“I don’t know—what do you like?”
“Everything, pretty much. Danny—one of the guys I work with—says there’s a new Vietnamese soup place just south of McKennitt. We could give it a try. He’s says the food’s good and cheap.”
“That sounds wonderful. I’m on a bit of a budget. I’m saving up for a new guitar.”
“You play guitar?”
“Mmm. When I’m playing it’s like the whole world’s gone perfect—even when I’m flubbing my chords or forget the words or something.”
“I used to play mandolin in a band,” he said. “Before I moved to the city….”
And just like that, they were deep in conversation and it stayed like that all the way to the restaurant and through dinner. The food was great, and the company was better, but as they were waiting for their bill, something reminded Ruby of Joey, lying there in his hospital bed, alone. Maybe it was the old black man she saw walking by the window of the restaurant. Maybe it was because Kyle had mentioned liking her tattoo, telling her it reminded him of this old song his band used to play, which turned out to be the same song that Joey had taught her when she first started taking lessons from him. Maybe it was because, even with the doctor’s reassurances, she couldn’t quite shake the worry that had settled in her chest this afternoon when she’d opened the door to Joey’s apartment and found him lying there, so still.
“Is everything okay?” Kyle asked.
“What? Oh, sorry. I was just thinking of Joey—one of the regulars at the diner. But he’s also a friend of mine and he had a…I don’t know quite what today. But I ended up having to take him to the hospital and they’re keeping him overnight for observation.”
“Would I know him?”
“Probably.”
Kyle nodded as she started to describe Joey.
“He’s got those eyes that seem to see everything.”
“That’s Joey, all right.”
She went on to tell him about how she’d found him that afternoon, how he was teaching her all these old songs, how she just liked him because he made the day seem better whenever he came into the diner.
“What time are visiting hours over?” Kyle asked.
“Nine, I think.”
He looked at his watch. “There’s still time. We could stop in and see him, if you like.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “It’s good to take care of the people that mean something to us.”
“I just checked in on him,” the nurse said when they arrived at the nurse’s station, “and he was still sleeping. But you could sit with him for a while if you like. Visiting hours are over at nine.”
Ruby nodded. “I know. Thank you.”
She led Kyle off down the hall to Joey’s room before the nurse could ask who he was. But when they got to the room, Joey’s bed was empty. There were men asleep on the other three beds, but none of them were him. He hadn’t changed beds. The bathroom door was open, so they could see there was no one in there.
“This is weird,” Ruby said.
She went back to the nurse’s station with Kyle to check that she had the right room.
“He’s still in 318, dear.”
Ruby started to feel panicky again—the way she had while she was waiting for the ambulance this afternoon.
“Not anymore, he’s not,” she said.
The nurse gave her a puzzled look. “But I was just in his room, and no one’s come down the hall since.”
She led the way back to 318, but Joey was still gone. When she hurried off to get help, Ruby walked over to the bed. She had the oddest feeling that while Joey wasn’t dead, she wasn’t going to see him again.
“What’s that?” Kyle asked.
He pointed to the pillow. A long black feather lay there.
A crow’s feather, Ruby thought. She touched the magpie on her arm and could almost hear Joey’s voice in her head.
Magpie and crow. We’re both corbae—I’ve told you that before.
And then there was this curious sensation in her chest, as though something was stretching inside her. And she heard…she heard…
“That’s weird,” Kyle said from beside her, his voice soft. “Did you hear that?”
Ruby turned to him. “What did it sound like?”
“Like wings.”
Ruby nodded. That’s what she’d heard, too. It had been just like the sound of flapping that you could sometimes hear when there was a lull in the city’s general hubbub and a large bird flew overhead.
A pigeon or a gull. A crow.
Or a magpie.
She picked up the black feather and took Kyle’s hand.
“What about your friend?” he asked as she pulled him towards the door.
“I think he’s already gone.”
“But—”
“Shh,” she said. “Did you hear it again?”
Kyle nodded and looked up, as though he expected to see a bird, here in the hospital. But Ruby had felt the stirring begin in her chest once more and knew where the sound was really coming from.
“I guess all those stories he was always telling me were true,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
She let go of his hand and slipped hers into the crook of his arm.
“I’ll tell you on the way,” she said.
“On the way to where?”
She shrugged and smiled.
“To wherever it is we find ourselves going,” she said.
The Fields Beyond the Fields
I just see my life better in ink.
—Jewel Kilcher, from an interview on MuchMusic, 1997
Saskia is sleeping, but I can’t. I sit up at my rolltop desk, writing. It’s late, closer to dawn than midnight, but I’m not tired. Writing can be good for keeping sleep at bay. It also helps me make sense of things where simply thinking about them can’t. It’s too easy to get distracted by a wayward digression when the ink’s not holding the thoughts to paper. By focusing on the page, I can step outside myself and look at the puzzle with a clearer eye.
