Having finished his breathing
exercises, he lay on his back, his calves resting upon the
upholstered living room chair like an astronaut ready for takeoff, his head upon a pillow, rocking gently to the repetition of four
songs on his old Walkman CD player positioned upon his chest, songs
by the Psychedelic Furs: In My Head, Heaven, The Ghost in You,
and When She Comes, his right index finger rested on the skip
button, his left arm spread out towards Hugh, who, with his large,
brown limpid eyes, lay beside him, chin on his outstretched front
legs, looking at him with a greater sense of affiliation and
affection as they shared the soft carpet pile and a similar
perspective, enjoying the occasional tummy rub as he sniffed the
essential odours of Duncan mixed with the fusty nuances embedded in
the carpet around them.
Duncan had forgotten how much time he'd
spent on floors as a child, under tables, behind Chesterfields, on
stairs, under them, and beneath the covers, the early environments of
childhood imagination. Looking through the open passage to the next
room, he gazed upon the dining room table he'd inherited from his
parents, a heavy, dark Chippendale inspired number with a footrest
between the legs, one he used to sit upon pretending it was his
submarine, or lie supine like a vampire in his coffin, and how he'd
get yelled at by his Father for doing so. The cracks were still
there, the repairs weakened with age. The table was fraught with
memories of tension-filled suppers: the solemn graces, the baptism
with spilt milk, the daily incarnations of the potato, and his
recalcitrance before the salmon cake. But also the joys of birthdays
with their 1960s Woolworth Department store pastel confections with
their inevitably dried-out red roses and candied silver ball-bearings
he'd leave behind on his plate, and of course the shaky inscriptions
in occasionally misspelled or abbreviated names—accepted with a
reduction in price; the holidays too, with their turkeys—legs in
the air like him now—and the hams with their Argus-eyed pineapple
slices pinned in place with sharp edged cloves like miniature
tomahawks, and those seemingly endless games of Monopoly, Gin Rummy,
or Crazy Eights. An embarrassing memory came back to him. He must
have seven or eight, eager to relate the details of what he'd learnt
at school that day, an exploration of the inner ear, and how he had
used the word 'Fallopian' in place of 'Eustachian' tube and watched
his parents mysteriously turn to stone, only their eyes shifting to
each other in a paroxysm of shock. Nothing had been said. The
silence, like an exhalation, had dwindled in the renewed clatter of
forks and knives, and no doubt a change of subject. Only later did
his brother tell him of his mistake. How had he known of it at that
age he wondered? Or had he? Had it been in the Junior Encyclopedia
Britannica, the one his brother had written on the bottom edges of
volume seven, '100% Junk' in what must have seemed, at the time, an
epic act of defiance? He couldn't remember. His youth felt
over-weighted with innocence and ignorance, the latter a great
regret—how he wished he'd been one of those precocious geniuses
found in books—but the former, a characteristic he cherished
like the lost stone with the perfectly round hole he'd stubbed his
toe against at the water's edge on Cavendish Beach in Prince Edward
Island, an innocence best exemplified by his youthful spinning round
and round on a summer's day until the light-headed dizziness warped
him out of orbit and he fell to the grass trying to hold the azure
sky and fair-weather clouds from being sucked into the vortex of his
self-induced wonder, lying there overcome by the mystery of distant
galaxies and endless space, a feeling of organic oneness with the
spinning earth beneath him, and the numinous above.
Pinned by gravity, he lay upon the
carpet in this most comforting of postures as the memories of
childhood faded. Breathing deeply, he pressed the pause button and he imagined the CD's rpms descending to zero. His collapse in the
bookshop, he thought, was strangely similar to that childhood
pastime, the world spinning round, his head at once weightless and
heavy as granite. Perhaps it had been a result of all those adult
years of not spinning round and round, all those years of
non-attentiveness to . . . innocence? No, he wouldn't go there.
Amelia would think he was going down the path her parents had
followed to everyone's eventual dismay. Yes, he must keep on the
rational side, the “A” side of interpretation, even though his
random, and apparently mundane, utterances in Norwegian were a
mystery to him. He agreed with her Uncle Edward: leave it be, let it
settle, get on with life. What were they but syllables and sounds?
Nothing to worry about. He was no stranger to the quirks of language.
