No Ordinary Breeze

The breeze blew in off the lake and he felt it on his face.

It was no ordinary breeze; it was made of memories.

*

It would be impossible to prove something like this. There is no science behind it. We know that memories are stored in the hippocampus and neocortex and not in gusts of wind. Sure, sensory experiences often evoke memories - the smell of baking bread, the softness of a fabric not worn in ages, the dull buzz of fluorescent lights in a waiting room - that, too, can be explained by science. But external memories? He’d felt breezes near other lakes before and felt nothing. Remembered nothing. There must have been something about that breeze. It contained something, perhaps a part of him that had been left behind and was now getting to come home.

The remnant of a memory. A concrete distillation of something in the past.

It certainly isn’t beyond reason. Authors love this kind of thing. Daphne DuMaurier’s narrator in Rebecca talked about her wish for an invention that bottled up a memory, like scent. And it never faded, and it never got stale. And then, when one wanted it, the bottle could be uncorked, and it would be like living the moment all over again. Fitzgerald wrote about being boats against the current, born back ceaselessly into the past. For Gatsby, the past and his memories were everything - he built a life around the past that he would eventually die for.

Our preoccupation with memory is nothing new - it is a frightening abyss that seems to only grow in size the more we learn about it, like some brave caver thinking they have reached the end of a cave system only to find out it is just beginning. The idea that memories could exist outside of our brain, and not just be evoked by a smell or sound, is pretty appealing.

The reason for this is the power in memory. We build our lives around trying to slow down time. Portraits. Photographs. Making every second count. Cherishing the memories. Our endless devotion is to wrap our hands around the hands of the clock and fight them, trying to put a stopper on the hour glass as the sand spills out mercilessly, for time is cruel, if nothing else.

This is, of course, why memories are so important. They are the antidote to the crushing despair we all feel when we are greeted with our own mortality, if even for a few seconds, because we get to go back in time. We get to momentarily patch the leaky bucket of our lives, to rescue a heartbeat that has already been spent and rewind our own movie. It’s magic, in a way. Or at least it makes us feel like it's magic. Because in reality, it isn’t real. A photograph is just an image, the smell of baking bread is just a chemical reaction and a breeze is just a breeze.

Unless there is more to it. There is so much about our world and universe that we don’t know. Just because someone hasn’t discovered a way to turn DuMaurier’s narrator’s idea into reality doesn’t mean it can’t happen without us knowing. Maybe that’s what God is. If God is everything and the Earth is part of everything, and we are on the Earth and our memories become part of us once they exist, then maybe memories don’t just live in our brains. Like falling leaves from the tree of our experience that are blown by the breeze, maybe they live all around us.

But that’s just me. He certainly wasn’t thinking about any of that wishy-washy nonsense when he was at the beach that day. Actually, he was above the beach, looking down, so that the breeze had to rise up to him. It had to find him. He was just thinking that it might be time to actually let himself think about it. To let himself remember that night, so long ago, when the moon hid behind the clouds because they tried to tear the sky in half.

The memory didn’t come right away, like in movies when a flashback happens and the screen dissolves and the younger protagonist appears wearing bad makeup. It took a while.

In fact, he wasn’t brought back to that night until the breeze, that breeze, flew across the water, along the beach, up the rocks and onto his face.

*

They had been going to Longpoint Provincial Park to camp ever since they were seventeen years old. They were twenty-one that night, and the hedonism that they brought to the campground had only increased with the years. There was the core group of four friends: Dom, Adrian, Patrick and Andrew. Though they brought various other acquaintances with them over the years, the ‘core four’, as they called themselves, were the ones responsible for making it all happen.

They met in high school and quickly established a shared passion: drinking. It was something they did with surprising prowess. They did pretty well party wise during the school year, but once the summer rolled around, they all knew that Longpoint would be something different. Their desire to party around a campfire was not unusual - many other teenagers ended up at the same place, but the Dionysean fever they brought with them was unmatched.

And then Patrick died. It was a tragic car accident that took the life of his mother and sister as well, leaving his father and brother to live the rest of their lives under an unrelenting black cloud. For months, the remaining trio didn’t speak about the prospect of returning to Longpoint - it was too raw, too fresh.

Until one day, Adrian called them together: ‘We gotta go back to LP this year, boys. We’ll do a memorial thing for Andy.’

