Thirteen Crucifixions, 83

                                                        1984

            “I awoke not knowing where I was.  A sheer white curtain billowed like a Hallowe’en ghost by the open window.  It was dark, but for the full moon that made the night almost intolerably bright.  I was somewhere, sleeping in a narrow, rather hard bed, inside a smallish room with a sloped ceiling.  I could hear the waves outside.  I knew I had been dreaming, though I remembered nothing. I didn’t know my name, nor how I’d arrived here.  I had no memory.  I switched on the night lamp, then reached for my clothes, hoping for some clue to my identity.  My wallet was missing from my pants.  I had no identification, no money.  I got dressed.  The white walls of the room were bare but for a small painting over the bed of a poppy field.  I looked at the door and wondered if it was locked.  I opened it without difficulty, onto a darkened corridor.  I found my way to the bathroom, peed, then looked in the mirror.  I didn’t know the face staring back at me.  I returned to my room, closed the door, and sat in an easy chair.  On a small desk I noticed a thick notebook and three pens.  Nothing else. All the pages were blank. I wrote down my experience of amnesia, and of waking up in this strange room in the middle of the night.  I wondered if anyone would come to the door.  No one came.  I was alone, yet I felt not alone, as though one hundred thousand eyes, within this space, were trained on me, watching my every move, reading my every thought.

            I didn’t want to go outside.  Here only, in this room, felt I safe, though I knew that I was being observed.  I didn’t mind, feeling that I was in the presence of friends.  Perhaps I was under a kind of house arrest? Gradually, I began to recall the old woman, then the girl in white.  But I didn’t know where to find them, nor that it would be wise to seek them out.  I didn’t know their names, though at the moment, names didn’t appear to matter.  Much to my surprise, I didn’t feel restless.  And  this caught my attention.  Whoever I was, I was a person who didn’t ordinarily hold still easy.  I seized on this clue to identity.  Why could I never rest, hold still, until now, that is?  Fear? I was one who was driven.  What had been driving me?  Why did I shun stillness, the silence?  These were questions that I could not answer.  And why did I no longer fear this being still, this being quiet?  My breathing was calm, deep and untroubled.  It had never been this way before.  Why?  In time with the waves, the gentle surf, my chest gently, slowly rose and fell, rose and fell, again, again, again.  I did not want to look out the window.  Why?  The person I had been had always been easily distracted, with the attention span of a cat.  But I didn’t like cats—or at least the person I had been had found them rather odious.  Now, it no longer mattered. They seemed as good or as bad as dogs.  Why had I preferred one animal over the other?  Dogs were loyal, you always knew where you stood with them, they were obedient, devoted.  They were active, constantly on the go.  They loved you unconditionally.  Unlike cats, which were self-centred, sneaky, treacherous, female, so very female.  And dogs were male?  I hated women?  But the person I was had loved women, many many women.  Yet, no familiar female face appeared in my mind’s eye.  I hated, rejected the feminine?  My own femininity?  His own femininity.  What a girlish concept.  Queer, actually.  I was afraid of being queer?  So then the person I had been held secret hankerings towards his sex?  To become with another man a woman—or to make a woman out of a man?  Projection.  Very Jungian.  I yearned for the feminine, though I wanted some guy to fuck my brains out?  Which brought me again to the question—how could I possibly reverence life while rejecting my own life principal, the anima, the feminine.  The sound of the waves was making me sleepy again.  I took off my clothes, returned to bed and turned out the light.  I lay still, and waited for sleep to return.

            “Sleep didn’t return to me.  I lay quiet and still, though I can’t say if I was really awake either.  Possibly away somewhere, yet very present.  The hard radiance of the moon gave way to the leaden twilight of early dawn, then a gradual softening into the new day.  Birds were singing and seagulls were crying.  There was a soft knock on my door.  I was reluctant to open or call out.  I thought I heard receding footsteps.  I had no desire to see who was there, nor wanted I any human company.  I still was aware of many eyes watching me, which somehow I found comforting.  I got up, dressed myself and opened the door.  There was a tray on the floor holding breakfast—a pot of coffee, rolls, fruit and cheese, and then I knew this was neither hallucination or dream.”

            Glen lay aside Richard’s journal in order to look at the sleeping form of Stephen.  He had only recently come out of coma, now he heeded rest.  The tubes had been taken from his nose and mouth, though he was still on IV drip.  From his wrists the thick white bandages gleamed like a lurid fashion statement.  A week had passed since his attempt on his life.  It was almost Hallowe’en.  He was fortunate to get a private hospital room.  Pierre would be back soon, once he was finished work.  Tomorrow, Glen would work his final shift at the Pitstop, which was closing.  According to Marlene, the owner’s poor management had run it into the ground.  Pierre believed that this had also triggered Stephen’s attempt on his life, since his job at the Pitstop was the only legitimate work he’d ever done.  They were for a while afraid of losing him forever.

            Marlene was dating Randall again, who had recently returned from tree planting.  He was staying with Glen, an arrangement that, to his surprise, was working well.  He was almost never there, was clean, quiet and didn’t get in the way.  He had calmed considerably.  Carol still wanted nothing to do with him.  Glen was spending a lot of time with her in conjunction with Dwight and Margery.  They had formed together a kind of spiritual fellowship, Christian, but rather spare on theological labeling.  Carol thought they were rather like Quakers, sitting together for an hour, or longer, of deep contemplative silence.  Doris Goldberg having met with them periodically, referred to them as honorary Quakers.

