Read Part 1 here.
Read Part 2 here.
Part Three of Three: ‘What are we to them?’ he asked.
I have not read many love stories. I have been told that there are a few out there, the infamous ones telling love as the beginning of a tragedy, as if simple human connections had grand designs. They do not. Two people meet and believe that their lives spiral around each other to reach the same conclusions, not realizing that we are often on outbound trajectories—that in coming closer we set ourselves up to be whisked farther away. Margaret was on such an outbound spiral, our interaction more a feature of our ephemeral proximity than of a universal conspiracy. Love was not a tragedy: it was not much of a thing to be much of anything.
‘That is deep,’ said Bond, who had, over time, taken charge of correcting what he called a depressing shade of grey in me. ‘We need to fix you, Grinns, and we will start with how you pronounce my name. It is Bond, James Bond, not Blonde.’
Every week, he appeared in a new avatar, showing me the way through his new book or movie script. He remained largely the same though, confident, dramatic and with a penchant for proving his perspective to me.
‘Look at Holmes,’ he said. ‘If you think he is one guy at one time, you are wrong. What makes him such a great character is that he is constantly being thought up as a different guy. He is evolving like that.’
And indeed he was. The first Holmes I knew was a man sure of himself, one who had been in the business long enough to know what a character could expect from being a newspaper comic hero. Not a lot, he would say, except the rigours of maintaining a certain expression for prolonged periods, on the off-chance that some curious reader took a particular interest in your face. When the New Artists took over, he had come in as a more jittery character, his persona wrecked by too much doubt, too little hope, talking about how a character needed to maintain their characterhood both within and outside the printed walls we lived in. And when the Artist’s were being laid off and he was reborn from his archives, we saw a much older Holmes than we remembered him to be, more cynical about the meanings of our existence, so that we wondered how someone reclaimed from the past could have been so transported into the future.
‘That is exactly it!’ Bond explained. ‘We always change, regardless of whether we are brought back from our archives. Nothing stays the same.’
‘Nothing stays the same’, I had repeated over and over to myself, pulled back to the moment when I had walked up to the Atlantic and knocked at a cover.
‘Margaret, will you come with me to Bedford and Kings?’ I had planned to ask her.
And she would smile, the familiar crinkles at the edge of her hazel eyes making deep fissures in my heart, and say yes, or no, or maybe, or anything that made her say something after all those months.
But the cover had opened to something else, to someone else who was not Margaret but claimed to be her. ‘Hello Grinns’, she had said, an unfamiliar smile forced on an unfamiliar face.
‘You. You are not her at all!’
‘Oh’, she smiled, waving her dismissing hands, her words appearing as unrestricted text below her. ‘I see what you mean. I am a reimagination, if you will, still Margaret but not the Margaret you knew.’
‘But… But, do you remember?’
‘Not quite’, she giggled, ‘I am her but very, very different. I was not a natural progression, you see, so I mean, I am not the exact same character, so I, I do not know.’
‘Oh, okay,’ I say, my heart suddenly a lot heavy for me to carry around.
‘I am sorry if I misled you, you know. It was interesting when I heard I was asked out to coffee. I did not mean to.’
‘Ok.’
‘I would understand, you know, if you were to not be too inclined for a date.’
‘Ok.’
And we stood there, silent, on the tip of our toes balancing ourselves on a thin line between desperation and despair, afraid to veer too much either way. At length, I left, trudging back to my book, slipping into a box and waiting there a while, until the sun came up and the people came in, and no one could talk about what had happened the night before.
Bond saw in me that which I could not. ‘You, Grinns, will make it big’, he boomed through a speaking action-figure near his silent books. ‘There is more to you than nostalgia. People will eat you up on the silver screen and ask for some more.’
‘You think so?’
‘I know so.’ he said, and I was catapulted that moment onwards into an upward spiral. Someone told someone that I resonated with the youth, and I appeared on tee-shirts and coffee-mugs and banners. ‘Nothing stays the same’, I repeated to myself, before I entered the 35mm screens, and while I blinked on and off websites. I was evolving, changing for the better, attaining that height of characterhood that not many could attain but everybody aspired towards, if Bond was to be believed. Very soon, I sat as an action figure on Aisle 23, rows of me sandwiched between rows of Batmen and rows of Bonds.
‘How does it feel, Grinns?’ Bond had asked, grinning widely.
And I had said, ‘Ok’, because it was all just, truthfully, quite alright.
Calvin had not evolved, his best self preserved eternally into a coupled sketch with Hobbes, their fingers stretching their lips into smiles bigger than their faces could carry, challenging the absent photographer to get them to take life seriously. And I often thought if they felt that they were limited in time and culture, if they thought they were worth due to nostalgia and the unflattering tendency of a fluttering heart to hold on to familiar panels. But I could never bring myself to it, they seemed too happy to be burdened with these questions, too innocent to deliberate upon the ramblings of a lonely man. They were also the only characters I knew untouched by change.
And just like that, for the first time in a century, I was exhausted. The Artists who make us seldom realize that we live on long after they perish. We might not want to be picked up and reimagined or evolved. We might want to retreat in time, go back to known destinations, known companions and be sure that we will reach known experiences, that our archives, at least, unlike our lives, will be untouched by time. ‘What are we to them?’ I asked no one. ‘What are we to them?’ I wondered, floating through life unhooked, unhinged.
I have not read a lot of love stories. I believe that there is little chance that two spirals meet. I think love is not much of a thing to be much of anything.
But once a while, I like to hope.
I like to hope that on a warm May day, a lovely May day, indeed a Shakespearean May day, the smell of a strong coffee would arouse us out of a deep sleep and we would find our old frames stuck to windows in a cafe at the corner of Bedford and Kings. And I would walk up to that intersection in Dover, as confident now as nervous I had then been. I dream that we would sit on a bench, she and I, and talk about change and permanence, about humour and adventure, and possibly about romance and companionship. She could tell me where she was spawned when she disappeared from the pages we shared and I would tell her about Aisle 23 and maybe we could laugh a little, cry a little and spend much of our time silent yet communicating.
‘Did you really say that day that I had hazel eyes?’
‘Yes. In our greyscale lives, you have to notice the colour you are offered.’
‘And here I was, thinking you had complimented my stroller more passionately than my eyes.’
And we would take a moment to laugh.
Strangely though, Margaret, in these dreams is not the adventurous lady I once met on the sheets I knew. She has become, slowly, surely, taller, her voice deeper and her words more certain. Over the few months that I had known Margaret from the Atlantic cover, she had come across as a wonderful person, whose laughter appeared more genuine than the impulses I had imagined much of my former love to be composed of. And one day, she has promised, we would look for her old panel where she had stood facing away into the distance.
‘I am unsure, Margaret, which way do you prefer from this intersection? Left or right?’
‘Why, Mr Grinns, you seem to be adept at spotting colours, but less so at guessing directions.’
And then I would confess, perhaps choking on my words, ‘We made it here, Margaret, though it seemed for a while we would not.’
And she would say maybe, ‘I also had my doubts for a long time’, her way of telling me that it was okay to have had doubts. That it was important that when we met, that both of us had tried hard to make this meeting happen. That it was important to have had hope, and so I hope.
I hope, and in this dull, grey, cold city of a million possibilities, a love story might just happen.
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