Authors: Matt Cohen
Tags: #Fiction, #General, #Literary Criticism, #Canadian
“This is my room,” she says, and signals towards the bed. “I’ll make some tea.” Already early morning and cool, her room seems damp and low-ceilinged. His legs ache from the unaccustomed pavement so he sits down on the bed and lights another cigarette. The floor of the room is littered with discarded jeans and shirts, record jackets, half-read magazines and empty incense boxes. These objects of the generation that is not yet her own stop at the wall where there is oddly a crucifix hanging, a brass crucifix hung from an adhesive picture hook. And below
the crucifix is a long shelf with a matching brass incense burner and a small leatherbound Gideon Bible. Automatically he picks up the bible and begins leafing through it, unable to read because the print is so small and the room is lit only by a painted lightbulb suspended from the centre of the ceiling. “It’s a good book,” she says. She kneels beside him on the floor and puts down a tray with tea and thin biscuits. He feels there is no way at all he can connect with her except to drink the tea she has brought and so he does, finishing it in long burning gulps before she even has a chance to offer him a biscuit. “Lie down,” she says. “When you’re tired you have to rest.” He knows that this is just an opening and that later she will demand stone mansions and limousines. He lies on his back and with his head on the pillow is instantly hospitalized. “Have some tea,” she says.
He woke up knowing where he was, as if he had been waking and falling back to sleep all morning, his arm stretched out across the bed remembering that the girl had been there and gone, gone hours ago. The low hum of an electric alarm clock. He looked at it and saw that it was two o’clock in the afternoon, that it had been set for eight. The time made him nervous, set him in motion, crossing the room and finding the sink, splashing water on his face and using his finger and her toothpaste to try to take the night away from his mouth. His baggage was where he had left it, one suitcase in a locker at the train station. He went to make the bed and saw that she had left a note and a key for him, on her pillow. Without thinking he put the key in his pocket: the key, the piece of paper, and a short pencil stub that he found on the shelf below the crucifix. The teapot and plate of biscuits were still beside the bed. He decided against eating, put the tray near the sink and lit a cigarette. When he went outside, he wrote down the number of the house and the name of the street. Walking along Bloor Street again, walking east towards the train station. Bloor Street is the place where all the smaller streets are leading to. Lined with shops and movies and taverns and hardware stores, each of these masked with people standing in front of them, talking to each other, doing nothing, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and pop out of styrofoam containers and tin cans, brushing real and imaginary ashes and
dust off their wide-cuffed checked trousers, loud patterned suits and jackets that have come out of these same windows, whispering and cementing endless unknown deals. Erik was walking again towards the centre of the city, past the restaurant where he went with the girl, past the subway stop where he had emerged from his train journey. He could see his own apartment building, the tip only, a high-rise that was only a few hundred yards away. He stopped, trying to decide which way to go. But there were too many people on the sidewalks for him to stand still; and he was pushed with the crowd until finally he resumed walking with them, east along Bloor Street towards Yonge, the summer afternoon grey and humid with the sky a grey dome hubbed over the city. The stream of people on the sidewalk grew denser, bunched up and then curved out on both sides like a swollen human pore to enclose the ambulance that was parked at the curb, outside an apartment building; the doors of the building opened and a stretcher appeared. Several men were leaning over the side holding down a woman who was thrashing and kicking. “Life is a tragedy which no one understands,” she was declaiming in a theatrical Louisiana accent. She bit the arms of one of the men who held her, and momentarily her upper body was freed and she could reach over the stretcher trying to grab at the wheels and pull herself onto the ground. She was naked and as she swung towards the ground one of the men hastily covered her with a sheet, standing between her and the crowd with a look of extreme embarrassment. Then the woman got hold of the sheet and pulled it away from the man. In the scramble other arms let go of her and suddenly she was off the stretcher and running. “Let the fucking bastards see me,” she yelled — then stopped at the door of the building and turned towards the ambulance, her arms outstretched, laughing. More people were coming out of the building, grabbed her and began pushing her towards the ambulance. The man with the sheet rushed up and wrapped it around her, putting his hand to her mouth so that she was reduced to muffled grunts and curses. Finally they had her in the ambulance and it began to move down Bloor Street, its siren slow and high-pitched, like the mating call of an hysterical streetcar. The man with the sheet still stood on the sidewalk. The
sheet was now wrapped around the man’s wrist and arm: with the ambulance gone he was the centre of attention. The heel of his hand was bleeding profusely. “She bit me,” the man said to Erik. “The bitch bit me like a goddamn dog.”
