Involuntary Bliss Page 5

  In his letter he explained how, in the wake of Warren’s death, he’d decided to abandon all academic pursuits in favour of a complete commitment to his poetry. He’d also mentioned that since returning from Peru and settling in Montreal, he’d had a brief affair with a woman named Madeleine, an episode he could not bring himself to describe in his letter, but that he’d tell me about if I found the time to visit, which he hoped I would. As a testament to his commitment to his newfound vocation, the letter also contained a transcription of the first canto of “The Maundering Harlequins,” which he’d written since I’d seen him last. In some respects the poem was typical of the kind he’d shared with me before: full of irreverence, of puns (some awful, some inventive), of livid invective and adjectives describing verbs. I remembered trying to appreciate it, and then rereading it, struggling and failing to arrive at an understanding of the poet’s conceit. James’s latest work, I concluded, was his most unsettling to date. In a lengthy explication, he expressed how he envisioned “The Maundering Harlequins” as an epic that would constitute an entire volume. The inspiration for the first canto arose from his experiences volunteering at the nursery of the Children’s Hospital and his recurring dreams following his encounters with the missionaries. He began with the notion that the young are more inclined than the old to be revolutionary in both thought and action. Not yet fully beholden to the adult tasks of making a living and raising children, young people have a greater capacity to oppose those oppressive institutional structures upon which, as they approach maturity, they will eventually come to depend. Extending this line of reasoning further, he suggested that virtually all revolutionary movements fail or are prone to corruption because those who perpetrate them have already become implicated in the function of oppressive power at the moment they learn to recognize and respond to the sound of their own names.

  He thus conceived of newborn, prelinguistic infants as the only true potential agents of the revolution. A baby, after all, is naturally inclined to make a fist, he argued. This spontaneous act of defiance is one of the few physical actions of which a newborn is capable. Because of unprecedented population growth on a global scale, there are now more infants, more prelinguistic human beings on earth, than ever before and thus, more revolutionary potential. Marx’s crisis of production, according to this logic, is in fact a crisis of human reproduction. In his efforts to explain the profundity of “The Maundering Harlequins,” James in his letter expressed something more than simple dispassionate curiosity as to the potential for numerous infants, working in tandem, to physically overpower an adult. He speculated as to whether the blows of a single infant, when multiplied several dozen times over, would be capable of actually ending a human life, the cumulative bludgeoning of innumerable fists eventually adding up to a ‘death of a thousand blows’ suffered by the full-grown perpetrators of a bourgeois world order those infants were bound to inherit if they did not strike when the iron is hot, that is, when their fingers first close upon their palms and their tiny fists are first formed.

  Several objections had occurred to me upon reading his letter. An infant, after all, though it may flail its limbs, does not intend its fists to be used for bludgeoning or punching. The forming of the infant’s fist, to my understanding, is nothing more than a reflex, an involuntary contraction of the tiny muscles in the fingers and the palm. I imagined James countering that the infant’s intentionality was beside the point, that the outcome was what mattered; that, in fact, several dozen innocently flailing infants, given enough time (also, he would be forced to concede, strategically placed around an immobilized victim), could assassinate just as effectively as a full-grown, cold-blooded KGB operative wielding an ice axe. I would counter with the notion that any meaningful revolutionary principle was predicated on the idea that humans are different from animals in that they can either reason or can conceive of the essential arationality of their existence. This is why humans have the potential of bettering their lot, or at the very least, of living with authenticity as they attempt to do so. Even more to the point, the one true use of an infant’s fist I could think of was not striking, but grasping. As captured in any number of sentimental photographs, a tiny infant’s fist may close around the comparatively large finger of an adult. Too small to hold an entire adult hand, unable yet to embrace, to kiss, or to vocalize whatever it may feel toward the mysteriously benevolent giants in the hands of whom his immediate fate lies, an infant can, with closed fist, grasp the outstretched adult finger with surprising tightness. Surely this act, if only in a symbolic sense, says more about human nature than the violently bathetic vision which James had conceived.

  But even as I followed this line of reasoning, anticipated James’s rebuttal and revised my critique accordingly, I knew I was missing the point. James, after all, had not written a manifesto, but had merely attempted to explain his poem. In doing so, he’d elicited a response from me that his poem had not. He’d have to revise the poem substantially, I thought, for it to affect me in the manner of his explication. I’d meant to tell him this, to write my thoughts honestly in my reply, but I never did, perhaps because I knew that even on the page I could not really say what needed to be said, knowing as I did that James’s confidence was more fragile than it appeared. I learned later from the letters that followed that he’d not managed to maintain the standard of productivity he’d set for himself, that the poem’s opening canto was all he had managed to complete, and as we sat there in silence on the mountain, James’s tetrahydrocannabinol high no doubt beginning to dissipate as the light took on the distinctive hue of late afternoon on a late summer’s day, I could sense him growing anxious, as if it had been he and not myself who’d been so absorbed in the contemplation of the difficulties with which he was confronted.

