Consolation

by Michael Redhill

  “When did this happen?”

  “I’ve had it in my eye for some time. Then I woke up one morning a couple of weeks ago and the rest had followed suit.”

  “Do you have pain?”

  “No.”

  “If I can help you, you’ll have pain. And even then, I don’t know what kind of improvement you’ll have.”

  “I’ve had pain my whole life,” Ennis said. “I know how to deal with it. But I can’t practice my profession with half my extremities out of commission.”

  The doctor nodded and returned behind his desk to take down some notes. “Have you been bled?”

  Ennis raised the eyebrow that could be raised. “No, and I don’t plan on it either. That’s English medicine. I need Irish moss.”

  “You’ve had enough Irish physic, Mr. Ennis,” said the doctor. “We’ll bleed you here for a few minutes and see how you do. Are you his brother or his son?” he asked Hallam.

  “I’m an acquaintance.”

  “What do you think of blood? Will you be sick?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What about me?” said Ennis, looking back and forth between them. “Does my opinion count here?”

  “No,” said Doctor Cotter, and then to Hallam, “hold his arm.”

  “I can hold my own lordly arm,” said Ennis, and he swatted at Hallam, but the doctor gestured at the palsied one and had him hold it steady along the side of the examining bed.

  “I’m sure you’d rather be lanced in the one that can’t feel it.” He took an armature with a curved blade and expertly opened the vein in the crook of Ennis’s elbow. Ennis flinched, but only because he expected pain. He felt nothing, and after the initial puncture stared at the wound with curiosity. A dark slow blood leaked out of the opening, thick as paint. Doctor Cotter lifted the arm and put it in a receptacle made for the procedure, and Ennis’s blood ran down either side of the cut, collecting in the black hair of his forearm, and finally dripping into the porcelain tray, as slow as molasses from a tap.

  The doctor marked the running blood and listened again to Mr. Ennis’s chest, then tucked the earpieces of his stethoscope back into the pocket of his gown. “That you will die is more or less a certainty,” he said.

  “I can make the same diagnosis of you, sir,” said Ennis.

  “I’m a man of almost seventy, however, and I would place a bet on my surviving you at, what is it? Forty?”

  “I celebrated that birthday some years ago, but you’re close.”

  The doctor leaned forward and closely examined each of Ennis’s eyes. Hallam looked as well, unsure what to make of his eyes beyond the obvious differences. “Do you want to know how it will happen, or just an approximation?”

  “Give me the testimony entire,” said Ennis. “I embrace my fate.”

  The doctor’s narration lasted less than a minute, and although Ennis nodded through it, his face drained of color. They took him outside, respectful of his silence, and put him in the hack. Hallam went back into Cotter’s surgery and, mentioning his late business, said that he would prepare Mr. Ennis’s physic himself. The doctor had said oh at one point, making some connection to him from a tale he’d heard going around, and perhaps it was this that prevented him from offering to use his dispensing privileges on their behalf. And so Hallam spent the better part of two pound three at the dispensary, buying — at nearly twice the cost it would have taken to stock it himself — bryony, guaiacum resin, and pleurisy root. He took it all in a small box and then returned to Sam Ennis and brought him back to his house in the near-dark.

  THE TWO MEN proceeded west along Queen Street in the hackney carriage, each in his own silence. Hallam watched the northern side of the street pass by in a drab dumb show. Shopkeepers drawing down their grates, or simply locking their doors. The sounds of the day-end carried on the slow-moving breeze, along with the scents of the street, the dust in the macadam kicked up all day by traffic, the pervasive smells of wood, of sawdust, of cut lumber and planking. The forest, so recently standing in these places and still surrounding and within the city, lay down blond and dead in the middle of it, put to civilized use, bent to human will. In his mind’s eye, Hallam imagined a pantomime in which the trees shed their barks, their branches, stood naked in their living wood and then fell to in long planks, stacking up and becoming houses, becoming doors and countertops and cabinets and beds. The trees spun themselves to dust, distributing their parts into lathes to be transformed into newel posts and table legs. So willing, so selfless. He thought of Mr. Ennis, whose death was upon his huge body like a broadsheet on a hoarding, and wondered what people’s passings lent back to the places they’d lived in. There was no similar transformation in store; their bodies would not help build the cities they’d carved out of forests, they would not rewater the rivers that had been filled with dirt. “Sometimes I think,” he said, “that no one will ever know we were here, but for the damage we did.”

