Thirteen crucifixions 21

Hey everybody.  I am still feverishly busy so while something original is incubating please enjoy this big fat ass chunk of my big fat ass novel.

                                                            1984

            The yellow peach halves stared up at Glen from the syrup and the pancakes like the naked buttocks of a recently drowned child.  The waiter had presented them in the most outlandishly campy fashion: “fruity pancakes, prepared by a fruity cook, and served up by a fruity waiter for one fruity—”  He caught Glen’s not quite hostile eye, went silent, gave him his pancakes and skulked silently to the back of the café.  Glen’s sister, Marlene, managed the Pitstop, which served a largely gay clientele on Davie Street.  Her staff all seemed to adore her darling little brother.  Apart from this one.  He supposed that the feeling was absolutely mutual.

            They had recently become the best of friends, Glen and his sister.  With financial assistance from their mother he had rescued Marlene from her coke-dealing boyfriend in Toronto.  One particularly savage beating had put her in hospital.  Glen checked Marlene out of the hospital and onto a flight back to Vancouver.  Her gratitude and loyalty to her brother, since, had become for him at times embarrassing, though generally he had come to greatly enjoy the friendship of his sister.

            The morning paper lay in front of Glen like a snake’s discarded skin.  His half-consumed pancakes almost floated in the excess of imitation maple syrup that he’d dumped on them.  Glen attributed his sweet tooth as a harmless genetic flipside to the legacy of his father's alcoholism.  He noticed in the paper an item concerning Carol Hartley-Atkinson.  The author, one Derek Merkeley, indicated that she “still refuses to comment on her role in Thursday’s violent demonstration against the American foreign and nuclear policy as symbolized in the visit of the U. S. Secretary of State in front of the Hyatt Hotel.  Turning verbally abusive on this reporter, she threatened me with physical harm, then turned me out of her place before I could place even the first question, after she had specifically invited me in for an interview, which leads me to wonder if this telegenic doyenne of Vancouver’s anti-nuclear movement might be beginning to crack under pressure?”

            Glen liked his pancakes cold, mushy and excessively sweet.  Marlene came in, her little black purse hanging like a tiny sandbag from her shoulder.  She collapsed dramatically into the empty seat across from Glen.

            “You’re such an early riser”, she said yawning.  “Oh my GAWD!  What have you done to our beautiful pancakes!  All that syrup, you’ll be wearing dentures before you’re forty.

            “You’re up early this morning.”

            She lit a cigarette, then shoved the pack to her brother who declined.

            “Oh, you Sunday smokers.”

            “I haven’t had one in over a week.”

            “Details, details.  Hey Jack!  Bring us some coffee here, eh?”  To Glen Marlene muttered, “If I had my way and the waiter wasn’t giving regular blow jobs to the proprietor of this tacky establishment then I’d have had that conceited moron out on his fat ass ages ago.”

            “The boss likes him?”

            “He’s been sucking his cock for three weeks already.”  The waiter returned with coffee.  “We need cream”, Marlene said.

            “You want cream?”  He put his left hand on his hip, holding the pot of coffee just so.  “I’ll give you both some cream.”

            “Oh, go perform an indecent act on an exhaust pipe.  Just look busy.”  To Glen, Marlene said, “Walter’s sick so I have to cover for breakfast today. Our Lady Twit over there can’t be trusted here alone.”

            “You haven’t had a lot of sleep?”

            “Three fucking hours.”  Jack, the waiter returned with a dish full of plastic creamers.

            “Hey Marlene”, he said, “Want to know how you can tell when a Jewish Princess is having an orgasm.”

            “I’m not Jewish and I don’t want to know.”

            “When she drops her nail-file.”

            “Jack—OFF!”  He pranced away giggling.

            “Your boss knows how to pick them.”

            “What are your plans for today?”

            “The Walk for Peace.”

            “Mom was trying to remind me yesterday.”

            “Are you going?”

            “Yeah, sure, on three hours sleep with a restaurant to run.  I’m still going to have time left over to save the world.  Like, give me a break already.  Speaking of work, how’s your job going?”

            “I got fired yesterday.”

            “What happened?”

            “Burn out.”

            “I thought they liked you.”

            “What are your plans after work?”

            “Sleep.”

            “Doris said that you’re more than welcome at the reception after the march.”

            “This is the second year in a row that she’s turned down my offer to cater the damn thing.  And knowing her she’ll still want me to do all the work.  No thanks.  I’m tired.  Oh, you know that guy who was staying with you?”

