Illuminated Clementine

Raised Catholic, I was indoctrinated in school with the notion of soul. The nun, in her old-style black habit, tried to give us a compelling picture. The soul, she said, was like a white sheet, and each sin was a little black mark on that whiteness. Sitting at my tiny desk, my shirt tucked into my short pants, I felt panic because her description didn’t ring true. All this talk of the soul was too abstract for me. I was skeptical, which was probably a sin. I thought about our neighbour complaining to my mother that she had hung her sheets out to dry, and when she took them in, they were covered in tiny specks. “Fly shit,” she said with some venom, before her voice dropped to a whisper. “Aren’t they spreading pig manure across the road?”

My neighbour’s more visceral description of her fly-spotted sheets came closer to illustrating the concept of soul than the nun’s did. But, in all fairness to Sister Clare, the task was almost impossible. Not long after, I had my own vision of the soul while standing beside my mother in the local butcher shop. Holding the hem of her sleeve, I was taking it all in: the floor covered with sawdust, the blade-scarred bench, the honed cleaver and knives, the butcher dressed in shirt and tie under a crisp white lab coat, the chops and organ meat in the angled display case, and behind, on hooks against Victorian tile, the great carcasses. Thirty years later, I described the moment in a poem, “First Class”:

Standing in that butcher shop in small-town Mayo, I had no idea that such imagery would one day lead me up the garden path of words. Later again, and more judgmentally, I saw in this moment the raising of a white flag. Given a chance to speak up for my vision of the soul, I failed. A not unreasonable balk, I still think. After all, what did I know. The Church was the supreme authority on such matters. At six years old — the mouths of babes notwithstanding — how could I be expected to know more than my teacher? Also, corporal punishment was still in use. Stop hiding behind excuses, said a voice in my head. Eventually the same voice (ghost of the purple-faced pulpit thumper) argued that because I had failed to stand up for my vision of soul, it was forfeit. I had lost it; therefore, I was lost.

Each year, when I was a child, a carnival came to our town. It was a small operation, with bumper cars, chairoplanes, swinging boats, and a little arcade that had slot machines and other coin-operated games of chance. I had never played these kinds of games before and found them intriguing. I was especially attracted to a vertical pinball machine that paid out money if the ball found its way into the winning slot. A deposited coin bought three ball bearings — three chances to win. Surely, I reasoned, these were good odds. My eight‑year‑old self didn’t know any better.

I came from a family where money was always tight and budgeting was a way of life. My parents provided the necessities. In addition, I got a set amount of pocket change each week as payment for doing a small number of chores. With the exceptions of Christmas and my birthday, anything else I wanted — a fishing rod, a football — I bought myself. The only way I could afford big-ticket items was to save up. The same was true for the carnival. If I wanted to go there and enjoy what was on offer, I had to save my pennies. Which was what I did that year, beginning as soon as I saw the poster. For months, I deposited my weekly allowance in a jar. By the time the carnival arrived, I had what I considered a small fortune. Incredibly, my parents even gave me a little extra as I left to go up the town that first night.

I entered the fairground, walking over the already bruised grass. I could smell the diesel generators and the oily fumes of machinery. I could hear bumper cars rumble on steel flooring, see the trail of sparks above each car where the stem’s metal eyebrow brushed the mesh ceiling. Children were squealing on the swinging boats and flying chairs. Drawn by the smell of candy floss, I watched the vendor dip sticks into what looked like an empty washing machine, pulling pink cumulus clouds out of the ether. Maybe I saw some of my friends in the games tent. Maybe I was just drawn by the brilliant colours of the slot machines. Either way, I went inside. It wasn’t long before I came to a stop before the vertically aligned pinball game.

It was a mechanical device, with no bells or whistles and no flashing lights or electronics of any kind. Maybe it was the simplicity of its design that led me to believe that I could master it. Everything about it was alluring. Even dropping money into the slot brought satisfaction: the clink of the coin deepened to a resonant clunk as the machinery engaged it, drawing it deep into the interior. I placed my hand on the plunger, pulled down until I felt the spring contract, the tension increase. The first ball dropped into the firing chamber. I let go and the ball shot vertically up a silver track, then hard right across the inside of the case. I felt a simultaneous release and quickening in my body. But that smooth action and precise trajectory were completely at odds with what happened next, when the ball fell into the cabinet. Once inside, the bearing bounced and ricocheted between obstacles as it made its way toward the bottom, where it disappeared into a series of slots, only one of which paid out. A winning shot deposited a handful of coins into a little metal font. Soon I was mesmerized by everything about this game.

