Author's Note

When i was in my second year of university, aged nineteen, my studies ground to a halt. Just as the curtain was lifting on my adult life, with promises of untold freedom, what I might do with that freedom began to trouble me. I had always expected academic degrees—a bachelor’s, a master’s, a Ph.D.—to be the banister that would steady me up the steps of my successful life. But that year I stared at paragraphs of Immanuel Kant in a state of dumb incomprehension, I failed two courses and the banister fell away. The view gave me vertigo.

One consequence of this youthful existential crisis was my first creative effort, a one-act play I wrote over the course of three days. It was about a young man who falls in love with a door. When a friend finds out, he destroys the door. Our hero promptly commits suicide. It was, without question, a terrible piece of writing, irredeemably blighted by immaturity. But I felt as though I’d come upon a violin, picked it up and brought bow to strings: the sound I made was perhaps terrible—but what a beautiful instrument! There was something deeply compelling about creating a setting, inventing characters, giving them dialogue, directing them through a plot, and by these means presenting my view of life. For the first time, I had found an endeavour into which I was willing to pour all my energies.

So I wrote. I wrote another play—an absurdist pastiche, awful—before switching to prose. I wrote short stories—all of them bad—before writing a novel— equally bad—and then more short stories—none of them good. To pursue the violin analogy, I drove the neighbours crazy with my bad playing. But something drew me on. It’s not that I saw a future in it; to think there was a link between my scribblings and books on shelves was preposterous. I didn’t think I was wasting my time when I wrote—it was too exciting—but nor did I think I was building a life. The fact is, I wasn’t thinking at all; I was just doing, madly, like Paganini (without the talent).

Slowly, however, by dint of practice, I got better. Here and there I struck a beautiful note. My developing sense was that the foundation of a story is an emotional foundation. If a story does not work emotionally, it does not work at all. The emotion in question is not the point; be it love, envy or apathy, so long as it is conveyed in a convincing manner, then the story will come alive. But a story must also stimulate the mind if it does not want to fade from memory. Intellect rooted in emotion, emotion structured by intellect—in other words, a good idea that moves—that was my lofty aim. When such an emotive idea came to me, when the spark of inspiration lit up my mind like a bonfire, the charge was like nothing I’d ever felt.

I got my inspiration anywhere and everywhere. Books. The newspaper. Movies. Music. Daily life. People I met. Memories and experience. And also from that mysterious creative ether whence ideas just popped into my head, unheralded. I put myself in a state of receptivity to stories. My eyes and ears sought them. I looked out, not in; in bored me. I did research with pleasure. Research was my way of learning, my own private university. Nothing delighted me more than to investigate the world for the sake of a story. Meanwhile, I lived with my parents. Or, to be more accurate, I lived off my parents. I paid no rent, ate their food. I did short-term work—tree planting, dishwashing, working as a security guard—never letting these jobs get in the way of my pen. That I was doing nothing credible to ensure my future did not worry me (or my parents; thank God for them: all artists need patrons) because, to give just one example, I had a long story in mind—it might even be called a novella— “Helsinki” for short. It was inspired by the death of a friend from AIDS. The title was unwieldy, the premise was awkward, the development was cumbersome. But there was life in it, the kind of life you find in a newborn child, in an exalted violin solo, the kind that makes everything fresh and hopeful and worth all the work. With that kind of life wriggling in my hands, how could I possibly worry about a bed and a pension for my senior years?

I sent stories out. Once I sent sixteen different stories to sixteen different literary reviews. I received sixteen rejections. Another time, it was nineteen stories to nineteen literary reviews. Two were accepted. That’s a success rate of 5.7 percent. No matter. I would soldier on with my writing until something else came up. Nothing did, nothing has—and I’m happy for that. The four stories in this collection are the best results of my early years as a writer. They did well. They won me some prizes. “Helsinki” was adapted to the stage and to the screen, “Manners of Dying” also to the screen and twice to the stage. First published as a book in Canada in 1993, the collection came out in six other countries. With these stories, the neighbours stopped banging on the walls and instead came over to say, “Bravo! Bravo!” It was a thrill for which I was—and still am—grateful.

Ten years on, I’m happy to offer these four stories again to the reading public, slightly revised, the youthful urge to overstate reined in, the occasional clumsiness in the prose I hope ironed out. No doubt I have other stories to tell, but these four will always carry for me the joy and excitement of a world premiere.

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios pour J. G.

Ihadn’t known paul for very long. We met in the fall of 1986 at Ellis University, in Roetown, just east of Toronto. I had taken time off and worked and travelled to India: I was twenty-three and in my last year. Paul had just turned nineteen and was entering first year. At the beginning of the year at Ellis, some senior students introduce the first-years to the university. There are no pranks or mischief or anything like that; the seniors are there to be helpful. They’re called “amigos” and the first-years “amigees,” which shows you how much Spanish they speak in Roetown. I was an amigo and most of my amigees struck me as cheerful, eager and young—very young. But right away I liked Paul’s laidback, intelligent curiosity and his sceptical turn of mind. The two of us clicked and we started hanging out together. Because I was older and I had done more things, I usually spoke with the authority of a wise guru, and Paul listened like a young disciple—except when he raised an eyebrow and said something that threw my pompousness right into my face. Then we laughed and broke from these roles and it was plain what we were: really good friends.

 

Then, hardly into second term, Paul fell ill. Already at Christmas he had had a fever, and since then he had been carrying around a dry, hacking cough he couldn’t get rid of. Initially, he—we—thought nothing of it. The cold, the dryness of the air—it was something to do with that.

Slowly things got worse. Now I recall signs that I didn’t think twice about at the time. Meals left unfinished. A complaint once of diarrhea. A lack of energy that went beyond phlegmatic temperament. One day we were climbing the stairs to the library, hardly twenty-five steps, and when we reached the top, we stopped. I remember realizing that the only reason we had stopped was because Paul was out of breath and wanted to rest. And he seemed to be losing weight. It was hard to tell, what with the heavy winter sweaters and all, but I was certain that his frame had been stockier earlier in the year. When it became clear that something was wrong, we talked about it—nearly casually, you must understand—and I played doctor and said, “Let’s see . . . breathlessness, cough, weight loss, fatigue. Paul, you have pneumonia.” I was joking, of course; what do I know? But that’s in fact what he had. It’s called Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia, PCP to intimates. In mid-February Paul went to Toronto to see his family doctor.

Nine months later he was dead.

AIDS. He announced it to me over the phone in a detached voice. He had been gone nearly two weeks. He had just got back from the hospital, he told me. I reeled. My first thoughts were for myself. Had he ever cut himself in my presence? If so, what had happened? Had I ever drunk from his glass? Shared his food? I tried to establish if there had ever been a bridge between his system and mine. Then I thought of him. I thought of gay sex and hard drugs. But Paul wasn’t gay. He had never told me so outright, but I knew him well enough and I had never detected the least ambivalence. I likewise couldn’t imagine him a heroin addict. In any case, that wasn’t it. Three years ago, when he was sixteen, he had gone to Jamaica on a Christmas holiday with his parents. They had had a car accident. Paul’s right leg had been broken and he’d lost some blood. He had received a blood transfusion at the local hospital. Six witnesses of the accident had come along to volunteer blood. Three were of the right blood group. Several phone calls and a little research turned up the fact that one of the three had died unexpectedly two years later while being treated for pneumonia. An autopsy had revealed that the man had severe toxoplasmic cerebral lesions. A suspicious combination.

I went to visit Paul that weekend at his home in wealthy Rosedale. I didn’t want to; I wanted to block the whole thing off mentally. I asked—this was my excuse— if he was sure his parents cared for a visitor. He insisted that I come. And I did. I came through. I drove down to Toronto. And I was right about his parents. Because what hurt most that first weekend was not Paul, but Paul’s family.

After learning how he had probably caught the virus, Paul’s father, Jack, didn’t utter a syllable for the rest of that day. Early the next morning he fetched the tool kit in the basement, put his winter parka over his housecoat, stepped out onto the driveway, and proceeded to destroy the family car. Because he had been the driver when they had had the accident in Jamaica, even though it hadn’t been his fault and it had been in another car, a rental. He took a hammer and shattered all the lights and windows. He scraped and trashed the entire body. He banged nails into the tires. He siphoned the gasoline from the tank, poured it over and inside the car, and set it on fire. That’s when neighbours called the firefighters. They rushed to the scene and put the fire out. The police came, too. When he blurted out why he had done it, all of them were very understanding and the police left without charging him or anything; they only asked if he wanted to go to the hospital, which he didn’t. So that was the first thing I saw when I walked up to Paul’s large, corner-lot house: a burnt wreck of a Mercedes covered in dried foam. Jack was a hard-working corporate lawyer. When Paul introduced me to him, he grinned, shook my hand hard and said, “Good to meet you!” Then he didn’t seem to have anything else to say. His face was red. Paul’s mother, Mary, was in their bedroom. I had met her at the beginning of the university year. As a young woman she had earned an M.A. in anthropology from McGill, she had been a highly ranked amateur tennis player, and she had travelled. Now she worked parttime for a human rights organization. Paul was proud of his mother and got along with her very well. She was a smart, energetic woman. But here she was, lying awake on the bed in a fetal position, looking like a wrinkled balloon, all the taut vitality drained out of her. Paul stood next to the bed and just said, “My mother.” She barely reacted. I didn’t know what to do. Paul’s sister, Jennifer, a graduate student in sociology at the University of Toronto, was the most visibly distraught. Her eyes were red, her face was puffy—she looked terrible. I don’t mean to be funny, but even George H., the family Labrador, was grief-stricken. He had squeezed himself under the living-room sofa, wouldn’t budge, and whined all the time.

The verdict had come on Wednesday morning, and since then (it was Friday) none of them, George H. included, had eaten a morsel of food. Paul’s father and mother hadn’t gone to work, and Jennifer hadn’t gone to school. They slept, when they slept, wherever they happened to be. One morning I found Paul’s father sleeping on the living-room floor, fully dressed and wrapped in the Persian rug, a hand reaching for the dog beneath the sofa. Except for frenzied bursts of phone conversation, the house was quiet.

In the middle of it all was Paul, who wasn’t reacting. At a funeral where the family members are broken with pain and grief, he was the funeral director going about with professional calm and dull sympathy. Only on the third day of my stay did he start to react. But death couldn’t make itself understood. Paul knew that something awful was happening to him, but he couldn’t grasp it. Death was beyond him. It was a theoretical abstraction. He spoke of his condition as if it were news from a foreign country. He said, “I’m going to die,” the way he might say, “There was a ferry disaster in Bangladesh.”

