by Mike Barnes
No idea how many men are on her list, or should be.
Close your eyes.
§
Open them again, she’s sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair, a dining-room chair it looks like, between her father’s body and the door. She sits slightly behind and to the side of him, as if they’re taking a car ride together. She is sitting up straight, her patent leather shoes close together, her bloody hands in her lap. First day of school. Still staring upwards at that spot beside me. There’s no movement in her body, no expression on her face. Her marble self. There’s no sign of the carving knife, but she holds my finishing hammer in her lap, one small red hand around the grip, the other on the shaft.
An instant. That’s all that’s passed, I think at first. Like drifting off in a movie and waking up a second later, the scene slightly advanced.
Except that can’t be. It’s wrong. Too many things have happened. She took the knife someplace. Found my hammer in my coat pocket. Brought in the chair. The blood drenching the corpse slumped opposite me’s sticky-looking where it isn’t dry. Dull, not shiny.
And the fire dead. Gray ash, black chunks of wood. My neck stiff and sore, spiky jabs and aches, when I turn to take it in. Cricked from hanging straight down on his drugs.
An hour? Hours maybe. The lamps in either corner still on, but the room darker without the flickering flames.
On them still. Armies in my head. His sand swirling, stoked kiln of closing. Fusing to murky glass. Struggling to climb up, see straight.
Judy stands up smartly, as if at a teacher’s command. The hammer in one hand, the other smoothing the hem of her dress. Blood splotched and smeared all over her now—dress, blouse, arms, swipes on her face. Anywhere she’s touched with her gore gloves. Her white legs bare and skinny, scabbed in places, above her white socks. She takes a step toward her father and hits him on the back of the head with the hammer. Not a blow of anger or undue force. Just the smart crack you give something out of whack. A dull sound, between a thud and knock. The head moves slightly. She sits back down as if returning from the blackboard.
A new game. Neck, knife, hammer, head. Knife beats neck. Hammer beats head.
Watching me now to see what I’ll do, her eyes averted. Ward watch. What you learn in stir never leaves you, not even when you want it to.
Not knowing my play or wanting to, I close my eyes.
Sand beats flame.
§
Gone.
I listen, but I’m sure. Elapsed time hangs around me like a fluid. Something dark that is your element, breathing where others drown. Straight-backed chair gone with her.
I get up, cautiously. The room veers. I bend over the chair, holding on to it, taking deep breaths. Things slow to a wobble.
Fizzing weakness in my legs. Like I’ve run a marathon and been transfused with ginger ale. My arms too. Bubbles fizzing up and down my body.
But I take a step, and stay upright. The next step better. Move my arms. Get your blood working. Disperse his shit.
It will take a while. Which you haven’t got. You need to leave now. But you need to do some things first.
A glance at my wrist, my watch gone. Since when? Don’t remember it all night. Part the curtains. Still dark beyond.
Move as fast as you can.
No faster.
A trail of blood spots, getting smaller and more widely spaced until they stop, leads through the kitchen to the dining room. The center drawer of the sideboard pulled out. The carving case in it, but the bloody knife left outside the case, laid between it and the front of the drawer.
Locations always approximate with Judy. Or micron-accurate, by her measures.
Turn and see her table setting. Partial… or complete. Dining paraphernalia, mismatched in kind and number. Two stacks of dinner plates, different patterns of china. Smaller one of side plates, also various. One bowl. Two drinking glasses. A wine glass. Teacups, saucers. Many mugs. Pieces of cutlery blocking out a couple of rectangles. Scattered elsewhere. Napkins in rings, folded, crumpled and strewn. Banquet in Bedlam.
Time to start thinking. My head clearing, but not quickly enough.
Smears and splotches all around. Her prints, not yours.
I take a linen napkin from the open sideboard drawer. Retracing my steps to the door, I try to remember what I touched. Not much. The Sandman took my coat, led me straight to my cage. Careful, he called himself.
The front door’s ajar, cold air sidling through it. You shut the door on her, Sandman, but you forgot to take back the key. Probably couldn’t imagine her having the nerve to let herself in. How on earth did she keep it all these years? Hang on to it, cyclone after cyclone?