Only last month he remembered ordering a pear tart from a fine French
pastry shop and had used the words 'tarte de poivre,' in place of 'tarte
de poire.' What was an extra 'v' but an accidental amusement between
the clerk and himself? He was always fumbling with words. He wondered
now if it was an inherited trait. His Mother, who had no real French,
having been born in Notre Dame-de-Grace in the late 1920s, and had
never studied the language like many of her generation, had still
been willing to try with her simple salutations and her 'comme ci,
comme ça.' and had even tried to converse with the non-English
speaking wife of his Father's business associate who he'd invited to
dinner one evening, a dinner where his Mother had related how she'd been out in the rain that day with her new umbrella and had used
the word 'pamplamoose,' in place of 'parapluie.' Duncan smiled to
himself. Yes, he was a chip off the old block.
As well as this verbal side-effect, he
felt his recent medical ordeal and symbolic rebirth had enabled him
to shed a hardened skin of habit, an integument of reason, allowing
him to regain an enlivened perspective on life, and with fresh eyes,
observe the world around him. He'd already become fascinated with the
mundane, the overlooked, the absurd, like the five jars of
semi-finished pimento stuffed olives that had migrated to the back of
the fridge looking much like a mad scientist's collection of
extraterrestrial eyes in briny formaldehyde, or the button plackets
on all his shirts with their horizontal button holes that framed the
vertical ones—like a birth and a death—a detail he'd been
unconscious of after five decades of his own fashioning. Not an hour
ago he'd found himself re-buttoning them all as they hung in
haphazard attention upon their plastic hangers, less in the desire
for order than in a renewed fascination with the clever device and
the urge to keep the shirts as human-like as possible. The crisp
shirt collars had also stimulated the now distant memory of attending the
Knox Crescent and Kensington Presbyterian Sunday services as a child: he and his
brothers dressed in their white shirts and bow ties sitting on the
little benches in front of the first pew, fidgeting and squirming
while their cherubic minister, like an actor on a thrust stage, stood
at the centre of the altar steps and extemporized on his homily of
the week, a simplified story for them, his hands gesticulating
expressively before returning to each other and gently clasped upon
his stomach. And then the Sunday school volunteer would lead them
away along the red carpet to the side door to the sounds of the
muted organ and a soft hymn, leaving the adults like those forsaken to deal with a sinking ship. A backwards sequence of recollections had been triggered and his Saturday morning excursions with his parents to
the old Atwater Market in search of the rump roast for Sunday dinner
were brought back to him. The butcher's stalls with their cold room windows revealing the carcasses, half carcasses, the
oxidized blood mimicking slabs of marble; the pig carcasses yellow
and orange with various triangular and circular marks like passport
stamps; pig, beef, lamb, veal, ageing in the dim light; he could
almost smell the sawdust upon the floor behind the cutting
tables where the mustacheoed butchers in their white shirts, hats and
pink-stained coats conversed in French, content in their profession,
content in their skin. Notwithstanding the horrors of factory
farming—if they had existed as such in the 1960s—at least he'd
known where his meat had come from, and had given thanks before
meals, though to his mind it should have been given first to the poor
animals, and second, to his Mother for preparing the meal, but such
truths had been overlooked for the greater truth, whatever that might
have been. The circularity of the weekend ritual of seeking out the roast beef and its final consumption had been a subservient shadow to that great abstraction. And now he was meatless, having followed Amelia into vegetarianism for what seemed
forever. Only the memory of a succulent smoked meat sandwich made him feel at all nostalgic for his meat and potato origins.
He shifted his eyes to the corner of
the room where the lamp light reflected back from the ceiling in two
soft arcs like female breasts and he thought of Amelia taking her
bath, no doubt trying to soothe her worries over his health and her
concerns over whether he'd wake from his first night's sleep at home.
Dr. Yee had assured them he would be fine, the tests having failed to uncover any hidden dangers. She'd been confident in his recovery
through the use of medication and exercises. There was something about Dr. Yee that reminded him of Yiyin however. Cheekbones? Lips? Eyes? He'd been tempted to inquire if they were related, but a sense of
formal restraint had held him back. Perhaps another time. Perhaps
with a followup appointment in the future, if it felt appropriate,
the atmosphere relaxed, the timing right.
© Ralph Patrick Mackay
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the product of my imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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