BLACK PILLS IN EXILE - PART 1

I sometimes joked with Antoine that we were like Adam and Eve if there had been a B-movie sequel and they had returned to the garden.

Only in this instance the garden we had returned to was bleak, cold and mostly destitute.

It was all part of the plan. Or at least Antoine’s plan. The way he saw it, Toronto was no longer a sustainable place for us to live and we needed to do something radical in order to protect the sanctity of our relationship together. Privacy had also become a major concern lately.

“Privacy will be more valuable than water in the not too distant future,” Antoine always liked to remind me considering himself a prophet of the digital age, one that could see the future before everyone else.

He had a valid point though. Things had gotten pretty hairy in the last few months before we high tailed our way out of the city. Forced to leave his job teaching at the university, Antoine began to receive death threats  from the ‘student militia’ as did several members of his familiy.

It was, as he put it, “getting a little hot in the kitchen.”

His heinous crimes? Only speaking his mind on various topics that were regarded as sacrosanct by the new puritans of the woke age. At first I was mad at him for speaking out, but the more I came to reflect on it, the more I realised he could never compromise his way of thinking. It defined who he was.

“Without intellectual honesty, I would become simply mediocre.”

I liked that his biggest fear wasn’t that of being physically attacked, more that he might become mediocre. It was this natural arrogance of his that first attracted me to Antoine and led me to fall deeply in love with him.

But alas, even the deepest of love can reach the bottom of the well and from the moment we exited the car and caught sight of our corrugated chalet, I feared for our future.

The search for an affordable, yet obscure house had been rushed and extremely stressful. Time had put pressure on our decision making and now we were forced to reconcile with our fateful decision which was mostly negotiated via glitchy video calls.

So, here we were, half way between Yellowknife and Great Bear Lake and already I started feeling anxious about how we were going to keep warm. A partially collapsed fireplace had put paid to our dreams of home fires burning and unless Antoine or I repaired it properly, we would have to make do with our portable electric heater which rattled like an old man’s chest and emitted about as much heat as a match in a snowstorm.

As the onset of the long winter became a reality we could no longer avoid, Antoine threw himself into it like he was plunging into an ice cold lake without any regard for the possibility of hypothermia. He tended to do things by extremes. Pulling out his collection of Tchaikovsky vinyl that he’d bought from thrift stores back when we lived in the city, he determined that a Russian mindset was the only way to brave the grimness of the deep winter we faced in our remote location.

Re-reading Tolstoy and listening to Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony on repeat, I can’t say I was as enthralled with this approach as he desperately wanted me to be. I didn’t want to be his babushka fermenting potato skins to make vodka with. I became broody. Not for a baby, but for a holiday. The more he embraced his spartan winter, the more I craved a getaway to somewhere hot He hated me scouring travel accounts on social media filled with images of sun, sparkling blue skies and loud, latin pop music.

“You know, too much sun gives you cancer.”

“That would explain why the average Russian male has such a long life expectancy,” I replied sarcastically.

It seemed a disappointment to him that I wasn’t embracing our new found hardship as if it was some sort of privilege he had bestowed upon me. I had never yearned for the beach as much as I did those first few weeks of November. I felt deprived of light, society and sex which sadly for us had become too wrapped up in angst ever since we’d made the big move to nowheresville.

The closest thing I could compare it to was being forced to go on a Buddhist meditation retreat when I was a teenager with my mother. I remember it was touch and go whether I would stay after the first 48 hours where I nearly broke my mother’s spiritual equilibrium beyond repair. On the third day, exhausted by my own rage, I succumbed to the experience and even found some benefit in the serenity away from my peers, though I could never admit it to her at the time. She’s dead now and part of me thinks she was looking for a cure before she even knew she was sick. There was a desperation to her seeking spiritual salvation somehow, which is still one of the few things that repeatedly breaks my heart to this day. Somewhere in the back of my mind there was a genuine fear that I might break down in similar fashion to her.

And now I think of it, there was a similarity between the head Buddhist priest Matthieu (who scared me) and Antoine. They both share an austere manner with a singular focus. For Matthieu it was enlightenment, for Antoine it is pragmatic nihilism. Perhaps they’re the same thing.

