The Origin of Waves

by Austin Clarke

  “I took it serious, but I didn’t take it so.”

  “ ’Cause we grew up together. And what happened to me happened to you. What is wrong with me is wrong with you.”

  “From small. We were always together.”

  “And we goddamn know each other, from the time when you even couldn’t swim. Library, school, playing cricket and football, Lilliputian-cricket kneeling on our knees in the broad-road and batting, and marble-cricket; running all over the goddamn pasture playing we are athletes and sprinters … goddamn! My life is your life, your life is my life, my life matches your life. So, for me to come-on strong, as I did, I musta-been out o’ my goddamn mind! We went to the Public Library every Saturday to get books to read in reading-races between me and you, goddamn, man, what got into me to … if you see what I’m saying …”

  “It never crossed my mind. Seeing you and chatting with you has helped to make me forget time and forget the terrible, sad life I have been having here. It made me forget. I have forgotten, for the time we were sitting drinking, that I wanted to go back to the house. And it saved me from having to enter an empty house, once more. Sometimes, it feels like a house with a ghost in it, although I don’t believe in such things. It has a ghost, or a curse, in it. Seeing you has-brought-me-back to life. If you see what I’m saying.”

  “I see where you’re coming from.”

  “Closing-time,” John says. “Closing-time, now.”

  “Past closing-time!” Buddy says, glancing behind, still polishing glasses, and moving bottles of liquor, one closer to the other, and then changing his mind.

  “Time to close,” John says.

  “Closing-time!” Buddy says.

  “What’re we doing here, still?” one of the three women says; and together they rise, and run their hands over their waists, over their hips, ironing out the creases and the hours from their sitting. Their faces are ready now for the sharp bite of the night; and their winter coats are on their bodies, and their bodies have grown suddenly larger under the wool, and still they shake their bodies in a playful jerking, anticipating the sudden fall in mood and the change in the temperature. “We should all be in the Caribbean, laying on some beach!” one says. We hear her.

  “That’s for goddamn sure!” Buddy says, liberal and expressive in his comments, now that the bar is closed. “That’s for sure! This cold?” And he too shakes his shoulders, as if he is shaking snow from the collar of his winter coat.

  “ ’Night!” the women say, in three voices, at three different times, one after the other, almost in unison in their enjoyment.

  “ ’Night, guys!” one of them says, speaking for the other two. And they leave. They leave as they had entered hours earlier, showing no effect from the long night, with no alarm and notice, just three women walking in out of the afternoon cold to get warmer, to have a drink to make them feel warmer, and walking out now.

  “You ladies get home safe, now!” Buddy says. “Drive carefully!” And all three of them wave their gloved hands over their heads without looking back, and giggle a little, and before the doors are closed behind them, we can hear the exclamation from their mouths, telling us how much colder it has become outside on the dead street. The slush raised by a passing car is like the sound of waves beating against a breakwater.

  John sits for a while, not talking, just running his fingers round and round an expensive unlit cigar, following the flashes of his face reflected in the mirror behind the bottles of liquor on the shelf; and Buddy, fussing like a housewife, moves one bottle a short distance, and puts it back in its former spot, as if he is killing time.

  “Family?” John asks him.

  “Wife and three kids,” Buddy says. “Lovely family. I’m going home to a warm bed, a lovely woman, and who knows what else! Who knows what else, eh?” He laughs, telling us by his laugh that we know what else. “Yeah, I’m a family-man.”

  “Goddamn lucky!” John says.

  “Been watching you two fellas all night. You sure are tight. Good friends. From out of town? Good to see old friends get on like you two. Me, I have a friend like that. Left him back in Sydney-Nova Scotia. He wouldn’t leave Sydney. Even with all the unemployment in Sydney, he never wants to leave. Buried him last November, never wanted to leave Sydney, left only once to come to visit me and take in a Blue Jays game while he was here, but never left Sydney after that. But what a guy!” And he moves from behind the bar, and he is carrying two large snifters of Spanish brandy poured up to the thick fat belly of the glass, and without another word puts them down before us. He is back behind the bar, and he says, “On me, take your time. I have a few more minutes to check things. Take your time, take your time. Cheers!”

