I’m surprised by the spike of irritation I suddenly feel towards Sander and his incessant questions. Fortunately, the waiter returns with two bursting basketfuls of bread, and just as Sander starts tearing into them, the restaurant’s glass door opens and Odessa Steps enters.
Whenever she comes into a room, the words Odessa Steps enters float into my head like stage directions. Her entrances and exits always transform an entire room.
The world rearranges itself around her in a more artful way, bending gracefully to flatter her like footlights in a theatre. With only a few very remarkable people do you feel the weight of the air that they displace with their bodies, the universe making way for them. Odessa is one of these people.
The clouds part as she strides across the restaurant, and a spotlight of blinding white sunshine falls across her face. She’s cut off all her hair since the fall, and her bald head gleams. Like every other style, she’s mastered it effortlessly.
“Hello boys,” she says, sliding up to the edge of the table and throwing herself into a chair beside Sander. Her grey eyes flick back and forth between us.
“You both look starved to death. What are we eating?”
She sticks her finger in the olive oil and balsamic, takes a lick. Picks up the wine lists, flicks through, decides she doesn’t want any. Picks up the dessert menu, beckons the waiter over, orders one of everything. All the while, she never stops talking.
“Your hair is gorgeous, Adam. How did it grow so long in six months? It must be down to your waist! It’s almost as if you’ve stolen mine. I cut if off on a whim in Nha Trang. Do you like it? I do. I think it looks great. Sander, you clearly need to eat something, like right now. Why don’t you have food in your mouth? Are you finished with that bread already? Here, eat these Earl Grey Kit Kats I got for you in Japan.”
Odessa Steps tears through the world like a tornado, stirring up dust that most people would rather keep settled. I met her on the LRT, where she was performing an unauthorized one-woman Fringe show that she called The Clitoris Monologues. I’ve never been so deeply uncomfortable and hilariously entertained at the same time, and I’ve seen every one of her shows since. She describes her work as feminist performance art, and her most infamous pieces include painting guerrilla murals with her menstrual blood and wearing her used tampons as jewellery. It’s a mark of pride for her that she’s been banned from a dozen public buildings. Last summer her big project was called “Please do not feed the animal.” She sat at the head of a long feast table in a public park and invited people to come eat while she starved herself, occasionally reading out quotations about female body image. She was almost as thin as Sander by the end.
The waiter arrives with heaping plates of pasta. Odessa dishes out some fettuccine for me and some linguine for herself and lets Sander sort out his own food. His appetite is actually a little frightening on Melting Day, when it seems like he could unhinge his jaw and swallow us whole, along with the table and chairs. We nibble. He gobbles.
I chew my pasta and look between my two friends. One in grey pyjamas and one in a seemingly infinite loop of scarves. One the picture of frailty and one the image of robust health. One listening and one speaking.
When you’re part of a trio, it’s tempting to go through every group of three and assign each person a part. Sander is super-ego; Odessa is id; I am ego. Sander is rock; Odessa is scissors; I am paper. Hermione, Harry, Ron (the ginger always gets stuck with Ron). Sander loves Edmonton; Odessa doesn’t seem to care; I hate this city. We’re three sides of a triangle (equilateral, scalene, isosceles), the strongest shape in the world.
“So I know you’re both dying to know where I’ve been,” says Odessa. “And I’ve got to say I’m a little disappointed with myself: only six countries this time. I got stuck in Luang Prabang for months, learning how to weave scarves.”
“I had some excellent dreams,” says a barely comprehensible Sander through a mouthful of lasagna. “In one of them, a convoy of barges carrying confetti cake mix crashed into the High Level Bridge and the hot afternoon sun baked the whole river into a birthday cake. People walked out onto the spongy river and gobbled up handfuls of the cake and jumped on it like a trampoline.”
I’m usually as hungry as Sander to sit back and feast on their stories. But this year I finally have a story of my own to share.
“I had something happen this winter,” I announce.
They look up from their plates, surprised. Sander stops eating. Odessa stops making faces in the back of her spoon.
