I loved how his deafness made him study the emotion in my face. It was enough to make me fall in love with him every time.
TES ENFANTS LES TI-PAUVRES
Prayer to the Grand Antonio:
When you left us, you taught us how to be free. And long before that, too, mon doux.
Do you know that when I look into the eyes of a large animal or one that thinks it’s bigger than small, one brave enough to live outside in the winter and lick its nose clean at the risk of freezing, one who picks a fight in the most desperate situations and wins…I look into its eyes and I see you?
It was hard to never hear you speak about World War II. What happened to you? Did you see everyone you love die? Were you unable to rescue them? Did it take the strongest person in the world to save them, and you weren’t yet that strong? Did it confuse you, cause you anguish, that you couldn’t repel the tanks with your shoulders? That you couldn’t jam the shells back into the cannons with your fists? That your arms weren’t big enough to stop your entire family from falling into a crypt, weren’t long enough to pull them out?
That you spent the rest of your life pulling buses with your hair to make yourself as strong as your family had needed you to be?
We all had a theory. But we were all wrong. Because you never spoke about it, there was no past. The silence was as heavy as you were, and it crushed us. So, in our pain, we wrote prayers and mailed them to your office at the Dunkin’ Donuts on the corner of Beaubien and Saint-Denis, hoping that one day you would answer us:
Dieu le roi
Antonio Barichievich
Dit Antonio de Montréal
Champion des champions
Embrasse-nous
Tes enfants les ti-pauvres
Tes enfants qui se souviennent trop
Champion du monde
Número un
Antonio de Montréal
Tes enfants qui sont esclaves du passé
Du passé présent, passé décomposé
Explique-nous la guerre, ce dégât
Soulage-nous, Dieu le roi
When you didn’t answer us, we became kinder to animals. We started eating cloves of garlic by the wheelbarrow and ran head-first into tree trunks from sixty metres away. We blocked out the pain of your silence by growing our hair long and braiding it with black electrical tape. We became kinder to the animals of ourselves and learned to live outside.
And we began to forget our pasts.
For many of us, it started while watching the TV interviews you gave. Your answers changed. You said you were Siberian until you were transfused with Italian blood. Then you said you were Yugoslavian once Yugoslavia ceased to exist. There were whispers that you were Croatian. Suspicions that you were Slovenian. Rumours that you were Greek.
You set us free with every incoherent word that the microphone couldn’t pick up. We burned our birth certificates in a garbage can at the corner of Beaubien and Saint-Denis and gave each other new names while we watched the heat melt the ice on the sidewalk.
We began to speak with echoes of strange new accents, inflections not our own. We turned questions down and statements up. With no prior addresses, we couldn’t get jobs or new homes, and that’s when we really started to take care of each other. We learned that there was always enough food to share, even for the hungriest alley cats.
Sometimes our mail came back from Dunkin’ Donuts marked “déménagé,” so we took to taping our messages on the window, text facing in, hoping they’d stick and stay up long enough for you to see them.
We started to forget our own pasts, but we couldn’t forget yours. Did you bargain with marauding soldiers to spare the lives of everyone in your village, promise a feat of strength only to miss it by a few kilos? Did you watch everyone get shot while you worked through a Charley horse? Could you not pull everyone to safety with your hair? Did the army reject you for some unseen infirmity? Were you not yet your own army?
Some of us changed when you claimed to be prehistoric, when a woolly mammoth came alive in front of us, all yellowed tusks, ageless. You were an animal of shifting breed.
We couldn’t bear the silence so we told each other constantly changing stories about our own pasts. Our backgrounds became fiction, but we learned to live them. In bars we reached into our pockets and produced watches, gold pendants, torn and faded photos, heirlooms that nobody gave us, stolen, borrowed, found, freed from hock. These random objects became who we were. We traded them for drinks and stories. We lent out our tree trunks indiscriminately.
Our stutters were born in countries without governments or flags.
