Plague Journal: A Novel

One

New Year’s Day. Our place, Swiftcreek, B.C.

Zizzy gave me this scribbler for Christmas, and I promised her I’d write in it, so here goes. She must have worked for days to decorate it, because the cover is a mosaic of hundreds of tiny images clipped from magazines and mail order catalogues, glued together into quite an original work of art. Mauve, violet, and lavender colors predominate. Exotic nineteenth-century heroines, herbs, flowers, miniature landscapes, and her favorite Renaissance paintings are arranged into a garden of earthly delights—the kind of delights that appeal to a ten-year-old girl.

   On the first page of looseleaf, she has pasted the old logo from my adolescent periodical, The Quill (total subscriptions during its heyday numbered forty-seven). Beneath the drawing of the quill she has penned an inscription in flamboyant calligraphy. It reads as follows:

To my Father, the best writer in the world.

   A slight exaggeration. When I unwrapped it on Christmas morning and read the dedication, I had to suppress a laugh, then suddenly I choked up. Tears in my eyes. Big hug.

   What a sweet kid. If only I could have been a better dad for her and Bam. If only, if only—the refrain of my life.

   It’s for you to write in, Poppa, she said.

   What’ll I write? I asked.

   Thoughts and secrets, and things you want to remember—the good things. She smiled at me. Not like the stuff you write for the paper.

   This is so beautiful, Zizzy, I don’t want to touch it. It’s a treasure. I couldn’t bear to mess it up.

   You’re supposed to mess it up! she laughed. That’s what it’s for.

   "Interesting insight for a giggling ten-year-old. A work of art that you’re supposed to mess up? Like my life, I suppose. Well, life is messy, pardon the cliché.

* * *

March 6.

The mind is a mosaic, or, more accurately, a swirling multimedia art form. I think about the mind-brain relationship constantly. How does it work? Why does it work? Chimps and crayfish figure things out within the parameters of their limited world views, but only man thinks about thinking.

   Which I am doing at the moment.

   Zizzy wants me to write good things. Thoughts and secrets and memories, she says. Yet two months have now passed, during which I have not found a free minute to collect my thoughts, to pick my way through the filing cabinet of recent events in search of a single archival treasure.

   Most treasures are fleeting. I dip into the reservoir and pull out a few:

Memory: A child’s smile, intimate but enigmatic: Waving goodbye, Bam hikes up Delaney mountain alone on snowshoes, as I did when I was his age. Waving hello, Zizzy builds a tree fort halfway up a giant cottonwood. Ascent is natural to children; it is their instinctive hunger for transcendence.

Memory: Ziz pretending she’s a ballerina after seeing a video of The Nutcracker. Arms extended for balance, tremulous at her first rise upon the point of her running shoe. Confident in her beauty, but untested. A fledgling, she has wings but cannot yet fly. This is the delicate moment, the first of many incidents in the long passage from childhood to adulthood. It needs the parent’s smile of encouragement and boundless (sometimes faked) confidence. Blunders are common at this point. Let the wise parent beware.

   You are my Dad, the smile asserts, and I love you, but I must have my own quest, and my own private interior, where I explore the terrain of my undiscovered self.

Memory: The pure contentment of waking from a sleep that is so deep and so restorative that you regain consciousness as if it were the first day of creation. Forgotten is your habitual fatigue and sadness and consciousness of failure. Gone is the knowledge that you are a bitter, middle-aged, single parent. You are rubbing sandman’s dust from your eyes, gearing down to be a responsible adult for yet another day, when what to your wondering eyes do appear but half a dozen teddy bears, seven dolls, a stuffed monkey, and a statue of the Blessed Virgin, ringing you on the rumpled quilt of your bed, each gazing upon you with great affection. And a note:

Breakfast will be Served shortly!

In Bed!

Happy Father’s Day Poppa!

   The smell of toast, frying bacon, and eggs.

Memory: I am six years old, lying on the silvery, mica-flecked sandbanks of the creek. I am wearing only swimming trunks, and the sun is burning on my back. I am watching the slow, exhausted lashing of battered salmon as they arrive at the last cascade of Swiftcreek, their ancestral spawning beds. They have completed the five-hundred-mile journey from the sea. They will give birth and die. For the first time in my life, I feel the immense dignity of life’s determination to prevail over death. I fall passionately in love and slide down into the cold waters of the creek to join them. I am a fish.

