Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  ‘Could you move the Station?’

  ‘I could. It has two giant engines. But I never did get the steering wheel. It was the one part I couldn’t find.’

  ‘Maybe the owner swallowed it.’

  ‘He did have quite the throat.’

  Strung across the kitchen are lines of sausages curing, banners of hot peppers drying out and blocks of cheese aging into parmesan. Clear bottles of homemade grappa sit on a shelf above the sink. Beside them, a wooden crate is nailed into the wall with three boxes marked MISC., RECIPES and GOOD LUCK. A wash basin and, above it, a razor, a bar of soap and a towel worn at the edges. On top of the gas stove is the raspberry pie and, beside it, a loaf of fresh molasses bread. They are both caving in. ‘I am a terrible baker,’ Samuel says. ‘Too much measuring. I have patience but not when I’m hungry.’

  Still in his wetsuit, Samuel gestures toward the couch. ‘Please.’ I sit.‘Le Roi.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Le Roi. I name all of my furniture. The couch is the King. That guitar, Two-String Johnny. The table, Horst P. Horst.’ He lifts the end of my shirt. ‘My tools: Liberty Valance, Loudon, Nina, Stan, Tomboy, Leopard, Butch, the Overlord, the Undertaker.’ He laughs, eyebrows shooting up, a tick of amazement. ‘You are the first person to know that.’ He dabs at the wound with a cloth, and then lays the beet leaf down, cool and damp. ‘You will need a stitch, Eugenia. Or two.’ He gives me a second leaf, taps his heart and then points to mine. He returns to the kitchen and fills the kettle, turning his back so that I can unbutton my shirt and lay the beet leaf down. Against my skin, it is a flag pulled from stormwater.

  Samuel gives me a bowl of white broth with carrots and seaweed and green onions, some sweet bread and a piece of raspberry pie. He retreats to the back of the Station, peeling off his wetsuit and pulling on his clothes while I eat.

  ‘This is the best meal I have ever had.’

  ‘Because you slept outside last night. That makes everything taste better.’

  When I am finished, he kneels down in front of me with the box labelled GOOD LUCK in one hand and a bottle of Scotch in the other. From the box, he pulls a needle and a spool of dark thread. He passes me the Scotch. Lagavulin. ‘Single malt. Please.’ I take a sip, having never tasted alcohol before. The Scotch drags its long hot fingers down my throat. I cough. I take another sip. And another. My ears feel full of water. My eyes too.

  ‘Ready?’

  I nod. He splashes Scotch on the cut. As I look up, the ceiling sways, the rings are dangled by hypnotists. His blowtorch to the needle, I feel its first prick and, not one for pain, I faint.

  For a moment, I am under Immaculata’s bed and I am revolving.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  e,

  the earth is so harmless from here.

  i can blot it out with my thumb.

  yes, it is a marble.

  yes, it is a child’s toy.

  yes, it is punctuation.

  the end.

  your s

  Next morning, I am standing in front of our former home, heart loose in my throat, waiting for word from Finbar. The sky, pendulous above, its owl eye flashing, is bottle-glass green. Soon the air will break apart into droplets. Mr. and Mrs. Next Door have already landscaped our front lawn, tailoring the overgrown shrubs into cones and spirals. Pink and blue flowers dot the dirt below, discarded pompoms. The house, once a weathered white, is now painted purple with pink trim. It is suddenly the headquarters for the glee club, and it taunts, cheerily: Just try to burn me down. The windowsills are crowded with figurines, plaid curtains hanging behind them patterned like party napkins.

  In front of the house are our bedrooms. The contents of our dressers, our desks, our books, our barrettes, our board games are laid out on tables, prices stuck to them. Most everything is less than one dollar. Except Mink’s hairbrush. It is five. Her wig: eight. Even Immaculata’s folder labelled DEATH is for sale.

  Mr. Next Door sits on a lawn chair, today’s newspaper open in his lap. He is wearing a windbreaker, hood up and pulled tight, the knot tied by Mrs. Next Door double-looped under his chin.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ he offers, too solemn, and then waves the paper as though he is being attacked by hornets and it will clear the air.

