by Andrew Pyper
Turn to meet a face that cuts through the surface and stops the same time I do. And at first I see it as my own, although I realize in the same instant that it looks nothing like me aside from the blue skin and ice-crusted hair. A man with little strength left pulling catches of air through a frozen grimace. Then it becomes who it’s supposed to be. My client. Working to tread water no more than an arm’s length away, but going down in half-inch increments even as I recognize who he is.
He doesn’t say anything although it’s unlikely he could even if he tried. I know this because I try myself but without results. We are left to watch each other without any gesture of forgiveness or horror or rescue. The fact of our situation so plain there’s no point even acknowledging it. We’ve brought ourselves out here and we can’t stay afloat for much more than a dozen seconds longer and following that we’ll both drown.
But Tripp decides not to wait that long. The bobbing of his head caused by whatever movement is keeping him up abruptly stops and yet for a moment he stays exactly where he is. Eyes open on mine but he’s not seeing me anymore, they’re just frozen that way. The grimace turned to an empty show of yellow bone. Sits like this above the waterline as though his skull were made of styrofoam.
And then he goes down all at once.
Maybe my own head goes under because my body exhausts itself at the same time he decides to give up. Maybe I go down just to watch him go.
The darkness enfolding him in the time it takes me to focus on where he is only a couple of feet below. And once he’s gone it all goes with him—there’s no water or cold, up or down, me or him. A dream that ends not with waking but the revelation of what it is to be nothing at all.
It’s the crushing pain in my chest that brings me back. Overcoat thrown off onto the stones that glow mottled blue in the dawn light. Shoes still tied to my feet and pants held stiff down my legs, crisp with ice. Sitting up, clutching at my neck and the top of my arms. First time I’ve ever had a heart attack for an alarm clock.
After a while the pain drains away on its own though, or most of it, a weight still wrapped around my ribs like a lead vest. The lake licking up to my ankles over the blistered sand. There’s no sign of Tripp or anyone else except for a whiff of burning spruce that floats downwind from Helen Arthurs’s chimney. No prints left on the pebbly shore although I don’t bother to look. Nothing in my head but the idea that I have to get up now or I never will.
I pick my coat up and throw it over my shoulders, arms too stiff to find the holes. Make my way into the still darkened trees following the drifting smell of smoke as much as the trail itself.
FORTY-NINE
The following morning comes after eighteen hours of dreamless sleep. If the front desk phone rang through the night I didn’t hear it, and the one in my room has been silent since I pulled its cord out of the wall and tossed it in the closet. The floor littered with folded notes from the concierge, white lilies on the hardwood floor.
There’s a swelling ache I recognize as hunger, a migraine from the long denials of thirst. Scuffing along the walls, pulling on clothes as the chill requires them. I’m aware of how the movement of my body is the only thing that disturbs the perfect quiet of the room. In the air, a trace of my sweat.
Though it’s with you at every moment, it’s always something of a surprise to discover that you can be at once alive and alone.
“I’ve come to say good-bye.”
Doug Pittle turns from where he stands four rungs up a stepladder replacing a book the size of a small suitcase on the top shelf of one of the stacks. A leatherbound Gray’s Anatomy.
“Didn’t know you were still in town,” he says, squinting eyes still swollen from sleep.
“It’s a hard place to leave.”
“You’re telling me.”
Pittle could have been a tall man. At least his standing above me on the ladder doesn’t look wrong so long as I keep my eyes chest high. With his rich voice and beard and considered movements—he would make a better tall man than I do. It’s fate, it’s dumb luck, it’s all in the genes. Nothing to do but blame your parents.
“So have you spoken to Tripp since the trial?” he says.
“No, I haven’t, as a matter of fact.”
“Well that makes two of us. I’ve been trying to hunt him down for an interview, but he seems to have disappeared.”
“I’m sure he just wants to be alone.”