“Stephen?”
            “You mean Tanya?”

            “Tanya?”        

            “Looks pretty good in a cocktail dress.”

            “You’re sure it was him?”

            “Absolutely.”

            “Did he say anything?”

            “No.”

            “Tell him to call me.”

            “If I’m not busy.”

            “Was he on drugs?”

            “Of course he was on drugs.  They’re all on drugs.  The customers, the staff, the owner.  After Toronto and Kristoff you’d think I’d find a job in a clean environment?  Speaking of jobs, do you know what you’re going to do yet?”

            “Work here?”

            “Serving tables?”

            “Are you hiring?”

            “Come in tomorrow at five for a training shift.”

            “Thanks.”

            “No problem.”

            “I might travel, I mean maybe next year some time.  I’ve got some money put away.”

            “Where would you go?”

            “Central America.”

            “No, you might get shot.

            “I don’t even know if I’m going anywhere.  I might stay here.  I don’t know.”

            “Don’t get defensive.”

            “Sorry.”

            “That’s enough.  Why do you always have to apologize for everything?”

            Glen didn’t reply.  He resumed eating.  Marlene butted out her cigarette.  “I have to get started.  Breakfast’s on me.”

            Seven years ago Glen had left his smoke-engorged body, and viewed from an unknown height the frantic paramedics performing CPR on him.  He was sucked up into a vortex.  After this, he remembered nothing.  Two days later he woke up to his worried mother sitting near his hospital bed.  He had seen God.  He knew this.  He knew also that something indescribably beautiful had happened to him.  Those thirteen naked and dying Jesus’ he had executed had taken it out of him.  Glen could no longer paint.  He had died on Good Friday, just when he was finishing the thirteenth crucifixion.  In the hospital he rose again on Easter Morning.  In Vancouver he lived again with his mother in the two- bedroom apartment they had shared during his adolescence.  Tim, his ex, he no longer heard from.  It was as though he had actually died and now remained dead.

            Glen was thirteen when his parents divorced.  His mother sold the family home and his father moved to Britain where he married a former student of his, by whom he now had four children, none of whom Glen had met.  This left Glen in the sole care of his mother.  Marlene had gone first to stay with their father, before he left Canada, then she bounced from one group home to another, as their mother found her too unmanageable.  At fourteen Glen had his first homosexual experience, with the eighteen year old nephew of Doris Goldberg.  When he was sixteen, at Wreck Beach, he encountered Tim, who two years later took him with him to Toronto where Glen enrolled at the Ontario College of Art.  When he returned with his mother to Vancouver he was clinically disoriented from his near-death experience.  He could no longer paint, but he drew, usually detailed portraits of such persons as he would often meet later on.  This created quite a stir.  Then, at twenty-three, Glen found a job in the Downtown Eastside, working with society’s most destitute persons, helping them to find shelter, get welfare, employment, counselling, medical attention, communities and agencies that would tolerate them, clean up their mess and delouse their bodies that usually stank of the most wretched poverty.  He was attending an Anglican church in the area, on the recommendation of Bryan Verhoeven.  Bryan was one of the servers dancing attendance to the priests at St. Jude’s during high mass.  He was also an assistant director of St. Jude’s primary downtown mission, the Good Shepherd, where Glen ended up working.  It was during a Solemn Liturgy for Good Friday when Glen first visited St. Jude’s.  He was badly wanting to bring closure to his Good Friday immolation of two years ago.  He walked in midway through the service, where to the sad and sonorous plainsong reproaches, he found himself weeping, prostrate over the wooden feet of the crucified Saviour.  He later learned that this was the Veneration of the Cross.

            Bryan was in love with Glen, whom he tried to push into the Server’s Guild, but without result.  Glen said that it interfered with his ability to worship, to which Bryan would shrilly chide that the actions of serving at mass were an integral part of the worship.  Still, Glen demurred.  He tried to get him involved in choir—Glen had a fine singing voice—but the choir director’s preciosity in addition to the egotistic venality of certain members of the choir were too much for him.  Glen quit after two practices.  When he finally successfully networked Glen into the Good Shepherd Bryan was crowing with delight and came to regard him as his personal trophy.  They had 

first met during the previous summer.  Glen, convalescing with his mother, did next to nothing, and Alice McIntyre was very happy to accommodate her son.  He read, took long walks and hikes, sat inside cafes with his sketchbook or journal.  The fire had well provided Glen with insurance money—there had been speculation that for this reason he had deliberately set the fire.  Glen’s mother had snatched him back to Vancouver, before Tim, who was spending the Easter weekend with a new boyfriend of his, had a chance to retrieve him back to their apartment.  They never saw each other again, and Glen felt unable to write or call him.  It was Tim who had modelled nude for Glen’s Thirteen Crucifixions.   He would often sit still at his mother’s for extended periods of silence, at times losing himself in contemplative raptures.  Losing simultaneously his cravings for meat and for human flesh, Glen was soon vegetarian and celibate.  He didn’t miss Tim.

