Bellevue Square

by Michael Redhill

  “And then what?”

  “You take pictures. You go away and think about it, you come up with a theory, and then you test that theory.”

  “And then you solve the crime.”

  “Eventually. You thinking of a career change?”

  “Another one? No thank you.”

  “Anything else, Miss Marple?”

  “No. I’m going to go check on the boys.”

  —

  I look at Ian sometimes and wonder how we actually ended up together, given the odds as he’s explained them to me:

  What was the likelihood that we’d ever meet? Never mind how right we are for each other. We have no idea what other lives we might have led.

  His philosophy is that as soon as something bad happens, it’s already in the past, but good things reach into the future. So he ignores the bad things. I accuse him of toxic positive thinking; he says he’s making his own reality to counteract the odds.

  Ian: You are one person only, and only once, and so how is it you are born a woman in the twentieth century, at a time when life expectancy is double what it was even one century ago, and for the first time in recorded history you have rights, and you’re a Canadian, and white, and you got to marry me and pass on my genes, which is awesome for you! Calculate the odds of that happening. Being happy is a choice!

  Me: I am happy! Jesus!

  My sister: The odds are someone is going to marry a decent man, and maybe you did.

  My mother: If something is too good to be true, then it’s probably not true.

  Ian is scrupulous about his taxes, and not because of his background as a lawman but because his mother raised him right. In our old hometown, he’d had the reputation of a minor superhero, although equal numbers of people hated as loved him.

  His mother: I raised him right. What are you doing with him?

  To my case for a numinous order maybe existing in the universe, Exasperated Rationalist will ask me how do I think a woman living on a garbage tip in Calcutta would see my theory? What does it mean about her that there’s supposedly some order in the universe? That you really have nothing to complain about makes you lucky, it doesn’t mean you’re good or that there’s a god who loves you personally. Ian preaches randomness and claims he finds it as mesmerising as any other philosophy.

  He says: You can stop taking everything personally. Nothing is meant to happen or not to happen. You’re one of the fortunate ones. Don’t be an idiot and not enjoy it!

  Of course I know this is true. But really, how can you be this unromantic?

  I MARKED THE END of my sixth week in the park with no verifiable sightings, although I was now bringing an entire roll of loonies with me every day I went. Which was, more or less, every day. I’d hired a hand for the bookstore, a PhD candidate named Terrence whose specialty was female sci-fi writers like Ursula K. Le Guin and Nalo Hopkinson. His thesis was called “Stellar Reproductive Technologies.”

  I’d put on four pounds since the beginning of my vigil, many of which were the result of a superior ice cream store being within a hundred metres of the park. I was trying to cut down on their malted milk chocolate by switching to their hazelnut and fig, but I wasn’t making much progress. Cullen came to sit beside me in my usual spot on the low wall surrounding the playground. I gave him half my ice cream and felt virtuous. He had a sighting he wanted to be paid for. No one saw Ingrid as often as Cullen did, but he was good company and he needed the money.

  There’d been no persuading Miriam to take Cullen off her shit list. Most of the time she’s sentinel at the front doors of the Kiever Synagogue, across from the square. The synagogue—which has a fascinating history, she’ll tell you if you so much as glance at it—looks like a Communist wedding cake. It looms over the northwest corner of the park. Miriam collects tips by warning people when they’ve parked too close to the recessed fire hydrant beside the temple. It’s countersunk into a fence, set back an extra three feet, and people always miss it. Even in broad daylight they miss it, although Miriam makes more money when it’s dark. She darts over when she sees someone backing into one of the two trouble spots, the ones within three metres of the hydrant. She’ll come calmly by and “notice” that someone has just parked too close. Her patter goes: Oh excuse me, sir/ma’am, you might not want to park there. Yessir, that’s a hundred and eighty-one dollars you won’t be spending today. If the person is Jewish (and she is never wrong), she’ll ask if they’re coming to services. If they are, she adds: You don’t want to take God’s name in vain the second you come out of shul! No members ever park in front of the hydrant: they know it’s there. But Miriam always has fresh meat. Out-of-towners, new members, people in for the high holidays, the only time they ever come.

