Chapter 13- The Golden
Gio’s last words on the staircase to the basement, revealing for the first time, to me at least, that my writing assignment is meant as a kind of treatment for his Alzheimer’s, is a surprise that disturbs me.
I was already confused by his stories, some that Julia vets as real, and some she tells me are pure creations of his imagination. Now another dimension is revealed.
“When he doesn’t remember his own story, his ‘self,’ he makes things up, like another super-self. Aren’t they so much fun to read? What an imagination!” Julia had told me, but she never mentioned the treatment aspect. So, are his fictions as important? Am I a kind of babysitter for this man who is being slowly invaded by Alzheimer’s? Does Professor Hans, my creative writing teacher know about this? And how does this jumble of stories fit into learning to write creatively?
So, do I need to ground myself in the real biography of one Giuseppe Lupo, while being entertained by the fictional accounts? I’m confused, every time I see him, will I need to ask myself, “what is this now? a telling, or a retelling? …or therapy?”
Gio is in the basement, standing behind the bar. He places himself there whenever he is about to tell me a chapter of his life, as if it’s his desk, or pulpit. I now wonder if there is any relation between where he stands, in front or behind the bar, and his life stories, the factual and fictional ones.
“Here you go Baksheesh,” he hands me a cold frosty beer can that he has just opened, and a tall glass. He pours the beer into his glass, and the rising foam reveals that the glass is embossed with the words HMCS Quadra centered under a crest that has a medieval turret in the middle. Gio sees me looking at it.
“What does it stand for?” I ask.
“Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship. HMCS Quadra. A navy base I once served at. That was many moons ago. History.” he reminisces. “I was just a kid. Barely three years after I arrived in this great land.”
I reach for my notebook, not wishing to miss any of this. We seem to be starting a fresh story. The beer glass and the logo, these tell me that it must be a real tale from his past, and not fiction.
“There, they instilled in me virtues and values when I was still living without direction. I was eager and curious but had absolutely no depth. And this: Do you remember the freedom you felt as a teenager of twelve or thirteen, when you swore for the very first time - that’s how it felt to go to this navy camp. I became a sailor, and so I became what comes with it: adventurous, very much an individual. Not restricted by decorum and full of limitless dreams. They gave me a compass.”
He laughs, happy, and then out of the blue he does something that scares the daylights out of me. His face becomes stern, he snaps his heels together and stands erect. He shouts as if he is giving a command or maybe it’s a command he had heard often and now reminisces.
“Spit and shine you wankers. Spit and shine. Or I’ll send ya down to Davy Jones’ Locker. Now then, lads, Anchors Aweigh and Bravo Zulu!”
He relaxes and looks at my confusion. Behind him he reaches for a shoebox on a glass bar shelf. He places it between us on the bar. He opens it and inside I see an item wrapped in white muslin.
He unwraps it. It’s a black military boot. The toe is pure black and shines like a mirror. “I shined it this morning. Once a week. Spit and polish. Literally.”
In the brilliant mirror-like reflection of the toe I see his face and mine, the room and basement ceiling curved concave behind us. For a long moment we look at each other’s distorted faces inside the reflection. I can see that he is drifting away. Is it nostalgia or Alzheimer’s? I’m not sure. The length of his gaze makes me feel uneasy.
He begins to speak again, and I now know that he has left. He is drifting to his own other ‘self,’ one that is strange to me.
“There are many mysteries. Everything, really. I always, always wonder, and need to know this: how does music move us. No really. What are we moved to do when we feel the music? Capture angels? All we really ever have at the most, is a veiled yet incredibly strong emotion.”
I grab my notes and I try to write but my hand is shaking.
“Spit and polish. It’s always spit and polish” He slowly repeats
It’s the first time that I witness first-hand the onset of his attack. I am unable to write any meaningful words. I am scared. I feel like I’m witnessing a ghost or an apparition.
“Spit.”
