by John O'Neill
He decided that if the opportunity presented itself, he’d be willing to pay for sex; or at least for a blow or hand job, though he had no idea how this transaction might work, its details, its choreography. He tried not to think of this, about how he’d probably find himself in a sour motel room, its walls containing pores, its carpet like an unshaven chin, its doors and windows in the last stages of a flesh-eating virus. But, he thought, perhaps the environment might be compensated for by the professionalism of his companion, that she might mitigate the lewdness through her efficiency, her dedication to a job well done. Again, he thought of Alison, about her manual dexterity when running loops of film through her hands, how her focus lent a kind of nobility to the task.
Before long, he spotted a woman in brown thigh-high boots and a pink tank top, pale flesh visible beneath her cracked leather bomber jacket. She was leaning up against a section of scaffolding at the old Eaton Centre. As Leonard approached, he could see her heavy make-up, that she’d drawn lips beyond her actual mouth. Her colourful face and the little hook of her nose reminded Leonard of a budgie. He suspected mental instability, but was heartened by the fact that she was talking on a cell phone, so wasn’t a complete stranger to social interaction. He waited to see how she responded to other men who passed near, and indeed she smiled and nodded, nodded and smiled. Even if she wasn’t a hooker, she seemed to be open to the idea of locking arms with someone, and tilting on her stiletto heels off into the night toward an illicit rendezvous.
And, she had a healthy shag of black hair. Leonard sidled up close to her, as if he were searching for a place to light a cigarette, out of the breeze. He crossed his arms, began to study passers-by, as she was doing. Imitation was the best form of flattery.
She chirped into her cell phone: “Just a sec.” Dropped her hands. Looked at Leonard. Smiled. Though now her smile looked too broad, a parody. “Whatdoyawant?”
He took a step back.
“Nothing. I just thought maybe you were looking ...”
She cut him off by half-twisting away, as if she was about to flap up into the electric air. She said: “I’m not looking, you’re looking. I know everybody has a story, a tale to tell, but just ’cause I’m by my lonesome doesn’t mean ... oh, fuck off, or I’ll call my boyfriend.”
She lifted the phone again, the pink nail on her little finger curling almost right around it. Then, she struck a provocative pose, dropped a shoulder, lifted a knee and stabbed a heel against the wall. Leonard had the impression she was playing a part. He decided also to play his part, to try misplaced indignation.
“Fuckin’ slut,” he said. “Who the fuck are you?”
But he said this quietly, afraid the woman’s real boyfriend might appear.
28
FLAT EARTH
Tire World was surprisingly busy. Leonard was annoyed, perplexed at why such a store should be crowded at 11:30 on a Saturday night. Perhaps a segment of the Toronto population felt the midnight need to inspect buckets of screws and bolts, spools of duct tape and rope, or the varieties of tires, hubcaps and windshield wipers. The store was huge, rambling, and once Leonard entered its fluorescent aisles he tasted metal and felt the beginning of a metallic headache. (He pictured a nail gun, clearance sale in aisle five, placed precisely between his eyes, and some skanky ho, okay, not just some skanky ho, but the one who’d dissed him earlier, pressing a finger to the trigger).
He found himself first among camping gear, most of it having been yanked from boxes, examined, then shoved back. Multi-coloured sleeping bags hung cocoon-like from the shelves, and warped tent poles protruded dangerously. Various camping stoves and cooking utensils were heaped and tangled in barbed piles. Leonard imagined that a platoon of boy scouts had swept through, in pursuit of a guerrilla merit badge whose attainment required the infiltration of a large box store, the sampling of all the camping equipment, and a quick escape.
