by Trisha Cull
Their moaning stops. I open my eyes.
I wrap a sheet around my body, cross the room, pick up a knife and hold it over the flame until the tip blackens and the wooden handle burns.
I think of the kittens mewing in piles of laundry in Grandma’s back porch, their fur the scent of fabric softener. And withdrawing the knife from the flame, I press the tip firmly into my flesh.
Here.
We are left to close up camp, nail down the shutters, tie up the boats and empty the latrine. It is a windless hot day.
I sit on the wooden steps tossing Cheezies into the space ordained as whisky jack feeding ground. Food littered the area when we arrived—a secret human offering, a proposal between man and nature. No one questioned it. The whisky jacks came with great expectation each day around nightfall, so we succumbed to their want and gave them what we had. But now as I toss the bits into the clearing, the gesture seems wasteful, as though my absence at feeding time will diminish the sacrament, and all it will be is whisky jacks and garbage.
Leigh fries a battered fish in a black cast iron pan on the gas stove, brings it to me on a metal plate. He has already eaten his, sits back full-bellied in sunlight with the tin coffee cup in his hand.
“One last dip?” he mumbles.
I cut into the fish, its new breaded skin. Its insides blossom white and flaky, emit steam.
“Are you sure you cleaned it?” I ask, fearing bones or remnants of feces.
He laughs. “Yes, I’m sure.”
I place it on the step as he drifts off to sleep. Part of me longs for it, to eat it the way the others do, consume it with the same sense of delight and pride as when a thing is sought out and found in the most primitive way. But as I think of June’s Cove and the casting of the line, it is less a conquest and more of an impingement upon nature—my mind a lure sifting through the black-green waters, and a fish in passing snared by my hook. I would rather we met in a place where one body can enter the other without implication, each consoling the necessity for loss, as lovers, for love and hunger.
I slip away to the pond instead and discover the murky water has cleared. The slate in the middle stares back, wounded, but having come to occupy this place by some accidental plummet from the sky. My mind glides across the sparkling surface, propelled by an expectation of flowers, something faintly sweet, diluted rose water.
And closing my eyes, I fall in.
In Rome my sister was free, thieving among the ruins. In Rome, a civilization had already fallen, and what remained could not fall again. She moved across the cobblestone streets with this knowledge inside her, wandered into churches as if she too was a Roman.
“Did you ever love David?” I ask.
“Yes, I loved him,” she says. She has turned to a picture of us sitting around the tree at Grandma’s house on Christmas morning. I am smiling gleefully, the orange kitten in my lap. “Did you know all orange cats are boys?” she says.
“Is that true?” I say, remembering where he hit the wall above the piano, the wall not altered, the cat only slightly.
In winter the house creaked, ice clenching its foundation. Icicles fell from the porch into drifts of snow like darts of wind. Sometimes the piano made a sound, every so often a high-pitched ting from within, as if it could no longer contain its desire to play itself, imbued with a frustration it would never be able to rid itself of. Blossoms rustled in summer, and in autumn came the thwack thwack of leaves at the windowpanes. In spring, footsteps made a sound in the wet green turf on the porch.
She closes the album and tells me she sat at the foot of Michelangelo’s David and wept. “At the end of a long corridor you come to an ordinary doorway… and within, an ordinary room,” she says.
But what you find stuns you, brings you to your knees. You expect something to scale, perhaps the size of a real man, but instead he is twenty feet tall, so perfectly proportioned and fraught with expression that real men become manifestations of an original. You weep because you know you can never return.
Journal
October 27, 2008
Spent the day looking for Easy Boy. We have put up posters all over the place and have hand-delivered more notices and placed them in people’s mailboxes. I ache for this cat, miss him terribly, am worried.
On another note, it is awful at home right now. I am officially broke, no more income coming in.
This could be bad.
October 30, 2008
I am super high on NeoCitran, DXM; I am writing this while high. I have written most of these journals while high.
