by Steven Price
Lear looked up, his hand hovering over the pieces. I guess so, he said.
He waited but Mason said nothing more and did not look at him. At last Lear took up his pawn and crossed the boy’s queen and held two fingers on his chess piece and peered around it on all sides as if some opposing piece might be concealed there. At last he lifted his hand from the board.
Well, son, he said. Do your worst.
Mason slid his pawn to the outer edge of the board.
Lear looked from the board to the boy to the woman where she slept and back to the board. What was that?
What?
That.
Mason peered down as if he might have made some error. It’s checkmate, he said.
You’d think I’d know when I’m being hustled. Was that even a little bit hard for you?
A little bit.
Sure it was.
Kat showed me that. She calls it Mireau’s Gambit.
Lear shook his head. She’s a good player?
Yes.
You’re not so bad yourself.
Want to play another?
I don’t. I really don’t. You’ll go easy on me again?
Yes.
Then I definitely don’t.
The woman was muttering and then she fell back and slept on. Mason pulled off his eyeglasses, rubbed his eyes.
Lear reached across, dumped the pieces into the frayed cardboard case with a clatter and slid the board inside and folded the flaps shut. Through the tarp doorway figures were moving very slowly and the long shadows stretched their long fingers over the brown asphalt. He was thinking of the attendant who had not returned and of the error in the names and then he got to his feet and ducked his head to avoid the overhanging netting.
The boy peered up at him and he looked all at once like the boy he was.
I’m just going for a cigarette, Lear said. I won’t be long.
Okay.
I mean it.
Okay.
He stepped out into the sunlight ducking his head and squinting and he walked slowly across the pavement. There was a smell of motor oil and softening apples and as he shouldered his way through the crowds of refugees he caught his hands trembling and he slipped them into his pockets. He was thinking of the attendant’s words. If a Records Desk existed perhaps some evidence could be found of the boy’s sister. He made his way to an open space lined with desks on all sides. Small tarped shelters where rows of tables had been set up. He could see on one side of the square a group of volunteers pulling bundles of clothes from black garbage bags, passing them across to the desperate crowds. Ahead of him a large handwritten sign indicated the Records Desk. The crush of the desperate was restless, thick, hot with the stench of unwashed bodies. The old man wiped his face, his neck. There were tarps and tents tacked up at strange angles and wide crooked lines of figures making their way between. He pushed his way in.
When he felt a hand on his shoulder he swung around.
Arthur? Arthur Lear?
He screwed up one eye, stared down his interlocutor. He did not know him. It was a grizzled old man in rumpled blue coveralls. His wrinkled skin was loose and dry under his jaw in the sunlight but his voice was powerful in its soft darkness and seemed not of his own devising. As if it rumbled out from some space just behind him.
The old man stared. Struggling to revive a world and time long past. Then it came to him.
Brady? he said. Jesus. I’d never have known you.
This man from his distant past. This man who had been a sculptor years ago, whose wife had known Callie in Toronto. Lear sighed. Something heavy and dark was rising in him.
Who’re you looking for? the sculptor asked.
What do you mean.
You’re not here for the Records Desk?
Lear frowned. It doesn’t matter. I don’t know if she’s even here.
The sculptor nodded, set a scarred hand on the old man’s sleeve and drew him out of the crowd. I’m with the salvage units here, he said. We got updated lists. I’ll take you.
Lear shook his head. You came in from Toronto?
No. Why?
I just thought.
I’ve been living here for fifteen years Arthur.
Of course.
But then the old man fell silent. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a stained handkerchief and dabbed at his face and at the back of his neck and then stuffed the rag back in. He felt light-headed, weak in that heat. How’s Suzanne? he asked.
The sculptor took off his cap and clawed his fingers through his white hair and put back on his cap. She died two years ago, he said. No, it’s okay. It was a long time coming.
I’m sorry. Callie always liked her.
She always liked Callie.
Well.
