“Okay,” Evan said. Evan didn’t know Sarah Englemont, and so could not know the rush of emotion that had flooded Danny’s system when he even suggested the possibility of…Like he had stumbled onto something mysterious, like he had wandered into the pharaoh’s tomb. “Okay,” said Evan, and the glassy look was there so maybe it didn’t matter, and Evan understood better than even Danny did. “Show me Sarah Englemont’s room.”
His bedroom filled up with lazy June sunlight when Danny pulled back the curtains. He looked across the road at 106 Spadina Road where he used to live, he and his dad and his mom all together. And Sarah Englemont in the apartment above, her music leaking through the floorboards at night, the smell of her dinner drifting through the vents, her laughter like a ghost inhabiting the silence his parents never managed to fill.
“There,” Danny said.
Lo and behold, there was Sarah Englemont’s room just above the window that had belonged to his parents’ room.
And lo and behold, there was Sarah Englemont at the window, curtains open, and – as Evan swung the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass in a slow parabola from the sky to 106 Spadina Road – suddenly Danny was sorry he had suggested this. He didn’t want to share Sarah Englemont with Evan, not Evan who liked big titties and nipples as round and hard as gumballs, Sarah Englemont wasn’t for him, Sarah was his, Sarah was his.
But a slow grin was spreading across Evan’s face, a sleepy sort of molasses grin that made Danny want to punch him, just land a solid one amidst all those craters and freckles.
“Whoa, Danny, she’s a real…she’s primo, you know what I’m saying? She’s just, yeah. Let’s see, baby, let’s just see…” Evan pressed his eye against the lens piece so that when Danny turned to look all he could make out was that one red comma eyebrow floating above the mailing tube.
Danny said nothing.
Danny said nothing because Danny had stopped looking at Evan and his molasses-slow grin, his dirty fingers leaving marks like pennies on the polished brass.
Danny was looking at the window where Sarah Englemont lived. Sarah Englemont, who had smiled at him through a shimmer of pink lip gloss, with whom he had watched old black-and-whites like Casablanca and Kind Hearts and Coronets, and who, when he had struggled with the moving box full of his most prized possessions after his parents split, had given him a look of profound sadness before she ruffled his hair like she used to when he was six even though he was eleven then and never let anyone ruffle his hair.
In that window, by some chance, by fate, by whatever gods watched out for twelve-year-old boys, there was the distant figure of Sarah Englemont. Even from a distance Danny could recognize her McDonald’s uniform. He’d seen her in it countless times. She hated the thing, he remembered. She loathed its polyester texture, its awkward cut.
No, Danny thought, no!
Because Sarah Englemont hated that uniform. She despised its polyester feel. Its stench of cooked meat and grease, so thoroughly soaked into the thing that not even the laundry machine could strip it out, disgusted her.
No, he wanted to cry out, even as he felt an electric jolt from his balls to his brain. No, don’t do that, someone is watching, don’t you know someone is watching?
But Sarah Englemont could not hear his silent pleas, and because Sarah Englemont did not know, she proceeded, achingly slowly, to strip off the loathsome uniform.
Her pants first. She removed them easily, slipping out legs that were long and slender. And then the shirt. She began to wiggle. The shirt wouldn’t come free. Her head was caught.
Danny was stunned. His breath stalled in his lungs. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. He was held captive by the scene playing out before him, barely discernible to his naked eye, half-imagined, perhaps, but magnified, perfected and etched in the exquisite detail by all his boyhood longing. The black lace of her bra. The white strip of flesh above her panties, a strip of white that had he been able to magnify his vision sixtyfold would have revealed a perfect, little bellybutton with a jewelled stud.
Then the shirt was off, and – at last – Danny shook off his paralysis.
