By Wm. Anthony Connolly

Prelude

This book is my memory.

It is a Brownline C530F accounting ledger with a calendar of the year on the inside cover, and on the back inside, an array of perpetual calendars from 1984 to 2040. On the top right hand corner, I wrote: Mary Cross/Portage la Prairie/Manitoba/Canada/Earth/The Galaxy/The Universe. Every 13-3.8 by 8-inch page is ruled with appointment scheduling from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in half-hour intervals. Daddy gave it to me the year I left him and Mother for good. It weighs a ton; it’s not particularly beautiful with its now tattered and stained green cover. Most its 200+ pages are waterlogged or rippled. Some pages are falling out, alongside loose newspaper articles and magazine pictures stuffed inside. It’s a precarious thing. The fraying leopard-print tape applied to the broken spine and the industrial strength thick rubber band holding the covers on don’t help matters, either. I’ve hauled it everywhere for three decades. It’s my one true star in an ever-expanding array of constellations and space. It’s chock-full with what I know, and what I thought I knew. It’s filled with an accurate accounting, mixed in with my irrational worries and plans, both realistic and truly not. It is my Theory of Everything.

Ten years ago, I had it with me when I returned to Edinburgh, Scotland to attend the funeral of my grandfather – Papa.

It was with me when, at 17, I ran away from home with nothing, but a knapsack and a conspiracy on my back.

This book was with me when I struggled and nearly succumbed, when I met and married Gregory, and when Nancy was born.

Its ugly cover and rippled pages were with me when my marriage crumbled and it was with me when I began to piece my life back together again.

The book is my longtime companion. I first held it when I was 16 going on 17.

It is with me today. I am 47.

The book is the contents of my head, such as it is.

I hold it in my hands and practice what I will say to Nancy.

This is what it feels like to have that feeling.

I flip through its wild fugitive passages, and become breathless at its inked extravagances.

I really did see and feel what I saw and felt.

I run my polished fingernail under each furrowed line or flowing arabesque, as if composing these for the first time.

It tells a strange story – it’s hard even now for me to fully believe it actually happened.

I stop and stare.

This book is my memory.

This is what it feels like to have that feeling.

It goes like this.

Ever blanked out? I mean, those times when you’re walking along and you suddenly become aware that you have no idea how far you’ve gone. Or, you’re at home, hanging out, when you realize you have no idea how long you’ve been simply staring off into space? Where were you? You were in your head, buzzing about, puzzling over something that happened yesterday, or months ago, or pondering what you plan to do tomorrow or next week or when you get rich. This slightly-embarrassing awareness doesn’t come until after you’ve spaced out briefly. It’s an eerie feeling. Here, but not. You’re such a space cadet.

It doesn’t happen like that for me, and it hasn’t since I was a little girl. We all have our things – this is mine. When I blank out, I go somewhere. I see things. For as long as I can remember, I have seen what others do not, while seemingly zoned out – not dancing unicorns or anything like that. Something else, but I’ll get to that.

The fugue, or “spells” as my ex, Gregory, liked to call them, doesn’t necessarily sneak up on me like one of your blank stares off into the wild blue yonder do. I know when it’s about to happen. I know I will have been somewhere, but, most unnervingly, I see and feel it all during my space out, which, for reasons I’ll get to later, are referred to as WooWoo or Black Holes. My spells, episodes, fugues, blank outs, space outs, zoning out, etc. are all interchangeable with WooWoo or Black Holes, the first word I came up with – I’m told – to describe it. It – singular, plural, doesn’t matter was WooWoo. Later on, I called them Black Holes.

The episodes began when I was around five. My parents were told it would pass, but the episodes continued into my teens, when I thought everyone was against me. They continued well into my thirties and I felt I was going a little bonkers, until they dissipated and disappeared in the background for a while, as the years of my marriage unfolded. I was in therapy, on an off of medication, and started a career. And then … they reappeared, just over ten years ago. I’ve gone from awe to irritation over them, and then back to wonder and tiresome again.

