by André Alexis
I am in Sandy Hill racing through backyards and sailing over fences, slipping through hedges, in and around the university, over the Laurier Bridge, and then the Parliament Buildings are before me, close and deserted, and on it goes, my killer as miraculously athletic as I am, still in pursuit as I run along Rideau back to Sandy Hill, back through the university, back over the bridge, back to Parliament, back…
And there you have it. Which city indeed. The city I know best is too intimate to share, not because I wouldn’t share it with you, but because you must have rubbed against it at least as often as I have to understand that the Parliament Buildings aren’t the Parliament Buildings so much as they are words in another language.
I mean, there are two strands of the city in my imagination. There’s the city I walk in: the smell of summer on MacLaren as I pass Dundonald Park and hear the trees whisper…an inch of snow on the black railing beside the canal…inside the old Elgin Cinema down to the front row and take off my coat and say “Excuse me” as my elbow bumps the stranger beside me, “No problem, no problem”…
Then there’s the city I negotiate in dreams and daydreams.
They aren’t entirely distinct, of course. Ottawa feeds the city of my dreams, and the city of my dreams is a dimension of the city itself.
The War Memorial, for instance. The first time I remember seeing the monument, with its forbidding stone angel and dark soldiers moving through a white arch, I wasn’t so much frightened as confused. Somewhere inside of me, the monument meant something more peculiar than Death or Heroism.
And then, years later, when something was broken in my life, I dreamed about the monument. I couldn’t stop dreaming about it. The arch and the angel were white as milk, the soldiers like living shadows, whispering and grumbling as they tried to pull the cannon through. For some reason, the angel was angry, but angry as a shopkeeper might be at a difficult employee, and in anger it beat its wings, sending bright-red insects in every direction.
Whispering the cannon through the arch?
Red insects from stone feathers?
It doesn’t matter what the dream meant, if it meant anything at all. The point is, it was vivid enough to stay with me for some time, and when next I saw the monument I didn’t actually expect the angel to beat its wings, but the monument itself seemed as much a part of the city as a part of my self. It was a word in the shared language of my mind and my body.
I mean to say, Ottawa is a crucial messenger in the dialogue between my mind and my body. A short vocabulary of its language might look like this:
Body at: Mind:
Bank Street: boredom, beauty (Lansdowne),
boredom (buses 1, 4, and 7)
Billings Bridge: happiness (intellectual), despair (emotional)
Elgin Street: desire, friendship (buses 14 and 5)
Major’s Hill Park: strange advances
War Memorial: anxiety (death- or sex-related)
National Arts Centre: friendship, quiet, hush
St Laurent Blvd: desperation
Vanier: anxiety tout court…
And so on through streets and buildings, alleys and lots, from the Market and Notre Dame to Blossom Park and Chinese food.
Of course, the words I’ve used (boredom, desire, etc.) are translated from a language that exists only in silence. And, to make matters worse, the language is constantly changing. The monument doesn’t mean the same thing to me now as it did at one time. I can pass it without thinking of insects. It has gone from being a vivid line in a poem (“Ode to Ottawa”) to a vivid sentence in a novel (We So Seldom Look on Ottawa), and when I die it will be a volume in an encyclopedia in which there’s a vivid entry on red insects (Encyclopedia Ottaviensis, Thomas MacMillan, Editor).
* * *
—
I’ve been talking about Ottawa, but in a way I’ve also been talking about Henry Wing.
The idea of a secret language, for instance, was one of Henry’s favourites. Encyclopedias were his obsession, and, in the matter of world and dream, I remember a day we sat together, eating sugar cake and drinking tea.
It was summer and I was eighteen when, out of the blue, Henry mentioned how much he wished his latest idea had come to him sooner.
– What idea?
– I’d like to write my oneirography.
– I’m sorry?
– Or is it my auto-oneirography? Whatever it should be called, I was thinking of writing my life story. Someone somewhere might learn from my steps, I thought. The problem is, my life has been so uneventful, an autobiography would bore me to tears, you know? How to make it interesting, that’s the question. And it occurred to me that the most interesting things in my life have happened while I slept. And I thought: Wing, wouldn’t it be wonderful to relive the life you and Kata have lived in dreams? And then I thought: Hold on a minute. Quite a number of people have dreamed of you over the years. If I could collect and cobble their dreams, that might be interesting. I bet I’ve lived a full life in the dreams of other people. If I could get them to tell me of dreams in which I’ve appeared, I could write my own life without the tedium of living it twice. That’s what I mean by oneirography, Tom. An elegant solution, don’t you think?
He sipped his tea and smiled.
I really did think it an elegant solution, though like any number of his ideas, it stayed with me longer than it did with him. Long after he’d abandoned his oneirography, the idea of it kept me amused.
(It amuses me still, yet I wonder if the difference between our lives and the lives we live in others isn’t much less interesting than Henry supposed.)
* * *
—
It’s difficult to say which of the two, Henry or Ottawa, I know best.
