by Alex Pugsley
“Gotta smear—” said Dunc Chapman, making a great boozy grin. “Gotta smear that fuck all over you.”
“Fucking right,” said Bunker. “As long as it’s done according to Hoyle.” His mouth slightly open, Bunker allowed his head to roll around his shoulders, as if he was working a kink out of his neck.
While it’s true a certain stamp of women were aware of Bunker—he was cocky and tall and immediately handsome—I’m not sure his was an appeal universally acknowledged. This didn’t matter to Bunker because he would never accept a situation where a woman liked him less than he liked her and I remember when he asked Kelly Gallagher to his high school graduation—and she demurred—he never spoke to her again and simply behaved as if she never existed.
“But what about you, McKee?” asked Bunker. “What’s up? Weren’t you and your buddies writing a book?”
“Didn’t happen.”
“Didn’t finish it? So where you coming from—The Seahorse? You and the other New Wavers.” Bunker took off his cap, touched at his bleeding eyebrow, and turned to Dunc Chapman. “McKee was a punk rocker there for a while. Ran around with the lunatic fringe. Mohawks. Safety pins. The whole schmear. He was with this one little nut job. Kind of chunky. I don’t know what she had stuck in her clit. But the energy he put into this girl. Jesus. I hope she’s grateful. I hope she knows what you did for her.” Bunker smiled again, his upper lip catching on one of his front teeth, making him look briefly like a simpleton. “Glad to see you put on your big-boy pants because I didn’t think you were going to get anywhere with her.”
Bunker meant, of course, Gail Benninger. Gail didn’t really belong to the logic of Bunker’s civilization. And this understanding was not really open to revision. It would not change—no matter how much evidence was created to the contrary—because Gail’s possibilities were not convenient for him. Bunker needed coordinates and reference points that could match with his own interests, or his own self-interests, and, thinking about someone like Gail, he couldn’t find any. To Bunker, Gail was merely an aberration, an irrelevancy. And me—what were my coordinates? I was restless with a few contingencies. I put my hand in my pocket, my fingers finding and closing around the soggy Trivial Pursuit card. The card seemed a forlorn little entity now, like an elastic band you might see in a puddle, and on impulse I brought it out. Contemplating its colours, I said, somewhat privately, “William Jennings Bryan—”
“What’s that?”
I took the magnum of champagne from Bunker and chugged from it. “That’s who pulled Dooder out of the Arm that night.”
Bunker’s instinct was to laugh, not so much with amused surprise as outright derision, and grabbed the magnum back. “McKee,” he said. “Remember when we played the quarters of the open? Epic. Fucking epic. Dunc, you should’ve seen this guy. In the first set, McKee’s on fire! Total beast mode. Swinging top-spin volleys from No Man’s Land? Who does that? Running no-look overheads? Who even tries that? I was like, How is he doing this? Just killing me. Then in the second set tie-break, you’re stumbling around, you’re swearing, you’re screaming. How many match points you have? One smashed racket later and—boom—you’re gone. Thrown out of the tournament. The Full McEnroe. Done and dusted.” Bunker pulled on his cap. “Too funny.”
“Yeah.” Letting go of the Trivial Pursuit card, I watched it drop, like a descending magic carpet, to the tiled floor. “I got boned. I got boned on that one. Totally boned up the old ass-crack there. Boned till my eyes popped—”
Bunker was smiling at me, assessing me, the better to process my deadpan remarks and suddenly, or not suddenly, but gradually and inexorably, standing there with Bunker Burr I felt an overwhelming sense of Halifax—a great interconnectedness of the Nova Scotian Open and Wednesday Night Races and the Headwall and LSATs and Connaught Avenue and Park Lane and the Palace and Liquor Dome and X-Rings and Kelly Gallagher—and Bunker Burr seemed sort of absurd to me, with his beliefs and misbeliefs, how he worked to secure connections through teasing and jokes and stories and when he swigged again from the magnum of champagne I found I couldn’t look at him without feeling slightly sick.
I gazed instead at Dunc Chapman. He was passed out in his chair, bent over, slobber from his mouth dribbling into the paper towels wrapped around his bloodied hand. “Dunc and Bunk,” I said. “Live from Carnegie Hall.”
