Blood and Chrysanthemums

by Nancy Baker

  “Couple of times on the snowpatch up on Norquay. You?”

  “Not yet.” The bell over the door rang and two young men tumbled in, talking enthusiastically. To Mark’s relief, Steve seemed to know them and before long he was involved in showing them the latest snowboards. Mark sauntered casually back to the other side of the store and looked at the skis.

  Ardeth had a T-shirt draped over her arm and was holding another up contemplatively. Mark shifted sideways a little to see the slogan: “Fear not—you can only die once.”

  “Nice sentiment,” he said and she glanced up sharply, eyes narrower and harder than he remembered. “I’m Mark Frye. We met the other night at the gym.” She seemed to recognize him then and her face relaxed, eyes losing some of their wary look. Her lower lip was distractingly full and red. He tried very hard not to notice. “Words to live by?” He caught the faint ghost of a smile, a quirk of the lips that seemed both amused and bitter.

  “The first part’s a reminder to myself,” she admitted. “And the second part isn’t true.” Then she was sidling by him to the cash register. Steve dragged himself away from the snowboards to take her money and shoot Mark a smirk that suggested he knew exactly what “store inventory” Mark was really interested in.

  Mark managed to feign indifference as Ardeth collected her change, then moved to open the door for her and follow her out. She gave him a brief smile of thanks but didn’t seem inclined to do any more as they approached the street. Say something, say anything, you idiot, a voice inside him wailed. Before she walks away again.

  Then, in a rush of desperate inspiration, it came to him. “I’ve been thinking about your proble. . . . you know, the sun allergy thing.” She paused and looked at him and he could see reluctant curiosity in her gaze. “I’m on a break from work but I’ve got a few minutes. I was just going to get a coffee. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll tell you about it.”

  “All right,” she said after a long moment. “Thanks.”

  Mark breath a small prayer of relief—and a larger one that whatever god protected mountaineers and fools would help him figure out an answer to her problem before their coffee got cold.

  In the end, he was the only one with coffee as they settled into chairs at a corner table. And he had an answer.

  “There are some climbs on the other side of Tunnel Mountain. They’re in shadows by four or five o’clock these days and dark by about seven. You could do most of them by the time it got really dark.” Stirred by sudden enthusiasm, he dug a pen out of his jacket pocket, jumped up to beg a sheet of paper from the bemused cashier and began to sketch the mountain. “This is the southwest corner here and over here’s the southeast.” His pen drew the long lump of the mountain and added a few tiny trees on top. “Here at the southwest are the Gonda routes, Le Soulier and Mark One. The Gonda Roof’s an aid route so you probably wouldn’t want to try that one right off. Over here,” his pen settled on the south-east corner, “is Gooseberry. It faces mostly east so it’ll be in shadows by mid-afternoon. It’s a little more complicated.” The other side of the page filled up with lines and scratches designating ledges and roofs, cracks and corners.

  “How hard are these climbs?” Ardeth asked, leaning over to peer at the growing map.

  “Mostly 5.5 to 5.7.”

  “Which means?”

  “Moderate.”

  “As in moderate chance of killing myself?”

  “As in moderately difficult, with very little chance of killing yourself if you do it properly,” he corrected her with a grin.

  “And that means?”

  “With the right gear. And with someone who knows what they’re doing.”

  “Meaning you?” He looked up from the diagrams to meet her eyes.

  “If you’d like,” he said, then found himself holding his breath waiting for her answer. Her eyes dropped back to the cryptic scratches.

  “Could someone do these by moonlight?” He let out his breath and frowned, thinking back to the times he’d done the routes. The best days had been lazy, sunny mornings, when he hadn’t felt like doing anything more ambitious. He tried to transfer the memory to night and replace the backing heat of the sun with the cool light of the moon.

  “It’s possible, especially with a headlamp,” he conceded. “But not recommended.”

  “Could they be done solo?”

  “Most of them have been done that way at one time or another. By people who know what they’re doing. In daylight,” he added, mistrusting her questions, focusing for the first time on why she might be asking them. She couldn’t be intending to solo the damn thing by moonlight? Except that sounded exactly like what she was intending to do. Christ, Mark, what have you done? If this woman ends up at the bottom of the mountain with a broken back, it’ll be your fault. He hadn’t been thinking about what she might do with the information. Christ, he hadn’t been thinking at all. . . . except about her eyes and her distracting lower lip and the fact that it had been a long time since he’d noticed those things in anyone. Was he so desperate to get laid that he was willing to risk her life?

  Before he could absorb the consequences of his impulsive offer, she had folded the map into her purse. She looked at her watch. “I have to go. Thanks for telling me about the climbs.”

  “Ardeth. . . . don’t do it alone. I mean it. If you want to go, call me. I don’t care if it’s noon, or four o’clock or two in the morning. Don’t go alone. Promise me.”

  Her eyes flickered away and he saw her gathering herself to rise. He reached out, caught her fingers and held tight.

  “Promise me.”

  He felt her fingers flex beneath his, then his hand was holding only air. He caught a faint glimpse of something that looked like regret in her eyes, and she was gone.

