The Smallest Universe

By Wm. Anthony Connolly

This book is my memory.

So begins a story chronicled in the tattered journal of Mary Cross, kept in an old accounting book that was a gift from her father when she left home at age sixteen. It is a chronicle of experiences, struggles, and breakthroughs of a woman diagnosed with schizophrenia, traumatized by the most vivid of visions and voices. But were these episodes, fugues, or “spells,” as her ex Gregory used to call them, something else entirely? Mary's journey toward truth and overcoming her symptoms takes her far away, where she learns the rest of the story her visions and voices had always told her, from a past she did not know.

With a childlike perception of danger and wonder that is vocative of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, luminous with passion and mystery as Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, Wm. Anthony Connolly's newest novel is a resonant journey into what is real, and what is imagined, and why it matters.

After years of quiet, Mary finds herself once again overtaken by spells that feel as if she's fallen into a black hole, where she encounters fragments of dreamlike, indistinct voices, whispering in a tide of truth that will not be muffled, no matter how it ultimately rearranges the world around her. She struggles to make sense of the chaotic patterns of light and shadow, visual experiences that are as real to her as the ground underneath her feet. She finds comfort in writing down her perceptions in an old journal, faithfully recording nonsensical mutterings as well as deeply meaningful phrases. Mary also finds the patterns of the universe line up with what she's experiencing, and give her a language to describe to herself what is happening. Diagnosed with mental illness as a child and institutionalized, she escaped and found that once away, the episodes stopped. Mary was able to make her way in the world, finding love and settling down to mundane life. Until she visited Scotland for her grandfather's funeral, and found herself in a street at once familiar and frightening, and the visions and voices descended upon her once again.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Propertius Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005789701

Book preview

Prelude

This book is my memory.

It is a Brownline C530F accounting ledger with a calendar of the year on the inside cover, and on the back inside an array of perpetual calendars from 1984 to 2040. On the top right hand corner I wrote: Mary Cross/Portage la Prairie/Manitoba/Canada/Earth/The Galaxy/The Universe. Every 13-3.8 by 8-inch page is ruled with appointment scheduling from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. in half-hour intervals. Daddy gave it to me the year I left him and Mother for good. It weighs a ton; it’s not particularly beautiful with its now tattered and stained green cover, most of its two-hundred-plus pages are waterlogged or rippled. Some pages are falling out, alongside loose newspaper articles and magazine pictures stuffed inside. It’s a precarious thing. The fraying leopard-print tape applied to the broken spine and the industrial strength thick rubber band holding the covers on don’t help matters either. I’ve hauled it everywhere for three decades. It’s my one true star in an ever-expanding array of constellations and space. It’s chock-full with what I know, and what I thought I knew; it’s filled with an accurate accounting, mixed in with my irrational worries and plans—both realistic and truly not. It is my Theory of Everything.

Ten years ago, I had it with me when I returned to Edinburgh, Scotland to attend the funeral of my grandfather—Papa.

It was with me when at 17 I ran away from home with nothing but a knapsack and a conspiracy on my back.

This book was with me when I struggled and nearly succumbed. With me when I met and married Gregory and there when Nancy was born.

Its ugly cover and rippled pages were with me when my marriage crumbled, and it was with me when I began to piece my life back together again.

The book is my longtime companion. I first held it when I was 16 going on 17.

It is with me today. I am 47.

The book is the contents of my head—such as it is.

I hold it in my hands and practice what I will say to Nancy.

This is what it feels like to have that feeling.

I flip through its wild fugitive passages, and become breathless at its inked extravagances.

I really did see and feel what I saw and felt.

I run my polished fingernail under each furrowed line or flowing arabesque as if composing these for the first time.

It tells a strange story—it’s hard even now for me to fully believe it actually happened.

I stop and stare.

This book is my memory.

1.

This is what it feels like to have that feeling.

It goes like this.

Ever blanked out? I mean, those times when you’re walking along and you suddenly become aware that you have no idea how far you’ve gone. Or, you’re at home, hanging out, when you realize you have no idea how long you’ve been simply staring off into space? Where were you? You were in your head, buzzing about, puzzling over something that happened yesterday, or months ago, or pondering what you plan to do tomorrow or next week or when you get rich. This slightly embarrassing awareness doesn’t come until after you’ve spaced out briefly. It’s an eerie feeling. Here, but not. You’re such a space cadet.

It doesn’t happen like that for me. And it hasn’t since I was a little girl. We all have our things—this is mine. When I blank out, I go somewhere. I see things. For as long as I can remember, I have seen what others do not while zoned out—not dancing unicorns or anything like that. Something else—I’ll get to that.

