Toward the North Read online

  “Your region is a good deal better than some. In Mississauga, the caterpillar situation is an absolute mess. Those caterpillars have already started to spin silk and drop down to the ground. Many people’s roofs and driveways are covered with caterpillars. Each step results in a thick gooey juice. If this continues, probably fifty percent of the trees in the city will be killed by these caterpillars.”

  “Are you saying that the caterpillars in the trees will come down and crawl on the ground?” I paled with fear.

  “This will certainly happen. However, I know that city hall is preparing a plan and getting ready to spray pesticides using planes. The members of city council are now debating whether or not to ask the federal government to pay the five-million-dollar cost to exterminate the caterpillars.”

  “This is unthinkable. How can they use planes to spray pesticides in a residential neighbourhood? The insects may not be the only ones killed; perhaps even people will die.”

  Youssef was ready to climb into the tree to lay out traps to capture a few live bird specimens to use for laboratory testing. He climbed very high; soon he disappeared from sight, hidden by the dense foliage. I sat under the tree, peered through the spaces between the branches, and watched the sometimes hidden, and sometimes visible Youssef.

  By now I had learned the birdman’s life story. When he was young, he was a Nile River fowler. His family had been earning their living this way for generations. Later, he came to North America and was employed by the New York airport to keep the birds off the runways by using a group of wooden decoy hawks. Eventually, the airport replaced him by using a machine that emitted ultra-high frequency sound waves to drive the birds away, and so he became an independent bird catcher once again.

  That day, Youssef stayed up in the tree in our backyard for a long time. At first, I felt he was working very conscientiously, but later I realized that he was probably amusing himself with the birds that were flying back and forth. He prolonged his stay in the crown of the tree, becoming almost one with the birds who were flying in the sky above.

  All this time, my wife had been standing behind the window, watching Youssef’s every move.

  Recently I have noticed that my wife is often standing at the window, silently staring outside. I can’t figure out what she is paying attention to. Ever since the day before yesterday, after she had touched that dead black bird, she seems to have acquired a peculiar bird-like stance. That night when I was fast asleep, I was suddenly awakened by her nudge. She said, “Wake up. I saw our next-door neighbour, Mrs. Swanny!”

  Still groggy from sleep, I asked her, “What are you yelling about? It’s the middle of the night. Are you dreaming?” She pulled me up to the window and had me peer out into the dim light of the night. From this angle, I was looking out over Mrs. Swanny’s front yard. During the day, you could see that the gigantic umbrella-shaped tree in their garden was covered with crimson blossoms. These blossoms look a little like Japanese cherry blossoms, but are even more vivid. The plants that grow beneath the tree are unique, and those who pass by will frequently take pictures of the display. Lately I had been a bit puzzled, for during this period of time our neighbour’s home had become quiet. It seemed as though no one lived there. I didn’t know who was caring for those plants and flowers. I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and carefully scrutinized the outside.

  This time I noticed the silhouette of someone moving about in the flower garden. Gradually, I could see that it was a woman with clipped, short hair. She was using a small rake to loosen the soil in a sunken garden bed and was watering it at the same time. I saw her very clearly. It could not have been a dream. She was facing the street, and there were streetlights illuminating her body with lemon yellow rays. I don’t know why, but I could not see her face.. I was not sure that she was Mrs. Swanny, as I had never actually met her before and even now could not see her well. One thing that I am sure of: in the past I had noticed quite a number of middle-aged women going in and out of her house, but she wasn’t one of them because, in contrast, the movement of her silhouette seemed so graceful and so mysterious.

  I found myself becoming a bit stirred up and anxious to see her face, so much so that I even had an impulse to run outside into the night and help her with the watering. That way I could finally determine whether or not she was the woman from the lake. I watched her from the window for about two minutes. She wandered about in the garden, now appearing, now disappearing, as illusory and unreal as a shadow on a photograph negative. And then she suddenly disappeared.

  I felt a little lost and disappointed because I didn’t get a good look at her. But I thought, if she really has come home, perhaps she will come and call on us. If she doesn’t, in that case, I should still be able to see her, at least the same way I had seen her tonight. I told my wife that Mrs. Swanny returning home must be a good thing, indicating that even though she is infected with the West Nile disease, it is nothing to be afraid of. Didn’t she return home to recover? My wife said that she didn’t think that way at all. Why would the neighbour water the flowers in the middle of the night? When she was young her grandmother had warned her that people must not water the flowers after dark because if they do, it will cause the person to waste away.

  The next day was Monday. In the morning, I accompanied my wife to the doctor for her check-up. Our family doctor’s office was in a neighbourhood near the rental apartment where we had lived a year ago. Because Dr. Xu is from Taiwan, he is able to speak Mandarin. Even though we had made an appointment in advance, we still had to wait a long time. Among the other people waiting, there were several Chinese people as well as Eastern Europeans, Iranians, East Indians, and Black people. The secretary is a Hong Kong emigrant, and we were familiar with her. Sometimes she is very warm to us, and at other times she is chilly. The back of her head is noticeably flat, and since we don’t know her name, behind her back my wife and I call her “Flat Head.” Our appointment time had passed some time ago, but Flat Head told us that there were still five patients ahead of us.

