The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  “You handle a pencil reasonably well,” admitted the interviewer, a pale man with lank brown hair, a posh British accent, and nicotine-stained fingernails.

  “They’ve got verve. But they’re hasty. They’re rushed.” Cyril started to explain what had happened but the other interviewer, a fat man in a black turtleneck, black beard, and black crewcut, seemed in no mood for explanations. He pooched out his wet, red lips then sucked them back in. “Impatience is the mark of the amateur.” Ama-toor.

  “Not uninteresting though,” allowed the first. “Intriguing, actually.”

  “Makes me want to scrub my hands with bleach,” said the fat one. “And there’s no colour. Nowhere do I see colour.” He sorted through the drawings with his thick-fingered hands. “Drawing and colour are not distinct. As one paints, one draws. Can you tell me who said that?”

  Cyril could not.

  “Cezanne. When colour is richest, form is most complete.”

  “Many fine artists have worked in a limited palette,” said the first.

  The other was unimpressed. “Adolescent,” he said, pointing to Stalin in the bonnet. He turned his profile to Cyril, indicating that the interview was at an end.

  “That’s a tad harsh, Glen.”

  Glen gazed at the door as though longing to obey the EXIT sign above it. “Alistair, dishonesty serves no one.”

  Alistair clasped his hands on the desk and looked seriously at Cyril. “Why do you draw?”

  “It’s as if there’s always something waiting at the end of the drawing,” he said. “Something surprising.”

  Alistair nodded vigorously.

  “The question,” said Glen, turning his gaze from the exit sign back to Cyril, “is whether you’ve got any vision worth evolving. Otherwise you are merely a draughtsman.”

  “Draughtsmanship is important,” cautioned Alistair.

  “But without vision it is merely a trade,” said Glen.

  “My father was a draughtsman,” said Alistair. He nodded encouragingly to Cyril. “There’s a call for draughtsman in the building industry. Have you considered draughting?”

  That September he moved into the top floor of an old house with slanted ceilings and a view of rooftops and downtown, the closest thing to a Parisian garret the city had to offer. He continued stocking shelves at the IGA and with the rest of his time he drew, occasionally venturing into colour, doing oil pastels of the city at night while listening to the traffic, the sirens, the shouts, the occasional crump of a collision or crack of a gunshot.

  He imagined Connie living here with him. She could hang her swords on the wall, he’d help her rehearse her lines, and she’d pose for him. He phoned her house once but her grandmother just kept repeating, “Je ne connais pas. C’est vie pas bon, pas bon  . . . ”

  Then Paul showed up one evening. This would have been awkward at the best of times, but the fact that he was drunk made it worse. Paul was erratic when he drank and tended to say even more vicious things than when sober, but this time booze had put him in a maudlin mood; he looked old and tired and troubled; he’d never had many friends and it was terrifying for Cyril to realize that after a lifetime of enduring Paul’s sarcasm he was turning to him. It was a first, and Cyril wasn’t sure how to act.

  Sensing Cyril’s unease, Paul reverted to form. “This place is a hole.”

  Cyril was almost grateful. “Nice to see you, too.”

  Paul raised his middle finger and kissed it. “Any time. Got anything to drink?”

  “Tap water.”

  Paul sneered then drew a flask from his suit coat, swigged, and was halfway through twisting the cap back on before he paused and tilted it toward Cyril.

  “What is it?”

  “Chinese tea. What difference does it make?”

  Cyril drank. Whisky. He suppressed a grimace and passed it back.

  Paul gave it a shake to see how much was left then gulped the remainder. “She’s miserable.”

  At first Cyril thought he meant Della. Then he understood. “Ma?”

  He nodded heavily. “Misses him.”

  “Dad?”

  “Darrel,” said Paul, shaking his head in disgust.

  “What does she say?”

  “Doesn’t have to say anything. I can see it in her face.”

  Cyril guiltily changed the subject and asked after Della.

  Paul gestured as if to say who knew. “Swimming, volleyball, archery.”

