Five

Imagine blue, she says. A primitive blue, first colour.
I imagine this blue rising from collarbone to skull top, an opened mind enthralled with voice as I cry in the shower and later on the slope of Mont Royal. I carry my camera. Nobody may hear me yet: This story is my bewildering secret.
      My god, Myra, the pressing in my veins when I stand so new above this city, memory like a violent injection of homeblood. It is astonishing, this return of desire. Somewhere in the trajectory of my feverish memory, Mother, there is ground, there is a living earth, and if I am chosen, then this ground is where I will find love.

You walk the Sunnyside beach on summer nights when the air in your one-room apartment turns to dust. A dare to yourself. It is dangerous, and the dread you feel the first time turns into howling fear as your walking continues. Grace taunts you.
      You won’t keep it up. Flash in the pan. Once a coward, always a coward. Remember when I tied your hands to the railway track?
      Shut up. I never told Myra about it. I could have.
      Still trying to hold me on your knee, Nora?
      You turn, and in a voice you try to keep steady say, Once I wanted you to die, I looked at you asleep in your little bed next to mine and I prayed that you would die so that my humiliation would end.
      You walk the beach thinking about how love might turn your heart toward something further than tomorrow, the thought drawn into thin lines by your furtive scanning left and right. A black dog sniffs at your heels. Jeannette walks with you, or rather swoops along the water’s edge, silently, watching. Djuna stands by a gingko tree, an ancient figure, gnarled, in old coat and shadow.
      Grace is right. You do not believe you can keep this up. You contemplate the lake. You put two heavy stones into the pockets of your skirt, then stand on the shore in the lake’s soft glaze beneath two thousand stars, composing the note. Then three geese pass directly across the face of the moon. You set the stones down and return home.
      On Alice’s eighty-ninth birthday you take the subway and bus to the edge of the city to see her. She lives in a nursing home now. After arranging cornflowers in the one vase she has – beige, dull, who brought her this ugliness? – you lie together on her bed, leaning against her three needlepoint pillows, all swirls of green and turquoise blue. You put your young arm around her, feel her damp neck against your flesh. The juxtaposition of her few belongings – warm wool, dark wood, her red crushed velvet chair the only piece brought from her home, even the bright aquamarine dress she wears – and the sterility of the metal walkers and wheelchairs and side rails, she takes these much better than you. You cling to a nostalgia that has no place here. Useless.
      She repeats the story about her friend Earla Burke telling her where babies come from, and embarrasses herself. Shakes her head. You are bored and she knows it. She starts to tell stories about the nurses and the cleaning staff. They are poisoning her.
      She says suddenly, I have to go to the ladies’, in the middle of a sentence. Big uncertain flourish, scurry, shut the door after setting her gently on the toilet seat, her thighs cool in your hands. You didn’t get your gifts from me, she shouts behind the door. Maybe from your grandfather.
      And what you should have said then – but what could you say while blindsided by doubt? What gifts do you possess? You are wailing. The family portraits are grim on her wall.
      What words?
      Is this grief? To see every act instantly in introspection?
      How can you keep your eyes trained on the world?

What can we call home, Father, in this car now moving over rises in the land, its tires swift against the pavement? A photograph catches the circles of its spinning wheels which blur into ellipses, the photographic moment irreconciled to the black and white cows at the gate, there, munching their cud; or to Djuna, drifting in surreal middle space, who just now points to a woman in a field with her child; or to that raven, now sweeping down from its perch high above us to cross in shadow the mother and child’s little scene as the landscape turns a green-lit forty-five degrees and we are falling over the crest of this green hill.
      You call leaving, home.
      Who is the man in the photograph, Jefferson? I want to shout.
      We each must be allowed our secrets, Nora.
      Tell me. Tell me.
      The raven mounting the sky is a consolation, the terrain we are passing through marked by glinting liquid in its fields which correspond in angles and degrees to the map at our feet.
      We are travelling through this Canadian landscape overland, you are here to conduct your business, I saw you there in the ravine and I want to tell you about Djuna, how she is sitting on the hood, want to shout at you above the roar of wind tumbling in this open car as we fly past a rotten hedge where balances a Swainson’s thrush.
      Now the map’s blue catches an echo of the sky as we note the cumulus advancing the horizon three degrees, and our darting eyes flit from floor to road to grey pond without lilies.
      We’re kicking up quite a dust just now, here, at this Canadian corner.
      Tell me.

