Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  “Rudy, are you going nuts?” says Camelia.

  “It’s a little favour I have to do for somebody in a high place,” he says, smiling at a sparrow. “Besides, we must face the music, and it will make the company smell like a rose.”

  “Holy mixed clichés,” says Camelia. “Are you normal? The only way you’re going to make this company smell like roses is to rip it out by the roots and plant something new.”

  “Camelia. One more thing,” he tells her.

  “You want to buy a free hit of heroin for every junky in downtown Vancouver?”

  “I want Turner to get busy now, moving low-income families into our developments under a rent scheme through the city. If the city doesn’t believe our goodwill, here’s a hook. I want you to price the top three properties you’ll find listed in my Speculations and Bidding folder, file five. Once we get a price on them, we come, we see, we conquer, and I want to proceed with a very old design plan you’ll find enclosed in file eighty-five, folder four. Oldest design I ever came up with, the first one that made B.F. think I had promise. B.F. turned it into an exclusive place with gates and guards. But the original plans are all there, and that’s what we’re moving on now. Just gut the old buildings, leave the skeleton standing, but gut and reinforce. All the new contractor lists are under folder four. If people are leaving the developments, others will stay on. We will integrate rich and poor into the new system, and it will be a place for children to thrive and grow.”

  “I cannot do this all by myself,” says Camelia.

  “Certainly not. No woman is an inlet. Just start the bidding. I know when something is hot, and these properties are hot, hot-hot, sizzling…”

  “Rudy, if I may, you wanted to buy the properties in file five. Two of them we already bought. We already built there, Rudy, we own them and they aren’t for sale.”

  “That’s where we save money. We do the same thing as we do to the other ones. We gut and rebuild. Anyone with inside information knows those buildings are as stable as a donkey’s arse. They’re built on metaphorical sand, Camelia, on sand.”

  “But we built them. You built them.”

  “And there’s nothing wrong with them according to the old Turner philosophy, with their outward appearance. But they aren’t fit to live in for more than another five years. After that, the outsides will be falling off too. And we don’t want the outsides to fall down and kill somebody. Of course, we could just demo those two entirely…”

  “No, wait,” says Camelia. “Let’s start with the bidding on the other property. The one that just needs gutting.”

  “‘It’s not easy to achieve freedom without chaos.’”

  “I can’t believe that’s you on the phone.”

  “Actually, it’s Anais Nin,” says Rudy, scribbling in a book.

  “After we get the bidding started, then you can demo your old sites.”

  “Great start!”

  “Rudy? Are you okay?”

  “I’m better than I have ever been before.”

  “Then we are turning old Turner around?”

  Rudy smiles and watches a sun-dappled squirrel so close he could reach out and stroke it.

  18.

  JACKIE AND VESPA will have to take care of Olesya’s apartment while she is in jail. A video of Olesya spritzing the gallery of the grave-digging man with pepper spray and saying, “I am Oleysa! The avenger!” is on three television stations and the cover of The Village Voice. The woman who knows a whole lot about art is begging back Olesya’s love. A number of other women are begging it for the first time. Alaska is also coaching her on what to say to the media. Olesya is still in the prison infirmary. She remembers nothing but agrees that the woman in both the bank and the gallery video is definitely her. She is discussing appropriated art, and she is more articulate on the subject with every interview, with Alaska coaching every moment at her side. Olesya is now so well-versed on her topic that Jackie feels her first moment of real shame while she and Vespa watch the television and Olesya says, “When the white man reintroduced the horse to North America,” causing Jackie to blurt out, “I didn’t know that! I thought there never had been any horses!” and Vespa to whisper reverently, “Neither did I.”

  Olesya is discussing social differences between the discovery of unmarked grave remains in postwar Europe, and the same discoveries in North America when the little telephone rings by her bed. Vespa remains fixed to the screen.

  “Call before you dig,” says Jackie, and throws herself, stomach-wise across the bed to answer.

