A Minor Chorus: A Novel

by Billy-Ray Belcourt

I’d been experiencing life as a problem of form: it is difficult to live in a world that corrodes freedom.

I wanted to take a sledgehammer to the past to let in the shimmer of a light I didn’t know was there all along.

If I admired my own abundances, my own little rebellions against subjugation, I reasoned, I could learn to be as alive as possible.

They’re streets in the same city, and sometimes they intersect. I think I’m already planted at that intersection. I’m already under its streetlights.

River seemed to have access to a wisdom I’d only ever stumble onto.

Where I stood on the spectrum could change from one hour to the next. Usually I felt everything all the time.

I write because I’ve read and been moved into a position of wonder. I write because I’ve loved and been loved.

My anxieties weren’t just about writing but living; the two had become enmeshed.

On dating apps, I sometimes asked men to describe the texture of their grief.

On my couch, surrounded by wobbly towers of books about loneliness and state-sanctioned oppression, we talked for an hour about how I thought the body was a human invention, a ruse, a story that’s easy to digest.

I decided instead he meant something like the act of hanging oneself up to dry forever. He was speaking for those who felt water-damaged by the world.

What if I’m a beautiful wound people dance inside of?

“Rusty” was the only word I had for the effect of having a body with wounds that aren’t recognized as wounds.

A novel is a body of water from which I frantically wanted to drink.

I decided that if I were a word it would be “grieve,” and it would be sprawled across my forehead, as both a demand and a self-description.

My novel, then, would be a kind of literary ethnography of sadness and hope, of constraint and possibility.

All the while people resisted, loudly and quietly, but always creatively.

It is we who experience aliveness as both inescapable and a shimmering impossibility.

If there isn’t time or space to account for or to avow with bewilderment and frustration and joy the emotional fabric of one’s life, to assert one’s enmeshment in a narrative of humanness that continues to unfold, where does that language go, where does it pile up? Inside us, as routinized as oxygen? Or is it like dust, a porous, vulnerable, almost unperceivable film covering everything? In one’s mouth, would it taste like the earth?

Blades of grass rebelliously sprung through the cobblestone underfoot.

Perhaps there’s a kind of freedom in this, to be rid of the demands of personality and subjectivity and given over to a grammar of intimacy that’s plural, undeniably worldly, against loneliness.

Or was it that we’d never stopped running, that we couldn’t distinguish between being alive and living furtively anymore?

All she’d done these last few years was live inside his anguish.

She loved him as if that were all one needed to make a good life.

There’s a difference between infamy and reverence, I wanted to say to Mary, but I figured she already knew, instinctively, that only the living sweat over semantics.

It seemed that whatever Jack did to try to be less encumbered by the world, the world would retaliate, lashing out with equal or greater force.

Which means we are half-truths; we are where the boundary of the real intersects with that of the unreal.

What were two brown boys dancing in the forests of northern Alberta but glistening accidents, lowercase letters scribbled down for no one to see, that somehow, against all odds, came to life? What was I if not a disobedient blur?

Suddenly I became the family’s writer and, in this, its historian, its coroner.

I had turned his grief and anger public and it isn’t always easy to forgive someone for doing so.

He had to do alone one of the unavoidable demands our humanness makes of us: submit to the indeterminacy of our feelings, allow them to govern us, however terrifying it is to do so.

I felt obligated not to the recent past, the one I had just abandoned, but instead to a fantasy from another life.

Light pooled between us like a stain on the carpet.

But just as we don’t get to choose who we love, as the saying goes, I don’t think we get to choose which kinds of language envelop us like another layer of skin.

All faces are still-drying paintings, I thought, when glimpsed from both ends of a long decade.

A group of clichés is a reason to live,

Even his grief was a lighthouse to a boy whose future had no shape to it.

Maybe early on I determined I didn’t have to live, Michael said, in a plangent tone, I just had to be alive.

I knew what he meant. What is inside a letter if not light?

to mention a history of tears often had the effect of bringing someone to tears.

Do we make ourselves into tragedians trying to accrue proof of our aliveness in retrospect?

Somewhere between love and loss we pitch a tent from which we only look backward.

he convinced himself he was a stray bullet that silence had clenched between its teeth.

If a home were a monument to what you lost or were losing out on, wouldn’t you run away?

Is that bizarre? Michael asked. That such a brief experience of love was too much?

How could anyone hold such a jagged memory up to the light and not wince?

We all begin with emptiness, he argued: an empty name, an empty house, an empty life.

He said he doesn’t ruminate on what his life could have been. It’s his small act of refusal, his silent rebellion.

It was like a bird’s wings rattling against a cage—a beautiful and terrible melody I suspected he would eventually die to.

Two nameless men rattling around in the dark sometimes just made each other dimmer and dimmer.