Martin Sloane

by Michael Redhill

  In the middle of January, in those dead weeks of winter, I plugged the phone back in. A storm had dumped more than eighty inches of snow on the entire eastern seaboard; the newspapers showed streets with rows of humped drifts, cars beneath run aground. I sat on the cool parquet floor in the front room and dialled Molly. When she picked up, her voice sounded tired, like she’d worked all night. I listened to her say hello into my silence. There was a long pause. Then she said, I know it’s you, Scott.

  Scott? I said. She was silent, just breathing. It’s me, Molly. Did you get my message?

  I got it, she said.

  Who’s Scott? What’s going —

  Goodbye, Jolene.

  My heart jumped into my mouth. Hey! Don’t — Molly? I waited in the huge silence. Are you still there?

  I told you not to give me that fucking thing.

  What thing?

  The artwork. The honeycomb.

  Oh my god, Molly. I don’t care about that.

  It shows, she said. Maybe Martin knew that about you.

  What are you talking about?

  No doubt he discovered it was gone, she said. You made me a part of something terrible.

  I was reeling, trying to hold together the seam of conversation. Just slow down, Molly. Please. I’m going crazy out here.

  What right did you have to give me it? Did he tell you to?

  No, Molly … but he would have been thrilled to know you had it. You loved it! I just wanted you to —

  What? she said. You just wanted me to have one of your tablescraps?

  You took it the wrong way.

  How do you think he’s taken it?

  The one thing has nothing to do with the other!

  Don’t you shout at me. Her voice was a low, threatening rumble.

  Molly … obviously I’ve done something wrong, I said. I’m sorry, I am, I want you to tell me what I can do to make it right. But at this moment, I need to talk to someone, and you’re my oldest friend —

  I don’t think we better.

  Molly, please — I said, but I could suddenly hear my voice echoing in space. There was the sound of the disconnect — tock — followed by the soft, empty, long hum of the dial tone.

  In the last days before I left Bloomington for good, I felt as if the world faded out around me, gentled itself out of existence, as if it were leaving me. I slept on the floor, like an ascetic, and the sun crept across the wood, warming it and then me. I walked around the campus like I was already a ghost, the swirls of dusty snow blowing up beside the brick walls, the vines bare and black. I saw, one morning, that the shantytown was finally being dismantled; the university, on the grounds that it was too cold to carry on any outdoors experiments in democracy, had decreed the town at an end. Grounds staff pulled the shabby buildings down, protected from the protestors by a ring of hard-looking state guardsmen, their black visors pulled down over their eyes. There was no need for the show of force: the shantytown inhabitants, bleary-eyed from being woken before 11 a.m., stood apart from the dismantlers, blinking helplessly. In half an hour, the town was gone, and only piles of tie-dyed bags and clothing remained among the scattering of raw earth patches where the interiors had been.

  The police as well as the protestors filed back into the denuded space, the former to inspect the belongings of the latter as they were claimed. Most of the evicted — well over a hundred people — milled about with their dew-damp sleeping bags drawn up around them. Some were still passing joints like cups of morning coffee, but it looked like the police were going to let it slide, knowing the protest, without its locus, was shortly going to taper to nothing. A few half-hearted cries of hell no, we won’t go were heard, but they weren’t picked up.

  I went around the lip of the hill that formed one edge of the now-dead town and noticed a number of what were recognizably professors standing among the protestors. It was clear from the state of their deshabillé that they had not just arrived. Some boldly stood with their arms around pink-faced freshmen — mostly girls with their lace-edged shirts knotted up around their midriffs. There was no question of how those who had lived here during the fall nights had kept warm at night: three or four of the women were obviously pregnant.

  The protestors stood where their buildings had been, around their foodstuffs, their pots and pans, their rucksacks. The dead little fires that had looked like miniature black craters half an hour earlier were flickering to life again, and some of the police moved back up onto the ridge. One of them spoke out of a megaphone, You are in violation of Code 18-91 of the State of Indiana. You are instructed to leave the area at once. Please return to your regular dwellings.

