I brought in an old pair of hearing aids an uncle had left me—why he would will me his ear pieces was beyond me until I needed them for Louise. I discovered that Louise’s ear canals were blocked by excessive wax build up, and that she had been suffering from a sinus infection at the point where her nasal passage joined the ears. After a course of antibiotics and some ear drops to loosen the wax, she began to hear me.

  “I thought you were dead inside yourself,” I told her one night in my closet office.

  She nodded and smiled, and then, as if something was speaking through her, she began to sing. I might have expected a hymn if someone had told me that the first intelligent sound from her lips would be a musical number, but what came out was an old Rudy Vallee song, “I’ve Found Myself Again.” Then she added, as if an afterthought when she finished: “Bing Crosby also recorded it.” Louise was returning to the land of the living.

  I argued with the home’s supervisor over Louise’s impending release.

  “You can’t just turn her out. Look at the progress she is making. We are witnessing a medical phenomenon.” I didn’t want to use the word miracle. The medical profession does not believe in miracles. They are unscientific.

  I back-and-forthed with the administrator for over an hour. The administrator said that they needed Louise’s bed for another patient.

  “Is the other patient dying?” The administrator wouldn’t tell me.

  But I won. I would pay for Louise’s additional care out of my salary—something I couldn’t afford—and Louise would continue to improve, though I could not record my treatments of her various conditions. We met each night in my broom-closet office and gradually she unfolded her life story to me.

  She had been beautiful once, she said, and wanted more than anything to be beautiful again. “Ah,” she said, sighing, “beauty belongs only to the young.”

  “But can’t you see I am making you young?” I held up a hand mirror I had borrowed from a younger patient.

  “That’s not me.”

  “It is you. You are making a comeback. You are undoing the ravages of time.”

  “Time kills everyone,” she said. “It kills the body, but it also kills the soul by poisoning all hope.”

  “Do you still have hope?” I asked. “Look. Look the mirror. You are growing younger by the minute, and minute by minute hope is returning to you. You told me that years ago you had been a dancer in a speak-easy. A flapper. I’m not sure there’s much call for that now, but you are making tremendous progress. I want to see you dance again.”

  She laughed at me. I have never been one to tell an elderly person there is no hope. My father had insisted he was going to die on Good Friday at precisely eleven a.m. I had told him he would not, and what had made him so sure?

  He replied that he had been visited by a dark angel and the angel had called his time and day of death exactly a week before. When I left him in his hospital room late on Holy Thursday evening, alone in his private Gethsemane, he told me that I didn’t care. Those were his last words to me. He had fixed the time and day in his mind and was determined to fulfill his agreement with a shadow. But I would not surrender hope for Louise and I told her so.

  Her cheeks had filled in again and her colour was healthy. I had replaced her cracked dentures with teeth made by a dentist friend of mine who cautioned that I needed to be careful, that the whole thing could backfire on me, that I could ruin my career. He reminded me of the “do-no-harm” oath I had taken, but I had assured him that finding life beneath the layers of time and pain inflicted on a person could only be a good thing. I was walking a very thin ethical line.

  The vitamins were making her hair come in sable at the roots, just as it had been, she said, when she was a young woman in love. The snow that had been in her hair fell softly outside the window of the home, covering the lawn and trees while Louise’s hair grew long enough to cut off the white and give her a Twenties bob cut. By the end of the winter, Louise was ready to be released from the home.

  On the day of her release, I was summoned to the home. The doctors, especially the gerontologists, could not understand how the transformation had taken place. This was not right, they insisted. Louise is one hundred and six going on one hundred and seven. She should have died by then. And because I needed my job, I dared not wheel anyone else from their rooms in the dead of the night to restore the human being that was still alive inside a broken body.

