by Camilla Gibb
The Limits of Smell
Emma and Andrew didn’t even say goodbye, they just picked up shovels and started digging a trench between them. She hurled words and accusations and he just lobbed them back into her court.
“Remember you told me to tell you when I thought you were going crazy?” he said.
“Well, I said if, not when.”
“Well, you’re either going crazy or you’re just showing your true colours. And believe me, they’re not pretty.”
The hollow within was now two parts hurt and two parts guilt-tinged regret. She had hitched a ride on Andrew’s satellite and breathed artificial air for almost three years, and in the process, if she really faced the truth of it, she’d sacrificed Blue. With Andrew’s departure she sank down in the bath and washed him away. Underneath all the dirt she was covered in bruises, big and blue, just like her brother, the boy who’d once carved his initials into his skin so that he’d never get lost. He was moving elsewhere now, moving west, and while she could handle the scars left with Andrew’s departure, without Blue, she felt battered and unhinged.
There was no map any more. She could either bounce out of orbit into some eastern fringe where the sun stank and the dust storms were blinding, or she could follow in the well-worn footprints of a man who’d gone nowhere. Otherwise, she could chart a different path, even if it meant moving like a starving dog sniffing everything she came across in the hope of finding some nourishment. Burying her nose in the backs of strangers in elevators; her tongue twisted in foreign manes of hair, inhaling sweat and licking hairspray. She’d find something human, something outside herself.
Her heart was still in hiding, though, when she received a letter scribbled onto a paper bag.
Dear Em,
I said I probably wouldn’t write because I’m not a writer. I hate writing. But anyway, remember when you asked me if I’d seen Dad? Well, I didn’t really tell you the whole story. I’d been looking for him for a few months. The warehouse where he used to live had burned down to the ground and so I started searching for him in all the other warehouses but I couldn’t find him anywhere. A few weeks ago I ran into this guy at the coffee shop where he used to hang out and the guy said he’d heard Dad talking about hitchhiking out west. I don’t know. He could at least send a postcard or something.
Blue was obviously on a quest. One that didn’t include her.
Learning Japanese
Blue’s bus pulled into a fairytale-like strip of hotels and stores running through a valley in the middle of Banff National Park. A picturesque oasis at the base of ragged grey mountains. It humbled him to look up. As he stood on the main street, with his heavy knapsack cutting into his shoulders, he marvelled at the inconsequence of being human. He had always felt small despite his size. Here, his size didn’t matter.
He made his way to the youth hostel, where, for twenty-two dollars a night, he could rent a shared room and pee in a communal toilet at the end of a drab hallway. His roommate was a big lug of a guy named Mitch from Montreal. Like him, Mitch had come west for some unspecified reason. Blue suspected the reason might have been criminal in nature, but he could tough it up as good as the next guy, so Mitch treated him like a buddy and gave him the alternative geography of Banff: the map that detoured around ski trails and sporting equipment stores and fine-dining establishments to the places where guys in the know could buy pot, party after hours, and find girls.
Blue liked the bitterness of Banff and the community of exiles who congregated in these hidden places. Apart from the mountains, they were the only relative constants—a small core of workers who stayed through the seasons and drank, played pool, hung out, and complained about their shitty jobs and the fact that their managers were telling them they were going to have to learn Japanese.
Within three days of his arrival, Blue had a job in the laundry room at the Ptarmigan Inn. The job had its humiliations, but it included accommodation in the basement of the hotel, so he and Mitch divided up what remained of their jointly purchased case of beer and he moved up the street and underground.
Blue had never imagined he’d have to learn a new language to work in a laundry room. He wondered if there were really words for things like fluff and fold and permanent press in Japanese. He closed the Ptarmigan Inn-issued pamphlet of 101 Useful Phrases for Doing Business in Japan, and picked up a pen. Perched on a bar stool, eating bacon and eggs at three in the afternoon, he wrote to his sister again.
Dear Em,
Banff is pretty fucking amazing. I think you’d love it. You’re never gonna believe this—I saw a moose in the middle of the road yesterday. How cool is that? There are tons of elk here too. They can be pretty vicious, especially when it’s humping season, so sometimes they pack vanloads of them off and send them to northern Saskatchewan. It takes them a few months, but eventually they make their way home to Banff again.
The town is okay. It’s full of tourists like Niagara Falls, but these ones are loaded. Lots of people here looking to make a whack of money. I’m going to save all I earn so I can start my own business when I get home. I’ve got a job in the laundry room at a hotel downtown. Downtown? That’s a bit of joke. It’s just like Niagara Falls, really—one street you can drive down in two minutes. Guys still cruise the strip. Open their windows and blare the music late at night even though there’s no one on the street and it’s fucking freezing. Funny.
My job’s kind of embarrassing, but they give me a room for free. And there’s no tax on beer in Alberta! And the girls are awesome. When I first got here I met this girl who was Swedish. She was all yurdy, gurdy, fletch and burdy, and I didn’t know what she was on about. She didn’t make any sense but she could have been a model. Anyway, I better stop now because this is probably the longest letter I’ve ever written in my life and my scrambled eggs look like they’re covered in wax.
