Fatal Light Awareness

by John O'Neill

  She was one of two people he wanted to see, who’d give him permission for the expression of his despair. But, walking toward her, he hesitated. She appeared to be wearing her clothing inside out. Her head looked drowned, hair flattened and grey. Her face was pearly, translucent, her eyes lower on her cheeks. She’d lost weight. Everything about her was falling, as if gravity had gathered in a ferocious and particular way above her alone. When she saw him, she turned toward the car, gripped the handle, let go of it again. Leonard thought that maybe she’d already heard about his mother’s death, had absorbed all of his grief, stolen it from him. But when he tried to concentrate on the notion, like on a mysterious ache or muscle twinge, it disappeared.

  “God, Mavis, what’s wrong?”

  Mavis steadied herself, said, in a barely audible voice: “Oh, Leonard, I’m, sorry, I must look. I’m. Umm. I’m taking Sophie in for surgery. I just, I left lesson plans.”

  She stumbled toward the back of the car, and Leonard saw that her daughter was sitting in the passenger seat. Mavis gestured weakly at the window, and her daughter stepped out.

  “Soph. This is Mr. Edison, the, ah, drama teacher.”

  Mavis leaned against the car, while Sophie, ignoring her, came forward and extended a hand. Leonard thought about consoling Mavis, but the daughter’s forthright manner made him give his full attention to her.

  “Hello, Mr. Elison,” she said.

  Leonard didn’t correct her. He was struck by the length of her arm, by the grace with which she stood straight, chin raised up, shoulders forward, and her eyes right on his. Her handshake was firm and entire. She showed no sign of illness, her beautiful dark eyes bright and untroubled, her mouth small but full. Her nose was straight, her black hair curly, and he could see Mavis in her, at least the way Mavis had been, previously. Determination came off her like warmth. She smiled fully too, not at all awkward or tentative despite the fact that her mother was sobbing, drooping against the car. Leonard wondered if there was contempt in the girl’s confidence, that her poker-straightness and poise was meant to underline her mother’s weakness. Leonard was won over, willing to give in completely to the daughter’s ascendency. He was ready to accept this new, better version of Mavis, who had thrust her hand at him so boldly, as if ready to pull him across some threshold.

  “Pleased to meet you,” Leonard said. “I’m sure, everything will turn out fine.”

  The girl kept her eyes on Leonard, said, in an even voice: “Of course it will. Mom worries way too much. I’m sure you know.”

  The young girl’s beauty, her steadiness and edge, made Leonard forget that her presence was an inconvenience, that he couldn’t reasonably introduce the subject of his own troubles, under the circumstances. He didn’t care. Then, he saw that she wore the same cross her mother wore, the tortured little tree Christ. Except something was different. The cross wasn’t on a chain, but a choker.

  She went and pulled her mother up from imminent collapse, and said: “I better drive.” And, looking back at Leonard: “A pleasure.” Loaded her mother into the passenger seat and moved to the driver’s side.

  Leonard leaned a little toward Mavis, mouthed, through the closed window: “Everything will be fine.” But she wasn’t looking at him. He backed away, his eyes on Sophie’s forearms and hands as she steered the car out of the parking space. Mavis had folded, disappeared. He could see only Sophie’s head through the rear window.

  19

  REPAIRS

  When he got home, Leonard stretched out on the couch in his room. Couldn’t relax. The sky was darkening, and Ellis hadn’t yet ignited the lights in the backyard. There was a soft knock at his door, and his sister entered.

  “Leonard, what’s going on? There’s gotta be ten bicycles in the spare room.”

  Leonard grinned and nodded, as if this was an answer, and pictured his sister staring at the rows of wheels all propped toward the ceiling, and her breathing in the wild, animal-like pungency.

  “Nothing,” he said. “A friend of mine repairs them, asked if I could keep them while he’s renovating.” He changed the subject. “Poor Dad. He shouldn’t have attacked you today. I guess it’s just the shock.” Ruth leaned against the doorframe, an anguished look crossing her face. “Ruth, don’t let Dad … he shouldn’t have said that. He doesn’t understand.”

