“For money?”
“Yes. I’ll give it to you. When it happens—” She draws the D in the air. “We’ll have to sell the house. I’ll get half.”
Tonight Erica sleeps soundly for the first time in months while I lie awake. I’m thinking about my father and how, when he first developed diabetes, the medical paraphernalia fascinated me. In my mid-twenties at the time, I was still living on Connaught Drive, unable to find a job that required the skills of an Honours English grad. I would sneak into my parents’ room (either they still shared a bed or my father believed I had proprietary rights to my old room) and open the drawer of the bedside table where he kept his lancets and needles. He wouldn’t speak to me because I’d flunked the LSAT. In some way I felt avenged by the sight of these small implements that gave him pain.
I wonder what he feels now.
Out on Bowen Island, he sinks down on the edge of the bed. The old mattress buckles as though he’s getting into a rowboat. He pitches and laughs. Using the prosthetic foot as a lever, he slips the loafer off his real foot, rucks up the left pant leg far enough to get at the straps. The unfastened prosthesis falls onto its side on the braided rug. A dull thump.
Does he miss us? Is he nostalgic for us, for his former life, his past? Will he ever feel a pang, an ache, a throb, for what he’s cut himself off from? And we, will we continue to feel the pain of a phantom father now that he’s really gone?
It’s night, the room dark. I can’t see what isn’t there, the missing leg, not even the stump. I can’t visualize the stump sock tossed on the floor, or the man, Mr. Justice, my father the judge, Gerald, massaging the knob of flesh under the knee joint.
Gerry.
Who?
I don’t know any such person.
Shhh:
3 Stories About Silence
1
There was this man who worked for something like thirty years at the BBC. In the production side of things. Editing, cataloguing, filing. These were the days before computers and DAT, obviously. Everything was tape and spools. It was his job to edit out the ahs and ums, the fucks and Freudian slips, all that. Also the silences. When the pauses got too long—chop chop. In those thirty years he took the silences out of some mighty mouths. Khrushchev and Kennedy. Reagan and Gorbachev. The Beatles, Beckett, Nureyev. But he never met or interviewed these people himself. He was a stutterer.
So thirty years go by and the guy’s old and he retires. They throw a party for him in the BBC canteen or somewhere. They ask him how it feels to have polished the voice of history. G-g-g-g-g-g, he says. Something like that.
All those years he’d kept the stuff he cut out. He had it all filed away and when he left, he took the files. He went to live in the country where it was quiet so he could work undisturbed. He had a project he’d been thinking about for years. Maybe in the beginning he planned to use the ums and fucks, but later he tossed them. It was the silence he was interested in. What Reagan didn’t say. What Kissinger sounded like when he finally shut the fuck up. He spliced these together, but not just in any old order. He was working with different qualities and textures in the silence. He was a composer, right?
Now and then he played the tapes for people. They found them profoundly moving. Some were reduced to, you know. Tears.
2
And?
He died a few years later.
What happened to the tapes?
Eric turns on the ignition long enough for the back windows to purr and descend. I don’t know.
Where did you hear about him?
On the radio.
Nat starts to laugh. Eric of all people tells this story with reverence? He hasn’t shut up since they got in the car, not for the forty-minute drive to the terminal, not for the twenty minutes they’ve been cooking in the ferry lineup. Opinions he’s got, and anecdotes, but mostly facts, facts, facts, like he’s shaking his teeming brain out in her lap.
He leans back. Sticks his hand up through the open sunroof into the blue of Horseshoe Bay. Sunlight sheers off his Medic Alert bracelet. Lifestyles’s not so bad, he says. I could get used to this. I could get used to fee-jords.
Fjords, says Nat.
I know. But I didn’t always. I mean, f and j. F and j together? There’s only one other word in the English language that starts with f and j.
Nat says nothing.
Aren’t you curious?
She sighs.
Fjeld. A high, rocky plateau, especially in Scandinavia. There she is.
The ferry emerges from behind a green meringue, plowing the blue, a toy still, but growing larger. We’d better get on, says Nat, desperate now, but this is not entirely certain. Cars, minivans, motorcycles, SUVs, recreation vehicles—they all infarct the lanes. She’s beginning to think along the lines of unlikely and two more talkie hours with the encyclopedic Eric. She hardly knows him. Like her, he’s not on his usual beat, accidents and crime scenes. Nat returned six months early from mat leave and couldn’t get City Hall back. It’s Lifestyles all summer for Nat.
