Pile of Bones

by Bailey Cunningham

  “Just buy it,” Shelby said.

  “I should, right? I deserve him.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Except that he’s twenty-nine dollars.”

  “Really? Wow.”

  “He has a detachable outfit. Plus, he’s limited edition.”

  “So buy it.”

  “I don’t have twenty-nine dollars. I just used my student Visa to make a payment on my Canadian Tire card. I should be taking away some kind of lesson from this.”

  “Andrew, you’ve got years of relative poverty to come. That’s not going to change. If this strange, demonic vulture-dude makes you happy, I think that you should buy him.”

  “Technically, he’s from another planet. And he’s not a vulture. The Skeksi and the Uru were once part of—”

  “I’ll kick in half if we don’t have to talk about their origins.”

  He blinked. “Fair deal.”

  “I thought so.”

  They paid for the action figure, which Andrew placed gently in his knapsack. Then they left the comic store, heading for Carl’s place.

  “If I had a real office,” Andrew said, “instead of a shared TA space, I could put him on my desk to freak out students.”

  “Don’t let go of that dream.”

  “Do you think we’ll get jobs?”

  “A grad student drops dead whenever you ask that question.”

  “I know it’s a bleak market, but there’s got to be something, right? We’re smart. We’ve presented papers, and Carl has that book review.”

  “Not even my mother can help me find a job. I’m going to end up working at Chapters with an ironic name tag.”

  “It might be fun if we all worked there. We could trade off on reading books at the Storytime Pajama Party. Lately, their selection has been a bit too focused on the Rough Riders, and I’d like to throw some Dennis Lee into the mix.”

  “Let’s make a pact,” Shelby said. “If none of us have tenure-track jobs in the next four years, we’ll invest in my library-slash-nightclub idea.”

  “I’m still not sure I get that.”

  “The club is on the first floor. The library is upstairs. Long-suffering partners can hang out there, along with the club kids who are tired and want to sober up. Obviously, there’d be no drinking among the stacks, and we’d have to pay the librarians more to work at night.”

  “How could they read with the racket downstairs?”

  “We’d use thick floors and lots of insulation.”

  “I think you’ve been watching too much Holmes on Homes.”

  They stopped beneath the red awning directly below Carl’s place. A steady stream of people went in and out of the adult video store. Shelby had gone in once or twice to look around, but their selection of lesbian erotica was designed for straight men: every video featured topless women kissing inexplicably on staircases, or in what appeared to be unfinished garages. They made strange kittenish sounds and didn’t resemble any of the girls that she’d ever been with. Not that she’d been with a lot.

  Carl emerged from the narrow door that led to the upstairs apartments. He was unshaven and looked tired.

  “Bad sleep?” Shelby asked.

  “My neighbor decided to break in his new karaoke machine around three A.M. I got to listen to a truly horrific version of ‘Radar Love.’”

  “Ouch. Well, let’s get some coffee in you.”

  “It’ll provide a good base for drinking later.”

  “I thought we were supposed to stay sharp,” Andrew said. “Once the sun goes down here, we won’t get much of a chance to rest.”

  “We’re going to a fancy party, with more wine than any of us can possibly imagine. Drinking will help us fit in.”

  “Parking,” Shelby murmured, although her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Not a single person is listening,” Carl said. “They’re glued to the screens.”

  “Whatever. Just don’t sing. Promise me that.”

  “What if the spirit moves me?”

  “You’re there as an observer, not as a performer.”

  “What if a moment comes when—”

  “I’ll shoot you with an arrow.”

  “She really will,” Andrew said. “I’ve seen her pretend-aim in your direction before, when you were being tedious.”

  Carl looked slightly uncertain. “But we’re in the same company.”

  “A company requires four. We’re in a sketchy threesome at best, and if you start crooning in front of the basilissa, I’ll shoot you in the leg. Understood?”

  “You’re scary sometimes.”

  “Someone has to be.”

  They stopped at Sweet for a coffee. The old brick building was surrounded by a swath of construction. The proto-condos, their foundations exposed and scattered, reminded her of urban bones drying beneath the sun. All of this used to be paskwâ, and the buffalo were paskwâwi-mostos. Prairie cows. That was one of her favorite Cree words. Because she couldn’t speak nêhiyawéwin, the words that she did remember had the feel of bones to them, partially submerged and out of context. Plains Cree was her grandmother’s first language, and her mother could also speak it with great facility. The only complete phrase that Shelby knew was Namôya nipakaski-nêhiyawân. Basically, it meant “My Cree sucks.”

  Campus was fairly sedate when they arrived. Carl headed toward History, while Andrew and Shelby made their customary circuit through the halls of Literature and Cultural Studies. There was a line of students waiting outside the graduate chair’s office. Nobody was crying yet, but the day had just begun. Everyone carried stacks of books with photocopies teetering on top. By Shelby’s second year, she’d learned to balance a tower of hardcovers, a travel mug, and a purse, all without walking into anyone. Some students employed luggage on wheels, making the narrow hallway resemble an airport terminal. She preferred to carry her things back to the library in old shopping bags, loading them up until the plastic bit her palms.

