Their parents tried to lift the children's palpably heavy spirits by embracing the few local customs with enthusiasm, and with Halloween just around the corner, their mother brought them to a gargantuan drugstore and told them they could each choose whatever they wanted from the aisle of masks and costumes. Dragging their feet across the linoleum tiles, their first time ever with shoes on in a store, they stood in front of the synthetic jack-o'-lanterns. Neil lifted his arm as if it were unbearably heavy and chose the mask of a sad scarecrow. His sister a sad clown. When the big night came, they were pulled moping from house to house, walking on the implausibly long streets amid zombies, Draculas, ghosts, passing one another with little ceremony. When it was over, he and his sister traded candy on their living room floor, sliding like-groups of crinkling wrappers across at each other with the detachment of shifting commodities on the stock exchange.
There were two things that lifted Neil out of this slump. Springtime, when tiny but innumerable green flames began unfurling from every dead branch in the nation (turns out they weren't dead after all); and, two years after that first spring, when he got his hands on a car magazine, lent to him by a friend at school. Initially, the magazine helped transport him to the free and glorious sensations of driving in his father's Hudson, which the family, “perversely” to Neil's mind, also left behind. But then he realized that the magazine gave him an instant connection to other boys in his grade, as well as something to talk about with his father, something that put them on common ground for the very first time. He came to discover that the interest in cars was a kind of club where, if you had a bit of knowledge, or even a preference, you were automatically admitted into its innermost circle, its opinionated fraternity. His parents noted this budding interest, and he soon had subscriptions to several monthly and bi-monthly automobile publications, which were then left lying around the house, pages spilled open, photos of metal with gracile curves, pinups in his room.
When, in 1969, his father decided to buy a new car, Neil went along with him through every stage of research, test driving, selection, and purchase. Neil felt he could judge a vehicle best by how things looked from the driver's seat, carefully examining the interior, the dials and gauges. He preferred dashes that were clean, uncluttered, seats that were non-leather, supportive, comfortable. When his father had finally signed the papers at a dealership, Neil was sure that the decision was made more or less on his recommendations. He was happy to have been of service.
While growing up in Toronto, in the well-to-do residential area of the Annex, he'd had to find ways of integrating into city life, and when he couldn't, he utilized the newfound and applauded skill of not complaining. But that didn't mean that South Africa wasn't in the back of his mind; it was, and at times even came to the forefront, entered his conversations, became something that was important to highlight. “Me? No actually, I wasn't born here. I'm from SoewthAvrikuh.” He liked how even the mere word “Africa” carried with it a certain exoticness, an instant flare, consistently conjuring images of leaping gazelles and elephants trampling the savannah, all to the mental soundtrack of bongo drums and monkey calls. Yeah, he seemed to imply whenever the wild continent was mentioned, that was him, that was Neil; he was raised there, was a direct product of that striking place; he'd
lived
those images his friends were conjuring. Whatever they happened to be.
Once or twice he was confronted with strange and slanderous references to his homeland, which, because they didn't make any sense at all (and were probably based out of a more than understandable jealousy), he'd thoughtlessly dismissed. Until he was in a classroom at the age of fifteen and his social studies teacher handed out the first hard evidence, sliding it lightly onto his desk. It was a photocopied article from
Time Magazine
, about apartheid, which, undeniably, was a word that Neil had heard before. It was even a word that was inherently understoodâin the way that his relationship to the coloureds who had helped raise him was understood, in the way that mystery was understood. Without questions.
Before the class was through, he'd found himself in a desperate argument with the teacher, then with other classmates, the whole time standing firm behind the claim that
Time Magazine
was a sham, that it was making uninformed accusations on the actual, true-to-life
reality
of apartheid. Neil knew better. He was born and raised there, wasn't he? He'd seen this phenomenon first-hand, and everything was fine with it, he was sure, he
knew
. He was SoewthAvrikun.
