Night Moves

by Night Moves- Stories (v5. 0) (epub)

  “Sensei,” I said as I turned to him. I held up the sulfur rock I’d been given. “Duke was poisoned by Torchy and Sfen before they took your knee and the sword you love.”

  He looked in wonder at me. “How do you know?”

  “Did he faint and have seizures before they took your sword?” I asked.

  “The day after. He was tested. We took him to the vet.”

  I shook my head. “They used mushrooms. Your vet would have missed this.”

  I could feel the energy change around him to anger. “How do you know this?”

  “Before she passed, my ehtsi had dog medicine. I can cure Duke but I need your help.”

  “Anything.” He knelt beside me and I looked. I saw only tenderness in his eyes.

  “I need frozen caribou meat and a file and an ulu.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Why?”

  “We’re going to slice frozen caribou meat into small pieces and pepper them with sulfur. Then you’re going to stick the meat into the sides of Duke’s mouth.”

  He swallowed hard as he looked at me and at Duke. “This is the only way to draw it out,” I said. “It’ll take all night. We can’t stop once we start and we need to work together.”

  “Bear,” he said, “if you save Duke, I promise you that I will train you in ways the world is forgetting. I will show you everything that Torchy and Sfen know, and then I’ll show you how to beat both of them.”

  I thought about it. “Deal.”

  He took my shoulder gently and gave it a squeeze before he made his way back to the house.

  I very carefully ran my hand through Duke’s fur. “Duke, hold on. Your father and I are going to cure you and then we’re going to get that sword. I promise you. I will be your father’s greatest student. We are going to return that sword to its home.”

  I looked up at the stars. They were now waking from their great vanishing. I had a mission. I had a new contract. I would take on Torchy and Sfen and I would return that sword to Japan. Most of all, I’d return honour to myself and my family. I had to. For Wendy. For my grandparents. For me.

  Tomorrow, if Duke was okay, I’d call Marvin. I’d tell him I was back. I was in grade twelve now and I didn’t need to blow it. This, I decided, right damn then and there, was going to be the best year of my life.

  Skull.Full.Of.Rust

  This happened in a town everyone passes on the highway in Alberta. When you were a girl, you had a friend. We’ll call him Tommy. You and Tommy had a secret game. You both called it “What am I thinking?”

  It went like this: You thought very hard and very fast for a full minute. You wanted to think faster than Tommy could write because, after that minute, he’d hand you a sheet of paper with your thoughts printed out exactly on the page: It’s cold what’s for lunch? I didn’t do my homework did you? Can someone please turn down the frogs at night? They are so so loud. I wish the sun would come out and play.

  This was your game, and you could never win because Tommy wrote all your thoughts down. Every word. Exactly. This game always left you with a scent, a musk: a skull full of rust. You welcomed it. You felt ancient playing it until the day the stranger came to your school.

  It went like this: you were playing alone when a man in a black suit wearing the shiniest shoes you’ve ever seen in your life approached you. He knew your name. He said, “Tell me where Tommy is.”

  He looked important. He wore dark glasses, ones you could not see behind. He smelled kind. A perfume blanketed you. A pretty smell. A pretty rust. When he smiled, you felt as if it were Friday at home time. You relaxed and suddenly remembered that Tommy was behind the school playing cards with the janitors.

  Tommy had other games he could play with his gift. A few of the janitors knew that Tommy could bring luck, so they taught him how to play poker. Then they challenged men from town to come out to the school and play. Tommy would tilt his head and nudge the janitors into their next decisions about how to play their hands. The janitors never lost and were generous with Tommy and their winnings.

  Tommy didn’t come from a wealthy home, and Tommy liked what money could do. You thought about this as you led the stranger to the card game. He knelt down and whispered something into Tommy’s ear. Tommy rose when the man stood. He followed the man to a car that was waiting on the school road. This car sped down the road and vanished and Tommy was never heard from again. The pretty rust the stranger left inside of you soured and stayed with you as you helped make sandwiches with your mother for the searchers, but you never told anyone the true secret of this, until you told this to me.

  You’ve tried a million times to remember more of what the man looked like or how he asked to see Tommy but it’s a mindblur, a ghost of a memory.

  There, in the smallest room inside of you—under the rust—is where this story slept in quiet for decades. And this is where the party comes in.

  Years later, after the guilt and mystery behind Tommy’s disappearance began to fade, you were in art school. You were at a party. You were famous for how shy you were. Some thought you were a mute. Others thought you were eerie. “Don’t Stop Believing” by Journey was just finishing and everyone was singing along when one of the louder men announced that he had just finished a workshop: “How to Hypnotize Anybody”. The loud man in the kitchen got the crowd all worked up. They began looking for someone to hypnotize. Someone signalled you. Before you knew it, before you could stand, you were surrounded by people you didn’t know who were chanting your name while this man fished out a silver stopwatch. Before you knew it, you were counting backwards with him as the only sounds you could hear were laughter from the hallway as other partiers had no idea what was about to happen.

  And there it was again: you were filled with the aroma of rust. All of you.

