Hellgoing Stories Part 8

Betty did something to her voice for the reading - Sara had heard other poets do it too. Sometimes it seemed stagy and contrived and other times, depending on the poet, it worked well. With Betty it seemed natural. She changed her timbre substantially - the entire personality of her voice changed. It was low and meditative. There wasn't any laughter. It was the speaking-voice of Betty's mind.

Sara looked out the window and saw how the sunset was painting the valley. Her eyes turned on like taps. She tried to get it under control. This happened at the movies sometimes - even during the previews. The music would swell, a camera would zoom in on a face, and it was as if someone had reached beneath her ribs and flicked a switch. It didn't matter what was going on, necessarily. The content wasn't the problem. It was a thing that happened outside of words.

Afterwards the polite thing to do was discuss the readings with Betty and Herb respectively.

"I cried," she told Betty, who looked startled, and then laughed. Sara laughed with her, feeling relief. This was the same sort of phenomenon as my plane was. .h.i.t by lightning, the same sort of ritual. You speak it in defiance. It was freeing the same way blasphemy was freeing.

WHEN THEY WEREN'T having group meetings, they had private meetings, one on one. Individually, she found them to be splendid people, and wanted to a.s.sure them that the fact they had any proficiency at all was wonderful and they shouldn't get so tied up in knots about it because they also had jobs and houses and licences to drive cars, which made them like G.o.ds as far as Sara was concerned.

She and Mac conducted their meeting walking into town to buy alcohol and bottled water. It was coming toward the end of the week and people had started to sit outside and drink in the evenings, prompting Terry to bring his guitar out of his office and play Gordon Lightfoot songs.

Mac told her about his memoir as they walked the gash of road through the endless fields on either side. The sky felt like something they could disappear into. She made sure to walk in the middle of the road, like a child avoiding cracks in the sidewalk.

"This landscape is crazy!" Sara interrupted Mac at one point.

"Different from where you grew up," said Mac. Not a question. He figured he knew everything about her. He was, she had determined a few days ago, constantly angling to discuss Eden.

"I've never been to the Kootenays," he continued. "I love how you describe them in the book. The mountains and trees . . . the clouds against the mountains . . . 'yet another barrier.' It was great how . . . I mean, you said everything but the word 'prison,' right?"

"G.o.d-made dungeon," said Sara. She thought she was saying it spontaneously, but the moment she did, realized she had quoted the nineteen-year-old.

"Oh, that's right, that's right," said Mac. "You did say dungeon. But that sense of claustrophobia - it came across so well. None of that here, eh?" He gestured to the sky. Here you could gesture to the sky simply by raising your arms a few inches. "Nothing holding you back."

Sara was concerned because Mac was clearly modelling his book too closely on her own. His story wasn't even really his, but his grandfather's, who had been a leader in the Winnipeg General Strike. He had done endless research. He had, as he put it, "reams" of material.

She decided to tackle the subject head-on, to talk about Eden as much as Mac craved in order to dissuade him, to show how him wrong-headed it was. He wouldn't be able to write his own book until he fell out of love with hers.

"Do you see why this approach can't work?" she demanded as they walked. Walking made it easier to be honest, they didn't have to look at each other. The crunch of gravel filled in the conversational gaps. "The two books have nothing in common."

"But it's more the att.i.tude of your book I'm trying to get at -"

"This att.i.tude thing again -"

"The tone."

"The tone is internal, Mac. The tone is the inside of a teenage girl's head. Do you think I had to go to the library and research that?"

"But how did you . . . like that thing with the trees and the mountains and the clouds against the mountains - one barrier after another. Crafting those kinds of metaphors. That's the sort of thing I'm after."

"They weren't metaphors," said Sara. "That was how things looked, through my eyeb.a.l.l.s, and so I wrote it down."

Crunch gravel, crunch gravel. Mac was casting a shadow over her. He is so big, thought Sara. He could kill me.

"I thought you didn't remember writing it," said Mac, smiling at the approaching town.

SOMEBODY HAD BOUGHT a newspaper and it lay splayed across one of the tables in the main hall. There was news from her city, and news from overseas - all the news she didn't want. She was thinking about throwing it away when Herb wandered in from the cafeteria, noticed Sara hovering, and asked if she was reading it.

"No," said Sara. "No one should be reading it."

