The Retreat

by David Bergen

  He grunted, as if in agreement, and then he began to speak and it was as if the darkness in the room and the darkness outside had freed him. He said that when he was nine his brother Nelson had been taken away. “There was a man and there was a woman, and they came to my grandma’s house looking for Nelson and me. Only I wasn’t home. So they just took Nelson.” He said that for the longest time he had waited for Nelson to come back. And then at some point he began to forget about his brother. Not all day, or every day, but there were times, like when he was playing, or when he was in school, when he’d suddenly realize he hadn’t been thinking about Nelson being gone, or coming back, and he’d felt guilty because Nelson had been the one to be taken away. But then the guilt went away as well, and life became usual. There were times when his grandmother would tell stories about Nelson, and she’d laugh then, and he would wonder if someone would have been telling stories about him if he had been the one taken. He said, “It’s like Nelson has lived a bigger life than me. You know? But I always feel like there’s something I have to make up to him.” He was quiet, and then he said, “Nobody stopped them.”

  Raymond fell silent. Lizzy, still standing by the window, did not move. She understood that what he was telling her had always been real, but now, as he spoke the words, it had become truer: because she was there, and because, even though he could not see her, he knew that she was listening.

  She heard him exhale. He said that he was tired. And hungry. He was going to sleep for a bit, and then maybe they could get him some food from the kitchen. And then he would go.

  In the darkness she heard him cross one boot over the other and very soon she heard the sound of his steady breathing. She stood, alert to the sounds coming from the open window. The wind in the trees, and faintly, from the highway, the sound of a truck gearing down. She stood there watching while Raymond slept. He was on his back and his breath caught with each intake so that he startled, but not enough to wake himself.

  She felt alone, but with this came a strange elation, as if she herself were safe from danger. She did not know, nor would she ever truly know, Raymond Seymour. She had explored his body as if it were some sacred site, but that was just skin and blood and bones. The shell of the body. She didn’t know what he believed, not really, she didn’t know how he saw the world, or how he saw her. About all of this, she did not know. Just as she did not know that in the autumn to follow, she would despair the heartlessness of the world and her inability to consume her own sadness. That, with the passing of time, what was precise and unbearable would eventually dim and gather a layer of longing, and as she would grow older and try to recall the details of the events of this summer, she would fail, and she would always lament that failure.

  She went to Raymond now and lay down beside him, hoping he would wake, but he did not. She wanted to hear his voice, and she wanted to tell him that he should go soon, before it got light. She whispered, “You are good. You know that?” Then she lay there, judging the time and the sound of the night, and she fell asleep with her face pressed against him.

  When Raymond woke, he saw the dim light of the early morning. He worked his way free of Lizzy, stood above her, and then went to the door, opened it, and surveyed the empty clearing. He saw the pale light from the Doctor’s window, paused, and then stepped outside and down the stairs and over to the side of the cabin facing the bush and peed. As he made his way towards the entrance to the cabin he heard a voice and looked up and saw the Doctor at the edge of the trees. The Doctor’s voice was clear and it broke the silence. “Come over here, Raymond.” Raymond took a few more steps into the clearing. Then he saw, by the trail that led to the main road, that Vernon was walking towards him. Raymond turned to look behind him and perhaps it might have appeared that he was going to run. He did not hear the shot, because the bullet hit him before the sound arrived. He put his hand up to his throat and sat down carefully in the clearing. One leg was straight out in front of him and the other was bent off to the side. He sat slouched forward, one hand at his throat. He pulled his hand away and saw the blood. When he tried to say something, the blood bubbled out of his throat. He looked about. A haze had settled over the clearing. The treeline, the sky, all was wavering. He saw the Doctor off to the side and he saw Vernon approaching him. And there was Hart behind Vernon, cradling a rifle in one arm. Vernon’s mouth was moving but Raymond couldn’t hear him. Raymond cocked his head quizzically and tried to tell him that he was shot, but Vernon knew. He was kneeling before him and looking at the wound, as one would inspect a hole in a fence. Vernon shook his head. “You stupid prick,” he said. He saw Vernon’s face up close, and it seemed confused, as if on the verge of weeping. He saw Vernon shake him. He didn’t feel anything but he knew Vernon was shaking him because Vernon’s arms were moving and he knew his own shoulders and head were moving. Vernon was wearing a red vest. He held Raymond’s wrist and with the other hand he pushed against Raymond’s throat as if to stopper something there. He stood and stepped backwards. The front of Raymond’s shirt was full of blood. He saw the blood and it was like a vast hole and his head fell towards the hole onto his chest. The lunge and flicker of his brother floating in a white boat, a herd of deer turning to look backwards, birds disappearing into a black cloud. He lifted his head briefly, and then it dropped one last time.

