Jah No Sleep
by:
388
Views
Views
28 Votes
Chapter 1:- One
Preface
Chapter One
The dimension that separates
the living from the dead is exactly
as wide as the edge of a maple leaf.
Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet
His stirring dragged me out of sleep into a soundless night. I moved closer, pressing my back against his breastbone. My flesh quivered on contact with the soft, slightly ticklish crine. The downy hairs that reigned over his chest and abdomen had also reached the region of his shoulders. Vanguard filaments ventured even further down the columns of muscles flanking his ribcage; they threatened to someday collide with the cilia governing in the region of his buttocks. Perhaps in his senior years, the greying fleece might have achieved hairy hegemony. Already the tufts, nestled like snipers, were beginning to sneak out of his ears and the elflock at his throat threatened to join ranks with his beard hairs, the reserve guard he shaved for now.
I curled myself into the curve of his torso and pressed tightly into his pelvis and thighs. He reached his arm further around, engraving me deeper into the warm hollow formed by his closing frame. I would have liked to have been absorbed completely, as by osmosis, and become one with his breathing, his breath, his life.
He whispered in my ear, teasingly, playfully: "Ehhh, la grosse, je t'aime!" Suddenly, a jolt fired through my nerve-endings; I remembered. Oh God, I remembered! Horrified, I pulled away, quickly reaching for the lamp chain. I tugged and turned to look. No. Not there; only a vague indentation, only a slight depression where he had lain. Disbelieving that it was just a dream, I slid my hand along the barely discernible, still warm hollow in the sheet.
Then, in a split second, a terrible implosion, as if every cell, every atom of my body was being compressed into an impossible density. Just as suddenly, that compressed cellular mass exploded; torn asunder, molecules of skin and blood and bone spun out into a blackened sky, I wailed, furious, forlorn, into the deaf night. Soon spent, I gathered myself into a tightly constricted foetal position and wept quietly. Eons later I slept, drowning my consciousness in a pool of anguish.
He had come just like that those first three nights. He had come in the middle of the night and held me gently and firmly in his arms, his cheek pressed insistently against mine, his sweet, sweet breathing harmonizing with the rhythm of my sleep. He had come to tell me he was still with me; that he had not gone so far that he could not reach me. He had come to let me know he could still touch me, still loved me.
After that, every night for weeks after his funeral, I climbed the fire escape onto the second story roof of Moishe's Restaurant on St. Laurent Boulevard. I made my way over the tar and gravel to the base of the chimney that ascended all the way past the top of the eighth floor of the adjacent building. There I sat leaning my back against the grating bricks, crumbled bits of mortar sticking to my skin, my perspiration acting like glue. I spread my arms like fledgling wings and grabbed the edges on both sides, my thumbs extended downward toward the earth buried below all that cement and brick and mortar and asphalt: into the earth where his body had gone.
Why are you hurting yourself? he asked.
I need to understand, I answered.
Go home now, he said.
I didn’t go home. I stayed for hours, until dawn finally broke into fiery auras around the edges of skyscrapers to the east. In moments, the city was ablaze, soon to be extinguished by the stark white light that turned those same buildings to ash.
I tried in vain to envision what had happened. I thought, if only I knew exactly how it had happened then I might understand why. They hadn't told me much that morning. Only that he was dead. That he had fallen seven stories from the top of the Cooper Building on St. Laurent Boulevard. It had happened in the early, early morning, just past four am. That was all.
He had failed to meet me after work that night, so I stopped off at the all-night deli across the street from that same building to have a sandwich with a glass of milk before going home, something we might have done together, had he been there.
When I emerged out onto the sidewalk, I noticed men in uniforms, policemen and firemen, on the roof of Moishe's across the street. I remember thinking: there must have been a fire, but there doesn't seem to be much damage. Then, just as I started to cross over, an ambulance suddenly shot out in front of me from the curb on the other side and sped up the boulevard. Dangerously, it swerved past the early morning traffic. Only later did I make the connection between that speeding ambulance, the officials on the roof, the fall, and his barely beating heart amidst all those broken bones disparately juxtaposed on the stretcher.
We didn't live far from the boulevard and I was soon home, wondering what had happened to him, wondering why he hadn't met me after work. Maybe he’d met up with friends and lost track of the time. I'll see him in the morning, I thought. And he’ll be in trouble. It was almost morning now. I decided, better I sleep a bit than wait up for him.
The phone rang at seven.
With eyes still closed, I felt his side of the bed; no, he wasn't there. It must be him. Annoyed, I reached for the phone.
"He's dead. He fell…at four this morning…from the top of the Cooper building."
"No!"
On the third day after the accident, the day before his burial, I sat by the window at a bistro on Duluth Street with Peter’s friend Daniel. It was the first time I met him, although I’d heard about him of course, from Peter. Daniel had been with him on the roof that night. Earlier in the day I had phoned, to ask Daniel if he would meet with me. I didn't need to say why.
I hadn't been out of the house since that fatal morning. I hadn't moved from the armchair (his favourite chair) in the living room except in the wee hours of the morning to crawl stiff and aching into bed.
It had taken me forever to walk down the block to the restaurant. It had taken every iota of strength I could muster to constrain the tears dammed at the floodgate of my eyes. I would have liked to make myself invisible. Everyone on the street, everyone sitting on their porches and balconies, everyone standing in a doorway raised their eyes to meet mine as I passed. They searched for an answer I could not give, not even to myself. They knew what had happened, it was written all over me. This was impossible of course, but it felt just like that.
Daniel leaned towards me. His eyes were the colour of lapis lazuli, dark and deep, with specks of yellow in them. They seeped into mine as he confided what weighed most heavily on his heart.
"He let go, Ciarra. I'm telling you... but I think it's better if you don't tell anyone else. It's all I've been thinking about… since... can’t stop thinking about it. I don't understand. He just let go!"
Now the fragile weir of will collapsed. Blinded by a barrage of tears, my breath arrested, I recoiled from that monstrous truth. But I knew, of course. Memories flooded through the circuits in my brain, swelling in brackish pools, depositing information like silt, forcing my consciousness to wade through those areas that threatened to engulf me like quicksand.
