by Lisa Moore
In his mother’s last moments Loveys had had two fingers on her neck, feeling the pulse banging away hard until it got faint and then he couldn’t feel it at all. Then he took his mother’s face in both his hands and touched his forehead to hers and his tears splashed off his own cheeks onto her face, and because she was gone away to nothing the tears slid fast over the bones in her cheeks and down onto the pillow. He dragged the guitar out and sang, more howl than song, right there beside the coffin.
A week later, her employer called — she had been a social worker, child protection — and said how insurance would pay for the funeral. And he’d told the truth: there had been no expenses but for a few sandwiches with the crusts cut off for people who came by, and the lobster in them sandwiches, which he caught himself. But the cheque still came and paid for a two-week bender, and this is when he got the idea about jumping off the ship. Insurance companies were giving money away.
Loveys’ dead mother had appeared when he was trying to dry out and told him to keep on playing. That was what he had been put on earth for, according to Mom Loveys.
She’d said all this without moving her lips. She had appeared to him as if encased in a milky and semi-opaque envelope, floating two feet off the ground without a stitch of clothes, breasts down to her belly button, broad across the hips, three rolls of belly and the short little legs which Loveys had inherited, but all of it transparent (he could see the heart and lungs and the bowels, small and large intestines, even a clump of stool that hadn’t made it out before she died, the prune-like ovaries and the womb, for which he’d felt a pang of nostalgia). More importantly, inside her there was a constellation of stars, which Loveys understood to be radiating love, just love.
So there he was at the Barnacle for two weeks before he boarded the cruise ship, singing and playing the guitar. The songs told about his old mother, but they also spoke of the lovemaking he had engaged in over a lifetime. They evoked a young woman with Rollerblades on new asphalt, and the rumble of those blades, her lime Popsicle and her cold mouth when he kissed her — and this was his first wife. And he sang about each of his wives and his children, how their hair had smelled when they were infants, and the mustard colour of their infant poo, and his dog that shed white hair all over the couches and was hit by a car, and whom he’d found in a puddle after a thunderstorm and torrential rain and a whole night of searching for him, and how a bone in the dog’s leg had stuck out, and how the vet sewed him up and how later, years later, the vet put the dog down and the dog died with his eyes open and Loveys asked the vet to close them and the vet said it couldn’t be done. You can’t close a dead dog’s eyes. Loveys sang about never being able to close your eyes.
People were pressed into the doorway of the Barnacle and blocking the sidewalk and spilling out onto the street, threatening to trample each other, trying to get closer to the source of that music. Loveys sang about everything from genesis to eternity, and the cops showed up because the hullabaloo was blocking traffic, and they, too, got out of their cars, which they’d left parked slantwise across the road, and stood still, listening along with the crowd.
* * *
Now Trisha was down in the bowels of the ship with staff from all over the world — Ghana, Guatemala, the Philippines and Nicaragua, El Salvador and South Africa. Some of them had not been home for nine months or more, some of them had babies they had never seen, babies who had been born back home while these staff cruised from place to place, swabbing decks, sous-cheffing, or turning down bedding. All these men and women were here, grinding on the dance floor.
They started a party game, with the men in a circle facing out, legs squeezed tight together so they could hold up a carrot, an orange stick jutting out from their crotches, how lewd and marvellous; there were strobe lights and streamers and women doing the rumba in a circle around the men, dancing hard to taped music because they couldn’t stream a note.
They were nine miles into the fjord and had left the rest of the world behind. There was no signal, no internet, nothing. Just glaciers out there in the dark, the ice demurely drawing back, everything vulnerable and lost at the top of the world.
When the music stopped the women had to grab at the carrots, snatch them from the men’s crotches, and squeal with electrified joy if they were successful. Whoever didn’t get a carrot had to make out with a carrot-castrated man, and chug a beer with him and crunch the can.
