Aubrey McKee

by Alex Pugsley

  He lay against the wall, his legs bent and crossed at the knee, the elevated tip of his shoe bobbing slightly with the pulsing of his blood. September stood watching him some time, studying his sunburned face, his white-spotted eyelashes, and reading what was written on the back of his hand. Sensing my presence, she dipped her head to ask, “Isn’t that the songwriter from the Changelings?” I said it was and so she looked at him again, maybe remembering gigs she’d seen, or speculating on songs unwritten inside him, or recalling some of the stranger stories in circulation, that he’d had some crack-up or break-down or freak-out. To get right to that: two years before, an unattached Cyrus Mair had fled his own surprise party only to be discovered in and evicted from the open-air seal tank at the Dalhousie Life Sciences Centre. From there he wandered plastered to the empty Zuber home on Geldert Street. Knowing the family kept a spare key in a tin of Quality Streets in a backyard sandbox, Cyrus used it to enter the house through the basement backdoor whereupon he helped himself to and finished off a bottle of Zirbenschnaps. Rising to the kitchen, he encountered Feldman, the Zuber family dog, a Labrador-­Schnauzer mix, with whom he passed out in a quilted doggie bed in the back porch. Dr. Zuber found them sleeping there the next morning, Cyrus clutching a black-and-white photograph, a snapshot of a Foster Parents Plan child named Amadu, which had been magnetized to and liberated from the door of the brown Kenmore refrigerator. No charges were laid.

  ~

  Twenty minutes later and new arrivals were shaking off dustings of snow, the floor was wet with slush melt, and Cyrus Mair was awake again. He was chatting at the bar with a young woman. She was in the first blush of youth with violet swooshes of eyeshadow, big hair in a side ponytail, and wearing a sheer blouse which showed an ample bust within a demi-cup bra. Now Cyrus was pretty susceptible to feminine beauty, a fresh complexion could destroy his constructs of self at fifty paces, and although he might be distracted by any number of spirits, you always guessed his interest in Karin Friday would remain paramount. But as the young woman pulled on his sleeve and gushed to the end of a sensational, if apparently semi-humiliating story, I could see Cyrus was listening to her as if her opinion very much mattered to him, as if she were someone who obviously put a lot of thought into everything she said, and he was nodding as if he knew just how privileged he was to be in the company of such a bold and original thinker. This little display, I should say, was a pretty good example of Cyrus Mair in the Public Domain. In many civilian situations, he was self-effacing to the point of invisibility. He had a decided willingness to be ignored or thought irrelevant but of course he was, in his suits and smarts and sunburned cheekbones, fairly difficult to overlook. Which was why the young woman was gazing at Cyrus with equal parts interest, suspicion, and puzzled amusement, as if she guessed there were a few things she were not privy to, and why, as he bumped his way through the crowd with a new round of draft, she stared after him with To Be Continued frisson.

  “That the vice-provost?” I took a draft. “So I was right.”

  “Different vice-provost.”

  “How do you know her, the push-up bra?”

  “In a vision once I saw, the push-up bra, the see-through blouse.”

  “Seriously, where’d you meet her?” I glanced at her again. “Jesus, is that Mary Mingo?”

  “She’s got some pretty terrific ketchup stains on that see-through blouse. I’d like to dedicate the night to those stains and—” Cyrus inspected the elbow of his coat for dampness. “The fucker who just spilled wine on me.”

  “It is Mary Mingo. All grown up. What were you guys talking about?”

  “Just um—” Cyrus sniffed. “Juice Newton. Turns out I’m not that familiar with her discography.”

  We watched Pete Dooder approach the bar and sidle up to Mary Mingo. She gave Cyrus a joking look, a sort of I-told-you-what-would-happen-if-you-left-me-alone look, then made a klutzy face, stuck out her tongue, and smiled into her vodka tonic.

  “Looks like Mary likes you.”

  “We went on date once.”

  “She try to feel you up?”

  Mid-swallow, Cyrus shook his head.

  “She didn’t like you?”