I move to Montreal. After Alice dies, I write Jeff telling him I am a lesbian. He writes back: Floods are not homosexuals. All right then, I think. Have it your way. I won’t be a Flood except by silent adventure. I will sit in cafés drinking café au lait or absinthe. I will think thoughts and speak to no one.
      There was a child went forth every day.
      Start believing in time.

I have been walking all afternoon, trying to drown in the snow which falls in sheets. I have been walking all afternoon, rehearsing what I will say to Robin when I see her.
      With Rae. My god. How could you do this to me? Every bed you leave, without caring, leaves you feeling peace and happiness. And now, once again, you think you have made your escape and you are free!
      The snow is climbing the walls of the street, the light from front windows lies down like golden caskets cradled in the fresh snow. It is twilight. A lazy wind blows, gusting. It is Alice who would have called what is stabbing through my inadequate coat lazy: It goes through you instead of around you.
      Lazy, Alice? It is hostile.
      A shadow moves ahead of me. I can see it vaguely through heavy sweeping snow. It moves awkwardly through the blizzard. As I gain on the figure I can see an old woman leaning heavily on an elegant walking stick. Djuna. She wears her sturdy black pumps, and is unsuc-cessfully negotiating the slippery sidewalk. I hear her cursing, a deep contralto voice.
      O, for chrissake. You damned fool, going out tonight of all nights. My god, it’s dreadful. Dreadful.
      I half expect her to suddenly vanish, just as she has done before, as Jeannette does, coming and going of her own accord, never when I beg her to appear. But Djuna continues to fuss even as I bear right down on top of her. She turns, snapping at me.
      All right, Nora, no need to climb up my back. Now let me take your arm, and let’s get out of this dreadful snow. Come on now. Give me a hand.
      Alarmed though I am to feel the real weight of human touch suddenly against my arm, I hold her as we make our way along St-Laurent toward home, Djuna complaining through the gusts that sometimes steal our breath.
      You’re not going to keep on with that dreadful woman, are you? she asks. Believe me, Nora, she’ll break you. Don’t I know. No, you don’t want to show her a single thing more. My god! There’s a beauty. How does she expect to invent anything? A person has to believe in something, Nora. Or someone. Believe in now. Here. Here. Everywhere. This is! Even cranky miserable old me had a little faith. One has to. I could not have invented you if my only purpose was to please myself. But that one! She’s not on ground, she’s on stone! No largesse. There’s a part of that one she’ll never give away. No, you just avoid them all, darling, and you’ll be all right. I promise you. My god! Fools. The lot of them.
      A cat flies past us and lands in a snowbank. Djuna screams, clapping her hand over her mouth. Then she begins to chuckle. She turns and looks at me, her eyes wide.
      Listen, Nora, she says, the world is full of fools, you will keep meeting fools and then they get inside and you don’t know the horror at the voices in your head when you get to be my age. But don’t listen to fools. Listen to the sterile mind, if you can, that’s the ticket. Do you understand? You must want to know what’s here inside and out there.
      Her finger traces an unspeakable line across my heart and then across the light breaking through.
      Robin’s trouble is that she imagines there is nowhere on God’s green earth good enough for the likes of her stupendous talents. Nonsense. And you! You’re full to the brim with pride. What words? Isn’t that what your old pansy used to say? What words?
      I don’t know which way to go, Djuna! I cry.
      Djuna points with her cane to a column of snow that gives the impression of rising rather than falling, and suddenly I am lifting out of my boots and rising into the air, pedalling, as in my dreams, on an inevitable bicycle, up through the falling snow into the dark sky, thousands of feet above the city. The lights below me sparkle, a grid of lights moving in discernible pattern across the landscape. I can see them through the veils of snow streaming alongside me as I am tossed on my uncertain course: The cross shimmering on the mountain, the Oratoire and the Olympic stadium. A host of dazed romantics flounder about in the maze of white streets circling the heart of the city. My ears begin to freeze and my toes turn hard as stone. I am turning, tossed in the wind, my skin opens flat like bedsheets breaking free from an ice-encrusted clothesline, sailing toward a frozen rose garden.
      A tremendous knowledge overtakes me.
      Djuna rises up out of her black pumps, she rises like a tiny black crow across the pale sky, she rises with her arms outstretched and all the lines upon her face washed clean, she is wearing a top hat, a white silk scarf about her elegant neck, she is wearing un smoking, her cheeks are rosy apples, a warm red life stains her full lips, she is rising, she is singing, she is exquisite, radiant, she is calling out to me, Nora, better to take one beautiful photograph than to make love all night long!
      And when she passes through me, I begin my descent.
      I am dropping down onto a darkened street in the Plateau, touching down on the sidewalk outside my apartment. Rae is there on the outer stairs. She is just leaving. Her little dog H.D. bounds away from her into the night.
      H.D.! she calls. C’mere, girl! Hey, Nora. Is it you?
      I try to speak to Rae, to ask her, How can you do this to me? but sound stays swirling like blood inside my mouth. The snow glows with its own inner light. Then, unexpectedly, something merges with this light and a great crimson heat breaks through the snow. I am standing barefoot on black ground, in Myra’s garden, and the life of this garden beneath my feet is hollering.
      Well, see you, Rae says, her eyes crawling around. Drop by if you’re in the neighbourhood.
      I turn and head back to the Main. My feet, though white with the bite of snow, are warm. My boots stand on the sidewalk where I lifted out of them, the left one at a slight outward angle, the right one pointing straight ahead. Exactly my gait. A strange gaiety billows up in me as I spot Djuna sitting in a snowbank, her old wrinkled face returned to her, her thick legs pushed straight out in front of her, her unsteady hands clasped together in her lap, the walking stick jammed into the mound of snow beside her. She’s catching a flood of snowflakes on her tongue. I decide I will not go home; instead I will ask Djuna to come to the studio, let me take her picture, then have a drink with me.
      Now will you give up believing in time? she asks when she sees me. I stop dead in my tracks. What do you mean? I say, steeling myself to demand an explanation if she tries to evade my question but she is flattening into the relief of an old gold coin and rolling away.

