All he saw was a wall with a picture on it.
If he’d been a tourist, taking a quick snap of Mural #6 Arrival of the Reindeer in Horseshoe Bay, that would have been okay. But the longer he stared at the cinder blocks, the more frustrated he became. The Penelakut woman, gazing down Stuart Channel toward Bare Point, defied him. The British warship gliding into Horseshoe Bay remained frozen in time—paint that had long since dried on an impermeable wall.
Harry had parked his walker a few paces farther up the lane, turning it around so he could use it as a chair. Buddy, leaning on his walking seat, resisted the urge to ask how his friend was doing. “See you in a bit,” Harry’d saluted, as if stepping out for a Sunday stroll. Then he was gone—absorbed into the scene. Buddy had rousted Harry from his mural reveries often enough to know they were in some sense real—that Harry’s startled, disoriented looks upon ‘returning from the other side’ were genuine expressions of surprise by a man jolted from a dream.
These troublesome thoughts were disrupted by a group of Chinese teens—tourists or international students, Buddy guessed—spilling into the lane off Mill Street, goofing around and laughing. He smiled, and they acknowledged him in return with quick, obligatory nods, then got back into their antics.
They appeared to be doing improv in response to the wall painting. One of them—a beautiful girl, decked out theatrically in a black flowing gown and shiny gold-tinted pantaloons, with matching ribbons streaming from her hair—posed below the Penelakut woman, looking up adoringly. As her companions captured her performance on their mobiles, she pleaded loudly, seemingly for the Penelakut woman to look down and acknowledge her. The actress ended by scolding the impassive wall-figure for not granting whatever favour had been curried, then skipped over to her huddled companions to watch instant replays of her performance. Satisfied, they lurched on happily.
Buddy glanced Harry’s way. The old man hadn’t moved or shown any sign of having been distracted by the frolicking teens. Where the hell are you? Buddy wondered. If only Harry would talk a bit more about his excursions into the murals, or ‘over to the other side’, as he had taken to calling them. But the shaky scribblings in Harry’s ‘Mural Log’ were the only records available to Buddy, accounts so sparse that reconstructing the stories was a form of creative writing.
Was Harry there now, on the rolling deck of The Reindeer, his shirt pressed against his chest, hair combed by a favouring sou’wester blowing over the tip of Vancouver Island? What might he be smelling, feeling, tasting in the salt air of that dream world? Harry’s slight, slouching form didn’t offer a clue. He seemed inert. You couldn’t even tell he was breathing.
What would I see inside that wall? Buddy wondered.
Would he find himself reincarnated as a seagull, hovering over the lazily rocking ship? Would he become Harry’s guardian ghost? Or would he be alone, in a solitary fantasy? Don’t want to know? Buddy gave up even the notion of some kind of imitative quest. That’s Harry’s alternative reality; I’ve got enough figuring out to do in this here and fucked up now without speculating on another.
He couldn’t let go the idea entirely, though. The urge to find Harry and connect their separate dimensions intrigued him, the same way the emerging image of a jigsaw puzzle kept you reaching obsessively for new pieces to fill in the gaps. He found himself focusing on the Penelakut woman’s cape, imagining Harry doing the same from the other side… And that’s when he sensed the gravity of the mural, felt himself hovering on the brink of what seemed a dangerous transgression.
I can see into the wall! Buddy suddenly realized. He was tempted to reach out and touch the fringe of the woman’s cape, but recoiled. This is deliberate madness. If he let his hallucination become real, Buddy feared he would never be able to disentangle the intermingling of worlds… that he would find himself asking again and again: What’s really real? Who’s joy? Who’s suffering?
He wavered on the threshold, woozy and confused as a drunk. The light filtering through the woman’s cape was as real and fraught with meaning as the whoosh of traffic passing on Mill Street, the whisper of the breeze in the shrubbery behind him, the warmth of sunlight on his neck. How could two worlds co-exist, interpenetrate, and not negate each other on contact?
How could he hold such a baffling contradiction together in his head?
“Can’t,” he mumbled. “Gotta let go…”
Find Harry…