“Do you have a headache?” he asked me, and I said I did though I didn’t. I just wanted the easy hiss of yes off my tongue right then. He said something about adrenal glands and pressure points, things I couldn’t quite make out through the fog of his pale smooth hands cradling the backs of mine, his thumbs kneading the ache in the bellies of my palms. His wedding band glinted. A moan nestled in my throat waiting for release, and it was then I could feel my soul lifting. Not in any joyous sense; it was as though I were losing myself, as if my soul were seeping away, and I started to cry. I didn’t know the watchmaker’s name.
Last night, Thomas said that he couldn’t go to a therapist. It would get out, he said, and spread like wildfire: Thomas Gary is a porn addict. He’d be a laughingstock.
I fingered my watch. Madge from Jim 1940.
Thomas slept in his office again. He left for Toronto first thing this morning.
After work today, I got into the car and drove past the café without stopping. If the watchmaker could really read palms, he’d have seen this coming, he would understand. I drove past the watch repair and the café and past the turnoff toward home. Wading into the thick traffic on Highway One, I headed east until I was lost—nothing but farmland and the odd strip mall.
I passed a sign that said vancouver zoo and aquarium, made a U-turn and parked.
I am at the zoo now and the sun is setting. It won’t be open much longer but I feel as if I am prowling, groping for something. I wish I had a child on my hand right now. Something in a size small with messy curls and a precocious mouth, a child who has just learned to talk a blue streak but doesn’t know yet how to censor herself.
I pass by the reptile pavilion, stopping only briefly before I realize I’m not interested in snakes. The cat cages don’t work for me either; their restless paws make my heart race. The penguins look too fishy and the fish too hungry. Instead, I am drawn to the monkeys, which normally I am not, but I don’t question. This morning I made a decision to have what I crave.
The first cage has the orangutans. I stop and watch them: frantically hairy, they stretch arms out to each other, to food, to the chain-link fence, to outside bodies. It’s a slow day at the monkey cage and only two other people are there: a woman and her bored boy-child who is whining, “Ma-a-wm. The sharks.” He needs to get to them before their official feeding time, he insists. His mother yes-es him, absently, but she is busy: she is engrossed. She’s leaning across the thin moat that’s supposed to discourage patrons from getting too close to the cages. It’s only about a foot wide, though, not all that discouraging. A young orangutan, barely her son’s age, has attached himself to the fence near her, one hand and both feet entwined in the chain link, the other hand reaching through, reaching for her. She ignores the do not touch sign and takes his hand. They stare at each other. He sighs a little, wraps his fingers loosely in hers and closes his eyes, then opens them on her, tilting his head. She kisses the fingertips of her free hand and touches them to his, and her son says, “Mom, I’m going. I’m serious, I’m going.” But she is transfixed. The orangutan’s mouth turns up and he looks grateful and loving and resigned in a way that he can’t find words for. The boy huffs and stalks away, toward the big-fish house.
Ten minutes later, the woman is still holding that dark hand, running her light thumb over the fur at his knuckles. He’s resting his lips on his own wrist, on his side of the cage. He looks as if he would squeeze himself through one of those two-inch diamonds in the chain link, as if he would gladly let her tear his hide through, limbs scraped off in the process, if it meant he could curl against her breast on the other side. Her eyes are welling and her son is long gone, watching big-toothed fish swallow chunks of flesh the size of dachshunds.
I am mesmerized. And watching them—her and the monkey—gives me a peculiar twinge: sympathy and jealousy all mixed up. And hunger: the real kind and the figurative kind. I suddenly want to swallow everything I come in contact with, and I wonder if I should have gone along with that boy of hers to commune with the sharks.
I am only four or five feet from the woman and the orangutan, when the zoo guy comes between us.
“Excuse me,” he says. “Ma’am! Can’t you read the sign there? Do not touch the animals and do not feed them; don’t touch ’em, don’t feed ’em. Understand?”
She turns her head, eyes red and brimming. “I’m not feeding him.”
The orangutan doesn’t look at the zoo guy, just squeezes his other hand through and takes hold of the woman’s forearm, pulling her closer.
