Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  ‘But you have never mentioned him before.’

  ‘It just came to my attention.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘You.’

  And, in the hush of the library, you mime doing a handstand.

  Finbar is a tightrope walker. The high wire. He ruled it flamboyant and firm. You show me photographs of him again and again, commenting on your likeness – though Finbar has what Mink would call a face only a mother could love. To me, he looks battered. Swollen in burls and hard waves like his bones are punching him out from the inside. They shoot through him, thoroughbreds in a gallop – his face, hooves in motion. I imagine running my hand over it. I imagine it shifting under my touch.

  With your palette knife, you carefully cut the photographs from the book. When we are banned for life from the library, you tell the librarian, ‘You have a neck like a stem, which, if I was intent on destroying flowers, I would snap.’ And then you hold the cut pages up to your face, a mask, and you say, ‘Boo,’ and then you laugh, and then you say, ‘Boo hoo hoo.’ The librarian, shaking, frostbitten, says, ‘Beat it, buster,’ and you repeat, ‘Buster,’ and then we do beat it, with the push of a broad man in a blue uniform, cut pages falling from the book like bulky snowflakes, photographs of Finbar stuffed in your pockets.

  When we get home, we close the door to your studio and we iron the crumpled pages flat with our hands, the tightrope a straight line again. Here is Finbar in nothing but dark tights. Swarthy, a handsome musculature, he pushes a baby tiger in a wheelbarrow on a wire the width of your thumb across Niagara Falls. The baby tiger and Finbar appear to be roaring at each other. And grinning. They appear to be in love. They are 160 feet above the gorge. Water churns below them: a death soup. Here is Finbar between two skyscrapers, cooking breakfast on a small stove, the classic: eggs over, bacon crispy, a potato onion hash, strong coffee. I imagine him lifting the coffee to his mouth, staining it. The wind gathers between the buildings. He salutes an airplane overhead. Here he is again, with a woman sitting straight-spined on a chair on his shoulders, flanking Florence, spires crooked behind them. She is tall, remarkably tall. Like you, she is instantly someone you want to know, someone you want to be shuttered in with. She waves to the crowd gathered below. Contrapuntal. They are dead quiet. A frieze. She flutters. Her dress is bandages and they are coming undone.

  You tell me, ‘The woman on the chair fell to her death seconds after that photograph was taken. Some drunk shook the wire.’ And then you punch the wall of your studio, your fist immediately gloved in blood like you just birthed a calf. The blood is thick and it sticks to everything you touch. Making my cheek, my neck, my hair, me, red as you tell me, ‘Some drunk shook the wire. Some drunk shook the wire.’ Two scars form on your knuckles. Of the seventy-two scars on your body, there are only four that I was there for. This moment accounts for half. I wrap a towel around your hand and I kiss your knuckles through the reddened towel, and with my new, worried mouth I pretend I am a queen in wartime. You do too. And then you lean in, your moustache now balsam-waxed in the style of his, straight across your face, a right angle in a world without right angles, Finbar’s words, not your own, ‘The trick is to have a stunt that no one else can perform.’ I see the words in the space between us. The lettering is gold and ornate.

  ‘Did Finbar fall too?’

  ‘He tried.’

  Sometimes a slow dance, tonight a toppling – the sun sets decisively and night sweeps in, all dark majesty and menace. A Cheshire grin. The air: teeth. I eat the liverwurst sandwich. It is wood chips. It is ashes. I can hear the vacuum cleaner inside. It is the sound of accusation. Mink is cleaning. We have not spoken yet. There is no need. I will be gone soon and with my absence there will be one less thing for her to worry about. She will have to wait a few weeks, but then she can turn my bedroom into an exercise studio.

