The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  She took the garbage bag and stepped out into the hall to carry it down to the chute. The hall was so silent at this time of day. She passed the doors of people she barely knew, but with whom she shared walls and floors and ceilings. They practically breathed the same air. She used to know her neighbours. When she first moved into the building it had been like one big party until, slowly but surely, the people she knew moved out, got married, moved on. And she was left behind. It had been a better-kept building back then too, she thought, as she noticed the scuffed baseboards, the stains on the carpet, the grimy windows overlooking the front of the building, where the overhang roof was strewn with debris: plastic bags, bottles and—what was that?—a broken doll.

  She reached the garbage room and opened the door to find the chute jammed, again, and a pile of plastic bags on the floor. She accidently nudged one with her foot as she leaned forward to place her own at the back of the pile, and as she did a swarm of cockroaches skittered out and she shrieked, dropped her bag and jumped back. She caught her heel in the threshold ridge, and staggered backwards, arms flailing windmill style, and she thought for a moment she’d be able to right herself and could even imagine laughing later at how silly it all was, just some innocent insects and everything was all right, but then it wasn’t and in a great whoomp of air and impact she hit her head on the wall and landed on her behind.

  Her eyes closed, she gripped the back of her head. She smelled the sickly, somewhat sweet stench from the garbage chute. Cockroaches running toward her! She opened her eyes. No cockroaches. She took her hand away from her head and looked at her palm, knowing there wouldn’t be any blood, she was quite sure of that, but that was what one did, wasn’t it? There was no blood. She looked behind her at a head-shaped dent in the wall. She must have hit with some force. Her right knee hurt and she considered it might be badly wrenched or even dislocated, and maybe she’d have to sit here until someone came home and there would be ambulances and a great deal of fuss and she’d need X-rays and maybe she had a concussion, which would mean staying in the hospital.

  She looked down the hall, undecided if she wanted anyone to come to her aid or not. On the one hand, it was a shock, toppling like that, and she could use a strong arm and someone to tell her she was going to be fine. On the other hand, it was humiliating to be a middle-aged woman flat on her bum by the garbage chute, possibly smelling a little of vodka.

  She wiggled her toes and that was all right, so she tried to bend her knee. She was able to do so with only a minimum of discomfort, and she chuckled at what a close call that had been. She’d have to talk to the super about fixing the stripping, not to mention the goddamn roaches. She’d already had to have her apartment fumigated twice in the past two years. She shuddered. She had some roach spray. She’d spray it round the floorboards right away. She rolled onto her side and then up on her left knee, bracing a hand against the wall as she pushed up with her right leg. Pain shot along the inside of the joint in both directions. “Oh, Jesus,” she said, but managed to get to her feet. She rolled up her pant leg. Was the knee swelling? It looked okay, maybe a little swollen. She rubbed it.

  The elevator bell rang and the door opened, letting off Charlie, the young man who lived at the end of the hall—some sort of blue-collar worker, a plumber or welder or something.

  Oh, fine, now someone shows up.

  She quickly unrolled her pant leg. Her legs weren’t shaved, for one thing, and the knee-high stocking and the white skin above that—puffy around the knee, mottled with spider veins—was hardly an attractive look. Charlie wore painters’ overalls (was that what he did?) and a down vest. He carried a shoulder bag that clanked as he walked.

  “Afternoon,” he said.

  “There are cockroaches in the garbage room,” she said, standing in front of the dent in the wall.

  “In my kitchen too,” he said as he walked past her. “Better get yourself a can of Raid.”

  Charlie slouched down the hall, his broad back and bushy hair reminding her of a pudgy bear. She didn’t want to start back to her apartment until he was in his own place, for fear he’d turn and see her hobbling away. But she couldn’t just stand there. She couldn’t lurk. What would he think of her? Then again, why hadn’t he asked her how she was? She put her weight down on her right leg. Not too bad. It ached, but no sharp pain. She probably hadn’t torn anything. One step. All right. And then another. It was just the shock, that’s all. Horrible creatures, cockroaches. Anyone would have been frightened.

  She looked over her shoulder to see Charlie disappear into his apartment without even looking at her. Well, perhaps he wouldn’t have been scared. He probably didn’t even care they were in his kitchen.

  Safely back inside her own little sanctuary, her own temenos, she poured a bit more of the Russian fairy into her glass. Medicinal. She’d had a shock. It would dull the pain and relax her. She took her glass to the bathroom and knocked back a couple of Advil in the hopes it would stop her knee from swelling too much. In the mirror over the sink her face looked pale. She plucked a lipstick from the basket on the back of the toilet tank. Rapture Red. There, that was much better. She rather liked this look—the red lips, the pale skin. It was romantic, and yet bold. It was still the face of an interesting woman. Perhaps not pretty any longer, but certainly interesting. She could live with that.

