TBT #99: Dedication

Courtney slouches in her chair, drinks coffee from a styrofoam cup in short sips, peering through wide-rimmed glasses at three words on her computer screen. She works in a tiny office with stark white walls and deep blue carpet that feels like fuzzy concrete. She doesn’t decorate much, her desk is covered in papers and pens and more papers. Her one indulgence is her “Kitty of the Day” calendar. Today, it’s a Siamese Cat standing on a skateboard, looking incredulously at the picture-taker as if to say “I’m not even going to humour you on this one.” Courtney just laughs and points at the caption, “Rebel Cat hits the Street.” She grins, waiting for me to return the expression, and then slyly peeks at tomorrow’s kitten.

You know Courtney. And I’m not saying that in some deep, metaphoric or otherwise illustrative sense. You literally know Courtney, as do a great number of people in this country, and even more around the world. If you read popular fiction, odds are you read a very personal, very obtuse, very meaningful message to her. Owen Blake, author of the now wildly successful (and recently available in paperback) novel Highway on the Clouds opened his book with a simple two-line dedication, aimed at a Courtney. The already notoriously tight-lipped author has been unwilling to go into detail about this Courtney and his relationship to her, but phone calls to friends, family members and former associates of Blake’s have all pointed towards this girl sitting with me.

Courtney, floating lightly from left-to-right in her office chair in half-spins, chewing on a pen, still intently focused on the words on her screen, is, as far as I can tell, the Courtney. All the evidence points to her, to this office, in this small town far away from everything that Owen Blake has come to know and value. For a moment I begin to doubt myself, bolstered by feelings of potential disappointment. This interview was to be with Owen Blake’s muse, his lost love, the person who shaped him into the writer he is today. Can that person really be this person, a girl who includes pictures of cats dressed up in funny costumes among her most favourite and treasured things?

But then she shatters my doubt, speaking while still not looking at me, barely acknowledging me: “You’re the first person to find me,” she says, her voice flat. “You want to know about me and Owen.”

The words on Courtney’s screen read “NO LEFT TURN.” She doesn’t like the phrasing; it’s awkward and rude. “And illogical,” she adds. “Because there is a left turn there, we just don’t want people to take it.”

Courtney has been designing road signs for the past seven years. It’s one of those jobs, she says, that people never even think of existing. We take for granted the signs we see every day, driving to work, the ones that so carefully help us avoid turning our cars into heaping masses of metal and fire. Courtney doesn’t like to give herself too much credit, but clearly has an enthusiasm for the work.

“Most people don’t even think of what goes into what I do. They see a sign, they obey it, and that sign is out of their head, but so much rides on that moment of understanding. You can’t take risks with that… — with that moment because, well, if you do, then you’re looking at a crash. Sometimes a big crash. Maybe someone dies.”

It is, of course, a car crash — on the titular highway — that provides the impetus for the major plot of Owen Blake’s novel, and sitting here, listening to Courtney talk about the importance of signs, one can’t help but wonder if there’s a connection between what she does, and what he wrote.

Courtney laughs at the idea, finally tearing her eyes away from the words on her screen. “Oh come on. Owen and I knew each other when I was all of… geez, it must have been 15 years ago. We were kids. Do you honestly think that I had this kind of enthusiasm for road signs when I was a teenager? That this job was my goal, my dream, all my hopes and ambitions? Don’t get me wrong, I love it, but this was not my plan then. Not when I knew Owen.”

She smiles a different smile than the one she gave me when she showed me her cat calendar. It’s slyer, sneakier, almost secret.

“Hell,” she continues, “I think back then I still wanted to be an astronaut.”

She said she wanted to fly and he told her no. They stood among lilies, blindly fighting the day, languishing in each other. “I want to fly. I want to go. I want to be far away from here,” she demanded, shuffling her feet and furrowing her brow. Earlier they had lay on the ground and looked up and named the clouds after animals. Now the clouds were gone. “No,” he said firmly, then added weakly, threading her fingers through hers, “stay.”

Courtney brought a pasta salad and an apple for lunch. She takes it outside the tall narrow office building and I follow her to a picnic table underneath a big shady willow tree near the highway. She tells me how much she loves apples this time of year and that Royal Gala Apples are her favourite.

“Did Owen like apples when you knew him?” I ask.

She shrugs her whole body. “I don’t know. I don’t think. Those things don’t really matter, do they?”

Traffic is slow, and she marvels at it, chuckling to herself. “I had a boyfriend once who used to tell people I made traffic. He told them that was what I did! ‘She makes all those signs that tell you to slow down and not to park here or there’ he’d say. And I’d try to tell them otherwise but… because, really, you know, I hate traffic. It’s what I try to stop every day.”

“That’s again the moment of understanding,” she says, peering into her salad. “That moment, you know, I don’t want to sound obsessed with it but it’s all I think about. The sign is so important then. It needs to be large and short and easy-to-understand, even for someone who doesn’t know a lot of English or might not have their glasses on or might be tired or sick or, well, drunk. It’s when the signs are hard to get, when the moment of understanding is not there, that people just drive on by, and then everyone gets stuck…”

“Traffic,” I say, hoping to conclude this line of conversation.

