why do you think it is that people never say what they mean? Why people let go of love, leave it out too long?”
I feel her eyes on me. I don’t rush my response. Without looking at her I answer. It’s an answer that has slept a long time.
“Because we fear it is not enough.”
I look over at her then, her eyes and lips, her face thin in the faint light. The moonlight paints her hair bright.
After a few moments we fall back into a natural silence and she rests her head on my shoulder. I don’t know how long we stay this way. But as I drift somewhere between sleep and mindfulness, I hear her whisper, “I’ve missed you, Andy.”
“I’ve missed you too, Cara.”
The next morning is a blur. The arrival is just after nine and there is a bit of scrambling, as I can’t find my wallet. After eventually finding it deep beneath my seat, I get off the train and look for Cara. She is waiting for me by a large concrete pillar not far away, and in the natural light of the world, amongst the concrete and bustle, she is a sight I could not miss. It feels strange to have such a brief farewell after spending the better part of four days together, but that’s the way the world works. It’s felt like a year. It’s been a beautiful trip. I don’t say much about it, but Canada really is a breathtaking place and I know she agrees. Now though, we have schedules—taxis to catch and different places to be. We embrace a final time and I make sure to cherish the moment. She tells me she’ll see me soon, and I tell her the same. Then the girl I’ve loved since I was ten years old walks away, and I feel a fullness in my heart.
Much later, during the second week with my brother, I am digging through my bag looking for another travel-sized tube of toothpaste when I find a small piece of paper tucked along the lining.
I open the folded note and read it. The first line at the top reads, “Andres,” and I know the handwriting. I will spare much of the letter for myself. Its words are that dear to me, and I wish not to spoil them. This is the year I lost a friend to an accident out of my control. This is the year my mother was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. This is the year I turned twenty-six and missed everybody I ever loved and wondered about the girl who gave me solace. And she came from the shadows in a strange moment of life and we shared four nights on a train in a particularly warm July. I still love Cara and I know that I always have. When I was younger this tore me apart. Now, I know it as a reassurance. That despite the time that eats away at us, the heart we carry remains the same. Four days could not heal a life. One person cannot do that, even if there is love. But time goes on and somehow we find reasons to survive. Even if it’s just a hint. Just a moment.
The last line of the note reads, “It has always been enough.”
The 7th Day
LIAM RYAN
it’s Sunday—
our least favourite
we watch reruns
as the clock ticks
and the shade
creeps over the lawn
I meant to do laundry,
you meant to call your Mother
but neither of us are good with
these things so we’ll brood instead,
watching the tv in silence
the walls are older now
just like we’re older, just like that
but they still keep the quiet in
so i love them
just like I love you,
just like that
my warped coaster
your Mexican blanket
and Sunday
the shade creeping
over the lawn
The Shooting Squad
CANISIA LUBRIN
WE CARRIED YOU UP THE AISLE, THEN listened to a strange woman turn your death or your whole life into a lesson. I paused, I think, because
I sensed something monstrous in her voice and the clean tiles and rogue robes the people on the altar wore. Later, back at the house, everyone was drinking and drinking. I remembered your sips, how maniacal and musical. I don’t have to speak sinister things now because I learned something from you, my insensitive twin. How to keep the quiet in. Why this whole life is obscene.
Still, there is something beautiful in all this.
I hadn’t wanted to quit drinking, though the tremors waking me nightly took me away from thinking otherwise. Nightly, I woke up howling. I’d have brokered another reason to clench my teeth, to mute my whole body into a single sound, or to curve the world into a bell if it meant one more moment with you still sitting on the porch, and with Mum, that yellow-white fire we knew in our childhood. Only a month ago I figured if I just kept drinking something I’d be fine. So I drank juice. All I drank was juice. The kales, collards, spinaches, beets, carrots. Each of them a way of emerging from this darkness of being broken. This afternoon, though, I have this fake ID that says I’m old enough to own a gun.
I am here because I want to tell you that I did that stupid thing and got a license to teach people how to shoot. I considered thievery and prostitution, maybe selling my blood to The Flea. I know it’s a place we made up in our childhood just like that place we made up for the girls who paid us no mind. I realize now this strategy would lead to zero torque in our romantic lives.
I’ve been going to a nursing home every Sunday to play cards with the residents. Some of them look like they’re fine being almost-dead and it’s a gift to witness. Do you know now everyone’s wish for when to go? Do you know about me and my new Sunday life?
