Natasha shut the door and went out to buy a leash and collar.
Six Sikhs boarded the bus. Natasha could not help but notice them, even though Toronto was a hodgepodge of ethnicities. Six robust gentlemen in their forties or fifties, with aristocratic features and neat moustaches, beards, and turbans. Yet their clothing was incongruous: shapeless nylon jackets and ill-fitting trousers in forgettable shades of khaki, olive, and tuna-grey. She imagined they were tired, displaced gods eking out a living at one of the furniture plants along the bus route. Gods from a forgotten pantheon, driving forklifts and spray-painting filing cabinets so that their children could go to medical school at U of T.
No, not gods. Princes, perhaps. Or kings. But not gods.
The men found separate seats, ignoring each other as if they were brothers or strangers. The eldest — judging from his snow-white moustache — sat beside Natasha.
“That is a beautiful dog,” he said.
The dog was sitting at Natasha’s feet. So faithful — even loving. Man’s best friend, and this woman’s bane. Natasha had just taken him to see her aunt, a veterinarian.
“I suppose,” she said, sullenly. Her aunt had declared the dog to be perfectly healthy and normal. Natasha took it as a personal insult that he did not have the decency to be a little unusual. Her aunt had then asked about Paul, and Natasha had lied — hating Paul for making her lie.
“What is his — or her — name?” the man asked. His voice was gentle, cultured. From his accent, she guessed that he had been educated in England.
“His,” Natasha said. “Shadow.” Despite his thick white coat. She had been forced to come up with a name at her aunt’s clinic, and it was the first that came to mind. A friend in grade school had owned a Siberian husky named Shadow. This dog looked a little like the husky, except that his fur was pure white, like the Sikh man’s moustache.
Shadow sat bolt upright on the floor of the bus, facing Natasha. He could have easily put his head in the lap of her skirt, but she knew he would not be so bold. His fur was cool and plush against her legs, and she resented him for it. She wound the leash tighter around her hand. She touched that hand to her throat as if she were the one wearing a new collar.
“Where did you find such a magnificent creature?” The man scratched Shadow between his pointed, wolf-like ears. Shadow shook off his hand as if shaking off water.
“Sorry,” Natasha said, and then wondered why she was apologizing for the dog.
The man smiled. “It is quite alright. I would not want my head touched by strangers either. Where did you find him?”
“He found me,” Natasha said. She bristled at the thought that this stranger believed she had acquired Shadow of her own free will. “It’s a long story. I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Stories are meant to be told,” he said. “That is why they are stories. How else are we to learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others?”
Natasha snorted. “Stories are just stories. They have nothing to do with real life. They’re just what people want real life to be. They’re fantasies. Types and clichés strung together to form a plot.”
The man sighed. “The young have no faith. They are always so angry, so sure of themselves. As I once was.”
“No,” Natasha said. “It’s just none of your business.”
He smiled. “Stubborn, are we? Not a nice trait.”
“In a woman, you mean,” she said, thinking of Paul and not at all of the man to whom she was speaking.
“No. In anyone. If you are not careful, your obstinacy will wrong those whom you trust.” He ran his callused hands through Shadow’s thick fur. This time Shadow did not shake him off.
The man’s mouth smiled, but his eyes did not. “Let me tell you the story of my brothers and myself.”
She glanced out the window of the bus. It would be another twenty minutes until her stop. “Alright,” she said, sighing. “I’m not going anywhere. Tell me your story.”
The History of the Six Kings
I am the eldest of six brothers, the sons of a great king. As children, a marriage was arranged between myself and our cousin Nourounihar, as was the custom of my family. When our dear cousin came of age, she arrived at our kingdom to be wed. To my delight, she had become a beautiful, agreeable woman, and for our first year of marriage we had a harmonious union.
