“I’m just overtired,” Craig said. He hoped it was true. He’d come to the bar desperate to unload about the Sheepasnörus nightmare. But amid the clinking glassware and fuzzy Springsteen tune pumping from the speakers, he wasn’t sure he was ready to sound quite so insane.
Their bartender came over, a thin, slouchy girl who smelled like Juicy Fruit.
“Another?” she said.
“Two,” said Craig. “For us. One each for him and me.” He waggled a finger between him and Stephen, who had barely made a dent in his first drink. He followed his friend’s eyes up to the TV. Messi was weaving his way through a glut of players like a homing bee.
“There’s this noise machine Rosette has,” Craig said, tentative, voice quivering. “It’s been driving me up the wall.”
“Unh-huh. The toys’ll get you. For a while Gwen wouldn’t allow Dexter anything with batteries. It was great. Didn’t last.”
The waitress brought two fresh bottles.
“I guess it’s more than just being tired,” said Craig, wondering how deeply he could trust Stephen to field his neuroses. Whether he could talk to his friend about how time had become warped since Rosette was born. How she had forced him into a new shape, one he wasn’t sure he could maintain. “I guess I’m feeling a bit helpless. Invisible.”
Stephen turned to him. He held out his bottle for a cheers. Craig picked up his Budweiser and clinked it.
“Fuck it,” said Stephen. “You ain’t never gonna be Lionel Messi, but I like hanging out with you.”
Craig smiled, but the statement rattled him. The calm, hissing voice came back: You’ll never play soccer. It had known him. All the ways in which he’d failed, all his anxieties, all the dreams he hated for not going away.
“This stuff never bothers Elise the same way,” Craig said. “She’s always so . . . present with Rosie. Her attention, her patience, it never falters, you know? How does she do it, Steve?”
On TV, Messi scored again. Stephen took a sip of Bud. “Two things,” he said. “Number one, women, they just have this thing. An instinct. We’ll never be mothers; just dads. Different role. Moms carry most of the emotional weight of the first year.”
“What’s two?”
“Two is, she has to do it, because you don’t.”
“I will!” said Craig. “I’m willing.” He would do anything for Rosette, anything.
“Sorry, wrong word,” said Stephen. “You can’t.”
On the stereo, Springsteen moaned that he was tired and bored of himself. When Craig was little, his parents had played this record on vinyl and danced around the living room to it, singing into candlesticks. Decades later, here it was: the same damn song. He dragged the bottom of his beer over the mosaic bar top, bits of coloured glass embedded in white plaster. It made a hollow clunking. The Boss, Messi: they thrilled millions. This was what Craig contributed — empty music of a half-drunk beer in the musty afternoon light of a city pub, soundtrack to an emergency meeting he’d called to confess his dealings with a monstrous, sedative sheep.
He felt tears welling up and swallowed them. He was tired, not weak like some old man, some sad condiment salesman terrified of being alone with his daughter for longer than half the length of a soccer match. Rosette would love him. She had to.
“Do you ever think about your kid watching you die?” he said.
Stephen gave Craig a flat look. He put down his beer. “My Uncle Anil,” he said. “He had three kids, my cousins. Two weeks before the family was supposed to leave Mauritius, he went for a walk down to the rum shop and keeled over on the way. Cardiac arrest; dead in minutes. No one there with him. His kids were at home, watching The Price Is Right. My kid, your kid: who knows where they’ll be when we go. It’s all a gamble, man. No one knows shit.”
He raised another cheers, drained his beer and grabbed the new one. “We’ll finish these,” he said. “Then you need to go home to your girls.”
Time ran down and Barça took the game. Messi strolled off the field, nonchalant in victory, a true champion. Craig stared into the glow of the liquor stocks over the bar, looking for Elise’s face, for Rosette’s, watching dust drift through the neon lights and settle on the bottletops.
He got home four beers later, slouched but calmed, the tension in his muscles loosened enough that he could admire the blush in the sky, the warmth in the breeze. Stephen had been easy to coax into a few more. Craig had texted Elise to make sure she was okay to get Rosette down alone, promised to make her dinner the next day, give her an extra-long foot rub before bed.
