by SK Dyment
A heavy thunderhead has fallen out of the sky and tumbled down onto the city. It is made up of smaller storm clouds, but they are turned upside down, breasts fallen out of a bra, milk poured slowly into tea. All night, the streets have remained dense with fog. With morning, spirals generated by the activity of a million spoons, have created a vortex of agitated air that pushes the mist to her feet. To Jackie’s perception, the headfirst cloud has picked up speed, drifts away from Toronto in search of softer earth. People in the processing room at police station comment that it looks as if there isn’t going to be a storm, and that no one need to leave home that morning with their umbrellas. Despite this, they all have.
Underground, the downtown court has entertained an indolent series of prostitution convictions, a festive parade of smart remarks, one fart, and two unpursued threats of contempt. Morning is still only beginning. “Jailbird Jackie” is sitting in her cell. The women around her are sensitive enough to appreciate that she is lost in her own world and try not to interrupt her with jokes.
Their new cellmate is thinking about an electromechanical device designed for the issuing of cash. She sways slightly in the holding tank beneath the earth. The women sitting near her have almost vanished in as far as her senses are concerned, in preference to her musings. She meditates on the technology of unattended, online computer banking, imagining herself loading a newly-freed banking machine onto a truck and driving it coolly away. A subway trundles to a stop and then rolls away again from the College Park Station, and the walls shudder slightly. Her arms twitch, her eyelids lower. Across from her, a woman named Mimi stirs, glancing at a woman in a fox-fur coat. They smile, and Mimi motions with her chin at Jackie. It is fortunate that Mimi likes Jackie because Mimi is not only a far more powerful woman than Jackie might guess at, she is one who is destined to redirect Jackie’s life.
Mimi grins at the women and raises a brow. Jackie is starting to doze. A loud tap on the bars makes the group jump.
“Your phone call,” says the guard. “Best make it now.”
Jackie follows him down the hall. Fighting a twinge to pee, she composes herself and steadies. She stares at the phone directory, and then searches for the vintage motorcycle repair shop. Yes, it is there. It has been waiting for her to dial her old friend. The phone rings at the other end. Jackie blows a dark forelock out of her eyes. The overheated density in the guard’s station is awash with male hormonal sweat and aftershave.
“Wanda here.” Sitting alone at the Toronto bedside of a comatose Ben, who only months before crashed his lovingly rebuilt Czechoslovakian motorcycle, Wanda has been taking calls on her cellphone.
“Hello, love,” Jackie answers, realizing she had been expecting an answering machine. “Guess where I have landed. And this time I am certain it is not my fault.”
Her heartbeat counts the moments before Wanda’s ironic voice responds: “The same type of little lock-up we met in last time?”
Jackie sighs in recognition, shifting on her shoes with no laces.
At the other end of the line, she can picture Wanda’s smile at the familiarity of Jackie’s voice. Wanda also needs to explain a new situation to her friend. Ben’s IV drip glows softly as a chapel window, gathering radiance from the fluorescent lights in the hall. The bible her grandmother had once carried through an alpine windstorm is resting next to his tray. All this she describes to her friend. Wanda is not wondering as to Jackie’s claim of innocence. Since the very first day, seeing there was a morality problem in Jackie, Wanda had looked into her new friend’s eyes and felt love. And in that first night, she was also certain she had discovered in Jackie a life-changing sense of witchery, a current of what it is to be alive. Wanda was, of course, overqualifying an unethical person, and, at the time, she reminded herself she was also a person easily led astray, something that protective Ben would remind her of if or when he surfaces from his coma, a solo trip to an unconscious realm no one can fathom.
“Take what you need, reach into the cosmos, and if you can survive, Wanda,” Jackie had told her, “you can also dance.”
Because of her, Wanda had renovated her Catholicism to include a love for things inanimate. Since the unfortunate evening back in Vancouver when the escort agency that promised to connect actors to the movie industry was raided by the police, Wanda had never forgotten meeting Jackie. And in those first days, while she sat studying the strands of life-support wires and tubing that had become Ben, technically recovering, she saw Jackie’s thing for machinery was something an ordinary person could admire.