“From what?” said Bunker, befuddled.
“But Dunc’s drunk—”
“You’re a funny sort of fellow, aren’t you, McKee?”
“And you’re a lot of Bunk.” I tilted my head. “So fun! But I’m done.”
“Done with what?”
“Limericks.” I stared at him. “And beurre d’arachide.”
Bunker’s expression didn’t really change, exactly, but his smile shifted into a pressed-lipped sort of grimace and he put down the magnum of champagne. He tugged on his shirt cuffs. He touched at his cufflinks. He was bleeding again—a few drops splashed to the floor tiles—but he stood there, Bunker Burr, as if he knew what to do in every given moment, as if he knew what best served the city’s interests, as if he knew his prospects were perfectly set. It was the reaction of someone who kept to himself a sense of his own future superiority and I knew, in Bunker’s mind, in the family sweepstakes of the city, the Burrs would always win. They would be taken to be the victors and returning champions, no matter what the pursuit, no matter what the endeavour, and Bunker Burr was proceeding toward such a destiny as if it were already true. Staring at him in the Halifax Infirmary, I took a sudden dislike to Bunker Burr and I felt a charge of anger so unstable it seemed the anger of another person. What was said next I don’t recall but I knew, as the champagne and scotch mixed in my blood, I had to get the fuck out of that waiting area and the next I remember I was running in the storm, scowling at insolent stop signs, swearing at idiotic trees. In my fury, I felt super-powered—and “Psychotic Break” might be a phrase appropriate to this part of the evening—and as I sprinted I began to think of myself as Super-Fast Running Man, or perhaps Drunk Guy Who Thinks He’s Super-Fast Running Man, but whichever, I ran through the stormy streets of Halifax for no reason except I felt I had to do something. I don’t know about you, but there are days after you’ve been flipped into the ocean, blown around by a hurricane, and forced to dress in stolen hospital gowns, when you feel some sort of direct and immediate action should be taken. I was taking it, I was running with it, and I tore in the blizzard into my own No Man’s Land.
The warmth of my perspiring body mingled with the smell of the cashmere coat, provoking a sort of soggy woollen fragrance that seemed very personal to me and which gave me focus as I ran and followed westward a single set of snowplow tracks. I had more going on in my mind than I knew but mostly I was thinking about families and the city and cities over time and I remembered how I used to run this very street with Uncle Lorne and I remembered the silent reading of the purple-faced boy and scenes with Sofya Benninger and dealings with Howard Fudge and a hundred other figures to whom I was connected by strains of life lived and thoughts sustained and I became strongly conscious of my former life and the various Aubrey McKees who put in appearances here and there in other people’s lives and it seemed to me I was coexisting with earlier versions of myself—here escaping my sister’s birthday party, there returning to an empty house—and as I ran a few cardinal ideas emerged in my mind about myself and Halifax and someone like Bunker Burr. Bunker Burr would always go to where he was envied and admired and he would become what was considered a success in Halifax, he was the very pattern of the place, a merchant prince through which the city might perpetuate itself, and I knew Bunker Burr was arrogantly himself just as Gail was furiously herself and Cyrus Mair strangely himself and so, perhaps, was everyone themselves but something inside me wasn’t right, some disruption within me was growing, much more than the flang of feedback or a few misplaced notes. All my pursuits, common, personal, and
trivial, seemed ridiculous to me and I felt, if this was to be a question of final belief, then there had to be something more. Either I wanted to be more than I was, or I wanted the city to be more than it was, and though I couldn’t hold in my imagination what I wanted these to be, exactly, I knew very drunkenly, very extremely, very finally, that I was choosing not to care about Halifax anymore, I didn’t see myself in Halifax anymore, I didn’t see a future in Halifax anymore. With this conclusion arriving in my mind, directly between my eyes, as it were, I skidded to a stop in the snow, sucking air, exhausted, my race done. In memory, this sequence plays for me cinematically so suppose the camera has dollied in on me, finding in extreme close up my staring eyes, and audible offscreen is my huffing-and-puffing and the thunder of the storm, but as the camera rises up all diegetic sounds drop away and heard in the sound design are the faraway winds of a blizzard, and noticeable now are a few drifting synth-tones from the musical track, and with their advent the scene slows down, snow flurries loose in the air, rotating in real-time a moment more, before tumbling sluggish and time-bending into slow-motion, CGI snowflakes spinning and spinning in a widening spiral, a few ambient piano notes coordinating with their down-falling movement, and the camera gradually cranes up and away, looking down on a figure shrinking smaller and smaller in frame as we rise as high as the crane will allow, above the treetops and into the swirling snow—and with this bird’s eye view the music shimmers between B minor and A major chords and we are about to slowly fade to black when somewhere out of frame sounds the first blast of an air-horn—a very triumphant overachieving D major—stopping cold the camera move. It isn’t until a fire engine fishtails past me, and I begin to chase after the flashing lights of an ambulance, that I wonder just what in God’s name is going on.
