On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light

by Cordelia Strube

  “Of course, ace.” Heike hops onto his lap and he wheels them out onto the street.

  Before the drive-by shooting, Forbes played amateur baseball. When he pitches rolled-up flyers at doorsteps, his arms, muscular from navigating the wheelchair, flex and extend like a real pitcher’s. On the rare occasions he misses, Irwin trots up the walk to retrieve the flyers and place them on the doorstep. For this Forbes gives him twenty percent of the take.

  “Can I throw the next one?” Heike asks. “Please please please? I bet I can do it better than you.” Perched on Forbes’s lap, she pitches the flyers perfectly, one after another. She can do anything better than anyone. Irwin can’t understand how Uma, who cries all the time and can’t get a job, and Trent, a bankrupt IT consultant who can’t commit to anything but bike meets, could produce a miracle like Heike. “There was a mix-up in the lab,” Lynne says.

  That Heike insists Irwin be her after-camp babysitter baffles him. Uma disapproves, he knows, because she rarely leaves her laptop to acknowledge him when he brings Heike home. Uma is working on another thesis, which is why she can’t have Heike home after camp.

  “Slide it through the goddamn door handle,” an old man, wearing a ball cap with Number 1 Grandpa on it, shouts. “How the dickens am I supposed to bend down and pick that up?”

  Heike skips back up the walk, hands the old man the flyers with a flourish then curtsies. “My apologies, sir.”

  “Aren’t you a cutie? Thank you, lovey.”

  Heike makes everybody love her. Lynne says Irwin did this when he was little. “You used to light up a room,” she says. “Everybody loved you.” He knows she wants him to be little again, lighting up rooms. “You always used to laugh,” she says. He tries to laugh, and do the things she asks, like vacuuming and cleaning. When he calls her at work to make sure he’s doing it right, she grows irritated. “What’s the matter with you?” she says. “Use common sense.”

  Forbes spins his chair around to look at Heike. “Where’d you learn to curtsy like that?”

  “Ballet. I’ll teach you. You only really need one leg.”

  Forbes can stand for short periods on his right leg, although it doesn’t sense hot or cold and sometimes goes into spasm. His left leg hangs lifeless when he uses his crutch to move around the apartment. Balancing is a challenge. If he turns his head quickly, it can throw him off, making him crash to the floor. Irwin has witnessed several falls and been alarmed by the change in Forbes, who thrashes about cursing his leg. Eventually, his fury spent, Forbes lies still and silent. After a few minutes, Irwin helps him to a chair.

  Heike demonstrates a deep curtsy. “All the weight’s on my right leg, see?”

  “Hmm, must try it. Way snappier than a bow.”

  A yellow dog charges out of a house, barking. Unperturbed, Heike holds out her hand for it to sniff. “Easy, boy.”

  Dogs frighten Irwin. Forbes says too much frightens him, and that when he breaks through the membrane Irwin will stop being afraid because he will see that humans are just interacting particles. “Reality splits up into a set of parallel streams,” Forbes explained, “each representing a different possible outcome, just like we split up into multiple selves in a multiverse.”

  Irwin doesn’t understand quantum field theory. But the multiverse makes sense to him because why would there be just one universe if the cosmos is infinite?

  Heike pats the yellow dog’s head. “Nice doggy.” Irwin takes the flyers from her and leaves them at the door.

  When suicidal thoughts taunt him, Irwin goes to his room and jerks off, thinking of Sydney, even though he’s afraid of her too. Her eyes change colour daily. Sometimes they’re violet, sometimes green or blue. He knows she’s wearing contact lenses but still the bright colours unsettle him—especially if he meets Sydney coming out of the bathroom after her shower. Knowing she is naked under the terry robe stiffens his penis but, when he looks at her eyes—minus the coloured contacts—he almost doesn’t recognize her. She looks washed out and worn. By the time she leaves for LA Fitness she has her lenses in and makeup on and he can resume jerking off. It prevents him from searching for somewhere to hook the end of his belt.

  “Beep beep beep, big brother, you’re holding up traffic.” Irwin steps out of the path of the wheelchair and into a flowerbed.

