The Republic of Nothing (26 page)

After Burnet left, I thought Gwen and I would become closer, but a strange silence crept between us again, this time worse than before. I kept asking her, “What's wrong?” but she wouldn't answer except to say that it wasn't me. It didn't have anything to do with me. I invited her over many times, invited myself over to her house, but it was always no. She was pushing me further and further away and I didn't know why. She had also begun to miss school which was very unusual for her. I figured it had something to do with Burnet, and something to do with the war. Word had come back that Burnet, after training in Canada, would be shipped down to the States for further work with a unit in South Carolina, and then it would be off to Southeast Asia. The crazy bastard was going to have his chance to kill after all. I wanted to explain it all to Gwen, to tell her what Burnet was really like, that maybe it wasn't his fault but that he was a born destroyer. But every time I talked to her, every time I launched into a one-sided conversation with her, I never once mentioned Burnet.

May arrived and the sun reappeared, warming the cold stones, melting the last of the ice. The lifeblood began to flow in the veins and gulleys of the land. I was out walking the perimeter of the island again at night. Ian, alone. A familiar portrait. Seventeen was a no man's land. I felt like I had somehow lost the fun of being a kid but couldn't figure out how to grow up into something that was worth growing into. There were powerful tides in my life and I had no control over anything. Other forces, too omnipotent and too distant, held gravitational sway over my being. I wanted to fucking scream.

Then I saw her. I was on the lee side of the island, near the small crescent beach that my mom used to take us to when we were young. The moon was behind her as she was looking straight out into the water, down that shimmering silver path
that my mother called the highway of the moon. The highway danced over the bay. My heart leaped into my throat. It was Gwen. I dropped low and sank to my knees behind a clump of sea oats. She took off a jacket, undid her blouse and stepped out of her skirt. I had only a silhouette to go by, but it was enough to make my lungs forget their evolutionary training. She was light upon the sand, and I watched as she walked into the cold bay water in a straight line centred upon the highway of the moon.

I was, in those days, a dreamer of many dreams; this one seemed closer to imagination than to the fact, so I could not bring myself to waken. Instead, I almost believed I was sleeping the best of sleeps. The water was up to her neck, her throat, up to her lovely nose and eyes but she was not about to swim. How can I describe the way she moved forward, her long brown hair now floating like feathered seaweed behind her, the moon still shining down like cold steel fire?

What happened inside me must certainly have been directed by the moon. Some volcanic thing happened in my blood, something less than the deathburst of a fatal star but larger than the forging of a planet. In a split second, the dream was gone; I was fully alive, no longer a child, forever the next thing to come and sprinting down the sandy beach and into the water.

The water was cold. I sloshed through the shallows and dove forward, tackling Gwen beneath the darkness of the bay. She had no idea what had taken her and she hit me hard in the stomach. I pushed her to the surface and tried to hold onto her hand but she was scratching at my face with her nails. There was nothing to do but hang onto her and pull her shoreward. I felt cruel when at last we were out of the water and I heaved her on the sand, only to watch her fall face down where she sobbed and heaved like some sea thing deprived of its natural environment.

To say it happened like this will seem false, but the truth is
I knew then and there that I would never be the same. What I felt could never be described as anything less than awareness and arrival. Gwen was crying and I had no idea what to say. Too many thoughts were racing, too much was ready to spill from my mouth. I found her jacket and put it around her shoulders, then stepped back and found myself kneeling in the wet sand.

“Ian,” she said at last.

She had turned towards me and I could see her face now in the moonlight. For a brief instant the child had returned. We were twelve again. We were kids who played near the shores and picked up sand dollars and put stranded starfish back into the pools. Then it was gone, and she was Gwen, the older one who dazzled in sunlight and walked in grace.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

She didn't say a thing. Her eyes had swallowed me. She dropped the jacket now and slowly stood up, inches from where I knelt. She stood full before me now, the moon at my back, and I could understand that she wanted me to see more than just her beauty. Her breasts were round and full, magnetic above my face, and the skin over her stomach was smooth and taut. It was like the smooth morning sun on the skin of the horizon when the sea has gone perfectly still. I could tell by the way she placed her hands on either side of her stomach that she was trying to tell me something. Still stunned by the intensity of the moment, I leaped to the portent. Remembered the talk at school. I had never heard the words myself from Burnet, only the jokes, the rumours.

My hands seemed to move of their own accord as they reached out and touched those two delicate hands. Leaning forward with what I thought could be my final breath on earth, I rested my head gently against her beautiful belly and then kissed her just above the navel. I could feel her shake with a spasm of sobbing and heard her begin to cry but I
didn't move, didn't let go. Kneeling there on the wet sand and getting to know this mysterious, dangerous girl for the second time in my life, I whispered,
It's all right. Everything is going to turn out just fine.

There was nothing more to be said that night. Things
were
going to be all right. I knew it and I knew that I would somehow take charge of this situation. The old Ian, the rescuer of dead grandfathers, would make something good come out of this. I was filled with a sense of responsibility and necessity and returned to the land of the living.

