Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  I pull my face from his chest. He smells of the lake. The middle of it. Where it is two hundred feet deep, and you might find a piano on the bottom.

  ‘I was looking up,’ I say.

  ‘I was looking down. You won’t believe the things people lose.’

  There is a formality to his way of speaking like he is trying on the words, seeing if they fit. Immaculata told me, overarticulating, ‘Children are born with the capacity to speak every language as they adapt to their environment they discard the shapes for syllables and vowels they deem to be unnecessary we should try to adapt Euge we should really try to adapt.’ The man forgot to throw away these extra shapes. His mouth is crowded with the sounds of every alphabet. He could pronounce anything.

  He is carrying a cooking pot, which hangs from one hand. A grey shoelace pulls his hair back off his face. His eyes troll from the toes of my boots up to the crown of my head and then back down again, pausing at my belly button. He stares at it. Just when I think it is a blue finch and he will stroke it, he leads me to a bench, protectively, as though I am blindfolded. We sit and pull our knees up to our chests. The two of us, beside each other, forgotten accordions, waiting to be opened and played.

  ‘I found a coin once outside a bus station. When I picked it up, I thought, only one thing is this heavy in a hand.’ The man’s eyes are elfin in shape, tapered at the corners. They are the colour of gun smoke. ‘Gold.’

  ‘My sister used to find all kinds of things.’ I picture the small, soft bodies of rodents, snakes and bats swirling in jars under her bed, her zigzagged afghan pulled down around them. She lay on her back between them and painted the black slates of her cot into constellations and planets. To them Euge this is the universe.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  I nod. He beams, making creases of his face.

  ‘You don’t have a concussion? I won’t have to wake through the night?’

  He laughs a molten-core laugh. His laugh is older than he is. When he is finished, he hums a bit.

  He has a tuxedo stripe down his black pants. He is wearing tennis shoes. They are also wet. He could tell me that he swam here, with nothing but his cooking pot, and I would believe him. He could tell me that his cooking pot holds the lake, and now, when I look out, all I will see is a piano.

  He tilts the pot toward me. It is three inches deep with fresh raspberries. ‘Please.’

  I put one in my mouth. It is the taste of a lost body part.

  ‘They came early this year. I pick them by the tracks. At the end of Dunn Avenue.’ He lifts a finger to his mouth, it is tipped with dirt. ‘Don’t tell anyone.’

  I find myself leaning in toward him. ‘I won’t.’

  His hands and arms are scratched. White shirt rolled up to the elbows, it is spattered red across the shoulders, the shirt of a man shot at while dancing. He had to fight for the raspberries.

  ‘I am making a pie,’ he says.

  ‘Our neighbours made a pie until they burned their house down.’

  ‘They probably wanted a fire. Not a pie.’

  I see the twins, their skin hardening into scales, how they enacted disaster for their mother’s touch. How they stood in front of their oven as it flared into an inferno. How they made themselves stay before it, considering it an unusual flower – one they could not help but pick. What we will do to be touched.

  The CN train hurtles across the bridge at Queen and Dufferin, shaking the round-windowed tower of the Gladstone Hotel. A great clang and grunt against the rails. The man covers my ears until it passes. The undersides of his hands are rough. His skin is the colour of chestnuts. Drifter skin. He sleeps beside a campfire and when he whistles a horse appears.

  I watch him eat a raspberry. If I kissed him, he would bite my bottom lip, my shoulder blade too. Immaculata would call him lupine.

  He asks me a second time, ‘Are you all right?’

  I nod.

  We stare out at the people tramping the sidewalk. We sit in silence. We have already had every conversation we need to have. We have completed a most exhausting cycle, and we have finally found this bench to rest on together. We could sit here and do nothing but grow old, and one day be declared prehistoric. We could turn each other into icons and then mortals and then icons again. We have already dangled those two words, love me, like beads on a fine string. We have already witnessed those beads fall and scatter. We agree that the people rushing by us appear to be practicing war. They are chasing their beads. We’re not. We are sitting this war out. We have only just come home.

  We finish the raspberries. Our lips are stained red – our mouths new, flamboyant birthmarks. The man’s hair is dry. I could not drag my fingers through it. They would never find their way out.

  I look into the emptied pot.

  ‘What will you do now?’

