by Russel Smith
“Why? Is she a biter? I’ve known some biters. She’s younger?”
My sister was older, I said, and wasn’t much of a biter. Then, on impulse, I opened my mouth to display my wobbly front tooth.
“Ooh,” said the boy. “May I?” He touched at my tooth with a fingertip. “Yes, that will come out directly.” He made a strange sort of smile, exposing his own front teeth. “I still have mine. See? But yours will grow back. They do grow back.” He glanced down, as if searching for something he seemed to find missing in the grass, then looked at me to confide, “There’s a skeleton inside you, you know. A complete and utter skeleton. Beneath your skin.”
This news I received with some confusion for I connected skeletons with ghouls and graveyards and scary cartoons—and I couldn’t be sure if this kid was telling the truth or if he was merely, and this impression had been building over the past few minutes, indulging in some form of slapdash free association. What kind of person would tell you there was a skeleton inside you?
Giving the merry-go-round a last shove, I said I was going back to my sister’s birthday party but he could come if he wanted.
“A party?” He winced. “Maybe. But I don’t like ice cubes. I don’t want to taste them and I don’t like the sound they make in my teeth. One second—” He put a hand on my elbow, conspiratorial again, and evaluated me. “You know, you could grow a moustache if you wanted. And no one would recognize you. Except French people. There’s a seagull!”
I looked up—only to realize he was pointing at the shadow of a fleeting bird, a shape that was presently ribboning across the grass and puddles of the playground, gliding past the curb, and unfolding into South Street … And so this boy, this unexpected child, this curious young party, this was Cyrus Mair. There was something incomprehensible and quivery and completely recognizable about him. He reminded me of the imaginary kid, a character in my own private mythology, who ran along the side of the highway, keeping pace with my family’s car on road trips—a fantastically swift boy who hurdled over cement culverts, ducked under fallen trees, never tripping, never tiring—and as I watched Cyrus Mair in the playground of the Halifax School for the Blind chasing a seagull’s shadow, on the way to the rest of his life, pushing his fingers along the posts of the wrought-iron fence, trying to touch every one, now going back to tap the post he missed, I thought him reckless and exuberant and smart. He was fabulously weird. I wanted to know what he knew. I couldn’t really guess what he was dreaming up in his mind, nor what games and inventions occurred there, but I liked him. His world was in a constant state of becoming, and this Friday afternoon was the beginning of a fascination that would last a sort of lifetime for me because, even if I didn’t know what I wanted, like everyone else I would not be able to stop paying attention to the creature known as Cyrus Mair.
“Do you like jokes? I like jokes. Did you hear about Napoleon?” Cyrus turned to me. “Josephine sucked his bone apart!” It was probably the single worst joke I’d ever heard. His jokes made no sense at all. I didn’t get them. I didn’t get them the third time he told them. But each joke went over huge with Cyrus Mair, his giggles bursting into the air like birdsong. I did not share his high spirits at first. But, at a later juncture, around the time we were sneaking into my backyard and towards my family’s basement door, the phrase “Coat-Cheese” arose in our conversation, an example of the usage for which might be “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese, you’re a fat Coat-Cheese,” or “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese sitting in a pie,” or even “Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese stuck inside a toilet seat, Coat-Cheese, Coat-Cheese pooping in your eye,” all of which formulations seemed astonishingly relevant to our developing understanding of the afternoon, and by the time we entered my house to tiptoe up the basement stairs—Cyrus bending over with laughter and slapping his thigh to keep himself from falling—we were sweaty and gleeful and manic with intrigue. The birthday party was in full fling: a dozen teenybopper girls hopped up on peppermint cupcakes and cream soda. Cyrus was happily assimilating all the details of the party—the table of wrapped gifts, helium balloons bouncing against the ceiling, the girls in their swishy party dresses—assimilating these details but perhaps not processing them. “There’s a lot going on in this house,” he said. “I think we need a drink.” He moved instinctively to the living room and my parents’ liquor cabinet where he fetched out a bottle of Rose’s Lime Juice Cordial. “Ah.” He twisted off the cap. “The good stuff.” He brought the bottle to his lips and glugged off several swallows. “That’s the spot,” he said, tightly shutting his eyes. “I feel a bit drunk already.”
I asked what he was going to do when he had the last ingredient for the potion, the drop of human blood.
