Margaret Atwood - Cat's eye

Toronto lies behind it, at a great distance, burning in thought like Gomorrah. At which I dare not look. Thirteen - Picoseconds

Chapter 67

I wake late. I eat an orange, some toast, an egg, mushing it up in a teacup. The hole poked in the bottom of the eggshell was not to keep the witches from going to sea, as Cordelia said. It’s to break the vacuum between shell and egg cup, so the shell can be extracted. Why did it take me forty years to figure that out?

I put on my other jogging suit, the cerise one, and do some desultory stretching exercises on Jon’s floor. It’s Jon’s floor again, not mine. I feel I’ve returned it to him, along with whatever fragments of his own life, or of our life together, I’ve been keeping back till now. I remember all those mediaeval paintings, the hand raised, open to show there is no weapon: Go in peace. Dismissal, and blessing. My way of doing this was not exactly the way of the saints, but seems to have worked just as well. The peace was for the bestower of it, also.

I go down to get the morning paper. I leaf through it, without reading much. I know I’m killing time. I’ve almost forgotten what I’m supposed to be doing here, and I’m impatient to be gone, back to the west coast, back to the time zone where I live my life now. But I can’t do that yet. I’m suspended, as in airports or dentists’ waiting rooms, expecting yet another interlude that will be textureless and without desire, like a painkiller or the interiors of planes. This is how I think of the coming evening, the opening of the show: something to get through without disaster.

I should go to the gallery, check to see that everything’s in order. I should perform at least that minimal courtesy. But instead I take the subway, get off near the main gate of the cemetery, wander south and east, scuffing through the fallen leaves, scanning the gutters; looking down at the sidewalk, for silver paper, nickels, windfalls. I still believe such things exist, and that I could find them. With a slight push, a slip over some ill-defined edge, I could turn into a bag lady. It’s the same instinct: rummaging in junk heaps, pawing through discards. Looking for something that’s been thrown away as useless, but could still be dredged up and reclaimed. The collection of shreds, of space in her case, time in mine.

This is my old route home from school. I used to walk along this sidewalk, behind or in front of the others. Between these lampposts my shadow on the winter snow would stretch ahead of me, double, shrink again and disappear, the lamps casting their haloes around them like the moon in fog. Here is the lawn where Cordelia fell down backward, making a snow angel. Here is where she ran. The houses are the same houses, though no longer trimmed in peeling white winter-grayed paint, no longer down-at-heels, postwar. The sandblasters have been here, the skylight people; inside, the benjamina trees and tropical climbers have taken over, ousting the mangy African violets once nurtured on kitchen windowsills. I can see through these houses, to what they used to be; I can see the colors that used to cover the walls, dusty rose, muddy green, mushroom, and the chintz curtains no longer there. What time do they really belong in, their own or mine?

I walk along the street, slightly uphill, against a scattered traffic of small children going home for lunch. Although the girls wear jeans, denoting freedom, they aren’t as noisy as they used to be; there are no chants, no catcalls. They trudge along doggedly, or so it seems to me. Maybe that’s because I’m not at their level any more: I’m higher, so the sound comes up to me filtered. Or maybe it’s me, the presence among them of someone they think is an adult, and has power.

A few of them stare, many don’t. What’s to see? A middle-aged woman, hands in her coat pockets, the legs of her jogging suit bunching above her boot tops, no more bizarre than most and easily forgotten. Some of the porches have pumpkins on them, carved with faces, happy or sad or threatening, waiting for tonight. All Souls’ Eve, when the spirits of the dead will come back to the living, dressed as ballerinas and Coke bottles and spacemen and Mickey Mice, and the living will give them candy to keep them from turning vicious. I can still taste that festival: the tart air, caramel in the mouth, the hope at the door, the belief in something for nothing all children take for granted. They won’t get homemade popcorn balls any more though, or apples: rumors of razor blades abound, and the possibility of poison. Even by the time of my own children, we worried about the apples. There’s too much loose malice blowing around. In Mexico they do this festival the right way, with no disguises. Bright candy skulls, family picnics on the graves, a plate set for each individual guest, a candle for the soul. Everyone goes away happy, including the dead. We’ve rejected that easy flow between dimensions: we want the dead unmentionable, we refuse to name them, we refuse to feed them. Our dead as a result are thinner, grayer, harder to hear, and hungrier.

Chapter 68

M y brother Stephen died five years ago. I shouldn’t say died: was killed. I try not to think of it as murder, although it was, but as some kind of accident, like an exploding train. Or else a natural catastrophe, like a landslide. What they call for insurance purposes an act of God.

He died of an eye for an eye, or someone’s idea of it. He died of too much justice. He was sitting on a plane. He had a window seat. This much is known.

In the nylon webbing pocket in front of him was an inflight magazine with an article in it about camels, which he’d read, and another about upgrading your business wardrobe, which he hadn’t. There was also a set of earphones and a vomit bag.

Under the seat in front, beyond his bare feet—he’s taken off his shoes and socks—is his briefcase, with a paper in it written by himself, on the subject of the probable composition of the universe. The universe, he once thought, may well be made up of infinitesimal pieces of string, in thirty-two different colors. The pieces of string are so small that “colors” is only a manner of speaking. But he is having doubts: there are other theoretical possibilities, two of which he has outlined in his paper. The universe is hard to pin down; it changes when you look at it, as if it resists being known.

He was supposed to deliver his paper the day before yesterday, in Frankfurt. He would have heard other papers. He would have learned.

Stuffed under the seat along with the briefcase is his suit jacket, one of the three he now owns. His shirtsleeves are rolled up, which doesn’t solve much: the air-conditioning is on the fritz and the air on the plane is overheated. Also it smells bad: at least one washroom toilet is out of order, and people fart more on planes, as my brother has had occasion to observe before, having taken a lot of plane trips. This is now compounded by panic, which is bad for the digestion. Two seats over, a fat bald-headed man is snoring with his mouth open, releasing an invisible cloud of halitosis. The shades on the windows are pulled down. My brother knows that if he were to raise his he would see a runway, shimmering with heat, and beyond that a dun landscape alien as the moon, with a blinding sea in the background; and some oblong brown buildings with flat roofs, from which reprieve will come, or not. He saw all this before the shades came down. He doesn’t know what country the buildings are in. He hasn’t had anything to eat since this morning. Sandwiches arrived from outside, strange granular bread, the butter on it liquid, some sort of beige meat paste that hinted of ptomaine. Also a piece of pale sweaty cheese in plastic wrap. He ate this cheese and the sandwich, and now his hands smell of old picnics, the roadside lunches of wartime.