“What do you do?” John asks. It takes me a while to realize that he is speaking. “What do you do?”
“Now?”
“These days.”
“What do you mean?”
“These days, what do you do?”
“Killing ants,” I tell him.
“Killing ants?”
“They’re eating-down my house.”
“So, you walk around in your house, killing ants with a spray-gun? What kind o’ ants? Red ants? Brown ants? Ants that sting, stinging ants?”
“Wood-ants.”
“Goddamn! Run that by me one more time. You. Walk around your house. Killing wood-ants. Goddamn! Is this what this country is doing to you, brother? At your age? After all these years? You don’t know where you’re going when you walk out on the street, you say. You walk around your house, benning-down, looking for goddamn ants to kill, you say. And you say they’re eating-down the house? And you talk about this Chinese woman who I don’t know if she is dead, or alive. Don’t you have to find the direction the ants’re going in first, before you can kill them?”
“Picture me, since you’re so interested … There I am, sitting down in a chair, with a large can marked ‘Black Flag,’ and …”
“Black Flag? Goddamn!”
“… and with a Scotch and soda in my other hand, and I find myself just watching and waiting. I find myself sitting in that chair, looking at the patterns in the carpet, at the patterns, like knots in the floorboards, waiting, and sudden-so! I see a son of a bitch! a’ ant! And I uncover the top of my Black Flag easy, easy now, eeeasy … and I look again to see if the knot in the floorboard is an ant. Or if it is part of the pattern, or if the pattern in the carpet has changed from my eyes focusing on it. And I look hard … eeeassy, easssy, ’cause the son of a bitch has ears and eyes, and the son of a bitch plays tricks, plays dead, and tries to fool me. And when the son of a bitch moves, squish! Got it! The son-of-a-bitch starts wriggling and walking in circles!”
“God-damn!”
“And I have to hold my Scotch and soda far from the sprays, in case this damn Black Flag has-in something that is detrimental to my drink.”
“Black Flag!”
“Black Flag, with a flag attached to a mast, like any flag you see flying on buildings. The Stars and Stripes for instance, or the Canadian flag, the red maple leaf. But Black Flag is a black flag, not of a country, but with ‘black flag’ written in big, white capital letters on the can.”
“Black Flag. Goddamn!”
“For ants. Ant, cockroach and earwig killer, with chlorpyrifos. Continuous killing action for sixty days.”
“You memorized all that?”
“Yeah.”
“Sixty days? Goddamn!”
“Continuously killing those sons-o’-bitches!”
“But what is a’ earwig?”
“I never looked it up in the dictionary.”
“I could tell you about cockroaches. In Brooklyn … well, no need to say more. But I have never come-across earwigs. Cockroaches I know. In Brooklyn, goddamn, they be the most multitudinous motherfuckers on earth! You kill one, and you see five more. You bring-in the exterminators with their fancy equipment for killing roaches, and they kill hundreds. And the minute they take your cheque and pack-up their high-tech gadgets and drive-off, Jesus Christ! Then, you really see cockroaches! In their millions! Goddamn! As if the roaches love the exterminator fluid! But you and your can o’ Black Flag …”
“In the summer, I am sitting on the front steps, watching people pass. All kinds of people. Women pass. Men pass. I watch women pass, watching women walking and holding hands with women, men with men, and kissing … yes, kissing! Men making passes at women. Prostitutes at the corner …”
“I’ll be goddamned! Where is your house situated? Such lovely broads as I see during my short stay in Toronto, and some even at the hospital, such pretty broads kissing one another? Goddamn waste o’ flesh!”
“… and men passing and holding hands, and kissing, and sometimes …”
“Getouttahere! Goddamn! And you holding-on to your can o’ Black Flag!”
“… and if I take my eyes off the sons-o’-bitches …”
“The women? Or the wood-ants?”
“And if I take my eyes off the sons-o’-bitches for one second! Those goddamn wood-ants, as you would say. The ants, I mean. And when I stop looking at the two women kissing in front of my railing, a stream of ants, marching in line. Big ones. With little bags attached, their guts full of the dust of wood from eating-down and eating-up my blasted house!”
“Wood-ants do not eat wood!” John says.
“To me, they do!”
“And out comes your can!”
“Goddamn right!”
“And squirt-squirt!”
“Kill the motherfuckers!”
“With your big Black Flag can in your hand!”
“Continuous killing action for sixty days!”
“What do you do with them, after you kill them?”
“Nothing.”
“Leave them where you kill them? You don’t bury them? With a killing action for sixty continuous days, you could have a mountain of the motherfuckers in the house, encouraging other motherfuckers. A real big ant-hill. Shit, brother, you gotta do something, some-goddamn-thing with those ants that you kill!”
“I am a man, sitting, looking at the pattern in the carpets and the knots in the hardwood floor, looking, waiting for ants. And when I see one, squirt! Out goes the son of a bitch!”
“Any cockroaches?”
“No cockroaches.”
“What about rats? And mice?”
“Occasional. But I live in Rosedale.”
“The Black Flag can out-out those, too?”
