Stanley Park

by Timothy Taylor

  He turned next to the handwritten notes. They were journal entries, a careful record, although the handwriting was exceedingly scattered. Letters slanted different directions within a single word, words themselves floating free of the lines or sinking into the line below. The pages looked old, although they were not dated with a year. Maybe the writer had been caught up in the precise limits of the moment being lived, and the future (in this case the future reader) had been an impossible abstraction.

  Jeremy took a breath, preparing himself, then read.

  Some introductory words: [the text began]

  It should be understood that my interest in this place is longstanding. I have expected for some time that I should return here once my study achieved a certain focus, and that this return might represent the culmination of all previous work.

  Jeremy leaned back in his chair, rolled his head back and looked at the ceiling.

  “God,” he said. How had he not seen it coming? These words were, to say the least, somewhat Professorial.

  Jeremy leaned forward again and considered the page more closely. The only thing wrong was the illegible handwriting, cursive but barely. Each letter, each stroke within each letter, was individual, separate from the word. As if the words might disassociate from one another any minute, the letters within each word disband and fly off the page.

  The Professor had only a few pretensions in the material realm, but penmanship and fine writing accoutrements were definitely two. Jeremy recalled him signing field trip approval slips with a LeGrand Montblanc Bordeaux, and for special occasions unsheathing a huge Pelikan fountain pen made of bottle-green glass with inlaid silver birds. His handwriting matched the equipment: elegant, aloof and singular. Broad, flat strokes (only a particular obscure nib would do) leaning distinctly left on the page, despite the Professor being right-handed. It was so dense and consistent from top to bottom that a complete page of his writing had a distinctive uniform brocade. And then there were the touches. The final r in Papier, for example. It didn’t finish in the little dimpled anthill you were taught in penmanship classes, but formed itself like the printed r, a haughtier letter entirely: a short, sharp vertical stroke, with a flaring finish, tapering dramatically up and to the right. The same way, every time.

  Someone with bad handwriting and a similar interest? Was there anyone with a similar interest? A colleague?

  Jeremy read on.

  What I couldn’t have known is that Miss Harker would provide this focus. Witnesses, after all, are not my interest. The murder of the Babes in the Wood, as a murder in itself, was not really my concern. And yet I was interested in this girl, in how she had acted out her heartbreak at leaving Vancouver among these trees on the same day as the murder. And how by doing so she had unwittingly cemented herself into the story, into the landscape from which she had been uprooted, the same landscape of which these children had become a tragic part.

  I went and interviewed her earlier this year. We had tea, spoke at length. She told me the things I knew already: the woman, the two children. But she told me something else, far more interesting. She told me of a premonition, a vision that unfolded under a cloud of fear. She thought she might have fainted; she found herself on her back, the forest rising above her. The air was suddenly dark and in the darkness the forest was filled with people, with sounds.

  When she came to, there had been a young man there. Skinny and ragged. He disappeared into the forest, but he had touched her forehead as she lay. She knew so, she said, from a smudge she found there later.

  Enter Caruzo. I have wondered about his role, and this visit (after many) I am determined to lay this matter finally to rest. I hope he will answer my questions. I hope also that I can last. This work presents a mental and physical test. Tonight, to begin, I will hike across the hillside a safe distance and set up my own camp.

  August 13

  Drizzling at seven-thirty in the evening …

  There followed a week of weather reports, while the author waited for Caruzo to reappear. Then, a little further down:

  August 21

  We aren’t talking about much yet, but he has consented to show me around. Caruzo, for the record: tall and heavy, 230 pounds. Age difficult to guess: fifty, sixty even. Large nose. Black and grey, distant eyes; he is caked in evidence of his surroundings. Dirt lines his face and neck and lives under his nails.

  What I know about his past is limited. He speaks of voices. He was institutionalized at one point. Received electroshock. Schizophrenia, I believe.

  He carries nothing, has no evident totem. No toby. Talks in riddles, repeating words like incantations. His are mad, angelic ramblings.

  The weather reports and geographic detail resumed as Caruzo slipped out of reach into the forest. Jeremy skimmed down two weeks to find where the story resumed.

  September 9

  Caruzo has returned. Two excellent days of work. He talks lately of our estrangement: from the earth, from “the garden.” He said something very odd: “The two are meant to be together. Just as the two were drawn from the same soil, so too must the same soil hold them, and through it must they be reconciled.”

  He speaks of the children, I’m sure. As if the wrong might be righted by his long presence here. And I sense it is a long time. When asked, he did not appear to know that it is 1987.

  Will the ’90s bring better things for him? I don’t think anyone in the city yet understands what he might be saying, what he might represent: the first of a latter-day generation that will live as he does.

  An aside: Dr. Tully hung up on me this morning. He rejects this data gathering technique. “We do not believe that anecdote is evidence,” he said.

  On other fronts, Hélène grieves. I have broken with my normal practice and begun to call. Each time there are many, many tears.

  Jeremy pulled his head out of the carrel sharply. When it came, he thought, understanding came suddenly.

  1987. Hélène.

  Jeremy hunched back over the yellow pages, reading and rereading the sentences with a new hunger.