  Andrew had to print something out, so they stopped at the computer lab. It was more of a small corridor than a lab, which conveyed the sense of open space. This was a computer closet, with muttering fluorescent lights and a pile of broken chairs in the corner. The warm space behind the machines was covered in dead flies, and the air smelled of cigarette smoke, pot, and academic desperation. Every few months, a doctoral student would lose her shit and trash the place. Comps rage, they called it, like a form of cabin fever. Right now, the only other person there was an MA student whose name Shelby had forgotten. Her thesis had something to do with food and Fellini. She prepared herself to say something friendly, but the woman’s eyes were glued to her computer screen. There was no sense in making contact. She wouldn’t have noticed if they set the place on fire.

  Andrew printed out an article, which he was clearly excited about, since he could barely wait for it to appear. He touched each page as it came out of the printer, warm and inviting. She half-expected him to rub the pages against his cheek. Shelby couldn’t remember a time when she’d had so much raw enthusiasm for research. She loved reading primary sources but also feared that her arguments were trite and unoriginal. Who was going to read her thesis? Did she even fucking have one? Andrew didn’t seem to ask himself these questions—or, if he did, he asked them silently. It didn’t bother him that scholars had been dissecting his poems for centuries, analyzing every glottal stop.

  Someday, she would no longer feel like an imposter. She’d publish and buy conference scarves and get asked to review things. Like her mother, she’d have an office with sunlight, happy plants, a radio always tuned to CBC.

  “You’re pensive,” Andrew said. “What’s up?”

  “I just never know if I belong here.”

  “You wear Restoration T-shirts. I think that should answer your question.”

  “Maybe I was supposed to become a travel agent.”

  “You’re exactly where you should be.” He glanced down at his phone. “Carl just texted us from the library.” />
  “He’s probably lost on the fifth floor again.”

  “It is pretty disorienting up there.”

  “He’ll want a drink by now.” She sighed. “I guess he’s right. If we’re going to”—she glanced once more at the other student, who still hadn’t noticed them—“crash this party, so to speak, we might as well do some pre-drinking.”

  “Maybe we’ll sober up when everything—you know—switches.”

  “I’ve tried that. It doesn’t work.”

  “Too bad. It would be an amazing hangover cure.”

  Supposedly, the rules against “parking”—discussing the park during the day—had emerged to protect it from discovery. But most people weren’t even listening. They were checking their e-mail, proofreading papers, and obsessing over arguments. If she suddenly began talking about lares and silenoi, they’d assume that she was referring to an RPG or some weird seminar on the ancient world. It was more likely that the nondisclosure rules had been invented to conceal those who actually visited the park, to ensure that companies didn’t overhear each other. It was difficult to recognize people that you met in Anfractus and beyond. They looked and sounded different. She’d met Andrew and Carl by chance, but they were the only ones she had a relationship with on both sides. It was strange to think that anyone she met by day could be a completely different person by night, and she’d never know unless Fortuna decided to show her.

  Nobody knew if it was the park that found you, or the other way around. Shelby had discovered it by accident, while walking along the paths of Wascana in the early hours of the morning. She’d been ruminating about an article, something to do with female stage presence in the Restoration. Now the critic’s name escaped her, but at the time, she’d been thinking about the power of being looked at, the peculiar scrutiny exerted upon women who decided to appear publicly in the seventeenth century. Aphra Behn was called a prostitute for staging her plays and for daring to visit the theater at all. She was likened to the masked vizards and orange-girls who had sex behind the proscenium. She’d been thinking about fruits and offstage sex when, out of nowhere, a naked man stepped from the gazebo.

  He couldn’t see her, and she felt like the nymph Salmacis, getting an eyeful from her obscure vantage point. He was lightly muscled, with short hair and nice legs. His body steamed in spite of the cold, as if he’d just emerged from a tropical climate. His dick was matter-of-fact, a modifier dangling from dark curls. It didn’t necessarily fill her with desire, but she wasn’t looking away, either. As she watched in mute fascination, he walked over to a nearby tree and pulled a nylon drawstring bag from its depths. He untied the bag and withdrew a pile of clothes. In spite of his surroundings—a park in the middle of the night—he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. He dressed casually, as if this were normal and he had nowhere else to be. Once his shoes were on, he swung the bag over his shoulder and walked toward the street.

  Logic told her that he must have been crazy, but Shelby couldn’t scrub his image from her mind. How had he stepped barefoot out of the darkness? Where had he come from, and why did she feel like this was something that he did all the time? She’d gone back to Wascana the next night in search of him. Although he didn’t appear, she caught a glimpse of a woman running barefoot through the trees, clutching a pile of clothes to her chest. It took a few weeks of visiting and wandering, but eventually, she went down a certain path and ended up naked herself in an unfamiliar alley. That first time, there were no clothes tucked safely in the wall. She had to scale a low balcony to steal someone’s tunica.