The sculptor unbuttoned and folded back the heavy blue sleeves of his coveralls baring his forearms. The old man studied the run of faded ink covering them. There seemed a thing wild and frightening in his old acquaintance. He wondered at it and then at what he must have seen these last few days.
The sculptor put an arm around his shoulders. You doing alright, Arthur?
Lear did not know how to answer that. After a moment he said uneasily, I got out. I guess that’s something.
You were buried?
He shrugged.
Were you alone in it?
Yes.
The sculptor regarded him strangely. They were walking around the perimeter of a great heap of rubble and Lear peered up at the slope, at its huge tumbled blocks of concrete.
We got dozens of people still trapped in there at least, the sculptor said. God only knows how many others. He shook his head. It’s a mess. We keep trying to get in there and the army spends half its time just arguing with us. We know what we’re doing. You move the wrong piece and the whole thing comes down. It’s got to be done right. But the army’s got teams trained for it and they just don’t listen to us.
Well. It’s hard, I guess.
The sculptor pointed at the ruined collapse of some outbuilding to their left. Yesterday a guy got up in there looking for survivors. I guess he could hear someone and he went in. Came out with a kid in his arms. But while he was getting the kid out he saw another kid in there and so he put down the first one and went back in and as soon as he was inside the opening came down behind him. We were starting to get him out when the army stopped us. They said it wasn’t safe.
Lear said nothing. He pinched his eyes shut.
We still haven’t found his body.
I’m sorry.
I heard you stopped painting.
What?
The sculptor was looking at him.
Lear grimaced. I don’t know. I guess I did.
The yellow air was hazed with dust and a sour daylight was bleeding through and they wandered in that smokey wasteland for a time in silence.
At last the sculptor said, I just keep thinking this can’t be all of it. Suzanne used to talk about it. How much you can’t give back. Your hands learn things they can’t unlearn.
The old man ran a hand through his hair.
Where are those lists?
Just up here.
The sculptor led him towards a kind of communications shelter and two soldiers nodded to him as they passed but did not break stride. There were soldiers wearing headsets and working dials amid tall racks of instruments. A wall of television monitors showed various scenes of destruction and the sculptor left him watching them. The old man could see on the screens tall fires burning unchecked in the streets and he saw ambulances and police cruisers weaving slowly through the wreckage. He saw a bloodied woman bearing a child in her arms. Two men dredging a body from the Inner Harbour. The Empress Hotel sunken and tilted onto its back. Houses with collapsed chimneys filmed from the air, their families milling in the streets. And then he was viewing what seemed a crater of destruction ringed by tarps and asphalt and he saw it was the Vic General and he could see ragged silhouettes picking slow paths down and a crowd was gathered in the gras
s and then he looked away.
There are more coming in all the time, the sculptor said.
Jesus, the old man muttered. You hear about this. But it’s another thing to see it.
The sculptor nodded. He handed a clipboard across thick with papers.
Is this the list?
It’s all in alphabetical order. That was good as of this morning. There’s a new additions list somewhere around here. Let me find it for you.
Lear flipped to the C’s but he did not see a Kat Clarke. Nor did he see an Anna Mercia Clarke. He put the clipboard aside.
The sculptor had come back and he handed across more loose pages and the old man looked for Clarke and again found nothing. He flipped to the M’s and saw there three distinct listings for a Mackenzie and he closed the papers and then he opened the papers again and looked again. Just under Mackenzie he saw an entry for Maddin. Aza Maddin.
Lear could feel his hands trembling and he wiped his palms on his thighs and he regarded the sculptor where he stood. What is this list? he asked slowly.
What do you mean.
What does it mean. Does it mean they’re alive?
No. I don’t know. That’s the arrivals from today. Is she there?
But Lear’s tongue had thickened. What does 2D mean?
Second Division. Those are the tents we passed on our way up. What is it?
Lear shook his head.
Arthur?
Nothing. It’s nothing.
