Army of the Brave and Accidental

by Alex Boyd

  Army of the Brave and Accidental

  Copyright © Alex Boyd, 2018

  all rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, info@accesscopyright.ca.

  Nightwood Editions

  P.O. Box 1779

  Gibsons, BC v0n 1v0

  Canada

  www.nightwoodeditions.com

  editor: Amber McMillan

  cover design & typography: Carleton Wilson

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

  This book has been produced on 100% post-consumer recycled, ancient-forest-free paper, processed chlorine-free and printed with vegetable-based dyes.

  Printed and bound in Canada.

  CIP data available from Library and Archives Canada.

  ISBN 978-0-88971-341-3

  for Elizabeth

  1: Oliver

  It happens that a man who’ll be a murderer and the officer who’ll arrest him walk down the same stretch of sidewalk together, years before they meet. Stories are larger than we think. Maybe there’s only one story, and it’s big. Falling back isn’t a gentle float down a tunnel—it’s closer to a packed bus on a summer day. It’s suffocating and full of elbows. In some ways it was like travel on the sea. You could be pitched one way or another, in rougher or smoother patches, though it was an entirely translucent sea with all kinds of activity above and around you. They haven’t perfected how to get the thick history of people out of the way and your bones want to unhook to get through it all. There’s a kind of screaming you recognize and a kind of screaming you don’t. You hear others complaining and unknown machinery creaking, and you catch glimpses of events turning and falling into place. A dictator learning to crawl.

  I had yet to learn that I’d feel this many times over, skipping like a stone. Of course, it wasn’t supposed to happen that way. I arrived and knew something was wrong right away. I took a few steps and fell over. I examined a tuft of grass and died. Not a literal death, but I was wrenched from that time like someone fighting to the surface and then pulled back under. There had been no way for me to know it would be like this. Is there a way for anyone to know? So with the first of my final moments I thought of Penelope, no bigger than a minute but strong. It changes your perspective on your remaining time when you’ve not only seen others die, you’ve died yourself once before. I thought of the email that I rediscovered months after Penelope sent it to me. She’d written out the song in her head as she waved goodbye before going to work that morning: “You are my sunshine, my only sunshine, you make me happy when skies are grey, you (something) know dear, how much I love you, please don’t take my sunshine away.” She was never good with remembering the words to a song. But it was that sunshine song in my head as I sailed again along thin rails of time, catching sight of a spinning moon.

  My first morning with Penelope, we walked out on a summer day. She smiled at seeing a man on a patio who moved to give his waitress room to deliver a plate and put his arms straight up in the air, surrendering to his omelette. That’s important to point out—she smiled and squeezed my hand, but she didn’t laugh at him. I thought of her and saw this again, and again I saw her commenting on my round, handsome face, saying my dark hair was so short it made my ears stand out, like two seashells. She said, “You aren’t the tallest or the craftiest man, but you’re sturdy like an old stone building.” In a blended landscape of moments I saw her generous smile and wheat-coloured hair. I saw her walking, comfortable in her own body. It was a body I used to hold at night and now I fell through the possibility it may be held by another.

  I saw my childhood: it wasn’t easy being a highly sensitive kid. Once, an older kid offered me a stick of gum and it was a trick—a bar snapped down on my finger like a mousetrap. I was so shocked a gesture of goodwill could be designed to humiliate me that I picked up a branch and hit the other kid with it while I looked up at him. I saw the fury in the eyes of the older kid, but my brother stood between him and me and talked him down. Upset, I threw open a wooden door in the basement so it hit the corner of the chest where my toys were kept. I could always put my finger in that splintered hole in the door and touch the mark my anger made, like a bullet hole. When another kid spat at me on the playground, the spittle came looping through the air and something hideous and inevitable made it land on the back of my coat. Competition makes you either withdraw or rise to meet it, and our world needs both types: one to keep things going, the other to think of better ways. I decided to compete only with myself.

  Through the months of Penelope’s pregnancy, I felt a low level of anxiety, as if I were on my way to the dentist for fillings. I’d read that first pregnancies are often delayed and prayed for a little extra time to watch old films and finish reading books. What if fatherhood wasn’t for me? What if I was a failure at the most important job in life? How was I to know I would like my son? There would be nothing to do but trudge through my duties, and I thought perhaps I could think back to some wave of experienced culture to draw from, given a little more time. And then began the shooting pains playing tag in my limbs, the shortness of breath. Long, anxious days of testing revealed it was inoperable, as though I wasn’t meant to be a father, as though I’d taken a wrong turn.

  Falling back in time you’re like an idiot balloon. It’s fairly expensive: there are those who argued it was ridding us of the greedy and the wealthy, though only after we’d allowed irretrievable damage to the planet. So there were two advantages: you could live out the rest of your life in a better world, and it was healing, your physical condition somehow reset. Don’t ask me to explain it—I’ve spent my whole life using technology I can’t explain. Naturally, there were long waits, but a cancellation and a rare opportunity opened up weeks before Tomas was only a month old.