  That had been nearly two years ago. Sometimes she lingered by the gazebo while Andrew and Carl were occupied, but he never reappeared. It wasn’t until they walked into that empty house, years later, that she finally recognized him once more. The mask disguised his face, but she remembered the rest of his body. That must have been the last night that Felix returned to this world. After that, he became a citizen. She didn’t trust him but couldn’t really explain why. It felt now as if she’d gone too long without admitting that she knew him, or at least that she’d once seen his shadow getting dressed. It would only provoke Carl’s own suspicions and possibly upset Andrew. It seemed better to say nothing.

  They picked up Carl in the Department of History.

  “We should toast Regina’s Olympic rowing victory,” he said. “Most of the history grads are already at Athena’s.”

  “I’ve never known you to be patriotic,” Shelby observed.

  “I happen to think that both rowing and drinking are awesome. What’s wrong with celebrating a prairie win? Maybe you’re being antipatriotic, and it’s my duty as a proper Canadian to keep your malaise from spreading.”

  “Just don’t overdo it.”

  “I never really understood that phrase.”

  “Exactly what I’m talking about.”

  Athena’s, located in the Student Union, was loud but not yet packed. Various televisions delivered instantaneous coverage of the games in London. Although it seemed perfectly functional, the upstairs of the pub had been closed for as long as she could remember. The hipster boys occupying leather couches reminded her of Sparkish from The Country Wife, who loved a fine spangle. Not much had changed since the Restoration. There were still sparks and bubbles, still fops, changelings, and manly women. But there were also student loans, and OkCupid, and thumb drives that contained their own gorgeous libraries.

  They ordered a round and sat by the window. Shelby looked away for a moment, and when she returned her attention to the group, Carl had finished his first pint. She hadn’t even seen him pick up the glass. He ordered another, and she gave him a look.

  “Don’t stinkeye me. I’ll be good.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “Let’s take the emphasis off me for a second. Have you been making any progress with your online Sapphic flirtations?”

  “Don’t be a dick.”

  “I have a dick, therefore I am a dick.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Come on. Just tell us.”

  Andrew was staring out the window. She knew that he was partially listening, but he’d be no help in offering a distraction. His mind was chasing salamanders.

  “I heard from her yesterday,” she said carefully.

  “Did you trade emoticons? They have ones that mean hug and blush. There must also be one for scissor—”

  “You’re disgusting. This conversation is over.”

  But Andrew chose that moment to come back into focus. “What did her message say?”

  Carl grinned. “Good question. Let’s get to the bottom of this.”

  “If you’d like,” Andrew said, “you can focus him out. Just pretend that we’re on the bus, and he’s the crazy guy who carries around his own radio.”

  The waitress brought Carl’s beer, which momentarily distracted him. Shelby turned to Andrew, trying to speak in a low voice. “She suggested that we have coffee.”

  “Holy shit.” Carl ignored the beer. “Coffee is the entering wedge that leads to full-on social interaction. This sounds like real progress.”

  “It seems best to take things slow.”

  “Right. You should get to know each other, first. Then, once she’s into you, find a tactful way to reveal how you stalked her in the library.”

  “It wasn’t stalking.”

  “It most certainly was stalking, abetted by your own friend.”

  “I abetted nothing,” Andrew said. “We barely spoke.”

  “Oh, there was a shitload of abetting. We both saw it happen.” He turned to Shelby. “Now you’ve got a choice. You can hope that she never sees Andrew again, or come clean and tell her about your harmless sociopathy.”

  Shelby looked up at the bank of televisions, attempting to avoid him. One was tuned to the news and displayed a picture of a coyote. The sound was turned off, but she watched as they showed grainy footage of the park at night, followed by an interview with a stern police constable. Hadn’t there been a de
ath in Cape Breton a few years ago? Coyotes did kill people—it was rare, but it happened. Anything was more likely than Andrew’s hypothesis. The idea of silenoi wandering around Wascana—as they wandered through the tangled alleys of Anfractus—made her blood run cold.

  Before she could think of a reply, her phone started buzzing. Shelby clicked on the message, and saw that it was a text from her mother. Bring dessert.

  “Fuck,” she hissed. “I forgot about dinner.”

  “Dinner?” Carl looked interested. “I thought it was just coffee.”

  “No, not with her. With my mom and my grandma.”

  “Great. Count us in.”

  “You weren’t invited.”

  “Your mom loves us. Andrew defrags her computer each time he visits, and I eliminate the need for leftovers by having thirds.” He smiled with peculiar pride. “That’s why she calls me her garburator.”

  “She calls you other things, too.”

  “Don’t try to poison our relationship.”

  Shelby couldn’t think of an excuse not to invite them both along. Her mother did enjoy Carl’s endless stomach, and her grandmother loved the look of sharp focus on Andrew’s face whenever she decided to tell stories. He would listen to her in captive wonder, like a child hearing The Cat in the Hat for the first time. They picked up a dessert from Safeway—something in the chocolate log family—and then walked over to the North Central neighborhood. Her mother and grandmother shared a house on the Piapot urban reserve. Her grandmother’s garden was abuzz with sunflowers and prairie crocus.

  “Nôsisim.” Her grandmother hugged her at the door. She was holding a cup of strong black tea, which she held at arm’s length while they embraced. She drank tea all day long, which may have been why she slept so little. “Tawâw. Welcome home, sunshine.”

  “Nohkô. Good to see you.”