Authors: Dionne Brand
Apparently you can weigh a thought, and different thoughts have different weights. Beauty is not weight. That is why it doesn’t stay long, that is why it doesn’t damage. The weight of beauty is negligible. Lia would like to be damaged by beauty. Wouldn’t we all? You forget it so quickly. If only
it could accumulate. If only it could pile up. Like, for instance, gathering together all the mornings when you wake up with not a care, not a worry. Perhaps beauty could adhere to the skin, be like sweat or hair. Over on the island Lia feels untethered. As if she’s connected to no one, and disconnected from everyone. She is only intent on this one thing now: beauty. And why? Because, it weighs less than pain. She’s seen it through a window, it is a combination of light and time, a random combination of light and time and matter.
Last night for instance Lia went foraging on the internet and found
Asterope markii
. This butterfly is indescribable. Black-blue, Dotted Glory, spotted on the left lower quadrant then its basal side is bright orange and red. What accounts for that in a butterfly? Then she saw
Asterope
pinned, spread-eagled on eBay for $3.99 each. She would have liked to buy one but, her hand hovering over the cursor, she thought better of it. That
Asterope
would not be sitting still on the edge of the Amazon forest, its appearance quiet and surprising.
Like the appearance of a certain thought. Did Mercede ever love her? And Germain. Her ghost. Or her nonno. Nonna? Had anyone ever loved her? Descending into the subway she is heavy with this thought. She’s blown away by
the thought: none of them. Wow.
Wow, wow, wow
. How careless. How careless they all are. And now, if she could unhook herself from them all. She thinks of a bat now,
Balionycteris maculata
, unhooking itself from its membrane. It is the smallest fruit bat in the world, she recalls again from last night’s foraging for beauty. She looks for its spots on her hands. Spotted-winged, it’s called. Its spots, fluorescent, marking its joints. This bat is perfect, and has thought of everything, including the day it will unhook itself from its membrane. It has marked its joints in case it forgets. And in the meantime that fluorescence is a warning to predators, she imagines, and a sign to family. The westbound train to Kipling glares through the tunnel. She will try to live as perfectly as this bat.
G
host and Bedri loop into the city again. They are aimless, indecisive, and the city is like the cardinal home of a boomerang. They can’t get adrift of the place.
“Gravity bends time,” Ghost says.
“A madman does not lack wisdom.” Bedri giggles.
“I know shit people don’t even think I know.” Ghost laughs. “If we slingshot back into town it’ll be a different day and a different time.”
“A difficult day?” Bedri mishears.
“A
different
day,” Ghost corrects. He is always having to correct. Correct Bedri, correct Mercede. Correct the guy
sitting in the Beemer.
Correct, correct, correct
. But he was not always certain that he was right and sometimes in the middle of him there is a hole.
“A different day,” Bedri nods. “A different day. I’m down with that. A person stands next to shade, not next to words.” Bedri’s hand is throbbing beyond pain. It will always throb. It will always feel as if it is melting; as if some fire ate it.
“Yep,” Ghost agrees, “you’re a fucking philosopher, man.”
“Like how … like if you come down in the right place.”
“Yeah, like we don’t see it right, but the earth right, has big bumps and then massive ditches where gravity is stronger. If we find the ditch …”
“We could go anywhere?”
“Anywhere.”
“Okay,” Bedri says. “Let’s do that.”
The car speeds up, Ghost’s foot hammering the gas pedal. He presses hard trying to turn gas into nuclear accelerant. If he could go fast enough they could ricochet down the Don Valley Parkway towards the lake. Maybe they would arrive in the city in another time.
They had no place to go, really. There was the imaginary idea of Montreal, there was the nothing time in their heads, the time when and where they would have what they
thought of as a life. Time hanging out, leaning against cars, smoking or drinking. Their clothes would be fine, maybe they’d be barebacked with six pack stomachs and gunning arms, maybe those arms would be wrapped around a girl who had long bare legs. Maybe they would lift those girls in the air with one hand.
