by Cecelia Frey
“‘Blame’ falls into the category of bad thoughts.” They were silent a moment. Then, “Would you want to come back?” His eyes were steady on her face, as though he had resolved to keep them so. “I mean … would that be of any help to you?”
Helena felt his male presence. She wanted him to put his arms around her. She took a step backward. “Would you want me back?” She felt a lump grow in her throat.
“Yes.”
Helena swallowed the lump. It seemed to get caught in her chest. “It’s never seemed to me to be a viable solution. I’d scarcely fit in to your life.” She half turned, waving her hand at the singularity of his existence. “Nor you in mine.”
“What is your life at the moment? I mean, is there anyone else?”
“No. What I mean is, I have no life.”
“Maybe we can make a life together. Maybe out of our non-lives we can make a life. We could find a place. Buy some real furniture. There are some low cost condos near the university.”
Helena’s mouth twisted. “Somehow I don’t see you in a housing development.”
“Maybe you’re right. But there are other places to live. Other people like us live, people who don’t fit in. People do manage to live together.”
“Yes, some people do.”
He held out his hands, palms upward. “What can I do to help you?”
She had not yet found out what she needed to know. She could not leave without finding out. Here was her chance. An opening. She took a breath. “Tell me about Amanda,” she said.
He dropped his arms back to his sides. “We walked down through an orchard, down to a creek. We talked about the garden, the day, the sunshine. We walked back up the hill. I got in my car and left. She called me a Christian Jew.”
Helena braced herself. “Did she say anything about me?”
“I’m afraid we talked about me. Selfish of me, when I think of it now. But I seemed compelled to talk.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Oh, you know, my old problem, my guilt, my confusion. I was still carrying that. I needed to talk and she let me.”
Helena couldn’t let the idea go. Amanda had left her a message — for months now she had carried that in her mind, a seed at first, growing into a reality. “Are you sure she didn’t mention me?” she asked.
His face was perplexed. She knew that expression. It was the one his face got when he was thinking how best to say something that might disturb the other person, when he was trying to find the right words, the best words, the least hurtful words. “She might have … I don’t remember anything specific.”
Helena felt that she had been delivered a blow to the mid-section. She turned to the door so that he would not see.
“My arms are open,” he said, behind her. “If you change your mind.”
She was able to compose herself and turn her head. She looked into his face. It was a good face, scrunched up with the effort of trying to save the world. She wanted to hold that face a moment in her mind. Before she let it go forever. “You’ve beaten your addiction to self-destruction,” she said. “You’re one of the lucky ones.” Again, she turned to the door.
“Remember,” he said. “I’m here.”
“I’d only make you unhappy,” she said without turning.
“That’s okay. I’m one of that so-called chosen race not meant for happiness.”
Those were the last words she heard him say before she stepped through the door and closed it behind her.
VI: AMANDA
THROUGH GLASS DARKLY SMEARED with urban grime, Benjamin watched Helena, a small black figure, disappearing into a network of budding poplar branches. His brow was marked with two small vertical cuts. Why had she come?
He had no illusions that she actually wanted to see him. Well, it didn’t matter. She had come. That was the main thing. He had been so pleased to see her, he had not let himself wonder. Now, he did.
She wanted something. He didn’t mind. He wanted to give to her. But what did he have to give? Amanda, information about Amanda. That was what she had been leading up to from the moment she stepped through his door. His visit to Amanda, the details. She wanted something she could live by, something she could hang onto.
But was there anything to hang on to? Was there any sense to it all? He thought of his street people. He thought of Bruno. Because he and Amanda had died the same night, both, it seemed, victims of a malevolent god, he often thought of them together. Their deaths had been equally bizarre, one freezing to death without proper shelter in the middle of an affluent society, the other drowning in a metal box she couldn’t get out of. Bruno had started out with an ordinary life and had ended up in a cardboard shelter over a heat vent. Amanda had been the promising younger sister in a trio of intelligent accomplished women and had ended up scratching for a living on a run-down acreage in a self-imposed exile. How did such things happen? But maybe that was not a valid question. Maybe we are simply a collection of molecules. Maybe we are simply animals, involved in the equivalent of grazing, digesting, sleeping, chasing down prey. How about George’s cause and effect theory? But the same cause could have different effects. Was it all chance or was there an underlying pattern?
Helena seemed to be asking these kinds of questions. He thought it a positive sign. She had arrived at the place where she was looking for meaning. When a terrible blow first comes, people are too stunned to think about meaning. They walk around as the living dead, zombies to shock and disorientation. When they get to the stage where they look for meaning, that is a sign that they are coming to life.
She had not been reluctant to talk. That was another good thing. He knew from his crisis counselling at the centre that when people can talk, it’s usually a good sign. Not always, though. Sometimes people talk just fine then a few days later you find them dead.
She was delusional, he was sure of that. Like some of his derelicts seeing pictures in their minds, she was probably imagining things that had not happened. On the other hand, she had been driving the car in which Amanda had been killed. That was a fact, one she had to somehow work through. She had come to him for help in working it through and he had failed her.
