by Dionne Brand
“And?” Sydney is trying to enjoy the heat of the shower and lets it run silently for a few more minutes before shutting it off.
“Such liars. If they ever, ever truly did a ‘thorough’ environmental assessment of anything they would have shut all this shit down long ago. We’re talking about a pipeline, Sydney, running through water tables and food lands. The gut of the continent. Sydney, do you want your hot shower and your car so bloody much that we have to destroy the world?”
“Well I don’t want to go foraging for wood at this hour, and I can’t walk a hundred kilometres.” Sydney does not want to have to form these words or any words. The shower has made her bright. The two a.m. Laphroaig has washed away.
“Fine.” June gets up, throws the cigarette into the toilet bowl where it sizzles. “Don’t think about it.”
“I’m not.” Sydney rummages around in the closet. “I can’t do anything about it and I don’t want to think about what I can’t do anything about.” She is looking for panties, the black ones, the Jockeys.
“Fine, don’t think about it.”
“I don’t intend to.” And Sydney pauses in realisation, before, “Ah, you haven’t heard from that kid, have you?”
June is quiet. Sydney doesn’t like that sound. It is the precursor of unbearable mornings in June’s bedroom and this morning is unbearable so quickly.
“You always pick a fight after good sex,” Sydney says, quite naked, “Do you know that? You always pick a fight. You have to spoil it.”
June is brought up short, a little less certain, taking in Sydney’s point. “I do not.”
“Well, fight by yourself this morning,” Sydney marches out to the hallway, slamming the bedroom door.
She does not fight after good sex. Sydney simply cannot handle a serious discussion, Sydney did not have enough sophistication or interest and in the mornings June needs a bracing appraisal of the world to open her day. Well, clearly she can be gloomy at times, she does admit. That is why she needs someone who can take up the argument with enthusiasm and help her to clarify the meaning of the world. Not someone who wants to act as if the world were not about anything serious. One simply has to be aware of global warming, eco-justice, geopolitical strategies, in June’s book, to get up in the morning with any sense of human events. What kind of brain, June wonders, would wake up to an alarm clock with not a clue about what is happening and only the thought of what is for breakfast, or lunch, but utterly dismissive of the great moments of human history?
She wishes it were easy. Food, drink, sex. These, as pleasures, happened to her in some mechanical structure of her brain but the main engine ran on what was wrong with the world. When did that engine start spewing the greasy film of what was wrong? The year she got her glasses, perhaps fourteen. The year she solidified a desire to know every detail of conditions in the world. That way she could see the angles and not act without thought. And why would it have occurred to her at fourteen? Fourteen is precisely the age to act without thought. But if you walk down a street and find a parallel version of your life, then you must become aware of the world and being aware of it means you can do something about it. You have a chance.
Sydney, returning, says to June, “You know, June, you think love is complicated but it’s very simple.”
“Love is simple? Are you joking? Then why is it love? And who was talking about love anyway?”
“You think it’s deep, that’s why you can’t do it. That’s why.”
“Who says I can’t do it?”
“I know you can’t. You haven’t.”
Well maybe she couldn’t and maybe she hadn’t. All the people in that world had agreed on a lethal definition of love. It was full of rapture and betrayal and intrigue and she was no good at that. Sydney may belong to this cut-and-thrust world but she didn’t. She was not a person who seduced, she found that ultimately unsustainable. Seduction was a sheet of paper folded into secret creases. In these secret creases, Sydney was better.
“So you’re saying love is superficial?” She couldn’t help herself. She had to bring some snide language into the debate.
Sydney hated that tone in June, that tone after which the only response was to curse. “No. I’m saying it’s fucking simple.”
“That is not an explanation.” June didn’t think emotion was ever trustworthy on its own. She preferred reason. Sydney was all impulse, she dismissed June’s reason. In fact, Sydney had said as much once. “You have nothing to teach me.” June had thought it was emotion speaking and it was, but it was also Sydney, plain and clear.
“Look, do you want to fuck me?”
“Well …”
“Do you see what I mean? Simple question, you can’t answer.”
Where can they go from this question, where? June thinks, as Sydney kisses her, as Sydney touches the place between her breasts and covers June’s nipple with her mouth. Where? A short distance, very short. To the bed, or the floor. Half an hour later Sydney seems to think that some depth has been arrived at but June, naked as she might be, feels uncomfortable, restless and unresolved.
“Every second we live,” June says, although she is now lying there naked with Sydney again, “every second we live is so commodified we cannot be sure it is the real present.”
“What the fuck!” Sydney says, also naked but feeling suddenly clothed. “Why are you saying that now?”
“We cannot be sure there’s history, as in events, if each moment is commodified.”
There is silence and June thinks that it is the silence occasioned by her profundity. She pauses, letting it sink into Sydney. Then she says, “History, in history things happen, in commodification, things are.” Sydney sits up. June notices Sydney’s back. Two columns of muscles, a smooth cataract of a backbone, the triangular scapulae and the neck. Is it commodification? No, it is fact, history. The backbone is not a bone per se, it is a tunnel, a long basin. June feels like saying diluvial when she watches Sydney’s back, and other words like divulge and gorge. “I don’t mean ‘are’ in the sense of being, but ‘are’ like never changing, but never giving up anything new.”
“Jesus,” Sydney says, “Jesus, why?”
June takes this to mean why is commodification unchanging and goes on to explain.
