“In the first circle…” and here she tossed me a six-pack of socks with the L’Équipeur label still on ’em, “you won’t find anything a person really needs. The first circle is for pastel caricatures of your girlfriend made while you wait. Amulets on blankets. Cupcakes covered in glitterballs four dollars apiece and each no bigger than my nose. My brother-in-law’s carvings marked up fifteen hundred percent. No bread except in fancy restaurant baskets. No toilet paper, no Dumpsters.”
“I did find a papeterie,” I confessed. What a place. State-of-the-art nibs and bottles of Venetian ink.
“Don’t get distracted, new kid in town. Don’t blow your wad on dumb trinkets.”
Last night I admitted to Sophie I still crave that fountain pen, the vial of ink, the rag Amalfi notecards with deckled edges. But I have hardly any money left, again.
“You’re just like all the other ex-soldiers who come to me for help. You find it almost impossible to hold on to money or dignity, let alone both.”
Sophie does her best to correct the notions of mine she finds misguided or unhinged from sensible civilian perception because of what she calls my “unbalanced military past.” Her advice amounts to quite a compendium. She overwhelmed me with it in our first Septembers together.
“Watch out for fancy boulangeries,” she reminded me this morning. “Get the baguette on Wellington Street. Take the Metro to Marché Jean-Talon and scavenge a few red peppers out of the Dumpsters.”
Marché Jean-Talon is in the second circle bordering the third, where a change in the streets makes it dangerous for me to walk around or find things, though Sophie claims I could fill my backpack using the Costco card the Mission gave her for janitorial supplies.
She insists I buy bicarbonate of soda instead of toothpaste, but demands fancy toilet paper. The Mission monitors quantities pilfered by staff and anyway she doesn’t like theirs, she wants three-ply and she wants it quilted, whereas I’m fine without any at night in the park.
“We’ve plenty of leaves and moss,” I tell her. “There’s always the newspaper.”
“You and your newspapers!”
“I keep hoping to find clues in them about things I’ve missed. Might the Gazette, for example, not address my wonderment as to where I may glimpse the simple domestic scenes that bypassed me during my soldiering years?”
When I go on like this she buries her nose in her phone. “You and your sad little questions.”
“Why do I never see windows with curtains and coloured lamps peeping out, or the shoulders of someone buttering a slice of bread and handing it to a son or daughter who has come home from school? Why don’t I see anyone practicing a violin or splitting the talon in a game of piquet with his mother? Where do all the mothers and sons live?”
Mothers and sons certainly do not live in Sophie’s first circle, where people swarm in suits cut from dark wool, or hang about alleys drinking Hungarian wine, or lay watch chains on the curb with an eye out for the permit inspectors.
“Condos. Down by the Champlain Bridge.”
“Those faceless boxes?”
The boxes loom, bordered by miniature walled gardens that promise intimacy but fail to deliver it. Walls around the plants lie low enough to show shrubbery off but not low enough for a child to climb, or for the child’s father to sit and fill his pipe or consult his street map. The garden walls stand like boudoir biscuits around a cake, narrower than brick or stone, so narrow that even if they were lower you could not balance your croissant on them, nor a picnic cup. Around the greenery, which is shiny and alienating, run banisters, platforms, and outdoor passageways that purport to be for people to walk through but that are instead full of bitter wind licking round corners like tongues of the tiny northern lizards that hide in cracks in the cement.
“Always wanting picnics,” Sophie scoffs. “Is this the Cotswolds? Are we Bill and Dot cavorting around the Lake District?”
I suspect she has no idea what the Cotswolds are like. I suppose Bill and Dot must be relatives of hers whom I have not met.
“A hamper, please,” she singsongs, “a checkered cloth, a steak-and-kidney pie and eight hard-boiled eggs—poor little Tool-of-the-Empire wants his cucumber sandwich!”
“But look, why do things here possess a façade, even the vegetables? Nothing seems content to be itself.”
