Graeme Gibson - Communion

“Memories are like bad dreams.” Ritson’s voice, it doesn’t sound like a voice, he hears it in the dark. “They torment me so. That’s why I live in a cellar, it must be: I am lonely, but I am away from it all. That must be the reason. I have had to get used to it, it has not come easily. How could it? It is not man’s nature to live like an animal.” Perhaps he has said this before. If only he could get up, he doesn’t want to wet himself. Did he get up yesterday? it seems to him that he did, but it’s possible that he has deteriorated to such an extent, and in such a way, that he hasn’t noticed; and it’s the not noticing, after all, that’s the measure of real and significant deterioration, perhaps it has gone so far that he didn’t get up yesterday, that he won’t be able to get up today. “A basement is not an ideal place to die.” That voice again, his voice. At the same time he doesn’t appear to smell of stale urine, that would suggest he’d been on his feet yesterday. But not necessarily. It could just as easily mean that he’s subsided to the point where he doesn’t have to pee every day, that the pressure he now experiences is a reservoir of urine that’s been collecting for several days. The body’s organs do decay in this way, its processes do break down, there’s no question of that. It isn’t surprising. There was a time when he was able to pee as many as fifteen times in a single day, the urine rushed from him in torrents. But that’s history too, and there’s no reason to hope that it will be possible every day, any more than it was possible, say eighteen months ago, to believe he could then continue to pee more than seven times a week.

If he allows himself, he’ll pursue this sort of speculation forever, he’ll exhaust every combination of possibilities, and even though it’s challenging for the mind, even though it could prove to be more or less diverting, it has nothing to do with him lying here, on his back, his body undeniably weaker than he has ever known it to be. A cellar is not an ideal place to die. He rolls onto his side, drawing his knees up to his chest, levering with his arms, he flops onto his belly, he struggles to raise his trunk from the mattress, to rise onto all fours, his arms are too weak, he collapses, his face bangs rudely against the cellar floor. It’s probably like this every day, soon the strength will return, he lies motionless with one arm beneath him, his face is pressed against the cement.

“Memories are like bad dreams.” Ritson’s voice, it doesn’t sound like a voice, he hears it in the dark. “They torment me so. That’s why I live in a cellar, it must be: I am lonely.” There’s a woman, a fine-looking woman, wide-hipped and full-breasted: she’s shrouding the furniture, her arms are naked, she shakes white sheets, they billow over the stuffed chairs, they settle noiselessly on the sofa. A purposeful young woman, she doesn’t look more than thirty-five; he isn’t confident that he knows who she is. Who is she? Bending she adjusts the sheets, she tucks them under the legs of the furniture. She brushes hair from her brow and sighs. He doesn’t understand why she’s doing this, why doesn’t she acknowledge him? it’s as if he isn’t in the room. She pulls the blinds down, one by one, she draws the curtains and then, still without looking in his direction, she goes into the other room, he can hear her, he finds himself in the doorway. Because in this room, too, the blinds are down, because the curtains are drawn, he cannot see her. Where is she? alone into the room he knows she will not see him. He hears an unrecognizable sound from the corner of the room, a slight repetitive sound, he opens the cupboard, she’s in the cupboard, her feet no longer touch the floor: her face, although contorted, is brutally serene; her tongue is swollen, it lolls from between her teeth, he sees that she’s bitten it, there’s blood in her mouth, it’s boiling onto her chin: bulging from their sockets, her eyes stare hugely over his shoulder into the room. The noise is caused by her fist; compusively, as if counting time, she’s tapping the cupboard wall with her fist. He’s appalled by the calm in that body beneath her blackening face; all the energy of death is in her face as her body rotates imperceptibly.

Manoeuvring onto his back, he opens his eyes. On his back in the dark, it’s like sleep, the empty house above him, so many rooms, he remembers the woman, she must have done that before she left. Or has he always been alone? He remembers many women, and children, some of them had children in their arms, they prepared meals of soup and sandwiches for children coming home from school. It doesn’t matter. He must get up, the pressure on his bladder insists, he closes his eyes, he opens them again. Children skating on a river, their red toques brilliant in the sun. Their voices come to him in the wind.

Leaving by the side door, into the alley, it’s dark, he’s wearing running shoes and goes directly to the park, then left into the ravine, he moves with empty grace, through the underbrush, a path beside the road because sometimes there are others, there are cars without lights, there are figures, shadows in the corner of his eye.

And tonight there is a car, he knows where to look, he sees it, heart’s rhythm and muscles tightening, his mouth parting, he pauses: leaves shiver about him, a light evening breeze on his face. He stares at the motionless hulk of the car. He can almost smell it. Circling up the side of the ravine so they won’t see him; he wonders if they’re screwing. He hopes so. Pausing to stare down at them he thinks of hurling a brick or something, bouncing it off the roof. He stands grinning in the dark. There’s no sound from the car. The wind has gone, he hears traffic somewhere above him; he’d never do a thing like that, he knows it’d scare the shit out of them, they’d probably never make it again. He stands without moving: there are animals, he hears them in the dead leaves, the night sky is full of bats and owls. He no longer cares why they have no place to go, why they have to come here, inviting almost certain detection by the police who patrol the ravine with search-lights on their yellow cars. It doesn’t matter, it’s true the car is there, it might as well be empty. He doesn’t understand how he could have been tempted to crawl closer to the glinting metal body, the brush of bodies perhaps? He knows how pathetic that is. They groan, breathing and sighing, the noise of their bodies, he sees them, they don’t know he’s here, so close to them, teeth bared, eyes white, he reaches, fingers extended, staring he reaches into the car, he sees her legs convulse like arms. What does he want from them, any of them? He doesn’t know who they are. He doesn’t feel anything. They’re there, he’s seen the glow from at least two cigarettes and smoke drifting from the driver’s open window. He can’t make any sense of it, he can’t even remember why he’s standing above them in the dark, deathly still, as if remembering something he’s never experienced.

He’s almost there, he’ll cross the stream, it’s always the same. He smokes a cigarette under the railway bridge: cupping it secretively in his hand, he leans against a concrete column. Water rushes over rocks and garbage, it stinks of the cemetery. Crushing the butt beneath his shoe, he listens intently for any noise that will betray the other, the watcher; he hears only cascading water, the predictable sounds of night and the city above him. Secure that he’s not observed, he crosses the stream, he scrambles directly to the entrance and with some difficulty slides the metal cover until there’s an opening big enough for him to slip through. Because it’s cramped inside, in fact there’s scarcely enough room for his crouching body, it’s hard to push the cover back into place. He has to brace himself against one wall, it’s not so much the weight, it’s the angle: it doesn’t matter how often he does it, how carefully he tries to remember the position that’s given him the angle, he has to rediscover it every time. Tonight, for some reason, he falls into it very quickly, it hardly takes him any time at all and although he’s not a superstitious man, he accepts it as an omen.