by Claudia Dey
And then he asks, as I climb the first rung of the ladder and he comes up behind me, forehead between my shoulder blades, hands rough on my hips, I tilt them back toward him, body quivering, the needle of a compass, ‘Do you think that we are really alone in this world or are we twins who eventually find each other, completing puzzles?’
Not looking at him, I say, ‘I don’t know yet.’
Stepping off the tilted dock, first time on land in three days, I adjust my stance. Water laps the shore behind me, an obsession. I recall the sound of the metal detector against my heart. I reach into my breast pocket and fish out a gold necklace. Marta’s locket. I see her tearing it from her neck, so hard she breaks the skin. I open it. No photograph. Blank canvas cut to fit. No self-portrait. You could never stand still long enough to finish one. You explained that your own face just made you want to run. I throw the locket into the lagoon. A small shock against the water. Your limbs striking the surface of a pond. The locket will sink and travel, be found one morning and melted down.
I walk south from the streetcar stop toward the Bedou Inn, the city thinning out around me. A reverend hurries by me. His skin tobacco-brown, hair dyed margarine-yellow, white boots and a black hat, a suitcase on wheels that won’t quite close because of the hotplate nudging its zipper. In his pipe-cleaner arms, he holds out a cat for an aegis. It is Sirloin the cat, with his one lazy eye, the sign still on his back:
I have been abandoned.
Please be kind.
As they pass, the reverend mutters to me, ‘God works, God works’ – not like God works in a factory or God works in a disco but like God was broken and now God works.
You told me once that you nearly killed yourself but that at the last moment God saved you. You knew that you had to die outside the house so as not to scar us forever, so you called a taxi and you opened the passenger door, noose already looped around your shoulder. ‘Rosedale Ravine, man.’ You planned on hanging yourself from a 130-year-old tree in the place you found most beautiful in the city. You had looked. And, like a dog, you wanted to die alone in the woods. You thought being alone was brave – more brave than being with other people. You tied the noose while watching Clint Eastwood play Marshal Jedediah Cooper in Hang ’Em High. Taking note of the technique for both of us, parroting a prisoner in the hole, it snaps your neck like a dried-out twig, and soon after demanding, ‘Unlearn that, unlearn that right now, Eugenia!’ On the way to the ravine, a fog descended upon the city, blurring it and then hiding it. It became impossible to find anything. Cars put on their blinkers and then finally pulled over, obsolete robots. An open road, and the taxi driver saw it as adventure. And for some reason, he wanted to impress you. Maybe it was your eyes. You had fighter eyes. Clint Eastwood eyes. He persevered until apologizing, ‘I could try to get you back home.’ But then he could not do that either. Finally he stopped the taxi and let you out, saying, ‘Good luck, man.’ He did not charge you, which struck you as chivalrous, and maybe even lucky. You stepped out onto the curb. You thought maybe this was heaven. Heaven is so private – you cannot really see anything but your own hands in heaven. And then you looked down and saw that you were standing on a path and so you followed it and vowed that its end would be your home. When you pushed open the front door, you were looking at the three of us looking at you, noose looped around your shoulder. You were home and this is when you started to believe in miracles.
{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
stunt,
you cannot move between two points
without a belief in the other end.
your,
s
The Bedou Inn is a small motel, twelve rooms in total, located where the Lake Shore meets Cherry Street. Rectangular, built of brick, it is reminiscent of a freight car dislocated from a train. The motel is beside the empty site where the circus pitches its blue-and-yellow-striped tent when it comes to town and people weep under it because they see other versions of their kind in flight. A mess of rail yards around it, mostly industrial land, one diner kitty-corner called the Canary, the smell of grease and sugar, OPEN glowing in its window.
Room 12 is the corner room and the receptionist tells me in a sharply articulate voice, ‘It is the only suite here, the only suite at the Bedou Inn.’
