Something for Everyone

by Lisa Moore

  And there’s the boy — just at the moment when the barber has the edge of his thumb against my left nostril, and his index finger against my cheek, essentially pulling the nostril away from the cheek as far as he can in order to shave the beard and moustache, and my lower face is covered in a shaving cream and the guy has a long blade and it hovers in my peripheral vision flicking back and forth and to start the guy is going for nose hair, actually — and in bursts the boy with the ski mask and the syringe and the apron with a raspberry reduction stain smeared over his heart like a wound, demanding all the money in the cash register.

  He holds out a plastic grocery bag and says: Here. Put it in here. He waves the syringe which he holds in his fist, the needle pointing down, and he says, his voice breaking, because he is also still a child, after all, an adolescent, a kid: Don’t make me use this thing. It seems more plea than threat.

  At which moment the roof of the mall caves in under the weight of the reindeer and the sleigh. Chunks of concrete smack down on the top floor of the mall, and after a brief pause that floor gives way under the weight of the destroyed ceiling and the remaining customers are running in all directions and there are clouds of dust and thousands of reindeer galloping through the hallways and up the escalators and, upon seeing themselves reflected in the glass storefronts, charging the glass with their antlers, shattering the windows, and they knock over racks of winter clothing, and one animal has a pair of watermelon-coloured underwear hanging from an antler which I suspect he thought was fruit and tried to eat.

  And yes, I do exist. Yes, I am real.

  And yes, I look into your hearts and see your desires, the real ones, and yes, on Christmas Eve I meet those desires head on and I am the spirit of giving, and of hope, which is why I stand, with half a white curly moustache missing and the pinkened flesh below visible and stinging a little, and unvelcro the cape and let it fall to the floor. I raise my arms like a conductor, and the concrete tumbles back upward and the ceiling seamlessly reforms and the boy drops the syringe and the clouds of dust do not just settle but are sucked back up in the vacuum that occurs when time reverses, which they don’t mention in the myths, but is one of my special talents, reversing time. Reversing regret.

  And so too is healing of all sorts, and so the grandmother’s white blood cells, those toy soldiers of good health, turn the tide on the infection just at this moment and her teeth are saved, which the dentist will later comment is akin to a miracle, and the boy rides backwards on the bus, expelled from the wheezing, rubber-flanged doors onto the sidewalk, the syringe tumbling back into the snow without him noticing it falling from his pocket, and sails through the back door of the restaurant, up the hall and around the corner where he gathers a pile of thirty-seven dessert plates and jams his chin down on the top plate, and his manager Elena says, Move it, move it, and as he approaches the dish pit the chef splashes moonshine onto a frying pan of scallops and flambés them while yelling over the noise, Hey, watch the bacon grease on the floor there, kid.

  And after the shift the boy unknots his apron and hangs it on a hook and outside the restaurant he notices the spilling of the scarlet traffic lights on the freshly fallen snow, like fresh blood, and he thinks for a moment of what it would be like to rob the Avalon Mall, but instead starts home to Flower Hill, a slice of caramelized banana squished in his armpit.

  And again I snap my Moroccan whip overhead, a thundering clap, a streak of mercury, instantly and simultaneously undoing harm, healing the wounded, and lighting up the dark all over this old earth.

  Skywalk

  1.

  There was guy pacing in circles in the parking lot, tall, lean, a thick tuft of hair, more a grown-out cut than a style. He halted, absorbed by a ding on his phone.

  Then he strode toward her, full of purpose. There was nobody else in the parking lot. Behind him the sky was cloudless and the stars swilled backwards into the black night. It was almost one in the morning; they were already two and a half weeks into September.

  Do you know Clancy, he asked.

  No, she said. Another ding. A patch of light on his chin as he scrolled through messages. Chelsea could see his breath. Pale fuzz over his upper lip. He slipped the phone into his back pocket.

  Guy named Clancy is supposed to meet me, he said. Douche is selling an iPhone 5. I’ve been here twenty minutes.

