The Beggar's Garden

by Michael Christie

  Then the phone rang. Dan whacked his shin on the glass top of his coffee table while he ran for it, crumpling him to the carpet. Buddy came to him. He didn’t lick Dan’s face, but Dan was happy to note a certain attitude of concern.

  After a deep breath he set the phone to his ear.

  “Where’ve you been?” Winston said. Dan could hear Jacob yelping nonsense in the background. He took the cordless out on the balcony where the air was refreshingly cool and sat, testing the swelling that was conglomerating on his shin.

  Dan attempted to recollect what he’d been doing the past few weeks and came up with a mental summary as formless and without value as a handful of gravel. What had he been doing? Sleeping? Trying to cheer up Buddy, was all he could say with certainty. He told Winston he’d been working on something.

  Winston then asked what happened with Ginnie that night and Dan told him the story, omitting the kiss.

  “I liked her,” Winston said. “She stood up to Marta.”

  “Well, she seems to be standing up to me as well, which is surprising because all I ever wanted to be was her friend, so there’s nothing to stand up to.”

  Winston exhaled into the phone. It sounded like wind. “C’mon, you liked her, I could see it, you were unleashing facial expressions I haven’t seen in years.”

  “I do really love her dog, Jo. I really miss her.”

  “Her dog? That’s why people get dogs, isn’t it? To meet other people with dogs? Am I not right? Sort of like joining a club?”

  “No, I wanted a companion.” “Come on.”

  “Buddy and I understand each other. I don’t know what I’d do without him. People say dogs are loyal, but they really are actually loyal.”

  “Speaking of loyal, I saw on the radio this thing about how if someone dies in their home and nobody drops by or smells the stench, and that person has animals—like so many lonely shut-in types do, may I add—then it only takes three days, three days, until the pet, doesn’t matter what kind, cat or dog, whatever, will actually eat their owner’s body to stay alive. How’s that loyalty for you?”

  The thought of Buddy feasting upon his corpse filled Dan with a curious pride. Buddy would do what he had to do to survive. This stood as another example of what non-dog-owners could never understand.

  “I just don’t want to see you miss out on an ideal opportunity is all,” Winston said.

  “You know what the saddest part about this whole Ginnie situation is? Who the biggest losers are?” Dan said, excited like an oilman who’d struck it rich with a geyser of the unsaid. “Jo and Buddy, that’s who. Those dogs love each other. You can tell. Buddy hasn’t been himself all week. He’s having trouble eating. And how cruel and immature is it for someone to deny these two innocent dogs their only pleasure.”

  “You’re aware of my theories on female friends, Dan. Nonexistent. Oxymoronic. And I don’t want to tell you who the moron is in this situation. Believe me, there are plenty others out there, and to be honest, she wasn’t exactly Best in Breed at Westminster, if you know what I mean.”

  After they hung up, Dan realized his eyes had been tracing the geometry of Ginnie’s building in the same way he’d doodled whenever on the phone as a kid. The drawings he’d found he’d done were always more interesting than anything he managed with conscious effort.

  Sheets of light had punctured the clouds and were refracting in the facets of her condo. The structure seemed more in the way now than it ever had. Like it was a spaceship recently touched down and the crew, disguised as humans, were wreaking immeasurable havoc on the city. There should be insurance for something like this, Dan thought. There ought to be a guarantee on something as important as a view.

  He saw movement in her window and realized this would look really bad. Him out there, it looked creepy. Great, he thought, now he couldn’t even use his balcony.

  That night, Dan and Buddy watched the special features on one of his DVDs, then Dan fixed himself a cosmopolitan and grilled some salmon.

  “You know what the truth is?” he said to Buddy, because he seemed like he wanted to hear it. “The truth is there’s probably—no, very probably—someone out there in the city, maybe someone even living in this building, my building, who’s just like Ginnie in every way. She may even be a nurse for all I know, maybe she even has the same messy car and all the same opinions on things, only she doesn’t … you know, without the, the affliction Ginnie has.” Buddy’s smacking of the blackened salmon skin seemed to be an agreement.

