Night in the World, page 10
The first column he wrote about fluoridation for the Post was also his first to meet rebuke. His editor called it a “loony-magnet issue” and ran the piece only after Oliver had placed the fluoride discussion in the context of other water purity concerns. When his editor went on vacation, though, Oliver slipped through a profile of several local anti-fluoridation activists whom he’d interviewed and come to respect. One was a university professor, who wearily explained that fluoride was a money-making scheme foisted on a misled public and dimwittedly supported by corrupt, bullying dental “experts.” Emails and letters poured in from dentists; readers called him a conspiracy theorist. His editor hit the roof — and that was his last appearance in the Post.
His career would have recovered. But the fighter in him had been ignited, and he didn’t know when to back down. He was an Islander; he’d come into the world surrounded by water, listening to water, and it pulled on him like blood. Water connects, and he was starting to see how other connections — between industry, science, government and health education — had led to serious abuse. His old “Eco-Spotlight” column embarrassed him.
He pitched alternative presses. Some of his fluoridation articles were picked up, but most editors said it wasn’t what they were looking for. Friends and colleagues tried to caution him. Connie, a journalist also, grew uncomfortable with the newly politicized, increasingly bitter and underemployed Oliver. Only later did he recognize that her reaction came mostly from concern. At the time he resented her and the rest of his colleagues for “playing it safe.” He didn’t understand how necessary a good reputation is, and how fragile.
“You’re not listening,” he remembers her saying, over and over.
I don’t believe in you, he heard.
He no longer wanted to attend the latest launch of somebody’s book about recovering from drug addiction or being a lesbian parent. Connie went to all the launches. She was liked. She supported others, felt happy for their success. “You should think about your friends,” she said once, when he caught her at the door, dressed and perfumed, and snarled a complaint at another night’s absence. “Where’d they go?”
Then their split, his move to the east side.
He learned a lesson then.
Yes, he’d been wrong to approach such a touchy subject full-on. He’d gotten obsessed. Fluoride, after all, was just one issue among the many affecting water. If he could write about all of them — like his ex-editor suggested — then he’d stay safely away from the fringe zone and reach a receptive audience. This was the most important thing.
In that period of adjustment, he conceived of the book he’d write: the definitive exposé on water quality in Ontario. He’d already done much of the research. It would be his comeback.
For many painful months, he gnawed on that ambition. He joined the gym, where Foroud didn’t employ a right-hand man yet, and for money did odd gigs, writing commercial newsletters, editing a journal. Justin had withdrawn from his life long before that, or one of them had; he had a baby daughter by then. All Oliver’s energy went into his book. During that year following his move, its structure began to emerge. Surprisingly, the story was personal: the first chapter was about the island. With growing excitement, he started to see how he could craft the story to move people — for everyone recognizes the beauty of water. Once that opening chapter was drafted to his satisfaction, he emailed it with an outline and proposal to several publishers. He applied for and received a small grant.
He was still bitter, though. Life was lonely and tough, and he hid his hardships from everyone, smiling when his mother asked how things were going and talking about “the book” to assure her his career was back on track.
Connie visited now and then, probably to reassure herself that he was still alive. She’d started seeing someone, and though she didn’t say so, it was obvious that this new relationship was getting serious. He could feel it in the atmospheric change between them: a sense of final remove, of orbits disentangled. They were friends.
One day she brought astrology charts and a book with the word “evolution” in its title. Late in their relationship she’d started studying astrology — an appalling move that helped shore up his belief that they didn’t think alike, she was not the woman for him, and so on. She sat him down, laid out her charts on a box he’d still not unpacked.
I’ve been looking at your transits.
The Uranus opposition, that’s what she’d diagnosed: when a person approaches forty, the slow-moving planet Uranus comes opposite one’s natal Sun position, an event that acts as a mid-life planetary kick in the ass. Truly it was a watershed time, she cooed, an opportunity to shed his skin. The universe would guide him well, if only he could stop feeling so victimized —
He all but threw her out. Didn’t speak to her again for months.
The accident happened not five minutes from home. An early spring morning, clear and cold. The roads were dry, but as he rode his bicycle under a bridge into its shadow, he hit black ice. A car following hit it too. They slid together in the lane, a slow-motion ice duet: car spinning, bike skating, like a planet dancing with its moon. His foot caught a bumper and he slammed into the concrete pier.
Uranus: lightning planet, planet of surprises. He woke in the hospital, unable to turn over unassisted due to an agonizing, knife-like pain in his back: a ruptured disk, from which he’s still not fully healed, seven years on. Months of physio and frailty frightened him to his roots. Typing: twenty minutes at a time, at most, lying on the floor. Walking: like an old man. Having buses pull away on him because he couldn’t hurry to the stop.
On the balcony, Oliver downs the last of his beer. Seven years in the shadow of that loss. The work on his book ground to a stop. Even after he grew stronger again, even when one of the publishers he’d contacted expressed interest, he found he just couldn’t continue. Day-to-day living took everything he had.
