by Peter Unwin
Let the other ones do that. There were so many of them now, so many sparky young beauties running around. The world couldn’t get enough of them. The media fed on them. This one had appropriated a name freighted with misery, a self-dramatizer. What was more contemptible than self-drama, she thought? Enough went wrong without it. All she had to do was wait ten or twenty years and she’d find herself covered in enough of her own bruises, she’d have no interest in parading around in someone else’s. Or even have room on her body to put those bruises, she thought.
Linda waited a few moments until the heat subsided in her and then went to the sofa and slept.
POSTSCRIPT 5: ROAD KILL
SHE TURNED IN AT A paved lot on the banks of a crashing river and ate tuna fish sandwiches outdoors in the sun. The fish tasted like tin, not even fresh tin. The air was rich with the smell of fir trees. Ten minutes later she was back on the highway over the Batchawana, past the Kozy Kabins, boarded shut, and into the anonymous forest tracts.
Up front of her, through the windshield, she saw a commotion of some kind; then it became clear. A moose had wandered onto the highway and been horribly T-boned there. Now it lay obscenely wounded and enormous, like the end of the world she thought, lying on its side, unable to get up. As she sped toward the spot, she saw an emergency vehicle with a flashing yellow light parked next to the animal, a slender man in a brown official-looking shirt crouched on the highway administering the rites of a bush religion it looked like, murmuring consolations and holding his hand piteously against the warm flesh, stroking the fur. Linda thought that the man was crying, she saw it. His face was stricken. The animal too, she couldn’t bear that, to see the stricken face. She was about to cry herself. Her own stricken body. The suffering of animals. She couldn’t tolerate it. What had they done except refuse to be human? To love their children? The beast was too magnificent to be dead, it mustn’t be dead, she thought. It must not be dead. He had to save the animal. She told herself wildly that Paul could do it, he could save the animal. He would pull some arcane knowledge from a hat and cure it. The man out on the highway in the brown shirt. He could do it too. There were times when she had faith in what men could do. The brown wool waved in the wind, whipped by the passing vehicles. In a moment it was gone, she saw it in reverse in the mirror. Gone. The ash was in her throat. In the fleeting appearance and disappearance of that dying animal her grief took hold of her. She was in grief for living things that wandered from the wilderness, or into it, and were struck dead by forces that made no sense to them. She grieved her husband.
17
ERRATIC
PAUL CAME DOWN THE STAIRS in his housecoat, barely cinched at the waist, thudding heavily and erratically, like a boulder come loose from the side of a hill. An erratic. She had married an erratic. I wanted erotic she thought, and instead I got an erratic. She lay tenaciously on her side on the sofa, as though on a life raft, with a tattered comforter tugged over top of her. Her eyes were open, Paul saw the flecks of bronze in them. He also sensed that her eyes had been open all night, looking through everything. Looking through him in particular, looking through the holes in him, the empty holes. A volume of her Dictionary of Canadian Biography lay open, face down on the floor. He felt suddenly stupidly jealous of it. Steady snow came down outside the window.
“Good morning.”
“It’s snowing,” she answered.
“Yes, snowing.” His fingers went to his face as if to take the stubble off his jowls. He saw snow coming down, swirling, hesitant to make contact with the ground, apprehensive about landing. He blinked at her. “Is there coffee?”
“Did you know Loretta Ramsay is the last of Beothuks? The very last one. Forced to wear hoop earrings and attend gallery openings at which she is gazed upon by middle-aged men like you. It’s a sad story. Very sad.”
“Coffee,” he repeated, carefully.
“Infected by a very common and virulent strain of guilt, she’s forced to dance half-naked, night after night, in downtown nightclubs, high on designer drugs, until she avenges the crimes that call to us from the past, and having done that she drops dead in the front seat of the car of a married advertising executive who is driving her back to his penthouse condo in the hope of sleeping with her. Very sad story. ‘The Last of the It Girls.’”
“I gather there’s no coffee?”
“It doesn’t bother you?”