  Dan hand fed him some of the filet and scraped the rest into the dog’s bowl. Better to give it to someone who’d enjoy it, and he was having trouble tasting because of the booze. After a while Dan ran out of Cointreau and cranberry juice, so he started drinking the vodka straight, calling them vodkapolitans to Buddy as a joke. It grew dark and he turned on the lights. Reflected images of his home leapt into the windows and he could no longer see Ginnie’s building or anyone else’s, and both Buddy and Dan liked it that way.

  They played for what must have been hours with one of Buddy’s favourite toys, a rope connected to a rubber ball. Buddy’s jaws were strong enough for Dan to pick him up and swing him like an Olympic hammer-throw. They were doing exactly this when Buddy unlatched and went flailing across the living room, his body glancing an end table and sandwiching a lamp against the wall, breaking its ceramic base in two.

  Buddy lay there, his husky breathing laced with whines, and he flinched at Dan’s touch. It seemed so sad to Dan that Buddy could never grasp the concept of intent. “I’m so sorry, Buddy,” he repeated over and over as he ground his face into the carpet, level with the dog, whose breath was hot and meaty, his gums slick black. Dan found himself weeping. The dog squeezed out one final whimper and began licking Dan’s hand, then his face.

  In the same instant, Dan realized both that he’d been lonely and that he wasn’t anymore, like a person waking up after routine surgery and being told in the same breath that they’d found a tumour and that it had been successfully removed.

  Late that night, the vodka long gone, Dan flicked the lights vigorously, making a giant strobe light of his place, like a fucking disco in here, he said before he lost consciousness on the couch.

  She called early the next day.

  “Dan,” she said, “I’m sorry to ask you this.”

  “It’s okay,” Dan said, “just say it.” His hangover was just getting going and he felt benevolent.

  “My brother”—Ginnie’s voice veered toward a sob but she recovered—“he isn’t well, and I need to go to Toronto for a week to drive him to appointments. I need you to dog sit.”

  Dan told her he was sorry to hear that. “Have you known for a while?” he asked, with a selfish desire to be sure this was what had kept her from calling.

  “I just found out. Look, Dan, I don’t know who else to ask. You’re so good with her. And Buddy is too. I would take her to a kennel, but you know how those places are.”

  “You could take her to a dog spa?” he said, wanting to stretch this moment out as long as possible, her needing something and him about to provide it.

  She laughed, sniffed. “Yeah, not likely.”

  He met Ginnie and Jo in the lobby of his building. There was a flurry of phone numbers and intricate instructions for Jo’s feeding and general care. Ginnie’s hair was up but she’d left pieces to hang like spider legs at her temples. Ginnie was someone who still believed in dressing up to fly and he couldn’t help but find this charming. Her voice was strong with tragedy and necessity.

  “I think I might have made some kind of mistake …,” he said at the last possible minute, the beginning of a speech he hadn’t known he’d been preparing.

  She looked relieved. “Dan, I agree, it was a mistake, and I got weird the other night. Can we just be friends again and act like it never happened? Sort of block it out? I’ve thought about it and that’s what I want. I just think it’s really important for the dogs to stay friends.”

&n
bsp; “That’s basically what I was thinking,” he replied.

  She kissed his cheek and they hugged and she got in a cab.

  “Look who’s here,” Dan said, and Buddy leapt almost as high as the fridge.

  He took the reunited friends to the park, ran them for hours and later grilled the last of the salmon, which was now officially Buddy’s favourite. Buddy had more energy than Dan had seen in weeks, and as for himself, Dan found that another animal in the house simply doubled the amount of joy.

  His life felt full, he thought that night in bed, populated. This business with Ginnie had convinced him once again of the irrationality of others. How awful it was that Buddy was the one who’d had to endure the worst of it. Dan decided then that he would get another dog, as a companion for Buddy. This way Buddy could never again have his best friend taken from him on a whim, and Dan could watch the dogs grow together. He knew another Andalucian would look a little obsessive, but he didn’t care. The ‘Lucian was the finest breed he’d ever known. He settled on emailing Sandy and Ihor the next day.

