Exit strategy

Every story needs a start. Here is Aubrey’s dad, Rae, around the time my son Aubrey was born.

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.

1. Brochhaus Encyclopaedia, quoted by Sebald in The Rings of Saturn, 1998

2. Whiskey is a metaphor. You know what I mean.