So there we stood on Bear Street watching the tourists and the cars and then staring at a robin working a worm up out of the soil on the lawn out in front of the museum. Just when it had tugged out the worm, nearly tipping over onto its back in the process, Daniel Atijas appeared. The worm has nothing to do with it, I said to the grandson as Daniel Atijas was approaching the museum, though one never knows for sure, and who knows where my friend would be now had the worm stayed stuck in the ground. The grandson shot me a baffled look. He had no clue what I was talking about, and he did not, as I saw, realize that Daniel Atijas was heading toward us for he didn’t know Daniel Atijas; he had never seen him and probably wouldn’t even know his name. Perhaps, at the end of their meeting, Guy Fletcher had told him to step outside, that there would be two men out in front of the museum who would like a word with him. The grandson was indecisive at first, for he had counted on getting back to Calgary as soon as possible, but Guy Fletcher was adamant, persuasive, chatty, and the grandson stayed. Guy Fletcher was relieved, I was sure he was, when all that grief left his office. He sped to the window, cranked it open, and took a deep breath of the warm, dry, heedless mountain air. I couldn’t blame him, if that is, indeed, what he did, for that much grief, or whatever it was on the grandson’s face, might choke an unwary onlooker, and having in mind what it felt like here, where we were standing in the open by the river, I could only imagine its horrific effect indoors. Later, however, when the three of us, Daniel Atijas, Ivan Matulić’s grandson, and I, were indoors, in Daniel’s room, I noticed that my misgivings had been unwarranted.
The grief was still there on the grandson’s face, but by then, if I can put it this way, his was only half the grief: the other half had sidled over onto Daniel Atijas’s face. And while the grandson’s face slowly began showing a softness I had seen no trace of earlier, Daniel Atijas’s face, at least for that evening and night, looked less and less like the face I had been drawing and because of which I was sitting where, by all accounts, I should not have been. The next day during breakfast I tried to explain this to Daniel Atijas through the haze of his and my hangovers, but my mouth was dry, the words stuck to one another, and I had to give up before I’d properly begun. Daniel Atijas kept shaking his head, stopping only long enough to sip his coffee. We held our coffee cups like drowning men clinging to life belts. He had thought, said Daniel Atijas finally, that he would not be able to fall asleep last night at all, but as soon he dropped his head onto his pillow, he sank into a deep, though unfortunately not refreshing, sleep, which was probably, he said, obvious, and me? he said, asking how long I had slept. I said that, unlike him, I had dropped off to sleep while my face was still in the air above the pillow and that I had slept, if my arithmetic wasn’t off, at least four, maybe five hours. I don’t know why I had to lie and why I didn’t admit that I had slept on the floor next to the bed and that when I woke, I couldn’t get back to sleep afterward, in part because of what all of us, and particularly Daniel Atijas and Ivan Matulić’s grandson, had talked about, and because of my fear that Daniel Atijas’s face wouldn’t go back to being the way it had been before, but also because of everything that had been playing out inside me, about which, even if I’d wanted to, I couldn’t have spoken.
I woke up at four; the sky by then was starting to fill with light, and soon the light was so bright that I could no longer squint it out, so I got up and watched the morning turn into the world. Excess is never a good thing, said Daniel Atijas, regardless of whether it was excess of drink, food, music, or whatever else. Last night, for instance, he said, we gorged ourselves on words, and if we had vomited later, if we could have, out of us would have gushed half-chewed, gnawed words, jumbled sentences, the occasional punctuation mark. Both of us raised our hands high — he his left, me my right — to flag down the waiter and his jug of coffee. At noon we were supposed to meet again with Ivan Matulić’s grandson; instead of going back to Calgary he had gone to spend the night at a cousin’s in Canmore about twelve miles from Banff; at the very thought of the words we’d be saying then, though most of them would belong to Daniel Atijas and the grandson, I began feeling queasy, though, like every addict, I could hardly wait to feel that way. The waiter finally came over, poured coffee into the cups shaking in our hands, tsk-tsked, and promised he’d be back again soon whether we hailed him or not. Daniel Atijas’s face was once again the face I had seen on the small poster by the reception desk. True, tiredness had left its mark, his eyes had shrunk, the corners of his lips were loose, but all that, I was convinced, was transitory, and none of it alarmed me. What did alarm me was something I sensed more than saw, something which still had no definite shape, nor was it attached to any particular part of his face, something which, at least for the moment, I would not have been able to draw but which kept slipping, shadowlike, over his features, his brow and the bridge of his nose, threatening, at some point, to stop and stay, I feared, for good.
It was not, to be frank, the shadow itself I feared, its density or its reach; what worried me was that in it I saw only a beginning, an intimation of events that had been set in motion and could no longer, as in a Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, be recalled. I am a child of the plains and don’t know much about avalanches, but while we were sitting that morning in the dining hall of the Centre in Banff waiting for the waiter to bring fresh coffee I could not suppress the thought that we were in the path of an avalanche from which, no matter what we did, we would not escape. I didn’t even try to explain this to Daniel Atijas, and had I tried, I wouldn’t have gotten it right, but even if I had gotten it right, he wouldn’t have believed me — this I know. I later wrote on the back of a drawing that it was interesting that I felt no jealousy at all, which was unusual, since Ivan Matulić’s grandson attracted Daniel Atijas in a way that I had not; something had sprung up between them that I could not touch, a rapport they shared through their background, even though Ivan Matulić’s grandson, as he had told us the previous evening, was born in Canada, whereas Daniel Atijas was a Jew, an outsider, essentially, in the place where the grandson’s ancestors were from. In that sense, “background” is the wrong word, but better that word than none at all, though I doubt that Daniel Atijas, as a writer, would agree. Whatever the case, they had spent yesterday and last night growing closer and closer, not along a straight, one-way trajectory, but rather along one full of small retreats and advances, as if they were playing chess on an invisible board with invisible pieces.