He may have only shrugged and left. I was suddenly standing there alone right when nothing was further from my mind than solitude. Doubled over on the floor of my studio this night, I thought for the first time that I should burn all the drawings of the face that I had made, and had I been anywhere but Banff National Park, where they would have arrested me for a candle flame lit on a forest meadow, let alone for a blazing pyre of failed stabs at art, I would probably have nothing left at this point but a box full of ash, the fitting end to every cremation. Instead of burning them, I gathered them together and began to draw again, but I gave myself over fully to the details, such as the left corner of the lips and the tiny web of wrinkles along the edge of the eyelids. Then I dropped off to sleep. When I awoke, I saw a bird on the branch of a conifer. I didn’t know what that meant, nor whether birds have any special meaning at moments when dreams dissolve into waking, just as I didn’t know whether the number eight, the number of my studio, meant anything besides being a number, and all this, all this quest for meaning, was a sign of my agitation, my effort to find comfort or at least relief by searching for the special meaning in particular things or events to resist the pressure of anticipating the inevitable fear of departure. Not mine, of course, not mine. I lay on my back, listened to the morning sounds of the mountains and woods, and thought about a new beginning. Thinking about a new beginning is a fine defense mechanism, especially at moments when nothing can change whatever it was that came before the new beginning.
This doesn’t change anything, I knew, but sometimes it does a person good to breathe in deeply without effort and slowly release the breath at will, exactly the way one wants to. Our life, I said over breakfast to the playwright from Toronto, is like a sack of potatoes: if we want to keep them, we must constantly pick through them and snap off the sprouts. The playwright asked if might he jot that down, because it was, he added, an excellent line for the very scene he was working on, in which the protagonist decides to leave her husband and start over. I have never liked the potato, said the playwright, and mashed potatoes made him gag, but there you have it, sometimes we are most helped by things we like least; he might just start eating potatoes, who knows, out of a sense of gratitude for the inspired resolution to a scene that had stymied him. I didn’t mind us sharing the potato inspiration, I told him, but while he was talking I was darting glances every which way. It seemed odd that Daniel Atijas hadn’t come down to breakfast, and I could imagine any number of reasons to explain this, the worst being a tryst with Ivan Matulić’s grandson. The playwright did not stop retelling his scenes, in which more and more places cropped up where the potato signaled salvation, meanwhile continuously shoveling milk-soaked oatmeal into his mouth, so that several times after he sputtered his words I had to pick the moist specks off my forehead and cheeks. Then several more people joined our round table, so the playwright forgot the potato or maybe found another source of inspiration for his limping scenes.
I knew none of the new arrivals, though two of the young women, with long faces and hair done up trimly in ponytails, clearly ballerinas, shot me glances in which there was a trace of recognition. If I did know them, I couldn’t remember, and had I tried, I wouldn’t have been able to, as all my thoughts were tied up with worry about Daniel Atijas’s absence. I may be exaggerating when I say it was worry, because what filled my thoughts was more like anger than anxiety, and I was feeling betrayed rather than curious about his whereabouts. I remembered how one day soon after he arrived, at a moment when I was trailing around after him through the Centre and Banff, I noticed how his hair was growing in a tangle down his neck, reaching all the way to the edge of his shirt collar, where it disappeared and probably joined up with the hairs that covered the upper part of his back and shoulders. Had I had a comb just then, I don’t doubt that I would have smoothed those locks; had we known each other better, who knows, I might have taken him to a hair stylist. A haircut in Banff, I would have told him, is a novel experience, for a person, so high in the mountains and freed of the ballast of needless hair, feels he might soar. Nothing holds you back as much as unruly hair, lifeless locks, and split ends. As someone who grew up in the sixties, I probably shouldn’t be saying this, but it is difficult to resist change in a society in which a constant state of flux is the sole condition that merits attention — other people’s attention, of course, because other people’s attention, in this society, is alclass="underline" nothing else matters. Whatever else does not attract enough attention is condemned to oblivion, to sinking like a stone.
I thought about that while I stared at the back of Daniel’s head and neck on the streets of Banff, and I thought of it again the other evening while I focused on drawing details; I even tried to summon the scene, the tangled hair, some of which was pure white. Those hairs so entranced me that several times I drew the place where his eyebrows knit, trying to catch the play of light and shadow, the tiny wrinkles above the bridge of his nose, and a droplet of sweat that happened to show up like an interloper. I suddenly wanted to drop my head to the table right next to the bowl of oatmeal and fall asleep among all those simultaneous voices and stay that way, secure in my desolation, until Daniel Atijas came along and woke me up. Instead I got up, raised my hand in a gesture of farewell, as if I were an Indian chief, and turned, ready to go. I turned slowly, as if I would never make it around to face in the opposite direction. I turned again on the stairs when I heard Mark Robinson’s voice, but this time faster, as if speed could help. What is so absurd here, I had said to Daniel Atijas when we had our first long, serious conversation, is that artists come to the Centre seeking solitude, dedication to their inspiration and their work, but most often they cannot for the life of them elude the curiosity and envy of those who do not succeed in finding either. It’s easiest here, I said to him, to do nothing, and that is exactly what most of them do, pretending all the while, of course, that they are working on something great or at least that they never stop thinking about their work. This notion, I said, that artists should isolate themselves from others, from society, which should be the source of their work — this idea is misguided and so absurd in a system that has long since ceased endorsing isolation for any one of its segments.
The notion smells of segregation, isolation, classification by any other determinant except general membership in the human race, which is forbidden and politically out of sync today, but artists continue to be set apart in reservations; this one here happens to be situated in the middle of a national park traversed every year, I said, by three to four million tourists, and we are expected to create works amid all the frenzy, works that express our serenity and focus on questions of form and content, the resolution of the dilemmas of poetics. I don’t know why I spoke so furiously at the time, just as I don’t know how all of this relates to the tangle of hairs on Daniel Atijas’s neck, but when I next had a chance to see the nape of his neck, it was freshly barbered. I don’t know who had taken him to the hair stylist; maybe he went on his own — after all, he struck me as the type who figures out how to find his way around an unknown city with ease, and Banff, hand on heart, is not an overly challenging urban labyrinth — but it is quite certain that Daniel Atijas did not then look like the kind who was ready at any moment to soar into the air. That’s how it is with some people: the more you free them of the ballast that is holding them down, the heavier they get. Instead of rising, they sink; instead of growing, they shrink. I may be overstating this: perhaps the snipping of a little hair from the neck and behind the ears cannot be fairly compared to other feelings of liberation and levitation, especially not to those which spring from a long-lasting reliance on certain psychophysical skills, but I feel this way every time I step out of a hair stylist’s.