Trisha didn’t get the carrot because, really, she couldn’t make herself grab there — it was a man’s crotch, for god’s sake. So she kissed this guy, joining tongues and hands — a guy with a synthetic beard down to his belly button and a wig from the Tupperware costume box, and she’s not even into men, she tried to tell him. But she still couldn’t get enough. Who are you?
He said: Omelette Station, Omelette Station! He didn’t speak English: those were the only words he could say with confidence, and sure enough, she saw him the next morning, both of them hungover as hell and shy-smirking at each other — some onions please, and cheddar, yes — as he made personalized omelettes at the breakfast banquet in the upper-floor dining room.
But all that came after she staggered back to her cabin, the ship rolling such as she had never experienced before. She just made it to the toilet, and what happened there was so violent she knocked her contact lens out. Her very soul is what she vomited into the crapper, and there was a strange vibration in her butt as she hugged the toilet bowl, hugged that bastard like it was her lover. It took her a moment to understand — she’d pocket-dialled Jimmy from the Fjord of Eternity, where you can’t get reception . . . but never mind, she had reception. Jimmy? That you, Jimmy? It turned out Jimmy was at the stake-out with his sushi in the Florida Keys, raw tuna and seaweed, and his guy was there with the fucking garbage. This guy, said Jimmy. The blood from his mouth and nostrils, gushes of it spurted, because of the asbestos in his lungs, and out came his two little kids, to whom the guy says, Back in the house now kids, Daddy’s gonna be fine. And Jimmy dropped a tuna chunk from the chopsticks and it went down the front of his shirt even as his tongue wriggled out to catch it.
The guy, Jimmy’s guy, at that very moment he patted his chest pockets and what do you know: out came the pack of smokes. Jimmy went for the camera, click-click-click.
Got him, Trisha, he whispered. Fucking got the bastard. Ka-ching. Fucking ka-ching. And that’s when Trisha lost him. The signal was gone as fast as she had happened upon it. Jimmy? Jimmy? Trisha spewed some more.
She would tell Roy at OptiLife everything: that she had failed in her mission; that she’d seen some things on the way. She would give up her cubicle on Spadina and would never again have to watch Jimmy with a fleck of couscous on his cheek from the jumbo wrap with shredded lettuce, falafel, and Sriracha; never again hear him ask: Could she pick up one for him if she was going to that little place on the corner, I mean if she was going anyway? Could she spot him? He’s good for it.
And she would never leave the Arctic, because the sublime had broken her. And if Roy of OptiLife knew what was good for him, he would leave his job, Roy, and come on up here to see for yourself what she was talking about.
Once she got internet again, she would tell him. In the meantime, before bed, she would go on deck to tilt her face toward the midnight sun.
* * *
When Trisha caught up with Brad Loveys she was on the third deck, starboard side, of the Northern Explorer. The crack in the cliff where Loveys stood was as wide as a six-lane highway and full of glacial spill. There had been no sign of human habitation for maybe seven hours. They’d been going ten knots most of the night. Just mountains on both sides of the vessel. Behind Loveys there was nothing but nowhere, and lots of it.
The Fjord of Eternity at his feet.
He stood with his legs apart, his wig of blue tinsel full of static electricity and the luminous strands raised all over his head like a flame from a propane torch. The midnight sun
searing his gold guitar. From the deck of the cruise ship, the guitar seemed to writhe. A trick of light and oblique angles made the neck look like a snake he was holding by the throat. Loveys’ body jackknifed back and forth as he tried to hang on to it. He was clinging on for all he was worth. Sometimes he leaned so far back under the wriggling instrument, his crotch was pumping toward the sky and his shoulder blades came close to the ice rubble behind him.
The light at that hour was Bubblicious pink and Orange Crush orange and hazard-tape yellow and it shone through the haze rising from the water, brackish and old-fridge smelling.
