He draws a baby’s bottle from the inside pocket of his trenchcoat and parts her lips with the rubber nipple. She flinches as the first hot spurt of blood hits the back of her throat. He strokes her hair.
— Oh, Grace, he says. You’ll never know what we’ve become.
He presses his lips to her forehead. She closes her eyes in contentment and suckles.
— Jerusalem, Athens, Alexandria.
Libby chants the names under her breath like a child’s skipping rhyme as she walks down Queen Street West. It’s an old trick from her youth to distract herself from the cacophony surrounding her. After the two-month retreat at Meg’s farm and recording studio, being in the city again hurts her preternaturally sensitive ears.
— Vienna, London, Unreal.
She adds New York to T. S. Eliot’s list of mythic cities. New York is Toronto, squared: twice as tall, twice as narrow. Batman’s Gotham City — a dark, claustrophobic, art deco dystopia. Although the last time the band played there, Times Square had been surprisingly clean, and most of the seedy sex shops replaced by bright and shiny brand-name franchises. Mayor Giuliani has apparently put it on the road to redemption.
As for her hometown, it’s ready to be added to the roster. No one refers to the city as Toronto the Good anymore. Now that Libby’s back from recording the new album, she notices the sounds that never bothered her before: the purr of tattered posters peeling from construction hoarding, the monotone hum of her old haunts in the Annex, the smog that drones in the horizon like a church organ. And everywhere she goes, she only hears restless boredom — not only in the conversation of passers-by, but in their heightened pulses as well. Toronto’s decadence reaching mythic levels, Libby thinks. Sounds like a newspaper headline.
Even if it weren’t the last summer of the millennium, she suspects that she would still hear the city in a state of anticipation: a seething whine below the surface of the familiar, like AM radio during a thunderstorm. All the city needs is a disillusioned Hero, a tender young lamb whose sacrifice will usher in the new age. The city is already preparing for the changeover; brand-name boutiques are supplanting Queen Street’s scruffy secondhand shops, and Yonge and Dundas is under the knife of a tourist-friendly facelift. Yesterday she rode a streetcar across King and heard the slurp and chatter of dot-com startups eating up dingy warehouses from the inside.
A seagull’s plaintive cry intrudes into her thoughts. She shivers. She has never missed the city’s seagulls while on the road. There is something vulgar in their cries, yet sad as well, as if they hunger and mourn with one voice. A perfect blending of the sacred and the profane. She quickens her steps and the seagull scurries from her path.
Meg and Garth wait for her at the MuchMusic studio at Queen and John. The interview begins. Fans and curious pedestrians idle in front of the studio’s open window despite the unrelenting summer sun. Meg shines under the spotlights, her hands waving. The veejay’s eyes crinkle at the corners as he listens to her honey-and-whisky voice. Libby wonders if her eyes crinkle as attractively when she hears things.
— Libby’s my sounding board, Meg says.
Libby smiles shyly when the camera swivels toward her.
— If it weren’t for her, I’d be just another angry young woman singer-songwriter. She knows just what my songs need. She produced and mixed the new album.
Libby smiles again. She refines Meg’s rage because otherwise the music sears her eardrums with its burning, prickly edges. But she says nothing, and the camera turns back to Meg.
— So what’s next for the band?
— The tour doesn’t start until October, so we’re taking a short break. I’m going out west to chill out, and Garth’s drumming in a side project.
— What about you, Libby? What are your plans for the month?
The veejay’s eyes are kind but there is a sudden twinge in his voice, like a snapping violin string. She looks like someone he used to know, Libby thinks. Probably an ex-girlfriend.
— I haven’t made any plans, she says. I guess I’ll be hanging out here, in Toronto.
Outside, between the droning layers of white noise, a seagull cries.
The alarm clock’s ruthless buzz shoves Scott into consciousness. He grabs the clock and hurls it against the wall. He bought it from Goodwill; he can buy another if it breaks.