In the days that followed, Gwen and I walked to the bus together. We talked in soft serious tones in a language that was different from the rattle of nonsense spoken by our peers. And we met at night, out along the same sandy cove, where we walked and we talked.

“It was my idea,” she said. “I could have told Burnet no, but I wanted him.”

I was probably the stupidest kid my age in the world when it came to matters of sex. Sure, I thought about it. I knew other guys who bragged, including Burnet, but in my company he had never said anything about Gwen. Yet I had believed I understood what sex was all about. I was a kind of romantic pervert, I suppose. I ached for love. I ached to be
in
love and my mind was fixed on Gwen. If I had thought of having sex with her, it was always because that would be the natural thing so closely tied in with that deeper feeling. The other guys spoke about sex so differently — “fuck ‘em and forget ‘em” was a sort of macho anthem that I heard over and over. The code of the male destroyer. Only this time Burnet the destroyer was also the creator.

“How come you didn't do anything to keep from getting pregnant?” I asked.

“I wanted to but Burnet said that it didn't seem as natural that way.”

“What a jerk,” I said. “Why did you listen to him? How could you do it with
him?”
I was really mad at her arid she looked hurt.

“I wanted to,” she said. “I just wanted to, that's all.”

I swallowed my anger, my pride. I tried to erase the awful image of the two of them screwing. That's the verb Burnet would have used. It was certainly not lovemaking. “Did you love him?” I asked. I guess I wanted all the pain just then. I wanted her to pick up the hammer, pick up the metal spike and drive it straight through my heart.

“I think so. I'm not sure. I knew it was you I should have been in love with but — I guess it was him. I can't explain it.” She came over to me and took my hand, held it up to her cheek, wanted me to look her in the eyes, but I couldn't.

“Do you think he loved you?”

“No,” she answered. “I don't know if a guy like Burnet will ever feel real love, not until he stops hurting so bad. That's part of why I fell for him. I knew that beneath his tough exterior he was very vulnerable. I think I believed having sex with him might help him in some way. It sounds crazy, but I thought it might make him more caring, more compassionate.”

“Guess that's why he decided to go to Vietnam,” I said, the acid of my dark sarcasm carving a new chasm between us. I should have kept my mouth shut.

She pulled her hand away, started to inch backward.

“Sorry,” I said. “I shouldn't have said that.” I picked up a handful of sand. “What about now?” I asked. There weren't quite tears in my eyes but I felt the sting of their presence. I would hold back. “Do you still love him now?”

She shook her head no, but it wasn't convincing. I wondered if she had any idea of my hurt, my pain. Is that what it would take for her to fall in love with me? I deserved as much pity as Burnet. If pity would make Gwen love me, I would cut off my arm and scream in pain until she was willing to com-fort me, to love me, to make love to me.

Fortunately, my good sense prompted me to say nothing. If silence, the inability to express myself, had been my worst fault of late, it was also to be my saving grace. I pulled her back to me — or at least this other Ian did, this Ian with good sense, who had suddenly transcended the boy. He wrapped his arms around Gwen, he kissed her on the neck, he whispered in her ear that he loved her and would do anything to help her and that he didn't care if she loved him or not, that he'd always be there.

Gwen had not told her parents but she told her grandfather, crazy old Duke who seemed to sparkle with good natured vitality ever since he had arrived on Whalebone and accepted his new identity. He was an easy guy to talk to and I understood why she told him. He was never judgemental and always somewhat askew, never direct with an answer. His answers, like his opinions, were cloaked in mystery and beauty.

“I explained everything and asked for his advice,” Gwen said as we walked home from the school bus that had let us off at the bridge. We walked past the barking hounds of Burnet's house. We could hear his old man yelling out the door for them to shut up, heard him fire off a string of foul curses like machine-gun fire. I gulped, wondering what Duke could possibly have to offer.

“He said that there are always waiting souls in the great soul bank. Sometimes they come into the world, sometimes they don't. Usually it's not us here on earth who have anything to do with the decision.”

“What's a soul bank?” I asked.

“I asked him the same thing. He just quoted something from William Wordsworth — ‘not in entire forgetfulness… but trailing clouds of glory do we come.'”

“Trailing clouds of glory,” I repeated. It had an eerie,
deja vu
feel to it. Of course, it was something Duke would say, part of the great mystery of who he was. What exactly had he been before he ended up on the street? A professor? A poet? Himself trailing clouds of ragged glory from his street life outside Grand Central Station? “What do you think he was trying to tell you?”

She looked a little glum. “I'm not sure, really. I think he meant something about the baby.” It was the first time she really said the word and a chill ran down my spine. It's incredibly odd how there can be such a big gulf, a huge distance, between the idea of being pregnant and actually having a baby. “I think he was implying that if I have the baby, a soul will come into the world; if I don't have the baby, the soul will still be out there and come into the world another time.”

“You're pregnant. You
are
going to have a baby. What else is there to it?”

She hung her head. “Think about it, Ian. Vietnam, nuclear bombs, China, assassinations, dictatorships. A father who gets his kicks by going off to war to kill people. Does it make good sense to bring a baby into the world right now?”