            Bryan had just entered the café while Glen was finishing his portrait.  They had never before met or set eyes on each other.  Bryan was astonished, and declared that Glen was a mystic and most surely a saint.  He was in his late twenties, balding.  He was intense, shrill and controlling.  He was an alcoholic.  Glen was unable to reciprocate Bryan’s love for him, who was simply an interesting fellow for him to hang out with.  He accepted Bryan’s homage, treating it as an honour.  Every week they would meet at this café.  Bryan became Glen’s mentor, daring not to lay on him an unwarranted finger.  The resulting friendship for Glen was close, intense and suffocating.  He soon learned that he was but one of many beautiful, lost young males hanging on Bryan and exploiting his vulnerability.

            Early in his career with Good Shepherd, Glen had been assigned to assist a schizophrenic woman named Veronica.  She was Mexican, and had taken to wearing long winding white bed sheets that looked like saris.  One day on the street, she asked Glen to bless her.  She was pretty, about thirty, and claimed that she often had visions of saints and angels.  To Glen she seemed lucid, more so than what he usually encountered in people.  Often Veronica would succumb to lengthy spasms of violent and prolonged weeping: she claimed to be in intercession for the planet, which she perceived as a living entity that was slowly devouring itself.  Glen had never been asked for a blessing before.  Gently he put his hand on her head, as she had requested, and blessed Veronica in the name of the Holy Trinity.  She smiled beatifically, tears flowing down her face.  She thanked Glen and then walked away.  He was so overwhelmed by the encounter that he had to book off sick for the rest of the week.

            Glen came to regard St. Jude’s and Good Shepherd as rather eccentric manifestations.  The preciosity of Anglo-Catholics was legendary, he soon learned, constituting that minority of Anglicans besotted by a medieval obsession with Catholic ritual and Byzantine liturgy.  For Glen, attending mass there was like living inside one giant Pre-Rafaelite painting.  The solemn mass was visually rich with the splendour of candle-bedecked high altars, incense, bells and plainsong.  Glen believed that regularly in the Eucharist he was meeting and receiving Christ, the Living Christ Himself.  He found the other parishioners to be quite a different story.  Generally they were well-heeled older Caucasians worshipping in a neighbourhood full of poverty and renown for homelessness, drug-addiction and prostitution.  He quickly recognized that Good Shepherd was St. Jude’s penance for their inability to connect meaningfully with the unsavoury reality that surrounded them. There was a board of directors on which Bryan sat, composed entirely of St. Jude’s parishioners.  The services they offered were diverse: housing, advocacy for ex-mental patients, home support services, child-care, a battered women’s shelter, financial aid administration, palliative care for the dying—it was cradle to grave service.  Glen had found his own position there hard to define.  He seemed to be everyone’s go-between.  He was almost indispensable.  St. Jude’s sighed with relief as Glen found finally his niche.  Finally his life was attaining a certain order.  He found himself a small apartment on the top floor of a renovated mansion near Commercial Drive.  When he wasn’t working, he usually spent his time alone, or with his mother, his sister, the Goldberg’s or Bryan.  He didn’t socialize with anyone else at St. Jude’s and this church didn’t appear naturally to accommodate young bohemians.  Glen didn’t realize how dreadfully lonely he really was.