My new bride troubled me, however. At dinner, no matter how lavish the banquet, she would only consume a few grains of turmeric-stained rice and a couple of dates. She would bring them carefully to her lips with the tiny silver teaspoon she kept on a chain around her neck. Yet days and nights passed and she never exhibited signs of wasting away. When my grand vizier speculated that sorcery kept her hale, I stubbornly refused to listen to his suspicions and ordered him to be drawn and quartered.
But my faithful servant had planted the seed of doubt. A week after his execution, I stole into my wife’s quarters after we had dined. Again, she had eaten little. She excused herself from the table early. Hidden in her boudoir, I watched my wife whiten her face with nightingale droppings, rouge her lips and nipples, don her filmiest veils and her brightest jewellery. When she had finished her preparations, she used the silver teaspoon around her neck to scoop a little powder out of a rough clay pot on her dressing table. She cast the powder against a wall, and a doorway appeared as if traced in smoke.
I watched as she entered the secret passage, and then I followed.
I found myself in a brilliantly jewelled cavern. Precious stones twinkled from floor to ceiling, and to either side of me brightly coloured, iridescent fish — jewels themselves — swam in shallow pools lined with gems. My wife’s eager path brought her to a cloaked figure whose shadowed face was so pale, so gaunt, so wicked, he could have only been a ghoul or demon.
She flung off her veils and consorted with her unnatural lover until I could take no more of their base revelry.
Fie! I cried, springing from my hiding spot. So you will not dine with me, yet would fraternize with demons?
Foul miscreant! my wife said. I will see that you never leave this place.
She uttered a series of strange words, and I suddenly found myself thrashing underwater. She had transformed me into one of the coloured fish.
The shameless wanton married each of my brothers in turn as they inherited the throne, convincing them that it was their filial duty to provide for her. They could not resist her lustrous ink-black hair, her safflower-tinted nipples, the silky petals between her thighs that unfolded like a Chinese puzzle. Each of my poor brothers discovered her perfidy too late and joined me in the pools of the jewelled cavern.
Nourounihar ruled our kingdom with her lover by her side, and her reign was a period of terror and depravity. Often she would bring innocent men and women — already half-dead from torture — down to the cavern and push them into the water. As my brothers and I had been reduced to animals, we had no choice but to nibble away at the living flesh in order to sustain ourselves. There was nothing else for us to eat, except each other. Nourounihar enjoyed telling us whom we were devouring and the trifling reasons why she had condemned them to such a fate.
My brothers and I languished with no hope of being restored. Seven years after my transformation, however, we spotted a youth wandering through the cavern. Unlike Nourounihar’s victims, he appeared whole and healthy despite his tattered clothes. The boy’s pockets brimmed with jewels — no doubt plucked from the walls — but he was clearly lost.
The boy sank to his knees by our pool. He gazed hungrily at us, but we were too quick and slippery for his tired hands.
Ah! he said. What use are the finest jewels if I join the other skeletons in this cavern?
I poked my head above the water’s surface and said, Young master, we know the way out.
The boy gasped and scrambled to his feet.
What witchcraft is this? he asked.
None but the wicked sultana’s, who keeps us imprisoned in these powerless shapes, I said. We can tell you the cavern’s secrets, but we ask but one favour in return.
What would you have me do? the boy said.
I said, We require that you depose of the sultana and her degenerate consort. We were once men, and their deaths will free us from this foul enchantment.
The youth protested. I said, My five brothers and I are kings. We have a lovely sister who is sweet and well-tempered, gentle and docile. We will give you her hand in marriage, and our kingdom, if you free us.
The youth swore that he would avenge us. I directed him to the cavern’s egress, and my brothers and I prayed day and night that he would deliver us from our fate. A fortnight later we awoke to discover that we were men again. We escaped the cavern to find our kingdom celebrating the death of the sultana and her consort at the brave hands of the youth.
We gave the youth our youngest sister’s hand in marriage as well as our kingdom, for he had truly earned them. My brothers and I left to seek our fortunes elsewhere, and now we earn our keep with our hands and no-one knows that we were once proud, foolish kings.
