Un vrai bête en amour
I woke up by chance just before he began to move convulsively and spin off the shoulder of the 401.
I woke up by chance just before he began to move convulsively and spin off the shoulder of the 401. I grabbed the wheel and used my elbow to push his chest into his seat. With the other, I removed his leg from the gas. When I looked up, we were driving in a straight line. It lasted a minute or so. He regained consciousness and took a moment to refamiliarize himself with the vehicle, seeing me as if for the first time, my right hand firmly on the steering wheel, my left pulling on his leg.
When I was a kid, my father would drive around until I fell asleep. I would come in and out of dreams, always so surprised that he was the person he claimed to be. Later he would pick me up from parties; I would be drunk, he would drive silently. He would take me from theatre rehearsals to work to home to auditions and we got to know each other behind all that traffic. One night, I locked myself in the car and threatened to end my life. He stood, his face pressed on the window, not so much in pain but like he was suffering from facial blindness, like if he didn’t blink, if he kept his eyes open indefinitely, the world would stop spinning. That was the look he was giving me now. He only gave me that look when he couldn’t use a riddle or a metaphor or a joke to bring himself back to a place that felt like home. I wasn’t entirely sure what had happened, but whatever it was, it terrified him. I didn’t know what to do so I smiled.I find my father on the edge of his bed in our family home in Oshawa. The dark curtains are new; the carpeted floors are covered in photo albums. The bedside table hosts a generous collection of medicine bottles. He sits up, watching the static come in and out of the TV; the connection isn’t as clear this far north of the city, but he never seems to mind. He doesn’t even hear me come in, frightened when I join him on the bed. I give him an awkward nudge, calculating myself so not to say or do anything that could upset him. “How are you, baby?” he asks. I tell him I am fine and he answers good and we sit watching the static. He has lost a lot of weight. The skin around his eyes and his mouth has gotten loose. The lines on his forehead are much more defined. I try not to stare, not to dramatize his condition, which wasn’t terminal, though he can’t be convinced. Today, he seems reasonably happy. I had gotten used to him moping, or looking empty, or not looking like anything at all. I want to hold on to this happiness while it’ here. They have him on new anticonvulsant drugs, he tell me. He is mixing that with Klonopin but still reluctant to try tranquilizers and anxiety medication. I tell him controlling his stress levels might be exactly what he needs to minimize his seizures. He tells me he does not have any stress. When we first arrived from Congo, my father rented a studio apartment in downtown Toronto while he went back to college. We shared a bed: my mother, my father, my brother, my sister, and me. The bright room had a fridge and counter space to make up a kitchen; the rest of the floor was occupied by the mattress and our suitcases. I remember this time like a still image, like footnotes as opposed to concrete evidence of the way things were: Junior and I are playing by the window, Mom is breastfeeding Maï on the bed, my father is standing by the door looking out on us, I blink and he is gone again. That’s what I remember the most, how quickly he went.
That’s what I remember the most, how quickly he went.When we ran out of money, Papa moved Mom and the kids to a women’s shelter where we stayed through the winter of 2000. I don’t know where he slept. I don’t know how he ate. He would visit and bring us coins to put in the vending machines and out came chocolates, cold cans of pop, cookies. We toured the shelter and heard the places he had been, the books he had read, the poems he had written, the drawing he had done—his tone engaging but sorrowful, as though afraid his stories would be all he could ever offer us. Yet none of them seemed to be about him. Each involved an idealized figure who had wit and charm and nothing else. As I got older, the hero in his stories got sadder. I had this strange feeling that Papa was being tormented by the need to be a better man—a better father of some sort. But he got us out of the studio apartment, then out of the shelter, then out of the government housing, then into a sizable house with a lawn and a backyard. For some time, that was enough. Then life weakened him and those feelings resurfaced.
“Oh baby,” he said, “you kids grew up plugged into these little gadgets, now your brains can never rest and be lively. You know, when I was a boy, I used to climb mango trees in this small city between Righini and Salongo—I think the field was in Lemba—I can’t quite remember, it’s a bit of a blur to me now, but I could never forget spending hours eating mangos and watching the birds. I can name you all the birds that flew across the circle, les bécassine sourde, les pigeon rameron. Once, I fell asleep on a branch and woke up face flat on the ground. In my time, we exercised our brains. There was a little pond just north of there, I would go sometimes to drink some water or wash off. I did it all on foot, all on my own. You know, spending time alone builds character and discipline, but here, oh everybody is so sensitive. Everybody wants to give you treatment. I don’t understand what’s there to treat.” He had always been like that, full of nostalgia, full of passion. “We just want to make sure you’re not neglecting yourself, is all.” “We, we, we—your mother worries too much.”
I think Papa’s brain is kind of incredible. He can remember details about the civil war in Congo from 1994 as if he’d witnessed it that morning. He plays the same song from his childhood, over again, and never tires of it. He believes the life people once had to be much more fascinating than the life they are living. I argued that life transcends, and he said it breaks into multiple moments that keep breaking into smaller moments, and on and on. The goal was to hold on to as many moments as we could.
