And those words, so bitter as he crooned the last sustain, and the shufflers ceased shuffling and clung to one another under the lights of the Vimy Memorial Hall, those last words made him wish never to sing again. Of course, what he did was not singing, but what they had once called whispering, but he decided in that moment that neither would he whisper, even if it meant he would cease to be a Western Gentleman. He also had an accurate sense of his own performance: it would be better to anticipate his dismissal and resign quietly.
He did not know what would happen next. After the last shuffler had shuffled away, he ate his cold supper in a side room and listened to the men talk about baseball, rye whiskey, and women. He thought about his annuity. He spread mustard on a roll and thought about capital, and how he had none, had never had any capital but his face and—sometimes, when he was very lucky—his voice. He added roast beef to the mustard, then salt and black pepper. He thought about Mrs. Kilgour and her fortune, the villages and hunting lodges and mines. He thought about how much time he had left, and the state of his lungs. By the end of his pickles and cheese and the two matrimonial bars, he had decided that he would go to Mrs. Kilgour’s lawyers. He would go there tomorrow and suggest that he take his capital and not bother them again. It would see him through a year or two in Mexico, and as he reckoned it, that was all he needed. Before dawn the next morning he woke in the room he shared with four other Western Gentlemen, quietly packed his things and walked a slow mile to the bus station, where he bought a ticket to the city, and Mrs. Kilgour’s lawyers, and a little of his capital.
He arrived on one of those milky mornings he remembered from earlier Novembers in the city, the buildings and streets swamped in a pale, lukewarm fog that blunted noise as well as colour. By eleven he had a place in an ugly rooming house on the east side, half-full of loggers. At one o’clock he found Goshawk’s address, which he had kept for years in his little book, but never used. He brushed his coat and changed his shirt and set out, feeling the cracks in the pavement through the soles of his old shoes, and thinking that they would be the first thing he’d correct when he had his capital.
An hour later he was on the familiar corner, but the building was gone and in its place a pit and a sign that read “The Future Home of the Kilgour Institute.” He didn’t know what the Kilgour Institute could be, but it sounded dreadful. By three he was drinking coffee (pale brown, tasting of chicory and toasted barley) in a café called Adele’s, among the boys in khaki—lads, he thought they still called them, or laddies—who laughed over tables covered in cups and dirty plates. Having made his pilgrimage to a demolition site, he could not remember what came next.
The only thing he could think was that he did not wish to walk back to the rooming house, with the sidewalks so rough and wet. He now wished that he had remained a Western Gentleman long enough to replace his shoes. He’d had new soles just two years before, but they were expensive with shoe leather being (apparently) necessary for the War Effort.
In early 1940, he had decided that he would not make a War Effort. He wouldn’t buy victory bonds (not that he had the money), or march, or sing, or anything. He meticulously shredded and discarded his cigarette foil so as to prevent its being recycled by those hoards of scrap-collecting children. “Mister!” he remembered a child saying to him—where? It might have been Regina, or Nelson—“Mister, you want to give us the foil for Victory?” Some scabby twelve-year-old with freckles and dirty knees. Liam had stared at the boy, feeling that old arrogance come over him. He lit a cigarette. The child shuffled foot to foot. “Mister?” he said again, wrinkling his brow as though he’d just looked back to see his own muddy footprints on his mother’s clean floor. Liam had pulled out the last cigarette and stuffed it in a pocket, then separated the foil. He balled it up in his fist and dropped it down the grate at his feet. Then he gave the snot-nosed little berk the outer case. He would get very little for paper.
Despite the wet, he would have to get up soon, get back to his hotel where he could solve the problem of his shoes, and then face the Kilgour issue. He would cut some cardboard insoles to delay the inevitable, if he could find cardboard. The soldiers at the other table were laughing very loud now over some stage-whispered joke about the waitress’s tits. The waitress’s tits weren’t particularly intriguing. Liam was more impressed by her pompadour, which added four inches to her height. Without it or her high white pumps, she’d be a tiny little thing, like a midget. Her brows had been plucked bald and replaced by ink-black lines like quotation marks around her eyes. Her mouth was the bright red of a flag.