“Good question,” he said, passing me the lime cordial. “My plan is—wait. Before we go further, I need to know something.” He took a step back and put his hands on my shoulders, much in the manner of a captain steadying the nerves of a young recruit. “Are you a Crab or an Anti-Crab?”
I asked what he meant.
“Well,” said Cyrus, puzzled. “It’s quite simple, really. I’m an officer in the Anti-Crab Army. Like my father. And the world is either Crab or Anti-Crab. Which are you?” He peered into my eyes. “I think you’re Anti-Crab.”
Swigging from the bottle of lime cordial, I made a few nods to show I was inclined to agree.
“Good. That’s all you have to tell them. That and your serial number. Remember that when you’re being tortured.”
“When I’m being tortured?”
“Exactly!” said Cyrus, making a move to race into the party, his pajama top coming loose from his belt and billowing like a sail.
The cake was being served—a special in-house recipe my oldest sister, Carolyn, made for each of us on our birthdays—a vanilla sponge cake embedded with store-bought candies and coated with milk chocolate icing. Carolyn was handing out plates of this delicacy to the last guests when, seeing Cyrus and me, she sliced off two more pieces.
“Ah,” said Cyrus. “Chocolate Thermidor.” He swiveled to me. “But maybe you shouldn’t.”
“Why not?”
“You know—” He tapped at his own front tooth. “The wiggler.”
I said I would use the other side of my mouth to chew.
This seemed to reassure him and he focused his attention on his own piece of cake. He took a large bite and chomped the cake experimentally—before spitting a mouthful to the linoleum floor. “Just as I suspected!” He made an odd smile. “Raisins.” He kicked at the offending gob with one of his Oxford shoes—which was loose on his foot now, the laces free from the top eyelets. My sister Carolyn assured him there were no raisins in the cake, and Cyrus, seeing his blunder, for he had mistaken a red jujube for a raisin, bent to the floor to pick up the candy. He was popping this in his mouth, to the fascinated horror of at least three of the girls present, when my sister Bonnie returned from a bathroom break. “Who the hell is this kid?” She pointed at him. “And who invited him to my party?”
I was explaining I’d invited him, that he was my guest, when, rather as if he’d been waiting for the appropriate moment, Cyrus stepped to the center of the room to say, “I’m the world’s best escape artist!”
Bonnie regarded him, skeptical. “Um,” she said. “No, you’re not.”
“Oh, yes I am,” said Cyrus, swallowing the red jujube. “I can escape from any ropes or shackles or booby traps you devise for me. And—” He flung his hand above his head to point at the ceiling. “I throw down the gimlet!” He was beaming at the girls, daring to be contradicted. “You could tie me up and I shall escape anything.”
A small girl in a turtleneck dress—her name was Alice Gruber—produced a pink skipping rope and Bonnie took it and thrust it at Cyrus. “Prove it.”
Taking the skipping rope, Cyrus wrapped it around his left wrist three times. “I wrap it like this and you—” He offered his hands to Alice Gruber,
who seemed shyly delighted to be participating. “You tie it nice and tight on my other hand.”
Alice Gruber tied a simple bow knot firmly around his right wrist. He offered his tied wrists for us to inspect. “See? So I shall go behind these drapes.” He walked to the windows, where my mother, because of our too-close proximity to the next-door house, had installed floor-to-ceiling curtains. “And I shall escape and disappear by a count of ten. Ready? On your marks—Go!”
Cyrus’s small outline, and especially the heels of his shoes, showed in contours in the fabric of the curtain. The girls looked at one another, uncertain, so Carolyn started loudly counting, the rest of us joining in and finishing—noting, of course, that Cyrus’s shoes were exactly where they had been when this started. Bonnie jerked the curtains open, revealing the skipping rope fallen into Cyrus’s empty shoes. For two or three seconds we were fully amazed, as if the laws of the universe had shifted without us understanding why, until Bonnie pulled the curtains all the way open, revealing Cyrus giggling, barefoot and triumphant, at the end of the window. “Yes!” His face flushed red as he took back his shoes from Alice Gruber—who had picked them up in her new capacity as magician’s assistant. “My second greatest escape today! I told you. I can escape from torture chambers or wire cages or anything at all.”
