She connected, but it was an odd feeling, blunted. Her attacker’s face jerked down. The hose seemed stuck. In a panic she yanked back and he was sagging to his knees, dropping the ice picks, reaching for his face. The other two men stopped and froze.
“Shane?” the tall one said, voice shrivelling. “What’d she do to you, man?”
He was making coarse, braying sounds. She crouched down, holding the once-more streaming hose, grabbed the ice picks, put them in her outside pocket, stood up.
“Shane?” said Zach.
“My eye,” he said. The words were muffled. He lowered his hands and turned his face up toward hers, his friends still behind him. She flinched and gasped—a ladylike sound—a lady in a film, about to faint.
She dropped the hose and knelt down. “Oh my God.”
“Get away,” he said.
“You,” she said to the tall one, who was closest to the hut, “go in, call 9-1-1.”
“9-1-1? Are you fucking joking, lady?”
Now she was a lady.
“We need an ambulance,” she said.
“No way, they’ll take us in.”
“Just ask for an ambulance!”
“He’ll be okay. Come on, Shane.”
“My eye!”
Zach started toward her and Shane.
“Don’t move!” she told him. “You might step on it.”
“You mean …?” His mouth was ajar, brows stitched together.
“We have to look for it. Call 9-1-1,” she told the tall one. “Step carefully!”
He glanced over at Zach. Zach said, “We could like, call, then run for it.”
“I need you both to help me look.”
“They always send a cop car too,” the tall one said.
“They can put it back in,” she said, “the eye.” She was pretty sure about this. She looked at the hut. She needed to turn off the water. It kept spewing from the hose lying at her knees, so water was lapping out around them, maybe carrying the eye further into the dark. But it couldn’t have gotten far. Shane was on his side on the wet ice, curled up, rocking and grunting, one hand over the socket with its dangling nerve as she searched around him, tearing off her four gloves, peering hard, easing her hand over the ice. There were only a few spots of blood. No eye.
“Please,” he whispered, “help me. I’m sorry.”
“We’ll find it,” she said. “Tell your friend to call an ambulance! The tall guy.”
“I need help, Gabe, call!”
Zach was shuffling around, hunched almost double, searching. “Pretty hard to see over this way,” he said with the casual tone of a drunk looking for a dropped coin. Gabe picked his way toward the office door. Ellen was crawling over the puddled ice, tracing a circle around Shane. She would spiral outward in widening laps until she found the eye. She glanced over at the crazy man—still confronting the obelisk, oblivious. The door of the office swung open and light spilled onto the ice.
“That’s good!” she called. “Leave it open.”
“Hey, I think it’s … shit. No.” Zach was bent over, groping at something on the ice. As she watched, he toppled slowly forward.
Gabe was emerging from the office. In the doorway he stood silhouetted, panting as if he’d just run back from a distant payphone. Her new radio/CD player was in his hand. He shrugged, sheepish.
“I did call,” he said. “I’ve got to go. Sorry, man.”
She wasn’t sure who he meant by that. Pushing with one foot, sliding with the other like a curler, he skittered away to where the ice ended at the path leading onto Bay Street. As he hit the pavement he began sprinting, impressively fast for an intoxicated man with a large object in one hand.
Zach, now on his hands and knees like her, had stopped looking for the eye. He was watching Gabe disappear. She figured he would take off now too—but then he went on searching.
She said, “Zach?”
“I’m Sh-shane.” A whisper through jittering teeth. The black leather of his jacket was frosting over.
“No, I mean your friend.”
“Me?” said Zach. His head turned vaguely.
“Come more over this way—I doubt it could have got over to the boards.”
“Be careful,” Shane breathed, “they can put them back in.”
She was moving away from Shane, outward in her circles. Then she thought she saw it. It had slid off a good twenty feet, to where the wet ice met the hard bank of snow shovelled to clear room for the rinks. It was in the shadow of that bank. She was sure now. She crawled toward it, trembling. The eye seemed to watch her with unnatural alertness, even a kind of indignation, as if she were too slow in coming to its aid. Closer still, it seemed to stare not at but through her, at something behind or beyond her.
“I think I see it!” Zach yelled. He must be watching where she was headed.
“Go into the hut,” she called back. “There are bags in there, plastic bags in a Kleenex box, by your feet on the right as you go in. Get one and fill it with snow and bring it here. No, just bring it here. There’s snow here.”
“Okay! Just a minute!”
“You found it,” Shane said behind her.
“You’ll be all right,” she said. She reached for the eye, then paused, wanting to put her rubber glove on. The glove was back on the ice beside Shane. She didn’t touch the eye. She might damage it. It was hideous but riveting. Disembodied eyes made occasional appearances in horror novels, but those eyes were usually conscious, vigilant, a threat. This one was glassing over, as if losing interest in the world. Maybe starting to freeze. It didn’t look real. Porcelain with an iris of grey-blue glass, and too perfectly round to be real. If this were a film she would complain about the special effects. Like when the Twin Towers fell, soon after Gavin’s death—how it looked less real than the artificial disasters in films.