I met them on the same day, but I’ve been more intimate with the city since then. If it were suddenly turned into a human being, I’m certain I would recognize it. In fact, I sometimes think I am its embodiment. I am so thin and my eyesight so poor. I get along in both of its languages. My work is menial, but it has an official title: Senior Research Assistant, Lamarck Labs Inc.
On the other hand, despite my love for him, there are aspects of Henry Wing that still seem peculiar. If Henry were turned into a city, I don’t think I’d recognize it at all. He himself admired third-century Alexandria and Renaissance Florence, cities of sensual learning. He tolerated Ottawa.
Though he never left the city, he managed to turn his little part of it into somewhere else.
* * *
—
Anyway, we had walked from Manotick.
Now that I think of it, my mother must have been in foul temper. She had a snivelling child, two suitcases to carry, and nowhere to go but to a man whom she had not intended to see.
She asked passersby for Cooper.
– Cooper?
– Cooper?
I assumed we were looking for someone named Cooper, though what we wanted was Cooper Street. And when we found 77 Cooper, it was a disappointment, a slightly grimy three-storey house that might, at one time, have been fashionable but, in 1967, looked to be on its last legs.
(How wrong an impression can be. I am now writing these words at a desk on the second floor of 77, looking out the window towards Elgin. The house is doing well.)
We pushed the doprbell.
The door was opened by a dark old woman with red hair.
– Come in, come in, she said
as if she’d been expecting us.
The first floor was dimly lit, and the place smelled mildly of exotic cooking. The walls of the entranceway looked as if they hadn’t been cleaned; they were whitish. But, as we passed a set of French doors, I caught a glimpse of a bright sitting room, with colourful carpet and wide wind
ows. (My memory of the sitting room is in thrall to my love for it.)
My mother wasn’t interested in the first floor, though. We made for the stairwell before us and climbed to the second.
Here too the walls appeared not quite clean, though they were papered a light blue. There was a sculpted plaster rose on the ceiling above the stairwell. From the centre of the rose, a lightbulb in a frosted globe depended. This floor smelled faintly of lilac.
We turned sharply at the top of the stairs, my hand on the banister, and there, behind sliding-glass doors, was what looked to be a large living room. In the room, which Henry called a den, was a handful of laughing women sitting on high-backed chairs.
Actually, I don’t remember how many women there were, and they seemed old, though they couldn’t have been much older than Henry was then (forty). I remember red lips, an orchestra of jewellery: rings, bracelets, necklaces, earrings…And when my mother pushed the glass doors apart, the scent of lilac, and other flowers, was overwhelming.
It was an impressive display of femininity, though as I later learned, it’s possible the women were actually men. Henry was neither transvestite nor homosexual himself, but he enjoyed the company of either, on the grounds that it kept him faithful to my mother, his beloved Kata.
As we entered, the laughter stopped. My mother said, as if she owned the room
– Excuse me, ladies, Mr Wing and I need to speak.
It was then that I saw Henry Wing for the first time. He was standing in front of a blackboard at the far end of the den. He was wearing a grey, pinstriped suit with a white shirt, top button buttoned. I remember that suit and shirt, and I remember the numbers on a corner of the blackboard:
40 +4M
-40 -4M
(The numbers were there forever.)
I have always thought Henry the most handsome man I’ve ever met. He was tall, slim, with a slightly unusual face: dark-brown eyes, high cheekbones, and ears a little too big. His hair was short, his fingers long and graceful. His skin was as dark as my mother’s and he smelled of lemon soap, the bright-yellow bars of which were the only soap he kept about, so that, to this day, the bathrooms here hold a trace of him. For this I am, though I haven’t always been, grateful.
He was handsome, but he wasn’t quite aware of it. He always dressed well, with clean shirts and polished shoes, but the clothes were less impressive the closer one was. The pinstriped grey suit, for instance, was old and, at the elbows, the material was worn.
He carried himself as very few people do, seeming informal and attentive however straight he stood. From our first handshake to our last, I was at ease in his company.
My mother was in a state; dishevelled, impatient, child in tow. The ladies rose from their armchairs and filed out of the room.
– Poor dear.
– We’re just outside, Henry.
The perfume was sweet in their wake, and, when they had gone, Henry said
– Hooray, you routed the sirens and then, looking at me
– And who’s this?
– This is Thomas MacMillan, my mother answered. Thomas, would you leave us alone for a minute?
– Oh, but we haven’t shaken hands, said Henry.
We shook hands, his kind face looking down at mine.
Once out of the room, the glass doors sliding shut behind me, I was in the company of the women (or of the men).
– Poor boy.
– Look how dirty he is.
– Doesn’t your mother feed you, dear?
– What does the young woman want with Henry?
I was thankful for the attention.
* * *
—
I don’t want to give you the wrong impression of Henry. I hope I haven’t put too much emphasis on his eccentricities, what with the mention of oneirography and men dressed as women. If one can appreciate his passions, the most important of which were ideas and Katarina, he seems much less unusual.
