Away From Everywhere (19 page)

In those weeks before his diagnosis with depersonalization disorder, a rabid fear of schizophrenia sometimes kept him up at night. It made his mind wander as he lay in bed; that noise outside the window,
maybe
it wasn't really there. Maybe he was crazy for wondering what the noise was, for picturing scenarios in his head. Was it a tree branch? A person? Any man's mind can wander like that at night, he knew that, but he also knew that a schizophrenic's mind can wander so far it gets lost. That fear of schizophrenia was the last thing his father had left behind for his sons.

He got home that day and started to read the pamphlet.
At its worst, on the bad days, DPD sufferers can feel detached from themselves. Most sufferers describe the feeling of detachment as not feeling emotionally reactive to what is happening to them, or not feeling present in their body, as if they are watching their life as a movie, and yet they can carry out all their daily work and social responsibilities just fine…
By the end of the first paragraph, he'd crumpled it up and thrown it away.

…typically caused by childhood traumas, witnessing something traumatic, or…
The words, the causes, it all made him feel weak, pathetic, and he didn't want to know what it all meant, or how long it would last, or why Alex never had all these problems.

IN NEW SKIN

August 22nd, 2008,
In the garden, desperately in need of fresh air.

The danger of being human is our ability to justify our actions.

It's been happening for a while now. We started exchanging looks a long time ago, biting into each other's souls with hungry eyes. Not even lewd glances, just a desperate but denied gaze. Wanting the new beginning. The escape, from the world before now.

On some nights, those eyes feel more like invisible hands, a soft embrace. A physical manifestation of hope, of how it could be, sort of massaging me into a weak state, a lapse of judgment, so that I might lay my body beside his.

And then we moved on from there, having to satisfy the body's need for contact, for touch, the one sense we cannot, literally cannot, live without.

Or deny.

We started finding reasons to brush past each other, to touch
each other. Even if I've seen it a dozen times before, I'll say “nice shirt,” and rub his shoulders a little, pretending to examine the material, but more truthfully rubbing his shoulders in a way to let him know that I am good with my hands. I deflate when he touches me. I slip out of my skin. He seems to tense up. I like to think of it as him being struck stiff, erect and aroused. But sometimes he'll almost haul away, like he can't take it.

Today was too much.

Owen was particularly “alive” today, as he says, and he was tangling himself up in the monkey bars with the girls, and dizzying himself by spinning them around and around on the merry-go-round, charged on by their laughter. So I couldn't just sit there on the bench reading like I usually do. Watching them all laughing like that, I wanted in on the fun. They all headed over to a red plastic tunnel connecting a set of monkey bars to the slide. “C'mon, Mommy, come get in the tunnel with me and Callie and Uncle Owen, pleeeease!”

She didn't have to beg. The four of us ended up in the tiny tunnel. It was hardly big enough for four kids, let alone two kids and two adults. It was claustrophobic, we were almost stuck in there, but the girls loved it. They pretended we were all trapped, and made Owen and me pretend as well.
They shimmied and squirmed until me and Owen were lewdly squat together. Sandwiched in a way that went my leg – Owen's leg – my leg – Owen's leg. He was in cloth shorts, and I was in a thin, loose summer dress; we could barely feel the clothes between us. They had me pressed down on him so hard that my breasts were pancaked on his throat, and we were more or less hugging each other, my palms flat against the bottom of the plastic tunnel. My lips closer to his lips than they've ever been, and some primal magnetism drawing them closer and closer until I felt his warm breath jacket my lips. I got close enough that our noses touched. And untouched, and
touched again. We both pretended not to notice. I could feel him, IT, against my inner thighs, and we pretended not to notice. As Callie and Lucia jostled around, swinging their arms, telling their animated stories about how we were trapped in a submarine, they rocked and squirmed to simulate a sinking ship. Their movements had me rubbing it with my thigh, and I caught myself adding a more sensual motion to how they had me rocking against him. And that's when I yelled at my daughters to stop what they were doing and get out of the tunnel. Even Owen jolted at the tone of my voice, though he looked relieved. Relieved and something akin to embarrassed.

