All Saints (13 page)

A walk. Just the thing, he decided, getting up from the toilet. A walk would loosen him up. And it was a gorgeous October day. A little cool for October, actually, but still lovely. Yes. A walk in the woods. Perhaps a poem might come to him.

The scent of leave-taking—

The aroma of elegy—

He had replaced the box of matches, put on his windbreaker, decided against wearing his gloves or leaving a note and, last thing, made sure he had his wallet and his keys.

 

Be able to identify my body, at least. Enter my apartment and dispose of my effects.

No. None of that. He must not waste time with that kind of nonsense. He must keep his head and think. What does he have to work with? The light. Going fast, but not gone yet. And where was the light when he set out? On his left? Yes. The light was on his left when he stepped into the woods. And where was it when he turned and doubled back? Did he think to keep it on his right?

He doesn't know. He can't be sure. He thought he was walking a path, damn it. And now he's cold. And thirsty. And it's getting dark. And—

Stop it. Stop it. Use your head, man. What did you learn in scouts about being—
his mind flinches from the cliché—
lost in the woods
?
Well, you learned not to get lost in the first place, didn't you? Always carry a bloody compass. All right. What do you know about being lost already? What do people do when they're lost? They walk in circles. Yes. They waste time and energy going nowhere. So the best thing is to stay in one place and wait to be found.

There. A solid, sensible decision. Something to give him focus and purpose. He will stay right here and wait to be found. For he will be found. Of course he will. He didn't come up here alone, after all. He's part of a group. They will be back from town and beginning to wonder about him by now, surely. Getting a bit worried, perhaps. Standing on the porch, peering into the woods. Maybe even starting out after him. Fanning out in all directions. Calling his name.

He listens. Hard.

Well, they may not have started out yet. They could be still standing on the porch. And if he has indeed been walking in circles, then he can't be that far from the cottage. So it would make sense for him to call to them. Yes. He would be justified in raising his voice. Under the circumstances.

He clears his throat. “Hello?” His voice sounds very small. He takes a deep breath and tries again. “Hello!” No answer. No footsteps. But at least he has made a decision. To stay in one place and call. Until he is found. “Hello? Anyone there? Owen here. Owen James. I'm over by the—” He almost laughs. “Tree.”

 

Owen James. James Owen. He used to think that if he ever started to publish, he would do so as James Owen. Yes. The poet James Owen.
The Collected Works of James Owen
.

He has never particularly cared for his given name. But it was his father's name, and it didn't lend itself to shortening. After all, what were the possibilities? Owe? Wen? Then when he went away to university, his first year roommate—a nastily clever type who said everything in a tone of such dripping irony that Owen could not object to any of it without appearing petulant—nicknamed him Ovoid.

“Enter the Ovoid!” greeted him whenever he returned to their residence room, which this roommate never seemed to leave. Though he was fairly sure of its meaning, he looked the word up, hoping he was wrong. He was not wrong.
Ovoid
. The aptness of it, the cruel accuracy, took his breath away. He was already thickest in the middle, the way his father had been, to judge from photographs. And his hairline was starting to recede in much the same way. His father had lost his life in the war at the age of twenty-two—
Don't say he was killed, Owen, say he lost his life
.—so Owen had no idea how much hair he himself was likely to lose. Whether it would stop at some point, leaving him tonsured, or whether he would end up bald as an—

“Ovoid!”

“Tell you what,” he said early on to his tormentor, trying to be reasonable, “If you want to call me something, why don't you just call me O?”

“As in,
The Story Of
?” the roommate snickered.

Owen endured till the end of the semester, then moved off-campus on his own. Best to be on one's own.

 

“Hellooooo!” I'm here! Please!”

He doesn't know when he started adding the
please
. At least he hasn't said
help
. And he will not say it. Even though every
helloo
threatens to become a
help
.

His mouth is dry. The light is almost gone. The clenching in his stomach has become an unmistakeable heaviness.
Devil's in the timing.
Soon he will have to drop his pants and squat. But not until absolutely necessary. He will not allow it until the only alternative would be to soil himself.

He keeps his shuddering back pressed up against the trunk of the tree that he will not leave. He is aware of a deep childish desire to turn around and embrace it, his tree, press his face to its bark. But he will not allow himself to do that either.

Cathy. He'll think of Cathy. Play the man for her.

“Helloooo!”

 

Cathy. Could he really have been so irritated by her the first time he saw her? People do tend to irritate him. The too-large family that stops his elevator one floor from ground and crams in, buggy, dog and all, forcing him into a corner. The stranger ahead of him in the cashier line-up who feels moved to turn and engage him in a conversation about how long they've been waiting.

All Cathy did, that day in the laundry room, was take his clothes out of the dryer in order to put her own in. She was even folding them neatly when he caught her at it. “It's just that there are never enough machines,” she said when he protested, “and some people leave their stuff inside for hours.”

“Well, I'm not one of them!”

Really, he was only five minutes past the time. He wouldn't even have been that late, had not the phone rung just as he was starting for the door—a telemarketer who had to be told in no uncertain terms to remove his name from her list. So it was not fair of this young woman to empty his dryer. And it embarrassed him to see her handling his clothing.

“No, I can see you're not one of them.” She grinned as she spoke and gave the shirt she had just folded a friendly pat. Afterwards, he ran their brief conversation through his mind several times, searching for a hint, a trace of irony in her tone. Finding none.

