Trader

by Charles de Lint

  I was wondering when you'd be showing up.

  He looks so calm, so accepting of the situation, while I feel as though the ground has vanished underfoot. I know I’m standing here in someone else’s skin, trying to talk to someone in my skin, but at the same time I’m plummeting, and who knows where I’ll finally end up. The sensation is so real that it’s all I can do to keep my balance.

  “You...you were expecting me?” I finally manage to say.

  “Well, sure,” the man replies. “I mean, look at us. It’s goddamn unbelievable, isn’t it? If you hadn’t showed up here, I’d have had to come take a look at you—just to make sure I wasn’t going nuts, you know what I mean?”

  I lift a hand to my cheek and trail my fingers down to my chin, unconsciously exploring their shapes. When I realize what I’m doing, I drop my hand to my side. I don’t think I’ll ever become comfortable with the unfamiliar contours under my fingertips.

  “You’re Johnny Devlin,” I say. I’m like the country yokel on his first trip to the big city, everything moving too fast for me, nothing really making sense because I don’t understand the context of what I’m experiencing. I speak slowly because it seems as if I have to search for every word before I can use it. “This is really your face.”

  Devlin nods amiably. “Weird shit, isn’t it? It’s going to take some getting used to, that’s for damn sure.”

  “I’m not going to get used to it,” I tell him.

  Devlin has a cocky look of superiority in his eyes that I’ve never seen when looking at myself in the mirror. He wears my body differently, too—the way he stands, the way he moves.

  “Can’t say’s I blame you,” Devlin says. “I’ve been checking things out— you know, your business records, your bankbooks. You seemed to have made a pretty comfortable little life for yourself here.”

  “What did you do to me?” I demand.

  “Hey, slow down, pal. I didn’t do a damn thing to you.”

  “You’re telling me this all just...happened.”

  Devlin shrugs. “All I know is I fell asleep in my own bed last night and woke up in yours this morning wearing your face.”

  “And you didn’t do a thing?”

  “Like what?” Devlin asks, the mockery plain in his features and voice. “You think I killed a chicken and went booga-booga or something, and then zip, bam, boom, here we are?”

  I nod. It’s not quite what I mean, but it’s got to have been something along those lines. Something I don’t understand but he does.

  “I never bought into that crap,” Devlin tells me.

  “You had to have done something.”

  Devlin shakes his head. “Nope. I just went to bed and fell asleep. Wished I could wake up and all my problems’d be gone, but that’s nothing new. I’ve been doing that for about as long as I can remember because, just between you and me, pal, I was not nearly as together as you seem to have been. I mean, if I could screw it up, I did.”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing. “So you just made a wish and here we are?”

  “Works for me.”

  “This is ridiculous. Next thing you’ll be telling me your fairy godmother showed up.”

  Devlin gives me a long, studied look, that mocking light bright in his eyes. “Look at us, pal. Something happened that should have been impossible. Who are we to buck destiny?”

  “I want my life back.”

  “Understandable. But it’s a no-go. I don’t know why things worked out the way they did, but I’ll tell you this: From here on out, every night when I go to sleep I’m going to take a moment to concentrate on maintaining this new status quo.”

  “You can’t get away with this,” I tell him.

  Devlin smiles. “Who’s going to stop me?”

  Then he closes the door in my face.

  I stare at the wooden panels for a long moment, then hammer my fist against them. The door jerks open again.

  “Keep it up, pal,” Devlin says, “and I’ll have to call the cops.”

  I fold my arms across my chest. “Fine.”

  Devlin sighs. “And what’re you going to tell them?”

  “I...”

  “Exactly. Nothing. Because if you try to tell them the truth, they’ll laugh you off. And if you stick to your story, they’ll send you to the Zeb for psychiatric testing. And if I decide to press charges because you’re in my face and harassing me, well, maybe they’ll just lock you away for a while or at least issue you with a cease and desist. Are you starting to get my drift yet, pal?”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” I ask. I hate the plaintive note I hear in my voice.

