by Steven Snell
I haven’t figured out why it ended. I used to tell you things, maybe not often enough. I think we told each other things to please each other. I knew what my feelings were … but I never really knew yours. Your words were often different than your actions. I know you cared for me. You could make me feel more real than anybody, more alive, more amazing. Some of the things you did for me – I felt like I was the best at something, the best at being a person. I felt strong and happy. We made better places in our heads than places we could have ever gone together. Maybe that was our problem. Maybe we never really just said where we were coming from, who we were.
And these are the things I should be saying, but instead I sit here with a mug of tea, a mug we bought together and say nothing at all.
“Say something, Shawn.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Why are you doing this? Is this making you feel better?” she asks softly.
“No.”
“Why did you call me?”
There is something in her voice I’ve not heard before. I sit here; she sits somewhere else. Both pressing our phones to our ears. Breathing. Trying not to suffocate. Missing. Reflecting.
It’s lightly snowing outside. I can’t make sense of it. It could be March or September.
7.
It’s morning. I’m standing in front of my bathroom mirror. My pale bruised chest. That crash. That bruised sky sunrise deep contusion. Crashed on my bike last night riding away from words not said to Gabriella. I responded to “why are you calling me” by calling someone else and feeling her body against mine wishing it was Gabriella’s.
I stroke the bruise, my fingers through my chest hair. I look down at it, back to the mirror. No one’s here, I mouth to the mirror. No one is here. I dab last night’s sleep from the corner of my eyes and brush my teeth and splash my face with cold water and run my hands down my hair and leave the bathroom. I put a white shirt on and jeans on and shoes on and a brown wool coat on. I look at myself in the mirror beside the front door. Things fall into order enough. I flick the light switch off, open the door and walk down the hallway and the three flights of stairs and step outside. The sky a grey cloudy oppression. Concrete sidewalk, concrete buildings, concrete sky.
An emptiness in me.
Some inadequacy.
That crash, but something else in my chest. I don’t know what I’m doing, Gabriella; I just don’t know. The bruised sunrise throbs in my sternum. I look left and then right and turn and walk. I pass a planter of dead perennials and real estate keys locked to an unadorned wrought iron fence delineating weeded grass from the sidewalk, cracks in it filled with asphalt, an erred collection of surfaces, a remedial mending. Mending. Mending, something else needs mending.
I walk. My eyes follow the fence and from around a distant corner a girl turns and runs through the cross walk and down the sidewalk towards me, locked into her music. I look at her, she passes me without notice, and her black fitted long-sleeve spandex top and black fitted spandex bottoms run by. She wasn’t attractive anyway.
I walk north, parallel to the weight of buildings spilling west over me. A tree locked in a metal grate, others absent and remaining holes covered with tied down metal lids. I look for cars and jay-walk the street and pass along a chain link fence. Paper coffee cups impaled on the top twists, a row of plotted headstones for temporary labourers standing here on mornings seeking a day’s wage to give them hope of another life or pay to deteriorate those weary things inside of them. Other cups and bottles and daily papers and cigarette butts collect at the bottom. I continue and drag my finger along the fence, a consistent rhythm tapping along the green plastic coated metal. The fence ends and I stop at the corner. Traffic back and forth. Where should I go? It doesn’t matter.
I turn left, stop, take a step backwards and turn, walking, a rudderless sailboat with a broken mast guided by some current underfoot wooing me without purpose, without sovereignty.
A magpie calls. Perched on a parking meter, waiting. I watch it fly away and the sky’s remaining blue disappears and that grey darkens and it starts to rain. Christ, I mutter. I pull up my collar, dig my hands into my front pockets and lower my head. I look at my sneakers. The laces, then the concrete, the spots of years old gum worked down into the grey to become a part of the texture, black blobs of history. I step around a splash of dark brown vomit, a remainder of someone’s passed and lost evening. Was there debauchery and quickly removed clothes and forgotten first names and a memory with hope to forget? Maybe just the leftovers of a homeless person dumpster diving for calories. I don’t know. I keep moving.
