by Alex Pugsley
He made no answer—he seemed to be holding his breath—and I was wondering if he were one of those semi-autistic kids who stare for hours at a green eraser when he finally exhaled to say, “I’m not even here!” His eyebrows, I noticed, were sun-bleached to whiteness. “I’m supposed to be somewhere else, but I’m not there either because—because I’m an escape artist!” He was English or at least spoke with an English accent. In later years, when I remembered this moment, I would think of him as one of those hyper-articulate British schoolchildren whose accent is so fluty, and whose syllables are so precisely enunciated, you want to thump them in the head with a rubber fish. I ran to the merry-go-round and grabbed the handrail closest to me. Giving it an almighty heave, I spun the boy as fast as I could. The contraption revolved twice and I timed my next push for maximum acceleration.
After a few unstable rotations, the boy jumped off, woozying a few steps and bringing his fingers to his eyes. “Oh my lumbago,” he said, dropping to the grass. A small eyedropper bottle tumbled from his pajama pocket. The boy picked it up, wiped away some dirt, and showed it to me. “This is one of my newest inventions,” he said. “A potion of many ingredients!” He gave me the bottle. I held it to the sun. Inside its blue glass was some sort of liquid, a small key—as if from a lady’s jewelry box—as well as some shifting blobs of oil. “All I need to complete it,” said the boy, taking back the bottle and looking at me wildly, “is a drop of human blood.”
I asked why he needed the potion.
“I’m making it,” he said, shaking the bottle, “in case a sea pirate comes home to find that I’ve been abducted by a goliath. This is the potion that can bring you back to life. This is the potion that can grant you one wish!” He looked at me, conspiratorial. “I’ve also invented a word—shropter.”
I asked what it meant.
“I don’t know yet.” He searched for something in a front pocket of his jodhpurs. “My first invention was a treasure map of many escape routes.” He brought out the sheet of coloured paper I’d seen him chase along the sidewalk. It was marked up with several scribbles and diagrams. I liked it straightaway and immediately wished it were mine. “Probably it will fall to me to escape. But it may do for my father as well. Do you have a father? I have a father. I’ve only met him twice. But I’m going to see him again, I should expect. That’s why I’ve become interested in inventions. And you?”
I had four sisters, I told him, and made a shrugging reference to Bonnie’s birthday party, adding that I didn’t much want to go.
“Why? Is she a biter? I’ve known some biters. Is she younger?”
My sister was older, I said, and wasn’t much of a biter. Then, on impulse, I opened my mouth to display my wobbly front tooth.
“Ooh,” said the boy. “May I?” He touched at my tooth with his fingertip. “Yes, that will come out directly.” He made a strange sort of smile, exposing his own front teeth. “I still have mine. See? But yours will grow back. They do grow back.” He glanced down, as if searching for something lost in the grass, then looked at me to confide, “There’s a skeleton inside you, you know. A complete and utter skeleton. Beneath your skin.”
This news I received with some confusion for I connected skeletons with ghouls and graveyards and scary cartoons—and I couldn’t be sure if this kid was telling the truth or if he was merely, and this impression had been building over the past few minutes, indulging in a form of slapdash free association. What kind of person would tell you there was a skeleton inside you?
Giving the merry-go-round a last shove, I said I was going back to my sister’s birthday party but he could come if he wanted.
“A party?” He winced. “Maybe. But I don’t like ice cubes. I don’t like to taste them and I don’t like the sound they make in my teeth. One second—” He put a hand on my elbow, conspiratorial again, and evaluated me. “You know, you could grow a moustache if you wanted. And no one would recognize you. Except French people. There’s a seagull!”