  She makes forty or fifty dollars a day. She distributes half of it to parkies, in the form of those half-pints of 2% milk, and she keeps the rest of it for herself. There are people of every colour in the park, and she gives to all of them. Except Cullen.

  “What was Ingrid doing?” I put a loonie in his palm. “How close were you?”

  “She was sitting right here. Where we’re sitting. I thought she was you.”

  “How’d you figure out she wasn’t?”

  “She told me she wasn’t. I said to myself, Cullen, this one really does have a twin, or she’s goofy. She didn’t know your name yet so I told her.”

  I made a game-show buzz. “Wrong. Katerina’s already told her my name. Give me back my dollar.”

  He tried to return it, but I pushed the coin away. “She said she didn’t know it. She gave me more money than you ever have.” He unsnapped a breast pocket and removed a ten-dollar bill. It was a bill that had been old when I was a kid, light purple with shadings of burnt orange, and a kaleidoscopic background of spirographic rosettes. It had a restrained psychedelic vibe. Behind Sir John A. Macdonald, the word CANADA was chisel-fonted in a dark, authoritative violet. On the current bill, our first prime minister looks like he’s recovering from a bender.

  “Ingrid gave you this? Ten dollars from 1971?”

  “I guess so.”

  I gave him another loonie. “Keep up the good work.” He went away without saying thank you and reappeared ten minutes later with a cigarette in his mouth and one over each ear. I could see the bill still crumpled up in his shirt pocket.

  “I’ve had cancer twice,” he offered. “Lung once. They told me I was terminal but I wasn’t.” He drew on the cigarette like he was sipping champagne. “Except in the usual way. What are you doing if you quit smoking when you get a diagnosis of terminal lung cancer? Presuming it doesn’t hurt to smoke, why not keep on keepin’ on? The conclusion is foregone and change is pointless. You feel gratitude and happiness in being alive.”

  “While you kill yourself?”

  He mimed sprinkling bread crumbs to invisible birds and a couple of real ones flew up and came near. Maybe I was as gullible as they were. “I laugh in the face of people who recycle their fast-food wrappers and detergent bottles full of poison,” he said. “Too little! Quitting smoking is like being environmentally conscious in 2016.”

  “You don’t care that we’re killing the planet with our filthy habits?”

  “The planet isn’t dying because we’re bad and we poisoned the oceans. It’s dying because nature is death on the hoof.” (Puff puff.) “The destruction of the planet and the extinction of all life is stamped upon it, my dear. Now take us: what a weapon.” (More puffing.) “The adaptations of bipedalism, the opposable thumb, and face-to-face sexual congress sealed the planet’s fate the moment all three were within the same animal.”

  Once Cullen hits a vein, he can take off on amazing flights, and I listen with admiration for what the human mind can do with its talent for missed connections. First you had to figure out what the puzzle was, then you had to solve it. “These three things,” Cullen continued, crushing the cigarette underfoot, “guaranteed that the human species would have a large territory—in the end it is all of the habitab
le land on Earth, and much that isn’t—that they could hold and finely manipulate objects and therefore invent tools, and that it would develop culture. My god, it’s wonderful and sinister! Do you know, Jean, we’re the only species that looks into its mate’s eyes during intercourse? It developed our concept of the other, and therefore we also conceived of ourselves. There is another, said the monkey, I am the same. Face-to-face intercourse makes the passing on of genes a personal thing. Empires came of it. And empires and cities made overpopulation inevitable. Overpopulation was the mother of invention in the Industrial Age and the exploding costs of keeping billions of people alive led directly to going off the gold standard in the 1970s, when it was already too late to do anything about the inevitable outcome of all this success. When money becomes metaphorical, we go extinct.” He mimed taking a puff from an invisible cigarette and then he got up and walked away.

