Then—Grab. Shake. “What are you doing? Fern? What’s wrong?”
Oh for god’s sake, I’ve got to go, she’d wanted to say, but there she was in the kitchen all of a sudden, her mother touching her shoulder and demanding answers to foolish questions when anyone could see that Fern was almost there, it was just around the corner.
She tried to push past her mother, brush her off with “The thing—I gotta … Thing!”
Fern’s mother grabbed hold of her with both hands then, voice rising, “What’s wrong with you? Are you on something? Fern look at me! Are you on drugs?”
She never forgave her mother. How could she? But now this Martin Flash with his rat. Him turning into a bird the way he did, it had to be a sign. A premonition of some kind.
She filled the cups with raspberry and apple-lime cider, and thought of Flash standing before those screaming people, hating him, threatening him. She saw his webbed feet again, carrying her away. She thinks of that Jesus poster, the one with the single set of footprints. Something was gelling in her mind but she couldn’t quite make it out yet. Maybe if she could just talk to Martin Flash, find the missing link, it could all make sense.
“Are these on sale?”
Fern squinted up. “Huh?”
“Performance artist, Martin Flash, or The Flash as he’s known in some creative circles, announced three days ago that in one week’s time, that’s the tenth of July, he will act out what he calls the ultimate human experience when he drives a steamroller over a rat. Here to comment on this increasingly controversial stunt are animal rights activist Ryan Turner as well as …”
Fern is reading the newspaper while she listens to the six o’clock news, dropping cracker crumbs on a picture of Martin Flash.
The Province quotes him as saying, “Art is the ultimate question, it is the provocateur, and it is life itself. Protesting art is tantamount to embracing a totalitarian state. It is death. These are the same people who get exterminators in their homes to kill pigeons, mice, squirrels, roaches, whatever they can snuff out. These rats, at the pet shop—the majority are purchased to feed snakes.” His face in the paper is a black and white portrait of lonesome courage, Fern thinks.
When another news item comes on, Fern changes the channel. She catches the tail end of the Flash story on another channel. When it ends she continues to flip stations until she hears Middle Eastern music and a voice saying, “And just as in his dream Peter Bailey woke that night to a house in flames.”
A small bald man appears in an armchair and says, “If it weren’t for my dream I would not have gotten out alive.”
Fern checks the TV guide: Dreams, Visions and Intuition.
The bald man continues. “Khalil Gibran said, ‘Trust in dreams for in them is the hidden gate to eternity.’”
Fern gawks at the screen and rubs her stomach, trying to calm the flutter.
The two birds chirp in her ears, breathless, but she understands them. Exhausted, their breasts heave. They have been building all day, laying eggs, one each.
Fern knows they are far too tired, there is barely anything left of them. They beg her to help, lay the third egg. She cries for them. She understands now. Three. Three is the magic number.
She is at Costco giving out samples of Melba toast with a new kind of peanut butter and she’s thinking to herself how she’s becoming like that girl in the Margaret Atwood book, The Edible Woman, the one who found herself so repulsed by life she could eat nothing but bread and peanut butter. Except with her it’s crackers and cheese.
She can’t stand food or people or anything. She can’t even remember the last time she returned a friend’s call. Does this mean I don’t have friends any more? she wonders. The idea isn’t terribly troubling, and just as her eyebrows raise in curiosity at her own indifference, Molly MacRae walks right up to Fern’s peanut butter stand and pops a piece of Melba in her mouth.
“Long time no see, stranger,” she says to Fern, sputtering a few crumbs.
Fern wipes away the one crumb that’s landed on the back of her hand. “Yeah,” she says for lack of witty repartee.
Molly MacRae’s baby is parked in a stroller beside her and Molly absently jiggles her baby, who drools a small smile at anyone who will look. “Where the hell have you been, Ferny? Haven’t heard a peep out of you since Christ was a kid.”