  I lift my glass, and the action takes my eyes to John whose face is lined with tears that stop at the fatness of his cheeks; and I think of that one finger of sea water, a stranded wave, which comes up too far onto the beach and dies in the sand at my feet, and I watch it die, and do nothing about its separation from the rest of its family of waves.

  “We leave the cradle,” John says, “and our mothers who bring us into this whirl, who bring us up, on Cream of Wheat, and feed us food to make us into men; and we leave them behind and we take our different paths in different directions in different countries that we know about only from books we read in school, countries we make our beds in, and we never get the chance to go back to the place where we were borned, and we never grow up really, ’cause we leave the only place we know, too early, too young; and we leave the island as forced-ripe men, and we never get real ripe, or grow up. Goddamn! We leave the cradle where we know everything about it, the marks we put there as little thrildren with our teeth, the stains from peeing in it, the holes in the mattress from standing up in it, looking out through the bars in it, seeing things through those bars around us that don’t harm us, things that love us. But leaving that cradle so early, leaving that nest, that bed, and coming away, we never grow up into men, really. And it take me all the travelling I been travelling, coping, copping a plea, getting into trouble which I didn’t tell you about, shifting, slipping punches and landing a few myself, all these things only for a goddamn man to be able to say he’s a man; and the punches that I throw are only a few, only a goddamn few for a man of my learning and education. It take me all that travel I been travelling to understann that years and time can’t change a man, can’t change how we, you and me, start-out on a beach, two barefoot boys looking into the goddamn sea and seeing things, things which we didn’t even know we was watching and seeing. Sometimes, when I think of those times, at my desk in the office of the social services place where I am the supervisor, right there in Durm, North Carolina, sommany miles from that island, sometimes, at those times, I tell myself that we shouldn’t have-look so goddamn hard. That we shouldn’t have-had the means o’ seeing. Because, perhaps, if we didn’t look so hard, spraining our eyes and making our eyes water from the concentration, and the glare off the sea, we would still be on that beach, happy and innocent. Still sitting on the sand, looking out at the ships and the fishing boats that bring-in the tourisses and visitors and fish. Certainly we won’t be in all this fucking cold!” John shakes his shoulders, pretending he is freezing. And then, he just sits, and does not say a word, and does not move. His silence is heavy. I cannot bear it. I feel he has spoken his part, and the silence that has dropped I take as my cue to travel in my own thoughts.

  So, I sit at the house in a chair, and wait for that telephone call to come a second time even though I know it won’t; and I sit for all hours of the night, one, two, sometimes up to three in the morning, waiting; and I know that this time I shall rush to answer it, and I will have to answer it; but I also know now that it will never ring a second time, not like the first unanswered time on that summer day when I was in the garden at the back, chasing squirrels and killing wood-ants with my Black Flag. A grown man, sitting fully dressed, with shoes on, in a chair, holding a can of Black Flag, an extra-large size, waiting and w
ondering why my life would want to smother me in an empty haunted house in Rosedale.

  “When Lang passed away,” I say, “when she died, the first thing that came, the first thing that came into my mind was the old conch-shell lying on the beach. I wonder who blows it, now? Lang has the same colour almost – had – and it is strange that I would compare the colour of a conch-shell, especially the colour of the conch-shell in early summer, to the complexion of Lang. I think about that, all the time, the colour of her skin and the colour of our conch-shell. I have left the beach, and exchanged it for Rosedale, living in a big house of wood and glass and concrete and wood-ants, and empty. Me, in this house, with nothing to do but sit and wait, sit and take my daily walks because I can’t do anything else, not since the injury. Retired through injury before I reached retirement age, with all the things a man craves. Except one. Except that one person. So Rosedale means nothing now that she is only a ghost, my ghost in the house I live in. Rosedale is nothing like that day on the beach, sitting on the sand beside you. Sometimes, I ask myself why couldn’t I see on that day, and at that time, as clear as I see the marble seal in the silk silver-grey box she gave me. Why in my youth I could not see that I would meet this woman, this Lang, and have happiness as long as the moving waves; and why did my happiness last only for two or three months, the late summer and the first chilly months of fall, for such a short space of time. This loss, the loss of Lang, is a long way to travel to, a long way to go, a very long way and time, for such short happiness.”

