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This is Kali here. Strange, or not so strange, that all my early lovers were foreigners, that I went with them partly so I could see this country through the eyes of immigrants. For it is never the same country, you know; it keeps changing. And there is another country inside this one, and another, and another, if you look long enough. Exiles and strangers came together in me, enemies came together in me, all of them ashamed of their beautiful difficult names and shortening them to suit a language where even Manitou is a monosyllable. And me nevertheless insisting on calling them by their real names (Demetrius, Antonio, Ivars), me the native leading them back to their lands while they revealed to me the many Kanadas mirrored in their eyes. Then came Noman, more foreign than anyone because he did not come from outside, but from inside this land - Noman who, like the devil, was always a perfect gentleman, who appeared in my life like the demon who lived in the back of an old chair, and who I had never seen until I sprayed the chair with gold paint and his face emerged laughing from the wood. Noman who performs his endless disappearing acts, but always returns after huge lengths of time with his dazzling smile and his dazzling amnesia to throw my life into splendid chaos once again. This plural being with his many lives. Thirteen years ago he said, 'Let's possess the future as surely as we possess the past. Let's become the masters of time, let's move into time!' And then he walked, stark naked, through the arch at Kingsmere and disappeared. Disappeared from my eyes at least, but I heard he was very active during the following years, appearing here and there in one guise or another - (the child saw him performing magic at a birthday party) - in hot pursuit, as ever, of his several selves, living out whatever alternative lives and alternative realities he was forced by his nature to experience. Torn out of time, memoryless, he could imagine himself a master of time, but when he realized that in truth he possessed neither the past nor the future, he returned to me. I do not need to master time; I contain it. I am his fixed point, his sundial; with me he can watch the shadow of himself turning and returning to the same position. I am his compass, I am his sanity. Let me tell you of the kind of love that endures absences. Even defines itself by absences, thrives on absences. Let me assure you that thirteen years without him had the same texture as a day, and it was of little consequence how many moons passed, how many breaths. Time does nothing to you; you do things to time. Criminals do time in prison; lovers make time. I gathered time, waiting or not waiting, it did not really matter - for I had the child, and the child seized time and swung it round and round his head like a sword. Nothing occurs that is not miraculous; all of life is an act of magic. So when I drove back to Kingsmere that night and found Noman stumbling out of the forest, I was not surprised. At some preordained signal we both returned to the scene of his disappearance to discover one another all over again. Time had served us well, preserving our selves, our separate identities, leaving us free to introduce each other to our separate, complementary worlds. Neither of us has ever claimed to 'know' the other; the idea is distasteful to us both. We offer each other the priceless gift of our own mystery - for what more do we have to give, finally, than the enigma of our selves? What can we 'know' of one another? Nothing. Men doodle differently than women; women make circles and arcs and men make arrows and knives. Closer to the mystery we cannot come, nor do we want to. (So I do not want to know him but to know what he is not, all the people he is not, all the places he can't be found. The contours of his absences. I define him only by default, as you must also, and as you will.) At first I didn't tell him about the boy, and made sure the boy was out whenever he visited. Luckily, he'd been with his grandparents when I first brought Noman back. I wanted to wait until he was ready, until at least part of his memory had returned. But the nightchild - as the neighbours called him - perceived everything right from the start. 'It's him, isn't it?' he challenged me. 'It's that creep, my father.' (The nightchild knows everything; he knows what time it is down to the last minute without consulting a clock, he knows everybody's secrets, he knows the outcome of every major sports event, he knows when the price of gold will drop.) 