  “Why don’t you play me Warren’s song?” I asked, and he nodded his assent. But not here, he said, as he picked up Warren’s mandola and slung it over his shoulder. I followed him back to the path we’d left behind, and then further up the mountain’s incline, which grew steeper and more difficult to traverse, until it ended at a paved road. We followed the road until we arrived at a plateau, a parking lot from which we could view the eastern sprawl of the city, the high-rises of downtown to the south and the river beyond. A tour bus with New York plates was parked there and as we stood and took in the view, we were surrounded by a group of tourists in their seventies and eighties, their cameras directed toward the expanse of the city. Some of them looked at the distant horizon, pointing in the direction of the Olympic stadium, while others, clutching the arms of companions, looked downward, cautiously, at the base of the mountain we’d just ascended. Looking south, I tried to determine the building from which we’d emerged the night before, but it was impossible to distinguish from the dozens of high-rise towers in what I gauged to be the vicinity of the train station. I turned to ask James if he could point it out and I saw that he now held Warren’s mandola in his hands, its strap slung over his shoulder and its case open on the ground before him. He tuned the instrument and when he was satisfied, he began to strum a ballad, several tourists turning toward him to listen.

  Though James had not fully mastered the instrument, his playing was passable. The lyrics of the song concerned a precocious infant with one eye, who, before he reaches his first birthday, falls victim to a number of misfortunes. The song was more grotesque than poignant, but there was a sincerity in James’s delivery, and I could tell by the sporadic applause at the end of that first performance, the tossing of several coins into his case, that some of the tourists were appreciative, though I did not understand why even before the modest applause had died down, James felt compelled to launch into a repeat performance of the very same song.

  The second performance was superior, James having had the benefit of warming up, but by the time he came to the first chorus, a young woman wearing a sun visor and carrying a clipboard began directing the elderly tourists toward the waiting bus. The seniors were
largely cooperative, those who’d listened to James’s song the first time willing to let themselves be led away. Those whose gaze had remained unwaveringly fixed upon the horizon turned away one by one, their faces drawn, seemingly exhausted by the expanse of urban landscape with which they were confronted. At the conclusion of the second performance, only a single tourist remained, a small woman in a Fort Lauderdale sweatshirt and dark sunglasses with abnormally large, square-shaped lenses, a transparent cellophane kerchief covering the whiteness of her bouffant hair, as if she suspected it might rain. James half-bowed toward her before he knelt to collect the money in his case.

  “Did you write that song?” she asked, and James said that though the words were his, a friend had composed the tune.

  “It’s sad,” she said. Then she said that a good friend of her husband’s had lost the sight in one eye in a boxing match when he was just a boy, and that he’d gotten through life just fine with one good eye, although he had limited peripheral vision, and his depth perception had not been very good, and he hadn’t been able to read for very long at one time, which was fine, because he’d only ever liked to read newspaper headlines. She said her husband’s friend, who’d been the best man at their wedding, had lived a good life, had never let his bad eye get in the way of him doing what he wanted, and that he’d been a cheerful man, although people who didn’t know him often thought he looked sad, and she thought that this was because people smile with their eyes as well as their mouths, and he only had one good eye to smile with.

  The woman with the clipboard took the old woman by the arm and said, “It’s time to go, Eunice, everyone’s waiting,” and Eunice said to James, “Why’d you play it twice in a row? No one gave you any money the second time,” which was something I had also noticed. James said that whenever he performed the song, he always played it twice. He said that everyone had to pay the bills, but that he did not perform the song simply to make money, or to entertain.

  “We have to leave now,” said the clipboard woman.

  “This young man is speaking,” said Eunice, with an authority that seemed to surprise the clipboard woman.

  “The others are all resting on the bus,” said the clipboard woman. “Everyone needs a nap,” she said, almost whispering. I looked toward the tour bus, and the driver was leaning beside the open door, looking back at us, taking a stick of chewing gum from its package. The bus’s tinted windows made it impossible to see what was happening inside. When I turned my attention again to Eunice, the clipboard woman had tightened her grip, betraying the true thinness of Eunice’s arm despite the generous billows of her sweatshirt.

  “Don’t force me,” said Eunice, “my hip.”