            Stephen Bloom was one of Bryan’s young protegees when he was still a teenage rent boy.  Not even Glen was fully aware of how Bryan passed his time in private.  Around St. Jude’s there had been rumours and whisperings.  Bryan would pettishly insist that he was faithfully chaste, and that he wouldn’t dream of staining his fingers with scandal.  Stephen was on the cusp of his twentieth birthday when he first encountered Glen sitting with Bryan in the café by English Bay.  Glen was already aware of his friend’s predilection for lissome young males, and Stephen he tried to politely ignore.  Stephen swallowed Glen in a single glance.  He became his stalker, following him, and not always discreetly, everywhere.  At the Good Shepherd he made his claim upon Glen, worming his way under false pretences into his apartment.  His physical resemblance to Glen’s ex-lover he found uncanny and not a little disturbing.  Tim, whom Glen associated entirely with his previous life, his existence before he died in the fire, was confronting him again, in a younger, more hostile form.  So the tables were quickly turned, and now it was Glen’s turn to pay his debt.  But this was a debt that he had no intention of repaying, much less accepting.  In under a year and a half Stephen’s patience paid off, and Glen made the strategic blunder of inviting him into his apartment.  In the three weeks or so that it took getting rid of him Glen had grown incurably attached to Stephen, who seemed only too happy to finally be able to escape from him.

            Glen’s life had come to revolve around Stephen, who would follow him to the offices of the Good Shepherd where he would lolligag on the re-upholstered chesterfield of Christina Wilkens, where Glen’s ears would sting from Mrs. Bainbridge’s strident remarks concerning “that young sodomite, Stephen”.  Back to the apartment Stephen would follow him, where he would assume his position in Glen’s comfy chair, plugged into his walkman and virtually ignoring him.  Stephen began parading about nude, sometimes with a visible erection.  Glen eventually cracked under the strain, becoming irritable, short-tempered and disorganized.  His performance at work was deteriorating.  Christina Wilkens issued him two warnings.  Finally, when on the couch of seduction in Glen’s apartment, when Stephen was placing on Glen’s tumescent groin his naked big toe, he gave him such a reptilian, leering grin that he sprang up in a panic, slammed shut the window, then moved to the armchair.  When he returned from the store, Stephen was gone, leaving only his black pullover sweater draped neatly over the back of the dark green chair.

            Glen pulled  off Stephen’s black sweater which he had been wearing and put it in a crumpled heap next to him.  He had returned to the same corner booth by the window where he’d had his pancakes less than an hour ago.  Down at Sunset Beach, he discovered that they would not after all be needing his assistance setting up the stage and sound equipment for the rally this afternoon.  There was already a surfeit of volunteers.  Not being terribly confident about working with his hands, Glen felt relieved, almost elated at this sudden feeling of being set free.  He didn’t ordinarily wear black, but it suited him well.  He had already claimed the sweater, accepting it as rent and nuisance fee from Stephen, though he still hadn’t washed it.  He wasn’t quite ready to divest himself of Stephen’s scent.  But he wasn’t going to return the sweater.

            “You just missed him”, Marlene said.

            “Who?”

            “That guy who was staying with you.”

            “Stephen?”

            “I guess that’s his name.”

            “He was here?”

            “She was here.  Still in drag and with two of his rough trade friends.  Fucking obnoxious little twits.  I almost threw them out.  Turns out he’s chummy with Pierre.”

            “Pierre?”

            “One of my waiters.  The cute dark one with the big fat crush on you.”

            “He never charges me for my coffee.”

            “Better him for a brother-in-law than a drag queen.  Oh, it’s her again.”

            “Who?”

            “Behind you—that serious chick with the lack-lustre hair.  Don’t gawk at her, she’ll think you’re staring at her.”

            “We’re both staring at her.”

            A tall young woman, slender, widened her large green eyes in recognition as she approached Glen, smiling, appearing suddenly beautiful as she came over with the cautious grace of a long-legged wading bird stalking prey in a lagoon.

            Glen introduced them and Margery said to Marlene, “You’re his sister?  But you don’t look at all alike.”

            “He was adopted”, Marlene said.  “The offspring of aliens.”

            “We’re all aliens”, Margery said.  She was no longer smiling.  She was dressed all in black—loose rumpled pullover and tight jeans.  On her left middle finger gleamed a Chinese jade ring set in gold, which brought mystic emphasis to her eyes.  Glen met Margery during his first year at the Good Shepherd when she was lodging at one of their experimental facilities for ex-mental patients.  She had a premeditated, carefully-scripted way about her, as though she was perpetually trying not to step in anything horrid.

            “Are you going on the march?” Margery asked Glen.

            “Yes.”

            Marlene said, “Well, some of us have to work for a living.”

            “I work”, Margery said.

            “Where?”

            “In a nursing home.”

            “You’re still there?” Glen said.

            “Still.”

            “I just got fired.”

            “From the Good Shepherd?  What happened?”

