Perdition: Last of the Hernian stories.

The remainder of the first day of recovery was uneventful and I merely completed the morning crossword and went to bed. I began to picture the various elements of my life up to that moment, why had the trajectory of the thing been so erratic, or if not erratic, why so poor? I was feeling sorry for myself in other words, but the pain in my groin was far greater than the anguish that resided in the brain. I tried to fight the urge to take pain-killers with my absurd connection to 19^th century men (or women) who would never have had the opportunity (which was incorrect, they could easily have had tincture of opium or morphine, or brandy) so I lied awake, listening to the snores and smelling the smells of the men around me, the old gentlemen who voided themselves without aid of the bed-pan, of the grunts and murmurs of the afflicted all the way down the hall way. It must have been four in the morning when the night nurse came in with flash-light in hand, and saw me , totally awake and staring into the light of the torch. “Mr. Goodwin, take your pain medication…why are you still awake?!”…I must have been the last one up, so I reluctantly popped the Tylenol 3 into my mouth and eventually the pain became rounded and I awoke two hours later drenched in sweat. The bed was soaked and I needed to get up. It was the 17^th, Friday, and I was slightly over 24 hours to departure. I was exhausted, but, for whatever reason, I felt better, was a fever broken? I am unsure, but I eventually made my way to breakfast. The Middling Banker and his associates were, of course, not present, they would have been involved in the repair process, and the tell-tale sounds of the wheel chairs and the shuffling began in earnest, coupled with the ringing for the nurse station from pained and delirious post-op patients. I decide to read the papers that arrive in the lounge, only the Star and the Sun…the opposites of the social/political capital spectrum and equally inferior, a mirror to the polarization of Canada and the West in general. The insanity was picking up in pace and the shufflers reflected the trend. That evening, after the “Last Supper” as the ‘old guard’ called it, in bemusement, I spoke with a couple of gentlemen from old farming stock. One was a veteran of the IT field, and worked initially in the public sector for the Ontario power agency and was outsourced to a third party in order to make things ‘as efficient as possible’, meaning, of course, to take the governments largesse and squeeze every dollar out of it for their own pockets while leaving the public’s power supplies compromised and increasingly expensive. The other hardscrabble gent had his own farm and was a conservative in manner but was not impressed with the Governmental intrusions regarding cyber spying, (The Toews Statement: “You’re either with us or with the Child Rapists”) the bill was being debated in Question Period at the time. The IT guy piped up as well. Both gentlemen had strong jaws, large farming hands, plain spoken pragmatic sentiments with the Canadian traditional prudence of not going beyond budget, of doing right by all with adroitness and honesty, these men, such as myself, were adrift in the cynicism and winner take all mentality of the 21^st Century. The IT man, back to the conversation, agreed with the farmer and stated that the slow crawl to fascism was upon us. Let me be very specific, these were not wild-eyed conspiracy theorists, these were not men who lived in the basement of a parent, feasting on pizza-pockets and taking breaks between hysterical V-Masked blogging for shameful acts of self-abuse. No, these men were (are) both great contributors to society, one aided in keeping Power plants secure, the other raises cash-crops for the benefit of all. When hard faced, and strong minded practical men, who otherwise would have absolutely no time whatsoever for so called ‘flights of fancy’ regarding government intrusions, when these men begin to state that “Fascism”, and that is a direct quote, is ‘creeping into this country, and quickly’, you know that there is a problem. All of one’s internal inferences, that at one time seemed paranoid and seemingly dismissible, began to dawn on a horrible reality: the frenzy may be a real reaction, the dancing panic behind the solidity of rationalizations might actually hold weight, it might actually be happening. They continued along, but nervousness pervaded the conversation, the rest of the floor had gone to bed. As a natural insomniac, I remained awake in the lounge too, there was no more talk of Hockey, or ‘The wife’, or the basic and subtle complaints regarding the surgery. No, in the darkness and the faint glow of the 24 hour ‘news’ channel (‘We’ve Got You Covered’…indeed), a low ebb was manifested, among the hold-overs from the 1970s, not just the architecture or the faded game-boards, but in the minds of the men talking, was a strange and prohibitive hope at a synthesis of society, for a little while, until they took it for granted, until ‘market forces’ and ‘supply side’ economics came to the fore, until they equated pensions with investment, until the surfaces gleaned with gloss over the rough hewn backgrounds of decay and concentration, until the rulers disappeared, until the madness became the ‘new normal;, until Robo-Calls blanketed the rights of voters, until the elderly, the young, the weak, the ignorant, the vain, the impressionable, the voluble, were told to vote against their proper standings, until it all became about ‘wedges’ and ‘identity politics’ to mask the reality that inexhaustible labour met exhaustible resources in the end game of the Western Experience, until the children of the children of the Greatest Generation, unless they are radiated horrors, woke up and could not believe the past, could not believe the present, and could have no handle on the future, beyond the clicks and groans of the glowing screen, the magnet that would remain in the face of the absolute darkness everywhere else. We sat there, and fell silent (“What Can We Do?” I imagine ran through their thoughts, in a plaintive, if not impotent way)…I said, “Well gentlemen, I am off, I had better sleep.” And so it was, I languished in bed as once again, the Roommate was set to vibrate, and I thought once again, with self-pity, about the trajectory of my life. I felt absolutely without content, with all of my metal clips removed, my pain medication untouched, and this night it was not to be consumed. I stared at the ceiling, I thought of 1998, I thought of the Fleetwood Mac song that reminded me of a time that I thought only of the future being complete, with strong opinion, with unvarnished confidence, when it was to be Law and Politics, when it was to be me and a family at the top of Summit Circle, with the law firm at the top of the IBM building in Montreal. Then the inevitable Blue Drape fell over my reveries and I was again in the smallish hospital bed, the dawn coming through another sleepless nightime.

