Life Before Man

  "Mother, stop laughing," Janet hissed. But though she kept her mouth closed, Elizabeth could not stop. When the hymn ended and she could raise her head again, she was astonished to see that a number of people were crying. She wondered what they were mourning: it could not possibly be Auntie Muriel.

  The children are attached to her hands, Janet on the right, Nancy on the left. They're wearing their white knee socks and Mary Janes: Janet's idea, since these were what they wore to visit Auntie Muriel. Janet is weeping decorously; she knows this is what you do at funerals. Nancy is looking around, her head swiveling unabashed. "What's that, Mum? Why is he doing that?"

  Elizabeth herself is dry-eyed and feels slightly giddy. There is still laughter in her throat. Was the service the result of premature senility, or could it be that Auntie Muriel at last had been making a joke? Perhaps she'd planned it for years, that moment of helpless astonishment; gloated over it, picturing the faces of her old associates as they realized that she might be other than what she seemed. Elizabeth doubts it, but hopes so. Now that Auntie Muriel is actually dead, she is free to restructure her closer to her own requirements; also, she would like to find something in her to approve.

  Nate is there, on the other side of the grave. He kept apart from them during the service; perhaps he didn't want to intrude. He looks across at Elizabeth now and she smiles at him. It was sweet of him to think of coming; she didn't ask him to. Sweet but not necessary. It occurs to her that Nate in general is not necessary. He can be there or not. Elizabeth blinks, and Nate vanishes; she blinks again and he reappears. She finds herself able to be grateful for his presence. She knows well enough that her momentary gratitude may not lead to anything and will evaporate the next time he's late picking up the children. Nevertheless, that war is over. Dismissed.

  "I'm going over to see Dad," Nancy whispers, letting go of Elizabeth's hand. Nancy wants the excuse to walk quite near the grave and get a closer look at the men shoveling; but also she wants to be with her father. Elizabeth smiles and nods.

  Hilarity is draining from her, leaving her shaky. She's finding it difficult to believe that Auntie Muriel, now shriveled, boxed, dirted over and done with, actually did all the harmful, even devastating things she remembers her doing. Possibly Elizabeth has exaggerated, invented; but why would she invent Auntie Muriel? Anyway, Auntie Muriel really was like that; Elizabeth should know, she's got the scars.

  Why then can she suddenly not bear to see Auntie Muriel being merged, leveled, as if she's a flower plot? Prettied over. "She was awful," Elizabeth wants to say, testify. "She was awful." Auntie Muriel was a phenomenon, like a two-headed calf or Niagara Falls. She would like to bear witness to this fact. She wants it admired; she doesn't want it diminished or glossed over.

  Auntie Muriel is out of sight now, and the older mourners are beginning to shift, fade away towards their cars. Their scarves and the wreaths flutter.

  Elizabeth would like to leave now too, but she can't: Auntie Muriel's death is not yet complete for her. She didn't sing at the funeral or join in the prayers. If she opened her mouth, she felt, something disreputable would come out. But she has to say something, some word of dismissal, before the green rug is finally installed. Rest in peace seems inappropriate. Auntie Muriel had nothing to do with rest or peace.

  "Ancestral voices prophesying war," she hears herself murmuring.

  Janet looks up at her, frowning. Elizabeth smiles absently; she's searching her head for the source. A stately pleasure dome. They'd had to memorize the whole thing in Grade Eleven. Where Alph the sacred river ran, something about caverns, down to a sunless sea. She remembers the teacher, a Miss Macleod, who had frizzy white hair and talked about fairies, revolving in a circle with her eyes closed. Those caves of ice.

  Except for the shovels, it's very quiet. The cloudy green of the trees stretches into the distance, spongy, soft as gauze, there's nothing to push against, hold on to. A black vacuum sucks at her, there's a wind, a slow roar. Still clutching Janet's hand, Elizabeth falls through space.

  It's Nate who picks her up. "All right now?" he says. He rubs clumsily at the mud on her coat.

  "Don't do that," Elizabeth says. "I'll get it dry cleaned."

