by Tim Bowling
Delmore, still on his hind legs, backed away slowly. “It is here. It is close. Oh God.” His human eyes locked on the chess players, and he began to whimper. “Child, come away, come away.”
I couldn’t tell whom he was addressing. Chelsea, perhaps? I certainly wasn’t a child; that other self grew dimmer with each passing year.
“It’s all right,” I said, impatient with his melodrama. Delmore Schwartz, as is clear from his biography, relished the making of mountains out of molehills, especially as he aged. I turned back to the chess games.
There stood Keaton, just behind Harvard’s hunched form, as if to study the next move in the game. Except Keaton wasn’t looking down at the board; he was staring at me, his white mask almost giving way to an identifiable expression. I couldn’t quite read it. The stare went on and on; it stayed on my face, yet seemed to pass through me and travel the seven hundred miles to the edge of the salty sea where I’d been born, where he’d once ridden a motorized railway handcart. Confused, I finally decided that the ghost’s presence at the chessboards was a form of encouragement, and approached the homeless man who’d sold me the rare mechanical bank.
Delmore cried out, “I can’t . . . I can’t help with this . . .”
I didn’t turn back to him. I’d never been a risk-taker, but now the die was cast. In truth, I saw no risk.
“Sorry to bother you.” I stood over the chessboard, smiling down at the two players. Harvard’s opponent, the young man with the fleshy arms, looked up with a scowl, then immediately dropped his eyes. Harvard didn’t even move. “We met earlier today,” I went on, “out on Jasper. I bought those toys from you, remember?” Still no reaction. Yet the air thickened around the silence. I became aware of the pounding of my heart.
“Tim,” Delmore pleaded softly, “come away.”
The use of my Christian name changed everything. It was as if my mother had called me, as if her voice had travelled out of my childhood to give me an important piece of advice. But the die had been cast. Nothing could be changed.
“One of the toys,” I said, my mouth and throat dry, “was a cast-iron bank. It turns out that . . .” A deep growl came from nearby, and at first I assumed that Delmore had taken a more aggressive approach to lead me away. “It turns out,” I continued, “that the bank is worth quite a lot of money.”
Harvard’s hands tightened even more. I thought the bones in them might snap. Too late, I realized that the growl – which was now repeated – had come from him. Too late, Chelsea shouted, “Professor! I forgot. You shouldn’t bug him when he’s playing . . .”
But I had already placed my hand gently on Harvard’s shoulder, the way Delmore so often placed his paw on mine. The touch set off an explosion.
Chelsea screamed. “Professor! Watch it!”
Her cry reached me at the same time as Harvard’s skull. He drove his head straight into my chest and knocked me to the floor, scattering knights and pawns around us like acorns shaken off a tree. Before I recovered from the shock, I felt a hard kick to my ribs. Chelsea screamed a curse. I widened my eyes against the pain to see her launch herself at my attacker, her face contorted, both arms flailing. Greg Arious shrieked, again and again, in an ever-increasing crescendo, as Chelsea struck repeatedly at the head and torso of the snarling figure now sprung back from my prone form. I struggled to get up, my breath short, the pain flaring along my side. Other voices – shouts – flooded over me as I stood. “Call security!” “What the fuck, man!” “Help her!”
Oh, I tried. I tried harder than I’d ever tried anything in my life. But it was like attempting to hold back tears with reason. Before I could reach the fight, I heard the cry, “He’s got a knife!,” and it was the same as hearing, “You’re too late! You’re too late forever!” But I kept moving forward, my thighs, my chest, in heavy swamp water. I might even have cried her name. The way my mother had cried mine, from the very depths of our beginnings together.