Eric says, Boats are feminine in English but masculine in French.
Yeah? I’m going to la toilette.
You’d better hurry.
Outside the car she pauses to adjust her skirt, which has been taking its own ride. She slings her purse strap over her shoulder and walks off into the hot metal maze of cars. When she glances back, she happens to catch Eric in a frank act of appreciation. It’s her he’s appreciating. He looks away and so does Nat, who can’t remember the last time lust factored into her life. So thrown off balance, she has to put a hand on the hood of a truck to steady herself. It feels like a stove element.
In the grim portable that is the bathroom she takes a good look at herself, pleasant enough when she smiles, but she can’t have been doing that. She splashes her face, dries it with paper towels, puts on lipstick. Then the voice of doom announces that the ferry has docked. Straightening, she sees them in the mirror, her obvious selling point—the twin trophies of a nursing mother.
When she gets back to the car Eric asks, How’s Don? as though this will retract the appraising look. It doesn’t. It has fully penetrated and is marauding around inside her.
Better.
What was the matter exactly?
Panic attacks.
When’s he coming back?
She keeps her gaze forward, pretending to watch the chain reaction of brake lights in all the lanes as the engines start up. It’s not enough to be able to leave the house, she says. He’s a cartoonist. He has to get his sense of humour back.
I love his stuff, Eric says. But can you explain the hedgehog?
The what?
The hedgehog. What’s the significance?
Eric is actually attractive in a dissolute way, she realizes now. He has tons of silver-threaded hair, which he wears long with his tan and his crumpled paper bag of a linen shirt. Hiding behind his Euro sunglasses, morning-after eyes. What are you talking about? she asks.
There’s that nasty hedgehog in all his cartoons.
Oh. That’s not a hedgehog. That’s his Self-loathing.
Their lane begins to move. Neither of them speaks, though this can hardly be called silence. A man in an orange vest stops the fourth car ahead of Eric’s.
Oh well, says Nat. She smiles. Now what are we going to do with ourselves?
The man confers briefly with the radio clipped to his vest, then begins paddling the air toward himself. The line advances.
Eric’s is the last car on.
Ronald Reagan received a life-sized topiary elephant for his eighty-second birthday.
Really? She notices herself in his sunglasses, wearing her sunglasses, head cocked, feigning interest.
It weighed as much as an actual elephant and took eight years to grow.
They are sitting out on deck watching the fjords recede, the wind an unrelentingly fond uncle tousling their hair. It inflates the baggy clothes of a nearby group of teens. They look blown-up, like they could fl
oat away. Nat left her jacket in the car and she shivers in her sleevelessness.
There’s a topiary zoo in Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
Do birds kiss? Nat asks.
What?
She points to the ferry’s bronze bell where two crows perch, apparently swapping spit. Her phone rings in her purse. When she sees it’s Don, she tells Eric, I’m going to get some batteries from the gift shop. She walks away, out of earshot, wondering about panty lines.
Don asks, How are things?
I’m on the ferry. Is everything all right?
Yeah.
Did you talk to him?
Not yet.
There is a pause. (This, Nat thinks, should be edited out.)
I will when Gemma goes down, Don says.
Nat says, I’ll call you when we’re heading back.
He hesitates.
(This too.)
Bye.
Bye.
She finds Eric in line at the cafeteria, marvels to see his lips are moving. He brightens at her approach, takes off his sunglasses and hooks them over his chest hair. She chooses V8 and a salmon sandwich.
A sockeye can jump thirty-two feet, Eric tells her. He orders a B.C. burger.
How high can a cow jump? Nat asks.
While they’re eating, he tells her about the garden in Columbus, Ohio.
Stop, she begs. You’ve been doing research. You’re making me look bad.
In Columbus, Ohio, they’ve recreated Seurat’s Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte. In topiary. I saw the pictures. It’s amazing.
A piece of his spittle flies across the table and lands on her. It’s warm, but it cools immediately. How long till she can wipe it off without his noticing? It sits there, a tiny weight on her cheek, the spit of the former most annoying man in the world.
The Beachcombers lasted nineteen seasons. Three hundred and some episodes.