  Mid-September

  I have been granted sick leave.

  September 24

  I have begun to feel less like a visitor and more like a resident, an altogether unexpected pleasure. Caruzo has shown me much. He has covered my tent with maple leaves that overlap downwards and spread onto the ground. In the wet they facilitate run-off and minimize flooding.

  I have lately begun to realize how permanent this arrangement could be. Caruzo has shown me a simple snare for squirrels, a lasso of copper electrical wire. He has shown me how to catch starlings on a stick with peanut butter and glue. Ducks may be netted, although the technique is fiendishly difficult. I am changed by this selective and respectful harvest. The bounty of the park, given up to those who care to know it, binds us to it.

  Last week of September

  We have had the long-awaited breakthrough. We were eating, talking little. Without prompting, he repeated something he said weeks ago: “The two are meant to be together.”

  Who? I pressed.

  He saw the children. Frankie and Johnny, he calls them. He saw them enter the forest with their mother. He followed at a distance. He saw the girl, Miss Harker, lying in the path. He stopped over her. He touched her face and she woke. Startled him. He ran into the forest. He crashed in circles, became lost. The children were gone.

  October

  He is gone a week and I am afraid for him. For myself. I have pneumonia and cannot sleep for terrible fever dreams.

  Last night there were children outside my tent. I cannot describe it any other way except to say that I was awakened by their glow. I was afraid, filled with unknowable fear. Through the nylon walls of my tent I saw the yellow and orange light, and I began to shake uncontrollably. I began to weep.

  A boy’s voice, a small boy, said: “Come out.”

  I crawled out into the ferns. He was crouched near the fire pit, with a stick in his hand, poking the coals back
to life. The little girl stood next to him, silent. She held a duck, by the neck. It had just been killed.

  “Are you hungry?” the boy asked me, looking at me, through me.

  I didn’t answer. I was numb.

  He stood away from the fire. He looked like any number of boys I have seen swinging on swings or playing with matches over the years.

  The girl held the duck up towards me and smiled.

  I woke remembering this scene, disturbed. I climbed from my tent and down through the forest to the men’s room at Second Beach. Caruzo has shown me how a pane of glass can be removed from the rear of the structure, allowing one to use the hot water before the front door is unlocked. I washed at the basin, feeling a strange stillness stretching away all around me.

  I paused on the trail, walking back, thinking of all that I had learned. I saw myself here for many years, as he has been. As they have been, the two children. And with this thought came another, a sweeping thought of Hélène. In the cool of the morning, in the dew and across cold pavement I made my way to a pay phone. I phoned her, needing to hear her voice. Needing her to understand what must come next. She didn’t answer. The phone rang and rang.

  Part of me wishes to submerge here, to understand perhaps finally the lesson about all places that is buried here. But I will return to my other home instead. Return and repair what damage I may have done.

  I still don’t know if he found the children, but I believe he searched for a very long time. Years even. And at some point, his searching turned to guarding, of a memory, a site of memories that might be made holy through his steadfast watching, through his resolution to remember. Somehow he has remained and become the first, again. Resident zero in the new community that has grown here.

  I will remember the following strange words: “… meant to be together. Just as the two were drawn from the same soil, so too must the same soil hold them, and through it must they be reconciled.”

  The others are drawn to his vigilance.

  Jeremy was almost entirely numb by the time he had finished reading. Numb and oddly frightened. He walked to the washroom on stiff legs, washed his face at the stainless steel basin. It was as close as he had ever returned to those moments of blinding grief. As he stood at the mirror, water running from his face, he wondered what his father could have felt standing in the men’s room at Second Beach that day. He imagined having made the same discovery. This living theatre of rootedness, born in tragedy and thriving in the person of Caruzo. Ignorant for just those few remaining hours of the strange tragedy that had already fallen in his own life. In their life. He could not know how the two of them were about to diverge. First fleeing one another, and then, brought together again by their twinned obsessions: seeking.

  At the Social Sciences desk Gil was atypically gregarious.

  “Well …,” he asked, “how was that?”

  “Fine,” Jeremy said. It was necessary to be out of this place.

  Gil smiled a narrow smile. “You read the notes. Crazy, hey?”

  “No. I don’t think so.”

  “You’re a writer,” Gil guessed. “A TV writer. You write for The X-Files or no, wait, Last Chapter.”

  Jeremy shook his head. “I’m a chef.”

  Gil was suitably surprised.

  “The notes. They appeared in the file one day, unexplained,” Jeremy ventured.

  Gil nodded. “A few years ago. I assumed they were intended for someone. Maybe you know who wrote them.”

  “I’m pretty sure I do,” Jeremy said.

  “Well, take ’em then.” He warmed discernibly. He took the file, extracted the notes and handed them to Jeremy. “So, where do you cook?”

  “The Monkey’s Paw Bistro,” Jeremy said, proud to speak of it. “That’s my restaurant.”

  “What kind of food?” Gil asked.

  Jeremy was about to explain urban rubber-boot food to Gil. He was about to grow enthusiastic about local bounty, about the soil under their feet, about the richness of knowing what that soil could offer, when it came to him rather starkly that his restaurant was closed.