After two months in the country carrying no keys at all, Erik’s pockets seemed to be bulging with them: the keys to his apartment, to his office at the university, to the girl’s apartment, even a big key, thick and light with a dull aluminum surface, for the train station locker. And when he had finally walked there and gotten his suitcase, he was inexplicably exhausted again, too tired to eat, and he took a taxi back to his apartment. It was as he had left it. There were clothes strewn all over the floor from his hasty packing, the mail Valerie stopped forwarding, dirty cups and saucers in the sink. He paced about his apartment, felt ill at ease, put on a record. He had sent post-dated cheques to the landlord but he hadn’t bothered with the telephone bill. Now the phone was disconnected. Good. He stripped off his clothes, kicked them in the direction of his dresser and went to take his shower. He stood in the tub facing the water, gingerly soaping the cuts on his back, then put his head directly in the stream of water, letting it spray against his eyes and scalp. He shaved without drying himself, letting the water drip onto the tiny red tiles that were supposed to be the touch of luxury distinguishing this particular high-rise, making it desirable above all others. In this fluorescent bathroom light the whites of his eyes seemed enormously young, unwilling to concede anything, as white as the lather against his sunburned skin. When he was finished shaving he went into the living-room and turned the record over: classical music, woodwinds and strings that marched in long melodies and counterpoints, music that Valerie had given him. Now she would be making her careful gifts to her psychiatrist, long wide ties with harmless animals frolicking on a pastoral background. The apartment seemed to belong to a previous existence. He felt uncomfortable in it, didn’t want to stay. There was a lawnchair on the balcony, toppled over by some wind, rusting from the whole summer’s rain. He unlocked the glass doors and retrieved it. Then didn’t know where to put it and shoved it outside again. His suitcase
was open in the middle of the floor. He found clean underwear and put on his jeans again, liking the feel of the denim against his bare feet, jeans and an old cotton shirt from the farm. In the suitcase were the three diaries Miranda had given him, the ones he had seen Richard reading in the hospital. They were leather-bound, with ribbons attached to the binding for keeping the place. One of the ribbons had a ring knotted to it, a small gold ring with a nondescript stone: it was blackened and lumpy, looked as if it had had an accident in a fire. Dressed now, he turned off the record; without the noise and the excuse of getting clean he felt trapped in his own space. He nervously sorted through the diaries, trying to decide what to take, chose the diary with the ring. Volume One, and then immediately walked out of his apartment, before he had time to think about it, out into the hall and pushed the door closed behind him. Outside again, he felt foolish and panicky, looked up at his window and wondered if he would have jumped. As he stood in front of his building, people walked in and out of the lobby, neighbours, people he had never spoken to. They paid no attention to him or to each other: the only necessary politeness was the ritual holding open of the unlocked door. Perhaps they assessed each other, estimating the chances that this one or that one might really be a thief, might try to climb in balconies at night or steal chained furniture from the lobby. He began to walk quickly, came to the corner and didn’t know where he was going, turned automatically towards the girl’s apartment. The sky was clearing but it was still hot; his hand was already sweating against the leather binding of the diary. Erik Thomas, he said to himself, my name is Erik Thomas. He let his lips move over his name, pronouncing the words out loud. Erik Thomas, only son of Richard Thomas, who was the only son to survive his own father, Simon Thomas. He had half-suggested to Rose Garnett that they live together but she had ignored it, as if it was clear that he couldn’t possibly mean such a thing, that he was obviously incapable of letting anything pass in or out of his own boundaries, that he was simply saying it out of boredom. He was stopped again, standing still and looking down, his socks and sandals dusty from the street, the sidewalk marked with