Saturday the 18^th was my day to leave, I was entering my third day without bathing, I was dishevelled, but I managed to shave with the electric razor and tried to wash, in vain, my face. Constipation was almost total, Oat bran was trying to affect changes but without great success. I was a wreck, as it were, and packed up, slowly, my belongings and effects, and shuffled down to the last breakfast. Ah ha, the gleaning faces of two nights ago had now joined the Ghost-Dancers, the middling-banker was slovenly staring into his oatmeal, he briefly looked at me with eyes of Pain and faint anger, “You damn liar!” his face told me, and I smiled inside myself, I tried to be more honest than the emissary I spoke to four days earlier, but I guess it all comes out the same. What difference would it make, to say anything else to the contrary, when the mechanism cannot be stopped and the momentum has no braking tool except total immolation? I sat down, and ate eggs and bacon, I said nothing and this time ensured that I was alone…many of my cycle-men had already gone home and I was one of the last. I began to walk as much as possible, circling from floor to floor in a blank state, I would be glad to return home, to see my wife and daughter, to resume stewing in self-imposed exile, in regret and failure. I waited outside for the final half-hour for my wife to pick me up in the silver Japanese sedan as rank and Western despair riled up inside. She came, and I gave her a perfunctory hug and kissed my daughter sitting in her safety seat in the back, her beautiful blue eyes flashing unconditional love into mine. I opened the front door and sat, silent, as questions first began to flood from my wife beside me, to which I gave short replies. The anger, the rage, the emptiness was mounting. I did not want to be driving back to Guelph, my life was careening into nothingness, it was cars and the 407 and the 401, trucks, wheels, slush, snow, what was I returning to? The Mat of hate was falling onto my brain, as if nothing had changed since the previous fall, the disappointment with programs, the drinking that became a life-raft filled with lead, what was the point of the exercise then? Or the repair? To come out the other end with the same bloodied rage and cursory nascent hate that revolved in my head. We arrived and I sat, slowly, into the Lazy-Boy, I wanted to drink immediately, but none was available, I wanted to be alone, but I could not move to avoid the gossip that inevitably comes with days being absent from ‘home’. What really changed? The resentment still persisted to this adopted city, to another failed decade seemingly at its beginning, to a downward political cycle of the Western World reaching its fevered apex prior to being torn apart, cosmically, by profligacy, decadence, stupidity, the rise of more mendacious eastern customers, the rise of preposterous and asinine theocracy at home and abroad when going to college was considered an act of “snobbery” (according to Santorum), to the thought of aspiring to greatness as being sin, when the true masters of mankind increased their unimaginable wealth while simultaneously disappearing from view. I had enough, I was sitting in front of the computer two nights later, it was 12:30 at night, I had three drinks in me and I was beginning to repeat. I thought of blue eyes, of being 31, of seeing mediocrity crashing in all around me, of ten years of talking and talking and drinking, and talking, and not sleeping, of not writing, of not laughing enough, of stupid reminisces that go nowhere, and finally once again to the conversation with the two men on Friday night, at the fear and panic that danced around in our brains, that the Western world, and Canada specifically, was not the glowing sceptre it was, that the cyclotron was spinning too fast, that the hospitals were closing, the schools were not teaching, the parents were not raising, the synthesis of society was not there, too much disparity, too much shouting and frothy mouthed sociopathy emanating from leaders, from people who could not deal with civility, so engrossed in themselves that they feared ten seconds away from self-aggrandizement through their i-pids, their phones, their social networking, their ‘healing’ classes, their ‘play-dates’, their false community front that masked Narcissism and Fear and Emptiness and Black impulses in a World, a model, built on nothing, built on debt, built on lie, built on guile, built on Hate…ground into dust, into the Process of the Market. I needed to write, so the talking had to cease, and so to I had, in spite of it all, retreat while expanding, into my own glowing screen.