Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  He’d run to his mom’s room, to her and Roy’s bedroom, but the bed was empty, not even mussed. Of course Roy was still at work at the station. He could see by the clock that it was just past midnight, so Roy would have just got off the air, wouldn’t be home for a few more minutes. And Jenny? He’d run to the window again, and now picked her out, naked as the rest of the dancers, her long hair swinging to her waist, but in no way covering her boobs or her bottom.

  What had he done then? He can’t remember. Only he must have gone outside, sat on the back porch, because he remembers the stars, and the smell of liquor and the sweetish smoke of the marijuana. The music was coming from Jenny’s portable stereo, the one Roy had given her for Christmas.

  And then Roy was home, coming out through the back door, stopping, his large body still but not afraid. His hand to his beard. And then the music stopping, so Roy must have turned it off. The dancers all pausing, and then one of them, one of the men (Bryan can see him now, skinny, his long penis hanging) shouting out, mockingly, it had seemed: Jen, I guess your dad’s home. What had happened next? Bryan doesn’t remember. Yes, he does: the hippies gone, with much sarcasm and flipping the bird; shouting, from Jenny and Roy. Himself crying, but unnoticed, swept with them as they moved from room to room, Jenny yelling mean things, Roy responding with heavy – what? Patience, logic, it had seemed to him, then. Not anger.

  Himself burning with shame for what Jenny had done.

  Back at Roy’s, he turns off the engine of his truck but sits still in the cab. Will Roy still be asleep? Will he be willing to let Bryan stay the night?

  He imagines Roy nodding, non-committal.

  Roy has never asked him about Jenny.

  They’d left without Bryan’s belongings, in a hurry, on the Greyhound. He’d been so angry at Jenny. Had sulked the whole trip. (Where had they gone? Kamloops, or Merritt: She hadn’t had enough money to go further.) She’d said: I should have left you behind. Without turning his face from the window, he’d said: Yes, you should have.

  They had slept in a campground just outside of whatever place the bus had dropped them, that first night, on some newspapers and a tarp, Jenny curled around him, her breasts against his back, her breath in his hair. He’d woken to find her gone, to find himself alone in a dark empty place. He knew he’d never see her again.

  But then she was back: You’re not crying, Monkey Man? I just had to take a piss.

  And he had thought: How can there be just the two of us? For the first time, he had thought that. He had tucked himself back into Jenny’s body, but he had felt, for the first time, that he did not, could not melt into her. That she was too small to hold back the cold, to protect him from the dark, the emptiness, the night sky.

  THE BURGESS SHALE

  CENTRIFUGED OUT OF THE DEPARTMENT by imposed early retirement, out of the Order by heterodoxy, she spins her wheels for one year, two. Her new/old house a shell she maintains, the main tenant. Which is not to say there is no ingress, egress, progress. Mainly, though, regress: reliving, reconsidering, recanting. Then revision: she takes a lodger, who takes her out of herself, takes her places, takes her for granted. She takes exception. The lodger takes it badly, takes it out on her. She takes herself seriously, out of circulation.

  This doesn’t take her far. She takes more care. Taken. Is it a given? She is given: to fits of despair. Despair fits. (Like a glove? kid? velvet? boxing?) She is boxed in. A boxed set, the sisters, in the Order. Box without a key, house without a door. That old riddle: the egg. To be laid, cracked open? The yolk’s on her. She is a soft-bodied creature, defenseless but for her word test, her bone house.

  In her new car, her leaving gift from the Order, she drives west, without purpose, at first, along the lakes. Toronto, Thunder Bay. Sleeps at hotels near the Trans-Canada, booked ahead, eats at Zagat-rated places, then doesn’t. Swims laps, rises early. Becomes one with the car, her nerve endings fused to wheel, pedal. A disembodied voice, annunciation, updates her on the state of her brake pads.

  After Thunder Bay, the dense forest, the open stretches of road. The Cambrian Shield. The speedometer digits metamorphose: 125, 130, 135. The engine, in fifth gear, plainsong in F sharp. The highway a blur of moving water.

