Lovers Fall Back to the Earth

by Cecelia Frey

  This matter cannot be resolved in any other way than by you returning to your country and facing the consequences. Many young men have applied for conscientious objector status. You are accurate in your understanding that one of the questions asked is do you believe in a Supreme Being? …Most unfortunate that your beliefs in this regard have altered since your youth … may be a choice between submitting to the draft or going to jail … and are you certain of your motivations? Of course, I share your ideas about this war, or any war, and none of us can know with certainty our country’s motivations in waging it. It may well be, as you say in your letter, a sop to the munitions factories in Texas that have a strong lobbying position. It may be that our country is shoring up its own economy on the bent backs of unfortunate peoples in third world nations (your words). But in spite of all its imperfections, no other country on our planet promotes and allows as much freedom as does ours. Your mother and I have no desire to see you go to war. But will you forgive yourself for not facing the problem squarely? We understand that this opening in the graduate program seems like a heaven-sent opportunity for you. You mention that this is a great chance to work under the supervision of a man who is a respected historian. But please remember the temptations of Satan and how he can be an extremely appealing force.

  Think of the future. You may never again be allowed to visit your home! Your mother and I will never be able to visit you with clear consciences and feelings of good will. We, you and your parents, will never be able to look into each other’s eyes without feelings of shame. Be careful son, be very very careful in your decision … the right decision always involves obedience to the law. That is the lesson we learn from the story of Abraham. Also, the importance of the law. The law must take precedence over the wishes of the individual … without the law it is all darkness. Your idea about our coming to live with you in Canada cannot be taken seriously. Even if we would uproot ourselves and leave our home, a home we have worked for so many years to establish, we could not ourselves defect with a clear conscience.…

  Please, please, telephone us to say that you are coming or even to discuss these matters. We will accept the reversal of charges. Your mother sends her love and hopes to see you soon.

  After a while he stopped reading the letters. After a quick scan in case they contained anything of importance, which they never did, he tossed them into a box. After a further while he tossed them in unopened. His parents did not attend his wedding. By then, his father had ceased to write. Instead, his mother sent long, newsy epistles, which he dutifully read although he found them boring, full of the neighbours and community life around the synagogue. He could scarcely remember the people she was talking about. He had lost his connection to home. He was very busy at that time of his life, with his studies, with his new wife.

  The fatal letter, as he thought of it, he received during Christmas exams. He was teaching an introductory course that had three hundred students; he was trying to finish his own dissertation. He had stuck it into a pile of papers on his desk that he meant to deal with when he had time.

  The very day that he returned from his mother’s funeral — by that time the amnesty for draft dodgers was in place — his hand came upon the letter. He was cleaning off his desk and there it was, the hand of God to strike him down. He slit open the envelope, unfolded the paper inside and, after a couple of paragraphs about the weather and Myrna Bercov who had had cancer but they operated and thank God caught it in time, and Myrna’s son who was out at the West Coast now and doing very well in private practice with two darling little girls whose pictures Myrna had shown around at the last ladies auxiliary meeting, read: That polyp I was telling you about in my last letter, it looks like it’s cancer all right. I have to go for treatment, then they may want to operate. Well, that’s life for you isn’t it? The rest of the letter went on about the bazaar and the benefits of the hot tub at the new Centre for his father’s stiffening joints. It ended: My dearest wish is that I would see you before I die. I don’t know why I would get cancer. It doesn’t run in our family. But the doctor says the greatest cause of these things, and many more, is stress. I guess stress is the big thing nowadays. I hope you’re not mad at me for not attending your wedding. You know how your father is. It would have been difficult for me to go. But sometimes I think I should have gone and faced his disapproval. Sometimes I think about that at night when I can’t sleep.

  Benjamin could not remember the next year of his life. It was all one big smoky spaced-out haze of alcohol and drugs, painkillers he called them. Somehow, he had gone on and gotten the doctorate, although he knew he had disappointed his supervisor by not doing as well as expected. The university had given him a position, but the quality of his work had fallen off, he was merely going through the motions. Still, he managed for a few years to hold things together, at least he thought he was holding things together.

  He could not pinpoint exactly when he started to despise his students — their materialistic goals, their superficial aspirations, their petty grievances, their blatant stupidity, their mean and petty lives. He could not mask his contempt. He stopped being a good teacher. The most startling comments came out of his mouth — rude, contemptuous remarks when some timid little bastard dared ask a question. The gossip about him making lewd suggestive remarks to some of the young women was true. What else did the little cunts, as he thought of them then, want? Why else would they wear jeans so tight the seam was like a g-string separating each buttock, T-shirts that were meant to emphasize the size of their breasts. Obviously, they wanted to be looked at. However, they did not want to be touched. He found that out when one young woman took her complaints to the head of the department.

