What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  Ray had growled, spat.

  When he had started working there was more crew. It was summer. College guys worked for the summer, and there was more work: the gardens and the mowing. Then they all were laid off except Cliff and Ray and a woman, Nicki, who worked through the winter, doing what there was to do: trim trees and hedges, sweep up branches broken in storms. Clear leaves from drains. Shovel up snow if there was any. This was Cliff’s third winter. Nicki was in the greenhouses this week.

  Nicki had warned him: Nicki had said, don’t trust Ray far as you can throw him. He’d forgotten. He oughtn’t to have told Ray about his purchase. He shouldn’t have let Ray know. Ray was too good at weaseling out things. He’d just asked, can you give me a lift from a store, and Ray had been on him for the details. Now he had to get out of it, hope Ray would forget. And he had to find another method of transport; that was for sure.

  IT HAS TAKEN CLIFF YEARS to find a place of his own. He’d been in shared houses before: Often, he’d been able to afford only a mattress in a corner of a room shared by two other people, who themselves shared kitchen and bathroom with another couple, on a floor in a house cut up into similar floors. Smells of toilets, always, and cooking, burned grease that seemed to coat the walls, mildew in floor joists, cat pee in carpets. Laundry in the basement (also inhabited, every square inch), machines always in use or broken. Doors that no longer fit. Nothing could be left unlocked without someone helping himself to it. (Accusations, always, of theft, of breakage, and fights.) Twenty-five or even fifteen-watt bulbs put in by landlords who were waiting for land prices to rise, waiting to buy whole blocks of old houses, who were not willing to put in any more time or money than necessary into repairs, who weren’t often appealed to anyway, because there were always more people sharing the space than the lease allowed, always more people looking for a space to live.

  Two of the places Cliff has lived in have since been razed. Completely erased, the space they occupied, along with adjacent spaces, now filled with concrete and glass high-rises. Boutique shops on the street level, condominiums above. The city is remaking itself from the centre outward.

  Cliff had known, almost instinctively, that he could find more space, more affordable space, by moving outward, ahead of the expansion, moving out of the downtown, but he had clung to it as if it had been a village he had always lived in, a village his ancestors had inhabited for generations. He had understood that the city core was becoming more and more expensive, that it consumed its denizens with its overpriced stores, the convenience stores that charged double for a carton of milk as the bigger stores a kilometre out, that the noise and smog, the fouled sidewalks, the fortressed new high-rises sprouting up, growing, like bull kelp, metres every day, gobbling the sunshine — had understood that these elements were sucking out his money, his health, his spirit. But he had not been able to venture out of the city’s core. It was his home territory. It was as if an invisible ring of markings kept him from venturing.

  He had stood on the sidewalk and watched one of his habitations smashed by heavy balls on cranes: the wrecking ball knocking out walls so that a room he had lived in for months, with its thickly-layered paint and discoloured wallpaper, the plaster behind them, the lamp-cord wiring and patched lead-soldered plumbing, the cracked lino, the shredded carpets, the rotten plywood and sturdy oak and old-growth fir beneath them — were suddenly raggedly torn open, exposed, with a terrible revelation, like an x-ray of some broken creature — and then, in the next swing, gone. Dust.

  How a space you had lived in — filled with your possessions and your music and your thoughts — could be eliminated, cease to exist. That was the strange thing.

  He had applied at different apartment buildings further out, east, along Main and Commercial, even Renfrew, leaving so much of the application forms blank that he knew he would never be considered. But then, after he had been working for the landscaping job for a few months, he had suddenly got a call from this place off Main, so far south he didn’t know the bus route. He had moved up the waitlist. He could move in.

  It was a studio suite, which meant no separate bedroom. He had hoped for a separate bedroom. Then it would feel like a real house. But there was a bathroom, with a working toilet, a sink, a bathtub with a shower, and a kitchenette, with an actual working stove and refrigerator. And it was all his.

  After he moved in people he had known kept tracking him down, saying they needed a place to stay for a few days. But he did not let them in. He had longed for his own space for so many years that he was resolute.