Harvard’s knife slashed the air seconds before my arm reached out. But it wasn’t the knife that did the damage. Chelsea’s assault upon my attacker had somehow released Greg Arious, too, and, instinctively, he had taken up Chelsea’s cause, with a ferocity surprising in such a small, cheerful creature. His shrieking attained its highest pitch yet; his fangs flashed a sharp and terrifying whiteness in his babyish face as he leaped on to Harvard’s head. From there, the little monkey raked its claws over the grizzled cheeks of the man, who whirled and shouted and waved the knife dangerously around his own face, trying to stab at whatever drug-induced nightmare he must have thought had followed him into the day-world. Meanwhile, Chelsea, who had sensibly backed off at the cry of “He’s got a knife,” perched at the edge of the whirling figures, her whole being coiled and tensed like a cougar’s above its passing prey. How much I pushed against the dark waters to reach her! Yet I hardly moved. I saw the monkey’s fangs, heard Harvard’s shouts of pain and rage. The knife dropped from his hand with a thunk. He yanked the monkey off his skull like a great scab, gave a wild, gargled cry, and hurled his body sideways at a broken run, like an Olympian about to toss a hammer into the sky. There was a sharp crack as the monkey’s head struck the side of the chess table, and the shrieking ceased. Two, perhaps three, seconds of silence followed, sliding across us in the same awful way that death slid across the monkey’s twitching little body. Then Chelsea cried out, lunged forward and dropped to her knees.
“No! Oh no no no no . . .” Her pain and moaning were so much worse than Delmore’s, for she was young and alive, and I had not dreamed her. So why couldn’t I move? It all happened in an eyeblink, yet I saw everything unfold with such clarity that I might have been sitting in a darkened theatre gazing at a screen. Even then, the plush curtains finally close and the lights come up. I knelt beside her. She had lifted the monkey’s fluttering ancient eyes close to her own and was whispering, “Please please don’t go please.” Tears and sweat blurred her freshly repaired mascara into a primitive mask, and when the broken creature’s eyes stopped fluttering and its body gave a last spasmodic twitch, the mask hardened. She looked at me, and it was obvious that she did not see me, nor did she hear me, my weak, horrified, repeated, “Chelsea, I’m so sorry.” She placed the little corpse into my hands as she rose, her cry one long ferocious vulgarity, her linebacker’s shoulders launched in the direction of the bleeding, bewildered form of the man who had just wakened from his own violence.
“You fuckin’ douche bag, you shithole, you fuckin’ . . .” Chelsea drove herself at Harvard, but, even in bewilderment, his strength did not abate. He received her violence and threw it to one side. Chelsea landed on her knees in a brief, graceless slide. Now, at last, I moved. If he was going to attack anyone, it wasn’t going to be her. My chivalry served no purpose. From far off, the wail of a siren drifted out of the city and up the broken escalator and over the stricken faces of the two dozen library workers and patrons scattered around us like the knights and pawns I stepped on as I moved, the monkey a limp, still warm offering in my shaking hands.
The siren woke something in Harvard. It gave him back whatever grip on reality he had, for he shook his bleeding head at the sound and, at a half-run, headed for the escalator, passing the security guard who had just arrived at the top, his hand twitching on the holster at his hip, his eyes full moons of blood.
Chelsea scrambled up and, still shouting, followed.
I called after her. “Chelsea! Stop!” Pain pierced my side, and it hurt with each gasp, but I kept going. For I did not doubt that Harvard would crack her skull as easily as he’d cracked the little monkey’s. My haste, however, proved unnecessary. The man had all the speed of mania to propel him – mania in fear of persecution – and not even a woman’s grief and vengeance could outpace that. By the time Chelsea reached the main floor, Harvard had banged through one of the swinging glass doors, knocking some books out of a woman’s hands as he whirled out into the warm air like a great, nectar-drunk drone driven from the hive.
> Outside, I finally caught up to Chelsea as she stood on the curb of an intersection, looking wildly around in all directions, her mask liquid again, her shoulders trembling, her chest heaving.
“You fucker, I’ll kill you you . . . you . . . you . . .” But all the strength had gone out of her curses now; they were turned inward, driven down into the place of doubt and pain where her father kept closing the door of her childhood and walking casually away. Soon the peal of the siren was so loud that it drowned out even her harsh, broken breathing. The pain on her face was louder than the siren and it turned full force on me now. It did not even light on the death in my hands. It settled on me and stayed there. Pain and confusion and sorrow, and the terrible unspoken question that age is supposed to answer. Words would not come to me as the traffic revved by and the passing eyes of the world stared at the bizarre end to our bizarre chase scene. But words – the tools of my working life – were useless now, and I knew it.
