There’s a bench in Cook Street Park where Buddy goes from time-to-time to sit and look out over Stuart Channel. It’s there gravity took hold again, and the universe reasserted its order… there he learned, contrary to Harry’s teachings, that you can fix a car while you’re driving it.
The view from Cook Street Park isn’t exactly like what you’d see in Mural #EC5 – By the Bay, but it’s close enough, and sometimes he’d imagine himself, propped on his walking seat, gazing into Harry’s favourite painting when he was sitting there on the verge of the ocean.
But this is real life, not still life, he was thinking by way of apology that day, even though he was pretty sure Harry would have allowed the change of setting—from painted scene to 3D vista. Least ways Harry hasn’t shown up at either vantage point to complain, Buddy thought.
He smiled at his own distracted mood.
Over the weeks since Harry had ‘checked out’ a sort of malaise had set in, like he didn’t know how to be anymore in anyone’s company. Bernice shooed him off whenever he asked how she was doing, as if she wanted to be alone with her memories of Harry. “I’m fine,” she’d say, “and grateful enough already for your company, Buddy. You make some time for yourself.” Jen’s visits reverted to brusque and unpleasant as ever, with a whiff of suspicion about them, stifling as bad perfume.
He breathed in the fresh sea air, scanned the thrashing ocean, and, beyond that, the rim of his world, defined by the jagged ridges of the Coast Mountains across the Salish Sea. Sometimes he wished he could just continue breathing in, and in, and in, until he expanded into nothingness, a spirit so vast it encompassed everything… could everythingness be a word? he wondered.
Gawd, you’re like Buddha on steroids!
He laughed, the air forced out of him by a quip Harry might have made.
Newton and Copernicus, they set down the laws of physics; who’s going to come up with equations that describe the laws of psychics?
Buddy shunned the thought, filed it under the Idle Speculation heading in his list of priorities. The world spun on its axis, revolved round its sun, and clung to the elastic fabric of creation like a minuscule bead, tiny as an atom. Oh! Way smaller than that! His inner-voice protested. He let go the conversation… had other things needed thinking about.
Leanne had agreed to an ‘equal division of assets’, whatever that meant, ‘to be worked out as we go’. They both owned the house, but she’d get to live in it for now. He’d live off his pension; she’d ‘get by’ on her realtors’ earnings. They’d recalibrate when she packed it in. He could park the Looner Module in the driveway and plug it in when he was visiting Victoria. “That’ll do for now,” she agreed. Seemed ‘fair enough’ to him.
Robbie and Gloria were still trying not to take sides… even though there were no sides to be taken. A sphere has no sides, his steriod imbibing Buddha might have observed. Who knows, maybe we can all get together as family sometime? Unlikely as the thought seemed, it still hadn’t been swallowed up by the black hole of emotional improbability. He’d leave it there for now, on the brink of his knowable universe.
Then there was Andrea and Herim…
Got yourself into a real situation there! A voice that wasn’t exactly Harry’s said.
It’s me imagining myself as Harry, Buddy pinpointed its source.
Splitting Harrys you could say!
“Harry’s the one who split,” Buddy reminded himself.
A split personality, you figure?
A banana split!
They laughed. “Welcome home!” Buddy tested.
Same to you.
It was that quick, the wonky universe settling into some semblance of stable order. Harry, Bernice, Leanna, Gloria, Robbie, Andrea, Herim… they suddenly became voices inside him, vibrant in the rarefied ether of his inner ear. He had become the centre of a gravity that captured even light, and he found himself excited and content at one and the same instant.
“Clack,” White Raven agreed from the twisting branches of Buddy’s favourite tree.
THE END
A book is never finished
though its cover may be closed.
‘The end’ is but a milestone
on Imagination Road.
Thank you for reading,
and helping write
The Mural Gazer.
CraigSpenceWriter.ca