From a Great Distance

At the beginning of this story I felt slow and sad and stuck, like I was repeatedly catching in my own throat, a balled up obstruction retching endlessly in the corner of my life. I was living on my own, in a tiny house out in the country, far away from anyone else. The house had a small covered garage, just a few poles and a tarp, with space only for one small car and winter tires stacked up on each other at the far end. A little stand of trees, space to walk out in, space to think, space to echo over and over and over myself. I was too young to be living alone and so far out, and I knew almost no one in that country. I became the smallest version of myself, an origami figure, tight and compressed in a thousand folds. I had come into the house suddenly (it had belonged to an uncle) and I had been nursing myself on it, frugal and squinting, cutting wood from the copse and using it to save on the hydro bill in the colder months, stacking it end over end in the fire and digging out the ashes every morning. But I was like the wood, stacking myself over and over. I needed a change. I was losing my mind. 

I moved back to the city. Soon the house was a dream, very far away, almost impossible to imagine. I was ashamed to think of myself like that, living far out there in the middle of nothing, alone in the world, parking my car so neatly between the two sides of the tarp garage. The shame was a kind of apology, because it was a privilege to live like that at all. Somehow I fell in with a group of men. They had been meeting for sixteen years, more than half of their lives. They met to roll dice and imagine a world together. The map of the world changed on the table before us. One traced our path in smudged pencil on grid paper, calculated percentages, gains. Sometimes we fought—with each other, with ideas that came between us, riding horses and waving swords, speaking alien languages. I’ll say it plainly: it was a game, an escape. 

The house where we met belonged to the leader, a large man who made large jokes. I didn’t know if I liked the man or his jokes but I felt comfortable with him because I thought I knew what he was. In high school I had played sports with boys like him, boys who challenged, boys who wrestled, boys who talked openly about the women that they wanted to fuck. But the large man surprised me: in at least one way he wasn’t quite like the boys I had known in school. Sometimes I would arrive early, well before the others. Sometimes this was out of necessity: I needed his help to create a new character because mine had died. Mine was always dying. Afterwards he would get me a beer and we would sit in his living room. While we were waiting for the others, he would talk about his depression. It was a darkness, a difference, something that set him apart in the world. I told him that I was depressed too. He took an instant liking to me. I can talk about it with you, he said, because you understand. Sure, I said, of course, I understand. 

This happened in my real life. Everything in this story is from my real life, which is the only place anything can happen.

I’ll say it plainly. All of these men were writers. I was a writer too. This happened in my real life. Everything in this story is from my real life, which is the only place anything can happen. I met the men at bars, in front of a curtain, a microphone, a stool, a stage—between beers we would watch men and women get up on the stage or in front of the curtain to read their work, poetry or prose that it was almost impossible to follow in those dark rooms, with a drink in your hand and with music filtering in from the front of house, where confused regulars were drinking together in their repetitive melancholy. We nodded and clapped and later we talked about what we thought of the readers, a judgment based mostly on affect or looks or a few comprehensible words, because it was almost impossible to hold a whole poem in your head, unless it was really exceptional. We introduced ourselves, talked about our influences, connections, made jokes—glancing, sideways ones, jokes that were easy to tell in front of an audience of people we had never met before and would rarely see again. I became good at these jokes, jokes I made as if I was shouting down at my new friends from a balloon. As if my voice and inflection needed to carry a great distance.

Before I moved out to the country, I had been in a relationship with a woman. This woman was my teacher once. I was flattered to be in a relationship with her, because she had once been the person assigned to evaluate my performance. I sacrificed a lot to be with this woman, who seemed more intelligent and more exciting than anyone I knew or had known. She was six years older than I was, which felt significant at the time, because I had only dated one person in my life before—my ex-wife—and my teacher had dated countless, or countless as it seemed to me. She had lived all over the world and I had lived in only one city. I will be honest. It didn’t end well. She wasn’t happy only being the smartest person in my life. She wanted to be the only person that I spoke to or even looked at, and she cut me off from everyone I knew. I trusted her judgment—I thought all of her experience meant that she knew what was right and what was wrong. Until I realized even that wasn’t enough for her. It was one of the reasons I moved out to the country after my uncle died, to get away. And one of the reasons that when I moved back, I felt like there was no one in the city waiting for me.