  You came to with a roar of people screaming into your ears to let go of the wall. You looked around and people were horrified. One woman was crying, looking away. Another was on the phone. Her cheeks were so red she looked slapped. There, in the corner, the hypnotizer was being yelled at by his girlfriend. She was pointing at you and yelling at him to “Help her!” You realize “help her” meant help you. They were all yelling at you to let go of the wall. You looked ahead and realized that the largest man at the party was hanging off of your arm, trying to break your stance. You looked at the wall and saw your palm and fingers had pushed through the wall and there was dust and paint chips on the webs of your fingers and on your shirt. Your arm and hand were throttling with exertion. You couldn’t feel your hand, wrist or arm, until you heard a pop and the man fell to the ground when your arm gave. Immediately, your hand, wrist and arm tore in searing pain and you fell into the arms of someone behind you.

  When you came to, the hypnotizer was on the phone with his teacher and they, together, summoned you “back to normal.” All you remember was having the sensation of being catapulted from a field miles away back into your own body. Your arm felt snapped in half for a week. Ice and heat compresses and the occasional puff were the only thing that got you through. It was only later, after a dozen phone calls begging for him to “make it up to you,” that you went to the hypnotizer’s house where he and his girlfriend made you supper, that you understood the force you worked with.

  “Who’s Tommy?” the man asked.

  “Why?” you winced as your arm throbbed with pain.

  The idea, he explained, was to trick you into thinking you could hold up a falling wall and yell for help, yell for everyone to get out of the house as fast as they could—you could only hold it up for so long. The idea was to get everyone laughing at the quietest girl at the party who was now the loudest. It was supposed to be funny. Instead, you ran to the wall, planted both feet into the linoleum and slammed your palm through the wall. You see that when they remove the framed Van Gogh sunflower, there is your handprint embedded in the cement through the drywall. It is a perfec
t hand print in stone, pressed so hard that you can see the seven in your palm and the faint scar of a glass cut when you were a girl, so faint that you can only see it when you tan. “You started calling for Tommy to come home, to be with you and his family again,” the man says looking down. “You were yelling you missed him. ‘I’ve never forgotten you,’ you kept saying. ‘I’m sorry I gave you away!’”

  Everyone was scared of you at the party because they couldn’t break your grip.

  “You were holding up the wall for Tommy,” the girlfriend said. “And we couldn’t help you. You kept yelling, ‘How did the Devil know my name?’”

  Years later, your flight was delayed. You were stranded with your portfolios of new work, work you couldn’t believe that you’d done because it was of fire and horses and a lacerated field. These were the true faces of your dreams finally captured on canvas, and these were the faces of agony. This was the work of your life and you wouldn’t hand it over to the airlines. You insisted on carrying your art portfolios onto the plane. It was because of the weight of your portfolios and the crush of the crowd that he ran into you.

  He had changed, you said. He was an old man now, yet how could this be when you were supposed to be the same age?

  Tommy.

  He was an old man now—sick in the blood with something inside him—and it was gnawing on him slowly and carefully. His lips curled when he told you to “watch it.” He had so many missing teeth and the ones he had left, you said, would be better off pulled. He was almost bald. His skin was pasty, ashen, thin as paper. But his eyes hadn’t changed. His eyes were still sharp, and it was those eyes that made you call his name: “Tommy!”

  He wheeled around and took your arm, immobilizing you. “Who are you?” he hissed. All your weekend courses in self-defense, all the movies you’d ever seen that you stored in “what to do if” vanished and there you were, surrounded by hundreds of travellers, paralyzed. The strength of your legs. A cold shot through your body and you were dizzy, weak and that smell returned: a skull full of rust.

  “I’ll ask one more time,” his foul breath—it reeked of cigarettes and hot pus. “Who sent you?”

  You spoke your name, catching yourself to remember to not add your married name. He tilted his head to remember and eased the pressure off your arm and neck. He remembered you.

  Without realizing it, you dropped your portfolios and were hugging him, calling his name. He was skin on bone, you said. It was like holding a bag of antlers. Here was Tommy. Finally…

  “Where did you go?” you kept asking. “We thought you’d died.”

  “Shhhh,” he hushed. “Tommy’s not my name anymore. Hasn’t been for years.” He scanned the area around you, stopping once to look in your eyes and you grew dizzy, immediately dizzy. You remembered the police, the questions, the silence for years that came from the house he used to live in, his parents who never looked your way again.

  “How much time do you have?” he asked.

  “Hours,” you lied.

  “Buy me supper,” he said, “and I’ll tell you a story you’ll never forget.”

  The man, Tommy said, that day, the stranger—was CIA. From the US government. He’d heard of a boy who could read minds and wanted very much to meet him.

  After walking towards the car, they’d travelled for what seemed like days: the car ride, a train, two planes—very small and very fast—arriving at night, barracks, walking into a room full of children, and teens, all of whom could hear what others were thinking.

  From then Tommy was trained in how to use his gift and play “What am I thinking?” to protect members of the US government and, yes, eventually the President of the United States.

  “They called us ‘Sniffers’, but we called ourselves ‘The Invisible.’”

