by Mike Barnes
“It’s on, fucker!” the yelling resumed. “I know you’re in there!” Then a forearm smash, maybe a shoulder thrown against the door, shaking it in its frame. It wouldn’t hold. “I’ve been waiting all day long. It’s on!”
Part of me – not a small, but a very controllable part – wanted to fling open the door and try my luck with the tequila bottle. Rick’s momentum might topple him, give me one shot at least.
LET . . . ME . . . IN!” Each crashing blow rocked the door in its frame.
Turning to Angela, I mimed that she should tell him I was out. This was difficult to communicate with just hand gestures. After pointing at myself and waving my hands – which just made it seem that I was panicking – I found the correct sequence. Five gestures: point at Angela, a bird-beak sign of talking with my right hand, jerk my thumb at the door, point at myself, wash-out sign – hands crossing and uncrossing, cancellation. She nodded.
The pounding on the door was continuous now, roundhouse blows by a boxer throwing wildly with both hands. Angela opened her mouth to speak and I made a wait sign. It was hard to wait. You wanted to counter the barrage with your own screeching, noise to noise.
Finally there was a moment, Rick resting or taking a step back. Hoarse, ragged breathing from the other side of the door. I pointed at Angela.
“He’s not here!” she yelled.
“Bitch!” Rick shouted. It was strange to hear him panting from behind a thin slab of wood. Just the one slim panel making all the difference. There and here. My eyes fixated on the brown paint and brass hinges as if they were the outward signs of an immense mystery, the everyday unfathomable.
“Paul’s not here!”
“You fucking bitch . . . where is he?”
“He’s over at Claudia’s.”
I jerked my head around and stared at her. Outside there was another wheezing pause, and then a last smash at the door before his boots thundered down the stairs, sounding like twin bags of cement dropping on every step. It seemed to me the whole house shook.
Angela was backing away, and I realized I’d taken a step towards her with my hand raised. “Why’d you say her?” I’d got the hand down, but had also taken another step.
“Well you usually are, aren’t you?”
That stopped me. It wasn’t true, not really. But then it was, too. Ramon? Peter? Or just the near-infallible telepathy that tells you when someone is slipping away, and sometimes even the direction of the slide. It’s dangerous to underestimate people.
“How did you . . . ?”
But it was a mystery that could, would have to, wait. No time for it now.
“Where’re your art supplies?” I said.
“Huh?”
I don’t know why I asked. She used them right in front of me all the time, and besides, there was no place to hide anything in the four small rooms. I went to the coffee can on the living-room desk and got her x-acto knife, the heavy one she used for canvas and linoleum.
“Paul, no. Paul. Let’s talk. Don’t go out that door,” I heard vaguely from behind me, my hearing fogged by adrenaline and fear. Later I would think of it as an odd choice of words, meaningful on many levels, but at the time it was only another version of “Stop.”
The one thing I couldn’t do.
Pictures flooded my mind as I ran to Claudia’s. The day, which had begun at a buzz, then slowed to a thoughtless crawl, had switched over again into manic mode. Time enough to run past houses and still catch, in my peripheral vision, the coloured flares and bursts and wheelings. Hear the booms and screamers. More than ever like an artillery barrage. D-Day. Armageddon. Terrible . . . beautiful. Time to imagine what he was doing to her. What he would do to me if I couldn’t do something to him first. The only picture that was unclear, that wouldn’t come into focus properly, was the last.
“Claudia!” I banged on her door.
No answer.
“Claudia!” I banged like Rick had banged, willing the knuckles through the wood. The blade was extended from its handle, up at chest level. Across the face, quick and hard. I chanted it to myself like a mantra. There would be just the one chance.
“Paul?”
She opened the door a crack, then flung it wide. A glance to see she was all right, just breathing heavily, then my eyes flicked over her shoulder. “Where is he?”
“At Neale’s apartment. I think.”
“Neale’s?”