That was the first time I've ever unjustifiably yelled at my daughters. We all crawled out of the tunnel and Callie's lips were trembling. She was hurt, but too frightened and taken off guard to know it yet. Lucia stood behind Owen, pouty and baffled. Owen pretended to comfort her so he wouldn't have to look up at me.

“You were hurting Mommy's neck and elbows was all. I'm very sorry I yelled, I was hurting and I panicked. Mommy is sorry, okay?”

Maybe it was the first time I lied to them as well? My neck was just fine, slung down over Owen like that. I liked my hair on his face. I liked it too much. If today wasn't a line crossed, I don't know what will be. If my daughters weren't there I would have kissed him. Kissed him in a way that said I loved him, and kissed him in a way that would have led to sex.

And now we're almost avoiding each other, as if that
was
sex we'd just had. And despite the clothes that lay between us, it was just as thrilling as sex. The erotic gnaw of
not
touching each other. The way he was breathing, how his inhales would lift my body. I rose and fell against him, slowly, soothingly.

Now I just feel dirty. Alex will be home soon. The three of us will sit around a table, small talk and pork souvlaki. At no point tonight will I feel as alive as I did in that tunnel today.
And at no point tonight will I rid this guilt. It's in my pores now, too deep to scrub out or ignore. I fear I wear it like a dress everyone can see.

It's all changing the way I look at my children too, my daughters. Less confidently, like I am denying them a secure parental unit and lying to them somehow. Denying them something different from, but equal to, safety: the only definite motherly duty. And I am, or some part of me is, the sole cause of what I am doing wrong to them. A part of me that has nothing to do with being a mother, but everything to do with being a woman, yet I can't separate the two without literally tearing myself in half.

Falling in love is so easy, so natural, so romantic. Falling out of love is so painful, so hard, so sharp that it cuts into you with every breath. I feel trapped in my life before now. Fenced in by it. Caged in. Denying myself something the world is offering, quite readily, and won't stop until I take it.

FATE AND MISFORTUNE

SINCE THE DAY HE SCRIBBLED that poem at his mother's grave, Owen took to sitting and writing at her headstone for the rest of the winter. When spring came, the snow began to melt and made a wet, muddy mess of the place he once sat. So he bought a collapsible camping chair and brought it along with him. He knew it was an odd or even morbid setting to write in, but sitting under the shelter of the city's tallest birch tree was serene, and the isolation made him productive. The fresh air was stimulating and the sunlight that filtered through the evergreens was calming. It all kept him focussed. The only sound was the distant hum of traffic, the soothing hiss from the taps and hoses the cemetery left running for people who wanted to fill planters and flower pots on gravestones. There was also an occasional fluttering of finches and dark-eyed juncos in the trees above him. The birds got used to his presence within a few minutes of his arrival every day. If he didn't finish a granola bar, he'd fling it to the birds. He tore the crust off his sandwiches for them.

It was quiet in the cemetery. It was loud in his apartment and he hated it there. Everywhere else he could go felt like hassling reminders of feeling lost in life. On rainy days, he'd sneak into the university library, but the busy footsteps of all those students around him made him feel like he should be heading off to a class himself. And he'd grown sick of working around the visiting hours at theWaterford, only to sit and stare at that shell of a man who used to contain his father.

At his mother's grave though, the world felt a little farther away and life hassled him less. If someone did come around, they didn't bother him, because people keep to themselves in a cemetery; the most they'd burden him with was a hardy nod of the head. Nothing existed except the story he was writing.

Some days there would be funerals. On one miserably foggy spring day, the mournful sounds of sobbing and one woman's guttaral cries of goodbye caught his attention, and he tuned into the Brooke family's funeral. Some people seemed so devastated, one woman bent at the waist to let out gut-wrenching howls. Others seemed merely obligated to be there, standing tall and biting their fingernails or blankly watching traffic. Some held each other, and others held themselves. Some were dressed in well-fitted suits; the teenagers wore the best outfits they could throw together: black jeans and a borrowed dress shirt two sizes too big. When they lifted their arms, it looked like they were budding wings.

