by Lisa Moore
The waitress is a large, hospitable woman. She never stops moving. She sets the table in front of you, cocoons of forks and spoons together, and she sets a second spot but there is no one else and you think you must look like someone expecting company. A glass of water from a sweating jug. The slosh of ice. She pours the jug sideways, hand under the glass like a connoisseur. Can I take your order? she asks, mid-pour. The ice and water sloshing, settling. There is a towel under her arm. And a pen in her ear.
Pea soup, you say.
Homemade pea soup, she says. Good choice.
She comes back shortly, instantly, with the soup, the pale dumpling, setting it down carefully, the soup sloppy and steaming and terribly yellow and there’s the faint outline of her thumbprint on the rim of bowl. You smile up at her and thank her and when she leaves you stare down into your lunch, considering it like a dare.
You eat the dumpling first with the spoon. You inspect the spoon after each bite, turning it in the light and wondering, how many mouths? There are scratch marks on the spoon. Teeth marks or the natural wear of machine-washed cutlery. Like key scrapes on a vehicle or a dog owner’s hardwood. You see yourself in the gnarled reflection of the spoon and you are unrecognizable, a vagrant. You will have to shave tonight. You decide now that you will find a hair in your soup. There is always a hair in your soup. You eat guardedly, suspiciously, hoping to reinforce your view of the world.
The box appeared to be full. You think about it again and again over lunch and you know the box was full. You will pass by it again tomorrow. You will confirm the fullness of the box at this time. But for now this is all you have to go on: that it is a box for jawbones in general and it may or may not be full. And there is a padlock. The box is guarded.
Your tongue is burnt and sore from the morning’s black coffee. The jawbone box has made you intensely aware of your own mouth. You know the temperature of soup can vary tremendously and you take cautious sips as though carefulness can change the temperature of things. You have not yet found a hair in your soup.
You think of your own jawbone. Solid ivory scaffolding, rods of teeth, straps of muscle fibers like the exposed roots of oak trees. You think of other bones that belong to you. You think of words like femur and sesamoid. You do not know these words. Not really. You think that skeletons are other things, anthologies of bone. You have never considered skeletons to be anything other than medical relics. Anything other than anthropological art. Anything other than Halloween decorations, laminated cardboard with small metal hoops for joints. And you think now that there’s a skeleton actually inside you, a real one, a real cartoon-looking thing folded into your flesh and muscle and you think how strange, how weird, how fucked up that there are actually skeletons folded into all of us.
The waitress is above you now and she asks how you’re doing and you picture her as though she is behind an x-ray.
You say you’re doing fine, thanks for asking.
You do not say you are looking for a hair.
You do not ask, Are these teeth marks?
You are an inspector of homes and buildings for an insurance company.You travel too much. The insurance company is built on a foundation of minimizing risk and you are sent to hunt for risk and to neutralize it like a form of pest control. Controlling risk is literally in your job description. You do not enjoy your job. You enjoy your job. You enjoy this pea soup. The corollary is that you see risk even when you are not looking. The burnt out fluorescent lighting is indicative of a deeper electrical issue. There are exposed bulbs over customers’ heads, soups, dumplings. The crunch of glass. There is a slick of water just beyond the floor mat. The floor mat is curled and frayed on one edge like a lapping tongue and the tongue is saying, Come on, you, trip. The slick of water is like candle wax. Within it the upsidedown restaurant. Within it a thousand days or more of litigation and discoveries and physiotherapy.
You finish your soup quietly.
You do not find a hair.
You are disappointed by your stroke of luck.
You remember the next house as scraps of minutiae like a strange art exhibit, or, more appropriately, like a trailer park ravaged by a tornado. Or, an exploded puzzle. You remember the house as greased vinyl tablecloths and breadcrumbs in the margarine. You remember the house as rags of orange carpet and Littlest Hobo reruns on a floor model television and a long narrow hallway with station-wagon walls. You remember the kitchen table but also a second table in the living room for company and the table was a boat or a fort, it was solid, you remember, dense, and you consider now that this table was perhaps what held the home together.