The zoo guy scowls. “Now, look what you did. These animals are very unpredictable and you riled him. It’s almost closing and now we’ve got to extricate your damn arm outta there.”
The woman gives the furry face a closed-mouth smile and smoothes the fingers on her arm. The orangutan takes sharp breaths and holds tight. She turns her head just a little, snuffles quietly, and says, “Please go away. We just need a couple of minutes. I promise I’ll be gone by the time you get back.”
“I’m gonna go get the primate guy. And Security. Bet your ass you’ll be gone,” he mutters. And he heads off in the zebras direction.
The woman looks back into the monkey’s eyes, tears sliding toward her jaw, and starts to sing, her voice cracking, “Lullaby and good night …”
The orangutan lets go of her forearm and reaches farther, straining his hand to her face. She leans her wet cheeks closer and lets him touch her jaw as though she is beautiful; as though she is the most wondrous thing he has ever seen, until they let each other go.
According to Madge and Jim’s watch, it’s nearly seven o’clock. An announcement comes over the loudspeaker: the zoo is closing in ten minutes.
I’m not ready to leave and I don’t know where I’ll go when I do. I feel as if there is just too much blank space around me suddenly. I need to sit a minute and collect myself.
Walking toward the duck pond, I move fast to wake up, get some adrenalin going, some fight-or-flight. I ball up two fists and dig my nails in and take a lot of sharp breaths and shake my head hard when the wrong thoughts come in, and I don’t care what kind of lunatic I look like.
My calves ache a little by the time I sit down on a bench—it looks brand new, wood stain, no slats, and sanded smooth as a pup’s ear. Sun hits the pond and droops lower in the sky, falling into an orangutan-coloured haze, and I take off the watch, set it beside me, whisper to it to go back home, where it belongs.
Greedy Little Eyes
SHE RIDES SHOTGUN IN SOME EARLY-SEVENTIES convertible, candy apple red and the top’s down. Playing her boyfriend is a twenty-something guy sporting a great white Dentyne smile. He shifts gears and regards her with a whole and perfect love. She glances at the map and grins back; her smile is Pepsodent. They are so beautiful and clear-eyed and strong; together they could win best of breed.
Eventually, they spot it, the cabin; in the midst of a wheat field, not another building in sight, not a person, not a thing, nothing but this cabin and endless waving grain. The cabin sits on stilts as though it were near water and built for flooding. Seeing her uncle outside the door, plump in a suit, smoking a cigar, a fat black moustache behind the smoke, she and the boyfriend climb out of the car and run up the stairs. The uncle smiles and holds his arms open, gestures them inside to a small, single room. Her heart sinks. There is nothing inside but a bed and a dresser. On the dresser is a pile of flawless white eggs and a heat lamp. They have been duped.
It is clear now that she and the boyfriend have been lured by this uncle of hers to procreate and leave the egg behind, where it will be hatched, the baby sold through the black market. The door closes.
Knowing they will be held until they comply, they do what needs to be done and add their egg to those warming on the dresser.
They break past the uncle before he can change his mind, rush back to the red convertible and speed off. Until her furious boyfriend stops the car only minutes from the cabin.
She pani
cs. “Drive!”
“I’m not leaving it.”
“Forget it! They can’t be alive with just a heat lamp. They’re dead. Drive!”
“I’ve not leaving without it.”
“You’re on your own.” She gets out.
The boyfriend turns the car around and leaves her in the dust.
She’s scared that he’ll be killed, that they’ll come after her or she’ll die there alone in the long yellow grass. But he returns in seconds with an egg-filled sheet, its four corners twisted together, transforming it into a sack. She leaps back into the car. Suddenly another vehicle gives chase.
The boyfriend is fierce now, driving for his life. She holds the sheet of eggs in her lap until the prairie grass ends and they are suddenly in Vancouver, rolling right onto the beach. The car stops and she jumps out, eggs in hand, rushes down the hot sand. The sun is falling; the horizon in front of her is turning pink and orange as her feet hit the ocean. She has a stranglehold on the sheet, swings with both hands like a batter, sending the eggs into the setting sun until they splash, bobbing light on the water. Peach rays shine through the eggs, illuminating the babies inside, their hands held up to the warmth and bright. “They’re alive. They’ll die now and it’s my fault.”
