Uncle Adelard squinted at me, then nodded his head in satisfaction. “Perfect. A perfect fade.”
“Why do you call it ‘the fade’?”
“Because you have faded away. Like color gone from an old piece of cloth …”
I shivered with the cold. As I hugged my arms to my chest for protection, I could feel my shirt, the cotton fabric and the buttons.
“My clothes,” I said. “They're in the fade. You can't see them, can you?”
“No. Anything within the immediate energy of your flesh, even a wristwatch or a ring, goes into the fade with you. But anything you touch or pick up will not be affected, will still be visible.” His eyes narrowed. “You're cold, aren't you?”
“Yes,” I said. “As if it's suddenly winter.”
“The cold remains with you during the fade. But after the first few minutes, you adjust to it, get used to it. And remember this—it won't always be hard to go into the fade. Yes, there will always be the pause and the flash of pain—but this happens so quickly that sometimes you'll slip into the fade easy, the way a knife slips into a sheath. …”
“How long does the fade last?” I asked.
“As long as you want,” he said. “Until you force it away.”
“I'm afraid, Uncle Adelard.”
“Of what?”
“Everything. Moving. Walking. Right now, I'm afraid I might lose my balance and fall down if I try to walk. Does that sound crazy?”
He shook his head, smiling. “It's what happens the first time. Trying to walk on legs you can't see. How do you know they are really there? But trust me, they are. Trust yourself, too.”
I looked down and saw nothing. Only space. Although my body retained its weight, I felt a sensation of lightness, as if my body could soar through the air.
“Take a step or two,” he suggested.
Those steps were like a child's first steps, faltering, wobbly, my body unbalanced, in danger of falling, as if I were walking a tightrope and could not see the rope. I placed my hand on the back of a chair for support, surprised at the solidity of wood in my grasp. As Uncle Adelard promised, the chair remained visible.
Walking tentatively across the room, I gained confidence. Went to the window and looked out at the world of Eighth Street, a world that seemed very far away. I made my way cautiously, dragging my feet a bit, toward my uncle. Stood a few feet away from him.
“Some precautions, Paul. Sometimes, the fade comes without invitation. There'll be a warning—your breath will suddenly become short, which means the pause is about to begin. You won't have much time before the fade begins. If you are in public, you must get away, seclude yourself as soon as possible.
“The fade will also take away your energy. After the fade, you will feel wrung out, tired. Not so much at your age, perhaps, but as you grow older. The longer you are in the fade, the bigger toll it will take on your body.”
He held up his hand, as if to detain me, perhaps sensing the panic that was growing in me.
“One more rule,” he said. “Stay away from cameras. Avoid having your picture taken when you are not in the fade. Cameras will not capture your image. Other times you will appear on film. There are many things I can't explain to you about the fade, Paul, and this is one of them. This camera thing is maybe something to do with light and how it affects film. I don't know. So, you must avoid having your picture taken….”
“That picture in the album, Uncle. You told me you played a prank,” I reminded him.
“Yes, I did. That time. I forced the fade just before the photographer took the picture. But I found out later, by accident, that I did not emerge on film….”
Standing before him in that strange new state, present but absent, transparent, my head spinning with his rules and precautions, I wanted to cry out: Get me out of this, take away the fade, let me wake up from this dream, this nightmare.
As if he heard my silent plea, he said: “Come back, Paul. Leave the fade.”
I pressed forward against the invisible barrier, my hands curled into fists at my side, felt a force pushing against me, held my position, and I was in the pause again, caught in that strange place between darkness and light, my breath taken away, panic racing along my flesh. And then the flash of pain, as if my body were a taut wire through which bolts of electricity passed, unendingly, excruciatingly. At the point where I had gathered myself to scream, the pain fled, the pause ended, air filled my lungs and the cold vanished.
I was suddenly whole again, restored, intact, visible, here and now, Paul Moreaux, in the second-floor tenement of my grandfather's house on Eighth Street. Everything the same as before.
But not really the same again.
Never to be the same again.
“Why did you choose me?” I asked as my uncle Adelard and I walked the streets of Frenchtown, nodding hello to people as they passed, pausing to watch Mrs. Pontbriand hanging shirts and pants on her clothes reel, as if putting invisible children—children in the fade—out to dry.
“I didn't choose you, Paul,” my uncle said as we crossed Seventh Street.
“But you said you came home this time because of me,” I pointed out with whatever logic I was able to summon. For a week, since his first revelation on the piazza, I had been in turmoils of thought and emotion. He had told me that day to be patient, that he would explain it all in due time. He asked me to trust him completely, to keep the fade a secret between us.
During that week, I had kept to myself, reading books, taking long walks to the Meadow, avoiding Pete Lagniard especially, afraid my secret would burst out of me if we talked. I stayed away from our usual hangouts, ignored the urgent messages he sent me in the soup can on the pulley. My final insult had been my refusal to go to the Plymouth that afternoon for the final chapter of The Ghost Rider when we'd learn the identity of that phantom cowboy who galloped across the prairie. Incredulous and then angry, he cried out, “The hell with you.” He stalked away without looking back while I watched his departure with regret, knowing I had had no choice but to let him go.
