by Mike Barnes
Awake? Hard to say for sure. But she had to be, didn’t she?
“I need copies of these. Two. No, three.”
“No, man.” 303 takes a step back. “I told you, I’m not touching this shit. It sounds like it could get heavy.”
I stand up. “For a cyber-wise dude, you seem a little disconnected. This is heavy. These are from a dentist in our neighbourhood, drugging his female patients and posing them in kink-freak shots. Posing them at least. I think the cops are going to be very interested.”
303’s eyes are rounder, more alert than I’ve ever seen them. “Fine. So make your own copies. It’s not like I’m the only—”
“Three USBs. Or the cops visit you tonight.” He gulps. I owe him something. Without a go-to computer guy, who knows when I would have heard the Wyverns’ Christmas music? “But give me the three sticks and our agreement is over. I won’t call on you again.”
“What are you going to do with them?”
“Whatever it is, your name won’t be mentioned. Ever.”
He crouches down in the corner, muttering as he roots under another pile of clothes and crumpled bags.
“How many jerk-pics does one guy need?” I say, thinking aloud again.
“Who says they’re for one guy?” says the salesman in 303.
§
Up in Big Empty, I pace before Maude’s Precious Things, wanting to touch them but afraid for some reason. Several times my hand reaches for one and then I straighten again. Max’s Mother’s Day card. Why do I need to look at it when it’s in my head? Along with his photo gallery. No little kids in the pictures. None under eleven or so. On the other hand, a parent often accompanies a little kid, talking, holding a frightened hand. No old people either. A question of taste? Or the uncertainty of drug reactions past a certain age? Fear approaches me like a speeding train, thoughts inside it I can’t see yet, and just like that, I’m out the door, headed for the garage.
At the house on Selkirk Street, I walk across the front lawn and peer in the window. Bluish TV glow, backs of people in a semicircle, watching. Mrs. Rasmussen staring out at me from the other side of the glass, a dish rag in her hand.
Two seconds later she’s on the front step. “What in the name of—”
My hands up, like 303’s. Everyone with a gun trained on them nowadays. “Mrs. Rasmussen, please. I just need to talk to Judy for five minutes. Two minutes.”
“Come back tomorrow if you have to. They’re in their pajamas, having a snack. Front door closes at 10 p.m.” Her eyes flat as nail heads. Would make a good bouncer in any bar.
But it’s strange. I’m trying to think of a good reason—something more communicable than my fear train—when she relents on her own. Usually the Face frightens people, hardening their opposition. But once in a great while—never when I expect, and seldom when I need it to—it has the opposite effect. “Five minutes. I’ll be right inside the door, timing them. And just in the porch. It’s chilly out here, and she just had her bath.”
Judy looks old and smaller than ever. Her hair wet and combed, in her pajamas and slippers.
“Can he have some cocoa, Mrs. R? He is a good friend.”
“He can’t stay long, sweetheart. He just has a message to deliver.”
But as Judy sits in one of the rocking chairs, hands around her cocoa mug, any message that might have been forming skips out the door and down the wooden steps. Nearing sixty, asking for cocoa for her friend. I pull a rocker up beside hers and sit down in it, get it going slowly. Forgot how good this feels, how relaxing. Back and forth. The motion that goes nowhere takes my questions with it. There’s no approaching Judy directly anyway, there never has been. It was only sudden panic made me forget that. Why did you leave home so early?
That is not what killed my mother—what did you mean by that?
We sit and rock like a couple of old ghosts atop a tower, looking out to sea.
“My mother went up the chimney,” Judy says, bringing her mug to her lips.
“I know. Sandor told me she was cremated.”
“She did not fly. She climbed.” In oracular mode, Judy’s voice goes toneless, flat as nothing. The wind through broken masonry. It’s why the shrinks—most people probably—never considered her answers real replies. Kept asking the same questions.
“She climbed up.”
Still no idea what to do with it. I wait.
“Do you like Sandor?” she says, a few sips later.