“What a sexist story,” Natasha said. “The women were either sluts or virgins.”
The eldest brother shrugged. “It is all subjective. I am sure my youngest sister tells a different story. We cannot help our tales being influenced by who we are and what we know. How would you describe the men in your life? Are they heroes? Knaves? Villains?”
Natasha said nothing.
“Now will you tell me where you got this dog?” he asked.
She shook her head. He sighed. “Your obstinacy will be your downfall, as it was mine.”
He stood up and yanked the cord. The bus halted at the next stop. The six brothers stepped off into the night. Natasha watched them through the window, turning away only when the bus continued ambling along its route. She could not talk about Shadow even if she wanted to, because she did not know where to begin.
Fortunately for her, however, the best stories start in medias res.
She woke to muffled shouts and Paul’s motionless heat against her back. Something was happening in the intersection below their building. She lay quietly, listening. As the shouts grew louder, Paul stirred.
“Another goddamn parade,” he groaned. “Why does every goddamn parade in Toronto have to pass through Dundas and University? Don’t people have anything better to do on a Sunday morning? Like sleep in? Doesn’t anyone go to church anymore?”
Natasha twisted onto her other side in order to close the distance between them in the bed. But Paul flopped onto his stomach, burying his head under a pillow. “What’s this one about?” he asked.
Being a large, cosmopolitan city, Toronto was a jumble of visible minorities and special-interest groups. Every weekend there was a celebration — or a protest. Both the US consulate and the provincial government were on University Avenue, near Dundas Street, and City Hall was within marching distance.
“Who cares,” Natasha said, her arm sliding across his shoulders, seeking his warmth. One of her legs scissored open over his.
He pushed her off. “Come on,” he said. “You’re closer to the window.”
Natasha sighed and flipped over toward the edge of the mattress. Her limbs creaked and wobbled as she stood, cramped from defending her side of the bed.
She parted the blinds. Below, a procession of cement mixers and sewage trucks crept southbound on University. “It’s just some construction trucks,” she said.
“The white man’s parade,” Paul joked. Natasha punished him by not laughing.
Several spandex-clad bodies sporting large black numbers on their backs sprinted past the trucks. “There’s also a marathon,” she said. A few seconds later, a herd of people in shapeless white T-shirts stampeded through the intersection.
“A charity marathon,” Natasha added, squinting at the logos on the participants’ T-shirts. From the eleventh floor, they were indecipherable. “For breast cancer, I think. Or heart disease. Wait — wasn’t there supposed to be something for juvenile diabetes this weekend?”
“That was yesterday,” Paul mumbled from under his pillow. He was falling back asleep. Resentment surged from Natasha’s stomach and into her chest like heartburn.
She was about to close the blinds when she noticed that there were now more women walking down University Avenue, and fewer were wearing the white T-shirts. Women of all ages, all shapes, sizes, and colours, toting makeshift signs. A pair of mounted policemen trotted behind them, ready to control the mob if necessary.
Natasha peered at the signs, unable to make out what they said. She wondered who the women were. Government employees demanding reimbursement for years of gender-biased salaries? Sex-trade workers? Mothers against drunk driving?
Furious shouts floated up from street level and buffeted the window pane. “Down with men!” the women chanted. Natasha shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs from it. Surely that could not have been what she had heard. Her frustration with Paul was warping her hearing. She glanced at Paul’s side of the bed; he was snoring slightly, dead to the world. She slipped out of the bedroom and onto the balcony.
“Down with men!” the women repeated. Natasha had not imagined it. “Down with men!”
Natasha was shocked at their vitriol. Surely in this day and age of equality between the sexes, men were not the enemy. Yet at the same time wished she had the courage to be down there, the weight of a sign braced against her arms, the splinters from a wooden signpost digging into her hands. She wanted that pain to jolt her awake. She wanted, for once, to be angry without any fear that she was being a shrew or a bitch.
