Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (3 page)

By the time Sankar reached the residential area of Scenery Hills the rain had eased and the sun come out. Sankar gestured to the tropical phenomenon of falling rain and brilliant sun—different in quality of light and even texture of the rain itself from the sun showers we in Canada know—and he said, as if it were a question, “The devil and his wife?” I felt like a child, but I knew it would please him if I finished his sentence. “Are quarrelling,” I said. We were both pleased that I had remembered the local saying.

Sydney was usually wheeled out into the garden by Lancelot at four thirty or so every afternoon, but this time he had waited for me to take him out. In the past, he would almost lift himself out of the chair, reaching his arms up around my neck in greeting, but today he remained sitting, his hands on his lap, turning them palms up for me to rest mine inside. He had indeed deteriorated.

I pushed the chair through the wet grass to the edge of the garden and positioned it to face the calming waters of the Gulf, grateful that Lancelot had telephoned me in Toronto to say that I should come down at once. I had been skeptical at first, given that I had rushed to Sydney’s side on two previous occasions because “Sydney take in bad-bad and only calling your name,” as Lancelot had explained. “If he come through is only because God so good he spare him, yes,” and therefore I “should come quick-quick.” So down I rushed. Of course, Sydney had pulled through both times. After the last trip, I had returned home to Toronto thinking irritably of Lancelot as the nursemaid who cried wolf. But when he’d telephoned this last time, something compelled me to drop everything and head to the airport. Perhaps it was Lancelot’s unusual restraint, and his use of standard English. “Mr. Sydney isn’t doing too well,” he said. “He is weak. We are a little worried. If you don’t mind us saying so, Mr. Jonathan, we think you should come. If he sees you, he might pick up.”

The red-and-black plaid wool blanket I had foolishly brought Sydney the first time I visited was draped on his lap as if the air were as chilly as a late fall Toronto evening. I am still embarrassed and amused by my own prior ignorance; knowing more now, I think of stories I’ve heard about aid agencies battling the after-effects of disasters in tropical countries, appealing to well-meaning people from colder climes—like my old self, I suppose—not to make donations of duvets, wool blankets, fur coats and the like. But Sydney
used the blanket right up until the end. I don’t know if it was because it suited his actual needs or because it was I who gave it to him.

That evening, Sydney didn’t hold my hand like he usually did. He wasn’t able to. His remained in mine only because I gripped it firmly. His skin was cool. It had become thin. I tried, and I certainly hope I succeeded, not to show my utter terror at how he had weakened and aged since I was last here. The thick gold bangle I have always known him to wear, a
bayrah
it is called here, seemed too large and far too heavy for his slender wrist. The sea ahead shimmered gold and onyx, and the sky, shot across only minutes before with wispy tails of gold-dappled airplane exhaust, soon turned bloody brown. We sat watching the light play on the sea, both of us quiet. Everything seemed, at once, dire and ultimately of no consequence. What words dare be spoken, sentiments expressed, in such circumstances?

Save for the screeching of parrots as they lumbered like stones through the air, the rustling of billowy stands of bamboo in the hills behind us and the passage of the occasional car below, it was a quiet evening. Time seemed to collapse, and once again I found myself acutely aware of my surroundings. I stored in my memory details of the view, of the scents and sounds, and at the same time my mind leapt forward in place and time, imagining looking back on the moment we were in. Then, quite contrarily, I thought of Toronto, of how cold it had been when I left that morning, so cold that I wore my leather jacket to the airport
and left it in Catherine’s hands as we said goodbye on the sidewalk outside of Terminal 3. Such cold there, I thought, and here such suffocating humidity—the extremes available to a person in a single day. Poor Catherine, I thought, too, and immediately wondered if it was fair to pity her and yet hold on to her. She had come to know that whenever I visited Sydney I was leaving her in more ways than one. And then I realized that in thinking of Catherine I had squandered precious moments with Sydney. I focused my mind and squeezed his hand.

