by Mike Barnes
Lucius is standing behind her, at the correct distance to indicate support without crowding her beyond endurance. He gives me a helpless shrug, drops his eyes. Behind him, Lucy’s sticking her head out of the far stairwell. At the sight of me, she disappears.
Mrs. Xue and her husband are the most profoundly withdrawn people I know. I don’t know how they could have met and married. Schizophrenic, or autistic, or some other combination of syllables that closes like a shell far above them. In their fifties—though, like all extreme introverts, they can look ancient or almost babyish at times—they live in absolute silence behind an embossed metal plaque whose meaning has always eluded me. It shows, in reds and golds, what look like two toddlers, a boy and a girl, but dressed in ceremonial adult robes, smiling as they embrace each other playfully. Mr. Xue will be as far behind that door as he can get, if not in a closet or in bed with the sheets pulled over him. I’ve rarely seen him. On the rare occasions when communication is unavoidable, Mrs. Xue handles it, usually in writing: propping an envelope with twelve post-dated cheques against my door once a year, waiting just long enough to make sure I answer her mouse-like tap. Sliding a request for a repair under the door, vacating the apartment while I complete it. When speech is unavoidable, her voice is quiet but clear and precise, to avoid the need for repetition or elaboration, and she flinches visibly from the effect of my voice in her ears. They shop at night, at one of the 24-hour groceries, and return by bus laden with bags. If anyone else is entering or leaving, they shrink against the wall until they pass, becoming slender silhouettes of negligible dimension.
A stranger seeing Mrs. Xue now might see a woman working so intently that she’s oblivious of the two men in the hallway with her. Yet our presence is so intolerable, even at the distances we’re observing, that she’s quivering all over with the strain of keeping at her task. She’s somewhere deep inside herself, atom-sized, cowering in a safe black space preserved beneath her rattling paper skin.
To relieve her, Lucius comes up by the entrance to talk to me. “They went up and down every floor, banged on everyone’s door. Don’t say anything, just banging a couple of times. Loud. A few people sleep right through. But most people wake up. Come out into the hall, see who’s banging, maybe a fire or something. Some people got scared when they don’t see anyone. We knocked on your door but there’s no answer.”
“I was out.”
Lucius nods. He’s speaking softly, barely looking at me. An honest man’s mild rebuke. “Lucy and I get them settled down, tell them it’s just kids, no problem. But Mrs. Xue…”
“Trying to wash them off her door.” Now I’m the one nodding. Lucius is just looking at the floor. “What did they look like?”
“Big guys. Two of them. They were at the end of the hall.” Flicks a glance up at me. “Your door,” he says. “You want me to come up with you?”
“Thanks, but no. Go to bed. I’ve got it.”
My guys. My problem.
I brought them here to soil Mrs. Xue’s door. Brought them to where people were sleeping.
Time to put this adjustment to bed.
§
Upstairs, the door hangs crookedly, the jamb splintered above and below the knob.
Piss stains on the wall by the balcony door. Side by side, yellowish-gray, almost dry. Puddle beneath them. Reassuring somehow—hardly the seal of craftsmen.
Fridge and freezer doors standing open. The contents scattered in a circle, some dumped or smashed. Two veggie bags ripped open, bok choy and gai lan flung about. But not the bag. It’s with some others in a puddle of milk and coffee grounds, the stick inside dry and intact.
Two blocks of chicken broth dumped out and thawing. Just two again. Two out of perhaps a dozen. These wall-pissers didn’t want to get their hands too dirty. But no point in tossing a place unless you toss it all.
Wyvern hiring—Wyvern outsourcing—to the rescue again.
A shambles, all the same. The bedroom first up, and hardest hit. Bed and bedding thrown around, mattress and box spring knifed open. Curtains yanked down. Closet box of keepsakes and papers dumped and flung about. I close the door on it.
The Ikea sofa—lumpy and stained for twenty years—finally done. Lying on its back with short legs in the air, the frame and cushions sliced open wildly. Half-empty cushions thrown around, gobbets of stuffing like gray sponge cake. Coffee table upended, a leg kicked skew. Only the armchair strangely intact, lying on its side by the window.
