Excerpt: I Remember Lights by Ben Ladouceur

Excerpted with permission from Book*hug Press

I first arrived in Montreal when I was nineteen years old. Still a child in many ways, though I didn’t feel that way then. Some classmates back home in New Brunswick had already become engaged or even married. If they hadn’t, two options were left: for the clever, school, and for the others, including myself, the tobacco fields, in which a living could be made no matter a person’s brains or physical strength. All he needed was tolerance regarding the stench of the plants, the heat of the sun, the slow but discernible yellowing of his own hands. I had these qualities. By the end of summer, my arms were gold, all the way up to the elbows.

I had a friend named Lucy. When we were still in school, we usually walked home together, and I often ate supper at her parents’ house. We would listen to records together too. Dionne Warwick, Dusty Springfield, Barbra Streisand. For a time, we were made fun of. It was said that this was how total squares lost their virginity: they found other squares to do it with. But before long, Lucy and I disappeared into the classroom and the schoolyard, unnoticed. When high school was finished, we kept up the walks. She apprenticed at the drugstore, to eventually become a pharmacist. She took correspondence courses and bought devices and tool sets that looked fun until their purposes, unfailingly bland, were explained.

We were happy together. She kept me from feeling the bottomlessness of my own insides, a feeling that was strongest on alone nights of television-watching or radio-listening. But we never kissed or even touched, except when she grabbed my hips while teaching me cartwheels one afternoon, or when together we lifted an empty nest back into the branch from which it had fallen in a gust, before our eyes.

When Lucy finished her courses in the fall, her parents encouraged her to travel somewhere. Exams would take place next, and her adult life might then come together quickly. There would be no time for trips. Her parents offered to cover her travel costs. I had just enough money to accompany her, and her parents were okay with this. Lucy and I determined that Montreal was an exciting destination, though it made her parents a little nervous, because whenever the news mentioned Montreal, it was about terrorist attacks by the FLQ, who planted homemade bombs throughout the city in support of some cause that to me seemed convoluted and somewhat boring. I didn’t know what the letters FLQ stood for. Lucy’s parents asked her to call every day, but there was no doubt that she was going to do that anyway.

I had a feeling that they expected something of me, and I eventually figured out what it was. They expected that Lucy and I would return as an engaged couple. And I thought: Maybe they’re right. I had a feeling that change was coming. Something consequential, something healthy and painful, some task that I was putting off so thoroughly, I was even putting off identifying it exactly. I just knew it was inevitable, this thing I was going to have to do, now that school was long over and a different kind of ordinary was taking shape. Perhaps the thing was proposing. Perhaps these were the feelings that always preceded that life step, in the chests of all young men. Without thinking too hard about it, I pocketed the ring that my dead mother had received from my father when they became engaged. It was an emerald, and my stepmother had made clear before my father’s proposal that she disliked it. As a young boy, I sometimes unearthed it from the kitchen cupboard in which it was kept, to slip onto my thumb, confident that placing it on any other finger would be an affront to my mother’s dignity, and to my own masculinity, but that thumbs were different. Thumbs were fine. My half-sisters, when they came along, agreed with their mother, dubious of the emerald’s value and ignorant of its beauty. Nobody would notice its absence from the drawer. Shoving the ring in my pocket, I felt that my own absence too would go unnoticed.

At the train station, the specialness of travel occurred to me in earnest. The only people I knew who had travelled at all were rich people, or men who had gone to war before I was born. Lucy and I were two young people travelling for pleasure, and this made us laugh giddily, though Lucy’s levity degraded into tears when she said goodbye to her parents. As we took our seats, she called herself ridiculous and cleaned the tears off her face with her fingers. During the ride, she read a book, and I did nothing in particular, except feel the ring pulse in my pocket. After lights out, I slept poorly in my seat, while Lucy got a good night’s rest.

“It reminds me of childhood,” she said in the morning, as our train pulled into Montreal’s gigantic Central Station. “You fall asleep on the couch, or in the car, and when you wake up, you’ve been taken somewhere else.”

This idea didn’t resonate with me. Where I fell asleep and where I awoke had always been the same.