I had meant to stay just the weekend—there was school—but I ended up staying ten days. I did a lot of housecleaning and cooking during that time. The family didn’t notice much, but that was all right. Paul helped me, and he liked that because it gave him something to do. We had the car towed away, we replaced a phone that Paul’s father had destroyed, we cleaned the house spotlessly from top to bottom, we gave George H. a bath (George H. because Paul really liked the Beatles and when he was a kid he liked to say to himself when he was walking the dog, “At this very moment, unbeknown to anyone, absolutely incognito, Beatle Paul and Beatle George are walking the streets of Toronto,” and he would dream about what it would be like to sing “Help!” in Shea Stadium or something like that), and we went food shopping and nudged the family into eating. I say “we” and “Paul helped”—what I mean is that I did everything while he sat in a chair nearby. Drugs called dapsone and trimethoprim were overcoming Paul’s pneumonia, but he was still weak and out of breath. He moved about like an old man, slowly and conscious of every exertion.

It took the family a while to break out of its shock. During the course of Paul’s illness I noticed three states they would go through. In the first, common at home, when the pain was too close, they would pull away and each do their thing: Paul’s father would destroy something sturdy, like a table or an appliance, Paul’s mother would lie on her bed in a daze, Jennifer would cry in her bedroom, and George H. would hide under the sofa and whine. In the second, at the hospital often, they would rally around Paul, and they would talk and sob and encourage each other and laugh and whisper. Finally, in the third, they would display what I suppose you could call normal behaviour, an ability to get through the day as if death didn’t exist, a composed, somewhat numb face of courage that, because it was required every single day, became both heroic and ordinary. The family went through these states over the course of several months, or in an hour. i don’t want to talk about what AIDS does to a body. Imagine it very bad—and then make it worse (you can’t imagine the degradation). Look up in the dictionary the word “flesh”—such a plump word—and then look up the word “melt.”

That’s not the worst of it, anyway. The worst of it is the resistance put up, the I’m-not-going-to-die virus. It’s the one that affects the most people because it attacks the living, the ones who surround and love the dying. That virus infected me early on. I remember the day precisely. Paul was in the hospital. He was eating his supper, his whole supper, till the plate was clean and shiny, though he wasn’t at all hungry. I watched him as he chased down every last pea with his fork and as he consciously chewed every mouthful before swallowing. It will help my body fight. Every little bit counts—that’s what he was thinking. It was written all over his face, all over his body, all over the walls. I wanted to scream, “Forget the fucking peas, Paul. You’re going to die! DIE!” Except that the words “death” and “dying,” and their various derivatives and synonyms, were now tacitly forbidden from our talk. So I just sat there, my face emptied of any expression, anger roiling me up inside. My condition got much worse every time I saw Paul shave. All he had were a few downy whiskers on his chin; he just wasn’t the hairy type. Still, he began to shave every day. Every day he lathered up his face with a mountain of shaving cream and scraped it off with a disposable razor. It’s an image that has become engraved in my memory: a vacillatingly healthy Paul dressed in a hospital gown standing in front of a mirror, turning his head this way and that, pulling his skin here and there, meticulously doing something that was utterly, utterly useless.

I botched my academic year. I was skipping lectures and seminars constantly and I couldn’t write any essays. In fact, I couldn’t even read anymore; I would stare for hours at the same paragraph of Kant or Heidegger, trying to understand what it was saying, trying to focus, without any success. At the same time, I developed a loathing for my country. Canada reeked of insipidity, comfort and insularity. Canadians were up to their necks in materialism and above the neck it was all American television. Nowhere could I see idealism or rigour. There was nothing but deadening mediocrity. Canada’s policy on Central America, on Native issues, on the environment, on Reagan’s America, on everything, made my stomach turn. There was nothing about this country that I liked, nothing. I couldn’t wait to escape.

One day in a philosophy seminar—that was my major—I was doing a presentation on Hegel’s philosophy of history. The professor, an intelligent and considerate man, interrupted me and asked me to elucidate a point he hadn’t understood. I fell silent. I looked about the cosy, book-filled office where we were sitting. I remember that moment of silence very clearly because it was precisely then, rising through my confusion with unstoppable force, that I boiled over with anger and cynicism. I screamed, I got up, I projected the hefty Hegel book through the closed window, and I stormed out of the office, slamming the door as hard as I could and kicking in one of its nicely sculptured panels for good measure.

I tried to withdraw from Ellis, but I missed the deadline. I appealed and appeared in front of a committee, the Committee on Undergraduate Standings and Petitions, CUSP they call it. My grounds for withdrawing were Paul, but when the chairman of CUSP prodded me and asked me in a glib little voice what exactly I meant by “emotional distress,” I looked at him and I decided that Paul’s agony wasn’t an orange I was going to peel and quarter and present to him. This time, however, I didn’t make a scene. I just said, “I’ve changed my mind. I would like to withdraw my petition. Thank you for your attention,” and I walked out. As a result I failed my year. I didn’t care and I don’t care. I hung around Roetown, a nice place to hang around but what i really want to tell you about, the purpose of this story, is the Roccamatio family of Helsinki. That’s not Paul’s family; his last name was Atsee. Nor is it my family.

You see, Paul spent months in the hospital. When his condition was stable he came home, but mostly I remember him at the hospital. The course of his illnesses, tests and treatments became the course of his life. Against my will I became familiar with words like azidothymidine, alpha interferon, domipramine, nitrazepam. (When you’re with people who are really sick, you discover what an illusion science can be.) I visited Paul. I was making the trip to Toronto to see him once or twice during the week, and often on weekends too, and I was calling him every day. When I was there, if he was strong enough, we would go for a walk or see a movie or a play. Mostly, though, we just sat around. But when you’re between four walls and neither of you wants to watch television anymore, and the papers have been read, and you’re sick of playing cards, chess, Scrabble and Trivial Pursuit, and you can’t always be talking about it and its progress, you run out of ways to whittle away the time. Which was fine. Neither Paul nor I minded just sitting there, listening to music, lost in our own thoughts.

Except that I started feeling we should do something with that time. I don’t mean put on togas and ruminate philosophically about life, death, God, the universe and the meaning of it all. We had done that in first term, before we even knew he was sick. That’s the staple of undergraduate life, isn’t it? What else is there to talk about when you’ve stayed up all night till sunrise? Or when you’ve just read Descartes or Berkeley or T.S. Eliot for the first time? And anyway, Paul was nineteen. What are you at nineteen? You’re a blank page. You’re all hopes and dreams and uncertainties. You’re all future and little philosophy. What I meant was that between the two of us we had to do something constructive, something that would make something out of nothing, sense out of nonsense, something that would go beyond talking about life, death, God, the universe and the meaning of it all and actually be those things. I gave it a good thinking. I had plenty of time to think: in the spring I got a job as a gardener for the city of Roetown. I spent my days tending flowerbeds, clipping shrubbery and mowing lawns, work that kept my hands busy but left my mind free.

The idea came to me one day as I was pushing a gas mower across an expanse of municipal lawn, my ears muffled by industrial ear protectors. Two words stopped me dead in my tracks: Boccaccio’s Decameron. I had read a beaten-up copy of the Italian classic when I was in India. Such a simple idea: an isolated villa outside of Florence; the world dying of the Black Death; ten people gathered together hoping to survive; telling each other stories to pass the time. That was it. The transformative wizardry of the imagination. Boccaccio had done it in the fourteenth century, we would do it in the twentieth: we would tell each other stories. But we would be the sick this time, not the world, and we wouldn’t be fleeing it, either. On the contrary: with our stories we would be remembering the world, re-creating it, embracing it. Yes, to meet as storytellers to embrace the world—there, that was how Paul and I would destroy the void. The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. Paul and I would create a story about a family, a large family, to allow diverse yet related stories, to ensure continuity and development. The family would be Canadian and the setting would be contemporary, to make the historical and cultural references easy. I would have to be a firm guide and not let the stories slide into mere autobiography. And I would have to be well prepared so that I could carry the story all by myself when Paul was too weak or depressed. I would also have to convince him that he had no choice, that this storytelling wasn’t a game or something on the same level as watching a movie or talking about politics. He would have to see that everything besides the story was useless, even his desperate existential thoughts that did nothing but frighten him. Only the imaginary must count.

But the imaginary doesn’t spring from nothing. If our story was to have any stamina, any breadth and depth, if it was to avoid both literal reality and irrelevant fantasy, it would need a structure, a guideline of sorts, some curb along which we blind could tap our white canes. I racked my brains trying to find just such a structure. We needed something firm yet loose, that would both restrict us and inspire us.

I hit upon it while picking weeds: we would use the history of the twentieth century. Not that the story would start in 1901 and progress up to 1986—that wouldn’t be much of a blueprint. Rather, the twentieth century would be our mould; we would use one event from each year as a metaphorical guideline. It would be a story in eighty-six episodes, each episode echoing one event from one year of the unfolding century.

To have figured out what to make of my time with Paul electrified me. I was bursting with ideas. Nothing struck me as more worthwhile than making the trip from Roetown to Toronto—commuting, imagine; that dull, work-related chore—to invent stories with Paul. I explained it to him carefully. It was at the hospital. He was undergoing tests.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “What do you mean by ‘metaphorical guideline’? And when does the story take place?”

“Nowadays. The family exists right now. The historical events we choose will be a parallel, something to guide us in making up our stories about the family. Like Homer’s Odyssey was a parallel for Joyce when he was writing Ulysses.”

“I’ve never read Ulysses.”

“That doesn’t matter. The point is, the novel takes place in Dublin on a single day in 1904, but it’s named after an ancient Greek epic. Joyce used the ten years’ wandering of Ulysses after the Trojan War as a parallel for his story in Dublin. His story is a metaphorical transformation of The Odyssey.”

“Why don’t we just read the book aloud since I’ve never read it?”

“Because we don’t want to be spectators, Paul.”

“Oh.”

“To start with, we have to decide where the family lives.”

He was looking at me blankly. He was sceptical— and tired. I insisted. I even got a touch annoyed. I didn’t use any of the D words, but they were in the air. His face crumpled and he started to cry. I apologized immediately. Yes, we would read Ulysses aloud, what a good idea. And then—why not?—War and Peace. I had left his room, was stepping into the elevator, when a long shout exploded in the corridor.

“Helsinkiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!”

I smiled. You see, Paul and I were on the same wavelength. We were young, and the young can be radical. We’re not encrusted with habits and traditions. If we catch ourselves in time, we can start all over. So the story would take place in Helsinki, the capital of Finland. A good choice. A faraway city where neither of us had been would be much easier for our fancy to play with than one that was right in front of our eyes. I returned to Paul’s room. His face was still red from shouting.

