by Camilla Gibb
I’d never even kissed a boy. Neither had, or ever would, my brother.
When I was fourteen my mother told me that men were now looking at me rather than her. She implied there was power in this—I have no doubt there had been for her—but all I sensed was danger. I wasn’t like her. I wanted it off me. It felt threatening, and I had no idea how I was supposed to respond.
A year later, I was scouted by a modelling agency. I was in no way equipped to handle this kind of career. It ended quickly, the day a photographer ground the hard lump in his pants into my leg.
My brother’s first career had come to a similarly abrupt end. He was escorted home one afternoon by two police officers after lifting a cassette tape from a store. He was too young to be charged, so they issued him with a warning.
Between them, my parents must have decided my brother needed a father, or my mother must have decided she could no longer cope—perhaps a bit of both—because Micah suddenly left to live with our father, who had by this point settled on a rundown farm in eastern Ontario. We’d been visiting him there for the past couple of years.
I went to stay with them every other weekend. I wrote poetry by flashlight during the long hours on the Greyhound bus on Friday nights. I’d been writing ever since I learned how to string letters together into words. Stories about icicles with human souls and girls who lived among animals. Poems that got darker and angrier over the years.
My father would pick me up at the Brockville terminal and we would drive another fifty minutes into the black country, where he was drinking a forty-ouncer of gin every day. I never knew which way he was going to swing, what was going to provoke him. He would get hugely enthusiastic about grand schemes that neither money could nor logic would support. I learned not to say the obvious. He built some things, but he destroyed a great many more.
It had always been thus. I remember mornings when he would draw up plans and make lists before the ritual visit to Canadian Tire—all this, a prelude to the massive destruction that would take place in the afternoons. He had torn down a wall in an apartment he had rented in Toronto. Then he’d torn down the ceiling as well, and in its place he’d painted and erected a mural on particle board. It was beautiful—two blue and gold peacocks. It was beautiful—it just didn’t make sense.
On the farm, he ripped into a hillside with a backhoe for no apparent reason, felled (illegally) a good number of trees in a government pine plantation and tore down three of the farmhouse’s exterior walls. He lived behind tarpaulin, without plumbing or heat. It was dirty and cold and so were we.
He became more bitter and more paranoid with each season. He told me that he was not responsible for anything he said after midday. He mutated throughout the afternoon into something mean and ugly. By nightfall, when his transformation was complete, we were trapped in the one room with heat, a dimly lit kitchen in a haze of wood and cigarette smoke. The world outside the window was silent and black: not even a light from a neighbouring farm in the distance.
My father seethed, skewering us with profanities. The thrust of his diatribes was that he had found us out, he was on to us, our “game.” He could see straight into our perverse minds, he knew just what we were thinking, he could see how we were manipulating people for our own deviant purposes, how we thought we had him fooled. It was the extreme version of a theory he seemed to have been developing over the years.
We cried silently into our laps, and the more upset we became, the crueller he would get. We made ourselves small, becoming shrivelled remnants of ourselves.
My brother stayed at the farm for two years, breaking the ice on top of the well on winter mornings, taking a shower at the Texaco station once every two weeks, being bullied at school, worse at home.
Every time I arrived at the farm, I asked my father to hide his bullets, keeping them well away from his hunting rifle. I was a sleepwalker. And he’d taught me how to shoot.
You may wonder where my mother was in all this. I actually wonder, too. Did she pick me up from the bus station on Sunday nights? I suppose so, though I have no recollection of it. What did I tell her about these weekends?
I was an angry teenager. A teenager built on the sullen and withdrawn back of a child. I can’t have been easy to love. I suspect I told her nothing.
What did my brother tell her on his visits home? I assume very little. He would begin to speak of his time in the country only years later, and even then, he would swear me to silence, prefacing anything he was about to divulge by threatening to kill me if I told our mother.
He wanted to protect her. We both did. We wanted to protect her not just from unhappy stories but from the destructive potential in ourselves. She gave us physical safety, worked hard to keep us housed, fed and clothed, saved money to send us to camp and to visit relatives in England, all without any financial help from my father. We couldn’t burden her with more, with evidence of the increasing cruelty and eccentricity of the man she’d freed herself from. With evidence of disturbance in our own souls. We couldn’t afford to lose her.
Years later, my brother would say of his time at the farm: There was nowhere for me to run. There were only trees. Miles and miles of nothing. I used to stare at the trees and realize I was trapped. There was just nowhere to run.
I think a piece of my brother died out there.
I had my notebook, but Micah had no refuge. Until at fifteen, he found his in drugs.
2
Growing up, I was quite sure I would never have children. I didn’t have fantasies of marriage and motherhood. Perhaps the rupture of my own family destroyed my confidence in the idea of one. Perhaps I was just too dark to embrace the necessary light. There has long been a strain of nihilism in me that wonders what we all amount to in the end and why, indeed, we bother.