In the matter of ideas, he was a connoisseur, as others are connoisseurs of butterflies, crickets, or scorpions. For the most part, he was a diligent amateur, keeping lists of unusual conceptions (see figure 3) and, as with most amateurs, the out-of-the-way gave him particular pleasure.
At times, he thought seriously of writing an encyclopedia, to be called Wing’s Abstractions: A Cyclopedia of Unusual Conceits. He had twenty-six oversized, leather-bound “paste-books” into which he glued articles, definitions, and original ideas. But, as with any encyclopedia, there were subtle problems to resolve before beginning:
How to order ideas?
Alphabetically? By conceptual likeness? (Should Anthropomancy be included in an article on Hieromancy? Or should it be mentioned in a general article on strange uses of the human body?)
What to do with nameless ideas?
What do you call the use of human skin for book binding? Or the various attempts to shorten the alphabet? And, names lacking, did he have the right to name ideas? (This wasn’t a problem in the case of ideas he considered his own – Archephilia, Partitionism, etc. – but to name a conception that belonged to someone else struck him as tiresome.)
What, precisely, constitutes “unusual”?
Here was a real problem. The idea that children are made when men grunt in the company of women, this is unusual but immature, a simple misconception. Should it be included? It might be mentioned in a general article on “Childish Misconceptions,” but such an article could itself exhaust an encyclopedia. (“The sky is blue because the clouds aren’t there,” and so on…)
And then there were ideas that, though common, are still unusual: radio, for instance.
And, finally, there were ideas that are both common and usual, but which, on investigation, are as mysterious as the rarities: Dwelling, Time, Number, Cause and Effect. Why should they be excluded?
He never resolved any of these questions, and it was in this that Henry showed himself truly amateur. If he’d made a decision on any of them, as opposed to the decision, he might have finished the encyclopedia some time ago, immense though it was as an undertaking.
What he needed was single-mindedness, but that would have diminished his one real pleasure: the conception of unusual ideas. He spent hours, days, weeks leisurely meditating, trying to discover an idea that was original, potentially useful, and, to the best of his knowledge, as yet unnamed.
I don’t know if it mattered how good or how appropriate his “new” ideas actually were. He took real pride in something like Archephilia, which is, to quote his handwritten entry in Wing’s:
diagram 1
ARCHEPHILIA (from the Greek arkhe one, order + philos loving) (a: •kә•fíliә):
1. A love of order, manifest in the search for system (material or spiritual) in circumstances not obviously ordered.
2. In its metaphysical sense, Archephilia is the desire for dissolution in the oneness that precedes order. 3. (derogatory) The persistent search for order where none exists.
(Antonym: Archephobia: fear of order, resentment of God or anyone like him.)
Archephiles in History: Parmenides, Nicolas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno, John Donne, Isaac Newton.
Even by Henry’s own modest rules, this isn’t very convincing. It’s more a description than an idea and, so, not entirely appropriate. Still, he took such pleasure in the sound of the word, he couldn’t bring himself to exclude it from his work.
(It’s sad that I should have opened Wing’s to this particular entry. If Henry had loved order a little more, he’d have gone further. The disarray in which he left the encyclopedia, with illegible entries, blank pages, and nothing at all in volume eleven, is a memento of the qualities he lacked.)
It was only around my mother that he was, occasionally, absurd. I mean, Henry could be unbearably courtly, and when, from time to time,
I saw that side of him, I understood why my mother wasn’t always comfortable with him.
Now, in my admittedly personal understanding of Love, it’s a time-based phenomenon. I mean, first love and infatuation are glandular matters, and once the glands are sore, there’s still breakfast and bad humour, sharp toenails and flatulence, things it takes time to accept in oneself, let alone in another. That’s not to say that I fall out of love at first fart, but, after the holiday of infatuation, I’m able to love with a clear head, accepting the things I find distasteful as part of the compact.
Though he didn’t always behave as if he were infatuated, and though he is the only man I know of who truly loved my mother, there was a touch of the unbridled in Henry’s feelings for her, as if every aspect of my mother were admirable.
Neither of them ever told me when or how they had met, but it was obvious they’d known each other for some time. From our first night in Henry’s home, my mother grumbled about aspects of him I wouldn’t discover until much later. And, though he had nothing but praise for her, he knew her qualities infinitely better than I did then.
(I suspected Henry was my father and, on our first night with him, I asked my mother if he were. And I remember her sitting on the edge of the big bed that had been prepared for me, in a bedroom that smelled of camphor.
– What a question, she answered.)
Despite his knowledge of my mother, Henry sometimes chose the most annoying ways to express his feelings. It was in this I thought him absurd. He would recite for me, but only in my mother’s presence, the most sentimental poetry:
The long love that in my thought doth harbor,
And in my heart doth keep his residence,…
On the dining-room table, he put yellow carnations in a glass bowl filled with water. He would play recordings of madrigals after dinner. He bought colourful birds: a canary, turtledoves, a parrot.
