The World More Full of Weeping (10 page)

The search for the missing boy went on for weeks.
Newspapers as far away as Toronto wrote about the
disappearance, and TV crews from the city parked their
vans in the field beside the house. Diane answered most
of their questions. When they had Jeff on-camera, he was
barely able to articulate his loss. He seemed to have given
up, long before the searchers did.

Some days, after the search, after the headlines, Jeff
would find himself in the woods with no awareness of how
he had got there. He would find the quiet of a clearing near
the forest's edge, or tuck himself into the lightning-struck
cave at the base of a giant cedar tree, and just sit. He would
sit for hours without moving, listening to the wind in the
leaves, the sound of birds around him.

He would sit for hours, waiting, hoping to hear, just
once, the echo of distant laughter.

And at night, he would stand in the dew-wet grass of
the back lawn as the dusk settled around him, looking out
at the darkening swath of trees, the black hill behind them.
He would stand there until full dark, looking for small,
luminous figures in the distance, waiting to hear his son
call to him, Brian's reedy voice calling to invite him to come
away with them.

He would have gone.

But the call never came.

And once the full dark came on, he would turn away, walk back into the house. He would close the door behind
him, but not lock it.

He never locked the door again.

And he always left a light burning.

I wrote this novella over the course of a month or so in the
summer of 2006, using a Lamy 2000 fountain pen loaded
with Noodlers Black in a standard issue, middle-grade
composition notebook.

While I was writing, I was listening, exclusively, to the first
two albums by
The Band: Music From Big Pink
and
The Band
.
Something about those songs, utterly contemporary (even
now, some forty years after their release), yet utterly timeless,
put me in the perfect mindset for this story, set as it is on the
rubicon between contemporary and traditional storytelling,
between domestic reality and mythic fantasy. At one point,
I decided to change the music — a month is a long time to
spend several hours every morning listening to the same
two records, over and over — and almost immediately, the
writing stopped. So, after a day or two of frustration, I put
the albums back on. It seemed to do the trick.

This story was finished sitting in the woods a short distance
away from the shores of Cowichan Lake, smoking a cigar and
listening to my son in the distance, playing in the water with
his aunt and uncle, his mother and grandmother. It was one
of those perfect moments.

The title of this novella is lifted shamelessly from “The Stolen
Child” by W.B. Yeats. The poem was an inspiration, but it's
not an answer, should you be inclined to look for one.

Some truths are slow to sink in; there are things that you know, implicitly, without necessarily
grasping their full implications. Over the last year, for
example, it has been brought vividly to my awareness that,
despite the best of intentions, writers often don't know just
what they're writing, even as they're writing it.

I should have known, though. That fact was certainly
brought home to me a few years ago, when my first novel,
Before I Wake
, hit the shelves and people started asking me
questions that simply hadn't occurred to me. I realized then,
from their questions, that there were whole aspects of that
book that I had no real awareness of having explored.

If you were to ask, I would tell you that — consciously —
I'm a narrative-focused writer. To my mind, story is the
main thing. Give me a good plot, and some good characters
to see it through, and that's all I can ask for. I don't get hung
up on the language of a story or novel; in fact, I prefer that
the language be as transparent as possible, not drawing
attention to itself and, more importantly, not drawing
attention away from the story and the characters.

When
people
started
asking
me
about
Before
I
Wake, though, I realized that I also wrote — completely
unbeknownst to myself — with a considerable emphasis
on the novel's sense of place. To such a point that people,
especially readers in Victoria, were singling out that aspect
of the book for special emphasis.

And there was always one question that came up, over
and over again: why Victoria? Why had I chosen to set the
novel in Victoria?

The answer I tended to give might have seemed flip to
those asking the question, but it wasn't, really. It was the
only answer I could honestly give: I set
Before I Wake
in
Victoria because that's where it happened.

No, not literally — this is fiction, after all. But it's where
the novel happened in my head. And once the geographic
specificity was pointed out to me, it made perfect sense.

I've always been a believer in something I've come to
call “personal geography” (or, if I'm feeling lofty, “psychic
geography”). There may be some arcane science that goes
by that term, but I use it to refer to the way we reflexively
and subconsciously build maps in our own head.

Note the plural: maps.

Take me, for instance. Anyone can log into GoogleMaps
and pull up a map of Victoria and have a pretty clear, if
abstract, sense of how the city is laid out. That's cartography.
At a personal level, though: I've lived in Victoria for more
than twenty years now; there are parts of the city I know
very well, and parts that are a complete mystery. My
personal map of the city, therefore, has incredibly detailed
portions (downtown, Fernwood), and some areas that are
barely more detailed than a street-map (Oak Bay, Gordon
Head).

Picture one of those old encyclopedias, with the sections
of transparencies to illustrate, say, human anatomy.

The cartographic map of Victoria is the base sheet,
carefully labelled, and filed with the National Geographic
or whatever society keeps track of these things, all grids
and conspicuous landmarks (the Legislature, the Empress
Hotel). Personal geography is the stack of transparent sheets
that overlay that base sheet. The first one is knowledge: the
sheet slides into place and certain areas of town go dark,
and others become cluttered with landmarks.

