Trader

by Charles de Lint

  Hank...Fitzhenry Park—Newford itself, for god’s sake. They’re all gone. All that’s left of them is my knapsack, and an ache in the back of my head where I cracked skulls with Devlin. And in their place...

  I must have been out cold for a while, I realize, because it’s at least a three-hour drive from downtown Newford to here—here being Janossy’s old farm, nestled in the foothills of the Kickaha Mountains. But at the same time that’s going through my head, I know it can’t be true, because the farm’s been deserted since Janossy died, half the outbuildings fallen in on themselves, the fields all overgrown, herb and vegetable beds gone wild. This farm looks the way it did when I lived here. When Janossy was still alive.

  And that’s not possible.

  Even if someone’s bought the place and fixed it up, it couldn’t look like this. How would they know to trim back the rosebushes just so far? How could they duplicate Janossy’s peculiar pattern for the cedar shingles on the roof of the workshop so that it looked like the Japanese ideograph for autumn, floating in a sea of clouds? How could they have found another old sleigh and positioned it so exactly at the side of the house, just the way Janossy had? I can still remember breaking that sleigh up when it finally rotted through one winter, burning the wood in the fire pit behind the bam. And the barn’s back, too. The last time I was here, the roof had finally collapsed and all that had been left was the stone foundation and two of the wooden walls.

  It’s like that wherever I look, everything that time wore down over the years returned to its original state. A feeling of such dislocation comes over me that I’m afraid to stand up. It’s like climbing the stairs of a stopped escalator—it’s too disorienting. All I can do is stay seated on this low rise where I’ve found myself and try to quiet the thunder of my pulse.

  I have to look away from the farm, so I turn to trace the long laneway that leads out of the farmyard and joins the highway, except the highway isn’t there anymore. The lane peters out into an overgrown field, raspberry bushes pressed close and hanging over it, tall weeds growing up between the ruts. A hawk floats high above the field, hunting. It all registers, but only in my peripheral vision. All my attention is now focused on Johnny Devlin, sitting there on the ground a half-dozen yards away from me. There’s blood all over the front of his shirt, streaks of it under his nose and chin and smeared across one hand where he’s been trying to stanch the flow.

  I must’ve broken his nose when I whipped my head back and hit him in the park. His nose. My nose.

  The park. A buzz starts up in the back of my head. Where the hell is the park? How did I get from—

  I stop that train of thought because I know if I ride it any further, the panic I’m trying to keep down is going to swallow me whole and the next place I’ll wake up is in the Zeb, strapped to a bed and pumped full of tranquilizers. I focus on Devlin, instead. The new bend in his nose makes those familiar features of mine less familiar. It’s easier to look at him and deal with the fact that we’re still inhabiting each other’s bodies.

  When he sees me looking at him, he starts nervously. For a minute I think he’s going to bolt, but then his shoulders sag. What did he think I was going to do—give him another head-butt?

  “What’d you do to me?” he asks.

  I can’t believe he’s blaming me for this. The flow of the blood has stopped, leaving his nose discolored and swollen, black smudges around his eyes. It’s got to hurt, but I don’t feel much sympathy for him. The swelling gives his voice a nasal quality, like he’s got a bad cold.

  “What did I do to you?”

  “I didn’t bring us here,” he says.

  I shake my head. “You’re the one who got us into all of this in the first place.”

  “I saw the look on your face when you sat up,” he says. “You know this place. You’ve been here before.”

  “I knew this place,” I tell him.

  He looks at me, absently dabbing the sleeve of his jacket against the bottom of his nose, and waits.

  “It was like this years ago,” I explain, “but it doesn’t look like this anymore.”

  “So what’re you telling me? You’ve dragged us back into the past?”

  I feel like giving him another head butt, but I manage to keep my— his?—temper in check. Fighting’s not my style. I hardly ever argue either— though you’d never know that from the past few days.

  “I’m telling you,” I say, “I had nothing to do with bringing us here.”

  He gives me a yeah-sure look.

