Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  Instead the world is lost. The world is listing.

  All your intuitions and miniscule decisions have tricked you and nothing remains but the booming thud of despair.

  Once you and Ferdinand had talked about offshore. The two of you were lying on his perversely cozy flannel sheets and you’d mentioned you had a high-school friend who’d become an underwater welder at the Streamline project off Sable Island. “You know,” Ferdinand said, “all that oil and gas goes right past us.” You nodded although you’d had no idea and he went on about the pipeline, how it simply drifted right down into the States, probably passing over some traditional sacred Mi’kmaq land. Ferdinand said about this symptom, this faith in offshore oil and gas. He was talking and talking about this East Coast promise that had never been realized, saying how Nova Scotians would be paying into Streamline’s pocket for years after the wells dried up, and you thought it was good that he was an idealist and that he cared about the causes and of course he was right. But you found yourself unmoved by the politics, found yourself just pondering the image of an offshore oil rig: iron legs stretching down to the continental shelf, schools of cod and mackerel nibbling the algae and kelp that grew on their great black knees. You were picturing a little flame down there in the wavering near-black, the blue-white nimbus bending metal in the murky subaqueous dark. You were dreaming the fallen ships of Sable Island, currents holding them against underwater mountainsides, algae and krill spawning from the remnants of human bodies long dead. And at the same time you were thinking upwards, above the surface. You were picturing horses, the famous wild horses of Sable Island. Ferdinand was talking pipelines and you were picturing horses galloping through the salt-gnawed grey.

  You are running, now, up McDonald Bridge in the direction of Dartmouth. Running in your jeans and flats and are you running towards Ariel or away from her? The darkness is fading into day and you haven’t slept and the clouds are moving fast, fast and silver over the harbour. There is a quivering quarter moon and you are running, panting, sprinting for the peak of the hill. Running has never felt so effortless and you feel there is something wrong, something ghostly. You are looking past the suicide rail into the sky and you do not know what you will do when you reach the top.

  When you called Miranda instead of Ferdinand from the emergency vet’s office you knew the deal was broken. She asked why he wasn’t there and you blurted that he doesn’t want babies and she said what and are you okay and you panicked and hung up and didn’t answer any of her texts.

  The vet said there was nothing you could have done. It was cardiomyopathy and it happens spontaneously and he was sorry but kittens sometimes just die. The vet suggested you could get another kitten and you vowed no, never. He mentioned “disposal” and you said no to that too. Said no to everything and forgot the cat carrier as you took the stiffening creature in your arms and walked away. Walked past the fake-smiling receptionist in her pink scrubs and carried Ariel back to your apartment where you dug a hole between the compost and the crumbling brown tulips. You set a cinder block over the grave and set off running, running in street clothes down the long hill towards the harbour and then back up through this great metal stitch in the midnight sky.

  One of your flats wriggles off but you do not stop for it, keep running one-shoed. Approaching the apex of the bridge you are thinking of Ariel lying in the cool soil. You are thinking of Ariel and your calves are tiring as you reach the top of the hill and you look out over the moon-churning harbour and you keep running, running, galloping effortless. Ariel floats purringly in the air alongside but it is you galloping four-legged over the bridge that is no longer a bridge the wind in your hair and your hair becoming mane and beneath you oil runs through pipelines, runs deep underwater and welders wield thunderbolts in the liquid dark but how good it feels to run the full length of this marram-tufted sandbar, to run fast and weightless, almost flying, hooves kissing nimble over sandy wet earth.

  HORSE PEOPLE

  FRIDAY

  The Manager of Jumping calls and asks me to wiggle his mouse around, which at first I think is sexual. But then he says seriously. There’s an emergency at home and he wants me to go into his office every fifteen-twenty to jiggle the mouse around, maybe tap a few keys. “There are monitors,” he says. “Denise gets alerts. I know this is weird but if you want my recommendation for that position in Dressage.” I’m not sure I want his recommendation but I write down his door code (0000) and computer password (Hor$edude) and walk into the office with the pictures of his hairdresser wife and pageant-prim daughters grinning together, their mouths full of cantaloupe. I sit cruising his mouse around its pad and then I’m logging in. I think about searching the hard drive or the browser history but decide I don’t want to find anything dark and still have to smile as I stare into his Belmont-browned teeth.