In the reflection on the boot, I see behind me his wife entering the basement. She notices his state and rushes to him. I excuse myself and ask to go upstairs to see Julia.
Her mother tells me that I’ll find her in her room.
As she gently leads Gio to sit in an easy chair, she says: “She’s there. Alone in her world,” and shrugs, seemingly regretfully. She is talking as if Julia is another person who has strange habits that she doesn’t understand. It is the same way many parents feel about their grown-up children - and vice versa.
Julia’s room is down a small corridor to the right. I notice that it’s across from what looks like her parents’ bedroom where I notice two separate beds.
The door to her room is closed. I knock twice and wait. She opens the door and I see that she has a large black pen between her teeth. She smiles and motions me to follow her in. She heads to the bed, which is placed at an odd angle, with one side against the wall. She nods at a cushioned wicker chair, sit.
I feel a draft and see that there is a window ajar. I now recognize that the cold air accentuates a sweet sticky smell. The afterglow of the spicy scent of a recently finished marijuana joint.
She lifts a large board from beside her on the bed and I see that she is continuing a sketch that she was working on when I knocked.
On the bedside table is a radio that is set at a soft low volume. I recognize the lyrics of One Is the Loneliest Number by Three Dog Night.
Spread over most of the floor of the room are layers of cloth, bedsheets for carpets. These are covered in Indian motifs, block printed in copper brown and deep purple, with paisleys and other twirling patterns. The walls of the room are covered with posters, each hanging by a piece of beige masking tape. All of them are charcoal sketches. All of them are of horses’ heads and horses’ torsos. These must be hers I’m thinking and glance to see she is sketching a horse’s mane.
One poster that stands out from the others, is a store-bought print, like the ones one finds sold in record stores. The poster screams Freedom is Frightening under a portrait of a Japanese drummer.
“Baksheesh.” She laughs. “How is the old man?” She’s holding a thin stick of charcoal in her hand, running the long, curved strokes of the mane across the large sheet that rests on her lap.
“Julia? What did Gio mean when he said that I was assigned to write his story because, well, this creative writing course, it’s really a medicine for him?”
She lifts the pad to her and blows across it. A tiny billow of a grey cloud flies away from the paper.
“Remember when I told you that his mind is going weird on us? Well, it’s more and more of his Alzheimer’s. It’s still the early onset of the disease, but he has attacks, ‘journeys’ without memory. These are usually rare, but less so these days.”
“Yes, I think he’s having one now. He told me about them, these places where he sees other people, hears others’ voices.” I tell her.
“Well, one of the treatments, a way to ground him, is you, my dear Baksheesh. In the present, when he is in this reality, ask him to tell his story. Even if its fictional.”
“I see, but don’t you think you should have told me? Shouldn’t I be aware of this?”
“No. That would make a huge difference, you know? His doctor told us that he shouldn’t know, so that he can be unassuming. But he must have figured it out somehow. He’s not stupid.”
She puts the sketch aside and reaches for a small old tin can box on her side table. She opens it and I see that she is about to roll a joint.
“We didn’t want it to turn into an investigation. It’s his story not yours, and we wanted you to find and not to seek. So we didn’t tell you either. Get it?” She smiles, remembering something.
“You see, we once took him on a cruise, and it stopped for half a day at Naples. You know what he did? He cried with nostalgia when he saw the coastline and the city, although he had never been there before. At least not in this reality.”
It all makes sense now. I realize that this explains the Italy sessions, the World War Two stories and the prisoners of war. That version makes sense now. It’s his other self.
I remember the Siddhartha quote that he had marked in the book on the porch. Do not seek, find. That connects to this. They wish me, and him, to find and not seek. No prodding allowed.
“With your help, we will uncover more and more of his memories, all of his pressed flower stories, you could say. Through you we might discover dry wild roses, bright pink carnations, lilies and maybe, just maybe, even purple junipers.” She continues, smiling. She is encouraging me.
