He gets into the driver’s seat and speeds away.
Nik wakes up on a front lawn, head sore, body aching and stiff. Confused, he looks around, sees rectangular houses, hears car doors slamming, engines revving. In the distance he can see the coastal mountains. He can smell salt water. He’s still in Vancouver, but in the suburbs. It’s morning. Nik doesn’t know which suburb he’s in or how he got there. He doesn’t realize his boots are missing until he stands. Water droplets trickle down from his still-sodden pants and chill his dirty bare feet. He checks one pants pocket for his wallet, which he still has, and the other for Jennifer’s cellphone, which he doesn’t. The figure on the bridge last night was a clue, but Nik wasn’t fast enough. He couldn’t catch up. He has vague memories of a net and a boat but can’t make any sense of his garbled thoughts. His head aches worse than any hangover he’s ever had. He touches his forehead and looks at his fingers. Dirt. Water. No blood. Nothing gushing.
He begins to walk. Pavement and pebbles stick to the bottoms of his feet, wears them raw. Then he walks on soft front lawns and bedding plants until he gets to a major street. A car horn blares at him and he steps back, cautioned. He’d started crossing the intersection without waiting for the light. Backing up onto the sidewalk, he blinks and rubs his eyes. He locates east from the location of the murky sun and heads in that direction. It doesn’t take very long for him to find a mall.
Inside, the polished floors are cool and soothing on his feet. Many of the stores are still closed, their windows darkened like retail caves. The first shoe store he comes across has an oversized red sign and sells sporting goods. Its fluorescent lights make everything green and surreal. Nik examines the items on a sale rack by the door. He picks up then puts down a pink skipping rope, a sparkly green child’s ball, and an oversized catcher’s mitt.
“Can I help you?”
The voice startles Nik and he drops the mitt with a clatter. Leaning down to pick it up is difficult, his limbs aching, knees unwilling to bend. He looks up and sees an androgynous clerk wearing an all-white uniform that resembles a karate suit. There’s a halo of something bright around the clerk’s face. Eyes that look like two black pebbles in the middle of a white oval. For a moment Nik thinks the clerk is an angel. But there’s an overwhelming stench of dirty salt water emanating from his still-damp clothes. That seems real enough. He puts his hand on his head again where it throbs. This time he feels a crust of dried blood. This discovery makes him dizzy. He grips a plastic shoe rack and holds steady. Now he can see what he’s looking for. His eyes dance up and down the display twice, three times, four times. He points to a pair of black running shoes with a small white insignia.
“Size 12?” he asks. The clerk’s oval face bends forward in a nod. Nik sees eyelids open and close around the pebbles. The clerk hovers, then floats away, disappearing down a flight of stairs Nik hadn’t noticed before. Nik sits on a white vinyl bench and fishes a pair of cheap white tube socks out of the basket beside him. They are too small for his feet, but when the clerk returns, he, or she, bares bright, gleaming teeth. Nik understands this forced smile is relief. The clerk is glad Nik is wearing the socks.
The clerk drops the shoebox at Nik’s feet and then steps back, well out of whiff range. Nik waits for the clerk to say something reassuring or sales-like. Instead the heat vent clicks on, blasting a growling roar. He flips the lid off the box, peers at the shoes inside. The clerk fades out of his periphery.
Bending forward makes Nik’s head ache. It takes him several minutes to tie the laces. At first the shoes feel like Styrofoam — much lighter than his old boots. Nik lifts his feet up and down, one foot after the other, testing how fast and nimble they might make him. He imagines running after the figure on the bridge. With these shoes he could catch him. Or her.
“They look ridiculous,” Old Aaron whispers to him.
“I don’t care,” Nik says out loud.
“I wouldn’t buy them if I were you,” Old Aaron says. “They’re not cool.”
“I need these shoes!” Nik says.
“Don’t waste your money then!” Old Aaron says. “One quick sprint out that door and they’re yours. C’mon, let’s rock ’n’ roll.”