  Her knee was little more than an irritation, an inconvenience, and wasn’t most everything, to one degree or another, just an inconvenience? G.K. Chesterton had said that, hadn’t he? Or something like it? An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered. That was it. She would rightly consider. This little knee thing didn’t matter. She hadn’t fallen down stairs and broken her neck. She wasn’t sprawled out in front of a speeding subway train. Those were things that happened to drunks. She had merely snagged her heel. It could have happened to anyone. Look at that face in the mirror. She smiled, just slightly, so the dimple in her left cheek showed. She arched her left eyebrow. She was just in the spot where drinking made her look better, where it put a sparkle in her eye. You still got it, kid.

  She drank and giggled. She was filled with good cheer and hopefulness. Perhaps, although she’d had a fall and a terrible shock at the morning’s miscarriage of justice, she might choose to look at these things as signs that life was full of close calls and bad choices and she was liberated from a job that wasn’t working anyway, and she bet she had an unfair termination case just waiting for her, an adventure rightly considered.

  She raised her glass to the interesting woman smiling back at her with such confidence and such interesting lips. A woman like that could tackle anything, do anything she chose, be anyone she chose.

  She would call the temp agency right away and get started on this new life that lay waiting for her in a glimmering slipstream of possibility. As she walked down the hall from the bathroom to the living room she was aware, although the ache in her knee was hardly noticeable, that she was just the tiniest bit unsteady. That cinched it. No more to drink today. Absolutely not. She drained the glass of the last of the vodka and picked up the phone, but what was the number? Right. Silly woman.

  Carrying the phone, Colleen retraced her steps to the bedroom. Her favourite room, the room where all dreams happened. The bed, which needed making, but why bother when she’d be back in it soon enough? The bureau with her pretty music boxes on top and the leather-bound collection of books—Dickens and The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám—and, most importantly, her desk, there, under the window. It was a plain old oak desk, marred by nicks and dings and gouges that added to its character. When she found it in the second-hand store on Mount Pleasant, she had imagined it was once the desk of a newspaper man or a professor, and perhaps it still held some residue of their intelligence, their dedication to the art of putting words on paper.

  She sat in the office chair she’d bought for next to nothing when the Registrar’s Office was renovating (that stung, thinking about the university), and flipped open her
laptop. Open the Outlook program, find the number for C&C Staffing. She checked her e-mails. Had she wanted a larger penis or to invest her money in Nigeria, she would be all set. Concentrate. Get the number.

  “Hello, C&C Staffing. How may I direct your call?” a man’s voice asked.

  “This is Colleen Kerrigan calling. I’d like to make an appointment to come in and register as a temp.”

  “Have you worked with our agency before, Ms. Kerrigan?”

  “I have, several times. I’ve always been very pleased with the agency.”

  “Let me pull your file up. Can you spell your last name for me?” Colleen did.

  “Oh, right. I have the file here. And you’re looking for work again?”

  “I am. Just as of this morning. I lost my job and I have to get back to work quickly. I’m the only support for my ailing mother, you see. You’ve always been good in the past about getting me temp work.”

  “Glad to hear it. When would you like to come in?”

  “Can I come in today?”

  “Today?”

  “Why not. Take the bull by the horns, you know?”

  “Okay, why don’t you come in, say … about an hour—one-fifteen, could you be here then? We need you to take your tests over again and so forth.”

  “I could do that. Certainly. But I don’t understand why you need me to take the tests over. You have all that, don’t you, from before? Typing speeds and so forth?”

  “Well, it’s not so much about typing speeds anymore, Ms. Kerrigan. It’s about what sort of computer programs you’re fluent in, and then there’s the usual aptitude and intelligence tests, just the standard tests you did last time you were here. When was that—two years ago, yes?”

  Yes, it had been just two years ago. There had been that little misunderstanding in the Theology Department, but it hadn’t been her fault at all.

  THE SOUL HUNGER

  It had begun so innocently, as these things always did. Father Paul McIntyre was on a visiting professorship from the St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and Colleen had been assigned as his support staff. She had resented the extra work at first, especially since he was wrestling with a new manuscript she was expected to type up, but he was such a kind person—leaving little thank-you notes and the occasional box of chocolate truffles on her desk—that she soon found herself quite liking him.

  His book about early Irish Christianity from the time of Saint Patrick to the ninth century intrigued her and she found herself absorbed by its combination of science and spirituality, by the argument that science and faith were reconcilable, that the sacred could be found in nature, contrary to the Roman belief that the world and all in it was to be rejected.

  One late afternoon, when he came back to the office from his last lecture, bringing with him the scent of autumn leaves and pipe smoke, she commented on how much she admired his work.

  “I don’t usually pay much attention to what I type up, but this is different, Father.”

  “Is it, now?”

  Black Irish they called colouring like his, with the ruddy skin and mop of unruly black and grey hair. When he smiled, as he did now, charming little lines appeared at the corners of his wild blue eyes.

  “Well, what you say about the reconciliation of transcendence and immanence, that they needn’t be at odds. If I understand correctly, you’re saying one can approach the question of transcendence through an appraisal of immanence … that it’s through the hints God writes on the book of the cosmos about Him, or Herself, that we can know, or at least get glimmers of, that which exists independently of the cosmos.” She felt a flush rise up her neck. She was probably blithering. “It got me thinking. I don’t know, it was quite inspiring.”