“I told him Neale has the Klee.”
I stared at her. When? I thought. And why? But the more immediate question: Can I trust you?
“You had to tell him to get rid of him,” I said hopefully.
She shot me a strange look – part her usual sneer, part wince. “I told him the truth,” she said. “The first and the last of it anyway. I left out some middle bits.”
Her eyes were wide, her skin gone past its normal pale to paper white. “Did he hurt you?” I asked.
“Rick?” She seemed surprised by the question, which might have been my biggest surprise so far in a night filled with them. “Rick wouldn’t hurt me.”
Add it to the list of mysteries there was no time for.
“Come on,” I said.
We ran side by side down Hunter Street. Claudia ahead at first, skimming on those long skinny legs, but then flagging fast, me taking her by the hand and pulling her by the end of the first block. Image of the Red Queen dragging Alice through the air, the little feet dangling. Run as fast as you can to stay in one place. To get someplace, run twice as fast.
It was only two long blocks, and then a little way up Bay, but it was all over before we got there.
We slowed to a walk as we approached, getting our breathing back closer to normal. But not my heart, and I’m sure not Claudia’s. A knot of onlookers had already gathered on the sidewalk, pressing inward at the edge of the lawn of the Bay 200 building. A policeman stood with his arms stretched out, marking the limit of their advance. He allowed them to lean forward, though, craning to see around and over his arms. At each bang from the fireworks behind, some of the heads swivelled around, then back, then, in some cases, around again, as if torn between a certain spectacle and a potential one. But there was really nothing to see. The two police cars were parked hood to hood at the top of the curved driveway, angled to make a V-shape like a Japanese screen, shielding the small area of pavement before the entrance. Two other policemen stood behind the screen, heads down.
Claudia and I left the sidewalk at the same instant, walking on a diagonal directly across the lawn towards the red tail lights of one cruiser. “Hey!” came the voice behind us. We walked faster. We’d see what we could, while we could. But it wasn’t much. Blood, mainly. A bright oily splatter, taking on lurid neon hues from the cruisers’ red tail and roof lights. Still, somehow – it may have been only what I expected to see – the splayed body parts I caught gave an impression of length, of attenuated reaching. Something glittery in the light, too. Glasses? But shattered length, definitely. Not the crumpled block that was the only other possibility.
Giacometti, not Brancusi, I thought, and cursed myself for it. Galleria . Or just the mind recoiling from what the eyes forced upon it.
“Hey!” We turned away, reluctantly and gratefully. “What is that?”
I stared down at where the cop was pointing. The x-acto blade still out and clutched in my hand.
“We were doing some artwork. We heard the sirens.”
The cop shook his head wearily. A rough shift, getting worse. “Is this your business?”
“No.”
“So walk away.”
Strange to do that, walk away, and hear the ambulance siren behind and see the giant chrysanthemum blooms in the sky up ahead. The night shuddering. The display was reaching its climax. The city had promised a full forty-five-minute show this year. That meant everything had happened in less than an hour. Einstein’s universe: frozen massively before the big bang, exploding outward at the speed of light.
We walked side by s
ide, not looking at each other, not saying a word.
Back at the apartment on Park Street we found Claudia’s door ajar. Pale splintered wood beside the doorknob and on the inner edge of the jamb. Two doors down on the other side, a pair of fearful eyes over a chain in a doorslit.
Claudia walked right in, but slowly. I felt for the knife in my pocket, but on instinct left it there. Something – some crisis gauge – told me that the spasm was past; my part in it anyway.
Rick was in the bedroom, sitting slumped on the edge of the bed. Like the sleepy man I’d seen eight days before. He held the painting between his knees, dangling it from one huge hand. He might only have been taking a breather, a pause, but he looked done in. Claudia sat down next to him and put a thin arm almost across his back. She murmured something to him, her lips close to his ear. It was hard to watch.