  Mark sat still, staring after her, coffee cooling forgotten on the table.

  Stupid bastard, he told himself. You had to open your mouth. You had to want to impress her. You had to want her.

  It’s not your fault, part of him insisted. She’s an adult, after all. She can make her own decisions. And she could have found those routes in any guidebook, from anyone. But he had told her. He had been too entranced by her interest, too eager to find some reason to talk to her.

  She didn’t have any idea of the risks involved. She thought it would be like the wall, where you’d actually have to work at it to hurt yourself. On real rock, anything could happen. Real rock broke bones, shattered spines. Real rock could kill.

  Maybe she wouldn’t go after all. But he didn’t believe that. There was something about her interest, her attention to his instructions, that made him certain that she would try it, sooner or later.

  So it is your fault. What are you going to do about it? he challenged himself. What could he do? He didn’t know where she lived or how to get in touch with her. But maybe Sally, who worked for the town, could bend a few government rules and give him a clue. It wasn’t as if Banff was big, for god’s sake. Eventually he would run into her on the street.

  If he didn’t . . .

  He could always go out to the mountain to look for her. Just a quick hike around the trail to see if she was there. Yeah, he thought in self-mockery, just a quick hike of an hour or two in the middle of the night. But the idea exerted a strange appeal. One miserable trek would probably help assuage his guilt and if he found her. . . . well, she could hardly send him away when he’d done all that out of concern for her.

  Of course, even if he did it—for whatever chivalrous or selfish motives—it would probably not be the night she chose, and she’d end up injured, paralyzed of worse.

  Mark sighed and took a sip of coffee, barely noticing that it had gone cold. He looked out the window of the shop and, for the first time in years, prayed for rain.

  Chapter 4

  The photograph was of a scrapyard, rows and rows of rusting cars laid out in the bright noon sun. No shadows so
ftened their stack lines, no grass seemed to grow between their corpses.

  Rozokov looked at Ardeth, who was studying the photograph as if it held some desperately sought secret. After a moment, her mouth twisted a little and she looked at him. “What do you think?” she asked.

  “Interesting,” he said and then smiled, remembering retreating to that noncommittal word in a hundred galleries and salons over the last five hundred years.

  “I like it,” Ardeth announced. “I’m sure that I’m missing some important political or aesthetic point but I like it.” They moved on, pausing by the next photograph. The presence of the Banff Centre for the Fine Arts, overlooking the town from the flank of Tunnel Mountain, meant that the town had access to a surprising diversity of cultural activities. They had already been to a chamber music recital here—his choice, Rozokov acknowledged. The photography exhibit was Ardeth’s selection.

  “Now this is more to my taste,” he commented. It was a black-and-white study of female nude, the light and shadow turning the flesh into a sculptural arrangement of smooth shapes.

  “It figures. Philistine.”

  “True enough. I am an old man. I have old-fashioned tastes.”

  She laughed and tucked her arm through his. “Did you know any famous artists?”

  “I met Delacroix in Paris once. One of my lovers, a wealthy Florentine widow, wished to commission Cellini to do a bust of me. I declined.” He kept his voice light and jesting, though none of the gallery’s other guests were standing near them.

  “Are there any pictures of you?”

  “There was a small portrait, by an artist of no particular fame. It was done before I changed. It hung in the library of my old home.” He could barely remember it now, just a faint vision of a thin, serious face over a black scholar’s gown. “I have avoided such temptations. It is not wise to leave so concrete a visual record.”

  “No photographs then? Nothing from the nineteenth century, with a frock coat and mutton chop whiskers?”

  “I was not even certain I could be captured on film until . . . this century,” he finished delicately, having no desire to stir in either of them the memory of the snuff films they had forced him to participate in and her to watch. “And I could hardly grow mutton chop whiskers even if I wished to adopt such a fashion.”

  “For which I’m very grateful,” Ardeth said and they paused at the next photograph. A family posed in front of a large car, parked before a tidy suburban house. The photograph seemed to be old and in black-and-white, but had been coloured in bright hues by the artist. It was set in a gilded frame of handmade roughness. The frame was decorated by strange shapes. Ardeth laughed and Rozokov glanced at her.

  “I made a frame like that when I was in public school.”

  “What are those off shapes?”

  “Elbow macaroni sprayed with gold paint. You see the things you were spared by not attending school here.”

  “And the point of the photograph?”

  “Ironic comment on the suburban dream, I would guess. The photograph itself looks like it’s from the 1950s, which some people persist in believing was the pinnacle of civilization.”

  “The good old days,” he quoted, “I have heard the lament many times. It seems human nature to look back to some lost golden era, whether it be Greece or Rome or the 1950s.”

  “Golden eras that never existed,” Ardeth pointed out.

  “No. I cannot speak for Greece or Rome or even the 1950s, but I can assure you that many times I have had to hold my tongue while some self-proclaimed expert described in glowing terms a time I knew from experience was harsh, plague-ridden and violent.”

  “What about the present time?”

  “It is not the future that was predicted, that is true. But I am not certain that this time’s problems are any worse than those of the past. The only thing that can be said in the past’s favour is that the population was much smaller and whatever ugliness it created did not touch the rest of the world so greatly.”