I asked him about the name of the family. He pouted his lips and narrowed his eyes and thought for a moment. Then he expelled a sound: “Roccamatio.” What? “The Roccamatios—Rok-kah-MAH-tee-ohs.” I wasn’t keen on that one. Not very realistic. Something more Nordic-sounding might be better, no? But Paul insisted: the Roccamatios—Rok-kah-MAH-tee-ohs, he repeated—were a Finnish family of Italian extraction. So be it. The Helsinki Roccamatios were located and baptized. Their story was waiting to be told. We agreed on the rules: I would be the judge of what was fictionally acceptable; transparent autobiography was forbidden. The story would take place nowadays, the mid-1980s. Each episode would be related in one sitting and would resemble one event from a consecutive year of the twentieth century. We would alternate in telling the story; I would have the odd years, Paul would have the even years. We discussed what we knew about Helsinki and agreed on the following: one, it had a population of a million inhabitants; two, it was the capital of Finland in every way—political, commercial, industrial, cultural, etc.; three, it was an important port; four, it had a small but fractious Swedish-speaking minority; and five, Russia always weighed heavily on the mood of the nation. Finally, we agreed that the Roccamatios would be a secret between the two of us. We decided that after a period of reflection and research, I would start with the first episode. I brought Paul a pen, some paper, and a three-volume work called A History of the 20th Century. His father set a small bookcase with wheels beside his bed and filled it with all thirty-two volumes of the 15th edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Now understand that you’re not going to hear the story of the Helsinki Roccamatios. Certain intimacies shouldn’t be made public. They should be known to exist, that’s all. The telling of the story of the Roccamatios was difficult, especially as the years went by. We started brave and strong, arguing all the time and interrupting each other constantly, surprising ourselves with our cleverness and originality, laughing a whole lot— but it’s so tiring to re-create the world when you’re not at the peak of health. Paul wouldn’t be so much unwilling— he would still object or redirect me with a word or a scowl—as unable. Even listening became tiring. The story of the Helsinki Roccamatios was often whispered. And it wasn’t whispered to you. Of these AIDS years, all I have kept—outside my head—is this record:

The Facts Behind the Helsinki Roccamatios

1901—After a reign of sixty-four years, Queen Victoria dies. Her reign has witnessed a period of incredible industrial expansion and increasing material prosperity. In its own blinkered and delusional way, the Victorian age has been the happiest of all—an age of stability, order, wealth, enlightenment and hope. Science and technology are new and triumphant, and Utopia seems at hand. I begin with an ending, with the death of Sandro Roccamatio, the patriarch of the family. It is dramatic, and it allows me to introduce the family members, who are all at the funeral.

1902—Under the forceful leadership of Clifford Sifton, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier’s Minister of the Interior, the settlement of Canada’s west is in full swing. Sifton sends out millions of pamphlets in dozens of languages and strings a net of agents across northern and central Europe. Ships that have just dumped their Canadian wheat on the Old Continent bring home the catch. In less than a decade the population of the Prairies increases by a million inhabitants and wheat production jumps fivefold. Laurier proclaims to the booming country, “The twentieth century belongs to Canada.” 1903—Orville and Wilbur Wright fly at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina. Their powered machine, Flyer 1 (now popularly called Kitty Hawk ), stays in the air for twelve seconds on its first flight, fifty-nine seconds on its fourth and last.

1904—As a direct result of the Dreyfus affair, Prime Minister Emile Combes of France introduces a bill for the complete separation of Church and State. The bill guarantees complete liberty of conscience, removes the State from having any say in the appointment of ecclesiastics or in the payment of their salaries, and severs all other connections between Church and State.

A routine to our storytelling has already developed. It’s nearly a ceremony. First, and always first, we shake hands every time we meet, like the Europeans. Paul takes pleasure in this, I can tell. If there’s a need, we deal with health and therapy. Then we small-talk, usually about politics since we’re both diligent newspaper readers. Finally, after a short pause to collect ourselves, we get on with the Roccamatios.

1905—The German monthly Annalen der Physik publishes papers by Albert Einstein, a twenty-six-year-old German Jew who works as an examiner in a patent office in Bern, Switzerland. The Special Theory of Relativity is born. There is energy everywhere. E = mc2, as Einstein puts it.

1906—Tommy Burns defeats Marvin Hart to become the first (and only) Canadian to win the world heavyweight boxing championship. Burns defends his title eleven times in three years, notably knocking out the Irish champion Jem Roche in 1 minute and 28 seconds, the shortest heavyweight title defence ever.

Paul is nearly well. He is plagued by minor ills—night sweating here, diarrhea there—and a lack of energy, but it’s nothing unmanageable. He is at home, and as he has never been sick a day in his life until now, the routine of illness has an exotic appeal. He is started on a program of azidothymidine (AZT) and multivitamins, and he visits the hospital every week, sometimes staying overnight. He likes the hospital. The omnipotent men and women in white, their scientific jargon, the innumerable tests, the impeccable cleanliness of the place—they exhaust and reassure him. His mood is good.

We make plans. We speak of travel. I have travelled some, Paul less, mostly with his family, and we both see travel as essential to growth, as a state of being, as a metaphor for inner journeying. Disdaining the well- worn path, we hardly speak of Europe. We are magi, not tourists. After touching on Iceland, Portugal, Bulgaria and Poland, our star leads us to other lands, to Turkey and Yemen, to Mexico and Peru and Bolivia, to South Africa and the Philippines, to India and Nepal. 1907—A new strain of wheat, Marquis, is sent out to Indian Head, Saskatchewan, for testing. It is the result of an exhaustive scientific selection process, the credit for which goes to Charles Edwards Saunders, cerealist at the Ottawa Experimental Farm. The new strain’s response to Saskatchewan conditions is phenomenal. It is resistant to heavy winds and to disease, and it produces high yields that make excellent flour. Most importantly it matures early, thus avoiding the damage of frost and greatly extending the areas of Alberta and Saskatchewan where wheat can be grown. By 1920, Marquis will make up 90 percent of prairie spring wheat, helping make Canada one of the great breadbaskets of the world.

If I’m not distracted by my job or by thoughts of food, transportation and the like, I think of the Roccamatios. They are my mind’s natural focus. I have to find historical events. Then I have to think of plot and parallel, of the way in which my story will resemble the historical event, whether in an obvious way or a subtle way, for one symbolic moment (at the beginning or at the end?) or all along. These thoughts pester me, challenge me, make me go on. I am hardly aware of my workaday life. 1908—Ernest Thompson Seton, author, naturalist and artist, organizes the Boy Scouts of Canada. The aim of the organization, like that of the Girl Guides founded two years later, is to foster good citizenship, decent behaviour, love of nature, and skill in various outdoor activities. The Scouts follow a moral code and are encouraged to perform a daily good deed. They go camping, swimming, sailing and hiking. They undertake community service projects. Their motto is “Be Prepared,” and they shake hands with the left hand.

I had not envisioned the Roccamatios so ambitiously. Marriages, the runaway daughter, the bitter but liberating divorce, childbirth, entrepreneurial success, romance, community leadership—they are a dynamic family. Paul and I go about them briskly. I meant for us to alternate years, but so far they have been more of a co-operative invention.

But there are clouds on the horizon. The year 1909 is mine. I see trial and error in the story I make of it. Paul sees trial and fraud. It’s the first time we quibble. And I’m troubled by his story for 1910.

1909—Commander Robert E. Peary, on his third attempt, claims to reach the North Pole. Though generally accepted, the claim is questioned by many because of the inadequacy of his observations and the incredible timetable of travelling he has submitted.

1910—Japan, increasingly militaristic and determined to expand its power and influence, annexes Korea and begins to exploit the country’s people and resources entirely for its own benefit. Koreans are denied freedom of speech, of assembly and association, even of going to school in their own language. I launch the Roccamatios into the hurly-burly of Helsinki municipal politics!

1911—A federal election is called in Canada. The dominant issue of the campaign is reciprocity, an agreement to lower tariffs between Canada and the United States. Liberal Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier favours reciprocity. Conservative Opposition leader Robert Borden does not. Eastern Canadian manufacturers cry that such an economic accord will be the first step in a political takeover. Certain statements by influential Americans—“I hope to see the day when the American flag will float over every square foot of the British North American possessions, clear to the North Pole,” says Champ Clark, Speaker of the House of Representatives—seem to justify those fears. Laurier and his Liberals go down to a resounding defeat, and Borden becomes prime minister.

Paul’s moods are changing. I think he’s starting to realize what he’s in for. Initially his pills and injections were a source of delight. Here comes health, they signalled to him. You’ll beat this. But health eludes him, and he’s angry about it. He still takes his medicines religiously, but they taste bitter now, not sweet. In 1912, the Minimum Wage law is passed in England; Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole; a beautiful bust of Queen Nefertiti is discovered in Egypt by German archaeologists; Edgar Rice Burroughs publishes his first Tarzan stories; Marcel Duchamp shows his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2. But Paul will have none of these. His story, about a mugging, is plain, simple and brutal.

1912—After a siege of five hours in Choisy-le-Roy, a suburb of Paris, anarchist Jules Joseph Bonnot is killed. Bonnot and his gang, la bande à Bonnot as they are known, have been terrorizing French society with the jaunty unconcern with which they shoot tellers, guards, passers-by, policemen, dwellers and drivers during their bare-faced bank robberies, break-ins and car thefts. In the final attack on his holdout, the authorities deploy against a solitary Bonnot three artillery regiments and five police brigades, and they use guns, heavy machine guns and dynamite. Bonnot is found, still alive, wrapped in a mattress. He is finished off. There are more than thirty thousand spectators at the siege. Lasting optimism has one essential ally: reason. Any optimism that is unreasonable is bound to be dashed by reality, leading to even more unhappiness. Optimism, therefore, must always be illuminated by the gentle, purging light of reason and be unshakeably grounded in sanity of mind, so that pessimism becomes a foolish, short-sighted attitude. What this means—reasonableness being the tepid, inglorious thing it is—is that optimism can arise only from small but undeniable achievements. In 1913, I put my best foot forward.

1913—The zipper is patented. Paul has been hospitalized. He’s having a relapse of Pneumocystis carinii. He’s put on dapsone and trimethoprim again, but this time he suffers side effects: a fever, and a rash all over his neck and chest. He’s amazingly thin; he hardly eats and his diarrhea is intractable. He has a tube up his nose. In his story, Marco Roccamatio has a serious fall-out with his brother Orlando.

1914—In Sarajevo, for the sake of a South Slav nationalist dream, nineteen-year-old Gavrilo Princip pulls the trigger of his revolver and starts the First World War. Austria declares war on Serbia. Germany declares war on Russia. Germany declares war on France. Germany declares war on Belgium. Great Britain (and with her Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Newfoundland) declares war on Germany. Montenegro declares war on Austria. Austria declares war on Russia. Serbia declares war on Germany. Montenegro declares war on Germany. France declares war on Austria. Great Britain declares war on Austria. Japan declares war on Germany. Japan declares war on Austria. Austria declares war on Belgium. Russia declares war on Turkey. Serbia declares war on Turkey. Great Britain declares war on Turkey. France declares war on Turkey. Egypt declares war on Turkey.

I tell Paul 1914 was the year the Panama Canal was opened and wouldn’t it make for a more pleasant story?

“Your history is biased,” he replies.

“So is yours,” I shoot back.