I have decided to put a full stop on the prescribed medication because it’s making me fat. I think Leigh is repelled by my body now.
I look for warmth in him by touching all over his warm body. It is a safe, well-rounded goodness that I find in touching him, but it is flimsy and means virtually nothing to me at the same time. I have always gone for men who seem to only love me halfway, whose conservatism is unwavering even in the wake of that hot-headed passion I cultivate and demand in the relationship. In other words, I go for cool men then push them to the brink, testing them, trying to break through the cool facade that first attracted me to them.
I will take a few days to wean myself more gradually off the Effexor, because it is a bitch to stop cold turkey. You get nauseous and dizzy, can’t see straight.
It has occurred to me that since seeing Dr. L I have not gotten better, I have gotten worse. I have felt less anxious, perhaps, but only insofar as I am utterly altered and over-medicated. (But to be fair, my DXM use probably screws up the positive effects of any of my prescribed medication.) I may just be in a state of flux, preoccupied with the newness of my personality in its underwater sluggishness. What I have considered to be a decrease in anxiety may just be the medication assaulting the other stuff of which I am comprised. What I thought was decreased stress has perhaps manifested from medically induced self-distortion. Who the hell am I now? Who was I before? Do I risk becoming so medicated through both prescription drugs and DXM that I may never find my way back again?
On another note, I took that job earlier this week, working weekends at the library up at Royal Roads University, but I called and retracted my acceptance of the position today. Leigh is going to kill me. I am so completely fucked financially. But I simply cannot go back to that kind of work, anything resembling office administration. After seven years of it I have reached my saturation point, even though circumstances are dire, desperate even.
I have a student loan payment due on the very near horizon and other bills pending. There are still those parking tickets. I just bounced a cheque for twenty-eight dollars. Sorry Prism magazine. And I turned down a job?
But I am not well enough to work.
What would happen if I just fell silent, if I became dumb and mute for the remainder of my life? Would this be a perfect defence or a life wasted?
I am tired of talking, tired of trying to prove myself, tired of feeling like a complete zero.
I had the weirdest epiphany the other day; it was so ordinary and obvious that it can scarcely be called an epiphany, but it was.
I thought, Maybe I can just choose to be happy.
November 4, 2008
I saw the neurologist today, Dr. Barale. Nice guy. It was kind of pointless. He mentioned the abnormality on my frontal lobe. I keep meaning to ask if it’s the left or the right lobe. I asked him what the spot on my brain means, what it means to me?
He said, “That’s a good question.”
But the question went unanswered. He said it was inconclusive, but again asked me if I’d had any seizures. I said no, couldn’t help feeling that everyone is completely off-track where my mental health is concerned. I have never had a seizure in my life. Why are we talking about seizures? I just want to be happy.
He has scheduled me to have an MRI. I will have to wait for three months. A
nd he’s going to do another EEG to further understand the spot on my frontal lobe.
It was all so unsatisfactory.
November 11, 2008
Sometimes when I hear a car screech to a halt, I have this urge to know the exact pressure between the tires and the road, to understand precisely the force applied, the resistance created, everything working together to make the car stop. I crave it, to understand the friction.
My desire to know these various unknowable frictions, forces, interactions and so on is ultimately rooted in and aggravated by the unknowable dimensions of death, or rather of what happens after death. I search for evidence of some ultimate consequence at the end of the line, of some ultimate consequence (Is there a God?) that makes the randomness relevant.
I mean, I’m getting high on cough medicine. I take it in order to feel altered, as I’ve said so many times, because the ordinary quality of my sober living environment is intolerable. The early signs that you are overdosing on DXM is in fact the getting-high part. In other words, if you are high from DXM, you are overdosing. A common short-term effect from using DXM, for me, is disassociation, that out-of-body sensation. Someone described this feeling as having her soul ripped from her body. It’s not a relaxing experience, so it is in essence counterproductive to my desire to feel positively altered. But it is preferable to the horror of this depression. It’s a cycle. I get high. It terrifies me. I come down. I sober up. I get depressed. So I get high again.
