From the fifteenth floor I could see clear into Charlevoix County: wiggly-squiggly lines of delicious coldness, the road, hills and houses, frosted over with raspberry vanilla and blueberry ice cream.
From the twenty-ninth floor, Canada’s trees rose snowily or not beneath my mountaintops, inviting me to admire the sea-view of Lake Superior. I could almost see a peaceful, stylized woman framed by pale green hills.
From the thirty-seventh floor I could see all the way to the beginning of the Great North, whose ruffled snow invited me like a loved woman’s frilly underpants between the shadowed knee-hills of frozen sky-stone, and my soul rode away on spectacular waves of snow, ice and clouds like eagle-armies above.
From the eighty-eighth floor I discovered mountains like immense blue teeth; then a bird’s wing of cloud above the fog.
The penthouse on the one-hundred-and-forty-seventh floor was windowed all around like a greenhouse. Up here I could easily make out the curvature of the earth. The first telescope angled due north, but maybe it was actually a kaleidoscope, because when I placed my eye against it, everything exploded into sunny blueprint abstractions of an astronomical character. Had I only spent my life learning and reasoning, I might have been able to interpret that message, but it was too late for that.
There was also a telescope pointed due west, and it showed me the brassy sun fleeing across the Pacific. This comprised futurity, and I longed to see my destiny here. After much labor I finally saw myself on one of the Queen Charlotte Islands, on my ninetieth birthday in a nursing home. I asked the lovely darkhaired nurse to kiss me, but she wouldn’t because I was so old and gruesome. So I begged her to spit in my mouth — that way I wouldn’t contaminate her — and she kindly did. I had to hurry now; this sunbeam was speeding on! For my birthday present I begged her for an injection of potassium to stop my heart; through the dusty window of the nursing home I could not quite read my lips when I made this plea, but because I knew myself, I knew what I was asking. The nurse smiled, stroked my hair and nodded. Just before her needle went in, I understood that after the carrion died, I would rise up from it, take her hand, and she and I would walk away together. She loved me! Wishing to gain some benefit from her love before it was too late, I raised the telescope up into the air, trying to spy on the two of us; but we were already gone, or else she had already buried me; either way, I had missed the train.
Hoping to do better, I pressed my face against the southern telescope. The instant my eye crossed the border, I was ambushed by grief; scanning streets where I had once been with a woman I had been far too late for, I felt the grief rise up in me like the numbness of an oncoming brain clot; I hoped to avoid focusing on where she lived; but the farther away I swiveled the telescope, the more anxious I became; why wasn’t I going where I should be? Not caring to miss my opportunity, I finally aimed my gaze at her living room window; she was watching television and eating ice cream with a nice young man who kept kissing her hand; my God, she didn’t even have hair under her arms; they were both too young for me; I’d been born too early, which is to say too late! Raising the telescope despairingly upward, I saw storybook airplanes ascending with live soldiers waving at me through the windows and descending laden with flag-wrapped coffins. Quickly I swiveled the telescope away, incredulous that I had failed to remain with the woman and the country that I still loved. And when I stood away from the telescope, it was as if I were departing from her city in the early morning dark, unable to accept that I had not made myself known to her. For some time, she had still loved me, and grieved in bewilderment that I would not be her friend. I had seen the same uncertain friendliness on the faces of the soldiers who had waved to me. They wanted me to accompany them on their mission; one corporal had even offered me his binoculars as he shot off to his death.
Needless to say, there remained the telescope oriented due east, where come spring the melting roads of Québec would be chocolate under the snow. I approached this eyepiece with a sense of excitement. And what would you know? I found myself peeping in on Lilian Terrace! That nice girl was in her high heels, and her nipples were very, very pointed. I spied a snowy landscape painting on an easel behind her, her garment draped over the chair. Well, after that, I wanted to be as Canadian as a beaver dam silhouetted beyond constellations of tree-forms rising up into the cirrus clouds and downward (reflectively) into splendid brass-dark pools. To hell with soldiers and ice cream eaters! Never mind that nurse! As for the sunny abstractions, I had time to figure those out whenever I wanted to. I felt so Canadian that I even wanted to take part in the Santa Claus Parade.
A gentle gong sounded four times: closing hour. So I rode the elevator back down to the lobby and went out into the snowdrifts in the ice-blued streets of Old Toronto, whose picket-fences were almost lost in winter; and the only ominous factor was the red maple-leaf flag at half-mast for me above Grosvenor Street. I felt hungry, but I gathered sunlight’s warm patches between shadow and wind.
A little girl’s hair blew straight back behind her as she rushed toward the parade, holding her father’s hand. A woman’s hair streamed behind her and her cheeks turned red and white with cold, just before the man she loved kissed her. A girl in a knit wool cap shivered and smiled. Among the parents and children holding hands on subways, bundled babies, couples holding hands nakedly in the cold, I searched for the Canadian girl for whom I had been meant, and the later it got the younger I became, until beneath the yellow-banded sky of late afternoon I found her, on a bicycle, her books in the basket behind her; and because she was meant for me, one of her books fell into the snow. I ran to pick it up. Smilingly, she asked me to walk her home. I was now so young that I had become too small for my wrinkled skin.
I accompanied her through tall narrow slices of shadow, sky on cloud between them, while she confessed that she had always been lonely. (A girl in a hooded white parka with rabbit fringes was shivering; I knew that I could make her warm, but I had to be faithful to the other one forever. Inspired by me, a man ducked down his head against the wind and hurried to the parade.) And now we had arrived at a bank of brick-celled house-flesh with tall windows bulging out, the roofs steep and peeling very sharply against the cold sky; they’d been maimed by a million frosts. I understood that even here life must sometimes be as dull as a sidewalk between office towers when the winter sun goes behind a cloud, but my face burned for that one girl in the lovely chill of Canada. I had become fourteen years old.
My girl went up the steps to a creamy door beneath a lavender snow-roof against a certain tall narrow yellow housefront. She went in, and it was too late for me to follow her, too late!
Grey hairs rushed out of my pores until I seemed to be covered in sealskins. I sought other RETAIL OPPORTUNITIES, but all the women screamed.
In Canada my friend North, who had once been nervous to the point of making others sad and angry, was now at last happy, with a paunch; his wife was lovely; they had daughters and a nice old house; they fussed happily in the kitchen, cooking scallops from Novia Scotia, talking about the old characters on Digby Neck. I too could have been a Canadian. I could have married the right person. I could have been younger. But it was too late.
VIII
WHEN WE WERE SEVENTEEN
I pray you, my friend, look into thyself, and endeavor to find out in what part of thy composition is the prima materia of the lapis philosophorum, or out of what part of thy substance can the first matter of our stone be drawn. Thou sayest, it must either be in the hair, sweat, or excrement. I say in none of these thou shalt ever be able to find it, and yet thou shalt find it in thyself.