she, in winter
Suddenly a truck horn blows towards my ears on the wind, wavers, vanishes, blows back. I feel the fine hairs on my ear lobes, now cold but afire, react to the noise, writhe, make themselves known to me. Declaim their presence. But why?
The horn. Instinctively I brace for the crash of an accident, shrug my shoulders and grit my teeth, but when the crash doesn’t come I lower my left shoulder and look back over it. Then I spin right around. A giant snowplough, the first I’ve seen in my life, has mounted the curb near the corner of Haldimand and Mont Carmal. Huge tires scudding along the icy footpath, snow everywhere. People screaming.
It’s headed straight for an old man I know. We waved to one another just minutes ago in fact, even said bonjour in passing. Before that he was a stranger like any other in this strange fairy tale city, weird logos on their coats, incomprehensible words issuing from their scarf-covered mouths, looking straight or down instead of everywhere, at nothing instead of everything, but now he is a friend and the shovel I watched him use to clear dirty shop entrance snow is limp at his side. He’s going to get hit, I know it.
So in shock I cup my hand over my mouth. Scarves don’t sell where I come from and my gloves, kangaroo leather, are nothing but conduits for whatever temperature it happens to have fallen or risen to; they’re colder than my skin. Gulping in too much air, I splutter. The frost makes it caustic and my throat tastes of iron. Then, as if by some miracle, the snowplough’s enormous yellow bulk comes to a halt at the last possible moment. Truly the bulbar is close enough to smell. My friend the old man grabs snow from the ground with gloveless hands and pelts it at the passenger side window, iced down to the small nautical roundness they call hublot, and gesticulates madly. The door opens. A huge man in an ear-flapped Peruvian tuque gets out and I consider bolting over to intervene. But the old man takes off his jacket, which is a brand I now know as Canada Goose, laughs, gives the other a hug, climbs aboard. Meantime she’s now some distance up the hill, almost undetectable in the whiteness.
As I quicken my steps to catch her, I think about winter. What is it to me? It’s cold but too hot for snow. Darkness falls earlier than summer but not in the middle of the afternoon like here. It anticipates spring but only in the way that grayish shallow seawater anticipates the deep blue of the open ocean, whereas in these parts it could be the moon turning from white to green and spawning saplings and sunflowers in its bare craters. This dead of winter which makes people indoors claustrophobic and dry-lipped and people outdoors, under their huge coats and balaclavas, anguished with cold, will gradually recede and reveal the new spring, nothing less than a benediction. But at home it’s nothing; the smell of lawn clippings maybe, more rain. Nothing. And the leaves? Suddenly I’m not thinking anymore and it is like returning from the distance. Those high-spirited idiots and their snowplough are pictorially with me. At first their afterimage makes me chuckle.
But then as the incident loses its immediacy I notice another feeling welling inside me, shock, and through shock and the exertion of trying to catch her up my blood seems sprung to life but my body numbed. I can wriggle my toes again but barely move my legs. Hear the thud of a rising heartbeat over car tires quieted by fresh powder. Falling more heavily now the snow veils buildings, sends snot gushing from my nose to freeze solid on my moustache, salty icicles goading my tongue, lick them off lick them off, when I know that if I do they’ll come back twice as bad. Proof I am rising; the old port, the bus terminal next door, the maple markets (I bought some apple butter for my mum there), the walls of the Old City, all slowly coming into view. Misted sweeping outskirts all low-income apartments and plumes of steam and shopping malls. She is from the poor side of town with three malls one after another and I don’t know how many Tim Horton’s. The malls are exact replicas but closer to different sets of commission houses.
Now like a horn like a postcard like a dream I can see the Saint Laurent, hear – but only figuratively – the tumbling Chute Montmorency, feel myself swept over formless nameless edges. It’s frozen in parts and the scores of tributaries running into it, when seen from this height, look almost like legs squiggling from the belly of a great spider. I am keeping sentry over the most powerful river in a nation where water is as plentiful iron-ore is back home. Me, I am doing that. Next to it the Murray is a murky leak. The sheets of ice floating downstream are wider than the Yarra, firs on its banks colossal white arrows. Though veiled in fog at each end I know that, not far from where I stand, the river forms one of the largest estuaries in the world. And this hugeness, this oceanic sense of scale I don’t limit to the river itself but gift also to the land it borders, land which, if viewed in isolation, would be of no interest and devoid of heart. Or so it seems to me right now. Later, when the Saint Laurent has become the plain old Saint Lawrence again, I’ll think differently. Stopping on the narrow sidewalk to let a woman pass, I cop the brunt of the wind and gaze riverward and think of the Inuit and the Mohawk and the Arctic Northern Provinces and she says merci and, having to think a second, I answer c’est rien back. She’s talking on the phone. Moins vingt-sept is all I understand.