  “Let’s go. Let’s close the joint.”

  “It is closed, John.”

  “Goddamn!”

  “What’s the time, now?”

  “Time?”

  “Night-time.”

  “Twelve, yet?”

  “One gone!”

  “Let’s go. There’s nothing left.”

  “There’s nothing waiting.”

  “Let’s go.”

  “Yeah! Let’s get to-hell outta here!”

  The snow outside the front doors is like a single step I have to step up on, and then straddle to reach the sidewalk which has disappeared in the long, unblemished, bodiless whiteness. The marks I leave, no smaller than the marks he leaves, go down deep into the fresh foam, and in the night. The dampness bathes our feet and washes the leather of our shoes in a kind of chill caused by a fever. We stand a little outside the black doors, catching our breath which spurts out in bursting vapours like from the nostrils of some fire-breathing animal.

  “This shit,” John says, “I walked through this shit in Paris, Berlin, in Brooklyn, and now here!”

  We catch our composure and our balance, and we move on, in some direction. The night is quiet and cold and we are the only two persons in this sleeping street, except for the dead mannequins raised by the winking lights in store display windows, and the lazy traffic lights changing from red to yellow to green. I pull my collar up to my ears, and still I feel razors of cold steel puncturing my face. “This shit!” is all John says about the cold that is walking through my body and through his.

  “I am damn scared to go back,” he says, and he spits into the fresh, unspoiled snow. The brown blob slaps the snow and spreads and then disappears under the whiteness, leaving only a smudge, some kind of indication of the fear that grows within him, the fear to face the truth, to face the hospital, to face his son, to face his woman. “I am not a brave man, Timmy. I never was a brave man, even when I had the cobblers in my foot, and I axed you to swim-out for that goddamn rubber tire. I knew all the time that you couldn’t swim. I had to know. Things like this you have to know, just as I know my weakness after years of pretending that I am a brave son of a bitch. Some of the things I tell you back there was true. Some was true. It don’t matter now which o’ them was true. But some is true, bound to be, if you see what I’m saying.”

  “I am not going to take you home. To my house.”

  “I didn’t axe.”

  “Not because of anything. I am not taking you to my house. No one, no one but me enters that door. Not since Lang. The week after, I got rid of the housekeeper. Now I think the house is suitable only for her ghost, her presence. Her presence in her absence. Sometimes, I don’t shovel the snow, or take out the garbage. My Christmas tree is still up. From three Christmases. It is just a place. A big, beautiful place, though. But not happy. Walking this street, Yonge, much earlier in the year, I would walk-back-down into the ravine, and instead of going inside, right away, like a normal man going home, I would sit in the front garden, on the wrought-iron bench there, and look at the flowers, and follow the marching of those wood-ants, and become so tired from looking at them, and so disinterested that I won’t raise a finger sometimes to squirt them dead with my Black Flag. In the wintertime, like now, I would remain in the front garden, and sit and sit and sit, ignoring the cold iron bench, and look at the dried, dead flowers which is all she left, the flowers and what the flowers mean. The flowers in this city are different. Have you noticed? There are different flowers here, not like the ones back home; but they are her flowers, Lang’s flowers. When you carry a woman out of your house, your home, and you bear her to another place to rest, you can’t easily take another woman through those same doors. Or a friend, even. Not if you have a heart.”

  “Your mother always said that. ‘If you have a heart.’ If you have a heart, you would never think of doing this, or doing that. If you have a heart. I now know what she meant when she said it. If you have a goddamn heart! I-myself can’t go back to that hospital. I don’t have the heart to do it. I can’t face much more in my life, ’cause I don’t have the fucking heart, and I never was a brave man. But I have to.”

  “You have the time?” I ask him.

  “Time?”

  “What is the time?”

