Come Back

by Rudy Wiebe

  And recognition slams him: Gabriel’s “dream job” at the National Film Theatre, “the study and appreciation of cinema,” was the worst work he could have found in 1985. Far worse than tiring body labour, worse than a course which would have had some instructor direction: here he was paid (minimally but enough) to evaluate and advise on movies to be shown in repertory theatre—his job was simply to sit and watch any and all movies. And he did: twenty-two theatre movies listed in January, twenty-one theatre movies in brief February, PLUS TWENTY-NINE MORE at a Fifty-Hour Movie Marathon. Gabe organized it; it ran without a break from Friday evening to Sunday night, living hell! Hal unfolds the NFT poster like a trap:

  The idea is really very simple: we want 50 celluloid junkies to attempt to sit through 50 continuous hours of movies. And we want each participant to find sponsors willing to pledge money for each hour of film watched. This is an ideal opportunity to catch up on 30-odd features in one short weekend, Feb. 15–17!

  Hal cannot remember how much he sponsored Gabe—he must have, a lot—hour after relentless hour to stare at a screen; he does not want to think of it, he shudders to remember. That lean 6-foot-3-inch body, 165 pounds doubled for fifty hours in a chair—no matter how “amazingly comfortable!” the brochure bragged it would be—fifty hours after having already been up for twelve hours, since six Friday morning, moving “a comfortable lounge full of comfortable armchairs” into place with “large-screen video projectors.” And such superb, psychologically shredding films lurking everywhere throughout the program: Psycho—Cat People—Dr. Strangelove, and especially La femme de l’hôtel:

  Three women: a film director, a mysterious suicidal woman she encounters in her Montreal hotel, and an actress who acts out both their traumas.

  And, O blasted thought, John Huston’s new Under the Volcano at 10 a.m. on Sunday morning, Malcolm Lowry’s drunken meditation on the Sermon on the Mount—what a Sunday worship—that drove Gabriel to his only marathon comment:

  Finney great as the alcoholic who’s given up on everything—sounds familiar

  With scribbled sidebar:

  Yes okay. and what did you have for breakfast.

  Gabriel, no wonder you scrawled “going insane” over and over again. No wonder two days later—day after day you kept on punishing yourself with these pitiless movies, bending your long body inert while virtual violent worlds reeled through your total attention, you need do or decide nothing, you were totally controlled by a fiendishly skilled camera—two days after the marathon you submit yourself to what you name “the brutish lyricism” of Sam Peckinpah, twice in a row! and confess:

  Extremely depressed. Started that night before The Wild Bunch, then depr. renewed after seeing … Bunch again. Alone in apartment in Edmonton. I am obviously living in some dream world if I think anything at all exists any more. I smoke I drink the wind howls time twitches on

  And suddenly in this Tedious Nowhere, suddenly the ineffable place where pure dearth is inconceivably transmuted—changes into this empty surfeit …

  Angel, if there were a place, some ineffable carpet where this column of total zero …

  (Rilke)

  Gabe! Where was your work community? The convivial, witty, artistic, stubbornly opinionated people with whom you ate lunch, had drinks—too many?—talked Oilers, ideas, winter weather, politics … were you locked into shame at what you felt? With them especially?

  All the Marathon Program could note was: “Special thanks to Gabriel and Ross for putting together … managing …” Ugh.

  And Fred? By then he must have had, however unaware, more than a Europe Karen whiff of your “obsession.” Did you simply, wordlessly, shift past each other in the narrow aisle kitchen of your apartment?

  Did you ever talk with anyone?

  DAILY PLANNER 1985: March Wednesday 13

  Okay read—I know you’re reading this, some day, these repetitious scribbles of a trite, obsessive mind / reflection is needed. However, with the phenomenon of Gabriel Wiens something more is necessary. Remember dignity. Remember how to forget?

  To b&w Cul-de-sac 7 minute beach scene.

