by André Alexis
and myself?
Hearing those words – “it is possible to do the right thing” –
Father Penn felt as if he’d been called back to himself, back to
his vows. And at that moment in Forest, Ontario, after a shearing,
he had chosen his vows over love.
– But what if Elizabeth’s husband dies? said Professor Bruno.
Could you choose your vows then?
– You mean if Robert died now? asked Father Penn. Liz and I
are friends, but fidelity to my vows has become my anchor. I would
choose my vows. That’s the happy ending John was talking about.
I could see why Father Penn and Mr. Stephens had become
close. They’d gone through something similar: love leading to a
difficult moment. But Father Penn’s decision and his reasoning
resonated with me the way the unknown man’s words had
resonated with him. “It is possible to do the right thing” struck
me as immensely hopeful words. Hopeful not where my feelings
of guilt and loss were concerned, but hopeful with respect to
my new gift. In listening to Father Penn, I understood Skennen’s
words about stealth more clearly. The priest had chosen discre-
tion and work. He’d eclipsed himself for the sake of others. And
I wondered – not being an artist, not being a priest – how I
might disappear behind the good, as opposed to behind my
good intentions.
212
Professor Bruno and I left Barrow at five in the morning, as Mr.
Stephens had suggested. I told the professor that I had business
to do at home, business I’d suddenly remembered – something
to do with banking. He didn’t like to get up early, he said, because
it was then that his joints – shoulders, elbows, knees – were at
their worst. But he felt “beholden’ to me for accompanying him
on his “journey of discovery.’ So, we both rose at four-thirty,
dressed, ate breakfast with John Stephens, and were ready on
the stroke of five.
Before we set out, Mr. Stephens thanked the professor for
his interest in Skennen’s poetry. But he asked that Professor
Bruno respect his privacy. As far as he was concerned, John
Skennen was no more and he didn’t want to be troubled by
readers or admirers or anyone. He considered himself retired
and he would be upset if others came looking for him.
– But you wouldn’t mind if I sent you a copy of my book on
Skennen’s work, would you? asked the professor. I think the book
will please you.
– I’m sure it would if I read it, said Mr. Stephens, but it’s
about something I think of as over. After this, I won’t be talking
about John Skennen to anyone. But do send it to me, if you like.
There might come a time when I can read it. You never know.
Turning to me, Mr. Stephens put a black-leather prayer book
– supple, five by six inches, crimson-edged – in my hand.
– I hope I see you again, Alfred, he said. Use this when you
need it. It’s a Book of Common Prayer. I read from it every day to
remind myself of my task.
I thanked him, and the professor and I drove off in darkness.
How different the return was to the setting out! All was dark,
though in the east the first light of day showed the contours of
the land: treetops, jagged cliffs, the roofs of faraway homes. We
drove, first, past Lucan on our way to the 401, by which time
213
Professor Bruno was “wide asleep,’ as I think of it, snoring like
nobody’s business, while the occasional light in a farmhouse
window winked at us as we passed. Save for the professor and
the sound of the engine as I drove, the world was quiet, chastely
dreaming of light.
And how different our journey had been to the one we’d
planned. Professor Bruno had set out to confirm his ideas about
John Skennen. And his doubts had been resolved, for the most
part. I, on the other hand, had only wanted to help a close friend
of my father’s, to transcribe the professor’s interviews, to learn a
little about the land I’ve lived on all my life, and to look for
Oniaten grandiflora. I was returning a changed man. It seemed to
me as I drove that every atom of earth was miraculous, and every
instant a parade of wonders. I was fascinated by questions that
would have been inconceivable to me not eight days before.
Somewhere around the outskirts of Hamilton, dawn flooded
the road. The landscape I knew so well, the dullest part of the ride
home, was illuminated so that the Queensway – the highway
itself, the industrial buildings, the glimpses of the lake’s blue skirt
– seemed new, as if no one before me had ever seen this stretch
of road, though anyone who lived in Toronto would have seen it a
thousand times at least. And, not for the first time, enchanted by
a return, I wondered if home was home or only another part of
the journey, and I remembered the words of the Romanian physi-
cist Blavdak Vinomori: “There is no home but in travel.”
Of course, this return really was a return to a new world. The
lake – a constant in my imagination – was different, knowing
that I might help the drowned or heal the sick. The boarded-up
buildings made me think of the homeless and brought thoughts
of duty to mind. Knowing that I could ease the suffering of others,
I entered a city – my city – to which I had new obligations.
What saved me from messianic feelings – not that I had
such feelings – was my sense of how difficult those obligations
would be to fulfill, how difficult to know the difference between
214
the just and the good, how difficult to act in such an uncertain
and strange world.