Fern jolts from sleep and stares at the ceiling.
She is giving out Lindt balls in a department store, handing each shopper a Swiss-made blob of sugar, cocoa and hydrogenated fat, wrapped in one layer of red foil and another of clear crunchy plastic, twisted at either end, giving them the look of legless flying bugs in gaudy formal wear. Fern has an agent who rents her out at sixteen bucks an hour—three for the agent, thirteen for Fern—to hand out food and drink samples in supermarkets, liquor stores, wherever they want a shiny-faced girl with a quick smile and a miniskirt.
Prior to this job, like, say, when she was working as an office temp in glassy high-rises downtown, Fern could not have imagined anything so staggeringly dull as six hours spent lurking in department store aisles, lips opening and closing like those of a dying guppy, the same words falling out over and over, Would you like to try a Lindt Swiss Milk Chocolate Truffle? Not that one really need ask when holding a wicker basket full of eyeball-sized gobs of chocolate. All day long, hands open under her nose and lips demand more—for their children, husbands and mothers, visible and not. During the lunch rush today, they lined up all the way out of Candy and into Gourmet Foods.
It’s not even three o’clock yet. Fern breathes and stretches to keep from trying out the Kick Boxercize she’s learned from infomercials and booting down six-foot displays of Mon Chéri and Ferrero Rocher. She prays for one of those lonely old mall-women to come and talk preserves with her, talk about her sons, her hip replacement. The air prickles her nose as though something might just haul off and happen any minute now. She breathes slow and deep, tries to think serene thoughts as she turns around into a breathless shopper’s face.
Fern laughs softly and steps back. The woman oopses and ohs and touches Fern’s arm, setting her purse at her feet, gasping, her heavy bosom heaving. “Oh Jeez.” Her hand flits off Fern’s arm, then lands again. “You got any idea what’s going on in the mall, hon? There’s a bloody jewellery heist upstairs!”
Fern smiles and waits for the “highway robbery” punchline. “No,” she says. “I haven’t heard a thing.”
“Yes! I’m tellin’ you, right upstairs. The cops are there and the two guys got those, uh, those black toques that go right over your face. They have a hostage! A girl your age, they’re using her like a human shield.”
She says human shield like it’s something rich and exquisite, the way she might say movie star or diamond tiara. Or perhaps that’s just the way Fern hears it.
“Upstairs? Now?”
The woman nods, quivering from her cheeks to her arms.
“They have a hostage?”
More nods. The woman lets go of Fern’s arm and takes a chocolate from Fern’s basket. “Oh Lord,” she says, still catching her breath, pulling the wrapper’s ends, letting it spin itself open, then popping the brown ball in her mouth and sighing as though it were a sedative. She pats Fern’s hand in thanks and walks away.
Fern scans the floor for the supervisor from the food distributor’s office who just might have picked today to come in to check that her smile is in order, and that she insist the customer eat the candy there on the spot thereby upping the chances that they might buy buy buy.
No supervisor in sight. She drops off her basket behind the candy counter, mumbling to the clerk—whom the store dresses in a white doctor’s coat, as though he really is doling out sedatives—that she’s going to the bathroom.
Police have blocked off the escalators and stairs to the second floor of the mall. Fern gazes up longingly past pissed-off teenagers who demand to know why they can’t go upstairs. The officers don’t seem to be parting with any information and Fern swallows the lump of desire in her throat. She imagines the hostage in the thief ’s arm, his free hand holding the gun out in front of them. Fern can feel his arm there across her own chest, can feel herself being pulled backwards along the glossy mall floor. He’d bring her to the getaway car and they would tear out of town, him, her and the driver, diamonds falling in her lap, biting into her thighs with their sweet toothy ridges. She looks at her watch. One more hour of candy-flogging.
