The Origin of Waves (23 page)

“I am not going to take you home. To my house.”

“I didn’t axe.”

“Not because of anything. I am not taking you to my house. No one, no one but me enters that door. Not since Lang. The week after, I got rid of the housekeeper. Now I think the house is suitable only for her ghost, her presence. Her presence in her absence. Sometimes, I don’t shovel the snow, or take out the garbage. My Christmas tree is still up. From three Christmases. It is just a place. A big, beautiful place, though. But not happy. Walking this street, Yonge, much earlier in the year, I would walk-back-down into the ravine, and instead of going inside, right away, like a normal man going home, I would sit in the front garden, on the wrought-iron bench there, and look at the flowers, and follow the marching of those wood-ants, and become so tired from looking at them, and so disinterested that I won’t raise a finger sometimes to squirt them dead with my Black Flag. In the wintertime, like now, I would remain in the front garden, and sit and sit and sit, ignoring the cold iron bench, and look at the dried, dead flowers which is all she left, the flowers and what the flowers mean. The flowers in this city are different. Have you noticed? There are different flowers here, not like the ones back home; but they are
her
flowers, Lang’s flowers. When you carry a woman out of your house, your home, and you bear
her to another place to rest, you can’t easily take another woman through those same doors. Or a friend, even. Not if you have a heart.”

“Your mother always said that. ‘If you have a heart.’ If you have a heart, you would never think of doing this, or doing that. If you have a heart. I now know what she meant when she said it. If you have a goddamn heart! I-myself can’t go back to that hospital. I don’t have the heart to do it. I can’t face much more in my life, ’cause I don’t have the fucking heart, and I never was a brave man. But I have to.”

“You have the time?” I ask him.

“Time?”

“What is the time?”

“I should be getting back to the hospital.”

“It’s night-time.”

“Twelve, yet? I’ll get back though, and sit in the Emergency, till a nurse tells me where to go, to the waiting room, or some place … near his room, and wait. I was in the corridor outside his room and I got up and just walked out. Just walked out because I couldn’t face it no more; so, I took a stroll and end-up bumping into you, and imagine …”

“Winter makes time look the
same
time, whatever is the time!”

“Look at this
shit
!”

“When I had to go to work before my injury, it was this time of the year that took the life outta me; leaving in the darkness, working in the darkness, although
there were fluorescent lights, and returning to the house in the dark, in darkness, even though the snow is white. I call it, this time o’ year, the white darkness, the white darkness.”

And we walk slowly because of our age, and also because we are more accustomed to walking through sea water and wet sand, and also because of our tipsiness. Like two fishing boats without sails, rudderless in the broiling white foam of the waves. We walk with our arms round each other, affection and guidance, ballast we always found in our lives; two old black men coming through a storm in a place we do not really know.

“It’s safer here, though,” John says, reading my thoughts.

“Safer than the South?” I ask nevertheless.

“If this was Durm …,” he begins, and says no more.

“I’ll walk you to Sick Kids,” I say, protectively.

“No, you won’t. I can find my goddamn way in any storm! This ain’t the worst shit I have walk-through, brother!”

