by Alex Boyd
Of course, I thought of my wife and daughter, but we’d already fallen back the better part of a lifetime. And somehow to be displaced in time is to pull a curtain across your old life. They were so painful to think about; my mind had already started to reduce them to a series of prominent memories. If only I’d been hauled back a few years, or a few months, rather than a lifetime. Is it healing or a form of destruction to take the person you used to know and reduce them to that? I used to play with my daughter, both of us crawling around on the floor pretending to be cats. Who’d see the muted look of shock on my face now and picture me doing that? I thought of telling Oliver I wore a look of sadness for two people who’d not been born yet, but didn’t want to offend him. He’d offered me friendship, and now he offered me a new life.
We stayed a year, but after that we began to grow restless. We grew tired of cooking in Julien’s small kitchen where the flies from the neighbouring cows landed on everything. And as Julien drove us to town, all the sudden and winding turns made my stomach weak as though we were on a roller coaster. I knew what Oliver was thinking, and he knew that I was determining another member for our lonely team. We talked to Julien about coming with us when we fell, and explained it in a way that made us seem as sane as possible. I’m not sure he believed any of it, but he propped open the door a little and told us that if this thing was really happening, the dogs would get out and the neighbour would see to them. Finally, Oliver sensed it coming and I braced myself for it to happen again. I tried to help us stop more quickly this time. I dug my fingers into the soft bed of the past.
10: Penelope
I’ve always had good instincts for people. More than instincts: mild premonitions. When I was a child, my father got cancer. He was a mild-mannered lawyer, always in a black suit and a colourful tie, his one method of expression. His hair had been grey forever but otherwise he didn’t look old. My mother began the process of worrying herself away, embracing an anxious state of mind that concerned my father more than anything else. It was as though she’d been replaced by a twitchy actress with the same soft, rolling brown hair. I simply closed my eyes to think about it and knew he’d be fine. I pictured him celebrating a birthday with me, years later, and after a struggle that lasted about a year, he won.
But Oliver confused me. I hoped I’d know what to think, but I saw him coming back and saw him settling somewhere else. I spent four seasons alone, as any woman newly separated should. A year alone is a way to get back to yourself. In a way I think I was meditating on the loss, aside from being busy with Tomas. Oliver left in the fall, always my favourite season for the gentle reminder that change is a constant, and that everything is on the verge of transformation. After that, winter comes with its bright beauty and emphasis on hibernation and reconsideration. Spring is my second favourite season for the other side of the transformation, and summer makes me think of heat and frantic action. My preference is balance, either in spring or in the fall.
It was fall again, a year since Oliver left, when I tried Internet dating, only to abandon it after a few months. In the spring I met Blake at an audition for a commercial, both of us waiting for hours in a hallway with various others to prove we could smirk at a joke as we loaded laundry. He was a bit pale and his facial features looked somehow uneven, a little like they were drifting and trying to settle, but he dressed sharply and carried himself well. I was surprised and tempted to be offended when he asked for my phone number, but I provided it anyway.
Over a drink he said, “I noticed your gracefulness. I saw you in an audition before, but you didn’t take the slightest notice of me while I admired the way you jogged up a few steps at a time, your arms showing a loose comfort with the rest of your body. It was the way your movements were smooth and your hair took the air. There are many attractive women, but the most astonishing ones also have other, unmistakable qualities, like comfort in their own skin.”
Flattery is the most obvious, the oldest of techniques. It wasn’t supposed to work, but I did feel like opening the possibility. He instinctively made me sense he’d be supportive and pleasant to be around, and in terms of the feeling it created, it was like using muscles I’d not used or thought about for a long time. I was cautiously intrigued. He said idiotically brilliant things like, “There’s no one else like you.”