  “That was my restaurant,” he said. “In fact, it’s closed now. It’s reopening, eventually. We’re reopening. I have a partner. But there will be another restaurant. A new one. New name and everything.”

  He stopped talking.

  “Hey, if you’re sure,” Gill said, and with that he spun and wheeled away.

  He made one last visit to The Paw to remove things from the kitchen that he didn’t want touched by the designers, whoever they were going to be. The Fugami blade of course, but also some of his smaller knives and favourite utensils (a green Vaseline glass lemon juicer, by contrapuntal example).

  When he was finished he stood for a moment with his loaded box and looked around. The Zone. The blackened range, towering still. The familiar black and white tiles of the floor. The swinging door into the dining room.

  “Goodbye,” he said aloud, then noticed that Jules had left one of her chef’s jackets hanging on the back of a shelving unit. He picked it up and turned it over in his hands. The heavy white cloth was lightly stained at the cuffs and across the front. Stained with some simple dish they had jointly created. He fingered the embroidered Capelli on the left breast. He began instinctively folding it, folding in the dirty sleeves onto the breast, doubling down the jacket onto itself.

  And then, without warning, he was crying. Bawling, mewling, blubbering. He found himself saying aloud: “What?” As this riptide swept around him, his mouth and nose filling with mucus. “What?” he said, hands to his temples now as Jules’s jacket dropped to the floor. His shoulders were shaking with convulsions, eyes seized shut, mouth agape, slick strands of viscous fluid connecting his upper and lower teeth and lips. “What?”

  “You don’t like that we might be working on parallel projects,” the Professor had once said to him. He might have made the comment years before. They were feasting on a canvasback together. A bird plucked from the lagoon, spit-roasted simply.

  His head was spinning. He picked up the jacket and wiped his face with it, paused. He wondered what his father had done, packing away her clothes. He pushed his face back into the safety of that stained cloth. There was a residual smell of her, not perfume of course but sweat. A tired smell, an end-of-the-night smell. The smell of their hugs after things had really worked.

  God help me, thought Jeremy, standing with his face still buried.

  He lifted his head from the damp jacket, which he stuffed into the cardboard box on top of his knives. Looking up, he saw the lumpy, rain-soaked figure standing there regarding him.

  “Jesus!” His whole body jerked back in surprise.

  “Hey, hey. Hey.”

  “Caruzo.” He was almost yelling. “Don’t do that! You scared me.”

  “Smoke, Jay?”

  So they smoked together, Jeremy’s hands shaking. Caruzo was looking around the place, nodding, not understanding why the lights were out. Saying nothing for a long time.

  “Hey, Jay. Know something? Wanna know something. I never cry. True. Never cry. Not even once. Not then. Not now.”

  “Forget it, would you? As a favour, just forget it.”

  But now Caruzo was staring blankly at him, having moved on from the particulars of the incident. He had something else to say.

  “OK, why? Why don’t you cry, Caruzo?”

  “No ducts,” Caruzo said, exhaling smoke. “I got no ducts. No ducts at all. Anywhere in my head. No ducts. My head is defective that way.”

  “Because you have no ducts,” Jeremy said.

  “My old man had no ducts neither,” Caruzo said.

  Jeremy smoked and nodded. “Both my old man and I have ducts,” he said to Caruzo.

  Jeremy might have guessed that was Caruzo’s point all along. “You do,” Caruzo said to him. “Ducks and ducts. Your old man. You too. Ducts and ducks.”

  Jeremy began to laugh. It was a satisfactory alternative to crying, although it too required
ducts. He laughed until a different kind of tears came down his cheeks. Caruzo laughed along politely with him, a steady dry chuckle.

  “You have time,” Caruzo said, when they were finished. “You have some time today, tomorrow?”

  “I have time,” Jeremy said, taking a last draw on his cigarette.

  “You coming to the park maybe?” Caruzo said. “Coming on down to the woods?”

  I am, Jeremy thought, nodding to Caruzo. I most certainly am.

  STROMOVKA

  “Dinner. Yeah?” Caruzo was saying.

  The Professor looked at Jeremy.

  “Dinner,” Jeremy agreed. “I’ll cook.”

  “Hooray,” Caruzo said, then crashed off into the bush.

  Jeremy glanced after him, then over to his father.

  The Professor shrugged. “It’s best not to try and understand his comings and goings,” he said. “He’ll be back.”

  The Professor had been proudly displaying his new snare. “Observe,” he said to Jeremy now. He unfolded a white cane that he had pulled from his knapsack. “The net was a dead giveaway. But it is remarkable, really, how the blind are left alone. Police, especially. It embarrasses them.”

  “You pretend to be blind?”

  “When I walk the park trails near public spaces, I use the cane. It took some trial and error,” the Professor said, snapping together the cane into a single 4 ½-foot length. He paused here for a second. “The original idea was to fasten my Swiss Army knife to the tip like a spear.”

  Jeremy shook his head.

  “Precisely. A violent, uncertain undertaking. I maimed a squirrel, I’m afraid. Never caught him. Caruzo was quite upset with me.”