  Devlin shakes his head. “I’m not doing a damn thing to you. I’m just rolling with the punches, pal. Playing the hand I was dealt. Now why don’t you get out of my face and do the same?”

  He closes the door again, but this time all I can do is stand there in the hallway. I stare at the door, knowing I should be angry, knowing I should be furious. But all I can muster up is a confused sense of loss. I feel empty, drained of the strength to go on. My life’s been stolen away from me and I can’t do a thing about it.

  12 TANYA

  Tanya didn’t quite make it through her whole shift. She tried. She did the best she could to put this morning’s weird encounter with Johnny behind her. Pretending everything was normal, she managed to hang in until the midafternoon lull that inevitably followed the lunch rush. Then, when it wouldn’t seem too obvious that she simply had to get out of there, she tidied up her section, balanced her receipts and made her escape. Her coworkers at the café were like family, especially Zeffy, but there were some things you couldn’t share with family, even a family-of-choice. She needed to be alone with her confusion and pain.

  She couldn’t stop thinking about Johnny, but now instead of being confused about where their relationship stood—was he interested in her, did she even love him anymore—a whole new set of questions had entered the equation, leaving her more scared than she was willing to admit to herself, little say Zeffy. Scared and in need of a fix.

  She couldn’t understand what had happened with Johnny. Their relationship had been pretty much on the rocks for the past couple of months, but that didn’t begin to explain the way he’d treated her this morning. It wasn’t like she’d been obsessing on him, constantly in his face, calling him, trying to hang around. What had she done to deserve the reception she’d gotten from him this morning?

  She knew as well as Zeffy that it had been Johnny standing there in the hallway of his apartment treating her the way he had. Aliens hadn’t taken up residence in his brain. She wasn’t stupid. But he had been so different. Seriously, frighteningly different. The way he’d talked, the way he’d looked at her...She knew it was an act, but even knowing that, she still found herself feeling that he really hadn’t recognized her at all. She couldn’t stop searching for some kind of logic behind his actions, like he had to have been in an accident and now had amnesia.

  Which was being really dumb. Because, no. It was like Zeffy said. It had just been Johnny playing some stupid game with them. What didn’t make sense was why he’d have to go through such an elaborate charade. If he wanted it to be finished between them, all he’d have to do was say so. She hadn’t been calling him. He'd called her. To borrow money, it was true, but still he’d made the contact. It seemed hard to believe that he’d go through all of this just to get out of paying her back. It was easier to believe that something alien had taken up residence in his brain.

  That she could even consider such a thing with any sort of seriousness was what probably scared her the most and had her yearning for a fix. A little hit of euphoria. A small space of emotional detachment. A well-deserved break from the pain and stress.

  She settled for a cigarette as she waited for the bus to take her home. It would be so easy to go back, to let the junk swallow up all of her problems and hard times and hide them away in a warm, comforting blur. No worries, as that Crocodile what’s-his-nam
e from Australia would say. It made for fine times. Except the trouble was you always came down. And if you cranked another hit, the coming down got harder still and you were just asking for the monkey to crawl back up on your shoulder.

  That she couldn’t face again.

  The bus came and she butted out her cigarette. People talked about how quitting smoking was the hardest thing they’d ever done. They should try going cold turkey from a serious habit if they wanted to know some real fun and games. They should try going through the days of shivering and sweating and throwing up. The anxiety and muscle spasms. The sleeplessness, and then when you did manage to sleep for an hour or so, you dreamt that there were things crawling around behind the wallpaper and you’d wake up with big claw marks and blood on the walls and all this wallpaper under your nails. You ended up feeling like a dishrag under someone’s sink and the worst thing was that you knew—you knew—that all it’d take was one little hit to stop the agony.