  He was her age or slightly younger, self-possessed. He spoke to her as if they’d known each other since birth, but she’d never seen him before. He seemed to really want to buy the phone.

  It’s freezing out here, he said. Do you think this guy Clancy is in the bar? They could hear the live music coming across the parking lot, but the facade of the campus bar, brown brick with narrow, tinted office windows on the second floor, looked blighted and asleep.

  You’re underage? she asked. Chelsea had been getting into bars since she was sixteen. Narrowing her eyes at the bouncers. Dishing up a look that was part sexual taunt, part demented plea. It gave the men who had a fleeting authority over her — professors, bouncers, potential landlords — the willies. She was uncompromising and fragile; they felt like she could see through them. Her nineteenth birthday was already more than a month ago.

  The boy on the parking lot pulled out a fake ID from his back pocket.

  I bought this, he said. Think I should use it?

  So, you’re David? she asked. The ID had a picture of a man who was at least thirty years older than the boy. An older, hideous version. The square face misshapen, gouged with lines that stretched from the sides of a twice-broken nose to a fleshy, loose mouth.

  Dave, he said. People say David or they say Dave.

  You related to this guy in the picture? she asked.

  He’s just a random dude, the boy said. By contrast, the boy was riven with an intelligence that made her think handsome rather than hot. The unlikely, ephemeral resemblance to the photo and the fact that it didn’t look like him very much at all made her laugh. He took it back from her.

  I wouldn’t show that to anyone else, she said.

  All I know, the boy said. Douche says meet me outside Bitters. Doesn’t show up. This is Bitters, right?

  They have bouncers, Chelsea said.

  I said in the parking lot. I texted I’m here.

  Can you do me a favour? Chelsea said. I have to go through the skywalk to get to the other side of the parkway.

  The entrance to the skywalk was maybe five minutes from where they were standing, maybe a bit more. Then the staircase, which had no windows so you couldn’t see who was on it, then the landing halfway up with its single flickering bar of fluorescent light, then the walk, extending over four lanes and the median with its chain-link fence meant to stop students from taking a shortcut, then the staircase on the other side. There were security cameras, but if someone were wearing a ski mask, or a hoodie? She hated the skywalk. Especially at night.

  Are you afraid because of the rapist? the guy asked. He had turned his back on her and walked to the curb, where he lifted a small bike out of the grass. A stunt bike like the ones some of the boys rode in the skate park at Mundy Pond. She’d seen them disappearing over the lip of the concrete bowls and then they were spit up out of the earth’s crust moments later, the chrome bikes turned limp and wiggling in the blasting sun.

  Chelsea had seen the skate park early that September, when she’d gone to view a basement apartment near Mundy Pond. The apartment was smothered in a particular two-tone shade of indoor-outdoor carpet that went halfway up the walls, a puke hue that had shown up in some of the other apartments she’d seen. She’d almost taken it because she’d been desperate by then. The rent had been fifty dollars cheaper than most one-bedrooms, but they wanted too much security deposit up front.

  This guy outside Bitters, this David, with his fake ID and the small bike, probably lived in some far-flung new suburb, Chelsea thought, in a house that dwarfed the
building lot, a lawn out front and a forest behind. Near Paradise, or the once-protected wetlands behind Penney Crescent, recently slated for development. He seemed to be using the stunt bike as a mode of transportation.

  By that point Chelsea had viewed fifteen basement apartments — nine in late August and six more over the first two weeks of September. She’d arrived in town to find that the room she’d been promised had fallen through. Somebody’s boyfriend was taking the room. They were sorry for the inconvenience. They said they knew another house with a room, but she’d hung up on them. That was before she knew about how hard it was to get a place.

  Chelsea had been staying with a friend of her mother’s, Gabrielle Fudge, who told Chelsea to call her Gabby. She’d brought Chelsea into her living room that hot mid-August evening when they’d first met, and everything was tinged amber with the setting sun. Gabrielle had fanned out her hand toward the fold-out couch like a woman on a game show revealing a dazzling prize. The light withdrew, inching back across the hardwood floor while Gabby listed the amenities, the rules, and spoke about her husband, and his affair, financial difficulties, the instability of her job, until the deepening orange light had faded and everything was in shadow.

