by Gemma Files
So smile if you like it, baby mine. Smile.
* * *
The second night, I hit a nearby 7-11 to stock up on fast food and napkins, planning to pee in a wadded up paper bag and bury it at the bottom of a wastepaper basket. As I approached the counter, a man and a woman were already investing in their own little haul—or rather, he was buying, she watching. Sometimes he’d smirk and whisper something to her, adjusting his toque. She was one of those bendy girls, double-jointed and voluptuous, but with lips so thin they barely masked the points of her small, sharp teeth. It was late September, colder at night—sky a black vault, like an open door into vacuum—and he was dressed accordingly, his Maple Leafs jacket bulbous with down. But she wore a slip-on smock dress and a shapeless grey sweater, her sockless feet stuffed into a pair of too-small, open-toed summer sandals. Whenever she moved, I thought I could hear her exposed toenails rasp on the floor beneath her, like the stealthy claws of some passing animal.
The man finished his business and drew her away into a big, tonsil-polishing kiss: She twined one leg around his, leaning back. There were almost no other customers in the store, and the clerk kept his eyes firmly on the free show by the door. I briefly considered just grabbing what I wanted and telling him I’d already paid for it.
A minute later, they were gone, and I was telling the clerk to add on the big bottle of cran-apple juice I’d spotted on display near his elbow.
So: Back on the site, still with no flashlight. (I guess I might have put myself far enough out to actually bring my own, had I cared enough to do Saracen’s job for them. But the way I saw it, if a flashlight had ever suddenly appeared in that desk drawer, I would have lost my sole excuse not to do a real patrol.) Since Colin wasn’t in, not even by 0200, I polished off the last of the cran-apple juice, and almost threw the bottle away before I realized its other possible uses.
Three hours and a half-full bottle later, justifiably paranoid about an unannounced visit from my site supervisor—they usually come on the first night, just to see whether you’re sleeping, smoking or entertaining guests on the job—I capped it, zipped up my parka, and stepped out to dump this impromptu toiletry aid on the nearest waste-pile.
I saw them on my way back, through one of 1088’s wall-high “windows”: Toque-man and the girl from the 7-11, knit and heaving against one of the support girders. She had her skirt hiked up and her underwear bunched around one ankle; he had apparently decided it was too cold to risk opening more than his fly. Both of them were a little too busy to notice me, frozen in the glare of my own embarrassed annoyance (because this was the first situation I’d ever come across on a site that I felt I might be required to actually do something about)—until the girl’s nostrils flared, suddenly, and she looked up over his shoulder, meeting my eyes just as the headlights of a passing car caught her pupils, bleaching them blank as the silver coins on a corpse’s eyelids.
The guy would have kept on grunting even then, if she hadn’t nudged him. He squinted at me, unafraid, demanding: “Shit you want?”
“You’re trespassing,” I said.
He snorted. Behind him, the girl gave a laugh—high, husky, curled back in on itself: The brief bark of something not entirely tamed. It made me shiver and the guy smile, like it sent some hot needle of fresh desire tugging up through his buried dick.
So: “Fuck you, bitch,” he replied, and went right on back to what he was doing.
The cops got there at 0525 (ten minutes late, according to Sonny’s predictions), and one of them had a flashlight. But all we found where she and Mr. Toque had been was a stain at the base of the girder, a dark spot that could be anything—blood, oil, sperm.
“Nothin’ we can do,” the older, bigger one told me. “It gets cold out, people end up wherever’s open.”
“Not to mention you wouldn’t believe some of the places we’ve found ’em goin’ at it,” the other one added.
I nodded. I said I understood.
As they got into their car, the older one offered: “You should tell your boss he wouldn’t even have this kinda trouble, if they’d let you guys carry guns.”
