The half-moon grew immense as it prepared to dip into the cold silver bath of the sea. Sylvie was sure there was a sound as the lunar south pole touched down on the Atlantic. Then, it seemed to increase the speed of its descent, anxious for the full bath of night and the sleep that would follow.
“They say Yuri Gagarin went mad before he died,” Kit said, “and it had something to do with being in space.”
“More likely something to do with being on earth.”
Kit smiled.“You’re a good friend.”
“Thanks. Can I tell you something?”
“What?”
“You are going to get well and you are going to be okay.”
“How do you know?”
“I know. And you should believe me because I have been around for a long time and I know some things.”
“Women’s intuition?”
“More than that.” But Sylvie would shroud the rest in mystery. What she knew was that if she could convince this friend, Kit Lawson, that everything would be okay, then it would be. Simple trick of the mind. Earth force, mind power. Healing touch of the sea. Mix and shake, cook it for a while. Spice it up if necessary. Tastes good and cures. She should write down the recipe some time in case she started to lose her memory.
Sylvie was certain she could feel them before she saw them. Four: two of them just small. Dark humps on the sea. Her whales, a few of them at least, returned.
The moon was diminished to a quarter. Ten more minutes of light if that. Then nothing but the afterglow of star shine.
“They’re beautiful,” Kit said.
“You can’t see much but their backs.”
“But why are they here? How did you do that?”
Sylvie truly believed that she had brought them here. Called out to them with her mind. An old woman’s delusion. The whales would come for her if she needed them. Wouldn’t say so out loud. Sound like an idiot.
“Good guess, really. I didn’t know they would come, but I felt some connection between your pain and confusion and something going on out there.” No, don’t rattle on and try to make it sound all fuzzy and metaphysical. Just shut up, she told herself, and let it be at that.
The whales were in as close as they could come now, and, in their wake, the phosphorescent diatoms, stirred back into life.
“Trailing clouds of glory,” Kit said.
“Yes, that.”
The whales in close, in that deep, deep place that made the island unique and made it possible for whales to commune so closely with life ashore. Reach out and touch them with your mind, Sylvie said silently to her friend, but her lips did not move. Not telepathy, just a tug at a thought. She watched Kit’s face, saw her doing just as she had suggested.
“It’s amazing.”
“It is, isn’t it? You would have missed it if you hadn’t been losing your mind tonight.”
Sylvie studied the dark, moving forms. Felt their motion inside her, experienced the powerful but timid thoughts of her allies. But something else. Something that felt like an apology. Something that felt like a husband dying or someone saying goodbye. The ache of wanting to stay but the tug so strong to leave, to be someplace else where it is necessary to survive.
Then the moon was gone; the eyes of the two women adjusted to the lesser lights of suns millions of light years away. The tide came inching up on the rock shelf towards them. Then, in the new full-darkness, the Milky Way remembered itself and painted a band of soft light across the night sky.
Chapter Eleven
Sylvie was not just a casual acquaintance with madness. The two of them had been around the block a few times together. Old close friends in the 1950s in particular. Husband number four from Halifax. William Toye. Brilliant, restless, highly educated, a man who drank and waxed eloquent upon subjects Sylvie had never conceived of: history of Mesopotamia, John Calvin, calculus, Ernest Cassirer, the pantheistic religions of Aboriginal peoples.
William Toye. She should have known he was at least half-crazy by the look in his eye. Something bright and burning inside him. How could she resist? William Toye was, in a way, her escape from the island when she needed it most. But she would not have to leave.
“I’m through with Halifax,” he told her when she asked him why he had come to the island. “I’ve quit the university — Dalhousie. Oh, they’ll miss me when I’m gone, but I’m good and gone. I’m tired of academics. I’m looking for life. Life. Life. Life.”
And then he looked into the eyes of Sylvie Young and he thought that maybe he had finally found life after all. And Sylvie had found her own new life off the island without moving a step onto the boat.
William Toye had smooth hands, hands that had never been pierced by a fish hook, never chafed by ropes, never blistered with wielding a tool. He did not mind the idea of work and agreed with Thoreau that work was edifying.“Self-reliance gives a person dignity. I admire all the men on this island more than any of those louts at Dalhousie.”
“What of the women?”
“Yes. Them too. Behind every great man is a great woman.” A line borrowed and one that Sylvie took as either an insult or a compliment, she just wasn’t sure.
William Toye asked the circumference of the island and Sylvie’s answer proved satisfactory. “Would you walk it with me, madame?”
Her reply: “Yes.” It took the better part of the day. William Toye talked at great length but when he finally flagged, he turned to Sylvie and said, “You have eyes the colour of that sea pool there, hair like the fields of autumn grass. Something about the way you walk. I’m having a hard time not touching you.”
Sylvie had not been touched by a man since the death of her third husband, Doley Keizer. She closed her eyes and faced into the light sea breeze, let it decide for her what to do. William Toye cautiously took her fingers in his hand, then grasped her whole hand in his, took a deep breath and said, “Poetry pales compared to this.”