I recall meditating for hours on end that summer at Nova Scotia surrounded by all sorts of broken people seeking spiritual refuge. I felt as if I was being hit by their conflicted vibrations that seemed to travel invisibly through the air like arrows toward me. At some point however, I created a shield around my mind that helped protect me from their tangible suffering. I hoped I could do the same now as an adult out here, but I was badly out of practice. I had a become a restless creature but now had no choice but to be still.

It’s not hard to appreciate the quietness when everything around you has been so hectic. The first few weeks in our new place felt like a cheap holiday, but one that yielded some happy moments, like when Antoine and I went fishing and cooked our catch before getting drunk with some French brandy he’d been given as a Christmas present by one of his mysterious benefactors whose identity he’d never disclose to me.

Around that same period, we went for a few days camping up at Great Bear Lake which gave us a few days and nights to recover from the trauma of our move.

One night, gazing up at the stars in the clear night sky, Antoine expounded on the constellation above us.

“You see that star up there. That’s Algol, the demon star.”

“What’s demon about it?”

“Not it. Her. In skylore, its variable brightness represents the eye of Medusa.”

“Medusa, eh? The original feminist icon,” I jested somewhat in earnest.

“Maybe she had her reasons. She was raped by Posiedon after all, which her sister later had her punished for.”

“Never a dull day with the Greeks.”

Antoine seem unimpressed with my humorous asides which wasn’t uncommon. Sometimes I think he just wanted the female version of himself to steel his intellect against.

Antoine felt I often trivialised things as a way of deflecting, but the truth was, I felt a natural desire to counter his teacher-like affectations. I personally hated school (always getting suspended) and resented authority (a trait I had inherited from my anarchist parents) so felt a resistance to his academic mannerisms, even though he was now in exile from the institutions he’d been trained to teach in. There was something grimly funny about that to me.

As I looked up at Algol, the demon star winking back at me. I felt a strange sympathy with Medusa and wondered if history had got her all wrong.

Our brief excursions were over now and it felt very much like we were entering hibernation mode like the crew in Alien before they entered hyper sleep. Now I look back at it, I realise in many ways those mini diversions were a form of escapism from the very real reality of the winter we faced ahead of us.

Making our life together in exile was going to be a test for both our bodies and our souls.

The first snow storms began to arrive and roads became increasingly inaccessible to the outside world.

I’ll openly admit I struggled with structuring my weeks as we began our hibernation months, the opposite to Antoine who was very disciplined and structured in how he managed his. Most days, I just wanted to sleep and sleep and would often then have dreams of being back in the city.

Sometimes when I woke up in the late afternoon darkness, all I could hear was Antoine downstairs playing his bombastic classical music below and it felt suddenly as if the walls had closed in around my entire life. My bed had become my life raft and I was just grateful we had at least both sensibly agreed to have separate rooms when we found ourselves getting too much on each other’s nerves.

What he failed to somehow understand is that it had been a wrench for me to leave everything behind. In contrast, Antoine appeared to be relieved, understandable though that was under the circumstances. Here, he no longer had to look over his shoulder and could focus purely on his academic writing. By day he would write articles for his subscription website and chapters for his ever expanding book, all the while buying and selling stocks, shares and cryptocurrencies.

I sometimes wonder why Antoine had stuck with me, considering how insanely different we both were. But perhaps he valued the contrast. My friends would often ask me what it was about him that I felt so strongly about. There was no argument from them that he wasn’t handsome and had significant charm. But it was deeper than all of that. I think he represented the complete antithesis to my crazy father who was always on the run and often moving mom and I around with him. He had always been an active protestor, leading a motley crew that fancied themselves as some sort of off-shoot of the weather underground. I didn’t really understand any of my father’s life until Antoine explained it all to me after spending an afternoon doing some extensive research online.

And yes, I know, the irony hadn’t passed me by. Here I was, once again on the run with the second most significant man in my life.

Eventually, I began to change my routine and forced myself to get up early each morning and go for a run up through the woods close to our home.

As I made the small ascent through the mazy woods up onto a rocky plateau, I would gaze at the view down below. It gave me perspective which I struggled to find back at the house.

I closed my eyes and felt the cold wind against my face and could hear my mother’s voice calling out to me.

“Don’t be a hostage to love.”

It was something she repeated on several occasions to me before she died.

Back then, I really didn’t understand what she meant. But now, I think I get it.