I shut the door, first wiping the knobs on either side and the edge of the frame. None of which I remember touching, but could’ve. The bell outside. I open the door again and wipe it. Jump at the ring inside the dead house. Keeping the napkin around my hand, I open the closet, take my coat off the hook. Put it on, pat the pockets. The hammer back in its place, crusty with blood.
Judy. Such a strange, wrecked creature.
Still wearing the slippers, careful not to step in any of the blood, I take three plastic bags from a dispenser under the kitchen sink. Drop the napkin in one of them, put the other two over my hands, huge white fingerless gloves. Grab a new napkin. Go back into the room with the corpse collapsed in his gore, wipe down every part of the chair I could have touched. Bag the glass. The slippers will follow last, added outside the door.
Did I touch any of the pictures? Just stood before them, wondering. Amazed and appalled.
Just one more place to visit, and easy to find if I’m right. An organized person. Careful.
Yes, but old. And cunning. Knowing there’s a point past which help is mandatory.
His office downstairs. The basement chilly but dry, no hint of must. I leave the stair and hall lights on to dispel some of the dark, but the shadowy pantry and the rooms beyond it still make my skin prickle. Dark mouths, things in them that want to rush out.
Sitting at his solid oak desk, in a straight-backed maroon leather chair matching the armchairs upstairs. On the desk two framed pictures. One with friends on a fishing trip: three old men, each grinning and straining to hold up a salmon by the gills. The other with the brown-skinned woman at a party with balloons, their heads leaning together, laughing.
The wall in front of me a curriculum vitae of sorts, its entries framed and under glass. His medical degree. Specialist’s certificate, a duplicate of the one upstairs. Certificates of membership in physicians’ colleges in Canada and the U.S. A testimonial of appreciation on his retirement from the hospital, colleagues’ signatures in various inks at the bottom. A similar tribute on his retirement from U of T. Other honours and ceremonial expressions of gratitude.
What stops me longest is a metal nameplate set in brackets just above the desk. The metal painted black, the deeply-cut letters painted silver. M.S. Wyvern, MD, FRCPC, ABA, Professor of Anaesthesiology. I stare at it a long time, wondering what kind of man still wants—needs—to be reminded of his privileged office space twenty-five years after his retirement? Wants to see it each time he raises his eyes.
The kind that bleeds out in a leather chair, butchered by his daughter.
What I’m looking for is in the bottom right-hand drawer of the desk. Where I expected it to be, more or less. Where it had to be. It is a large rectangular packet of soft suede, the colour of yellowed ivory, much handled. Like an oversized wallet or undersized briefcase. Last Will And Testament and To Be Opened By My Executor are printed in black pen on white labels slid into plastic windows on the front. It has a button clasp of dark wood inside an elasticized loop. Inside are various soft and stiff compartments, the latter with documents in them, the former with articles of miscellaneous size.
All pretty much as you expected. As if you’ve
been here in a dream, with only the details gone blurry. It has to be where Max, the executor, who has seen it many times, will find it easily, so he can remove it on the first pass.
Holding the packet with one plastic-wrapped hand, I poke through the contents of the soft front pocket with the other. Two disks labelled “Christmas Music,” in different pens. Other disks: “Holiday Favourites.” “Easter Parade.” “Valentine’s Medley.” Two envelopes of old prints, some of them Polaroids, predating the musical titles theme: “Fond Memories” and “Home Snaps.” Either never digitized, or else kept in their first format anyway, originals too precious to destroy. The first image I flick to shows me Max Senior’s disdain for Max Junior was justifed in one respect at least: in terms of sexual sadism, the son might have learned from the father but could only ever be a dabbler by comparison. In bringing home pictures the old man could no longer procure for himself, Max was doing more than ensuring for himself the lion’s share of the inheritance. He was also propitiating the father who saw him as a failure, the dentist who couldn’t cut it as a doctor. On some sick level, a little boy trying to keep Daddy happy if he can’t make him proud.
Take in another couple, even more extreme and elaborate, thinking, Where’s the surgeon? The OR nurses? Is this blindness or collusion?