'Yes, it's him,' I said, 'but he mustn't know yet.' And then the uncanny child began to follow Noman around everywhere, taunting him and playing beastly tricks on him, relishing his secret knowledge. Noman told me that whenever they encountered one another it was neither day nor night but some place in between, some dawn or dusk when day and night had each other in a stranglehold that seemed to go on forever. I was afraid they'd end up by killing each other, but no matter how horrible the child's tricks became, Noman desisted from retaliating on any grand scale. He could have turned on his full powers and wiped the boy out with a single soul-destroying stare, but he contented himself with relatively harmless acts such as giving the boy a case of unbearable itching all over his body which lasted for a full twentyfour hours. Meanwhile the boy tried to blow him up with dynamite, kidnapped his little cat and doused it with gasoline before attempting to set it on fire - (Noman rescued it just in time) - filled a large brown envelope full of worms and addressed it to him and put it in his mailbox, phoned him and delivered blood-curdling screams into the telephone, passed a rag soaked in turpentine under his door and lit it from the outside, painted a huge red swastika on the pavement outside his house, jumped him from behind on the street and emptied a bag of white flour onto his head, threw stones at his window and burned his mail. 'Sooner or later,' Noman said, smiling grimly, 'he'll go too far.' The whole of that summer Noman wandered around in the clouds of his amnesia, but by the Fall things started coming back to him. On Sunday October 23 (the world's birthday, he informed me, the world having been created on that day in 4004 B.C.) he told me he'd had a dream in which a police officer approached him saying 'I'm taking you into custody for killing yourself.' 'Do you mean I'm dead?' he asked. 'Yes,' said the officer, 'several times over, and I want your address and any identification you have on your person.' 'Which person?' Noman asked, and the dream ended. We went to the lakeshore and walked warily along the beach, drawing together and drifting apart, each of us trying to get a better perspective on the other, only dimly aware that we were performing the steps to a slow, ancient dance. Gulls took off from the breakwater and dove headlong into the sunset, razor-coloured, razor-edged waves scuttled into shore, pieces of driftwood bleached white were the bones of bizarre animals. 'Let's not learn too much about anything,' he said, 'especially about each other.' 'Fire,' I replied. 'My sentiments exactly.' Then he smiled. 'But I've said that before, haven't I? Before and before ...' We drove along Lakeshore Boulevard in the sad blaze of the autumn evening. At the Exhibition grounds pastel lights lit the pavilions for food and flowers and automobiles and horses, and turned them into Medieval castles and Byzantine shrines. In that unreal light they existed in their own peculiar dimension in time and space, as we did, as the lake did, wistful now, brooding, bereft of boats. It gleamed like black metal, lit by the magic of carlight. Wherever you are, I thought, the landscape is revised. 'All right,' he declared. 'Let's go so far East we'll end up West of
ourselves. Let's go to the International Dateline Hotel in Tonga where they
advertise that today becomes tomorrow.' 'Consider eternity,' I said. 'The Egyptian hieroglyph which means thousands and thousands of years is a string of suns. It looks like the DNA molecule: I discovered that yesterday.' 'The DNA molecule is a yard long film coiled in the cell, and it can be spliced, like editing tape,' he said. 'Maybe our lives can be spliced like that,' he went on, 'edited and endlessly revised.' The road unravelled before us, endlessly turning. It was just after the first snow that he became entirely himself again. Around the skating rink at City Hall Square children lay in the snow, making angels or mandalas with the scissor movements of their arms and legs. Noman said he would like to die like that, in the snow, then caught himself, smiled, and said that in at least one of his lives he already had. Purple music poured through the loudspeakers, countless silver blades ate arcs into the ice as the theme from Exodus soared over the square and the pale curved towers of City Hall, which looked like something from another world. 'I don't know if I can do this,' he said, expertly lacing his skates in two seconds. Then he swayed at the edge of the rink, ankles collapsing inward, faking it. 'This is the part in the film where Eva Marie Saint tells Paul Newman that they won't make it, and he walks away into the intermission,' he said. And then - what else - he took off with dazzling speed across the ice. He claimed the whole rink, speed-skating around it counter-clockwise until someone crashed into him and left him flat on his back, splayed out on the ice, making an angel. 'I've decapitated myself,' he announced, gazing at Moore's Archer, which was turning greener with age at the far end of the square. 'Did I ever tell you I was inside that thing?' he asked as a flurry of people swept past him, the kids in multi-coloured snowsuits tumbled and slid like fat little jelly beans, the boys shot a puck, the lovers went arm in arm, dazed. 'In fact, did I ever tell you about any of it? It's all come back to me, Kali, my past lives, everything!' he cried, and we both laughed out loud at the relief of it. 'The sky looks wild from down here,' he said, so I joined him on the ice. We
lay together on our backs, and the night sky was an inverted bowl of stars.
