by Nino Ricci
Around dawn I fell into fitful sleep. There was a period of dreams then, though more like half-waking memories that had somehow got tangled up in the logic of dreams: I was en route to the Dogon village again only now it was raining, in the distance great monoliths of smoothed rock, foursquare and vast, towering up from the landscape like stones the gods had dropped; and there was a mystery to solve, and a ritual whose end was the expiation of some ancient crime. When I arrived at the village – had this happened? had I ever arrived there in real life? – the villagers were all in their separate homes in the cliff face, caves really but also a sort of hotel. I went from home to home, conducting my interviews; but in each place it was the same, the same indifferent, evasive shrug, the claim that there was no ritual, no culprit, no crime.
Rain and more rain: it continued on through the day and into the evening. I got up briefly to make food, my stomach like a pit that had been scoured, then dug deeper. Outside, the rain formed a continuous sheet on the roads, rivering into the sewage drains and sloshing up over the curbs as cars passed. Jose was holed up in an open shed at the back of the service station across Huron; he was in his usual stance, squatting, rocking, his eyes doing reconnaissance along the street while his bundles and bags sat heaped around him like precious spoils.
I called Rita’s.
“She’s out.” Elena’s inscrutable tone, and at once the paranoia in me: she knew or would know, was like a time bomb from which, in moments or weeks or years, all the outrage at what had happened would be unleashed.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Dunno. I thought she might be at your place.”
A pause.
“You sound sick or something,” she said.
“Yeah. Just a flu.”
I slept. The racing of my mind had eased: it seemed to have worn itself out, to have entered some new, limbo-ish place where there was only fatigue, only the dreamy relinquishing of no way out. I had a vision that Rita had come and was tending to me, that she was there on the bed wiping fever sweat from my neck, my brow, with a heated cloth. There was a chipped enamel basin on the night table, a crucifix on the wall. At the door, a sound of hooves against cobblestones, the grind and complaint of cartwheels: someone was coming for us, in an instant we’d rise and ride off together into golden afternoon light.
When I awoke, Easter Sunday, the fever had dimmed. The apartment looked as if the storm of the previous day had ripped through it: there were clothes strewn about in the bedroom, a couple of vomit-flecked towels on the floor, a heap of bedsheets, the ones Rita had bloodied, bundled in a corner; in the kitchen, pots of half-eaten food on the table and dishes I couldn’t remember having dirtied piled up in the sink.
I couldn’t form my thoughts around any plan. On my desk were spread the pages of a paper I hadn’t finished, more than a week overdue now, then beside them a stack of library books, also overdue. My mind was fixed somehow on that overdueness, the nickels and dimes of it, the vague forces lined up to punish me. I stood staring at the pages I’d written out, with their slanting blue scrawl, the evidence that I’d formed thoughts, made decisions, considered one thing more important than another; and then at the books with their arcane titles, their careful systems of words. I had the sense I’d been tricked in some way: none of this mattered, there was nothing holding the systems in place.
I went out. The streets looked scrubbed, hosed down, from the previous day’s rain. It was still overcast, the air liquidy and thick, wisps of fog rising up from the pools that had formed in parking lots and on front lawns.
At the back of my mind was the thought that Rita hadn’t returned my call; and then I was ringing her doorbell.
Elena came to the door.
“Hey, Vic.” She gave me her sardonic smile. “Happy Easter.”
There were footsteps in the background, then a woman’s voice.
“Who is it?”
“Rita’s brother.”
She was coming toward us down the hall, an older woman, hair wiry and streaked grey, who I recognized from the party.
“Suzanne,” Elena said, by way of introduction. This was probably as far as she’d ever gone in allowing me into this side of her life.
“Hello, Rita’s brother,” Suzanne said, but didn’t extend her hand.
They were both dressed in sloppy house clothes, jeans, tattered sweats.
“Rita’s out,” Elena said. “She went for a walk.”
“Did you say I phoned?”
“To tell you the truth, she got in pretty late last night.”
“Where did she go?”
“I dunno,” Elena said. “Maybe she had a date.”
Suzanne laughed.
“You know, boy meets girl,” she said.
I couldn’t get my mind around any of this. The thought that kept forming in my head was that it was Easter Sunday. But none of this was like Easter, everything was out of whack.
“You should ask him in for a coffee,” Suzanne said. “He looks a little beat up.”
“No. Thanks. I should get going.”
When I got home my shoes and socks were completely soaked, though I couldn’t remember stepping in any water. The fever began to come on again, a dark glow at the back of my brain.
The phone rang. It was Elena.
“Just thought you might want to know that she’s back.”
“Is she there?”
“She’s in the shower. I’ll tell her to phone you.”
But no call. They were playing a game: Elena was in on it, Suzanne, perhaps even Sid. At some point I had the impression again of an urgent ringing and clanging, the jangling pouring-forth of a million nickels and dimes. But by then I was back in the fever’s darkness, burrowing through its conduits and tangled paths trying to trace there the connections, the careful, deliberate scheme being laid out for my downfall.
