Nocturne (11 page)

In Vancouver, I go to your old apartment out in Burnaby. It’s a long and arduous journey by bus, and I get off in the wrong place and have to walk the steep part of the hill that I was trying to avoid.

There’s a F
OR
R
ENT
sign on the front railing of the building, but a barbecue on your balcony, so it’s not your apartment that’s vacant. The cedar and bushes in front of the building have grown fast in the year and a half since I was last here. Another year and your balcony will be entirely screened in green, an oasis protected from the busy street. I can picture you walking out into a lush cave of vegetation to sit and have a break from practising. I can imagine your living room shimmering green in the sunlight.

I feel like I should say something to you at the apartment, but, as at the cemetery, that just seems stupid, so I don’t. I take a photo for Cathy and walk back down the hill, stopping every now and then to look south over the view of Vancouver that you liked so much. In the other direction, the line of mountains is obscured by clouds today, and I can’t see any part of them at all.

Cathy suggested going to have a coffee in your honour at the café down the street from your apartment, but I feel too miserable to do that, so I just get back on the bus and return to the hotel.

It’s hard to be in Vancouver. I go past places where you used to work, one right by where I’m staying, and this morning when I was on my way to the bus stop, there was piano music spilling out of an open upstairs window. That was, in fact, the last place you worked, and you were there that night, a few hours before you went into hospital. The very last time you played the piano was in that building.

I look for you in the places where you were, and of course, you’re not there. It’s no comfort to go to your apartment, but I go anyway. It’s not like I need to be reminded of you, like I don’t think of you all the time anyway. But it turns out that parts of the journey are so much about you that it does make me feel I was
meant to ride that bus back to your apartment. The classical record shop on West Hastings with all the old piano recordings in the window, much of it music you have played. The sign on another building across the street that said, W
HAT WAS ONCE, ALWAYS HAS BEEN, SOMEHOW NEVER AGAIN
. The old stuffed koala bear in the junk shop that looked just like the stuffed koala you used to have when you were a little boy—when you slept in bed with all your stuffed animals, your favourites being two monkeys you named Jiffy and Jocko, who slept on either side of you, like guards.

I walk all the way down the hill and halfway up the next hill on my way home, and when I finally stop to catch the bus, I am standing directly opposite the funeral home where your body was taken after you died.

What I really hate about you being dead is that you’re not in your apartment, that you don’t come to the door when I ring the buzzer, that you don’t come out with me onto the streets of Burnaby, down to the coffee shop, that you don’t say,
Let’s stop and have a coffee
, that you aren’t with me on the bus (because that bus was the one that took you directly to work), and that I’m not waiting for you to finish work right now, listening to the sound of your piano fall from the open window above this street, that it’s just me
doing these things in your name, that they feel useless, that you’re not there to sanction my activities, or argue with them. You’re not there to stop them from being necessary.

I’m back in Kingston again. For the first time, when I stepped through the door the new house felt like home, like somewhere I belonged. I find that I want to stay in this house. I don’t want to move, to keep moving, the way I have for all of my adult life. I want to stay here and fix this place up, spend money on it when I have some money to spend.

It was sunny today and I took the dogs out to the fields. They ran through the grass, splashed across the muddy river, rolled in something dead. I yelled at them and they paid no attention. On leash, returning to the car, they practically yanked my arms out of their sockets.

It’s good to be home.

My hair has grown longer during my travels. It got tangled today by the wind and the walk. On the way back to the house, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rear-view mirror. My windblown hair, dark and curly, looked exactly like your hair, Martin. There was a full moment where I didn’t know if it was you I saw in the car mirror, or me.

When the dogs are together sometimes they pee at exactly the same second, or react identically to an outside interest or threat. They are so alike in those moments that it is as though they share the same brain. Maybe that is what it is to be siblings, the similarities are buried so deep in the cells that they aren’t questioned or acknowledged—they just are.