  Now that she's obviously still alive, Nancy decides it's safe to cry. Janet, exasperated, asks Nate if he's got any liquor on him; to revive her, Elizabeth assumes. For once he doesn't, and for Janet this is the last straw. Her parents are graceless, and incompetent as well. She turns her back.

  "I'm perfectly all right," Elizabeth says. It maddens her, this need everyone has to be told she's all right. She isn't, she's frightened. She's done other things but she's never blacked out like this before. She foresees a future of sudden power failures, keeling over on the subway, at intersections, with no one to drag her out of the way. Falling down stairs. She decides to have her blood sugar tested. The old ladies, those that are left, regard her with friendly interest. As far as they're concerned this is exactly what she should have done.

  The two men are lifting the carpet of green plastic grass, unrolling it. The funeral is over now, she can take the children home.

  Instead of riding back in the undertaker's car, to the funeral parlor or the church where coffee and cake will be served, they'll walk to the subway. At home they'll change their clothes and she'll make them something. Peanut butter sandwiches.

  It suddenly amazes her that she is able to do this, something this simple. How close has she come, how many times, to doing what Chris did? More important: what stopped her? Was that his power over her, that piece of outer space he'd carried, locked in the pressures of his body until the final explosion? She remembers a high-school game she'd heard about but never played: chicken. They would drive to the bluffs, race their cars, heading for the long drop to the lake, trying not to be the first to brake. Standing in the sunlight, she feels the horrified relief of someone who has stopped just in time to watch an opponent topple in slow motion over the edge.

  But she's still alive, she wears clothes, she walks around, she holds down a job even. She has two children. Despite the rushing of wind, the summoning voices she can hear from underground, the dissolving trees, the chasms that open at her feet; and will always from time to time open. She has no difficulty seeing the visible world as a transparent veil or a whirlwind. The miracle is to make it solid.

  She thinks with anticipation of her house, her quiet living room with its empty bowls, pure grace, her kitchen table. Her house is not perfect; parts of it are in fact crumbling, most noticeably the front porch. But it's a wonder that she has a house at all, that she's managed to accomplish a house. Despite the wreckage. She's built a dwelling over the abyss, but where else was there to build it? So far, it stands.

  Friday, August 18, 1978

  NATE

  Nate sits on a folding wooden chair behind a card table, on the east side of Yonge Street a block south of Shuter Street. The afternoon sun beats down on his head. He shades his eyes with his hand; he should have worn sunglasses. He wishes he could drink beer, just one can anyway of Molson's tucked between his feet, a quick lift to the mouth. But it wouldn't look good.

  Across the street the intestinal tubing of the Eaton Centre festoons itself over walls and stairways. Shoppers enter and leave, legs brisk, faces thrust forward, intent on small lusts, small consummations of their own. Those on his side of the street are less hopeful. Old men with the shuffle of the perennially drunk, youths with armless black T-shirts cinched into their jeans by studded belts, their arms tattooed; pasty office workers in summer suits whose pinkish eyes evade his own; disgruntled women with fat ankles and scuffed shoes, their fingers locked on shopping bags. Few smile. Some scowl, but most are blank-faced, keeping their muscular twitches of anger or joy for safer, more private moments.

  Nate fixes each approaching pedestrian with what he hopes is a compelling stare: Your Country Needs You. Most glance at the sign propped on the table and quicken their pace, trying to get past before he can rope the
m into anything upsetting, any commitment. RCMP WRONGDOING, the sign says, rapping the Mounties lightly across the knuckles. CORRUPTION or, even better, SIN, would have brought more money.

  Some pause and he hands them leaflets. Occasionally he gets a nibble of interest and goes into his spiel. He's collecting signatures on a petition, he says; surely they are opposed to ROMP Wrongdoing? He mentions mail-opening but leaves out barn-burning and office-wrecking in Quebec. Most people have no barns or offices and are indifferent or hostile towards Quebec, but they do have mail. To show their seriousness, signers of the petition are being asked to contribute a dollar each to a fund which will be used to further the campaign.