            “What hasn’t happened while I’ve been there?”

            “You do have a point.”

            Marlene said, “Are you having coffee or anything, Margaret?”

            “My name is Margery.”

            “Oh, so sorry. Where the fuck did—hey, Jack-O!  Fuck, he’s having another coffee break.”

            “I’ve never seen you in here”, Margery said to Glen.

            “Timing.”

            “You’re here in the afternoons,” Marlene said to Margery.

            “Peter”, Margery said grimly. 

            “You’re still with him?” Glen said.

            “I’ve got to get my own place.”  To Marlene she said, “You’ve both got the same mouth.”

            “I beg your pardon?” Marlene said, cigarette smoke billowing through her nostrils.

            “It’s the shape of your mouths.  Especially the lower lip. That curved, sensuous pout.”

            “You’re right”, Glen said.  “We both have our father’s lips.”           

            “Whatever.”

            “I don’t know my father”, Margery said.

            “Count your blessings,” Marlene said.  “Anyway, I have to do the payroll before Daniel has a chance to take more drug money out of the pile.  Last time he got his hands on it, we were all racing each other to the bank before our paycheques could bounce.  Lovely to meet you, Marilyn.”

            “Margery.”

            “I have the worst memory for names.”

            As soon as his sister was gone, Margery said, “She doesn’t like me.”

            “She’s possessive of me.”

            “Older?”

            “By two years.”

            “You’re—“

            “—Twenty-eight.”

            “Same as me.  Peter was wanting me to pay him for the lovely brunch he was making today.”

            “Pay him?”

            “Fill in the blanks.  I already have told him numerous times that I just can’t do this any more.  I’ve been sleeping on the couch for the past month and he still isn’t getting it.  Good thing he’s homophobic or he’d be following me in here.”

            “That’s why you come in here?”

            “The waiters are cute.”

            “They’re gay.”

            “Makes some of them cuter. I can only flirt enjoyably with homosexual men.”

            “Because they’re safe?”

            “I like men.”

            “But not sleeping with them?”

            “Sex is overrated.  It’s an animal impulse.  You do it, you’re satisfied, then it’s out of your system for a while.  I enjoy being celibate.”

            “It’s seven years for me.”

            “And you’re a man.”

            “So?”

            “You said ever since you nearly died in that fire.  How come?”

            “Long story.”

            “You told me once.  You actually saw God?”

            “I can’t remember.”

            “It doesn’t matter.  It’s written all over you.  And it’s changed your life?”

            “I’m no longer really interested in sex, but what I have instead is an ongoing desire to touch other people’s lives.  Because, suddenly, they were touching mine.  It was like a barrier, or a wall, had come down.  Ever since the fire, I get overwhelmed by such sweet, agonizing and supernaturally beautiful sensations.  I’m often told that I have a kind of supernatural radiance.  Bryan calls me a mystic.  Sometimes I lie in the dark, on the floor, and I’m weeping, because I’m so aware of being at one with other people, at one with humanity.  I can hardly cope with this kind of intensity of feeling.”

            “Yes.”

            “You understand?”

            “Yes.”

“Does this happen to you?”

            “The way you’ve described it—yes.”

            “Margery?”

            “Yes, Glen.”

            “You haven’t really told me your story.”

            “One day.”

Margery usually thought it to be obscene that anyone should candidly speak about one’s private spiritual reality.  It was worse than vulgar, it was almost pornographic, like watching others having sex.  She felt prurient, and in a way violated, from having  listened to Glen’s self-disclosure.  This had been just what she’d wanted to get away from when she met Peter, who still remained for Margery as ordinary as buttered white bread.  Now she wanted to get away from him.  When she married him, Margery already knew and accepted that she was marrying an alcoholic.  She was bored and she wanted adventure.  Margery had completed a course in practical nursing while still under the care of The Good Shepherd.  She met Peter at the reception following the graduation ceremonies.  Drunk, she found him to be a radiant, blond-haired Dionysius.  Margery laughed full-heartedly at his cheesy pick-up line.  They were married in six months.  He was a real estate agent, and Margery had already found herself a good position in a nursing home.  On their pooled resources they soon had a spacious luxury apartment on the West Side with a big balcony and a lavishly appointed courtyard.

While he was drinking Margery never left her husband’s side.  An abstainer herself she would still share in the spirit of her husband’s drunkenness, and together they would descend in raptures of shared inebriation, wallowing and rolling in it like two happy pigs in a cesspool.  Margery often woke the next morning beside her reeking of alcohol, snoring husband, more hung-over than he, though she herself had never touched a drop.

