Chapter
TODAY.
THE THOUGHT strikes Archie like a grandfather clock’s bong.
Dim white light scratches his peripheral vision, demanding his attention.
Archie jerks his head around.
His heart flips, flops, tumbles around in his chest, winding up his mind into a screech.
12:01.
One minute past midnight. Not 0001 as it should be, but 12:01. Civilian time. Archie hates this digital clock ticking time down as if it’s another ordinary day. He craves Pawpaw’s analogue clock: only Pawpaw’s grassland-experienced, war-weary, faithful clock is allowed to show time in twelve hours in Archie’s mind. But Pawpaw’s clock is broken.
The digital clock’s dim numbers flare their shapes into his retina. Archie shuts his eyelids tight and can see the numbers in the blackness behind like he has night vision. With a gasp, his eyelids pop open. The silent numbers greet him, unchanged.
Time is broken.
It remains one minute after midnight.
Archie stretches his ears out into the first minute of the new day. It heralds silently the deepening night.
Like Pawpaw’s travel alarm clock, absence is a sound.
His grandfather’s old wind-up travel alarm clock with its fading white face and steel arms and numerals, in its worn tan leather case had decided to stop ticking time yesterday. Archie had snuggled it into his jacket pocket yesterday morning—as he’d set out on his walk of the city. For once, he’d had a goal: find a clock repair shop. He had. Within an hour, he’d spotted a glass window filled with old clocks from grandfathers to steely alarm clocks. He’d entered time’s sanctum with its gold flat carpeting and its glass case straddling the back wall across from the glass door with its diagonal handle. A man about his age responded to the tiny bell’s tinkling as Archie had entered and had arrived on his side of the case as Archie had from the door side.
“Can I help you?”
Archie had fished out the travel clock, opened it, and placed it with its face facing the man. “Can you repair this?”
The man had picked it up, studied it, then looked up at Archie. “My grandfather can, but he’s not here. He’s gone to Florida and‘ll be back in April. Can you wait until then?” He’d handed the clock back to Archie. Archie had taken it, snugged it into his jacket pocket, nodded once, turned on his heel, and left. He’d had no choice but to buy a new clock, with its 12-hour numbers, to replace Pawpaw’s.
Archie lets his head fall back into its natural position of face up to the ceiling. He squeezes his eyes shut, hoping for sleep to return so that he can stop thinking about clocks and time. The seconds tick on in his mind. Psychic pain floods his chest. Then suddenly…nothing.
Detachment separates Archie from his frustration. He’d left the frozen-in-time shop and had stopped outside its door. He’d inhaled deeply as he’d steeled himself to turn his booted feet towards the bustling and always-being-renovated Eaton Centre, which contained a familiar Best Buy. Dread had filled Archie as he’d joined the cacophonous mass of people swirling in through the Eaton Centre’s revolving glass doors, around its balconies and indoor trees, into its snaking halls, threading themselves chaotically into the shops. The noise of many voices and endless feet had pummelled his head. People had zig-zagged into Archie, bent on their missions, unheeding of the paths of others. Panic had screamed into his heart and flailed at his ribs. Archie had lunged into Best Buy, careened towards the aisle with clocks, and snatched up the first one he’d seen. He’d hustled to the cashier area, only to have to wait in line. His nerves had stretched and stretched till thin strands of packed-in electrons tensed his muscles, causing his feet to stir as his mind fought his body’s desire to run.
As his fingers had begun to let go of his intended purchase so that he could flee, unhindered, the cashier had called out, “Next!” Tension had blown out as he hustled to her counter, paid for his clock, and speed-walked out the automatic sliding glass doors. Relief had sagged his straight back as he’d walked far from Bay and Dundas, away from the shopping crowds who were bent on the hunt for pleasure through spending.
Reminding himself he’s flat on his back in his bed, Archie exhales the memory hard.
He has yet to figure out how to change his clock to the 24-hour time.
Archie grimaces and closes his eyes against the dim, screeching numbers, now showing 12:02.
