The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  He laughed. Sorry, we don’t really accept gifts, he said.

  He was trying to be professional, but I couldn’t help but take this personally, especially because my card was nothing if not personal. If only I could tell him what was inside the envelope, then he would know why he actually wanted to accept it as a gift, but that would ruin the whole surprise effect that is so great about card-giving.

  You should open it. You’ll like it, I said, winking, with a feeling that I was already giving too much of the card away.

  He said he couldn’t right now because he was in the middle of an emergency. I looked down at the unconscious man on the stretcher whose legs were both wrapped with large pads of bloody gauze, and he seemed pretty content to me.

  The elevator chimed and the medical people started pushing the man through the doors. Do you want to grab a coffee after work? I asked, with no other choice than to ruin the most exciting part of the card completely.

  He mustered a strange expression, the bewildered kind people give when they’ve just heard something that is so absolutely impossible that they can’t even consider it. Did he think he was too good for me? For my card?

  Sorry, he said, and walked into the elevator and I saw now that he was just as heartless as Sideburns or any other guyfriend I’d ever loved—perhaps more so—and that he was probably just accidentally horny the day he came over and found me so interesting. I yearned now to prove him wrong, to wound him and show him how much he did in fact care for me, deep inside him, on frequencies that his heart couldn’t detect, with a tenderness and compassion crafted only for me, and during this contemplation I found myself warming again to the whole killing-myself business. I wondered how many people had actually killed themselves because of the callousness of others, or even just so they didn’t have to feel like a liar anymore, and I figured it was probably all of them.

  I took the deepest breath I could and locked it away in my chest. I felt my eyes bulge and my lungs began to chip away at the air. Miniature crystal bells tolled in my ears and it was as if I was pressing my stomach to a brick wall, peering through a window, and then I knew I was envisioning our future, his and mine. I watched the paramedic and I on a queen-sized bed, spending entire days entwined, our arms going to sleep from constant embracing, breaking only for one of us to make toast while wearing the rumpled clothes of the other, settling for the lightest toast setting because the longer toasting time seemed like a painful eternity to be apart.

  How much do you love me right now? I would say, returning with fresh toast slices on our last clean dish.

  I love you this much, he’d say, stretching his arms past the edges of the bed, as wide as was physically possible for him.

  Only that much? I’d say.

  Then I love you as far from here to Neptune.

  Do you love me more than you did yesterday?

  He’d think a minute, and here I mean really think.

  Yes, I do, he’d say.

  Then you didn’t really love me yesterday, I’d say, not really. But I didn’t know yesterday that I could’ve loved you more today.

  What if you love me more tomorrow?

  Oh stop this, he’d say, kissing me in rapid fire. And then he would say that he didn’t care, he just loved me today and tomorrow and forever and I would believe him and we would have sex with each other’s bodies as well as our minds because the mind is the largest erogenous zone and we would live with no need for greeting cards because we would speak in our own voices without fear and each day would be the day before the day he would leave me.

  Then my imagining stalled because by this point my lungs were crawling, like two lobsters having a death match in my chest, and I was on the floor. My paramedic was feeling my neck and talking at the others saying the word seizure. It was a beautiful word, as pure as lightning. Maybe I was having a seizure, I thought, grand mal, probably, which is French for really bad, and that seemed apt for the way my paramedic was abandoning me with such cruelty.

  But then I saw it: in his panic, in his furrowed brow, his sudden sweaty gleam, in his desperate wish for me to continue my life, which was plain to all those present in that hallway. I saw the brilliant, steadfast jewel of his love, and I wondered if someone could tell you they loved you over and over, so rapidly that the sound of the words would blend into a constant tone—kind of like a dial tone—but infinitely more beautiful. Wouldn’t that sound be the most comforting sound in the world? Wouldn’t it be the greatest painkiller ever invented? Better than morphine, or phone calls, or cooking shows? As he tenderly sought my pulse and gently pried open my mouth to clamp something plastic-tasting between my teeth, as he cradled my head in his hands like a man holding a newborn child that he was sure was his own, this was the sound ringing in me, burrowing into my joints and tendons and bones, into my heart and into my guts. I bit down on the plastic and offered myself to the sound, wholly and without reserve, and it was then I felt the sound penetrate to the very doorstep of the dead part of me, the part that had been strangled long ago by someone or something I could not name, and there the sound wavered, diminished and was turned away.