“I’ve met worse.”
“He is my little brother.”
“I know he is, Judy.”
We sit and rock a while longer and gradually I become aware of a little sound, light and flicking, like the tip of a thin branch hitting a window, and realize it’s Mrs. Rasmussen behind us, a small sharp sound, tick tick tick, she must be using her fingernail.
§
Back at No Name, the phone machine is blinking. Staring at it, I narrow the most likely possibilities down to two—a strange ritual, considering that I’ll know as soon as I pick it up. It could be the Owner, ready, after a two-day sulk, to bitch about the “sweet deal” the new tenants are getting. When it suits him, he forgets my job is centered on mopping hallways and unplugging toilets, and talks as if I have suction with the higher-ups on the Landlord and Tenant Bureau who exist to screw an honest businessman out of his profits. He might also have seen the new tag on a drive-by and be needing to fulminate about his vandalised property.
Or it could be the new tenants themselves. Any chance they could begin setting up—cleaning and painting—a day or two early? They’d be willing to pay, pro-rated, for the advance. And will I get around to the repairs we discussed before or after they move in—just checking? Something like that.
I pick up the phone and push the button. A woman’s voice. Someone between thirty and fifty probably, though voices can fool you. That and the fact that her voice is calm and pleasant, easy-sounding, is all I can be sure of, though I replay and listen to the message several times. Curious at first. Then just wanting the voice and what it says in my ear.
“Hello. I apologize, I misdialled the number. And I hope you have a blessed day.”
10
Sunrise. Happening whether you see it or not…
Night’s a long time clearing, its shadows lurk and huddle in the pink-veined sky, daring daylight to disperse them. But night can’t win an argument with day, or day with night—they’re evenly matched, half-kings each—and it’s day’s turn now. Somewhere behind Shoppers, the sun has cleared the houses and is climbing steadily. Laying a lane of light down eastbound Eglinton, making the firehall’s red door glow.
No sirens—not for a couple of hours, since they brought an abrupt end to dreaming. Breakfast time in the city, but no one yet has dropped a smoke into bedclothes and rolled over to catch a few more zees. Stood too close to the burner with housecoat ties dangling.
Light blooms steadily, a soft explosion. Undramatic, undeniable. Faced with a ball of flaming gas a million miles wide, those dark shifty punks scatter underground to regroup and wait for twilight’s chances. All they leave, their calling card, is the sooty brick and dark brown flashing of the Latimer, an alley-width in front of me. It seems absurd that a five-story apartment building can block my view of the largest object in the local universe. 99.8% of the mass of the solar system, which might be termed the sun plus some debris.
Yet it’s true. The Latimer’s enough. Day will have to climb a little higher before light reaches this balcony.
Making a third coffee. Two’s the normal limit—like the first beer, the third coffee shows me things I can’t afford to see. But today I know I’m going to see them no matter what precautions I take. Another notice from Stone last night, he’s a broken record now. Besides, I need the caffeine to bring me fully awake. I’m not tired, not physically or mentally—I wish I was—but I’m de
eply disoriented. Drifting somewhere above sleep but below waking. Or somewhere off to the side of both of them—in a spooky place with its own rules, not answerable to day or night.
“Waking dreams, uh huh,” murmured an early assessor, “Fairly common in many pathological states, especially psychotic or dissociative ones.” His bland, bored-sounding voice and the quiet rasp of his pen—which sounds like a cement mixer in my ears—telling me he’s never had anything like a waking dream, it’s a phrase in a textbook to him. And I want to jam that pen in his eye.
The water in the glass carafe goes past dark to black. Watching the coffee grains tumble in convection spirals below the plunger, zoning out on them, I return easily to the dream or waking vision I’ve never really left. Some kind of dim underground room, or set of rooms with doors and corridors connecting them, in which the dead and living mingled. Maude. Her late husband. Brad. A boy I roomed with, sharing the febrile intimacy of a cramped cube with cots. But also Judy. And myself of course. And Danika, weirdly. The faces dim, hard to recognize, as they shuffled in the grainy light—then glowing for an instant, as if lit by a candle from within, when I came close to them.
