Corridor Nine

by Sophie Stocking

  “Man, did I ever fall asleep. How late is it? Eight o-clock all ready?” He looks carefully at Bernie’s face. “Why don’t you come into the bedroom and talk to me.”

  She gets up from the table.

  “I’ll be back in a little while to read to you guys.”

  “That’s okay,” says Lola. “We don’t need a story tonight. We’ll just go to sleep.”

  “Don’t worry about the dishes,” says Eben.

  When they hear the bedroom door close, they go dig in the fridge for something edible but come out empty handed.

  “Daddy bought groceries, but why does he think we all have to be on his Keto diet?” wails Lola. “There’s nothing but yogurt and cheese and nuts and kale!”

  “Don’t ask Dad for food, he’ll just make you another green smoothie, says Eben, but then he remembers the Ichiban under his bed.

  “Lola unloads, Lou and Mo load. I’ll make Ichiban,” he says before heading up the stairs to get it.

  “Try again.”

  Fabian stares at the screen and forces himself to think “other”, to imagine what the blood-sucking vacuum of need could possibly want now. Again, he visualizes himself defenseless and immobile, exposed and cold, and the screen clears a spot in the opalescence like a hair dryer melting a frosty window.

  “Oh! Oh! Keep the focus! Excellent.” Through the aperture the egg uncurls and flails. Warm, thinks Fabian. Contain me. Baby David seems to relax into his skin and settle into expectant waiting. Suck. Suck a lot. The baby burps but stares through the screen disgruntled. Good Lord suck some more then. Fabian scores a smile. Always come, always come when I shout, and finally he responds with a fast forward spurt of maturation. In a blink he grows from an off-kilter baby, to a sitting upright Buddha, robust and complacent.

  “Wow! Very good, you’ve grown him to six months. Now what do you see? What does he need?”

  Fabian sighs and hugs his knees to his chest as he sits. He stares at baby David, what did he Fabian want at this point? Eyes, watch me, watch me. Mirror, adore. Smiles, hands there, contain but let me go too. Touch me! The infant morphs again. Suddenly Fabian cannot watch, he rotates away with a jerk and the screen gives off a squawk like the needle dragged across a vinyl record.

  “Always the babies! The bloody babies! How can I give what I never received? I never got touch, or mirror, or adore!” and yet I must provide ceaselessly?” He stands, walks away from the screen and paces. “Finally, with Margaret I thought I would get my share. She oozed maternity. Finally, I would have nurturing and companionship and sex! But David came the first year we were married. He hypnotized her. He sucked up my entire cut. He made her hate me.”

  “The baby and mother do hypnotize each other. They can’t help it. You must admire and encourage this dance, an exhausting and virtuous infatuation . . . ”

  “Moronic prancing around the diaper pail, more like it,” finishes Fabian. “Any intellectual rigour she contained turned to mush, and the whole process, the swelling and birthing, ugh, disgusting. They stretched out her lovely skin. She squandered her beauty on them instead of saving it for me.”

  Bune stares at the cantankerous toddler for a long time and scratches his head.

  “To be honest with you I’m not sure how to proceed.”

  “With what? My indoctrination?”

  “I can’t seem to find any crack in your armour.” Again, Bune materializes a cigarette. He paces slowly into the dark trailed by regular puffs of smoke.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Just walking for awhile.”

  “Walking where? That’s the way to the Sponsor Ring, are you going to go visit? What’s it like? I wonder if . . . ” Bune stops just before vanishing from sight in the black. The puffs of smoke slow. Deliberately he rotates. The two extra heads erupt from his shoulders, and all take on expressions of benign affability as he walks back.

  “Logically speaking,” says the wolf head gruffly, “by the law of cause and effect, ‘karma’ if you will, any insight you achieve here on Corridor Nine will be immediately rewarded.”

  “An essential characteristic, a biological function perhaps,” continues Bune’s angel head.

  “Will be restored to you,” the griffin rasps, tilting his head sideways to fix his beady eye on Fabian. “For instance, because of your marginally successful completion of Lesson One you regained the capacity for physical exhaustion, as you recall.” He fidgets the ridged edges of his beak together gently.

