It was the farthest I ever ran and I was almost passing out because my cramp hurt so bad when the Director said cut and they brought us back to the waiting room. Then they got us to take off our costumes and said thanks very much for your time and told us they didn’t need us anymore. My legs were still shaking while I went looking for Rick. I walked around for an hour until I saw him still wearing his costume talking with the Halifax guy and the tall pretty lady and the fat Assisting Director over by the trailers.
You can’t go in there, a guy with a clipboard said.
In where? I said.
Over there, he said. So I just biked home.
It had been a few days and I was waiting for the sound of the back gate when Baldev came down the stairs followed by the smell of his country’s kind of food that Rick hates but as far as I can tell smells really good, like the lunch truck.
This has come for you, he said, holding out a letter with the government’s picture on it.
I opened it but I didn’t understand what it said because my disabled brain makes it so that I can’t read.
Is this from girlfriend? Baldev said, making his big boobs. Let me tell you Baldev loves big boobs. He puts his hands out in front of his chest to show just how big of boobs he means, which is really, really big. Then he looks down at the boobs and squeezes them. He admires them like he would even settle for having big boobs himself if he ever got the chance. This is maybe the one thing him and Rick agree about.
No, I said, but louder so that he could understand. Baldev, can you read this for me?
Baldev dropped his boobs and took the letter. He saw the government picture at the top and said, no, no, this is not near to my business. Then he went back upstairs.
I sat on a chair trying to make myself read. Once I got a letter from them saying they were going to send somebody to check out whether I was still disabled and see if I could work. After Rick read it out loud, he ripped it up and said there was no way in hell me or my brain was ever going to get better and that they were the ones who needed their heads checked. Then he said something like he always says about how mean the whole world is. Then we sat down and drank beers and felt better. But nobody from Welfare ever came, which was good because we didn’t want them to see the beers or that the basement was a basement. Now I was worried this letter was another one of those and that maybe this time they really were going to come. I stayed up all night listening to the furnace.
Rick didn’t come back the next day or the next. I got hungry and couldn’t stop my brain from thinking about the food truck. I wondered if it was still there, because if I could dress up in some old rags and furs again and sneak back, just once, I knew I could eat enough to last me at least a week. Or how maybe they moved the trucks to some other movie somewhere else, and I thought about riding my bike around looking for movie stuff, like cranes and things blowing up. But I was too tired. I could have got some emergency money from my worker, Linda, but the letter made me afraid they’d found out I was working as an extra person and they would kick me off like Rick or stick me in jail. I didn’t even know where the good dumpster with the doughnuts in it was because I always just followed Rick.
Then early one morning I woke up to a noise I thought was rats. I turned the light on and saw Rick going through his boxes of stuff.
Oh. Hi, he said.
Where you been? I said.
He sat in a chair and leaned his head way back like somebody was washing his hair, and it sounded like he had a cold because he was sniffing lots. I saw he was wearing different shoes and a different coat. They looked new.
Then all of a sudden Rick started talking, not excited like he usually did but still staring up at the boards that I guess were actually holding up Baldev’s floor, and even with my bad smell I noticed Rick smelled like lots of beers. He said that after they picked him to be a leader of the future, they gave him a laser rifle that he was supposed to fire at the star. What if you hit him? I asked, and he shut his eyes, blew air out his nose, and said they were going to add the laser beam later. Then Rick said when the Director yelled action and he started running, his helmet slipped over his eyes and he accidentally turned and crashed into the big star right before the huge explosion. He said he was in the only camera angle that they really needed so they had no choice, they had to give him a bigger part in the movie so it didn’t seem weird that he was there.
Does that mean our cheques will be bigger? I said.
He said he guessed it did.
Then I asked when we’d get them because I was hungry. Not yet, he said. Oh, I said.
It’s just like stew, he said. You have to wait. You get impatient.
I asked him if he had any money for us to go get burgers or make something on the hot plate.