He said anyone who could create a fable was tuned to the underground currents and deeper influences that help shape our lives. I told him, “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go to the bathroom and make a current of my own.” He laughed, but I could tell he was taken aback by the crudeness of my joke. I was, for the moment, tired of his pompous remarks, and felt like keeping him off balance. He handed me an envelope to read later and it turned out to contain a brief story he’d written about a young gypsy poet:
His mother named him Dukker, meaning fortune teller, and as a young man he said the strangest things about sunlight waiting patiently to get to the front of the line and touch his face, just for a second. He travelled, seeing London but not the rest of England, and was struck by a woman in red shoes stumbling down subway steps. He read great books and learned to cook a little. On trains he read about Nobel Prize winners even as boys behind him talked about wanting, wanting, wanting. From nowhere, a stranger turned to him and apologized, and within a year another simply commented that life could be worse than shaving, putting on a clean shirt and sitting around an apartment alone. He stood around train stations where sets of patient people crossed the floor and were swallowed by the city.
Walking with me to the station, Blake said, “You know, the city makes you choose. You glimpse a small man with wisps of straight black hair and watery eyes looking at nothing in particular, and you face a choice: love him or turn away. That’s how the city kills warmth, one piece at a time.” I had a fleeting thought about how the city has pockets of warmth, but people just didn’t often feel so happy as to try and bond with a stranger. I felt like telling him he was full of it, but we’d reached a turnstile door made up of polished bars and I said, “Look, I’ve got to go,” and he said he understood. He sent me a letter telling me he’d written an ending for the story about Dukker. The young man rejoins his family but one morning is simply gone. It’s finally suggested a tree nearby hadn’t been there before, that the young man had fallen and been transformed by earth, saying he’d let words wander away like so many coyotes. Let the world come to him.
11: Oliver
Julien needed a moment and was unsteady on his feet. We sat on a bench a while, and then blocks away met our preacher woman, Victoria, among the coloured houses and tilted streets of St. John’s, Newfoundland. She had her hand on the stomach of a pregnant woman, a stranger she’d met while jogging, and was giving the child a blessing. “May your child that comes from love live in love, and know warmth and safety and joy.” Victoria had short dark hair, a thin face and a wiry frame. She spoke calmly and remained perfectly still.
At first I had thought to scoff, but as we got a little closer I saw tears in the eyes of the pregnant woman. The woman hugged Victoria and walked away. We started to introduce ourselves, but Victoria said she needed to continue her run, so we jogged with her up to Signal Hill, which was far longer than any of us realized. Out of breath, leaning, we slowly took in the magnificent view and chatted further with Victoria. She revealed she had been a minister but had been forced out to live and work independently. I didn’t want to demand more of the story, but took note to try to learn more when we’d earned more trust.
A week later, Victoria taught us greater subtlety. The next time we felt ourselves falling back, outside a pub on Water Street, she was a little out of reach and simply lifted an arm in our direction. Apparently, this intent was enough for her to fall back with us, and Victoria followed us gracefully to London a few years earlier. There were Carl and I clinging to Julien and each other like a couple of teenagers on a roller coaster ride.
We met the twin British boys
—James and Aidan—when we found them standing on the steps to Westminster Bridge, not far from a statue of a lion that looked stunned. They asked, “Do you know where the closest groceries would be?” which Carl found hilarious, as much as Carl can find something hilarious. I admit that I cringed a little when Carl laughed. I’d never seen him laugh that hard. These two young men just stood there blinking like owls. They were both so thin they looked like they could slip under a wall.
One of them was born before midnight and the other after midnight, so they had different birthdays. They told us this with a slow and solemn manner, so everyone nodded. I looked at Carl so he would smother his laughter and nod too. Everything they said had a kind of honey-thickness, and I wondered if they’d be some kind of anchor the next time we fell back a few weeks later, but they weren’t. Of course, we told them they’d fall back with us, and Carl and Julien in particular were good at looking serious and convincing about it.
Ferah was a young Turkish woman working in a dusty, small-town Spanish restaurant. On a patio made up of large, flat pieces of dry and cracked stone, we sat and ate before we eventually asked her to join us. She moved carefully but seemed curious. She was able to join us after the owner barked a few more orders in her direction over his shoulder. “I’m a student of history and philosophy,” she said, pushing off from the table. We gathered her summer job here in this town had started to feel like a wrong turn and she’d prefer to leave.