  After out with Beth to Ninth Avenue

  Beth. Beth, in the Vancouver Airport, that Beth. Hal remembered her like a splash of frozen memory: cropped hair, tall, dark blond, it must have been the mid-nineties, 1994, ’95 and he bought her a latte … she was a volunteer driver at the Vancouver Writers Festival. She had picked him up at the hotel in lots of time to catch his flight back to Edmonton and said she had time for coffee, Joy Kogawa’s plane from Toronto wouldn’t be in for an hour.

  Hal told her, “Joy was in Grade Seven with me, my school.”

  “Really!”

  “Taber, Alberta, and kids and sugar beets, that irrigation slogging, her first novel, Obasan, it’s superb at describing that mind-breaking labour.”

  “Did you do it too, hoe beets?”

  “All Japanese and Mennonite kids did, that was South Alberta after the war.”

  “Why didn’t they ask you to have a conversation with her too, here at the festival? Not just Clark Blaise?”

  “Hey, that’s a great idea—World War Two: the Vancouver expropriation and prairie exile of Japanese Canadians—let’s pick up Joy and go back and tell them!” But then, abruptly, she stopped laughing with him. He looked up; she was staring beyond him, her grey eyes fixed as if something was there, coming. She said, deliberately,

  “I used to live in Edmonton. I knew your son.”

  She had picked him up at the airport two days before, and he had noticed her in the festival hotel, checking tickets at the door for some events. Then she was in the audience, front row, for his “A Conversation with Clark Blaise” and in the van returning to the airport she had talked about nothing but that: “I liked the way you pushed him about ‘beginnings,’ that was so strong, his ‘beginnings’ comments.”

  “You really feel I pushed him?”

  “You were very good, evocative, when he said, ‘To begin, to begin, the first paragraph of a story is an act of faith,’ and you pushed him and he’s so quick: ‘It’s in the nature of story, story seeks its beginning like the drop of the baton seeks the first chord in the symphony—’ ”

  “You knew him, Gabriel?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  “Working at National Film Theatre.”

  “You weren’t at the funeral.”

  “No …”

  “Half a dozen NFTers came, they signed the …”

  “I couldn’t come.”

  “You just got drunk.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Guess … easy oblivion.”

  “Yes. Gabriel never was—he drank but he was never really drunk.”

  “You sure?”

  “Not that I saw, not the eight months I knew him, not …”

  What could Hal remember? Surrounded in his basement by notebooks and paper, holding in his hands the 1985 diary with those suddenly pale blue words rolled across the last line of March Wednesday 13:

  To b&w Cul-de-sac After out with Beth to Ninth Avenue

  A class restaurant, a neurotic Polanski film. Hal clutched his head: my memory, my memory’s so overloaded it’s … that latte, those airport lattes … I drank them then, all the time, but this … the old Vancouver Airport … my memory is inventing …

  Gabriel wrote all his ’85 diary in black, why this single line return to blue? Hal tried to calm himself, to organize his thinking into discrete areas, complete one single thought, follow it through—how often does Gabe name Beth? In the diary, he must look through all the NFT days again, and also after he was laid off, was there any Beth after, when was it, May, when he turned in—Yes! May Friday 17:

  Phone NFT office, bring them the keys

  out with Beth, Ross, Jack

  In blue pen. But also two guys. Was it inside Vancouver Airport she confessed she knew Gabriel? At a coffee table, where surely they sat face to face? Didn’t she say it
driving, where the traffic would allow him no more than her profile? Her handsome face—not beautiful but character handsome, certainly older than Gabe, early forties by ‘94, such a face chiselled from marble—and the same stab of sudden rage, he knew that! hit him: why didn’t she seduce Gabe? Her body, her powerful character could surely have overrun that fixation on an avoiding child, soak him in pleasure, let your body roll and stop torturing yourself, stop fumbling around that confused kid you never see anyway except in some crowd, embrace this, now, and whenever that girl grows mature enough to respond—accept or reject or play, whatever—well then that will be—Beth, why didn’t you!

  Hal was hunched around himself. Oddly down on the floor.

