The room was, of course, astonishing. It could not possibly fit in the closet Baddeley had entered. What’s more, this time, the view from the windows was as if from the middle of Lake Ontario looking back on Toronto, looking back, impossibly, on the Toronto Western and on the very window in which Baddeley and Andrews were framed. Looking out the window and raising his right hand, Baddeley saw his own hand rising in the distance. It was, to say the least, disconcerting: an illusion of some sort, obviously, but most confusing.
Without waiting for a question, the patient said
— The answers I could give you would not help. I am here because I too suffer. You remember how peaceful it was for you to share the mind of ants at work? So it is for me when I am in your mind, my son. It is such bliss to find simplicity.
It didn’t seem to Baddeley that his thoughts were simple.
— Your thoughts are simple, said the patient. You’re only worried about what you call your sanity. A negligible matter, Alexander. The boundary is subtle, even for me. But, I understand you’d like to write poetry. There are two obstacles to your writing. One is within you. You must learn to listen to me when I am with you. And that will not always be pleasant. The other obstacle is before you. You’ll have to free Mr Andrews, if you’d like to take his place. I don’t believe you’re capable of it, but Avery is convinced that you are.
Avery Andrews turned to face the man he had, from the moment he’d set eyes on him, assumed to be his killer: Alexander Baddeley.
— I want to die, he said.
Nothing about this moment made any sense to Baddeley. For one thing, who could comprehend the trajectory he was expected to make: from admirer of Avery Andrews to Andrews’ assassin? How was he supposed to put aside years and years of admiration for Andrews? At this moment, in this place, for this audience, he was to murder a man he loved? There was no question of him doing any such thing. Whatever Andrews’ emotional problems, Baddeley could not see himself killing a man who was one of the only sources of beauty and consolation in his life. Someone had misjudged him.
Turning towards the patient, Baddeley asked
— Who are you?
— Don’t look at him, said Andrews. Look at me. I’m the one begging for mercy. I’ve been bound to him for thirty years. I’ve looked after him for thirty years. Every line of poetry I’ve written, everything you’ve admired has come from him, from listening to him. I’m nothing but a vessel for his ramblings. I want to be free. I want to die.
— But I’m not a killer, said Baddeley.
— You must be, said Andrews, or you wouldn’t have found me.
Turning toward the patient but not looking at him directly, Andrews pleaded.
— Tell him, he said
— What should I tell him? asked God.
— Tell him that I’m nothing. There’s no poetry in me, except for what you put there. All these years, he’s admired a stenographer. It all comes from you. There’s nothing of me in it. I’m a fraud. He could do what I do just as well as I do. Better! He’s a critic!
His hands shaking, Andrews pulled a notebook and pen from his shirt pocket. Opening the book to a blank page, he held it up for Baddeley to see.
— Look, he said and, then, turning to the hospital bed, he bowed his head and mumbled something or other. Baddeley could not make out Andrews’ words. Baddeley himself was thinking of nothing so much as how to escape from the men into whose awful company he’d wandered — the poet and his “God.” But then, a strange “mind” was made manifest to him. Yes, insofar as he could recognize “divinity,” the mind Baddeley experienced was “divine.” In a way, it was the twinned opposite of the red ants’ mind. While there, with the ants, a purity beyond words had brought peace; here, in this presence, he experienced a peace brought forth from infinite ramification: mind without end, pattern without border, a reachable horizon. For the first time in his life, Alexander Baddeley knew a different order of beauty, an unworldly vision that lay just within the range of words.
How long this moment lasted, neither man could have said. It was accompanied only by the scritch-scratching of Andrews’ pen on paper, by the shedding of words — a shedding that seemed to Baddeley more an irritation than a gift, though Baddeley had been, and knew he had been, attendant at the creation of a poem by Avery Andrews. The poem was unmistakably Andrews’ but unfamiliar…
While the Eumenides sharpen their thumbs
To scratch our prophecies, bitter in falclass="underline"
The immortal benefits of glorious life,
Resplendence of our everlasting story,
No prayer advances down the shopping mall,
Pure wheat of which is baked the bread of life.
When the spell was broken, when the moment had passed, Baddeley and Andrews stood facing each other, exhilarated, both of them fascinated by the residue that God’s presence had left: poetry, though these — oddly enough — were not the words Baddeley himself would have saved from the listening.
If there had been doubt about the patient’s identity before this moment, there was no doubt left in Baddeley’s mind immediately after it. The illusions, the tricks with time and space, were paltry compared to the vision he and Andrews had shared. Baddeley was ecstatic. Andrews’ exhilaration was short- lived, however. He had been here before, often. He knew this moment well and was tired of it, though he tried to talk it up.
— You see? Said Andrews. It’s wonderful, isn’t it? How could you turn this down, Alexander? Think what it would mean to live your life in His presence!
Every one of Andrews’ words rang hollow.
— All I’m asking, he continued, is this small thing. Please, Alexander. I’m being eaten alive by the sacred! No! I don’t mean it that way. It’s not as bad as that. It’s wonderful. But I’d like to pass it on. For that, I need someone who’ll free me.
— Why don’t you free yourself? asked Baddeley.
— I can’t. I have a duty to…
Andrews moved his head in the direction of the Being in the hospital bed. Neither man looked at Him directly, but as Andrews completed his ever-so-slight gesture there was a moment of desolation. God’s recession was not gradual or graceful. It was not like a wave receding from the shore. It was immediate, as if all seas had suddenly ceased to be. There was, in Baddeley’s soul, the most complete abandonment he had experienced; so agonizing that, for a moment, it occurred to him that his life was worthless, that the best thing for him, under the circumstances, was death. In fact, he looked towards the window wondering how high up they were.
But there was no window. There was no window, no ward, no God, no beds, no lacustrine vista. He and Avery Andrews were in a darkened room that smelled of disinfectant. At least, he was in a darkened room of some sort. He could not see the person with him. Rather, he heard the muffled sobs of another man, the intake of breath. Baddeley reached out in the dark, meaning only to touch Andrews’ shoulder, but as he did the door to the room opened and there was a flood of light.
— What the hell’s wrong with you people? Can’t you do your nasty business at home? This is a hospital, for Christ’s sake!
Baddeley and Andrews were in a janitor’s closet. Baddeley’s hand was raised. It was in the vicinity of Andrews’ cheek, as if the nurse who’d opened the door had interrupted them in mid caress. Both men stared at her as if she were an apparition.