The Abandoned

by Kyp Harness

  Tim thought back to the one time he had steeled himself to see what Sherrie’s boyfriend looked like. He stood in the food court across from the store and saw the stocky fellow waiting on a customer, smiling affably, his white teeth flashing from time to time beneath his thick black moustache. The moustache seemed to bespeak adulthood and manliness beyond anything Tim had to offer—it was mind-boggling for Tim to imagine Sherrie’s tiny, delicate body being embraced by the large, cumbersome body he saw before him. He had seethed, the image of Bruce Ferguson seeming to jab into his eyes as he watched him in the mall. He felt like an assassin.

  “He’s not that interesting,” noted Russ as the two boys stopped off at a small donut shop in the strip mall not far from Tim’s house. They sat down together at a table.

  “I guess he must have something,” Tim allowed weakly.

  “No,” said Russ. “He’s just a run-of-the-mill guy.” Russ shrugged. “There’s a thousand other guys just like him out there. But there’s not a thousand other guys like you,” Russ noted as he sipped his glass of Coke.

  “Well,” said Tim looking down, cheered by his friend’s words, “but I don’t know how much good it does me.”

  “Sherrie’s hemmed in,” Russ ventured. “She’s like a lot of people—she’d like to be doing something different, living in a different way. But she’s stuck. That’s what I see. So she stays with this amiable, dull guy, hoping for the best because she simply hasn’t got the guts to make a move. But so what? A lot of people are like that. Sure doesn’t make her unique,” Russ said, looking around the small donut shop. “People are led around and crushed by fear and guilt and cowardice. They end up trapped in lives they don’t want, then whine about how they never got a chance, never had a choice.

  “The farce of it all!” Russ proclaimed, gazing bitterly into his glass of Coke. “It’s pathetic. What pathetic specimens human beings are!” he said as if talking to himself. “Everybody watching the same television shows, talking about the same television shows, wearing the same clothes, thinking the same thoughts. Old, borrowed ideas, old borrowed dreams and old, borrowed lives.

  “You know, Jesus said, ‘You are the salt of the earth, but if you should lose your savour, you aren’t really good for anything except to be thrown on the dust heap,’” a sudden blaze in his eyes. “That’s what people miss—that it’s a real sin to lose your savour, to not be authentic in this life. It’s a sin to give your life over to the forces of mediocrity. Jesus said that anyone of us could do the very same things He did—and greater… But anyway,” Russ observed, calming down into a resigned disgust. “This town is just a sinkhole of mediocrity. You must be glad you’ll be getting out of it.”

  This statement took Tim aback. After a moment he realized that Russ was referring to the fact this was Tim’s last year in school, and after that he was expected to go on to university.

  “I mean, I imagine you’ll choose to go somewhere far from here,” Russ had noted. “I can’t imagine that you want to stay around this place.”

  Tim was in grade thirteen, the year that students completed only if they were planning on pursuing higher education. He had thought of quitting school the year before but he’d had no real idea of what he wanted to do. He’d toyed with the idea of going to an animation college but had never gotten around to applying. So he had gone back to school to avoid going to work, and now that he was halfway through his final year, the question of what he was going to do with his life was staring him down again.

  He had the marks necessary to qualify for colleges and universities, but he had no idea what he wanted to study. He knew that in order to get a degree he’d have to take courses he wasn’t particularly interested in, which was not very appealing. He would never hold a job, he told himself, that required a degree. The idea of attending university was attractive to his parents, for no one in his family had attended before, but for Tim the value of the idea wholly resided in the fact that it was something to do and a way to avoid working.

  As much as he could tear his mind away from his dilemma with Sherrie—for it was that which absorbed all his attention—Tim’s view of his future was nonchalant. In fact, when things worked out with Sherrie the way he expected them to, he told himself, he likely wouldn’t go to university at all. Beyond this, he was of the opinion that whatever he did was of little consequence—he was an artist in the Joycean sense, as embodied by Stephen Daedalus in A Portrait of the Artist as Young Man, and his purpose was to find the best form through which to express his sensibility. At one time he had drawn, and now he was interested in writing. Perhaps he would perform. At one point as a kid he had a magic act he put on, with a banner that read, The Great Tim-tini. Maybe he would do something in that line, he thought.