“What are you on about now?”
“Even a parsnip has no fragrance under the skin.”
“Are parsnips the fat grimy white roots? Didn’t you eat them in the Gaspé?”
“I can barely locate a parsnip. But if I were fortunate enough to find one, it should be full of perfume. That’s the point of a parsnip.”
“What about carrots?”
“You can’t inhale them here. There’s no sharp intake of perfumed bitterness. No anointing. How is it that North America manages to strip a thing’s essence? All that remains is counterfeit external structure. A convincing, robust specimen, but only on the outside.”
“Huffington Post says people are asking supermarkets to keep the spindly carrots and tarnished produce in bins for snobs like you.”
“I wouldn’t mind a spindly carrot. But more than that I yearn to see a crumbling wall, or a wall that at least has a chance to crumble in a few years, a wall not full of…what did you tell me it was? Styrofoam. Everything is so ostentatious yet unreal: the buildings, the parsnips, the athletic people running along the Saint Lawrence in their clothing that seems to have been made out of rubber pressed paper-thin then overlaid with silver lightning-bolts in case we mistake them for sensitive walkers trying to notice snails along the path, or caterpillars…”
“You’d like runners to wear handspun outfits?”
“I’d like to look at a thing that remains itself all the way through and isn’t made of chemical compounds that have been solidified and macerated then solidified again to resemble building stones or fabric of any kind.”
“You need a drink.”
“Parsnips and carrots should emit an unexpected pungent burst…”
“It’s hardly unexpected if you expect it.”
“Nothing can prepare one for the delight.”
“But…you’d be a bit prepared…this would not be your first carrot.”
“The sensation of an Old-World carrot can’t be held in the memory. It’s too particular and animal. It’s a small delight, but one such delight builds on another to create one’s real life. Which is what I miss.”
“You miss feeling like an animal.”
“I miss smells. Leather and smoke. Primroses. Lily-of-the-valley.”
“You’re completely out of it. You and your simplicity and your crumbling walls.”
“Out of what?”
“In this century, simplicity’s for wealthy people. Who all think they’re not asking for much. Haven’t you clued in to the fact that only big shots get to have a crumbling wall made of real stone? The rest of us can’t even hope for plywood anymore. Do you even know what plywood is?”
“Of course.”
“Plywood is too good for us. We might get particleboard if we’re lucky.”
“Board made of particles?”
“Remember I told you to buy tins of solid white tuna, not chunk light or, God forbid, flaked?”
“You said flaked is the factory floor sweepings.”
“Good boy. Particleboard’s the wood version of that. It’s sawdust that has been reconstituted with glue and pressure to make extruded planks of building material.”
“That’s exactly the kind of thing I hate.”
“I know, but you seem to think people nowadays have a choice. You’re looking at it as an aesthetic failure because you have no clue about the cost per square foot. You don’t think about the cost per square foot of anything, do you?”
“Nothing could be farther from the truth.”
“Really?”
“I’ve always been aware of bills, and of paying them, and of the humiliation of asking my father and mother
to help me make up for the shortfalls of a soldier’s pay….”
“For God’s sake, don’t start crying again. Maybe I am wrong. Maybe you’re not a privileged little dickhead. Maybe the soulless new world has drained all the flavour out of your parsnip. Or maybe the culprit is your own naturally occurring decrepitude. I mean, according to your own calculations, your taste buds are nearly three hundred years old.”
And so Sophie continually berates me, and I continue asking questions of her like an innocent child.
“What about the horrifying third circle, north among the warehouses? Do people live there?”
“What do you even know about that circle—you refuse to go.”
“And why are you so judgmental about the second circle right around our park? I like all the blue and red and gold doors. The spiral escaliers. The cupolas and wrought-iron railings.”
“Gentrification.”
