That has every answer,

No smart expert

With a stock response.

Only measuring tools

To find deep down

How far thoughts swim.

How far thoughts swim

To find deep down

Only measuring tools

With a stock response.

No smart expert

That has every answer.

There’s no knowing

What the water wants.

I try to imagine.

✲

Ayo hasn’t often returned to Nigeria in the years since she left. The most recent occasion was her elder sister’s wedding in 2017. It was a sumptuous, joyous affair, assembling family and friends from many places and time zones. It brought the dancer out in Ayo, but also, days later, as if in delayed response to her fervour, the need for time alone, chair drawn up to a window, chin on the heel of her hand. This land had hosted the two high dramas of her early years. The second, in 2001, was the armed burglary leading to her family’s exile, in the course of which only courage and female solidarity had staved off the worst. But these virtues had hardly sprung out of nowhere; they were doubles of those found by the Sokales the previous year, early in the rainy season, on an evening which seven-year-old Ayo would never forget.

No one came that afternoon to collect her and her kid sister from school. They were sitting in their empty classroom (empty save for a teacher), a building on ground firm and high enough during the season’s wettest days to remain dry inside. The rainstorm showed no sign of relenting, the drops increasingly loud and heavy, knocking and knocking, harder and harder, on the door and windows as if saying, ‘Let me in!’ Their mother had been caught in the downpour as she returned from a trip to Lagos. She had assumed the family’s driver would collect the girls and bring them home.

It was seven in the evening when Toyin finally got in. ‘Where are the girls?’ asked her niece. An hour’s journey on foot in the dark – for the street lights were down, the local roads washed out – awaited her. On lower ground she had to wade through murky water that came up to her waist. All around her, cars and rubbish floated. In the days that followed, several people would be reported missing.

Ayo delighted as never before in her mother’s silhouette as Toyin clambered into the classroom and relieved the teacher. A dirty brown puddle swelled around her feet, and her blouse and wrapper were so wet they were see-through. Ayo had never seen her mother naked, or almost naked. For the first time she observed the outline of her mother’s breasts, the roundness of her hips and belly. The shock of seeing them, mixed with relief, subdued the shock of having been marooned.

Toyin carried the sisters on her back and side, as she had once carried each in her belly. Ayo held on to her mother for dear life as they waded back through the drenching dark; she was afraid, and her fear was not far from despair. She would not understand until much later what she was witnessing, being subjected to: the drains absent or in disrepair, clogged with rubbish, the poorly thought-out roads built too close to waterways; decades of diverting a nation’s wealth to line the Big Men’s pockets.

Then at last the compound appeared, a fleck of light in the distance. Almost home. Her aunt and cousin whooping, ‘Girls! You poor things!’ as they hugged and kissed them and rubbed them warm and dry and helped Ayo into her green Little Miss Mermaid pyjamas.

✲

She is her parents’ blood, of course, but she is also water. More water than blood in fact. Over half of her lean body’s weight is water (she has looked up the number on her phone); threequarters of her brain and heart is water.

A lifetime’s work to gauge these inner depths, to channel them; to conserve their strange and secret flow.

Danny

On the roof above the studio he stands and waits. All afternoon the studio floor is overbooked and surplus staff work where they can. A television camera stands with him on the roof, infinitely patient. The way it waits there it could be made of time. He – not so much. ‘Action!’ he shouts, and in short order the door to the stairwell opens and out step half a dozen spies, dressed in beige trench coats with their collars up.

Of course, they are not real spies, they are actors. Overdressed, ironic parodies of the Z-movie secret agent, sunglasses and fedoras concealing their youth and gender (all of them, twenty-something). They are taping a sight gag for children’s TV, they haven’t any plan as such to follow. They improvise, entrusted to their instincts, for the director knows to keep out of their way.

Enduringly famous, several of them, from our perspective, by which I mean big-name, autograph-book-level famous. They don’t know this, because they won’t land their breakout roles for another year or more. It is Friday the thirteenth in September of 1974.