  “Why’d you grab me in the park?” I ask, deciding to put him on the defensive for a change.

  For a moment I don’t think he’s going to answer. When he does, his answer makes no sense.

  “You ripped me off,” he says.

  It’s my turn to look blank.

  “Don’t play innocent,” he says. “I saw you coming out of my apartment building with that knapsack you’re carrying. What’d you take?”

  I can’t believe this guy.

  “Your apartment building?”

  “It’s mine now. And so’s whatever you took. I was waiting for a chance to get it back when you started arguing with that guy.” He touches his nose gingerly. “Christ, this hurts. Why’d you have to hit me so hard?”

  “Well, excuse me.”

  He points to the knapsack. “What’ve you got in there, anyway?”

  “I don’t believe you,” I say. “No wonder your life’s such a mess. You don’t think of anybody but yourself and even then you’re too screwed up to get it right.”

  He gives me a sullen look. “Easy for you to say. You’ve had all the breaks.” His logic is so skewed I can’t help wanting to hear him out. It’s that, or slap him silly.

  “All what breaks?” I ask.

  “You know.” He shrugs. “Things just went your way. I’ve been through your stuff. You’ve got a good business, a nice apartment, money in the bank— all the things I’ve never had. Can you blame me for wanting a piece of it?”

  “So you just step into my life and take it?”

  “Hey, I had nothing to do with what happened to us. But the deal’s done, so I might as well take advantage of it, right?”

  For the first time since we switched, I’m not so keen to get my own body back. There’s something about the way he’s wearing it that’s giving me the creeps—like he’s soiled it, just by inhabiting it for the past few days. Which doesn’t make sense, considering I’m sitting here in his skin and who knows what he’s put this body through. I’ve got god knows how many residual pieces of him floating around inside me, but this skin still feels more like my own at the moment. The temper, the depression...I don’t know what else he’s left behind for me to deal with. But the thing is, I feel as though I can work it all out. What I’m not so sure I can handle is being back in my own skin—even if we could figure out how to make the switch—because this body feels like my own now.

  We’re funny creatures, we human beings. My father was right. It seems as though we can adjust to anything.

  “What’re you looking at me like that for?” he asks.

  “I’m just thinking about how anything you touch seems to go bad.” That wakes a spark of anger in his eyes, but his body language tells me he’s too scared to do anything about it. Scared of what? Me? Because I managed to break his nose when all I was doing was panicking and trying to get away from him and Hank? I guess it’s the classic bully syndrome. Once someone stands up to them, once they get hurt, it lets out all the air and bluster. Or maybe it’s the pieces of me left behind in him that stop him.

  “What would you know?” he says.

  “As it stands,” I tell him, “I already know too much.”

  “Yeah, well I just never got—”

  “The breaks. I know. We’ve already played that side of the record. Did you ever think of making your own breaks instead of stealing them from other people?”

  “I never—”

  I don’t want to hear it. “Look
at what you did with your life: no money, no job, lost your apartment, treated your girlfriend like shit. That’s not bad breaks. That’s just you being a loser.”

  “I was going to pay Tanya back,” he says. “I even went by the café today to give her the money, but she wouldn’t take it.”

  “And where’d you get the money? From my till.”

  “This is bullshit. The money’s mine now. Your life is mine.”

  I think back to that first morning when I saw him in the doorway of my apartment, standing in my skin, and how I just fell apart. Backed down. Took off. Panicked. All I’d had to do was stand up to him.

  And what? Everything would have been better?

  No, but different. It’s too late to know now. But it’s not too late to deal with him.

  “You better start walking,” I tell him. “I don’t want to hear you, I don’t want to see you, I don’t even want to remember that you’re taking up any space in this world.”