  “Nah. She couldn’t handle my hideous deformity.” He giggled. “She didn’t like my orthopedic shoe.” Cyrus regarded the room, giddy. He was someone for whom every moment was a carrier of possibility and, in the course of a day, he picked up so many meanings, seen and unseen, you often didn’t know what prompted his reactions. But he was finding a lot to like in the Seahorse Tavern. He smiled. He smirked. He drank from his draft. He looked at me with a zany shake of his head, as if to share with me his general bewilderment, and squeezed my arm. “Oh, it’s nice.”

  “What’s nice?”

  “Stuff.”

  “This is your oh-there-is-poetry-in-the-world thing?”

  “Not asking for much. Angels playing in falling leaves. Sunrise on Jupiter. The little things.”

  I nodded, as if I agreed, but secretly I was nervous. For in his eyes was a furtive sort of joy. It embarrassed me and made me wish I hadn’t seen it. What he thought of the world, how he thought of the world, seemed sort of ridiculous—he was sort of ridiculous—but no sooner had I considered such worries they seemed sort of ridiculous and I was left with Cyrus plainly staring at me, amused, expectant, very much himself.

  ~

  At this point in the narrative, I think it relevant to check in with my changing feelings regarding the day’s marriage ceremony. I found it odd that two of my friends would not be attending, though I understood their starkly different situations, but there was also rising within me a resistance to my own wholehearted involvement. I have not really detailed so far my Troubles with the Law. They were extensive, embarrassing, and occasioned a number of alcohol-related injuries of my person. I’d spent a few nights in the Drunk Tank and showing up sloshed to a wedding service at Saint Mary’s Basilica, where my family was waiting for me, wasn’t seeming like the best idea. It would be understood, in fact, as another episode in the long-running series Fuck-Up McKee, programming my father was not really keen on, in fact I’m sure he wanted it cancelled and completely off the air.

  So my plan, newly forming, was to sneak in later in the service, somewhere around the Eucharistic Prayer, and mix thereafter into the reception. Which allowed for more Seahorse drinks. For I was drunk and happy, and happy to be drunk, and happy to be with Cyrus Mair. Being in his company had reminded me of an immense current of ludic behavior—voices, mimicry, absurdist bits of business—that we shared and riffed on and whose existence I’d kind of forgotten. It was comforting reconnecting with it, after the fractiousness with Gail, and sensing the value of such electricity and how it might charge the afternoon I asked him about himself and his thesis and where he’d been the last two years.

  “I get it.” He nodded. “I know people think I’m wandering the countryside, sharing my bread with Kurds and hobos, and wallowing in my own filth. I get it. I’m not dumb.”

  “At least you got filth.”

  “Well—” He poured half his draft into my empty glass. “Sometimes it’s someone else’s filth. But the thesis?” He started jiggling a knee. “England’s a funny sort of place to write a thesis. English people, they’ve inherited a topos, I don’t know if that word means anything to you but it’s a standing set of expectations or traditional themes or set of tropes about something and what’s been in place there is arguably kind of longstanding and fucked up and has to do with history and how they’re instantiated and held in place by history but history’s changing—”

  “History’s changing?”

  “It’s going to get a lot bigger.”

  “When’s that happening?”

  “In the future.”

  “Sure.”

  “History will be way bigger. Our sense of human history to the Early Holocene especially will be way bigg
er. And more interstitially complicated. It should’ve happened ages ago but whatever. I mean we’re just talking timeline history, right?”

  “What do you mean—timeline?”

  “Stop thinking about linearity for a second and figure it out.”

  “Just pretend I’m dumb for a second and explain it to me.”

  “Well,” said Cyrus. “People tend of think of time as a linear progression that reduces contingency to a sequence of unmediated specifics resulting in Consequence A or Consequence B. That’s the traditional notion of a timeline. But if you want to talk about final beliefs, it is a bit of a fiction. Because history’s just one way of looking at time.” He blew the froth off another draft. “Everything’s going to be manifold soon anyway because the forms by which we engage with stuff are changing. Even the metaphors we understand stuff by are changing. It’s going to be McLuhan times a thousand. So the old systems are going to fall away, which is fine, they always do—”

  “What do you mean by systems?”