A girl in skin tight white shorts and a black thong pulled above and a plunging white shirt exposing pushed up sad skin breasts saunters stumbles staggers in white high heels. I follow her form up and meet nothing eyes. She pulls at her hair. A woman of the night, of lonely men in hotel rooms. A broken dancer without choreography. I look past and shrug up my shoulders. Her more death than life and smelling of cheap cleaning solvents found in cheap hotel rooms. Her gait as though one leg shorter than the other becomes a shuffle and she finds the curb and rocks her heel over it, standing, swaying. I walk past and wonder what sick asshole would continue damaging that, her.
A mail box. Stenciled on it in black spray paint a rat with a stick of dynamite. A fragment of beauty on this feeble street. Beside the box a wood electrical pole with a bark of rusted staples. Tacked to it a poster reads, “Junk City” and a date and location to a reading and a paragraph about this city built so as to be thrown away. Vinyl and stucco and laminate and warrantied concrete. Beneath it and beside it and above it are adverts for dated live performances. I think of the house I grew up in, the cul-de-sac where it sat, where I now work, the store I buy groceries at. What’s permanent? What’s been discarded, pulled apart, built upon, Christian churches over pagan places of worship and homage and belief? Everything falls and comes undone on a long enough timeframe. Gabriella and I came apart. Why? What pulled us apart? Parts. Pre-determined parts. I take a deep breath and sniff and continue wandering without intent without goal end aim aspiration point. Just movement, the bruised sunrise healing towards sunset and disappearance out of my chest.
I pass a construction bin, a Rent-Me sticker pasted to its side. An indecipherable graffiti tag over it and a scrawled ejaculating penis with a phone number under its hairy testicles. Lumber and drywall and plastic garbage bags and branches ring the bin’s edge. I drag my finger along the wet metal and continue, another block, another, another. A few minutes become ten more and cars pass and a bike courier and rain falls lightly from the sky and a person hovers under an umbrella.
An awning extends over my head and the rain ceases for these few paces and beings again. I cough into my elbow. I slide my hand down my hair. I rub my knuckle under my nose and breathe sharply and cough again and return my hands to my pockets.
I walk past a liquor store. There’s a group of people sitting on wheel stops passing and drinking from a slushy cup. All seem indifferent to the rain. They’re dressed in jeans and sweatshirts and ball caps and they laugh and look pissed off or angry or forlorn at the same time. One sits smoking. I share a brief glance with him, as if a zoo animal. The girl pushes one of the boys in some sort of jest. He falls over dramatically and together they laugh. I can’t remember the last time I was drunk, but I remember being high and I don’t want 400 blows anymore.
Across the parking lot past two dumped shopping carts and pickup trucks and tossed or tipped over pylons is a homeless shelter, its front door ajar. On its roof stands a cross lit with Christmas lights, less than two thirds lit up. I walk over the gravel, through the lot, across the street and pass the entrance. Inside in the foyer are employees passing each other and sorting plastic bags of dropped off clothing. They’re urban Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus for a person on the dole needing a button-up shirt, an outgrown cashmere sweater, jeans out of fashion, out of waist size. One of the employees looks at me and nods maybe
recognizing me from the area and I nod back and continue and pass a boarded up construction site with movie posters tacked to the eight-foot-high painted white plywood on the property line. A solemn motionless crane extends up, some amputated beast of capital’s regression or capitalist’s greed.
My pace slows. I’m not much more than shuffling. The weight of gravity. Something hurts. Not just my chest, something. An aching. I move to the curb and sit down. Gabriella and I used to sit on the curb on the edge of the park and watch a group of teenagers play street hockey on warm spring evenings or on another curb and it didn’t matter what we were watching but that we were doing it together. We’d sit shoulder to shoulder and talk and hold hands and when our bums turned sore we’d walk home or to a restaurant or a store and remain shoulder-to-shoulder.
I purse my lips and shake my head and between a bicycle lane and a sidewalk and a gravel parking lot in the middle of downtown I sit on this curb and it hurts and it’s raining as if gods are tipping buckets, dumping overhead their water to flood this city. I sniff the moisture leaking from my nose. I yawn. I hang my head. I pull at each ear lobe as if to open them. Still blocked. I look at the cuffs of my jeans that are soaking up the street’s grime and moisture.