“Never tried. But I’ll think about it, though. For I am a man who sits in a chair, with a Scotch and soda in one hand and my can in the other, waiting for those sons-o’-bitches to move. If they just move, I got them. Let a’ ant move, and I gottem!”
“Goddamn!”
“And I have started to make a study of ants. After a while, you get to know them, and you find yourself studying them. Liking them, almost. How they move. When they come out. When they are fooping. When they are having little baby ants, their children. They sure have a sense of the multiplication tables! How they send their messages of danger to one another. And do you know something? I believe they have sense and intelligence and that they send out vibrations and S-O-S’s. Because I can kill one, and quick-so, three or four would run-out from under a piece of wood, run to the ant that I squirted with Black Flag, and scamper, just like real people running from a fire. I have been studying ants.”
“Goddamn, I say! All I can say is goddamn!”
“Ants.”
“Reminds me. You still do a lot o’ reading? Like we used to do back home, in the olden days, when me and you used to have reading-races? We went to the Public Library every Saturday morning, early-enough before I had to go and play cricket, and how we used to bring back four books each; and sometimes, if the librarian was in a good mood, she would let us take-out six? Adventure books, mysteries, Agatha Christie, murder stories, English novels – Jane Austen and so forth – history books, all kinds o’ books. You still read as much? Well, if you still do …”
“Five books a week. There’s a library round the corner from my house. But not in the last five years.”
“Well, if you still used to, you woulda come-across a book with a French name … lemme see if I can remember the name in French. I think it was … lemme see … something like … autobus? Autobahn? … Auto-something! Auto-auto-auto … Auto da Fé? Yes, Auto da Fé! Ever read Auto da Fé?”
“Never heard of it.”
“You have to read it. Ever heard of Elias Canetti?”
“An Eye-talian?”
“Bulgarian. Born in Bulgaria with Spanish and Jewish parents. Lives in London. And I don’t mean London-Ontario!”
“The Mother
Country’s London.”
“Your obsession with killing ants remind me of Klein. Now the author, Elias Canetti, has this Klein fellow obsessed by books the same way you’re obsessed by ants. I only read the first hundred and seventy-three pages, out of four hundred and twenty-eight. But I came-across this novel, Auto da Fé, in 1979, in Italy. No, in Germany. Klein is a strange man. You remind me of Klein, one crazy son of a bitch. Klein liked books like you like ants. Not that a’ ant is similar to a book, but in my profession we call them the same thing, this obsession, a’ obsession of fatalistic proportions. Talking plain, and not as a professional, I would say that an obsession is nothing more than love gone so far that it turn-into hate and hatred. You can’t tell one from another. Not that you are crazy, or becoming crazy. But you should watch yourself. These blasted ants, and the amount o’ time you spend looking at them, with that Black Flag in your hand. You may very well have an obsession with ants, like Klein had an obsession with books.”
“I never thought ants were like books. To me, it is getting-rid of pests.”
“Symbolically. Well, metaphorically speaking, also. Anyhow. Take Klein. I just happen to remember, word-for-word, a serious passage dealing with obsession. This is the passage whiching I am trying to remember …”
“You always had a good memory. I remember that you were best at remembering the translations from Virgil Aeneid and Livy XXI and Caesar Gallic War. You always could memorize anything.”
“ ‘Quidquid id est, temeo Danaos donas fexentes.’ Remember that?”
“ ‘I fear the Greeks when they bring gifts’!”
“You’re not senile yet, neither! You remember Hannibal? And how Hannibal crossed the Alps with his columns of elephants? ‘Hannibal, in occulo altero Alpam transgresserat cum impedimenta’? And that is something that up to today the Eye-talians can’t face, nor accept. Historically speaking, and psychologically too, that Hannibal cross the fucking Alps!”
“Pun intended?”
“Pun in-fucking-tended!”
“But you were talking about Klein.”
“Oh, yes, Klein. No pun intended. I hope you don’t mind the comparison. Here it is. I am trying to remember it from memory, but it won’t come back. I’ll just tell you the story of Klein. Klein was a man who would walk up and down in front of his books in his library, calm as a cucumber, and sudden-so, he would start making these strange noises like a man going mad, and all of a sudden would stop walking, and stand at attention. Just so. Come to a full stop. Just as strange, he would get up on a ladder, and climb to the blasted top o’ the bookshelf o’ books. And guess what next Klein would do? Klein takes out one book, leaf-through a few pages, and puts the book inside his briefcase. He gets back down, and starts walking up and down the library again. Klein stops. Thinks. Studies himself. And then, blam! Pulls out another book. One. Two. Three. Four. Five books. One of these books was giving him trouble, so he takes this book, and blam! shuts it hard. The five books was heavy-heavy in the briefcase, and guess what Klein did next. Up again on the fucking ladder, with the briefcase o’ books. Back up to the top, to the last rung of the ladder. With the briefcase of five big books. Up at the top. He starts taking out the five books. One by one. One. Two. Three … and while taking out the fourth, to put it back into the shelf, his blasted foot got tangled-up in the ladder. The shift o’ weight and books. And what you think happened next to Klein?”
“He put-back the other four books?”
