Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  It was a lonely building though. The rest of the world still hadn’t caught up.

  I stood in the bustle of the spaceport and looked up the four-storey cylinder above me. I stood in the middle of a vision of a better world that hadn’t quite made it. The longer I looked, the more I saw how the vision was breaking down. The Plexiglas tube enclosing the moving sidewalk spanning the second and third floors was hazy with scratches. There was a fuzzy white square on the railing to the central courtyard where someone had removed a sticker but left behind some adhesive. A dark smear of bubble gum blemished the otherwise-gleaming floor. There were subtle signs of decay everywhere I looked. It was as though the building tried to outrun the present but got caught in a dark alley.

  I didn’t see Donna or Father or Saliva on the other side of Customs. They must have found their driver and headed into the city. I couldn’t find my driver, so I hailed a cab.

  The ride to the hotel was a solitary affair. The driver smoked the whole way and mumbled at the traffic in French. At the hotel, the gentleman at the front desk would not speak English. He just shrugged at me until I put my passport on the counter, then he checked me in without a word. My room was a small, street-side affair with a Romeo and Juliet balcony overlooking the Opera House. I didn’t turn on the lights. I stood looking out at the golden angel statues and listening to the foreign sounds drifting up from the street. There was the constant whoosh of traffic punctuated by the occasional sonar blast of a horn that echoed off the surrounding buildings. The voices coming from the sidewalk were smoky and exotic. It seemed everyone had someone to talk to, to stroll hand in hand with through the streets of Paris. They all seemed to have something they could say to bring smiles to their companions’ faces.

  In the dark, I picked up the phone and demanded room service deliver a bottle of San Pellegrino Chinotto, three lemons, a Cohiba Robusto and Taku Wild smoked salmon, raw buttermilk cream cheese and salted capers on a bagel. At that time in my life, obscure room service orders became a proxy of my loneliness.

  Half an hour later there was a knock at the door. I opened it to find a tray on the floor with a small bottle of Perrier, two lime wedges, a packet of Marlboros and some stinking cheese and a baguette. I brought the tray in and sat on the bed with it beside me. I drank straight from the bottle, threw the limes across the room into the bathroom sink, lit a cigarette and cried while contemplating the cheese.

  I gagged on the smoke. My mind sparked with the cigarette’s crackle to the last time I smoked, fifteen years old and the taste of marshmallows on Paige Green’s lips when we kissed by the campfire. I remembered the solitary light over the empty, black highway. The only thing between the stars and me was a buzzing power line. Standing with Leonard in the vast darkness, I never felt smaller until that night in Paris. I was small again but this time in a darkened hotel room in the middle of the City of Lights, surrounded by millions of people, on the eve of my greatest show ever, crying over blue cheese—or perhaps it was the baguette that made me weep.

  The cigarette butt hissed when I pushed it into the stinking chunk of cheese.

  My cellphone rang.

  “Richard.” It was Leonard. “I’m so glad I caught you. Where are you?”

  “Paris. Alone.”

  “Is everything all right? You sound…”

  “It’s good to hear your voice, Leonard.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “All of a sudden, I feel everything.” I snorked back a gloob of snot that had somehow made its way onto my lip.

  “What do you mean? Are you drunk?”

  “No.” I couldn’t keep back a sob. “I can’t… I can’t eat the blue cheese.”

  “That’s okay, buddy, few people can.”

  “No, listen. I can’t eat the baguette either.” There was silence on the other end, which I took as a prompt to continue. Maybe I haven’t explained it all that well, I thought. “I probably shouldn’t even be drinking this water. I’ll bloat an inch and the $80,000 pants won’t fit. I asked for San Pellegrino but they brought Perrier.” I needed to get it across. I needed Leonard’s help, not Donna’s, I always had. “I have been shitting myself for a week. I needed to, no, I wanted to, so I made it happen.”

  “Richard, slow down. You aren’t making sense. Start at the beginning.”

