Cassandra Voices

Tag: daughter

  • Icarius’s Daughter

    Introductory Note

    “Icarius’s Daughter” celebrates Penelope, Odysseus’s wife and heroine of Homer’s Odyssey.

    In the Odyssey, two narratives are woven together by means of changes of scene and frequent flashbacks. In the first strand of the plot, Odysseus has many dire adventures as he makes his way home to Ithaca from the siege of Troy. In the second strand, covering events on Ithaca, Odysseus returns in secret, reveals his identity, and overcomes the Suitors. In the very last four lines of the epic (24.545–548), the goddess Athene reconciles the factions on Ithaca and restores peace.

    The Suitors are wealthy hereditary lords. They mix competition and cooperation as they pursue Odysseus’s wife, waste his resources, exploit his workers, and plot against his son Telemachus. Unlike Odysseus, who was a good king, the Suitors have nothing to offer the people of Ithaca.

    Today we might describe their regime using two Greek words: oligarchy and kleptocracy. That Odysseus has a home, an estate, and a kingdom to return to, and that a path remains open to legitimate government, is thanks to the role played by his wife Penelope. In a striking passage in the Odyssey, Penelope is compared to a good king.  In a roundabout way, she becomes an icon of good governance (19. 107 – 114).

    At the centre of the story is that Penelope, under tremendous pressure, has promised to marry one of the Suitors as soon as she finishes weaving a burial shroud for her father–in–law Laertes.  Her plan is to keep unravelling her own work by night, thereby keeping everything open for a while longer. This ruse is finally exposed as the epic moves towards its climax.

    Penelope’s courage through the years of uncertainty and despair is rooted in her love of Odysseus – and also in her loyalty to the values of her upbringing.

    The Odyssey was composed (possibly) around the year 700 BCE.  Penelope, a Spartan princess, reminds me of the epitaph for the Spartan “300” who went to their deaths at Thermopylae in 480: “Go, stranger, and tell them in Sparta that we lie here having kept faith with their laws” (my translation of Simonides).

    The Bible was rendered into Greek in the 3rd century BCE. The New Testament is written in Greek. The early followers of the “way” of Jesus needed to make sense of the Greek literary tradition. A view emerged that in Greek literature we find seeds of a fuller truth revealed subsequently in the New Testament.

    The present poem tries to take this insight further.  I assume that there are “structural” questions about human life that arise independently within all traditions.  A reasoned examination of these questions is part of what we call “revelation”.  Homer’s portrayal of Penelope’s faithfulness anticipates in important respects a Christian conception of vocation.

    “Icarius’s Daughter” is constructed out of building blocks of three kinds: a single, brief proem or introduction; “real–life” scenes based on incidents or images in Homer; and sequences in which we hear the inner voice of Penelope. Penelope is intended to represent any woman who acquires a coherent view of life through long experience.

    The proem has eight lines. Each of the ten stanzas that follow is in sonnet form. I leave it to the reader to discover where scenes from life segue into the meditations of Penelope. In many stanzas, the octet is the scene from life, the sestet a soliloquy.  In stanzas VII, VIII, and IX, we hear Penelope’s voice throughout. In stanza X, the scene and the soliloquy merge.

    At the end of this document, I offer some notes on the background to each part.  Readers may wish to review these notes briefly before reading the poem itself.

     

    Icarius’s Daughter

    For Darine on her 60th birthday

    Proem 

    Donne ch’avete intelletto d’amore:
    The women who have come to know love’s meaning
    Were Dante’s team. They helped him to ignore
    Some things and do others. And so, Darine,
    To mark your birthday, a wise, loyal wife
    Inhabits this verse; famous, too, for coping
    With crises patiently. Dante’s New Life
    Depends on the women–artisans of hope.

    I

    Those powerful men, grim in their cross–purposes,
    View and review her. Their adulterate eyes
    Fix on a face and figure. Who she is,
    Where she will turn – this she can dramatize,
    Acting her chosen part. They imagine her theirs.
    They bond, amid the clattering cups and cheers.
    A fold falls by her cheek. She climbs the stairs;
    Collapses, an unwanted puppet, in tears.

    So many things are matters of the will:
    That put–up job, night after night; forgiveness;
    How even today, each day, I’m scheming still:
    I shelve the toys of memory, to live.
    My glory was never the shine in others’ eyes.
    Nor in my own. Mine is a greater prize.

    II

    There in the harbour, an apron of dressed stone.
    Odysseus is tossing orders to his men.
    The urgency of doing has outgrown
    All the old doubts. “They may come not again
    From Troy, these long–oared ships.” She could have died
    Right on the spot. “Await me until the day
    The beard has come to that child’s cheek.” That child.
    “Then marry well.” And still he’s looking away.

    Waiting for sleep, my thoughts were numerous
    As notes the nightingale produces, lonely
    In darkness. Laneways near my father’s house
    Entered my dreams. Each morning there was only
    Ithaca. The vague mist, the barren scree.
    I too have wandered a weather–beaten sea. 

    III

    “Others besides Odysseus were lost in Troy.”
    As if the memories his mother stored
    For all their sakes stood in his way. A boy
    Essaying the sharp impatience of a lord.
    An instant destiny, to have a son.
    Abyss of love and dread, all your life through.
    The nothing you would ever leave undone,
    Weighing against the nothing you can do.