The last of these goals was the most easily fulfilled; store employees were scarce. There was, though, a positive aspect to this lack; if ever some amorous pair of customers found their libidos inflamed by the proximity of, say, so many poles and flies, they’d be free to throw up one of the more luxurious tents, furnish it with sleeping bags, improvise a wet bar from a Styrofoam cooler, borrow a boom box from the entertainment section, set up a row of automotive lubricants, then fuck languorously within the tent walls without fear of interruption. Though he walked and re-walked several aisles, Leonard didn’t spot anyone he could ask for assistance, except for the two girls who worked the cash registers, fully occupied with the double line of unhappy customers.
Finally, he spotted a uniformed Tire World employee in the lighting department, crouched down with a lamp in his hands, unscrewing the bulb, screwing it in again as if practicing a vital military drill. When Leonard asked: “Where might I find a pair of wire cutters?” the young man presented him with the most moronic expression he’d ever seen; the boy’s mouth plopped open, some strands of greasy hair fell parallel to the bridge of his nose, and vacant but soggy eyes stared back. He looked like someone playing at being a moron, like one of Leonard’s drama students in a comic scene, though if that were the case, Leonard would have explained that his interpretation of idiocy was too extreme. And Leonard thought of the beginning of the standard joke, How many Tire World employees does it take to screw in ... et cetera, but the young man managed to pull his mouth shut, though he didn’t rise from his cross-legged position in the middle of the aisle.
“What?” he said.
Leonard repeated the question. An obscure anger squeezed the boy’s face as he began to turn the light bulb again.
“Not, not sure,” he mumbled, helpfully.
Leonard thought of the employee’s head as a football on a tee, and himself as the place-kicker in the final seconds of a Grey Cup game in which his team trailed by two points. Leonard planted his feet more firmly, worried they might act without his consent, and said: “Could you find someone who can help me, then?”
In the ensuing pause, the young man twisted the light bulb two or three more times, as if his answer depended on this enterprise. Leonard turned and resumed the search himself. He found the wire cutters hanging in an aisle directly opposite the bicycle display. Leonard took this as fateful encouragement. When he arrived at the checkout counters, only one was in operation and he imagined the vanished checkout girl had taken her place next to the idiot-boy in the lighting aisle, assigned to mopping up his drool. Or, she’d seen the increase in customer traffic, so took her coffee break. The line was obscenely long and seemed to be the Toronto chapter of a cult that disbelieved in forward motion, a sort of flat-earth society of stillness. On the near wall was a large industrial clock, situated to heighten customer dissatisfaction. Leonard concentrated on the movement of its hands to see how they compared to the movement of the checkout girl, who moved as if at the bottom of a lake. A large woman in front of him was trying to quell the tragic wailing of a small child, obviously well past its bedtime, and Leonard almost proffered his wire cutters so she could snip the child’s vocal cords. We must all, Leonard believed, work together in adverse conditions.
When finally liberated from the store Leonard passed a front window and spotted, inside, the moronic boy from the lighting aisle, standing above some smashed garden gnomes, holding fragments in his hands. In front of him was a man in very tight jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wearing yellow work gloves. The man was alternately mincing and spinning tornado-like, then screaming into the face of the boy, who was sobbing. Leonard suspected that the boy was in fact challenged, afflicted in some way, and felt shame at not having recognized this earlier. He could hear, through the glass, the treble whine of the man’s fury, and felt a pinch of relief that another human being had momentarily dropped below him on the sensitivity scale. Leonard also saw that, in the shadows near him outside the window, two or three other people were watching the event, and wondered if Tire World staged such spectacles to lure
the Jerry Springer crowd inside.
29
FINGERNAILS
It was nearly one a.m. when Leonard arrived at Alison’s house. The windows were dark, and Leonard worried that she’d gone directly from Innis to meet up with her friends. Upon closer inspection, he saw her bicycle on the inside of the porch railing, chained to the slats. The porch, helpfully, was very dark, the overhead lamp out, the only light from a distant lamppost. The closest neighbour’s house was also dark. He checked the sidewalks, then sidled along the porch to where the bicycle was fastened.
