by SK Dyment
Vespa twirls the straw. “You’re lucky to be alive.”
“Well, lucky, hmm. Lucky. My parole officer would have laughed. He always said I deserved what I got.”
“People don’t deserve to die for breaking into places, they deserve…”
“To go to jail for that, yes, I sometimes think so too.” Jackie sips again, hands the glass back to Vespa, who is sitting up at the edge of the bed, a fiery look in her eye.
“Well, they should go back to the community where they committed the crime and they should apologize. That’s what I really think.”
“Well, believe me, this was the beginning of a long apology.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but that’s what I think. I think people should say ‘I’m sorry.’ And restore the things that they have broken or stolen. That’s what I’ll always think.” Vespa extends her legs again and rests the cold drink against her thigh, her eyebrows high.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I couldn’t agree with you more. Anyway, I was younger then, and I didn’t deserve to die.”
“No, no one deserves to die.”
“So,” says Jackie, starting again, “I lay there for some time, assessing how I could possibly have come to be there. Finally, out of sheer curiosity I would say, more than an idea or anything, I clambered around it, entered the place, and then fell down in a second blackout on the waxed and tiled deli floor.”
“You were totally brained by the giant steel door.”
“It gets worse.”
“I lay there, inside a restaurant an hour before dawn, in order to rob it in some way. I had no memory of planning the event, only the knowledge that I had never been a quitter. The machine was a small, front-loading bill-dispenser. If I had brought the right equipment, and the door was not in the way, I could have easily scooted it down the alley. In fact, the door was angled in such a way that I could have easily pushed the four-foot high mini-bank into the alley and away from the deli, breaking it out of sight of passersby on the street.”
“It sounds like you came around.”
“Came around, no! I had no memory of how I had even come to be there.”
She notices that Vespa, out of concern for her, is now on the verge on tears. “I’m okay,” she reassures her.
“Well, good, because this is the worst thing I have ever done,” Jackie says.
“The worst thing? It sounds like you didn’t even know when to run. It sounds like it wasn’t you.”
“Well, that’s kind of you because a normal person would have decided to leave.”
“But not you?”
“No, I was not making very good decisions.”
“Well, who knows? Maybe staying was a good decision.”
“No, running would have been it. My eyes, however, were adjusting to the darkness. And there was a strange galaxy of glitter that filled everything. There was a nerve-wracking alarm.”
She tells Vespa how it had raged in her ears. Jackie had counted down seconds as she always did, forgetting that she had been out cold for several minutes and not able to make sense of her wristwatch in the dark. She picked up her tools, despite the blood running into her eyes and went back to work. The case broke free with a moan and a shudder, and she encountered a galvanized plate.
“It was not the normal way I even cracked open these things. The machine was front-loading; and I was coming at it from the side, tapping away like a kid with an egg on Easter morning. The problem was, I had not brought an electric drill. But then I came up with a solution.”
“What about time?”
Jackie nods. “I only had moments. I duct-taped my hand screwdriver to one of the restaurant’s electric blenders and held it up to the screw plate.”
“You were innovating.”
“No kidding. And there are so many settings on a blender these days, what if it went the wrong way? That’s when I realized the ringing in my ears was not an alarm system I had set off, but the physical effect of being struck in the head with the free-swinging door. Not knowing what to do, I stumbled to the meringues in the glass pastry cooler. Suddenly, I found myself preparing to take a nap. Right there, behind the espresso bar. A light was blinking on and off on the eight-inch display screen of the machine. I looked up and saw the deep connection I have with machines was paying off in a way I had never expected. The display screen read, ‘JACKIE, GET UP, GET UP!’”
“Sounds like a helpful hallucination. Sleeping off a concussion can be deadly.”
“I was certain the display screen couldn’t give personal messages to an individual visitor, even at four a.m.”
“It’s true.”