  The bathtub and the toilet and sink were a strange pink colour, like the insides of ears, and there was pink and white hexagonal tile on which grew a variety of moulds and fungi and algae. There were bugs in the kitchen that could never be got rid of, that taught him quickly to keep his food in jars with tight lids. The stove was yellow and the refrigerator was green, and then when that one stopped working, almond.

  It was all his.

  He’d got a bed from Goodwill, with only a few stains on the mattress. A real bed with a frame and box spring. No room for a couch but he’d found an armchair in pretty good shape in the alley. Table and one chair from someone’s garage sale. Dishes, the same.

  For a while it seemed that there was no end to things he needed to acquire for his apartment. Sheets and blankets. Lamps. Cooking pots. Cleaning things. For a while, he had felt dizzy with the proliferation of things he owned. He would come back from shopping expeditions with a bag of items to wash and put away, and he felt a kind of disgust, a surfeit. He slept long, heavily, then: ten hours a day, more on weekends.

  But he had found most things for a nickel or a quarter. There was nothing in his place that he had not found and brought back that he did not know intimately. Everything was catalogued and described in his mind. Everything glowed in his imagination with its own selfness.

  He bought cleaners and a scrubbing brush and cleaned everything. He washed all of the cloth things and dried them in the big front-loader dryers, feeding in more and more quarters, staying to watch nobody removed them still damp to appropriate the machines, waiting until they were over-dry, too hot almost to touch. Then, he thought, they were really clean.

  ONE DAY HE HAD NOTICED someone on his floor was steam-cleaning their carpets. You were supposed to do this before you moved out: if you didn’t it was deducted from the damage deposit. But the cleaning never seemed to have been done when people moved in. Someone was cleaning, though, an older lady, and everyone opening their doors and grinning, like she was throwing money away. But Cliff asked her: Could he borrow the machine for twenty bucks if she had time left on the rental, and she said yes, suspiciously, afraid of being scammed, of course. Yes if he would carry it down the stairs for her after and put it in her car. Which he did, after he had steamed the heck out of his carpeting and the armchair, years of dirt making a black soup in the collecting tank of the machine. Had gone over the rug again and again, till he was afraid the water — it wasn’t really steam, but hot water with some sort of detergent in it — would start dripping through the ceiling of the suite below his.

  He’d got his first TV at a yard sale: It was very small and not all of the channels worked. But cable was included in the rent automatically so it felt like a kind of economy. Then he had started watching nature shows and cooking shows, crime dramas and BBC dramas and sometimes old movies in the evenings and on weekends and his life had grown richer and rounder, as if he’d moved to another country.

  He does not bother with soap operas — he is at work anyway — or sitcoms, where people stand in a row and say stupid things to each other, and then a group of unseen people laughs hard. He doesn’t like the sound of the laughter in his place. He doesn’t watch sports, because he doesn’t see the point. And because Ray at work always wants to talk about the game. If he watches the game he will be able to say something about it — he sees the other guys do this — and then Ray will argue with him, tell him he is wrong. He does not se
e the point of that.

  He rides his bicycle to work and locks it in the shed at work and in his apartment when he is home. The building manager had showed him, when he moved in, a place where he could keep a bike: in the basement of the building is a room full of mesh cages with locks where things can be stored. The front door key unlocks this door also, the manager had said, taking him down some steps where rainwater was pooled, showing him a side door, painted army-truck green at one time but dented and graffiti-splotched. Inside a room full of cages. They had numbered tags attached: 313 belonged to Cliff. Same as your apartment, the manager had said. He seemed friendly — old, with white hair sprouting from his ears — but the cages made Cliff nervous. There was some stuff in the cage marked 313, and the manager said, I’ll have to get some wire cutters and get the lock off. You need your own lock. The manager had said, don’t leave anything in cardboard boxes that could be eaten. We got mice here. We got rats. There’s openings, ventilation openings, they can get in. The manager showed him a way to get into the cage room from the back stairwell, the fire exit. There was a door at the back of the room that led to a corridor full of turns, past the electrical room, under ducts and conduits, to another door that opened to the stairwell. If it’s raining, you can come this way, the manager said, but Cliff did not think he would want to.