  ‘Pick more.’

  There is no question of whether I will go with him. We do not run in packs. We keep each other separate, and in so doing, keep ourselves intact. The man walks away, in the direction of where I used to live. Suspenders hang from the back of his pants. His body is limber and supple, a slipknot. He could outwit chains and handcuffs. Exit an apiary without being stung. He could have a tortoise on a leash, a gramophone on his shoulder.

  ‘Bye,’ I say.

  ‘You’re a slim bit of flint.’

  His words bound in my head, bulky and flourishing. His accent is placeless. Mink would try to imitate it, but she would never quite get it.

  ‘Is English your first language?’ I call after him. He stops and gazes back at me. If his pockets were full, people might accuse him of stealing. He seems to sit on both sides of the law.

  ‘I don’t have a first language.’ And with that, the man vanishes into the fold.

  From our collision, raspberries blot the sidewalk red. They appear like markings at the beginning of a trail. The man’s front teeth were capped. And his words in my ear were the snaps and hollers of a dream being remembered.

  I will wait for Finbar’s response. He is the clue you left for me, the only one. And so, patient as a huntress crouched on a platform high in a tree, I will wait for it. If he is prompt, which I think he will be, given the brightness of the number eighteen, how it flickers, it should take two days. And with his letter, I will hope that, in accordance with some decent frontier-town barter, he will include a map, and that once I follow the map, there you will be, cigarette between your teeth, smoke rising in powdered wigs and signatures. You will tell me you wished you could give me a world that was only beautiful but that this is impossible. And then, your face a downpour of tears, you will drive it through the nearest pane of glass to give yourself a new scar, your most formidable yet, as apology.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  eugeniamydarlin’,

  distance nothing but a line between us.

  one we will walk.

  s

  The morning after Mink comes home from Sudbury (eye roll) smelling of menthol, you find Urszula Minor dead in the backyard. You had seven stray cats: Sirloin, Madame Balcony, the Naturalist, Peter Frampton, Rococo and Mighty Digger. But Urszula – elegant, minuscule, tailless – was your favourite. You would bring her a bowl of food every night balanced in your filthy shoemaker hands. While she ate, your boot would circle the dirt around her, trenching a moat. You wanted her to live with us, to perch on your shoulders while you painted, to curl up at the end of your bed. But Mink would have none of it. Turning the vacuum cleaner off with the kind of kick that starts a motorcycle, she said, Urszula is probably drowning in fleas. She wasn’t then. But she sure is now.

  Urszula’s body is mangled and mud-glazed. She lies stiff under the apple tree. A bowl from the wedding-china cabinet sits beside her, licked clean. You swear that she was poisoned. You pull her to you, crumple over like a page on fire, and you yell her name. Ula. You called her Ula for short. Ula. Ula. You shout it over and over again. Ula. A curse that has filled you up. Ula. Ula. Ula. You break through the
back door. Blood freckles your hands and neck, thick splinters to your hair. You clear off the kitchen table and you lay her down. Immaculata broods beside you, fitful and sparring, a body trapped in a burlap sack. Mink’s brow knits. She is searching for an answer.

  I want to be the body on the table. I want to be the name that has taken you. I want to be your curse. Immaculata, suddenly very calm, pulls you away from Urszula and intones, ‘She’s gone Sheb she’s gone.’ You glower and then all the muscles in your face die. You turn to me. Your eye could tumble out.

  You retreat to your bedroom and stay there for three days, hitting your soft head against the wall.

  Urszula is the first thing I have ever seen that is dead. Aside from Immaculata’s clippings in the folder labelled DEATH and the photograph of Lenin in his coffin, which she keeps, like a portrait of the Queen, above her bed. ‘I bet the mourners did not know that his mouth is sewn shut true that’s what the embalmers did sewed your mouth shut true sick but neat whoa,’ Immaculata told me and then quickly sutured her mouth before pinning the photograph there below her reading light.

  ‘Death makes you available for anything.’

  ‘Death can make you carry a placard for something you do not believe in.’

  ‘Death can make you wear an argyle suit.’

  I study the photograph. Death is being trapped in a strange mould while others stand above you, wondering what they will look like dead. Wondering if they too will look glue-coloured. Wondering when.