Squealing brakes fling his eyes open. A woman swears at the driver: “Watch where you’re fucking going, you fucking moron! Don’t you know this is a fucking residential street, you fucking turd?”
Apparently not, Archie thinks. And neither does she, he adds morosely. Most drivers don’t. Not Toronto drivers. Archie had heard that the politicians had reduced the speed limit, but he’d seen no evidence of it.
Archie hates Toronto drivers. All drivers.
He has no use for them or desire to be one of them.
He walks to where he wants to go.
I should sleep, he grouses, his consciousness returning to his present dusky surroundings, as the car screams down the street away from his closed single-pane window with its old, crooked blinds that let in the streetlight in ribs of light and shadows on his walls.
Rapid clicking of a woman’s heels follows the car into the night.
Silence returns to the street.
Archie lowers his eyelids. He turns his mind to the muscles in his forehead. He tenses them as he begins his relaxation exercise, the one his last VA counsellor had taught him, the only man the VA had assigned to his care who’d understood his mood, his pain, his isolation. The only man who’d buoyed him up; the only person he had looked forward to seeing all week.
And then the VA had taken him away.
And now here he, Archie, lies in Toronto, in a rooming house on a dark November night far away from the searing sun of his home and the wretched dirt of Afghanistan, unable to sleep. The Canadians I flew here to join are probably in their own beds wide awake, too, Archie thinks. It brings him no comfort.
Today.
Archie releases his lips into a sigh of grief as he lets the word into his consciousness. He blinks until his eyes dry out. But his chest refuses to give up its cache of sobs. What does a broken heart look like on an ECG? “All normal,” the VA cardiologist had declared, before slapping his file shut and ushering him out the door. How can his heart be normal when every day an elephant sits on it and the pain devil squeezes it on either side until he’s gasping for air? The scans and EEGs, the VA neurologist had lectured him, are all normal. “Get on with your life, and you’ll be fine,” he’d declared. Only his counsellor had listened to him until he’d run out of words. His brows curl up as he remembers how his body had released its burden for one moment that first day in the man’s office. He’d begun to speak a few words, a couple words at a time, his consciousness on high alert, scanning the face and body language of this new man supposedly provided to cure him. The new VA counsellor had frowned in thought and empathy at Archie’s sparse words. Archie had doubted the veracity of this persona he presented. Could he really be hearing him? The counsellor had furrowed his brow into the silence Archie had let fall. He’d leaned forward, clasping his rough tanned hands. Then he’d looked up into Archie’s eyes, his brown ones softening, and had said: “You are broken. But you can be healed. I will teach you. I will help you. And I will never give up on you.” Archie had heard the words but hadn’t felt them. The counsellor had said, “It’s okay, Archie. I will show you I’m here for you.” Over the weeks, by degrees, Archie had begun to believe that here was one man who heard him, one person who wouldn’t give up on him.
The roughness of the sheet under his curling right hand returns Archie to the present. He blinks at the yellowed white of the ceiling with its splotches of smoky stains, its little flakes that point toward the floor like tiny signposts, its meandering crack that in his almost two years of staring at it has crept from one corner of the room towards the middle. It hasn’t reached the middle yet with its lone, feeble bare LED bulb—Archie had replaced the incandescent with the LED light when he’d moved in—and he wonders when it will. He wonders if he will see it reach that round white-metal base of the light fixture.
Today.
Archie flings away the thought that word brings and focuses on musing where the glass shade for the fixture had gone. He stares at the large bulbous shape of the LED so that its solidity will replace the images lodged deep in his brain. The LED seems to grow and fill his sight. Another car gunning down the street shatters his exercise of blanking his mind.