  I’m drifting the cursor around a pixelated beachscape—a confetti of desktop icons amid tiki huts and plastic cups—when Denise raps on the glass. It is presumably less than ideal to have the CEO knocking on the big open window that looks onto a carpeted hallway, the window with blinds that I did not think to close. It’s not great to have the CEO observe me illegally shifting office habitats to undertake phony computer activity and then Denise walks right in.

  “He asked you to come in and move his mouse around?”

  I nod into Denise’s tectonic jaw.

  “Pinkiedicked shithole.” I must look stunned because she says, “Off the record but true—he’s a scandalous manwhore.” The Manager of Jumping, she explains, has been “liaising” with the breeder from Barbados who was in for a presentation yesterday, the one with the upturned nose. Denise tells me “just between us girls” that the snout-nosed breeder is also a married woman. Then she tells me to get back to my cubicle, pulling out her phone to call the Manager of Jumping. I head to my desk and sit checking horse passports and listening to the squirrel rucking around the ceiling panels.

  The Manager of Jumping calls toilet paper “shit tickets.” The Manager of Jumping’s favourite casual Friday T-shirt says “I Support the Performing Arts” next to a swervy cartoon butt in a sequined green G-string. The Manager of Jumping is actually named Chad Tucker but I prefer to think of him as the Manager of Jumping because when I told Pierce his job title there was some confusion and then various running jokes about the Superintendent of Leaping, Le Directeur de Sauté. The Manager of Jumping pronounces minestrone “mine stroan.” The Manager of Jumping uses “gay” as a pejorative. Once Denise asked if he was a homophobe and he went pale before blurting “No I’m not you’re the friggin’ homo.” The Manager of Jumping has almost no lips and one of those beardless male faces with marble-cake swirls of blush, as if he were constantly exercising. The Manager of Jumping is generally disliked in the office but the Manager of Jumping has been here twenty-seven years. The Manager of Jumping had not yet learned my name when he walked into my cubicle and without pretence asked about my left ear. “How’d you get that prune ear?” Which what if I’d been born like this? What if it was a birth defect? What if I’d emerged from the womb with an extra pinkie or a huge purple birthmark on my face? I suspect that in each case the Manager of Jumping would have walked directly over and asked me to account for my abnormalities.

  At lunch Denise is no longer serious Denise. She is now pregnancy fairy godmother Denise, giggling over to put a hand on my medicine ball belly as I’m trying to gorge rigatoni. I guess I’m showing the embarrassment because she gives the chin-jut that means female solidarity then says, “It’s okay hon you’re eating for two.” She pats my stomach-flesh and smiles as if the two of us are syncopated, our cycles linked by the secret language of the moon. And then it’s the urgent “you look so good” that makes me suspect the opposite. So I’m sitting there eating a rigatoni that’s gone tasteless and wondering why everyone particularly older women feel suddenly permitted to prod and rub and vocalize about my body just because I’m growing a
miniature human. Like the body suddenly becomes a public archive with everyone asking “how are you feeling?” and grimacing when I ask them back. People asking how am I feeling and what they really want to know is how are the hemorrhoids, how much have your nipples darkened, how does it feel to wake up in the middle of the night to find a weep of colostrum drying on your upper arm.

  Denise asks how far along now and I tell her thirty-two weeks without mentioning that she asked this question yesterday and the answer was the same. She coos and rubs her model-sharp jaw and tells me about Horace, how he spent the whole third trimester standing on her bladder. “He was really just perched on my pee-pump,” she says, adding that by the time she had her pants back on she always needed to pee again and even though he felt like a cheese grater coming through her perineum she’d do it again in a heart murmur—“at the wink of a ventricle.” We laugh and then she tells me to get back to work. “Don’t you have some horse passports to vet?” She juts her formidable chin in the way that means she is joking and not joking, joking but don’t push your luck.

