I was dreaming of nothing. This morning, after phoning in sick to work, I lie on the bed with my legs out of the duvet, bare, open.

I am sick and turned on. My head against the pillow feels stiff and wrong. My eyes throb. My hand finds its way between my legs to pet the short hairs, the warm crease.

I am watching Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Love Liza1, delirious with grief, out of his mind, yelling up toward the upstairs window of his mother-in-law. Hoffman plays a character whose wife has recently taken her own life. He doesn’t know why. He’s yelling up at the open window at Kathy Bates who has her hair up in a towel. He wants, all of a sudden, photos of his wife.

He yells up at Bates, I have nothing!

In the movie, Hoffman has begun huffing gasoline and model airplane fuel and flying model airplanes.

Bates yells down at him, you had everything!

*

While I wait for the clinic to call back, I watch the movie with my hand between my legs. I am in no hurry, I have no motive. I am merely lying in bed, sick, waiting to be seen.

*

I recall bringing a bowl to my son to puke into. Placing a towel along the edge of the bed. I recall making a washcloth wet, and the hotness of my son’s forehead.

I make an online order for a sex toy called Tracy’s Dog because it sounds loyal. So much has changed over the years. There is a pain in my chest that must be my heart.

The phone doesn’t ring, and I am too hot. I fling off the duvet so that I am naked from the waist down on the mattress. I want something sordid. On top, I wear a yellow t-shirt printed with the words Nice People Use Drugs, pulled up so that what I see from my throbbing eyes is a body, fragile and sexualized.

And then I am cold and pull the duvet back. I am a warm white cloud. I am a puffy duvet with knees sticking up.

*

The phone doesn’t ring and there is all day to be with myself. I carry on being sick, turned on. How fortunate I have been to know love.

We are in the kitchen of the place we rented on Kootenay Street.

Rae is unbuttoning his pants. His belt is unfastened. The window is open behind him, which means it was sunny. The trees seem bare, so I am guessing it was a fine spring day.

Rae seems to be remembering something and looks beyond the camera to a place beside me near the floor.

*

I’m going to take us somewhere.

To do that, I’ll need to offload a bunch of apps on my phone so that I can take a photo of this photo. Like many of the things I own, my phone is ancient, but also, it is chock a block full of photos that I am too inept and nostalgic to put onto my computer or delete. So, when I want to take a photo, I have to off load apps.

So long Tinder. Auf Wiedersehen Google Maps.

*

He is dead now, likewise our son. As the remaining one, it falls on me, I guess, to tell the story.

The photo was taken either when I was living in the upstairs suite and Rae was living in the downstairs suite of the old house. Or he lived upstairs and I had moved on…I can’t recall. But it was definitely before I read any of W.G. Sebald’s books.

What can I tell you about Sebald that will make the least bit of sense?

He grew up in Germany, but after the war, so that much of what he writes about has a terrible, pregnant, haunting after-ness about it.

He was a smarty pants—Sebald, I mean. A professor of English Literature in German, and his writing is chock a block full of the kind of writerly references that make one feel ponderous, reflective in a somber, leather-bound kind of way. He references the kind of barely readable literature written by people shocked by plague, by pubic hangings, high on God, hunched over paper milled from cotton and linen rag, and dimly illuminated by reed lights, inscribing secret histories of sea urchins.

*

If you want to read Sebald, I suggest Austerlitz. It’s a more accessible than say, The Rings of Saturn, because it has a narrative. It’s a fictional work that resembles a biography of a child who, during WWII, is brought to Wales on a Kindertransport. When he grows up, the child, now a much older man, begins to remember his origins.

The story evokes more than tells—there is a Daedalean narrative, and Sebald-esque grainy black and white photographs—what is unremembered but evoked is possibly more haunting—and damning—than what is recalled.

On the back of what is called a novel of an individual but reads more like a history of a people is an excerpt from New York Times Book Review Richard Eder,

“Sebald stands with Primo Levi as the prime speaker of the Holcaust and, with him, the prime contradiction of Adorno’s dictum that after it, there can be no art”

What did we do after I took the photograph? I no longer recall if we went to bed and took off our clothes. Maybe we got high and walked down to the train tracks.

As a former lover, Rae has assumed a place in my erotic mind as someone I used to know. I have fleeting memories of making love—his chest, in particular which was delicate (Rae said he was pigeon-chested from some childhood infection), his fingers, the brazen way he kneeled on the bed, cock in hand—and those are mixed up with memories of drinking whisky, a trip on a train through muggy Southern Ontario in summer, with Aubrey in a stroller, to visit our respective families.