  Cliff was worried that the previous owner of the boxes and oddments inside the locker would blame him if they came back and found the stuff gone. He didn’t have anything to put in the locker then, and when he bought his bike, he was too afraid of the room with the cages — he didn’t want to leave it down there. He didn’t want to find his way through the maze of underground passages, with their possible rats and mice, either.

  So he rides every day, even in the rain, and he carries his bike up the stairs to his apartment. It doesn’t fit into the elevator.

  His rent takes two-thirds of his paycheque, sometimes more if the weather is poor and there isn’t a lot of work, but that is okay because he doesn’t need much else. When he has money left over, he saves it. He saved up for the bicycle. He has saved up for a new television to replace the yard sale one, which doesn’t work very well. He is saving for a rainy day, so he will never have to beg anyone for a corner of a room again.

  He keeps mostly to himself. That is important, to keep safe by not letting anyone know too much about him, not letting them into his place. He feels — in his bones, he says to himself, but that’s not quite right, it’s really somewhere at the very back or core of his head — that someone is going to try to move into his place, to take over his stuff and his space. He doesn’t know why he would feel this.

  He has let only Cleo see his place. She had phoned him to go for lunch and then had come inside and knocked on his door; the buzzer wasn’t working, she said. It sometimes wasn’t. Then he had tried to come out into the hallway and pull the door behind him but Cleo had pushed the baby at him and slipped by. Cliff, she said, I really need to use your washroom. So she had got in and then she had stood and looked around and said, It’s really nice, Cliff; you’ve fixed it up really nicely. You should put some pictures up on your walls.

  Can’t, he said. The manager said, No nail holes in the walls. It will come out of my damage deposit if I ever have to move.

  They all say that, Cleo said. You put some filler in. But it’s really nice, Cliff.

  He had seen, from her narrowed eyes, that she was thinking about how she would fix it up. The next time he saw her, she had given him a cushion, a big square green cushion. For your place, she had said.

  He did not want a cushion from Cleo to be in his place, but then Sophie had taken to sleeping on it, so he let it stay.

  THE SALESMAN IN THE STORE is about Cliff’s age, middle twenties, and Asian. He doesn’t have an accent, though, and his cheeks are plump, smooth, shiny. Would he have a beard? Older men you see in Chinatown have thin, wispy beards. Cliff doesn’t have much beard, but he doesn’t shave very often, either, so his skin is never smooth. The salesman is wearing a red pullover sweater over a checked shirt. The shirt collar looks tight. Cliff feels a tightness at his own neck, has to run his finger around the neck hole of his T-shirt. It’s not tight but he can feel it as if it is.

  He knows which one he wants. He has spent the last six months researching. You can get the books at the library, reference section, where you look up the consumer ratings. He has looked at all of the flyers that pile up in the mail closet, saved and compared. Now this one he had decided on is on sale, this week only. He had been afraid there would be none left when he got here, but there are two boxes, beside the display one.

  The store’s motto is: We don’t sell, we help you buy. The sales guy doesn’t seem very interested in helping him buy a television, though. Even this one, which is not the cheapest, and has a built-in VHS player. Even after he points out what he wants, leads the guy over to it, the sales guy says, hopefully: Looking for a new computer? Car stereo?

  He doesn’t have a car, has never had a computer. He would like a computer but he doesn’t have the money for that. Anyway he can use the computers in the library. But the sales guy’s disinterest or redirection has him doubting himself suddenly.

  Does he want a TV?

  Yes. That is what he wants. He has looked at flyers and saved up for months.

  Also he has already got rid of his old one, the Sally Ann one with the 13-inch screen that was mostly snow now, carried it down the back stairs before dawn this morning and to a dumpster a couple of blocks away so nobody would notice him getting rid of it, ask questions or guess.

  Maybe it’s a really good deal and the sales guy doesn’t want him to buy it because he won’t make any commission. That would be devious, but too bad. Cliff has a right to buy the TV. But it’s a reassuring thought.