“You did?”
“Yes.”
I look through the tabletop, down into the river, at the swiftly flowing chunks of ice. I take a deep breath.
“Normally I stay inside all winter. I only go out to attend lectures, or go to the gym with Brock, or go to parties with the Dixies. But not this year. This year I walked in circles every day. Outside. For hours. I went down to the river, waiting for it to break, praying every day for spring to arrive. I slipped into a mind-numbing routine of sleeping and waking and walking and waiting. And after a while, I realized that I didn’t exist anymore.”
Odessa’s eyes narrow, then start roving over me, picking apart my postcard dress. Sander holds a dinner roll up to his open mouth, frozen in concentration.
“I felt like I’d walked down into the ocean, and the waves covered me up bit by bit. For months I was down there, on the ocean floor, where no light could penetrate. I knew who I was when I left the shore, but I didn’t know who I was at the bottom of the sea. I knew I wasn’t Adam Truman anymore, but I didn’t know what would happen next, where I would surface again or who I would be. I didn’t know when I’d reach the other shore, and be a person again. But yesterday, I finally did.” I smile. Telling the story makes me realize how lucky I am to have escaped my winter doldrums once and for all.
“Yesterday, I realized that I’d become addicted to being on the ocean floor. It felt good to be numb. It felt good to be nothing. But it was also killing me, slowly and surely. So yesterday, I broke the river. I decided to end winter, to end my sleepwalking, and to finally become the new person I’m meant to be.”
My cheeks are hot, burning red yet again, but this time with pride. I look between my two last friends, the traveller and the dreamer. Odessa looks mildly impressed. Sander’s eyes bulge.
“You broke the river?” he says. “Is that even possible? That doesn’t seem right. I mean, is this really spring at all then?”
“Of course it’s spring! You’re awake, aren’t you? Odessa’s back. And I’m finally feeling alive again! To think that all these years it was possible, but nobody ever did it! We always just waited and waited for the ice to break. But I made winter end. I made spring come. Because that’s who I am now: I am Melting Day!”
I stand up, high on my newfound confidence, ready for a blinding white sunbeam to spotlight me just like Odessa. My friends look up at me, dumbfounded.
“Seriously?” I say, almost laughing but also irritated. “Nothing? Not even a bravo, Odessa?”
She leans back in her chair and folds her arms across her giant beard of scarves.
“Oh yes,” she says with a knowing smile, “you deserve a bravo—brava, bravi! You’ve finally started your secondary succession.”
“What does that mean?” I ask, sinking back into my chair.
“It means that sometimes you have to burn everything to the ground so that a new life can grow from the ashes.”
She rests her elbows on the glass tabletop and stares at me with her penetrating grey eyes.
“Primary succession is simple. You’re born, you grow up, there’s not much there to begin with. Everything is new and it’s easy for your first identity to take root. But your second self, well, that’s trickier. Your second self is the hardest to make. It’s a painful process. It helps if you have some sort of disaster to clear away your old life and make room for the new. But don’t worry. The third self is a bit easier. And the fourth is even easier after
that.”
Odessa reaches across the table and takes one of my hands in hers.
“Everyone needs a catastrophe to intervene every once in a while—to burn everything down so that new life can bloom.”
She looks between Sander and me, then lays her hand across her belly.
“Which is why I’m pregnant.”
“Uh, what?”
“Four months along, or something like that. I’m going to give birth as a piece of performance artwork in the fall.”
She looks back and forth between us with familiar energy coursing across her face, flushed with the excitement of a new venture.
“It’s going to be the ultimate performance. An act of pure artistic creation. I’m going to do it all myself.”
“Is that safe?” asks Sander.
Odessa shrugs glamorously.
“True art is never safe.”
She gives a toast to her own words with her glass of sparkling water.
“Thank you for not asking who the father is, by the way. Most people would’ve. But that’s why I like you two best. To me it really doesn’t matter. I’m going to be a kickass single mom. I’ll raise my kid in a hundred different countries. Maybe I’ll call her Pangaea. Or wait to find the right name during our travels. Or let her name herself.”