It was Tuesday morning before I surfaced again, the apartment filled when I awoke with a glare of morning light like at the instant of a bomb blast. The only sign that I’d lived through the previous day was the apartment’s increased ruin, more half-eaten food, more clutter. At some point I’d moved my sleeping bag from the bed to the couch and set up a sort of encampment there; there was dirty cutlery on the coffee table, and a blackened pot with some sort of noodles and sauce congealed at the bottom. In my mind, the residue of dreams: backwoods and marshy, ramshackle settlements, dark dirty rooms, half-naked children streaked with grime. A sense of the thin line between human and beast, of order broken down, of being pushed back to the outer rim of the known world.
Then, in the half clarity of wakefulness, a sort of revelation came, the understanding that there was no way to think this thing through. I could only act, headlong, could only push forward bloody-mindedly until something had come together or been smashed.
I went out again. This time I came at Rita’s house by circling around to the cross-street just beyond it. I hadn’t showered or shaved, must have been in a state by then but was aware of my body only as a kind of machine, something to move me from place to place and be forgotten.
I waited at the corner. I knew Elena had a class at ten, Rita not till mid-afternoon. The minutes ticked by, nine-forty-five, nine-fifty; then finally Elena emerged from the door, a book bag on one arm. Seeing her secretly like that, as she swung her bag up, as she pulled the door shut to lock it, still her staunch, unswerving self though she was alone, I had an insight: that Elena was what she was right down to her sinew and bone, while Rita was changeable, shifting, someone who blended into things like camouflage. For an instant I couldn’t even call up an image of her: there was a blank in my mind like a photo that had failed, that showed a background, a setting, but where her likeness should have been only empty space.
I waited till Elena had disappeared down the street, then rang the bell. Footsteps, then Rita’s voice, tentative, wary.
“Who is it?”
“It’s me.”
Her eyes flashed fear when she opene
d the door: I must have looked crazed.
“Are you all right?”
For a moment, face to face like that, all our defences seemed down.
“Yeah. I dunno. I’ve been sick.”
“I tried to call,” she said.
“Oh.”
We stood not looking at each other. What the matter came down to was this: we were the same, were both frightened and ashamed, were both alone.
There was a sound of movement in the background. Rita’s eyes met mine for an instant like a curtain rising and falling.
“John’s here,” she said.
He was in the kitchen, sitting with his awkward bulk in one of the rickety vinyl chairs there. He smiled his pained smile when I came in and rose to shake my hand. The smile gave him the look of someone who’d borne all his life some small, unremitting affliction.
“So we meet so soon again after all,” he said. “I hope you’re better now.”
He was a bit formal and stiff, uneasy perhaps at being found here or simply sensing, if only from the look of me, the charged atmosphere that my arrival had ushered in.
“Yes. Better. Thanks.”
There was a moment’s strained silence. Something in the chemistry of the three of us alone in Rita’s kitchen seemed to have set up a hum of weird, not-quite-readable tensions.
“Please, sit down,” John said.
We sat. Rita had already melted into the background, collecting a few dirty dishes off the table and then turning her back to us and busying herself at the kitchen counter. All of this seemed to have come about as if by arrangement, John and I at the table, Rita safely away. I had a flash again of the fevered paranoia of the past few days.
“So you must be busy now with the end of term,” John said.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
“Ah.”
There was a sort of stumbling forward into conversation. Rita was making coffee, using the conversation like a shield. Every time there was a lapse, her movements would quicken slightly as if to push us on.
“You were saying you and Rita met in a class or something.”
“Yes. In the fall.”
I still couldn’t place his accent: Scandinavian, perhaps, or German or Dutch.
“You’re doing a degree?”
He looked a little embarrassed.
“Well, perhaps. Mainly I just do courses. What I like.”
His embarrassment made me uneasy about asking him any more questions. He was this big lump of a man, all gangly limbs and bulk, his skin ruddy and pink as if someone had over-scrubbed it. What was he doing here, at ten on a weekday morning? It went through my mind that he was Rita’s “date” of Saturday night. But it was somehow clear that there was nothing sexual between the two of them, not merely from the few things Rita had said about him but from the plainly paternal air he had around her.
“I was wondering,” he said. “We were thinking of taking a little excursion. Because of the weather. Maybe you’d like to join us.”
An excursion. The word sounded absurd, as if we were leisured aristocrats arranging some parasolled outing to the country. Here we sat, at the frayed edge of sanity, and we were planning an excursion.
“I don’t know. There’s things I should do.”
“Yes, of course.”
I couldn’t catch Rita’s eye.
“Rita has a class at three,” I said.
John’s gaze went to Rita uncomfortably, as if this contradicted something she’d told him.
“I didn’t realize. Anyway it’s probably just review now and that sort of thing.”
I was still awaiting some sign from Rita. They would go off together and another day would pass with nothing resolved.
