HAMISH HAMILTON
an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited
Canada • USA • UK • Ireland • Australia • New Zealand • India • South Africa • China
First published 2018
Copyright © 2018 by Heidi Sopinka
She’s Got You
Words and Music by Hank Cochran
Copyright © 1961 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC,
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International Copyright Secured All Rights Reserved
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Sopinka, Heidi, author
The dictionary of animal languages / Heidi Sopinka.
ISBN 9780143196426 (paperback)
ISBN 9780143196440 (electronic)
I. Title.
PS8637.O575D53 2017 C813′.6 C2016-904765-2
Cover and interior design by Kelly Hill
Cover images: Fred Van Schagen / Getty Images;
v5.1
a
For JL
When you dream of a savage bull, or a lion, or a wolf pursuing you, this means: it wants to come to you. You would like to split it off, you experience it as something alien—but it just becomes all the more dangerous.
—CARL JUNG, CHILDREN’S DREAMS
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Pigeon
Nautilus
Fox
Wolf
Deer
Nightingale
Hare
Hyena
Reindeer
Swan
Dolphin
Snake
Bee
Buck
Swallow
Black Swan
Bat
Starling
Owl
Magpie
Crow
Songbird
Peacock
Whale
Skylark
Horse
Crustacean
Seahorse
Heron
Moth
Mourning Dove
Butterfly
Acknowledgments
PIGEON
Columba livia domestica; eating bread left by a homeless man + raw field recording of rain.
MY EYES BECAME HER EYES, the eyes of someone who died young. Which makes them hard to live with. But Skeet doesn’t know this. Or Ondine. Or Valentina even. The only one left who knows is me.
Any eggs in the coop, Frame?
Yes, I tell him. But he hasn’t heard. He’s shaken out the coffee beans and ground out my voice.
The fork tines clink rhythmically against the steel bowl like the metallic call of a long-legged grassland bird I have transcribed. I am attuned to sounds. After all the animals I have recorded, read glyphic and elemental, like songs. He turns on the tap at the sink. He knows water works better than milk. It occurs to me we are a woman and a man in a stone house. The man making breakfast. It could be one of those tender moments that occur, the kind between sex and full-dressed protocol. But this isn’t that. I haven’t told him of the letter. It is a bit of a trick, this timing between it and Skeet arriving out of nowhere by the same low sun.
We eat our food slowly, in comfortable silence. My legs dangle from the too-high chair like a child’s. Skeet butters the bread in angular little lines, and says, This place is smaller than I thought.
I know, I say. It’s intensely orchestrated, three-quarter size. She must have culled everything and photographed from cunning angles. What is that? High or low, I can never remember.
High.
He sips his coffee looking straight ahead. I am reminded of my fondness for him. How nothing between us is insincere.
You know this valley has been called the Playground of Kings, I say. The Garden of France. Which makes you think it should be those things, but all I see are these hot yellow fields of sunflowers that will soon be cut, gleaming and bristling like a big cat’s pelt. They could be cornfields in middle America. I hold up my mug, feeling the steam on my skin. This coffee doesn’t taste like anything. It has happened to food too.
He looks out the window and blinks at the sun.
I suppose it has a certain kind of beauty. He eats his toast. The beauty of death.
I’ve missed you, Skeet.
Anyway Frame, what does it matter? You’re like an animal. Not even one percent changed by geography. He pauses. How are you?
Well you and I both know that isn’t true. The leg is better, I tell him, but that is hardly an event. Aren’t you going to ask me?
What?
About le grand projet.
Oh.
He is distracted. Normally this is his first line of inquiry. His eyes downcast, on the envelope with the letterpressed insignia and the same French font as all the graveurs on the table by the front door. A letter is pulled from a postbox and everything is pulled with it. Maybe it is me who is distracted.
Skeet gets up and paces the room, his fingers following the papers taped to the walls. I forgot this about him. He cannot sit for more than a few minutes. He goes quiet for a while and then turns to face me.
The photographs are everywhere, interlocking and branching patterns, extreme density interspersed with silences. All the data, the transcriptions in fieldbooks and papers with rubber bands in shopping bags on the floor. For a moment, I see the way someone else would see it. Not Skeet, but someone normal. How barking mad it all looks. As though I might have finally and definitely lost my mind. Despite feeling off-pitch, the project reassures me. I have always known myself in it.
After a long silence, Skeet sucks in air. Fuck.
Oh my god. What?
He stops dead. Frame.
What?
I don’t know how to tell you this.
What? You look so worried. This look on your face, I’ve never seen it before.
He breathes out. He’s not sure which thing to tell, there are so many.
What’s going on? Is it about the project? I say, unsure.
Well— he hesitates. Yes and no.