Earlier this evening Saskia and I were talking about magic and wonder, about how it can come and go in your life, or more particularly, how it comes and goes in my life. That’s the side of me that people don’t get to see when all they can access is the published page. I’m as often a skeptic as a believer. I’m not the one who experiences those oddities that appear in the stories; I’m the one who chronicles the mystery of them, trying to make sense out what they can impart about us, our world, our preconceptions of how things should be.
The trouble is, mostly life seems to be exactly what it is. I can’t find the hidden card waiting to be played because it seems too apparent that the whole hand is already laid out on the table. What you see is what you get, thanks, and do come again.
I want there to be more.
Even my friends assume I’m the knowledgeable expert who writes the books. None of them knows how much of a hypocrite I really am. I listen well and I know exactly what to say to keep the narrative flowing. I can accept everything that’s happened to them—the oddest and most absurd stories they tell me don’t make me blink an eye—but all the while there’s a small voice chanting in the back of my head.
As if, as if, as if…
I wasn’t always like this, but I’m good at hiding how I’ve changed, from those around me, as well as from myself.
But Saskia knows me too well.
“You used to live with a simple acceptance of the hidden world,” she said when the conversation finally turned into a circle and there was nothing new to add. “You used to live with magic and mystery, but now you only write about it.”
I didn’t know how to reply.
I wanted to tell her that it’s easy to believe in magic when you’re young. Anything you couldn’t explain was magic then. It didn’t matter if it was science or a fairy tale. Electricity and elves were both infinitely mysterious and equally possible—elves probably more so. It didn’t seem particu
larly odd to believe that actors lived inside your TV set. That there was a repertory company inside the radio, producing its chorus of voices and music. That a fat, bearded man lived at the North Pole and kept tabs on your behaviour.
I wanted to tell her that I used to believe she was born in a forest that only exists inside the nexus of a connection of computers, entangled with one another where they meet on the World Wide Web. A wordwood that appears in pixels on the screen, but has another, deeper existence somewhere out there in the mystery that exists concurrent to the Internet, the way religion exists in the gathering of like minds.
But not believing in any of it now, I wasn’t sure that I ever had.
The problem is that even when you have firsthand experience with a piece of magic, it immediately begins to slip away. Whether it’s a part of the enchantment, or some inexplicable defense mechanism that’s been wired into us either by society or genetics, it doesn’t make any difference. The magic still slips away, sliding like a melted icicle along the slick surface of our memories.
That’s why some people need to talk about it—the ones who want to hold on to the marvel of what they’ve seen or heard or felt. And that’s why I’m willing to listen, to validate their experience and help them keep it alive. But there’s no one around to validate mine. They think my surname Riddell is a happy coincidence, that it means I’ve solved the riddles of the world instead of being as puzzled by them as they are. Everybody assumes that I’m already in that state of grace where enchantment lies thick in every waking moment, and one’s dreams—by way of recompense, perhaps?—are mundane.
As if, as if, as if…
The sigh that escapes me seems self-indulgent in the quiet that holds the apartment. I pick up my pen, put it down when I hear a rustle of fabric, the creak of a spring as the sofa takes someone’s weight. The voice of my shadow speaks then, a disembodied voice coming to me from the darkness beyond the spill of the desk’s lamplight, but tonight I don’t listen to her. Instead I take down volumes of my old journals from where they’re lined up on top of my desk. I page through the entries, trying to see if I’ve really changed. And if so, when.
I don’t know what makes sense anymore; I just seem to know what doesn’t.
* * *
When I was young, I liked to walk in the hills behind our house, looking at animals. Whether they were big or small, it made no difference to me. Everything they did was absorbing. The crow’s lazy flight. A red squirrel scolding me from the safety of a hemlock branch, high overhead. The motionless spider in a corner of its patient web. A quick russet glimpse of a fox before it vanishes in the high weeds. The water rat making its daily journeys across Jackson’s Pond and back. A tree full of cedar waxwings, gorging on berries. The constantly shifting pattern of a gnat ballet.
I’ve never been able to learn what I want about animals from books or nature specials on television. I have to walk in their territories, see the world as they might see it. Walk along the edges of the stories they know.
The stories are the key, because for them, for the animals, everything that clutters our lives, they keep in their heads. History, names, culture, gossip, art. Even their winter and summer coats are only ideas, genetic imprints memorized by their DNA, coming into existence only when the seasons change.
I think their stories are what got me writing. First in journals, accounts as truthful as I could make them, then as stories where actuality is stretched and manipulated, because the lies in fiction are such an effective way to tell emotional truths. I took great comfort in how the lines of words marched from left to right and down the page, building up into a meaningful structure like rows of knitting. Sweater stories. Mitten poems. Long, rambling journal entries like the scarves we used to have when we were kids, scarves that seemed to go on forever.
I never could hold the stories in my head, though in those days I could absorb them for hours, stretched out in a field, my gaze lost in the expanse of forever sky above. I existed in a timeless place then, probably as close to Zen as I’ll ever get again. Every sense alert, all existence focused on the present moment. The closest I can come to recapturing that feeling now is when I set pen to paper. For those brief moments when the words flow unimpeded, everything I am is simultaneously focused into one perfect detail and expanded to encompass everything that is. I own the stories in those moments, I am the stories, though, of course, none of them really belong to me. I only get to borrow them.
