Likeness Read online

  Copyright © 2021 David Macfarlane

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  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Title: Likeness / David Macfarlane.

  Names: Macfarlane, David, 1952- author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200212575 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200212583 | ISBN 9780385693714 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780385693721 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Macfarlane, David, 1952-—Family. | LCSH: Macfarlane, Blake. | LCSH: Parents of terminally ill children—Biography. | LCSH: Cancer—Patients—Biography. | LCSH: Fathers and sons—Biography. | LCSH: Bereavement. | LCGFT: Biographies.

  Classification: LCC RC265.6.M33 M33 2020 | DDC 362.19699/40092—dc23

  Cover and book design: Kate Sinclair

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada, a division of

  Penguin Random House Canada Limited

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One

  Section 1

  Section 2

  Section 3

  Section 4

  Section 5

  Section 6

  Section 7

  Section 8

  Section 9

  Section 10

  Section 11

  Section 12

  Section 13

  Section 14

  Section 15

  Section 16

  Section 17

  Section 18

  Chapter Two

  Section 1

  Section 2

  Section 3

  Section 4

  Section 5

  Section 6

  Section 7

  Section 8

  Section 9

  Section 10

  Section 11

  Section 12

  Section 13

  Section 14

  Section 15

  Section 16

  Section 17

  Section 18

  Chapter Three

  Section 1

  Section 2

  Section 3

  Section 4

  Section 5

  Section 6

  Section 7

  Section 8

  Section 9

  Section 10

  Section 11

  Section 12

  Section 13

  Section 14

  Section 15

  Section 16

  Section 17

  Section 18

  Chapter Four

  Section 1

  Section 2

  Section 3

  Section 4

  Section 5

  Section 6

  Section 7

  Section 8

  Section 9

  Section 10

  Section 11

  Section 12

  Section 13

  Section 14

  Section 15

  Section 16

  Section 17

  Section 18

  Afterword

  Those Blake Would Have Thanked

  About the Author

  To Gillian and Ron. And to Effy.

  Much of what I do in creating a painting is construct it to engage the viewer. However, I understand that every viewer will enter into the imaginative space of the painting in a particular way. I don’t expect to have any control over this.

  John Hartman

  Between 2014 and 2020, John Hartman completed the portraits of forty Canadian writers. David Macfarlane above Hamilton (oil on linen, 60″ × 66″) can be viewed at manylives.art.

  one

  1

  Begin outside. That’s where all the grey is. Start at the back. That’s where the mists of time are.

  There is a small rectangle there. It’s to the right of my right eye. Not to my actual eye. It’s to the right of my right eye in a painting of me. I can show you. You can see what I mean.

  Get closer, and if you squint a little you can imagine a concrete playground. Girls’ Side. Boys’ Side. No colour because there wasn’t much.

  Earl Kitchener Junior Public School was erected on Dundurn Street, in the city of Hamilton, in the province of Ontario, in 1914.

  Erected. Har-dee-har.

  “Slang.”

  Dun coats. Dun air. The back stairs, clang, clang, clang, clang.

  “Incomplete sentences.” Mr. Parsons’ irritated red cursive.

  Children shout in the dull air. The volume at recess is remarkable. And under the stairs, clang, clang, clang, a boy (slight, dark-haired, doomed) is telling a joke to the huddle of fall jackets around him.

  You cut off his arms.

  He’s reciting the joke, actually—as if it’s a lyric to a tune he isn’t singing.

  2

  When John Hartman, who is an artist I know, asked me if I’d give him a tour of Hamilton, I said that it would be a pleasure just like my father used to say: it would be a pleasure. Not that my father said it would be a pleasure that often. My father didn’t say anything that often.

  My father grew up in a red brick house, not far from the red brick house in which I grew up. I could explain their approximate geography with the oil painting of Hamilton that Hartman finished a few months after I gave him my guided tour.

  Even though the streets in Hartman’s composition are suggested as much as they are drawn, I could use the picture to point to where my father’s childhood home used to be and (about the length of a Winsor & Newton paintbrush away) the playground of Earl Kitchener Junior Public School. They were that close.

  3

  I read those two passages—the part about the playground and the part about where my father’s old house used to be—to my son, Blake, when he was in the hospital. I wasn’t sure what he thought of them. This wasn’t unusual.

  Blake was terrible at pretending to be interested in something he wasn’t interested in. This was partly because when he really was interested he couldn’t help looking really, really interested. If he was listening to a story that he wanted to hear he’d have exactly the expression you’d want on the face of someone to whom you are telling a story.