  Cyril could see Della, tall, strong, focused, shooting a bow and arrow.

  “Next it’ll be lacrosse.”

  Paul wore glasses with thick black frames and a short-sleeved button down white shirt and narrow black tie. Mr. cga. Paul looked up suddenly. “I miss the old man.”

  “Me too.”

  “You knew he was a party member?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  Paul’s tone angered Cyril. “How could I? No one ever told me anything. You guys all made sure of that.”

  Paul shrugged and looked out the window. “Okay, okay. I’m not here so you can gripe. That’s why they left Lvov and moved east, to Kiev. To be closer to the centre. Closer to him, the great man. Everyone wanted to be near him.” Paul yanked at his tie loosening it. “He was a god. The new god. And the old man was a believer. He believed it all. The people, fed and happy and singing.” He grew quiet, adding, “Dad loved to sing.”

  Cyril didn’t remember his father ever singing and had a hard time even imagining it. “What about ma?”

  Paul blew air and shrugged. “She believed because he believed. Because it was exciting. Because it was big. Because it was history. They figured believe hard enough they could make it real. That if you didn’t believe there was something wrong with you. And if you didn’t you ended up in a camp or against a wall. So they believed. Except Koba wasn’t much of a god. Not even much of an uncle. He stole the harvests. Let the Ukrainians starve, better to feed the people in Moscow, the people who count. The winter of frozen corpses. Ma told me about it. Every morning the streets and the river bank thick with bodies frozen as hard as marble. The rats couldn’t even chew them. The ears. They could chew the ears. Went on all through the ’30s and then the war. The thing is if they’d have stayed in Lvov we’d have been able to eat. And maybe my bones wouldn’t be like balsa wood.” He shut his eyes and slumped back, exhausted. “You, you’re lucky. Did you know there’s a town in Ukraine called Luck?”

  Cyril walked past Darrel’s place, a two-storey, stucco-sided apartment building with junipers and bark mulch. It was early evening. Cyril walked past twice. On the third pass he plunged on up the walk to the intercom and ran his finger down the list of names and discovered that where Stavrik had been there was now a strip of masking tape with ‘Occupant’ written in red ink. He stepped back to see the front of the building, thinking he might spot some clue. Nothing. He returned to the intercom, took a breath and pressed the buzzer. It ticked and buzzed, ticked and buzzed. He was relieved until he knew he’d have to return and try again later, so he buzzed again and counted ten ticks. As he was turning to leave, a female voice broke through the static.

  Had Darrel already hooked up with another woman? He felt betrayed on his mother’s behalf. How long had it been, six months? He leaned towards the grille and asked if Darrel was there.

  “Who?” The woman sounded young, his age.

  The bastard was playing around with one of his students! “Darrel Stavrik,” he repeated.

  “Oh, him. I don’t know. I heard he moved back to Edmonton. To his wife.”

  Gilbert often dropped by after driving cab. They’d drink Luckys and stare out the window speculating on their futures, Gilbert in no doubt that his future was bright and full of money, that he was destined to make a million before he was thirty.

  “Driving hack?”

  Smiling at such simplicity, Gilbert said, “It’s research, my friend. Making contact with people who count.”

  “Like who?”

  G
ilbert became enigmatic—one of his favourite roles—and said he was meeting big wheels, high-fliers, movers and shakers, entrepreneurs, managers and CEOs, people who were going places, and he was taking notes. “Don’t worry about me, my friend, worry about yourself.”

  Entering the desolation of the IGA one afternoon Cyril heard the muzak—Acker Bilk doing Stranger on the Shore. He cringed under the bleached light of the fluorescent tubes, felt the skin-constricting chill of the refrigerated air, sensed the tins of Chef Boyardee watching him, endured the mockery of the Jolly Green Giant, saw Norm spritzing the iceberg lettuce. Cyril stood as if in a coma. He couldn’t muster a thought, he could feel though, and what he felt was despair. Was this his Fraser Mills, his green chain? Water splattered his face.

  “Start stacking.” Norm’s crewcut resembled the bristles of a scrub brush and his eyes were pebbles, hard and small and dark.