You expect the house to bestow some likeness of your grandparents onto the new owners. But there have been a long line of owners since your grandfather and grandmother and the likeness is thinned beyond any recognition. The man is young, energetic. His wife is quiet and aloof. These people are not your grandparents. They invite you in. They call you an adjuster but you are not an adjuster. You do not adjust. You do not correct them because. Because you have stopped correcting people on this point. In insurance matters there are salesmen and there are adjusters, before disaster and after. You will always be one of these.
You recall these small exhibit scraps as you are taken through the home and you do not tell the owners that you know their house better than they do. You do not tell them you were here when the house was new. You do not tell them about the station-wagon walls or the orange carpet or that there was a boat in the living room and you guard these memories like a cantankerous curator.
In fact there is not much about the house you recognise and you are pleased that your version of things is preserved only in memory. You do not want these people to live in your grandparents’ house and you are happy to discover that they do not. In the kitchen you look above the doorframe and there is a pinch in your heart and you recognize something, finally, a varnished pine plaque placed there by your grandfather. You were with him when he bought the knick-knack, when he nailed it there and you remember the revolving display of them at the drugstore and your grandfather studying them as though he were investing in a philosophy. The plaque reads:The older I get, the more I recall, how little I knew when I knew it all.
The owner now reads this for you, out loud, and you smile as though it is the first time you’ve heard it. But you’re thinking instead of a different plaque.You’re remembering that he bought two different plaques that day although you have not seen the second one anywhere. The plaque read: A camel can go without a drink for eight days, but who the hell wants to be a camel? Before you leave, the owner shakes your hand and you ask him, casually, with camels on your mind, the location of the nearest liquor store. But the owner tells you he does not drink and you wonder then about the fate of the second plaque and you think, here, right now, is a man who wants to be a camel.
The view of yourself in the motel mirror is startling. You drink liquor from a coffee mug, holding it like coffee while you shave. Sipping it like coffee. Sliding the razor slowly along the edge of your face, feeling your jaw as an extraneous limb.
There is hair in the sink and somehow it is not your hair. You are afraid of it. You wash the hair away with the tap water, splashing the upper reaches of porcelain but the hair is as resilient as pubic hair on soap. You reassess yourself post-shave, still unimpressed. You wonder if there are other boxes in the world for other bones.
The hipbone box.
The tailbone box.
More rain. You try to picture other people who’ve stayed here. In the same squat motel room. The same bed. How many mouths? Stains on the carpet the same colour of the carpet only darker. Shades of stains, dimensions of them. The ceiling slopes with the roof. You’ve hit your head while changing. You’ve said, Fuck. You’ve said fuck because there are things you say when you’ve hit your head and this is one of them. Pain is the audience. You picture someone else at this desk, sitting. The glow from the laptop. The desk lamp with extra outlets. You could plug a lamp into a l
amp. And another lamp into another until you had an infinite progression of lamps and you wonder if this is, on some theoretical level, how the world works. The curser is blinking in the Google search bar and you type:
Jawbone Box.
The rain stops suddenly and you notice the noise of cars now. Attention is demanded by abundance. The noise of them passing on the highway, not quite a hiss but a hiss with bass, a throb, a thrum, elusively bursting with meaning. Google is as confused as you are. You close the lid of the laptop. You notice you are slouched and humpbacked in the wall mirror and there is the coffee mug, full of anything. You straighten your back, sip.
On your way out of town the next day you slow to take more of the sign in. You stop altogether. You pull over. The details come into focus as though under a lens. The sign is embossed driftwood, varnished. You stare at the box below. The box of jawbones. The lid of the box is pushed open. The padlock is unlatched, hanging. The container is bursting with jawbones. They look large, cumbersome, substantial. You decide, moose. That they are the jawbones of dead moose. You can picture the noise of one jaw being added to the box. The clanking. A reanimated mouth.