Big Empty’s talismans sent skidding around the floor. Too much space, and not enough things, for them to do much with. They found the USB when they tore the lid off “Precious Things.” Before the kitchen, probably—it helped make them lazy. The original and any copies would have been stressed—but see their faces: stupidly pleased, leering at snagging the prize.
The butterfly wing frame smashed against the window ledge. Glass pieces and twisted wood beneath it, square of matboard. And—what’s this?
Over in the corner, lying on its side, the single wing. A faded orange and black—it seemed brighter under glass. But whole. Not of interest to them.
Just as she found it. Northern rock. Scarred parquet floor. Still voyaging.
I stare at it a while, lost below thought. Then retrieve a sheet of paper from the bedroom mess and make a crude envelope, slide it in gently. Fold over the top.
One last place.
The empty inside Big Empty. Its empty heart.
Nothing for them to do in there. Yet fearful just the same. Knowing they swung hands with knives, kicked apish feet. Knowing—
I switch off the light before approaching the open closet. Sky brightening now. No light normally reaches it, not beyond what leaks under the door.
Move my hand through timidly. A pass across. Up and down. The nothing they found. It couldn’t have detained them long. Moments, no more.
It’s the one place air has substance to my hands. A solid shape it takes under my fingers, just for an instant, before vanishing. Like thinnest ice—melting at the first touch.
Close the door quietly.
§
It takes a couple hours just to put things in basic order. Decide what can be salvaged—not much. Start taking the rest in loads down to the garbage room. Bags of the smaller stuff for the bins, which are almost full. Tonight the garbage goes out to the curb for morning pickup. Their timing was perfect, that way. The wrecked furniture leaned in the niche for odd items and exchanges, an alcove of leftover space beside the garbage room at the bottom of the stairs.
Someone has left a mattress there. Not too old or stained, still fairly firm. I take it back upstairs and set it down on the bedroom floor, once I’ve swept and mopped it and let it dry again. I don’t need it at the moment. The bag in Big Empty’s fine for whatever sleeping’s left in this window. But once the window closes I could be spending a lot of time on it. Time you may not remember. But it’ll go by all the same.
I stand in the doorway, taking it in. The padded rectangle the only furnishing in an otherwise clean, bare room with white walls. It looks like a display, a piece of art—some kind of simplified statement in a museum—rather than anything normally meant by the word “bedroom.” And I can’t decide if it’s beautiful or hideously ugly. A meaning in it hovers just beyond my reach.
The whole apartment’s that way. Radically reduced. Aside from the appliances, just two pieces of sizable furniture remain: the mattress, and the armchair by the window. The rest had to be pitched.
What looked like the spare essentials of a management monk seem, in memory, almost cluttered. What would simple actually look like? Where—how—would you find it?
Maybe to answer that—to get closer to the answer—I bag all the keepsakes and old papers and journals from the closet box, even those not ripped up, and take them down to the garbage. The small bookcase in which I kept library books and magazines, and a
couple of other small tables for setting things on—these go down to the exchange space, for anyone who wants them.
I wash the wall by the balcony. Then refill the bucket with soapy water and wash any other smudges. Sweep all the floors and mop them afterwards with Mr. Clean and hot water.
An armchair and a mattress. That takes care of sitting or lying. If you’re not doing those, you’re standing or walking—and plenty of unobstructed space for that.
Sleeping bag in Big Empty, for a guest.
Which is you at the moment.
I phone the guy I use for doors. A surprising number of them get smashed: thieves occasionally, more often going-away gifts or break-ups. He can’t fit me in until next Thursday, he’s too busy. For an extra hundred bucks, he offers an expedited service, but Ken’s funds are already overstrained. And, obviously, the Owner is nowhere in the picture.
“Just the regular. Thursday’s fine.” And, after a trip to the hardware store up the street, I get the door fastened well enough with a staple and hasp and padlock, screwing them in above the splintered section around the knob. A hinge is jiggling loose, but that can wait.