“He fell-off the fucking ladder and broke his ass!”
“Klein did?”
“Klein did.”
“Klein died?”
“Nearly.”
“That’s serious.”
“That’s what I been telling you about holding a can o’ Black Flag and killing ants.”
“Goddamn, as you would say!”
“But you may be all right. You ever fall-off the steps in your front yard? Or the stairs inside your house? By the way, was the ants black, or red?”
“Black, and fat, and lumbering. And when I squirt them, Jesus Christ, you should see the juice, the stuff coming-out of them! The ants are black.”
“Just like the cobbler that was in my heel that afternoon, when we were sitting-down on the beach. Cobblers in Barbados’re black. Ants are brown. You don’t have to worry about falling off steps or stairs, then.”
“I had a fall once, though.”
“Going after a’ ant? Off your front steps?”
“Off the bed.”
“Goddamn! Did the Chinese chick throw you outta bed? Goddamn! This is getting to be more serious! A chick did that to you? At your age? I told you about trying to foop young women!”
“It was after I had-seen these ants crawling-over the pattern in the carpets, and stopping-dead and pretending to be knots in the hardwood floor; but I spotted the sons-o’-bitches as ants, anyhow! So, anyhow. I had-gone to bed, and …”
“Alone? Or with the Chinese woman?”
“At my age? Alone. I had-gone into bed, and was dreaming, and it was a good dream I …”
“A wet-dream?”
“A dream. You dream a dream in the night, and then in the morning you can’t remember what you dreamed? One o’ those dreams. And then, around noon, after I returned from my walk, I remembered the dream, because it included a woman who was Chinese. A group of us were going to have Chinese food at a restaurant that we all know, as we used to have Chinese food there, three times a week. But on this particular afternoon, we were walking, and we come to this fork in the road, and …”
“Fork! That’s a very significant word in the realm of dreams. Remember fork! But go on.”
“… and for some reason the group got divided, and four of them were separated and went one way, and I was left with this Chinese woman. We had to go another way, but it wasn’t anything, because at the bottom of the fork in the road, we could join-up with the bigger group; and I can’t remember if in the dream I was talking to the Chinese woman, if I knew her, or not, or if I was just walking beside her. But then, I found myself alone, separated from this Chinese woman, walking this road on the left-hand side of the fork and, sudden-so, I am alone. There is no Chinese woman. I look down the road and see three men talking by the side of the road, and beside them, close-enough that they could touch it, was this small cow, a calf which I knew was a cow and not a bull, because it had no horns, and …”
“Goddamn! This is a serious dream! Note the word horns! Now, we have fork and horn. You know what that means, don’t you? To horn, man! To horn a man. Eye-talians would kill a man for that. In the olden days you would challenge a man to a duel, if he horned you! Make him choose his weapon. Point o’ honour. You were dreaming about homing, man! You were seeing your life before you, in terms of honour, and in the shape of a dream dealing with horning, and forks. Infidelity and betrayal. Honour. In plain words, your Chinese woman was giving-’way the pussy behind your back! Goddamn! Is this the Chinese woman in the snapshot? You should kill the bastard! And the three men? You ever know who these three bastards were?”
“No, man. No, it is not like that.”
“Men always say, ‘No, man, it isn’t like that.’ ”
“This is a dream. It has nothing to do with sexual infidelity.”
“You tell me! You said horns. Your word. Not mine! Let me tell you something. It is my profession. As a therapist, I know a dream is a funny thing. A dream deals not only with the present, or with the past. But more important than that, a dream tells you your future. Even if your future in the dream is not your future in real life, and is mistaken for the past. The Chinese woman could be dead in real life, but this is a dream. A dream is much more real than real life. You see what I’m saying? A dream is introspective, and it can tell you things before they happen, and it tells you things that happen even before you were born. But I am listening to you. Forget, if you want to, what I said about horn and horning.”
“There were three men. They were standing and talking, and beh
ind them was this cow with no horns, that’s how I knew it was a cow; and I saw them continuing to talk and not paying attention to the cow, and I went my way with the Chinese woman beside me, feeling I was out of danger. And then, all of a sudden, the cow which was a calf turned into a bull with horns. And it came roaring at me. Its horns getting longer and longer, with froth at both sides of its mouth, and its eyes were red and big and bulging, and … the Chinese woman had disappeared from the dream …”
“Goddamn!”
“… when I knew for certain it was coming straight at me, and when all I could see was the two horns, and that it was a bull, and as I said, the Chinese woman was no longer walking beside me, and all I could see were the two long horns, and the eyes pointing at me, and when I was sure, for certain, that the bull was coming at me, to gore me, or to kill me, I raised-up, I put-up my two hands, just-so! Look! Like this. And I flinged my two hands out in front of me, to protect me from getting pierced by the horns of the bull, and in so doing, with the flinging-out of my two hands, I lost my balance, and when I heard the shout ‘Brugga-down-down!’ I fell outta the bed. And I am flat on my arse, on the floor!”
“You fall-outta bed?”
“Brugga-down!”
“Outta the bed?”
The Origin of Waves Page 8