            Stephen still hadn’t spoken since regaining consciousness.  And Glen wanted to hear from his own mouth what had happened: not simply what had precipitated this attempt on his life, but whether while clinically dead, he had “seen” anything.  Glen wanted to compare notes.  He badly wanted to remember what precisely he himself had seen and heard while he was dead.  He seemed nowhere near finding this out.  Stephen, according to the note he had left, had named Glen, with Pierre as his next of kin.  He felt honoured.  It was a strange connection, what he felt with Stephen and Pierre, and very different from what he had going with Carol, Margery and Dwight.  He felt like a bridge between these disparate parties.

            But, he needed badly to find out what, exactly, he had experienced.  Ever since he had felt a pronounced rift from his life before the fire.  Yes, his life had changed and certainly for the better, he felt.  But he needed to remember who he had been.  He had forgotten.  The Glen who had painted, who had lived with and loved Timothy, who had wandered through a confused and silently tormented adolescence, seemed to him a ghost, a pale memory, unconnected from who he’d become. He knew that he would have to again move forward with his life, that he must grow, but he could not do this without his roots.  He needed, wanted his roots back.  He tried to discuss this with Pierre who replied with insouciance replied that he merely needed to get laid.  Recently, in the silence with Carol, Margery and Dwight, it had occurred to Glen that he must somehow embark on this process of reconnecting with himself.  He felt the time he was spending with his sister and mother was helping.  But he still needed to make that one strategic connection.  He must remember, completely, what had happened during the fire.  Margery believed that during their next several sessions together, it would come clearer to him.  He was getting impatient.  He didn’t like much this restlessness, this sense of uncertainly.

            He was painting again—small pieces, smaller than a notebook.  Single flowers he was painting—trite, unoriginal work, but he needed to begin somewhere.  And flowers were rooted in the earth, so of course he would be painting them.  Anything abstract felt too threatening, scary.  His colours were bright, flashy.  Marlene had already bought two from him.  She wouldn’t let him just give them to her—she attached to his recent paycheque an extra hundred dollars.  He still refused to write her a receipt.  On Greg’s advice, they had discontinued their visits together.  He had become unemployed again, and felt that there were too many personal issues, spiritual and emotional, for him to sort through to make him much good to anyone.  However, they’d just recently chatted in the Pitstop, and had agreed to reestablish their meetings together in early November.  He’d had a difficult time leaving his job.   Slowly he had been losing his voice from the constant talking on the phone.  His doctor had diagnosed a strained larynx, and recommended that he take an unemployment insurance holiday.  Greg had also confided that the last two surveys had sent him over the edge.  They had been, respectively, Colombian coffee and international banking.  This was when his voice began to go.  Aware as he was of the human rights abuses, and all the innocent blood that was being shed over the causes of coffee growing and global mammon, Greg had confided to Glen of a particularly gruesome nightmare he had had, thus convincing him that he should quit.  He had walked into the phone room of his work place.  All the stalls were dripping with blood.  Greg knew that it was human blood.  The following day, telling his bewildered boss the dream, he tendered his resignation.  He thought that it was just as well that they’d taken a couple of months off from each other.  Glen again was feeling very sexual towards Greg.  He seemed so innocent, and he didn’t want to complicate their relationship with sexual desire.  He didn’t want to contaminate this beautiful mantle of peace that covered them together.

            For now, his life was particularly occupied with Stephen and Pierre, especially Pierre.  He had come running into the Pitstop to find him, the evening he’d discovered Stephen bleeding to death on the bathroom floor.  Glen would be off shift soon.  He sat with Pierre in the hospital emergency, next to what was left of Stephen, then returned with him to his apartment.  He hadn’t the heart to leave him alone, and Pierre begged that he stay.  For several nights they slept together, side by side, sometimes cuddling, but tactfully, and without sex. They needed and wanted only warmth, comfort and acceptance from each other.  When Glen was home alone again it seemed to him strange, this solitude.  He actually hankered for another night, however chaste, sleeping next to Pierre.  A long dormant yearning had been awakened?  Perhaps.  But he still wasn’t interested in sex, except perhaps with Greg, who was not about to be forthcoming.  And Glen still had a desire to damage the integrity of what they shared.  But now, thanks to his nights with Pierre, he was remembering in painful detail what it had been like with Timothy.  He was being overwhelmed by nostalgia.  He wanted someone, not anyone, but someone.  There with him, next to him, touching him and wanting him there, by his side, whosoever it should be.  Glen was lonely?  He couldn’t really say.  He didn’t have to be with Pierre, neither with Glen, nor with anyone.  And he did want Stephen to pull through, which now seemed likely.  It was Stephen’s fault?  Teasing, tormenting, stalking then abandoning him, all the time reminding him most cruelly of his one and only lover, Timothy?

            He scanned what he had just read of Richard’s journal.  This was taking him an awfully long time.  Fortunately Carol was patient. It was too much to absorb, except by reading it a page here, a page there, not every day, and not always every week, either.  These writings had become for him, as for Carol, Dwight and Margery, a surgical instrument.  He would review with them the contents of what he had read.  They commented little.  They were together receiving surgery.

            He looked up, and tried to estimate for how long Stephen had had his eye trained on him. They said nothing to each other at first, and Glen simply stared back, blue-grey eyes meeting brown-black eyes.  Stephen closed his eyes.  “I’m thirsty”, he said weakly.

            “Shall I get the nurse?”

            “Please.”

            Glen returned with a sealed plastic container of orange juice, into which he inserted a straw.  He held it under Stephen’s mouth, as he slowly sipped.  He expected Pierre, who would be finished his final shift by now.  He wanted to leave before he got there.  Suddenly, he desperately wanted to be left alone