  The pained look on his sister’s face didn’t soften, but intensified.

  She closed the door and stepped into the room, settled at the other end of Leonard’s couch. Aware that his sister had never before come and sat beside him with such solemnity, he believed she was going to question him, that she already knew his plans for that night, and that she also knew about all his indiscretions, how he was responsible for the state of his marriage. Leonard regretted that he’d commented on their father, had opened some door of judgement.

  “Dad’s just, well, he doesn’t like Jack.”

  Ruth laughed, put her fists between her knees.

  “Why? Because he didn’t come with you?”

  “No. It’s more, it’s old. I don’t know. It’s ancient history, really. I used to confide in Mom. Remember that time I moved back home, in the seventies? It wasn’t because Jack was away on business.”

  “Oh,” Leonard said, but couldn’t remember.

  “It’s ancient history. Ellis, when he was little, used to wet the bed. Jack has no patience, you know. He thought Ellis needed fixing. We fought about it. I was on medication at the time. Whenever Ellis had an accident, Jack would make him stand by his bed. Sometimes with the wet sheet on his head. When I found out, I nearly killed him. I took Ellis and we moved out, for a while. I spent some time at a friend’s, then with Mom and Dad. Dad’s never really forgotten. But not because of Jack. Mom went into a depression. She was worried for me, for my marriage. Of course, there was more to it. Dad was drinking then, too. Remember? He’d come home from the Legion, plastered. Around the time he lost his insurance job. It’s mostly forgotten but sometimes he’ll make a remark, like today. It all has nothing to do with anything, really. Jack didn’t come because he really does hate funerals. Of course, I worry about Ellis. Obviously, he’s not the most ambitious soul. But so what. He doesn’t hate his dad. When he won the lottery, I was happy and afraid. But he’s okay. Except for his disappearing act. Maybe it’s because you’re here. I think he’s used to living alone.”

  “That’s a lot to take in,” Leonard said, pretending to be disturbed. He let the silence build, become his ally. “I need to be alone, for a while. Think I need to go out. I think I need to, you know, mourn.”

  They didn’t move. The sun had almost disappeared, and they could hear children’s voices, the ghouls, goblins, princesses and clowns, moving from house to house, the youngest trick-and-treaters out before it got too dark. They could barely see one another in the failing light, two silhouettes. Both were waiting for the doorbell to free them, Ruth because she felt that what she’d shared with her brother needed time to settle, Leonard because he recognized this and felt it necessary to play along, to allow his sister to believe what she’d told him changed something. The doorbell rang.

  “Leonard,” Ruth said, “could you do me a favour? If you’re going out, could you swing by and see Dad? I want to make sure he’s all right. People react pretty strangely to loss.”

  “Ruth, he’ll be fine.”

  “Just do this for me? I’ll give you the key. He was so calm today, I think it hasn’t sunk in yet. Please, Leonard, just for a minute?”

  After Ruth left his room, Leonard tried on his costume: black pants, black turtleneck, black shoes, white neutral mask on his face, one on the back of his head. With the fake knife in his belt, he resembled a psychotic mime. He considered what he could do to lessen this impression, maybe jeans and a plaid shirt, to approximate a sort of Ed Gein, Texas Chainsaw Massacre character. But he wanted to appear nondescript, better to assess the situation with Alison.

  Lastly, he pinned on the spiked wheel pendant he’d sto
len from the Goth store, thought about the scarred girl who worked there; perhaps she’d turn up at the Circus of the Grotesque this night, also searching.

  Leonard put the masks and knife in a plastic bag and tried to leave quickly, so his sister wouldn’t ask him anything. As he reached the foyer of the house – Ruth and Ellis sitting on kitchen chairs beside a big bowl of candy – the doorbell rang again. Leonard had to squeeze by a clutch of costumed children.

