Love Enough Read online

  ALSO BY DIONNE BRAND

  FICTION

  In Another Place, Not Here

  At the Full and Change of the Moon

  What We All Long For

  Sans Souci and Other Stories

  POETRY

  ’Fore Day Morning

  Earth Magic

  Winter Epigrams and Epigrams to Ernesto Cardenal in Defense of Claudia

  Primitive Offensive

  Chronicles of the Hostile Sun

  No Language Is Neutral

  Land to Light On

  thirsty

  Inventory

  Ossuaries

  Chronicles: Early Works

  NON-FICTION

  Bread Out of Stone

  No Burden to Carry

  A Map to the Door of No Return

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2014 Dionne Brand

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2014 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, a Penguin Random House Company. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Brand, Dionne, author

  Love Enough : a novel / Dionne Brand.

  ISBN 978-0-345-80888-2

  eBook ISBN 978-0-345-80890-5

  I. Title.

  PS8553.R275L69 2014 C813′.54 C2014-902437-1

  Cover design by Terri Nimmo

  Cover images: detail from Caza con reclamo by

  Francisco de Goya © Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid;

  (butterfly) © Carlosphotos / Dreamstime.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  ONE

  The best way of looking at a summer sunset in this city is in the rear-view mirror. Or better, the side mirrors of a car. So startling. All the subtlety, the outerworldliness of the sunset follows you. If only you could drive that way forever. It’s counterintuitive, you understand, but you get a wide measure of that quotidian beauty. If you ever travel east along Dupont Street, at that time, look back. Despite this not being a particularly handsome street—in fact it is most often grim—you may see, looking back, looking west, something breathtaking. It is perhaps because this street is so ugly; car-wrecking shops, taxi dispatch sheds, rooming houses, hardware stores, desolate all-night diners and front yards eaten up by a hundred winters’ salt; it is because of all this that a sunset is in the perfect location here. Needed.

  And later you can see moons here too, rounding perfectly over a derelict building where artists and musicians live. Or vagrant, over the personal storage depot filled with rooms of regret—unpaid for and best forgotten. Then too, undressed, over the abandoned fish store, and flaring, over the wheel alignment garage.

  June. She lives only two streets away. On Salem. She could walk. But she drives along here, on Dupont Street, in the evenings just to be taken up by a glimpse of beauty in that rear-view mirror. You might ask, beauty? Yes, she would say, beauty. She is not the type who is happy the way other people are happy.

  The other day, June and Sydney were out running along the waterfront trail. Lake Ontario, barely recovered from toxic effluent, was a salvaging green. The sky was violet; a violet soft with polymers and hydrocarbons, and June saw two small blue butterflies mating near the lake. It was just beside the dogwood bushes. Summer Azures. She stopped. Her heart felt feathery at the sight. She was on the verge of crying when Sydney said, “Only people like you notice that kind of thing.”

  “People like me?”

  “Hm hm, people who watch everything all the time.”

  June heard a splashing of water, it ripped right across her heart. It might have been a duck on the lake or a swan. She saw a half moon drizzled in violet polysulfides. She saw the east side of the city dissolving across the lake.

  “Who do you think you are anyway, Sydney?” A small rage overtook her at this notion that all she did was watch. “I have done so many things you will never, never understand.”

  “Like what?” Sydney didn’t mean to say that, but small rages were infectious with them.

  A bird flew by, black, with red underwings. A gaunt man in a coat, a woman with red hair were ahead of them on the boardwalk.

  “Just because you cannot make out two butterflies … fucking, is no reason to insult me.”

  The lilac sky was greying out. More synthetic than sky. The nuclear plant to the east had been altering the clouds by degrees for decades. “Insult? My god, I’m glad you can see two butterflies fucking. That’s all I was trying to say!”

  “Now they’re gone.” June was blue too.

  The gaunt man in the coat, the woman with the red hair were ahead of them still, closer now. The woman bent down, as if crouching, the man waved an arm like an axe above her. A gull lifted off the lake. June took off, ran past them, leaving Sydney behind. She made her way to the locks and behind the sandbanks, disappearing from Sydney’s view. She felt like running to Hamilton, sixty-six kilometres away; they say you can do that running along this path. But it’s not Hamilton that June wants to go to.

  She wants to get out of her own head, a stoop from which she can pick a fight with the most benevolent human being in the world. Even when the sky is lilac or violet and even if two butterflies stop her day with their urgent life, she hovers on this stoop like a praying mantis, looking harmless but not at all harmless. Her stick of a body is deceptive. Her poised look, her brain in compressed rage—all the reedy details of a life lived cautiously and suspiciously yet on the verge of weeping at small beautiful occurrences.

  Sydney catches up to June and runs beside her silently towards Hamilton. They run now in a coming twilight. Glass condominiums ride their right shoulders to the end of the waterfront path. To their left the lake meets the Humber River. They are just trying to run out June’s anger and unreasonableness and Sydney’s failure to be quiet and observe.

