The Gallery of Lost Species

by Nina Berkhout

  “Endangered?”

  “Even in some wildlife reserves, they have only been spied once in fifty years.”

  Raven walked by with a coffee and a bag of chips. She did a double take and gave an exaggerated wave before moving on.

  Theo told me about the animals he’d been searching for over the years, which he called his cryptids. Many were being wiped out by deforestation, poaching, and civil wars. He went on about how parts of Africa and interior Australia and South America hadn’t yet been inhabited by humans. Even though they were mapped out, cartographers had identified these ecosystems only from airplanes. In some far-flung places, Theo said, explorers chronicled descriptions in their logbooks of creatures so fantastical that they were considered insane.

  “Are Bigfoot and Nessie part of your research?”

  “I denounce hoaxes. You may have heard of the pygmy hippo or the giant panda?” I nodded. He dabbed his eyes again. They were silvery in the changing light. “The Indian tapir, the giant squid, or the Komodo dragon?”

  “Of course.”

  “These used to be monsters of folklore.”

  The rain was pounding down again. I offered him a ride home and he declined, saying he’d arranged for a driver. Then he told me he wouldn’t be in this climate much longer.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Somewhere far and warm.”

  My thoughts jumped to Liam on his hot continent, suntanned and surrounded by gems and minerals like a conquistador. For the rest of my conversation with Theo, my mind was elsewhere.

  * * *

  IN THE EVENING, Raven called.

  “Who’s your friend?”

  “Theo.”

  “He’s too old for you.”

  “I’m hanging up.”

  “What’s he doing in an art gallery?”

  “Long story.”

  “I bought a Rothko.”

  “Poster?”

  “No.”

  “Print.”

  “Nope. Authentic replica from China. They paint them in seven days, exactly like the original.”

  “I heard about those factories on TV.”

  “Child labour?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Fuck. It’s a no-refund policy.”

  “Which one did you order?”

  “White Over Red. Blood-red, I guess.”

  I told Raven about the nausea. I wanted to make sense of my sister and her sickness, the way Theo wanted to make sense of the natural world.

  “That’s stress,” Raven said. “When I’m stressed, my hair falls out in clumps. Like your mom’s dog.”

  After hanging up with her, I had a flashback of me, Viv, and Henry in Bella Coola. On that trip—our last trip with our father before he died—we visited a fish hatchery. It wasn’t one of my favourite memories, which would explain why I’d blocked it out.

  At some stage of the hatchery tour, the guide led us through riverbeds of salmon battling their way upstream. The smell of festering flesh made me queasy and I wanted to go back to the station wagon, to where Henry was fishing on a nearby lake. But Viv’s stamina was boundless that day, although she knew there were no bears to see there—the guide had said as much.

  She told me to be a trooper and insisted we push on. She told me to get a grip and not to surrender to my anxiety, and that she’d buy me an ice cream if I kept going. So for the next two hours, in uncomfortable, hard rubber boots that tore my skin up under my socks, we trudged by half-dead carcasses, some still flailing, until Viv stopped in her tracks and turned to the guide with, “We can go back now.” Just like that.

  I didn’t get my ice cream. And I never understood what it was my sister was seeking on that gruesome and pointless expedition. It was almost as if she put herself through these hardships on purpose, to test herself.

  The part of me willing to undergo the surgery understood that this illness wasn’t Viv’s fault. Yet my sister had formidable willpower. I still struggled to accept her condition as something she had no control over.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  WHEN I DIDN’T HEAR from Viv after two weeks, I began to feel uneasy. I’d left messages for her, but she hadn’t returned my calls.

  Eventually I walked over to her place after work. It was raining, the sky a sheet of pallid ink like the white linens Constance washed with dark colours. The leaves were skipping their usual fiery transformation, going from green to brown then falling, creating a thick paste on the ground. I held on to the railing to avoid slipping on the mulch-covered steps. Two men across the street looked on spiritlessly, drinking beer.

