Love Enough by Dionne Brand Page A

repeats. “Sunnyside,” he repeats again. The woman is brooding, so he is quiet. Every six months there’s an inspection on this car, he has to do this to keep the plates, then there’s the gas, then there’s the other driver, who is always crying about money as if Da’uud doesn’t have enough children of his own. Of course this is not what he would have done if there was any other way but there was no sense thinking about that. The heart is sore. Before you know it you’ve been driving a cab for ten years. The cab flies along the lake at the south of the city to Sunnyside.
    “Where in Sunnyside?” he says when they are near to Parkside Drive.
    “Just here,” the passenger says.
    “Here?”
    “Yes, here. The parking lot,” she says.
    He pulls into the parking lot. There are geese crossing the lot going toward the lake. Da’uud waits, the geese cross. He wishes he could come out of this cab and walk with the woman. She pays him, he sighs. It would change his life again to go walk with her. She waves to a man near a statue. Da’uud glimpses the man’s face. He doesn’t like it, it tears a sliver in his chest. He thinks, that man can kill someone. He has seen the faces of people who can kill people. The woman flutters toward the man. Da’uud leaves, saying to himself maybe he’s wrong, the things he knows are not useful. None of the things he knows has helped him to recover Bedri as a son, an obedient son whose life would redeem the choices a father makes.
    The lake oscillates like green-blue wet glass. What is in that lake, the woman leaving the taxi wonders. She wonders this the second after she sees the man’s face. After the taxi pulls out she walks towards him. She’s dyed her hair red for this meeting and she hopes he likes it. She’s met him here before. He always seems furious at seeing her even though he’s called her and begged her to come. Onceshe sees him she always, for an instant, regrets coming. But now she sees the lake and understands her attraction to him. She thinks, there is something turbulent there but she can’t see beneath the surface. Like looking in a mirror.
    The geese go about their daily life.
    The woman and the man walk toward each other expectantly, and then they turn together along the boardwalk toward the Humber bridge. All that they each had rushed to this appointment to say has evaporated. It has become inaudible or unspeakable. It walks between them, a slim column of molten air. They cannot reach through it to hold hands or embrace, its particles are prickled like small spinning blades. She has nothing to say to the man and the man has nothing to say to her. What is in that lake, the woman wonders again. She wishes she could see through its billowy green. A bird, red under the wings, flies across their path and the woman says, “Look!” She wants their meeting to be full of wonder so again she says, “Look!” She wants him to see the red underwings as an omen. But he ignores her. He doesn’t want to see anything beautiful. She tries to touch his arm, the spinning blades sting her and she withdraws, then she turns again, gripping his arm this time so that he stops, turns toward her grimacing, feeling the blades cut his wrists and his forearmmuscle, feeling himself a casualty of an event, though of what event he doesn’t know.
    He cannot fathom why he brought her here, why he wants to hurt her, why he wants to hurt himself, to crush something in himself. It is not love that brought him here, it is possession. It is not love that brought her here either, it is possession. It is so private, so sacred, so overwhelming, this possession, and it is malignant. Possession covers their heads, it is a tight band, a cupola of airless air. A covering so complete there is no world outside. Except she sees the billowing lake and she wants to dip her head into it, she sees a sign in the black bird with red underwings and she tries to show him. While the man is thinking that if he