Hummingbird

  CHAPTER SIX

  After a long, disorienting moment, I understood that I hadn’t, in fact, been buried alive. Weak light pushed under the door, illuminating the shapes of a toilet, a hamper, a wall-mounted sink. A band of pain tightened around my head as I hauled myself out of the empty bathtub and groped for the light switch, shielding my eyes from the sudden flood of brightness. Fruit flies darted all around me, dotting the walls, coating the damp towels on the floor. The toilet seat was up, the bowl flecked with vomit. I filled the sink with cold water and lowered my face into the pool. At the count of ten, I reared back, making glancing eye contact with the creature in the mirror: a pale, bloated thing dragged up from the bottom of the sea. The one lit bulb above the vanity mirror hummed.

  I opened the door and found that fruit flies had colonized the entire apartment. Takeout containers and empty bottles and cans had exploded through the living area. A pile of unopened bills lay below the mail slot. Kim’s door paintings were gone, along with her clothes, her CDs, her books—any evidence of her presence in my life having been erased. I picked up the phone, but if I’d ever learned Kim’s number, I’d forgotten it. After listening to the dial tone for a moment, it occurred to me to push redial. The line rang.

  Kim answered warily, as if fairly sure who’d be calling. The moment I heard her voice, I started to cry. She sighed. “You have to stop calling here.”

  “I’m sorry.” My voice was thick with tears.

  “Jesus, Felix! Don’t do that. Don’t cry at me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t fair. What you’re doing right now is not fair.”

  “I miss you so much,” I sobbed, and as I said the words, I realized they were true. When we were together, I’d disliked everything about her. But now that she was gone, it seemed that she’d been just about perfect. “What can I do?” I moaned. “Tell me what to do.”

  She exhaled slowly. “What, exactly, do you think you miss about me, Felix?”

  “Everything.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  I came up with what felt like a safe answer. “Your eyes.”

  “My eyes,” she said flatly.

  “Yes.”

  “What colour are my eyes, Felix?”

  I could hardly picture her face, let alone her eyes.

  “I …”

  “You have no idea, do you? What about my middle name? My sign? My favourite movie?”

  “Tell me,” I said. “I want to know everything.”

  She gave a hollow laugh. “It’s too late, Felix. Stick with whatever caricature of me you had. It’ll be easier that way.”

  “Why are you doing this?” I wailed.

  “Me? You did this. You’re the freaking ringmaster.”

  “That’s not true!”

  “Look, I have to go. Can we say goodbye like adults? I really don’t want to have to hang up on you again.”

  “Can’t we just—”

  “Goodbye, Felix.”

  “Wait!”

  “For fuck’s sake!” She took a long breath and exhaled. “Okay … Do you remember my friend Shauna? The therapist? I can give her a call if you’d like. I’m sure she’d fit you in.”

  “I don’t need a therapist.”

  “Really. Then what do you need?”

  “Another chance.”

  “Felix, we don’t even like each other!”

  “That’s not true!”

  Someone laughed in the background on Kim’s end, a high-pitched, tinkling sound.

  “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Kim snapped.

  “That laugh. Is someone …” I sat up straighter, my extremities buzzing. “Oh god. She’s there, isn’t she? She’s sitting right next to you.”

  “Who?”

  “Jasmine.”

  “Who?”

  “Angela.”

  “Angela? What does she have to do with anything?”

  The woman laughed again, derisively, it seemed to me.

  “Ask her what’s so funny,” I said.

  “Felix …”

  “Ask her! Ask Jasmine what’s so funny. Or better yet, ask her about the pink room. I’ll bet she hasn’t told you about that.”

  “Oh, wow,” Kim said. “You’re actually crazy …”

  “You can’t do this,” I sobbed. “You can’t just breeze into someone’s life, then walk away like nothing happened.”

  “As a matter of fact—”

  I was done listening. I shouted and hurled the telephone across the room. It bounced off the wall and skittered along the floor. The impact almost broke the receiver in two, but somehow it didn’t sever our connection. I could hear Kim’s tinny voice coming from the open line on the floor: “Felix, what just happened? Are you there?”

  I sat on the couch, coolly watching the phone for a moment, before leaning down and gently severing the connection. My finger was still on the disconnect button when the phone rang a few seconds later. I lifted my finger. “Kim?”

  “Felix?”

  Not Kim after all, but my sister, sounding concerned.

  “Eileen?”

  “What’s happened?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve been crying. I can hear it in your voice. Did someone die?”

  Another wave of grief hit me and a sob broke out of my mouth. “Oh god, she left me, Eileen!”

  My sister sighed, all sympathy draining from her voice. “Oh.”

  “I don’t know what to do!”

  “This was a girlfriend, I take it?”

  I curled on the couch, clutching the broken phone to my ear. “I can’t live without her!”

  “I’m fairly sure that’s not true.”

  I cried like an overtired child, ignoring Eileen’s halfhearted attempts to console me.

