Dead Voices, page 6
To this day, when he tried to connect the dots, his addiction to the printed page made little rational sense — except that it was as much sensual as cerebral.
He had grown up in a drab neighbourhood beside a steel plant during its heyday when a guy could make his bones playing hockey like the Rocket and the Golden Jet, or baseball like Yogi and Mickey. The only claim to beauty in the area was the inside of the parish church which sported as colourful a theatre of pomp and circumstance as any movie or TV show. Every Sunday, and every day during Lent and Advent, he’d see the priest, in vestments of green and gold and black and white, perform miraculous feats on the altar with words alone. And when he heard the priest intone the sacred words, the words of power that changed the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ, he, too, kneeling on the pew with his face aglow, felt their power course through his body. So much so that when he looked up at the large statue of the crucified saviour, showing the bloodied Jesus nailed like a white wafer to the dark wood, he trembled with such fervour he felt unworthy of being so blessed. All he needed was the word, he’d say, and his soul would be healed.
He could still recall the words in his Missal, a Confirmation gift and the first book he ever owned, on crinkly thin pages that had an intoxicating odour of incense.
Upon reaching his teens, however, the sacred words of his Missal had been blind-sided by an unexpected force of nature. First in the male magazines, with their erotic stories of brazen women whose inner desires quickened his blood, and then in the dirty pulps, with words so carnal and seductive and debauched he was lifted off the ground.
And from there he had gone on to other words of power. Either to the story-tellers who had could weave a web of dreams more real than his life around him or to the great thinkers and seekers who could feed his hunger to know the secrets of reality. Though the small library in his hometown had started him out in his quest, it couldn’t satisfy his insatiable appetite. Only after he had gone to university in his new adopted metropolis, with its vast libraries, not to mention the many bookstores at the time, did he find a never-ending stream of words on the page. And much later — after he had been to Paris and Rome, New York and Chicago — did he realize first-hand that his new adopted city could compare with any world centre for bragging rights on the love of the printed word.
On the ground floor of the BDV, Mark went from shelf to shelf, book to book, like a vampire, looking for the appropriate black blood to slake his thirst. By perusing a few pages he could easily determine which words were no more than dust and bone, forever dead on the page, and which could be transformed into delicious food for his hungry eyes. And after some time, he found a few books that excited him enough that he had to buy and enjoy at home. One of them was a new Arden edition of the Bard’s work.
He was stuffing his chosen books in the shelves, when the Dark Lady came up to him out of nowhere and startled him. She had a plastic basket in her hand.
“This’ll help,” she said with a smile.
“Thanks.”
“You can’t carry everything in two hands, you know.”
Abruptly shaken from his reveries, he was lost for words. He looked into her eyes. Her features were stark white against her dark attire and beret, with no hint of makeup. Close up, even though she wasn’t as attractive, with a cold hard sheen to her features, her dark eyes and aloof reserve made her even more mysterious.
“I know,” he said. “Sometimes we need a helping hand.”
“I’ve seen you here often. You’re a bibliophile, aren’t you?”
“I suppose I am. And you’re always in the same black outfit, with the beret, as if in mourning. Can I ask you what you’re mourning?”
She paused, regarding him with her dark eyes, her features registering a sense of weariness. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe it’s just from working in this store. Sometimes it feels like a sinking ship. Our inventory of discs and videos is slowly dying to digital. And all these books. They’re dying as well. It’s like a mausoleum. Like a bookstore of dead voices.”
Her words, said with such disarming candor, took him by surprise. “Well, not all the authors are dead, are they? And it’s up to us to keep the voices alive, right?”
“Yeah, I suppose so,” she said, her face brightening up. “Maybe there’s still hope.”
And then she vanished into the shelves of books.
When he looked at his smartphone and saw just how late it was, he placed his books in the basket and took them to the cashier.
