The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

  Grace was done playing minutes later, the Barbies heaped, the collection of them, in the carnage victors are never obliged to clean up. Norman would, but later.

  It changed slowly, life. A dog called Blue on the TV needed help finding clues. A bilingual girl, Dora, with a backpack, found it easy to mediate and move from one language to another. She needed help find things as well, with Grace, pointing and shouting in an alliance with Blue and Dora, her circumstance, perhaps, not so out of the ordinary.

  *

  The Sanchezes arrived in a pickup with a trailer of equipment, most notably a wood chipper. There was no concealing what they were, or how they earned a living. The name ‘Sanchez Lawn Care’ was written in big letters across the side of the trailer’s wooden slats.

  A husband and wife and a grandmother exited the pickup.

  A second mini-van pulled up. A squat woman emerged with the same thickening middle as Sanchez’s wife. Both wore embroidered sweaters. On the side of the minivan, it said ‘Sanchez Daycare’.

  Joanne watched the Sanchezes go up the drive. She turned to Norman. ‘They seem genuinely interested.’

  A Cutlass Supreme arrived with alloy rims and music booming. It was evidently the son. His presence, on exiting the car, conferred an immediate menace to the Sanchez wood chipper.

  He walked with a rolling gait, gangster-style, up the drive.

  *

  Norman was brazen in ringing the doorbell to his own house, but then the realtor had never actually met him. He identified himself as a drive-by interest. He was in the market.

  He pointed to the sign, while introducing Joanne and Grace. In doing so, he advanced into the hall without the realtor having agreed to it. The realtor seemed on the verge of protesting, but it would have been too awkward and disruptive to try explaining it to the Sanchezes.

  From what Norman could evince, the Sanchezes were definitely interested and disbursed to various quarters of the house.

  The father – Miguel – his name embroidered on his shirt, was fiddling with the thermostat. His son was alongside him. The father communicated something in Spanish and then the son interpreted in English and said to the realtor that they wanted to see the heating bill.

  The furnace was on full blast. The bathroom sink and the tub were all running, the bathroom a microclimate of billowing steam. There was a vent the realtor evidently wasn’t aware of. Norman resisted saying something.

  The Sanchezes didn’t care about the dining room, a box off the kitchen that had been much maligned by previous buyers. It was left unexplored.

  The Daycare sister-in-law was down in the basement with Mrs Sanchez and the grandmother. Norman went down. They were apparently taken with the spaciousness of the unfinished basement, but there was a fetid odor of mildew. It was discussed in Spanish and then English, and relayed to the realtor who arrived and wrote down notes on a sheet attached to a clipboard.

  The son followed and tapped the faux wood paneling Walter had installed to disguise a poorly installed drywall. A chalky dust powdered the baseboard. The son bent and ran his finger along a line of fine dust in a manner Norman prejudicially aligned with a dealer checking the quality of cocaine. Evidently, the Mexicans had their own plans for the basement, a remodel.

  In the unfinished laundry room, Norman turned on the only tap not running in the house, just to show some genuine and competing interest.

  The son had an industrial-sized yellow tape measure. He took a series of measurements. The conversation continued, conducted in Spanish, then in English when the realtor was asked a question. There was talk of a daycare unit, or that is what Norman gathered, the realtor unsure of the legality of permits. He thought she was scuttling his prospects and again, he had to refrain from saying anything.

  The grandmother fingered rosary beads, her mouth moving in a prayer of providence. She said the word, ‘Daycare’. Seemingly, there was no word for it in Spanish, or maybe the concept only existed in English.

  It appeared that the son was planning to take care of the remodel himself. He made some more provisional measurements and wrote them down in a spiral notebook.

  Norman stood amidst the dank limestone drip of unfinished walls in the laundry area. A smell of bleach clotted the air. He could see, across the basement, the crawlspace. He was mindful of what was still there – his bundle of porn magazines.

  He felt a great shame in all that had passed. The basement would now become the center of a daycare business, this basement where he had jacked off and where Helen, too, in her failing years, had faithfully watched Judge Judy, becoming an expert in small claims cases, fence line disagreements and overhanging trees, in the likelihood that you could sue and win over a bad haircut, and affirmed in her belief that you should always take pictures and bring at least two legitimate estimates to court. This had been the end of her days.

  With his mother, Norman conceded that there had always been the sense of a mind that had never settled on what she had wanted or on what she could have been.

  In thinking it just then, Norman forgave her.

  The Mexicans moved eventually through a double-door of paned glass to the patio and the garden. The double garage out back had a set of prized die-cast tools his father had owned and an air-compressor unit. The son wanted the tools included as part of an offer.

  The mother, when she had otherwise been speaking Spanish, announced in perfect English that she wanted the furniture, too, the beds, the linens, the curtains, everything.

  *

  The realtor had done Norman no favors. No wonder there had been so little interest. He was by his parents’ bedroom along a hallway. Helen’s medicines were beside her bed, along with a glass of water dried to a hoary calcified coating.

  It was Norman’s failure, not doing what a son should have done, gone out there at least once. It was easier to blame the realtor.