    Sometimes, you smile.  One day, a meowing sends me
    Into the yard. The trough. More wild contortions.
    Knowing that seconds count, I move. A frenzy
    Of mother–love surrounds a half–drowned morsel.
    A cleavage in the clouds. A quick reaction
    Wrenching the wheel of nature off its axle.

    IV

    Hours given to her son were never wrong.
    Like this, as a young girl, she would sit and spin,
    Delving in the unwoven stuff of longing,
    Trusting in life. Like this, as years close in,
    Ageing, unkempt Laertes is content.
    His vines and orchards give him a new prime,
    Far from the palace and old arguments.
    A mind at play knows no hard edge of time.

    That his lost father would come back to us,
    Here to our home, away from the world’s harms,
    Is what I was praying for, for Telemachus.
    Acting the hero in a goddess’ arms,
    Odysseus yearned for this hearth, mortal embers:
    That brush with human love a man remembers.

    V

    So deep is their embrace, it seems that Dawn,
    collusively, holds back.  “Our wedding gifts,
    I polished them last year until they shone,
    Which pleased the older servants.” Her man shifts
    To face her. “Look, we’re winning. That’s why
    Tomorrow I move inland to find support.
    Later, we know it from a prophesy,
    There’s one more journey. Of a trickier sort.”

    Daybreak. I stir myself in the chill air.
    The maids and I are getting his trunk ready,
    His practised voice is carrying everywhere.
    I think of our immoveable carved bed.
    Here will I lie. Wherever the wind blows,
    It starts from here, this life that I have chosen.

    VI

    “The junction of this world with the unreal
    Or real world of life after death. The queen
    All empathy as I deliver my spiel.
    Achilles, a shadow of what he once had been.
    Ajax, with whom I clashed in life, estranged,
    Unwilling to accept a simple hug,
    Once, twice, three times. No gleam, even of danger,
    For thwarted Sisyphus. Eternal fug.”

    Odysseus bounces back to his round of tasks.
    “As long as the sun shines, I must be active.”
    Within, like a sustaining loaf and flask,
    I hear a softer voice. Your gifts are intact.
    Now take your way towards measurable good
    And testify to all you have understood.

    VII

    I often think back on my hard departure
    From home and my poor father, Icarius.
    Once that idea of our living in Sparta
    Failed, as I knew it had to, he would fuss
    Endlessly over our going; day by day,
    And almost hour by hour, he would alight
    On gifts or tokens for my going away.
    If candles could bewitch the encroaching night!

    Inevitable that Antinoē,
    My maid, should quit her outhouse in the palace,
    Not for a man, but to accompany me.
    This was our law, which we termed “natural”.
    Ordained for servants by all–seeing Zeus.
    Or un–thought out, impersonal, abusive?

    VIII

    Eumaeus would point out that they dispensed
    With everyday skills: building, ploughing, planting.
    This he compared to their indifference
    To children and the homes they took for granted.
    The suitors had been lifelong specialists
    In power and unearned income. Towards the poor,
    Their laws on property were like closed fists.
    All eyes were dazzled by the cult of war.

    Odysseus facing Scylla. Long acquainted
    With conflict, his one tactic was to fling
    Spears even at ogres. Our wide planet painted
    By poets is hungry for a homecoming.
    Facing time’s monster, we unfriend our peers.
    Angry and small and armoured, we wave spears. 

    IX

    So much was there on that one perfect morning
    In Pylos. I remember the well–built
    Citadel empty. A session on the shore
    Of the whole populace. The ample, gilt
    Wine–cups. The welcome. Joy, to have our fill
    Of sunshine and good food. In this equation,
    Prayers to the gods were ineliminable.
    The way we shared our time was a libation;

    In the dark forest of a leaden Age,
    A glade of peace.  No staked–out paradigm
    Or single rule explains events. To gauge
    What’s going on within some frame of time,
    And where the meaning is gentle, to take part
    Trustingly, equally, is the great art.

    X

    The walk to the old quay is getting too steep.
    Besides, no ship will come now. She mutters,
    Daylight is not forever, we fall asleep.
    It’s time I gave my fine possessions to others.
    Helen went out and came back. Calibrated
    Poorly, in some dark hour, inscrutable signs,
    For all it matters now. I wept and waited.
    My modesty in presence of the Divine.

    Beneath the landscape of our daily hurt,
    All broken down into particulars,
    There runs the constant river from which blurt
    Fountain–like moments, juxtaposed like stars.
    I am resolved, whatever the future brings,
    To thank God for my being and for his things.

    NOTES ON THE BACKGROUND TO “ICARIUS’S DAUGHTER”  

    Title and images

    In Greek legend, Icarius was Penelope’s father. They lived in Sparta around the time of the Trojan War.  Penelope’s relationship with her nymph–mother is less well defined in the stories than her relationship with Icarius.

    Helen (“Helen of Troy”) was Penelope’s first cousin. In Homer, Penelope is aware of the very different trajectories of her life and Helen’s.

    The first image (title) of Penelope is a painting by Domenico Beccafumi from c. 1514. Penelope contemplates her loom, as if to invite reflection on her character and capabilities. For nearly thirty years, Beccafiumi directed work on the pavement of the cathedral in Siena.

