The Republic of Nothing (29 page)

Gwen woke up a little groggy but feeling cheerful. We were given some pamphlets concerning potential problems and a phone number to call if we had any worries. They were very nice people at the clinic. I asked them to call me a cab because I had no idea if I'd succeed at simply walking out into traffic like the Americans could and waving one down. I led Gwen out to the noisy city street. When the cab stopped and asked where to, I hesitated. We would not go to the youth hostel after all, I decided. We would not sleep in separate rooms. That was all wrong. We would sleep together in the same bed.

“A hotel nearby,” I said. “Some place nice but not too expensive.”

The guy looked at us in his rear-view mirror. He looked at the name of the clinic on the doorway we had just come out of, smirked and bit down on a toothpick in his mouth. “You got it,” he said. He drove us eight, maybe nine blocks; clearly we had passed a dozen or so other hotels on the way, all of which didn't look too fancy, but I kept my mouth shut. The streets were full of university students and pretty freaky looking people — seemed like a lot of police too. Some of them were walking the streets, some sitting in patrol cars, others on horse back.

We were dropped off in front of a sooty brown brick hotel with a sign out front that said, “The Waverley.” I paid the driver and said nothing when he shook his head at Gwen and clucked his tongue. The desk clerk inside the dingy lobby was a very unusual looking man of about forty with yellowish, almost translucent skin that seemed like it was pulled too tightly over his skull. You would have thought him sinister if you did not look closely at his eyes. There was something about them — sad and compassionate, friendly even.

“We'd like a room,” I said. “A nice room.” Gwen stood
beside me. She looked very tired, very weary, almost as if she were pleasantly drunk. The clerk looked at her briefly and smiled — not the leer of the cab driver but something deferential and fatherly.

“Sign here please.” I took the pen and signed my name and Gwen's name, then put our address: Whalebone Island, Nova Scotia.

The clerk looked at what I had written. “My father was a worker on a ship once. It was a very bad company and they treated the men badly. When the ship came into port in Halifax, he complained to the authorities and the captain was arrested. A very bad ship, a bad man. In Nova Scotia, my father told me, you will find real people. That's what he called them.
Real people.
He visited ports all over the world and he said there were only a handful of places where he found real people. Are you real people?”

I wasn't expecting the litany to my home province. “Yes,” I said. “And those are our real names.” I wasn't sure if he was playing a game, accusing us like so many who had probably come here before, checking in without using their real names.

“Are you married?” he asked. I had been ready for this question but there was not a trace of accusation in his voice.

“No,” Gwen said. “But we've known each other for a long time. We belong together.” She said it as if in a dream. I felt suddenly so proud, so happy. I looked the clerk right in the eye and there was no judgement. His eyes sparkled with a distant fire.

“Of course you do. You are real people. Real people be-long together. Here is your key. Top floor.”

We took the ancient elevator to the top floor and I led Gwen down the hallway to our room. It was an old, run-down but surprisingly clean hotel. Cheap, but somehow honest. A surprise. And then an even greater surprise. When I opened the door to our room, I saw that it was some sort of large, well lit suite of rooms with a magnificent view of the park below.
Gwen yawned and looked around with a sleepy angelic smile on her face. “It's beautiful,” she said. And it really was. Everything was perfectly old. My guess would be 1930s. Things were shabby but neat, authentic but not improved. Gwen zeroed in on the bed and waltzed like a somnambulist to it and collapsed. She was exhausted and her body needed rest.

I closed the door, walked to the bed and lay down beside her. She was in a near fetal position as I tucked up around her, feeling her warmth, meditating on her soft, childlike breathing. I hugged her and she squirmed in a most comfortable way, and despite the strangeness of our day and the less than romantic nature of our circumstances, everything now seemed perfect. We were together, alone. I loved her very much. We were boyfriend and girlfriend, husband and wife; we were two people who needed each other very badly and had found our way to ourselves.

As I closed my eyes on the impossibly neat but tattered 1930s suite, I fell asleep and travelled far into some deep warm mysterious universe where nothing was tangible but light and voices. I recognized at once that this was some place familiar, a place of spirits, a domain that was one my mother must have known well. It was her other world. I was, for some reason, being given a glimpse into it. Voices were speaking; I could not understand the words. It was all indistinct, but I understood the nature of what I was being told; I had found, maybe for the first time in my life, a perfect moment. With Gwen I had found peace and contentment through love. The spirits around me were suggesting it would not last but the echo, the reverberation of that feeling, would linger with me forever. Then a solitary voice was asking me to look down.

I hadn't even realized that I was “up.” I looked down and saw my own body pressed against Gwen; we were lying there, cupped together, fully clothed on the bed, and I could read the message on my face: perfect peace. But where was
I
? Was I dreaming? Was I dead?
No, definitely not,
someone answered
more distinctly now. The voice was decidedly Nova Scotian in accent but I didn't recognize it. I wasn't even sure if it was a woman or a man. As I looked down on us sleeping, I suddenly grew frightened. I felt as if I might fall from my height, but a hand reached out and steadied me.
Am I about to be punished?
I asked. I remembered the abortion and how we had come to the decision, that in the end it seemed like the right and logical thing to do. But was I wrong? Had we performed some grievous sin and was I now about to be penalized?
No,
came the answer.
Nothing like that. Nothing is ever lost. Everything goes on and on. The way it should. Only actions made without thought, without compassion, do any harm.

