by Angela Long
More than half a decade had passed since I’d first left Montréal. But I never really left Michel.
By the time he’d arrived home (after a night spent who knows where) on the morning I drove away from rue de Bordeaux, the car had already been packed. Two cats. A pair of cork boots. Half a dozen huipiles – hand woven Mayan blouses. It was difficult to choose what to keep from nearly seven years of a life together.
The day before, Michel had kicked in the door on his way out. “Merde!” His eyes had darkened. “I wish I could hit you. I just want to hit you right now.”
By this point, it had been three summer months since he’d told me he wanted to try a different flavour of ice cream: “I’ve loved vanilla for many years, but now I want to try strawberry, maybe chocolate.”
I’d told him to get out. But he wouldn’t leave. He’d come and he’d go. And I’d let him. One day I was the love of his life, the next I was the bane of his existence. He wasn’t the only one who was confused. I was good at living in denial. I’d read somewhere that adopted children had major issues with rejection, but hadn’t yet understood I was classic case-study material.
“Don’t leave!” Michel had yelled from the fire escape when he finally realized what was going on. “Don’t leave!” I heard his voice echo as I drove down the back alley, rolling up the window, heading west. I drove fast, not caring about things like speeding tickets or accidents.
After weeks of desperate phone calls at my parents’ house in Oshawa, I returned to find Michel waiting for me at Iza’s place. He took my hand in his, brought me to his new apartment where we made love on our old futon as though nothing had happened. I had a few days of bliss before I found the love letters from Ingrid. Then I knew I had to leave the country to leave him. But even then I called him from every location in Europe, where I survived by working on farms, waitressing, cleaning hostels – living in a thatch cottage on Inis Mór, a monastery in Rome, an olive grove in Crete, a sheep farm in Pays Basque. And I’d returned to Montréal – to visit Iza, I’d tell myself – again and again.
When I shared these tales, friends and family no longer felt sorry for me. Maybe I’d slept on people’s couches one too many times, or stared listlessly at one too many plates of food. Instead of viewing my behaviour as tribute to a man who’d loved me so fully I couldn’t live without him, my friends had viewed it as evidence of Michel’s controlling and manipulative nature. They perceived me as a hapless victim, systematically destroyed, transformed from a fun-loving, mentally well-adjusted young woman to a cynical, irresponsible basket case.
“You used to be so intelligent,” my father had said when Michel and I had still been together and Dad had realized that being in love, becoming a transient, and boycotting higher education weren’t just phases. “You were an honours student. Do you know Mr. Beharel, your old English teacher, still asks about you: ‘What’s that Angela Long doing these days? I always thought she had such potential.’”
~
I dialed the number. “Allo, vous-êtes bien chez Michel.” I hung up. Dialed again. I closed my eyes, letting his voice sting like salt water in a wound. “Vous-êtes bien –” How good it felt to hear his voice. I dialed again.
“Allo? Allo?” I held the receiver tight to my ear. “Angie, is that you?” How good it felt to hear him say my name. “What do you want, Angie?” Why was he so angry with me? His father had just died. I just wanted to express my condolences. “Stop calling me. I know it’s you. How many times have you called? Twenty? What’s wrong with you?”
I hung up. I looked down at the phone like it was a live creature. I couldn’t do this anymore. I had to stop.
Get Up and Spin
“The Earth hurtles through space at a speed of 108,000 kilometres per hour,” Ben Pfeiffer said. I stopped chewing my muffin. Ben, a faerie-like woman from the south of France, continued, “Imagine the Sun the size of a Cadillac and the Earth the size of a grape.”
After class I wandered around for the rest of the day in a daze, the spell of the universe cast upon me. I felt very small. I wondered if “Exploring the Universe” had been a wise choice as the final course of my Fine Arts degree. Was ignorance really bliss? How comforting it would have felt to believe the earth was flat and stationary, celestial bodies spinning placidly about the stars – deities, sailing across the heavens in barques, their predictable motions determining our fate. But the cornflower-blue summer sky was really just a random scattering of gas molecules; the dusky-rose sunset nothing but the result of an “earth spin.” I was living on a glorified rock, hurtling through a void, yet acted like this was all normal. And I wasn’t alone.