I looked up—only to realize he was pointing at the shadow of a fleeting bird, a shape that was presently ribboning across the grass and puddles of the playground, gliding past the curb, and unfolding into South Street . . . And so this boy, this unexpected child, this curious young party, this was Cyrus Mair. There was something incomprehensible and quivery and completely recognizable about him. He reminded me of the imaginary kid, a character in my own private mythology, who ran along the side of the highway, keeping pace with my family’s car on road trips—a fantastically swift boy who hurdled over cement culverts, slipped under fallen trees, never tripping, never tiring—and as I watched Cyrus Mair in the playground of the Halifax School for the Blind chasing a seagull’s shadow, on the way to the rest of his life, passing his fingers along the posts of the wrought-iron fence, trying to touch every one, now going back to tap the post he missed, I thought him reckless and exuberant and smart. He was fabulously weird. I wanted to know what he knew. I couldn’t really guess what he was dreaming up in his mind, nor what games and inventions occurred there, but I liked him. His world was in a constant state of becoming, and this September afternoon was the beginning of a fascination that would last a sort of lifetime for me because, even if I didn’t know what I wanted, like everyone else I would not be able to stop paying attention to the creature known as Cyrus Mair.
~
“Do you like jokes? I like jokes. Did you hear about Napoleon?” Cyrus turned to me. “Josephine sucked his bone apart!” It was probably the single-worst joke I’d ever heard. His jokes made no sense at all. I didn’t get them. I didn’t get them the third time he told them. But each joke went over huge with Cyrus Mair, his giggles bursting into the air like birdsong. I did not share his high spirits at first. But, at a later juncture, around the time we were sneaking into my backyard and toward my family’s basement door, the phrase “Coat-Cheese” arose in our conversation, an example of the usage for which might be “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese, you’re a fat Coat-Cheese,” or “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese sitting in a pie,” or even “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese stuck inside a toilet seat, Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese pooping in your eye,” all of which formulations seemed astonishingly relevant to our developing understanding of the afternoon, and by the time we were tiptoeing up the basement stairs, Cyrus bent over with laughter, slapping his thigh to keep himself from falling, we were sweaty and gleeful and manic with intrigue. The birthday party was in full fling—a dozen teenybopper girls hopped up on peppermint cupcakes and cream soda. Cyrus was happily assimilating all the details of the party— the girls in their swishy party dresses, helium balloons bouncing against the ceiling, the table of wrapped gifts—assimilating these details but perhaps not processing them. “There’s a lot going on in this house,” said Cyrus. “I think we need a drink.” He moved somewhat instinctively to the living room and my parents’ liquor cabinet where he fetched out a bottle of Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial. “Ah.” He twisted off the cap. “The good stuff.” He brought the bottle to his lips and glugged off several swallows. “That’s the spot,” he said, tightly shutting his eyes. “I think I’m drunk already.”
I asked what he was going to do when he had the last ingredient for the potion, the drop of human blood.
“Good question,” he said, passing me the bottle of lime cordial. “My plan is—Wait. Before we go any further, I need to know something.” He took a step back and put his hands on my shoulders, much in the manner of a captain steadying the nerves of a young recruit. “Are you a Crab or an Anti-Crab?”
I asked what he meant.
“Well,” said Cyrus, puzzled. “It’s quite simple, really. I’m an officer in the Anti-Crab Army. Like my father. And the world is either Crab or Anti-Crab. Which are you?” He peered into my eyes. “I think you’re Anti-Crab.”
Swigging from the bottle of lime cordial, I made a few nods to show I was inclined to agree.
“Good. That’s all you have to t
ell them. That and your serial number. Remember that when you’re being tortured.”
“When I’m being tortured?”
“Exactly!” said Cyrus, racing back into the party, his pajama top coming loose from his belt and billowing like a sail.
~
The cake was being served—a special in-house recipe my sister Carolyn made for each of us on our birthdays—a vanilla sponge cake embedded with store-bought candies and coated with milk chocolate icing. Carolyn was handing out plates of this delicacy to the last guests when, seeing Cyrus and me, she sliced off two more pieces. “Ah,” said Cyrus. “Chocolate Thermidor.” He spun toward me. “But maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know—” He tapped at his own front tooth. “The wiggler.”
