If you ever see anyone on a subway who looks incredibly like Rudolf Nureyev, you’re probably actually looking at one of his clones, but just don’t say so to his face.
As for Latska, he still lives in Pas-Grand-Chose. Lately he has been working on something on a much smaller scale: making phosphorescent snails. He can be spotted at sunset, wearing a long sort of kimono that goes down to his feet, wandering around in a melancholic trance. He will ignore you when you call out to him, as he has become a recluse, like his clones, eschewing the public gaze. As the sun goes down in Pas-Grand-Chose, the lights of all the snails begin to glow. They are like the lights on top of taxicabs stuck in traffic in Times Square. They are like the little TVs lit up at night in the hospital rooms of terminal patients. They are like the Indiglo of watches being checked in a movie theatre during a really long film. You feel as though you are standing in the Milky Way and you could scoop up the stars with a butterfly net. It is so utterly charming and wonderful that you will never feel quite the same after looking at it. Does it have any great goal? No, it is a strange miracle. It is art for art’s sake. It proves that the universe is full of surprises.
And as for the Siberian tiger, it is known to creep up fire escapes, slip into bedroom windows and crawl into the single beds of children. Snuggling up to the youngsters under their blankets, with its mouth next to their ears, it tells them not to be afraid of their revolutionary dreams. It lets the children know that it has their backs.
THE HOLY DOVE PARADE
Dear Piglet,
The thing that bothers me the most about all the newspaper stories is that you are reading them. And it worries me that you don’t ever get to hear our side of the story. I have so much time on my hands these days that I want to just tell you about how things happened, baby step by baby step.
I met Edward when I was seventeen years old, outside the grocery store. He had just gotten out of the juvenile detention facility that was on the other side of town. It was his eighteenth birthday. He had a jacket tied around his waist, and a plastic bag with some paperback books in it. I took one look at him and I thought, Hallelujah. We drove my parents’ car to Montreal and I did not see them again until the trial.
The newspapers and my family and old acquaintances are always going on and on and on about how much I changed. What they don’t mention is that it was a good change. Because I don’t care what anybody says — nobody wants to go through their whole life being nothing but a pipsqueak afraid to speak up and afraid of their own ideas. And I might still be that girl if it weren’t for Edward.
We are brainwashed from when we are very little to have the thoughts that the government wants us to have. We think these are our own thoughts, but they are not. They are like frozen-dinner thoughts. We buy them already made and then heat them up in our brains a little and then think them. As if they are our own. As if thoughts didn’t take any effort.
You have to create thoughts from scratch, Piglet. And as for the ingredients, you need love, wisdom, terror and acceptance. You have to put all these emotions together in order for them to be big and bold and gigantic ideas that you can be proud of and truly call your own. These are the kinds of thoughts that are free and original and can change the world.
After you spent time with Edward, he would teach you how to have all these amazing ideas. You would realize how limited your thoughts had been before.
Those were my favourite days. The days when it was only me and Edward and before we had anybody else with us. We ditched the car and were sleeping in the park in the city. Edward would talk about his ideas and his visions. We didn’t have any money or jobs, but we were so young that we didn’t even know how to worry about them yet. And so for the moment the two of us had achieved our goals in life. We were free. Once we got a can of beer and when we opened the tab it sounded like a flashbulb and like someone had taken an old-fashioned photograph of us.
I was always running up to cars that were stopped at red lights, trying to clean their windshields. I would beg everybody for a little change. Sometimes I sang outside the door of the metro. You should have seen me then, Piglet. I was wild.
Edward was really good at dumpster diving. He could really live like a bum and it didn’t bother him at all. Edward never worried about germs from other people. He would pick up a cup of coffee that was on a bench and was half filled and drink from it, or sit at a table at a food court and eat whatever was left. While he ate, he would be reading the newspaper with his legs crossed. There was something really dignified about him always. He was above material possessions. He really was. (And, whew, did I find him handsome!)
He got us two half-eaten Monte Carlo potatoes out of the garbage of a fancy restaurant. He would say that I had nothing whatsoever in the world to worry about because we were living like kings. He said that he always wanted to live like a sparrow in the city. He said that he would eat garbage that was left behind for him and he would build a nest anywhere. But he knew that he had to find a place to stay because of me. Even though he couldn’t pay for it, he signed a lease for an old storefront that had been abandoned for ten years on a block that was filled with rundown tenements. It used to be an ice cream parlour. There was still a sign for ice cream painted in gold lettering on the window. Edward said that it was the perfect spot for him to start a church.
We filled up the ice cream parlour with chairs that we found in the garbage. There were all these mismatched kitchen chairs for all the wild variety of people who came to sit in on Edward’s lectures.
It’s a funny thing. When you are a little kid and people ask you what you want to be when you grow up, you don’t say, “I want to be a prophet,” or “I want to be a visionary” or “I want to be an apostle.” But these are all things that you can be. A bright kid born into horrific circumstances is what marks the birth of a prophet.
Edward was put in a group home when he was six years old. He was beaten and mistreated by the staff for years. He had cigarette burns up and down his arms. There were marks on his back from straps.
Edward often walked around without his shirt. He wasn’t ashamed or self-conscious of all the marks on him. He wasn’t proud of them either. He simply didn’t seem to think about them that much. But just because he went around acting as if they were nothing but some marks — no different than moles or acne scars — didn’t mean that they didn’t somehow get below the surface.
Edward said that he didn’t mind having a bad childhood. Edward said that someone had to have that childhood. He said that somebody had to be born on that day, in that house, to that family, in that town, in this province, so it might as well be him. And one thing that made him happy was knowing that since he was having that shitty childhood, it meant that there was someone out there that wasn’t having it.
Edward always had the loveliest way of thinking about things. Edward never felt sorry for himself. Edward always thought that who we are is so much bigger than our circumstances. Certain people, if they found themselves in Edward’s shoes, would be bitching about everything they had been through for their whole lives.
He said that it was generally the state of childhood — to find yourself in a home that you didn’t like and to be subjected to the random laws of ignoramuses. Parents go through their children’s psyches looking for contraband ideas the way that guards toss apart prisoners’ cells looking for items that they might have smuggled in. All children were being raised in prisons of one sort or another, according to Edward.