  Right of assembly! someone shouted back.

  You are trespassing on private property. You are in violation of Code 18-91 of the State of Indiana —

  Fuck your code! came another voice, and a shudder of movement went through the place. In the distance, closer to the university gates, I saw a few of the state police move down the incline and take up positions at the back of the crowd. Behind them, a phalanx of cops on horseback appeared where they had been. There was a brief sweep of movement as half a dozen or so people tried to leave at that end and were pushed back — the time for reasonable action was now deemed over. A smoking canister of gas arced over my head and landed in the crowd in front of me. I got muscled aside by the cops descending the hill and the protestors rushing up from below. The river of people opened and closed around my body, and as I stood there, the air became warmer, like I was nestled in them, in their heat, in their longing to live the way they wanted to. The whole place was a buzz of love and destruction.

  A couple of days later, my bus pulled out of the station and began driving out on Grover Avenue toward the highway that led north to Indianapolis. It felt as if some tether might pull me through the window and drag me back through the centre of town and campus, and then into the front door of the empty house on Service Road, and then through it to the locked shed where I’d left Martin’s works abandoned. But the bus stretched this spirit line thinner and thinner until it seemed to break. I flattened back against the seat and I watched the breakfast places go by, Big Wheel, Denny’s, International Waffle House, and the snow still coming down in clumps, floating in front of the restaurant windows filled with Texans or Californians or whoever else was passing through that place that was, mostly, just a place in-between others. As it was, in the end, to me.

  Grover stretched along the remnants of township: the very last restaurants, the few scattered flat-top buildings and businesses, and then the stadium, rising red and immutable beside us. Finally, it was the Church of the Sorrowing Virgin. It slid past on the right, silent and still, the final mediating presence, the last chance for salvation before the highway. I looked out the window on it all, and I had that feeling you can give yourself if you say your own name over and over again until it falls apart in your mouth. And you think: Is this really my name? These broken sounds, this air? Is this really me? Is this place my home?

  I had decided on going to Toronto. So I could wait for him there, I thought. But I had already lost hope, and I realized, as the years began to pass there, that I had only chosen to live where I knew I was unwelcome, and so where I truly belonged.

  Dublin

  IV

  GOING UNDER, 1968. 3 @ 14" X 18" X 4" THREE-PART BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FOUND OBJECTS AND OIL PAINT. WORKING ELECTRIC LIGHTING. BERGMAN COLLECTION, INDIANA UNIVERSITY, BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA. LEFT: A SINGLE BUOY SEEMS TO FLOAT IN MIDAIR AGAINST A DARK BLUE BACKGROUND. MIDDLE: THE SEA, REPRESENTED BY LAYERS OF PAINT AND GESSO, IN MANY SHADES OF BLUE. RIGHT: A SHIP LIES AT THE BOTTOM OF THE SEA, OBSCURED BY WEED AND CORAL.

  ONE WEEKEND IN OUR FIRST WINTER, WHEN MARTIN and I met up in Rochester, we spent a morning in bed and I made up a game.

  The Sunday Times was spread all over the sheets, the grey sky outside the window making it easy to stay in the room. Here, I said, let’s test how well we know each other.

&
nbsp; You don’t think we already do?

  We have our intuitions, I said. One of us will tell a story, and it has to start out true, but end up false. And the other person has to figure out where it switched. He shrugged. You go first, I said.

  Okay, he said. I’m nine.

  You’re always nine in your stories, Martin.

  It’s 1937. I’m in hospital.

  I already know this one.

  It’s a detail from a larger work.

  I laughed and pushed some of the paper off the bed to turn around and watch him on my back. I propped myself up on some pillows at the end of the bed.

  It makes it hard to concentrate, with you all spread out in your glory like that.

  Cope.

