The Origin of Waves (9 page)

“Goddamn!” John is twisting in his chair. I can see his sensual discomfiture in his wriggling.

“I really and truly asked God for five minutes. Out of my whole life. And then, I had to request of Him five more minutes. The cup of Lang is a gift that was placed at my lips containing too much responsibility. And a challenge. And when the second reprieve had run-out, I saw Lang strong and more beautiful. And I had to face my weakness, and my failing. I could not accommodate the burden it caused me. The burden of that fear of sterility. God, please lend me another five! It was an epic journey like in the poem
Paradise Regained …

“Goddamn!” John says. “More like
Pardise Lost!”

“I saw paradise last night. And I saw
Paradise Lost
. I had struggled to hold on to it, as it was moving away from me. Life and Lang. Moving out of reach, like a wave in the receding sea. My experience in this journey is limited. Fantasy and poetry. I had to use imagination. I bite it. I eat it. But I lost it. And then, I regained it. But Lang is stronger, so I lost it. And then, it was morning. Morning came as a relief. A night of pain from a toothache or a pain in the stomach, morning always saves you. Things look more real in daylight. And when morning broke, Jesus Christ,
Paradise was Regained for
the second time …”

“Goddamn!”

“I was fagged-out. The bed was soaking-wet. I had been suffering from a fever of impotent sexual journeying. An old man. The water poured off my body.
The parameters, the location, the environment, the circumstance, and the atmosphere itself, the meaning of the journey undertaken on that bed remained untouched, and it passed my understanding. Lang remained untouched and unconvinced. Goddamn! Man, it was still pretty. As beautiful and new an experience as a new shilling. Fantasy and poetry.”

“Goddamn!” John says.

He says this as if he himself is going through the exertion of the narrative, as if he himself has endured the details of my journey over the landscape of the story.

“Are you dreaming this story for my benefit? Like, where are you coming from? She’s dead, man! She’s dead!”

“All during this time, I could not concentrate on anything else. It is only smells that I was smelling, scents that I was scenting, juices I was tasting, spasms I’m spas-madizing and feeling, vibrations I vibrating, vibrations, pillow, mattress and springs, the experience that I experienced last night. I remember antique furniture all of a sudden. For no reason. I remember old, expensive plate with flowers painted round the rim, in gold and blue. I remember crystal and silver and lace. I remember champagne. I remember white wine. I remember paisley. I remember silk from India or China or from worms and cotton in the island. I remember brassieres. I remember lace. I remember the leather in her boots. I remember a bath towel thick as a steak from Bigliardi’s on Church
Street. I remember a white cotton dress that hangs from her body. I remember coffee from the hills of Kenya, and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, perked and jerked. I remember the flash of a red pair of underwear that was transparent, that you could see through, delicate as the web a spider is spinning, lace that you could punch with your eyes and see through from here, all the length, all the time to the coming of an orgasm. I remember her eyes were as thin as a slit of glee pressed tight in anticipation, and full of tears. I remember the beauty of her skin. I remember a tattoo on her left bubbie, her left breast. And I remember the tattoo high on her thigh, near to her … her, and seeing that it would have to have been
shaved
for a tattoo to have been placed so delicately and precariously
there
, and I touched the tattoo and I touched
there
, like a man grasping the straw of his surviving rescuer. The first tattoo and the second tattoo were both of red roses with two leaves of green, each. I remember the dunlopillo, the foam-rubber mattress of her vibrating bed. I remember incense.
Tisiang Tsang incense from Beijing, China
. I remember hearing my name called-out in chilling, plaintive, forcing screams of someone drowning, like how my uncle was drowning, someone going-down, down, down, in a voice that hasn’t much strength left in it from the struggle of surviving, a voice not too loud, because breath and life are at a premium. I remember the depths of desperation and desolation. And the heights of righteousness. I remember, I remember, I remember.”

“Goddamn! God-damn! God-damn!”

“I remember yesterday, as clear as if it is happening now. Here. Last night is tonight.
Now
. But. There. Last night. It was like a trough of glory and damnation.”

“Goddamn!”

“I tell you that it was a jewel. From now-on, I may not live, may not be alive for
one
more day, and don’t want to be, to be able to tell my testimony of confession to anybody else but you …”

“Goddamn!”