  In retrospect, I am not sure I could do what I had done for her for anyone else. It wasn’t just that Louise had a strong heart, a heart that had kept her alive when everything else about her gave the appearance of death—the lovers who had abandoned her, the hungry years of the Great Depression, the hard labour of unskilled work when she cleaned office buildings at night until she was ninety and bent over from pushing a broom. What had been the key to Louise was that she was alive, vital and determined to fight her way out of her incarcerating body in search of the life she was certain she still possessed.

  I wheeled her into the sunroom as my shift began on her last night in the home. The hallways were dark. The patients were sleeping. Down the hall we could hear someone’s television set and the strains of Irish dance music echoing in the darkness while the viewer slept.

  “Please let me come and live with you,” Louise said, begging. I had thought long and hard about the possibility that she might want to attach herself to me for longer than the course of my treatment, but at that point I grew afraid. I became a doctor rather than a healer. I could not bring myself to form any sort of personal relationship with her. It would have been the final wrong in a litany of broken boundaries.

  She now had the appearance of a young woman of thirty. It might have been good to extend our relationship. She had become beautiful again, but what she had told me during our long nights of treatment made me fear her. She knew so much more of the world than I did. She carried the weight of accumulated experience that I would have to live a lifetime to acquire. Some would call it the age gap. I call it the need to learn of life on my own terms.

  I told her, no.

  She would have to make her own way in the world, just as she had done before. And having done it before she would know the way better now. I wheeled her out of my tiny office and closed the door. She began to weep and tried to open it, then banged with her fists on the barrier that stood between us.

  Then she fell silent, and I heard her say: “This door is Time. You once opened it for me and now you have closed it. What do I have to live for now?” That was the last thing she said to me.

  I had no answer.

  I fear death.

  I fear seeing it in others and I fear seeing myself in them.

  I thought it was empathy that made me want to reach out to her and return what had been taken from her. Then I explained it to myself as a man of science and medicine—that I was doing no harm. And yet I had harmed her in a way I could not have harmed someone my own age. I had no endgame for what I had done. Leaving a person without the mercy of time is, perhaps, the worst harm one can do.

  I could hear her sobs as she walked down the hallway to the front door where a taxi was waiting for her. And as she wept, I imagined the years flooding back into her face, her eyes, and her trembling lips, until they filled her body once again, and I was helpless to stop the flood of silence.

  Empty

  JOSHUA CAME UP to me at the shiva with a glass of whisky in his hand, and in a reserved toast touched his dram to mine. The shiva for Harriet had been more like an Irish wake, and Joshua was deeply troubled by several things that afternoon—his mother’s death, the fact that he had not been there in the end of hear the prayers said upon her dying, or to stand at the graveside where she had been laid to rest. Joshua had not been able to make a connecting flight and having sat in one departure lounge after another as he hopped from destination to destination of small civic airports and never got nearer to home with each snakes and ladder move. He felt bitter. He was angry my mother was alive when his wasn’t. It was the grief or the drink talking. Probably both.

  Death is a shared occasion, but I felt as if I was intruding. As the son of an Irish immigrant, I had identified with Joshua’s mother, Harriet, who had grown up in Dublin. She told me of the night in 1942 when the German bombers, whether by accident, or on purpose, or on the orders of de Valera who no one trusted except the priests, had levelled the Jewish district of the city. Her father and uncle were sitting shiva at the time for a local mohel who had passed from a lung infection. They never knew what hit them. The house of mourners had been blown apart, and Harriet’s connection to the language of her ancestors was severed in that moment. Her mother, an English woman, had converted to Judaism to marry Harriet’s father. In the wake of that bloody night in 1942 when the Germans mistook Dublin, two hundred miles away, for Bristol, and only bombed the Irish city’s Jewish district, Harriet’s mother—possibly out of fear and possibly because she felt alone in a land of strangers, did not even whisper the traditions Harriet should have learned.

  When Harriet came to Canada, she studied her faith from the beginning. She had said it was a rebirth. A voice, she said, awoke inside her. Then, having recovered what she felt was rightfully hers, Harriet married an Irishman, an older friend of mine who had been an altar boy. The memorial for Harriet was both a shiva and an Irish wake.