The day I arrived home from a months’ long trip to North Africa and Europe, I found him in bed bouncing his football off the ceiling. He hadn't heard me come in. Indeed, I hadn't phoned to let him know I would be arriving that day. I'd wanted to surprise him.
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching the mechanical flip of his wrist as he bounced the ball off the ceiling, puzzled by the morose expression on his face. I could not speak, so overwhelmed I was by the sadness in his eyes. The ball sunk abruptly into the palm of his hand as he caught sight of me. He didn't jump up, excited, happy to see me, enveloping me in his arms. He just lay there, staring, as if stunned.
Months earlier he'd cried the day before I left, begging me to stay, but at that point he'd already moved out of the house many weeks before. We'd hardly seen one another until he'd heard I was leaving, and then he started coming around again. More often as my departure date approached. He offered to move back into my flat while I was gone. It was preferable that someone be there. I agreed. And then the day before my flight, over breakfast, he broke down and finally admitted to me how much he loved me, how much he had missed me, how sorry he was. He told me he wanted to stay now, wanted me to stay. But it was too late to cancel the trip. I had my ticket, I'd quit my job.
I travelled for many months. There were calls made, some postcards and letters sent, from Paris, Barcelona, Marrakesh, Al Jaza’ir, Tunis, Athens, Rome and Paris again. I wanted him to join me, first in Barcelona, then Marrakesh, Al Jaza’ir, Tunis, Athens, Rome and Paris, but he was afraid. Of what, I could not imagine. Each time we spoke, he said: it's enough, stop punishing me, come home now.
After that night, given the opportunity, I would have redeemed those months with the remainder of my life.
Daniel reached over the table to cover my hand with his. It didn't help; nevertheless, I was grateful for the gesture. He spoke ever so softly.
"About six months ago I sculpted a very unusual piece. What I’m saying is, it wasn't like my usual work. It was of a man falling from a high building. I realize now it was a warning. But how could I have known then? If I'd known, I..."
"What could you have done? He never would have believed you anyway. How could you have known what that meant? Besides, it was what he wanted."
He'd had a death wish. He had been suicidal while I was gone. He'd plunged into a severe depression in the dead of winter. He'd mentioned none of this on the phone and I'd detected nothing in his tone of voice to indicate that his discontent was anything more than his desire for my return. But when I got home he did tell me. And we made a pact.
Daniel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He lifted the cup of espresso to his lips, and then put it back on the table slowly, without taking a sip. Bending forward, he whispered.
"What do you mean it was what he wanted?"
"Just that I don't believe it was any kind of accident."
Already suspect, he looked at me solicitously. I didn't offer an explanation but instead asked him what the others could not tell me.
“Please, tell me exactly what happened? I need to know."
“Ciarra. Are you sure? I mean..."
"No, no, it's all right. I want to know. Exactly."
I braced myself. Reluctantly, he recounted the events of that early morning.
"Well, when the bar closed we hung out on the street for a bit, just hanging out, you know, talking with one of the waitresses from the bar and another friend of mine. Peter said you would be along any minute. I guess he was waiting for you to finish work. Then he suggested we climb the fire escape to the top of the Cooper Building, to see the lights of the city. I hesitated and asked him: but what about Ciarra? He said we’d see you coming up the street. So we went up by way of the fire escape. Once we got up there, I guess we were being a little rowdy, someone in the building must have phoned the police because we heard the sirens and then saw them parked in front of the Cooper looking up to the roof. At that point Peter was still walking along the ledge."
I looked at him quizzically. He continued, explaining.
"He'd been walking along the ledge of the building, don't ask me why. The others ran for the fire escape but I waited because he'd got to the chimney and it looked like he was going to try to swing around it. On the outside. Crazy! I ran toward him just as he swung out, but by the time I got there he was already inching his way down the chimney. I just managed to grab the collar of his jacket and told him he was insane, he'd never make it! I let go when he pushed my arm away. I remember thinking in that moment it would be worse if I tried to hang on. For sure he'd fall. And I’d probably go down with him. I mean, he was fighting me. He yelled at me: "Laches-moi! Je descend par ici!" His mind was made up. He was determined. I think he was defying the police or something, you know what I mean... well, you know what he was like. Anyway, he scaled down a few feet, so even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to reach him. And then, well, the others were insisting that we follow them down the fire escape but I just stood there. I couldn't move. Then, the weirdest thing. First he looked down. Then he looked way up into the sky. Then... well, he just let go. He let go, just like that."
“Traitor!” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
The day I'd returned from the Maghreban trip we sat talking in bed until late that night. It was then we'd made the pact. I was the one who proposed it, as a measure of deterrence really. It wasn’t something that would ever have occurred to me under normal circumstances, except that he kept going on and on about wanting to leave the planet. He described in excruciating detail how horrible life was on this planet, the injustices, the suffering he witnessed all around him. He railed against "the system", against corporations that in collusion with governments were destroying the earth and oppressing peoples of all nations through evil acts of conspiracy and corruption. He railed against the system that justified a distribution of resources that left a large percentage of people in lack while the few stockpiled or consumed to a point of absolute absurdity. Then he railed against the human race that perpetrated this system through participation and collusion and sheer complacency. He condemned warmongers, murderers, rapists, thieves from the corporate to the individual level, and most especially he railed against child abusers. It was as if he had made a collection of news items that he had filed in his memory banks and now was laying them out on the bed sheet between us like clippings, each horrible story accompanied by his scathing commentary. He denounced humanity for its lies, its greed, its ignorance, its arrogance and its lack of compassion.
And he reprimanded himself most of all for his own incapacity and lack of will to affect any change or alleviate any of the suffering.
He had done this sort of thing before, this castigation of all of humanity, and once exhausted, sobbed in my arms like a defeated child. I could do nothing against the raging because fundamentally I agreed with him on all counts. I tried to soothe him with another perspective, a positive outlook, the outlook I often tried to soothe myself with, but it was difficult for me. I too was sensitive to the injustices perpetrated, the destruction I saw all around. I too felt powerless.