More than seven billion earthlings walked around, so self-assured and complacent. Did they know over fifty thousand asteroids bumped around in the Kuiper Belt just itching for their chance to break free of their orbit and scream towards Earth? Chunks of rock and metal could do serious damage while travelling at millions of kilometres an hour. According to Ben, NASA tracked ninety percent of what they referred to as Near Earth Objects with radii larger than one kilometre, but didn’t bother with the rest, like the one with a radius slightly less than one kilometre that had wiped out 250,000 square kilometres of the Siberian taiga in 1908. Ben said, “We’d have a three-second warning if one were to hit.”
How could I think about such things, then iron a black work shirt, tie on an apron, and ask, “Would you like anything to drink to start?” It was difficult to look a customer in the eye when I’d learned that Joni Mitchell was right – they were made of stardust, every one of their atoms built in the core of a star. As I uncorked their bottle of wine and looked towards False Creek at the full moon rising – that was actually the position of the moon’s orbit in relation to the earth’s rotation – it was difficult not to mention that Pink Floyd was wrong. There was no dark side of the moon. The moon rotated synchronously, always showing the same side to the Earth. The moon was only dark when other entities cast shadows upon it. Often, I wanted to tell them, I felt the same way when I arrived at work, filled with the light of the universe only to be told that my shirt was too wrinkly and table five needed water. Shadow meant -233 degrees Celsius, bright meant +123 Celsius. The universe, I wanted to tell them, unlike their banal conversation, was a place of extremes. But customers didn’t want to hear this. They wanted their Gorgonzola Bruschetta.
I understood now why I had troubles keeping up with things. Why when my section filled all at once and every customer glared at me as though they’d just crossed the Sahara by foot rather than ridden the elevator of their million-dollar condo, I wanted to push the pause button. Though gravity tethered us, surely we must have sensed things were moving far too fast. I knew now why when I drank too much, or fell too much in love, I got the spins: my senses gave in, my atoms joined their stardust friends in a cosmic whirling dervish. I tried to let go, but I couldn’t. I just wanted it to stop. I wished I’d said no to that last double vodka and cranberry, that I could find a nice, quiet man who just wanted to stay home and do crosswords. I wished I could stand fixed on an immovable axis, like the wind-up ballerina with powder blue tutu stuck to the top of the jewellery box I’d had as a child. Or, at the very least, I wished I could control the turning of that golden crank.
For years, I’d dabbled in yoga, essential oils, and herbal teas, hoping to tether myself to a solid core, to escape the spin. Now I feared it was all a farce – there was no such thing as solidity. Tectonic plates were shifting, lava was rising. The Earth was as young and unruly as a wild colt. Everything was bucking, whinnying, writhing, expanding, contracting, bubbling, cooling, rippling, crashing. Nothing on this planet was solid or fixed; if it were, we’d be dead.
So there was nothing to do but spin. Nothing to do but run from the kitchen to table eight to the bar to table twelve to the patio to the hostess stand to the dishwasher, and smile like a maniac. There was nothing to do but relinquish control to the myste
rious forces of the universe, to throw up my hands and laugh at that shiny-faced man at table thirteen who was angry because there were no more soup toasts, or the heavily made-up woman at table nine who had been waiting five minutes for her double-skim latté light on the foam with one shake of cinnamon. I wanted to tell her five minutes didn’t even register on a geological time scale where human beings had existed for thirty-five minutes, that we’d waited more than a million years to see the light of Vega scintillate in the summer sky.
I wanted to tell them all that Alan Cromer thinks “science is a new factor in human existence that goes against the grain of our egocentric mind.” It was useless to care about soup toasts or coffee when you truly accepted that we, along with the Earth, weren’t the centre of the universe, an idea the Catholic Church had also struggled with from 1616 to 1992, when they’d finally crossed Galileo off their list of heretical bad boys. It was challenging to remain egocentric while living on a planet three hundred times smaller than Jupiter, a trillion times smaller than the estimated size of the universe.
