Who can say? Perhaps all of it happened at once, perhaps it is happening still, perhaps the past comprises all possibilities, and we, at an easy arm’s length, choose the options that suit us best? I hadn’t had a chance to talk about this with Daniel Atijas, though I meant to tell him about the dream, to hear what he’d have to say, and to put forward the ideas prompted by the vision, if it was a vision. When I finally wrenched free of the labyrinth of visual impressions just as the room was growing visible, I realized I should paint this vision of mine as a triptych of vast dimensions, with many allusions to William Blake and Hieronymus Bosch. I also resolved to read Dante again, though I am not sure why. In that, I thought, Daniel Atijas was the person who could have helped, but the day, the last day he spent at the Art Centre, was too short, he told me when I called him, for all the things other people had planned for his departure. He was to have lunch with the director of the Literary Arts Programs and the director’s wife, dinner with the president of the Art Centre and his wife, and he hoped to make the rounds of the places he liked, do his last shopping, return books to the library, and then, around ten in the evening, he was going to get together with Mark Robinson and the other artists he had become close to one way or another and have a farewell drink. It wouldn’t be bad, Daniel Atijas remarked, for me to join them, which I refused with disgust, of course, though I tried to keep the disgust from showing, claiming that I was tired and upset. Then breakfast is all we have left, said Daniel Atijas, because shortly after breakfast, as he had been informed by the office of the director of the Literary Arts Programs, someone would be shuttling him to the Calgary airport.
Would he be able, before he went to breakfast, to stop by my studio? I asked, explaining that I had something to show him. He was not keen, I could hear that in his voice, but he agreed. He was planning for breakfast at eight, he said, and he could stop by my studio fifteen minutes beforehand if that suited me. Suits me, I said, and hung up. Maybe I was wrong not to accept his invitation to attend the send-off with the artists from the Art Centre, but I didn’t regret it. I’d see Mark Robinson after Daniel Atijas left whether I wanted to or not, and the others I didn’t care about anyway; they, at any rate, cared nothing for me. And after all, I knew they’d be getting together at the little restaurant in the Sally Borden building, and I could have gone over to join them had I wanted to. I got myself ready, therefore, for a very long day, figuring it would be best to spend it completely dedicated to making sense of my vision. I also decided I would eat nothing that day, which seemed appropriate for one intending to devote oneself entirely to the spirit. The cleansing of the body can only contribute to the elevation of ideas, no doubt about it. I intended to drink just water and, when I went to bed, mint tea. During the afternoon, using the side stairs and moving from one tree to the next, I left Lloyd Hall and went to my studio. The day was sunny and warm, and a man and a woman only in bathing suits were playing tennis. A squirrel was sitting on a chain-link fence. When I was near the practice huts for musicians and thought I was finally safe, Guy Fletcher stepped out in front of me. He turned up like a ghost, though ghosts do not usually turn up in broad daylight, and it transpired that, like all ghosts, he was bearing news from the other side.
When he had heard yesterday, said Guy Fletcher, of the tragedy on Tunnel Mountain, he was almost sick, because only the day before in the early afternoon, Ivan Matulić’s grandson had stopped by to see him at the museum and had left something there for Daniel Atijas. He extended to me a small package wrapped in white paper and secured with crisscrossed rubber bands. He had tried to find Daniel Atijas in his room, he said, but Daniel Atijas wasn’t there, so he thought he’d come over to my studio, figuring it would be best to give me the package, but there was no one there either, he said and it was a lucky thing, he said, that we’d met, because he was beginning to despair, convinced that he would not be able to fulfill the last wishes, he could say that now, of the deceased. I stared at the white package in his hands as if it hid some sort of time bomb. I reached out slowly and touched it with my fingertips; then I took it and drew it in to myself. It was light, much lighter than I’d expected, and Daniel Atijas’s name had been written on it in the right lower corner in uneven letters with a thick felt-tip pen. He was almost sick, Guy Fletcher told me, because of the words that Ivan Matulić’s grandson had said at the time, and which only later, when he learned of the accident, revealed themselves in their true meaning. The grandson, Guy Fletcher continued, had said he was leaving things he knew he would not be needing anymore, since he no longer needed anything. Sometimes, the grandson told him, it is great to be stripped bare. And only when the bad news reached him, said Guy Fletcher, did he grasp the meaning of these words, the meaning of the nakedness.
He looked me straight in the eyes. I didn’t know what he saw in them, but in his I saw tears. I patted him on the shoulder and told him not to worry, that the package had come to the right hands and that I would definitely pass it on to Daniel Atijas as soon as the opportunity arose. Guy Fletcher thanked me, and having said that he still had to get back to the museum, he hurried downhill toward the parking lot. I waited for him to get beyond the administrative building, and then, right there on the little bridge, I pulled away the rubber bands and tore the paper. The edge of a soft cardboard box appeared. I opened that as well, actually ripped it open, and out of the gaping tear there began to fall photographs, postcards, sheets of paper with writing on them, notes with little drawings and smudged scrawls. Then an envelope appeared, small, all white, on which in the same uneven letters was the name Daniel Atijas. If there was something that resembled a human heart, I thought, then this envelope was it. I leaned over and began collecting the scattered bits of paper and photographs, and only then, when my head was near the ground, did I hear the muted sound of a flute, though it could have been the sound of a clarinet or a recorder, because except for the piccolo and the saxophone, all wind instruments sounded the same to me. I quickly had all the papers in my hands, and hugging them to my chest, I walked, slightly bent over, over to the studio. No one saw me, I met no one, but just in case, I locked the door and drew the curtains. I looked over the photographs, leafed through the sheets of paper with writing and the notes, picked out the blades of grass and twigs I had inadvertently gathered up with them.
I leaned the little envelope on a glass that was standing in the middle of the table. Everything that was in the package, in the torn box, all the photographs and pages covered in text, had to do with Ivan Matulić’s grandson’s time spent in Croatia. I assumed that the pages came from his diary, or perhaps this was his whole diary, supplemented with postcards and photographs, some of which, judging by who was in them, he had taken himself, whereas others had been taken by someone else. I did not make an effort to read anything, just as I did not open the white envelope. Though I didn’t know what was written in the letter inside it, I could make an educated guess: all he had discovered on his travels, on his journey into the heart of darkness, Ivan Matulić’s grandson was leaving to Daniel Atijas, convinced that he, Daniel Atijas, was on a journey headed in the opposite direction, away from the darkness and into the light, and there is nothing that so inspires us to embrace the goodness of the light as a constant reminder of the ominous nature of darkness. There are those who leave others the legacy of a torch, a beacon that shines, while someone else endows an absence of radiance, a black hole, a monster under the bed. I inferred all this from the letter in the white envelope, and then my head drooped, and I rested my forehead on the table surface. I knew, without trying to explain the reasons to myself, that I would not give Daniel Atijas the letter, but I did not know what to do with it. I could, for instance, have gone to the Banff cemetery and buried it there by a tombstone, along with the rest of the papers and photographs.