I realized to what extent his sensitivity had become intolerable; he was contemplating taking his own life. It had nothing to do with me. It was the first time it had gone so far. I was terrified that he would actually do it and leave. Leave me. An idea occurred to me. I made him swear that he wouldn't leave without me. I made him promise to take me with him; we would go together. I was convinced that if it ever really came down to it I could always stop him. This hope I kept to myself and we made a pact: each forfeited his right to leave without the other. I believed this would protect him from himself.
It didn't, of course. He took the opportunity when it presented itself or perhaps he himself created the opportunity. Either way, he left without me.
The morning of the funeral could have been a day like any other. I woke to the slight chill of early autumn air, the first foreboding of cold, dark winter days and darker, colder nights ahead. The draught through the window vibrated with acute timbres that piqued my ears. I pulled my knees into my chest. I wanted to sleep more. I wanted to stay the consciousness inflaming my mind. More than anything, I wanted to forget.
The morning light pushed through my eyelids. I shut them tighter, squeezing tears through compliant eyelashes. In the next moment I became aware of something different. Something... I opened my eyes to survey the bedroom. There was an unusual quality of solitude, the base note to a singular feeling of emptiness hanging in the air. Peter was gone. He had been there in the night. I remembered. I remembered his presence beside me under the dark sheets. Now he was gone. I might have felt worse at the sudden realization except that it was impossible. I could never have felt worse. I lay there cocooned in the duvet, dreading the day.
It had been arranged that one of Peter's longstanding friends would come for me at ten. I had never been to a funeral before. Death had never been so close to me. No one I had ever known personally had ever died before, until now.
I dragged my spirit through body motions so thick with lethargy it was nearly suffocating. Despite this, when the doorbell rang I was dressed and ready to go, ploughing myself through resistance at the door.
Marco had nothing comforting to say. He broke his silence once only.
"He didn't suffer much, Ciarra."
"Bullshit,” I retorted, and bit my lip. “Sorry,” I said, a little while later.
I stood in an aisle just far enough away that I could not see, even inadvertently, over the edge of the coffin. I could not bear to see his lifeless body. I refused to allow the sight of his corpse to be imprinted on my memory, refused to let that be my last image of him. My imagination taunted me with macabre visualizations, however. That was enough.
His parents and siblings stood side by side in the front row holding hands, some with their arms around another’s shoulders. Peter's friends and other relatives filed into the room. Peter followed behind the last of them.
I saw him as if he were flesh and blood and bone. He was whole, nothing broken, nothing displaced. His countenance seemed normal, as if it were perfectly natural that he should be there among the mourners, among his friends and family. As if it was not he lying there in the coffin.
I watched in fascination as he made his way one by one to each of those he loved. He sidled up to them, bent forward a little and spoke into their ear, sometimes smiling or joking, and always with a consoling gesture. Each responded in their fashion; with some a quizzical look that suddenly broke on pained faces, others exploded into tears, and others suddenly smiled through their tears. No one could see him, but they felt him. They all felt him. When he approached me, my body suddenly filled with the essence of him. I was utterly overwhelmed: my knees folded with the weight of his love.
He stayed by my side, all at once teasing and consoling. Once having succeeded in making me smile, he went to join his parents.
After the exequies, everyone piled into an array of vehicles and drove for a short distance to a suburban graveyard. Peter wasn’t there when they lowered the coffin into his grave. I knew he wouldn’t be.
The reception passed in a kind of blur. Later I vaguely remembered having been introduced to his relatives and old friends, each offering condolences. None of it had made any sense. Peter mingled with the crowd the whole time, enjoying himself, as if at a party. I resented his happiness, envied his light heartedness.
After the initial shock, I descended into an abysmal despondency. At first, I raged against him for having betrayed the pact, for having left without me. I screamed in protest at the walls that formed my skull, as if my mind had been straightjacketed and I was left unattended and powerless to battle my own demons. I ranted and raved whenever his image came into focus, screaming abuses and recriminations at him, but he stood his ground until my love for him washed the rage away, and all that I was left with was a flood of longing.
My interior life became ridden with despair, despair so all-encompassing that there were times I could no longer breathe and I lay in bed, clutching at my heart, gasping, angry at my own instincts for sucking air into my lungs against my will. More than anything I wanted to go find him, truly convinced I could. At first it was to rebuke him for not loving me enough, for leaving without me, and then later because I could no longer stand how much I missed him.
His mother came by my house to visit two weeks after the funeral. She came to assure me that Peter had loved me. Mothers know, she said. She had been with him his last day. They had gone down to the river for a picnic in the afternoon, after her shift at the hospital. Peter had only talked of me, his mother said, and she was looking forward to meeting her. Now she was glad she finally did.
“You are just as he described,” she said. “He loved you so much.”
She had also come to ask if he had been with me those first three days after the accident. Yes, she thought so, because he had not gone to her until after the funeral. He had stayed nine days with her. I took everything she said at face value. Questioning this woman’s experience would have meant questioning my own sanity. I was in no condition to do that.
Several months later, Peter stopped waking me in the middle of the night. Instead, I woke in the morning with his breath on my cheek. I heard him rushing up the stairwell to my flat. I saw him at the end of the street, grinning that wide, mischievous grin of his, all teeth and bright eyes, beckoning to me from behind a tree. He spoke to me from the limb outside my bedroom window. He whispered through the ivy clinging to the glass. He thought it was funny. He tried to make me laugh. I cried harder.
I took to drinking. At first, only a few drinks at work. Soon, more drinks in clandestine bars after work. It seemed to quell the intolerable pain until I found myself alone again and then it was far worse. I asked for more and more shifts at work until I was working almost every night in the club. I slept all day. My friends worried about me. Too often, in the wee hours of the morning after work, I was found sobbing on a bench in the neighbourhood, oblivious to my surroundings. They brought me home, put me to bed.
Two seasons passed. Grief consumed me. I hated the city more than ever. I hated the club and the life-style my job engendered. I missed the day, the light. I despised myself for the loneliness that forced me to seek out company when it would have been beneficial for me to stay alone. I hated the fact I was drinking far too often and far too much. I hated comparing myself with Peter’s friends who seemed to have accepted his death in stride and who were now getting on with their lives as if he had never been a part of them. I hated the fact that I missed him so much. Most of all, I hated myself for what I was becoming, an embittered, self-pitying drunk.