There’s a man who comes out of a house and he has a big green garbage bag and he’s hurrying across his lawn. The bag is flapping behind him like a cape.You’re sitting and minding your business and wondering about the jawbones. He taps on your window. You roll down your window. He asks you if you want to buy a jawbone. He says he saw you eying them and you were eying them, true, but you were also minding your business. More minding than eyeing. But there are crucial questions to be asked here. The man, for one, does not look like a purveyor of jawbones. Or maybe he does. Maybe he looks exactly how you’d imagine a bone salesman to be and you consider other sayings now.That everything is for sale at the right price. Or one man’s trash is another man’s… Picturing the words hung above other people’s doorframes, one doorway after another, an infinite progression of drugstore philosophies, jam-packed wisdom, time-worn, hand-me-down things seared in varnished driftwood. The rain is coming down real hard now. The garbage bag is flapping in his hands. He’s leaning down to get a look at you, this potential buyer of secondhand jawbones. His hand is on his hat and it looks like the rain is paining him. The Jawbone Box is behind and to the right of him, and for a moment you see it all as a still shot—a portrait of the curious salesman and his bones.
You roll up your window. You do not answer him. You are not in the market for spare jawbones. You already have one, custom-built, fully operational. He looks as confused as you are. There is not much that makes sense to you anymore. There are noises for seasons and this is one of them. Fall is the sound of rain heard from inside a vehicle.
Gorillas
Jenina MacGillivray
ANNA MAKES FORAYS into whatever wilderness she can discover existing around our house in the city. She brings a notebook, in which she draws pictures for her collection “Wild Things Existing Harmoniously With City Life.” She’s nimble, curly black hair, penetrating green glare. She climbs trees and looks through the leaves and observes passersby, like a bi-polar Harriet the Spy. Very often, she ends up in the graveyard. She draws a digger, digging a grave. She returns to the house with paper objects she’s collected. These objects come to exist in a new reality in her presence. She says they call out to her. Scratch tickets, grocery receipts, bus transfers. Things that were formerly trees.
Anna’s staying with us because her fiancé is out of town on business for a month. Sometimes the cops bring her home. This time, the tall cop who accompanies her to the front door has draped a blue blanket over her shoulders. Anna is holding on to a matchbook. It has a little blue bird on it and it says, “Blue Bird Cabs, We’ll Get You Where You Need to Go.”
Read this, Anna says, and holds up the matchbook. Read what this says. This is about me.
I try to do the planned ignoring. Her doctor told me to do this.
When the doorbell rang, Nate and I were in the living room, watching TV. Or, Nate was watching TV and I was watching our neighbours, through their kitchen window, cooking and drinking wine. Sometimes he reads to her and after that they make out on the couch. It’s too far away for me to be able to read the titles of the books. For this I would need binoculars, which is a step I’m not willing to take.
Seems Anna had been sitting on the ground in the graveyard reading the tombstones. Someone had seen her out their window, getting her shoulders covered over in snow, and called the cops. The snow is now melting on the shoulders of the blue blanket.
She’s wearing her white bathrobe.
This is your sister?
Yeah, come in, I say. I’ll run a bath.
Meanwhile, Anna raises the matchbook and holds it next to her face, cocks her head to one side. She has one hand on her hip and an eyebrow raised like hello I have serious evidence here.
It’s unpleasant somehow, having a revolving door in a psychiatric hospital. Holding on to my sister’s coat and a black, reusable bag from the grocery store full of socks and underwear. Anna still wears her white robe with her engagement ring tucked in the pocket. I couldn’t get her to put shoes on.
In a side room waiting to see the doctors and she still fingers the matchbook. She tucks it into the pocket of her robe next to the engagement ring.Then, she starts to change shape.
I’m pretty sure I’m turning into a gorilla. Am I starting to look like a gorilla?
Her movements are heavy, lumbering. Her shoulders slope. She makes her way around the room.
Planned ignoring doesn’t work for circumstances like this. People changing into gorillas.
You’re not a gorilla.You’re human. Trust me. If you were a gorilla, you would have hair all over you, right? Do you have hair all over you?
Not as far as I know.
