Come Back (21 page)
Authors: Rudy Wiebe
Though he named twenty-eight different movies.
And there were three loose pages; torn out of something. No dates.
Page 1: lists birth information, including “6 lbs 10 oz May 19, 1971” and the names, addresses of “Jordon from Brooks, Lee from Bow Island, met at the Roy Salmon Praise and Worship May ’85 weekend. Favourite saying: Right on!”
Page 2: an outline sketch of the bedroom with full page list of items and rectangles of drawers labelled with contents: “make-up,” “letters Lee, Jordon,” “underwear,” “socks,” “in bank: $76.00 babysitting,” “sweaters,” “bedclothes,” “skirts/shirts” …
No “letter Gabriel”?
Page 3:
Petals, petals falling
It’s just a flower
She’s barely a teenager
The flower doesn’t even have the sense to
completely denude itself
Oh, I feel soooooooo bad!! (I’m writing like a little kid)
She is so common as to be banal. Her dreams—huge Michael Jackson poster,
Ghostbusters
, Fears for Tears, handwritten recipe for lemon sherbet—nothing more, nothing less. A Bible—ever opened? not noticeably. But, then, after the day or two of hate, after thinking that
the rose is finally, absolutely, dead, you realize suddenly (like a breeze washing over you) that you still love her. After you noticed that she is not quite as beautiful as you thought, you find you still love those full lips, those eyes, yes more than ever. The feelings are human. The family album pictures, the ones that captured her off guard, looking right, staring over her shoulder, at what? I listen to her tapes, tapes she has gone to the trouble of making, she has held how often in her slim hands
It’s a sad affair
When there’s no one there
He calls out in the night
And it’s so …
Suffer suffer the children
And beyond the three written pages there are pictures.
Seven prints. Hal could not believe it possible these were all Gabriel with his unending demand of camera took the long week he stayed in that house—if he did stay. More likely he could not endure even one complete day in a place so haunted, especially at night—in what bed could he dare sleep?—especially the kitchen sink over which they once talked, side-by-side, handing each other dishes (though surely Joan heard them, and Grant, from wherever they were in the spacy bungalow with all those wide archways opening to kitchen, dining room, living room, hallway to three bedrooms). He could not have endured that smallest bedroom nearest the hall telephone—five of
the seven pictures he kept were of Ailsa’s bedroom. The tightening order of black and white obsession; no colour, nothing touched:
Picture 1. The unfocussed backyard seen through the curtains above the kitchen sink: one of the curtain folds could be a pale slender thigh with knee bent, leg and ankle slanted forward as if running;
Picture 2. The pale telephone: hung up beside the closed hallway cupboard; the cord dangled in coils to the baseboard;
Picture 3. The bedroom, clothes closet: twenty-nine black wire hangers, thirteen with clothes hanging unrecognizably together; long dresses, perhaps a robe, jackets, shirts, skirts or slacks;
Picture 4. The bedroom, bed: brilliant light on the shadowed bedspread like a massive, winged creature; between its jagged upper leg and wing lay one small pillow, and on it the embroidered word “HOME”;
Picture 5. The bedroom, vanity and corner of large mirror: a reflection of the bed with ribbed throw and cushions, sunlight shone through lace window curtains, end table with radio, writing desk with lamp; the edge of the mirror lined with head-shots of teenage girls;
Picture 6. The bedroom, full mirror: “star” pictures pinned over each other on poster above bed; mirror outlined with portraits, the left side all Ailsa school photos from kindergarten to grade 8. But also: above the portraits along the bottom edge of the mirror a faint shadow of Gabriel’s head. Very small and in profile, looking right.
Picture 7. The bedroom, full mirror: the blurred double-image of the back of a man from the waist up, naked, pointing the pistol of his left (right) hand into his ear.
Not a word written about the pictures. Nowhere.
The ‘85 diary from June 25 to August 3 named only movies and minimal acts; but then, suddenly, two intense personal statements.
DAILY PLANNER
1985:
July Monday 1
I owe Ross a beer tennis with Denn
July Wednesday 10
Fender-bender with parents’ pickup—changing lanes, my fault
July Thursday 11
V
. Nabokov, “To Russia: Will you leave me alone? I implore you!”
July Wednesday 16
Reading Robert Kroetsch,
What the Crow Said
People, years later, blamed everything on the bees
July Tuesday 23
Tennis with Denn
July Friday 26
Four days cabin work 9 hrs 6 hrs 10 hrs 6 hrs
July Wednesday 31
Unemployment Insurance application accepted.
Miriam returns from Quito with Leo I cry for what’s to come
Thursday August 1
Trampoline with Denn. Out with Ross, Judy, Beth
August Saturday 3 across Sunday 4 and Monday 5
Writers weekend, about ten talking with Dad at Aspen Creek, they read their (often pretentious) work. Isabelle o you are such a flake. Sure you have brilliant eyes, but real intelligence? To argue that females should get male roles is ridiculous! Why on earth or heaven would anyone want a male role, always lonely, shy, timid, yet always expected to be endlessly competent, to forever compete! We’re so loaded down with old shit, females should want to invent totally new roles for themselves.
Image, the evening campfire (Isabelle sat there, she saw it too): A moth flying out of the darkness, beautiful swoops, flutter, dive, a faint hiss, a wobble, it falls to the ground beside me. The end.
Memory Image: when I returned from Europe, first time back in her house, A came up from the basement dressed like a clown, face and all, October 27 1984. She was playing the buffoon, the comic inversion for what is all-powerful and controlling—she wouldn’t know it, but I know now, for sure.
So okay God, you create a world, a world we have to exist in. Why?