She left during one of his violent rages.  He didn’t hit her, but was throwing dishes and overturning furniture.  He didn’t appear to even know that Margery was there.  Stepping over the broken crockery, she left the apartment and spent four weeks at her mother’s.  She returned to a sober and contrite Peter who was already involved in a Twelve-Step program.  To fulfill the obligations of his Step Five, Peter apologized to Margery and offered to make to her whatever amends he could for having inducted her into the role of the enabler.  They sat at the kitchen table.  Its surface didn’t feel quite clean beneath Margery’s bare forearms.  The apartment was neither dirty, nor disordered, though in Margery’s absence it had acquired the sad, slightly sour aroma of a dwelling that hasn’t been properly loved.  Peter himself had changed. Gone was that wild and bitter tomcat insolence that had so turned her on. Begging that Margery return to him, Peter was reminding her of an apprentice scout master.  Asking for a week to decide, Margery returned to her mother's home where she promptly vomited into the toilet.  She filed for divorce.  Her psychiatrist decided that she wouldn't need to resume taking anti-depressants.  She was not going to have a relapse.

She had already had two abortions.  The first was a product of rape when, at seventeen, Margery was walking home late one night from a party.  Knocked unconscious, she never saw her assailant, nor had she been conscious during the rape.  The much younger sister of her mother’s childhood friend had just moved from Toronto.  Megan was a radical lesbian feminist who quickly took Margery under her wing, introduced her to her women’s collective and helped her get an abortion.  They became lovers, and were soon living together.  For four years Megan and the women’s collective became Margery’s life, and they worked hard together to help women take back the night.  Then, in a pub where she was beginning to seek respite from this oppressive relationship Margery permitted a charming young Englishman named Warren to pick her up and take her home for the night.  Despite Megan’s bitter remonstrances Margery continued to see this man who was on leave from his wife and child in Birmingham.  Warren returned to England, as his visa had expired, not realizing that Margery was again pregnant, this time with his child.  Against her better judgement, she permitted Megan to cow her into terminating the pregnancy.  She was already past the first trimestre.  She felt like a murderer.  Margery had a breakdown and overdosed on pills.  A psychiatrist inaccurately diagnosed her with early stage schizophrenia.  Perpetually stoned on medications that she didn’t really require she moved into the House of Unconditional Love, free at last from the women’s collective, and free at last from Megan.  In this therapeutic community that operated under the auspices of the Good Shepherd Margery spent the next two years trying to reconstruct her broken life under the benevolent tutelage of Bryan Verhoeven. 

Margery had never been mentally ill.  She did have a breakdown, which was something altogether different.  She simply had not been able to comfortably accommodate, nor accept the shift in her life that Megan had instigated.  The second abortion had simply been the final strategic blow.  Megan’s dominance and control over her had simply led up to this.  In Warren Margery had found respite, liberation, and—she had hoped—motherhood.  Until Megan, as always, had her way with her.  How Margery hated that woman, and she was too terrified of her to be able to stand up to her.  No one, it appeared, could stand up to Megan.  She was like an unstoppable force.  Margery could only defy her through her interest in men.  Mental illness then became her ultimate weapon.  She was found in a coma after overdosing on pills in a hotel room.  In the hospital Margery was assessed for psychiatric care.  Megan came once to visit her.  Margery screamed and then threw herself on her like a rabid coyote.  They had to pull her off of Megan, who was then barred from seeing Margery.  Then she was assessed and transferred to the House of Unconditional Love where Bryan became Margery’s new Svengali.