He cleared his throat. I found myself saying lightly that his skin was a bit dry and that next time I came down I would bring him a good hand cream. He nodded. Ahead of us, the iron bulk of oil tankers faded rust-orange rode high and leaned back as they awaited cargo from the oil refinery to the south. From the refinery’s harbour—an iron and asphalt archipelago in the Gulf—danced tiny points of orange flame that intensified as darkness descended. Lights on the lower decks of the cruise ships had lit up as we sat. The staccato sound of a police siren floated upwards on a breeze, followed by the monotonous two-tone siren of an ambulance. Sydney pulled lightly at my hand. I stooped at his side. In a low voice he asked how I was getting along with my work. I told him that I’d written a few small pieces for magazines. He asked more directly, had I been able to make headway with the writing of short stories or a novel? He must have known that I was not telling the truth when I said, “Yes, yes, I’m working on something,” and elaborated no more.

He merely nodded again. Then he advised me that he had spoken with the pundit who would officiate “at the end.” I chastised him, gently of course, saying that there was no need for such thinking, no need for such talk, and that once we were back inside the house we should telephone his doctor and request a house call, and that I was sure that he would in no time feel better. He let me ramble, but when I finished he was firm. Whether we liked it or not, he said, the conversation had to happen, and what would make him feel better right then was to know that he had said what needed to be said, and that I’d heard him.

I felt suddenly weak, and my tongue seemed to swell inside my mouth, stifling my words. The chugging of fishermen’s boats grew louder and voices drifted our way. In my mind waxed an image of the market at the wharf in Port of Spain, a vendor’s stall there, and on the counter deep trays of shaved ice that cradled plastic bags of fish tails, bones and heads—eyes blank and lips parted to reveal rows of tiny teeth and hard, fat tongues. Sydney said something, but his voice seemed far away as in my mind I levitated. Like a dragonfly I darted off, and in an instant I was high above the King’s Wharf in Port of Spain looking down at the fish market, at beached pirogues, a cruise ship and the St. Vincent Jetty Lighthouse and the traffic circling it. I took off inland, around the humming towers and the wires of the city’s electricity plant and over the cemetery, and only when I arrived at the Savannah, above a bromeliad-laden, centuries-old samaan tree, did I come to a halt—truly in
mid-air. I angled myself to make a nose-dive into a coconut vendor’s stand.

Sydney must have seen that I’d gone far away, for in his typical manner he sharply yet gently squeezed and shook my hand to bring me back to attention. Listen, Jonathan, he said. You must listen, please. He wanted me to take the lead in the ceremony, he said. I bore up quickly, and had enough presence of mind to speak around the thickness in my mouth, the lightness in my head. What would taking the lead entail? I asked. He brushed the question away with a gesture of his fingers, and said that Pundit would guide me through everything. My dread must have been evident, for Sydney said that I shouldn’t worry too much, that it was all quite straightforward. I was to take charge of his affairs, too, he said. He had left notes outlining it all. He said he wanted me to know that the house, this house here in Scenery Hills, would be mine.

This last was too much at once, too premature. I may have arrived expecting the worst, but now that I was here, in his presence, touching him and speaking with him, I was not prepared to let him go so soon. Sydney then asked if I would wear the
bayrah
that was on his wrist. I held both his hands in mine, and brought them to my lips. When I was a child, such displays of affection had been the norm between us, but during these last years we had not been physically close. During Sydney’s final days, however, nothing was as usual. If a script exists for such a time I have never seen it, and all that I had learned about how to conduct myself
in the world fell away and had to be reinvented. Time and habits and ways shifted forwards and backwards and sideways, without reason. Sydney slid the
bayrah
off his wrist and tried to put it on mine, without success. I put it back on his wrist and our mutual distress was relieved with more laughter than the situation merited.

We moved inside the house as the last light faded. Sydney insisted he did not want the doctor. He wanted time alone with me, he said. His frailness in the lamplight appalled me, and, looking back, I have asked myself how could I not have seen that he was so close to the end? Still, I console myself with the thought that nothing about him indicated that he was anything but compos mentis, and perhaps I erred on the side of respect for his autonomy. Perhaps I should simply have heeded my own judgement and called for a doctor the instant I had arrived at the house. But there were things on his mind, things he’d begun to tell me and hadn’t finished, and he insisted he needed to tell me everything
now
, for who knew if there was to be another visit.