Hearing the word philosophy, Carl couldn’t resist the opportunity to tell her about the three-bullet theory. He’d told me this before and I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “In a way, it’s very simple,” he said. “People would treat each other with better manners and civility if everyone carried a weapon and three bullets. The bullets would be engraved with a serial number that meant police could ask no questions if the bullet is found at the scene of a murder. As a result, everyone would be more polite. Seriously. You might not waste a bullet on someone rude in a grocery store, but few grocery clerks would want to take that chance. And some people who’ve lost all their bullets would need to bluff for the remainder of their lifetime, carrying around an empty gun. C’mon, you have to like the idea of a world with such civility.” Carl wagged a finger at no one in particular.
“Civility,” Ferah replied, “but only from fear, really, a kind of ongoing fear.” Her green eyes moved back and forth from Carl to me, and while she had certainly put a pin in the balloon of his idea, the sharp point was softened by her genuine smile. “And black-market bullets could imitate the special ones and ruin everything,” which left Carl stroking his chin and admitting the need to refine his theory. Ferah impressed me and spoke with us whenever she could for a few hours before finally walking off the job. The owner followed us a short way down the street ranting almost incoherently before the gravity of his business drew him back.
12: Oliver
We all stepped into the sunlight at a train station in Stuttgart, Germany to meet Maddy. She was a short, blonde woman in her thirties. She examined a sticker on a pillar and then made painstaking efforts to tear it off. She noticed us and said simply enough, “It’s a sticker that argues multiculturalism means giving up power to others. You look lost and confused.” She spoke flawless English and as she began to teach me a few phrases in German I started to feel she might join us as well. As we talked mostly in English, a pale older man worked his way over. “Excuse me,” he said. “I know you speak English but here in Germany we speak German.” He spoke as a train rolled into the station. He paused to look at us and then stepped onto the train to be carried away. Maddy fumed. “That’s really rude,” she said. I decided to be fair—it’s possible to meet a creepy man in any country.
I sensed we’d be here longer. In the first few days, before we all began to settle into apartments in the same neighbourhood, we went to a lot of restaurants. Germany began to feel like a country of sharp contrasts: one waiter spoke coldly and his eyes were hidden behind glasses that sometimes caught a reflection as another smiled, barrel-chested, his woodpecker-rapid laugh ready on a hair-trigger.
A year unfolded. I liked Stuttgart for its open parks and public squares, a pedestrian street and a twittering tree filled with birds I couldn’t see. A store announced the “Year of the Scots” sale, a cartoon man in a kilt slashing the price. The Scots were, it seemed, synonymous with cheapness. We visited a folk festival with beer tents, rides, huge mugs of beer and rumours of waitresses in Munich who could carry eight on a tray with one hand. Learning German was challenging and I began to appreciate the difficulties of someone new to a country, trying to build a life. It was a language with a sharp beauty, but it stuck in my mouth like twigs. Maddy had a boyfriend named Aldman—a name that means old man—and he was as patient as Maddy when it came to repeating German words until they began to take up residence in my brain. Aldman worked in a bookstore, and while bookstores still drew me in like a magnet, I found that in foreign countries I could only stare at the covers and guess at the contents.
As Aldman took a break from work, a few of us stood around eating pretzels off a pretzel stand. Maddy fixed me with a stare and told me a British tourist had yelled something at her along the lines of, “Your breasts proceed you like a motorcycle escort.” I looked at Ferah, speechless for a couple of seconds. Part of it was the absurd politeness of “breasts,” even as he was appallingly inappropriate. Aldman only laughed and rolled his eyes. He was one of those huge, gentle people. In some ways the world is the same everywhere.
We visited Schorndorf, Tübingen and Cologne, which had a magnificent cathedral, its walkway buffeted by wind and every inch covered in graffiti. Black-and-white postcards in racks on the street showed the city after the war, devastated except for the cathedral. Maddy’s kindness contrasted with a glimpse of a pack of skinheads on the street, walking through the fog with their tall leather boots and assorted dogs. We heard about a Molotov cocktail thrown into a synagogue, impressive arts festivals, and I will never forget sitting with Maddy and Ferah on a bench somewhere along Philosophers’ Walk above Heidelberg as all the bells of the city rang at once.