  I look away from him, his anguished face – what is loss but loss split again into more loss? Up the street, I catch sight of a white pigeon flying in through Leopold’s bedroom window just as it is being boarded up, the other windows already covered in planks and nailed tight. Inside, with matching butter knives, Leopold and Immaculata scrape the dirty bumper stickers from the bedposts, the lampshades, the entertainment unit. Later, they will build a pyre in the backyard and burn most everything. Immaculata will place the mask she has sewn onto Leopold so that he will not take in any smoke. Tying it around his mouth, she will cough explanation: ‘It just wouldn’t be good for you cough cough.’ Together, they watch his old life burn. The flames remind him of the only time he saw his mother wrestle. In the morning, there will be the mark of fire in the grass. They will pick up the blackened remnants, the logs like stacking blocks until they break apart, ashes under their fingernails. And then they will hold hands.

  The dogs love Immaculata instantly.

  The postman approaches just as Mrs. Next Door glides out in full rain gear with a stack of our orange tarpaulins. ‘Rain, every garage sale’s worst enemy!’ she announces. She looks at me and then quickly to the ground like it is yawning open into a cauldron and soon it will swallow her. The postman approaches, stops in front of the house, combs through his pile and then continues on his way, nothing to deliver. The smell of defeat. The birds come out, frenzied in their song. A storm is set to hit. The three of us stand there, not quite staring at each other.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  eugenius,

  the newborn stars, you can tell they are newborn

  because they glow scarlet halos

  with hydrogen announcing themselves

  2500 light-years from the earth.

  but what i really need to tell you is this:

  fixed points are a fiction.

  fixed points are a fiction.

  fixed points are a fiction.

  s.

  The rain skips off the polished deck of the ferry. It stampedes the roof. And then it becomes so heavy that, inside, the white and blue walls glisten wet as though the passengers before us were licking them. Across from me, the high shriek of pleasure from a portly woman in an apron giggling at a joke made by a man whose arm she grabs for a moment. She steadies herself. He carries a pair of flippers. Looking back at the city, raindrops snaking across the window, the rain appears like pins on a map and the city is being sewn shut.

  I race to the Station, tongue out, dusk sky in torrents, the rain, a curtain, pulled sideways by the wind that I run through again and again. Breathless. Knocking. Translucent. Everything is pearls.

  ‘Where can we swim?’

  Samuel Station takes my hand and we run down to the channel. Along the way, cabbages have broken through the bottom of a paper bag. Leaves flayed purple, gleaming. Fresh enough to eat. The islanders have retreated to their cottages. The power goes out. The beams of flashlights, the glimmer of candles. Some children dance between the cottages in bright raincoats, pockets heavy with water, habitats for goldfish. Immaculata told me that goldfish grow depending on the space they are accorded. I see the children walking down to the lake and emptying their pockets there, returning day after day to wade into the water and to stroke their giant fish, their hearts swelling and becoming nearly unbearable in their chests.

  Samuel takes off his shirt and his pants and stands naked before me. His body is more muscular than I imagined. It lies in long strips, slender portions. He bows and laughs. I laugh too, rain coming down around us in gulps and needles. He glistens.

  Dared, I take off my jacket, my pants, my shirt, my under­shirt, my underwear. I too am naked. Samuel runs his fingers o
ver the stitch of my new scar and then he stands back. He looks at me for a long time. I cock my hip, hoping for the illusion of curves. We laugh again – my boy’s body, the body that never flourished.

  We slip down the boulders and the moss that clings to them. We reach the shoreline – stones, branches and froth. We find a still pool. Slip in. Quake and pant. The dying light stripes us. Our faces, like the banks of the channel, are streaked in fins and ivories, making us exotic, shimmering creatures. Evolution. We are buoyant. We find each other’s hands and press our bodies together, my legs finding his hips, his mouth finding mine. Lips thick like a foreign script. All the desire that has been in me, scouring the earth for a contour, for a place to plunge myself into, rushes to the fore. We kiss for a long time, tasting each other’s interiors – what we have known, what we have eaten, what we have loved; all of the stories borne by smell, by taste, lying dormant, are drawn out of my mouth and into his. He dives beneath the surface and takes my nipples in his mouth, between his teeth, a gentle bite, and me, floating on my back, his tongue tracing my belly, my thighs, and then inside me, his hands holding my hip bones, I move with the sway of the water. To be loved is to be picked up, a stone, to be smoothed out. To be loved is to be given the space to explode in.

  I come down to him, to his wet neck, his collarbone, his chest, his sex, a swan in my throat, I take him whole, and there I taste the languages, the dwellings, the oceans; all that he has been is inside me now. I am marked. A monument, glorious defeat, I am done. I lift myself up and pull him inside me, perfect pain, and we are still there for a long time, our bodies full and tight with the wet of each other and the wet of the water, the rain pelting the surface, he pulls the ends of my hair and sucks the lake from them, our mouths fall together. I start to move, a deep slow fit, this is the act of becoming, our bodies sink until they are the speed of the tremors in the centre of the earth. We mend each other. He tips his head back and he cries. My skin is seconds old.