When I told the leader about the woman I had dated, in that span of time when we were alone before the other men joined us, he said that he knew what I meant when I said that it had been unbalanced, unhappy, that one person held more power than the other in the relationship and that it was perverse, it infected us, it became abusive, desperate. I’m not sure why I told him—I think I had gone a long time without telling anyone and then I decided to start telling everyone I knew. To get it off of me. He said he knew how I felt. I asked him if he had been in a similar situation. He said, yeah, once I dated a student. I said, what? I felt like a pebble being thrown down a shaft. He said, when I was teaching English as a second language, I dated one of my students, she was 21, 22, I can’t quite remember. I asked him how old he was at the time, he said, probably 27? 28? Late twenties in any case. Anyway it was a really fucked up relationship, I know exactly what you mean. She was so hot, though, my god. It was fucked, yeah—super perverse. Not healthy, you’re right. We were sitting across from each other. I think I had just promised to do something else for his reading series. I don’t know why I said I wanted to do it—I didn’t want to do it. After he finished talking I didn’t know what else to say. I just looked at him. Maybe I nodded my head.

I continued going to bars. I continued meeting people. One night I got so drunk that walking home, very early, with a friend, we ripped open a bag of bread that had been left in front of a convenience store for the next morning’s sale. It was my idea. I hated myself for it. I came home with a baguette that made me feel anxious all morning. I didn’t want to eat it, but I did eat it, because I also hate wasting food. We had stayed at the bar after a reading. One of the women we were talking to asked me how I was involved in the “scene.” I mentioned the leader and the men that I knew through him. She told me that she had made out with the leader once, in that very bar. She pointed to the spot where they had made out. She was in her early twenties and he was over thirty. She said she hadn’t liked how he had pressured her to go home with him. I didn’t want to go home with him, she said, I just wanted to make out. Damn, I said. I’m glad you didn’t go home with him. Right, she said. And then my friend tapped me on the shoulder and we left and I stole the bread, and for the next week that was all I could think about—the stolen bread, nothing else. 

I didn’t say anything, to anyone, because I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t like what I had heard, but what had I heard? Maybe I knew enough to ask about what I didn’t know, but I didn’t ask anyone about it. I only knew what I wanted to know, which was this: the leader had started to make me feel uncomfortable. I was on the outside of the group, or at least that’s how I’d always felt. I’d known them for only a year, or maybe two years. I thought it was like this: that my knowing them was always somewhere far off in the future, someplace I would never quite arrive. I don’t know why it felt like that to me. But for him it wasn’t like that. It was something I owed him. It made me uncomfortable. I stopped playing the game. I’m sorry, I said, I just don’t have the time anymore. I stopped working for his reading series. I didn’t even apologize for that. I talked to men and women who said it was smart of me to distance myself. I didn’t ask why. 

Nothing in this story is true, except for the anger, and the violence, and the loneliness. Nothing in this story is true except for all of the details that came from life—the stolen bread, the story about the leader that the woman told me in the bar, the knowing that something was wrong with him but not being able to articulate it. Nothing in this story is true except for the fact that every time I introduced him to one of my female friends—even my girlfriends—he found a way to make them feel uncomfortable, like they were an aberration, a purpose, a goal. It was inevitable. Nothing in this story is true, except that. And a story told to me by two women at a bar with foggy windows, in the winter, and the anger of one of the women, who told me what she knew about this man. This story is for that anger. And for the dream the two women shared, which roared up like a coyote stalking me through the forest, shouting at me from behind the trees, making me feel vulnerable and exposed.