  This had been true of him all his life. He withered in the face of boredom and, as a result, he learned at an early age to avoid it when he could. Once, when we were walking home from kindergarten or nursery school or swimming lessons or somewhere and we passed Trinity-St. Paul’s, at the corner of Robert and Bloor Streets in Toronto, I asked the six-year-old Blake if he had any interest in going to church. “Nope,” he said.

  I remember this clearly—in part because his lack of hesitation made me laugh but also because walking home from kindergarten or swimming lessons or whatever it was on this particular occasion is the walking-home that I think of when I wonder, as I sometimes do, when we last held hands when we walked anywhere.

  I looked down at him. I wasn’t pressing the issue.
I had no evangelical intent. I was just interested in the prompt confidence of his answer.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “I’m not a religious guy.”

  Blake thought playing with his Star Wars figurines on Sunday mornings was a better use of his time. He might have been right.

  By the time he was a teenager, Blake composed electronic music. He made beats. He edited documentaries. He directed music videos. He worked as a DJ. He had an animation camera set up in his bedroom. He kept journals. He drew a lot. He watched lots of movies I’d never seen and listened to lots of music I’d never heard of.

  He liked to work. He could sit at his computer, headphones on, for hours.

  He usually had a few things on the go. Even when he was sick, he was doing some editing when he could. He was always working on a song. He was taking piano lessons. He played guitar and, when he did, he seemed to find his way to melodies that sounded more like East Africa than the standard three chords of the blues progressions I played. He was building a climbing wall in his bedroom so he could practise rock climbing when he had more use of his arms. He was making a Millennium Falcon out of Lego. Because it was fun. Because it reminded him of Sunday mornings playing with his Star Wars figurines.

  It was difficult for Blake to entertain long-term projects when he was sick. His collaborations waxed and waned with his energies and with the cycles of treatment and medication. This made him sad.

  There was something, though, that he had in mind. He spoke to me about it now and then. He wasn’t yet sure what it would be, exactly. He could see it as a graphic novel. Maybe animation.

  His friends. Our friends. His colleagues. Our family. A small, stalwart community had rallied around Blake’s illness, and Blake had been fretting for a while about how to thank them. He tried writing a group letter. I remember he asked me to look at drafts a couple of times. But there was something about this that he found wearisome. It began to feel like a task. That’s when he came up with the graphic novel idea. Perhaps an animated short.

  It would be the history of his illness—a story that he would tell in a very Blake kind of way. It started as a doodle—a comic-like sketch about getting his medical marijuana card. But he refined it a bit, and as he did it occurred to him that this was a way for him to tell a bigger story: what it was like to be not-sick and then so sick.

  Three panels, in black pen and filled-in with Sharpie. And somehow, in the shuffle of everything, I still have that piece of paper. I remember being struck with the composition: distant, closer, close up. The simple lines do actually look like Blake.

  It would be quirky, and dark, and funny. It would be something he could work on whether in the hospital or at home, and when it was done he could send it online as his thank-you. To friends. To family. To a few doctors and a lot of nurses.

  I thought this was a good idea. I could see it would engage him.

  I asked about it occasionally, but I didn’t want to appear like I was pushing. I’d long ago learned that creative projects, much like girlfriends, were subjects Blake would address without much in the way of input from his father.

  The story of his illness was something he found difficult to tell—and not because the subject of an unexpected illness was emotionally overwhelming, although sometimes it was. What Blake found difficult was describing what being sick was like—how it made everything different, and how everything stayed different, even in remission. Perhaps especially in remission. Blake said he felt like he was in another universe sometimes.

  Blake watched a lot of movies when he was sick. An awful lot. When I arrived in one of the many hospital rooms he was in, he was usually watching something on his computer, propped open on his bed-tray. When he was at home, living in the apartment we have in our basement, he was often on his couch, under a blanket and surrounded by carefully positioned pillows, watching (I sometimes joked, but it wasn’t far wrong) every single movie that had ever been made.

  He was catholic in his enthusiasms. He’d seen El Topo, and Vertigo and Day for Night and Rashomon. But he’d also been through all of Star Trek and Star Wars. Several times. It was hard to come up with a horror movie—whether fantastically bad or very good—that he hadn’t seen. He knew his Dario Argento but he also knew his Vincent Price. We both loved The Shining. He was a big fan of the Mexican director Guillermo del Toro.

  This is only an approximate guide to Blake. But approximations are all we’ve got to go on. Even the most thoughtful and painstaking portraits are educated guesses. And so, when I try to imagine what Blake had in mind as the thank-you gift for the people who were helping him get better, I’m probably only getting it partly right. Quite possibly I’m getting it entirely wrong. I can picture his delighted, engaged expression and I can bring to mind his blank, baleful stare. Either is possible. And that’s the problem. This is the best I can do.