I placed Greg Arious gently on the filthy sidewalk and stood like a child lost in a crowded market. Chelsea turned into me, sobbing, her head on my chest, and it was all I could do to fight the pain and weakness in my body and remain upright. But I managed. As I held her, and soothingly said the words that language must contain to orient us to the earth – her name, my regrets, my reassurances – it’s all right, Chelsea, it’s all right, it’ll be fine, I’m so sorry – everything that must be said to resurrect sanity on the borders of madness – I didn’t hold her as a professor or as a father or even as a middle-aged adult. I held her as one suffering human holds another, without a past or a future, with only a chasmic, unforgiving present. Her tears dripped like solder through my shirt and seared the skin. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.
The siren screamed louder. Over Chelsea’s head I saw the flashing red lights. Something of the little monkey’s fierce loyalty rose up from the pavement and coursed through my blood. Sensing her shock subside to exhaustion, the rage and pain to the beginning of the long dull ache of grief, I whispered, “Come on, we have to go.”
I bent over and discreetly gathered up the corpse and held it pressed to one side under my arm. With my free hand on Chelsea’s upper back, I guided her out of the muted, broken sunlight through a doorway to the parking lot’s stairs. The heavy door closed, and we descended into the gloom and undersea silence, the hollow echoes of the arcade investing the place with a mysterious, fogbound quality. Even in a heavy fog, the Pinto would have appeared. It was bright as a block of sunlight, though cold as we climbed inside. Chelsea didn’t seem to notice that I had gently taken the keys from her purse to unlock the car, ushered her into the passenger seat and then occupied the driver’s seat myself. I sat there, a little lost, the dead monkey on my lap. It had been years since I’d driven a car. There’d been no need. And now the need was greater than I could ever have imagined, even though I had no idea where I would be driving and for what exact purpose. Seconds ticked heavily by. Chelsea began to wipe her tears.
“Let me take him,” a gruff voice said from the back seat.
I turned, and there was Delmore, his great, shaggy face heavy as granite and his eyes swimming with human pain. I had forgotten all about him, and about Keaton’s ghost.
“Where did you go?” I asked as I gently placed the corpse into his thick paws.
“Death does have dominion over the dead.” The human sigh out of the bear’s throat seemed even more vulnerable than a normal sigh. “But you’re not dead. I’m glad of that. And the girl’s not dead. For a moment there, I was . . . well, I almost tore the eyeballs out of my head with fear.” He glanced to the side, then delicately handed the body of Greg Arious back to me. “You have more work to do. Harder work.”
I returned my attention to Chelsea, whose question Delmore had clearly anticipated.
“Where is he?” she asked in a small voice, a child’s voice.
“Here,” I said. “He’s right here.” I placed the dead monkey in her lap and watched her large hands run tremblingly over his crumpled, pale face. By the time she spoke again, a tear or two had dropped from her chin onto the fur, as in a fairy tale, but there would be no magical resurrection. I could almost hear the little girl she’d once been wishing fiercely for it; her quivering lips would have planted that transformative kiss if there’d been any hope. I couldn’t measure what hope she might have felt, though the battle – between the only child of a tragic, single mother and the young woman whose favourite literary genre was fantasy – heated the cool interior of the Pinto with a friction that lifted the hairs on my forearms.
“It’s all my fuckin’ fault,” she said, her head bowed. “I’m so fuckin’ stupid. I should have warned you.”
“No.” My response came quickly and firmly; I could not bear her taking this death upon herself as she had probably taken her father’s departure for the past fifteen years. “No. It isn’t your fault. There’s nothing you could have done. Someone like that . . . mentally ill . . . maybe schizophrenic . . .”
Chelsea’s face turned to me; it was a moon plunged under dirty water. The black-smeared white of it seemed about to slip off like the powder of the silent film comedians. “She told me. Fuck. She told me.”
“Who told you? What?”