“Traffic,” she agrees.

“How did you know Owen?” I ask, trying the direct approach.

The only sign we can read refers to trucks. “Trucks use Centre Lane” it says. It’s not one of hers.

“I don’t know,” she sighs. “He was a friend for a while and then we lost touch.”

She didn’t think it was fair: everything he said, everything he did, everything he tried to do. She was special now, and she knew he knew it. He saw her at night, glowing energy like sapphires, shimmering like the backside of a CD in sunlight, leaving patterns across the wall. “You can come with me,” she’d say, looking upwards at the stars. “No,” he’d always reply — “I can’t fly like you.”

“What do you think of ‘Don’t Turn Left’?” she asks me. We’re back in her office again.

“Oh wait,” she adds quickly, leaving me no time to reply. Contractions are bad. I hate contractions. They leave so much out.”

Over the course of my morning with Courtney I only managed a few tidbits about her past life with the author. They went to high school together, and lived together for a brief period afterwards. She gave me indication both that they dated and also that they never were together. She smiles a lot when she thinks of him, but not in a nostalgic, longing sort of way. It’s more mischievous, more whimsical.

She pushes her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Do not Turn Left,” she concludes.

I ask her if she’s read the book, and she tells me she has. I ask her what she thinks, and she doesn’t really know what to say.

“I don’t know. I think, you know, it was too long. And, well, wait, I should probably start by talking about the things I liked before, you know, the things I didn’t. That’s polite, isn’t it? I liked a lot of things about it. I liked the book. I mostly liked the book. It was very pretty and flow-y and a lot of the sentences made me feel nice.”

“But too long?” I question.

“Too long. He just went on and on and it didn’t really feel like anything happened to any of the characters aside from, you know, they all fly away. Poof. They just leave and go and are gone.”

The next sign is a longer one. She opens the file on her computer slowly, and again sits back, rocks in her chair, chews on her pen, and considers the words: “Expressway keep left.”

And he didn’t know exactly what she was, but then he never did, and it was at that moment as he watched her float and swoop and dance in the rising steam of that summer night, snuggled into the sky like it was their bed, that he realized he did not care. Neither of them knew what happened when they collided, just that something transformed in both of them in a tangled mess of steel and thunder. [...] And out of it they both discovered roles for themselves: she, who could fly, and he, who brought her back to earth.

“Why did Owen dedicate his book to you?” I ask, as she begins to shut down her office for the day. Her computer monitor goes to black with a soft click. She never finished the one sign. She struggled with it all afternoon.

“I just want it to be clear about the direction,” she had signed. “I want people to see it, and know where they’re going. Because that’s what’s important, you know, that people know where they’re going and that they get there.”

This comes up again, as she talks about the dedication. “It honestly took me by surprise, that whole bit. Because, well, who am I to him, really? I don’t think I really know him at all anymore, and I’m sure he doesn’t know me. That was all so long ago. He went in one direction, and I went in another.”

“Mine had signs,” she says, with a half-smile.

And, of Owen, who got to where he is on a road that was never very clear, defined or marked with signs, she finally says this:

“He got lucky, I think. I mean, I’m happy for him, for what he has, for what he’s done and I guess what he’ll do now that he’s so well-known or whatever. But he never really had any concrete goals, any ambitions, he just wrote these things — these good things — and then hoped that they would get him places on their own. And I guess they did but there was no guarantee. There was nothing pointing towards that happening. He could have ended up in a really bad place.”

“What kind of place are you in?” We’re in the elevator, descending.

“Oh, this,” she gestures. “I like this. Where I am. Where I’m going. I don’t want for much, if anything. I make enough money, I know enough people, my parents are proud of me.”

The elevator opens to the lobby where a lone security guard sits behind a desk reading a newspaper. She wishes him goodnight as we pass and I realize this interview is almost at an end and I still haven’t asked the salient question:

“Courtney, what happened between you and Owen Blake?”

She doesn’t answer for several minutes. We walk in silence. She clutches her car keys. I study her face. She’s prettier than she lets on, with fine blonde hair that frames her face. Her cheeks glow in the cold night air. I like the sound of her high heels on the concrete. It’s rhythmic and I try to match it.

“Courtney,” I say, as she pushes a button and unlocks her car, the light inside comes on.

“Traffic,” she says suddenly, violently, looking at me then away. She sobs quietly then pulls back, regaining her composure. “That’s fucking funny, right?”

“He wanted to go and you wanted to stay.”

“No,” she says. “It was the other way around.”

Her small two-door coupe coughs and wheezes, then starts. The headlights illuminate me, blind me, as I stand in the path of her car. I step to the side and watch as she drives by, her face calm, her fingers at 10 and 2 on the steering wheel, just like she was taught. In her back window there’s a suction-cup cat grinning at me.

Blake Owen’s dedication, as everyone has read by now, is short and vague. Like much the rest of his writing it’s not so much about what it says but what it does not say: the words between the words, the moments between the moments, the understanding that happens at a subconscious level, like when you glance at a street sign and know, without even thinking about it, exactly what you need to do.

“To Courtney,” it says, “who has so much pain.”