The names in which we hide

"Sometimes it seems that I don't have the skills to recollect,
the twists and turns of plots that took us from lovers to friends,
I'm thinking I should take that volume back up off the shelf,
and crack it's weary spine and read to help remind myself.

I am waiting for something to wrong,
I am waiting for familiar resolve;
I am waiting for another repeat,
another diet fed by crippling defeat;
and I am waiting for that sense of relief,
I am waiting for you to flee the scene,
as if you held in your hand the smoking gun,
and on the floor lay the one you said you loved.

And it's strange:
they are basically the same,
so I don't ask names anymore."
-- Death Cab for Cutie, Expo '86


I write in pencil, but will never erase words; do I need to remember things that are wrong so much? They feel like the most important ones, sometimes - there must be a reason they are wrong. These days, no-one needs a reason to be right.


FAITH
Chapter -

When they are nervous, most boys will fidget incessantly, driving everyone around them into a state of complete distraction; I was the opposite. I sat stone still and silent in Dr. Isaakson’s waiting room, my eyes reading the pattern on the carpet again and again. Deep wine red, square then line then curve then square then line then curve – I still remember that carpet. It felt, not surprisingly, like there was blood everywhere. I was fifteen, had spent every summer of my young life in the French countryside, and I had never seen an animal – not even a chicken! – killed; it strikes me that my great uncle (or more likely my great aunt) understood a little more about me than I ever realised.

Whatever the reason, I felt sick to my stomach as I sat alone in the big front hall of 22 rue d’Alimonde, waiting for something bad to happen. I was convinced I had killed her, or that at the very least they would amputate the leg; I suppose it must have been the stricken expression on my face that helped the good doctor to take pity on me; short of the poor thing lying on his couch, I don’t believe there was a more wretched-looking child in the whole district.

“You’re Mme. De Francois’ nephew, aren’t you?” he said with a sigh – I think it must have been something of a trademark – lowering himself slowly to sit beside me. His English was flawless; I could only nod dumbly.

“You look absolutely terrified, lad! Don’t worry yourself so much – your young lady-friend will be just fine.” His bluntness was a tonic; long into my adult life I would appreciate this man for his ability to offer the truth, unadorned by never cruelly.

“The gash on her leg was deep, but not particularly dangerous.” He spoke to me softly, but as though I was an adult. “No major arteries, no big muscles: with some rest and a little, she will soon be as good as new. Would you like to see her?”

Of course I did not; his tone did not ask the same question his words did, however. With his arm around my shoulders, I ventured into the room, feeling guilty and several years younger than I was. I was entirely unprepared.

When I struggled to explain the moment to my mother, a long time later during one of her lucid periods, she offered me the only decent explanation I have ever been given.

“Guilt and love are emotions that stay with us longer than any others. When you are young, they burn themselves into you even more than normal. Mix the two, suffer them when you are most vulnerable, and who is to say it will not snare you for the rest of your life?”

I stood staring at her for a long time in silence, the darkened room shaping itself around the two of us, intimate and stifling.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked drowsily, and I could tell her grasp of the present was already slipping. I did not have an answer.

“Why,” the girl repeated, sounding more curious than in pain, “are you staring at me?”

I did not have an answer.

“I’m sorry,” I mumbled. It didn’t even register that she was speaking English. “I’m sorry about your leg. I was just…” I couldn’t think of what I had ‘just’ been doing; I went back to staring.

Dr. Isaakson laughed quietly, and I realised his hands were still on my shoulders. “I would guess,” he offered, amused, “that you were just turning a corner at the wrong time. I would imagine you both were. It is an explanation,” he continued thoughtfully, “that applies to a great many things in life.”

It would take me a great many years to remember those words, to recall what he said in those moments; for the longest time all my memory contained was a pair of brilliant, aggressive grey-green eyes framed by a tangle of insanely thick chestnut hair. When, however many decades later, I remembered his voice in that scene, I was perversely sad: it feels to this day as if I have let go of something very important by doing so, instead of gaining it.

“I’ll take her home,” Isaakson said kindly, filling the silence. “She’ll be perfectly fine with me. You run along: I’ll phone your aunt and explain everything, not to worry.”

Maybe misunderstanding the awkwardness, he steered me deftly out of the room, but was forced to pause on the threshold when she said, “boy! What’s your name?”

“Patrick,” I said, and – because fate or God or whichever demon attends me has never, ever given me a choice when it comes to her – “what’s yours?”

In that moment she smiled, and somewhere too deep to put it into words I understood that there are corners and then there are corners, and from this one there would never be a turning back.

“Faith.” The smile never left her lips. “Je m’appelle Faith.”