The Dualists

While notorious for having the highest murder rate per capita in Canada, a distinction held until recently, Winnipeg, Manitoba, that anomalous civilization rising out of the heartland of the continent, is perhaps even more widely known for its near-polar weather, which endures for more than half of the year. During the most punishing stretch of winter, the six weeks following Christmas, it was essential to develop some coping rituals. Satwinder and I, who were united in our love affair for Early Modern philosophers, used to drive every week on a Friday or Saturday night out past the southern city limits, keeping on the highway until we arrived at Humpty’s Family Restaurant. Humpty’s, so far as I know, is an institution that only exists in Western Canada. You would be right if you guessed that its name derives from the ill-fated egg in the nursery rhyme, Humpty-Dumpty. Despite the food ranging from mediocre to atrocious, the place possessed a quiet virtue, related but somehow distinct from the jukebox, the photographs of old automobiles, and the charmingly anachronistic milkshake bar. Mainly, though, the reason Satwinder and I came to regard the restaurant as indispensable, almost sacred, will forever remain mysterious.

Though we always brought along a chessboard to Humpty’s, we were usually too enthralled by our swordfights over consciousness and the structure of time to bother with the symbolic warfare of little plastic figurines. We were nineteen, both of us philosophers in embryo. I was aggressively Cartesian in orientation; Satwinder, who agreed with me as recently as autumn on the bedrock questions of metaphysics, was increasingly an enemy to the purity and noble beauty of dualism. He now preferred the flimsy explanation of atoms and neurochemistry to what he called “the mysticism of disembodied Mind.” The rift made for punchy exchanges, our conversations having gotten livelier since we’d become opponents than when we’d agreed and could only jointly abuse heretics of the Cartesian orthodoxy.

One night, as I tried several lines of attack against Satwinder’s new brand of materialism, our waitress Denise, who was every bit the personification of diner-waitress nostalgia, right down to the whippy attitude and crimped bleached hair, was irritated more than usual with our radical skepticism of Humpty’s menu. Perhaps because Humpty’s tables, booths, and stools were never more than a quarter the way to maximum occupancy, for the most part Denise and her aproned colleagues were willing to put up with Satwinder and me lingering for hours over soda or a hot beverage. But tonight she seemed bored by the five lonely simpletons she had to attend to—men who shattered crackers into their soup and gazed out the window like cats—and she couldn’t understand how Satwinder and I could be so enraptured by what to her was no more than empty gibbering.

“A lot of people of faith come here and rattle on about God to me,” she said, topping up Satwinder’s coffee. “Never have I heard him talked about with so little feeling. You boys speak of God like you were training for a Jeopardy program.”

“Not a bad observation,” Satwinder said. An acolyte of the Socratic method, Satwinder tended to be diplomatic toward whatever position he was exposed to. “Philosophers have a different way of conceiving of God than believers.”

“So, that’s what you call yourselves.” Denise did not make a move to refresh my coffee, though she stared hard at the gray liquid at the bottom of my cup. “Here I was thinking maybe you were a couple of apprentice wizards.”

One day in mid-February, I was threading through the stacks at the university library when I recognized the gangly shape of a shadow lumbering toward me. As the library’s crepuscular light gradually adumbrated its features, the shadow resolved into my favorite philosophical sparring partner and nemesis in chess. It was not unusual for Satwinder to join me in the philosophy section, where the two of us would compete for how fast our minds could imbibe the lifeblood of print. Today, though, I could already tell from the severity of his expression and the lack of pop in his gait that he was feeling far too sluggish to contend in any marathon of the intellect.

Satwinder stood before me, frowning, smoothing a slash of black hair into its accustomed place against his skull. The formal attire of a checkered sweater worn over a collared shirt, nylon dress pants, and polished leather shoes for once did not strike me as the product of a very subtle vanity but instead as appropriately demure.

“I’m here on an unhappy errand,” he said.

“Go on,” I said, shutting the book in front of me. “The conch is yours.”

“Brace yourself for something terrible,” he said.

The sentence, I confess, stimulated me more than it distressed me.

“It’s Lascaux,” he said. “Fallen from thirty-four stories.”