It was the beloved grandfather/father/brother/husband Thomas Brooke who'd passed away. From the family's reaction, from each of their individual reactions, Owen spontaneously started to create a fictional life story for Thomas Brooke. With the exception of the wife, there wasn't much crying, so he assumed it was a long drawn-out death, cancer maybe, since no one had that loud shrieking cry that meant someone has been taken too soon, too unexpectedly. But by the words shared, by how long people lingered, by the quote Owen read on his headstone after the family left, he could tellThomas was loved. He could tellThomas was loved by the way no one knew what to do with their hands when they spoke to each other. Thomas seemed like the glue that held the family together. It was definitely his house where they all got together at Christmas. He was definitely the man who fell asleep in the chair at the hospital waiting for each and every one of those grandchildren to be born, so he could be the first to see them. But there was one girl, mid-twenties: why did she stay back, listless and biting her nails? That's where the story lay, why this girl was the foreigner in the family.

Owen took it from there. He had his laptop with him and wrote the story of what the grandfather did for that girl that no one else in the family could know about. How it was so profound, so selfless and inconceivable, that it meant she died when he did. That she was in that grave with him.

The story he wrote, “Thicker Than Blood,”won Owen the recognition he'd been waiting for and opened the door to a modest career in writing. People called to congratulate him on the good news, people who once considered writing a juvenile waste of time and awkwardly changed the subject whenever he talked about his writing.

The story earned him five thousand dollars, but more importantly, a contract to write a novella for a literary magazine called
Tether
. It was a thick magazine released quarterly, and they wanted to divide the story into four instalments and drag it out over the year. Overall, he got the initial five thousand for the short story, and another twenty thousand for the novella, which he agreed not to publish elsewhere.

He gave them
The World Before Now
, a forty-thousand-word manuscript he'd written years earlier. Something that had been rejected by seven publishers. The editors at the journal loved it though, and marketed Owen as “a grittier James Salter.”A reviewer in a national newspaper had written:
Collins has written a story that will reach its hands into you and pluck the heart clean out of your chest. He has written it so magically
you'll feel that pain and love him for it.

The money meant he could finally get a more comfortable apartment, and budgeting his spending to a thousand dollars a month allowed him to take the next two years off to write a novel. Start from scratch. Begin again.

He moved into a quiet, clean, two-bedroom apartment on Gower Street, five-fifty a month, heat and light included. That left him with four hundred and fifty dollars a month for food and alcohol,
to fuel the writing
. He used one bedroom as an office, and loved the old fireplace in there, the exposed brick along the entire wall.

Above the toilet in the bathroom, there was what looked like a door to an attic. Within two weeks he had to satisfy his curiosity and open the latch. He dragged a chair into the bathroom, climbed it like a ladder, opened the door, and braced himself for a hailstorm of insulation and mouse droppings. But it wasn't an attic. The latch opened to the roof: a black sky, some stars, barely shining behind black clouds, and the glow of the moon spilling across it all from the left. He crawled up and took wary footsteps, afraid the roof would cave in and swallow him whole.

A previous tenant had built a make-shift patio up there, with a table and two wooden lawn chairs, all painted blood red. It became his new writing nook, and all September long he watched huge cruise ships squeeze into the harbour through two walls of rock locally dubbed The Narrows. Every time a cruise ship left the harbour,Owen thought of all the places he could've gone, of all the different people he could've been. Each alter ego budding a new story to write.

When he was younger, but old enough to have conversations with his father, Roger had made him promise that the two of them would take an Alaskan cruise on his fiftieth birthday. His father was always fascinated by the North, by snow and icebergs, how they could
stop us invincible humans dead in our tracks.
The sheer age and immovable nature of glaciers and icebergs, he said, reminded him of
how short-lived and insignificant we humans are in the grand scale of things.