All Night

by Alan Cumyn

  “You wouldn’t want to miss that,” she says. “Just because your partner and friend is dead. You know what this reminds me of? The elephants!”

  “Not the elephants,” I moan. A year ago we watched a special on elephants on National Geographic TV. Since then the elephant story has showed up in every argument we have had.

  Jess begins to shuffle around the room. She swings her arms together like a trunk. “There they are, the mothers. And the little orphan elephant is trapped in the mud hole.”

  “Shut up!” I say. But of course I watch her. Performing, she has an extra glow.

  “All the female elephants pull that orphan out and adopt him! But what are the males doing? They’re off at the water hole, the big bulls. And poor Grampa elephant is trying to get in, to take a sip. But they won’t let him! He’s old and weak. He stands in the heat for hours until—”

  Jess falls back on the bed. She twitches, lies still. Then she gets up. “And all the bulls run around Grampa. They trumpet: what a great elephant he used to be! But did they lift a trunk to save him?”

  I pull her under the covers again. “Enough of you and your elephants,” I say. “I sat on a bus for hours in the cold in the wrong clothes to mourn my friend. Doing our act at the Rats’ Nest is another way of honouring him. And besides, people from the Second City club might be there. You never know who will hire us next.”

  “To pay you what?” Jess asks. “French fries?”

  I rub my empty belly. “French fries would be good right now. I would kill to get a basket of french fries right now.”

  She rubs my skinny belly, too. Warm, warm hand. “Let’s not kill anybody, okay?”

  “It’s just a figure of speech,” I say.

  Something flits across the floor. Jess sits up. “Oh damn! I saw one! I saw one!” She squirms on the bed. I peer into the gloom. “Do you see it?” she asks. “Do you see it?”

  There it is—a cockroach! I grab a shoe and hammer along the floor. There and ... there! I chase it, hammering.

  “Is it dead?”

  I blow roach guts off the shoe. “You wouldn’t happen to have any french fries, would you?”

  When I get back to bed Jess holds me close. “My hero! I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I’m just ... I shouldn’t have talked you into wearing that tuxedo. Overdressing was stupid. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  “You were thinking of your father,” I say. “His tux is just a little big on me.”

  “We should have shown more respect. Now Peter’s family thinks we’re just clowns or something. As if we thought it was Halloween.”

  I stroke her hair. It’s going to be all right. “Peter loved Halloween. And Peter loved you. He really did.”

  “I know,” she says.

  “He wasn’t just carrying a torch for you. His torch was like a ... a flame-thrower!”

  Why did I say that? She shakes my hand away. “Shut up.”

  I have started, so I keep going. “If he hadn’t died, he would have been all over you. He was just waiting for me to exit the scene.”

  “He was not.”

  So much for talking truths! I should just shut up. And yet I can’t. “He tried to kiss you that night at the thing,” I say. “At that swimming party.”

  “He was drunk.”

  “Peter was never really drunk in his whole life. As soon as he saw you, he knew what he wanted.”

  Jess pulls a pillow over her head. “Can’t we just go to sleep?”

  So that’s the way it is! I move closer. “What, and not honour Peter? It was your idea. You’re the one who wanted to talk about things.”

  “Important things. The changes we need to make.”

  “What changes? We are on a path. I need to do my act at the Rats’ Nest because the Second City club might be next. You need to check your messages. A gig might have come up for you.”

  She hits me with a pillow. Feeble, a glancing blow. “Nothing has come up for me.”

  “I know I joke around a lot,” I say, “but this I truly believe: the world can change in a day. Are you ready for it? That’s the big question here.”

  “I’m not ready for it,” Jess says. “I need more voice classes. We’re out of money. I can’t even afford to get my picture taken. A proper head shot. By a real photographer. How are we going to have kids?”

  Kids? Is that what our fight is about? “We’ll, um, raise them in a shoe box, to start,” I say. “We’ll get deals at the Goodwill store. We can pay for everything they need on credit and then get new cards.”

