Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  COPYRIGHT © KAREN HOFMANN 2019

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication — reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system — without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of the copyright law. In the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying of the material, a licence must be obtained from Access Copyright before proceeding.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Hofmann, Karen Marie, author

  Echolocation / Karen Hofmann.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-988732-56-5 (softcover).

  ISBN 978-1-988732-57-2 (epub).

  ISBN 978-1-988732-58-9 (Kindle)

  I. Title.

  PS8615.O365E24 2019 C813’.6 C2018-904448-9 C2018-904449-7

  Board editor: Anne Nothof

  Book design: Natalie Olsen, Kisscut Design

  Cover texture © successo images/shutterstock.com

  Author photo: Julia Tomkins

  NeWest Press acknowledges the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Edmonton Arts Council for support of our publishing program. This project is funded in part by the Government of Canada. NeWest Press acknowledges that the land on which we operate is Treaty 6 territory and a traditional meeting ground and home for many Indigenous Peoples, including Cree, Saulteaux, Niitsitapi (Blackfoot), Métis, and Nakota Sioux.

  # 201, 8540 – 109 Street Edmonton, Alberta T6G 1E6 780.432.9427

  www.newestpress.com

  No bison were harmed in the making of this book.

  Printed and bound in Canada 1 2 3 4 5 21 20 19

  To those who go on foot,

  and who pay attention to their footing.

  CONTENTS

  Virtue Prudence Courage

  That Ersatz Thing

  Vagina Dentata

  The Bismarck Little People’s Orchestra

  Echolocation

  The Swift Flight of Data into the Heart

  Unbearable Objects

  The Canoe

  Clearwater

  The Burgess Shale

  Holy, Holy

  The Birds of India

  Instant

  The Flowers of the Dry Interior

  Acknowledgements

  VIRTUE PRUDENCE COURAGE

  HE SAID dream vandals, the animals roaming the island at night.

  What kinds of animals? she asked. She had never heard a man talk about his dreams before. It was like hearing him say frightened or pussy. She blushed. She was wearing little suede boots, jeans, a long baggy sweater, jade-green. All of her clothes were cheap. She had pale eyelashes mascara didn’t stick to, and an overbite – she had been raised by her grandmother, no dental plan – and tended to hide behind her hair, which was not cut properly, and fell like a hood around her face, thick mats of it slanting across her forehead and over her cheeks.

  At this party at her residence, she had been approached by a raw-boned, wispy-bearded young man, a young man who had barely enough flesh to cover his long bones. In his lanky, rusty-haired, knob-jointed ugliness, he had seemed less intimidating than the more smooth-faced, opaque-mannered young men she met in her classes or at church. She had not been afraid of him, and so she had talked to him, listened when he explained about his work on sea birds, and had him all to herself the whole evening.

  To be sure, she did not always understand what he was talking about. White bears, he said. A society of white bears, who exchange secret vows with smoke. You can see the gouges in the walls of houses. Their warnings. You can see their neon tags on the boles of the cedars. They want to put their own gloss on the scripts in my head. He said this patiently, but as if she should be able to figure it out on her own, too.

  It was poetry, she thought, like Ecclesiastes or The Revelations of St. John the Divine on the Isle of Patmos. She waited for his pause. Would she be expected to provide an extemporaneous close reading? That did not seem fair. She stood on one foot, then the other, remembered not to bite a hangnail.

  She asked, What do they say about your dreams, the animals? She thought that she was being intelligent, to ask this. But his eyes, which had been meeting hers in an open gaze, now narrowed and hardened.

  I can’t keep doing the work for you. You’ll have to figure it out yourself.

  She blushed. Okay, she said.

  He was twenty-seven, a Ph.D. student.

  Then they had made arrangements to go see something in his lab, and for a hike, and another hike, and she saw that she was spending all of her free time with him. He called her a lot. She did not have any close personal friends with whom to discuss him; she fell into his life activities, his energy, as into a vortex.