  Norman felt a grave and sudden loss. It felt like home again, and all that it meant.

  A wind-up clock in the hallway, a Woodland songbirds clock bought at Lake Geneva so long ago, had stopped at 4.15, either a.m. or p.m. Time had ended in their absence.

  Norman remembered the trip gained for the correct answer in a write-in answer contest for a talk show where the result was read from the flick of card, in the index of answers read over the air, the sound of each answer, each card, the anticipation.

  The win had included a romantic cruise around the lake and dinner for two. There was a picture somewhere of Norman in a nautical cap. The man who had invented the foil that went on the tops of old milk bottles had a mansion on the lake. It was his one invention. There was no envy, just a providence of luck. A house like that was always just one good idea away.

  They stalked Norman suddenly, his parents. He took the songbird clock key, felt the key in the heart of the gears, turned it, felt the tremor of movement.

  What was time, in a home without the quiet tick tock of Eternity, a feeling lost to a digital age of clocks with their buzzers, time, a bully of responsibility, and not something felt and experienced?

  Joanne came out of Norman’s bedroom with Grace. She pointed to a poster on the bedroom wall. She said, ‘I would never have pegged you as a Star Wars fan.’

  Norman said, ‘I was in love with Harrison Ford.’

  Then he smiled and Joanne smiled.

  The realtor ascended from the basement and seemed concerned about the billow of steam gathering in the bathroom. She said tentatively, ‘The windows are painted shut.’

  It was a strike against the house, then she added, ‘But the shower pressure is strong.’

  Norman confided, ‘There’s a vent above the window.’ He caught the realtor off-guard, and then she suddenly understood. He went into the bathroom and opened the vent.

  A fan whirled in a funneling suck of air like the house needed to exhale.

  25.

  IMMENSITY WAS THE mistress of all. This Nate understood in his aloneness against the advance of his own passing, and yet t
here was hope in the remotest of places, something more readily apparent when facing the anonymity of a world outside a hotel window. Nate had the run of it in his head, what he would do after Norman Price stopped banging on his hotel room door at The Drake.

  He would put his trust in the socialism of the Canadian healthcare system and not in the Philippines. He knew it better, Canada, the Wild, where, for years, industries had always flourished, then petered, where life was never a certainty.

  He could better navigate this unknown. This is what he knew, the assumed history, first the natives, then the trappers, then men come up from the south in search of quick fortunes in the mines and forestry, and nearly all finding, eventually, the summer too clotted with black flies, the winter too cold and long, and the wages not profitable in the way they had anticipated. He felt the flux of hardship in the mere conjuring of it, this history.

  There were the most desperate always, the newly arrived on the continent. Of the immigrants, though, in the latter part of the twentieth century, few did not know the hazards of the North, so the Canadian North became the province of men like Nate Feldman, men escaping civilization for any number of reasons – the law mostly – men who settled with the understanding wages were paid through a system of credit at a company store, so there was little real saving, and those who came were consigned that this was the best it would get, this allotted freedom, when it might not have been secured elsewhere, so they were safe from the reach of the law and bureaucracy of provincial and federal governments.

  You could not take a picture when Nate Feldman arrived in Grandshire, because of the native superstition that, in doing so, you captured a soul. Ostensibly, it was the reason given, when it was more about eluding the law, so there was no definitive identification of who existed up there. It predated, of course, the proliferation of cell phones, this willful and respected détente between authorities, that this life up there was perhaps banishment harder than prison, but, on one’s own terms.

  Of course, it had changed, the largesse of a natural bounty, the great wealth of resources, with the emergence of fracking, the advent of chipboard and plywood, the resurgence of new growth cutting, the rise of impermanence and the lightness of life, in the way a house might now be furnished in faux-wood-finish panels, a kit assembled with an Allen wrench, in a world where there were no longer heirlooms, where nothing lasted, and everything needed to be made, or made again, recycled and rebought, and this constituted the illusion of progress.

  The great and ancient woods were again protected in an emergent eco-politics that was essentially anti-human, or, at best, it vilified what humans had done, and were still doing, to the planet, a movement that ran counter to the collectivism of Marxism, to that old-world view that all human activity was about class and economics, so it was obvious, how the serviceability and truth of ideas changed with the times.

  And yet, Canada distinguished itself. It kept a hold on certain values. Economically, the provincial governments abided by a socialist policy, without overtly referencing the rhetoric of compassion, because there were still few enough to share, and there were boom towns, like Edmonton, and the Pacific influx of the Hong Kong expatriates to Vancouver.

  The reach of the Empire was not the curse it was in the heart of London, but something else. In Canada the land was too vastly big, its isolation, its disconnectedness, its greatest virtue, so all that came before was put in the context that nothing survived. It staved a certain fanaticism. It set human existence against a greater presence.

  In the intervening years, he had seen the change. He was under no illusion, going back across the border. There was more attention to school board meetings and PTA meetings, so you might think there was progress and enlightenment, when it was all bureaucracy, and education was more a holding pen for the great majority, an institution that sapped what youth represented once, a revolutionary force.