Trisha thought about how they had cruised the coast of Newfoundland through Iceberg Alley and on up to Labrador and disembarked on Cut Throat Island, where the bear monitors in fluorescent orange vests had spread across the hills. It was possible that Loveys might have stayed there for a winter, but when Trisha and the other passengers had stepped on the beach and seen paw prints, big as your face, still filling up with water, like little finger bowls, claws clearly delineated, and steaming scat, it seemed more likely that Loveys’ shin bone would have made a toothpick for some peckish polar bear. They’d stopped in Hebron and Ramah, resettled communities where Yolanda, the staff archaeologist, told passengers not to step on the sunken sod-houses. The struts would have been whalebone, Yolanda told them, and the windows translucent seal intestine, and the floors shale. Storms, and babies born and blubber shared, all lit up by a soapstone dish full of seal oil and a grass wick.
Trisha had flashed Loveys’ photograph around to the six archaeologists marooned from Memorial University for the summer, swollen probably beyond recognition with blackfly bites. They’d set up camp in the Torngats, armed with their camel-hair brushes, magnifying glasses, and ball-peen hammers.
A young post-doc, Brittany, had said: Yeah. I’ve seen him.
Craggy-looking?
Craggy, yeah.
Eyebrows?
No eyebrows.
But something enigmatic?
Sexy.
What was it?
His eyes.
He has nice eyes, you’re saying.
Yeah, unnaturally green, with tug.
Tug?
They tug you right out of yourself.
You’re saying . . . ?
You can’t look away.
Are you saying something occurred between him and you?
Absolutely.
So, he was alive?
He was very fucking much alive.
But by the time Trisha spotted Brad Loveys on the green-grey, blue-grey ten-thousand-year-old glacial spill at the top of the world, about to be devoured by a serpent/guitar in the Fjord of Eternity with nothing for a million miles in any direction except silence, she was convinced he was dead as a doornail. That’s what she’d be telling Roy and Todd, and all the guys she’d ever have to answer to, for the rest of her life.
She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers hello. Then the ship cruised past the wall of ice and the crevice closed shut.
Dead and gone.
Except, she still heard the music.
Marconi
He was not at the table. Then he was at the table without ever crossing the room. My head jerked up. The windows all around him black. The white collar was the first thing to form in the dark, floating just under his chin. The white cuffs, poking out of the dark wool jacket, also floating.
That is all there is of him at first. He coughs. Two slime-clotted hacks.
Then the rest of him becomes visible, as though the cough has made him seep through the fabric of the dark. Made him coalesce at the end of the table. A cold draft circles my ankles.
The boy they had polishing the silver yesterday saying the devil. Taking the sheets off the line with Sarah Callahan, them stiff as boards because of the frost, me and her having to bend them up to get them in the basket, and she saying the letter S was for Satan. There were others saying he could contact the dead with his secret box. They talked about how he held himself. They said confidence. They said money.
I was told I should be waiting.
He’s liable to get up in the dark, wanting something to eat, Mrs. Hearn had said. So I was in the corner on a straight-backed chair.
Be ready, I was told, in case he wants something. But I must have dozed off.
He coughs and I jump and smooth my apron with both hands. He lights a match and holds it to the candle on his table. The light sliding up the bevelled edges of the bow window.
Good morning, I say. I take a step closer to him and my reflection in the glass splits and multiplies where the window curves; I am an infinite army receding into the deep black space of the garden and the gardens beyond and out over the ocean into the dark forever. I ask him what he wants.
His hand shoots up and he grabs my wrist. His grip tight enough to hurt. He’s twisting the skin so it burns. He draws me close to him. My elbow smacks down on the table next to his own. In the candlelight I can make out the checked pattern of his jacket, the leather buttons. His eyes are just sockets. But when he leans in to me I can feel his breath on my chin. He’s that close. His breath smells of Christmas oranges.
