HENRY MEADOWS (fiction -- part VII of VII)

Listening to someone in person is mostly a matter of watching. You are undeniably hearing the words coming out of their mouth, true, but you are also gazing at that mouth, and their eyes, and the wrinkles aligned in an unsteady row at the top of their forehead, and their sudden hand motions that deflect attention away from the content of their speech. It's a game of absolutes. Both the aural and physical are unknowingly demanding your attention. Rituals are being enacted.

 Hearing what Henry had to say, it seemed as if he were disconnected from himself, his agitaed speech and its uneasy rhythms offset by the equally jittery manner in which his upper body bobbed and distracted me from his words. And always the ebony occupation of that black patch over the surface of his eye, the sight of which had once come across as so compellingly opaque, but which now seemed like nothing more than an arbitrary affectation. I knew that it wasn't; I understood that his actual eye was damaged, and that the patch was necessary to keep out unwanted dust and grime from a sky that was steadily growing more and more black with the dark bulge of pollution. Still, as the conversation wore on, as he nattered on and gesticulated with his own sense of smug glee, I knew that I was losing something. Mostly my belief in some kind of whole truth.

I wish I could tell you. For I heard of his tales of dangerous travels in backwoods India, in villages so remote that these Hindu peasants were not even aware that white people had existed; I listened to what must have a twenty-five minute monologue on the difference between the texture and durability of Swedish and Finnish ice in the darkest of winters, a distinction he discovered for himself after cracking through the surface of ponds at some point in both of those countries, almost drowning in both, a frozen death deferred. (Twice.) I watched as he grew ever more excited as he told salacious tales of professional Chinese paramours and amateur Indonesian concubines; I did my best to let his attention hold me with narratives of African riverboats hastily pieced together from the barest of twigs. How many countries he claimed to have visited (or lived in) I can't even say, but a curious effect made itself known the longer the convesation extended. With each new place spoken of, every exotic experience uttered, my mind would start to imagine, not the contents of his explorations, but instead would begin to graphically paint a portrait in my head of my own office at the department store downtown. My trusty gray stapler; my metallic pencil sharpener  firmly bolted to the right side of my desk (one of the first in Toronto, so far as I know); the slightly withered emerald plant in the corner that I suddenly remembered needed to be watered in the morning; my phone, gleaming black and expectant. Of course, I would mutter the approprtate words of sheer surprise and delight when he paused in his talk to let me utter these mandatory exclamations, but even while stating these obvious interjections, I would visualize the picture hung over the door of my office, the one featuring a fawn in the woods bathed by a sinking sun's crimson light . Trite, but moving to me. I got moved even then, while Henry Meadows rattled on. Moved to tears, almost.

"Old chap, I've said enough," Henry said, beaming, finishing the last of his beer. Smacking his lips. Slightly belching, but only slightly, as if he was self-conscious of the fact that he could have been more rude, but chose not to be -- for my benefit. He leaned back, made a grandiose decision to scan the bar and nod, and for all the world look like he had somehow come to occupy a higher residence of respectability in this place compered to these other said patrons.

And all the while, I thought: He's lying.

What a simple, likely scenario. He was lying, Henry Meadows was. He had gone nowhere. Done nothing. A dozen years is a long time, yes, but he had most probably spent it somewhere in Ontario, in small towns like Barrie or Sudbury, possibly further north in Kenora. Doing the odd mining job, or working in the kitchens of saloons, rinsing beer suds from old mugs. I can't say for certain why I believed my theory to be true, but I knew it was a sudden statement of fact, even if no verification would ever be possible. I felt like, at last, by acknowleding his own silly lies, I had grown up. Released myself from the shackles of my wondering all these years where the hell he had been. Knowing this, believing this, I could hardly ask himself to explain himself further, to justify his own life.

"What a tale," was what I said at the end. "My lord, what a tale."

"Isn't it, though?" Henry said, delighted at my own delight. "Isn't it all just the damnedest thing?"