  “It started after the orgy, the one in Tokyo, I think. A few years ago, anyway, I had just seen my butt hole and my life didn’t make sense. I didn’t know my own butt hole and I got thinking that I didn’t know anything. My God, Leonard. I realize I have never felt anything. I never felt love for anyone. I never felt the friendship from you. I always knew we were friends but now I can feel it. I never felt anything for my family but detachment. I never felt pleasure in my success. I’ve never wanted anything. It all happened and over the past few years, I’ve figured out that I can change things. I’ve always lived on the outside, outside my skin. Then, all of a sudden, tonight, I feel everything. The whole past twenty-two years is here tonight. All that stuff that has built up on the outside, now I can feel it. The past twenty-two years, all at once, and it’s wonderful and terrifying and sad.”

  Native Americans would retreat into the wilds and, for weeks, they would starve themselves into visions. Fatigue and physical stress limits the brain’s metacognitive abilities resulting in a breakdown of the ability to discriminate between internal and external stimuli. People rescued from the desert report lucid hallucinations, waking dreams so vivid that they swear they were guided through the dunes by Jesus or Obi-Wan Kenobi. Dehydration causes fluids and electrolytes to be depleted in cells and, in the brain, this is detrimental to intercellular communication. That’s when the mind goes sideways.

  I know this now.

  My psychologist said I had Malignant Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

  I had no clue what that meant, but that night in Paris, I understood.

  “Richard, that’s great,” Leonard said.

  I failed to see how.

  “You have to come see me,” Leonard said. “We have to talk.”

  “I can’t,” I said. “I have to go to Heaven.”

  “Shit, no,” Leonard said. “Richard, don’t do anything. Don’t hang up. Talk to me. You aren’t supposed to die until the year 2000.”

  There was a moment in which I thought I heard Leonard reprimand himself.

  “What?” I asked, sobered.

  “Nothing,” Leonard said, unconvincingly. “Remember what we talked about? When you asked me to figure out when you were going to die? Well, that’s why I’m calling. I didn’t want to talk about it on the phone but I figure you’ll die early morning, New Year’s Day, in the year 2000. It’s not a science though, remember? You said that.”

  When we were kids, Leonard would push me into the street and then pull me out of traffic. Each time, he claimed he saved my life and that, by our Ninja Code, I had to be his slave until either I died or saved his life.

  It felt like the old days again.

  “Thanks, I owe you,” I said and hung up.

  The phone began to ring again.

  I wiped my eyes.

  It was September 28, 1998. I would die on January 1, 2000.

  I could feel now.

  I felt like I had just awoken from a twenty-two year sleep.

  I could feel.

  It was like suddenly being able to see after living blind since birth. There was a glorious confusion of colour. The things I had pictured in my mind, through touch alone, I could now see.

  The phone stopped ringing.

  I had wants. I had desires.

  I had just over a year to live a lifetime.

  I was a baby in an adult body.

  I felt the instant crush of time. I had just over a year to live.

  I felt panic race through me. I embraced it bravely.

  I felt the overwhelming immediacy of each second. I had just over a year.

  The phone beeped; there was a voicemail.

  I felt an i
nvigorating rush of fear mixed sweetly with anticipation. In just over a year I would die.

  Nothing adds value to time like the lack of it.

  Everything I did until then would matter.

  CHAPTER 13

  Minutes to Midnight

  Slender fingers with cinnamon-heart nails frantically undressed me. My fingers joined in the disrobing. My heart pounded and my hands trembled, flailing from one button to the next. A bead of sweat trickled a path from my hairline, tickled through the film of sweat coating the back of my neck and slid down the canyon of my spine. My arrector pili contracted, causing fine blond hairs to stand at attention. I panted with animal focus.

  That other set of fingers, the ones with nails lacquered in glossy red, those belonged to a woman named Mitsi. Mitsi’s lips parted and her pink button tongue slid from the centre of her mouth to the corner, leaving a salival sheen on the plump flesh in its wake. She worked the buttons of my pants. My shirt piled to the floor.