If someone wants to smash through this, they’ll have earned a used mattress, a twenty-five-year-old chair, and two weeks’ of chicken soup.
The USB of Christmas Music goes in one of my top coat pockets. Where it should’ve been all along? Can’t remember, at the moment, why I decided that was a bad idea.
§
Before heading out, I undertake a few repairs from my list. Partly because I’m in a maintenance groove, and partly to show the tenants I’m back on the job, that their super is no longer AWOL. From their dubious looks and sourly mumbled thanks, they’re not buying it. Why should they? Where was I, after all, when assholes were pounding around the premises?
I knock softly on the Xues’ door but get no answer. I wasn’t expecting one. Putting my ear to the door, I hear—or imagine—glidings, sub-whisperings. Twin absences that graze the threshold of communion, silences rubbing against one another in endless consolation.
After a visit to the No Frills off St. Clair, where I restock what’s needed to keep my meal plan going, I drive over to Mount Pleasant, south to Bloor, and then east over the viaduct. The anti-suicide mesh creates an effect of taut, stretched sails—but sails you can see through. The Luminous Veil, it’s called—a name which, like my denuded bedroom, is either delicately beautiful or brutally callous, depending on my mood. Sometimes I see it both ways, like a coin spinning above me in a toss. A veil, luminous or otherwise, exists to screen something off from clear view. But what is being screened? Suicide? A life without suicide? Everything about the barrier has been ambiguous from the start. An editorial citing the moral necessity of suicide prevention, especially since most attempters, if stopped, do not make a successful attempt later—but the well-reasoned paragraphs concluded by adding that falling bodies often endangered motorists on the DVP below, traumatizing them if seldom hurting them more directly, and holding up traffic on an already notoriously congested roadway. Before the barrier, the Bloor Viaduct had more fatalities than any other elevated structure in North America after the Golden Gate Bridge. After the Luminous Veil was in place, suicides from that spot all but ceased. Yet the number of suicides by jumping from other structures in Toronto didn’t change…
Mrs. Rasmussen is raking the yard on Selkirk Street. There are no trees on the lawn, but the wind has blown a few leaves and paper scraps onto the narrow strips of grass on either side of the walkway. More than necessary landscaping, it looks like an excuse to get out, get some fresh air, a little exercise. One of the residents is also standing with a rake, close to the edge of the property. He’s just holding the rake loosely, staring down at the ground.
When she sees me coming, Mrs. Rasmussen comes down the walk. She holds the rake straight up and out from her side, like a soldier in a movie about the old aristocracy might hold a staff. She looks tired—beyond tired, burdened to the end of weariness. Her heavy shoulders slump in her cardigan. Like she’s carrying the viaduct on them. Oh no, I think.
“She’s gone,” she says. We’re close to each other, but still moving.
I stop walking. “When?”
Now she stops too. “Oh, no,” she says. “No, no, no.” She puts a hand into the space between us, as if to touch my arm or chest, though it doesn’t make it all the way. For a moment, before she drops it to her side, I see it hanging in the air between us, like a third party that has floated in to take its part, not attached to either of us—this smooth, pinkish hand, which could almost be a girl’s, though with dirt under its lacquered nails. “I mean, she’s not here. She’s left.”
“When? Left for good, you mean?”
“I don’t think so. She’s always found her way back before. She went to bed early, just after curfew. But she wasn’t here at count this morning.” Mrs. Rasmussen looks back at the young man, who hasn’t changed his posture. She turns back to me. “She does this sometimes. Goes off her meds. We don’t see her for a while.”
“Does she say where she’s been when she gets back?”
“Sometimes. Not usually. We assume she’s back on the streets. Turning tricks, at least part of the time. She often comes back banged up, though her weight’s about the same.”
“What do you do then?”
She looks surprised at the question. Perked up by it somehow, standing straighter, as if it’s shifted some of the load off of her. “What else? Get her back on program.”