I’d begun to wonder if my salvation depended upon embracing my ignorance rather than searching for a solid core of self. Maybe ignorance was my only shot at bliss. According to Ben, even the NASA gang would tell you that most of what we thought we knew was based on conjecture, theories with histories of changing radically from one decade to the next. One tiny discovery could transform our knowledge – or confirm our ignorance – overnight. Any good astronomer knew this, utilizing the realm of the unknown as the blasting pad to explore the unimaginable.
Perhaps the universe was just not as predictable as me. It was an extreme place. Take me to Venus where a day was longer than a year, to Jupiter where the Great Red Spot had stormed for hundreds of years, to Saturn where the wind blew at eighteen hundred kilometres an hour, to Uranus where summer lasted forty-two years. Take me to Pluto where the sun looked the size of a pinhead. Take me to any place that challenged what I once knew, where I could be surprised into transformation. Where I could begin to believe anything was possible.
For how else was a girl to survive the stingy customers of the world – whose idea of a tip was to round their bill of $28.77 to $30.00 – if she didn’t believe anything was possible? To believe this in an extreme sense, in an extremity akin to faith? What else did astronomy do but encourage such a faith? It was here I could learn to navigate the unknown, to believe it possible that the woman at table twenty with a fleck of parsley on her front tooth could see through my swirling masses of atoms and realize I too was human and not a robot trained to fetch her a teaspoon that wasn’t water stained. It was possible she’d look me in the eye and see that I too was fragile and vulnerable, subject to the whims of an unpredictable universe. I too got parsley stuck between my teeth and could turn into a bitch at the slightest turn of Earth’s axis.
It was possible we’d look together towards Cypress Mountain and the black sky would fill with light. We’d watch as the greed, poverty, injustice, and suffering of planet Earth whizzed by at 108,000 kilometres per hour and disappeared back into the void from whence it came. Everyone would put down their forks, get up, and spin. Finally, I would untie my apron and feel immense again: as big as a Cadillac, as powerful as the hydrogen bomb of the Sun whose atoms I shared. I would feel immense because it wouldn’t matter anymore that we lived on something the size of a grape, for we were much bigger, more fantastical, than we were capable of imagining.
part two
The Travel Agent
I couldn’t stay in Delhi another moment. I couldn’t even stay in this country.
“Why change your money to Nepalese rupees?” the travel agent asked.
“Because I’m going to Nepal,” I answered.
“Nepal is a bad country. Very dangerous.”
“I want to see Everest.” Actually, I’d heard Nepal was a gentler place than India, a better place to ease into Asia.
“Oh, but you can see much better than Everest in India. Our Himalayas are Number One. We will take care of everything, Madame. Now I will take you to a secret place to cash your travellers cheques.”
Usually I didn’t agree to such ventures, but I was simply too hot to argue. After three days of unimaginable heat, my brain was addled. The heat penetrated skin and simmered blood. Cold shower water rolled down my calves as warm as pee. Nothing I wore was light enough or absorbent enough. No fan whirled quickly enough. The fire inside could not be doused and I wandered the city like someone in need of rescue. I must have looked as desperate as I felt.
The travel agent led me through the streets of Paharganj to his friend’s shop where travellers cheques were cashed quickly without commission. “They’re American dollars, right?” he asked.
I rummaged around in my money belt, feeling flummoxed, even my brain sweating.
“Shanti, shanti,” the travel agent said. Peace, peace. “What are you so afraid of?”
I was afraid to disappear down one of those garbage-strewn alleys into a dank cinder-block building and be sold as a white sex slave. I was afraid of being kidnapped by insurgents. I was afraid of getting robbed, raped, of amoebic dysentery.
“Everyone is always staring at me,” I said.
“Maybe they think you’re beautiful. Or maybe they wonder why you look so afraid. Relax.”
