“Well,” he said, still standing close. He braced himself with one hand on a support post as the bus bounced and tilted, and his other reached out in a silly, exaggerated motion towards an imagined horizon. He stared off to the distance and mock-squinted his eyes like the news would be difficult to deliver. “Somewhere...out there...is another beauty with...dare I say it?...one cold hand!” He looked back at her now, and the smile had indeed turned to amusement. But it stretched a little past that and he carried on, maybe a little too far. If she wasn’t the type to think him funny already, she definitely wouldn’t think this worthy of a laugh. “Yes, yes, I know: it’s difficult to imagine. But won’t you help me? Won’t you stand up for justice? Won’t you stand up to fight evil? For the sake of the little people everywhere. The ones with one... cold... hand...”
She didn’t stand up, only looked out the window with her smile still intact. Her tongue was rolled up in her check and she was shaking her head. She bit her lip then, against that smile of amusement and she looked back at him—right in the eyes. That shake said, you’re nuts and everyone on this bus is going to know that. But the smile under the bit lip, in a reluctant sort of way, an admitting sort of way, said, I kind of like that.
Step two. Objective achieved.
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He didn’t quite know how he did it, but he convinced the most beautiful girl he had ever seen to cut class with him and go on a quest to search out the owner of the white mitten. It was, of course, a ruse. She knew it. And he knew it. But he made nearly every offer to her that it was just that. Somehow, though, she seemed ready to accept it, ready to run off with him from the bus when it stopped, hand in hand even, and find a police officer immediately.
When they found one in the Eglinton subway station she dared him to actually approach the cop and tell him the story of the mitten. And he did. She couldn’t believe it, never in a million years did she think he would go that far, ludicrous boy with wild eyes, but he did.
The cop smiled, even listened to the whole tale Zeb had imagined on the spot, the one about injustice, fighting evil and righting the wrongs of cold-handed damsels everywhere. Then the officer got a little grumpy over it and finally told Zeb to carry on.
Zeb was just going to press it a little further, when he felt the girl lean against him and grab his arm, “Come ON!”
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She was a beauty in features and in voice. But also in heart. Her face was like none other, true. But what she had to tell him was a similar kind of magic.
They struck a cord together that afternoon, got mochaccinos from a Starbucks, and walked along Yonge, checking second-hand record stores and seeing how many copies of The White Album they could find. It was a game he had made up then and there, and they were both pleased when they only found six: three on CD, two on vinyl, and a lonely double-length cassette in a store called Darling Ears. That was a gem that few people let go of, Zeb thought. Most people realize the record as a good set of songs, but do they actually like it? Or have they just been told it’s good?
But she was good. He knew that immediately and there would be no one who could tell him better than that. Her name was Caeli. Unprecedented, he thought. He had never met a ‘Caeli’. She had never met a Sebastion. Certainly not one with an o instead of an a near the end. They sat cross-legged on squat cement posts across from a pub where she worked part time and Zeb finally had the nerve to tell Caeli that her eyes were the most stunning things he had ever seen in a face. Somehow, he still doesn’t quite know how it happened, they found themselves in an upheaval of raucous laughter after that and it made him feel like he could tell her anything.
But he didn’t. Not on that day. She was studying at York as well, languages, second year. They both loved music, he liked to paint, she liked to sing baroque in her landlady’s overgrown garden. And that first day, that’s as far as they got into either side. They talked about bigger things mostly, things beyond themselves but instead within the scope of the world at large. And amongst those monstrous topics, they talked about the little things, like the skin on the tops of their coffees, and the sound the soles of their shoes made on gravel as they walked. The hours were consumed.
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They made plans to meet the next afternoon at three at a funky coffee house on the corner of Bloor—one which they both knew, though neither could remember its name. Far earlier than three, Zeb went to the Ground’s Edge and pulled up a chair in the corner, facing the mass of the room. The house stereo was playing a Hawksley Workman record and he read a book of poems, glancing up between each and scanning the room for her.
