Sarah Court

by Craig Davidson

  “What sort of crops?”

  “Potatoes,” Matt tells me. “Little coloured ones. Boutique potatoes, they’re called. Funky colours: purple and orange and bright red. All the rage with top-flight chefs.”

  “Rages come and rages go,” says Michelle. “Why not russets? Mashers, bakers, fryers.”

  “But they aren’t niche,” Matt says. “We’ve done better with cattle.”

  “A wonder you didn’t suggest pygmy cows.” Michelle kisses the top of his head. “Bright purple pygmy cows.”

  The hospital room was stark white. Abigail covered in a white sheet.

  Her nipples were hard. I tried to fiddle with the thermostat but the box was locked. As my presence was a breach of the restraining order, I couldn’t ask for help. I smoothed my hands over the sheets. So glossy they could be made from spun glass. Somebody had trimmed her fingernails. Went too deep on the left pinkie: a rime of dried blood traced the enamel.

  The brain is a funny organ and breaks in funny ways. Saberhagen says a damaged brain is an old car in a junkyard that, every once in awhile, you twist the key and it starts. If this was her forever after and she’d never remember anything of who she’d been— pre-September Abby—I could live with it. But some days the chemicals inside her head would surge, old doors would open and she’d be who she once was for an instant. An instant of complete confusion and rage and in the next she’d know nothing. A lingering sense, only, a taste on the back of the tongue.

  A tray sat on the bedside table. Cold minestrone soup. Meatloaf. Lime Jell-O. How long would it sit before being taken away? Would another tray arrive for breakfast? I wanted to find the orderly who’d brought it and throw him down a flight of stairs. Above the tray sat the machines. Beeping, wheezing, heartbeat-spike-emitting machines. If I didn’t leave soon I might find myself fiddling with those dials and knobs. With the easy notion of it.

  Imagine driving home one night. You hit a girl on her bicycle. That broken tapestry of limbs splayed over your hood. The sound of impact with the windshield—would it sound like so much at all? Twisted handlebars in the grille and the ironclad assurance that the existence you’d followed up until that moment was finished. Every overblown ambition harboured. Each foolish hope nursed. Now imagine it again. This time it’s your own girl. Realizing you’d settled behind that wheel the very night she was born. Guided yourself with terrible precision into that collision. No man can live inside his skin after reaching such an understanding. Even a one-celled organism, a planarian worm, would turn itself inside-out.

  I walked down Queenston past a Big Bee convenience near the bus depot. An elderly man in what appeared to be pajamas exited a late-model minivan. He’d left the engine running. I hopped in.

  Thus kicked off my short, silly career as vehicle thief.

  The highway runs north. James and I can’t return to the houseboat. I don’t even want to. I’m nearly where I need to be, anyway.

  Dawn rises over tailback hills. I drive into the town of Peterborough. A bakery’s just opening on the main drag. I go in, buy coffees and rolls hot from the oven. James and I sit on the hood of the Cadillac. Matilda lays on the passenger seat. Cone-wrapped head lolling in the footwell. A pickup passes, its bed full of itinerant workers in snowmobile suits. The bus station lot lights snap off, halogen coils dimming inside their plastic shells as the sun breaks over the squat block of a Woolco store.

  “Where now?”

  “Back south,” James says. “I got a place. Niagara Falls. U.S. side. For tax purposes.”

  “To do what?”

  “I’m thinking—this may sound crazy—about raising earthworms. It’s a messy enterprise,” he admits, “but they’re gold. Not just for fishing: it’s the composting wave I’ll ride. Easy to start a worm farm. Couple kiddie pools, nightcrawlers, off you go. But you need quality worms. Good bloodlines.”

  “Worms have those?”

  “I’ve been told so.”

  “Well . . . I got to go, James.”

  For whatever reason he’s confused. As if he’d expected me to tag along the rest of his life. The sun carries over the low-rise architecture of this central Ontario town. In the Cadillac’s windshield stand James and myself, reflected. James with his bruised face, me with my scabby scalp. Matilda stares through the glass. With the cone round her head brightened by the sun she looks like the bulb in a car headlamp.

  I catch a cab at the bus terminal. It heads to the destination I’d been given over the phone by a man with a Robert Goulet voice. Lakefield Research Centre. Some kind of metallurgy lab. It takes about an hour. I doze. I give the cabbie everything I’ve got left on me—everything in my pockets. Cash, half a pack of gum, a Subway Club card one punch-hole shy of a free footlong. He takes it all gratefully enough.

