by Claudia Dey
Worse, though, is his mind. What was once a steel trap for the birthdates of warriors, the Latin etymology of names and the sequence of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal is failing. He was a raconteur of delirious proportions and, everyone agreed, the performer of the best party tricks. He could loosen a pair of silk stockings from across a room. By the time he got home, his pockets would be spilling with them. Shed snakeskins. He would press them to his nose and guess the wearers’ addresses correctly. He could seduce anyone’s wife. Within twelve words, she would be climbing up on a table and loosening a hook from an eye. Within twenty, his son-of-a-farmer hands steadying her ankles, she would be stepping out of her petticoats. He could strip a duchess and be given her crown while she was being sworn in. He could make a woman come or cry, depending on his whim. He could ruin your life in a morning if he felt so inclined. But now the small has become too big, the big too small. When Finbar looks for something, it sneaks out of view never to return, his mind migratory as driftwood. He is losing operas to breadcrumbs.
After his beloved fell, Finbar never walked the rope again. He was forty-five years old – probably your age now. He retreated to the woods, his location unspecified, but early speculation pegged it to be near the Alaskan border, in the dredges of an abandoned mining camp, a radius of eighty miles uninhabited around him, to feed on his grief. Despite his isolation, and that Cubist face, Finbar had visitors. It was said that any girl who walked past his gates would be undone – the tinker’s daughter, the tailor’s, the chief’s – and they would all re-emerge with child. Finbar planted his seed and his seed spread, giving his house the provocative moniker Orphan Stadium. He was an illusionist, nowhere and everywhere at once.
When Finbar grew bored of the girls, their bodies lustreless in the pitch of morning, he kicked them out of Orphan Stadium and they hanged themselves from the willow trees that surrounded the fiery yawn of his home. Not suicides but graduated lovers. Fallen daughters, they suspended themselves in lighted husks, iridescent pods. Promises. Offerings. Fireflies in cases, waiting to be cracked open again, by him. Illustrious I. I., carnivorous I. I., natural disaster, demigod and host to a kingly erection that was rumoured to last for entire days. He was inexhaustible. The girls would show him their breasts when he took out the garbage. If he took out the garbage.
Recalling your voice now, deep like it is made of dirt and syrup and you have to summon it up from your toenails all the way to your throat, I wonder, is Finbar, eighty years old, asleep in a pile of dead women’s dresses, still a spell? And if so, am I, in preparing to meet him, just an egg waiting to be smashed?
When you introduced me to Finbar, and you dipped your fingers, caked, cracked and stained mustard-seed yellow, into balsam wax, making a ruler out of your moustache in the style of his, I did not tell you that I beat you to him. For this past year, when you locked yourself away for days at a time, to claw the dark, to fall into your mattress, the feathers and cotton coagulating in parts, cutting into you, cut me, this bitter rind, taking root, his Unofficial Autobiography became the one book that I could recite by rote. It was not the titillating details – the grocer’s daughter, the piano tuner’s, the auctioneer’s (though these were an education unto themselves) – but his training that captured me, and that, in a way, made me his own. You were not the only one to leaf through the book like you had discovered your family album.
What you saw as miracles – balls caught in the crook of my neck, roofs walked, chairs tipped and climbed, a handstand on a crane – you did not know were the result of hours spent stretching and lifting and making myself strong, a perfectly stacked axis, all in the method of Finbar, all in the anticipation that one day I too would step onto the wire.
four
I reach Ward’s Island just as night falls – netting over a mourner’s eyes. From here, Toronto is a vision of the future. Bright and tall, the buildings big as the first computers. Sheet lightning pitchforks the sky. Whenever we saw lightning, Immaculata would recite a passage from A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology. She would address that effusion of light, describing it to itself, intimating it did not understand its power, ‘This burns a man inward and consumes the body to ashes without harming the garments it stays the youngling in the womb without harm to the mother it consumes money the purses remaining whole.’ When you vanished, this is what I feared I would find: your suit laid out, ashen and rumpled on the floor of your studio, the effigy of a disintegrated man. I could not help but feel that you were the conduit for a phenomenon, a punishing force I could not begin to give words to.
