by Camilla Gibb
Five nights a week Amy still took herself and her hot tamale of a body down the road in her brown Ford Mustang to take off her clothes for gaping guys who gave extravagant tips. He could handle it, he told himself. A job is a job. And she was resolute about this. “Some guys can’t handle having a girlfriend who dances for a living,” she had said before she agreed to move in. “But as long as you remember it’s my job, and I’m a professional, you have nothing to worry about.”
“But you met me there, didn’t you?” he asked in one of his more insecure moments.
“That was different.”
“But maybe another something different will come along.”
“Blue, there’s nobody like you.”
“But I worry about you.”
“Well, you get a few creeps in there occasionally, but the management usually makes it pretty clear that they’re not welcome. Most of the guys just come to talk with their buddies, hang out, flirt a little, but, you know, they’re pretty respectful all in all,” she assured him. “Come with me tonight and I’ll show you. Just watch how I work—you’ll get it,” she said.
He did go with her. He stayed the whole night, but there were rules he had to follow. He couldn’t interfere with her while she was working and he had to pay like anybody else had to pay if he wanted her exclusive attention. It was mostly staff from the Banff hotels who came down to the club when their shifts ended to have a few beers and watch the show. It was uncomfortable, but if he drank enough beer, it seemed relatively harmless. The borders around bodies blurred. It was like looking through the dirty glass of a fish tank. Seahorses and shimmering fish swimming gracefully in and out and around static objects with wide hungry eyes. He almost felt proud. He loved a fish that no one else could catch. The other men were motionless, fixed in place, and abandoned there when the lights came up and the fish slipped away to their hidden caves. These men’s lives ended when the lights went up, where Blue’s never did.
For Amy’s birthday they decided to rent a room in the Banff Springs Hotel and have a proper grown-up dinner in a big, old-fashioned dining room. They played Mr. and Mrs., him in a suit he’d borrowed from Mitch, and her in a little red satin dress she’d bought in Calgary. She wore heels so high he had to carry her like a new bride across the parking lot to the hotel entrance through the cold, teeming rain. They were giggling and happy, ordering the bottle of wine that fell in the exact middle of the wine list, simply because it fell there. They knew nothing more than it wasn’t cheap and it wasn’t too expensive.
They were surrounded by older white-haired couples and refined Japanese gentlemen, and they toasted each other with a clink so loud that the people at the table behind them turned around. The waiter delivered the roster of specials and said he would be back in a few minutes.
“What the hell is a fennel?” Amy whispered to Blue.
“Some la-di-da vegetable,” he said, drawing upon knowledge stored in his numbered days as a busboy for the hoity-toity. “Looks like celery, tastes like licorice.”
“Gross,” she sneered.
“Okay, Missus. What doesn’t look gross then?”
“Maybe steak,” she said. “They’ve got to have steak, right?”
“Aw, come on. You can have steak any time. Try something exotic.”
“Okay, you choose, Mister Cosmopolitan.”
“How about goose with cranberry glaze and portobello mushrooms?”
“I’ll try it,” she shrugged. “What are you going to have?”
“Steak,” he said.
“You!” she cried out, throwing her napkin across the table at him.
They blew a light bulb with the cork of a champagne bottle in their room later and Amy let out a scream so piercing he thought someone might call the police.
“You nut,” he said, slapping his hand across her mouth and throwing her down on the bed. She wriggled beneath him and he tickled her so hard tears ran down her reddened face. She bit his cheek then, clenching until he was forced to say, “Mercy.”
They lay there, full, drunk, and out of breath, him on top of her. He looked into her eyes and said, “Why don’t I make you a real missus?”
“Does that mean I can make you a mister?”
“Technically, I already am.”
“Then it’s not fair.”
“Since when has life been fair?”
“But I want to make you something too.”
“You have already.”
“What’s that?”
“Happy.”
“How the hell did that happen?”
“God only knows,” he laughed.