  Things had become strained between them almost at once. Gabby had wanted Chelsea to basically rent the couch. There was no privacy. Chelsea had to whisper when she called her mother on the phone in the evenings, and her mother complained that she couldn’t hear her. Gabby and Chelsea ate dinner together when Chelsea didn’t have night classes. Even Gabby’s chewing, slow and wetly noisy, seemed an accusation.

  That morning Gabby had asked about a croissant she had been saving for her breakfast.

  I left it on a saucer, right here, she said. The shame of it, for Chelsea, had been scorching — a white saucer blazing under the potted kitchen lights with a single flake of croissant left.

  Of course, you’re welcome to whatever’s here, Gabby had said. She had a tear-shaped growth on the side of her nose, no bigger than a single tear, that always seemed shiny, as if seeping whatever gelatinous tissue was inside it. Her chin disappeared into the folds of her neck when she was expressing disbelief or indignation. Her eyes, protuberant and brown, would shut with exasperation and suddenly flutter, the flicking lashes girlish and ironic.

  Chelsea had to wait for her walk to school in order to speak to her mother, who by that time was driving, and had her on speakerphone. They kept losing the connection, and there was too much static to hear. Even then Chelsea found herself trying to keep her voice down, as if Gabby were lurking somewhere nearby, trying to listen. Chelsea told her mother she wasn’t sure she would ever find a place. Even though she had already decided to go up fifty bucks. It would come out of what she had budgeted for food.

  Well, look harder, her mother shouted over the static. You’re not looking hard enough.

  That guy has raped someone else, Chelsea said. But she’d lost reception again.

  * * *

  None of the fifteen apartments she’d looked at were cheap enough. And they didn’t have access to laundry or they stank of mould. Once the landlord had stood too close throughout the short tour, and he had put his hand on the small of her back, letting his fingers spread downward, so that he was touching her ass, as he pressed her from the kitchen to the bedroom.

  I bet there’ll be fun times in here, he’d said. When they’d walked down the hall together he’d said: Down we go, down, down, down.

  When Chelsea came home from classes that evening a dinner had been set out for her under Saran Wrap, congealed tomato sauce clinging to the plastic, cold spaghetti clotted underneath. A Post-it Note with instructions for how many minutes the meal should be heated in the microwave.

  She and Gabby had been eating together every night for two and a half weeks, with the flowered paper serviettes, which, according to Gabby, cost nearly four dollars more than the regular white ones, but it was important to treat yourself, important to splurge on small things.

  You know what, Gabby had said. I just bought them on a crazy whim. I just said to myself, I was lucky to be rid of him.

  I said, Things are going to change around here.

  For the same reason, they used the good silver that had been in Gabby’s family for generations, but had only seen the light of day for special occasions, and sometimes not even then. Her husband — “my ex,” as she called him — didn’t care about silverware.

  But now that he’d left, Gabby used the good silverware. It couldn’t go in the dishwasher; that was the downside. But with Chelsea there, it was just two forks and two knives, their little teaspoons. How long does it take to pop those in the sink? She was an avid life-hack collector, she told Chelsea. Had she noticed the tennis ball? Gabby had sliced it open halfway across the middle? That was for holding letters and bills. She had hammered the tennis ball into the wall by herself. She’d learned how to find the beam by rapping her knuckles and listening for when the sound was hollow, and when there was something that sounded solid, like a two-by-four.

  I can tell when something is hollow, Gabby said.

  Chelsea could see that the hour of dinner together had been Gabby’s only reprieve from acute loneliness. But something callous and self-preserving kept Chelsea looking for somewhere else to live. Ultimately, she could not allow herself to fall into Gabby Fudge’s weltering abyss of need.

  This morning, the incident with the croissant, now the Saran-wrapped dinner. Gabby had eaten before Chelsea got home and her plate was not in the dishwasher, where she usually put it as soon as the last bit of food was scraped up with the side of her fork. Instead, the plate was in the sink.