In fact, my first experience of the difficulty came that very
morning.
Professor Bruno had complained about his arthritis before
we left Barrow, and I’d seen him wince as he sat down and got up
from the Stephenses’ table. When we arrived at his apartment
near St. Clair and Bathurst, I thought about how I might help
him without his knowing. I would have to touch his joints while
he was still sleeping. But that meant I’d have to remove at least
some of his clothing. This was not something I wanted to do
while parked on Bathurst in what was now the full light of a busy
day. Nor would I have wanted him to awaken while I was trying
to undress him. It came to me, then, that the best way to go about
it undetected would be to put my hand in his clothes, carefully,
in such a way as to escape notice. I saw at once that his sleeves
were too narrow to allow any kind of intrusion. He’d have awak-
ened had I tried to insinuate my hand up his sleeve to touch his
elbow. But his pant legs were wide enough and, if I could gently
turn him so his legs were hanging out the car door, I’d have
access to his knees.
Lying the professor down on the front seat and extracting his
legs from the car was, surprisingly, easy. He didn’t come close to
waking – snored even louder, in fact – and I was pleased by the
thought that
I could, without further betraying my gift, ease the
suffering his arthritis brought him. But while I was holding his
shoe up so I could put my hand in his pant leg, an elderly woman
stopped behind me.
– Is your friend all right? she asked.
– Yes, I whispered. Yes, he’s fine. He’s asleep.
– Then why are you holding his foot up like that?
There was nothing accusatory in her tone. She seemed kind
but she was also, clearly, puzzled. Not knowing what to say, I
said the only thing that came to mind.
215
– He’s lost feeling in his legs, I said. Bad circulation.
– Oh, I know all about that, she said. You have to hold the
leg higher.
Before I could thank her for her advice, she’d taken his leg
from me and was holding it up so that it was at a forty-five-
degree angle to his body. This was inadvertently helpful, because
the professor’s pant leg slid down and exposed his knee. I was
even able to touch his knee with both hands, but it was then that
I noticed he was awake and that he now looked as puzzled as the
woman had before she’d taken his foot.
– Oh, you’re awake, said the woman. Does that feel better?
– What are you doing? he asked.
For the n th time in eight days, Professor Bruno was bewil-
dered. I thanked the woman and she walked away, pleased that
she’d been able to help. When she’d gone, I explained what had
happened. That is, I told the professor that the woman had tried
to ease the inflammation in his joints. Strangely enough, he
accepted this idea, but he wanted to know how she’d known
about his inflammation in the first place.
– I told her about it, I said, when she asked why I was helping
you out of the car.
– Ah, he said, you were helping me out. That was good of
you, Alfie, but it was indiscreet of you, too.
He was curious as to why she’d wanted to start with his knee.
– We’d have had to undress you to get at your elbows, I answered.
– Well, there, at least, you’re making sense, he said.
Though our travels had lasted only eight days, I began to miss
his company as soon as I’d brought his suitcases up to his apart-
ment. He must have guessed my mood. Before he closed the door,
he hugged me, kissed the air in the vicinity of my cheeks and said
– You’ve been invaluable help, Alfie.
And I suddenly realized that Professor Bruno was one of the
few witnesses – a partial witness – to my world’s transformation.
He’d gone through much of what I had. He was the only one
216
with whom I could speak about John Stephens or Feversham.
And these were things I wanted to talk about, even if I couldn’t
talk about certain things at all. Driving home, south on Bathurst,
I felt a new loneliness.
Home again – key jiggling in the lock, apartment quiet – I was
almost intimidated by solitude. I took my sketchbook and the
prayer book Mr. Stephens had given me and walked down to the
lake. I sat on a bench facing the water. How strange, I thought,
that my ability to help others was partially to blame for my own
bewilderment. As I was thinking this, I saw a stretch of Johnson
grass growing through the pavement like a green scar. It immedi-
ately reminded me of John Stephens, a reminder I disliked, because
I hated to think of the plant as representing anything but itself.
Still, it was then that I opened the prayer book and found Mr.
Stephens’s dedication to me. It was written in short sentences, as
if it were a poem. But it was a simple reminder of my new state.
Let very few know what you can do.
It’s not safe.
And remember always that silence abides.
Well-meant words.
217
But, of course, I didn’t yet know what I was capable of doing.
If I was simply a healer – and one who could bring small animals
back to life – I would live accordingly. If I could bring people
back from the dead, I would have to deal with that, too. But what
a complex moral equation! Though I accepted that it was, in prin-
ciple, a bad idea to bring those who’d found peace back to this
uncertain world, I would have to awaken someone dead to know
what I could do, wouldn’t I?