  In the morning he woke to an odd, two-tone sound, like a faint police siren with inadequate power. He padded to his living room and discovered that the sound originated from a furry heap. It was Jo and Buddy. They were next to the couch, by his DVD rack, fucking. Buddy had mounted her, with something that resembled lipstick passing between them.

  He wondered if he should stop them but did nothing. He watched. It wasn’t a bestiality thing, nothing like that, he wasn’t close to aroused, it was something else—a kind of vicarious admiration he’d seen on Winston’s face that day in his backyard when he watched Jacob hit a ball with a green plastic bat. Buddy perked up and regarded Dan with a sort of smile, mostly on account of his mouth being just shaped that way, but Dan knew there was real joy there, the little guy probably felt like he was back in Spain, releasing some tension after a long day of vigilant herding. Dan wondered how he would explain things to Ginnie if Jo became pregnant. But even if Buddy wasn’t fixed, he believed Jo almost definitely was, so he put it out of his mind. Dan watched as Buddy, in a workmanlike way, devoid of all the absurd facial expressions and ridiculous moanings of humans, pushed Jo around in a little circle.

  “Enjoy it,” Dan said, returning to his bedroom to let them alone, shutting the door as gently as he was able.

  King Me

  As he ate his lunch, Saul watched the stout Assassin feed Georgina—a stunted, moaning woman to whom God had accidentally issued a mollusk instead of a brain—guiding a plastic spoon of wobbling pudding into her mouth, with a little flick over her lower lip to catch what didn’t make it in. The Assassin was a short, rotund Latino, and his presence rang Saul with alarm as he pulped the crusts of his tuna melt.

  Saul had recognized the Assassin because he was a self-taught detective, which meant he knew what to look for. He’d seen men like this night after night on the news: inflamed guerrillas and private militiamen, nationless killers and hooded butchers, all either shooting into the air or wailing mournfully, draped across the body of a fallen brother. Saul shifted a table closer and his suspicions were strengthened by a deep scar that tunnelled the length of the Assassin’s left cheek, the shape of a minnow, clean enough to be the work of a scalpel. A box-cutter duel in the steaming slums of Nicaragua, Saul suspected. Or perhaps he’d been a child soldier, his soul now turned mercenary and septic with hatred. All seemed equally possible.

  He saw the man unlace Georgina’s bib and lift it from her limp neck. Had he come for her? But Georgina couldn’t even speak—not entirely true, she knew two words: one that sounded like bah, which meant “bad,” “hungry,” “bathroom” and “angry,” and the other roob, which was used for every other linguistic purpose. Saul’s thoughts were interrupted when suddenly she gurgled and whacked her plastic bowl from the table with a sharp pink elbow, slopping ivory pudding on the right tire of her wheelchair while she brayed with delight. The Assassin went scrambling for a mop, desperate not to publicize his incompetence on his first day.

  Saul decided to launch an investigation. In the smoking room, he found Drew, who was relishing his 1:15 after-lunch smoke. At Riverview, all aspects of existence were subject to a schedule, an iron framework of meds, meals, sleep, bathing and activities over which the staff attempted to stretch the battered material of their ruined beings like the fabric of a tent. Staff controlled the smokes because patients like Drew would torch an entire carton in a day if given the chance. Not that he ever had.

  “Who’s the new staff? And what does he want with Georgina?” Saul said.

  “You mean the Latino guy wire tap water wings?” Drew said, blurting the words as a prefabricated unit. Drew’s mind had been shredded by wagonloads of methamphetamines and radio waves sent especially to him by his great-uncle’s ham radio. At some point he’d correlated the entire inventory of his brain into a useless fizzling web. Saul didn’t care to fraternize with Drew— one got tired panning everything he said for nuggets of sense—but he often divined things that others couldn’t. “Yes, the Latino guy.”

  Drew shrugged and exhaled a globe of smoke. “Not sure footed the bill Cosby kids are all right now.” Then he scoured his face vigorously with his palm as if it were a blackboard and he couldn’t stand what was written there.

  “He’s new,” said Kim later at the craft table, unfurling a battalion of paper angels she’d spent the last five minutes cutting, working her jaw unconsciously in time with her pink safety scissors.