I drink a lot of scotch and throw up a couple of times. I put black pen to page and draw parallel lines that refuse borders, circles that leave their centres, chevrons moving into zigzags. I hold the Nikon away from my shimmering body and take my own picture. I take away the light on the surfaces of things and hold a candle in the dark, creating looming shadows. Open the lens and wait, let the moment record its passing, don’t worry; it comes slanting like time through a heart taking heed of itself.
      This morning I curl like a cat curls around a wood stove, curl around my self, my hand breaking the space between my thighs. As if I had known to do this just then a gush of blood comes into my cupped hand. I am holding my own blood in my hand under three blankets and a star that gives no light.
      I run blind to the bathroom. The cat stumbles after me, blinking dumbly. It is six am.
      I wash my hand, my blood running pink into the basin, swirling. I move into the living room. I can see my vulva if I drop from my waist – I am falling. My ass is bare and smooth and vulnerable. The smell of ancient blood grows in the burning fire’s heat. I miss Robin then. I crawl back into bed.
      I imagine her: Tight, standing in the middle of a room, rocking from foot to foot, blind. I mumble Fuck out loud, the cramping is getting worse. Watch the colour come into the slanting clouds, grey at first coming pink. I watch the window, watch the newly fallen snow come pink come into blood come into blue. I want purple and something else that won’t come. I feel sick.
      My mouth tastes like baking soda after I throw up. I rinse the plastic basin of my vomit then get back into bed, wondering again if Robin will come home at all. I wish I had said, What will you do without me? but I made a big scene the night before about giving me time (my blood cupped in my hand alone), a golden suitcase jerking across the floor. What if the world counted on me to know myself? A fragment from a dream about adolescence, mine, the quality of skin like my ass, a beautiful thing.
      I make coffee. While water blasts up through the grounds, I tie my blood around words in my head like sacred documents, my words bleached and quick and needing her ear, a thousand racing words about what it could be like, leaving her. Line them up on the edge of a razor blade. I keep a quick pace, waiting for reason to come, but every bend reproduces my old closet and banished candle, voices battling, claws under the door. The only way is forward, scratching pith and pulp, pulling back raw flesh, bending my head to observe how Robin’s tongue slowly protrudes, how she moves it on a dark nipple, how the tongue scratches slightly, how the body rises. Observing Robin tearing off clothes, jamming dildo into harness into another, tongues in strange darkness, the heat of new skin the hook of an anchor she needs.
      There is nothing I will not bend to see. No story I wish to prevent the telling of. Running behind with an open notebook, a Nikon camera if not her heart. A lifetime of shadow and light to explore if I give up believing in time.
      But there are no ends to the earth. For forty years Djuna carried stones in her pockets. Waiting. What was the purpose of forty-odd years drunk in a bachelor apartment on Patchin Place? Could she make no use of Nothing? Why invent me, then?
      The bait rises up in the night, roaring, and I take it.
      Where the heart opens, that is the Way.