  “Come on,” I urged Mitsi under my breath.

  The pants dropped, underwear too. Mitsi had her hands at my ankles, pinning the material to the concrete as I stumbled out of them.

  A midget walked past.

  Scratch that. I think that should be little person, not midget.

  He looked familiar, though I couldn’t guess from where.

  The little person didn’t seem to notice fumbling Mitsi or naked me. Not that he should, not with so many bodies crammed into this space, so many bodies in so many states of undress.

  “Step in,” Mitsi’s tone conveyed she had no patience for midget-ogling.

  Scratch that. Little person.

  Mitsi was on a mission. She pulled up my new pair of pants. As they slid into place, the space my body filled displaced a puff of air. An acrid, musty smell wafted up, the scent of every man who wore them previously. The pants had travelled the world so regularly, so thoroughly, that it was unlikely they had ever been cleaned.

  Mitsi sighed and slid a hand between the fabric and my skin. She made adjustments to everything before zipping up.

  “No underwear,” she said. “Doug says it makes his clothes look like shit.”

  “The underwear’s not to blame,” I said.

  Mitsi smiled and I buttoned up a fresh Deacon Grande shirt. Since no designers are named Doug Melynachuk, Doug wanted everyone to call him Deacon Grande. If any reporter asked, he was from some obscure European place. I didn’t remember which one but it caused Doug to spit when he pronounced it. Whatever we did, we were not to mention Estevan, Saskatchewan and under no circumstance was the word Canada allowed to broach our lips.

  Doug was a douche.

  Mitsi, on the other hand, was marvellous. Mitsi was a dresser. That was her job. Between catwalk appearances, there were as few as twenty seconds before we had to be changed and back in front of the cameras, which included first-looks from the director and final touches from Doug.

  Doug was a monster.

  Mitsi was a queen. She was great at her job. She didn’t go to school for it; in fact, nobody knew where she came from. Given her name and comfort in the arena, I would have said she was in porn or was a stripper.

  Scratch that. Adult film industry or exotic dancer.

  Either way, I was glad she had our backs.

  “You’re good to go,” she patted my bum and turned to disrobe Stella Supernova who had pulled up in front of a mirror with the elegance of a Mercedes at a racetrack pit stop.

  “Richard, you look gorgeous,” Stella said with a glance. “I saw you in the Heavenly Show last year and you looked…” She paused for a moment to construct an expression. When she looked sufficiently like she had smelled something long dead in a tropical climate, she continued, “…sickly. This is much more civilized.”

  “Trench, now,” Doug barked from nearby.

  “Oh, that man is so much more charming when he doesn’t speak,” Stella said. “Go now. Find me after the show. We’ll talk then.” Stella held her arms out to either side, slightly bent at the elbows. Mitsi draped a shimmering shawl across the crook created by each arm.

  It was obvious that Doug was new. He fidgeted with his nose like he was on blow. He tugged and adjusted himself, seemingly trying to tailor his body to accommodate his bloated sense of self-importance. This was his baby, a fifteen-minute spot in the New York Millennium Fashion Show. Respectable designers like Pucci, Alaïa, they’d gone with Fashion Week. They were elsewhere tonight, observing the millennium at some fine party where the music was agreeable and the company better attired.

  Doug’s show was a mini event, in a tent half the size of Fashion Week’s that sat on the squishy grass of Bryant Park like a flaccid reminder of better times. They hadn’t even bothered to block off the streets around the park for this one. Everyone was over at Times Square. That’s where the main event was.

  Even still, the space we did have was packed. The flashbulbs were furious and the crowd was famous. As much as Doug was a poseur, the show wasn’t half bad. Doug’s show was called “Strippers, Gimps and Midgets.”

  Doug adjusted my clothes, and then my body parts under them, with much less finesse than Mitsi, before shoving me toward the stage. I pushed through the curtains and started the walk through a sexualized potpourri of bodies.