  “My roses,” a woman in a muumuu squawks from her porch.

  “Sorry,” Irwin mutters. Heike says he has to stop apologizing all the time. “It’s not like everything’s your fault,” she tells him.

  But it feels that way. Harriet falling, Gennedy leaving, Lynne smoking.

  Heike does a cartwheel on the sidewalk. “Were my legs straight?”

  “A little frog-like, ace,” Forbes says.

  “No way.”

  “Yes way.”

  She does another one. “How was that?”

  “A little better. Point your toes next time.”

  They stop at Mr. Hung’s for freezies. He doesn’t speak to them, hasn’t spoken to customers since his wife died. People new to the neighbourhood think he can’t speak English.

  At the Shangrila, Mr. Shotlander talks to himself while doing the crossword. “Now what dang word is that? Come on now, you know that word.” As Mr. Shotlander grows deafer, he talks louder. “Forty-one down, five letters. Wild dog of Australia. You know that word.”

  “Dingo,” Heike says.

  “For the love of Mike, you’re right. Dingo.” He quickly writes it into the crossword then jabs a finger at Irwin. “Where’s my dang Mirror?”

  “They haven’t been dropped off yet.”

  “You come by for a Coke when you bring it.”

  “Will do.” Irwin enjoys visiting the seniors because they talk about Harry.

  Once Forbes is in his apartment, he grabs his crutch and levers himself out of the wheelchair. Heike, clenching her freezie between her teeth, demonstrates curtsies. “You can go really deep, or just kind of bob. You should probably just bob.”

  Forbes, standing on his right leg, bobs.

  “Excellent. Now hold your hand out. Kind of sweep it across.” Heike gracefully sweeps her hand sideways as she bobs.

  “He’s tired, Heike,” Irwin says. “Teach him some other time.”

  “No prob, I’m on it.” Forbes manages a wobbly bob and a sweep before steadying himself against the wall.

  “What’s your favourite animal?” Heike asks.

  “Elephants.”

  “Snap. They are sooo civilized. The females anyway. The males are jerks.”

  “Like the males of most species,” Forbes says.

  When Harriet was in a coma, Irwin asked repeatedly what her favourite animal was, even though he knew it was a capybara. He asked her many things in an effort to wake her. Lynne and Gennedy wouldn’t let him visit long. “Don’t disturb her,” they said. But the ventilator was more disturbing than Irwin could ever be, blasting wind in and out of her. He had to speak very loud for her to hear him. When she didn’t answer, he would answer for her, sometimes incorrectly, hoping she’d get mad and correct him. “What’s your favourite colour?” he’d ask, knowing she didn’t have one because colours changed in light and she could never pick a favourite. “I bet your favourite colour is black,” he’d say, expecting her to sit up and tell him black is not a colour. “Who’s your favourite superhero?” he’d ask, knowing she thought only derps were into superheroes. Gennedy would put his hand on Irwin’s shoulder. “Time to go, little man.”

  Irwin talked to Harry every day until they told him she had passed. Irwin knew kids only died on vents when their parents said it was okay to take them off. “You took her off the vent!” he cried. “You killed her! She was getting better. I saw.” He screamed until his insides felt bloody and a nurse gave him a needle. When he woke up he was at home and convinced it was all a horrible nightmare. He scrambled to the kitc
hen, where they sat slumped over cereal. “Let’s go see Harry,” he said. “I want to talk to her now.”

  His mother poked her spoon at the Shredded Wheat. “She’s dead, baby.”

  “No she’s not.”

  “I’m afraid it’s true, champ.” Gennedy tried to pull him close but Irwin started screaming that they were murderers. Mrs. Butts banged on the door to find out what all the commotion was about. Irwin wailed for thirteen hours then couldn’t stop crying. They took him back to the hospital to get hydrated. He insisted on taking Harry’s pillow because it smelled of her. Hooked up to an IV, he pressed his face into the pillow, soaking it with so many tears it didn’t smell of Harry anymore.

  Heike pokes a finger in her mouth. “I have a wiggly tooth. That means another toonie from the tooth fairy.”