That was the year when the dangerous seductions of climbing rooftops and scaling the eight or ten financial towers and tallest hotels that made up the city’s skyline was more alluring to adventurous youths than any dance party or masquerade. Although I’m not sure who originated the fad, the most gifted of the climbers was surely David Lascaux. Both Satwinder and I had known Lascaux—whose last name was pronounced like the famous caves filled with Paleolithic art—since high school. Back then, he was already distinguished for his freakish physical capabilities as much as he was for his shocking speed at calculating mathematical equations in his head. It’s not impossible that had he continued with football American colleges would have recruited him. And yet he quit in his senior year, saying he wanted to give himself freer rein at parties and devote more time to skateboarding and video games.

Dating back to the previous spring, Satwinder and I had often witnessed as Lascaux—along with six other daredevils who equalled him in risk-taking but not in finesse—would scramble up fire escapes or even, with the help of mattresses or garbage bins in alleys, vault to a balcony or window ledge, and then, through an arduous and incremental process, gradually ascend a building’s facade. It was almost disconcerting how comfortable they were on the vertical plane. They were able to spot grooves in the brickwork of a building, slender ridges in the masonry that to them were as broad as a tabletop. Their arm strength coupled with their fearlessness conspired to make them both superhuman and grotesque. Were they to be suddenly transplanted to the jungles of Africa, I could not imagine them having any more difficulty scuttling up to the canopy than a band of chimpanzees.

Lascaux, in particular, was insatiable in his explorations of the upper reaches of the city’s architecture. I recall once, when Satwinder and I had brought along binoculars, seeing Lascaux take a running leap from the edge of a rooftop, swooping across the chasm that separated two buildings, and landing safely onto the roof of the other. It was as if he’d gained the power of levitation—or at the very least the ability to hover through the air like a flying squirrel. I had vertigo just watching him.

Though winter climbing was even richer in opportunities for peril, neither Lascaux nor his crew gave any sign they would opt for a tamer form of recreation until the spring. No, they’d developed an addiction to the ecstasy of vertical conquest and would grow noticeably jittery and short-tempered if they went a couple weeks without a climb. It was easier to reframe the weather and wind as interesting challenges, snags to overcome, than to deny themselves the rarefied bliss only their sport could provide.

And overcome them they had, for a while anyway. The last time I saw Lascaux scale a building, though he wore a parka and a wool cap, he seemed every bit as invincible as ever, like Spider-Man in a black suit. But in the gamble he’d made with destiny, perfection of his movements and nerves was crucial. A single awkward step sufficed to turn gravity into an assassin.

Despite Satwinder having more time to metabolize the news than I did, he seemed even more disturbed by it.

“Let’s not forget the ancients envied those who die young,” I said, hoping to buck him up.

“You shouldn’t make his death sound sexy.”

“Well, it’s true. Lascaux will go down in our local mythology as an Achilles. I don’t doubt for an instant that he died with a grin.”

The night of Lascaux’s accident, though I had a class in epistemology, I told Satwinder I was willing to skip the lecture so we could drive to Humpty’s and commiserate over the news. Other youths in our orbit would surely be gathering in honor of our friend, but we were in no rush to join them. Funeral obligations, and other teary-eyed memorials, would capture much of the week. For the moment, we desired only the solace of philosophy.

At Humpty’s, when Denise noticed we were even more introspective than usual, I saw no reason to withhold the tale of Lascaux’s thirty-four-story fall to the unmerciful concrete of the sidewalk on Portage Avenue. Initially, Denise received this story with incredulity. But Satwinder and I persisted, and finally convinced Denise our friend’s death was not some kind of treacherous yarn. She became quiet and retreated to the kitchen. Several minutes later, she returned with two slices of peach pie, flanked with a cumulus of whipped cream—a tribute from her and the cooks. I eyed the dessert with considerable pessimism, but upon sampling it found it to be tastier than inductive reasoning would suggest.

Satwinder and I started a chess game, sleepwalking through our openings, the mirror dance of pawns. Both of us delayed any attack, and soon it became clear we were missing the killer’s urge necessary to execute our plans for domination. We left a few dollars on the table for Denise and spilled out into the night. It was actually rather mild, a sudden oasis of temperate weather, or at least so it seemed from the otherwise unbroken spell of Siberian cold we’d been experiencing. Satwinder produced a joint from a knapsack in the trunk, then leaned against the hood of the car, guarding the lighter’s flame from the wind with his mitt as he sparked it up. As philosophers in training we were normally prone to austerity, critics of the hedonic ways of our looser contemporaries. Tonight, though, with our moods plummeting, we seemed to have no other path available but to trust in the spirit of an intoxicating plant.