She wasn’t sure how soft an eye was—her impression was that the main material was more or less like pudding, though held firm by a membrane. She could imagine her fingerprint remaining on the eye, a pattern he would look through for the rest of his life. She would wait for the bag of snow and ease it in with a knuckle.
A far howl of sirens, the sound slowly mounting. She stayed on her knees, huddled low over the eye as if to shield it from the cold. She cupped it with her shivering hands without making contact. This way she didn’t have to see it. She glanced back. Zach had paused as he reached Shane on his way to the hut. He stood wobbling above his friend.
“You’re going to pull through, dude.”
“The hut!” she cried. “I need that bag!”
“Okay.” He staggered on, almost fell again. Then his head tilted with a drunk’s abrupt, temporary alertness. He’d heard the sirens. They were closing in. He ducked into the hut and emerged briskly, as though instantly sober, and slid toward her across the ice. The whites of his eyes showed larger. She had her left hand out for the bag and he relayed it to her with his stretched right.
For a second he stood above her, captivated by the eye. He glanced back at Shane. “I got to get out of here,” he whispered loudly, then stepped up on the bank and tore away across the park—the opposite direction from Gabe—his shoulders pitching and his hood peeling back. He ran past the obelisk, the man there turning his head stiffly to watch him go. As the moaning of the sirens merged into a single scream, she stuffed a handful of snow into the bag—they were kept in the hut for picking up the dog turds that cluttered the park and sometimes the ice. With the knuckle of her index finger she nudged the eye over the lip of the bag. It rolled right in. Unsure whether to seal the bag or leave it open, she turned and crawled back toward Shane. She was afraid of standing—she might slip, drop the bag, even fall on it. She crawled on her knees and right hand, her left holding the bag clear.
Shane sat up as she approached. The back of the hand covering the empty socket was blue and unbloodied. His good eye was fixed on hers. He was seeing her now, really looking. One of those rare times. Sometimes life seeme
d little else than a struggle to win the attention, the gaze, of others. That was what Gavin had really been doing, she supposed, screaming into that van at the end.
The ambulance and two squad cars flashed into sight, driving east on Ordnance. They would circle around and enter the park from Bay Street, by the hut. They vanished again but their sirens went on ripping the air apart.
“It’s going to be all right, I think,” she said, reaching him.
“If I can just keep my eye.”
“You will.”
“I’m sorry.”
“They’ll have that face of yours up and running in no time.”
She wasn’t sure if this was true. She’d almost said good-looking face.
“If I have to go back inside,” he said, slurring the words through purple lips, “I can take it, but not blind. Can I see it?”
“Guess you’d better confirm we’ve got the right one,” she said.
His torso jerked, as if shaken by a single laugh. She opened the bag. “Oh … Jesus,” he said, stared back at by himself. She set her bare hand on his shoulder. His body trembled under the leather. The folds in the lap of his low-crotched jeans were frozen so it looked like he had an erection. He didn’t flinch or look at her—he wouldn’t now.
“Did you hurt Walt, at the other rink?”
“Not like this. Hardly at all.”
“That better be true.” She gripped his hood and pulled it roughly onto his head.
“And for t-t-twenty bucks. Nobody could believe my life.”
With a face like that? she heard herself think. The crass assumption she now sometimes shared, that life must be a June breeze for the nice-looking. As if her life had been easy in her teen years. Shane would have been all over her then, and she would have craved him for the danger in his look. Why had nature given bad men all the attractive vitality? Like Gavin, years ago. Why did horror and romance so often overlap? She pushed her hand further, around his shoulder, feeling uncomfortably huge next to him. He seemed about to rest his head against her arm, then pulled back. A wall of hard, hot light came at them as the ambulance and squad cars shrieked up behind. To shield her eyes, she ducked her face, got a closer look at him. He seemed to be going into shock. His good eye stared off to where their twinned shadow was fast lengthening over the ice and the shrouded park. The crazy man was lit up at the edge of the headlights’ fanning swath. Turned toward them at last, he seemed to be staring, his posture solemn, noncommittal, his baseball cap in his hands like a mourner. “You’re going to be all right,” she told Shane, though really she wanted to take him by the chin and roughly turn his face toward hers and say, “Look at me.”