“It’s true. ‘HELLO,’ ‘WELCOME,’ but never ‘GET UP.’ I tried to crawl over to it, but I fell back, like this, on my back. I felt a sensation telling me to let it all go. I almost did, and then again, the stupid machine was flashing at me through the haze. Finally, I crawled over to it and propped myself up against the thing, like it and me were old-time friends or lovers at a bar, which is where the dogs and the police found me, dripping with sweat and drying blood.”
“But if you had been lying instead of propped, it may have been worse. You might have not made it.”
“Exactly. Machines love me. The police took me to a hospital, questioned me about an incident I had not a clue about, not even the remotest memory. I did not know how I came to be in there or where I had planned to go to had I ever left. They stuck me across from a plexiglass wall with a lawyer and that was that.”
The delicate details of burglary with intent were explained to her, and she was warned of ten years in prison. Still in a haze, she was behind bars again, and not even because she had stolen anything, although she had intended to eat a meringue. She tells Vespa how people in the city of Toronto began to complain that they were being issued bills spotted with blood, with sad faces on the sovereigns, and the problem circulated for months. When police examined the stains, they found it was not a type they had ever seen before, a sort of type O, mixed with so much oxygen and common sweat that the forensic computers scrolled out a blood type that was 1 sodium atom for every oxygen and hydrogen atom, or an endless series of 1s and 0s. She became known out of sympathy for her concussion as ‘The Binary Burglar,’ and for days after her arrest, bank machines across the city malfunctioned and refused to issue cash. Jackie’s lawyer got her off on charges of break and enter with vandalism, arguing there was no charge for bleeding on a machine designed for the issuing of cash. This, thought Jackie, this was free of charge. Because she had become a darling of bored newspaper writers, and later because Wanda helped her win parole, she got off with a five-month stint in jail. It seemed like a long time, and, although she never did remember the actual robbery, it was long enough for her blurry head to unscramble various yes-no units of information that were fired at her and to bring her data transfer rate up to the normal speed. It was also long enough to recover serial packets of information to her most familiar directories and original file hierarchies where she was used to finding her thoughts. The recovery was an enormous relief. She began to read and cherished every word of every author in the cobwebbed prison library.
“I read fifteen books about young women with different names who each ended up on a street corner before being saved by a male devotee of Jesus and giving him sons. Fifteen. My eyes were aglow at the close of each book, and even the matron worried I would never move on to the Westerns. As I healed from my concussion, I wondered what the hell I had been reading, and an admirer sent me books both by Kerouac and Kerouac’s daughter.
“It would be years before I knew that the admirer had been Wanda. Personally, Kerouac was the healing point, and I was thrilled to have my mind back.”
“You must have found that made you more receptive to your own ideas,” says Vespa gently.
“Sweetheart, I was a tungsten filament glowing hotter than white. Too pure, a
nd supersaturated, my mind was a little too bright. I was going to freeze at a thousand degrees. I was undergoing a chemical and physical reaction, my energy was vibrating, my crystals were breaking up, my solid structure seemed to be evaporating! Physical state, Church and State, and then, I was pulled out from under the house of cards. I was most suddenly removed.”
“Your sentence was up.”
“I was released like a rat from an empty sack. I gathered my package of shoelaces, necklaces, and my pawed-through personal belongings. Just when I thought I could not stand it for another minute, I was out on the street, walking without destination, sleeping in downpours, talking in free verse to alley cats and barking out poems to dogs. And just when I thought I would explode from the clatter inside me, I had been cut loose, my body left to fend for itself. I was swinging and sparking in the wind like a broken electrical wire in a storm. I was free, but terrified to talk to anybody, to even articulate a thought. I was absolutely uncertain as to whether I was an anarchist, an Aristotelian, or just a piece of ass. I moved into an unheated garage, fed scraps to stray squirrels, and made friends with toothless old men playing pool on the wrong side of town. I went on a series of fasts because my stomach was turned upside down from jail, and I picked up a job repainting automobiles. I filled my own garage with cut flowers and lined the walls with books and photocopied art. At the end of each cheque, I went to a bar for lesbians, met no one of interest, came home and toyed with the industrial-sized vibrator I had constructed myself. Every night I placed the sexual lubricant back on the shelf next to the chain and gear oil, had a nightcap of whiskey liqueur, and cried myself to sleep.”