Sophie is strange about money. She wants and doesn’t want it. She’s one of the few Mission staff given her own room separate from the dorms that house hundreds of homeless men, but she refuses to sleep there unless it’s twenty below outside. She recoils from people who live in park-side apartments with elegant balconies overhanging the boulevard. Yet woe betide me if I’m a day late with her rent. Over the past ten Septembers she has kicked me out of the tent early more than once, due to my precarious funds.
In the eleven autumns I’ve known Sophie, I have slowly come to suspect that my own destiny in New France might be that of a street person, much like her: constantly on the move, sleeping where the daily battle warrants, forever dreaming of stealing a fortnight in a proper bed, yet—if that opportunity approaches—realizing I’ve become fit only for our ramshackle nest under the sky, which she reminds me I’m lucky to have.
I fear being homeless might render me aimless like the men slouching on the Mission steps, smoking Pall Malls they buy from Kahnawake.
“How can they hang around so purposeless?” I once asked Sophie.
“They’re like the pigeons you’re so fond of. Hanging around the sidewalk, letting time go by. And hopefully they make it through the day.”
“I can’t see how they can stand it. Surely it’s a misfortune not to have an employment or a profession of some kind or other, to fill up the intervals of our time….”
“Spoken like a real military man.”
“But…to live merely for the sake of eating, drinking, without the prospect of any business, or of being useful. That, in my mind, is a heavy condition.”
“Isn’t that attitude precisely what gave General Wolfe all his troubles?”
Sophie has an unerring instinct for magnifying every misgiving I have ever entertained about my life’s work. She holds my military career up to me as if it were a mirage that I now have a chance to see anew. And even as she does this, she gets so impatient with me.
She says I refuse to gain perspective, that I’m too invested in my crimes: still needing to make sense of them, to justify my butchery.
“You can’t see the forest when you’ve torched all the trees,” she taunts.
If only it were just trees we burned.
Dear Mother,
We set fire to so much more…
—
GOD, I NEED TO GET out of Place d’Armes—the place makes me depressed. But…to journey to the third circle!
Must I go?
Catacomb of alienation!
Still, Costco at least boasts a section where a man can find sausage in a bun. I’ll admit Sophie has a point when she claims every Englishman is constantly on the lookout for a sausage. Costco also sells a cold brew sans alcohol but with a sharp fizz like new beer, sweeter than Parisian lemonade, in paper cups the size of tureens one can refill at no charge.
Have I remembered Soph’s Costco card? All right, Jarry Station, here I come.
I labour once again to master the eye-avoidance people practice in subway cars. The Montreal trains are full of passengers who are not white or who are too young or too old to own cars. I seem always to be the only tall white man on the train.
I end up wedged next to a black woman weeping unobtrusively, her tears sliding in silent streams down a face otherwise expressionless, even serene.
I depart the car to transfer at Station Sauvé.
Hello bus 121, pilgrimage through cathedrals built of strata and substrata of expanded polystyrene covered in glass fibre mesh embedded in crack-resistant polymers replete with cracks and groaning bulges and peaks and valleys of synthetic stucco stretching endlessly to the new world horizon.
Why did I not even lay a hand on that woman’s arm, to comfort her?
5 Costco
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4.
AFTERNOON.
Costco and environs. Montreal, Quebec
THE REAR BUS SEAT IS EMPTY! I plonk onto its wild velvet pattern as we sway around traffic islands, past Walmart and fly-by-night computer repair outlets.
That which is, already has been. And that which is to be, already has been. And God seeks what has been driven away….
Ecclesiastes always strikes me as the only reasonable part of the Bible. It supports my belief that if you arm yourself with philosophy, you can be master of whatever befalls you. As Montreal’s charmed balconies peter out and warehouses abound I find Ecclesiastes more comforting than I did in any pew with my mother, or at wartime devotions, or by candle in my billets and camps.
Our driver lurches in and out of her stops. I know nothing of those who board, nothing of these outskirts’ shopping centres or parking lots. I ride anonymous in their sprawl, waiting for the crater that might jolt me properly into being in the present instead of floating in the past. They call Montreal’s copious potholes nids-de-poule—chicken nests. I need our bus to bump in and out of a giant one of those, maybe an ostrich’s home instead of a chicken’s.