  Nate speaks quietly, without undue fervor. Anything like fanaticism must be avoided. He's supposed to represent the average decent-minded citizen. But knows he does not. It gives him a wry satisfaction that most of those who have so far responded with any enthusiasm have come from the ranks of the black-shirted youths, obvious dope-pushers, fences and petty thieves. At any moment he expects to see a client or a former client among them.

  "Jail the bastards," one says. "Bust into my place last weekend and went through it like a goddamn chainsaw. Didn't find nothing on me though."

  He wonders what his mother would make of this phenomenon, concludes she would not be offended or even surprised. "A signature is a signature," she would say. Will say next weekend, when her capable buttocks will rest squarely on this very chair, her feet in their sensible crepe-soled shoes hold down this sidewalk.

  It should have been her today, but she twisted her ankle at the hospital. "A twist, not a sprain," she'd said on the phone. "They're very short of volunteers, otherwise I wouldn't ask you. I've never asked you before."

  This isn't true, she has asked him before. Pieces for Peace, rescue the Korean poet, ban the bomb. It's just that he's never agreed to do anything before. He wonders why, this time, he has. Not that this enterprise is any more likely to succeed than her other enterprises. But collecting signatures against RCMP Wrongdoing does not at the moment seem any more futile than most other things in his life.

  A middle-aged man scans the leaflet, then thrusts it towards Nate as if it's hot, glancing behind him. "I'll give you a dollar," he whispers, "but I can't sign my name." He has an accent, not French, not Italian. Nate thanks him and stashes the dollar in the cash box. More people than he would have imagined seem to think they'll be in deep shit if they sign their names. The Mounties will get hold of them, whip the bottoms of their feet with dog whips, apply electric hair-curling machines to their genital organs; at the very least, open their mail.

  Nate doubts it; he doubts that the Mounties even care. Nothing like that will happen here, not yet. Which is probably why he's never done anything like this before. It's too safe. He's held out for some overwhelming choice, danger, his life on the line; a careless laugh, eyes shining, death one false step away. Instead he broils in the August sun, wheedles strangers, lights another cigarette to combat the exhaust fumes from the street.

  When he went upstairs to the office to collect his stack of leaflets, they greeted him like the prodigal son. Three women in wrinkled summer dresses shot from their cubbyholes to shake his hand; his mother was a wonder, they said, so much energy, he must be proud. The director invited him into his brownish office, its desk stacked waist-high with grimy papers: letters, forms, old newspaper clippings. Nate explained about the twisted ankle and made it as clear as he could without being rude that he was merely temporary, a substitute. There seemed no need to add that he finds the petition a kind of joke. It's supposed to go to the Prime Minister, who will doubtless make paper airplanes with it. Why not? He's read the letters to the editor, he knows that most people will allow six million Quebeckers, Pakistanis, union leaders and transvestites to have their fingernails pulled out rather than admit that the paint is chipped on the bright red musical Mountie of their dreams.

  Possibly the director himself knows it's a joke. He was grinning at something. He'd smiled like a clown penny bank, white teeth slightly open and acquisitive, his blandness deceptive. His eyes above his apple cheeks were shrewd and in that gaze Nate had squirmed. They all acted as if he is in truth what he's spent so much effort to avoid becoming: his mother's son. Which maybe he is.

  But not only, not only. He refuses to be defined. He's not shut, time carries him on, other things may happen. By his elbow is this morning's Globe, which he hopes to scan later when the stream of prospects thins. Perhaps there will finally be some news. A small part of him still waits, still expects, longs for a message, a messenger; as he sits in his booth proclaiming to others a message he suspects is a joke.

  At four o'clock his replacement, a German Catholic theologian, he's been told, will arrive and grip his hand earnestly as if he is indeed a kindred spirit. Nate, embarrassed, will leave the booth and join the walkers, those homeward bound, those merely wandering; he will lose himself among the apathetic, the fatalistic, the uncommitted, the cynical; among whom he would like to feel at home.

  Friday, August 18, 1978

  LESJE

  Uniformed in her lab coat Lesje descends, winding around the totem pole on her way to the basement. She isn't doing lab work today but she wears the lab coat anyway. It makes her feel she belongs here. She does belong here.

