But there was also something horribly freeing about Chris pleading guilty and beginning his sentence. It reminded me of Kafka’s
The Metamorphosis.
There is the grim, sick confinement of the man who has become an insect, and you’re horrified for him and horrified of him, and you hope for a miracle that will cure his condition or end the nightmare. But the miracle never comes and the condition becomes harder to stand. You want him
not to die but when he does die, when he’s gone, you are relieved, and you walk out into the sunshine for the first time in months, stirred by the breeze, with a lighter heart. Maybe you hate yourself for this. And maybe you hate yourself because you don’t.
Was this what lightness demanded?
We decided to go out for a change. We were sick of hiding in my apartment, as though we were contagious, and went to a bar in Halifax to be among people, and perhaps less among ourselves. It was a Tuesday night and the bar was not one we’d spent much time in back in the day. The baseball game was on. It was the World Series between the Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Giants. I paid more attention to the game than Susan. The Oakland A’s were a juggernaut that year, and it was awe-inspiring to watch a lineup that included Rickey Henderson, Jose Canseco, and Mark McGwire, as though Achilles, Hercules, and Theseus had decided to play ball. Around the third inning, a guy I knew from the rickshaw shed, named Steve, appeared in front of our table. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt. He had a leather bracelet around his wrist and a silver hoop through one ear. I didn’t like him, particularly, but I said hello. He told me to go fuck myself, and he greeted Susan by calling her a cunt.
Susan’s face went pale. She looked as though she’d been punched in the stomach.
I asked what the fuck was his problem.
I saw you two holding hands, he said. He had a look of disgust on his face, and at some level, I was amazed, after all that had been said and done in the shed, all the lying and the cheating and the misogyny and the sexual escapades, that any member in good standing could be disgusted by anything done by another.
I also couldn’t remember holding hands. That was how unconsciously we must have done it.
We’re friends, I said.
I bet you fucking are, he said, and he put his foot on my chair and pushed it away from the table. I felt as though I had been shifted by a giant.
Please don’t, Susan said.
Shut your fucking mouth, you skank, Steve said.
I stood up.
It was impossible to stop his fury. He came at me with both barrels, two fists flying, and I took punches to the head and the mouth and the nose and the neck while only trading weak and flailing shots in return. I remembered hearing Susan screaming. I crumpled to the floor and he began to stomp on my back and kick me in the ribs with the sharp toe of his shoe. Each punch, each kick was an explosion of gratitude. I deserved every blow.
The bartender and a couple of his companions stopped him. Steve demanded that I be thrown out onto the street. We know you did it, you rat bastard! he yelled. Why the fuck aren’t you in prison too, huh? Why did Chris take the whole fall?
Nobody called the police. Nobody moved to help me except Susan. She was weeping and shaking as she grabbed my jacket and keys. We helped each other out.
You deserve each other! Steve yelled after us. You’re both fucking cunts!
Susan
wanted to take me to the hospital. I didn’t want to go. It was difficult to breathe, but if my ribs were broken, there was
nothing that could be done. I could move my arms and turn my neck and I had not lost any teeth. I just needed sleep.
She lay with me on the sofa bed. It sagged badly with one occupant. It was almost impossible for two. You needed to cling to the edge so as not to slip into a huddled middle, poked at by springs. I almost wished that she would leave, except I was as low and lonely as I’d ever been in my life. I missed my friend badly. I remembered the time, all those years ago, when Dusty had kicked me in the face and broken my arm. Only Chris had called for justice. Now Chris was gone, and the beatings were back.
Do you think it will ever get better? she asked.
And because I hated myself and hated her too, I said, I hope not.
She seemed ready for my cruelty. She seemed to need it in that moment.
The next week, while San Francisco was still paralyzed by an earthquake and the world could only watch, she tried to kill herself with pills. It was a half-hearted attempt, one of those so-called cries for help. After she recovered, her parents sent her across the continent to Vancouver, where she moved in with an aunt. I heard that she began classes at the university that winter. I never saw her again.
