Margaret Atwood - Hag-Seed

They shook hands at the door. She had a tough grip, more like a man’s. “What’s your name?” she said. “I mean, what name should I say, in case?”

Felix hesitated. None of your business trembled on his lips. “Mr. Duke,” he said.

It didn’t take Felix long to discover that it was easy to disappear, and that his disappearance was borne lightly by the world at large. The hole his sudden absence left in the fabric of the Makeshiweg Festival was filled soon enough — filled, indeed, by Tony. The show rolled on, as shows do.

Where had Felix gone? It was a mystery, but not one that anyone appeared dedicated to solving. He could imagine the chit-chat. Maybe he’d had a breakdown? Jumped off a bridge? The intensity of his sorrow when his little girl had died — so tragic — and then the way he’d immediately become obsessed over that frankly crack-brained Tempest of his, you had to wonder. But you didn’t have to wonder very long, because for everyone doing the wondering, other, more pressing concerns would have flowed into the empty space left by Felix’s departure, and the ripples of gossip must quickly have subsided. There were careers to be advanced, there were parts to be memorized, there were skills to be honed.

Here’s to the mad old bugger , he could imagine them saying in the Toad and Whistle or the King’s Head or the Imp and Pig-Nut, or wherever else the actors and factotums of the Festival were in the habit of lifting a glass in their off-hours. To the Maestro. To Felix Phillips, wherever he is.

Felix moved his bank account to a branch in Wilmot, two towns away, where he also rented a post office box for himself. He was, after all, still alive; he would need, for instance, to file his tax return. Nothing would set the dogs on his trail so quickly as a failure to comply. Such was the minimum price to be paid for the privilege of walking around on the earth’s crust and continuing to breathe, eat, and shit, he thought sourly.

He opened a second bank account in the name of F. Duke, claiming this was a nom de plume. He was, he explained to the bank, a writer. It pleased him to have an alter ego, one without his own melancholy history. Felix Phillips was washed up, but F. Duke might still have a chance; though at what he could not yet say.

For tax-paying purposes he kept his own name. Simpler that way. But he was “Mr. Duke” to Maude and Bert, and to their scowling little daughter, Crystal, who clearly thought Felix was a child-devourer, and to Walter, their surly teenage son, who, for the first few years — before he moved out west to work in Alberta — did indeed haul a few loads of firewood over to Felix’s modest abode every fall.

For a time, Felix tried to amuse himself by casting Maude as the blue-eyed hag, Sycorax the witch, and Walter as Caliban the semi-human log-hauler and dishwasher, in his own personal Tempest —his Tempest of the headspace — but that didn’t last long. None of it fitted: Bert the husband wasn’t the devil, and young Crystal, a podgy, stubby child, could not be imagined as the sylph-like Miranda.

And there was no room for an Ariel in this ménage, though Felix paid Bert — who was handy with tools — to add an extra electrical cable in from their farmhouse, alongside the surely illegal one that was already there. With that he could run a small heater on cold days, and also a bar fridge and a two-burner hotplate, though he could not have them all on at once without causing a blackout. He bought an electric kettle too. Maude estimated how much power he used and overcharged him accordingly. If the Maude family was anything in The Tempest , they were lesser elementals: a source of power, though not very much of it, he joked to himself.

Apart from the envelope of cash that Felix delivered into the roughened fist of Maude on the first of every month, he had little contact with his landlords, if that is what they were. The Maude family minded their own business. And Felix minded his.

But what was his business?

He made an attempt to avoid news of the theatre, and reading about the theatre, and thinking about the theatre. It was too hurtful. But his attempts were rarely successful. He found himself buying the local papers, and even the ones from nearby cities, scanning the reviews, then ripping them up for fire-starters.

During this early period of mourning and brooding he turned to the improvement of his rustic dwelling. The activity was therapeutic. He tidied up the inside space, swept away the cobwebs, got his few things out of storage and moved them in. With a little oiling and priming and a new rubber gasket, the hand pump worked. There was no mystery to the outhouse: it was functional, and so far not smelly. He bought a package of a brown granular substance advertised as being the right thing for outhouses and dumped some in periodically. He added a rug to the bedroom floor. He added a night table. The photo of Miranda perched brightly upon it, laughing with joy.

Despite his pathetic attempts at domesticity, he slept restlessly and woke often.

He bought a few implements at the hardware store in Wilmot: a hammer, a scythe. He cut the weeds in front of the shanty; he cleaned the window and, more precariously, the skylight. He thought of digging a garden, planting some tomatoes or other vegetables. But no: that would be going too far. Still, he kept himself busy. He worked at it, this busyness of his.

It wasn’t enough.

He went to the library and took out books. Surely he should use this opportunity to read all those classics he’d never made it through in youth. The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment …But he couldn’t do it: there was too much real life, there was too much tragedy. Instead he found himself gravitating to children’s stories in which everything came out all right in the end. Anne of Green Gables, Peter Pan . Fairy tales: Snow White, Sleeping Beauty . Girls left for dead in glass coffins or four-poster beds, then brought miraculously back to life by the touch of love: that was what he longed for. A reversal of fate.

“You must have grandchildren,” the nice librarian said to him. “Do you read to them?” Felix nodded and smiled. No sense in telling her the truth.

But even this resource was exhausted for him after a while. He began to spend a reprehensible amount of time sitting in the shade, in a striped deck chair he’d found at a garage sale, staring into space. When you did that long enough you began to see things that weren’t there strictly speaking, but this didn’t alarm him. Shapes in clouds, faces in the leaves. They made him feel less lonely.

The silence began to get to him. Not silence, exactly. The bird songs, the chirping of the crickets, the wind in the trees. The flies, buzzing so contrapuntally in his outhouse. Melodious. Soothing. Sometimes, to escape that ongoing semi-music, he’d climb into his increasingly unreliable car and drive into Wilmot and buy something at the hardware store, just to hear the sound of an ordinary human voice. After a few years, he had an accumulation of Krazy Glues and a small junk-pile of loose screws, hooks without eyes, and picture hangers. Had he begun to shamble? Was he regarded as a harmless local eccentric? Was he a subject of tittle-tattle, or did anyone notice him at all? Did he even care?

And if not, what did he care about? What did he want, in the way he had once wanted, so passionately, to be a mover and shaker in the world of the theatre? What was his purpose now? What did he have to live for? His occupation was gone, and the love of his life. Both of his loves. He was in danger of stagnating. Losing all energy. Succumbing to inertia. At least he kept out of the liquor store, and the bars.