“But mine is the correct bias.”

“How do you know?”

“Because it accounts for the future.”

I can’t understand it. I have read of people who have AIDS who live for years. Yet week by week Paul is getting thinner and weaker. He is receiving treatments, yes, but they don’t seem to be doing much, except for his pneumonia. Anyway, he doesn’t seem to have any particular illness, just a wasting away. I ask a doctor about it, nearly complain about it. He’s standing in a doorway. He listens to my litany silently—he’s a big, unshaven man and his eyes are red—and then he doesn’t say anything and finally he says in a low, measured voice, “We’re—doing—our—best.”

It’s my turn. I must be careful. I refuse to invoke the war. I would like the extension of suffrage to women in Denmark. But a story of reconciliation would not please Paul. I consider the publication of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. It’s too dark. I must neither give in to Paul, nor ignore him. I must steer between total abstraction and grim reality. I don’t know what to do. I go for the ambiguous.

1915—Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist and geophysicist, publishes The Origin of Continents and Oceans, in which he gives the classic expression of the controversial theory of continental drift. Wegener postulates that a mother landmass, which he names Pangaea, broke up some 250 million years ago, the pieces drifting apart at the rate of roughly an inch a year, thus producing the continents of today.

“An inch a year?”Paul smiles. He likes my story, too. But he won’t be stopped.

1916—Germany declares war on Portugal. Austria declares war on Portugal. Romania declares war on Austria. Italy declares war on Germany. Germany declares war on Romania. Turkey declares war on Romania. Bulgaria declares war on Romania. More tests. Paul has something called cytomegalovirus, which may account for his diarrhea and his general weakness. It’s a highly disseminating infection, could affect his eyes, lungs, liver, gastrointestinal tract, spinal cord or brain. There’s nothing to be done. No effective therapy exists. Paul is speechlessly depressed. I give in to him.

1917—The United States declares war on Germany. Panama declares war on Germany. Cuba declares war on Germany. Greece declares war on Austria, Bulgaria, Germany and Turkey. Siam declares war on Germany and Austria. Liberia declares war on Germany. China declares war on Germany and Austria. Brazil declares war on Germany. The United States declares war on Austria. Panama declares war on Austria. Cuba declares war on Austria.

For 1918 Paul wants to use further declarations of war—Haiti and Honduras declared war on Germany, he informs me—but for the first time I use my power of veto and declare these fictionally unacceptable. Nor do I accept the publication of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, in which Spengler argues that civilizations are like natural organisms, with life cycles implying birth, bloom and decay, and that Western civilization has entered the last, inevitable stage of decay. Enough is enough, I tell Paul. There is hope. The sun still shines. Paul is angry, but he is tired and he submits. I think he was expecting my censure, for he surprises me with a curious event and a fully prepared story.

1918—After an extensive study of globular clusters—immense, densely packed groups of stars—Harlow Shapley determines that the centre of the Milky Way Galaxy, our galaxy, is in the Sagittarius constellation and that our solar system lies about two thirds of the way from this centre, some thirty thousand light years away.

“Isn’t it grand,” I say.

“Aren’t we lonely,” he replies.

His story—of Orlando, of alcoholism—is ugly. 1919—Walter Gropius becomes head of the Bauhaus, a school of art, design and architecture in Weimar, Germany. Under his leadership, the teachers at Bauhaus break with the past. They emphasize geometrical forms, smooth surfaces, regular outlines, primary colours and modern materials. Just as importantly, they take to massmanufacturing techniques, making their functional, aesthetically pleasing objects affordable to everyone. Never before have objects of daily life looked so good to so many.

“This AZT is exhausting,” says Paul. He is anemic because of it and receives blood transfusions regularly. In 1920, I forbid the publication of Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which Freud posits an underlying, destructive drive, Thanatos, the death instinct, which seeks to end life’s inevitable tensions by ending life itself. Paul changes historical events while keeping the same Roccamatio story.

1920—Dada triumphs. Born in Zurich during the depths of the First World War and spread by a merry, desperate band of writers and artists, including Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Richard Hulsenbeck, Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Francis Picabia, George Grosz and many others, Dadaism seeks the demolition of all the values of art, society and civilization. Paul tells me over the phone that he’s developing Kaposi’s sarcoma. He has purple, blue lesions on his feet and ankles. Not many, but they are there. The doctors have zeroed in on them. He will be put on alpha interferon and undergo radiation therapy. Paul’s voice is shaky. But we agree, we strongly agree, with what the doctors have said, that radiation therapy has been found to be successful against localized Kaposi’s sarcoma, and he’s only got it on his skin, in fact, only on his feet, and it doesn’t hurt, and at least his lungs are fine. I promise to come by the hospital. Paul is quiet. He is in his usual, favourite position: lying on his back against a fastidiously constructed pyramid of three pillows.

1921—Frederick Banting and Charles Best discover insulin, the glucose-metabolizing hormone secreted by the pancreas. It is immediately and spectacularly effective as a therapy for diabetes. The lives of millions are saved. I have just started my story when Paul interrupts me.

“In 1921, Albert Camus died in a car crash.” He doesn’t say anything more. I continue until he interrupts me a second time.

“In 1921, Albert Camus died in a car crash.”

“Paul, he didn’t. Camus died in 1960.”

“No, Albert Camus died in a car crash in 1921. He was a passenger in a Facel-Vega. Never heard of it, have you? It was a small series, French copy of a Chrysler, not very road-tested. Camus and some friends were returning—”

“Paul, what are you doing?”

“They were returning to Paris from the Lubéron, where Camus had bought a beautiful white house with his Nobel money. The road was—”

“Okay, that’s enough.”

“The road was straight and dry and empty. Along the road were trees. Suddenly—an axle that broke? a wheel that blocked?—for no reason, the car—”

“You’re not following the rules, Paul.You’re chea—”

“THE CAR SLID and hit a tree. Camus was killed instantly—”

“In 1921, Banting and Best isolate insulin, the glu—”

“In 1921, Camus was killed instantly—”

“The glucose-metabolizing hormone—”

“By a tree—”

“By a hormone—”

“In 1921, the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and it killed—”

“Ha! In 1921, Banting and Best—”

“In 1921, the bomb was dropped and it killed—”

“It is spectacularly effective as—”

“It killed—”

“Is spectacularly effective—”

“It ki—”

“Is effective.”

“It—”

“So, so effective.”

He’s tiring; I can sense he will submit in a moment. “IT WAS DROPPED AND IT KILLED CAMUS!”

He shrieks this in a tone of voice that chills me and shuts me up instantly. He’s glaring at me, wild-eyed. I’m thinking, What have you done, you idiot? when he lunges for me. I’m startled and pull back, but he’s going to fall to the floor, so I catch him. I’m amazed at how light he feels. He punches me twice in the face, but he’s so weak it doesn’t hurt. He begins to sob.

“It’s all right, Paul, it’s all right. I’m sorry,” I tell him softly. “It’s all right. I’m sorry. Take it easy. Listen, I’ve got something better. In 1921, they didn’t discover insulin. In 1921, Sacco and Vanzetti were sentenced to death. Sacco and Vanzetti, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti.”

His tears are flooding his face and dripping onto my arms. I lift him and push him back onto the bed. “Sacco and Vanzetti, Paul, Sacco and Vanzetti. It’s all right. I’m sorry. Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti.”

I get a wet facecloth and wipe my arms and gently wipe his face. I comb his hair with my fingers. “It’s all right, Paul. Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sacco and Vanzetti.” I improvise a grim story. Sometimes our stories are short on plot, but by means of details left unexplained, by means of fertile ambiguities, they nonetheless resonate in the way of a painting, static but rich. But here it’s not at all like that. There is little plot and little meaning. The story just stumbles along, unbelievable, unexplainable. Loretta Roccamatio drowns herself.

1921—Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, both poor Italian immigrants and anarchists, are found guilty and sentenced to death for two murders committed during a robbery in South Braintree, Massachusetts. In spite of flaws in the evidence, irregularities at their trial, accusations that the judge and jury were prejudiced against their political beliefs and social status, evidence that pointed to a known criminal gang, in spite of worldwide protests and appeals for clemency, Sacco and Vanzetti will be executed in 1927.

Paul is put on anti-depressants—amitriptyline at first, then domipramine. It will take about two weeks before they become effective. In the meantime he is kept under close surveillance, especially at night, when he sleeps only in fits. The clinical psychologist comes by nearly every afternoon. I call Paul up to six times a day. 1922—Benito Mussolini, at the age of thirty-nine, becomes the youngest prime minister in Italian history, and the first of Europe’s 20th-century fascist dictators.

“I can feel them in my blood. I can feel each virus as it flows up my arm, crosses my chest, goes into my heart, and then shoots out to one of my legs. And I can’t do anything. I just lie here waiting, knowing it’s going to get worse,” he says.

He’s so fragile. I give in to him again.

1923—Germany is incapable of making its payments on the war reparations imposed by the Allies in the Treaty of Versailles (set at the equivalent of thirty-three billion dollars). France and Belgium occupy the Ruhr district to force compliance. The German government blocks all reparation deliveries and encourages passive resistance. The French and Belgians respond with mass arrests and an economic blockade. The German economy is devastated, and its government begins to founder. The ground is fertile for extremists. Paul is plainly waiting for me. He’s bored. Strange how this illness, which aims to rob him of time, leaves him with so much of it on his hands.

1924—Vladimir Lenin, whose health has been precarious for the last eighteen months, dies of a stroke at the age of fifty-four. The secretary general of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, Joseph Stalin, whom Lenin had unsuccessfully tried to remove, starts an extravagant cult of the deceased leader, thus portraying himself as Lenin’s greatest defender. I bump into Paul’s parents as I’m leaving the hospital. I have gotten to know them well. They have taken to me, as I have to them. I used to call ahead when I was visiting Paul at home, but quickly I was given a key and told that I was welcome any hour of the day or night, seven days a week, no knock on the door required. It’s as though I have three parents now instead of one (my father died when I was ten): Jack pats me on the back, and Mary smiles and rests her fingers lightly on my forearm as she tells me that there are mocha yogurts in the fridge, my favourite.

1925—Adolf Hitler publishes The Settlement of Accounts, the first volume of his political manifesto, Mein Kampf (My Struggle). “All who are not of good race are chaff,” he writes. Germans “must occupy themselves not merely with the breeding of dogs, horses and cats but also with the purity of their own blood.” The book is pompous in style, repetitious, meandering, illogical, and filled with grammatical mistakes. The ranting of a halfeducated nut.

I should have gone for a better story; Paul seems to be improving. His Kaposi is uncertain, but his diarrhea is nearly gone.

1926—Rudolf Valentino, through the intercession of a ruptured ulcer, suddenly enters immortality at the age of thirty-one in New York City. Valentino came to the United States from Italy in 1913 and variously worked as a gardener, dishwasher, dancer in vaudeville and bit part actor before playing Julio in The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (1921). He immediately became the greatest star of the silent-movie era. His death provokes a worldwide commotion. There are suicides, riots at his lying in state, and a queue to see his body that stretches for eleven blocks.