Memory: The first snow, two, maybe three years ago. It falls at dusk, late afternoon. The world is hushed, and the children run out through the back door and hurl themselves into it, making snow angels. After hesitating, I run out, too, coatless, and fling myself in between them, making a man-sized angel between the cherubim.

Memory: Deep winter. Bam, Ziz, and I are curled up together on the couch in front of a blaze of pine knots in the fireplace. Our hands dig into the greasy popcorn bowl while a blizzard howls outside the picture window. I light a candle and begin to read to them from Tolkien’s The Hobbit.

* * *

Stop right there, Dad! Zizzy commanded, sitting upright. Read that again.

Read what again, Honey? I asked.

The part about the stone.

The stone?

Please, Poppa, before it’s gone from my mind. Bam explained: I think she means the part where they’re running away from the dragon’s lair. You just read it a minute ago.

I did? I said, genuinely puzzled. Whatever they were referring to was definitely gone from my mind. I must have been reading on automatic pilot. I quickly scanned back a few paragraphs and found the section where the dwarves and the hobbit flee through the underground passages, hoping against hope that they will escape Smaug the Dreadful.

You mean where they’re running up the stone stairs? I asked.

Yes, that’s it, Ziz nodded dreamily, entranced by an obscure illumination. Read it again.

 ‘Though all the old adornments were long mouldered or destroyed, and though all was befouled and blasted with the comings and goings of the monster, Thorin knew every passage and turn. They climbed long stairs, and turned and went down wide echoing ways, and turned again and climbed yet more stairs, and yet more stairs again. These were smooth, cut out of the living rock broad and fair; and up, up, the dwarves went, and they met no sign of any living thing, only furtive shadows that fled from the approach of their torches fluttering in the draughts.‘ 

"Cut out of the living rock, Zizzy breathed, staring into space. Oh, that is so beautiful!"

Bam and I laughed. We think she’s a hopeless romantic.

Bam, in his thirteenth year of life, hates emotional excess. In recent months he has been exploring the male mystique of stoicism and big muscles.

"The dwarves wouldn’t have called it beautiful, he corrected his little sister in the driest tones of condescension. They were interested in making things. Useful things, not pretty things. Tunnels, underground cities, swords, tools—"

Poppa? Ziz ignored him. Isn’t Tolkien a genius at finding just the right word?

I nodded. He sure was.

I was busy pondering the fact that I had read the passage—aloud no less—without directly engaging my conscious mind. With a jolt I realized that the brain can function simultaneously on more levels than one. How utterly bizarre!

What did it mean? Was my brain fragmented, and, if so, did it mean I was crazy? Or was I a prototype of some new kind of man: homo sapiens multiplex, a superior being who can rub his tummy and pat his head at the same time?

Zizzy’s request had alerted me to the hidden dangers of complexification: a lack of focus, compartmentalization of thought, the loss of attention, an indifference to the illuminating moment.

I stared into the fire, my eyes blurring. Strangely I heard a fragment from a poem by Robert Frost, the words rising unbidden from memory: Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.

Now where on earth did that come from? And why did I hear it now, at this moment? Is there a central routing office at the core of the brain? A tiny secretary who directs all inquiries to the appropriate department? Or is there an omni-index that cross-references every scrap of meaning absorbed by the mind during its life? Then cross-references the cross references?

The word stone, for example. Through my mind there flashed a series of images:

The Tolkien passage I just read.

The Frost poem about tumbling stone fences in a field—Mending Wall, I think.

The time when I was eight years old and had finally mastered the art of stone-skipping, sending a flat, black disk of slate across the waters of Canoe River, touching the surface twelve times before it sank.

The red stone Bobby MacPhale pelted me with when I was fourteen years old, knocking me to the ground and giving me stitches in the forehead.

David’s five smooth stones, one of which killed Goliath.

My grandfather Stiofain’s stone cross, which is now hanging on a nail at his cabin down the road.

The stone that rolled over the entrance to the cave where I hid during the forest fire so many years ago.

The stone that rolled away from Christ’s tomb.