She had grown up in virtual solitude.  Her mother was a published poet who also raked out a subsistence as a magazine editor.  When Margery was three she had taken her away from her abusive husband in Ottawa and they settled in Vancouver, where the rented main floor of an Edwardian era house served Margery the only home she had ever known.  Her mother was quiet and tolerant about her arrangements with Megan, though she had carefully assured Margery that she was welcome home anytime.  There was little she felt she could do about Megan, who had been so good to her daughter and was the sister of her best friend.  Margery metamorphosed under Megan, cutting her waist-length hair, and doffing her bangles, sandals and long Indian skirts for bluejeans, boots and leather.  Megan and the women’s collective taught Margery to hate men and with them she worked hard to dismantle the patriarchy.  Warren was the man she hadn’t been warned about.  He was everything that she’d been indoctrinated into believing that no human male could possibly be.  In bed he put Megan to shame.  He was not possessive. Margery didn't know that she was pregnant until after he returned to England.  She didn't want to lose this child.  The will of Megan and the Women’s Collective prevailed.  Margery’s ultimate hope, or symbol, of an existence, of a life and identity that she could call her own, was ripped out of her body by the abortionist’s suction device.  All in the name of smashing the patriarchy.  By this time Margery cared not a damn about the patriarchy.  She wanted only her baby.  After the abortion, she lost it.  Megan tried to shock her out of it by taking her to an art gallery where a local artist was displaying realistically rendered acrylic paintings of aborted fetuses.  Margery walked out, alone, leaving behind her a dismayed Megan, who never would have thought that the girl of her dreams would be on her way first to the pharmacy, and then to a budget room with an ocean view at the Sylvia Hotel by the sea where she would try to end her life.

            At the House of Unconditional Love, Margery conformed.  She behaved well, and took her medications.  Then, one day, she stopped taking them.  The psychotropic fog began to lift.  She felt better.  Well.  Herself.  This was like tasting food again after a very long illness or fast.  She was overcome by outrage.  That she had submitted to two years of abusive treatment by the well-intentioned Bryan, and before that to four years of Megan and those wretched lesbians in the Women’s Collective.  She was furious, she became a welter of vengeance and wrath.  They couldn’t deal with her outbursts of rage and emotion, and they promptly tried to put Margery back on medications.  She refused.  Her psychiatrist, one of the few really good ones in this city, backed Margery.  She moved back with her mother.  She finished the nursing program, wrote Bran Verhoeven out of her life, graduated, found employment and married Peter.  For Margery this was a life of relative normality—a husband, a respectable position in care-giving, a nice apartment, and alcohol.  Through Megan, through Bryan, Margery had lost six years of her life.  She wanted those years back.

            When she left Peter, Margery was content to live alone for a while.  She wanted to work on recovering those lost years.  She forced herself to contact Megan, who sounded vague and embarrassed when she called her on the phone.  In one conversation, Margery had deduced that the power had left her former keeper’s voice.  She had been weakened.  Megan alluded that she had a new woman in her life, which Margery should not consider complicating.  She did not respond to Margery’s invitation of meeting her in a café.  She struggled to find the will to confront Megan.  It no longer seemed important.  She had made the phone call, thus wresting from Megan the necessary key that would grant her re-entry into those missing four years of her life.  She made no attempt to contact Bryan, who, unlike Megan, she had come to profoundly loathe.  Glen, alone, she could come close to trusting.

            She was having problems at work.  Margery no longer had Peter and his drinking to divert her energies.  She was no longer on anti-depressants.  Margery had recovered her lost years.  She had recovered her mind.  She worked as a care attendant at Oak Hill Lodge, a nursing home in the Oakridge area.  Theresa Somerville, the director, had with Good Shepherd a special arrangement: they took on as training staff any of their residents at the House of Unconditional Love who had successfully completed the nursing program. Margery herself wondered that any reputable care facility would want to hire workers with mental health issues.  She noticed that a resident in her care hadn’t had his diaper changed in nearly two days.  The stench, and the outrage, motivated her to complain to Theresa who tactfully replied that Margery was in no position to draw such attention to herself and that, if she really loved her job then she’d better keep quiet.  There had been at Oak Hill Lodge a blanket of denial concerning the poor quality of care they were giving their residents.  Margery, fully enjoying this moral reawakening that had accompanied her recovery of herself, her mind and her lost years, persisted, despite the odds.  Her co-workers began shunning her.  Theresa herself was expressing grave doubts concerning the state of Margery’s recovery.  It soon became clear that Margery’s boss had been colluding with Bryan in order to undermine her every step of the way.  Knowing that bringing any further attention to herself would only result in her being branded as being paranoid, and likely her being dismissed from her job, she kept quiet.

She gave her patients the best possible care, often feeling that she was the only person in the world who wasn’t somehow drugged or sleepwalking. Margery, alone, was awake?  Going off her meds had restored to her a heightened state of perception.

