What happened on the train, Sandrine? She had in the end tired of the years of lonely views and focused just on the upholstery, its patterns repeating, over and over. Clack clack clackety clack. Eventually the train had left North Africa and gone back to Canada as only dream trains can.
Sandrine heard her husband enter the bedroom. She listened to him sit down on the bed; it must be late, even by her standards. She began her descent, clutching the little green hardcover book with its descriptions of thought processes and sad cafés, if not train upholstery. Later she’d leaf through it again, and hopefully come across a list of lovers’ names that would end with her husband’s.
On Fire Bridge
I’M SURE NOW THAT YOU started the fires, that your desire called them into being.
I see you in our kitchen, your orange-stockinged legs up on the table, smoking cigarettes, pleased as punch. It’s dawn and we haven’t slept.
“We are like gods,” you say, “playing marbles in space.” I like you saying it; I like your arrogance. I like how you always push me to stay up late, when, if it was up to me, I’d have been in bed hours ago. But you need those sunrises, need what they give you.
We walked together so very far, little friend, much farther than I ever could’ve gone without you. I was so happy! We dreamed together, prying open all the doors in space, doors that were never supposed to be opened, at least not by us. The revolutions that occurred in far corners of the galaxy because of our pliers! That were never supposed to occur, at least not for that reason. In the very centre of things we found a gaping hole and fell into it. Time yawned. In its breath we were taken apart and reassembled, exquisitely, in a different way.
In my memory I come with you till halfway across the bridge. It is so cold on your damn bridge, a shivering place, and underneath us the waters rage, a stormy winter current so strong I’m afraid it will carry me away, even when I’m just looking at it. I never thought for a moment you were planning a much longer journey, a journey you would never return from. I come up behind you, always the dawdler, going only because you have gone, sometimes you fool me, allowing me to believe it is I who leads.
On the bridge I stay back a few feet, watching, a little terrified, how you sit on the edge, your legs dangling, staring into the whirlpools. I like it, but it’s very strong; enough of God’s raw breath to last me a whole month. But you, you always want to stay. You call me a wimp. All the same, you want me with you. When we do leave, you explain, it’s because of me, because you don’t want to stay alone. I sigh. We go home together, home to breakfast specials and laundry and floors that always get dirty again. I am content just to be with you, but for you there is never enough; you are so hungry, always wanting to go back. Over morning coffees we argue, and the outcome is always the same. You will go alone, you say, if I don’t come.
When I met you I thought I was the brave one, the adventurer; sometimes you even let me believe it, for a little while, so long as it meant I’d come a little further, stay a little longer. Until of course the time came I didn’t go. And now I retrace our worn steps, calling, hoping to find you.
The surface of the water rippling. Scudding smoke, embers. The fire is close by tonight. The rain turns cold, turns white. Pebbly stone rough under my hands. The bridge’s railing. One hand, the right one, curled around a cigarette. Cigarettes change taste when it turns cold, when the snow comes. The new sharp smell reminds me of you. I smoke: the tips of my fingers go numb and tingly with clues. You are nearby.
And now this writing has led me to you, to a voice that seems to be yours, to a place like the places you loved, the bridges. “Isn’t it good here?” you say in my mind. “Isn’t it good?”
And I say, “God, how I’ve missed you, how I’ve missed this strange feeling, as though my cells were electrified, as though I’d been drinking for a week, as though I hadn’t slept in years. Oh God, oh God,” I say.
You chide me, saying, “If only you’d come too, that last time, like you promised, everything would have been different.”
Perhaps I did promise.
If only I’d had the courage to leap into the fire, then I would find you still alive, unsinged. I go in my mind, now, just for a moment, to be with you. You are always inside the fire now, dancing. It’s as if I can see you through the flames; as though you come out and join me to say, “Hey, no burn marks.”
We talk. I care about burned bridges, about writing, but you never have. “It doesn’t matter,” you say. “Death doesn’t matter, appearances are a lie. They saw insanity, those others, but that was only the outer shell. I am where I have always been, dancing inside the fire.” Ah, that strange feeling of being with you.
It’s always night and sleeting on your bridge.
You turn to go. You smile, will I cross with you tonight? But I don’t, not even this time, this second chance. If I did, they’d burn the bridge, and besides, I have to be somewhere in the morning, to write you into life. I stroke your leather jacket good-bye, with a tenderness born of fear, as though even in this dream our lives are so dangerous we might really never see one another again. As perhaps they are.
My footsteps ring on the empty bridge but you call me back one more time. “Kim?”
And I say, “Yes?” and you hand me a film can, full of wooden matches.
“You might need them later,” you say, when I ask.
In the morning the city is grey and full of rain; I walk through it bleakly, missing you. The newspaper is full of stories of fires, and I am jealous, knowing you caused them.
I go to the bridge, but in the morning it is just a bridge, snow swirling into the river. There is the smell of smoke, of fire, but I know that even if I crossed here, I’d never be able to find you; the snow has obscured your footsteps. Still, I hear you laughing at me, faint as a train whistle, very far away. Later on I sit in cafés and look out at the snow. I drink coffee and smoke endlessly, writing in notebooks, feeling I have failed.
The forgetting begins, the loss of memory. For days that feel like centuries I sit in my diner by the river, reading my newspapers, watching the snow swirl. I forget what you look like; everyone becomes you. They build a highway, a busy one, between the diner and the river; all summer the bulldozers are hungry, tearing the earth. When winter comes again I have finished the front section, moved on to arts and entertainment. When the snow returns I am sure you will come back, will bloom again like a winter flower. I bring a boom box to the diner, and I listen to talk shows and to my favourite tapes while I wait for my pancakes. When they close up for the night they leave one light on for me, and let me help myself to coffee. I become a legend, a tourist attraction; bohemians and artsy types come and sit down beside me, hoping to catch some of my fire, hoping they, too, will become so free they will be allowed to stay in diners all night long, watching the fish swim around the room at purple morning, let out from their aquarium for an hour at dawn before the place opens for the nine-to-fivers to get their before work coffees.