When you approach from the back you will see workmen and scaffolding. You will see concrete, lines of vehicles and pylons. You will see obstacles. You will see a place you do not want to be. And at the top of the driveway leading to the entrance, there is a small bench beneath an overhang. It’s utilitarian, a place for patients to sit as they wait for transport. There is no view to be had, just cars and cement and shadow, and sitting there you feel like you’re in a parking garage. On the ground beside the bench, sesame seeds are scattered. A patient almost certainly makes a slow procession to this place each day. Feeling fragile and less than he remembered, his bare legs exposed beneath his hospital gown, he would cast seeds to the tiny birds who would come to feed. Amidst all this mess, this construction and revision, this tangle of concrete and flesh, he would sustain them. This mercy, his daily gift. And he would watch the birds hop and cheep, marvelling at their perfect eyes and darting movements, their little, old man legs and mysterious feathers, and how with one small breath they were up and away, lifting into the blue skies just beyond.

They didn’t talk much, although the one with the small, white hospital towel draped over his knees, offered that, “heart disease might be involved, too.” He took a drag from his cigarette as he waited for a response. You could see the tattoos covering his hand, the IV piercing the skin just above the word HATE spelled out on his knuckles, the smoke being exhaled. The other guy nodded. He had nothing to say. And with that the conversation disintegrated. Just space between them now. An unbroachable distance. Grief-struck and lost, a million miles apart, they looked through all the people passing by on the sidewalk in front of them, and stared off into other worlds.

She loved many people, most of them more than me, and my love was cloying and imperfect. I lost her many times. Days, weeks, months later she would return without tears to my shabby and crooked apartment on Coloniale. And I would attempt ferocity and steely eyes, but I was powerless before her. Oh, Monique in new pants, Monique skating at Carre St. Louis, Monique opening a tin of tuna—each moment an act of singular and irreducible beauty.

Her dreams took on the form of divine revelation. Each morning she woke up astonished, unable to grasp the portent of her nocturnal wanderings, but certain of their implicit significance. They became puzzles to solve, ghosts to tend, arrows to follow.

Watching her eyelashes flutter and knowing at that precise moment she was dreaming, I imagined them taking form and floating like mysterious cave drawings in the dark above us. I wanted to pluck them from the air, to preserve them so we could study them later, but even in my mind’s eye they eluded me, curling away like smoke and then disappearing, a trail of phosphorescence reabsorbed into the ocean.

After she left in the morning I would put on the sweater she had been wearing. Intoxicated with her redolence I would wander the streets breathing her in. Everything shining.

While driving along Bloor he started to talk about how much things had changed. This, a safe conversational starter for men past a certain age.

What used to be there.

What’s there now.

All the things we had known and lived.

And so we shared our wonder at the velocity of the world overtaking us, of all the businesses popping up on the blocks passing by and the real estate prices that had long since soared beyond our reach. Each aspect of this conversation revealed an unresolved bitterness in the man, a sense of having missed out, and then a car cut him off. He slammed his fist on the steering wheel, “DID YOU SEE THAT ASSHOLE?!”, he shouted as he accelerated into traffic. I tried to say something neutral yet supportive in tone, and then in an attempt to distract him from his rising fury, I asked where he’d most like to live if there were absolutely no limitations.

After some struggle, he offered up San Diego, but this only served as an entry point for a long, detailed story about being on a cruise ship with his ex-wife, getting ripped-off at the bar, and the fist fight that ensued. “They didn’t know who they were dealing with,” he said to me, his voice a cold, flat hiss.

And then we came to a red light and stopped. It felt like the barometric pressure had changed, that some destructive potential was either gathering or dispersing inside the car. And so we sat there quietly, lonely now in ways that could not be acknowledged. And beside us at the red light a beautiful young woman idled on her bicycle. When her eyes accidentally fell upon us, she quickly averted her gaze, just as we knew she would.

And then the light turned green.

She stood up on her bike and pedalled confidently away, into the future, I guess, and there was something so sad and beautiful in this, that neither the driver nor I even thought to speak for the rest of the ride.

(Photo credit to the great Lincoln Clarkes)

Thin and pale, her hair was pulled back into a practical, oddly lonely ponytail. Her mother walked beside her, carrying the young woman’s belongings in a plastic bag and speaking cheerfully about trivial matters, as if relieved to finally be able to speak of trivial matters. She was trying to assure her daughter that she did not belong in a hospital, I think, and that she could just pick up her life wherever she had been forced to abandon it. The young woman said nothing as the mother talked, and although her eyes were still a little sunken and dull, there were traces of relief to be read in her tired and beautiful face.

They passed through the revolving door that led to University Avenue and stepped out into what must have felt like a miracle. The night was so unseasonably mild that it seemed like you’d just emerged into some temperate and surreal vacation– and everything, the waiting stand of festive cabs, the disembodied sounds of the night, everything,  felt laden with potential. The young woman stepped forward onto the sidewalk and looked up into the the dark canyon of sky above her. With arms outstretched and head back, she moved in a slow circle, as if calling the world back. When she was finished she was facing her mother, her arms still open. And in this unexpected moment their eyes caught. They smiled at each other, and then over the course of a second, maybe two, their smiles began to tremble, and then they were both in tears, sobbing and embracing on the sidewalk, the cab drivers looking quietly on.