  I stumbled in my mind to give Joshua an answer. I’d been into the drink for over an hour. I tried to explain to Joshua that connections are never as permanent as we would wish them and as that came out it sounded awful to me; then I addressed whether the connection of faith or culture or life are things we lose forever, that maybe we carry them with us in our hearts. I sounded like an ass-end priest. Joshua repeated the question. He still wanted to know why my mother lived and his was dead. I told him I didn’t have an answer, but that I loved my mother, wanted to hold on to her, and treasured the time we had already spent together. I remembered sitting on her knee as a small child and learning the Lord’s Prayer by heart.

  “What did she teach you?” I asked.

  “What sort of fucked up question is that?”

  “Did she pass on the traditions to you? Did you go to Hebrew school or at least celebrate Passover or Shabbat?”

  He glared at me. I thought he was either going to punch me or throw his drink in my face. That would have been an appropriate response to my bluntness, at least from his Irish heritage. “Yes. She did all those things.”

  The Irish music from a tenor in the next room, accompanied by a fiddle and a tin flute, suddenly fell silent. I heard a deep voice intoning something ancient, something profound and sad. Joshua turned away from me to listen. I leaned against the dining room table and stared into my glass. I saw my reflection in the water of life.

  When the Kaddish ceased, the music resumed, but it was joined by a clarinet and a piano, and the tenor broke into a song that was punctuated by shouts of joy.

  Joshua turned to me. “So, you haven’t answered my question.”

  “I can’t. I’m sorry. There is no explanation for either life or death. There is only the time we have in this world to do the things that make being in this world tolerable for ourselves and for others.”

  “I’ve spent ten years of my life wandering,” he said. The tears were welling in his eyes. “I’m going to have to keep looking. I just don’t know what the fuck to do.”

  “Well, if there’s the half of it as my family says, it is that we are wanderers. There’s the old belief that the Irish are the lost tribe of Israel. Both the Irish and the Jews—we are peoples who have been scattered by time and history and are constantly searching for something we can’t name until we fall down, drunk or exhausted, or broken-hearted by God. We live. We suffer. We rise from our sufferings and go in search of more because that’s where life drives us. Not curiosity, just life. We wander. We all wander, I guess. The only way to find something is to look for it, and if it isn’t out there somewhere, it might be right under our noses. That’s the best I can do for an answer.”

  “Empty,” he said. Just that one word “empty.” He patted my shoulder and moved deeper into the gathering.

  I heard Joshua had gone to the Far East. I saw a photograph on his Facebook page. He was standing on a mountain top, looking into the horizon and wondering where it would take him or whether there was an answer to his questions at the end of it. His post was captioned simply, “I don’t know, but it has to be there.”

  Star of Wonder

  CLARITY HAD BEEN a long time returning. First the accident and the head injury, then the nervous breakdown. His employer had been tolerant of the accident. That hadn’t been Ern’s fault. The boss was far less sympathetic about the breakdown. The language, the awful verbal assaults on his co-workers and their loud music at the Christmas party, and then the fit of weeping, had been the last straw. Besides, Ern had been around a long time. Once upon a time, longevity in a job would have meant something; but now it was a case of an old guy not being able to keep up with the intuitive skills of the office. He never knew what button to push except the one that upset everyone.

  Ern and his wife, Erma, sold their home in the spring and moved into a midtown condo “to be close to things,” as Erma put it. The condo had large windows and good light. Erma thought it would help bring Ern back from the inner death he told her he was experiencing in the wake of his “fall from heaven.” Just when he looked like he was making progress, though, he had bad moments. Ern brought a dinner party to silence a week before when he had insisted, over dessert and his fifth glass of wine, the angel choir that appeared to the shepherds when Jesus was born were the demonic rebel angels on their way down to the ground when Satan fell. “I mean, do angels talk to us the rest of the time? Who else would wreak such havoc through overheated stores, nauseating music everywhere, and chintzy glass balls on trees?”