  “Well—I don’t know—anything from Catholicism to Marxism to any of the current and available modes of historical thought all the way over to precipitation patterns in the Yucatan Peninsula. Because, if we’re going to be honest about the pathless immensity of phenomenological reality and the infinite, overabundant, overwhelmingly irrelevant complexity of it all—that we’re confronted with every single waking fucking nanosecond—then for sure, Jesus Christ, people need systems.” Still jiggling a knee, he shifted a few empty glasses back and forth, as if they were markers in a game. “I mean you can live without systems and embrace all identities and admittedly there are fundamentalists who seriously do do that—and that works for as long as the identities perpetuate the fundamentalists—but with systems it often comes down to the same questions. Like it’s a question how much disorder can be exported to the context outside the system from which the system can then derive and renew itself. That’s key. That’s also when things risk getting junked out and becoming sort of pretty fantastically complicated and disruptive and difficult. Then there’s going to be a reactionary instinct to move from open mode to closed mode in order to get things done properly. Or what people perceive as properly. It’s about getting the balance right. But I’m not sure I’ve got the balance right.”

  “Because you haven’t worked out the specifics?”

  “Because I don’t give a fuck.”

  “You don’t give a fuck?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it’s better not to understand it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because maybe understanding something in systems and words is always separate from its pure and persistent reality.” He watched me finish my draft. “Maybe it’s not persistent, though, without language. Because maybe everything can feel itself to be a thought anyway. I don’t know. I don’t know how this thing got started. And I’m not sure it does you any good if you think you do know. So maybe it’s better not to understand it.”

  “Not to understand what?”

  “Everything.” Cyrus drank off his draft. “Maybe it’s better to be in it than explain it.” He was making that giddy smile again, his eyes bright. “That’s why I came back.”

  ~

  Outside the storm was worse—a sense of high winds and unstable atmospherics, snowfall in plump white drifts, smells of tidewater and diesel fumes.

  “Phlogiston,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The word I was trying to remember. This theory of a substance given off by burning bodies. It’s obsolete now.”

  “Phlogiston,” said Cyrus. “Sure. Like Spontaneous Generation. And frogs in the mud. Except it’s fire in the sky.” He shuddered. “Jesus. This is a fucking snowstorm.” He fastened all the buttons of his coat. “Winter is within us. And the sea is all around us. And so is Juice Newton.” Staring into the street, he said, “Harold, you better get to your wedding.”

  “Not exactly my wedding. What about your phone calls? I understand if you have to ditch me.”

  “I’m not ditching anyone!” Turning to me, Cyrus spoke with some dismay. “Why does everybody keep saying that?”

  “So no vice-provost?”

  “One last call. To confirm. At my house.”

  “All comes down to one last call? And then what? Leipzig?” I reached for his briefcase and yanked on it, surprised by its heaviness. “Fuck, what do you got in here? Gold bullion?”

  “What do I got?” Cyrus wrapped his scarf three times around his neck. “Beurre d’arachide.” This was a phrase drawn from our tennis-identified idiom circa 1977. It was invoked whenever you drew one of the Burr brothers in the first round of a tournament and it was meant to imply generalized displeasure at the perversity of the universe. For a while, we repeated it so much and so often that my youngest sister co-opted the expression, using it as she shooed away a spider, say, or tried to close a sticky window, or even as she followed rebelliously one of the Burr family down a sidewalk, Katie hissing over and over in a whisper, “Beurre d’arachide! Beurre d’arachide.”

  “That’s like—” I looked at Cyrus. “What’s that guy’s poem? He has some peanut butter and buries it in Oklahoma?”

  “I placed a jar in Tennessee,” said Cyrus, stepping into street-slush and waving at a Regal Taxi. “Try and keep up, bud.”

  “No,” I said, watching him. “Peanut butter. Why you get stuff wrong all the time, I’ll never know.”