  She remembers the way she once followed with her eyes those others she used to glimpse on her Saturday excursions, men and women but especially the women, walking purposefully along the corridors or whisking through the doors marked STAFF ONLY. Then she'd seen their lab coats as badges, of nationality, membership of some kind. She'd wanted so much to be able to go through those doors: secrets, wonders even, lay beyond. Now she has keys, she can go almost anywhere, she's familiar with the jumble-sale pieces of rock, the fragments, the dust-covered bundles of unsorted papers. Secrets perhaps but no wonders. Still, this is the only place she wants to work. Once there had been nothing equally important to her, but there is still nothing more important. This is the only membership she values.

  She will not give it up. Fists jammed into her lab-coat pockets, she paces the basement floor, among the cases of mannequin Indians in their stolen ceremonial clothes, the carved masks, joyous, fearful. She walks briskly, as if she knows where she's going; but in fact she's soothing herself, running the Museum through her head once more, room by familiar room, a litany of objects. How soon will it be before she will never see it again?

  Sometimes she thinks of the Museum as a repository of knowledge, the resort of scholars, a palace built in the pursuit of truth, with inadequate air conditioning but still a palace. At other times it's a bandits' cave: the past has been vandalized and this is where the loot is stored. Whole chunks of time lie here, golden and frozen; she is one of the guardians, the only guardian, without her the whole edifice would melt like a jellyfish on the beach, there would be no past. She knows it's really the other way around, that without the past she would not exist. Still, she must hold on somehow to her own importance. She's threatened, she's greedy. If she has to she'll lock herself into one of these cases, hairy mask on her face, she'll stow away, they'll never get her out.

  Will they ask her to leave? Resign. She doesn't know. A pregnant paleontologist is surely a contradiction in terms. Her business is the naming of bones, not the creation of flesh. The fact is that she's missed her period twice in a row. Which could be what they call strain. She hasn't yet gone for tests, for confirmation, she hasn't thought past the fact. She will be an unwed mother. Of course that is becoming more common, but what will Dr. Van Vleet, a gentleman of the old school who demonstrably does not live in the year 1978, do then?

  And what will Nate do, what will she do? It's hard to believe that such a negligible act of hers can have measurable consequences for other people, even such a small number of them. Though the past is the sediment from such acts, billions, trillions of them.

  She's not used to being a cause, of anything at all. On her office wall the tree of evolution
branches like coral towards the ceiling: Fishes, Amphibians, Therapsids, Thecodonts, Archosaurs, Pterosaurs, Birds, Mammals and Man, a mere dot. And herself another, and within her another. Which will exfoliate in its turn.

  Or not; she's thought about that. She could have an abortion, stop time. She knows it's easier than it used to be. She hasn't yet told Nate, she doesn't need to tell him. Everything could go on as before. Which is not what she wants.

  She can't tell whether he will be delighted or angry or despairing; possibly, considering his feelings about his two other children, he will be all three. But whatever his reaction is, she knows her final decision will not be based on it. Nate has been displaced, if only slightly, from the center of the universe.

  She climbs the back stairs and walks forward through European Costumes, skirting the Chinese Peasant Art Exhibit, which doesn't much interest her. As she rounds the corner towards the main staircase, she glimpses a square dark figure on the floor above. It's Elizabeth. Elizabeth doesn't see her. She's looking over the balustrade, out over the rotunda. Lesje has almost never seen Elizabeth like this, unconscious. It's as if she's seeing her on the last day of her life. Lesje isn't used to this; she's used to thinking of Elizabeth as permanent, like an icon. But Elizabeth standing by herself, unconnected with anyone, is shorter, worn, ordinary; mortal. The lines of her face and body slope down. Even though she knows her own pregnancy will cut no ice with Elizabeth, may even make her delay the divorce as long as possible, to prove something - what? That she's first wife? - Lesje can't remember why she has been afraid of her.

  Will they still be doing this in twenty years? Older women, old women, wearing black and not speaking; ill-wishing; never seeing each other, but each keeping the other locked in her head, a secret area of darkness like a tumor or the black vortex at the center of a target. Someday they may be grandmothers. It occurs to her, a new idea, that this tension between the two of them is a difficulty for the children. They ought to stop.