All the Anxious Girls on Earth

by Zsuzsi Gartner

  Then remember: Nietzsche.

  Decide he’s in there turning into superman and that he might just come out and bash in everyone’s head. Wish that your look of empathy had been less wishy-washy, more distinct. Vow to practice blinding glances of compassion in front of the bathroom mirror on your break, if you’re not too tired.

  What does it take to push a man over the edge? Nine out of ten disgruntled U.S. postal workers agree: Not a whole heck of a lot.

  Consider circumstances under which you might kill. Imagine you have a daughter—seven? strawberry blonde but has begged for highlights? My Little Ponies™ are strewn all over the hallway and you tripped on one earlier that day and twisted your ankle and whaled on her. And during a party a man—a friend’s friend’s friend? uninvited? jovial uncle? choirmaster? blond monster in nice khakis and Florsheim shoes? high school dropout beaten by stepfather and driven mad by the Scott Joplin tune that spews incessantly from the speakers of the ice-cream truck he drives due to reduced opportunities (he really wanted to be a vet, loves animals, it truly broke his heart)?—enters her bedroom. Seconds later you stand in the doorway and see him burrowing under the covers behind her. You return, limping because of the ankle, with a meat cleaver—still flecked with minced cilantro from the guacamole you made for the party?—and chop off his head, surprised at your own strength. Surprised it was so easy. Thinking about it now, grit your teeth so hard your jaw just about cracks. Wonder what would be a worse trauma for this unknown daughter: the rape itself or the head—the neck a bloodied stump—rolling to the centre of the bed and her mother standing above, wild-eyed, a Chinese meat cleaver in her hand?

  To know you would readily kill—to have considered the possibilities—brings a grim relief.

  At least you don’t call guys like that Mister here like they do in the Globe and Mail. Mr. Olson. Mr. Bernardo. Mr. Lepine. Mr. Karadzic. And Miss or Ms. Homolka, is that one lump or two? You don’t know what you’d do if you had to do that, probably want to quit. Probably wouldn’t, though. Just like your compadres there in Toronto don’t quit over it. But don’t think it doesn’t bother them. Rim pigs dream in Technicolor.

  Week Five: Learn to look death in the face and laugh. Remember: Rim pigs don’t cry.

  The formula for what you do here is simple. You could call it the slide rule of tragedy. Take the number of dead and divide it by the number of miles the site of the disaster/ murderous rampage/political upheaval lies from the epicentre—which in your case is Vancouver. Then multiply the figure by the importance of that place or the dead to your readers on a scale of zero to ten (this last part is subjective, of course). For example, a plane crash in South America would have to involve at least fifty dead to make it into the paper with three column inches at best. A plane crash up north may get three column inches on page A6 even with only two dead. A plane crash at the Abbotsford Airshow, one dead, makes fourteen column inches on the front page. Two dead in Azerbaijan due to rock slide, well, that wouldn’t even make the wire if they’re Azerbaijanis. A Burnaby couple killed in Azerbaijan due to rock slide? Now you’re cookin’ with gas!

  You do get bonus points for ironic circumstances. For example: Fitness guru dies of heart attack. Eighty-eight killed in Punjabi village by flooding dam during feast day celebrating opening of said dam.

  You could say that you do body counts in inches here, and that’s all you do.

  Strangely, you wake up most afternoons to find your pillow covered with big, wet blotches. Decide you were drooling. Try to remember your dreams. Even if you can’t remember the specifics, you’re aware they’re always filled with a weird chiaroscuro effect. That’s the essential difference between those who dream in their sleep during the day and those who sleep and dream at night, this razzle-dazzle mix of light and shade to create an illusion of depth. All that, and Technicolor, especially when it comes to blood and auras.

  Bodies plummeting through water in chiaroscuro light, feet encased in cement—or is that concrete?—blocks. Bodies piled by the shed like cordwood in chiaroscuro darkness, still too green to burn. And you, you’re the one with the measuring tape and the maniacal laugh.