Autumnal, low grey-skied September in Toronto. With every minute that passes four o’clock, it looks more and more like rain. Not the best day for filming outdoors, but what can you do? At present the actors race and leap and hop along the roof, which is a good twenty or twenty-five feet above the ground, maybe higher, until, near the centre-edge, they stand and put their backs to the skyline and the cars nosing down Yonge Street in the direction of the weekend.

Only a few japes more to go, the director thinks, and there’ll be enough in the can to knock off too.

Now their heads are bobbing, ducking invisible rocks. And the director is happy, he is beaming, looking younger than his forty-odd years – much the same man as when he played the clown on a kids’ show in the early sixties. Because all the comedy resides in the actors’ energy: exuberant, zany, unpredictable. The camera is loving one of the biggest and youngest guys, the scene’s powerhouse. Danny. Daniel Edward Aykroyd to the province’s traffic cops, who will pull him over every now and then for speeding. See how he runs manic circles around the skylight! Watch the tall, burly whirlwind of his body as it gathers pace! Imprudently, he cuts across the skylight’s dirty glass.

The director shouts to him, ‘Keep off the glass,’ but the honks of cars drown out the warning.

Danny plummets, in shock and gasping. In his haste he did not give the glass – its thinness – a second thought. He stepped on the pane, feeling it burst into shards, the murky void beneath swallowing him whole.

What happens to Danny turns the others on the roof to stone. All that falling could be the death of nearly anyone. They stare at the skylight with a pane now missing on one side, they peer down, down, into the storage room which a moment ago housed only light stands, and then someone, John Candy or Gilda Radner or another of the actors, starts downstairs to call an ambulance.

Supposing he hadn’t collided with a water pipe on his way down, they will say afterwards. The pipe had broken his fall.

He is breathing, and his body is intact. The remains of the skylight glint around it, enormous shards like shark’s teeth. Presently sirens sound, and Danny when he is hoisted onto the gurney groans weakly, ‘Way to start my career in TV!’ Quick as a shot, the ambulance man replies, ‘You’re going to be a star.’ He pronounces this sentence in an accent of stunned certainty. ‘We can fix arms and hearts,’ he continues, ‘but not heads.’ To have come away in one piece from such a fall meant Danny Aykroyd’s head had to be something very special.

✲

The first time I heard Aykroyd and Asperger’s in the same sentence I had just been diagnosed myself. That would have been back in the early noughties, which doesn’t make either of us, Aykroyd or myself, any younger, but I still remember the interview well. It aired on National Public Radio, which I listened to on the show’s web archive. To tell the truth, I came across the interview by chance. Aykroyd hadn’t been in the news for a while by then, but when I saw the NPR link I recognised the name immediately. That goes without saying. For a period of about ten years, in the eighth and ninth decades of the twentieth century, he had been among TV and cinema’s biggest stars. Being a child of the eighties, I grew up on his movies. Like just about everyone else, I saw him in Ghostbusters (whose original screenplay he wrote), with Bill Murray, their lasers trained on the slimiest – and funniest – monsters you could ever hope to encounter on film. So I listened with interest as the comic actor answered questions on his life and career, and almost fell off my chair when he told the interviewer about his Asperger’s.

As a matter of fact, he hadn’t gone behind that microphone expecting to talk about anything quite so personal. The interviewer, Terry Gross, had more or less hypnotised him, as he explained it later, with her excellent preparation and gentle questioning. Gross, too, was a little thrown; she seemed almost not to believe that she could have surprised Aykroyd into so rare a confidence. She wondered aloud whether he was joking when he said the funny-sounding word Asperger’s, whether an interviewee like him, all alter egos, a jealous guardian of his private life, might only be teasing her listeners. But no. The word, which sounds like a bit of fun but turned out to mean what it means – mild, high-functioning autism – was uttered, it seems, quite sincerely. So that each time another interviewer would bring it up through the following years, almost in a whisper, as though it were a possible source of embarrassment, he replied in the affirmative. But he would not elaborate. The window on his mind had been tantalisingly opened, and just as quickly closed.