God, I almost sound happy, he thought, putting down his Niagara Falls pen. He burst out laughing.
“No more coffee for you today, big boy,” said the waitress.
He folded the letter like an accordion and scribbled his phone number on the back.
Imagine
Emma did the unthinkable and reached under the lab table to squeeze the thigh of the graduate student who was the teaching assistant for her osteology course. She felt his thigh tighten instantly, and she exhaled with the relief. Somebody could feel her presence: she must be alive. He kept his eyes fixed on the tin plate of charred animal remains in front of him, but his pupils dilated, becoming black stars.
She daydreamed them into the desert. They were excavating a castle. Him in shorts, the sun beating down relentlessly, their mouths like cool water in the blessed shade of a lonely tree. She worked her fingers between the buttons of his Levi’s, crawling in to nuzzle hard warmth. His black stars exploded into black holes, compelling and vast. He let out his breath and Professor Newman turned around and gave him a disapproving look.
Alone in the lab on Thursday evening they analysed the patterns of wear on a set of human teeth. She offered to bite him but he ignored her. He talked about difference in wear patterns in carnivores and herbivores while she moved her toes in his lap and his breathing became heavy.
His name was Peter and he lived with Patti Summers, the thirty-year-old wonder-child with a tenured job in the department. They had met on a dig in Jordan two summers ago, but that didn’t seem to be stopping him from letting Emma crawl under the table and take him and his sweet smell of soap and pepper into her mouth.
He pressed himself against her back and pushed her gently down the stairs into the basement of the building. He lay on top of her on the hot, dusty floor by the boiler. A bigger boiler, a different boy. But when Peter looked into her eyes she didn’t see anything familiar. She could feel him retreat, going limp, shrinking, and waving bye-bye: I’ve got to go home to Patti. “Very sexy,” he said, shaking his head. “But very impossible.”
Under his weight her tears began, running down her face and int
o her ears. Once she’d started, she couldn’t stop. He pulled her into his lap like a child and held her against his chest. She buried her face in the side of his cliff and he apologized over and over again in the dust of the basement. “Very sexy,” he repeated. “But very impossible.” Very tragic, really. She was crying almost, but not quite a river.
Emma was horrified to see Patti marching down the hall of her residence at the end of that week. Patti was screaming at the top of her lungs, calling Emma things she never would have imagined a professor saying. “You fucking bitch!” she screamed into Emma and Ruthie’s room. Other students poked their heads out into the hallway and stared. Emma closed the door in her face, but Patti kept on yelling.
“Holy shit,” Emma said, crumbling against the bookcase. Ruthie, who was sitting down at her desk with her back to Emma, didn’t turn around. “Ruthie?” Emma said weakly.
Ruthie remained still. Emma said her name again and finally Ruthie turned around reluctantly and said, “What is it, Emma?”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“It’s not me you have to apologize to,” she said, not looking at Emma.
“What’s wrong, Ruthie?”
“Nothing wrong with me,” she said abruptly.
“Don’t be like that.”
“Emma, it’s just … what the fuck do you think you were doing messing around with her boyfriend? That wasn’t very smart.”
“I know.”
“And you know it’s not him. You’re just on the rebound. You’ve got to chill out for a while. You know, give yourself a chance. Find your feet, don’t just run to someone else. Sorry to say it, but it looks a little pathetic, you know?”
Ruthie was right, though her wisdom came like a punch in the stomach. Emma buried her face in her hands. “It’s just that I feel like I don’t have anything left.”
“That’s not true.”
“Well, what’s left? Seriously?”
“Me, for starters. But more importantly, your work. Why are you here, Emma? You’re not here because of Andrew, you’re not here because of Blue, you’re here because you want to be an archaeologist. Why don’t you just focus on that for a while.”
Emma would have to make a choice—perhaps the first choice she’d ever made on her own. Instead of going home and finding some shitty job and being depressed all summer in Niagara Falls, Emma could spend the summer working on a dig. Archaeology and Andrew weren’t inherently pieces of the same pie. It had never been something she was just going to dabble in like a dilettante while her husband was off at the lab.
This summer, she could get her hands in the dirt, dig deep, and create a new life. She’d begin with the act of ceremonially throwing all previous neuroses into the back of a dump truck headed for the sea. Like an entombed Pharaoh, she would take with her only those things that she wanted near her in her next life: the broken dinosaur tooth she carried now in her pocket, and the book of wild imaginings she and Blue had made as children. She’d recited their entries to Blue in the basement while war waged in the kitchen above them.
“Imagine that I had gills and that whenever I wanted to talk I had to stick my head in a fish tank,” Emma would read to Blue.
“I’d like to be a fish,” Blue would say.
“So would I,” Emma would reply.
When the plates came crashing to the floor above them, Blue would quickly ask his sister to recite another.
