Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  Crone knew much about Napoleon’s habits largely through the Royal Mail, who were grateful enough to him for introducing the idea of parcel post that the Postmaster General saw no issue with having all of Louis Nap’s letters appropriated, steamed, perused for any mention of the inventor, and resealed before being sent on their way. It was through the Royal Mail that the Napoleons received their crosswords from the Americas; tangrams from China; a French translation of The Charades written by Pope Leo XIII; a Russian minus cube; some ancient Greek assembly puzzles; a disentanglement puzzle from northern Korea mixed, with an impossible object, called the Acorn Heist; Iranian puzzle locks; a Sri Lankan magic box with a gorgeous roach inset; lateral thinking one-minute mysteries, most of these from Britain (in which a pile of sawdust beside a bed inferred mind games with a circus midget leading to his suicide, or a nude man in the desert was obviously on a doomed balloon trip with some friends and drew the short match to save them all, or some equally ridiculous twist); and many, many others. There was certainly nothing that could link Napoleon to any plot on the Welsh inventor’s life.

  Similarly, Crone’s team of private investigators came back with nothing but the old emperor’s grocery lists, half-eaten mustard and brie sandwiches, cigar bands, gardening tools, and the first ten rows of what they assumed would eventually become a sock, although it might have also been a mitten, a sweater sleeve or a stuffed animal of some sort for young Jérôme, who had been diagnosed with a rare hereditary disease shortly after they came to England. Louis didn’t even appear to know anything about the role the sleeping bag had played in the war, let alone Crone’s part in it, as evidenced by an incomplete crossword from October 1, 1872, with the 5-letter clue: 11 DOWN Put the Prussians to sleep, beside which, in the page’s margin, he’d scribbled the name of the German poet Gleim, along with the words booze, and even death. The investigators suggested Crone was safe, but he interpreted this omission of his name as a poorly contained fury, in which Louis Nap could not even bear to speak or write his name. And so Crone sold the company he had built from the ground up to another Welshman named Pryce Jones. Crone liquidated all other assets he had, and started work on the steel fortress where he could live out his last days safe and alone.

  During that time, he continued to receive daily reports on Louis Nap’s life, piecing together, through these scavenged artifacts, what the deposed emperor must be thinking, how the Frenchman must, in his own way, have been piecing together elements of Crone’s own life and assembling them into his careful plan for revenge. Whenever he misplaced something, Crone flew into a rage at his workers, followed by a swift apology, followed by solitary brooding. Eventually, only his chief contractor was allowed in his presence, and it was this man, another Welshman by the name of Ian Rotches, who single-handedly welded the final walls into place.

  Rotches is listed in the information bureau of the Sefydliad chan ’n Crone Astudiaethau as the last person — and in several conspiracy books as the second last — to have seen Saith Drava Crone alive.

  On January 9 of the following year, Louis Napoleon died of kidney failure. But Crone was already locked up in an impenetrable fortress, so presumably lived out the rest of his days alone and afraid. In 1917, forty-five years after he closed himself off from the world for good, one of the fortress’s walls was accidentally breached by German bombers. At that point, the gardens had become overrun with weeds, with most of the exotic fruits having completely disappeared. The only evidence that Crone’s notebooks did not just contain the writings of a madman were the traces of seeds in the stool of the monstrous flock of macaws that had taken up roost in the bell tower.

  Crone himself was discovered in the innermost recesses of his fortress, apparently suffocated by one of his own sleeping bags, in a room that was locked from the inside and contained nothing but his body, a piano wiped clean of fingerprints save for each F key, a bat, a mirror, and a table sawed in two symmetrical pieces.

  After police followed the clues to various dead ends, the case was eventually dropped.

  The Torogeans

  There was no hope for him this time: all nine lives had been used; or however many were allotted to the squirrels, on that day when the cats somehow sulked away with more than they deserved. I often thought to myself: Was this the reason so many insects lasted only a season, or a day, or less? These horrible cats?

  The squirrel, fracturous and truculent in death, his body wrapped amorously around the base of the No Parking post just east of Yonge, would have been practically bald on one hip were it not for the flies that worshipped there, motionless in their solemnity. I ratcheted down for another look; and allowed myself to be impressed by it all, the stillness, until we both became swarmed by these women, the errant lunchers, with their designer salads and one fashion sense between them. I continued cursing under my breath and staring as if the sight did not interest me. But then the first of them boiled up enough social responsibility that it frothed from her mouth, and the dams were broken:

  — Did anyone see how . . . ?

  — Has he been . . . long?

  — Did he . . . peacefully?

  — And everything . . . ?

  — Ah, well, he’s gone to a better world.

  No doubt. Those milling cows. I wanted to take him home with me, so dead he was; or at least to the park, where he might at least escape them and their lazy sighs. Would the officials run me off for digging in the park? Surely not, on such a solemn occasion.