  “No one’s forcing anyone,” said the clipboard woman, letting go of Eunice’s arm. The clipboard woman raised her index finger toward the driver as James told Eunice that he’d never known an infant or anyone else with one eye and that the one-eyed infant in the song existed only in his imagination. He said he’d written the song out of respect for the courage the imaginary infant had shown in the face of suffering. It was very rare that anyone ever dropped anything into his case during the second performance of the song, but this was the point. The second performance was in keeping with his intentions precisely because he didn’t make any money from it. Playing the song twice was to his mind a way of making the tragedy easier to endure. One one-eyed infant was an aberration, but two were a pair, there being a formal symmetry in his repeating the song that he found comforting, even hopeful, although the infant in the song would never know anything of that comfort or that hope. As he spoke, Eunice listened with what seemed to be attentiveness, her thin and spotted hands resting on the oversized fanny pack she wore around her waist.

  “They’re waiting for me,” she said, when James had finished, and the woman with the clipboard nodded.

  “I meant to put something in your case after the first time you played the song,” she said, “but then you started playing the exact same song again. Is it all right if I give it to you now?” she said.

  That would be fine, said James. Eunice unzipped her fanny pack and took out a green wallet with a reptilian sheen. From the wallet she took a crisp red bill and James extended his hand to accept it, but rather than pass it to him, she knelt and placed it in his empty case. Still kneeling on the ground, she turned to the woman with the clipboard, and said, “Help me up please, Laura.” Laura was already moving to help her to her feet, Eunice’s expression betraying that she was in pain.

  “Would you like a hand?” I said, addressing Eunice, but it was Laura who nodded, and James who handed me Warren’s mandola and reached for Eunice’s free elbow and her hand, and helped Eunice to her feet.

  “You remind me of him,” she turned to say to James, as Laura escorted her toward the bus.

  “Who?” said James.

  “My husband’s friend,” she said, and James nodded as if he understood. I turned to gauge his reaction to Eunice’s words, and if he’d not looked so sad before, he did so then, the sadness emanating from his eyes, which were blue and pale, as he looked back at Eunice. Then Laura, addressing all of the waiting seniors, said something about going back to the hotel, and Eunice ascended the last of the steps and the door closed behind her, and the bus drove away and James turned toward the eastern horizon and pointed to a high-rise he was certain was the one we’d inadvertently entered the night before, shortly after I’d arrived.

  I’d travelled by train, and James had agreed to meet me at the station. The station was high ceilinged, with escalators that led to the underground tracks below. Along the perimeter were fast food restaurants and coffee shops and kiosks, all closed when I arrived, partitions drawn across their countertops and entrances. While I waited for James, the other passengers claimed their baggage and made their way to exits, or down passageways lined with empty, darkened stores. The station seemed to me surprisingly quiet for a Saturday night, and soon the only other person in my vicinity was a girl who looked no more than sixteen years old, sleeping on a bench, a tattooed arm flung across her face, covering her eyes. A duffle bag lay on the floor beneath her. One of her fishnet-stockinged legs hung down, the bag’s strap hooked around her dangling combat boot.

  I sat on a bench nearby and picked up a discarded copy of . I tried to practice my French by reading an article about the exploits of local motorcycle gangs, but my head throbbed from fatigue and I could not focus. As I closed my eyes, I experienced the vague sensation that I was still in motion, as if I were still on the train, and this illusion prompted me to recall a story James had once told me about his infancy, when his mother would take him for drives to lull him to sleep. When he was very young he would scream for hours on end for reasons neither his mother nor her doctor could understand, and on such nights his mother would be compelled to put him in her Grand LeMans station wagon and she would get behind the wheel and drive, not leisurely, but with intention, as if they were late, as if they had somewhere to be, a pressing midnight playdate with another insomniac . At first, he continued to scream bloody murder, as his mother put it, and this spurred her onward. She would drive as if he was not in the car with her but left behind alone in his bassinet and she was driving away from him and all the responsibilities that he entailed. Her own mother had tried to persuade her that she should be comforted by his screams, that even though the screams would cause her head to throb and make it impossible for her to sleep, she should find them reassuring, for it is only when a child no longer has the energy to scream that you must worry, when you hold in your arms a child who is without sleep or contentment, a child moaning and writhing without the cacophony that sound lungs and health and wilfulness produce, that you must be concerned. Nevertheless intent on silencing his screams, his mother drove him through the side streets of the suburbs, avoiding intersections with stoplights, rolling softly past stop signs so as to preserve the fluidity of transport, the unceasing revolution of the whe
els upon the road, in an effort to envelop him soundly in unconsciousness, the soothing illusion of perpetual movement complete when gradually his screams would subside as he finally drifted off to sleep.