  He grabbed one of the newspaper sections and draped it over me, then pulled one of my feet into his lap and warmed it in his hands. Like I said, I’m nine, and I’m in Temple Street. I’ve been there a couple weeks and I’m scared — a lot of the children in the ward are still very sick. There’s a boy in the bed beside me who’s probably eleven or twelve. He’s started growing, he’s taller than me. His parents never come to visit; it’s like they’ve left him there and forgotten him. But when mine come, they bring toys and books for him too, which he never says thank you for. It makes me angry, but they seem to understand. I always feel strange, after they leave, when we both open our toys and start putting them together, or start reading books, and I know I have these things because my parents love me and are worried for me, but then what does it mean that they’ve given him things too?

  Anyway, one night, long after the lights are out, I’m woken up by the sound of the boy trying to breathe. His chest is rattling and he’s gasping for breath. I switch on the lamp beside my bed, and as soon as I see him, I’m horrified by the greyness of his face and I switch it off again. I pull the covers up and turn on my side, but then I think, no, he’s almost my brother, this boy. So I turn the lamp on again. There’s yellow stuff running down from his mouth. I get out of my bed and crouch on my knees beside him and I wipe his chin. He looks frightened. He says, I can’t breathe. I tell him I’ll get a nurse, but he grabs hold of my shoulder and asks me not to go. So I don’t. And we sit there together. I see all the books and toy soldiers my parents have bought him sitting on the table on the other side of his bed, and I can’t help thinking that if he’s going to die, I’m going to take those things back, that I think of as my own. But I try to pay attention to the boy. I tell him, You’re going to be all right. He nods. Then he coughs more of the yellow liquid, and it’s flecked with blood. And it gets worse.

  Worse how? I grabbed the duvet from the edge of the bed and pulled it around me, cowering.

  He begins to quake in the bed. His hand is in mine and he’s making me tremble. I tell him I have to get the nurse, but he won’t let me, and his eyes are rolling in his head and he’s breathing only every ten seconds or so, these huge gasping intakes of air that sound like someone forcing him to breathe through a tiny hole. And now I’m crying. I’m crying Don’t die! Because I think, if a boy my parents have come to love — because I think it’s love — if a boy my parents love can die … then …

  Jesus.

  And he dies. He dies with his hand in mine. And I draw the sheets back over him, and I get into my bed and I turn away and lie awake for the rest of the night. And no one else has woken.

  He leaned back against the headboard and let go of my foot, which slid down along the inside of his leg. I lay there motionless, staring at him. That’s it? Some of that is false?

  Yes.

  It’s the end, isn’t it? That no one else woke up.

  No.

  I sat up and the sheets and the newspaper went flying. But it’s all true! I said. You’ve told me this story before!

  A boy died in the bed beside me, it’s true. But I never woke up. It all happened in the middle of the night. We woke up, all of us in the ward, and a boy had died.

  I dropped my hands into my lap and stared at him. My god, I said. That’s sick. You made all that stuff up about him dying in your arms? All that, that pus and shit?

  You never said what we could make up. I know that’s what happened, though.

  How?

  That’s how we died. That’s what got us, the tubercular ones.

  I settled back down into the sheets. Don’t tell me any more stories about tuberculosis or polio, okay? I feel like I’m in bed with Little Dorrit.

  Your turn.

  No. Let’s not play again. Let’s go out.

  He sat there, watching me. He’d told the story without so much as a shake of the head for that dead boy. Although the boy had really died. Sometimes it felt as if there was a colour inside him that could not be altered. Not by his own tragedies, nor by anyone else’s. I wanted to test that, I realized, and I relented and took my turn.

  All right, I said. This is one of my stories. When I was a baby, my mother used to garden a lot. It was the thing she loved most apart from me. She’d put me in a hammock surrounded by pillows and while away the afternoon tending her vegetables and flowers. I think my first memory is of the tops of the maples swaying quietly back and forth across the sky. Then later, when I was five — I guess Dale was a baby then — she decided to start something new. I came home one day from kindergarten and she’d dug up the backyard, turned some peat moss and black earth into it, and she told me she was going to start growing berries. For money.

