Think of what John was like. If you want to play it safe, just don’t paint any infants or children.”
Izzy shook her head. “I don’t know ....”
“Nobody can force you to do it,” Kathy said. “I’m not trying to force you. But I do think you were given a gift and to not use it, to not give these beings a chance to live—the choice to live—is to abuse that gift. Not in the same way John says Rushkin does, of course, but it’s wrong all the same. Sure it’s a dangerous world out there, but it’s just as dangerous for us and we make do.”
“But why put anyone in a position where they have to risk that clanger in the first place? Don’t you think it would be better to just leave them where they are?”
“I can tell you’re not planning to have children.”
Izzy sighed. “It’s a consideration, isn’t it?”
But Kathy remained firm in her belief. “If they didn’t want to come across, they wouldn’t inhabit the bodies you paint for them. They make the choice.”
“But—”
“Then think of it this way,” Kathy said. “One of the reasons the world’s in such sad shape is that no one believes in magic or wonder anymore. The beings you bring across could well spell the difference between the flat, grey world that most of us see and one filled with actual manifestations of enchantment and mystery. Confronted with the results of your magic, people might learn to look up from the narrow field of vision that lies directly in front of them and actually see the world they’re in and the people they share it with. When that happens, maybe we’ll finally start to take care of it and each other better.”
“It still doesn’t seem fair to make them risk their lives like that for us.”
“It’s not just for us,” Kathy said. “It’s for them, too. You can’t tell me they don’t like it here, or why else would they choose to cross over? I’ll tell you this: I don’t think I ever met anyone so enamored with being alive as John is.”
Izzy couldn’t deny that. “Okay,” she said. “But that’s still an awfully big assignment you’re setting for me.”
“But one worth attempting. I can’t think of a better rationale to create a work of art. I don’t care what form one’s art takes, it has to be an attempt to leave the world a better place than it was before we got here or it’s not doing its job. And I don’t mean just making things that are pretty. I’m talking about confronting the problems we see and trying to do something about it. Trying to get other people to see those problems and lend their help. That’s why I write the kinds of stories I do.”
They left the argument unresolved. Izzy needed time to mend both her body and her heart. Her body mended quicker. Long after she was able to get about once more, she still missed John and was no closer to understanding why he wouldn’t come back to her than she’d ever been. He’d been so quick to read her heart before. Why couldn’t he feel her regret now? She’d made a terrible, terrible mistake. She knew that. God, she’d known it not ten minutes after all those horrible things she’d said had come spewing out of her mouth. All she wanted to do now was say she was sorry. She knew she’d always love him, no matter what he was, or where he’d come from. But she couldn’t tell him any of that unless he came to her. She had no way of reaching him herself.
In her worst moments she felt that he did know, but he still refused to return, and that was the worst feeling of all.
Journal Entries
There are no truths, only stories.
—Attributed to Thomas King
Biographies bore me. I don’t care how insightful a biographer is, no one knows what’s going on inside someone else’s head. Autobiographies bore me, too, because we lie to ourselves even more than a biographer does. Here’s what I think the bottom line is: if you’re looking for truth, try fiction. Oh, I can hear the protest already: “But fiction is even more lies.” This is certainly true. But I’ve always believed that the lies we use to make our fictions reveal the truth with far more honesty than any history or herstory or life story. So why have I started a journal? Well, it wasn’t my idea. Truth is, I was dead set against it.
I went into therapy after Izzy moved back to the island. It wasn’t Izzy’s moving away that sent me over the edge—that had been building up for a while. I’ve always had these bouts with depression; I hide them well, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Some mornings it’s all I can do to get out of bed and face another day. So it wasn’t Izzy’s leaving me alone in the apartment so much as it was that I didn’t have anybody around for whom I had to put on a cheerful mask. The thing with pretending you’re in a good mood is that sometimes you can actually trick yourself into feeling better. Without Izzy being there every day, the emptiness I’ve always carried inside me expanded until it threatened to swallow me whole.
So I thought I’d try therapy. Sophie’s been through it. And Wendy. Even Christy, though lord knows why he would have needed it, he always seems so confident, so self-contained. Still, I suppose people say the same thing about me. We’re back to masks, I guess.
Anyway, I went to see this woman that Sophie recommended, Jane Cooke, but it didn’t really seem to help. I’ve always been a talker. I’ll talk to just about anyone about anything—except about myself.
My sessions with Jane weren’t any different. After a couple of months of weekly visits, she was the one who suggested I start keeping a journal.
“You’ve already told me that anything anyone might want to know about you is in your stories,” she said.
“That’s true.”
“But there must still be things you feel a need to communicate, or you’d no longer be writing these stories. Would that be a fair assessment?”
“I don’t think I’ll ever have enough time to tell all the stories I need to tell,” I told her.
Jane smiled. “There’s never enough time, is there?”
“But the stories aren’t enough. I know people who use their writing as therapy, but I don’t get a sense of catharsis from mine. Telling stories is something I have to do, but it’s like the part of me that tells the stories and the part of me that’s always depressed are two separate people. The stories help other people work through their bad times, but they don’t do anything to help me.”
