Joyland Trio Deal

by Jim Hanas

  “I came back here. I walked home and peeled my fruit and put it in a bowl and washed my hands and ate at my table. I sat by the window until it was dark, thinking of nothing, and then I came to you.”

  “It’s a hot night and you’re a young man. You have to turn the muscle of your heart into something as indifferent as the muscle in your arm. We are performing a service by being here. You think that these people hate us, but you’re wrong. They are indifferent to us. Their eyes are so full they’ve gone blind. We have to tell their story.”

  “Why do they need us to do that?”

  “They don’t. It’s always someone else who gains by knowing tragedy. I can take the story from you. I can tell it for you. You can haul yourself through the streets like one of them. You can let your eyes go dark. Watch the killing, come home, eat and sleep, and then speak to me. And I’ll be you. I’ll be the you who needs to get paid. Drink up and write a letter home. You only look like you come from here. You were always able to leave.”

  “Do you think of yourself as a good man?”

  “Yes. I think of you that way too. You miss your wife and you’ve forgotten your name. It’s a kind of fever that we all go through, and that’s all.”

  “That’s all?”

  GOOD NIGHT, JULIE. FAR AWAY from me you must be kneeling down upon your shadow now; and the gleam of your irises is screened from the night by your hair. I can smell your skin in the palms of my hands. Float away, only love, away from the planet’s strange embrace. Tread through the cumulus of dreams. May you wake with a mouth full of violets. May you drink clean water from the tap. I’ll come home to kiss you in the grass again. We will never tremble apart. Julie — fear is waking without you. So turn the bed upside down and we’ll make love in the curtains. I can see your arms and legs. I can see the empty plates and glasses. I can see the gnawed corncob. I can see the patina of rust in the white porcelain sink. I can see your fragile nightgown folded on the floor. I can see your eyelashes flickering.

  The Lilac Fields at Sabor

  FOOTSTEPS CONCATENATE WITH SHOUTS ALONG the street. Sebastian blinks. He rolls away from the window and crushes the pillow to his cheek. He covers his exposed ear with a damp arm. As his eyes adjust to the darkness, the slumped shoulders of rumpled shirts draped over the iron rails at the end of the bed and over the loosened doorknob materialize as the desolate ghosts of soldiers. He hears glass breaking and then, finally, the night silences itself.

  “Four of us were at a table. A good-looking, shorthaired girl served us drinks from two gun holsters strapped by a leather belt to her skinny hips. She clapped a dirty highball on the table and asked me if I wanted whisky or gin. And then she took the bottle from her right hip and uncorked it with her teeth. She poured the liquor from the height of her shoulder and I stared into the brilliant jet, falling past my loathsome face,” Barbus says and laughs.

  “Did you take her home?” asks the second man.

  The second man arrived at the dining hall a few minutes ago, inserting himself easily into the famished gaggle of journalists eating breakfast around the long plywood tables. He smiles at Sebastian and lifts Sebastian’s coffee cup to toast the group. He introduces himself as “Tamai. I am a good driver. You need me,” he says.

  “I know where to find a dozen women like that for you,” he adds. “With long hair too. You should have a long-haired woman — to make you strong.” He grins. His front teeth are cracked. “You are writers, are you all? You must see the fields at Sabor for your papers; I’ll take you tomorrow, twenty-five dollars each.” He holds up two fingers and then five fingers and points affably between himself and them.

  Strains of American music filter through parted curtains in Barbus’s room. The crimson fabric inflates and deflates with the dusty breath of day. Dust motes glisten in the rose-light. Everywhere, the fermenting odor of alcohol enlaces the verdant scents of sweat and smoke.

  “Barbus?” Sebastian calls.

  “Sleeping,” comes a familiar growl from the direction of the bath.

  Outside the birds cackle up the dawn. The rumble of car motors competes with the snap, snap of toy guns fired at suspicious looking garbage bins.

  “The kids are up early,” Sebastian mutters. He plucks at the muscles along his neck and finds them taut as guitar strings. His spine feels crooked from sleeping twisted in the bowed palm of the antique mattress. “How many hours to Sabor?” he shouts looking in the speckled mirror over the bureau.

  “Two,” Barbus calls back.

  When the sun rolls into the clearest region of the sky, the air ripples with heat. White filaments of cirrus clouds veil the fields in spotty shadow. The light silvers the road. Sebastian leans his forehead on his hand to shield his eyes from dust and turns his head to watch the landscape. Music winds painfully out from a cassette tape, through the crackling speakers in the front, muffling his companions’ conversation. There are no animals in the leas alongside the road. No chubby sheep or stocky ponies graze the scruffy greenery. Sebastian stares into the citadel of trees set back, meters away from the asphalt divide.