Liam decided in favour of wet shoes, pavement and the possibility of cardboard insoles rather than another round of obnoxious military laughter. The lads in khaki were no better than they had been in 1915, and it did not surprise him, considering how young they were, and how afraid. Outside again, he looked down a street full of determined activity and shades of drab. A flat disk of sun failed to properly illuminate the chalk-coloured sky. It was late afternoon. He would return to the rooming house, though it was ten blocks away and his feet were already wet. He wished for trolley fare. In a few blocks he reached one of the big department stores, glancing in at polished wood and perfume bottles gleaming in the incandescent light, women statuesque among them in their sleek, black dresses.
For the first time that day, he realized that he saw everything with the excruciating clarity of fever, a precise and narrow glance that picked out all the shades of grey between white fog and shadow, that saw every luminous shape multiplied in the mirrors of the department store, and the polished glass doors, and marked in detail the motion of a woman’s hands as she wrapped tissue paper around a box. Everything about him was distant and tiny and perfect, made of translucent amber, and mother-of-pearl. In his ears the sounds of the street became a slurry, no words he knew, though in it he heard, unexpected, a through-line, like a motif, like a message. He would not go back to his room to cut insoles out of old cardboard. He would push through the bright, ordered world of the department store instead, and stare like a desert nomad in from the wild, eyes swollen with vision. He would follow that motif and discover its source. He would go in. He would go.
As he opened the double doors, a woman came out, dragging a child after her. She passed him so closely the fabric of her unfastened coat brushed against his wrist. She was heavily pregnant, smocked in an ugly blue dress with a white collar, like a nun would wear out of habit. The touch of her coat clung to his skin, like a hand briefly holding his. He turned to watch her.
She was pale. She had honey-blonde hair and freckles, and under the distortion of her pregnancy she was slender, with narrow knees and ankles. Her small hand around the child’s was hard and strong, and the bones that jutted through the skin were held in place by whipcords of tendon. All this he took in as he saw her, and with it came a surge of recognition, then relief. He did not even recognize the trick of his illness, that on this unfriendly street he should feel such familiarity. He knew the young woman and was sure she would know him, too, as though she was part of a life he had mislaid just this week, and the last years were only a temporary exile in which he had wandered, before he found his way back.
She led her child down the block to a streetcar stop. He took a step toward them. The child hung onto her hand, rocking back and forth. The woman ignored her, but never loosened her grip. The child hung her head, and Liam heard “no no no” faintly. I know her, he thought again. He looked carefully at the little girl (dark-haired, dark-eyed child with skin like white paper), and slipped his hands from his pockets to see that they were shaking. He had almost caught up with them when the trolley stopped, and the doors opened, the line moved forward, and the woman dragged the little girl after her onto the trolley. The child looked over her shoulder at Liam, still on the sidewalk. He felt in his pockets for carfare.
She walked along the aisle and took a seat, her daughter by the window staring out at him, but the woman looking away, the tendons on her neck st
anding out like the bones of her hands.
Other people wanted on the car. Liam stepped back into someone, confused, and felt a lady’s foot through the sole of his shoe. He apologized: Sorry, I’m sorry, sorry. One hand wandered up to his forehead, down his cheek and felt the tight, hot skin beneath his fingers.
The trolley departed. Not liking to watch, he walked in the opposite direction, past the café that still held the lads in khaki, then toward the park. He remembered the park. During his last visit to the city, he thought he had walked through it, and someone had told him stories about the woods. He would walk there until his head cleared, look at the specimen trees, and keep out of the rain in one of the little tea houses.