He had told her he would be reading “The Complete Works of E.E. Cummings,” a well-worn edition with a black cover. And, he added, he would be reading it intently. In his mind he imagined the excitement in her face when she came through the front door, the little cowbell ringing above her head. She would discover him there with that tattered book in his hands and her smile would fill the room as she ran over to him... It was a romantic thought and it replayed in his mind like images caught on a loop of film stock.
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“What does the poem mean?” she asked. She leaned forward and the wooden chair she sat in was made to squeak a little.
“I don’t understand the question,” he responded. He was standing at the front of the class with his copy of the current text in his hand. There were hastily scratched words across the back cover. White words on black.
He was wearing his school uniform, as was everyone else in the classroom. He stood partially turned away from the rows of desks. They were filled with silent faces and curious eyes—and some of those faces were getting ready to snicker. He looked at the teacher’s assistant, Miss Rimbauer, who sat at his teacher’s desk off to one side of the classroom.
“Well, Sebastion, what do the words invoke in you? Do they give you a sense of anything?” She looked a little nervous, to be honest. To Sebastion she seemed wary of what he might say. Miss Rimbauer was young, pretty, and dreadfully inexperienced. She was an intern and this was her first time leading the class. Left alone in the room while Mrs. Woods was off making photocopies, Miss Rimbauer was on her own for the entire afternoon. And she had almost certainly been told by Mrs. Woods of Zeb’s ‘circumstances’.
“Well, they make me see colors.”
“Oh. Okay. What kinds of colors?”
“Orange. Yellow mostly.”
“And does that help you with the meaning of it?”
“M-Hmmm.” He looked down at his feet and the sniggers finally came. They started in the back.
Miss Rimbauer glanced in the direction of the noise, but quickly looked back at Sebastion. “So, does the poem have a meaning then?”
“It means...” He trailed for a moment, then looked back up at her, “It means we’re all dying in the sun.”
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Three-thirty came so quickly. By then, on the overhead speakers inside the Ground’s Edge, the Workman record had ended. Now it was The Dandy Warhols, telling him that he was Godless. He looked about the café and it was empty. Full of people, but empty.
Below him on the table’s coffee-ringed surface, overturned with a straining and lined spine, was the black-faced book of poems. On its closing cover, the following short verses lay, scratched with the point of a thumb tack to become stiff white words made flat on the shiny surface:
The tick-tock walk
Of a grandfather clock
One day will end,
One day will balk.
And the steady commands
Of its laden hands
Will turn, then rest,
‘Pon where it stands.
The tick-tock mock
Of that grandfather clock
Will some day cease
To even talk.
He could still hear the clock in his head as he read those words now. It had a rhythm and an audibility that he would probably live alongside right to the end.
He remembe
red writing the words and that felt like a million years earlier. An intern—what was her name? The giggling fifth graders. Right... Appreciation for Literature. She had made him come to the front of the class and recite his homework poem, one displaying a use of three major elements in poetic style. Only he hadn’t written one, hadn’t wanted to.
He had scratched “Tick-Tock” out on the back of his E.E. Cummings text in the ten or so minutes before his name was called. And that intern, Miss Rimbauer, was never the wiser. Course, as usual, everyone had laughed. She got flustered like she always did and he was made to sit down without identifying any of the key elements of poetic style. That was just as well. They had been laughing after all.
Alone with everybody, he sat until four, waiting on Caeli. That was when he finally realized there was a lecture he needed to attend. With no pay phone in the Ground, he had to run, full tilt, four blocks to the nearest public phone. He dialed the number of a classmate and begged her for the day’s notes, then hoofed it back to the crowded coffee place. She was nowhere, and his table had been stolen. He pawed at his brain with tired imaginary fingers and tried to convince himself he had not been at the telephone long enough that she would have come by and left already. He found a seat at the counter, this one a little closer to the door, declined a cup of coffee, and waited two more hours. She was worth that and more, he decided. But she never came. He stared down at those words, the tick-tock mock of a grandfather clock.
