Three Years with the Rat

by Jay Hosking

  I deflect, feign some excuse, and give her a perfunctory kiss. Then I hop in the cab and head to the train station.

  Hours later, back at home in Toronto, John’s notebook reveals its next section to me when I use that piece of shit Thornton’s name as the key.

  SILHOUETTE BREAKS RANK – II

  A few minutes down the street from Shifty’s is an old church with a park bench in front of it. During the day, the bench is a favourite spot for the homeless of Toronto; at night, though, the area is almost always empty and perfect for quiet summer conversations, despite being just a few feet from College Street and all its bustle.

  Grace and I sat there talking on the night I met her. Well, not talking, exactly. She and I just sat there, with me staring at her and her smiling blindly into some memory or idle thought. Of course, her absent gaze was probably because I was looking at her so intensely. I doubt I have ever looked so hard at anyone as I did that night.

  It was barely summer, then. The air was getting warmer but it was restless, and it came in bursts that would cause her hair to dance around her face. The Toronto skyline was reflecting off an overcast ceiling, painting the city in bright reds, and I wished I had my camera to preserve something of the night.

  Instead, my memory was all I had to capture those first moments. Her cheekbone and lips were caught by the white light of the fire station just across the street. She wore a small summer dress that left her legs bare. This was before her obsession with wearing layers upon layers, before she starting losing what little weight she had; the woman was not yet lost in the clothes. Back then she was light, ethereal, and delicate. Because of the breeze, I had given her my black spring jacket to wear, and she kept the zipper undone. A small, thin necklace cut across her skin and hung just above the line of her dress, and my eyes kept moving back to that meeting of silver and fabric, no matter how hard I tried to be polite and look at the rest of the city.

  I shuffled in my seat, my knees wide and my hands clasped between them and pressed on the bench. I could hardly sit still. She leaned back and her beautiful legs slid forward, one dangling over the other. Still she looked away, something a little restless behind her half-smile.

  Finally I spoke up and asked her what she was thinking about.

  She took a good, long time before saying something like, Imagine this was the last time you’d ever see me. Imagine this was all you got.

  I pointed out that the way in which she phrased her words suggested she wasn’t going anywhere. Then I panicked: did I sound smug? Or like the nerd I used to be?

  In any case, she laughed, one hard Ha. Her family’s laugh, I would later learn. She repeated, emphasized: Imagine, John. This is your last chance before I leave. What are you going to do with it?

  I told her I’d use the opportunity to convince her to stay.

  She said, If you did, it would be a waste of time for both of us. I’m not the type that stays.

  She turned to me and said, Be more creative.

  It was a challenge.

  She said, What are you waiting for?

  Without thinking I stood up, reached out, grabbed her hand, and pulled her up. Her face rushed to me, her nose near my collarbone. I could smell the darkness of her hair and feel her nervous vibration finally dissipate into stillness next to me. It was a challenge. Then, catching even myself by surprise, I started running down the quiet Toronto side streets, pulling her along.

  —

  Hours before, the three roommates had proven nearly inseparable at their party. Lee, Nicole, Grace.

  Lee had her hair drawn back and was wearing gloves with cut-off fingertips and tight jeans. She was too interested in conversation with her friends to notice the attention she was gathering from the young men around her. The only time she broke away was to chastise people for pulling her records out of their sleeves and getting fingerprints all over the vinyl.

  Nicole, on the other hand, was acutely aware of the male gaze and enjoying shooting down their flirtations. She was the only one at the party wearing a party dress. She could have acted like the archetypal vixen, pouting her lipsticked kiss or thrusting her curvy hips, but instead she was demure and coy in a very authentic way. There was a moment between us, an instant with her eyebrow raised and me politely declining, and then there was no attention from her at all.

  And there was Grace.

  When I think back to that party, I imagine Grace standing stock-still in the middle of a hundred bodies buzzing and flitting like a sped-up film reel. Small, skinny, wide-eyed, clearly beautiful and brilliant Grace, nervously glued to the shoulders of her roommates. I had no doubts as to why men would be attracted to Lee or Nicole, but for the first time in my life, I felt something visceral in response to a woman. Here was the girl I had seen in a vision, no longer a reflection from some hallucination, but real, corporeal, and directly in front of me. What I felt for her was a need.

  —

  Grace and I ran down that dark street with our hands pressed together and the skirt of her dress flapping gently behind her. Her sandals clopped in rhythm. Three or four times I actually howled, something between a laugh of surprise and a whoop of victory. Her hand was soft and firm with good bones and no intention of letting go. She was smiling with her teeth, perfect and monstrously white under the street lights. Amber-tinted houses passed, then a lonely parking lot, then a street corner. We entered Kensington Market along a path I’d never taken before.

  We found ourselves in Bellevue Square, a cluster of small trees, a patch of unremarkable grass, and some sand that could be called a playground only by definition. The park was abandoned and waiting for us. There was a bronze statue of the King of Kensington, gentle and frozen in place, and he stood over two park benches near the entrance. In his sincerity and humble appearance I always felt something like pride and pity mixed together. He was our spectator, silent, hands held out in a gesture of friendship.