"It's sad," said Herb, settling into a chair. "But we have to live in this world, don't we, retreat or no? We can't close our eyes to these things, much as we want to. That's what writers do. We face up."

Some of the partic.i.p.ants heard what Herb was saying and inched closer. Sara had noticed this on several occasions - Herb wandering into the main hall with a cup of coffee, initiating a conversation, waxing casually profound on the subject of writing until he had gathered a tiny, devout clan around his chair.

"War," said Herb, scanning the front page. "Are you telling me you haven't considered writing something about the war - if you haven't written something already?"

"I refuse," said Sara, feeling the perverse adamancy descend again. She had written a handful of terrible poems only a few months ago.

Herb's talking about the war, someone called nearby.

"Oh, Sara, don't," said Herb, as if she were hurting him. "Don't refuse. Don't turn your back. If writers refuse to discuss these issues, where does that leave us?"

"You cheapen it," said Sara. "You cheapen it when you give it words. The more you talk about it, the more commonplace and mundane it becomes, until we're all going, oh yeah, the war, war - war war war. It's just war." Sara felt itchy all of a sudden, wanting to scratch herself like a monkey. "We work in a pretty cheap medium, really."

Betty was walking past. She caught what Sara had said and laughed explosively.

"Let's all stop writing!" exclaimed Betty, not slowing down on her way to wherever she was going.

"Yes," said Sara, "let's stop." She turned around and saw Terry, who smiled and gestured to her.

I'm being called to the princ.i.p.al's office, thought Sara. But that wasn't something so much in her experience as it was the rest of the world's - the outside world's. To her it was just an expression - one of the many exotic, puzzling expressions she heard after leaving the family, like pushing the envelope and don't be hatin'. Growing up behind the mountains, Sara was only ever called into her father's office. Her father's office was wherever he happened to be.

She sat across from Terry, who had nice blue eyes and laugh lines and loved a good Gordon Lightfoot singalong. Plus, he was no more than six years older than her. Plus, she had done nothing wrong and was being ridiculous because she was sweating and closed-mouth panting the way she had done on the plane.

"How are things?" said Terry.

And it was also like her shrink's office, when the province decided she had to see a shrink before she could be declared an independent minor. How are things, that was how the meetings started. Sara's shrink had been a woman, however. One of the social workers had insisted on it - Sara found that out later, poring over her own files for the memoir. She had lied to Mac about that - she had conducted research on herself.

"Things are great, Terry."

"Week's gone okay?"

"It's been great, yeah. Wonderful group."

"Mm-hmm?" His eyebrows went up. "Any stars this year?"

There were no stars, but Sara threw out Alison's name to make Terry happy.

They smiled at each other, Sara relaxing a little. Maybe Terry was holding these impromptu, individual meetings with all the instructors.

"I wanted to ask you," said Terry, "if everything's okay in your bathroom."

Sara sat for a moment.

"With your toilet and everything," Terry prompted.

She burst into laughter like Betty.

"Oh my gosh! Yes! I'm sorry, Terry, I should have mentioned -"

Terry started to shake his head rapidly and wave his hands. "Yes, the maintenance guy had it fixed by the end of the day, no problem, no problem at all."

"Because," said Terry. "I was going to say, we could always switch your room, if you're having any problems."

Sara shook her head back at him. "Oh G.o.d, no, it's fine, it's been fine all week."

Terry didn't seem to be absorbing her rea.s.surances. He pressed his lips together and inhaled through his nose.

"So the shower and everything is -"

"Shower, sink, toilet," recited Sara. "Everything's great."

Terry blinked his fine blue eyes at her.

"I mean," said Sara. She thought for a moment about the shower. "I can't quite remember if -" She tried to imagine the taps, the nozzle. Tried to conjure up a picture in her mind.

Suddenly her hands darted to her scalp. She looked down at her palms like they had come away b.l.o.o.d.y.

SHE'D BEEN TO these retreats before, both as a mentor and mentee - to use Terry's jargon - and there was always at least one person in attendance who was the person everybody talked about. Once it had been a young instructor who systematically slept with every female member of his group and then went on to infiltrate the others - it was like he had a checklist. Once it was a fiction student who refused to talk to any of the other partic.i.p.ants and just sat staring at them with his eyes slitted like a cat's and his fingers forming a steeple when everyone came together for meetings or mealtimes. It got so no one was able to eat in his presence. Once it was a woman who was believed to be shrieking every night in her sleep, until someone reported that she wasn't sleeping at all - she was making these noises wide awake.