My grandfather Stiofain saying to me, Tanny, our hearts are like stone, and only suffering carves them into bowls big enough to catch the joy. Incomprehensible to me at the time, but unforgotten.

And so forth.

I tore my eyes away from the fire, shut down the mill-race of memory, and resumed reading to the kids.

* * *

May 20, Swiftcreek

Pick a word, any word, and see what the index comes up with. Try Love. Or Hate. War? Truth, maybe? Wife? Maya?

   No, not wife. Not Maya. Definitely not Maya.

   How about the word pain?

   Doc Woolley says the brain is basically a machine, with a driver attached, but a driver who is conditioned by the instrument he thinks he controls. There is something not quite right in this concept, but I’m not sure what it is. So far, I’ve been able to locate and distinguish several levels of function that I loosely group under the title Myself. Me. Nathaniel Delaney:

   1. intellect—data, ideas, rational concepts.

   2. imagination—the inner theater. All kinds of images and dramas pop up on the screen, with or without an invitation.

   3. emotions—raw surges of feeling, some pleasant, some not so pleasant.

   4. the body—the senses (self-explanatory).

   5. Grandpa Delaney insists on the category of the spirit. A man’s soul, he calls it. I’m undecided about this department, having received no absolutely convincing evidence about the question from the other departments. Although there are tremors on the edge of consciousness that indicate undiscovered dimensions of our being, for the moment one can conclude only this: the human person is complex, unpredictable, a mystery. Above all we are not machines.

* * *

June 8. Our house

My daughter, Zöe, and my son Tyler have embarked upon an adventure. A real adventure.

   They have gone away on a four-day school trip to Vancouver. I dropped them off at the bus, then came home to a hollow house. I’m all alone for the first time in ages. I find myself floundering in an unexpected hiatus of silence. I hear Bam and Zizzy laughing and talking in the backyard, which is impossible, so it must be some kind of residual memory, maybe a minor bug in the index, or just the automatic pilot humming along oblivious to real-time. Who knows? Sometimes I turn around to see where the voices have come from only to catch myself, the fool of a not unpleasant hallucination. I laugh, scratch my head, then as an afterthought I rub my tummy.

* * *

That was all I could write. The mind-mosaic swarmed with multicolored stories, images, fragments, but none of it would gather itself into a coherent form, and I couldn’t seem to force it to do so. Was it writer’s block or general burnout? In any event, the index was locked.

I went out on the back porch with a cup of coffee and my pipe. The sittin’ stump in the yard had been rain washed and sun dried, and it seemed to beckon me to meditation. I sighed. I was too tired for meditation. Thinking takes effort. But I sat down on it anyway.

A squirrel descended the tree upside down and scolded me for disturbing his projects. Or maybe he was just making his policy statement. A male, no doubt, establishing the borders of his little geopolitical world. Size means nothing when the territorial instinct is at work. Possibly he was just scolding me for my shallowness, my heaviness, whatever—my many failures.

Easy for you, Chip! Easy for you to judge! I said. You are neither complex nor a mystery to yourself.

This infuriated him, and he launched into a diatribe against the follies of mankind.

Chip, I said in a conciliatory tone, it’s not my fault.

His arch look implied that it certainly was my fault.

Spreading my arms wide, I protested: "Do I look like I invented the neutron bomb? Do I look like I invented the concentration camp?"

Blame shifter! he accused in a nasty little voice. You’re all blame shifters. I sighed again.

When she climbed onto the bus this morning, Zizzy turned, ran back down the steps, and gave me an extra good-bye kiss.

While we’re away, Poppa, don’t be lonely. Promise?

Sorry, kid. Can’t help it, I said. You’re not even gone yet, and already I’m lonely. I love you.

She grinned and gave me her best schoolmarm look. Maybe you’ll feel better if you write in your Christmas journal.

A capital idea, my dear young lady! I shall hurry home and do that very thing.

You can write the following, Poppa: ‘My daughter, Zöe, and my son Tyler have embarked upon an adventure. A real adventure.’ 

Excellent! I replied. Why, Miss Delaney, you and J.R.R. Tolkien have an uncanny genius for finding just the perfect word.

And so forth. We were interrupted by the impatient bus driver, the impatient teachers, and the impatient fellow students. Honk-honk, roar, gusts of diesel exhaust.

