A Map of Glass

by Jane Urquhart

  “I don’t know for certain,” Sylvia had answered. “I never have.”

  As they walked down the hotel corridor, however, she touched her husband’s arm, wanting him to know, by this gesture, that there was no malice in the words she was going to say. He had taught her this, how to touch someone softly, when trying to make a point. It had not been easy for her, this reaching toward others, but she had learned to do it.

  “Julia couldn’t tell you where I was, not because she was unable, but because she didn’t know,” she said. “Still, if she had known she likely wouldn’t have told you anyway.”

  “No,” said Malcolm after a few silent moments. “No, probably not.”

  They stepped into the elevator, the arrival of which had been announced by a startling bell. “You see,” Sylvia continued, “like you, Julia is not a believer … with this difference … she doesn’t believe in the condition … my condition … she doesn’t believe in it at all.”

  She looked at her husband’s profile, to see how he was responding to this information. He was standing with his hands clasped behind his back and his head lowered. She was almost certain that there was no expression at all on his face, not even an expression of disagreement or disapproval. It was as if he hadn’t heard the words she had said, or perhaps had heard but didn’t believe in them.

  Later that evening, when she walked into the bathroom to prepare for the night, she saw that evidence of her husband was everywhere: his toothbrush, his travel case, his razor, his brush and comb.

  Such familiar objects.

  Lying on the bed after undressing, she willed herself to consider Malcolm, who lay, as always, with his back to her, sleeping in the almost purposeful way of a physician whose rest is often interrupted. The room was merely pulsing now in the faint city light that the curtains could not entirely extinguish: things were better. She began mentally to go through the shelves in her husband’s study, book by book, recalling how the different colours of the spines had pleased her once she had become accustomed to the newer volumes placed here and there among the older texts left behind by her father. As a kind of lullaby, she allowed a list of titles to run through her mind. Clinical Gastroenterology, Pathological Basis of Disease, An Index of Differential Diagnosis, Medical Mycology, The Metabolic Basis of Inherited Disease, Principals of Surgery. She went to sleep comforted by the thought that someone, anyone, had taken the trouble to attend to a tragic alteration of the body, as if he had wanted to draw a map of its regions, then explore its territories.

  After dinner she and Malcolm had walked into the alley and she had showed him the door she visited each day. “He is so young,” she had told him. “Only a boy in many ways.”

  She watched Malcolm as he took in the graffiti, the name Conceptual Fragments. Though he had said nothing, she sensed his distrust of such things. “I still don’t understand,” he said. “Who are these people? What do they have to do with you?”

  They were standing by the drainpipe that Sylvia had examined when she first reached the city. It looked darker somehow, and small icicles had formed, like teeth, around its mouth in the evening cold. The sound of a streetcar and laughter from a group of people passing on the sidewalk had become more than noise, seemed to have taken on a physical presence. “He found him, Malcolm, he found Andrew,” Sylvia said at last. “Jerome, the young man who lives here … he found Andrew’s body in the ice.” Sylvia glanced toward the door and lifted one hand almost as if she were going to touch it, then let her arm drop. “I think he was the right person, the right person to find him,” she whispered, speaking to herself now, knowing that what she said was true.

  “Oh,” said Malcolm, placing his gloved hands in the pocket of his trench coat. “Oh, so it’s that. I suppose you were after the details.” He coughed, then took Sylvia’s arm and began to lead her back toward the hotel. “Well,” he said, turning away from the alley, “at least that’s all over now.”

  “No,” she said calmly. “It’s not over. I won’t leave this unfinished, I just can’t do that. I am going back tomorrow. I said I would and I will.” She stopped walking. “Alone,” she added.

  He remained silent, but she could tell the stubbornness, the refusal was gone from him. It’s the leaving, Sylvia thought, he knows I can do that now, just walk away. “You’ll have to get in touch with the office,” she said, “to tell them you won’t be there tomorrow. You’ll have to get someone else to be on call. I will leave the hotel after lunch. You can pick me up here at this door at five.”

  “This is all very unsettling,” he said, but once they were back in the room he immediately picked up the phone to make the necessary arrangements for his absence. Then he smiled at her in a resigned, fond, and faintly condescending way. I’m doing all this for you, the smile said, I am doing all this because of your condition.

  His patience, she decided, was a burden: not for him—for him it was second nature—but it was a burden for her. She wanted to throw it off, be done with it. She was tired, she suddenly knew, of taking all the responsibility for it.

  On Saturday mornings Jerome and Mira almost always ate a late breakfast at a nearby café where they could order brioche or biscotti and read the weekend papers left behind by previous customers. This was a lingering luxury, ending only when they decided how they would spend the afternoon, whether they would go to a gallery where a friend might be performing or exhibiting, watch a film, or simply explore certain unfamiliar neighbourhoods in the city, cameras in hand, seeking new images. They rarely returned to the studio on Saturday during the daylight hours, wanting one day in the week where a kind of fluidity would determine their actions. Sometimes a casual group of mutual friends or acquaintances would gather around them, expanding and contracting as they moved from place to place. The appearance of Jerome’s work in certain magazines or in the arts pages of newspapers had made him more socially sought-after in such places than he had ever been in the past, and often he and Mira had hardly settled in at a table when they would be joined by other young people dressed in the customary dark clothing.