He examined the chain around the rear wheel, concluded that he could make quick work of it. The tricky part would be transporting the bike to the trunk of his car. He wasn’t sure it would fit and he’d been forced to park a hundred yards away. Worst case, he could abandon his scheme, abandon her bicycle. But he needed to deprive her of the ease of movement in the hope she might better contemplate his needs. He needed to take her bicycle home with him, to hold it hostage until she stopped and turned full toward him, and earned her right to treat things as a blur, as fleeting shapes on her periphery.
He took the wire cutters from his pocket, began to remove the vacuum-packed skin of hard, clear plastic. But he could find no weakness in the coating. He tried to explode it like a bag of potato chips, then bit into it, working his jaws. The wire cutters remained sealed. He took some pleasure in imagining that, once he’d liberated them, he’d return to Tire World and apply their teeth to the scrotum of the man who’d been berating the ‘slow’ boy. Leonard saw him chasing his balls as they bounced between lawn chairs down one of the aisles, then watching helplessly as some trailer-park, hatchet-faced Hell’s Angels type with grey ponytail and penitentiary muscles, while stepping toward the display of industrial dog-leashes, in search of one for his grey-haired, thick-necked Rottweiler, trampled them.
Finally, and foolishly, Leonard pitched the still inaccessible wire cutters against the side of the opposite house. They burst from the packaging and slid down the brick, vanishing through the opening of a metal grate on a basement window. The packaging came to rest on top, too large to fall through. Leonard turned and gripped two of the wooden porch slats around which Alison had chained her bicycle, leaned in and hammered them with his head.
“Fuckfuckfuckfuck,” he said.
One of the porch slats turned in his hands. With a determined series of yanks, both slats broke away, and Leonard lifted them through the chain and placed them neatly on the ground. He walked around and onto the porch, took Alison’s bicycle by its frame and carried it to the sidewalk. His boldness was rewarded; no one approached from either direction, and, as he manoeuvred the bike into his car’s trunk, he felt the world had hesitated in acquiescence. Leonard was excited at the thought of Alison’s tears, the anger and feeling of violation she was sure to experience, and he drove home in anticipation of a particularly intense masturbatory session. But he also held an image of her in the dark projection booth, sitting under the QUIET sign among canisters of oil and shredded pieces of film, and felt contempt for how she, at work yet absent, responsible yet impassive, paring her black fingernails, allowed the reels to turn, to turn and to turn.
He wasn’t worried that his nephew Ellis would ask any questions when he saw his uncle carry a bicycle, rear wheel still chained, into the house and the bedroom – he doubted that, even if he’d lugged a dead body up through the hall, a string of congealing blood trailing from its mouth, his nephew would summon the energy to inquire. But when he arrived at the house, propped open the screen door, Ellis was, predictably, in the basement watching television. The boom and rattle from simulated explosions masked the sound as Leonard stumbled, ran the bicycle’s front wheel into the wall near the kitchen and left a skid mark that resembled a wing. In his room, Leonard placed the bicycle close to his bed, upside down on its handlebars, its wheels toward the ceiling.
Went to the kitchen to check the phone for messages. None. Brought the phone into his room, positioned it on the bicycle between the spokes of the locked rear wheel. As he lay on the couch, he contemplated how he’d brought these two objects together – both of them black, utilitarian, full of promise. But both hopeless, and both harbingers of disappointment.