Well, I obediently wrote it down in the journal. But for now I am busy trying to rub my tummy and pat my head, lapsing into the private mental journal I keep whenever I am not talking to squirrels.

* * *

Royal York Hotel, Toronto. August 14

I’m here for the national press convention. It’s hot as blazes out there on the streets, but my room has air conditioning, thank goodness. Ziz must have smuggled the journal into my luggage. I’ve been remiss. Months have gone by, and I haven’t had a chance to write in it. I’ve been too busy, as usual.

   The kids will be having fun with Grandpa Delaney at his cabin. I miss them. I would like to call them, but Grandpa doesn’t have a phone.

   I was a bit miffed when the convention staff informed me upon arrival that my speech had been dropped from the schedule. No explanations, just weasel talk. They sent the press association’s PR man to handle me, and ooh, is he good at what he does. He said that somebody in clerical staff had made a big mistake, overbooked the speakers and underbooked the conference rooms. Profound apologies. His eyes shifted left for a split second. Next year, he said, they want me to be keynote speaker.

   Yeah, right.

   Obviously it has something to do with my latest editorials. I’ve been drifting from the comfortable center. More accurately, from their concept of the center. Of course they wouldn’t for a minute admit that’s the real reason.

   I ran into Pete Stanford in the lobby this morning. I haven’t seen him in years, not since he was a reporter at the Vancouver Star. We’re about the same age, mid-forties, but he looked ten years older than I. He seemed to be in rough shape, trembling hands and a haunted look in the eyes.

   He put on a hail-fellow-well-met mask for about thirty seconds, then sagged. A troubled guy. He said he had been looking forward to hearing my talk and was surprised to see it wasn’t on the schedule. He wanted to know what happened, so I told him.

* * *

They dropped me, I said.

That’s nuts, he growled. They didn’t drop any of the jerks. He named a few hacks. So how come they dropped you?

I don’t know for sure. Probably PC issues.

What! You? Politically incorrect? He shook his head in disbelief.

Yeah, I guess I am.

He laughed humorlessly. C’mon, Delaney, that can’t be the reason.

Sure could.

You? A fascist?

No, Pete, I said, as pleasantly as possible. I’m not a fascist. I’m not even conservative. Not what they mean by conservative.

He looked at me curiously. "Then what the hell are you?"

I don’t rightly know. Haven’t figured it out yet.

He pursed his lips, removed his glasses, and stared at the floor.

The medical ethics stuff?

That’s my guess. It’s considered downright distasteful, and very bad journalism, to publish an honest opinion these days. Have you noticed?

Yeah, I’ve noticed. Some of us are more equal than others, right?

Precisely. We’re living in Orwell country now, Pete. When did it happen? How did it sneak up on us?

It’s not that bad yet.

Yet? If the Supreme Court says it’s perfectly all right to give your grandma a lethal injection, or cut a child to pieces in the womb, it can’t be all that bad yet, eh?

He didn’t answer.

So, anyone who still calls it murder is a slandering, hate-mongering rabid dog and should be sued for libel, right?

At the very least, he’s an embarrassment, Pete mumbled.

So, pal, I’ll understand perfectly if you want to disassociate yourself from me. I don’t think anyone’s noticed us talking yet.

I said it rather sardonically. He stared into my eyes hard.

Thanks for the insult, Nathaniel. Just when I was about to offer you a drink.

Then he punched me semi-hard on the bicep and grinned crookedly. I’m buying, he said.

He took me up to the revolving restaurant on top of the CN tower. At 1800 feet, it’s reputed to be one of the world’s tallest structures. That’s a foothill where I come from, but when everything else is far below your line of sight, and even a huge city like this looks like a scattering of tiny dice, your perspectives alter somewhat. I expect they have inscribed on the roof, Neither God nor man can sink this ship. Only God would read it, of course.

The view was Zarathustrian. There we were, a century after Nietzsche, two little overmen—übermenschen—revolving in the eternal circle. The waiter brought our drinks, and we stared out the glass windows, watching the world rotate around us. Magnificent view of Lake Ontario. You could see the curve of the earth.

Pete’s macho joshing didn’t last long. Saying nothing, he stared glumly into the depths of his imported Dutch ale, while I swirled a swizzle stick in my vodka and orange juice. To break the uncomfortable silence, I asked about his family. I was pretty sure I had heard he was married.

