After James

by Michael Helm

  “Merwin was unlikely to offend. Or so I thought.”

  “Or so. No more bear stories, please,” said Anton.

  He tended to address his drink when he said these things.

  “What have you pretended to misunderstand now, Anton?” I asked. The others, even Patrice, I noted, seemed delighted.

  “I’m not the pretentious one.”

  Patrice explained that Anton thought I’d used the Italian word for bear, orso. He apologized for his copilot. I wondered how it was sitting with Anton, this third instance of someone apologizing for another person. Patrice explained that Anton was bitter that Air France had without warning informed their pilots that all communications to towers globally were to be in English.

  “His ear for English isn’t precise. He’s worried there will be incidents.”

  I pictured Anton, upon the wrong angle of incidence and some misidentified English word, flying a plane into a woods full of orsos. I was exhausted. For three days I’d been reading poems, looking for patterns, hearing echoes. The work survived into my off-hours. What I needed, in fact, was to hear banal song lyrics in a good voice without earnestness, maybe on a beach somewhere with the waves being waves.

  I stood, waved, gave a little bow. I apologized to Anton for whatever misunderstanding was about to ensue, thanked everyone for their company and mindfulness of my unilingualism, and walked off, crawled through the dormer, our entry/exit point, which led into Yves and his wife’s rented apartment, which led to the hallway and stairwell and Durant’s apartment, and my hard bed, where shortly I curled up in a dark full of floating foreign syllables.

  —

  On my third day in the apartment a woman appeared. As was his habit Durant had gone out for the afternoon and I was at work in the little station he’d prepared for me, a desk with a printer in the corner of my bedroom, with a window to my left looking out at the opposing windows and flaking stucco of the rust-yellow apartment across the narrow street. For only a few minutes in the early afternoons the sun would drift between the buildings and fire them to a light I’d seen before and marvelled at, but never contemplated. In sunlight the walls became the very planes upon which, to their makers, God’s energies met those of common, untabernacled man. I had already come to love that window and the street’s thin slot of sky, and I was sitting with a stack of poems from Three Sheets, waiting for the full sun, when I heard the front door being unlocked and opened. I bent back to the lines at hand, a short poem called “July” that seemed to be telling me something I couldn’t quite hear, when a voice spoke from my bedroom doorway.

  “So you’re the new me.”

  I turned to find a tall young woman, maybe a little older than I. Her face was slightly tapered, fine-featured. Sunglasses propped on her head pulled her brown-blond hair back to reveal a widow’s peak that returned the eye, pleasingly, to her face.

  “I’m Amanda. He didn’t tell you about me.”

  “James.”

  “Any breakthroughs, James?”

  I was trailing the moment, aware of looking, and of her awareness of being looked at.

  “A lot of leads,” I said. “I didn’t know anyone else had had the job.”

  “Then you weren’t meant to know. He won’t be happy that we’ve met. I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

  In their set position the edges of her mouth curled slightly upward so that her expression ran against her tone. They present all at once, the proportions of beauty, but it’s the incongruences that mark them out and steal into us. That’s not at all why Yeats was so attached to the idea that “there is no excellent beauty without strangeness,” but it’s what came to mind.

  She delivered unprompted the account of how she had come into Durant’s employ. Seven months ago, just after she’d graduated with a master’s degree in something called Truth and Justice Studies, Durant emailed her with the same job offer made to me. They’d exchanged comments posted at SHEPMETSOR and he said he liked her description of the poems as “mysterious little buildings with their doors ajar.” Durant flew her to France, where he was working, and they both transferred to Rome, just before she quit the job. “We were becoming too attached.” That she said all this so freely, so fully, and so soon upon meeting, should have left me wary of her, but she seemed without guile.

  She excused herself and went about watering plants while I sat staring at the doorway where she’d appeared, failing through vertigo to connect my recent life in a Montreal basement to the one I was now living, though in both all I seemed to do was read. My first impression of her hurt slightly, in that I was sure Durant must have realized upon meeting me how far short I fell of Amanda’s easy confidence, and very likely of her abilities. I am twice as present on the page as in person. If the same was true of her, then compared with mine her interpretive skills must have been of a different order of sophistication. Besides which, she had studied Truth and Justice, two nouns in that category of words I’m ashamed to utter for my lack of service to them as principles. Only the shame counted in my favour.

  In a minute Amanda came in and watered some fern-looking thing beside the dresser.

  “August doesn’t notice plants. If I don’t do this, they’ll die. It’s why I still have a key, our last arrangement, though I think he’s forgotten it. I doubt he knows when I’ve been by.”

  “You only come by when he’s out?”

  She finished watering and stood there, just beyond arm’s reach. I had not been this close to a woman paying attention to me since I was last in Europe.

  “It’s easier. He’s out every afternoon. I see him sometimes for dinner. He likes to know that he hasn’t stranded me here.” She now worked in a bar that catered to Americans. In time she intended to head north to The Hague, where she had some connections, to see if she couldn’t scratch up some social justice internship for one of the tribunals. She made it sound like migrant labour. She held a dented tin watering can. “What are you working on? Can I ask?”

