by Alex Pugsley
It was with somber and serious worry for this errant child that my parents walked in the front door of our house on Tower Road somewhat surprised to find the very object of their concern tied to a dining room chair, sideways on the floor of the hall closet, blindfolded, and thrashing like an animal in a trap. “What in God’s name is that noise?” asked my mother. Speeding to ground zero, I spun the key in the door, yanked it open, and bent down beside Cyrus Mair. I pushed away the blindfold. Although he was on the verge of liberation, his expression did not change. His eyebrows were tense with concentration and, now that I was this close to him, I could see three of his eyelashes had gone white—or started white—and I noticed, too, a spiral of absolutely white, de-pigmented hair swirling out of the crown of his head. He was silent, sullen even, as if he suspected he had misjudged the situation—or the situation had misjudged him. “If you help me escape,” he whispered, struggling against the pink skipping rope. “If you help me out of this booby trap, I’ll help you escape from anywhere. And I will remember. Will you?”
“Remember what?”
“Everything!”
I said I would help him if he showed me all of his escape routes. “You promise?”
“I promise,” said Cyrus Mair, his blue eyes very wide. “I do.”
~
Half an hour later and the party was in the breakfast nook among some softening-but-still-airborne balloons, second helpings of cake, and Bonnie’s haul of birthday gifts. Cyrus had very easily integrated himself into the gathering and babbled intimately with everyone—as if he’d known each of us all his life. Bonnie, feeling contrite over his imprisonment, and sensing my parents’ distant but frank interest in this child’s welfare, tolerated his presence. The other girls accepted and approved of him, especially Alice Gruber, who, in a tizzy of overexcitement, had begun applying chocolate icing to the tip of his nose. “That’s disgusting!” said Cyrus, wiping his nose and straining to make the word as emphatic as possible. He turned to Bonnie, who was opening and reading a birthday card. “I think you should always keep a present you don’t open,” Cyrus said, moving his piece of cake away from the groping fingers of Alice Gruber. “That way you can always go back to open something you don’t have.” Alice Gruber let out a squeal of laughter at this remark, then right away covered her mouth with both hands, shutting down any further noises. Bonnie opened the beautifully wrapped present anyway, displaying to the table a page-a-day pocket diary. I thought it very splendid with its gilded pages and royal blue binding, as well I should, for I remembered it was my gift to Bonnie. My mother and I had charged it at Mahon’s Stationery the week before, my mother deciding that the gift of a diary would encourage Bonnie to read more. Bonnie remarked casually that she already had three diaries, that I could keep this new one, and flipped the gift back to me. She went on to the next present and so did everyone else. Everyone except Cyrus Mair, who stared at the diary as if spellbound, as if he’d never imagined such an invention could exist.
Finishing my own piece of cake, I became aware of my parents talking in the kitchen. I was not really sure of the topic of conversation, but sifting into my vicinity was the sense that Something Complicated was ongoing, and overheard in my mother’s side of the conversation were phrases such as “heart flutter” and “shock of the water” and “the whole thing is unthinkable.” This last phrase was delivered as she stared out the window at a favourite tree, a Japanese maple, which was always first to turn in autumn and the phrase acted on Cyrus’s imagination with great force and meaning. The boy, even as kids go, was tremendously suggestible and in another moment he’d wandered out of the breakfast nook. “The whole thing is unthinkable,” repeated Cyrus, touching at his pajama pocket and his potion of many ingredients. “But if you can’t think it, how can you say it? How do you even know it?” My mother came over to warmly smile at Cyrus, saying she was glad he’d had some birthday cake, he was welcome to another piece, perhaps some ice cream, and he shouldn’t worry because arrangements had been made to get him safely home. She sent a look to me to show she was happy with my own conduct and then joined my father, who in quiet tones was speaking into the black rotary telephone in the dining room.
