Peninsula Sinking

by David Huebert

  This is the quiet perversity looping through Gavin’s mind as he watches Rubix drop a drool-slathered frisbee at his feet. This is the societal hypocrisy that has caused the first real disagreement between Gavin and Zara.

  Zara. The vegan with optic heterochromia who works the counter at the neighbourhood microbrew and volunteers at the Ecology Network. Zara who was born in Mumbai and has never been back but has vowed to take Gavin there one day to watch cricket and swim with sea turtles and sip tea under whispering fronds. Zara who did not turn Gavin’s life around but pushed it into a delirious cartwheel of pleasure and something larger. Zara who said yes he should go to cooking school at NSCC and no he was not too old to start a new career. Zara who read his chapbook of poems about teeth decomposing in Coke cans and said she liked their gothic ecstasies, said they read like the music of blood-drunk mosquitoes and what better compliment could she have given? Zara with one blue eye and one green and Gavin never able to say which was more ravishing against the opiate dusk of her skin. Zara the woman who is adamant about the benefits of neutering their dog.

  Gavin stoops to grab that drool-slick disc as Hermione the red-coated duck toller takes a vigorous interest in Ezra’s crotch. He tosses the frisbee and watches Rubix blast across the pitch while Hermione continues to sniff Ezra’s privates, tail thwacking Gavin’s shins. Gavin knows Hermione was spayed last April but still he follows protocol—tugs Ezra away and tells Hermione’s person that Ezra hasn’t been neutered yet, prompting a grimace from that toqued barista. Kijiji trees a squirrel and Ezra charges over to howl up at the quivering tuft of russet. Gavin watches Ezra leap at the tree, watches that gangly puppy coil and spring and wonders how it happened—when did such joy become available through a body other than his own?

  Zara is home brewing peppermint tea and as they say hello he wills the glow of this woman standing over the stove they share to seep through him. She pecks his cheek and he says he missed her and they embrace like nothing is wrong. She pours him tea and puts peanut butter in a Kong for Ezra. Much as he wants everything to be resolved between them Gavin finds himself saying about Hermione’s person. Saying who does she think she is and all this bourgeois nuclear dog family bullshit. Zara scoffs and they glitch into the argument that has come to define them. Gavin says about the banality, says it is just so perverse to have this nation of so-called pet lovers scraping out their companion animals like Halloween pumpkins.

  Zara mentions the safety, the docility, the trainability.

  They throw cancers back and forth.

  Gavin adds weight gain, surgery complications, the cone.

  “Would you feel the same if it was a female?”

  “Of course,” Gavin lies. He has weighed this question many times and remains deeply, shamefully unsure.

  “How much of your life are you willing to spend on these same words, this same conversation?”

  “A lot, I hope.” He tries to be cute but sounds petulant. Meaning Zara heads to the bathroom to take a triumphant shower. Gavin picks up his collected Baudelaire and stares at a poem for a long time, not turning the page. Zara sings a Springsteen tune into the shower head and the notes come to Gavin thick and muddled through the bathroom wall.

  They were sixteen and they’d set out swimming in the harbour—Theo and Gavin and Drew. Sixteen and swimming in that sewage-slick elbow of the Atlantic and they knew it wasn’t safe but the mushrooms did not care for prohibitions, did not fear bacteria, did not respect sanitation. Swimming among the tiny jellyfish and the tampon applicators, among the unrecorded suicides and the debris of 1917. They’d set out together but soon they were alone, each boy on his own journey through water and body and mind. Drew and Theo disappeared and Gavin was not concerned with them. The water moved over him and each slither was an undreamt dermal rhapsody. He swam through the black, swam beneath the surface and found to his pleasure that he had no need for air. Through the darkness he saw a hulking shadow, gnarled and round.

  Gavin and Zara met on a rideshare to Montreal. He’d borrowed his mother’s car to go to there for the launch of his poetry chapbook, Agricola Dentata, and he didn’t want to do the twelve-hour drive alone. His ad got a few responses and of course he chose the woman’s name and when she climbed in the car wearing a romper that showed the floral tattoos stitched up her thighs he felt sleazy and fearful and awed. There was traffic on Robie Street and Gavin brought up the city’s need for light rail but Zara said that was what she loved about the place, that they were stuck on this peninsula within a peninsula so the city couldn’t possibly get any bigger. He said she was right, said the only way to build was up but the people wouldn’t abide that because they didn’t want to ruin the view from Citadel Hill.