So you’re not a gorilla. Also, you can talk. Think about it. I promise.
I use the same big sister tone and language as when we were kids. If you run really quickly back up the basement steps nothing will get you. And nothing did.
Maybe I’m a hairless gorilla who can talk, Anna says.
When we were young, our parents took us to the Washington Zoo.The gorillas lived in a large pit with trees and a mini lake. A habitat. Some bratty kid leaning over the railing threw in a pile of bright candy wrappers, yelled insults at the gorilla family. Anna and I tried to make him fall in, using only our eyes, like in that book by Stephen King.The baby gorilla knuckled over to the blue wrapper, inspecting with its brown lips. Then the mother gorilla instantly covered the ground between her and her baby with the most surprising speed for her size, took the wrapper from its mouth, glared at the child leaning over the habitat railing. An intelligent, human glare. Steady and full of resentful acceptance. The kid stopped yelling and hid his face. Anna and I high-fived.
Anna gorillas over to the other side of the empty waiting room. The door is closed and thick. She bangs on the small window with her gorilla hand. Then she’s fumbling in the pocket of her robe.
Read out what it says on the bottom of this matchbook. She kicks it over to me.
Keep away from children.
That’s about me. You better keep me away from your daughter.
No. It means keep matches away from children. It’s not about you. I promise.
I had a recurring dream when I was a kid where I was sword fighting with my younger cousin Matthew in a large white room filled with different sized white blocks. I cut his face, and out of the long red slit, the envelope of skin I’d created, came instructions, covered in plastic: how to change your cousin back into a primate. Evolution in reverse. I peeled off layers of his skin, tissue, and muscle and he became a chimpanzee. Maybe I told Anna this dream.
Anna starts sentences with “in the wild” as in: In the wild, light is always changing. It’s never a constant glare all the time. You should install a dimmer in here. She tells me about articles she’s read like “Boy Raised by Wolves” and “Yorkshire Housewife Adopted by Monkey
s in Jungle.” She memorizes quotes in the articles and suddenly repeats bits to me as if she’s reading aloud. The woman learned to catch birds and rabbits with her bare hands after being abandoned in the jungle by kidnappers, it was reported. She shows me a picture online of a pretty dark-haired woman next to a picture of a capuchin monkey.
Two nurses come in, a man and a woman, and speak to me in hushed tones.
Is she violent?
Anna turns her gorilla head toward us.
The male nurse is already moving toward Anna, places a hand on her shoulder.
The thing is, Anna will respond OK to me in this state. She knows that I know that she’s not completely gone, even when she’s changing species and such. But when doctors and nurses approach her, something primal takes over. It’s because when she tells them about the gorilla thing they don’t believe they can appeal to rationality. They assume there is none. How can one think one is turning into a gorilla and still be able to think rationally? they think. Anna can see they’re a little bit afraid of her and she also sees the needle held by the female nurse, and this combination of affairs releases the gorilla fully and she lets out a screech and I try to tell them she’s OK, she’ll be OK, but Anna is rushing the door, banging it with her gorilla shoulder and screaming like they’re going to murder her. Like this, right now, is the end of her life. I try to put my arms around her, but she escapes and they inject her with the needle, the two of them holding her down.
I’m sorry, says the nurse, we have to.
Anna is admitted and says don’t leave me but now that she’s been sedated she’s almost asleep. They have an IV set up because she’s a little dehydrated.
They have to watch her closely because Anna has a bird heart. Not literally, of course. No heart transplant wherein her human heart was replaced by the heart of a robin or a chickadee. It’s weak because there was a hole in it when she was born. As a baby she would periodically turn an alarming shade of blue because of the hole, so no one wanted to babysit her. My mother, convinced it would fill up the hole, began feeding Anna pabulum and potatoes in her bottle, and the doctors said yes, it does seem to be filled up. My mother had to make the hole in the end of the rubber nipple bigger with a red-hot needle. Anna says sometimes she thinks she can feel the hole in her heart. The place where the hole used to be. The phantom hole.
