More art direction from Dad: Hautville House, our home on Guernsey. What I was escaping from! It’s beautiful, but there is not one single inch of it that he left alone.
Fasten your seatbelts …
Reenactment: A Day in the Life
Of course I changed my name. I could feel their eyes, always! Worrying, warning, pushing, insisting. Right along the back of my neck, above the buttons. I had to take steps. They cannot see what I have written, I have concealed it in code. And now I assume the same protection for myself; I have gone underground in plain sight.
It is so much better, immediately. Avoiding their eyes has extended my own. Like that strange fish known as the anableps, my top eyes are calm, placid, as am I, seemingly; my disguise is complete. But my bottom eyes - those belong to a different animal: dark, urgent. Full of risk and error. Hidden in the undercurrents, I see, but am not seen.
“What if the Americans invaded?” An entire display room in the Citadel fort in the center of Halifax, Nova Scotia (now a Canadian national park) is devoted to this question, including dioramas, mannequins, schematics, pencil drawings, and a play-by-play of what-ifs: “well, they would never get past our defenses on the harbor! But if they did, they would never get up our giant hill where we can see them coming! But if they did, they would never get past our moat! But if they did, they would never get past our sharpshooters stationed at acute angles along the inner wall! But if they did … ” etc.
The ship finally docks, after lurching and worrying its way west for a month. The tiny cabin, the plunging horizon, the inquisitive overtures, the cold and the rain. Nature is terrible—terrible. I won’t meet their eyes. But, in a moment, this moment, it falls away. I have forgotten. Everything is forgotten, everything is new. I’ve lived this so many times in my mind that I am hardly present to my present. Everything shimmers; I watch myself walk down the gangplank and onto the dock, hovering a few steps above the planks and stones. No one knows; not yet. Not anyone. Not him. I have a secret name. I have a secret language. I have a secret mission. There are practicalities of course, I must see to my bags. I must find rooms. I must remember who I am, and who I am pretending to be. And then, in this place—finally!
My life will begin.
Act II, Eyes II: Halifax
So I said I am Ezra
and the wind whipped my throat
gaming for the sounds of my voice
I listened to the wind
go over my head and up into the night
Turning to the sea I said
I am Ezra
but there were no echoes from the waves
The words were swallowed up
in the voice of the surf
or leaping over the swells
lost themselves oceanward
Over the bleached and broken fields
I moved my feet and turning from the wind
that ripped sheets of sand
from the beach and threw them
like seamists across the dunes
swayed as if the wind were taking me away
and said
I am Ezra
As a word too much repeated
falls out of being
so I Ezra went out into the night
like a drift of sand
and splashed among the windy oats
that clutch the dunes
of unremembered seas
- A. A. Ammons