Jane nodded. “Do you keep a journal?” she asked.
“I never really saw the point in it.”
“Well, I’m going to ask you to give it a try.”
I thought I saw what she was getting at. “You want me to write about the things I can’t seem to talk about.”
“You do seem to have an easier time articulating certain concerns on paper.”
“So I write this stuff all down and then I show you the entries.”
Jane shook her head. “No. I want you to think of them as stories that you write just for yourself, instead of for other people. And don’t make any rules for yourself about what goes in the journal except for the fact that you write in it every day. You can write about the day you’re having, or plan to have.
Story ideas, events from the past, philosophical chitchat, anything at all. Think of it as a way for you to have a dialogue with yourself, for yourself. No pressure, no expectations.”
‘just write for me.”
Jane nodded.
I laughed. “Sounds kind of like masturbating.”
Jane smiled in response, but I could see she didn’t agree with me at all. “There’s nothing unhealthy about doing something for yourself,” she said. “Our society has made it seem somehow shameful if we do anything for ourselves and that shouldn’t be the case. We deserve a little downtime to devote to ourselves.”
“Okay,” I said. “So I start a journal. And then what?”
“Then nothing,” Jane said. “I don’t want you to go into this with any sort of preconceptions. Just do it for yourself. Perhaps it will help you recall something that we can discuss in our sessions, perhaps not, but that’s not the reason you should be doing it. I want you to simply talk to yourself on paper. Give it
a chance and see how it goes. We can discuss how it makes you feel after a few weeks.”
So that’s what I’m doing here—talking to myself, working on my autobiography, ha, ha—instead of telling stories to other people. But is it still autobiography, if I’m only writing to myself with no plans for publication? I don’t know what it is, or how it’s making me feel. For now I’m just going to do it.
* *
Rereading yesterday’s entry—yes, Dr. Jane, this makes two days in a row, whoopie-do got me thinking about autobiographies again, only from a different perspective, that of celebrities and their public’s seemingly insatiable need to know everything there is to know about them. I mean, People magazine didn’t get so popular because of its dedication to serious journalism.
I know Jane thinks I should be using these pages in a therapeutic manner, but I can see another use for these pages as well and that’s to set the future record straight. I don’t know why I care what people write about me after I’m dead, except that since I invest so much of my time telling the truth in my fiction, I’d hate to see someone play fast and loose with the pieces of my life. I don’t care what they might think of me; but I don’t want lies about my life used to invalidate the stories. My characters seem real because they are drawn from the realities of my life. I didn’t have to research their pain; I just tapped into my own.
So I realize that while I can use these pages as a journal the way Jane wants me to, I also have to use them to tell my own story. I’ll have to be completely honest. I’ll have to overcome my distaste of autobiography because of the fear of what they’ll say about me if I don’t write this.
The truth is, the success of The Angels of My First Death surprised no one as much as it did me.
But while my friends were all delighted with the newfound fame and freedom from monetary worries that the sales of that first book brought me, I could only think: what if when I die, my biographer goes to Margaret and gets her version of my early years, rather than the truth? Izzy and Alan and Jilly and the rest of them, they can fill in my Newford years, but going back to what brought me scurrying into the city—I’m the only one who can tell that story.
So that’s what brings me here: therapy and fear. But I’m going to compromise. I’ll tell the truth—I’ll always tell the truth in these pages—but I’ll do it in my own way.
* *
Here’s a weird thought: What if everyone only has so many words inside of them? Then sooner or later you’d run out of words, wouldn’t you? And you’d never know when it was going to happen because everybody would have a different allotment, it would be different for everyone—the way hair colour varies, or fingerprints. I could be in the middle of a story, and then run out of words and it’d never be finished. I could be using up the words I need for that story writing this.
Christ, I don’t even want to think about it.
* *
It wasn’t until I was fourteen that I discovered why my mother hated me. Like many unwanted children, I had a recurring fantasy that I was an orphan. That one day my real parents would arrive and take me away. But I never really believed it. I just figured, even as a child, that some people were born with good fortune and others got dealt the shit. You either played out your hand, or you folded. Then one day when I was fourteen ...
This is more intimidating than I thought it would be. Even with all these good intentions I’ve got and the past so far behind me, I still find it hard to write anything more than a few details. Fiction’s such an easier way to tell the truth. Anyway, here’s a big clue: I could only call her Margaret, not Mother.
I told all my friends I was an orphan, but here’s my real family tree: My father went to jail for molesting me when I was an infant and he was killed there by another inmate. I’d like to think it was because the other prisoners drew the line at having to do time with child-molesters, but the truth is he was a stoolie.
My mother committed suicide. Not because she loved my father and died of a broken heart. She just couldn’t deal with real life. Tell me about it.
Siblings? Not a one.
* *
Got up. Looked in the mirror after having a pee. Went back to bed. Don’t know if ever want to get up again. Is this the kind of thing you had in mind for me to write, Jane? I hope not, because it’s really starting to depress me and it doesn’t take much these days, let me tell you.
