A (7 page)

The months that followed were a time of unshakable ambivalence. Baddeley did what his publisher expected of him: two readings and a brief interview in which he tried, unsuccessfully, to say what his novel “actually” meant. He tried to use his inspiration to write poetry. But poetry, even bad poetry, was beyond him. No words meant for poetry would come. What came, despite his resistance to it, was yet another novel. To make matters worse, the novel that came seemed little more than a variation on
Home is the Parakeet
. This one,
Over the Dark Hills
, was set in the heart of an African conflict, its protagonist called upon to lead a herd of elephants over mine-infested ground to freedom.

There was, of course, compensation. Writing while he was inspired was tonic. The hours would breeze by as he wrote about lands he'd never seen, animals he'd never touched, and people who brightly lived in the recesses of his psyche.
While
writing, he did not care
what
he was writing. Novel, fable, poem, recipe ... it was all the same. Disappointment came when he measured what he had written against his own ideals. First of all, there was, as far as Baddeley was concerned, the matter of fiction's inherent inferiority. When he compared his work to the genuinely sublime (Goethe's “Metamorphosis of Plants,” say, or “Canto 3” of the
Inferno
), every word he'd written turned to ash.

Some time during the writing of
Over the Dark Hills
, at a moment when he was tempted to go back to the Toronto Western, Baddeley tried to reason himself away from his need for inspiration.

– I'm only writing fiction, he thought. I should be able to do this on my own.

It seemed to him that, having been a reviewer, he was familiar with “literature,” familiar with its rules, variations, and tropes. He could push a character through memories and places as well as anyone else, surely. Davidoff had been doing it for years, and a less inspired writer there
could
not be. But five chapters into
Over the Dark Hills
, Baddeley no longer knew where to take the story. Should he kill off one of the elephants? Should his protagonist betray his fiancée? And to what terminal was
this
novel heading? He tried to think his way through his questions, but he simply did not trust his own instincts and reasons. So, he was left with a choice: he could go on writing and re-writing scenes until one of them felt right or he could return to the Toronto Western.

He returned to the hospital and, for the last time in his life, Baddeley found the room he was looking for at once. Anxious that “God” would overtake him before he could speak, Baddeley cried out as he entered the ward.

– Please, he asked, what are you?

– I am, said God, what you cannot imagine that imagines you.

– But are you God?

– That word has a trillion meanings, Alexander. I am and I am not what
you
mean by it.

– But why use
me
? asked Baddeley. What am I?

– You're the peace I seek endlessly, said God.

– But I don't think I'm as strong as Avery. I don't think I can ... The Lord interrupted him.

– You're not Avery Andrews, Alexander. Your voyage is different.

– Do all writers go through this?

– Almost none of them do. Priests are much better at it.

– Did Avery see the kind of things I saw last time?

– Much worse, said God.

And took him to a terrifying place where he witnessed or, more exactly, participated in the murder of a family. Here, he was each of the three men who entered the family's home just before dawn. He could smell the last of the previous evening's supper. He experienced the killers' sense of righteousness, their exhilaration, their fear, their contempt for the ones they slaughtered. But he was also the three members of the family: father, mother, and twelve-year-old boy. His mind was as if partitioned in six and every moment experienced by each of his six selves was inescapable. He could not cry out, neither in righteousness nor fear. He experienced death three times and then found himself in an empty room in Radiography.

For a very long time after this, it did not matter to Alexander Baddeley what or who was at the heart of his ritual at Toronto Western: God, his own imagination, the devil, or the errant fumes of anaesthetic and soap. It did not matter whether the places he went were inside of him or not, whether the things he experienced were taking place, had taken place, or would take place. It did not seem to him that the words he dispersed over the pages of his Hilroy notebooks were any sort of compensation for this traumatic empathy.

Although his inspiration waned again towards the end of
Over the Dark Hills
, Baddeley chose one of the many endings that suggested itself, wrote it as plainly as he could and sent it off to his publisher, more or less unconcerned about the work's fate. Moreover, his lack of concern went unpunished. It seemed he alone noticed the flaws in the novel's ending. Those reviewers who actually finished the book assumed that the shift in tone towards the end was part of the novel's point. And the novel did well, allowing Baddeley to buy a house on Augusta, a house that was a short walk from the Toronto Western, though he hadn't been mindful of the hospital when he bought the place.

With the success of his novels, Baddeley had the life he wanted, a life of reading and reviewing, a life of seclusion and quiet in the heart of a city he had come to love.