We prayed to saints with names we couldn’t pronounce.
We started to feel free from some of the pain. We started to write, and we learned with sadness that in some languages we didn’t stutter, that we could stumble too quickly through the words, mouthfuls of liquid with nothing to chew on. We learned the curse of fluency.
We wrote prayers that were poetry, but junk mail to donut shop managers. When they tore our notes from the window, we began to gather in front of Dunkin’ Donuts, paper shaking in hand. We read loudly in case you were nearby and could hear us:
Dieu le roi
Saint-Antonio des rêves
Dites-nous la vérité
Que le passé décomposé nous libère
S’efface-t-il lui-même?
Oui, en toute beauté
Écrase-nous tes enfants
Écrase-nous quand tu dors
Notre mort nous libère
C’est du passé tout cela
Champion mondial, le plus fort des futurs
Explique-nous la guerre des mots
Antonio de Dunkin
Menteur número un
Tes enfants te croient de plus en plus
De moins en moins
Some of us changed when the price of donuts went up, when they kicked you out and explained it was a business decision, when you spent the following years sitting on the fibreglass bench outside as if you had always done that, as if a quickly cooling coffee had always been enough to keep you warm, as if you had not suddenly been put outside like an unwanted animal.
Some of us changed when you claimed to no longer be prehistoric but extra-terrestrial. Some of us had been waiting our entire lives for interplanetary contact. Others didn’t know that our pasts could leave the earth. Of course you were an alien. What else could you have been?
All of us changed when we realized how easy it was to rewrite stories that no longer explained us. We finally understood that the war no longer explained you. A bomb cannot explode in outer space because there isn’t enough oxygen. But donut sprinkles can float for light years.
I often think of your hands, how you laid them on my head all those years ago. As if you knew I would need the strength of a holy anointing. I’ve felt the promise of outer space ever since.
And I’m sorry for what I did. I should’ve defended you in the face of false accusations. I was distracted by root beer. But it’s still no excuse.
When you left, it was just another rewriting of your past. You were just leaving another war.
We would never hear from you again, no matter how many letters we wrote. But we would still write them.
And that’s how we finally became free. Now we could leave home and not worry about losing it. Because there was nothing left of our home.
Mon Antonio, mon doux.
Where have you gone? We still can’t take it.
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST 1475997
“—the shortage of supplies. The weather changed rapidly, and we monitored it on the hour, made gains when we could, pushing forward a few hours at a time until night when we set up camp and tried to keep warm. Without much oil left, we had to burn shoe wax to thaw our fingers and toes and to cook. Frostbite set in, and some of our bravest lost extremities. To their credit, they did not complain despite the terrible disfigurement and, to avoid lowering the morale of our battalion, they did not cry during amp
utation. I hope their souls will be rewarded in heaven. There was more snow than expected. Our guns froze. The mechanisms did not fire, and we had no way to remove the frost that lined the cannon walls. At first we tried to do this with branches, but either the wood got stuck and caused further complications, or we ran out of trees. The war has destroyed the forest. A few soldiers died of hypothermia, and we had to leave them behind. We buried them in the snow, and a soldier whose uncle used to be a priest read them the Sacraments. The worst was when they died while we were stuck at base camp, tank treads encrusted with ice and glued to the ground like houses. We had to sleep among the dead, and they invaded our dreams. In the morning, rigor mortis lifted their arms or legs into the air, poking through the shallow snow graves we had dug. One of the deceased gave us the finger. It was a sign. We tried to bury the dead face down, but then their posteriors poked through. We started to give confession to them just before they died. We told them our secrets so our secrets would die nose-down in the frozen ground and we would not have to carry them anymore. Anything to lighten the load. Many of us confessed to murdering when it was not necessary. Bayonets clean through children. Vengeance. Loss of control. In civilization, we kind of went crazy. In isolation, we went even crazier. You can say that it is the snow that has defeated our country. Foregone conclusion. We were indeed starting to lose morale. There was a