Boundaries, and other fictions
R. Rawdon Wilson
“Questions of origin in narrative fiction, of who is speaking and from where, have been given much attention in recent times by writers of fiction as well as literary theorists. In this unusual collection of short stories by Michael Rawdon such questions are repeatedly posed but the familiar approaches towards answers are blocked by an elaborate process of comic sabotage. This has the effect of making the questions loom larger. The writer clearly knows and enjoys literary theory sufficiently to play games with it in his fiction. Many of the stories unsettle reader expectations concerning personal and national identity by adopting a variety of narrative voices and poses in ways that suggest a ventriloquist’s performance. One of the most interesting paradoxes of the collection is the way in which a metafictional emphasis on writing as performance runs against the grain of the predominantly realistic narrative conventions used. While individual stories tug at the emotions with their absorbing presentations of human predicaments the set as a whole draws attention to the artifice of the venture, to the duplicity of the author in his role as actor-trickster.” Kateryna Arthur, CRNLE Reviews Journal, 1 (1987): 83-5.
Michael Rawdon, Green Eyes, Dukes & Kings. Kingston: Quarry Press, 1985. Pp. 148.
“I think that the metafictional, playful and conceptual aspects of Green Eyes, Dukes & Kings must tend to distance it from the ordinary preoccupations of the CanLit establishment. One can easily imagine a potential reviewer for almost any newspaper in Anglophone Canada staggering backwards in shock and despair at the prospect of having to read fiction that requires thinking and that cannot. . . be caught in neat categories. . . . my favourite would have to be “But Who Should Weave The Nets?” In that story a Canadian man looks back (another retrospective narrative) at a motorcycle trip that he had taken with two friends from London to Lexington when he was sixteen. The tense adventures of the three Canadian boys with rednecks in Kentucy (who had never seen an English motorcycle) is intercut by a present tense narrative of an encounter with The Man Who Practised Plain Talk in the Anthropology Museum at the University of British Columbia. The plain-speaking man denounces the use of abstractions and, in effect, the entire labelling discourse of museums, but the narrator remembers the ‘pale Kentuckians’ who could not recognize a motor cycle when they saw one. The glaring clash of different cultures reflects, but also hides, the inevitable friction between distinct conceptual systems.” M. L. Scott, “Travelling in Other Lands,” The Fiddlehead 149 (1986): 79-82.
“Shortlisted for the Howard O’Hagan Award for Short Fiction, Boundaries, and other fictions is a collection of short fiction with an eclectic cast of people and places. The inhabitants of QueAng-QueAng; the wise Shultz and his companions; Tommy Joe, a Texan robber and Lorne, his Canadian accomplice–these are but a few vignettes of Robert Rawdon Wilson’s personal and fantastic portraits about human desires and responses.” Paula E. Kirman, “More Summer Reading,” Suite101.com
http://www.suite101.com/article/cfm/canadian_literature/43544
“Most of the pieces in Robert Rawdon Wilson’s Boundaries deal in one way or another with the problem of distinguishing fact from fiction, and honest fiction from self-glamourizing construct. . . . Wilson’s work, enmeshed as it is in theory, is also an examination of the dangers to the soul inherent in theoretical thinking. . . . Wilson has a gift, sadly rare in intellectuals, for responding to humanity with a smile that refuses to become a sneer. He’s an extremely funny writer too; Boundaries is one of the few books I’ve read that had me both reaching for reference books and laughing out loud. Wilson is also possessed of a strong, crystalline prose style that moves and dazzles.” Aleander Rettie, “Reviews,” Alberta Views (July/August, 2000); 54-5. Http://www.albertaviews.ab.ca
* * * * *
Someone asks me did I know that the people of QueAng-QueAng drink the eyeballs of living animals using a slender metal straw. The trick, that only practice can teach, is to pierce the eyeball through the iris to the exact centre and then drink the vitreous gel in many tiny sips. In QueAng-QueAng, they also execute blasphemers in a similar manner. The community kneel and angrily pierce the condemned person's body with their metal straws. When the execution has been finished nothing much is left but skin and bones. These dry in the desert air until, withered and empty, they blow away into the bleached horizon. The condemned, like husks, are soon forgotten. I do not know how to answer. I do not understand the people of QueAng-QueAng. I try to remember Montaigne, but he offers little help. Finally, I decide that, no matter what, I shall not go there. I shall leave the people of QueAng-QueAng to their private intensities. (From Boundaries)
* * * * *
QueAng-QueAng has a coastline, a harsh littoral that stretches along the sea from one point on the map to another, but it does not have beaches. It does not have beaches because the people of QueAng-QueAng have no concept of play. They have no room in their lives for swimming, for picnics, for sunbathing, or for surfing. The people of QueAng-QueAng say that they are serious and do not open their lives to fun. Fishermen draw their boats upon the sand and women often look for anemone in tidal pools from which they make dark purple and red dies. No one goes to the sea to swim. They tell foreigners who ask that it would be frivolous to waste time in swimming or in playing in the surf. On certain days when the sky is empty of everything but light and the sun burns with red ferocity, young theological students may hire a carriage that will be drawn by peasants over the sand. The carriages are black and completely sealed. Inside, there is neither light nor breeze. The young men have themselves pulled a great speed along the sand, from one headland to another, and back. They do this only to demonstrate that there are no beaches in QueAng-QueAng.