Outside, he put the bag of books into his backpack and looked in both directions. It was a mild spring day, the street filled with pedestrians and cars. The adjustment to the real world never ceased to be jarring. His wife, Jen, had told him once that he always had a spaced-out look upon leaving a bookstore. Indeed, it took some time to readjust to the visible world and get his bearings. Like the times as a kid he’d exit the movie theatre after seeing a western and feel he was still on a horse under the hot sun, riding over the plains, his holster securely tied to his thigh.
As he walked, he observed the pedestrians, all oblivious of his metaphysical powers. A few stores down, he stopped in front of Ye Olde Pub, an old red-brick structure that had been in the Annex forever, it seemed. Either he could walk to the nearest subway station and be stuck in the long rush-hour ride home or get a few beers and wait it out.
Just the thought of a cold one going down easy, however, was enough to make up his mind. He called his wife and told her he’d be late. They had a townhouse in the west end of the city, not far from the end of east-west subway line. Their grown-up son, Matt, after studying acting in New York and trying to make the theatre scene in the city, had moved to Vancouver.
Though he hadn’t been inside the building in ages, he could still remember the washrooms reeking of stale piss.
Since then it had gone through various makeovers. Nowadays it sported a mock Tudor façade, mullioned windows, and a heavy oak door. Since a patron could nurse a beer for hours with no hassles, it had long been a hang-out for writers and artists and actors, some of whom lived in the neighbourhood.
Over the front door was a sign offering Karaoke on the weekends.
Taking off his backpack and windbreaker, he sat at a middle table in order to get a view of the outside. He was in his denims and walking shoes, with a blue long-sleeve sweater. The inside was dim and shabby in the late afternoon, the dark wooden tables and chairs looking as if they hadn’t been upgraded in decades. Each table was lighted by an electric candle with a mushroom top that reflected the light outwards. On the faded walls were old photographs and drawings, some of them caricatures, of well-known writers and playwrights of times past. Mark had known a few of them in his earlier years when he was learning his trade. Once upon a time he had looked up to them as Olympian gods and goddesses who could instruct and inspire him on the secret power of words.
The pub was almost empty this time in the afternoon. One table had three boisterous kids who appeared to be students from the university down the street. Another, directly in his line of vision, had two men who were in black tights and white collarless shirts, as if they had just come from a rehearsal. An older couple sat at a table close to the side door which was left open to let in some air. He didn’t recognize anyone.
No one was tending the bar. A lone waitress — thin and waif-like in her Tudor dress and apron, her face so heavily rouged she looked like a guy in drag — brought him a pitcher of draft.
After he gulped down a glass, he looked out a window at the busy thoroughfare of pedestrians and cars. Not much had changed in the Annex since his student years. It still had a village-like atmosphere, with its large and turreted Edwardian houses, some of which still accommodated students. Many of the store fronts had changed, of course, but the movie theatre and many of the restaurants and delis were the same as decades ago. And the department store emporium with its glitzy neon façade was still there, though he had learned it had been sold and slated for demolition. The neighbourhood, however, avoiding the pricey commercial redevelopment of the downtown core, had a worn and faded look to it.
The sleepy atmosphere in the pub seemed to activate his memory.
He’d come here every so often when he was a graduate student living up the street in the rooming houses and later when he was a young writer and working at the small publishing house a few blocks away. In those years of struggle and heartache and loneliness, he had practically lived on the page, trying to learn his craft by trial and error — and his unstinting effort in studying and copying the greats. It could only take total dedication and sacrifice. Someday he, too, wanted to call down the great cosmic forces and energies with words alone. Someday he, too, if he made the ultimate sacrifice, would perhaps be able to make the invisible more real than the visible with words alone. And bring to life the inner world.
If he was worthy, that is.
Such early zeal, however, had led to a dead end, fool that he was to forget his pedigree as the son of hard-working immigrant parents who were practically illiterate. He had forged his own separate identity with words, to be sure, but he still needed to have at least one foot on solid ground. He wasn’t some dreamy idealist with his head in the clouds, nor a visceral Rimbaud living at the end of his nerve strings. He was a realist to his core, as he well knew, and he had to live in the real world, with a steady job, with the love of a woman, with a family, and be grounded in the reality of the day-to-day.
