Vinyl Cafe Unplugged

by Stuart McLean

  Suddenly Brenda understood what was going on. Of course he knew she was there. That wasn’t a burglar in the bathroom. It was a killer. He wasn’t going to the toilet. He was sending her a message. He was going to kill and dismember her. Then he was going to flush her down the toilet.

  Brenda did the only sensible thing she could think of doing under the circumstances. She jumped out of bed, clamped her eyes shut and leapt out the bedroom window.

  Dave’s neighbor Jim Scoffield, who happened to be sitting in his backyard, smoking a cigarette and enjoying the warm evening, looked up when the window exploded. He said it was the most remarkable thing he ever saw in his life.

  “At first I thought it was Morley,” he said. “I was sitting there and all of a sudden out she flew. I thought it was a gas explosion. I thought maybe I was next.”

  Brenda landed on the roof of the gardening shed in Dave’s backyard. She landed on her feet, like a cat, and stood there, looking around. She had a few cuts on her arms, a big bruise on her shin, a sprained ankle, but nothing serious.

  Jim looked at her across the fence. They made eye contact, and then they both looked up at the same time at the broken window she had sailed through. Galway was standing on the window ledge flicking her tail at the moon. Jim and Brenda looked at the cat and then back at each other.

  Still they hadn’t said a word.

  It was Jim, who comes from the Annapolis Valley, who spoke first.

  “Nice night,” he said.

  He came over and helped her down from the shed roof. She was wearing a pair of flannel pajamas she sometimes wears when she takes the cab out in the middle of the night, so she didn’t feel completely uncomfortable to be out in them.

  They went inside together to look for the burglar but only got as far as the kitchen. That’s when Brenda mentioned the toilet flushing. That’s when Jim told her about the cat.

  “Do you want a cigarette?” he asked.

  She thought, Do I ever, and said, “Sure.”

  Jim went to his place to get his cigarettes and came back with a sweater for her, a beer for each of them and a plate of cheese and crackers. They sat in the backyard for almost three hours—found out that they had both dropped out of Mount Allison the same autumn. By the time they said good-night Brenda had decided she liked the way the Toronto sky didn’t get night-black, didn’t mind the river of faraway voices and car sounds that played constantly in the background.

  When Dave and Morley got back on Sunday afternoon Brenda was sitting in the backyard, Arthur at her feet and Galway in her lap. She said she was extending her visit by a week.

  To no one’s surprise Jim announced in November that he was going home for Christmas for the first time in years.

  “It’ll be good to see everyone,” he said. “I’m planning to get out to the island for New Year’s. Maybe visit Brenda.”

  For her part Brenda told everyone in Big Narrows that Toronto wasn’t so bad. That it’s easy enough to meet people in Toronto.

  As long as you go out at night.

  The Fly

  The small pleasure of going home at lunchtime is one of the welcome dividends that comes with owning a second-hand record store. When you choose to paddle in the backwa ters, people don’t get too bent out of shape when you pull to shore from time to time.

  Dave closes his store and goes home for lunch a couple of days a week. It is the one time he can count on being home alone. Which—being the father of a teenage daughter—is a small pleasure he is thankful for. Most of all Dave enjoys getting to the mail before anyone else—sorting and reading it while he eats a sandwich or a bowl of soup.

  Dave keeps a collection of smudged notes, handwritten on cardboard, taped to the inside of the front door of the Vinyl Cafe, which he uses whenever he closes during the day: “Back in fifteen minutes”; “I’m at Kenny Wong’s” (that’s Wong’s Scottish Meat Pies, five stores along the street); “Gone to the bank.” He has been using some of these notes for years—and a few of them are so smudged that Dave is the only one who can read them anymore. He sticks them up, nevertheless, and customers who find the store locked when they thought it would be open peer at the black smears taped to the glass, and often try the door several times before they wander away.