“I’m not one to push on medication, anyway,” I say, still watching the static. “But I’ve asked my doctor—there are studies that suggest sudden seizures can often be related to unresolved stress, or just, I don’t know, some inner conflict that is colonizing.” “This is not just sudden, this is a disease, this is my life now.” “Well disease or no disease, don’t you think talking to someone on a deeper level might do you some good.” “Which doctor? Who? Doctor Hoffman? Doctor Hoffman knows better. He wouldn’t say stuff like that.” “Actually, he’s a psychiatrist at the university. I told you about him last year. I see him. Sometimes.” “Ma fille, you’ve let the world tell you there is something wrong with your brain, hein. This is how they make their money, tu vois.” “All I mean—say I went along never seeking attention for—” “The panic attacks,” he says in a rising voice. “Sure, then, maybe by the time I’m as old as you, then they turn into seizures instead. There’s a whole study on it. I don’t know the accuracy or whatever, I just mean, if you’ve tried everything already, how about trying to approach it from a different perspective?” “There’s a whole study on everything,” he says. “The other day I read in the paper that some people who read too much pollute their brain, oui, that drinking too much water has its side effects. Can you believe it—they say things like this always because of the science. Now music is the cause of violence, now women and men can live together and not marry. Now men and men is okay. Now in America, oh, those Americans, it’s not safe and I bet you there’s a science behind that, too.” “If not science Papa, and if not stories, what else is there?” “There is a God, isn’t there? We give all our worry to God and when he is willing he will take them away from us.” “And what if God isn’t willing—then what? You sit and wallow? “God is always willing.”
I moved out of my parents’ house one morning without saying goodbye. My mother used to say I ran away. I used to say she kicked me out. It’s been years and we still go back and forth. Our relationship had become irreparable, everybody suffered because of it. I could hear my younger siblings crying over my own cries while I was throwing plates at my mother for having thrown a mug at me. I had unexplainable mood swings that felt manic in comparison to those of my friends. At first, I experimented with self-harm to get a rise out of her. What I got in return were Bible verses and a mason jar full of holy water on my dressing table. Then I drank and cried myself to sleep. Then I was perpetually high. I drew her pictures of my brain, wrote her emails and poems and letters and stories, explained my head as a beehive and my emotions as a pack of erected wasps. She’d gasped like I had been full of shit. All she heard was the one night I told her I wish I had died inside of her.
I moved out of my parents’ house one morning without saying goodbye.The next day, my father came and sat on my bed the way I sit next to him now. He told me about the girl in his dream. How special she was. How kind she was. “Have you seen her?”
Ornella, my youngest sister, took over my room when I left. She was born two years after we immigrated to Canada. She hung her own paintings and drawings but kept the poems I printed in the frame of my dressing mirror. Now I stretch out in the room, colder than I remember. More open, more bright. My sister Maï, the shy one, said moving out was the best thing I could have done for them. “How’s Maman?” I ask. “She thinks you hate her—she talks about you all the time though.” “And Papa?” “Maman thinks he’s depressed. I mean, I get it, you know. He’s not really responding to any medication anymore. He just kind of cries all the time.” “Yeah when I talked all of this, it kind of just didn’t exist. It was all in my head.” “You know how he gets,” she said. “Maman doesn’t want him to get the surgery because it might leave him brain dead.” “I don’t think he knows. When he’s driving alone and he crashes mid-seizure. I think he thinks we’re accusing him of something he doesn’t know is happening.” “Yeah,” Ornella says. He has more frequent episodes now, while doing the most mundane things—at the dinner table, watching TV, gardening, doing the dishes, drinking water. She says he once dropped her off to a friend’s house and while standing in the foyer with the friend the parents, he had an episode in the middle of his sentence. It lasted a minute or so, and right after he continued speaking without realizing. Everyone stood stunned, she tells me. She laughs remembering and then slams her palm over her mouth. Then I begin to laugh, and then we laugh for some time.
When the seizures first began, they were so subtle that we didn’t have a name for them. Now they have gotten longer, more violent, easier to track. Mom recalls waking up to his shaking, sometimes getting slapped in the face by accident, sometimes finding him on the bathroom floor. I remember him picking me up on campus, asking about my day, telling me about his. He parked the car somewhere in Scarborough, got on the GO train, then the subway, and walked down Spadina Avenue to the office. On his way, he saw a homeless woman who seemed happy. This image stayed with him throughout the day, the happy woman and the homeless one, arguing that they are two different women stuck in the same body. By the time we got to the 401, I dozed off and woke up shortly after he had begun seizing. I grabbed the wheel, I pulled his right leg off the gas, he foamed on the mouth, his arms flew, sending my glasses flying. He regained consciousness and continued, “. . . woman is not actually homeless, not entirely happy, but needs to feel alive the best way she can. Don’t you agree?” I answered sure and let my head rest back on the window. I always got control of the vehicle before causing any true impact. He went on to crash on two occasions on his own. He walked away without a scratch both times. There’s a God looking after us, he said.