  He was not entirely at ease with this. Not being much of a talker, he was never quite sure of what would be expected of him by way of conversation and was grateful for Mira’s poise, her curiosity and genuine interest in people: in what they were thinking, doing, how the small dramas of their lives were unfolding. He generally left the talking to her, but listened, nevertheless, intrigued by the way Mira hid or revealed her cleverness, deferred or brought her thoughts forward into the path of the talk. But he frequently felt ungainly, awkward, as if his legs were too long to fit comfortably under the table, his voice either too loud or too soft.

  Today, however, they had arrived at the café early enough that no one they knew had, as yet, emerged from the badly heated studios or cheap apartments they called home, and he and Mira were able to sit near a window, talking quietly.

  “Look,” Mira was saying, “you can see the top of Sylvia’s hotel from here. We could call her, you know, or drop by.”

  Jerome did not respond.

  “She doesn’t know anyone else in the city,” Mira said. “ What is she going to do all day?”

  “The map, remember,” Jerome answered.

  Mira was gazing out the window, looking with concern at a couple of half-grown stray kittens who were gnawing on a discarded hamburger bun lying on the sidewalk.

  “Don’t even think about it,” Jerome said to her. “One cat is enough.”

  “Okay,” she said, turning back to him, “let’s go home. I think we should finish reading before tomorrow. And anyway,” she said, looking around the half-empty café, and then at the partially eaten pastry on her plate, “I’m finished. I’ve had enough.”

  Something echoed in Jerome as Mira spoke. It was his mother’s voice, speaking these exact words—I’m finished. I’ve had enough—late at night, when his father had not been home for two days. She had been talking to herself, or perhaps to her husband whose inebriation woul
dn’t have permitted him to hear her even if he had been in the room and not in a bar God knows where. The despair in her voice had both frightened and infuriated Jerome; he had wanted to shake her, he had wanted her to forget about his father and his troubles because despite what she was saying, whatever announcement she thought she was making, he knew she hadn’t had enough. His father would return, beg for her forgiveness and receive it, and the whole cycle would begin again, maybe in a matter of weeks, maybe not for a month. He was fifteen years old the night he heard his mother speak these words, believed he hated his father and, in a curious way, also his mother, hated their weaknesses. He wanted them out of his life, out of each other’s lives, or failing that he wanted them to go back to the life they had lived while they had all still been in the north.

  “What are you thinking about?” asked Mira, leaning forward to shake his arm gently. “Where have you gone?”

  “Nothing,” said Jerome. “Nowhere.” But he knew exactly where he had gone: back to the disappeared world of his childhood, the place he couldn’t stop revisiting. Quite often, in recent months, when he had been attempting to complete some ordinary task, he would visualize the long dark avenue of an airshaft he had peered down as a child. Never permitted to enter the mine itself, he had found the shaft housed in a small unlocked building just beyond the perimeter of the site. Terror-stricken and fascinated, he would slip through the door and gaze into a depth of blackness, experience the warm draft on the skin of his face, the pull of the underworld.

  His father would have engineered that shaft, all other ventilation shafts, as well as the shaft that was the route to the underground. The tunnels that followed the threads of gold that branched like a central nervous system through the solid yet vulnerable rock would have been designed by him as well.

  Those were the good years, years when alcohol was a companion, an equal, not a master. Everyone was young; the northern Ontario settlement was a wilderness adventure, the mine a miracle unfolding so far from the rules of ordinary life that no rigid social order was born in its wake. Uneducated immigrant miners and labourers mixed with the collection of necessary professionals assembled by the company. Bosses strolled through the underground labyrinth with the men. A pipefitter might become godfather to the son of an accountant. The doctor might serve as best man at the wedding of a sump-pump operator. Legendary parties celebrated such weddings and christenings (the dog sled delivering the whisky driven by the mine manager himself) or bloomed on nights when there might be nothing more to celebrate than a record freezing temperature or the fact that the mail had finally got through after a blizzard.

  And in the midst of all this there was Jerome’s handsome, laughing father, architect of the underground: a singer, a dancer, the last man still dancing at dawn.

  Jerome had but the faintest of memories concerning this period, but his mother had resurrected fragments of the narrative after his father’s death. The time his father had insisted that all the girls at the brothel attend the manager’s Christmas party, the time he had arranged for three famous rock bands to be flown in by a squadron of bush planes, the time he had offered to be Santa Claus at the school and had been so exhausted by the previous evening’s revelry he had fallen asleep under the Christmas tree. This was the carefree, madcap side of booze, a sort of good-natured jig on the part of the Grim Reaper performed in advance of sharpening up the sickle. It had infuriated Jerome that his mother took such obvious pleasure in recounting these episodes, as if his father’s intoxication was a life-enhancing achievement rather than the hot destructive windstorm that he remembered devouring everything in its path. But he loved her, and was also grateful, therefore, for these brief sessions when she was free of pain. He had kept his expression neutral, smiled or laughed on cue. He had pretended to listen with eagerness.