“The fucking guy,” Rick was mumbling. “Give me the fucking painting, I go. He goes, No. Holds on to it and fucking glares at me. Like he’s going to fight me for it.” The words, muttered quickly, sounded strangely heavy and singular in my ears. Like sobs almost, each one coated with shock and disbelief, rolled in hot wet air from the lungs. “He backs on to his fucking balcony. All I want to do is grab the fucking thing and run. But he hangs on. One little push in his chest . . . and he’s gone. Fucking over.”
“He loves his art,” Claudia said.
Rick turned uncomprehending eyes on Claudia. Big brown glossy eyes that reminded me of Frankenstein’s, but filled with self-pity, the injustices foisted upon him by the weak. He saw me then, and the sorry eyes caught and flared, but then spun out like a screamer, leaving black air.
But even the memory, the reflex, of rage seemed to galvanize him. “Listen, babe,” he said to Claudia, speaking rapidly as if he’d just remembered that time was running and he had to catch up to it. “You gotta help me. You gotta do me one big favour, okay? I just gotta leave this thing with you for a while” – he tilted the picture between his knees up briefly, like a placard – “just until I can figure out where to move it. I gotta disappear for a while. You okay with that?”
I am, I thought, thinking of the disappearance part. Some of the earlier Rick-pictures bubbled back into my head, blood and groans and thumps down stairs, but they flickered out like the screamers had. I couldn’t sustain them in the face of the sorry sack of man staring at Claudia, thick wet lips parted as he waited for her answer. But she was rubbing his back in small circles between the shoulder blades, listening to his babble instead of throwing him out, feeding him back to the streets. Was this how he did it? The baby that threw vicious tantrums, then hung its head and moaned about them. It wasn’t something I could ever have imagined Claudia responding to, wanting to soothe. Ramon’s cool slow made sense . . . but this?
Though when she did speak, it was sternly. “That’s fucked, man. It’s totally silly. This thing in your hands . . . it’s not real. It’s not worth anything. You need to just leave. Fast. Now.”
“Not worth anything. What the fuck you – ”
“Turn it over.”
Rick did.
“What do you see? On the stretcher. The wooden part. Above the frame.”
“Hauptman’s Art Supplies,” he read.
“You know where Hauptman’s is?”
“How the fuck would – ”
“It’s an art store out in Westdale. I buy my supplies there.”
Rick stared at Claudia, then turned “Wayward Guest” around and stared at it, then back at Claudia again. Not understanding all or even much of it, but getting the part about himself being screwed. He lifted one heavy haunch and farted. Then let the painting fall to the floor. Kicked it sideways with one of the pointed black boots.
“You need to go,” Claudia said. “That’s a posh place. They probably have video surveillance.”
Rick looked startled at the thought. A biker? I thought. A dealer?
“I’m outa here,” he said, then started mumbling, “I’m going back to Timmins. I hate Quebec. Quebec is totally fucked. I can’t even speak French.”
I removed myself to the kitchen, partly to avoid witnessing this, and also to avoid being in range if a last screamer went off. “Sorry about the door, man,” I heard, the low voice sounding honestly regretful, and then a click shut.
And then Claudia found me and we got busy on some tea.
We sat in our usual positions at opposite ends of the brown couch, sipping our teas, not saying anything for a long time. Where to start? Truthfully, I felt too tired at the moment to even try. We had two fallen men between us now. Two men dropped from heights by a series of mistakes. The dead men seemed to occupy the space where “Wayward Guest” had sat, no less freakish, no less astonishing. Plugging the mouth with wonder, first, before the other feelings hit.
“I want to tell you something,” she said finally.
“Yes,” I said. Half knowing what she was going to say before she said it. I could see ahead to a time when there would be no more of these secrets to tell, no more gradual risings of the truth. It was still distant, a dust devil on the horizon, and I looked forward to it, while at the same time, for reasons I didn’t understand, dreading it too.