The hook was the first part of the operation. Drawing back on the plunger and firing the ball seemed tantalizingly within my control. Intuition told me that this was where I would win or lose. The amount of tension I pulled into the spring would determine the speed and route of the ball. After each winning pull and release, I tried to retrieve from muscle memory the precise amount of force I had used. Each time, I felt sure I could replicate it. The second part of the operation stood in stark contrast to the first. Different laws applied once the ball bearing entered the cabinet. Randomness and chaos vied with gravity. The hare-brained flight of the ball was exciting to watch, but it also jangled my nerves. It soon shot my theories about force, torque, and intention full of holes. It mocked the notion that I was ever in control.

The longer I played, the more I became one with this mechanical device. Winning made me egotistical and self-congratulating. I was that spring-loaded plunger precisely calibrating each outcome. I was a machine. But as my winnings disappeared and my initial stake evaporated, I felt increasingly desperate. I resisted the notion that there was no consistent way to win. There had to be some calculable relation between the first and second parts of the operation. It couldn’t be that the randomness and chaos of the second part erased all mastery of the first. It wasn’t so much that the game was rigged; it was the nature of the game.

It took me less than an hour that first night to lose my months of savings. I was shocked. Something had happened to me that I did not understand. An injustice had been perpetrated, and it had happened in plain sight. If anyone noticed, they didn’t say. One minute my pockets bulged with coins, and the next I was stony broke. I stood outside the games tent asking people for spare change. My sister saw me and reported this fact to my parents. They were waiting for me when I got home. They asked me if what she had said was true. They didn’t seem angry so much as concerned. I denied everything. They didn’t press the matter. Instead, they issued an order prohibiting me from going to the carnival again that year. Fine by me, I said. Who would want to go to that stupid carnival anyway?

The truth was I was deeply ashamed. Sick with myself, confused about what had happened, grieving the loss of all my hard-earned savings. I didn’t know it at the time, but that experience opened new depths in my inner life. Out of this wavering underworld came the goldfish.

Grief is often associated with soul. Loss stirs up depths in feeling, often lifting strange images into the conscious mind. In my fifties, grieving the death of both my parents, I found myself — psychically speaking — in troubled waters once again. One day, on a visit to a shopping mall in St. John’s, I noticed that a travelling carnival had set up in the parking lot. Feeling sentimental, I stopped my car near the miniature Ferris wheel to listen to the sounds and watch the comings and goings. After a few minutes, a little girl walked past, holding her father’s hand. He was carrying in his other hand a plastic sleeve in which I could see a single goldfish. I remembered that I had always wanted a goldfish, but given my history with carnivals and games of chance, I knew better than to try my luck. Which must have been why, a short time later, I emerged from the mall’s pet shop the excited owner of both a goldfish and a goldfish bowl. Walking back to my car, I kept pausing, lifting the bag to eye level to check on the welfare of my new friend. Fins flickering, mouth going pop, pop, pop, it looked shyly back at me. When the bag twirled, the thick seam lent distortion. It strobed around the fish, making it Mr. Ordinary one second and Mr. Monstrous the next. Its colour flared from gold to illuminated clementine.

Back home, as directed, I filled the bowl with treated tap water and placed the bagged goldfish in it. Once the temperature evened out, I tipped the contents of the bag into the bowl, adding a few flakes of dried food. A few days later, I bought a plastic kelp plant, some colourful pebbles, a miniature treasure chest. I was supposed to change the water every week, which I did at first. But soon that became every other week. Then a month went by. Green nibs of algae developed on the sides of the bowl. Over the next few weeks, I watched as they elongated into filaments that wove together into a dirty wig that steeped the water into pea soup. My prize was no longer visible. Occasionally I glimpsed in my peripheral vision a burnish or, startlingly upon closer inspection, a disembodied eye. It seemed to plead with me — to ask for oblivion. This earnest appeal my squeamishness found reason to deny: even a heretic knew it wouldn’t be Christian to clap poor Albert Finny between two decorative water-rolled bricks or to crack him under my boot heel on the back concrete step.

So I decided instead to flush — an idea that promised to be clean but turned out to be anything but, philosophically. No sooner had I depressed the toilet handle than I understood that goldfish light, cast into subterranean darkness, would draw slitherers. They would find my goldfish both defenceless and delicious. Unless, in their near blindness, they read its dazzling presence as a threat, as though it were a bacterial lantern lure dangling before A‑list portcullis teeth. Maybe my goldfish’s unexpectedness, its alien quality, would prove to be its best defence. Slowly there arose in me a conviction that those foul sewer waters, Styx-like in their coolness, might not be lethal to my fish — might even be beneficial to its development. Unconstrained, it might grow out of bounds.

A possible proof of this eventuality arrived some years later. Browsing the Hamilton Spectator online, I was lured by a piece about hundreds of goldfish that had found their way into the harbour and were thriving in Lake Ontario. The specimen in the accompanying picture was unbelievable: it took two blue-rubber-gloved hands just to hold it. Freakish, awesome, mesmerizing. It occurred to me then that soul was never meant to be seen, only to be come upon by chance. After which mind found reason to disbelieve and body pronounced it as invasive.