  Occasionally he sees a soldier, lounging at the periphery, leaning a narrow body against a birch trunk. Sebastian sits up straighter to get a better look at them. In the city the young soldiers are always alert and on display. They parade their uniforms down the ruined alleyways as if the cobblestones hold pot lights, and all the broken windows hide galleries of breathless girls. Among the trees, from a distance, while they stare into the canopy and draw on cigarettes, the soldiers seem like wardens for the pastoral world. They guard the forest from the city and the ground from the sky. Vanity glimmers behind still irises and sullen jaws are set firmly above supple necks. At times they look hot and bored, like boys in Sunday suits. They long for some infringement, some spark to light their consciences. They would prefer to fight. They ache to move. Their pale cheeks are always flushed, and their eyes are always shining. At thirty years of age Sebastian already feels himself growing old, whenever he sees the white teeth of soldiers.

  “She has skin as pale and warm as sand. I told her I would marry her when they rebuilt the church. She said that was a safe offer,” Tamai continues.

  Barbus laughs. He tips his head back and slurps coffee from a steel canteen. He glances back at Sebastian. He smiles and his cheeks vibrate as the car hits a hole in the road. “My friend Sebastian here, has a fantastic lover. Tell the good driver about your wife, Sebastian. Go on. Ah, he’s shy.” Barbus turns back.

  “Never mind.” Tamai waves a hand, dismissing the silence. He points to rubble beside the road. “My mother was in a movie once, filmed over there, by those stones. You see? That used to be a house where a crazy old man lived. He liked to sit outside his kitchen in a chair and wait for someone to drive by. When he saw a car coming he ran out into the road waving his arms and yelling so that the startled driver would pull over, thinking that there was some trouble. When the car stopped the old man stood, waiting calmly for the window to roll down and then he would invite the motorist for lunch.” Tamai pauses. “It’s so lonely out here. I’m glad that they destroyed that house.”

  “What is the movie about?” Sebastian leans in from the window and coughs. Tamai’s black hair ruffles in the wind.

  “Well, it’s about a deaf woman locked away from everyone as punishment for letting too many accidents happen around her. The idea is, I don’t know, ever since her childhood she has a curse or something. Terrible things happen around her, but she doesn’t know. Because she can’t hear,” he gestures at his ear with one hand. “People scream for help around her. But she never looks up, never sees any of the disasters that draggle behind her one long life. Children drown while she bathes. Dogs are run over while she arranges fruit in a basket. Trains derail as she reads poetry in the station, and my mother never sees, never knows why she has been locked up in this house. She sits in the old man’s kitchen chair for months, waitin
g for the person who left her there to come and retrieve her. At the end of the film she drifts asleep, just as the world is going to war. Cannons roll over desert dunes, airplanes shed missiles over cities already on fire, water boils in the oceans, and my mother sleeps in the kitchen, with her head tilting toward her shoulder.”

  “How long was she an actress?”

  “She wasn’t an actress. She was in movies made by the neighbor. He had a camera shop in Sabor. He recorded most of the scenes with a VCR off the television.” The driver shrugs. “Nobody is an actress here.”

  “How long until we reach Sabor?” Barbus interrupts.

  “We’re almost there.”

  After a few minutes of silence Tamai clears his throat and looks into the backseat. “Why don’t you talk?” he prompts Sebastian. “Tell me something about you. Tell me your five favorite places, the five most beautiful places on the Earth,” Tamai shouts as a truck passes their car on the left side and the car tilts as they slip onto the shoulder.

  “Countries or cities?” Sebastian asks.

  “Anything. Places — like a city, or a room, or a bed, whatever is a place and also beautiful to you.”

  Sebastian licks his lips tenderly. His tongue is dry. His voice sounds coarse.

  “Okay. Porte Saint-Denis,” he says. “Where I grew up. The violet wallpaper in the cafés. Port Hope — where Julie used to live. Lying in my shorts in the wild grass, watching the water locks open and close,” he sniffs. “The clear smell of the water as it rises and falls. My kitchen at home: when the sunlight floods the counters, Julie sits on a stool by the island and wraps her brown feet around the stool legs and reads the paper. Where else? The window seat in an expensive restaurant in Toronto, the highway, watching the stream of lights, red lights on one side, white lights on the other . . .”

  “He’s very sentimental,” Barbus says.

  “What about you, Tamai?” Sebastian asks.

  “It’s Sabor. It’s just in the past.”

  The car hits another hole in the road. Sebastian grasps the frame of the window.