  “What’s wrong with you today?” Mira was asking. “You’ve barely spoken since we got up.”

  “Nothing’s wrong,” Jerome said. He began to fish in his pocket for money to pay the bill. These coffee bars, he thought, these pretentious places. “Let’s go back,” he said to Mira. “If you want to finish reading those notebooks, then we’ll finish reading those notebooks.”

  Walking toward the studio Jerome fought off the dark image of the air shaft and attempted to enter the moment, to be a man in the company of a young woman on a Saturday morning in an interesting part of town. But he knew this wasn’t working. Mira was looking at him intently by the time they entered the alley, a number of unspoken questions were in the air, and he could feel resentment rising in him. He wanted to hold on to the privacy of his mood. Her intuition, and her concern about this, was an intrusion.

  Still, once they were inside, and before he had arranged himself on the couch again with Mira, he had begun to soften.

  “Let me read it this time,” he said to her.

  Mira opened the book to the spot where she had placed the piece of wool the night before. Then she handed it to Jerome. He scanned a few lines, then said, “She will probably go, once we’ve read the journals. She only asked for a few days, after all.” The feeling he experienced when saying these words was tinged with something he couldn’t identify. Anxiety. Sadness. Fatigue. Maybe guilt. For a moment he wondered who was leaving whom.

  “Summer after summer,” he began, “beyond the bright windows of the Ballaig Oisin …“

  Jerome put the notebook on the table and looked at Mira. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know what to do about her. I might be about to let her down, somehow.”

  Mira moved closer to him. He could feel the slight expansion and contraction of her ribs, the rhythm of her breath. “It will be okay.” she said. “For now just keep reading.”

  Jerome leaned forward, picked up the notebook. “Summer after summer,” he began again.

  “Andrew always said there were people who were emplaced.” Sylvia was standing now, speaking to Jerome’s back while he was busy at the counter making tea. The green notebooks lay on the crate that served as a coffee table but, as yet, Jerome had made no reference to them. Walking that morning from the hotel to the alley, she had been lit with anticipation, hungry for Jerome’s reaction to Andrew’s words. But once she had entered the studio, she found she couldn’t bring herself to ask the question, to expose the hook in her mind.

  “It seems that those who are emplaced are made that way by generations of their people remaining in the same location,” she continued, “eating food grown from the same plot of earth, burying their dead nearby, passing useful objects down from father to son, mother to daughter. He said that I was like that to such a degree I was almost like an anthropological discovery. Or perhaps an archeological discovery; something, more or less preserved, more or less intact. I was so emplaced, you see, that it was an adventure—almost an act of heroism—for me to leave the County, travel thirty miles to his hill. Without him … without the lure of him … I never would have done it.”

  Swimmer had jumped up on the crate and draped himself in a casual manner over the notebooks.

  “He also told me that there was always a mark left on a landscape by anyone who entered it. Even if it is just a trace—all but invisible—it is there for those willing to look hard enough. He said this elsewhere, of course, not just to me, said it in lectures and wrote it in his books before he retired and became silent and all but forgotten. But what about his own trace?” Sylvia asked suddenly, a hint of anger in her voice. “When he disappeared no one looked for him, looked hard enough, long enough. We knew it would come to this, they likely thought, a huge final disappearance at the end of a series of lesser disappearances.”

  “Maybe they did look for him,” said Jerome, “maybe they just didn’t know where to look. Perhaps you were the only person who knew where he might have gone.”

  “And yet I didn’t know,” said Sylvia. “I didn’t know where he had gone. But he was walking toward the past, I think. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “It makes sense to
me now. I … both of us read what he wrote.” Jerome handed Sylvia a steaming mug. “Because I’d been out there on the island surrounded by the remnants of what had existed in the past, it was astonishing for me to have it all reconstructed, to have it come to life, or come back to life.” Jerome stood in the middle of the room while the slim ribbon of steam from his own mug rose toward his shoulder. “And I was a bit surprised.” He sat on the end of the sofa nearest to Sylvia’s chair and placed his tea on the table. “I was surprised by the humour. I would have thought him to be more consistently serious.”

  “He was serious,” said Sylvia, “but he loved humour, loved laughter. I always thought that Andrew would remember forever how I laughed when I was with him, I, who so rarely laughed. But perhaps to him I was a woman who laughed often, one who was light-hearted, easy to know.”

  Jerome smiled. “We liked the story,” he said, “but somehow it made me think that everything in the world is just a mirage, just a suggestion, gone before it’s graspable. I think I already knew that, some part of me already knew that, the part that avoids”—Jerome searched for the word—“stasis, stability, that emplacement you just spoke of. Stability seems to me, sometimes, to be just another way of saying the end.”

  “Stability was what I always wanted,” said Sylvia, “More than you know.”

  “Perhaps. But you … you lost someone. And I’m worried.” He cleared his throat. “I worry about that.” He paused. “About you.”

  “Oh, don’t,” said Sylvia quietly. “You’re so young. And all of this … it’s well …” For the first time it occurred to her that she might have troubled this young man. “You’ll forget this,” she said.