Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  She brings out the toothbrush for the second time. And then she hauls everything out to the curb. It makes a tidy heap. No one touches it. It reads too much like a hex. Your last portrait sits on top. A left eye, floating.

  When the garbagemen come in the dawn in their orange suits and their safety gloves, you do not watch them make away with your work. But Mink, a fanatic for the solid line of completion, does. She stands by the window, and when they drive away, she makes a sound, a tickle in her throat. The only thing left, at my insistence: the birth announcements. Laid out like the beginnings of a city.

  In the backyard, below the apple tree, a mound at her feet, shovel propped against her side, hands raw from digging, Immaculata holds Urszula aloft and calls to me, ‘Eugenia she is ready to be buried now or else!’ The cat is a mascot for herself – both of them resplendent in their white beaded headbands, their smoothed coats.

  I bolt from the house, a drunk with a destination, white sunglasses frames crooked on my face. I run up the street, past the church, past Leopold of the Onions, his finger up, ‘Wait,’ past the prostitutes, ‘Honeychild,’ ‘Sugarlumps,’ ‘Sister Pain,’ and past the mission. The sky is the blade of an axe, and below it the city dwellers are hurried and desperate, just short of clawing each other. I weave between them and stop in front of the library, hands clapped over my ears. Parkdale’s shipwrecked drape the stairs. I step over the men, pickled, parka-ed and tossing prayer and insult to the wind.

  I open the door. Quiet as a capsule. The librarian looks up at me, her head a bird-twitch. I bird twitch back and wander the stacks. It has been three days since you locked yourself in your bedroom. Even when you are at your most unreachable, there is always a sliver, a hole that only I can crawl through. Threading a needle. But not this time. I need another world, one that will force me to forget the red swell of your eyes, the soundless marathon of your mouth, your vow to stop painting. I find the heaviest book in the place and pull it down. It is a cannonball in my hands.

  Black and leather-bound. The lettering, gold and ornate. Trilled at the edges.

  I. I. Finbar Me the Three,

  Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie:

  An Unofficial Autobiography

  On the back cover: ‘The trick is to have a stunt that no one else can perform.’ The words stop me dead.

  The book smells of mould and mildew; it has just been brought up from a basement and placed here by a drowned woman with palm leaves for hands and snails for eyes. I hear her wet call. The centre of it falls open. Photographs. Glossy and dated long before I was born.

  1914. Finbar’s first walk. In the posters around Avening, Ontario, a farming town northwest of the city, he billed himself Boy Wonder. Not yet thirteen years old, he stands on the wire, arms outstretched, a scarecrow thirty feet above a field of corn. A small crowd is gathered below him. Stalks to their chests. Arms crossed over, they are arguing against the very thing they are seeing. The rest of his hometown are in their shops and kitchens staring at their radios. In petrified silence, they listen to the first moments of the War to End All Wars. The Russians are mobilizing. The townspeople’s faces fall. But Finbar, triumphant, does not.

  1920. Here is Finbar, now ‘I. I. Finbar Me the Three,’ a young man of nineteen in striped tights and leather shoes. Pitchforks, scalpels, razors and butcher knives spike the ground silver. He walks above them, blindfolded. ‘Inexhaustible!’ Finbar balances on one foot, a line of flame leaping below him. And then, most stunning, is Finbar’s first ascension, 160 feet above the whirlpools of Niagara Falls. The surface is a scramble of hard waves. It is the white of molars, stealing itself away and then feeding itself back into being. Finbar walks in a sack. And then he does somersaults on stilts, and then he hangs from his bare feet, a prehistoric bird.

  I enter the photograph; the division of time and place dissolves. It is as if Finbar has already met Death and so Death does not hover about him. Finbar, in his tights and his leather shoes, crossed a room, pulled back a chair and sat at Death’s oak table. He pinched the ends of his moustache smooth and he bargained. He bought time. With what, I wonder. What did he have to give away to do this? The shoreline is thick with people. I hold my breath, body pressed between them, and there I am taught for the first time: possibility.