“Well, the thing commodified is supposed to be pleasurable but what is that ‘pleasurable’? I mean … real pleasure changes. It is not the same always, but commodification says it is always the same, which is why people are in the end unhappy because it is in fact the same. It doesn’t yield any new sensations …” Sydney’s breasts, for example, are also beautiful and ‘beautiful’ in this case may be one word but only because of the limitations of a language, not the many ways in which this idea opens up. Sometimes it is the quality of light in the room that makes them so beautiful, other times it is the memory of seeing them in a river, that river in Blue Mountain where they dangerously went naked because whenever June got drunk she became incautious. But nevertheless beautiful is wholly inadequate. Was it the commodification of breasts in general that led to this gaze … Another part of Sydney, her legs. In snow, Sydney’s legs are durable, they look determined as she shovels the walkway. And of course in water they look fractured. Fractured, it is this fracturing that June thinks has ultimately endeared Sydney to her. But Sydney is not fragile in any way. These legs June admires as Sydney rises, these legs are solid. June reaches up to touch them. Sydney says, “I have to go, June.”
“You do?”
“Yeah, I really do. Right now. I’ve had it.” Sydney answers, abruptly.
“Ah,” June says. It is possible to be in the same place and not the same place, June thinks. She has obviously gone as far as possible with Sydney in this argument. Sydney’s left calf has a scar. It’s a mark like an interrupted sentence, it fades away and returns near the Achilles. Sydney told June it was from a bicycle spoke. Sydney had stolen a ride on her brother’s bicycle and crashed it. See, June thought, even that is beautiful about Sydn
ey’s legs, it summons up Sydney flying down a hill on a bicycle.
June is always just about to crack like a thin-shelled egg. Though June thinks her shell is hard, but all shells are fragile even if they’re hard. They’re shells. She wants Sydney to stay. She won’t try to persuade her, though, because then would it be Sydney’s desire to stay or June’s desire to have Sydney stay? It matters to June. And so in a way, June is for stasis, though of course June thinks of it as the ethics of persuasion. Really June wants Sydney to choose to stay freely. If Sydney can’t do that then well, it’s fine.
At any rate, just as Sydney’s leaving, June says, “Why do you suppose you couldn’t do it?”
“Couldn’t do what?” Sydney asks.
“The daily embrace and the kindness.”
“Fucking Christ, June. We just fucked, didn’t we?”
“It’s not the same.”
“Not the same? Then what is it?”
“It’s sex.”
“And not the same?”
“No.”
Sydney is thrown. All this time Sydney thinks of it as the same. “You got to be kidding me.”
“This is the difference between you and me,” June says as Sydney drops to the bed. “You think this is the only form of intimacy.” Intimacy, intimacy, the word sibilates around the room.
“Okay,” Sydney says. “I couldn’t do it, all right? I couldn’t.”
“You are so pessimistic,” June says, “Why? Why couldn’t you do it?”
“It was too big. It wasn’t a small thing at all.”
“See,” June says.
“You know what, June?”
“What?” June asks.
“You collect sadness.”
June is silent. Sydney is silent. The silence reaches the end of the room, the door seems about to close and lock it in. Sydney gets up and opens the door and June thinks Sydney is leaving for sure. But Sydney returns, lies on the bed beside her. And silence hovers and lingers and a little oxygen, which is not the enemy of silence exactly but which can turn silence into its several beings, a little oxygen comes in and makes the silence more variable than it was a minute ago. Because a minute ago the silence was volatile and atomic. June understands the favour Sydney has done her, because June never knows what to do with that kind of silence. It is the silence of endings. So June lies motionless beside Sydney. This quiet is not the same as that silence. It’s quiet. The way quiet is sometimes about revelations. Or about something settling.
I suppose I do, June thought. She made a sound but not the sound that came with these words. She didn’t want to form any words, she wanted to lie there in quiet.
Sydney put her hand on June’s back then and they both said nothing and made no sound and June felt Sydney’s hand like a benediction. Yes, June collects sadness. What would happen if no one remembered sadness? We’d walk around mutilated and mutilating and not know how we got there or have any remorse.
“Someone has to,” Sydney says, moving her hand up and down June’s back. And it was as if Sydney had said the best thing ever to June. June felt Sydney’s soothing hand cover her. There is nothing universal or timeless about this love business, Sydney now suspects for the first time. It is hard if you really want to do it right.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to Louise Dennys most dearly for her rigourous editorial attention; to my patient and critical first readers, Filomena Carvalho, Linda Spalding, Allyson Holder and Madeleine Thien; to my translators and interlocutors, Abdi Osman, Sara Fruner, E.W. and M.O.; and to my agent Sarah Chalfant of the Wylie Agency for her reading and support. A special thanks to Deirdre Molina and Terri Nimmo.
“Love Poem 17” from The Collected Works of Xavier Simone is reprinted with permission of the author © Xavier Simone (1968).
DIONNE BRAND’s most recent book of poetry is Ossuaries, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; her nine others include winners of the Governor General’s Literary Award, the Trillium Book Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. Her novel In Another Place, Not Here was selected as a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year and a Best Book by The Globe and Mail; At the Full and Change of the Moon was also selected as a Best Book by the LA Times. Her novel What We All Long For was published to great acclaim in Canada, Italy and Germany and won the Toronto Book Award. In 2006, Brand was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize for her contribution to the world of books and writing and was Toronto’s Poet Laureate from 2009 to 2012. Brand is a professor in the School of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Guelph. She lives in Toronto.
