Free Love Enough by Dionne Brand Page A

from her last job. She’d emptied the perfume, which she thought stank, and filled the bottle with Clorox. It wasn’t very large but it was elegant and she hoped people appreciated that elegance: there were two Greek women reaching for a god on the bottle. Sibyl had been fired for its disappearance, though they could not prove she had taken it. The world is unfair, she told June, they did not prove it, yet they fired me. They should have to prove it.
    Magnesium and mercury. June hoped no place was mad enough to sell the woman mercury. Magnesium was harmlessenough, though she didn’t know what it did in great quantity. Perhaps if Sibyl remained preoccupied with a search for mercury it could replace the Clorox fetish. She might let the bleach fall away as not effective, and of course no one in their right mind would sell Sibyl mercury.
    Perhaps it was memory loss Sibyl wanted. Mercury would do that, displace all the good minerals in the body and induce memory loss. Or perhaps Sibyl wanted to slow down the energy, the adrenaline she devoted to cleaning and disinfecting herself and the world from whatever disease she thought they had. Sibyl saw the invisible diseases that were quite possibly there.
    You never know who you’ll meet in this city. Apart from the constant construction and reconstruction occasioned by winter, there are the appearances and disappearances of people. One could, as is often the case, disappear into someone else. One could become totally invisible. And so Sibyl disappeared, became invisible after that last visit. June looked for her and waited for her. She prided herself on knowing the city, but Sibyl knew it much better and disappeared. June checked the shelters and the vans that served the homeless. She went to Lansdowne and Bloor, the corner where she’d first met Sibyl, where Sibyl had first hinted at the realities of dreams. Once or twice she thoughtshe caught a glimpse of her, but hurrying quickly to meet the figure it would turn out not to be Sibyl. Who knows who she may have disappeared into. Perhaps she had become a dental assistant, to find mercury. Perhaps she found the door to the key and walked into another life.
    Sibyl’s dream keys had stayed in June’s mind and puzzled her. There were three gold keys, Sibyl had said. June wondered if they stood for time or simply the letter “k,” which needs three gestures. June could not believe her own ineptness. She had tried to play about in someone else’s life without having the wherewithal let alone the imagination. People think they can save other people but really they’re trying to save themselves. Now June understood that she had to figure out what part of herself she had been trying to save when Sibyl approached her.
    June hates referencing her own biography, she thinks that when people do this they draw false parallels. Her mother was a cheerful woman. A woman who did not want to know very much except that life was good. And so June never told her of meeting her father on the veranda of that identical house on another street. Later June abstracted that her mother probably knew, but did not need it confirmed: it would have spoiled her mother’s sense of goodness. And still later June thought, why must such arrangements alwaysappear as betrayal? It was a betrayal by her father, of course, but only in the context of totalizing it as a betrayal; that is, of having that set of emotional formalities laid out in that particular way; that teleology, if you will, of domesticity.
    June doesn’t believe in a codex of childhood events that adjudges the state of one’s present life. She knows this is the way people think they come to “understand” things about a person: this is what they share in coffee shops and in bed together, and this is what they extrapolate into friendship and familiarity. Not her. She rarely offers her lovers a catalogue of her past or her childhood. Now is now, she thinks. Here is here.
    But perhaps she had caused