In the morning, he woke to the scent of sour milk. He brushed his teeth, drank a warm can of Coca-Cola. Glancing through Ladies’ Home Journal, he found a picture of the exotic girl he’d imagined yesterday. She wore a one-piece swimsuit, flesh-toned, and dark glasses, but she was certainly the same girl. Behind her, the palm trees looked like explosions.
Hilda slept late. Simon watched traffic from the window. He longed to own a flashy car. On the corner below him a Chinese restaurant owner, sweating, argued with two men in business suits. Simon pulled the pin from an imaginary grenade and let it slip through his fingers to the street.
The room was quiet. Full of flies. Sitting on the bed, making an island of pastry crumbs in the spilled yellow milk on the night table, he waited for Hilda to wake up.
5
After their son’s birth, things went from bad to worse for Hilda and Simon. It seemed to rain through all his visits home, and they argued relentlessly, reliving and sullying the days of their courtship. When she finally left him for an American engineer, he went to see Robert at the penthouse. Robert was not sympathetic.
The men looked haggardly beyond each other.
“I don’t know what’s happened to us,” Simon said.
“Things happen. You should know that, partner. Boom! It’s all different. Person changes. Gets older. We’ve bought a little house on a quarter section. Agnes told me to invite you down for a few days. I must tell you I don’t agree with your lifestyle. I don’t believe in killing. I never really thought about it before. What you do frightens me. No, I don’t want the details. I don’t know who you are anymore. But Agnes feels sorry for you, thinks you must be lonely or something.”
“Does she?”
“Maybe she’s dazzled by your thrilling stories. I don’t know. She’s got more heart than either of us. Anyway, there’s a creek by the house. Come down if you get the chance.”
6
Simon. In extremis. On a sales clerk’s phone on top of the downtown Hudson’s Bay. Raging. Contained. Trying to get above it all. All those cars on Portage. Pedestrians like in a movie of pedestrians. Snaky Red River.
“Agnes?”
“Simon, I said I didn’t want to see you or hear your voice again.”
“Agnes, Hilda’s dead. Are you there? I told you she’d settled in Portland with some engineer. She was killed. The guy phoned. Buried under a wall at a construction site. Agnes? You listening?”
“Yes. I’m so sorry. Where are you?”
“The guy wants to keep my son! I don’t know what to do!
“You know what I’ll suggest, I’m sure. Give up that bloody, bloody life and get him home, bring him up yourself.”
“I can be there in half an hour. I’ll take a cab out. Is Bob home? I better come over. This is the last time. I promise.”
“Robert will be back at four. I want you gone by then, understand? I don’t want Bob upset. And Simon, please calm down. It’s very sad.”
7
Simon had not touched Agnes for almost an hour. She remained wide-eyed, stretched on the carpet between the coffee table and the sofa.
After an emotional meeting they had made love, then sat drinking coffee and smoking at the kitchen table. When the sun came out, Simon had strolled into the living room. All the items of furniture, the ornaments, the carpet, the window frames, had looked out of kilter. When the glossy surface on the painting above the fireplace began to shriek, he had picked up the knife from the mantel and called out to Agnes.
She entered the room, eyes blinking; she looked uncertain. Simon held his arms wide, appealing, the knife concealed. During their embrace, he’d put the blade into its present position. Agnes had merely sighed down his body.
In the armchair by the window, he was now counting the pickets of the white fence outside. Beyond the fence the prairie horizon tucked cleanly into a huge sky. Three-thirty.
You see, Bob, we were just sitting at the kitchen table, talking. It felt good to talk. We talked all afternoon! Then the sun came out. I always loved her, Bob! She is so beautiful, so familiar! Pretty soon now you’ll come into this room and sit in your usual chair, this one by the window, smell the coffee and the cigarette smoke. But you won’t count the pickets of the white fence enclosing the yard. The room will seem straight and ordinary to you. I swear. To God. We were all such friends. You understand that. You were right. People change. Because she wouldn’t let me stay. Is that clear? In some ways they don’t change. In ten minutes you will place your hand where her blood darkens. But I will have quit the house by then, opened the gate in the white fence, walked along the creek, down the dirt road. A clean getaway. I know how to escape, to hide.