  A busker, pervasive in Halifax, even in December, was singing and playing acoustic guitar on the sidewalk. Out in the middle of the street, in the middle of a snowstorm, in effect, was Pete Dooder, free of his companions and dancing by himself to the busker’s song, a song whose title I was just able to identify, “It’s My Life” by Talk Talk. Dooder revolved in the street, eyes closed, singing the chorus to himself. To me, it seemed a perfectly appropriate activity and the combination of the song and Dooder and my perception of the moment seemed wonderfully connected and I added this to the other I’ll-remember-this-moments I’d been holding in my mind—a peach in the gutter outside Gail’s boardinghouse, the Trivial Pursuit card in my pocket, Mary Mingo’s look of disgust as she tasted someone else’s drink, and two or three further details that seemed worth remembering but which, as I ran toward the taxi, vanished from my mind like fish into deeper water.

  ~

  The Mair House at 1121 Tower Road is forever fixed in my imagination as a convergence of civilization, enchantment, and dereliction. To walk into the house was to travel back into the past, into a still-life of clotted cream, steamer trunks, a tarnishing silver tea service. Nothing seemed to change within it for a century. I loved its old-fangledness, its Haligonan mysteriousness, the Mairness of its everything.

  Cyrus and I arrived to a long-ringing telephone and he went dashing into the dark, letting fall his briefcase, lunging for the receiver, and slapping at the light switch above the rolltop desk. With his call in progress, I stepped around the toppled briefcase and went to see about refreshments. In the gules and purpure of the pantry, odors schemed and mingled. I sniffed moldering shortbreads, mildewed linens, and something else, a strong greenish smell, like a liqueur spilled into a musty throw cushion. Amid the cordials and sours, I selected a quart of Beefeater Gin, a dusty can of Bitter Lemon, and two glass-­bottomed pewter tankards. From these I fashioned two gin fizzes. I was drunker than I thought because, after cracking open ice cubes from a stainless-steel tray, the lever-action was so satisfying I immediately searched the freezer to crack another. Plopping four mammoth ice cubes into each pewter tankard, I walked double-fisted down the hallway.

  The sounds of pigeons outside, unremarkable when we arrived, seemed to separate into distinct sounds—the flutter of wingbeats, a rheumy hyperventilation—a sense of many birds was imminent and the word infestation was occurring to me when, not for the first time that day, I heard Cyrus smash down a telephone receiver. Walking i
nto the front hallway, I set one of the drinks beside him. But Cyrus did not appear to see it. He sat at the rolltop desk, staring at the black rotary telephone. He was faint, uneasy, weak with some internal quivering. And I asked if he was all right.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Why?”

  “You seem shaky and messed up.”

  “It’s a full moon. I’m sort of—I don’t know—shaky and messed up.”

  “You don’t look like yourself.”

  “Who do I look like?”

  “I don’t know. Some Scandinavian.”

  He looked up, glancing not at my eyes but at some spot below my shoulder, as if it were too much, just then, to encounter another person’s energy. I’d never seen him like this, he’d never shown himself to be so fragile, and I wondered if this infirmity were somehow my doing.

  “How was the phone call?” I asked. “Meeting someone before the airport?”

  He shook his head. “Not happening. Probably the biggest not happening of not happenings. I thought I was going to meet someone. But now I’m not.”

  “Was it important?”

  “I don’t know.” He massaged his eyes. “It was kind of a big deal. We were going to talk about the purity of hope, where the sky meets the sea and, you know, how our destinies are joined briefly in a dream.”

  “But now you’re not? That sucks.”

  “Yeah, that sucks. That sucks so bad. It’s of a suckosity so out of this world it’s not to be believed.” He slumped forward in the chair. “I travelled forty-three hours to be here.”

  “So what’s the new plan?”

  “No plan.” He sighed. “Maybe stay here a spell.”

  “Storm some battlements?”

  Staring unfocusedly at the telephone, Cyrus said nothing.

  “Not everything’s over.” I drank from my gin fizz. “We can still go into the future.”