Sitting behind a teak desk on a chair that swivels, reading glasses strung round her neck, the receptionist wears a midnight-blue taffeta gown that gathers at her waist. She slept in it. No stockings. It is just too hot. She wears black ankle boots that point at the ends. They look to be too big, perhaps even a man’s; she stuffs the toes to make them fit. Her hair is thick and grey, to the shoulders, and evokes the heaps on the beautician’s floor. Her body is an elegy. A cat balance-beams the edge of the desk. Another one sits by the door. And another sleeps, curled, a closed fist, in her lap. The air is full of dander. A standing fan in the corner makes it tremble.
Books are piled high around her. They are imitations of her face: opened, read and closed too many times.
‘I used to have a lover who read Rumi to me in translation.’ She lights a cigarette even though one is already burning in the overflowing ashtray, the waft of sweet wine rising with the smoke. ‘But he died.’
‘Are those his boots?’
‘Yes.’ She laugh-coughs. ‘He slept with them on for a year. So that they fit perfectly. His feet. Not mine.’ She laugh-coughs again. It is the sound of a tuba under water.
A tattered black velour curtain hangs behind her. Its bottom is fringed white with cat hair. I can make out a cot covered in Indian prints and what appears to be a green budgie flying free. It is her one wild thought. She would have taught her cats to go against their natures and not kill the bird. ‘It is so rare to meet three-dimensional people these days, don’t you think?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like they are extinct.’ She strokes the cat in her lap, her touch darkening its coat for a second. ‘Are they?’
‘No.’
‘That’s a relief.’
‘May I ask you please who made the arrangements?’
‘I haven’t a clue.’ She huffs booze and bites her teeth together to stop herself from saying anything more and then she looks at me, eyes blue as the marrow of fire, moves her hand like she is lifting a heavy canvas off herself and her tamed cats. Ta da. She is dismissing me. I close the door to the sound of her muted chatter, finishing our conversation with her cats, Rumi, ‘We are going to sky, who wants to come with us?’
There is a milk truck parked in front of Room 2. Otherwise the lot is empty. Some silver trash bins and a single shoe. If only the shoes had agreed on a meeting place. Three plastic chairs are set out between the rooms. Once people sat on them and read to each other.
As I push the key into the lock, I wonder what will await me there in the gloom: a crepuscular Finbar in sultry repose feeding himself grapes, a baby tiger at his feet, or you, a bag messily packed with clothes that will no longer fit me?
Your last night at home, when you joined us at the dinner table, folding a green bean into your mouth before sitting down, Mink asked you as she always did, ‘So what did you do today?’
You answered as you always did. ‘I levitated.’
For the first time, she said, ‘Show us.’
‘I can’t.’ You explained, ‘I have to be alone to do it.’
‘And where do you go when you levitate?’
‘Nowhere. Yet.’
‘But then –’
‘But then, I am going to levitate into outer space. I need to see where I came from. Don’t you?’
I sat there letting the question echo sepulchral in my bones.
And then Mink said, ‘Thank you, Sheb.’
Without the war between them, our parents were suddenly weightless. We hurried into their laps, sinkers keeping them in place.
‘But what about us what will we do when you’re in outer space what will we do without you our family would be uneven,’ Immaculata pleaded.
‘I’
ll send postcards,’ and then you winked. Newborns contort their faces in sleep, practicing to win their parents’ love. I gave you my most convincing face.
‘Did you hear that?’ you asked.
‘No.’
‘A bell is ringing.’ And then you looked at me with a love in your eyes, but the love could have belonged to anyone.
I open the door to Room 12. Propped on its kickstand is your bicycle. The black frame, broken toe clips, rearview mirror duct-taped to the yellow handlebars, the wooden Canadian Butter box bungee-corded onto the rear rack. You are not here. But your bicycle is. I run my hands over it. The grease of the chain. You have not been on it for days – nothing of you lingers, nothing.
