Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  When I woke up in my old room and saw the boxes full of my dad’s old things, I briefly imagined that they contained all of my old notebooks, that I had written ten or twenty times what I remembered, that I could spend my week poring over them as if I was revisiting an old friend.

  But of course, that was just a fantasy.

  Outside the sun was high, casting long shadows, but there was still a slight chill in the air. Because it was so much warmer in the city I hadn’t thought to bring a jacket with me. So I was forced to dig around in the closet for an old one from high school, the least offensive by modern standards, a puffy green jacket that had weathered the intervening years better than all the others. Outside there was a fragrance from the few leaves that had come down, and something about that smell combined with the cold to make the world feel scrubbed clean and new.

  I grabbed a newspaper and a bag of chips from the place near the highway, closest to the subdivision. The woman who rung me up recognized me, even though I’d changed a lot. She asked me how long I was in town for, and then if I was still dating that guy she used to see me hang around with. Five or six years ago.

  It took me a while to figure out who she was talking about.

  “Paul?” I said. “No way.”

  “Oh, too bad,” she said, “I liked him.”

  She gave me a wink, which I didn’t understand at all. People in Durham think everything’s their business and that they know better than everyone else. It got on my nerves.

  What did it matter to her? Paul was a jerk. We’d dated for a year, and he’d come up with me to visit, once or twice, to meet Jess and once Tiff, and he acted like he was better than everyone I introduced him to, and tried to get me to give him a blow job in the main floor bathroom while Mom and Dan were watching TV, and then got sort of pouty when I wouldn’t, which first made me confused — like, should I? — and then angry, and we’d gotten into a huge fight when we went back to my room and I’d kicked him out, which I don’t think either of us realized was serious until after I had shut the door and locked it, and turned off my cellphone, and later I found out that he’d had to sleep in the train station while waiting for the early bus on Monday to take him home.

  But he had a nice smile and he was tall and I guessed that was why the woman who ran the store liked him. Her name was Ann, I’d remembered, after I’d left.

  I felt sort of angry after that and I’d wandered at random through the downtown, slowly eating chips out of the bag, sort of surreptitiously because I didn’t want to feel judged, even though there were much worse things I could be doing downtown, out in the open, that no one would ever care if I did. I went down to the creek to see if the bike that got thrown in there sometime over my senior year was still there, and it was, caked in layers of mud and buried deep, or if it wasn’t that bike it was a different one that looked pretty much the same as the old one had, part of an endless procession of bikes stolen and drowned and forgotten. I kicked dirt and rocks down at it.

  “Fuck you,” I muttered.

  Then I checked to make sure that no one was watching me talk to myself or to the bicycle, alone and eating chips so close to the highway.

  The way everyone made a point of noticing me, nodding, and making eye contact as I walked through town, made me feel like I was being watched. It felt so strange after years of living in Toronto, where no one ever looks at you unless they want something from you. I wasn’t prepared for it, and it made me self-conscious, even though I knew that was just the way things were in Durham and it didn’t really mean anything.

  Anyway, it reminded me of the time I went to Tom’s temple when he was away. I went to one of the night classes, which usually included a meditation and a lecture and a question period following the lecture. The theme that night was “Removing Attachment.”

  I felt conspicuous the whole night. As if everyone there would realize that I wasn’t really Buddhist. During the meditation all I could think about was whether my breathing was loud enough to disturb my neighbours. By the end of the night I actually felt more anxiety than I had when I had walked in. It made me angry. I started wondering what the white person leading the group really knew about Buddhism, real Buddhism. I couldn’t understand how any of the stuff she was saying could make me feel any better. It was just words.

  And wishful thinking.

  During the question period, I got angrier and angrier, until I felt like I was ready to burst out of my chair and denounce the whole room.

  Then there was a loud and angry voice, clear and sharp as the tone of a bell.

  “Fuck you, bitch! Fuck all of you!”

  When I heard that come out of my mouth I was so horrified my entire body was shaking. My ears were ringing and I could taste blood in the back of my throat. I just sat there, with my vision blurring, wondering how I was going to get out of there. Or tell Tom what had happened the next time he asked me to go.

  But then I saw the thin, middle-aged woman pointing at the teacher on the other side of the room, arm vibrating like a tuning fork, and I realized that she was the one who had spoken. Not me. There was a moment of silence as everyone recovered from shock and registered what had happened. Then the instructor calmly explained that the woman was obviously suffering. She’d said this in a way that was somehow devoid of pretence or condescension. She explained that we should spend the next few minutes silently relieving the woman of her suffering.

  The woman just stood there, looking dumbfounded, as we all closed our eyes and entered into another meditation. I tried, but all I could think about was that I had missed my opportunity to be cared for by the rest of the group, that the attention could have and should have gone to me. I mean, thinking that, then thinking that was selfish. Then wanting attention again. When we finally opened our eyes, there were tears running down the woman’s face, and she was smiling beatifically.