By the time the police arrived, Simon had not said a word for almost an hour and a half. Robert was crouched over his wife’s body. He had not spoken.
Simon stared at the antique Packard gleaming in the driveway. He began counting again. He counted thirty-seven, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one pickets in the fence, four of which were broken.
CANARIES SING IN RUSSIAN AIRSPACE
A FEW DAYS AFTER THE SOVIET Union’s shooting-down of a Korean passenger jet, Canada sends home the Russian elephant, the Russian bears, and the large Russian cats. In fact, James Cooper, as you’re crumpling your release papers in the dark, in the empty apartment, as you’re packing Halifax box by box, ready to fly home to Victoria, the whole circus is being made to feel the cold Canadian shoulder. You hear the item again on the radio this morning over donuts at the airport coffee shop.
In the dismal ship’s hold a silence spreads. Such a silence, you feel, could only follow the sudden hush of dark exotic laughter. And don’t the animals look small? Surely much smaller than they would appear on sawdust, under the big lights. Perched atop the elephant’s beautiful woven blanket the trainer listens, her ear to the elephant’s ear. The cat tamer listens to the cats listening. The ship rocks, straining against its moorings in the stormy harbour.
I wish we had a radio, the bearded lady says, so we could hear the news.
Ronald Reagan is a pagan, quips the midget.
The bears moo and the tightrope walker leans like frozen rope against the stallion’s flank.
Kamchatka, she says, and sighs.
As you fasten your seat belt you think maybe they wouldn’t return by ship, maybe a deep-bellied plane would transport them back to Russia. You’ve quit the navy, you’re flying home, you’re imagining circuses; the world may end, and you’re reading Crime and Punishment.
The old woman was as always bareheaded, you read. You remember elephants you’ve felt sorry for. Remember sleeping two days ago, but not since. You order another drink from the flight attendant who’s making his last rounds.
There’s your sister crouching with her dog close to Mother and Father. Her pale knees point upward in nearly opposite directions, one to the top of a distant escalator, the other to a flight arrival monitor screen. There’s Jimmy! she calls, and the dog goes crazy as you walk down the ramp.
Father staggers forward. Give me the suitcase, son.
You slide your fingers through Father’s hand, then turn to kiss Mother. Your hat is still on your head and the case in your hand.
Here, Poke!
The dog wags forward to greet you, setting your sister apart from the family. An American stops dead in the middle of the crowd to rage: You can visit me! But you won’t! All our appointments! Broken! Broken! Father unfolds his arms, lets them dangle loose at his sides. He stares at the Avis Rent-A-Car sign, and laughs. That’s what it all is, a joke. I’ll get the car, he says. You allow Mother’s arm to link yours as you stroll through the automatic doors. You incline your head politely toward her pursed mouth.
Jimmy! your sister calls.
You will answer in a moment. It’s an old game, but she has been caught, as always, believing you’ve forgotten all about her. She looks thoughtfully at the airport tiles, and blushes. A spindle of a girl, graceless, nearly as tall, nearly as whi
te as Mother. She wears her hair neatly bound in two heavy braids. Under the bangs thick lenses magnify her road-grey eyes.
Michael-Ann Cooper!
A sharp-nosed gangly creature, she races at the closing glass doors.
That night you tell her about the circus.
Keep still, keep very still, keep very still, the trainer tells the elephant, who trumpets sadly and begins to wave his trunk at the gathered performers and animals, at the spies in their puma skins, at the clever canaries the spies always carry with them. The canaries trill and warble. The plane dips and soars through the invisible night. Everyone but the tightrope walker is very frightened, but they try not to let it show.
I wish we had a radio, says the cat tamer.
The midget climbs on a camel. My sister, he proclaims, has a yankee transistor.
Listen, says a clown, how the engines all lie and lie.
Through their teeth, says another clown. And he makes his nose honk.