“Hey! Don’t be such a spaz!” Evan snarled, as an elbow collided painfully with his ribs. The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass spiralled wildly and almost clocked Danny a good one in the chin, but then he had it under control, and now his eye was pressed to it. He was scanning, madly scanning the windows, found his mom’s – he recognized the little floral teapot she kept to hold back the curtains during the day – and brought the scope up a few degrees to find…
“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?” Evan grumbled, annoyed. “You can’t see anything anyway. She’s not even there. What a frigging waste.” The older boy rubbed at a spot under his T-shirt. “The thing must be busted. Your dad bought you an old busted-up telescope, how do you like that?” There was bitterness in his voice. As if they had both been let down by his dad’s failure. “Who’d want something like that anyway?”
Danny wasn’t listening. He had an inkling that he had screwed up, could hear that in Evan’s voice, and that he’d pay for it sometime. Even though he and Evan were friends now, something else had entered Evan when he turned twelve. He wasn’t a bully. He couldn’t be, not yet, not when he was a four-foot-nothing, skinny-assed redhead with a face full of acne, but he would be one day and he was already starting to try on the clothes of his older self to see if they might fit.
But Danny didn’t care at that moment, though the warning bells were still going off, muted, in the back of his head. He was searching, searching, searching.
Finally, the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass slid into place and he knew instinctively that he had found it, that as the image resolved itself he would see something magical and forbidden, whatever Evan said, something that would be worth any number of imaginative future torments.
But as his eye focused, everything looked wrong; it wasn’t Sarah Englemont after all. It was an old woman, cigarette clutched between two xanthic-stained, twitching fingers. She let out a smoke plume that curled like a cat’s tail out through the open window.
Danny pulled away.
Sarah had tugged on a new, baby-blue cardigan.
Danny looked into the spyglass, but there was only the strange old woman, eyes full of sadness gone stale, chain-smoking through the window.
“I told you, spaz, it’s broken. Your dad got you a broken spyglass. What a jerkoff.”
That white strip of flesh continued to burn feverishly in Danny’s mind even after Evan had left. He masturbated tentatively and then with increasing fervor until he came in a little puff which he wiped away with a tissue.
As his mind went to that sharp, blank place it always went to afterward, it was not the strip of flesh that lingered, but the face of the old woman releasing all that sadness in curls of chalky smoke.
It had been Sarah’s room, he was sure of it.
It couldn’t have been Sarah’s room, he had seen Sarah’s room and Sarah had been in it, one part of his brain argued. But it was, said another more deeply buried part, the reptil-ian hindbrain that dreamed sex and violence and held that image of Sarah like a mosquito in amber. It was, it was, you know it was. The window had the same crumbling ledge, the same paisley, trimmed curtains. Yes, it was the same. Mostly the same. The same, yet different.
“Her name was…Jennifer,” Danny’s dad said that night at the dinner table. “Something like Jennifer anyway, maybe it was Ginny. Ginny Crowther.” He trailed a spoon thought-fully through the mess of cheese sauce and elbow macaroni clumped in his bowl. It was overcooked to the point that the noodles split easily under the pressure of the spoon. “You wouldn’t remember her but she used to watch you sometimes when you were just a baby.”
“Was she sad?” Danny asked.
“I guess so. She, uh, passed away about seven years ago. You were, what, five at the time then. You kept asking where she went and if you could see Crowsy again.” His dad looked at him oddly. “That’s what you called her.”<
br />
“Did she smoke?”
“Like a chimney,” his dad chuckled. “Your mom hated it but I was still smoking then, so she never really said it out loud. But you could tell. Your mom would get this look and she’d never have to say anything, you’d just know immediately that something stuck in her craw.” His dad looked away guiltily. “I mean, your mom really loves you, Dan-o. I never want you to think…” He lapsed into silence, and Danny took to dividing the elbow noodles into pulpy confetti.
“Did she…” Danny couldn’t think what else to ask.
“I think her husband died in Vietnam or something like that, and then her sons, well, one had a heart attack and when she called to let the other know…he just…the same goddamn thing.” He shook his head. “It would make you laugh if it weren’t so crazy.”
Danny tried to remember her, the smell of cigarettes maybe, how she might have laughed, the colour of her eyes. Crowsy.
His dad blinked, returning to himself. “Not hungry, Danny?”