And the next level, the next transparency sheet, is
experience. In those bright, landmark-dotted areas of the
map, there start to appear footnotes, memories. Beacon
Hill Park where, during Luminara, I walked around in the
gathering dark smoking a cigar and being part of a family-friendly group hallucination as powerful as any drug I've
ever taken. The corner of Government and Yates, where I
spent seven years working in a bookstore and where there's
a Starbucks now (a Starbucks where my best friend — and
former co-worker — and I insist on having a coffee whenever
he's in town from Toronto, a bit of Venti-sized gravedancing). The various stores — Munro's Books, Curious
Comics — where I've spent too much time and money over
the years. And then there are the missing places, sites that
have disappeared but still occupy the personal map: that
building will always be A&B Sound to me, no matter who
takes it over. That building was the glass-blowing studio
where Xander spent so many enthralled hours before they
closed up shop. The restaurant where I interviewed Susan
Musgrave, that's now a different restaurant where I've never
been. The first bar I ever went to when I was legal, which is
now a strip club, where I . . . nevermind. Ad infinitum.

This isn't a radical thought at all: everyone has their
own personal geography of the places they know. My
Victoria is my own, an image shaped from my experiences
and my interests. I can tell you, for example, where every
bookstore — used or new — is downtown, but I haven't the
faintest idea of where one could buy shoes. I know where
to find the best prices and selection on CDs, but I'd have to
look up a men's clothing store in the phone book. Or stumble
across it by accident. That's the “personal” part of personal
geography; we all create our own cities around us.

But there's one page of transparency left. And as it
slowly drifts into place, certain points on the map spark
with an electrical current. Places I might not have even
known I knew existed, or attached no particular memory
to, crackle off the page.

The last transparency sheet? Resonance.

The funny thing about resonance — in general, I mean —
is that you never know when it's going to hit, or just how
hard it's going to hit you. That's why you can hear a song a
thousand times, but when the circumstances are just right,
the opening notes take you back, body and soul, to being in
a car on the highway, watching a beautiful girl sing along,
knowing with a gut-clenching certainty that there's more
to this new relationship than meets the eye. That's why
the smell of baking bread and cinnamon opens a door to a
kitchen full of family, laughing and joking and eating, with
no idea of the sadness that will inevitably come to them.
That's why the touch of a certain breeze can transport
you to a west shore beach, the feeling of wet socks and
the laughter as a little boy looks for fossils in the rocks,
and that's why the sound of Glenn Gould playing Bach's
Goldberg Variations
will always be the sound of falling in
love. Resonance is the ghosts that haunt us, always present,
whether we're aware of them in the moment or not.

Resonance is where, for me, the writing happens,
geographically speaking.

Take
Before I Wake
, for example. The novel opens with
a car accident, a hit-and-run, in a crosswalk near Hillside
Mall. That crosswalk was part of the “knowledge”and
“experience” levels of my personal geography: I used it
every morning on my walk to work to cross the six lanes
of traffic separating me from the bookstore. And the cars
would whip through, regardless of who might be in the
process of violating their God-given right to arrive at work
as fast as possible, pedestrians be damned. The close calls,
and the fear, gave that crosswalk resonance. When I needed
a place for the hit-and-run to happen, well, there it was.

Similarly, Royal Jubilee Hospital. After the accident,
Sherry is taken to RJH, and her parents spend a long
time in the Emergency Room. Been there, done that. RJH
is part of my knowledge, and part of my experience. The
resonance, though, came from a very long afternoon in the
ER when my wife was suffering a kidney stone attack a few
years before I wrote the novel. I channelled the whole thing
into the novel, not just the physical particulars, but the
sense of helplessness that comes, that freakish distending
of time that only occurs in hospital waiting rooms. And the
resonance, it turns out, led me astray: RJH doesn't treat
children. A little girl hit by a car would have been taken by
ambulance out of town to Victoria General for treatment.
Accuracy be damned, though: it's the resonance that
matters.

And now that I'm aware of it, it's easy to see that that
resonance, and my underlying interest in the physical place
of my writing, has continued. My forthcoming novel, for
example, is also set largely in Victoria. Thus, there's a musty,
cluttered, antiquarian bookstore en route to downtown
that plays a significant role in the book: Poor Richard's
may be long gone from the actual map, but it lives on in my
soul and, as Prospero's Books, in my work. And it's not just
Victoria: there is a scene in the Astor Court, the gorgeous
Zen scholar's garden in the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York, and something terrible happens in a Portland
hotel room. Well, the Astor Court is perhaps one of my
favourite places on Earth. And I've stayed in that very hotel
room. Resonances. Always resonances.

(As an aside, there is something interesting about
resonance, I've discovered: it's cyclical. The act of writing
about a place renders that place resonant, even if it wasn't
prior to the act of getting it down on the page. Thus,
walking around downtown Victoria is, these days, often a
little surreal, with places given additional weight through
their writing. And writing tends to fix those places,
permanently, in my mind. Thus I'm surprised whenever I'm
at RJH to discover that it has a sleek, modern ER, not the
cracked, dingy hell-hole that I have in my memory, my soul,
my book. And the library hasn't looked like it does in
Before
I Wake
since before the novel came out. Often, walking
through these familiar places feels like walking through a
dream, or a dissociative state. It's like I don't know quite
what's real, and what's not. Which, now that I think about
it, is pretty much how I spend every waking moment, so . . .
no harm there.)