He knew, that is, in the same way he had been sure he knew Cedric. Naivety is always obvious, glaring, tacit; unless it's your own. That day, at the age of fifteen, Neil began his personal, complicated, and three-decade-long slide from a head-held-high pride about his native country to a head-hung-low shame. From a boy who shouted out his origin above the squeaking of swing sets to a receding-hairline insurance broker on the golf green, leaning over his putter, hunched, small, and mumbling the same country name under his breath before quickly changing the subject.
As the topic of the injustices in South Africa mounted in the mid-to-late 1980s, pop culture picking it up and running with itâblockbuster films, television series, tabloid news programs, songs, concerts, venuesâfingers began pointing. And it seemed like shame, as always, was appointed to the only people who kept their fingers to themselves. This, Neil found, helped let Canadians off in a way, let them conveniently forget about the long list of things that they had to be ashamed of from their own past. True, they weren't loud with their accusations, weren't belligerent, but they did make it clear that they believed they were in the right, and that, presumably, they always had been. It was a quiet pride. But it happened to be just boisterous enough to drown out the creaking rust of their wrongs.
Yes, South Africa had given Neil shame. But that wasn't all it had given him. Because what he had come to understand, and in the last few months more than ever, is that there were other things, things that permeated quietly, things that seeped in from the different places we've lived, the different skies we've walked beneath. Things that, for Neil, had to do with songs that his nanny had sung to him in another language entirely but whose meaning he had nevertheless understood. Things that had to do with the way sunlight could somehow move, ever so slightly, beads of glass that were suspended on a string. And something about those beads of glass themselves, and the way they could split the sunlight that was moving them, separate it, and lay it out in all its vibrant, disregarded fragments. Neil had been given a way to hold on to mystery, which he had almost forgotten along the way. Thankfully, he was able to recall just enough, enough for it to filter into his thoughts on this noon hour, January 30, 1991, while sitting across from Cedric Johnson. Just enough to allow for this strange conversation to take place, allow Neil to consider these claims of his now ex-business partner as being a real possibility. A small and archaic piece of him that could afford this one suspended moment of believing Cedric.
Cedric cleared his throat, looked into his lap for a second, scratched his chin. “And you know,” he said abruptly, “while I'm at it, there's another thing. You remember that one night, when we were all over at your place and wereâinto the cognac, was it?âand I made a complete ass of myself? God, we were liquored. And there was that . . . I mean, when me and your wife were in the kitchen for that long while, mixing drinks and . . . And you remember all this?”
“Yeah?”
“Well, I just wanted you to know that . . . nothing happened.”
“I know.”
A pause. “How do you know?”
“Because she told me.”
“And you believed her?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.”
Cedric looked into his lap again, and this time noticed something. He stretched his back out against the chair behind him, running his hands over his belly. “Guess I was a bit thinner back then too, eh?”
“Thinner?” asked Neil, trying to assess Cedric's paunch that was protruding under the table.
“Well, thinner . . . than I become, I mean.”
“Oh. Right.” Neil broke off to look around the dining lounge, which was really beginning to fill up. This was crazy really. The conversation, the things exchanged, the suspension of reality. “Well, must say, whatever
is
going on in that head of yours, it's good . . . I mean, good . . . that you . . . kind of came clean, I guess.” He turned back to Cedric, who looked suddenly quite concerned.
Cedric snatched his glass of water from the table, the ice tinkling against the sides, his eyes darting around the room as he drank from it. Then he put the glass down a touch too hard on the table, trying to smile. “Sorry?” he said, unfolding his napkin to dab his mouth. “Wha'd'you . . . wha'd'you meanâcome clean?” He looked away quickly, scanning the room, pausing at one of the waiters, who was glaring at him while pouring a glass of wine at another table.
Neil observed him for a long minute, noting the slight changes in his gestures, in the nuances of his body language, until he'd watched him long enough to know. He let out a half-snicker, shaking his head, opening his menu. “Nothing. Forget it. I didn't mean anything.”