  Ennis brought his face around from his side and peered at Hallam with rimmed eyes. “We’ll know. Who gives a good feck about anyone else?”

  “At least you make something.”

  “Pictures,” he said almost inaudibly. “The rich in their glory and the desperate poor in theirs.”

  “It’s a better legacy than mine.”

  He looked over and put a hand on Hallam’s shoulder. “Keep the finer points of my condition from Mrs. Rowe, please. She has no need to know.”

  “She’ll ask.”

  “Tell her nothing can kill me. She’ll laugh at that.”

  Back at his shoddy little house, Ennis limped inside, refusing Hallam’s aid, and collapsed on his pallet. His weight on it sent up a sour odor. In the winter months, Ennis did not smell as strong as he did now, with the spring air an ideal vehicle for the scents of disease and uncleanliness. Hallam sorely wanted to get out and go home to face Mrs. Rowe’s impatient questioning, but he had first to administer the guaiaci and it would take preparation. “I’ll open a window so you have some fresh air.”

  “The authorities disagree on fresh air,” he said, wheezing on his back.

  “You’ve just had plenty, so a little more won’t hurt you.”

  “I’ve heard that there is a particulate in air that can lodge in your lungs and kill you. And that it is out there all the time hunting for victims.”

  “I think it depends on a person’s constitution,” Hallam said. “But you are right, there are plenty of things we can’t see that we encounter daily and could make us quite ill. That we wander around in such air, and touching unclean surfaces like doorknobs and other people’s hands, it’s a wonder we don’t die ten times over every afternoon. We must be doing something right.”

  “Some of us are.” The air was clearing the closeness in the room as Hallam made up a half gill of guaiacum syrup. “I’ll have a pipe before you indoctrinate me with your witchcraft.”

  “Go ahead,” Hallam said. “It’ll restore your nerves.”

  Ennis’s pleasure in his pipe bought the apothecary a few minutes of quiet, in which he could concentrate on quantities and processes. It was amazing to him that a mere three months away from the only profession he’d ever had was enough to render his fingers thick and useless. He had no formulary with him, and had to rely on dim memory to remind him how much resin to dissolve in the gum arabic, what color indicated the correct potency, how much of the mother-water to incorporate back into the syrup.

  His attention, directed as it was to his hands, did not at first detect the sweet odor of the opium paste with which Ennis had doctored his tobacco, but when he smelled it he spun around and leaned over to pluck it out of Ennis’s mouth. “I won’t have you speeding your end along while I’m over here trying to delay it.”

  “It’s a painkiller,” he said.

  “You said you don’t have pain.”

  “See?”

  Hallam took up the tray with his preparations on it and drew the only chair over to Ennis’s bedside. “I’m paying f
or your recovery, Mr. Ennis, because I feel bound to. But I won’t do it if you plan on counteracting my good physic with your bad drugs. Do you understand?”

  “So I’m to have no pleasures?”

  “Will you settle for the pleasure of being alive?”

  “With you as my nurse?”

  “You can be reassured that under my care you’re safe, Mr. Ennis. Could you extend that guarantee to all who have passed under your thumb?”

  Ennis regarded him with frank wonder. “A man with your imagination should have been writing romances, Mr. Hallam. Not even in my most sinful dreams have I done the kind of evil you think me capable of. But fine, so I am a dark soul. Why come to my aid, then?”

  “At Mrs. Rowe’s behest.”