The real reason there are no beaches, one traveller writes who knows them well, is that no one has ever imagined a beach before or what could be done on one. The people of QueAng-QueAng do not have a word in their language for fun. The single word that even begins to translate "play" applies only to the flighty actions of puppies and very small children. They believe in conformity. They do not tolerate deviance. They dress sombrely alike. They always tell the same stories. They weave patterns that are different, but somehow always the same. There are only a few patterns in life, they say, and these are all one pattern in any case. Even if God were to be seen surfing, the people of QueAng-QueAng would not emulate Him. (From Boundaries)
* * * * *
The Scarlet Crab
A mist curls through the flat, like the vapour that rises when lava strikes the cold sea on Big Island. Nestling down onto a soft cushion, Tyler sits slouching, his right arm stretched along the back of the rattan chesterfield. Birgitte has snuggled her face into his shoulder. Across the room there is a quick motion along the bottom of a unit of wall shelves. (He understands that the room recalls, but does not exactly replicate, the condo furnishings on Kauai.) The motion takes an abrupt shape. A large frog with a dark blue back, purple almost, and long, bright green legs climbs up the shelves, gracefully hauling itself up over the drawer handles. Tyler marvels at how easily it climbs perpendicularly, its dazzling body fully extended. Suddenly from the right a large crab with a brilliant scarlet shell attacks. It leaps from the shelf of the wall unit onto the floor and rushes toward the shelves. The frog scurries around two or three small, plastic bins to reach the edge of the chesterfield, but, scuttling sideways quickly, its two stalk-eyes bent forward, the crab gains ground in full pursuit. The frog cowers just beneath Tyler's left arm stretched along the chesterfield's armrest. When he looks down at it, the cold mist making it appear dim and distant, he can see that the frog oozes fear. Its bulging eyes stare out from the unmistakable consciousness of extinction. Tyler sees it quiver in its death-terror. There is also a small lizard that he has not seen before. Both animals now run under the chesterfield while the crab still pursues. Tyler knows that the crab will eat them, though this is not natural food for crabs. He can see that the crab is a land crab, more like the ones he had seen once in Vanuatu than the crabs he and Birgitte had actually seen in the water, or washed up on the beaches, on Kauai. Crunching and snuffling noises spill from under the chesterfield. They know that the crab is eating the animals. Birgitte holds him more tightly, incoherently moaning her empathy. "Birgitte!" Tyler snaps awake, calling out.
