You will stand safely on the shore, watching others being shipwrecked and hearing their cries in silence. The spectacle will indeed arouse your pity; but your own safety, compared with others’ danger, will arouse just as much pleasure. That is why I am sure you will eventually get rid of all your sadness. Just so. But then you will think, What if I am not safe on shore? What if I am in the midst of the wreck? And you will have to reckon with yourself.

He did not write, as he always did, “This is the truth,” which had been the four words with which he had ended every column. This particular piece was unfinished, and in any case, the claim to truth was fraudulent. He’d known this from the beginning, when he had first typed those closing words, but some greater force had guided him. Everyone — his readers, his editors, those who wrote letters back to him — all of them liked that he announced the truth. Only his family rebuked him. Lucille had said that he was exploiting those who loved him. She no longer wanted to be fodder for his writing. He’d argued that if he did not use what was in front of him, the clay of his own life, then he would have nothing to say. “Use your imagination,” Lucille said. She had an office on the fifteenth floor of a downtown corporate building and she would come home and tell Morris about her patients. Though these people remained nameless, they were very real. There was the man who couldn’t have sex unless he was wearing a red dress. The woman who kept changing her identity, using the phone book to discover new names. The adolescent boy who tried to kill his father as he slept. And there were those, ordinary people like him, who were overwhelmed by staying alive. They were addicted to the material, to commerce, to the comfort of stuff. The world was mad. He had used Lucille’s stories, the people she worked with, as a taking-off point for much of his earlier writing. Very much disguised, these people had entered his column. And then there came the day — he can still remember the tiny quiver of recognition — when he began to use his own life, and though he suspected he was betraying his family, he saw himself harnessed to some great fated and unguided wagon. The astounding fact was that his readership grew. People were hungry for the personal and the private. He offered himself up as if he were both Abraham and Isaac, and he laid himself out on the altar and took up the knife as if to slay himself. And how he had succeeded.

ot long after Martin died, Morris, in a painful and irrational attempt to justify his son’s death, had begun to stop people on the street and ask them, “Are you free? ” It was not a casual question; in fact, it was a hard-found query, full of irony. Using the convoluted logic of politicians and generals, Morris reasoned thus: (1) Freedom is everything. (2) We are in danger of losing our freedom. (3) Our freedom must be defended. (4) We must seek young men to defend that freedom. (5) The young men will die doing so. (6) But they will preserve our liberty. (7) Therefore, we are free. And so Morris began to ask the question “Are you free? ” which did not go well, because people misunderstood, thinking that they were being asked if they had a moment to talk, or as one young man said, backing up, “Get lost, fag.” And then Morris began to ask, “Do you have freedom? ” and this too was difficult, but it was both general and personal enough to make people think. Or so he thought. “Sir, sir, do you have a minute? ” he asked a man in a suit carrying a briefcase near the Trizec building at the corner of Portage and Main, certainly a banker or a lawyer, and when the man paused and Morris asked the question, the man shook his flat head and he moved on. Morris looked down at himself as if to understand whether he looked like a panhandler, or appeared to be mad. He was wearing jeans and a dark jacket. He had shaved, though he might have looked a little grey around the jaw. He attempted to talk to several more people, two women and an older man, but they too snubbed him, although the man, bald and with rheumy eyes, did say that he would be free when he won the lottery. Morris discovered that an answer, any answer, was more possible if he approached those working as the slaves of modern society: waitresses, bank tellers, the barista at Second Cup, taxi drivers. He also learned to couch the question in less obvious ways, as an offhand curiosity, or as part of a random survey. A few people patronized him but most thought him foolish. He was astounded by the indignation, the lack of thought. Of the two people who talked to him at length, one was a drunk standing outside the Sherbrook Inn, the other was a young man on a bicycle to whom Morris offered one hundred dollars to answer one question. The young man refused the money with a smile. He was a Christian, he said. And then he proceeded, over the next half-hour, to try to convert Morris.

Lucille, when she discovered what he was doing, said that of course no one, absolutely no one, would answer that kind of question, especially when it was asked by some stranger on a city bus. “People are just trying to make it through the day. They don’t want to be accosted,” she said.

“But it was Martin, and boys like Martin, who made it easier for those people to make it through the day. Martin died so that Ian, our neighbour, could buy a new Lexus every spring. So that your cousin Annalena could send her daughter to Juilliard. So that Libby can be free to choose what colour of iPod she wants.”

“Or so that,” Lucille said, “as a girl, Libby can choose whether or not to suffer circumcision. Or to be educated.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, come on. It was the Muslims who saved Plato’s writing from the Christian fanatics.”

“You’re sad and angry, Morris, and you’re taking it out on complete strangers.” She said she worried about him.

rsula was an American woman who wanted to be but was not yet his lover. She was six years younger than he was and he had come to know her in December of 2006, when she sent him a letter in response to one of his syndicated columns that he had written ten months after his son died. The column, one of the hardest he had ever written, and something he had put off for a long time, had been about a young soldier who was killed in Afghanistan. He had described the soldier’s fear and his bravery, and he had referred to the boy’s emails and phone calls to his parents in which he had talked about the good that the army was doing. He had also mentioned his own fear and the boy’s doubt, the sense that people at home didn’t truly believe or support what the soldiers were doing. “There are times, Dad, when I’m not even sure. I get scared, Dad. Scared that I’m going to be killed over here.” The whole column was written in the third person, and only at the end did Morris write, “This boy? This beautiful twenty-year-old with his life ahead of him? This boy who was killed? This was my son.”

