by Lisa Moore
They say about it in the opening remarks of the librarian conference, every panel, they say, We are cognizant of what has happened here. I’m in a line at the bar, trying to get water for the woman who gave blood. Diane from Georgia, Meaghan from New York, two from Minnesota.
Two librarians from Boston, ahead of me. They turn to chat with me, introduce themselves.
I’m from Newfoundland, I say. Do you know where Newfoundland is?
Sure, they say.
We Newfoundlanders built Boston, I say.
Thank you, they say in unison.
What are you doing here? I ask.
Acquisitions, one of them says. Okay, we hate the word, but Edutainment. We acquire packages, the kids learn something, but they enjoy it.
Okay, I say.
We know, one of them says, swivelling all the ice at the bottom of her plastic cup. We hate that word too.
Not just the word, I say.
The concept, one of them says.
Did you give blood? one of them says.
Not yet, I say. I wonder if it’s a private company. Because the blood flows like a river and is someone making money? What was it like? Commotion, terror, the music still going, strobe lights and neon teeth in the black light, smell of coconut lotion on warm skin, everybody running, and what does that kind of gunfire smell like? Is there smoke? Does it have a coppery-tinged fug?
I give the woman who looks like she will faint a big glass of water and honestly? She doesn’t look great.
They had cookies, she says.
You should have had a cookie.
I thought, I don’t need a cookie.
It’s the heat. I nudge the glass of water toward her. And she says thank you.
Just sit, I say. Take a moment. She closes her eyes.
The musician I’d made love with, lost in the playing, the cymbals, the xylophone, the bow, and I see him move his lips, speaking to himself, just a few words, gently chiding, or an encouragement.
* * *
On the last day of the conference, after the last panel and the closing remarks, twenty thousand librarians pour out of the conference centre, fighting over the cabs outside. A black man in a fluorescent vest is trying to get a line formed for the cabs, but the librarians, still wearing their lanyards, are actually running down the sidewalk in clots of three, or four, or six, trotting away from him, skipping the line! They are skipping the line, creating havoc, and getting in the cabs parked and idling near the curb, skipping the individual librarians who have lined up and waited their turn. The orderly librarians are gesticulating and talking loudly, if not shouting, to the other librarians, the ones who are skipping the line.
The librarians left on the sidewalks, the ones who have been skipped over, these librarians are slapping the windows of the cabs. Trying the door handles which are locked. The librarians already stuffed into cabs have locked the doors. They just look forward. They refuse to meet the eyes of the librarians actually hammering their fists on the windows of their cabs that are pulling slowly away.
I walk back to the hotel by myself, a blood blister on my ankle. I orient myself by the giant billboard that I’d seen from the musician’s apartment. The Viper’s Revenge! The snake faded by the sun, rearing up over the treetops in the gathering dark.
Lighting Up the Dark
This is the story of a boy. My encounter with a particular boy on Christmas Eve at the very moment when the course of his life is about to turn irrevocably toward disaster and ruin. The moment on Christmas Eve just before the Avalon Mall in St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada, caves in on itself due to unexpected stress on the roof.
Some stores in the mall have already turned off their lights, and the glass fronts of those establishments look particularly grey and dead next to the ones still open, still blasting cheery white light and glittering Styrofoam snowflakes with silver sparkles hanging from threads and garlands of metallic gold and red and green.
Those already darkened stores look like grey teeth in a hyper-whitened smile.
In charges the boy, through the automatic doors which swing open for him, wearing a ski mask and an apron, carrying a syringe, about to commit armed robbery in the Olde Tyme Barber Shoppe of Yore, the first establishment you see when you enter the Avalon Mall through the Winners entrance, next to the Wellness Store that emits the aroma of sage, a scent I am pretty sure I’m allergic to, but never mind.
I’ll get back to me in a moment, a few biographical details about which I have decided to break my silence. A few myths I need to correct.