  Behind him, the cabin door opened and Lizzy appeared. She ran down the stairs, missed a step, and stumbled. She was calling, though Raymond could neither hear nor see her. She came into the clearing and as she did so, she stopped. Her mouth opened and she let out a silent howl.

  The sun had climbed just above the treeline and it fell into the clearing where Raymond sat. One leg was stretched out before him as if he were hurtling over something. His chin had dropped to his chest. Raymond’s shadow was slight. His body had tilted a little. And then Lizzy was upon him, saying his name, touching his head and shoulders and chest, her hands bloody now, the long wail of her “Nooo” lifting into the sky. From a distance, the two of them might have appeared as children at play, one who is impatient and imploring, and the other who has sat down and refused to budge.

  When they were young and still living together with their grandmother, Nelson understood that Raymond wanted to be just like him. Raymond copied his movements, his speech; he tried on his clothes and boots and even took to saying that his name was Nelson, not Raymond. Sometimes, to humour his brother, Nelson played along and they would spend the day talking to each other as if they were the other person. And then one day Nelson grew tired of the game and he pinned Raymond to the ground and began taunting him. Raymond struggled uselessly and cried out that Nelson should let him win. “I’m you,” he said. “Then free yourself,” Nelson said, and he held him down and aimed a fist at Raymond’s ribs. “Who are you then?” he mocked, and he did not release Raymond until he admitted that he was a little prick, and that his name was Raymond.

  That fall, while in prison, Nelson thought often of his brother, whom he had always pictured as the lucky one, with family nearby and his grandmother’s love; he had never lost who he was. Nelson had arrived at the medium-security prison in the middle of September, after a stay in the hospital and a brief trial at which he was found guilty of attempted murder of a police officer. On the second day after his arrival at the prison, out in the exercise yard, a wiry boy who spoke French set upon him for what appeared to be no good reason. Nelson, surprised at first, moved backwards, his arms in the air as if grasping for the rung of a ladder that did not exist. The boy held a makeshift knife made from the sharpened handle of a spoon, and he said words that Nelson did not understand, though the sounds were musical and distracting. Nelson’s astonishment was eclipsed by the cold arrival of reason and he quickly dismissed the boy with a flurry of fists. Before the guards arrived, he pushed the boy’s head against the cement of the yard and whispered in his ear that the next time he would beat his brains to froggy pulp.

  Throughout those early days in prison, he fought his wa
y up the pecking order and he grew to understand the place in which he found himself, and he came to feel a kind of comfort. Sometimes in the evening, before he slept, he played dice with Yuri, his cellmate, a thirty-one-year-old Slav who had permanently crippled a friend over a gambling debt. The cell smelled faintly of urine. The cement floor was cold. Outside, an early winter bore against limestone walls; inside, the whistle of wind through the air shafts. One night Nelson won a pair of shoes, a carton of cigarettes, Yuri’s wife for a night, things real and things not, and by the end of the evening he gave it all back, even the false wife, aware of Yuri’s past and that he didn’t want to be maimed in his sleep. Yuri said that his previous cellmate, the man Nelson had replaced, had hung himself one night. Fashioned a noose from a bedsheet. He woke in the morning to the smell of piss and shit and the sight of the man’s bare feet, purple and swaying.

  That night Raymond came to Nelson in a dream and he sat down and began to speak. His face was turned away from Nelson and so all Nelson saw was his silhouette. He said that he had chickens to slaughter and would Nelson help him. He held up his hands, which were spotted with blood, and wiped them on the shirt he wore, and Nelson saw that it was his own, a favourite snap-button cowboy shirt, checked orange and white. Then Raymond laughed and his laughter was easy and good and he said that there was nothing to be afraid of, he was in good hands. “Look at me,” Nelson said, and he called Raymond a stupid shit, getting himself killed. Nelson woke, heard the weeping of a prisoner two cells over, and he covered his ears and stared up into the darkness.

  One day, a man in a suit appeared, bearing in his briefcase a survey with myriad questions. He wore a fedora and he was runty and pale and he interviewed Nelson in the visitors’ lounge while a guard stood nearby. He held a pencil and took notes and he asked Nelson where he’d been born, and did he watch TV as a young boy, and when did he leave home, and how many brothers and sisters did he have? At some point, the man held up a flashcard and on the card was a paragraph, and he read the sentences out loud and asked Nelson if there were words that he did not understand. One word, sublime, was complicated, and Nelson wasn’t sure about it, but he did not want to admit this. “You can go fuck yourself,” he said. The man did not flinch. He bent towards his notebook and scribbled something and then he looked up and asked if Nelson believed in God, or if he was an atheist. He said the word atheist and he rolled his eyes slightly and Nelson thought that he might be retarded. He said that this was none of the man’s business. And then the man asked what he wanted to do with his life, and Nelson looked at the man, and he leaned forward, and he said that he would live, and he would live well. “In spite of shits like you, with the hat and the milky hands and a nub for a dick.”