Others were more forgiving. They told me “time heals”, but I knew Time alone would never be enough to heal the gaping wound in my heart, the rent in my soul. I wanted to get far away. From myself, if I could. Every day I was reminded of him. Every day I walked past that building on my way to work. Every day I saw someone who had known the two of us. Every single day images from the past formed themselves out of the commonplace; by association, everything related back to him, our history together. I could not escape it. He was every rider on every bicycle, every man sitting in the window of every Bistro we had ever been to together. He was sitting on a bench in every park. He played with the children in the street and he was always waiting for me when I got home. Why couldn’t he do this when he was alive, I wondered?
Nearing spring, something began to change in me. Tender, fragile shoots emerged from a warming earth. Suddenly the trees decorated themselves with miniscule bulbs like ornaments that soon bedecked all their branches in full array. Tulips appeared over night. Children shed their soggy mittens and donned brand-new running shoes that would wear out by the end of the season. Windows flung open in wide welcome to the sweet, sultry air. People’s faces turned up to the sun, its warmth enticing cracked lips into smiles finally out of hibernation. The terraces were brimming with lively individuals whose eyes shone with anticipation for the summer ahead. The sun's rays stroked newly exposed skin and promised hot, lazy days and new love affairs in the not too distant future.
There was something subtly seductive in all of this. I felt a faint, yet distinct desire to connect with life again. With a life that had meaning. My old life no longer held any appeal. I wanted to go somewhere where there was an abundance of life. I wanted to surround myself with so much life that I could forget death for a while.
I asked for time off work; when it was granted I went at once to speak with my travel agent. He recommended Costa Rica. The charters had just opened up that year.
"No army and beautiful beaches,” he said encouragingly.
I booked a two week charter and left Montreal one week later.
Preface
Only to the extent that we expose ourselves
over and over to annihilation
can that which is indestructible be found in us.
Buddhist Teaching
over and over to annihilation
can that which is indestructible be found in us.
Buddhist Teaching
This past dry season, by a strange and insidious process of reduction, I had reached a dead end in myself. To any observer who knew me, the facade looked the same, the eccentric expression of myself strong and somewhat rebellious, free; but there was no longer any correspondence between my inner life and its outward expression. I called myself the dead end girl, jokingly, but it was no joke.
It seemed as if all the negative patterns of my life were being reflected in a kaleidoscope. And if you looked toward the centre, where resided my Being, the psychedelic configurations repeated themselves at an increasingly successive and concentrated rate; they became so concentrated in fact that it seemed there wasn't any space left for me. Or so it felt. I knew then I had to completely break through to the other side, or die. Perhaps breaking through was just that, a kind of dying, the little death I'd heard of somewhere. In either case, I knew there was no escape. Not this time.
Yet, so depleted of energy, so worn out by love, so steeped in self-recrimination and self-pity, and so ashamed of my own weakness and lack of courage, all I wanted was to be left alone to die, to absolutely die. Physical death, death only of the body would not have been sufficient. I sought annihilation, the absolute obliteration of consciousness. Only then could I truly rest. Only in oblivion would memory cease and with it all vestige of suffering. How this was to be accomplished I had no idea. I lacked the energy to even imagine a suitable suicide scenario, let alone utter extinction. I thought it could be as simple as willing myself, in a heroic moment, to stop breathing. There didn't have to be anything dramatic or tragic about it. It could simply be an irrevocable decision, a final act.
Very soon after I realized that I must be prepared to surrender everything.
Now I know nothing again. Each day is a deliberate and painfully conscious struggle through the medium of my art to arrive at a different, and hopefully, larger perspective of myself. I sometimes feel like I am in hiding, like a wounded animal that seeks a dark burrow within which to lick its wounds; only not as sad as that now, just necessary in a very positive sense, as if the slate has finally been rubbed clean, leaving only the streaked and hazy impressions of memory to be deciphered anew. Or rather, as if gesso has been applied to an old canvas that is tattered at the edges, and I begin again to apply the colours composed of memories, letters, conversations with others and myself, stories told again and again, the hues changing with each telling, certain details rising in relief, others fading or blending into the background. I cannot say what the result will be, but I already know that it will be different for each viewer and different for me each time I look.
I have adopted a solitary existence and live through these days painting and writing, growing into a new self, or rather attempting to return to my Self. I know it is but for a definite period of time, this solitude. Nevertheless, I cannot envision a future beyond the work at hand. I have renovated an old barn on the property of some friends and I am quite comfortable here. It serves my purposes for the moment. I have space enough, everything I need to work, and I remain alone with my introspection.
Below the window a quiet river runs by whispering stories as I watch the moon; always through some strange quirk of logistics the moon shines on my bed no matter where I am in the world. I bathe in the moonlight at night as I bathe in the river each morning, washing myself in the soothing, cooling memory of another river under another moon far away now. Still the memories of that other stream trickle clear and close, still bubble up to the surface, still wash over me. Perhaps this river will carry this story too, whispering it to another attentive ear at another destination further on its path. Maybe this river will find its way to that Other and tell again the story we have been composing together for so long. Who knows?
And I wonder now if the telling of it will have the effect of an exorcism? Will I somehow be purged in the end? The suffering, I know, is a necessary tool for transformation and for this I should rejoice. It is the stuff of my awakening. But when in the throes of it, the pain is so blinding and creates such confusion, I cannot imagine the end result, I cannot imagine there might be an end to it at all.
In my heart I know this is the way I have chosen and therefore must believe that it cannot be for naught, that its higher purpose is ultimately my own edification. Yet, if the telling is a tool that will facilitate the cleansing or only serve to extend and exacerbate the suffering, I do not know now in this moment. This is the jealously guarded secret of Time. Nevertheless, I have the impression that, one way or another, I will be purified.
The distortions are so many, yet one sure thing I have learned is that a pure heart finds its expression in unconditional love. It is indeed a state of Being. This I know now without a doubt. Yet the healing of the heart is a tricky business. How this state is to be arrived at and sustained is another matter altogether. The tendency when wounded of course is to close the heart, to encase it, to shut out all tender feeling. But the price one pays for this act of disassociation is high, too high. It must not be allowed to become a way to live one’s life. Undeniably, it negates even the possibility of entering love. And a life dammed to love is most assuredly the greatest affliction of the soul.
