Evie of the Deepthorn

by André Babyn

  Hi Sarah. How are u? The weather here is so nice. Every night we eat by the ocean. Must be no fun cooped up in the house! Has it snowed yet? It’s coming sooner than u think. We went into Havana and it wasn’t as nice as the resort but Dan did enjoy looking at all of the old cars. For my part I am getting a lot of use out of my new bathing suits!

  Be sure to remember to clean out Carl’s litter thoroughly before you go. I don’t want any nasty surprises when I get back. Dan says to remind you to keep the thermostat down when you are out of the house and at night when you are sleeping. You can save us a lot of money this way.

  Thanks again! Love u.

  Mom & Dan.

  I couldn’t tell whether she’d written the message before or after my email, or if they even had a way of checking their email up there. I fired up my laptop, and nestled within a flurry of advertisements and concerned messages from Tom (the last one beginning, as I could see from my Gmail inbox, “I don’t know what I did to deserve this, but …”) was an email (“thougt you migth want to see these sarha! love mom and dan xxo xox”) of photographs of their vacation: Dan posing in front of old cars on Cuban streets; the two smiling together at dinner; Dan bleary-eyed, waiting for their flight, still wearing his bomber jacket; Mom on the beach acting coy for Dan behind the viewfinder (why did she include that one?); the two taking turns posing in front of a fibreglass swordfish that looked like it belonged to the resort. Once I finished looking at all of the photographs I deleted the email immediately.

  I was angry that the email I’d sent, the one about Dad, had been completely ignored.

  I yelled “FUCK!” at the top of my lungs. But the computer had cost me a lot of money, and I needed it to write, and all of my work was on there. So instead of throwing it across the room like I wanted to, I gently closed the lid and slipped it into its protective case, and then I put my head on the table, then fell back into my chair, then rolled onto the floor, then crawled under the desk I had been sitting at, then pulled the rug over my face and felt my breath beating back against me in the darkness until, much later, a whiskered face tentatively pressed against mine.

  * * *

  It’s helped me to write to you, to an extent you probably can’t imagine.

  I’ve noticed that there is something in the air in Durham, timeless and lazy, which maybe partially explains this weird funk I seem to be in. That feeling is also somehow menacing, for reasons I can’t describe. It is the reason, I think, that everyone looks so old.

  Do you remember Walid Khan? Weren’t you two friends? I saw him, yesterday, still working in the pharmacy, although now it looks like he’s the manager, or the owner, maybe. He’s gained thirty or forty pounds, and he has all of these lines on his face, like he’s a pack-a-day smoker, or something much worse than that. Anyway, he doesn’t look like he’s in his midtwenties anymore, even though he must be. I don’t know for sure, but I bet he has children. It looks like he has children. And doesn’t want them. Am I an asshole for thinking that?

  Or are the lines on his face not from kids, but from the changes that work makes to you? I wonder if that’s what I look like in Toronto. Like a total lost cause. Sitting in front of my console, moving my hands frantically while I stare, dead-eyed, into the screen. I guess I have ambitions — good as those have proved to be — but I feel like I’m just scrambling from day to day, working for no purpose. I can’t see when I’ll get to rest — if I ever will. I don’t really go out, except to get drunk with Tom’s friends. I used to write more when I was a kid, and back then I went to school, too, and spent a lot of time worrying about my parents, and had at least Tiff and Jess to confide in. At least, sort of. More than I have anyone now. The truth is, my life is smaller now, and I am smaller. And exhausted. I don’t know how it all got away from me.

  But I don’t feel dead. Not completely. Not yet. Something separates me from the people up here. Is it just the lack of options? I don’t want it to be an accomplishment that I haven’t completely succumbed. I want to feel alive, interested, excited. Genuinely. Like there’s something waiting for me. Like I sometimes felt when I was younger, despite all the problems in my life then. That there was something waiting for me on the horizon, that I just had to age into it, that it would come to me, eventually, if I worked hard, and applied myself, and was honest about my limitations …

  I’m going home soon and I don’t know what to do.