Sadly, this state of affairs continued after she happened upon a garage sale ( http://michaelmurray.ca/garage-sale ) Rachelle and I were having, and then kind of exploded the other night on Twitter when I got involved in a debate about condos she was having with another Toronto writer. I interceded in the middle of the debate, and these are the tweets that passed between Atwood and I on that night:

******************************************************

@margaretatwood: The un-rich have owned their houses for decades. Why should a development go right up to their lot lines and kill their beloved trees?

@michaelmurrayca: Have you seen an un-rich!?!? I hear they have teeth where ears should be and can only be killed by Dragonglass or gentrification!

@margaretatwood: Oh. It’s you.

@michaelmurrayca: I am an un-rich, you know.

@margaretatwood: Yes, I was able to deduce that from that little garage sale you had.

@michaelmurrayca: Made almost $80 at that sale.

@margaretatwood: Why, that must be more than you made on your book!

@michaelmurrayca: Unlike some authors who quickly sell-out to tv, I have some integrity. It’s not all about the money, Margaret, some of us are artists.

@margaretatwood: There is no hyphen in sellout.

@michaelmurrayca: I hear that they’re making The Handmaid’s Tale into a reality tv show.

Kind of like The Bachelor. You must be very proud.

@margaretatwood: Yes, as proud as your wife and son must be of you and your ability to provide for them through your “art.”

@michaelmurrayca: You remind me of Cersei Lannister.

@margaretatwood: You hate powerful women, do you?

@michaelmurray: Yes, very, very much.

@margaretatwood: Do you also disapprove of civic mindedness?

@michaelmurrayca: I am for whatever position you are against.

@margaretatwood: So you are in favour of killing trees, then?

@michaelmurrayca: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

@margaretatwood: So the fact that you’re totally uninformed about this condo development and the devastation it will bring to the local environment, that doesn’t prevent you from jumping in with an “opinion?”

@michaelmurrayca: I’d say it’s more commentary than opinion.

@margaretatwood: Tu tetras, homo parum de moron.

@michaelmurrayca: Oh, la-di-da! The grand dame speaks French!

@margaretatwood: Yes, I do, but the Tweet you are referring to happened to be latin. Like they speak in Mexico.

@michaelmurrayca: Were you called Margaret Fatwood in high school?

@margaretatwood: Oh my, I had forgotten about your biting wit.

@michaelmurrayca: In high school I was called The Enforcer.

@margaretatwood: It was ironic, I take it?

@michaelmurrayca: I was practically a god in high school, you have no idea!!

@margaretatwood: You miss those days, don’t you?

@margaretatwood: In spite of all the sport’s teams you never made, the low C’s you struggled to achieve and all the pretty girls who wouldn’t even glance at you, those were still the best years of your life, weren’t they?

@margareatatwood: Yes, I thought so.

Sitting on the sidewalk between the mailbox and garbage can was a man selling pens. He wore a red ‘Fly Emirates’ hat, had a distended tongue that protruded through his mouth, a tracheotomy tube sticking out of his throat and loosely bandaged hands. He was so low to the ground and positioned in such a way that it was difficult to tell if he had legs or not, and he gave the appearance of some wax creation melting into the grey concrete.

A chopper sounded unseen in the sky above, likely landing on the roof of the Children’s Hospital right around the corner. Somebody, all sorts of people even, were in the midst of the worst, most unimaginable day of their lives.

A handsome business man with an immaculately trimmed beard strode by as if on a catwalk. Standing about 6’3, he was resplendent in a perfectly fitted suit that he’d accented with a pair of beautiful Italian shoes and a pocket square. He spoke calmly into his phone as if he was in control and absolutely  everything  was  going  exactly  as  planned.

Walking toward him was a blonde woman who was just as thin as a blade. She was concentrating so hard on looking unattainable she seemed angry, like she was off to eliminate an enemy. Dressed expensively, she was so deeply articulated by fashion that it was hard to imagine anything existing beyond exterior.  Behind sunglasses and confident on high heels, as inky as a shadow she smoked–an image to be captured rather than a person to be spoken to.

It seemed that these two people, these two vectors of power and beauty, had been moving their entire lives toward this moment of collision, but they passed without incident or plot, and the man selling pens on the street beneath their indifferent gazes cast such a stark contrast as to feel like a biblical thunderbolt. 

Moving his mouth to no effect, he held out a pen to everybody who passed, but nobody stopped or even noticed him. Not a single person. He was beneath their sight line, both figuratively and literally, and may as well have been living in a completely different world.

A woman on crutches was standing near him. You could tell that she wasn’t sick– that she’d just had a minor accident and was still living in one world and not the other. But still, she was angry. She might have been angry about a lot of things. She was limping about very dramatically, exaggerating, exasperated that that the cab stand was 20 meters away. The beggar, wordless and unseen, waved a car over for her, and as one materialized, she limped furiously past, never noticing the blessings of the saint kneeling before her.