  She stared gloomily out the window as the bus stuttered between stops on its way up Battersfield Road. When it reached Stanton Street, she got off, but instead of using her transfer to continue on home, she walked down the street to St. Paul’s. The magnificent cathedral loomed up above her in a Gothic splendor of grey stone, tall arches and gargoyles, an old architectural patriarch in a neighborhood of gently decaying Victorian houses and estates, overseeing their fading genteelness with the kind gaze of a favorite grandfather.

  Tanya scattered crowds of foraging pigeons and gulls as she climbed up the wide sweep of its steps to sit down near the top. She was surprised by the day’s warmth, considering how cool it had been last night. Undoing a button of her blouse, she leaned back on her elbows and took in her surroundings.

  The lunch crowds were gone from here as well, but there were still some hangers-on. Tourists getting cricks in their necks as they jockeyed with their cameras, looking for the perfect shot. Street people, dozing in the sun or talking to themselves. A couple of buskers playing—for themselves now, instead of for the money. She recognized the fiddler. He was Geordie Riddell, one of Jilly’s friends, a tall, lanky fellow with long hair who always looked a bit scruffier than she thought he should. She knew the red-haired woman playing the Irish pipes with him only by sight.

  Usually the kind of music they played cheered her up. It was hard not to smile at the lilting spill of notes that made up a jig or a reel. But today the music’s good humor only depressed her.

  Everybody had something they wanted to do with their lives, she thought. Everybody had a goal, something that burned inside them, something that they not only wanted to do, but had to do. Zeffy wanted to make a living with her songs. Jilly was an artist. Wendy wrote poetry. Geordie and his friend had their music. What did she have? Nothing. Her life was usually defined by whoever she was going out with at the time and if she wasn’t going out with anyone, then she thought of herself as between boyfriends. Not as a singer or an artist or by any other kind of career appellation. She was just someone between boyfriends.

  It was so pathetic.

  Zeffy was always telling people that the reason they worked shifts at the café was because it left them the time for the things they really wanted to do, the important things. It always embarrassed Tanya because if she wasn’t going out with anyone, she didn’t have anything important to do. She’d keep the apartment clean. She’d make herself some new clothes. She’d read. When she had the money, she’d go clubbing.

  Zeffy could spend hours practicing in her bedroom. Playing her guitar. Singing. Writing new songs. The closest Tanya ever came to anything creative was being an appreciative audience for her friends’ endeavors.

  Tanya sighed. She put her elbows on her knees, propped up her chin with hands and watched the Stanton Street traffic go by.

  She must have wanted to be something once. Before she hit puberty and got onto this treadmill of boyfriends, she had to have been enthused by something, had some ambitions. When did she become a “pretty face” and nothing more?

  Before puberty, she realized, because that was how she’d always been defined. In school, at home, in college. Hadn’t her parents always gone on about how she should be a model or an actress, because wasn’t she so pretty? Hadn’t they pushed her into trying to make her way through life on her looks? And she’d gone along with them, hadn’t she? Not so much because she wanted to, but to make them happy. Because until she knew better, that was the way she thought it was supposed to be—even though she felt it should be different. Inside. Where no one cared except for her. And later, Zeffy.

  The beauty pageants had been a complete turnoff. No matter how they were gussied up, they were still meat markets.

  Modeling hadn’t been satisfying either. All you were was a mannequin and there were too many smarmy men always trying to feel you up, too many other beautiful women who saw you only as competition and treated you like dirt.

  Acting had been better, except she had a terrible memory and kept forgetting her lines in live productions. She could deliver them perfectly—but only when she remembered them. It had quickly gotten to the point where she didn’t want to embarrass her fellow cast members, never mind herself.

  In films she could at least go over her lines between takes, but there still hadn’t been any room for her to add any creative input. Everybody decided how she’d look, what she’d wear, how she’d deliver her lines. No one wanted to listen to what the “talent” might be able to add to the role. And she always got cast as “the girlfriend,” the one who clung to the lead’s arm and had to be rescued, or ended up on the end of the killer’s knife, when what she really wanted was the character parts. Those were the roles with the most meat to them but the producers never thought she could play them. She was too pretty. She was the perennial girl-next-door. Her face didn’t have enough character. It was too much of a stretch.