  One thing was for sure, Tim would not be a professor or a teacher or a scholar. To him, these were lower types who lived lives of emasculated boredom. He felt as though he had something more to give to the world, and he needed time, perhaps a lifetime, to bring it out of himself. He wanted to express the pure, illuminating beauty that struck him in the works of Van Gogh, in the writing of Joyce. Tim dared to entertain such hopes for himself, and in this sense the call he felt to be an artist was as irresistible and grave as the call some feel to become preachers and prophets. He also decided he would never use his artistic gift for such prosaic acts as teaching, or prostitute it for money. It would be far better to work menially for a living, or in an area utterly unrelated to art, than to sully and devalue it for such purposes.

  Tim’s convictions were strengthened and augmented by his new Charitas view of seeing a world of love and truth that existed behind the world he knew. He felt connected to humanity in a manner he had not been before, and Christ’s exhortations from the Sermon on the Mount reverberated with Tim’s vision of his road as an artist. He would do sacred work beyond the institutions, work schedules and sensationalist hum of society. Such work could take a lifetime to achieve and may not serve humanity’s purpose until a lifetime after that; it transcended the concepts of time and space.

  As a child, Tim had never wanted to grow up, so miserable and harsh the adult world seemed to him. Existence seemed such a painful thing for most of the adults he observed that he wondered why they bothered. Now he saw that the adult world was not only constricted, brutal and tragic, but was actually sheer madness. The Charitas weekend had shown Tim possibilities he had not known existed before, a hint that life was more than toil and pain. His sense that there was a higher love derived in great measure from Sherrie but beyond her, the spiritual experience she had led him to had freed him further from the monetary concerns and harsh punishments the world threatened him with.

  In his freedom, Tim grew more detached and flippant about his schoolwork. He arrived one day at a course he was taking in Canadian literature to find the class was doing a test on a book he had neglected to read. He sat down in front of the test, panicked for a moment, but then relaxed as he saw what he had to do. He answered the questions as though they were about a book he wanted to read, or imagined he had read. He went through the test, writing in answers, sometimes essay-length ones. What is the symbolic significance of the fence post? The fencepost signifies the dreams and the aspirations of the entire family, now shadowed by encroaching mortality. Why did Jim slaughter the calf? Jim slaughtered the calf because of his long-held feelings of hostility for his father.

  Tim missed his next class because of a doctor’s appointment, but some of the other students came up to him in the hall and told him they’d spent the entire period going through his test, laughing at it, the teacher polling the class as to whether Tim deserved a passing grade for his ingenuity. Some of the students were in favour of it, while others were opposed, since he obviously hadn’t read the book and prepared for the test as they had. The teacher stated that she was giving him a fifty percent grade in view of the writing ability he displayed. Several of the students thought he should get
a better grade, one girl noting that Tim deserved something more for his creativity alone.

  “Talent and creativity are wonderful,” the teacher observed. She was a middle-aged woman who wore stylish glasses that she often took off, placing the end of one of the arms in her mouth with an air of quietly amused sophistication. She had no children of her own and was fond of stating that she looked on all of her students as her children. “But this wasn’t a creative writing exercise. It was a test on a book most of you have read. Tim took it as an opportunity to display his talent, and I’ll give him a pass this time, but he shouldn’t be rewarded for it beyond that.”

  7. Roberta Cameron

  Sherrie’s face held endless interest for Tim, since beside the beauty he found there, he read her eyes, the curl of her lips, for clues as to what she was thinking. Her personality for him was like an object sighted in night that can only be defined by the outline around it. She had a particular smell which became identified with her in his mind, an acrid but not unpleasant odour he couldn’t recall ever smelling before. When they walked through the halls talking, Tim’s head would bob up and down, swooping in again and again to hear her words as they emanated from her small frame. He was always performing, trying to win her over and away from the clutches of Bruce Ferguson.