shortage of food. We had a soldier who was proud of having never cried, but he blubbered like a baby the night he watched a friend spread dandruff on a piece of sponge like butter on toast. That little thing completely broke him down. Our batteries died and we lost radio contact. We should all have died at the time. The mortars exploded around us so often that we didn’t notice the sound anymore. Or we had gone deaf. Without rescue or instructions, we considered retreat. After all, the war could’ve been over and we never would’ve known. But most of us were also snow blind and unable to identify forward or backward. Our maps were frozen, brittle, disintegrating. Our tools gave up on us. If we could move in any direction, either toward the enemy or away from them, then we had some hope of salvation, in either escape or capture. But we were immobilized in ice. The warmer days messed with our minds, the snow melting, then later, the water refreezing to ice before we had a chance to move on. Brief glimmers dashed instantly. Then there was the morning when everything changed. One of our own, fat and useless for most of the war, woke up early. I say this with all affection because we living remnants had grown quite comfortable speaking about each other this way. Not only fat and useless, he was also silent and lazy; we thought he’d been sent to war for being mentally ill, or maybe so he could mooch food and board. He used to speak to the dying as their blood froze, but we never heard what he said. We assumed he had more secrets than most, having a much bigger body. When he wasn’t alone, which was most of the time, he shared his warmth. We used to gather around, three men under each arm. He allowed us the courtesy of pretending to sleep. So we learned to respect him despite his strangeness and despite the fact that he stank. We had completely run out of tank fuel. Almost no food left. Stuck until spring, which would be far too late for most of us. So we slept in our tanks and waited to die. We left the doors open so we could stare at a roof of stars, so we could count ourselves into permanent sleep. Sometimes we counted the stars, other times we counted the people back home. We said their names again and again, slightly changing them every time, until they were different people altogether and we could forget them in our hearts. It was rare that we all woke up alive, but one night, it happened. I no longer believed in God or humanity or peace or love, but I did believe in fortunate turns of good weather and all they make possible. We woke up to one such day. The sun was yellow and hot. Spring was a sudden blaze, an attack, which cleared the frost right out of our ears; we snapped just to make sure the sound was real. It was not the sound of the enemy coming to capture us. It was the sound of metal. We kept snapping to rule out the sound of shrapnel ricocheting through memory, but no, it was our man linking up the tanks with chains, like a row of army toys, and pulling them through the melting snow and the mud, the chain wrapped around his enormous hair and beard. He pulled us forward while sinking into the earth, burying himself alive so we might all be saved. And in no less than twenty-two languages he declared himself a war hero. Stupidly, we just kept snapping our fingers until he—”
THAW
BIGGER THAN BOTH OF US
Eric was right about my mom. He knew I needed to chisel her out of the ice in my head and ask myself the right questions. But it had to come back naturally. Well, one day, it did.
The image itself is fairly uncertain. I’m small and standing in front of a record player. The receiver is silver and covered with dials. There are tiny tuning meters in little glass windows filled with yellow light, stacked like apartments in a building. The needles wobble back and forth, showing the science of the music. In this image, I’m not sure what the song is. I’m staring at the record spinning on the turntable. The label hypnotizes me, creating a swirl of colour in my head that didn’t exist before. The grooves orbit past me like black oil, smooth and perfect. I’m just discovering my relationship to the substance of vinyl. This record doesn’t have any scratches. The arm bobs as the record turns. There’s a slight warp. I want to see the needle up close so I pretend I’m tiny and jump onto the turntable in my mind. You might say I haven’t come back since.
As soon as I land beside the arm and admire the boy-sized diamond tip at my feet, I begin to feel I’m not alone. There’s a presence behind me. Don’t ask me what the clues are: shadow, body heat, breath on the back of my downy neck. For whatever reason, I don’t want to turn around. Maybe it’s because I know the music will stop.
