by André Alexis
When a nurse stopped him to ask if she could help, he answered
– No, I was looking for a ward.
– Which one? she asked.
– 88A?
– I don’t think there is an 88A, she said kindly. What seems to be the problem? Are you lost?
– No, no. Thank you very much, he answered.
But, of course, he was lost and, after a while, walking around the hospital was like walking in a forest when evening comes and one begins to suspect one has been going in circles.
Over the years that followed, Alexander Baddeley returned to the Toronto Western from time to time. He did not find “God” or inspiration or any such thing. However, the place saturated his consciousness and penetrated his dreams. And one night, while he was dreaming of an intersection in a city he did not recognize, a passerby of whom he asked directions smiled, pointed “west” and showed him what he held in his other hand: a stainless steel, kidney-shaped dish, four inches wide at it widest, eight inches long, and three inches deep. In the dish there were two white cotton squares of the kind used to swab skin before a needle is given. The swabs were side by side. One of them had a speck of blood on it.
– Oh, said Baddeley. I must be home.
And looking up he suddenly recognized the corner of Bathurst and Dundas, and saw that the passerby was not a stranger but, in fact, Avery Andrews, looking much as he’d looked when Baddeley saw him for the first time.
– I know, said Andrews.
Meaning that they were both home, a thought that filled Alexander Bertrand Baddeley with such relief he let himself sink deeper into the place from which all worlds come. And he woke the next morning feeling that he’d been — even if only briefly — as lucid as a human can be.
Toronto, 2011 – Ocala, 2012
Home is the Parakeet
&
AVERY ANDREWS’ POETRY
WRITTEN BY HARRY MATHEWS
About the Author
André Alexis is the author of two novels (Childhood and Asylum), two books of short stories (Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa and Beauty and Sadness), a children’s book (Ingrid and the Wolf) and a number of plays (Lambton Kent, Name in Vain, Fidelity). He was a contributing book reviewer for the Globe and Mail, and has worked extensively in radio, having been the host/writer of CBC Radio One’s “Radio Nomad” and CBC Radio 2’s “Skylarking.”
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