  Of course I didn’t believe that Cullen had seen Ingrid. But still, I thought about her sitting there, imagining her body present within mine. I let her fill me, starting from my heart and spreading out to my trunk and my limbs. I even felt heavier.

  My phone made its Paula Skypesound and I cleared my passages and squinted. In public, sometimes I talk to Paula as if I’m on a regular phone call, with my iPhone against my ear, but she complains she doesn’t like staring into my head. Even in a world where people bark into Bluetooth mics while walking down a street, I’m not yet comfortable conducting video conversations in the wide open. This time, however, I needed the grounding of Paula’s eyes and mouth and I lay the phone in my lap and looked down at her pixelated face. “Hey.”

  “You’re in romantic silhouette,” she said. “With the sun behind your head and all. What time is it there now?”

  “I don’t know, it’s…just past four. You can’t see the time on your phone?”

  “I wanted to know what time it was where you are.” She had her phone mounted on a selfie stick, giving me a panoramic view of her lying-in on her sick-couch in the middle of her depressing condo. “Is the background supposed to make you look holy?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m leaning over. I don’t want to be too obvious, talking into my own lap.”

  “Ashamed of me?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “Are you there right now? In the park?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you see her?”

  “I wouldn’t be on the phone with you if I did.”

  “Show me the park.”

  I held the phone out and panned left to right while I narrated. “Disgusting restrooms, drug dealers, wading pool with waders, pigeons and ducks, the street, the path, trees, Giorgio the stand-up comic, trees, pot smokers, pot dealers, Ritt the photographer, King of Kensington bench, nappers, the synagogue, cheap clothing, the playground, me.” I put the phone back in my lap.

  “The park has its own comic?”

  “He’s a homeless guy who does a routine about poo. You have to pay him five bucks to hear the whole thing.”

  “How are you?”

  “Feeling insubstantial.”

  “Suck it up, girlfriend.”

  Her tumour is a vestibular schwannoma, which Paula says is German for getting fucked in the ear. It’s a tumour that forms on the eighth cranial nerve, below the brain. When at last she’d been bullied into seeing a physician, the tumour was already too big to remove. She’s left with a permanent ringing in one ear, wonky balance, and a paralyzed cheek. She looks drunk and leers a lot, not on purpose, and prefers to stay indoors. I send books to her Kindle to keep her busy. I also write her actual letters once in a while. For a shut-in person like my sister, getting mail is like having someone visit you.

  Paula is the first person I confide in, which sometimes has unintended consequences. She takes the other person’s point of view readily if she thinks it’s correct. She says it means I can trust her. And I do, of course. Her own problems have made her no less practical than she was when we were younger and more carefree.

  “Have you been outside in the fresh air recently?” I asked her.

  “I went on the balcony. It was raining.” She raised the stick to show me the grey Phoenix skies. “Who’s cooking your children their suppers?”

  “Ian is defrosting, reheating, or ordering in.”

  “How long have you been there today?”

  “Just a couple of hours.”

  “Anything?”

  “No.”

  “What’s her name again?”

  “Ingrid.”

  “And how do you know that?”

  “Katerina—a lady from the market who knows her—she told me. She’s seen us both.”

  “And what does Katerina do? Sell drugs?”

  “She works at a pupuseria.”

  “A poo-poo what?”

  “A pupuseria.”

  “Does she talk like Salma Hayek?”

  “Salma Hayek is from Mexico,” I said, hoping no one could hear either end of our exchange. “Katerina is from Guatemala.”

  In my lap, Paula dropped her jaw halfway down her neck. “There is nathing fonny about my Eenglish.”

  “Katerina’s accent is a little more subtle than that, superstar. And she does Bogart.”

  “Where does she know Ingrid from?”

  “From the market, Paula! Listen to what I’m saying.”

  Suddenly she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Pain,” she mouthed.

  “Your head?”

  “Your face.”

  We waited it out. I wanted to ask her what to do, but there’s never anything I can do.

