Martin Sloane

by Michael Redhill

  He’ll be back in two secs, I said, but she’d already gotten up.

  I have my ways, she said, smiling sweetly, and she put her drink down with a faint clink on the glass table in front of us. Before I could say anything, she went out where Martin had gone out just minutes before and started crossing the grass. I rushed to the door and stood on the verge, watching her stride across the now-dark lawn toward the faint yellow light at the back of the property. I was trying to get past the stunned feeling so I could find the thing to say that would stop her in her tracks, but before I could manage it, she reached the door and simply opened it. Then went in and closed it behind her. I stood frozen to the spot, feeling the bite of the cool misted air, my mouth stuck open.

  Shortly, across the small expanse separating me from the shed, I heard soft voices. Calm, quiet voices, floating in the air between there and here. Never mind frog-marching her out of there, he was actually talking to her. He didn’t mind that she had invaded that silence I had always, so assiduously, honoured. This was a different silence than my father’s, and maybe I had misread it. I stood in the doorway separating me from these two people I loved and it felt like my heart would just stop beating.

  My father’s silence had sunk my childhood house in impenetrable gloom; it was a silence I disturbed at my peril, not because my father was prone to violent reactions of any sort but because if roused, he was capable of starting off on terrifying tangents. He might ask if I thought the couches in the house ought to be recovered, or if there were any churches I wished to join (and it seemed to him the more the better, saturated, as he must have thought I was, with my mother’s inclination to sin). So I left him to stew, and stew he did, until he died of it. Standing there in my adult home, I wondered if the outcome of our unhappy life in Ovid would have been any different if I had charged into my father’s room and made him speak to me. What if I had forced that connection on him, that same angry reaching-out that Molly was forcing on Martin now? Was I capable of that? And was it courage or selfishness? With my father, I’ll never know if I could have saved him from his grief. It may be simple why. I may have lacked — I may still lack — the humanity.

  I put on a pleasant face and began crossing the lawn. I came at an angle that closed off the light from the single window, and then gently wheeled in toward it so that it burst gold in my eyes like the light in the honeycomb had. I called out to them as I approached, anxious that I sounded as though I was going to catch them in something, although I couldn’t imagine what (she may have been beautiful, but Martin’s fidelity was something I never questioned). As I came round toward the door, it opened and Martin stepped out.

  I was just about to come and get you, he said. I saw Molly behind him stepping out into the dark beside the door. Martin put his hands on my shoulders and kissed me. Rescue me, he said quietly.

  I was just thinking you might need some help.

  He took my hand and reached for Molly’s. She brought one hand out from behind her back to take his, and smiled childishly. Does this mean we’re not done yet? she said.

  It’s an evening of firsts, he said. Let’s see how many people we can get in this thing. He led us both back inside.

  Entering the shed with them made me anxious because of my own misdemeanors. It wasn’t true that I wasn’t allowed in Martin’s workplace (I’d said that to take the sting out of the potential insult to Molly); I’d been in there with him many times. But when he was out of town, it was assumed I would not go in there by myself. However, with as long as two weeks at a time between visits, I went in frequently, and being able to be among the things that he loved made the wait bearable. I even told myself that he probably knew I did this, since the keys were so obviously accessible, and he’d never actually told me not to go in. I’d started small, opening the door and just standing in the verge, like I was now. And then, later, actually entering. And finally, in recent months, sitting and doing as I pleased, opening drawers, taking things out, turning both finished and unfinished things over in my hands, even opening them and touching the objects inside. I’d cracked the rim of a clay bowl in one of them, and knowing Martin had a box full of them — bought in New York City a number of years back for next to nothing — I removed the broken bowl and glued down a fresh one in its place. Each time I left the shed, I left it exactly as I’d entered it, and went back into the house with a queer mix of guilt and satiation. As if there were something in the sin itself that was needed, as well as the pleasure of being there, alone, as it were, with him.

  Well? What’s been the subject of conversation? I probably have a few things to add to it, whatever it is.

  Just life, said Molly, turning. She smiled at me.

  Art, said Martin.

  Yes, we were talking about art, Molly said mockingly.

  Really?

  Molly was just telling me she’s a fan.

  Well we all know that, I said, and I smiled.

  Stranger things had happened somewhere, I was sure, but not here. Molly walked past both of us to where floor-to-ceiling shelves on either side of the door were stacked with finished artworks. It was the least-safe place in the world to keep such things, I’d told Martin numerous times. But for him they were not “artworks” the way the world thought of them; they were references and guides and records of something that was always in progress, that he constantly referred to. It made no sense to him to keep them “safe.”

  The shed wasn’t much bigger than four outhouses set up in a square, but he’d made the most of the space. There was a single old typesetter’s stool that could wheel across the smooth tin floor. Opposite the door was a deep shelf taking up the whole wall, at lap level, which served as his workspace. A variety of things in different stages of completion rested on it. Above the shelf, dark cubbyholes labelled with Dymo tape labels — dowels, 3 inch–8 inch, rings and balls, glass, lenses (although it said lemses), hinges, dowels, 1 inch–3 inch, screws, nails — the latter two of which were in bottles.