  “There was a field outside the city,” Tamai starts, “where the wind scattered lilac petals from the trees across the grass, and the air was perfumed like a bordello. Boys walked home for dinner with fists full of lilac stalks for their mothers. I had a little dog named Talia, after a girl that I wanted, and we ran together in circles kicking up clouds of purple petals. There was a café on the V-shaped corner of a dead-end street, and the fumes from the cars gathered there, but the waitress always wore dresses, and the cakes were sweet and warm. There was a banya, a bathhouse, where I met my friends and we splashed each other and swam naked in the warm pool. There were benches along the road where old men sat in rows and argued, or sometimes recalled their youth and joined in a rain dance with their arms around each other.”

  “What else?” Barbus asks. He is writing in his notebook, sticking the tip of his thumb into the end of the metal spiral at the top. Sebastian reluctantly retrieves a square of folded paper from his jeans pocket and gropes himself, searching for a pencil.

  “There were long white lines of laundry in all the yards. There was a house with an orange roof that my mother always wanted, so we walked past it every day. There were schoolyard jungles filled with bullies and pretty girls and athletes and bookish children. There was the camera shop where Salman Bibolt made photograms of coins and lace, and concocted scripts for home movies starring the lovely, married Asya Chermoev. There was a hospital where I had stitches in my forehead from falling off my bicycle. There was a window where I saw a naked woman, pulling down the blinds. There was a room in the preschool where I found my numbered steel pot in the circle of steel pots and sat with all the other children to be toilet-trained at nine o’clock. Yes, Sabor held all the most beautiful places on earth. Here we are.”

  The brakes complain as the heavy car slows. Sebastian looks outside and blinks with shock. The green, the scrub and bushes, the soldiers and cigarettes, the dead matches, the hills and trees are gone. The car halts and the sound of the car doors opening and closing explode the quiet.

  The air smells strange, smells dusky like the smoke of ordinary objects burned up in the human atmosphere. Sebastian swallows a stone of saliva. The birch trees are shattered. Every brick on the ground is broken. The horizon is unobstructed, empty. The entire city has broken down into the tiniest fragments and scattered like a trail, warning: don’t come this way.

  “Here?”

  “Yes.” Tamai stands stiff with his arms at his side and his chin braced against the sunlight. “Sabor,” he says, “is Russian for cathedral. But now the city is just rust. While I was driving, it really seemed as if I could arrive here as it was. Like I was on my way to visit someone, because I had forgotten their death.”

  Tamai scrapes a line in the dust with his heel. “I stand here, and the sky turns to powder above me. All the past, the crying after beatings, the laughing after swimming, the snoring, and the sighing, all of it, dissolves into a bell in my brain that sings: it’s over, it’s over, it’s over. I wanted to be the one to bring you here because I knew that, if you found it at all, you would never believe it was a city.

  “Over there, men with tempers played cards at night. And there, men with sunburned shoulders dug ditches. Lovers ate nothing all day from distraction. Children carried home bundles of sticks and called, ‘comrade, comrade.’ And the odor of the leaves —” Tamai inhales.

  Sebastian scans the horizon and sees a narrow band of sepia air rising in the distance. Pieces of metal glint in the furrows of dirt. The sky lies flat and indifferent over their heads.

  “The odor of the leaves,” Tamai whispers, “in the fall, was like the glow in your testicles after love. To remember it is obscene. It’s ruthless. It’s like lighting the church afire with prayer candles.”

  My Birth

  OUR TOWN AND WORLD DURING My First Year (in my mother’s handwriting): Montreal, Mr. Gross who was kidnapped was found the day after I was born, he had been captured and held by the Quebec freedom movement. They had already murdered Pierre Laporte, a French cabinet minister. The city of Montreal had been placed under martial law and 5,000 federal troops were patrolling the streets.

  I WAS EARLY AND THAT became usual. My mother kneeled on the floor in their living room, sorting out the gold and silver tree ornaments. The evergreen in the bay windows cast a conical shadow across the walls. My father stood, testing the strands of Christmas lights. Sirens interrupted music straining from the radio in the kitchen. My mother gasped and my father paused.

  “It’s too early,” she said.

  “It’s all right,” he reassured her. “A lot of people put up their trees after the first snowfall.”

  Then there was pain and blood. A frantic drive in a cramped Volkswagen followed by the sudden ambivalence of an ordinary-sized infant. After rushing to arrive I hesitated at the entryway until the doctor yanked me into the room with a set of tongs not unlike the kind that hang beside a barbecue.

  The doctors left. It was almost midnight. My father was still in the waiting room, winning at cards. Left alone with a protesting infant lying across her heaving chest my mother started to cry.

  “Sir,” the nurse said. “Sir, your wife needs you.”

  “If you ask me, and I know I’m the foreigner, but the FLQ are just the IRA with pastries — is she, with the baby?”

  “Yes. You have a lovely baby girl."