They were words Cedric looked relieved to hear.
“So.” Neil ran his finger down the entrees, trying not to look up from the list. “What'r'you gonna have?”
They ate their meals, exchanged pleasantries and chitchat about nothing in particular, and when the waiter stiffly placed the bill on the table, Cedric slapped his Visa onto the billfold without reading the total, signed it a minute later, and they stood to leave.
They shook hands in front of the restaurant, standing on the long-running sidewalk of Church Street, Neil offering Cedric a knowing, loaded smile, which found Cedric again becoming unnerved and ruffled, citing the cold as the reason for his hasty retreat. “Well, I'm off before I freeze to death. Talk soon, old boy,” he'd said, turning his back with a final wave.
Neil waved at him in turn. “Talk soon.”
Neil's car was parked at the curb, and he hopped over the slush ruts, got in, and waited for the engine to warm, looking in the rear-view mirror. Cedric was gone now. And once the exhaust of Neil's
SUV
had clouded his view, he shifted it into drive and pulled out, his all-terrain tires plowing easily through the slush. He looked down between his arms to check the gauges, the focal point of his clean and uncluttered dash. No warning lights. Everything was fine. He turned left onto Maitland, worked his buttocks deeper into the seat. They were non-leather seats, supportive, comfortable. He could hear the radio just beneath the purr of the engine (a 3.9-litre, fuel-injected, 8-cylinder); it was calmly discussing the Hudson Bay Company's decision to stop selling furs. He switched it off, turned onto Yonge. Checked his gauges again. Everything was fine.
Everything was fine.
The rocks under the water were as speckled eggs
and noticing that, I noticed the swallows
taking no notice of me,
skilfully catching insects over the springtime lake,
swooping and diving in abrupt curves
until they'd caught one.
Then, somehow, they'd signal to their mate
who would meet them halfway, between
their catch and the nest.
And just before the two birds collided they would
camber up, until their bodies had stalled,
hanging there in an aerial balance,
where, at that deadpoint of slipping for an instant
out of gravity's fingers, in the pause of their
hovering weightless, beak to beak,
the insect was handed off. Then, dropping to the
surface with a twirl, a flutter, both would
glide away in opposite directions.
Such exactitude, delicate choreography in rearing their
chicks, squeaky with thankless mouths wide,
gawky and huddling in wait.
Thinking that our dance to do the same had so little elegance,
I picked one of the speckled stones from the water
to take home, but put it back for its weight.
Melissa pulled a sweater and the road atlas out of the car, slammed the door in the humming quiet of the gas station's fluorescent lights, and ran her finger along the red line of the highway as if to measure how far they were from Thunder Bay. Just then a sizeable moth plopped onto the map next to her hand and became instantly still, probably sensing that there was something large and breathing hovering over it. The moth was pale green with a delicate maroon outline and a set of discerning eyes painted onto its wings. Two long lobes dropped from the mimicked face like tusks, the insect's body in the centre making up a kind of furry nose. It was the most striking moth Melissa had ever seen, and she found herself looking up at the lights, as if to find more of them there. Once, her friend Nathan (some might have referred to him as an old boyfriend), who was a great collector and retainer of factoids and useless trivia, had told her about the way moths had evolved to navigate by the strongest celestial light: the moonâif it wasn't newâor one of the brighter stars, Sirius, Arcturus, Alpha Centauri. Which is why, he'd said, when they pass by an artificial light, naturally assuming that it's going to stay in the same place in the sky, directly above them, for example, they have no choice but to circle it in order to keep it there, at that one fixed point in their vision. They're not, contrary to popular belief, attracted to light; they just can't seem to get past it, disoriented by their only means of orientationâlike an arctic airplane heading continually west in a spiral around the magnetic pole. They're drawn into danger by a set of intuitions that they know only how to trust, into a blindness by the very way they see. And there was some aspect in that, considered Melissa, folding the map as the moth flew away to bounce off the lights again, that was really, and quite wonderfully, human.