  “Very funny,” she says. “You’re just a scream.”

  But I’m not laughing. Can’t she see that? “Do you really want a guy in a suit who rents his soul to some company?”

  “If his sperm is good and he can pay the bills.”

  What? Why is she saying such things? “Maybe ten years from now we might be ready for kids. What’s the rush? I thought you didn’t want to be hemmed in.”

  Jess gets up and begins pacing. She has heavy feet for someone so small. “I feel trapped and poor. I don’t feel as if I have ten years to spend on a risky career. We just got the warning shot. Go to sleep tonight, tomorrow might not happen.”

  She shivers, even in her mother’s thick pajamas. “It’s freezing in here!” she cries.

  She picks up the phone.

  “You are not calling our landlord,” I say.

  “You’re right,” Jess replies. “I’m not. You are! Tell him he might find two blue corpses first thing in the morning.”

  She carries the phone to me in bed. It’s the middle of the bloody night.

  “I’m not calling!”

  “No, you’re not calling,” she says. “And you’re not getting a good job. You’re waiting for me. You want me to get some office job that will pay for you ...”

  “No.”

  She’s still waving the phone at me. “We have to do something!”

  “Start by checking your e-mail,” I say. “Some film director might be looking for you!”

  She punches in our landlord’s number and holds the phone out for me.

  “I’m not taking it!” I fall out of bed trying to get away.

  “Yes you are!” Are we doing this? I scramble in the cold, she chases me with the phone. We go around and over the bed. She grabs my leg and pins me down. I hate wrestling with her. She’s tiny and too good! And if, somehow, I win, she pretends to be just a girl, anyway.

  On my back, on the floor, I finally take the phone. “It’s the machine,” I say.

  “Well, leave a message!” Her hair is falling in my face. I could just sort of help her move towards me. I think of her at the reception in her dress, on the bus with her eyes closed.

  Even when we are pulling apart, I feel as if we are moving together.

  On the phone I say, “Hello, Mr. Stewart. It’s, ah, Gregor Luft.” I change my voice because Jess is listening. “We’re, ah, close to the North Pole now, sir. But the weather is closing in. Jess has left me here. She’s making a dash for it. I’m worried about her gear.” I hold the phone away for a moment and make wind noises. “Not sure how much longer we can hold out here without heat, Mr. Stewart. Please call our families if you get this message. You might find us dead in the morning.”

  Jess grabs the phone. “Mr. Stewart, Gregor is just kidding. Well, not really. It is freezing in here. The heater has died again. Please, fix it! Thank you.” She hangs up and throws the phone down. “Nothing is serious for you,” she says. “Everything is a big joke.”

  “That’s not true,” I say. Why can’t she see what that was? Not a big joke, a bridge of jokes. A way to be in this world. A way across a cold, dark river.

  Why can’t she see what I am about? Who I am?

  “What are you doing Saturday night at the Rats’ Nest?” she says. “To honour Peter? What’s the plan?”

  “It’s improv comedy,” I say. “We just say the first thing that comes into our heads. Even better if it’s funny. There is
no plan.”

  “So you and the third guy, what’s-his-name, Jeremy. You haven’t talked about how to honour your missing partner?”

  “We haven’t.” The floor is cold. I move to get free of Jess but she pulls me back. I let her.

  “You haven’t actually replaced Peter already, have you? Mr. Elephant?”

  I am not an elephant beside her. More a giraffe beside a herd dog.

  “Of course we haven’t replaced him yet.”

  “Can’t you do improv with two people?”

  “Not really, not as well,” I say. “Three people are funnier. They can trip each other up. Aren’t you cold?”

  “No.” She is focused. Focused on fixing me. “Okay,” she says, “pretend it’s Saturday night. Jeremy Elephant is away. It’s just you. Some big talent agent is in the crowd. You’re all alone onstage. What are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” I say, and I mean it.