  People end up working at the Canadian Equine Federation because they’re horse people. They go for a career at the Federation because they grow up with their knees turned sideways in the backs of Toyota Tundras and Ford Rangers. They come here because they love the warm reek of fresh manure, because they know that sheep dung is the best fertilizer and round bales are better than square. They come here because they loved using the curry brush on an irascible sorrel gelding named Chewbacca while the inbred kittens scurried around their aunt’s barn leaking from their distempered sockets. They come here because they like to watch barrel racing and the six horse hitch and The Mane Event. They end up here because maybe being an Olympian didn’t work out and then being a vet didn’t work out and being an admin assistant for the Federation with maybe the possibility of one day travelling to the Olympics looked a lot better than answering phones for a wholesale vacuum company or labelling porn videos according to sex act. They come here because they are horse people, soil people, country people, people with mud on their boots and a saddle that never leaves their back seat and horsehair all over the upholstery. They end up becoming Chads and Denises. They end up writing memos about budget synchronicity and brand revitalization and the toxic culture of tardiness. They end up saying they have a nut allergy and although this has never been confirmed with an actual allergic reaction it means nobody in the office can brush lip or eyelash to walnut or pistachio. These sometime horse people end up spending forty plus per week in a building with fully regulated temperatures, a building where you cannot open the windows because they are barred from the outside, a building where the AC is cranked so high people sit around their cubicles wearing sweaters on a thirty-three-degree July afternoon. These animal lovers spend one hour per week debating the relative merits of allowing employees’ pet dogs into the office, finally deciding no on the grounds of cleanliness and preferential treatment, on the grounds that Meredith’s dog is twice the size of Antoine’s so mess-wise it really wouldn’t be equitable. These people who grew up thriving on hay and muck and trying not to crush the new chicklets while they walked through their dirt-patch spend their lives staring at emails and PowerPoints and using words like “synergy” and “innovation” without ever wondering what they mean.

  The Manager of Jumping appears after lunch, unshaven and smelling of hotel champagne. He blusters over to my cubicle and does not thank me for the mouse wiggling but instead opens his practically lipless mouth and says WTF. He does not say “what the fuck” although that would require fewer syllables. “WTF Trace,” he says, his red face turning redder. His teeth stained with lipstick or strawberries. “What’s that sound?” He points up towards a corner of the ceiling and I’m wordless until I realize I’d been blocking out the scratches and patters of our new ceiling rodent. I tell him it’s the squirrel. It’s been there all day. I explain that the squirrel must’ve burrowed inside somehow after Denise had that tumour-pocked tree removed from the outskirts of the parking lot. The Manager of Jumping does not like this explanation. The Manager of Jumping hisses “vermin” and spends the rest of the afternoon standing on various chairs around the office, using a snow shovel to pry the ceiling panels. No rodents fall from the vent-shaft and the sound does not stop and eventually it’s cake time, either because it’s somebody’s birthday or because tasteless white sugar cake on Fridays seems to be part of the office’s Mandate of Bland.

  How I got the prune ear was a grandmotherly Palomino named Luna. Luna got an infection and lost her eye so my aunt Shelly got her for a couple of haybales and none of the students wanted to ride her so I did. I was thirteen and eager to have my own horse so I led her and worked her and trotted her around the ring. She was easy and docile and although she could barely muster a canter I was thrilled to take care of her.

  One day I startled her putting her summer blanket on and she nipped me. When you’re with a horse you have to make sure it sees you, which means you move gently to the side, where the eyes are. This time I forgot about the bad eye and so I was standing to her left without thinking maybe she didn’t see me. I came around to the right and I must have moved too fast because she flinched and kicked the back wall and then bit me in the ear. Not hard—something between a fear bite and a curiosity bite—but her teeth were hard and my ear went loud and numb and I could feel the blood leaking out, could hear it drizzling onto my shoulder. Strangely I did not run or scream. I did not dart away or call for my aunt because after she bit me I turned to look at Luna and I saw the pupil gaping in her amber eye, saw the fear pulsing in that great brown ocean. I stayed there dripping blood onto the shoulder of my denim jacket and humming to Luna, clucking and shushing and feeding her hairy carrot ends, telling her it was okay, that she was okay. I came up to Shelly blood-soaked with a hand cupped over my ear and we jumped in the Dodge and headed for the hospital. As I sat there watching silos and rotten barns whip by the shock faded and the pain came on loud and dazzling and Shelly told me it was alright, that you’re not a real horse person until you’ve got a nice mean scar.

