The Most Precious Substance on Earth

by Shashi Bhat

  I used to think I was an exceptional friend. I thought I noticed everything. I thought it was enough to notice.

  Before she left me at the library, I’d had one final look. The last time I saw her. Clomping boots with the untied lace. Chewed lips and cuticles. The unwashed hair of a girl who smokes cigarettes belonging to other people. And that familiar action: arms reaching behind her and holding the bottom of her backpack to alleviate the weight.

  Do you want to talk about it? I could have asked—not just then, but so many other times in the years I knew her.

  What else do you want to tell me?

  What else have we not told each other?

  PART

  TWO

  Mute

  EVERYONE IS DRUNK. It’s like I’m in a John Cheever story—or maybe I only think that because he’s all over the syllabus of our Character Development class, where the professor reads stories aloud to us with theatrical enunciation and tells us about the old days when he used to drink with Cheever.

  A month and a half ago, I moved to Baltimore to attend a graduate creative writing program. Baltimore is a port city, but not like Halifax, where you always remember you’re near the ocean. In Baltimore, you always remember you’re in the setting of The Wire. My classmates—there are nine of them—seem overwhelmingly American. They’re all white and have New York or Southern accents, and their voices boom over my head. Was I this quiet in Canada? I can’t remember. In bars, my classmates always know what drinks to order and are decisive about where to sit or stand. When they ask why I decided to apply here, I vaguely mention better funding, though really, I’m not sure: Why hadn’t I just stayed in Halifax?

  We are at a department party at the faculty club. Rooms open into rooms. Each room has a name—The Nobel Room, The Milton Eisenhower Room, etc.—and crown moulding on high ceilings, and tall windows with pleated brocade curtains. All of the employees are racial minorities, which makes me question which side of the room I should be on. The waitstaff carry silver trays covered with bits of puff pastry and skewered scallops topped with pea sprouts and ginger miso cream. There’s an open bar.

  Five of my classmates are discussing their midterm teaching evaluations.

  “I read mine after like half a bottle of limoncello,” says Natasha, whose lipstick has left a flawless red half-lip on her wine glass.

  “Mine were excellent overall,” says Murphy, who is wearing a bowtie and speaking in a maybe-ironic voice. “I plan to address the constructive criticism over the next few weeks.”

  Most of them received comments calling them “inspiring” and complimenting their clothing or facial features. I can only remember the two bad ones I received, one of which said, “Though the course has the word ‘creative’ in its title, the instructor does not seem like a creative person.” And the other: “Spoke a lot but said little.”

  An alum approaches, wearing a suit the colour of buttercream, an open collar, and wingtip shoes. He’s a former literary wunderkind who keeps attending department parties even though he graduated in the nineties. In profile, his hair is a tilde—a perfect sideways wave. The two older female secretaries fawn over him as he pushes his hair back from his forehead, and his eyes flit past them for someone more important to talk to. I’ve developed a guilty, nebulous crush on him and wish I wasn’t clutching a crumpled napkin full of empty skewers. His critically acclaimed first novel, published a decade ago, concerns a fictional protagonist who is also a writer and the same age as him and an eternal bachelor who struggles with commitment and the meaning of literature while living and socializing with three friends in New York. It’s basically Sex and the City with men. Before I fall asleep I sometimes fantasize about lying to him and pretending that I, too, once lived the ennui-filled life of an editorial assistant in New York City, to woo him by way of our commonalities. This is what someone on a WB show would do.

  Along with the alum comes Professor Coates, an older, imposing man who is known to scream at people in his office when the door is closed. “A delight to see all of you.” He raises his glass. He begins with small talk—“How are you all finding it here?”—and then segues into a discussion of the program’s long history and expounds on its notable alumni. “This fellow here,” he says, thumping the alum’s shoulder, “was on a thirty-under-thirty list not too long ago, as I recall.” My guess is that the list came out in 1995. Still, I feel awed to have ascended into this world where writers are real people you know—and I’m ashamed of having not yet published anything. As I’m fretting about this, I sort of lose track of the conversation. And then I’m studying the black cocktail dresses of the other female guests and realizing that I’m dressed quite wrong, in a cotton floral A-line skirt with a hem that lands below my knees. Earlier, when I came out of a washroom stall, one of the secretaries said, “Oh, Nina, I knew it was you from the shoes.”