  Sarah

  That was the last letter I wrote to him, though I didn’t deliver a single one. I couldn’t even be sure he was still in Durham, since I hadn’t seen him again even though I’d been heading up to the spot in the forest every day.

  I felt like I was on the precipice of something, and there was something terrible behind me, and that the only way down was to jump. But I didn’t want to. I was afraid. I woke up in the morning and went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and was afraid of what I saw looking back. Who. A kind of challenge in my eyes — but challenging whom? An unhappiness, an emptiness. Disappointment. But my disappointment was so general I couldn’t really tell what it was that disappointed me.

  I was a type from an old novel: the disappointed woman.

  Theoretically I should have been feeling better since I was at least taking a break from work, but I only felt worse, somehow. Everything just reminded me of how precarious I felt. How I was sliding further and further back with nothing to show for it and no idea what to do.

  I’d responded to a few of Tom’s emails, but not with anything substantial. I didn’t really want to talk to him. I told him I was trying to figure something out, that we would talk when I got back, which, incidentally, would be soon. I didn’t have a new phone yet. Which was fine by me. I didn’t have a clue what I was doing, so how was I supposed to have anything to say about us? To him or to anyone else?

  But I would have to know within the next two days. That’s when I was heading back to our apartment, to work, to whatever it was that I’d been doing before. In the meantime, more postcards. A Cuban baseball team, one of Havana, an empty beach, fish in a market, and one of Dan and my mom with the resort’s logo in the bottom left corner, a neon pink overlay. The same message on every one, never varied. Greetings from Cuba!

  Didn’t she have anything else to say?

  * * *

  Later I thought of my dream again, the one I’d had before coming up. My dad on the back of Excalibur, pointing toward the horizon.

  I’d lost him, that second day.

  Wasn’t he worth more to me than that? Maybe the next time I came up there would be no trace of him left at all.

  I went up to the attic and lay down amidst all of his old stuff, staring up at the ceiling. I tried to forgive him. For leaving me. For never telling me the truth. I said, “I forgive you, Dad.” But my heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t mean it.

  “Why?” I asked, of him, of myself, getting floaters in my eyes as I stared up at the rafters where the bare yellow bulb was hanging. I asked this question several more times, until I started creeping myself out. It was so empty in there.

  And it feels creepy waiting for a response that you know isn’t coming.

  Since I had nothing else to do, I went down to my room and started going through the boxes from his office, hoping there might be something in them that might help to put everything in focus. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, exactly. I realized as I started leafing through the first box that I had gone through everything before.

  I don’t know what happened next. One minute I was reading through some obscure memo, the next I had pushed the box I was rooting through off the stack and was lying on the floor.

  That part of my father was dead. A long time ago now. Nothing worth saving. Nothing ever living. After making sure that Carl was outside the room, I screamed and pushed all of the boxes down with a hip check and my good hand. They collapsed with a satisfying crash, folding in on each other. Then I closed the door and went outside.

  I didn’t really feel any b
etter after that. I just wandered, at first reluctant to leave my mom’s crescent. Doing a couple circles, then slowly expanding my orbit and circling the whole town, from the IGA to the Giant Tiger, to the LCBO, to Joe’s in the plaza, to the river, to the gas station, to the pharmacy, and, finally, to the little park in the centre of town, where a decommissioned anti-aircraft gun stood, I guess from World War II, painted over with several coats of forest green. When I was a kid my dad used to sit me on it and point out targets: the barbershop, the town of Rouen, a dragon, your mother, the car.

  I sat in the pilot’s seat and tried to play the game again. But I’d forgotten that the gun itself didn’t move, because all of the gears had been bolted to the frame. The wheel that was supposed to rotate the gun on the horizontal plane still worked, but they’d removed the gear attached to it, so it just turned without any resistance at all.