I looked out at the lake before me. The water nearest shore
was greyish-green. In the mid-distance it was dark green, and far
away it was dark blue. Above me a handful of clouds pretended
they did not move, daring me to catch them at it as they made
their way across the sky. Behind me was my city, Toronto, soothing
for being a faithful presence, a boisterous Eurydice: cars passing
on Lakeshore, people speaking, the occasional cries from the
seagulls, the not-quite-autumn wind that was not quite cold.
I closed my eyes, the better to remember my parents’ faces,
the way they looked when they were young, just before they had
me, which is the strongest visual impression I have of them,
coming as it does from a photograph – taken before they were
married – that hangs on a wall in my study.
– What a strange world you’ve left me, I said.
– Oh, Alfie, said my mother, you don’t know the half of it.
– Marjory! said my father. No one knows anywhere near that
much!
He was teasing her, as he always did when they were happy,
and I was suddenly, deeply grateful for the love they’d had for
each other. I wanted to tell them, but, of course, there was no
need. Existing as they did within me, they knew everything I did.
When I opened my eyes, the daylight had dimmed and the water
before me was an undulating grey, as a four-seat scull quietly passed,
heading back to the Argonaut Boat Club at the end of the day.
Quincunx 5, Toronto–New York
218
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
Days by Moonlight is not a work of realism. It’s not a work that
uses the imagination to show the real, but one that uses the real
to show the imagination. For instance, though most of the place
names in the novel exist, the cities and towns they refer to are
distortedly, exaggeratedly, or (even) perversely portrayed.
The novel was influenced by a handful of wonderful books
about real or imagined travel, books read or remembered while
writing:
Paradiso, Dante Alighieri (1472)
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, Anonymous (1499)
Lazarillo de Tormes, Anonymous (1554)
Bartram’s Travels, William Bartram (1791)
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1605, 1615)
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol (1842) (Donald Rayfield, trans.)
The Golden Flower Pot, E. T. A. Hoffman (1814)
The Unconsoled, Kazuo Ishiguro (1995)
Voyage d’automne et d’hiver, Gilbert Lascault (1979)
Manuscript Found in Saragossa, Jan Potocki (1810)
Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)
But it was inspired by Pier Paolo Passolini’s Teorema and
Ugetsu Monogatari, a film by Kenji Mizoguchi.
John Skennen’s poems were written by the a
uthor, except for
“Ticking Clocks,” which was written by Lea Crawford.
In Chapter 4, the dreamlike version of “Johnson Grass” was
created by Andy Patton.
The stanza quoted by John Skennen (“lovers by the score,’
etc.) is from Dennis Lee’s poem “High Park, by Grenadier Pond.’
The words “a dense garden, a bed smooth as a wafer of sunlight”
are from “You Have the Lovers” by Leonard Cohen. The fragment
of Arnaut Daniel’s poem “Lancan vei fuill’e flor e frug” was trans-
lated by the author.
All the poems of John Skennen were edited by Kim Maltman
and Roo Borson. Kim also provided the repurposed graphs in
Chapter Two.
Alfred Homer’s drawings were by made by Linda Watson.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
André Alexis was born in Trinidad in 1957 and grew up in
Canada. His debut novel, Childhood, won the Books in Canada
First Novel Award and the Trillium Book Award, and was short-
listed for the Giller Prize and the Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
His previous books include Asylum, Beauty and Sadness, Ingrid
and the Wolf, and Pastoral, which was also nominated for the
Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, and Fifteen Dogs, which won
the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, the Scotiabank Giller
Prize, and the 2017 edition of cbc’s Canada Reads. His most
recent novel is The Hidden Keys, shortlisted for the Trillium Book
Award. In 2017, he received a Windham-Campbell Prize for the
body of his work.
Typeset in Albertan and Gotham.
Albertan was designed by the late Jim Rimmer of New Westminster,
B.C., in 1982. He drew and cut the type in metal at the 16pt size in
roman only; it was intended for use only at his Pie Tree Press. He drew
the italic in 1985, designing it with a narrow fit and a very slight incline,
and created a digital version. The family was completed in 2005, when
Rimmer redrew the bold weight and called it Albertan Black. The letter-
forms of this type family have an old-style character, with Rimmer’s
own calligraphic hand in evidence, especially in the italic.
Edited and designed by Alana Wilcox
Cover design by Ingrid Paulson
Cover image is by Zachari Logan, Datura from Eunuch Tapestries, pastel
on black paper, 59 × 100 inches, 2013. Image courtesy of the artist.
Coach House Books
80 bpNichol Lane