“At the food court.” Chelsea’s eyes fluttered slowly, the lids like iron. “She told me . . . told me never to bug him when he’s playing chess. Fuck . . . fuck.” She smashed the hard bottom of one palm into her forehead and dragged the hand down over her smeared face.
I knew what she meant now: the old woman with the Scandinavian name – Ardeth or Agneth – who had told us where to find Harvard.
“I never warned you. She said he hates to be interrupted when he’s playing chess. Fuck. Stupid stupid stupid . . .”
“Chelsea.” My own battle now – between firmness and tenderness – played out in my voice. “I wouldn’t have thought that meant he’d attack me. You can’t expect that kind of violence. Not from anyone.” Especially not from a chess player named after an Ivy League college, I thought, but didn’t speak. Who could predict the swiftness from concentration to violence? It wasn’t a chess move; it was the move of a digital age, except the blood and the grief weren’t virtual. When a computer game ends, when you reach the final level or fail to reach it, the world – the dull, old, ordinary dial-up of the senses – is exactly the world you left behind. This game was different. I felt the change not only in my psyche, but in my primitive practical brain. After all, I had to act. I couldn’t think clearly through the aftermath of all that had happened with the speed of a shrike’s killing descent.
Where would we go now? The police were in the library, and the numerous witnesses to the murder – for murder it undoubtedly was – would be telling them about us, what we looked like, that we had run outside. Presumably a search of the area would be made. And though the theft of Greg Arious seemed a petty crime in light of his violent death, I still didn’t relish having to explain it; I especially didn’t relish putting Chelsea’s guilt and pain into the purview of the official janitors of human messes. Discreetly, but with shaking hands, I inserted the key and started the engine. I knew as I backed out of the stall only that I had to get the Pinto’s vivid yellow coat out of the downtown. Once I’d done so, I could turn my full attention to Chelsea.
The task of driving away wasn’t so simple. The car bucked and reared as I inexpertly applied the gas and brakes, and I was the recipient of two horn blasts and at least one middle finger salute as I plunged down the steep hill beside the Hotel Macdonald, the grand granite railroad hotel where Keaton and Chaplin and other vaudeville stars had once stayed. But the sun, golden and soft over the valley of the North Saskatchewan River, raised my spirits. I drove across the Low Level Bridge, sibling to the High Level a few miles to the west, and poured on the speed as I approached my home territory of Mill Creek, with its comfortably renovated old homes and stately Dutch elms and cozy little cafés and bakeries. Chelsea, meanwhile, kept stroking the fur of the
dead creature on her lap, kept dropping tears in a doomed effort to alter reality. I could sense a resolve starting to form in her, deep below the shock, and I had to fend it off. Given what I knew of her – a surprising amount in such a short time – I knew what she would want to do. If I could distract her long enough, perhaps the desire for revenge would abate. The trouble was, how could I distract her?
Food and drink, first. I was desperate for a coffee myself, though I was in no shape to sit in a café, and neither was Chelsea – and she wasn’t about to relinquish the little corpse. My mind raced. The girl did have a mother, after all. Maybe I could drive Chelsea home and let whatever maternal skill that woman possessed take over. Then there was my wife, too, as resourceful a person in an emotional emergency as you could want. Oh, but the explanations required – the idea wearied me to the point of collapse. From what I had gathered about Chelsea’s mother, she’d likely be drunk and depressed and in need of care herself. What to do? What to do? I had no experience to fall back on. I had fathered three children and raised them to the ages of fourteen, twelve and ten; I should have had some useful resources. It seemed that I’d lived half a century without awareness, numb to my own capacity for human response. For a long moment in the middle of a modern urban centre, I’d dissolved all ego and definition and held the ancient, essential anonymity in my arms. As powerful as that was, it couldn’t go on. The deepest moments happen, and soon after you’re driving around your neighbourhood in a yellow Pinto with a crying student and a dead monkey and thirty thousand and five dollars worth of mechanical bank and transparent horse in the trunk.
“Haven’t you forgotten something?” Delmore grunted.
I was so relieved to be reminded of his presence that I almost drove up onto the curb. Recovering, I immediately sought his advice.