Gargoyles

by Bill Gaston

  So the men are inside. So, his gargoyles have failed. But probably they were made impotent only because their secret was made known. His mistake had been to hire out labour, a carpenter with no allegiance to the project, and who no doubt had gone right off to the nearest pub to bellow details of this oddest of jobs, that he’d been well paid to haul away every door in the house, plus plaster over all recessions and screw holes, and replace these doors with nothing. And of course it would filter out that there was nobody inside this newly doorless house but a rickety old coot alone upstairs. Plus the carpenter had that little helper come out for the garage door, that’s right, and it’s not hard to imagine them in any number of bars, laughing about it. And so goes the secret behind the doorless house. Mystery is a gargoyle’s only power.

  You’d think the mystery of no doors would be limitless.

  He should have done the damn doors himself. His mistake was to doubt that he was up to lifting doors and mixing spackle. No, his real mistake had been age.

  He stands, almost falling. Stiff at the radio for too long, his shoulder has seized and he is crooked with no balance. He loosens up by the time he reaches the closet, where he chooses the gold silk robe instead of the white terrycloth. The silk robe lacks a waist tie, and he is wearing no underwear — he is glad and a little proud to see he still has a sense of humour despite three men crossing his threshold and invading his house.

  He hears hoarse whispers — laptop and cut the fuckin’ cable. They are taking the expected things. In their mousey rustling he can hear that his gargoyles worked in part. They aren’t barging about fearlessly. Drawers are being slid out with care. Cupboard doors are silent on their hinges.

  It doesn’t sound like they will be coming upstairs at all. So he will go down to them. He will confront the men with openness, welcome them into the logic of expansion, wherein no evil can survive. The men will either run or become odd friends.

  Richard watches his mother tilt her head back to empty the beer, the universal gesture so unlike her. She rises and takes the bottle to the kitchen, depositing it under the sink in a manner that tells him she won’t have another today but will tomorrow.

  At her new fridge she rests her fingertips on its surface as if to reacquaint herself.

  “Are you hungry? Would you like something to eat?”

  “No thanks. I ate on the flight.”

  “You did?” Mock horror, an old family joke. He actually likes airplane food.

  It’s amazing she can find humour at all, given what has happened. But maybe not so amazing, maybe it says that all her years with him have been an emergency and that yesterday’s debacle was simply the emergency continuing. In fact maybe what he was witnessing here wasn’t the collapse of a monumental relationship but rather a last shard hitting the ground, and the settling dust.

  Richard can only imagine the two of them in recent years. His father growing quietly wilder, his mother concerned with security to the point of paranoia. He does see this all the time with older purchasers and perhaps it makes sense: the less life to lose, the more one wants to protect it. His mother has always been afraid of encroaching crime, the inner city crawling out. He remembers her locking car doors, even taxi doors, when she drove through a downtown, particularly its grubby perimeter. He recalls his father, in a family discussion about a next new place to live, asking if she would like him to design her “a castle with a clear view of the peasantry coming up the slope.”

  Gazing out the window he eventually registers the school of kayakers he’s been staring at. They look tentative. He thinks he can make out grey heads. His mother is slowly spooning and tinking something into a teapot. What was it like for her when the doors first came off and the blankets hung? Listening to his father during that call, Richard actually thought it a cool idea, at least a funny idea.

  “Okay, Richard, picture this,” was how his father put it, his voice pocked with the years but his confidence as robust as ever. “You’re a thief, a bad guy. You’re walking down a street, a suburban street. You’re casing it. You pass a house with no doors. Instead it has blankets hung over the door holes. You’re a thief. Is that the place you pick to rob? Would you rob that place?” The question’s rhetorical, but his father waits. All his life, Richard has had to answer the rhetorical questions too.

  “I dunno.”

  “No. You wouldn’t. Why? Because a person who uses only a blanket has no worries about safety. You’re a thief and you see this house and you imagine this unbelievable monster living in there behind those blankets. Right?”

