Black Sheep - A Novel

My daughter, Marla, just turned twenty-three. I wonder if we would have been friends had we met when I was her age. I have never asked her.

The irony is that I don’t appear before myself at different ages. But I feel myself at different ages, shaped by what the people that visit tell me of my past.

Friends or not, I like my daughter and she likes me. We both consider privacy paramount.

“So, Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time again?” Marla’s fingers are yellow with nicotine. I miss smoking.

“Why are you quoting Vonnegut? What an awful book. I wish I had never wasted my time reading it.”

“Life is hard sometimes.”

“I didn’t tell you about this so that you could mock me.”

Last year, I told her that people come to visit me. I shouldn’t have. It was a moment of weakness, born of living in the past more often than before. I guess I thought that maybe people came to visit her, too.

They don’t.

She touches my arm. A blue surrounds her and has since the moment she was born. I love blue. When her blue is near me I feel safe. I don’t know why. It has always been difficult for me to trace the genealogy of feeling.

Where is anything born, if everything that’s happened exists before you at once?

“I love you, Marla.”

“Did you pay your rent on time this month?” she asks, starting to clean my dishes.

“Leave those alone. I worked at forty major newspapers across Canada. Why do you think I’ll always forget to pay my rent?”

“Well, did you?”

I shake my head.

My daughter stops with the dishes and she makes me a sandwich.

I don’t know why she is always worried that I won’t eat. My mother’s sandwiches were good. Marla’s aren’t, but I appreciate them anyway. She leaves quickly after I’m done eating. She always leaves quickly.

“Bye, Daddy. I love you.”

“Bye.”

“Don’t look at me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Nothing. I don’t know. I love you.”

I kiss her on the forehead. I am very tall, and I have to lean down to reach the soft skin under her dark fringe. For a moment, I see her mother in her eyes. She locks the door behind her.

When I head back to the kitchen, I see Marla as a four year old, hiding in the corner, laughing. I hope we will get to spend the day together. I love children. They are much easier than adults.

“Hi, Daddy.”

“What a wonderful surprise!”

“Sorry for hiding.”

Don’t envy me. Just because my memories are just three-dimensional doesn’t mean I get special treatment. I don’t get to choose the pace at which my life happens. Death comes fast or it comes slow. Time will one day end it.

Frank, by the way. My name is Frank.

He walked towards her. He’d dressed up. He held his motorcycle helmet in his hand.

“So, how are you?” she asked.

He shrugged, uncertain. She noticed her reflection in his eyes.

“How are you?” he asked.

The conversation hung on that.

“So do you want to go first?”

“No,” he said. “Why don’t you?” He looked away, wincing. “Let’s not do this here.” And so they walked, exactly two meters apart, along Toronto’s busiest street. Traffic sounds pitched and blurred. She pictured them walking naked, like mannequins, looking like people but really being plastic.

“I’m not happy,” she said.

He put his hand against the air, stopping something hurdling towards him.

“We don’t have to do this. We’ve talked so much, that’s all we’ve done. My failure has always been an inability to communicate with you.”

She nodded, and five minutes later, he left.

And that’s how two years disappears in the blink of an eye, the slight of a hand.  

She could only identify it in retrospect, but the man she hadn’t met was hovering around her.

She knew him; like magic, like weather, like dreams that came and took over unannounced.