The problem with voyeurs is they think it’s all about them and their greedy little eyes. They never stop to think about the exhibitionist. Ask any old exhibitionist you like, and they’ll tell you: exhibitionism is by the exhibitor for the exhibitor. Fern sits on her couch, watching the six o’clock news, and bites into another cracker with cheddar as she carves out this new theory of demonstration and spectacle as though it were a letter to the editor.
A performance artist named Martin Flash is the second lead story tonight, the pink underside of his cape snapping in the wind as he calls out over the small crowd in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery: “In exactly one week, I will perform living art, here, at the bottom of these very steps which were once the steps of the Vancouver Courthouse, the steps to so-called justice, the steps on which we are left to scramble in despair like so many rats.” With a flourish of his long bony hands, he presents a fat black rodent encased in a clear container the size and shape of a five-pin bowling ball. Flash goes on to say that seven days from now at exactly 4 p.m., he will drive a steamroller over this rat between two art canvases. Fern titters at the screen but feels queasy. The crowd is beginning to heckle as Flash picks up his ball of rat, bows to the cameras and strides off. She pictures herself in that steamroller beside him, the crowd screaming as the two of them make history and the six o’clock news together.
The segment cuts to some reaction sound bites. Owen Almond from the Life Is All Right movement announces that Martin Flash is a sick individual and that, as long as he is chairman of LIAR, not a single hair on that rat’s head will be harmed. Almond goes on to say that the mandate of LIAR is to expose abortionists and murderers and these sorts of so-called artists for the liars that they are. Looking straight into camera, he says, “Freedom to kill is a lie.”
Fern reaches beside her for another cracker to go with the last slice of cheese, her eyes on the screen as a girl with pink dreadlocks and a pierced eyebrow shrugs into the reporter’s microphone and says, “He’s just some loser trying to get attention.”
“It’s not the rat, it’s the message!” Fern shouts at the pink-haired girl. She thinks for a moment. “A decent exhibition is the only thing that brings the obscure from darkness into light.”
She is sitting on a rock, has given up—the sand is liquid and soupy and can’t be walked on. She’s tried and her feet sink. She slipped in up to her knees the last time, like she was in quicksand, the type that swallows you up to your neck and then holds you there, lets you hover until some passerby reaches out with a stick and drags you to safety. At least that’s how it used to work on Gilligan’s Island, but perhaps in real
life there would be no hovering.
Sand and rocks and ocean—she is stranded there and the only living things she sees are green pokes of grass sticking up through the wet sand. Until he appears. Just like that, he comes toward her, but he’s not wearing his cape. He’s a regular guy in jeans and a T-shirt and he’s walking just fine. His nose is a real beak—it’s large and hooked and she wants to touch the bump and slope of it with the tip of her tongue. He walks across the soup to her without a care; he walks on quicksand like Jesus on water. He asks her if she would like a hand and she says yes, yes please. He bends and picks her up, cradles her in his arms. Each step he takes, each time a foot dips into the silt, it becomes a bird foot, clawed with short webbing, and each time he pulls one out, toes again, human. She looks into his eyes. “Where did you learn to do that?”
“I saw it in a movie,” he tells her. And she is in love.
At the supermarket the next day, Fern is giving out mini-paper-cups of non-alcoholic cider and she’s cold and frustrated. Too much bloody air conditioning, she thinks, who needs to be this cold? Her mind strays nervously to Martin Flash and how he appeared to her as a bird-man in her dream. She’s never dreamed about a person having bird-like qualities before. Never. Only herself with the whole egg-laying business.
Fern has always assumed she is a bit nuts with these egg dreams. She remembers the very first one, when she was a teenager. She’d always had the feeling she was waiting to perform some big, important task, that even though she didn’t know what it was, she was late—she was missing it. The sense of it niggled at her, constantly there in the back of her mind while walking home from school, having a bath, doing sit-ups in the middle of P.E. class—she had to get going, now. Hurry the hell up was the general gist of the feeling. It drove her to distraction and confusion and then, wham, the first dream: birds. Dream birds were creating something monumental and they sent for Fern, because they desperately needed her help. She had to make a journey and on that journey she would learn her purpose; she would know what she was meant to do. She walked along, cutting through the backyards of strangers, giddy with anticipation.
Greedy Little Eyes Page 11
