When his aunts and uncles had drunkenly patted him on the back that summer at the family gathering, congratulating him on the degree, he could only give a lame “yeah, thanks,” and smile uncomfortably. He felt bad about this. It was clear they expected more from their freshly graduated scholar, as people kept calling him ironically. A speech, a few words, something clever or funny, but nothing came out. His family poured him out drinks, shots, they told him he was an adult now. His father, by the end of the night, even drunkenly told everyone that he planned to give him the old family car, and everyone cheered and patted him on the back. And he was grateful. But throughout the night, as he looked around, his eyes fell again and again on the same scene. His uncle, red-faced, drunk, seated in his deck chair, 40 years of being a weekend warrior stacked in folds on his stomach, lighting another cigarette between his fat fingers; cracking another Busch Ice, laughing at some joke one of his buddies made, the same jokes they had been making since he was a kid. When they asked him what was next, he said he didn’t know, even though he did – he would move out of his college town and get a job – but the wide-open world they congratulated him on entering only seemed to him flat and empty.
And now, walking through the city streets he passed people – businessmen in their suits, younger professionals in chinos and polo shirts, students dressed in rags not out of want but as a matter of style – and he wondered how he could live among these people. Most didn’t look at him, the few who didn’t meet his eyes. All trudged without emotion along the rainy street, stepped over puddles, all marched with the same tirelessness past the 19th century houses that now rented as split apartments for a whole paycheck a month. It was the students he most closely watched. He had been one of them just now, not so long ago, and he still saw them as he had then – living, breathing, full of life, like bright spring flowers still peeking out through the fall mud. But now there was a wall between him and them, they lived in a world he no longer had access to. At times he lingered about the campus on his walk home from the parkade where he rented a parking spot – a hundred and fifty dollars a month – and watched the students exit the dorms and the study halls, wearing red and gold with their school logos emblazoned on the fronts of their sweaters, carrying books, walking about with big ridiculous headphones on. Could it have been so long ago that he walked among them? Only a year prior he had stood in those big, thronging crowds, laughed with them, he had lived in that world; and now even standing on the sidewalk beside the university he felt like an uninvited guest intruding on something private.
Where was that world now? Where had it gone? Plainly it was still there but no longer could he reach it. He peered through the branches of the trees at the tall white pillars, watched the heave and swell of the red and gold against the shimmering marble steps. His aunts and uncles when they spoke to him, intimately, their faces nearly touching his ear, told him it was the freedom he would miss. The nine-to-five eats up all your time, they said. You can’t stay up late or sleep in. You can’t get drunk on a Wednesday night and skip class Thursday morning. But it wasn’t the freedom he missed. He certainly hadn’t been free as a student. Always he had been dogged by deadlines, by assignments and emails, straining in the late hours of the night and the early hours of the morning to finish his work; and yet he had never felt fettered. Now he had two whole days of freedom each week, two entire days, and he did stay up late and sleep in and go out drinking just as he used to. But there was something else missing, something that he could still feel when he walked by that campus that he was unable to put into words. There was a humming, a kind of life that blew off onto the sidewalk where he stood, intoxicated him with its perfume. Now he could only lap up the dregs.
It was the wild, breathless vitality of student life that he missed. The rolling green lawns of campus invite you into the mystery; the vines that enwrap every red-brick building seem to speak to you of all the undiscovered possibility that life holds. Standing on that wide open expanse, with the warm September sun painting everything in gold, every first-year student has the same secret, exhilarating thought: that all the world is there before them, waiting, waiting to be had. But it was the standing columns of marble, at the very centre of the campus, that were the most important part. Archaic, immense, holding up the pediment of University Hall, it was they that allowed for that living, breathing Arcadia that grew out all around them. It was these pillars that existed as the solid foundation of the whole world. The campus lifted you up; it allowed you, for the first time in your life, to see what could be. But it was those pillars that demanded something of you in your newfound freedom. You looked at them as they looked back at you. It was those pillars that demanded that you become what you are.
Walking home along the rainy street he didn’t stop at his apartment. It was a fashionable apartment, in an expensive part of town, but sometimes he couldn’t stand it for its emptiness. It was one apartment among a million other fashionable apartments, an island fortress among other island fortresses in an endless concrete sea. Instead of stopping he put in his headphones, put on his old and familiar music, and continued to walk. He stepped around the crowd listlessly waiting for the bus. It was overcast, grey, but it wasn’t raining anymore. The deluge had come and gone and now only the rolling grey autumn clouds remained. The wind pushed at his back, flapped his coat around. He kept walking, his feet carrying him along, over the bridge and towards the park. Sometimes he just needed to think. He couldn’t think in his apartment. He wasn’t yet used to the endless buildings of the city, the tall towers and the old houses and workshops, the confinement. He was used to the countryside and his little university town, where the woods were only a short distance away at any given point. The park was a poor substitute, but it was better than sitting in his apartment for the entire evening.