  “Hey, you can’t just—”

  I point to where the laneway trails off onto the field. “There used to be a highway over there. Head south, it’ll take you into the city. North, you’ll be entering Kickaha land. I don’t care which direction you pick, just get going.” He gives the forest beyond the field an uncertain look. The hawk’s still floating above the field, the sun’s pouring down like liquid gold, but it’s dark under the trees, the thick upper canopy casting a deep shadow on the forest floor. He’s got a city boy’s nervousness about heading off into the bush on his own. I know the feeling. Without the gridwork of streets and city blocks laid out for you, it seems like it would be so easy to get lost. And it is. I dealt with it the first summer I came to stay up here with Janossy, so I do understand what’s going through his mind. Thing is, I don’t care. I just want him out of here.

  “I don’t think the city’s there anymore,” he says slowly.

  He’s got a point. I’d already come to a similar conclusion, but I’ve been trying to ignore it.

  He looks back at me. “I don’t think we’re anywhere real anymore.”

  “Then you’ll fit right in,” I tell him with more bravado than I’m feeling.

  “You can’t do this,” he says.

  “Try me.”

  “We’ve got to stick together.”

  I look at my watch, but it's stopped. So I check the height of the sun.

  “You’ve got about five, maybe six hours, before sunset,” I say. “You better put them to use and make tracks because I can’t guarantee what I’m going to do to you if you stick around.”

  I may be bluffing when it comes to acting calm about where we are and how we got here, but I’m more than half-serious about threatening him. Every time I look at him, all I want to do is hit him. I know it’s residual pieces of his own bad temper that’s making me feel this way, but I’m too unbalanced at the moment to deal with both the current situation and the crap he left behind when he quit this body. The main priority for me right now is to figure out where I am, how I can be back here with the farm unchanged. Dealing with him on top of that is too much.

  I don’t know what he sees in my face, but it gets him to his feet.

  “You’ll be sorry,” he says.

  “That I ever heard of you? I already am.”

  He staggers a bit, vertigo making him unsteady on his feet. I make a note to be careful when I get up myself. He looks as though he’s trying to think of something to say, a withering comment of some sort that’ll let him get the last word in, but he finally turns and shuffles away. I watch him go down the lane. He looks like an old man, shoulders sagging, head bowed, and I almost feel sorry for him.

  It’s probably not entirely his fault that he is the way he is. And he’s not a truly bad person; I don’t think he’s evil. He’s just so caught up in himself— the whole world revolves around Johnny Devlin—and that selfishness blinds him to what he’s doing to the people around him. And himself. We’re all born self-centered. Babies only have one thing on their minds—themselves. Feed me, warm me, soothe me. They learn to expand their world as they grow older, learn to take other people into account, learn to share. Devlin was just never taught that, or he didn’t absorb it when he was.

  Or maybe he’s the way he is because he wants to be. At this point, it doesn’t make much difference. Just so long as he’s gone.

  I turn back to look at the farm, trying to center myself. The sun is drenching the fields with a golden glow, all the greens leaning into the yellow end of the spectrum. The skin of my face and hands soaks in the warmth. My clothes feel heavy, confining. I close my eyes and listen to the hum of the bees, distant birdsong, crickets and June bugs.

  When I open my eyes, the farm’s still there, unchanged, as though the years never went by. I wonder if there are ghosts waiting for me down there, and I’m not sure if I like the idea, or dread it. I can’t shake the feeling that this is a dream, that it has to be, or the farm wouldn’t be down there, the lane would connect to a highway that appears to have disappeared, but the experience has none of the qualities I associate with dreaming. Unless I’ve been dreaming since I woke up in Devlin’s body.

  Devlin. I glance back in the direction he took. He’s out of sight now, but the weird thing is, I know exactly where he is, how far into the forest he’s gone. There’s a connection between us that I’d never noticed before, a thin invisible line of something attached from me to him, or rather from me to my old body, as though I’m still linked to the pieces of myself I left behind in it, the way Devlin left pieces in me.

  I try to ignore it.

  Standing, the vertigo hits me the way it did Devlin, but I’m expecting it. I sway for a few moments, close my eyes until my equilibrium settles, then pick up my knapsack and walk down the hill toward the farm. I know there’ll be ghosts down there—there can’t not be. If they’re not waiting for me, then I’m carrying them down with me.