The next morning, in the sultry cloud of semi-sleep, he rolled her over onto her stomach. She purred beneath him and spread her legs. “Mmm. Just do it. No preliminaries,” she rumbled into the pillow.
“You sure?” he whispered into her ear, pushing the full length of himself inside her.
“Sure,” she groaned.
“How sure?” he whispered, lifting up her hips with one strong arm and slowly rubbing two wet fingers against her clitoris.
“So sure,” she moaned.
“So sure you would marry me?”
“Mmm. If it always felt like this … I’d—”
“I mean it, you know.”
“Only if I can make you something more than happy. More than just a Mister Happy.”
“Just?”
“Yeah. There’s gotta be more.”
“You’ve got big expectations, my girl.”
“I just never thought happy was the end of it all.”
He pulled out of her, flipped her over onto her back then. Looked at her with the seriousness of a Catholic in confession and said, “You’re right. It isn’t the end, the middle, or the beginning. But now that I found it, I wouldn’t give it up for the world.”
“Not for a better life? A happy family? A father?”
“Anything.”
“Then yes,” she said.
“Yes, what?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you. As long as you promise it will feel like this always.”
“Like what exactly? What am I agreeing to?”
“To always crawl inside and tell me the truth.”
“Don’t know if I always know the truth.”
“Promise to pretend?”
“That I can do, girly girl. I can promise to promise to pretend.”
Big Bang Theory
She was the first person at the site that morning. She had her hands hammered deep into the pockets of her overalls and she was talking aloud, rehearsing a speech she was going to deliver to Professor Rocker. Emma could picture the headlines: Student’s discovery advances understanding of North American prehistory by leaps and bounds. Emma Taylor (originally of Niagara Falls, now of the world), pictured here with her professor and mentor, Nick Rocker, points to the largest and most elaborate burial grounds ever discovered in North America.
But when Professor Rocker had listened to her impassioned monologue, he didn’t leap into the air and scream, “Eureka!” He just sighed. “Emma, it’s a little far-fetched. I mean, I’m all for a little creative thinking, but you’ve still got to make the facts add up.”
“Okay. So here are the facts. There’s a cave below here. This crevice is too clean and too deep to have been caused by any natural means. Someone sawed through the rock with a high-powered saw. And they must have done that for a reason. I think someone shifted these rocks here to cover something up—something that they thought would be more hassle than it was worth. I’m sure there’s an ossuary below here.”
“Emma, what you’re telling me is one part fact, one part conjecture, and one part pure fantasy. You can’t leap to those kind of conclusions. You’re not even considering any other possibilities.”
She bit her tongue, wanting to tell him: I can see it. I can see the bones of a thousand bodies right through there. About ten feet beneath where we’re standing.
“And besides, Emma, we’d know if there was a b
urial ground here,” Professor Rocker continued.
“But how would you know?”
“Because the area isn’t subject to any native land claims and it’s also been surveyed once before.”
“Well, why are we here then? Why are we surveying it again?” she asked with increasing frustration.
“Because the first survey was done in the 1970s, but the proposed construction never happened. Legally, we’re required to do another survey.”
“So all this is basically some bureaucratic formality?” she said, getting angry.
“Ostensibly, yes.”
“Well, why didn’t you tell us that in the beginning?” she almost shouted.
“This is an exercise, Emma. A learning exercise.”
“An exercise in patronizing us? Making us believe we’re actually doing something worthwhile?”
“An exercise in technique, primarily,” he said sternly. “But yes, also an exercise in the sobering reality of archaeological work.”
“You know what your problem is?” she said, pointing at him.
“Careful, Emma,” he warned her.
“You’re bitter,” she continued, undeterred.
“I’m realistic,” he defended.
“Well, it’s possible that they missed something the first time,” she muttered, kicking a rock with the toe of her boot.
“I don’t think so, Emma.”
Emma was exasperated and unconvinced. “You don’t even want to investigate? You’re not even curious? You don’t even want to satisfy yourself by finding your own answer? I mean, what if there really is a burial ground here? It could offer all sorts of insights on burial customs and native history. What if they just covered it up twenty-five years ago? Thought it better not to open up a huge can of worms?”
