Oh Christ, it’s—it’s right behind you, right fucking now. You know, the—Christ, Steve, you know what the fuck I’m fucking talking about—
* * *
‘Sybil, what do you want?’ you ask. To which I reply . . .
* * *
—fuck, don’t look, moron, just don’t—
* * *
I want to DIE!
* * *
—STEPHEN, FOR FUCK’S SAKE, DO NOT LIGHT THAT FUCKING CA—
Mouthful of Pins
SOMETIMES I DREAM that my father, who’s been dead for eight years now, appears at my door in the middle of the night and tells me he’s actually been living in another country with a whole new family—but he won’t tell me where or who, no matter how I plead and cry. Sometimes I dream of rain. But mostly I dream of Yle’en, the Drowned Land. I dream of the Twins and the Green Lady, of the Monocle, the Hammerheads, and the Unseen King. And that frightens me.
* * *
There were five of us in the game of Yle’en—Mary, and Eunice, and Ray, and Trevor, and me. We were all quite young when it began, friends mainly by virtue of our shared pain. We met at school. Hurried conversations in the yard at recess soon revealed our remarkable similarities. Mary and Eunice received midnight visits from their live-in uncle, as I recall, while Ray’s highly religious relatives’ ideas about child-rearing had left him with an awful stutter. Trevor’s fat
her ignored him. Mine beat me. We would all have gladly traded places with each other. That not being possible, we escaped—as far as we could—into Yle’en.
We were model children, all told—quiet, neat, polite. Our bruises kept well-hidden under slightly unseasonable clothes, we faced the world each day with the calm aplomb of prisoners of war. We never talked back, or broke things, and didn’t seem actively unhappy. We simply hadn’t the strength to be.
So we created Yle’en, which slowly gained strength enough for all of us.
Eventually, we grew apart. Our time in hell done, we exploded out into the world, and haven’t stopped moving in completely different directions since. Ray lives with his lover in Vancouver, making sculptures from “found objects.” Eunice has three kids of her own. Trevor is a homicide detective in Winnipeg. I’m still in Toronto, working for an ad agency. You may have seen a few of my commercials for beer, cars, or the Canadian National Exhibition. I put in too much overtime, drink more than I should, and—once every two years or so—precipitate a brief but painful affair by picking up a similarly ambitious young woman in a downtown gay bar. Late at night, I often go into the bathroom and press a lit cigarette into the crook of my elbow. Just to prove that I’m really alive.
But Mary is dead.
* * *
Yle’en is a cold place with a very rigid hierarchy. Being more than a little intimate with the power of fear, we populated it with the things we each feared most. I contributed my twin brother Ian, who fell from a second-story window when we were five. His memory took fresh significance as the glass-armored Twins, one of whom lies forever coiled inside the other like a twisted reel of tapeworm. Ray, who had a morbid dislike of flowers, which possibly stemmed from his love/hate relationship with female genitalia, remade himself as the Green Lady—her arms and her legs articulated like a praying mantis’s, her face a ravenous lily. The Monocle was Trevor’s father’s geometry set—Yle’en’s executioner, cutting variables viciously down to size with his razor-edge calipers. Eunice’s repressed rage finally found form as the Hammerheads, a whole shoal of sleek, stupid ghost-sharks bent on mutilation.
And Mary was the Unseen King.
She brought a book on Antarctica to school one day and spread it out excitedly beneath the jungle-gym. “The most inhospitable place on earth,” she called it. Faced with the facts, we had to agree.
Turning and turning at the world’s utter end, breaking apart only to reform again with a slowness which makes fossils seem hasty, Antarctica is an abstraction made real upon which nothing was ever meant to live for long. It is nothing, an inexhaustible waste stretching as far as the eye can see—numb, blind, and devouring.
It was the way we felt. We loved it for that, and made it our own.
In Yle’en, no clocks run. In Yle’en, the ice is made of glass. It freezes the breath solid in your lungs everywhere you touch, choking you, cutting you to the bone. Blood is its art, cruelty its highest form of compliment. Our horrid avatars move with ritual politesse across its blank, lidless eye. Their hunger is an incurable virus running rampant and unafraid across the crevasses, inexorable.
We exiled our parents to Yle’en daily, and tortured them without pity. We murdered countless generations there, and reanimated them to face the knives again, at a whim. We exterminated a slew of civilizations, just for fun. And, along the way, we instilled Yle’en’s citizens with our own values—the wit and wisdom of abused children, laid down as unbreakable law.
We took comfort in it, outgrew it, and forgot it.
But it never forgot us.
* * *
A week before she died, Mary called me up. I had just broken with Babs for once and for all, and was drowning my sorrows with crème de menthe in the kitchen. I let the phone ring ten times before I picked it up, more out of respect for the caller’s tenacity than curiosity.