Sun breaks through the clouds over the house behind her. Full sun still, a couple of hours till setting, it lights up her pink ears, makes them glow, purple veins in their tops, curly hair like thin silver wires around them. I feel it on my face. Clear, golden autumn. Except there are grains in the air—everywhere I look. Not as fine as dust, not as coarse as black pepper—like soot, maybe. They dim the light, float like a veil between my eyes and what they see. It’s the same light I see on the stairs, in the rooms underground. It’s the sun that makes it obvious. Light that should be clear.
§
Driving back through the city. Judy’s home at the moment. A big home. Big and small.
Taking major streets—Bloor, Church, Yonge—for the same reason others avoid them at rush hour: because they’re slow. The car a good place to be, to sit in, to see and think about things while barely moving.
Today, though, I feel tension driving. A strange kind of tension—maybe tension isn’t the word. It’s not a feeling of being strained, stretched hard or tight. It’s more like fizzings, or pricklings—many small movements, in many directions at once, that have a sickening sense, something faintly nauseating, about them. I’m a while locating the feeling—it keeps running away from my attention, like beads of dropped mercury—and then I realize it’s coming from my chest. My heart, the area around it. Or over it, more precisely. The pocket in my coat.
The USB.
It doesn’t feel like what it is: a thin stick of metals and plastics, whatever carefully machined products they compress into this elongated wafer to store digital information. It feels like something primeval. Something nasty and unpredictable. Like a bunch of big red centipedes, the hairy kind with pronounced pincers, scurrying, writhing, trying to get out.
A boy in a schoolyard once set fire to the bottom of a big nest of tent caterpillars in the fork of a sapling. As the flames spread in the cottony lower layers of the whitish, semi-transparent nest, the ball of dark worm-like shapes separated and started to wriggle outward and upward, looking for escape from a structure they’d designed to have none. As the fire broke the nest open, burned bodies dropped to the ground, writhing and twitching. Using whatever legs remained to inch lopsidedly away. Caterpillars from the upper part of the ball, insulated from the flames by the burned bodies of the others, scattered like pinata prizes, scrambling away on small rushing feet. We stamped on them gleefully, turning
them to green-black smears.
Nasty, veering sensations. They tell me the other reason I wouldn’t carry the sticks with me before. Hid them in the fridge, hid them in the mail to Ken. Even if someone takes you down, rumbles your pockets, they’ll survive. True—but not the whole truth.
It’s also having the images against my chest, next to my heart. Faces and parts of the girls and women come faster to mind, seeping directly through the skin into the bloodstream. Stirring a soup of nasty feelings, of guilt, of dirty dealings, of fear. Faces, bodies, parts of bodies. I see them all, except for the images of Vivian—why? In Christmas Music she appears more often, and more nakedly, than any other woman. Its leading lady, in a way. But you’ve seen her as a person, cold and calculating, damaged and damaging who knows how—but whole. Not just a flesh bit, captured in a hole with a shutter click.
Things happen quickly once you know they have to happen. Nothing to it but to do it.
I buy another ExpressPost packet at a postal outlet I’ve never used before. In the line-up, I look up the postal code for the Globe and Mail’s address on Front Street, so the clerk can enter the charge. The Globe’s been lagging far behind the Star in the investigative journalism department—analyzing the skulduggery others have uncovered, and editorializing about political morality and public accountability, even the media’s (their own) role, while the Star keeps on piling up juicy chunks from Hizzoner’s dismal ruckus. Give the Globe a fighting chance to lead for a change, though I doubt they’ll take it.
Pick up the two packages returned by Ken, which are waiting at the other branch. A new branch, it’s still open nearing 5:00—showing the Avenue Road crowd it stands behind its banner pledge “to set a new standard for customized financial services.” I don’t even have to show any ID—the Face, once seen, is not forgotten. It could be a sight gag in a comedy about the world’s worst undercover cop. The manager, still standing by the coffee urn and some picked-over muffins, gives me a half-hearted smile but doesn’t offer me a cup and a nibble. His memory is perfect too, clocking me as a low-roller and a future-phobe.