  “I guess.”

  “Maybe it’s a guy just waiting for someone to try. You wouldn’t go in there if you were paid to. Someone who feels safe living behind a blanket is a witch or a maniac. No way you’re wandering in there to steal their stuff.”

  He had a carpenter lift the doors off, up went the blankets, and his mother had stayed for a while. It must have been a final torture for her. Apparently the blankets were authentic Navajo, flown in on this whim of his, and expensive. And then a month or so later — his mother isn’t clear on this, though his father had phoned her at her new condo to explain — he’d had the carpenter come back to remove the blankets, and the garage door too, even plastering over all the holes from screws and hinges and locks. Smooth, pristine entranceways.

  Richard knows her torture was only a side issue, a by-product. Of his art. His art was all. It always had been. In fact it was maybe her paranoia that triggered this particular project in the first place. Him trying to prove something to her. It was perverse and juvenile and it failed. Richard remembers another prank that was also probably a reaction to his mother, in that house — they called it a hacienda — his father reno’d while they lived in it, on the north California coast. He built a family room extension to include a living redwood tree that was four feet in diameter. To accommodate movement, not so much from growth but from wind, he found some kind of space-age gasket for the roof-hole, a kind of putty that adjusted itself. Grandson of Flubber, his father called it. Richard grew to love that tree, its cavernously grooved bark. It had as strong a presence as a person. But he suspected even then — and he’s more suspicious now — that the idea arose out of his mother’s loud fear of ticks in the area and the serious fever they gave you. Is it possible the tree was his father’s perverse response? That his bringing the threat inside was just another sign of his parents’ nauseating marital warp?

  “It’s reebus,” says his mother, and Richard has no idea what she means by this. Perhaps it’s the tea she’s making.

  Richard tries to make what he says next sound as little like criticism as possible and it comes out almost chatty. “So you haven’t seen him yet?”

  His mother turns from the kitchen counter. Kettle steam tumbles up beside her face. She takes Richard in, not answering, but her expression is plain. Why would she visit him, no matter what shape he was in? Why visit a man who, after fifty years of marriage, would treat her this way? Despite her pleas, despite her promise that she would leave if he actually did remove the doors — he just went ahead and removed them. Should she visit such a man?

  “I haven’t.”

  “Do you think you might want to?”

  Again no answer. He is afraid to tell her that in ten minutes he is going to leave, and visit him. He hasn’t foreseen this, that she might feel as deserving of his time as his father, though he lies wounded and deranged in a hospital.

  “Mom. Obviously he hasn’t been himself. What he did was cruel, I know, but he isn’t cruel. He hasn’t been himself.”

  “Well, maybe it’s time I wasn’t myself too.”

  He thinks for a moment that she is going to stick her tongue out.

  “Mom, I’m not going to try to talk you into it. But they say he might have had some sort of stroke. He has a head injury. And a hand injury.”

  “They’ve kept me informed.”

  “Well. Okay.”

  “He can visit me when he’s better.” />
  “Well, no, I think he’s sick, Mom. Before this.” He doesn’t want to say what he thinks, because to insult him is still to insult her.

  “He doesn’t have dementia, Richard.”

  “You don’t think?”

  “He was cruel to you too. He was. You know he was. And now, now he’s been very cruel to me.”

  Richard rises and passes her in her small kitchen, her “galley” it’s probably called in this oceanfront building. He can come to her kitchen and root around in a cupboard because she’s his mother and that’s what sons can always do. He puts his hand on a can of bing cherries. He knows she means his father mocking him, early on, for choosing to sell real estate. For selling instead of creating. Choosing, as his father put it, “to drive people around, wipe their bums, take their money.” But he never thought his father was shaming him so much as he was trying to get him to change his mind. There’s a huge difference. In any case, if shame is what it was, it didn’t stick. And it’s hard to say that to a mother, that a son could live a few thousand miles away and no longer think of his parents much, even if he’s been shamed. Perhaps especially if he’s been shamed.