We split up, our son Aubrey grew up between our two houses and lives, and when Rae was 50 and Aubrey was 5, he had a massive cerebral haemorrhage that caused damage in several parts of his brain.

I recall driving my Subaru Chaser on the dark, snowy backroad between Rock Creek and Kelowna to the hospital where Rae was in Intensive Care. Aubrey was in the back seat. It was new years eve.

*

I said I was going to take us somewhere. I have not forgotten. It’s just that it’s hard to explain.

Nobody enjoys hearing about suicide. Least of all out of the mouthes of people they love. Still, it must be said: I have longed for death.

I have longed for the past.

I have longed for something which has been lost but I cannot name.

*

I have recently been re-investigating my sexuality.

*

Rae’s brain damage was extensive. It meant that he could no longer work at in schools where he assisted special needs kids. Instead, he stayed home, smoked pot, and drank whiskey.

My son loved his father fiercely, and because he knew only the brain-addled version of Rae, he accepted his dad and his befuddled behaviour fully and completely.

When my son was in the height of his drug addiction, his dad was at the height of his delirium, so that the two of them held onto and supported the other in equal parts.

They lived in a small village—a gas station, restaurant, liquor store.

Rae—a wizened gnome in girl’s jeans, beaded bracelets. Sans teeth, sans sense, wandering to and from his rural senior’s facility, up and down the highway smoking joints.

My son—always— trying to help his dad—fucked as he was, face spotted with meth, gaunt with meth-fun, hollowed by fentanyl-deadening sleep.

I’d get texts:

Mom, need help with dad. Send $.

Mom, dad sick again. Hlep. Hes throwing up all day!!

Yo, mom, dad in ER. Gong there now. PHone me?

*
I’ve been taking photos of myself in the bathroom mirror. In the reflection of the microwave. I seem to have a need to see myself. Suddenly, after years of careful sober behaviour, I want a renaissance.

The rings of Saturn consist of ice crystals and probably meteorite particles describing circular orbits around the planet’s equator. In all likelihood these are fragments of a former moon that was too close to the planet and was destroyed by its tidal effect. 1

Here is Rae, kneeling on the bed. His fingers, his hands. There goes Aubrey down the highway on his skateboard. He’s got a little bag of stuff that he bought at the gas station. Inside, a Mars bar for himself, and two Ensures for his dad.

I want drugs, I want whisky2, I want sex. I want whatever youthfulness I have remaining.

I’m fucking for three.

It’s because I am flipping.

The story read in the correct direction loads the mind, spells the spell. So that by the time you end up at the ultimate scene, believe me, you too would eat the cockroach.

*

Is trauma breaking or being broken?

Grammar would show us that breaking is in the active voice of the verb. When I break, I am the subject of the sentence. I do the action, and I retain agency.

Being broken is in the passive voice, suggesting that something is being done to me by an unseen, in this case, unnamed agent or subject. Then I become the receiver of the action of breaking, I become the broken object.

*

I am flipping.

I turn to literature because I am fed up with popular culture. I am fed up with being fed notions about my own brokenness.

I eat my brokenness, I put it in my mouth, and with the powerful digestive juices of my guts, I make it a part of my body.

I can’t remember much else of Lispector’s story. I read it a long time ago. This is supposed to be a review, but it’s more of a meal.

*

I keep talking about trauma, as if it could make a magic around the moment when you died. Or rather, the moment when I learned you had died.

There was a line between life and death, and I learned of it. You went on the far side of the line, and I stayed in the parking lot of Walmart, screaming.

I had been planning to sleep in the back of the car. I had a sleeping bag. I was searching for you. I didn’t want to rent a motel because I was sure I would find you, strung out and belligerent (but glad to see me), and we would escape in the car.

But my phone rang, and I learned you had gone over the line, and I became alone in the parking lot.

*

On my side of the line, things have been strange. I am being told that I have a trauma in me, and my belligerent, erratic behaviour is a sign of that being broken by your going across the line.

But you were just doing what any dead person would do.

On my side of the line, I have identified within myself a savage resistance to being fed, and a primordial hunger.

If you try to objectify me, I will devour you.

Any sane person would eat what is put before them.

We have added the meaning "incapable of relenting, unmoved by pity, unpitying, insensible to the distress of others” over the centuries.

It’s the darkest time of the year. I can barely admit how sad I am. It’s such a downer.

I run along ocean and watch the waves roll in. There are drugs which can cause a process in the brain.

There could be a meaning to being alive, but I do not know what it is. And yet, oddly, my favourite people persevere.