  “Well, I’m glad no one’s dead,” she said, once my crying jag had passed. “I had a terrible dream. That’s why I called you. I was feeling superstitious. I thought something might have happened.”

  “What kind of dream?”

  “It was about Mathilda. She was older. Grey around the muzzle, like she was towards the end, you know? Anyway, I’m back in the old house and I’ve got this paper cut on my arm. A tiny little slice that’s hardly bleeding at all, and Mathilda comes over and starts to lick it. I want to push her away, but I don’t because I feel like she needs it. So I’m holding my arm there and she’s licking and licking. And the more she licks, the bigger the cut gets, until she’s not just licking my arm, she’s licking inside my arm. Lapping, like a dog drinking water from a bowl. And then, God, I’m feeling sick just remembering this, then she starts to nibble. Delicately, at first, with her front teeth. I’m still not doing anything to stop her, because it doesn’t hurt. I could move if I wanted to, but I’m fighting to keep still. I’m letting it happen. Even when she starts tearing off little chunks of skin and meat—not aggressively, but gently, looking very peaceful while she’s doing it—even then I don’t pull away. Because it’s my obligation to feed her. But when I see my own arm bone hiding under all that gore, I can’t hold still anymore and I start to scream. I start to fight … That’s when I woke up.”

  “That’s horrible,” I said, forgetting Kim for the moment.

  “Like I said, it was a nightmare.” She yawned. “There was no way I was getting back to sleep with that image in my head and Peter snoring beside me, so I got up to make myself a cup of tea. I saw your number on the fridge. I figured you’d be around.”

  I thought it over. “I’m the dog.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You said the dream made you think of me. I’m the dog.”

  “Um … no. I was actually thinking—hang on a second.” She half-covered the phone to say something to her husband, then came back on. “I should get going. I’ve got an early morning tomorrow. I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “I hated her,” I said.

  “Excuse me?”r />
  “Kim. When we were together, I hated her and she knew it. But everything’s different now. I’d do anything to get her back. It’s like she changed me somehow. She put all this need inside me.”

  My sister was quiet for a long moment. “You know,” she finally said, “you might want to talk to someone. Like a professional.”

  My hand tightened around the receiver. “That’s what Kim said.”

  “Well, she’s right. I hope you’re not harassing her.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t play dumb. You know what I mean.”

  “I … Why did you call me again?”

  “I was worried. But you’re okay. So.” She kept saying it, as if repetition would make it true. “Have you talked to Dad lately, by the way?”

  I made a vague noise, unsure just how long it had been.

  “You should give him a call.”

  “Why?”

  “You just should. Listen, it was good to hear your voice. I really need get back to bed …”

  We hung up after promising to talk again soon, neither one of us meaning it. Ever since she’d moved to New Zealand, we’d been like strangers. All the same, I felt better for having talked to someone. I put the phone down and it rang again almost immediately. I answered without thinking.

  “Hello?”

  “You bastard.”

  “Kim?”

  “I thought you’d done something to yourself. I was about to call the police.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, surprised and touched.

  “What is wrong with you?” she shouted.

  “I just … had a problem with my phone.”

  “A problem with your phone?”

  “The line cut out.”

  “The hell it did. I heard background noise. I thought you’d fucking killed yourself!”

  The louder she got, the calmer I became. Her anger was irrelevant. She cared. That was all that mattered. As she continued to harangue me, someone knocked at the door. I carried the phone over and found the superintendent on the other side of the spyhole. I held the phone against my chest, watching her. She knocked two more times then gave up and went away. I put the phone to my ear again. “Kim, listen …”

  “No, you listen!” she said, her voice breaking. “You’re sick! You’re a sick human being, Felix!”

  I laughed, without knowing why.

  “This is funny to you?” she yelled.

  “No,” I moaned, laughing so hard my stomach hurt.

  She sputtered for a moment, then grew dangerously calm, uttering four words, with the intensity of someone laying a curse: “Never. Call. Me. Again.”

  The line went dead. I set the phone in its cradle, still laughing, and went into the bathroom. In the mirror, my face looked old and shapeless. I punched the wall, surprised by how easily my fist broke through the plaster. I turned off the light and climbed into the empty bathtub, soothed by the close walls, the low drone of the ceiling fan. I draped towels over the tub to make a roof for myself. I’d stopped laughing. I’d stopped crying. Minutes passed. Hours. Days, maybe. I experienced each moment of emptiness, the building unusually quiet, as if had been evacuated for an impending natural disaster. I slept and woke and slept again. Hunger gnawed at me, then left me alone. Eventually, a thin voice came to me through the darkness, a voice I recognized as my father’s, eroded to a low, barely audible pitch, as if he were speaking through an impossibly long tube. I slipped into that tube, shimmying back several years to a grey blurred street. A January drizzle. A cold phone against my ear.

  “Dad?”

  “Felix.” Dad sounded tired. “How are you?”

  “I’m all right,” I said. “I’m good.”

  I took a drag on my cigarette and looked up and down the street to see if anyone had followed me, if anyone was watching.

  “Are you on a payphone?” he asked.