  Of all the notes, Dave’s favorite is a sign he didn’t make himself. It’s a sign Morley gave him when he opened the Vinyl Cafe—a cut-out of a raccoon wearing a beret and smoking a cigarette. The raccoon has movable arms that you set like the hands of a clock. It’s wearing a sweatshirt that says “Back At!” You position the raccoon’s hands to tell when that will be. Dave uses the raccoon when he closes at lunch.

  Dave came home for lunch one day in the middle of the week and found an envelope of the kind he is always hopeful of finding. The sort of letter that is the reason he bothers to check the mail. An ivory envelope of fine quality. Best of all, it was addressed to him.

  As he carried the envelope into the kitchen Dave dropped the rest of the day’s mail absentmindedly on the coffee table. A handwritten personal letter is not the sort of thing that you see every day of the week. It gave him pleasure just to hold it. So much pleasure that instead of opening it right away he set it aside while he made himself a sandwich—grilled cheese. Dave is old enough to know that the jackpot of anticipation is always a grander prize than truth affords.

  As he cooked his sandwich he kept glancing at the ivory envelope. He didn’t recognize the handwriting. There was no return address. He had no idea who might be writing him like this. Whoever it was had used a fountain pen. It was a touch that implied intimacy, a kind of extravagance—something an old girlfriend might do. Dave carried his sandwich to the table, ate half, wiped his hands carefully on a napkin, picked up the letter and slit it open.

  Dear Dave,

  The salutation had been handwritten in the same ink as the address on the envelope, but the body of the letter was typed. Printed actually. It appeared to be a form letter.

  There is no disappointment as painful as the fall that comes from great expectations.

  Dear Dave,

  This letter began five years ago in a small village on the coast of Turkey. It was written by a woman who lost her husband and children in a horrible traffic accident. Since she wrote this letter it has traveled around the world five times. It has brought fortune and good luck to those who have received it and have not broken the chain. A lady in Brazil received a copy of this letter in 1997 and she sent copies to relatives and friends. Within a week she won a lottery and now lives in a large house in Miami Beach. A dairy farmer in Britain threw his copy out and England was eliminated from the World Cup.

  You must make five copies of this letter and mail it to five friends or neighbors within forty-eight hours. You do not have to send them anything else.

  If you follow these instructions good fortune will occur within a week. However, if you throw this letter out, or forget to forward it, there is no telling what horrible thing could happen to you. One elderly lady in Arizona made five copies and put them in her purse, but she forgot to mail them. Everyone who lived in her retirement community began to speak in a strange language that no one else could understand. Do not tempt fate. Continue the chain.

  The letter was unsigned. Dave examined the envelope again. The handwriting looked vaguely familiar, but Dave couldn’t place it. He got up from the table and carried the envelope and letter across the kitchen and dropped them in the garbage can. He washed the dishes and went back to work.

  But the thought of the letter tugged at him all afternoon. Dave knew perfectly well that making five copies and sending them to his friends wasn’t going to bring him good luck. It was the bad luck he was worried about. England had, after all, been eliminated from the World Cup. Dave didn’t want to wake up one morning speaking a language no one understood.

  That night he pulled the letter out of the kitchen garbage and flattened it and folded it and stuck it in the pocket of his pants.

  It’s a
hard world. You can’t be too careful. It’s not such a big deal to make five photocopies. And even at forty-six cents, a stamp is still a bargain. Dave went to bed feeling better—so good that he completely forgot about the letter until he found it, a week later, when he reached into his back pocket looking for his wallet.

  Dear Dave, Do not tempt fate. Continue the chain.

  The same frustratingly familiar handwriting. But Dave’s forty-eight hours of grace were up. He had broken the chain—there would be no letters from him.

  The lingering urge to pass the letter on was a defensive urge—an evasive action. Dave knows he is never going to win the lottery and live in Miami Beach. He is comfortable with that, with the knowledge that he is not a winner. But he is also just as determined not to be a loser.

