The Death of All Things Seen Read online

  At the time, everyone understood what brought an American up there, and yet he was regarded with neither suspicion nor interest. Vietnam was not Canada’s war. The work at the mill kept the workers busy and attentive. The whirling bite of a blade could cut a man in two. Nate was hired and worked a year that shaped him into a man.

  He met Ursula Abenakis right after he arrived. She was a twenty-two-year-old half-blood native who worked at the hotel. She met his stare with the greenest of eyes, her sallow skin framed by a black sheen of hair, betraying her lineage.

  She wrote his name into a leather bound ledger, the languid sweep of her writing style suggesting a convent education. She had, in fact, been brought up in a Catholicism that never took hold. In the pulse of nature, in daily life, there was a more powerful God.

  She became his fascination, this Ursula Abenakis. He took his meals at the hotel, tipping with a view to catching her attention. He watched the way she filled the pepper and salt shakers, topped up the milk jugs, turned over the damp brown sugar in the glass bowls, and at the day’s end dutifully changed the fly-strip paper.

  He learned, in the coming weeks, sitting by her in the dying evenings, that her father had been a fur trapper, three-quarters First Nation and a quarter French-Canadian, as were most trappers in the region after centuries of interbreeding along the Saint Lawrence and the fur-trade routes.

  Nate was fresh-faced back then, a young man destined for great things. Or so Ursula told him. It didn’t take her long to come out to the cabin he found in the fall, her housewarming gift a rhubarb pie and a pound of ground coffee beans.

  At the hotel, she had called him ‘My American’, smiling with a beatific grace. He had thought her a beauty he could never possess, and he carried the thought of her in the way men carried lost dreams into battle. He loved her for her intelligence and mystery. When she poured him coffee, he felt like weeping. He thought he would never have her.

  When she arrived with the rhubarb pie, she wore nylons under her jeans, but no underwear or bra. It was revealed as she removed her top and then her jeans, placing them by her side, and doing so without the slightest sense of urgency or impropriety. She observed a polite restraint in the wake of their lovemaking, which was full of struggle and passion. She never asked directly about his family, or if he might return to America. Vietnam was the reason for his being there, and yet it seemed so remote, it didn’t bear mentioning.

  For her part, she revealed she was from the Anishinaabeg tribe, a name which literally meant, ‘Beings made out of nothing’, a conjuring that set Nate into a swooning sense that, yes, all came from nothing, that all things had to be envisioned and decided upon and then made real. He considered their relationship the same way, something made out of nothing.

  Of course, Ursula came with a past, something before the current nothingness. She was honest, open and proud. She had been with a First Nation man, Frank Grey Eyes, born into the Wolf Clan, a ponytailed, equine-faced native with wolf eyes and a temper. He wore a black bowler hat and a poncho. His favorite things in the whole world were scratch lottery tickets and booze. This was where mystery and revelation had gone, or so he believed.

  They had ventured to Toronto in 1968 so Frank could work construction, but Frank couldn’t handle the booze or the loneliness and, though he complained that Toronto was killing him, he stayed and got attached to white women in bars where his kind fell easy prey to women on the way down, white women who held a certain allure of what non-white males felt was a conquest, a victory of sorts. It just exacerbated the decline, because it felt like something other than it was, when it was nothing but the end.

  When Frank was sad he used to trace the outline of a circle around himself, shuffling in a circular, tribal, tomahawk-wielding dance, a slow vortex spun against the spin of the cosmos, as though he could create some concept of home. He wore his bowler hat, so it was sobering, sad and moving to witness him dance in the dark of the apartment.

  Sometimes he scratched a lottery ticket, the silver filings sifting through the air like a spell. He was looking for small, contained miracles. He was fascinated, too, by fortune cookies. He felt revelation was hiding in the most unlikely places, and that you had to work against the petulance of the spirit world. Toronto seemed like a place that the spirit world might inhabit. It was worth a look.