He left the sculptor then. He made his way back through the shouting crowds and he ducked his head and entered a Second Division ward with his heart heavy inside him. As he stepped in he let the tent flap fall back into place. It was dim and hushed within and he paused, rubbed his eyes.
He could hear a soft weeping there and then he could make out the stooped figures of nurses among the cots. An old bulb swung on its naked wire and sent his shadow sliding weirdly up the tarp walls and over the upturned faces of the wounded in their cots. Sleepers slept on pallets in the crowded aisles and he picked his way among them with care. A boy in bandages studied him with dark eyes. From a bed in the corner a young man lifted his long wet face from his hands. A wispy moustache ghosting his upper lip. He had lost both of his legs. The bedridden regarded him as he went past with their feverish eyes and one called out to him but he did not stop. Fans in their silver cages were turning the slow air in the tent, the rotors ticking noisily.
He stopped at the rail of a rumpled cot. There was something wrong in his chest and he could not breathe.
Oh god, he said.
It was her. Tiny and boneless and bruised where she lay. Her mouth had been badly torn along one cheek clean to the ear and the flap of skin had been stitched roughly there. Her nose was heavily bandaged as if it had been crushed. Both of her arms were gone. But it was her.
Aza, he said. Aza?
And then his voice gave out and he was crying.
He sat with her. After a time he stood and lifted her intravenous drip and dapped at the bag with his fingernail and then he unhooked her chart from the foot rail and stood reading it. He could make no sense of it. He sat again.
He wet a strip of cloth with a bottle of mineral water and he sponged it over her bloodied lips, her raw eyelids, he drew it in streaks over the translucent skin at her nape and the damp grey hairs plastered there. She trembled at his touch. As if the temblor were within her still. Some aftershock shuddering up through her flesh. The old man leaned over her and washed her, washed her, thinking of the woman and of the boy asleep beside her and then of the gardener dead in his cellar. A dark figure came to the tent doorway and the old man could not quite make him out and he stared and shook his head and swore softly to himself. It looked like the gardener and the old man knew his mind was not well.
Don’t you go to pieces, he thought.
A nurse rose from somewhere nearby carrying a tray of bloodied rags and as she walked past she was crying. He was remembering the boy. His hair tufted and grey with grit. The weight of him in his big hands. The red brick dust and the hot lamps beating down upon them where they dug. Lifting the boy up out of the ruined ground and then the men with blankets rushing in to swaddle him and him crying out for his mother in the still-pulsing earth.
He ran his big scarred hand through the tobacconist’s hair and she groaned.
Aza? he murmured. He set the back of his rough hand at her cheek.
But she did not wake. He leaned his ear in close, as if to hear whatever horror had taken hold in her, as if to hear her crying deep in that darkness, and in this way find her, and perhaps bring her back.
In the early hours of the evening he felt an eerie lightness come over him. It seemed under his own grimed skin a second skin was growing, all burnish and shine. He could feel some part of himself which had come away while he had been buried beginning, slowly, to attach itself again. He sat there with the tobacconist, filling with an immense light, as if the clothes he wore and IV standing beside her cot and the sickening groans of the ward itself were all afire and yet unburnt. As if grace were real, and with him as she slept.
No. My god no. I hardly knew Aza back then. She was Callie’s model, not mine. I don’t know if we shared ten words between us.
I’d see her some mornings from the upper bathroom. I’d be shaving, and turn, and catch a glimpse of a girl in a bathrobe smoking in the doorway of the shed. She’d be barefoot among the weeds and I’d wonder always about broken glass. I remember she had black hair with a strand of grey tucked behind one ear. I guess she dyed it that way. Callie would drift like smoke just inside the doorway, her dusty hands pale in the shadows, and then Aza would turn to her and smile and I’d blush, like I’d just witnessed something shameful. I don’t know.