  Discard

  Earl drives from his motel into the fray of the city. He stops at a downtown supermarket where he selects two preroasted chickens from a warming cabinet and places them in his carry basket.

  “Sunday supper?” says the clerk, a man of his age. Earl is surprised such a person would be working as a grocery cashier. “With my grandson,” Earl says, feeling suddenly disloyal for the admission. He pays and, to spare the man the trouble, bags the chickens himself.

  He drives the short distance to English Bay, parks, and pops open the domed-plastic container. Steam bursts from the joint as he tears a leg loose. Half-listening to the radio, he eats nearly the whole bird, digging morsels out from between the bones with his fingers. It is winter, and night in this place comes much too early for Earl—a vacuuming kind of dark that settles in by four-thirty. He sits watching the lights of the countless freighters tremble in the void of the inlet. They resemble distant cities, so numerous it’s impossible to tell where one ends and another begins. He glances at the green digits of his dashboard clock: 8:30. He’s not late but should be going.

  Earl recalls the day not long ago when he bought this car—a small, efficient thing, well suited for a city—and how he laboured that night for hours to set its clock and finally was forced to return the next day to the dealership for a kid in a blue jumpsuit to set it for him. He’d always rather do a job himself, even if it took three times as long, and when his wife was still alive there were many nights where his dinner sat cold on the table while he fiddled, red-faced, with something in his workroom.

  Earl steps into the sea-rich air and tosses the picked carcass into the trash. As he backs the car away, his headlights catch a primer-grey sea bird descending greedily upon the barrel.

  Soon he’s trolling the narrow streets of the West End, hunting for a nook he can shoehorn his silver hatchback into. He nuzzles up behind a carpet-cleaning van only a few blocks from where he is going. He reaches for his aluminum cane on the rear seat, and is pleased to find the second chicken container still warm as he tucks it under his arm. Lately, Earl has been feeling increasingly brittle, and his knees wobble and click as he enters an alley lorded over by two dizzying concrete apartment buildings. His new doctor has fitted him with a pair of tight nylon stockings because blood has been pooling in his legs, not making the return trip. This began two months ago on the airplane when his feet blew up like violet bear paws. The stockings haven’t helped much. Earl suspects the dampness of this place doesn’t sit right with his circulatory constitution, if there is such a thing.

  He reaches the dumpster where his grandson will be. Beside it is some scrap vinyl siding and an oak desk, the heavy kind schoolteachers once preferred. The lid of the dumpster is shut, but not locked. He’s noticed that more of the bins are being chained and padlocked, and there have been arguments about this on
the radio. He’s heard interviews with city planners who want the dumpsters gone, and with security guards who pour bleach on bins full of perfectly good food to thwart scavengers. The logic of this escapes Earl. Who cares if a person gets some use out of what nobody wanted anyway?

  He hoists the dumpster’s lid and peers inside. Six nearly identical tightly cinched grocery bags of kitchen waste, a large browning houseplant, and a box with a plastic window through which Earl can see an untouched birthday cake that reads: Happy 28th Charlie! Love, The ‘Fam. The only explanation Earl can imagine for the uneaten cake is that in the frenzy of preparation, Charlie’s overzealous family accidentally ordered two.

  The dumpster is against a cinderblock wall and the lid won’t stay flipped back. Earl sets it on his head and stretches an arm deep inside, his heels lifting shakily from the ground, so as to lower the chicken in its plastic coffin as close to the bottom as he can before releasing it. The metal lip bites into his sternum and his eyes fill with blood. Just as he lets go, there is sudden tension then a cold snapping in his left knee and it throws his weight funny and the container tumbles wrongly from his fingers. Earl watches the domed plastic pop away from the black base when it lands, springing the contents loose. The chicken comes to rest half on the plastic, half on the slimy bottom of the dumpster.