The world around him faded into nothing as he walked. He passed faces, more bus stops, corner stores, nothing made an impression, like droplets of water on a windshield all these images rolled off and away with his motion. When he arrived the park was as busy as the streets. As soon as the rain had let up, people had come with their dogs, their families, and despite the overcast day they walked about with energy. He brushed the water off a bench and sat down. The trees in the park were scraggly and bent, mostly pine and twisted white poplars and Norwegian maples, but here and there a towering oak stood out, its head shifting in the wind above the rest; and hanging over the trail where people walked a willow brushed its long branches against the ground. Past the trees he could see the ocean, ships coming and going to port, and with the people walking and the trees moving there was a sense of activity; he even thought that the sky seemed lighter here only a few kilometres away. He watched the happy families and their children running and playing, the old couples walking through the park. At a bench not far from him an old Arabic man sat and smoked a tall hookah. How he had carried the fragile thing down here was a mystery, and the sight, completely out of place, made him smile.
Off to his left he heard movement. He turned his head, and just then from out of the woods a dog appeared, golden, its big head looking left and right. The dog stopped for a moment. They locked eyes. Then the dog jerked its head and sprinted away. He watched it go. His eyes turned back to the place where the dog had been just a moment ago and he was suddenly struck by memory. He was fourteen years old again, walking through the woods around his childhood home with his father. It was a fine, sunny spring day. A cool wind had been blowing and lazy white clouds shuffled across the bright blue sky. As he and his father rounded a corner, a fox had come up out of the ditch and stopped and stared at them just like the dog. He and his father had stopped in surprise. They instantly became quiet. The fox was long, sleek, brilliantly red, muscular – it was clearly eating well. Its paws were covered in mud. Its shining dark eyes had met theirs; its little head had tilted to the side as though asking them a question. And then, a moment later, the fox ran away. He remembered it perfectly. His father had laughed, a big, hearty laugh – “that’s not something you get to see every day, eh?” – and they continued their walk. And afterwards the woods had seemed somehow more alive, the plants and grasses had seemed greener and newer, as though the fox had brought the very life of spring out of the undergrowth with it and into the brilliant, shining sun.
When he came back out of this reverie, he was shocked to feel tears, real tears wetting his face. It had been a long time since he had last cried. He fought the rising in his throat. His jaw quivered. How he longed to go back to that day! How he wished it could be spring in the woods again, spring forever. And how different, he thought, was his life now to what it had once been – how different was the world he had come to inhabit. Somewhere was living, breathing life, pounding through the forest on light feet, and once he had seen it himself – where had that fox gone now?
He was embarrassed at the tears on his face, which still fell, and not wanting to make a scene he got up and left. As he stumbled back towards his apartment, he saw that it was indeed darker towards the city. More clouds had rolled in as though the storm had decided to pick up where it had left off. He saw the cars lining the streets and the lights of the buses passing in the now darkening twilight, he heard his apartment door close behind him, but once he sat down at his desk in his room he realized he could not recall any of the walk home. How different life had seemed to him back then! What had been lost – what had been lost and left behind on those broad campus lawns, in the spring woods, and how could he retrieve it? His head whirled, he neither saw nor heard a thing. His music played in his ears and the night passed on, but he couldn’t calm himself, and finally, weariness overtaking him, he climbed into bed.
When his alarm went off the next morning it was as though he hadn’t slept at all. He got dressed in his slacks and his collared shirt, he climbed down the steps and into his car and as always, he began his commute – but something felt different. Looking through his office window that morning he watched the sun rise up over the bay. The sky was clear. The water in the bay was brilliant, undulating, the sun shone and painted everything in the colours of golden autumn. The steam from his coffee rose up to his nose and fogged his glasses. He tried to type, tried to open his email inbox, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t focus on his work at all. His mind returned to the fox, the campus, the wet leaves on the steps of university hall, it returned again and again to his father’s booming laugh, to the face of his uncle, obscured and yellowed by cigarette smoke. And it seemed to him – the thought occurred, tentatively, quietly, a mysterious, secret thought – that the life in the fox was in him also. It seemed to him that he too could carry that life out of the underbrush, that all the world could be animated by this same spirit, that even the lowliest could be brought up into the shining light of day – by his hand, by his effort, could be brought to full bloom – and that whatever he had once had was not lost, only forgotten, and that what is forgotten can always be remembered. He watched the sun rise up over the bay until it reached its completion and stood in its lofty position in the sky. And then he finished his coffee, turned to his computer, and set to his work.
The world of boomers, for a youth full of vigor, certainly is a dreadful one.
Very good young Werther! The cure for existentialism is always joyous Work. I especially love this line: "Somewhere was living, breathing life, pounding through the forest on light feet, and once he had seen it himself,"
Good luck on your play and short stories as well.