It seemed as if all the negative patterns of my life were being reflected in a kaleidoscope. And if you looked toward the centre, where resided my Being, the psychedelic configurations repeated themselves at an increasingly successive and concentrated rate; they became so concentrated in fact that it seemed there wasn't any space left for me. Or so it felt. I knew then I had to completely break through to the other side, or die. Perhaps breaking through was just that, a kind of dying, the little death I'd heard of somewhere. In either case, I knew there was no escape. Not this time.
Yet, so depleted of energy, so worn out by love, so steeped in self-recrimination and self-pity, and so ashamed of my own weakness and lack of courage, all I wanted was to be left alone to die, to absolutely die. Physical death, death only of the body would not have been sufficient. I sought annihilation, the absolute obliteration of consciousness. Only then could I truly rest. Only in oblivion would memory cease and with it all vestige of suffering. How this was to be accomplished I had no idea. I lacked the energy to even imagine a suitable suicide scenario, let alone utter extinction. I thought it could be as simple as willing myself, in a heroic moment, to stop breathing. There didn't have to be anything dramatic or tragic about it. It could simply be an irrevocable decision, a final act.
Very soon after I realized that I must be prepared to surrender everything.
Now I know nothing again. Each day is a deliberate and painfully conscious struggle through the medium of my art to arrive at a different, and hopefully, larger perspective of myself. I sometimes feel like I am in hiding, like a wounded animal that seeks a dark burrow within which to lick its wounds; only not as sad as that now, just necessary in a very positive sense, as if the slate has finally been rubbed clean, leaving only the streaked and hazy impressions of memory to be deciphered anew. Or rather, as if gesso has been applied to an old canvas that is tattered at the edges, and I begin again to apply the colours composed of memories, letters, conversations with others and myself, stories told again and again, the hues changing with each telling, certain details rising in relief, others fading or blending into the background. I cannot say what the result will be, but I already know that it will be different for each viewer and different for me each time I look.
I have adopted a solitary existence and live through these days painting and writing, growing into a new self, or rather attempting to return to my Self. I know it is but for a definite period of time, this solitude. Nevertheless, I cannot envision a future beyond the work at hand. I have renovated an old barn on the property of some friends and I am quite comfortable here. It serves my purposes for the moment. I have space enough, everything I need to work, and I remain alone with my introspection.
Below the window a quiet river runs by whispering stories as I watch the moon; always through some strange quirk of logistics the moon shines on my bed no matter where I am in the world. I bathe in the moonlight at night as I bathe in the river each morning, washing myself in the soothing, cooling memory of another river under another moon far away now. Still the memories of that other stream trickle clear and close, still bubble up to the surface, still wash over me. Perhaps this river will carry this story too, whispering it to another attentive ear at another destination further on its path. Maybe this river will find its way to that Other and tell again the story we have been composing together for so long. Who knows?
And I wonder now if the telling of it will have the effect of an exorcism? Will I somehow be purged in the end? The suffering, I know, is a necessary tool for transformation and for this I should rejoice. It is the stuff of my awakening. But when in the throes of it, the pain is so blinding and creates such confusion, I cannot imagine the end result, I cannot imagine there might be an end to it at all.
In my heart I know this is the way I have chosen and therefore must believe that it cannot be for naught, that its higher purpose is ultimately my own edification. Yet, if the telling is a tool that will facilitate the cleansing or only serve to extend and exacerbate the suffering, I do not know now in this moment. This is the jealously guarded secret of Time. Nevertheless, I have the impression that, one way or another, I will be purified.
The distortions are so many, yet one sure thing I have learned is that a pure heart finds its expression in unconditional love. It is indeed a state of Being. This I know now without a doubt. Yet the healing of the heart is a tricky business. How this state is to be arrived at and sustained is another matter altogether. The tendency when wounded of course is to close the heart, to encase it, to shut out all tender feeling. But the price one pays for this act of disassociation is high, too high. It must not be allowed to become a way to live one’s life. Undeniably, it negates even the possibility of entering love. And a life dammed to love is most assuredly the greatest affliction of the soul.
Chapter One
The dimension that separates
the living from the dead is exactly
as wide as the edge of a maple leaf.
Handsome Lake, the Seneca Prophet
His stirring dragged me out of sleep into a soundless night. I moved closer, pressing my back against his breastbone. My flesh quivered on contact with the soft, slightly ticklish crine. The downy hairs that reigned over his chest and abdomen had also reached the region of his shoulders. Vanguard filaments ventured even further down the columns of muscles flanking his ribcage; they threatened to someday collide with the cilia governing in the region of his buttocks. Perhaps in his senior years, the greying fleece might have achieved hairy hegemony. Already the tufts, nestled like snipers, were beginning to sneak out of his ears and the elflock at his throat threatened to join ranks with his beard hairs, the reserve guard he shaved for now.
I curled myself into the curve of his torso and pressed tightly into his pelvis and thighs. He reached his arm further around, engraving me deeper into the warm hollow formed by his closing frame. I would have liked to have been absorbed completely, as by osmosis, and become one with his breathing, his breath, his life.
He whispered in my ear, teasingly, playfully: "Ehhh, la grosse, je t'aime!" Suddenly, a jolt fired through my nerve-endings; I remembered. Oh God, I remembered! Horrified, I pulled away, quickly reaching for the lamp chain. I tugged and turned to look. No. Not there; only a vague indentation, only a slight depression where he had lain. Disbelieving that it was just a dream, I slid my hand along the barely discernible, still warm hollow in the sheet.
Then, in a split second, a terrible implosion, as if every cell, every atom of my body was being compressed into an impossible density. Just as suddenly, that compressed cellular mass exploded; torn asunder, molecules of skin and blood and bone spun out into a blackened sky, I wailed, furious, forlorn, into the deaf night. Soon spent, I gathered myself into a tightly constricted foetal position and wept quietly. Eons later I slept, drowning my consciousness in a pool of anguish.