  He lived alone, austerely, with a mattress on the floor and camping equipment and stacks of animal skulls piled against the walls. They lay side-by-side reading their textbooks during the long rainy days and still she did not think of him as a boyfriend. Then one day he put his large-knuckled paw on the small of her back and kissed her nape, and when she turned her face toward him in surprise, her mouth.

  Then he began to kiss her more, and to undo her clothing, and she said, I am a virgin. She meant this as an apology for her lack of experience, which was soon to be revealed, but the young man said, I respect that, and even if I never do more than kiss the tips of your fingers, I will devote my whole life to you.

  This was, surprisingly, a disappointment to her. When she encouraged him to continue to move his ginger-furred hands under her clothing, he said, We should get married. There were so many good excuses for not inviting family and friends – distance, penury, scheduling – that she was not even remotely troubled by the possibility of other motives for their secrecy and haste.

  It was final exam time. For their honeymoon, they would spend a month on a remote West Coast island, where he would be doing his research. There would not be electricity or internet on the island – they wouldn’t even have a phone. That made her feel safe from something.

  HE IS HER HUSBAND. He is twenty-seven. He is studying gannets, a kind of white seabird with black lines around its eyes and bill, like the lead in stained glass windows. He has a beard, wears real boots with steel toes and laces, plaid flannel shirts. She has never met anyone who knows as much as he does. They have been married for three weeks.

  In their tent under the giant dark trees and the many distant stars, he tells her about the animals on the island: their habitats, their behaviours, their secret communications.

  She is not sure about the white bears. That’s another island, further south, isn’t it? The white bears, the spirit bears. She has read about them in National Geographic.

  What kinds of animals?

  In the three weeks they have been on the island, she has seen these: a white-footed mouse, running across the tent platform; two raccoons, washing stolen beef jerky in the stream; four Steller’s jays, trying to rip open a package of instant noodles, stolen from the table; some small birds that may have been finches, calling zonk, zonk in spruce; a woodpecker; a bald eagle; a flotilla of surf scoters bobbing offshore, in the open waves.

  She has not seen any bears, nor a cougar, though the skipper who dropped them at the beach had warned them.

  She has not seen the gannets. The gannets nest on the cliffs. He doesn’t want her to tag along when he is working. She will corrupt the observation site, simply by her presence. She has to stay at the camp.

  He goes to the cliffs five times in two weeks: the first three times in the first week.

  It rains every day. Even when it is not raining, the cedars drip. Everything they own is damp. They spend a lot of time trying to dry out their cloth
es and their sleeping bags.

  When he has gone to the cliffs she reads, but she has read everything she has brought, now, all of the novels. She is reading his field guides and notes, and then makes tiny forays into the trees and underbrush around their camp to identify vegetation, and, if she’s lucky, animals. She ventures only as far as she can without losing sight of the orange fly of their tent.

  The wet cedars and the underbrush smell like cat pee. She thinks it is the cougar, but he says no, underbrush just smells like that. She doesn’t complain because he is working, but the days he goes to the cliffs are as long as weeks, and at the end of them she is hollowed out, empty as the crab claws on the shingle beach. She then has no thoughts, no sense of herself thinking. She’s scoured out like a rock pool. Only panic running in her head, a small engine. She tries to remember the pattern in the living room carpet, at home, questions on exams, her grandmother’s voice, but it’s all gone. All she has is the noises of the underbrush, the endless dripping. When he returns on those days she has no words left: she has petrified, toes to ears. Only then with his talk, he brings her back to life, inch by inch.

  A great deal of their time is taken up with cooking and eating. In the first week, bacon and eggs, but now canned food: salmon and tuna and corned beef, mini-ravioli and stew or beans. Protein. Twice, mussels chiseled off the rock face at low tide, tasting of salt, of blood, of herself on his beard. He forages for chanterelles and morels and fiddleheads, though he won’t show her where to find them. Cougar, he says. And once he brought back a big blue crab, not really enough meat for both of them, but they’d made pancakes, after, eaten them with a jar of jam. He had stabbed the crab in the water, wading barefoot, his toes, he said, completely numb. It was June, a month without an R, but still safe for seafood he said, because of the cold currents hugging the island. No red tide algae. She was surprised and somehow disturbed to find a scientific basis behind what she thought was folklore. What other prohibitions, recently shucked off, would she find out had a legitimate basis? She felt the ground was crumbling under her.