Commendably, despite sensing loyalty, Jackie has never attempted to involve her friends in a heist. She stands inside the battered jailhouse telephone underground and feels wistful for a moment that she had not. Perhaps she might have saved Ben from spinning out his new bike.
At the hospital, Wanda gathers her things. “Because of you, somehow,” she tells Jackie, “because of this, Ben will be well.”
“I’m not sure I follow your logic on that,” says Jackie, but Wanda has already hung up. Jackie shuffles back with the guard, realizing Wanda thinks of her as a sort of visit from the underworld, an underworld that is populated with magic and is holy and revered.
This Toronto arrest, like the last vehicle charge, is based on a copycat criminal who has not only nothing to do with Jackie, but who also has nothing of what Jackie considers her finesse. Because of this, Jackie knows she will be released. While undergoing questioning, she learned that she was mistaken yet again for an amateur with at least one accomplice. Jackie, who never uses an accomplice, had become so interested in solving the case that she had completely forgotten to use her phone opportunity until her transfer to the cells under the College Park Court. The possibility that they could try her for a crime she had practically solved on their behalf now annoys her and dangles like an ambush. It would be a betrayal of her sleuthing efforts as well as a miscarriage of justice.
Above her, the streets pale. Through the Toronto morning, Wanda races her car past showroom windows, where motorcycles and flashing televisions stare out at wintry streets. All over town, fingers break open bagels, bran muffins, croissants, and apply wet pats of hot butter. Underground, the friendly brown-eyed guard appears in the corridor and motions to Jackie to come. Word has arrived through her state-appointed lawyer that her copycats have been apprehended. As it would take too many hours of phoney legal work to construct a connection to Jackie, she is free to go.
“Because of this, I am reuniting with sweet Wanda. And going to visit a vintage motorcycle shop. Where there is some sort of love. Thank you, copycats. Thank you,” she says out loud.
Above ground, a hot-dog man named Gus is cracking jokes with a young man cracking gum, and the flames leaping around his sleeves are three fork prongs away from setting fire to his arms. His arms are muscled like ropes and have old European tattoos on them of interest to both queer men and ladies. He is giddily glad he finally moved East at Swan’s urging from Vancouver. He grits his teeth as a streetcar blasts a horn at an absent driver. It is Wanda who has parked her car with flashing lights on the curb, blocking the passage of traffic. One of Gus’s teeth is gold, and the backs are filled with silver. The holes are filled with sugar. He smiles as the hot sun breaks through the clouds, and the licorice-wet street before him begins to steam and rise. He is distracted not by the parked car, but by the quickly moving form of Wanda, who has hurried away from the car into the courts. He wants it to be the girl from the Schilthorn, the red-cheeked woman from the Lions Gate Bridge. She has moved too quickly to be certain, yet still his heart jumps in his chest.
Six riders jump off the streetcar: Four men, a boy with jeans on that has a chain leading to his wallet that is knocking against a pocket at the back of his knees, and a girl who wears a toque that says “boy,” a statement conveying a range of interpretations. They are all wearing gold goose-feather coats. It is not because they represent something,
but because it has recently been twenty degrees below freezing in Toronto, and gold goose-feather coats are a practical and hot look. It is a fashion this winter that a small group of Canadians standing in a snowbank look like lost bees awaiting a message from their Queen. Gus busies himself while the group buzzes around the car and discusses moving it out of the way. The streetcar remains stalled as Wanda has run into the mall. Because they are Canadians, the group of bees call the absent driver “an arse.” They shout it together: “Takes a real arse to park in the streetcar lane,” and the hum of their shared indignation reverberates back to the onlookers in the streetcar. There is a cheer from within the streetcar although nothing has happened.