  And so I was folded up like a letter and sent back. They can only send people into the past. The rumour was that someone had gone into the future and simply dissolved into possibility. Only one echoing statement returned, saying he saw trucks sinking into the earth to rot like dinosaurs. I swam and pushed against the current but it was useless to do so. What would fatherhood mean to me now?

  2: Oliver

  “We don’t always have another chance to get it right, eh?” She only lifted her eyes from the page slowly, as though they had little weights on them. And yes, they use paper for the work they do when they send you. It’s important that no information is lost, so first they inscribe it on paper that joyously soaks up ink, and then they type it into a database. You would think travelling through time would involve rows of blinking computer banks, like something out of an old film, or at least some kind of ceremony after all the press this had, but it was a woman with a notebook shoving me through a door. To be more accurate, an ornate metal framework door without walls, standing between you and the rest of the room. The woman was secured by a brace to avoid being caught up in the furious gusts of air that seem to want to fill the voids that have been created, and translucent images could be seen trading places and dying out on the far side of the room, beyond the door.

  A piece of string secured at our end and running along the floor to the door frame suddenly lifted and toyed in the air around the centre of the frame like a needle in a gauge frantically trying to indicate something nobody could understand. S
he said, “Follow the piece of string but don’t step beyond the point where it disappears—not yet.” Turns out you can pull a string and unravel the world. She didn’t even wear formal shoes and I tried not to look at her toes because they overlapped like a plate of sausages. It’s a tough and competitive business, I told myself. I assumed she was also there because occasionally somebody needed a good shove.

  That morning, I suddenly realized I’d reached the end of my natural life. I knew it was my last day in this life as I turned on the shower and lifted an arm, gesturing like a man in a showroom. What is it about humans that makes us note passing time but ignore the need to change anything? Youth is stubborn and invincible. Then we step behind the same set of eyes each day and fail to notice the first grey hairs, the slow change.

  I arrived again, gasped and shook off the vague hands. Through a fence I could see a schoolyard corner where a few children had cornered another. The largest of them hit the cornered child with a stick and turned away. I took a step toward the lonely one that had been hit. For a second I thought I’d stepped in a pothole, but I hadn’t—my body simply twisted and fell. Again, I would die where I arrived. What was happening? I needed a foothold, and to stay somewhere. It had better be different next time, I thought, looking at the child and closing my eyes.

  3: Penelope

  When we met, Oliver and I were like a couple of smoothly run countries at peace, discovering we bordered on each other. And I think that’s quite rare, as there’s so frequently a note of desperation on one side or another. “Are you participating in this thing too?” I turned to see his calm, steady eyes and the hint of a warm smile. We were both in the lobby of the Gladstone Hotel, where we’d been invited by a mutual friend to participate in a fundraiser for a theatre company. I liked the look of him and promptly shut him down completely. “Oh, yeah, but I need to talk to that guy over there,” I said, walking away. It was true, I needed to rehearse a short skit I’d worked out with my friend, and Oliver had prepared a poem that was quite good for an amateur poet. A few hours later, the event over, we sat together in a small group where he was calm and perceptive.

  I resent that I feel uncertainty now, and I’m not always sure where to direct the resentment. It’s thinking of him without seeing him that gets me. There are ghosts creeping around in my peripheral vision, and some days he’s everywhere. Whatever isn’t him is something that fails to be him. When he first appeared, he was perfect: smart and calm, a beautiful smile. Learn to be happy on your own—such simple and impossible words after he left. I tried Internet dating; I phoned men while looking at my pathetically scrawled list of reasons why my husband was no longer the one for me, often carried in my pocket like a tiny shield against a storm. I couldn’t even tell you what was on it, except for one note saying he was gone and would never come back.

  Oliver said there was little point in being angry about anything. He said God was like an absent-minded person who keeps a lot of fish in an aquarium, and sometimes forgets to change the water or feed them, eventually noticing some of them have died. It isn’t that God is against you, just that he sets things in motion and gets distracted. I could never tell him that after those first few dates, when we were finally and unabashedly looking into each other’s eyes, I literally did thank God. I asked for a life with him and said I’d be extra kind and happy. Decent. And maybe God said, Here’s the real challenge: lose what you want most and figure out how to do that anyway.

  One man I phoned spoke slowly and told boring stories, so a few days before we were to meet I emailed him and said sorry, but someone had stepped on my heart. It wasn’t recent news, but it was true. I met so many men through the Internet they began to blur together: they had a twin brother and were an only child, they were vegetarians and loved meat, they had backpacked everywhere and they’d never left home, they hated cusswords but thought women should shit or get off the pot. In a dream I was politely put on trial for failing to kiss one of them. No reply to an email, voicemail messages left and ignored, dropped into nothingness like coins down a deep well. I started dumping the emails in their own folder at some point and eventually noticed I had 108 of them.