Archie’s in Afghanistan, his commanding officer yelling, “Gun it! Faster!” as he’s driving down a dusty, pit-holed road, all his hip and leg and foot muscles pushing the accelerator of the convoy truck down hard as he steers with all his fingers and thumbs wrapped around the steering wheel to keep it from jouncing out of his control. The smells of the heat, the sweat pouring from underneath the armpits of his superior sitting next to him, the dust clouding up around the spinning wheels of his truck, assail his nostrils. The roar of the engine as he accelerates drowns his ears. The sight of endless desert brown through the dust caking his windshield assaults his vision. His heart thuds hard against his ribs; he pants. The voice of his VA counsellor penetrates Archie’s internal repeating movie: “Inhale deeply. Tell yourself the year and place you’re in. Replace the memory with the present. Do it!”
Archie inhales deeply, hoping to replace the memory with the actual smells of his room. “Ground yourself,” Archie hears his VA counsellor’s voice call out from the distance of time. He strains to inhale clean smells of lemon, bleach, and pine. Archie mops the floor every day with lemon floor oil, he cleans the walls with bleach, he scrubs the floor near the door with pine cleaner, anything to replace the smells of dirt and fear with the peaceful, clean smells of city life in a country that’s the closest to home he’ll have on this earth. But he still smells fear. Archie tells himself the date: Remembrance Day. November 11th. He yells out: “Toronto!”
Suddenly, Archie is back in his room. The silence deafens him. A sob from his own mouth interrupts it. Archie clamps his hand over his teeth to stifle it. He’s so sick of crying. He’s sick of the memories. And that wasn’t even the worst one. Pain lances his soul. He sucks his lips in between his teeth and bites hard. Physical pain spreads into Archie’s wet cheeks as memory stabs his consciousness and his hand slips down to his sheets.
The VA had taken from him the one counsellor who’d promised to stick with him. Archie had shown up one day at his weekly appointment and been told that they’d transferred his counsellor to another VA hospital, and they’d assign him a new guy. Not again! Archie had flamed to himself. He didn’t want another new guy. The third counsellor they’d assigned him had been it. Archie’s chest had burned with his need to see his patient, caring, listening counsellor. He’d clamped his lips tight. With a squeak of heel on mopped floor, he’d turned and walked out. He’d walked home, packed, walked out of the family home, and flown to Canada with his insanity, his health, his desire to…
In Canada’s biggest city, Archie had hoped to heal with his Canadian army buddies, the ones who’d welcomed him into their unit in that dusty country. But healing is a long, winding road with no end in sight, a road pockmarked with pain, with crevasses so cavernous you can’t see them until you’ve fallen in and find yourself even more alone than you had been before. Every time, his Canadian army buddies had pulled him out. How many times can they do that? How many times will he want to?
Weariness drags every fibre of Archie’s muscles down until he feels like a lead plug.
I can’t go on.
The knowledge sinks into Archie.
Indelible images appear of the dead, limbs shredded from their torsos, hands blackened lying on their own far away from their arms, feet blasted apart. Archie’s heart raises its beating tempo to one hundred, one hundred and twenty, one hundred and fifty. Sweat pops out on Archie’s forehead. Archie sees the men alive, with him in their tight quarters, telling stories, guffawing and slapping their thighs as they swigged beer together in their sweaty tans. His lips quirk upwards in remembered happiness. Then their gruesome bodies insert themselves again into his vision. Archie’s pulse shoots up to one hundred and eighty. Faint words from the listening counsellor speak through the metronome of death: “Ground yourself.”
Archie reaches out his left hand to the object glinting in the light of the alarm clock’s numbers. With his fine, long fingers, he touches its hard handle, he traces the in-and-out contours above the handle, he strokes the long, cold metal. Archie retracts his hand back to his side, to lay it on the bed beside his leg underneath the white sheet and white sleeping bag as his heart slows down and drops below a hundred. His forehead dries.
Today, I will escape, Archie assures himself. I will end this eternal pain. My story is over.
Comfort and relief flow out of Archie’s head and into his body, relaxing him into the thin foam of a mattress many have lain on before him, burying him into the rough sheet that covers the foam that he’s lying on.
Archie sleeps.
A dream startles his eyes open. The dream vanishes, the words remain: I still have a story to tell.