There were things I’d never do. But when I was younger I had made many mistakes. I had been married once and I hadn’t been a good husband. The reason was that I didn’t want to be a husband. It made me angry to think of myself as one, because I felt trapped. I hated to be angry but I hated to be a husband even more. I was angry for at least two years. More than that. Maybe I’d been angry my whole life and it was just coming out. Oh, it had come out before. But it is hard to know the things that are wrong with you until you see evidence of them yourself. Until you learn what you are and how you have been made. How do you know anything until you know that? We wanted different things. We felt differently. Still I didn’t think I had pressured anyone in the way that I heard the leader had. Or at least that was what I remembered. My ex-wife would know better. I was very young when I got married, younger than anyone should be. It was like a marriage from medieval times, we were so young. Still I thought I had acted better than this man, who was much older than I was when he should have known better, who explained himself away with stories of his depression, as if that was all he needed to do. 

I would continue to hurt people. I would move from partner to partner like a hummingbird, unsure of where I was in life, always on the verge of running out of fuel. 

What right did I have to say anything? What did I know? I’ll tell you the truth. I worried that if I said anything, I would be attacked. I don’t know by who. Either by this man, or by my ex-wife, or even by the teacher I had once dated, who had a very different idea of the relationship than I did—she once sent me an email saying that if I ever wrote about her, she would bring a gun to one of my readings. This confused me. I didn’t know if she was serious or not. Was she trying to provoke me? Did she want me to say the same thing back to her? Was it a kind of pact she had imagined? All I had ever wanted was for us to get along. I didn’t want to shoot her. I didn’t want her to shoot me. So I was glad when I heard that she was moving out of the country. I didn’t want anyone to bring a gun to one of my readings, and I had written about her. I wasn’t going to stop. 

This was going to be a story about the men who met together at the leader’s home, but it’s not a story about that because nothing is more boring to me than stories of men escaping together in a space where women are forbidden. Nothing seems worse to me than men who wish themselves at the centre of a perpetual escape. A man in a long-term relationship once told me that he was ready to leave at any moment. That it would take him less than five minutes to pack up his life and leave his partner. That up until that moment it had just “worked out” with her. Five years they were together. I wondered if she knew. I know that there are women also like this, women terrified of being trapped. Women who betray their partners casually. But it’s different for men. There are more of us. It is different for us because we aren’t escaping expectations, in fact we have not thought of them at all. We have not thought of anything. We are taught to believe ourselves exceptional: flying above the earth at a great speed, from a great distance, afraid of looking down. Or perhaps not even afraid—no one’s taught us there’s anything to fear about looking below ourselves and seeing the damage we have done.  

I was rolling dice every time I left my house, waiting for them to come up with a number that would tell me what I wanted to know.

This story isn’t for anyone. It’s not for me, and it isn’t for you. It’s not for men. It’s not for women. It’s not for anyone else. I read a story once about a little boy who is destined to be a writer, at least according to the conceit of the book. The story is the writer’s autobiography, even though it’s mostly full of lies. Careful, children, says his teacher. Don’t trust this boy—he is a monster and he will betray you. I was married when I first read that story and I related to it because I knew that I would betray my ex-wife, in my writing at the very least. I wrote about my desires and I desired to leave my ex-wife. I hadn’t thought about my desires much before I got married. That was wrong. I can’t fix it. But I didn’t know anything, I was so young. I was walking without touching the surface of the earth. I was rolling dice every time I left my house, waiting for them to come up with a number that would tell me what I wanted to know. I thought it was okay to be so confused and maybe at times it was, even if I ended up hurting other people in the process. You can’t avoid that even if you wanted to. But I will tell you what I know now—that there’s a line that you cross, I can’t say where it is exactly. It’s where experience becomes a responsibility. And I will tell you this as well: wherever that line was, the leader of the group of men had crossed it long ago. Well before I ever met him. But he lived as if it was still somewhere far away, marked by a single grey light blinking passively on the horizon, in a place he’d never have to reach. 