  The screen came off its hinge when I pulled the door open. There was masking tape across the bell, so I knocked. A dog barked on the other side of the door, but no one answered.

  I went around to the back entrance. As I fiddled with the padlock on the outer door, someone came out on the deck above, charging down the stairs. A bald man in gunmetal track pants slowed when he saw me.

  He tugged at his crotch. His hard stomach bulged beneath his hockey jersey. “Hey darlin’, what can I do you for?”

  “Is Vivienne Walker here?”

  “She moved out.” He extracted a flattened pack of cigarettes from his pocket, offering me one then tapping his own on the railing. Smoking, he leaned over and retrieved a key from the Velcro pouch of his Adidas, passing by me more closely than was required to remove the lock.

  “Didn’t want no squatters.” There was a whistle in his speech. His smile revealed a gap where his bottom front teeth were missing.

  I followed him down the stairway, bowing my head to accommodate the low ceiling. When he pulled a cord and the light came on, a mouse scurried along the baseboard, vanishing under the stove. The unit smelled of industrial chemicals.

  “Wife sterilized it for the next renter,” he said, stubbing his cigarette in the sink. “So’s you know, guy across the hall says she sold him her furniture before she took off.” He turned the tap, discarding the butt down the drain. The water gushed out brown. “Motherfucker,” he mumbled, appraising me. “Here’s her things. Hadn’t got around to chucking ’em.” He pushed the two sagging cardboard boxes on the kitchen counter toward me then made his way back up the stairs with, “Door catches. Pull hard when you go.”

  One box contained her clothes. I sat on the floor in the area off the kitchen where Viv’s bed and table used to be, going through scruffy jean and shirt pockets. At the bottom of the pile was her knit sweater. There was paint on it and a cuff was unravelling. I smelled it; its oiliness reminded me of our father’s shed.

  The second box was almost empty. I questioned what the landlord had kept for himself. What remained was Viv’s Swiss Army knife with her name engraved on it. Henry had given each of us one, growing up. Viv used the knife for scraping canvas. I opened the compartments. The blades were rusty.

  There was also a picture of Viv in a magnetized frame, meant for a fridge. She was smiling and the sun lit her hair, giving her an angelic appearance. There were large trees and a park behind her, likely Stanley Park. In Viv’s eyes Liam was reflected, holding the camera.

  Then there was the AA Big Book, with Viv’s plastic chips taped inside the cover. When I flipped through it, a lacklustre Serenity Prayer page marker fell out, with a phone number written on it.

  I looked for some clue as to where Viv had gone. I opened the cupboards and pulled back the shower curtain and lifted the lid of the toilet tank. All I found were mice droppings.

  On the way out, I noticed another box near the trash bins. A box so big it came up to my waist. I walked through the mud and opened the wet flaps. It was filled with synthetic corks and screw caps, hundreds of them, maybe more.

  I dragged the box back down the steps leading into the basement. I turned it upside down and a dank smell invaded the room as the bottle stoppers rolled out, covering the floor. Among them was one of the notepads I’d given her. It contained sketches of a boat made entirely from corks.

  * * *

/>   “WHAT RETREAT?” DR. Black asked when he returned the call I’d made to his answering service. “She knew I was going on holidays—my replacement informed me this morning that he couldn’t get through to her by phone or by house call.”

  I barely maintained the control in my voice. “She’ll get it together, I’m sure it’s nothing. I’ll keep you posted.”

  “Edith.” Dr. Black’s bedside manner usually kicked in when he addressed me by my first name. “Vivienne was not making satisfactory progress. She was almost too ill for the surgery.”

  “But she was passing the weekly tests,” I protested.

  “Her urine came back clean, yes. But it’s easy to buy urine. She had refused her last two rounds of blood work, violating the drug testing component of this process. Even if you had made it to Bangalore, once they re-evaluated her, they would have sent you both home.”

  * * *

  I SWALLOWED A couple of sleeping pills I’d taken from Con’s before she moved, and slept for thirteen hours. The next morning, I called in sick and phoned Viv’s manager. “She hasn’t shown since last month. I don’t want to be a dick, but the deal was she had to check in weekly. If you see her, tell her she’s fired,” he said.