    The second image is another early 16th century painting from Siena, Pinturicchio’s work of 1509 known as “The Return of Odysseus.” We see Penelope, the returning Odysseus and the displaced Suitors. As in Beccafiumi’s painting, Penelope’s use of the loom is a key to understanding her character. On the cathedral pavement, Pinturicchio’s representation of two Greek philosophers at the summit of the “Mountain of Wisdom” is a significant statement about the relationship between Christianity and classical culture.. 

    Proem

    A proem (Greek: pro–oimion) is the introduction to a song.

    Donne che avete intelletto d’amore (which I translate in line 2 as “women who have come to know love’s meaning”) is a line from one of the poems woven into Dante’s short prose work Vita Nuova (“New Life”). The Vita Nuova is quasi–autobiographical. Dante comes to accept that his love for Beatrice will never lead to a relationship or to marriage. Instead, Dante is drawn, through Beatrice, towards a vision of human life in the round. Dante the troubadour becomes the philosophical poet of the Divina Commedia.

    The “wise, loyal wife” referred to here is, of course, Penelope.

    Stanza I

    A fold falls by her cheek: “the daughter of Icarius, wise Penelope” makes her first appearance in the Odyssey (1. 329) when she descends from her upstairs room to face the suitors. With two maids in attendance, she takes her stand by a pillar, drawing a fold of her headscarf across her face. Finally, she returns to her room and collapses in tears (“she wept for Odysseus, her beloved husband …”). As we move with Penelope to the bed chamber, Homer notes the continuing noise from below, from the men who wanted to sleep with her (1. 365). 

    Stanza II 

    Await me until the day …:  these eight lines are based on a flashback (18. 259) in which Penelope describes the circumstances of Odysseus’s departure many years before.  In the sestet, the image of the suffering nightingale is borrowed from Homer (19. 518).

    The urgency of doing has outgrown / All the old doubts. One tradition tells us that Odysseus initially tried to avoid joining the expedition to Troy. In the Iliad, the Greeks’ motives for fighting are ambivalent. This is brought out early in the poem when Thersites accuses the leaders of the expedition of being interested mainly in booty. There are misgivings on the Trojan side as well, centred on the never fully tested possibility of negotiating an end to the siege.

    Stanza III

    Others besides Odysseus …: Telemachus rebukes his mother in this way in the first scene in which we see them together (1. 354). Telemachus’s coming–of–age (and growing assertiveness) is an important theme in the Odyssey. In this stanza, the “scene from life” occupies only four lines. The remaining ten lines of the stanza are devoted to Penelope’s memories and reflections.

    Stanza IV

    The first eight lines picture three forms of contemplative or creative activity. The “young Penelope,” imagined in line 2, is based on the portrait of the princess Nausicaa in Odyssey, Book 6. The determined gardening of Laertes, Odysseus’s widowed father, is described in most detail in the last book of the Odyssey (24. 226).

    We know from the Odyssey (23.333) that Odysseus spoke to Penelope about Calypso.  At the beginning of the Odyssey, we find Odysseus entrapped by Calypso, a beautiful goddess, on her remote island.  So far from taking advantage of Calypso’s promises, Odysseus longs to see again “even the threads of smoke rising from the homesteads of his own country” (1. 58).

    Stanza V

    Dawn,/ Collusively, holds back: in Homer, the surreal holding back of “rosy-fingered dawn” by the goddess Athene prolongs the great recognition scene in which Odysseus and Penelope fall into one another’s arms (23. 239). Odysseus almost immediately starts to talk about his future plans. These include a mysterious journey he must undertake before his old age. We first learn of this additional tasking of the hero in Book 11 when Odysseus meets the prophet Teiresias at the edge of the underworld.

    Our immoveable carved bed: Odysseus’ and Penelope’s carved bed was immoveable because it had been constructed (by Odysseus himself) around a living olive tree (23. 190).

    Stanza VI

    The queen/ All empathy as I deliver my spiel:  the queen is Queen Arete of the Phaeacians. Odysseus is reliving for Penelope the presentation he had made at the Phaeacian court. The pinch of salt implied in the word “spiel” is already there, I feel, in Homer.

    The junction of this world with the unreal/Or real world of life after death: as a prelude to making his way home and overthrowing the corrupt order that has developed in Ithaca in his absence, Odysseus is obliged to travel to the edge of the known world to a place where it is possible to meet with the souls of the dead. These encounters seem to me to shape the “existential” context of the whole story.  There is life after death. The gods are concerned with justice. On the other hand, life in the “other world” is much inferior to life in this world.  What happens after death is difficult to understand, interpret, or rely on. This sense of the inaccessibility of ultimate truth is reinforced by Homer’s technique. Odysseus’s experiences of the “beyond” or near “beyond” are narrated not by the inspired poet (“Tell me, Muse …”) but indirectly by Odysseus himself as a character in the poem.

    Like a sustaining loaf and flask: when the prophet Elijah loses confidence in himself he awakes to find a loaf and a flask at his side. A voice instructs him to resume his work. In the Odyssey, a divine influence can help us get through what might otherwise be too hard (cf. the daimōn or spirit in 3.27). The sestet in the stanza reflects Penelope’s inner thoughts on hearing Odysseus talk about God.