  “Damn.”

  Earl pulls himself from the foul pocket of air, tingles of bad circulation in his ears and fingertips. He tests his knee and it appears to be fine. That the rotten thing has a mind of its own enrages him more than any pain could.

  Earl checks his watch. He’ll be here soon, the same time every night, much too soon for Earl to drive back and get another one.

  A few months previous, when Earl still lived back east in the brick bungalow on Miles Avenue, his grandson appeared to him in a kind of vision. It was a time when Earl was adrift in the wake of his wife Tuuli’s sudden death at sixty-four of an aneurism that occurred while she was curling at the club where they were both members. Since the funeral, after the casseroles that appeared on his doorstep were long consumed, Earl had been subsisting on cans of condensed milk and loaves of white bread bought from the corner confectionery and eaten in a single day. He’d retreated to the basement he had finished himself, with its chestnut panelling and dense industrial-pile carpet that Tuuli had claimed hurt her feet. He preferred this room to the others—it was the least shot through with her memory—and there in the basement he watched hour after hour of television with little regard for what his eyes fell upon.

  Many weeks quietly unspooled in this way, until one night Earl came across a news special about homeless people in Vancouver. The reporter spoke in the overemphasized way of reporters, like she was instructing a fool, but also as if she herself was exhausted by the overwhelming nature of the homelessness situation. With one hand gripping an umbrella, the other an almost comically large microphone, she strolled past a soup kitchen, along a lineup of downtrodden men, with their beards and shopping carts, all of them tinged with misery and grime. He’d never before seen someone known to him personally on television, but there in the line Earl saw his grandson, like an apparition, inhabiting the body of one of the men. The boy’s red hair had made its way into a stringy red beard, and the same defiance and glazed recklessness dwelled in his good eye. But it was the other eye that convinced Earl, spun halfway into his upper lid, what people nowadays would call lazy.

  It had been nearly fifteen years since Earl had seen Kyle. Not since the slushy day he’d fetched him from out front of the holding cells where the boy had spent the night for public drunkenness, aggravated assault, and God knows what else. Earl drove him straight to the bus station, put six 20s in his hand, and turned his back on him. He was sixteen years old.

  Earl realized, there in his basement, that a rarely visited part of himself had long ago decided the boy was dead. His first thought was to call his daughter, Sarah. But that wouldn’t do. She was a fragile creature, the kind of girl who’d be bent all out of sorts by something like that, one who was born sure that every miserable thing on this earth was her own damn fault. And what would she do, anyway? Go and get him? Bring him home? She lived in Cold Lake, Alberta—a cruel, wind-beaten place—with her four-year-old daughter and the girl’s father, a flight sergeant named Reginald, a man Earl had never met, who for two weeks of every three flew thousands of kilometres over empty tundra. Since she’d left home, Sarah had called Earl at all hours, when she heard noises at night in her basement, or after eating some food she suspected had expired. She’d been a disorganized but well-behaved girl, and it had been a great surprise when she’d become pregnant at seventeen by a boy named Dennis who lived a few blocks north over on Whalen Street. If the two had been dating, Earl and Tuuli had never known. Dennis had worked with Earl at Hydro one summer, digging and backfilling kilometres of trench for underground cable, only to be laid off when the ground froze, but eventually secured a better-paying job in a diamond mine five hours north. Earl had found him to be a good worker and had no unkind words for anyone who took pride in holding down a job.

  Sarah decided to keep the baby, and when Kyle was born she merely continued living at home without ever asking their permission. But neither Earl nor Tuuli minded. Sarah was the sort of girl you heard about on the radio who’d do something like put a baby in the oven to dry it after a bath, so they slept better with her close by.

