by The Journey Prize Stories 32- The Best of Canada's New Writers (retail) (epub)
Days later, I’m still pulling black feathers off my skin, out of my underwear. I shower and still find them in my hair. Instead of throwing them away, I keep them in my pants pocket. Proof that I was a part of something, even if it was only for a minute. That dance floors and pockets can hold things as big as forgiveness and grief.
HSIEN CHONG TAN
THE LAST SNOW GLOBE REPAIRMAN IN THE WORLD
The last snow globe repairman in the world is in Northfield, Minnesota, a three-hour drive from the town where I live. I saw his photo in a book at the library. The photographer won a big prize that year, so the portrait of the snow globe repairman has a chance of living forever, or at least longer than the profession itself. I’m sure he’s not really the last of his kind in the world, or even in America, though there can’t be many left.
This seemed odd at first because there are still plenty of snow globes out there. Maybe what it means is that people still buy them, but when they’re damaged, no one tries to get them fixed. Someone is trying to save the penguins, someone is trying to save the rain forest. Snow globes? We can always make more.
Winter is a series of small capitulations. Putting away the sandals at last and taking out the boots. Digging in drawers for wool socks, a warmer hat. The longer we stay out of these clothes, the longer the fall will linger. Even when the bicycles have deserted the streets and the children are skating on the lakes.
Outside my window, it is the second snowfall of the season—the first came and went two nights ago, in my sleep. The snow blows by almost horizontally; some god-child has left the globe on its side. But as the wind whips the world behind the glass into static, I know we are being punished, not merely neglected.
The last snow globe repairman in the world lives in Minnesota. I’m curious about him, but also afraid. What if he’s boring? Or merely sentimental? There’s something so sad about kitsch, and yet here is someone who must believe in it.
A radio station website has the recording of an old interview.
“How do you repair a snow globe?” the host asks.
The last snow globe repairman in the world replies, “First you clean out all the debris, the broken glass, the sealant. Then you take the music out. If the figures are broken, I can replace them. Then you make the globe sterile so the water won’t go bad. You fill it up and plug it. Put the music back in, and it’s ready to go again.”
The last snow globe repairman in the world pronounces music like musique. How do you repair a snow globe? You have to take the musique out.
The interviewer is surprised. Do they all have music? No, but many do, like a music box, or on a microchip. There have been many advances in snow globe technology. Now they recite scripture. Now they blow snow. You don’t have to tip them anymore. They talk to you.
* * *
—
Arjun and I play a game. We call it Hemingway, and it goes like this:
Tell me a happy story in two words.
Anteater. Ant.
Tell me a sad story.
Ant. Anteater.
Long words are better, compound words are the best. Hummingbird. Superhighway. Antidisestablishmentarianism. Snow globe is two words.
Penguins turn up a lot in our conversation. I blame it on that Werner Herzog documentary we saw together, in which a lone bird leaves the flock and waddles full tilt for the mountains, where it will likely die. “Can a penguin go insane?” Herzog asks.
Dorothy holds Toto under her left arm, shields her face with the right. Behind her, a giant funnel towers and twists over a prairie landscape, a single farmhouse caught in its grey mesh.
When I push a switch on the base, the tornado and house start rotating, while an internal blower sends glitter swirling. I’d meant to get something more classic, but after three days of scrolling through Christmas- and Disney-themed globes online, I knew this was the one.
An imaginary gale has moulded Dorothy’s dress against her legs, but as the scene turns, her clothes do not flutter. She and Toto are part of the base, outside the storm and untouched by glitter. In this version of the story, Dorothy never got out of Kansas, never made it to Oz. Never killed the witch, never met the scarecrow. She paid no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The first time Arjun and I spoke, we were up to our elbows in chicken parts.
“Could you hand me that Tupperware, please?” I gestured.
Arjun looked at me, mouth behind a face mask, gloved hand extended in a finger pistol, and raised both arms in mock alarm. “All right, all riiiight,” he said, sounding more Super Mario than Marlon Brando as he slid the plastic container over.
We went back to cutting meat. Elsewhere in the wildlife rescue centre, a raccoon rattled the bars of its cage. At the end of our shift, Arjun tossed a gizzard at me and asked, “Wanna get a bite?”
What can I say? He made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.
The best part of the job, Arjun tells me over slices at Mamma Mia’s, is release day, when the staff return a rehabilitated animal to the wild. They usually invite a few of the volunteers, like a little farewell party.
“My favourite are the birds,” he says. “It feels like something when they go. It’s not the same with the squirrels or skunks. Those just scurry into the brush or up a tree, like they’re ashamed to have known you.”
The loneliest snow globe repairman in the world lives in Minnesota. I meant “the last,” but instead I said “the loneliest.” It’s not a mistake though. If he is the last, he must also be the loneliest. And the tallest and the shortest and the handsomest and the jolliest. If he is the last of his kind, mustn’t he be lonely?