“How long did this go on?”
“Weeks, then months, while I hopped from job to job, picking up an enormous amount of information with the mathematical, mechanical side of my brain while I patiently waited for my love of literature to turn to trade manuals, and, you know, to escape the hairdressing classes from prison. I even bought myself an arc welding kit and a generator, and anything else that gave me tactile pleasure. I treated myself to chainsaw engines and broken things. I stroked and stoked them, and decided I was not all that different from any other woman who was not getting a whole lot of sex and didn’t care. Then, I borrowed a forklift from a warehouse where I was working and drove it through the plate glass window of a supermarket near my house. I tore the four-foot banking machine from its position on the wall and drove it to a van I’d stolen an hour before by jamming a screwdriver into the ignition. I abandoned everything but the money and went home to water my plants.”
“What did you do with the money?”
“With the money? I flew to New York and decided to live it up a little. I met a middle-class Russian called Olesya in a bar. We had a fling. When I realized she was politically feeble-minded, I lost interest in her. Then, when I returned to Toronto, I was arrested as an accomplice to an armed robbery gang I had never met in my life.”
“They caught you.”
“No, they hadn’t ‘caught’ me because it was something I hadn’t done.”
“They never caught you for the forklift?”
“No. It must have looked too masculine.”
“But they thought you were accomplice to armed robbery.”
“Exactly. People I’d never met in my life, and much more serious in every way.”
“How could you prove that you were innocent?”
“Well, I panicked a little, and then I realized I could contact Olesya. Because everyone saw us partying at clubs in New York. So I scarcely broke a sweat. I just left a voice message and then waited. And then another one, and then another one. All I needed her to do was to come north and testify that I had been with her in bed. I assumed any friend, even an enemy, would fly up the same weekend, and I offered to pay for her flight. I knew I had showed her a good time in bed, and she had seemed eager to stay in touch with me.”
“Makes sense. She can easily testify, supported by cameras, bartenders, mutual contacts from that week. So did she spring you?”
“Olesya? No. What she did finally, was to write to me in the form of a postcard that said, ‘I’m sorry, but I have my life to consider, and I am not out of the closet.’”
“What? Not out of the closet, when she’s the only alibi, so she can’t?”
“If only she had been out of my life. Instead, she wrote to me once a week for my entire time back in jail. It was the most irritating thing that I have ever experienced.”
Vespa pouts. “What were her letters like?”
“Full of sympathy and invitations to me to come and stay with her once I was released. Then, after a few letters, in the form of grade-school quality poetry, she shared her discoveries in her coming-out journey as a lesbian. They were unsolicited and involved elaborations of Olesya’s sexual exploits.”
“You must have treasured them.”
“I used them as wicks to light my cigarettes or to create bonfires in my toilet after lights out. By the time the authorities realized they had their missing gang member on a security camera while I had been locked behind bars, Olesya wrote to tell me she had met an empowered lesbian who urged her to testify. When Olesya finally phoned me to announce that she was coming to Toronto to deliver justice, I was four hours from release.”
“So, she would be the first free person that you would see.”
“Well, if I still had not discovered anything helpful to read, I had discovered Gay Pride. I was proud enough not to welcome her up with her new girlfriend. I was post-trauma. I didn’t want to risk upsetting her and for all I knew, being sent somehow back to prison. In my politest of manners, I promised I would come to New York sometime and visit her at home. My anger was so deep, it was difficult not to make it sound like a threat. Through long incarcerated days and nights, I had come to hate everything she represented. I had been sending bad-vibe beams at her since before the mistaken bust, and so I was careful to control my voice.”