* * *
Over breakfast, I got into an argument with my mother, who was on her way out to an audition—the first in a long time, so she was irritable to begin with, but I didn’t think that excused her then, and I don’t now. She said that somebody had said that Colin had jokingly said that he was going to hire a hit-man to get her off his back, and I said that I didn’t understand why she felt she had to tell me what somebody had said Colin had said about her. And so it went, escalating in volume, until her cab came and I stomped away upstairs, put a facecloth over my eyes and lay down in the half-dark to dream.
I dreamed I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror, flossing my teeth so hard that one of them fell right out in a gush of blood, clattering in the sink. Causing my mother to lean over my shoulder, exclaiming: “You know how much fixing that is going to cost?”
And I dreamed I turned, slapping her hard across the face—but that the movement broke my hand open at the wrist, peeling it back like an empty husk to reveal the glint of a sharp, blood-stained hook.
* * *
You’re wondering, about now, why I never told anyone about what was going on—why I never said: “Hey, Colin? Those harmless homeless people I was complaining about, down at 1088? One of them laughed at me like a wolf last night, and I also think she might have eaten this guy I saw her doing the nasty with. Now I watch the building all the time, I see people come and go, and more of them than I like to admit look familiar to me—bums on the street I pass every day, guys hanging around outside the liquor store, women I’ve seen on the subway and thought they were just coming back from work, so bone-tired they were holding their romance novels the wrong way up. Some come back out. Some don’t. And I hear the ones who do come out talking to each other, but the words they make are all sound and no sense, like those cats people train to sing Christmas carols, or those dogs that bark like they’re saying ‘herrow’ or ‘goorbai’. I sit there and listen to them all night, and pee in my cran-apple juice bottle, and never go outside after the big neon cross turns off. I keep the door locked until 0800, and everything I’ve written in my D.O.R. for the last three days has been a lie.”
Or maybe: “Hey, Mom? You know how you’re always saying I’m so distracted, how I’m no fun to talk to or be with anymore, how we can’t say two words sometimes without our necks going up, how we’re verbally pissing on each other’s shoes all the time to prove whose opinions are more worthy of respect?
“Well, part of that is natural: I’m getting older, we’re growing apart. And part of that is because I’m just beginning to see that Colin has handed me a line of bullshit from day one, and you were right about him all along, though I will never admit it.
“And yet another part of that is because every night I spend eight hours in vague fear for my life, not even knowing really what the hell it is that I’m afraid of, and it’s all so improbable that I forget about it as I’m coming home, only remembering it when I’m back on site and I can’t do a Goddamn thing but wait it out ‘til morning.”
But I told neither of them any of this. I told no one anything. I had my own wound to deal with, and it took up all my free time. I drifted in a growing batch of silence, uprooted. And though I seemed to move further down with each new kick, I can’t ever remember touching anything like a bottom.
I left Mom’s place, went to Colin’s, cried on his plaid foldout couch. I told him I’d had all I could stand of being their Goddamn emotional go-between, and begged him to settle things with her himself—before the wedding. Before it was too late. He made soothing noises, kissed my breasts, ignored every word I said. And all the while, Dewey whimpered in the corner of his bedroom, staring up at us with her poached-egg eyes.
Oh, Jesus: Whatever. Fill in the rest of these blanks yourselves, why d
on’t you.
Because how can I ever expect to explain to you how preoccupying the pain of knowing I was losing Colin’s love was—so vast it drowned everything, even my own fear? Even then it was ludicrous. Laughable.
Which sure as hell leaves me with no excuses now—when I don’t really recall myself how it felt to love him, in the first place.
* * *
Nights, I sat in the portable and filled out personality tests in the backs of old teen magazines like Sassy and Y.M., aka Young Moron; days, I lay in Colin’s bed, staring up at the ceiling and wondering who the uncalled-for denizens of 1088 Dupont could finally be. Until, finally, a certain woozy dream logic looped what facts I already knew together, stringing them like beads on a thread of unprovable intuition. What if, what if.