  Dave was on his way to work when he found the letter in his pocket. And it was with some anxiety that he walked to the corner and dropped it into a garbage can by a telephone pole. As he did that, Dave sighed; it was a deep sigh of resignation, followed by a long deep breath. Which was, as far as he can remember, the moment he inhaled something.

  Something that wasn’t air. Something bigger than air. Something big enough to drive every thought out of his mind and send him reeling across the sidewalk, coughing. Tearing. Sputtering. Pedestrians were gaping at him as if he were having a heart attack. Surely not now, he thought. He was not even fifty. But for a moment, for a minute, for a couple of minutes—minutes he spent wheezing and coughing, minutes that he couldn’t remember anymore—for this eternity, until he could breathe again and was able to wave everyone off (No, no. I’m all right), for this lifetime, Dave thought he was about to die.

  Something had gone down his throat. Something big. Something like a watermelon. Except watermelons are smooth. This was . . . rougher. More like a coconut. Except bigger than a coconut—this thing that nearly killed him.

  When he was able to collect his thoughts, when he had collected himself, reassured the people who stopped to help him and wiped his eyes on the tail of his shirt, Dave tried to work out what had happened. The last thing he remembered, he had dropped the letter into the garbage can on the corner. He looked over at the metal container. At the garbage spilling over the top. At the flies buzzing around.

  I just swallowed a fly, he thought.

  His hand flew up to his chest involuntarily. He took a few tentative steps away from the garbage can. Everything seemed to be working all right—his legs were working. He coughed gently. He took a few more steps. He shrugged and began to sing softly to himself.

  I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.

  That made him feel better. He smiled, and started to walk a little faster. Still somewhat unsure, but the unsureness was now joined by the giddy relief that descends upon the survivors of major disasters.

  He had almost died. He was alive.

  I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.

  I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

  This event, this brush with death, had happened not far from the Vinyl Cafe, almost in front of Kenny Wong’s restaurant. Dave thought maybe he should get a pop. Rinse his mouth.

  As he went in, he debated whether he should tell Kenny what had happened—whether there was any shame attached to swallowing a fly. He decided it was something he could speak of. So he did. And when he stepped back on the street he felt a whole lot better. Walking to work. Singing.

  I know an old lady who swallowed a fly.

  I don’t know why she swallowed the fly.

  Perhaps she’ ll die.

  And he stopped dead.

  As he stood on the sidewalk halfway between Kenny Wong’s restaurant and his record store the awful possibility hit him like a sledgehammer in the stomach. Maybe he didn’t swallow the fly. Maybe he had inhaled it. Maybe the fly wasn’t in his stomach—where it would drown and be eaten by stomach acid and disposed of in the most fitting of all possible fly burials. Maybe the fly was in his lungs—where there was oxygen. Where it could presumably . . . live. And lay eggs.

  It was Dorothy at Woodsworth’s Books who once suggested Dave should have changed his marriage vows from “in sickness and in health” to “in sickness and remission.” She had a point. There is no denying that Dave has, over the years, waged more than his share of battles in the struggle for survival.

  The war began when he was a child.

  It began the summer afternoon he noticed his kneecap was loose. He was seven years old, attending a school swim meet, sitting in the stands in his bathing suit with his hands on his thighs when he stood up to see over Nancy Miller’s head, and discovered that if he pushed down on his leg with his hands his kneecap moved back and forth under his skin. He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. Then he went to the boys’ locker room and locked himself in a cubicle so he could check out just how loose it was. It was alarmingly loose. He suspected that it was probably like a loose tooth and that he should leave it alone because the more you wiggled it, the looser it would get. He was worried that it might fall off. But once you discover something like this about yourself, it is hard to leave it alone.

  Six months later when he went for his polio booster Dave showed his loose kneecap to Dr. Art Ormiston. Dr. Ormiston examined it carefully and acknowledged that there was no question it was moving around. Then he patiently explained that a kneecap wouldn’t likely fall off. There was all that skin to hold it in place. Unfortunately he went on to tell Dave that from time to time people’s kneecaps could dislocate. Dave looked puzzled. “Slip out of place,” said Dr. Ormiston.