I was still looking down at myself asleep. The fear was gone and I had been returned to a mild euphoria tinged with what I had felt before. I looked up to find the voice again, but as I did, I felt myself falling like a rock and then I hit the bed. I bounced. Not high, but I bounced. Gwen pulled away slightly and tugged at the bed cover, pulling it up over her shoulder. I sat up and looked around. I shook my head, looked for the lights, listened for the voices. Nothing. A dream, I decided. An important dream, perhaps, but a dream. Nothing more. I covered Gwen more fully with a blanket and went into the bathroom to splash some water on my face.

I looked at myself in the mirror. The afternoon light was warm and yellow. In the mirror, I did not look like me. I remembered a boy there once. I remembered the face of a confused, excited, nervous little kid who expected miracles each day and often found them. Now there was this: a young man who needed a shave, the mug of a skinny but tough looking fisherman. It was the face of a stranger, but after a brief study, it became likeable, agreeable. I looked for the fear, because that fear, lurking in the corner of the eye and in the corner of the mouth was what had made me turn away from mirrors so often in recent years. Fear and doubt and an aura of impending doom. It had been the face of some poor kid who
was just about to receive bad news from a stranger. That was the old face. This one was different. Unsophisticated perhaps, the face of an island kid now too big for his old boots, but it had, I decided, character. I sat in an old overstuffed chair by Gwen and watched her sleep as the sun set over the tall buildings. As it grew dark, I saw bright lights turned on below in the park. I saw a gathering of young men and women. There were placards and a guy with a megaphone talking about the war. I heard shouts of anger and outrage and saw people thrusting fists into the air. There was a war on the other side of the world and outside the protestors were performing some sort of anxious ritual in an attempt to stop it. Gwen heard the guy yelling on the megaphone and woke up. She rubbed her hand across her stomach and came to stand by the window with me. I held her as we watched the pageant below. So much anger down there behind all the good intentions.

This was almost like watching TV or a movie. Clearly, it couldn't be real. How could there really be a war on? How could men be killing women and children, burning villages, dying of sniper wounds, falling into human traps or stepping on land mines, burning jungles and pouring living fire of Na-palm on families while I stood by a window with Gwen, feeling so peaceful and so full of love? Such things could not be. I can't remember if we said anything just then. There were syllables, there was the syntax of lips kissing, of shared breathing, of the soft rustle of hair, of the slide of her hand across my sandpaper chin. After a while, the outrage outside subsided and the crowds dispersed. I had hoped that the protestors concluded that a war could not possibly be raging on a night like this, a night so full of love for clearly, I had enough love in me right then to overwhelm any living soul within a six-mile radius. Then Gwen and I went to bed and fell asleep. No dreams returned save the vision of a warm dark sea lapping at the shore of Back Bay in the moonlight on the warmest night of the year.

When I woke the next morning, Gwen was already up and dressed. Someone had just slipped a newspaper under our door and she picked it up. I watched with one eye half open as she sat down and began to read. For a second I felt very adult, very old. I had just slept the night with Gwen. We were here together, like man and wife on a honeymoon in the strange old-fashioned honeymoon suite (that was my theory) and it all felt so right. I was lying there trying to think of something really romantic to say to Gwen to start the new day, and our new “life,” but my brain was fuzzy. She beat me to the punch and it wasn't what I was expecting.

“Nixon's bombing Hanoi again,” she said, holding the news-paper headline up for me to see. “It's one of the heaviest bombings yet. Right on the city. He's escalating the war.”

I rubbed my eyes, felt more than a little puzzled. The spell was broken. “How are you feeling?” I asked.

“I'm a little sore. But I'm okay. There's going to be a march today from Harvard to the Federal Courthouse. It starts in about an hour. I'd like to be in it.”

Downstairs, checking out, I asked the man about our room.

“Belonged to a big guy in the crime syndicate. Louis Longines was his name. You probably never heard of him. He killed lots of people, but he had a heart of gold. Kept his girl-friend there and treated her like a princess until she died in the flu epidemic. After that he paid the rent on the room for the next hundred years. Said all the owner of the hotel had to do was change nothing, keep it clean and, you know, special and every once in a while let it out to a nice couple that looks like maybe they deserve something extra nice.”

“Wow,” I said, handing over the money I figured I owed.

The clerk pushed back my hand. “It's okay. Compliments of Louis Longines. How was everything? Okay?”

“It was perfect,” Gwen answered. “Just perfect. Thanks.”

“What became of Louis Longines?” I asked. “He end up in prison or something?”

“Nab. Somebody shot him.”

“Oh,” I said. I suddenly felt a bond to this invisible, kindhearted criminal.

“Killed in World War Two by a German bullet. He was a major at the time. Go figure. It was the war that got him, not the crime. But he was a good guy. Real people. Like you two.”

“Yeah. Well, thanks.”

After a massive breakfast in a little coffee shop that only charged ninety-nine cents for the whoppingest breakfast I ever had, we walked on to Harvard and saw thousands of people, mostly our own age, rallying around the steps of a building. There was the feeling in the air of something about to explode.