And he left feeling powerless.
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He reeled after that, for weeks and weeks. In his mind, he replayed their first day together over and over and he could never really understand what went wrong. He expected to come across her on the bus but she was never there and so he carried that dirty white mitten at the bottom of his book bag, everywhere he went. There was no reason in particular. So much time had passed by then that he stopped expecting to see her and he didn’t know what he would say anyway. He certainly didn’t expect to just walk up, hand her the thing, and everything would work out. That would be empty idealism according to Oliver.
But just outside a theatre at school, he saw her walking in a direction vaguely away from him. It was a brief glance, among the throng milling about, one that happened across her face and hair, but he was certain it was her—even though they had not made eye contact. In fact, she had not seen him at all; he was sure of that.
He wanted to run up to her, hold out his arms and blurt like a child, “I was there!” But he didn’t. She was with friends and they were talking hurriedly. Further embarrassment could be avoided. His eyes followed her as she turned off towards a set of lockers near the student center. He approached, cautiously, and saw her withdraw books from one and then walk off, eventually parting ways with her friends.
From his bag he withdrew the infamous white mitten. On a piece of note paper he scrawled, “But worlds are made of hello and goodbye.” It’s time for hello again. Then he added, quickly, without thinking, his phone number.
He curled up the paper and stuffed it inside the white mitten. Then, after stealing a roll of tape from an office down the hall, he pasted it with lengths of the stuff to her locker door.
Caeli called him that night. And they talked for hours. At first it was stifled. He was surprised to hear from her, and she was surprised to be holding that silly lost mitten. In truth, it had made her dial the numbers. It was, to her, the memory of a fantastic moment, and one that she hadn’t wanted to throw out. But still, she had discarded it. She said quietly, “You didn’t come...but it’s okay. No big deal.”
He wanted to interject, to explain, and to understand what had happened but he let it go. For the first time, he sensed the confrontation wouldn’t be worth it and he let it go. “You don’t take the bus to class anymore.”
“No. Some days, yeah. But my landlady, bless her heart, she lets me use her car since I promised to take her to appointments, get her pills and go to shopping the odd day.”
For a while, Sebastion circled what he really wanted to ask. He was holding the handset loosely to his ear and making small-talk. He did that routine until he couldn’t stop himself any longer. “Why did you get off the bus with me?”
“You said my greens pulled you in,” she answered, almost without any pause at all, nearly like she had been waiting for the question. “Well your blues did the same to me. I looked at them, at you, and knew that you meant every crazy word you said.”
They found their feet again, Sebastion and Caeli, quicker than either had thought possible. And in the coming weeks the white mitten, that fuzzy white mitten that neither of them could bring themselves to launder, had found its way between their two houses more times than could be counted. She left it in his mailbox with a note inside, quoting Cummings’ “I Have Found What You Are Like.”
It meandered back to Caeli at campus lot E4, clinging beneath her landlady’s wiper blade. Tucked inside on that day was a snatch of Cummings’ “In Just- Spring.” And, in a stroke of genius, Zeb thought, he found the mitt stuck on the end of a branch outside his bedroom window—the one on which Oliverthecrow usually sat. Contained in it that day, were two tickets to the symphony.
And so it went on like this, back and forth. The messages got ever longer, and the implications became ever more pronounced. If Sebastion had been asked, he would have said it was love. Or at least it should have been love.
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His father continued to hand Zeb the newspaper across the dinner table. And he continued to make offhanded remarks about the cost of tuition. They weren’t necessarily intentional, and certainly not mean, but they were always there. That newspaper nagged at him. It said to him, here. Do something. Do Anything. Like introducing himself to Caeli as Sebastion, and not Zeb, this was a faint but omnipresent indication of things rolling over. It made his eyes itch, made them irritated, and finally drove him to do just what dad’s subtle lack of eye contact had instructed. There was a quiet determination in the back corner of his thoughts to at least start paying a portion of his own way. The comments, offhanded as they may have been, were on the mark. Dad had stepped up and had paid for everything. Zeb’s first choice may not have been business classes at York but he was there, and it would land him in a good career. He owed his father a great deal for that at least. Didn’t he?