How often had he sat with people raving on drugs, delirious through illness, whispering through despair? How often had he listened to their confessions, found the words to soothe them? But he had not been able to find the right words for this person who meant so much to him. All the things he might have said — replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, Amanda would want you to forgive yourself — sounded pompous and tired. Yet those things were true. He supposed that was why clichés became clichés. They spoke everybody’s truth.
He had not been able to supply her with a meaning for his visit with Amanda, at least not a meaning for her. For him, it had meant the difference between life and death. Should he have told her that? But it was all such a mystery in his own mind, he didn’t know how to voice it so that it did not sound like rubbish. Still, maybe he should have said something. Should he have fabricated a meaning for her? No, he could not have brought himself to do that. Anyway, nothing was ever gained by evading the truth. If he had told her about his experience with Amanda, would it have done any good? He didn’t think so. After all, it had been his experience. Helena was so focused on her own pain, she wasn’t open to hearing about other people’s experiences. Besides, he wasn’t sure, himself, what had happened to him that day, only that after years of being dissected joint by joint from himself by himself, in her presence he had felt whole again. Should he have said that to Helena? But it sounded so irrational. He could not voice such irrationality. There were no words to turn something mystical into an explanation that would not sound plain foolish. Words would have trivialized something deeply felt. Was that why he had never uttered the words he might have said, never telling Helena that he loved her?
Helena di
sappeared from his view, but he could still see her, the shape of her skull, the bones beneath her skin. He was familiar with that hollow-eyed ravaged look. If he rolled up her sleeve, he knew he would find evidence of needle marks.
A different Helena came to mind. Helena coming in from the snow, cheeks pink, green eyes sparkling, snowflakes caught in her hair. He had met her at the door, brushed the snow from her hair, put his arms around her, his body shaking with the pain of pure joy. She was alarmed, thinking that something terrible had happened while she was out. He could not speak to tell her that everything was fine. He had been so full of exquisite pain he could not speak.
That had been good pain, but he knew a lot about bad pain, too, how at first the mind is cauterized by it. That’s the easy part. When the blood starts to flow back into the brain, that’s when it becomes unbearable. You have to get to the place where pain is bearable before you can think of a way out. You have to try and fill your head with good thoughts so there’s no room for bad thoughts. The process takes discipline. It takes strength. It takes time. You have to think of something besides your own misery, even if, at first, you can do it only for minutes, seconds. The time will grow longer.
But it was just as well that he had not said those things, for, in the end, all a friend can do is hold your hand and try and keep you from doing something foolish, hold your hand until you’re ready for the miracle. You can experience a miracle through another person, which is what had happened with him, but you have to be open to receive it.
The process doesn’t happen overnight. It takes a long time to get to the open position. That was a bit of news he could have imparted. Some never get over a severe shock, was another gem. That’s what the books and the counsellors never told you. Most of the people at the Drop-In Centre had been stopped by shock. Some had once had successful lives, friends, and careers, before the thing happened that made them not want to be part of the ordinary world.
Bruno had been married with a family, had a job, a place in society before things went wrong, before he started drifting, started drinking. In a way, Bruno had been successful in dealing with his pain. He had found his place in an underground society as an independent entrepreneur, a dumpster diver, a scavenger, picking bottles and cans out of garbage containers and cashing them in at recycling depots. He had a career. Picking. He would not accept welfare. He wouldn’t even collect his pension, though he was nearly seventy. He wanted nothing to do with governments.
How a person deals with pain is a defining factor. Some people fixed themselves at the cauterization stage, some dealt with pain with drink and drugs. Most of the street people did that. But that caused other problems to do with health and relationships. And the pain could come back, like the eruption of an illness lying dormant for a while before re-emerging with a vengeance.
Then there were those who fought like wildcats against pain, who would not let themselves be destroyed, who would use any means or any person available as an object to save their own egos. Veronica was like that.
“Fuck, does this mean we have to stay in?” He could hear her voice as clearly as if she were standing here now, holding back this same rag of curtain. Was it really nearly two and a half years ago?
“What a dump!” That was Veronica’s appraisal of his apartment, as well as his life. She had been right. She had been right about a lot of things. Veronica was a very smart girl.
“I might think you’re still in love with your wife.” Had she said that the same night, regarding him with those eyes that never seemed to look at anything but saw everything? “Except I doubt you’ve ever felt that emotion. You’re pitiful.” She probably said that, too, that night. She had said it more than once.
Veronica was another blight on his conscience. He should not have brought her here to his rooms, he should not have feigned feelings for her, although to be fair to himself he didn’t think he had done that. She had presumed. But wouldn’t any woman under the circumstances? No, he was not proud of his actions with Veronica. Her legs had been what first attracted him. They’d been standing in front of him at the Pizza Hut booth in the food hall. His eyes had travelled up, up from the legs to the hips, the flat back, the fall of golden hair. Maybe there hadn’t been anything wrong with that, men are attracted to women, after all. But when he had realized that she was emotionally unstable, badly damaged in fact, he should not have pursued. She needed someone who was strong and firm, who would not give in to her tantrums or her emotional wheeling and dealing. She might be healed by such a person. But it was the old story. Fucked-up people find each other and fuck each other up even more.