Paul is feeling better. He has an appetite and hardly any diarrhea. And his Kaposi is looking fantastic. He shows me his left foot. The lighter lesions are gone, and the bigger ones are smaller and paler in colour. Most importantly, he’s in a great mood. He’s just received a transfusion and he’s feeling strong. On a Saturday morning, I’m at the hospital with his family. They’re happy and excited: Paul is coming home. He puts on his street clothes, which he hasn’t worn in several weeks. They fit him loosely. His pants look like they’re empty, and his shirt dangles on his frame. I notice it, we all notice it, but we all ignore it. Paul walks a bit unsteadily. There are plenty of arms and smiles to support him.

1927—The near-bankrupt picture company of Warner Brothers releases The Jazz Singer, with Al Jolson. In an otherwise silent feature film, they add four songs, incidental music, various sound effects, and a little synchronized speech to replace the title cards. As a result, the story moves along fluidly and the plot becomes gripping. The film is an enormous success. The era of the talking pictures has begun.

To do something, to pass the time, to assert control, Paul and I rearrange his room. He gives orders and I execute them. We make a circus of it. I huff and puff while lifting a book, then move the bed pretending it’s nothing. Paul laughs.

1928 is Paul’s year—and today is his birthday—and what a good year it was. Suffrage was extended to men and women equally in Great Britain; the Kellogg- Briand Pact, which outlawed war as an instrument of national policy, was signed in Paris by sixty-three countries; Amelia Earhart flew across the Atlantic, the first woman to do so; Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, paving the way for the extraordinarily effective practice of antibiotic therapy for infectious bacterial diseases; Ravel’s Bolero was a universal hit; Canada’s Percy Williams was the sensation of the Amsterdam Olympics, winning gold medals in the 100-metre and 200-metre sprints—yes, it could only be a good story for the Roccamatios. Happy birthday, Paul! 1928—The world sees its first animated sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, by Walt Disney. Its star is a cheerful and mischievous anthropomorphic rodent: Mickey Mouse.

Paul shows me some photos. One is of two boys, fifteenish, sitting in a pile of orange and brown leaves, dressed in jeans and heavy sweaters. They both have wide, slightly demented grins.

“That’s James, my best friend in high school, on the left.”

He doesn’t say who’s on the right. The implication is clear: it’s Paul himself. I manage to check my gasp. But I stare hard. I try to find one point of resemblance— the hair, the chin, the nose, the glint of the eyes, anything—but there’s nothing. Paul Photo and Paul Beside Me are two different people. Paul Beside Me doesn’t notice my reaction. Nothing evokes the past, rejuvenates the sick, raises the very dead, like a collection of family photographs. These flashbacks to a healthy past, to a time of boundless energy and clear skin, cheer Paul up. I take in the remaining photos of this hale and hearty ghost in a state of private horror. We go for a walk, a slow walk. He moves cautiously, dragging his feet lightly, feeling the terrain to avoid any tiring jerks. The summer weather is warm, and there’s the sweetest breeze. He’s deeply stirred by the expanses of green grass and the leaves rustling in the trees. We sit on a park bench. He can’t stop looking about, in a constant state of marvel at Nature. His feelings are intense and radiant. I make 1929 one of our finest stories. 1929—The comic book Tintin au Pays des Soviets is published, the creation of the Belgian Georges Rémi, better known as Hergé. Another twenty-three volumes of the thrilling adventures of the intrepid reporter will follow. The illustrations are precise, brightly coloured and highly readable, and they are drawn in lines that are long and continuous, without shadowing, a spare yet vivid style pioneered by Hergé that becomes known as “ligne claire,”literally, clear line. The world of Tintin will enrapture generations of readers.

Paul has been home for over two weeks. The house is like a solar system, with Paul as the sun, the centre of it all. In every important room in the house, there is an intercom that is linked to all the other intercoms. The system is on all the time. Every rustle, every cough, every word that the Sun King produces is heard throughout his domain. The kitchen is littered with his culinary whims. Medical journals—he buys Nature, Scientific American, The New England Journal of Medicine—lie on bookshelves, on tables, on the floor; his parents secretly loathe these magazines because they make them feel powerless, but he reads them assiduously. His things— a sweater, a half-drunk glass of orange juice, an open book, slippers, an unfinished crossword puzzle, a portable electronic game—are everywhere, left around not because he’s spoiled but because he’s tired and forgetful.

The routine of the household, as regards his parents and his sister, is nearly military: everything significant is done on time and in a manner that is structured and thorough. The aides-de-camp relay themselves in gently waking their commander-in-chief at precisely midnight so that he can take his AZT. This isn’t a sharing of a burden; it’s that they all want their turn. Paul talks of starting his studies again, by correspondence, or, better still, part-time at the University of Toronto. We’re enthusiastic. He’s thinking of majoring in philosophy and film studies.

1930—The American astronomer Clyde Tombaugh discovers the ninth planet of our solar system, Pluto.

The Roccamatios will be interrupted for a week. Paul and his parents are going to their Georgian Bay cottage. “It’s for my white cells,” he tells me. “They don’t want to go up. Big spaces, fresh air—it will be good for them.”

His optimism seems to be flagging.

1931 is my year, but Paul asks to do it. My story is trite—based on the invention of the game Criss-Cross Words, better known later on as Scrabble, by the American architect Alfred Butts—and I feel sad that day, so I let him have it. Before Paul leaves, he tells me a brief, puzzling story. I feel even sadder afterwards. 1931—The Austrian-born American mathematician Kurt Gödel publishes his Incompleteness Theorem, better known as Gödel’s Proof, which shows that within any mathematical system there are propositions that cannot be proved or disproved on the basis of the axioms within that system, and therefore the basic axioms of arithmetic may give rise to contradictions.

Jack and Mary rush Paul back to Toronto. He has abdominal pains that keep him bent in two. They drive him directly to the hospital.

A count of five hundred white cells. Christ. Next to no immunity protection left. He’s wide open.

1932—Socialist Realism is declared the official theory and method of artistic composition in the Soviet Union. The building of a classless society becomes the only acceptable theme of any work of art, and the sole criterion by which its worth will be measured. What results are novels and paintings of meticulous political purity—and unremitting mediocrity.

It’s a ridiculous thing to put in the balance, but in the balance of things I suppose it’s better to be losing a brother than a son. A child dying before a parent, the future before the past—can there be anything more killing to the spirit? It’s the ultimate hopelessness, something worse than death: extinction. No one adapts well to disease, but Jennifer is doing it the least badly. As it has with me, Paul’s illness has throttled her whistling, youthful insouciance. She is more deliberate, less amused, quieter. She tells me that often at night she worries about the small risks of life and can’t fall asleep for them. They terrify her not for her own sake, as you might expect, but for her parents’. With Paul gravely sick, she feels a silent pressure from Jack and Mary: love. She feels that she mustn’t at any cost let them down and die. She doesn’t use the hair dryer in the bathroom anymore for fear of water and electrocution. She doesn’t ride her bicycle any more for fear of gaping sewer grates and swinging car doors. I don’t want to deal with 1933. In fact, I want to drop the Roccamatios completely. I bring an Oriental game that a friend has recently taught me called go. The rules could not be more simple—you play with black and white beads on a board checkered by vertical and horizontal lines, the aim being to capture more territory than your opponent—but the game is as complex as chess, only more accessible to beginners. I think Paul might get into it. He interrupts me.

“You’ve forgotten something, haven’t you?” “I don’t feel like it today.” “You said it was the only thing that counted.” “Well, maybe—” “Do you know what happened in 1933?” “It was the beginning of the New Deal in the United States.” “Try again.” “The rumba is the craze?” “One more time.” “Welcome King Kong and false eyelashes?”

Paul kidnaps my year. Marco Roccamatio gains majority control over Orlando’s group of small shareholders and forces Orlando off the board of directors of the thriving corporation they have been running.

1933—Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. The Third Reich is proclaimed from Potsdam. The first concentration camp is opened on the site of a former ammunition factory in Dachau, Bavaria. Since Paul took 1933, I take 1934, his year, and keep

1935. I impose myself. There is no greater, more beautiful thing than a newborn baby and the love one feels for it. I announce the birth of Lars Roccamatio.

1934—In a poor French-Canadian farmhouse near Callander, in northern Ontario, the Dionne Quintuplets— Émilie, Yvonne, Cécile, Marie, and Annette—are born and live, the first set of identical quints in history ever to survive for more than a few hours. The good news amazes and delights a world in need of good news. Gifts of money, clothes, food, breast milk, equipment and advice begin to pour in from all sides. The Red Cross builds a special, ultramodern hospital for them across from their farmhouse. But people aren’t just generous; they’re also curious. They want to see these miraculous mites for themselves. In short order the world begins to move in on the Dionnes. They become the biggest tourist attraction in Canada. The hospital is expanded and becomes the centre of a complex called “Quintland.” Tourists come and come and come, as many as six thousand a day, to see the five through a one-way glass as they gambol about their special playground. The tourists spend a total estimated at five hundred million dollars. Across the world, Callander becomes the best-known city in Canada, and real-estate values there soar. Hotels, motels, restaurants and souvenir shops proliferate. Those who can’t make the trip to see the Quints in the flesh can see them in their three Hollywood movies, or in the Fox-Movietone newsreels, or on the covers of countless magazines, or in the ads for the many products they endorse. The world wants to know every day how their sweet Quints are doing. Two days later I go for the excitement of a crisis at Helsinki City Hall.

1935—Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett calls a federal election. Since Confederation his administration has come the closest to being a one-man, quasi-dictatorial show. He guaranteed that he would solve the problems of the Depression. “I’ll blast a way through all our difficulties,” he said. In 1935, people who can no longer afford gasoline remove the engines from their cars and hitch the cars to horses; they’re called “Bennett buggies.” In 1935, the Canadian people blast away Bennett. The Conservatives suffer their worst defeat ever, winning only 40 seats in a House of 245. William Lyon Mackenzie King is prime minister again.

Paul is hardly listening to me. I hear a swallowing. I look up from the notes I have made for my story. His eyes are watery and his lips are trembling. I stop. “Ohhhh,” he moans, “I just want to live. I’ll give up on any other ambitions.” He begins to cry. “I don’t ccare if I make nothing of my life. I’ll do any l-l-lousy job, anything.”

We have been through this before, often, but for some reason, at that moment, I’m not prepared. I panic. I get up from the chair next to his bed. I move towards the door (to get someone?). I sit down again. I get up. I sit on the bed.

“I just want t-t-time.”

I want to speak, but the words (what words?) don’t come. I want to cry, but I feel that I mustn’t so I don’t. I stand up. I take hold of the glass of water on his bedside table.

“It’s so unfair.”

I look at the open curtains (maybe I should close them?). I sit down on the chair.