  He explained that when you see the President, you’ll never see them. They are the ones who are selling ice cream, handing out flags, bumping into you and saying “Sorry—pardon me” in a goofy hat and ludicrous T-shirt, but, all the while, they’re sniffing you, the crowd, opening strangers, tasting the currents, reading the air for delicate signals.

  Tommy had been used in hostage negotiations, the ones that rarely make it to the news. He worked for the UN for several years, and became one of the President’s closest.

  You read, years later, that there were people who could leave their bodies and spy. There was a group of them from all over the world who wanted to see if they could visit the President. They slept and left their bodies from their homes to swim through the night skies to Washington. As they approached the White House, they were met midair by bodyguards who were doing the same, and were told if they tried to pass, they would be held in the air until their bodies died. In the distance, hundreds of bodies circled the White House: listening, watching.

  “I was paid well for my gifts,” Tommy told you. “I could have retired when I was in my thirties, but I stayed on.”

  “So what happened?” you asked. “Why are you so sick?”

  “This?” he asked and pointed to his face. You realized then when you saw his yellow fingers that he was a chronic chain smoker, “This happened because the top brass—and I do mean the top brass—taught me how to erase someone with my mind.”

  He explained that if there was an enemy of the state, “the Sniffers” were trained to loop someone into insanity. The mind was much like a whirling soundtrack, he explained, but he could drive a thick, rusty nail through it. The CD would then skip like a broken record. Their targets couldn’t get past one single thought, and that’s all they would have for the rest of their lives.

  “Is it a thought you plant?” you asked.

  “No,” he explained, “it would be the thought you were thinking last as I walked by and touched you. I got sick because I became the best. I could reloop or ‘skip someone,’ as we called it. I touched many people who were asking questions about the American government. People who were never the same again.”

  “After several years of this, I, too, began to question a few of the files. I was given less to go on after a while. Sometimes it would be a picture and an address. I’d ask why and I was told to ‘just do it.’ Some of them were mothers. I saw a boy once walking with my target. He saw me and waved. He smiled. And that was when I quit. He looked just like me when I was a kid. I couldn’t do it. It was like the child of me waving at the man I’d become. Maybe it was the old part of me remembering my own vanishing, but I quit.”

  “Soon, I was ambushed. A unit of Erasers surrounded me and I looped myself. I declared myself insane, incapable of working another day. It happens. It’s rare but it happens that someone like me burns out, but they had me in a warehouse for weeks and all I did was sputter, shit and piss myself, while I hid in the deepest part of me they couldn’t read.”

  “I’d surface in milliseconds, once a month, until one month I peaked and there I was: in a sanitarium. It was a slice of Hell: hundreds of people in a room all trying to get out. Hundreds of lost souls screaming. There was one guard I learned who was stealing from us and he was my target. It took me a day to escape and I’ve been running ever since.”

  “Where will you go?” you asked.

  “I have a plan,” he coughed, “and I’m going to live it.”

  He looked at the clock and motioned that he had to go.

  “So who exactly were you working for in the CIA?” you asked.

  “To this day,” he said, “and this is the most terrifying part of all—is I don’t think any of us will ever truly know. Maybe the Devil… I don’t know.”

  You think he left you then with a hug, but you can’t remember boarding your plane or going to your hotel or even ordering supper that evening or calling home.

  You remember coming to, the next morning, with your right arm aching, reaching for the ceiling, and that smell of blood behind your face, gagged from your mouth, behind your nose.


  All these years later and I think he “erased” you out of protection. He did, after all, suspect that he was being hunted.

  When I thought about it, when you spoke about being hypnotized, your voice slowed, your eyes settled on your right hand. You put yourself into a trance speaking—so much so that my heart slowed with how calm your voice was. And I think this is the only way you remembered, because when I saw you, years later, I thanked you for a story I have never forgotten, and you had no recollection of your meeting with Tommy or with ever growing up with a boy your age with the gift of listening and hearing.

  You had no idea what I was talking about.

  And so, if you still don’t believe that this story began with you, ask your husband about the comment you made on the phone that night, after you had found Tommy again. You said he asked you about it when you returned from your trip. He’d waited until the kids had gone to bed. He said you sounded so lost when you phoned, alone, but more than alone: lonely. He said before you hung up the phone, you said, “We are all creation, but some of us are monsters.”

  So, at your request, I’ve recreated the story you told me that day, in the airport, when our flights were delayed because you didn’t believe me when I told this to you. And all of this is because I asked, “You know I am your biggest fan. I’ve always wanted to ask you, Why do you place such haunting red hand prints throughout all of your paintings? And you paint all those souls in agony. Forgive me for asking, but who or what are they reaching for?”

  Because of What I Did

  Crow pulls the rabbit inside out in front of us. Sinew snaps and pops. All that life and oh what little fur. No blood. She sets aside the lungs for Benny. They look like dragonfly wings soaked in water. She sets aside rabbit babies, and I close my eyes. Creator, I did not know she was pregnant when my hands took her. The babies look like toes. That’s when I turn to look at the sign that’s always hung up in the living room: “Benny’s: Because it’s all about collateral.”