  A long quiet. Between the wind and the water both raging now, we are weightless, extinguished.

  Samuel takes my hand and kisses the centre of my palm. I have never been kissed there. Then, he fills his lungs and he dives down into the channel, staying below for what feels like three minutes. I tread water, with him somewhere amidst the bicycles covered in barnacles, the church organ and the shipwreck – a Swedish fishing boat called the Baltic Belle built at the turn of the last century. Samuel told me that on a winter day you can lie on the ice and see her every black rib.

  Just as my breath becomes skittish, spikes and flutters, he returns with a fish in his hand. It flops frantic, folding itself over and over again. He holds it above his head and shakes it back and forth, quickly snapping its backbone. Samuel is so steady that from the shore you would swear he was standing on the bottom.

  ‘A yellow perch,’ he says, eyelashes wet triangles, presenting the fish. ‘I am going to cook for you.’

  We come up out of the river, and there we see that I have grown hips and breasts. He lets his mouth fall over them again before carrying me into his home, the fish, gold and dark green, dangling from his other hand.

  June 15, 1981. Mrs. Next Door and I are on the front lawn of 101 Dunn Avenue playing tug-of-war with the air, until she implores, ‘Please go away now, go away, we don’t want any trouble here.’ She has not made many sales. The tables are still mostly full, the racks of clothing and assorted displays seemingly untouched. I don’t know which is worse: being for sale or not being sold.

  ‘I just want to know if anything has come in the mail.’

  ‘I have already told you, dear, no.’

  I browse like a thug, making it clear that I am not leaving.

  ‘Some rain,’ she offers.

  ‘Some rain.’

  ‘Three whole days.’

  I handle the merchandise: Mink’s audition tape, her old headshots, her black tights and turtlenecks, my white sunglasses frames, Immaculata’s baby blanket.

  ‘You know, there’s a cat buried in the backyard.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Under the apple tree. Her name was Urszula Minor. She was tailless. If you’re desperate, you could sell her too.’

  Mrs. Next Door titters and then she takes a quick peek behind her. Mr. Next Door draws the party-napkin curtains closed. Mink’s water-skiing photo, Immaculata’s collection of embalmed rodents, Finbar one thousand feet above Niagara Falls, cut from the library book and smoothed out, it is all for sale – a sign propped between:

  BARGAINS BARGAINS BARGAINS

  I know that Mrs. Next Door is lying. I know that there is something for me here. I think about throwing a fit, falling and flexing on the grass, Mrs. Next Door hovering above me, pleading, ‘Don’t bite your tongue.’ Instead, the smallest striptease in the world, I lift the end of my shirt and show her my fresh scar.

  ‘Ow.’

  She draws in a long breath. ‘Poor dear.’ And then she comes so close I could bite her arm. She smells of jam and glue. I can see where her liquid makeup stops, tan-coloured before her hair-line. A perm growing out, Marta would call it russet, her hair is pulled back with two bronze bobby pins that hang a little bit. Eyes on the scar, she tells it, ‘Don’t you move.’

  I look up the street. Immaculata knew things about me that you didn’t. She knew that when I was afraid I saw panthers sprinting up the stairs behind me. She knew that I liked names with five syllables best. Hers was one. Im-ma-cu-la-ta. Yours was the other. Sheb-Woo-ly-Le-doux. When I told her that I had seen a ghost at the end of my bed, and that she was bald and had no teeth, she just stood there not haunting me or making any noise, just staring at me, Immaculata made me promise, ‘If she visits again Euge get me.’ But the ghost never came back.

  Sa-mu-el Sta-tion. Five syllables.

  Inside their boarded-up house, Immaculata is preserving a red squirrel. Slats of light come through the windows as if she is always standing beside a film projector. Leopold watches her. His face is so radiant, it melts. After she makes lunch, Immaculata brushes her teeth while she pees, as she used to do, and Leopold sits on the edge of the bathtub, as I used to do. He thinks he sees her blossom and then die and then he panics that she will leave him. He says ‘No’ aloud.

  ‘What is no?’

  ‘Will you ever leave me?’

  ‘No.’

  He is comforted, though he still wishes for forever.