DXM is also a depressant (and yet it is described as an opiate, similar to morphine). It can suppress the central nervous system, you can stop breathing, your heart races, your temperature spikes. Long-term effects include brain damage. I’ll stop there because, well, it’s brain damage right? What could be worse? Of course, you can die.
Still seeking a new doctor, who I will then have refer me to a new psychiatrist, possibly the one that the neurologist guy recommended. I am wary of those mind-altering medications and will be more cautious in the future. Oh, the irony, I know.
November 14, 2008
My throat is sore today. I have a blood spot on my eye from throwing up, sort of hidden under my bottom lid. My eyes are oddly red.
I have left the house only a few times in two weeks. I have not walked anywhere far in months. It has been a strange and dangerous year.
Two
The Gondolier Wears Nikes (August 2003)
The bridges in Venice arch from one side of a canal to the other and pin together two distinct possibilities, one a network of cobblestone and narrow corridors at another. You may cross or turn back, and as a result you will be either here or there. The outcome will be the same: you will become at least remotely lost. The streets in Venice lead nowhere.
The bridges are arched so the gondoliers can pass under by tilting their heads downward while the gondola glides through. It’s midday. I’m lying prone on hot cobblestone with my camera poised on an even keel with the canal. “Look,” I say. “Look at his red shoes.” I take pride in this observation and want to be rewarded for it.
I get the feeling that on the other side of one of those bridges I might bump into myself, my elusive twin. She exists perfectly. She is happy and dressed in silk. Her red scarf flutters into the balmy wind. There is a faceless man on her arm, her soulmate. He exists perfectly too. He exists for her.
Leigh takes a green bottle of beer out of his backpack, looks around and when the coast is clear takes a swig. “Oh yeah, look at that,” he says.
I snap a picture but the gondola slips past. I won’t know until I get home and develop the film that I have captured nothing more than a river of milk and a flower box under an iron grate of a window across the way. A smear of red would have been enough, something that might have been a shoe, a blotch of insect blood, a wing of light refracted back into the lens, because no one will believe me now when I tell them I saw a gondolier in Nikes.
I will search for that gondolier as the day progresses. I will search for others in similar shoes but won’t find any. An interval has passed that I’ll never get back. It’s one of those unremarkable snapshots that imprints itself on your brain—flowers against a white wall. I feel like I have missed something important. I will never be satisfied in life. You know life will never be what you once thought it could be. You didn’t think it would require so much work.
Leigh will propose marriage to me in St. Mark’s Square near the end of this day. I will not understand until that moment the implications of my answer, or how much I did and did not want authority over such a preposterous choice, though all my life I had been waiting for it. I will feel something inside me ignite like a flame, and the moment will crystallize around me. There he will be on bended knee.
Yes. No. Cross or turn back.
He is an older man, a good man. He owns a small boat with two sails. There is a void of open water beyond Discovery Island in Cadboro Bay I will never penetrate. I watch from the shore as he and his spinnaker get smaller and smaller and, rounding the peninsula, disappear. I will always be new to him. I tell myself he will always love me for my relative youth. I want him to teach me how to love him the way a good wife should.
I have been comparatively horrible, taken pleasure in hurting him, insulting him in public. I called him vacuous in front of my mother, and I said it like this: vac-u-ousss. In the shoe store I said he was nothing more than a cheap suit and tie. Some of the worst things I’ve ever done I’ve done to him.
Perhaps it’s the current, how the gondolier plunges his staff into the water and shoves his vessel forward; the ease of its glide that slows your sense of time and makes you think gondolas all over this city move at precisely the same speed. You think you can reach out and catch one, but they move quickly. They have always been moving this way. One day when there are no more gondolas moving, Venice will hoist itself from the imagination of civilization and become a real place in time.