“I was fagged-out.”

“You was
fucked
, brother!”

“I can’t remember when I started-out on this journey. And I can’t remember when it came to its end. I can’t remember anything more. Perhaps what I just described to you is a dream or a fantasy. Dreams and fantasy at my age are the same as fact. Something like being able to make an imagination come true, like wanting to be with the woman from China. Perhaps what I just narrated is nothing more than what my mother calls a “friction” of my imagination. I use it to light the loneliness I live with. The boredom. Nothing so good in real life has ever happened to me. Not even in a dream.”

“Ain’t no dream, brother. You was
fucked
!”

“It is a dream. Take it as a dream.”

“Dream, my black ass! You was fucked, brother. Goddamn!”

“It could be a dream.”

Outside, on the white street, the darkness of night is falling. The lights in the bar are now visible in the changing light. The sharp, bright, blinding reflection of the snow outside is now turned into the soft, short, glowing movement of flames from matches and cigarette lighters. Voices are soft. The sound of drinks, glass and ice and bottles placed on tables, is as decorous as white wine served in crystal and placed on a mat on a table-top, on the silent, almost noiseless linen tablecloth. A woman gives off a giggle, remembering perhaps a happy moment in the long day at the office, which has ended just a few moments ago. A man speaks in a voice as seductive as his hand which passes stealthily over the colours in her winter shawl. She removes the hand travelling like a spider. The blood-warming colours of her shawl and the comfort in the bar are disturbed, but only for a moment, when a man and a woman enter, and the door is left open. Outside is the evening. Time has changed through the passing of hours, how many hours I do not know, and John is not interested; but it is still sharp and bright and blinding on Yonge Street, the streetlamps hit against the undying whiteness.

“This Cutty Sark ain’t doing nothing for me,” John says. “What’s the time? Why don’t we try something else?”

“Gin,” I say.

“Martinis?”

The lights make all the faces in the bar visible now. There are women who sit together in groups of three
and four, taking drinks that are thick and white, and some that have slivers of fruits, cartwheels of orange and lemon and lime, and they remind me of the trials with drink at this time of year that are not resorted to when January comes, and of the avalanches of food, and the desperation of figure and form that must be squeezed into dresses of black and red and green, which had been gift-wrapped in the best intentions of gold and silver paper, now that the holidays are spent. Men, who do not have the same obsession, drink fast. They throw the other caution,
si vous buvez, ne prenez pas le volant
, to the cold winds. They ignore the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, and the police, disregarding in one gulp and puff the bold-typed mortal scare on two sides of their Player’s and Dunhills – Cigarettes cause cancer.
La cigarette cause le cancer–
and they send out clouds of smoke from their lips, and these float in the reddish, warm light while they cough. All this is taking me back to the beach, when we two men, young boys then, sat un-smoking on the sand the colour of the conch-shell, ignorant that a cigarette in French is feminine, and the cancer it causes is masculine. We sat, then, looking into those clouds above the green sea, seeing forms and imagining shapes in them that quench our anxiety for departure. Our plans were as loosely shaped as those clouds, and these puffs of cigarette smoke floating above and around us. I think of years ago, but in this country, when I was in the same shape as John with no money, and the Gas and
Electricity people turned their services off; and of that one time, one week before Christmas when I had to dress in suit and long-sleeved sweater, winter coat, scarf, gloves, and Russian-bear winter hat, two pairs of ugly grey construction socks with red bands around their tops, stomping from one room to the next. I walked up and down like a soldier marching in shivering fear on a battlefield in a similar theatre of war to those that Napoleon fought in and lost. After this exhaustion, I remained colder than if I had been outside in the glistening street with vapours of clouds spewing from my mouth. In this room, in this bar, the softness of the lights and Christmas on our breaths warm me and join me again, after all these years, to that afternoon when the two of us sat on the sand and the warm sea water cleaned the grains of conch-shell sand from between our toes, and we looked at the whiter clouds playing over the green fortune-telling sea, up into the blue skies. I see things now as if for the first time. The lights come alive and I can see them now, although they have been burning the whole time.