The walls are covered with framed needlepoints. So clustered together, I can barely make out the bold floral wallpaper behind them. You came home with a suitcase full of these once after a three-week stay in the hospital. You were wearing socks with the hospital name and address printed on them. I remember the stink in the corridors: hot food and industrial cleaner, and that you wanted to host picnics on the weekends because there were more suicides on the weekends, and if people were together on a blanket, sharing sandwiches, they might forget to kill themselves. Your needlepoints were all portraits of other patients, their pupils bumpy to the touch. The doctors told you, ‘Even here you try to be the best.’
A silk nightgown is laid out on the bed. A toothbrush, toothpaste and ivory comb are on the bathroom counter. The bath is drawn. I skim my hand through the water. Still hot. Lavender oil. In the bar fridge, there is a block of cheese wrapped in wax paper, a jar of olives and a corked bottle of white wine. One linen napkin. French bread on the desk with a knife, grainy mustard and maple cutting board. Samuel told me that scissors make the divots in French bread; he was a cook for bush camps near Nanaimo and baked twenty loaves at a time. He ordered flour in fifty-pound bags. He stored vegetables underground in a dugout called a cache, and mashed hundreds of potatoes with bags over his feet because to do them by hand would have taken too long. The firefighters were hungry. Once, he had to give all of his French bread to a black bear mad with starvation. The berries were late and so the bear stalked the camp. Samuel could not believe how much the bear liked his bread. And that it did not kill him.
Otherwise the room is made up of the standard fixtures: a double bed, a suitcase stand, a rack with hangers, a Gideon Bible in a bedside table. The suite part of the room consists of a couch in an alcove. I check the drawers, between the mattresses, under the pillows, but there is no note, and there is no second map.
Samuel tucked the same book under his pillow every night, the idea being that the contents would drift up and lodge in his mind. There was a prophet who learned everything this way. The Sleeping Prophet. And Samuel thought: try. Teaching a Stone to Talk. Annie Dillard. He had to keep elastics around it or he would lose all of its pages. Sections were starred and underlined, some drawings beside them; this made me think he had spent time in prison, and there, in his cell, he had only this book.
Reading it, he said, we had to wear 3-D glasses. We put them on – one red square, one blue over our eyes. My head in his lap, the smell of two bodies rooted together in the air, he read his favourite part to me early one morning when there was no food left in the Station but a small envelope of saffron picked by Mennonites. We filled our mouths with the expensive flower. ‘Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged as falling snow?’
‘We could put raven feathers behind our ears and call ourselves the chief of something.’
‘Ravens.’
‘We could untie the anchor lines.’
‘Float out past the Sunfish Cut, Snake Island, and into the open water.’
‘We could look for the steering wheel.’
‘We could take the dogs.’
‘We could find another island and you could teach me every language you know.’
‘Only the dirty words.’
‘How do you say Where is the bordello? in Finnish?’
‘We could invent our own language.’
‘Only the dirty words. We could live however we want, Samuel.’
I walk the length of his spine. His skin is bronze next to mine.
‘What did you shoot with your arrow?’
‘A fox. He was sick. He was going to die too slowly. The hastening of a natural law. Some things cannot last here, Eugenia. It is just too crushing.’
And then, carefully keeping the pages in order, Samuel backtracks. ‘I could very calmly go wild.’
‘More.’
‘I could very calmly go wild.’
In the bath, my blood slows to a sap. I look down at the marks on my skin from my hours with Samuel. They pulse. I hope that he is doing the same. When I watched him gut the fish on a boulder, in the rain, huddled under my suit jacket, making a seam with his thumb, the perch still breathing through its gills, even though its heart jumped in Samuel’s palm, I saw that the same life could take place in two locations, and that perhaps this is what love is: the heart of a fish in a palm keeping time with the throbbing body beside it.