He had watched her leave much as he had just now watched Helena, through the same window. Except, then, he’d had to scrape ice from the glass and the figure he had been tracking with his eyes had disappeared into a storm. And, although he saw Veronica occasionally around the university, that was the last of their scenes. For that was the night of the phone call. When he packed a bag and called a cab to get him to the airport, she had not yet returned from the Crown. When he got back from the Coast a few days later, she was gone.
Benjamin let go the curtain and turned from the window. He picked up the whiskey bottle. He found his last cigarette on the table and took it and the bottle with him to the armchair that at one time had been his worry chair but was now his thinking chair. At one time he had worried and agonized nonstop nearly twenty-four hours a day, scarcely taking time out to sleep, and even his sleep had contained his worries. When the day came that his thoughts were less clouded, he decided that he wanted to get control of his worrying. He set himself a specific time each day in which to do nothing but worry. During that time he let himself worry about anything that was bothering him and especially about the thing that had destroyed his life. At all other times during the day or night he did not let himself worry because it was not the appropriate time.
That this technique worked surprised him. Maybe because his upbringing had been comprised of god’s law and his studies had necessitated discipline of the mind, he was programmed to follow rules. Although at first he was tempted to worry outside the allotted frame, this disappeared with time. It was a slow process, but over the months that became years, his worry time became shorter and shorter. The day came when he found himself impatient with the process. Instead of being confined to his chair worrying, he wanted to be up and about, getting something done. One day he almost forgot to worry. That was the beginning of the end of his worry time.
Benjamin took a short pull at the bottle, cradled it on his lap, closed his eyes and settled in to what he liked to do best — think. Ordering his thoughts, trying to figure things out, this had always been his passion. It was what had made him a promising scholar.
Helena, he thought, and let his mind freely fall. How excruciatingly wonderful to see her again. Yet, he felt that he had been through an ordeal. The emotional turmoil of seeing her, that had been difficult. More disturbing was her condition. Even in the hospital when she had been bruised and bandaged, she had looked better than now. Then she had been in bad shape physically, now she was suffering from soul sickness. She was bent on self-destruction. He had known that even before he’d seen the grief in her eyes. He had seen it in her defeated posture, her skeletal appearance, her mouth that grimaced in place of a smile.
He had watched people travel the passive route to self-destruction — willing themselves into sickness and death. It was not hard to destroy yourself if you put your mind to it. Some people ate or drank or drugged themselves to death. Some people stopped eating. Helena was doing a combination of these things. He wondered if it was a conscious act. A lot of people were not aware, perhaps did not let themselves be aware, that they were killing themselves. They felt sick. They couldn’t eat. The body reacted, provided physical dysfunction until they became seriously ill.
But why do some people decide on self-destruction while it never enters the heads of others whose trou
bles are just as severe? A moral abhorrence of such action, was one answer. Faith, he supposed, was another. Some people, like Esther, seem to be born with faith and some people find it. He had found it. Before that, he had been on the path to self-destruct. Ten years ago, just like in the old bible stories he had learned at his father’s knee, a mighty wrathful God had smote him down. He had gotten even with Benjamin for all those student years of shouting that God was dead and that the bible was a myth, for quoting long passages from Nietzsche about man being superman and able to chart his own destiny and everything being permitted.
God had shown him a thing or two. The main thing God had shown him was His existence. Hell exists. Benjamin knew that now with certainty because he had been there. If hell exists, reasoned Benjamin, then God must exist. So then his attitude was, ‘Okay, you sonofabitch, you may be out there and you may be stronger than I am but you’re a mean old devil and I don’t have to respect you or like you.’ Thus started a long ongoing battle wherein Benjamin tried to kill God. But the more he tried to kill God, the more God killed him.
His father had taught him that God, although stern and sometimes cruel, is just. The problem was that justice for him would have been to burn in hell for eternity. That was what he deserved. That was what a man who had killed his mother deserved. There was no way around that fact. Justice was no good to him. He needed forgiveness, he needed love. But he believed in neither. Until three summers ago, when he had visited the Island. Until that summer, for seven long years, he had been filled with an incoherent rage. Since that summer, he was a changed man. Or, at least, a changing man.
Benjamin upended the whiskey bottle, set it on the floor and lit his last cigarette with a cardboard match that he found in the chair cushion. He stretched out his body, put his head back, closed his eyes and drew smoke deep into his lungs. He thought about the letters that began Dear Benjamin and ended, Your Loving Father. He still had them, all of them. He kept them in a tin box high up in a corner of his closet. One of them was dated August 22, 1970. That was the one that started: Your letter has caused a great deal of anxiety and worry to your parents …we can not believe that you would accept a graduate position at the university there and marry this young lady with no thought of your duties. The letter went on, a father’s plea to a son: … my thoughts … the laws of, and duty to, the state or the group have precedence over the wishes of the individual. What sort of country, corporation, household, universe, could you run if this were not the case? And apart from the law, and perhaps even more importantly, is the personal carrying out of one’s duty to others and to God, although I know your thoughts on the subject of God.…