I hold them for a while, set them down on paper, and then let them go. I can own them again, when I reread them, but then so can anyone.
* * *
According to Jung, at around the age of six or seven we separate and then hide away the parts of ourselves that don’t seem acceptable, that don’t fit in the world around us. Those unacceptable parts that we secret away become our shadow.
I remember reading somewhere that it can be a useful exercise to visualize the person our shadow would be if it could step out into the light. So I tried it. It didn’t work immediately. For a long time, I was simply talking to myself. Then, when I did get a response, it was only a spirit voice I heard in my head. It could just as easily have been my own. But over time, my shadow took on more physical attributes, in the way that a story grows clearer and more pertinent as you add and take away words, molding its final shape.
Not surprisingly, my shadow proved to be the opposite of who I am in so many ways. Bolder, wiser, with a better memory and a penchant for dressing up with costumes, masks, or simply formal wear. A cocktail dress in a raspberry patch. A green man mask in a winter field. She’s short, where I’m tall. Dark-skinned, where I’m light. Red-haired, where mine’s dark. A girl to my boy, and now a woman as I’m a man.
If she has a name, she’s never told me it. If she has an existence outside the times we’re together, she has yet to divulge it either. Naturally I’m curious about where she goes, but she doesn’t like being asked questions and I’ve learned not to press her because when I do, she simply goes away.
Sometimes I worry about her existence. I get anxieties about schizophrenia and carefully study myself for other symptoms. But if she’s a delusion, it’s singular, and otherwise I seem to be as normal as anyone else, which is to say, confused by the barrage of input and stimuli with which the modern world besets us, and trying to make do. Who was it that said she’s always trying to understand the big picture, but the trouble is, the picture just keeps getting bigger? Ani DiFranco, I think.
Mostly I don’t get too analytical about it—something I picked up from her, I suppose, since left to my own devices, I can worry the smallest detail to death.
We have long conversations, usually late at night, when the badgering clouds swallow the stars and the darkness is most profound. Most of the time I can’t see her, but I can hear her voice. I like to think we’re friends; even if we don’t agree about details, we can usually find common ground on how we’d like things to be.
* * *
There are animals in the city, but I can’t read their stories the same as I did the ones that lived in the wild. In the forested hills of my childhood.
* * *
I don’t know when exactly it was that I got so interested in the supernatural, you know, fairy tales and all. I mean, I was always interested in them, the way kids are, but I didn’t let them go. I collected unusual and odd facts, read the Brothers Grimm, Lady Gregory, Katharine Briggs, but Famous Monsters and ghost stories, too. They gave me something the animals couldn’t—or didn’t—but I needed it all the same.
Animal stories connected me to the landscape we inhabited—to their world, to my world, to all the wonder that can exist around us. They grounded me, but were no relief from unhappiness and strife. But fairy tales let me escape. Not away from something, but to something. To hope. To a world beyond this world where other ways of seeing were possible. Where other ways of treating each other were possible.
An Irish writer, Lord Dunsany, coined the phrase “Beyond the Fields
We Know” to describe fairyland, and that’s always appealed to me. First there’s the comfort of the fields we do know, the idea that it’s familiar and friendly. Home. Then there’s the otherness of what lies beyond them that so aptly describes what I imagine the alien topography of fairyland to be. The grass is always greener in the next field over, the old saying goes. More appealing, more vibrant. But perhaps it’s more dangerous as well. No reason not to explore it, but it’s worthwhile to keep in mind that one should perhaps take care.
* * *
If I’d thought that I had any aptitude as an artist, I don’t think I’d ever have become a writer. All I ever wanted to capture was moments. The trouble is, most people want narrative, so I tuck those moments away in the pages of a story. If I could draw or paint the way I see those moments in my head, I wouldn’t have to write about them.
It’s scarcely an original thought, but a good painting really can hold all the narrative and emotional impact of a novel—the viewer simply has to work a little harder than a reader does with a book. There are fewer clues. Less taking the viewer by the hand and leading him or her through all the possible events that had to occur to create this visualized moment before them.
I remember something Jilly once said about how everyone should learn to draw competently at an early age, because drawing, she maintains, is one of the first intuitive gestures we make to satisfy our appetites for beauty and communication. If we could acknowledge those hungers, and do so from an early age, our culture would be very different from the way it is today. We would understand how images are used to compel us, in the same way that most of us understand the subtleties of language.
Because, think of it. As children, we come into the world with a natural desire to both speak and draw. Society makes sure that we learn language properly, right from the beginning, but art is treated as a gift of innate genius, something we either have or don’t. Most children are given far too much praise for their early drawings, so much so that they rarely learn the ability to refine their first crude efforts the way their early attempts at language are corrected.