    Stanza VII 

    In this stanza and stanzas VIII and IX, there is no observed event or scene from the Odyssey that triggers Penelope’s meditation. We hear her own voice throughout.

    That idea of our living in Sparta: in the Greek literary tradition, Icarius was heartbroken that Penelope was leaving Sparta. However, his plan to persuade Odysseus to set up home in Sparta was unrealistic. Odysseus was an ambitious king whose base was in Ithaca.

    Antinoē:  Antinoē is one of several slaves mentioned by name in the Odyssey.  Eurycleia, Odysseus’s old nurse, and Eumaeus, the swineherd, were born in freedom. They are victims of raids (like St. Patrick at a later period) and of the slave–trade. Laertes never exercises his prerogative, as master, to sleep with Eurycleia when she is a young woman (1.433). Eumaeus is cared for by Odysseus almost as if he were his own child (14.140). Neither Eurycleia nor Eumaeus fits the profile of the “natural slave,” whose limitations and unavoidable dependence on others supposedly justify the institution of slavery.

    Eumaeus makes a couple of comments that are significant in this context. In book 17, he states that “all–seeing Zeus takes half the virtue out of a man on the day when he becomes a slave” (17.322) – in other words, what might be thought of as poor or dependent behaviour in a slave is shaped by the harsh treatment he has received. Eumaeus also states (13.59) that “it is the dikē of a serf to live in fear.” Dikē appears to mean something like “lot in life” or “place in nature.” Homer engages with the institution of slavery and understands the perspective of slaves, serfs, and the abject poor (ptōchoi, a word that recurs in the Sermon on the Mount).

    The Odyssey provides a solid background, I would argue, to the last three lines I give Penelope in this stanza, including line 12: “This was our law, which we termed ‘natural’.”

    Stanza VIII

    They dispensed/ With everyday skills: this phrase is based on a conversation in Book 14 of the Odyssey between Eumaeus and Odysseus. Posing as a stranger (the scene is marked by dramatic irony), Odysseus describes a certain type of privileged person (male) who despises the skills and virtues necessary to create a good home. The central word is oikōpheliē (14.222), derived from two words meaning “household” and “help”. In Homer, perhaps the most attractive feature of Odysseus’s elusive personality is his mastery of all kinds of skills such as carpentry, agriculture, seafaring, and even public performance. In this, he is very different from the elite warriors of the Iliad, who do no work other than fighting. In lines 1 – 4 of the stanza, I imagine Eumaeus drawing on his conversation with the disguised Odysseus in a subsequent discussion with Penelope about the suitors.

    Odysseus facing Scylla: in Book 12 of the Odyssey, Odysseus must sail past the whirlpool Charybdis and the monster Scylla. Scylla uses her six heads to seize six men (or given time, twice six) off every passing ship; she is violence personified, her mother’s name, Cratais, suggesting “force”.  In common with some other dangers faced by Odysseus on his journey (the Sirens, the Cyclops), Scylla and Charybdis cannot be faced down by organised military strength. Circe is explicit in her advice to Odysseus: deeds of war  (polemēia erga) will achieve nothing against Scylla (12. 116). Odysseus disregards this warning. He puts on full armour, grabs two spears, and stands on the forecastle deck as the ship sails between the whirlpool and the monster. Acting according to the instincts of a warrior, Odysseus is powerless. Scylla seizes and gobbles up six of his comrades.

    We unfriend our peers.  Odysseus fails to forewarn his comrades about Scylla (12.223).  His guile has a purpose, to ensure that his men keep rowing and are not distracted by fear. Perhaps the posturing on deck with the spears is intended to serve a similar psychological purpose.

    Stanza IX

    This stanza draws on two religious ceremonies in Pylos described in Book 3 of the Odyssey. The first takes place on a beach in the early morning and involves all or most of the citizens of several towns. (Did this inspire Keats? What little town by river or seashore …) The second ceremony, inside the palace, includes Nestor’s daughters and his sons’ wives. Women are not mentioned as being present in Homer’s account of the liturgy by the seashore. However, they are so obviously part of the second liturgy that I find it reasonable for the Penelope of my poem to recollect a ceremony by the sea. My account is intended to carry a small echo of the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

    A leaden Age. In Hesiod, phases of history are identified, symbolically, with reference to metals. The Golden Age is the  ideal.

    Stanza X

    In the final stanza, I take one last look at Penelope “from outside,” picturing her in old age, probably widowed, as she takes her regular walk to the pier in the bay from which Odysseus set out for Troy so many years before.

    In some dark hour:  for Penelope, Troy is the “unmentionable place.” Nevertheless, Penelope’s unjudgmental and even kindly attitude to Helen is true to Homer (23.218).

    Modesty in presence of the Divine: according to a later author (Pausanias), Icarius, on Penelope’s leaving home, raised a shrine to Aidōs in her honour. Aidōs means “shame” or “modesty”. It refers to the disposition in a human person to respect the laws of God.

    Constant river: the image of a “constant river” surfacing here and there is inspired by the Greek belief that the fountain Arethusa in Syracuse sprang from an underground river originating in Arcadia in the Peloponnese.

