Wonderland (76 page)

The White Angel of Death.

Guess how we got here to Yonge Street, guess how we got across the border! ! !

In Toronto people seem multiplied because it is a strange country, or I am very tired now. It is April and getting warm. I see people here I knew back home, I think, only they are different people, but they look the same. Why is that? Are there only a certain number of faces to go around in the world, and they get used again and again? Father, you should see Noel’s face when he is angry. He has everything in him. His head dominates us like the sun. He told me not to write to you any longer, that’s why I didn’t write for so long, he thinks you are gaining strength from us because we are sick. Noel has been gone for three days, I don’t know where. I don’t care how long he stays away. When he is gone I don’t get hungry & don’t think about anything. No problem about me when he is gone because I can only remember myself when he is with me. By myself I just stare at the wall & want for nothing.

You wouldn’t know me if you came here now. My face is not the same now. I am free of you. I don’t remember you except in flashes, when things go bad in my head.

I am the Angel of Death here—fell off a ledge but didn’t get hurt. No blood. There is no blood in me now. I saw the street coming & gave in to it, I let myself go, there is no resistance between matter and spirit if you can dominate. Noel taught me that.

They cried over me, even Noel. The White Angel of Death. But I didn’t die. Woke up again. I thought you would come to me & bring me home, I tried to get away, on the street, but Noel told me
no, no
, to lie down & rest.
You are my angel
, says Noel,
don’t be so afraid
. He rubs his forehead against mine & our tears come together. We were born with the same fear in us, that you would eat us up.

Noel won’t talk about his father but I see him: see the shadow of him, the shape of him, in the back of Noel’s head.

I am the White Angel of Death and I cannot be killed now, even by you.

Someone in our family here was killed. Randall, “the Dimpled Soldier.” Did I tell you about him. Deserted from Iowa but the draft dodgers up here snubbed him. They are so loud, always so angry. Anger is no good. Randall kicked all over & his hand knocked a window out by mistake, & the surprise of it killed him. Nobody’s fault. There is a broom on the landing somebody left. Roaches behind it. The glass flew all over. I started crying, to have to lie down in the glass, but Noel gripped me by the back of the neck & said
Pray for us! Help us!
Randall was high so long his heart gave out. You could see the edges of his mouth, bright red blood, & blood coming out of his nose & ears. St. John who moved in with us started to cry. We all got down on our knees. Out on the landing is the broom somebody left but I couldn’t get it to sweep the glass up. Too tired. Noel has been gone three days but St. John is here. Out on the street you are multiplied, Father, a thousand times. I can’t go out there because of you. They dragged Randall downstairs saying he was still alive, but I knew better, to take him over to the hospital, but in the street some police were coming so they left him. In the Hacienda doorway, but it was nobody’s fault that he died. Noel is mad at somebody at the Hacienda. It was nobody’s fault that Randall died. I swear that.

Love,
Shelley

What are you going to do to her?

Bring her home
.

How?

Bring her home
.

Yes, but how? How will you bring her home?

He drove from Chicago to Detroit, thinking of his last conversation with his wife—her expression of caution, disbelief, fear—the way she kept staring at him.
Yes, but how?

He would do it. He would bring Shelley home.

Though for the last several months he had been strangely lethargic, almost exhausted, though he had withdrawn to administrative work in the running of the hospital, feeling too shaky and too tired to work with patients, he now felt energetic, even youthful. He felt that nothing could stop him. He would drive to Toronto and find his daughter and bring her back home.

She wants me to find her
, he told his wife.

Helene had pressed her hands against her face. What was she thinking? Seeing?
Better to think of her as dead
, Helene had said wearily.

But Jesse drove from Chicago to Detroit, rested half an hour in Detroit, and then, inspired by an energy he had not felt in years, drove through the tunnel that connected the United States and Canada. He was stopped at Customs.
Citizen of what country? What are you taking into Canada?
He had only one small leather suitcase and his leather bag; a letter from a professor at the McGill Medical School; and the pistol he had bought years ago, which he wore in his coat pocket, inside, so that he could feel it against the side of his chest. The Canadian customs official leaned in the window of his car, which was a black Cadillac with tinted windows, and glanced respectfully into the back seat.