Molly’s from Cape Breton and Christ and hell figure a lot in her conversation. Fern finds this particularly irksome right now for reasons she can’t quite place. Perhaps it’s the use of Jesus’ last name like that, as though he were prime minister. Or a serial killer. Fern tries to smile but thinks that for a bunch of Catholics, Cape Bretoners wouldn’t know something sacred if it bit them in the ass.
“So?” Molly stares wide-eyed at Fern. “What’s up?”
“I’m”—Fern looks away for two or three moments as though she might be going into a trance, then looks back at Molly—“going to have a baby.”
Molly gasps. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph, Fern! I didn’t even know you were seeing anybody. Wow! That’s great! Isn’t it?”
Fern smiles sheepishly, then beams. “Yeah, it’s pretty great. It’s what I’m meant to do. This baby is—This baby will complete the world.”
Molly lets go of the stroller and comes round to hug Fern. “Oh god, that’s terrific! That you’re happy and all, and, and who’s the proud pappy?” Then she whispers, “You didn’t run off and get married already, did you?” Fern shakes her head. “But you’re going to, right?”
“We haven’t decided yet.” Fern’s smile becomes smug.
Molly holds her at arm’s length. “Chrissake, Fern, you’re bringin’ a baby into the world. Get yourself married.”
“Why? Mary and Joseph weren’t married.”’
“What? Of course they were married! Jesus had brothers and sisters for god’s sake.”
“You’re just assuming that. And Jesus wasn’t married either.”
Molly lets her go, puts one hand on her hip, the other over her mouth and shakes her head as though wherever they just let this girl out of, there is no choice now but to take her right back.
After a moment she says, “Fern, Jesus never got married because He’s God. You know? He was a virgin. The man never so much as looked at a woman.”
Fern looks at her with pity. “Oh sure, he and Mary Magdalene were just platonic.”
The heat is on now and not just for Martin Flash—the whole town is suffocating in record temperatures. But it must be especially bad for him, Fern thinks, being on the lam and all with his rat. She thinks of the rat’s impending doom and feels a momentary sadness. But it is only through death that life can come.
Her eyes well at the thought as she rubs her hand in circles over her belly, round and full now with crackers and cheddar and jasmine tea. At least there’s only one more day to wait. Tomorrow Flash will show the masses a thing or two about a thing or two and Fern will be there. She’s already turned down two jobs for tomorrow and one of them would’ve paid double her usual salary. It involved dressing up like a bumblebee and giving out samples of tuna salad downtown. No matter: tomorrow she will be dressed in a manner befitting a mother-to-be and she will find him and take his hand and instantly he will know, live on camera, that she is the one. No one will ever forget Martin and Fern Flash.
At 3:30 p.m. the next day, Fern is making her way downtown. She is frustrated with herself because she’d meant to be there by now. She wanted to be standing right beside the steamroller where she could smile into Martin Flash’s eyes as he turned the ignition. He would know her instantly and bring her into his light.
But instead, she’s stuck on the Burrard Bridge and traffic is at a standstill. A sunny Friday summer afternoon in this city and the whole place goes mad; they don’t know what else to do but run to their hopeful little Miatas that have been sitting with their miserable tops up for a month of soggy Fridays, jump in and peel off to somewhere blue and glinting, anywhere just to be seen in the sun by
the water, looking breezy and blessed.
Fern smoothes her new dress and glances at herself in the rear-view mirror, noticing her eyes are a little baggy. She could hardly sleep last night, and as soon as the stores opened, she spent hours changing in and out of dresses. She wanted something gauzy and flowing and visited ten or twelve different shops in Kitsilano trying to find it. She would know it when she saw it, just the way she knew Martin when she saw him and the way he would know her. And she’d finally found it all right—this was the dress. She felt radiant just having it against her body. She looked down, patting her belly. “We’ll get there. We’ll get there because we’ll get there, that’s all.”