I tried my best to heed his advice and release the stomach muscles where my money belt lay plastered by sweat. I tried to look people in the eye. Some of them smiled.
When I’d awoken that morning to the sounds of stray dogs yelping in pain and rage, I’d known my friends and family had been right.
“India? Are you crazy?” they’d asked when I told them of my travel plans.
I’d felt invincible the night I’d arrived home from work at two o’clock in the morning, fired up my laptop, and punched the numbers of my Visa card into the British Airways website, declining cancellation insurance. After four years of sitting in university classrooms beneath fluorescent lighting and waitressing in nearly every spare moment, it had been time to go. The hum of my hard drive had said it was now or never. Now, when I was quickly approaching forty and my feet ached from a Friday night of serving wild Pacific salmon on a bed of fiddleheads paired with Okanagan chardonnay. Now, when the sight of anyone drinking five-dollar-take-out lattés, walking designer dogs, and talking on cell phones filled me with loathing. I’d known I was in danger of becoming bitter and cynical. I needed to have faith in something and god wasn’t an option.
A euphoric feeling had buoyed me as I began the procedure of closing down my tidy little life: a call to my landlord, a chat with my boss, an email to my parents.
But as my departure date drew nearer my enthusiasm had waned. A taxi driver originally from Mumbai had warned me to wear a false wedding ring and carry bear mace. When I went to the travel health clinic to enquire about vaccinations, the doctor said, “India, hmm? Alone?” He’d looked me up and down. “Which part?”
“Everywhere,” I’d answered, a little proudly, scanning the map on the wall from north to south.
The doctor handed me a sheaf of pamphlets: malaria, Japanese encephalitis, typhoid, hepatitis. “Take a look at these and decide how you want to protect yourself.”
I read of spastic paralysis, delirium, orthostatic hypotension, and seizures until I was terrified to go. Especially alone. But there was no one to join me. All possible candidates were married with children, expecting more children, in debt, tied to a job, getting laser treatment on their eyes, or simply not interested in the discomforts of travel. But it had been too late to change my plans. I was going to India even if it killed me.
“Chai!” the travel agent yelled out into the bustling alleys of Paharganj, and minutes later a little boy returned balancing a tray laden with slender glasses.
“Kashmir will be cool this time of year,” the travel agent promised as I handed over a pile of freshly exchanged I
ndian rupees for a one-way Deccan Air flight and week-long stay on his family’s houseboat – a deal my guidebook warned would be a scam of the highest order. I didn’t care. This man could have promised me anything so long as I didn’t have to clip on my backpack and face the steamy chaos of over twenty million people and thirty thousand wandering cows.
He’d thrown in a complimentary lunch, rickshaw tour, and a place to spend the night. “My sister and her family are visiting from Australia and I know they’d love to meet you. I’ll call them right now.”
The travel agent must have smelled a sucker. He must have known it had taken me more than twenty-four hours after my arrival at Indira Gandhi International Airport to leave my hotel room. I’d lain on the bed in the middle of the room, overhead fan on high, scarcely able to bear the weight of the sheet. I’d lain there listening to the call to prayer, to Hindi dance music, to praying and chanting, to the breeze blowing through a thicket of trees. I’d smelled the wood-smoke from the Tibetan refugee camp, the stench of sewage wafting across the Yamuna River.
I’d ordered room service – Tibetan momos, Chinese stir fry, continental breakfast – the Wongdhen House insignia on everything from the teacups to the fuchsia napkins. I’d wondered if I could stay in this room until my return flight next April. I liked Wongdhen House, its dilapidated elegance. I liked the white marble floors, carved wooden doors, the windows with intricate bars and screens.
But the time had come to either leave the room or catch the next flight home. I remembered the words of my tree planting foreman so many years ago: “Go big or go home!”
“First time in India?” the only other lone traveller sitting in the Wongdhen House restaurant asked.
Was it so obvious? “Yes,” I said, wondering which would be safer – the porridge or the banana pancakes.
