Chapter
MEMORY SQUEEZES ITS arms around Archie’s body, deceives his mind that the past is the present. Archie’s heart revs up.
Archie shoots straight into the air, flinging the top sheet and sleeping bag halfway down his bed, and lands on his feet next to his bed. He hunches down and darts his head around to scrutinize the blinds covering the window; the middle slat with its metal bent one-third of the way along its length seems to wiggle. He drops his head while keeping his eyes straight forward. Archie sniffs the air. It’s a blend of the pine floor cleaner he uses and musty wood. Yet the familiar odours don’t allay him. Archie bends his knees so that his legs are ready to spring if needed and simultaneously bends his elbows and keeps his arms at waist height in case they need to strike.
Archie creeps toward the blinded window, one soft footstep at a time, like a tiger stalking its prey. He reaches them in three steps. His eyes do not blink. The bent slat doesn’t move. His corneas dry. The blinds remain still. Archie’s muscles ache from the strain of immobility, of vigilance, of remaining ready to leap forward or crouch down. But the blinds, including their bent slat, don’t move. The minutes tick past in Archie’s mind.
Slowly, rational thought tickles the edges of Archie’s brain: the slat is not a threat.
Archie uncoils himself, straightens his arms, straightens his legs, and lifts his head. He shakes his head and shoulders, letting his arms sway unguarded with his movement, letting the tension leave his body. He reaches his right hand up, and his fingers arrow in between the bent slat and the one above. Using his fingers to spread the two slats apart, Archie peers through the gap. The quiet street greets his sight. The old metal-halide-white streetlights light up the grey sidewalks in their hostile artificiality. Ribbons of tar gleam in the lights’ glare along the asphalt road. Ragged trees reaching crooked branches to the lit-up sky, clinging to their few leaves, provide pockets of darkness on either side of the road. Archie stretches out his ears and listens. In the distance, traffic creates steady white noise, but no cars turn on to his street. Archie releases the slats, and they clash back into place. The blinds bang against the window in a fading rhythm.
Archie turns around and pads back to his bed. He drops onto his bed and wriggles his feet underneath the top sheet. The night air has cooled it. He pulls up to his armpits the chilled top white sheet and the white sleeping bag Andrew had given him. A Canadian army one for the Arctic. His body is used to desert heat not clammy Toronto November cold; the Arctic sleeping bag warms him. The whiteness of his bedding soothes him. Archie’s body re-warms the crumpled sheet underneath him. He stretches his long legs under the gathering warmth, bends his elbows, and laces his fingers behind the back of his head. His eyes cannot close. Archie turns his head to check his clock: 1:22. He doesn’t react; instead, he turns his head back to contemplate the ceiling.
Archie’s mind blanks out. All he sees, all he knows, is that ceiling above him, staring back down at him, the flakes growing larger in his vision, the crack meandering off the flat two-dimensional surface and reaching an accusing end down toward him. Archie watches it draw closer to him with no reaction, no emotion, no thought.
Archie blinks.
And the crack is just a crack on the ceiling. The flakes are tiny bits of old paint losing their adherence.
Archie yawns.
Briefly, a wish to be asleep and not awake, to be able to put his head down and sleep eight hours straight like he used to, enters Archie’s thoughts. Archie brushes them away as he pulls his right hand out from behind his head to wipe his eyes. He puts his hand back behind his head to cradle it with its left companion. The air stills itself into infinite silence. In his internal ears, he can hear Pawpaws’s travelling clock tick each second off. It had witnessed many mornings of battle. This new clock is soundless. It’s all visual. It’s seen nothing and so is not broken.
Like the endless road before him as he drove one of the convoy trucks month after month on one of his tours in Afghanistan.
Archie blinks.
Archie doesn’t want to remember the desert or the truck or the men riding with him being blown to bits or his superior losing his leg or the VA tossing him out like so much junk, as if one counsellor is the same as the next. Archie particularly doesn’t want to remember…
Archie shakes his head. Left, right, left, right, one cheek then the other one slamming into his pillow, his mouth opening in a silent scream, tears sliding out of his eyes and dripping toward his ears. His hands leave off cradling his head and grip the short, spiked thick hair on the back of his skull and his elbows pull together to hide his face. Archie shuts his eyes. His legs bend and straighten in a parody of running.
No.
No memory.
It’s over.
It’s done with.
They made their decision. And I made mine, he reminds himself.
I’m safe here in Canada, away from abandonment, away from rejection, away from the people who loved me the most.
Or so they’d said.
Archie stops. He opens his eyes. His eyes look to the wall on his right; his right leg is bent while his left is straight. He mouths the date: November eleventh. He tells himself where he is: Toronto. He straightens his right leg as his hands release his hair. Slowly, slowly, his shoulders loosen and his arms drop to his side.
“I’m not like the desert anymore, Pawpaw,” Archie whispers. He draws up into his nose the scents of his room to remind his brain where he is. A rainy city.