What did I learn in the bar with foggy windows, from the two women from earlier in this story? They told me something I’d known for a long time without knowing that I had. You can guess. I wasn’t sure who. I didn’t know when. I didn’t ask for details. I didn’t need to. I trusted the women. I felt like I’d been wrapped up in something. Or like I had been wrapped and at the bar I had been unwrapped. Like while I was sitting there they were taking the wrappings off of me. Like the floor was littered with strips of linen that had been tightly wound around my body. I’ve never heard anyone say that about him before, I said. But I believe you. I am not surprised. I was interrupted by a man from the adjoining table who had overheard only the first part of that statement. He was angry—just because you’ve never heard it before, he said, doesn’t mean that it isn’t true. I know, I said. I agree with you. I know. He must have been drunk, because he kept going. I just nodded my head. I looked from the man to the two women sitting next to me, nodding my head. I wanted to pick up the wrappings and hold them to my chest. And then—I don’t know what. It was idiotic. The man turned around and went back to his table or to the bathroom or maybe back up to the bar. The women kept talking. I wanted to hear more. I looked down at the wrappings littering the floor. I thought, what will I do with these? I don’t know what to do with these. I wanted to say something more, I wanted to take action, say something profound, do something noble, but there was nothing for me to do.

When I was living alone in the middle of the country it was easy to imagine myself as good. I didn’t know many people who lived out there. I had a quiet job where I interacted with maybe one or two people, and I went home to an empty house that I flooded with light and music to pretend that there was someone else there. I was angry, but that anger didn’t go anywhere. I started running as a way to calm my anger and my growing anxiety. And when I was home I watched a lot of television, by myself, season after season, imagining myself friend or neighbour or colleague to the characters on the screen. It was a dream that didn’t need anything from me. It was life projected onto my skin, free from conflict or decision. Some mornings I woke up out of these lives, stumbling to the kitchen as the haze of fantasy dissipated. I wanted so badly to have the camera pan over me in a tight arc as I lifted my first cup of coffee for the day, a bouncy song playing on the soundtrack. 

The stories that people tell about themselves are real to them. I like to think that I am good but I have little evidence of that. What is good is complicated. The good is unimportant without action. At times we get stuck in ourselves. We forget the good. But there are some things we should never forget. Just as there are some things we should never have to learn. The morning after going to the bar I woke up early. My cat was pressing his head into my face, licking my chin with his tongue—getting ready to bite. The window was open slightly and a chill breeze was blowing through the screen. I stumbled over to the window, my cat meowing and nipping my heels. He was only hungry. Quiet, I said, brushing him aside with my foot. There was nothing outside. The sun had risen over the street and the concrete was shining with a warm yellow glow.

I remembered a party, in late summer. This was after the leader and I had more or less parted ways. It was supposed to be a deck party—the host had a deck that was almost the size of her apartment, extending out from the kitchen—but it was raining, a light but persistent rain that nevertheless hadn’t stopped anyone from coming. The apartment was packed. People were pressed up against bookshelves, furniture, sitting on the beds, in each other’s laps, pushing through the crowds to the refrigerator and then, hopefully, back to their hastily-filled voids. The windows were open but it was somehow also humid, punishingly hot. I’d found a little space in a corner of the hallway, and I was standing there with a friend of mine. The leader pushed past me. I was still friendly with him, even though I knew I didn’t want him in my life. Hi, I said. He raised his eyebrows. He pushed past me again, a second time, brushing my shoulder. I didn’t say anything. A third time he was trailed by another friend. Hey, I said later, to this friend, how’s ——— doing? Oh, this friend said. He feels weird because he wasn’t invited to the party. He felt like no one wanted him here. That’s too bad, I said. Was he angry with me? I asked my friend. What? No, it’s not your fault. Why would you think that? I didn’t know. But I’d felt that, somehow, as he’d passed me in the hall. Like there was something I could have done, though nothing I would have wanted to do. 