  Professor Coates and the alum are discussing a short story, but I can’t tell which one. My classmates are all throwing in astute observations about the story’s restraint of language and the unmatchable elegance of its ending. The alum makes a pun involving the story’s title that causes Professor Coates to laugh so hard he needs to hold his whiskey with both hands. By now, most of the class has gathered around, along with three faculty members. The air is filled with rhetoric.

  “You—” says Professor Coates. He’s pointing at me. This is the first time he has spoken to me at all. Everyone turns in my direction, smiles fading at his sudden shift in tone. “Why don’t you contribute something to the conversation?”

  In the background, dishes clink. I say nothing. I’ve gone mute.

  * * *

  After I was accepted to the program, my peer advisor, a second-year student, sent me a lengthy, stream-of-consciousness email in which he warned me that in Baltimore there were more rats than people. He forwarded a link to an interactive map of health violations at local restaurants, and it was dotted with rodent icons. In one section of the city, he said, a garbage truck had sunken into the street, swarmed by rats that had eaten through the ground below.

  Don’t live below 25th Street, he advised. And never take public transit. I wasn’t sure what to make of this—I couldn’t afford a car, so how would I get around? Always lock your doors, he said. This is Bodymore, Murderland. The city that bleeds. This was counter to what I’d read on a tourism website, which had called it “The City That Reads.” I suppose this was their equivalent of the Discover Halifax website prominently featuring Celtic fiddlers, when everyone I knew listened to alternative rock.

  When I first moved here, following the portentous wisdom of my peer advisor, I read the crime reports and thought about getting a gun. There was a rumour that if you raised your arms above your head on campus at night, sensors would alert campus police. My apartment is beyond the reach of their protection. Each night a man who lives down the street stands on his porch and yells, “Where you going?” at anyone who passes. Once, when I ducked my head without answering, he followed me for several metres. “Hey! Where you going? Will you clean my house?” he shouted at my back, and I could tell from the rising volume that he was getting closer. My right hand clutched my apartment key inside my pocket, ready to use it as a weapon, and when I got to my building I walked past the door and around the block, back in the direction of campus, until I was sure he was gone. After that, I began using my building’s rear entrance to avoid walking past his house.

  Every day I encounter a new insect in my apartment, each leggier or wilier than the last. The cockroaches travel in packs, like moving rugs. One morning I found a long house centipede curled in the water glass on my nightstand.

  To calm myself I read Halifax newspapers online, though the familiar pictures of columnists make my heart ache. I unpack a box and find a rape whistle with my old university’s logo on it. I blow into it gently, and the sound is bird-like, unusually clear.

  But in some ways, my peer advisor�
��s impressions seem to conflict with what I actually see: A robust set of libraries and museums in stately, sky-lit buildings. Discount shops with chatty owners offering bags of irregularly shaped cleaning sponges for a dollar each. Pies that are far more delicious than any pie I’ve had in Canada. Laughing people gathering on porches painted lime green or cherry red, seeming so extraordinarily happy that walking past them stirs my sadness.

  It turns out my peer advisor’s list of safe neighbourhoods is an exact match with the list of gentrified areas I discover on a website describing the city’s complicated history of segregated housing. It strikes me that much of what he told me was racism, unadulterated and covert, and from then on, I can’t trust what is real about the city and what isn’t.

  This is Baltimore.

  * * *

  In undergrad, I stayed in residence even though my parents lived ten minutes from campus. I had a crowd of friends. We met in a first-year orientation meeting, where a team of university employees told us about a girl who left her room door unlocked and woke up to find a man sitting in the chair next to her bed, watching her. Then the orientation leaders handed out the rape whistles and told us to protect ourselves. With the bright objects dangling from our necks, we asked, “When exactly are we supposed to blow the whistle?”