  I called the number on the Serenity Prayer marker. A raspy female voice answered. “Dial-a-Bottle, please hold.” I hung up.

  At eleven in the morning, I went to Viv’s hangout, the Laff. The Château Lafayette was older than the Parliament Buildings. It was older than the Château Laurier and it was older than the city.

  There were social bars and there were drinking bars. In a drinking bar, no one talked. Drinkers drank in solitude, not wanting to be disturbed. Mostly they stared into their glasses, devoted to the pursuit of dying. The Lafayette was such a bar. In the mornings the only ones in there were the addicts, the homeless, and the welfare recipients.

  Dusty evergreen garlands were permanently fastened across the wrought iron railing, as was the artificial holiday wreath on the door. Festive, chiming bells sounded when I pulled the handle. Inside, a filmy ray of sun came through the window, hitting the worn chairs, the scuffed tables, and the brown-black wood floor. I went up to the bar where a few men were sitting with their backs to me.

  An alarmingly skinny girl with a red bob, wearing a tank top that showed her belly button and a child-sized miniskirt, stood by the jukebox. She flipped through the song charts, jerking her hips back and forth even though there was no music playing. In a series of convulsive steps, she made her way over, in a walk similar to the one I’d seen in crack users over by the mission whenever Raven dragged me there. At the bar, I took in her smudged makeup and her dry, bleeding lips. Her face was covered in boils.

  “Gimme another, Daddy!” She draped her arm around the grizzled man beside her, stooped over his drink. The man didn’t budge from his stool or look at her, reaching into his pocket and handing her a crumpled bill. She stopped biting her nails long enough to grab it and slip it into her bra, doing a little twirl and bow. Barefoot, she went skittering out of the bar.

  The bartender put his book down. “Help you?”

  I’d seen broken bottles outside. “She’s going to cut her feet,” I said. “She’ll freeze.”

  “She won’t feel a thing.”

  I gripped the thick wood surface for a minute. I hadn’t eaten since the night before and was dizzy. “Has my sister Vivienne been around?” I showed him the grainy picture from our camping trip, of Viv standing by the lake, her figure wavering in a halo of ruddy light.

  The bartender was surly. “Haven’t seen that one in ages.”

  “That one?”

  “That hooker.”

  “She’s not a prostitute.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “What’s your definition of ‘ages’—hours?” My chest was tightening.

  “Weeks.”

  As the patrons emptied their pints, he took the glasses, refilling the tap beer mechanically without being asked. Then he rubbed his beard and yawned, returning to his novel.

  I wrote my name and number down on a napkin. When I put it on top of his book to get his attention, he stared back up at me, I thought to tell me off. Instead, he said, “There was a guy. Used to check in on her here. She called him Angel.”

  There were a lot of Angels and Jesuses in the underground world. Probably a pimp or a pusher with a name like that.

  A minute later, it hit me.

  The men lined the length of the bar as if they were tied to a train track. I wondered if they would get up if they heard the dark haul of a locomotive approaching. If they would look up and notice its black iron face about to plough them down. Or maybe that’s what they were waiting there for.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T HARD to find him. An online search listed seven Nick Angels living in the city. Only one of them worked at the Department of National Defence. It had to be him.

  When I phoned, he agreed to meet me at the Starbucks by the downtown library the next night.

  He was there when I arrived, sitting at a table stacked high with children’s books. When I tapped him, he regarded me thoughtfully. I sat down across from him. Fine lines extended from his blue eyes.

  “Edith. It’s been a long time. You’ve cut your hair since we were kids. It suits you.”

  I ran a hand down the back of my head. I’d chopped my hair off into a pageboy after Liam left and my neck still felt too bare; I hadn’t got used to it the way Raven vowed I would.

  “I thought of contacting you in the past. About your sister, I mean.”

  “You haven’t seen her, then.”