“It bothers me,” he said. “No coffee.”
“It doesn’t bother you that your friend is traipsing around under the name of the last member of an extinct tribe? That’s too pathetic.”
He went to the window and examined the familiar stern outline of the church, lit up with floodlights, every window in the place fiercely lit. The church resembled a surreal birthday cake offered up to an indifferent child, a child who did not like cake at all. “Fortress God,” he said, and turned quickly on her. “How do you know she isn’t? How do you know she’s not the last surviving member of some doomed tribe? A Transformer, working medicine we don’t know anything about. She’s after something, like everyone. She’s been put here for a reason. Like you. Even me.”
“The woman is a fake. She’s wearing dream catcher earrings. She’s wrapped herself up in shells, she’s ...” Linda felt the intoxicating rush of a full-blown rant coming on her. She was good at ranting, it was a skill she had picked up from her mother, who had levelled elaborate curses at just about everything, including an upholstered chair. “She is really that most despicable of things.” Linda thought she might be shouting, but was pleased to determine she was speaking calmly. “An artist. Don’t you get the sense that even the gods are sick of artists? How many times can you piss on Jesus Christ or smear menstrual blood on a wall? Or talk about your process?” She was up now, peering again at the postcard on the fridge. “Behold the artist,” she said. “Fakes. That’s what it’s come down to.”
“Nobody’s a fake,” he said suddenly. “Not even God. I had a dream last night, I’m sure I did. I just can’t remember it. You tell me is that the same as not dreaming? Did I dream? Did I save the world in a dream I can’t remember? Did I just dream me doing that? Or her? Or you?” He stared intensely at her. “Who are you? Loretta? A Ramsay? Or anyone? You as much as anyone are the last of your kind. You’re the last and the first. You have no choice. You were strung up on a cross. Your husband was shot dead in a raid.” He turned to the window, to the snow that fell as soft as a child’s blanket and to the amber light that burned from the church.
“Paul,” she said softly. “You should be careful.” She did not understand why she had spoken those words. He gave no indication of hearing her but in a moment replied, “We should all be careful.”
18
THERE’S SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR WATER
… when the world has been befouled and the waters turned bitter by disrespect…
THE PROPHECY OF THE SEVEN FIRES
IN JANUARY, HE LEFT THE house with a throbbing toothache while the church looked down on him with disapproval. The bells refused to chime anymore. He remembered when they chimed. What man could ever forget when the bells chimed? Or the woman who was involved? Four times that day they hectored a solemn diphthong as he lugged two suitcases into a cab and drove away to take rooms in what he hoped was a fleapit, at the Waverly Hotel.
“Take rooms.” That’s how he put it to her without a wince of shame. He would take rooms, like Beau Brummell. He would take rooms next to the mission for the homeless, the funeral home and across from the madhouse where they put 10,000 volts into the brains of lost street poets. He would pay his penance. That’s how he put it to her. He would take rooms in the bleached edifice of the Waverly Hotel where paranoid drunken poets hauled meagre belongings from room to room in the hope the RCMP was spying on them. He would live as he had always thought he wanted, the way a man should live, among the salt of the earth, a dropout with a past lounging beneath s
moke in the scrubbed white lobby where a television hung from the ceiling, broadcasting clips of war, shootings, and spoiled rivers. He would drink cheap wine with the refugees from the Six Nations and stay drunk all the time.
In fact, it was too late for any of that. The Waverly had flipped management on a daily basis and was now a tottering strip bar from which the dancers stormed out unpaid and cursing on Friday afternoon, kicking over chairs and giving the middle finger to the manager. The salt-of-the-earth poets had performed their last righteous delirium tremens on the stained mattresses, and were now dead and forgotten.
LINDA DIDN’T KNOW WHAT HER husband did in that place. Or much care. She stayed in the house alone, a monastic, confiding only to Rover even though Rover did not belong to her. He was merely on loan from the Holderlichs the way men were on loan. Not for the first time she longed for a child, a chattering and thoughtless infant that she could gibber agreeably with. She shut that thought down very quickly. She dusted off old vinyl LPs and played them. She perused an art book on Arshile Gorky and imaged herself married to the man. Goodbye my lovelies he’d written to his wife and daughter before snapping his neck.