* *
Definitely a down day yesterday. Maybe I should try to find something happier to write about, like how from the first time I met Izzy, I felt we were knitted together, the way the eye knits a landscape, horizon to sky. I knew we would always be friends. Two weeks of being together with her and I wanted to be more than friends. I realized that I had fallen in love with her from day one, but I never once got up the courage to tell her. I hope I do before either of us dies. Maybe when we’re old and grey and nobody else could possibly want us—though I can’t see anybody ever not wanting Izzy. It’s not because she’s beautiful, which she is; it’s because she’s an angel, sent down from heaven to make us all a little more grateful about our time spent here on planet earth. We’re better people for having known her.
She’d die to hear me saying that. When it comes to modesty, she’s cornered the market. She was like that right from the start.
* *
Here’s something Izzy’s friend John once told me. He was passing it on as a story idea but I never have gotten around to using it yet. I never forgot it, though. We were having dinner together at the Dear Mouse Diner during that crazy period when Izzy was trying to put together her first show at The Green Man, both of us feeling a little lonely and left out of her life. I told him I’d been reading the Bible lately, mostly because I wanted to soak in the language, and how startled I was at just how many good stories there were in it.
“What about the ones they left out?” he asked.
“Like what?”
“Like how there wasn’t only a Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, but a Tree of Life as well, and who ate of its fruit, lived forever. That was why God expelled Adam and Eve—not because they had acquired knowledge, but that they might acquire both knowledge and immortality.”
“Where’d you hear about that?” I wanted to know.
“Can’t remember,” he said. “But you can go ahead and use it.”
“Maybe I will.”
He just gave me one of his all-purpose shrugs by way of reply and then steered the conversation elsewhere.
Funny thing is, I was never jealous of what he and Izzy had going. I was just happy that she was happy. I know how corny that sounds, but what can I do? It’s the truth.
* * *
I actually had a pretty normal day today. I got up early and wrote all the way through until about twelve-thirty when Alan came by to see if I wanted to go down to Perry’s for lunch, where we ran into Christy. Alan had to go back to work after lunch—he’s editing a collection of Kristiana Wheeler poems that his press is publishing in the fall—so Christy and I went rambling through the narrow streets of Old Market together, just the two of us, soaking up the ambience, pretending we were somewhere in Europe inside of Newford. That’s one of the things that I’ve always liked about this city. It’s such a hodgepodge of architectural stylings and humours that I sometimes feel as though I could visit any major city in the world without ever leaving its streets. All I have to do is turn a corner.
Old Market is definitely old world. The matrons in their black dresses and shawls, gossiping in clusters like small parliaments of crows. The little old men sitting at tables in the cafes, drinking strong coffee, smoking their pipes and playing cards or dominoes. The twisty cobblestoned streets, too narrow for most cars. The way the old gabled roof-lines seem to lean up against each other, whispering secrets in the form of swallows and gulls. The air is full of the smell of baking bread and fish and cabbage soup and other less discernible odours. Hidden gardens and squares rise up out of nowhere, tangles of rosebushes and neatly laid
-out flowerbeds, small cobbled-stoned plazas with wooden benches and wrought-iron light-posts. The rest of the city seems a hundred miles away. A hundred years away.
By the time I got back to the Waterhouse Street apartment I was feeling so relaxed that I sat down and finished “The Goatgirl’s Mercedes” and got about three pages into a new story that’s still waiting on a title. Truth is, I don’t even know what it’s about yet. I just met the characters and we’re still negotiating.
* * *
I brought my journal along to my session with Jane today, but I didn’t show her any of it. She asked me how it was going and I had to admit that I enjoyed writing in it.
“But even writing to myself,” I admitted, “I still can’t seem to talk about the past. I start to write about it and everything closes up inside me.”
“Don’t force it,” Jane told me. “Remember what we agreed on: no expectations. Let what wants to come, come.”
“That sounds like the way I normally write.”
“So you’ve already got the trick down. What you have to do now is stick to it.”
I can’t remember what else we talked about. Nothing monumental, that’s for sure. I almost told her that I just wanted to forget about these weekly sessions, but then I remembered Christy talking about how long it had taken him to work things out when he was in therapy and I decided to stick with it a little longer. I mean, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do with that one hour a week.
* *
The new story sucks. I’ve never dragged such a limp cast of characters out of my head as the ones that I’ve got stumbling through this story. I’d scrap everything I’ve done so far except I know from experience that having let them out onto the page, they’ll never give me any peace until I take them through to the end. Makes no difference to them how shitty the story turns out to be, just so long as I finish it.
* *
Margaret used to delight in tormenting me. I don’t know what she had against me. So far back as my memory goes she would find ways to hurt me, emotionally as well as physically, and it just never made any sense. I mean, what could a three-year-old—which is as far back as I can clearly remember—possibly have done to earn such hate? I used to drive myself crazy trying to make sense of it. Trying to figure out ways to get on her good side.
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