What if I told you I found any real thing in that place? Otherwise, I’d just want time to study what I know about being a man, what I know about our father, why he said he was going for one year to work in Côte d’Ivoire and never returned. But there’s that moment I was sure I glimpsed you in the garden out back of that old-age home. I thought I saw a gang of wraiths tear you open with the gold-plated bayonet of a gold musket. I reached out for you, tried to move my legs, to call for help. But I was trapped in something thick and grey. Luminous and suddenly struck with a chorus of crickets, the garden shrunk, or I did and I might have tumbled into an atomic explosion. I might have followed that streak of light as it fell away from me. I felt no rage. Just silence.
You know already that I’m not here because I gave up drinking, or because of something endlessly recognizable. Crimes by any other name.
Then let me tell you about this one time I introduced myself as C. L. R. James to one of the ladies at the old-age home. You can imagine how I felt when she told me she was related to CLR twice removed on her mother’s side and then she looked at me with calmness as though to confirm I had some d
ecency left in me. I told her it was you and Mum who introduced me to the man—one of the true polymaths of the twentieth century. She told me that the next time I visit you I should ask you to spare this boy one pity—that if you were up to god-business now, you should remember I’m not looking for much, other than a handful of proud, hopeful, and some constellation named after you. CLR would want it so, she said.
The senior people never asked for my name. I respect that. They’re too tired and not in the mood most of the time. But I’d like you to meet them: the shortest of the trio is Yaan, then Ras S. (just Ras S.), who has a scar across her face from ear to ear that she called a tattoo, to cover up her metamorphosis from cyclops to human. I didn’t ask her, but she divulged that her eyesight was better before; two eyes did not necessarily translate into double the vision. But I think Paul Paul would be your favourite. Paul lived in the Amazonian jungle for five years with an Indigenous community he claims no one else on Earth knew. His was a ragamuffin’s sensibility, like he was always ready for some mischief. I suppose they were so starved for a goddamn good time by the ridiculous elder-care system they didn’t care much for what I brought in with me, just what I came for. After weeks of being underwhelmed with the boredom of giving into boredom, I made my move. My name, to them, might as well have been Mary or Hello, There, which is what the nurses called me.
I got to know these people because I taught them how to shoot. This is the real story, the most important thing to know because, of course, there are no shooting ranges anywhere near here.
They were talking during teatime one Saturday and Yaan—who was strong, stronger than me but was so ready to go she must be dead by now—said she and Ras S. might as well give up on that dream because their arthritis wouldn’t let them shoot. That instead of bullets, they might just end up shooting curses out of their mouths anyway. Paul Paul said that he was a sniper in WWII, part of the Ghost Recall unit under General Something—I forget. So he was perfectly suited to assist me but when he offered to teach the group, I looked down and noticed he was missing both of his indexes.
“No, you can’t,” I offered. My cup of coffee trembled. “Do you have indexes somewhere to snap back on those hands?”
“You are a rude fella,” he said. “If we all went out like lights during a storm now, you’d keep all the treasure for yourself.”
“But I would also kill the dragon,” I said, feeling clever.
“The only dragon to defeat will be yourself,” he said. He looked away, somewhere far off, and chewed hard. His was the most enthusiastic chin.
Paul Paul finally shook his large head and trotted off behind his walker. Ras S. said she’d never be brave enough to pull the trigger, and Yaan just stood there staring at the cobweb, hanging like a sad corner chandelier over the brown table near the kitchen.
A moment later, she said, “So, you shoot guns.”
I told them I was the youngest Top Gun champion ever and for that I had to beat out trigger-happy Americans who were full of fast food and the right-to-bear-arms. I was only halfway through that story when Yaan said, “I wish those killjoy PSWs would let us shoot guns for fun around here. What kind of old-age paradisio comes without a designated shooting range? And why would they let a shooting instructor loiter the halls just to rub it in our faces?”
Sure, I was the nameless volunteer who started playing cards with seniors because he stopped drinking coffee and could no longer bear to be around his friends, who is still stuck to the hour in which his twin stepped on a gun and shot himself dead. Even though, to carve out a route through imagining a different outcome, he preferred the story that this death was caused by caffeine toxicity. In truth, I was moss. Moss growing on a fallen tree trunk, deep in the forest.
“Heck,” I told them, “I can teach you how to shoot. And you don’t need a range.”
