The house sits at the base of a wooded valley. Pickup trucks in the blacktopped drive. Smells: woodsmoke and pinesap. Sly noises in the fringing trees: raccoons, maybe spring turkeys.
Heidi slides off the seat. “Sit a minute?”
She leads me to a wicker swing on the porch. A motion-sensor halogen snaps on and I note, in that stark sudden light, just how beautiful—and how young—she is. My prosthetic leg collides with a porch rail and she says, “Shshsh. You’ll wake my folks.”
We sit on the swing. Heidi’s body presses close to mine. I know nothing about this girl: her age, her hat size, if she is an honorable person, whether she’s ever been happy and in love. It’s been this way many times before, anonymous and meaningless, but what once seemed ideal now fills me with a profound melancholy.
“How did it happen—your arms?”
“Tragic cheerleading accident. Do you really want to know?”
“I guess not, no.”
“Of course not.”
Then Heidi’s kissing me. She is very adept, very knowledgeable—a surprise. She draws my tongue into her mouth as though her intention is to consume it. Her arm stubs dig into my breastbone.
And as we sit in that queer half-embrace on the porch I experience a vision of such clear unflinching intensity it takes my breath away: the two of us sitting on this same porch years from now, surrounded by children. Armless, legless, unfinished children wobbling around on artificial legs and crawling on stumps and swinging from the porch on shiny hook-hands, grinning and babbling and lurching about. I’m dandling a toddler on my knee and realize that—horrifically, insupportably—the fucking thing has a prosthetic head: milky white latex draped over curved steel slats, hair shining with the false luster of a doll’s, roaming marble eyeballs socked in its fake face, whining servo motors teasing the corners of its mouth into a wide smile and in that darkness gears meshing, pinions spinning and winding. And while I recognize the scenario is an impossibility I push her away.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I have to go.”
“Do you have a girl? It’s okay, I don’t mind. Don’t go, it’s fine.”
I’m shivering now, I’m trying to stand.
“What’s wrong, Ben? Did I do something wrong?”
“No. Yes. You have … no fucking arms.”
“You … asshole! ” She flinches away from me as though I’m the bearer of some deadly equatorial disease. “You’re not better than me!”
“I know.” Clomping down the steps sickened with myself, with her, the whole pathetic scene. “I know.”
Key the bike, open the throttle. Heidi’s yelling now, her face pink with strain. Although I cannot hear her over the engine’s roar, I can guess what she’s saying.
You rotten-ass bastard.
Blast out of the valley like a house on fire. Bury the needle, tach redlined, 170K in the passing lane. The sky a smooth black dome, cold and starless. Cut onto the QEW, accelerate up the Niagara overpass. Catch a whiff of burning rubber and figure it’s a tramp steamer or garbage scow plying the Welland Canal until I see flames and realize my leg’s on fire. I set the prosthesis too close to the tailpipe and now latex is burning merrily, a greasy skirt of fire robing my hips. I gear down and slap at the flames, picturing my broken-necked body propped against a concrete bridge support, clothes burned away and flesh melted from the heat.
The image isn’t entirely unpleasant. Sort of funny, actually, in a semi-tragic way.
Jam my hand down my pants, pop the coupler. Leg tearing free, bouncing across the street-lit tarmac over the retaining wall.
Plummeting three hundred feet, extinguished like a burning matchstick in the darkly flowing water.
I’VE TAKEN TO SCREWING with people in online support chatrooms.