  “But alternatively,” concludes Bune “other rewards are up for negotiation.” Fabian straightens, hands clasped behind his back and ponders the three-headed being.

  “What are you suggesting?”

  “Other recompenses perhaps. For instance, a field trip of some sort . . . ”

  “You mean to the Sponsor Ring?”

  “Yes. An orientation, so you can plan your next assignment and to provide motivation for your last two lessons.”

  “Absolutely!” cries Fabian. “That seems fair, absolutely. Count me in!”

  “All right, then. Let’s do a lap and then get back to work. Do you want to pick the form I will assume for our walk? Variety will refresh us both.” Fabian wags his pink finger from head to head.

  “Eeny meany miney mo. I pick the dog.” In a moment the wolf rubs his head against Fabian’s shoulder and they set out.

  Bernie stands on the stepladder and reaches to the top of the wall of books, slides her hand into the hole left by the copy Peter had brought home, and gets her fingers under the next identical book behind it. David wants one, and she will wrap and send it to him before she picks the kids up from school. She tugs and wiggles the massive paperback out of the misaligned front layer and stops. Her headlamp shines into the hole and on tiptoe she can just see the back surface of the cavity. A wide crack oozes hardened Bulldog adhesive, a glimpse of a two-by-four between the gypsum panels.

  “Oh my God!” She starts pulling books from the top of the stack, widening the hole and throwing them behind her until she gets that section of wall down to chest height. “When will I get to the end of this?” She slides her hand back in against the wall and pulls with all her force, managing to tip the balance and the books domino down around her almost knocking over the stepladder. Too late, Bernie realizes she buried the sledgehammer and spends five minutes digging to unearth it. Stepping wobbly back across the new higher ground, she looks, and his writing greets her. This time just one word.

  PSYCHEDELIA

  Drawn to the right of the “A” stands one of his cartoons, sketched in a few quick strokes as if seen from behind, a mouse complete with rectum dot, tail draped over arm, head sideways to show snout and whiskers. His other hand holds a valise and he walks away from Bernie, stepping into new and festive territory. She gets out her cell phone, turns on the flash, and takes a picture. Here stands the mouse in the last scene of the little book Francis the House Mouse. He wrote it for her and David when they were small. A few years ago, she finally burnt it in the fireplace. Francis is a house mouse. Oh, where is his house? Where is a mouse to go? Francis doesn’t know. Everywhere mice wonder too.

  The basement seems drained of air. Bernie wishes she’d brought Angus. She picks up David’s copy and struggles over the books and up the stairs.

  “Can’t we repair him?”

  “Mmmm. Sorry, no rewind function I’m afraid.” The toddler seems oddly caved in, with the disfiguring indentation running under his chest, up his throat, and settling in the uncertainty of his eyes.

  “Well, it looks very much like him actually, the expression at any rate. That’s why he always seemed . . . ?” Fabian looks up at the wolf.

  “Yes.”

  Fabian turns away, wraps his arms around the thick ruff of the dog’s neck, and talks into the muffling fur.

  “Jealousy overcame me you see, when he took more and more of her. He became a wedge between us. I mean my jealousy was, was the wedge. But you can’t understand the power of the feeling,
like a wave, a tidal wave. I fought it. I felt shame, but the envy knocked me down, swept me away, so far out that what was the point in coming back to see what I had done?” Fabian seems to shake and Bune pulls away so he can see him. With his long tongue he licks the contorted face.

  “If you’d like I could return your tears now. After I’d given up all hope, I do believe you completed Lesson Two.” Fabian breathes a long sigh; he rolls around to sit, leaning back against the wolf’s hip.

  “I miss tears, but I thought you said the reward was negotiable? Have I really completed Lesson Two?”

  “We will practise some more with the girl egg. But essentially yes, and of course, the field trip, if you prefer. Let’s pack him up now. If you like you could apologize to him. That usually helps everyone.”

  Fabian stares through the screen at David. It’s not your fault. My fault. So sorry. Very slowly the indentation pushes out, settling on the toddler’s skin a long and puckered scar.

  “His eyes look happier, don’t you think?” asks Fabian.

  “Yes. Too wise for a three-year-old, but happier. You are right. Now just say goodbye.”

