A person who has just had a haircut and doesn’t smile when he looks at himself in the mirror while the stylist brushes the hair off his shoulders, that person has something terribly wrong with him that may eat him alive. When I saw the freshly trimmed hairs on Daniel Atijas’s neck, I wondered whether he smiled after getting the haircut, and I have to admit that I was at a loss for the answer. I didn’t have it then, nor did I have it later, nor while I did what I could to untangle them while drawing the detail of his tangled hairs, or as I did — while standing at the entrance to the dining hall — what I could, though feebly, to untangle the morning, a morning that was slowly but surely, whether I liked it or not, turning into day. All in all, I didn’t have much time — perhaps, who knows, I never did — but if I wanted to get something done, there was no time for waffling. I am forever surprised by the fact that time passes more speedily between mountains than it does out on the prairie, though never, when speaking of time, should one talk of facts, for time does not exist, so it cannot be measured the same way phenomena and things can be that are, or at least seem to be, real. Whatever the case, there were still two or three days before the moment of Daniel Atijas’s departure, and they seemed, regardless of length, inadequate for all I had in mind, especially for finishing the picture of the face, and this was not only because of my working slowly but also because of the feelings that kept rising up and becoming impassable obstacles. The faster time passed, the slower I worked. I made no effort to explain this to Daniel Atijas, especially after his assertion, repeated several times in various circumstances, that time in his country had stood still.
When he first said this, I had thought he was still speaking of the plain, of that sense of its endless expanse and the drop beyond the horizon when a person really has the impression that time, mid-plain, stands still, but he had something different in mind and was thinking, he said, of time as a reflection of life, and in his country, time, he said, became a quagmire, a temporal rotten egg, and as with all rotten eggs, nothing could come of it, nothing but foul smell. Time that reeks, said Daniel Atijas, has never been recorded as such. I tried to imagine life in a place like that but couldn’t. The only thing I did say was that this must be what one of the circles of hell was like, at which Daniel Atijas laughed and said that in comparison to the stench in his country the stench of hell was, to his nostrils, a breath of fresh air. And he had lovely, slim nostrils, which quivered a little whenever he was excited or raised his voice. I attempted in one of the drawings to record that quiver, sketching the outlines using a similarly shaky hand, but that didn’t do it. Many more static attempts also didn’t work — when, for instance, I sought the shadow cast across his cheek under his jutting cheekbone. I don’t know how I could ever have believed in the possibility of capturing, in an artistic rendering, one quivering nostril, or even both, either way. Our capacity for self-deception is incredible, I thought, and I trust that Daniel Atijas would have agreed if only he had shown up and given me the chance to ask. Instead of him, on the steps appeared Mark Robinson; he had finally caught up with his voice, the voice I had heard as I was leaving the dining room. He grinned as if nothing had happened the evening before.
Then he thumped me on the back and invited me that evening, if my obligations allowed, to get together with him and finally spend some time with our memories. Memories, said Mark Robinson, are the single constant in this changing world. I know, I said, and I really did know, because that was a line from one of his popular poems, so popular that children read it in the Saskatchewan elementary schools. I promised I would give it a thought, but I didn’t dare promise anything more than that, though I feared that the morning might never end, that the previous evening was something only archaeologists still cared to seek, and that sooner or later I would sniff the reek of stagnant time, the same stink Daniel Atijas had been talking about. When that happens, I thought, even the mountain peaks won’t help, and it won’t matter whether a person is in the middle of the plain or at the highest point above a vertical cliff. And besides, one falls into, not out of, oneself, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be speaking of falling just now, but some things do surface with no intention on our part, no matter what the psychiatrists claim. To say that everything is linked, that a pear dropping from a tree somewhere in the heart of Europe has anything to do with a horseshoe that flies off the hoof of a horse in southern Alberta and kills a boy perched on a fence, to claim that between these events and hundreds, thousands, millions of others there is some kind of cause-effect link, not obvious yet incontrovertible, is the pointless effort of a superior human mind that does not grasp its humble scope. I didn’t say this to Mark Robinson, because I didn’t want to talk with him, and while he was walking away I quaked at the possibility of his suddenly turning around and coming back, but as soon as he’d crossed the path and headed toward the building with the swimming pool and sports hall, I thought of the pear snapping off the branch and that hurtling horseshoe.
They were, they should be, my bulwark against the onslaught of those who work to persuade us that our behavior is nothing more than a repeat of pre-set patterns and that, no matter what we think, we are merely entering data into a fixed equation of vital and spiritual structures of whatever, according to these interpretations, makes us all the same. Identical, I should say. Anyway, when I thought at that moment of a cliff and of falling, I wasn’t thinking of a real cliff and a real fall; if I had anything in mind at all I was envisioning a sort of fresco or painting of a person’s free-fall, his plummet from celestial heights. I was thinking, in short, of how one falls through space while actually sinking into oneself, into what used to be called the human soul. And as I walked away from the dining hall, taking the path that ran by the cemetery, I said to myself that I really ought to ask Daniel Atijas whether he had noticed how people no longer refer to the human soul as they used to, as if everyone has figured out what it really is or, more likely, as if, today, no one cares any longer about looking into the human soul, more than anywhere else, for answers to the essential questions of our existence. Why ask questions, the heralds of our time might say, when we are pleased with how we live? Dissatisfaction spawns doubt, doubt spurs questions, questions are a reflection of our insecurity, our insecurity gives rise to a feeling of inequality, inequality provokes envy, envy is another name for evil.
None of that, they say, exists today. No one even tries to ask the question of the meaning of life, because practical science, fed by a groundswell in the economy, has begun to negate the need for a philosophical framing for life’s meaning; it offers the possibility of genetic predetermination, modification of mental and emotional determinants, and an endless prolonging of life. To wonder about life’s meaning, to tremble over the fullness of experience, to think of happiness, to doubt — all this begins to seem like ballast dragging us downward and threatening to sink us. Death is, simply put, no longer in fashion. Cemeteries, I thought as I neared the cemetery wall, will be unnecessary, and trades such as the art of digging graves or carving names into marble tombstones will vanish, as has happened with scribes or will happen soon with people who repair typewriters. We will all be alive, and we will live forever, or rather they will — they, not we, or at least not I, because I will not have the good fortune, or, I’d rather think, misfortune, to live long enough to greet the triumph of genetic manipulation. I couldn’t explain to myself where all these thoughts of death come from unless they have something to do with Daniel Atijas’s imminent departure. Every departure is, after all, a little death, as an Arabic poet, if I am not mistaken, once wrote, and the proximity of the cemetery, the almost-tangible weight of the uncountable deaths, surely must have influenced the flow and substance of my thoughts, even though I saw a young man and woman kissing by the cemetery gates. The kiss meant nothing to me, nor did the man’s hand, thrust deep into her pants, and even if their embrace did touch me a little then, it also darkened my sour spirits, casting a gloom I hadn’t felt since arriving in Banff, which only worsened once I came out onto the main street and mingled with the bustling throng of tourists; it made my face, as I saw in the glass of a shop window, into a scowling mask.