He received Ursula’s letter via his agent. She wrote:

Dear Mr. Schutt,

My name is Ursula Frank and I live on a dairy farm two hours from Minneapolis. This is not far from where you live, and though an international border separates us, I feel very close to you today. I just finished reading your column about your son who was killed in Afghanistan. My heart broke as you described your son’s death. I also had a son who was killed during the war, only he was in Iraq. His name was Harley. He was nineteen and he was killed last year by a bomb that exploded underneath the Humvee he was driving. He died immediately. When I heard about my son’s death and felt that first wave of shock, and then waited and waited and finally watched his casket being lowered from the transport plane, all of that was easy compared to what came after, and that’s why I’m writing you. It’s amazing to hear from someone who has lost a son to war like me and who is able to write about it in such a public way. I’ve read your column before but I’ve never thought, Oh, I should write him. And then, when I read your last column, I felt that you were sitting right beside me, telling me the story of your son. I’m not sure how to talk about your son or how to talk to you. Oh, I know that you are famous and that I’m just small fry and that you probably won’t even read this letter, but I wanted to send it, I wanted to write it on actual paper, using a pen, and I wanted to fold it and push it into an envelope and put a stamp on the envelope and drop it into a mailbox. These small things are what save me these days from my constant fear. Even though the worst thing that can happen has happened, the death of my child, I’m still very angry. And I’m afraid. In your article you mentioned the word “fear” and I thought to myself, Oh, he might be afraid as well. Is that true? Thank you for listening.

Sincerely,

Ursula Frank

Her writing was so formal and yet so clear and so moving that he wrote her back immediately. He too wrote on paper, with a pen, and mailed it to her through regular post, making sure his own return address was written on the top left-hand corner. He first talked about her son, and how sorry he was, and he said that he might be able to gauge her grief, though grief was personal and he didn’t want to be presumptuous. He said that he did not see her as “small fry,” not at all. And he certainly wasn’t famous. And then he addressed what was most poignant in her letter, the question of fear.

Oh, yes, Ms. Frank, I am afraid of many things. Of sleeping and dreaming of my son and then waking to find that I was only dreaming. Of the darkness, of death, of life itself, of plodding through the day, always aware that I am alive when my son is dead. That makes me unbearably sad and it makes me fearful. And I am afraid of the possibility that I will lose my daughters as well, or my grandson, Jake, who grasps after life, though I do not see him often and have been told that I cannot see him. What kind of world is it that we live in where a grandfather cannot spend time with his grandson? And truth? I am afraid of truth, because if I truly look at myself, I will despair. Of happiness as well, because if I am happy, then I have let go of my sorrow.

I was walking by the river the other day and I saw the ducks and they were diving for food, their tiny rumps pointing to the sky, and I stood and watched them, little things, no need of lodging or clothing or money, just the feathers on their backs and their webbed feet, such intricate elaborate instruments, and for a brief moment I forgot who I was, and when I returned to myself, I realized that I had been experiencing happiness, allowing my emotions to whip my reason, and I was filled with panic. I am full of betrayal and selfishness. And you. I am afraid of you, Ursula, because you allow me to speak in this manner, freely, with no editing, no red pencil striking out the emotion. Are you Jewish?

Morris

nd so began a correspondence that was intelligent and flirtatious and raw. And hidden. Morris did not tell Lucille about Ursula, and because he was the one to retrieve the mail, Lucille remained unaware. The privacy and the secrecy allowed his imagination to soar in the letters; so different from the mundane scribblings of a columnist. He was starting to see that by confessing to the public he had damaged himself and his family. At the time, he believed it had been healthy, that he was honest and worthy, that he was truer than the average man. Now he saw that he had been deceiving himself. This secret correspondence with Ursula left him giddy and alive. He talked about Martin and she talked about Harley. She told him about her life as the wife of a dairy farmer. She’d met her husband when he spent a year working in Holland. They fell in love; she quit school and moved to America, a country that was very different from the one she was raised in. “I never planned to be a farmer’s wife,” she wrote, “but here I am, in the middle of a life that I chose when I was too young to know better. I always imagined I would have a career of my own, use my education.” She apologized; she hated whiners. She said that her husband Cal had closed himself off after Harley’s death, and if she didn’t have Morris to talk to, she would be alone in the world. He echoed these words and, in a moment of brilliant betrayal, said that he felt closer to her than he did to his own wife. This did not surprise or frighten Ursula. She agreed. They spoke of longing and loss and they spoke of sex. He said that ever since Martin died he had become more interested in sex, as if death had dredged up some hidden desire inside of him, as if this was his way of overthrowing his own demise. He said that his wife found his feelings contrary and frightening. She claimed that he was in denial and that sex was masking his grief. It wasn’t normal to want to have sex when you were broken hearted. “It is what it is,” he wrote. “I refuse to be conquered by despair.”