  Canada employs a universal free health care system. For minor illnesses you go to see the family doctor. If your family doctor believes you need to see a specialist, then you are referred for an appointment.

  At ten o’clock we finally met with Dr. Xu and told him our situation. Dr. Xu was very familiar with us, and he wanted to take some of my wife’s blood and give it a complete laboratory analysis. He took five or six vials of blood, and in the meantime he asked me if I was willing to get my blood tested, too. It had been quite a long time since I had had a physical check-up, and I thought his suggestion was a good one. So I went back to the reception area to get my medical records from “Flat Head.” I rolled up my sleeve to let the doctor take a few vials of my blood. When he finished, the doctor ordered a list of routine tests: x-rays, ultrasound, ECG, etc. and he sent us to a nearby medical testing centre.

  After we had finished our tests, we asked when we would get the results. The nurse said it would take two weeks: one week to process the tests, and after that one week to send the report to the family doctor’s office. We asked whether or not we could come back and pick up the report ourselves, so that we could find out the results sooner. The testing clerk looked at me with consternation and said, “Absolutely not. You can only hear about the results at the doctor’s office.”

  When the tests were finished, it was already noon. Without having to go too far away, we found a McDonald’s for a quick bite. I noticed my wife beginning to look a little strange. She said, “To have to wait for two weeks is too long. Won’t it be too late for the treatment?”

  Trying to comfort her I said, “You definitely will not get the disease. So many people have told you that the West Nile virus is blood-borne and is not contagious. And besides, you look very healthy. Look, you easily ate a hamburger and fries. How can you be sick?”

  She said, “Actually, I didn’t want to eat, but I ate in order t
o do all I can to increase my strength. If I couldn’t keep anything down then the situation would really be serious.”

  From that day on, I told her not to go to work but stay at home and rest. I made a big mistake in doing this. I should not have let her linger at home by herself, giving her ample time to let her imagination run wild.

  After eating supper on Wednesday evening, I prepared to go out for a walk with my wife. Just as we were leaving the house, we watched a number of vehicles arriving one after the other at our neighbour Swanny’s house. The first was a large GMC Safari station wagon, carrying two canoes on the roof. Then there were several cars towing jet skis and a truck towing a large boat. By this time, I wouldn’t have been surprised if I had seen a car dragging a seaplane. Last fall, I had also seen a number of cars in the driveway carrying canoes and a boat, but I had never seen so many vehicles and water sports equipment as this. These vehicles were not in the driveway, but were all parked by the side of the road. A great many people had gone into the house. It seemed as though, for a long time, there had been no one going in or out of their house. I hadn’t seen Swanny’s husband and two sons for a long time. So, it was unusual to see so many people there that evening. I told my wife, “Perhaps Swanny’s whole family stayed up at the cottage at the lakeside to keep her company and help her recover. Now that her illness is cured, the whole family has returned home, even bringing back the boat and canoes.”

  My wife said, “Then why are there so many people?”

  I answered, “Perhaps this is a recovery and coming home celebration party for Mrs. Swanny.”

  At that moment, I noticed something unusual. A black sedan decorated with white lilies drove up. The black sedan drove directly into Swanny’s driveway and came to a stop. I was startled to see Swanny’s husband and two sons get out. They were all wearing black suits. I had seen them many times, but each time they had been dressed in loose and comfortable everyday clothes. They were never dressed as formally as today. Their expressions were sombre, but when they saw us they still greeted us politely.

  “It’s been a long time since we saw you. How are you?” I said as we walked past.

  “Yeah, we haven’t been back for a long time. We were all at the lakeside, keeping my mother company,” Swanny’s son Tom said.

  “How is Mrs. Swanny? Did she return, too?” I asked.

  “No. My mother passed away,” said Tom.

  “What? Is this true?” I said in disbelief.

  Mark, Mrs. Swanny’s husband said, “Yes, she passed away a week ago. Since last summer her condition seemed to be slowly improving, but recently her health suddenly worsened. She has been fighting the West Nile virus for a long time, but in the end she was not able to defeat it. After she died, we took her back to her hometown in New Jersey. She was an American, you know.”

  “I am very sad to hear about Swanny. She was a good person,” I said. My heart suddenly felt empty. It was very strange. A few nights ago, my wife and I saw a woman tending the flowers in her garden, and we had thought she was Mrs. Swanny. But by that time Swanny had already passed away.

  That night I kept thinking about Swanny. In my mind, as soon as I closed my eyes, she appeared in that lethargic slumber with blackish red blood dripping from her nose. I could no longer distinguish between Swanny and the woman by the lake. A thought began to form in my mind: “I have to go back up to that Algonquin Lake to take a look at the woman one more time. Is she still there? Is her nose still bleeding?”