  Across the street and five doors down, Meatball Marta draws her curtains closed. Of all the neighbourhood women, she is my favourite, the one whose affections I court. Her face is that of a film starlet reclining on a divan. Skin like butcher paper, lithe as an electric eel, she has a Polish accent even though she has lived here since she was a girl. When she speaks on the telephone to her relatives in Warsaw, it sounds like cream eternity cream eternity cream. She could have state secrets and a fan made of peacock feathers. She could have a young lover in riding pants. On her bed is a buffalo hide, a lantern shaped like a phoenix above it. Her apartment is full of candelabras. They are bronze and ornate, borrowed from Renaissance paintings. Mink calls her the spinster in loungewear. Marta is always dyeing her hair and apologizing to me for being moody. She collects old books. The Everyman’s Library. Her apartment is sinking from the weight of them. They are stacked in her attic. She says, ‘I am unemployed. I am existentialist. I have no reason to leave the house.’ I go there to look at the engravings in the books and to admire the adventurers, tall at the helms of ships, heading into the great unknown. Surely that’s still on someone’s map, somewhere: THE GREAT UNKNOWN.

  Now her lights flicker yellow, like gnomes live there and they are bustling beside a great hearth, like her hovel is the one you find when you are lost in the forest and need a heel of bread. For a moment, I want to go there and have her pat my head and speak to me in her hard syllables, bricks of gold. I want her to calm me. But I don’t dare. I could miss you.

  I see what you are thinking. Why you didn’t come earlier. It is all clear. As the outlaw says, cocksure, swayback, wet toothpick in the teeth, I must be under the cover of darkness to be wrapped in a horse blanket and stolen away. Pow pow. Now is the time. I know all about night, its roominess. I watched the movies with you, our fingers tangling in the popcorn. You would roar alongside the lion and then the movie would start and you would sink to a squat and fall still as a disciple. That black-and-white stutter broadcast on a sheet in your studio: cowboys liver-spotted with dirt loping through teepees; mistresses in nightgowns, purse-sized rifle clutched in hand, boss-lover’s blood seeping into the carpet below; a spy on his elbows inchworming under a French window. You would cry for a thing downed, for a thing won. You could not distinguish their world from ours. I could. But I would pretend the delusion. ‘Huzzah,’ you would say, ‘huzzah.’ Cigarette stem ghosting the air. ‘Huzzah,’ I would answer, like a good catch, ‘huzzah.’

  The last time I visit Marta, one week ago, she pats my head as she always does. She wears an oval locket around her neck. It is new. She will not let me see who is in it. Her hair is Chicago Night Life Black and matted and she has not dressed even though it is evening. Her cheeks are flushed like she has been tilling a field of stone or weaving wool to make garments for hundreds of children. She is full of children. They are quiet hills growing inside of her. She smells like she is fermenting. When I ask her if she has a fever, she says, ‘No, I am sanguine.’ When I ask her if she is pregnant, she says nothing and pulls a book down for me, the shelf teetering as if it is a beginner stilt walker.

  The book is about a girl three oceans away who invents a language for a rope. The girl transmits a series of desires and commands to her rope and, to her astonishment, it rises an inch off the ground, and then a foot, until it coils up and lassoes itself through the air, coming back to her feet, and it dances for her and then it dances with her and then she thinks she hears it chuckle.

  The girl feels a closeness with the rope that far surpasses anything she has ever felt with human beings, even her grandmother, whose kindness is never cumbersome. This closeness, like an undertow, makes her go toward the rope and away from everything else. She repeats these conversations with the rope a thousand times a day. Always away from her home and her school so that she will not be mocked or called mad. Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods, between the jackfruit and the betel nut, bamboo creepers, the jamun and the mango. Until she does not have to have any other conversations. One day, she looks around as everyone eats their meals and laughs and wears certain shoes and ties their hair the s
ame way and she wonders, missing her rope: When did I become so different from everybody else?

  ‘I know,’ I tell the girl in the book. ‘I know,’ I tell Marta.

  The girl leaves for the forest.

  On the day that they are about to lock her up, the mad girl in the woods, her village is wiped out by a flood. But she is not, because she talks to her rope and it rises while she stands on it, lifting her to safety. She hovers above her village and watches its superstitions be washed and wrung clean. Before they are drowned, the villagers have a final glimpse of her. They think she is an apparition floating above them. But they are wrong. Things like this, a girl on a rope in the air, are not sudden or fake or heavenly. They are a slow coming. They are an accumulation of events. Much like the flood. It seems quick. Barrelling across the earth. But it is not. It has been plodding. It has been brooding. Yes, the water was loosened – but it had been groaning all the while.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  my darlin’,

  there is no blue here.

  memorize blue.

  your grand disappointment,

  your only scar,

  s.