  “Ah, that unsullied creature.” Hallam didn’t reply, setting out his medicines. “So where are all the women carrying my spawn, Jem? Lurching about the back alleys crouching over their birthing pans? Or, or, the dead-eyed supplicants queuing at my door, ready to trade their mortal souls for a picture of themselves? Surely in my rapaciousness, I’d be running my dirty thumb down the shank of some ten-year-old, even as you brought me back to health.”

  “Do you want me to go?”

  “No. I want you to tell me where are my victims, Mr. Hallam.”

  “Am I not one of them?”

  This caused the jolly look on his face to fade. “I never touched Mrs. Rowe with anything but my eye. Or any of the others. I was a young Jem Hallam myself, a married man come to a new world to make his name for his loved ones, to set up a doorstoop and light a fire, and I failed as well. I have a wife in Kerry, Jem, and four children, and all I want is to go home. And if that means a bare loin in here to quench the market for such things, then so be it. It will pay my passage home and I can’t see what business of yours it is.”

  “You’re not married.”

  “With four littlies, Mr. Hallam: Peter, Ceiran, Martina, and Sèan. Eight, ten, fourteen, and seventeen.”

  “Then in their name, how can you do what you do in here? Hopping yourself up, your door wide open to whores?”

  “I NEVER TOUCH ‘EM!” he fairly roared, and his voice died at the end of it. He lay on his bed, panting. “And I live alone, Jem Hallam; you’ve got nothing to say to me. Give me my medicine and you can take your lectures home.”

  “I won’t do anything for you,” Hallam said, and he stopped what he was doing. “You’re poison, and you’re an addict. There’s no percentage in you.”

  Ennis hoisted himself up to sitting, groaning like a rusty bellows, and with further effort pushed to standing, his great form tottering in the air. To Hallam, his weakness was awesome to see, but he proceeded to the cupboard above his sink and from within brought out a small wooden box such as was used to keep butter in. His breath was coming ragged and raw, and with one big hand he scrabbled out the contents of the box and hurled them at his unwilling savior. Hallam had the impression of a book missing its boards, but instantly it burst apart: envelopes and papers, a scatter like a flock of birds suddenly put to air, that fluttered to the dirty floor. The two men stood facing each other, Ennis supporting himself against the dry sink. He nodded upward with his chin, too winded to speak. Embarrassed, Hallam leaned down and scraped up a couple of the bits of paper from the floor. He saw the same handwriting everywhere: a salutation: Dear Sam, words here and there with place-names, weather, the names he’d spoken: Peter, Martina, and as if to brand Hallam’s eyes, a drawing in pencil of a man on a winged horse, a child’s effort: the horse had three legs and no tail.

  He took the box from Ennis’s hand and carefully replaced its contents, gently shaking out the letters that were covered in grit. Hallam moved them out of his direct line of vision, so he would not see again any of the private words of love and sorrow that came from home. He stacked them carefully in the box. “They’re out of order, I’m sure.”

  “Now you know my real sin.”

  “What is that,” said Hallam quietly.

  “That I convert my coins to paper at the going rate, and mail it off to home, where Brianna converts it back to coin — at the going rate, mind — and she writes letters on paper she buys with that money, and buys postage and converts my meager earnings into messages she sends back. To keep me company here. Have you ever known such a rich cold city as this, Mr. Hallam? That a man with my love of life should be dying alone without so much as conversation or someone to lift a yard with? I send my pennies home and beg my wife to give me the time of day.”

  Hallam went to take his arm, which Ennis thrashed off.

  “This place has made me mean,” said Hallam.

  Ennis went and sat in his chair. “You’re not entirely wrong. I am an addict.”

  “So am I. I can’t sleep without my preparations.”