Next day Michael-Ann hides with her dog behind a bush in the yard. You walk to the bush, look intently at it, put your hand deep inside, pluck a leaf; the bush trembles.
In her room, she empties the package of crayons you’ve given her onto the world map colouring book, snaps the stem of the red crayon. Tell me about the tightrope walker, James.
Later, you say.
After school, you meet her in the sunshine on a hill that seems foreign, but at the door of a house that is your parents’ house, the house you grew up in. On the way to town, you pick a bindweed blossom and show her how to hold it to her nose by breathing in. When you give it to her your hands barely touch. One minute she’s talking very fast, the next she’s silent. Inside the shopping centre the blossom falls and you let her wear your cowboy hat. You give her a puff of your cigarette. She holds your hand as you click, one at a time, click through the turnstile.
Over Australia she snaps a yellow crayon. Then a blue one. Now?
He laid the axe on the ground near the dead body and felt at once in her pocket (trying to avoid the streaming body) —
Forget Raskolnikov, you tell yourself. Keep still!
For weeks you can’t go outside the house, unless to meet her. Unless she’s with you. She finds a green silk scarf on the street by the fence. You ask her how she knows it is silk. She says she can feel it is silk because it sticks to her face as she runs, one arm outstretched. She balls the scarf in her fist. The field you used to cross now has houses and you’re so mad you jump the fence. She screams. But you just borrow Dad’s car and drive her to another field. Poke chases you, then her. She lets you try the scarf; you must sprint fast to keep it in place. You spot for her as she walks the trunk of a fallen tree, arms wide for balance, your own raised to catch her should she fall. Your dad says he can’t figure you out. Mom tells him to leave you alone. The strange feeling you’ve had since coming home begins to disperse; it does not pass, but grows thin — a green veneer over the world, like looking through the scarf as you race. You reach to tie the scarf round her head. This is how tightrope walkers wear their hair.
They know how to balance. Even on airplanes flying high over the sea. They are so good at figuring things out. The beautiful tightrope walker lets her long waist melt, bends in half and speaks to her toes. Let’s have a re-enactment, she says. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Elephant, you be the missile. The horses will be the passengers, seals the American agents. The rest of us will be airspace. Their airspace over here, our airspace over there. I’m a computer to keep us on track. Beep!
The midget clears his throat scornfully, races bandy-legged from one airspace to the other.
Beep! The tightrope walker grows taller and slimmer; she makes the sequins on her bodice glow like satellites. The canaries perch like tiny hearts along her arms. Beep!
Poised on the narrowest part of the tree, Michael-Ann listens, her eyes big. Is that all?
That’s all.
So she jumps down and sits crosslegged at your feet, tells the story of going to meet you at the airport. You stand in the field and watch leaves spiralling down. One falls from a birch onto her head.
Dad backed into the parking spot, but we couldn’t get out of the car, the doors wouldn’t open, the other cars were too close. People came from the buildings, got into their cars and made a long line of traffic, so we couldn’t move. Was Mom ever mad! Then more and more people came. Even Pokey began to whine. James’ll find us, I said. Let’s open the windows and tell them to hurry up. They were the most nicest friendly people, Jimmy. The airport was full of moms and dads and kids. Then there was no one. Then we could get out. Then —
And instead of a field, your sister chattering, a silence — profound — takes centre ring. And you’re staring into the elephant eyes, one on each side of his trunk, this time convinced you’re supported by a medium denser than air, convinced that you’re witnessing truth. Elephant? you think. Ocean? you think. And are worried she will ever stop pestering you.