  Cyril started to speak but didn’t know what to say so turned and walked out.

  He began looking for jobs. He considered Hotel/Motel Management, Small Arms Repair, Power Engineering, careers he’d seen advertised on the inside cover of a matchbook. He investigated the possibility of becoming a dental mechanic, thinking that making false teeth involved an element of sculpting. He pondered and rejected taxidermy, just as he rejected Mortuary Arts, both of which had a certain aesthetic component. He got hired on as an apprentice upholsterer but quit after six days because the formaldehyde in the fabric gave him headaches. He began training to be a bus driver but quit realizing the scores of rude, violent, weirdos he’d have to deal with. He got on at a pallet mill, a shingle mill, a paper mill, a foundry, the brewery, a distillery, an office that did phone sales, a hospital. An earnest pursuit of employment evolved into a game, the highlight of which was finding and quitting two jobs in one day; in the morning getting hired on at an automotive parts warehouse and in the afternoon a rope factory. He worked as a swamper, a garbage man, a night janitor, a mail sorter. He installed windows, laid carpet, assembled lawn chairs, filled out the paperwork for training as a fireman. He enjoyed this whirlwind of possible careers. Quitting jobs was exhilarating. Everyone was hiring. He even sold, for an afternoon, the Encyclopaedia Britannica door to door. One thing he never did, however, was wash dishes. It was only when Gilbert urged him to try getting into the Guinness Book of World Records for the most jobs ever that Cyril decided he was spiralling out of control and enough was enough.

  He got on with a construction crew and vowed to stay one year. He discovered that he handled tools well and liked the logic of the work: you measured, you cut, and if it didn’t fit you fixed it, and did a better job the next time. It was solid and tangible and not without beauty. His growing competency made him feel better about himself. He liked the clean smell of fir in the cool of the morning, and the spice of sap beading on the two-by-fours in the heat of the afternoon; he even liked the scent of asphalt shingles and the smell of wet cement. Before long a load of lumber was a house, each house was distinct, and every few months you moved on.

  Even on the job he found time to sketch. Whenever he had a moment—and often when he didn’t have a moment because he should have been working—he’d sharpen one of his wide flat carpenter’s pencils and draw vines climbing the two-by-four uprights of a doorframe, embellishing them with leaves in which lurked naked elf maids with come hither eyes. The rest of the crew would discover them and follow the scenes unscrolling lewdly along window frames and across joists as though watching an animated film that rewarded their diligence with tits here, ass there, occasionally even a bit of bestiality. Drawing on wood presented its own unique challenges, and he was always pleased when he could incorporate the knots and woodgrain into his images: the grain as flowing hair, a knot as an orifice. He became a great favourite with his fellow workers, though they’d howl with disappointment and beat the floor with their hammers if Cyril failed to provide them with a penultimate scene from the kama sutra or some satisfying vision of girl-on-girl.

  The foreman indulged this behaviour until one afternoon the owner arrived unexpectedly and toured his home-to-be and, baulking at the pornographic graffiti desecrating what would one day be his child’s bedroom, demanded it be sanded off.

  “You should quit,” said Gilbert.

  “And do what?”

  “Come to San Francisco with me and get some of that free love. You could do graffiti. Or T-shirts. Or body painting. All those hippie chicks want their tits painted.”

  While there was a definite allure to painting boobs, Cyril didn’t want to go to San Francisco, he wanted to go to Los Angeles, because he’d received a letter from Connie.

  Dear C,

  First of all, apologies for not writing.

  I’m a total s—t. No excuses but lots of

  explanations. Like working two jobs

  and going to auditions and rehearsals.

  Hardly time to breathe. The competition’s

  fierce. And to be honest there isn’t much

  call for my type here if you get my drift.

  Though did have a role in an episode

  of I Spy. Got to use a gun. Cosby and

  Culp are so cool. It was a taste. Amazing

  how long you can live on a taste.