The English painter J.M.W. Turner had an exhibit two Septembers ago at the gallery near McGill University—his images glowed at me from billboards on Sherbrooke Street—I bought a ticket and marvelled at the man. He was born sixteen years after my death but might have been my brother. From his paintings I saw he must have been perpetually in a condition like the one I inhabit every October through August, the time when I am not with Sophie. He dwells in pure atmosphere: air, fire—vague like the French word for a wave in the Atlantic whose heaving waters never failed to sicken me when I sailed with the fleet.
I read how Turner lashed himself to a mast and painted his silver fury of storm and spindrift. His work evokes the frightening mist to which I return once my September leave is done. Standing in front of his paintings I felt understood for the first time. Sophie called this ridiculous. “He was very short-sighted,” she said, “and so are you. The thing you have in common is that you’re both half-blind.”
As I bump along on the bus now, I find it dispiriting that no one in this city ever recognizes me. Even when I put the red coat on, people don’t know who I am. I have to confess, I expected many difficult things, but not anonymity on my return to a French-Canadian city. And I miss combat. As long as I lift no musket, shoulder no cannon, shout no order nor hold council of war with men—even men whose disdain weighs more on me than the other tasks combined—my heart hurts more than it did in battle.
I yearn back, crane forward: I look with impotent compassion upon the soldier I was. I rage against that soldier’s time lost to dreary encampments with their filth and noise: damp fires where we devoured our dead brothers’ rations and scanned the hill in case a brother was not dead or had somehow revived and might crawl back to us even if, like my beloved comrade Elwyn, he now possessed only one arm.
Civilians imagine we soldiers need to recover from the horrors of active duty, but it is the white-hot ordeal of a soldier’s inactive waiting that gnaws him from the inside out, starting with a walnutsized cluster of dusty brown worms in his brain, and for me those worms are not done feeding yet.
I wish I could write to my mother at this mome
nt—but on the bus, my knees jiggle and the minute I look down the motion sickness starts. Writing even a few lines to her would make me feel less aggrieved by how the fragile haunts of earth—so humble and ordinary for civilians—elude and torment me. Even the print on the fabric of the bus seats reminds me of certain glorious fireworks.
—
AT COSTCO YOU SIT AT A TABLE with your knackwurst and as long as you can produce a membership card no one accuses you of loitering, even if you sit writing to your mother all day.
I always rummage in the Lost and Found to see if anyone has left something I can use. Last September I found a scarf woven in the Scottish borders. So far no one has left me an umbrella.
This place, dear Madam, I write as a woman hollers into her phone near a pyramid of paper towels: “Arnold! Where’d you disappear to?”
This place from which I write to you now is in need of attack by French fire-ships: I know you feared those more than any other weaponry at my Enemy’s disposal, but I thrilled to their conflagration. It was so easy to quench them that I deliberately let them float toward us longer than necessary…
“I’m over here by the Bounty. Did you get Jasper’s food?”
I know my mother does not want to hear how the approach of Montcalm’s fire-ships thrilled me at night on the Saint Lawrence. One flame-lick to our vessel and molten oakum would rain fire on my hair. I loved how the fire-ships lit the embankments, unleashing smoke and turpentine from the spruce overhang. The incense filled me with lustful purpose.
“No! I read that one has ground-up tumours in it. Get the Kirkland.”
I try not to write to my mother about mortal danger, nor erotic thrill, nor my days of meaninglessness and despair. How many letters have I begun to her, only to crumple and fling them in the fire?
This place is crying out for a conflagration now….
Around my Costco table, which has been bolted to the floor, the walking dead appear. They move slowly, heavily, and have lost all animation or verve. Are they French? English? Was it for them my blood poured out of three ragged holes?
Lost in September Page 5