That is to say, there was always an odd person out at these things, always a weirdo.

She was clean for the reading with Marguerite, having sat under the shower for twenty shame-soaked minutes after talking to Terry. It hadn't turned on immediately. She was just thinking she would have to march her filthy-headed way back down the hall to his office when the nozzle hacked up a few squirts of tobacco brown, and finally silver jets began to spray out.

How could she have gone five days without taking a shower? She wondered if something had happened when she was up on the plane - if some fundamental part of her brain containing the instinct to bathe had been fried by the lightning jolt. The flight attendant told them the bolt had come out of nowhere - there'd been no indication of lightning anywhere in the sky before it hit. But what happens sometimes, he explained, is that the plane causes the lightning to occur. It flies through a charged cloud and the lightning actually originates from the plane.

"It came from us," said the flight attendant into his little intercom.

MARGUERITE GOT UP and read a poem about Marie. She was nowhere near the poet Betty was, and read like she was reciting from a grocery list. Plus, the poem was bleak. It was clear Marguerite wasn't kidding herself when it came to Marie's likely fate. There was a line about the winter fields screaming up at the sky that made Sara wince. One person noisily swallowed a sob and Terry stared at Marguerite, the fatherly cheer gone out of his eyes.

"Um," said Marguerite when she was finished. Behind her gla.s.ses she had a sweet, round face with a bow mouth like a fifties starlet. "I'm sorry if that was unexpected, I know poetry isn't my forte."

"It was wonderful," said Betty and started clapping. A couple of people in Betty's group made noises of agreement and picked up the applause.

Marguerite looked around, gathered up her pages and left the podium, which was awkward because she was expected to read for another fifteen minutes or so.

Sara was in the middle of a gla.s.s of wine, so took it to the podium with her after Terry's listless introduction. It was up to her to salvage the mood, which was fine. Sara was good at readings. She had a standard twenty minutes of all the most compelling bits from her short story collection, tightly arranged and well rehea.r.s.ed. She knew just which phrases to punch, precisely how long to make her pauses for maximum comedic effect. It was the same little song and dance she'd been putting on for quite some time in the hope of getting people more interested in her fiction.

She held up the book and was happy to disappear behind it for a while. She was better at reading than she was at talking - or even writing, she sometimes thought. Everyone laughed at the spots where she knew they would laugh, and clapped with apparent sincerity when she was done. She shut her book and drained her wine, smiling.

"What about questions for Sara?" called Terry. Mac's big hand poked up like a gopher's nervous head.

"I would really appreciate," said Mac, "a quick reading from Escaping Eden."

"Yeah!" said Betty, clapping, clattering her bangles.

It was Marguerite's fault for finishing early - leaving Sara all this extra time. "I don't have a copy with me," she protested. But Terry was already on his feet and at the book table.

"It would mean a lot to me," said Mac.

She took the copy from Terry, opened it up to the first page and started plowing through the first paragraph. This, she remembered, was how she used to do readings when she was starting out. It never occurred to her to comb through the book, picking out the best-written sections. In Sara's opinion, there were no particularly well-written sections in Escaping Eden. People liked it because it was about teenage girls and s.e.x and G.o.d and suffering. It was, in other words, a soap opera.

She read the words like they were someone else's - stumbling, missing key inflections, having to go back and start entire sentences again. The book started at the end of the story - a fairly conventional structure, suggested by her editor - with the night of Sara's escape. The rest of the chapters would fill in the background of her grotesque upbringing. When the book was released, she remembered, no one could believe such a community still existed. People were appalled - that is, they purported to be appalled, even though Sara remembered how gawkers from Creston and other nearby places used to cruise the village daily wearing faces of delight. She had said this in interviews.

Back then, she told everybody everything - every shameful detail. She couldn't have shut up if she tried. And people believed her, they heard her, they were every bit as angry as she was. She was soaring on outrage, the energy of having it released, as if she'd been flung from a slingshot.

She remembered the feeling of swooping across the country like a giant, avenging eagle. It was a dumb, obvious image, but that's how she remembered feeling - she'd grown up watching eagles, making mini-G.o.ds of them. She didn't know enough back then to reject them as hackneyed. She wrote about eagles in the diary that became her book - their lizard eyes and pitiless heads. But her editor told Sara to take the eagles out. It was overused, amateurish symbolism, the editor said.

