Audi 2008 Annual Report Download - page 131

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Montreal
4
too expensive, I took the bus. They’re big and fairly unmissable. But eventually,
I couldn’t read a newspaper, a book, a computer screen, a letter, a menu. I could-
n’t actually read the words macular degeneration, couldn’t see my own diagnosis.
I asked myself, who is doing this to me? I felt cold everywhere, cold in my chest,
cold in my stomach. I realized I had seen my last clear image of the world, it was
retreating moment by moment. Standing in a parking lot that day, I put my hands
out to steady myself. Someone was blotting out the world, dab by dab, with a lit-
tle grey tissue. I lifted my hands to stop them but they just kept coming, an army
of caves. I covered my eyes. The next morning I flew home to Montreal.
On est au milieu de nulle part, I told Ren on the day she left me. Here I am at the
staircase. Evening light around me and a warm wind that stirs the trees. A couple
walks past, whispering to one another. In my mind’s eye, I see their fingertips
brushing, their hatted heads bowed together. I hear the clicking paws and huff-
ing breath of a little dog, the crunching of a paper bag, I smell warm bread.
A chair creaks on a nearby balcony and a man pulls a child away from a display
window, and the child cries out in soft, bereft French.
I nudge my shoe out and find the bottom step, swim my hand tentatively
through the air until the iron handrail folds itself into my fingers. I shuffle up. To-
morrow I will get a cane but today I want to be someone else. The air smells of
dry leaves. Up and down the street, there’s life and movement, like when I was a
boy and I used to sit on the curb and watch the cars rush by. All the foreign lan-
guages ran out of all the windows, deafening, like they were begging the world to
listen up, to take notice, newcomers like city birds who chirp harder to out-sing
the traffic. Bicycles whirr by and a cheer goes up from a sports bar down the
street. Maybe there’s a thick-necked guy running up the ice now, waving his stick
in the air. I can hear pint glasses slammed down on a beer-smeared table.
Step by step, so different from when I used to imagine running up this stair-
case, slamming my fist against Ren’s door. Sometimes I imagined bursting in,
and all the rage and guilt I felt would flood the sunny walls and on her face I’d
see regret and love and maybe even fear. Was that me? The person I was twenty-
two years ago, does he still belong to me and I to him? So here I am and I can see
the door. It has a black hole in the middle and it’s pulling me into it. The sound of
my knocking is confident. And Renny’s face when she appears falls into the same
darkness, haloed by the frayed edges, and I know that I waited too long.