~
A Final Scene: A house in flames and tempest. There is something to the spectacle of a house on fire, when all around is stormy dark and the place flames amazement—chimney bricks bursting into the night, shingles melting into creamy smoke, a thousand embers like confetti in the sky . . . Let me explain what happened not as I knew it then but as I came to understand it later, a last commotion between Mair and Friday, the final movement of the night, and the figurative coda to the symphonic work that was The Common Room. Some of what follows is conjecture because I wasn’t there, I was on the outside, looking darkly in, but certainly all the planning, all the plane tickets and phone calls, the crammed briefcase, all of these were in service of some final escape and elopement. In my mind, I see a jumble of his clothes—suitcoat, shirt and tie—leading from the staircase to the third floor attic where, soaked through and almost hypothermic, Karin has collapsed in the bed. The house is dark, the rooms cold, and Cyrus rises up the attic stairs with a lighted candelabra, slush from his shoes pooling into puddles on the wooden steps. She is shivering as he undresses her, unfastening the fifty-eight pearl buttons on the back of the once-in-a-lifetime dress, peeling off the crystal-beaded bateau neckline of the bodice, stripping off the ivory-satin skirt. He removes the rest of his own clothes, clothes he’s been in for days, and doubtless their looks to each other now have some shyness, Karin watching his profile, touching at his sunburned face, she in candlelight looking silver-pale, other-worldly. She stares at him full in the eyes and for him it would have been thrilling, calming—everything—to look again into the eyes of Karin Friday, to be at her side, faithful now to the theme and vision of his life. Six years they’ve known each other, true, but meanings change over time, and in these first minutes there would be for both some sudden newness overwhelming past familiarity, as moments past change into moments loving, moments that belong to their privacy and of course into further romantic intimacy I do not feel comfortable imagining myself. Whether or not they make love as some have daydreamed, I do not know and have never sought to discover—for these final stage directions there is no unanimously agreed-upon version—but Karin and Cyrus do fall asleep together, like lovers anywhere, really, with infinity on either side of them.
~
When I arrived on Tower Road, the air was full of ash and fire and the heat from the blaze could be felt across the street and my clothes, once sopping, were soon baked dry to my skin, sweat fresh on my face. The fire fighters were soaking the rooftops of nearby houses when someone smashed their way naked out of the windows of the first floor of the Mair House. It was Karin, I saw, bleeding, and getting to her feet, she fought disoriented against a fireman, trying to return to the house. It was lightning that hit the house and started the fire, just where it struck was never determined. It may have travelled toward the tallest point on the block, a Golden Pippin in the backyard, then into the ground, only to stream back up within millionths of a second to the first floor fireplace. There it set alight the flammable chimney-stuffs—dried droppings, nesting twigs—which burned and sideways-smoked because the chimney-tops were clogged with snow. Cyrus left the bed when the chimney materials first exploded and moved dizzily downstairs to Emlyn’s bedroom, the site of the only plausible fireplace, to find the source of the smoke. He did not know the fire had started and spread from the floor below. He did not know Karin behind him would awake alone, dozy with smoke inhalation, and stumble all the way down to the first floor, finding the place in flames. Of course Cyrus returned to the bedroom for her, his face seen for a moment in the attic window—this my last-ever glimpse of him—before vanishing, as if responding to a cry within, but now, for a first time, there was no one in the house but him. Karin outside was being wrapped in a fire blanket—and finding her way out of a fire blanket—and falling to the snow and slipping as she ran toward the house only to be pulled screaming to an ambulance, screaming because the freshly broken windows had provided combustible air for the fire within and with a stunning whoosh the house enflamed, the volumes of its libraries, Watership