by Emily Anglin
“So, did you ever go back there?” Mattie asked.
“I did, but the only interesting thing I ever found was a small waterfall. Still, there was some kind of danger there that my mom would only hint at. She would get irate and shut things down if us kids talked about it as a mystery or a game.”
Celina and Mattie walked together into those woods that day. About a half-hour in, they came to a grassy clearing and, on their left, saw what looked like an old road, a trace of one heading back toward the main road they had started from. A rusty wheel protruded from the ground. Alongside it, another bent piece of metal stuck out, another wheel. In the centre of the two wheels, scraps of cloth and rubber protruded from the dirt. It was a baby carriage that had sat there so long that it had slowly sunk into the ground.
“I remember finding this before,” Celina said, “It’s been here forever. It terrified me. I thought the wheels were the rear tires of two ancient bikes, side by side, and that the kids who had ridden them long ago had been swallowed by the ground while they rode, the ground closing back up around them, leaving only the two back tires unburied. Everything back here seemed to vibrate with meaning in those days. But in the end, I never found anything that interesting back here.”
When Mattie and Celina returned to the cabin, everyone else seemed quiet, sunburnt and a bit drunk, and they all packed up to leave in near silence. Pete and Celina drove off in their car, the other couples in theirs, and Mattie in hers, having made an excuse not to carpool but to drive up alone. On the highway, Mattie found herself driving along at first behind Pete and Celina’s car and then beside it. She stayed beside them but they didn’t notice her, and she didn’t lose them the entire way back to the city.
As Celina and Pete pulled up into the entrance to the underground parking lot of their building, Mattie parked across the street, got out of the car, and then slipped into the underground lot. Mattie saw them lugging their bags into a glass elevator. Back outside, she followed with her eyes as the glass box stopped at the seventh floor. She sat in her car for a few moments. She watched the lights come on one by one in one of the condos, a big corner unit overlooking the lakeshore. The condo had been bought in large part with Celina’s money; once it was invested in the condo, Pete had thought of it as his money. But he hadn’t fought to keep what he felt was his, because he didn’t want anything coming out in court that Celina didn’t already know, about his relationship with Mattie while he and Celina were still married.
Pete could only see, would only ever see, Celina—and not Mattie—in the small square view of Celina’s home that his screen showed him, an excerpt of her new life with no context visible beyond its cropped limits. Mattie thought of those other, distant squares that held a past configuration: first, the car Pete and Celina drove in, ahead of her; then, the elevator they took up to their condo; finally, the condo itself, with its huge windows: three boxes of glass, each holding, suspended, the life Celina and Pete had shared. Pete’s money—or what he’d thought of as his money—belonged to Mattie and Celina now. But Mattie didn’t care about the money; she cared about Celina, and what little she could understand about why Celina had chosen to care about her.
Mattie gazed out the window of the house she lived in now with Celina, which sat at the edge of the city, far from the city’s lakeshore and the building where Celina had once lived with Pete. Celina was still talking to Pete. Mattie had come to the spot in Celina’s manuscript where Celina had switched from type to handwriting, because she found the screen too hard on her eyes when she was writing. Mattie wondered if the screen on Celina’s laptop was bothering her eyes now, as she talked to Pete. Mattie’s own eyes were beginning to become strained from reading, partly because of Celina’s handwriting, and partly because she was starting to feel like a stranger in the world of Celina’s story.
Anya’s Painting
Why do we eat birds’ eggs but not reptiles’ eggs? It’s a question Anya used to ask when we would go walking at the bottom of the city by the river, watching the cormorants whirl in the rainy air. Now, when I walk by the lake behind the condo building I live in—my new home, in a new city, without Anya—I’m reminded of her question. The birds are sleek, silent. Collapsible when they land, like black umbrellas. “But they’re dinosaurs,” as Anya would say. “It’s as plain as day. If we are what we eat, then we’re a lot less like we are than we think.” That’s how Anya talked, sometimes not so much to me as beside me.
I recently moved from one city to another, and into a lakefront condo tower named Shoreline Terrace, where I live alone. I’ve been getting to know a new geography.
I’ll admit that in my first weeks in the building, I was dazzled by all the frills of condo life, and the extent to which the residents seemed to take them for granted. Anya had warned me: “Just because you have nouveau money, don’t think nouveau riche is going to feel natural.”
I think Anya found the Dickensian twist of fate that intervened in our lives to be in poor taste. My grandmother passed away and left her condo to me, her only grandchild. It meant I would have to move across the country if I wanted to live there, but I was ready for a change anyway. When this happened—completely unexpected, but, to me, the best of all possible news, the end to the cold, to Anya’s shoplifting—Anya got interested in travelling. She got a job teaching at a high school overseas and left the country, instead of crossing the country with me to go to what I’d hoped would be our new home.
With her gone, what else was I going to do? I had to move somewhere. But I find the condo residents strange.