“Sorry, Dad. It’s getting better though. This pot was better.”
“Yeah, well, your mom was always the cook. Thanks.” Danny’s dad stood, and began to clear the dishes away, stacking them in a growing, uneven pile in the sink.
Danny stayed at the table. In his mind he dissected and reassembled the pieces of information his dad had given him. The same window. Two different women, one twenty-six, impossibly perfect. Present. One ancient and grieving, died seven years ago. Past.
Danny thought about the light travelling from distant stars. Whatever you were seeing, it had already happened. It was only the effects that filtered out through the universe, light moving more slowly than time, time moving backwards if you only knew how to look at it properly.
He blinked and caught his dad’s shadow falling across where his bowl had been, a tiny ringlet of cheddar-orange left in its place.
“I know it’s been hard, but we’re okay, right?” His dad’s voice was oddly disembodied. “You’d. Well. You’d talk to me if you were having problems.” Pause. “Adjusting.”
Danny turned and, on an impulse, wrapped his arms around his dad’s waist. Richard Damaske’s hands lifted and flapped for a moment like startled birds before coming to land on his son’s head. He fingered the fine blond hair. To Danny his dad smelled of equal parts stale, chemical nico-tine and something sweeter that he couldn’t quite recognize – like syrup, maybe. But it didn’t matter, it didn’t matter because under all that was his dad’s smell, and Danny clung to that, breathed it in, let it fill him up.
Every other Tuesday Danny went to his mom’s for dinner, and so when Danny came home at the end of the day with his backpack slung over one shoulder, a hand crammed into his side pocket, he walked on the west side of the road rather than the east as he would on every other day of the week. Danny entered the code on the outer door, mumbling the numbers as he did so. He took the elevator up six floors, turned left when the doors slid open and made his way through the overbright corridor. Danny paused in front of Unit 24. He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to knock now. He shrugged off his backpack and let it settle in a heap. He waited a moment. Knocked tentatively.
His mom was instantly at the door, thin body etching out an autumn-tree silhouette. “Oh, Danny, you’re here. You’re here. Good. Perfect. Happy birthday, darling.” She kissed him on the cheek. Once. Twice. “Come in! You can put your bag…well, you know what to do, don’t you? It’s not your first time here.”
Danny stepped inside and dragged his bag until it was just inside the door. Green and blue crepe paper stretched like kudzu from corner to corner. A pile of hastily blown balloons rested on the chesterfield.
Danny’s mom had dressed for the occasion in a fitted, black wool dress, pearls circling her neck and studding her ears. She was a handsome woman. Had Danny’s fine, blond hair and arched eyebrows. But whereas on him they looked slightly feminine, on her they were boyish. Almost androgynous.
“Darling,” she said. “Come here, come here. I want you to meet someone.”
A slow sinking feeling settled in Danny’s stomach.
“This is Henry. Henry Croydon. My friend from work. He’s going to join us.” As an afterthought: “If that’s all right with you. It’s your birthday, darling, so if you’re not comfortable…”
Henry Croydon emerged from next to the cluster of balloons, and Danny realized they must have been his handi-work. The crepe paper too.
Henry Croydon had bruised bags beneath his eyes. His suit was an identical shade and pattern to the chesterfield. He looked like a high-school vice-principal. Or a small-town crook.’
“Hello, Daniel,” Henry Croydon said. “Twelve, eh? That is really something. Congratulations.” They shook hands, Danny’s sliding in and out with as little contact as possible.
Danny decided he didn’t like Henry Croydon. Danny decided he hated Henry Croydon.
“Well,” said Danny’s mom. She watched the exchange with a kind of sick concentration, and when it was over, she smiled an overdressed smile. “I’m sure my two men will be close as houses.”
“Safe as houses,” Henry Croydon whispered under his breath, and Danny decided, no, his mom had been right, “safe as houses” didn’t make any sense, “safe as houses” was crap.