  He knows not to take the one in the box that’s been opened and re-taped, but to ask for the one behind it. And then to ask for the box to be opened and to check that everything is there: the cords, the manual. The sales guy carries it to the counter. Then there’s the handing over of the cash from his wallet: six fifties, two twenties. He’s remembered to have enough for the tax. He’s never had that much cash on him before — or given it into someone else’s hand — but it’s a relief too. He feels lighter, now that he doesn’t have to worry about his wallet, the sense he had that it was sending out signals, some kind of high frequency whistle or smell, advertising the presence of the money.

  He turns down the offer of the extended warranty: He’s read about that. The paperwork. He signs. Then carries the box outside.

  He’d hoped a taxi would come soon but it doesn’t and the box is too heavy to keep holding in his arms. He has to put it down. It starts to rain and he sees the water puddling on the gum- and bird-shit-spattered sidewalk and lifts the box up a little, balances it on his toes, so only one edge is touching the ground. He should have asked the sales guy to call him a cab, maybe. He’s nervous, the crowds of pedestrians pushing by, the big box advertising its contents.

  After a while the sales guy comes out of the door. Hey, man, he says. Are you going very far? I’m leaving in about five. Give you a lift if you want to wait inside?

  It’s said casually, in a friendly way, but Cliff thinks: Not a good idea. He shakes his head.

  When a cab does come, East Indian driver, it stops before he can wave it down, and then he worries: Was it looking for him? Did the sales guy call it? But it’s raining hard now, and dark, and the box darkening, and against his instincts, he lets the driver lift with him the box into the trunk and gets in. Edge of his seat all of the way, watching the route, but the driver stops where he asked and lifts out the box with no alarming deviance from what should happen.

  Two-and-a-half flights up. Cliff finds he can lift the box a couple of steps at a time, set it down, lift it again. Thirty-five stairs. They are carpeted, and he moves steadily but without rushing. He doesn’t think he has made a sound but on the second flight the door from the hallway opens a
nd she’s there, the skinny girl with the sunken eyes, the butterfly tattoo on her neck. She stares at him for a moment, then retreats. He wishes she hadn’t seen. Wishes he’d put his coat over the box, hid the printing.

  Now his floor. Out of the stairwell, holding the spring-loaded door open with his back while he shuffles the box through. Now his door. His keys. Imagines the corridor listening. Shuffles inside, re-bolts. Flips on the light switch. Sophie sitting there in the middle of his room, watching. Seeing him in the dark.

  Home safe.

  You’re going to like this, he says to Sophie.

  Nature

  ON A MAP CLEO HAS SEEN that there is a park greenspace near their house, only a few streets over and a little higher. It’s not on a street they walk or drive, but it’s not far. On a sunny day she packs a picnic and finds their rubbers and they set out, with the stroller.

  Will there be animals? Olivia asks.

  Good question, she says. Maybe. Birds, anyway. She’s afraid of getting lost in the cul-de-sacs but the park is easy enough to find, the entrance marked with a split-log rail and a sign. There are trees, there is underbrush. She can see the new leaves. Birds are singing. Now at its mouth, though, she’s afraid to enter the park. The streets of this neighbourhood seem empty, the houses uninhabited. There is no one to see where they have gone.

  But Olivia has run ahead, is running as if wound up, full of green energy, and Sam bouncing in the stroller, calling out. She wonders, belatedly, about bears and cougars.

  In Butterfly Lake, once, when she was ten or so, she had come face to face with a cougar, on the path. She had walked backward, keeping her eyes on it, the tawny-grey velvety huge catness of it, until around a corner, and then had run.

  There are likely no cougars here. Or bears. Just houses.

  There is a trail paved in chips for the first hundred feet or so — just until the bend, where it can no longer be seen from the street — and then dirt. Or, rather, mud. It’s very damp, the ground soggy, with little pools. She can see why: The forest slope above is running with rivulets. It’s beautiful, jungle-like, thick with cedar and fir and salal and swordfern, the ground swathed in almost bizarrely thick and bright green moss. But the path is very, very wet.