  I told myself it would contaminate the experiment to reveal my thoughts—for this reason Durant left me alone by day—though in truth I was afraid she’d be unimpressed. I was considering the possibility that the poems were posted in an order designed from the outset rather than randomly, which would mean that, because certain details seemed to allude to current world events, elsewhere in each poem would be lines that had been preselected. Upon this idea, I was extracting the most telling words in a few poems I’d marked by the date of their first appearance on the Three Sheets site. And I’d come to one that held me in its little mystery, door ajar.

  “Do you remember ‘July’?”

  “Let me think. A swimming pool. And a bird. What else?”

  Rather than hand it to her I pulled the poem out and slid it to the edge of the desk. She put down the can and moved one step closer. I read along with her, my eyes on the poem, my focus caught in lonely adolescence.

  That summer the heat wouldn’t quit

  and the water in the 1963 blue

  concrete pool climbed

  to 89 degrees a robin

  appeared on a branch in the stairs

  landing window with so many

  twigs in his beak so symmetrically

  held that he presented long

  whiskers and a helmet of horns,

  looked, in fact, like a Kurosawa

  character. I am telling you

  they were exactly measured

  and held just so by a force

  whose agency is at work again

  now in this question you ask of me,

  its dimensions concealed from you.

  Ridiculous, really, the

  accidents of likeness,

  that you should want to know

  the magicked secret of it all.

  “Right,” she said, “ ‘the magicked secret.’ ”

  “It’s beckoning us to solve a mystery. The poem’s showing us the concealed dimensions but we aren’t seeing them. Or at least I’m not.�
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  She was still focused on the page, but she blinked, deliberately.

  “The poem is complete,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  Now she looked out the window. The rooftop shadows claiming the walls meant I’d missed the minute of perfect light. She took hold of the pot with the ferny thing and held it up in front of her.

  “Let’s not name this plant.” (I couldn’t have.) “Let’s look at it. We can touch it, put it in different lights, care for it. But we don’t ask what it means.”

  I was looking at her, not the plant, but she kept holding it, so I looked. It was, all in all, a plant.

  “Yes,” I said. “Well, I don’t think the Poet is at quite the same level of creative power.”

  She set down the pot.

  “The speaker in the poem is writing about the mystery of likeness. In any given case, is the likeness of one thing to another an accident or not? He’s been asked a question he doesn’t want to answer, which means there is an answer, and yet there’s the mystery of the memory it brings on, the bird unknowingly having made a new face for itself. That’s all, it’s complete.”

  “You think I should just let the poem be.”

  She picked up the page and was handing it to me when the light through it revealed the notes I’d made on the back of the sheet. She turned it over. I watched her read. Date of the pool, hot summer, house with a landing, thermometer reading in Fahrenheit. So a U.S. American house. Two-storey. I picture it mid-twentieth century. Not suburban, maybe somewhere in the West. Can’t say why I think this.

  “I should be going. Will you look after the plants now?”

  “I’ll forget them, too. I know that much about myself. Why did you quit the job?”

  Her expression shifted minutely—toward doubt?—and she looked down to the page in her hand, as if surprised to find it there, and handed it back to me.

  “These poems,” she said. “The moment you touch one, turn it over, it gets ahold of you. Whether he admits it or not, that hold is why August gets up in the morning. It’s what he doesn’t know that matters to him, not the answers to puzzles. He thinks he wants to find the Poet, who he’s convinced lives in Rome—it’s why he’s out every afternoon, playing hunches, sitting in cafés, staring at the people gathering at statues—I bet he pulled that trick on you, too, didn’t he? ‘The Art of Memory’ in Campo de’ Fiori?”

  “Yes.”

  It was all much bigger than poetry, she said. Durant was convinced that the Poet possessed something of his, a great, specific loss.

  “What are you talking about? What has he lost?”

  She took the can and walked back to the living room. Watching her walk away only intensified my wish to follow her meaning. She stopped and turned and seemed to be having an argument with herself. The winning self nodded and spoke.

  “ ‘The sun winks and we play blind.’ ”

  “Is the poem quoting someone? Who said it?”

  “He did.”

  “Who did?”

  “August. To his daughter. In their last conversation before she went missing. Three years ago.” She winced slightly to hear herself. She had come to the apartment to say exactly as much as she’d said, but she was betraying Durant. “Don’t tell him we’ve met. Or you can say we’ve met but that we both insisted there be no talk about the poems.”

  A missing daughter. Durant had impressed upon me the seriousness of the work, but I hadn’t quite believed it connected to anything real. I stood and started toward her. She drifted away slowly so that my path pushed hers to the doorway.

  “Missing how? Did she run away?”

  “He gives few details and there’s nothing online. She was in her thirties. She seems to have walked out of her life and never reappeared. Private detectives found no trace. Then there’s me, and now you.”

  “How did you learn all this? Is it in the poems?”

  “He told me in one short, drunken conversation. I found nothing of her in the poems.”

  “What about the sun winking?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe a coincidence. Or maybe he thinks he coined an expression that in fact he overheard. Maybe it’s out there, circulating like an old penny.”

  The words in her answer impressed themselves visually. I pictured the coin in coincidence and then saw the penny and it dropped.