The lights in the living room were on, but instead of going in he went around the back and into the yard. The door to the shed was closed but not locked, and he opened it slowly, to prevent it from creaking. The bare bulb threw a thin white gloss over the workbench. Sheepasnörus leaned against the slats of damp grey wood, paw resting on a rusty old vise grip that Craig never used. He stood in front of the cursed toy, looking down at it, feeling his pulse piston in his neck. What now. What now. What now.
A whiff of gasoline blew in on the wind as the thing twitched, stood up on its stubby snack-cake legs, took two steps forward as though preparing to bow, and spoke — the force of it, the terrible ordinariness, making Craig reel backward into a stand of old rakes:
“I lied before, you know,” it said. Its voice was smaller now, more muffled, but still carried its undercurrent of sibilance, the undulance of breath.
Craig caught his balance. He was awake. Wide awake; there was no mistaking this. He felt an itch behind his ear, a crick in his knee. He gaped at the thing, sweat pouring down his back.
“When?” he said. “About what?”
“You can play soccer. I can give you his place.”
“Who?”
“Messishhhh.” Sheepasnörus gave a little hop-skip and a kick, miming the Argentine’s dribbling. “He owes us a debt.”
“Us?”
“Me and you, Carl.”
Craig squeezed his eyes shut. He was losing it. There was no way out of this. The thing would not leave him, not admit the impossibility of its presence.
“Nuh,” he said. A blunt negation, all he could manage.
“You want to play? Don’t you? Be bestsssshhh?”
“Yes! No! Why?”
“Lionel Messi is a very rich man.”
Craig grabbed a rake from the stash and held it in front of him like a wizard’s staff, hands around the wooden pole, eyes peering through the fan of bent red metal. He considered the grain on the handle, the parts where different hands had worn it smooth. It had been Elise’s grandfather’s rake. It had years on it. Smashing it on the workbench would surely snap the teeth off.
“You’re lying,” Craig said. “You can’t.”
“I know you’re considering it.”
Craig winced. He wasn’t; he was. In his mind, in his chest, he could feel the racing of Lionel Messi’s feet across the pitch, fluttering with energy, graceful and precise, always knowing what to do. How to be such a man? To fly, to move fluidly through the morass of the world: you had to give something up.
“Yes, just like that. It’s easy. Take my hand.” Sheepasnörus held out a nubbly plush paw. Outside, a breeze made the maples hiss. A cat meowed. Something in the bowels of the shed began ticking. Craig tasted metal on the back of his tongue, felt the smoothed wood on his palm, Messi’s nimble footwork in his stomach and his shaking calves, felt a heat in his neck, pressure on his teeth, the floor collapsing below him.
With a whipped flick, he threw the rake aside and reached out to grab Sheepasnörus, one fist curling around the offered paw, the other gripping the plush folds of its opposite thigh. He hoisted the haunted gizmo into the air in front of him, so it was framed by the dusty window, where a million tiny flies had alighted and died on the sill.
“Yesshhhhhh,” said Sheepasnörus. Soothing, somnolent. “Yesshhhhhhhhhhh . . . ”
Screeching like a crazed, wounded hawk, Craig pushed all the strength he co
uld into his toxified blood and reefed on the sheep’s arm, twisting and pulling until he felt the snarling resistance of the threads, and pulled harder, until the arm went whuff and split off from the torso, leaving a spill of cotton batting spooling out into the electrified air between host and limb. He flailed, wailed, shook the sheep, flopped it around on the workbench like a mess of dough. The hissing got louder, rent by bursts of radio crackle. Craig snatched a ball-peen hammer from the wall rack, took aim, and brought it down on the speaker box, crushing through plastic and wires, stuffing and tiny screws.
When he realized he was yelling his own name, over and over and over, he stopped. Let the silence of the shed infuse him.
But now there was another sound — round, wet, percussive, like a steady rhythm played on a miniature sealskin drum. Craig knew it. Its fragility, its surprise. He’d heard it before, channelled by a gelled wand through a speaker; felt it bumping gently through muscle and skin to vibrate in a hand placed on Elise’s stomach, searching for the unknown child inside.