I was lonely, and I was not well liked. I had a lab partner
who didn’t know me, and we went to the local art house cinema. Milan Kundera got me laid. And when I said that the lightness of that moment was a blessed relief, a visit by a nymph who, for one night, held a bowl over my forehead to catch the dripping venom, that does not adequately capture the pain I was in. Without sounding any more melodramatic than I already do, how can I describe how close I was to killing myself as well? I don’t mean that I was going to jump off a bridge or swallow a bottle of pills, but I wanted my life to be destroyed. I looked for other people and other means to do it for me. I drank as hard as you can drink. (Like father, like son.) I got myself beat up whenever possible. (Each punch, each kick, an explosion of gratitude.) I did it because my friend was in prison and I was not. The light one was heavy, the heavy one walked lightly away.
How do you live with your own lightness when someone is willing to carry so much weight?
When
the semester ended, I bought a backpack, gave up my apartment, and told my parents I was going to travel in Southeast Asia. My father, who had never understood me, understood me less than ever now. But he gripped my hand and then hugged me and told me that he knew I’d find my way. I was less certain of this than ever, and skeptical of his born-again lightness, but I will forever cherish the weight of that embrace. I wish I’d known how much an ending it was.
I flew to Hong Kong. I arrived at night, dazzled by the lights of that very foreign city, and made my way through its dense glamour and money into its dingiest squalor. I rented a bed in a room with five other men, all migrant workers, in an apartment complex. My window overlooked a wide garbage chute that must have been created when the neighbouring buildings got conjoined. In the evenings, a rat the size of a cat would appear on the sill of the open window and stare at the food being cooked on the hot stove. One of the men, a Bangladeshi who spoke English, always said hello to the rat and called him Charlie. I could tell this was done for my benefit.
I
bought a typewriter in Hong Kong from an old Chinese man who spoke English with a British accent. The shop was at the top of the stairs in a building that was bursting with other stores, on a busy side street near the stock exchange. The old man asked me what kind of work I was doing, and I told him I was a writer. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone that my work was writing. He asked me where I was living in Hong Kong, and I told
him I was not living here and not staying for long. I was travelling. I wanted the typewriter to fit in my backpack.
You travel with this? he asked in astonishment. It’s too heavy!
I told him I could handle the weight, but that I would need extra ribbons.
At
airport security, they became upset by the unusual device I was lugging. Everyone was on edge because of Salman Rushdie and assorted terrorist threats. They pulled out my typewriter and exposed it accusingly, demanding to know what it was. It was very odd to see a typewriter emerge from a backpack and I could understand their confusion. Dissociated from the harmless act of typing, linked to the dangerous act of bringing strange items onto planes, it seemed sinister, even threatening.
It’s a typewriter, I said, not a bomb.
And that seemed to bring us all to our senses and made everyone laugh.
But later, as I typed, and each key punch exploded off the page, I was no longer sure it wasn’t a bomb after all.
I
flew to Thailand. In Bangkok, I stayed on Khao San Road in a guest house where I had my own room. The walls between the rooms were thin plywood and I could hear everything around me, the coughing, the farting, the fucking, the flicking of lighters. The restaurant on the ground floor was a collection of tables in a garage open to the street. Like every restaurant, it showed
movies every night.
Apocalypse Now. Easy Rider.
If you didn’t like what was playing, you could stroll down the street and catch a different movie somewhere else. The air was layered with smells and the sounds of Western music and bleating horns. The streets were filled with vagabonds, and I got some solace walking anonymously among them. Everyone had come from somewhere else. Everyone was going somewhere different. No one knew what I’d done, who I’d hurt, or how much I dreaded every new morning.
One night, I forced myself to sit through
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
I bought a train ticket the next day to head south for the islands and look for Rivers. I figured if anyone could understand what had happened and how I could somehow manage to use that in my writing, it was either him or Joseph Conrad.
