Steel Animals

by SK Dyment

  They trade no lies for bricks of gold

  That will fall around their ears.

  Natalia likes it when Rudy sends her poems he has written himself, but it disturbs her when he adds at the end:

  “What … fills this city? The pleas to end pain? The cries of sorrow? On the assassin, or assassins, I call down the most vile damnation—I will avenge him as I would avenge my own father.”

  Natalia, who is feeling paranoid as a result and stops smoking cannabis to put herself to sleep at night, stays up late reading until she happens upon Rudy’s quote in Oedipus Tyrannus, which is being shown at a theatre in the Bowery district. When she goes to see it, she realizes that it is a play about a man who kills his father. Also that the actors are all wearing recycled plastic packing material and automotive parts as costumes. Despite the nudity and the endless minor notes of a collection of keyboard pieces squawking from three different tape players placed around the room, she is able to understand what Rudy is saying. She suspects that he continues to suspect foul play in the death of Turner. Whether it is a reasonable fear is not important. She sees now that he related the old man Turner to his own father, a man who died early in Rudy’s life. In Oedipus Tyrannus, the death of the father by the son results in a curse, and ultimately the tearing out by the son of his eyes, which in the Bowery version is demonstrated with paint-filled sponges and hand-held paintballs that squirt outward. Natalia leaves intensely grateful, invigorated, and grossed-out. Fortunately, Rudy is not sleeping with his mother.

  She calls his mother in Etobicoke, intending to tell her Rudy is in danger. Instead, she asks her about Rudy’s father, the one who had died when he was young.

  “Rudy didn’t take that very well, I must say. Now I think Gary went just the way they said he did, by falling in the river all liquored-up and drowning. He was a fool for the bottle, something I tried to protect Rudy from. But after Gary died, I couldn’t protect Rudy from the rumours. He was up to some mischief before he died, a part of a bad crowd. Rudy always believed that they had killed him.”

  “Do you mean the safe-cracking? And being in with a gang that specialized in picking locks and breaking into businesses and banks?”

  Rudy’s mother was surprised by this woman who knew intimacies about her son’s life, and, at the same time, pleased by the directness and frank concern of the younger woman’s manner. She herself had remarried and had not talked about her previous husband much in the past thirty years. It had been forbidden in her house. The manner of Rudy’s friend was kind, relaxing, and her phone voice was so calming that Rudy’s mother realized she had words and pent-up emotions that had been trapped inside for years.

  “It was a very hard time for our family, Natalia. All I wanted was to protect my son and keep him from a life of crime. Rudy did not mourn or act like a boy who was in mourning as I thought he should. He would sit at his father’s place at meals, insisted on keeping favourite articles of his father’s clothes when I just wanted to throw everything away. And the other things I wanted to throw away … Rudy was too fast.” She dabbed her eyes.

  “What other things of his father’s did he keep before you could throw them away?”

  “You know what sort of things. His father was his model, but he was a criminal. Rudy,” his mother told her, “is by comparison a very honest boy. It was a great pleasure talking to you, dear. I hope he marries you if he has told you he will.”

  “He’s on a retreat right now,” said Natalia.

  “Oh, they run away, but he’ll be back. You seem like a very nice girl.”

  “I mean, he’s gone off to the woods for a while to collect his thoughts about life.”

  “The death of the Chairman. He told me all about that on the phone. He’s been put into a position with a lot of responsibility now.”

  “Yes, he has, and he’s running it by remote control. I’ll have him phone you when he is out of the mountains. I’ll have him call you as soon as I can,” says Natalia. She believes this woman, this caring mother, might have been a good person for Rudy to do something else with besides brag to over the years. If Rudy is not killed by assassins. The word is stuck in Natalia’s mind.

  Animated, take wing with the spirit of wonder

  I climb weightlessly high and fall shamelessly under.

  It is a poem Rudy has written about young hawks he has been watching as they begin to fly.

  “I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore that sitteth upon many waters,” he adds.

  Less charmingly, he follows with, “‘Where we are, / There’s daggers in men’s smiles: the near in blood, / the nearer bloody.’”