  Ennis nodded, lost in himself. What could be worse than being accused of criminality, Hallam imagined, but being forced to think of what you are, what you’ve become. It was like this for Hallam now as well, and this realization shocked him, with its reminder of how long he must already have been here to get like this. He thought, Mr. Ennis’s palsy is nothing compared to our underlying condition, that systema of unhappiness that makes all thoughts of joy afflicting to think of. It would be the pipe for him before long, he thought. His careful plans were not yet at an end, but looking at Samuel Ennis, he saw that they would be.

  “I give up,” Hallam said. “I surrender.”

  “To what.”

  “To this.” He swept his hand through the air, taking in all of their present reality. “The only way you, and I, and Mrs. Rowe will survive is if we throw in our lots together. There’s no point in pretending any longer. Between the three of us, we have one means of making a living, so we should accept that.”

  Ennis contemplated his guest. “Are we to open a grocery stall, Mr. Hallam? With me wheezing over the rice and knocking cantaloupes?”

  “No. You will train Mrs. Rowe and myself in the operation of your equipment. We will all share your knowledge and then we’ll figure out what to do with it. We’ll combine forces. We’ll look out for one another.”

  Ennis laughed. “And I suppose Mrs. Rowe is at home this very moment knitting another curtain to divide your commodious rooms in three?”

  “No, Mr. Ennis. There’s hardly room for the two of us there. I’d have to bed you on my countertop, and that won’t do.”

  “No, it won’t,” he said. Hallam helped him back into his bed and formed the two pills Ennis would have to take before retiring. His expression had not changed much from that look of perplexed wonder he wore when the argument had ended. I will be a better man now, Hallam thought. I shall be a good man in the realm where such goodness can make a difference to those whose lives are joined to mine.

  What stood now in this place as home, as family, was all he had.

  FIVE

  THE WORLD BELOW

  TORONTO, NOVEMBER 1997

  ONE

  IT WAS COOL after dawn, even on this day at the height of summer, and John thought, Here is the hidden nature of the world: it holds back until you’re looking. He got into the car in the almost-dark and crossed the city to David and Marianne’s house. The streets were empty except for a few cars and one or two pedestrians.

  When later he thought of the morning, he’d realize he had no memory of being alone in the car, in those last minutes approaching the Hollis house. Perhaps he’d daydreamed, made logy by fear, but more likely the tail of some thought had appeared and then vanished, leaving no trace of itself. Because he remembered getting into the car and then, in the next instant, he was at the top of the Bayview Extension and David was beside him, his hands folded in his lap. For a moment, before the road dipped down into the valley, John had seen the lake. The windows were down and the last of the wet night air rushed through the car, and David breathed in great drafts of it as if it tasted of something.

  “They did nothing down here for eighty years but make bricks,” he said. “Half the h
ouses south of Eglinton began their lives in kilns beside the river. Do you know what it smelled like?”

  John shook his head.

  “Some people thought bread — that it smelled like bread.”

  “Was that in your photographer’s diary?” He kept his eyes forward.

  “No. Not that I recall,” said David.

  They passed under the Bloor Street Viaduct, and the moment it was behind them, John heard a train rattle onto the undercarriage of the bridge. It was always something to be in the dark underground and then burst into light over the valley and the roads. From the windows of a subway train, the full denuding of the river and its wetlands below bore in on you: the roads on either side of the thin waterway rhymed with the paths cut through trees that had once been used by industry, now reclaimed by hikers and bicyclists. There were defunct train tracks down there as well, and he wondered who apart from David could picture the sound and smoke that must have choked the place once, except that he himself could now. John had listened to all of the stories, and there was never a single time present for him in Toronto anymore. After today, he would smell bread in the Don River Valley.

  David said, “They never regarded this as pretty, you know. The river and the trees. A tree was an obstacle or a table, and a river was something wild that could do your work for you. The idea of a nice Sunday walk was not an amble in the woods. This here” — he tapped the window with his ring-finger — “this was the factory floor.” They had come out onto the flat that ran down against the side of the river. These days, people kept tents in the trees and hung their laundry there; in the winter, you’d see flashes of color through the branches. “There hasn’t been a salmon in the Don since 1920.”