  And still his stupid instinctive male thinking: the first, the simplest cure for all men and women: sex. After all his decades of growing old. Ach Gott.

  Love, let it be love.

  He must find what he had known, then. He rolled to his knees, hoisted himself onto his feet, crunched through papers, began to climb the two stairs up through his house. His legs were heavy as logs but his head light as a single thought; the space of the house seemed to be turning round and round around him but the weight of his legs balanced him upright, as long as he was upright the turning cannot waive his lightness. Inside his office finally, he leaned down against a filing cabinet and reached for the bottom drawer handle. Still he did not fall, not quite, and there were the heaps of his diaries: on his knees, searching, October 1993 … 1987 … 1994 … only October it could only … yes …

  Sunday October 23: Van. Fest.

  Author Brunch Edm. return

  Beth G drove me to airport / friend of

  Gabe at NFT 1985! told me in van on way

  in Montreal (film scout) week before his

  death / so not at funeral / very hard alone

  almost ghostly experience / still dreams

  of him / thinks of him / he comes in

  dreams but never speaks

  So. His thick, pocket-size 1994. Hal stared at the flat words. And inside the “Name and Address” back cover: Beth Garneau (knew G) 604 654 3219.

  He could call her. She offered him her number, he has never called her. Fifteen and a half years. Late fifties now, almost catching up. He sat in his armchair and lifted the phone. What will he say? The Orange Downfill passing, did you ever see—the mechanical voice comes: “There is no one available to take your call right now, but if you” hung up.

  And sat staring at the ends of files lining his wide desk. He has tried off and on to arrange what he did with his lifetime. His sieve of memory. They drank airport lattes, he was suddenly absolutely certain, yes, so why didn’t he write down what they said—words wasted on driving—they had, they must have said it.

  He: “Did you love him?”

  She: “I would have, if he had let me.”

  The closed computer on the desk beside Hal’s arm. Flat, coiled, waiting with mind-boggling Google, uncountable Wiens sites and images—his e-mails, uggh. Hal fled back to the basement, to the specific, limited paper Yo stored for them alone in such restricted order. What a thin life to find in this scrambled chronology of scraps jotted down. Thinner than skin, but enough.

  SPIRAL NOTEBOOK (3): March 18, 1985

  I phoned your house, asked for your mother—and it was you! I didn’t even know it, your voice was so different I hung up. Then I caught on and phoned right back and talked nervously to you, about Joan. But I couldn’t talk and foolishly hung up again without giving the phone number, which you even asked for, your voice breaking in a cough. I can’t talk to you, not even when I don’t have to face you.

  Ailsa, how have you been? Your cough, are you ill? Do you still think about me? How did you feel just now talking to me. Do you want to hold my hand again. I see you sitting on your hotel bed in Frankfurt (that early morning, we were driving to Chagall in Mainz, your dad and brother were already gone to Marburg with mine) looking so sad, why? Oh all I want to do is hold you. Are you lying in your narrow bed, are you really sick, can I comfort you get you some water, pills, put on a record, wipe your forehead. Or just sit silently beside—or perhaps you want me to leave. Ailsa, your voice was so harshly deep …

  Gabe you’re a useless human being

  Run away run away

  Existence is an ugly pain.

  Please tell me why I exist,

  in a neat English paragraph

  I can understand. No thank you

  Mindless dribbly stuff looks more like the rantings of a

  fool than

  I sit here alone and write your name down the whole

  page again

  Ailsa Helen

  Helen fatal beauty

  go abstract

  line curve colour gesture

  left foot right foot

  eat, eat

  stand talk

  talk of eat

  tea/coffee sit tell stories

  soak feet lovely feet

  heart pounds long thin limbs thighs

  move

  move

  eye movement voice fingers

  like pen on paper

  trivial

  I don’t remember what what

  I remember remembering but have forgotten go back

  Re-membering, putting together lost parts of the

  dearest lost body

  where are they

  Ailsa Helen I’m sorry to think of you

  as a saviour

  you’re just a lovely

  young girl—nothing more—nothing less either

  Please—I know not what I do

  DAILY PLANNER 1985: March Thursday 28–Friday 29

  Ailsa—I look at your picture and I weep. You are so beautiful, what have I done. I drink and smoke. Where are you, where in the empty world? Please God give me the courage to talk, please, it’s not much to ask—