“I w-wish I had a g-g-girlfriend.”

I get up. I put the glass back on the table. I sit on the bed. I put my hand on his hand.

“I can’t take it anymore, I just can’t t-take it anymore.” I look at the door. I look at his sheets (should I rearrange them?). I look at him.

“Paul”—I finally manage some words—“Paul, you can’t give up. You’ve got to hang on till they find a cure. Hundreds of millions of dollars are going into research all over the world, in the US, in France, in Germany, in Holland, here in Canada, everywhere. Scientists are on to this thing like never before for anything else. It’s like a huge medical Manhattan Project. They’re making new discoveries every day. You know that; you’re the one who reads all those scientific magazines. Time is on your side, Paul. But you’ve got to hang on.”

He starts to calm down. We talk some more. He falls asleep. I change my story and whisper it to him so that I don’t wake him.

1935—The Depression is still on, hard. I’m stuck in traffic on the 401 as I’m heading home. I can’t believe I said that. “Time is on your side.” Fuck.

1936—The Spanish Civil War begins, exceptional in its bloodletting ferocity.

Jack just can’t manage it. He’s a member of that square, hard-working war generation, with a career as straight as a railway track, a salary as hefty as a locomotive, and an emotional reserve like a first-class compartment. He’s a man whose happiness operated within a clearly defined structure. When a bomb shattered that structure, he fell apart. He’s the one who has adapted the least well to Paul’s illness. His emotions are a runaway train. He struggles to cope, to stay in control, to feel useful. He’s a fragile man with a hollow look in his eyes and his hair whiter than before. And he’s on antidepressants, just like his son.

1937—Japanese forces invading China come to the capital of the Nationalist government. The rape of Nanking ensues. Over the course of six weeks, more than a third of the city is destroyed, approximately three hundred thousand Chinese citizens and surrendered soldiers are killed, and tens of thousands of women are raped. Paul has received another transfusion. He experiences a moment of strength and—directly related—of euphoria. For 1938 I’m expecting a story inspired by Kristallnacht, the violent pogroms that irrevocably shattered the illusion that Jews might survive in Nazi Germany, but he surprises me. “You’ll like my story,” he tells me. And I do.

1938—Lazlo Biro, a Hungarian-born Argentinian, invents the ballpoint pen. Test, tests, tests. Bad result: lack of oxygen in the blood. Possibly a relapse of PCP. His lungs are fragile and he’s afraid; his breathing is quick and shallow. He doesn’t want to talk about it, but it’s so obviously on our minds. I must tread a fine line.

1939—President Antanas Smetona of Lithuania broadcasts a last speech over the radio, protesting his country’s annexation by the Soviet Union, which will be a brutal affair—one quarter of the Gulag will be composed of Lithuanians by the end of the 1940s. Smetona does not want to make his speech in Lithuanian, which no one outside his small country will understand. But he also refuses to speak the tongues of the oppressors, Russian or German. Smetona makes his last speech in Latin.

I walk around the hospital. To prepare myself. Something will come up. I breathe deeply. Amazing remissions have been reported. In some desperate cases of cancer, for example. Why not here? I see people lying in beds. Many of them catch me as I walk by, their heads turned, their eyes wide open. Why are they here? Do they have it ? I don’t want to know. I go down a staircase, am approaching Paul’s area. There are medical miracles. His system is so young and fit. At the end of a corridor I see a man in his sixties sitting on a chair beneath a window, gently rocking himself back and forth. In his hands he holds a small brown paper bag. Some treat or other, I imagine. He’s plainly dressed, and he waits with the meek patience of the underprivileged. Where’s your son or daughter, old man? Being examined? Undergoing a test? Or just in a sleep akin to a coma? And what was it? Was it sex? Sharing needles? Looking at the man, I’m overwhelmed by the feeling that he’s of no importance. A loser. He could die, his son or daughter could die, and it wouldn’t matter to anyone. A funeral without mourners, a few bags of clothes in the corner of a room, an empty bed—that would be it. Nothing left unfinished, no mark made, no significant memories. Behold the suffering of the man of no importance. Behold the solitude of pain. I can’t face Paul yet. I walk some more.

1940—Doctor Karl Brandt receives a single-paragraph letter from high up. “Doctors to be designated are to be authorized so that patients considered incurable, as far as can be determined from a thorough and rigorous examination of their state of health, can be granted a mercy killing.” Op- eration T4—(Paul interrupts himself. “ Can you believe it? T4, short for Tiergartenstrasse 4, the address in Berlin from which the program was run, and exactly the same name as the cells in the immune system that are attacked by HIV. Isn’t that an amazing coincidence?”)—Operation T4 is set in motion. Grafeneck, a home for the physically handicapped run by the Samaritans, is taken over and transformed, the first of six euthanasia centres. 10,654 “incurable” patients will die there, mostly mentally retarded men, women and children, but also the physically handicapped and others considered “useless eaters” by the Nazis. Those who transport the victims wear white coats to keep up the appearance of a medical operation. The killings are done at first by lethal injection or starvation, but then with poison gas administered in rooms disguised as showers. Relatives receive condolence letters, falsified death certificates signed by physicians, and an urn containing ashes. Operation T4 will claim more than 70,000 lives. It ends officially in August of 1941 after protests from church groups, but in fact it continues covertly, killing another 130,000 victims before the end of the war. And the technology, experience and some of the personnel are transferred outside the country, to Poland, for example, where the Nazis have other plans.

Mary has developed a limited resilience. She has hope. And when her hope is troubled, when the unthinkable forces itself upon her, she seems to find something within her and, diminished, permanently saddened, still manage to go on. Certainly more than Jack, anyway. Maybe she’s religious, I don’t know. I am careful never to talk about religion. Who am I to kick at people’s crutches?

1941—Marshal Pétain institutes Mother’s Day in France. A lumbar puncture isn’t supposed to hurt—it didn’t last time—but Paul screams. They have to go at it twice before they get the needle in right. I think I’m cool—I look Jack and Mary in the eyes and I tell them it doesn’t really hurt, he’s just being over-sensitive, and it’s for a good purpose, it’ll help in establishing a diagnostic, and it doesn’t take long and everything will be all right—I think I’m cool, but when I go to drink, my hand is trembling so much I can’t hold any water in my paper cup. I bend over and drink from the tap. He’s back in his room, lying on his side, exhausted. There are bristles on his pale, skull-like face. They stand out individually. I could count them if I wanted to, just below his temples, on his chin, a few more on his upper lip.

“You need to shave,” I say, to make light conversation. He blinks several times before replying. “I’m not shaving any more.” He doesn’t have the strength. But I guess at another reason: because he’s been losing the hair on his head and it hasn’t been growing back. It’s falling out in patches. So now he wants every hair he has. I feel like bursting into tears. The abandonment of his shaving ritual devastates me. His bony fingers clutch the research notes he’s taken. A page lies open on the bed, its title, “The Wannsee Conference,” neatly underlined. Fifteen men, senior bureaucrats from the relevant ministries and offices of the Nazi regime, meet in a Berlin suburb to plan the “final solution to the Jewish problem.” The Einsatzgruppen, besides being too disruptive to local populations, are unable to keep up with their work. Instead of mobile units of killers, there will be mobile victims. A paradigm shift in policy. As a direct result of the conference, the extermination camps of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka are set up, and camps such as Auschwitz, Chelmno and Majdanek increase their efforts, all of them linked by railway lines. The new camps are led and staffed by veterans of Operation T4 and are highly efficient. Belzec, for example, during its ten months of operation, needs an SS staff of only thirty, aided by a hundred Ukrainian prisoners of war, to murder more than six hundred thousand Jewish men, women and children.

Paul is too tired. “I can’t,” he sighs. “We won’t do episode 42. 1942 will be the year of nothingness.” How can any stories be told in the face of this?

“Okay.” I feel numb, numb, numb.

1942—The year of nothingness. The results are in. Paul has a fungus called Cryptococcus neoformans in his spinal fluid. There is a risk of meningoencephalitis. The thing could go to his brain. The doctors are going to keep a close watch. At the smallest sign he will be put on amphotericin B and flucytosine. He is strangely calm. I want to forget it all. I want to be a million miles from all this.

1943—Emile Gagnan and Jacques Cousteau invent the first autonomous underwater breathing apparatus. Scuba diving is born.

He puffs out his story weakly. I feel each breath against my cheek. I have so much energy compared to him, so much good health. It feels arrogant. To atone, I do the equivalent of what people who are very tall do: I go about with stooped health.

1944—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, author of Le Petit Prince, is shot down over the Mediterranean while on a reconnaissance mission.

The side effects are too serious: Paul will stop taking AZT. He’s happy about it since he will feel better. The announcement stuns me. There’s not even the fiction of a cure anymore. I sit beside his bed, trying to contain myself. My throat is tight and I feel heat in my eyes. I have a carefully prepared story, as I always do. Monika Roccamatio is on a train, alone in her compartment, when a dignified older man with a disfigured face and a cane steps in and sits down, and eventually they begin a conversation. But on the spur of the moment I change my historical fact and I change my story. It’s the shortest of all Roccamatio stories, a murder. The man strangles Monika. I end the story with an image of the murderer running across a field, escaping. It makes no sense, neither psychologically nor practically. How does the man get off the moving train? I don’t explain it. But Paul is pleased.

1945—On August 6, at 8:15 in the morning, the Japanese city of Hiroshima becomes the first city in the world to be struck by an atomic bomb. Nicknamed “Little Boy,” the bomb is dropped by the Enola Gay, a B-29 bomber of the US Air Force. The bomb explodes with a blinding flash in the sky, followed by a tremendous rush of air and a deafening rumble of noise. The loudest sounds after that are of falling buildings and roaring fires. The immediate death toll is eighty thousand. Many more will die later of injuries and radiation sickness.

After the hospital I go tramping about the streets of Toronto. I catch the headlines at a newsstand—blood in Sri Lanka, the West Bank, Haiti, Iran, Iraq; the Ku Klux Klan wins an election in Louisiana; a science magazine rings the alarm bell on the health of the oceans—and I am delighted. It sets me off. The world is metastasizing! We are not a viable species! The environment is our worst enemy! Long live the greenhouse effect and acid rain! Down with animals! Let us all rise to the defence of the shrinking of tropical forests and the expansion of the Sahara and the emptying of the oceans. All stocks will be replenished with starvation. Everything will be made better with pollution and human blood. Our mission is a cleansing one: we must scour this earth of anything living. Death is our destiny and destruction our greatest talent. So hip-hip-hooray for war! Three cheers for poverty! Boo Amnesty International and the white rhinoceros and Mother Teresa! In Pol Pot and Shining Path we trust! LONG LIVE DEATH! DEATH TO INTELLIGENCE! I look at where I am. I’m on Bloor Street, not far from Brunswick. I’m in front of a Lebanese greasy spoon. It’s a bright, sunny afternoon. I’m starving. I go in and order a falafel in pita. I watch the man make it. I feel something in me start to unwind. I pay and move on along the street. There’s a small supermarket with a billboard in the entrance. I take in the ads, the lost cats, the yoga classes, the furniture for sale, the roommates and drummers wanted, the babysitters on offer, all the little cries of good will and good deals that are a community billboard. I move on. I come upon a café. All the beautiful people. The waitress is a blonde dressed in black with black-rimmed glasses. Sexy. A bum comes up to me and asks me for some change. I ask him what he’ll spend it on. “Feeding Africa,” he replies. I give him a dollar. He staggers off. I move on. I pause at the display window of a second-hand bookstore. All the interesting books. I go in and buy The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder, and a collection of short stories by the Italian writer Dino Buzzati. I move on, taking in more stores and more people. The attack wears off completely. I’m dazzled. All our funny, strange, intricate ways. I spend the rest of the afternoon wandering about Bloor Street like a fish poking around a coral reef. But don’t get me wrong: I’ve merely developed an ability to enjoy catastrophe.