Somebody's skate blade narrowly missed his cheek. Doctor Zhivago filled the night; the bell of the old City Hall tolled the eleventh hour. He covered me with his mouth, his knees, his skates. The other skaters, very polite and Kanadian, skimmed by us at a respectable distance muttering excuse me, excuse me, and left us lying there in little storms of silver dust. Now I must tell you of the peculiar incident in December when Noman and the boy had a sort of a showdown and the boy played an awful trick on him. It was an unfortunate episode, but not entirely a negative one, for something between them was finally resolved and an important stage in their relationship was reached. Noman had realized at last who the boy was, and had approached him seeking a kind of ceasefire in their bizarre war. But the boy did not honour the truce. 'Help me, Kali,' Noman pleaded on the phone to me. 'This is my darkest hour. This time he's gone too far. He's discovered his darker powers; he's learned to bend light.' 'And?' I asked, laughing a little. I am wonderfully beautiful I looked at myself in the mirror and considered that I had never felt like Eve, but like Lilith, the first woman, wilful and wise. I had good teeth, wolf-white and even and strong, teeth made for softening the skins of animals. I put on an ornament of shells and feathers and an old necklace of blue beads like a string of eyes which stared back at me from the mirror. I dressed carefully, preparing to be divested of all my garments, defrocked, utterly undone. The nervous satin of my skirt trembled when I moved. I turned off all the lights in the house so only the moonlight shone through the windows. 'Kali, I'm here,' he said when I opened the door for him, 'but I'm invisible. The kid has worked some terrible magic on me.' 'Nonsense,' I said, and drew him by the hand into the moonlit house. 'I tell you he's made me invisible, he's eclipsed me,' Noman protested as we made our way into the bedroom. In the darkness my jewels became underground stars. Noman fingered the blue beads on my neck and they remembered his touch. We became the beast with many mouths; we spoke an ancient language, a sort of Linear B. The breath of wolves and the wings of ravens brushed our skin, fabulous figures of angels and animals flew across the ceiling. You could have blown us over with a single breath, we were that delicate. We were as insubstantial as air, as real as fire. Strange that no one is born knowing how to love. It is a tremendous task requiring great courage, a dynamic surrender to one's real being. The only heroes on earth are the lovers. In love we achieve one another. It is a great victory, a terrible blow to the angel of death. They should give a standing ovation to the world's lovers, offer them the Nobel Prize. Ours is the only story worth telling. Afterwards we lay still for a long time; we had just invented the world and were wondering what to do with it. It was infinitely beautiful, infinitely treacherous. Everything had been revealed to us, and now we knew nothing. Noman and I had become the wisest and most ignorant of beings. We were rude, insolent, vulgar, pompous, self-righteous and insufferable, we were stupid with love, exempt from everything, we were hopeless, we were the lovers, we were above the law. Love was the Law. 'We must look as though we've been struck by lightning,' I said an hour later as I went to turn on a lamp. 'Kali, I've warned you ...' he said. I laughed, and flooded the room with light. Noman was not there. There was an awful whiteness before my eyes. 'Say something,' I said in a voice not my own. 'I'm here,' came the voice from the bed. 'I told you, Kali. But it won't last long, don't worry.' I looked at the white walls, and the bed which seemed to have been hit by a cyclone, and the string of blue beads against a white sheet. 'This time,' I said, 'he's gone too far.' The craziest intersection in the city is where King and Queen and Roncesvalles meet in a mad jumble of streetcar tracks which have been ripped up and rearranged a hundred times in the past. Finally, somehow, one street subtly becomes another. It is hard to tell what happens exactly - Queen devours King? Roncesvalles surrenders to King? Anyway, it all sorts itself out, or braids itself together, depending on how you look at it. The house where Noman and Ibrahim lived was close to this insane intersection, and it was here that Ibrahim gave his little birthday party, which fell on Xmas Eve. He called it his birthnight party. 'Most people are born at night, night is the great mother,' he said. 