  Am I missing my code? Are the stars blinking a message? Are those car lights for me? Did they not dim and brighten? Was that a tapping on the roof ? Footsteps on the path? A whistle? I know that if I see the sun strain itself against the sky, I will die. Please do not let this happen. Please do not let day come.

  We did swear. Our thumbs cut and pressed together, blood as our witness, we swore. Forever. We both have scars to show for it. I look at mine now. Ephemeral as a smudge.

  What if you promised yourself to others? What if you have a hundred daughters? Scattered, all of us waiting in our corduroy dresses on our front stoops, all of us with our indented thumbs. All of us, the useless boom.

  I lean into myself, hugging my knees to my chest – a pull there, which, like the beginnings of illness, I want to ignore. And then I feel the pain in my jaw that comes when I won’t let myself cry. It is akin to something being sprained out of inactivity. I have got to pull it together, as Mink would say, pull it together. I am nothing but frayed cords twitching sparks at their ends. And being broken is dangerous.

  Immaculata drops a shawl onto my shoulders, a bag of rice from a float plane. ‘Warmth,’ she says to me and moves soundlessly back toward the house. And then she returns. ‘It’s so clean inside we could sell the house for a mint for a pretty penny Mink says come in for a rest I hate to think of you asleep in the out of doors the pervs you know it’s late you know and most people die at four in the morning true and it’s almost that time.’ She is gone. And then, postscript, ‘Mink has the toothbrush out.’

  Mink has the toothbrush out to scrub away every detail of what life was before this day – until she can no longer lift her head if she has to. Your stubble in the sink will be flushed into the sewers. Kill the evidence and you kill the life that was. This is Mink’s economy. Her mathematics for living. She will reassemble herself. She will do it out of a physical compulsion that she does not understand. Mink is the only person on earth who is haunted by nothing. Of all of us, she is the only one who is truly invincible.

  I see you. Coming toward me. The gait. Unmistakable. Gallant bird in an oil spill. Shimmering like celluloid. Silver. I stand to meet you. One quick look back at the house. And then back to you and you are gone. In your place, the sun. The sun and all its wretchedness snakes itself across the sky.

  You are not coming for me because you are dead.

  Only, you are not dead.

  You are not dead because you fried the kippers, left the note, drew the tumescent monk, plucked the apple tree bare and took your bicycle. All this since you tucked me in some thirty hours ago.

  Two policemen arrive this morning to find me, asleep on the front lawn, my underwear showing, my eyes the underbellies of spaceships, swollen and transiting. The shawl must have been stolen. I wake to them standing, stock-still as targets. Their boots are aggressively shined. They smell of swimming pool.

  ‘Is your mother home?’

  They are so tired, these men. They are so tired of asking people questions. I think of deranged pigs trying to eat their own ears. Is this what they do at the end of their day when they sit in their cruiser staring at a river, do they shift in their seats and try to eat their ears, so unfilled with answers?

  One of them wears a turban. ‘Will you please take off your turban and let me swing from your hair?’ I’m not good at abbreviating the truth. Pure, so pure, you would have said. Mink would have snap-whispered, What, were you brought up in a barn? Loud enough for them to hear, reproach, reproach. And then she would have subtly winked apology at them.

  ‘No,’ the Turban startles. His partner, mime-white with a weak chin, repeats, ‘No.’ His voice does not match his face. It is much stronger. He is in a choir. He goes on, ‘What are you doing out here, waiting for the tooth fairy?’ It is a particular school of men, this tooth-fairy school. Not the one I am used to. They don’t collect birth announcements. They don’t bellow soft-rock anthems from the tops of telephone poles. They don’t bite the cheeks of passersby – gently – and then hurdle fences, crawl beneath bushes and never miss a pond. Skinny-dipping only! Pinstripe suit hanging nearby.

  These men don’t walk bridges as viewfinders, imagining their bodies dismembered by the pavement below until, wrung out, they retreat into their bedrooms to finger the dark, to fall into their mattresses, the feathers and cotton coagulating in parts, cutting into them, cut me, this bitter rind, taking root. They don’t suffer as you suffered. Because you are pure, so pure.