Without giving himself time to think he lifts the recycling bin from its corner and heads inside and opens the filing cabinet’s lowest drawer. Thick file folders. Whenever he’s contemplated doing this it seemed too radical, like home tooth extraction; now it feels right, inevitable. He can almost feel the relief of the hanging file folders, emptied of their bulk.
Cleared. Ventilated.
This too is dead. Time to bury it.
He picks up the first folder and slips out its contents, intending to toss it in. Already his mind’s conjuring a fire somewhere. But a sentence catches his eye:
I grew up on a little island.
It’s the first chapter, which he barely remembers writing.
Its ponds, channels, and white sand shores were my home. I could wander its woods and meadows and swim its lagoons without fear. I learned a kind of trust that everyone should. I was lucky . . .
Was this really him?
Pushing the bin aside, Oliver sits on the floor to read.
• THE LAKE •
9
RICE LAKE, ONE A.M. Darkness hides the lake, where three days of February rain broke the ice and wore it away. Darkness hides the woods, and the Mound, and her.
The Mound hides bones.
The lake hides an old bridge.
The woods hide the future generations. Hundreds of them.
The moths of the future aren’t formed yet. Last summer and fall, they were caterpillars. They lived to stuff themselves with food. One by one as the air began to cool, each caterpillar stopped eating, spun its own shroud, and sealed itself in. And then, in this self-made abyss, it consumed itself. Enzymes dissolved organs, tissues, flesh; it lost all shape, even identity. It became presence without form — like darkness itself.
It kept one thing: an intention.
While the cold lasts it endures, living without breath, awaiting its moment.
* * *
A LOW RHYTHMIC TRILL breaks the silence. Two repeats, a pause, then three more calls: a screech owl in the oak stand down the hill. Gabe listens, but the owl is quiet now.
She’s been sitting atop the Mound for hours, should get home and to bed — yet what a night! The wind is from the south, steady and dry and smelling of thawed ground. It’s so warm she’s left her winter coat open. Walking here carefully in the dark, she felt her boots sink into the ground a little with each step. Earlier today in a sunny courtyard on campus, she spotted the first snowbells, their heads bent like supplicants or half-asleep dreamers emerging from the soil.
After months of winter this soft night beckoned her here, yet it’s unnerving too. February’s not spring; if the weather trend persists, it could summon the moths and other insects to hatch too soon.
The owl hoots again: a set of three, always the same pattern. The world is made of such patterns, and people — modern people, at least — are just beginning to appreciate this. Centuries of determined movement toward casting the light of reason upon everything, mapping and naming and explaining all, have reached a place of shadow: a realization that the patterns are bigger, denser, wilder than imagined; that reason is but a headlamp; that we have seen through a glass, darkly. At the same time, Earth systems and patterns are changing. Weather, species — all are in flux, on the move. The culture of the light has left wounds, poison, destruction. Great actions are needed; that is clear. How to change and how to mend are not.
Lately she’s thrown herself into the stream of guest lectures, seminars and events on offer at the university and other venues in the city, trying to learn as much as possible before her fieldwork begins. She’s getting to know some of the other students, particularly her fellow TAS for BIO 150, and they’ve become a little team, informing each other about upcoming talks, attending and discussing them in the grad lounge afterwards or over beer. Habitat conservation, resource management, infectious diseases, invasive species, genomic diversity, evolutionary biology — in every single area, they hear, the problems today are critical, urgent.
It’s hard to take in these changes. She wonders if those not rooted in an Indigenous culture truly can. And how do you live with emergency ringing in your heart and head, so that even moments of joy and beauty — like this night — are always tinged with apprehension? She’s coming to appreciate the comforting structure that science provides: every study follows the same steps, abstract, literature review, materials and methods, et cetera. Tidy. Ordered. The skills-building sessions she’s attended have helped her adopt the right language and style, while this immersion in research and the academic milieu teaches a way of thinking and approaching the vast realms of scientific study so such work becomes tenable. Her first couple of assignments have been returned with respectable grades. She feels encouraged.
And also?
Off track.
In all this activity, the reams of studies, books, talks, labs, and classes, in the dedication of energy, resources, passion — certainly there with profs and students alike — there seems to be something crucial missing. It goads at her; she can’t put her finger on it and wonders if it’s simply that she came to this work late, got set in lazy ways out east? Maybe it’s going to take more time and effort for her to adapt. She hopes getting into the fieldwork will help.
With a sigh, she sets aside these thoughts and stretches her legs. The screech owl seems to have departed. In the south there’s a moon glow behind thinning clouds. As the light strengthens, a serpentine shape appears on the shore. The snow’s all but melted in the park, but a ribbon has lingered along the beach, snaking the waterline sand like a ghostly companion to the Mound on which she sits. She wonders if ancient peoples here once saw the same phenomenon: Snow Serpent, lake’s guardian.
When she stands she bows toward the image, brings her hands together in thanks to the Mound builders for creating this place, for their love. Flicks on her flashlight then decides it’s not necessary. She heads back the most direct way, by the disused road.