“Because no one would be that stupid or irresponsible,” snapped Professor Rocker. “And besides, archaeology just isn’t all that exciting. There’s not a lot of intrigue and conspiracy going on, Emma. You’re letting your imagination get the best of you.”
“Well, at least I have an imagination!” she charged back.
The other students, who had arrived by this point, were standing in a silent cluster behind Emma.
“Unlike me, I suppose you mean,” Professor Rocker replied.
“It’s just that it all has to be so literal with you. You can’t even entertain the possibility of something unexpected.”
“I’m a scientist, Emma. Not an inventor,” he said, his patience spent. “Archaeology is a science. Not the stuff of a romance novel.”
Emma was now frothing at the mouth. “I have half a mind to phone up someone who’d really be interested—like the chair of your department or the press.”
“Then you’d really only have half a mind,” Professor Rocker retorted. “If you start making noises about something like this, do you know what happens, Emma? It means that this building doesn’t go up for years. It means five to seven years of archaeological work as we are forced to prove beyond any doubt that there is nothing here. Five to seven years of wasted effort all spent pursuing your fantasy. It means red tape and bureaucracy into the millennium. It means that in a case like this they’ll hire a professional surveying company next time. It means they won’t want to have students working on surveys. It means it will be harder and harder for students here to get any practical experience digging. It means a fuck of a lot, Emma. A fuck of a lot of unhappy people—and believe me, that will include you.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“I’m telling you not to be an idiot,” he shouted.
Emma heard laughter behind her. She turned around and glared at the other students who were clearly revelling in the display. They nearly cheered when Rocker hurled the word “idiot” at the class pet. “What a primadonna,” she heard one of the students mutter. “Quite the little hissy fit.”
“You can all just fuck off!” Emma screamed, nearly hysterical. “Just go to hell! Dig deep enough and maybe you’ll even find yourself there!” Emma wiped the tears from her face and picked up her bag to leave. She was so angry she could have skewered them all though the bellies and roasted them on a spit.
Then she heard Rocker’s parting shot: “And another thing, Emma. In addition to patience, the most important thing about archaeology is teamwork.”
Emma emerged from the subway an hour later and walked in dazed defeat down the summer street, sticky with spilt Coke and black tar and soft pink gum. She passed asbestos-lined buildings constructed in the architectural oblivion of the sixties, hot-dog vendors with Eastern European accents, blue-eyed women with shrill laughs and arms full of books.
She pushed herself through her door and crashed into bed, muddy boots and all. Oliver was right, she’d realized, as she stormed away from the site. People did lack vision. The thought of being like Oliver was enough to make her want to chuck herself out the window, give up altogether. She cried a bucketful of tears and took three extra-strength Tylenols and fell into a deep and disturbed sleep instead.
Vision. Perspective. Dreams. Under a tickertape of Oliver’s words she dreamt what felt like a recurring dream, although she was sure she’d never had it before. She was eighteen years old, but she had a head full of grey hair and yellow teeth and people kept addressing her as Oliver, or Mr. Taylor. She was in the airport and she wanted to shave her legs because she was going home, but she couldn’t find her razor. She was searching for it in the bottom of her carry-on luggage, but all she could find was a giant breadknife with serrated edges stained with dried blood. She didn’t know where the blood had come from. Perhaps she’d killed a rat in the back seat of the taxi on the way to the airport. She hoped she hadn’t killed anything else. She was sure that if she licked the blade she’d be able to tell if the blood was that of a four-legged or two-legged animal.
The airline clerk was denying her entry. The picture in her passport was the girl she remembered being—Emma just after she’d first dyed her hair black—but they were addressing her as Sir, and telling her the passport she was carrying obviously belonged to someone else—someone younger and female. She was perplexed.
Blue suddenly appeared at the check-in. “It’s okay,” he said, winking at the woman behind the counter. “I can vouch for her. She’s legit.”