  I see you in the Rosedale ravine, blinkless and shivering, your antelope frame folded against the trunk of a rotting red oak. You are the last of your kind. I have to find you. A novice crouched over a colony of mushrooms, you cannot separate the beauties from the poisons. Unsupervised, you will taste everything.

  You take me camping once to Darlington, which also happens to be the site of a nuclear power station. You do not notice the spindly towers that straddle the landscape. Instead, the car a rocket, you steer it agog – back road after back road until the back roads end. It is the first and only time I have been outside of Toronto. You park the sedan in a ditch and scribble a sign on cardboard:

  with my daughter

  and then say to me, a man receiving a message from an eagle, ‘This way.’ You lead me through the unbeaten bush. You want to live off the land, so you bring nothing but a pack of matches. How how. You build a fire and we sit around it for two days in a tangle of trees and horseflies while you hitch cigarette to story to cigarette to story. You do not notice the groan of our empty stomachs, steamers turning back to shore. You are on a streak, your mouth wheeling unstoppable. On the third morning, upon my coaxing, we tear down camp, walk ten minutes to the sedan, slumped brown in the ditch. One of the windows has been smashed in by a tree branch. The sign is still there. We go to a nearby truck stop for coffee. The window glass is scattered sequins on the seat. The backs of our bodies shimmer dust and arrowheads. When we sit down, flecks of blood sprout beneath our pants. One of your eyes is clamped shut by bites. You steal the sugars and the creams, stuffing them into your suit pockets. Just in case. Just in case you cannot find what you thought you might.

  When we get back to the city limits, scruff and abattoir, you hand me the pack of matches, carefully and with promise like it is a velvet box and in it are birthstone earrings. The cover says REDBIRD. Strike anywhere matches. I open it. There are two matches left. You profess, ‘Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you’ll find out for yourself.’ It is the only gift you have ever given to me. I would watch you light matches off brick walls, the soles of your boots and, leg pulled up mid-march, the thigh of your pants. You would leave black skids everywhere, as though you were in prison and counting the days, the surfaces of the world your own primitive calendar.

  I have to get you into a bath at the edge of everything, where
it is tomb-quiet. I have to get a proper coat to you. And shoes. You are probably not wearing shoes. I see your long toes – your left big toe, yellow, the nail curdled and shrunken, because when you were growing, so astronomically, you were too shy to ask your adoptive mother, Plump Marie, for a new pair of boots – eventually you wore the black nail right off. I have to get you home.

  I look up at the policemen, their aftershave faces. The Turban reaches down and offers his hand. My eyes fill fast, fast as a thing turned rabid, fast as a thing forgotten. The thud of this day, loud as a trampling. I finger the ground and feel the nudge of everything buried beneath me: infant bones, wooden spoons, the frames of houses lifting themselves to the surface and nosing the air, nosing me. I take it. The Turban’s hand is much colder than yours would have been, but the grip is good. He has a monogrammed towel in his locker and wears plastic sandals in the shower. He has a gold medallion under his shirt in the shape of a cheetah. He never thought he would be a police officer. Sometimes, he and the Mime harmonize.

  Mink answers the door. She turns on her beauty. It is persuasive as a milky thigh at a bus stop. The policemen will never forget her. When they drive by our street, when they hear the song ‘Magic,’ when they look at their wives rolling their stockings down into ankle doughnuts, they will think of Mink. Mink is a winner. Even when she is sleeping, she is winning.

  Mink looks at me like I am a badly pitched tent. ‘What has she done?’

  ‘Nothing,’ says the Mime defensively. He pops a piece of gum into his mouth.

  ‘Are you trying to quit smoking?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘Because you’re in a choir?’

  ‘Yes. I am.’

  ‘Sorry.’ Mink ushers me in behind her and upstairs. Immaculata waits there for me. She drops her head on top of mine. I sit bolt upright, my feet tapping; we are a secret breathing in unison, a two-headed morning creature. Twenty feet of polar-bear-white shag carpet unspooled between us. Mink and her daughters. We are an entire tropic apart.