  We slowed ourselves into a walk and it was clear that we were both enjoying the heavier breathing. She looked at me and smiled hard enough to crease the corners of her eyes. Our hands were still clasped together.

  I told her that the King of Kensington welcomed her.

  She said, I’m sure he welcomes everyone.

  Not true, I said. I had a co-op placement down the street, and I have to tell you, sometimes those arms are pushing people out of Kensington, not drawing them in.

  And are they going to push me out of the market or draw me in?

  In, but they won’t be able to make you stay.

  She said, See, now you’re getting it.

  She pulled me to her, put her palms on my shoulders and pressed her right cheek against my chest. I took a deep breath and told myself, remember this moment. Wisps of her hair made my nose itchy. The collar of my jacket was bunched up on her downy neck and her hands barely poked out of the sleeves. The new muscles I had built wrapped around her and I felt a pressure in my neck disappear. I would not move until she did.

  Across the street was a row of houses, silent and sleeping. I saw us mirrored in someone’s kitchen window, my ridiculously rigid stance, the slender silhouette I held in my arms, the King of Kensington. But there was more.

  In the reflection, countless shadowed figures had surrounded us and were witnessing the whole event unfold. Dark shapes stared at us from the glass, intent on ruining this perfect moment. I hadn’t seen them since the dead end, years before. But here they were again, shuffling in that unsettled way they had before, and I was certain it had something to do with meeting Grace.

  Do you see that? I asked.

  She looked up at me and I pointed with my chin to the reflections in the windows.

  Everyone’s asleep, she said.

  In the reflection. Figures. Do you see?

  She turned back to me, confused. She had seen nothing. How could she have been on the other side of that threshold but have no knowledge of it? I pulled her close again and kept my eyes on the mass of figures shuffling toward
us in the windows. They were encircling us, draining the light from all around us.

  I see strange things, I told her. Once before, I saw this. And again tonight.

  She recited, Research suggests an association between creativity and psychological instability.

  I’m not particularly creative, I said. I’m not sure if they’re real, but twice now I’ve seen people watching me.

  The people on the other side of the reflection shuffled together and swallowed up our image until there was only an inky blackness.

  She said, Did you know Nicole and I had a bit of an argument over you? We always argue, of course. That’s what best friends do. But these days, I find myself irritated with her all the time. And your arrival in our little social circle didn’t help one bit.

  She pressed her smile against my chest.

  I’m trying to tell you something, I said.

  I heard you. Don’t worry. Crazy can spot itself from a mile away.

  I asked, And why are you crazy?

  She separated her body from mine and I wondered if I had ruined the moment. She frowned and lowered her head and cast her face in shadow. She asked, Can I trust you to keep a secret?

  I cleared my throat and said, Yes, you can.

  Then ask me again.

  It took me a moment, and then, Why are you crazy?

  She put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me close. She kissed my cheek once, lightly, and whispered, Because of the things a man did to me when I was thirteen. Because my mother and father pretended the whole thing didn’t happen. Because I have murder in my heart.

  And before my mind could catch up with her words, her whole attitude changed. She straightened, she laughed again, Ha, and she hid everything else away.

  She said, Now please stop looking at me like what I just told you defines me. Go back to being the handsome boy with the nice shoulders. And kiss me.

  I obliged her. It should have been a perfect moment, but it wasn’t.

  When I opened my eyes again, we were the only ones reflected in the window. Not yet, I thought. Tonight, she’s mine. And I chased that perfect moment until I found it in her lips. We stayed in the park until the sun threatened to break the horizon, until the clouds broke to a deep-green sky, and until the need for a long sleep couldn’t be ignored any longer.

  2007

  GRACE, THIRTEEN YEARS OLD, head freshly shaven with wisps around the hairline, raccoon eyes, nails bitten to the quick. On the washroom counter are a box cutter and a chewed pencil. She looks at me in the mirror and says “It’ll be O.K.” before she closes the door. I can hear her sucking air, wincing, on the other side. My mother drags me away before my father shoulders and breaks the door frame. Grace shouts, “Don’t touch me.”

  I woke out of the dream in our chilly basement apartment and was surprised to find myself still in my clothes, sleeping on the couch again. I dug through my jeans until I found my cell phone and called in sick to work. My bosses weren’t in the office yet so I left a message.

  Sometime later that morning, Nicole stood over me and spoke. “You’re late for work.”

  “Mental health day,” I said and immediately drifted back to sleep.

  The night before she’d been frigid and distant, which was somehow much worse than if she’d been heated and angry with me as per usual.

  The next time I awoke, the sun was filtering in through our little window near the front door. My phone was vibrating against a hard surface somewhere in the apartment. I wandered around the basement, wrapped in the blanket, until I found the phone skimming across the kitchen counter.

  “Hello,” I said.

  My eyes were bleary and wouldn’t stay open.

  “You busy?” John asked.

  There was no sign of Nicole.

  —

  I put on my pea coat and locked up. Outside the apartment, the persimmon tree had lost most of its leaves but the plump, colourful fruit still hung from its branches. There were patches of blue in the sky but the air was bitterly cold in my lungs. Winter was coming too quickly.

