Country of Cold (9 page)

This was in 1984.

When Robert moved to Montreal from the prairie he had never lived alone before. He spent three days looking for an apartment and when he found one he liked he rented it and had the keys in his pocket within an hour. It had wooden floors that gleamed in the afternoon sun.

There were people he knew from home who had moved there but he didn’t seek them out, choosing to refashion himself in a way that would not be credible to someone who had known him as a child, especially his brother. He bought and tried to read difficult books, and studied the book reviews to learn what he should be concluding from them. He learned French and he learned which accent he should affect. He adopted mannerisms that would have been deemed absurd on the prairie. They were absurd here, too, but the city was more tolerant of fops.

He became preoccupied with appearing interesting to people. He claimed to have been in the Foreign Legion, and to have walked across the Darien Gap. He said that he spoke Swahili. He decided to study the hermeneutics of literary theory. He didn’t even know what that phrase meant. He was twenty-three, just.

When his father came to visit, he and his newly foppish son had even less to say to one another than they once had, when the boy would hang around his father’s garage workshop. The boy was ashamed to have his father see his new clothes and hear his half-baked ideas, and he turned that shame into embarrassment over his father, though no one in the city would have found the older man any more improbable than his son.

They ate lunch together and the father asked him what he was studying and how his classes were going. The boy spoke at length about German ideas about text and identity and class. He kept using the fact that these ideas were German to account for the imprecision with which he described them. The father left mystified. It was the boy’s last chance, really, to save himself, and he ignored it.

Mornings for the emperor penguin are even worse. In the Antarctic dawn they stir, stretch their wings, squawk sleepily to those around them, and head down to the edge of the ice floe, to do something about breakfast. Something in the way of
Eugenia superba
, which teem in the waters of the southern oceans and constitute the emperor penguin’s principal food source. Trouble is, as the mob of still-waking penguins approaches the water’s edge they start to remember about the leopard seal. For the leopard seal, breakfast is emperor penguins. So the penguins all stop right at the water’s edge and lean way over and look real hard for the leopard seals, who of course are not nearly so stupid that they’d give any suggestion of their presence. The classic Homeric quandary: to breakfast and test one’s mortality or to fast and fear.
The penguin equivalent of bacon and eggs, without the fruit salad cop-out option.

These quandaries can only go on so long, of course, and soon the penguin mob starts to get a little restless. What to do? What happens is: the ones at the back start pushing.

There is a great shriek of indignant protest, much scrambling and flailing about, and eventually—a splash. Everything stops. The penguins lean over, way over, watching silently. The penguin in the water stares around, at first with a terrified and then with sort of a self-righteous see-it’s-not-so-bad type of look, and then there’s a stirring in the water and a cloud of red. The other penguins all back up quickly.

And after the Real Life Nature Drama, there was the Prayer Hour and a Half and then the Home Shopping Channel—a dozen ice cube trays for twenty dollars, who’d have imagined such bargains could still be had? Heading into the third hour of late-night television, who knows what beauty is? Even fifteen minutes of sleep would be paradise. In lieu of that, live rugby from Australia. The Newbridge ’Nihlators versus the Bainsbury Brick Bats. Bring it on.

They speak of sleep hygiene. Just as eating from each of the four food groups, brushing after every meal, and tending to your cuticles are habits that will pay dividends the whole of your adult life, so too will your nighttime equanimity be maintained by observing the
following rules: No napping. Retire and arise at roughly the same time each day—no weekend slumberfests. No eating and no reading in bed. If you can’t sleep, after one hour get up and do something until you feel tired. No heavy physical exercise after 6 p.m. No eating within two hours of retiring. Minimize nicotine and caffeine use. Resist alcohol or sedatives for short-term relief—you just end up with a hangover the next morning, might as well have not slept. Try running or long walks earlier in the day. And if all this fails, ask yourself, is there something else bothering you? Is everything okay at work? Is there any particular reason why you haven’t set foot outside your apartment in a month, except to go to work and pay the pizza delivery guy?