I think of other endangered species out in the cold, like the sea otter, whose babies trap so much air in their pelts that they float like corks on the water. It’s because of that thick fur that they were hunted to the edge of extinction. No one wants to turn a snow globe repairman into a mitten, so why are they endangered? What is the natural predator of the snow globe repairman?
I found my first snow globe at a store on Main and 22nd, a touristy sort of place, but it was what I wanted: the town in miniature, the most recognizable parts at least—the square, the clock tower, the lake, and the bridges.
As I was paying, the woman at the cash register handed me a slim white leather wallet and asked if I knew the owner. The driver’s licence photo showed a young girl with straight black hair. The name was Korean.
“I don’t know her,” I said, closing the wallet and giving it back. “Why would I know her?”
“Oh,” the shopkeeper said. “It’s just. There are so many…” She stopped. “So many students, you know? I thought you might know her.”
“No, I don’t.”
I felt like I should apologize. Instead I said, “Good luck.”
I grew up on a tropical island—no snow, just thunderstorms that went on for hours, or hot muggy weather that went on for days. I never shopped for souvenirs then—those are for places you want to remember—but I do wonder what the Singaporean equivalent of a snow globe would be. I once saw some rain globes in a Seattle bookstore, which I thought was funny. What else falls from the sky?
* * *
—
Fifteen minutes into the reading, the poet quoted two lines from a Plath poem that had inspired her, and then all I wanted to do was go home and read Ariel. On the way back to my apartment, Arjun attempts to speak entirely in rhyming couplets.
“If you’re trying to punish me for making you go to this thing,” I say, “at least try to do better than rhyming Jules with drools.”
It starts to storm before we get to my building, and I ask Arjun if he wants to come in and wait it out. I’ve pulled the hood of my jacket up, but he’s bareheaded, the rain dripping from his beard and glasses.
Upstairs, he takes off his shirt and wrings it out in the bathroom sink.
“Want me to order Mamma Mia’s?” I ask from the living room.
“As long as it’s not the fucking butter chicken pizza.”
Arjun emerges, drying his head with the towel I handed him earlier. In the two years I’ve known him, the boy has acquired an impressive collection of line art from the town’s two tattoo parlours, but this is the first time I’ve seen the larger pieces.
A tree branches across the left side of his chest, trunk running down his abdomen, a whorl in the bark around his belly button, just visible beneath the fuzz. The roots continue below, though to that particular tangle, I am not privy.
On his right side, mirroring the branches, half a dragon’s head, the horn curving around his clavicle. A long-haired anime wizard whose name I don’t know peeks over his right shoulder, while the skin under his right ribs is red with a design that wraps around to his back.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“I’ll show you in a few months, when it’s done.”
“Are you going to fill it in?”
“Nah. Line art only. I don’t like how colour looks on my skin.”
We watch animal videos on YouTube while his shirt dries on the radiator. Sea otters tie up their pups with kelp so they don’t float away. Elephants mourn their dead. Hummingbirds have been known to survive the winter.
I’m in charge of thawing out the mice for Joan Wayne. They come in frozen blocks that we run under the faucet until the little bodies separate. They can’t go in the microwave.
Joan arrived at the centre a few months before I did, a red-tailed hawk with a wing on the mend. Her name was given by Arjun, of course, a reference to how in Westerns, they dub a red-tailed hawk’s scream over the stutter and squeak of a bald eagle. The real voice behind an American icon.
Some days I prepare her breakfast, but only staff are allowed in the enclosure. I watch her when I can, safe on the other side of the fence. Red-tailed hawks can be almost white or nearly completely black. Joan Wayne is an undistinguished in-between shade, with orange tail feathers and brown spots on her pale underside.
A med student I dated had this schtick about how our bodies are just plumbing and carpentry, with some electrical wiring worked in. Faced with an injured animal, the idea brings little comfort. A squirrel is small, but its heart beats so fiercely. Weeks ago, I watched one of the staff give CPR to one. She pressed on his chest with two fingers and pinched his cheeks to blow in his mouth. This went on for much longer than what you learn in first-aid class, longer, it felt, than faith should endure. So long that it was a shock when he finally blinked back to life, as surprised, I’m sure, as I was.
Arjun says I should collect Magic 8-Balls instead of snow globes—at least when you turn one over there’s a chance of a different outcome.
Will I cop litter box duty at the centre next week?
Signs point to yes.
Do I have enough dried pasta to last past Tuesday’s blizzard?
Outlook not so good.
In one version of the story, I am an agent of order and good smells.
In one version of the story, humans don’t make it through the coming ice age.
So it turns out you can toilet-train a bobcat.
The kind stranger who found Rufus in a parking lot thought he was a stray kitten. After an ill-fated attempt at bottle-feeding, the meaning of the cub’s odd markings and large paws became clear, and the stranger, hands in bandages, brought the centre a new tenant.
Big cats are a lot like little cats, and the staff put the young bobcat in a large cage with a domestic tabby and her kittens. Arjun watched them compulsively, but the cub never seemed inclined to hurt his tiny foster siblings. Instead, he picked up some personal grooming tips and started using the sand-filled box in the corner.
