The English painter J.M.W. Turner had an exhibit two Septembers ago at the gallery near McGill University—his images glowed at me from billboards on Sherbrooke Street—I bought a ticket and marvelled at the man. He was born sixteen years after my death but might have been my brother. From his paintings I saw he must have been perpetually in a condition like the one I inhabit every October through August, the time when I am not with Sophie. He dwells in pure atmosphere: air, fire—vague like the French word for a wave in the Atlantic whose heaving waters never failed to sicken me when I sailed with the fleet.

I read how Turner lashed himself to a mast and painted his silver fury of storm and spindrift. His work evokes the frightening mist to which I return once my September leave is done. Standing in front of his paintings I felt understood for the first time. Sophie called this ridiculous. “He was very short-sighted,” she said, “and so are you. The thing you have in common is that you’re both half-blind.”

As I bump along on the bus now, I find it dispiriting that no one in this city ever recognizes me. Even when I put the red coat on, people don’t know who I am. I have to confess, I expected many difficult things, but not anonymity on my return to a French-Canadian city. And I miss combat. As long as I lift no musket, shoulder no cannon, shout no order nor hold council of war with men—even men whose disdain weighs more on me than the other tasks combined—my heart hurts more than it did in battle.

I yearn back, crane forward: I look with impotent compassion upon the soldier I was. I rage against that soldier’s time lost to dreary encampments with their filth and noise: damp fires where we devoured our dead brothers’ rations and scanned the hill in case a brother was not dead or had somehow revived and might crawl back to us even if, like my beloved comrade Elwyn, he now possessed only one arm.

Civilians imagine we soldiers need to recover from the horrors of active duty, but it is the white-hot ordeal of a soldier’s inactive waiting that gnaws him from the inside out, starting with a walnutsized cluster of dusty brown worms in his brain, and for me those worms are not done feeding yet.

I wish I could write to my mother at this moment—but on the bus, my knees jiggle and the minute I look down the motion sickness starts. Writing even a few lines to her would make me feel less aggrieved by how the fragile haunts of earth—so humble and ordinary for civilians—elude and torment me. Even the print on the fabric of the bus seats reminds me of certain glorious fireworks.

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