The other two just looked at him in awe; there was a bravery in Adrian they hadn’t thought possible in someone their age. All they had to do was nod their heads, and they did.

*

By the time they made it to the beach that night, they had become something more than themselves. This sort of exponential growth was natural for them as they would meet each other’s intensity and push past limits and common sense around how much a mortal human should be able to drink. On that night, though, there was something else fueling them - a manic drive, brought on by some elegiac spirit in the air that said that every beer was for him, every shot was for him and every moment that they shared together was for him.

They sat on the beach and passed a bottle of Jack around. Patrick had his guitar and they had been saving it for this moment. It usually came out around the campfire, but something unspoken had told them that Lake Erie should be their audience for this performance. As Patrick tuned the strings, Adrian and Dom looked out across the lake. The waves rolled in darkness and the stars were pinpricks in the sky’s dark canvas.

Dom laughed: ‘Remember that year we first came? We met those guys. What’d we call them?’

Without missing a beat, the other two said: ‘Fatty and the boys.’

They all laughed and it was a laughter that didn’t try to hide its sadness.

‘Shit, they must have been in their thirties,’ Adrian said. ‘And all they wanted to do was hang out with us punks.’

Back to stillness and the gentle crashing waves and a shared thought - that they would have wanted to be doing this when they were thirty but that they couldn’t anymore. That it wouldn’t be the same. Nothing would be the same.

Patrick started strumming some chords. He was a pretty decent player and could keep the tempo relatively steady even when he had enough booze in him to down an elephant. The other two didn’t do anything until it was clear that it was time.

‘A long, long time ago… I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.’

The other two sang in unison in voices that were off-key but wholly felt. It wasn’t just the booze that had bonded them all those years ago - it was the music of their parent’s generation. Don Maclean, Cat Stevens, Led Zeppelin, the Stones and Elton John were what they sang when they were together. The old stuff tapped into something they had living inside of them, a desperate yearning that they just couldn’t find in whatever was on the radio in the early 2000s.

That night, they sang every word to American Pie and then Sympathy for the Devil. If this were the trio’s concert, then these were always the closing songs. By the guitar solo in Sympathy, Patrick stood up, his toes in the sand beside the now empty bottle of Jack as he wailed away at Keith’s guitar solo. Dom and Adrian were on their feet, too, moving and gyrating in ways ancestral, tribal and ancient. They were communing with something greater than any of them could conceive of. It was the spirit of the night, of youth, of anger and delight and sadness, of memory and nostalgia, of freedom and a realisation that that freedom could be gone before they even knew that they had it.

When it was over, Patrick lay the guitar in the sand and sighed.

‘The solo was always his favourite part. He always used to touch a finger to the guitar and pretend like it was on fire.’ A few beats passed. ‘I never got a chance to tell him how much I appreciated that.’

‘Tell him now,’ said Adrian. ‘He’s out there somewhere listening. Might even be right here with us.’

They were too close to shit-talk when it was something this serious, so even though Patrick and Dom felt like this was all a little far out, they did.

‘Hey bud, it’s me. Pat. Just wanted to say that I miss you. That you were a hell of a guy and you could make people feel great about themselves.’ A sniffle and a tear brushed away. The lake listened and responded with more waves.

‘Yea, uh, me too. Dom here, Guess you already knew that. I never knew anyone like you. Guess I never will. Take care up there, pal.’

The sand shifted around as Adrian stood up. Without a word he sprinted into the water. He bounded into the through the waves as if he were breaking tackles, taking strides like he was on the football field where he was most at home. The other two watched. He swam a bit and then stopped, looked up at the sky and screamed. Like a baying hound trying to split the heavens above, he screamed and his anguish poured out of him and it seemed like the sky shrunk in fear and the moon hid behind a cloud. The other two sprinted in to join him; within seconds, their voices melded together and the water vibrated with the emotion that was being unleashed.

When it was done, they treaded water and looked back at the shore. The moon had peaked out from behind its cloud and bathed the beach in a silvery glow.

Adrian pointed to something above the beach and said, ‘Look.’

Their eyes followed his intention and they saw the cliff. It was one they knew well, having jumped from it countless times. But only during the day. They had a tacit understanding over the many years of their Longpoint shenanigans that cliff jumping at night wasn’t to be done. They knew that jumping off a cliff at night with fresh booze in their blood wasn’t a good idea.