  Ern should have been hung over the next morning when he woke early and stood at the balcony door, but a change had come to him in the night. He felt different. He felt organized inside his head. The rooftops of the city skyline were steaming. The night had been bitter cold, but the clouds had passed, and the dawn was an unusual purple. For the first time in years, he could see without his glasses. He could read the license plates of cars in the street below. The fog had left his mind. He felt good about himself. He felt he had the strength to face the world again. He had clarity. The clarity should have stayed with him, but by Christmas day it had gone somewhere else.

  Their eldest daughter, Ella, who still lived in the city, came for the big day, and brought her two boys with her. They were loud and cranky and he wanted to tell them they were brats but thought better about calling them names in front of their mother. She was doing her best. Her mothering just wasn’t good enough. Ern figured it was the lack of a father figure in their lives, someone like his own father who would lay down the law and set things straight. Ella’s husband had walked out on his family a year ago, at Christmas time, and Ella had fled to her parents for support. Ern wanted to think of the boys as urchin, but he felt too sorry for the pair to let his mind wander into speculation about what would become of them. “Just love them and be there for them, Dad,” Ella had pleaded. Ern was tired of being the father figure. The boys needed their own old man, not an old man who’d done his time and been faithful to his wife and his fatherly duties.

  Neither of the boys was happy with what Santa had brought them. They kept calling their grandfather Ern Poo because he refused to be called Grandpa, or Bumpa, or Booboo, and the word Poo irritated the hell out of him. The boys knew this. “Poo, Poo,” they said over and over again whenever he tried to sit down and enjoy a drink. Christmas was the one day of the year Erma let Ern enjoy a succession of gin and tonics. The more he tried to enjoy himself, the more the blurriness returned to his brain, and the more the boys taunted him.

  Ern’s old, limping dog was the last vestige of a time when his family had been happy. Caper was the one creature he could trust in the chaos inside his head to know which way to turn on their walks through the streets of apartment towers. The boys were louder than a catastrophe of steel. Erma and Ella argued over the thickness of the gravy and the amount of salt in the mashed potatoes. The sunset was hanging over a long day that was becoming longer. Ern’s head began to bang from the inside. Caper needed to go out for a crap.

  Ern got up the strength to get dressed in his overcoat and scarf and boots and took the dog down in the elevator. A woman on the second floor—he had run-ins with her in the past because she let her Yorkie loose and his dog, a mongrel, disliked all other dogs, especially small ones—was waiting for them at the elevator door, and in a moment of chaos, through the haze of the gin Ern had consumed, he was startled to find he wasn’t at the ground floor and his dog was lunging at the small, white thing. He pulled his dog back into the elevator just before there was any bloodshed, but it shook Ern. He stared at his dog and the dog looked up at him, sheepish, as if to say: “Well, I like what I like.”

  In the snow-covered rose garden, his dog sniffed about in the darkness. Ern felt the cold sinking down the back of his neck. He wanted to do up his coat but was cautious another dog might suddenly appear, and he would lose control of the situation and shriek at the owner and possibly take a swing at the person. He didn’t want that. He wanted peace on earth, as the motto of the day suggested. The dog squatted and turned and looked relieved before going back to her sniffing.

  In the upper level of the condo garden, there were readers’ benches, a nice place on a summer day and a lonely place on a winter night. The dog pulled Ern over the edge of the shovelled walk. He was standing past the top of his boots in the piled white shovelling. The dog tugged again, and Ern lost his balance and fell over into a patch of unbroken snow.

  He wanted to scream when his head hit the ground but who would hear him? He lay there, staring up at the stars, uncertain if they were astral or cerebral. Caper stood above his face, licked it, and then sat down. If this was how defeat felt, Ern thought, it was about falling, not once or even twice, but over and over again. He had become a fall artist in so many ways. Falling was the one thing he had to show for the effort he had put into his life. The kids were right. He was a piece of Poo.

 

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