The Audi was a dream box, and they both had the same dream. As long as the car kept running nothing would happen that was important or connected to anything outside of it. Ghost’s right hand clasped the gearshift. He was in
Contact
like Jodie Foster, going faster and faster, creating a black hole to shift time, to catch up with time and to go past time. Like their bodies were electrodes, or sound waves melded to the body of the Audi. Down in the city the lights were out. They heard a great pop when the Audi leapt and the city fell into darkness. Everything could suddenly be heard without engines and electricity. A child said, “Where’s Papa?” Then a woman said, “He’s down the road.” But the child said again, “Where’s Papa?” And a dog barked and airplanes tried to lift off, but all that could be done was grass growing at a terrible speed and all that could be heard was a long quiet.
The Audi is shaping into a nuclear cylinder and Ghost waxes about shit he knows for certain. “Energy is mass
times speed and at the speed of light mass and energy are like the same … and speed is distance divided by time. At the speed of light you can bend time … like make a black hole … if we drive at the speed of light …” It is perfect, Bedri thought. His hand is almost perfect in this time. The Audi digests this theory, the elegance of it. It takes 100,000 years to cross the galaxy at the speed of light, but waves, invisible events, violent waves hit all the time. Like Bedri’s fist, for example. Gravitational waves hit the earth, we only need the smallest change.
“Perfect, Blood,” Bedri agrees. It was like what happened to his hand and his coat. The bird flying out of it. Maybe the hand would subside if they could do this; if they could arrive on a different day. His perfect day would be what he wondered. Yeah, music would be in it for sure and a girl with a voice like Angie Stone.
“Angie Stone?”
“Yeah, Angie Stone, what’s wrong with that, Blood?”
“Old school man, Rihanna.”
“I don’t care. Angie Stone is mine.”
Anyway, they’d be at a club, like the Guvernment, and they’d just be cool. It would be summer and they’d walk across the street to the lake and just sit there. But the day would start clear and sunny and he’d look out his window
first and feel good. And there’d be no father coming home to darken the living room. He would get breakfast and play music and dance. And then he would shower and put on some clothes and call his girl with the voice like Angie Stone and they would spend the whole day cruising and stopping to have sex wherever they wanted.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing man, nothing. That’s my perfect day too. She’d be a freak though, my girl Rihanna. Like that.”
“No more fuckups.”
“No more dickheads.”
Anyone would want a day like that. Simple. The problem was gravity and the answer was gravity. Gravity held this simple possibility, it held them both to the time they were in and it could unleash them from time.
“We have the car.”
“Yeah, we can do this.”
“Anything. We can do anything, fuck it.”
The Audi sped up, it shone like a new skin, a glistening meteor skin. It cut in and out of slower sluggish cars. It spun into the southbound Don Valley Parkway heading for the waiting city.
I
f June had the chance to be born again she would prefer to be born in the countryside. There you notice how life is, however brutish it may be. Animals eat animals, grass dies away and springs back, some insects flourish one year then fail another, and that’s the way life is. But nothing one sees in the city truly instructs one as to the course of events; as to the flow of life and death in the natural world. One expects immortality in a city and that is delusional. And if someone were to say that indeed the city is not the natural world, June would say death is when we enter the natural world no matter how cunning the artifice of the
city. In the city death is abrupt; unexpected and unfortunate, most of all unfortunate. No one expects it and it is always taken as a tragedy. As if the joys of the city are so great and the juice of living there so sweet. In a city, it is as if you will miss some great moment if you die. In the countryside death is ragged and random, it doesn’t seem as selective and vindictive as in the city. June thinks it’s because everyone in a city thinks they’re so special. They think that they get a special visit from mayhem when in fact mayhem is normal in the world. The city tries to keep out randomness and mayhem, it is in a prolonged and constant battle with these two concepts. June observes the waste water of these two elements every time she steps outside. That is why she would rather have been born in the countryside.