'Come in; my spirit entertains its guests! In the East we make our own parties. If someone forgets your birthday it is your own fault because you did not make it known to him. Here everyone is expected to read your mind; it is not just.' Noman had disappeared a few days before Xmas, so I went alone to the party. There was cold chicken and cantaloupe and pineapple sliced very thinly and arranged in rings. Yellow oil swirled in little eddies on top of the eggplant salad. There were paper plates rampant with cheese and tomatoes and olives. Eastern music oozed through the radio. There were plastic picks with maple leaves stuck into the sardines, and some wickedly rare roast beef. Cherries skied down the chocolate mountains of the Black Forest cake. We drank araq out of black and gold zodiac cups. 'I bought all twelve of them,' Ibrahim explained, 'so whoever comes here, I have the right cup for him.' But no one came and we sat alone, toasting each other. I sang Happy Birthnight Ibrahim, and taught him some carols. 'King forever, ceasing never, Although he considered that friendship between a man and a woman was yet another corrupt Western custom, and that it was totally impossible for a man and a woman to have a relationship that was not sexual in nature, he had grown to like me. But he was always testing me in a hundred different ways. 'Do you do it ? ' 'Do what?' I countered. 'It. You know.' he said. Then he plucked a chicken bone from between his teeth, cleaned it on a napkin and handed it to me through the candlelight. 'Make a wish, Kali. Here is my soul, fragile as a wishbone.' We snapped the bone, and the better part of it was in my hand. 'Forget it,' he said. 'Perhaps I only love you because of him.' Then he wandered to the window and gazed out, his eyes fixed on some private point in space. 'He's here even when he's not here,' I said. 'I know.' He turned to me, his soul drowning in his black eyes. The we both fell to silence. Outside the window, the visible absence of Noman, the stark white streets of Xmas. Noman returned later that night, and on Xmas morning we went to the island, a short ferry ride away from the city. He looked a little shaky and pale and told me he had been ill the night before. It was the end of the terrible storm that had gone on for days, and the waves in the bay were still whipped to a froth by the white wind. On the far side of the island we watched crazed waves roll and dash themselves against the breakwater, then double back, spitting foam. A lone gull shrieked and sought asylum at the lighthouse on the eastern tongue of the island. Our faces smarted from the spray, the cold and brilliant sun. I fished out a cigarette - he had never succeeded in stopping me from smoking - and he lit a match for me, his hands cupped around the flame. Then he froze in the middle of the action and stared out across the water. 'The lake,' he breathed. 'The lake. This summer.' We walked back towards the dock, and it was then that everything entered another order of time. In a lagoon close to the dock a lone skater was describing concentric circles, a sort of penmanship on ice. Something in me went numb with fear. I had told the boy that we were coming here, that I had wanted these few hours alone with Noman to urge him to come home with me late that day so that the two of them might be reconciled. But he'd followed us, and now Noman saw him, and now he was smiling a smile which filled me with horror. 'Doesn't he realize how thin the ice is?' Noman asked. 'You wouldn't ...' I said. 'Wouldn't I? 'Noman replied. Then there was a crack like the sound of a hammer striking glass. Then another crack, and the boy disappeared. I screamed and my scream was a horrible black bird being torn out of my mouth. Noman raced out onto the ice and tore off his coat and without a moment's hesitation lowered himself through the gash in the ice into the black blood of the water. Just beneath the ice was a layer of trapped light, a blinding prison. The cold was the metallic cold of steel gates and bars. Above him were sliding white panels of ice, terrible doors that opened and closed in insane random patterns. The boy thrashed his way away from the hole and was bashing at the ice with his fists, his mouth open in a soundless scream, a roaring silence. Noman grabbed him and tried to pull him back, but he resisted, kicking and punching in ghastly slow motion. Their lungs began to burst. Somehow Noman manoeuvered him back to where the sky slashed through the ice in a vivid hallucinatory blue. I stretched myself out on the ice and held out my arms. When the boy's head broke through the water I felt a sensation which to my shock was one of relief coupled with an absurd sort of jealousy. It was only much later that I realized that Noman had given him, with this terrible baptism, a sort of second, greater birth. I can't remember how long it was before they both lay gasping and shivering beside me. 