She finishes rolling the joint and passes it to me. She stands and heads to the window, opens it wide and motions for me to join her. She cracks a flame on a Bic lighter to entice me.
I head to her and lean down to the sparkly blue flame and light the joint. I inhale deeply, and I slowly let out the faint blue smoke. I pass it to her.
I look at her take a puff with her eyes looking back at me, I feel the smoke ooze to my veins. I hear the radio play Simon and Garfunkel’s Feeling Groovy. I feel the music like silky, exotic cotton candy.
Outside, I gaze at the wide blue sky spotted with random white puffs, I see the planet Venus shining down on me. I member Gio and smile. Always.
Julia and I listen to the music and when the joint is done, after many last-minute small puffs, like little kisses to the stub, she flicks it out the window and whispers: “Ah, the beautiful self-indulgent poetry of youth.”
“What?” I ask, confused in my high.
She nods to the radio, to the song, to the lyrics.
Slow down, you move too fast
You got to make the morning last
Just kicking down the cobblestones
Looking for fun and feeling groovy
Ba da-da da-da da-da, feeling groovy
I slowly, involuntarily sink to the floor. She smiles down knowingly and then follows me. Facing each other, knees touching, this is the first time that Julia and I are this close, this intimate, all a byproduct of the high, and of circumstance.
I now see her as if for the first time. It dawns on me. She is playing different roles. Today she’s a hippy. It’s in her room decor, her art, her attitude and the marijuana. Another time, when I first saw her, she was a preppy fashionable, well-off girl, dressed in an expensive fur coat, fully made up and manicured. And when we fell in the mud together, she was a lumberjack, in a checkered shirt, jeans and boots. “Which one is the real true Julia?” I am thinking.
I am interrupted by one word she says slowly, as if savoring it:
“Baksheeeeeesh.”
Two days later, Professor Hans calls me to his office.
“Yous, I had a drink with Gio last night. He sends you this to add to your writing.” He hands me a small envelope. Sealed.
Once alone, I open it and read the contents.
Dear Baksheesh,
First of all, sorry about the other day, I’m sure you know by now that I can’t control it. It just happens. Here is where I went, where the mind drift took me, maybe:
A voice spoke to me then. A so, so familiar, yet truly unrecognizable voice. This is a very unnerving state to be in, and I will add this: very confusing.
The voice told me this funny thing, I don’t remember where we were, and to be honest I am not sure if it’s a real memory of where I went, my mind that is.
It told me about the stage immediately at, and after, everyone’s death:
In the moment between when the soul leaves the body and before it reaches the often mentioned ‘bright tunnel of light and love,’ there is a short journey that is called ‘The Golden.’ A person reaches this stage first. Floating above, he looks down, sees his own body, and realizes that he is now no longer of that physical dimension of being.
Then, a golden flash bursts and fills his vision, and he now sees his own body below as a curled up, purple-veined wet newborn, and then he sees it grow and morph through aging until this moment, the moment of death. His whole life passes in front of him in a short space of time.
During this vision, as if by magic, he relives every moment of his life, all in the space of a few minutes. It starts with that bright flash of gold heralding his birth, and I’m told that in this very short span of time, he sees the happy moments of his life in colors of yellow and green and his sad moments in crimson and blue. The long moments in between, the periods when his life was mostly eventless, he sees the passing colors as grey and white.
Finally, as this ‘reliving’ reaches the moment of his or her bodily death, the present moment that is, he sees his body burst into another flash of gold, and realizes that he was born in a flash of gold and dies in a flash of gold, and then, and only then, is he ready to move on.
He now understands and remembers.
That very same flash of gold, The Golden, well, Baksheesh, that voice told me told that we often get an atom of it, right here in our own lifetime, a small tiny grain from that wide infinite universe - as a token, a forget-me-not, a memento, some say a memento mori, the French call it La petite mort, - this being the short fleeting moment of an orgasm.
One day, you and I, all of us, we will all re-unite in The Golden and remember and finally understand.
Yours,
Giuseppe Lupo