“I am NOT going to steal them,” Nik says.
“I didn’t say you were,” says the clerk.
Nik tries to focus. It takes a minute before his vision clears. He realizes the clerk is a thin woman with short blonde hair.
“If you buy them you can keep the socks,” she says, stepping back even farther. “Although I’d probably let you keep them either way.”
Nik can see her eyes now. They’re brown. And fearful. He takes his wallet from his pocket, tries to smile. The clerk retreats to the cash desk and stands behind the cash register, waiting. Nik pays for the shoes out of the Jennifer Fund. He’s shaking and shivering as he keys the PIN number into the handset. He needs these shoes to be able to catch up to Jennifer’s captors. He needs to work faster to find her. He needs to be able to run.
Aaron
I miss Vancouver. Being high. Or low. Outrageous. Raging. Staying up until dawn and sleeping all day. Saying whatever I wanted, doing whatever, fucking whomever. But the months ago of it already feel like years. Professor Moreland is scrawling her office hours on the dry-erase board in red marker, and I think about once when I was high and Ilana put glitter on my eyelashes and everything I looked at turned into fireworks. An astral sparkle none of the brain-dead idiots here will ever see. I make angry scratches in the dull finish of the writing desk with the end of my pen. I wish I knew where Nik was. I miss him the most.
I jot Moreland’s numbers down in my new notebook, even though I know I won’t need them. I figure I got at least a C on the first assignment. We were supposed to describe one of the CanLit books we’ve read so far and it only took me a couple of hours. English classes are easy. All you have to do is read books then write about them. It’s not like having to paint or create something, which can take days. Or forever.
Moreland calls up Karen Ang, Paul Banerjee, and then me, Aaron Chase. She hands back my assignment and glares over the frames of her black plastic reading glasses. I grab my paper and my backpack and get out of there. I don’t look at my mark until I’m down the hall, clear of any classmates. There are a lot more red circles and scratches than I’d expected on the first page. I flip to page two, where I see D- in unnecessarily large script. That bitch.
I put on my coat and bolt off campus. This puts me smack in the middle of the busy, grubby mess of Toronto’s Yonge Street. Vancouver’s grimy, too, but everyone stares at the water and the mountains and goes into denial. Only real difference is there’s scads more people here. That makes it a good place to hide. Forest for the trees. I push through dazed shoppers walking super slow like they’re mentally incapacitated. I get halfway to the subway then remember those office hours I wrote in my notebook. Guess I need them after all. My mom and dad are funding this little back-to-school operation. The deal is I’ve got to get a C average or they’ll kick me out of the house. I’m pretty much on Plan Z at this point, and totally broke. Plus I don’t want to have to make an extra trip back downtown. Might as well get the business over with. I grab my cellphone out of the pocket of my jeans to check the time, ignoring the new text messages from Ilana. Moreland’s got half an hour left.
I boot it back to campus. More people are waiting to get on the elevator than can fit, so I huff up a couple flights of stairs and navigate the hall maze to Moreland’s closed office door. I wait for a few minutes. The door opens to let out a stressed student with the huge plastic food container and nondescript clothes of a science major. She’s probably picking up a prerequisite.
“Next,” Moreland says from behind her desk.
I stride in, toss my coat and bag on the floor, and slump down in an orange guest chair. Moreland pours steaming water from her electric kettle into a latte-sized mug. A nauseating fruity herbal tea aroma fills the tiny, book-cluttered room.
“Aaron Chase.”
“You’re here because you don’t like your grade, I imagine.” Moreland crosses her legs and leans back in her chair. She’s got a boxy black jacket on over a blue T-shirt. Her scary-short haircut makes her look like a male model. Everything about the way she looks, moves, and speaks is intimidating.
“Yeah. What’s up with this?” I toss my paper onto her desk.
Moreland plucks her reading glasses from the top of one of her massive paper stack towers and looks at my assignment for a long time, considering she’s already read it. I stare at her wiry shoulders. She’s fit for someone so old. I wonder what she looks like when she takes the jacket off.