The group outside shouts, “One and-a … two and-a … three and-a…” while they heave the Honda Civic out of the street and onto the sidewalk. Together, they have the severe expression a crew might adopt while transferring an injured snowmobiler to a gurney. Now the Civic is even more incorrectly parked than before, confusing foot traffic and frightening the street people panning for change.
This time, the yellow bees cheer. They are enormously, extra-proportionately proud of themselves. And the streetcar can now pass. The six gold, goose-feathered friends slap their mitts together and hop back on the streetcar. A great hurrah rises up from the passengers who the friends rejoin on the streetcar. The girl in gold announces that the guy who owns the Civic must be one card short of a deck. There is another hurrah and laughter.
A relief driver in a grape coat jumps on board to announce that whoever owns that Civic has the kind of hair that grows into his head instead of out. The new driver, who is two suit buttons short of a dress coat since the day his wife jumped onto a westbound car and phoned him from the east side of Halifax, chats to a dispatcher on the phone. From out of the College Park mall, a woman with one regular hand and one prosthetic hand rushes forward, pulling Jackie with her as if she were a toddler. Glancing at the car parked on the sidewalk she declares, “Saint Ciboire! Anyone who would do that must not have both their oars in the water!” Wanda’s blue Honda is seven blocks short of a tow-truck operator and fifteen blocks short of a junkyard fine. Her friend stands blinking at the reflected light, at the homeless people wrapped in sleeping bags outside the office towers and department stores, at the snowbanks, and at the new gold goose-feathered coats on the people standing in streetcar. Finally, she stares at the Civic blocking the sidewalk instead of the road.
Jackie has a drawn-out look that is different from the fresh, bright-eyed, fruit-fed passersby, and different again from the feverish, frostbitten people sitting on the ground. Her friend places her coffee on the ground, and together, they shove the little Civic back out of the snowbank and into the traffic. It is a feat of physical power that inspires a whistle from Gus. “Holy foot-longs!” he mutters in a reverent way, an expression he has learned as a member of Toronto’s male steam bath community. The cry of exclamation dovetails with his day job without the raising of a brow. He stares at the two women, thinking one of them must surely be Wanda, his beautiful lost girl on the ski hill, as he passes the simulated bacon bits to a boy hooker. Gus and his male distraction are struck in the face by a blast of snow. He turns away, and an eyelash blows into his relish pot and disappears.
When he looks up to flirt, the Civic is gone.
8.
MIMI, STILL AWAITING charges of solicitation, withdraws a neatly rolled joint wrapped in plastic from her vagina. She is glad that Jackie has been freed. She knows that Jailbird Jackie was confident that there was nothing to prove it was her, and a confident ex-con is almost always a right-on one.
The woman with the doob is still imprisoned in the joint, in the holding cells of College Park. She is awaiting trial, floors above, in a courtroom still many levels below the surface of the street, and only a few levels beneath a mall teeming with shoppers. A more naive citizen might suggest perhaps a body-cavity search overlooked her, or that it was never conducted at all. The truth of the matter is that this particular woman has been subjected to many. She has learned the art of transferring contraband on her body in a series of lightning-fast sleight-of-hand movements that are older than time itself. The possibility that uninvited latex gloves will ever recover what is inches away from their grasp is not even worth consideration. It is more ancient, more eye-popping than the most elaborate of card tricks, and it is something that she does extremely well.
The women spark up the spliff. Each take three hauls and passes it to her left in the time-honoured manner, remarking that it tastes a bit like a fish. The third woman strokes the fox fur of her coat and out of protocol says, “I wish I could just walk out of this place right now.” It is as if she is speaking to none of them at all.
“I don’t see why we can’t,” responds Mimi, who has a flying squirrel tattooed on her hand. “I am so tired of getting picked up by the same goddamn crooked cops. They’re all familiar faces to me. I’ve been doing this work for centuries. It’s my body, not their property. I can do whatever the hell I want.”
“You can’t walk through walls,” suggests a woman in tight tan jeans and white jean jacket decorated in rosettes.
