The Origin of Waves Read Online Free Page B

blindfolds the afternoon. Out of this surrounding curtain comes a voice. “Move-out o’ my goddamn way, man!” The words injure the sweet, white silence of the snow. “What the arse …?”
    It is like a voice crying out from amongst thick belching smoke and crackling shingles, of a house on fire, burning for help and assistance. But it is also a voice of anger. I know the anger in the voice of a burning house. I have heard it many times. Voices like this come after a ball bowled too fast and causing injury. This is a voice that comes after a race that is lost, after a wrong key in a solo, in a descant. It is as if the burning house and the white snow engulfing it has to clear before I can learn the distinctness in the voice. The second reprimand is a longer declaration for assistance. This makes the thick smoke clear. It is a voice I know. I heard it once on a beach. “What the arse … You want to lick me down, man?”
    Still, I cannot see. No shape, or owner of this voice. And in this blinding snow he cannot see me. But I stop walking, though I am unable to stand motionless, inthis snow which shifts like an uncontrollable roller skate, for too long. My shoes are sliding. I can feel winter on my soles. My left foot is wet from the soaked, cold, woollen sock. And I go back to that time, on a pasture, the Garrison Savannah Parade Ground, so hot and so sticking wet, when I was made to stand at attention, while the Governor moved through our ranks taking his royal time, and I could barely see him in the distance; for in that regal distance, the Governor was nothing more than a bunch of regimental plumes, all white. At that distance, it was as if he were a gigantic common fowl-cock or a Leghorn about to crow the morning in, from the top of the wooden fence, his roost surrounding our yard, and bring his hundred hens to sexual attention. This voice, though, is the same voice I had heard next to me, as I wavered while ordered to stand at “atten-shunn!”; when the water in my bladder was making it impossible for me to be rigid and soldierly, when I moved ever so slightly to ease the pain and the burning of the sun and the sweat pouring down my face and into my neck, making the khaki uniform shirt no longer stiff, and down into the white, blancoed belt me and my mother had laboured over, and changed from green canvas to spotless white.
    I am now close enough to stand, to see. And to wonder. And recognize. And call back, in this thickening snow, in this flash of abusive time, all those years.
    “John!”
    “You?”
    “John?”
    “Goddamn, man!” he says. I am sitting beside him once more, on the warm afternoon sand. And an inner tube is drifting out, into the sea, into the Atlantic which we knew would join us up again, some time later, in a land too far for our young eyes to see, after it has separated us.
    “Jesus Christ!” I say, giving the miracle of this reacquaintance credence and reality, giving the sudden reunion its greeting of incredulity, giving his appearance its dramatic significance.
    “
You
?” he asks, believing and not believing.
    How can he believe so easily, in this mist of time, in this street, in this city, in this country which we had not only studied in our geography books at Combermere School for Boys and knew by heart, but still had refused to believe to be the place we would choose to live in? In this North America? In all these forty-fifty years we had not once exchanged even a post card at Christmas. Birthdays were forgotten landmarks. And the telephone neither of us thought about. It was out of the question.
    In all this time, neither of us knew we would voluntarily live with this cold, this ice, this snow.
    “God bless my eyesight!” I say.
    “Too goddamn good to be true!” he says.
    “Jesus Christ!”
    “If anybody had-tell me that you and me, who last see each other sitting-down that afternoon on thebeach by Paynes Bay! Look at this thing, though! God bless
my
eyesight! How long