What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

felt a stifling lethargy. Wasn’t she just thinking about love? “Draw me a picture of you so I won’t forget your face, Mom.” Angie had laughed, kissing her. That feature of love, the one that recalled something unadulterated, enjoyable, she no longer remembered it. The flush of pleasure never came on its own. Always the invasive clasp of a wilfulness, as if she loved Angie despite things, not for them. She hated her father because she loved Angie, she loved Jamal because she loved Angie, she loved her friends because she loved Angie, she was a bicycle courier because she loved Angie, she hated policemen and ambulances and bank tellers because she loved Angie. Loving Angie was a gate, and at every moment she made decisions based on that love, if the gate swung open or closed. She kept from loving because she loved Angie. She collected nothing like furniture or books because she loved Angie and things would clutter the space between her present self and the self that Angie loved. Carla needed a clear empty path to Angie as a living being. She appeared calm on the outside. She had a cool surface. But the battle to sort out what she could and couldn’t love was furious in her. The loop of experiences with Angie needed more and more space in her brain and the invention that maintaining an image of her mother required took all her will and focus. The things that she could touch that reminded her of Angie were few. This building was one. Today it yielded little that could nourish her purpose.

The latest tenants went in and out of the doorway. Carla searched their figures for any familiarity. Doesn’t a life leave traces, traces that can attach themselves to others who pass through the aura of that life? Doesn’t a place absorb the events it witnesses; shouldn’t there be some sign of commemoration, some symbol embedded in this building always for Angie’s life here? She guesses perhaps not, though she stands on the lawn as if she should be noticed or acknowledged. What did she actually want here? Acknowledgment or release? She was holding on to a precious bundle; there was a woman’s face there and scraps of conversations and what felt like nerves and emotions and sinews—and the bundle was fragile and elliptical and she wished that she were not the only one responsible for it. Angie would disappear if Carla let the bundle fall. And why should Angie disappear, what had she done? She had, yes, crossed a border. But wasn’t that daring! Wasn’t it hopeful? How come she had to disappear for it? Angie had lived dangerously, as one should. How else could anything be done. That was what Carla was holding for her. If only because Angie had made her and Jamal, if only for that, Carla would hold Angie’s bundle of sinews, impressions, and her face.

Jamal was waiting for her to do something to get him out of Mimico. His next bail hearing was in three weeks’ time. There was nothing else for it, she had to go see her father before that. She turned away from 782 Wellesley if not energized then purposeful. It was afternoon now, three o’clock or so, and she felt hungry—she would walk across the great arc of the bridge to the Danforth—it wasn’t far, but turning to the bridge, her body sank, she couldn’t summon up the stomach to go there. Not now.

TEN

TUYEN’S FATHER’S HOBBY was drawing all the buildings in the city as if he had built them. In his spare time, which was brief, after the restaurant was shut for the night, after the produce was put away, and the kitchen cleaned, and the lights dimmed, Tuan would go home and draw. Because after all that work he couldn’t sleep. He had gone past tired to that wide-awake state that prevented him from sleeping until three or four in the morning. Tuan would often begin working on his drawings at one of the tables in the restaurant, not bothering to go home when the rest of the family left. He could not always endure his wife’s insomnia, which was not a restful one like his, but a continuous pacing, throughout which she went over again and again the scene at the bay when they both lost sight of Quy.

Cam played the vision over in her head, trying to regain the moment when she did not see, trying to alter the sequence of events so that she would arrive at herself in the present with her family and her mind intact. Just a split second would have been all the difference. Why hadn’t she noticed that moment as she should have? Why couldn’t she reclaim the time? Why had this happened to them? It was she to blame, it was she who could have with one turning of the head caught sight of Quy and pulled him to her. She could taste that moment, she longed to live it, it terrified her. She had such a deep sense of shame she felt inhuman.

Tuan, for his part, worked to stave off his own lessening. No work was back-breaking enough for him. He welcomed the rebuff of Canadian officials and employers to his licensing as a civil engineer as it matched his sense of unworthiness and dishonour. There was nothing they could take away from him, nothing he had that he had not lost already. Though despite both himself and the powers that be he was successful. But he drew buildings as if he was still what he was.

He did not like to think of that moment the way Cam did—if he did, he would have days of paralysis when he could not get out of his pyjamas, his limbs felt weak, and he could not work. He would glimpse himself at the bay, feeling relief that they were finally leaving, ticking off in his mind all the preparations he had made, all