My pocket buzzes and I pull out my phone and silence it and place it back. I stand and round my shoulders and pull up my collar again and cross my chest tucking each fist under each armpit. I travel under a railroad track and the train passing above deafens whatever thoughts are inside my head and the four lanes of traffic beside me also silenced. My body tightens. I breathe. Breathe. I walk.
I pass from under the bridge and the concrete sidewalk turns to asphalt laneway turns to my figure being reflected in blue mirrored glass. A judgment. But I do not look. I look up. A phallic tower 48 stories of it thrusting into the above. Some civic symbol. Fortitude or hope or a marker for a place found and intent on growth. The weighty base growing into a slender concrete shaft ending in a red blub of glass observation deck and rotating restaurant. People up there eating while looking down and I wonder about a metaphor but no metaphor comes to me.
I cup my hands and blow into them and rub them together. I open my fingers and stare as if holding some clandestine thing. I read my palms and they tell me I’m cold and need warmth.
I quicken my pace across the street and step between ornate bollards onto a cobblestone pedestrian walk and follow the awnings and duck under a green one into a coffee shop.
I exit and walk with both hands around this hot cup of coffee up to my lips and blow into the lid’s hole. I take a hesitant sip. Its heat on my tongue stirs something and a twitch wraps around my neck and hairs stand erect under my collar. I settle into a pace aided by the heat in my stomach.
I turn a corner and before me in the middle of the street an upside down and canted church built of Lucite, its steeple its fulcrum. A red roof, blue door, white walls, a yellow steeple. Primary colours. I look for a placard but it’s stabbed into the earth without title or definition or artist. It’s beautiful. I walk around it, slowly. I return to where I began. I squat down, trying to get it at eye level. I look up at the door extending past the street lamps. I stand and back away. One small slow step at a time. I smile. The only churches I’ve ever been in were tourist attractions in cities where I didn’t speak the language. I don’t believe in God or gods but I’d find something to worship in there. And then the air turns to a breeze turns to wind running down the street shaking street trees and garbage and sandwich-boards placed in front of shops. Drizzle turns to sleet. A shiver runs through my body. I catch an upward glance and I blink, a reflex to the sleet. I brace against the wind.
Across the street another construction site and another crane hoists a swaying toilet to the upper floors. At its base a commissioned particle board mural tied to orange construction fencing. Folk art of a mother holding her daughter’s hand holding her brother’s holding his dad’s. A dog and ball and a green sun and other bright and swirly shapes. A cement truck slows and stops and parks in front of it.
I take the last sip of my coffee and remove the lid and walk and pitch it in a green bin and beside it another bin I toss the cup in.
I pass a street vendor with a Jesus Our Lord banner taped to his cart hawking hot dogs and pop to a line-up of people with torn shoes and dirty trousers and the vendor preaches animated and angry and yelling with condemnation, with each serving looking to save his congregation. I picture the upside down and canted church and this bastard falling out of it.
I cross the street and walk the nine laconic treed blocks that advance to the river which bisects the city into north and south. A billboard on a developer’s temporary sales office reads, Waterfront Condos Starting at $493,000. Reduced. A deep pit behind it and workers building the foundation for the parkade.
Another chill runs down my spine and I pull tight into myself. I yawn into the back of my hand. I can’t be tired, just exhausted, just numb. The wind has died and the sleet has turned to a grey mist. I lean against a fence and watch the sky waiting for it to change texture. I close my eyes. I stand here for a minute opening and then closing and then opening my eyes waiting for change.
I lean forward and start to walk again along the river pathway between signs of progress and age; squat buildings and tall buildings and some brown brick and some glass and one sandstone. A skateboarder in brown cords and a white collared shirt and skinny tie and a woman with her dog and girl biking, another girl pushing a stroller. The river’s water rustling past on smooth rocks and conifers tipped out over and Canadian geese plucking at grass and some weight of an afterbirth the city of sleet and rain and gravel and dust and broken bodies and the aroma of grease and I sit my hands on my belt and hike my jeans up on my hips and return my hands to my pockets and again watch my shoes on the pattern concrete, observing and moving as if seeking, as if an internally displaced migrant with a numb ringing in my head without place to settle.