  I try to understand Oliver leaving—I understand anyone wanting to fall back to a better time, a more habitable world, and wanting to live quietly in the past. But he wouldn’t have left simply for that reason, my Oliver. His cancer made the trip a requirement. Falling back is an effective cure. And what about memories, stored chemically in the brain? I like to think he will always remember our son Tomas, only a month old, his fingernails as small as pebbles, and his little fist, smaller than a plum gripping the end of my finger. Oliver had hovered over him, planting so many kisses on Tomas that he wondered aloud how many a baby could take. He wanted our son to live in love, shrugging off kisses like rain. How many kisses will ward off a stray bullet or thrown rock ten or twenty years later, waiting in time?

  4: Athena

  I met Oliver so many years ago. As researchers early in our careers, we were sent to bright, flat Alaska to work quietly in a place thought to be out of the way. The grizzly bear under glass in the lobby of the hotel was always partly shrouded in glare, no matter how you looked at it. We rented a red Firebird and drove south to the Alaskan Wildlife Conservation Center where a Sitka black-tailed deer approached anyone and relentlessly licked them. Was it the salt? The bison and muskox sat around like people on couches in need of remotes, and a guest eagle sat perched on a tall branch, as calm as slow time. Nearby, a small fleet of halfway sunken houses was all that was left of Portage, a town destroyed in a 1964 earthquake. Peeling paint and doorways you must crouch down to look through. Surely someone grew up there, and maybe even lived an entire life there. We drove south to the town of Seward where the whole downtown is a few blocks of restaurants and souvenir shops, and stopped in a restaurant where a woman asked, “What are you doing here?” It wasn’t exactly tourist season.

  On the way back north to Anchorage we pulled into Beluga Point, and in the parking lot nearly stepped on a shotgun shell. Ah, America. What was there to do at Beluga Point but sit on the tallest rock like Buddha and have both our photos taken? The water alongside the highway had receded by that time of the day and left ice chunks the size of refrigerators.

  Our next day off we took winding roads north to meet a man named Vern and go dogsledding. There were several more moose loitering in the snowbanks outside the entrance to his home and dog kennel. Oliver said they seemed as common as raccoons in Toronto. Vern was short, scruffy and bearded like a Civil War veteran from history books. We got out of the car surrounded by his barking dogs as he greeted us warmly, sized us up and decided we were fit enough to take turns standing as riders on the back of the dogsled. Normally he sat people in the sled and left it at that.

  “It’s a very peaceful way to travel,” he said, and he was right. The dogs worked frantically but quietly, and we found ourselves gliding across the earth, though on a few occasions the sled didn’t take the corners as easily as the dogs and we were pitched into a snowbank. As we got out of the snowsuits and various layers he’d given us, Vern asked if Oliver was an athlete, and I almost laughed—he was a researcher, after all—but he had apparently managed to cling to the back of the sled through turns that would have thrown a lot of people off.

  Shaking hands with Vern, we drove further north to see Denali, or Mount McKinley to the locals. We parked in Talkeetna and walked the one street it had, which is the closest I’ve ever come to feeling I was in the Old West. In the middle of town an old man was setting up a wheelbarrow so he could sit in it in the back of a pickup. Oliver warned, “I’m going to greet this man.”

  “Good afternoon, sir,” was all he’d needed to say to open the floodgates: “Do you ever observe Mother Nature?” It was, we were told, important to look around, and we heard readings from his encyclopedia about the colour of sulphur at room temperature and the experiments “those old boys” did. He told us he often sat to
observe jet trails, only once mentioning he was a Vietnam vet and leaving it behind in the torrent of information that lasted about ten minutes. We thanked him and made a polite farewell. Driving back to Anchorage, we went the wrong way on one-way streets and passed road signs marked by gunfire.

  That was it, really, a brief friendship, but a friend you don’t forget. We fell in step beside each other like two people who were meant to walk together all along. And a friendship that could have been more—he was curiously handsome, with a strong nose and a short, solid frame—but he was so deeply in love with Penelope. After that, I was granted a privileged position at Olympus Labs in Anchorage and he went back to Toronto. I had no time for romance or family, and felt like I was among the lonely gods, the exclusive manipulators. The money came pouring in but so did the scrutiny—staff were watched both at work and in our personal lives. I saw three moose in Anchorage loitering at the side of the road and chewing on vegetation and I joked in an email to Oliver that they were part of the surveillance.

  Over the years, we dropped out of touch, and when I finally heard Oliver had been lost to us, I knew I needed to help the outside world learn more about what was happening and how things sometimes went wrong. I set up a meeting between his son Tomas—now twenty already—and a man I knew named Matthew. At the very least, it would be a start. I couldn’t be too direct and risk exposure.

  I appeared as Tomas to book a flight—it was a simple matter to step into the data-stream and create a hologram, borrowing photons and light and images of Tomas. Time would bend around me and resume its shape like a river around a rock. For the second that a clerk looked at my identification, the atoms in the flat plastic were made to look like his identification. I relaxed the effort and appeared as myself to mail the ticket and information to him, stepping out of a post office a few blocks from the family home in time to see Tomas for the first time. He rounded a sidewalk corner on his own to stop and look away from me down the street for a long minute. And then whatever it was, he simply let it drop from his mind. He was just like his father: strong, a dreamer.