  Week Six: See Week Five

  Week Seven: Take in a photo to make your desk area more homey. But remember, its not really your desk, so don’t forget to put it away in your mail slot at the end of your shift. Its tough to decide whose photo to bring. A picture of your boyfriend will just remind you of what you’re missing and how this job is ruining your life. You have no nieces or nephews. Your brothers never caught a big, huge fish. You have no dog. You decide on Pamela Anderson Lee. This will remind you that things could be worse. You could be a perky, supernatural blonde bombshell who no one in their right mind would make the subject of a visual essay. This way, at least, you stand a slim chance.

  The Matador raises his eyebrows. Decide he’s kind of attractive at a certain angle in a wan, androgynous way.

  Say: I like her, okay?

  Say: Its just so you don’t confuse us. Ha ha.

  Say: Kidding!

  Your bra, on the inside of your T-shirt, feels saggy.

  The explosion comes in the middle of the week at about 3:00 A.M. There’s a dull boom that you barely notice because it comes from so far away. Later you’ll remember thinking that it sounded like the nine o’clock gun, but, of course, it couldn’t be since it was nowhere near nine o’clock.

  Its the sirens everyone reacts to and soon all the phones in the newsroom are jangling. Martin, the young guy from the Delta Mirror they brought in to replace the ambitious Anny who’s now on courts, is going nuts. He doesn’t know which phone to pick up. He runs to the windows to look outside, which is stupid, you think, since the only view is of the back parking lot.

  Pick up the nearest phone. Take notes. Realize that you, too, can be a reporter. Anyone can. Just take down the facts, Jack. And don’t forget to ask if there were any fatalities. But this is harder than it sounds. You just can’t form the word “dead” in your mouth. But there’s always hurt—hurt is easier.

  Say: I’ve got the scoop. Its at Broadway and Cambie.

  Say: A pizza parlour blew up.

  Say: There’s glass everywhere.

  When Dave asks who you were talking to, force yourself to be honest.

  Say (quickly): I don’t know.

  The Matadors laugh rises up sharp, hot, sulfuric.

  Riding the Broadway bus home at 7:30 A.M., you find that the street has already been largely cleared. Workers are putting new plate-glass windows up at the Royal Bank, while small business owners are busy measuring, taping, sweeping, up and down the block. Enormous piles of glass are heaped on the sidewalks and sparkling mounds line the gutters like some dangerous new drug.

  Decide to ring the bell and get off the bus even though it’s not your stop and your brain is zinging with fatigue, the skin pulled tight across your temples. All that glass is mesmerizing. It looks positively Arctic. Forget the summer heat for a moment and stroll along as if you’re on a polar expedition. Stand on a large slab of cracked blue glass and imagine you’re an Inuit grandmother sent off to die on her very own ice floe. Decide the idea sounds peaceful. Think about how quiet it would be, lulled to sleep by the waves sluicing across your hands and feet, the ice cracking imperceptibly beneath you as you drift off to sea. All those other worn-out grannies floating on the water.

  Try not to be embarrassed when the woman from the Label Clippers store shakes you awake and flags you a cab. Brush slivers of glass nonchalantly from your jeans with a crumpled chocolate bar wrapper.

  Back at work, several miles away, the windows are intact. The glass on the picture of Pamela, tucked away in your mail slot, has a hairline fracture, invisible to the human eye.

  Week Eight: Resist the temptation towards melancholy. This will be difficult, but not impossible. Very difficult, but not quite impossible. Okay, formidable. But you’re a big girl with lots of outer defences. A regular rhino skin. Ex-Catholic, ex-virgin, ex-drea
mer, ex-fighter pilot. All these exes make for great epidermis. You have grown somewhat preoccupied by death in these waning days of summer. Your childhood best friends mother dies of a disease she shouldn’t have had. Lung cancer. A woman who’s never smoked a cigarette in her life. Must have been from all those chemicals she was breathing in all those years of cleaning other peoples toilets, your mother tells you. You never knew. She lived in a beautiful big house in a leafy subdivision with her husband and three children. A Fisher-Price life. An immigrants dream. She could afford to have someone come and scrub her own toilet, stick their head in her Jenn-Air. You find yourself in a parking lot outside the Arts Club Lounge on Granville Island howling at the cloud-shrouded moon.

  Your soon-to-be-ex-boyfriend says: “Get up. You’re drunk.” Which is somewhat true.