I breathe my chest up and hold it. Above me the featureless sky wrings out its last drops and the fabric pulled across it tears with crepuscular rays and leaks blue and my shadow extends out from under me and I raise my head and in front of me an allée of trees. The sun in me. I feel the sun in me. I follow the trees for quite some time. The pathway ends and I arrive at a great green park not of the day it was an hour ago.
A woman crosses in front of me and enters an amphitheatre sunk into the ground where a small crowd has gathered. I follow her to the concrete ledge of the upper tier. Ten ledges down is a concrete basin normally a great pool and fountain with jets of water spraying across its body now drained for some other spectacle. I step down a ledge. People are sitting and talking and some in rags and silent and some sleeping. Seagulls trawling at a garbage bin. Men in ties and others in sweatshirts and women in dresses and blouses and jeans and sweaters. A couple sits down two tiers in front of me. Her blond hair pulled forward over her shoulder and he wears a toque, a bulk of curly hair peaking out at his neck. She leans to him, her head to his shoulder.
I lean forward, my elbows to my knees and clasp my hands. It’s near silent, just stirring. I think I smell horses. I look over my shoulder. More people.
The sun further cracks the grey and I feel the heat on my back and its warmth works through my body. I sit up and unbutton and remove my brown wool coat and lay it beside me. I take off my wet shoes, my wet socks. I roll up my cuffs and squeeze them.
A dark haired woman sits down holding her pregnant belly not ten feet from me. She looks at me, past me and returns to watch the assembly beginning before us. We see a congregation of feathers and hides and bodies marked with paint. Someone starts beating a hide drum. I scan the amphitheatre. A man and a boy sit off to the side in their blue jeans banging on drums and chanting. A man wearing the great plumage of an ornithological beast emerges red and yellow and green out from the group of performers like a paper boat sliding down a giant’s hand to be released into a river flowing out to sea. This dancer, his head down p
rancing on the smooth and featureless concrete basin. He moves on it. As though it is something to be avoided, he touches it or teases it encouraging the earth to pass something up into him, release something. Another man joins him. His arms a soaring bird of prey seeking lowly things. Together their beaded and dyed soft moccasins move, locked into some requiem from 10,000 years ago. The dancers with gods in them. An accumulation of primitive times where these men called forth the origins and drumming some repertoire of history.
Then silence. The two dancers retreat and throat sounds rise from the performers and a group of five dancers take the centre, their feathered crowns reminiscent of tribal elders, respected, their actions as if governing the right way to act and be in this world. Men seeking subterranean vibrations or creating them.
I sit and absentmindedly rake my fingers over the concrete ledge and I think of animals and rain dances and praying for sun or ridding evil spirits battering this mortal world pushing them into some transitional place and I look up not to look but to feel. I close my eyes and the chanting and calling and drums moving through me. Every sonic wave of them through me. I feel. I feel.
Dancing and singing and worshipping and visions and a ceremony telling me – ME – listen, Shawn, listen! Four men before me as if cardinal points, before me destroying and creating, humanizing, standing bent over concrete, lifting the ground, lifting it or floating over it, as if some wounded beast, a bear, a bison, an antelope, a god. Listen, Shawn. The story, of customs and practices reflecting a moral standard to accept to adhere to. Find something. Be grounded. Believe in something.
And then the city disappears behind me and this late morning ritual extinguishes whatever city there is in me. This migrant starting the day under rain now watching a mimicry of divine reward nourishing me, a pedestrian apotheosis. The four men spread apart and an aged savant comes forth his hands up stretching seeking or repelling the profound forces ebbing in the sky. He calls at something. A sound of remorse. His vocals emitting a suffering for punishment of a past seeking salvation and he hangs his head, his arms still up in expiation. He shakes them. This sage. Opening his mouth breathing the breath as if of a dead elder. Then silence, nothing but for a seagull flapping its wings – and then clapping, an ovation, an eruption.