  Frank was good like that in understanding the ways of the spirit world. But it was white women that destroyed him. They didn’t understand his energy. They could reach in and tear his heart out. There was no magic against white women. Frank was helpless. They passed right through the circle.

  The last time Ursula saw Frank he was in a Drunk Tank. He called her not by Ursula, a Christian name bestowed upon her, but by a native name, which translated meant, ‘Something Good Cooking by a Fire’.

  Frank was bestowing a grace on her, releasing her. His face and nose were smashed in. He kept drawing an invisible circle around himself so the cops thought he was nuts.

  Ursula watched him through a one-way mirror before she left for the last time. She drew a circle around herself. Then she was gone. She took a bus back home in the magic of her aura, and so ended the summative history of what had been almost three years of her life.

  Frank was eventually stabbed and died in a Toronto hospital.

  She revealed the story, working a fire that Nate couldn’t start. There was a trick, the bedding of embers had to be packed with sawdust dipped in a gel paraffin, which, when she lit it, gave off a bright blue light like the star of first creation. Nate was taken by the flint of light caught in her eyes, the light licking the sheen of her cleavage and up under her chin as she turned and faced him.

  *

  By seven thirty, after a day and night of snow, Nate eased toward the outskirts of Windsor. Almost thirty-eight years had passed since he had crossed the border at Sault Ste. Marie as a desperate nineteen-year-old.

  If felt like a lifetime ago. Ursula was dead almost eight years, her radiant face still the trademark design of the organics enterprise he had sold the year after she succumbed to cancer. He had sketched her face up by Handsome Lake in the first year of their marriage.

  He didn’t go out of his way to tell those who didn’t know the story of the origin of the company logo when it might have increased the sale price of the business. Nor did he reveal his own personal story, his Vietnam history and exile that, equally, might have lowered the price. His voice had leveled, with a broadening of his vowels, so he sounded Canadian without consciously trying. He sounded like a man without a history.

  In approaching the border crossing, he could see how the divide between America and Canada had diminished in the push of global sameness, the eastern Canadian cities running along the border filled with the same big box stores – the Walmarts and Lowes and Sears and Targets – the same fast food franchises, the same car manufacturers. These Canadian cities now inhabiting just a slightly altered version of the American experience, a reprise of the American experiment overlaid with a sense of decency and socialist tendencies, though it was all becoming a oneness, so there was no real understanding of a divergent past, or it didn’t much matter anymore.

  He considered calling his only daughter. They had not talked in a great while. Against his and her mother’s wishes, she had married a Pakistani immigrant, Rahim Hafeez, who had gone on to great success with a controlling interest in a call center in Karachi, and whose view of English Imperialism was exceedingly gracious.

  Disconcertingly, Rahim had made his daughter dress according to a conservative Muslim code, while he dressed like any one of the terrorists who had hijacked and crashed the planes into the Twin Towers – in button-down shirts, Levi jeans, Nikes, and a Blue Jays baseball cap. It was a fight Nate knew best to put off for another time. Perhaps he would visit, but not just then.

  In truth, Nate’s mind was elsewhere. He had found Norman Price’s email address on a theater website. He might contact him, making polite reference that he was returning t
o Chicago.

  In fact, he knew he would contact him. It was decided in his heart, though it would be a delicate matter, how to broach the subject of Helen Price, but for now there was the advancing line of cars ahead of him, and America awaiting his return.

  5.

  JOANNE ENTERED NORMAN’S office, asking casually, ‘What are you working on?’ as she handed him a mug of coffee.

  He looked up with a determined seriousness shot through with a good-natured roll of his eyes. ‘A grand theory of relativity that will account for everything we have ever felt or experienced.’

  ‘And it’s coming along well, I trust?’

  Norman took the mug, ‘Not really...’

  Joanne smiled. ‘Well, there’s always tomorrow!’

  In so saying it, Norman understood the impasse of his life and work was of no great significance. He was arriving at the point of awareness that, if he never found greatness, it wouldn’t matter, not to the larger world, or to Joanne. It was small comfort, but true, and then Joanne was leaning on Norman’s shoulder, staring at the wavering feed of the realty site.