The clock proves to be indestructible, however. Scott drags himself from his afternoon nap, regretting his decision to work the diner’s night shift.
The summer evening is humid. Scott flings open the door of his dank basement apartment and decides that he doesn’t need a jacket. The neighbourhood’s resident bag lady follows him for a block, asking questions that he cannot answer. He wonders why she doesn’t demand spare change instead. He would gladly give it to her if she asked.
— Don’t you know anything? Don’t you see anything? Don’t you remember anything?
Scott ignores her although the rhythm of her words lingers in his head. He has heard them before; in school, perhaps. He doesn’t know. He hasn’t been in school since Christmas.
He can’t help feeling ashamed as he walks a little faster. Susie the bag lady is harmless, just down on her luck, one of the many who have slipped through the city’s cracks. He shouldn’t ignore her. After all, it’s only a matter of time before the cracks beneath his own feet widen and he plummets further into obscurity.
He should be happy or at least satisfied that he’s surviving, but he isn’t. He hasn’t found his father, which was why he left home in the first place. He suspects that he’ll never find him, that it’s just an excuse. He’s missing something from his life, as if he’s the only person not in on some grand, cosmic joke, and his deadbeat dad is the most convenient explanation for this sense of loss. He watched a lot of TV back home; he knows his pop psychology. And yet his mom said he never learned anything.
He turns into an alley, his usual shortcut, and sees the body.
Vagrants curled up on the asphalt in a bed of rags and empty bottles are not uncommon in Toronto. Passers-by stooped over them, presumably to help, are. Rarer still are those with blood on their chin and hands.
The man crouched over the body doesn’t look like a murderer; his polo shirt, although splattered with blood, is tucked into a pair of crisp khakis. A light-coloured trenchcoat sits off to the side, neatly folded as if he’d just taken it off a stack at the Gap. He looks like he is more likely to be on the front page of the Toronto Sun for insider trading rather than a gang-related shooting.
He appears young, perhaps in his thirties. Around the same age as Scott’s dad, before he went out for cigarettes and never came back.
The man glances up from the body and meets Scott’s gaze.
His eyes are the cold, dull gray of slate, the pupils indiscernible. Scott blinks at the bright pools at the man’s feet, half-remembering a quote from a Shakespeare play about a Scottish king. Something about someone having too much blood in him. The shock dissipates, his mind defogs, and Scott realizes what is wrong with the tableau before him: the man’s slate-coloured eyes do not reflect the streetlights that glint off the wet asphalt.
— Shit.
The man grins. A thread of blood slides from the corner of his mouth to the ground.
— Oh, shit.
Scott turns around and runs, taking the long way to the diner.
Libby hears her waiter before she sees him; how can she not, when his heart beats like one of Garth’s fevered drum solos? Her brow furrows in concentration as she tries to read the National Post — not that she was paying the newspaper much attention anyhow. All there is to skim through these days are banks and airlines reassuring the public that the turn of the century will have no affect on their computerized services. Computers, she thinks disdainfully. She tried to listen to Garth’s computer once, wondering if her unusual talent could dia
gnose why it had crashed — after all, techs must make more than musicians — but all she had heard was meaningless chatter, like a baby who hasn’t figured out how to use language yet.
Libby sighs and pushes the paper away. The waiter’s pulse pounds in the back of her head like a migraine. She looks up, and raises her eyebrows. The kid can’t be more than seventeen. Libby has seen his type before: lanky, cute in a goofy sort of way, and in desperate need of a haircut. His breathing is irregular, his heartbeat heavy and resonant.
— You okay? she asks.
He nearly drops his pen and pad of paper.
— Yeah.
His answering smile could charm adolescent girls out of malls, but Libby hears the underlying tremor. The syllable rests on an unstable foundation. A nudge will send it crumbling like Jericho’s walls.