  “You’re going to bankrupt the poor woman,” Forbes says.

  “She’s not a woman, she’s a fairy. What happened to your tooth?”

  “I broke it.”

  “How?”

  “Undoing a zipper.”

  “What zipper?”

  “On a pair of jeans.”

  “Why were you undoing your zipper with your teeth?”

  “It wasn’t my zipper.”

  “Whose was it?”

  “My ex’s.”

  “Why were you undoing her zipper with your teeth?”

  “Guess my hands were busy.”

  “You’re not making any sense.” Heike always says this when she doesn’t understand, as though it’s the other person’s fault that she doesn’t understand.

  “Heike,” Irwin says, “check your phone to see if Dad’s called.” They’re supposed to have dinner with Trent, but he cancels if he’s running late or has a bike meet. Heike checks her cell. Lynne stopped buying Irwin phones because he kept losing them and she’s not made of money.

  “He says to meet us at the fish and chips place,” Heike says. “Sick. Mum’s going to be super pissed.”

  Irwin is uncomfortable around his father because he looks at him as though he wishes he were someone else.

  Forbes hobbles to the balcony door and slides it open. Heike pulls her notebook from her backpack. “I have a lead on the guy who exposed himself to that little girl.”

  “Not that little, ace, she was older than you.”

  Heike reads from the notebook. “Suspect between five-foot-six and five-ten, with spiky hair and a big nose.”

  “That’s no lead,” Forbes says. “They said that on the radio.”

  “Me and Irwin saw a guy who fits that description at the SOC.”

  “Which is?”

  “The DQ. He did it in the DQ parking lot.”

  “So why didn’t you call it in?”

  “He took off. But I’m starting to see a pattern. I’m going to stake him out.”

  “Not by yourself you’re not,” Irwin says. Uma gets hysterical when Heike does stakeouts on her own.

  Forbes collapses on his armchair, immediately slipping until his ass is half off the seat. Irwin used to worry he’d slide right off until he figured out Forbes grips the arms of the chair between his upper arms and ribs.

  Heike practices more curtsies. “Tell us another orifice story.”

  Forbes was an emergency room orderly before he got shot. That’s how he figured out before anyone else he was paralyzed. The shooter didn’t know Forbes. Forbes was eating burgers in the wrong place at the wrong time. “What was the last orifice story I told you?”

  “The lady who swallowed three quarters, two dimes and a nickel.”

  “Did I tell you about the guy who swallowed magnets? They looked like candies. He swallowed them at different times so the magnets sought each other out, screwed up his guts.”

  “Eww,” Heike says.

  “Then there was the guy with the glowing gut. What do you think he put down there?”

  Heike, looking puzzled, fondles her lucky horseshoe pendant.

  Irwin likes Forbes because his body is as out of control as his own. People who can control their bodies lose patience with those who can’t. Forbes never loses patience with Irwin and doesn’t seem to notice his head or ears or clumsiness. He never stares at the shunt pulsing under Irwin’s skin or at the scars on his scalp or his shaking hands. Most people try not to stare but end up staring anyway. And they always keep their distance. The last seat on the bus is always beside Irwin.

  “I’ll give you a clue,” Forbes says. “What glows?”

  Heike scrunches up her face. “A light? What kind of light fits in your gut?”

  This makes Irwin think of his own gut. The neuro showed him the X-rays. The broken tubes looked like snakes. When he can’t sleep, he feels them slithering around inside him.

  “No light can fit in a gut,” Heike says. “He’d have to swallow it and it would be too big.”

  “A minor detail, my dear Watson. Guess again.”

  “He swallowed a glowstick?”

  Forbes wiggles his eyebrows. “There are other orifices besides the mouth.”

  Heike sucks on her freezie then gasps. “You mean he stuck a glow stick up his bum?”

  “A flashlight.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “To see better.”

  Heike, unconvinced, stares at him, narrowing her eyes like Uma.

  Forbes winks at her. “Did I tell you about the cockroach crawling into a guy’s ear?”

  “We have to go,” Irwin says.