Mostly, though, this is the story of a boy whose grandmother has a toothache, one that has led to an infection, which, if it’s in the bottom teeth, might travel down her neck, across her shoulder, and into her chest and stop her heart. If it’s in her top teeth, the infection might travel up to cause brain damage.
But because of the way pain migrates, the dentist isn’t sure if it is the top teeth or the bottom or both. While the boy grips his grandmother’s hand, the dentist wiggles one tooth after another with his gloved index finger, all the while saying very softly and with great feeling: I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.
The sound the boy’s grandmother makes is high-pitched, a whimper, and nothing he’s ever heard before. The sound doesn’t just describe the pain, it is the pain, and the boy squeezes her hand and wants the pain to leave her and migrate into his own hand and up his arm so he can take the pain himself, if the pain would just leave his grandmother alone. He would do that.
His grandmother’s eye flutters, one eye, and he feels her hand with the woody knots of arthritis in each of her knuckles. She often holds out her hands and says, I used to have the loveliest hands, and now I can’t even wear my rings, and he feels her hand go limp but he calls her back.
Hang on there, Nana, he says, I’m here. The dentist, who is sitting on a stool with rolling castors, pushes away all of a sudden with the heels of his shiny, black, not fancy or ostentatious but perfectly polished shoes, and with the loud rumble of the castors on the tiles, he swishes a few feet away, because it seems that the amount of pain the grandmother feels is sacred, or holy, or too much for even the dentist to witness.
As he swishes backwards in the drum roll of the wheels, he also reaches up and pushes at the light hanging on an articulated metal arm over the grandmother’s face. He unsnaps the latex gloves from his wrists, and the grandmother, who has been staring up into the light, sees a floating spot, blinding her, and a sudden shadow when the light is pushed away. The spot floats very slowly down onto the tiled floor where it fades and disappears.
I can’t do anything here until she gets antibiotics, the dentist says.
The boy asks: Does social services cover antibiotics?
This is the story of a boy on welfare who needs nine thousand dollars to pay a dentist to repair the teeth of his grandmother, at least six of the teeth, the dentist estimates, though it’s impossible to say without an X-ray. A grand to fifteen hundred a tooth, he says, and it’s hard to tell which ones are the culprits, so they all have to be fixed or they all have to come out and really, young man, I can tell you right now, you might pay all that money and they might have to come out anyway. There’s no guarantee and my advice, young man, I would have to say my advice is we remove the teeth.
And his grandmother raises her finger to interrupt with a little joke, and they look at her and she sings in a wavering voice: All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. Then she lays her hand against her hot and swollen cheek.
Because this is his grandmother, who raised the boy, who let him run wild, except that he didn’t, he never did anything bad, hardly, because you have to take care of old people and not upset them, and who made him homemade bread every week, the arms on her from punching down the dough, and his mother phoning from Fort Mac every now and then, when she’s drinking and she’s having herself a little cry ab
out leaving him, and did he want to come up and meet the new baby, his little sister, and his Mom’s boyfriend — and if not for Christmas he’d definitely have to come up for the wedding.
The boy’s grandmother would have done anything for the boy, that’s the way it is between them, anything but this: no matter how much he begs her, she will not have her teeth pulled out of her head, which social services would pay for, but they will not pay to fix them. And because the grandmother will not have the teeth pulled out, he has decided he will pay to get the teeth fixed.
One side of her face has blown up like a balloon and she is in her seventies and she has, she says, her looks to consider.
You lose your teeth, she says, I’ve seen it, your face falls in.
But before I continue with this boy’s story, I would like to take a moment to clear up those few misconceptions about myself and my life’s work. For instance, I want it to be known that I do occasionally shave my beard. This is a story about a boy and an armed robbery (the syringe, he found in an alley outside the restaurant where he worked—not an item he is normally in possession of) but first you must allow me a few facts: the animals are not named, as some myths would have you believe. I have not given them individual names; they are not pets, for gosh sakes.