  “God,” she said, exhaling. “It’s like someone’s stirring my brain with a chopstick. Hold on.”

  The view of the room changed as she stood. It takes considerable effort for Paula to rise from a seated or a prone position. She gets “overlaps,” where some part of the previously seen angle is still visible while she is in motion. It looks like a screen wipe from Bonanza, she says. The camera at the end of her stick pointed down at the floor and I watched her feet shuffle back and forth first over the broadloom and then over the ticky-tack kitchen tiles, grey with fake marble streaks. She leaned the camera against the counter while she shook out her pills and I got a view of the interior of her sink. It looked like a badly loaded dishwasher, with plates and pans and utensils standing pressed against each other. She capped the pill bottle and ran the water. Her palm came into the frame shaking, containing five pills, a quintuple dose. My disembodied voice said, “Whoa,” into the sink.

  “Am I getting a lecture now?”

  “Five?”

  “Lowest effective dose.”

  “Lowest effective overdose!” She returned to the couch, vorkapitching the view of the floor as she spun the selfie stick in her hand.

  “I better take Gravol next time we talk. Why can’t you just hold that thing still? Or call me back!”

  “I want you to get a feel for my actual life.” The scene returned to Paula lying on the couch, the houseplants drooping behind her, and the wall adorned with her idea of fine art: calendar pages, old ads framed in cheap Ikea frames.

  “I wish you’d let me come and see you,” I told her for the umpteenth time. Paula refuses visitors to her tomb, as she calls it. Even delivery boys are told to leave their pizzas on the hall carpet and go away.

  “You know you can’t see me, darling. I’m barely here. What could you do?”

  “I could give you a hug.”

  “Your arms would go right through me.” She pushed the pillows up behind herself and got settled again. “How long has it been, anyway? I bet we don’t even recognize each other in person.”

  I’d tried to go down once or twice after her diagnosis, to see her, but there was always a reason I couldn’t, or she stopped me from coming. Being apart this long makes me feel closer to her than maybe I would feel if we had regular visits.

  “This vigil you keep, what’s it really about? See a couple
new wrinkles beside your eyes?”

  “Mr. Ronan saw her, too. It’s more than just Katerina. And those two people I’m sure have never met.”

  “Who’s Ronan again?” she asked.

  Cullen waved to me from the sidewalk. He had an aggravated expression on his face and I felt guilty of something. I waved back with two fingers and he got into a black Corolla that was parked at the curb. Passenger side. The car drove off.

  “What are you looking at?” Paula asked.

  “Mr. Ronan is the gazpacho guy.”

  “Oh, Gavin!”

  “Him. He’s seen Ingrid too.”

  “Well, that’s proof, then,” she mocked. “How are my nephews?”

  “Reid is still a space alien and Nick has grown two inches since last summer.”

  “Any hair on his upper lip?”

  “A small, blond caterpiller.”

  “God, getting an adult in return for a child is a bum deal.”

  “Agreed.”

  “I would have loved your boys.”

  “You mean having kids of your own?”

  “Having a family would have been better than this. Anything would have been better than this, but I didn’t think it through.”

  She began to drift. She couldn’t stay focused for very long. “Should we say goodbye for now?”

  “Goodbye for now,” Paula said, and she collapsed the selfie stick. Her face flew at me. “In case you’re interested in my opinion, I think you’re bonkers.”

  I HAD QUITE a shock when I got off the phone: it was nearly nine at night. I’d lost all track of time. I’d also forgotten it was a Friday, and I had five texts from Ian. They were increasingly splenetic. The final one read: I thought we had an agreement. If I don’t hear from you by 8, I’m making a missing persons report.

  He picked up halfway through the first ring. “Are you okay?”

  “Yes! I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I was doing inventory and the system crashed and I had to call Terrence to come in…I just lost all track of the time. What a mess! Did you eat?”

  “I was worried sick.”

  “I hope you guys ate.”