  The department was very good to him. They gave him several warnings, several opportunities to shape up. Since he was bent on self-destruction, that only meant he had to go further to destroy himself. He went to lectures unprepared and under the influence of various substances. His sarcasm developed into verbal abuse. He was very good at this. He had a clever tongue. It was a gift that, up until then, he had tried to use for good. He abused his gift, turned it into a weapon. To take your God-given talents and use them for evil was, in his father’s opinion, the worst thing a person could do. He did exactly that. He perpetrated his evil onto innocent victims, one victim in particular, Helena.

  By the time she left for the Coast, he had destroyed her cheerful optimism, turning it first into sad resignation, then into cynical pessimism. Worst of all, she became fearful. His brave fearless Helena became apprehensive when he came in the door. She never knew what to expect, never knew what ugly mood he might be in, what he might have been smoking or drinking or snorting. After a while, they could no longer look at each other. Finally, she applied for graduate school at the Coast.

  Into his mind came an image of Helena walking toward him. He was waiting in the doorway of the campus watering hole and she was coming toward him with her full free stride, coming from one of her classes, her hair long then, floating around her face in a soft autumn wind.

  He shook himself into reality. She was no longer that person, either. Her life, too, had been irreversibly changed, first by him, then by Amanda’s death.

  Amanda’s death, nearly two and a half years ago, a bitterly cold night on the prairies. He was kneeling beside a heat vent holding Bruno’s dead body in his arms when Victor’s voice called his name. It was Esther on the phone. She had received a call from Reuben.

  Benjamin heard again Bruno’s words, very faint, a hoarse whisper. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He had no idea what the old guy had in mind. But it didn’t matter. According to doctrine, in an emergency a lay person can hear confession, can perform the last rites. Such a person does not need to know the details. Anyone can forgive you your sins. You only need one other person to forgive you.

  He had found such a person in Amanda. He had poured out his heart to her, everything, the letters, his mother’s death,
his behaviour toward Helena. He had told her the worst things he had done in his life. She had forgiven him, and through her words he was able to receive his mother’s forgiveness. “Your mother forgives you. She would cheerfully have died for you. You have to accept her gift. It’s what you can do for her.”

  What had directed him to Amanda so that she could give him the last rites? He did not know. He had not seen Amanda for years before his visit. He could not remember consciously steering the car in her direction. It had seemed to travel toward the Island by its own volition. He knew that was nonsense. At the very least, it was unsettling. He could not responsibly believe in a force that had directed him toward Amanda any more than he could believe in something called spiritual awakening. How could he, a serious intelligent person believe that he had received some sort of mystical guidance from another person? What had happened, he rationalized, was that he had found solace in talking to Amanda. In her presence, he had felt at peace for the first time in years. A healing balm had congealed around the open wounds of his nerves and his mind. Amanda, with her slow, calm, accepting nature might have that effect on someone, he surmised, but to elevate the experience to the level of mystical empiricism seemed a bit much. What he could not deny, however, was that after his last sight of her waving goodbye in his rear-view mirror, he had felt that he could go on, that he could find a way to go on. He regretted that he had not been able to do the same for Helena.

  Benjamin’s eyes sprung open. He had a sudden realization. Helena was looking for something, not so she could live but so she could die. He saw again her eyes when she was asking the question about Amanda. Her eyes on his face had been like a fire, flaring up for a moment then quickly dying when he had not been able to say the words she wanted to hear. He saw her bent head, her manner of resignation.

  She had come to see him for words from Amanda, words of absolution she could take with her to the grave. She wasn’t choosing slow starvation or alcohol poisoning or any of the hundred other slow ways a person can shorten their life. She meant to choose one of the fast routes. He stood up quickly. Where was she now? He must try and find her. Esther. Esther’s number must be in the book. Where was his phone book? Did he even have one? He cursed his own lack of order. Where was the damned phone book?

  VII: HELENA

  I MAY AS WELL BE DEAD, Helena thought. I am dead. I’m a breathing dead thing. In order to be alive, you have to have something to look forward to.

  She stared at her hand against the steering wheel. She must be back in the car. In the palm of her hand was a mound of round blue tablets.

  Soon she would sleep. Sleep. Sleep. Sleep was like a lover calling. How she longed for sleep. Oblivion.

  How she longed to stop thinking. The curse of life was thinking. You were never free of it, even when you were asleep. Unless you were sleeping the deepest sleep of all, the one that clicked off your brain. She must get her brain clicked off. She could not stand the voices, the pictures.

  It hadn’t worked. That thought kept going around and around in her head. It hadn’t worked. Ben had not worked. The thing she had counted on had not worked. The belief that she might find a way to die in peace, the belief that had given her hope since she had looked into that mirror in Prince Rupert, the belief that she had carried with her, so carefully, as if it were fragile porcelain, from that place to here, had broken. She had been so sure of Amanda.

  She shouldn’t have come. She had gained nothing and she had lost everything that she had left to lose. Her belief in Amanda. Her belief that Amanda had left her a message. Her belief that she had occupied a space in Amanda’s mind. That she might occupy that space in heaven, for surely if there was a heaven Amanda would be there.