Sylvie knew it was not just her. It was the combination of everything. And she knew she was in love with this William Toye already, even though she had sworn off love, decided that the excesses of grief were not worth it. But she had been expecting that she would mostly have to contend with island men. A Slaunwhite or a Swinnemar, men easy to resist. And she was certain she was way past longing.
Now this cloud in her chest, this summer day, this crazy man with candles in his eyes beneath a pale blue sky and the advice of the sea telling her that life was yet to be lived. And she knew it.
Invited for supper,William Toye could not say no. “I’m living purely by my instincts now. Sylvie, I don’t know what you did to me today but I’m thankful. I don’t know if I ever want to leave this island. Here I am, only fifty miles from Halifax, and I feel like I’ve gone far, far away to a Greek island or some village on the shores of Fiji. It’s as if I’ve been asleep all my life. Those dusty classrooms at Dal. Those boring meetings. Old men with opinions. Oh, so many opinions. I was buried and now I’m resurrected. I’ve come back to life.”
Sylvie loved the way he pronounced words. She sat silently, waited for more syllables to spill from William Toye.
“I’ve brought cognac,” he said.“To celebrate.”
And celebrate they did. William Toye was a man all of fire. His eyes, his drink, his own animated opinions, his attitudinal knowledge of the world’s history: “There is no truth to history, no way of nailing it down. Oh, we try, but we know next to nothing. That is what my own education, my readings, and my knowledge have given me, the understanding that we know next to nothing. Better to give up the past for dead.”
“My mother said we should learn from history’s mistakes. She was considered a very wise woman on this island.” She did not tell him that her mother had been an adamant temperance organizer. The temperance movement had been partly responsible for lifting her intellect. It had been a call to women’s rights for many of her mother’s generation and she had taken that call. She had fought against booze and then gone on to be quit
e a free-thinking woman for Ragged Island.
“Your mother was right to an extent. We should learn, but we do not. We plunge back into our own errors with glee. We will dream ourselves into oblivion now that we have the weapons to do so. We will kill off humanity with the belief that we are doing some good, some purposeful important deed, standing up for what is believed to be right.”
“Dark words, Mr. Toye. Do you really believe this?”
William Toye sipped cognac ambitiously from a glass that had once been a jelly jar. “I don’t know what I believe anymore. I believe in reason, perhaps. I believe in the rational mind. I believe in the pursuit of knowledge, but I cannot fully defend any of the above. It is what I know and who I am, but now I’m here with you on this island and I feel like I am becoming another person.”
Sylvie sipped her own drink tentatively. Each time she sipped, she thought of her mother. A paradox. Her mother would have loved to hear the words pouring from this man, yet would have abhorred him for bringing strong drink into the house. Sylvie studied the face: fixed muscles in the cheek and chin as if too much time had been spent questioning and criticizing every minutiae of daily life and thought. Hairline receding as if a tide was going out, slowly leaving pallid skin stretched over a prominent skull — like a shiny, light-coloured stone. Longish hair aft and a protracted neck with a prominent Adam’s apple that bobbed as he spoke. City clothes and hands, those smooth, lily-white hands, always framing things in the air in front of him. It was as if he were constructing some small invisible building as he spoke his ideas: footings like fists, plane-level floors as the language flowed out, upright beams as fingers pointed rigidly skyward asserting positions of ancient arguments, strong rafters and joists and even a roof in the testing of two opposing ideas with fingertips arched against each other in some kind of contest of strength.
“I’ve given up trying to make sense out of the world,” William Toye said after spilling several thousand words in her room, asserting and questioning the reasons for life on earth, World War II, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Once it had all gushed out and silence collected in the near empty bottle before them on the table, Sylvie wondered if she should talk at all. For she felt so uneducated, so completely different from this man in front of her. But the cognac had made her light-headed and she felt words welling up in her own throat. They would not be satisfied to remain inside of her.
“Death is what makes the world make sense.”
“Death is what prevents us from achieving our full potential. Death brings us to our knees and erases who we are just when we are realizing that potential.”
“I don’t know if that is truly the way it must be. William, have you lost anyone close to you?”
“My parents are both alive. The Toyes tend to live to a ripe old age. I’ve lost a colleague or two. Accidents. Cancer.”
“I’ve lost three husbands. Death has always been very close at hand for me.” Her hands were framing something now as well. She wondered what sort of edifice she was building. Palms upright, opposed to each other. “Death. Life.” Then she flattened her hands and waved them in front of her. “Opposites? I don’t think so.”
“You would deny the duality of things as basic as life and death?”
“They’re not opposed to each other, if that’s what you mean.”
Toye studied this with a frown, then gave it up. “You’ve studied religion, then. Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen?”
“Not much of that around here, I’m afraid. Mostly just Baptist and Pentecostal. I’m not either one. I have my own beliefs.”
William sat silent now, wide-eyed.
“Suppose we did not think of things in terms of opposites? Us/them. Good/bad.”