"Birgitte!" "Birgitte!" Calling her name, Tyler runs toward her, as she stands under the gold watch, indifferent to kitsch, to Japanese sham. He remembers the green nubuck jacket, the black trim setting off her red hair, the one they had looked at together in Harry Rosen's just a couple of days before she had split, walking west on Bloor, waving over her shoulder as flurries of dry snow danced slantwise. They had looked at it together and now, he guesses, she wears it only to prompt him to think of what he has lost. The people sitting at tables beneath the Shot Tower, momentarily concerned, look up at him sprinting, waving his arms. He hasn't seen Birgitte for more than two years, and his body feels eager, like a long, fiery itch. Hugging, only a few people looking up now from their tables, he keeps kissing her, whispering, "Do you remember?" Then. Those times. They race, skipping almost, up to the Museum entrance, whirling about within their hugs. When they reach Swanston, he tries to kiss her once more, but she has cooled already. Two years have passed, now halting briefly, and time has begun to flow forward again. More calmly, they walk south to Latrobe and head east, up the street to the Lumière. Tyler continues whispering about the past. Then.
At the Lumière, they are screening Krzysztof Kieslowski's 1991 film, La double vie de Véronique. Birgitte feels sympathy for the young woman who leads two lives, one Polish, one French, that do not connect. She clutches his arm at Véronique's unhappiness. When she dies suddenly in her Polish life, then the camera staring unblinkingly up through a glass lid as dirt is shovelled upon her coffin, Birgitte ducks her head down upon his shoulder, her nails digging. Tyler can feel their hard, cold points through his jacket. In her French life, Véronique is more unhappy, Birgitte's voice weeps, her affairs so wretched, so despairing. But alive, Tyler whispers. She shifts her head away from him. He wants to tell her that that he has heard Morten Kyndrup give a lecture on this film (in Danish, he adds, for Birgitte's benefit) in which he spoke about the irreducibility of Kieslowski's narrative to a fabula, all so angularly postmodern.
After the film, he thinks. After the film, sitting in a Carlton bistro, she asks, Would being two have made me more unhappy? Would it only have made me endure repetitions?
Birgitte has never been out of mind. Almost to every step, Tyler can recall the places they have gone together. Do you remember making love on the stairs of the lighthouse on Samsø? he asks. The fogwisps wafting off the Kattegat made you look like a seamaid, a silkie splashing within a wreath of fire.
--- When I was in Hawaii I remembered you being dumped in the surf at Waimea, and then laughing, your eyes still blinded by salt, sand in your mouth, your hair like dark kelp. Or how we walked that one night, hand in hand, along Kalakua toward Diamond Head, the stars like plankton. You were excited, swinging my hand in yours, telling me about the ocean you grew up near, cold, stiff with its boisterous mythology. I remember things like that.
-- Every summer, remember, each June, my family would build fires on the beach, honouring St. John. When I was a little girl, I would ache for the Sankt Hans bonfire. Midsummer then, not winter, and the days would slide for me downhill to school and then to Christmas. Tyler, you have always a mind more memory than hope. You remember more than I do. Even about myself.
In the bistro, they laughed and told stories, the way they had always done though it had been even better that night. Tyler had never forgotten the range, the excitement and laughter, of her voice then, walking through starlight along Kalakua.
--- If only you were with me once more, you would help me remember what is slipping.
So much had vanished, leaked or even skidded from his mind. Tyler imagines that mind as many dark bins. At first he had tried to configure his memory as a honeycomb, the different cells containing distinct larvae, each a kind of experience. But now he pictures rows of bins, like a field neatly ordered in stooks or, more usually, a warehouse. He can sort through them, discovering forgotten bits, shards of past experiences, stored and waiting to be retrieved. He supposes the bins to have names, labels that help him find his way. Go to the first bin on the first right hand row for sex, the second for love, but seek in the third row on the left for beauty. In that row he stores all images of unusual appearances. In the third bin, he keeps not only images of a few extraordinary women, such as Vikki, but also certain rainbows, sunsets, mountains and waterfalls. There he can locate green sunsets, such as the one he had seen a distant April evening driving across Gippsland toward Melbourne when the sky erupted briefly in pistachio kernels and guava peel. Vikki, who was in that bin but also in the first and the second on the left, had twisted toward him, reaching across the seat to squeeze his arm, and moaned in the moment's beauty. But often, he wanders aimlessly among the bins, casting about in the darkness, looking for surprises. Only yesterday, anxious for his meeting with Birgitte, he had found an evening when they had stood together in the garden just north of the Sultanahmet Camii and looked through the spraying water of the fountain while summer lightening flickered in glaring sheets across the Bosporus, illuminating the Mosque like a gothic peepshow. In those moments of recovery, Tyler feels himself split, conscious but doubled, a castaway from experience beached, no more than drying wrack, on memory's sands. Then he hauls himself up, and begins poking about in the murky bins. If Birgitte would come back to him, she could be the ship that stands above the horizon, coming to the rescue, lifting the castaway from the desolate shore, from tidal pools, anemones and crabs.