The streets of Peterborough are utterly vacant at this hour. She pulls up at the family home, thinking briefly about her parents, living in a condo complex for retirees in Victoria, BC. They flew here at Christmas, which had a special warmth this year with Gabe “living at home” again, and she could tell they were both excited for her, proud she’d taken this step. Jenn and her brother-in-law also, despite their teasing about Gabe’s track record and the fact that she and her eldest nephew are in university at the same time. Hard to believe that she is this old and feels so young and unformed, while Jenn’s children are already leaving the nest.
Downstairs she turns on the little salt lamp by the bed, cracks open the window, undresses and snuggles under the duvet. The moth tree she created has grown, its branches now outspread to touch two other walls. All these photos she took herself over the years. During the day she reads black marks on screen or page, left to right, top to bottom, but in the living world there’s no such thing as one direction — even this “tree” is more like a web. There are only patterns, of shape, colour, and design . . . The eyes of an owl appear on the wings of the Polyphemus; the Snowberry Clearwing resembles a bumblebee. Which came first? And what sets the patterns? The patterns seem to be what nature creates and how it creates, a musician riffing on structures and phrases.
That’s about as much as she understands tonight.
• THE RIVER •
10
THE STYLIST IS SHORT AND STURDY, a bulldog-type with tat-covered arms and grey, spiritual eyes. He circles the chair, lifting Justin’s hair and letting it fall.
“Can you make it look cool, and a bit different, without it looking like I’m trying to be twenty-five?”
The stylist runs the hair through his fingers and rubs it like he’s testing cloth. Justin has never felt his hair being so tenderly appraised. “Absolutely,” the man says. “You’ve got a lot to work with.”
The cut takes an hour. A girl (young woman, Justin mentally self-corrects) who has a ruby-coloured brush cut brings him a double espresso from the place next door. She’s friendly. Everyone’s friendly. He savours his drink like the caffeine hit’s enough. In the future, it will be enough.
It’s been a wretched few weeks.
He hit bottom that day after the after-hours party at Leverage. That woman. Women. Maybe “bottom” isn’t the right word, though. He should be wary of dismissive judgement, which brings guilt and repressive weirdness. On that side lie Mommy Suits and Daddy Suits and the security-crazy anxiety cinching up his life — and Naomi’s, and frankly everyone’s, as far as he can tell. The whole world seems to be spiraling into that trap.
Still, that night was a mode or a road he doesn’t want to travel again. He’s fighting back. There’s been no more illicit sex and no more nights with Kurt. He has not, in fact, seen Kurt at all because he’s barely gone into Ace. He’s too afraid.
With darting snips, the stylist deftly tailors the cut to Justin’s head. The effect is pleasing: the shaggy dog look has gone and he really does look cooler, “a bit different.” He feels like he’s been seen.
It’s just a haircut, but he has to start somewhere.
After paying and tipping he slides on his Ray-Bans and steps outside. It’s a bright day and cold again. Nonetheless, he’s starting to sweat.
Medical accounts of crystal meth that he’s read online explain the drug’s effects in chemical terms: dopamine and the psychological-reward system. The analyses cite studies based on lab rats and mice. In their language, a user’s brain is like software being overwritten by crystal’s new code.
These are uncertain analogies, Justin thinks, popping two chiclets in his mouth while he waits for the light. Talking about the mind like it’s a program, testing on rodents and applying the results to people. Being neither mouse nor machine, he’s skeptical. A rodent’s wants are unique to itself, while a computer has none.
In the car, hands trembling with the keys.
It’s been exactly seven days since he last did crystal, and the strength and persistence of the cravings alarm him. By the time he drives to Gwynn’s school and parks in the smoldering vehicle queue, the calm and safety he felt at the salon are gone. He eats sour chews from a bag, joggling his leg. Women pass on the sidewalk, speaking in tight, high-pitched mommy voices to children. The women sound like children. He finds himself staring, then fearful of staring. Did he break the three-second rule?
The passenger door whooshes open and he starts. He’s expecting women with claws, men in uniform, the screeching demons of his dreams.
Gwynn climbs in and buckles up.
“How’s my Bunny Bear?”
“Okay,” she says.
He waits to give her space to say more, but she doesn’t. She’s in a mood, it seems. Well, he can’t blame her, all day in that place.
He starts to drive. Traffic. Cyclists. Scratchy-scratchy cravings. He’s fighting back. But he needs more strategy. Today the haircut filled the midday danger time, yet he’s no better than —
“Dad!”
“What?” He hits the brakes. The car behind stops and honks. “Piss off,” he mutters, glaring at the driver in the rear-view, then at Gwynn.
“What are you yelling about?”
“Nothing.”
He makes the turn into their street carefully. Takes a deep breath.
“Just . . . your lips were moving.”
“Ah. I see. Well, I was just thinking things over, Pumpkin. I hear you talking to yourself in your room all the time.”
“But you shouldn’t do it outside.”
Justin nods. His daughter’s head’s getting filled with junk values. But that’s okay — that’s where he can help.