“Imagine that there was one magic word in all the universe that could make the sky crack with thunder and I was the only person who knew that word.”
“I wish I knew that word,” Blue would say.
“So do I,” Emma had to agree.
Those lines had offered them comfort then. Now Emma recited them to herself.
Somebody Else
Emma had obviously taken the photograph of herself. Held the camera at arms’ length and snapped off the top of her head. A dangerously slanted grey building leaned over in the background and the hot-dog buns of some vendor dominated the lower left-hand corner of the frame. Blue had to laugh when he saw the picture. She thinks she’s being artistic, he thought, as he stared at the photograph on the back of which she’d written, “I am somebody else.”
She was always trying to be someone else. She would make bold proclamations about who she was and what she was going to do but she seemed to spit them out of her mouth before she’d ever even tasted, let alone digested them. She would get things in her head that she didn’t get in her heart. It was harmless enough when they were children—I’ll trade you my marbles, if you’ll give me your life—but the older she got, the more was at stake. I’ll give away all sense of humour—hell, I’ll even give away my brother—if you’ll just let me be the slightest bit like you.
At some level he understood. There was always a sacrifice to be made. He looked at himself in the cracked mirror of his tiny hotel bathroom—saw a big, burly man with thick skin and a chin covered in black stubble as rough as porcupine’s quills, and thought, They think this is me. It bewildered him. Whatever was going on inside certainly didn’t look like that.
He wondered if Oliver had felt that way. Confused by the fact that people looked and treated him as a single person, when he probably experienced himself as scrambled pieces of jigsaw puzzle scattered across a linoleum floor. You could put the pieces together, but there would always be several missing—critical pieces, like the bow of a ship, or California on a U.S. map.
Blue wasn’t sure if all the things he felt could be part of the same landscape, let alone the same person. He’d known that the last time he visited the butterfly conservatory. He’d been reminded of it several times in his life by incidents that exaggerated the distance between the inside and outside of him.
At sixteen, making his way home on Christmas Eve, a police car had sped down the street and pulled up on the curb just ahead of him. Two uniformed men got out of either side of the car, stiffly, with their hands on their holsters. “What are ya carrying there under your coat?” one of them said, eyeing the bulge under Blue’s leather jacket.
He had run out of the house in yuletide panic because he didn’t have a Christmas present for his sister. It was eleven-thirty at night and the only thing open was the 7-Eleven. He bought a pink stuffed pig that said “I wuv you” when you pulled its tail and snorted when you poked it in the stomach. Emma still has it somewhere.
“A Christmas present,” said Blue, perhaps a little too defiantly, because the next thing they did was throw him up against the side of the car and pin his arms against his back. One man pulled him off the car and the other one unzipped his jacket. A brown paper bag fell into the snow at his feet.
“Do you want to tell us what’s in the bag?” the officer said, prodding the bag with his steel toe.
“It’s a fucking pig,” snapped Blue.
“Whad’ya call me?” the officer shouted.
“I didn’t call you anything,” said Blue, rolling his eyes. “There’s a stuffed animal in the bag. A pink pig. It’s a present for my sister.”
“Pick it up,” the officer barked. Blue bent down, all his leather squeaking, and picked up the paper bag. “Open it.”
Blue opened the bag and pulled out the pink pig. “See?” he said angrily. He poked the pig in the stomach and it let out a big snort. The officer in front of him jumped backwards at the sound. The officer behind Blue laughed.
“Ahh, fuck off, Barry,” the officer in front said to the officer in back.
Blue pulled the pig’s tail. “I wuv you,” the pig whined, and Blue walked off, snickering to himself. That’s how he chose to remember it, anyway. In truth, he’d cried all the way home, devastated at the world’s wish to strip him of his innocence.
Blue stuck the picture of his sister to the bathroom mirror. “I am somebody else, too,” he said, toasting her with his toothbrush.
Digging
Having her own tools made Emma feel like a real archaeologist. It didn’t matter that they were just a
trowel and a used toothbrush; in her hands they felt like the equivalent of Leonardo’s paintbrushes, or Shakespeare’s inkwell and quill. She was on all fours in search of native artifacts, or in her most extreme fantasies, some unparalleled discovery that would throw existing theories into doubt and cast entirely new light onto, say, our understanding of human evolution. This would lead to a cover of Scientific American with Emma standing parched and freckled, holding some equivalent to the Rosetta Stone in her hands, and then a tour on the lecture circuit, stopping at, say, Stanford, where Andrew could wither in the audience as she waxed eloquently about the limits of carbon dating and received her honorary degree.
It didn’t matter that their professor, with the unlikely name of Nick Rocker, had told them this was a routine job for the government: the archaeological survey of a building site slated for construction the following spring—the site of a subdivision to be built not in Egypt, or the Yucatan, or China, or Iran, but in the blandest of the bland suburbs of Toronto. It didn’t matter that Professor Rocker told them it was unlikely they’d turn up a single arrowhead, because Emma’s head was deep in dirt.