  Gabby’s plate was a tomato-smeared reprimand.

  Chelsea knocked lightly on Gabby’s bedroom door. But there was no answer. She felt a chill and broke a sweat under her arms. Turned the handle and let the light from the hall fan into the room. Gabby lay fully dressed on her bed, face up. She had not taken off her shoes, the stiletto heels pressing into the shiny synthetic bedspread, now opalescent with the light from the hall. Gabby’s hands were folded together at her waist. The tiny bedside lamp cast a dim light and made a bright line on Gabby’s cheek, and on the soft folds of her neck. Chelsea moved to the foot of her bed. She was whispering Gabby’s name.

  Please, she said. Please god. Please. Then the woman stirred. Her eyes opened, but she was looking at the ceiling. When she spoke her voice was clotted with mucus and Chelsea knew she had been crying.

  I think, a simple courtesy might be to mention if you take the last of something, Gabby said. I’d been looking forward to that croissant all day.

  She was alive. She had not swallowed all the antidepressants in the bathroom cabinet.

  You know what, Chelsea said. Fuck the croissant. Fuck the fucking croissant, Gabby.

  Then Chelsea left for the party at Bitters. Gabby didn’t like her coming home late and maybe the door would be locked when she got back. But she would stay out as late as she could.

  Now outside in the cold with this guy Dave, she found herself terrified about having to walk back in the dark. She hadn’t stayed out this late before. There were several missed calls on her phone from Gabby. She was afraid to get in a taxi. Afraid of walking in the dark spaces between the streetlights. What if she weren’t smart enough for university? Just finding her way around the campus exhausted her. The tunnels were under construction and heavy sheets of opaque plastic hung all over the place, blocking her path, and busted-up bits of concrete you had to step over.

  She was afraid of the rapist. The cops were using the term cluster, rather than the term serial. They didn’t want to say serial rapist. Three is a cluster. She was afraid she would never find an apartment, and she would have to go back to Grand Falls and work at Tim Hortons for the rest of the semester.

  Her father had committed suicide two years before. But Chelsea’s mother was doing better than Gabby
Fudge. Her mother was not using the good silverware, or listening to apps that counselled women to find a Lean In Circle in their community, to gather in solidarity, to encourage each other toward new goals or to learn new skills. Or to demand what they wanted.

  Her mother wasn’t trying to get out there. Or trying to be gluten-free. She wasn’t making her own green cleaning products. She didn’t stand before a mirror and pinch her stomach with both hands, looking back over her shoulder at Chelsea to say, See this fat, I’d like to slice it off with a scalpel.

  Her mother had not considered, to Chelsea’s knowledge, Botox. Nor did she rail against Botox. She did not dream all day about coming home to a croissant. If there had ever been a leftover croissant in their house, which Chelsea sincerely doubted, Chelsea’s mother would have expected Chelsea’s younger brother to eat it in two bites. Fold it into his mouth and follow it with milk from the carton, standing there bathed in the light of the fridge, whose door he would leave swinging open.

  Chelsea didn’t know what, exactly, her mother was doing.

  But Chelsea was doing nursing.

  She would become a nurse.

  If she could find a place to live and get the fuck off Gabby’s couch before it folded up around her and swallowed her whole.

  If she could make it home in the dark.

  If she could get through the skywalk without getting raped.

  * * *

  Chelsea had travelled to the apartments she’d viewed by bus, sometimes taking routes that required two or even three transfers. In these places, at the edges of the city, it was not unlikely to have a moose, sometimes a cow and calf, gallop through the playground at dusk, hulking and swift. Swings that danced by themselves in the wind, the chains moaning humanly under the moonlight, used syringes in the sand.

  Drugs were everywhere in town. Chelsea’s English professor wore a naloxone kit strapped to her thigh. During the first class, she’d hiked up a calf-length tweed skirt and jutted her hip to show her leg like a chorus girl in a black-and-white Western. The plastic casing and elastic straps that wrapped around her leg held an injection that could bring a person back from the dead.