  This time, Natalia knows the last bit is a quote from the death of Macbeth. There is a production in the East Side with vocalists projecting the words of the play from behind screens, while the actual parts are acted out by power tools, concluding in the death of a reciprocating saw at the hands of a twelve-amp grinder and a five-foot orbital sanding machine. Despite the promise that sparks will fly, Natalia chooses not to go. She studies Macbeth instead, looking for clues in the conspired death of a king. There may be several assassins, and if Rudy is in danger, she certainly wants to be in the know.

  The next mail comes only a day later and opens with “‘Had he not resembled / My father as he slept…’”

  He follows with his own haiku:

  Look further

  Hawks grown to feast and murder

  Yet a grace on the wing.

  He then sends his best wishes and tells Natalia to have no fear. A living dog is better than a dead lion.’” It is a quote from Ecclesiastes.

  Empowered by the talk with his mother, she writes to Rudy’s secretary Camelia, using the encryption device Rudy has installed into Natalia’s computer and told her no one else could understand.

  “Hey? Emergency, answer back!” she writes Camelia. She writes it a second time with a new encryption to scramble the words, then a third. Camelia will have the technology to unscramble it, she tells herself, then retires with a book about the assassination of Abe Lincoln. She has settled in with his prophetic words: “Corporations have been enthroned … an era of corruption … working on the prejudices of the people…” when a gong on her computer notifies her that another email has arrived.

  It’s Camelia, pissed as hell, wondering what Natalia meant by, “Askance? Scenery, enemy herb!” not to mention, “Keen? Hymen, brace necessary!” and, “Wench? Beg, sneaky creamery!”

  It has just made Natalia sound like a whore, which she is. She rambles around her apartment, then lights up her “enemy herb” and stares out at the city. That is when she has the herb-enhanced memory of Rudy installing the encryption. It does not take her much longer to realize that the letters from “Hey? Emergency, answer back!” have convoluted into those three anagrammed and unsolicited insults she then sent off to a woman she has never met. Which means that not only was Natalia unable to communicate with Camelia, except in the form of an apology from an unhacked-with computer, but that Camelia was also not able to read or translate her communications with Rudy. So, Camelia would have no inkling of any assassination talk or premeditated murders that may be in the works. Natalia put the roach out. She had told herself to quit, and paranoia is the last thing she needs if there was a threat.

  21.

  THE NEIGHBOURS in Natalia’s building have had an incident. They had been getting along well—a friendship lubricated by drinking—and they have just returned from a movie. Because she is high, Natalia realizes she has seen this before in a neorealistic movie. The movie is about three women who watch in drunken dismay as their imprisoned friend’s over-amorous cat pitches from the balcony and falls harmlessly six stories into some shrubs. In the movie, the innocent cat slides slowly on a spilled drink and some ice cubes. There is also a slow-motion sequence, which provides plenty of time to pick up the cat before it goes over the edge. A
laska is surprised by the over-amorous cat and thinks that it should be able to catch its own bearings in life as she did after losing her lover to a jail sentence. Jackie was a little too loaded to believe that the cat was falling sideways. As far as she was concerned, the whole building was doing some pretty interesting stunts with gravity, a theory which, when the building inspectors finally arrived, proved sound. Vespa had just smoked herself up and was certain that the sliding of the cat was somehow a replay from the film, not realizing that neorealism is called neorealism because it has just really happened, or it is about to really happen to you. The cat walks out onto the balcony, Jackie spills her drink in surprise, and the animal begins to slip on the ice. Rather than hesitate as the women in the movie had done, they break with the script and leap forward to prevent a yet-to-be-proven harmless fall. Failing, they clutch at the balcony railing and look down with tragic faces at the cat spirals away from them on the wind.

  It is Alaska who immediately feels guilty. Jackie is transfixed and is still staring bug-eyed over the balcony at the social dysfunction of it all, while Vespa and Alaska appear on the lawn, wandering through the security lights, calling out the pet’s name. Didactica, the cat, has fallen into a soft hedgerow of decorative shrubs, is thrilled to be the centre of attention and is not injured in the least. To be sure, they take money from Olesya’s defense fund and taxi the animal to the vet at midnight. The vet puts a tensor bandage around the animal’s left foreleg and a Hendrix-like white scarf around its head. He charges them one hundred and seventy dollars.