No, he said, but there was food and beers at the wrap party. He took a half a sandwich out of his pocket and gave it to me.
Is that where you got those clothes? Were they presents from the wrap party? I asked. I was eating the sandwich as slow as I could, picking fluff from my mouth.
Yeah, he said. Then he got up and said he would go right then and find out where our cheques were.
I asked him if he could read my letter first.
He grabbed it out of my hand and read it really fast.
It’s fine, he said, doesn’t mean anything.
There’s more on the back, I said.
He flipped it and read the back. It’s still fine, he said.
Does it mean they know? I said. That I’m not disabled anymore?
No, he said, and started throwing his things into some grocery bags, but none of his important stuff. And you are still goddamn disabled, he said. It just means they don’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.
Good, I said.
Then he dropped the bags and put his hands on his face. You don’t have to work anymore, it ain’t right for you to, he said.
Especially if it’s shit work, I said. Like being extra.
He stood there covering his face for a little bit, breathing weird, and I knew he was really angry because when he took his hands away his face was red and there were veins in it like a bunch of blue candy worms. But then he just gave me a long hug that squeezed my breath and left.
The good part about living with someone is you can sit there and look at their stuff and know they have to come back sometime to get it. He’d left the hot plate and his steeled-toe boots. Sure, he’d taken the pictures of the rotten witch, but he’d left most of his clothes and his favourite baseball cap. I checked outside and he’d left his racing bike, which made me feel even better.
After cleaning the place up a bit I sat for a while on my hunk of foam. I already forgave Rick for getting mad at me because I called his new extra job shit work. He liked to get mad sometimes for bad reasons, so I decided I’d just have to not talk about it ever again and it would be okay. Then I folded up the disabled letter as small as it would go and tried to throw it in the garbage bucket but I missed. I was thinking about how, after working as an extra person from the future for so long, it was like I was becoming a professional waiter, and how that now I could wait for pretty well anything as long as I knew it was coming. I thought about how long it would take for my belly to eat the sandwich Rick gave me, and about how long it would be before my disabled brain wouldn’t be able to stop me from following the smell of Baldev’s wife’s food up the stairs and knocking on their door. I didn’t know how long that would be.
An Ideal Companion
1
Before he did a website for a local organic deli for dogs, Dan had never imagined himself a dog owner. None of his friends had dogs and he’d never wanted one as a child. But at some point while camped at his home-office desk, daylight banished by dusty Venetian blinds, somewhere during all that coding, linking, cropping and resizing, Dan flared with a sudden and insatiable interest in dogs.
He noticed them everywhere. On the street, in his elevator. The breeds were a language he taught himself, a new
ly discovered planet. He quickly caught on to how much a dog could say about its owner, how people didn’t resemble their dogs by accident, and it sure wasn’t the dogs who did the choosing. He spent countless bloodshot hours at his computer sifting canine images for the dog that would best represent him, finding all the usual breeds too regal, or showy, or boring, or simple-minded. After weeks of frustration, a felicitous click on a rare-breed site brought to his screen a picture of a dog so instantly familiar to him, a dog of such undeniable beauty and grace, Dan could do nothing but settle back into his computer chair, hands dangling at his sides, and allow a great calm to overtake him.
Originally from southern Spain, the Andalucian wolfhound was a herder, a working dog, not a fashionable furry accessory. During the Spanish Civil War it was used by the Republicans to root out Nationalist ammunition caches as well as keep watch while its masters slept in the woods. An agile dog of medium build with a blunt snout and large ears that rose up like furry candle flames, it had only recently been rescued from extinction. Raredogs.com declared the Andalucian to be making a major comeback, due to its being “confident, reliable, proud, undeniably intelligent, an ideal companion, flush with loyalty and a joyous energy.”
Dan could locate only one credible breeder in Canada, a kennel in Saskatchewan stewarded by a couple named Ihor and Sandy Kuziak, whom he emailed before he could weigh the idea any further.