I know where we are walking, I know what we are passing. I know the names of the stores and the names of the streets, and I know that after all these years of walking, I am still passing these same strange monuments that bear no relation to me, and I know even in this thickening snow that they mean nothing to me, because they do not know me. That I can pass this stretch of road, black in warm weather, and white in winter, and go alone with my thoughts down to the
Lake and stand and lean and give the impression that the Lake is calling me into its dark, dirty, oily green water that is pulling me to her face, which I can see on its unmoving looking-glass. And no one would raise a hand, lift a finger until afterwards, after the body has splashed into the thick, oily green, after the stench rises to mark the difference. And I can walk these streets in a darkness of unrecognition, and only the store windows and the unseeing mannequins inside them would know I have seen them. Look now. Here. They sell records here, reggae and dancehall and calypsos; and beside it they sell classical records at bargain prices; here, they sell jeans and in the summer the jeans are made easier to be purchased by the blaring music from the tropical part of the world, funky, raw, pulsing and passionate and scary. And when it is time for the body to drink in its tonic of heat and barbecues, they sell T-shirts with names from all over the world, designers’ names, political slogan names; and beside the stall that stands like a tired sentry-man in summer there is a stench of pee from the men without homes who make a bathroom of the wall and of the short, hidden, safe alley adjacent. And across the street is the Eaton Centre, now like a grave; in the daytime filled with flowers and smells and people. And this street. Running silently at this time of day or night, at this ungodly hour, this street, Dundas Street, a vein that pumps people into the section of this city that I like best, into Chinatown where she fades and becomes
buried amongst the hundreds of other faces from China, where she and I eat the entrails of pig and chicken and duck, with two long sticks made out of fake ivory. This street corner is where my breath leaves me each time I reach it. It is here that her body comes pelting back to me in various positions and times, when I feel the presence of her love in a fast, short thrust of passion and affection, something they call emotion. Thick and raw and smelling fresh and still moving, like the blood of the pig stuck under the neck. I must face the truth on this street. I must face the truth of this street. Our short, thick life together was never consummated. It was just a touch, an intention … Here, right here, is the street, Dundas Street and Yonge, the intersection where my feet pull me every day of my walking, as they pull me now, as I am walking beside the best friend I have left in this world. But the world is getting whiter and colder and, at the same time, black with danger, for if a policeman should see us, obvious and standing-out on this landscape this time of Michaelmas and Good King Wenceslas, in this silent night, and if he is in the wrong frame of detectiveness, we do not have to be in Durm, North Carolina, or on Utica Avenue, Eastern Parkway, or Nostrand Avenue in Brooklyn, for him to “pull us over,” even though the only carriage is our feet. Our feet are our only carriage, somebody else said.

“The cold sure as hell brings life into your body! A strange thing! The cold make me feel sober. They say it
makes you look younger. You look more younger than me. I be living in all that heat in Durm, and you living in all this goddamn cold, walking through all this shit!”

We stand over a round hole in the white pavement, marked out clearly through the difference in temperature, and we feel warmer; our feet are two temperatures as if they are melting minute by minute. As we stand a policeman in a cruiser the same colour as the snow passes his eye over us, and continues on his way. John makes a slight jerk with his body, paying sudden attention. “The Man,” he says, softer than he needs to, for the window of the cruiser is closed against the cold. “The motherfucking
Man
, y’all!” and I feel and share the glee in his voice which shivers from the cold. We stand over the round iron hole and watch the steam rise; and we like this warmth, and we do not move immediately. And just like that, in the warm white night, our affection for each other comes to the top and we are hugging and slapping one another on the back and turning round and round and slapping as we turn; and shouting and laughing. The snow falling around us takes our voices, and magnifies our exhilaration, as we dance and turn. And then fall, still clutching each other, in the warm thick snow. It was just like this when the last wave, that last time at Paynes Bay, carried us, sitting in the inner tube, up onto the wet beach.

“Try one of my cigars,” John says. We are still sitting up in the snow. “They’re good for you, but don’t tell the Surgeon General I say so!”

The burning brown cylinder warms my hand, and the strong smell, the smell of success and of confidence, takes me on the swirling smoke to the dining room of Trinity College, where old men with paste in their complexion and thin strands of silver in their hair, eat. I imitate them, dressed in old tweed jackets with patches of leather or suede on their elbows, for economy and category, and follow their mannerisms as they lift their heavy brown pieces of rolled tobacco to their lips, ponderous and bulging, in the middle of their small round mouths. They look like babies feeding from a bottle. I move my cigar as they do, scotched at the sides of their mouths, showing the teeth, showing the accumulation of spittle, and speaking words covered in the richness of dark-brown sherry and port.

“I will walk you to the hospital,” I tell him.

“I have to face this alone. I am scared. But lemme
try
to face this alone.”

“I wish I didn’t make, I didn’t allow my house to be turned into … to take on the ambience of a tomb … I’m not saying this too well.”

“No problem,” John says. “I know.”

“It is not a place to take anybody any more, not since I carried her body …”

“I am sorry.”