  Natalia tries to avoid them after they recount this to her in the elevator.

  The next day, a press meeting is held and a full-scale campaign is launched to activate the people in Olesya’s building, so unsound that both an African violet and a cat have fallen from the balconies, resulting in expensive damages in both cases; or, three if you love plants. The woman upstairs, who owned the African violet, appears to be avoiding the women on the sixth floor, but she is so friendly in the elevator that they cannot imagine why. It is frustrating their campaign, and since she lost her African violet, they would like her to be involved. Alaska offers to coach her so that she can talk to the press. The other tenants in the building have stories of cans falling out of cupboards, magazines sliding paranormally from tables, and one semi-retired gentleman is willing to testify that a carpenter’s level slid across his hall floor as he was watching television and struck his miniature Sheltie in the ass. He hesitates to reveal his name. It is Alaska’s hope that they will all sign for a class-action suit, hoping they can win damages from B.F. Turner without having to actually move.

  Lawyers make Jackie nervous and she is haunted by dreams of a falling cat superimposed by a second dream of a powerful, menacing-looking flying squirrel. She also feels uncomfortable around Alaska, who is in love with Olesya because she feels nervous about what she has done to Olesya.

  When Vespa makes love to Jackie her deep, intense eyes burn into Jackie’s soul, and she is beginning, for the first time in her remorseless life, to experience regret. Jackie goes to Ben and finds solace there. Ben has discovered a month-to-month studio rental which is basically a cheap garage.

  “It’s New York,” says Ben. “People are everywhere scrabbling to find apartments to stay in, but this little garage, because it’s unheated, it’s been waiting here unrented. I think it’s cute.”

  Like Ben, Jackie has always enjoyed garages. She throws her money at the rent the same afternoon. While Wanda tours galleries and shops in SoHo, Ben sits in the quiet of the garage studio space, contemplating his recovery. “I was outside of my body, and now that I’m back, I can’t decide how to move forward with my life. My reputation in vintage motorcycle repair is something I can salvage, but I’ve changed, changed in some ways I can’t yet understand. I love Wanda, but I don’t always know if she sees me.”

  “You’ll need some money,” says Jackie, who thinks easy money is the solution to all ills.

  She finds Ben’s company is uncomplicated compared to his sister. They hang out in the garage while Wanda is off shopping and exploring the city, often with Alaska, her new bff. Together Ben and Jackie begin designing an ultralight device shaped like an animal, one that glides without sound. They are both fascinated with flying, or at least, Ben’s obsession and the dream have drawn Jackie in.

  “In the coma, Jackie, I was astrally suspended outside of my body. My whole life, cruel people have tried to tell me that the physical form of a black man makes me not worthy of a full, free life. I tried to choose people who loved me. I had a boyhood friend, someone I loved, so you see I am capable of loving a man equally to my passions for a woman. I had to face this in myself. Society is not kind to that sort of passion. He was one of several men I have felt love for, physical love, and Rudy hurt me, and then he took up with Vespa, and also hurt her. I saw that I had to stay close to Vespa, who has cared for me selflessly from the start. I wanted to build something for her as well. For everyone. I saw the full extent of it, and while my body healed, I healed my mind with it. I felt love for myself, for the first time, I guess. Love. Maybe it was that. My body letting me back in. Nothing is going to stop me now, Jackie, nothing.”

  Jackie rents torches and has tools, machinery, and steel and aluminum parts dropped of. She consults the blueprints with Ben. A flying animal. When Alaska or Vespa visit, Jackie says it is a sculpture of little Didactica, and that it is going to be a publicity mascot for the group. Jackie is lying; it is Ben’s flying obsession becoming ultralight, it is the reoccurring dream squirrel coming to life.

  At the building, Natalia is unsure whether to join the safety of the tenants’ committee, or to go into hiding. She is certain she is the only tenant who knows the condo unit zoning is about to be trashed by Rudy and the entire place altered, perhaps demolished entirely, to make way for a more organic look.