Sign in under a phony name to retain your anonymity. Online, you’re nothing more than a screen moniker, a disease, an addiction, a sickening frailty, a set of reduced values. It’s amazing, what’s out there. More amazing is how maddeningly supportive everyone is. I’ve joined groups for Albinism (CASPER82: Know what I miss most, guys? The sun. The warm, bright sun); Narcolepsy (MR.ZZZZ: So I says to Jim, I says to him, I says akcifaacvggggggggggggggggg); Breastfeeding (CHAPPEDNIPS: My nipples get so dang sore. It would feel really nice if another woman rubbed them, preferably in slow, concentric circles. ); Compulsive Gambling (CARDSHARK: Bet I can beat my addiction faster than any a you chumps. I’ll book you 5-to-1 odds); Retirement (MOTORHOMER: Don’t you sometimes feel, lying in bed late at night, that life is basically empty and devoid of all meaning without a job?); Dementia (NAPOLEON55: Which one of you slippery motherfuckers stole my slippers?), Gulf War Syndrome (VOICESIN-MYHEAD: Look down at your best friend’s face and all you see’s a pile of GOO); Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (DOZY: Let’s just forget about this wacky syndrome and take a nap); Cold and Flu (MA’SCHICKENSOUP:You are the wimpiest bunch of candy-asses I’ve ever met. It’s a fucking cold,for Christ’s sake!). Pepper my posts with emoticons, smiley faces and frowny faces and winking smileys. Smiley faces acting as a shorthand for grief, commiseration, love, hope, redemption.
Lately I’ve haunted Friends of Bill W, a group for recovering alcoholics. Tonight I’m CONSTANTCRAVINGS.
STONESOBER: Welcome aboard, Constant!
BETH54: Welcome, Constant. How long have you been a friend of Bill?
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Thanks, Stone and Beth. Me and Bill have been acquainted three weeks now.
STONESOBER: Bill’s a good man. He changed my life.
BETH54: Mine, too. He’ll change yours, Constant.
CONTANTCRAVINGS: I hope so. Pretty rough going at the moment.
STONESOBER: Gotta be strong. Gotta livestrong.
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Sometimes, alone here in the dark, I get to thinking about how good a beer would taste. A cool frosty one sliding down my throat, all bubbly and golden. Man, that would hit the spot.
BETH54: Put those thoughts out of your mind. Stay strong in your beliefs.
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Wobbly pops. That’s what my buddy Franky calls them. “Hey, man,” he’ll say, “let’s head down to the Hitching Post, blow the foam off a few wobbly pops.” I wonder what Frank’s doing, right now.
STONESOBER: Better off without him. He’s an enabler.
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: We used to have canoe races. Remember those? Line up five glasses of draft beer, those little 8-ouncers, drop a peanut in the last one. First guy to chug all five and swallow the peanut was the winner. I loved winning. Gave me a real sense of accomplishment.
BETH54: We remember canoe races, Constant. Change the subject, huh?
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Scotch, too. God, I do love my scotch.That smooth brown goodness rolling over my tongue, into all the nooks and crannies of my mouth. That delicious, nutty, cask-mellowed taste.
STONESOBER: What are you, Constant, an ad writer for Bushmills? lol!
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Man, I know they call it Demon Alcohol, but it’s always seemed somehow angelic to me. Makes things more … bearable, I guess is the right word. The world’s just a little bit brighter, a little softer. You know?
BETH54: Sigh. Good luck, Constant. [BETH54 has exited chatroom]
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Oh, sweet baby Jesus. My wife, the ridiculous old prune, she collects airplane booze. Those little bottles, right? And I see now she’s lined her collection on a shelf above the computer. Christ, they’re all here: Johnny Walker Red, Absolut, Crown Royal, more. Dozens of little soldiers lined in a row. Lord, I’m all shaky and sweaty. Maybe just one …
STONESOBER: Don’t do it, man! It’s not worth it!
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: I just cracked the seal on a bottle of Captain Morgan’s. My word, that smell. I’m in heaven. It tastes so damn GOOD. It’s even better after not drinking for so long. Like being a virgin again! Hey, Stone, won’t you join me? Must be some booze lying around your house—in the toilet tank, maybe? Under the sink?
STONESOBER: Good luck, Constant. I’ll say a prayer
for you.
CONSTANTCRAVINGS: Say a prayer for yourself, killjoy! Have a drink and lighten up!
[CONSTANTCRAVINGS, you have been banned from this forum]
I’M SITTING IN A CORNER BOOTH at the Concorde, a strip club near Clifton Hill. I used to come here with my high-school buddies, all of us toting fake IDs. We’d sit along pervert’s row, laughing and hooting, superior in our youth and wide-open future and potential to do great things.