Thud. We both startle at the sound. The bird again. It began hurling itself at the window before I left the house yesterday morning. I switched off the light and removed the keys and discs from the windowsill, all the deceptive things, to warn it off. Thud. It hit the glass again. The sun was bright and the wisp-white clouds passed above as I walked out to the car. In the country you are always driving. The glass is hot; the driver’s seat swings wildly. I keep a breadboard wedged behind it, which allows my feet to touch the pedals and fixes the seat in position. The sky is vast and clear. There is only one road out. The fields blur, silvered by clouds that momentarily close over them. A relief from the gold sizzle that
rattles the grasses dry and forces dogs to lie in shade, ribcages labouring. Everything grows from the cracks. Roses, ditches of poppies, trees bending with fruit. This time of year people come. They file into castles with conical spires. They pose in front of churches. I have no emotion for it. The beauty is general. The car radio crackles. What’s-her-name is singing, Yeah what have I got? / Nobody can take away. And it suddenly strikes me as funny that we see ourselves as immortal. What I have got somebody is about to take away. Nobody gets out of here alive. The sun flickers in like a heartbeat through the evenly spaced plane trees that parallel the road, their wide calico trunks tessellate.
For months nothing arrived from the conservatory or the university, but today, in the small metal postbox, finally, a letter. I think of countless fieldbooks full of animal sounds shaped into images, webbed maps, rough chorales, thin silver frequencies. They all funnel into this single gesture, a woman swivelling on her heel, handing me a white rectangle, eyes fixed on the next person in line. Except they don’t. I open it standing at the blue and yellow counter. Everything is bright and vibrating in the room. Pain swings and pits behind my eyes. Every little thing shoots off course, like looking up at the night sky of another hemisphere, not a single star you can name.
I drive home with the open letter on my lap, passing right by the short gravel lane to the house. It seems impossible that something that weighs almost nothing can contain such stunning facts. My breathing is panicked and sharp. The fields ripple and ride in waves from the wind. White cows all facing the same direction, lining up not as the farmers say to predict rain, but because the earth is one big magnet. The windows are down, open to birdsong and the thin layer of dust that bangs up from the cracked dirt road. These things I have seen a hundred times before I am now observing with total attention. The sky is saturated and smooth as stone, cut through with small grey wings. Cold perspiration films on my body, my clothes stuck to the leather seat. My hands are shaking. Of all the time it has taken between it and now. Facts never come soon enough. What is a fact? So much of life is lost vacant time of which you remember almost nothing. Memory is not a fact. But what is memory? Billions of infinitesimal particles collected from outerspace, Edison said.
Skeet moves his chair, the low timbre of wood dragging across the stone floor.
I first met Skeet years ago, at an airport, a kind of shack at the end of the tarmac where I was waiting for him in Whitehorse. He was tall with a good set of eyes, a bit of wildness in them. He looked serious, but had a part-grin that hid crooked teeth, the kind you don’t see anymore. The first thing he said after looking around was, You get the feeling that this is a town where people arrive on horseback. He is friendly but remote. The fieldwork is such a welcome antidote to all the hours bent over laboratory recording equipment. We spend great swaths of time sitting in cold, dry snow, waiting. Our eyes darting, anticipating the flashes of grey that will appear against the blinding white. In town we see a raven kick snow off a roof that slides and lands on a man’s head. It fits with the legend, where the Haida say they are the creator, but also the trickster. There is a white raven in legend too. Supposedly it brought the world into existence. It stole the sun and the moon and then flew through a smoke hole, turning black but also bringing light to the world.
Up there back then, Skeet was finishing his dissertation on lupine acoustic structures and had been sent to assist with field research. The conservatory said he was the brightest doctoral candidate they had ever seen. A Yukon winter. A cold-layered beauty. The sunlight through the icy air made the objects firelit. The truck skidded on its chains. I was struck by the feeling that all I wanted was to keep going. Everything felt safer sitting high up, looking out through chilled windows. I started to tell him things that I’ve told no one, and he talked too. His long limbs folded into the truck, eyes squinting at the sky.