“There really is a lot going on in your house,” said Cyrus, following my mother into the hallway. There seemed to be too many ideas fizzing at the brim of the moment, mostly beyond a kid’s immediate ability to sort or commit to understanding, and Cyrus, standing in front of the telephone desk beside a wicker chair, was choosing simply to register the desk’s sundry details—a white wooden golf tee, the Halifax-Dartmouth Yellow Pages, a stapler, a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and The Visitor from Planet X, as well as a box of envelopes for the Sunday offering provided by St. Matthew’s United Church. He studied the cover of the Tom Swift book and said, to no one in particular, “Every book is the same book. That’s why you read them. Unless it’s a mystery book. And then it’s eponymous.” Holding the eyedropper bottle as if it were a wand, Cyrus passed it over the desk’s effects. “This could be a church,” he said. “And all these bits its candles. But you have to be careful because people will turn you into a bob.” He looked at me with real purpose. “People will turn you into a fact.”
The front doorbell rang. After a furtive look into the hallway, Cyrus turned to me. “I’m getting curious again. I can feel it. And when I get curious, I’m supposed to breathe and count to twelve. But I can’t because I’m feeling—shroptered.” The word seemed to make perfect sense to him now and I nodded to show I understood. The doorbell rang again and I stepped into the hallway to see what kind of oddity would be ringing and ringing the front doorbell. There on the porch, framed through the doorway, was a giant of a man. He wore a heavy black raincoat and a brimmed, flat-topped hat. He was, I would learn later, a driver from Regal Taxi. But in form and demeanour he reminded me ominously of Bill Sikes from the movie Oliver! seen by me a few weeks before. So frightened was I of Bill Sikes, and so scared to see this fellow staring into our house, that a cold shiver spread across my shoulders. While I was perturbed to see this man, Cyrus was absolutely horrified. Whether he recognized him as an actual enemy or simply guessed at possibilities darkly perfidious, I wasn’t sure, but Cyrus’s nervousness quickened toward an almost epileptic intensity. As he backed against the wall, scanning the rooms for alternate exits, I felt something peculiar happening to the ground floor of the house. Cyrus’s jumpiness was making me triply aware of my surroundings and their causes and effects. Items within his awareness began to resonate with newfound, probable energies, and so the stapler on the telephone desk seemed to vibrate, the wicker chair seemed to teeter and slide to one side, and my very thoughts seemed to variously spin, as if the merry-go-round of my mind had been pushed in new directions. “Just after my best greatest escape,” said Cyrus, his eyes leaky with anxiety. “That’s when he starts staring all over me?” He tucked his pajama top into his jodhpurs and readied himself for a getaway. But I could tell he was worried. He had that skeleton-inside-you look again. “But if it’s unthinkable,” he whispered, “then I’m not even here. So how could anyone find me?” His questions were frightening for me to consider and as I thought over the scenes of the afternoon I felt I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t dreamt all the days before this, the small world where I had my own life and times, my Batmobile and Boy Detective games. The moment was oddly emotional for me, and for some reason, I picked up and pressed into his hands the gift of the page-a-day pocket diary, explaining my sister Bonnie had three other diaries, she preferred pink diaries anyway, and he should take this diary for his own inventions.
Cyrus turned to me, touched to be given such a souvenir. There was a glisten of perspiration on his forehead and he blotted this moisture with his pajama sleeve. “But I don’t have anything in return because—wait a minute.” He gazed at me with open eyes. “Say! I don’t know your name.”
I told him.
“Aubrey McKee,” he repeated. “I do
n’t have anything. Except perhaps—” From his pajama pocket he took out his potion of many ingredients. “Except this. There’s enough for one sip. Would you like to make a trade?”
