The Origin of Species Read online

  “I haven’t really thought about it that much.”

  This was not the truth—he thought about it hourly, his exalted future, though nearly as often the actual vehicle of his exaltation shifted, as if he were still a child playing at doctor and fireman. In his mind he had already mapped out a version of himself that would fit Ingrid—he could do a degree here, become a teacher of English perhaps. There was his family, of course, his studies, his friends, but then these were exactly the things he had fled.

  One weekend they took the children’s kite out to where he and Ingrid had picnicked along the coast, a deserted stretch of meadow and cliff where the wind off the sound raised the kite until it was the smallest speck.

  “I think you must have kites in Canada,” Eva said.

  “Yes, but I don’t think I’ve ever flown one.”

  “But you are so good!”

  It was just the wind, any idiot could have done it, but still he took Eva’s praise strangely to heart. Afterward he felt they had had a perfect day, together like that in the wind and the salt air. At night, making love with Ingrid, he could still taste the sea on her. It crossed his mind that it could actually come to pass, his remaining here. The oddest sensation went through him at the thought, not unpleasant but hard to place, like an unfamiliar smell.

  But lying beside her later, he felt a sort of shame come over him.

  “Is everything all right?”

  It was pointless to hide things from Ingrid. She sensed every shift of mood like an animal sensing a threat.

  “Just tired, I guess. I’m fine.”

  He lay awake after she’d gone. Everything about the day seemed to skew—they were all just play-acting, really, he saw that now, were all just putting the best face on things the way Eva had done with the kite, trying to make all this seem normal. But there was nothing normal in any of it. He was just a kid; there was no question, really, of his staying. He had known that from the start, that all this was just an excursion from his real life.

  In the morning they got to talking about his friends in Copenhagen.

  “It felt different there, I guess,” Alex said. “Like people were trying to live differently.”

  “Ah,” Ingrid said, clearly surprised at this. “But I thought you were unhappy there.”

  “That was more just personal things.”

  “In what way different, then?”

  “I dunno—I guess that they didn’t just close themselves off in their own little world. That they were trying to change things.”

  There was an awful pause.

  “But that is what I do, is that what you say?” Ingrid said evenly. “That I close myself off?”

  “That’s not what I meant,” Alex stammered. But he knew he’d intended exactly the meaning she had taken. “You’re so curious about everything.”

  Ingrid forced a smile.

  “It doesn’t matter, you are right. I think so too, sometimes, living here in my little village.”

  They never got back on track after that. Someone other than Ingrid might have pretended, might have let the matter pass.

  “I think tomorrow you must go,” she said when she came out to his cabin that night.

  Alex couldn’t believe the relief that flooded through him.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “There’s no need. You are young, you could not stay here.”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think I could.”

  “It’s a shame for both of us, is the only thing.”

  The children came with them to the ferry the next day. It was like having chaperones, yet Alex was grateful for them. The relief he had felt had given way to something less certain.

  “I will write to you,” Ingrid said. She didn’t seem as stricken as he might have hoped. “I will miss you, my Italian who is not Italian. Perhaps another time.”

  But he doubted if he had the gumption to have to face this sort of decision again.

  All that seemed far from him now, that summer with Ingrid. He’d lived a lifetime in a matter of weeks, from child to man, then had spent all his time since regressing: he was slightly older now than Ingrid had been when he’d first met her, yet he felt less wise, less grown, than he’d felt then, still awaiting some beginning to his life that would set it on course. Maybe he’d missed his chance—if he had stayed, he might have saved himself all his false starts.

  He had yet to crack open a book for his exam the following day. A repeat of the interview with the prime minister was playing on the radio, though by now he would be winging his way to the Tokyo Summit, to lick the Americans’ feet and beg for a place at the table. A group called the Middle Core Faction had vowed to blow the summit leaders to kingdom come, and Alex felt an instant’s thrill at that prospect of apocalypse, maybe because all his private sins would seem small then.