More: it was a life that brought him closer to the work of the poet he still admired. Having been through some of what Avery Andrews had been through, it was now possible for Baddeley to rightly value Andrews' stamina, his persistence in the service of a “God” who was unstable and wayward. Knowing what Andrews had been through, Baddeley could now accept Andrews' poetry for what it was: the narrative of a man's withering in the presence of the sacred. Far from tarnishing Andrews' work, Baddeley's knowledge made the poems more precious to him. It also made him, he thought, the only man who knew (who would ever know) the true weight of Andrews' books.

And yet, this is not how the story of Baddeley's time with Avery Andrews ends.

Some eight years after the publication of
Over the Dark Hills
, Alexander Baddeley should have been at peace with himself and the world. He was frugal. The money he made from his books was more than enough to keep him in Brussels sprouts and vanilla yoghurt. A movie was made of
Home is the Parakeet
— a good one, though it was unhappily named
Parakeets are Free!
— and there was talk of filming
Over the Dark Hills
as well. So, as far as anyone (himself included) could tell, Baddeley's future was not precarious. It was this very fact that began to weigh on him. He was not, he felt,
doing
enough with himself. Reviewing had become a habit, a reflex almost. It was no longer a proving ground or a necessary marketplace. He had grown comfortable, almost bourgeois and that thought troubled him.

Then, too, the pain he had experienced during the creation of his second novel had dissipated into the kind of memory of which one says, “Actually, it wasn't that bad, now that I think of it.” He remembered, above all, the ecstasy of divine presence, the joy of exploring places in himself to which he did not otherwise have access. And then again, he was still young. Forty. Why should he not again experience the heights of inspiration?

So, one day, he went to the Toronto Western, warily but also hopefully, entering on Bathurst. The hospital was just that — a hospital. Spiritually speaking, there was nothing special about the place. At the entrance, it smelled of antiseptic and coffee and a host of evanescent things: perfume, leather, sweat, bread, urine, nail polish, rubbing alcohol ...

The sheer banality of the place was the most distressing thing about Baddeley's return. Whereas, in the past, he had gone
towards
something, towards a feeling, now it was as if he were in a place he'd never been before. The faces around him were, naturally, unfamiliar, but so was the way the light fell on the walls and the sound of shoes on the polished floors. Even the music playing — insistent and soft from somewhere above — was in a language he did not understand

– ...
e l'uomo sai chi e? Un certo Alexander che Manzoni fu
...

Nowhere in this building of brick, concrete and glass did he feel anything like inspiration or the presence of “God”. The building was not godless, exactly, but it was no more God-compassing than the Kensington market or the
Nova Era
bakery.

When a nurse stopped him to ask if she could help, he answered

– No, I was looking for a ward.

– Which one? she asked.

– 88
A
?

– I don't think there is an 88
A
, she said kindly. What seems to be the problem? Are you lost?

– No, no. Thank you very much, he answered.

But, of course, he
was
lost and, after a while, walking around the hospital was like walking in a forest when evening comes and one begins to suspect one has been going in circles.

Over the years that followed, Alexander Baddeley returned to the Toronto Western from time to time. He did not find “God” or inspiration or any such thing. However, the place saturated his consciousness and penetrated his dreams. And one night, while he was dreaming of an intersection in a city he did not recognize, a passerby of whom he asked directions smiled, pointed “west” and showed him what he held in his other hand: a stainless steel, kidney-shaped dish, four inches wide at it widest, eight inches long, and three inches deep. In the dish there were two white cotton squares of the kind used to swab skin before a needle is given. The swabs were side by side. One of them had a speck of blood on it.

– Oh, said Baddeley. I must be home.

And looking up he suddenly recognized the corner of Bathurst and Dundas, and saw that the passerby was not a stranger but, in fact, Avery Andrews, looking much as he'd looked when Baddeley saw him for the first time.

– I know, said Andrews.

Meaning that they were
both
home, a thought that filled Alexander Bertrand Baddeley with such relief he let himself sink deeper into the place from which all worlds come. And he woke the next morning feeling that he'd been — even if only briefly — as lucid as a human can be.

Toronto, 2011 – Ocala, 2012

Home is the Parakeet

&

AVERY ANDREWS' POETRY

WRITTEN BY HARRY MATHEWS

André Alexis is the author of two novels (
Childhood
and
Asylum
), two books of short stories (
Despair and Other Stories of Ottawa
and
Beauty and Sadness
), a children's book (
Ingrid and the Wolf
) and a number of plays (
Lambton Kent, Name in Vain, Fidelity
). He was a contributing book reviewer for the
Globe and Mail
, and has worked extensively in radio, having been the host/writer of CBC Radio One's “Radio Nomad” and CBC Radio 2's “Skylarking.”

Colophon

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A

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