  I see where your entrepreneurial streak comes from.

  She had a friend in Ithaca who’d started her own business. She wasn’t much of a fruit-grower at first, but she’d salvage what she got the first couple of summers and make some jams and maybe a pie, but then after about three years, her canes started to take. She’d had problems with bugs and birds, but she’d laid some mesh over the plants, and on a tip, she bought a box of ladybugs for the aphids. That’s another of my earliest memories. Watching ladybugs fall from my hand into a patch of leaves.

  So she started selling her berries at roadside in the late summer, and then she expanded to small groceries in nearby towns. My dad bought her a Ford with a big flatbed when I was seven and gave her a pair of driving gloves, light green leather driving gloves. And then she got serious. She read books, she went to conferences for fruit-growers. She brought back white bags full of powder that she mixed into the soil. It was fascinating to watch her, my dad and I would stand in the kitchen window watching her empty great big bags of fertilizer into the soil. We’d all try to help her in the garden, Dale mainly tottering down the aisles trying to eat as many berries as he could. I guess that’s a couple years later. I’d bring her tall glasses of ice water from the kitchen and lie in her lap between the rows. She’d sing “I Get a Kick Out of You,” and I thought it was a song about kicking people. One afternoon, she got into her truck and started out for Cortland, which was thirty miles away. She’d been making that trip a couple times a week by that point. This is 1972 now. She had pints and bushels of raspberries in the back, and she was probably tired from kneeling and picking all morning. Nobody ever figured out what happened exactly. She drove into a tree out on Route 8. She went through the windshield.

  Martin’s face hardened a little hearing that. It was clear it wasn’t the false part of the story, but he hadn’t been expecting such a thing in my past.

  She went over the hood, I continued matter-of-factly, and a few minutes after that, a local chicken farmer found her and she was sitting up against the tree “like she was in a church pew,” he told us later, and she was looking calmly across the road at the orchards. Her sunhat was in her lap, and mayflies were stuck in the berry juice all over the hood of the truck. When there were enough people on the scene to carry her off the hood and bring her across the street to someone else’s flatbed, four men crossed the road with her body high above their heads so they could watch for traffic. They took her to Cortland, I said. Where the hospital was. I stopped talking.

  Well, I know what part I want to be unt
rue, he said.

  Actually, it’s all true, I said quietly. The part I was about to tell you wasn’t going to be true, but I decided not to tell it.

  He nodded. What was it going to be?

  I was going to say that it was just one of those tragic things that doesn’t mean anything.

  Do you want to tell the real ending?

  No.

  I must have looked bad because he reached for me and pulled me gently across the bed and gathered me into himself. Later, we got dressed and went out for sup per and spoke of other things.

  By the fall of 1999, I had been living in an apartment on Havelock Street in Toronto for almost seven years. My backyard looked over a park where mothers gathered every Tuesday to stoke a stone oven that had been built there by the city. They baked bread in the oven and made fresh pizza for their kids, and afterwards they all sang songs together, songs my own mother had sung to me. The women outside my window would have been children when I myself had been a child and now they were mothers.

  I’d bounced back and forth from one place to another over the ten years, going from a basement to a flat and finally to a house, as if I were coming out of a long hibernation underground. It would have been a good decade in which to suffer a loss if I’d been able to get into all the healing that everyone was doing. I had co-workers in therapy, neighbours in yoga, and I briefly knew a man who drank his own urine. But keeping busy and the passage of time were the only things that helped. Coming up on ten years since I’d left the country of my birth, strangers no longer automatically lowered their eyes from mine. I did not give off rads of grief. I wore normalcy like a lead shield and sometimes I even smiled at people on the streets (something that Torontonians found stranger than open bereavement). Now I was a respected member of a teachers’ union. I bowled and I dated. Sometimes I laughed. And I was a citizen of another country, a citizen in fact, having given my motherland the old college try. In 1995 I’d become a Canadian.