“Zeph,” Harry mocked. “What kinda name is that?”
“Short for Zephyr.”
“Here Zeph!” Harry practised, as if Goldie was trotting along beside them, not left at home with Bernice. “Might work,” he allowed.
“It evokes her spirit. That a part of her we can’t see, but we appreciate more than anything.”
“Christ, I shoulda known you’d come up with something like that, Shakespeare.”
“More like Tennyson,” Buddy corrected, striking an indignant pose.
“Yeah, well, him I don’t dislike so much, I guess. But only cuz I’ve never read anything he’s ever written.”
They laughed.
“So, where are we going?” Buddy wondered.
“Thought we’d like to try something a little different.”
“Oh?”
“You’ll see. Just try and keep up, okay?”
They laughed again, Buddy thinking, maybe-just maybe, Harry was perking up. He doubted it, though. Bernice had drawn him aside that morning before he’d gone into the house. “He’s stopped taking his meds,” she warned in a whisper. “We don’t know what to expect, except to say, nothing good.”
Step-by-step they inched up the incline from Maple Lane into Waterwheel Park, a route they’d often taken. Buddy had got used to Harry’s chuffing up the hill, an ancient locomotive pulling a long train up an endless incline, but this time Harry had to stop and rest where the path levelled out on the other side of the park, near Uptown. “Lungs are wheezing like bagpipes,” he joked. “Must be the Scottish blood in me.”
“You want to sit down?”
“Naw. Just gimme a sec. We’re here anyways.”
“Here?” Buddy looked around.
Harry nodded toward a circular terrace just off the path.
“Labyrinth,” he said. “Only one way in, and no way out, unless you want to do it all over again in reverse.”
Buddy stepped up to the edge of the concrete patio. “Looks like intestines on a plate,” he said.
“Been around for thousands of years, the official mural guide says. You’ll find ‘em all over the world. Says there’s seventy-five of them right here on Vancouver Island, although this is the first I’ve ever seen one. You’re supposed to walk in from the outside to the centre and meditate as you go. Might be right up your alley.”
He’d wheeled up beside Buddy, and they stood together at the entrance.
“You first,” Harry said. “You probably meditate faster than me. I’ll meet you in the middle.”
Buddy didn’t like the idea. “Why don’t you go, and I’ll watch?”
“No looking back,” Harry insisted. “Take your time. That’s one thing we never run out of while we’re still breathing, eh? It’s free. Those corporate bastards haven’t figured out a way to bottle and market time-by-the-minute yet.”
“Ever heard of parking meters?” Buddy challenged.
“Hah! You bastard. Now even that illusion’s burst.” He nodded toward the entrance. “After you,” he gestured. “Don’t get lost.
“One foot in front of the other,” he coaxed.
Buddy stepped into the circle, instinctively adopting a measured pace, head down, eyes focused just in front of his feet, hands clasped behind his back. “I’m feeling like a dead man walking,” he said over his shoulder.
“Then you’ll want to go slow.”
Buddy moderated his pace, reigning himself in.
“You have to settle into it,” Harry coached. “Stop at each turn and meditate. Maybe stretch. Relax.”
“Have you done this before?”
“No,” Harry admitted. “But I read the manual. Says labyrinths are meant to be ‘mindful’. I know that doesn’t come natural to you—me either, for that matter—but let’s give it a chance, eh? You’re leaving me in the dust here, Bud. Ease up.”
Buddy stopped for a few moments at the next turn, closed his eyes, and let the rustle of leaves and the annoyed chirp of a robin pass through him, melding with the distant whoosh of a passing car on Willow Street. This is now; there is no then; I won’t be coming back again. He carried on through a few more turns, then stopped once more, listening for the rattle of Harry’s walker behind him and the rasp of his ancient friend’s breath.
I breathe, therefore I am, he proclaimed. But a premonition of mourning saddened him. He resented the palsied shuffle of Harry’s dogged steps, his words become an echo without origin, sounds that resolved into utter meaninglessness the moment they were spoken.
White Raven’s wings pulsed overhead. You think that by measuring, you have encompassed the mysteries of space and time, she croaked, vanishing into his imagined sky. Then the clatter and clang of Charlie Abbott’s wheelbarrow echoed somewhere beyond the periphery of the labyrinth, sounds still receding into the unknowable, dissolving with the flesh and bones of history.
Lost in the windings of the labyrinth, Buddy felt his way forward, sometimes coming close to its centre, then retreating to the edge. Lost? Again, language failed him. Wherever you go, there you are. He’d never read the book on ‘mindfulness’ by Jon Kabat-Zinn, but the phrase emerged—sprouted in the soil of my imagination, was how he’d remember it later…
A clatter and thud from behind shattered Buddy’s fragile equilibrium. Twisting round, he surged toward the disturbance instinctively, even before he saw Harry sprawled on the concrete, next to his toppled walker.
Next: MAID in Canada