I said I’d use the other side of my mouth to chew and this seemed to reassure him. Focusing his attention on his own piece of cake, he took a large bite and chomped the cake experimentally—before spitting a mouthful to the linoleum floor. “Just as I suspected!” He made an odd smile. “Raisins.” He kicked at the offending gob with one of his Oxford shoes—which was loose on his foot now, the laces free from the top eyelets. Carolyn assured him there were no raisins in the cake, and Cyrus, seeing his blunder, for he had mistaken a red jujube for a raisin, bent to the floor to pick it up. He was popping this in his mouth, to the fascinated horror of at least three of the girls present, when my sister Bonnie returned from a bathroom break. “Who the hell is that kid?” She pointed at Cyrus. “And who invited him to my party?”
I was explaining I’d invited him, that he was my guest, when, rather as if he’d been waiting for the appropriate moment, Cyrus stepped to the centre of the room to say, “I’m the world’s best escape artist!”
Bonnie looked at him, skeptical. “Um,” she said. “No, you’re not.”
“Oh, yes I am,” said Cyrus, swallowing the red jujube. “I can escape from any ropes or shackles you devise for me. And—” He flung his hand above his head to point at the ceiling. “I throw down the gimlet!” He was beaming at the girls, daring to be contradicted. “You could tie me up and I shall escape anything!”
A small girl in a turtleneck dress, her name was Alice Gruber, produced a pink skipping rope and Bonnie took it and thrust it at Cyrus. “Prove it.”
Taking the skipping rope, he wrapped it around his left wrist three times. “I wrap it like this and you”—he offered his hands to Alice Gruber, who seemed shyly delighted to be participating—“you tie it nice and tight on my other hand.”
Alice Gruber tied a simple bow knot firmly around his right wrist. He offered his tied wrists for inspection. “See? So I shall go behind these drapes.” He walked to the windows, where my mother, because of our too-close proximity to the next-door house, had installed floor-to-ceiling curtains. “And I shall escape and disappear by a count of ten. Ready? On your marks—Go!”
Cyrus’s small outline, and especially the heels of his shoes, showed in contours and creases in the fabric of the curtain. The girls looked at one another, uncertain, so Carolyn started loudly counting, the rest of us joining in and finishing—noting, of course, that Cyrus’s shoes were exactly where they had been when we started.
Bonnie pulled the curtains open, revealing the skipping rope fallen into Cyrus’s empty shoes. For two or three seconds we were fully amazed, as if the laws of the universe had shifted without us understanding why, until Bonnie jerked the curtains all the way open, revealing Cyrus giggling, barefoot, and triumphant at the end of the window. “Yes!” His face flushed pink as he took back his shoes from Alice Gruber—who had picked them up in her new capacity as magician’s assistant. “My second greatest escape today! I told you. I can escape from wire cages or torture chambers or anything at all.” The birthday guests were certainly amused and so was I but not so the birthday girl. My sister with narrowing eyes was rethinking the wrapping and tying of the skipping rope, correctly deducing that Cyrus had made sure the skipping rope crossed on the underside of his left wrist, allowing for a quick release when he twisted his hands away from the crisscrossed rope. Once free of the rope, he slipped out of his shoes and slunk along the window to hide flattened within the curtains.
Keen to continue the challenge, Bonnie brought a chair from the dining room. She asked if Cyrus could escape if he were tied to the chair and blindfolded and locked in the hall closet. Cyrus studied the door to the hall closet. It was an antique-looking door with a skeleton key resting in its lock. “It would be my third great escape today,” he said, considering. After procuring a fold of newspaper, which he positioned on the floor beneath the lock, and making us promise we wouldn’t tinker with its placement, he raised his hand to point again at the ceiling. “I accept the gimlet!” Bonnie then went to work, securing him to the chair, tying his hands behind his back with the pink skipping rope, binding his ankles to the chair legs with kitchen twine, and using the sash from her sparkle dress as a blindfold. All through this procedure, Cyrus held his breath, quietly smiling, and flexing his shoulders to make himself bigger. With Carolyn’s help, Bonnie bumped Cyrus and the chair over to the hall closet, dumped him in, and turned the key in the lock—just as my parents came through the front door. They were confused to see the birthday party gathered around the hall closet, and more than this, I could tell from their posture and solemnity that Something Complicated had happened in the outside world. It was only now I realized how irregular it was that neither of my parents had been home to direct the events of Bonnie’s birthday party—it was a tribute to Carolyn’s abilities the party’s proceedings had gone so smoothly. So we dispersed, innocently returning to balloons and loot bags in the kitchen, and leaving five-year-old Cyrus Mair chair-tied and blindfolded on the hardwood floor of the hall closet.