-- There is so much rubbish, piling like mountains behind me, mud sucking. You would tell me where the shit comes from and what other people do to manage it.
In his dream, he can hear the scarlet crab devouring the terrified frog. The small lizard makes shrill squeaking noises. The bones crack loudly. Birgitte clutches his arm in fright, but he stands up, trying to see under the chesterfield. The wet, hanging mist is much thicker near the floor. There is a great deal of quick scurry, scrambling and wild commotion. He knows that the crab will eat both the frog and the lizard, though they are not natural food for crabs. He understands that the crab is a land crab, like the ones he has seen in New Caledonia, and thus it can run quickly, scuttling across roads, through ditches or over dunes. He continues to hear crunching sounds, swallowed by the piercing shrieks of terror. He knows that the crab is eating both animals.
Birgitte and he might create again those odd little maps, with all those crazy conceptual crosshatchings, poised just over the surface of things. Like then. She would have understood the woman Tyler had seen this winter. A woman with destination on her face, she had walked toward him though blind to him and to everyone else.
Tyler likes the gold velour bikini, the fuzzy material crinkling and folding inwards at her crotch as her legs cross and recross. Over her shoulder, she carries a silver-grey Fendi bag, the thick black stripes signalling to the world that she has taste, or money or just difference. The bag may hold her beach gear, if she has any, or it may simply emit those signals to the world. She has a matching Fendi case for her sunglasses hanging over her left hip from the cord of the high-cut bikini. In her right hand, she carries a large white sandwich with a muffin balanced on top. There are four men, soldiers from Fort DeRussy, sitting at the table nearest him. They begin to watch her bear down. Lithe and blonde in her gold bikini and Fendi bag, she catches the eye. He thinks, They can't miss the muscular rippling thighs and the firm bum, signs of care, of athleticism, of narcissism. She is somewhere in her middle thirties and, he supposes based on what she does, from southern Europe. Slinky Eurotrash, Birgitte would say. Tell me about cultural shams, he had once demanded, and she, with Scandinavian pedantry, had replied that, first, there is similarity and, second, there is difference. Sisters in the same household, though they do not always like one another, cannot deny the resemblances that link them, but they keep their eyes sharp for falsehood, and for hidden intent.
Tyler quietly observes the soldiers. Not much to watch early in the morning when Waikiki is mostly empty, but he has been sitting vacantly on a concrete bench sipping a coffee from one of the kiosks at the beach-end of the Waikiki Shore, his eyes peering across the low surf toward the ships slowly outlining the horizon. Half a century ago, the beach at Fort DeRussy was engineered out of a tropical swamp that lay between what are now the Waikiki Shore and the Hilton Village. Along the entire length of Waikiki, with its flat surf and sharp stones, it is the best place for swimming. Tyler has been overhearing the soldiers tell stories about Desert Storm and complain about the drill at Fort Drum, or Bragg or wherever. Abruptly, they stop talking and just watch this woman approaching, gliding along the promenade walk like vapour taking a floating shape.
She draws parallel to Tyler and just a few steps from the four soldiers, then gives an exasperated shake of her head, a grimace almost, and throws the sandwich and muffin onto the tiny square of sand at the foot of a palm tree. He stares, fascinated. Birgitte would remember how clean Waikiki is. Lots of sleeze, but high order. And hardly ever any trash on the promenade or even on the streets. The trash, Tyler knows, walks around in tee-shirts and flipflops. Official people pick up whatever slough does get left behind. There are bins everywhere, with "Mahalo" written on them, that makes it easy to throw dirt out of sight. A person would have to be pathologically self-absorbed to chuck trash thoughtlessly in Honolulu. And here, he thinks, is this woman from Italy, or wherever, slinging her sandwich down onto that neatly groomed square of sand.