  Lakefield is painted that industrial lime shade common in the seventies. Inside are the partially lit hallways, gypsum floors, and whitewashed concrete walls of any elementary school. I walk down halls, finding nobody, nothing but the hum of machinery through the walls. I come upon a chair and man sitting in it. Old, in a janitor’s outfit. I tell him who I am and he nods. I follow him down another hallway, up a flight of stairs. The reek of ozone. A green-tiled room. Riveted metal floors. Military cot. I lie upon it and fall into an exhausted sleep and awake to face my butcher.

  Starling looks not bad, considering. Bandaged up, everything safety-pinned in place. He sits awkwardly in a wooden chair backgrounded by a man I find familiar. Starling sniffles. The other man wipes his nose with a Kleenex, which he balls and tucks up his sleeve as an old biddy would.

  “The man’s dog?”

  “Tough dog.”

  “Tough,” Starlings agrees.

  “So who cuts—you?”

  “I’m not a professional,” Starling tells me. “Or a gifted amateur. Only The Middle. Your organs are point A. Their destinations point C. They meet through me. We have surgeons. Not, mind you, the best this world has to offer.”

  “You can cut me to rags and throw my body to the dogs. But my eyes . . .”

  “Your daughter,” says Starling. “You love her? You must. There will be various handler’s fees,” he explains. “Other miscellaneous expenses. Whatever’s left will be deposited into your account.”

  I brace my arms on the cot’s edge. “How much do you figure I’m worth?”

  “Depends how much you’re needed. By whom.”

  “There’ll be some kind of . . . gas?”

  “We’re businesspeople, not animals. Go shower.”

  A shower room as I remember from high school. Steel colonnades stretching ceiling to floor. Nozzles strung round. I strip down and twist the knob.

  She will see life as an eternal ten-year-old. The worst fate in the world? Hardly. That this is the most cowardly plan of action can hardly be denied. History is crowded with fathers who’ve fled blood debts. I could try to pay back in increments what I stole. In moments and hours and days. Fifty years paying back what is essentially un-repayable. But I’m not that man. Never possessed that strength. Not for one instant in my existence.

  It hurts to deny my daughter her rage. Hurts she cannot scream it into my face. Direct the cold barrel of that hatred at me. Melt the flesh off my bones. My deepest frustration finds itself here. Since anyone can be a father, can’t they? Half the human race. Takes nothing but to find a woman, tell her you love her—or love her truly, if you have that in you. Fatherhood follows. Yet nothing is so easy. I do love my daughter but this much is true: love is a sickness. Some kind of pathogen existing above all explanation.

  A peculiar darkness falls through the casement window—a cold hole opening in the centre of the sun—as droplets fall, silver freckles striking my skin. No noise at all. The water. My heartbeat. That cold widening spot in the sun.

  Black Box: Fletcher Burger.

  The plane is afflicted with vehicular leprosy. Exterior panels flake off, rivets bursting, plates of steel carried off in the jet stream. Grip fast the yoke as it sh
immies in my hands. I could let go but to this final end I am selfish. The life you cling to most dearly, worthwhile or not, is your own.

  Guilt crushes you into shapes unrecognizable. Hate to sound weak of will but things happen. They happen. And yet I am truly quite sorry.

  I pull back on the yoke. The line in the sky separating earth from sky, that sketchy pastel scrim of blue, gives way to darkness. The plane comes apart. As do I. My hands blacken. Whiteness of knuckle through charred skin. My eyes catch fire in a green flash the way phosphorous flares burn in the colours of their dyeing.

  How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and pray it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we’d rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.

  BLACK CARD

  NOSFERATU, MY SON

  First, let me tell you about my boy. Dylan. Great kid. The greatest.

  He’s chubby. Chubby-edging-fat. I’ve always been thin and my wife, ex-wife, she’s trim as a willow switch. The charitable genes we inherited reversed polarities in him. Now I don’t mind that he’s chubby but I don’t know what it’s like to be chubby so I’m a stranger to his struggles. My dad suggests a dietician. Too Hollywood. A ten-year-old with a dietician. What next—a PR flack?