They all lean forward. A good intellectual banter is starting up. The woman known as Mimi can really rattle a woman’s cage and she grins cheerfully. “If all our realities are creations of our minds, then everything around us is a perception. And as I’m sure you already know, all our perceptions can be altered….”
Since the woman in white and tan is arguing in favour of pessimism, Mimi is confident she can win. She asserts, “But all matter is composed of some type of carbon-based molecules … and carbon is bound to other carbons, creating concrete, blood, iron, steel….”
“I am a carbon-based life form…” declares the woman in the fox-fur coat unexpectedly. They stare.
“You most certainly are…” answers jean-jacket.
“A carbon-based somethin’. A carbon-based somethin’, she most certainly is,” Mimi concludes, and together they begin to catcall the woman in the fur.
A correctional officer behind one-way glass taps on the surface.
“We exist,” declares the woman who brought in the joint.
Mimi smiles and remarks, “A grain of sand exists, a feather exists, an electron exists. All of them exist, because we accept them and allow them to be so, and so, we then perceive them to be….”
There is a silence.
“I haven’t perceived an electron in some while,” the woman in white tells Mimi. The group busts out in laughter.
Beneath the earth, Mimi further digs in her heels. “A drug, a bug, within the laws of our thoughts, it doesn’t matter. A prison. But let’s say that we don’t believe in their existence, or their relevance to our lives. None of you women in this room could argue that is not true. Then nothing around us is really tangible or true, it is all just an illusion that we have collectively agreed to. If we choose to believe in the existence of a Creator, then we agree that we are more than these material bodies, that we return to the universe after death, and that we can transcend our present form, not just astrally, but by unifying with each other in pursuit of our common destination, our true destiny, to transcend all things physical, to unite and pass through elements sharing the same basic molecular structure as ourselves … to travel through the non-distance….”
Another silence, this time very electric. All eyes are now fixed on the woman with the joint.
“Therefore, our Gods, Goddesses, and Creators are as dependent on our belief system as a grain of sand….”
“That’s why I don’t believe in any God,” says a woman sitting against the wall. She wears a mass of bleached hair confused in a constellation of ribbon and string.
“For one thing, every time I go to a house of God, ‘He’s’ not there. Sometimes there is a janitor there, sometimes there’s a cleaning lady. And who wants a spiritual power watching over them who has a
cleaning lady to clean up ‘His’ house? If God answered prayers, there would be no suffering in this world. Well, there is. I’m about to take the heat for a fifty-gram rock my boyfriend, excuse me, my ex-boyfriend, stashed in my apartment, and I’ve got two little girls. I’m going to jail and he’s walking around free. My mother said she might take care of them. Yeah, like she took care of me. I’m suffering right now and I have a tension headache the size of the GTA. Is God helping me? No. Pass the joint, will ya?”
The conversation continues. Mimi observes through a slight shadow in the one-way glass that in the guardroom next to the holding cell, the deep brown eyeballs of an officer of corrections roll upwards under his lids. Above them, the streetcars and the hot-dog man and the swell of humanity rush in all directions. They are expelling a hundred different types of sweats and smells. Mimi feels as if she is able to bob up through the earth and see them there. The guard has been watching her talk, and she stares at him, knowing he is hypnotically drawn towards her in her simple sweater over a T-shirt and a pair of shorts over tights. She takes off her sweater. She has been the centre of the group from the beginning. She draws him into her group with her mind. There is a group: they are seven, sitting in front of him. And there is only her at the centre. His eyes drift shut again for what seems like a moment. When he opens them, Mimi knows he is horrified. A moment later, he is unlocking the holding cell door, and stands gaping at the empty room. He walks into the centre of the cell, then to the corner. They are not there. Seven women have vanished, and the door to the cell is swinging freely ajar. A current of air from the frosty winter outside makes the many hairs on his body wave in an eerie, spooked-out way. He turns and looks up at the video camera, and the robot filmmaker captures in digital motion the collapse of everything the wet-eyed guard had ever understood about the physical world.