  She was locked out of paradise, deprived of Amanda forever. She was locked into an eternity of dragging herself up and down streets like this. Hell must be like this, eternal grey streets littered with broken glass and empty cardboard food containers, smeared with hacked up gobs of spittle, inhabited by the weak, the sick, the dispossessed, human fallout of a failed experiment.

  The time had come. Even though she no longer had the hope that she might die in peace, die she would. She would go into that black hole of torture and stay there for eternity. Eternity is a very long time. Eternity is forever. That’s how long she was damned to hell. To suffer the torments of hell for eternity was what she deserved. That was the proper verdict for a woman who had killed her sister. The worst thing you can do. Cain and Abel. The first murder, the worst one. Cain was marked and cast out into the wilderness. That’s where she’d been the past few years. That’s what she deserved. The hell of the past few years.

  What difference whether hell was in this world or the next?

  She was regarding the blue tablets when it came to her — she would not be able to swallow so many pills without liquid. For a moment, she became confused. She thought she might become frantic. Stay calm, she instructed herself. Be sensible. There must be water some place nearby. She raised her head. In the direction of Ben’s apartment building was nothing. She looked across her shoulder and saw a corner store. It seemed a long way away.

  Could she make it there and back? She had to make it. Otherwise, she couldn’t have what she so desperately desired.

  She raised her right hand cupped with the pills to the left hand that held a small brown plastic bottle. Carefully, she poured the pills back into the bottle. Carefully, she replaced the bottle into the special zippered pocket of her purse. She opened the car door. She stepped back into the dismal day.

  Hunched into her coat collar, she watched the toes of her shoes against the cracked sidewalk. How inevitable it all seemed, her footsteps obeying the command of the future.

  The network of black branches overhead, a thick and intertwining net, lowered down on her, closed down like the lid of a coffin. She couldn’t breathe. She was suffocating. Her mind was shattering into fragments. She could not catch any of the fragments. She felt for her purse.

  Deliverance. She carried it with her, under her arm. Her black bag and her pills. She squeezed her arm tighter to the side of her chest. Yes, it was there, solid, a solid something she could hang on to.

  Let me get to the store, just let me get to the store. The thought was so vivid she might have spoken it but she was not speaking to any god, not even to fate or chance. She was simply sending her words out into the cold air, air devoid of understanding or mercy, human or otherwise.

  She was so tired. She had never been this tired. But she had to get to the store. She had to make it to the end of the block, she had to cross the street. There was nothing else she could do, except lie down on the sidewalk and never move again. She contemplated that action. But someone would eventually come and take her away. To where? A hospital? The loony bin? Back to Esther’s? And what then? To lie in bed all day, or on the living room sofa, or in the TV room watching movement on a screen? Going shopping with Esther, going for lunch, visiting art galleries and museums? Poor Esther, trying to keep her sister going, trying to keep her too busy to think about despair. But it wasn’t working and Esther was exhausting herself trying to think up new solutions, new activities.

  She must rid Esther and the world of the burden of her personality.

  And this body. This repulsive body. This smelly, repulsive body. This repulsive skin, hair. The thought of her digestive tract caused her to feel something akin to horror. Swallowing food, having it pass to her stomach, becoming waste. Elimination. Blood. What leaky smelly disgusting objects human beings were, she, in particular, was. She couldn’t do it another day.

  At the corner, she looked both ways then stepped off the sidewalk to cross the street.

  She became aware that she had been standing a long time in front of the cooler. I’m in the store, she thought. The drinks were all too sweet. Still, she must make a decision. If she lingered, people would notice, they might call the authorities. They might
take her handbag away from her. Choose. Choose, she ordered herself. She opened the heavy door, reached in her arm and grabbed a can of soda. At the counter, she waited for her change. This is silly, she thought. What does change matter to me now? Still, she waited, and when she received it, put it in the proper change purse in her bag.

  When she arrived back at the car, she felt calm, in control. The drink business had confused her momentarily, but now she knew each step she had to take. She felt good about being able to solve a problem, and she felt confident that she would be able to apply herself to the project in a detached manner.

  She slid between steering wheel and seat, closed the door. Her hand knew where to go, inside her bag, straight to the zippered pocket.

  But now an old man shuffled past. A woman with a shopping bag was heading her way. People were stopped for traffic at the corner. A man and a woman were chatting on the sidewalk. She could hear their laughter outside her metal container. She felt eyes on her. She felt Ben’s eyes on her. I may as well be in Grand Central Station, she thought. What she was about to do was an intimate act. She needed privacy. She had to find a lonely place.

  Almost noon now, but the clouds had lowered and the day’s greyness had intensified. The car was moving, probing the misty air, searching, slowing at certain locations that offered promise. One of these was a street beside a deserted schoolyard. The tires rubbed against the curb and stopped.