~
The progression of event that follows I still have trouble sequencing. I remember opening the eyedropper bottle, squeezing the bulb pipette, and stealing a swallow of the potion—tasting the ferrous bitterness of the key—just as the late-afternoon light streaked through the stained glass of our front door, creating a gleam of rainbow on the hardwood floor, and the Regal Taxi driver stepping inside our house, my mother turning to greet him with perfect charm when Alice Gruber, kicking at a deflated red balloon, ran to my mother to ask if Cyrus Mair had to escape again could she at least keep his shoes? Whether it was my mother’s murmur or Cyrus’s shriek that came next, I’m not sure, but I recall Cyrus sprinting barefoot into the front hallway, clutching the blue diary, aiming for the still-opened front door but in his panic running smack into the newel post of the staircase. Then I was in the hallway myself, watching him bounce backwards through the air and rear-end my sister Carolyn and Cyrus sprawling on the floor, his right leg twitching, only to spring up straightaway and dash under the sweeping arms of the taxi driver toward the puddles of the sidewalk. I was appalled. Shouldn’t this kid have told me when he was going, how he was going, where he was going? It seemed to me then that everyone was deliberately betraying their promises to me and with a sense of berserk purpose I put my head down and made for the front door, planning to catch up to Cyrus Mair. The door was swinging shut, and I saw I would soon crash into its stained glass window, but I chose to persevere, my upper lip hitting first, my nose squishing, the door-glass shattering, my loose front tooth detonating out of my mouth, and as my tongue touched at the gap in my gums where once my tooth had been—a trickle of warm blood mixing with the residue of the potion’s bitterness—I saw through the smithereening glass Cyrus Mair escaping down the sidewalk, pajama top blousing out of his jodhpurs, and I closed my eyes, swallowing a drop of the completed potion, but knowing finally what I wanted, for I wanted to be Cyrus Mair.
Action Transfers
The summer my parents divorced the first time, the summer I turned seven, I was no longer able to walk. Something happened to my super-speed. The flash of quickness I once relied on to propel me past any other living kid left me and I began to limp from an ache localized at the top of my left leg. This progressed into a sharp and steep pain, preventing me from walking, from hobbling, until finally I simply hopped everywhere on my right foot. My older sister said it was because I had an undigested carrot lodged in my hip-bone and explained I should have listened to her about properly chewing my food, but another diagnosis pointed to a form of idiopathic avascular osteonecrosis and a bone disorder called Legg-Calvé-Perthes. So I was hospitalized for the months of that summer and spent my days and nights in orthopedic traction—that is, with pulley weights dragging my legs away from my pelvis.
Even though I had brought with me a pencil case of precious effects, and even though my parents had spoiled me with a number of new Letraset Super Action Transfers—acetate heroes that could be rubbed on to cardboard panoramas—my stay in hospital was a strange time for me. I was so surprised by my new situation that I mostly pretended it wasn’t happening, that I wasn’t in a hospital, that things were the same, and that I would soon be returned to my family’s life, delivered from whatever mythical creatures this place contained. But morning after morning, I awoke in the Izaak Walton Killam Hospital for Children, unable to walk away from my hospital bed, unable to use my legs, unsure what would happen.
~
I remember the smells of the place, the green reek of the industrial cleanser used on the tile floor, the blended odours of a lunch cart’s undelivered meals—cubes of processed ham congealing into cheese macaroni, softening tapioca pudding, snack-size cartons of souring skim milk. By the end of the fifth day, I developed chafed elbows and bed-sores, my skin a mess of raw crosshatchings, and I was forced finally to pass a bowel movement into a metal bed pan. I buzzed for a nurse to come empty this pan but nurses were often busy and no one came right away. So the smell of my feces, my just-lying-there-on-the-stainless-steel poop, spread through the air, slightly sickening me and very much embarrassing me, for I was not alone in the room. I was in a double room and over the eight weeks of my stay behind the curtained partition was a succession of other kids—tonsillitis kids, appendix kids, car accident kids. A new patient might come in the middle of the night, host a crowd of visitors that morning, have surgery that afternoon, and be gone the next day.
Small talk with other families depleted me—fake smiles, hopeful waves, promises to stay in touch. I was happiest when I was alone and the other bed was empty, a stack of laundered sheets tidy on its bare mattress. All day I would occupy myself with my pencil case of precious effects—a much-loved Batman figure sprung from a toy Batboat, a green terrycloth wrist band, a newly received Yellow Submarine. For hours I played with this Yellow Submarine, tremendously impressed with the cast-metal permanence of such an artifact, its revolving periscope, and the hatches that opened to reveal pairs of psychedelic Beatles. At the end of the day I watched the black-and-white television mounted on the ceiling, each evening wondering at Truth or Consequences and the lives of people who lived outside hospitals. I awoke sometimes to screams at night—kids wailing, adults sobbing—and sadder adults you will never see than those pacing a children’s hospital at three in the morning. The hallway outside my room was mostly quiet with moments of sudden, shrieking calamity.