  Other week he found a grocery bag full of used work gloves at a building site. Sweat encrusted. Worn through at the fingertips. The sheer uniformity— gloves! a humongous bagful!—must have intrigued him. Then days ago he came home with a trash sack slung over his shoulder. Chewing on a Snickers. Two questions, son of mine: why did you pick up that charming sack of trash and where’d you get the candy? His answer: he discovered the candy in the sack, which, naturally, was why he picked it up. Its contents: twenty-odd pounds of chocolate. We drove to the site of his gold rush. The home’s owner, the manager of Haig Bowl skating rink’s concession stand, told me that yes, he’d pitched chocolate bars past their best-before date. They wouldn’t kill anyone. I let Dylan keep five. A finders fee. On the drive home a sugar rush gave rise to one of my son’s parented Deep Thoughts:

  “Daddy, would a cloned human being have a soul?”

  “Sure, Dill. Why not.”

  One vivid-as-hell imagination. He’s been a stegosaurus, a fusion-engineered-saber-toothedrattlesnake (with stinging nettle skin), gas vapour from a 1973 Gran Torino, an atomic mummy, both a llama and an alpaca as apparently there’s a difference. For days he’ll speak in this spur-of-the-moment dialect: “Fitzoey blib-blab hadoo! Wibble-wabble?” His whimsy gave birth to the Phantoids: aliens the size of atoms who colonized a marshmallow he carried in a shoe box. When the marshmallow went stale he told me the Phantoids returned to their home world.

  “Wasn’t the marshmallow their world?” “They were on vacation.”

  “Budget travellers, those Phantoids.”

  You’ve got to carefully monitor his stimuli or he’ll pick up a contact high that lasts weeks. It can be a bit embarrassing, as when he overheard a private conversation between his mother and I and created a jazzy new superhero: Captain Pap Smear. For a minor eternity he shouted, in basso profundo voice, “This sounds like a job for Captain Pap Smear!” and “He seeks out evil and smears it!” Or during his Night Stalker phase, where he deployed his skills at sneaking about—he tiptoes like Baryshnikov!—to catch my wife and I in flagrante delicto. He’d popped up at the end of our bed with a cry of “YeahHA!” but his brow beetled with perplexity so I’d leapt up chuckling “Ho ho ho!”, girding my hips with a sheet to escort him back to bed.

  Lately he’s been a vampire. A manageable fixation. Before that it was No Bone Boy. That incarnation saw him lounging in sloppy poses over sofa arms. Splay-armed on the floor.

  “Dinner’s on, Dill.”

  “Sure am hungry, Daddy, but”—big sigh—“no bones.”

  I’d drag him into the kitchen. Perch him in a chair like a muppet. Head flat on the table.

  “Having a no-boned son sucks, huh?”

  “Are the doctors working on those space-age titanium bones?”

  “Around the clock.”

  Next he would slide, sans bones, onto the linoleum. I mean, my kid is method.

  The phone call comes at three a.m. Flights booked: Hamilton to JFK onto Russia. From there by charter to the Sea of Okhotsk. I call Abby.

  “It’s Nick,” I whisper. “Sorry, sorry. Alright I bring Dylan over?”

  “Mrrrmffah.”

  I pop a Black Cat caffeine pill. Grab a pre-packed duffel. On into Dylan’s room.

  “Dill, gotta get up.”

  His eyes crack. A stale drool smell wafts off his pillow.

  “I’m taking you to Abby’s.”

  “Can’t I stay with Mom?”

  “Mom’s still settling in up in Toronto.”

  He pulls his planet-patterned covers up, squashing Jupiter upon the curve of his chin. “No time for this, buckaroo. Either Abby or grandpa.”

  That does it. I bundle him into the car with his “Emergency Away-From-Home Kit”: locomotive to his Lionel train set, a book: Lizards of the Gobi Desert, packets of banana-flavoured Carnation Instant Breakfast which he takes blended with one real banana.

  I drive Ontario Street past the GM plant and its stargazer’s constellation of security lamps. Chase a yellow through the intersection of Louth past the Hotel Dieu hospital. A man sits on an ambulance bumper. Bloody towel pressed to his head smoking a cigarette. St. Paul a cold strip hammered flat between shopfronts. Men in snowmobile suits with frostburnt fingers black as cigar butts. Dylan’s touching the inside of his wrist with two fingers.

  “What are you up to?”

  “Checking my pulse. It’s the most reliable indicator of bodily health.”