Then close “Home Snaps” before I can see Judy. Or anyone else I recognize.
No need for another reason to get back on the wagon.
Rage clarifies. To a point. Past which it fogs and blurs. My mind’s almost back to hyper-drive. Just the body lurching and fizzing a ways behind.
I riffle past the envelopes which start with the will and go on to various dated codicils. I can guess the contents in broad strokes, without needing to know the details. Dead Dr. Wyvern trying tirelessly to control people, even from beyond the grave. Bestowing or retracting this treat or that, according to how well and how recently someone had pleased him or the reverse. In some ways a brutally simple man, with a brutally simple code: Play by my rules, you get paid off. And with a wish of diamond simplicity yoking his personal and professional lives: that other human beings be reduced to pliable, unthinking flesh to serve his sovereign desires.
With legal means as well as drugs to accomplish this. An envelope marked POA Maude. Outlining, I assume, the Max/Sandor split. And behind it, from thirty years earlier, The Sandman’s first foray into legal de-personing. In lawyerese it spells out that, beginning 12 November 1972, the power for all of Judy’s decisions—financial, medical, choices of any kind—rests with her father. And this power never revoked. Handy. If she ever said or did something inconvenient, to be able to produce a document proving she hadn’t been a legally responsible adult since age seventeen—in other words, ever. But he hadn’t ever seriously feared waywardness from Judy, no more than waywardness from any other sentient being. He just preferred people supine and paralyzed, and knew ways beyond hypos and IVs to achieve this. It puts Judy’s migrations between group homes and alleys in a new light. She might have been choosing the safest, even wisest, course she could—retaining the only powers of self-determination left open to her.
And here, ah, yes—an addendum from 1989: Sandor, in his twenties, named Judy’s alternate POA. In case the patriarch’s immortality ever proved to be a myth. Maude left out of it even then.
I fold the document and put it in my pocket. Only to realize, a second later, that that changes nothing. Another copy sits in a lawyer’s office. Probably in a safety deposit box as well. No matter. I want to have it.
In some way, reading it brings a bitter relief. A kind of vindication even. It demonstrates, in the only slightly faded black ink of a 1972 typewriter, what I have always known and understood perfectly. Judy forfeited her right to family membership by becoming mentally ill. She forfeited her right to citizenship by the same mistake.
Upstairs, looking down again at the dead man, a surge of the bad rage, the fogging kind.
You got off too damn easy. Maude losing her mind slowly, in a series of institutions. Like being eaten alive by ants. Likewise Judy, starting long before. Max and Vivian, who deserve no pity, facing a long battle to keep their sanity in a prison cell, after a long and costly battle to stay out of one. And Sandor—as always the question mark, the one I can’t decide about. His role in all this? The grieving eyes above the glass say victim more than perp to me—though no law says you can’t be both. Either way, wherever he finds himself, he’ll go on being swamped. Will break down and rally, break down and rally. What did he call it? Death by a thousand paper cuts. One of the many entries where Maude’s plight segues quickly into his own. Whereas you, the author of so much harm—what happened to you? No perp walk, no public vilification, no class action hatred, no cell rot. You went on doing exactly as you pleased, exactly as you’d done for ninety-four years, right up to the moment your daughter slit your throat.
Your carefully curated public self will be smashed to pieces posthumously, but you won’t be around to see the demolition.
I drop the satchel in his lap, wishing, too late, I could slip Judy’s POA papers back in. It might help in her defense: how can a non-person consciously kill a person? It would keep her in the kind of facility she’s used to instead of prison.
And then remember, again, it doesn’t matter. There are other copies, in all the right places.
Not thinking straight, still. His drugs as good as his word. Time to go.
A last look back from the door. The curled figure sunk further into the chair, a wet pulpy outgrowth of its leather and brass buttons. Stained a deep red, looking small, almost fetal. Cradling his satchel.
Another voice in the Wyvern chorus. Their mix tape from hell.
§
A brief stop to try the Honda. Not a cough or sputter. I wonder what he planned to do about my car. He would have had it covered.