  When she’s alone for the day she eats crackers and peanut butter.

  She thinks that the cliffs are the source of the good days, of his energy. On the days he does not go to the cliffs, in the third week, she thinks about saying, why don’t you go to the cliffs, it always seems to cheer you up. But she does not say this, because he had told her at the beginning that she could never tell him what to do, give him advice. This was on the first day, when they were putting up the tent, and she’d said, What about here, here’s good, and he had said, Don’t ever do that. I’m the boss here, okay? I am used to wilderness living. You’re not. It could be life and death, and I won’t have time to explain it or argue with you every time.

  Okay, she had said. Her chin had trembled.

  After he has stopped going to the cliffs, he spends hours lying silently in their zipped-together sleeping bags, and won’t eat or talk to her, turns his face away as if she’s done something wrong, or paces around their campsite as if it is enclosed by an invisible fence. In those hours she doesn’t know what to do; she has run out of reading material. She decides she will reread some of her novels, but if she tries to read he shuts her book, silently, reproachfully.

  He doesn’t like her to read fiction: he says that she likes fiction because her brain is still adolescent, immature. She should wake up to the real world. She thinks this is at least partly true. She doesn’t know what these stories really have to do with her life, though she is good at composing neat, well-constructed essays about them.

  She reads over and over the folklore anthology she has brought along, which he doesn’t object to. Her mind, which reads and sees the patterns in realistic stories so adroitly, can’t make head nor tail of these fables and contes. It’s as if her brain can’t even pay attention properly to the words. She has to piece them out bit by bit, as if she’s learning to read all over again. But she feels them seep into the cells of her body.

  THEN THE RAIN STOPS and the sun comes out and she puts her head into the tent and says, Rise and shine, sleepyhead! Going to the nests today? But he groans, pulls his pillow over his face. For the first time, she feels a puff of impatience towards him. That’s rude, she thinks, and immature. Come on, she says, pulling at the pillow. You haven’t been out on the cliffs for a week. You need to do your research.

  He pulls the pillow more tightly then and makes a sound she has never heard him – or another adult – make before, a sound somewhere between a whimper and a snarl.

  Suit yourself, she says.

  She makes herself a pot of porridge and eats it. Then she drags her duffel bag with all of her clothes out of the tent and hangs her damp jeans and T-shirts and jackets up on the clotheslines – everything except what she has on. She washes her underwear and socks and hangs them too.

  Now their campsite looks like a medieval fair, the metal of poles shining in the sun, the orange tent, the flapping of her clothes like gay banners. It’s very cheerful. It lifts her spirits. It’s like the king is going to appear, on a white horse.

  She carries water from the stream, fills all of their containers, putting in the potassium permanganate crystals. She decides she’ll go for firewood, save him the work, and takes the tarp bag and the axe and sets off into the sparkling forest.

  When she has gathered as much as she can carry, she begins her journey back to the campsite. But even before she’s through the trees she can smell it, the smoke that isn’t wood smoke. She doesn’t let go of the tarp bag she’s dragging, but begins to walk faster, so that it bangs into roots and trees along the deer path. Then, at the edge of the clearing, she lets go and runs.

  All of her clothes have been taken down from the clotheslines and are smouldering on their campfire.

  Ohmygodohmygodohmygod, she says. Her husband is sitting, dressed, on a campstool, whittling. When he looks up at her, he’s calm: There’s a glint of humour in his eyes.

  Time to see what you’re made of, girl, he says, affectionately.

  Is it a metaphor for something?