  Then stubble fields, dusted with the first snow, dotted with gargantuan hay rolls, pumpjacks like Devonian insects. Houses with imitation stone façades. Many collapsing barns. Dozens of hawks: Swainson’s, rough-legged, red-tailed, sentinels on power-line posts, hanging in the air over the highway as if at an infinite dining table. The names of hawks rise from her childhood as from a rain-swollen guidebook.

  On the salt-rimmed lake at Chaplin, an unlikely pelican, relic of the vast Cambrian Sea. Loving divine pelican. Is there redemption, after a wounding of the self? She sleeps at Super 8s, dreams she is still driving, the highway flowing toward her, a black oleaginous stream.

  The salesman from the next table at Roy’s Texas Bar and Steakhouse, also alone, also oleaginous. So, you’re an ex-nun? He says it as if it’s the set-up line for an off-colour joke. The line before the punchline. Her knees are pressed together under her high-waisted jeans. But she and the salesman are sitting side by side on his motel-room bed with a bottle of wine inside them and one of Alka-Seltzer on the night stand. She is fifty-seven. She has had sexual congress exactly five times in her life, all in a two-week epoch about six months previously. Her body is reasonably elastic. Her face is still smooth. She is well-preserved. She can pass for fifty, in incandescent light.

  She has a horror, now that she has disembarked from that elevated train of post-mortal destinations and joined a more temporal concatenation, of missing out on any important stops.

  She says this inside her head and the words, along with the wine, form a little glass case inside which she is able to take off her sweater her pants her grey cotton underwear (grey because it can be thrown in the wash with jeans) and allow parts of herself to be coaxed into temporary, temporal, pliancy.

  Her lodger had become presumptuous, had begun to critique her small habits, her devotion to reading: to expect of her the penance of laundry, the benison of prepared meals. She is better off with the temporary, the transient.

  After Medicine Hat, she regrets only the small necessary sacrifices: the revelation of her former professions (nun; linguistics professor), her destination (her sister’s home in Abbotsford), her name.

  From Medicine Hat as far as Banff.

  She has spent five days travelling. She stumbles out of the car at her motel, dizzy. It is early afternoon. She could drive further today – reach Revelstoke. She is tempted. But she is tired in her bones, her core. Her tiredness is slowing her momentum; it is a giant elastic band resisting her forward propulsion.

  And she has come to the mountains. She has not driven through these passes before. The sight of the slopes and peaks affects her: She is appalled. They are rough, rude, in extremis. Naked rock, they jut and thrust.

  When she falls asleep, she dreams that she is driving a pass. She dreams that she must feel along the edge of the highway with her hand while she drives, to make sure that she does not go off the edge, down the side of the mountain.

  In the morning, her car will not start. She finds a tow truck, a garage, goes exploring on foot.

  It is autumn; the aspens of Banff have turned golden. She walks around the downtown, stopping at a wine store, a soap store that censers patchouli and lemongrass into the mountain air for a full block in every direction. She stops at a rock and mineral store selling fossils. She is tempted by a display case of iridescent ammolites. Fossilized nacre: the colours, red, gold, violet, peacock shimmy across the gems’ surfaces. But what would she do with them? She does not want to accumulate possessions, weight.

  She sorts through all of the buckets in the rock store: She has infinite time on her hands. Fossils from the time before these mountains, for sale.

  She walks along the Bow, admiring the brilliant and varied colours of the natural shrubbery. She admire
s the tumbling waterfall. She crosses a bridge and walks through an old cemetery, where elk are grazing unafraid. She sleeps well, after a dinner of pasta, in her hotel room.

  The whorled shells, the world. Time all curled up in its shale strata: the day with its night curving back in reflection; the year with its seasons of burgeoning and decline. The river, the mountains, where once was equatorial sea. We do not visit the same river twice. We do not stand still.

  Near here, she knows, lies the Burgess Shale. She has read about and seen images of those obsolete creatures, life forms from half a billion years ago. Records of the other creation. She would like to see the Burgess Shale, to see the fossils in their exposed seabed. This is possible, she discovers. Guided tours, hikes, on-site lectures. She need only drive through the mountains a little more.