[ NOUGHTS & CROSSES ]
an unsent reply
––Original Message––
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: April 22, 2007 1:16 AM
Subject: RE: Hello?
n,
yes yes i did get your email but needed to reflect a little. i’m sorry. and yes i do think it might be best if i pulled back a little now, i seem to need some space to hear my own breathing, my own thoughts, it is hard when we are always in dialogue. i am sorry if this feels abrupt or my reasons feel vague, they just must be. for one thing, as i guess i implied, i have been asked to keep secrets and want to keep my word. i know you understand. you, after all, are one of my secrets. and as you know yourself and even said, maybe a severing, a temporary severing is what’s best now, for both of you. for everyone involved. please don’t worry about me, i will be all right, i am determined to get through this time. i promise i will get in touch again when i feel i can.
love always,
j
—
n
As in: never again, never again. That phrase with its cardiac cadence. Slight arrhythmia. A certain tunnelled clump of muscle misbehaving, missing steps or taking clumsy extras, a drunk at the top of the stairs in the dark. When you used the abbreviation before, that n, it was an intimate act, an adoring diminutive, as though to make the beloved compact enough to carry with you secretly. You always found me tall for a woman (too tall?). Now it’s as though you want to avoid repeating my full name: Arnella. Nelli. nell. n. To deduct the name down to nothing. Nobody, no one, nowhere, nothing, nought, null, nil.
yes yes
The one thing you would never say in the act was Yes! It was always O no O no O no O no! when you were getting close, and when I asked if it was because something was wrong, this “thing” was wrong, or was your pleasure (I would like to think so) intense to the point of pain, you turned shy and said it was “just what came out—you know” (your favourite lazy phrase) “like when a song shows up in your head and you just, like, let it out?” I didn’t press the point. I sensed you retreating into your separate memoir of intimate events. I didn’t ask if that was what always “came out,” or only with me. Separate memoirs, former loves. How crowded our bedrooms are these days. (Or not. Not my bedroom. Not these days.) For over a century there was a tunnel extending from the crypt of the main cathedral here down to the Hôtel Dieu, the old Catholic hospital, so the nuns and priests could stay indoors in winter when they were called off to see sick parishioners or perform the last rites. A few weeks ago I read about it and for some reason kept wanting to tell you. Why not now? Forty years ago they decided the tunnel was becoming unsafe. They sealed it off at both ends, but the passageway is still there, thirty feet under Brock Street, totally dark, of course, and empty. Sometimes now when I’m alone it hits me.
reflect a little
Five days of this little reflecting. Here is what gnaws me, besides the after-effects of five days of little reflecting on your part and much waiting on mine. What gnaws and haunts me is: whatever passed through your mind in those five (plus) days, all the stuff you decided not to voice, reconsidered, revised, rejected then retrieved, reneged on again, at last deleted. I want it back, the full census of your reflections, a crammed CT-scanful, all those references to me, I can’t accept that they’re gone, neural flickers like email never sent or lost in transit somewhere in the digital ether we’re all adrift in now. Or: whispers of a couple passing in that tunnel before it was sealed. A pair of nuns, let’s say, lovers on the down low, erotically revved up by the proximity of illness, death. Death’s weirdly elating ultimacy. Did they have torches? A medieval image, cinematic to the point of camp: dark figures hunched, capes wafting, torches in hand, flapping down limestone corridors propped with timber stays for safety, as in a mine shaft. Our lovers must feel unnerved, even so. They are crossing so many lines. The anxiety of the crime makes one notice other dangers everywhere. And safety measures always seem to whisper: some day we will fail! It feels safer where there are no measures. And either way, in their presence or absence, no safety.
i’m sorry
Sorry, maybe, because there were no reflections? You’d made up your mind? You’re sorry that you stalled about breaking the news, is all? They say that from the bottom of a deep hole you can see the stars shining even at noon. I never trust those little factlets from the Globe; still, it’s good news for the dead.
and yes i do think it might be best
Italics mine. But even without the italics (it’s my ethnic privilege to overuse them) your implication here is that I made the suggestion in the first place! Actually, of course, I did: “If you need me to pull back now, I will.” Naturally I didn’t mean it, though. Didn’t want you to accept. Wanted you to say O no O no O no O no! What’s more, you must have known I didn’t mean it—you just pretended to take the words at face value to give yourself a convenient out. Lovers are the world’s only honest people, according to certain poets and sages. Ho ho ho. I’m nostalgic for the salad days, grad and postgrad in the late ’70s and early ’80s, York and UBC, when it was an article of faith (if not experience) in our circle that straight lovers, bourgeois lovers, were the only dishonest ones. T[he] on/lie dys/honest ones.
That stage of li
fe when confidence depends on culprits.
Oh, to have both back.
i seem to need some space
But, but I thought we were bitter opponents of platitudes, you and I; we agreed that our love was not like any other love (italics mine, quotation yours, email 64, line 17: I am now chief archivist of your intimacies), and to consecrate and, as you would say, “honour” this singularity, we agreed that we would never speak of our love in clichés. We smogged the air with exalted vows like that. Teenage summer lovers in a song by the Boss. So, maybe a return to cliché is a neatly symmetrical way to shut things down … to deconsecrate our love, the way they do with those churches whose flocks have died off or moved to Palm Beach, and the buildings are converted to meeting halls or museums or daycares. Ever wondered how they deconsecrate a cathedral? I really should know, after a quarter-century in my field. (A century, one learns, is a small thing.) A choir assembles for the last time, chanting in discord, an infernal chorus. At the altar a bishop exhausts the full roster of religious obscenities. The organist, wild-eyed, riffs on anthem-rock standards, Queen, Gary Glitter, The Sweet, as if playing at a hockey rink.
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