  My parents stared at me as if I was a stranger to them. The look of a baby shocked them. My fingers seemed too small for my hands. My limbs seemed elephantine, and my head was misshapen. Outside in the surrounding streets, rain dissolved the snow. The RCMP officers pulled plastic hoods over their helmets. Horses blinked away the drops of rain. Snipers crouched on the roof of the hospital, and the tanks marched down the streets like proud beetles.

  This Is the Story of How W
e Met

  THIS IS THE STORY OF how we met. I know the story of how we met. That doesn’t matter. It was a Wednesday or a Tuesday and it was raining. You were standing outside the art gallery in the rain and I asked why. You said I like the feeling of it; some people do. So I left you and went to find my friend. The wine was very cheap so the bartender poured small glasses until I made fun of him and he poured white wine until it ran over my hand. I saw you come in and I tried to make you talk to me. All the music was by bands I didn’t recognize. The art was photographs of people in crowds in Toronto where I am from on the streets walking around and looking at things but not at each other. I was wearing silver shoes with little flowers embroidered on the toes. In my shoes I was the same height as you and I could see you everywhere in the room until you were behind me. So why did you stay so near me and not speak to me? I was being careful. I thought you were quiet, very quiet and serious, but you’re not at all, are you? Sometimes I am, but I like to talk. We had all the same friends that night and so we walked together to a bar after the gallery. My friend said that she would like to have a shrine built for her. I said I would rather have a cottage. We wanted you to build the shrine and the cottage for us because you once built churches in Mexico. I can speak a little Spanish, but I have never been to Mexico. There was an empty chair beside me at the bar. You sat down right after I thought: I want him to sit down in this chair and talk to me. I bought you a cider and you told the table how once your car caught fire when your sister threw her cigarette out the window and it blew into the backseat. I thought I laughed too long at that story; it was too obvious. I kept drinking long after I was drunk because you were still there. After last call I asked the bartender if there were any mints and he said he would give me peppermint schnapps, but I laughed and came back over to the whittled group. You said I have Jack Daniel’s in the trunk of my car, but I said I have to go home. I kissed everyone goodbye and said will you walk me out? On the stairs we said our friend who was sad was actually lucky. You said he has a beautiful woman who is coming home to live with him. Outside the streets were very empty, but still the taxis filled up before they reached me. I said it is a little scary out here at night and you nodded as if it made sense now why you were there. I was hoping you would kiss me, but instead you said this one is yours and hailed a yellow taxi and put me inside. Then I went away for a week for a family birthday. My grandmother was turning ninety-five. After her party I went to her bedroom and lay on the bed with her. She was tipsy and laughing. I said what advice do you have for me now that you are ninety-five? She said find a man who is intelligent and kind and has a strong sex drive. Find him and fall in love with him and give him everything. I said did granddad have a strong sex drive? She said yes, we used to go to parties and he would guide me into a room and kiss me and I was afraid someone would come in and see us having sex on their coat. I still miss him she said. I thought about you while I was away. I thought I think I miss him. When I came back I sent you an email, but for days you didn’t answer. When you answered you were really formal and I felt crushed. Why did you do that? I was being careful because I knew I would be leaving for Japan. I would be gone for years and I didn’t want to hurt you. It hurt me anyway. It will hurt when you go, but I don’t care. I don’t care if it hurts. When you said the other day this is going to hurt, isn’t it? I thought please be like me, please don’t care. But what I was saying before was when I came back I thought why is he resisting me, I think he likes me. When we are together it seems as if he likes me. The next time that I saw you it was at the same gallery for a party. And you were walking away from me all the time. After the party we went with all our mutual friends to a dance club. It was dark except for the moving colored lights and the screens on the walls showing old television shows. Everyone was happy. You bought me a drink and we danced in a group. The music was more that I didn’t know. It always is that way. I don’t know many songs. I was hot after dancing. My hair was wet from sweat and I sat down at a table by myself. You came over with two more drinks. I said is that for me? And you nodded, you didn’t say yes. We had a conversation. After a while I took a breath and I made myself say so do you actually like me or do you just like me liking you? You said I like you very much. You sounded serious. I don’t remember the conversation after that only that my cheeks hurt from smiling until I said when are you going to kiss me? That’s not what you said. What did I say? You said do you like me enough to kiss me? I said do you like me enough to kiss me, but you didn’t say anything so I said no? You said I do, I will, or I am. I don’t really know what you said and we kissed and we kissed for three hours with all the music disappearing and our friends watching and strangers. And I knew that you were going to make my life better. That is the story of how we met. You’re wrong, we met months before that. No that was only being around each other. People can be around each other for a long, long time and never meet. In another scenario you stayed careful and I thought you liked someone else. We were around each other a handful of times for a few more months and then I went back to Toronto and you went to Japan and we never met. Sometimes I think that is what really happened. It’s that simple. We never met and this is just a story I tell myself when things are hard and I think about you.