The birthday guests were certainly amused and so was I. But not so the birthday girl. My sister with narrowing eyes was rethinking the wrapping and tying of the skipping rope, deducing correctly that Cyrus had made sure the skipping rope crossed on the underside of his left wrist, allowing for a quick release when he twisted his hands away from the crisscrossed rope. Once free of the rope, he slipped out of his shoes and snaked along the window to hide flattened within the curtains.
Bonnie brought a chair from the dining room, keen to continue the challenge, and asked if Cyrus could escape if he were tied to the chair and blindfolded and locked in the hall closet.
Cyrus studied the door to the hall closet. It was an antique-looking door with a skeleton key resting in its lock. “It would be my third great escape today,” he said, considering. After procuring a newspaper, which he positioned on the floor beneath the lock, and making us promise we wouldn’t tinker with its placement, he raised his hand to point again at the ceiling. “I accept the gimlet!” Bonnie then went to work, securing him to the chair, tying his hands behind his back with the pink skipping rope, binding his ankles to the chair legs with kitchen twine, and using the sash from her sparkle dress as a blindfold. All through this preparation, Cyrus held his breath, flexing and swelling his shoulders to make himself bigger. With Carolyn’s help, Bonnie bumped Cyrus and the chair over to the hall closet, dumped him in, and turned the key in the lock—just as my parents came through the front door. They were confused to see the birthday party gathered around the hall closet, and more than this, I could tell from their posture and solemnity that Something Complicated had happened in the outside world. It was only now I realized how irregular it was that neither of my parents had been home to direct the events of Bonnie’s birthday party—it was a tribute to Carolyn’s wherewithal the party’s proceedings had gone so smoothly. So we dispersed, innocently returning to loot bags and balloons in the kitchen, and leaving five-year-old Cyrus Mair chair-tied and blindfolded on the hardwood floor of the hall closet.
A note of civic history—Howland Poole Mair, K.C., known popularly in the province as H.P. Mair, served as the fourteenth premier of Nova Scotia many years before Cyrus and I were born. Most of the Mairs were given to highly variable and eccentric vanishing acts but the disappearance of H.P. Mair was bold even for them. On the day he vanished, H.P. Mair was senior counsel to one of the city’s oldest law firms, Merton Mair McNab, and the circumstances surrounding his disappearance, and the convergence of inward meaning and outward implication these circumstances implied, would generate speculation for many years. I saw him only twice, the first time when I was four and he was eighty-one, outside St. Matthew’s United Church one winter morning, when my father made a point of introducing his children to a passing older man, elegantly dressed, sharply stern. Tall and bald, to me H.P. Mair most resembled a stretched-out version of the Banker in the board game Monopoly. I remember singing for him the first verse of my newly-composed “Extravagant Yogurt” song, a routine to which he gave a quick and single roar of laughter, and I remember my father treating him with uncharacteristic deference—a consequence, I would later learn, of my father having articled with H.P. Mair when he first graduated law school. My father would accept a position with a different law firm, but his debt and connection to H. P. Mair he always respected. Not so my mother. “The Old Grey Mair,” she said. “He ain’t what he used to be. Such a peculiar fellow. We’d be at some party. He’d walk in, speak to no one, watching from the corner. You try to talk to him, he’d just shake his head and walk away. If you ask me, he needed help. But your father loved H.P. Mair. Thought he was brilliant. Sure, if brilliant means drunk. If brilliant means stumbling home drunk from The Halifax Club, then he was a genius. He used to show up sozzled at our back door. I’d give him the vacuum cleaner and tell him to start in the living room. The man was just gassed. Juiced to the gills. Alcohol ruins so many families, Aubrey. At the end he didn’t know where he was. At the end he sort of knew he was yesterday’s man. The last year of his life, he was calling your father at all hours. In the morning. The middle of the night. The man was over-billing, double-billing, he needed money something terrible. Had a wife with expensive tastes, for one, plus this other woman, and drinking all the time. That once-brilliant mind, all that booze. The month he disappeared, he came to see if your father would represent him because he was about to be disbarred and God knows what else.” My father was president of the Nova Scotia Barristers’ Society at the time, a member of the same disciplinary committee that was investigating H.P. Mair, and so was obliged to recuse himself from acting for him. H.P. Mair went missing three weeks later. He had