For instance, I quickly became convinced that some residents aren’t even aware of the storage available to us, down there in Shoreline Terrace’s expansive, dry, quiet basement, with its broad rows of stalls. Whole households of furniture could remain for years down there in packed-away units. But the lockers sit almost entirely empty, small forgotten rooms with walls made of raw boards.
Except for my storage locker, that is. I know it’s weird, but I’m going through an adjustment. Some of my furniture just didn’t look right to me placed in the condo itself, so I put the misfit pieces in the locker. A chair. A space heater designed to look like a fireplace—complete with moulded flames painted orangey red with smoky licks of charcoal grey (which I was able to run in there with the help of an extension cord). And Anya’s painting. It was a perfect triangle of furnishings, as it happened: a little room completed by the portable window of the painting, which I hung from one of the two-by-fours that structured the space. I took to sitting down there. Maybe I liked it because it was so warm down there, not only because it was close to the building’s boiler, but also because of that reliable old space heater. Anya and I had bought the heater years ago for our old, always-freezing apartment, where we lived back in the other city, before fate stepped in and made an expatriate of Anya and a condo dweller of me.
That old apartment was beyond cold. Once, Anya had placed a thermometer on the dresser beside my bed at night. It told us that it was twelve degrees in there. We took pictures of the thermometer, had them developed, and wrote the words “please note” on the back above our signatures. We sent the pictures to our landlord with stamps affixed to the upper right-hand corner like postcards. He claimed he never received them. That fake fireplace got us through our first winter together.
Our cat, Prometheus—who had dragged himself into our lives from some invisible urban wilderness one night, scratched up and bloody from a fight—got his name from that fake fire. He never let us touch him, but he would sit with almost-shut eyes beside the heater all day, all night, all winter, entranced. “Our copy of Prometheus’s theft from the Gods,” Anya said. “Stolen again, this time from Walmart.” The space heater was one of her major shoplifting victories. We guessed that the poor cat had never known fire or its warmth before, stolen or not.
The last time Anya and I had talked had been shortly after I’d moved into Shoreline Ter
race. Trying to embrace my new home, I stood looking out my condo’s window over the water as we talked. “You could stay with me here when you visit next. You’d like the lake,” I told her.
I listened to her stories. Her job was supposed to be temporary, but she had quickly become blended like paint into an unending night of a life there: an impressionistic slurry of cabs; food eaten near dawn with strangers; names for bands and books thought up and forgotten; eye-numbing piles of assignments to mark all day, every day.
But there was something wrong with her phone or with our connection; her voice was crackling and faint, and I could only hear fragments of what she was saying. I pictured telephone wires at the bottom of the ocean sinking deep into the silt of the sea floor, cutting into the mud and being swallowed by billowing and settling sediment below the swimming paths of eyeless fish. Does it work like that? Did it ever? Or was it a satellite being knocked by the debris of a fragmenting asteroid?
Growing weary of trying to make out what she was saying, I told Anya that I needed to get off the phone. I didn’t tell her that I wanted to go sit in my storage locker and feel the building above me sitting like a giant creature roosting on the rocks, gazing out over the lake, me its unhatched egg.
That’s what I did do, and what I started doing a few times a week, thus leading to the evening in question, when I sat in the storage space drinking a beer and considering calling Anya again. I gazed at her painting that was hanging in front of me. It was starting to bother me.
Anya was a good painter, sometimes by accident and sometimes on purpose. Once, at our old place, she found a bunch of old paintings on the side of the road set out with someone’s trash. She took them home and painted over the canvasses one by one in our kitchen. She would sit at a chair with a canvas in her lap, leaned against the edge of the table, her legs in black tights splayed out straight in front of her in an easel-like “v.” The cat would walk through and leave a trail of coloured paw prints behind him on the newspapered floor, each print fainter than the last until they disappeared, like the creature who had left them had levitated into the air.
Her “portraits,” she called them. But there were never people in her paintings: only places. And sometimes animals, usually with their backs turned: an owl flying toward the brown light in the sky above a parking lot, or a coyote limping across an empty expressway, its head low and facing away, its fur moulting from its hide in bunches. She said the animals weren’t symbols. She wouldn’t explain much beyond that.
The one piece of hers that I’d kept and brought with me to the condo was the painting that I had hanging in the locker. It was the only one I could remember her ever doing that had people in it—though they weren’t prominent. A house was the main subject, a dark house among stands of trees at night. The whole painting was dark except for the light seeping through the seam of the ajar front door, and a small, glowing window with a silhouetted cat sitting in it. Behind the cat, in the house, were the silhouettes of two people, one with arms held up, as though captured in animated conversation. But tonight, for the first time, it struck me that the exchange looked less like a conversation and more like an argument. And I’d always thought the cat in the window was facing outward, toward the painting’s viewer, but I realized now that it was crouched low with its head turned to look inside, directly at the people in the house, as though startled by a noise.