I was on a train to the wine region town of Neustadt with Carl when we stopped and I looked out the window to see a lanky skinhead on a bench, his girlfriend draped over him. He looked up and smiled a sick grin, and I turned back to my book, unable to engage him. Long minutes later we were finally on our way again and a conversation began in our compartment, an old man telling stories about tollbooth castles along the Rhine and opposite castles run by two brothers who hated each other. He talked about a woman who distracted sailors by combing her long golden hair. He spoke to a friend who translated for him and turned his head away shyly each time I looked over. I went through my phrase book and as I stood to leave, managed to say quite perfectly, “It was nice meeting you.” He beamed at me and asked where I was from. When I said Canada, he listed on trembling fingers the parts of Canada he’d seen.
I began to sense we’d be falling again soon. It was time to get everyone together. But I was glad I’d been there. Canadians aren’t taught anything about Germany at school. We’re given a steady diet of information about the world at war, a tiny river of black-and-white carnage in the mind. History can’t be forgotten, but I felt glad to have new realities: a gentle smile from Aldman, filed away under Germany.
13: Athena
In the end, there were around a dozen of them. I couldn’t always see what Oliver was doing as he gathered his small army. The data pooled and collected. I caught up with them, or could at least monitor them most of the time, though sometimes they moved behind dense thickets of activity and living history like fish moving out of sight in an aquarium. Put all kinds of whispering days in one room, and the noise is deafening.
As head of the program, Dr. Waters has a tendency to come sweeping into any room as though he owns the place, his white hair and beard making him look like a madly alert grandfather to us all. I�
�ve only seen him outside the facility once, standing on the street and wearing a hornet-yellow helmet while holding a bicycle, a small, red brick house behind him with checkered curtains in the windows and a cloud that appeared to be coming out of the roof. I thought maybe it was where he lived, but he simply stared down the street, mounted his bike and rode away without seeing me.
Waters said he could see data patterns, tunnels of lived experience. As soon as one person finished watching an old film noir, another person began it, leaving patchwork lines like trenches across time where men hesitate in shadowed doorways forever, or are slapped across the face again and again. Waters winced and turned away at centuries of wife beating, and laughed for long minutes at the sound of happy babies. Some said his discoveries had driven him mad, but I didn’t agree. He was doubtless eccentric and seemed foolish at times, but it was a mistake to underestimate how sharp-witted he could be, or how physically spry. He sometimes spoke in poetic fortune cookies, his own curious shorthand. He said, “A lifetime is something that sails in and out of the crowded room of the world as briefly as a gurney on little squeaking wheels that hope to be remembered.”
With him staring at my computer screen, suspended over my keyboard and staring like a gargoyle, we worked together to gather more data about Oliver. In Mexico City they met a theatre-maker and clown named Fernando as he practised in a park. He wore minimal makeup but colourful shirts with black pants and tall boots, pulling his hair back into a ponytail to highlight his sharp features. They watched a black dog run across green grass, thinking it belonged to Fernando, but the dog simply kept going. Fernando was calm but curious, like a cat, and seemed to inspire as much in those around him.
They were together as a group when they walked into a soft trap, a place called Club Lotus, where the drinks were often spiked and people were robbed. They’d have been obvious targets, giving themselves away as new in town. They arrived in Verona and were close to the Lotus on their first night in the city, Oliver leading his dozen people like a disorganized scouting party through the streets. Dr. Waters had left me alone and so I intervened, appearing in the form of a short, middle-aged restaurant owner in a dark blue suit with a round face. As they arrived on foot I caught their attention and pointed out the owner’s place down an old alley. It had a small patio that always had fresh flowers. In gregarious fashion, I told Oliver, “You look like a man who appreciates a good restaurant!” I shook Oliver’s hand and walked away. I knew Oliver, and knew to be pleasant not pushy, though I think he suspected something and caught a hint of my real mood as I tried to walk away thoughtfully, my round face an awkward mask in the moonlight.