They’re driving through Gibsons Landing. Eric points out Molly’s Reach, the pub featured in the beloved TV series. Just think. People in Costa Rica and Slovenia, all over the world where The Beachcombers is still in reruns, they know this pub.
I wonder if we’ll see a Bruno Gerussi topiary, says Nat, and Eric laughs. Since they’ve gotten back in the car, the flirting has intensified, or so it seems to Nat. When he shifts gears, he grazes the side of her bare leg. Sorry, he said the first time.
Once they’re clear of Gibsons, the drive is prettier. On Eric’s side the ocean sometimes insinuates itself into the view between the rocks and trees. That’s Arbutus menziesii, he says, pointing out a tree on a rocky ledge above them.
Bark hangs off its trunk in long cinnamon strips, like a skin disease. Nat asks, What’s the matter with it?
They’re in moult.
They pass a golf course, a nursery, numerous hand-painted signs that point up narrow gravel roads, like the one they’re looking for. Herbs. Eggs. Massage Therapy. At every bus stop some civic-minded resident has left a chair—a vinyl kitchen chair, a folding lawn chair, a resin patio chair, even two.
Nat opens the glove compartment, sees a box of condoms. The sandwich inside her leaps. She makes a show of looking. Map?
In the door, he says.
Ah. She slams the compartment. Just then they pass an inn. Oh God, she thinks. Condoms. An inn. On the way back, the interview will be shorthanded into her notebook, the topiaries locked in the chip in Eric’s camera. They’ll stop at the inn for a drink. They’ll deserve it. Eric must be a vocal lover. She imagines him telling her how many sperm swim in a teaspoon of cum, how many orgasms a woman is capable of achieving compared to a man, while these things are happening.
Are you religious?
Nat starts at the question, not just because it annihilates her fantasy.
Sorry, says Eric. Maybe that’s too personal a thing to ask.
No. She tugs her skirt down over her knees. I’m not.
For several minutes they drive without speaking. This is less of a relief than she would have thought back in the ferry lineup. She feels awkward, embarrassed even. Speaking of religion, she finally says. We’re out in Surrey now. We bought an old farmhouse last year. There’s a field out back where there used to be a barn. Someone approached Don and asked to put a trailer out there. Rent the field, he meant. Don knew the guy in high school so he said yes. Turns out he’s part of this cult. There are people coming and going all the time.
How do you know it’s a cult?
They do their thing out in the field. They walk around in a circle. Rain or shine they’re out there walking. They owe us five months’ rent.
The sign on the highway: Topiaries. They come to a second sign at the foot of a long driveway and turn there, raising dust. Nat rings at the house while Eric unloads his equipment from the trunk. It’s an ordinary house, a seventies split-level painted green with a textured panel of amber glass beside the door. The garden in front is carnival coloured.
This is annoying, she tells Eric, who is waiting by the car now with his camera cases and tripod. I talked to her yesterday.
Maybe she’s in the back.
She follows Eric around the side of the house through a trellis tunnel. The backyard opens into a large rectangular clearing cut out of the forest. Unlike the front, it’s monochrome, carpeted with lawn. The topiaries, a dozen or more, stand on their own, connected by a bark mulch path.
Wow, says Eric, setting his equipment on the patio. He strikes off toward the closest figure while Nat calls out, Hello! Hello! She drops her purse on the patio table, takes out her notebook and phone, looks up the contact name and number, dials. A phone starts ringing inside the house.
She crosses the grass to where Eric is circling the Buddha. I can’t believe this.
They haven’t put up any signs, says Eric. Who’s that over there? Jesus? Signs would help.
She catches sight of someone at the far side of the clearing emerging from the trees. Oh, thank God. She heads for him, waving. Hello! It’s Natalie Koerner! From the Sun!
He disappears behind one of the figures. As she’s cutting across the grass toward him, he dodges back into the trees. Hey! Nat yells. I saw you!
Gandhi, it looks like, when she reaches the topiary. A rake leans against his dhoti, clippings scattered at his feet. The man comes out of the trees again and pretends to be surprised to see her.
Very funny, she says.
He’s young, not even twenty, wearing a baseball cap with an acronym, the same baggy clothes as the kids on the ferry, Nikes. Also work gloves, which bring the size of his hands into proportion with the size of his feet. His face is angular, gaze skitting. She gets the feeling he’s listening hard, but not to her. Without even seeing the wires that connect him to it, she figures it out. A Discman.