It was.

We left the bar soon after, with a lengthy handshake and repeated backslaps. I did not see Henry Meadows again for another five years, when I happened to spot him while waiting in line one brisk autumn afternoon to see a  matinee at the Royal Theatre off of Spadina Street. My wife and the twins would be shopping downtown for most of the afternoon, and I decided that a good Hithcock picture would be quite the time killer. There was a substantial line, so I had time to let my eyes wander, and I noticed Henry right out front as the lengthy que gradually crept closer to that towering marquee.

He was sweeping leaves away at the base of the box-office window. He looked heavier than before, and sunken, as if he had lost a few inches. A sparse beard speckled his face. His clothes appeared worn and shabby. I wanted to approach him, to tap him on the shoulder, to tell him that I would never forget the afternoon he left me in the pub, nor the afternoon he returned (as I never have, at some reliably standard level of my soul), that those days had did something to my life, had aligned my own fate into a moderately modest sense of proportion, that he nevertheless still occupied a heroic slot in my heart, that I remembered the way he had reassured that sad boy on the ice when we were both children. I wanted to say all of that, and whatever more I might find.

I said nothing. I watched him finish sweeping his leaves into a black garbage bag. He picked up the sack, slung it over his right shoulder, and hurriedly rushed into the cinema. (I thought I might have glimpsed that trusty old black eyepath, but I can't be sure.) I quietly stepped out of line, muttering apologies to the strangers surrounding me, and I and walked the other way up Spadina, not looking back. I wasn't sure where I was going, but there were a few more hours left in my afternoon before I would meet up with my family, and I wanted to fill that small space, make some good use of my time.

HENRY MEADOWS (fiction -- part VI)

Certain conversations can only be recollected, never reanacted. What I mean is: We talked at that bar for a good three or four hours, over beer after beer, one Heineken and Labatt's mixing freely with the next, and I could not even begin to tell you in detail the exact words we exchanged. This not merely a matter of time; of course everything fades sixty years, especially something as ephemeral as mere words in the air tossed back and forth between two old friends, but there is also a sort of sensory protection I believe my brain is now enacting. Images from that afternoon still highlight themselves in my mind, but after our initial awkward greetings, I'm left with a sense of the conversation, but not its concrete dimensions. Stuff has been veiled.

You might well say (and you could very well be correct): "Why would you remember a few hours of talk a good six decades later?" Yet I'm not playing linguistic games here; I'm attempting to parcel out the process by which my head does its thing. When one reaches my age, the simple fact that there is any awareness of individual acts of cognition in the first place is a pure celebratory bonus. (I've always stayed sharp, but the rise to one hundred years old will dull any blade.)

What I'm getting at is something deeper, linked to memory, and feeling, and the flutery vagueness of sensation. I can offer you the scent of those beers, the way that they filled up that pub and spread like blue smoke, as if they were the most pungent and fragrant dark ales that had ever been poured. Each sip and swallow seemed to heighten what I most needed from myself at that time. Had I any artistic talent, I could literally paint you a picture of the way that the light outside the slightly-cracked window slowly shaded, then inked the small lulls of our conversational ebbs, the sun almost waiting for any pause in the chat before another tint of the night was dabbed here and there. Our talk tempered the mood of the oncoming evening and the boozily kinetic vibe of the patrons that milled all around us like frantic fish in a tank. They were letting their afterwork lives dwindle down -- smoking their cigs, ordering another round of crisp fish-and-chips, slightly soggy with oil in some spots, Jurgen's stove-style small tic -- but our words seemed to encapsulate Henry Meadows and myself in our mutual pod of the past. I can no longer hear what someone says on the other side of a room, but I can still hear the bouncy sound of the clunky bar radio's big band music floating through the gaps in that closed-in small crowd, all those high and low notes somehow circumventing the bubble of the table we shared. It was like the universe had decided to augment the sensory aspects of this place and this time, because the cosmos somehow sensed other speaking opportunities would lag, or vanish altogether.

