Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  Wal-Mart’s toilets. Same Wal-Mart halogens, same Wal-Mart paint: eggshell white with a greenish under-hue. The colour of an egg with a stillborn chick inside. Water slicked over the tiles. Had she tried to flush a tampon—a boxful?

  A puffy lump wedged down the lone bowl. Mycoloured: I mean to say, the colour of skin. The fact it’s in a toilet prevents my understanding. A baby in a crapper fails to conform to any known reality so remains as unbelievable as satellite footage of that same baby orbiting Saturn. Face down, arms pinned in the guts of the bowl where the plumbing begins so all I see is a wad, not distinguishably human, clogging things.

  I reach into the toilet to grip the body and turn it, her, face up. Skin stained 2,000 Flushes blue. I accidentally bonk her head on the lid and hope to Christ I didn’t hit her fontanelle and squash something—her sense of smell? zest for life?— permanently.

  I cradle her, dripping, to the diaper change station. Root my index finger through her mouth fearing the insane bitch stuffed her throat full of toilet paper. Close my lips over her mouth and nose. I might’ve inhaled her entire head if it wasn’t so bulbous, that being the style of baby heads. Blow too hard and I’ll rupture her lungs. So I’m blowing as if to inflate a fleshed-out plum.

  Not a cough, sigh, or puke and all this is now barrelling toward a senseless end. Trying to pour life into a permanently stoppered vessel—had to head the list of Worst Human Experiences. Top five, guaranteed. My fingerprints all over this beautiful dead body.

  “Breathe.” Thumb-pumping her sternum. “You stupid little bitch, breathe.”

  A gutful of warm toilet water. This wee infant girl’s bawling.

  I was told my mother died birthing me. You could say I killed her, though this is the only course nature can unfortunately take. My father survived, but you could say his heart did not. It went hard as pig leather in his chest, with no capacity for much else but me. And Alvin, as it would turn out.

  Philip Nanavatti, my father, built fireworks. An archaic livelihood, same as a cobbler. His work funded by cigarette companies who organized a competition, Symphony of Fire, where fireworkers from across the globe set off volleys from rafts floating on Lake Ontario. He was more wizard than artisan. Much of this had to do with what he created. A cobbler mends shoes, a pair of which is owned by everyone and exist permanently beneath our eyes; through natural processes of alignment, the cobbler comes to be seen the same. Fireworks are totally unnecessary. The cobbler is earthbound. The fireworker’s domain is the heavens.

  He looked the part of wizard, albeit a modernday variety. A threadbare man who cultivated a beard out of expediency and the rising cost of razor blades. His favourite article of clothing a macrame poncho bought on a Pueblo reserve, which he wore in his drafty basement workroom. Drywall hung with tools whose outlines he traced in black marker. Unlike other handymen whose toolboxes contained spanners and drillbits and lugnuts, my father’s contained pill bottles—he bought them wholesale from a medi-supply company—full of powders, pellets, shards, clusters, and gems all carefully labelled. Sodium D-Line. Potassium Perchlorate. Rice Starch. The indentation of safety goggles permanently impressed into the flesh round his eyes, the way spectacle-wearers have nose-pad grooves on their noses.

  My father once found a box of flashcubes at a garage sale. A joyous discovery, it turned out. We returned home with haste, to the basement, where he put the cubes in a vice and drilled a hole through the paper-thin glass.

  “Everything on earth is made up of four elements,” he told me. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. All living things are carbon-based. There is a static number of carbon atoms on our planet. No more or less today than a trillion years ago. Things are born, live, expire, break down to component elements. Those carbon atoms go on to be part of new life. Like plasticine: mould a dog, smush it up, mould a cat. The bulk of matter never changes. Only the creations.”

  He had me fetch an egg from the icebox. He poked a hole in it to drain white and yolk. He mixed coloured magnesium with the flashbulb powder and funnelled it into the egg. Wadding, a fuse, sealed with a bead of paraffin wax.

  “You and I are cobbled together out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. You may have a trilobite’s tail in your elbow, pet. A cell from Attila the Hun in your eye. Your tonsils could have a brontosaurus nail in them.”

  “Where did we come from?”

  “The simplest answer is the stuff making up all life is hydrogen, whose atoms come from the fusion process taking place at the centre of suns. So I suppose you can say we come from stellar waste.” He touched the tip of his tongue to a canine tooth. “Or from stardust. Better?”