“But, Blue,” Emma stammered as he led her away from the counter by the arm. “I don’t understand what’s going on.”
“Just look straight ahead and keep a low profile,” he said under his breath. “And don’t do anything unnatural.”
She had no idea what he meant by that so she just kept putting one foot in front of the other. But they weren’t walking. They were sliding across the waxed floor and she could feel everyone stop and stare. When Emma turned to look back she saw they had turned to stone, Oliver and Elaine among them. Their fossilized eyes remained glued to Emma and Blue.
She felt Blue’s hand beginning to crumble, turning to dust in her grasp. She screamed so loud that she stirred up the residue of a thousand crumbling bodies, leaving her shoeless and blind in the midst of a black cloud. Perhaps this is what it is to spontaneously combust, she thought. Perhaps this is what they mean when they talk about the origin of the universe being a big bang. There wasn’t even a single whisper in the dark surrounding her. Not a shadow or an echo. Just the sound of her heart beating. Cardiac Morse code.
She awoke fourteen hours later, unsure where she was. She could sense the existence of parallel universes and multiple pasts. Dreams spill over borders, overflow the eavestroughs of places, threaten to pollute. Dreams could remind her of places she didn’t really want to revisit because they felt dangerously incomprehensible, or incomplete. Being called a lezzy at thirteen because she had a best friend named Maxine who called herself Max because she wanted to be a boy. Kissing Blue under the porch because she thought boys didn’t like her. And Oliver, who sent postcards from outer space.
She picked up the phone and called her brother, the first spoken words between
them in too long. It was two a.m. in Banff, and he was slightly drunk, but he did his best when she told him that she’d fucked everything up and couldn’t go back. He said things like: “Come on, Emmy, don’t be so melodramatic. Don’t freak out. So this dig thing didn’t work out. There’ll be others. Why don’t you just go home? Maybe you’ll discover an ancient burial ground in the backyard. Fucking acres of arrowheads and bones and fossilized racoon shit. And you can take all the credit for the discovery. Didn’t the Hurons used to torture their captives by pulling out their fingernails? What could be more exotic than that?”
Emma didn’t tell her brother what was worrying her most—that she was dreaming up things that didn’t and couldn’t possibly exist. Just like Oliver. But Blue was trying, and maybe he was right. They had plenty of ruins in their own backyard—not Huron, mind you, but their own. Maybe Oliver had buried family heirlooms underneath the raspberry bushes. Maybe Elaine had laid to rest all that they had ever shared in that patch of dirt at the end of the garden where the sun refused to shine.
Deadlock
Amy was trapped between Blue’s knees again. It was the second time that week. She was near the foot of the bed, under the duvet, and Blue had her in a headlock and she could barely breathe. He was fast and furiously asleep. Rather than startle him, she gently stroked his calf and called out his name. She had worked her way through terms of endearment—babe, baby, Lou, honey, sweetie—by the time he woke up and released her.
He started to cry. He’d done it again. He could only say that he was sorry, that he didn’t mean to hurt her, that he didn’t know why, that he loved her.
“It’s okay,” she said, trying to calm him. But it did worry her. Blue had started dreaming wild dreams, and shouting his way through them. They were epics, with casts of machete-wielding thousands raping and burning women and fields. “What’s worrying you, Blue?” Amy asked every time he awoke shouting. All he could do was stare ahead blankly and shake his head.
As soon as he’d asked her to marry him, Blue had become afraid. He began having difficulty with the promise of the promise to pretend. He worried that as much as he wanted to marry Amy, marriage might actually be the gateway to hell. The first step on a slippery slope that plunged down into a torrid sea where a man and woman yelled in a kitchen and a husband became a hermit and a wife became an alcoholic. And babies came into marriages, they couldn’t help themselves. And maybe fatherhood sent men flying into strange psychotic fits where they decided to build bridges and Eiffel Towers because they couldn’t seem to do anything right in the day to day.