Robson Street is so packed with traffic, Fern is on the verge of abandoning her car smack in the middle of the road and walking the last couple blocks. She searches for an all-news radio station. Toward the end of the dial, a female reporter quacks about an angry mob gathering in front of the art gallery. Martin Flash has yet to be seen.
Fern’s heart jumps through her new dress. She looks at her watch and screams out the window, “It’s five to four, you bastards. Move it!”
She manoeuvres and darts ahead, ignoring the honks and curses of surrounding drivers. If she has to, she will pull up onto the sidewalk and park, tow trucks be damned.
Coming up on Georgia Street, she can hear the crowd. She turns up the radio. The reporter’s voice bites through the airwaves. “ … and pockets of schoolchildren are chanting in unison, ‘Free Shnooky, Free Shnooky.’ As you may know, the black rat that Martin Flash will crush has been dubbed Shnooky by children across the city. They’ve climbed onto the steamroller parked here in front of the gallery, and the children vow they will put a stop to the rodent’s murder—Here he is! Martin Flash is coming down the steps of the gallery in a black and pink cape. Flash is smiling but he does not appear to have Shnooky the Rat on his person and—Oh no—Martin Flash has been hit! Someone from the crowd has struck Flash and he is on the ground—Police are moving in …”
Fern churns round the corner now, laying on the horn, screaming at the top of her lungs. About thirty metres ahead, men and women heave together as one contorted mass, spewing rocks and obscenities. The caped figure of Flash wrenches himself free, and tears across the grass, the sidewalk and through parked cars. Hypnotized by the sight of his cape snapping toward her, Fern’s foot continues to shove the gas until something large flies out from the crowd. Martin Flash is slapped across her windshield like a scrap of paper before he flutters down and off the hood of her skidding car.
Fern is paralyzed, her foot jammed into the brake as police demand public order over bullhorns in the distance. Protestors stand in the street, mouths open, staring at Fern.
She stares back. The sun has shrunken her pupils to nothing, giving her pale eyes the look of the blind. Pushing the gear shift into park, she steps out of her car and around to the front.
Furious strangers glare from all sides as she hunches beside Martin Flash. A rat hangs dead from a pink lined pocket inside his cape.
Fern puts her cheek to his, says, “Forgive them, Lord, they know not what they do,” and carefully lays her body down beside his.
“Shh.” Flash slits one eye open just enough for her to catch it and whispers, “Lie still,” as cameramen cut through, circle around and crouch for a clear shot.
You Sound Tiny
A PETULANT MOAN FILLED THE ROOM, the bawl of something small that would one day grow into its large paws. I could feel the vibration of whimpers through his hands as he clutched my hair, edged a blade harder against my neck—or maybe it was just the nails of the hand holding the knife that bit me.
“You can’t let her go,” Ed insisted. Then into my ear, “Tell them who you work for. Where is my mouse money!”
He was demanding cash again as if I were a bank teller, as if I had control over more than renewing overdue books.
A police officer inched forward, hands expansive, arms wide. He said, “Before I became a cop, you know what I was going to be? A marriage counsellor! Let’s just sit down and talk, the three of us. This doesn’t solve anything, does it.”
Two more police officers stood outside the library doors. A walkie-talkie squawked from the hall and a hand rushed to silence it.
Ed stomped his foot.
Butterflies taste with their feet, I recalled. I have a tendency to recite trivia when I am nervous.
“She’s not my wife,” Ed said. To my ears the words had a liquid quality, as if they’d been left in the rain.
There was no one else but us in the library now: the cop, Ed and me. Everyone else had slipped out the emergency exit. He had let everyone else go.
Then suddenly Ed let me go, spread his arms wide and waved the knife in the air. It must have looked as though he was dancing, like in a Gene Kelly movie. It reminded me of how romantic he could be. With Ed to the side now, I could see into the policeman’s sugary-brown eyes, the nearest one, who might have been a marriage counsellor. It seemed we were exchanging some kind of ocular smoke signals. My eyes dipped to see his holster undone, and just as I began to understand he might shoot Ed in the gut, Ed barked another obscenity and slammed his knife on the returns counter.