  “Better.”

  “Stardust, then.”

  The park near our house had shuffleboard courts. White sandblasted stone. Dad centred the egg on the court and waved me back to the jungle gym. He lit the fuse and ran with hands tucked over his head: gait of a soldier running down a foxhole.

  “A carbonized imprint,” he said after the detonation. “Magical, isn’t it?”

  The shuffleboard court was framed with colours, shapes, patterns or their raw inklings. A solar system in miniature: every manifestation of life, insect and beast and plant and forms long extinct or as yet undiscovered helixing into each other, nameless in their complexities. Limbs and stalks, broken angles, conchial whorls, geographic forms that struck as unnatural only as they existed beyond my understanding. The arch of a swan’s neck thinned into an umbilical cord shot through with emerald threads spidering into beetle-legged strands which in turn shattered into violently-coloured orbits. Such designs must exist, invisible, all about us. When the powder in that egg ignited, powerful chemical magnets drew them out of the air to imprint them, recklessly, on the stone.

  Who else but a wizard could conjure a sight like that?

  Lieutenant Daniel Mulligan is attractive if horsetoothed. He smiles in a manner that—were his lips to skin back to reveal the pink beds his teeth are buried in—might be wolfish. A horse-toothed wolf?

  A corkboard-panelled room at the Niagara Regional Police headquarters. Terrazzo tiles scuffed with shoe skidmarks. It’s not difficult to envision them being made by a stave-gutted plainclothesman pivoting on his brogan to smash a telephone book into a poor perp’s skull. Lt. Mulligan picks at a wart on his index finger. Distressingly, it resembles a nipple. A finger-nipple. A . . . fipple? When I think of his hands upon my body—as I’ve been doing since he came in—I now picture spongy growths like toadstools popping up every place he’s touched.

  “The woman. Tell us what she looked like.” “Us?”

  “The constabulary working this case.”

  “I’m a case?”

  Mulligan smiles.

  “You’re a good Samaritan. Yes?”

  He sets a folder on the table. Patience Nanavatti

  on a label affixed to its tab. Cleat-shod music-box ballerinas spin pirouettes up my spine.

  “My permanent record?”

  He flips it open. “Says here you peed your pants in grade five gym. Kidding. That whole ‘permanent record’ stuff, it’s bullsh—malarkey. If everyone left that kind of paper trail, paper-pushers would get biceps big as grapefruits shoving it around.” His laugh indicates the paper-pushers of his acquaintance are shrivelled of arm. “You’re nervous.”

  “Trying to remember if I peed my pants in grade five.”

  “That’s not germane to the investigation.”

  He directs my attention to a wall-mounted TV. “Security tapes. Took awhile to get clearance—big conglomerates.”

  Footage: iron greys wash into gauzier greys. Spots of polar whiteness. Humanoid shapes move herkyjerk: the world’s most tedious nickelodeon show. The woman is a dark, jagged, lumpen apparition ghosting through the frame.

  “That’s her.”

  “Right, we’ve ascertained as much. What we’re interested in, Ms. Nanavatti—”

  “Patience. Please.”

  “Details, Patience. The descr
iption you gave the onsite officer . . . you told him”—reading directly from the page—“the perpetrator seemed to be enveloped in malaise. He’s also transcribed your claim she didn’t have an evil heart.”

  “She was confused. Or ill.” Tapping my skull. “You know . . .”

  “Descriptions such as ‘having the eyes of a hunted animal’ aren’t valuable from an investigative standpoint.”

  “She looked . . . like she could use a friend?”

  Mulligan rubs his forehead as if a toothy determined something were trying to tunnel out. His pleading expression softens the contours of his face. More handsome than the last guy I dated. An indemand sessional musician, he said. He performed the guitar riff that plays over the Seven-day Forecast on the Weather Channel. He couldn’t come inside me. Retarded ejaculation; I looked it up. A phobia based on insecurity. Fear of losing control. Or of infection, which seemed more likely: he told me he’d slept with a groupie “on tour,” afterwards spotting a pubic louse drowned in the bus toilet. A tiny banjo with pincers, he said. We worked on it. We’d have sex and when he was close I’d get out of bed and stand in a corner so he could masturbate. Next I sat in bed while he jerked off. We worked all the way up to him spurting on my tummy. Soon after finishing inside me the first time—he wore two condoms—he moved to Portland to join a jam band.