  She wasn’t the only one, either. A wave of goodwill and calm had spread throughout the room. Things were even more peaceful than they had been before. But I had been incapable of praying for her, and I felt more alienated in the awe that followed from that moment.

  * * *

  There was an even bigger television in the basement, leather couches, a glass coffee table (on its surface more remotes, a little basket of potpourri, and the box set of season three of The Wire). A new floor-to-ceiling mirror took up one wall, next to a set of weights and a new stationary bike and Stairmaster. But my dad’s medieval gear was missing. The boxes from his office were up in my room now, but all of his armour and weapons were gone, not even in the closet or stashed in the garage, no traces even of where they used to stand — somehow they’d even taken out the marks in the carpet.

  Had they sold it all? They might have been able to get a decent price for them if they’d had the industry to cart the stuff to one of the fairs. But probably they’d just put an ambivalent post up on Craigslist and sold the whole lot for thirty or forty dollars.

  Or just left everything out on the curb.

  It made my heart sick.

  It was like he’d never even existed, like he’d been a mirage that only I could see. The last time I mentioned Dad, at the breakfast table, across Dan reaching for more pancakes, my mom only stared at me, then changed the subject.

  I was too stunned to say anything. Later, when I asked her what had happened, she said she didn’t know what I was talking about. That she would have talked about him if she knew what I was saying. “Sarah, you know I’m hard of hearing. You have to speak up.”

  That was the first I’d heard about it.

  All I could think about was the look on Dan’s face as he speared three more pancakes with his fork, like he was sneaking around the back of the house with an ice cream he’d stolen from the freezer, his ears red and burning, his face guilty but full of lust and glee.

  * * *

  What there was, in the basement, was a full-size fridge (the one that was in our kitchen when I was growing up), stocked completely full of beer.
I knew they didn’t entertain that much, so that seemed crazy to me, the idea that they could ever get through everything that was in there. Maybe that was the point. In the freezer there were also a couple litres of gin and vodka, with pristine layers of frost crisping the sides of the bottles. I brought those upstairs and set them on the counter, then poured two generous shots of each into a tumbler that I topped with ice and orange juice, so that it was a pale, glistening yellow.

  I put a movie on TV and lay down on the floor, looking up at the ceiling, letting the soundtrack wash over me, wondering idly if I should burn the whole place to the ground.

  Probably not, I thought.

  I rolled over and took a couple deep pulls from my drink and after I had put it back down again and was still for a few minutes Carl briefly, tentatively, stepped on my back, the pressure of his two paws the most arresting physical sensation I had felt in — maybe — a month?

  Which reminded me — where was Tom? I’d texted him after coming back in the house, short and needy (“I feel sad”), but so far there was no response. Which made no sense because he’d finished work hours ago and should have received it by now.

  “Where the fuck is Tom?” I asked the empty room, over the volume of the television, startling Carl from where he’d settled by my head.

  I sat up.

  “WHERE THE FUCK IS TOM?” I shouted.

  Carl ran to the other room, then peered at me from behind the doorway. It wasn’t long before he was back again, rubbing his head against my knee. I closed my eyes and felt nothing, just a pinching emptiness that I was somehow expecting to feel. I lay back down and tried whispering to Carl in the hopes that he would get on my back again, but he just bowed his head and charged it into mine, collapsing awkwardly, so that his whiskers tickled my face, annoying.

  Purring louder, somehow, than the movie.

  “Go away, Carl,” I said, without doing anything to move him.

  I didn’t really want him to go.

  * * *

  Lying down on the carpet, feeling the alcohol run through me, turning the sound up on the movie higher than I’d ever let it go in my apartment, higher and higher, until it started to feel like the pulse of my blood, something was beginning to dawn on me, something large, something that I thought if I lay down like that long enough might come into my brain and change my whole life.

  But I was tired of lying down.

  I let the movie continue playing and headed upstairs, taking pleasure in my slight delay, my lack of coordination. My drunkenness. Speaking of which, I was nearly finished my glass, and so I topped it up again before I mounted the stairs. I didn’t put any more orange juice or ice in it, telling myself I probably wouldn’t drink it all. In contrast to the pleasingly sick yellow it had been before, now it was almost clear.

  I had a burst of inspiration. It took me a while to grab hold of the hook that brought the attic ladder down — I had to bring in a chair from my old bedroom, and then steady myself against the wall before I could grab at it with enough force to bring it down. Then, slowly, slowly mount the ladder as I made my way up, with one hand holding my drink. Stopping multiple times to catch myself and my breath. Once I got to the top I fished in the air for the light switch; it was hanging loose, so I searched in the darkness for the piece of ribbon that someone had attached to extend the old chain after it had broken.

  When I finally found the ribbon and pulled it down, I had become so used to the darkness that I winced and blinked while I waited for my eyes to adjust.

  Then I saw that I’d been right — there were all of my father’s things. His chain-mail on the tailor’s dummy, his clothes (in bags, his suits and costumes hanging up on one of those rolling hanger bars), the replica twelfth-century English standard that used to hang on the basement wall, pinned to the rafters, his weapons, even, leaning behind boxes and tucked behind shelves, framed posters from the fairs he’d gone to.