I rewatch Cast Away, the movie with Tom Hanks and his friend the volley ball. I’ve always been attracted to far flung places.

Me and Tom.

It’s way sadder than I remember.

*

I go to the mall in search of colourful wrapping paper, and a pouf, which is a kind of stool for my feet. So that I can sit in a chair and put my feet up and write.

A pouf, I say to the salesperson at the till. I am for some reason embarrassed to say the word. Your catalogue says you have it in stock.

I am too warm. I wore long johns and a bulky sweater because it’s so cold and damp outside, but inside the store, I am overheating.

The salesperson consults his screen. There is a line behind me. An ottoman, you mean? Sure, I say. Yes.

Consults his screen again. You’ll have to find a sales representative on the floor.

But I just came from the floor, I say as politely as I can. He told me to come here. He said I need a stock number or something.

I don’t mean to be a pain, I say, but I can tell I am. I can tell my voice is changing. My face is showing irritation. I am too warm.

Just forget it, I say.

And then behind me, a man to his young child, “Well, that’s not the Christmas spirit, is it?”

I scurry to my car and cry as rain falls on the windshield. It’s completely dark at 5 in the afternoon.

*

I notice trends in my reading. In my apperception. I listen to certain songs so much they remind me of loneliness. The waves roll in, I fall into music, I chase a feeling.

The book came on like drug, blowing my mind. Wind salted and also rain blowing side ways.

I’m tripping. The author’s words are so fucking subversive I feel alone just reading her. I am the only one on the planet! I’m talking about I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman.

A sudden squall. A character much like myself, stuck in an incomprehensible world. Would there be someone? Why was she there?

*

This is supposed to be a review of I Who Have Never Known Men, but also a Ghazal (Persian poetic form), and also a narrative about feeling existential loneliness at Christmas (hell, at any time of year). But then I recall that in the Ghazal form, each couplet is supposed to end on the same word. Also, so far, I have told you very little about Harpman’s strange book.

If I had to choose a word to end each couplet, what would it be?

*

I think to myself, imagine celebrating the birth of a baby knowing that he’ll die in just a few short decades. He was barely a man.

Of Cast Away, one critic says, “he could retain some sense of mastery over his little world by killing himself.”

“And yet that, too, fails.”

December? Rain? Alone?

*

The same critic speaks of discourse that humanizes the other1. In Cast Away, that is Tom’s dialogue with Wilson. Wilson who helps Tom start the first fire, who saves Tom’s life by tricking him into not hanging himself. Wilson, who represents a sage counterpart to Tom’s increasing estrangement. Alone.

In I Who Have Never Known Men, the other that humanizes the central character is the very text that she writes—the one we read. A text written by a woman who is completely alone in a world that she cannot comprehend. A world of which practically nothing can be learned. You should read it. Rain.

All that I recall of the Ghazal form is a leaping. Imagine a gazelle, lighting upon a single word, and then bounding off somewhere else. It’s this transport that I am after. This muscular and airy sense of movement. Pouf.

In my life, you are the other that listens, that sees the waves come in. You travel with me to the mall. You watch the rain fall on my windshield as I reverse my car into the multicoloured lights. December.

This morning, I rode my bike across town and up the long hill toward the job I have worked at for nearly twenty years. I’ve been away. In fact, everyone thought I was gone. After my son died, I left my job and life here in the city and moved across the province to a dilapidated house in a small town.

But now I have returned. When I open the door to the classroom for the first time in eighteen months, I use the same key as twenty years ago. Inside, I turn on the same two switches that control ten panels of overhead lights. It is still dark outside, but through the bank of windows that face the inner courtyard of the college campus, and despite the glare from the inside lights, I can see the dark outlines of the same Japanese Maples as when my son was a boy.

When I first started working here in 2007, when my son was 11 years-old, the trees’ branches reached only to the bottom of the window sill. Now, black branches with pendulous drops of rain water reach beyond the top of the window frames.

*

Before work this morning, I took the dog out for a walk in the early morning dark and rain. I was a bit ahead of schedule, so we walked down the path toward the gorge. As I walked, it occurred to me that I wanted to describe this scene to you: a paved path that broadly zigs and zags down a short steep hill toward the water through overarching trees’ branches; at the first bend, a bench and behind that, a rather Narnian lamp post.

One time, years ago, I came upon a man sitting on the bench holding an umbrella. As I approached, I saw that he was well dressed, as from another century, in dark coat, formal hat and cravat; a narrow face, neat beard and moustache.

This is the memory I had this morning as I walked with the dog in the rain. This dapper gentleman under the lamp post with his umbrella.