What I'm saying is: Conversation is a substitue for communion. I'm not sure that Henry Meadows and me ever achieved such a grandiose state, but I am certain that my mind has attempted to codify and preserve its visual essence and tilt, and I suspect that the words we bounced back and forth have receded with time to somehow compensate for this extravagance of compressed emotion and mood. I'm left with the essence of the essence, which is not diluted nostalgia per se, but something darker and denser and altogether more sad. I have to fall back on the depressingly tacticle reconstruction of words to reassemble what happened next. Mood might not be enough. Such a modified attempt to convey what we said will not offer up any kind of real truth, but it might be something like it.  

HENRY MEADOWS (fiction -- part V)

"I thought I'd find you here," Henry said, that wry grin of a badge still intact and shining.

I should have shot back a witty retort, but such perfectly-timed lines of rebuttal don't exist in real life. (That is to say, they quite possibly could, but surely not in any of the interior lives that I've lived up to this late point in my place.) The very act of speaking itself seemed an unreasonable goal. My mouth was connected to my face, and my tongue inhabited a space in the reasonable vicinity of my assembled teeth and two lips, but somehow synching these disparate parts for an audible purpose was a task that I couldn't even begin to approach. In front of me was a symbol of something I thought I had lost -- what you could call a facsimile of a life that might have been mine, had I stepped out of myself at some point in my past, and not embraced what I later realized was my present, period. Instead of my friend, I keenly understood that I was looking at a mirror, darkly; I saw my own status as a man in the wearied glare that he gave as he sized me up.

What could he see? Nothing but the steadily-approaching-mid-thirties man that I was, one who had spent the previous dozen years or so building a settled life of some sort. Embedded in a city so eager to let the war find its space in the cozy history of Confederation that something vital in my cranium had been psychically buried along with that whole bloody era. A kind of resilience, perhaps, sunk in a grave of good will. A boldness, deferred. 'We'll get back to that bravado in a bit, but first let's not raise too much of a fuss' -- isn't that the meekly Canadian way? Or maybe I was merely reading into Toronto what I most feared in myself -- an acquiescence to civility, and all its mundane minutia. The quivering need to solidly plant myself in this town had allowed me to steadily rise in the hierarchy of the Eaton's Department store chain.

No lack of ambition in this chap, right?

That was my line as I nightly lay in bed before the dark became deep. It was what I silently whispered to my soul when the lights were all out. My own monologue, mute in its shout. Henry Meadows had escaped into oblivion, but I would soon be managing the whole of Men's Wear at both the flagship store on Bloor Street and the new John Street location. Take that, globetrotting ambition! One can find contentment in tasks that allow us to refine and mature. Henry Meadows can take a flying fuck.

Oh, if only I had said that to him! I was regretting my cowardice, but I also understood that it would be futile and absurd. I uttered nothing of the sort, of course, because this mysteriously tactile and accusatory mirror-image of myself quickly shattered in my vision, and I was left with my friend, Henry, now a middle-aged man like myself, and boy did it show.

The patch was still there, and in its brightly black sheen I could almost believe that it was the same one he had worn on the day he had left, were it not for the spider-web of wrinkles that stretched out from its edges and crawled down his cheeks. His entire face seemed to have slightly cracked, as if it had merely been an egg shell that had shattered at life's every tap. His chin was scraggly, his build a little more bulky, yet despite all his newfold creases, he was still nothing but Henry Meadows, and the smile that he wielded with such force let me know that he knew it too. He had left, but not divided.

"I don't know what to say," was what I finally said.

"Ha!" Henry spat, more of a bark than a laugh. "Good call, my old friend. What can you say at a moment like this? At the very least, order me a beer, and that will be fine for a start. I'm pretty parched."