By that time I was dating someone. And something wasn’t right. I wasn’t sure what it was—there was nothing wrong with the relationship, necessarily, except that I didn’t want it. I was dragging myself to it, like I had been injured. Like someone had clipped my wings. Like I didn’t belong on earth, but in the air. As if there was something else there, the clouds or the sun or the blue that I couldn’t touch, that was equal to the woman I imagined behind me, below me, on the ground, a million miles away. My therapist said, why do you think that is? Do you think that’s because you don’t love her? I said, I don’t know, no, no, I don’t know, no, no, maybe, I don’t know what’s wrong. 

It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that desire worked this way, that it made no sense, that it was dependent on conditions outside of either party’s understanding. That we could live outside of the world in a private utopia and still be sad and incomplete and that we could return to others and feel the same way. That we could live alongside another and never touch them where they needed to be touched, or to be able to touch them in that way but not to be touched ourselves in return. That we could live and want and love but that what we loved about the one that we loved—aside from the pragmatic negotiations that make living with them bearable and which are not always possible—was something completely interior to ourselves. We love the good and the good that we love is weirdly what we knew what was good beforehand. We seek that good that we already knew even if when we find it is surprising to us. And when it is missing, even if everything else works, we know. We know and it hurts because the part of us that loves is the part of us that believes in that good’s existence. And it is terrible that we have to pretend as if this good does not exist even though we are looking for it in every corner. 

The problem at the bar was this: I wasn’t good. I hadn’t been good for a long time. Happiness follows for those who will correctly, and unhappiness for those who believe they are willing correctly even as they swerve off their path. I was going through the motions of being good while I was an elf riding a horse through a dense forest. An elf dodging missiles, trying to fulfill a meaningless quest. The good can be separated from the people that we attach it to. And we can chase it without regard for the feelings of the people we profess to love. And then all we are doing is chasing phantoms in a fantasy world, seeking targets that never were. 

It is one thing to chase the good when you are sitting together around a table imagining a world together, or revising your poetry over and over until it resembles what you saw. It is something else entirely when you locate the good in another person, as something which you must have at their expense. I’ve done this. It’s wrong. But how then do you love? Love is not an excavation. It is a meeting. When you find the good you must be careful to treasure it for what it is, and not to wish it was anything else. It will never be exactly what you imagine. It is something to honour. It is always locked away in someone else, never to be quite touched in them, just as you must also understand that for your lover it is locked away in you. 

I felt like something profound had happened and that something should or would change as result, but nothing was actually different.

When I was sitting at the bar with the two women from the beginning of this story, I thought, in a sense I am still living in that lonely cottage in the middle of nowhere. In a sense I have always been there and will never leave. And I was afraid to leave the bar—I stayed until last call, and then we walked outside into the cold December night, and I stood uneasily at the bar’s foggy window while the women lit cigarettes and I wondered when I should say goodbye. I felt like something profound had happened and that something should or would change as result, but nothing was actually different. They had pulled aside the curtain and let me know what was happening behind it. But I’d already known what was there. I’d known long before anyone told me about it. And if I had met the leader again, or one of his friends, if I found myself standing next to them at a bar or a party, I wasn’t sure what I would do—probably I would act cowardly. Probably I would say hello. Probably I’d even give them a hug if they volunteered first. Probably a part of me would turn off—as it had turned off long ago—and I would speak as if nothing had changed. I would be polite but not welcoming. I would volunteer nothing but I would talk as if I didn’t have a part in the conversation. As if I was nothing and what I wanted or needed wasn’t important. And then the conversation would break up, or I’d find myself talking to someone else, and I could safely forget about it, as if nothing had happened at all. As if I was only visiting. As if I’d only stolen some bread I didn’t need or want. As if my horse was waiting for me, and my sword, and my bow and arrows. One of the women asked me if I was going to the subway. I said no, I live just up the street. Well, she said, you don’t have to stand here waiting for us to finish smoking. It’s cold outside. Okay, I said, glancing in the direction of my apartment, you’re right. And I said goodnight and waved goodbye and left them standing together in front of the bar. That part, at least, is true.