And then Natasha saw the men — men also of all ages, shapes, sizes, and colours. Men marching up University Avenue carrying similar signs. “Down with women!” they chanted. “Down with women!”
The sexes met, head-on, at Dundas Street, and then Natasha could not tell what they were shouting anymore. The occasional word bubbled to the surface of the noise and drifted up to where she stood, sounding as clear as if she had spoken the words herself.
Blame … partner … faults … vanity … understand … want … hero … goddess … equal … listen…
Hypocrite … hypocrite … hypocrite…
An arrhythmic crash of gongs and cymbals interrupted the shouting, heralding the approach of a Chinese New Year pageant. The dancing lion emerged from Dundas Street and wove around the demonstrators, prancing, blinking its long-lashed bulbous eyes in apoplectic ecstasy. It shook its shaggy head, lolled its felt tongue.
Raucous static drowned out the cymbals. A flatbed truck crawled down University, towing a Gay Pride parade float on which bare-chested men boogied under arches of rainbow-hued balloons. Smiling, sweet-faced young women marched behind the float, holding hands in twos and threes and fours. They observed the heterosexual melee with amusement.
The mounted policemen nudged their horses into the middle of the bedlam. “Move it along, please,” one said from his towering perch. With no warning, a dreadlocked youth wearing a Che Guevara T-shirt leapt forward and stabbed the policeman’s horse with a bowie knife.
“Fuck you, Mr. Man,” he yelled.
The horse screamed and buckled. Angry young men streamed onto the street. Glass bottles and raw eggs smashed against the US consulate’s barred windows.
A cohort of masked riot police swept through the crowd. Balloons popped. Men and women screamed. The Chinese lion danced away as fast as its many legs could carry it, cymbals crashing double-time.
When the smoke and tear gas cleared, a dozen upside-down clowns staggered down University, coughing and wheezing from their crotches. Eight tiny plastic reindeer bobbed behind them. Santa Claus had arrived, signifying the end of the parade. A
Molotov cocktail landed in the back of his sleigh. He snuffed the flame with one of his woollen mittens and tossed the bottle back out into the crowd. Natasha marvelled at his coolness. He was a parade veteran.
She slipped back inside. “What was all that racket?” Paul asked. “You said it was a marathon.”
“It was nothing,” she said. Goosebumps prickled her bare arms. She climbed under the covers and curled onto her side, trying to warm up. Paul squirmed toward her and pressed himself against the small of her back. His cold fingers burrowed under her camisole. Natasha clenched her teeth, feigning sleep until he gave up and retreated to his side of the bed.
Her irritation surprised her when his snores rumbled behind the wall of her turned back. Hypocrite. She was not sure if she meant Paul or herself.
When did this cold war start? she asked herself. When did their bed become a tacit battlefield? Who drew the imaginary line down the centre and dug trenches on either side? When did their marriage become polarized, cleaved into silent rejection and amiable civility, divided between night and day?
She pictured Scheherazade — lying beside her husband, a near-stranger, wondering how long she could live this way before the axe would fall.
Natasha thought about abandoning the dog. (She refused to think of Shadow as her dog; he was simply a dog, the dog.) She thought about it all the time. She thought about the different ways she could do it: a classified ad in the paper; the doorstep of the Toronto Humane Society; the parking lot of a suburban grade school on a Sunday morning, driving a rental car away while Shadow chased butterflies outside.
The Sikh gentleman on the bus had been right. Shadow was a beautiful dog. Someone would want him. Although the fact that someone might want him more than Natasha did made her want to keep him out of spite.
Still, one day while alone in the dog park, the leash slipped from her hand. It was not intentional. Shadow was crouched beside a garbage bin. Natasha looked away, as if to be polite.
Paul had never liked using the toilet when the bathroom door was open. As she remembered this, her fingers slackened and the leather strap scraped her knuckles and dropped onto the ground. She stared at the dropped leash for a second. Shadow had not noticed.
Tesseracts Twelve: New Novellas of Canadian Fantastic Fiction Page 13