  While they wait for Trent at the fish and chips place, Heike dusts for prints. “Mum says they never clean these tables and there’s germy prints all over them.” Uma carries plastic bags in her fanny pack and slips them on like gloves to open doors or press elevator buttons. Operating ATMs wearing the bags is difficult. People line up behind her, growing irritable. Uma doesn’t notice.

  Heike gently blows on the baby powder. Most of it sticks to the table’s greasy surface. “As I suspected.” She hops over to the scarred woman at the cash register. Mr. Chubak told Irwin the cashier is from Afghanistan and had a jealous husband who threw acid on her face. She looks annoyed all the time. Irwin would never have the nerve to speak to her. “Excuse me, ma’am,” Heike says. “Would you be so kind as to wipe our table? I have to be careful about germs.” Heike coughs to demonstrate her sensitivity to germs then smiles apologetically, revealing the gaps left behind by baby teeth. “Sorry, I don’t want you to go to any trouble.”

  The lady smiles back, although, because of the scars, only one side of her mouth lifts up. “Not to worry, miss. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Thank you so much.” Heike pulls binoculars out of her backpack and leans out the glass door to survey the street.

  “Can you see Dad?” Irwin asks.

  “Yellow helmet at six o’clock. ETA four minutes.”

  Forbes calls Heike a smooth operator and says he can’t wait till she becomes prime minister. Watching Heike operate smoothly makes Irwin nervous. He fears one day she will go too far, like Harriet. She will be away from him, among strangers, operating, and he will lose her. He won’t be able to stand it.

  Twenty

  “How’s the dynamic duo?” Trent asks, pulling off his yellow helmet.

  “Good.” Heike fits her binoculars into her backpack. “Let’s order, I’m starved.” She looks at Irwin. “The usual?” He nods.

  Trent takes the chair closest to the window. “Your mom will want you to have some veggies. Get a couple sides of slaw.”

  “Mummy told me not to have slaw here because there might be toxic bacteria in it.”

  Irwin knows Heike’s lying because they didn’t tell Uma they were going for fish and chips. This is Heike being a smooth operator.

  “FYI, Dad,” she says, “you’ve got helmet head.”

  Trent runs his fingers through his
hair and glances at Irwin as though he wishes he were someone else. “How’s it going, Irwin?”

  “It’s going.” He knows his father finds it hard to look at him.

  “How’s your mother? Working two jobs, I take it.”

  “She’s always working two jobs,” Irwin says. “Does your going bankrupt mean you’re poor now too?”

  “Not poor, exactly, but we have to tighten our belts a little.”

  “Who’s ‘we’? I mean, you haven’t been sending my mother any money. So it doesn’t make any difference to us. Our belts are tight anyway.”

  “It’s more to do with Uma. She’s got expensive tastes. She’s going to have to lower her standards a little.”

  Uma calls herself a perfectionist. Irwin doesn’t understand why when she is far from perfect and can’t get a job. Lynne calls her a lazy German sow.

  Irwin watches Trent staring out the window to avoid staring at his head. He wishes Heike would come back with the order, but she’s chatting happily with the scarred lady. Conversation with his father has always been difficult. Irwin knows he divorced Lynne because of him. He heard Gennedy and Lynne argue about Trent many times and Gennedy would say, “He left you because he couldn’t handle a mentally and physically challenged son. What kind of coward is that?” Irwin doesn’t know what kind of coward that is. Or what kind of coward leaves a wife and two children, and then another wife and one child. Children need their parents, Mr. Shotlander says. He believes Harriet fell because she didn’t have a father looking out for her, just “that layabout.” Irwin still visits Gennedy in the rooming house, despite his fear of the white Rasta boarder with floor-length dreadlocks. While Irwin waits for Gennedy to answer his door, the white Rasta talks at him with great urgency, saying things like “What a sweet nanny goat a go run him belly,” or “Fire de a Mus Mus tail, him tink a cool breeze.”

  Finally Heike brings the food to the table. “Everybody has to say what their fish is shaped like.”

  “Mine’s shaped like a fish,” Trent says.

  “No way, it looks like a torpedo. What about yours, Irwin?” She leans both elbows on the table and scrutinizes Irwin’s fish.