Soliloquies Anthology 30.1

By Spencer Diver

The creaky floorboards match Arthur’s bones, which fight to maintain their integrity as he rises from his stool. There is a rhythm to his getting-up, a raising of one butt cheek after another, the pressing of his feet on the carpet, not fully, to leverage his legs into a stable position. Then comes the lift, longer in these last few weeks than it seemingly ever has been. He presses his palm against the edge of his writing desk, the other holds onto his bookshelf, which shifts slightly with his weight, knocking a copy of Lucky Jim onto its side. He stares at the shelf for hours, reminiscing about the memories that each title gives him—a favourite of a friend that passed during quarantine, a barely touched copy of a Toni Morrison novel to impress a socially-conscious fellow undergraduate, his father’s copy of Howards End—the binding gnarled and loose but still able to contain its pages. Howards End was the first book he bonded with his father over—it was, according to the old man, “the only good book a fairy’s written on this side of the century.”

The stacks of theory were left on the bottom shelf—Lenin, Marx, lots of Trotsky, Lukacs. He likes to say he “lost the revolutionary spirit after the first Trudeau took office, and the second didn’t help much either.” It was ‘68 that changed things—made it all too real. He remembers when the tanks rolled into Prague, the meeting leaders dislocating their shoulders while handing out pamphlet after pamphlet of apologetics, Maoists in berets chanting for world revolution. The October Crisis was what caused him to start writing articles. Articles became TVO appearances, and TVO appearances became book deals and campus tours. He had been charismatic in a way that was easy to translate from text to screen. He was handsome back then, too—a slightly smug grin and chiselled jawline with a neatly trimmed mustache. He had admirers, women that would approach him after talks to “further discuss his work.” But it was a young man that caught his eye. Ray Stiglitz—nineteen, slim, pretty, and an artist. They argued more than they fucked, but they fucked nonetheless. They never saw each other outside of their respective apartments. The young man resented it. There was a final argument—the last words were Arthur’s: “I don’t want to be seen as a homo. I want them to know I’m normal.” Stiglitz died a few years later from AIDs. Arthur sent a letter to his hospital.

It was only after the towers fell that he came out. There was a book tour, and he made sure to mention that he was “afraid, afraid of what some groups, some groups that hate our freedom, might do now that I’ve spoken up.” Two years later, he was married, and fathered two children from a surrogate. The Globe and Mail quoted him on the process: “In many ways, we’re like the perfect nuclear family. Although, it would have been nice to have kids before I started blowing out my back trying to pick them up.” His kids lived well, and had gotten into good schools—one in McGill, one abroad, at Brown. They both got good jobs, and would try to make the trek to Toronto as much as they could. He loved them.

Soon after becoming a father, he gave up on the tours and the television appearances. His skin had begun to sag, and his hair became too grey to touch up easily. He found his niche in the editorial pages of The Star, and tried his hand at blogging, which turned into Twitter posting. He was still moderately successful, occasionally having to keep his head down for a few weeks when a few “off-colour remarks” surfaced from private email exchanges. His husband, Frank, never seemed to mind much, with the worst incidents only eliciting a shameful muttering of “Artie…” and a brief tsk-ing. Frank never understood his desire for politics, but he supported him, if not everything he said. When they had sex, Arthur would think of Stiglitz. He would think of the first time he and Stiglitz had sex — messy and passionate. He would picture his legs placed on top of his lap as Arthur worked on his books. He would think of him in the hospital, reading his letter. The last one caused him insomnia for a year. Frank used to ask him why he looked so distant when they had sex, but this annoyed Arthur greatly, so he stopped asking.

Arthur feels his legs begin to give out, so he slowly lowers himself onto his chair again. On his desk, beside his laptop, lies the last gift Frank gave to him before he died. It’s a gold plated letter opener with a trillium engraved on its pommel. Frank got it for him in 2019, before he got sick and before the lockdown. He died not long after, and with his kids quarantining with their own families, Arthur was left alone. His articles became longer, and his opinions more extreme. Eventually, his editors decided they were too risky to publish, and The Star dropped him. They left him with a nice severance package for his years of service, and he often sat with his thoughts, occasionally blasting them out on social media or whatever podcast would have him. His kids sent him concerned emails, which he responded to with hostility. Eventually, they stopped talking to him all together.

He places the letter opener in his desk drawer, and starts his getting-up process yet again before eventually shuffling to the bathroom. He looks at himself in the mirror and he finds Ray Stiglitz staring back, gaunt and pockmarked with sores, his gentle beauty turned hard by the jutting bones that were now exposed under his taut skin. Arthur jumps back, and Stiglitz watches as Arthur’s head makes contact with the rim of the toilet bowl. He is left in a puddle of his blood and urine for a week before his monthly hired cleaner smells him upon entering the house. The funeral is more a memorial for a career than a person, with fellow pundits and essayists taking up more time in eulogizing than any of his family does. Eventually, the mourners depart. Arthur’s corpse, touched up with makeup and his head wound carefully obscured with the head of a flower, is brought off for the burial. His tombstone, a modest granite piece, holds only his name, the years of birth and death, and one line: “Live in fragments no longer.”