  “I’m aware of his newness,” Saul said, careful to control the annoyance he found scurrying in his voice, a displeasure that had in the past sent Kim wheeling into another of her depressive cycles. “But why is he here?”

  “Oh, I dunno, the same as the rest of them, I guess … to help?” Kim set the scissors back in the craft box. “Here, I’ll call him over … Luis!”

  “No that’s—” Saul said, too late.

  The Assassin hurried over from his organization of the board-game cupboard, his hands stashed behind his back. Saul panicked and looked to the reflective glass of the nurses’ station for anything weapon-like in the Assassin’s grip.

  “What’s up, guys?” Luis said in the simultaneously droning and cheerful way that Saul figured they must spend small fortunes on training these people to employ, and then to Kim, “Oh, I like your angels,” and then to Saul, “Are you helping Kim with her angels? That’s nice of you.”

  “No,” Saul said, reeling from the Assassin’s attempted butchery of his self-respect. “We are—no, pardon me, were—conversing.”

  Luis’s good nature was unflagging. “Okay, well, looks like fish burgers tonight, and maybe I’ll ask the duty nurse if we could watch some tube after dinner? You’re a real TV buff, aren’t you, Saul?”

  Saul displayed the type of facial friendliness that was used as a currency on the ward, just to be rid of him. He watched Luis return to the board games and clumsily topple a whole stack to the floor. As Luis pressed his cheek to the tile in search of scattered game pieces, Saul realized his heart was galloping on the narrow plain of his chest. He’d been rattled by the Assassin’s knowledge of his TV habits. How could he have known this? Had he been studying him? Gathering intelligence? For what purpose? It seemed so absurd. No one on the outside even knows I’m here, he thought. Well, his parents, and one other person, an unmentionable woman whom he’d long ago scoured from his memory. Then came the dull thud of Luis’s head against the underside of the games table. The Assassin groaned, slowly, like he’d just heard crushing news. If someone really does want me dead, Saul thought, why send this amateur? A man so evidently a card-carrying fool? He’s no more an assassin than any other of the psych nurses, Saul concluded, then passed the remains of the afternoon on a puzzle that depicted a windblown Spanish castle dangling gloriously over a turbulent sea.

  The next day, just to be sure, Saul requested a meeting with Dr. Darko Kraepevic, his personal psychiatrist of the past thirty-six years. Kraepevic was a fine man
and brilliant doctor whom Saul admired deeply. A hawkish Slovak with a sharp goatee and cloudlike puffs of white hair that encircled an expanse of flawless, gleaming scalp. A man who, as if to manually punctuate his sentences, liked to double-click the gold pen that, as he’d once confided to Saul, his daughter had bought him for his fiftieth birthday. Saul shut the door.

  “What’s this issue, Saul? You seem troubled,” Kraepevic said. The leather of his chair bleated and the doctor interlocked his fingers.

  “It’s this Luis. Who sent him? I mean, where is he from? What are his credentials?”

  “You are well aware, Saul, that I’m not about to discuss the personal histories of new employees,” Kraepevic said, no doubt quoting verbatim from a policy manual.

  “Just curious,” Saul said. “I feel like I’ve seen him before.” He slackened his face and feigned nonchalance.

  “Impossible. Luis is new to us here at Riverview. Look, we don’t want to have you getting overly interested in a staff member again, Saul. You’ve been doing so well since the Janet situation. All settled.” Kraepevic was referring to a former psych nurse who’d made inappropriate advances toward Saul, and against whom Saul had lodged a formal complaint. Rather than face disgrace, she’d relocated to another province, after which Saul had spent a week in the Quiet Room collecting himself and mitigating the stress of the whole ordeal.

  Kraepevic could see Saul’s doubts still working away in his face.

  “Without divulging specific information, let me assure you Luis has not been sent by anyone, and is qualified in every possible way for this position. He’s taking Margo’s shift while she’s on mat leave, and, like Margo, his job is to assist the psychosocial rehabilitation of you and the other patients here. Must I remind you, Saul, there are other patients here?” he said, clicking his pen. “And speaking of you, how are you doing? Because you seem a touch pale. Sleeping? Any intrusive thoughts? How’s the medication?”