~
A note of civic history—Howland Poole Mair, K.C., known popularly in the province as H.P. Mair, served as the fourteenth premier of Nova Scotia many years before Cyrus and I were born. Most of the Mairs were given to highly variable and eccentric vanishing acts, but the disappearance of H.P. Mair was bold even for them. On the day he vanished, H.P. Mair was senior counsel to one of the city’s oldest law firms, Merton Mair McNab, and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, and the convergence of inward meaning and outward implication these circumstances provoked, would generate speculation for years to come. I saw him only twice, the first time when I was four and he was eighty-three, outside St. Matthew’s United Church one winter morning when my father made a point of introducing to his children an approaching older man, elegantly dressed, sharply stern. Tall and bald, to me H.P. Mair most resembled a stretched-out version of the Banker in the board game Monopoly. I remember singing for him the first verse of my newly composed “Extravagant Yogurt” song, a routine to which he gave a quick and single roar of laughter, and I remember my father treating him with uncharacteristic deference—a consequence, I would later learn, of my father having articled with H.P. Mair when he first graduated law school. My father would accept a position with a different firm, but his debt and connection to H.P. Mair he always respected. Not so my mother. “The Old Grey Mair,” she said. “He ain’t what he used to be. Such a peculiar fellow. We’d be at some party. He’d walk in, speak to no one, watching from the corner. You try to talk to him, he’d just shake his head and walk away. If you ask me, he needed help. But your father loved H.P. Mair. Thought he was brilliant. Sure, if brilliant means drunk. If brilliant means stumbling home drunk from The Halifax Club, then he was a genius. H.P. used to show up soused at our front door. I’d give him the vacuum cleaner and tell him to start in the living room. The man was just sozzled. Juiced to the gills. Alcohol ruins so many families, Aubrey. And at the end he didn’t know where he was. At the end he sort of knew he was yesterday’s man. The last year of his life, he was calling your father at all hours. In the morning, the middle of the night. The man was over-billing, double-billing, he needed mon
ey something terrible. Had a wife with expensive tastes, for one, plus this young girlfriend, and drinking all the time. That once-brilliant mind, all that booze. The month he disappeared, he came to see if your father would represent him because he was about to be disbarred and God knows what else.”
My father was president of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society at the time, a member of the same disciplinary committee that was investigating H.P. Mair, and so was obliged to recuse himself from acting for him. H.P. Mair went missing three weeks later. He had lunch at The Halifax Club near noon and was later seen purchasing a bottle of Veuve Clicquot at the Clyde Street liquor store, the cashier giving a statement to the police that, the last she saw him, H.P. Mair was walking down South Park Street. Officers found his house with its doors open, his purple Mercedes-Benz in the driveway. His disappearance would become the talk of the province. There were theories he’d been murdered, that he’d run off to Bermuda to avoid prosecution, that he’d committed suicide in Maine. For a while he was the missingest man in Canada and seemed destined to become one of those figures, like Judge Crater or Captain Slocum, who simply evaporates from the twentieth century. But twenty-one days later, on the morning of Bonnie’s ninth birthday, a body was glimpsed in the ocean off Black Rock Beach by two Waegwoltic kids in a Sunfish sailboat. The authorities recovered the drowned man, finding on the fully clothed corpse no identification except, in a sodden suit-pocket, my father’s business card. My father was asked in for questioning later that day. After identifying the body as the remains of H.P. Mair, my parents went along to relay the news to the widow—a peripheral family friend. Vida Mair, who had been estranged from her husband for some years, lived alone and alcoholically on the seventh floor of the Hotel Nova Scotian. Not only was she vexed to learn of her husband’s death, but she was out of her mind with worry that one of her extended family, her husband’s son with another woman—a five-year-old who had been placed provisionally in her sister-in-law’s care—had gone missing the night before. Phone calls were made, a search party rallied, and another Missing Persons file opened.