They are reindeer. They are an ancient herd, hundreds of thousands of reindeer. On the night in question their old bones lift from the black sludge of peat bogs and those bones gather up muscle and shiny, sleek hides, the soft fur inside the ear, wet black noses, sniffing the frost-stiffened breeze; their hearts flutter, still stone-crusted, those hearts and arteries, and the hearts begin to fibrillate and then they pound.
They burst up from the earth, these reindeer, hooves clattering out of mountains of granite; they rise from the rivers of lava in the volcanic eruptions of Iceland, molten orange coats, each hoof touching down on the smoking, blackened stone and lime-green lichen and white snow. They crash out of glaciers, shattering blue ice with their antlers. They are more meteor than reindeer; they are a pure, clean kind of fuel.
The reindeers’ harness is fashioned from fibre-optic cables scavenged from the sea floor, writhing with old and random bytes of data. Their breastplates are malfunctioning motherboards from trashed computers, and those breastplates, pure ornamentation, of course, glitter in the soft, white fluff beneath their long and graceful necks. The reindeer prance and flick their heads; the musky stink of their coats rises in the steam from their flanks on a cold winter’s night.
Many people imagine sleigh bells. The myths make mention of them. Folkloric accounts include onomatopoeic instances of aural phenomena such as sleigh bells’ ring-jing-jing-a-ling. Let’s dispense with that notion at once. There are no bells. We travel faster than the speed of sound.
The herd with eyes rolling so the whites flare, shying sideways when veils of snow hiss over the glacial field that is the North Pole, rearing and jostling each other and kicking out hind legs, snickering lips, sometimes a weird bawling out into the night.
The sleigh itself an elongating spill of mercury, more fluid than solid.
My whip is just an ordinary whip, though. I picked it up in Tangiers. Braided leather. An ordinary whip, but on the night in question I flick it hard over my head and it coils and cracks. A boom that echoes through the universe, spooking the herd so they cannot hold still any longer. They paw the sky with their glassy hooves. The sleigh moves slowly at first, there is the crisp rasp of dry snow under the runners. Then we are away. It is not a speed that can be felt or otherwise measured or even thought of as speed. We bypass tired notions of duration and the idea of moving from point A to point B.
We lurch through time and space. Lurching or looping. What we do is we implode through the seconds or centuries. We transmogrify, our molecules unbind and bind back up. There is a coalescing of everything. We zip.
And here is the thing, which brings me to the boy in question. As we soar, I come to know every human being on earth. I know every thought. Every synaptic charge that leaps from one brain cell to the next, the Riverdance of pointed toe, heel, toe, leaps of stray memories and hard decisions, the floods of emotion, epiphany and dervishes of despair, the twirling of agitation and transcendence, the wrongdoing and good in every soul on earth and all those moments pass through me, the pain of that boy’s grandmother as her blood turns septic, all the grief and joy and war and love is duplicated in the 3D printer of the cosmos and rips through me as my reindeer team traverses infinity. Marrakesh, Vienna, Antarctica, simultaneously. We land; we deliver. Ireland, Florida, Beijing, Botswana. I am given sweets and glasses of rum.
In short, I am everywhere and I know everything. Vancouver, Winnipeg. St. John’s, Newfoundland, the Avalon Mall. Winners, the Olde Tyme Barber Shoppe of Yore, the Firebird on tickets to raise money for the Shriners, the kiosk for cellphones, the man in a wheelchair with his four-year-old daughter riding on the back in her pink puffy jacket and a tiara of tinsel and pink feathers, the kiosk for jewellery, the chocolate store with the giant chocolate Santa on tickets for the Janeway Children’s Hospital, the artificial tree so high it almost touches the ceiling. The scarlet, crushed-velveteen sofa set up for children to get their picture taken with “Santa,” the line-up, the blast of a flash and another flash.
I am here. I am there.