  An update on Chernobyl came on. There was apocalypse if he wanted it. Then he was back to Sweden, and his son: for all he knew it was raining fire over in Engelström. He felt anger rising up in him. At whom? The Soviets? Madame Curie? But it was simply that he was still here, so irrelevant. Already he’d missed the boy’s crucial first years—that wasn’t something that could ever be got over, that could ever be fixed, as enduring as a genetic flaw. She hadn’t had the right to do that. She hadn’t had the right to make that sort of decision on her own.

  He put in some time with his notes. When he grew bleary-eyed, he switched on the TV: more updates. The winds had shifted, thankfully, blowing the cloud that had spread into Sweden back onto the Ukrainians and Poles. Better them; they were used to disaster. No images yet from the site, though from Sweden they showed the lineups at clinics for thyroid shots, long vistas of blonds who looked already bleached through by radiation.

  He had to go to him, of course. Sometimes a visceral sense of his connection to him would rise up in Alex like a flood tide. But what was just as compelling was the fear the feeling might pass, the sudden realization that minutes had gone by, hours, an entire day, when he had hardly given the boy a second thought. The thing was slipping from him with every day that passed. Soon doing nothing would seem a real possibility, maybe the only one.

  He had a last smoke on the balcony. At this hour the black hump of Mount Royal looked like a hole cut out of the city. He made a mental note to remember to call his mother the next day for her sixty-fifth. He would be the only one missing from the brood. On account of exams, he’d said, though the truth was he couldn’t bear these family gatherings. They were all pleasant enough, his family, as families went, and yet the moment he was among them he would feel all the life drain out of him.

  During his summer with Ingrid, he had missed one of his regular Sunday calls home. When he’d finally phoned days later and no one had answered he’d tried his sister Mimi.

  “Jesus, Alex, where have you been?”

  He had known at once that matters were grave.

  “I dunno. Nowhere. I’ve been here. In Sweden.”

  It turned out he had ruined his parents’ vacation. They had thought of canceling, then had gone on regardless but had been calling home three or four times a day.

  “What was it, Alex? Why didn’t you call?”

  He’d been gone over two months by then. It hadn’t occurred to him that anyone would care one way or the other.

  “I guess I didn’t think it was a big deal.”

  Mimi let that sit. Of his five siblings she was really the only one with whom he had what he would call a relationship.

  “Well,” she’d said finally, holding back all the things she might have said, “at least you’re all right.”

  His life was full of this sort of bad family karma, much of it involving phones, which was maybe why he didn’t just put himself out of his misery and phone Ingrid—he had her number, of course, it would be so simple. But each time the notion crossed his mind, he resisted: tomorrow, he would think. Until he actually called, his logic seemed to go, he still had the call in reserve as a last resort
. This logic was all the more compelling, perhaps, in being so perfectly circular.

  He changed, brushed his teeth, slipped into his bed. He could do it now, he could dial the number; it would be morning there. He thought of those glorious mornings that first summer, waking to sunrise at four, with Ingrid beside him.

  He could do it: ten digits or so, and she’d be there. Or not now—he was tired, it was late—but surely tomorrow. Tomorrow, he vowed, he would call.

  – 6 –

  The English Department was a warren of dirty stairwells and windowless classrooms that occupied the back end of the downtown Y, the air there forever underlain with a chlorine stink from the Y’s pool. The exam room was already a hush of fevered thought by the time Alex arrived, so that he made the mistake of sitting next to Amanda, who glanced over at him with such heartbreaking furtiveness that for some time he couldn’t focus on the questions in front of him. Then the first one came clear and he felt doomed: Jameson. Of all the gobbledygook Alex had had to wade through that year, his had been the worst. It was hard to believe the man was a Marxist. If The Revolution ever did come, Alex hoped Jameson got one of the first bullets.