  “Jackie? It’s Wanda. Ben and I want to leave the hotel and come over there. What do you think about Oleysa on the television and her little talk about her friend who spent time in prison, preparing her for her ordeal?”

  “What did she say?”

  “Don’t you have the television on? She just mentioned the whole thing. It is obvious she looks up to you, Jackie. Didn’t you hear her?”

  “Hey, she just said some stuff about you!” says Vespa.

  Jackie covers the receiver. “Press ‘Play!’” Jackie calls out.

  She wants to hear what Olesya says, but Wanda is nattering in her ear. “Now she’s moved on to some commentary about Indigenous artifacts.”

  “Is she talking about Indigenous artifacts?” Jackie asks.

  “No, she’s talking about you,” says Vespa, reclining on Olesya’s fun-fur couch.

  “There’s a bit of a time-lapse.… She’s talking about me, and Vespa’s hitting ‘Record’….”

  The opening credits of a Rossellini movie blast the room.

  “Turn it down! Turn it back!”

  “You said hit ‘Play’!”

  “I said ‘Record,’ so we could play it back, Wanda, I gotta go.”

  “It’s all over,” says Wanda. “She only talks about you for a second. Then she moves on to…”

  “Vespa, she talks about me!” Vespa is thumbing through Olesya’s video recordings.

  “She also says some very interesting things about stolen grave objects.”

  “Rossellini. Olesya is much more erudite than I had thought. I wonder if she has Ladri di Biciclette!”

  “Vespa! I said turn it back!”

  “Jackie, for heaven’s sake, I can’t turn back the time,” says Vespa, “and it’s probably over by now.”

  “Ladri di Biciclette was De Sica. All the characters were amateurs, it wasn’t real!”

  “You’re back on the air again,” says Wanda. “They keep running the clip where she talks all about you.”

  Jackie strains to hear Wanda’s newscast through the receiver.

  “Well,” says Wanda, “I guess that was all there was. Just a little clip. Too bad we didn’t tape it. Can Olesya videotape TV in her apartment?”

  “Yes, that’s what Vespa’s fooling with right now. She’s looking at her tapes. She wants to watch Rossellini and De Sica, instead of watching me. I don’t enjoy De Sica. It’s not even real filmmaking. And it’s got goddam modern things in the middle of black-and-white things…. When I watch a film…”

  “Of course, it’s real filmmaking. It’s Neorealism,” says Wanda, suddenly in her element. “How could you say it’s not real? That’s why they hand-pick everyday people!”

  The New York news station is discussing the release of a killer whale back into nature that has been trained only to kiss girls in bikinis in exchange for tossed fish.

  “Listen, I’m on the television again! I mean, Olesya is. I’m here, and I’m on television. I’m three places at once.”

  “Now that’s Neorealism,” says Wanda, “And a dash of the surrealistic. If you’ve studied the forms. Travelling through time, three places at once.”

  The whale is followed by a clip discussing the use of homeless people to advertise Internet shopping. Jackie is seen bobbing across the street ove
r to the Pilsner umbrellas. Olesya is running out of view in her tangerine jacket. A journalist on camera moves in front of the scene to discuss the police reaction to the picket.

  “I have to go,” says Wanda. “I know this whale.”

  “What if the whale is attracted to places where there are bikinis?”

  Wanda hangs up.

  Vespa leans back and scratches her head with the remote.

  “Well, I guess that’s all there was.”

  “What do you mean? She was talking about me.”

  “She was talking about a lot of interesting stuff, Jackie, if you had listened nicely instead of talking.”

  “I was listening, as a matter of fact, and I think Alaska, her coach, is very intelligent and she is telling her what to say.”

  “I bet Alaska doesn’t have Bergman in her video collection.”

  “It’s probably on loan from her,” says Jackie.

  “What do you have against Olesya, anyway?”

  “Sometime, we should talk.”

  “No time like the present.”