            She went to the media about Oak Hill Lodge.  The scandal became front page and six and eleven o’clock news material across the nation.  Theresa threatened her with dismissal, but then she herself was sacked and subpoenaed as the matter went to court.  Only having a supreme court judge for a brother-in-law got her off the hook, leaving Theresa Somerville the only surviving member of the old guard still at the helm of Oak Hill Lodge.  The quality of nursing care was vastly improved, Margery kept her job, and Theresa tried every possible manoeuvre there to make her job hell and misery for her.

            Margery met the playwright Dwight Llewelyn while administering palliative care to his grandmother.  A faithful Catholic of 103, she breathed her last while clinging to a rosary.  Dwight and Margery alone were present.  Deeply moved by Margery’s devoted care to his grandmother, Dwight asked if they could meet together sometime over coffee or a drink.  Every week, in the same café, Margery and Dwight sat together.  They began to visit in his apartment.  He always treated her with the utmost respect and propriety, which suited Margery, being comfortable in her celibacy.  They talked, or usually Dwight did the talking.  To Margery, who listened to him carefully and attentively, Dwight, who needed badly to talk, accepted that this was not to be a romantic liaison, or so he said to Margery.  She asked him what he wanted, or felt that he needed from her.  He didn’t know.  He was a divorced father of two small children who were now living with their mother and her new husband in Toronto.  He was alone now, and he didn’t think that he was handling it well.  His, he admitted, was a spiritual, an existential dilemma. Margery, without saying as much, had agreed to help facilitate for him his journey.

            They were sitting quietly one evening in Dwight’s apartment, sharing together the silence.  They sat each in a different armchair, not quite facing each other from the corners of the room.  An almost tactile presence of peace and silence had descended upon them both.  They lost all sense of time as a cool, soft breeze blew in through the window and swaddled them both in its sweet balm of renewal.  Margery fell briefly asleep, or, she thought she was sleeping.  She dreamed that she was in a conference room surrounded by a panel of dignitaries to whom she was reporting.  They were advising her.

            For nearly an hour Margery and Dwight shared in this silence.  Neither one could quite articulate to the other what had been experienced.  They continued meeting together, every week, spending an hour in silence, or together they would study the writings of Julian of Norwiche, or the Cloud of Unknowing.  She moved in with Dwight, converting his den into her bedroom.  Now, daily they would together pass an hour in silence.  It was Lady Julian’s vision of a hazelnut being held in the Hand of God as representing our humanity in his tender care that opened her eyes.  She sat quietly for another two or three hours if only to absorb the impact of this revelation.

            One morning, in midsummer, Margery woke earlier than usual.  The sun had not yet risen.  Everything, but for the singing robins, was silent.  She surveyed the gentle chaos of her little room.  She’d been here for more than a year.  She had never entirely unpacked, nor had she settled in.  The walls were stark and unadorned.  Two boxes of books she had stacked together as an impromptu night table: she had novels, mostly by women authors, a few murder mysteries, the tragedies of Euripides, a coffee table book about the Amazon Rain Forest, and two vegetarian cook books. There was also a book on astrology.  She wanted to get rid of it.  She couldn’t destroy it, since she strongly disapproved of censorship.  She was going to be moving.  Soon.  It was as though she’d been suddenly told this, that it had been whispered in her ear.  She went back to sleep, dreamed about the conference room and the panel of persons in authority to whom she was reporting.  This was becoming a frequent dream for Margery.  On two occasions, when she woke, she remembered clearly the instructions she was being given, but they would recede again from her consciousness as she returned again to the leaden rhythm of the waking world.  Dwight woke her and took her for breakfast.  Margery announced suddenly that she wanted to move.

            She was again on her own.  Her natural father, whom Margery had never met, died weeks before she was born, on the streets of Budapest during the aborted Hungarian Revolution in 1956.  Her parents had met in Paris, where he was living in political exile.  Her mother was British, and didn’t even know that she was pregnant till after returning to London, where she married her fiance, the son of a Canadian diplomat, who already knew the child wasn’t his. Margery had no memory of her stepfather.  Her mother had given her a picture of her natural father, which she cherished.  He looked rather like Dwight.

            In the afternoon, Margery encountered Peter, her ex-husband, who hustled her into a café where he begged her to come back and be, if not his wife or his love, then at least his roommate.  He was short on rent.  Margery, trying hard to ignore the bad art on the wall—it consisted of large gaudy renderings of badly done tropical birds—gave Peter her ex-husband her consent, but only as a roommate.  Peter was overjoyed, and Margery walked home more amazed than appalled at the depth of her stupidity, especially given that she could easily afford now to live alone without even having to budget her money.