I did as I was told, he the schoolmaster, and I his pupil. I raised the index finger of my left hand, waggled it a bit, cleared my throat with a cough, all in an almost-vain attempt to get the minimal attention required of Jurgen, the portly German barkeep, who seemed to reluctant to let his gaze wander from his folded-up newspaper that lay splayed on the counter from morning to night. He gave me the briefest of glances as I pointed at my beer, motioning for another, and I wondered where the waitress was, and why he had hired her if she would not come around.

"You look well," I said, which is what you say to everyone who you've not seen for some time.

"'Well' is a relative term," Henry said, taking off his scruffy black coat and letting it slide to his side. "I'm broke, and weary, and shell-shocked to be sitting across from you in a bar, but I suppose, compared to many, maybe most, I could even be called, shall we say, exemplary."

He laughed at that, and so did I, a genuine chuckle that felt authentic and welcome. The past and the present had suddenly tied themselves into a finite loop of completion with our mutual laugh of great cheer, as if a warning shot had been fired, an icy puddle dissolved, and I felt less than enamored with the thought of continuing to torture my spirit, wallowing in my life's lacks. We were two old friends about to share a drink, that's all, and our lives had been leading to this moment of plainspoken kinship. I told myself that our experiences were compatible, perhaps even adjacent. And I've been repeating this to myself for a good many years.   

      

HENRY MEADOWS (fiction -- part iv)

Nostalgia is almost always a sly form of disdain.

I can confidently state this -- with such blunt assurance -- because I am unspeakably old. Disgustingly old. Creeping fairly confidently up to a hundred, and at this age, one is filled up with memories, the present moment, unweighted, and the memories in the end do nothing but win. 'No contest', as folks much younger than me used to say back in the day. I'm not pronouncing that the past is better; I'm not even implying that I would rather be back there, permanently. (I'm not a lunatic.) I'm simply asserting that there is no force like the past, that ever resurgent, perpetually toxic tonic of lore. It will always come back, and will never lie down.

Of course, I'd always had distinctly declamatory thoughts like this, even as a young man, perhaps even as a boy, so it's no surrpise that I was thinking about something similarly melodramatic and portentuous the day that Henry came back into our lives with all the casual ease and bravado of a thirsty traveling cowboy shoving his way through the swinging doors of an old-time saloon. (Or at least the movie version of such a speakeasy.)

If this were a story, you would not believe the next detail, nor would I expect you to, but since there's nothing fanciful going on here (at least not on the conscious level; I am, bear with me, almost one hundred, after all, and the mind does tend to fold in on itself when you hover that close to a number so vast), you can rest assured that what happened is true, or at least as true as I can make it. He returned, is what I'm saying. He returned, to the same bar where I had seen him last a dozen years in the past. He returned, and I was in the same spot, drinking quite the same drink. He returned.

Just before he shuffled his way over to my table, I had been thinking about an image from my past, (still in my thirities, yet obsessed with what I had once been), brooding on its broad dimensions, on  a hazy picture of light, one that seemed to consist of disparate, fizzling sensations that built up in my chest and seemed to starburst themselves through the rest of my body, from torso to toes. It's odd to imagine an image as such being mostly bright light and shattered nerve-endings, but as the decades have dwindled, that seems about right. We feel before we see, and we remember what we sense, and in that moment a pure flash of childhood decided to make itself bright.

There was a darkness, enclosed and binding. My finger felt around the thin wedge of a hole. The inside of a hole. The boundaries of the hole. There was just enough space to squeeze one of my nails straight on in to the left. I somehow understood (no more than two, possibly three at the most) that if I lingered too long, something bad might ignite. I knew (then) that sensing was much more than seeing, and I understood (in the bar) that this could very well have been the first memory of my life.