  “Fucking perfect!” she laughed. “This place is so brilliantly backward.”

  Zara was from Halifax and had gone to St. Pats while Gavin went to QE. She was only a year younger but they somehow knew none of the same people—she’d been in French immersion and the high school musical while he was drinking Colt Forty-Five and skateboarding poorly and secretly writing blankverse sonnets about fingernail clippings.

  Dropping her in Mile End he wanted to ask for her number but only managed to blurt about the poetry launch. She said “that could be cool” and slid out of the car and he assumed he’d never see her again until he was two poems deep in the dark room full of hostile strangers. She strode in with her shoulder bandaged from a fresh tattoo and laughed with the bartender in the middle of his poem. Laughed and flicked back her hair and became a streak of neon in a sepia photo. After his set he bought her a cider and as they chatted their mouths and knees drew closer and closer. When he went to the bathroom she crept up behind him at the sink and hissed “whatever you want” into his neck but another poet walked in and they stumbled out giggling.

  They met Zara’s friends at a dangerously packed bar on the Plateau. Zara found a storeroom and thieved two six packs of Stella, stashing the beer in the corner where the two of them kissed and rubbed thighs and drank free until close. They stumbled home with five or six of Zara’s Blundstone-wearing girlfriends, all of whom were vocally unimpressed by Gavin’s skate shoes and straight-leg jeans. Gavin peed in an alley and got a ticket from a police officer in camo shorts and when he looked up Zara and her friends were gone.

  He drove home the next day hungover and cursing himself for not getting her number. Lying in his bed in Halifax he told himself not to but finally got up at three in the morning and emailed her. She wrote back a single, unpunctuated line—“what’s your address?” Three days later she showed up with a growler of IPA and a toothbrush and she hadn’t left since.

  Gavin goes for post-work drinks with Theo and Drew, who won’t stop swiping his phone. Drew is bragging that he never swipes left and using words like “Tinderella” and Gavin is wondering how this culture can believe it is the dogs of the world who need their sexuality adjusted. Gavin starts a conversation about turning thirty, how people suddenly stop looking at you as if you were always about to throw a stink bomb. Drew says girls love thirty-year-old guys and points to the grey streak in his lumberjack beard and Gavin can’t tell how serious he is. Theo snorts but he is not there, he has drifted. He’s been euphoric since Corrine got a job at Halifax Grammar and they moved back to town but tonight he seems punctured. He says something about how we’re all nothing but deteriorating bodies and the comment looms in the acrid bar air.

  They order tequilas and Gavin asks the waiter for a lemon. Drew scoffs “training wheels” and Gavin thinks as he often has about how dogs are like practise children. All the thirtyish couples he knows who didn’t want or couldn’t afford or couldn’t commit to human children got dogs instead, their nurturing instincts channelled into doggy daycares and doggy spas and doggy treats. Gavin thinks that a dog might be better than a kid anyway because it never grows up, never turns teenage and gets caught shoplifting. Never totals the car. A dog never winds up s
taggering across streets heedless of lights and horns and intersections, face scaled with meth sores.

  But dogs come with their own set of problems. Such as the one facing him now as these three old friends sit together ignoring each other at a table. Three faces lit by the ionic cosmos of Drew’s phone. Gavin is considering how silence is alright between old friends, how silence between long-time pals is even kind of pleasant, when Theo blurts the news about his mother. No warning whatever and then the words “early onset” and Drew and Gavin sitting there in the dark, gulping. Drew asks how could this have happened and Theo shrugs and downs his beer and Gavin finds himself saying it’s okay. Saying it’s okay and not believing it and thinking of Nancy, cosmic Nancy, her tanned calves in platform sandals just two summers ago at Theo’s wedding. How could a body that sleek and sure ever break down? He is thinking of Nancy in all her ageless splendour and putting a hand on Theo’s shoulder and saying it will be fine, these things take time, it will be slow, very slow.

  Theo says no. It’s fast. Last week she got lost on Barrington and parked in front of the house on Morris where she hasn’t lived for fifteen years. She sat there for five hours and missed two work meetings before she called anyone. Gavin cups his friend’s hands and Theo gives in to a long silent sob and they are three thirty-year-old men sitting in a dark bar with eyes wet and throats burning, helpless against the gnaw of decay.