  Norman said preemptively, ‘It’s a house I inherited.’ He qualified the remark, ‘My parents’ house.’ He stopped. Explaining his parents’ recent deaths, which he hadn’t done, would have only revealed a deeper hurt that there were secrets yet kept from her. Then he thought better of it, and mentioned Walter and Helen by name.

  An airy quality was gone from Joanne’s voice. Taking a step back, she said flatly, ‘You’re putting it on the market or keeping it?’

  Norman hesitated. ‘There’s no liquidity in the markets now. You’ve listened to the congressional hearings.’ It wasn’t an answer.

  Joanne cleared her throat. ‘Were you ever going to bring it up?’ Her eyes glossed, her gaze moving from the screen to the white board. She looked at the stick figure of herself, along with the rendering of the Craigslist heirloom table, and at the center of the formula the stick figure of Norman (N) . Arrows connected Norman to Grace in the bathtub, to Joanne, Grace and Randolph’s departure each day for The Walk (w), his stick figure with an exponential joy quotient (j)X at their receding image.

  Joanne said, ‘Can I be honest with you?’ as if it was hard containing what she felt. Her eyes met Norman’s. ‘It’s about your work.’ Her eyes were on the board again, and then on him.

  Norman went to reach for Joanne’s hand but she pulled away. Her voice rose. ‘I went to one of your shows once with Peter. He knew all about you. We ended up seeing Latchkey Kid, and what I honestly felt while watching it was that your work lacked humanity.’

  Norman tried to breathe quietly.

  Joanne kept talking. She would not be dissuaded from discontinuing. Lines showed around her eyes. ‘The things you said about your parents... It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them, but there was no restraint. It was downright pathological.’ She turned to the board. ‘Sometimes restraint is what’s needed.’ She had begun and she would finish. This was not anger as much as truth speaking. Norman knew it.

  ‘Of course, Peter defended you. He said you were...’ She raised her fingers for the effect of quotation marks. ‘“Re-appropriating darkness, embracing a rarified pathology of male pessimism characteristic of the American theater of the forties and fifties.”’

  Norman forced a laugh. ‘You’re almost making me like Peter.’

  Joanne turned on him. ‘I bet you would like him. Peter was always generous about the failure of others.’ She did the quotation marks thing again. ‘He said something like “there is exalted genius in facing a darkness too few try to confront anymore”.’

  Joanne was staring directly at Norman. ‘Of course, he was talking about his own work as much as yours. And you know what I said to Peter when he finished with his explanation?’

  Norman didn’t risk responding.

  ‘I said, “That’s all well and good. Norman Price might be a genius, but he’s also an asshole.”’

  Norman flinched.

  In the sudden silence, Randolph appeared. He needed to go.

  Joanne went out with him, closing the door behind her so Norman heard the receding echo of her footfall on the cold tile.

  *

  In Joanne’s absence, Norman felt a trembling feeling of guilt. He understood his capacity to drive people out of his life – his parents, Kenneth, any number of men he had dated, and now Joanne. He went and faced Grace’s room and thought that whatever about adult life, about the injury one could inflict on another, Grace was different. She represented a permanence and hope. This he had against the world.

  He wanted to suddenly reclaim her, to front her at the center of his existence, and yet, in observing her, in compelling himself to love her, he felt instead what he felt most times when he looked at her, an unsettling emptiness and lack of any genuine connection.

  Guilt jumped in him like a live wire. In truth, he had come to see his relationship with Grace as akin to the sort of chasm that opened in those awful castaway plays that went nowhere – ideas and plot lines that existed at the liminal horizon of something conjured but never made quite real. The play that never formed, not so much for a lack of will, but because of a failure of the imagination to sustain the mundane, the ordinary, to buoy existence in the float of sorting through the infinite possibility of what a minute, an hour, or a day might hold, then aligning it with a guiding foreknowledge of where it might lead and eventually end.