You are shooting photographs in a famous restaurant on St-Denis when a woman comes up to you asking, Can I take your picture?
      Yes. And no one will believe it, you answer. I look like a small brown bird. We Are All Like This.
      You wait for Robin.
      You have begun the excavation. The stranger you unearth has a solar plexus full of diamonds. There are pebbles in her mouth. The trajectory of desire is a cool stone thrown, and when it lands you know: You are leaving to go somewhere.

I wrote Myra a note today, just a hello to let her know I am alive and that I am thinking about her. Robin said, Just love her for an hour here and there. But loving Myra and the others is a lot like taking a picture. I have to practice. Call myself a practitioner. I can’t just turn it on and off. It requires long preparation in my mind and self-examination in my skin. Bodies in infinity is what I’m trying to stand.
      I regret all those years I didn’t believe in my loving, but then I tell myself, Forget it.
      Do it now.
      Don’t waste your time.

The community that I begin to photograph is full of contradictions and nuances, is a sick and gorgeous, a treacherous and glorious, thing.
      After Robin leaves for work, after I unpack the suitcase and put it back into the closet; when the memory of last night’s cruelties have me crawling on my knees, unable to lift my head; when the hour that follows this is darker still, I take my camera and admit escape. Next to me at a marble-top table in this Montreal café of cool teal and dark terra cotta is a dyke. She is young, strong. Head-hugger of a crew cut with a slash of long white hair tucked behind one ear, her claim to former crisis. She is wearing a short army jacket, black jeans rolled up twice neatly at the ankles. Green socks. Converse sneakers.
      Does she smoke? Yes. Look. Inconspicuously. The smoke drifts up from her hand where it dangles below the table between her legs. She is reading Voir.
      Does she wear black lingerie to seduce a lover? Does she wear her runners? Are her strong legs coated with a fine captivating down? Does she change behind the bathroom door or above her lover on the bed? Does she wear a dildo, slide carefully into her date?
      Does she hate sex, preferring instead her John Players in their shining black box?
      Does she sense me watching? Does the impulse to speak overtake her? Would she like to run?
      What colour are her eyes?
      Has her father just died? Is her mother –
      Is she hungry? Does she like to travel?
      Is she HIV positive? Does she speak English?
      Has she ever loved a man?
      What colour are her eyes?
      When she looks at herself in a mirror does she wink?
      What does she do for cash?
      Can she tell herself much she needs to hear?
      Has she ever tried to kill herself?
      Did she take music lessons when she was young?
      Has she ever held a gun?
      Has she ever had a stranger hold a cool cloth to her hot forehead while she puked into a bowl?
      Does she believe in everlasting life?

I dream I am climbing around dark streets looking for a guillotine. Robin is fucking two women in a church. On my prowl I run into Donny. I tell him about Robin. He tells me, The life of the mind is only an effort to hide the body so the teeth don’t stick out. I ask him is he quoting? He says, Forget Robin, and make up some rules of your own.
      Is there a way to foster a new realm of dreams? Surely indifference has no territory in the heart. Only voluptuous deep loving solitude, the lost moment of travelling imagination? The open aperture and a view of the world?
      Your love when it began was fit to dry a rose in. Now a window has broken and petals scurry along the baseboards. A window isn’t broken but a door blows away.
      How long can you balance on the fulcrum of a lie?

You are tracking light as it moves across the world. Your photos hang from tacks around your studio; you lean your back up against the brick wall and study the sequence taken yesterday: The dyke in the small café.
      Maybe we spend our whole lives garnering love. In yesterday’s photos, the citizens of the world experiment with their lives. Who tried to leave the sterile heart; who made things worse for their loved ones by speaking the words, It is over; who stayed on in sadness and anger; who jumped from a seventh-floor window?
      You wonder if the love Robin says she has for you will last without a home. You go to the window of your studio, deck yourself out, dance, laugh: Then throw it all away.

I am meeting Robin tonight for dinner at Le Continental, she is treating me to pasta alla carbonara, she will taunt me as the raw egg begins to tilt then spill its alchemy over the steaming spaghettini. She will laugh, throw back her long elegant neck. She will regain her focus, lean in toward me, pour more wine.
      You look so alive, she will say.