  “You’re not telling me everything. I need the whole story.”

  Whether the whole story was Durant’s or hers, she seemed to be calculating the cost of telling it, reading numbers on some invisible meter. She offered to meet me the next afternoon in the park of the Villa Borghese. She pulled the sunglasses down over her eyes, a way of announcing her exit, or of preventing me from reading something in her face.

  —

  My life falls to its rhythms, some common to many, some mine alone. Breaking the rhythms, taking my eggs poached for once, changing the route to a job, choosing to stop loving or stop failing a loved one, I inscribe a new line in my brain. It’s the patterns that I can’t get outside, whether I recognize them or not, that define me. To see my specific self—sorrows and fears and pathologies—reflected in external reality effects a recognition. Some such moments calm me. Others do me in.

  My father was a military man. He and my mother had taken early retirement in a town near the base in Nova Scotia where he’d last served. I grew up many places but this last town had become familiar and I knew it wouldn’t be lost to me as the others had, even if, and sooner than I imagined, it would come to contain the greatest loss.

  One week each summer and Christmas, Montreal to Nova Scotia, back.

  In every sense he was a hard man to know.

  My parents were United Church Protestants. When they both turned sixty-two they moved to Turkey for a year to work for an NGO in a refugee camp near the Syrian border. The circumstances of their deaths were ambiguous. They were found sitting inside their car on a dirt road, a few kilometres past the last cotton field, where the stony desert took up, dead of blunt force trauma. I had the accident report sent to me and translated. In separate sections, it described the conditions of the vehicle and of its occupants. I read about the car but only glanced at the second section, not allowing myself to read left to right, up to down. Instead I cast my eyes over the words, registering random phrases. The white Kia outwardly showed no evidence of having hit anything. Inside, matters were different. My parents seemed to have met a very sudden stop. They were dashed on the dash, steered into the steering wheel. Neither had been wearing a seat belt, a detail underlined by hand in the original document, as if to explain their fate or to blame them for it, yet they always wore seat belts and the car’s annoying reminder bell was in working order, a signal detail, though what it signalled I didn’t know.

  Normally, they were buckle-up folks, my parents. Resourceful, tough, good in crises. They strapped themselves in, lashed themselves to masts in storms. In their third week at the camp one of their colleagues was killed when his car, leading a van of police officers to a food-collection point, tripped a thousand-pound bomb placed under the road by the PKK, Kurdish separatists “agitating” for a homeland. Before the day was through they’d contacted the man’s wife, a woman in Pennsylvania they’d never met, and arranged immediate support for her, somehow collecting names and numbers of the couple’s family and friends. After which my father set out himself, on the same road, overland at the bomb crater, to organize and secure the food transport.

  There were dangers everywhere. A Turkish nationalist group in the area had been implicated in the murders of Christians, some of them foreigners, and Al-Qaeda and ISIS had begun setting up thereabouts to promote their specific lunacies across the border, inside the civil war in Syria. I asked them to return to Canada but my mother said, as if she had no say in it, “Your father wants to see this through.” For him, the world was complicated but life was not. Life was an enactment of duty to principles. He regarded my central passion—literature—as an indulge
nce, unforgivably inward. The inwardness was a kind of selfishness, even a cowardice. When I started graduate school he was warily proud, and my quitting it confirmed his assumptions. He believed I would never have a steady job, let alone a career, and whether or not I married, would never surrender my self-indulgence to the building of a family of my own. In so many words, he said all of this, said it once, on what would become our last Christmas Eve together. With some embarrassment, some pride, I’d produced at the table a little magazine in which I’d had three poems published, a magazine of the kind read only by the other contributors, though my parents wouldn’t know that. My idea was to suggest I was making some headway in the writing world. My mother hugged me. I can still feel her bracelet pressing into my back. He looked at the poems, not seeming to actually read them, said I was just “playing a game,” and announced he had to say his piece.

  I was hurt but not angry. I still don’t know if he was right. I’ve written just one poem since. That night I tried to tell him in words other than these that I agreed, that to write poetry is like playing a game, a board game, but it’s play in service of the real, a game in which the win is the defeat of the game itself. In the last move the gaming piece (imagine a stone) leaps from the board into the world, the real, the physical, a red quickness, the actual, and the game becomes a kind of miracle, rules broken and laws suspended. It’s a lesser miracle, but one connected to the greatest of them, the creation of life itself, in which inanimate material, a stone (imagine a gaming piece), is struck into consciousness and set down in the home space, the world.

  “Words,” he said.

  The final word was his. Though he’d worked his whole life, and lived modestly, my parents’ worth when they died was under six thousand dollars, not enough to cover their funeral and the estate lawyer. It was months before the NGO, on an audit, discovered the missing funds. Near the time of their deaths my father stole from the organization almost forty thousand lire. His defenders argued he must have been paying protection for the organization, though no one could say to whom. Other details emerged. Expensive new windows and a stack of rugs and blankets in their apartment in Gaziantep. A tight schedule of doctors’ appointments for my mother. Everything seemed telling at one moment, meaningless another. To repay the missing funds, the organization sold their car, still in good working order.