Your hands would always shake, but the moment your brush touched the canvas, they were still. Painting, you finally left the atmosphere. Your paintings were you. Melancholic voluptuaries, they were paintings your collectors would kill to bed, to love, to know. Paintings they could never tire of but would instead tire of them. You did them in one sitting, convinced that people need to experience the making of the thing. Always working in the same method – from the top left corner down. Your subjects with their pipes, their mutts, their mandolins, lay naked and corpulent, legs spread wide. Others were bony, their eyes closed, your sink in the corner, its pipes exposed. One woman slept beside her thin dog. You called the woman Cupid. She slept for three days. You hated when people posed. Somnolent Cupid and her dog, the hull of her ribs, the pink-blue ribbon of his tongue, were perfect.
You layered the paint so thickly your paintings would never completely dry. Leaning in, too close, viewers were immediately clowns, the ends of their noses turned red, yellow, grey. They wanted to creep into your paintings. To live them. To be their slashes and gouges. They did not know the danger of their wish. That you had barely come through their making, and that if you were anywhere but that magnificent hall, rushed by admirers, their stained noses a black comedy, you would collapse and tell me that the sea level was rising, and soon it would reach your bed.
Lake churning white beneath, the islanders descend the ferry by bicycle. They pull carts behind them filled with groceries and children and various supplies: wood, soil, plants. Blackbirds hop around them, music notes that have jumped from a page. One boy eats ice cream from a carton with a toothbrush. He has a friar’s haircut and a squiggle for a mouth. A girl fans a fly from her arm. Her eyes are a washed-out brown, as if, in a low mood, she added too much water to them. The islanders’ skin is blushed, radishes. They do not lock their doors. They do not have basements. They have ninety-nine-year leases. They are a different kind of settler. A blackbird lands on my head, its sure scrawl against my scalp. Welcome. Bird’s nest. Mink would laugh.
Toronto Island is a sandspit. From above, it appears as a collection of rocks smoothed flat for luck by a nervous hand. Marbled by water, it is composed of fourteen islands in total, the archipelago coming together in a thick hook shape at its western end. The island was formed over the course of 10,000 years. After the Scarborough Bluffs were bullied into being by the last ice age, Toronto deaf under a kilometre of ice, the bluffs were carried by wind and currents to form a peninsula. The night of April 14, 1858, a storm broke the peninsula’s neck, separating it from Toronto for good and founding the island. It was, like so many things, born out of a natural and lengthy violence.
The small cottages that dot Ward’s and Algonquin islands could be wrapped in wool, and, smoke piping through their chimneys, converted into warm, square kettles. Trails are worn between them. Their light is Marta’s light, golden and trembling. Maybe she is here. Lit matches in her hands, lending halos to her wrists, skimming over dog bones and the discarded lines of poems. Maybe this is the afterlife and the afterlife is incandescence, and I will spend the next two days playing dead.
The islanders ride past me, their loads shuddering over the wooden slats as they climb the bridge to their cottages. They bid each other goodnight. I wish for them to stop. To pluck me up and to drop me into their carts, to invite me in and swing their arms around me like ivy. But they fly by in a broad front, determined to re
turn to their homes, far away from that vision of the future.
It is so quiet here without the noise of the city – and without you, your dissertations, renunciations, your strivings, disappointments, your cries in the night, your telephone calls to strangers. You would dial operator, offer up a city, say Toledo, and you would guess a last name, and then you would be connected, hello Toledo! and you would converse with Toledo about their favourite food, favourite pastimes, favourite music. Favourites! Portal into a stranger! And to everything, you would say, Me too! It was so easy for you to slip, a cat smoothing himself under a fence, into another person’s heart. You would never call again, even though you would repeat their number back to them, slowly, deliberately, as if you were making a note of it on your forearm. But it was just an accident in the first place, one you could never recover. Plus, there were so many other strangers. So many other cities. Say Calcutta. Say Huntsville. Say Buenos Aires. So many other fences to get under.