A sense, almost erotic, of a current leaching itself out of the hole on its way to my heart. Briskly blue and diverging. I tried to poke my finger closer, further, into that hole, until my finger was knuckle-deep, and then the feeling, that static sqawl of electricty that orgasmed into pure joy, was offset by a shriek, an aural assault, and I realized that my mother was pulling my digit out of the white wall's socket, and it wasn't the electric buzz by itself that ignited my screams, but my mother's wail of panic, her purehearted moan.

Suddenly, I was no longer 'feeling' or 'sensing', but allowing my sight to seize hold, everything visible, my blind instincts abandoned, and I belatedly saw it as just a wall, a bad hole in the wall, and the smack of her palm on my cheek shook my gums like green jelly dessert, and it was thinking this thought, this after-three-beers blend of wistful and tragic spare pyschic parts, as I wondered if that childhood  moment was the exact one when the pain shifted from the sting of my face to the imminent sludge of my foot, soon to be useless and void, when Henry Meadows  slumped across the table from me with a sigh, the simple act of his presence popping my reverie, my mental splatter its wake, like a pimple that's burst after extended build-up.

 

HENRY MEADOWS (Fiction -- part iii)

Before I go any further, I feel that I must bring to your attention a certain incident from our past, one of those dazzling childhood afternoons that one tends to forget for what seems like decades, until the moment suddenly emerges, intact and pristine. Only a few months ago did I suddenly understand how it must have impacted my life. Absurd! To think that momentous occasions can recede like the tide, but I suppose that's what life's steady accumulations tend to quietly erode, all those fragile incidents smothered by the years steady push.  Getting older simply means that some things have go. Yet they often straggle back, as this memory did.

We were playing hockey one particularly brittle February morning on the frozen pond that abutted our school. It must have been a weekend, because in my recollection we had skated all day, loopy with the kind of winter exhausition which comes from hours of stop-and-start skating, and I'm quite sure that we would have continued well into dusk had not the subsequent 'incident' occurred precisely as it did.

Probably seven or eight of us, three or four to a team, plus goalies in their nets. I can't recall all of the boys who were with us, but there was myself, Henry (of course), Thomas Malton (who occupies centre ice of this story, even though he was a goaltender in real life), the Kepowski twins, Wallace and Wendell, and a few of our other casual friends from grade school who had joined us for the day of good sport. (This is a convenient way for me to acknowledge that their names no longer ring any bells in the chapel of my head. They remain faceless, although I can remember the faded red and green knitted toques that they wore, along with certain whistles and laughs that wheedled out from their mouths. Time, you sly bastard!)

The important point, what I need you to know, is that Henry stood up for a boy. I wish I could recollect his name. I can't believe I've forgotten it, but there it is. A nameless boy, given dignity, is what I am left with, and what I'm passing on to you.

There was some kind of a skirmish -- two boys fighting over the puck, a quick fall to the ice, a knee banged-up and bloodied. (Or so I assumed) I watched it all from behind the (imaginary) blue line of my own defensive zone; my role was to stay back and protect. Leave it to Henry, the goalie, the ultimate stopper of force, to one-up my own part.

I recall hearing his akward skates glide from behind as they cut through the ice. (In those days, all our skates were little more than hardened felt fastened to dull sticks of steel, but Henry's were especially crude, little more than lengthened rocks bound together.) He might have said something to me. I can't be sure. Yet as he breezed by me, the freezing afternoon wind seemed to sway just a tad -- as if it, like me, paused in its lazy arc of motion to allow the silence its space. In that audible gap, he might have even said what he planned to say to the boy. Nothing filled, it though, and the silence kept its own swell.

The boy was bent over at centre ice (or as rougly 'centre' as one can get in the uneven breadth of a pond). His tormentor, or bully, or perhaps equal adversary was skating back to the other end, welcomed by chuckling comrades. I slowly made my way up to where Henry was kneeling beside the stomach-clutching kid. In the fastly-spreading dusk, it was hard to make out just what the fuss was about, but I figured he had been probably sucker-punched, and was clutching his gut in a vain effort to gather his wind.