Down, Daisy Miller, Jack Harkaway—as well as the wingbacks, pianos, photographs—all tinder for this great fire. I was witnessing something I never thought to see, everything was sort of unreal and hyper-realized at the same time, but my imagination was fighting the permanency of these events and when I rushed the house I was near enough to breathe its searing fumes, near enough to singe my eyelashes, near enough to sense a deeper fire within the flames, before I was seized by two firemen and frog-marched backwards. The pigeons, I saw, were flapping above the gables and eave-troughs, not wishing to leave their home, or each other, dozens of them fluttering panicked about the windows, many burning their wings and falling into the flames and as the top floors collapsed into the basement, I realized I was watching, finally and literally, the fall of the house of Mair—the great pith and moment of a family passing—there seemed an eerie music, a wailing sigh, as the place crumpled inward, sending into the night a confederation of sparks, and I was made to realize that my friend’s time and possibilities, and all those he imagined for us, had ended, and so Cyrus Mair was dead.
~
I remained on Tower Road for some time, well after the emergency vehicles left, for there were fires and sirens in other neighbourhoods now. I walked up the street, still wearing the blue cashmere coat. A few minutes before midnight, underneath South Street’s only functioning streetlight, beside a parking lot which had once been the playground for the School for the Blind, where first I saw Cyrus Mair, I reached into a coat pocket and took out his diary. I removed its rubber band. From the back of the diary, from a hollow inside the paste-down endpaper, fell a folded personal letter. The moment had a strange, fifth dimensional quality and, as I located the letter in the snow, I stared at it dumbfounded, as if I didn’t know what it was, or what it did, or even what side of it I was on. I picked it up. The letter, composed on pink onionskin paper in blue Magic Marker, was written some years before, a few months after its sixteen-year-old author met the addressee, and it seemed to have been read and reread, and unfolded and refolded, three hundred times since. I opened it. As snowflakes spun out of the sky and along the edges of the letter, the blue words leak
ing into each other in a smudgy palimpsest, I read the letter once through before letting its pages drop and blow down Tower Road. Afterwards, I felt no need to read anything else. Then I slipped the diary back into a coat pocket. I took off the coat. Before trudging away, I left it swinging from a fencepost in the whirling snow, knowing for a while the coat saved my life, maybe in the way this letter saved someone else’s.
l’heure bleu
a new year’s eve
un pneumatique
O My Own Dear Sweet Darling Cyrus Mair
I am so sorry I dint get to see you again this evening on this your last night home even! Cuz my Mom dint tell me you was here til it was too late. You know, my Mom what’s starting to get upset because of how she dint bring me upright and how I’m not as good a hostess as I could be and how I’m a delinquent because I’m starting to talk like you all the time. Oh pshaw and harrumph.
She dint tell me you came back bud when I heard your voice at the back door I ran downstairs to the landing but man I durst not go further. I was wearing only a slip! Barebum. All my Mom’s party-men woulda seen ma décolletage. There was about 104 of them. I was thinking of snucking out but Mom’s really had it with escaped orphans et les enfants perdues. I fought you mite fro rox at my winnow so I wend back into bed. A-waiting. I called your house bud Auntie Em said you weren’t home yet. Where do you go? You are always disappearing, Cyrus of Persia! I guess I shoulda gone out and got drunk with the Common Room, right?
What a loofah. So I gave up on reading. Too tie-erd. It was pass one in the moaning. I fell a-sleep for a-while. It was quiet in the dark-of-night then. But now I’m awoked and just found and opened your note and think you are the nicest wonderfullest sweetest boy I know and you are always sea-prizing me, boyo! I jez never figgered that present box woulda come from you. The best magic ever! And I shall share these gifts with some youngsters because I know you would like that I can’t believe how much I love that letter and plus I always love green spearmint leaves.