Upon embarking on this project in 2019 my idea was to speak with Aykroyd’s early friends, neighbours, classmates and first colleagues, to learn more about those parts of his life the media had mostly missed out, his formative years, the ones that had made his extraordinary mind what it is. I didn’t expect him to agree to talk with me directly. And so it proved. The way his cousin explained it to me, I got the impression that he found dwelling at any length on his inner life an ordeal, an ordeal like having his molars pulled. Which I could understand, even though I had never been reluctant to share my own experience of neurodiversity. As luck would have it, he grew up in Hull (as it was then called), Quebec, a place I know particularly well. In addition to Aykroyd’s past interviews, I combed the local press archives, in both its languages. I sent out enquiries. I chased leads. I made many calls. The people who answered were all generous with their memories. Vivid insights and recollections, forty-, fifty-, sixty-year-old stories, they shared with me. A composite Danny began to emerge.

✲

Peter Aykroyd had worked out west once. He had scouted locations for the National Film Board, in Manitoba, in Saskatoon, in Edmonton, weeks in advance of Princess Elizabeth’s national tour. That was why his wedding to Danny’s mother, Lorraine, took place out in Winnipeg, in September 1951. The king died that winter and in the summer Danny was born. Lorraine told her husband to get a proper job.

He worked then as a road engineer in Hull (and later behind a mahogany desk at the National Capital Commission). But Peter couldn’t resist sneaking some televisual oomph into the home, in the form of a Philco set. How wondrous the new medium was: ballet dancers one hour, a quiz show the next – it radiated culture throughout the country. Alongside some less mindful ‘entertainment’ which was just as well; its programming was magnanimous. Slapstick to kill an hour agreeably, and then Liberace for the wife. And all those weekday shows, episode after unrelenting episode, as though everything in the world exists to end up in a show.

In the evenings Danny sat and fidgeted in front of the porthole screen, and as the broadcaster read out the news the little boy repeated aloud every other headline. The Prime Minister John Diefenbaker … in Malton, Ontario, the Avro Arrow was rolled out for cameras … yesterday’s successful launch of Sputnik I by the Soviet Union … Lorraine and Peter listened without batting an eyelid – the telly always had an echo whenever Danny was present; there wasn’t an announcer, not a newsman, their son heard without mimicking the syllabic voices.

Adequately informed, Peter rose from his chair and switched off the set, and Danny along with it.

Lorraine would have much preferred to wean Danny from the screen; she would have preferred to see him outside, playing sports, like other people’s boisterous boys. But knowing his son, Peter couldn’t see that happening. He had another idea: why not make him a microphone like the one TV announcers use? A toy to occupy the small hands more pleasingly than, say, flapping. He sawed up a beat-up hockey stick he had, and wrapped the toe of the blade in a black ball of duct tape and then dropped a length of string from the heel, curly as wire, conducive to a little boy’s imagination.

Someone might speak to him, as he sat watching this or that show, and he would seem miles away. Even on a hot day he’d warm in his hand the glass of milk that his mother or, sometimes, his grandmother gave him. A grown-up’s commands to scrub dirty palms, comb hair or remake the bed, coming when they did from the other side of the little screen, he could blissfully disregard. He seemed to have ears only for the characters. He could have listened all day to the one called Friday, Sergeant Joe Friday, although the detective entered living rooms every Thursday (and later, Tuesday) – for the bright, clipped things he said. This and other voices too he absorbed, exhaled back, the better to merge himself with them, dissolve in them, become them. Light as a voice. And as free.

Only … sometimes the set resolved not to work, as all things electric are prone to do, and the static supplanted the voices then and would have left Danny in angry tears. His father consoled him with a bedsheet. Hung in the basement, it became a movie screen on which Peter projected rented reels. The Ghost Breakers starring Bob Hope, and the Bowery Boys in Ghost Chasers. Buster Keaton and the Keystone Cops. His father’s son, Danny goggled at the old square cars onscreen, how they vroomed and spun and knocked walls and barns, even themselves, gleefully to pieces. Cars, it seemed, could take all manner of liberties in this world. Oh, to live like a car!