“What do you do?” John asks. It takes me a while to realize that he is speaking. “What do you do?”

“Now?”

“These days.”

“What do you mean?”

“These days, what do you do?”

“Killing ants,” I tell him.

“Killing ants?”

“They’re eating-down my house.”

“So, you walk around in your house, killing ants with a spray-gun? What kind o’ ants? Red ants? Brown ants? Ants that sting, stinging ants?”

“Wood-ants.”

“Goddamn! Run that by me one more time. You. Walk around your house. Killing wood-ants. Goddamn! Is this what this country is doing to you, brother? At your age? After all these years? You don’t know where you’re going when you walk out on the street, you say. You walk around your house, benning-down, looking for goddamn ants to kill, you say. And you say they’re eating-down the house? And you talk about this Chinese woman who I don’t know if she is dead, or alive. Don’t you have to find the direction the ants’re going in
first
, before you can kill them?”

“Picture me, since you’re so interested … There I am, sitting down in a chair, with a large can marked ‘Black Flag,’ and …”

“Black Flag?
Goddamn!”

“…  and with a Scotch and soda in my other hand, and I find myself just watching and waiting. I find myself sitting in that chair, looking at the patterns in the carpet, at the patterns, like knots in the floorboards, waiting, and
sudden-so!
I see a son of a bitch! a’ ant! And I uncover the top of my Black Flag easy, easy now, eeeasy … and I look again to see if the knot in the floorboard is an ant. Or if it is part of the pattern, or if the pattern in the carpet has changed from my eyes
focusing on it. And I look hard … eeeassy, easssy, ’cause the son of a bitch has ears and eyes, and the son of a bitch plays tricks, plays dead, and tries to fool me. And when the son of a bitch moves,
squish!
Got it! The son-of-a-bitch starts wriggling and walking in circles!”

“God-damn!”

“And I have to hold my Scotch and soda far from the sprays, in case this damn Black Flag has-in something that is detrimental to my drink.”

“Black Flag!”

“Black Flag, with a flag attached to a mast, like any flag you see flying on buildings. The Stars and Stripes for instance, or the Canadian flag, the red maple leaf. But Black Flag is a
black
flag, not of a country, but with ‘black flag’ written in big, white capital letters on the can.”

“Black Flag
. Goddamn!”

“For ants. Ant, cockroach and earwig killer, with chlorpyrifos. Continuous killing action for sixty days
.”

“You memorized all that?”

“Yeah.”

“Sixty days? Goddamn!”

“Continuously killing those sons-o’-bitches!”

“But what is a’ earwig?”

“I never looked it up in the dictionary.”

“I could tell you about cockroaches. In Brooklyn … well, no need to say more. But I have never come-across earwigs. Cockroaches I know. In Brooklyn, goddamn, they be the most multitudinous motherfuckers on
earth! You kill one, and you see five more. You bring-in the exterminators with their fancy equipment for killing roaches, and they kill hundreds. And the minute they take your cheque and pack-up their high-tech gadgets and drive-off, Jesus Christ! Then, you
really see
cockroaches! In their millions! Goddamn! As if the roaches love the exterminator fluid! But you and your can o’ Black Flag …”

“In the summer, I am sitting on the front steps, watching people pass. All kinds of people. Women pass. Men pass. I watch women pass, watching women walking and holding hands with women, men with men, and kissing … yes, kissing! Men making passes at women. Prostitutes at the corner …”

“I’ll be goddamned!
Where
is your house situated? Such lovely broads as I see during my short stay in Toronto, and some even at the hospital, such pretty broads kissing one another? Goddamn waste o’ flesh!”

“…  and men passing and holding hands, and kissing, and sometimes …”

“Getouttahere! Goddamn! And you holding-on to your can o’ Black Flag!”

“…  and if I take my eyes off the sons-o’-bitches …”

“The women? Or the wood-ants?”

“And if I take my eyes off the sons-o’-bitches for one second! Those goddamn wood-ants, as you would say. The ants, I mean. And when I stop looking at the two women kissing in front of my railing, a
stream
of ants, marching in line. Big ones. With little bags attached,
their guts full of the dust of wood from eating-down and eating-up my blasted house!”