  Silence is how they make peace. Usually each works out the facts and fictions in her own mind, the way one does, forgetting one’s own part and then forgetting the other’s part. Finally each won’t remember the whole fight clearly and they’ll leave it at that. The dregs of a fight, though, can be more dangerous than the fight itself, since these dregs are a synthesis of collective arguments over time. A concentrated toxin. No argument in the world is ever resolved. Resolving would suggest some liquid in which arguments could be immersed, perhaps love. But it must be love enough. The consistency of the mixture would have to be a greater portion of love. So many decilitres of love to dissolve so many millilitres of the other stuff. And the trouble is, this “other stuff,” this toxic material, is sometimes flammable. These other
ingredients are random and personal, like childhood or desire and they don’t necessarily mix well with love. Love is not as durable or pliable as one is led to think anyway. Love can be indefinable all on its own. But this fight, the one about the butterflies, will be remembered with humour eventually because after all it was only about two butterflies mating, not the greater matters of the world.

  June was in love once. Truly. She sometimes comes upon the memory in the form of a breathless panic. Then she closes that door quickly. It took place in a bachelor apartment, and at the Yonge subway station, and during several springs. She was twenty.

  At the Yonge subway station. She remembers waiting there on the southbound platform for the lover. Each train that came through the tunnel from where her lover lived ran up June’s spine like a corkscrew. Late, always late, the lover would emerge like a gift, bright and innocent. As if not late at all, but on time. They would go to whatever movie or party or club in a radiant cylinder of what June now calls panic but then she called love. They would dance among other people in love too, encased in their own cylinders. These cylinders weren’t smooth but jagged and electric to the touch, and, on the dance floor, June and the lover were a dangerous energy. They were exhausted and frantic in their desire, and all the other desires around them made them clash and incinerate. June heard a constant clanging in her ears. Her breath was like small sharp silver bracelets. When they parted at the Yonge subway station again, June felt suicidal and could not look down at the empty station rails.

  The bachelor apartment where her lover lived was full of jasper rocks and sunlight no matter the weather outside. June spent days walking over the rocks and turning her face to the sunlight. She lost her part-time jobs at the daycare centre and at the Mac’s Milk store where she stacked shelves because she spent so much time with the lover coupled on the rocks. The rocks were blood warm and June found red lichen on the lover’s ankle.

  Love lasted only one year but the time felt like several springs strung together. The lover said it was over long before June heard. When June did hear, her chest caved in and she put her hand there to stop it. The love was in pieces and June collected them and smoothed them over with her thumbs like you would a bird’s wing or an envelope. After, she could not recall the lover’s face, nor revisit the jagged ice and the coarse paper of their quarrels. June walked out of the apartment with its jasper and sunlight and up to now has not gone back to that street. She doesn’t avoid that part of town, you wouldn’t say that, but it is as if that street doesn’t exist. It has been cut out of the street map of the city. The city limns there. Once or twice she saw the lover but it wasn’t the same person. That made her wonder if we ever see people truly or if in fact, in love, we are simply teetering on that thin filament in the brain between the insula and the striatum. Alone. We are peering over a precipice in a particular quadrant of grey matter, frightening ourselves with a leap we cannot make. As we all do, June had expected her own reflection in the lover’s face. Her reflection being a benign understanding. But the lover’s face, in the end, was fierce and foreign. It wasn’t the same person. Not someone June knew at all.

  June doesn’t visit that area in her mind anymore. That abyss is off limits unless something surprises her and she feels that panic again. A song or a door slamming is all it takes at times. And certainly the southbound train at Yonge subway station. So for years June never took this train, especially in the evenings, until they renovated the station and then it was a different place altogether.

  TWO

  Turning across Highway 7 to Brougham, the Beemer was ahead. The Audi followed, losing and finding the tail lights of the Beemer screwdriving along the highway. The road was unlit and Bedri conjured trees. Sweat poured into his eyes and he fought to stay in the glow of Ghost’s tail lights. The road wound its way around Locust Hill then jogged east. He wondered if Ghost knew where he was going. He wondered, but he did not stop or press the car horn. The Beemer danced ahead in the now full darkness. He crouched over, gripping the steering, licking the sweat pouring down his face. The Beemer and the Audi emerged out of forest and retreated into forest for half an hour and then they came to a big crossing. Ghost made a right turn and Bedri followed. They seemed to be driving in squares. The line down the centre of the highway glowed phosphorescent. It blinded Bedri in the left eye. He didn’t know if he was sweating or crying. He realised they’d turned around and were heading back the way they’d come. He leaned on the horn. He saw Ghost signal right and followed him off the shoulder into a narrow driveway. They drove down into a park, he saw a sign or half of the sign, “Milne Conservation” it read. He slowed, stopped and jumped out of the Audi, waving his hands in the dark shouting, “Ghost! Ghost!” Ghost continued driving then stopped about one hundred metres ahead.

  Bedri ran toward the Beemer. Breathless when he arrived, he said, “What the fuck, man?”