  “Not since she was in that centre last year. She got day passes. We’d meet up.” Through the noise of the coffee grinders, the steaming and hissing of the espresso machines, I tried to interpret this as Nick went on. “We had an argument. I didn’t see her after that.”

  “About what?”

  “Same as always. She said she was better, but she rarely lasted more than a few months. I moved to Vancouver for her—she didn’t tell you that, did she? I moved back here for her too, to keep an eye on her. We weren’t together anymore. Things seemed good with her. But then there was that Christmas potluck with the telemarketing co-workers.”

  “I hadn’t realized you were back in touch.”

  “We weren’t ever out of touch. Even after my dad shipped me off to the academy, I’d call her late at night. We never stopped.”

  How could I have missed the signs? All those midnight conversations I thought she was having with Liam as a teenager, while I eavesdropped against the bedroom wall. Later, her lack of interest with Liam even when they lived together in Vancouver. Then her uncaring reaction when I expressed my own feelings for Liam, over the campfire in Algonquin Park. It was Nick Angel all along. Even Liam had suspected it.

  Yet I couldn’t let my guard down with this guy. I still reproached him for Viv’s ruin. “I wanted you dead,” I told him.

  Nick slouched further into his chair. “There was a time I wanted myself dead too. I was a confused teenager. I would’ve done anything for your sister. Did a lot of shameful shit, pardon my language. All that experimenting. Viv wanted to party and I went along for the ride. But then you grow out of it. Or most of us do. I never touched drugs again after the overdose. Tried to get her to quit too. Your sister stayed hard-core with the sauce, though. That’s the one thing she couldn’t lay off.”

  He drank from his paper cup. Customers filed in and out, letting in a cold draft.

  “Anyway, there was a gift exchange at the potluck. I helped her choose a set of cookbooks, but she called me that night, crestfallen.” He picked up his camo ball cap, studying it. “When I asked her what happened, she told me there was a game where each person unwrapped a present then stole another. She wound up with a liqueur concoction nobody wanted. She gave it away, but it kept landing back with her. She had the bottle on her desk all afternoon. Then she put it in her knapsack and threw it into a Dumpster somewhere along t
he way home.”

  He looked beat. “She white-knuckled it till spring, then it all started again. I couldn’t keep bailing her out,” he said, as if seeking forgiveness. He paused and squeezed his eyes shut. “She bragged about you constantly. Said you were the smart one who’d go places. I have no idea where she is, but I wouldn’t concern myself too much if I were you. She’ll turn up. And when she comes back, I can’t get involved again. My wife’s losing patience. We have kids, things are different.”

  He steadied his gaze on me with those clear, almost neon eyes that had immobilized me as a girl. Before me was a burly, cynical man fighting back tears. Blaming himself for what I now knew was no one’s fault. I didn’t see the point in upsetting him with Viv’s current diagnosis.

  He glanced through the doors that led to the library. “If it wasn’t the potluck, it would have been something else. There was always one temptation or another around the corner with your sister.” He reached for his coat. “How is your mother, by the way?”

  “She won’t talk about it.”

  “I never met her, but I sometimes got the sense that Vivienne worshipped her.”

  “What do you mean? She couldn’t stand her.”

  And then he gave a defeated smile. “From what I heard about your mom, they seem alike, those two. Sad, unfulfilled. Haunted by God knows what.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  ANOTHER WEEK PASSED WITH no news. I decided to file a missing persons report. Even though Constance said don’t.

  Grief was untidy. My mother wanted no part in its damage to her composure. She’d had shingles since my sister’s hospitalization, although she didn’t complain about the belt-like pattern of blisters erupting along the side of her chest, which I’d noticed on her last visit.

  “Heureusement this prevents you girls from doing that outlandish surgery. She is a grown-up and must care for herself. She is not your responsibility, Édith.”

  I waited for her common sense to kick in. Neither Con nor Henry had siblings. I shouldn’t have expected her to understand the enduring allegiance I felt toward my sister. How this fidelity transcended the ill will.