  ‘Please refrain from speaking in the library.’ The librarian is beside me. So close, she fogs my face. She grew up in a farmhouse, an only child, looking out at a river, with her aunt’s appendix in a jar on a shelf in her bedroom. ‘You are talking to yourself.’

  ‘Oh?’

  She lifts a finger to her lips. ‘Sh.’

  I nod. Her hands are chapped and packing-plant-clean, nails painted black with press-on moons and stars. The ‘sh’ one is taped.

  ‘I understand exuberance.’ She is small, my height, with a soft stomach. You could punch it down like dough and feel her spine there at the bottom, a ring recovered from a lake. She crosses her arms, reading my mind.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say, cancelling the thought.

  ‘It’s all right.’ She studies my face. ‘Do your parents take care of you?’

  We speak to each other in low tones, like we are an endangered species and do not want to be found out. We twitch and then she returns to her desk.

  In the photographs, dated from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties, Finbar is always a figure in the distance, his face inscrutable – a lantern in a snowstorm. I see that he is strong and broad. True to his farm stock. He could clear an entire field of stones and build a fence with them in an afternoon, fell a tree and carry it out of the forest on one shoulder. I see that he walked the beams of his barn while his family slept, swallows spiralling into a smoke signal through a hole in the roof. I see that he used sheep and then horses and then steers for weights, having hypnotized the animals with whispers into their keen ears. In the dark, he lifted them, steam coming out of their nostrils, their brains on fire. His chest always bare – I can imagine his vanity.

  When I turn the page, I see his face for the first time. It is grotesque. As if he survived a great storm, but his features, after being bashed by the air, were not returned properly to their places. He was never reformed. His cheeks hang slack in pouches from bones that look stolen from a strongman’s thigh. His jaw is puffed wide and then tapers too long near his clavicle. His lips and nose are purpling fruit. And, skull mushrooming above and below them, Finbar’s eyes appear to be two black points. Period. In them, there is only one thing: the power of a man who gets his own way. His hair is thick and blond. It hangs down to his shoulders. And his moustache, the only fine line. When Finbar looked in the mirror, wax on his fingertips, this is where he focused his attentions. Upon sight of him, Mink would have stifled a laugh and then she would have grown very quiet and stared. You would beg to paint his portrait. And then you would wish that his face, that squall, were your own.

  The second-last photograph is of Finbar standing beside a woman, pale and long as an icicle. Freezing or melting, one can never be sure. I can see that, in her, Finbar finally found someone more powerful than himself. Finbar’s arm clasped around her waist is a python. If it were not there, she would be kicking up dirt. The woman is not exquisite, but if she were in a crowded room, she would be the only one you would want to look at. Her eyes: too close together and ringed with coal. Her nose: Roman. Her cheekbones: too high into her temples. Torso too short, legs too long, breasts heaving and full on such a thin frame. With these proportions, her clothes never completely fit. It is like she is always soaking wet, having just emerged from a lake no one else can find.

  In this photograph, the woman’s dress rides too high on her thigh, black garter peeking out, straps falling down her arms. She is not trying to provoke. Rather, she does not abide by the rules of civility. And every night she slips away and sleeps beside a fire, and wakes in the morning, a fox covered in soot, only to become a woman again. She has the kind of wildness that everyone else trades in too early.

  S
he did not pose for this photograph. She did not sink into the arms of her beloved. No, she challenged the photographer, his request to be still. Please. By the time he got his shot, she was the only subject he ever wanted. Chin thrust in the air, a slender cigarette in one corner of her mouth, and with its smoke she obscures Finbar, his deranged face. Her eyes catch something and she smiles at it, just outside the frame – always just outside the frame.

  The woman is referred to only as Finbar’s Queen. The last photograph is her tombstone. Untended. 1918–1945. She was twenty-seven years old when she died. After that day, Finbar disappeared from view. He never walked the rope again. Now I know what he bargained when he sat down at the oak table with Death.

  I walk home from the library. My steps slow and small, a slight bend at the waist, conjuring a balancing pole there that intersects me. Twilight descends. And with it, so do you.

