John
Woolfrey 2651 words
1729
Rue de la Visitation
Montreal,
Quebec, Canada
H2L
3C3
(514)
597-2189
At the Top of the
City
Copyright by Raymond John Woolfrey
Published in Future Tense: New English
Fiction from Quebec,
Véhicule Press, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
1997
From East of the Big Q,
a collection of gay short stories about Montreal
And that arctic air mass can linger well into spring.
To the memory of Kent
The sky at the
top of the city was made of bands of
aluminum and pewter. It pressed down against the burial party, dropping
handfuls of snowflakes that the wind caught and blew into our eyes. “Færie
dust,” murmured Michael, as he stared through a gap between the mourners. I
smiled and looked at him. His black, wiry hair was all frosted by the snow, and
tiny snowflake crumbs slid down his red down jacket. His face was red, too, but
not from the cold—Michael’s face is often red.
Rows of graves rolled away from us over
the gentle slopes of Mount Royal. Beyond them bare grey-brown hardwoods covered
the other two summits, and the distant hush of the city encompassed us.
We didn’t know any of the family. We
hardly knew Justin. But Michael was adamant about going. “It’s time I faced up
to it, William. Unlike you, I’ve never been to anybody’s funeral—always avoided
them. But now I wanna see what it’s like.” Michael’s doctor found pml in his brain. No cure for that one.
Little by little the body becomes paralyzed, until the brain shuts down. He
might live for as much as another year. I heard him tell me all that last
month, but none of it made any sense to me.
Since I knew Justin—though only a
little—he asked me to go with him. I felt odd about going to the big Catholic
church. “He was just a trick!” I’d protested. “Not just a trick, William,”
replied Michael. “You got to know a little something about Justin when you met
him at Christmas. Not just about his body but about his fears. Something I never
knew when I saw him back in Vancouver at clubs and in my hiv-doctor’s office. Between the two of
us we knew him a bit.” Then, with very steady and serious eyes, he’d implored,
“Just come with me, okay?”
So here we were, watching the family of
another queer we barely knew toss earth into his grave. When they’d all taken
turns, the woman who I guess was his mother broke down on the shoulder of the
man next to her. A guy who looked like a slightly older, less good-looking,
version of Justin just stared into the grave.
“Okay, let’s go,” whispered Michael. I
nodded. As we walked away he added, “We’ll cross over into the Protestant
cemetery and then down to Saint-Laurent Boulevard for food.
It was early April. The winter’s snow had
almost all melted away during the thaw of the last few weeks, but a last gasp
of arctic air had rushed back in hard and fast during the night—the grave
diggers had had just enough time to turn the earth. The sloping roads of the
cemetery were shiny black from runoff that had frozen in its tracks, and we
avoided slipping on it by crossing over hardened mud and brown grass, trying
not to trample too many graves along the way.
We wended our way east like that until we
came upon the fence that separated the two cemeteries, where the uniform
headstones of soldiers’ graves were laid out in rows and columns on either
side. We passed through the gate with its forged-metal posts, each capped by
ornate crowns. Michael stopped. “Look,” he said. “The only reason there’s a
gate here at all is to let military workers care for the graves of both the
Catholic soldiers on one side and the Protestant soldiers on the other. You can
bet there’d be no other reason for Catholic and Protestant cemeteries to
communicate!”
“Hunh.” Typical of Michael to notice something
like that, I thought. “You’re probably right. They probably didn’t let people
roam about up here a hundred years ago.” Today the gate serves as a shortcut
for hikers and skiers. Michael and I often take walks up here, especially in
the spring, when all’s abloom with crab apple, cherry and, a few weeks later,
lilac. It’s a beautiful, calm place to be, almost like the country. Like now.
But I couldn’t help thinking this coming spring would probably be our last time
here together. A cemetery, of all places. But his disease still doesn’t make
sense to me. And then, as we stared at the graves, and as though he read my
mind, Michael said, “Imagine a graveyard like this, only instead of soldiers
it’s all the gay men who died of aids
in this city.”
We stood still, not speaking, just being
quiet. We couldn’t hear the city from this sheltered corner. Some chickadees
twittered, and the wind blew through the bare tree limbs.
Suddenly, Michael looked at me. “Did you
smell that?”
“Incense? It was just a whiff. I wasn’t
sure if I imagined it.”
“Wow. Hey,” he added, brightening. “That
gives me an idea. And I bet it’s coming from up there. Come on, I wanna show
you something.”
“Where,” I asked, warily.
“Up there.” He pointed to the hilltop
above us.
“I’m cold,” I protested.