He seems to have dropped out of nowhere. The name isn’t his. He was born too early. Rangy, he was more mosquito than baby. Abbreviated and then stuck. He says his mother and father fought like cats and dogs until his father left for good. She was fifteen years old. Everyone admitted her beauty, but as self-destruction went, she was expert. Skeet says they lived above a shabby hair salon. Hairdresser found God, his mother told him. Closes shop at the wrong times. She had tried sleeping in rollers, but woke up feeling as though she’d been punched in the neck. She told him she couldn’t think through the catpiss smell of ammonia from the perms. The one boy he brought home said filthy things about his mother the next day at school. She sat dead-eyed, smoking at the kitchen table in a see-through robe. She could get like that. He didn’t know what was worse, that catatonic state or the frenzied one, when she said fantastical things he knew would never happen. He was always sent to school with his lunch in a narrow brown paper bag from the liquor store that ripped each time he pulled out its contents. Soon the teacher called his mother in. She wore a thin red leather belt with her tightest jeans she’d zipped up wet over hipbones with a metal hanger, lying on the floor. It made Skeet nervous. Whenever she wore them, a man would be in their kitchen the next morning. A child cannot grow, the teacher said, from eating potato chips and peaches from a can. The lunches are the starting point. His mother laughed, refusing to put out her cigarette. The teacher went further. He is a smart boy. She would help. His last vision of his mother before he was taken away was her standing in the doorway in nothing but a shiny, opaque pair of white underpants, clutching a bottle of rye. Black smudged raccoon eye makeup, the ends of her blond hair grazing her ribs. The smear of lipstick rubbed off from the bottle left her lips looking wounded. What are you looking at? His eyes going to the only clothed place. Godsakes, she laughed. It sounded like a crack. She looked down, then chopped her hands on either side of her pubic bone in a V. You sprang from these loins, she finally said.
When the woman had told him he could quickly go and collect his belongings he realized there was nothing he wanted to take. He was brought to a tall German couple, pastoralists who ran a self-sufficient farm and lived by Hermann Hesse’s notion of the self. They adopted him. They tried to change his name to Hermann. They didn’t like his name, which was tattooed above his birthmother’s tailbone. He’d seen it sticking out from the top of her underpants, which he thought inane. What, is she going to forget his name? But they decided he’d already had too many things change. He grew up in the country. He watched nature programs with them, and they would quiz him energetically afterward. How many hearts does an octopus have! What’s the lifespan of a housefly! Why do whales breathe air! It made him miss his mother. She liked to yell and laugh and slap the TV like it was a person. Except the show they saw about the opera singer. She got really quiet. All she said was, She’s gotta voice like God is talking through.
The other children thought Skeet was cold, but inside a fire grew. He loved the start of school in fall. He loved fall. The scarlet leaves, he liked to think, were the minds of trees on fire. He liked the rows of glass cylinders in the science room at school. His favourite element from the periodic table was selenium. He grew to be surprisingly tall, like the German couple. And when he graduated from university, on a whim he bought a plane ticket from bursary money for his mother. He’d had a secret, but unpredictable, correspondence with her.
At his graduation, her seat remained empty long enough for him to think she wouldn’t come. But she did come, oddly unaged. You’ve grown so handsome, she kept saying. She had her hands on him. If you squinted, they almost looked like a couple. She had unfocused eyes, a flask of whisky in her boot. She drained several plastic stemmed glasses of wine set out on a seminar table with a stiff white tablecloth glaring back under hot, two o’clock sun. As soon as he saw her, everything flooded back to him. Her need for attention. Her slurred speech. His longing for a mother whose face reflected something he recognized in himself. After the first prick of embarrassment, he always felt low. After all these years, after all the learning and travelling and studying, it occurred to him that s
he was still a child, whereas he no longer was.
Goddamn shit-hawks, she yelled, referring to the pigeons clotted on campus trees. She pulled out a pistol from her purse, steadied it, took aim, and then swivelled to face Skeet, saying, Okay, sugar, let’s eat. Police were involved.
Skeet looked over at me in the truck. Something filled him from the inside. His eyes pinned him to me with a feeling that neither of us yet knew. I felt his silent grief and a great wave of love for him, though all I managed to say was, They used to have a more exalted position in society, the pigeons.
He swallowed and nodded.
With their orange eyes and iridescent necks, I continued, they were brought to cities to be ornamental. Of course they are also vital messengers. They have been decorated in war.
Like a homeless man with a heroic past, he said, eyes fixed on an invisible mark.
The thing that his parents couldn’t forgive was not what happened that day. Or that he’d contacted her. It’s that he had done so without telling them. It’s the trust, they said, that has been broken. The cardinal sin of the adoptee. When he left home to study and work, he was not sure if he would ever see them again. There were no letters.
—
A clatter of dishes, Skeet clearing breakfast. He takes out a pack of cigarettes, shakes two out, puts them both in his mouth, lights them, and passes one to me. Thing is, he exhales, what I’m trying to tell you— He pauses. Is that. Well. We’re on the run.
The way he looks at me, I’ve no idea what to think. And I’m not sure what’s more ridiculous. To have Skeet suddenly here out of nowhere or his using an expression like on the run as I sit here immovable.
Skeet, I’m ninety. I use the figure ninety, though in truth I am ninety-two. And still all this work left, I say, with an unintended quiver.
I see how close you are, Frame. You know that I do. I can help.
How, I say crossly, though immediately wish it had come out more tenderly. I look at him, his hair sticking up in parts, and think there must be something left to do.
The Dictionary of Animal Languages Page 1