  Each of the other two walls had a library catalogue drawer against it. These were labelled alphabetically and contained small objects and pictures from everywhere — from postcards to magazines and comic books to stamps to advertising and photographs.

  Even graphic police and morgue images, none of which had found a home in his work yet but suggested a bewildering openness to unforeseen change. The pictures, and the little toys and bits of fabric and pieces of broken things, were organized by genus and contained in #3 envelopes with holes punched out of the bottoms so they would fit on the pipe slides in the bottoms of the drawers. Upon opening the drawers for the first time, I had the impression of entire worlds labelled and laid out in white rows. The levels of organization stunned, and even frightened, me. If Martin wanted a picture of a leopard frog, for example, there were perhaps a half-dozen to choose from. He’d have them in a single envelope behind a card that said “Amphibians, Freshwater,” which was in a set of six drawers labelled “Non-mammalian,” which was in a section five rows wide called “Animals,” which was itself in the cabinet labelled “Sentient” on the left side of the shed, which he had designated “Natural.” It faced the other cabinet, with its own complex taxonomies, which was labelled “Man-made.”

  Above the drawers, now directly behind where I was standing, there were cubbyholes on both sides, the ones on the right containing manufactured things of every variety — dollheads, coins, cans, apothecary bottles, tintype photographs, the clay bowls, and so on. The left held things mainly found on walks — driftwood, birds’ nests, dead insects, moss, bark, hay, stones, sand in bottles, quartz. The contents of the shed had been collected everywhere, but gradually Martin had been bringing down what he had in Toronto as well, and now the two workplaces each contained about half of what he had, as far as I understood it. Around us, on the walls and on the desk in front of us, was the complicated jumble of all the things that got drawn down into his work.

  Martin must have told Molly she could look at whatever she
wanted, because she was taking things off their shelves, plucking them like she was finding coins in the street. Soon, she had more than a dozen of them out, and they faced us, their glass fronts reflecting us and the night behind. Many, of course, I had seen and knew well, not just because I’d looked at them in here but because Martin had kept them in the house from time to time (he said it helped to see them out of the corner of his eye), and many of them had been on public display. There was Linwood Flats and The Curtain, Sunken and Universe. Voluptuaries (the first thing Martin ever made specifically for me, it was full of butterflies hidden behind twigs), Childhood Game, and Downstairs.

  Molly whistled low and then sat down in Martin’s chair and looked at the boxes, and they looked like a row of front windows in houses, arrayed there. Let’s turn off the light, she said, and Martin did, and when our eyes adjusted, the moon was throwing the shadows of things onto the backs of the boxes. Molly was breathing them in and I looked back at Martin and he was leaning against a shelf on the back wall and watching Molly with a look of Sunday-morning pleasure on his face. Then he closed his eyes, and his face went to stillness. I realized I could relax, I was here with permission, and I stepped up with Molly and breathed them in too. Pine resin and cold iron and moss. In Childhood Game, a crank on the side moved a row of colourful animal faces along a track, like the targets in a shooting gallery. A plate of smoked glass below revealed the underside of the game, family photos pasted onto the targets. (Two separate chains made it look like the animal heads, sinking out of sight, transformed into real people upside down — I’d opened the back of this box with a screwdriver and marvelled at its construction, at the fact that, somehow, Martin would know how to make something like this.) Molly had one hand on her chest and her fingertips over her mouth. They really are beautiful, she said.

  They’re just a few things I want to keep. He was in silhouette now, the moon against his back.

  What’s this one? Molly asked. She was kneeling by a low shelf where she’d pulled a box made of glass on all sides out of its place. The front and back panels held an object encrusted with dirt. Through one side, you could see a rusted latch. Through the other, a page from an old Bible, lit up with illuminations. I’d seen it once or twice before. Martin had described it as unfinished — he hadn’t even given it a title. But now he took it from Molly and told her it was called The Good Book of Mysteries.

  You’ll like this story, he said to her. It’s based on something my father told me when I was little.

  Is it? I said.

  Yes, said Martin. This story is for Molly though.

  Alright.

  It was called the Clonmacnoise Bible, he continued, the one my father told me about. It was supposed to be the most beautiful illuminated manuscript ever discovered. It was named for the ancient monastery on the shores of the Shannon where they discovered it. When they found the Bible, buried in the foundation of a nine-hundred-year-old church, it was in a rotted box, and its pages were open to two ancient illuminations, the most beautiful things ever seen. But the rest of the pages in both halves had partially decomposed from water leaking into the box through the ground, not to mention the discharges of all the bodies buried at varying depths in the church floor and in the yards, and then the pages had also petrified from centuries of pressure on the collapsed box. So what they decided to do was, they kept the second half at Clonmacnoise and sent the first half to Trinity in Dublin to be studied. And so began a succession of terrible luck. A curse, in fact.

  Really, I said.