  It hasn’t occurred to him in years, but when he first started selling, he did feel shame because of his father, though a different sort. It had to do with what he had learned from him. When he took clients into a backyard, shrugged at a tangle of wild shrubs and described a tight bank of cedar in its place, or pointed out a bay window or deck where there wasn’t one, and he saw the buyers’ eyes fix and understand, he was seeing the world as his father saw it and using his father’s words. He was also proving again one of capitalism’s open secrets, that fortunes are made from others’ lack of imagination. That he was straight and male seemed to add credibility: if he could see aesthetic improvements they must be essential. It happened again and again. How many times had he made a sale and gained the seller fifty thousand by insisting they first spend ten thousand to add a dropped half-deck and hot tub? Timid purchasers would step through the sliders and see not a shitty backyard neighbourhood but instead a dropped deck and tub, and a little breathlessly see themselves as wine-clinking success stories, naked and beautiful in their tub, and they could see friends and bosses seeing them too. It was all about painting a picture for those who couldn’t paint their own. Sometimes he left his black convertible in the client’s driveway, nose pointed out, and sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes he insisted that certain curtains be closed. He installed tastefully unique screen savers on his clients’ computers. Essential oils — tangerine was best — he dabbed under homely kitchen counters like perfume near an armpit. He always suggested there be no children around, and that all but one good toy be hidden. It was what his father called “the built environment.” In Richard’s business, colleagues saw it both as manipulation and as service, and no one — not even purchasers these days — saw any contradiction.

  “Richard?”

  He is standing over her in her chair. His hand rests on her shoulder and she has put a hand over his to keep it there.

  “What.”

  “He doesn’t have dementia, Richard. He’s working.”

  At the top of the stairs he’s aware of the shifting facets of himself. He’s aware of vestigial anger, a lingering bile that wants him to stomp down there and yell get the fuck out of my house you low-life bastards. Several deeply quiet breaths take care of it for now. Another part of him wants to be entertained, wants to come upon them as if casually, tell them to please do help yourselves, yes, take those electronics specifically, I no longer have a use for them, too much nudity on TV these days, so yes, please, do me the favour of carting everything away. Another part of him wants to appear from out of the shadows, gnarly, old, and clearly unafraid. And then of course a wheedling part, a part he has to breathe through as well, wants to run back to his room, lie down, cover up, hide, wait.

  But he takes a first step down. As he does so he almost falls, for in his stepping he has understood, for the first time, the genius of a staircase. Squares of wood fit perfect against squares of space — harlequin squares. Sized to fit the human stride, they ascend and descend, impossibly, at the same time. Up and down both, always and eternally, and very alive at their fulcrum of stillness.

  The cab driver has buzzed, Richard and his mother have hugged. His hand is on her doorknob but he stops because she is going to say something more. Behind her head, the cruise ship is being pushed sideways into a pier by three tugs.

  “He thinks I’m afraid but he’s the one who’s afraid.” She stares through Richard’s chest, angry. She brings her hands up and clenches both into fists. “He’s afraid, Richard. Do you know that? He’s afraid of his feelings. Do you know—” She pauses, looks up at him, appears to be registering his face at the cost of forgetting her words. She has to look away to find her train of thought. “— Do you know he could not watch the movies? Never could? Never tried again?”

  She keeps her gaze on his chest and appears satisfied and finished, so Richard must say, “What do you mean?”

  “The family movies he took. Remember? With the old camera? The home movies.”

  His father had always had the best possible video camera — early on, a Super-8 — for walking around a structure so he could see how it “moved,” as the light, shadow, and background changed as he circled it. Once in a while he pointed it at Richard and his mother. Richard has seen them all once or twice, though not in twenty, thirty years. He remembers favourite shots, his father water-skiing and falling cartoonishly for the camera. A sequence of Richard at the same cottage, ten or eleven, a chisel-wound from carving, a palm gouged and proudly displayed for the camera, the young machismo. Holding his hand up and waving, a blood bead coursing down his wrist. On film it looked black.