“You have nothing to declare?” he asked.

Jesse felt no apprehension at all. “No,” he said.

The official waved him on through.

So he crossed the border into Canada without any trouble. That was good luck. He had always had good luck.

He got to Toronto in the early evening, his eyes a little seared by all the driving and by the acrid air, which had a faint yellowish cast to it; but he was calm, calmed by the very weight of his expensive, respectable car. Shelley’s half-dozen letters now lay opened on the seat beside him and when he had to stop for a street light he glanced at them, his eyes skimming the familiar lines. He could hear her voice inside those letters, calling him. She was certainly calling him.
Guess how we got here to Yonge Street
.… That letter had come only the day before; she was certainly calling him to her.

It was an evening in early April. Jesse could smell the coolness of the wind that blew from the lake, and he imagined that this city was more northerly, more pure, than the cities he had known in the United States. But it looked like an American city: the crowded streets, the
neon lights, the blocked-off right-hand lanes, the trucks, buses, people crossing against traffic lights, and, when he finally got to Yonge Street itself, the confusion of colors and costumes—young people wearing blankets draped around them, fringed gowns, girls who might have been his daughter sitting with their backs against buildings, staring out into the street, their faces blank and pale and used up, yet expectant, as if waiting for Jesse himself. Waiting for something.

All these crowds perplexed him. Had he come so far only to lose her again in another crowd? His energy subsided a little. What good did it do, he wondered sadly, a life dedicated to explaining, to making an order of confusion—to testing, analyzing, diagnosing, correcting, curing?—what good did it do out on the street like this, bucking the crowds and the traffic, anxious only for fresh air? His life, his very self: it would mean nothing to these people. They were wandering, yearning. Like a tribe of baffled, nomadic strangers, a human avalanche flowing opaquely through the downtown streets, as if searching for some larger crowd, a vast sweet crowd, a gigantic consciousness that would take them in.…

He decided against checking into a hotel. No time. It seemed important to find her before another night passed.
Anything could happen at night
. He parked his car in a lot and went to Yonge Street and stared at the crowds. So this was Yonge Street? The center of the city? The center of the world for him, for Shelley? The world had subsided to this street. He would walk in one direction, that was how he would begin.… He walked along quickly, a tall man, dressed in a dark coat of very light material, noticing that his reflection in the jumble of store windows moved along much too fast, almost darted along. He was one of the few people on the street who hurried. Someone approached him: a boy with long curly hair, on crutches, who whined something about needing a dollar. The boy smelled of stale, unwashed flesh. Jesse shook his head sternly, no, get away, leave me alone, and walked past the boy. But he realized that he must look like a stranger, a foreigner, dressed in these clothes. It was obvious that he did not belong in this part of the city.

As he walked he took off his tie and stuffed it in his pocket. And now the coat, which was too warm anyway; he carried it over his arm. Did he look less suspicious? In the bleary, glazed eyes of the young people who passed him he guessed he must still not look right. He was too old.

So this was Yonge Street!

He walked headlong into odors of food, fumes, currents that were stale and intimate and welcoming. An open-air fruit market: a whiff of the tropics. A meat market with objects dangling inside, plucked and withered, headless. Scrawny little wings. The odor of blood and sawdust. And all the restaurants—the pizza diners, the coffee shops, the hamburger joints that were no more than single counters. Jesse peered into these places, hesitating. The street was noisy with music from competing record stores. Blaring loudspeakers. Jesse had the idea, from all the noise, that no one could truly hear anyone else or even see anyone else, that the din and the jostling crowds would have confused even a spectator who was looking out of the windows of one of the high buildings, waiting for Jesse.