He made his way toward the dark green at the end of the street, above it the grey sky now bluing to black. It was like a theatre, he thought, one with the castle walls all around the auditorium, and pinewood showing above the battlements, and the stars coming out in the domed ceiling overhead. He had sung in a theatre like that, where the arches were Romanesque grey stone, and there were oak-hewn doors studded with bronze. Though he felt the earth and gravel through his soles, he still thought that it might be boards he walked over, trailing his long black coat toward the apron and the accompanist. What would he sing when he reached the lights?
In the woods he began to shiver. His wet coat made him feel like a man with stones in his pockets. He felt no rain, but somewhere it fell, high above in the crossed branches of fir trees. He wanted to lie down and let the fever burn through his skin, through his coat until it warmed the wet earth beneath him and he could sleep, with nothing but rye whiskey to keep out the night.
He did not lie down. He turned and started on the path back out, trying to find the old stride that had carried him through so many other, earlier night walks. Once out of the woods, the night was no brighter: the streets were empty, and the only light came from narrow-beamed blackout lanterns carried by men he could not see, who patrolled the dark. He wanted to go to them and ask for help. Each cough now filled his nose with a sour yellowish scent. Each cough tore at the thin membranes inside him, and the ominous bubbling he felt might be blood as well as phlegm. He thought that sometime soon he would disgorge his own lungs, and leave them steaming, half-rotted on the pavement and walk away, newly lightened, the fever gone.
His room was damp and filmed with coal smoke. Liam lay in bed and listened to the noises of the house, the creaks and rumbles and talk from the other rooms on the landing. He had gone so far as to take off his shoes, which were drying on the register beside him. He would have to go out again in the morning and find Goshawk. He did not wish to do it in wet shoes. When he closed his eyes, it seemed he was still walking, through the woods or through dark streets with blackout curtains over all the windows. He opened his eyes to confirm yes yes oh of course yes he was not on the street; he was in bed, though the room was cold and he too tired to take the wet clothes from his back.
But soon when he opened his eyes he could not confirm his location, and when he closed them he felt as though he was tumbling, circling downward, drawn into the deep by some irresistible weight.
He slipped into deeper sleep, but the weight was there too, and now the air he breathed had the viscous texture of a nightmare, and the light around him inexplicably dreadful, a shade of yellow he knew and feared, the colour of stage lights that both obscured and revealed, not by daytime law but by some other rule he could not comprehend. As he fell, his own hands seemed so far away he could hardly make out their details, his head resting on earth and his feet in some deep reach of the universe, and all this time the weight on him, so he sensed it with the hairs of his scalp, with his belly. His heart felt the weight most of all, and its beats slowed, then slowed again. Each breath thicker and more taxing. In the end all he thought was
dear god, please let me breathe let me breathe let me
breathe let me breathe
please let me
DEAD THINGS
It was pretty much inevitable that something would die up there. After squirrels breached the attic above Anthea’s apartment, the inside of the house wasn’t much different from the street or gardens in what the CarbonNinjas called the city’s Urban Forest. The attic, the walls, the floors belonged to rodents now, and pigeons, and all the attendant parasites and nesting materials such creatures required.
So when she climbed the long stairs to her suite after her last visit to the Aquarian Centre and she smelled something, she wasn’t surprised. They had been loud and territorial for weeks, as though engaged in a war of succession or a campaign of occupation. One morning she awoke to a large grey squirrel chittering on her kitchen counter, tearing into a box of Cheerios. It saw her and pissed down the cupboards, then ran through the paper on the floor, knocking over candles and coffee cups and tracking piss-prints over that portion of the Kilgour Archive she had stolen. That first morning she was too frightened to chase the squirrel out, and temporarily retreated from the front room. When she crept back, he was pacing below the sill of the open window, before he fled under her stove. She fled as well, back to her bedroom. She still didn’t know when he left, and worried when she turned on the oven that screeches and an unpleasant smell would emanate from beneath it, and then there would be trouble.