Pittle heaves the textbook cradled in his fingers onto the shelf and climbs down to lean against the ladder’s base. And without looking at him I realize that he knows who I am. Has known for a while probably, having done his homework—“Crane Girl Drowns in Fireweed Lake” found in an early Phoenix along with a photo showing Richard Jr.’s stunned adolescent face—but he’s not going to ask about it. He’s a historian. It’s only the facts that interest him. An escaped mental patient falls through the lake ice. A boy is suspected of murdering his cousin. They’re all just stories he needs to get straight.
The two of us stand there for a while, our eyes scanning the gold lettering along the uniform spines of the texts on the shelf next to us. A Study of Common Viruses. Your Prostate, Your Health. Diseases of the Mind. Below these a line of werewolf, demonic possession and vampire novels occupying the shelf marked OCCULT. Down another level yet, a dense row of well-thumbed paperback profiles of serial killers, all with “8 Pages of Photos Inside!” standing above the TRUE CRIME label.
“You’ve ordered these rather sensibly,” I say. “Is it the Dewey Decimal System or the Doug Pittle Method that puts science on top, followed by black magic and ending with your old, everyday psychotic murderers?”
“That would be me. Actually, taken together this whole stack is the most popular in the joint.”
We nod together at this but keep our eyes on the titles, the space where we stand too small for eye contact between parting men who have known each other for only a short time.
“Listen, Doug, I’m sorry about the interview. I know I promised, but I can’t do it right now.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he says, picking up A Forensic Companion from the returns cart behind him. “Give me a call whenever you’re ready. And not necessarily about an interview for the paper, either. Just a call.”
“Hey, sure. And look me up if you ever get down to Toronto. I’m serious. Drinks on me.”
“Absolutely. Sounds good.”
We look at each other directly now and there’s an understanding that no such calls will be made. And not because we wouldn’t want to or that, in the weeks and months ahead, the idea won’t occur to us, but because we simply won’t. Doug Pittle will stay here with the newspaper that’s always four or five days late with the news and with the library that nobody seems to use. He won’t get down to the city because he’s made his own place and knows it’s not much but it’s his place so he’ll stay. We won’t call because what we have in common is the knowledge of terrible things, and why would we remind ourselves of that?
I’m pulling down the wallpaper in the honeymoon suite. Not the vines and blossoms glued to the wall decades ago but the bold headlines and columns of dried newsprint. Tearing through the same brittle photos of Ashley Flynn and Krystal McConnell that have been displayed across the country and will be recognized by hundreds of thousands for a couple of months until the next local atrocity comes along and new carelessly smiling faces are produced to replace them. At first I take each sheet and fold it back into its original quarters, but this allows too much time for every page to rest in my hands with their faces looking back at me. So I begin to rip them down instead, clawing blindly at the walls, crunching up whatever catches in my hands and tossing it all into a pile on the bed. When I’m done I watch the resulting cone of newsprint tremble and pitch as each of the pages struggles to open up once more. Continues this show of life until, after a time, it comes to rest as a sleeping body on the white bedclothes.
The Lady is all that’s left. A face that enlarges without
anything on the wall around it, filling the space as though a full-scale portrait. I pull the tape carefully away from her, hold the surprising weight of the paper in my hand before slipping it inside my shirt pocket. Feel its warm and shifting burden against my chest as I grab my bags and pull the door closed.
“Time for me to pay up,” I say, keeping my eyes away from the concierge’s baldness by laying a credit card on the desk and continuing to dig around in my wallet.
“Headin’ out, are ya?” Taps the ancient computer to life and sets to grinding out a copy of my bill on a printer that produces a sound equivalent to the operation of a sawmill. “Thought you might be makin’ this place your permanent residence.”
“We can’t always get what we wish for.”
“No, sir, that is the truth.”