cracks and coloured crayon outlines for hopscotch, paper garbage lining the gutters and spilling out onto the street. He was standing beside a nursing home, the kind they had gotten for the old woman in Kingston. A garage adjoined the house and there was a door leading out onto its roof. There was a wrought-iron fence and plants along the perimeter. All the patients were white-haired and in wheelchairs, blankets draped over their knees and transistor radios blaring different stations into the sun. He could smell the heat rising from the streets, tons of uncollected garbage, food decaying in plastic cans behind restaurants. He was sweating. There was no one he wanted to see, nowhere he wanted to go. His stomach felt ill-at-ease, unsettled. A police car passed by slowly, two uniformed men inside. Erik began walking, irrationally afraid that he would be questioned and asked for papers; he walked quickly, holding firmly onto the diary, walking west towards the girl’s apartment, late afternoon, watching the sun bob in and out of trees and buildings. And when he was finally there, he lay down on the bed and opened the diary, surprised to see that it was written in pen and ink, the unfamiliar writing faint and difficult to decipher, then seeming like Richard’s hand, large and square and careful:
After they arrested me in London they took me to the prison. At the end of a week, they threw me out on the streets again. Then I went towards the river thinking I might find a place to sit with my wounds immersed in the water. There was a girl who saw me & the blood that was caked on my clothes & skin. She took pity on me & took me to where she lived. She was very young & not yet a woman nor could she speak or hear. I would not have gone with her but for her touch which was light & shy like a child. Her mother told me that this girl was unable to be employed in the factories because she was too frail & too stupid even to work in a house & so they let her do as she pleased. & her mother (who was not old but might have passed for twice my age & had two more daughters) washed me & let me lie in her bed for three days. The girl stayed constantly with me & though
she could not hear me she wanted me to talk all the time; because she could put her hand or her head on my chest & feel the rumbling of the words which passed through me to her like a train.
One morning her mother woke her up & said to prepare herself in her best clothes; & she gave her a small linen bag to pack. Because it had been spoken in that part of the city that there would be given £10 King’s Dowry to any woman who would sail to the colony of Canada & was legally single. & the girl’s mother had seen one of the men who advertised this; & had arranged to take the money for herself though later she agreed she would share half of it with her daughter. So this girl who could not speak or hear & did not have a name was taken to the boat & I went with her hoping the Captain might take me in her place, as minister & deckhand. Where I found him was on a long wooden dock which jutted out from the land into the river; the boat was moored to this dock and seemed a small ship to weather the famous gales of the Atlantic. Beside the boat were lined up barrels of different goods for the colony & provisions for ourselves; & the Captain showed me a beaver fur hat & said that on the return voyage, the vessel would be filled with these furs. Also on the platform were all the women who had signed to go. They were surrounded by the sailors & the crew who were joking with them & telling superstitious tales about the sea. I made my offer to the Captain but he only laughed & asked what kind of minister would want to sail with a boatload of women. & I said,
“God knows all flesh was one & that it was therefore fit that a man should want to surround himself in such a way.”
& the Captain laughed again & said I could dine at his table for he would take me aboard as his clown & then, giving a signal, the crew pushed us all, the girl included, up a wooden ramp to the ship; & once we were there the ropes that moored us to the dock were loosed right away & I did not see the Captain again for some long time.
Our ship was one of twelve & when we came across the
ocean in this apostolic convoy we were like an army of the dispossessed. We had thought ourselves better than our nomad ancestors who had wandered to Europe from Mesopotamia & Africa, but now we too were disinherited & forced to seek out a new world; & so we closed the circle on our past.
They kept us in the hold like cattle not knowing that we were pressed body to body in God’s way. The sweat ran from flesh to flesh like a river & the river of our common sweat was our love of God & He knew that & caused it to pass through us & through the wooden membrane of the ship to the ocean. & so it was that even though some ate more than others we were all nourished, even after the storms which ruined most of the food. But the officer of the ship mistook their own privilege to keep each his body to himself as if it was a jewel being hoarded by a miser; & after the storm they stole food from the crew & from the passengers but still they fell ill and starving & then hearing that I was a minister of God they called me up to them & begged me to save them & I said,
“If you desire to be saved then you must first believe & therefore get you up from your bed & walk out upon the decks of the ship where you can receive the sun & be seen by God & show Him that you receive Him & his creations by standing naked in His World.”