During the course of my graduate work in England in my mid- to late twenties, I found myself in the midst of a long and major depression. I did not fall into it, there was no tumble, just this sense of numbness and dread within and all around me as if it had always been there. I didn’t know then that this was depression. I just knew it was best that I keep my head down and do my work.
As a master’s student this meant presenting a paper to my tutor each week. After that weekly meeting, my friend Sarah and I would go to the pub together and lose our minds for a night before starting research for the following week’s paper the next day. This meant trudging to the Bodleian Library in the inevitable and unremitting drizzle, ordering books that would take two days for a librarian to unearth from the catacombs and returning to my room in residence in the interim to think through questions like: what is a person?
I wrote a reasonable essay in response to that question while feeling I was becoming less and less of a person myself.
I had come to England possessed with some fantasy that I was of this place; that I would feel, at some deep level, a sense of origin and continuity, some affinity that could root me; some attachment. I had often wondered how different a person I would be if I had grown up here instead of in Canada.
But Oxford was the worst place to bring any fantasy of belonging. It is a cold and competitive environment that demands not just intellectual rigour but a resilience best served by the privilege and entitlement only a certain pedigree can engender.
I tried to put these realities to one side as I went about the business of pursuing a very good education. But I soon began to feel I was really nothing more than a brain in a box. I questioned whether I even had a body anymore. When I walked down the street, I felt not just unseen but unseeable. I had a sense that I was breaking up into pixels, no longer a coherent whole.
Perhaps it was the need to know whether I still had a body that led me to open my door to relative strangers: my door, my bed, my legs. To men, women, couples. The net result of a lot of random sex was that what was left of me disappeared.
I became convinced that I must have inherited my father’s illness, whatever that might be. At ten, I had diagnosed him as an
alcoholic, but even then I knew it wasn’t simply the bottle. At Oxford, I started to read in search of answers. I spent hours squatting on the floor of the psychiatry section at Blackwell’s bookshop looking up symptoms and signs. I read about schizophrenia and manic depression and various disorders of the self, and although I knew my father had had a penchant for killing small animals as a child—a classic sign of psychopathology—I was too scared to pursue that line of inquiry any further.
My father never sought any help. He was immensely suspicious of any kind of authority. Once, he and my brother had both become ill on the farm after eating some chicken my father had wrapped in tinfoil and chucked into a fire—his preferred method of cooking. (I can still feel that particular combination of charred skin and blood in my mouth; in fact, I am nostalgic for it in the way I am for anything he cooked: burnt toast with Marmite, boiled ground beef.) I was not with them on this occasion. I took my brother to a clinic when he was back home for a weekend, and he was diagnosed with salmonella. My father refused to see a doctor. If he would never let a doctor near his body, he certainly wouldn’t let one into his mind.
My master’s program was coming to an end while I was unravelling. Those weekly papers were read and discussed but never graded. The entirety of the degree rested on two days of exams and a take-home essay at the end of the year. After the second day of exams, I took a walk to Port Meadow—flat, often flooded and shrouded in mist. Lewis Carroll began Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland here, rowing up the Isis with the Liddell sisters. I stood on Walton Well Road Bridge. There was a Roma caravan at the end of the bridge, horses in the meadow to my right, but I was staring at the canal and the train tracks running below.
You’d do little more than break your legs by jumping off it, I thought.
I’d never had a thought like that before. Unfortunately, once you admit possibilities like these into consciousness, they never leave. They are always there, dangling at the outer reaches; they can even become a source of comfort.
I had some friends who lived near the meadow, in a depressing nineteenth-century industrial block of unheated houses owned by an ironworks factory. I left the bridge with my new thoughts and walked to their house. One of them was a social worker and I told her how I was feeling. She suggested I speak to a psychiatrist, and we made an appointment at the Warneford, a psychiatric hospital, for the next day.
From the outside, the hospital looked just like you’d imagine a former lunatic asylum should. I have a memory of stepping inside, the height of the atrium, the quality of its light, but no memory of the particular psychiatrist I saw. I didn’t know then that I was crossing a threshold into a world of mental illness. There would be several more psychiatrists over the years; they rather began to bleed together.
I remember answering questions about myself and my family, a doctor creating a psychiatric profile. I was asked whether I had ever heard voices. Whether I had ever believed I was governed by forces outside myself.
These are complicated questions. You know that answering yes marks you as a particular kind of crazy. You know that answering no doesn’t tell the whole story. But there is no answer halfway between—at least not in psychiatry. Once, was my answer. Once, about three years before, I had felt I was being drawn somewhere not of my own volition.
I had fallen in love in my second-last year of high school. David was two years older, a math and physics major at the University of Toronto. We met through music. He was an exceptional flautist and understood music in the innate way he understood math. I was an unexceptional violist, drifting away from school.
David took me by the shoulders and asked me what I was planning on doing with my life. He was the only person who had ever asked. He was concerned: he said I was smart but seemed completely lost. I had dropped out of more than half my classes. I had no answer for him.
David’s parents were both social scientists. I wasn’t sure what this meant, except that at the dinner table they discussed interesting, worldly things: AIDS in Africa, female circumcision, politics, the environment. They had lived in Paris. They drank wine with dinner. It was so unlike the world in which I’d grown up that I sat in mute, intimidated silence.