Jackson was visibly goaded when Zeb started blowing him off to spend time actually writing his papers, but he became nearly irate when Zeb announced he had a job at Painter’s Palette, an art supply store on North Bathurst. To him, it meant the duo was done. As much as he had struggled against it since Vivian had entered, then exited, the picture he now knew the team’s days of waking up at noon on school days in foreign bathtubs with water-thin blood were over. But for Jackson that seemed nearly okay. He clung less after that, and Sebastion would come to realize that Jack had meandered, subtly, into another world. For Jackie-O Sebastion’s new focus was just as well.
The pay at the Palette was terrible, minimum wage plus a nickel, but at least he could smell canvas, feel the metal tubes of acrylics and oils, and tell patrons which supplies to use with which techniques. That was something and it made him enjoy the work. Painter’s Palette was in the ground floor of an old red and tan brick brownstone that had a minor addition tacked on to the back for a stockroom. Stacks of canvas, rolls and pre-stretched, along with crates and boxes, sat in the long narrow room. It had a low tin roof, and walls of tan brick similar to the original construction, but obviously newer. The malevolent sun made it an oven on hot days and the dry air sat unstirred like the inside of a stifling coffin where every breath inhaled was a gag and every breath let out was a choke.
But for Zeb the smells were the thing. Sometimes the lack of ventilation made them hang in the still air and cling to the heat of it. And sometimes he would go back there during a slow moment and just sit on a box to take it into his lungs.
After an all-nighter and the arbitrarily dry introductory finance exam that followed, Zeb was feeli
ng pent-up and overtired at the front desk of the Palette. His shift ended at nine and he was to meet Caeli at her place after that. But he was beginning to consider the alternative: sleep at home, alone.
The clouds that night were luminous, fraying cotton-candy patches drifting in front of a dark flannel sheet where pinprick holes winked and teased. The evening was cooling off as it got towards nine, but the store still held the day’s heat. He decided to head back to the tin and brick stockroom and sit for a moment to try and regain his composure. His heart always seemed to beat a little faster when he hadn’t had enough sleep. It was like it was trying to catch up. He wondered, briefly, if doubling or tripling up like that for a day would shorten his life by twelve hours or so. Maybe a heart only has so many beats, and if you use them up, they’re just gone. Then he laughed to himself: what an insane idea! Zeb, he said to himself, you need to go home and lay your head down—no Caels tonight. No, not tonight.
A moment later, he was sitting on a crate, trying to compose himself after his endless day, trying to tame the spinning of his worn brain. His elbows were propped on his knees, his hands holding his head up and shaking a little—like his too-fast heart, his hands always quivered a little when he hadn’t had sleep. And to confound matters, he was a long way off before another meal. There had been no one in the store for at least an hour so he figured he could get away with a moment’s peace here under the bare bulb behind the swinging stock door. Sitting in the back would be better than taking his rest up front. Sometimes the boss showed up near eight or so—Nathaniel Darlinger, that was, the slightly exaggerated and eccentric painter who owned the place. If Mr. Darlinger did come tonight it would be better that he found Zeb away from the counter in the back, than propped up on a stool near the front window where anyone could see him snoozing soundly. This way, at least, he could sit more comfortably and he would still hear the bell over the door if it rang, giving him enough time to snag a small box and head back out front, making it look like he was just fetching some stock to busy himself. He preferred it back here because it was good cover for Mr. Darlinger and because it was the one moment in his day when he could be absolutely and completely alone. But then there were the smells. Paint and thinner. The odor of metal tins and of canvas stock permeated this space. And that recharged him a little. If only a little.
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