Geoff Ryman - Was

Manhattan, Kansas-September 1989

"BREAKING THE WILL"

This phrase is going out of use. It is high time it did… But the phrase is still sometimes heard; and there are conscientious fathers and mothers who believe they do God service in setting about the thing.

I have more than once said to a parent who used these words, "Will you tell me just what you mean by that? Of course you do not mean what you say."

"Yes, I do. I mean that a child's will is to [be] once for all broken!-that he is to learn that my will is to be his law. The sooner he learns this the better." -The first paragraphs of a front-page article on child raising from the Manhattan Nationalist of Friday, January 15, 1875. The article goes on to describe, as an example of good child-raising practice the case of a four-year-old boy who was subjected to a two-day campaign to get him to pronounce correctly the letter G.

Jonathan's Canada had disappeared. It had been there when he left in the earliest seventies. By the late eighties, Corndale had been swallowed up by an administrative fiction called Missasauga. It was another Indian name, another vanished tribe.

Missasauga was a sea of subdivisions. Corndale's nearest neighbor, Streetsville, was solid, stolid housing as was Corndale itself. The two realities met as fiction. The farms on which Jonathan had seen running deer as a child had disappeared. When he visited Corndale now, he got lost in the bewildering meander of streets designed to stifle speed

and protect children. It was all about land values and Toronto airport and Highway 401. Urban foxes, urban raccoons were rumored to rummage through trash cans at night.

So where was home?

Jonathan pulled the gray Celebrity out of the parking lot of the airport of Manhattan, Kansas, and suffered a delusion. Outside there were wide green fields, and huge trees the like of which he had not seen since the elms in Corndale had been cut down after Dutch elm disease. He thought he had finally, somehow, found his way back to Corndale. In particular, he was driving along the number 10 highway, the road that led from Brampton.

This made him very happy. This made him feel that suddenly everything had gone right with the world, even though there was for some reason a puddle of blood and stomach juices on the back seat. It seemed to him that he recognized the road signs, the chalky limestone through which the road had been cut. He recognized the huge, 600-acre farms. He wondered what had happened to his childhood friends, and if he could visit them now.

Then suddenly, instead of blood on the back seat, there was a visitor. Oh dear, thought Jonathan. Why did I bring him along?

On the back seat sat Mortimer.

It was going to be terribly embarrassing taking Mort home, because he was in full drag. Perhaps he had come fresh from some Halloween parade. He was dressed as Dorothy.

He had pigtails and a checked apron and balloon sleeves and white surgical gloves. For some reason he was also wearing a bandito hat and was holding maracas. His face was in sections like a quilt.

Mortimer gave the maracas a shake. "Hola!" he cried. "Que tal!"

Spanish? "Bee-ba Meh-heeko!" he cried, lips thick with red lipstick. Jonathan was mildly surprised to see red, but could not remember why.

"This is Mexico, isn't it?" Mortimer was not sure.

Jonathan couldn't remember.

"We're in Kansas?" said Mortimer as if he had stepped in something. The maracas sank to his lap. The surgical gloves were bloodstained. "What the fuck are we going to do in Kansas?"

I don't know, thought Jonathan, still driving.

"I thought you wanted to go to Mexico! That's why you were going to learn Spanish." Mortimer gave a showy sigh. "And I so wanted to go abroad." Mortimer giggled. "Who knows, I might have come back a lady."

Jonathan had never realized just how camp Mortimer was. Jonathan hated camp. Where, Jonathan asked Mort, do you come from?

"From you!" said Mortimer, pointing. He smiled and gave his nose a wrinkle.

I'm nothing like you.

Mortimer pressed his spongy, latex face against Jonathan's sweaty cheek. In the mirror of the visor, Jonathan saw the same blue eyes staring back at him.

"See the resemblance?" Mortimer whispered in his ear.

How? That face? Jonathan thought.

"Daddy sliced it."

My father was good and kind, thought Jonathan. He was an athlete. He wanted me to be an athlete, but he never pushed me. He only hit me twice, once when I had hit little Jaimie Cummings and when I'd stained his walls with berries.

"He only hit you twice!" exclaimed Mortimer and clapped his hands together as if in admiration. "What a sweetie. Did you ever hit him?"

He never deserved to be hit.

Mortimer lounged back in the seat, smiling as if his lips were full of novocaine.

"Did he die or simply ascend into Heaven?" Mortimer asked. "Making a noise like a dove, perhaps. Whroooo!" Mortimer blew on the palm of his glove and white pigeon feathers fell in the car like snow. "And dropping doo-doo on people underneath."

He was killed in a car crash, thought Jonathan, bitter with grief, as if it were some kind of vindication. Mortimer grinned back at him. Jonathan searched his mind and really did find his father without blemish.

"He never did anything wrong!" Jonathan was shouting aloud.

Silence, and a numb smile.

Jonathan muttered, "How else are you supposed to discipline kids?"

"Oh! I am in complete agreement," said Mortimer, hand on breast. There was an instrument of torture, rather like a corkscrew, on his lap. "In fact, the differences between me and your father might be less than you think. Do you like my dress?" Mortimer batted his eyelashes.

Go away! thought Jonathan.

Mortimer's eyes went evil. "I thought you wanted to see Kansas!"

He pressed his face against Jonathan's again and grabbed Jonathan by the chin and made him look in the rearview mirror.

"This face is Kansas. A country is like a child. Smooth and new and virginal until Daddy slashes its face."

Mortimer fell back into the rear seat. Jonathan felt Mort's sweat still on his cheek. Mortimer was opening the back door. "Don't kill any babies," he warned, and launched himself out of the moving vehicle under the wheels of a truck.

Jonathan swerved violently as the truck roared past, horn blaring. Jonathan pulled over onto the soft shoulder and stopped the car, his hands weak, his heart pumping. In the side-view mirror, Mortimer lay on the road like a prairie chicken. A loose, broken wing stirred in the backwash of air from other cars.

Jonathan sat shivering in the front seat.

My God, he thought, my mind is going. I really am going crazy. I shouldn't be let loose, I shouldn't be driving this car. I don't even know what country I'm in, and I haven't been able to keep anything down, even water, since breakfast yesterday. What am I going to do in Manhattan, Kansas? He ran a hand across his damp forehead.

There was nothing he could do, but press on.

Kansas, he told himself, as with extreme caution he moved the car back out onto an empty stretch of highway. I'm in Kansas. God knows why.

Then he looked up, across the road into the fields, and he thought he was having another vision.

Some way back from the road, there was a white schoolhouse. It was one-roomed, immaculate, blazing white, with a blazing white bell tower. It was nestled in trees. Beside it, sitting in a field of autumnal red sorghum heads, was a two-story frame house. The windows were not set square in it. There was a porch. Behind it there was a windmill.

Jonathan pulled the car over once more. He reached over the back of the seat and pulled out his new camera. He had bought it, credit card once again, at St. Louis airport. He had read the instructions on the airplane.