Uncle Adelard had chosen that afternoon to initiate me into the fade, borrowing the apartment of my uncle Octave and aunt Olivine in my grandfather's house while they went on a picnic to Lake Whalom.
Now we turned into Mechanic Street, past the houses to which I had once delivered papers whose tenants were now Bernard's customers.
“I came back because I knew it was your time for the fade,” he said.
“How did you know?”
He sighed, placing his arm around my shoulder. “Something in the blood. Something that passes through the generations. I look at you, Paul, and see myself as I was back on the farm in St. Jacques. I asked the same questions of my uncle Theophile, who revealed the fade to me the way I revealed it to you.”
My shirt was damp with perspiration from the heat and my overalls clung to my body.
“Theophile was a commercial traveler, a fancy name for salesman in those days. He made his home in Montreal and visited us once in a while on the farm for the holidays. Les ßtes. But he arrived this time in July and stayed a few days. One afternoon he followed me to the outer fields and showed me the fade. …”
Dust danced in the sunlight, rising from the street that had been tarred and covered with gravel earlier in the week.
“My uncle Théophile told me all that he knew about the fade. He said it passes from one generation of the Moreauxs to another, always from an uncle to a nephew. And how it all began a long time ago….”
Anticipating my question, he asked: “How long? Who knows? Back to the time of Christ, maybe. Uncle Théophile traced it for me as far as his knowledge took him. He was initiated in the fade by his uncle Hector when he was eight years old. That was in 1878,1 figured later. And Uncle Hector learned about the fade from his uncle, a man named Philippe, back around 1840 or so, according to my calculations.”
We left the paved section of Mechanic Street and headed down the hill toward the city dump and
the cemetery.
“I spent only that one afternoon with Théophile and the poor man tried to tell me all he knew, which wasn't much. There were big gaps he couldn't fill in. He said Hector told him of a peasant in France, a Moreaux, who was a fader. This Moreaux sailed on a ship to New France, which is what Canada was called then. This was sometime in the middle of the seventeenth century. Do you see how far back the fade reaches, Paul?”
Arriving at the house of Mr. Lefarge, we paused in the heat and glimpsed the desolate tombstones in the cemetery. I followed my uncle as he traversed the narrow road barely wide enough for funeral processions.
“So what we know of the history of the fade starts with that peasant who came to Canada. We can guess the rest, of course. He settled in Quebec, farmed the land, raised a family, had descendants. You and me. Philippe and Hector and Théophile before us. He instructed his nephew in the fade as he had been instructed, as Fm instructing you.”
We rested on a stone bench, the heat of the sun passing through the fabric of my overalls, stinging my skin. Uncle Adelard leaned back, thrust out his legs, and closed his eyes. Lines of weariness were in his face, like old claw marks.
“I wish I had a lot more to tell you, Paul. More history, more rules and regulations. Answers to all the questions that must be in your mind. But that is all I have to offer, sorry to say.”
He opened his eyes and looked at me. “Maybe you'll find out more about the fade yourself in time to come. Maybe you'll write about it. Not for others but for people like us, faders, as a guide for them. We do not have many consolations….”
The sadness I had come to identify with him was there in his eyes. Where was the sly trickster my father had told stories about? This wan, weary man did not resemble my father or my other uncles. Had the fade done this to him? Would the fade do this to me?
“Come on,” he said, rising.
I followed him across grassy paths, between tombstones of all shapes and sizes, crosses and angels, some ornate and others merely slabs of slate.
He stopped at a corner lot where an impressive granite stone stood, the name Moreaux chiseled on its front. A small square of granite had been planted beside the big stone. Daisies surrounded the square, fresh and bright. The name Vincent had been carved into the stone.
Uncle Adelard knelt down, made the sign of the cross, his lips moving in prayer. I also knelt, and prayed for the soul of my uncle Vincent. It was strange to think of him as Uncle Vincent. He was only twelve years old when he died. I remembered my father's anger because Uncle Adelard had left town before Vincent's funeral.
We rose to our feet. When I glanced at Uncle Adelard, his face looked misshapen.
“The grass is nice here,” I said, needing to say something.
“Vincent died because of me,” Uncle Adelard murmured, his voice so low that I barely understood him.
“Let's leave this place,” he said wearily, his hand on my shoulder as if my body were a cane to support him as we walked away.
less me, Father, for I have sinned,” I whispered in the darkened confessional, the words hissing against the screen that separated me from Father Gastineau. I had chosen him for my confession because he was the youngest of the three curates at St. Jude's. “It has been June since my last confession. I received absolution and made my penance.”
The old formula completed, I hesitated, unsure of myself despite my careful plans. To gain time, I called upon my usual ‘start-off’ sin, the venial sin to ease my way into the more important transgressions. “I lost my temper, three times.”
One of the church's huge doors closed gently, almost with a sigh. Otherwise, all was silence.