Their reply came within minutes:
One Lucian left. Not a puppy. A good dog. Still interested? Sandy and Ihor ;o)
His disappointment at the lack of a puppy was quelled by an attached picture of a gorgeous chocolate brown dog with white paws and a blue bandana slung round its neck, its head cocked inquisitively, reclining in a patch of crispy prairie grass.
Who needed a puppy anyway, Dan thought, considering his own age, thirty-six, a number he found hemorrhoidally embarrassing whenever he was required to write it on an application or a form.
He replied, and the couple sent more information, which he briefly scanned before paying for the dog right then and there, his finger abuzz while clicking Finalize Transaction.
“You don’t even have a yard,” said Dan’s best friend and former bandmate, Winston, in his usual distracted tone, “and your square footage is barely double digits.”
Three years ago, Winston had accidentally impregnated Marta, then merely one of that species of desperate, tragic girl who often gravitated to their shows. Soon after, Winston ceased calling it an accident, quit playing music, cut way back on his drinking, married Marta and bought a house in Port Coquitlam, a suburb an hour out of the city. In a matter of a year, Marta had gone from a near-transparent chain-smoking waif to an extremely successful self-employed makeup artist and aesthetician—a success that baffled Dan, given that each time he saw her she managed to have rendered herself even more unattractive. They’d recently had another baby, and now Winston called only during his masochistic commute, his attention mainly on flaring brake lights and timely lane changes.
But Winston had a point. Dan’s condo, a one-bedroom, was small.
“Tell that to all the other dog owners in my building,” Dan said. “Plus there are parks, off-leash parks, and there’s the seawall.
It’s called public space, Winston. I don’t need to own something to appreciate it.”
Dan heard the first few seconds of several songs as his friend trolled for one that would best compliment his mood. Winston settled on a punk rock staple they’d often covered as their second encore—a song that once had shocked and inflamed them but now just sounded needy and indulgent, like a clamouring child. “And what’s with this bloodhound? Never heard of them,” Winston said. “Is this thing accredited?”
“Wolfhound,” Dan said. “They’re from Spain. They were used by the Republicans in the Civil War, but now they’re making a major comeback,” with a pre-emptive pride for his dog tightening in his cheeks.
“And how long do these things live?” Winston said.
From his research, Dan knew exactly how long, but he saw where Winston was going. Ever since his ultimate sacrifice, Winston had enjoyed nothing more than subjecting Dan to languid dissertations on all of life’s inevitable and unromantic realities. Dan ignored the question.
“Because this isn’t like yoga, Dan-o. You can’t just quit after two sessions because there aren’t any attractive women in your class.”
“You know that wasn’t why I quit. I’ll never touch my toes, it’s genetic. And plus the teacher was a flake.”
“In a yoga class? Anyway, is this recognized Republican breed the kind you’re going to have to walk? Like outside?”
“Of course.”
“Well, I endorse anything that’ll get you out of that Plato’s cave you have going on over there. Maybe you’ll even make it out this way for a taste of the good life.”
The morning he was to pick up his dog, Dan spent an unusually long time in the mirror, meticulously shaving the horseshoe of stubble that grew, clinging there, around the back of his head. To him, the horseshoe didn’t signify he was bald, but rather balding. It was evidence of a process that was to Dan much more humiliating than any barren result. At least shaving it put him in charge. It looked better anyway; his hair had not been anything much. He held his own gaze, wiping bits of shaving cream from the knuckles of his ears with a towel that smelled somewhere on the continuum between mould and fabric softener. Dan was not what he would call an attractive man, but this knowledge was also a kind of power. He felt he had a fair inventory of his assets and worked with that. He’d vowed never to be one of those—mostly European—men he’d seen at the public pool whose great hairy and gelatinous girth was slung with a scrap of spandex, their denial of reality being their primary offence. It was one of Dan’s greatest desires to make it through his life without disgusting anyone.