  We were told that we had to wait for two weeks to get the test results. At first, I thought that the time would pass by quickly, but those two weeks dragged by extremely slowly. By now my wife was in a very bad state. Mrs. Swanny’s death deepened her fear and panic. Many symptoms began to appear on her body. First, she felt an aching and burning sensation in her finger joints. Then, there was a choking and breathless feeling in her chest, which was accompanied by severe pain. She was restless now and unable to stop moving. The first few days she would only stay inside the house, then she felt unable to breathe in the house and would run out into the street.

  At first, I still went to work and let my wife rest at home by herself. In fact, it would have been much better if I had taken her to work with me and allowed her to do a little business to distract her. At work, I was always ill at ease, and from time to time would phone home to ask her how she was doing. Sometimes when I phoned there was no answer, and I knew she had probably gone out into the street. She told me that when she walked outdoors, she felt more relaxed. A few days later, when I had not been at work long, she phoned me and said that she could not bear the thumping of her heart and asked me to hurry home right away. I realized that my wife’s condition was getting worse. Her hair had lost its lustre and within a few days had become flat and dry, even white in many places. Her complexion was dark and her eyes dull. She told me that when she was walking back and forth on the street the neighbour, the old man who had planted the tulips, was continually staring at her. Even when she walked to the end of the block, he still watched her. I said, “Your appearance is not right. Your hair is not combed. Your clothes are buttoned all wrong. Whoever caught sight of you would think it very strange.”

  I told her not to be nervous because it was impossible for her to have the disease. In order to convince her, my daughter and I spent the whole day on the internet getting information on what might be wrong. We entered her symptoms into the computer. The results essentially showed that her symptoms were not those of the West Nile virus, but were rather symptoms of menopause. Another possibility was a kind of anxiety disorder caused by a shock that had given rise to an autonomic nerve disorder. However, she did not believe what we said. If we persisted in our claims, she just got angry and her symptoms worsened.

  In order to weather this storm, I didn’t go to work. I hung a “Gone on vacation—Temporarily closed” sign on the company door, even though this meant that I would lose thousands of dollars in revenue every day. I kept her company all day long. When she felt the chest tightness, I gave her a back massage. When she was nervous, I soothed her with calm words to get her to relax. Her temperament became like that of a four-year-old child—sometimes good, sometimes bad. I went with her for walks outside. This was the most important method she used to calm down. When she and I walked around the tree-lined road, she would seem very happy, and many of her symptoms were alleviated.

  We’ve been married for more than ten years. In all these years, except for the period of time before we got married, we have almost never been as close as we were when we went together on these walks. While she was walking she would speak about many things without pausing. She said that the previous day she had bumped into the Taiwanese neighbour, Zhen. She had never spoken with him before. Yesterday he was weeding near his gate and, taking the initiative, greeted her. He said that the night before, someone had thrown a lot of fish into his yard, and he asked her if she had met with the same experience. She said, “Taiwanese people certainly talk a lot of nonsense. How could fish be thrown helter-skelter like that? What a joke!”

  She also said that the garden on the corner, which was surrounded by a carved cast-iron railing fence, was owned by a person from India. She was annoyed because the many flowers in his garden grew in a wild and disorderly mess, and the garden was covered in dandelions. The day before yesterday when she passed by the Indian’s garden, he was pulling up weeds by hand just like my wife herself does. The Indian said that they were in the restaurant business and were usually very busy. They liked the flowers but had no time to care for them, so the garden was unkempt. My wife said that she could forgive him now.

  She also brought me to a back lane to see a newly renovated house. After expanding the house, the front wall was resurfaced with patterned granite. It was her favourite stone. She said that in the future we should tear down the house and rebuild it—she had the blueprints in her mind—so that the square footage of our
house could be doubled. We passed by another house that had also been rebuilt. The walls of that house had been plastered with mortar, and the added second floor resembled a little hat. My wife turned up her nose at this house.

  Every day we would walk for a distance of three blocks to Godstone Park, where there is a large expanse of grass and woodland. The park is home to two soccer fields. Toward the evening there are often a lot of people playing soccer. There is a team of young Koreans with their own uniforms accompanied by a group of pretty girls who cheer them on. They play against a group of Black children. We would sit on a park bench and watch them play. Sometimes we would watch people walking their dogs, or join a group of elderly Chinese people who come to watch their children do tai chi under the trees.

  My wife developed a routine of exercises for herself. In her first set, she interlaced the fingers of her hands together, then raised them with palms upward, and then, taking a deep breath, she sunk to a squat and then stood up. Her second set was a yoga routine. She spread out her arms horizontally in the shape of an airplane and raised one leg towards the back. In her third set, she walked backwards slowly, and, after a few steps, her left hand and left foot were in unison. She was very earnest in her efforts. The hot afternoon sun shone on her face, turning it a bronze colour and causing the appearance of butterfly freckles. Sweat covered her face, yet she gave no thought to any of it. Her intensity moved me. Sometimes women are very strong. I knew she was doing everything in her power to battle the disease, even though the disease does not necessarily exist.

  Everything had changed. Before, staying home was her favourite thing. Now I had to be doubly careful, because during this time her mood often shifted. She used to watch reruns on TV and never tired of them. She was able to watch late into the night but now, as soon as we started watching a show, she immediately told me to change the channel.