A change in perception can register on the brain like a flash at the edge of our vision: it seemed that it was only just now that the cat in the painting had turned its head.
I decided to get out of there and clear my head, stretch my legs. It was a nice fall night anyway, a good night for a walk to the lake.
I have a usual place I like to sit by the lake: the firepit. Another perk of condo living, not strictly owned by the building owners, but used by the Shoreline Terrace residents as a place to roast marshmallows or hotdogs. I sit there almost every afternoon, looking out at the horizon.
If I sit with my back to the building, right on the shore, I can imagine I’m not in a city at all. There’s an island out there in the lake, to the west, near the end of a long, thin spit of land that curls into the water. At a quick glance, the island looks like it’s connected to the spit—the last joint of a finger pointing away from the city, advising exodus. But if you look closely, you can see the brief stretch of sky where no trees rise up.
When I first noticed the island, I wondered if I was the only condo resident who knew for a fact that it was out there—but I had no way of knowing. Until a night quite recently, I had barely spoken to the other residents. I could hardly count as conversations the commiserations about condo fees or the weather that I didn’t participate in, but overheard in the lobby or in the elevator (me smiling sympathetically, sliding by, looking at my hands like they had instructions written on them).
That night, after talking to Anya and looking at her painting for too long, when I left the basement and went outside through the back, lake-facing doors of the building, I went straight for the water, past the firepit, down to the water’s edge.
Stepping among the rocks and close to the gently lapping water, I saw something orange in the reeds: the nose of a small tin boat. I uncovered it.
“Hey!” a voice said behind me. “Hey! Boat thief, stop!”
A man in a tuxedo jacket came up beside me, stumbling through the firepit. He had a white silk scarf around his neck, the kind Fred Astaire would wear. Under his dark hair, his face was greenish. It could just as well have been a symptom of his obvious drunkenness, but it was clearly face paint.
“Don’t look so scared! I’m only kidding. It’s not my boat. I’ve never seen it before. Now, we haven’t even properly met.” He put out his hand. “I’m Dead Frank Sinatra.”
“I was thinking Fred Astaire,” I said.
He sat down by the non-existent fire in the firepit and put his hands out, as though warming them. He pulled them back in and hung his head in his hands. Slowly, he let his fingers drag down his face, smearing the makeup into stripes that revealed another layer of makeup.
“Ah, this condo,” he said, his eyes looking through his fingers, his lower eyelids pink and watery. “It’s an endless night. Do you want a drink?” He reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a green bottle, unopened. A shade of green that meant gin, the medicinal taste of juniper already on my tongue.
“Sure,” I said.
“You can drink first,” he said, handing it to me.
“No,” I said. “You first.”
Somehow the issue of who would drink first displaced the question of whether or not I would drink at all. As long as he drank first, I thought, it would be okay. I would watch for signs in him that there was anything other than gin in the bottle. He drank first, and passed me the bottle. I took a swig, and handed it back to him.
“Have you ever noticed how much everyone in this building resents the condo fees we have to pay? Why do they resent them? In exchange for the fees, we get things. They even built a path that leads from the terrace door down to the water. The landscaping is well done. It keeps you company, even when you’re alone. Is that not worth a few fees? Maybe the residents who begrudge the fees don’t want the feeling of company, I try to remind myself. Maybe they just want to work all day, party all night, and rollerblade for an hour along the lakefront in the windows of time left over.”
He drank again, and looked at me. “Don’t look worried. Do you want to go back up?”
“Up where?”
“Back to the roof. To the party.”
“I didn’t know there was a party.”
“I assumed you’d come from there. Yes, there’s a party on the roof, tonight, all night, every night, all summer, into the fall. We had a tropical theme for most of August. Now that fall is in the air, we’ve switched over to Halloween season. Most of us have run out of costume ideas, and it’s not even Oct
ober yet. We’re in a dead-celebrity phase. This should last until Christmas, when we’ll move inside and set up a tree in the rec room. You’ll know the season’s changed when you hear bells.” He stood up. “Are you coming?” he asked.
“Yes, I guess so,” I said. Since my arrival, I’d felt different from the other condo residents; it was a comfortable sense of difference, and not one I saw aligning with the weirdness of my new companion. But I had to at least try.
We walked up the path to the back terrace and through the glass doors to the elevator, a silent, green-carpeted glass box that swallowed us up and slipped like a beam of light up the shaft to the top of the building. Frank leaned his forehead against the glass, gazing out over the view of the lake, the dark expanse of black water invisibly joining with the sky. Out in a westerly direction, where I thought the island must be, I thought I saw smoke rising grey into the air.
When the elevator opened, it was into an empty, carpeted corridor, with chairs and furniture and artificial-flower displays. Frank slipped through a door, and I followed him into a dark ballroom, across which I saw him gliding toward a pair of French doors on the far wall, his white scarf fluttering and catching the moonlight as he threw them open, the warm noise of unknown voices surging up and into the silence like uncorked bubbles.