As it is, it will be towed away soon after 10 a.m. The parking regs odd on Elm. You can park all night and most of the day, but not between 8 and 10 a.m. But parking regs tell a story, if you listen. In this case, no hassle for lines of friends at dinners and other do’s running late into the night. And no hassle for busy people needing lots of road to wheel big cars to work.
Someone will be on the blower by 10:01.
And that, with luck, will be before Iris returns from Mississauga. And before the police open their mail, and Max, panicking, starts calling Home Office.
Who—you hope—amidst all the kerfuffle to come, will recall the junker briefly disrupting the melody of a Rosedale morning?
I won’t be picking it up anytime soon, if ever.
Walking. The pre-dawn air cool, not cold. Making my slow way home on drugged and battered bones. Stopping for frequent rests on curbs, benches.
4:10 by the clock tower on UCC, staring from atop its column down Avenue.
When and how did the watch disappear? Image now of it on my wrist, glancing at it soon after I arrived. It can only have been Judy. Odd to think of her close to me, unclasping and removing it. An oddly delicate action amid the night’s carnage. But no bloodstains on my wrist. I stand under a streetlight checking. Another unanswerable adjustment mystery. Closing windows thick with them.
Scary thought: Judy the sanest, least spooky member of her top-end crazy, top-end spooky family.
Sane enough to get out for good.
No, not scary. Nothing is that clears your head. That lets you breathe.
Wherever Judy is gliding in the city, I know that in some sense she is right here beside me and always has been. In our very different ways, through twenty years apart, we’ve always been on the same unending path: ignoring red lights to cross deserted streets in the middle of the night.
18
Hallowe’en is the usual lumpish modern affair, limping remnant of a rite that must once have had real verve. I set up around 5:00 on the landing at the top of the stairs. Half blocking the buzz-in pa
d—visitors have to reach awkwardly around me, or I key them in—but there’s nowhere else to sit without blocking the door. Dusk has barely begun, twelve steps down people are passing back and forth from work and shopping, but this is the time of highest traffic in a neighbourhood of young couples, who walk the little ones around between school and suppertime.
Most of my gear borrowed. Lucy’s kitchen chair. Her largest mixing bowl, with the assortment of Shoppers candy bought from the tenants’ donation box, topped up by Ken’s almost-empty fund. My Mayor Mask came from 303, who bought it for a party but decided to stay home and game instead. It’s hot inside the cheap latex. And it doesn’t bear much actual resemblance to His Worship—just a hairless, jowly orb that could belong to any old, fat man who eats and drinks incessantly. It’s a glutton’s version of the Face, I realize, minus the scarring and perched bizarrely atop an anorexic body. Not many kids brave the trip up to it. They hesitate on the threshold, peering up at the vision, elongated further by their low-angle perspective, of impossible stretch topped by a blob of sickly white. Parents murmur them back, but they’re already retreating. Would more, or fewer, make the climb if I took it off?
It’s mostly teens who empty the bowl. Later on, when the little kids are done and the ritual is all but concluded. Costumeless, elbow-dared by a friend, one mounts the steps, attempting some sort of hard but wheedling face, grabs a fistful of candies and jumps back down to guffaws. Part of the joke seems to be that I don’t move or speak at all. Wax dummy.
§
Nichols’ Variety was about a mile’s walk from my foster parents’ home. My second or third set, I must’ve been about seven. It was a new subdivision, filled with vacant lots and houses under construction, with dirt mountains and excavated pits and concrete basements with rooms but no doors, perfect for fantasy explorings. Mr. Nichols was tall and bald, with sad eyes and a pot belly, the image of stern authority to a kid. His wife was a mass in a flowered dress filling an armchair in the shadows while he worked the counter. Big glass jars of candy along a board in front: jujubes, gummi worms, raspberry dollars, lemon chips, licorice strings, black balls, peppermints, sour balls—three picks for a penny. It changed the way you walked, ignoring what’s ahead to inspect the curb and gutter for glints of copper. The day before Hallowe’en, I snuck out of the house after dark and broke the windows in Nichols’ with a metal rod from one of the homes-in-progress. Climbed through and smashed the candy jars, after filling my pockets with a few handfuls. Sat on the curb in front of the store, ringing rhythms on the road with the bar.