There was a bin, Mahalo, just to her right, not more than two steps out of her path. Tyler thinks, Eurotrash, self-absorbed, what a cretinous twat. But he doesn't say anything. The four soldiers respond as if they have heard hostile gunfire in the distance. Starting into erect sitting positions, they gape at her like a sudden enemy patrol.
--Hey, mam', what'd you do that for?
--Mam' there's a garbage can just behind you.
--Lady, that ain't the right thing to do.
The blonde woman looks at them sharply. And then with extravagant leisure in her gesture, she gives them the finger American style, bending forward and thrusting her right forefinger, the one now freed from the sandwich, into the nearest face like a stiff, vertical tongue. Fuck off, jerk. A thick-faced redhead, flushed by ruptured vessels, starts back, on the edge of diving for cover. Saddam Hussein could never have unnerved him more. That long, slow finger with its pointed red nail registers like a sudden barrage of in-coming shells. It has its effect. The soldiers shut up completely, pivoting slightly on the concrete stumps to watch her pass. She swishes by.
Birgitte would remember the time in Frederiksborg, in front of the royal castle, when they had watched the Danish man watch the Spanish woman throw her cigarette under the tree. By her norms, the woman was behaving well: grinding out the fag-end on the footpath and then kicking it circumspectly onto the dirt under the tree. But this Dane with a Jacques Tati expression had seen her do this and his mouth flapped open in shock. He moved off a few steps, hands clasped behind his back like M. Hulot, and then turned back to stare. Tyler could recall that the Spanish woman had looked rather imperious, dressed in a dark tan leather pantsuit with boots up to her knees and long hair streaked with grey falling beneath her shoulders. It was the grey more than the leather that made her seem peremptory. She hadn't even tried to disguise her age, she was that confident. Unsettled, puzzling, the Dane had watched her board the bus again, and then he circled the crushed fag as if it had been a dangerous insect. Tyler had felt certain that he would pick it up and throw it into a nearby trash bin. But finally he had simply stared in profound dejection, trying to pick her out through the bus's tinted windows, and then walked on, hands still clinging to each other behind his back, Hulotesque. At that moment, Tyler would have bet that he was thinking, Euro-monsters, and wondering what would happen to Denmark as the South, ever more assured, moved north. Birgitte would remember. They had sat there on the bus watching the whole episode, nudging each other and whispering like kids. The soldiers at Fort DeRussy seem to feel the same kind of culture shock and a similar desire to pick up after a barbarian, to make the world sparkle once more. The sense of civic duty works them hard.
A big dark man, maybe Hawaiian, with black and green tattoos on his legs and arms, rises from the soldiers' table and heads over to the sandwich. He kneels down and picks it up, balancing the muffin on top just the way the woman did. He carries the trash over to the bin, but before dumping it in he has an idea. Holding the muffin squished between his left arm and chest, he opens the sandwich and with one finger scrapes the contents, junk meat or pressed turkey, into the trash. He dumps the lettuce into the bin and rubs hard at the smear of tomato sauce. Then he ambles by Tyler to the lawn behind the tables, breaks the bread into chunks and throws it out for the pigeons.
--Look kinda hungry.
Dismissively, deprecating his own kindness, he shambles back toward the table. His comrades gave him five highs, and turn away, looking for a surf that never comes that morning. Just at that moment, two Japanese girls, both in their early teens, run over to the bread. They have been sitting at another table closer to the Waikiki Shore and Tyler hasn't noticed them until now. They chase the pigeons away and begin picking up the bread-chunks. Bemused, he experiences a strong surge of unreality. And so must the soldiers, who wheel around, speechless. They stare at the girls like suspicious movements on the periphery of their position. Tyler feels amused that the girls are even more civic-minded than the tattooed soldier. They won't even allow the bread to remain on the grass for as long as the pigeons need to eat it. The girls take the bread in big handfuls over to their table and then (he imagines Birgitte saying, "amazing, simply amazing") something unexpected takes place: they spread the bread out on the table and begin to crumble it into small pieces. Tyler supposes that they are breaking it into rice-sized bits, trying to achieve the optimum magnitude for eating. They gather up the bread once again and start throwing it back to the birds in wide arcs. He sees their purpose: more pigeons can eat and more comfortably. Now they can even pretend that the bread is rice. The girls are also being civic, but in their own twee manner.