From his early success, he had thought he’d blaze a trail through the country’s literary horizons, fulfill the promise passed on to him by his mentors, Margaret and Dave, but it wasn’t to be. It was as if his teaching job, his daily life as a husband and father, his pedestrian existence as an invisible man in the suburbs, had grinded his inner journey without feet to a halt. He had plugged away at his writing, sure, like his hard-working mom and dad, but he was no longer sure he had done the right thing.
Though his life with Jen and his son, Matthew, had provided him with the comfort and security he needed to survive in the day-to-day, it had come at considerable cost to his search for the higher realities.
At least he had given his son the literary foundation he himself never had.
Jen had read Matty all the fairy tales and children’s books at the beginning. Then Mark had introduced his son to the Bard when he was no more than seven. They had sat side-by-side on the recliner, each with a copy of the complete works, and read alternate characters. In time and with effort, his son had become an accomplished reader of the plays, mouthing the mighty words of the Master like a prodigy.
It was like music to his ears. The words that he himself had taken decades to read correctly, let alone understand, his son had taken to as if they were hot-wired to his tongue. And when Matty was reciting the words, just a little kid with his innocent voice and his wide-eyed wonder, his son sounded as mercurial as Hamlet, as crafty as Antony, and as lovelorn as Romeo.
His pride in his little guy was boundless. He couldn’t wait to get home from work and be with Matty. It gave him nothing but joy to play all the sports and physical games with his son, imbibe in him the power of words, and watch him grow up hale and hearty.
Balance was the operative word. It wasn’t just words on the page. He and Jen had exposed him to music and movies and a social life. They had got him involved in team sports. Matt had competed on a high level in hockey and baseball and football, turning out a well-rounded scholar-athlete. In time his son had grown into a handsome and tall young man, extremely fit in body and mind. And towards the end of his high school years when Matt announced he was in a school play and interested in the theatre, it had come as a pleasant surprise. Mark himself had always been a shy and withdrawn teenager, preferring a silent life with words. His son had turned out almost the complete opposite.
After getting his university degree, his son had gone to New York and graduated from a prestigious acting school, hoping to follow in the footsteps of its alumni, some of whom had become great stage and movie actors. Things hadn’t worked out as expected, however. Even though it was long after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Centre, it was practically impossible to get a green card. After working at various shitty jobs in New York, his son was forced to come back to Canada, looking like gaunt and sickly replica of his former self. And since the economy and theatre business was even worse in his home city, it had been a hard slog to make it as an actor.
Even now, whenever he thought about his son, it caused him both joy and anguish. After all he had done for him, all the time he had spent with him, it seemed the older Matt got the more he had come to sneer at his father’s pedestrian life as a teacher and a writer. And at his lack of outward success.
No one knows you, Dad, his son had told him one time. I ask everyone and no one even knows you exist. You sit down all day and do nothing. I want to do things with my life. There’s a reason why it’s called act-ing, you know. Acting is do-ing. Even in the talking it’s the do-ing. On the stage we do it.
During the two years his son was in New York, Mark had planned his most ambitious project, a metafictional re-creation of the Bard’s lost years and his time at the Globe. He had done extensive research on the life and times, had gone over every line of the complete works for any autofictional clues, and consulted the works that had been most influential in the writing of the plays. He had even meticulously pored over the works of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Greene, Marston, and Dekker in order to saturate himself in the perspective of the times when the theatre was the preferred means of encouraging the illusion of reality and the workings of the inner self.
The project had come to naught, however. Not only had his ambition far exceeded his talents, but the Bard’s real life had proved too ephemeral a subject to capture with words. As if the Bard had made the big turn himself, living most intensely not in the physical world but in the words that re-invented it on the stage.