  Exactly because he was trying to avoid her, Alex found his eye returning again and again to Amanda. Amanda ought to have been beautiful, blue-eyed and porcelain-skinned and classically, fulsomely blond. He couldn’t say what it was that made her seem otherwise—the energy of her, maybe, something in her eyes, a kind of involution there that scared him, a snarling of the life force. He’d had occasion to look into those eyes at close quarters and hadn’t been able to forget the pit they had seemed: mistake, mistake, was what had screamed through his head at the time, though by then it had already been far too late. It had been too late, in fact, from the first moment he’d talked to Amanda at the beginning of the year—about Jameson, as it happened, whom he’d actually pretended to admire—and seen the need in her, and chosen to ignore it. Or not ignore it exactly: use it. He’d always had that radar, that ability to home in on weakness and find his shelter there. Not that anything untoward had happened, not then, except for the few outings he’d made to Amanda’s International Socialist meetings, about which he hadn’t been entirely candid with Liz.

  History is not a text, but is only accessible to us in textual form. After a moment of utter blankness, the fog began to lift and he started to write. There was a question on Benjamin he managed to fake his way through, then some fairly basic boilerplate stuff on Derrida and Bloom and Paul de Man. Alex filled page after page, trying to cram in every possible catchword and bit of jargon to show he knew the stuff, and then subjecting it all, and this was crucial with Professor Novak, to vicious critique. There were quite a number of questions on the feminists, which threw Alex off, given that Novak, all the while professing enthusiasm, had accorded them fairly short shrift during class.

  It was important that Alex do well: the year before, Novak had actually failed him on the theory part of his comprehensives. Alex had made the mistake of leaving all his theory to the end of his prep time, figuring he already had a smattering of the stuff secondhand from his Master’s, but then when he’d sat down with the texts he hadn’t been able to get through more than a few pages of any of them without falling asleep. He had somehow managed to fudge his way through the written exam, but at the oral Novak had been merciless.

  “I’m afraid I can’t pass you on this,” he’d said finally. “If you want you can take my course next term and I’ll put in an incomplete until then.”

  Alex had been livid. The incomplete was a courtesy to save risking the little scholarship the university had given him, but still Alex was tempted, out of sheer bloody-mindedness, just to take the fail and come back at the thing on his own. Except that he would still have been up against Novak, who would probably have found a way to break his balls again. Novak had it in for him, he figured, on account of that accursed article of his in Canadian Studies, which was a send-up of probably everything Novak held dear. In the end, Alex swallowed his pride and signed up for Novak’s course. Bit by bit, he actually started to like the man—he turned out not to be the stickler Alex had taken him for but a fox, leading them into the thickets and then running circles around all their false assumptions. Then at some point he learned Novak had done work on the Victorians, and went in to speak to him about his thesis.

  “Well, well. Let’s take a look at what you’ve got.”

  So it had come about that a weird symbiosis had developed between the two of them. Alex signed Novak on as his advisor, relieved to get free of the dinosaur he’d started out with, who’d had him reading Pater and Wilkie Collins for cultural context, and convinced at some level that anyone as hard on him as Novak had to be in the right. Then there was the air of political romance that surrounded Novak: he was a ’68er, having left Czechoslovakia just after the ill-fated Prague Spring. In class the Prague Spring served as a metaphor for one of the central tenets of Novakian thought, the impossibility of knowing a thing when you were in the middle of it.

  “The amazing thing was that people in the West probably knew more than we did—they had television, newspapers, when we were just on some street corner and didn’t even know what was going on around the block.”

  Alex had never had the courage to put a direct question to Novak about his life then but imagined it in suitably Cold War terms, the samizdat presses, the petitions, the secret meetings in the dead of night. He was willing to forgive Novak quite a bit on that account—his obvious unease with young men of a certain intelligence, for instance, which he covered with banter and biting sarcasm. With intelligent young women he was worse, something that had become increasingly apparent since Alex had moved to Mackay and the weekly après-class gathering had been shifted from the Café Prag on Bishop to Alex’s apartment. Novak was fond of his whiskey, which he didn’t mind asking Alex to keep in supply. Not, however, that it turned him into some sort of common lout; rather, it seemed to have the effect of sharpening him like a knife. He would be off in a corner in some tête-à-tête and there would be a flash, a little gesture, a quiet word, and suddenly the ground would be covered in blood.