Archie begins his relaxation exercise. He tenses his forehead and prays for sleep.
He’d forgotten to pray last night, Archie realizes with a start. Better do it now.
Archie begins to recite out loud to the uncaring room: “Our Father…” Archie stops. I can’t pray, he moans silently to himself. Who is listening? Who cares? Does anyone? Not the ones who loved him the most, so why would God? Emotional pain feeds into each neuron, and the surface of his body aches and burns. Where is God? God had been a vague figure back home. Only when he’d arrived in Afghanistan, facing the hostile landscape and hostile forces within and without, had he begun to ask this question. One of the men, as he was being shipped home, had suggested to Archie he go to the prayer meetings the chaplain held regularly, whenever he could. Archie had sat on the outskirts of the circle, listened to the stories, and felt the prayers flowing peace into him. That one oasis of peace became a necessity in the middle of the hatred and fear layering violence upon violence all around him.
Archie arches his neck in a futile attempt to stare straight through the ceiling above him, through the room above him, through the roof above him, to see the heavens and God. But all Archie sees is the faint lightness of the yellowed-white paint above. He searches for God, and God remains hidden on the other side of the barrier that his childhood had begun to build and Afghanistan had finished.
Archie sighs and straightens his head. He consciously relaxes his body until both legs and both arms slightly angle away from it. Eyelids closing, he begins his relaxation exercise again. He stalls at the frowning start. Why?
There is no answer. And he’s not one for futile questions; yet there it is, hanging in the space of his brain that’s lit with pain: the question behind his story.
Archie draws his brows together harder and squeezes his eyes shut so tight, points of light pop into his view. Archie forcibly releases the tension then moves on to tensing his cheeks and letting them drop back slack before tightening his jaw and compressing his lips. He arches his neck until the stretch pains the front and the pull his upper back. Archie straightens his neck with relief, then hunches his shoulders up to his ears, leaves them there for fifteen long seconds, and lets them go. With each contraction and each letting go, he relaxes and drifts towards sleep.
A FOOTFALL. OUTSIDE his door. Archie snaps out of bed, grabs his Smith & Wesson, and is standing beside his door with its five locks and new steel hinges protected by two thick steel plates screwed into the door frame underneath the moulding on either side of the door.
Archie waits. He slows his breathing down until he is a shadow amongst the other unmoving shadows in his room. Archie attunes his nose to the sickly sweetness wafting through the cracks he cannot fill. Alcohol.
“I know you’re in there!” The bellow erupts from the other side of the door. Archie doesn’t twitch.
“You can’t hide from me, you nasty little American. Yeah, I know you’re illegal here. I ought to report ya!” A crash punctuates this remark as the man charges his door. Archie recognizes the fuming voice: Nadine’s ex. The rooming house seems to hold its breath. Archie asks himself while keeping his focus on the man and his door: How did he find me?
Only his Canadian unit knows he lives here. Archie has kept under the radar. He hasn’t allowed himself to get sick or seek government assistance for anything. Archie’s still an American where your country takes care of its soldiers but you take care of yourself.
A body smacking against the door, a groan cut short, draws his focus back to the threat.
“I know you’re in there! You wife-stealing bastard!”
No point in arguing with an angry drunk. Arguments like that degenerate into a schoolyard rally of taunts. Waste of breath. The best offence is a defence. But Archie doesn’t relax, doesn’t assume the door will hold. This man is determined. Archie debates whether to open it and take him out. Archie considers the long barrel of his gun. If it goes off, its thunderous bang reverberating off the hard surfaces of this closed room will bring the cops and then the government and then the legal system. Archie grimaces in disgust. He walks over to his bed and slips the weapon underneath the flimsy mattress. Archie walks back to his vigil. Meanwhile, Nadine’s ex continues to bludgeon the door and is no longer cutting off his groans as the wood bruises his flesh and the steel holds the door firm against his assault.
Archie stands ready. Nadine’s ex is weakening on the other side of the door. Archie hears Rufus slam open his room door down at the end of the hall. The acrid scent of his unwashed body reaches his memory, and Archie’s nostrils involuntarily close. Archie sees the unfolding drama before it happens—Rufus thin from heroin use, muscles emaciated, mind haunted by the sight of a boy being raped in Afghanistan and being unable to move to help, unlike the rest of his unit who had rescued the boy and had given a lesson to the man he hadn’t forgotten. Rufus’s mind had chosen to disappear rather than act to his everlasting shame. Now any time he hears another being threatened, Rufus storms out on his tottery stick legs to help and inevitably ends up in the hospital.
Archie can’t allow that.
Archie swiftly, soundlessly, unlocks each well-oiled lock. He whips open his door; Nadine’s ex stumbles in; Archie grabs his arm as the ex trips by; whips him around; and marches him out his door and down the hall to the stairs, while calling out sotto voce to Rufus: “I got it.” Rufus can hear a pin drop on the other side of the house and three floors down. Over the swearing from the man in his hold, Archie waits to hear Rufus go back into his room and close the door. Then he says to Nadine’s ex: “You have two choices. You continue as you are, and I let go, and you fall down the stairs. Or you walk down them and out the door and never come back of your own accord.”