& after I said that I walked down between the rows of hammocks. I came to a man whose face was the face of a dead man with white skin exuding a week’s growth of beard; & on his face & throat though the skin was dead white there were red blotches. I opened up his linen shirt & there were more red blotches all over the surface of his body, especially the places where the flesh beneath the skin had been starved away & the skin lay mottled like a watery hide directly on top of his bones. & seeing he would be the first to die I lay down beside him to whisper further things to him, but he turned away from me & asked that I be taken from the room. His voice was unclear & hoarse & though his sickness made him look peaceful, his countenance
changed with speech so that it was greedy & sullen. I got up out of his bed & I said,
“God promised Canaan to the Jews. He promised it to Abraham not because Abraham was special among men or privileged among men but because he saw God. & so he left the land where he had been living & journeyed to Canaan with his barren wife. & when they arrived she was no longer barren & she had a son. & then God came to Abraham & asked him for his son. Because with man there is life & there is death & there are things which are alive & things which are dead & man has divided the whole world into what is alive & what is dead & says that what is alive may rule over what is dead & that what is alive and more powerful may rule over what is alive & less powerful. God promised Canaan to the Jews & Moses led them back from Egypt because he struck a stick against a rock saying this & this are dead, even though God had taught him nothing was greater than any other thing, Moses was not allowed to enter the land of Israel & died only seeing it. Because man without God is mortal he takes his life to himself & says that his life is his own & is different from other lives. & one man says that I am one man & not another man because I have my nose & he has his nose. Each man therefore owns himself & sets himself a place in this mortal world of life & death saying I have so much life & therefore can cause so much death as if there were no other way. With man there is life & there is death but with God there is only life because that is all He knows.”
Again I walked between the rows of hammocks until I came to the man who had denied me. & this man, still wearing the shards of his white linen uniform, lay now stiff on his back, wretchedly at attention thinking I was the Captain. & again I lay beside him in his bed & before he could speak against me put my hand beneath his open shirt so he could feel my flesh against his flesh, flesh against flesh as it is written, & I said gently,
“Why are you living like a fool & dying like a fool? Why must you be blind when it is easier to see the truth
than to be ignorant? This is God’s universe & man is meant to walk upon the land & breathe the air & join his flesh with others so he may be with God. This is God’s universe & I am Abraham being sent into Canaan to father a new race of men. I say that in your ignorance you are more stupid than the insects you thoughtlessly crush; you are more depraved than the slugs that inhabit your stolen meat & now live in your body, which is eaten already as if it had been ten years in the grave & smells more like a corpse than like a man.”
& as I spoke I rubbed his chest & stomach with my hand to make his own body feel the blood beating through my own body; & to make the rhythms of our blood mesh & harmonize & come together because though we were in man’s way sailing upon a ship upon an ocean we were in God’s knowledge pulses in the aether; & as I rubbed my hand against him I could feel his stomach rise & fall with his breath which grew deeper now & I whispered to him that he should sleep & then when he woke he should eat nothing but take only a small drink of water. After this I climbed down from the canvas hammock & I took off all his clothes while he slept & covered him with a light blanket.
All the while I was with the sick man, the Captain had been watching me. Also standing in the doorway with him were two men who followed him everywhere to protect him from the crew — who were said to desire to make a mutiny & sail the ship up the St. Lawrence River past its destination until they came to a place where they could settle on the shores of one of the Great Lakes. & they would take with them the women who were being sent across to the colony to be wives for the men who lived in Montreal & Kingston.