“Are you going far?”
“We were thinking of the zoo, actually,” John said. He looked embarrassed again. “It’s a bit of a journey to get there by transit, of course.”
“You don’t have a car?”
“No. Actually, no.”
The whole idea was crazy. It seemed there was no way to get to Rita except through this chaperon.
“We could take mine,” I said.
“Ah. Well. Yes. That’s much quicker.”
Rita was still standing at the kitchen counter.
“Is that all right with you?” I said.
“It sounds great.” Her voice was toneless, perfectly neutral.
“I’ll get my car, then.”
The zoo lay to the northeast of the city. We drove out on the Gardiner Expressway and then up the Don Valley, John in back and Rita and me together in the front. Beside me Rita sat eyes forward, in another world but also stilled somehow, as if she had moved into a new territory where anger, shame, were irrelevant, where there was only the brute fact of what had happened.
“You’re very quiet this morning,” John said.
“I’m just a little under the weather.”
“Perhaps you’ve caught something from your brother.”
The traffic moved swiftly. In the bright spring sun the speeding cars looked like night things scurrying for cover.
“So Rita tells me you grew up on a farm,” John said.
I wondered what she’d told him of the entanglements of our childhood. There was that forced quality in his question of not being certain where to begin, how much foreknowledge it was proper to reveal.
“Yes. A small one.”
“You like nature, then. Or perhaps you’ve had enough of it.”
Somehow I couldn’t connect our farm with what he seemed to mean by nature.
“Yes, I suppose,” I said.
The zoo was set out on a great sprawl of rolling woodland. Several large pavilions were clustered near the gates; beyond them, a maze of trails led past large outdoor animal runs. Despite the weather the place was almost deserted. There were a few mothers here and there pushing carriages or trailing toddlers, a few school groups that would appear from time to time, all frenzied energy and noise, then vanish again. John had put on a pair of sunglasses that gave him a slightly sinister look: I had an instant’s sense that if he removed them, some secret about him would be revealed, but when he did, to rub the bridge of his nose, they uncovered only eyes of a kind of silvery-blue indeterminateness like the colour of a river under cloud.
The trails that wound through the grounds were laid out by region, African, Eurasian, North American. We followed the African route, past a group of elephants in repose on the hard, barren earth around a scratching post, past a pair of giraffes just ducking out from a huge hangar-like shed. The giraffes moved like dream things, with their slow motion, larger-than-life unwieldiness and grace.
“You were in Africa for a while, I understand,” John said.
“Yes. In Nigeria.”
“You must have seen some game.”
“No. No. Not where I was. I saw some in the east, when I was there. In Kenya.”
“Ah. So you were in Kenya.” He seemed to register this as if it were the first piece of new information about me he’d garnered.
“You’ve been there?” I said.
“Yes. Many years ago now.”
Something in this intersection between our lives had touched a chord in him. He seemed to want to go on, but held back.
“What brought you there?” I said.
“Just travelling like that.”
“You travel quite a bit?”
“Here and there. It’s my hobby, I suppose.”
Rita had wandered ahead to the next enclosure. Despite the warmth she held the lapels of her sweater clutched tight against her as if warding off a bitter wind. She seemed hardly aware of me and John now, withdrawn into the far remoteness she would go into sometimes as a child.
“She seems very preoccupied,” John said. “Perhaps it has to do with her mother.”
“Sorry?”
“With her plans to move back to England. I think it’s very upsetting for Rita.”
At the big indoor chimp cage, she left us to use the washroom. J
ohn and I waited on a bench that faced toward the cage. A commotion of some sort, a fight, sent one of the smaller chimps scurrying toward where we were sitting. When he was safely away from danger he stopped, sat, licked at some hurt on his arm, looked furtively about. He caught sight of us watching him from our bench and stared an instant, then turned away; and then with a kind of evasive, meandering gait, as if to hide his curiosity, he began to come toward us. At the fence he stopped and gazed at us with his old man’s eyes, then stretched his fingers through the fencing’s narrow mesh as if in pleading.
John was still watching. In the absence of Rita he seemed older, diminished.
“Who was that writer, I can’t remember now. The one who talked about the first drawing by an ape and what it showed was the bars of his cage.”
Five minutes passed, then ten, and still Rita had not returned.
“Do you think we should check on her?” John said.
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
I stood at the washroom door and called out to her. She appeared a moment later; I had expected tears or some outburst but she was perfectly, chillingly composed.
“Is everything okay?”
“Just feeling a little sick, that’s all. Anyway I was thinking that maybe I should try to get to that class after all. With exams coming up and everything.”
“Sure.”
We were mostly silent on the trip home. Rita had asked to be in the back so she could stretch out there. I wanted to drop John off first to get Rita alone, but he had left his bicycle at Rita’s.
“It’s getting kind of late,” Rita said. “You can just leave me at the university on your way.”
“You sure you don’t want to go home first?”