  Tell him: “This is true grief. I’m howling at the moon to mourn, okay?”

  These are full-blown werewolfian howls. Your throat aches and you fully expect thick hairs to sprout from the backs of your hands. You later wonder how you got those little bits of gravel embedded in your knees.

  Your eyes glow green when you cry this much and the next day you walk the streets with alien orbs, chewing over the mutability of human life, wondering why the rocks that spin out from under the rear wheels of cabs accelerating too quickly at intersections don’t puncture veins in fragile necks—the fragile necks of those you love and your own fragile neck in particular—forgetting that rim pigs don’t cry You pass the Sweet Marie Variety and through the window you see the owner’s little girl—the one with the deadly straight bangs—sitting on the counter by the cash register, trying to balance a spoon on her nose. You want to tell her to keep practising because life is the ultimate balancing act.

  Mouth advice at her through the glass: Don’t eat yellow snow. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Don’t clean other peoples toilets. And don’t mess around with Jim. Somehow this makes you feel better.

  During the night, at work, things are easier. But during the day, death lurks in every corner of your dreams. A friend comes out of the shadows at twilight in a green Austin Mini to pick lilacs from your garden for her eighty-five-year-old father—to bring him back from confused anger to gentle lucidity. She doesn’t tell you this. You just know. He rages in your closet, garbled animal noises. You can’t make out what he’s saying, but you know he wants to die. You clip the lilacs like big clumps of grapes and your friend leaves with an armful, their smell sweetly sickening. You wake up to the crackle of foil and the whoop of a car alarm from up the street somewhere.

  Phone your mother long-distance every day, twice a day sometimes—just to say hi—until she asks, “What are you, nuts?”

  Across the alley, the staple-gun guys are oddly silent. No show tunes, no rat-a-tat-tat. And its 2:00 P.M., past their lunchtime and well into the most cacophonous part of the day. You wonder if the house is done, ready to receive its owners, bright young things with lots of money who will sleep peacefully under exquisite percale sheets—240 threads per inch—on the former post-apocalyptic playground. Look out your kitchen window just in time to witness a terrifying sight. One of the men, the youngest—honestly, he couldn’t be more than sixteen—is standing on the newly finished chimney, arms extended. You can’t see his face, but you can see the sharp little shoulder blades sticking out of his sweaty back like the beginnings of wings. He sways a little. One man carefully straddles the roof, holding his right arm out to the boy, saying something soothing that you can’t quite hear, while the rest wait on the ground. You notice that the sky behind them drips like molten lead, clouds churn, fingertips touch in chiaroscuro light, thunder claps—applause from on high for a moment brought to you by Michelangelo.

  Say: Whew, its just a dream.

  Say (trying not to sound clichéd): But it seemed so real.

  Say—

  Just then the man trying to save the boy slips, sending cedar shakes into the air, and a man on the ground, who looks like he could be his brother, screams, “Tony!” in a way that is anything but dreamlike.

  Week Nine: Realize that this is more careening than careering. The photograph, of a skinny man in a cheap cardigan, is the kind of thing you’ve been trying to avoid. You’ve been doing the unthinkable—cherry-picking—and you haven’t been caught yet. You’ve been deft, but you’ve mostly been lucky. A sleepy item on Senate reform; a quirky tidbit on virtual spelunking (Caving for Claustrophobics!); a gushy feature on the reunion of twin sisters separated for forty-five years who find each other through a recipe club specializing in marshmallow dishes—a testament to the resilience of the human spirit, brought to you by Kraft. Those are the kinds of things you can handle. But here it is, the first thing you grab, a face, the face of Matias Zupan, grieving Slovenian father, a face that speaks for the wounded. Matias Zupan, a bony fellow of indeterminate age in a cheap cardigan, a garment so unlike a decent sweater that you have to wonder where it came from. Perhaps it was sent by a harried relation—a guilt-ridden second cousin? younger brother?—who’s now in Hamilton. He saw the writing on the wall and left the day after Tito died and now is successful enough with his dry-cleaning business? janitorial service? pizza joint? to be able to send pillowcases full of clothes from Honest Ed’s to those he left behind. But trying to make a story of it, making light, doesn’t change anything. Matias Zupan, in a carefully knotted tie, contorts his face in anguish. He is held up by two other men at a graveside, his toes, in old Adidas, barely skimming the ground. You slip it under the newspaper on your desk, this obscene portrait of grief, but not before touching the tip of your pinkie finger to the man’s lips. Overhead, the fluorescent lights sing. One tube flickers, then pops.