During my many previous visits to his home in Scenery Hills, Sydney would regale me with stories. He had once said—and I’m not entirely sure if he was joking—that if I ever ran out of stories to tell, the ones he was telling me would surely serve me well. Perhaps, I thought, but only if he told me what
I
wanted to hear. If he wasn’t telling me tales about his high school friend Zain, who had never left Trinidad, then he would tell and retell the story of a walk he took one early and snowy morning from his apartment in Toronto’s East End to a clinic in the downtown core. Over the years I had come to anticipate those moments when Sydney would squint at the mercurial sky and fix his questioning gaze on some site where was written, it seemed, these seemingly unrelated anecdotes. Sometimes, as one recounting went on, it would contradict previous ones. He would pluck out of the tome in the sky some memory of Zain or of that walk—the blizzard the night before, or the street worker who had
tried to get his attention, or the overturned, snow-covered wheelchair in the neighbour’s yard—and resume whichever version he fancied. He had an astonishing capacity for recall and for detail, and in his penchant for digression he would often follow to great depth seemingly tangential threads that would be suddenly dropped, left hanging loose and frayed.

I would always listen with half an ear cocked for reflections on our family, longing to hear mention of me, some indication that in all the years after he’d gone away I had remained in his thoughts. And I cannot deny that this last time I was, again, hopeful that what Sydney hadn’t finished saying, and now needed so desperately to say, concerned his relationship with me. I expected, too, that he would tell me immediately what was on his mind, but instead he asked me to take him into the dining room as it was dinnertime and he had asked Rosita to welcome me back with her stewed pork and red beans. Although he himself had no appetite and would not eat, he sat at the table with me. I was too worried about his condition to appreciate the meal. I had the good sense, however, to make some noise about how good it was, how touched I was that it had been made for me. I kept hoping that he’d begin to tell me whatever it was that was so urgent, but perhaps Rosita hovering in the doorway between the kitchen and dining room—a sign of her anxiety about his health—inhibited him. I helped him into his bed shortly after, worried that perhaps the right time had passed, or perhaps it simply had not come at all, and never would. But at just that moment, thankfully, he asked
me to sit on the edge of the bed and stay with him a while.

He began—to my immense disappointment—by saying: Jonathan, you know that morning I told you about, when I walked in the snowstorm to the Irene Samuel Health and Gender Centre in Toronto? My heart that day was so heavy. There was no one with me, you know. There was all this snow and ice on the road, and as I’ve told you, there was that dreadful-dreadful wind, but I insisted on walking there. There were cabs about, but I wouldn’t hail any of them. He laughed then and said, I didn’t even want the company of a taxi driver.

My heart sank. Sydney was repeating—yet again—the story of that walk. Surely, I thought, he did not have the energy to embark on such a story, and I worried that precious moments were passing. I interrupted him, doing my best to reassure him that while I was always keen to hear that particular story, perhaps he ought to first tell me whatever was most pressing. He sighed and said, Listen, Jonathan,
this is
what I want to tell you about. I have never told you how that walk ended. But this time I must tell you. I must tell you all of it.

In my head—trapped there, thankfully—growled a rather loud voice:
All right; then tell me again if you must, but, for the love of God, please also tell me why you left our family
.

Sydney and I stared at each other. Then, as if he knew my mind, he said, Perhaps, Jonathan, you’ve been looking for simple explanations. But there is hardly ever a single answer to anything. And isn’t it so that the stories one most
needs to know are the ones that are usually the least simple or straightforward?

Sydney spoke in a soft voice, calculating his words. Contradictions are inevitable, he continued. You listening to my story is yet another angle; my story is incomplete, you see, Jonathan, without your interpretation—over which I have little control. No matter my noblest intentions, and no matter how detailed my accounts, you may still only catch a fraction of what I say. You must trust that in the story I will tell you tonight—God willing—is contained all you’ve wanted to know.