  Great! Gabe you sound like a most mature person

  I think I’ve been sick since childhood, I realize I should not project my desires onto one person but my life drags on—I repeat the same babble—why can’t I escape, to where, I am nothing but a creature of continuous hope for the nothing I seek which I know is not in existence. The mind keeps bumbling, to kill the mind, to kill nothing. Take my life—please I would

  Gabe. Shut up

  March Sunday 31

  Palm Sunday. Church choir very good “If these voices are silent, the very rocks will cry out.” Where are you, rocks? Cry!

  In hallway I look for A, she’s there and once looks directly at me. Then what? Not a flicker in my brain, what in that church building where I’ve gone for 18 years, surrounded by people warm-hearted and laughing, elders good as any grandparent— and smiling me a gutless jelly

  What am I blathering! Face it: I need a lover and A is a child. Once upon a time we held hands, she was barely 13

  April Monday 1–Tuesday 2

  Fool’s day. The world is alive with beautiful women and I am a fool.

  I need to cut this desire to write because I never edit this dribble, as trite as

  Lunch with Oleg at U, he’s still studying philosophy and a teaching sessional. To have a mind to think like that, clear, logical, straight ahead, and act. Like Socrates

  Don’t go near Dad’s office in English he’ll be there, offer Java coffee

  April Saturday 6

  Easter Saturday, Auditorium, Bach St. Matthew Passion. To the second performance, alone, parents with Grant and Joan went to first. Oh the beautiful contralto, she sings “Erbarme dich”:

  Have mercy (no—pity, pity) on me, my God:

  for my tears’ sake, look at me.

  My heart and eyes weep bitterly before you.

  Have pity.

  Under the singing violin, the beat plucked by the violoncello, gently steady, relentless and harrowing. A beat stealing your heart

  Scrawl at right angles to full page

  I weep. What have I done. Please, I

  —why do you read this whoever
you are—

  I realize this (madness) must end. It’s not the greatest choice a person can make, but really, what choices does one have. Being human does not give you profound choices, because one has to make these choices within the given moments and within the given personality one has that creates the existence we call “being human.” To void is simpler. Do I make myself clear?

  April Monday 8–Saturday 13

  Best Boy for 6 days. National Film Board Where Is Lily? shoot in Jasper National Park. Mountains and grey braided rivers. Pick up van at 8:30, drive

  And that’s blank. Not one word about that Best Boy week of work. Nothing of film people met, of technical skills observed, of creative connections. And the mountains—as a boy you “played mountains” in our backyard sandbox, lines and ridges of stones relining the Machu Picchu we visited when you were five, that picture of you and Mir beside the Great Sundial against mountains and Inca bright sky with your jackets tied around your waists and laughing, the Urubamba River far below—didn’t Folding Mountain and the milky Athabasca River jog a single slip of re-membered happiness?

  Not one intriguing person in the Lily crew? Not a word.

  April Friday 26

  Paris, Texas opening at Varscona, maybe for a month / let’s hope / stay and see second showing till end of Super 8 part. License Plate: 78734J

  Shave off moustache a.m. Start reading Nabokov’s

  Ada

  April Sunday 28

  Start growing new moustache immediately

  Gabriel, what happened? Your Oldman River Quest was marked so emphatically in your calendar. Was it the ambivalent doubleness—duplicity?—of river: both the life of the soil and the oblivion of irreversible time? One moustache shave was enough, and Nabokov’s indulgent novel?

  Hal recognized he was in his basement. The ceiling light was on, his hand gripped the edge of the box, a red file folder lay in it. Neatly labelled in that familiar hand: