In Which Virgil Watches Sheepdogs Run

Tonight in F major; tonight a rumination on clemency, tranquility, & the future; tonight, we’ll get there, although it will be a circuitous route, a long and winding road, the 401, a highway here in Canada with a darling British crown perched atop its road signs, depositing me once again in the bosom of the Annex. Which is to say, I was a traveler earlier today, an Alexander going east, only instead of India, it was Eastern Ontario; instead of Bucephalus, it was Kia’s car (instead of a Kia, it was a Hyundai station wagon); instead of murdering the enemy, it was “murdering a roti,” as I’m told they like to say in the U.K., perhaps in Canada too, given its adjacency to the Crown, though perhaps “murdering” is unlikely, given the Canadian temperament.

But you see, O Journal of Provincial Badinage, Kia called me this morning, early, 6 am ish, when my mind was still recuperating from Wednesday’s musical escapades, as some 1980s French movie about sea shanty singers in Bretagne played on the computer, I was scarcely on the leeward side of Thursday. On the phone, which I seldom answer and didn’t want to today (my voice froggy, my mind unused to the sunlight), Kia’s timbre was brassier than I remembered, and she seemed what an altogether different person might call “blissed out” & she said she’d swing by my new lodging, where I had dozens of local books strewn about like a mid-tier psychopath (some Canadian, e.g. Mordecai Richler; also Eugene Ionesco’s “Rhinoceros”; also there were some magazines (including one about cottage life (“cottage” is Canadian for “country house” )) & I was cutting and pasting words and images into makeshift «assemblages») and pick me up and guess what, we would be going on a trip! She said, Unless you have plans? Honestly I was still 80% in a dream & “You Never Give Me Your Money / Golden Slumbers” was circulating in my head, so I mumbled, Sure who huh what where?

Once we were on the road, she had brought bagels by the way, I found myself shivering & didn’t know whether it was from the cold Canadian morning or fear that this relative stranger from Nova Scotia was going to hand me over to the Premier or the Prime Minister for unknown international offences, & yes I did place a brief call to Harriet, then hung up, then renamed her contact DISLOYAL MONSTER in my phone, then blocked her (and couldn’t remember, as tired and chilly as I was, if I was truly mad at her, or not (was I both tactically *and* truly mad at her (since the two can coexist, surely; parasocial feelings can swim alongside real feelings in the modern muddled bloodstream) or, rather/additionally, was she mad at me, or was I just morose and lonely, in the end) hmm maybe one more closing parenthesis? mmmwah) — anyway there’s no embarrassment or psychiatric gotchas that arise from saying that I missed her at that moment, I wanted to hear her pouty voice to assure me all was well! But I sipped the mahogany coffee Kia handed me. No! then I spat it out the window in case she had poisoned it. Goodness, possibly it was the rabies from my shoulder presenting at last.

I said, in an ordinary voice, Say, Kia, do you have siblings? She said, I’ve got an older sister and a younger sister. I said, Does the older one terrorize you and belittle you when you act even a shade outside the norm? (Meanwhile the coffee, which I had decided couldn’t very well be poisoned, they wouldn’t know where to find poison in Canada, was warming me up fine and starting my engines.) & Kia said, Um, belittle me? i.e.? And I said, You mean e.g., not i.e. One mnemonic, if you’ll permit me (and she gave a little head nod), one mnemonic you can use, since memorizing the Latin isn’t simple, is that e.g. is like egg-xample, while i.e. means *that is*, and though there’s no easy mnemonic for that, i.e.’s just the one that’s not e.g. I’m surprised that they didn’t teach you this in college. She said, I didn’t go to college, I went to university. And I said, Egg-xactly; evidently it’s not on the syllabus here? Say, where are you going to medical school again? Kia said, Here; the U of T. To which I said, Harriet didn’t get into Harvard, either. Kia said, Lol I didn’t think to apply to Harvard. I said, Lamowww!

We were still in Toronto, that sprawling brutal plain loveliness, but from the map on the dashboard I could see some highways approaching, & it occurred to me that I didn’t know where we were going on our road trip. Should I ask? I asked myself. Kia was a calm and patient driver, she paused to take a puff of something and then was Medically Calm, she said, My older sister is nice, to your question. I said I was glad to hear it. I added, But now Harriet works at Princeton, well almost, she more or less has the job, & that’s nearly as good as Harvard, it’s like third-best, some would say, certainly a step up from Barnard. Kia said, Is that where you went, Princeton? And I said, Don’t be silly, that’s in New Jersey.

Then whoosh we were on the 401, which is what people call it here, The 401, almost with a capital, reverential T, it’s essentially the only highway in Canada, half the country’s population fills its ten lanes. I said, Are we going to Halifax? Kia said, Nope — I can tell you where we’re going, I never said I wanted it to be a mystery. (I’d forgotten it was me who had wanted it.) She asked if I would take over driving soon, and I said, What? No, I’m from New York City, I don’t do that. But apparently that was why she had invited me along: to share the driving duties. This was a disappointment, some might say. I sang, The long and winding road that leads… & now I needed to hear the song itself, the genuine article, so I hooked my phone up to Kia’s stereo and put “Let It Be” on — “don’t leave me waiting here!” — but then DISLOYAL MONSTER rang me up, her face commandeered the dashboard and brought the song to a halt, how embarrassing, evidently I hadn’t blocked Harriet after all.

Kia asked, Who is DISLOYAL MONSTER? While I set about blocking Harriet properly, I said, by way of dodging, since we weren’t all that different from strangers, Did your older sister ever say she didn’t want to be your sister anymore? And Kia said, Sure, all the time. Anyway we popped into a Tim Hortons on the side of the 401 because we needed more coffee, at least I did, and Kia continued, That’s just how it was, how she told us when we’d gone too far, so we would take a step back and give her some space; and then we would keep right on bothering her. I said, You’re using the past tense, as in, when you were a kid. Kia nodded, and I said, So I gather that this dynamic has run its course, and now you’re busy adulting.

May I add that it was brusquely warm today, Kia was dressed nearly like she was going sunbathing, plus a lulling blue sweatshirt on top for the morning cold; she said, Is DISLOYAL MONSTER your sister, then? By which time, we once again were speeding along the 401, I had put on “Revolver” & then BRUCE showed up on the dashboard, so I blocked him too. Canadian highways are much like American highways, I observed aloud, casually, although the signage is blue, at least sometimes, and there are crowns, & the mileage indicators are in kilometres not miles, yet the conversion is doable, or at least easily approximated, and best of all, as far as I can surmise, there are no billboards, not a one.

My Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt felt itchy. I said, Kia, tell me more about Australia. (She seemed glassy-eyed, she must have snuck another puff, still I trusted her, in a fashion.) Kia said, I don’t remember it too well, we moved when I was five. I said, So do you have an accent? She said, Do you hear an accent? I asked, Why did you move to Canada? She said, My father was in the military, so we moved to Kingston for a bit; then he left and taught at Dalhousie, in Halifax, that’s where I mostly grew up.

The idea of an Australian military, not to mention a Canadian military, was too much for my early-rising mind, so I giggled for several minutes & then invited her to play some Australian music. She put on an artist named Courtney Barnett, none of her songs was in 11/4, I didn’t like that twist, and didn’t care for the music otherwise, honestly, too much ennui, so I switched us back to The Beatles, then I fell asleep like rocks and when I woke, we were on Princess Street, in Kingston, Ontario.

∰

Kingston is a small city, like Manchester, N.H. or our friend Portland, Me., but far more orderly: battlements, turrets, cobblestones; scant evidence of brutalism, which I appreciated. It was barely past 9 a.m., Kia took me to a breakfast restaurant she favoured downtown by Clergy St., run by Australians, she claimed, although the food tasted American to me, i.e. haute & v. good. I told her my theory of Australian Collapse, namely: all Australians are secretly the same person at their root, like that giant fungus in Oregon with many caps but a shared subterranean body. She said, Doesn’t sound far off. I couldn’t pierce her medical cool! Not that I was trying to! I was wearing my smartest authenticity for her, executing my mental directives w/ alacrity and finesse. Also I suggested to the staff that they add a sandwich called The Babadook to their brekky menu and they said they would consider it.

To Kia, I said, Now please tell me where we’re going, and I hope it’s not Quebec (note: I pronounced it correctly) because I don’t have my passport. Kia said, You don’t need a passport to go to Quebec (I interjected: Could be a good idea!) but no, you and I are going to the Sheepdog Trials, over by Gananoque, in Ontario. I said, Repeat that? She said, Ga-na-no-que. Shouldn’t she be walking dogs? I inquired. No, yesterday was her last day as a dog walker. So we got a muffin to go, coconut cream, quite excellent, and went down to Highway 2, over a causeway, the lake bragging from sun. Kia pointed out the military college where her father had taught.

From there the landscape turned rural, not Westchester-rural, actual rural, hay and horses and cows, dissolute barns, etc. Pastoral is the word. I said, Is Halifax like this? Kia said, Halifax has 400,000 people, but the access to the water is great. Her eyes were giant black saucers again, I asked, When you’re a doctor, will you huff & puff so much on that stuff? With a slyness, she replied, Bedside manner, Virgil. She saw me watching the landscape and asked, Have you never seen the countryside? Your eyes are agog. I pointed out her eyes were agog! She said, I’ve never been to New York, I guess it must do a number on your mind growing up there.

This line of questioning (even though there were a few formal questions elocuted) put me a tad on the defensive, & I cried, What a facile comment (even though “facile” is undoubtedly the most facile word in the English language)! Nevertheless, being facile has its uses; I said, Surely if I’d been raised out here, my mind might be more at ease, more pastoral, more monochrome or placid or glassy, rather than what it is right now. She said, Which is? I said, Rainbow confetti! & she laughed, and then we agreed to put on Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Gordon + his bandmates had suggested I would like it; and I did. It was like listening to water. But the highly particulate nature of the music made deep conversation difficult.

Eventually we turned it off, then there was silence, I said, Well who would you be if you had been raised in New York? Kia shrugged. So I said, You know, I have a whole host of theories about the rural/urban divide, and Kia said, When you say things like that, do you actually have a theory, or are you simply clearing a path so you can talk? & while this was quite a conversational gambit, like the second half of “Abbey Road,” Kia said it w/ a disinterested grin, and after saying it she turned away, and I had the feeling it truly didn’t matter to her one way or the other, and I realized how DISLOYAL MONSTER always acts as if everything I say *matters*, which is to say it’s under the microscope, and how tiring it is to be on that little glass slide as the Ph.D. peers down at you and you wriggle this way and that, hoping to break free!

Suffice it to say, there was no need to reply to Kia directly, I swallowed my theories for the time being, since we were arriving at the magnificent park by the lake where the sheepdog event was being held.

There were hundreds of cars parked in the grass, a small array of food tents, and a grand green open field where dogs were chasing sheep around, one would have naturally thought they were sheepdogs, yet they were border collies. This was an annual event, said Kia. She used to go during her years at university. It’s known throughout Canada — as are many things that never get lobbed across the 45th parallel. Nevertheless it was lovely, very pastoral, I said, Thank you for bringing me here; and then, as I sometimes but not always remember to do among company, I said, Let me tell you three nice things about you, Kia: (1) You are open-hearted and welcoming; (2) Even if it’s medically induced, your overall calm makes me calm; (3) Your hair is very shiny and almost space-black. She thanked me, and I realized I hadn’t asked her when her birthday is, so I did, and she said, October 28th. I said, Oh, Penélope Cruz’s half-birthday, which was news to her! I said, Would you like more than three nice things? But she watched the dogs run and the sheep frolic for a few minutes and didn’t reply, until she said, This is quite an extravaganza. But I averred that it was, at best, a vaganza.

Hours lazed by, maybe we slept; Kia said, You were saying that you have theories on the urban/rural divide? I said, You really want to hear about it? And I said it with markѐd surprise, of course, because Harriet will often capitalize on my general tendency to distract myself, and never return to the subject at hand, but rather instead allow me to gambol on about the guitar melody in, e.g., “Strawberry Swing,” anyway I said, Wonderful, okay, but perhaps, to begin, a concrete example would be best; take Harriet; who would she be if she had grown up on Nantucket, if she spent her days chasing after White Whales, covered in briny barnacles, awake at the whip-end of dawn, instead of maturing in anxiety-riddled & guilt-swaddled Manhattan, merely reading about White Whales? Kia said, Having not met Harriet, I can’t say, but I imagine she’d be different. I said, Hmm maybe it’s not best, in fact, to begin with a concrete example.

Meanwhile the sheepdog announcer was calling out all manner of facts about the current dog and his Newfoundland owner, drawing applause from the Ontario crowd. & I felt suddenly at sea, as anyone might, so far from home, amongst blue highway signs and fresh vestiges of the monarchy, and I hadn’t even kept my placeholder almanac! So I resorted to another old soothing tactic; I said, A moment please, and grabbed a coffee from a beverage tent, and found the shade of a pine tree, seeing as the sun was legitimately burning my ears, and looked at place-names on my phone’s map: touring along the northern coast of France, where the place-names are clement, I saw Villers-sur-Mer, and Blonville-sur-Mer, and Benerville-sur-Mer, and Deauville (which had the gaul gall not to pin its name to la mer), Trouville-sur-Mer, Villerville, Cricqueboeuf. This last one intrigued me, & so I scanned a few pictures, it was mostly Celtic church ruins.

And then returning to where Kia sat, I said, Frequently I wonder who I would be if I were raised in the woods. And Kia said, Frequently? Do you really do it frequently? I said, No, it’s just a figure of speech; and then I added, Harriet said that I should call my journal In Which Virgil Demonstrates His Cleverness, but I daresay a better title would be In Which Virgil Is a Figure of Speech, since that is all I am, eh, a figure made up of speech? To which Kia shrugged and smiled at the sheep and the sheepdogs, which made me want to ask her about the great white dog she had been walking when I first met her; instead, I said, I can say three more nice things about you if you’d like. But she said, Would you like me to say three nice things about you, Virgil? And I told her how tremendously I’d *dislike* that (although I was polite about it (I said, to be clear, You’re so sweet, as part of my refusal)). How much of me (I continued) is due to slash just *is* the traffic and bustle of the city I was born in, & the same for Harriet? And how much of me would, on the other hand, be a slowdrift of leaves and hay bales if I had been raised elsewhere, an unincorporated town in a county deep in the middle of a pastoral state?

These are good points, said Kia, her eyes were both focused on me and on the dogs and on the pastoral vacuum; I said, No, no, let me try again — but honestly it didn’t improve. & if I may confess something, O Journal of Voiding Witness, no sooner had all these words dribbled out of my mouth than I became very, very, very sad. There was a much truer thought within me, a gorgeous & new-to-the-world thought; yet my mind hadn’t shepherded it to safety. How awful, how trapped we are, how much of our souls are beyond the torch light dropped into the mouth of the cave! But you see, at this point Kia handed me her little smoke-cylinder and said, Would you like to try? and I said, Yes please, and then I lay down for a spell.

And I said, after N minutes had passed, When I was younger and sadder, I used to dream that some creature would come & carry me away! Kia said, What kind of creature? I said, I don’t know, some beautiful genderless being, like that fluffy white retriever you were towing around Toronto the other day, but 30 feet tall. To which Kia said, I guess I had a similar dream when I was a kid, only for me it was my grandma who helped, she flew up from Melbourne and wore a red floral kimono. I said, Why did you need help? & Kia said, You really want to hear about it? It’s pretty rough. So I said, No thank you, I’m tender at this moment (I could have handled it, of course), nevertheless, I do want you to feel warmth & pleasure, so I could, if you’d like, offer you additional compliments. And then the sheepdog announcer told us some facts about Cape Breton, & Kia said, If you insist, Virgil, sure, go ahead.

∰

Mid-afternoon we left the sheepdogs and traveled back on Highway 2, the King’s Highway, they also call it (presumably Charles is pacified by this & releases his grip on the Governor-General’s throat), back to downtown Kingston, and grabbed a late lunch of roti at one of Kia’s university haunts, I chose the goat roti, after which she drove me to a beach near a hospital on King Street. How can it be so hot in Canada? I wondered, as Kia sallied forth and in one go spanked off her shorts and her top, leaving what one could only call underwear, & then proceeded to plunge into the water. She whooped, I guess it was rather cold, and invited me in, but I was in my Fruit of the Looms, which get miserably heavy when wet, and I had no ancillary outfit (nor any real interest in submersing myself (this was the 13th biggest lake, after all, not Lake Baikal nor the Caspian Sea nor even Lake Superior)), nor did I, even if suitable accommodations were made, want to go in the lake in my heart of hearts, even as I saw Harriet floating above me and wagging her finger diagnostically and saying, Thou art weird.

The pleasant thing about Kia, in her role as a Canadian, was that she applied no pressure, indeed seemed not even to notice. I shouted out to her, Here are four more nice things about you! as she dipped in and out of the admirably large waves, indeed they were whitecaps, I doubt she could hear me, & regardless, I don’t remember what I said. It was quite the Normal Day we were having, good cheer, etc. Who would I be if I had grown up in Canada? In Kingston? (In a Duke Ellington Suite?) It only occurs to me now to think of that sludge vector the East River by way of contrast; darn, I mean occurs to me only now; it didn’t occur to me while watching the lake-waves crash, approaching Group of Seven territory. Kia emerged from the waters essentially in a state of nudity, but that’s fine, and I said, So — what about your sister? What’s she like? Kia said, Who, my elder sister? She works in climate justice. I said, Oh dear. Kia said, Hmm yeah I know. We were passing her puffer back and forth by then; I said, What do we owe the future? Kia said, Man, it’s tricky. I said, Surely 26-year-olds can’t be expected to run the world or answer for its faults; I feel as if I’m still in my downiest infancy; I want to be absorbing paintings and songs and words; I don’t understand the bureaucracy nor how to inch any progress along. I have a fake dog at home named Norm who’s made out of paper. I want to enjoy pastoral landscapes, not be responsible for their caretaking. Kia said, And the doors of fate open outward, besides.

Together we gazed at the lake, as a windsurfer skirted along, then shortly after him came a parasailer, & were our legs touching, Kia’s and mine, hard to be sure, it was sisterly, let’s say. DISLOYAL MONSTER was doubtless getting worried. But then, what if I had escaped at long last from Harriet’s gravity? & then I asked Kia, because it was high time I knew, what was in her puffer, and she laughed and said, Who cares (and having asked, I felt I did not need to (and for propriety’s sake should not) ask again). The sun on the lake reminded me of the metaphor “spangled coins.” She said, You don’t talk much, do you, Virgil? which may sound odd to you, O Journal of Voice Activation, because you don’t see when I’m not ON, you miss all my entombed silences. I said, You don’t seem to mind that I don’t talk much; and Kia said, Why would I mind?

The sun had dried her, Kia put back on her clothes, I felt tranquility, and she noticed the redness on my shoulder and asked if this was due to the Doberman and I said yes, but I’m mostly fine, & felt tranquility, Kia was a clement presence, we drove to some restaurant by the water and ate supper, I felt tranquility and clemency, & the worst idea was to puncture that tranquility, just as the worst idea is to skip stones on a glassy lake. Evidently she knew some servers at the restaurant and got them to put on The Ellington Suites, and I closed my eyes, fluttered my lids, felt zero urgency to open them ever again. Until the lemon curd galettes, which I ate with zest (the restaurant offered lemon zest). But what about the future? I said as Kia sipped coffee. And also where’s all the French discourse if we’re so close to Quebec? And what about the pastoral? Could I rebuild my personality from the ground up as a patchwork of red & yellow leaves? F major is the pastoral key; I learned that in a college music course from a professor who was probably 30 and looked like Nathan Lane. Could I live in F major? Could we set the future in F major? (By now I was improvising, like Duke Ellington.) (I felt unmoored in a good way.)