Sure enough, a few tokes shared between us, and the chemical dust had freed us from our zombie daze. We were only nineteen, after all, newcomers to the country of adult sorrow. There would be time enough to reconnoiter the whole scarred territory, to get to know the boneyards of those bitter lands. Not that we were heartless, but we were used to encountering profundities as purely esoteric concepts, through the safety of our rational minds. Now we craved once more a child’s easy forgetfulness, a return to the giggly hilarity of teenage hijinks.

We toyed with the notion of driving back to the city and climbing the most approachable building in Lascaux’s daunting repertoire, one of the few effortless ascents he usually reserved for a warm-up exercise. Something about this plan, though, the more we considered it must have struck us as a trespass against Lascaux’s legacy. Instead, since it happened to be a clear night, the stars glaring and prolific, and the weather almost semi-tropical by our perverse standards, we started wandering down the icy shoulder of the highway.

Undeterred by darkness and snow, a new giddy, prankish energy infected us. In our strange condition we entertained the idea of walking to the next town, setting out on some vast pilgrimage to another city, maybe another time zone, our version of Sinbad trading the easy pleasures of Baghdad for the unknown destiny of a sailing voyage. A walking tour was something we’d often fantasized about doing, and maybe Lascaux’s death was the slap we needed to begin. We might as well drift along the edge of the highway, we decided, keep on walking until daylight. We could stop in at the next doughnut shop for sustenance. A few more miles and we’d be sure to see the bright spire of a franchise lighting up the horizon. Though our combined assets totaled less than a thousand dollars, we figured we could stay afloat for several weeks if we were thrifty. By then, who knows, maybe we’d be as far south as Mexico or Guatemala, where a few hundred dollars could be stretched out indefinitely.

It was past dawn when we finally reversed course. Sobriety stung like a rotten tooth. Though it was surely warmer out now, fatigue and exposure made it seem chillier. Somehow more alarming was that despite the sky becoming a pale blue, I continued to see the residue of starlight the way you’d see a red phantom of the sun on a cloudless day at the beach if you shut your eyes. We’d reached the center of nowhere in the naked plains; it was not our desired goal, but it was a practical substitute when our ambition to walk to Mexico struck us as impractical. The destination of Humpty’s parking lot, however, did not radiate the slightest mystique, not at the moment anyway. Still, we were happy enough to get to the parking lot for the warmth of the car and, before departing, we idled for several minutes, cherishing the blasts of reanimating heat.

“I had a very odd feeling back there,” Satwinder said. “This could all be sheer delirium but . . .”

“Never mind,” I said. “All the best wisdom is the child of delirium.”

Satwinder tweaked the volume dial, muting the thrum of electric guitars as he applied pressure to the gas pedal and steered us out of the lot. “This is going to sound absurd,” he said, “but I had the feeling back there, when we were walking on the highway, that I was somehow also Lascaux on the rooftop. I mean, like, I was simultaneously me and Lascaux. It was like a split-screen consciousness. I could see everything Lascaux probably saw, touch what he touched. I was scaling the Richardson Building. The wind was harsher from up there, obviously. But it was exhilarating all the same. Until my footing slipped, there was no inkling of any danger. Even then, there was a tiny moment—maybe a third of a second, I don’t know—where I could have saved myself, but by the time I felt the curse of my mistake the wall was careening past me, and I was tumbling, freefalling above the downtown. It was sort of cinematic. Time seemed to dilate to the point where I was traveling slow-mo and could make out my reflection in the window—Lascaux’s reflection. Below me, the traffic swarmed. And then, all of a sudden, I am among it. I can hear the car horns, the accidents I almost caused. Bus drivers, commuters, cabbies, everyone streams out of their vehicles. People from the bank, from restaurants rushing out, some of them not even wearing a coat. I am just lying there, dead as your dinner, completely squashed at first contact with the cement. A crowd of strangers look down at me, someone checks me for a pulse. And then my consciousness kind of slips off, rising above me, just like everyone claims in a near-death experience. I was this bird consciousness, this spectral energy swirling around Lascaux’s corpse.”