The next time he saw her was on a Saturday morning just outside their apartment building. She was coming toward him carrying bags of groceries and he wished there was something he could duck behind before she caught sight of him. But she gave him that grin again and called out, “Hi! How are you?” Then she actually stopped and put her bags down. Which obliged him to stop too.

He has never liked small talk. Never seen the point of it. Even the briefest exchange makes him feel as if he is lumbering along in a dance whose steps he will never master. “I'm very well, thank you. And yourself?”

She turned out to be one of those people who take such a token inquiry as a request for information. Nevertheless, while she was going on about her recent promotion, how scary it had been at first but how she was finally hitting her stride, and how much she was looking forward to Sunday, when she would be taking her niece and nephew to see the latest Harry Potter, he found himself, to his surprise, to be actually listening. With some pleasure.

“I'm Cathy Grant, by the way,” she said, sticking out her hand.

“Owen James.” He took her hand, which was small and dry. “I'm very pleased to meet you. Cathy.” And he was, oddly enough.

“You've lived in the building for quite a while, haven't you, Owen?”

Probably since you were in diapers
. He was glad afterwards that he did not say that. “Oh, decades.” Then, because he felt he should make at least a little effort, he added, “It's an excellent location.”

“Is it ever!” Then she started telling him about her previous apartment and how inconvenient it had been, how she had had to take two buses to work, and—

“I'm sorry,” he interrupted gently, “but I have to be going. It was very nice to speak to you. Cathy.” He was normally not good with names.

Thank goodness she didn't ask where he was headed. Not that there was anything wrong with going down to Harbourfront to take in an International Festival of Breads. It had looked intriguing when he read about it that morning in the paper. But for some reason he did not want this Cathy Grant to know that that was what he was going to do with his Saturday.

Still, as he stepped along toward the subway, he felt relieved by their brief exchange. Redeemed, even. His testiness that day in the laundry room, bordering as it had on rudeness, must have troubled him more than he realized.

Later, when he got back from the International Festival of Breads, which had been less absorbing than he had hoped, he did something he had not done in years. He sat down at his desk. It was actually his mother's old writing desk, with pigeon holes where she used to file receipts and letters from England. He drew a piece of paper toward him. Picked up a pen.

Her fresh face a flower upturning to

Like a sun-drenched flower, her face upturned to

Her face a

He had almost stopped wondering what ever happened to the poet James Owen. To
The Collected Works of
James Owen.
He would have been grateful by now to be plain old Owen James, who'd published a few poems. A very few would do. One. Just so he could tell himself there was more to him than—

“Seem to need a bit of help here. Gotten into something. Can't seem to get out of it
.
”

His flushed face poking over some young thing's cubicle wall. Then, a disgracefully few minutes later, “Owen's done it again
.
” Chuckling desperately. “Think you can help him out?”

There had been a time in the office when he was Mister James. A time when a file was something he could hold in his hand and put in its place. When others came to him for help.
Mister James? Where would I find—
And he always knew. He was—what do the younger people say? The go-to guy.

Now, a file is something he cannot even touch, let alone find and open.
Where did you put it this time, Owen?
The question he dreads most from these children he will have to work with for God knows how many more years while the gap between the cost of living and the amount his pension would be if he retired grows wider and wider.

“Well, I believe I may have put it—” Pointing a shaking finger at the screen. “But it doesn't seem to be there now.”

None of them knows about his poetry. He would never tell them. Years ago, he used to have the sort of colleagues who cracked good-humoured jokes about the company's poet laureate. Some of them were actually aware that T.S. Eliot had supported himself with an ordinary job. But those people had all moved on. The ones he works with now have likely never even heard of T.S. Eliot.

I feel her smile upturning

At the corners of my own

 

“Help! Help me please! I'm lost! Please come for me! Help!”

He is weeping, bawling into the dark. He wipes at his face, careful to use only the backs of his hands. His glasses are gone. He tried to hook them off his nose, using just the tip of his baby finger, which he thought might still be clean. But they fell to the ground, and now in the dark he'll never find them.

He couldn't help it. He couldn't wait any longer. And then while he was squatting, he felt something—a cobweb? A bat's wing? Something brushed near his mouth and he jerked back and fell on his naked backside in his own mess. He tried to wipe it off, then had to wipe his hands in the pine needles, which stuck to his palms. So he wiped his palms on the knees of his brand new jeans, the only pants he has with him, and now they're shit-smeared, inside and out. He can smell himself with every breath. And he is so very cold. And his teeth might break from chattering.

Where are they? Why don't they come for him? Where is—

“Cathy! Catheeee!”

 

It was such a mystery. The last thing he would have expected. For a long time, he refused to believe such a thing was even possible. For a person like him. At his age. He felt so foolish. And at the same time so glad.

When did it happen? And how? He hardly knew her. True, ever since that first conversation in the street, they had been stopping to chat whenever they met in the elevator or the laundry room or the vestibule where they picked up their mail. But that didn't really explain it.
Friends
, he told himself tentatively at first.
We are becoming friends
.
Well. Nothing so strange about that, surely.

Then one morning as he was hurrying to the subway to get to work, he caught sight of her just ahead of him on the pavement. He slowed and watched her. She had a bouncy walk that made her ponytail flop back and forth across her shoulders. It must have been annoying her, because she reached back and pulled off whatever was holding it, and her hair—

He wouldn't call her pretty, exactly. Her teeth were a little buckish, and her eyes on the small side and her ordinary brown hair too often pulled back into that careless ponytail. But there was her smile and her warmth and her dear little hand inserting her mail key. Apartment 502, he couldn't help noticing. Two down and one over from his own.