Lake Shore Avenue cuts through the island, from its eastern to its western point. I follow it. My boots are the only percussion against the pavement. Otherwise, it is completely abandoned. No trucks. No bicycles. No geese. Its surroundings too. Dirt and scrub and sky. A scrupulous minimalism. I am a fleck between civilizations. Shot from a cannon, wandering a land that I do not know. I pass the fire station, the fountain, the public washrooms and the lockers checked orange and blue. I can smell the charcoal and the meat from the day’s picnics. A sunbather’s blanket lies crinkled in the sand. A ball. A harmonica. A shoe sideways in the grass. Did everyone have to tidy all at once and leave in a hurry? Was there a great rush, and they had to run, dropping their things and only half-dressed? Or maybe everyone is hiding. In the fountain. Behind that poplar. Under that table. Maybe they saw me coming and this emptiness is a game. I look down. A mound of apple cores.
Past the filtration plant, and past the lighthouse, all the props of human living are suddenly gone. I could sleep here, hidden and safe beneath the brambles, but I don’t. I go on – pulled by a fishing wire looped around my waist, one hand, rough and sure, a black thumbnail, winding it on the other end. If someone did come upon me, my searching face, they would guess amnesiac and then they would spin me around and pronounce, Look, her only clue, about the photograph pinned to my back. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing you, they would send me on my way.
I wade deeper into the dark. It coats my skin and begins to claim me as its own. The air is cooler here, fever-wet. I know that there is a lagoon nearby; I can smell the tall grasses, the mulch at the surface of the water. The lake is on my left. It laps the shore, tired. Its edge cluttered with the refuse of the day. At this end of the island, near Hanlan’s Point, there used to be homes. Two hundred of them. A baseball diamond. A fairground. A dancehall. A theatre. Three hotels. I hear the flounce of a long skirt brush through the grass. The breath of a boy running through laundry lines to the carnival, coins skipping in his pockets. A hammer slung from a leather belt. An enamelled dish dropped on a stair. A girl peeling cucumbers for a sandwich. For a moment I can see all of them, their shadows bristling and hungry. And then, with a snarl, they are gone. This night: a black that is vacancy. The houses were bulldozed. The only evidence that anyone ever lived here at all is the walls built at the shore to battle the strength of the lake, which always threatened to drown them. Now some plastic bags are caught in the branches. They inflate with the wind like store-bought ghosts. The horn of the last ferry sounds. Everything stops just for that moment to listen.
I think about the girl with the rope. Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods, between the jackfruit and the betel nut, bamboo creepers, the jamun and the mango. When the flood comes to wipe out her village, she talks to her rope and it rises while she stands on it, lifting her to safety. Below, cats wrap themselves around their owners’ sandals, scamper up legs, sit on shoulders and then vault to higher ground. Bats come out like kites. Rats and dogs start to claw up chimneys, the sides of buildings, nearby hills. ‘Watch the animals,’ you said to me, ‘always watch the animals.’ The village is the sound of scurrying. No shouts, no hollers yet, only the sprint of animal paws. And then suddenly a groan, and the mud-brown water barrels down on them, rounding up umbrellas and wedding gowns, gulping trucks and bodies and boats. A boy rides the current on a bare mattress. He screams and it sounds almost like exultation. And then everything disappears. The earth is coated anew. It is a planet for the girl to discover first.
The wind picks up again, and I have the sensation that I am being watched. Heartbeat-footsteps-heartbeat-footsteps-heartbeat-footsteps. My mind is mice scrambling across floorboards. Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you’ll find out for yourself. I light a match. The wind so strong now everything is bantam-weight; the match is blown out. I stretch my arms in front of me, a sleepwalker miles from home, groping the dark, fingers reading it because my eyes cannot. This is the Great Unknown. I inch along the road, night tying my ankles tight together. Something waits for me here, and I have yet to bump up against it.
‘Hello.’