Craig squinted at the dismembered arm in his right hand. He tossed it on the bench in disgust. Crouching, breathing hard, he peered into the cavity on Sheepasnörus’ chest. There, nestled among the cotton, sat a tiny delicate heart, gemlike and robed in jellied red, beating out the code of life: whumsh, whumsh, whumsh, whumsh, whumsh, whumsh . . .
He reached out a finger, touched the living flesh. Somehow him, but not.
Back inside, the air was humid and perfumed with the rubbery, powdered smell of diapers. Elise was already upstairs. Craig stopped in the kitchen before going up and poured himself a drink of water from the tap. He stood and felt the cold, mineral liquid course down his trunk.
At the top of the stairs, he paused at the master bedroom, keeping his hands with their clumsily doctored burden behind him. The room glowed with the warm light of the bedside lamp. Elise lay atop the covers, eyes closed, a copy of The Happiest Baby on the Block splayed on the table beside her.
“Hey,” she said, without opening her eyes. “Can you try and be quiet when you go to the bathroom? She’s asleep.”
He took a moment to look at Elise — his wife. Rosette’s mom. The lamplight on her resting face revealed the soft shape of youth coming through the lingering weariness of daytime. He thought back to when they’d met, on a patio with ivy-covered walls, trading smiles under strands of lights. At all the years since, those chapters of love and faith, the entangling and partitioning of minds, the closeness of skin — all leading up to that night in the hospital, when they’d pulled Rosette from inside her, white and squawking in terror of life. The film of sweat on his wife’s face afterward. How she whispered to him the question they’d sat with for nine months: What is it?
Craig turned and walked, slowly, down the shadowed hall to Rosette’s room. The door was open a crack. He pushed on it and went in. His daughter was a tiny cocoon in the darkness, rising and falling with uneven breaths, some catching and shuddering out in frightened sighs. A patch of dark hair swirled on her forehead, fine as eddying black sand. The soft folds under her eyes mirrored Craig’s own.
The fact of her, the strange newness — it shook him, destabilized him like nerve gas, like a blinding kiss. She was everything. All of him, all his dreams . . . and he wanted that. For her to be next. To know all the love and wonder it was possible to know. To never feel rage, or sorrow, or hurt; to exist forever in fragile simplicity. To never feel disappointed in herself, even though she would. To know she could never disappoint him. Even though she would.
He stood beside her and cradled Sheepasnörus in his hands, its torn arm reattached with a wrapping of silver duct tape, bits of sawdust and flaked plastic clinging to its matted fur. Heart climbing into his throat, he flipped the switch on its back, summoning a low hushing noise, dull and crackly but still audible, a fractured sound to match her breathing. He placed it in the corner of his daughter’s crib, close to the tiny shell of her ear.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, tears blurring the darkness. “I’m sorry.”
Pavilion
As the time approached for me to come face to face with the Golden Temple, which I had never yet seen, a certain hesitation grew within me.
— Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Listen, faced with the living cockroach, the worst discovery was that the world is not human, and that we are not human.
— Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H.
1. Two houses stand at opposite ends of my public life. The first is the house that I owned. It was a white clapboard Victorian on Gore Street, just east of City Park, close to the lake. When we moved in after I was elected to city council, it was still a fixer-upper, full of dust and mould and peeling paint.
And roaches, of course — the roaches have always been with me.
It took months, but I cleaned the place up. Got it feeling like a real home, the kind of big old house you see in the movies, where happy families live. There’s a photograph from that time, taken for an early profile in the Whig-Standard, when I was still a fresh face on council. In it, the three of us are standing on the front steps: me in the middle with Sandra and Eleanor on either side of me. We’re all dressed in bright summer colours, and the photo is shot from below and framed so that a halo of sunlight rings the Canada flag hung from the gable over the front door.
That’s the image I try and hold on to now, when I’m reminded where I’ve ended up — in this apartment that smells of old grease and ammonia and the piss-covered toilet that runs all day long, where everything is yellow and dim and I’m alone with the fragments of myself that are left.