RED CLAY
YOU ARE A RUNNER AT POLITICAL conferences. Today, in the lower halls, you meet a woman who tells you her father and mother support themselves by digging clay which they sell in the market of the city where she works as an engineer on a new government irrigation project. This is like the information you are accustomed, indeed trained, to receive, and yet unlike. The woman’s preoccupied look is disarming; surely she knows you are paid only to stop briefly, to run on. Reluctantly, you sprint away upstairs to shake hands with a number of delegates from the provinces. They all wear soft kid gloves, and all have different-coloured skins. This should not be astonishing, but you find it so. You can no longer close your eyes as you round familiar corners; your pace feels irregular; you have two left feet. Fearing reprisals from superiors, expecting your erratic progress to be criticized at any moment, you flail along a corridor and up a connecting series of stairs to the auditorium, where a sitar recital by Ravi Shankar is about to end. You take a seat in the front row of a balcony as he strokes from his instrument a sequence of notes that makes you hug your stomach. Without looking around, you are aware that other members of the audience are also leaning forward, bent nearly double in their seats, evidently similarly affected. Ravi Shankar stands to speak.
Columbia Records flew me all the way to the United States in order to have me perform that piece. Why? They recorded it because they wanted me, the way I play . . .
Outside the concert hall, you find two pairs of trousers. A man below the railed walkway on which you stand calls out for the green stripes and you throw them down. As far as you can tell they match his jacket perfectly. He shouts his thanks and you feel pleased to be so treated by a delegate and you pull the remaining trousers over the gym shorts of your profession. By this time all the other runners have collected and delivered their various dispatches. You are hopelessly behind schedule, but no longer care. Alone, you leap easily downstairs, flight after flight, and out onto the large plain where your feet kick dust as you find your stride, putting the conference buildings behind you. Soon your legs stop feeling strange in the trousers. The sun turns the zigzag cracks in the hard ground jet-black. You make for the temple in the distance and, as you run, it gradually occurs to you to feel afraid of what you might find inside the holy place, which, as you come closer, you realize is in ruins. Keep running. The foreboding grows and grows. Without slowing, you swivel now and then to check the huge complex behind you. Midway to the temple, you look down at your stamping feet and ease your pace. Flies swarm about your sweating neck and you think sadly about the woman engineer and the sitar player and all at once you stumble into the shadow of the temple’s crumbling wall. You can smell wet clay. The odour of wet clay is irresistible as you plunge into a gap in the ruin’s side. You are overwhelmed by the scent of clay. Immersed in the scent of red moist clay. Breathe it in. Like cool water, it vivifies you and stills the pulsing world.
There, in a corner, lies the woman engineer wearing a deep blue sari, her breathing shallow and her com
plexion pale. She is seriously ill. She weighs nothing, almost nothing.
You retrace your steps and soon find yourself — the woman noticeably weaker in your arms — inside the convention centre. Your first thought, to seek medical help, to locate doctors and a sick room, at the very least a cool and comfortable bed, a nurse, soon gives way to other ideas.
The longer you hold her, the less inclined you feel to let her go. Now what you want is to find a quiet place where you can unwind the sari and explore the sleeping body without interruption. But there are people everywhere. Men in suits and robes, women in saris — all debating furiously. You overhear words like hunger, starvation, epidemic, structural adjustment, plague, peril, death. Nowhere can you discover, as you charge the passageways and stairs of the centre, a sanctuary. You dream regretfully of the desolate temple where you found her. How easy it would have been there to heave your body against her body. You endure terrible guilt because she’s unconscious and weakening, and you are solely responsible for her. Several times you almost lay her down on the cold tiles of a stairwell, where amid the echoing voices you would undress her. But always you are prevented by the presence of committees of persons using their urgent voices, their desperate issues, it seems, to separate you from the woman. At length, you arrive at a plushly carpeted alley that leads into the wings of the auditorium stage — the same on which Ravi Shankar has performed. As you scuttle down the alley, a uniformed guard asks where you are going. Panic stricken, you reply you must get the woman into the theatre.
I’m in a hurry — she’s to appear in the death scene — on the stage — any minute!
The guard looks at her. You want to strike him! He nods sternly but complicitly. Yes, you better be quick. She is going to die very soon.
So you are standing in the wings, holding the woman. Her breath rattles deep in her throat each second. The play is in progress and has reached the point where she is to make her appearance. The door of a small room to the left is propped ajar, the room empty but for a large pad on the floor. A key projects from the keyhole on the inside of the door. The woman still breathes. The play is suspended, waiting.
Parallel Rivers Page 2