  It took Dave no effort to imagine his kneecap slipping out of place. He imagined it sliding down his leg under his skin like a falling egg. In his imagination his kneecap ended up wedged in his ankle so he couldn’t walk. He wore a Tensor bandage around his knee all that spring, only giving up when summer came and he had to wear shorts.

  When he was eleven Dave got a sore in his mouth that hurt whenever he touched it with his tongue, which of course he did continually. Although he was ashamed of the sore, his curiosity soon outweighed his shame. He showed it to his father, who said it was a canker and that it would be over in a week at the most. Dave thought his father had said cancer, and understood that he was the one who would be over in a week. What he didn’t understand was why his father seemed so offhand about it.

  Later he learned about bacteria in health class. He began to hold his breath whenever he walked passed a sewer. He still doesn’t inhale when he empties the garbage.

  We all lug around baggage from our youth, and in the years that have accumulated since Dave was a boy he has become hyper-aware of the thousands of wily viruses and bacteria that orbit him like a family of organized criminals, sizing him up, preparing their move. He thinks of himself as a walking Petri dish, available for colonization by any one of the thousands of his microbic neighbors who may choose to move in. Knowing that at any moment he may inhale the wrong speck of dust and his face will begin to blow up like a balloon, or his capillaries will begin to leak blood and his crucial organs will pack it in one after another.

  He takes as many precautions as he can without drawing needless attention to himself. He never takes painkillers when he has a headache, in case he might accidentally mask a massive stroke; and he knows the symptoms of most serious diseases, and many obscure ones. He knows how to disengage a hungry tick with a spot of whisky—which he long ago decided was a good enough reason to carry a flask wherever he went.

  The notion of having a lungful of flies was not something he was going to shrug off. The notion of having a lungful of flies horrified him.

  Perhaps she’ ll die.

  Once again he was standing on the sidewalk, motionless, his hand on his chest.

  What did the old lady do?

  She swallowed a spider.

  That wriggled and jiggled and tickled inside her.

  She swallowed the spider to catch the fly.

  There was no way Dave was going to swallow a spider.
<
br />   It didn’t work for the old lady anyway.

  Perhaps she’ ll die.

  Dave did not want to die.

  Especially a trivial death.

  “Unexpectedly, on his way to work, after a brief struggle with a chain letter.”

  A small part of Dave understood he was being crazy. Paranoid. He couldn’t even say with certainty it was a fly he had swallowed, or inhaled. And there was a valve in your lungs that closed down when you breathed something in. Wasn’t there? He was pretty sure it was impossible to inhale a fly. He might have swallowed a fly, but he was pretty sure he didn’t inhale it.

  He was also pretty sure he could feel it bumping against the side of his lung—as if it were trapped between two window panes.

  He coughed as he unlocked the front door of his store. There was no one around. He left the Closed sign in place, locked the door behind him and stood despondently in front of the cash register. He looked around the empty aisles wondering what he should do. He could hardly go to the emergency department. He picked up a broom and began sweeping his way around the bins of records—pushing at the dust carelessly, trying to keep his mind off his lungs more than anything.

  It didn’t work. It was all he could think of. And pretty soon he knew with certainty the fly was in his lungs. He could feel it. It was a weird sort of buzzing sensation—a tickle that was less than a cough, but undoubtedly there. It wasn’t normal.

  By three o’clock Dave had worked himself into a complete lather. Maybe it was a fly that came into the country in a shipment of exotic fruit. A fly that carried an obscure disease that only a very few genetic types in all the world were susceptible to. And Dave was one of those people. They’d never diagnose that.

  He would get a fever and go into a coma and then after a long and valiant fight in the hospital the fever would suddenly break and he would snap out of the coma but he would be speaking a foreign language that no one could understand. And everybody would think he had gone crazy.