  Alex’s hand was getting sore. Novak wasn’t even pretending to keep watch while they wrote, sitting up at the teacher’s table peering narrow-eyed through his aviators into a text that had the fresh, unthumbed look of something hot off the academic press. He was a funny-looking man, really, spindly and slight but with a big, balding pate that gave him the appearance of a perfect egghead. And yet there was something magnetic about him, even attractive. It was the attraction of intellect, Alex figured, of seeming to see down into every sloppy syllogism or specious thought you’d ever let yourself get away with.

  Novak did not look up from his book until Stephen, the first to finish, inevitably, got up, in his measured way, to hand in his paper.

  “Piece of cake,” Stephen said dryly, the sort of joke, for some reason, maybe because he knew everything, had read everything, he could get away with.

  “Don’t forget a bottle tonight,” Novak said. “The good stuff, not the rotgut Alex usually has.”

  Alex wrote until the full three hours of the exam had elapsed. That was a mistake, he knew, it would seem amateurish to Novak, but he wasn’t taking any chances. There were big patches of sweat under his arms, the vinegary tang of which wafted up to him as he rose to hand in his paper.

  “Are we still on for our meeting today?”

  Novak squinted at him through his glasses as if he’d never set eyes on him before.

  “Sorry?”

  “About my dissertation.”

  “Sure. Sure. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  He was grateful when Novak’s attention shifted at once to Amanda behind him and he was able to slip away before she’d had a chance to accost him.

  The budding sense of purpose and hope Alex had had when he’d gone to bed the night before was more or less withered. He hadn’t called Ingrid, of course, and wasn’t about to call
her now, when he felt like he’d just emptied out his insides. Instead he went down to the liquor store on St. Catherine, still fuming over Novak’s crack about his whiskey, and picked out a forty-dollar Scotch, with the thought of throwing it in Novak’s face. Then, realizing that whatever he did would somehow end up turning against him, he walked out of the store without buying anything.

  For lunch he dug some three-day-old shawarma out of the back of his fridge, eating it cold while he thumbed through his thesis proposal in preparation for his meeting. All crap, he thought, just a hopeless rehash of the half-baked notions he had strung together more than two years earlier for his admissions application. He’d be lucky if Novak didn’t just drop him. He’d be precisely nowhere then.

  It’s curious, isn’t it? You go along all your life, expecting some plan’ll show itself, then you find out there isn’t one. That it’s just one damn thing after another.

  I suppose it’s a little like evolution, when you think of it, Peter. Some things work, some don’t. Natural selection.

  I guess that would make you a sort of genetic dead end.

  Novak’s office was just up the street in the Liberal Arts Building, a Second Empire graystone where the university’s Great Books program was housed. Most of the building’s nineteenth-century charm had been gutted out of it, replaced by padded divider walls and acoustic ceiling tiles, but there was still a collegial air of unhurried scholarship to the place, a rarity in these days of Gradgrindian utilitarianism. Novak was at the end of the main floor, in a cubbyhole of an office that overlooked the fire exit and back alley. Despite the impression he gave of sinecured permanence Novak was actually a sessional, and so had ended up banished here to his little closet in Liberal Arts rather than over in English among the tenured. Alex was always surprised by how tidy and spruce Novak’s office was, his books neatly shelved, his desk clear, the tiny couch beneath his window available for sitting. Alex supposed that all this mirrored the tidiness of Novak’s mind, though it did not seem to mirror his life. Rumors about him swirled constantly through the department—the wife who had recently decamped to Toronto, ostensibly to follow a job, though the grapevine said otherwise; the son who was apparently a skinhead. Novak, however, never gave any outward sign of these disturbances, or even that he had descended long enough from the usual parapets of his thought to notice them.