A nomad family who weren’t even a family, not criminals or cannibals, but predators who hid themselves by taking on the protective coloring of their chosen prey. Cultureless, rootless, migratory, instinctual. Not people who acted like animals, but animals who had learned to act like humans. The girl, staring at me. Her numb cat’s eyes, shining.
And the funny part is, I thought, it probably wasn’t all that hard.
Intermittently, I slept and dreamed—mainly of the woman with hooks for hands, of course. Only one of them remains particularly clear: Getting up to go to the bathroom (that weird sensation of “relief” that’s actually the anxious ache of automatic retention), bending over the sink to rinse and spit and then feeling a touch on the back of my neck. Looking up, seeing the woman with hooks for hands standing behind me in the mirror, her points laid lovingly under either ear, poised to dig deep, to rip me open.
To unfurl my innards like a flag for everyone to read, a red warning shout, with 1088 Dupont as its theme and title.
* * *
And then it was Thursday, the night my site supervisor finally turned up—a man I knew, as they say, of old.
“Hooper,” he said. “Heard this was where they put ya.”
“Sir.”
His name was Czolgoscz (first initial L., so you just knew we were fated to be friends), and unlike me—unlike most security guards, to be frank—he considered himself “career,” which apparently required growing a brush-cut little pseudo-cop moustache, with a gut to match. To normal people, this job was a step on the way to something better. But since Czolgoscz had no better thing to go to, he spent his time trying to make everyone as clinically depressed and constantly paranoid about their lack of employment options as he was.
He gestured for me to let him in, which I did. As usual, his first stop was my D.O.R.: A quick flip-through later, he went rooting for the site standing orders, eager to compare and contrast.
“No patrol since 0200,” he noted. I nodded. Always so impressive to find a site supervisor who can count.
“I was just going,” I said.
Czolgoscz smirked. “Yeah, well, you better put on your parka.”
I nodded again. He kept flipping.
“You cover the whole site when you patrol?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Even upstairs?”
“Yes.”
“Everywhere upstairs?”
He fixed me with what he’d probably call his “got ’em on the grill” look—a Dennis Franz-like glare absolutely made for admiring in bedroom mirrors. I wondered whether he was seriously still nursing a grudge from that time he’d tried to get me fired for supposedly deliberately leaving a janitor stuck in a George Brown campus staff elevator, and merely succeeded in having me moved to another site. (Though not this one.) I also wondered, idly, whether anyone had ever thought to put Sonny Rehan through this kind of bullshit.
“There’s . . . holes in the floors upstairs,” I said. “As you may have noticed from my previous reports.”
He wasn’t about to suggest I’d lied in the D.O.R.—but then, I wasn’t exactly about to volunteer that information either. So instead, he got up, shrugged his own parka back on, and opened the door again. Saying: “Think I’ll tag along tonight. If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t suppose you have a flashlight,” I replied, without much hope.
He chuckled, and gave me an abortive kind of slap in the general direction of my back—nothing he could find himself facing possible harassment charges for, if I happened to take it the “wrong way.”
“C’mon, Hooper,” he said. “We’re both old enough to vote, right? Think we can find our way around a hole or two.”
It was raining when we left the portable—sleety, half-frozen rain that seemed to fall in gushes rather than drops, street lamps mere hazy smudges of light through the gathering fog, and with no neon cross to see by, just the phosphorescent glimmer of the water-heavy air itself. We clumped along like top-heavy navy-blue astronauts, wreathed in the milky nimbus of our own breath.
Czolgoscz and I went around first one side of the building, then another. We checked behind the parked trucks. Nothing.
We went around the piles of earth and the stacks of gravel-bags, through the main body of the first floor, picking our way between the open dirt trenches and an intermittent sprinkling of dismayingly sharp-looking beds of metal rods set in concrete.
Again, nothing.
And now we were at the bottom of the stairs leading to the second and third floor, right beneath the largest of the holes, on the threshold of a part of 1088 Dupont that I had never seen before.