“Why are you hiding that?” I say. “Beer in Venice is like pop in North America.” The edge of my voice catches me. I am inflicted with the bitch I have become.
He says nothing. He has an older man’s tolerance. He holds the bottle to his lips, the green glass rim, looks hard at the gondola as the gondolier bends his neck into his chest and angles his body at a forty-five-degree angle over the stern of the boat and disappears into shadows.
I’m thirsty. There will be only select moments in this day that I don’t long for a drink of water; every twenty minutes another litre taken in and perspired out. Soon, thousands will die of heat exhaustion in France. I will feel shabby in cheap Mariposa dresses as we stroll around Paris during the final phase of our trip. I will come back hating a city I’m supposed to love. One night I will tell Leigh I hate him for looking at a young French girl in a white designer dress of such subtle yet superior quality I will want to cut my own skin. Instead, I will take off my cheap shoes and throw them at him from across Rue Lourmel.
Another night the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen close up will saunter past us, sort of dancing along the curb and sidewalk, a twinkle in her eyes. I will have a strong impulse to cut part of myself away, my hair maybe, a finger, a toe, spurned by the knowledge that a more moderate alteration would be redundant, even laughable. But I will walk away from Leigh instead. I’ll walk for three hours toward the lights of the Eiffel Tower, like travelling down a dark prairie highway toward the beacon of a distant town. The tower will seem close, then disappear, then close again as I round a corner. My heart will beat fast as I stroll the concentric circles of Paris increasingly lost—as if there are degrees of lostness—café after café, thirty-four degrees at midnight, the scent of hot concrete and roast duck in the air. It will feel like walking deeper inside, as though it is possible you’ll turn a corner and feel your body disappear. I will realize the folly of life with one man, but each time the tower disappears I’ll believe in love again.
“Where have you been?” he�
��ll say when I return, and I’ll think, He loves me. Thank god he still loves me.
That lost.
We have hardwood floors and red walls in our apartment. I walk on tiptoes because of the people who live below. I think this makes me a compassionate person and take pleasure in my goodness, but really it’s a learned behaviour from girlhood. I feel light and airy as I do it. Sometimes I catch myself, and as my socks sweep across the floor I realize I’m getting older and farther from the truth. It’s good to be quiet. It’s possible everything can break.
There is no large red rug in the middle of the living room, something to soften the edges I’ve repeatedly said. There is a large ugly painting of three fish about to intersect on the wall above the dining room table. I hate this painting because I know the fish will never meet. The table is a relic from his old life. I have seen photographs of his slender ex-wife kneading dough on its surface. His children painted pictures there. His youngest child, a daughter, is named after a Linden tree. His second son, a loganberry. His first son, Grant, embodies his father’s legacy. I have named no one over the course of my life, except my beloved cat, a pet ant and a snail. Spoofer. Anty. Snail.
On the backsplash above the kitchen sink Leigh has nailed into the wall a fish-shaped cutting board; it has a chrome head and tail but the middle is made of wood. Above that is a magnetized knife rack and a dozen sharp knives of varying sizes pointed downward. This makes me nervous while I wash dishes. I think that fish is in peril. Leigh likes chrome objects because they make a place look clean, he says, and small wooden boxes of any kind. I can understand a fascination with boxes. He likes to put objects inside them. He can always find things that way. I don’t know why he likes fish because I haven’t yet thought to ask.
He painted the walls and didn’t bother to tape off the edge where the wall curves into the white ceiling. He takes pride in his craftsmanship. It took him a week and three coats of paint. I also made love to him during this time, in love with the precision of his eye and the control of his wrist, the red speckles of paint in his hair and the scent of turpentine on his hands. I made love to him like he was a tired husband spent with labour and pride, as if it has always been me he came home to at night. That made me proud and spent too. I have never felt more like a good wife.