As I came to the doorway the Captain & his men stood without moving. Then the two men came forward &, one to each side of me, took hold of my arms & led me out onto the deck. There they led me to one of the lifeboats & passed my arms over its top & lashed my wrists together so I was stretched & suspended with only my toes on the deck. All this happened in silence; & then the Captain stepped up to
me & tore off my shirt; & saw then that my back was already covered with scars, scars up & down the length of my back that were old & black & scars that were new criss-crossed with my ribs from my shoulders to my waist. He slapped his hand against my back & said that a minister who buggered a dying man was no minister at all & that it was only out of pity for the women on the boat that he was not drowning me. & then he slapped me again on the back with his hand, so hard that it drew blood from the unhealed wounds. & he said that if the man lived he would spare me too but if he died he would have me whipped until I died. & then he threw the shirt over my back & left me there, hanging by my wrists from the keel of the lifeboat. & he said that any person who was seen to bring me food or water would also suffer the same fate. But God did not betray me here for soon, even though the water stayed calm, I could see a cloud, soft and grey, drifting across the sky towards us. It came & hung above the ship & loosed a gentle rain that soothed my back & ran down the boat where my cheek was pressed against the wood & ran in little streams in the grooves where the wood was pressed together & so I could put my tongue in a groove & shape it like a V-trough so the water ran straight into my mouth & slaked my thirst. & after the rain, the clouds stayed but were diffused so that the sun could shine through them & make a rainbow stretching to the New World.
When the sun set it was without show because of the clouds which were on the horizon, but the stars near the dome of the heavens were able to shine through the whispy clouds that veiled them without hiding them & by that time, because of the rain which soaked and stretched my ropes I was able to rest almost comfortably, my feet full on the deck. That night was almost warm & I thought of crossing the tropics where one sailor I knew in London had gone. He had sailed on a ship that crossed the centre of the earth & then went South round the Cape to India. & when they were there, he said, they traded what they had for tea & spices & then when they ran out of things to trade they
stole the rest & he himself had killed two men who were small & brown & too weak to fight. & he said that before he killed them he saw into their eyes which were large & with the pupils dilated with fright; & he said this is what the European nations are: countries which build vessels to sail about the oceans & bring back luxuries so that someone may sit in their wig & their powder & hold something to their lips & say a few words to their servant who lives like an animal — like the sailor who is pressed from the street to serve in the marine, like the men he killed, swinging an iron bar he said, & the first did not understand what was going to happen but the second, having seen the first die did not go down on his knees for mercy like a Christian but stood as the sailor swung the bar, stood rigid even though his eyes were loosed with fear, & as the bar descended towards his head he waited as if he had the timing of a god & spit in the sailor’s face just before it crushed his skull. & all the time he was speaking to me of this the sailor held one of my hands between his hands and rubbed them back & forth frantically. He told me of the women that had been promised to them & of nights spent under the strange tropical constellations & of the long white sand beaches where the sun reigned pagan & supreme bringing forth trees & fruits from the land. He said that they had stopped at one of these islands where there were men & women who were dark like Indians but who were taller & stronger & paddled from one island to the next in canoes which they fashioned from burnt out trees. & he said that some of the sailors on the ship had been so long without a woman that they went ashore one night & stole some of these women because they wore no clothes & were gentle. He said that he had seen too much to live & it was true that one of his eyes was now permanently round & open whereas the other was closed & shrunk away from everything & the skin around it was folded & old as if it was the eye of an elephant. & he said that the eye that was round & open was as it was because of all the places it had been but the eye that was closed had seen truly only one moment: the thin brown
lips open in derision & then pain & death.
The evening passed & the watch changed. The clouds moved thin & fast across the sky snapped trim now by the wind which filled and spread the sails so the ship gained speed too & the water could be heard spraying steadily off the hull back into the ocean.
At the beginning of the first morning watch they came to wake me up & undid the ropes which held my wrists saying that the sailor had survived the night & was better. They gave me a small piece of hard bread & put me down with the women. There, hardly able to walk because my legs had cramped & finally gone to sleep, I pushed my way along the wall until I came to the place where the girl would be waiting for me — in a back corner of the hold where we slept every night. It was so crowded in that boat that even in a few hours absence the carpeting of flesh had spread to fill this small corner & the girl was herself crushed up against the wall without even enough room to lie flat. But then we pushed and made ourselves a small opening & lay down; & her touch was as it had been in London, light & hesitant but knowing what it desires & she moved her hands over me to see that they had not hurt me & then she drew me down in the dark & we were together as God had willed it.