  These girls and I shared a bank of showers and ate our meals together, but we did not know one another’s origin stories, aside from the basics: Most were from out of province. One had been her high school’s valedictorian. Another was a junior golf champion. I had only a vague sense of relative wealth because everyone wore sweatpants, the great equalizer. Besides, there was so much happening in the present—who had time to talk about the past? These were harmless friendships, easy ones, unlike the quicksand friendships of childhood. With this group, I blended in, aside from every now and then, when I would tell a joke and someone would turn to me and say, “You’re so funny, Nina!” I would file that moment away to replay to myself later, and then I’d vanish contentedly into the group again. After a while, we said and did things that were funny only to us, like how we referred to our first-year residence assistant, Martin Case, as “Justin Case,” or how whenever we saw a long line on campus we would go stand in it and there was always free food at the other end, except for that one time when the line was for a blood drive. We pulled all-nighters and ate donairs and slept through morning classes and still got good grades without Adderall. When we went out, it was to pubs where we knew everyone, and the whole crowd was singing along to “Barrett’s Privateers.”

  * * *

  On the Friday after the reception, I get a call from a guy in my program. Eli writes fiction but has the expressiveness of a spoken word poet. He says a bunch of people are going to a bar called The Charles. He tells me I should come along and, since we live in the same neighbourhood, we should share a cab.

  “Unless you already have plans?” he asks.

  I was in the process of spreading Borax on the floor because I’d read that it is abrasive to a cockroach’s exoskeleton. “Just a night in reading Faulkner.”

  “I’ll call you when we leave here,” he says.

  I put heels on first, to stay high above the roaches. I purchased the shoes the day after the department party and now lurch around my closet seeking a dress. A YouTube search yields a makeup tutorial.

  Once I’m ready, I start watching one of the Fraggle Rock DVDs I rented from Video Americain, a Baltimore institution with a hip French name. The store has 30,000 films crammed into the basement of a Charles Village row house, with sections organized by country and director, and employees who can school you on the early works of John Waters and slip you a bootleg copy of his short film Hag in a Black Leather Jacket. There’s a Jim Henson exhibit on next week at the Smithsonian, and Fraggle Rock was a favourite of mine as a child. I owned a full set of the Happy Meal toys, each with a Fraggle sitting in a car shaped like a vegetable.

  The most captivating character on the show is Marjory the Trash Heap, a wise woman literally made out of garbage. Now and then a Fraggle will sneak through the Gorgs’ Garden to request her advice. She is a trash oracle. In answer to the Fraggle’s question, Marjory and her two nasty rat disciples will sing a nonsensical song, and she’ll bop her garbage-pile body around, snapping her banana-peel fingers while one rat accompanies her on the harmonica. How many roaches are in that heap?

  I watch an episode, but Eli doesn’t call. It’s nearing 10:30. How late do people go out in Baltimore? Probably later than in Halifax, I figure, remembering nights I stumbled back to my dorm over cobbled potholes after shared and spilled pitchers of Rickard’s Red, an arm thrown over a friend’s shoulder, my hair frizzing in the inevitable fog. I watch another two episodes of Fraggle Rock. Then it’s 11:30. I pace the carpet, and my heels leave a blotchy trail of Borax. I think about texting Eli but don’t. Maybe he did this on purpose, I think. Or, more likely—and more embarrassingly—he just forgot.

  At midnight I wash off my makeup and go to sleep. In the morning, my phone has one notification: a Facebook message. Anxiety blooms and swirls in my chest, but it’s from an older aunty, a friend of the family, who became a social media expert after moving into a home last summer.

  My birthday was lovely with all the loving notes, the little ones and my boys taking me to breakfast and bringing an orchid and carnations. Your mom phoned from Halifax. In short, it really was a nice day except that one of the women I have become friendly with here died suddenly. Hope your day was good, too.

