He crossed through the heart of the university, past St. George and Spadina with their popular student pizzerias, to the euphemistically named Harbord Centre for Well Being, which was actually located on Brunswick Avenue. Like Edward VII, it too had been displaced, but kept its name after being transplanted to this little backwater street, like a deposed royal living out its life in an anonymous hamlet far from the cultural centres of its heyday.
Dan walked up to the decrepit building that showed at least three colours peeling through a brown topcoat like a bad tan. Someone had made a stab at beautifying the outside by placing pots of geraniums along the windowsills, but these had failed to bloom in the absence of direct sunlight. In fact, Dan wondered if anything could blossom along this rundown stretch of street. The scraggly, light-starved stems presented a pathetic welcome to anyone looking up from the sidewalk.
He checked his watch: he was twenty-three minutes early. He didn’t want Martin to think he was anxious to see him. On the other hand, there was nowhere else to go in this neighbourhood of shabby student-chic housing. He spent the next ten minutes perusing the walls papered in notices for used textbooks, political rallies, flats to let, roommates wanted (and unwanted), descriptions of missing items with hopeful phone numbers beside them, as well as a plethora of numbers and email addresses of arcane purpose, the relevant notices having faded or been cut off or covered over by others clamouring for attention and demanding to be heard above all else.
The building’s elevator was perpetually out of service. He took the three flights of wheezing, complaining stairs that announced visitors by their tread. Dan imagined the long queue of clients — timid or brave, world-weary or hopeful — who passed over this threshold and down the hall to the large oak panels behind which the eminent Martin Sanger and his dry, probing intellect waited. Dan had experienced moments of both hope and resignation as he approached these doors, but today he was what he usually was: irritable and angry at having to be there.
He reached the office and let himself in. The receptionist listened, blank-faced, as he stated his name. He wondered if she really didn’t remember him when he walked through these doors every week at this time, or if this was part of his training to help him learn to be patient with what Martin had labelled his “perceived stupidity of others.” Dan waited while she looked down at her appointment book, nodded as she discovered his name and asked him to take a seat.
He watched through the glass as she bent to speak into the intercom to relay notice of his arrival to Martin’s office. She always struck Dan as nervous and unhappy. He wondered if she was also a patient here. Maybe reception work was how she paid for her therapy. This was the only time Dan saw her. She was gone by the time his sessions ended, and he emerged to a semi-darkened waiting room, as though she’d been compelled to take the light with her wherever she went.
Dan settled into what he’d determined was the most comfortable of three waiting room seats: a faded green club chair. Or in this case the least uncomfortable. The room was silent, with that surprising mixture of stillness and anticipation. From one floor above, he heard a sharp humourless laugh followed by a thump. A car passed outside the window and then, after a pause, another. He wondered why there was no music to provide comfort or distraction. Maybe this was part of his therapy too, his little wait in limbo while he was observed through a spy hole in the opposite wall.
He went over the list of topics he had lined up, imagining Martin’s reactions. The tale of Steve and Glenda would elicit an anticipatory glance; it might also earn him a point for compassion at having met with Steve at four a.m. to talk over his troubles. He could follow this up with his annoyance at Bill’s unreturned calls. No point in mentioning the lousy drivers he encountered daily in the city. They were par for the course; no one was exempt. He could also mention Ked’s new friend Ephraim, the ruffian. Or would Martin think he was being racist? He could simply not mention the boy’s colour, if it came to that. But wasn’t this session supposed to be a safe place for Dan to unburden himself? Didn’t he have the right to express concern over his son’s future?
If that failed to feed Martin’s interest, he could delve into his childhood, that old stand-by. Martin seemed to like it when he did. During their initial session, the awkward getting-to-know-you of pre-interrogation invasiveness, Martin had asked him what triggered his anger as a child. Dan couldn’t remember being angry as a child and Martin seemed to think that in itself was unusual. How could anyone get through childhood without experiencing anger? It spelled repression. Try being the child of a violent alcoholic and you’d probably repress your anger too, Dan said.
“Then why do you think you’re so angry now?” Martin had asked.
“It beats depression.”
Martin pencilled furiously on the sheet in his lap. After that, he brought up Dan’s early years till Dan was sick of rehashing his childhood, as though the key to who he was now lay in some mysterious past time that had had the door closed on it forever and could only be viewed by coming to this man’s office and peering inside its cage like visitors to the zoo.
In fact, Dan seldom thought about his childhood. He’d come a long way from his past and he intended to keep on going as far as he could. The best thing you could do with the past, he told himself, was forget it. Though if everyone thought like that, he’d be out of business. His job depended on other people wanting him to dig up the past and conjure it before their eyes: the young wife who hadn’t returned from a trip to the bank; the father who left work and was never seen again; the sixth-grader who ventured out between Algebra and French and dropped off the face of the earth.
It wasn’t till his third session that Martin asked him about his mother’s death when he was four years old. Dan replied truthfully that he recalled little apart from a gathering of relatives in his apartment and the hush around them whenever he came into the room. He remembered briefly being shipped off to a neighbour’s, and later being given Popsicles before returning to live with his father.
When she died, what little connection Dan had had with his father died along with her. His father seemed to have frozen over, ice covering the distance between them. It had stayed that way till his death ten years ago, though the ice was all on Dan’s part by then. Even Kedrick’s birth hadn’t changed things. There’d been just one family visit, a brief, guilt-tinged appearance supervised by Dan’s Aunt Marge, made at her request. Dan had watched, wary, as his father took the boy in his hands and sat him on his knee. The scar on Dan’s right temple throbbed, the one he’d gotten when his father threw him against a doorjamb returning home late from school not long after his tenth birthday.
Since then he’d successfully covered the past with a shroud, convincing himself it had few holds on him apart from the ones dictated by genetics. As far as he was concerned, the legacy was unremarkable on both sides of the family. He was the son of a miner who was also the son of a miner. His father’s relatives had lived in Sudbury for more than three generations. His mother had migrated there from Manitoba, no one seemed to recall why or when, and had been variously a waitress, a beautician, and a cashier at Woolworth’s until her early death from pneumonia one Christmas.
As far as Dan knew, he was the only one in the family who had attended a post-secondary institution. He’d never been in trouble at school or with the law. Until he left home, he’d never lived anywhere but Sudbury. The only home he recalled had been the second floor of a rundown walk-up in the Flourmill District, an area uniquely devoid of distinctive features apart from the six squat cement cylinders that had lain unused for decades before being turned into a museum of dubious distinction not long after Dan was born.
“Do you have any nice memories of your father?” Martin asked unexpectedly one day.
Dan thought about it. After a moment, he nodded. “My father was sometimes nice to me when he drank. That and Christmas. Usually the two coincided. I guess he was sentimental about certain things.”
“Did it change after your mother died?”
“That