  One day between classes they talked about the movie Flashdance that had just come out. “Do you want to see it? I was thinking about seeing it this weekend,” Sherrie asked.

  A tenuous excitement took hold of Tim. “Sure, yeah,” he said. “That’d be great.”

  “Saturday night?” she said.

  “That’d be great,” Tim said, hoping he was hearing her quiet voice correctly.

  They exchanged a hug and Tim watched as Sherrie moved through the crowds of teenagers. “I’ll talk to you on Saturday!” she called back over her shoulder.

  So this is the way it happens. This is the way it works, he thought, when a girl makes the decision to take a relationship to another level. She had asked him out to a movie, without mentioning Russ or any of the Charitas crew. For the first time they would be alone on a date. It seemed so logical, such a matter-of-fact thing to happen after all the intimacies they had already enjoyed, but to Tim it was the crossing of a major frontier.

  He traded off his shift at the variety store on Saturday night, and all day Saturday he stayed around the house, waiting for her call. He showered and shaved carefully so as not to cut himself. As the day progressed into the afternoon he began to get nervous, and as suppertime came he realized they wouldn’t be going to the seven o’clock show. But at eight the phone rang and he leapt on it. “I’ll be by in about twenty minutes to pick you up,” said Sherrie. “I’ve just got to stop by and get Barb and Mike, too. You know Barb and Mike?”

  He knew them. Barb had been her best friend at her old school, and Mike was her locker-mate. “Yeah,” said Tim.

  “Okay, I’ll see you then,” she said. And then: “Are you alright?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Oh,” she said. “It just seems all of a sudden your voice is different. Like there’s something wrong.”

  “No,” said Tim, pulling his tone up into the higher register of his cheerful, entertaining self. “Nothing’s wrong. What could be wrong?”

  “Okay, good,” she said. “I’ll see you soon.”

  Tim placed the receiver in its holder and sprinted to the washroom. He stood over the toilet and gagged, not sure if he really felt the physical impulse to gag, but needing to do it nonetheless, needing to react in the most radical, unequivocal manner. He convulsed and was able to retch up a small amount of orange-brown fluid into the toilet bowl.

  Tim accompanied Sherrie and her friends to the movie, noting that Sherrie seemed more outgoing when she was with Barb than she ordinarily was. He felt estranged from the friends and their shared history, and as they laughed and joked it seemed to him as though they treated him like an elderly or handicapped person they had agreed to tolerate out of kindness. They were glad to bring him into their camaraderie for a while, but he could never be a part of their lives in a real, substantial way.

  When he looked at Sherrie her eyes seemed different, never seeming to focus on him or to acknowledge the significance of what had passed between them, as though it had all been a dream he dreamed alone. When she dropped him off that night it was though he was being shut into a tomb. For the rest of the weekend he was in grief, with a pain in his stomach that wouldn’t let up. Years before, he used to pray that no one threatened him at school the day before a weekend so that he wouldn’t have to spend the two days in anxious depression dreading the Monday to come. Now he would have gladly traded this new anguish for all of the misery and pain he’d endured as a result of being tormented by bullies as a child. At least he had been able to hide from bullies, or to run away from them. What he felt now seemed strong enough to kill him.

  “You’re the most sensitive person in the world,” Russ noted solemnly, reacting to the gagging story Tim told him in art class. “And it seems to me she doesn’t know what she wants.”

  “I wasn’t too impressed with her friend, either,” Tim said, trying to wrench some dignity from his suffering through anger. “Sherrie seemed to become a different person when she was with her.”

  “Maybe she just isn’t what you think she is,” Russ offered matter-of-factly. “Maybe she’s just a normal, run-of-the-mill person.”

  “Not all the things she says are ordinary,” Tim countered, feeling a fierce desire to defend her. “And the experience at Charitas certainly wasn’t ordinary.”