  Immaculata is an expert in life expectancies. While she deftly alternates Urszula’s body between the freezer and the oven – preserving her until you are ready to bury her – she determines that, ‘By the looks of it, Urszula Minor is close to twenty years old this is plenty of life for a cat Euge should I tell him cause of death was nature?’

  ‘No.’ You prefer to be a habitation for injury. You prefer the sting complete.

  Immaculata smooths Urszula’s coat. Mink is too engrossed doing an inventory of the wedding china to notice that she has snuck her silver-handled hairbrush to do the job.

  I sit in the hallway outside your bedroom, waiting to be admitted entry. The house is so quiet without your threats to impale yourself, to throw yourself on a bed of cacti, to shoot yourself with Mink’s prop gun, without your stomping and your shouts, your claps, your clumsiness – things dropped and broken – your orders to clamour around the radio, tears falling in wet strands from your eyes, necklaces shining more brightly than anything else. Without your muddy footprints over the vacuumed strips of the carpet left there like a diagram for a dance student to step into.

  You moan to yourself to drown out the noise of the sun. Ula. Ula. Ula. You say it over and over again. Until the word is just vowels. Limp darts to the light. The shadows grow longer. Afternoon. You step to the window and pull back the curtain, a sniper. Everyone appears to you as Urszula Minor’s murderer. The postman. Clotilda and Yufeng with their grocery bags of bread and peanuts. Clotilda’s mute son polishing his silver car. Even Tuberculosis Flo with her hair band and pigtails. Even Elsie. Even Mink.

  Children gather to play hopscotch in front of our house. They draw white lines on the sidewalk. You lean your head out the window and you say in a whisper-staccato, the sound of blades, smoke coming out of your mouth, scat scat scat. And, frightened, they do. They split apart in a run, their schoolbags falling from their shoulders, laces coming undone. They start to spread rumours about our house. A madman lives there. He is tower-tall and he never washes and he never sleeps and his wife is a witch and his daughters are pale ghosts, and if they speak to you, run, it’s a trap, because if you answer, your mouth will be sewn shut. Now when they walk by, the children, without a glance our way, cross the street. The chalk clutched in their small hands, to you, the wretched vial.

  When you do finally emerge, the groan of your dresser pushed aside and the door creaked open three inches, you squint at the hallway light. A slice of your face and, behind you, your room is a darkened theatre. You don’t even know who I am. ‘I won’t paint anymore,’ you murmur. And with that, my heart does a kind of lurch and makes the low screech of a tanker running up against rock.

  ‘Just let me keep Eugenia.’ You are begging.

  ‘But I’m here.’

  You beg until you go hoarse.

  ‘But I’m here.’

  An air howl. And then, your mouth still moving, you close the door. The skid of your dresser scratching the bedroom floor.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  e(quatorial). e(cstatic). e(xcelsis deo). e(ugenia).

  contrary to fairy tales, stars don’t shine.

  they are so old that they are dead.

  this makes space the perfect hideout.

  invitation.

  still no neighbours. skin to the wind.

  s

  Now to find a place to rest my head on this bag of onions and money before I stalk our former home and the postman who, bandy in his postman shorts, smells of broth. I head east along Queen Street, toward the ferry docks, toward the lake, feet sure as any migratory instinct.

  ‘Those are some boots, mama.’ A man in a leather hat with skin that matches tosses this out to me, tipping his brim, junk shop behind him, birdcages and suitcases making fragile towers. His face is a plate that has been shot in the air. ‘I’d follow you to the grave, I would.’ This time he sounds serious. A filthy swallow dips his beak into the last shrinking puddle below him and, together, the man and his bird usher in my age, my new age, the age of eighteen. Its thirst.

  I feel as if I have been away. As if I’ve stood at the bottom of an ocean floor. Walked through snow thick as a blindfold. Been dragged behind a horse, pine gum in my hair. And now, returned, I have misplaced some things and forfeited others. In their absence, new things have chuted in to claim their place. They are just slightly harder to the touch, bones that much more fused. I stop in front of the beautician’s window to inventory, not sure what form they’ll take, these souvenirs. I could have a tricycle in my pocket. I could be covered in moon dust. I could have gloom for eyes. I could be cured with salt.