He had wanted Birgitte there. He had needed to hear her laugh and say that every culture has ideal solutions but only bizarre practices. Shams are just the reward for seeing in panoramic shots. She would have giggled at the gold bikini, smiled at the soldiers, and told him that every cultural stereotype is, seen from within its use, a form of prayer, but seen from a concrete table at Waikiki it would be more like a curse. He would kiss her then, or nuzzle her hair as if he were sucking licorice, and feel that the world was more straight-forward in its complexities, though these might well be greater, in her company.
When they had swum in the small bay at Lindos, St. Paul's harbour, she had jumped from the rocks while he watched her hair stream out behind her, rising to the surface like coils of tar, and, following her, he dove for the sunlight glinting off her dark hair. They swam into a sea-cave and he had wanted, so passionately then, to make love to her, but she, treading water, touching his cheek, her blunt nails striking down over his lips, said that once St. Paul had visited Lindos. Vikki's grandfather had come from Rhodes, and that was why she knew about Lindos, why she could speak serviceable Italian. Would St. Paul have made love in this cave, unchanged since then, still home to urchins and squid? Oh, Tyler, probably not, she exclaimed, pursing her lips in her serious, reflective way, but his student did. A handsome young man from a village in the Galilee, from Capernaum perhaps, a tiny spot north of Tiberias, a scholar who spoke Greek in strong Attic formations but with a definite Aramaic accent, he had met a pagan girl with hair like Thetis. He rowed them out to this cave, Pindar's ode evoking Rhodes echoing in his mind, and they made love here in the dark. With only reflected starlight to guide him, he had kissed her unsandalled feet, holding her head above water with the crook of one arm, her legs with the other, nuzzling her toes. Moments later, in his rapture, he had called out, "Thetis!" "Thetis!" The next morning he walked behind her up the stairs to the acropolis where she would worship Athena Lindia. He stood within the stoa and wondered if it were possible that he could see the one, true God in her hair. Did Thetis have black hair? Tyler asked, and Vikki told him, no, probably not, the gods of ancient mythology are always blond and fair: moon-pale Artemis; flame-capped Apollo. Even sea nymphs? Yes, Vikki had had laughed. When he had jumped after her, he imagined that she was a nymph, even Thetis, had he been wrong? Yes (very serious now), you were wrong. The young Jewish scholar was wrong too because he had thought that the girl he loved, who had flowing hair black as obsidian, resembled Thetis, wife of Peleus, mother of Achilles, sadly the lover of Zeus along an earlier pathway in her life.
Tyler walks slowly down an aisle. As he walks, he gently fingers each bin in turn. Today, he is seeking something extraordinary. He wants to find the memory of a palimpsest. He is looking for the archaic mythology of the Aegean, for a cave on Rhodes where St. Paul's follower might once have copulated with a pagan girl, where he and Vikki had made love. He touches one bin cautiously, feeling its density and quick heat. Would Vikki have forgotten Lindos? He, never. In the cave, holding her from behind as she clung to a rock ledge, treading, like a sea-god rutting in surf and dark pools, he had pressed, then slipped, into her, the hot pleasure rising like a film between his body and the cold water. She had called out a mythological splinter, "Poseidon!" twisting backwards to brush his flushed cheeks with her lips, one hand holding to a sharp-edged rock ledge, shrieking. The flat lapping of the water had filled their mouths. Afterwards, pushing through beads into the darkness, they ate yoghurt and honey in a small kafeterion near the Panaghia. Vikki said the best honey in all Greece comes from Thessaly. Not from Sicily? Not Hyblaen? No, always from the cool highlands, from Thessaly or Macedonia. Then, the day after, she had left for Nauplion, casting him off for good.