'I hate your guts,' the boy said. 'I knew I wouldn't drown down there. Don't you know how hard it is to drown? I could have been half an hour down there and I still wouldn't be dead. Ever heard of the Mammalian Diving Reflex? Your body diverts your blood from your arms and legs and holds it in reserve to protect your heart and brain. Suspended animation. And anyway I could have found my own way out.' 'Shut up,' Noman said. Someone had spotted us and called the harbour police, and in a few minutes a cruiser picked us up and wrapped us all in blankets and took us to the city. 'That was pretty good,' the boy told Noman in the first aid station. 'But not as good as Houdini. He went down under the ice all chained up and in a crate. Bet you couldn't get out of that one.' The stared each other down. 'So what other tricks do you know?' asked the boy. 'I mean except making the ice break.' 'I know a few card tricks,' Noman said. 'You're crazy. There's better tricks than that. Can you bend time?' And so on. We all went home and ate a golden turkey on a glorious bed of baby carrots and raisins and orange slices. Later I said, 'Why, Noman, why did you have to do it?' 'I was merely teaching him a lesson,' he replied. 'It's not fair,' I said. 'Women give birth to a child's body, but men give birth to its soul. A mother teaches him how to tie his shoes, and a father teaches him astronomy or magic. It's not fair.' I was furious. 'Yes it's fair,' Noman said. 'It's perfectly balanced, the power is equally divided. Thirteen years ago at Kingsmere I asked you to come with me, under the arch. Let's move into time, I said. And you didn't come - why?' 'I didn't have to,' I smiled. 'I already contained the future.' On New Year's Eve we went to a Greek nightclub called Ithaki, and drank retzina and ouzo and dipped bread into taramasalata. Itoasted the lean and anguished looking bouzouki player and stared in amazement as his fingers flew up and down the resonant strings with a will of their own. Ibrahim stared at the singer in her transparent red dress, her nipples peering back at him like eyes. Noman cried, 'Here's Spiros!' as a large man began fighting his way through the chairs and tables towards us. 'So it's you, my friend the hypnotist, or should I say the illusion-maker?' said Spiros. 'I haven't seen you since the day in my restaurant when you almost had me fooled into thinking I was seeing a vision. It was very convincing.' 'What have you been doing since then? 'Noman asked. 'Making money. Tell me, Yanni, do you still think you're more foreign than me?' 'Absolutely,' Noman said. 'Trellos. You're trellos - crazy!' Spiros laughed, and
ordered another round of drinks. 'Do you know the poem by our great poet Cavafy
with the same name as this club? Ithaki has given you the marvellous
journey. Without her you would never have set out. Now she has nothing more to
give you.' Someone with a Polaroid took pictures, and in an instant it was possible to distinguish the Kanadians from the Greeks, for while the Greeks grinned and faced the camera head on, the Kanadians, for reasons known only to them, turned away to smooth their hair and consider their response. My two crazy friends Jube and Omph showed up, though I hadn't expected them to, and the singer in the red dress whose fingernails were painted five different colours came down from the stage and sat in Ibrahim's lap and spoke to him in low thrilling tones. People started throwing money and plates onto the stage, and some non-Greeks mistakenly threw dirty plates so there were bits of rice and lettuce flying around everywhere until they were informed that they had to ask for cheap plates to throw, and to pay for them all. Noman climbed onto the stage, threw fifty one dollar bills into the air, and danced a spectacular zembekiko, that tragic, brooding, fiery, hilarious, difficult dance, a dance of life and death where one circles around oneself, seeking one's centre in the centre of the dance, a dance which can only be performed properly by one man, alone. He danced through the spaces between the broken plates and the money, turning around himself, dipping towards the floor, his arms outstretched like the wings of a glider, soaring, crashing. Next year, I thought, I am going to India. We went to the ravine near by, a long wound in the city where in the past Noman had staged another of his 'deaths'. The moonlit winter sky was turquoise and mauve and some new colour only just invented and as yet without a name. The hum of traffic along the viaduct over the ravine was visible sound, a line of tangerine orange light that curved from the past to the future with no beginning and no end. We went down the flight of stairs into the bright darkness, and stood in a place where space and time became one single, indivisible reality. 