She orders a coffee and Western omelette, and realizes, as her waiter involuntarily steps back, that she has been shouting above the cacophony that only she can hear. She winces and touches her fingertips to her temples. The city has become uncomfortably agitated. She likens the sensation to a buzzing in her ears, growing louder every day; a chattering multitude waiting for the miracle of the loaves and fishes.
— Um, are you okay? he asks.
Libby grins sheepishly.
— Yeah, she lies. Sorry.
He scurries off and the buzz in her ears softens to a hum. She frowns.
— Wait!
The waiter spins around and returns to her table, pen and pad ready to amend her order. The buzz in her ears intensifies.
— Yes? he says.
— Can you make it a decaf, please?
He nods and disappears into the kitchen. The buzz softens again, and Libby knows that he is the one for whom the city clamours.
— Excuse me?
Libby does not need to look up to know that her teenaged waiter has returned. He sets down her coffee.
— Yes?
Libby casually tears a packet of sugar over the coffee mug, trying to act as if she can’t hear the city’s fractured voice whispering to her.
— Um, you look real familiar, and like, I was wondering, do I know you?
He must recognize her from the band; their newest video gets a lot of airplay.
— You watch MuchMusic?
— Don’t have a TV.
— Oh?
A teenage boy who doesn’t watch television. Inconceivable and intriguing. She eyes him from above the rim of her mug, listening for other clues to his character. She hears nothing but his arrhythmic pulse and the babble of the city.
— I’m Libby.
She extends her hand. The coffee has warmed her to conviviality, and besides, there’s something little brotherly about him.
— Scott.
Not a name with possibilities, unlike hers and Meg’s. Libby’s birth certificate claims that she’s an Elizabeth, but she was Bess at first for her grandmother. Then Liz, as an adolescent, because she thought Bess was too old-fashioned. Beth, in high school, to distinguish herself from the overwhelming number of sunny-faced, cheerleading Lizes. Libby, when she moved out of her parents’ house, hooked up with Meg, and formed the band.
As for Meg, it’s hard to believe that she’s actually a Margaret. She says she’s been called Meg since birth. Libby knows a change is coming; Meg can’t stay angry forever. She’ll become a Maggie, or Marge or Peggy if she decides to go retro.
But Scott is irrevocably locked into his name. Libby could hear it as the syllable thudded from his mouth. It worries her, because she can hear that he’s on the proverbial verge of manhood, and his identity gives him little room for change. It means that the room will change around him.
— So — Scott — want to tell me what’s wrong?
— Nothing. ’Scuse me.
He disappears into the kitchen, leaving Libby to sip her coffee in relative quiet.
Scott takes a different route home even though logic tells him that the slate-eyed man isn’t stupid enough to kill in the same place twice.
Seven months in the city and he has never explored this block because the signs are too bright, too garish. He strolls past darkened shops and cafés, and counts the newspaper boxes on each corner. He reaches box number thirteen — a battered Toronto Star — and a flashing neon sign catches his eye. The orange and yellow sunburst tugs at his memory.
The sign belongs to a seedy hotel built from crumbling bricks and dented aluminum siding. Scott pulls his wallet from his back pocket and extracts a folded photograph. The hotel, sans aluminum siding, stands in the background. Scott’s father slouches in the shabby doorway. It’s the only picture Scott has of his father; Scott Sr. didn’t stick around long enough to fill his mom’s photo albums.
The placard in a ground-floor window tells him that the manager is in the lounge. Scott finds him behind the bar. The room smells like cigarette smoke, cheap perfume and futility. It smells like his mom’s house. Judging from the fake wood paneling and vinyl upholstery, time stands still in the lounge, although it has not been kind to the bar’s wizened patrons.
— Let’s see some ID, kid.
— Um, I’m not here to buy anything. I’m looking for someone.
Scott produces the photo. The manager peers at it under the dim, jaundiced light.
— Oh yeah, him. He lived here for a year or so. Nice guy. Real ladies’ man, if you know what I mean.
