Extraordinary by David Gilmour

appreciatively upwards at the available roof beams. (I’m phrase-making here, but you know what I mean.)
    I buzzed her number. The glass door clicked open. I went up the elevator and down the hallway, which smelt, as always, of fragrant spices and large families. Behind one door, a shrill woman’s voice chanted to a stringed instrument as though she were in mourning for the recently dead. Behind other doors, animated voices rose and fell.
    Sally was wearing that green dress; her eyes carefully made up, cheeks lightly rouged, modest lipstick. She stood in the centre of the room, wobbling slightly on her crutches. It was clear that she was going out.
    â€œI’m going to see—” She named a Christian revivalist, a perpetually tanned preacher whose unconvincing heterosexuality and next-world promises I had watched off and on for years on television on those afternoons when a nicotine-and-bourbon hangover made an excursion outdoors something you put off until nightfall.
    It puzzled me, her going to a revival meeting. What on earth was she thinking? Or
was
she thinking? Sally was a rigorously intelligent woman, a bemused and articulate observer of the world, and for her to embrace the word of a bullshitter in an ice cream suit seemed tragic.
    What was she after, taking an expensive taxi downtown to Maple Leaf Gardens, sitting in the front row in a gleaming line of wheelchairs and crutches, paralyzed limbs and distorted smiles? Did it mean that my sister had arrived at such a point of desperation, such a degree of unhappiness that, like Pascal’s gamble about the existence of God, she had put her common sense on hold to embrace the possibility that this mincing Southern millionaire could lay his hands upon her useless legs and make them work?
    I didn’t ask. I was afraid, I suppose, of the answer. (How ungenerous I was in those days.) I simply took her down in the elevator and put her in the back of a taxi and waved as the red tail lights disappeared in the early evening darkness.
    Over the months, my thoughts sometimes returned to that revival meeting, to her standing in the middle of the room in her green dress and glancing away, ever so slightly, when she told me where she was going. I never thought of it, never, without a kind of sinking feeling. But recently I’ve undergone a change of mind. Of heart, perhaps. I now see that evening, her descent into the throng of wounded and broken and famished souls, as something different, as something deeply poignant: her gameness, her willingness to try, even with a smile,
anything
, for a last kick at everyday happiness. When I think of my cherished Sally, I always come back to this word:
heroic.
    (Do the dead forgive us, I wonder?)
    The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened. Sally emerged. She had clearly been thinking about something in there. She said, “Do you remember that television show Chloe worked on?”
    â€œThe imitation American police drama.”
    â€œYes, that’s the one.”
    â€œSure, I remember. Chloe thought it might be a way into the world of scriptwriting. ‘Remunerative but sterile,’ I told her that.”
    â€œBut it looked so promising there for a while. One minute she was bouncy, the next minute she was talking about leaving town.”
    â€œYou don’t know about this?”
    â€œDon’t be coy. Tell me.”
    â€œWell,” I said, a little archly, “I’ll put it this way: instead of writing dialogue like ‘Step
away
from the vehicle’ or ‘So what did the lab say?’ she ended up in bed with the director. He was married, naturally, a strutting little wizard who could have been a Martin Scorsese or a Tarantino—he had a terrific eye—but he simply couldn’t control his appetites for booze and cocaine and pretty assistants with clipboards, and ended up a big-shot director in the wastelands of Canadian dramatic television. And that
is
a tragedy.