  “Now, ladies and gentlemen! Direct from the filthy, frozen apartment he will never escape! Mr. Gregor Luft!”

  I stay still.

  “Master of stacking chairs and cleaning cake from carpets!”

  “Shut up.”

  “Gregor Luft! The funniest man making minimum wage. It’s your big moment.”

  “It’s not my big moment. It’s not Saturday night. I don’t feel right.” I pull free, get up, and see the hot plate. It’s all we have for a stove, nearly useless for cooking. But thats not what we need right now. I turn it on. The hot plate element begins to glow orange.

  I smile at Jess—she is looking at me. I hold my chilly hands over the hot plate burner. Surely she can see me now—the real me? The burner isn’t much, but it’s quietly funny, and a little warm. Lovely in the dark, like an old campfire. From back when we humans were hardly more than giraffes and elephants.

  Any other time she would smile, but not tonight. Peter’s death really has rattled her. “Let’s just go to bed,” she says, her voice now dim, like a candle flame almost out.

  Chapter Four

  Suddenly, the wind blows the door open again. I hadn’t told the landlord a crazy story: we really are fighting arctic storms.

  “Shut the door!” Jess wraps herself in blankets. “Come to bed!”

  I jam a National Geographic magazine under the door to keep it closed. Then I return to my laptop.

  “I hope there are no elephants in that magazine,” Jess says. “If the lock is broken, how are we supposed to keep out burglars?”

  “We have nothing to steal,” I reply. “That will keep out burglars.” On the laptop I try her account, but I can’t get in. “Did you change your password?” I look up from the screen, waiting.

  “Maybe.”

  “You never change your password.”

  “You haven’t known me very long,” she says. “I changed my password all the time before I met you.”

  My fingers are still waiting. “Two years is a long time. What’s your new password?”

  She tells me it’s a secret because she doesn’t know mine. But I did tell her, that night in the taxi, when we were stuck in the snow. She had decided she wanted to know everything about me.

  I remind her of that conversation. “Oh, that famous night when we took a taxi!” she says. “We were just blowing through money!”

  She’s stalling. She really doesn’t want me to know her password. Why would that be?

  Because words have power. More than we know.

  “I will tell you mine again,” I say, “but then you might feel bad for not remembering, and blame me. So you need to forgive me now.”

  “I forgive you,” she says.

  “Okay. Here’s the clue: one of the toilet inventors.”

  “Oh! Oh!” She holds her head in her hand. “A password so stupid I should never have forgotten it!”

  “At least you forgave me,” I say.

  “But you must have changed it by now,” she says.

  “I don’t go around changing things that are perfectly good,” I reply.

  “No. No one will guess ‘Crapper.’ Thomas, wasn’t it?”

  “Thomas Crapper. Now you tell me your password,” I say.

  Jess closes her eyes. “Can’t you guess it? I thought you knew me better than that.”

  “You couldn’t guess my password, and I’d already told you what it was!”

  She sits up, not tired at all now. Ready to just keep on arguing. “But you’re really smart. You could be doing a lot better than this. It’s just about stacking chairs for you. Being in the moment. But you can’t be in this moment. Where are you? Waiting for Saturday night, Mr. Elephant? That’s the moment you want.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “If you knew me at all, you would know,” she says.

  I hold my head. “You’re just ... just looking to make trouble.”

  “I am. I’m a troublemaker. I want someone who really, really knows me. Who pays attention. Who makes plans.”

  “I do make plans!” I say. “Didn’t I buy the bus tickets with our credit card points from shopping at the grocery store? Tell me that didn’t take planning. Saving and using those points.”

  “I do the shopping. You save the points. Some plan. But what’s your plan about me, about our life together, about how we’re going to pay the bloody bills? Now that we have no grocery points left?”

  I press my lips together.

  “You looked as if you wanted to say something,” Jess says.

  “I am sitting here, taking your criticism like a man. Not an elephant. Or a giraffe.”

  “Giraffe?” She softens. “Come to bed, Mr. Giraffe.”