  He surveyed the crowd, hoping for a classic monster. But the group resembled a contemporary movie advertisement. A Spiderman, a SpongeBob, a Caribbean Pirate. There was a tiny Donald Trump, sporting a clump of yellowish hair and a sign that read “You’re fired.” The only exception to the rather corporate parade was a traditional ghost, a kid in a plain white sheet, arm and eyeholes cut out. Leonard thought of his nephew; of how many childhood injuries, physical and emotional, were concealed behind the little masks; how a child might find some relief in choosing a different skin. Maybe this was, in the end, why Hallowe’en was so popular, a celebration of otherness, until a person discovered new ways to sublimate pain.

  20

  HARD SHOES

  By the door of the nursing home, there was a small table with two full bowls of candy but the chair next to them was empty. The exterior of the building, its plain brick and harsh fluorescent windows, was uninviting, and perhaps the residents were a little too close to death: kids didn’t want to be greeted by real skeletons, by people whose flesh had taken on, without make-up, a ghostly pallor. But there were two women in the small lobby, one sitting on the couch, the other across from her in a hard-backed chair and Leonard had walked in on a dispute between them.

  “You’re a real dumb-bell,” the one in the chair was saying, drawing a white shawl around herself and wagging a finger. The one on the couch, also very thin but with a long shag of red hair over her left shoulder, responded with: “They’ll throw you out of here, I’ll see to it.”

  Leonard, embarrassed, hurried to his father’s door, opposite the little common area, and knocked. As the two women began to repeat the same words, dumb-bell, throw you out of here, Leonard slipped the key into the lock.

  It was dark inside, the only light from a glowing lamp. Leonard remembered his sister saying the bulb needed replacing, a higher voltage. A radio played, softly; a clarinet. From the door, Leonard could see his father’s bed, the bottom half of it where it jutted from an alcove. He saw his father’s legs there, curled up.

  Other legs, too. A woman’s legs. They were intertwined with his father’s, facing in the same direction. Leonard stepped closer. His father was fully clothed, still wearing his jacket and pants. The woman was naked, her arms around him, mottled and grey, and her knees pushed up between his. One of her ankles was pinned between his father’s hard shoes. Leonard stood and blinked. He saw his mother, wondered how she’d stalled death to extend this final farewell, this shared nap before her long lonely one. He examined their sleeping faces, the woman’s face against his dad’s shoulder. It wasn’t his mom.

  Now, a man on the radio was talking about UFO abductions. Leonard began to observe the scene, to record its details. He noted the woman’s cracked black purse on the coffee table, the two prissy teacups there, the vial of eye drops, the horoscope book. A keychain with a little plastic whale. The framed photos of his mother still propped up facing the couch. The woman’s pink pantsuit on the chair by the bed. Two drinking glasses on the bedside table, each with a pair of teeth suspended in cloudy water. He wanted to take the glasses, take the teeth, smash them against the wall. Instead, he left. The two women by the door had stopped bickering and both looked at him.

  As he passed, the one in the straight-backed chair suggested: “Son, you can take that candy, but be sure your mom checks it for you before you eat.”

  21

  HOWL

  He found a parking space on Berkeley Street, not far from the gutted church and the Hallowe’en party, Circus of the Grotesque. Once he’d put on his masks and slid the plastic knife into his belt, he walked to the corner and could see people in front of the church: smears of colour, towering hair, things flapping and flowing and circling. But he wasn’t close enough to identify any specific characters. The beat of music was audible, too, an un-churchlike electronic pulse that made him hesitate. He was startled by a figure that lurched out from an alleyway, a man with matted hair, layers of torn sweaters, purple pants and the remnants of shoes. Leonard winced at his ripe smell. The man shoved an upended baseball cap at him, not at all put off by his expressionless mask. Leonard found a loonie, dropped it in the cap, watched the man’s eyes roll unfocused. The man then stumbled in the same direction Leonard walked, so Leonard quickened his pace.

  The costumed figures in front of the church emerged now in distinctness: an Edwardian couple, cousin ‘It’ from the Addams Family, a box of laundry detergent. A horned devil with a pair of furry dice around her neck. An impeccably designed tribute to Henry Hull’s Werewolf of London. All were smoking cigarettes in front of the stone stairs, the werewolf grinning and having a lively conversation with the detergent box, the Edwardian couple mincing and sharing a cigarette. As Leonard started up the stairs, he passed an Einstein and a Brillo pad, and paid the $20 admission to a man in a dinosaur head and full tuxedo, a formal Tyrannosaurus Rex. There was a collapsed Coke can wedged between his rows of sharp teeth.