There is indeed someone in the room with me.
It’s odd to have a childhood memory in which there is no strange man present, but it comes to me as clear as ice. As clear as the ice that has melted and fallen off us. I see her long, flowing brown mane, the colours refracting in the sunlight like a prism over my shirt, tones of mahogany, apple, and wine, auburn radiant and captivating, parts of it golden like beer in a TV commercial, the memory of hair among the strongest I have, no mistaking it; the whole living room smells like her shampoo—she is no stand-in or imposter. She hears me calling her and comes close. A hug evaporates the dream and the fear, and I nestle into the crook of her neck, a soft blanket of curls, nuzzle deep inside the hidden wet strands, catch a taste of residual shampoo (wheat germ and jojoba, essential nutrients for a growing boy), and I can feel she has begun to hum the song that’s playing for us.
What I’ve come to learn is that people are songs.
I pull away because I’m starting to suffocate, and I tell her all about the impossible and crazy things that happened. She’s confused because we’ve been together all along, but there were things that happened in another world, in a world outside the living room and away from the music, away from the record player. I tell her about the ice dream, about the shivering coldness of it, and how I still can’t get warm. I tell her about her her her her her her her her her her her her her her. I tell her about the long search for a way out, the tributaries that I followed through the melting ice, traces of song, the inevitable refreezing and dead ends, how a scent can’t go cold when it’s already frozen. I tell her about getting lost in the streets of Montreal with boots on my hands to keep them warm, and it seems like she doesn’t believe me.
I need her to believe me.
So I bring out the scientific evidence. I make her stop the music so I can tell her about my discovery. I fetch a postcard and bring it to her. It’s a ratty piece of waterlogged cardboard with a photo of the specimen on the front. I explain how I discovered a woolly mammoth in the ice. I had been looking for her by scoping out traces of her hair, and instead I found this. It was a mistake, and it totally threw me off, just poking out, human-like, and with some of her colouring. In my desperation to connect, I reached out and grabbed it. I discovered a creature of a whole other sort,
and once I had done that, I had to bring the scientific experiment to completion, to see what extinct animal I had awoken into the world.
I need her to believe me, so I grab her hand and drag her into the building hallway and down the stairs without our jackets. She thinks I’m crazy, but lets me lead her to the street corner where we chill by the fire hydrant, which gives me a sudden urge to take a leak. I tell her that he was just here, he’s always here, and if we wait awhile, he’ll come by. Right here on this bench. The bench is covered with snow and ice that hasn’t been cleared since the season changed. We wait for about five or six buses to pass, squinting down the street for the tell-tale lights as each one approaches. We scan the windows for anything that matches the physical description I’ve given, but each bus leaves us empty-handed. My heart becomes a glacier, and we walk back to the apartment.
I blow my nose and ask her, for the last time, if she believes me.
As her answer, she puts on a record by Buffy Sainte-Marie and smiles.
I smile back.
Then something happens. Our landlord is in the stairwell, and he’s screaming about Swedish people coming here to steal our jobs. She knows what this means because she throws us into winter clothes and drags us onto an eastbound bus. We always find out about things at the last minute. But there’s no snowfall heavy enough to make the distance from the West Island to downtown uncrossable. The bus gets stuck in the snow, so we jump up and down to keep warm, and we make snow angels to kill time. Then a replacement bus comes, which is driven by more of a singer than a driver, and he goes through half the ABBA catalogue because we’re on the way to their concert at the Forum, and when we get there he parks half on the sidewalk and half on the street and tells us to save him a seat. Sure thing, buddy, we say. Sure thing. Then we hightail it through the front doors, and she tells the ticket taker that she’s a friend of Benny Andersson and that he’d better let us in because nobody wants a sad Benny Andersson. That could be the ruination of ABBA, the end of our happy winters, she warns. He moves away, maybe because he can tell we’d hop over him like a turnstile if he didn’t.
Mouthquake Page 12