'If you look long enough,' Noman said, 'you will see that the snow is every colour of the spectrum. Kali, this is the most exotic country in the world.' Now he went into intensive training in the pool for the lake swim. He did eight kilometres morning and night in a powerful crawl, his arms moving like oars, and sometimes he'd put on a jacket and do an extra kilometre or two with the added weight. Swimmers' hieroglyphics were chalked up for him on the big blackboard beside the clock: Pull 800 f / s - 200 Br, swim down. 400 f / s, 8 x 25 sprint on 30. Kick 400 f / s. He was an aquanaut; his body bit through the water, devouring time. He felt the world washing over him, and he was pulled along in the marathon of history. But some days he felt as though he were crawling over a sea of quicksilver. He crawled until the slanting light from the windows high up on street level darkened, and the cruel electric light of evening and the chlorinated blue light rippling in bands through the water were the only lights to see by. The white of winter collapsed and the ice broke up into little pieces, but the lake, unfreezing, was as dark and menacing as ever. As spring came and the marathon swim got closer, I was filled with terror. One night I drank about 97 gin and tonics and put on gobs of violet mascara and threatened to go to India and join Phoolan Devi, the notorious bandit queen who was a sort of female Robin Hood, champion of the lowest castes. Ibrahim and I exchanged horror stories about swimmers in the Cuba-Florida swim who were pulled out of the water when their shark cages fell apart, their faces stung by jellyfish and their tongues swollen to twice their size, swimmers in the past in Lake Ontario vomitting and fainting and swimming around in horrible crazed circles. 'Fools,' said Ibrahim. 'Sound and fury signifying nothing. Cuckoos.' The child asked Noman why he couldn't just teleport himself across the lake, why he had to swim it, like an ordinary human being, and Noman replied that teleportation was very advanced magic and even he hadn't yet mastered it. Then Noman was doing I6 kilometres a day in the lake itself, sometimes more, under a bright aquamarine sky and in an awful unreal cold that burned like dry ice right in the middle of summer. The lake expanded, became a sea. The swim from Niagara on the Lake to the Exhibition grounds was 51 kilometres; the prize was $25,000. (Swimmers were required to have completed 16 kilometres in a previous swim to qualify; I have no idea how Noman proved that he had done this.) His coach kept reminding him that the top swimmers in the world were from Kanada, and warded off manufacturers of swimwear, molasses, honey, high protein drinks and granola bars, while Noman threw up defenses against the coming ordeal. He memorized long passages of poetry and equations relating to nuclear fission; he invented lengthy games of logic to prevent him from yielding to the temptation of sleep, for he feared sleep more than the lake itself. Sleep alone could defeat him. Then the day arrived. There were thirteen swimmers in two buses going to
Niagara on the Lake, four of them women. Women have a certain advantage over men
in marathon swimming because female subcutaneous fat is an insulation against
cold, and provides buoyancy and endurance. All of the swimmers were friendly,
joking that they hoped the lake would be cold enough to finish off the cold
haters. Ibrahim, who had insisted on being with Noman throughout the entire
ordeal, struck up a conversation with an Egyptian swimmer and in two minutes
they were screaming at each other in mindless fury. 'The dog believes in peace
with Israel,' he told me later. 'I told him I hoped he would drown. I spit on
him. I gave him the worst curse of all - may all your dreams come
true.' Now that it is over, life has returned to normal - whatever that is supposed to mean. Noman and the child get along quite well, that is, they have stopped trying to annihilate each other, although occasionally the child still tries to set him on fire. He gave Noman his wand back, the one he stole at the birthday party some years ago, and in return Noman is transferring esoteric knowledge and power to him by degrees. They take long walks together and Noman teaches him mysteries and secrets which they think I do not know. ('Make sure you know who you are before you fall asleep. Guard your mind. Lay weapons of steel and gold beside your pillow to defend your dreams. Honour the morning.') Just yesterday they went into the forest to practice bending time and to dream up their real names. |
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