This boy, the boy in question, is working the Christmas Eve brunch shift in the dish pit, down on Water Street, and this restaurant where he works? It’s expensive. This restaurant puts a rim of dirt around the plate and the customers eat slimy things straight out of the backyard, and it costs a lot of money. He’s lied, of course, to get the job, and said he was sixteen but he’s fourteen and the hours are long, he walks home in the dark by himself when the streets are empty and the snow in the middle of the streets is undisturbed except when the traffic light changes and floods of squiggling red spill over the snow, and yes, there’s an industrial dishwasher but there’s also a mountain of plates to be washed by hand and the broken ones get docked from his tips.
So there he is, this boy, our boy, crossing the floor with a stack of dessert plates, both hands under the plates and the column is leaning against the bib of his white apron.
Unbeknownst to him, back on Flower Hill in the row of public housing, next to the apartment with a black garbage bag affixed with silver duct tape over a broken window, and in the bedroom that has a tiny slider window looking onto the street, the grandmother’s fever spikes, because the antibiotics have not taken hold of the infection, have done nothing to fight it back, in fact the infection has redoubled in strength and it courses through her blood toward her heart, toward her brain, even as my reindeer and I pass through the centuries, blip and blip, toward the Avalon Mall, and even as the boy, still in the restaurant, approaches the spill of congealed bacon fat on the kitchen floor tiles with thirty-seven of the plates that just a half hour before held sautéed bananas caramelized with a blowtorch, and homemade ice cream with, I’m not kidding you, bits of tree bark, and the top plate slides a little.
A minor see-saw action, that plate, even before the boy’s shoe meets with the slick of bacon grease and the grandmother sees shadows flit across the wall from the headlights of a passing car, and everything the boy has ever considered to be the ground, the solid thing beneath his feet, suddenly tilts up to meet the ceiling, and to get the floor back down where it belongs, under his feet, the boy must stagger-slip and whack-bolt his shoulders and all the minor muscles in his back, and perform a jagged, acrobatic lunge, trying not to fall, basically, trying to stay upright and reaching at the same time to clamp his chin down on the column of plates, to hold the plates between the vice grip of his hands under the bottom plate and now his chin on the top plate, pressing all the plates together, and just as the infection reaches the grandmother’s heart, and just as I touch down on the Avalon Mall roof, with hundreds of thousands of reindeer and the sleigh, the side of the column of plates slings out, sas
hays sideways, and the middle plate alive with a mind of its own waggles free, and the whole pile smashes across the floor and a blast of fire goes up from the stove where they are doing a flambé with whatever kind of moonshine liberally splashed, and Elena, the manager, starts in on the boy, yelling her fool head off, regardless of it being Christmas Eve: How the hell are you going to pay for this? And the grandmother’s darkened bedroom lifts up its skirts and turns slowly, slowly like a waltz.
The boy is staggering and sliding on the skim of congealed bacon grease all the way out the back door of the restaurant without even turning off the running water in the dish pit because what if his grandmother dies now that he has lost his tips?
That stack of plates, each handcrafted, is worth at least five hundred bucks, and onto the street, ripping at the apron he is wearing, apoplectic with fear because now he doesn’t have a job and tomorrow is Christmas and what if his grandmother dies, flinging his arms around to the back, where the hard little knot is grease-caked, and he writhes trying to get out of the apron, there on the sidewalk on Christmas Eve, but he can’t get out of it and it’s then he spots the syringe sticking out of the snow and picks it up just as the bus to the Avalon Mall stops right in front of him, and the doors wheeze open and he gets on.
And let’s zip forward because here I am just bathed in fumes of sage, to which I very well may be allergic, lying prone on a black leather chair, with a rubberized black cape up to my neck affixed with Velcro at the back. This is the story of a boy who is going to commit armed robbery at the Avalon Mall while wearing a ski mask and a hoodie and an apron, and then he’s going to get his grandmother to the dentist and basically save her life this very afternoon before everything closes for good, until the day after tomorrow, Boxing Day, but I’d like a fresh shave.