  Why didn’t he tell me?

  Someone should have told me.

  It was while sitting in the gun seat, making low shooting sounds under my breath like a total idiot, when I saw Kent again. He came up behind me.

  “War’s over, you know. Long time ago.”

  I almost jumped out of my seat.

  “I know,” I said. Pretending to be cool. “Just making sure.”

  He sat down on the rigging.

  “I thought you might’ve left town,” I said.

  He shrugged. “No.”

  “What are you still doing here?”

  He didn’t say anything. Instead he put his hands on the wheel and gave it a few turns.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I’m fine. Why are you still here?”

  “I’m leaving in two days,” I said.

  “Where to?”

  “Toronto. Back to work.”

  “You’re lucky you can still do that with just one arm.”

  It hit me suddenly. I sank down in my seat.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I can’t. I can’t do that. Oh, Jesus. Why didn’t I think of that before?”

  “Well, what do you do?”

  “I work in a call centre.”

  “Why can’t you do that with one arm?”

  “It’s not that kind of call centre. Most of it is automated, but I need to press a lot of buttons. Two workstations, four computers, at once. I set up the calls. It’s an awful job. I do ninety calls an hour. I have to. I need both of my hands for that.”

  He just looked at me. Vaguely concerned.

  “Oh my god,” I said, “what the fuck am I going to do?”

  “I think there’s a law or something …”

  I laughed. “If you can’t make quota, you’re out. They don’t necessarily fire you, but they don’t schedule you, either. I’m not really an employee. No one is. We’re all contractors.”

  “Could you go on disability?”

  “Maybe. Who knows.”

  I banged my good hand against the barrel of the gun.

  “Hey, I’m sorry …”

  I stood up. “It’s okay,” I said. “Do you want to get a drink?”

  10

  Later that night, the night I met Sarah again and the night I decided to finally leave Durham for good, I dreamed of a torture chamber. Something out of the Middle Ages. Bare, splintering wood for walls, a door held together by cast iron bands. Nothing else. No instruments of torture, though somehow I knew what the room was used for, in the pain that resided in the walls (or perhaps a better word is reverberated, like a pealing bell). There was a crack in the plank nearest to me, and I thought I felt a draft on my face. I improbably hoped that the crack contained a secret passage — not behind the wood, but in the crack itself, somehow.

  Someone or something was outside.

  Whatever it was, it was making a lot of noise.

  No, no, I thought, you can’t come in yet, please no, no, I don’t want you to, I just need a little more time. But I looked at the crack and realized that what I’d hoped for was useless, that there was no way I was getting through that. So instead I rushed up to the door and threw my weight against it, hoping that I could at least keep whatever was out there from coming inside.

  I don’t know what happened next, exactly. I know that the door opened, somehow. I have a close-up image of a bear’s jaw opening and snapping shut, and the next thing I knew I was in the garage, except it wasn’t really the garage because it was much larger than the garage. There were more doors leading outside. I was pushing past all of the junk in my way, frantically scrambling to lock all of the doors, because I knew something was coming later that night and I had to keep it out, but the locks kept coming undone, all by themselves, the doors rolling up a few feet, and I didn’t know what to do except scramble around trying to keep everything closed. Somehow, far off, I saw a bear, a real bear, walking down a hill, through the trees, and I heard a loud ringing, which I knew was its sound, not the sound it made, but the sound that followed it. But the dream changed to something else, something I don’t remember at all, and in a little while I woke up.

  In the morning, when I came to take the breakfast dishes away, my mother was sitting up with the paper, her back propped up on pillows, and between a bout of coughing and a moment when I had to grab a paper towel to wipe up something red and brown that she had coughed up she pointed to an item in the paper and asked me if I knew that raccoon feces are deadly poisonous, that they could kill you or even make you insane, and I was momentarily arrested, thinking of my dream and wondering how she could know about it. In the end I thought it was better not to ask, because it was crazy to think that she could know, so instead I pretended not to have heard as I went around tidying up her room, and when I left I realized that I hadn’t dreamed about raccoons but bears, which aren’t even in the same family, I think.