  Martin shot me a look. The first man who tried to pry the pages apart was the most renowned archaeologist of the time, and after a week of trying to separate one page from another with nearly microscopic wires, he gave up in despair and hanged himself from the corner of a bookcase in the library. The second man, a chemist, tried to find a solvent that would separate the pages without destroying the illuminations, and although he was able to get the very edges of the pages to come apart, he could not see any of the illuminations, and gave up as well. He didn’t despair about his failure, but his wife took their three children back to their grandmother’s in Belfast, appalled that he would tamper with a religious artifact, and so come in for the wrath of God. This man spent the rest of his days alone and bereft.

  Bereft, Molly said.

  Finally, said Martin, a group of scientists decided that the best way to separate the pages of the first half of the Clonmacnoise Bible would be to immerse it in oil — since the pages were on an animal skin of some sort and wouldn’t be damaged — and allow the oil to soak in, and then subject the book to a long, slow drying process that would likely separate the newly supple pages.

  Uh-huh, I said suspiciously. And?

  Well, they had the Bible in a kiln with a glass door, and they had it on a low burn. After a number of days, they could see that the Bible’s pages were easing apart. When they could almost see the surfaces of the pages, with those bright colours and the long-lost illustrations, they turned the kiln off and let everything cool, and then they opened the door after another day and got ready with the bottles of champagne.

  Molly’s face was pale. What happened?

  It fell to ash the instant they touched it.

  Jesus Christ, I said.

  So now the other half at Clonmacnoise is in a glass case and if anyone tries to discover the rest of its treasures, they’ll lose that little bit they do have.

  Molly stood bolt upright. And why is that story for me? she said. Why for me? It means don’t try to figure things out?

  I looked back and forth between them, lost in the sudden updraft of emotion.

  No, said Martin quietly. My father told it to me because something bad had happened to me, and I said that there was no reason for anything, that the world made no sense. My father was a religious man and this upset him.

  So what, you were just a kid.

  He said to me, just because you can’t understand why this is happening to you doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason. It’s just hidden from you, and you have to be able to appreciate life knowing you aren’t entitled to know all the answers.

  He advised you not to think about your life? Molly said.

  No. He was telling me to show some respect for both the beautiful as well as the darker mysteries, that’s all. He wanted me to understand that if something refuses to reveal itself to you, prying it apart could ruin something that was precious the way it was.

  Including this bad thing that happened to you?

  Well, it made me who I am, so I guess there was something good in it. If I think I’m leading a life worth leading.

  And are you? Molly said.

  I looked from her to him and back, not sure at all what had set this in motion. I leaned forward and gently took the fragile artwork from Martin’s hands. A prize in every box, I said. I slipped the Good Book of Mysteries back into place and drew out another box, one whose name I knew. This one has a happy ending, I said. Grand Central.

  Molly looked over at it and smiled softly. That’s pretty.

  And I know this one, I said, clearing my throat nervously. It’s about a cinema.

  A little while later, Molly looked at her watch and announced she had half an hour to make her bus. She went into the house to grab her bag. My god, I said to him, as we crossed the lawn behind her, what was that about?

  I’m not sure. He sounded tired.

  But what did she say to you? Molly reappeared in the doorway. You’ll tell me after.

  She put her arms around me. It did me a world of good to get away for a day, she said. Her voice contained no hint of her previous distress. Thank you.

  Okay, I said, a little lost. I wondered if she had quickly checked through her bag and seen what I’d left there for her. I could see no hint of what she was feeling under what she appeared to be feeling. Calm and collected.

  We’ll talk, she said. I’ll call you. She turned to Martin. Thanks, she said.

  He reached forward and hugged h
er. She slung her little bag over her shoulder, carelessly enough that I knew she hadn’t opened it and looked inside, and kissed us both. I just stood there and watched her walk toward the road.

  Wait, I said, snapping out of it, we’ll drive you.

  No, I’ll walk, she said. I don’t get lost.

  But your bus is going to leave.

  I’ll be fine, she said, and she waved to us both and turned down toward where the main road led to the station.

  Martin went back into the shed to tidy up, and I stood in the doorway, watching him, waiting. Well, are you going to tell me what the hell that was all about?

  He shrugged. Maybe she’s unhappy, he said.

  She’s unhappy? Stop the presses. She seemed miserable all day. Is that what she wanted to say to you? He continued meticulously to shelve his things. Martin?

  He walked past me in the threshold and snapped the light off. I stepped back so he could close the door. Then he turned to me sharply in the doorframe. I don’t mind if you come in here when I’m gone, he said. But if you break something, tell me so I can fix it.

  Oh …, I said.

  We stepped out of the verge and he clicked the lock shut. I’m not angry.

  Okay.

  But you can’t just replace a broken thing with an unbroken thing like you’re changing a lightbulb.

  I’m sorry, I said, and I linked my arm in his, but he surprised me by slipping his out.

  Just have a little more respect, okay? He continued across the grass to the house, and I followed him, knowing (in the way we tend to know things that are, if fact, just the way we’ve chosen to see the world) that there was no point in trying to make it right. At least not today, a day that had gotten away from me. I went in behind him and shut the kitchen door. It seemed to me that there were two darknesses that night, the one outside and the one in the house, and there was no difference, as if the door were a plate of glass dropped into the sea at night. I pulled the lock up. I had the image of that book of holy secrets, heavy with earth and rain and dust.