~
More terrifying for me was the attempt at recreation and diversion on weekday mornings. Day after day I would be wheeled toward the elevators in my hospital bed, the hallway’s perspective telescoping wildly like the dolly-zoom in a spooky movie, where I would share the rising car with a Perpetually Smiling Porter. Arriving at the top of the building, I would be steered down the hallway toward the fifth-floor play area. From inside my bed, I watched the walls go by, queasy at the sight of the cheerful posters that featured, say, a photograph of two kittens dangling from tree branches beside the jokey caption “Hang In There!” or a school of cartoon minnows happy to be reading from the same storybook. For the fifth floor was full of extremely ill and not-healthy-at-all children: cancer kids, burn victim kids, paralyzed kids in wheelchairs. But my attention that first morning was drawn to a purple-faced boy in a hospital bed.
I say purple-faced boy because that’s all he seemed to be—I had no idea the world held such problematics. He was a Thalidomide child who, God knows how, had survived into puberty and adolescence, and the purpleness of his complexion, which under the fluorescent ceiling lights looked positively saurian, was the combined result of teenage acne and steroid medication. The purple-faced boy was one of fifty Thalidomide cases born in the city and he was, like the jokes I would later hear in the school playground, a Guy with No Arms and No Legs. He was mostly just a head and I felt so humiliated and sorry for this purple-faced boy, who was living an existence he hadn’t chosen but which he must have known was about as wretched as a human life could be—and I am ashamed even now as I write this—that on that first morning I couldn’t look him in the eye and was too afraid to talk to him. Because he could speak, of a fashion, making glottal noises in his throat to indicate a direction or that he wished returned to his bed a fallen book. I was embarrassed by this purple-faced boy—wondering how on earth he had happened and could what happened to him happen to me?—and I was sickened to feel such embarrassment and this first moment has stayed with me and stayed with me and stayed with me, because of all the kids in the fifth-floor play area, the cancer kid, the burn victim kid, the paralyzed kid in the wheelchair, or me, a kid in traction, we all knew we were better off than this purple-faced boy, who was a horrendous fuck-up of a human. With his misshapen head and squiggly appendages—one arm stumpy, the other a fin with a crab claw—he seemed a sort of whelp and not a sure bet
to be anything but dead. I had never met a kid so marked for death. I could sense he knew this, his eyes were grey and grim and guarded, he probably knew he was not going to get out of that children’s hospital and that his possibilities for life were diminished and diminishing.
We happened to be the only kids in hospital beds that morning and the Perpetually Smiling Porter put our beds together, so that we were side by side, our bed rails bumping. A nurse assigned to the fifth floor, this was a formidable woman from Herring Cove named Patty Oickle, suggested I share my Super Action Transfers with the purple-faced boy. But in my panic I feigned discomfort, as if I were in pain from my traction weights, and stared instead at the bald cancer kid who was loose on the floor, playing with a golden Hot Wheels car I recognized as Splittin’ Image.
From the nearby nurse’s station, an eight-track played a release from that year, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Though I had loved the first side a few months before, especially the jubilant “Cecilia,” the tape’s second song became for me a small eternity of suffering. This was “El Cóndor Pasa,” an odd, despairing folk tune, full of faraway sorrow. The singer’s existential musings—he’d rather be a sparrow . . . than a nail . . . or a hammer . . . if he could? Who would want to be either? I didn’t understand the guy—preyed on my sense of insecurity and looming dread so that when recreation time was over and I was finally free of the fifth-floor play area, I was fantastically grateful to be delivered back to my room, regardless of its screams and smells and possible roommates, content in my diversion of Letrasets and comic books and my pencil case of precious effects. I’d rather stay in my room for the entire two months by myself if I could—if I only could, I surely would.