She brings a spoonful of tiramisu to her mouth, tilts her head at me as she sucks the sweetness off the spoon.
“You should pick a new name,” she says. “If everything about Adam Truman is dead and gone, then it’s time for you to kick the name as well. That’s one of the first steps of secondary succession, if you really want to have a new identity.”
“I don’t know enough about my new self to have a name yet,” I say. “Except, well, I guess there is one thing—”
“A name could be a good place to start,” carries on Odessa. “The name you choose is a promise you make to yourself. A statement about who you intend to be. ‘Odessa Steps,’ for example, is my fifth name. I chose it because I love Battleship Potemkin. It was the first movie to popularize montage, which I think is the greatest artistic technique of the past hundred years. In a montage, hundreds of shots come together to make something big and powerful. Slips of images are cut up, realigned into a deliberate order, to make something new—something that didn’t exist in any of them until they were brought together. That’s how people are really made.”
She pauses, and picks up an individual grain of risotto with her fork. She repeats this as she speaks, until she has a dozen grains artfully arranged along the edge of her plate.
“We all sift through all of our life experiences—everything we do and see and say and feel—and we use this raw material to build narratives for ourselves that make sense. Most of our lives end up on the cutting room floor, even in our own memories. We take a bunch of random shit, and we make it meaningful. We can even manufacture false memories if we have to, or use fictional ideas about ourselves to build our real identities. Like how there never actually was a massacre at the Odessa Staircase. Eisenstein made it up. But the images were so powerful that the Potemkin Stairs became a real historical memory. That’s the kind of art I want to make. Art that turns lies into truth. Art that redefines reality.”
I try to cut back into the conversation, but Sander snaps back at Odessa.
“I think that’s incredibly dangerous,” he says, again through a full mouth. He swallows his ravioli and wipes the sauce from the corners of his mouth. “History needs to be true and accurate. If we start saying ‘anything goes’ for history and memory, then how will we ever know what’s real anymore?”
Odessa shrugs.
“How do we know if anything is real now? How do we know if ‘real’ really means anything anyways? ‘Real’ is whatever version of reality that the majority decides to agree upon, and it changes all the time.”
I see Sander struggling between the competing desires to argue back or to finish off the heaping bowl of pesto fusilli. Fortunately he opts for the latter.
“Anyways,” I interject, not bothering to hide my irritation at having my big news railroaded by another one of their philosophical debates, “I was just trying to tell both of you that I’m not Adam Truman anymore. I’m starting a new chapter of my life.”
I turn to Odessa.
“I told Sander already that today is my last day in Edmonton. I’m going to leave tomorrow, and start fresh somewhere new. Maybe I’ll pick a new name. Maybe... maybe other things will change too. I don’t know. But I just wanted to know that you’ve got my back.”
Odessa smiles.
“Of course we do. Always.”
Sander lowers the plate of carbonara that he’s been licking clean and gives me a nod.
“If you have to go, you have to go. But I hope you’ll come back. Edmonton isn’t as bad as everyone thinks it is.”
He wolfs down one last spoonful of ribollita and then leans back and puts a hand on his belly.
“I think I’m full,” he says. “For a couple hours anyways. What do you say we check out the party?”
He waves his hand up the hill at downtown Edmonton, where jubilant cheers ring out.
“I thought you’d never ask,” says Odessa, waving to the waiter. She whips out her global elite platinum card.
Odessa’s grandfather, Ludlow Spetnik, is a hundred years old and the reason she hasn’t moved to New York or London or Los Angeles. Her mother died when she was very young, so he’s all the family she has left. He invested in oil sands development in the mid-1950s, so he’s incredibly rich. Odessa manages his investments, and they make enough money for her to travel and fund all her art projects—not to mention buying us lunch every Melting Day.
The waiter hands Odessa her receipt, builds a teetering tower of plates—glancing warily at Sander all the while—then skitters back to the kitchen.