  I meant to write sooner. But the thing is

  you’d write back, (I hope), then I’d miss

  you so much I might come running home,

  and I might end up resentful. Not fair to

  you or me. It was cold turkey or nothing.

  I hope you understand that. (It’s a compliment.)

  So what’re you doing with yourself? Married?

  Kids? Teaching art? Doing art? Stealing art?

  Let me know. And if you’re ever passing

  through L.A. drop in on us. If you don’t

  and I find out you’re dead.

  Hope this wasn’t too out of the blue.

  Love,

  C

  He’d reread the letter so many times he could recite it like a poem. But for all the sweet sentiment it all came down to one troubling word. Us. Drop in on us. No mention of her being married, no mention of a boyfriend, but there was that word, us. He’d have gone to Los Angeles in a minute if not for that one small word, those two tiny letters. He tried reinterpreting the letter, wondering if there was any way us might mean just her? Did it refer to Hollywood in general, to the city as a whole, was she perhaps identifying so completely with the place that she had become plural, or was it the sort of thing that happened to actors who had, he assumed, multiple characters to choose from for their various roles? Or had she inserted that one little word as a caution? It occurred to him to simply write and ask, except he couldn’t bear the truth even after four years. Us meant us. She was a couple.

  Which meant Los Angeles was out. Gilbert drove a lot of Americans in his cab and heard non-stop stories about sex and drugs. It was 1966 and the ever curious Gilbert acquired some lsd, and one Sunday at the beach he made a performance of cutting a confetti-sized square of paper in two then piercing one half on the tip of his Swiss Army knife.

  “Behold.” Gilbert’s hair hung to his collarbones and he sported motorcycle shades and a Joe Namath Fu Manchu moustache that was impressively thick and black. He licked the flake of paper from the blade tip then pierced the other half and offered it to Cyril. “Don’t want to hit the Haight as LSD virgins. We gotta be experienced.”

  Cyril glanced around. They were at Spanish Banks, the beach crowded with families, couples, sunbathing girls, screaming kids, seniors in sling chairs. He wondered if Connie had tried LSD. He knew Paul certainly hadn’t. Paul thought hippies should be sent to coal mines or Vietnam. Yet colours and shapes were said to take on new life. Baudelaire took opium and he had no doubt that Salvadore Dali had as well. Maybe he’d finally understand what was up with the flies and honey. He pinched the half hit of acid from the knife-tip and swallowed it down.

  “Bravo, my friend.”

  “Now what?”
r />   “We wait.”

  “How long?”

  “Until we’re there.”

  “Where’s there?”

  “Right here.”

  Lying on the sand, Cyril’s heart sped. It was noon, the sun gold in an azure sky. By half past twelve he felt nothing, by one he felt nothing, by half past one he realised that Gilbert had played a joke on him, and while he was relieved he was also disappointed. By two he was sitting up cross-legged pouring the miracle of sand from one hand to the other. How was it that sand could be melted down into glass, and how was it that something as solid as glass could be transparent? He stretched himself out on the hot sand and began to writhe, discovering the delicious feel of the sand against his skin. Oblivious of anyone watching, he writhed slowly to get the full satisfaction. Then he sat up. Gilbert was petting a log as though it was a cat.

  “This log is a genius,” said Gilbert.

  Cyril understood. They knelt side-by-side.

  “Ask it anything. Go on. It’s an oracle.”

  Cyril had no questions. Life was all too perfectly clear for questions. Electricity, radio waves, space, even glass, all made sense. He petted the log.

  “It’s purring,” said Gilbert.

  Cyril put his ear to the sun-bleached driftwood and discovered that it was, like a great big cat, a panther, a puma, a leopard.

  They remained with their ears to the wood and then convulsed in laughter.

  “Swim,” said Gilbert, sending the word like a smoke ring into the air.

  Before he reached the water Cyril dropped to the damp corrugated low tide sand and began drawing, trembling at the electric sensation on his fingertips, listening to the delicate scraping sound, intrigued by the texture of the lines and savouring the scent of brine. He thought of sea caves and galleons, the particulate existence of grit.