  3 LISA

  Lisa had the cabbie let her off at the main entrance of Fitzhenry Park. He stopped in a no-parking bus zone and leaned over the front seat to tell her the fare. When the #74 pulled in behind them and the driver leaned on the horn, he simply ignored it, but the unexpected sound made Lisa almost drop the bills she’d pulled out to pay the cabbie. She was on edge and only half-aware of her surroundings, worry clinging to her thoughts like unwanted autumn burrs. How was Julie? Should she call the hospital? What if she couldn’t find Nia? What if she found her, but Nia wouldn’t come home?

  “You have a good day now,” the cabbie told her.

  She felt like laughing. Did people even have good days anymore?

  Murmuring a rote response without being quite sure what she’d said, she got out of the cab and watched it pull away into the traffic. A little boy ran headlong into her, but she barely noticed either him or heard his mother’s apologies. When she did realize that the woman was saying something to her, she had no idea what had been said. It took her a long moment to sift some meaning from the words.

  “I’m fine,” she said at last, and turned away.

  At the entrance to the park, she paused beside one of the stone lions, shading her eyes as she studied the crowd. Her heart sank. All the vendors and street musicians gathered near this entrance made it one of the busiest areas of the park, drawing as many tourists as locals. The weather was so perfect today, it seemed as though half the city had taken the afternoon off and come down. Where would she even begin to look?

  Don’t panic, she told herself, but her breath quickened with anxiety all the same.

  She took a few steps into the park and paused once more. This time her gaze was more focused as it swept the crowd, panning slowly from left to right. The War Memorial, with its usual crowd of street people and teenagers. The vendors, shoppers, musicians, joggers, bicyclists, in-line skaters. Clusters of older women gossiping, nannies and new mothers pushing baby carriages, old men playing checkers and chess on small folding tables. People walking, reading, tanning, exercising. People with th
eir dogs, their friends, their lovers, their children.

  Her gaze searched all the way around to her far right where one of the park’s enormous oaks lifted its boughs to dizzying heights. It froze there on the figures gathered under the wide sweep of the tree’s branches: an Indian, sitting cross-legged, holding a burning smudge-stick. A red-haired woman. A dog.

  And Nia.

  The smoke from the man’s smudge-stick grew impossibly thick, billowing about them. She could smell it from where she stood. Sweetgrass and sage, with a hint of cedar. She cried her daughter’s name and ran forward, but it was like breaking a spell. Her voice, her sudden movement, something made the whole scene evaporate as if it had been nothing more than a desert mirage. There was no one under the tree now. No people, no smoke, nothing.

  She came to an abrupt halt and someone bumped her from behind. She stepped aside, nodding at the jogger’s quick remark until she realized that he hadn’t been apologizing, but telling her off. Anger was impossible to muster. All she could do was turn away to stare at the empty stretch of lawn under the tree.

  She was losing it, she realized. All the lack of sleep and worrying. It had her hallucinating now. But they had seemed so real—Nia and her two companions. The dog. She remembered the man in her hallway telling her that Nia was looking after his dog—was that why she’d imagined the animal as well?

  She made a slow circle around the oak, studying every square foot of the lawn under its boughs. Logic told her that she had to have imagined what she’d seen, but she couldn’t help wonder, what had the Indian been doing? There had been something almost ceremonial about what she’d seen, as though she’d intruded into some secret tribal ritual.

  None of it real, of course, she reminded herself.

  He’d been very striking, the man. Dressed like some war vet in a khaki jacket, T-shirt and jeans, though he could just as easily have been a hobo. No, that didn’t seem right. There’d been something about him that gave off a sense of...what? She wasn’t quite sure. Confidence, certainly. Maybe...enchantment?

  Ludicrous, but she knew why the idea of it had popped into her mind. It was because of the smudge-stick and the smoke and the way they’d all been here, under the tree, and then simply vanished as though she’d stumbled into a fairy tale with the last few pages torn out. As though the story went on, but the ending was now hidden from her.