  • The Communist’s Daughter

    In the morning before waking, I dream of vast empty plains of flatland and red undulating weather systems in the far distance. It is a dream I have often which leads me to wake with a nameless anxiety, and while the images quickly dissipate like dreams do, the nervousness persists. It is before dawn and I lie there on the couch for an hour, before rising and dressing without showering because I have resolved to leave for the office alone, but Tadhg appears in the doorway of his bedroom before I can make my exit.

    “Well Senan, how’s the head this morning then?” He asks in his meek manner which belies his Corkonian extraction.

    “Same as.” I tell him as I strip the sofa of bed sheets.

    “Ah man it’ll get better.” He says.

    “It will.”

    I check my phone for messages from Anaz but there are none since last night when she broke the silence which has existed between us for the past week and suggested we meet this evening for drinks. I check Instagram as well but little has been updated since I last checked it at about 2AM.

    “I’ll make us some coffee and we’ll head.” Tadhg says.

    I want to respond. Tell him that I’d rather make my own way to the office this morning, but I can’t put the words together. Instead I feel irritated by his presence, even though it is his flat I am staying in. I fold the sheets and leave them on one side of the couch, as if in anticipation of another night which will be spent there, and sit. Tadhg, still standing in the doorway, watches me do this, and after a beat when it becomes clear that I am no longer present, he moves to the coffee table in front of me and clears it of the cans and full ashtray that I left there the night before, despite his request that I not smoke inside. In the kitchen I can hear the coffee machine gurgle and spit, and the cans being crumpled one by one and binned. I consider just walking out the door while he is occupied, but checking my phone again I am reminded that I may need his couch indefinitely, so I stay where I am, staring vacantly into the screen of my phone, scrolling aimlessly and without register, down the endless feed of Instagram. Already new stories are appearing from people I barely know and I tap their smiling icons and view their manicured nails, brightly coloured and bedazzled, gripped around cardboard cups or tilting towards the small lens on their phones a plate with muffins of seed and bran and obscure berry or grape, and infused with cinnamon or pumpkin spice even though it is now November and not October, and the rain outside has turned cold and the air heavy, but all the pictures are warm and dry, and yet somehow still frigid and empty. After what seems like a long time but is likely only a few moments I am returned from my uneasy reverie by Tadhg planting a cup in front of me and falling heavily on the couch to my left, both his hands holding his own cup close to his lips as he blows on the steam that rises from it, and it is only then that I notice the cold of the room. The damp feel to it that I hadn’t felt before, and the dull throb of a hangover rousing behind my eyes.

    “Are you gonna see Anastasia later then?” Asks Tadhg.

    “I am.” I answer, though I don’t remember discussing with him my arrangement with Anaz. But then, I don’t remember much from last night.

    “You sure that’s wise?” He asks with only a hint of incredulity.

    “We share an apartment, Man.” I respond, and then after a beat, “And Buddy.”

    “This isn’t the attitude you had last night,” Tadhg says.

    “Well, I was drunk last night.”

    “I can see that,” he says, drinking his coffee now.

    “How many more did you have after I hit the sack?”

    “Not enough.” I respond.

    “Right.” He says, and a silence descends.

    “Look, I know I need to end it,” I concede. “It’s gone fuckin’ toxic.”

    “It’ll get better, Man.” He repeats.

    I pick up my phone again and open Instagram and refresh the feed. A new story from Anaz appears at the top, her icon a smiling glittering visage cuddled up to the dog we share, Buddy. I tap the icon and Buddy appears again, at the end of his leash which trails back up beyond the camera’s sight, and ahead of him is the public park which is across the street from our apartment building. The grass is an almost luminous green, the cloudy sky not grey but bright, and the caption reads “Out for a walk with my little man!”, with the sunglasses emoji. I lock my phone and put it down again and drink the hot coffee, its taste bitter and sickening.

    Tadhg is moving around his small flat, wiping down the coffee table and coming in and out of the living room from his bedroom in increasing states of dress. The place is tiny, the kitchen a cove, shared with an oversized washer-dryer that he was bragging about having bought, about never having to go to the launderette down the street again. The TV is too close to the couch, the coffee table too close to my knees, and the couch too low, old and impacted. I put down the cup of coffee and finish dressing by grabbing my tie, still tied from yesterday, and noosing it around my neck.

    “Not gonna finish your coffee?” Tadhg asks, a look of concern, or perhaps irritation, on his face.

    “I’ll grab one on the way to the subway station sure,” I say, before adding, “Thanks though, it was… decent.”

    From the street the sky is a huge churning spectral mass of grey which cascades over the roofs of the differently crested buildings of downtown Toronto. We walk the short distance to the subway station in silence and I am tempted to put my headphones on now rather than when we get on the train. I hold off and tell Tadhg that I am running into Tim Horton’s to grab a cup of coffee, but he follows me into the shop and stands with me after I order.

    I check my phone again for messages from Anaz, or anyone, but there are none. There are numerous new stories on Instagram, mostly of coffee cups and allegedly healthy breakfast choices. Anaz has posted a picture of a cardboard coffee cup and the yogurt and granola pot that she likes but always says is too expensive. I study the photo closely but there is little more info I can glean from how the picture is cropped. When I receive my own coffee, without thinking, I hold it out in front of me and open the camera function on Instagram.

    “Are you taking a photo of your coffee?” Tadhg asks me, laughing.