— You recognize him? After all this time?
— Yeah, I remember ’cause they fished him out of Lake Ontario a couple years back. Drowned. Was in the news.
— Suicide?
— They never said. But they didn’t say it was murder, neither. We were renovating that summer, that’s why I remember. Sorry, kid. He your friend?
Scott considers his response for a second.
— No.
So his father had died the way he had lived — mysteriously, and without Scott’s knowledge. He thanks the manager and leaves, coughing, trying to expel the stale smoke from his lungs. He feels the stagnation cling to his skin. He can certainly smell it, at least.
He is about to cross the street when he hears a soft, tuneless singing. A woman’s voice, high and girlish, drifts from one of the hotel’s rooms.
He looks up and the earth stops turning.
As a child, whenever his mom was angry with him, Scott fantasized that one day a more forgiving woman would show up to claim him as her son. His real mother would be beautiful, elegant, and a little sad because they had been separated for so long. Sometimes she was rich, sometimes famous, usually both. Sometimes she was a queen, or a secret agent, depending on the latest movie he’d seen. She would offer him unconditional love and whisk him away to a better, happier life.
The woman in the hotel window is exactly how he pictured his fantasy mother: fair hair cascading over a pale face pinched with sorrow. Which is preposterous, as it was only a fantasy, the type children outgrow as soon as they eschew fairy tales in favour of superheroes and secret identities. It’s a coincidence, Scott tells himself.
The incoherent song dies on the woman’s lips. She traps Scott with a gaze. A dozen clichéd metaphors come to his mind: a moth to flame, a deer in headlights, and other helpless creatures in unfortunate situations.
She smiles. Scott forgets how to breathe. She lifts a slender hand in greeting and he tumbles into pure bliss.
A shadow looms over the woman’s shoulder. Scott sucks air into his paralyzed lungs; the shadow has the slate-eyed man’s face. He wants to shout a warning, but he realizes that the woman’s eyes are the same as the man’s. Lacklustre and dull, dead yet full of love.
Scott flees the hotel and the earth resumes its orbit around the sun.
A tired old plot: boy meets girl, boy falls in love with girl, boy marries girl.
No one ever told Nick, however, what happens after said girl is diagnosed with a terminal illness. He was forced to make it up as he went along. That, he tells himself, is his excuse for the startling dénouement. A Liebestöd, love-death. Only in death can they remain in love. He could not have known that the change would leave Grace as simple-minded and childlike as she had been in the hospital.
He and Grace have reached the final act of their lives, one that will last until the end of time, or the end of night, whichever comes first. Till death do us part has a different meaning now. In sickness and in health is no longer applicable. For richer or poorer….
He surveys the mouldy walls, the sludge-brown curtains, the cigarette-scarred carpet dotted with mouse droppings. They could do better — much better — but any other place would ask questions. Grace curls up on the lumpy double bed, cradling the baby’s bottle.
— You shouldn’t stand by the window, he says.
— But I get bored when you’re not here.
— What if someone sees you?
— Why shouldn’t they see me?
He can’t answer her. She is in no danger if targeted by an attacker or rapist. She can defend herself with their new, uncanny strength; the other day she accidentally yanked the bathroom door off its hinges. If there is one person she should fear, it’s him. Fortunately she hasn’t asked where he gets the blood yet. He is not sure how to tell her that it’s not a matter of where, but how.
He has one last card to play:
— Just do it for me, please?
Her smile is full of love; it’s all she knows. He feels guilty taking advantage of her naïveté. He is torn between wanting her to be the witty, vivacious woman with whom he fell in love, and not wanting her to be lucid enough to realize what they are, the price they had to pay to be together forever.
She props herself up on her elbows to give him a quick kiss.
— Okay, she says. For you.
He scours his splattered hands and face in the bathroom’s rusty sink. She murmurs into the rubber nipple. He curls up behind her on the bed to wait for dawn.
Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction Page 7