  We’d gone to.

  For a minute I felt relieved.

  For a minute. Then I wanted everything to go away. They were just dead reminders, harkening back to a time that wasn’t even my father’s own. I would have thrown everything out the window if there was one to throw them out of. Even if I’d regret that later. Even if kids would have made off with the swords and armour before I thought to get it all back inside.

  I understood why Mom had put them in the attic. I got it. And I felt insane for ever thinking that it should be otherwise.

  I was insane.

  I’d thought, mounting the attic stairs, that if I found his stuff I might select a souvenir for myself. Bring it home with me, hang it in my apartment. But what was I supposed to do with a sword, or a dagger, or a shield with his made-up heraldry on it, or a suit of busted chain-mail?

  It would only weigh me down.

  Instead I sat there, on the floor, and tried to imagine my father moving underneath his equipment, to attach him to it, to make it more personal, somehow. I’d seen him fully decked out more than a couple times when I was little, and despite his diminutive size he had struck an imposing (if a little unnerving) figure. I saw him there with me, sitting on a trunk opposite, his sword in his lap, his helmeted head looking hesitantly around him, as if waiting for something, maybe me.

  * * *

  I decided to stay in the attic, even though I felt so small, so unhappy, sitting up there. I don’t know what it was about the attic especially that made me feel that way. I think it was that there was nowhere left to go, nothing left to see. I couldn’t pretend any longer. I had to look back and realize the problem was in myself, as much as I’d rather hunt through my father’s belongings looking for answers. I’d already found all of the answers I needed long ago, and they didn’t change anything.

  I liked sometimes to pretend it was Tom who was the real problem, just as I’d once thought it was Paul, or Joe, or Rick. Or Ross. Or Jess. And not that all of those guys weren’t assholes — they all were. Including Jess, to be honest. But I was the only thing they had in common. I felt cramped and squished and claustrophobic, small and mean and breathless, and I was the one who had made my life that way.

  It was such a terrible thing to realize, and it was the last thing I wanted to think about, maybe because I knew there wasn’t an obvious solution. I felt trapped, and whatever it was that was going to fix me — and I thought probably nothing ever would — it wasn’t going to come to me in a dream or in a meditation because I wasn’t on Oprah and my life wasn’t comfortable enough for that to work. I mean, for meditation you need a stable household, a consistent and generous income, a more or less stable social life. I couldn’t afford to meditate. I was gasping for air, but more likely to choke to death than to find a handhold and pull myself up to some place where I could just breathe.

  God, I wished I could just let it all go, forget about the money I thought my mother owed me, find another job and get on with my life, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I’d tried and failed a hundred times. Just like I’d tried and failed at everything else.

  It all seemed impossible.

  I was twenty-six years old and I’d already completely wrecked my life.

  It wasn’t a great mood to be in, alone and half-drunk in a dusty attic among your dead father’s things. With a full glass of vodka and gin and a couple shrivelled ice cubes and just the faintest taste of orange.

  8

  Whatever happened next, I must have been dreaming. That’s about all I can figure out. I was lying on the floor of the attic, thinking about my future, like it was being projected on the screen: a long, empty highway scrolling endlessly, twisting and turning and with no one else on it, moving at a hundred miles an hour. The picture getting smaller and smaller, like I was rushing into something. Smaller and smaller, like my spirit was being compressed. But never so small that I couldn’t see what was happening, making out the highway and the cracks in the road and the loose gravel spilling out into the ditch. I don’t know how to explain it, but I knew the feeling w
as doom. A kind of pure doom that was crashing like a wave over and over again in my head. I knew with certainty that whatever was waiting for me at the end of the road would be bad, even if there was nothing there at all, even if the road never ended.

  Then I heard a sound from the other side of the attic, loud and definite, like a block of wood falling from a great distance, and I looked up, expecting it to be Carl. Wanting it to be, so I could pull him closer to me and forget everything I was feeling. So I could bury my face in his fur. But Carl never went up into the attic, even though he often tried. Sometimes he sat at the bottom and meowed urgently as if he had been left on his own at the end of the earth. The ladder was too steep for him. When I remembered that my heart seized up with fear.

  “Carl?” I said. “Carl? Carl?”

  I was unsteady and my head started swimming when I propped myself up on my elbows to look into the corner.

  “Who’s there?” I asked, catching myself, fighting the urge to throw up.

  It was dark far down the attic, where the boxes were stacked high and the light from the single light bulb had difficulty reaching. But I thought I saw someone standing back there — a silhouette staring back at me from behind some junk.

  “I know you’re there,” I said, my eyes watering. Unable to take them off the corner.

  The figure — I could see now it was a man — had long hair, stretching down to its shoulders. It moved slightly, bending into itself. An acknowledgement, like it was bowing at court. When it moved its body shimmered, as if its teeth were caught in the moonlight. But it didn’t have any teeth.