He plunks the sales slip before my lowered eyes along with a ballpoint pen gnarled by teeth marks. But as I slip the credit card into the breast pocket of my jacket I feel something there, hard and slim as a postcard. Pull it out and and hold a crumpled 5 × 7 below my eyes. Krystal and Ashley posing in their white lace dresses with blue ribbons tied at their waists. The one I stole from Ashley’s bedroom.
I try to pull away from it but the picture holds me a moment more. Its surface gloss the silver membrane over still water. And beneath this, buried in the shallows, the reflection of those passed into the unrecoverable. Girls standing close, holding each other’s hands and staring out with the faces of imagined burden and loss. Faces set by history, both the one they were acting out in the names of others and now, in death, their own. A history claiming them even as they lived. As the camera shutter clicked open to the light and their image burned itself onto the film, even in this most present of moments they were already falling away into the past.
“Would you do me a favor?” I ask.
“Ask away.”
“Would you mail this to Brian Flynn for me? I think I have his street address somewhere here—”
“Not to worry,” he waves his hand. “I know where he lives.”
I hand the picture over to him and he finds a large enough envelope, drops it in and seals it without looking.
“Suppose I should ask if you found everything here at The Empire to your liking?” he asks after I sign the credit slip.
Then I do what I meant not to do and look at the concierge’s face. A near toothless man of indeterminable age who’s spent too much time out of the sun. Then I do what I promised I would never do. I look at the top of his head. A good long look at the bulging crisscross of veins patterned over his scalp, rushing blood around the circumference of his skull. But it’s nothing more than a flaw of the body, something that proves he’s alive.
“The room was very comfortable, thank you,” I answer, pushing the front door open with my knee and stepping out blind into the light.
The drive back to the city is long and cold. This is mostly because the car still lacks a front windshield and the temperature, as is appropriate for the season, flirts around the freezing point. There’s nothing for it but to pull up the collar on my overcoat, hunker down as low in the seat as possible and crank the heat so that, every once in a while, I feel a lick of warmth carrying the smell of burning rubber. Aside from two trucks that pass with a honk, their drivers laughing down at me to show teeth the color of diner coffee, I’m surprised that nobody seems to notice the extreme conditions under which I roll southward. Not that I’d be likely to notice anyway, eyes fixed dead ahead, my body a hunched question mark, unable to move but capable of driving straight down a four-lane highway just as well as the other unmoving shadows behind other wheels. Down past the factories, shipping warehouses and salvage yards, through the asphalt channels bordered by walls built to protect backyards from the noise their inhabitants moved out to the suburbs to avoid. Along the curving river valley, weaving down to where the highway meets Lake Ontario and dissolves.
I’m not thinking about tiptoeing around Graham and Bert as I clear out my desk, about facing the question as to whether the insurance on the Lincoln covers driver-inflicted demolition. My mind is free of thoughts on the collapsed arc of my career, how long my savings will cover the mortgage payments on the drywalled space above the rot and bustle of Chinatown, or what, if anything, I may be alternatively qualified to do. But what does occur to me, in a blink of memory that comes as I pull off the Don Valley Parkway onto Richmond Street and face the glare of sun off the mirrored downtown office towers, is the fact that Tripp’s bloody shirt still sits in the trunk of my rental car.
Down Richmond, past the squinting, under-clothed tourists and teenaged runaways of Yonge Street, across Bay with its corners clotted by the ministerial faces of professional money handlers, and onto Spadina, where I make a right and head north. Making turns that take the car deeper into the cramped residential neighborhoods off College Street, one block featuring over-renovated gingerbread numbers and the next a series of brick and wrought iron squares with three-foot-high fences enclosing concrete yards. Circle back, go straight, become lost. Just driving. Not knowing where I’m going until I get there. And when I do, it’s to pull over next to a parkette jammed between two blocks of redeveloped row houses, a chunk of clear space equipped with a slide and a swing and a sandbox now brimming with fallen snow like an unmarked grave.