  She will drive, then, to Field. She will get out of her car, her carapace. She will touch the rock that was mud. She will see the fossils, so tiny, compared to the models in the museum exhibits: squiggles on stone tablets. She will touch the stone bestiary: Heptogaster, a coiled, segmented phallus on a little stalk, with carrot-tops branching from its head. Marrella, like the rough draft of a trilobite, whose description has it rainbow-coloured. A half-inch long, it would have darted like glossy opalescent fingernails in the warm sea. Opabinia, a lush, velvety, lobed worm with a fantail, a proboscis. The famous Hallucigenia, with its which-way-up spines, a little handful of jacks, still a mystery. Creatures with bodies like 1950s spaceships, with five eyes or seven legs, with wheels for feet.

  Dead ends of evolution, these are, though from the same trees as living creatures. Barren: cloistered nuns.

  EN ROUTE AGAIN, she stops at a viewpoint, wrists aching from her grip on the steering wheel. Looks over the view: the rough, scraped, rock. The mountains have buckled up, heaved up against the sea, under which they used to lie. Layers of stone folded back on themselves, thrust up at oblique angles, sliced through. Layers of time, of millennia of microscopic silicate lives, roughly shaken from their sleep at the bottom of the sea, pulled up into the raw air. What are they for, these sterile folds and spills of stone? They are to hold back the continent. They are the continent balking at the sea.

  Busses of tourists have also stopped, and the tourists are busy with their raised cellphones, or the telescope lenses of their cumbersome cameras. They crowd near the barriers, but cannot obscure the mountains.

  This was the sea. Mud slid, transfixing life, and so we know: life moved. Life moves.

  She will gather her resources. She will regroup, repay herself. (In kind? But one is unkind, one is unreachable. One is untrue, one is unteachable. One is unjust and one unimpeachable.)

  One is one and all alone, and evermore shall be so.

  Alone she stands, but not stock still.

  Stasis kills: the anoxic pool.

  She will take shelter, make harbour. Harbour resentment, doubts. But also, strangers. Hope. She is wounded, wound up. In her word house she runs round. She will keep time. She will not run down. She will not fossilize: not stand still.

  HOLY, HOLY

  HE HAS TO ACCEPT THEIR OFFER, in the end. There’s a long weekend, a parade, a sailboat race, besides the university commencement in the city. All of the affordable hotels are full. He can’t stomach paying five hundred a night for a hotel room, on top of his flight. He doesn’t think he can stomach having to accept their hospitality either, but he really doesn’t have a choice.

  They give him a bedroom that is clearly the son’s – Catherine’s son’s. Catherine assures him that the boy isn’t using it, won’t mind. He’s working this summer in another province, won’t make it home for his sister’s graduation ceremony.

  Following her down the hallway of the house, which is large and labyrinthine, Kevin tries to think how old the son must be now.

  Nineteen! Catherine says. She turns to let him go past her into the room. He was anxious to move out, she says. That’s supposed to be the sign you did a good job of raising your kids. If they leave you.

  I wouldn’t know, he says.

  She winces at what he’s said, almost imperceptibly.

  He wants suddenly to press her up against the wall, to thrust his tongue into her mouth. But the younger daughter is around; he’s seen her, a tall thin pale girl, awkward in the doorway. And Catherine’s husband will be home soon.

  This is what he was afraid of. Why he shouldn’t be staying here. He’d had trouble getting out of the taxi, when it had pulled up in front of the house.

  She leads him down the hallway, then, to show him the bathroom he’ll have to himself. He makes himself focus on her sensibly-dressed person, ahead of him in the hallway. The grey-streaked hair in a bun. The denim shirt and loose cotton trousers. She seems to have lost her high round bottom, since he saw her last. Or maybe it’s just that her waist has thickened.

  Nevertheless. He feels his cock work upward against the seams of his jeans crotch, feels his senses narrow, sharpen.

  She gives him a partial tour of the house. It’s a period house, designed by a famous architect a century before. It’s not Catherine’s house: It belongs to the university and comes with her husband’s position. The rooms are high-ceilinged and formal in their geometry, finished in fine, dark-grained wood. The tall windows overlook, to one side, the famous rhododendron gardens, and to another, a sweep of bluebells sloping down to the blue of the sea. The kitchen has been updated, fitted with a restaurant-sized gas stove, several other large stainless steel appliances, acres of gleaming granite.