  Yeah? You should see me do a junkie...

  When the time came that she had to make the choice between moving out to the West Coast, or finishing her studies at university, she’d opted for the latter. And it wasn’t because she didn’t think she had what it took to make it in Hollywood, that she was scared of the hard work or the competition or any of the other heartbreaks that a career in film entailed. It was because she knew she didn’t care enough about that kind of work to put the effort into it.

  Because it wasn’t really her, was it? Her becoming an actress had been one of her parents’ enthusiasms, not her own. No, she was only good at getting boyfriends. Not keeping them. Oh no. Once you got beyond the pretty face, well there wasn’t much else there, was there? But she could hook them in just fine, thank you. She remembered how impressed Johnny had been with her Screen Actors Guild card and her acting credentials, never mind that they were only cheesy B movies. Or maybe, considering his taste in cinema, it had been because they were that kind of film.

  Sisters of the Knife had been the one that got her her SAG card. Johnny had bought the video of it not long after they started seeing each other and told her he loved her part in it. Sure, it was exploitative, but he’d seen worse and everybody had to start somewhere, right? He couldn’t believe that she’d given up acting when she obviously had such a talent for it. Yadda-yadda-yadda.

  She’d never seen the film itself—only some of the dailies. She’d hated the shoot, hated the gratuitous shower scene, hated the oppressive promise of violence that permeated even the nonviolent scenes. Sisters got her the card, but the shoot also gave her a habit. Here, try this. You don’t get hooked if you use it in moderation. A snort here, a snort there, and the next thing she knew she was sticking a needle in between her toes where the tracks wouldn’t show, mainlining that sweet oblivion because it was the only way she could deal with all the shit that had gone down on the set.

  God, this was depressing.

  She shook a cigarette out of her pack and lit it up. Through the cloud of grey smoke that wreathed her face she saw that Geordie and his friend had finished playing and were p
acking up their instruments. She hadn’t even heard the music stop. Geordie looked up and smiled when he noticed her sitting there. He said something to his companion and the red-haired woman gave Tanya a wave before setting off across Stanton Street. Geordie picked up his fiddle case and climbed the steps to where Tanya was sitting.

  “Playing hooky from work?” he asked as he sat down beside her.

  “I’d like to be playing hooky from life,” she told him.

  Geordie gave her a considering look. “You sound like you need serious cheering up.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tanya said. “I don’t mean to whine. I’m just having one of those days. I couldn’t stay at work a minute longer, you know, pretending to be happy.”

  Geordie nodded. “I don’t know how you can do it, day after day, the way you do.”

  “It’s usually half days.”

  “But still.”

  “Don’t make me feel more depressed than I already am,” Tanya said.

  She managed to find a smile to let him know that he shouldn’t take her too seriously, that he had nothing to do with the way she was feeling.

  “So what’s got you so down?” he asked.

  Tanya shrugged. “Just the usual. Bad luck with boyfriends. Worse luck in figuring out what I want to do with my life.”

  “Who says you have to do something with your life?”

  “Oh right. Wouldn’t that make a great epitaph: ‘Here lies Tanya Burns. She vegged through life and now she’s fertilizer.’ ”

  Geordie laughed. “I don’t mean anything so drastic. But really, don’t you think this desperate need to scrabble out a career that most people seem to have is a little overrated?”

  “It depends,” Tanya said, “whether you’re doing it for yourself, or for someone else. Do you feel there’s something wrong with your devoting all your time to making music?”

  “No. But that’s different. It’s something I want to do.”

  Tanya added. “And if you don’t get rich at it, it’s still okay, right? Because you’re doing something you want to do.”