  Dennis sent money with good regularity and came for visits on his longer stretches of off days. He had most of his things at their house, in boxes, which Earl had locked in the tool shed because Kyle would get into them. Earl had once caught seven-year-old Kyle brandishing a dull Mexican switchblade, and another time found a skin magazine hidden in his room; Earl threw both the knife and the magazine in the trash, because there are things you don’t bring into another man’s house. When Dennis would visit, he’d come on a foreign motorcycle that held his body at an absurd angle, and pass hours wrestling with the boy in the backyard while Kyle roared and his ears turned crimson. With Dennis around, Kyle was transformed. He went from a quiet and for the most part respectful child to a frantic performer, an attention seeker. He’d tear about the house with one of Tuuli’s old dresses fluttering from his shoulders like a cape, talking nonsense, singing and carrying on, all the while shooting expectant glances at his father. “I want to show you another thing,” he’d say, leading his father by the finger, and when they got where they were going, he’d have forgotten what he meant to show but by that time was on to something else. Showing off was the only way to describe it. Earl had never cared for spectacle of any kind. In his experience, any person who craved the attention of others usually wasn’t much worth paying attention to, and this was something the boy would have to learn. In the throes of Kyle’s nagging, Dennis found little peace, and Earl pitied him. He had to lock the boy in his room and mow both the front and back lawns so Dennis and Sarah could take some time alone.

  Over the years, Kyle was left increasingly riled up and difficult after Dennis’s visits, and Sarah took little interest in righting him. Soon, the boy’s sole pleasure when his father was away was to send him letters, and this had been pretty much the only way they could convince him to learn how to write. But Dennis never replied. And by the time Kyle was eleven, the visits had dwindled to nothing. Tuuli had tracked them on a calendar she hid from her daughter in the glove compartment of her car, marking days with circled D’s. Kyle grew sullen and neglected chores he’d once done happily. Sarah was called to the school principal’s office a number of times for his disruptive behaviour in class, but each time she was to go, she got a stomach ache or migraine and stayed home. As much as this pained him, Earl felt it wasn’t his place to intervene.

  “We can’t just do nothing,” Tuuli had said on their way back from bowling. It was a dry summer evening, the windows down, the sky full of minced, pink clouds, the kind of night Earl would later turn over in his mind for hours.

  “He’s a good kid most of the tim
e—there’s something off with him is what,” he said, “and with a mother who can hardly do up her own shoes, who can blame him?”

  “Oh, Earl, he hasn’t a single friend, the neighbourhood kids treat him like the plague.”

  “Well, if he acts like the plague, he’d better get used to kids covering their mouths,” Earl said, and Tuuli frowned. Earl shifted his grip on the wheel. “He just needs to take responsibility for himself. He’ll settle down when he’s working age. There’s no use beating ourselves up over it.”

  Shortly after, one of Sarah’s friends from high school found a job as a banquet waitress on a Norwegian cruise boat, and she told Sarah there was a spot for her.

  “I think I’d regret it if I didn’t do it,” Sarah said to her parents over oatmeal one morning. Kyle was at the end of the table, fiddling with the brown sugar container.

  “That’s enough sugar, Kyle,” Earl said.

  “We’ve always wanted to go on a cruise, haven’t we, Earl?” Tuuli said.

  “That’s plenty,” Earl said, feeling his throat close as the boy continued heaping it on.

  “It will be good experience,” Sarah said, and Tuuli took her hand while Earl nodded then stood in an effort to disperse the rage building in him as he eyed the wasteful peaks melting in Kyle’s bowl like dirty glaciers.

  It was clear what Sarah meant by this, even to Kyle. She was fragile, too young for a child, everyone knew it, always had, and now with Dennis gone there was nothing for her in this place, and no opportunity to better herself. The work would be just the thing for her. What good was there in asking the boy what he wanted? They’d always picked up after their daughter and this wasn’t much different. And so it was that when Sarah set off on a bright Friday afternoon for the airport to meet a great white ship anchored off the coast of Florida, while her son played lawn darts against himself in the backyard, Earl and Tuuli became the boy’s guardians.