  Jackie warms up. “Bergman as actor or screenwriter?”

  “Writer, of course. The opposite of Brecht.”

  “Bergman was a pessimist. He created films like a factory creates boxes of chocolates. I read Brecht in prison,” says Jackie, sitting down next to her girl. “The Nazis tried to nail him down, and McCarthyism tried to bust him here in America. But he was too smart for all of them. He was smart like a fox.”

  “Thea von Harbou, is that a woman? Wrote the screenplay for “M.”

  Jackie is unresponsive.

  “Where the underworld organizes to catch the killer, and hold a kangaroo court. All the criminals circle around Peter Lorre, and he says he can’t help who he is…” Vespa explains.

  “I know. I’ve seen it. Peter Lorre was one of the most brilliant actors of that time. A talented homosexual, and then he killed himself. Because no one understood the difference between what Peter Lorre was and what his character was in that film,” says Jackie.

  “I wonder if that’s what Olesya feels like. The homosexual surrounded by hostile criminal elements,” Vespa continues.

  “Stuff it,” says Jackie.

  “Why do you hate her so much?”

  Jackie says nothing.

  “Bergman then. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen Autumn Sonata.”

  “I was in prison. They show get-a-job movies in prison.”

  “‘To you I was a doll that you played with when you had time.… You shut yourself in and worked, and no one was allowed to disturb you.… You were always kind … but completely preoccupied.’”

  “What was that?”

  “That was Autumn Sonata.… “

  “I’m like that?”

  “Sometimes. You do have several sides, Jackie, several sides. I think there are parts of your personality that won’t talk to me. Healthy feelings you don’t show.”

  Vespa throws her arm around Jackie and they settle back on the fun-fur sofa. Alaska’s cat, which is staying at Olesya’s because it is shedding and Alaska is trying to carefully paint her passion for Olesya in oils, leaps up onto their laps and deposits a sweater’s worth of hair onto their clothing.

  “I love you,” says Vespa.

  “I’m easy,” says Jackie. She throws the cat onto the floor.

  “We should go to the bedroom.”

  “Why?”

  “People in this city spy in windows like this one. Besides, the couch is lumpy.”

  “It pops out.”

  “Yeah, well let it pop out for some beer. I’m taking you to the bedroom.”

  The intercom buzzes. “Paparazzi,” says Vespa.

  “Is that another filmmaker?”

  “No, it means….”

  “I know what it fucking means. Paparazzi … it’s a type of pop-out couch.”

  The intercom is more insistent.

  “Ignore it,” says Vespa. She unbuttons Jackie’s shirt.

  “What about the paparazzi watching from the windows across the street?”

  Vespa throws her leg over Jackie’s hip. Jackie unbuttons Vespa’s jeans and slides her hands across her warm, smooth stomach.

  The door rattles.

  “It’s me. I came to get my cat!” Alaska laughs and the cat jumps in alarm. “Just kidding! Hey, what are you kids up to?”

  “What are you up to?”

  “Can’t sleep in my apartment. Too full of fumes. I’m giddier than a glue-head in a glider factory.”

  Alaska stares at the two of them as if there were certain parts about them that she would like to paint over and correct. “I just need somewhere to crash,” she tells them. Her tone has a kidnapped-sounding quality. She turns on her heel and goes to the bedroom, quietly closing the door. From inside they can hear her saying Olesya’s name softly to herself and sobbing like a child.

  “Well,” says Jackie, moving the cat across for a second time, “I suppose we should pop out the couch.”

  19.