  “I should be getting back to the hospital.”

  “It’s night-time.”

  “Twelve, yet? I’ll get back though, and sit in the Emergency, till a nurse tells me where to go, to the waiting room, or some place … near his room, and wait. I was in the corridor outside his room and I got up and just walked out. Just walked out because I couldn’t face it no more; so, I took a stroll and end-up bumping into you, and imagine …”

  “Winter makes time look the same time, whatever is the time!”

  “Look at this shit!”

  “When I had to go to work before my injury, it was this time of the year that took the life outta me; leaving in the darkness, working in the darkness, although there were fluorescent lights, and returning to the house in the dark, in darkness, even though the snow is white. I call it, this time o’ year, the white darkness, the white darkness.”

  And we walk slowly because of our age, and also because we are more accustomed to walking through sea water and wet sand, and also because of our tipsiness. Like two fishing boats without sails, rudderless in the broiling white foam of the waves. We walk with our arms round each other, affection and guidance, ballast we always found in our lives; two old black men coming through a storm in a place we do not really know.

  “It’s safer here, though,” John says, reading my thoughts.

  “Safer than the South?” I ask nevertheless.

  “If this was Durm …,” he begins, and says no more.

  “I’ll walk you to Sick Kids,” I say, protectively.

  “No, you won’t. I can find my goddamn way in any storm! This ain’t the worst shit I have walk-through, brother!”

  I know where we are walking, I know what we are passing. I know the names of the stores and the names of the streets, and I know that after all these years of walking, I am still passing these same strange monuments that bear no relation to me, and I know even in this thickening snow that they mean nothing to me, because they do not know me. That I can pass this stretch of road, black in warm weather, and white in winter, and go alone with my thoughts down to the Lake and stand and lean and give the impression that the Lake is calling me into its dark, dirty, oily green wate
r that is pulling me to her face, which I can see on its unmoving looking-glass. And no one would raise a hand, lift a finger until afterwards, after the body has splashed into the thick, oily green, after the stench rises to mark the difference. And I can walk these streets in a darkness of unrecognition, and only the store windows and the unseeing mannequins inside them would know I have seen them. Look now. Here. They sell records here, reggae and dancehall and calypsos; and beside it they sell classical records at bargain prices; here, they sell jeans and in the summer the jeans are made easier to be purchased by the blaring music from the tropical part of the world, funky, raw, pulsing and passionate and scary. And when it is time for the body to drink in its tonic of heat and barbecues, they sell T-shirts with names from all over the world, designers’ names, political slogan names; and beside the stall that stands like a tired sentry-man in summer there is a stench of pee from the men without homes who make a bathroom of the wall and of the short, hidden, safe alley adjacent. And across the street is the Eaton Centre, now like a grave; in the daytime filled with flowers and smells and people. And this street. Running silently at this time of day or night, at this ungodly hour, this street, Dundas Street, a vein that pumps people into the section of this city that I like best, into Chinatown where she fades and becomes buried amongst the hundreds of other faces from China, where she and I eat the entrails of pig and chicken and duck, with two long sticks made out of fake ivory. This street corner is where my breath leaves me each time I reach it. It is here that her body comes pelting back to me in various positions and times, when I feel the presence of her love in a fast, short thrust of passion and affection, something they call emotion. Thick and raw and smelling fresh and still moving, like the blood of the pig stuck under the neck. I must face the truth on this street. I must face the truth of this street. Our short, thick life together was never consummated. It was just a touch, an intention … Here, right here, is the street, Dundas Street and Yonge, the intersection where my feet pull me every day of my walking, as they pull me now, as I am walking beside the best friend I have left in this world. But the world is getting whiter and colder and, at the same time, black with danger, for if a policeman should see us, obvious and standing-out on this landscape this time of Michaelmas and Good King Wenceslas, in this silent night, and if he is in the wrong frame of detectiveness, we do not have to be in Durm, North Carolina, or on Utica Avenue, Eastern Parkway, or Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, for him to “pull us over,” even though the only carriage is our feet. Our feet are our only carriage, somebody else said.