lunch at The Halifax Club near noon and was later seen purchasing a bottle of Mumm’s champagne at the Clyde Street liquor store, the cashier giving a statement to the police that, the last she saw of him, H.P. Mair was walking in the sun down South Park Street. Officers found his house with its doors open, his purple Mercedes-Benz in the driveway. His vanishing would become the talk of the province. There were theories he’d been abducted or murdered, that he’d run off to Bermuda to avoid prosecution, that he’d committed suicide in Maine. For a while he was the missingest man in Canada and seemed destined to become one of those figures, like Judge Crater or Captain Slocum or Ambrose Bierce, who simply evaporates from the twentieth century. But twenty-one days later, on the morning of Bonnie’s ninth birthday, a body was glimpsed in the ocean off Black Rock Beach by two Waegwoltic kids in a Sunfish sailboat. The authorities recovered the drowned man, finding on the fully clothed corpse no identification except for, in a soaking suit pocket, my father’s business card. My father was asked in for questioning later that day. This was the reason my parents had been absent from their daughter’s birthday party. After identifying the body as the remains of H.P. Mair, my parents went along to relay the news to the widow—a peripheral family friend. Vida Mair, who had been estranged from her husband for six years, lived alone and alcoholically on the seventh floor of the Hotel Nova Scotian. Not only was she vexed to learn of her husband’s death, but she was also out of her mind with worry that one of her extended family, her husband’s son with another woman, a five-year-old who had been placed provisionally in her sister-in-law’s care, had gone missing the night before. Phone calls were made, a search party rallied, and a Missing Persons file opened. It was with somber and serious worry for this errant child that my parents walked in the front door of our house on Tower Road, somewhat surprised to find the very object of their concern tied to a dining room chair on the floor of their hall closet, thrashing like an animal in a trap.
“What in God’s name is that noise?” asked my mother.
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nbsp; Speeding to ground zero, I spun the key in the closet door, yanked the door open, and bent down beside Cyrus Mair. I pushed away the blindfold. Although he was on the verge of liberation, his expression did not change. His eyebrows were tense with concentration, and now that I was this close to him, I could see that three of his eyelashes had gone white—or had started white—and I noticed, too, a spiral of absolutely white, de-pigmented hair splotching out of the top of his head. He was silent, sullen even, as if he realized he’d misjudged the situation—or the situation had misjudged him. “If you help me escape,” he whispered, struggling against Alice Gruber’s pink skipping rope. “If you help me out of this booby trap, I’ll help you escape from anywhere. And I will remember. Will you?”
“Remember what?”
“Everything!”
I said I would help him if he showed me all of his escape routes. “You promise?”
“I promise,” said Cyrus Mair, his blue eyes very wide. “I do.”
Twenty minutes later and the party was in the breakfast nook among second helpings of cake, some softening-but-still-airborne balloons, and Bonnie’s plunder of unopened birthday gifts. Cyrus had very easily integrated himself into the gathering and babbled intimately with anyone—as if he’d known each of us all his life. Bonnie, feeling contrite over his imprisonment, and sensing my parents’ distant but frank interest in this child’s welfare, tolerated his presence. The other girls accepted and approved of him, especially Alice Gruber, who, in a tizzy of overexcitement, had begun applying chocolate icing to the tip of his nose. “That’s disgusting!” Cyrus said to Alice Gruber, straining to make the word as emphatic as possible and wiping at his nose. He turned to Bonnie, who was reading a gift card. “I think you should always keep a present that you don’t open,” said Cyrus, moving his own piece of cake away from the groping fingers of Alice Gruber. “That way you can always go back and open something you don’t have.” Alice Gruber let out a squeal of laughter at this remark—then right away covered her mouth with both hands, shutting down any further noises. Bonnie opened the beautifully wrapped present anyway, displaying to the table a page-a-day pocket diary. I thought it very splendid with its gilded pages and royal blue binding, as well I should, for I remembered it was my gift to Bonnie. My mother and I had charged it at Mahon’s Stationery the week before, my mother deciding that the gift of a diary would encourage Bonnie to read more. Bonnie remarked casually that she already had three diaries, that I could keep this new one, and flipped the gift back to me. She went on to the next present and so did everyone else. Everyone except Cyrus Mair, who stared at the diary as if mesmerized, as if he’d never imagined such an invention could exist.