After the meal, Rachelle went off to run some errand with her sister while I decided to wander about the streets of our old neighbourhood.

Not sure where to go, I just stood on the sidewalk attempting the appearance of somebody who was making an important decision. This must have looked like providence to the woman walking by. She did a double-take, and then looked intently at me me, this man pulling an oxygen tank behind him lost in deep thought. She smiled, wanted me to know a bit about God, and handed me a pamphlet that asked the question, “Will suffering ever end?”

As if in answer to that, a street person immediately joined me on the corner. I would guess that she was in her 20’s, but she might have been younger. Through her wounded shell, you could see the beauty inside, how if just a few things had been different in her life, this capacity for joy would have blossomed.

She didn’t seem to want much more than company, as she just stood beside me, somehow assuming an immediate and willing position of subordination. It was as if we were now, and always had been, part of the same pack, and I was the Alpha.

Strung out and jittery, she kept shifting her weight from one foot to the other, sometimes moving in small circles in order to scan the horizon in all directions. Between her fingers she kept the small stub of a cigarette. There was little tobacco in it, but she worried it between her fingers like Rosary beads, asking each person who passed if they had a light. I tried to communicate to her that because of the oxygen tank I had with me, I couldn’t be around an open flame as it might cause an explosion, but she didn’t seem to understand.

I had to leave, but I didn’t want to. I felt protective, like she needed me there. I wanted to help her somehow, but the circumstance of my oxygen tank and her need to smoke were dangerous.

“Okay, I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

She looked disappointed.

“I can’t talk,” she began, “my words go away and I can’t find them, but I want you to know I’m big.” Her eyes were wide and she stretched out her arms, “I’m more.”  

Heather:

When I was initially diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Disease I characterized it as an act of terror.  By doing that I abnegated any responsibility for my circumstance. I did nothing wrong—there was nothing I could do to have prevented the disease, it was like getting on a bus that just happened to have a bomb on it.  I did not feel weak.  I did not feel that I was to blame.  It was a random, utterly arbitrary occurrence that just happened to have victimized me.  It would not come back.

When it did come back, my sense of disease as terrorism intensified.  It became a manifestation of fear.  Cancer was the terrorist bomb that could explode within my body at any moment.  I became jittery and tentative—vigilant to anything out of the ordinary.  I lived in fear, and I lived quietly, unwilling to make commitments to people or things, I locked myself indoors for worry of the terrorist threat within my body.

I am trying to stop that.

As always,

Anderson

It’s the hottest night of the year, and everything feels slower and more specific—the motorcycle whirring by, the exhaust from the bus, the distant shouts. Even movement feels weighted, as if gravity had been altered and natural time suspended, all of us now caught living in the space between an ending and a beginning.

In front of St. Joseph’s, broken men in hospital gowns are smoking cigarettes from their wheelchairs. I recently spent a long, uncertain time in hospital, and walking through this scattering of solitary men, all staring off at some internal horizon, I felt the need to stop.

Curtis, who was undergoing dialysis, had both legs amputated at the knee, was missing several fingers and teeth and was covered in tattoos. He didn’t mind being in hospital, he told me, because there were always people around and it was nice to have company. When I told him my wife and I were about to have a baby, his eyes got child-like and wide, “Oh, God has blessed you, sir, God has blessed you!”

We chatted for a bit, and as I was taking my leave it felt like we had both survived the same plane crash, but only one was able to walk away from the wreckage. After shaking his hand, and feeling like something almost holy had taken place, I walked into the hospital and later, at 4:40 in the morning on August the 18th, Rachelle gave birth to our son, Jones.

Rachelle was so strong. When the labour took hold and then seized her, she gritted her teeth, and then face a bright red, she pushed like a viking while k.d. lang played in the background. We thought this was going to go on and on for hours, as did the entire team who had anticipated a slow delivery, but suddenly Jones, whom I had been traveling 49 years to meet, appeared.

Neither Rachelle nor I saw him immediately. The presiding nurse, her face a sudden astonishment of joy, shouted, “Look down, look down!” And so we did, and there he was, glowing and perfect, seemingly illuminating all the faces now staring at him. For us, it was as if Jones was emitting a light that existed beyond sight, something so powerful and clarifying that with his first exhalation all the heavy, gritty air of the city, of the world and our lives, was cleared away.

The next day we all left the hospital– Jones, feeling the sun for the very first time as we carried him to the car in the Moses Basket a friend made for him. We passed through the smoking men who sat smouldering in the heat like rubble, but Curtis wasn’t amongst them, and so we continued without pause, taking Jones home. Home, an idea and memory that the boy and then the man, will forever be circling. And right this second this home is taking form, his mother rocking him in her arms, his father and dog watching from the sofa, a perfect and imperishable moment that one day Jones will close his eyes to summon.

(Photo courtesy of Donna Lypchuck)