André Alexis - A

While he was inhabited by the sacred — if “sacred” is what it was — Baddeley knew what he wanted to say. That is, he knew what he wanted to write . Words tumbled from him in paragraphs; a novel came to being within his imagination. Along with the ecstasy of suddenly knowing the words he needed, however, there was an anxiety that he might not manage to keep these words, to remember them when it came time to write them down. So that, at the moment of deepest inspiration, Baddeley also felt anguish at the thought of how much he might lose.

Moments, minutes, hours after the Lord had taken him over, His presence withdrew. It did not vanish entirely but, all the same, the withdrawal brought agony.

— Stay, Baddeley pleaded.

— I cannot, said the Lord.

And He withdrew as time returned and the room retreated into itself, its only bed occupied by the remains of Avery Andrews; the only living presence that of Alexander Baddeley himself.

On first encountering this “being,” Baddeley had assumed it was an aspect of Andrews’ madness — a delusion so powerful it could be parcelled and shared. After this communion, he understood why Andrews had come to think it was sacred. What he could not see was how Andrews had thought of the spirit as in any way “insane.” Nothing that could lead a man to such heights could be considered anything but miraculous. Literally miraculous, as far as Baddeley was concerned. He had been mired in a longing to express himself. He had not managed a single good line of poetry. But after this moment in the hospital he was charged with words. Having paid his final respects to Avery Andrews, Baddeley returned to his apartment on Runnymede and began writing. For five days he worked without eating, stopping only for water, coffee or the Allen’s apple juice he had in his fridge. He wrote the first chapters of a novel called Home is the Parakeet , a novel that existed fully formed in his imagination or, rather, half -formed like one of the statues left unfinished by Michelangelo, so that, for Baddeley, all was there. It was now only a matter of helping the thing from its integument.

( Home is the Parakeet ’s macabre first paragraph…

The black-garbed soldiers, perhaps thirty in all, were preparing for a final assault on what was left of the village: two farms housing three dozen women and children, who were equipped with a couple of hunting rifles and almost no ammunition. One soldier guided a muzzled alligator on a leash. Several others heated their bayonets with acetylene torches. They formed a merry bunch, laughing as they set off.

is now, of course, among the best known passages of Canadian prose.)

And yet, when the first chapters were written, Baddeley was uncertain about how to go on. He was overwhelmed by the number of roads his novel could take. Worse, it no longer seemed to him that his novel meant any one thing. No, his narrative of a man who returns from the Second World War traumatized at having witnessed the slaughter for food of exotic birds in a bird sanctuary now meant innumerable things. In his mind, Home is the Parakeet was a metaphor for everything from the struggle between man and nature to the nightmare of colonialism.

He went back to the Western.

This visit was much like the previous. Though God was not in 88A, Baddeley found the right room easily. Using only an instinct he did not know he possessed, he pushed open a door in the prenatal ward and found himself in what he now thought of as the “customary” place. And God — or whatever it was — overtook him at once. At once he was in the presence of God’s vision which was also, for a time, his own: like a single image printed on two transparencies that are then overlaid, one atop the other. And when his time with “God” ended, Baddeley was both exhausted and wide awake.

(An unexpected gift: at times like this — after an encounter with “God” — he found himself susceptible to the city. Walking home from the hospital, the city seemed to have awakened with him. It was like dawn in the arms of someone he loved. It wasn’t just a matter of the usual attractions: the lake, its beaches, the quiet of Mount Pleasant. No, in these moods, Baddeley loved every aspect of Toronto: the light of day, the washed-out blue of its sky, the breath one drew halfway up the hill that lounged against High Park, the sounds of voices echoing voices, the plain streets that led to avenues along which the houses were simple and true, and lanes that led past parks that flared as one passed them, leaving their impression of green and red and grey, the coloured metal of jungle gyms, swings and slides.)

He returned to his basement on Runnymede and, after eating a cheese sandwich, a handful of cherries, and a small container of vanilla-and-honey yoghurt, Baddeley went back to his novel, certain of the path he wanted to take, unconcerned as to whether it was the “right” path or not. Days passed and he wrote in peace, unafraid of losing his way.

It was on his next visit to the Toronto Western that things grew more complicated. He had no trouble finding the room, and no sooner did he enter than God entered his being. But whereas his previous communions had been a pure ecstasy, this one was disturbing. While under God’s influence, Baddeley suddenly experienced — as precisely as if he were actually there — a child being eaten by an alligator. He saw, felt, and heard. He imagined himself splattered with the blood that erupted from the child’s mouth, his own shirt wet. He experienced both the child’s terror and the happy patience of the alligator. He heard the child’s last words

— I’ll tell mom! I’ll tell!

and tasted, along with the alligator, the gaminess of the prey, the copper-salt taste of its blood. He shared the creature’s satisfaction at biting down hard, and for what seemed hours, Baddeley felt in equal measure the rightness of terror and the justice of hunger. He enjoyed the sweetness of human flesh. He experienced unspeakable fear and a savage complacency. His soul was torn in two and, finally, he cried out for mercy.

As soon as he cried out, Baddeley was brought back to himself. He was not brought back to the “real” world, however. He was once again in the ward with the mannequins. The three he could look at with impunity were comfortingly familiar. They were all versions of Anna Akhmatova, young and beautiful, middle-aged and sensual, old and dignified. The mannequin he was not meant to look at spoke.

— You mustn’t cry out, it said. You must learn to bear it as I do. There was no malice or unkindness. The words were said and then, in an instant, Baddeley was in a service elevator going down to where the ambulances came in.

To Baddeley’s surprise, the character of his communion did not seem to affect the inspiration that followed. If anything, this disturbing episode was more inspiring than the ones that had preceded it. Baddeley set about writing as soon as he entered his apartment. He spent weeks immersed in the world of Parakeet . He resented anything that took him away from the work: eating, sleeping, washing. And yet, he felt a curious distance from the novel. For all the passion and dedication and inspiration that went into it, Home is the Parakeet seemed not to belong to him. Yes, he recognized the various bits of his life and thinking distributed through the work, but they were not the novel’s raison d’être. Insofar as the work had, for Baddeley, a raison d’être, it was in the images and feelings that flooded from his imagination, a glorious release he could share with no one. In the end, the work was nothing but a shrine to his solitude.

(Why was he writing a novel, anyway? It had never been his ambition to write fiction.)