1946—War starts in Indochina between the colonial power, France, and the forces of Ho Chi Minh. The United States will eventually replace the French, and war will continue in Vietnam in one form or another until 1975. “Look at this,” says Paul. His skeletal hand slowly reaches for the top of his head. His fingers select a strand of hair. He pulls. There is a momentary resistance, then the strand comes out. “It makes the funniest little sound. You can’t hear it, but it makes the funniest little sound inside my head.”

1947—As a prelude to the termination of British rule, India is partitioned to accommodate the fears and aspirations of the subcontinent’s Hindus and Muslims. And so India achieves independence and Pakistan is created. But Pakistan is geographically absurd: East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) is more than a thousand miles from West Pakistan. Worse still, the delineation of the new borders through the intermeshed and irreconcilable communities of Bengal and Punjab envenoms an already violent conflict between Hindus and Muslims. There is a massive flow of refugees. Seven to eight million Muslims leave India for Pakistan. About the same number of Hindus make the journey in reverse. Terrible acts of violence take place. More than two hundred thousand people are killed. Paul’s world is shrinking. There can be no question any more of foreign travel. Going home is travel. Leaving his hospital room is travel. He hardly has the strength to walk; he makes it to the bathroom to relieve himself, and even that sometimes is too much of an effort. The edge of his bed is becoming the horizon.

1948—Gandhi is assassinated by a Hindu fanatic. Jack has always been a local history buff, but since the beginning of Paul’s illness it has become his passion. The Family Compact, the Durham Report, the inflexible Sir Francis Bond Head, the great Sir Isaac Brock (“Did you know he came from the Channel Islands?” he asks me)—with these and more Jack is endlessly fascinated and he shares his fascination with me and I listen attentively and ask thoughtful questions, though nothing interests me less than the Family Compact, the Durham Report, the inflexible Sir Francis Bond Head or the great Sir Isaac Brock (“Jersey?” “No, Guernsey.”). I love the man because of his pain. When we talk about the Battle of Queenston Heights or the tragic Tecumseh or the tireless John Graves Simcoe, I come away with the impression that we’ve been talking about Paul all along.

1949—The People’s Republic of China is established, with Mao Tse-tung as its chairman. Chinese independence is at last restored. Get away, pain.

1950—Under the indifferent eyes of the world, China invades Tibet.

Paul is afflicted with hiccups. These spasmodic jerks drain him completely. He has neither the strength to stay awake nor the peace to fall asleep. He floats in a horrible limbo. The doctors try drugs, then hypnosis. They are worried. The Roccamatios are interrupted for six days. When things are at their worst, they suddenly get better. Paul seems to have entered a period of ex- hausted stability. Miraculously, his hiccupping has stopped. And his diarrhea too, nearly. His lungs—always a worry: one man in the hospital has had seven bouts of PCP—are all right. He’s been off alpha interferon since long ago and his Kaposi has spread, but the nearest mirror is far, far away, and he’s too tired to care; it’s the least painful of his problems. He’s under constant perfusion with a hydrating solution of vitamins and minerals, he sleeps a lot, and he rarely gets out of bed. Like a pregnant woman, he has sudden whims for particular foods, but he can hardly hold them down, vomits often.

The year 1950—episode 50—is the last for which Paul takes full responsibility. He can no longer sustain the effort of concentration. He stops reading and he stops creating. Instead he becomes the critical spectator of my imagination. My only respite is that he tires so easily. He falls asleep at any moment, in midsentence sometimes. He doesn’t want to sleep; it’s his exhausted body that commands it. Often I let him rest, wait till he awakens before I go on with my story, but as the years go by I whisper it, knowing he’s sleeping.

1951—The Arab League appeals to its member states to tighten their economic blockade of Israel and, especially, to shut off oil supplies.

Paul finds urinating painful. The doctors check his catheter. There’s nothing wrong with it. Some urinary tract infection. Even that simple pleasure is denied him.

1952—The Supreme Court of South Africa invalidates the first elements of the apartheid legislation brought in by Prime Minister Daniel F. Malan. The system of racial segregation has been governing the relations between the races since well before the creation of the Union of South Africa in 1910, but never before in such an intricate, institutionalized way. Shortly after the Court’s move, Parliament approves a government-sponsored bill to restrict the powers of the Supreme Court. Malan and his successors, Johannes Strijdom and Hendrik Verwoerd, pursue the construction of apartheid.

Paul doesn’t eat anymore. Sometimes he sucks on an ice cube. I arrive eating a chocolate bar, not thinking about it. Paul stares at me, at my fingers, at my mouth. He’s not hungry. It’s the memory of eating chocolate that makes him crave it. I know that if he takes any, he will vomit. But the look in his eyes! I take a piece, a flake with a little caramel attached to it, and place it on the tip of his pasty tongue. He pulls his tongue in. A few seconds go by. I imagine the flake melting and saliva wetting his mouth. Suddenly he breathes out violently and opens his mouth—nausea! I run my finger over his tongue and remove the offending flake. I put another finger in the glass beside his bed and wet his tongue with a few drops of lemon-flavoured water. He keeps his eyes closed. He’s on an edge between nausea and pain on the one side and exhaustion on the other. I wait. He opens his eyes. He’s all right. I smile.

“It’s bad for you anyway—cavities,” I say.

“Pimples too,” he replies. He manages a smile.

He’s in a good mood. I have prepared two stories. I choose the better one. At the National High School Debating Competition, held in Turku, Georgio Roccamatio triumphs in the debate “Is television good for democracy?” and receives the Kekkonen Award from President Koivisto himself.

1953—Dag Hammarskjöld is elected Secretary-General of the United Nations. The transfusion is slow, takes time, but Paul’s system takes the shock. He feels better. Then he vomits blood. “Internal hemorrhage,” says the nurse. I can’t stop looking. My eyes won’t close or turn away. There is blood and clear liquid on the sheet, on Paul’s hand. The nurse puts on plastic gloves; they’re a horrible translucent white. Suddenly I’m afraid—of Paul’s blood, of Paul himself. I mutter that I’ll be back and leave the room. I head for the bathroom. I lock myself in. I start to roll up my sleeves, change my mind and take my shirt off. Someone knocks. I turn my head and look at the door, bewildered. “It’s busy. There’s no one here,” I hush. With hot water and plenty of soap, I begin to wash my hands, my arms, my face. I bring my hands to my face and inspect every square millimetre, searching for the least nick, cut or abrasion.

“There’s this”—pause—“burning inside me,” Paul whispers when I get back.

I place my hand on the sheet over his chest and gently tap, in sympathy for this burning inside him. In fact, I don’t want to touch him. Then at home, for the hundredth time, for the thousandth time, I read that there is no empirical evidence, none at all, that it can be passed on through casual contact.

1954—William Golding’s novel Lord of the Flies is published. It tells the story of a group of schoolboys who are cast away on a Pacific island. At first they get along and work together towards the common good. But soon their relationships degenerate to murderous savagery. Jack rules. Not in bed for me, that’s for sure. I’ve thought about it.

Better a bang than a whimper. Better a car crash, with metal screaming and glass exploding, than slowly in bed. Better no goodbyes than slowly. Better a bullet than slowly. Just not in bed, not in bed.

1955—James Dean dies in a car crash. Paul is in pain. It comes from nowhere. One moment he’s fine, the next he’s writhing weakly. I can do nothing but wait and watch.

“It h-hurts,” he moans (what? where?), fixing me with his eyes. He is dangling over a precipice. Our eyes locked together are like two clasped hands. Should I break eye contact, he will fall to his death. I don’t break eye contact.

1956—The Soviet Union invades Hungary to bring to heel a country reluctant to march to the drumbeat of communist totalitarianism. Material damage to the country is heavy, and two hundred thousand refugees flee the country for the West.

Paul is resting. Or at least his eyes are closed. Except for the slight rasp of his breathing, there is silence. I am sitting motionless, my arms crossed, my legs crossed. I want to scream.

He awakes. I smile wanly.

“Hi,” I say. He has chosen this day to talk about God.

“Do you believe in God?” he whispers. I take note of his tone of voice.

“Yes, I do."

There is a pause.

“I think me too,” comes his clipped response. He seems relieved. Tiny beads of sweat cover his forehead. Every time he swallows, he closes his eyes. He has forgotten all our atheistic arguments at university.

“I believe God is everywhere, in every manifestation of life and matter,” I add.

“Me too.”

“There was never a moment when we weren’t with God, nor will there ever be a moment when we aren’t with God.”

“Yes.”

“He cares for us all.”

He swallows and falls asleep.

1957—After slanderous accusations that he is a communist are revived in the US Congress, Herbert Norman, Canada’s ambassador to Egypt and a renowned scholar of Japan, commits suicide by jumping off the roof of an apart- ment building in Cairo. McCarthyism adds another Canadian to its list of victims.

I drop by the office of the hospital chaplain. I inform the secretary that Patient Paul, Room So-and-so, Wing So-and-so, would probably appreciate the visit of Charlie Chaplain. “Easy does it,” I feel like adding. “We don’t want him reading The Watchtower, do we?” Instead, I ask what the chaplain’s visiting hours are, to make sure I don’t bump into him.

“Why don’t I eat anymore?” Paul asks. “They should give me a drug that makes me hungry, don’t you think? They should feed me, don’t you think?” Before I can answer, he falls asleep. Beside his bed is the latest meal he hasn’t touched.