The fugues, or spells as my ex, Gregory, liked to call them, don’t necessarily sneak up on me like one of your blank stares off into the wild blue yonder do. I know when it’s about to happen, I know I will have been somewhere, but most unnervingly I see and feel it all during my space out, which for reasons I’ll get to are referred to as WooWoo or Black Holes. My spells, episodes, fugues, blank outs, space outs, are all interchangeable with WooWoo or Black Holes, the first word I came up with—I’m told—to describe it. It—singular, plural, doesn’t matter - was: WooWoo. Later on, I called them Black Holes.

The episodes began when I was around 5—It will pass, doctors told my parents. The episodes continued into my teens—when I thought everyone was against me. Well into my thirties they continued and I felt I was going a little bonkers, until they dissipated and disappeared into the background for a while as the years of my marriage unfolded. I was in therapy, off and on medication, and started a career. And then, just over a decade ago now, they reappeared. I’ve gone from awe to irritation over them, back to wonder and finding them tiresome again.

WooWoo have sound, they have things to look at. It’s always the same sounds and things, and in this way, it seemed to me like WooWoo were trying desperately to say something. I mean, after a lifetime of spells, wouldn’t you begin to think there was something going on you should pay attention to—after consulting professionals and priests should you be so inclined—like the universe was trying to tell you about your life?

Like here. Look at this. Papa the page reads. Big time WooWoo.

2.

Ten years ago, I was in Scotland attending the funeral of my grandfather—Papa, my dad’s father. It had been a few years since my last visit. I was born in Scotland, midwifed at Lauriston Place in Edinburgh, but my parents immigrated to Canada when I was four. Every summer we flew out of Winnipeg, Manitoba and returned to Scotland to visit relatives, almost exclusively on Daddy’s side. Mother’s family was rural and distant. She loved her family dearly, especially her brother George Brown, but he’d died young and there were never any invitations to visit that I was aware of arriving in the mail. As soon as I was on my own in Canada, living out west in Calgary, a Transatlantic excursion was out of the question; it was too expensive. During my marriage to Gregory we went twice, once early in our marriage to introduce him, to let my new husband see the Auld Reekie, Edinburgh; the second time we went to attend the famous Fringe Festival. But that had been a few years before my trip for Papa’s funeral.

The day after the funeral, I had just arrived via taxi at Turnhouse, the airport in Edinburgh, to fly back home. I was to take an international flight to Toronto, and then transfer in Canada to a domestic flight to Calgary. Daddy and Mother were staying on, I didn’t know for how long. I wasn’t talking to my parents at this point. We’d been estranged for nearly twenty-five years. The whole funeral was a rather strained affair. Daddy didn’t take the loss well and physically shook the entire time I saw him. He just couldn’t stop himself from shaking.

That day, I took one step inside the airport terminal and knew things were not going to go well. Just. My. Way.

Final boarding call for Flight 1534 to Toronto.

Shit, I said a little too loudly. That got a few startled looks.

I was, of course, running late, of course, of course, wasn’t I always, and I was going to miss my flight home. I had one of those pounding headaches you feel in your teeth; I was really short of breath; my lips and tongue were dry as a bone; I was cursing more and more under my increasingly short bursts of breath; I was steaming mad at Gregory-Theodore-Guinness, husband extraordinaire, who insisted—insisted—on sending me countless listings for new homes he thought we should consider buying and I had exactly 120 unanswered work emails sitting on my juice-depleted Blackberry. I was sprinting.

The gate is about to close…

People flew by in a blur. I was surprised I hadn’t torpedoed someone. I was pulling my teetering suitcase on the wheels from hell and hauling on my shoulder a bulging leather tote filled with the annual report of the Little Pirouettes Dance Company, Nancy’s dance school then, which I had foolishly agreed to vet its 234 rubber-banded pages; a pencil case that doubled as my makeup bag; an extra blouse and scarf; hairbrush; and a 400-page thriller—You have GOT to read this!!!—that month’s book club selection (untouched) to be discussed in a few days sat in the bag like a swaying anchor. The tote bag kept digging into my increasingly sore ribs. But I kept running until—

I grew dizzy. Dizzier.

Lightheaded. Really? The episodes. The spells? WooWoo? I thought I’d left them behind. Sufficiently ignored them. Black Holes. It had been years they were at full strength. And then…

And then I got downright unstable, clutching my throat and trying to say…

What is it? What is it you want?

Or I said something to that effect, because I could see it everywhere. In front of me, near me in the air, behind me: everywhere at once. I couldn’t escape it, until my legs shivered and then buckled and I fell first to my knees and then onto my right side there on the airport floor in Scotland. I could see a crowd gathering around as I was lying on the cold floor inhaling dust and puzzlement. And just before I blacked out