Sara hadn't read this bit in well over a decade, and found herself becoming fascinated, despite her clumsy reading, by what was happening in the pages - how the girl just climbed out of bed one night and left under cover of darkness. Where, Sara wondered, did that girl find the strength? She'd been told all her life she didn't have any - why didn't she believe it? She moved through the night without a doubt in her mind, jumped into one stranger's car and then the next. How did she get so sure of herself? Why wasn't she afraid? How could she be so certain she was right and they were wrong?

Afterwards, Betty unveiled a bottle of gin and bag of limes. Everyone had one more workshop left, but it wouldn't be until tomorrow afternoon and they were all too psychically exhausted to prepare. They acknowledged this to each other before starting to drink. The final workshop, everyone agreed once Terry was out of earshot, would be a hungover formality.

"I never imagined this would be such a wringer," said Alison, who looked like she might start crying for about the seventh time that week. "I thought - you know - it will be a nice little break, I'll learn some tricks. I wrangled PD money out of my company and everything - they're going to want to see results." Alison laughed like Betty - a desperate bray. "I can't very well come back and tell them, well, my copy hasn't really improved, but I spent ten days, you know, marinating in despair."

"Marinating," someone murmured. "That's good, I like that."

"Thanks for doing that," Mac said to Sara at one point, looking ashamed of himself.

Marguerite was sitting drinking red wine beside a couple of poets who were engrossed in conversation with each other. Sara came and sat beside her.

"Ah!" she said as a way of announcing herself.

Marguerite looked up, gla.s.ses like a shield. "I enjoyed your reading very much," she recited.

"Yours too," said Sara.

"I think it was a mistake," said Marguerite.

"Oh, it's all a mistake," said Sara, waving a hand. She was flying on the dregs of her pre-reading adrenalin.

"I'm just tired of the weirdness around it," said Marguerite. "All those posters, the fixation. I just want people to let her go, to quit messing with her."

"Like a balloon pushing at the sky," said Sara, surprising herself. She had produced a quote from Marguerite's poem.

"Ugh," said Marguerite. "I'm just not a poet. But what do you do when you're not a poet?"

"No, it's a good image," said Sara. "It's a simple, childhood image."

Marguerite's bow mouth puckered slightly. "Surrender Dorothy," she said. "We need something like that, some announcement. Written in the sky so everyone can see it. Surrender Marie, everybody. Give her up. It's time."

Sara folded her arms like her brother would have done and grunted as if from beneath a moustache: "It's about time they started bombing something." Blushing as Marguerite, in her confusion, looked down and then away.

ONCE, SHE USED to put herself to sleep like this: There is no family. There is no Eden. There are no mountains. There is no Heaven. There is no Earth. There are no people. There are no places. There are no names.

It was the names line that worked best, that brought her to the next level, caused her body to feel as if it had gently pulled itself into fragments, which now were drifting in opposite directions. The next level went: There is s.p.a.ce. There is only s.p.a.ce. Black, empty, infinite, all. There is I. I am s.p.a.ce. Black and empty. I am all. Stretching, infinite, everything. I am everything. I am all. I am s.p.a.ce.

SHE WOKE IN that darkness with a boom and a flash. People screamed and cursed convulsively, craned their bodies toward the windows. A distant alarm went off, low but insistent. Sweat blossomed from her pores, blotting against her clothes. There was laughter. It was still dark. Sara fell out of bed. Smoke filled the cabin. No it didn't. It seemed to - the seats and heads and stewardesses before her eyes went fuzzy. She couldn't smell the smoke. She bashed her hand against the corner of her desk. Something fell off the wall that had to be a picture of Christ, because that was the only thing they had on the walls. This is the nightmare, said Sara to herself. This is the thing that people say is like a nightmare.

There was a boom and a flash as she jerked open the door. One Easter, as a child, she woke in terrified, ecstatic tears after dreaming of the crucifixion all night long. She was Simon Peter and Jesus had flung himself into her arms. He was afraid; he didn't want to go. The social worker hadn't been able to hide her disgust. The EXIT signs glowed red. Sara moved through the red dark, trying to remember which room it was, the hallway crammed with smoke and panicked voices. She went from one door to the next, grasping and then releasing doork.n.o.bs, moving down the hall, in search of him.