  Father Paul sat on the ledge of the deep casement window across from her desk. “With a name like Colleen Kerrigan, you must be Catholic, am I right?”

  She grimaced. “Lapsed, I’m afraid.”

  “Well, a faith without doubt is not worth a great deal in my estimation, Colleen, and with a name like that you’re bound to have faith in your blood. To be named is to be claimed, and I feel sure God has claimed you as his own.”

  “I don’t know about that. I don’t feel much claimed.” She said this before she knew she was going to, but as soon as the words were out she recognized them as true. “Just the opposite, in fact.”

  Father Paul looked serious. “Oh dear. The soul hunger, then?”

  She laughed. “You have a poetic way of putting things.”

  He laughed himself then, a deep, rolling chuckle. “You’re not the first to accuse me of having an overly poetic soul. Comes from spending too much time either with my nose in a book or rambling about a windy crag somewhere. Tell me, did you go to Catholic college?”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t go to any kind of college. I’ve been on my own since I was a teenager, working. I mean, I’ve taken courses here throughout the years—literature, philosophy, comparative religion—but I never got a degree.” It annoyed her to feel the blush creep into her cheeks.

  “Really? I would have bet money on you being Jesuit trained, the way you talk about books.”

  “No. Just my own reading, mostly.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. Wasn’t George Bernard Shaw self-taught? And William Blake and George Orwell and Herman Melville and Benjamin Franklin, for that matter. But never mind. Doesn’t for a second reflect on your ability to think. There’s a world full of idiots”—he pronounced it eedjits—“graduated from universities without a decent thought in their heads. Now, back to the subject at hand. Tell me why you don’t feel connected to God.”

  It felt odd, and yet not odd, to talk about such things with a man she hardly knew. And yet, he was a priest and she could tell from his work he was someone who enjoyed conversations about what really mattered in life, meaty things, things of substance, and not just the random small talk so many people wasted their lives on. In fact, coming to work in this department had been a bit of a disappointment. She had imagined a group of deep thinkers. What she’d found was just another faculty full of petty politics and tenure-track bickering. Until now. Until Father Paul of the beautiful, wild blue eyes.

  “I don’t know,” she began. “It’s hard to describe. It’s as though there’s a”—she was about to say hole, but saying she had a hole that wanted filling sounded entirely unlike what she intended—“a kind of hollow”—much better—“a blank space somewhere inside.” She shrugged. “A kind of longing, I guess.”

  He bit his lower lip and nodded, as though she had said something profound. “It is not as uncommon as you might feel it to be. ‘The Dark Night of the Soul.’ Have you read St. John of the Cross?”

  “A long time ago.”

  He closed his eyes and recited, “Oh, night that guided me, Oh, night more lovely than the dawn, Oh, night that joined Beloved with lover, Lover transformed in the Beloved …” He opened his eyes again and smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of in the dark, Colleen.”

  She felt herself flush again, for a different reason. “It doesn’t always feel that way.”

  “No, it doesn’t, does it. Perhaps we should have a little chat about that then, when you’ve the time.”

  And so it began. They went out for a coffee, which turned into drinks once or twice a week, and long talks about God and the nature of the soul. His responses to her feelings of detachment, of “otherness” were always the same. “You must ask yourself, what is the invitation in my longing? What am I being invited to experience?” he would say.

  One day, on his invitation, she popped into his office after she finished work. He said it was a good idea; they could talk without the interruptions and clatter of public places. He had a lovely old office with a fireplace in it, although it didn’t work, and a mismatched pair of leather chairs. He invited her a second time, and a third, and it was on that third night Father Paul produced a bottle of Tullamore D.E.W. from his desk drawer. She loved the malted taste, the hint of charred oak
. It became their drink. He told her that her longing for God, which up until these discussions she hadn’t been aware she had, were reflections of God’s longing for her.

  They talked one night of Father Paul’s own search for meaning, and how he had come to find God. “I was a bit of a rascal as a young man,” he said with a chuckle. “I was even asked to leave the seminary for a time.”

  She wanted to ask why, but felt it was too personal a question. If he wanted her to know, he’d tell her.

  “It was suggested I might take a walk in the world, just to be sure I could manage the balance of the office, you know, to be sure there were things I could deny myself, in return for serving God’s glory.”

  She imagined women, red-haired, smelling of freshly baked bread, dressed in loose linen shifts, glowing by firelight. (There was an Irish shop on Bloor Street. They sold linen clothing, linen nightdresses.)

  Father Paul rolled the glass of whisky between his palms. “They asked me to pray on my calling, which I did, and I found Christ waiting for me on the mountaintops and in the fields and by the sea, singing in every stone and seashell. I realized there was nothing in the world to fear, all of it being visioned from the mind of God Himself.”

  She loved the way he talked.

  “Call me Paul,” he said. “I’m not your priest, am I. I’d be glad if you thought of me as a friend. A friend is a good thing to have and doubly so when a man is far from home.”