The first thing I want to do to my house is to level the crooked floors, to shore up the beams in the basement, and to bring the timbers of the building back into alignment. I want the structure of the house to be as it was when it was built.

We each remember you most clearly from when you most belonged to us. Mum thinks of you when you were a baby and little boy. I remember you when we were both teenagers and young adults. Cathy recalls the time you came home to live for a while and you and she were the only children in the house. Your old girlfriends think of when they were together with you. Death makes you ours again, even if it’s only in memory.

This is what we’re left with—memory, your music, and the physical objects that remain from your life.

I finally open one of the boxes I brought back from your Vancouver apartment, the one with the items that were beside your bed.

There are several books. There is my novel, with a 7-Eleven phone card as the bookmark on page 54. There are two books about New York that you bought when we were there together on that last trip. I’m sure you hadn’t started either, but meant to read both. One is a historical atlas of the city, and the other is a collection of photographs, portraits of men and women who work in vanishing professions—mannequin maker, television repairman among them. The explanation of each job is on the facing page to the photograph.

The last book is a Russian science-fiction story that is also a political allegory about Stalin’s dictatorship.
The Fatal Eggs
is the tale of a scientist whose experiments go wrong and, instead of creating a utopian world, he creates a nightmare scenario of plagues and violence. You had only got to page 10 in this book, but I know you were enjoying it because I remember you talking about it.

On page 10, the professor is just starting his experiments. Nothing is out of control yet.

The piece of paper that you used to mark where you were in the book is a map to one of the dance schools you played at. On the back of it you have written a list of things to do:
RAD money, invoice school board, Mum, call real estate agent, bills
. I’m always trying
to decide if these lists you made, of which there were many, were written before you knew you were dying, or afterwards. I don’t know why this is important, but it is. And this list, I think, judging by the note to call the real estate agent, was written just before you were diagnosed, when you were trying to sell your house in Toronto in order to move back to the West, before you gave up on that idea and rented your house out instead.

Your lists are often written in light pencil and are maddeningly hard to read. But these were lists meant only for you, and you wouldn’t care that they’re hard to read or incomplete. On one loose sheet of paper are the barely legible thoughts:
Maybe people aren’t sometimes lonely, so much as alone
, and,
Whether or not it is entirely accurate, it is better to think good of things, people, the world etc
.

Some of the items that were beside your bed have already been dispensed with—the pile of loose change, your cell phone and charger, the puddle of clothes that you had stepped out of at the end of your last real day on earth. You were in such pain when the ambulance came that you couldn’t even put your pants on. You just went to hospital in what you were sleeping in—a T-shirt and underwear, with a long coat thrown overtop for decency’s sake.

The box also contains things that I took from your apartment. There are CDs from your collection, programs from your recitals. There are two beer coasters with the words
Marty’s Bar
on them, which someone must have given you. There’s the obituary, carefully cut out of the newspaper, for your elementary school classmate who died at the age of thirty-eight from a heart problem he didn’t know he had—the first of your peers to die. And there are various pieces of your identification that I couldn’t part with, either because they had photos of you (your work identity badges, a transit pass), or because they were from an earlier, sweeter time (your university student card, your Surrey County library card from when you lived in England). The photo on the transit pass shows you with a full beard. The photo on your work identity badge from the last day of work that you did has you in the red T-shirt that I wear all the time now because it still smells, faintly, of you. In that photo you look gaunt. In that photo you are just weeks away from being dead.

After you died, I flew home to Kingston. We buried you, Christmas came and went, uncelebrated, and then I gathered my strength and went back to the coast in January to clear out your apartment. I took the train instead of flying because I wanted to
feel every inch of the countryside that had existed between us all those years we lived in different places; because I didn’t really want to arrive, didn’t want to have to face your life without you in it; because you had driven across the country when you journeyed from Vancouver to Toronto, and I wanted to see what you had seen. It was winter, so I couldn’t make the drive myself. The conditions would have been too dangerous, too unpredictable. But from the train window—seeing the snow, the sky, the trees, the endless prairie—I felt the distance, watched the countryside open and close. The slowness and deliberateness of the journey felt like the only way to move towards the task I was dreading.