I did not tell him where I was going or when I would be back. He will not ask questions until many hours later. He is patient that way. He does not implicate himself in the course of other people’s lives. Samuel uses the pay phone by the ferry dock to call his parents on his birthday and theirs. Otherwise, it is impossible to contact him aside from knocking on his door. He does not, living on the water, have an address. He has not had one for a long time. He prefers to land on other people’s doorsteps with offerings from his travels: a child’s string instrument from Moscow, the best green tea from Yamanashi and, once, a nurse’s uniform from a junk shop in Paris. He is good at finding things.
Our last night together, before Samuel finally fell asleep, he showed me a photograph he had taken of a tree beside a Buddhist temple in Kamakura. From it hung prayers, handwritten on slender squares of wood. This is how I feel, crawling into a motel bed in a stranger’s nightgown beside a ghost circus, at the other end of this day. Like a tree choked with wishes. I wonder whatever happened to the ordinary moments in the world. To pouring water into a glass, to your feet hitting the floor when you wake up, to the sound of a key in the front door. To thinking that the person across from you will be there the next day and the day after, that your closeness is not an invention but a truth, an unconquerable truth.
Morning creeps in, a grey spectre through the blinds, and I am trying to break the French bread in half. I am hungry. First, I notice the weight of the loaf, and then its refusal to be broken. It is a stubborn bone. I try to break it over the edge of the desk, against the busy walls, the bed frame. I pull at one end and then the other. Clumps of bread fall to the floor and I feel like I am tearing apart prey. I am all urges. I could very calmly go wild. I am the bear and when I die, they will find a small hard skull in my stomach.
There is something buried in the loaf’s middle. They used to do this in wartime. ‘Wives would send their soldier husbands brandy buried in loaves of bread. Mercy is about small gestures,’ Cupid told me when she finally woke up, her dog stretching open beside her. It had been three days. Portrait on your easel complete, you stepped away from it and she came to. You cried when she did. Your only magic trick. She chanted, ‘Thank you.’
I pull out a bottle and free the cork from it and see, inside, a scroll. I cannot, with my fingertips, pull it out. I run to the receptionist’s office. She is still in her blue gown. Her eyes are ringed red. Upon request, she hands me a pair of tweezers – first looking through every drawer in her heavy desk, books teeter-tottering, and then disappearing behind her black curtain, ‘I know they’re here some somewhere.’ The cat that sits by the door has green feathers around his mouth. Last night, in the summer heat, he ate the bird.
The receptionist lets me hold her.
I pull the scroll
free from the bottle.
38 Crescentwood Rd.
Scarborough, Ontario
Another map. Hand-drawn perfectly. No asterisks. From here, it is an hour’s ride.
I step into my boots and wheel out of the motel room like a daredevil on a motorcycle through a tunnel of fire. My balance is impeccable. It is only halfway that I realize three things: I am still in the stranger’s nightgown, flaring silver behind me. Your seat has been adjusted so that my legs can reach the pedals perfectly. And I have never actually pedalled a bicycle before.
I know the receptionist is waving even though I am long out of view. She will remember me as the girl who smelled like love-making. It had been some time.
five
I drop my bicycle and walk the nettled path to the front door. The sun through the willows bleaches the edges of everything. I knock. There is no response. I knock again. Still nothing. Did Finbar die in the night? Have I missed him? I try the handle. The door is unlocked. I push it open and step through. I take in a sharp breath, the long-anticipated moment suddenly real. Instead of the world I imagined, rooms crocheted with spiderwebs, plates stiffened with the remnants of meals, fish skeletons, corks, pits, ashtrays, dog hair, curtains pricked by moths, cluster-fly mounds on windowsills, a house that has not had a woman’s touch for too long, it is immaculate. Keys are assembled and hanging from one hook. Shoes are lined up in the front hall. The oak floors are polished. The shoes are too. Persian carpets. Colour-field paintings. The house is a model of propriety. Even ascetic. If Death has been here, he has licked the place clean.