Tyler had walked up the hill behind Ródhos, to the ruins of the temple of Zeus, the ancient columns patched with Italian concrete, and looked across the channel to Taslica. He could imagine Fethiye, further off in the other direction, where they had slept among bedbugs and eaten grilled eggplant for breakfast. Toward Turkey. Near the Blue Mosque one day, she had been shocked, startled from her self-absorption, and he had read outrage in her face. She had spun around quickly, looking for the man who had touched her, thrusting his finger between her legs as she had bent forward to read a plaque in German, pressing. He was gone already, even as she turned, vanished into the dark, colourless crowd. It was her hair. He had tried to explain that her red hair flamed, seemed to blaze, a revulsion to women, an attraction to the men, and that she should cover it. But she laughed at deference, at Islam, and continued to let her hair blaze. Respect, Tyler had whinged, is not cowardice, not giving in or accepting. But Birgitte only laughed, brushing her hair briskly until it shown like the glowing red-tile roofs south of the Bosporus, and they had gone out. On Ordu Caddesi, near the covered bazaar, watching the dancing bears, so uneasily wrung from reality, a man touched her and a woman had tried to steal her purse. City of differences that crushes difference, Istanbul had stunk in Birgitte's mind like excrement.
Tyler ran west on Bloor calling her name. "Vikki!" "Vikki!" When he caught up by the door to Longhouse, he saw that it was someone else. The November wind blew east toward the Danforth. His heart felt colder, that moment, than his face. Vikki, he mouthed her name, would she remember how the sun burst each morning from Turkey as they swam? They had walked up the long stone stairway to Palamedes's castle to look across the Gulf of Argolis toward the Peloponnisos. He had peered westwards, across the innermost tip of the Gulf, and tried to imagine the Spartan armies marching northwards, toward Athens, in the year that Pericles was archon. Vikki showed him the islands that she had visited as a girl, her father sailing the Gulf as he might have done his private lake, often as far as Psli. She had dived for octopus among the rocks and, in the early morning twilight, caught timid squid there. She remembered that, once, they had reached Spetses where they sat on black rocks near the beach, eating urchins and drinking retsina from a bag, her father producing lemons he had brought. The shallow surf had licked her feet. Tyler imagined her curled in the bow watching the limestone cliffs grow large or sitting in the stern, next to her father, dipping her hand in the racing currents. Once in a restaurant in Ródhos she had been able to smell the rotten fish through the cooking oil. She had learned that trick sailing the Gulf of Argolis, beneath Palamedes' walls.
Tyler liked to think of the hero building the castle above the Gulf. Was it before Aulis? Before games? Afterwards, after Troy, she said, since when life has always been peering through surfaces, distrusting what is given, discovering hidden rule-matrices. Palamedes taught us to pull codes forward into light, like squid, opalescent but still dark as they writhe above the surface. (Or, Tyler remembers, the black scorpion, hurtling up from under the rock Vikki had overturned, tail arched, while she stumbled back, clutching his arm.) Then the experience of the underneath, that rich hidden life that sham obscures, had not yet been entirely submerged, not yet needed rediscovery, in the thick growths of Mediterranean civilization. She told him that Palamedes's castle had been rebuilt by the Venetians, doubled and transformed, so that now only an archaeologist could tell what was original, what added two thousand years later in the Renaissance. But he still liked to imagine the hero in Bronze Age armour, directing the building, telling the Trojan slaves what to do, how to lay one ashlar stone upon another, just so, the walls mounting skywards as the gulf began to seem less threatening. Troy rose to music, Tyler said, but Nauplion to play. Vikki snorted, gesturing sharply toward the Gulf of Argolis, people have always worked, fishing or hewing stones. Fierce as Athena's, her face had drawn back.
They saw La double vie de Véronique at the Varsity, walking up Yonge Street from Eaton Centre through thick, wet snow. He touched her arm when the dirt is thrown on Véronique's glass-lidded coffin, filled with the sadness of passing, but she snarled under her breath that the film was the silliest she had ever seen. What sense does it make to imagine a single woman as two? You might as well suppose another Tyler, right now, even now, sitting in a coffee bar in Buenos Aires or dancing a tango, just being himself which is also yourself. Would that Tyler know about this one, here now in Toronto, who has just seen Kieslowski's senseless film? If the Argentinean Tyler doesn't know you, if neither of you are conscious of each other, then how could you be one?
--I might take a photo from a bus window, someday travelling in Argentina, in which the other Tyler happened to be caught, couldn't I? Then if someone else, back in Toronto, saw the photo and recognized me, the doubling would become obvious.