  “Will he feel this, do you think? The grown-up man in the real world, will this change how he feels too?”

  “Yes, at an unconscious level he heard your apology.”

  Goodbye and best wishes, thinks Fabian, suddenly shy. The wolf walks to the corner of the screen and looks quizzically at him. Fabian nods. Bune curls back his lips, delicately pinches the tail end of the rip strip with his teeth and pulls.

  Bernie jumps. In the sun, curled against the arm of the settee, a puddle of charcoal fur lifts its head.

  “Smokey?” His eyes are greener than the mossy velvet but his fur retreats in places, forgetting how to grow. The cat yawns wide, showing all the teeth, his black gorge, a pink and freckled tongue. He pushes up stiffly to sit, and half-hobbles half-pours himself onto the floor.

  “Mrwow.” She thinks he must be eighteen now. The world’s most ancient cat and her father’s only successful relationship. She crouches as he circles, rubbing his forehead and cheeks against her knees, his boney ribs vibrating like an old Model T. Bernie scratches under his new rhinestone-studded collar then works her fingers down his back and gives him an especially good scratch at the base of the tail.

  “Nice collar. Looks like Mrs. Gotslieg treats you right. How’d you get in?” He follows her, rubbing around her ankles as she walks from room to room.

  Oh, she forgot to close the bathroom window. Bernie pulls it shut and goes back to the living room, empty except for the settee. It waits, poised on its curved legs, eagle feet gripping cherry-wood spheres. She sits and lifts Smokey beside her, then spreads the manifesto on her knees. David wants a sample, so Bernadette takes pictures with her cell phone and attaches them to texts. She sends the pages:

  “How nazis and hyper-liberals use double standards to override ethical obiligations, Whitey’s reward, Drawing and quartering the heterosexual white male.”

  Bernie kneels and takes a picture of the cat in the sun and sends that to David too. Her phone rings.

  “Hey Bern.”

  “David! I thought you’d be working.”

  “I’m good. Just finishing some charting and my last patient cancelled. Quite the book eh? But I think you’re taking it too personally, I mean . . . ”

  “Everything I am David, everything I am he hated. He despised in fact. Women educated white women, mothers. Especially mothers. And, David, before anything else, I am a mother.”

  “I know, but he probably wasn’t thinking about you, maybe you were an exception in his mind.”

  “I don’t think so. Remember the “Secret Santa” packages on Christmas morning?”

  “Oh right, didn’t he lower them with a pulley and rope from the neighbour’s tree?”

  “Yes, and they were entirely full of toy guns, like fifty per box. Clearly, he thought I was a hyper-liberal, castrating mother. Even Eben, and he was only five, said; ‘I didn’t think Santa liked guns that much.’”

  “That’s when you moved.”

  “Yes, the last straw in a long string of weird shit. To address unknown.”

  “Well, way back, Bernie, I had to make the decision to stop caring or go crazy. If it makes you feel any better, this obsessive paranoid thinking is typical of long-term drug use. He just keeps repeating himself and going in circles in this book. I’ve seen it before. Totally crazy, but clever in a lot of places though, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah. It’s a shame.”

  “Are you going to break through the Psychedelia wall now? Maybe you should wait for Peter to come with you.” Bernie rubs her forehead.

  “You know, I just want to get to the end of this. I’m fine. Hey, I’ve got Smokey here for company. What a great old cat.”

  “Okay. Well give him a scratch from me and send photos of the next chamber.”

  “I will.” She stands up, puts the phone in her vest pocket and pulls the headlamp back on. “You stay here cat. Wait until I’ve finished the demolition.”