I never asked to be me I can refuse
August Monday 12 over Tuesday 13
If I do have love, complete love, I should be able to live forever, no matter what the outcome. If all I have to offer is death, obviously meaning, literally, the ceasing of this love, then it can be construed as not being a completely obsessive love. But non-existence can also be seen as an easy cop-out, a pathetic choice of evasion: even if the world is full of useless, trite things, including myself, I should fight against exactly
that
. However, to end now will be to undo the triteness A is, that I am. And I’ll be forgotten within months by the few who still remember, I’ll be missed by less in even less time.
It’s not that I don’t want to live, it’s that somehow I’ve lost a means by which to function. I’m as hollow as a pail filled with only one thing. Has there ever been a more nervous and shy … if only I were a beautiful female some Big Strong Manly MAN would save me.
Laugh
. What can I say if you don’t know and understand already—when you’re empty, what is there to miss? I’m sorry, I don’t mean to hurt anyone—I did not ask to come, with my personality, into a place in time and space to hurt anyone. Okay, refusal to be is an act against the God in us. I refuse to make choices, oh, obviously death is a choice—an extremely clumsy and awkward one at that. Can you imagine the discovery, poor person
Yah sure Gabe, your empty life is a continuous ravenous process, always a wanting more, always a somehow feed yourself hnnnn feed feed
Feed yourself. Hal remembered a morning in January, when Owl was leafing through Double Cup newspapers as Hal watched a pigeon on the sidewalk outside. It was bird busy, eating. Fluffed fat in the cold, it ran and fluttered between passing feet while pecking at what seemed to be the brown crumbs of a cookie. The crumbs were scattered everywhere, crushed into the cracks between sidewalk bricks, but the pigeon was finding them, pecking them out quick as fingers tapping when Owl spoke suddenly: “Feeding them is the least of it.”
Hal glanced up at him. “What?”
“This news again, East Africa.”
“Oh, yeah. Starvation.”
“Getting worse, every week …”
Hal said, “I can’t remember that, ever starving.”
“For what?”
“For …?”
Owl was staring out the window. Momentarily no one walked there in the brilliant cold; only the pigeon huddled into a fluffy ball now, and on the street motionless cars in shrouds of winter exhaust.
Hal said, “Starving, for food.”
“Yeah. That’s what I meant,” Owl said. “And I’ve needed food, not now, never in Edmonton, really, but where I was a kid.”
“Actually, my parents starved too,” Hal said. “Plenty, in Russia with the Communists,
‘Hungaschnoot’
they called it, hunger-need, agony. But I was born in Canada.”
“Me too,” Owl said. “But north, way too far north. In winter on the Deh-Cho Mackenzie River you need more. For a few days it’s not much, not so bad, a ache you feel up there lots of times, but sometimes it gets real bad and you all know Hunger Animal has come. Hunger Animal is different from ‘being hungry,’ we have a different word for her in our language, nobody ever says that name out loud, but we all know it, in English it would be sort of like ‘Hunger Animal.’ She’s like a black beaver, huge mouth full of teeth curved for gnawing, she starts small and eats herself bigger in your gut, you feel her chewing out your gut, the hole gets bigger and bigger and pretty soon it’s so big she’s gnawing in your chest, your throat, Hunger Animal’s in your mouth and eye, everything you see is something you have to eat. There’s never enough then, you see a bit of caribou fur, a piece of dog shit, whatever you find you take and put it in your mouth, it doesn’t fill the hole inside you but you chew it, you swallow, you see fire and a pot of water and your sister’s toes are a row of little sausages, they’re soup …”
Hal stared at his craggy friend. Owl, cold coffee forgotten, continued in what had now soaked into monotone:
“It’s way past having to eat, wanting food. Or being together … together is just something watching you eat. Nobody else is there anymore when Hunger Animal eats you empty, just you alone with her, there’s nothing left, just her. Eating.”
Beyond the glass wall, the pigeon was gone; only people, cars crept by, so slowly in the groaning, rutted snow it seemed they were hunched forward in weeping.
Finally Hal murmured, “You said, ‘For what?’ ”
“Oh yeah … food. Just having no food is pretty easy, even one rabbit or ptarmigan can start chasing her away, then, but she can come different too, you sometimes don’t know what she is but you know she’s there and she wants something. It’s not food—stick it in your mouth and chew and swallow—no, if Hunger Animal finds you she always wants some big thing you haven’t got … or can’t have—she’s inside you, gnawing deeper. When you can’t think or feel nothing else, that’s her.”
Abruptly it seemed to Hal that Owl no longer spoke English; he was somehow talking a Dene translation so thin it was diaphanous as vapour. And more so when he continued:
“When I was a boy, our medicine man who had four songs, while he was chopping down trees for that highway the Americans made to Alaska during the war, he told me he had once seen Hunger Animal. Huge, black, coming through the trees, you could tell it was her by the light following her. Big like a spruce all on fire, but coming and no other trees burning. He warned me, I was just young, he said if you ever see that, just run like hell.”
The warm surround of the coffee shop held them motionless in their soft chairs. After a time Hal lifted his Monday cup; took a swallow of cold coffee.
“Did you ever see that, in the trees?”
“No.”
“You believe what he said?”
“It’s not just food,” Owl said. “When she’s in you, he said, she wants what you haven’t got. And you have to have
it to stay alive, you need it more and more because there’s only less and less of you to want it.”
Music was playing from the ceiling, a familiar Beatles song but Hal could not think about that. He was concentrating on Owl, and asked him again,
“Do you believe what he said?”
“No,” Owl said. “No. But one bad winter, in the snow I saw the tracks.”
“Tracks?”
“Yeah. And you run like hell, but you can’t forget.”