He had come just like that those first three nights. He had come in the middle of the night and held me gently and firmly in his arms, his cheek pressed insistently against mine, his sweet, sweet breathing harmonizing with the rhythm of my sleep. He had come to tell me he was still with me; that he had not gone so far that he could not reach me. He had come to let me know he could still touch me, still loved me.
*
After that, every night for weeks after his funeral, I climbed the fire escape onto the second story roof of Moishe's Restaurant on St. Laurent Boulevard. I made my way over the tar and gravel to the base of the chimney that ascended all the way past the top of the eighth floor of the adjacent building. There I sat leaning my back against the grating bricks, crumbled bits of mortar sticking to my skin, my perspiration acting like glue. I spread my arms like fledgling wings and grabbed the edges on both sides, my thumbs extended downward toward the earth buried below all that cement and brick and mortar and asphalt: into the earth where his body had gone.
Why are you hurting yourself? he asked.
I need to understand, I answered.
Go home now, he said.
I didn’t go home. I stayed for hours, until dawn finally broke into fiery auras around the edges of skyscrapers to the east. In moments, the city was ablaze, soon to be extinguished by the stark white light that turned those same buildings to ash.
I tried in vain to envision what had happened. I thought, if only I knew exactly how it had happened then I might understand why. They hadn't told me much that morning. Only that he was dead. That he had fallen seven stories from the top of the Cooper Building on St. Laurent Boulevard. It had happened in the early, early morning, just past four am. That was all.
He had failed to meet me after work that night, so I stopped off at the all-night deli across the street from that same building to have a sandwich with a glass of milk before going home, something we might have done together, had he been there.
When I emerged out onto the sidewalk, I noticed men in uniforms, policemen and firemen, on the roof of Moishe's across the street. I remember thinking: there must have been a fire, but there doesn't seem to be much damage. Then, just as I started to cross over, an ambulance suddenly shot out in front of me from the curb on the other side and sped up the boulevard. Dangerously, it swerved past the early morning traffic. Only later did I make the connection between that speeding ambulance, the officials on the roof, the fall, and his barely beating heart amidst all those broken bones disparately juxtaposed on the stretcher.
We didn't live far from the boulevard and I was soon home, wondering what had happened to him, wondering why he hadn't met me after work. Maybe he’d met up with friends and lost track of the time. I'll see him in the morning, I thought. And he’ll be in trouble. It was almost morning now. I decided, better I sleep a bit than wait up for him.
The phone rang at seven.
With eyes still closed, I felt his side of the bed; no, he wasn't there. It must be him. Annoyed, I reached for the phone.
"He's dead. He fell…at four this morning…from the top of the Cooper building."
"No!"
*
On the third day after the accident, the day before his burial, I sat by the window at a bistro on Duluth Street with Peter’s friend Daniel. It was the first time I met him, although I’d heard about him of course, from Peter. Daniel had been with him on the roof that night. Earlier in the day I had phoned, to ask Daniel if he would meet with me. I didn't need to say why.
I hadn't been out of the house since that fatal morning. I hadn't moved from the armchair (his favourite chair) in the living room except in the wee hours of the morning to crawl stiff and aching into bed.
It had taken me forever to walk down the block to the restaurant. It had taken every iota of strength I could muster to constrain the tears dammed at the floodgate of my eyes. I would have liked to make myself invisible. Everyone on the street, everyone sitting on their porches and balconies, everyone standing in a doorway raised their eyes to meet mine as I passed. They searched for an answer I could not give, not even to myself. They knew what had happened, it was written all over me. This was impossible of course, but it felt just like that.
Daniel leaned towards me. His eyes were the colour of lapis lazuli, dark and deep, with specks of yellow in them. They seeped into mine as he confided what weighed most heavily on his heart.
"He let go, Ciarra. I'm telling you... but I think it's better if you don't tell anyone else. It's all I've been thinking about… since... can’t stop thinking about it. I don't understand. He just let go!"
Now the fragile weir of will collapsed. Blinded by a barrage of tears, my breath arrested, I recoiled from that monstrous truth. But I knew, of course. Memories flooded through the circuits in my brain, swelling in brackish pools, depositing information like silt, forcing my consciousness to wade through those areas that threatened to engulf me like quicksand.
The day I arrived home from a months’ long trip to North Africa and Europe, I found him in bed bouncing his football off the ceiling. He hadn't heard me come in. Indeed, I hadn't phoned to let him know I would be arriving that day. I'd wanted to surprise him.
I stood in the doorway of the bedroom watching the mechanical flip of his wrist as he bounced the ball off the ceiling, puzzled by the morose expression on his face. I could not speak, so overwhelmed I was by the sadness in his eyes. The ball sunk abruptly into the palm of his hand as he caught sight of me. He didn't jump up, excited, happy to see me, enveloping me in his arms. He just lay there, staring, as if stunned.
Months earlier he'd cried the day before I left, begging me to stay, but at that point he'd already moved out of the house many weeks before. We'd hardly seen one another until he'd heard I was leaving, and then he started coming around again. More often as my departure date approached. He offered to move back into my flat while I was gone. It was preferable that someone be there. I agreed. And then the day before my flight, over breakfast, he broke down and finally admitted to me how much he loved me, how much he had missed me, how sorry he was. He told me he wanted to stay now, wanted me to stay. But it was too late to cancel the trip. I had my ticket, I'd quit my job.
I travelled for many months. There were calls made, some postcards and letters sent, from Paris, Barcelona, Marrakesh, Al Jaza’ir, Tunis, Athens, Rome and Paris again. I wanted him to join me, first in Barcelona, then Marrakesh, Al Jaza’ir, Tunis, Athens, Rome and Paris, but he was afraid. Of what, I could not imagine. Each time we spoke, he said: it's enough, stop punishing me, come home now.
After that night, given the opportunity, I would have redeemed those months with the remainder of my life.
Daniel reached over the table to cover my hand with his. It didn't help; nevertheless, I was grateful for the gesture. He spoke ever so softly.
"About six months ago I sculpted a very unusual piece. What I’m saying is, it wasn't like my usual work. It was of a man falling from a high building. I realize now it was a warning. But how could I have known then? If I'd known, I..."