Against her better inclinations she read too much Manrique in translation but couldn’t remember whether the river that flowed into the sea was death. Or whether death was the dried-up river that no longer reached the ocean because it was dammed by a hydro project. Or was love the river and life the sea? Nuestras vidas son los rios. She slept again. She woke, she shuffled from room to room, fell into a river that was life or love or death. She came ashore brimming with confusion and undertook a dismal and semi-conscious campaign of going to bed with people. It was not difficult to meet men. She began with a silent, forty-year-old polymath with haunted eyes and subject to sudden bouts of narcolepsy of which she was envious. He was an authority on the Russian ghetto and the writings of Mordecai Specktor and the recipient of a court decree that allowed him to see his six-year-old son on Wednesday evenings and alternate weekends. After him, she crashed into a bearded and articulate Cypriot named Aris, short for Aristides, who clung to memories of a war about which she knew nothing and insisted on photographing her naked. (Kids Fridays, Saturdays, and alternate weekends.) “I will maintain you like this forever,” he promised solemnly. “Great,” she said. “No thanks.” Then she stopped.
IN THE MORNING, JETLINERS DREW contrails in front of the sun. She advanced toward an apartment building that towered above the trees. She passed the locked doors of jazz clubs and locked bicycles. She sought the man’s name on a gleaming glass screen in the lobby. It was there with the Greyhursts, Greenes, and Gluckmans, she saw her finger pressing a button beside a number beside a name. “Come up,” he said with only slight annoyance, as if he had willed her to this spot by a spell. She went up. She walked a cloistered hall of carpets, with ultra-modern light fixtures jutting from wallpaper and rapped at a door. The glass eye glared at her. Let me in, she thought, and immediately he came to the door and opened it. His shirt was unbuttoned. “I don’t really have time to fuck you right now,” he said.
“Still, it’s gallant of you to say. I need to pee.” She went directly to his bathroom, a stainless cubicle that reeked of his up-to-date masculinity. She came out and parked herself on a cold leather sofa. Around the room his belongings had been arranged in fastidious heaps, Soviet-era paintings neatly hung, generals encased in medals on canvas, the brutalists and the Vorticists, the victors of Stalingrad, the purged, the unpurged, law books arranged authoritatively on built-in bookcases. Tiny figurines of twentieth century dictators arranged like chachkas. His apartment was small, deliberately small to ensure it could never be shared with anyone.
“Do you have any idea what time it is?” he said.
“No, I don’t.” Behind Arthur’s head she saw a shelf on which a stack of micro-cassettes rose up in a precise towering structure, almost to the ceiling. He had two televisions going. News crawls slid from left to right across two screens. A seventy-year-old farmer had been pinned five hours under a pregnant cow, berries had gone dry on the bushes and were falling like shot. The bees had gone missing. She’d heard it before. The world was going away. Like the bees.
“It will rot your brain, Arthur.”
She watched him suck in the screens like an endless and shimmering mound of cocaine.… Sex fiend teacher reinstated after lengthy trial…. It seemed that Arthur was swelling in size with each fragment of news, each morsel of information. As the bombs went off, as each catastrophe pushed the previous one away, his head shot closer to the ceiling; a foul gas entered the membrane of his body and inflated him. She knew of these creatures, she’d read of them; Paul was a minor authority, or claimed to be; Wendigos that roamed in her land. Insatiably stinky beasts that ate human flesh and were afflicted with a hunger that grew worse the more they fed.… Concert pianist bites hand of flight attendant.… Feed me. Linda felt the apartment growing cold around her. The skin on Arthur’s face pulled itself more tautly across the bones, the hollows became more sunken. Suddenly he was unclean, he suffered from suppurations of the flesh. His body had grown to preposterous heights. “It will rot your brain,” she said, with no idea what she was referring to … Avian flu threat requires extermination of 50 million birds; experts…. How much is fifty million? … Annihilate them all says assistant deputy minister.… Annihilate what exactly?… Headless man found in topless bar. Lying now on the leather of Arthur’s couch, she longed for the days when headless men could be counted on to be found in topless bars.