  “Are you an artist, Patience?” Mulligan asks. “What is it you do for a living?”

  I hand him a glossy leaflet out of my purse. A naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A large pink star over her crotch. EZWhores-For-Fone! 1-976-SLUT (UK: 976-SLAG)! The Original Phone Sex Maniacs! Fetish Cellar! Sissy Training!

  Imagine attending a dinner party at an acquaintance’s home and using the washroom but instead of the bathroom door you mistakenly open the door to a closet full of mannequin parts. The look on your face at that moment is the same look Lt. Mulligan wears right now.

  “I’m only an operator,” I tell him. “I facilitate caller interactions.”

  He slips the leaflet into his blazer pocket. “Ah.” “The woman had brown eyes.” Brown is the most common shade and nothing about the woman was remarkable. “Dark brown.”

  He scribbles this down. I ask what’s going to happen to her.

  “We have to locate her first.”

  “I don’t mean her.”

  “Yes, right. Baby’s at the General Hospital. Tests, that kind of thing.”

  “Can I see her? It may jog something.”

  “I’ll check.”

  “Will you go out for a cup of coffee?” Compelled to clarify: “With me?”

  “My wife would not approve of me sharing coffees with strange women.”

  I’d seen his wedding ring. Many people are married. Not all happily so.

  “Great fireworks displays,” my father said, “should expand within a viewer’s mind.”

  The Mushrooming Imprint . My father’s phrase. It describes the effect any disciplined fireworks engineer should strive for. All displays leave a stamp upon the sky: only gasses in their dissipation, as unremarkable as fumes exiting a tailpipe. The Mushrooming Imprint was created when viewers closed their eyes as the lingering afterimage evolved. You could go a lifetime, eighty or ninety firsts of July, never seeing The Mushrooming Imprint.

  Myfather’ssignaturefireworkwas‘Bioluminescence.’ “Some creatures produce their own light, Patience. It’s called ‘cold light,’ as it produces no heat. The anglerfish has a glowing bell dangling off the front of its face on a pole of skin, like a man holding a lantern before him in a storm. Smaller fish are enticed into attacking the bell and the anglerfish”—he brought his palms sharply together—“chomp! Deepsea fish cannot exist in sunlight. If you one netted one and dragged it to the surface, its skin would turn to jelly and slide right through your fingers.”

  “Bioluminescence” began by affixing pellets of nitrate fertilizer to monofilament fishing line using a dab of superglue. My father tied these to wooden dowels suspended in a refrigerator box containing a dog’s breakfast of camphors and chlorides, the concentrations of which were guarded even from me. The box sat in our basement—“The Fermentation”— and when its seams were cracked the powders had drawn up to coat the pellets. Gumball-sized with patinas invidious to their creation. Some were riots of colour with rips of magenta and gold. Others dusty under camphorous wraps. They went into honeypots packed with black powder.

  Each ball, wearing dozens of chemical coats, blasted skyward on a tight trajectory. They bounced off one another; each collision peeled a coat. Every carom and ricochet sent the spectacle higher as it burnt brighter. The balls had a brief life span as combustion and contact peeled them down to their fertilizer cores, which burst with a faraway sound not unlike milk-doused Rice Krispies.

  Closing your eyes—as spectators did, instinctively—you would see The Mushrooming Imprint. Think of warm breath on a winter windowpane: tendrils of radiating frost, each unique to the breather.

  My father was a genius. Narrow of scope, but nevertheless.

  I asked my father how creatures came to exist at the bottom of the sea. He said over trillions of years weaker specimens got pushed down deep. Relegated to blackest waters.

  “Darwinism, pet. Big eats small. Nature has its hierarchy. They didn’t end up there of their choice. Who could want to live in the dark?”

  Yet the colossal squid hunts the darkest ocean channels and will attack sperm whales, sharks, even orcas. Prehistoric Megalodon, ten times the size of a great white shark, is believed to still exist in volcanic trenches along the sea bed. As a child it was the darkness between fireworks that enthralled me. The ongoing dark of an unlit sky. Even today I’ll wake in the still hours of night to stare pie-eyed into the darkest corner of my room. Dimensionless black like a hunger. Some organisms are happiest at bonecracking depths, guided by lights of their own kindling.

  “Ms. Nanavatti? Patience Nanavatti?”