  There’s a telephone call for you way across the room, at the entertainment desk for some reason. It can’t be your soon-to-be-ex since he knows which number to call. Your heart tumbles around like a crazed acrobat as you cross the newsroom in slow motion, wondering why the worst phone calls come in the middle of the night.

  It’s your mother. You ask what’s happened, your nerves jangling.

  She says: “I’m just calling to say hi.”

  You don’t respond.

  She laughs: “Hi, hi, hi!”

  She says: “It’s about your father.”

  But your father, and this is a fact, has been dead for seventeen years.

  Back at your desk which is not really your desk, someone’s moved the newspaper and the photograph of the skinny man at his son’s graveside lies exposed at your elbow. His pants are so sharply ironed that you can see the fine crease even in this poor wire copy. Did his wife cry as she ironed them? Are the tears pressed into the slacks? Did she iron to erase the ache in her heart? You know that under the same circumstances you couldn’t iron. You couldn’t plug it in. You couldn’t get the crease just so. You can’t even iron under the best circumstances. The tears charge forward, undammed, damned, unstoppable. They shoot from your fingertips and pour from your ears.

  As the ground drops away, you crawl into Matias Zupan’s mouth, so wide and welcoming in its grief. All of you fits easily inside the cavity of his body. Here in the dark it feels good to lie quietly for long minutes, listening to his breath and yours, trying to get your breathing in sync with his, but you’re always a little off. As if his is the real thing and yours just the echo. Light a candle and look around. His rib cage gleams in the flamelight. Its stunningly fragile and beautiful, like forbidden ivory. You’re the ship in the ship in the bottle. Run your tongue over his ribs. They taste like tar.

  After that, just sit and watch the wax drip onto your hand and listen to the fluorescent lights out there, somewhere overhead, faintly sizzle and hiss.

  The Nature of Pure Evil

  Hedy reaches for the telephone to make another bomb threat. In minutes, from the corner windows of this office on the nineteenth floor of the TD Tower, she will see people empty like ants from the art gallery across the way. Last week it was her own building, the week before an entire city
block—including the Hotel Georgia, Albear Jewellers and the Nightcourt Pub—and before that the Four Seasons Hotel. She knows it’s illegal, but has convinced herself that its not wrong, nor even harmful. Its a disruption of commerce, nothing more. Even the city gallery, with its reproductions shop and elegant little cafe, is a place of commerce. Hedy is like Jesus in the temple, screaming, “Get out!”

  Only, Jesus most likely wasn’t seized with mirth after ordering the people out of the temple. Although Hedy’s major acquaintance with the Saviour is not by way of the Bible, but through the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar, she can well imagine that Jesus didn’t shake with uncontrollable laughter after knocking over tables of dovecotes and chasing the money-changers and their customers into the street. And what would Jesus think of the temples of today anyway, some of them as violently rococo as the court of the Sun King, shamelessly passing their gilded collection plates at every opportunity? Her next target would be Christ Church Cathedral, no question about it.

  Hedy has to admit that her original impetus for disrupting daily commerce had not been half so noble as Jesus’s. His was the sanctity of prayer. Hers was Stanley.

  Hedy ironed the pleats of Stanleys white tuxedo shirt as he stood in the kitchen alcove in his undershirt, shaking Nuts ‘n Bolts into his mouth from the box and trying not to get any onto his freshly creased tuxedo pants. Hedy lifted the iron and it hissed like a small dragon. She pressed it down one more time. Stanley came over and traced her spine lightly with his hand. “That’s perfect, honey. Bang-on job.”

  After Hedy helped adjust Stanley’s bow tie, she asked him one more time, “So how come I don’t get to come to this wedding with you?”

  “Aw, Hedy, come on. Don’t start with that again.”

  “I’m not starting with anything. It just seems funny.”

  Stanley shrugged. “I told you, I’m the only one invited.”