I'm such a dubious soul,
And a walk in the garden
Wears me down.
Tangled in the fallen vines,
Pickin' up the punch lines,
I've just been fakin' it,
Not really makin' it.

~ Fakin' It, Simon and Garfunkel

Rock Steady

It took him more than a year to get back on his feet, literally and figuratively speaking. The three bones of his left inner ear were dislocated in the attack resulting in almost complete hearing loss and extreme vertigo. Unable to balance at first, he was sent to a surgeon. However attempts to rebuild the ear only exacerbated his condition and after several months he gave up and fired his doctors. Other injuries had left him with a slight limp, blurred vision in one eye, an incessant buzzing in his good ear and diminished sensation in his right arm and hand. Too furious to apply himself in physical therapy, he spent the next six months on his sister's couch, inebriated, so that he had little recollection of that time. She had offered him the more comfortable guest quarters but memories of Danny haunted him there; he couldn't bring himself even to look at the room let alone enter it. Isabel tiptoed around him, uncertain how to help.

When he had worn out his welcome with his sister and brother-in-law, he packed his few belongings and flew to his parents' home in Australia. His father, utterly at a loss to see his formidable son all but crippled and helpless, offered to find him a position with his company borehole mining fossil fuels. It was a respectable job for geologists, one he had taken two decades early. It had paid for Ivo's and Isabel's education amongst other things. Ivo's scathing retort – that Big Oil lacked the foresight to appreciate the devastating future environmental consequences of society's gluttonous consumption – was so vicious and damning, his father barely spoke another word to him the remainder of the time he was there.

His mother, querulous by nature, pitied her child and while she firmly believed that this was what came from the lifestyle choices he had made, she waited on his every physical need as she had not done since he was very small. She took grim satisfaction in his beaten sickly state and plied him with soup, meat and potatoes to counteract the prodigious amounts of alcohol he imbibed. Thus was Ivo able to pass an additional six months on another couch in another place.

He was busy languishing away when his mother set him off. "I don't know why you mope about," she said in disgust. "You aren't the only person in the world to lose someone."

His violent temper, latent in liquor, reared its ugly head. He'd been longing to lash out at someone, the anger so great he could no longer contain it. Berating her for the cow that she was, he added injury to stinging insult, hurtling a tiny figurine at her. It missed and shattered against the wall but the damage was done.

She spent the rest of his stay hiding from him. His father's only comment was an inquiry as to whether he had enough money to get by. Ivo mumbled that he would find a teaching position in England and two days later his father drove him and his satchel to the airport. He paid for his son's airfare and gave him an additional £7500 in cash and traveler's cheques to tide him over. Ivo thanked him awkwardly and they hugged their goodbyes even more awkwardly. Entering the airport, Ivo thought bitterly that their relationship had always been such – passing strangers in the same house. He blamed his mother.

That was Tuesday and on Wednesday evening he stood on the doorstep of Martin Zeindler's flat, pale, shaking but completely sober. His old friend was astonished to find him there – "No telegram? Nothing to let us know your plans?" – but ushered him in like a mother hen, offering him the rental unit on the ground floor as it was not let for the summer.

Ravaged but lucid, Ivo said he would only stay long enough to set up interviews in London and Leeds where he had connections. Martin said "Pish tosh!" and arranged an interview with Warwickshire the following week. After one month, Ivo was ensconced in the university and the rental portion of the flat. Outwardly he appeared to have returned to normal, burying himself in research and teaching. But to his students he was indifferent and aloof and to his colleagues so professional none of them felt they knew him even slightly. With Martin he did let his guard down some and allow himself to live a little – theater outings, vacations in Spain and Turkey, the long-awaited cruise to Alaska to view the geological formations of the glaciers.

To his sister alone he bared his heart in his missives, railing against everyone and everything for all that had befallen him. The letters were so full of venom that she never forgot them or forgave the men who had caused such a radical change in him. He was a stranger to her; whatever good he had in him lay fallow, his mind a fecund field for hatred and rage. He wanted revenge but though she begged him to fight in the legal system, he could not bring himself to do the deed. "I do not know what all I am capable of," he wrote to her. In the end he made only one brief trip to Nova Scotia – to identify them in the court of law. He never set foot in the province again. He left Isabel and the prosecutors in his stead. His father footed the enormous bill but this he did not learn until after the old man's death. He never knew that he had one parent who loved him more than anything, someone who fought for justice for his son; he never had the opportunity to heal knowing how much his father had done on his behalf.

By the late eighties he was comfortably situated in a tenured position and a permanent resident in Martin's rooms. They squabbled like an old married couple about nearly everything under the sun:

"Ivo! Close the windows!" Martin would bellow into the telephone, wrapped from head to toe in blankets against the frigid wind.

"Hot air rises," Ivo patiently explained.

"Yes, I know that." Peevish. "But this only applies if there is any hot air to actually rise!"

Ivo ignored him and went to bed, the windows wide open.

And into the early nineties:

"I've lost my key again. Trot along and fetch me the spare?" Playing the role of the scatter-brained, as was fitting a middle-aged professor of paleontology.

"You are forever losing your key. What will you do when I am not here to let you in?" He was indignant at the idea of his three hundred pounds trotting anywhere, let alone to fetch Ivo's infernal key.

"I should die without you." Said without any emotion as he opened one of Martin's journals on the table to read and wait.

"I will put it on a chain for you. You shall wear it everywhere and then you will never lose it!" Martin fumed, hoisting his enormous self out of the chair.

"Yes, yes, I shall do just that. Now the key if you please."

Martin's undergraduate students – a boy and a girl – were very excited by the exchange and stared at Ivo in open admiration. To witness the feared Professor Zeindler brought down to the mundane level of common man was positively awesome. The boy was trying to stifle his laughter. Ivo looked at him and then stared thoughtfully at him. He was very attractive, in a boyish undergraduate sort of way, calling to mind another boyish face a lifetime ago.

"Is Martin teaching you well?" he asked the boy, ignoring his female companion altogether. "Is he teaching you to write a blockbuster? Something bold and sexy?"

The boy bit his lip and laughed again, suddenly very self-conscious as all young people are prone to be.

Ivo watched him a minute longer until Martin wheezed into the room, clutching the spare key on a string. "I want to watch you tie it around your neck. I want to know it is never coming off."

"I shall wear it at all times," Ivo said softly, taking the key which remained in his delicate hand, his eyes on Martin's student. "I'll wear it in the shower, shall I?" The question was for the boy, who blushed furiously and refused to look up from his notebook. "Martin, introduce me to your students," Ivo commanded.

"Oh for heaven's sake. Ivo Steadman – that's Dr. Steadman to you!" He glowered, keeping his charges in their proper place. "Timothy Cornish, you may call him 'Tim' and Emily Hadfield."

"Well, Mr. Cornish," he pointedly ignored the girl in whom he had absolutely no interest, "Good luck with your novel." He permitted his eyes to linger one moment more before turning away.

"And close the blasted windows!" Martin groused.

Tim Cornish was too taken aback to laugh.