A
suspicious robbery and homicide detective might ask, Where did he, this uncharged friend of a bank robber, who’d needed one last job, get the money to travel the world?
In Halifax, after Susan tried to kill herself, I received a letter from Chris. It was the first prison letter he’d sent me. My hands shook when I opened it.
It was a long letter, written in stages and in different places—remand, county, maximum. The type of paper changed every two or three pages, too. He apologized for not sending it sooner. Stamps were hard to come by. Sometimes the letter was detail oriented, as though he were trying to sort through the confusion of what he was experiencing by relaying as many facts
as possible. Sometimes he confessed how frightened he was, and how he was learning what to say and not to say, and whom he could be friends with and whom he should stay away from. Sometimes it was funny. He had a way of making light of the most awful fears. He told me about some of the inmates he was getting to know, and what he’d learned about what they were in for. He told me that he received a big pile of forwarded mail when he arrived and that among the envelopes was his orientation package for police academy and a late notice and dire warning for a hefty unpaid credit card bill. Both institutions, he said, would be a tad surprised by where their correspondence had ended up. He did not mention any lack of letters from me.
Intermittently, he talked about how much he missed Susan, and asked me to look after her. He must not have known what she had done to herself, or that she and I had gotten together. He wished that he could understand why she wouldn’t write or respond to his letters. He imagined it must have been just too hard on her. She probably had no idea how hard that was on him.
I know she’s going to need to move on without me, he wrote, because she sure as shit isn’t going to wait twelve years. Nor would I ask her to. So I wish nothing but the best for her, and I’m sorry for what I put her through. You too.
He’d heard from some of the boys that I was being blamed for his predicament, and he was doing his best to send word that it wasn’t true. He’d caused his own problems. Still, he was touched by how many people had written him letters of friendship and support, even if they often included details about how they were going to torture and kill me.
Then he told me that he wanted and expected me to be a great writer by the time he got out. If he was going to do his time, survive this fucking hellhole, and emerge with a life worth living, I had to live up to my part of the bargain too.
He signed off: Start writing, motherfucker.
I
read and reread the letter often over the following week. I worked my way through it so many times that it began to dry and yellow. Then I noticed an odour to some of the pages and realized those were the ones that were most yellow. The odour was distinctive, acrid, and familiar. I realized suddenly that it was urine.
I put down the paper. I felt as though I’d been exposed suddenly to the degradation and squalor of the prison. How and why had piss gotten on his letter? Had an inmate desecrated it? Had a guard? I no longer wanted to read it, or touch it.
In the middle of the night, waking out of unsettled sleep, I finally understood. I found a lighter and held the letter up to the flame and read the other message he had written.
I
stood by the side of the lake three nights later, in early November, the water so cold it frightened me. I wore long underwear and track pants and a ski mask and gloves, and I carried a long knife and had a flashlight taped to my arm. I turned on the flashlight, stuck my arm in the water, held my breath, and pushed forward.
I swam all the way to the floating dock.
When I got there, I wasn’t sure I could take the cold any longer. I lay on the wood and tried to catch my breath and stop my heart from racing. I thought, I’m going to have a heart attack out here, lying on this fucking dock. Summoning whatever will I had left, I rolled to my side, shone the light underneath the dock and stuck my face in the water to try and see. I couldn’t find what I was looking for. I took the knife and I slid back in and went under and held my breath and squeezed my eyes tight as I sawed at the rope that kept the floating dock tethered to the concrete block far below. My hand and my arm and my chest and my cock went numb. I feared that I would drop the knife. Finally, the rope frayed and separated and I felt the umbilical cord of our life detach. I pushed the floating dock to shore, kicking and churning the water behind it.
No other kids would ever use the dock again, I thought, as I flipped it over. Fuck them, I said out loud, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. I was doing them a favour.