  But there’s one thing I’m sure of. There would have to be something a little off-kilter, a little unusual about how Blake would recount the history of his illness. That’s a given. And I think his friends and family would agree. It would be the history of an illness, but with something like a horror movie mixed in. It would be the history of an illness, but recounted during a time when a dark force is gaining control of a hospital. Or something like that.

  Blake’s history of his illness would be a little quirky, for sure. A little unconventional. My guess: a narrator who inexplicably pops up every now and then to speak directly to camera or, in the case of a graphic novel, directly from the frame of a drawing.

  This, in itself, wouldn’t be so strange. Specialists appear in hospitals. They say things. Then they disappear. And a nurse who specializes in palliative care is hardly a fantastic element in a cancer hospital. What would be strange (especially in the bright, white busy-ness of that hospital light) is this narrator’s calm, unhurried dignity.

  She carries herself like a retired dancer—which adds to her mystery. I’d guess her age at about fifty. But even though her back and shoulders and neck are proudly unbowed, there is the direct acknowledgement of grief in her bearing. She is a mother, too.

  This is apparent. This is part of who she is. That she is a mother is part of her empathy. She understands what she is witnessing. She knows the great, terrible weight of it. She does not pretend it is other than what it is. And this is why a visual medium (an animated short, a graphic novel) is so enviably direct. You don’t have to say all this.

  She seemed to just appear in Blake’s room—on that New Year’s Day. We’d never seen her before. We never saw her again. She was (you could sense immediately) kind. She was Indian, I think. She was friendly, even a little funny as I recall, but there was something so unhurried about her she seemed to have come from a different dimension of hospital life.

  That’s why she would make such a good narrator. She is the sort of presence who can show up from time to time in a story and tell you, face to face, what’s going on.

  The various departments of Blake’s interests and projects and jobs had been sequestered into different corners of the various communal apartments he’d lived in as a university student (Film Studies, mostly) and then, as a graduate of Film Studies mostly, as a young guy starting out and trying to earn a living in Toronto—a sometimes editor, producer, cameraman, DJ, director, composer. He liked living downtown. He’d go out dancing with friends to places I’d never heard of.

  Effy Min was his close companion, kindred spirit, confidante…And when I e-mailed Effy to ask about the music Blake was listening to at university, she answered: “During Flying Lotus phase (4th year) we were obsessed with Actress, Teebs, Shlomo—this being when Blake spent every single weekend evening making beats & led to what was imo his best work.”

  Parents are not wrong to think their children speak another dialect. The rhythms and jokes are different. So are the points of reference. But when Effy answered my e-mail I felt particula
rly (as my mother used to describe the condition) clueless.

  4

  My father’s stories of Hamilton were brief, congenial outbursts of information. His idiosyncratic history seemed all the more idiosyncratic because the house that contained this history—the house in which he’d grown up—no longer existed. The solid, dignified red brick residence (with its veranda and wisteria) was known by everyone who spoke of it (my mother, mostly) simply as “Duke Street.” It was at the corner of MacNab, one block west of James. Duke Street was torn down in the 1970s.

  It would have been quite different had my father grown up somewhere far away, in a place rarely visited. But we were basically from the same part of Hamilton. His childhood memories were geographically centred on what I considered the outer edge of the neighbourhood in which I lived. I sometimes walked past Duke Street on my way to swim class at the YMCA.

  The locations of my father’s childhood and my childhood were practically identical. But this was not obvious when I was growing up. His Hamilton seemed to exist in another world.

  In his Hamilton there was the aunt who fell from a minstrel gallery while dancing on a railing at a New Year’s Eve party. “In the twenties,” my father said, by way of explanation. He couldn’t have been old enough to witness the accident, but my father’s description of the moment before the tragedy was as spare as a James Thurber cartoon. Men in dinner jackets looking up. A pretty young woman in a fringed silk dress and high spirits, looking down. My father’s story depended on little more than the slightly ironic emphasis he put on the words “minstrel” and “gallery”—as if a frivolity of residential architecture was bound to end badly. She broke her back, and for decades thereafter was carried to family gatherings on a pallet of pillows and Afghan rugs.

  And there was my father’s uncle. He was a doctor. My father would whisper: “A dipsomaniac.” My father’s erratic uncle had trained in Vienna and was a well-known specialist in venereal diseases. Hamilton’s proximity to the American border meant that he was occasionally blindfolded, driven to a farmhouse somewhere in the vicinity of Niagara Falls, and called upon to treat famous mobsters for the clap. Apparently the pay for this was quite good.