30
DOGGED
I’m walking the sidewalk of a rainy suburban street. I hear a squealing sound, like machinery seizing up. I have the notion that the sound comes from the cleaning of glass, as if dozens of hands are applying cloths to dozens of windows. And, indeed, across from me are a row of houses, their windows shining, their shapes obscured by darkness and rain. I begin to make out forms in those windows, but my examination is interrupted by movement. A bicycle spins from out of the black, a blur of metal, of muscular legs, of taut arms. Also, a sheaf of black hair, not trailing behind the rider but pushed out in front, like a unicorn’s horn. As she speeds past, I have the sense that she’s Alison, though the large arms and thighs seem those of a stranger. Desperation rises in me, so I begin to sprint. But in the classic dream-frustration of chase, I can’t keep up. She pulls away. Seen from behind, she’s a sliver of light, flickering candle flame. The squealing continues, and my attention is again drawn to the windows, closer now. I see a creamy room, furnished in pastel shades; the furniture emerges naturally, softly, from the walls, from the peach-coloured carpet. But on the edge sits an animal, its head thrown back, its hair streaked with dirt. It’s larger than a dog, its shoulders broad; and its ears, flat against its skull, are pointed. It’s in the pose of a wolf in mid-howl, letting itself evaporate into its own sound, the way an animal can completely abandon itself to desire. Wetness eats the carpet around it. The carpet turns black, and the cream walls. I fear this shadow will swallow the house and spread across the lawn to absorb me, that I’ll lose my humanity in the dark proliferation. I walk up the street and past the next house, and the next, where the same scene’s being repeated. After what feels like hours, I reach the end of the street, find myself on the edge of a precipice, facing an expanse of darkness; I look back to see that all the houses, the entire neighbourhood, has been taken. The landscape is an oily, swampy expanse. But I can still see glimpses of light, like the reflections of knife blades: dozens of sets of wolf teeth forming a pattern, like lights in a building stacked up in rows, a whole neighbourhood of direness, of threat.
A howling woke Leonard. Series of handclaps. Huge exhalation of breath.
His mouth was paper. His tongue felt as if it had been folded, waiting for him to spit it out, to deliver it, like the receipt from a bank machine. He reached out and snatched the cordless to check for a message, believing he’d slept through a call from Alison, her voice scratching out apology for her behaviour, scratching out hurt at discovering her bicycle stolen, scratching out her wish that he immediately drive downtown, fall into her arms.
He replaced the phone in its holder, was astonished to see that the kitchen clock read 10:30 a.m. Drank a warm glass of water, went downstairs amidst the sound of explosions, pleading, automatic gunfire.
The thin basement room was dark. Even when Leonard entered, coughed and stood close to the large screen, Ellis didn’t shift from his collapsed posture but did, however, click to lower the volume.
“Did anybody phone last night, this morning?” Leonard asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Told them you were asleep.”
Though logic might dictate that Ellis would go on to share the identity of the person who’d phoned, or the content of the call, he just stared at the television, distracted by the sight of two bodies in a scene that mirrored the former violent one, the barrels of guns and knife blades now replaced by cylinders of flesh, forearms and thighs, fingernails and teeth, explosions giving way to grunts and groans.
“Ellis, hello. Who phoned? What did they say?”
“Wouldn’t leave a name,” he said, rising slightly from his pillow trench to extract a bowl of potato chips.
“Was it a woman?”
“No.”
“What exactly did he say, then? I need to know. Was it Dad, my father?”
Ellis had to summon all his strength to answer, as if the effort he’d expended thus far had exhausted him.
“No. Nothing. Just that he’d call back. You want some chips? This movie stinks. You should watch it. I have to return it tonight. I’m going to bed.”
Leonard was sad at Ellis’ announcement. He needed to talk to someone. He dreaded the idea of resorting to masturbation for release; he dreaded the feeling of emptiness that always followed, how his spent desire obliged him to focus on larger examples of unfulfilled longing, the inaccessibility of hearts and minds.
He was also relieved. A conversation with Ellis about his current problems was too rigorous a project. To explain his relationship with Alison, he’d first have to talk about the disintegration of his marriage, but there was no precedent for this in his relationship with Ellis. At least, on this night, first week of his residence, it was too early for such a confidence, for the camaraderie it implied. He’d have to become more of a fixture in this house. He’d have to take on some of the familiarity of, say, the television. He thanked Ellis for the offer, but told him that he was also heading off to bed again, that despite the hour he was exhausted, that Ellis would have to initiate the process of shutting down his entertainment system, like shutting down, Leonard imagined, the hydro grid of a small city.