  Leonard went up one of the sets of interior stairs, two sets of which branched off from just inside the heavy wooden front doors. An insect-eyed space alien, a sexy dragonfly. He came to a large opening, above which was a chimera, a copy of one that adorned Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. He hesitated before the wall of undulating bodies and could see beyond them to a hardwood stage at the church’s far end. On it were four women in scanty mummy outfits, bandages strapped across their breasts and midriffs and flapping from their arms and legs. One of them was tossing around a smaller mummy, a Tutankhamen sarcophagus doll that affixed to an elastic, so that she’d hurl it away and it’d rebound back into her arms. These women were, Leonard guessed, the Go-Go Ghouls mentioned in the advertisement. Behind them, on the stone wall at the back of the stage, were faint film images blurring together from two different projectors. Leonard couldn’t make out exactly what was being shown, only that the edits were quick, the colour bold.

  Leonard pushed through the crowd, aware of not only the various creatures coming at him – vampires, skeletons, surgeons, ex-presidents, gorgons, appliances, prime-ministers, Marilyn Monroes, Donald Trumps – but also of the smells: greasepaint, hairspray, glue, sweat, smoke, grass; muskiness, sweetness. He tried not to take offense whenever someone danced into him, an elbow or shoulder flying into his face. When he arrived at the stage he wedged himself between a duck and a Klingon, looked up to the second floor balcony to where, presumably, the projectors were located; saw another level of writhing bodies behind a wrought-iron railing that ran the whole high perimeter of the church. A series of ground floor spotlights bounced exaggerated shadows there, huge shapes of moving arms and heads against the roof of the church, an impression that made Leonard think of Goya, the black paintings. But there was one area of stillness, a dark square fronted by the two bright projector lights, directly opposite the wall above the stage. Alison would be somewhere close to it. He tried to imagine how she might be dressed, but, surrounded by the assortment of extravagantly costumed bodies, he couldn’t think clearly.

  Leonard was invisible. No eyes lingered even briefly on him, confirming the lameness of his costume. He wished he’d found something more elaborate and his feeling of inadequacy, that he was a child among adults, made him want to find Alison quickly, to have his say. He pushed toward the stairs at the church’s entrance, as though moving through heavy curtains. His face got temporarily buried in the sagging crotch of someone on stilts, a figure in top hat and tails and screaming pumpkin mask. He wanted to grab one of the stilts, pull it away so the man would fall, smash his pumpkin face into the floor.


  Leonard went up the wooden stairs. On a landing half-way was a clutch of vampires in capes and high-laced boots, with pale faces, red lips and dark eyes, all with perfect hair and forming an impromptu but self-conscious tableau vivant around a plastic tombstone with R.I.P. illuminated from within. Leonard paused, thought about how the elegance, heavy make-up, velvet crush of the scene, was so far removed from the reality of death and its banality: the third floor of the nursing home, the near-dead in sweatpants, pyjamas and robes; in wrinkled shirts, flowery sweaters, running shoes and slippers; with sad collapsed faces, stunned by the business of decline; and all of it under the glare of bright humming light. No designed blood, but piss and liquid shit.

  He emerged on the second-floor balcony. Most of the people thronged the railings, dancing and viewing the crowd below, observing, being observed. Wooden tables were pushed against the walls, strewn with plastic cups, purses, costume hats. A few revellers sat in chairs, detached from the action. There were two projectors at the centre of the balcony. The thump of the music had decreased and, through a garbled microphone on stage, someone was addressing the crowd. The second-floor crowd surged closer to the railings. This allowed Leonard to claim a chair at one of the tables, in clearer view of the projectors.

  No one seemed to be attending to the machinery. But there were so many bodies crushed around the projectors, most of them masked or heavily made-up, that Leonard would have to skulk closer to identify Alison.