  “Yeah. Thanks for taking the charges.”

  “It’s fine.”

  “I didn’t want to call from the house. They’re always listening.”

  “Okay,” he said, his voice carefully neutral.

  I hopped from foot to foot. My skin hurt from exposure to the outside world. “I would have called sooner,” I said, speaking quickly. “But I’ve been really busy. I got a job at a warehouse. A part-time thing. And I’ve started writing this book.”

  “I see.” He didn’t ask me to elaborate. A silence descended on the line.

  “How’s Eileen?” I asked.

  “Your sister’s fine. She’s in Australia now.”

  “Right, I knew that. Did I know that?”

  “I’m sure I mentioned it. She’s been travelling for months now.”

  “Huh.”

  More silence. My body ached to get moving. “So you’re working,” Dad said, not a question, but a statement.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s good.”

  “Actually …” I rubbed the side of my head. “The part-time thing didn’t work out. I’ve got some leads, though.”

  Dad didn’t answer. I pictured him in a pair of ironed blue jeans and a plain white T-shirt, tethered to the wall by our old rotary phone, snow in the window, faded flowers on the walls. Tears filled my eyes. I fought the urge to slam the receiver against the side of my head. “Well,” I said. “I just wanted to check in.”

  “How are you doing for money?”

  I flexed my jaw and dropped my damp cigarette on the pavement. “Now that you mention it … rent’s coming up soon.”

  “I see.”

  “I don’t need much.” I crushed the cigarette under my foot, obliterating it.

  “I understand,” Dad said.

  “A couple of hundred should get me through.”

  “I’ll put something in your account tomorrow.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I realize that.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  I sagged in shame, the transaction over. There was nothing left to say. I missed Dad the instant I hung up, but knew that if I’d gotten him back on the line, I’d have only wanted to hang up all over again. Strangers passed, probing me with their eyes. I pulled up my hood and walked down the street, trying not to think about how my roommates had been going through my things, stealing my food, filling my head with subliminal messages while I was sleeping. The world tipped down and I stumbled over my own feet. Hardly knowing how I’d gotten there, I found myself at the bottom of a steep set of stairs on a rocky shoreline. Empty mansions loomed on a cliff behind me. The sea looked stagnant and dull. I sat down on a driftwood log and peered through the rain at a distant container ship, unable to tell what direction it was going, or if in fact it was moving at all. It seemed to me that the ship had always been there, always would be there, just as those same gulls would always be stamped against the sky on ragged, crucified wings. I hated the dull coastal winters with their endless drizzle. I wanted to go home, to the snowy fields and the wide-open skies of the prairies. But for all Dad’s efforts to keep me off the streets, he’d seemed happy to leave me right where I was ever since I’d dropped out of school, making it known in countless small ways that home didn’t want me back.

  I put off calling Dad, specifically because Eileen had suggested it. If there was one thing I didn’t need, it was more bad news. I assumed that he would pick up the phone if it was important enough, although I couldn’t remember a single instance of him calling me in the past. When I thought about it, it seemed that our estrangement was directly connected to Mathilda’s death, an event I’d revisited more than once since Eileen’s phone call. One afternoon when I was in my early teens, I’d stumbled on Dad’s stash of girlie magazines in the garden shed and put them to immediate use. After I’d stowed everything away, I stepped out into the backyard and Mathilda rushed me without warning, crossing the yard low and fast. I watched her come, thinking she wanted to play. I just had time to raise a defensive arm before she hit me, pinning me back against the shed. I shouted, in su
rprise more than anything, waiting for her to recognize me and let go, but she held on tight, her teeth tearing through my sleeve to anchor in the flesh of my arm.

  I screamed for help, no longer knowing where I was, or what was happening, jostled from the shame-filled aftermath of furtive self-pleasure into what felt like a panicked struggle for my life. Mathilda leaned on her haunches and shook her head. I pulled back, bellowing in terror. Then, the door to the house flew open and Dad came thundering down the porch.

  “Mathilda!”

  She let go instantly and loped over to him with her tail flagging, as if abandoning a friendly game of tug-of-war.

  “What the hell happened?” Dad shouted. “What did you do to her?”

  “Nothing,” I said, shocked.

  He strode across the lawn, then stopped, going pale. “You’re bleeding.”

  On the way to the vet clinic, I kept my wounded arm in an improvised bandage, while Mathilda sat tied up in the back, gazing out the window with interest. The veterinarian, an older man who looked like he’d have been more comfortable handling livestock than family pets, examined her briefly, then sighed and pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “Well, she isn’t rabid,” he said. “It could be some other neurological problem, but really, that’s just guesswork. You say the attack was completely random? Nothing led up to it?”

  Dad looked at me.

  “What?” I said. “I didn’t touch her!”

  Dad sighed.

  “Has she ever bitten anyone before?” the vet asked. “Or threatened to bite?”

  “Absolutely not,” Dad said.

  “Hm.” The vet frowned at Mathilda like a mechanic at a failing automobile. “I’d almost feel better if she had.”