“It was beauty,” she said suddenly, sitting up.
“What?”
“It was beauty that killed the beast. There’s your story Arthur, it was beauty that killed the beast. It’s always beauty that kills the beast.”
From the twin screens the words, the images, the faces, the noise, the experts, the villains, the bugs, the vaccines and victims crawled into the room. Annihilate them all … put your faith in … She closed her eyes … birds drop from the sky while seventy-year-old sex fiend teacher bites off finger of flight attendant playing Mozart from beneath pregnant cow, film at eleven … She went to the sink and tried to wash it away with a long glass of water, but the water stank of the swamp, of an industrial swamp, and tasted of rust.
“There’s something wrong with your water.”
“What do you mean my water?”
He came to her side, took the glass from her hand, sipped it and pursed his lips like a professional wine taster. “Perfectly good city water.” He was dubious though. He’d lost any sense of what water was meant to taste like. Was there supposed to be a tang of fish in it? Surely the fish shit in it. Where else would fish go to shit?
Arthur finished snapping on his shirt. His briefcase made its way into his hand. He was prepared to impose himself on the day. There was work to be done. It was not her work. It was work for him.
“The door locks behind you,” he said. He seemed worried she might not leave. He would return ten hours from now and find her still here, having washed his laundry, wearing an apron and popping a casserole into the oven for him. His life over.
“Yes. The door locks behind me. I understand that.”
“Good.” He smiled. “Have a nice day.” The door swung shut. A black door. The man had a black door with a white cycloptic hole in it through which he scrutinized his visitors. The door closed with a crunch. She was cast away. Like Robinson Crusoe. It struck her as wrong that she didn’t have a goat. She had a man, Friday. It was in fact Friday. But she didn’t have a goat. Every woman should have a goat. Instead of tragedy she should have a goat.
The day was threatening to unroll in front of her. She was unrolling herself; she knew the signs; the lack of rain outside the window, or hail, no pestilence of frogs. The day was not doing anything except being sunny and sickeningly beautiful. Like the most perfect day possible. Even the birds were going at it. She missed her husband, her ridiculous husb
and who did not satisfy her. She reached into the pocket of her jeans as if to find him there. She missed a life of monotonous travel over long roads, the smooth blacktop. The miles piling up. Their windshield time together. Rivers whipping underneath them. She missed the folds of Paul’s body where she had gone. She missed the way he scratched himself. She missed his pronouncements, the pompous ones in particular.
She took up Arthur’s phone and punched in the number for Bulwark Books.
“It’s Linda,” she said breathlessly. “Linda Richardson.” In speaking her name, she felt she had uttered an extraordinary lie. “Vanessa, please,” she said. “Vanessa Wainright.” Vanessa was the sort of name a woman should have. A Vee name with its hint of Veritas and Verisimilitude and Virtue. If only her name was Vanessa, she would not unroll. The world would not burn as quickly as it burned.
“I’m sorry Vanessa’s in a meeting. Oh, wait, no she isn’t, one minute please.”
Finally the music clicked off.
“Linda? There might be a seed catalogue that needs proofreading. It’s all I have.”
19
WHO ARE YOU?
“Tolerant to Black Rot and Downey Mildew, the Arcadia broccoli is one of North America’s finest stress tolerant hybrids, and provides impressive yields with good dark green colour and outstanding side shoot development….”
BETWEEN THE BLACK ROT AND the development of side shoots the Holderlich’s cat came through an open window and gave her a rather chilling look before slinking out of the room. Apparently, she didn’t cut it. She no longer made the grade. There was no other audience, just mirrors on the walls of the rooms and a critical cat. The page proofs glared at her. She pushed them aside, stood up, and just as suddenly sat down.