  I parked my car around the corner from John’s apartment and ate some mashed potatoes at Features while I waited for him. He arrived carrying his shovel and a backpack and neither of us said much until we got back to the car. He saw the pile of Grace’s belongings in the backseat, the boxes and bags of possessions that had once filled his apartment, and he said, “I hope it wasn’t too inconvenient to pack it in the car again.”

  “Didn’t unpack it in the first place,” I told him. “It’s been in my car for months, since we put it there.”

  John lightly placed the shovel on top of Grace’s things, the handle poking between the two front seats and interrupting our view of each other. I started the car and followed Bathurst Street to Highway 401 out of town, then eastward.

  “Where to first?” I asked. “Your parents’ place or mine?”

  “My parents’ house is farther,” he said, “so let’s start there.”

  The highway bordered the northern edge of the city and traffic was light. The skeletons of twenty-storey condominiums occasionally lined the sides of the 401, half-constructed promises of more sprawl. The rest of the landscape was concrete boxes, strip malls, and long lines of asphalt. We crossed the Don Valley Parkway and continued into the suburbs of Toronto.

  “Is Buddy O.K.?” I asked.

  “He’s fine,” John said. It was hard to gauge where he was looking with the shovel’s handle blocking his eyes. “Lots of food, lots of play for him. And how’s Nicole?”

  “Fine. She’s fine.”

  “And things?”

  “Same,” I said.

  He opened the glove box and started sifting through it. “Can you see a future?”

  “I don’t know. She’s impossible to please.”

  “Don’t be so hard on her,” he said, catching me off guard. “She’s a good woman, and I imagine you haven’t been easy to be around this year.”

  I grunted, noncommittal.

  “I imagine no small part of that is my fault,” he said.

  I kept both hands on the wheel and checked my mirrors.

  “Well,” he said, “for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. And for what it’s worth, I think she’s a keeper.”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  Then I heard his breath catch in his throat and he was silent for a moment.

  “What is it?” I asked. I looked over and in his hands was the CD Grace had made for my journey back to Ontario. She’d scrawled Oblivion across its surface. John had found it in the glove box.

  “It’s been some time since I’ve seen her handwriting,” he said. Without asking, he slipped the CD into the player and turned up the stereo.

  The music filled our silences. We passed through the Green Belt and its temporary respite from the endless development, and at points the trees in the surrounding valley were below the height of the road. As always, I paid special attention to the second song on the CD, and even skipped back to it at one point: I’ll find my oblivion in the place where the water meets the trees.

  “Shouldn’t we have seen it coming?” I said, and recited the line to John.

  “That isn’t fair to Grace,” he told me. “If you judged everyone by the sad art and music and film that we consume, we’d all seem suicidal. And oblivion is never what she wanted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oblivion is the annihilation of the self. Grace was looking for the opposite, a way to remove everything but the self.”

  “Didn’t that ever offend you? That we were all obstacles in her desire to be alone?”

  “Of course,” he said. “But I doubt she’d really want it once she got it.”

  “Then where is she?” I asked.

  The exits for my hometown came and went, and the highway narrowed from twelve lanes to six.

  Finally John spoke again. “Take the next exit.”

  We passed the welcome sign for Oshawa, The City That Moto-vates, and
followed the off-ramp over a gentle hill and into the city. The roads were wide and littered with franchise coffee shops, like where I grew up, but overall the city had an older, unmaintained feeling to it, grubbier storefronts and virtually no pedestrians.

  “Are you going to need gas?” John asked.

  “Eventually,” I said.

  John pointed me through the city, turn for turn, and without the regularity of a grid I soon had no idea which direction we were travelling. Eventually he pointed out a gas station that was bright and clean compared to everything around it. We pulled in.

  He climbed out of the car and walked toward the station. “Fill it up, then come inside for a moment.”

  I slouched out of the wind and kicked at my back tires as I pumped. The sun had hidden behind some clouds. My hands were stiff with the cold and my teeth were chattering by the time I finished.

  I made my way into the station, a bell chiming above the glass door as I entered. John was leaning on the counter and talking to a middle-aged Asian woman behind the cash register. Her face was puffy with fatigue, but her hair was frosted and her make-up was impeccable. She didn’t smile.

  She glanced at me and said something in what I imagined was Korean.

  “Yes, yes, I will, don’t worry,” John said to her. Then he turned to me. “This is my mom. Mom, this is Grace’s brother.”

  “Nice to meet you,” his mother said, then looked to John and broke into a long string of Korean again. The only word I understood was Grace. John responded to her in Korean, and she fired back at him. I wasn’t entirely sure if they were arguing.

  “Pleased to finally meet you,” I said, waved, and walked out.

  John returned to the car a minute or two later. He was quiet. I didn’t know where we were going so I didn’t start the engine.

  “Everything all right?” I asked.

  “As much as it ever is,” he said. “We’re just a few minutes down the road from here.”

  I drove and waited for him to speak. The shovel handle still blocked his eyes, but his mouth was pressed tightly into a thin line. Finally I said, “Care to tell me what that was all about?”