Disturbances of sleep and mood have cause and effect wrapped around one another like two snakes on a stick. Very often trouble manifests itself initially and insidiously, through very-early-morning awakening, and only later does the visible darkness close in around one’s bed. What more telling a development for someone teetering on the brink of something than to spend a week wide awake at four in the morning, recollecting and recriminating? Streetlight shining in through night-lit window, empty ache in abdomen, throat feeling swollen and full.

My wife’s disposition is so retina-searingly bright, most people think her intoxicated or deranged on first meeting. She has no patience for melancholy friends of ours.
“You have to take responsibility for how you feel,” she’d say. “Feelings don’t just happen to you, they are chosen things, and they’re part of how you make yourself. If people choose despair, they’re not just sad, they’re wrong. And need to be told so.” On the matter of a neighbour of ours who left his wife and infant daughter for a bartender he claimed to have never wanted to fall in love with: “Bullshit, Robert. If he stopped meeting her and fucking her on her futon, he’d fall out of love with her quickly enough. It’s just will.” You’d think that, knowing all this, I’d have had some insight when she herself began rising to drink tea at the kitchen table in the very early morning.

The coordination and supervision of sleep is handled by a structure in the brain stem, called the reticular activating system, that is remarkable in that it exists in no one anatomic spot but rather throughout the brain stem, everywhere at once, like a shudder perhaps, or a sponge in gelatin. What it does when it is time to sleep is shut down the transmission of sensory input beyond the brain stem, allowing the cerebral cortex to turn inward and reel and dance and analyze the day’s experience in sweet reverie. It retains the option, however, to transmit sudden fluctuations in input—such as an alarm clock, or a spouse slipping into bed hours after she said she’d be home—up to the cortex for analysis. From an evolutionary point of view its development probably served
two purposes: going to sleep for the night kept us curled up in the fork of a tree silent and inconspicuous and conserving energy, not drawing the attention of predators better adapted than we are to manoeuvring in the night. And as mammals grew cleverer and cleverer, the need for the brain to be able to sit back and integrate subtle lessons and clues became greater. We infer this second purpose of sleep and dreaming from the fact that infants spend most of their day sleeping and most of their sleep dreaming, while septuagenarians sleep half as much and their dreams flicker past them in a too familiar whisper. As the world grows more known, less musing and inferring is necessary.

The ability of the reticular activating system to induce sleep depends upon its capacity to act at inhibitory synapses along critical neural paths in the brain. When the reticular activating system discharges these inhibitory synapses, conduction slows and sensory input to the cerebral cortex is reduced. Synapses are connections between nerve cells. One nerve cell relays information to another by releasing a chemical signal near the other’s receptor. This causes charged atoms—ions—to rush in or out of the cell, creating an electrical discharge. The secretion of an adequate amount of the chemical signal or neurotransmitter is critical to the entire process. The conceptualization of the blues that is presently most popular holds that it consists of a failure of certain nerve cells to secrete sufficient quantities of
neurotransmitter. The strength and speed of signals through the brain are reduced and all the drives suffer: libido, hunger, and anger all fade to memory, leaving empty abdomen and imprecisely described despair.

The nearly universal presence of sleep disturbances among people with mood disorders suggests strongly that the signals of the reticular activating system are weakened as well by the dearth of neurotransmitter. Interestingly, it has long been noted that many mood disorders can be quickly ameliorated by enforced sleep deprivation—a tool of limited clinical use, as eventually patients wind up sleeping in a broom closet someplace and waking up bluer than blue can be.