I could have skated closer. I might have clearly heard what Henry was saying. I should have been a bit brave, or at least more of a snoop. I realized that my assumption was wrong, that the boy had not been brutalized, that the source of such mockery was the black stain that rapidly spread across the base of his crotch. His blue jeans, a luxury in those days, almost an anomaly in that part of Ontario, were wetly ebony at their vee.

Is there any shame so intense as that possessed by a child who has pissed his pants before others? The whole moment lastled less than a minute. In retrospect (do we have anything else in life but retrospect?) it was, to be sure, one boy helping another to feel like less of a chump. Something far down inside me, however, underwent a small shift of upheaval. The first few stars were peeking through the soot-grey blanket of sky, and the soon-to-be-night seemed to ink its way into the air, and I could smell the sickeningly sweet stink of his urine, lifted then settled, as scents often do. I looked at them both, Henry and the boy, for a short snatch of time, but I felt them become older, and myself gain a foothold on what came to be known as the ladder of 'adolescence'. The moment seemed to expand, contract. Everything before felt like 'childhood', and everything after 'adult-like'. The way a cola can will explode when shaken for too long and too hard -- that was now my own sense of what humans might be. It was as if the notion of compassion extended its grace, allowed itself to be seen.

And then it was over, and the game resumed, and the image of the boy -- his face, his build, the shade of his skaes -- faded even before the night had come to a close. Decades later, all that's left is the smell of his urine, so horrific in its purity, its exposed humiliation. Being truthful, I can't even be sure which image is real from that day, and which one is a sketch, but the stink of his piss, I can tell you that was there. I'd forgotten about this day for years ever after, but now I can remember Charlie skating back to his net, giving me one of his winks with that one good eye of his, the other blind one even then clothed in a black matted square. I don't know if the urine-smattered boy left the ice right away, or after some time. I do know that something brave had been done, miniature yet mature. The night got colder, and darker, practically inviting even more accidents and misfortune, but we kept playing hockey until we couldn't see where the hands on our sticks matched up with the wood.

HENRY MEADOWS -- (Fiction -- Part II)

I can safely assume that none of you reading this are as deathly old as myself, so my memories of those heady days after the end of the war are not likely to be challenged, but I often wonder if I can trust my own feverish sense of that time, and its heady afterglow.

For days, even weeks -- dare I say months? -- after everything had finally settled and dispersed like a fire slowly burning down to its embers, most of us in my memory walked around in a daze of delight. I would see strangers on the streets of Toronto, and the two of us would share a goofy smile as if we were old chums; other times, an acquaintance from back home in Kingston -- Morgan Thomas, say, that tall goofy tall lad whose slap-shot was so pure, or the butcher's boy, Crandall Fitzpatrick, he of the family that smelled always of pork -- might rush across the road simply to show me that he was still alive, back from the front, all limbs intact, and I would be delighted by his eagerness to show off, his humble bravado. I never felt any animosity from these friends for my own lack of engagement in the battlefields of Europe. It was enough that the whole bloody mess was done. Time to move on, and move on we did.

Even so, as the years have dragged on, often overstaying their welcome, I've accepted that the basic force of memory itself cannot be contained, and I'm often awakened before dawn by stray moments from my past that refuse to fit into the cozy narrative I've written for myself. Was I truly so ecstatic as everyone else all around me? I would say yes, I was -- but I need to qualify that assertion with an acknowledgement of a certain gap in my side.