  Catherine bumps his hip with hers. Go on, she says. I know you’re lusting after it. Admit it.

  Well, yes, he says. A kitchen like this. A chef’s fantasy.

  It’s crazy, Catherine says. Nobody needs a house like this. But shows him the detail of the woodwork, the inlay and groining. He sees the layers, in her: the shyness, intimacy, even of her pleasure in the house’s beauty; over that a layer of deprecation, even mockery, at the grandness, the pretentiousness, and another layer over that one, of sensibleness: This is where we have to live. Why pretend?

  They have agreed that he will cook, the next night, a really great meal. Of course it’s not necessary, Catherine had said. But we’ll all love it.

  Something convoluted, again: She’s doing him a favour, allowing him to repay the debt of their hospitality.

  She gives him a house key, tells him to come and go as he pleases, to help himself to anything in the kitchen, to make himself at home. She’s businesslike about it. That’s Catherine, though: She gives you so much room that you feel you’re going to float away.

  The truth is he doesn’t think about Catherine very much, when he’s at home. He has a perfectly adequate life: in comparison to many people he knows, even very fortunate. He and his partner of five years, Aline, have good jobs, mutual interests, a pleasant house. They can afford to eat at a first-rate restaurant once a month, to take a nice trip, in reasonable comfort, every year. They are both, more or less, in good health, and, having met later in life, have no children to cause them anxiety. They considered carefully, before joining their households. They both have good conflict-resolution skills, learned in their respective careers. Aline is a stable, intelligent, self-actualized woman.

  It’s the longest he’s been with one woman. Been faithful to one woman. He carries the fact in him like a secret badge.

  What he feels for Catherine – it’s the product of conditioning, or body memory. That’s all. An inconvenience.

  He wishes, futilely, that he had thought of booking a hotel room much earlier.

  CATHERINE AND HER HUSBAND have a function to go to this evening, Catherine has told him, apologetically. A thing, she said.

  Not at all, he said. I have plans with our daughter.

  Catherine flustered. With Siobhan! Oh! Great! That’s great!

  He stays in his borrowed room reading until he hears the call and response of Catherine’s and Andrew’s voices, the practiced duet of it, cease with the clos
ing of the thick wooden front door, and then takes his spare key and leaves himself.

  HE HASN’T SEEN HER FOR six years.

  Kevin hadn’t even known he had a daughter. Then, ten years ago or more, an email from Catherine. She’d phoned his mother in Bishop’s Falls, remembering the name of the place, thinking correctly that it would be the same family. His mother, Mona, had given Catherine his email address, but then telephoned him, cautionary after the fact.

  When he’d told Mona he’d found out he had a twelve-year-old daughter, she’d said: She’s looking for child support. Ask for a paternity test.

  Ridiculous, he’d said. Catherine in her email had brought him up to date, not that he couldn’t have found her on the internet anyway. People like her are easy to find out about. For one thing, she must have brought in about twice as much as he did, when he was working. And the husband would be making even more. When he’d said that to Mona, she’d changed her tactic: Maybe you should try to get custody, she said. Then we could sue her for child support. Mona was a piece of work, that was for sure.

  He’d had no doubt Siobhan was his: In the pictures Catherine emailed, she looked like his sisters, his mother. The avid overbite, the feral mass of red hair.

  Siobhan had not been much interested in him, back then. Catherine had brought her to Ontario, where he lived, to meet him, a couple of years after that email. The two of them had stayed in a hotel and had spent evenings with him, but Siobhan had not seemed much taken with him. He’d proposed a number of outings; he’d polled people he knew, to find out what a girl her age would be interested in. Catherine had suggested a riding school for daytimes, but she didn’t want to do anything outside of that except watch TV and message her friends. He’d supposed she had been hoping for a more glamourous father figure, someone dashing who would undermine her parents, take her shopping in Paris, maybe. Instead here was a man with thick fingers and large earlobes, a heavy way of talking when nervous.