I went home that night, sweating like a jungle somewhere near Hell-and-Handbasket Road. I had fancied myself a hero, a warrior, a shaman. My math is problematic, so don’t cling too strongly. I must have been miscalculating how much commitment was in me for those end-of-lifers. What did it mean that I was close to holding each of those people close to my bones, passing them over my hurt like pumice? I’d gone mad. I can’t tell which way is up or east, but I had to figure out how to turn a snoozefest into a shooting range by that weekend.
Forgive me this one alienating moment of talking to you like you always wanted. Of course if you must go on and have your revenge that much is yours to do. I won’t bother to recount my detour through the library searching for books as though I’d expected to find solutions for already dead people who had, in their lifetimes, come back from madness. I may have a monopoly on delusion today.
It’s Sunday, our least favourite. Mum told me there’s only so much trying before anyone decides to give up or level up. She’s given up any hope of Dad coming back from Côte d’Ivoire. He must have found his door, she says. He won’t want to return to some place he could not trust to keep him out of the cold, she says. That piece of shit, that good-for-nothing so-and-so, she says. I left her talking to his picture and I’m here now. Or still.
I gather you’ve heard enough today. I gather you’re looking all wretched and forlorn out there. Or maybe you have no more use for these human entanglements. Anyway, I met the shooting squad in the courtyard as planned and I had four paper targets taped to the hedge near the garden. But instead of images of people, the targets had images of large animals so we wouldn’t rouse too much distrust. I handed them each a wooden spoon and explained that Colt himself practiced with a wooden spoon, that all the greats take the path less travelled. Sure, this was false, but we were four people who had had too much taken away. The connection to shooting didn’t take much reinforcing. There is a target. Point and shoot. It took Yaan all of half an hour to stop shaking.
“It’s only your finger that needs convincing, Yaan,” I said. “Your mind is already made up.”
“It is,” she said.
I taught them the basics. The importance of planting the feet. Paul Paul knew all of this, of course, but he could hardly hold the spoon up for more than thirty seconds before resting his hand back on his walker for balance. His gunfire sound effects were a master class. His bazooka blew Ras S.’s flared floral skirt above her head, and she said, “It’s enough to make you go deaf.”
Yaan brought the spoon between her dentures and bit down hard.
“Now, you try,” I told her.
They each took turns as I shouted from behind the hedge and punched holes through the targets to show where their shots passed through.
The whole thing went on and drew a crowd that, to us, the shooting squad, was invaluable. Then it was done. We looked at each other, saying nothing for a long while. A while longer than I felt comfortable with before turning away, smiling.
“You wait there,” Ras S. said, following me back into the fun room, which is a round hall with round tables set up with board games and visual-arts supplies and musical instruments. She pointed to a sketch, which she described as her childhood home. She said she’d spent three months working on it and she wanted me to have it now. Someone behind us huffed a disagreement and we turned around to see Paul Paul shaking his head at us.
“You two should fuck already,” he said and turned to walk away before I could respond.
“Don’t mind him,” Ras S. said, “he’s catching feelings because he was sure I put all this work into this for him. He’s good but he’s not that good.”
I covered my mouth, shocked. I had nothing to say even as I held out my hand to accept the sketch.
I know it’s hard for you to believe, after everything, that I gave up coffee and became a juice-drinking gun instructor. Listen, I regret it, of course, I regret it all. I wouldn’t have let you near that semi-automatic had I known it was on the floor. I regret the very morning we woke up to the inevitable end of that day. I regret how any idea seems like a good idea until the sun shines on it long enough for us to
see our folly reflected back. We knew shit-all about any of this gun business. That’s why it’s so hard to talk about it now. If I had known something about it maybe I could have done something differently.
It’s been three hours since I’ve been at your grave. At your fabulous tombstone. You’d love it, I think. Full of marble and the scripture of Lauryn Hill. I was hoping this was a prolonged dream, still cruel—but a forgettable simulacrum. I might even have heard you calling me, once, your voice shooting from the end of a long, empty corridor.
Waiting for a Story…
[POEMS THAT WEREN’T CHOSEN, BUT STILL COULD BE?]
I Love You
SARA BOND
those small silences
in between tangled words
everything is said
uttered in some other tongue
neither admits to know
in the uneasy wake
the moment slips
its simplicity
remnants
cluttering thought
drowning into language
Crowded
SARA BOND
let me lay down my mind
there’s a valley of a void
filled with discarded pages
i don’t want to rewrite
let me unravel here for a bit
to wash the icky inside my skin
clinging to the debris
of wasted words
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