But then while Kia went to use the washroom, she left her phone on the table unlocked and I saw that she had texted a friend “hanging with cutie Virgil,” maybe she had wanted me to see the message, anyway I watched my tranquility set sail. Let’s get the bill, S.V.P. the bill, I said. The bill arrived, I paid on the card Bruce had given me — & trot trot trot to the car, shut the door as fast you can, then we were questing for the 401 again, and I said, too loud I’m afraid, too loud, I shouted, Sometimes I don’t like people!!! But I said it with the window thrust open into the hot summer air, and Kia opened her window and shouted, similarly, Done with people!!! which, in an unexpected turn, quelled the embarrassment in my heart. Covertly I took out my phone and I changed DISLOYAL MONSTER back to Harriet Livia O’Shaughnessy and unblocked her (but didn’t call her (truly I felt no need right then)) and said, What’s the airport code for Kingston? Since Kia couldn’t tell me, I said, Want to hear three weird things about Harriet? Kia said, Want to hear three weird things about Hafza? I said, Who? She said, My older sister. I said, No, let me do mine, if you wouldn’t mind. (1) Every night, she wears a retainer to bed, like a little child. (2) She has a mole cluster on her right leg, quite gross. (3) When she goes to the bathroom, it smells like when our mom goes to the bathroom.

Granted, these were all physical Weirdnesses, bordering on prurient, perhaps even a mild invasion of privacy (not that I necessarily said all of them out loud with cotillion-level diction), but they restored even more of the tranquil mood. Then I enumerated a few airport codes: YVR = Vancouver; YWG = Winnipeg; YYC = Calgary; I told Kia other celebrities’ birthdays (Sarah Polley and Bruce Greenwood, aka Kia’s compatriots), & then I relayed some of Nostradamus’s predictions from my poor almanac (which waited for me on my rickety wooden nightstand in the Greatest City in the World). Kia said, Now I’d guess your enneagram is 5 wing 4. Then I looked at my watch and said, Ice cream o’clock? Perhaps ice cream was overkill, what with the richness of the galettes at the Kingston restaurant, still Kia said she knew a nice spot & though it was a bit out of the way, we got off the 401, drove to a little town called Cobourg, which has a beach on Lake Ontario and some summer lights, I endured soft-serve and took off my socks and walked in the sand, keeping a cordial distance from my companion.

Moving the conversation along, I said (or perhaps I thought), It’s funny, without Harriet impinging on my nerves sunup to sundown, all these Intrusive Thoughts about the future, about society, how I ought to be in a pastoral setting, they’re living all over me. Kia said, I’m sorry. I said, Or do you think it’s rabies? To which Kia said, I doubt it’s rabies (of course she didn’t know the details of my raccoon fight); but I understand what you’re saying, it’s tricky; these problems never really go away, you do have a responsibility to the greater collective, but you also have a responsibility to yourself, to your own joy. At last! I cried. At last someone mentions joy!

The sun had dipped, it was falling in the direction of Toronto, the waves caught a dash of lavender. I said, Do you think people in rural areas feel joy? Kia nodded. I said, Do you think if they reframed their environment as “pastoral” they’d feel even more joy? Kia shrugged. Several minutes prior she had finished her kiddie cone and was back to her puffer. There was an instinct in me to chide her for shutting out the world, but of course I shut out the world too, as do you, Journal, with your vertical margins; who was I to judge? Anyway we *should* be shutting out the world, it makes us clement, it certainly made Kia clement, so much so that I had forgotten about her romantic texts and sparkling wet body. She said, Virgil, has anyone ever told you that you look like — ? But I cut her off: Nobody has ever compared me to another soul. That was how I felt, in any case, and there should be no harm in saying how you feel. (As Harriet often says (too often), Feelings aren’t wrong.)

Even though it was a longer route, we took the King’s Highway back to Toronto, since it partook more of the pastoral, and I found as many string quartets in F major as I could, alas by the time we were near Oshawa (not Ottawa), my phone died, so we sat in silence, we were both tired, or I was. We got more caffeine, tons more, we didn’t talk much; without my phone, I had no idea where the lodging was, but Kia remembered, having slept there Sunday night, and now it was Wednesday. At my doorstep, I said, Did you know that Friday, this coming Friday, actually, is my birthday? She said, You’ve mentioned. Making sure to keep my body well outside the car, i.e. well outside her zone of influence, I said, And if I were to have a birthday party, would you like to come? She smiled and said she would. But of course, I told her, plans change, who knows, who knows! & she said, Who knows, and switched on the CBC, there was a sonata playing, and she drove off in the key of F major.

∰∰∰

( ( ( P.P.P.P.P.P.P.S. If you enjoyed this, you could buy me a coffee? ) ) )