“What’s the point?” He shoved me away. “You’re in on it, they’re in on it.”
Suddenly the room was a thunderous flight of heavy shoes, uniforms and hands. Ed reached out to his knife again just as he was tackled backwards in a braying heap. The blinds in my apartment are closed. The ringer on my telephone is off. I am wearing earplugs because without them it sounds as though war has broken out across the road. It’s only condos going up but I cannot bear the rapid fire of their nail guns, the sound of saws chewing through what comes near.
I’m reading Dr. Seuss again—the first children’s book I ever read, thanks to Ed. It was his gift to me and probably the reason I fell for him. Growing up, my parents, my father in particular, assured me that children’s books encouraged a form of idiocy and discouraged rational, lucid thought. Ed, on the other hand, was a proponent of idiocy. Through the two menstrual cycles I knew him, during the worst period day, he would bring home helium-filled balloons, tie one to each of my big toes, then lie beside me, rubbing my cramping belly, and reading me the words of Seuss’s Star-Belly Sneetches, the snootiest beasts on the beaches.
He was nicer during the first period than the second. Marriage changes everything.
The greatest economic loss from mice is not due to how much they eat, but what must be thrown out because of damage or contamination. I met Ed as a result of a curvaceous brown mouse who strolled brazenly from a hole in the baseboard of my kitchen cupboard. She would walk to centre-floor, stare at me with a bored cynicism, pick up a crumb, then swing her big behind round and saunter back from whence she came. Her attitude was what got me, the impudence. I let it go on for a week before I opened the phone book to Pest Control. I called Allsfair Pests. The man who answered said they couldn’t get an exterminator out until the following Monday; it was infestation season.
“You’re going to kill her?”
“What’dja think we were gonna do, put her in a home for wayward girls?”
I hung up, stared into the phone book and dialled Whoville Critter Control. Ed answered.
Of course I didn’t know he was Ed then and I asked what steps he would take in a case like this—if he would be exterminating.
There was silence at the other end until finally he said, “What kind of crummy question is that?”
He showed up with a catch-and-release contraption. A dollop of peanut butter was placed well inside the trap, which was set in the middle of the kitchen floor. Then Ed joined me in the living room to wait and watch from a distance. I offered him tea. Or perhaps some juice. There might be wine in the fridge. He declined, said he needed his full faculties when on the job. Besides, it would mean re-entering the suspect zone.
I smoothed my dress, folded my hands in my lap, and there we sat, in silence. Wait
ing. I could smell his Juicy Fruit chewing gum. His lean back curved forward, slim shoulders coming around as if to cup his heart. And his lips, so red against pale skin, made him look Pre-Raphaelite.
Within twenty minutes, the mouse sashayed out of her hole to survey Ed’s trap.
Watching her inspection, I whispered, “Do you think she’s calculating the risk factor?”
Ed tilted his head toward mine, moved his mouth to my ear. His breath was warm and fruity as he let the sweetest shhh breeze from his lips. I would have been much more popular at the library if I knew how to shush people that way. My head nosed up against his mouth, my ear stealing a kiss just as the trap door slammed me back into my skin.
A week later, my father called while Ed was in the shower. Pretty winged things had fluttered inside me when I thought of my very own Ed down the hall, but my father’s tone was something of a fly swatter.
“What’s this bill here: Whoville Critter Control? One hundred and seven dollars. Says, ‘mouse,’ on the bill.”
“I had a mouse and I called someone to take care of it.”
“Nobody has mouse. They have mice. Why didn’t you let me take care of it? Did you know that this Whoville Critter Control is just a one-man show? He works out of his home. Edward Margolese. Did you let Edward Margolese into the apartment while you were alone?”
My father collects apartments. He owns several in my building. Including mine. He calls it the apartment, never your apartment.
Greedy Little Eyes Page 12