I had chosen late afternoon, the final moments of the confessional hours, to make my move, waiting in a distant pew for the penitents to thin out. I had also argued silently with myself, wondering why I was there in the first place. Since Armand and I had been successful in deceiving our mother about confession earlier in the summer, she had not brought up the subject. Yet, as August dwindled, the sudden cool nights hailing the imminent end of summer, I felt a need to confess and had made a total of all my sins. The total was overwhelming. Get rid of them and die in peace if you are struck by lightning, I told myself.
Father Gastineau cleared his throat and I swallowed painfully, bringing my lips within an inch of the screen, and said:
“I have touched the breast of a female, Father.”
“A female?” the priest asked, his voice muffled, as if he were trying to strangle a cough.
I had thought long and hard about how I would confess my sin. I could not say that I had touched a girl's breast since that would be a lie. Priests had an uncanny way of knowing whether the penitents were young or old. How could I confess that I had touched the breast of a grown woman without opening the door to a lot of questions? Finally, I had settled on female.
“Yes,” I said, feeling my Adam's apple jumping. “A female.”
“And this female, how many times did you touch her breast?”
It was always “how many times,” the inescapable arithmetic of confession. “Once,” I said.
“Only once?”
“Yes.”
“What happened then?”
“Nothing.”
“You did not go—further?”
“No.” My lungs burned. I had been holding my breath.
“If you see this female again, do you plan to touch her as you did before?”
“No,” I said fervently.
Pause. My fate hanging in that pause, teetering as if on a high wire.
“Anything more?” he finally asked.
My first instinct was to say no and end this torture, but I had come this far after all these agonizing weeks and did not want to turn back.
“Yes.” I lowered my head as I said the words I had rehearsed countless times: “Father, I must confess a sin that I'm not sure is a sin.”
A sigh, almost a moan, came from the darkness on the other side of the screen. Had I made a mistake, waited too late in the day for confession? Was he too tired after hours of being besieged by sins to deal with a complicated question? But what else could I have said? I did not know whether the fade was a sin. In the shed or in the cellar, I had practiced fading, learned to endure the frightening limbo of the pause and the excruciating flash of pain. I had learned to absorb the cold, as well. After a while I was able to slip in and out of the fade easily, staying unseen for longer periods of time, my body becoming accustomed to it, the way eyes become accustomed after a while to the dark. The experience of the fade was always disappointing, however. The fade did not provide the freedom it promised. I had the power to pass through the streets unnoticed, to spy on people, listen to private conversations, enter stores and homes and public buildings, unseen, undetected. But for what purpose? Steal from Lakier's or the five-and-ten downtown? Sneak into the Plymouth without buying a ticket? These acts were too petty for the fade. I did not want to steal. Anyway, how could I take anything from a store when the thing I took remained in sight? And where would I hide it later? I was not a thief, did not plan to be one.
“Tell me about this sin that you are not sure is a sin,” Father Gastineau said.
I tried to gauge his attitude. Did he sound impatient, angry, tired? Or receptive?
“Don't be afraid,” he added, more gently.
“Is it a sin to spy on people?” I asked. “To watch them when they don't know you're there?”
“Are you a peeping torn?” His voice cracked, like a piece of wood snapping.
“No,” I said. But perhaps I had been. “Yes,” I amended. “I spied on people. Saw them … doing things they should not be doing….”
“Listen, my boy,” he said, so close to my face that I felt the breeze of his breath. “I will not ask you what you saw. If you saw a sin being committed, then you have the necessity to remain quiet. If you tell others about it, then you become a part of that sin. The privacy of people is sacred to them. If what they do in
private is a sin, then it is up to them to confess. You must do no further spying. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said. But I did not understand. Was spying a sin or not? It seemed to me that he had avoided the issue, had not given me an answer. I sagged with relief, however, had escaped an explosion of anger, and I dropped my chin to my laced fingers on the small confessional shelf.
“Anything more?” the priest asked, brusque suddenly, stirring in his chair.
“No,” I said. Hadn't he heard enough?
“For your penance, you will recite one rosary. For the rest, you will keep away from this female and not touch her again. And you will stop spying. Now, say a good act of contrition….”
Only later, running homeward, face lifted to the cool breeze of a waning summer afternoon, did I realize that I had forgotten to confess my other great sins: the impure thoughts at night and the spasms of ecstasy they brought.
Would the sinning never stop?
“Hey, Pete,” I called. “Pete … are you coming out?”
No answer from inside his tenement.
“Aw, come on, Pete,” I cried, listening to my voice echo back at me in the twilight, the neighborhood caught in after-supper stillness.
Again no answer, although I knew Pete was home and so were most of his family.
I kicked at the bottom step and drifted aimlessly toward the street. Twilight was smoothing the harsh edges of things, bringing with it an aching loneliness. I thought of the fade and how it had set me apart from the rest of the world, my world, Frenchtown. From my family. From Pete. He and I had barely communicated in the past two weeks. I had purposely avoided him at first and then he had stayed out of my way. At the beginning, I had been relieved that there were spaces between us. I had been dazzled by the fade, had had to find a way to live with it.
“What do you want?” Pete yelled, suddenly appearing at the window.
I shrugged. “Want an ice cream?” I called back. Lakier's still sold two-for-a-nickel cones and I had eight cents in my pocket.