But the smell began in the closet and spread, in the course of days, through the apartment. She worried that she now smelled to those she encountered not only of the paper and mildew of Rm 023, but of the dead thing in the attic. Anthea called her landlady and said, “I think something died.” And when the woman didn’t respond, she called again and said, “I’m pretty sure there’s a dead thing in the attic.” And then the next day, “Yeah, that’s what dead things smell like.” When the smell worked its way down to the other tenants, they began to call as well.
On the third day of the smell. Anthea, sleeping in a mask doused with lavender essential oil, like someone in a medieval, airborne epidemic, woke to find the scent had developed a new intensity during the warm night. Lying in bed, she thought about the potato field that Hazel kept, now overgrown. She remembered walking there one afternoon in the summer before, through the narrow band of trees and the trench that separated it from the public road.
She walked among Douglas fir, alder, cascara, west coast crabapple, Pacific yew, spirea, Saskatoon-berries-of-the-dead, salal, wild rose. Everything filled in with green: the trenches; the outline of Hazel’s potato beds; the strip of lawn that Max and then Colm had cut with the mower every week, now in the long grass since Colm had been so busy elsewhere. He had told her that it was once a goat field, though she wasn’t sure if that was in his time—one of Hazel’s many experiments with small farming—or in Simon’s. Now the deer grazed it, and the rabbits. In the evening she often saw an owl on the high branch of a Douglas fir.
As she walked she smelled something. Somewhere among the stems and trunks, some animal had crept away and died and brought an edge of decay to the air. It was not the sweet smell of rotten leaves, nor the vegetable stink of compost nor seaweed. Anthea knew that if she looked, she wouldn’t necessarily see it. Once, walking in the same woods, she had looked down to find herself standing in the ribcage of a young deer, long dead. She had jumped and kicked the vertebrae out of alignment.
She did not wish to see a dead thing.
NIGHTSHADE SOCIETY
One day in March of Anthea’s fourth year, Hazel called her little dorm room. She was drunk. “Darling,” she said. “Darling, when are your exams? You do have exams, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I really do.” Anthea looked at her calendar and the neat block capitals that indicated exams, now cross-hatched with red blue black exclamations about what she ought to know where and when. She didn’t have to say anything more, though, because Hazel kept talking. “Did you know that the ancient Greeks—” Her voice was all gurgly and spitty on the sibilant when she said “ancient.” Anthea thought she heard the little drops of saliva hitting the plastic. The last time she’d used
Hazel’s phone, she could not bear to let it touch her face, avoiding the bloom of fingers on the receiver and the dirty hairspray smeared on the earpiece. She did not look closely at the mouthpiece.
Hazel tried again: “Did you know the ancient Greeks believed in assisted suicide?” She would be sitting at her small rolltop desk where she kept the phone and wrote letters. She would be wearing polyester knit slacks and a sleeveless floral blouse. Near her there would be a glass of gin and a can of tonic that was flat for being open in the fridge from the night before. Hazel didn’t like a lot of tonic, so one can did two nights. There would be a small bottle of prescription pills nearby: Librium, Ativan, Clonazepam. One pill with the drink, maybe one before bed. Hazel liked to joke about her libritonics, ginazepams, ativonics.
“The ancient Greeks?” Anthea began, because this was something she knew. “Actually it was—”
“Yes yes, or the Romans. I’m not a professional historian, you know. I didn’t get the chance. But I know they believed in dignity, darling, for the old, and that you should get to pick when you were ready to go. Do you understand, darling, why that’s so civilized?” Again the wet sibilants. There was a pause and the sound of a mouth opening. “Because it gives people their free will, and their right to die. I can’t remember if it was the Greeks or the Romans. I always understand the philosophy just as well, I just don’t always know the details, but that’s because details aren’t really important. And I know that they believed in assisted suicide. One of them, anyway. You know I joined the Nightshade Society.”
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