“Come on,” Michael insisted. “You’ll warm
up as we climb.”
After a few minutes of panting up the
steep incline, we found the grave before which a pile of frankincense was
smouldering away. “There it is!” he said. We climbed some more until we reached
the bare top of the Greek section. It was the second-highest summit of Mount
Royal; the view was almost panoramic. We could see the other two summits, the
rows and rows of the grey Plateau Mont-Royal district fading into the east like
shale, and the St. Lawrence River in the southwest and again in the northeast.
Grey cloud bottoms sat over it all.
“Look at this city, William. I just want
to show you—though I know you already know—what a weird and wonderful place
Montreal is. Those soldiers graves with a fence running through them, and the
whiff of church incense coming out of nowhere—they just reminded me of how
bizarre and mysterious this city is. And up here, on Mount Royal, it’s all
summed up.”
I wondered what gems his brain had dug up
over the course of his two years here. His face was getting tense, earnest
looking; his eyebrows were making V’s, and he started to talk more
loudly. “What do you mean?” I asked, knowing that was the prompt he wanted.
“For starters, what you call your ‘mountain’
is really just a tiny lump of three hills, right?”
“Yeah … ”
“Three in one. Like a trinity. How perfect
for your Catholic city, n’est-ce pas? And each lump has its own, special
monument built on it. Over here on the northern one where we are—or is it west.
I can never tell in this crazy city with its river-oriented grid that makes the
sun set in the north! Anyway, on this hill you have the huge cock of the
Université de Montréal tower sticking up all bandé[1],
right?”
I looked at the art-deco university tower
with its yellow-brick shaft and smooth, shiny, half-sphere head. It reminded
met of all those mornings riding with my father to my English university on the
other side of the mountain; we’d drive up Darlington, and there it would be,
dead ahead and tall and as erect as what I usually had in my jeans that time of
day, thanks to the jiggling of the car and my seventeen years. Looking at it
anew, I noticed a slight bulge just below the top. “It even has a foreskin,” I
said.
Michael giggled. “William! Anyway, over
there on the southern mound there’s the enormous breast of the dome of St.
Joseph’s Oratory.”
Through the tree branches we could see the
larger-than-life stone shrine a kilometre away, its dome a dull green just
beneath the clouds. “I suppose you’re going to say the cross on top its big,
erect nipple is its body piercing,” I added.
“That’s good!” he giggled some more. “Now
shut up and listen. Finally, on the highest hill, ‘lord’-ing it over the other
two as well as the entire city, is that damn cross.”
Together we looked over the cemetery at
the cross on top of the park. I thought of something he might not be aware of:
“Bet you didn’t know the cross’s lights turn purple when Popes die,” I said.
“Get out!”
“Really!”
Michael shook his head and laughed some
more. “That’s so funny. See what I mean?”
I smiled and nodded. “And from Roy
Street,” I went on, getting into the spirit of it, “those two tv transmission towers flanking the
cross look the thieves who were crucified with Christ. A giant Calvary!”
Michael added, “Maybe the one that looks
like the devil’s trident is the one who cursed Jesus.”
We giggled and laughed some more. “tv tower!” howled Michael.
“Trannies!!!” Finally we both sighed.
“Isn’t it great? You got this trinity
mountain, one with a cock, another with a boob, and the highest with an S&M
scene! Fantastic! What an ad for Sex City.
“Michael!” I exclaimed. You’re nuts!”
“I know. But think about it.… Crazy, crazy
town!”
“Yeah. It is.”
The sun broke out and we fell silent. The
city hummed dully down in the distance. A Greek family, an old woman in black
among them, was tidying up a grave nearby and changing the flowers.
“You know which one I love the best?” said
Michael, quietly.
“Which one what?” I asked.
“The Oratory,” he replied.
“Oh yeah.” Michael had an obsession with
it.
“It’s so wonderfully bizarre. How many
places in North America do people come from hundreds of miles to climb up
hundreds of steps on their knees to get healed? Since you took me there when I
first came to Montreal, I always show it to my friends who come to visit. That
hot room with all the votive candles, the steps, the escalators, Frère André’s
pickled heart! And the outdoor Way of the Cross with the Pascal Lamb’s swimming
pool at the top, where you can just sit on a summer’s day and imagine you’re on
a hillside in Italy, the trees obscuring the view of the land stretching away.
“Remember that organ recital we came for
last spring? The sun was about to set, and as your friend started his Bach
toccatta on that magnificent organ in the Oratory’s vast space, the sun
streamed in like laser beams through the doors and into our eyes.”
“I was floating,” I murmured.