  When I do get in bed, with the laptop, she touches my nose, a sudden, loving gesture. “Misty,” she says.

  I don’t get it.

  “That’s my password!”

  Misty. Misty ... suddenly I hear Peter’s voice in my head, talking to Jess. “Misty, when are you going to dump this guy?” The way he used to talk, even when I was around. Joking, but not really.

  He loved her. He loved her. And she is using his pet name for her. She uses it for her password.

  “Check my e-mail and let’s go to sleep!” Jess says. She pulls the blankets over her head as if she doesn’t care what might be waiting for her.

  Chapter Five

  Misty. Peter and Jess. Jess and Peter. Some things you have to put to one side. They will need thinking through. They can’t be taken care of right away.

  I type “Misty” on Jess’s password line and then try to forget about it. “You have 2,081 unread messages,” I say. “Don’t you ever check your mail?”

  She nudges me under the blankets.

  “They are all junk messages, aimed at men with little thingies,” she says. That wouldn’t apply to Peter. He and I used to swim together. I don’t want to think about his thingy.

  “I knew it. I knew it!” I see the golden message she missed.

  “What?”

  “Ten o’clock. Tomorrow morning! An audition!”

  “For what?” Jess pulls the blankets off her head. “What am I trying out for?”

  “Sweeney Circle Acting School and Theatre.”

  “No!” She twists out of bed. Those small feet thumping on the floor. “I sent in my application months ago.”

  “And they replied last week. Why don’t you read your e-mail? You have to be there at nine-thirty.”

  “I have nothing ready to perform!” she says.

  “The acting school program lasts two years, and you get fully paid,” I say. “The first year is training, and the second year you’re in real plays with the other actors.”

  “But I have to try out! What am I going to do?” Jess wails. “I just ... I could give them that speech I learned when I played the girl who joined the circus in that show. In Whimsy. But I haven’t done it in ages. Do I even have the script anymore?”

  She could do any number of things. I could give her a list. She could even do the elephants.

>   I read from the screen: “Actors are to perform three to five minutes of original work.”

  “Well, that sinks it,” Jess says. She pulls at her hair as she walks around. She can do this. I know she can. But she says, “I don’t do original work. I can’t make things up. And there’s no time now. Oh, forget it.”

  “You make things up all the time,” I say. “What about the elephants?”

  “The elephant story only works with you. You know everything I’m thinking. The acting judges at Sweeney Circle do not.”

  I do not know everything she is thinking. Misty, for example. Peter. But I get out of bed and catch her hands—colder than ever—to stop her pacing. “If you get this,” I say, “we could rent a place on the planet’s surface. With proper windows and natural light! Fresh air. A little ... a little rose bush. You could smell it on your way to work in the theatre company of your dreams!”

  “I can’t make things up,” Jess says. “I need a script.”

  But that is what I’m here for: I make things up all the time, even when I’m on stage. I clap my hands. “We’ll just work out something right now. Okay? Pretend I’m a judge.” I make my voice sound stern. “What is your name, dear?”

  “Jess. Jess Hale.”

  “And what is your chosen topic for this morning, Ms. Hale?”

  “Ah, you got me,” Jess says.

  I drop the phony voice. “No, that’s not a good answer. What’s in your head right now?”

  “Death. My father’s death.”

  “Excellent!” I become a judge again. “Please proceed.”

  Jess paces, paces. “Oh damn, oh damn! My father was ... a strange man.”

  “Don’t tell me. Perform it!”

  “My father was a fighter. He was a martial artist, a tai chi bookkeeper.”

  “Act it out!” I say. “Show me with your hands and arms.” I punch the air.

  “Shut up,” Jess says. “This is not going to work.”

  “I have an idea. What were you doing—exactly— when you found out? About your father’s death?”

  “I’ve told you this, like, a hundred times,” she says.

  “I know. It’s a good story. You could use it in the audition. Just be yourself. The judges will fall in love with you telling that story.”