I do have a scarier one though… where the fellow says he’s hearing angel voices that’re telling him he’s got to kill me, you know, you read about things like that all the time in the papers. In this one I’m not in the apartment where I live now, I’m back in my mother’s house in Leamington and the fellow’s been hiding in the cellar, he grabs my arm when I go downstairs to get a jar of jam and he’s got hold of the axe too, out of the garage, that one is really scary. I mean, what do you say to a nut like that?
So I start to shake but after a minute I get control of myself and I say, is he sure the angel voices have got the right person, because I hear the same angel voices and they’ve been telling me for some time that I’m going to give birth to the reincarnation of St. Anne who in turn has the Virgin Mary and right after that comes Jesus Christ and the end of the world, and he wouldn’t want to interfere with that, would he? So he gets confused and listens some more, and then he asks for a sign and I show him my vaccination mark, you can see it’s sort of an odd-shaped one, it got infected .because I scratched the top off, and that does it, he apologizes and climbs out the coal chute again, which is how he got in in the first place, and I say to myself there’s some advantage in having been brought up a Catholic even though I haven’t been to church since they changed the service into English, it just isn’t the same, you might as well be a Protestant. I must write to Mother and tell her to nail up that coal chute, it always has bothered me. Funny, I couldn’t tell you at all what this man looks like but I know exactly what kind of shoes he’s wearing, because that’s the last I see of him, his shoes going up the coal chute, and they’re the old-fashioned kind that lace up the ankles, even though he’s a young fellow. That’s strange, isn’t it?
Let me tell you though I really sweat until I see him safely out of there and I go upstairs right away and make myself a cup of tea. I don’t think about that one much. My mother always said you shouldn’t dwell on unpleasant things and I generally agree with that, I mean, dwelling on them doesn’t make them go away. Though not dwelling on them doesn’t make them go away either, when you come to think of it.
Sometimes I have these short ones where the fellow grabs my arm but I’m really a kung fu expert, can you believe it, in real life I’m sure it would just be a conk on the head and that’s that, like getting your tonsils out, you’d wake up and it would be all over except for the sore places, and you’d be lucky if your neck wasn’t broken or something, I could never even hit the volleyball in gym and a volleyball is fairly large, you know?—and I just go zap with my fingers into his eyes and that’s it, he falls over, or I flip him against a wall or something. But I could never really stick my fingers in anyone’s eyes, could you? It would feel like hot Jell-O and I don’t even like cold Jell-O, just thinking about it gives me the creeps. I feel a bit guilty about that one, I mean how would you like walking around knowing someone’s been blinded for life because of you?
But maybe it’s different for a guy.
The most touching one I have is when the fellow grabs my arm and I say, sad and kind of dignified, “You’d be raping a corpse.” That pulls him up short and I explain that I’ve just found out I have leukaemia and the doctors have only given me a few months to live. That’s why I’m out pacing the streets alone at night, I need to think, you know, come to terms with myself. I don’t really have leukaemia but in the fantasy I do, I guess I chose that particular disease because a girl in my grade four class died of it, the whole class sent her flowers when she was in the hospital. I didn’t understand then that she was going to die and I wanted to have leukaemia too so I could get flowers. Kids are funny, aren’t they? Well, it turns out that he has leukaemia himself, and he only has a few months to live, that’s why he’s going around raping people, he’s very bitter because he’s so young and his life is being taken from him before he’s really lived it. So we walk along gently under the streetlights, it’s spring and sort of misty, and we end up going for coffee, we’re happy we’ve found the only other person in the world who can understand what we’re going through, it’s almost like fate, and after a while we just sort of look at each other and our hands touch, and he comes back with me and moves into my apartment and we spend our last months together before we die, we just sort of don’t wake up in the morning, though I’ve never decided which one of us gets to die first. If it’s him I have to go on and fantasize about the funeral, if it’s me I don’t have to worry about that, so it just about depends on how tired I am at the time. You may not believe this but sometimes I even start crying. I cry at the ends of movies, even the ones that aren’t all that sad, so I guess it’s the same thing. My mother’s like that too.
The funny thing about these fantasies is that the man is always someone I don’t know, and the statistics in the magazines, well, most of them anyway, they say it’s often someone you do know, at least a little bit, like your boss or something—I mean, it wouldn’t be my boss, he’s over sixty and I’m sure he couldn’t rape his way out of a paper bag, poor old thing, but it might be someone like Derek Duck, in his elevator shoes, perish the thought—or someone you just met, who invites you up for a drink, it’s getting so you can hardly be sociable any more, and how are you supposed to meet people if you can’t trust them even that basic amount? You can’t spend your whole life in the Filing Department or cooped up in your own apartment with all the doors and windows locked and the shades down. I’m not what you would call a drinker but I like to go out now and then for a drink or two in a nice place, even if I am by myself, I’m with Women’s Lib on that even though I can’t agree with a lot of the other things they say. Like here for instance, the waiters all know me and if anyone, you know, bothers me. … I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except I think it helps you get to know a person, especially at first, hearing some of the things they think about. At work they call me the office worry wart, but it isn’t so much like worrying, it’s more like figuring out what you should do in an emergency, like I said before.
Anyway, another thing about it is that there’s a lot of conversation, in fact I spend most of my time, in the fantasy that is, wondering what I’m going to say and what he’s going to say, I think it would be better if you could get a conversation going. Like, how could a fellow do that to a person he’s just had a long conversation with, once you let them know you’re human, you have a life too, I don’t see how they could go ahead with it, right? I mean, I know it happens but I just don’t understand it, that’s the part I really don’t understand.
Hair Jewellery
There must be some approach to this, a method, a technique, that’s the word I want, it kills germs. Some technique then, a way of thinking about it that would be bloodless and therefore painless; devotion recollected in tranquillity. I try to conjure up an image of myself at that time, also one of you, but it’s like conjuring the dead. How do I know I’m not inventing both of us, and if I’m not inventing then it really is like conjuring the dead, a dangerous game. Why should I disturb those sleepers, sleepwalkers, as they make their automaton rounds through the streets where we once lived, fading from year to year, their voices thinning to the sound of a thumb drawn across a wet window: an insect squeak, transparent as glass, no words. You can never tell with the dead whether it is they who wish to return or the living who want them to. The usual explanation is that they have something to tell us. I’m not sure I believe it; in this case it’s more likely that I have something to tell them.