Climb around to the back of the car and pop open the trunk. The shirt’s still there, tied inside its white plastic bag. Pick it up with both hands and walk over to the garbage can next to the park’s gate. On the other side, a bunch of kids playing tag. Boys and girls sent outside to burn off some after-school steam before dinner. Old enough to play together without supervision but young enough that they still love simple games like this, ones without teams or points or rules.
Take the bag and bury it deep below the sweet garbage of chicken bones, ketchupy fast food bags, an empty bottle of vodka and today’s issue of The Star with the front page headline “Lost Girls’ Teacher Goes Missing.” Then I lift myself straight and in the failing light of early winter dusk watch the neighborhood kids play. Listen to the triumphant “You’re it!” followed by squeals of fresh pursuit and escape. Children oblivious to the fact they are being watched by a stranger on the other side of the playground fence, tagging each other and turning hunted to hunter in regular turns, kicking up the snow as they run so that a shimmering cloud of frozen crystals follows each of the paths they take.
THE TRADE MISSION
An excerpt from
BY ANDREW PYPER
An excerpt from
To be published by
HarperFlamingoCanada
in September 2002
ISBN 0-00-200508-5
BEFORE
They are only boys.
Tall enough to be men but something gives them away, even with parka hoods pulled tight over their heads. From a distance they might appear as two swaying drunks debating over which of the paths ahead will lead them home. But look at their faces: freckles standing out against bloodless cheeks, chapped lips held tight against the wind. Their fear is neither a child’s nor a man’s. Nothing is real enough to be entirely believed by boys like these, although they’d like to believe in something if it might make them look a year or two older. But for now they’re too in-between, afloat in the not-quite-thereness of their boyhoods. Look at their faces: sometimes their eyes show a hurt they haven’t even lived through yet. It’s like a vision the two of them have shared, a premonition of the life ahead as an ongoing trade of damages. It’s why boys sleep as much as they do. And in their dreams they are caped crusaders. Human but with impossible talents like x-ray vision or freezing breath or flight. Dreams that often end badly nevertheless, with an assassin’s blade slicing their throats or tumbling out of the sky to gasp awake before they hit the ground.
“What’s it say?”
“That way, I think.”
“Which way?”
“Through there. North.”
The slightly taller one returns the compass to
the inside pocket of his parka and points a trembling finger into the trees that surround them. It’s officially winter, but up until a couple hours ago the snow had been cagey, dusting and melting and looping around but refusing to settle in for good. Now it’s coming down straight as marbles.
“It’s getting dark,” the shorter one says, and it is, the sky a purple sheet lowering over the cedar branches. It’s also getting cold. A drop of several degrees within a minute of the sun’s retreat.
They’re lost, but neither has said so yet. It’s their Outdoor Orientation exam—blindfolded then dropped off three miles in by sniggering prefects who kept calling them “lover boys”—and now it’s clear that they’ve failed. Why did the parents of one and the guardians of the other send them to this school in the middle of the Canadian woods anyway? It’s obscene, as the shorter one has taken to saying about all things that bore him. And to make matters worse, it’s one of those schools without girls. Its unspoken specialty is keeping the young gentlemen of the wealthy out of trouble. But what kind of trouble could you get into up here even if you tried? Nothing to do but drink smuggled booze and look out classroom windows at the wall of trees and prickly creeks that led to further nowheres. It’s as if the people that sent them here want them to get lost.
“You better get rid of that,” the shorter boy says, eyes on the mickey of rum pulled out of the same pocket as the compass.
The taller one lifts the bottle in salute and throws back a gulp. Passes it to the shorter boy, who drains the spittled backwash. At first the alcohol had made being stuck in the woods kind of funny, then it had offered temporary blooms of warmth. Now it does little but root them to their places, as though all the stuffing above their waists had poured down their legs and into the frozen earth. The shorter one chucks the bottle away and it takes its time in midair. A half dozen tumbles before burrowing under the white blanket on the forest floor.