  It’s like I’ve been sucked into this Nabokov story we have to teach in our intro classes, where all that happens is that this kid has a really shitty day. He goes to a party at another kid’s family’s estate and joins in a game of hide-and-seek, but while he is hiding between a wardrobe and a Dutch stove the others forget about him and abandon the game to picnic on bilberry tarts. At the end of the story he imagines faking his own suicide to make everybody else feel bad. I read one of the lines aloud in class—“One could hear a clock hoarsely ticktocking and that sound reminded one of various dull and sad things”—and then started laughing insanely. The students laughed along with me in this magical millisecond of connection. I felt so grateful that they got the joke.

  * * *

  The next Saturday I take the Amtrak to D.C. to visit the Smithsonian’s Jim Henson exhibit. I join a tour group that stands in a semicircle facing Kermit the Frog in a glass box. His green felt body looks inanimate and small surrounded by all the humans. The woman giving the tour refers to Kermit as “Henson’s alter ego.”

  While she speaks, a scene from Fraggle Rock keeps flashing in my head: Boober, who is the Fraggle I most identify with—he’s always worried and for some reason doesn’t have eyeballs—approaches the trash heap and asks, “Please, Ma’am, can you make me brave and daring and bold?”

  After a pause and some banter, Marjory rises from the garbage heap—or rather, the garbage rises and forms Marjory—and she puffs up like an inflatable couch to deliver her pronouncement: “Always wear a hat.” She and the rats sing away any follow-up questions.

  The tour group rounds a corner into a hall of more Muppets in glass cases. The guide says that, for her, entering this room feels like coming home: “They taught us how to count, how to read…”

  I hear somebody behind me ask, “So, who’s your favourite Muppet?”

  When I turn, I see this big, bearded guy grinning down at me. My first thought is that he’s so massive he could puppeteer Mr. Snuffleupagus. He’s twinkle-eyed and fidgety in a Georgetown sweatshirt, the sleeves pulled down over his hands. I wonder how long he’s been standing there, asking women this question.

  “Sweetums,” I say.

  “Which one is that?”

  “He’s the giant ogre. In his first appearance he tried to eat Kermit, but later he just sang Wagnerian operas.” I learned this minutes ago from a placard on the wall.

 
“Mine is Sam the Eagle, for his integrity.” The guy’s beard is dense and black with fine wiry hairs; I’m reminded of the Maritimes and the whittled wooden fishermen they sell at Peggy’s Cove.

  After the tour, we continue to wander together through the exhibit, and he occasionally bumps my elbow with his, pointing out a new Muppet drawing or fact. I like that this physical contact feels uncalculated, just a part of his personality. As we head to the gift shop, I keep repeating in my head the name Charles Etienne de St. Valery Bon, which I memorized for a bizarrely specific weekly quiz on Absalom, Absalom! The inner chanting has a calming effect. The big guy, whose name turns out to be James, reads aloud from a children’s book about an anthropomorphized stegosaurus, while I peer at turquoise and agate jewellery. We flip through all the art posters in the rack, their plastic frames clacking together one by one.

  “I hate to leave you, but I have to get back to work,” James says, motioning towards the door with his head because he has a souvenir magnet in each of his hands.

  “Oh. It’s Saturday.” I imagine the next hour: taking the train home, turning the lights on in my apartment, watching the cockroaches scatter.

  “I would love to make you baked ziti sometime.”

  “Okay, sure,” I say in an atonal stutter, but inside I am swooning—baked ziti. “I’m a vegetarian, though, and I live in Baltimore.”

  “No problem. Do you have an eight-inch square baking dish?”

  He walks me to Union Station and says goodbye in a Kermit the Frog voice. On the train ride home I start mentally preparing a tiramisu. Out the window, Baltimore is as youthful as a college town. Everywhere, late-afternoon sunlight falling on red brick. I see a rat, but for once it is running in the opposite direction.