In the few years after my good friend Henry Meadows left, and long before he returned, I admit that thoughts of his travels occupied my mind more than the war movement itself. This is a rather shameful thing to admit, even now, even since all (and I do mean all) my close friends and family have long since passed on, so any embarrassment I wield is now pretty much moot. When he was gone, I tried to shove the absence of his presence into a shoebox in my mind. Sometimes I succeeded, although the days at the factory were longer without his bad jokes, and his affected-but-amusing ways of expression. Within a few months, it wasn't his daily companionship that I missed, but rather the knowledge that we were exiles together. Other men at the factory were, quite obviously, not 'soldiers' per se, so I was certainly amongst a certain kind of civilian brethren, but I always felt as if he and I were separated from the others by way of our detachment from the whole dreary scene. We were, of course, secretly disgusted to be in some ways too feeble to physically defend our embattled northern land, but our mutual code of compliance meant that we had a means of reconciling this reality by the elevation of ourselves to a higher mode of expression. This is all rather self-aggrandizing, I know, but what I'm saying is this: I realized, when he left, and when he didn't come back, that I was, in fact, now and forever, as we all are, in this life utterly alone, despite my youthful pretensions of solidarity and a kind of communal endurance.

This feeling, vague but persistent, stayed with me, almost embedded itself, even as I married Joyce and had the twins soon after. We were busy with the children and work and watching Toronto become something quite other than what it had once represented. I could feel the Dominion itself come alive, shake off its fusty old coat, letting the dust and mothballs descend on the mouthy land just to the south. My memories of those years are filled with children being bathed in the warm splashes of a tub not big enough for their mirth, and Joyce's own laughter decorating our house with an almost ornamental reality, and my new job as a salesman at the Eaton's department store downtown providing a quiet, daily reprieve to what had been the constant, clanky noise of the factory, its unending smoky drudge.

These are good pictures, vital snapshots, ones I mentally take out and fiddle with more than you would care to know, but I do have to admit that throughout these good years of growth it was the space left by Henry Meadows that refused to be filled. He was now out there; he had left before the war, and remained absent after. As I settled into my life of grateful domesticity, I realized that there was another life that I was not living, and it was Henry himself who was exploring it for me. His was not some grand escape, but more of a time-out, one that allowed him to become almost legendary in my head, a fable taken from life, and although I knew he would one day come back -- how could he not? -- I also understood that he had entered other realms of living that would probably render him almost unrecognizable.

Only now, with the good grace of time, can I acknowledge the tiny thorn that drew blood in my head. The whole country wanted to shove the past into a big box and drop it right into the lake. So many dead, so best just to let that whole era of pain quickly sink into sludge.  Throughout those years, pre-war and after, I lived, worked, ate Sunday dinner, read THE STAR in my armchair that I felt I had earned, and that whole past life with my friend came to resemble what you could call a fond dream. I told myself that I had not changed all that much, even though he surely had, and I pretended that a certain anxiety that I felt was simply indigestion. Sometimes I would shoot up in bed after glimpsing Henry in my dream take off that black badge over his eye, and the light from his pupil was enough to blind me for good. Upon waking, I would shake it off, tell Joyce to roll over and sleep and don't make such a fuss, it was just a bad dream, get your rest and be still, but I also knew that the longer Henry Meadows stayed away, the less I could feel that the war was all done. What was he doing? Where had he gone? When could I know what his adventure had wrought for us all?  

HENRY MEADOWS (Fiction -- Part I)

In the early spring of 1942, right around the time when the last remaining snowpatches of a very grey winter had finally decided to melt and give mercy to us all, a young man who went by the name of Henry Meadows decided that it was probably time to just pack up and go. He wasn't sure where. Nor for how long. A great change was in order, even if his life was already, despite its ostensible stability, functionally adrift. That there could be a focus, even an identifiable pattern, in the decision to unravel his own comfortable means of existence puzzled him, but he had long before then realized that he could reliably trust his own unconventional approach to the notion of pursuit. I had always followed his lead, but this was one voyage he would embark on alone. (I've never been good at leaving behind maps.)