More spacious, more organic, she thinks, sitting at Tim Horton’s. Sibyl might pass by. Bedri might pass by. It could have been random—his finding her and telling her the story, like a kindergarten boy running in and gushing out a set of words then rushing out again. He’s disappeared into the elements of mayhem and randomness. They are indeed elements, June thinks, like iron or mercury. Of course June knows she’s being a little precious. She laughs at herself out loud. Right now she is probably an odd-looking woman in
the coffee shop. She looks around and laughs again. Everybody in the coffee shop is odd-looking except those who have someone sitting across from them talking. Companionship makes you look sane. There could be two perfectly crazy people sitting together but that act of social mingling legitimises their sanity. Ridiculous, June thinks. This is another act of cultivation, of keeping out the mayhem. She will probably never hear from Bedri again. There are, these days, so many newspaper articles about him, or someone like him.
It’s not entirely impossible to make out what’s what in this city. The people underneath are living, muddling through. The people on top keep the people below in their sights. Predators are always aware of their prey. That’s what June thinks. This was the fatal lesson her father had learned. He had died of alcoholism. June didn’t go to the funeral. It was a long time ago in another country. Her mother had survived him and actually thrived on his insurance policy, living in a condo in Florida. At the beginning of his last illness her father had made lengthy, almost exuberant, notes on local entities, political and corporate, detailing accusations of undermined democracy, government collusion with oil companies and widespread graft. He said these mechanisms owed him for the wastage of his life. June received six
red ledgers in a parcel from her mother, a parcel also containing a rich black Christmas cake. A paradox. She imagines her mother laughing from Florida.
She thinks of herself as always alert though she is always taken a little off guard. Sibyl’s gone missing. Bedri’s gone missing. And sometimes she falls into a sentimentality, a stasis. She was aware that her view was dim then. Her mother had said as much on the phone when telling her of her father’s death. “You go about your business dear, don’t mourn, don’t worry with your father. He is in a better place.” June had kept silent on her end of the line. Was her mother being sarcastic? Then her mother said in a conspiratorial voice, “He thought too much about the world. You watch yourself. Don’t care so much about the world. He was too much in it. I would be dead myself if I thought like that.”
One thing must be said, June loved a good sunset. Once, there was a sunset so orange, due to pollution of course, but so orange the buildings were set on fire simply through the heat that the colour orange makes. June could swear the back wall of the house where she lived was singed with that sunset’s glow. She ran outside in case the house lit on fire. She saw the hot dye of the ending sun fill in the sky where the houses had left spaces. And once she saw a full moon
hang on the summit of a skyscraper. She called Sydney to say, “Go outside now and look at that.” To see an almost non-obscured sunset in the city you have to go down to the lake, otherwise sunrise or sunset are concepts. Inferences. You imagine them and infer that they exist because there’s light and dark in the world or in any day. Light approaches or recedes, darkness approaches or recedes, that’s how you know.
Trevor, still dancing in the photograph with her, is dead now. June used to hear from him now and again after he left for New York. In those phone calls she always imagined his delightful smile when he said, “Oh my god, New York is wicked!” but his calls petered out and years went by without a sign of him. Then one summer walking by the lake June met one of the other dancers and she asked, “Have you heard from Trevor?” The other dancer looked incredulous, “Trevor died four years ago,” she said. June felt faint, she fell. “You didn’t know?” the dancer asked, holding June’s hands. “How could he die?” June sent these words out as if they were four last breaths. “He died in a small room in New York,” the dancer said, “Alone and sick.” The day ended right there for June. More streets disappeared from the grid of the city, more oxygen was burned away.
T
ime is turmoil. Cutting down the belly of the city, the Don Valley Parkway is a sticky bituminous river; its narrow, slick lanes are carnivorous. It is possible that what follows is a probable future. Every day is changeable. The Audi is a silverfish, a mechanical violent silverfish, nocturnal, wingless, boring down the Don Valley. It becomes exoatmospheric, it gains flight. And the two young men dream into the lives they want. However provisional, however small, however impossible we might think their dreams are. Who wants to live in the lives they have in the present? A lot of dreams get shanked because of money. Or gas. Or
the absence of a vision. So? They arrive now on their own adrenaline and they are the romantic young men they want to be. They are coiled and muscled and elegant and they have girls on their shoulders. Their hearts are calm. All the carbon monoxide gushed out and oxygen filled the vacuum. The car leapt a few possible worlds. They breathe some bristling shiny element, they fill their lungs full of it.