  Mrs. Next Door dips a cotton ball in Immaculata’s rubbing alcohol and then pushes it, astringent, against my skin.

  It stings. ‘Ow.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s infected.’

  ‘Just to be sure.’

  She retracts her hand and chimes, ‘All done.’ Something about the timbre of her voice sets her off. Her head fills with sirens. A stitch of agony sprouts between her eyes. Together, we sink in the damp grass, possessions grouped around us, listening to the plink plink of construction nearby. Mrs. Next Door pulls me to her. She smells like Mink’s closet. I realize then that she is wearing all of Mink’s clothes. Because they do not fit, she has had to layer them to cover herself: a sweater on top of a shirt on top of a dress on top of a leotard. Her arms are long and bone-thin. A praying mantis. They tackle me, her hug too strong. I try to tear away but she will not let me.

  So I surrender. Ear against Mink’s black cardigan, cashmere, I listen to her ragged breath, its effort; she is resuscitating something. Dew beads the grass below us. The world is made up of points, and while we can see each other from a distance, up close we are all indecipherable.

  Mrs. Next Door suddenly steps back and reaches into the pocket of Mink’s sweater – where the rope once was, the knife, the bags that captured your studio. Behind her, my nightgown stirs, discounted, on a hanger. She hands me an envelope.

  ‘Is there anything else?’ I ask.

  She shakes her head, ‘No. Time to go,’ and I watch her walk back into the house. She locks the door behind her.

 
; Ms. Eugenia Ledoux.

  Finbar’s hand.

  Inside the envelope is a key with a black vinyl tag marked 12 and a map to a motel called the Bedou Inn. The map is hand-drawn. If this were a war, its artist would be a prized draftsman. There is a note asterisked in the bottom corner: check-in 3 p.m. It looks to have been formulated during turbulence. Finbar, his eyes washed-out discs, turning the edges of everything into bathwater. The map tells me that the motel is on the Lake Shore. East. Here, in Toronto. When I expected to be boarding a train, coat brass-buttoned to my neck, travelling for entire days, climbing mountain passes, breathing frost and leaving time zones, when I expected the bite of Alaska, the Bedou Inn is probably only an hour by streetcar. This is disorienting, my projected journey so foreshortened. A dog barks from a rooftop above me. It sounds like collegial agreement. This is when I notice that there is no postage on the envelope. It was delivered by hand.

  When I leave the Station this morning to go to 101 Dunn Avenue for the last time, mail or no mail, Samuel is asleep in the middle of the floor, his arms and legs starfished open, lungs lifting and falling like soft cymbals. He talks in his sleep, a language that I do not know. The consonants ponderous in his mouth, I press my ear against it and experience the most gentle form of possession. He is wearing his wool socks; I can see where he darned them on the heel.

  We pull the mattress down from his bunk and we spend three days there, rain seeping in through the glass pyramid above us. The Station rising with the water level, Samuel checks the bilge pump and loosens the anchor lines. He plays records and he dances with the pluck and possibility of a colt. He pours Scotch for me in a mug and then adds ice from a bag labelled Iceberg Ice. We clink our mugs together and propose movements: The Tenderness Movement! The Retirement Movement! The Movement Movement! I watch him in still lifes: Man Waltzing Half-Naked. Man Clowning as Though for a Photograph. Man Snagging Heart Like Soft Paw.

  He strokes my feet, birds flying out of corners. I take him in my mouth – the flashbulb of temper, the devotion of strangers. He tells me, fingers in my hair, my mouth open against his collarbone, tasting salt and blowtorch and gold, his thigh hard between mine like the top of a fence, ‘I believe in the skills of one’s hand above all else. Technology is about to rule us, Eugenia, but when it implodes, these skills will be all that matter.’ He never abbreviates my name. We feed each other with our fingertips. Beets and fish and bread and pie until there is nothing left. We stumble and interrupt, pulling each other from the mattress to the kitchen counter to a squat by the door, speaking to an ankle bone, sharp like a scythe, the crevasse behind an ear, eyes squeezed shut and wet in corners, the down on the back of a neck, the birthmark beside a belly button. We have been separated for too long and we have to rush to tell each other things and we do not want to forget one. We refuse sleep. If we succumb to it, we could lose each other in the night. Samuel Station describes tracking wolves and living for one year in a weather station and how a woman told him once, ‘You are so solitary.’ And she was right. He is solitary. His worst nightmare is to be in a room full of people. Unless they are dancing.