  At night, in the darkness of his cell, Nelson lay on his cot and imagined his ultimate release and retribution. He would kill Hart. He saw no reason not to. He had nothing but time, and time augmented his passion for revenge. There was only absence: of God, of family, of Raymond. Still, he understood conformity and submission – his training in this had been arduous and complete – and he learned to curry favour with the guards and with those prisoners who held the power. One day, in the dining room after lunch, Ernest, an enormous man and a prisoner with power, cornered him and said that he wanted Nelson to take care of a young man called Soot. Ernest said that he only wanted a message sent; he did not want Soot dead. “That’s pointless,” he said. “Something more meaningful would be fine.” He pushed a thick finger against Nelson’s sternum.

  In the morning, Nelson caught Soot alone in the shower. Came up behind him, twisted his left arm behind his back, and pulled it from its socket. Then he walked away, barely winded, as Soot howled and writhed on the wet floor, his penis shrivelled and blue. Ernest tried to reward him with hashish and a month’s supply of cigarettes. Or sex, if he liked. Nelson shook his head and said he wasn’t interested in any of that. He wanted to be left alone; that would be payment enough. Ernest peered at him, eyes black and lidless, and then, before dismissing him, he whispered that he had met men like Nelson before, men who appeared to have no fear, no shame, no thing to lose. He said that this kind of man was very useful to him. “Might this be you?” he asked, but Nelson did not respond.

  One night, he dreamed of the dump and of the dogs tracking him, and he woke abruptly and sat up. A light burned dimly down the long corridor beyond the cell door. A voice, high-pitched and anguished, called out. He lit a candle and the flame wavered and danced, and in that muted weightlessness he saw his past spool and jump. He saw a white-enamel chamber pot in the corner of his room; his breath steaming as his bare knees shook. The back seat of the Ford Falcon, covered in plastic, smelling of the poly that sealed the windows in his grandmother’s house, and the heads, oblong and monstrous, of the man and the woman who had taken him away. The pale, thin arm of his stepsister and the passing glimpse of her sex as she changed in the bush at the edge of a gigantic brown lake. The anthracite in the coal bin and his shovel feeding the fire; the taste of carbon still there in the morning as he bent to his porridge and heard the drone of his stepfather’s voice spilling Matthew into the room, his thoughts roaming, roaming. Dorothy Stoez’s mouth and the taste of her tongue, the texture of her nipples, the tumbling nonsense words – they had met in an outhouse behind the school, surrounded by the stench of ammonia, seeking love. His grandmother’s thick grey socks with the red stripes. Reenie singing, her eyes closed, her bracelets jangling. He saw Raymond, flat on the ground beneath him, crying, twisting, little cocksucker.

  And he saw him dead. He did not know if Raymond had been surprised, if death always burst through the door like an unexpected visitor, if there was enough time to protest and call out, “Hey, you’re taking the wrong person.” And he saw Raymond wearing his jeans, his shoes, his shirt. No animosity this time, just the consolation of becoming each other. The long summer day rose and fell and the light seeped from the sky and darkness came, and to keep back the darkness they built a fire, their shadows indistinct against the wall of night that looked down on them.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The line spoken by Lionel on this page, beginning “And we won’t get any demands met …,” is taken from an interview with Lyle Ironstand and Louis Cameron that originally appeared in Paper Tomahawks: From Red Tape to Red Power by James Burke.

  The author wishes to thank Blaine Klippenstein and Jerry Tom. He also wishes to express his gratitude to his editor, Ellen Seligman.

  David Bergen’s most recent novel is The Retreat. His previous novel, The Time in Between, won the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction. It was also named a Kiriyama Prize Notable Book and longlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Bergen is also the author of a collection of short fiction, Sitting Opposite My Brother, a finalist for the Manitoba Book of the Year Award, and the novels A Year of Lesser, a New York Times Notable Book and winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, See the Child, and The Case of Lena S., winner of the Carol Shields Winnipeg Book Award, and a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the McNally Robinson Book of the Year Award, and the Margaret Laurence Award for Fiction.

  David Bergen lives in Winnipeg.