    “No.” I mutter, quickly locking my phone and putting it back in my pocket, disturbed by the apparent instinct of my own action. Tadhg continues laughing at me and despite the fact that he is probably my best friend in this country, the desire to walk away from him and put my headphones on is intense, and the knowledge that this reaction is merely a projection of other feelings does not quell the almost overwhelming impulse.

    I walk out of Tim Horton’s and make a beeline for the entrance to the subway station, holding my coffee in my right hand and pulling my wallet from its pocket with my left. At the ticket barrier I stop and struggle with one hand to remove my subway pass. Tadhg sees this, and his own pass already in his hand, takes my wallet and removes my pass and hands it to me so that I can easily go through the turnstile.

    “So where is it you’re meeting her tonight?” He asks me when we’re both on the other side, Tadhg this time holding my coffee cup while I put the pass back into my wallet.

    “The Communist’s Daughter,” I tell him, before adding, “Ossington.”

    “Ye seem to like that place, you go there so often,” he says, “I’ve still never been.”

    Redundantly I reply, “We don’t go there that often.” Though I find myself thinking about this point as we descend the city and catch a train that’s already waiting at the platform.

    At lunchtime I don my Bluetooth headphones again and hit play on a new episode of the podcast I’ve been listening to which is about an Irish serial killer who murdered his victims by pushing them in front of tube trains in London. I manage to duck out of the office unnoticed and make my way to the underground concourse 70 stories down and walk past a small second hand electronics store which is run by a short, crippled Asian man, past a dollar store where I bought a red rubber spatula when we first moved into our apartment, and through the link corridor. Then past a chain clothing store which reminds me of Dunnes Stores or Marks and Spencer or something of that ilk from back home, but is far more expensive just like everything is here. Past an LCBO which if I’m honest is located too close to where I work, and around the corner past three different Canadian banks, to the food court. I follow the kiosks which circle the seating area, reading the menus of each – Falafel, bagels, Indian, Chinese, Italian, Burger King, A&W Burger, Sushi – but I become aware that the seating area is full and bustling which will make it difficult to sit alone and away from absolutely anyone else, so I make a snap decision to leave the shelter of the concourse and take to the street.

    The clouds still hang low and swollen and ominous, and though the pavements are stained damp it does not appear to have rained again since last night. I walk steadily along the footpath, dodging some people and overtaking others, passing different shops where I could take a look at the lunch options but am put off entering either by the crowds or by the glimpse of my own haggard and tired reflection in the windows. Persistent, the hangover has abated to something more familiar and manageable, but my mood is a strange amalgam of weariness and restlessness. Tired and tense at the same time. Muscle memory leads me to subconsciously take out my phone yet again, and by the time I realise what I’m doing I’ve already unlocked it. So I relent and go through the process of checking everything: messages from Tadhg and Aidan and Freddie and Harry asking where I disappeared to and if I’m free for lunch; a missed call from our apartment building manager; an email from my bank offering me increased credit and an additional credit card; countless emails from Linkedin even though I have unsubscribed numerous times, and Facebook even though I deactivated my account months ago; nothing from Anaz. Instagram consists of stories depicting what people are actually watching on TV at any given moment and  posts about the colour of the clouds, or about how rain cleanses everything and how we should feel positive about this: “Positive vibes only”, followed by love heart emojis and the sun wearing sunglasses, probably expensive ones.

    I’ve walked as far as the shop fronts go before they turn into condo building entrances, so I enter a Loblaws and absently wander the isles not focusing on what I might eat for lunch but thinking instead about the last time Anaz and I were together.

    Despite a barrage of texts from Anaz asking where I was, rather than go home that evening, I had been out drinking with Tadhg and Aiden. I let myself into our apartment as quietly as I could so as not to set the dog off, or Anaz. But she was up.

    “Do you realise we don’t had sex in two weeks more than?” She said from the shadows before I saw her on the couch eating caprese salad in red lace underwear and a halter top. Her trousers, shoes, socks and jacket were strewn to various different points throughout the apartment, which was lit only by the sprawl of the city shining through the floor to ceiling windows in sharp spears of light. I wondered briefly if she had been alone the entire time. Whether she had removed her clothes herself, but before the thought could fully form in my mind she spoke again, “Where the fuck were you?”

    I digressed to the fridge and grabbed a beer, trying to remember what excuse I had made up, before finally settling on, “I told you, I was having drinks with clients.”

    “Sex,” she said again, not listening to me, lifting above her head a slice of tomato with a generous sliver of mozzarella cheese heaped on top of it, and a leaf of basil, and then lowering it, craning it, slowly into her mouth, and then shutting her eyes tightly and clenching her fist with pleasure. It was a display I had observed before, and had previously found strangely arousing, but in that moment I was so utterly repulsed by the show that I felt like weeping. Instead I did as I always do and opened the beer and downed it while standing at the kitchen counter.

    “Why we don’t had sex?” She repeated.

    “Because we don’t even like each other, Anaz.” I muttered to myself.

    “What?”

    “Where’s Buddy?” I asked her.

    “I walk him and feed him and now he sleep in the bedroom, where you think, Senan,” She answered me with a calculated bite.

    “You supposed to walk him,” She continued.

    “I walked him this morning, like I do every morning.”

    “Oh ya!” She scoffed.

    “Why are we fighting Anaz, it’s Friday and we’re both drunk. We should be happy,” I said tiredly to her. To the empty apartment.