I recall that I stopped and briefly spoke with him, and he was an adroit conversationalist. In a few words, we exchanged life stories and became known to one another. I was a woman who had a son; he was an old man who now lived in the subsidized senior’s care home at the top of the path.

That’s all I wanted to tell you. There once was a man.

*

All this was before I biked to work, where I am now, writing to you. Before I biked through town, on wet city streets, some strewn with garbage, past a nest of a person’s things spread out in the rain, minus the person. Past new shiny buildings, and people with umbrellas walking small urban dogs. There was a fire station with yellow fire trucks, and there was traffic: cars with bluish white lights that shone in my eyes as they approached me, and cars with red and yellow lights that shone or blinked as they rushed past me.

I am jumping around in time, it seems, in this short anecdote of my somewhat ordinary morning. A morning, which at the outset of this writing I accused of going on in time with out me. With me, the singular object as remaining the same, as re-iterating myself through this late-autumn landscape.

What am I trying to say?

*

Is this denial? That phase of grieving where I refuse to move on from my son’s death. As if I am stuck in the period when, say, he was 13, and I used to walk him to the city bus stop in the morning before I started work. He was a pre-teen, making his way to the junior high school down the hill. A bus stop that still exists a few blocks from here, where I am now.

Is it possible there is no meaning to grief, no meaning to death?

*

In the novel, the character loops endlessly on the same dull day in November. In this essay, I have somehow made it to the second week of December. It is late afternoon, and this morning’s rain has been blown away by a strong westerly wind. The bare branches of the Japanese Maple scrape across the windows, tap at the glass.

My son attended this school for a term, but he was was using drugs too frequently to do very well. Instructors—my peers and colleagues—who had my son in their classes don’t mention my son’s brief appearance in their lives. They are being polite, or they have forgotten. It has been a few years now. I have been gone for eighteen months, but I was also off work for a year and half right after my son died. Many of them look much older. Their faces are less fresh, the noses broader, creases have appeared around their eyes. A few have themselves died.

Some recall me and greet me in the hallway. You are back, they say, in surprise. Most of them are further along in their careers—they are chairs of their departments, associate deans. Yet, I am back at the same desk I started at.

*

I ride my bike home, and the sky is storm-blue tinged with apricot near the western horizon. Wind comes at me from the front, or the side, shaking my bike. The sky is brighter because of a lack of cloud, so the late afternoon seems less like nighttime. I find the sky and the wind beautiful and enthralling, but I am not joyous.

In the evening, I watch Youtube videos about time and the laws of entropy. I am frustrated with crying.

It turns out it’s not true that time’s arrow works only in one direction. Time, say physicists, is an analogy to describe entropy—moving from order to chaos. The tightly packed atoms and cells of my son, of me, of you—a one in a trillion likelihood—once undone, once scattered into the wind and onto the earth after our death—it’s not impossible for them to reassemble into the form of a breathing, loving human again. It’s just incredibly, painfully, and infinitesimally unlikely.

*

In the novel by Soljev Balle, the character eventually meets others trapped in the same November day. Interestingly, they take different meanings from being stuck in time. Some reflect on their individual impact on the environment, others on their impact to fellow humans. Some take advantage of the endlessly looping day to wander alone across a natural landscape repeating a singular late-autumn day. It turns out the landscape is different across the same day if you travel far enough.

If you travel south, the sun will emerge, flowers will unfurl, and it will seem like summer; if you travel north, the sun will slide behind the horizon even earlier in the afternoon, and it may snow.

*

Incredibly, painfully, and infinitesimally unlikely, but given the infinitude of time, also inevitable, say physicists1.

*

One time, I walked my son to the bus stop for the last time. He was a young teen, tall but not yet taller than I. It was a brisk morning in March or April. A grey early morning so that we wore warm coats and shoved our hands into our pockets as we walked. It was only a few blocks to the bus stop, and as I recall it now, I try to bring back every detail: leaving the house, walking up the street, through the clutch of trees, into the back parking lot of the college, and onto the street where the number 7 bus passed. I see us standing together. My son almost as tall as I, standing beside me, our arms almost but not quite touching.

My son wanted me to accompany him to the bus stop. I was his mother, and he wanted to be with me. It was my job to protect him. But at some point, maybe this particular day when he was 13, which keeps repeating itself in my memory, when the trees were unfurling their little lime green leaves, and passing cars sprayed water from puddles in the grey streets, he told me from then on he could walk to the bus on his own.

I was sad, but I also knew this represented an important moment in my son’s life. The exact moment when he could make his own way to the bus stop without me, and we could be apart for a time.