So far, such seemingly illogical, one could even say haphazard reasoning had allowed him to reasonably stay put while the world all around him continued on its mad stab. I spent many an afternoon with him drinking our blandless drafts at the various pubs which used to drearily line Yonge Street in a sad staggered row, their shapeless brown forms like the perfunctory beer-blots from our fathers that stained the kitchen table-cloths of our youth, and I would gradually understood over time that there was something beyond our mutual alienation from society that had motivated his flight. While our fellow childhood friends were off fighting for Queen and country overseas, the two of us -- he blighted by the abscence of his right eye, myself crippled and inert by a left leg that was bum right from birth -- did our pathetic best for the war effort by making munitions in a small factory at the end of John Street, We daily felt a mixture of relief and panic, thankful that were were not getting blown up in some remote Italian outpost, and disgust that something inside of us was palpably shrinking, a vital part of our youthful bravado slowly chipped away as we heard secondhand that another acquaintance had passed. While we regularly enjoyed bratwurst sandwiches from Shopsy's for lunch, extra mustard a must. So when he told me over our ritual brews one April afternoon that he had decided to leave, I wasn't surprised, merely overly cautious in how I should process my response.

"This has been some time coming," I said.

He nodded, smiling. Took a long chug of his beer, and allowed the froth of his beer to give him the kind of full moustache he could never grow on his own.

"I think the factory has gotten all it can out of my ex-per-tise," he said.

"And who's going to assemble all the jeep engine parts?" I asked. "Harold? Ronald?  You trust them with the future of Canadian military transportation?"

"My boy," he said, which was his pet phrase for me, and since he always said it so jocular, I didn't mind its banality. "I don't trust them, nor the Canadian military, nor trans-por-tation itself. I just trust myself, and you should, too."

"Implicitly," I said. "You were meant for more than the assembly line."

He wiped away his moustache with the sleeve of his shirt, suddenly looking quite serious, the same intense way that he did when we played hockey on the frozen pond behind our schoolhouse when we were mere lads, him always as goalie, in charge of stopping all the hard pucks tbat aligned against us.

"None of us are meant for anything," he said, shutting the lid of his one good eye. The other was covered by a black patch with a strap that crept up to his ear.

"Which means?"

"Which means," he went on, "that Abel Crawford is dead as of last, when was it, Thursday, I believe, while we sit here and drink, all warm and content. His head blown right off, while we burp and digest. You prove to me that there's a meaning in that equation, and the next one's one me."

I said nothing. That one of our public school chums had been killed in battle was a familiar form of news, but Henry's current reaction was not. It had something palpably sullen to its cast.

"So you are off to search for meaning in a world that you've just identified as meaningless," I finally said, after what I felt was an appropriately long pause. (Henry did tend to get irritated if you didn't let his statements breathe.)

"Precisely," he said, and this time his smile was back, that smile which always bordered on the brink of a friendly sort of menace. He rubbed his hands together, took a quick look around the bar, and looked all the while as if he had unearthed some logic to life that only he understood.

"Will you let me in on your 'plan', if I can call it that?"

"I will let you know shortly," he said. "In-ter-mittently, I should add. Until then, I need to tell you something important. Will you listen to something important?"

"Of course," I said."

He leaned in across the table towards me, and I had to consciously try not to stare at his black patch. The stink of the bar, its smoky afterglow, felt very real and primal to me at that moment. I understood that, outside, mere steps away, the sun had begun to shine, and the grass of the parks had begun to flow with the aftermelt of old snow, but in here, all was glum and tainted.

"If I don't come back, I want you to know that my ambition was real. Promise me you'll remember that. My am-bi-tion was real."

Enunciating his main points, an old childhood tic that had become almost rooted to his character with each passing year. It had always amused me, then irritated me, and now seemed almost ominous in its ridiculous portent.

"And your ambition is what, Henry?"

He smiled.

"You'll hear soon enough," he said, then slightly slapped me on the cheek, as one would after shaving. He stood up, pulled on his coat, gave a last little nod, then hurriedly walked out the door and into his life. I knew that he would be gone for quite some time, but I didn't have any clue as to his ultimate intent or motive, and I would not see him again for almost twelve years. In all that time, it seems like I did nothing but wait.