    “Why you don’t come home?”

    “Drinks. Clients.”

    “Bullshit.”

    Had I not been drunk I may have considered the fact that she was right, I was bullshitting her, and had done so countless times before. Had I not been drunk I may have contemplated the possible reasons I preferred not to go home to our spacious apartment in leafy midtown Toronto, where I had a beautiful girlfriend and a dog and a future unfurling. But rather than think I drank, and I don’t remember who initiated it or how and I don’t remember desire awakening in me, and I don’t remember but I must have joined her on the couch, and I must have allowed my eyes to trace up the silken sheen of her sallow-skinned legs, crossed and toned and elevated on the coffee table, to her underwear delicate and transparent. I must have because an image of it lingers even now. So too lingers the fragrance of sex, still in my nostrils. The smell of stale cigarettes and liquor and caprese salad. The taste of her mouth in mine. The sensation when her teeth broke the skin inside my lower lip, and the sight of blood, black in the dark, marked on her chin. The taste of it when my teeth and tongue followed the line it had traced. My hands as they held her hips and her waist. My fingers when they found the flesh under her top and drew up to her arms and threaded her fingers held high above her head. Then her underwear torn away and my trousers unbuckled and lowered just enough. The impatience we shared as we both tried to ease me into her, our hands wet with spit. The image of a tug at the corner of her mouth forming a sinister grin which I should have paid more attention to as I held her arms down with one hand and arched a leg with the other, blood smeared on her face, dripped from my lip tense with intent. The image of her legs locked around me as they negotiated a rhythm. The memory of her words of goading in the guise of encouragement. The tightening of her legs around me and the slow inward rise of an orgasm. The memory which is trying to bury itself of her holding my hands to flesh under her hips, of her holding me there, inside her. The memory of her intent. The memory of my words of caution turned pleads, turned echoes unheeded.

    The whole scene replays before me as I stand in front of single serving plastic containers of red and green salads, of triangular sandwich boxes, or wraps, or veg sticks and fruit cups. I haven’t eaten since lunchtime yesterday and though I feel empty and depleted, nothing in the array of options in front of me, anywhere in this shop, appeals to me. The disembodied voice of the Irish serial killer, gruff and slurred, brags in my ears about how many people he pushed in front of oncoming trains, how they were all ruled just suicides, and he repeats those two words several times, “Just suicides”.

    Still standing in front of the lunch options, as if to break the trance I’m in, I take out my phone. Another missed call from our apartment building manager. Instagram stories from people back home, coffee cups and porridges with seeds and honey, salads of avocado and lettuce with tomato and egg, and complaints about the cold and the wind and the rain and “It’d be a grand aul country if you could only move it har har!”. A picture of a dazzling warm sunset posted by my sister in Australia with a caption about there being “A grand aul stretch in the evenings”. So many different emojis plastered over every picture that I can’t fathom what I’m supposed to feel at all. And a reminder that a friend’s birthday is tomorrow, which I dismiss.

    I grab a sandwich and slalom the isles again, unsure if the sandwich will suffice or if I’ll need something more, something other.

    At the dairy freezer I stop and peruse the different cheeses, all of them foreign to me and expensive, like everything is here. I pick up a cheese that Anaz likes. One we eat with crackers in front of the TV. Aged Five Years is advertised on its red ribbon emblem, and without looking around me, I open my jacket and slip it into the inside pocket, and walk to the checkout where I purchase only the sandwich, before leaving the Loblaws and without thinking, without giving it any conscious consideration at all, acting purely on some sort of toxic instinct, I walk out into the middle of the street, traffic coming in both directions, and I cross the road and walk into a Firkin Pub which has a John Cleese silhouette on the wall ascending the steps, and I sit at the empty bar and order a pint of Moosehead and a shot of Jameson, and when I’m told that I can’t eat the sandwich that I bought in the Loblaws, I ask what sandwich. The bartender actually has to nod at my hand before I realise I’m still clutching the sandwich box tight, crushing what’s inside, so I ask for a food menu as well and end up ordering a Classic Poutine which I don’t initially think I’ll eat but end up devouring.

    Back in the office I spend the afternoon sending emails to clients: millionaire hedge-fund managers, managing billions of dollars worth of wealth. I send them short snappy missives which emphasise how I know how precious their time is and assuring them that I’m not in the business of wasting it. How their quarterlies show good numbers while many of their competitors are sliding precariously into the red. “It was my robust macroeconomic advice which assisted this, and with year end approaching I hope I can count on your business for what I’m sure will be another successful year. Kind regards, Senan O’Sullivan”. Then I avoid all calls and scroll Reddit and Instagram for hours until my neck and shoulders begin to ache. Anaz has continued posting stories throughout her day, of her yoga mat laid out in our apartment which she refers to as “My place“. Of Buddy at the obliterated end of a chew-toy even though it is usually me who plays those games with him. Of the view from our balcony which looks down the long stretch of Yonge Street to the city, broad and still at a distance. I am still scrolling Reddit when I leave the office, and still when I am waiting for the elevator, and still when I am riding it down the throat of the building. I am so engrossed in the variety of nothingness reeling before my eyes that I do not notice that Tadhg has gotten on the elevator as well and is speaking to me. I have to ask him to repeat himself twice before I can register that he is asking me about sleeping on his couch again tonight.