Mark gulped down another glass. Beer had a way of making him drowsy. Especially on an empty stomach. Outside it was starting to get dark.
No, he had muffed it with his son. And no amount of redress, either with words on the page or with heart-toheart talks, could undo the damage.
After coming back from New York, Matt had given him bits and pieces of what he had learned from the acting school, techniques that grew out of the Group Theatre and Stanislavski theories. The way Matt spoke, it seemed he had been indoctrinated by Zen gurus. While Britain and Europe were still doing old school, North American acting had been revolutionized, Matt said. In the general Method, actors were encouraged to use personal emotions from past experiences to feed their performance and make it real. The Meisner off-shoot of the Method in which he had been taught, however, sought to eliminate learned pretence, with its self-consciousness and intellect, in order to get back to the natural and instinctive and impulsive.
The quicksilver of instinct and action was real, Matt said, and the intellect that tried to arrest time into some sort of ersatz permanence was false. An actor was already too self-conscious and introverted as it was, listening too much to his inner voice. The object was to kill that confusing voice and actually be. What they had done in their classes, Matt told him, was to go over a line so often with different emotions till all confusion and self-doubt disappeared on their own and the words made it real.
As much as he admired such a method, however, he had argued that the actor was still reciting the lines of a playwright, lines that originated from an invisible voice.
That invisible voice, in spite of its doubts and fears and drawbacks, was the true oracle of re-invention, he told his son. And one had to keep true to its need to maintain a solid balance between the physical and the metaphysical. The actor had the luxury perhaps of being able to obliterate his own inner voice during his performance, but he still had to make real the words of the playwright. And those words, he had added, if they were gained through negative capability could only come at a great cost.
To drive home his point he had used not only Keats’s letters, but a line from Fernando Pessoa via his translator in the Book of Disquiet. I’m the gap between what I am and what I’m not, between what I dream and what life has made of me. Pessoa, a Portuguese writer who also didn’t do much in life but read and write, had emptied himself into the world of words. As an ironic twist, he told his son, this man who had virtually cancelled himself out into a nothing, who had even hid himself behind pseudonyms, who had avoided the limelight and sought anonymity, had his grave dug up long after his death in 1935 and had been reinterred beside the greats of Portuguese history. All from merely sitting down and translating his dreams into words.
Some people were either incapable of seeking public acclaim or too embarrassed by it — and wanted nothing more than to do their life’s work in peace and quiet, he told his son. Could true success ever come from a world that valued gaudy baubles over the invisible realities?
Matt, however, couldn’t be persuaded by such arguments. After trying to make the theatre scene in town, acting in a few indie productions, he had gone to Vancouver to team up with some of his colleagues from New York and try his luck there.
A loud scraping of a chair suddenly woke Mark up from his reveries.
He shook the cobwebs and found himself in the old pub with his pitcher of beer almost empty, having no idea how much time had elapsed. The door had been shut. Through the windows it looked dark outside on the street. He couldn’t hear any cars. It was dim inside. Disoriented, he felt as if having been awakened from a deep and unsettling sleep. The odour of stale beer was in the air. In a far corner he could see a dim black stage for the Karaoke. The waitress was nowhere to be seen.
He took out his smartphone and looked at the time. It was indeed quite late and well past the rush hour. Either he had dozed off or simply lost track of where he was.
The older couple and the students had left. The air inside the pub felt stale and musty. The only people left were the two guys directly in his line of vision. They had a pitcher of draft in between them. He could hear them talking. Either they were about to stage a play or actually rehearsing the play. Their voices were sometimes hushed and sometimes animated, as if wary of being overheard and yet carried away by their emotions. One had apparently written the play and the other was an actor — or they were both actors, he wasn’t quite sure. The assumption was that the play would be staged at one of the theatres close by. Mark had been to all three in times past. His son had been in one just the other year, a small indie theatre that was falling apart. Since the two guys were in a dim recess, the light from the table top played with their visages. As he observed and listened, he tried not to draw attention to himself.