Don’t use the past tense with dreams. They fade at narrative convention… keep the distance you’re forcing on them. Stay present instead. Stay in them.
All right, Lois. Too wiped out to argue.
I’m working in a series of small, unfurnished rooms. Underground rooms, their walls and floors bare stone. Broken up in places by slender pillars, rough to the touch. Gray, grainy light seeps down slowly from above, as if filtered through layers of cotton gauze.
I go from room to room with a pair of heavy metal shears, like tin snips or secateurs. In the first room I meet Maude Wyvern’s husband. Because he is the longest dead, I realize. I recognize his face from her photographs, but he’s wearing some kind of long robe, a fancy housecoat maybe. He shows me the ornate fetters on his wrists and forearms. They are like sleeves of metal, elaborately patterned, through which his mottled skin shows in places. The metal catches what light there is, giving gleams of silver, of copper, of gold perhaps.
I work with the shears, pressing to get the heavy tip of the lower blade between his skin and the metal. He winces in a familiar way—the babyish, make-it-stop grimace of the chronically ill. The metal gives way finally, though I have to press hard, feeling the strain in my wrist and fingers. When the fetters fall away, he doesn’t look up or say anything, but remains stooped over, rubbing the red marks the shears have left on his arms. This too is familiar.
In the next room, Maude stands waiting beside a pillar, looking vacant. Even in death she has dementia. I go to work the shears on her fetters, which are smaller than her husband’s, a narrow band, as if they are still forming. I aim the tip carefully, but somehow, by a slip on her part or mine, when I close the grip the shears shift and I snip off her baby finger.
I exclaim in horror, and feel as if I might throw up, but Maude just looks at me calmly. She seems to be waiting for me to continue, or begin. There was no crunch of bone or spurt of blood. The finger felt like soft dough and the stump has already sealed over. I realize that I did not cry out, only wanted to. Down here there are no sounds at all.
Near Maude is a steep, wide staircase. Looking down it, I sense many people waiting in a large space below. The light is dimmer still than on the level I am on, but though I can’t make out faces or bodies, I see, here and there, faint gleams of metal. It dawns on me that I belong down there, with the milling people. I’m in the wrong place still.
§
I take the coffee to the armchair by the window. Pick up Around Toogood Pond from the table where I left it, intending to spend the day inside reading it. Not going out, not even answering the door unless someone pounds without let-up. It will be the first day in months—the first in this window certainly—that I don’t venture out of the apartment.
It’s in the nature of a self-prescription, and a warning. Home rest if not bed rest. Your act won’t travel today.
First, though, leaving the book in my lap, I tell myself again why I’m not following through with last night’s vow to deliver “Christmas Music” to the police and the newspapers first thing this morning. Try to scrape off lies and evasions from the change in plans, see if anything’s left standing.
Coming home last night, the four USBs in hand, there was no question of the next step. Three simple words: Take them down. Max and anyone in on it with him. Helping him, enjoying his product. The fact, first, that a girl might be sitting in his chair this morning. Thursday a business day after all. And the scene, intensely pleasurable, of cops brushing past Gwen, wrenching Max’s arms behind his back to cuff him.
Take them down. Drain the Wyvern swamp.
Still the plan. Still what has to happen. Only—
Something I need to do first, before the cops swarm in and take over. Like what?
Cops too hasty. They adjust the obvious, so their adjustments never go far enough. I want more. What? I want to—yes, of course, blast him to hell, he’s made for the place, but beyond that… What? Not sure yet. Something.
Once the cops swarm the scene, it’s their show totally. The adjustment over.
And photo-play will be suspended after yesterday’s disruptions, at least for a while. Eyes on them. Someone shaking their tree. That much they’re sure of.
Sipping the coffee, leaning over to watch the traffic building on Eglinton.