  She hears a voice – her grandma’s or a prof’s – saying, think, and she does try to think. She tries to reason her way into a clear understanding of her dilemma and a way out of it, but the problem is that the problem is him, and whatever she thinks, he is there ahead of her. Even though he has put all of her clothes on the campfire, which was not a sane thing to do, and even though (she realizes it now) at least from their second week on the island, but maybe before that, maybe even since they met, he has been saying and doing things that are not exactly sane, he can still think faster than she can.

  I suppose you’re saying to yourself that I’ve lost it, he says. But what evidence do you really have? You’re just applying your preconceived notions of social propriety.

  I suppose you’re thinking about leaving me here alone, he says, but you know the boat isn’t coming back for two more weeks. You’re not going to hide in the woods – cougar, remember? I don’t think you’re strong enough to hurt me while I’m sleeping. I haven’t hurt you, anyway.

  You’re right, he says. It makes sense that I’ve got a way of contacting the mainland in an emergency, but if I haven’t told you where or what it is already, I’m not likely to now, am I?

  I’m disappointed in your lack of trust, and loyalty, he says. I thought you were exceptional, that you were wiser and braver and more unselfish than the others. But I see that you’re not.

  She can’t think fast enough. She can’t think of what to do or say. Every argument, every plea she makes, he blocks. She can’t find a way around him. She can’t think her way out.

  In her fear, then, she gives in to instinct. She does the one thing that seems possible. She takes off all of the clean clothes she is wearing, her shorts and sweatshirt, her panties and bra, and she folds them up and puts them on his lap, and looks steadily into his eyes.

  That’s better, he says. He doesn’t put her clothes on the fire; he pla
ces them, ceremoniously, on the camp stool beside him.

  She’s soon cold: It’s always cold, on the island. She feels too naked; she feels she has been skinned. But when she reaches for her clothes, he puts his arm out, a barrier, shakes his head, says, “Unh-unh-unh.”

  So she takes his hand, pulls him up, begins to undo his clothes. She takes off his flannel shirt and his shorts, the flip-flops he wears in their camp, his underwear. She leads him to the stream, and they squat in the stream together, and she cups her hands to bring water to his forehead and his mouth, and talks to him soothingly, playfully, admiringly, as she would her cat.

  BY NIGHTFALL she’s sunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and has not eaten since the porridge. She says, for the fifth time, May I cook? I’m so hungry. May I get dressed? I’m so cold.

  And he says, finally, Yes, cook. Yes, put your clothes on. He daubs mud on her bites, and she on his, and he puts on his clothes, too: long pants and a sweatshirt.

  She makes the fire come back, and stirs a couple of packages of pasta mix into a pot of water, the quickest thing she can think of. She’s so hungry!

  After they’ve eaten, he crawls into the tent and falls asleep, and she stays by the fire and tries to think.

  While he’s sleeping, she crawls into the tent and starts to go through his duffel bag, but he wakes up and grabs her wrist hard, and twists it, and snarls at her. Then he won’t go back to sleep, but sits by the fire, his head jerking every now and then, keeping himself awake. He has the duffel bag between his feet.

  She means to stay awake all night, watching him, but she can’t: She falls asleep by the fire in her sleeping bag, which she has unzipped from his. In the morning she sees that he has kept the fire going. He brings her water, makes porridge. She thinks she won’t eat or drink, and then she does: There doesn’t seem any point in refusing.

  In the morning he goes to the cliffs. As soon as he is gone, she dives at his bag, but of course the radio is not there. In the afternoon he comes back from the cliffs whistling so she will know it is him rustling through the salmonberry and salal and not the cougar. Comes back whistling, strips off his backpack and his binoculars and his Gore-Tex, his flannel shirt, his gabardine work pants, which are all coated with white and black smears, gannet guano. Builds up the fire, which she hasn’t tended properly, which has burned down to sullen coals. Balances the big black kettle on the flat stones, boils the water for washing himself and his clothes. Hangs his clothes not on the line but over the boughs of the cedars, which only he can reach. Nude and whistling in the clearing.