And now it’s over, all of it. You are a body in the cold ground, a handful of identity cards, the books you were reading, the CDs you played, the clothes you wore, the lists you made, the concerts you gave, the places you went, and what you brought back to remind yourself you’d been there.

One of the pieces you had planned to play if you had lived long enough was John Cage’s
4’ 33
.” This tribute to silence, to listening, was something you’d performed before, years ago. I was at that first performance, and I remember the nervous laughter from the audience as you sat down at the piano, hands folded together in your lap, back straight, and didn’t play a note. That laughter subsided into an uncomfortable silence, and that awkward self-consciousness was followed by a growing attentiveness, all in the space of five minutes.

When we were young we talked about what we wanted to be, how we were going to serve our particular art forms, what we wanted to achieve within
them. In the middle of life, having largely succeeded at what we had set out to do, we realized the limitations of our particular choices, and indeed of the arts to which we had chosen to devote our lives. I wish that we had been able to have more conversations about what we learned from those limitations.

The problem with writing, for me, is that it follows experience. It doesn’t recreate it, but rather lags behind. Writing done well makes a new thing of the experience it’s trying to describe, but it’s not always possible to do it well and so the execution of it is often unsatisfactory, although the ideas and sensations behind the execution never are. Virginia Woolf described writing as stumbling after your own voice. I wish she’d gone on to say that rarely, if ever, do you catch up to it. Increasingly I would rather live a perfect day than write about one, but when I was younger this desire was exactly opposite.

Music is always imposing itself. It’s aggressive. It takes a space and fills it with sound. It colonizes silence. I can see that the effort it takes to do this, the confidence needed to continually make this assertion, could easily fail. Is the noise of music really better than the silence it is invading? This will always be the question. I can understand why you said that you thought John Cage’s music of silence, in three movements,
each signalled by the opening and closing of the piano lid, was the greatest piece of music ever composed. I can understand why you would want to return to it when you were dying.

The piece is deceptively simple. In the original 1961 score there is no proportional notation. The three movements are indicated solely by roman numerals, followed by the word TACET in capital letters after each one.
Tacet
is the word used for an orchestral part to indicate that a particular instrument does not play during a movement. It is not standard practice to have this apply to a solo composition. But although performed originally on piano, Cage’s piece has subsequently been performed by other instruments, and by full orchestras, so the orchestral instruction for silence—
tacet
—makes more sense than any other word used in its place.

About the writing of his piece, Cage said: “Composing’s one thing, performing’s another, listening’s a third. What can they have to do with one another?” He liked to think of his composition as not needing a performer, that it was essentially a vehicle for listening. And about listening he went on to state that “What we hear is determined by our own emptiness, our own receptivity; we receive to the extent we are empty to do so.”

At some point while writing to you, I thought that I should mirror the structure of Cage’s piece. I wanted to format my thoughts according to the form of
4’ 33
”—which, after careful timing, I determined was approximately three and a half pages of written text. Each section in this book was to have been three and a half pages long. Each section was to have been your playing of Cage’s piece, and what I was hearing while you were sitting motionless at the piano. Death has made you this performer for eternity now.

But my grief is not that orderly, or that disciplined. It lopes ahead, stops short. I am not really able to contain it, merely follow where it leads. My only structural constraint is that I have decided on forty-five segments for this piece, one for every year you were alive.

But this act of writing is indeed an act of listening, and it is as though you are on stage, at the piano, in your tails, with the light behind you, and I am sitting in the audience, listening to the thoughts in my head, to the scuff of feet on the wooden floor, to the birdsong outside the window, the crackle as a cough drop is unwrapped. I am sitting here, waiting for you to make a sound, to guide me through this moment, when, in fact, the truth of this moment is that you are giving it to me, in its entirety.