  Your hair is combed like a jailbird just released. Your winter coat is off. Your suit is pressed and free of lint and dandruff. Your cowboy boots are polished. You have shaved your beard. Upon sight of me, you hear an entire symphony in your head and you scoop me up in your arms and you dip me and we dance in great lunges and spins. Over the horn section, you shout, ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Walking.’

  ‘Liar.’

  ‘At the library.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Reading.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Possibility.’

  ‘The possibility of a house other than your house? The possibility of a father other than me?’ The symphony ends and you fill the silence with fury.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t leave me again.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I promise.’

  ‘Promise.’

  ‘I just did,’ I say, looking around, meeting the eyes on us, ‘What?’ making them slink into the next fight.

  Later that night, you take me to Our Spot by the Lake and you say, settling into the sand, ‘One day, my darlin’, I will take you to the place where I was born. North. It is a pocked landscape, the flesh of a grapefruit, all horizon, an Arctic desert, an uninterrupted curve.’ You jump to standing and, in your boots, you are a slow-motion zero-gravity prowl. ‘Everyone bounds a foot and a half off the ground.’

  You lift your feet in an astronaut purr, 250,000 miles from the earth, until I ask, ‘What about Mink? Will she come too?’

  ‘She wouldn’t want to, my darlin’.’

  ‘And Immaculata?’

  ‘She wouldn’t either.’

  ‘Did you tell them you’re going to take me?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Will you?’

  And then, not answering, you go on, loose as a marionette, tapping your feet and winging your arms, performing your dance again in miniature. ‘You can trick yourself that you live in space in the north. It’s a twin to the moon, Eugenius. It’s where the astronauts train for their missions.’ And then you stop. ‘What, what are you looking at?’ When my eyes should be on you, in your silver suit and matching helmet, defying gravity, a million miles of deep blue around you, they are, for the first time, just outside the frame. Caught on Finbar and his wild Queen, who, together, curl up in me. A secret, they thrive.

  For months thereafter, the phone bleats and bleats, the hushed voices of your art dealers and your patrons bent like canes over your casket. They beseech you, but you cannot be reasoned with. After a long silence, you say, ‘Yes, I am here. Yes, I am listening. I have not stopped painting because I am depressed.’ And then, cradling the receiver, you pull down the portraits that remain on our walls. ‘It is the looking I cannot do. I cannot stand to look anymore.’ You hang up, pacing our floor now covered in faces, and you mutter, ‘Somewhere there is an island full of these things.’ Clockwise. When you pace, you pace only clockwise.

  Even though there is nothing in there but the birth announcements, you still spend your days in the studio with the door locked. Do you go through them, discovering again and again that you have the birth announcement of everyone in the world but you? Or have you dug a hole in the floor? Do you follow a slender tunnel every day out to a place built of logs on the fast water where the air is always wet? Dressing and undressing, dressing and undressing. Or drills. Dropping to the ground. Pretending disaster. Or sleeping. But you rarely sleep. There is too much to discuss, to read, to taste, to invent, to rage against, to fall in love with. I press a glass to the door, my ear against it. There is no sound. You are not learning how to play a new instrument or how to speak a new language. You are not tumbling. You do not even cough. Or light a match. You do not shuffle your feet. And you do not speak – which makes me wonder if you are even there, so accustomed am I to your fit of words. I am copyrighting our land! I am unplugging everything! I am reminding myself of my hunter-gatherer instinct in the urban colossus! I am making a saddle in the tradition of the Sioux! No. Every night, you return to us with the same expression on your face. Is it just a replica of you that opens the door, and he has been made mild after witnessing something he cannot quite explain?

  Despite your excommunication, the smell of your work clings to you the way a doubt clings. Urethane. Turpentine. Linseed. Oil paint. When Mink asks you, after you have kissed the tops of our heads and joined us at the dinner table, spilling whatever sauce is on it, ‘So what did you do today?’ you invariably say, ‘I levitated.’

  One night, after your usual exchange, Mink slaps you square across the jaw.

  ‘Don’t,’ I say.