My family? Which family? he said miserably.

Your wife, kids?

Had two. Two wives, four kids between them. Two families, not necessarily at the same time, mind you.

Had?

Both over.

I’m sorry, I said. Care to talk about it?

Not much. It was my fault.

My marriage is over, too, I offered. Also my fault. He looked up, vaguely interested. The usual causes? he asked.

Depends on what you mean by the usual. I didn’t cheat on her, if that’s what you mean. I just wasn’t there.

Same as me. No cheating, no wife abuse, in fact no nothing.

What happened?

Same as you, I wasn’t there for them. Always away foxhunting, chasing stories, pursuing my big career. You know the scenario.

"I know it all too well. The problem with me, Pete, was that I was there, but my head wasn’t. Maybe my heart wasn’t, either."

Any kids? he asked.

Three.

Who has custody?

I have the oldest two, my wife has the youngest. He was a baby when I last saw him several years ago.

Pretty nasty.

Yup. Leaves a hole in the heart.

Don’t I know it. My wives have custody. I don’t see my kids very often. They don’t like me.

I’m sorry.

Occupational hazard, he said. Yeah, occupational hazard.

This conversation was going nowhere fast. Clever lads that we were, we suddenly realized that we were indulging in convoluted thoughts as turgid as water circling a plugged bathtub drain.

Pete sat up straight and looked out at the topmost towers of the cityscape inching across his right shoulder. He drank his ale down to half empty.

How are you doing otherwise? I asked.

He gave me a baleful look. Otherwise? I write my columns, I pay child support, try hard not to turn into a dead-beat dad.

I read your articles on Africa and the Balkans. Very fine work.

He shrugged. As I watched, his hands began to tremble. Eyelids blinked too fast. Body language tightened up.

It must have been dirty over there, I prompted.

Understatement of the year. His voice was barely a whisper. He killed the final half of his drink, signalled to the waiter, and ordered another.

We sat in pained silence.

It shook you up, didn’t it? I said at last.

He nodded.

I decided not to probe. I had read his accounts of the massacres, the churches full of slaughtered women and children, the torture chambers and burial pits. The man was obviously still recovering.

He cleared his throat. Sorry, he said. It’s hard to talk about, even for an old newshound like me.

It must be, I said.

I’m not coping with it very well, he went on. My doctor has me on Valium. But it’s just taking the edge off. I’m not sleeping. The work is suffering.

It doesn’t show. I read your columns.

Thanks for the encouragement, but I know where the bear crapped in the buckwheat. You don’t get to be a foreign correspondent in a rag like mine by being dishonest with yourself. The fact is, my writing is slipping. If my higher brain functions keep shutting down, I won’t be at my desk much longer. The publisher wants me to check into a hospital. Then after some R and R, he’s going to pay for a short sabbatical. Which is generous of him.

Not so generous. You should consider it danger pay, or compensation for shell shock in the line of duty.

He smiled sadly. You’re probably right. If I get my confidence back, I’ll mention that to him.

He knows you’re worth it.

Maybe . . . Pete’s voice trailed off. He lapsed into a prolonged stare at the horizon.

I didn’t push, realizing it was better to wait for him to go on. There are other things happening, he said eventually.

What kinds of things?

He shrugged. Nothing you could put your finger on.

Personal things?

No. National things. International.

Oh, I see, foreign affairs issues.

He shook his head. Actually, you don’t see. Nobody sees.

I pressed him for an explanation, but he wouldn’t give one. Just mumbled, waved his hand dismissively. Shadows. Bad dreams. Bogeymen in the dark. It’s probably nothing.

It doesn’t sound like nothing.

He refrained from answering, stared some more, then offered the following cryptic comment:

Nathaniel, I have nothing to go on but intuitions and a few seemingly unconnected events. None of it amounts to material that’s fit for real journalism. Maybe it’s all in my imagination; maybe it’s just sleep deprivation or burnout.

Then again, maybe not?

That’s right, maybe not.

Why are you telling me this?

Why did you ask?

I’m a newshound, too. I trust my instincts, and I’ve read enough of your articles to trust yours. What’s happening, Pete? What shook you so much you don’t trust yourself anymore?

For a moment I thought I had