Turning to check his profile, Dan smoothed his golf shirt over his stomach. It has to like me, he told himself. It has no choice. He pictured long invigorating walks in the woods, leash in hand.
He was stopped at a light on his way to the airport when a quantity of fluid was suddenly dashed across his windshield. A squeegee flicked from his right and began frothing the liquid. Dan hit the wipers, clacking them against the squeegee, and a brief struggle ensued that reminded Dan of duelling swordsmen. The squeegee recoiled and his wipers arced freely. His view cleared and there stood a street kid with a three-pronged green mohawk and dirty patches affixed to his rotting clothes bearing the names of punk rock bands Dan still remembered. The kid lifted his hands, the squeegee drooling suds on the hood, and Dan could hear his Québécois accent even with the windows rolled up. “Ah, what the hell, man, I’m trying to help.” The light changed and Dan gassed as if in reply. Who knew what they put in that fluid—probably piss. It was something he would have thought was funny when he was a punk.
He arrived early. To kill time he parked in the econo lot and walked a good twenty minutes to the terminal through a grey, atomized rain. Inside, he stood beside a woman, mid-forties, black yoga pants and a few inches of hard-fought midriff. Not exactly a natural beauty, but she had obviously put in some effort, no doubt for the guy she was picking up. Cracking her gum, she let her gaze fall briefly on Dan. She smiled, so quick it seemed more of a grimace. He realized he was waiting for a loved one too—well, a potential loved one—and he felt a kind of kinship with this woman, and with all his fellow ride givers: brothers, friends, girlfriends, these people of the arrivals area.
Sandy was easy to spot among the passengers trickling through the automatic doors. She was tall, almost sideshow tall—easily over six feet—and wore the same flowery, ankle-length dress and hat she had worn in her picture on the website. The hat was a floppy, Cat-in-the-Hat style that had enjoyed a brief popularity in the nineties. It was a hat that women like Sandy referred to as funky.
Closing the distance, Dan noticed she wasn’t carrying one of those dog-carrier baskets.
“Hi, Sandy,” he said, o
ffering his hand. “I’m Dan. Forget something?”
Sandy lit up and swept her body into his. Dan could feel her chin brush the top of his tender skull, and her body was warm and smelt of a wet dock drying in the sun.
She spoke in the singsong of someone who has spent a large portion of her life with dogs and children: “Our little guy is in special cargo, and you know what? He told me this morning that he can’t wait to meet his new companion.”
She guided Dan by the elbow toward special cargo, swirling the air with talk, commending him for his decision to share his life with a ‘Lucian.
When they arrived at special cargo, an interval of loud buzzing issued from behind the doors. Sandy began rummaging for something in her leather-tasselled rucksack. She held a document to Dan’s face, too close for him to read.
“What’s this?”
“Standard contract: resale clause, guarantee of humane and ethical treatment, breeding restriction, standard stuff.”
Dan began scanning what was an agreement between himself and Life Partner Kennels Ltd. that stated he agreed to care for the dog, refrain from breeding it or profiting from it in any way. If he failed to do this, he was to return the dog to the custody of Sandy and Ihor without refund.
An ear-muffed baggage handler burst through the doors and set some items on the rubberized floor: a guitar case, a snowboard, what looked like a djembe drum. No dog.
“You can do it on my back,” Sandy said, turning to offer a wide, flower-patterned expanse.
Perhaps Winston was right and this dog idea had been ill-conceived. Purebred dogs were expensive, almost extinct ones even more so. Throw in Sandy’s round-trip flight from Regina to deliver the dog, and Dan’s savings had taken quite a hit.
He guessed the contract had been drawn up by Sandy herself—lawyers tended to steer clear of phrases like “Together embarking on a mutually majestic journey”—and it certainly wasn’t legally binding. Nevertheless, it seemed to represent the kind of serious commitment Dan had always avoided.
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