The sleep disturbances produced by the blues are various and may include hypersomnia; a roommate I had in university once spent the month after flubbing his GMAT sleeping eighteen hours a day. He’d go for days on end without getting out of his housecoat. After a while it seemed I hardly had a roommate at all, so rarely did I see him vertical. More typically, however, insomnia is the problem; sometimes initial insomnia—difficulty falling asleep—but this is more usually related to poor sleep hygiene and stress/anxiety disorders. Classically, what is found is terminal insomnia: waking up in the very early morning unable to fall back asleep, despite one mind-numbingly inane infomercial after another until the sky in the east is lightening to the colour of a deep and recent bruise. And now, Martha,
I’ve got something really special for our shoppers. I don’t think we’ve presented steak knives of this quality ever before. Handmade by traditional craftsmen in Thailand, you gotta know these are going to go fast. We have only three hundred sets of these beauties, so act now. Oh look, we have a testimonial on the line, so don’t take our word for it, Richard from Hamilton how do you find these knives?

Nothing goes on forever. The emperor penguin can wait tortured on the ice floe for only so long and then he has to eat. And the traffic appears in the street and it’s time to get dressed and go to work. And that whole day you’ll answer questions with confused non sequiturs and everyone from the lady at the muffin stand to the paper boy will comment on how unwell you look.

Think about the leopard seal: hiding under the water beside the ice floe, wondering if this is the spot the penguins will choose that morning. Invisible only for so long as she can hold her breath, eventually she has to return to the surface too. Think about the look the penguins and the leopard seal exchange when she pops to the surface, gasping for air.

This was in 2004.

Robert and Paul learned later that they had been regulars at the Café Kiev at the same time. They were both students then, but they went to different universities: Paul to the Université de Montréal and Robert to McGill. In those days too, feelings ran high over the language debate and the separation referendum. Robert was wary of approaching strangers in that city, with his French so rudimentary and inflected with the prairies. He regretted his caution, in retrospect. When he met Paul later, through Daphne, he thought that he could have used a friend like him that first winter in Montreal.

Felicinada returned to the city two years later. Gabriella had gone back to Buenos Aires. Felicinada asked mutual acquaintances if anyone had forwarding addresses, but Gabriella had left behind no trace of herself. When Robert moved back to the city from Paris, with an improbable anecdote about a Parisian
plumbing magnate and his ex-wife, he returned first of all to the café. He sat at a little table with his suitcase beside his feet and Felicinada walked up to him and they were cautious with each other, wondering if they were recognized. They each concluded they weren’t, and he gave his order and she took it, not making eye contact, and when his food came all he did was nod.

It was only as he was leaving that he betrayed himself. “How long have you been back?” he asked. She told him. “Nothing is the same, is it?” he said. She said she thought that what had changed had done so obviously, and what remained was more subtle and more important.

Hearing her say that made him suddenly miss the little girl Giselle, and he told Felicinada what had happened in Paris. Everyone in the café eavesdropped. There was the smallest bit of sympathy for him.

Cora turned her car into the curling rink parking lot and pulled up next to a snowbank. She let the engine idle for a while as she listened to the news. Only five in the afternoon and it was already dark. She shut off her headlights. The night sky lit up slowly like a just-plugged-in Christmas tree. She let the engine idle some more.

A truck pulled into the parking lot and out jumped a down-enveloped baby-blue Michelin Tire man who scurried into the rink with a rigid-armed waddle that spoke eloquently and precisely of the outside temperature. Cora shivered and turned up the radio. The prime lending rate was down a percentage point. Fighting in the Balkans; the Italian government looked as if it would fall. Cora heard another car door slam and then another parka-clad, sexless figure streaked past her, leaving behind a stream of breath vapour that lingered like an uncoiling leash. The snow glowed silver-blue under the night sky.
For the first time in her life Cora listened through all the football scores. “And it’s only December,” she said aloud. She had been living in the old suicide’s house, and living his life, for six months already. She shut off the radio and then, reluctantly, the car heater.

Slamming the front door behind her, she paused to catch her breath in the curling rink cloakroom. The heavy laundry-hamper air of the rink rushed past her, and the sticky smell of whisky and cigarette smoke and candy was more welcome than it could have been on any warmer night. Pierre Lavallee was hanging his coat up.