Not finding any of 1088’s usual residents around so far hadn’t really made me feel any better about being in the building after my chosen cut-off point, even with Czolgoscz’s big, beer-swilling ass at my side. Inside my pockets, I felt my hands curl in on themselves, as though tunneling for invisible weapons.
Czolgoscz put his boot on the last step. He looked at me. I looked back at him.
Then we went upstairs, together.
* * *
Romantic love. “Real” love. The kind of love where you’re so far into the other person they seem like a part of you, like they are you. Until it falls apart, that is—and the other person comes to you and tells you everything that’s gone wrong, how it can’t be fixed, how it’s all your fault.
And you think: But if I’m you and you’re me, honey-bug, then why the fuck didn’t I already know that?
I mean, I can live alone. It won’t kill me. I’ve done it most of my life. I’m doing it now.
But the thing is, I don’t want to.
* * *
Czolgoscz had just cleared the top step when an arm reached out and caught him around the throat, hauling him upward, two more sets of arms worming around either bicep as the first hand turned, dug, freed a wet, red starburst so suddenly I barely avoided being splattered, recoiling, catching the back of my parka on the ragged edge of the nearest hole and jolting myself so badly my feet slipped, losing the stairs altogether. Falling down, parka ripping as I hit the nearest girder, falling down hard on one knee and skidding, skinning it to the meat on 1088’s unfinished ground floor. Falling to sprawl (pretty damn near) right at the bare, clawed feet of the girl from the 7-11—my nubile cannibal rover, still wearing the same dress, the same blank eyes. The same stained smile.
(Her relatives making short work of Czolgoscz, meanwhile, up above both our heads: Up in the rafters, where they’d been sleeping like extras from Aliens or something, apparently, ever since I’d called the cops that one time. And me too distracted, one way or another, to even credit them with enough sense of self-preservation to hide.)
Thinking: Now I’ll never get to read those extra hundred pages of “Amazingly Accurate Information about My Secret Self” in Young Moron, or find out if Sassy thinks I’m a “Bad Girl Bud or A Substitute Sister.”
The girl just kept on smiling, enjoying the luxury of taking her time. I guess she thought I was too stunned to move. I guess maybe I thought so too.
But we
were both wrong.
* * *
Next thing I know, I’m back in the portable, holding the door closed behind me with all of my body as the girl crashes against it again and again. I dump out the key cabinet, scrabble through, grab the can opener, hook the cop button, back away. Looking for anything I can use for anything that’ll keep me alive until they get here.
Under the desk, the cran-apple bottle, full and capped. By the door, a fire extinguisher: Type 3—Industrial Fires. Hefting the one. Unhooking the other, as the door heaves one more time, comes off its hinges. The girl’s arm coming through. Her face, her smiling mouth.
“Faa hew, bisssh,” she says.
And then I break the bottle across her face, and start spraying.
* * *
I learned two things that night (among others.)
First—a little liquid nitrogen goes a long way: And second—on occasion, the cops actually arrive within five minutes.
I ended up at the hospital, which pleased the whole hell out of the guys at Saracen: With something this public, even they had to start thinking about compensation. Which was just as well, since it turned out I’d burned my hand pretty badly on the fire extinguisher’s spray, and had to wear one of those weird plastic gloves for the next month or so, just to keep it rigid. When they finally pulled it off, my hand shed its skin like a snake, leaving a fine vellum glove on the examination room counter.
Two weeks later, Colin and I broke up.
* * *
One night, weeks later, when I was booking on, the usual Dispatch deadpan gave way to Sonny Rehan’s cheerful voice, brimming with gossip. He told me how my former supervisor’s jawbone had been pried out from under the seat of that famous lightless Portasan, half his dyed brown moustache still attached, along with a full bottom lip.
“Pretty freaky, huh, man?” he asked.
“Guess Saracen lost that contract.”
Sonny guffawed. “Oh, no shit. Seriously though, man, you got out just in time.”