Crossing the street toward him when the light changed, a group of people broke into individuals: but they seemed harder that way, more abrasive, threatening. At a distance the crowds were fluid and gentle, despite their noise. He felt his energy returning, the sensation of certainty—he alone of all these people knew exactly what he wanted,
exactly what he wanted
. The others milled about helplessly. The motion of the crowds was somehow rhythmic, breathing with the music from the loudspeakers. Anxious to miss nothing, Jesse stared into the faces that passed near him; he felt a sudden perplexed pain between his eyes.
Will you know her after so long?
his wife had wept. But he kept walking. He stared into the crowds of people and was unable to find any center, any single place to look. That was the problem: maybe the young people themselves felt it, these baffling sexless creatures with their long trousered legs and frizzy hair and laconic, pleasant faces passing him effortlessly, as if in a dream, having no center to them, no core, no place to get to. Jesse felt that if he put his hand out to touch one of these people he would touch nothing, his hand would grope hopelessly in the air.…

This was Toronto: a city in a foreign country. But it seemed like any other city. From time to time he caught sight of men like himself—men with suits and ties, yes, conventional costumes; there were couples, prosperous tourists with cameras, even a young sailor who reminded him suddenly, painfully, of his cousin Fritz … though he had not seen or thought of Fritz for decades.… It did look like an American city after all. The faces of Chicago and of New York. The
same surging flow of fragments, the same conversations half-overheard; maybe even another Jesse here somewhere, hidden by the crowd, on the other side of the street, hunting … a perspiring, overweight Jesse, hurrying to keep up with this lean, anxious Jesse?… a scrawny, frightened young Jesse, hurrying along in this confusing tide?

Jesse tried to make out the horizon, but it was obscured by tall buildings that were in turn obscured by a haze of unwholesome, golden light. Was there, in that shadow-ridden heaven, another form of Jesse too, watching him, yearning to draw up to him Jesse’s hollow, radiant, yearning self? Yearning to purify himself at last, after so many years?

He collided with a fat boy coming out of a coffee shop. No, a fat girl—monstrous, in bell-bottomed white trousers. She grinned at him and he muttered an apology, feeling his face go red. Had bumped into her, a stranger. Had touched her flesh. After another block of this he felt he must sit down; he went into a bar and sat at an empty table. His chair had one uneven leg. Around him people were already gathered, though it was early evening, girls and boys, their legs moving constantly, their voices lifting like shrieks of music.… He ordered a glass of beer. A young girl with an icy, brilliant face passed near him and stooped, as if to peer into his face. She stared rudely. She was wearing a costume that looked like a curtain, many layers of white lace wound around her, a kind of shroud.
The White Angel of Death
. Jesse smiled coolly at her and turned away. Alcohol might ease that growing pressure at the top of his skull. He did not want to be hurried, too anxious. It was unwise to be too anxious about anything. That was how fatal mistakes were made.

The girl wandered over to another table and stared into another man’s face.

Jesse finished his beer and went back to the washroom. Washed his face, his wrists. He had to lay his coat over a wastepaper receptacle that was filthy. On the lavatory walls were the usual words, drawings—an odd picture of a woman’s cadaver, the heart and the lungs exposed, the stomach sac, coils of intestines, the womb carefully drawn. Jesse found himself examining the drawing, surprised that it was so good. The organs were in their proper proportions. At the very center of the little womb was an eye, elaborately inked in.

Jesse transferred the pistol from his coat pocket to his trouser pocket. It was bulky but it rested closer to him now, compact and reassuring.

He had another glass of beer and when he returned to the street he felt stronger. The cold water and the beer had restored him. This part of the street looked better: expensive shops and galleries were interspersed with sleazy shops, the camping-outfit and gun stores, the blaring record stores, the immense stores that sold stereo and high-fidelity equipment that must have been costly, though it was crowded together in the display windows. Near him a few boys were begging. They begged shamelessly but without urgency, reaching out as if to touch the elbows of passers-by, but not quite touching them. An emaciated boy with a knapsack on his back stood wordlessly by the curb, his hand extended. No one bothered with him. Flat-chested, flat-bellied, a barefoot girl strolled by with the stony eyes of a statue: impossible to impregnate such a female, Jesse’s instincts told him. She glanced at Jesse but did not seem to see him. No female left in her, no sense of his maleness.
I do not see you
, she seemed to say. Jesse realized how futile it would be to talk to any of these young people, even to approach them.… As he walked he noticed newer buildings: steel and glass and concrete, murals, mosaics, reflecting the jumble of neon lights, and even on the steps of these excellent new buildings people were sitting, with that exhausted unquestioning look Jesse saw in the faces of his terminally ill patients.