Is it a string of children holding hands, so still they were cut from paper? Is it two black storks stumbling and pirouetting? Is it a crater? An open mouth? Your hundred daughters? Dressed in suits, hair cut in slices? A hunched figure in the ditch. Is it you? Holding your breath. Boo. I blink, lids hard shutters, but nothing will clear.
A rustle in the woods. The snap of a twig. I stop. Clocking.
‘Sheb?’
The trees stretch out in a conspiracy-whisper around me. In them, movement. Unmistakable. Blood thumps in my ears. My heart pounds, a fist against a coffin, so loud that if someone called out to me, I would not hear them. I make out a man. Your dimensions. He moves so quickly in the woods that he is a forest fire leaping a highway and becoming two fires.
‘Sheb.’
I chase you. The branches are crabs, curled and thick lines, they toss me, biting through my suit. You wanted to die a hero’s death, you told me. You wanted to be gored by a bull. ‘What an epitaph, my darlin’, to have a set of horns through your rib cage,’ you would say, ‘what an epitaph.’ This is how I feel as I fight my way toward you: horns through my rib cage.
But there is nothing there – only the sound of your voice in my head, Stunt, a vapour, a velvet, a million birds I cannot name. I could vanish here. My onions, my withering, browning, hollowed shrine hanging above me. Or I could walk into the water, an inky twin to the night, and let it steal me away. No. I smooth my suit down and I walk back to the road. I am determined to return to my home.
‘He says he’s not painting anymore.’ Mink is on the recliner in the living room reading the World Weekly News, her hair singing under the light. On the cover, a boy in a diaper is waving. The caption reads: Boy Freeze Dried By Parents. Mink drops it, stands and shakes out her legs. Brow unknit, she heads to your studio so quickly that she makes the sound of an arrow shot to the wind.
You have left the door unlocked. ‘Hm.’ Mink walks in. Partly finished canvases are propped up against the walls, work lights on, photographs fingered on the edges, half-broken stereos and eight-track players below, garbage that you combed the streets for (Thursday night is garbage night!) and came close to repairing, the projector and the sheet that shone our movies. Boxes are piled high and dusted over. An ancient civilization to be excavated and reassembled. Gallery openings, invitations, packs of matches, yellowed receipts from the Waverley Hotel and the Spadina Hotel for Men, train tickets, newspaper clippings and unfilled prescriptions – all of which I would handle like thousand-year-old tools.
I was the one you let purr into the studio. I was the one who named your paintings. Your last opening: I was the one grinning beside you, my flight pattern an imitation of yours, my Lilliputian body. Every time you had to shake a hand, you let go of mine. Returned quickly to it. Your impossibly long stride through the gallery, your gait one that I could swing between, the slap of your boots on the marble, musk i
n the air having returned from the other side and translated it for us. Your paintings were divine stunts. Shake my hand. Touch me. I rode on your shoulders, the two of us forming the grand back of an elephant, an epic sauntering through the crowd. Everyone parted for us. Sometimes you lifted me in the air with one hand. I would spread my arms, born from your palm, and people would look on, the innate surprise of seeing a Siamese creature.
Your paintings were the bison and pregnant mares of cave drawings to me. Carved into limestone, scattering under the light, they were your effort to make a record of the human experience in all of its relentless motion. They were your attempt to be still. Alongside your collection of birth announcements, the story of our hunt was up to you.
Mink moves in the swift unblinking manner of nurses, impressively looping thick rope around your half-finished canvases, your sketchbooks and your brushes. Now deemed useless materials. Now corralled. She bags your tubes of paint, palettes, books, your trinkets, your photographs, ticket stubs, scraps and articles. The knife, the rope and the bags were in her black cardigan pocket, cashmere. Did she know that you would come to this decision? Was she just biding her time until you made your announcement? She does not seem disturbed by it. It is as though all of your friends have died and Mink does not see this as loss – only that with their deaths, you have been returned to her, and that all of the time you might have spent with them is now free to be spent with her – and she will win you and charm you and heal you so that you forget all about death, you forget all about the others. She will wipe you clean.