More than one lifetime needed to catch yourself lying to yourself. To know for certain.
Sure, unless you’re a terminal weakling or moron, you become a better self-interrogator. But the guy across the table in the little room has been practising too. Every minute of every day.
And no liar more dangerous than the one who believes his lies. Truth so toxic to him he never has to pretend.
I pick up Around Toogood Pond, by Wun Wing.
Flip through it first to get the gist of it, to situate it in the world of books.
A slim volume. At eighty-two pages, almost chapbook-sized. Something about the modest production values and the sparse colophon page says vanity publication, but with small presses struggling to survive alongside digital productions, it’s getting harder to tell.
Glue-bound in signatures. Nice simple cover, pleasingly stark. Cream paper with a pebbly texture, title and author lettering in a plain black font. Between them, a small borderless photo, in blurred gray tones, of a close-up of a late-season dandelion with half its filaments detached. A single drop of water near the top of its thin, curving stem.
Plain back cover, no blurbs defacing it. Also very welcome.
Inside the back, a brief author bio without a photo. Wun Wing has published fiction and non-fiction in a variety of Canadian and international journals. He lives in Toronto.
Below, the press’s Mission Statement, announced with equal brevity. Wun Wing Press is dedicated to publishing quality works of fiction and non-fiction that explore issues related to caregiving, disability, health, and recovery. Around Toogood Pond is its inaugural title.
Strange. The press having the same name as the author. As if author and press are identical. Which would seem to confirm the book as a vanity production. Except it doesn’t—since the vanity author would take care not to give that away. Would take care to invent a professional-sounding alias for his cheque book and local printer.
A subtitle on the title page. Around Toogood Pond: A Caregiver’s Journal.
Closing the book over my thumb, I watch as the pieces assemble easily. Wun Wing. Maude’s single butterfly wing in its frame. Autumnal cover shot, like the autumn plants behind Maude in the photo taken by her caregiver at Toogood Pond. A Caregiver’s Journal. Notebook ruminations in the Queen’s Arms.
Sometimes even a bipolar detective gets handed a no-brainer, Sandor.
§
It begins with a se
ries of quotations forming their own section. Nothing unusual in that. Except that the section, culled from an impressively wide range of sources, is ten pages long. Ten pages out of eighty-two. And the section has its own title, an interesting one—“Blazes, Cairns, Painted Stones”—and starts off with a little vignette, or parable, about the uses of quotation.
Blazes, Cairns, Painted Stones
…and pleasanter than never getting lost is to be lost for a time, and then, as you grope about blindly, to come upon a pale scar on a tree, a tumble of stones on flat rock, paint flecks peeping through moss—and realize that someone, perhaps long ago, has come this way and troubled to leave these rough signs.
I flip through the pages of quotations, letting my eye settle where it will.
Why not be totally changed into fire? (Merton, The Wisdom of the Desert)
Please—a little less love, and a little more common decency. (Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Slapstick)
…we must nurture everything that assists the descent. (Jung, Psychological Reflections)
We hate the people who try to make us form the connexions we do not want to form. (Weil, Gravity and Grace)
I saw to what extent the people among whom I lived could be trusted as good neighbours and friends; that their friendship was for summer weather only; that they did not greatly propose to do right…(Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”)
How do I know that in hating death I am not like an orphan who left home in youth and no longer knows the way back? (Zhuangzi)
Ten pages out of eighty-two. One-eighth of the book. But the bigger surprise—sipping my first Luck Yu—the impression of the author suggested by the quotations. Someone not in a hurry. Someone searching. Seeking. Patiently. Willing to work and wait for it.
Patience. Diligence. Humility? None of them qualities I would have associated with Sandor. Who, for all his troubled charm, which even I wasn’t entirely immune to, still struck me mainly as a spoiled and lazy rich man’s son. Indulging appetites until they overwhelmed him. Capable of compassion for another—from Danika’s indications, which I trust implicitly—but far more inclined to pity himself. The fat life coming off him like vapours off a house pet.