  Nate Feldman felt the maudlin sense that he was of another age. He put his hands to his face. He had lost the love of his life. He missed her so very much. It was a white man’s curse to want to seize and take hold and possess.

  Ursula told him this many times, but he could not let it go.

  *

  The Canadian Border Authorities were almost as insistent and inquiring in letting him back into Canada as the Americans had been in letting him into the United States, this, part of the great interconnectedness of the terror threat.

  He thought he might be done then, caught for taxes he had not paid the American government. Perhaps there was a warrant now out for him. The three lawyers had seen to it. His papers were checked. His Pakistani son-in-law was, no doubt, a great liability, or so Nate felt. If there was an indictment on suspicion of tax evasion, he would be connected with his radicalized daughter, even though they had not spoken in a long time. It was suspicious in and of itself. He could, in fact, if pushed, imagine her as a suicide bomber and imagine further the RCMP advising him of what had happened.

  How could mounted and police be used in the same breath concerning law enforcement, and in the twenty-first century, for God’s sake? There were moments, expressions and realities that would always seem strange. Oh, Canada! Despite appearances, he was the outsider.

  Nate drove along the 401 toward Brampton, waited at a Tim Horton’s for the early light, entered the rush of traffic descending on Toronto, then turned onto the 400, going north, when everybody else was heading south.

  It was premeditated, timed in the cycle of urban life. Nate wanted to more readily understand it. If there were a great disaster ever, most would die in their car. It was a terrible thought, though, if an enterprise could be pitched just right, a survival camp specializing in how to survive, it might attract a strain of people committed to the prophetic destiny of End Times.

  He had the specs on a wooden lodge with a field stone chimney, a central cabin, along with more rustic cabins, all with rights to fishing.

  He had priced at one point the added expense of a hydroplane to deposit avid fishermen at any of a number of lakes, remote and inaccessible, where wrangling of the heart and contradictions were best contemplated and settled once and for all.

  It was an old idea, come upon first as Ursula lay dying. She had the restlessness of a spirit wanting to go further north. There was a history book opened at the time related to the discovery of the Gaspé Peninsula on the St Lawrence. Nate had read it to Ursula.

  They had a name for those who ventured inland, Coureurs de Bois, meaning Runners of the Woods; white men who took their wives from the native tribes in what was described as à la façon du pays – after the custom of the country.

  In reading it, to explain it, he fell on how it took a multitude of languages: the native language, French and English, and sometimes the non-translation of French when a term or word was not fully translatable, and how certain ways of knowing were the exclusive province of a time and a people, and all that could be ever known was the hint at what was then lost.

  There was much of a practical nature in what he read to Ursula. She wanted to hear it. Nate read from the journal of a man called Daniel Harmon, who, in describing an ancient wedding contract, recalled how,

  the groom shows his Bride where his Bed is, and they rest together, and continue to do as long as they can agree among themselves, but when either is displeased with their choice, he or she will seek another partner... which is law here...

  Ursula liked the idea very much, these proud, independent women, though she confessed she would not share Nate. She said it, reaching for him.

  Nate was beyond tears. A great reconciliation was close at hand. He felt the faint creak of his joints as he moved to pull apart the curtain to let the light in.

  It was cold here still and would remain so for a month yet, the snow faintly falling. Cold frosted the window. His breath warmed the glass. He made a circle with his sleeve.

  He was barefoot, in pajamas with the buttons in the rear. He was no longer the man who had felled trees, th
e young man who had ventured so long ago into the North. The greater part of his life had been spent here, the sum of all acts great and small amounting to a life. They had slept like bears, he and Ursula, contained and provisioned, their own world organized and managed along a time of plenty and scarcity.

  It came as a revelation. The name of the enterprise would be Coureurs de Bois – Runners of the Woods. Those who came would learn, among other things, how to make fire, to erect shelter, to survive those first days of chaos and distress. He could see fear as an approaching reality. He had plans for safe routes, meeting places, points of connectedness for a family to reconvene in Toronto, and stores of dried food. It would call for an outlay and investment, but he had the Organics windfall.

  He would preach that it mattered how one accounted for the days and years, for, though a tree might outlive a man, live 100 or 500 years, it did so reliant on wildfires to break open and spread its resin-coated seeds, or the wind, or the pollination of bees. Fate, a thing decided for a tree, whereas a man could just up and leave if he so chose, and this was why God ordained the years were so much shorter for humans, the decisions so much more immediate.

  He would begin with the stabbing hurt of mortality, knowing, at all times, not a minute should be luxuriated and wasted. He would rely on the benevolence of a car crash victim. He would ask Ursula to watch the roads, like an eagle soaring above, for what might be scavenged – the fate of one, a donor.

  It was gruesome, no doubt, but less so than what was offered in the Philippines.

  26.

  YOU COULD FORSAKE sexuality, or sublimate it to a point where it mattered less and less. It happened eventually, the great suburban rut and the associated purchase of so damn much – washers and dryers and home appliances – the essential lure and eventual containment, so you turned to your side of the bed, seeking the escape of sleep, wondering what had become of your youth, your passions and great expectations?