  “He’s never, never, been able to watch you. I saw him try once, and he looked miserable and he cried. I don’t know if he sees your life flying by or his life flying by, but he can’t stand it.” Eleanor is teary now too. “Can’t see you as a little boy. Simply can’t stand it.”

  Richard is unable to tell whether his mother is crying out of sympathy for her husband or out of the same horror, seeing time die.

  He starts down the sacred stairs, treading softly with new respect. He hasn’t heard the men for a minute but he senses they haven’t left. He doesn’t know why he feels so weak but he does, and it’s all he can to do to keep gravity from helping him too quickly to the bottom of the stairs.

  He no longer knows what he might do or say and even less what he should do or say. All plans are off, mostly because a plan will change in any case — warp, distort, join the long dissembly that is the ongoing scatter and fade of his mind. Thoughts, they rise, have their say and then fade, all thoughts are the same in this, none are more than others, even the ones that change the faces of buildings. Each thought, like this one, fading now. Into the image of a knee lifting and planting, descending a perfect set of stairs, which was once seen to be a miraculous machine. Some people were probably afraid of early stairs, like his mother had been of the telephone. Richard at three was newly afraid up on his shoulders, though as a baby he had loved it, he grabbed him hard by the hair, a pain you can hardly stand but love anyway. Yes, once he clomped down some stairs with Richie on his shoulders, the little guy squealing, almost ripping out his hair. Eleanor unable to look, afraid they would fall, speaking so sternly with her face averted, that panicked monotone of hers, she wouldn’t dare a rambunctious syllable for fear it will make him trip and tumble, Richie fast in his hair like a monkey.

  Someone stubs a toe in the dark, swears, hisses, Gimme your light.

  And so, halfway down the stairs, he says to them through a smile, “Sorry.” It is his fault they’re labouring in darkness.

  An intake of breath, a Jesus. A flashlight beam swings up, into his eyes, light’s body strikes him and he begins to fall. Taken in gravity’s certain hand he lets care itself dissemble. And, time — another flashlight beam finds him, falling
. As his hands come away, as his robe comes apart and widens, he sees what he must look like as he flies down to them.

  At the front of the hospital is a wide fountain and Richard climbs the steps beside it. The air feels cooler for the planes of water running over slabs of smooth concrete. It’s a ’60s style his father dismissed, calling it “cubism for the masses.” The moving mirrors of water make no noise at all, and Richard knows someone was proud to get it exactly so.

  The ward he’s directed to is not intensive care, as he had assumed, but geriatric.

  When the elevator doors open he can smell an earthy something under the chemical germ-killer. He passes doors but won’t look in. He hears soft moans from one room, whining babble from another, silence from most. He came with Melanie to a place like this to visit her mother, once.

  Is his father here for good? All these old folks stuffed into sterile caverns, waiting for death. His father, so aware of his environment, claiming how environment is one’s mood. He would find a hospital hellish for that alone.

  At the nurse’s station he gets pointed directions, is told a nurse is in with his father now. Richard finds the door and meets this nurse on her way out. He introduces himself to the short, young woman with a kind smile and tired but patient eyes. She is dressed mostly in what appears to be green disposable paper. She rustles when she moves.

  “I had to dress his thumb again. It keeps bleeding because he won’t stop wiggling it.” She could be speaking about a child — isn’t he naughty. “We might need to put in a stitch.”

  Richard needs her to back up into bigger things.

  “He’s had a stroke?”

  “Well, now, the tests show nothing so far, but he’s uncommunicative.”

  “Always was.” Richard smiles to tell her it’s a joke.

  “He had a blow to the head. So we don’t know if it’s that, or it might be the shock, from the attack. He’s, how old is he? Seventy-five?”

  “Seventy-nine. He was definitely attacked? The doctor I spoke to says he may have fallen.”