The Departed

During the spring of 2003, the unnamed narrator of Ellis Scott’s Night Terminus travels to a hillside town in the Western Himalayas. He grows close to a Dutch-born Buddhist monk, Rudolph. Their mutual friend, Gloria, explains that she has known the “fit, distinguished-looking man in his sixties” since the 1980s. She was working as a nurse on the front lines of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in San Francisco when Rudolph brought his boyfriend, Paul, to her clinic. “He stopped talking about the past,” she says, describing Rudolph in the months after Paul’s death. “When there are no words to describe something, it’s easier to stay silent.”

Scott’s short, affecting novel consists of five disjointed chapters, each one named after a different man. It begins with the narrator’s memories of Paris in February 1985: “I had buried seven friends that year and there were still ten months to go.” As time passes, we learn relatively little about his childhood, except that he ran away at thirteen. “No place I’ve ever been is more foreign to me than the circumstances of my upbringing,” he tells a lover.

How does one articulate a personal grief? How does a community record an immense, generational loss? Over the past four and a half decades, queer artists and writers have wrestled with these questions. Responses have ranged from widely accessible forms, such as the AIDS Memorial Quilt, to obscure and experimental ones, such as John Greyson’s 1993 film, Zero Patience, a defiant counter-narrative to the now disproven theory that an Air Canada flight attendant from Quebec City, Gaëtan Dugas, was North America’s patient zero. There are no words, as Gloria says, to describe such pain. But the voices of the dead and those who survived must find a way to speak.

My thoughts kept returning to Dugas as I followed Scott’s peripatetic protagonist. In Randy Shilts’s non-fiction book And the Band Played On, from 1987, the airline worker is presented as a threatening phantom because of the mobile nature of his job; while criss-crossing the skies, he could also hop between beds and bathhouses. In Night Terminus, travel, while not without danger, is less a pleasure cruise than a purgatory. “Our people are stateless,” one character says, articulating a mutable queer nationalism that exists beyond borders. “We’re born in every country and yet can call nowhere home. This statelessness remains in the mind and affects the wandering body. It burrows within.”

In seeking spaces to express joy and desire without fear, gay travel, like its literature, risks a colonizing impulse. The host country can too easily become merely a backdrop to stage the liberation of tourists, while its domestic challenges are sanitized or made invisible. Scott is careful to avoid such missteps. In one chapter, the narrator recounts a trip with his dying friend Yuri, through Turkey and Iran in the late ’80s. The social and political realities of the region, which was just then emerging from the Iran-Iraq War, are well represented. Taking in the Ani ruins near Kars in eastern Turkey, for example, the narrator describes the “solitary skeletons of rust-coloured cathedrals and citadels,” which remain “under the watchful eye of the Soviet army.” He notes how the “soldiers in the towers could shoot on sight should we make any disturbance.”

Tourists are inherently privileged in that they can usually leave. Toward the end, the narrator prepares to make another departure, this time from Provence. “Honestly, I don’t think stopping is in my blood,” he says, a striking metaphor in a novel about a blood-borne virus. He suggests that life in transit now defines a generation of those most affected by the crisis. He had travelled to the Himalayas only after his partner, Henry, died from cardiac arrest: “I left as soon as we cremated him. He was standing on a train commuting into the city, then collapsed.” The narrator attributes this sudden death to a decade of experimental drug therapies. Grief is the ultimate terminus: the final destination and a temporary shelter for those left behind or waiting to depart.

With its anonymous storyteller, emphasis on transience, and elliptical structure, Scott’s debut is reminiscent of Garth Greenwell’s fiction, though a Canadian antecedent may also be found in Douglas LePan’s queer-coded tale of urban estrangement, The Deserter, from 1964. Early in Night Terminus, the narrator learns about the nineteenth-century artist Édouard Baldus, “who took large-scale panoramic pictures of the French railways” and “invented the landmark photograph, leaving out people, allowing the images of the architecture alone to speak for who made them.” In the last chapter, which takes place exactly forty years after the first, we learn that the narrator has become an academic who studies Baldus. He brings a friend, Frank, to an exhibition and shares that the photographer, known for his work in Paris, was actually a fugitive from Cologne. To escape counterfeiting charges, he changed his name from Eduard to Édouard and started over.

Throughout Night Terminus, characters offer testimonies about their lives in abundant — if overwhelming — detail. These monologues reveal a hunger for remembering despite tremendous loss. Like Baldus’s photographs, Scott’s story is a sort of palimpsest, privileging a chorus of disconnected voices that tell their painful stories while the narrator himself remains elusive. As Frank observes in the gallery, “The empty spaces give the photos meaning, and it’s the silences that have the most weight.”