  From his perch, Rudy wants to complement local fin-de-siècle architecture while providing a complete gymnasium for children who are registered in nearby schools and wish to bring their own guests. He also plans to install an indoor park and a wave pool, as well as facilities geared to help long-term homeless people have shelter that is so responsive to their needs they will never want to leave. If they do want to leave, and then come back, Rudy wants to make sure they can. Natalia has already seen drafts of the atrium with its waterslides and its lending library.

  “It’s possible, Rudy, but won’t it inconvenience the people already living here?”

  These are now combined with sketches of other features less fantastical and closer to those found in the fixed-income housing of more progressive countries. She wonders when the place will be inspected properly as Rudy has ordered, and when the tenants will be paid off if it must be demolished for flaws. Her email gongs as she is cooking a linguini. Strangely, when she later removes the pot, the linguini has migrated from the centre to the western side of the oven.

  It is a Rudy poem.

  Like father like son with every door picked apart

  Five rooms one mind one four-chambered heart

  I have not killed my father but my mourning is dead

  His windows are broken his spirit has fled

  With my father above I will face down my death

  Breaking open all doors ‘til my very last breath.

  It’s cute, thinks Natalia. She is glad Rudy did not kill his father; it’s something he certainly never mentioned to her. Neither did his mother. He was only fourteen when he lost his father and he wasn’t involved. Now, with a tear in her eye, Natalia thinks Rudy, poetic as he may be, is losing his mind. Not allowing for assassins, she has been afraid of losing him, but not in this way. Maybe that is why all his new apartment buildings are designed to house street people and the homeless.

  Rudy signs off: “‘I have done the deed. Didst thou not hear a noise?’”

  Another quote from Macbeth, she knows it now. She
is glad she finally caved in and went to see the version in the park, where an obedience school walked through the roles with microphones and woofers hooked on to canine collars. She is no thespian, but Natalia recognizes the quote from the performance, and the meaning is clear as a contact lens on a dinner plate. “I have done the deed,” can only mean he has begun the orders for the inspection, and the possible demolition of the building at West 108th. He is way ahead of the tenants committee, and she has no one to tell.

  “Like a thief in the night, she breaks into his heart…” she types, thinking it is an original poem and then realizing it is a song by KISS. She erases and types, “Call yer ma!” instead, accidentally hitting the key that encrypts it and sends it to head office.

  The next morning, there is a note on Camelia’s desk that screams, “Creamy All!” in large, bold-faced letters.

  Oh well, thinks Camelia. Why not go to New York and meet this hottie? She has heard from the New York office that Natalia is an extraordinarily delightful woman, perhaps even the mastermind behind some of Rudy’s progressive changes. It’s good to have her alliance, but her emails, particularly calling her a wench, have been more than a bit demanding. It is against her professional and personal policies, but if Rudy won’t come out of the backwoods, Camelia wouldn’t mind getting a little bit of that cream herself.

  22.

  WANDA AND BEN have returned to Toronto to assess the bike repair shop and decide what to do with their lives. They are making love, and he is breathing in the new tantric way that Wanda has taught him to. Distracted by the half-finished glider project and the possibility of setting a lucrative new repair shop in New York, Ben can’t keep his thoughts focused. He is fighting the urge not to visualize the male server at the New York Pilsner bar when a souvenir plate of the Statue of Liberty that hangs over their bed falls from the wall and strikes him on the head. He collapses into Wanda’s arms, and Wanda, delighted with the sudden intimacy, holds him tenderly, until she notices the blood trickling from his hair. The plate, like all good souvenir objects designed to celebrate freedom—and commemorate the first thing immigrants and tourists see upon their arrival to New York—is made of a heavy-duty ceramic similar to the cermet chosen by NASA. It does not shatter but falls like an Olympic discus onto the hand-hooked rug by their bed. Ben moans in such a spectacular way that Wanda is not alerted to the fact that he has just been knocked unconscious, causing all the precious neurons they fought so hard to remaster to suddenly go on the blink. She is enjoying the feeling of his more sensitive muscles relaxing in, and on, her body. But the weight of him is getting to be a little too much. When she sees the blood, she rolls his body slowly onto his side, hoping to look into his eyes. Instead, he slips from her embrace and to her dismay, rolls to the floor. The fall is three feet.