  RUDY WAKES with the slow rocking of his tree in the wind, and the creaking of branches around him. It is Tuesday again, and he calls Camelia to discuss a New York property that continually resurfaces in his head. He has dreamed of it twice, and in the second dream, he was Freder in Metropolis, the movie Wanda had rented so long ago. In the dream, the streets were burning, and he ran to West 108th Street with Vespa’s hand in his, and there was fire raging in the street. He turned back, but Vespa was inside the building he had helped design, which became Cubist, distorted, corrupted, and there was no way to get her out. A crowd had formed and things were falling, slipping from the many inch or more off-angle balconies and falling on people’s heads. He was Freder, and the answer was to fly, take flight, like Ben had once dreamed of doing. Rudy knew he was capable, but he had not the wildest idea how to begin.

  He calls his satellite dish, which phones his company and tells Camelia to quietly have Olesya’s building inspected and repaired or else demolished to make way for a new multi-level play park with indoor soccer, a swimming pool, and a rink for urban kids.

  He sits in his tree and stares at his hands. His books are full of sketches, but his mind is full of the shame and the torment of his deceit. He is walking alone through the desert of the father betrayed by his son. Nothing will comfort his spirit, and he is not eating anything that he does not stumble across, too sorry now to kill even a squirrel for his food. He feels that many eyes are watching him, but he does not want to believe in a God watching all of them. Any form of hierarchical thinking gets him down. He is confused. He has nothing to say to B.F. Turner. There are crowds of dead around Turner when he sees him in his dreams. He cannot reach him. He wants to comfort him, to hear him joke about raping teenage whores again, to be forgiven by a man who split his wife’s lip for overcooking a salmon. He doesn’t know where he is going anymore, and he wonders if he should hang himself from the tree. He wants a larger hand to hold his own, and then realizes he has wanted it for so long that his hand reaching out is not a man’s hand at all, but a tiny child’s hand, injured from fooling with picklocks and trying to jimmy the back trunks of cars. He wonders at it, stares at it. It is scarred already from fighting with boys twice his size.

  20.

  NATALIA, RUDY’S NEW YORK girlfriend, is sitting in her apartment on West 108th Street, staring at her long, and according to Rudy, expensive legs. She can’t help but feel as if her whole world is sliding from her. First, she lost her African violets. And now, the women above her, who ignore her in the lobby, have started a campaign. First it was to get the woman who was accidentally struck with Natalia’s violet out of prison. But the woman who was in prison had every reason to be there as the television news showed. Before pausing underneath Natalia’s building, she had robbed a bank downtown. She had then pepper-sprayed the
operator of a small gallery, a man who could have been an asthmatic or a person with a delicate heart. Now, the woman refused to come out of prison; she was on a hunger strike and talking on the news with more airtime than the killer whale. It was as if the killer whale, the issue Natalia really did care about, was only able to come up for air for a few seconds and then was pushed back under the surface by the debate of this woman’s actions. As if everyone was forgetting that she had robbed a bank, as if appearances did not matter anymore. Rudy, in the midst of all this, had asked her to fib for him, to say that they had played in New York for four days instead of two. Then he had stayed with her, and he had paid the tuition for Natalia’s attendance as a student in the dance school she had always wanted to be part of. Before leaving, he had put money into her bank account so that she would have time to attend the class, practice the moves, be coached privately, and still carry on with the other interests in her life. Rudy had said that he would have a private investigator follow Natalia and make sure that she pursued her studies, tossing it off as a sort of paternalistic joke. Now the building is surrounded with photographers, and Natalia knows, from lying in Rudy’s arms and being a confidante to Rudy’s fears, that his company has the corrupt money and power to take away people’s lives without retribution. So, the man who may or may not be following her, may be doing it for her safety because she knows that she has been seen with Rudy. Or he may be doing it to ensure that she does not tell the police she was only with Rudy for two days before the day that B.F. was announced as missing. In other words, if he has hired someone to follow her, the individual watching her movements could be an assassin. But Natalia is not afraid of assassination. She is afraid of losing Rudy. Via a deep-woods radio and satellite system, Natalia has received a poem a week. Some say things like,

  The animals that surround me

  Are not trained in artifice

  They live acutely for survival

  Contented just with this

  Without concern for buildings

  That will stand a thousand years