  “And the future?” Ardeth asked and Rozokov looked at her.

  “We must do what we can to guess what will happen, for our own safety. Beyond that, I make no prophecies.” He answered the impersonal question he willed himself to hear. The fate of the world he could discuss with equanimity. Their own future was another matter entirely. He was grateful when they moved on to the next photograph, a simple image of the mountains that sparked no disturbing discussions.

  As they moved, Rozokov saw Ardeth glance around at the gallery’s other visitors. He followed her gaze, taking in the scattered groups of people clustered around the room. An unusual number seemed to favour black clothing and he noted the unnatural copper colour of one woman’s hair and multiple earrings dangling from another’s earlobe. Ardeth said nothing but he felt some tension in her dissolve a little, as if she no longer feared being noticed.

  As if anyone could fail to notice her, he thought, watching as she stepped closer to study the photograph before them. He knew that she had never believed herself to be attractive and that belief coloured her transformation of herself after her rebirth. She was more striking now, perhaps, with her midnight hair and alabaster skin. But when he thought of her, it was most often as she had been when they were held captive together; her long fair hair tangled and dirty, her face streaked with dust and the traces of her tears. When he had seen her clearly for the first time, in the light of his returned sanity and self-awareness, he had thought she was unutterably beautiful.

  When she stepped back, he put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her, not caring at all if anyone should notice.

  After they had completed their tour of the exhibition, they found the path that led back down to the town. Clouds turned the sky above them into a featureless darkness and Rozokov acknowledged that he would do no stargazing tonight. Still, there was a stack of astronomy books acquired from the local library sitting by his chair in the apartment. There were worse ways to spend the night, he thought, than reading in companionable silence.

  Still, there were things to attend to before they sought the quiet of their rooms. It took more than an hour of searching to locate a lone elk, and midnight was approaching by the time they returned to the apartment.

  When Rozokov looked up from his book, it was nearing four a.m. Ardeth’s chair was empty and the light in the tiny bathroom was on. He rose and went to the open doorway, leaning against the frame. She was standing before the spotted mirror, scissors in hand, trimming the fall of her bangs. She was wearing only a white T-shirt that hung to her thighs.

  “I’m very glad that hair grows slowly when you’re dead,” she observed, sparing him a quick smile before returning to her contemplation of her hair. “Otherwise I’d have a serious case of blonde roots by now.” She sighed, rumpled her bangs up from their sharp, if uneven, line and looked at him again.

  “You look beautiful.”

  “Flatterer.” She glanced back at the mirror and then paused, seeming to focus on her reflection for a long moment.

  “I bought you a present the other day,” she said abruptly. “Hang on and I’ll get it.”

  She slid by him and he stepped into the bathroom to look at his own reflection in the mirror. He was rather glad the old mythology was not true; he much preferred to be able to tell how he looked even if he did not give it much thought most of the time. He considered his reflection for a moment. He was hardly the dandy he had been, one hundred and fifty years ago in Paris, but he was not the dirty, tangled-haired street person he had pretended to be in Toronto either. Still, he should perhaps trim his own grey hair, lest its length become too noticeable.

  Ardeth slithered back into the space behind him and held out a bundle of black cloth. Rozokov took it and shook it out. He stared at the words printed in white in momentary bewilderment. “Do you like it? I wasn’t sure if you would, so I didn’t give it to you earlier,” she explained, worry edging
her voice, and he laughed, surprised that she would be so concerned.

  “Yes. ‘Dead People Are Cool.’ I do like it.” He did, despite the fact that he was surprised that she would spend some of their meager cache of money on something as frivolous as a sloganed shirt. He nearly asked her why she had bought it, but something in her bright smile left the question stillborn in his through. Perhaps it was only another kind of escape.

  “Good. Now sit down and I’ll give you a trim too. You’re looking a little shaggy.”

  “And I will look less so when you are done?”

  “I realise it’s not my forte . . . but I’m cheap,” she pointed out, and he sat down on the edge of the bathtub and let her clip away at the hair hanging past his ears and brows. Her own T-shirt said something, he noticed. “Fear not—you only die once.” The irony of it made him shiver suddenly and wonder why she had bought it.

  He put his hands on her hips and looked up at her face. The white T-shirt seemed very thin; he could see the sharp points of her nipples beneath the cloth. Her gaze shifted to meet his but her eyes were shadowed by the fall of her hair and he could not read whatever emotion lay there. She put aside the scissors and slid her fingers through his hair.

  “Dead people are cool,” she whispered.

  “We are, aren’t we,” he agreed softly and stood up into her kiss and her weight and the arms and legs she wrapped around him as he carried her into the bedroom, and they did their best to prove that the slogans were more than just words, that dead people did not have to fear.

  That dead people were enough for them.

  Chapter 5

  It was dark out.

  Lisa Takara felt her neck muscles throb with sudden tension as a chill fingered her spine. After all her resolutions, all her careful planning . . . it was dark out.

  The department meeting had run late, then she’d had to review some experiment results prior to tomorrow’s class and somehow the hours had gone and the night had come.