Thirteen Crucifixions, 47

            Randall and Barbara were gone for the night, leaving Glen in charge.  They had taken their daughter, April, with them.  He had already given Gavin his bath and put him to bed.  They paid him well for his ministrations, and their second child, though severely afflicted with cerebral palsy, was not that difficult to care for.  Cheerful and cooperative, actually. They had done well, considering.  Barbara seemed to be finally done with blaming herself.  She was already forty-seven and unexpectedly pregnant again.  She was again a faithful Catholic and this ruled out ruled out abortion.  The marriage survived this time.  They were previously married to each other in the late seventies, divorcing after two years together.  They were old and faithful friends, who had actually badgered Glen to stay with them when he was suddenly homeless.  He still couldn't figure out why he had never considered their offer.

            Their lives had finally stabilized.  Randall was now teaching social work at a local college, and Barbara was running an antiquarian book store.  They had bought a house in Strathcona, small, late Victorian vintage.  Two stories with a turret.  Glen had his own room here.  They were after him again to come live with them.  The offer was tempting.  He knew from his experience of their having roomed together in the mid-eighties that Randall would be easy to live with.  He wasn’t so certain about Barbara, whom shortly after he had nurtured through a major personal crisis.  A casualty of satanic cult abuse, she was again being stalked by the demonic Rafael.  Barbara, for a while, was very emotionally dependent upon Glen.  He wasn’t sure that he wanted to occupy a full-time, live-in position of being care-giver to their son, for he was well aware that that was how things would turn out, and that that was likely in the back of their minds when they’d invited him.  He was as well concerned that he didn’t want to do anything that might jeopardize the stability that their lives had finally acquired.  He didn’t wish to be targeted by either of their emotional neediness.  They had also become for his taste rather bourgeois.  Glen was allergic to bourgeois complacency.  He didn’t wish to be seduced.

            Having enjoyed on their TV an episode of the Simpsons, it was clear to Glen that he really didn’t want to live this way.  He wasn’t what was needed in this situation.  He felt needed at Sheila’s.  Glen needed to be needed? Selectively, perhaps.  Randall and Barbara seemed to need him, or thought they did.  But it was time for them to both grow out of this emotional dependency on Glen that he had inadvertently cultivated in them.  To his surprise and chagrin, marriage had done little to dull this for them.  But this is how Glen had always connected with people.  Sheila would not have otherwise asked him to live in her house, much as Glen needed a place to stay.  He could have come here to Randall and Barbara, but they only needed him two days a week for their afflicted child.  Otherwise, they were a contained unit.  He respected this.  Michael, Sheila’s son, reaching out so savagely in friendship to the point of almost flashing Glen last night, who left his room just as the towel was coming off from around his waist.  He did not need to see Michael naked.  Not now, and probably not ever.  He might ask him to model for him—no, impossible.  Others had also so offered Glen their nakedness for the sake of his artistic advancement.  His answer was always a categorical no.  He knew why.

            Glen had determined a long time ago that he would never again allow power to become an issue in any relationship that he was involved in.  Someone standing naked in front of him for him to paint, that could only imply a whole scenario of power.  He would not have anyone making themselves this vulnerable to him, for any reason at all.  He knew why.   When he was in Costa Rica, in the mountains, he met Manuel, who worked maintaining the trails in an International Cloud Forest.  He was a thoroughly engaging young Mexican émigré, who took a fancy towards Glen.  Glen wouldn’t permit him to consummate his attraction.  Still he felt that he had been if not raped, then still severely violated.  In a forest clearing he sat on a log, listening to the peculiar song of a small flock of quetzals nearby while viewing a small plant bearing three fruits resembling large strawberries.  Manuel had attempted to make food of him.  He looked up at the quetzals.  The males had shed their beautiful long tail feathers, but still looked resplendent in their iridescent green plumage.  In the presence of Almighty God Glen vowed that never again would he enter any kind of situation where he and another might make food of each other.  From this moment on he would eschew the use of such power.

            On the wall opposite the TV hung a portrait he’d done of Barbara last year.  In her early fifties she was still a beautiful woman.  The signs of age were becoming less than mistakable, but Barbara was one who could not be said to be aging.  Perhaps ripening?  She had been pleased with the result as had Randall, but Glen was less than satisfied.  He had hardly adequately caught the lurking passion behind her calm eyes.  Though something else had come forward.  A kind of complacency, a smug self-satisfaction just  eclipsed by sudden, unexpected terror.  He had been careful not to make her particularly beautiful.  The camera lens of Rafael and various other fashion photographers had done more than their share of homage to Barbara’s variety of inextinguishable beauty.  She had thanked Glen for abolishing the trend, crediting him as being the first of her image-makers to actually humanize her.  He supposed there was something to what she was saying.  The face on the canvas was of a strong-featured matron with radiant skin and a stubborn will underscored by fault-lines of insecurity.  But that was still Barbara, all the way.  He always seemed to capture what was really there in a sitter’s face, whether he wanted to or not.  Every portrait he painted, for Glen, was like a picture of Dorian Grey.