I’m Natalie Koerner, she says, louder now, to compete with Eminem. From the Sun. I’m here to do an interview. An interview!
His face comes alive in a frown.
I set this all up yesterday with a woman named Joyce Pollard. Is she around?
He heaves a clownish shrug.
Are you the gardener? Or possibly the mime?
He emits a startling sound, like a seal’s truncated bark, and signs beside his ear.
Fuck, says Nat, swinging round. Heedless of the path again she marches back to Eric.
The surrounding trees smell sugary in the heat. It’s so quiet Nat can hear their cones snap open and the dry rain of seeds they release. The topiaries hold their stations, perfectly still, like green snow people. She’s never seen anything so kitschy.
She’s not here and that guy’s deaf, she tells Eric.
He’s standing before a green Mother, or some other, Theresa, sunglasses pushed to the top of his head. Eric usually takes pictures of dragged lakes, bland suburban houses encircled in yellow tape, the sculptural obscenities of highway smash-ups. She thinks he’s figuring out his shot.
Across the garden the deaf boy’s rake scratches the earth.
I don’t have
a story if I don’t have an interview.
Eric tells her, Shhh.
3
PANEL: WOMAN IN A WHEELCHAIR, HEAD BANGING AGAINST HEADREST, MOUTH STRETCHED TO THE SIDE. TERROR? MAN PUSHING, RED-FACED, BIBBED WITH PERSPIRATION, OBVIOUSLY STRAINING TO KEEP THE CHAIR ON THE PATH. DON AND GEMMA THE TALKING BABY WATCH FROM THE FENCE. DON’S BALLOON: ROUGH RIDE!
Don hasn’t actually set foot on the path himself, but he can see that after a wet spring and an abnormally hot dry summer, it’s a lumpy circuit of hardened mud.
PANEL: GEMMA THE TALKING BABY STANDING ON THE FENCE, POINTING AT THE WHEELCHAIR. PLENTY O’ DROOL. GEM’S BALLOON: HEY! DIDN’T MA SAY SOMETHING ABOUT LEGAL LIABILITY?
PANEL: BLAKE ALDERSON, SLEEVES ROLLED, BRINGING UP THE REAR. HIS TATTOOS LOOK LIKE BURNS. GEM’S BALLOON: HERE HE COMES, POPS! SAY SOMETHING! SAY SOMETHING!
PANEL: GEMMA BOUNCING ON THE FENCE, POINTING FRANTICALLY. DROOL SPLASHING EVERYWHERE. DON’S SELF-LOATHING RUBS ITS SPINES AGAINST THE FENCE.
This late in the day it’s just the three of them, though sometimes as many as five are on the path at a time, evenly spaced, presumably so they don’t step on each other’s heels and break stride. On weekends extras sit cross-legged in the grass or on their knees, praying while they wait to rotate in. Gemma prefers them to Teletubbies so Don brings her down every day after her afternoon nap and stands her on the fence. She applauds and points and chortles in a knowing way, but not once has any of them smiled back or waved or so much as looked at her. This is how Don knows their God is not his.
PANEL: BLAKE ALDERSON GETTING CLOSER. DON LOOKS OVER HIS SHOULDER. DON’S BALLOON: HEY! IS THAT MA’S CAR? GEMMA THE TALKING BABY TEARS AT HIS HAIR. HER BALLOON: TALK TO HIM! DROOL RAINS DOWN AND DRENCHES THEM ALL. DON’S SELF-LOATHING PUTS UP A MINIATURE UMBRELLA.
Gemma protests being taken away by ripping the sun hat off her head. Mommy’s home, Don tells her. He swings her onto his shoulders. Fat thighs squeeze his neck, the softest vise. She takes the reins.
Not so tight. Daddy doesn’t have hair to spare.
PANEL: INSIDE, STRIPS OF WALLPAPER HANG OFF THE WALLS. A RAT CHASES DON’S SELF-LOATHING. GEMMA THE TALKING BABY RIDES IN ON DON’S SHOULDERS. MA GLARES OUT THE BEDROOM DOOR AT DON. DON’S THOUGHT BALLOON: SHE SEEMS EVEN MORE PISSED OFF THAN USUAL!
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 13