  ‘Hit me back,’ she orders.

  You lift your arm. Immaculata gasps, ‘Don’t.’ And then you pull Mink into you, quicksand, and you hold her until all of the lines that kept her taut break. She goes soft. Her face slumped in your chest, Mink laughs until she cries real tears – the tears she used to cry only for champions.

  {POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

  echo!

  A low hum and the island street lamps click on, coating the night green. The light of swamps. The smell of wet fur. Ten feet in front of me is a fox. Her furtive eyes, the yellow of an unvarnished trophy, are set on me. She does not flinch. So close, I can smell the gristle in her teeth. She walked ice floes last winter to get here, gliding and pouncing between them. A red streak, she rode them into shore. I listen to the rhythmic pull of her breath. A pendulum. It feels like a drawing in. I am fading, being carried off, to be spread through the woods in a hundred holes beneath the ground.

  I shout and flail my arms. I jump up and down. In Darlington, you taught me: When trapped in the woods and faced with a bear and the bear snorts, make yourself bigger than you are so that it does not confuse you with prey. This is what I am doing. Making myself bigger than I am. The fox looks at me. I am foolish. She will not show her teeth and lunge at me, taking my throat with her, sinews stretched like a cat’s cradle between us. She has other plans. And she is busy. Come on. She begins to trot, her body a sleek flare, and then she turns her head to see that I follow. I do. Along this strip of road, she leads me a few hundred feet to a clearing. Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods. The street lamps click off. Night rushes in again, an iodine spill. The clearing blinks with fireflies. They are maniacs of light. The fox bounds between them. They illuminate my surroundings. I do not know whether she stays to watch, her eyes and the pulse of the bugs indistinguishable.

  The pines are pulled back, slingshots with the wind. Two maples bow into each other, their tops bent heavily in conference like elders, like lovers. Beneath them, there is one square for the moon to burn through. It is lanced by shadow. It is the face of Finbar, his bones punching him out from the inside, other lives clambering for space. He is telling me to go. I tie Marta’s rope between them. It is the width of three of my fingers, one of yours. Life must be caught up to. This is a moment that has been chasing me and finally I am alongside it. Vertigo. The stars come out. A million white knuckles. A nervous sky.

  I
kick off my boots, climb the tree and step up onto the rope. That quarter-inch dare to the air. One foot. It is taut, braided sinews to the underside of my arches. I lift the other foot – standing distilled to such a fine point. I fall. I fall again and again. I fall, Immaculata would count, sixty-one times whoa, without ever taking a step forward. This last time, my stomach catches on something: a piece of glass, half-buried. I wince. It will become my second scar.

  You have seventy-two. You would roll up a pant leg, slip off your boot, pull your shirt down below your shoulder and tell me their stories. Some are long and wide like flattened worms. Others are mashed and spread, desperate beggars. Some are small divots, darker than your skin, where teeth and corners dug into you. Still others look like zippers. Two look like eyes. Three are dark blue from leeches pulled off your toes. But on your left side, snaking over your lower ribs and splitting into a trident shape, is your most tremendous scar. Suffered in a fall when you were a rodeo king in High Level, Alberta, arm in the air, stomach pulled in, the hard shell of a crustacean. You told me you sewed that one yourself. This was the only night you drank. Now anyone would have pegged you for a drinker. Probably whisky and a dark ale. But this was your only dabble. Bourbon. Old Crow. You called it rotgut. You said it nearly killed you. Spent the next day retching on your hands and knees. I run my fingers over the mark of the stitches, too exaggerated, the seams too thick. This body is one you had to work to keep on.

  Immaculata thought you made them up. She told me this once, rocking back and forth on her blistered heels, bottom lip sucked in under her teeth, her expression fretful; she did not know how to introduce me to the idea. It was a line out into the unknown. When she saw my response, she exclaimed with a consolatory smile, ‘He is so clumsy Eugenia he is a total klutz think about it!’ I called her a liar and she said, searching my face, ‘I’ll leave you alone excuse me,’ and then, the human postscript, she added, ‘That is not to say his stories are not true to him.’