  Pierce is making stroganoff and drinking bourbon and when I come in to spoon some sauce from the pot he promises not to make the stroking off joke. I tell him that’s cheating and he holds the bourbon in front of my nose the way I like. “Peaty, eh?”

  I ask whether anyone actually knows what peat smells or tastes like or do they get their idea of peat-smell from whiskey. “You know peat is actually what preserved the bog people?”

  Pierce says that’s what he loves about me and turns away to plate the strog. I monopolize dinner conversation, complaining about the em of jay for a while then moving on to the squirrel. Pierce says maybe we can talk about what you like about your job which is really infuriating because isn’t it his duty to listen to me complain, to be on my side.

  No, he says, that’s not his duty. His duty is to keep me grounded and support me. “Seriously, what do you like about your job?”

  “Mat leave. Benefits.”

  “If you hate it so much you can quit.”

  “Quit at seven months pregnant?”

  He tells me sure, tells me he will support me with his freelance editing and his mandolin lessons and we laugh but then he says he’s serious.

  “It’s just sometimes I miss working with actual horses.”

  He says I should do what I love, that we can get a line of credit. I tell him he’s sweet and he’s an idiot and there’s no way I’m quitting my government job.

  After dinner Pierce pours me my three-ounce-glass of merlot. I’m in the third trimester now so I get a three-ounce pour on Wednesday and Friday and sometimes Sunday. I like to drink it after dinner, to relax with it fully sated.

  Pierce stands up to do the dishes and I tell him my theory about the horse people, how my co-workers start out horse people and end up email addicted budget police.

  “Houyhnhnms!” he shouts.


  I stare into the cherry-dark loveliness of my wine and wait for him to continue.

  “Houyhnhnms,” he says again, looking at me like he expects me to know what it means. When I tell him I don’t he goes bright and cackle-shouts, “Gulliver’s Travels?” I shake my head and he runs off towards his office, suds luffing off his fingertips. He returns saying he can’t find the book but I have to read it.

  We watch Planet Earth in bed until Pierce falls asleep and I lie there envying his big unimpeded lungs and trying to remember the great formless emptiness of a good sleep. Eventually I rise to pee and then I clean the glasses off our nightstands, take them into the kitchen and stand there looking into the bourbon bottle.

  I dream the baby staring at me. It is somehow in the womb and looking at me with wideset alien eyes. Its skin is translucent and its head is enormous and despite the ultrasound results it is neither boy nor girl, neither male nor female. It is far too alien for that. It is glowing and womb-pink and see-through and it sits in the uterus cross-legged, the fleshy cave rising up over its head like a throne. There are chicken-scratch scrawlings on the womb wall which in the dream I find a bit unsettling. Like maybe the child is far too smart, like maybe this extraterrestrial baby is chagrined by something, chagrined and scheming. But mostly what I sense is intelligence. Intelligence and curiosity coming through, almost incomprehensible, from the far side of a fleshy barrier that is not the difference between life and death but between life and life.

  SATURDAY

  I wake up with a soft headache and a tender dehydration and the feeling is familiar, the vague shame and depletion of a hangover. It is recognizable and not so bad but then it is acute and awful, more awful than a hangover has ever been. Especially as I rise to pee and feel myself waddling, my hands instinctively reaching for the bulge of my gestating child. The feeling becomes increasingly horrific as I remember Pierce going to bed early, recall sneaking into the kitchen for a second three-ounce Merlot and then a golden twinkle of bourbon, lovely and wretched. And this mnemonic murk sharpens into a poison of guilt as the unborn child in me starts to move and kick then gets what I used to think were hiccups but now think are prison-break-mother-hating rage-punches. I sit on the toilet long after I’ve finished, sit there just feeling this vile riptide of guilt and thinking of my irreparably damaged child, thinking of my baby blooming a spina bifida cauliflower between her shoulder blades. I’m seeing a parade of busted neural tubes, a cackling carousel of helpless mutant babies, feeling weak and hurt and horrid, wanting so badly to share my pain with Pierce but not knowing how.