On the raised parquet stage, a topless chick spins disinterestedly round a polished brass pole. A woman in her mid-forties stands in the red glare of a HOT NUTS vending machine, naked save a pair of pink heels. She’s eating barbecued peanuts from a plastic cup, pinching them between fingernails that must be two inches long. It’s the most oddly revolting sight I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I’m drinking Sauza tequila: empty shot glasses on the table, ashtray filled with wrung lemon wedges. The darkness and smoke favor the strippers, whose faces are made for mood lighting. In their younger years, many of them worked the pole at Mints or Private Eyes but, bumped by the influx of new meat, they’ve carted their sagging anatomies and failing looks here, a final stand before the street corner.
A new girl steps through the tinsel curtain to a smattering of desultory applause. Blood-red spotlights disguise the needle tracks on her arms but do nothing to hide the seam of a C-section scar curving from bellybutton to bikini line. A guy sitting up front whistles sharply, the way one seeking a dog’s attention might.
A woman slides into the booth. At the tail end of her career, pencil thin lines where her eyebrows should be, a broken nose that’s healed badly. A sarong wrapped around her waist, which I suppose could be either a token gesture at modesty or a means of concealing some gruesome defect.
“Drinking alone, baby?”
“Looks that way.”
“Want some company?”
My response is noncommital and she slides closer. She wears the brand of perfume strippers prefer; I wonder if there’s a communal atomizer they all share.
“I’ll suck your cock for fifty dollars.” She laughs crazily, as though I’d told a rakishly indelicate joke.
“I don’t even know your name.”
“Sharday. What do you say, hon?”
“Let me have another drink.”
“How ’bout getting me one, too?”
Suitably fortified, we sneak out the back door. A clear autumn night and the sky spread with stars, remote and numberless. Sharday leads me across the parking lot to a row of motel rooms. Her room is small but neat and smells of carpet freshener. Framed photos of two young boys on the nightstand; she turns them face-down before easing me onto the bed. Bills change hands. She unbuttons my jeans, tugs them down.
“What’s that?”
“A fake leg.” I assumed she’d noticed the replacement prosthesis in the club. For a moment I think she’s going to call it off, as though amputation’s contagious and she doesn’t want to risk it.
“How did it happen?”
“War wound. Desert Storm. Some brown bastard cut it off with a sword. Those wiggly looking swords.”
“A kirpan?”
“Sure … one of those.”
Sharday slips a condom over me with the clinical disinterest of an ER nurse. She works with a brisk, businesslike air, humming a familiar tune I can’t quite put a name to.
“Is it okay?” she says. “Feel good, hon?”
“It’s … fine.”
“Something else you want? It’s cool.”
I tell her to tuck her arms behind her back so that, from my perspective, it’d look …
“Like I have no arms?”
“Yes,” I say. “Like that.”
She does as I ask, but I can’t look at her. Lean back on the bed, stare at a ceiling covered in a constellation of water stains. One resembles a suckling pig, another some breed of tropical bird. Stare at Sharday’s bobbing skull, those dark roots growing out of her scalp. A bedspring pokes through the threadbare mattress, jabbing me in the spine. Music seeps through the wall from the other room: “Let My Love Open the Door,” by Pete Townsend. The song is followed by another and another, then “The Things I Do for Money” by the Northern Pikes is playing.
“Awful sorry, sugar. I’m dancing in a minute.”
She pulls the condom off and tucks me back inside my boxers. No refund is offered. I clip my leg on. Sharday leads me outside.
“Gonna be okay, hon?”
“Thanks for trying.”
She pecks me on the cheek then sets off across the lot, the click-click of her heels echoing off the graffiti-tagged walls. I walk out to the street. Cars packed with teens cruise past on Ferry, looking to pull a U-turn and head back down the Hill. A wire-mesh rack propped beside the Concorde’s door, stuffed with brochures for local attractions: Castle of Frankenstein, Skylon Tower, Hollywood Wax Museum, Colonel Tilliwacker’s Haunted Lemonade Stand. In the top right corner: a glossy blue brochure, killer whale leaping beneath the hub of a brilliant rainbow. Everyone Loves Marineworld, spelled out in inch-high bubble script.
