LITMIR.BIZ

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office downtown, he inhales the smell of English breakfast tea and unscented soap. The odour of a longing for desire. This young woman, Sloan, she smells of desire itself.

      It’s not fair to notice that, he thinks.

      But it is true. And Emma’s morning smell is not unpleasant. Just empty of desire and filled with a wish for it to return. He wonders what he smells like now, especially to a young woman. To Sloan. Can she pick up the odour of his medications, the antiandrogens he was on for months and the Taxotere and prednisone he started this past week? Can she smell the biphosphonates he’s taking to keep his bones from breaking under the weight of his body, the morphine patches, the urine dripping from his bladder into the catheter and tube emptying into the bag hooked onto his chair? The bits of dried feces clinging to his ass? To Sloan he must smell like a hospital ward for chemically castrated old men dying of cancer.

      Tell me again why I came home from the hospital, he says to no one in particular.

      Malcolm says, Well, I imagine you’re a hell of a lot happier here. With Emma being close by, I mean. And everything that’s familiar.

      Fife says, There’s no more being happy or happier, Malcolm. He’d like to add—but doesn’t—that for him now there’s only more pain and less pain, more and less nausea and diarrhea, more and less dread, more and less fear. Along with more and less shame, anger, embarrassment, anxiety, depression. And more and less confusion. Forget happy and happier, he says.

      C’mon, Leo. Don’t talk like that, Malcolm says.

      I believe I can talk any damned way I want now.

      Yes, that’s true, you can. That’s why we’re here today. Right?

      Right.

      Sloan puts her headphones on, and the darkness swallows her.

      Where the hell is my wife? Fife asks the darkness. He can still smell Sloan.

      Right behind you, Emma says in her low smoker’s voice. Renée told me you wouldn’t do this unless I’m present. True?

      Mostly true. Maybe I’d do it, but differently. Very differently. If you weren’t here, I mean.

      Why? This is for posterity. I’m not posterity, she says and laughs. I’m your wife.

      It’s easier for me to know what to say and what not to say when I know who I’m talking to.

      You’re talking to Malcolm, she says. You’re making a movie.

      No! No, I’m not. Malcolm and Vincent and Diana and Sloan, they’re making a movie. They’re here to film and record me, so they can cut and splice my image and words together and make from those digitalized images and words a one- or two-hour movie that they sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Company so it can be resold to Canadian television viewers after I’m gone and before I’m forgotten. Malcolm and Diana won’t be listening to me and watching me. They’re too busy making a movie about me. I’m just the subject. Different thing. But if I know who I’m talking to, I can be more than a subject. That’s why I need you here.

      Emma asks Diana for some light so she can find someplace to sit.

      Sloan, Diana says, give us some light. But Sloan is listening to Fife through her headphones.

      Vincent reaches for a wall switch and flips on the ceiling light, and Fife sees that they have pushed all the furniture against the far wall opposite the blacked-out windows, making the living room seem as large and empty as a hotel ballroom. With all the furniture clustered in front of the fireplace and built-in bookshelves, the room feels tilted onto its side, as if they’re passengers on a cruise ship, and the ship has struck a reef and is listing and is about to go down. Fife suddenly feels nauseous. He’s afraid he’s going to vomit. The ship is sinking. All hands on deck. Women and children and sick old men first.

      Emma crosses to the pile of furniture, and the ship lists a few inches farther in that direction. She sits on the sofa by the wall and crosses her arms and legs.

      Be careful, Fife says to her.

      What? Careful of what?

      Nothing. Diana, please shut off the room lights. It’s disorienting. The spot’s okay, but I don’t want to see the room. Or be seen in it.

      Oh, c’mon, Leo, you look great, Diana says. Really, you do.

      Definitely, Malcolm says. You look great. Too bad we’re only going to shoot your beautiful, brooding bald head.

      The light goes out, and Fife is once again illuminated solely and from above by the Speedlite. The ship is levelled, and his nausea passes.

      You know the drill, Malcolm says. Ready?

      Yes. Ready as I’ll ever be. Or ever was.

      Ready, everyone? Vincent? Sloan?

      Yes.

      Yes.

      Diana?

      Yes.

      Malcolm says Fife’s name and the date, April 1, 2018, and location, Montreal, Quebec, and claps his hands once in front of Vincent’s FS7. The camera is attached to a tripod on a track that orbits the circle of light on the bare floor and stares at the featureless, flat-black side of Fife’s face, like the dark side of the moon. The unseen side is lit by the overhead spot. His silhouette has a molten golden edge, a penumbra surrounded by impenetrable black space. Malcolm is right, Fife still has a beautiful, brooding bald head. At least in profile. The illness and chemo have dissolved a quarter of his body, liquefying his flesh, pushing forward the long arc of his nose and his cheekbones and prominent chin and the plates of his skull. He looks like a polished Roman coin.

      For a few seconds everyone is silent, waiting for Malcolm’s first question. But suddenly Fife says that he’s going to answer a question that no one knows to ask today. Or no one is rude enough to ask. It was asked of him many times long ago and over the years, asked privately and in public and presumably answered truthfully and completely over and over, so to ask it yet again would be either stupid or insulting. And to ask it on this particular occasion would seem stupid or insulting or both, when in fact it is neither.

      The question, he says, is simply this: Why did you decide in the spring of 1968 to leave the United States and migrate to Canada?

      For nearly fifty years he has been answering that question, creating and reaffirming the widespread belief, at least among Canadians, that Leonard Fife was one of the more than sixty thousand young American men who fled to Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s in order to avoid being sent by the US military to Vietnam. Those sixty thousand men were either draft dodgers or deserters. For half a century Leonard Fife was believed to be a draft dodger. It’s what he claimed on the day he crossed the border from Vermont into Canada and asked for asylum. He’s claimed it ever since that day.

      The truth, however, as always, is more complicated and ambiguous. Therefore, consider the preceding as merely a preface. For here begins Malcolm MacLeod’s controversial film Oh, Canada. Although brilliantly shot and edited by MacLeod and produced by his wife Diana in the late Leonard Fife’s own manner, it is in some ways a disheartening, disillusioning film about Fife, one of Canada’s most celebrated and admired documentary filmmakers. Oh, Canada shocked and disappointed the millions of Canadians who admired Leonard Fife for being one of those sixty thousand Americans who fled north in the late 1960s to escape being sent by the American government to kill or die in Vietnam. While his filmed deathbed confession may have been cathartic for Fife himself, it has brought many Canadians to question their past and present national policy of offering asylum to so-called refugees. Refugees are people who have fled their countries because of a well-founded fear of persecution if they return home. They are assumed to have seen or experienced many horrors. A refugee is different from an immigrant. An immigrant is a person who chooses to settle permanently in another country. Refugees are thought to have been forced to flee. Leonard Fife claimed to be a refugee.

      2

      Fife is well aware that the seeds were

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