  Gavin and Zara and Ezra are sitting in bed watching a documentary about Margaret Howe, a British researcher who lived in a place called “The Dolphin House” in the 1960s. Ezra lies on Zara’s belly, legs splayed like a frog’s, grinding his nose into whatever hand he can reach until the head-scratch continues. The Dolphin House was run by a hippy scientist named John Lilly who performed experiments such as injecting dolphins with LSD. Howe’s job was teaching English to a bottlenose named Peter. The research ended with Peter moving to a tiny, dark, half-septic pool in Miami and choosing to simply stop breathing, to descend to the bottom of that toxic, lightless pool as the air seeped out of him. But before that there were the dolphin hand jobs. A vet mentions that dolphins often prefer humans to their own kind and implies that Peter was in love with Howe. Howe herself is strangely forthcoming about the fact that, when his desire got in the way of her research, she satisfied Peter manually.

  After the film, Zara tells Gavin about the time she swam with dolphins. Her family went to a resort in Mexico and she spent the days sunbathing and playing ping pong with a boy from Rhode Island whose mouth was a snare of braces. She and her sister begged until her mother took them on the overpriced excursion and when they got there it deadened something in her. A small pool and a smell like sewage and cheap old fish. Dolphins chirping in that tiny stinking pool and she knew it was ridiculous but nonetheless felt they were asking her personally for help. She’d once seen a National Geographic video with dolphins swimming wild off the coast of Florida. Racing fast through the wide and blameless blue and leaping out of the water before darting back inand she didn’t know much about dolphins but as she watched them in that pool chattering for food she knew it was wrong. The whole thing was wrong.

  Though Gavin wants to, he doesn’t say who are we to be the arbiters of animal life.

  They lie together in silence for too long and then Zara says, “We’re okay, right?” Her eyes pulse like minute oceans, one blue and one green. Gavin says of course and believes it. Believes that they are okay, fundamentally. Believes that this crisis will make them closer, the way collagen thickens a broken bone.

  Gavin ushers Ezra out of the room and the dog watches plaintive as the door swings closed. As he pulls Zara in, Gavin finds himself thinking of that lonely dog curled on the far side of the door, listening to the squelch and creak of their union. He wonders whether Zara, too, is thinking of Ezra. But he doesn’t ask.

  Gavin’s task is pulling the meat out of the lobsters, putting the big chunks in the fish tray marked “lob fet” and the small stuff in the one marked “lob rolls.” Gavin, who has dreams of starting a vegetarian bistro with Zara and growing their own rosemary and oregano and cucumbers on the patio, is the person the red-faced chef chooses to boil then vivisect these crustaceans. Gavin who is studying cooking at NSCC and works here at minimum wage because of an agreement between the restaurant and the college. Gavin who plans to get his red seal, who has plans to stage in Chicago and Brooklyn. Gavin who has recently mastered garlic-scape pesto, who dreams of tapping his own maples and baptising pistachios in their syrup, who has designed a seven-course meal including onion confit and cayenne mushroom bisque and ending with salted caramel-apple profiteroles. This is the person they elect to drop live animals into boiling water before manually dissecting them, the person who will go home and wash his hands again and again and still be unable to rid his flesh of the chalky aftermath of the bodies he has torn and plucked and mangled.

  With each exoskeleton he slices open and snaps off, with each intact tail he eases out of its sheath, with each pea-greensludge of tomalley he spatulas into the fish tray, Gavin thinks about Ezra. Ezra lying inert under general anaesthetic as a faceless surgeon slices open his scrotum, seeking the small slick planets she is paid to extract.

  Gavin makes an incision and turns a lobster over to tear the tail off, finds the underside coated with a slick beard of eggs. The green-black beads clinging to that pale red tail and Gavin thinking of the lives these creatures might have had. He remembers reading about a lobster that traveled 273 miles between Maine and Nantucket, knows they often walk vast distances to lay their eggs. But these ones would have lived differently, conceived in hatcheries and grown in a suburb of tanks and filtration systems, of regular testing and men with thick gloves. Gavin thinks of all these dark, alien animals growing strong and fat and reproducing and none of them marching freely through the ocean, none of them hunting by night or hiding their eggs in the swaying deep, none of them birthed amid the dark and flowing greens of rock weed, alaria, or kelp.