The cliff leered at them, accented in the darkness like some promontory created by the night itself. All around it were trees, and the space left by the jutting rock edge gave the clearing a sense that it was floating in nothingness.

Not one of them said anything - they just swam back to the shore.

*

They brought flashlights, as the way up was hazardous. There was an easier way from the parking lots but it was out of the way, so they took the shortcut that brought them through overgrown paths and sharp inclines. By the time they got to the top, they were sweating and covered in dirt.

Adrian went first. He walked out to the edge and stood still, looking out at the darkness in front of him. The lake and the sky were indistinguishable now. He turned to his friends and waited a second before he said: ‘Cannonball.’

A few great strides were all it took to launch him out and into the waiting abyss, and a few seconds were all it took for the sound of his sizable body to crash into the water - the spray almost reached them on the cliff.

His shouts of triumph echoed around the lake like some sort of deranged loon.

Dom looked back at Patrick and shrugged. His strides were not nearly as great, but he managed to jump out and not down. Unlike Adrian, he squealed as he flew through the air like a child on a roller coaster. His splash was much smaller but still a welcome sound to Patrick’s ears.

The funny thing - if you can call it funny - was that Patrick was never afraid of jumping. He always kind of enjoyed it. And his form was immaculate. He never got close to the rocks. He always jumped out far enough. But there is always something not accounted for. You might think it was the booze, but no. It wasn’t his balance. It was the water from the bathing suits. When his friends had been standing there, the water from their suits and the sweat from their bodies had dripped from them and landed on the rock. It all added up. So when Patrick went to take his big strides, he slipped. Flew out from the edge but not far enough. And screamed.

From the water, Adrian and Dom heard the scream and the fear that flew out of it into the night sky like bat from a soul.

Then they heard the crunch of breaking bone.

*

The breeze - that breeze - left his face. The memory was back with him, in him, and that was what he wanted. It had been easy to forget about that night. He was reminded every day when he looked at his body, so why would he need to think about the reason for it? But now that he had felt the breeze, he felt the memory back inside of him, lodging in there and burrowing down to where he couldn’t forget it. It was what he wanted - he was sick of living in denial.

Two small tubes hovered in front of his mouth and he blew into one of them. A gentle sound whirred as his wheelchair moved back from the cliff and he maneuvered the stick at his hand (with what little movement he had) to complete a three point turn. He was about the switch to the other tube that sent the chair forward when he looked back at the cliff and the sunset. It was like a painting of a moment, a painting of a memory that had come back to say hello that would now live in him forever. He turned back to the path.

His driver was waiting for him and smoking a cigarette. Wordlessly, he got Patrick hooked up and on the ramp. While all of this was happening - and it was a complicated process getting Patrick into a vehicle - he thought of Dom and Adrian. For the first few years after his accident, they had kept in touch. Pretty much. Communications had changed and Patrick had to get his mother to transcribe his messages, which meant that his usual candor wasn’t as candid as it had once been. After a while, the messages had settled down. Fell back into a once-in-while routine of marriages, children being born and all of the firsts that come with that and less frequent significant life events like deaths and the Leafs doing well. Patrick knew it would happen and didn’t blame them - why would they wait for him? He would never be like them. It would be cruel to expect them to slow themselves down to the point that they would see him. But was it too much to expect that they might want to ask him real questions about his new life and not just how was he doing?

How could he possibly ever expect them to want to learn how to not be embarrassed about someone else wiping his ass on his thirty-first birthday? To not even be able to jerk off anymore, nevermind find a girl. To stare at his guitar in the corner of the room that he refused to throw away because looking at it made him feel angry and anger was better than nothing. But that was worse because what could he do about it? He was paralyzed from the neck down.

Once he was settled and the man was in the driver’s seat, he looked into the rearview mirror, his eyes twinkling, and asked: ‘Did you find what you were looking for?’

Patrick smiled and looked back at him. What he should have said was: No. Actually, could you take a picture of me on that cliff so I could remind my friends of what my life is like and so that they could get off their asses and do something? To actually be here with me, to make more of an effort than the odd message or shared Instagram video?

Instead, he said: ‘Yep. I sure did.’