Then the black ridges of Chateau Frontenac are in view. Behind them the sun’s orb looks paler than normal, sheathed in snow-cloud, and I imagine the sky as an egg laid by a starving hen. As the rest takes shape in front of me I’m forced to seek shelter in the gift shop of the old funicular, fingers frostbitten beneath my frigid gloves, with such pressure at their tips that they feel ready to explode. After a few minutes I’m warmer and an urge to piss rouses me and pushes the river from my mind. As if seizing the opportunity, she enters. I press back out into the open and strain my eyes both ways. There’s no sign of her anywhere.
Surprise parties only work if the person you’re celebrating shows up to the right place at the right time. Usually that means compromising the surprise; I wish that were the case now but it isn’t. She wanted to show me something but now I’m neither sure of what that something is nor certain she even said so at all, only that the words je voudrai and quelque chose, repeated now in my mind by the gruff lead actor of a terrorist film we watched together last night, issued from her mouth this morning. To what end? I forget or never knew. The urgency of her walk meant more than her words.
And so I’ve been plunged into one dark and teeter on the threshold of another; from the looks of it I’d say, at best, that there’s an hour and a half of daylight left before sundown. After that any glare refracted off the icy streets will do no more than impart a dim cruel clarity to my helplessness. No money, no SIM. I shake the snow from my shoulders and move on. Dirty slush bores its way through the unstuck toes of my boots and anaesthetizes my feet and my boot-heels make roguish slides from under me. With nobody on the street – nobody stupid enough – the world’s edges feel closer, closing. Silence more like a willful suppression of sound. And, when the whistle of the wind seems suddenly to embody all nature gagged and in pain, it describes to me the turmoil just born from my thoughts and interpretations. I’m panicked. Something even worse happens too: the landscape around me turns from white to grey, ethereal to menacing. Wonder isn’t wonder anymore, wonder is fear and, out of breath but colder than ever, I let the river morph from majestic into an abyss of nightmares.
Elk, inimitable sculptures on their heads, cantering down an empty footpath at night, lakes making mountains, mountains making lakes, rubbish bin raccoons, sulfur pits stained the colours of the center of the earth, the smell of fresh poutine. They’re not idyllic enough thoughts to level me out as my body, coincidentally, reaches the top of a final flight of stairs. The antlers are skeletal and the lakes are freezing and the raccoons stink and the pits stink and the poutine stinks. The plain I come to is vast and deserted. Also it’s littered with corpses.
Fully hundreds of figures stand, featureless and half-collapsed, their faces blown from their heads and scattered on the snow before them. A fortunate few have held onto their eyes, others their mouths or pipes, and one of the completely faceless majority still wears a black bowler hat. But not one nose has stayed on.
Because they’re arranged in precise columns, if I look through their rows at an angle the carrots appear to be markers for a kind of emergency runway, a last resort for planes run aground in the tempest. Then I notice that in front of and behind each column there are magnificent ice sculptures depicting not Elk but Moose, Indian braves too. And on its perch the chateau, with humungous icicles hanging from every awning, provincial and national flags flying from its two highest spires, channels the grandest European palaces and the castle at Disneyland. Not knowing whether to be impressed or terrified, I’d bet my life on this being the quelque chose I think she mentioned this morning. But I move as if I’m dreaming. To hit hard snow I track old footsteps in zigzags and circles on trails that seem to lead nowhere. I don’t see her or anyone else. No figures, no voices. Only wind.
After circling the plateau twice and finding nothing but empty ice-clad benches I decide to take shelter in the chateau. Misreading the sign I push instead of pull, tumble in like the physical comics so lauded in this part of the world. Nearby a revolving door turns towards and away from me mockingly; I turn away from it and move through the lobby. Dome-shaped, walls and ceiling crisscrossed with dark brown logs, it’s obviously modeled on a beaver den. A bluestone chimney rises from the center of the room, fires blazing on each of its four sides, medieval lanterns fastened in pairs all the way to the ceiling. There are mahogany leather armchairs and lamps made from gnarled pieces of driftwood. There are stuffed beavers and the heads of brown bears. Flags with strange coats of arms on them overhang the entrances to a series of tunnel-like corridors that must lead to the rooms. Two men in suits are playing chess. Tentatively I make to sit down but for reasons I can’t explain stay upright and walk over to the revolving door, which I let admit me on its third spin. And I’m outside again.
She’s at the other end of the plateau, silhouetted by mist, a shadow flailing her arms and a voice betrayed by the wind. I can hear the final cadences of her cries, shrill but soft as whispers. She’s beckoning me towards her. Relieved as I am, it’s a sight that summons all the exhaustion kept at bay by the incompleteness of the search, by the adrenaline of my panic, by the cold now temporarily quelled by the chateau’s four fires. I could collapse right here, I think, become one of the corpses. Were my eyes charcoal rocks I could pop them out and write with them in the snow and have her write in reply, I could place my nose in line with the rest of them, dig down to a treasure-filled grotto…she’s pointing at quelque chose. What is she pointing at? The sculptures? No, beyond them. The corpses? Beyond them. She’s pointing at the river.