It is difficult for her to tell Vespa all of this, and so they lie in silence in each other’s arms, staring at Jackie’s ceiling fan and drawing circles around each other’s nipples with the tips of their fingers and their tongues.
“Hate’s heavy,” Vespa says finally. “It wasn’t fair of her to pretend to be a friend, and then to be a terrible coward.”
Hate is something that has been bothering Vespa over the past five years, while Jackie has been inside and outside of prisons. It had been bothering Vespa since she first sat with Rudy on his lip-shaped couch. It has been hate, and in particular, the intensity with which Rudy conveyed his hate for B.F. Turner. B.F. Turner is someone Vespa has been forced to know all about, and she has pushed him to the back burner of her mind. Here his name and everything she knew about him has boiled with all the things he has done, for all the lives his consortium had destroyed. Even resigned, good-hearted Jackie hated B.F. Turner. Opening the pot only occasionally, each time Vespa finds it is to look in and see her friend Rudy boiling too. Rudy, the man who hopped in of his own free will. Only now when she looks in, she sees a new tremble in Rudy’s chin, a lost look in his eyes. She sees the Rudy that she could not forget: A man with eyes that said he could recapture his youth by carrying her to his bed, and a mouth that said he could get away with it if she objected.
She cannot tell Jackie all of this, so instead she says, “Hate’s heavy. Hate’s a heavy, heavy thing.”
They lie in bed together and exchange touches and sounds that express things that are to equal degrees more unexpected and more fantastic than either lover can imagine. They are enamoured with their invention of each other.
13.
AAS EVERYBODY KNOWS, B.F. Turner, is in the habit of disappearing for days at a time from his New York offices into the Adirondacks, frequently with a high-calibre gun and ammunition. He has also taken to the habit of scoring the tips of his bullets with an “x”—something he claims to have learned fr
om a Vietnam vet. He explains all of this to Rudy as they drive south together without hunting licenses to blow away unsuspecting deer.
B.F. will have none of it; a man of his stature should not need to ask when and where to hunt, and so, he disregards rules and drives on, heading to a place he has picked out. It is either the deer or his wife, he tells Rudy, and Rudy laughs like a good confidant should. Scoring the tips of his bullets, B.F. believes, will cause the missile to fragment inside the animal, a dirty trick he learned from a dirty soldier, and one that he says he uses experimentally, hoping to prevent a long, drawn-out chase like the hunt that bagged him his only rack. His hound is no longer part of the expeditions. After leaving it tied to a tree next to a locator alarm, the animal had panicked and bitten B.F. He shows Rudy the bite scar as if it is a proud battle wound, then tells him he killed the animal on the spot. It was, perhaps, a financial mistake, to shoot a pedigree hound, but it had never liked him, and so it had never been all that much help.
“It’s in heaven now,” says Rudy in a chipper voice. He complains of the cold, slips on a set of gloves. He asks if he can examine the scored bullets more closely and the luxury Silverado swerves on the road as B.F. reaches for the case. They already share the same type of weapon. Rudy gets out his own bullets and begins scoring them with his hunting knife.
“Look at you with your little dress shoes and Armani suit? Don’t you ever let your crack hang out?” B.F. says and tosses some of his own already-scored bullets into Rudy’s lap.
B.F. lets out a grunt-snort of derision and gives Rudy a dirty once-over glance. “I oughta stop at a restaurant along here for a sloppy joe and send you in to get it. With your suit on, the managers will bust a gut!”
“No,” says Rudy, in a more forceful way than he intended.
B.F.’s eyebrows go up in interest. They are near a highway truck stop. He cannot resist the possibility of embarrassing Rudy. He has so seldom seen Rudy show emotion or any kind of social discomfort or shame, and now he has him hostage in the backcountry with a lavender tie, B.F. is beginning to lather at the mouth.