  It struck him how he had so failed in the imaginative reach of conceiving a life with Grace, so there was no ordination of what might be accomplished or what was to come, no foresight of even the landmark moments – her first day of school, her first date, her graduation, or eventual marriage, nothing.

  Norman stared at morning light caught in the small, paned windows of Grace’s dollhouse. Within, he could see the porcelain figurines – the miniature proprietor, George Crumby, respectable banker, enjoying an eternal breakfast with wife Esther, son Harold, and daughter Polly; a proper Victorian family seated in a second-floor, wallpapered room with a white tablecloth, overhanging chandelier, and portrait of the queen on the wall.

  It was so self-contained, so real that it was easy to conjure up a life lived inside the dollhouse, this world fashioned and conceived in a time before two world wars and the collapse of the British Empire, in a time before the slow leech of civility, good manners and proper dress.

  Norman had the relevant history, the facts, the apparent mood of crusty manners, the staid voice of George Crumby – authoritatively clipped, sensible, George Crumby speaking over the rasp of a knife in the spread of butter on toast, with a measure of rebuke, reprimand or instruction. He felt he could begin right now with a play of sensibility and manners, and yet, in standing there, it fell on him, the revelation of what was far more difficult to capture – the in-between time of the great mansions and what came after George Crumby and his family – the subtle shift when a time was no longer as it had been. It took a keen insight to understand that what was felt was not the thing itself, but its after-effect. Though, somewhere in the in-between of in-betweens, he felt that an understanding could sometimes register – and just barely – if one had the acuity to feel it. This is where greatness lay.

  In looking in at George Crumby, in seeing the small black umbrella stand, Norman was reminded of the depth of Lennon and McCartney’s lament for the passing of an older England; their transformation from clean cut pop stars to the strung-out, long-haired gurus of an Eastern mysticism. How had they navigated from the perfunctory vacuity of ‘She Loves You Yeah Yeah Yeah’, ‘It’s Been a Hard Day’s Night’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, to the melancholic dirge of childhood memories of standing in the English rain? And so, too, capturing the inexplicable litany of those most English of moments in ‘Penny Lane’ where a pretty nurse sold poppies from a tray, to the dirge of ‘Eleanor Rigby’ in the church where a wedding had been, all of it a slurred past seen through a yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog’s ey
e.

  Norman recalled a naked John and Yoko in the bed-in protests in a world come undone by Vietnam, John and Yoko a contrite Adam and Eve reckoning with the grim reality of what the snake had so offered in the Garden of Eden.

  Norman looked away, felt a shudder run through him. He opened his phone, scrolled through some photos. He settled on a shot of Grace. Both her hands were earnestly fixed on the steering wheel of a miniature ice-cream truck.

  He scrolled to another image of her. How strange to mark time against physical change in the way a child grows with the passage of weeks and months. He could see with the distance of three years how exotically Oriental she had looked upon arrival, her large doll face, her body so shockingly tiny.

  Grace had suffered apparent malnutrition, or that was the determination of a doctor who had cautioned that, most probably, her adult teeth, when they came in, would need dental work. She was missing an enamel coating on her baby teeth. It was advised she not eat processed sugars. Her bones, too, had been deprived of calcium. She was suffering rickets. There were things that happened during her lack of prenatal care that might yet manifest. Norman learned all this stateside.

  Norman navigated to an image of the orphanage in the southern region of the Guangxi province, a province, until then, unknown to him and not disclosed before he left America. There had been that much secrecy in the adoption.

  The house warden was a small, withered peasant dressed in Maoist style standing outside a dilapidated government building that had served as a place for indoctrination during the Cultural Revolution. Against the dark background, he could see a constellation of lights, the eyes of the children caught in the camera flash.

  *

  When Joanne came back inside, she announced, ‘I can give a month’s notice if you like.’

  Norman rallied. ‘I just checked. There’s no law against practicing literary criticism without a license.’