  Mink takes me here the day of my ninth birthday. The beautician is blind. Her pupils pale and aimless. Her own hairdo a bit crooked, a slightly disappointing cake. But no one would ever tell her. Not because of her blindness but because she does not lend herself to other people’s opinions. This is what I like about her most. This is why I remember her and her beclouded eyes. She smells of cupcakes and talcum powder. When Mink apologizes for me having ants in my pants, the beautician says that she understands the restlessness of children. She has five children of her own – all named for countries she has never been to and knows she will never see. Chortle, chortle, she laughs and clutches her chest. I realize that she smells of her children, that she just cannot get enough of touching them. Driving home, Mink says, ‘With those names, her kids’ll be exotic dancers.’ Mink laughs hard. It is the sound of a turbine. She steams the front window. In the mist, I write EUGENIA. I imagine it to be the name of a country.

  Luxembourg. Côte d’Ivoire. Tuvalu. Belarus. Yemen. Eugenia.

  ‘Are you issuing passports for Eugenia?’ Mink asks, looking at me, my shellacked up-do. Her eyes flitting back and forth across my face, she is reading the same urgent signal again and again.

  ‘Would you like one?’

  ‘Yes.’

  And then we grow quiet; we are the first to round a corner and stumble upon a hidden dominion, fog to our waists, a thatch of forest beyond.

  Today, a sign on the door in a child’s handwriting reads CLOSED DUE TO FAMILY EMERGENCY. I cup my hands and peer in the window. Hair lies unswept on the floor. Octopi. Dust has gathered on the leather chairs and the kits of press-on nails and nail polish. Dust has made all the wigs grey.

  I take in my reflection. My face is not pure and beautiful. Not nearly as successful a configuration as Mink’s or Immaculata’s. The features are too exaggerated, a collage by an impatient child. But
I do belong in it. It is mine, this face that could almost be yours. I move in closer. Touch the glass. I miss you. My pupils are a translucent green. Seaweed at the surface of the water, the sun pulsing, blowing them out. My pupils are yours. You should be beside me rolling an apple through your dirt-coloured teeth, sucking on its seeds, spitting them out and turning the city wild with trees.

  I reach into my pant pocket to retrieve what I managed to sneak out under Immaculata’s watchful gaze: the box of REDBIRD matches. Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you’ll find out for yourself. And a black-and-white photograph of you. I took it on our camping trip to Darlington. It is the only one I have. Rain is skidded across your face. Blackflies too. A cigarette dangles from your mouth, you are mid-story. I pin the photograph to my back. Surely someone will recognize you. Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Surely you were that well-known. I pin the photograph to my back. Just in case I cannot find what I am looking for.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  from the last whole earth catalog,

  the ‘treaty for outer space’

  prepared in geneva 1966

  includes this clause,

  senate approved 88 to 0:

  if an astronaut lands on another country’s soil he must be

  returned safely, promptly and unconditionally.

  A heap of wedding dresses lies on the stairs of the Salvation Army, exhausted swans. Washed up in them, sirens spit from sea froth, is a pair of drunks, their hair long and white, sneakers falling off, jeans too. Sherry nocturnes lift from their skin, their faces puffed with sleep. Noses bulbous, eyes shut like those of fresh babies, the men hold hands. Their breath skims the surface, short and quivering. Under the midday sun, they are the red of boxing gloves, then the brown of spittoon, then the black of asphalt. They are birthday candles, drooping and sloping wax, and they are burning up here.

  In them, I see Finbar. His wooden teeth, his wandering eyes, the silvery disks that traverse them. At a round eighty years old, a death ripeness warms over him. It walks between his rooms. Curling a fingertip here. Whitening a hair there. Eating a vertebra. All of it the crook and hue of ash. But the desertion he hates to name is this one: his senses are going. His mouth is so bland now, given what it once was, pressed up against the hipbones of women, searching their crevices, their earlobes, his tongue in the small of a back reading the imprint of a button – knowing where it was made and from what wood, what shell. He could, at one time, smell a woman in an airplane flying overhead; the sky itself had turned to steeple – a steeple of rose blossoms, juniper and anise, and below it, he worshipped. Swaying on his property, grass to his waist, he nosed that roof of woman, and he waved with two hands, hungry, so hungry, save me, save me from this body, so sick with lament.