– The wall!
The wall occupied the whole windshield, first as a blur, then focused precisely as if an expert had adjusted the microscope – every pimple of the concrete three-dimensional – bright! precise! – fast film of the moon’s hide – then the windshield blurred again as the wall rushed into the glass of the headlights – I saw F.’s cufflink skimming the edge of the steering wheel like a surfboard –
– Darling! Ehhhffff.…
– Rrrrriiiiippppp, went the wall.
We passed through the wall because the wall was made of a scrim of painted silk. The car bumped over an empty field, the torn fabric clinging to the chrome Mercedes hood emblem. The undamaged headlights illumined a boarded-up hot-dog stand as F. applied the brake. On the wood counter I noticed an empty bottle with a perforated cap. I stared blankly at it.
– Did you come? asked F.
My prick hung out of my fly like a stray thread.
– Too bad, said F.
I started to shiver.
– You missed a great come.
I placed my clenched fists on the top of the dashboard and laid my forehead on them, weeping in spasms.
– We went to a lot of trouble rigging the thing up, renting the parking lot and all.
I jerked my face toward him.
– We? What do you mean “we”?
– Edith and I.
– Edith was in on it?
– How about that second just before you were about to shoot? Did you sense the emptiness? Did you get the freedom?
– Edith knows about our filthy activities?
– You should have kept on with it, my friend. You weren’t driving. There was nothing you could do. The wall was on top of you. You missed a great come.
– Edith knows we’re fairies?
I threw my hands at his neck with a murderous intention. F. smiled. How thin and puny my wrists looked in the dim orange light. F. removed my fingers like a necklace.
– Easy. Easy. Dry your eyes.
– F., why do you torture me?
– O my friend, you are so lonely. Each day you get lonelier. What will happen when we are gone?
– None of your fucking business! How dare you presume to teach me anything? You’re a fake. You’re a menace! You’re a disgrace to Canada! You’ve ruined my life!
– All these things may be true.
– You filthy bastard! How dare you admit they’re true?
He leaned forward to switch on the ignition and looked at my lap.
– Button up. It’s a long cold drive to Parliament.
40
I have been writing these true happenings for some time now. Am I any closer to Kateri Tekakwitha? The sky is very foreign. I do not think I will ever tarry with the stars. I do not think I will ever have a garland. I do not think ghosts will whisper erotic messages in my warm hair. I will never find a graceful way to carry a brown lunch bag on a bus ride. I’ll go to funerals and they won’t remind me of anything. It was years and years ago that F. said: Each day you get lonelier. That was years and years ago. What did F. mean by advising me to go down on a saint? What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape. His house is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world. He can love the shapes of human beings, the fine and twisted shapes of the heart. It is good to have among us such men, such balancing monsters of love. It makes me think that the numbers in the bag actually correspond to the numbers on the raffles we have bought so dearly, and so the prize is not an illusion. But why fuck one? I remember once slobbering over Edith’s thigh. I sucked, I kissed the long brown thing, and it was Thigh, Thigh, Thigh – Thigh softening and spreading as it flowed in a perfume of bacon to the mound of Cunt – Thigh sharpening and hardening as I followed the direction of its tiny hairs and bounced into Kneecap. I don’t know what Edith did (maybe one of her magnificent lubrication squirts) or what I did (maybe one of my mysterious sprays of salivation) but all at once my face was wet and my mouth slid on skin; it wasn’t Thigh or Cunt or any chalk schoolboy slogan (nor was I Fucking): it was just a shape of Edith: then it was just a humanoid shape: then it was just a shape – and for a blessed second truly I was not alone, I was part of a family. That was the first time we made love. It never happened again. Is that what you will cause me to feel, Catherine Tekakwitha? But aren’t you dead? How do I get close to a dead saint? The pursuit seems like such nonsense. I’m not happy here in F.’s old treehouse. It’s long past the