Her dark eyes glistening, Vikki was fervent, unyielding in her insistence upon rationality, upon lucid consciousness. If the two Tylers do not share a consciousness, how can they be one? You are confusing appearance with identity, just as Kieslowski does. Now, Tyler, she laughed, tell me what do the two Veronicas have to do with each other? Their minds are different, alien in their difference, how can they be the same?
In his dream, Tyler stands up from the chesterfield, feeling a vicarious terror. Then he begins to read an explanation to Vikki, or an account of some kind. It is printed on the back of his blue anorak. He can't make it out, the mist is very thick and, now, the message seems only half there. He tries to read it on his fleecy black windcheater, the one that usually has a Weiss Kookaburra soaring up the front. It drapes carelessly over a scruffy bin where he must have thrown it. Now he cannot focus and his eyes fill dimly with confusion. The words dance crazily. He can hear the crab munching beneath the couch. There must be an explanation, there on his windcheater where he feels certain he has already seen it, if only he could make it out. His armpits feel drenched and drops of sweat run chilly down his ribs. He is conscious, hotly aware, that his crotch has begun to stink from fear and that Vikki can smell him. The phone rings. Who would call him on Maui?
Vikki twists away, striding through the flurries along Bloor, passing Harry Rosen's without turning, her charcoal nubuck jacket, the green trim setting off her black hair, fading through the snow. She waves over her shoulder, carelessly, like one saying farewell to a casual shipmate, as slantwise gusts of dry snow prick against her. Tyler follows her through the crowd across Bay street, beyond Avenue Road, but loses her. Perhaps she has gone down into the St. George subway. Or perhaps she has walked farther on to Spadina.
He continues down to the platforms. He takes the first train south to Museum thinking that she may have gone up to the Royal Ontario Museum, where they had once walked, holding hands or letting their fingers link, among the collections, looking at ancient Greek vases and Ottoman tracery. He runs up the Museum exit, taking the escalator steps two at a time, into the Diamaru Centre. On the level above the Shot Tower restaurant, he sees Birgitte standing beneath the gold watch, her hair luminous as a blazing wick above her green jacket. He runs forward, calling her name, "Birgitte!" "Birgitte!"
The scarlet crab emerges from beneath the chesterfield. The noises from the dying animals have ceased. Tyler steps back in terror, but the crab turns slowly toward him, looking. Its two stalk-eyes fasten on him and seem to pause in consideration. He tries to call out for Vikki, but his mouth now feels dry and puffed, his tongue blackly swollen. Vikki has vanished and he understands that he is alone. He can hear the phone ring, but he doesn't know where to find it. Having deliberated, the crab starts toward him, its two claws scuttling, click-clack, click-clack, over the tile floor. It edges between two small bins, heaving one sideways. Perhaps the crab is only trying to frighten him, but he steps quickly back, holding a chair between himself and the scarlet, now angry, crab. The phone rings insistently. The crab grabs one leg of the chair and shakes it furiously and he stumbles back once more, this time into a corner where he grovels. The stalk-eyes follow him. He can hear the scuttling noise of the claws once more. Trying to wake up, he screams and then calls out weakly, impotently. He has the ringing phone in his hand now. When he answers, "Hello?" "Hello?" a distant female voice, muffled and distorted, wishes him a happy birthday. "Happy birthday," the voice repeats. Tyler's mouth thins and narrows into a piercing shriek, more shrilly as each moment he understands more clearly that he is alone. (From Boundaries)
* * * * *
Swiftly, above the scrub the bright birds sweep and dive. Shadows swirl over the ground. Stunted trees stretch raggedly. The birds fly low, close to the ground, only infrequently rising to the tops of the squat, ugly trees. Their feathers are luminous. Their wings are muscular and steady. Their eyes, like hidden suns, are sunken. As they fly, they sing melodiously. Their sharp bell_tones fill the opaque air. The radiant birds, their short wings beating furiously, wheel in narrowing circles. They are almost lost in the dark scrub. (“Metafictionist’s Metable,” from Boundaries)
About Author || Sitemap || Links || Contact
Copyright 2004 Robert Rawdon Wilson