“And we got to it from above and
behind—from Westmount. I’ll never forget the first time you took me that way.
Climbing up and up from The Boulevard in your little car, English-looking
Westmount with its Gothic mansions all squished onto that tiny hill. We drove
around the top, through its forest of streets, turned a corner, and all of a
sudden this huge green dome just appeared—looming on the edge of the hill, like
some monstrous alien, Catholic spaceship poised to devour unsuspecting
Protestant Westmount! As though the anglo west wrapped itself around one side
of the mountain, and the francophone east wrapped itself around the other side,
and that’s where they met. What a fantastic collision of Quebec-Catholic
extravagance and picturesque wasp
tastefulness!
“Oh, I love this city,” he went on. “It’s
such a playground. A real party town, everyone says it is.” Then he looked
north again. “One night I was driving back from the Laurentians, eager to get
back to the clubs. As I was leaving the foothills—just before Saint-Jérôme—I
could see the city in the distance. All lit up at night, it looked like one big
party: the skyscrapers to the left, lots of different lights way to the right,
and in between the lights of the road that runs over the park—from the distance
they looked like a string of party lights. And with the beams of light from the
beacon on the Place Ville-Marie building swinging over it all, the whole thing
looked like a giant amusement park!”
I’d seen that view a million times coming
back to town from the cottage. He was right. It did look like an amusement
park.
“And then here, on the mountain, we queers
have our own “Garden of Wonders.” Right smack below the cross. Acres and acres
of land spread out below our ‘Calvary.’ Jesus must be very pleased to have all
those men on their knees, don’t you think?”
“Oooh, Michael!”
“And it’s all so deliciously pagan,” he
went on. “Men hunting each other through the steamy, still woods on hot July
afternoons, scrambling up and down steep cliffs, the blue St. Lawrence in the
distance. Men listening for the sounds of each other and the clop-clop of cops’
horses, picking up the scent of a cigarette, moving stealthily; stalking. All
to the beat of the tam-tams[2]way
down below on Park Avenue, where the not-so-straight straights perform their
pagan dance rights around the foot of the statue of winged Victory. Men
hunting—not to kill, but for each other’s lust.”
“Mmmm.”
“And then, over on the edge of the park,
by the Molson monument in the cemetery—where else but by the tallest phallus in
the whole goddamn cemetery would you find queers? Huh! We spend our lives
drinking Molson beer in the bars, sucking cock by the Molson family grave—some
of us even go to their church—and if we’re rich enough, we can be buried near
them.”
“I never thought of that,” I managed to
get out between laughs.
Then Michael fell silent. The wind blew. I
shivered. The clouds had once more sealed the sky. I looked at my friend. “I’m
cold and hungry,” I whined.
We started forward again. As we went down
the steep hill and past the soldiers’ graves again, Michael mumbled, “Hunh!”
“What?”
“These cemeteries. I just noticed it. You
Montrealers spend your whole lives more or less apart, the English in the west
and the French in the east; but when you die the English get buried in their
Protestant cemetery on the east side of the mountain, and the French go to their
Catholic one on the west side—just the opposite!”
“Hunh,” I said. “I never thought of it. Do
you think that cancels out all the squabbling.”
We kept on walking. “What a funny city
this is. I don’t wanna leave it,” he said.
“What d’ya mean, leave it?” I demanded.
Michael turned to me, smiling fondly. “You
know that pml isn’t gonna go
away, Willy. I already have trouble writing. It’s only gonna get worse, not
better.”
My eyes immediately swelled, my sinuses
ached, my cheeks turned hot. I didn’t want my lips to tremble in front of him.
I didn’t know what I could say. I just sort of hooked his arm with mine and
said, “You’ll never leave us, you nutcase.” Then I pulled. “Let’s get outta
here!”
“Okay,” Michael said, as I hauled him
forward. But a grin began to stretch across his face. I knew he had another
weird idea. “Hey, know what?” he began. “When I die I want you to scatter my
ashes from the tallest cliff in the cruising area below Calvary… ”
“Michael!” I groaned, rolling my eyes.
“ … and the neon cross that turns purple
when Popes die can be my marker!”
I wanted to laugh and cry at the same
time. The only thing that made any sense to me right now was that my friend
Michael was very much alive—and that I’d kill him soon if he didn’t stop all this nonsense.
“Will you shut up!” I screamed, and we ran
as a sudden, thick snow flurry blew us across the cemetery and down to the Main[3].
[1] Erect, particularly a penis
[2] Tom-tom drums
[3] Saint-Laurent Boulevard: The street that marks the difference between the French side on the east and the English side on the west.