The roaches are here, too. Skittering across the linoleum, or poking, half-visible, from underneath the fridge or the bed or the dresser. Infantry for the host, tiny emissaries of the greater pestilence that lies, engorged, under the foundation of that other house, the one at the end — the house that owned me, for a time.
They’re a constant presence, the roaches. Except when I’m cleaning the rifle. When the scent of steel and ethanol fills the air, the purity of true conviction — then, the vermin run.
A house is a place for living in. But it’s been a long time since anything human lived in Bellevue House.
The original was built in 1840, by Charles Hales, a merchant of the early Kingston rich. It was one of the first examples of the Italian Villa style in Canada, an imposing, L-shaped building with white stucco walls and terracotta roofs and trim painted dark hunter green. But the reason it lasted has nothing to do with its architecture. Bellevue House is revered because of its association with Sir John A. Macdonald.
Kingston is a town that’s proud of its history, and few men cast a longer shadow over it than the country’s first prime minister. Macdonald lived in Bellevue House for a year, between 1848 and 1849. It was supposed to be a country retreat to help his wife, Isabella, recover from illness. A refuge from the stresses of public life, bathed in the tonic air of Lake Ontario. Before a year had passed, though, Bellevue House took its first victim. The Macdonalds’ firstborn son, John Alexander Jr., died at thirteen months old. Isabella got worse, tuberculosis festering in her lungs like a nest of termites.
Death has lived at Bellevue House since the very beginning. I should have known it would come for my family, in time.
2. There are so many versions of the story now, it’s hard to hold on to the real one. That’s the idea, of course. The more you refract the truth, the more doubt you sow in people’s minds, the easier it is to lull them into a nightmare they don’t even know is happening. No one is immune. I wasn’t.
These days, the version most people know is from the hit movie.
I’ve watched the whole thing hundreds of times. All 166 minutes of it. There are two scenes I always go back to, though, key moments designed to move the narrative subtly but purposefully away from the facts. Both take place in the mayor’s office. The first comes early in the film, and it’s the perfect set-up for the hatchet job
to come.
Mayor Jim Staughton, Councilman Tyson Webb, and Councilman Tim Gant are standing around a big oak desk laid with three glasses and a decanter of whiskey. Robert Downey Jr. plays the mayor. DiCaprio’s Webb. Tim Gant is played by some pale, mousy no-name, a B-list Steve Buscemi lookalike that you can’t help but loathe from the start.
“Gentlemen,” the mayor says. “Let’s talk about Bellevue House.”
“Sir,” says Gant, snivelling, “we’ve started charting out how to tackle it from a risk-assessment perspective —”
“That business-school methodology garbage won’t cut it with this one, Gant,” says the mayor, scowling. “This story’s got the potential to go absolutely nuclear. We already have people on social media calling Macdonald a butcher. Granted, that’s what makes the whole plan possible in the first place. But the bigger it gets, the bigger the potential shitstorm. We had the Globe and Mail calling the office this morning for comment. We’re juggling political plutonium here. So let’s get out the big guns and make sure we turn this crisis into an opportunity, shall we?”
Gant tugs at his collar. “With the right team —”
“No team!” says the mayor/Downey Jr., channelling his best Tony Stark. “This is the fucking team. I won’t jeopardize this project by handing it over to a bunch of numb-nut staffers. Zocalar is trusting us on this. It’s an unprecedented opportunity to replace a tired old heritage property with something bold, innovative. Jobs, culture, tourism — they don’t make legacy projects any juicier than this. The three of us, leaving our goddamn mark on the city! But if we louse it up, it’s a fucking bloodbath. Entrails, heads on spikes, the whole bit. Understand?”
To this point in the scene, Tyson Webb — the youngest of the three — has been silent, wearing a classic DiCaprio smirk, just right for a character being set up as a rakish hero. Now he leans forward in his chair and touches the table, fingers splayed to create little fortresses with his hands, skinny tie dangling between them like a black tongue. There’s a long pause, which slowly fills with the hiss of backwards cymbals on the soundtrack.
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