“I am sorry that …”

“Who axed you to swim-out? Eh? Who was sitting on the goddamn wet sand on the beach with me that evening when the cobbler got-in my foot? Eh? Who?”

“Me.”

“Well?” he says.
“Adios!”

I am standing alone over the breathing manhole, looking at his cashmere winter coat as it becomes indistinguishable from the falling snow out of the skies I can never see in winter, as he is being swallowed up, devoured in the glistening night, which like a contradiction is dark; and in this puzzling light in which I have lived for more than fifty years, I watch that part of my life slip into the unmarked snow that a man not accustomed to walking in can disappear in. The snow is blowing in a wind, and the smokescreen buries him from my view, as if he was never here, never beside me. I feel angry at this snow, at this wind and this cold. It is like razors slicing my face and my legs. They say that the winter preserved the carton of milk for days and days, for longer than if it was left in the heat. The snow has buried him from my view, from my arms, and I am cold and angry at the murder it has just committed. My face is getting frozen. There are tears on my face. From the circle of land on which I am standing, and feeling the small warmth of the circle I am standing on, like the small island in which I was born. The longer I stand on this iron circle, the sooner I know I have to abandon it, get off and continue into this late night. I do not even know where I want to go. Which direction? And to what destination? The more I stand, the greater is the urge and the knowledge that I must step off from its temporary warmth and walk and walk, continuing in
the direction I am taking, away from the house in which I live.

After a while I am closer to the Lake, standing unsteadily at this street corner, Yonge and Queen, with the sidewalk slipping underneath my feet as if the street is melting, is the intersection that it takes courage to cross. And when crossed, it changes my life, and empties me into a cinema from the wrong end, the end that holds the screen and the moving figures, and gives an inverted version of things and faces and people. She was standing here, debating her own crossing, whether to walk with the green and wait for the other green, or wait longer and continue her walking on the same side. I was on the opposite side, with no reason to run the lights; and she changed her mind and waited; and we crossed this intersection together; and did not speak until we stepped off on the other side. She spoke and I answered her question; but I cannot remember her question now; and before she went on her job interview to be an interpreter of foreign languages, we sat in the small coffee shop in a vast basement shopping mall, and she drank her coffee and I watched mine grow cold and unappetizing. And like that she was a part of me. Love was born in that crowded, clattering place of numerous round tables and plastic cups and spoons.

There is a bus stop at this corner. But neither she nor I was waiting for its transportation. So, here I am now, at this intersection, seeing her as she was dressed
in the loose-fitting white dress with the band not tied, hanging from her back; here as if I expect she will rise up from the white carpet that covers her grave; here I am remembering the Saturday afternoon we went on the long journey by streetcar and two buses to reach the suburbs, so that she might look at the flowers of the gardens of the Guildwood Inn, and sit on a rock beside the water which has no sand, and toss smaller rocks into the unmoving water. The street is empty now, and I can hear the squeaking of the snow under my shoes, slow for safety and balance and leading me to the point in this walk where I go every day, every year since she died, but never at this hour. And I pass things and places which I paid no attention to on previous walks, but now, I can feel the warmth from the round iron grate, and my body once more has the life of summer. The street is empty. I can hear voices of men and women, and hear their footsteps and see their smiles as they carry bags and boxes and parcels of T-shirts, and posters rolled up like white shiny spying-glasses, and there is music from the man playing a set of drums, a tune I do not recognize, but full of pounding; he is the only man, the only person who can see and hear the invisible musicians accompanying him; and this music takes me all the way to where I can see the bridge, the underpass, although no one walks above my head. And the palm of the street which fans out and leads you either out of the city or else to the edge of the land, to the edge of the water. In summer, this street is
filled with different colours of dress and of skin. And the screaming children rush and push their parents out of the way to board the ferry which takes them to an island small as a dot in the short distance from the mainland in the Lake. This island is not my island. I can only stand beside the end of the land and watch them, screaming for the lesser pleasure, the lesser beauty of this island dropped between the city and the Lake … this island is ugly compared to mine. For when I walked this distance yesterday, when it was also cold, the island was a mere trace in the mist that falls at the end of the land, at the beginning of the water.