I will say this: the rug in that room. They say a silk carpet from India. If you scuff it the pattern goes invisible. Runs the other way. I had scuffed across the carpet in my boots and just before he grabbed me: an electric shock. He felt it too. A tingling spark, no bigger than a mote in your eye, a tiny jolt — there, gone — with no location except the skin: it had leapt between us.
* * *
That wind will rip the features off your face, Mrs. Hearn says. Several men have hammers and they’re kneeling on the silk, up here on top of the hill, and the frame is wonky. They stand up the kite on one of its corners. The fabric ripples and snaps so it sounds like gunshots. Five men and they’re having a hard time hanging on to it.
They speak to each other the way men who are making something with wood will do. They hardly speak at all.
He put it in the papers: Something Big is what he called it. The men look chastened and sly, as if they’ve been had.
Mr. Peach is the oldest and he coaxes them by saying, Easy now. Easy.
Sometimes they say each other’s names. Gerry? Got it, Gerry? Or they say: Clarence.
A very hard blast of wind. The men with the kite dig their heels but they are dragged across the ice. Leaning back, skidding.
They’ll be carried over the cliff, Mrs. Hearn says. She tuts at the folly. One of the government men standing in the crowd loses his hat and he runs after it, hunched low against the wind, arms outstretched toward the ground, fingers scrabbling after it. His coat snaps out behind. A flash of the red lining.
(My Frank has a coat like it, passed down from a house where his mother is a char, but the red lining is worn so thin there’s a hole where the fabric has rotted, only a sagging ladder of threads holding it together.)
The hat rolls like a wheel on its brim.
* * *
In the dining room, his grip on my arm loosens but I don’t pull away. I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
The gall of you, I say. He turns my hand over so the palm faces up and he traces the blue vein with his finger.
I’ve heard it’s not even your own idea, I say. He blushes. He has skin like a baby. I have never seen a man so handsome. Everything plays out on his face. My Frank is probably the same age but his nails are black all the time.
I am the one making it happen, he says. He looks around the empty dining room.
Is there anyone else here? he asks.
Do you see anyone else? I say. He might have been asking me to take off my clothes. Frank and I haven’t ever taken off all our clothes. It was just the once with me and Frank. Behind the foundry there’s a field of long grass. Just the once but I was caught.
* * *
The men have lost t
heir hold on the kite and it rises up very high and dives. It comes crashing back down hard and fast. It looks like the corner is heading straight for Mrs. Hearn’s skull. She squeals and ducks out of the way. But before it crashes, it twists and lurches up. It wrenches itself higher; it dips and shivers. The noise of it. Lifts, falls and then straight up and out. Through the Narrows.
A shout. The crowd is shouting.
He has been standing at the edge of the crowd watching the kite, but he turns and enters the abandoned fever hospital where he has set up the machine. The kite is so high up; it’s just a white dot among the gulls.
That’ll do the job, the men say.
What do you want? I ask him in the dining room. They all said about his mother, the Irish whiskey heiress, traipsing from bank to bank, raising the money. They said her dresses and her red hair.
* * *
A hundred thousand more of me in the window.
Tell me what you want, I say. I ask him about the waves and he makes little circles with his finger on my wrist. Hardly touching me at all. It runs straight through me.
They can circle the Earth, he says. No man has ever touched me like this, without haste or intent. Desultory and possessive.
I need to get above the curvature of the Earth, he says. He doesn’t say anything else about the waves. I don’t ask.
What he wants, he says, is breakfast. I go down the narrow spiral staircase to the kitchen.
Mrs. Hearn with the cleaver — bang — on the rabbit’s legs and the two front paws tumble away. Mrs. Hearn buries her lye-chafed fingers into the soft fur of the rabbit’s neck, wedging the animal’s stiff shoulder out of the way and — bang — the cleaver comes down again. The head is off. Then she digs down between the fur and the flesh, wiggling her fingers. She rips the fur all the way down the hind legs, revealing the scrawny purple body webbed all over with skeins of yellow fat.