We spend the rest of the afternoon wandering through a dozen decadent debaucheries, greeted at each with open arms and free drinks. We sip piña coladas at a luau where fat men in grass skirts drape huge leis made of fragrant flowers over our shoulders. We drink margaritas at a fiesta and smash at an army of piñatas until candy pours forth and a pack of children swarm around our ankles. We pound back vodka shots at an ice bar and watch in awe as a magician uncorks a set of reverse Matryoshka dolls—a larger one springing out of each smaller one, until he opens up the final doll like a cello case and out walks a woman in a pink ball gown.
By the time we get to the parade route on Jasper Avenue, we’re well caught up to the million drunken Edmontonians who bumble around us. I try my best to forget my earlier irritation at Sander and Odessa, and I throw my arms around their shoulders. I love these two weirdos, even if they weren’t as enthusiastic about the new me as I’d hoped they would be. Jostling for a place at the curb, we’re squeezed in between a Totoro with a tiny umbrella and a Gene Kelly with a giant one.
It doesn’t take long for the parade to arrive. A mop-haired cover band belts out “Here Comes the Sun,” the unofficial Melting Day anthem, from the first float. A deluge of dancers—small children dressed as sun sprites, acrobats and fire-blowers—flows down the avenue. They pull people into the parade with them, swelling its ranks. The crowd shouts out the lyrics incoherently, but with such utter enthusiasm that their lack of tone or rhythm doesn’t matter. The three of us join in, laughing at how bad we are, waiting for Her to appear.
And then there she is: Alice Songhua. The Melting Queen. Glowing like a beacon with some internal fire. She wears an open-backed pink gown. Legs spread, she rides a giant blue horse, train trailing on the slushy street behind her. She scatters candied wild roses into the crowd. Her smile is so wide it stretches past her cheeks and scrapes against the windows of the office towers on either side of the avenue. The massive emerald in her crown glints in the sunlight, surrounded by peridots and pink sapphires. When she passes us, a frangipani fragrance settles over our hair. I smile as wide as she does, high on the delirious joy of Melting Day.
&nb
sp; After Alice Songhua has ridden past, Sander and Odessa and I hoist ourselves up onto the shoulders of three people in rubber sumo wrestler suits who offer us a lift. We flow into the street with all the other revellers. A papier mâché hot air balloon skids down from above, firing off pieces of candy from on-board cannons. People wave and cheer from the roofs of the buildings around us. I wave back at them, imagining that this parade is just for me, a grand send-off for a famous adventurer.
“Look!” cries Sander.
I follow the line of his finger. A wing of huge silver airplanes sweeps across the sky, flying towards the setting sun in goose formation. I try to count them—one, five, twelve—but then the sky is obscured by a white haze, trailing from the planes. It starts to rain down around us—snow, hail, sand!
“Sugar!” shouts Odessa. “See if you can catch some on your tongue!”
I do as she suggests, and I’m instantly overwhelmed by the flavour.
“It’s salt! Oh god!” shouts Sander, scraping at his tongue.
“Bleh! This is awful! Why did you say to do this!?”
“I thought it’d be fun but it’s not! Oh god!” Odessa retches.
I heave. I need water.
“Grab some snow,” I command the sumo wrestler, pointing at the dirty curb crusts. But the snow is doing worse than we are, dissolving under the lethal powdering of salt. The months-old ice crackles and fizzes as the salt burns into it. People all throughout the parade are brushing salt off their shoulders, shaking it out of their hair. After a stunned moment, the mob roars with joy to see the end of the snow.
After plenty of spitting and a couple of fresh coconuts from a nearby vendor, we carry on with the parade to its end point at the front steps of the Alberta Legislature, where Alice Songhua dismounts her mighty blue steed.
“Edmonton!” she cries, standing in front of the Legislature’s huge sandstone pillars. “You have waited with great patience for the end of this Long Winter! I have stoked and tended the fire, worked hard to maintain the spark of life within our city. But now the sun has risen! The ice has broken. The river runs on again. Winter is over. Spring has returned. And with this new light comes new life!”
The Melting Queen Page 4