Aza told me her friends never liked Callie. I guess I can see that. Callie was brash for back then. And loud. She laughed with just about the least ladylike laugh I ever heard. She couldn’t keep her hands off anything. She touched and caressed and fondled and fidgeted, she ran her fingers lightly over countertops, stroked her friends’ thighs, patted their shoulders, fingered the fabric of their blouses. Hefted and squeezed and set back whatever was near her. She had a nervous way of coming down stairs too. Always clutching the banister, shuffling her feet, like she was terrified of falling. I wonder if she suffered vertigo. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did. Not much to do with Callie would surprise me. She didn’t like to talk about where she was from. She had no interest in my past. When my grandfather died we took the train across the country, back to the island. I stood at the curb staring up at the house and said to her, Well here’s the old puzzle. And she just shrugged and looked at me and there were lights in her eyes but no curiosity.
I never did understand how she could capture such introspection in her figures. I guess she took the world in through her fingertips. I didn’t see that then. I guess there were a lot of things I didn’t see. Aza asked me once, if I were to meet another Callie, now, would I still be attracted to her. Would that interest still be there. I didn’t know how to answer that. I’m not so foolish as to imagine there aren’t any other women out there like Callie. But they wouldn’t be Callie. It’s not the same thing. It’s not the same thing at all.
As he made his way out into the crowds something came over him and he turned and stared back at the ward where the tobacconist lay. A man jostled him, pushed past. He felt a sourness rising in his throat like fear and he swallowed it back down. She need not die. Death is a tide that rises and slackens. The dry grass on the hill beyond the hospital stood long and yellow in the late sun and he wandered slowly over to it and up into it thinking of nothing at all.
Overhead he heard the creak and hinge of geese in formation moving south on heavy wings. Soon they were but elongated shadows and too far distant to be heard and they passed like that into the deepening blue sky and he stood for a time feeling that long grass rippling around his knees. He had left the gardener’s truck just beyond the rise and he made his way toward
s it feeling an enormous weariness. He remembered how his wife would grip his elbow with her pale calfskin gloves and lean into him pretending to be very old. Her heels clicking over cobblestones in Montreal and a trumpet playing in the streets at dusk. The cold air stinking of rain and boiled cabbage. He did not know where this memory came from.
He made his way up the slope above the grounds and turned at the crest of that hill and stared back over the smouldering ruin, the sheets of yellow dust rising in the wind. The refugees drifting among the slouched tarps looked very small. He crossed the uneven grass past the shade of a small tree, turning his battered face to the late sun.
The truck had not been molested. He checked that the doors were locked and then he opened the canopy in the back and shifted through the clinking bags until he had found the rifle and he double-checked that the bullets were safe. He straightened and peered out at the road but he did not see anyone approaching. He and the boy could sleep in the truck that night, he knew. Though he would be stiff in the morning.
He was thinking of the nurses he had seen in the wards. How tired they seemed, how thin in their own skins. He wondered if they were local and what they must have lost in the quake. He thought how goodness will burn of its own accord. How a soft light shines in a hard darkness. He banged the canopy shut and locked it fast and sat alone in that high grass and rested his eyes and he could feel the earth shuddering gently under him as the heavy trucks worked in the ruins below. He thought in amazement that there is real goodness in people and when it rises it rises no matter what. He did not include himself among such people.
What you take to heart, he thought with a tired smile, is always just the warning.
After a time he sat up and shielded his eyes and stared back at the road beyond him. There were still trucks wending their way down towards the hospital, still figures limping or staggering along seeking some requisite kindness. The good feeling in him was easing and pouring off and then he felt very old and very tired and he got to his feet with a groan.
He thought he would check on the tobacconist again but instead made his way down to the ward where the woman lay. The air among the refugee tents was pungent and thick and he breathed shallow breaths as he went. His left shoe was coming apart at the toes and he could see a slash of sock sticking through, comical and awful like an old-time slapstick tramp. At the woman’s ward he lifted the sagging tarp and stepped through into the half-light and the high muffled groans carried through to him. A nurse nodded wearily as he entered.