“I know what you and Nadine are doing, you American filth.” Nadine’s ex twists his head and exhales into Archie’s face, and Archie wants to vomit. Instead, he snuffles up the sour smell and blows out through his mouth, attempting to habituate to the revolting odour while calming himself.
“You’re mad at her. You’re mad at yourself for losing a fine woman. I get it,” Archie says.
“You took her from me—,”
“I know it feels like that,” Archie replies in an even tone, while resisting the ex’s attempts to escape his hold. “But if you think about it, it’s not true, is it?”
“It is!” Nadine’s ex gasps as he exerts sudden energy and it rebounds along his muscle fibres against the immovable rock wall of Archie.
“Really?”
“You would say that, wouldn’t you? You’re the one she’s having an affair with!” Pain flares up the man’s anger again.
Archie shifts forwards until the drunken man’s toes extend over the edge of the landing. Nadine’s ex rears back but cannot reverse from his precarious place on the staircase’s top edge against Archie’s solidity. The ex clamps his teeth together with an audible click. “I’m right,” he grits out.
“Are you?” Archie asks. “Or are you looking for a way out from your pain?” Archie angles forward, forcing the ex’s head to lean over the stairs, forcing him to look down at the bare wooden steps, their edges blackened and their middles sagging from a century of use. The ex fights for breath.
“She left me,” he half-moans, half-yells.
“She did. I don’t enjoy being dumped either.” Archie snaps his mouth shut and stays in place, letting his body speak its implacable message that Archie is the stronger. The rooming house’s hushed fear, the stench of people not wanting to get involved, surrounds Nadine’s ex and Archie as Archie pinions him until the ex realizes that the only way out is down on his own two feet. Nadine’s ex huffs, one, two, three times, until all breath escapes him like a deflating balloon. “Alright, I’ll go.”
Archie barely stabilizes him, lets him go, and steps back out of his reach. The ex’s left foot slides off the landing and onto the top step; he lurches as his right foot follows; he grabs the balustrade to prevent himself tumbling down. His forward momentum takes him down like a drunken sailor several more steps, while Archie watches, until he can catch his balance and slow his chaotic descent. Nadine’s ex half jogs down a few steps. He angles his head to the left to look out the far corner of his eye up at Archie, standing above him in the twilight hallway. He steps down, one, two, three stairs before twisting around fully to growl up at him: “This ain’t over.” Nadine’s ex leaps over the bottom three steps down to the first floor landing and struts out of sight toward the front door. Archie listens for the door opening and slamming shut. He listens for breathing, for footsteps. Nothing. Nadine’s ex has left.
Soft footfalls make his ears twitch. Was I wrong? Is that drunk back? Archie narrows his eyes downwards as his body vibrates with attention toward the sound. Rufus’s grey-and-white cat pads rapidly up the steps into his view. She skirts around him, trotting towards Rufus’s door. Suddenly, he recalls his VA counsellor’s words: that when he becomes vigilant, when he reaches for his gun, then he’s to remember things are less likely threats than just another sound or action in daily life. Civilian life in America is not military life in Afghanistan. Even less is Canadian civilian life, where people don’t routinely carry. Archie hears his counsellor’s words replaying in his head: “Reaching for your gun is the first sign you’re not in control.” Archie flushes with shame that he’d forgotten advice he used to remember when seeing the counsellor. The man had explained: “When you reach for your gun, what’s in control are the memories associated with loud shouts from men, with bangs and thuds, and those memories trigger your sensitized stress response system. They are in control.”
Archie groans. He is to ground himself first. He’s to breathe deeply, rhythmically, to put his thinking self back in control.
Back in the present, standing in the rooming house’s hallway, as still as a weathered statue, he watches the cat trotting towards Rufus. Not a threat, but he’d reacted as if she was.
Archie returns wearily to his room and its open door while keeping his ears cocked for human sounds or movements of air behind him. He can’t help himself. A soft meow wafts down the hall towards him. He pauses and trains his ears towards the sound. The last door on the same side of the hall opens; she zips in with a huffy yowl. The door clicks closed. A lock tumbles into place. The house creaks; groans ooze faintly out from behind a couple of doors down the hallway. Archie walks through his door and shuts it behind himself. He leans against it for seconds before turning around and locking all five locks methodically. The clean scents of the floor oil and cleaner from his nightly mopping reassures him.
Archie walks to his bed and bends down towards his mattress to fish out his grandfather’s weapon. Archie lays it back ready and on guard on the nightstand. He flops down onto his bed and covers himself up with his white sheet and white sleeping bag and stares sightlessly up at the ceiling. He is so wide awake he despairs he will ever sleep again.
Sleep comes.
Memory becomes the present.
As Archie dreams of the dead he left behind.