  The drywall crumples at the weight of the hammer. Bernie smashes with abandon, but she stops short of Francis the House Mouse. Stepping in, the colour momentarily dazzles after all the white books. This room is bigger, twelve feet to the next wall and plastered with brilliant posters. The headlamp picks out a periwinkle blue eye, the iris worked in intricate whorls and arabesques of turquoise. Beside it a magenta pink print, covered in the same complex organic forms but in black, and more diffuse; like patterns of gasoline on a puddle or the trailing smoke of a Chinese dragon. Her father’s “acid prints”, his silkscreens. Spinning, she realizes he tried to cover all four walls until he ran out of prints. Most are mandalas, sometimes framed in kaleidoscopic, diagonally stretched checkerboard patterns. Always the intricate pen and ink squiggles fill in the outlines but in every saturated hue. Mexican pink, chartreuse, egg yolk, carnelian, moss, azure, persimmon. Bernie reads the titles in the corners, Mandala 12, Cerebral Cosmograph, Cosmograph 5. She stands again in his garage studio just able to see over his worktable, feels the heat of the white blazing spot lights, the void behind Fabian’s eyes as he works for hours with dip pen and India ink. Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan and Mozart blast from the stereo. “Daddy?” she hears her little voice, but when he got like that there was no point talking to him. At a later session he’d photoprint the drawings onto their silkscreens, still later squeegee the brilliant inks across the surface for multiple prints. Sometimes he’d talk to her then, as the more manual labour didn’t require the inspiration of LSD.

  Her phone gives off its canned impression of a camera shutter, ka-sha, ka-sha, ka-sha. These signify how many hours of acid-tripping have curdled his brains. Towards one wall sits her cookstove, made from a small wooden filing cabinet, red light bulb burners that really turned on under a white Plexiglas top. The doll cradle. The rocking boat takes up a quarter of the space. Six blue plastic storage boxes sit stacked in a corner. She lifts the first one and starts lugging it out through the ragged drywall fissures and over the unpredictable footing of the books. Bernie finally makes it to the stairs and looks up to Smokey’s silhouette in the mouth of the doorway.

  “Mrwow?”

  “I’m coming.”

  When she opens it on the splintery hardwood of the living room, the box erupts with black and white photographs. Time Life quality, exhaustive documentation of her bohemian childhood. The sound of the shutter and the big black eye of the lens, her father’s most consistent attributes, and she and David his constant subjects. With sinking heart she sorts through them, David runs, a milkweed stalk aloft to the wind. The two of them and Randy and Sally Gotslieg in the plywood rocking boat under the poplars. A naked toddler Bernie crouches to pick up apples, her fuzzy orangutan outline caressed by the sun. Birthday cakes, Easter egg decorating, dress-up, dogs and cats and pet rabbits, paint and art and nature.

  Look, look, look what we gave you. Behind her right shoulder her fa
ther vibrates outraged indignation. Here David runs parallel with the surf on Long Beach dragging a whiplash of kelp. The Cabin in Nelson, the chicken coop and Indian sweat lodge. Bernie and David taking a bath at sundown in a claw foot tub floating in a field of daisies.

  Look what we gave you!

  But see our eyes? It wasn’t always so pretty. She picks up a group shot of their family and friends in front of a derelict barn. The baby-faced wives with their poetic hair gaze at husbands in groovy beards, funky felt hats, and intellectual black-rimmed glasses. The children showcase avant-garde charm.

  Idiots, innocents, thinks Bernie, and Fabian splutters, We were skewering convention to the heart of the truth!

  No. You were just blowing your mind. In the cathedral of a fir tree, Bernie peeks around a branch. Bernie and David stand balanced on a log in Kootenay Lake, suntanned and free.

  Argue with that.

  But you chose the pictures.

  She hasn’t eaten breakfast and now it’s past lunch, but she can’t think of food. The cat sleeps on the couch and Bernie sits with her face in her hands. A knock at the kitchen door makes her jump.

  “Who on earth? Oh.” Through the window in the kitchen door, a beehive of grey curls. She opens it and there stands Eva Gotslieg, softer, wider in the hip and lower in the bust, the chestnut curls now silver. But the same drooping owl-eye glasses, the same gimlet glint and fierce sociability.

  “Oh! Hello Eva! How are you? I’m so sorry I haven’t dropped by before, it’s been . . . ”

  “Don’t be silly, dear. I didn’t expect you to. I thought you could use a cup of coffee and a bite to eat, so I brought some of my plum cake. I’m a bit worried though; I can’t find your father’s cat. He wouldn’t happen . . . ”

  “Ah, Smokey! Come in here.” She leads the way to the living room where Smokey reclines comatose. “I left the bathroom window open last time, and he must have climbed in.”