Claudia set her mug on the floor. Stared at the patch of grey carpet in front of it. “Nobody phoned here from the gallery. Not that night anyway. I just said something, the first thing I could think of, to wind you up. I don’t know why. So you’d start digging maybe.”
“Yes.” And?
“It was me. I phoned Peter that night. As soon as Robert left here. I was just so freaked out. Seeing my painting. Not knowing what those assholes were doing, what they were mixing me up in. I never thought . . . it never crossed my mind what I was dragging Robert into.”
She covered her face with her hands. “He never entered – ” she began, but broke off and pressed her hands tighter while a shudder ran through her. But when I’d moved over beside her and managed to pry loose her fingers, her eyes were barely damp. Rinsed-looking. Like grey pebbles after a dew.
We wrapped our arms around each other and just stayed that way a long time. Locked tight like figures carved out of the same block of stone.
“Don’t go home tonight,” she said, close to my ear.
“I won’t.”
I glanced down the hall and somehow she caught it, perhaps the slight movement of my head near hers, and she said, “No. No. Just stay.”
And with that, the long day of time shifts entered its final slow, dream-like phase. It felt like underwater time, dream time, with sharp sights, corners of things looming suddenly, followed by long quilted intervals where you just drifted. It felt magical – eerie, but with the fright that dreams can bring somehow suspended. We hugged at times, not kissing yet, then drew apart and talked. Talk seemed able to proceed almost telepathically, using phrases as the visible tips of great language icebergs that glided on below the surface. “So you think,” I said at one point. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t.” It seemed like a long, packed conversation.
Toward dawn, when the sky was turning rose above the insurance-schoolyard, I lay down on my back on the carpet and drifted in and out of a daze. Claudia lay down on the couch and slept for a while. It felt peaceful. It felt like home, though not at all like anything permanent. When the sun came up I felt refreshed.
Peter opened his door already talking, which was another new twist. Neale’s bloody fall the catalyst for wholesale change in the gallery? Of the magnitude, if not the type, he would have felt was long overdue.
“If you’ll recall, I answered exactly what you asked me. No more, no less.”
It was the last phrase – like the tag line in a fastidious cookbook – that made me snap. Though another proximate cause would have presented itself in a moment. I drove my fist into Peter’s nose, felt something crumple.
“That’s for being so fucking stupid,” I said.
“Take a few days off,” Bud said. “Think about it. It’s been a hard morning fo
r all of us. Walter’s going to close the gallery for a couple of days anyway.”
“It’s going to be awkward,” I said. Wondering as I said it what exactly I meant, and what Bud thought I meant.
“Awkward?” Bud looked perplexed a moment, as if someone had just complained about the difficulty of dealing with oxygen. “We’re used to awkward around here.”
And realizing that we were – all of us were – the notice I’d just given popped like a bubble of jeu d’esprit.
Angela hadn’t been at her desk on my way in: one lucky break. News of Neale’s death seemed to have acted like some sort of universal negative charge in the gallery, dispersing everyone to their own nooks and corners, each as far away from everyone else as possible. Now I saw her, standing just inside the library door with Jason. They had their arms around each other’s waist, holding each other close. Jason had his chin up at a challenging tilt, combat readiness for any trouble I might make. Angela just looked sad, her lips set thinly together. She would expect violence of some kind, the fist through the closet door. Would she be disappointed at not getting it?
At the sight of them together, so many other things flew together suddenly, it was as if they were the positive charge, the attractive force, to counter Neale. Jason’s sudden return from lunch as I looked through his files. And Jason lived in Dundas, not far from the art school. I remembered that now. But why just now? Why not before? Are there some things you can’t or won’t prevent, so you just don’t let yourself see them happening? They fit, I found myself thinking. A giddy impulse came into my head to rush forward and shake their hands. They’d make it. For a while at least. In the end I might have nodded slightly, a terse blessing.
Ramon: Read the signs.