She finally looks at me. “Did you read the book?”
“’Course.” I cross my arms, realizing she already thinks I’m an idiot. I clear my throat and try to stop thinking about her mysterious, older-woman breasts.
“Let me see your copy then.” She flings an arm in my direction. I’ll bet she has those muscled Madonna contours in her arms that thin older women have.
I fumble in my backpack and retrieve my paperback of Ondaatje’s The English Patient. Moreland plucks it out of my hands and gives it a quick flip.
“That’s what I thought.” She hands it back with a smug look. “What were you doing when you read it?”
“I was probably on the subway.” The tea stink might as well be laughing gas. I can’t think fast enough to fabricate a convincing lie. “I’ve got this long commute.”
“And?”
“Well, I listen to music with my headphones to block out all the stupid chatting.”
“That’s skimming, Mr. Uh —”
“Aaron.”
“I need you to do a close reading of the book.” She lifts up her hardcover version and holds it in front of me like a child’s picture book. I watch as she slowly turns through the pages. It’s a mess of underlining and scrawls in different ink. It looks so personal she might as well be exposing her internal organs. “If you want to do well in my course, you have to learn to mark up your books.”
I stare at the book and nod. I’m no longer turned on. I’m paying attention. Weird. Moreland looks at her overlarge silver watch and makes a shooing motion at me with the back of her hand.
“If you’re interested in a less insulting grade, re-read it in a quiet place with no distractions and mark it up. Then come back and we’ll talk.” I feel her watching me as I fumble to gather up my paper, book, backpack, and hoodie.
I head to the subway in a daze. I’m already halfway to Mississauga when I realize Moreland didn’t go critical about my writing skills. All I’ve got to do is read the book again and underline stuff. Write in the margins. I can do that.
Subway in rush hour, GO train delay, forever wait for the bus. I endure it. Suburb maze, stink of backyard barbecue, deathwish kids on skateboards. My parents’ house is the only one on the block that needs a paint job. I open the front door and peer into the dim. My dad’s already sitting on the sofa in the front room with his beer, watching Jeopardy reruns.
“That girl Ilana called for you,” he says to me. “What is 1976?” he adds to the TV. “She says it’s really important this time, so I gave her your cell number again. Oh, Science for $400. Daily Double!”
“Yeah, whatever.” I make sure to hang my coat on the hook by the door and take off my new Timberland boots so my mom doesn’t yell. “Just keep telling her I’m not home.”
“Well you weren’t,” my dad says, still staring at his latest prized plasma screen. “What is hydrogen?”
“Well, even if I am, tell her I’m not.” For an otherwise healthy guy my dad watches way too much TV. When he first got this new flat screen, he booked off work for two whole days just to watch it. Guess when you’re a self-employed chiropractor you can do whatever you want. I could handle that lifestyle. It’s obviously way easier than trying to be an artist. Too bad I don’t have any science credits. I’d never get into chiro school.
Not that I want to wind up like my dad. The man never does anything.
“Supper’s in the fridge,” Dad says. “Mom left a burger for you. Salad, too. Oh, what are T-cells? Yes!”
I sigh and head to the kitchen. I already know it’s not a real burger. My mom’s been taking yoga classes after whatever she does at her downtown government job. That means natural this and organic that and a lot of tofu. Our dog Stan, a tired old basset hound, is sprawled out in front of his empty food bowl. He barely lifts his head when I walk in. When I try and feed him the soy patty he sniffs at it and looks away. I throw the patty into the compost bin and grab a bag of vegetable chips. I head downstairs into the basement.
My room, if you can call it that, with its half-finished walls and exposed wiring, is at the back of the house, beyond a jumble of broken appliances, old sports equipment, and a stack of televisions. You can trace the years with our failed consumer goods. Elliptical trainer, dead Discmans. Cellphones the size of shoes, old iMacs, a never-used breadmaker. The mangled frame of the second-hand Casio keyboard I threw down the stairs when my high school band broke up is mostly buried. The corpse of the electric guitar I left behind when I headed out west is somewhere under the mess.