  “Yeah, but let’s face it,” said Russ. “There may be some good things about Charitas, but it isn’t an intellectual triumph. It’s hokey.”

  “Well, I’d still recommend it,” Tim said, remembering that he’d been asked to recruit people for the next retreat. He’d often thought that Charitas was just what Russ needed to get in touch with his emotions, to actually feel the love of God instead of talking about it all the time.

  “Hey, you guys,” said Mr. Kosinski, his severe, goateed face appearing around the side of his canvas. “Maybe you should get back to work?”

  Disregarding Mr. Kosinski entirely, Russ exclaimed suddenly as if remembering something, “Oh hey! Do you really feel that writing about yourself is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree?” He gave a wide grin.

  Tim looked at him, puzzled. “How do you know I wrote that?” he asked.

  “My English teacher read it to the class.” Russ chuckled. “He got it from your teacher in the staff room. He even printed it up and put it on the bulletin board for everyone to read.”

  “I didn’t know that,” said Tim, flattered that his work had been appreciated. He had used a self-interview form from Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons. And the quote about nailing Jell-O to a tree was taken from Dick Cavett’s autobiography.

  “Yeah—he said it was a perfect example of autobiographical writing,” Russ said, beaming at his friend. “So,” he laughed, “do you still hide in your room whenever people come over to your house?”

  Tim wondered if he should feel violated that the teacher had photocopied and read out loud his piece of writing, especially when it was so personal in nature. But he really couldn’t feel anything but proud and pleased that his writing was being recognized, and he was thrilled it was being shared with others. He was also glad that Russ’s teacher found it so good when his own teacher had only appreciated it moderately.

  A couple days later, Tim was surprised by a girl coming up to him in the hall and telling him how much his piece of writing meant to her. Roberta Cameron had large blue eyes and a generous mouth. She was fourteen years old, in grade nine, and the younger sister of a girl Tim knew from Charitas. She that said she wrote, too, and her favourite author was Richard Bach, the author of Jonathan Livingston Seagull. She looked at the world with the wide, welcoming eyes o
f one who had little reason to distrust life and her fellow humans. Her words were spoken with the ease of one who had never known of a reason not to be honest.

  Roberta Cameron began to leave samples of her writing and notes in Tim’s locker. The subject of many of her writings was a spirituality that depended greatly on, and had a remarkable amount of faith in, the good intentions of humanity. There was serenity at the heart of her work that was even reflected in her handwriting: the blue lines were pressed lightly against the page, and they looped and curled with easy, imperturbable grace. After a while, the samples of writing fell off and the notes increased. Roberta showed little shyness in letting her feelings for Tim be known. Tim was flattered by her attention, and in his frustration with Sherrie he basked in it. He told Roberta of his hopes for Sherrie, but she was still glad to make herself available as he waited to see what Sherrie would decide. She began to call the house, and her notes to him were always signed, Always on my mind.

  Roberta’s open-hearted youth stopped Tim from having romantic thoughts about her because she seemed like a child to him. Her unguarded adoration for him was also difficult to accept because it made the contrast with Sherrie all the more obvious. Where Sherrie was mysterious, Roberta was forthright, and Tim was not attracted to Roberta’s acceptance of him. As his hopes for Sherrie had begun to fade, however, he wondered if he was taking Roberta’s love too lightly.

  On a day off school, Tim invited Roberta to come with him across the river to America where his mother had worked as a secretary for a real estate company for twenty years. Roberta and Tim walked around the city in the snow, feeling in a hundred inexplicable ways the unique American flavour of the place in contrast to their home only miles away. One of Tim’s ritual stops on every to the city was at a new building on the banks of the river, in which he could take the elevator up to an unoccupied floor and look out the window down onto the flowing grey river and across to Canada on the other side of it. He took the elevator with Roberta and gazed out with her on the snowstorm turning the wind white, the flakes madly swirling in the air high above the rushing waters. Roberta turned to him suddenly, her eyes seeming larger and bluer than ever. “You’re a beautiful person,” she blurted.