That night after he had returned to his own apartment across the road, Danny stared through the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass at the bedroom that now belonged to his mom and Henry Croydon, but had once belonged to his mom and his dad. Inside, he could see the floral teapot still holding open the curtains. Beyond it, the queen-sized bed with the chocolate-and-tan duvet his mom had purchased when the building heating had blown out that awful January and the three of them had to curl in all together to keep warm. Danny remembered the feeling of being trapped between two sets of knees and elbows, and every which way he turned there were the wrong angles, but still he had been warm, and his mother had stroked his hair until he slept.
He couldn’t remember if his parents had kept that comforter. No, he thought, Henry Croydon would want a new comforter. Henry Croydon wouldn’t sleep underneath the same blanket his dad had slept under.
Danny turned the dial on the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass. The image went blurry and resolved itself again. The same bedroom, but this time the comforter was askew with a figure half-buried in a mountain of blankets. Sitting on the edge of the bed, a young man with his dad’s blunted nose slipped on a slate-grey jacket. Danny watched for a moment longer, and the man in the grey jacket leaned over to pull back the covers. A pale hand emerged first, then a halo of blond hair, then a stomach bulging with the bellybutton popped out like a balloon tie.
His mom.
She heaved herself out of the tangle of sheets as if gravity meant something different to her, spine arched, her hand on the small of her back for support, but smiling with a sort of happy, pained smile.
Enough.
Danny turned the dial again, and the image went soft like running watercolours, became a darkened room, curtains pulled shut, backlit by the soft orange glow of the lamp. Cozy. Muted silhouettes behind.
Danny turned the dial.
The same room, curtains pulled back again, a single figure. His dad. Even younger, broad-shouldered with a clean, unlined face that Danny recognized as the one his own might grow into. He was laughing. He looked like a man who laughed often. He was unbuttoning a white dress shirt, the tails pulled out haphazardly at the back to hang in two wrinkled diamonds. He was staring at the doorway.
Danny nudged the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass the barest degree. There. The doorway darkened, the light suddenly blinding behind the silhouette of a slim-hipped woman.
She hung in the doorframe for a second that seemed to stretch on and on, husband and son both frozen in time. She was immeasurably beautiful, like a stage performer, otherworldly. The long sheaves of her hair twined into wreathes pinned at the top, the special silk dress she would wear only to the Canadian Opera Company, a Marilyn Monroe dres
s, black with a net of lace over the shoulders. Father and son stuck in that frame, hung up together on that beautiful woman. Sarah Englemont in ten years. Danny in ten years.
The image held, and then came unstuck. She began to walk from the pooling light of the hallway.
Danny turned the dial back. Found her again, framed in light. Beautiful. Still. She began to move. He reset the image, but he could not get it to stay put, there was no pause button, only an endless slice of time set on repeat. Light filtering out through the universe. Past becoming present.
Danny turned away from the spyglass, taken by the vague shape of some new emotion you must only get after you turned twelve. He tried to think about his mom, but all he could pull up in his mind was the image of the plastic doll with its Magic Marker tattoo. Bride To Be.
He turned back to the spyglass.
When Danny arrived at school Wednesday morning, the Wednesday after his second birthday party, something was different. Off. Like all seventh graders, like all weak creatures in a predatory ecosystem, he had attuned himself to the complex minutiae of his surroundings – the mouths hidden behind cupped hands, the whites of eyeballs rolling away from him, the vicious giggles of Laura G., Laura L., and Laura S., and the immediate hush as he passed them.
These were bad signs.
A kind of hurricane whisper blew across the schoolyard as Danny crossed the twenty yards from the chain-link fence to the doorway. He passed Evan and the other big-tittie boys. Evan smiled casually. His eyebrows had sharpened to points.
Here it is then, Danny thought. The new Evan.
“Hey, Danny.” But it wasn’t Evan. It was Sam Stenson who spoke, the cauliflower-eared kid next to him with the cut-up encyclopedia and a nose like a faucet. “Hey, Danny boy.” It was Sam speaking, but Danny could almost see Evan’s mouth moving along.
Time stood still. The storm was breaking around Danny.
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