Rufus loved to wrestle but let the smaller kitties win, rubbed his cheeks against the sides of the cage, and went wild over bits of pumpkin served mashed with his kibble. Early on, he tried to nurse and was rebuffed, but there was never any doubt that he was family. Looking at them together, I wondered if I’d missed some key developmental stage, the human equivalent of litter box 101. The tabby and her kittens were adopted out, and Rufus was transferred to a zoo in Minnesota when he outgrew our facility. Arjun wanted to visit him, and I said I’d go too.
“You planning to spring him out of jail?”
“Ha, nope. But we could swing by the Mall of America. I hear they’ve got a pirate ship.”
Tell me a happy story.
Bear, salmon.
Tell me a sad story.
Salmon, bear.
What makes a story happy or sad? It depends on what happens to whom.
I envy Arjun for the way he is in the world, sharp, but without the jagged edges. He takes up exactly as much space as he needs to, while I waver between trying to disappear or insisting, too loudly, that I am here.
Jules, Arjun.
Arjun, Jules.
Road trip is two words. Jailbreak is one.
“Jules, do you want anything from India?”
“India?”
Arjun and I are hosing down the former raccoon enclosure. This was a good week—two releases, warm nights, no owls hit by trucks.
“Yeah, my uncle has an animation studio in Mumbai, and he wants me to work for him. I’m heading back next month to check it out, see how I feel about being home.”
I know the expected responses for situations like this, the questions and the exclamations. But it takes me a little too long to get anything out. I find myself walking to the tap and giving it a hard twist, like it’s stuck.
“I thought you liked it here,” is what I manage.
Arjun grimaces at the smell of water meeting raccoon poop.
“I do, but I dunno. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to worry about the other stuff. Visas. Work. The whole starving-artist BS. Hey…hey! Scoop first, then spray.”
He sidesteps the dancing rubber coils and turns the spigot the other way.
“You not gonna miss Mamma Mia’s?”
We each take a spade and start shovelling the little brown squiggles into a trash bag.
“Jules, we have pizza in India. We have Chinese food too. It’s a big country.”
“What about Rufus? What about Joan Wayne’s farewell?”
I turn the hose full blast on a dark patch near the wall. Arjun hesitates between dodging the splash and moving in with a long-handled brush.
“Ahhhhh, they didn’t tell you?” He opts for the brush. “Joan’s being moved to a raptor centre up north. They train hawks to scare nuisance birds off runways.”
I’m glad for the masks we’re wearing in case of roundworms, though they make it hard to breathe. Arjun scrubs the floor like he means it.
“Come on, it’s a good gig.”
“What? Chasing seagulls or drawing cartoons?”
“Jules,” he says, not taking the bait, “this isn’t easy for me either. Home is…a bunch of things. You know.”
Maybe it’s the water droplets on his glasses and in his beard, but I’m thinking about the night after the reading and that fledgling tattoo wrapped like an arm around his torso, the beginnings of a story scratched into the skin. Back then I’d thought I would see this one through.
Arjun gathers the cleaning gear and picks up the trash bag as he steps out.
“Anyway, based on how our last two conversations went, I’ll probably get in a fight with my dad and be back in three days.”
“Wow. Oh wow,” I say, turning around to lock up. “These raccoons aren’t the only ones who are full of shit.”
I’m not the only one who likes the lake in winter. Out on the ice, old men huddle in small groups or sit alone with a fishing line and a thermos. I hide behind the reeds near the shore, watching the children skate, fall, and slide on their bellies. A group of penguins in the water i
s called a raft. A group on land is called a waddle. Is lake ice land or water? If I were a child, I would be the one headed alone for the treeline on the far shore.
Cellphone batteries run down quickly in the cold. There’s no reception so far from the city. If Arjun knocks on your door when you aren’t home to hear it, does it still make a sound?
The last snow globe repairman in the world doesn’t actually fix the broken figurines. Sometimes a dab of glue or paint suffices, but his storeroom, his whole home, is a warehouse of factory spares and replacements for when the damage is more extensive. I haven’t talked to another human in two weeks. Is this something that can be touched up with a brush? Or is there, in some waiting basement, a factory version of myself, colours vivid and still intact?
When I get home, I find a box of Japanese seaweed snacks outside my door. On it, a Post-it note says in Arjun’s rounded hand: KELP me! I’m drifting…
The message comes with a sketch of a distressed sea otter, paws against its cheeks. I stick the yellow square on my fridge.
I’ve grown familiar with the sight of Joan Wayne’s feet, pebbled and scaled like her dinosaur ancestors. Following these digits to their pointed conclusions, I imagine a rabbit or a vole, perhaps another of the centre’s recent guests. Who are we saving, and for what?
I picture my own skin too, a tender perch sheathed in neither fur nor hide. She would draw blood without a thought. I try to visualize those claws gripping a thick leather glove, the kind worn by falconers. A cord connects her ankle to my wrist. But the mind rejects the image, turning instead to cliché: if you love someone, set them free.