31 Halloween and I’m dressed as Question Man. I have a pair of cardboard glasses shaped into question marks. I wear a belt buckle with a question mark. Alex is dressed as a sheep and she asks me for a light. She says, Question Man, do you have a light? I’d thought Alex was a rabbit, but she’s Sheep.
I dont have a light, I say.
There is a freshly dug grave and a straw man with a pick through his head. The head is made of newspaper stuffed in a yellow sock. There is a thick-lipped sardonic smile. I see Lydia speaking to the pope, who wears a tablecloth and a tea cosy on his head. The pope is Craig Regular. When the hell did he get back in town? There is no defining element in the men Lydia finds attractive. All shapes and character types. Always a surprise: Wilf breaks into big American musical numbers. Craig is goofy but smart. Earl has an academic intensity. Some are sweet, others are sexy. Wilf has a charisma, that’s undeniable. But he’s an alcoholic.
I take a burning plank from the fire and hold it to Sheep. The plank has cinders and blistered edges. She bends towards it. The plank is hot on the fingers, but I still hold it. I know Sheep thinks this is dramatic.
The harbour is shiny. The planks we are burning are the same kind the house is made of. The updraft is making a ghost float.
Inside, Sheep takes me by the waist and says, Dance with me, Question Man.
Lydia comes up to me, and offers the final question of the night: What is the function of regret. And I say, it allows you to understand that there are other possible lives to lead.
No one, thankfully, asks me Leibniz’s question: Why is there not nothing?
November
1 I wake up. I wake up in the dark and there is someone leaning in to my room. It’s a woman. Come on, she says. She must be tugging my shoulder.
Gabe, come on.
It’s Lydia.
We’re going to Max’s, she says.
It’s the middle of the small hours. Max is propped by the gatepost, giggling in the dark. The giggle tells me he’s loaded. Maisie is sitting on the rock wall.
A boy, Max says. I’ve got a boy.
I’m afraid to take his arm from the gate. I am too sober to enjoy them. But we walk arm in arm up the road.
Max says there was a seam of black, the blood vessels breaking on Daphne’s face. He cut the umbilical cord. The cord deep blue and red.
Shhh, Max says. He misses the keyhole with his key. He tries again. I try taking the key from him, but he resists.
Are they in hospital?
Max: Theyre upstairs. Let’s go around the back.
And we sit on his deck and whisper loudly.
Daphne, he says. With a finger to his lips.
Have you got a name yet?
Havent got a name. Maybe Eli.
They are all about five beers ahead of me. Max and Lydia had called but my phone was unplugged.
Max finds us a round of beer. I realize they are in conversation. It’s a conversation I can’t follow, but there’s a raw nerve of excitement, of the new boy in the world.
I drink my beer and let them gush on. At one point, Max says, Some people never become themselves because theyre afraid to be fools.
2 Sometimes, at night, late, I will see Boyd’s pickup idling, parklights on, in behind the Big R on Long’s Hill. Boyd Coady stands across the street, hands in jeans pockets, looking in a gallery window at a print on an easel. He was on his way home and had to have a look. Longing for something in the print. The print is nostalgic, an outport at dusk, yellow squares of light indicating windows, woodsmoke, a reflection in a still sea. Boyd is longing for this. He lived there once.