            He wanted to paint Michael’s portrait.  Not just because of his bone structure, which was exquisite.  It was that strange mingling of single-focussed passion with eye-lash batting modesty in Michael’s face that he wanted to explore.  But he did not want to see him naked.  Besides which, one could not become more naked than the human face.  He thought that he might soon be ready to do another self-portrait.  Like Van Gogh, Glen was often painting himself.  Which he had done over the winter, turning out a dozen self-portraits, some of which he thought to be quite good. He started with a very light colour field, infused with yellow, mauve and pale blue.  Then he began working in solid primary colour fields: blue against yellow, yellow against blue; blue against red, red against blue; yellow against red, red against yellow.  Then they became steadily darker, until in the last painting one had to look carefully to distinguish his face from an even darker background.  Every time he painted himself, the result looked somehow haunted, spooked like some mysterious and frightening door had been just opened for him.

            Glen began painting again when his community had disintegrated.  Everyone was fatigued.  They had long ago lost count of how many people had died under their care.  It was the public scandal that Persimmon Carlyle, Media Bitch of the CBC, had launched against them that exhausted everyone  They had all run out of their emotional resources.  They would turn to one another in need and turn on one another in despair creating for themselves a Boschian purgatory in miniature.  In a household that espoused chastity, suddenly three conjugal couples were formed; followed by break-ups and side-taking.  Glen himself had very nearly gotten wrapped up with a particularly needy young man who began to sap his remaining strength, when Pamela intervened and gave him airfare for a two month holiday in Europe. He had intended to stay in London for a year, but things had gotten progressively worse for everyone at home.  There had been episodes of theft, vandalization and violence.  Police were involved.  Glen felt entirely responsible for the very existence of this community.  He returned from Europe, surprising everyone by his quick return, by the degree of temper and resolution he was suddenly displaying, by his unexpected capacity for taking control of a situation that had long ago lost its bearings, and by almost bodily expelling such persons as had been creating problems for everybody else.

            He had been grieving as much as the others: for their home—actually Pamela’s thirty room mansion—had become an unofficial, and unlicensed hospice, hence the media attention.  Never had anyone suggested to any of the AIDS sufferers who made their home there that they might cut back on their medications.  They simply did.  Even people in the earliest stages of the illness who with proper medication and nutritional attention could still prolong their lives by a decade, would suddenly dismiss all exterior intervention: they wanted to die sooner, they wanted to meet God.  Glen, Pamela and Margery had combined their voices in a common plea for common sense.  They were outnumbered, and opposed—not only by the patients themselves, but nearly every one of their colleagues.  It was like a collective blindness from a self-flagellating madness.  Margery, already locally famous as the "Death Watch Lady”, was particularly disappointed.  All of her experience in administering palliative care had been squandered.  Like Glen and Pamela she took Stephen Bloom’s death especially hard, and began to crack before anyone else.  After a week of prolonged weeping and tantrums Pamela offered to send Margery to Europe with Glen.  She instead moved to Toronto with Pamela’s daughter.  No one had heard of her since.  Pamela and the Reverend Michael Bailley were still together, enjoying the vast empty solitude of her mansion and the still impeccably kept grounds.  He had yet to contact them now that he was back. 

            He was feeling tired.  Gavin never woke at night.  Barbara’s face stared with an anxious acrylic serenity from the portrait on the wall.  He really ought to get his own place, as soon as he could afford to.  He was already comfortable at Sheila’s, though her son made him nervous.  Perhaps Glen was resisting falling in love with Michael?  Glen fell in love with no one, though he might as well be in a perpetual state of love with all people.  Glen was in love, though he couldn’t single out any single recipients.  He was himself a presence of love, for he reverenced the God in everyone.  He never spoke of his faith to others, preferring rather to speak to God Himself.

            He had forgotten this evening to listen for the robins.  He tried every evening to remember to hear them, till they ceased altogether from their singing in July.  He turned off the TV.  Gavin lay asleep in his bed, and Glen only wanted to stare into the dim twilight.  He had not troubled to turn any lights on.  This was when he was most comfortable, the most at rest.  Sitting quietly in the dark.  He wondered what he should do with his life, now that he was back in Vancouver.  Then he yawned and fell asleep.