    “You’ve been pretty out of it all day.” Tadhg says to me with a forced kind of humour.

    “Have I?” I feign. “Just tired.”

    “And will you be needing the couch?”

    “Probably…” I tell him, wanting to form more words, to give him an answer more certain, but I am just breathing audibly on the verge of a panic attack. He stares at me puzzled until the elevator doors open on the ground floor, where we exit to the lobby and walk together to Bloor subway station.

    The sky is now a disintegrating black horde manifested on the street as the heaviest rain I have ever seen, and we run through this along with hundreds of other people finishing work at the same time and descending from their offices in the sky and following the same routine. Cars and buses and taxi cabs blast their horns and make their presence known but otherwise there is only the sound of the falling rain and then the squeak of rubber soles on tiles as we enter the shelter of the concourse. At the ticket barrier Tadhg turns to me and says: “Let me know then, I’ll be downtown having a drink but the couch is there for you if you need it.”

    To which I nod and respond: “Grand, I’ll let you know.”

    And I’m thankful to him for being a friend, and I want to articulate this but instead we separate, going in different directions on the subway lines.

    When I arrive in Ossington the neighbourhood is drenched in the light of the city, the streets shimmering back at the night sky like a warped mirror. I’m early and I stand for a time under the awning of a restaurant in the style of an American diner on the other side of the street from the small speakeasy bar that reads above its door The Communist’s Daughter.

    It has been five years since I met Anastasia Smirnov on that curbside one sweltering summer night. Four years since I moved here to be with her. Three we have lived together. And two that we’ve shared Buddy. Each year marked by some type of progression or milestone or marker. Red Toronto streetcars pass me and chime at clocklike intervals. I take out my phone and text Anaz to say that I will be a little late, and then turn around and enter the diner restaurant and take a booth by the window facing across the street, and when the waitress comes by I order a gin and tonic off the bar-rail menu. In my ears ring the unsubtle hymns of Arcade Fire, and for the first time all day I feel tranquil.

    Anaz texts me back to say she will be there in the next ten minutes. I respond sarcastically that I’ve been enjoying the stories she’s been posting all day, but I realise the subtext was lost when she says she has been able to relax and think. That she has tomorrow off work so we should put some wood on the fire tonight and enjoy ourselves. Adding wood to the fire is something she has always said: that our fire will die if we don’t add to it.

    Instead of waiting just a little longer to speak to her in person like I know I should, I type out the message:

    “Are we just going to ignore what happened the other night?”

    “Ignore what Baby?” She responds a little too quickly.

    “That you made me finish inside you,” I write.

    And then immediately on top of that: “I wasn’t wearing a condom.”

    “No Baby, you didn’t pull out because you were drunk.” She immediately responds again.

    “Anaz, you wouldn’t let me pull out.” I tell her.

    “No Baby, it was you.”

    “Anaz, we were drunk but I remember,” I write, the memory of my rising panic giving me a sudden jolt.

    “I wasn’t drunk.” She says.

    Minutes pass and I don’t respond to the last message. I replay in my mind the events of the night as I remember them, only now I doubt myself. I doubt what I know is true. The minutes stretch and a directionless anger rises within me. I finish my gin and tonic and order another and while the waitress is walking away from me, I find myself typing: “The thing I’ve come to realise about you Anaz is that you are undeniably beautiful… but only on the outside.” I read this message over and over trying to calculate its effect before my fingers delete it and instead type and send:

    “Did you take Plan B?”

    “Yes Baby.” She says.

    “How can I know that’s true?”

    “Well you’ll see in 9 months when I don’t give birth.” She tells me and I can’t know if this was meant as a joke or not.

    Another expanse opens between us, the only sound the din of shifting metal cutlery and ice in glasses like a death rattle. Anaz has posted a picture looking out of a bus window at the rain with the caption “Date night!”, and the drinks emoji. When I look up from my phone I can see her across the street finishing a cigarette outside The Communist’s Daughter, and as always I am struck by her beauty, and the night maps out in front of me coldly.

    I will go over to her and we’ll order drinks, perhaps beers to start with but then we’ll move on to cocktails and we’ll definitely do shots, and then we’ll probably move on to another bar somewhere. Maybe we’ll take a cab back downtown, and maybe we’ll score some coke and then we’ll go home, possibly with some random people in tow, and the night will blur and we’ll never address that night or our problems directly, but we’ll take some wonderful pictures and videos and we’ll post them to our Instagram accounts and we’ll call them the memories we’ve made together, and people back home will comment on them saying how great I look and how happy we seem, and I’ll like the comments and respond with emojis which will assure everyone of my complete and utter contentedness.

    Anaz vanishes briefly into the darkness of the bar but reappears when she takes the booth in the window box which is the best table in the place, and I become aware that all I need to do to break this cycle is to not join her tonight – that on some unconscious level I already knew this and took the first steps by entering the restaurant and not the bar.

    I chew the ice at the bottom of my glass.

    I tear a napkin to shreds.

    I watch the waitress meander about the tables filled with the frivolous Friday nighters.

    I order another drink.

    The rain outside has started up again and I watch her over there, as she removes her red beanie hat which through the two water streaked windows that separate us looks like an undulating beacon, warning me, while always drawing me in.