  Russia. Goddamn. Okhotsk? Sound you’d make choking on a fishbone. These gigs usually go a day or two. Any longer I’ll have to buy local vestments. Waddling about in a bearskin parka, a babushka, one of those furry too-big KGB caps.

  Abby musters a groggy smile when we arrive. Boxers and a MET-RX tee shirt. Corded legs and calves a-trickle with veins.

  “Hey, troublemaker,” she says to Dylan in his one-piece pajamas with padded booties; I think he’s too old for them, but the fact they’re manufactured in his size makes this hard to argue.

  I drive to the airport and check in. Doze with the pocketed lights of Hamilton burning through the airplane window. Awake to a New York dawn. Layover in JFK. Commuters shuffling under halogens that accord us the look of zombies cooling our heels between takes of a grade-Z horror flick. No jetsetters. Jetlagged middle-of-the-roaders. Economy-classers. Shreds of airline-peanut foil under our fingernails. We, the tribe of semis: semi-handsome, semiintellectual, semi-successful, semi-leisure class, semi-happy, semi-alive. Half lifers.

  I’m in what a headshrinker might call “a fragile state of mind.” Not so much I cannot cope, not so much I’d abdicate my responsibilities, but . . . yeah. Fragile. There’s this commercial on TV a lot these days. For the Alzheimer’s Society. Maybe you’ve seen it? This old fellow in a house full of lemons. Shelves, the floor, fridge chockablock. He can’t remember he’d already bought them, see? Buys more and more. This poor old man in a house full of lemons. Playing solitaire. It wrecks me. Takes precious little, so suddenly. The ass-end of Christopher Cross’s “Sailing” on an easy-listening station. The smell of burning leaves. I’m standing there, welling up, asking myself: What the hell’s this all about?

  A pair of leggy foreign girls—German tennis players to take a wild stab—breeze past. Young and somehow more attractive for their harried-ness: a woman-on-the-go quality. Speaking in exotic tongues. Hair done up invitingly. I try on a smile but catch my profile in a chain pizzeria’s mirrored facade and the sight—punch-squashed nose, cauliflower ears: reminders of a childhood in the ring—causes the smile to rot on my face. I can’t even summon the enthusiasm to play the gay divorcée.

  Auf Wiedersehen, ladies.


  The next flight finds me stranded between beefy members of the beleaguered proletariat. A breakfast omelette resembles novelty vomit. My stomach curdles over the vast grey Atlantic.

  I work for American Express. Caretaker for Centurion holders. The Black Card.

  It began as an urban myth: American Express distributed a card with which you could buy anything to the limit of the company’s 20.87 billion dollar worth. A decommissioned battleship or gently used space shuttle. But the card never existed. Until one of the bigwigs at head office said, “Why not?” The Centurion is limited to 4,000 clients worldwide. Member fee: $350,000.

  You can look at me as a concierge. A perk built into the card’s exorbitant fees. Occasionally this reduces me to professional nose-wiper. I’m sent to monitor peculiar purchases. If a client’s aiming to buy a cruise missile, I have to say: nix.

  Clients do fall from Centurion status. In those cases we do as with any deadbeat: cut their card up. I cut up Michael Jackson’s, if you can believe it. He was in Europe. We charted his egress by the locations of each gobsmacking purchase. Three Qing Dynasty vases ($750,000 apiece) at a Glasgow antiques emporium. The 1.5-ton chandelier from the Belfast Grand Opera House auctioned at Sotheby’s Helsinki. An attempted purchase of Marienburg castle, a deal nearly shepherded to fruition by Duke Philip von Wuerttemberg—that man knew a pigeon when he saw one—occasioned my dispatch. I tracked Jackson to a hotel room in Budapest. Ushered past mucketymucks and a diaper-clad chimp before reaching the man himself. Who was a mess. Face falling off the put-upon bones of his skull. “Big fan,” I told him awkwardly, snipping his card in half. “My first slow dance was to ‘Baby Be Mine.’”

  That damn chimp scratched my arms all to hell. Novosibirsk airport holds the eye-bruising shade of a black market kidney. Red, arterial red, steak-tartare-served-on-a-stop-sign red stretching everywhere. The arcade past Customs consists of four Ms. Pacmans. Three of the four are busted. The man waiting at the luggage carousel—check that, luggage disgorger: scuffed tongue of a conveyor belt drooling suitcases into a metal basin—jabs a squared-off finger at the pocket he assumes I keep my passport in.