  “This is she.”

  “Donald Kerr. From Wal-Mart. The legal end of the boat.”

  I picture him hogfaced in a southernfried lawyer getup. Those white suits that incorporate the sweat of their wearers to set the works aglitter like a stretch of sun-dappled shoreline.

  “We’re calling to see how you’ve been since your . . . little incident.”

  “We’re calling?”

  “I mean to say, we, the legal team. May I first of all say, kudos! Were it not for your calm in the eye of the typhoon, a young life would have been snuffed. A toilet. Dear God. Happens every day, Ms. Nanavatti; that’s the horrifying truth. Babies left in Arby’s dumpsters and worse. The other day one poor dear was found in a crack den—you’re familiar with crack, Ms. Nanavatti? The inexpensive derivative of cocaine?—in a crack den, Ms. Nanavatti, behind the radiator, Ms. Nanavatti. Good Lord,” he says, as if in horrified realization at the past fifty words to exit his mouth. “Mainly women commit these acts. As I’ve noticed in researching the incident you were involved in. The hero of! I mean not to impugn your sex; yours is the better of mine, as anyone associated with reprobate behaviour will attest. You try to make sense of it, Ms. Nanavatti. I mean myself, a man, a father. Beggars reason. An ongoing struggle between mother and child? The mother’s way of saying, I bore you into this world, chum, and I can as easily take you out?”

  I smile. Not at the grisly bent of Donald Kerr’s mind, but at the fact a company of Wal-Mart’s stature has retained such a colossal wingnut as legal council.

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “Who would? Crazyperson talk! This job’ll do that to the best of us—not to claim I ever was. Have you children, Ms. Nanavatti?”

  “Not as yet.”

  “Flummoxed to hear it. Scalded, electrocuted, burnt to bones. Horrifying to do to anyone, let alone an infant. Donald,” he scolds himself, an old dog beyond better breeding. “Again, I apologize. Some at this firm believe I ought to retire, Ms. Nanavatti. Rumblings I’ve become an eyesore and embarras
sment.”

  “Are you calling in reference to a problem?”

  “Oh-ho-ho, heavens no! It’s only . . . have you much familiarity with the law, Ms. Nanavatti? Lawsuits? Citizens of our great land have it into their heads they’re karmically entitled to gross financial recuperation for every petty inconvenience. It’s a finger-pointing, me-first, I-was-wronged-so-gimmegimme legal system. Give a jackal a bite of meat and it’ll come ripping for your jugular!”

  He apologized for this second outburst. I was beginning to like Donald Kerr.

  “Ms. Nanavatti, you may recall that dizzy old grandma—sorry, sorry; everybody’s got a grandma— that dotty old darling who dumped McDonald’s coffee in her lap. A cool mil for a first-degree burn? Buy plenty of calamine lotion. Marinate in the muck. Okay, maybe her coffee was a touch hot. What’s the alternative? Serve it cold? Nonsense! Consider your—our—situation in this light. A baby nearly dies in a washroom. Not any old washroom: the most successful retail chain in the free world. Not flukily or through folly of its own devising. Maliciously. What can my client do? Video cameras in their bathrooms? Fah! Customers will worry about seeing themselves on those Girls-Caught-Peeing websites. No bathrooms, then? Let shoppers tinkle into the pockets of winter coats? Building codes dictate sanitary washrooms in retail outlets. It’s one ittybitty word, safe, at issue. Are the bathrooms safe? Insofar as there is nothing innately dangerous about them. Wal-Mart’s hardware section isn’t innately dangerous until someone grabs a hammer and brains somebody in Electronics. Nothing innately dangerous about coffee, either. Still, one clumsy dingbat made mucho hay off a cup of coffee. There’s always that nickel to be shaved.” Donald Kerr laughs a sporting laugh. “Bleed the beast but leave enough to keep the heart pumping to bleed it a little more!”

  “I’d better have my people call your people,” I tell him, and hang up.

  Afterwards I decide to take a walk. The sky is threatening so: galoshes and an umbrella. After two blocks the clouds withdraw. Sunlight paints the neighbourhood. My feet, trapped in militarysurplus rainboots, are sweating furiously. Mormon kids from Glenridge Academy pedal by on bicycles: boys and girls dressed the same, riding the same sized bikes with matching white helmets following their headmistress. Ducklings waddling after their mother.