“Well,” I said, rolling down the window so I could light the roach we’d saved for the drive home. “That’s all pretty interesting, especially coming from a so-called materialist such as you. Thing is, Lascaux was already long dead by the time you had your vision—if you want to call it that.”

“Yes, I’m not saying it makes logical sense. But is it possible that Lascaux was trying to communicate? Or maybe I picked up some memory out of the ether or something?” 

We passed through a sort of gateway separating the landscape from the ragged industrial zone at the city’s edge. Factories that were battered and deserted started to appear. The luminous colors of graffiti art blazed from their ruins.

“Sounds to me like you’re regressing into dualism,” I said.

“Typical. You seize on this confession only to champion your preferred metaphysics. Straight back to the old competition, huh?” Satwinder sucked a thin current of smoke and then flicked the microscopic roach out the window. “You just want me to be a dualist again.” 

“Don’t be dumb, Sat. I don’t want to convert you. It’s a lot more fun arguing with you on the other side.”

The next day we discovered that Lascaux’s death, though perhaps not a hoax, was a drastic exaggeration of the facts. Lascaux had indeed taken a bad fall, uncharacteristically losing his footing while climbing up the railing of an emergency stairwell. Yet his crash would have been far worse if he hadn’t landed on the cushions of an abandoned sofa, almost cloudlike in its softness from all the powdery snow that had accumulated over its lazy breadth. This should have been good news, and later—we were not psychopaths, even when we flirted with nihilism—we accepted it as such. But at the moment, what with our illusory night of mourning, our stoned quest through the purlieus of our frozen city, we felt cheated, as if Lascaux and his overly active troupe of imitators had deceived us for their own entertainment.

Satwinder was even more wounded by this reversal than I was. At the university library that day, he moped around with a peculiarly sheepish demeanor. Not bothering to tie the laces of his boots, he trailed little worms of dirt from the muck of the road. Whatever vision had astonished him last night had ebbed away, and now seemed only an embarrassing lapse into the hallucinations of boyhood. When I asked him if he wanted to visit Lascaux in the hospital he said he had too much studying to do.

“What studying?” I asked. “I can easily distinguish focussed Satwinder from unproductive Satwinder. The needle is clearly pointed to the latter.” 

“How about pissed off Satwinder? Do you get a clear reading on him?”

“Well, it could be worse,” I said, though I was glum about the lack of tragedy in our lives myself. “We could be visiting Lascaux at the graveyard.”

“There’s no rush to go to the hospital,” Satwinder said, throwing one of his freshly sharpened yellow pencils on the table, which quickly trundled past his notebook to the floor. “He’ll be there for days, from what I understand.”

“Yes, he will,” I said. “Though who knows for sure. It seems like much of what we get are false reports. I’m going to wait for photographic evidence before I buy into any more stories concerning our notorious friend.”

Some time in the late afternoon, weary from our heady research on so little sleep, we shoved our tower of books to the side and began a game of chess. As always, the black player mimed the white through the overly cautious opening. Later, I became disgusted with all this prudence and made a wild lunge at his king, using my horseman to outwit my rival with a gambit. It was a manuever I’d learned from leafing through a master’s game book, though I’d never yet summoned the boldness to deploy it in a live contest.

Satwinder gobbled up my knight with hardly a moment’s hesitation, though he usually studied the board nervously and so exhaustively I would be out of patience with him long before the end game. “You’ll never get away with that,” he said.

“Maybe not,” I said. “But if it does work, imagine. It’ll be a paradigm shift in my offensive strategems.”

“It won’t,” he said. “And no take backs this time.” 

So we went on, cruel and unforgiving in our imaginary battles, until the library grew dark and the security guard cast us into the stubborn night air. We made our way through the blank and shivery vastness. The wind blew fiercely and left a burn on our cheeks. We drew our hoods up against it, like a bulwark, coiling our scarves over our throats. Snow drifted about in its crazy way, tossed around in the gale. We hid from the brittle but sharply cold flakes as best as we could manage, unsuccessfully, the same way we hid from our confusion.