  I held motionless as the flies.

  The allergist told him his problems were not the fault of the city, his precious city of mumblers and shakers, but the Nature that had managed to survive by its graces: the trees, like weeds, particularly those spare saplings along the thoroughfares, held back from full maturity, thank goodness, in boxes of erupted concrete; the spaces between home and street, congested with grass; the parks. Their bawling infants of pollen set up unwelcome shop along his ancient runtish bronchi like the trendy coffee shops and designer boutiques along West Queen West and, gradually, drove all the oxygen from his lungs until he was confined to his room with his freshly scrubbed ventilation ducts and a triumvirate of hand-stitched hankies.

  No matter how hard the city tried to be rid of it, this Nature — pushing it further and further from the city’s center, setting up barriers of highways and suburbs, smoothing the rough patches with concrete and asphalt — some community action group lobbied the frail politicians to save another patch of central space: a ravine, or an underground creek no one could see. Lately, directly across the street from him, they’d been rehabilitating the old streetcar barns into some kind of new park, where the decades of oil and electricity that had seeped into the earth were sure to create trees of spiraling copper and tin.

  Every night as he gazed out his window he said softly to himself the word paralysis.

  And then, because the strange sound of it pleased him so much, he said equidistant.

  Then bubblegum.

  Armoire.

  Arm war . . .

  They could always count on his parents: to be oblivious to their world, and to post requested money without question. So when the thought of buying the house off Christie first entered their minds, it found exit through their checkbook with purpose and celerity. The former tenant of the house, a poet, had died in the old basement apartment, presumably from mold inhalation. The air, musty from the water leaking down an unused chimney through the shared wall of the duplex, hung in all the rooms; and sawing a hole through the drywall with a nail file to examine the extent of the damage, he discovered the poet’s secret deposit of allergy medication and assorted paraphernalia of loneliness: empty canisters of fluoxetine, fluvoxamine, citalopram and Nefazodone; phenelzine, Zoloft and another where the name had faded to illegibility; some bills, snug in their elastic cradle; a loonie; several cans of beer, uncrushed; three more, crushed; a toy train; two 1.5 liter bottles of cheap r
osé; a half-dozen airplane bottles of Canadian Club; several boxes of Smarties; and a dead bird.

  Prescriptions had sometimes been written only days apart, by Doctors Rathee, Bourrouilh, Rajagopal, Joyce, and others.

  He started making a list of the names and dates. This was how he felt he could finally connect with this city that was not his own, how he could share in its stories. But it succeeded in nothing but overwhelming him; he placed it all out with the recycling, including the list, and forgot about it.

  She had moved there for a boy. First of all it had been an excitement for her to have a fellow from Away. And then she had begun to like him. He had fallen on his feet in the city, he said, and had returned to his hometown merely for a holiday.

  Of course, her father had discovered the affair and had forbidden her to have anything to say to him.

  — I know these writer chaps, he said.

  Yet she had a right to happiness. To culture and stylishness. Frank would take her in his arms, fold her in his arms. He would save her. When she came secretly to visit him he went all-out on an air conditioner for the bedroom. They ate brunch in a diner with only three booths, four stools and a lineup that stretched around the corner. They embraced at a concert in what was normally a hair salon just east of Chinatown. The drummer couldn’t sit still and knocked over his entire kit during the final song. She felt elated.

  Only, once she actually moved there, the living was meager. He refused to work any more than he needed in order to eat, and she had to find a part-time job to cover her tuition and necessities for both of them. He made her to feel depraved for her new shoes, or skirt, or for buying the wrong cheese, or an iced coffee, which only made her require those things even more, for reassurance, concealing the clothing in the back of her closet for occasions when she went out dancing with her new friends, and the empty Vanilla Chillattes in the neighborhood trash cans.

  Her eyes strolled across the living room floor, imagining the broom and dustpan in its nook at the basement stairs, wondering where on Earth all the dust came from.

  The night Italy took the cup, the city wore the mask of a capitol. The five young men strolled along the Corso Italia in a faint cloud of beer gas and perspiration. They shouted loudly and gaily and their flags dangled from their shoulders. The other people, who also shouted loudly and gaily, also dangling flags from their respective shoulders, made way for them. At the corner of Earlscourt, a fat boy had removed his shirt and was waving at other fat boys to do likewise, the traffic lights flickering like a strobe between his moving arms.

  Several blocks over, their whistles and chanting stormed the broken vents and down the sweaty aural canals of the other poor workers who could not justify calling in sick — no longer French or Portuguese or German or Argentinian, but Canadian once again, silent and bitter.

  — Damned Italians! Coming over here!

  In loss and disappointment we all revert to being Canadian.

  Corley and his man lived in the apartment they could afford. Their drapes were as thin as secrets, as thin as promises, as thin as the privacy they held over their neighbors who pressed their ears against the wall with regularity and decried:

  — The nerve! Just listen to them!