1958—Boris Pasternak declines the Nobel Prize for Literature as a result of harassment by the Soviet government. This disease. There’s nothing left of him. Sharks wouldn’t take so much off his frame. Fire couldn’t disfigure him more. But it’s nothing quick, there’s no sudden push into eternity. Only a relentless attrition. He’s at the bottom of his bed. He weighs seventy-eight pounds and dropping. He can’t walk anymore. He can’t control his bladder or sphincter anymore. He labours to breathe. He’s as bald as a cue ball. He’s so decayed with disease he reminds me of garbage—bad meat, moulding cheese, rotting bread, overripe fruit—yet from this putrefaction a faint, quavering voice clamours its humanity by speaking my name. This disease. It’s enough to make me want to pass it on to God. The rings around his eyes are enormous black circles. His skin is covered in spots, scabs and lesions of every colour, the legacies of tests, injections, transfusions, perfusions and disease. Every shade of blue, black, brown, red, purple, yellow, green, set amidst a complexion that is waxen and translucent. He looks like a dying rainbow. “Tell me, doctor,” I feel like saying, “the boy has fever, diarrhea, pneumonia, Kaposi’s sarcoma, to name only those with pronounceable names, and you can’t do much about it. But could you at least tell me how skin gets green?”

1959—The first thalidomide babies are born. Thalidomide, on the market in more than forty countries, is prescribed to pregnant women as a treatment for morning sickness. It is soon found to produce severe deformities in babies, deformities such as phocomelia (“seal limbs,” in which the long bones of the arms and legs are absent and the hands and feet grow close to the trunk), malformations of the outer ear, fusion defects in the eyes, and the absence of the normal apertures in the gastrointestinal tract.

I was hoping to start the new decade with a brighter story, but Paul is having troubles with his eyes. The cause seems to be cytomegalovirus. There’s nothing to be done. He’s overwhelmed with fear. He asks a nurse to suffocate him with a pillow. He’s given nitrazepam; it’s supposed to help with “acute anxiety.” “I want to get out of here. I hate it here. I’m sick of being their guinea pig. I want to get out, I want to get out, I want to get out, I want to get out.”

He repeats it twenty, thirty times.

In my hands I hold a piece of paper: “1960—Anne Sexton publishes her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Deeply personal and insistently honest, the poems chronicle her nervous breakdown and recovery in images that are often startling and in a tone that is sardonic yet vulnerable. She wins immediate acclaim.” I crumple the paper up. I am stopping the Roccamatios.

I want out.

I run into the chaplain as I’m leaving Paul’s room. He’s a man in his fifties with perfectly combed white hair.

“Oh, you’re Paul’s friend. How are you?” he asks. His voice is warm. So is his hand. There’s nothing religious about his garb. No cross dangling from his neck, no clerical collar. Only the small black book he’s carrying.

“I’m fine.”

“It’s tough, isn’t it?” he says.

“It is.”

“Well, I don’t want to hold you up.” He half turns towards Paul’s room. “Would you like to talk about it?” “I should get going, sir.”

By the time I step out of the hospital, I’m so tense I’m trembling. I get to a gravel path. The crunching sound of the pebbles underfoot annoys me instantly. I pound the path with my feet and scream at it. My legs begin to hurt. I run to escape the path. I’m alongside a red brick wall. I stop. My back is to the wall. My fingers feel like hooks. I drop to my knees and scratch the earth, driving the hard black soil under my fingernails. I bring my forehead to the ground and close my eyes. I can feel the ground’s rough coolness against my forehead and hairline. I lie very still. I breathe. I lie very still. I breathe. I lie very still. I breathe.

I drive home, crossing those nightmare suburbs of Toronto that devour so much of southern Ontario. I feel relief when I leave Paul, that’s the truth—it’s an escape from claustrophobia, a vital stretching, a dazed relaxing— but I also feel depressed. When I’m with him, I feel so alive, so brilliantly alive. Away from him, I enter an environment that is cluttered with objects, that assaults me with trivia, commerce and vulgarity, that fills me with numbing boredom. I drive home, crossing those endless nightmare suburbs. I think only of Paul and of the Roccamatios.

There is a sign posted beside the door to Paul’s room: “Visitors are informed that Mr. Atsee has gone blind. Could they please identify themselves as they enter.” I can’t believe my eyes. I head for the bathroom and stay there twenty minutes.

When I go in, Paul is lying there, waiting for me. His eyes are open. They turn my way. I’m nervous. I can’t get any words out. Finally I can, and I can’t help myself.

“F-f-f-fuck, Paul, you’ve gone blind.”

For the first time ever, I can’t help it and I impose my sadness onto his. I break down right in front of him. Great, cracking, uncontrollable sobs.

Who am I to need comfort, but he comforts me. “Shhh, shhh, it’s all”—pause—“right.” I can hardly hear him. “Whose turn”—pause—“is it? What year are we?” Pause. “Is it my turn?”

Fuck everything. On the spur of the moment I make up a despairing story.

1961—Dag Hammarskjöld is killed in an airplane crash over the Congo while on a UN peace mission. “Yes,” is all Paul says. He’s been receiving morphine shots every twelve hours.

Paul is in a wheelchair. It’s Mary’s birthday today, and her gift is her son coming home. He’s bundled up in a wool cap, a scarf, a sweater, gloves and a blanket, and he’s wearing black sunglasses; all that shows of him is his nose and upper lip. We’re in the midst of an October Indian summer. I’m not even wearing a jacket. But he’s skin and bones. With every jolt of the wheelchair his limbs jerk up like a marionette’s.

Last thing I remember from the hospital: I’m walking down the corridor. I notice in a room a trinket on a bedside table. A shiny pink porcelain hand holding a bright red heart. Why is so much about death in bad taste?

Paul is lucid. He’s lying on his back in his bed. He’s happy to be back home, never wants to go back to the hospital. The room next door has been fixed up for the nurse who is there twenty-four hours a day.

“I’ll do”—pause—“one more story,” he whispers. “We’re at 1962.”

“No.” Pause. “You do that. I’ll”—pause—“do another year.”

“Okay. Which one? Do you want me to help you with the research?”

“No.” Pause. “I’ll do the year”—pause—“2001.”

Pause. “That’ll make it”—pause—“one hundred years”—pause—“of Roccamatios.”

“Great idea, Paul.”

“Yes.”

He falls asleep, or unconscious, I don’t know which. He slips in and out now. I had 1962 all prepared for him, a story based on the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, an exposé on the dangers of chemical pesticides and their terrible cost to the environment.

I enter his room to the strain of “With a Little Help from My Friends.” Beatle Paul is curled up on his side, a pillow between his legs. Beatle George, eternally faithful, is lying on the floor beside the bed.

“The year 2001?” I ask.

“Not yet.”

What can I say? I must wait. He falls asleep to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” I put a pen and a pad of paper beside his hand on the bed.

Today it’s “A Day in the Life.” He’s asleep.

Death has a smell. It permeates the house.

“Paul?”

“I’m still”—pause—“thinking.”

Jack has bought me a hemp shirt. A few days ago I gave him Mishima’s Sea of Fertility novels, second-hand, and he’s jumped at the opportunity of returning my kindness. He’s changed a lot since the beginning of Paul’s illness. He’s taken an extended leave from his job, and the way he talks about it now, I can’t imagine him ever going back to it. His mind and his heart have turned to other things. But he’s still so shaky. There’s still so much anxiety. He asks what I intend to do with my future. I answer vaguely about travelling and then going back to school. It’s not my future I’m worried about—it’s his.

“Paul?”

“Not”—pause—“yet.”

I walk George H. I like walking dogs. It gives purpose to aimlessness. I can’t stand it when people treat their pets like human beings, yet irresistibly I find myself conversing with this creature, brain the size of a lemon. He doesn’t seem as bouncy as usual. His tail is low and there’s no enthusiasm to his sniffing. I think he may be losing weight. I take a stick, wave it in front of his face and throw it. He watches it sail through the air without moving. When we return home, I ask Mary about George H.’s lack of pep. She looks at him. “He’s not eating much.” She gets a treat. “George H.,” she commands, staring into his bright black eyes, “one sick person in this house is enough.” She throws him the treat. “Eat!” He eats it half-heartedly. I smile. I go down to the basement to cry.

“Paul?”

“I’ve”—pause—“got it.” Pause. “But later.”

“Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is playing. I listen to the song. The album starts over. Pulse: 160 Blood pressure: 60 over 30. He’s dying. He’s sleeping. George H. has taken to lying on the bed right next to him, though carefully out of his way. He whines quietly. I notice Paul’s lips and nostrils are slightly blue. I ask the nurse about it.

“Cyanosis, which means a lack of oxygen in the blood,” she tells me.

“Which means PCP.”

She nods.

Oh man. All this to end the way it began. A cycle for nothing except protracted agony.

I find something scribbled on the pad, but I can’t make anything of it.

He’s too weak to move or speak. He just lies there, his eyes blinking once in a while. He’s had his morphine three hours before.

“Paul? Paul, it’s me.”

His eyes blink.

Since my eyes are level with it, I touch his ear. I rub the lobe with my thumb and forefinger. He seems to like it. I get some cotton swabs and I clean Paul’s ear, first the outer ear, then, very gently, the inner; a little yellow wax comes out. Paul’s mouth trembles into an approximation of a smile.

“Don’t worry,” I whisper. “It won’t be long.”

His lips move to make a word. There is no breath to create it. He struggles.

“Two.” It barely comes out.

Two. It must be for 2001.

For six days I visit every day. Sometimes he comes to—once Mary even found him sitting up—and he manages to speak a little, but never when I’m there. I ask if he’s said anything that was meant for me. There’s nothing.

Shortly before three in the morning, George H. shatters the silence. Mary, who has fallen asleep on the sofa beside the bed, awakes instantly. The nurse, who checked on him an hour before, is in the room seconds later, as are Jack and Jennifer. George H. is straddling Paul; his tail is erect, the hairs on his back are standing up, his teeth are bared, and he is barking furiously, barking like he has never barked before.

It would have been episode 63 of the Roccamatios. The year JFK was shot and people cried in the streets.

The year I was born.

The news comes to me over the phone. Each word is ordinary, but together they shock me breathless. I head over to their home.

I’m sitting in the hallway, outside his room. All is quiet. Someone touches my shoulder. It’s the nurse. A friendly, efficient woman in her fifties. She sits down beside me.

“I’m sorry about your boyfriend.”

I don’t react.

“He came to at around ten last night. We talked for a minute or two. He asked me to write something down and give it to you. It wasn’t very clear, you know, but I think I got it right.”

She hands me a neatly folded piece of paper. For some reason I’m amazed at her handwriting. Nice round clear letters, with the i’s precisely dotted and the t’s neatly crossed. Incredibly legible. Christ, if you compare it to my handwriting, so jagged and messy. “Could you keep this a secret, please?” I ask her. “Sure.”

She stands up. She’s looking down at me. There’s a moment of silence.

Then, just like that, she runs her hand through my hair.

“You poor boy,” she says.

2001—After a reign of forty-nine years, Queen Elizabeth II dies. Her reign has witnessed a period of incredible industrial expansion and increasing material prosperity. In its own blinkered and delusional way, the second Elizabethan age has been the happiest of all.

Sorry, it’s the best I could do. The story is yours. Paul

 

Copyright © 1993 Yann Martel All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc., 6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.