The summer after we met, David got a job in Nairobi working for a Swedish development organization. I joined him in July.
We took an overnight train to the Swahili coast, David and I in separate cars for men and women. I shared chapattis and rice, tea and sandwiches with the three Indian women in my sleeping cabin. David and I stayed in a small and basic hotel on the dhow-spotted Indian Ocean. I had never been anywhere so other and so beautiful in my life. We read Robinson Crusoe aloud to each other on the beach and made a promise that wherever life took us we would meet here, in this exact spot, in twenty years.
For David’s twentieth birthday, we took a Jeep from Nairobi down into the Rift Valley, descending six thousand feet from the cloud-covered capital into an arid plane dotted with extinct volcanoes. I stood in the midst of a salt flat in the punishing sun, wondering how people survived here. The NGO David was working for was concerned with how deforestation was turning arable land into desert. It was a shock to me, the idea of the encroaching desert, a problem largely of our own making. I knew then, right there in that salt flat in the Rift Valley, that I was going to become a social scientist like David’s parents.
By the end of that summer David and I had planned our lives together. I had a year of high school left in which to redeem myself. I would move into David’s parents’ house and change schools. For the first time in my life I had a sense of agency, of direction, albeit very much tied to David and his parents. My mother seemed to see the wisdom in this move.
Shortly after I moved into David’s parents’ house, my father turned up in Toronto. He had left the farm in eastern Ontario—simply stepped away from it, unable to afford to keep it any longer, left all the family heirlooms he’d taken from his parents, just abandoned it all. He was squatting in a warehouse on Cherry Beach. He came over one summer night when David’s parents were away. He drank a bottle of their gin. He told me I would be “scrounging off the state” by going to university; he was a man of too much pride for such a thing. He was going to start a business installing security systems for sliding glass doors. He’d invented the product. He was going to make money. That’s what it was all about. He wandered off down the alleyway at the side of the house that night, neglecting to say goodbye.
He called me the next day to ask if I could ask David’s parents whether he could live in their house, too.
I didn’t know what to do. He was my father. He had nowhere to live. David was not confused. “It’s completely inappropriate of him to ask,” he said.
The next day I stammered: “It’s not my place, Dad. I’m a guest here.”
“Right,” he said.
“But Dad?” I pleaded.
“Nuff said.” And then he hung up the phone.
I would later hear from my brother that my father had “disowned” me.
In our Kenyan-inspired master plan, David and I had decided to do our graduate work in England, both of us having been born there. But over the next couple of years, as his interests became more specialized, it became apparent he would be better off in the States. So in the late summer of 1989, we packed up his Honda Civic and drove from Toronto to L.A., arriving at his graduate residence with just two days left until my flight back to Toronto. We weren’t talking about the imminent fact of our separation, but in less than a week we would be halfway round the world from each other. I was going to Cairo. We had been inseparable for four years. Now we wouldn’t see each other for nine months.
I was doing my undergraduate degree in social anthropology and Middle Eastern studies—an interest that had been ignited by Ara. I had retained such strong memories of Ara’s passion and the contrast of his culture with mine, and I wanted to immerse myself in a richer world, study Arabic, learn about Islam, explore the Sahara Desert.
David and I wat
ched movies for those two days in his tiny room in residence. It felt terribly melancholic, sitting in the blue light while the Californian sun blazed outside. He drove me to the airport. I cried, suddenly remembering that I’d left the ring he’d given me, the one I always wore, on the edge of the sink in his bathroom.
“Tell me it’s not an omen,” I said.
“It’s not an omen,” he assured me.
I spent the first month in Cairo in tears. I was overwhelmed by this seething, heaving mass of a city and I didn’t think I could navigate my way through all its strangeness without David. He was my compass: he had been for years—my compass, my partner, my family, my friend.
I did begin to find my way—I loved the desert, but I can’t say I ever acclimatized to the city. David would be joining me in June; that was what kept me looking forward. Then, in May, he suddenly said he wouldn’t be able to come. In June, he gave up his apartment and left no forwarding address, no phone number. I began to spin. I couldn’t face the thought of my life without David.
After the term ended, instead of going home I went to the Sinai Peninsula with two American friends from the university. In Dahab, I met a soft, barefoot guitar-playing Israeli who rescued me from a very intense and beefed-up Egyptian man I’d made the mistake of kissing. We spent a reckless summer together, camping among lost souls on beaches on either side of the border. We weren’t in love, we weren’t happy. I was simply avoiding my life. I’m not sure what Lev was up to.
But I did eventually have to leave—my last year of classes was starting soon. I booked my ticket home. Lev said he would earn enough money to come to Canada. I was relieved when I got on that bus back to Cairo alone. But then I got hauled off that bus at gunpoint in the middle of the Sinai Desert. Visiting Israel had invalidated my Egyptian student visa. I would miss my flight home. I had to return to Israel, and to the Israeli.