"What could you have done? He never would have believed you anyway. How could you have known what that meant? Besides, it was what he wanted."
He'd had a death wish. He had been suicidal while I was gone. He'd plunged into a severe depression in the dead of winter. He'd mentioned none of this on the phone and I'd detected nothing in his tone of voice to indicate that his discontent was anything more than his desire for my return. But when I got home he did tell me. And we made a pact.
Daniel shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He lifted the cup of espresso to his lips, and then put it back on the table slowly, without taking a sip. Bending forward, he whispered.
"What do you mean it was what he wanted?"
"Just that I don't believe it was any kind of accident."
Already suspect, he looked at me solicitously. I didn't offer an explanation but instead asked him what the others could not tell me.
“Please, tell me exactly what happened? I need to know."
“Ciarra. Are you sure? I mean..."
"No, no, it's all right. I want to know. Exactly."
I braced myself. Reluctantly, he recounted the events of that early morning.
"Well, when the bar closed we hung out on the street for a bit, just hanging out, you know, talking with one of the waitresses from the bar and another friend of mine. Peter said you would be along any minute. I guess he was waiting for you to finish work. Then he suggested we climb the fire escape to the top of the Cooper Building, to see the lights of the city. I hesitated and asked him: but what about Ciarra? He said we’d see you coming up the street. So we went up by way of the fire escape. Once we got up there, I guess we were being a little rowdy, someone in the building must have phoned the police because we heard the sirens and then saw them parked in front of the Cooper looking up to the roof. At that point Peter was still walking along the ledge."
I looked at him quizzically. He continued, explaining.
"He'd been walking along the ledge of the building, don't ask me why. The others ran for the fire escape but I waited because he'd got to the chimney and it looked like he was going to try to swing around it. On the outside. Crazy! I ran toward him just as he swung out, but by the time I got there he was already inching his way down the chimney. I just managed to grab the collar of his jacket and told him he was insane, he'd never make it! I let go when he pushed my arm away. I remember thinking in that moment it would be worse if I tried to hang on. For sure he'd fall. And I’d probably go down with him. I mean, he was fighting me. He yelled at me: "Laches-moi! Je descend par ici!" His mind was made up. He was determined. I think he was defying the police or something, you know what I mean... well, you know what he was like. Anyway, he scaled down a few feet, so even if I wanted to, I wouldn't have been able to reach him. And then, well, the others were insisting that we follow them down the fire escape but I just stood there. I couldn't move. Then, the weirdest thing. First he looked down. Then he looked way up into the sky. Then... well, he just let go. He let go, just like that."
“Traitor!” I muttered under my breath.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Nothing,” I answered.
The day I'd returned from the Maghreban trip we sat talking in bed until late that night. It was then we'd made the pact. I was the one who proposed it, as a measure of deterrence really. It wasn’t something that would ever have occurred to me under normal circumstances, except that he kept going on and on about wanting to leave the planet. He described in excruciating detail how horrible life was on this planet, the injustices, the suffering he witnessed all around him. He railed against "the system", against corporations that in collusion with governments were destroying the earth and oppressing peoples of all nations through evil acts of conspiracy and corruption. He railed against the system that justified a distribution of resources that left a large percentage of people in lack while the few stockpiled or consumed to a point of absolute absurdity. Then he railed against the human race that perpetrated this system through participation and collusion and sheer complacency. He condemned warmongers, murderers, rapists, thieves from the corporate to the individual level, and most especially he railed against child abusers. It was as if he had made a collection of news items that he had filed in his memory banks and now was laying them out on the bed sheet between us like clippings, each horrible story accompanied by his scathing commentary. He denounced humanity for its lies, its greed, its ignorance, its arrogance and its lack of compassion.
And he reprimanded himself most of all for his own incapacity and lack of will to affect any change or alleviate any of the suffering.
He had done this sort of thing before, this castigation of all of humanity, and once exhausted, sobbed in my arms like a defeated child. I could do nothing against the raging because fundamentally I agreed with him on all counts. I tried to soothe him with another perspective, a positive outlook, the outlook I often tried to soothe myself with, but it was difficult for me. I too was sensitive to the injustices perpetrated, the destruction I saw all around. I too felt powerless.
I realized to what extent his sensitivity had become intolerable; he was contemplating taking his own life. It had nothing to do with me. It was the first time it had gone so far. I was terrified that he would actually do it and leave. Leave me. An idea occurred to me. I made him swear that he wouldn't leave without me. I made him promise to take me with him; we would go together. I was convinced that if it ever really came down to it I could always stop him. This hope I kept to myself and we made a pact: each forfeited his right to leave without the other. I believed this would protect him from himself.
It didn't, of course. He took the opportunity when it presented itself or perhaps he himself created the opportunity. Either way, he left without me.
*
The morning of the funeral could have been a day like any other. I woke to the slight chill of early autumn air, the first foreboding of cold, dark winter days and darker, colder nights ahead. The draught through the window vibrated with acute timbres that piqued my ears. I pulled my knees into my chest. I wanted to sleep more. I wanted to stay the consciousness inflaming my mind. More than anything, I wanted to forget.
The morning light pushed through my eyelids. I shut them tighter, squeezing tears through compliant eyelashes. In the next moment I became aware of something different. Something... I opened my eyes to survey the bedroom. There was an unusual quality of solitude, the base note to a singular feeling of emptiness hanging in the air. Peter was gone. He had been there in the night. I remembered. I remembered his presence beside me under the dark sheets. Now he was gone. I might have felt worse at the sudden realization except that it was impossible. I could never have felt worse. I lay there cocooned in the duvet, dreading the day.
It had been arranged that one of Peter's longstanding friends would come for me at ten. I had never been to a funeral before. Death had never been so close to me. No one I had ever known personally had ever died before, until now.
I dragged my spirit through body motions so thick with lethargy it was nearly suffocating. Despite this, when the doorbell rang I was dressed and ready to go, ploughing myself through resistance at the door.
Marco had nothing comforting to say. He broke his silence once only.
"He didn't suffer much, Ciarra."
"Bullshit,” I retorted, and bit my lip. “Sorry,” I said, a little while later.