A CAB DROPS ME OFF outside the front gates as early morning stars bleed into the lightening sky. Ticket booths boarded up, closed for the season. Head to the trainer’s entrance, kicking through drifts of crackling leaves. My key still works. In the prep area fillet knives hang on a magnetized strip above a block of frozen herring thawing in a metal basin. The odor of chlorine and gutted fish; the bark of penned sea lions. Step through another door onto the stage.
Security lamps burn on the amphitheater’s perimeter, casting a silvered sheen on the water. Cross the stage, past props silent in their wrap of shadows. A paddle wheel turns with a steady trickle of water. Birds roost on a bridge spanning the show and wait pools. Peel off shirt, remove shoes and socks and pants, uncouple my leg. Late September wind buffets what’s left of my body. I break out in gooseflesh.
The whale was captured in a drift net off the coast of Siberia. Sectioned from her pod, hooked to a fifty-ton winch, dragged aboard a Russian freighter. She spent three weeks cradled in a body hammock, hosed down with salt water. A crane lifted her through a moonlit sky and into a new world: 90” ×60” ×30”, glass and concrete. I was the one who fed her. Taught her. Kept her alive. I came to believe she belonged to me, the way land or a car can belong to a person. I forgot that every time I entered the water I belonged to her, and the moment I remembered was the moment it ceased to matter.
Ease myself down by the pool’s lip, dangling my leg in the water. Niska swims at the far end, dorsal fin cutting the glasslike surface. Air jets from her blowhole, a shimmering spume lit by the stark white lights. Cup water and lift it to my mouth, relishing that salty sting. The pool dark and fathomless, dropping into forever. As a child I suffered this recurring nightmare in which the floor of my bedroom turned liquid, bed bobbing on the placid surface. Peering over the mattress, I saw shapes wheeling and surging in the inky water, primordial Lovecraftian horrors with scales and blunt teeth. How far down did that darkness stretch: through the Earth’s core, out into space, to the edge of the known universe? The distance from the foot of my bed to the open door was perhaps five feet—I could clear it at a leap. But if I were to slip …?
Push off the concrete ledge, move out into the pool. One-legged and overweight, I cut an ungainly path through water so frigid it robs my breath. Niska’s head turns, a languid sweep. Her body describes a slow half-circle, starlight rippling over the contour of her dorsal ridge. I tread water, cold pressing against my ribcage. Catch my reflection in the pool’s dark mirror. No fear or indecision in my eyes and for that I’m thankful. Nothing to be done for it, now. There is only acceptance, and a hope that, in those slender moments separating what is from what may be, there might be understanding.
I once spent the night with a girl picked up at a downtown bar. I can no longer recall her name, her smell, the color of her eyes. She lived in an old building facing St. Paul Street, backing onto Twelve Mile Cr
eek. The bedroom overlooked a wooded dell, creek running swiftly behind. Early that morning I woke to the sound of voices. I sat up and went to the window. Three figures stood in the half-light. Down along the woodline, where it was too dark to make out ages or faces: vague outlines, rough movements and angles. Two larger figures had the smaller boxed in. They shoved the person to the ground—a woman; you could tell by the pitch of her voice. One of them fell on top of her while the other stood off to one side, head sweeping side to side. Predawn sunlight streamed through the window, picking up a patina of dust on the venetian blinds. I went to the kitchen and rooted through the drawers, laying my hands on a butcher knife. When I returned the two on the ground were rocking rhythmically. The other one said something—Give it, or maybe Give ’er—and laughed. I couldn’t quite grasp what I was seeing. I gripped the knife so tightly the grain of it lingered on my palm for hours afterwards. Then I slid it under the boxspring and slipped into bed, curling my body into that nameless girl who never stirred.
Maybe that’s how she wants it, I thought. Maybe there’s an arrangement. A span of dark time went by, punctuated by a single low moan. It wasn’t any of my business. She’d scream if she needed help. Birds chattered in the trees, and below that, the sound of endlessly rushing water. Someone else will notice. Someone else will commit.
And what becomes of it all? The brutalities and insincerities, the callousness and selfishness, wrongdoings real and imagined, the acts of inaction, the fear, regret, guilt? Doesn’t just go away, that much I know. Gil had it right: a balancing act takes place every minute of every day, a silent tally, each act carrying its own discrete weight, its own transformative power.
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