  Of course I couldn’t leave Durham yet. Mom was beyond all hope, but she needed me there, and I was resigned to stay, even though I often imagined myself riding out on a bus, the first bus going anywhere, leaving everything behind me, passing into nothing, into freedom, even though I couldn’t really imagine what that freedom looked like.

  Everything prior to the dream had been awful. I had come home later than usual, only to discover that the woman who normally brought my mother her meals had not come. She’d had car trouble and hadn’t bothered to find a replacement because she thought I would be there. If my mother waits too long past her regular mealtime to eat she loses her appetite, though she needs to eat to keep her medicine down. I finally got her to swallow her dinner, all of it, including the medicine, and I’d said good night. She grabbed my hand and squeezed it, and I went up to my room to read, but I was so exhausted I couldn’t do much more than lay the book over my face, and soon after that I heard a cry from downstairs.

  My mother had thrown up over the side of the bed, blood and vomit, some on the sheets, most on the floor. So I mopped and changed the bedding, and put the soiled laundry into the machine, and prepared my mother’s medicine again, and another meal (just a smoothie, that powder, I didn’t think she could handle much more than that), and gave it to her. After that I lay face down on the couch in the living room and waited forty minutes for her to throw up again, but she didn’t, so I went to bed.

  Yesterday, while the hospice nurse was visiting, I walked out to the park and tried to write. I felt weirdly homesick, for a feeling I used to have — for my poverty, for my independence, for my old apartment, even for the bedroom window that used to overlook the Dumpsters that would wake me up with their clanging every morning. I wanted to wander the streets at night, missing a romantic feeling I used to get — one where I felt certain I was heading somewhere, like my poetry could shape reality or at least alter it. Like it was real.

  I thought there was something in that feeling I could maybe work into a poem, but nothing came out, and, frustrated and sick of myself, I wandered over to the centre of town, where I found Sarah playing make-believe on the old artillery piece sitting in front of the Legion. She seemed like
she wasn’t having a great time, but she couldn’t imagine how much better shape her life was in, and I found it amusing to imagine her problems, which compared to mine seemed trivial and easy to resolve. Or at least possible to resolve.

  We went to the lodge and grabbed a few beers, talked about nothing, playing catch-up even though we never really knew each other to begin with. I don’t know if she was trying to come on to me or what, but I wasn’t interested, mostly because I couldn’t shake the feeling that every moment I was spending with her I was being erased, or rewritten, like my life was turning upside down, or it was already upside down and seeing her was what caused me to realize that — how I’d felt since I’d met her, as if now that she was in Durham I would cease to exist, or some part of me would. It was a crazy feeling, I know, and I’m not really sure where it came from, except maybe from the realization that the clearing in the forest wasn’t mine alone, that someone else had spent their adolescence sitting exactly where I had, daydreaming of bigger things and meditating on their future prospects. I wanted to tell her that but I thought she might get offended, as I probably would if someone told me that my mere existence threatened their sense of well-being. The feeling became even worse when she asked me if I had written any poems lately.

  “What? How do you know I’m a poet?”

  She shrugged. “Facebook, I guess.”

  “I’m on your Facebook?”

  “No,” she said.

  I leaned back in my seat.

  “I don’t even really use Facebook,” I said.

  “Neither do I,” she said. “Not really.”

  “Are you stalking me?” I asked.

  “What? Of course not,” she said. I think she could sense that I didn’t believe her, so she continued. “Someone must have mentioned it on my feed. I only remembered it now.”

  I told her that I hadn’t written any poems in a while, that I couldn’t write anything at the moment. That I was waiting for something to happen, and that it occupied all my thoughts. And that I didn’t want it to happen, but that once it did I might be able to work again.