  Gavin comes to live in thrall of the procedure. His mind a gothic slideshow of veterinarians and gleaming surgical steel. After weeks squinting through screen-blue darkness after Zara goes to bed, he knows the operation so well he thinks he could perform it. He becomes enamoured with the epididymis and the term vas deferens derived from the Latin for “vessel” and “carrying-forth.” This glandular circuit an escape route for sperm, most of which will be released into hostile terrain and die. The term reminds him of the great, churning tides of the Bay of Fundy. The tide and the sperm, the mind and the moon, all of it always carrying forth and this scientist species wanting to mute that motion, to dam the waterways of life. He writes a suite of poems based on this metaphor but it brings him no closer to a decision.

  And the dog ages steadily, the surgery more traumatic by the day.

  Two mixed terrier puppies entered their world and Gavin had no precedent for the way they would bend his life, the way his mind would buckle and zing. They called the smaller one Ezra and the bigger one Pound and when Gavin lay down to read both of them would crawl onto his chest and stare at him, the breath gradually slowing in their tiny puppy lungs. They eventually gave Pound to a friend of Zara’s and it was just the two of them and Ezra, their one-bedroom flat with the screeching bathroom fan and the warped back door with the glitchy lock transformed into a palace of canine glee.

  Gavin had never had dogs as a child and the bond was baffling to him. The trill in his heart when he let Ezra off leash and watched him take off across the grass, front legs barely visible as they scooped and dug into a pinball blur of forward, forward, forward. Gavin was baffled by the joy he took in Ezra’s habit of carrying a stick that was far, far too large for him, bouncing it off the calves of anyone who walked near. And he was astounded by his despair, his bottomless torment the day he watched that pup scamper too close to a fat-wheeled Norco, heard the crunch of busted tailbone and the dog’s awful pinse of betrayal. A sound Ezra had never made before and ho
w could Gavin not hear it as his own failure, stooping to comfort his puppy and wishing that he himself could have licked that frail bone back together.

  And now Gavin has to choose. He has to decide whether or not to wilfully hurt this creature he has done everything possible to protect. He must decide whether or not to extract something vital from this beloved companion’s insides, something that could bring him pleasure and excitement and riveting carnal bliss. Gavin must decide whether to permanently maim this cherished friend, whether to flatten Ezra’s world.

  The shadow was dark and round and when he looked closer he saw it was a mine. A massive underwater mine, the curved and rusted iron slick with a mucous of algae, a gnarled barnacle braille. He thought of Mr. Healy in Social Studies class, talking about the 3,000 unexploded bombs left in the harbour by German U-boats. A chore to remove those explosives and most of them dead by now so the traffic passed through in the hopes that nothing shifted or changed its mind.

  Gavin was drifting towards the rust-gnawed mine when Nancy appeared, beckoning him. Nancy flickering in the watery dark and it was only the two of them there in the liquid emptiness where no pollution or creatures or bombs could harm them. He saw her beckon and without a movement of leg or arm, felt himself drifting closer.

  Gavin gets up early to walk Ezra around the block and then he makes Zara a burrito fried in handfuls of the garlic he plucked last week from the backyard. She roams naked and fat-eyed into the kitchen, cups him from behind as he whips the guacamole. “Smells gorgeous,” she says and he is surprised, as always, that all it takes is the fragrance of bulbs frying in oil to blend this discord of rooms into a home. He says she smells gorgeous and she laughs, filling a mug with the coffee he’s just pressed. She sits down at the table, steam rising from her cup, and Ezra nuzzles into her calf. Gavin wonders, briefly, if the dog is stirred by the sight of this naked woman. He wonders this but does not say anything, does not say anything of the sort as he serves breakfast and sits down to eat. They talk about Gavin’s work, about his fall courses, about the cherry tomatoes finally ripening in the one patch of full sun. Zara asks about Corinne and Theo, suggests that they have them over for dinner. Gavin says they’re doing well and Theo has a gig teaching environmental philosophy at SMU in the fall. He’s reached the middle of a spiel about the student-as-customer model before he realizes that he’s not telling Zara about Nancy. He’s not telling her and he’s not going to and what does this mean? Ezra is rising onto his hind legs to sniff at the table scraps and Gavin knows sharply, darkly, that he will not tell Zara about Nancy or Blue Velvet or the early onset. Instead, he sneaks Ezra a peanut and scratches the dog’s eager ears and thinks about swelling ventricles, a shrinking hippocampus. He smells Ezra’s fetid breath as the dog’s tongue licks the sweat from his neck and thinks of the plaque and tangles in Nancy’s head, the disease boring her brain like sugar mining a tooth.