WooWoo have sound, they have things to look at. It’s always the same sounds and things, and in this way, it seemed to me like WooWoo was trying desperately to say something. I mean, after a lifetime of spells, wouldn’t you begin to think there was something going on that you should pay attention to – should you be so inclined after consulting professionals and priests – like the universe was trying to tell you about your life?

Like here. Look at this. Papa the page reads. Big time WooWoo.

Ten years ago, I was in Scotland attending the funeral of my grandfather – Papa, my dad’s father. It had been a few years since my last visit. I was born in Scotland, midwifed at Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but my parents immigrated to Canada when I was four. Every summer we flew out of Winnipeg, Manitoba and returned to Scotland to visit relatives, almost exclusively on Daddy’s side. Mother’s family was rural and distant. She loved her family dearly, especially her brother, George, but he’d died young and, that I was aware of, no invitations to visit ever came in the mail. As soon as I was on my own in Canada, living out west in Calgary, a transatlantic excursion was out of the question, as it was too expensive. During my marriage to Gregory, we went twice: once early in our marriage to introduce him, to let my new husband see the Auld Reekie, Edinburgh; and once to attend the famous Fringe Festival. But that had been a few years before my trip for Papa’s funeral.

The day after the funeral, I had just arrived via taxi at Stenhouse, the airport in Edinburgh, to fly back home. I was to take an international flight to Toronto, and then transfer in Canada to a domestic flight to Calgary. Mother and Daddy were staying on, but I didn’t know for how long. I wasn’t talking to my parents at this point. We’d been estranged for nearly twenty-five years. The whole funeral was a rather strained affair. Daddy didn’t take the loss well and physically shook the entire time I saw him. He just couldn’t stop himself from shaking.

That day, I took one step inside the airport terminal and knew things were not going to go well. Just. My. Way.

“Final boarding call for Flight 1534 to Toronto.”

“Shit,” I said a little too loudly. That got a few startled looks.

I was, of course, running late, as always, and I was going to miss my flight home. I had one of those pounding headaches you feel in your teeth; I was really short of breath; my lips and tongue were dry as a bone; I was cursing more and more under my increasingly short bursts of breath; I was steaming mad at Gregory-Theodore-Guinness, husband extraordinaire, who insisted – insisted – on sending me countless listings for new homes he thought we should consider buying and I had exactly 120 unanswered work emails sitting on my juice-depleted Blackberry. I was sprinting.

“The gate is about to clos…”

People flew by in a blur. I was surprised I hadn’t torpedoed someone. I was pulling my teetering suitcase on the wheels from hell and, over my shoulder, I hauled a bulging leather tote filled with the annual report of the Little Pirouettes Dance Company, Nancy’s dance school then, of which I had foolishly agreed to vet its 234 rubber-banded pages; a pencil case that doubled as my makeup bag; an extra blouse and scarf; hairbrush; and a 400-page thriller – You have GOT to read this!!! – that month’s book club selection (untouched) to be discussed in a few days sat in the bag like a swaying anchor. The tote bag kept digging into my increasingly-sore ribs. But I kept running until –

I grew dizzy. Dizzier.

Lightheaded. Really? The episodes. The spells? WooWoo? I thought I’d left them behind. Sufficiently ignored them. Black Holes. It had been years since they were at full strength. And then…

And then I got downright unstable, clutched my throat, and tried to say…

What is it? What is it you want?

Or I said something to that effect, because I could see it everywhere. In front of me, near me in the air, behind me: everywhere at once. I couldn’t escape it, until my legs shivered and then buckled, and I fell first to my knees and then onto my right side there on the airport floor in Scotland. I could see a crowd gathering around as I was lying on the cold floor, inhaling dust and puzzlement. And just before I blacked out, an old man, reeking of whiskey, gathered his tweed pants at his knees with his knobby hands, and knelt down to ease me, turn me, onto my back, and rest my head on his scratchy, bunched-up jacket. I was looking up and back at him, and blowing air out of my parched mouth. He hung behind me, upside down, as if in midair: his gentle face, white hair, and teeth. And he got closer. His lips moved and he said something, but the two didn’t go together. I could tell, even in my state, that his mouth was saying one thing, while I heard something completely different in a sing-songy whisper into my ear. “There, there, Jenny Muck.”