  “Let’s go,” Ghost said, jumping out and spinning him around. “Go! We’re ditching it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Shit, Money, you could never think. They’ll be on us quicker now.”

  “Then what did we do that for? Let’s take it to the guy in the east. The Audi ride too.”

  “He won’t want this one now.”

  “Turn it off!” Bedri said. Ghost had left the car running.

  “What?”

  “Turn it off—someone will hear it.”

  “It’s a fucking park, Money!”

  “Turn it off! Fuck!”

  Ghost reached into the car and turned the engine off. Then he angled sideways like a pitcher and threw the keys into the darkness. Bedri began to run back toward the Audi. Ghost dropped in beside him and they sprinted together.

  Bedri had a thick body. Ever since he was a child he’d had difficulty running. He was running now though and his body didn’t feel thick, it felt wet, steaming. It felt fleet. They couldn’t keep the fucking car now; they beat a man to death. Maybe. And now they couldn’t keep his fucking Beemer.

  The hundred metres felt longer that it was. He couldn’t feel his feet. Instead he felt like a fish swimming. Swimming beside Ghost. They got to the Audi and Bedri jumped into the driver’s seat. His hands felt big. Ghost seemed like a hot pinpoint of fire beside him. Bedri’s hands felt huge. They burned when he touched the steering wheel. They burned when he turned the key in the ignition. The key was hot as melting silver.

  Ghost, his face lit, his body coiled, wiry, he was glad he didn’t have to drive, his long fingers trembled, he felt like going to the bathroom, his body let off an odour, like iron. He wanted to say something wise or something cruel again but he was quiet.

  Bedri drove. He drove fast. Something told him to drive slow, and he tried but he couldn’t. He heard a yelp, it was coming from inside his head and it was coming out of his mouth but he clamped his lips shut holding it in. From the passenger seat he heard, “Whoa, whoa, man!” He lifted his foot off the gas. He should slow down.

  “Whoa, man, you feel me? You feel me, Money? That was the bomb!” Ghost had found something to say and his mouth was saying it. The bomb, the bomb. Bedri tried to make sense of the word. He felt as if he had inhaled water, or coke, or air freshener. His nose was clear, a burning skittered over his forehead, under the bone near his eyes.

  “Did you see that guy? Man, he was a mess. The guy was a mess.”

  Yes, Bedri had seen the face, the eyes swollen so quickly after one blow, it seemed. Yes, he saw the face. Fuck.

  “We are thugged out, man! Thugged out!” Ghost’s mouth found the exact words. Bedri felt Ghost’s hand on his shoulder, brotherly and loving, it made him yell too.

  “Yeah, yeah, thugged out.” He heard his own voice turn to a croak, “The guy was messed up!” His croaking made no sense to him and his laughter made no sense to him. He was hardly looking at the road, his big swelling hands seemed to block out half the windscreen.

  “Yeah, damn, Money. Damn!” Ghost’s voice filled the car and Bedri felt it boom
in his head.

  Bedri yelled back, “Yeah, damn, Money, whoa! Fucker didn’t want to give it up. Fucker, man!”

  The noise in the car was overwhelming. They were both screaming and a hot mist from their bodies clouded the windscreen. Bedri lowered the driver’s window. A cold shock of air came into the car though it was summer. A warm summer night, the kind that is quiet on this highway. They smelled a fleeting smoke, a fireplace somewhere out here, the air made them gasp, quieted them. Ghost giggled; a gurgling, spitting giggling. “Man, man, did you see his face?” The air from the window made Bedri aware that he was sweating, his face was cold, dripping ice. The smoke from the fireplace somewhere drifted to them and left them. He opened his eyes wide to focus on the road. He’d found the 401 somehow, turned west on it towards Toronto and driven into the express lane. The highway sound of cars grrred in his left ear, he liked it. It drowned out Ghost’s giggling.

  “Fucked up. Fuck up. Fucked up, man!” Ghost was talking to himself. “Fucked up bad.”

  “Shut up!”

  “Man, he didn’t want to give the shit up!”

  “Shut up, Ghost …”

  “Shut up?”

  “Yeah, we got to think, right? What to do.”

  “Do? We don’t got nothing to do. Don’t think too hard, thug. It’s easy like that, man, easy like that. Fucker should have given it up.”

  “Suppose …”

  “Suppose nothing. He should have given the shit up.” Bedri didn’t know how to feel what he was feeling. Ghost seemed happy, really high. He should be happy, he should be stoked. Was he dead? His body, big and soft, felt bigger, softer. He took one hand, his left, off the steering wheel, there was something wet on it. Then he felt like gagging. He wanted to scream and gag. He put the hand out the window and scraped whatever it was off the doorframe. He let out a scream that the highway ate, the whimper at the end slid up under the wheels.

  “That’s what I’m saying!” Ghost responded to Bedri’s scream as if they were sharing the same feelings. Bedri looked over at him. He was on a joyride, the thing they just did, and the thing that was supposed to make him feel high too, he couldn’t bear the thought of it.