Once, I asked him once if he could stop driving. We were standing on the porch. I had just arrived for dinner. Last we stood here, the neighbour had died of cardiac arrest on his driveway. Papa told me he drives to get to work, that he works so he can be the man of the house. I told him he’d be the man whether he drove or not. He told me I couldn't possibly understand what he means. I said, “Fine, but we’re going to lose you not because of your condition, but because you’re closed-minded. You don’t want to get better. You don’t want to try anything else.” “I’m the best I’ve ever been,” he said, before disappearing inside the house, retiring to his bedroom and remaining there all night.
When Maï was just born, Papa met his biological father at the age of 30. He was so sickened by the encounter that he left us in Congo to spend a few months in Europe. He travelled to Switzerland and Spain and then France, where he took these wonderful photographs in front of le Musée du Louvre. I don’t know everything about my father, but here is what I know for sure: when we drove Maman to work in the morning, he’d park in front of the nursing home and wait until she went through the first set of doors, then the second, then the third. He’d wait until she disappeared far out of sight. We called him un vrai bête en amour for the way he was affected when I first showed interest in boys, for the way he cried when I pushed my things inside a suitcase, for the way he recalls how painful that day was for him, coming home to see that I had emptied my room and left. He said he had been waiting. That he knew I would come back—that people and things always come back. Now my mother often calls and says, “Come, come see your father, come talk to him listen to his stories, he has no one to talk to.” When I do, I hear the same stories of the mango tree, the Congo River, how things used to be. I say, “Papa, how are you feeling.” “Feeling?” he asks. “Have I played you Nina Simone? Have I told you about Vicky Leandros? Oh, the time when feelings meant something.”
I go home when I can. It pains me, but I do it because I love him. I sit in a bedroom that no longer belongs to me. I stick my finger in the hole I made on my bedroom wall—just to see if I still fit. I let my mom scorn me for having been absent. I let her joke that he got sick so that I would come home. I believe it too, sometimes, that the idea of a hurting brain alone wasn’t concrete enough for my parents to believe in a condition that exists only in the head. They needed physical evidence. They needed the drama coming in and out of Papa’s face, the rapid muscle movement, the twitching fingers. Not that seizures and mental illness are physically related, but that Papa fell in and out of consciousness even before the seizures began. I tell my mother and she replies, “Bébé, people don’t get sick from a broken heart.”
The idea of a hurting brain alone wasn’t concrete enough for my parents to believe in a condition that exists only in the head.I float around my family, feeling this tremendous hole in my stomach. In it, my father’s dream girl is eating me from the inside out, his sweet girl, his kind girl. Still, I’m the only one who can sit next to him and have him know that I understand what he is going through. It’s in the way I say, “You’re all right, Papa,” and he says, “Yeah, you too, kid.”
Back at my apartment, I often feel exhausted. Not that anything in particular happens when I visit. I’ve just boiled so much of my past that I sometimes forget how to stay in one place. I try a song or a poem or story. I try to imagine how my father would write about the seizures—out for a walk north of Harmony Road behind our home, where there is so much sky to get lost in, where the road is surrounded by nothing but fields of grass that stretch as far as the eye can see, my father feeling a familiar sun land on his forehead, looking down at me with a great big grin, going on about the mango tree, how it’s a beautiful thing that gives so much to the planet and the people who tend it, a happy and delicate thing that has memorized how to push through across all seasons. Now looking up in the air like he often does when he is remembering, tasting every word like biting into a sweet fruit, noticing an old smell, a particular tickle in his mouth, experiencing every moment leading up to this one as a series of epileptic frames, hearing the music from his childhood, dancing along, running down the river like he often did as a boy, his hands flying in the wind, hearing his mother calling out for him from a distance, then, gently holding on to him by the shoulders, then, slowly, he is coming back, realizing that it is me calling, “Papa, Papa, come back, Papa.” It is hard to want the seizures to go away, knowing that this place is where he goes when he falls into them.
Later, my mother will phone with news of his latest episode. “He went blank and lost control of the wheel again,” she’ll tell me. “The roads were empty, nobody got hurt but the car needs a new bumper. They’re checking for injuries right now, I don’t know, to make sure he doesn’t have any internal bleeding, I guess. They are taking away his license for good now. The car is not surviving this one, bébé. Where would we find the money for it anyways? Your father is just so stubborn, that man. He never listens. But God is always looking out for him.” I will hang up and think of my first memory of my father: I am six years old. We have just come to Canada. He has been here for a year, though I don’t know that because I have forgotten about him entirely. We land in New York and there are so many lights, resting heavily on my eyelids, and I fall asleep. We take a bus and now we’re in Buffalo. The cold seems to be coming directly from the waterfalls. There are lights here, too, but fewer. They come and they go. We are in a moving vehicle and something about it makes me feel unsafe. I tilt my head and open my eyes but only just a little. I am being held and rocked gently. I look up and he is staring at me. I try to piece together the different corners of his face into a recognizable image, try to remember how I got here. After some time, a minute or so, I know who he is. Terrified, I say, “Papa?” sure and unsure, not guided by memory but by instinct. He smiles at me. He smiles because I’m here—finally.