I stood in an aisle just far enough away that I could not see, even inadvertently, over the edge of the coffin. I could not bear to see his lifeless body. I refused to allow the sight of his corpse to be imprinted on my memory, refused to let that be my last image of him. My imagination taunted me with macabre visualizations, however. That was enough.
His parents and siblings stood side by side in the front row holding hands, some with their arms around another’s shoulders. Peter's friends and other relatives filed into the room. Peter followed behind the last of them.
I saw him as if he were flesh and blood and bone. He was whole, nothing broken, nothing displaced. His countenance seemed normal, as if it were perfectly natural that he should be there among the mourners, among his friends and family. As if it was not he lying there in the coffin.
I watched in fascination as he made his way one by one to each of those he loved. He sidled up to them, bent forward a little and spoke into their ear, sometimes smiling or joking, and always with a consoling gesture. Each responded in their fashion; with some a quizzical look that suddenly broke on pained faces, others exploded into tears, and others suddenly smiled through their tears. No one could see him, but they felt him. They all felt him. When he approached me, my body suddenly filled with the essence of him. I was utterly overwhelmed: my knees folded with the weight of his love.
He stayed by my side, all at once teasing and consoling. Once having succeeded in making me smile, he went to join his parents.
After the exequies, everyone piled into an array of vehicles and drove for a short distance to a suburban graveyard. Peter wasn’t there when they lowered the coffin into his grave. I knew he wouldn’t be.
The reception passed in a kind of blur. Later I vaguely remembered having been introduced to his relatives and old friends, each offering condolences. None of it had made any sense. Peter mingled with the crowd the whole time, enjoying himself, as if at a party. I resented his happiness, envied his light heartedness.
*
After the initial shock, I descended into an abysmal despondency. At first, I raged against him for having betrayed the pact, for having left without me. I screamed in protest at the walls that formed my skull, as if my mind had been straightjacketed and I was left unattended and powerless to battle my own demons. I ranted and raved whenever his image came into focus, screaming abuses and recriminations at him, but he stood his ground until my love for him washed the rage away, and all that I was left with was a flood of longing.
My interior life became ridden with despair, despair so all-encompassing that there were times I could no longer breathe and I lay in bed, clutching at my heart, gasping, angry at my own instincts for sucking air into my lungs against my will. More than anything I wanted to go find him, truly convinced I could. At first it was to rebuke him for not loving me enough, for leaving without me, and then later because I could no longer stand how much I missed him.
His mother came by my house to visit two weeks after the funeral. She came to assure me that Peter had loved me. Mothers know, she said. She had been with him his last day. They had gone down to the river for a picnic in the afternoon, after her shift at the hospital. Peter had only talked of me, his mother said, and she was looking forward to meeting her. Now she was glad she finally did.
“You are just as he described,” she said. “He loved you so much.”
She had also come to ask if he had been with me those first three days after the accident. Yes, she thought so, because he had not gone to her until after the funeral. He had stayed nine days with her. I took everything she said at face value. Questioning this woman’s experience would have meant questioning my own sanity. I was in no condition to do that.
Several months later, Peter stopped waking me in the middle of the night. Instead, I woke in the morning with his breath on my cheek. I heard him rushing up the stairwell to my flat. I saw him at the end of the street, grinning that wide, mischievous grin of his, all teeth and bright eyes, beckoning to me from behind a tree. He spoke to me from the limb outside my bedroom window. He whispered through the ivy clinging to the glass. He thought it was funny. He tried to make me laugh. I cried harder.
I took to drinking. At first, only a few drinks at work. Soon, more drinks in clandestine bars after work. It seemed to quell the intolerable pain until I found myself alone again and then it was far worse. I asked for more and more shifts at work until I was working almost every night in the club. I slept all day. My friends worried about me. Too often, in the wee hours of the morning after work, I was found sobbing on a bench in the neighbourhood, oblivious to my surroundings. They brought me home, put me to bed.
Two seasons passed. Grief consumed me. I hated the city more than ever. I hated the club and the life-style my job engendered. I missed the day, the light. I despised myself for the loneliness that forced me to seek out company when it would have been beneficial for me to stay alone. I hated the fact I was drinking far too often and far too much. I hated comparing myself with Peter’s friends who seemed to have accepted his death in stride and who were now getting on with their lives as if he had never been a part of them. I hated the fact that I missed him so much. Most of all, I hated myself for what I was becoming, an embittered, self-pitying drunk.
Others were more forgiving. They told me “time heals”, but I knew Time alone would never be enough to heal the gaping wound in my heart, the rent in my soul. I wanted to get far away. From myself, if I could. Every day I was reminded of him. Every day I walked past that building on my way to work. Every day I saw someone who had known the two of us. Every single day images from the past formed themselves out of the commonplace; by association, everything related back to him, our history together. I could not escape it. He was every rider on every bicycle, every man sitting in the window of every Bistro we had ever been to together. He was sitting on a bench in every park. He played with the children in the street and he was always waiting for me when I got home. Why couldn’t he do this when he was alive, I wondered?
Nearing spring, something began to change in me. Tender, fragile shoots emerged from a warming earth. Suddenly the trees decorated themselves with miniscule bulbs like ornaments that soon bedecked all their branches in full array. Tulips appeared over night. Children shed their soggy mittens and donned brand-new running shoes that would wear out by the end of the season. Windows flung open in wide welcome to the sweet, sultry air. People’s faces turned up to the sun, its warmth enticing cracked lips into smiles finally out of hibernation. The terraces were brimming with lively individuals whose eyes shone with anticipation for the summer ahead. The sun's rays stroked newly exposed skin and promised hot, lazy days and new love affairs in the not too distant future.
There was something subtly seductive in all of this. I felt a faint, yet distinct desire to connect with life again. With a life that had meaning. My old life no longer held any appeal. I wanted to go somewhere where there was an abundance of life. I wanted to surround myself with so much life that I could forget death for a while.
I asked for time off work; when it was granted I went at once to speak with my travel agent. He recommended Costa Rica. The charters had just opened up that year.
"No army and beautiful beaches,” he said encouragingly.
I booked a two week charter and left Montreal one week later.
*