I’ve forged a path through the clutter that follows a crack in the concrete floor to my room, but my parents always trip on stuff when they come down here, which isn’t often. I step through the roughed-in two-by-four framing marking my doorway, jump over the heap of back-to-school clothes my mom bought me, and flop onto my unmade bed. The chip bag lands on my pillow, my school bag on the floor.
I glance at the new laptop my parents bought me for returning to Toronto. It’s sitting on a swanky glass-topped study desk I asked for, but never use. I reach for the computer then hesitate. All the new messages are probably from Ilana. I unzip my bag instead, retrieving The English Patient and a black ballpoint pen. I flick the lamp on, open the bag of chips, and lean the pillow against the wall. The first few sentences are about boring weather and trees. Nothing to underline. But I click my pen and underline the phrase “the penis sleeping like a seahorse.” Later I start circling Caravaggio every time he’s mentioned. He’s a tricky guy. A thief. I don’t get what his story is.
I’m still reading and marking up my book when my dad yells down the stairs a few hours later. His “Aaron, get up here!” freaks me out. Dad never shouts.
I get out of bed and I’m lightheaded from standing up too quickly. I see little sparkles in my periphery that remind me of tripping hard in Vancouver. I loved the randomness of those experiences. Life here is as paved-over flat as the suburban streets.
When I get upstairs, Dad’s turned the volume off and the captions on, something he only does if Mom is mad about something. I turn, expecting to see her, but instead there are two uniformed police officers standing in the foyer.
“They say they have some questions for you,” my dad says without looking at me.
“I’m Officer David, RCMP,” says the athletic-looking guy, and I wonder if that’s his first name or his last.
“Smith.” The burly female officer says her name and stares straight through me. “We have some questions about a missing person. A Mr. Nikholas Miklos from Vancouver.”
Fuck. Forest for the trees was a stupid plan.
I lead the officers into the kitchen. Smith steps over the immobile dog. I’m not going to tell them to take off their boots, even though they’re leaving tracks on the floor. They keep their jackets on, which is good. Maybe a short visit. A few easy questions. My pulse surges like a cocaine rush, but I try to fake normal. I’ve got plenty of practice doing that. It’s moronic to say when you’re tripping. Everyone knows drug stories are only cool after the fact. I gesture for the officers to sit down at the table our family uses to stash mail. I clear a space of flyers and bills so the officers can set their notebooks down. I don’t offe
r them anything to drink, though. I don’t want to them to feel too comfortable when I’m secretly freaking.
“As I’m sure you know, Miklos has been missing since early May,” Smith says, not wasting any time. “We understand from his family he was depressed.”
“We also know you were one of his roommates.” David flips his notebook open.
Both sets of eyes turn toward me, as though I will volunteer something. I lean on the back of my wooden chair, feel it wobble.
“Can you tell us why you left Vancouver?” Smith’s pen is poised over her notebook.
“I wasn’t doing great at art college.” That’s not the reason, but it’s not a lie, either. “My parents sent me some money and I got a plane ticket to come home.” I shift in my chair and try to think how long it’s been busted. Two, maybe three years? I don’t want my story to wobble so I think fast. “I was pretty close to Nik, so when he left I missed him. Our apartment wasn’t the same.”
Smith and David look at each other, as though signalling.
“Did you know Miklos’s boots were found in English Bay?” Smith leans forward.
That’s a hard punch. “Nope.”
“The family now believes it was suicide,” David says. His words collide like a minor guitar chord then hit me with the impact of a boot kick in the colon.
Nik. My brain takes over and the shit-my-pants feeling goes away. This story they’re feeding me is fiction.
“No.” My hands are fists under the table. “I saw him. I was on the city bus in Vancouver a day or two before I left and I was sure I saw Nik walking down Main Street. He was wearing running shoes. I got off at the next stop, but by the time I walked back he was gone.”
Circle of Stones Page 6