  The atmosphere was a turn-of-the-century burlesque show. The runway was dim and what little light was available had the flickering quality of torches and the sick glow of sodium vapour lamps. It was meant to mimic the clandestine underground feel of illicit spaces and naughty places that early socialites and railway barons would have visited to partake in gallons of hooch and to get their kit off amidst the shadowed folds of the silken tapestries. It felt like a fitting send-off for the year 1999, for, in the last sweep of the second hand, it was believed that we would lose a hundred years to some computer glitch. The television news shows were in a frenzy that we would all be thrown back to this: the only electric lights in the house were flashbulbs and the strippers, gimps and midgets Doug put together to showcase his clothes thrived in the writhing shadows.

  I had to hand it to him, he had tapped into something carnal with his freak show of body oddities, a smattering of sex-industry vixens, and a healthy portion of the sickest body idols available from Chester and the Agency. On top of it, cast the incorrigible Stella Supernova in the role of the Mistress of the House and there was magic in that small, second tier showing perched precariously on the cusp of the most dangerous New Year’s Eve of all time.

  There was a flashbulb lightning strike.

  I scoped Donna in front of me on the catwalk. She was such a trooper, she didn’t even limp. I couldn’t even tell that, only two weeks ago, she had the second toe on each foot shortened so she could sign a contract with Oxygen shoes. Donna had suffered from a condition called Morton’s toe, where the second toe was, tragically, a bit longer than the first. It’s not actually a condition, it’s just simple human variation. Regardless, Oxygen did not accommodate that type of person, so Donna changed to accommodate that type of shoe.

  I scoped the midget I had seen backstage. He was wearing a tiny gown, the hem short at the back and long at the front. The back showed supports, garter and just a hint of panties. The front was long so that when he broke into his contractual cancan dance and lifted the garment above his knees, the hem seemed to even out.

  I worked my way past the apogee of my orbit. As I rounded the end of the runway, I spied Father, little more than a glimmer of light reflecting from his teeth, glistening from the wing. His eyes were watery pinpoints, fixated on the billowing folds of the curtains where Donna had just left the stage.

  The midget followed.

  I followed.

  The noise backstage was as cacophonous as the front though less coherent. My chest clenched and grabbed my breath, as it always did, from the cigarette smoke, the chemical sweetness of hairspray, the mingling of one hundred kinds of wet, musky, salty body odours. The assault was not limited to sound and smell. My
eyes took in a clamorous mix of body parts, naked and clothed, all sliding past each other; arms passed through crowds of breasts that brushed past legs that slipped by shoulders. All of us created a super-organic creature that spat a steady stream of models out of its orifice.

  “Gotta light?” Someone croaked.

  It was the cancan midget. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth.

  I opened my mouth to tell him I didn’t smoke but Mitsi erupted from the crowd, grabbed my arm with both her hands and, the next thing I knew, I was standing next to Doug, his arm over my shoulder.

  Smile. Camera flash.

  Doug’s arm around my hip. Smile.

  A topless model passed between the cameraman and us.

  Still smile. Camera flash.

  Doug talked to a reporter. I stood there looking pretty. It was my job.

  Another flash.

  I hadn’t smiled. There was a scream. It hadn’t been a camera flash.

  “Fuck,” Doug yelled, excused himself to the reporter and stormed off. “Didn’t you listen? No smoking around the hair designer. Hairspray is flammable. Let me see your hands. Shit, they’re blistering already…” His voice was overtaken by the noise of the crowd and the steady rhythm from the front of the house.

  The reporter’s face fell momentarily before she turned her microphone to me. I couldn’t help but notice how well manicured her hands were.

  “Richard Trench,” she said.

  “Yes,” I agreed.

  She was right, after all.

  “In 1998, your face was everywhere. Then you all but disappeared after Ozone’s Heavenly Show. It’s great to see you in action again but, I wonder, where did you disappear to?”