“Brave woman. Tell me more.”
She blushed. She had never talked like this to any man. “What did you think of the island, today?”
“I loved the island. As we came back to the place from which we started our walk, I felt that for once there was a sense of meaning and completion in my life. And I was not the same man when the circumnavigation ended. Not the same man at all.”
“I understand what you’re saying. When we arrived back to the government wharf something had changed. Not just us. But the actual physical place.”
“Yes,” he said, more fire kindling in those eyes, but tempered this time by a silliness, a softer side of him.“You’ve read T. S. Eliot?”
“Who?”
“Sorry. I’m such an idiot. For all my adult life I have believed that you only learn from books. Second-hand knowledge. I’m beginning to see I’ve missed a considerable amount in my education.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself.”
“Is there someplace on the island I can rent a room?”
“There is, but it won’t be necessary. Stay here as my guest. There is an extra room.”
“You’re very kind, but I fear that it may not be the right thing to do. Your neighbours may want to give you some grief over having me.”
“Neighbours talk. That’s what they do. Those who know me will not judge. Besides, I like talking with you.” She almost said, It’s like talking to some handsome stranger from another planet, but she did not. She had learned over the years that half the art of good conversation was not saying everything that ran through your head. Her remaining reservoir of self-preservation told her she did not want an intimate relationship with another man — any man from any planet — but the cognac and the night were draining that reservoir. William Toye would sleep in the spare room and there need not be more to it than that.
But there was much more. She fell in love with him in a complicated package of emotions. She felt sorry for him, admired him, was attracted to his intellect, repelled by his self-confessed arrogance toward the rest of the common world that he could not seem to shake. But most of all, there was a sense of need between them. Mutual comfort. Some might call it love. And beyond that, there was the matter of Professor’s Toye’s education, seriously lacking in important particulars that Sylvie could teach him.
Sylvie didn’t fully realize that William Toye was slightly mad, perhaps truly psychologically ill, for at least a week. He switched from cognac to rum, the local staple. Rum was much cheaper if bought through the network of bootleggers who could still bring it in duty-free from ships off the coast, a longstanding island tradition that had somehow survived the end of the rum-running era. Drink loosened his tongue and inspired a stampede of speech that galloped forth — about great thinkers and inevitably about history. The Romans, the Celts, the Gauls, Japanese emperors, and the customs of Native tribes in the Amazon. The problem was that some of it was true (if books can be trusted, that is) and some of it was made up on the spot. And William Toye could not distinguish between the two.
Which was why he had been fired from his position as senior instructor of philosophy and history at the university. He had pontificated all kinds of things that just weren’t in the books. He made things up and he didn’t even realize he was doing it. Much of what he invented was far more interesting than what was factual.
He was a hit among students who reported back on final exams detailed information about wars that had never occurred and great thinkers who had never existed. Toye’s favourite subject for discourse was Guilliamo Mellesandro, a seventeenth-century Italian philosopher who had dissected the brains of a living subject without injury and discovered what he believed to be the seat of the human soul, a small, pentacle-shaped organ that could be accessed by a minor incision in the base of the skull. Mellesandro, of course, was scoffed at in his day, especially when he deduced from these surgical experiments that some people had the newly discovered organ (which he called the mellengra) and some people did not. Ipso facto, some people did not have souls. Toye admitted to his students that, of course, Mellesandro was wrong. You could not physically locate the human soul. But Toye also professed that Mellesandro the Italian philosopher had set in motion the very basis for our understanding of the physiol
ogy of the brain. Yet, he had never been given due credit. If you didn’t know your Mellesandro, you were not likely to pass the final exam for Professor Toye’s Philosophy 800 course.
There had been a departmental meeting finally when this Mellesandro business was put on the table and Toye was deeply insulted, outraged. The youngest member of the department, a small man with pinched glasses named Smeets who had only recently received his PhD from the University of Toronto, asked Toye to account for Mellesandro. “Pull any book from the department’s library shelves and turn to the page,” Smeets challenged. William Toye refused to have any man question his scholarship. Certainly, Mellesandro had lived in seventeenth-century Rome, where he had performed medical experiments upon cadavers, and even several living subjects. He had taken a faulty step in the evolution of knowledge but, in the long run, it had proven to be a useful one. All this was explained to a roomful of colleagues who knew painfully well that Guilliamo Mellesandro had never existed and that Dalhousie was not prepared to risk its reputation by keeping Toye on as a professor. Before the hour was up, he had resigned, maintaining that he was being crucified. Free speech and academic freedom were in absentia at Dalhousie that day and Toye would leave at once.
It never occurred to William Toye that he could be wrong, and he himself refused to crack open any book to verify what he knew to be fact.
“The English metaphysician, M. John McTaggert, believes that time does not exist,” William Toye stated at breakfast on the third day of his tenure at Sylvie’s house. Sylvie would have had no way of knowing if McTaggert was real or illusion, but then if time was an illusion, what were the reference points for reality?
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