  Decency was a luxury their passion could not afford.

  Meanwhile, there were at least fourteen feral cats on Corley’s street, and in the summer evenings they called out to each other like abducted, malnourished children. This took on an entirely different level of subtext when the actual children of the neighborhood gathered around them and crooned mockingly.

  Sanjay could imagine his friends talking of the affair and laughing. She was a little vulgar; sometimes she said I seen and If I had’ve known. Plus she corrected him when he said I feel bad by hobbling a crippled -ly to its tail when there was nothing wrong with his feeling mechanism, only that, when he spoke with her at any length, he felt ill in his stomach, and perhaps also in portions of his heart.

  Also, she was a cat person, whereas he spent most of his time on his porch spraying the dirty beasts out of his garden with a hose. He rejoiced when her precious Muffins was struck down by a roving knife-sharpening truck. But the veterinarians somehow succeeded in nursing it back to health, though it was now paralyzed from the waist down, and he had to literally squeeze the shit out of it two or three times a day, bracing the cat under his left arm like a set of bagpipes and forcing his bicep from its ribs to its ass.

  Despite the areas where she was quite talented, his instinct urged him to remain free, not to marry. Once you are married you are done for, it said. Once you are married, the cat is yours.

  And she snuggled up to him as if she didn’t already hate him as well.

  At Mimi’s, over a simple breakfast of chili and eggs, Little Chandler would become a star. With the remnants of its runny albumen in his whiskers, he would chuckle at appropriate moments and try to seem flattered and surprised when presented with the contract. The night prior, an A&R rep had flown in from New York to watch him play, visibly paying attention through most of the show; ever since, Little Chandler’s thoughts had been of her, of her invitation to breakfast and of the great city New York where she lived.

  For the first time in his life, he felt himself superior to the people he passed. For the first time his soul revolted against the dull inelegance of Bathurst and Queen. There was no doubt about it: if you wanted to succeed you had to go away.

  Afterward, with nothing more than her encouragement in his pocket, Little Chandler tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a musician’s soul.

  A band of tramps had huddled together along the steps of the abandoned bank, their old coats covered with dust and soot, stupefied by the panorama of the mid-morning haze and waiting for the first chill of night to bid them arise, shake themselves, and be gone again.

  At the party, he had told a story about working in a restaurant and stealing Celine Dion’s first Juno, which was not his own story but it did make him the center of attention. So, encouraged by his first success, he mistakenly told them more about his own life, how ants had overtaken their kitchen, and how once he had found one in the wine he had already bottled. Mice had also chewed into the cereal, the cornstarch, the saltines, and the rice puffs, and one night he had chased one of them around the entire apartment with a broom until it escaped under the stove. He’d set the dials to broil and waited ten minutes before dragging the great vessel from its moorings and revealing the tiny escape hole in the wall.

  Some people left the room. But, unfortunately, many remained to hear him speak at length about the insects’ stretched abdomens, or the reproductive cycle of the tiny rodents, and how warfarin, a chemical doctors prescribed to treat high blood pressure, was also commonly used to kill many pests, from mice to squirrels, essentially eating away at their tiny arteries until they died from internal bleeding. In the kitchen, where the party appeared to have moved without him, he regaled them further with tales about the invention of the rubber tire, and the great accomplishments of Pope Leo XIII, and about different wine varietals grown in California.

  Standing alone in their backyard at the end of the night, his body ached to do something, to go out and revel in violence.

  She was wearing a sweatshirt she’d lifted from the Laundromat on Roncesvalles. She’d purchased, for the party, a small bag of walnut cakes from the small Korean couple on Bloor. Then, on the streetcar, a stout gentleman with a grayish moustache offered her his seat because he thought she was pregnant, so she told him to fuck off. She ate a walnut cake. Then the woman beside her told her the story of how Jesus came down to Earth on a plane and gave us all technology:

  — Imagine this place a thousand years ago, the woman spurted wistfully, her eyes out the window; no cars, no planes, no factories or busses. . . . How boring!

  The floor became suddenly engrossing.

  — It’s a good thing there are people. �
��Cos otherwise, just animals. It would be a zoo!

  She ate another cake.

  — Do you have a boyfriend? All women need boyfriends to make them feel useful.

  . . .

  — Do you have a baby? My boyfriend and I are trying to have a baby.

  The walnut cakes were gone. And someone was responsible.

  James Chan lived in Port Perry, adjacent to Oshawa, because he wished to live as far as possible from the city of which he was a citizen and worker, and because he found all the other suburbs of Toronto crass, modern, and overrun with either immigrants or delinquents. It had taken him under twenty minutes to bike to work from their first home downtown. Then, drawn to the flame of an earlier retirement, he exchanged that central proximity for more space, investing in larger and larger properties for less and less money, and their existence grew less dense, less heavy, less expensive, the farther they moved from the city’s center.