Hummingbird

  “How do you know if it’s neurological?” Dad asked.

  “Honestly? You don’t. I mean there are tests, but I don’t have the resources you need and you’d be looking at quite the expense. At the end of the day, the results wouldn’t be a hundred percent conclusive anyway.” It was hot in the clinic and Mathilda had started to pant. I hung back in a corner of the room, my arm hardly hurting anymore.

  “So?” Dad said, leaving the obvious question unspoken.

  “She’s a big dog,” the vet said, carefully. “An older dog.”

  Mathilda kept sitting nicely, letting the humans talk, not knowing how dire her situation had just become.

  Dad turned to me. “Are you sure that you didn’t provoke her?”

  I nodded. Unless some glitch in her brain, or in the fabric of time itself, had caused her to skip back to the day when I’d thrown her against the wall as a puppy, I hadn’t done a thing.

  On the drive home, Dad didn’t say a word. I sat in the back, where Mathilda had been not long before, remembering how she’d looked when we left her, how she’d stood up, expecting to follow us, but had found herself bound to the veterinarian’s hand. I tried to imagine an alternate future for her, some shred of hope: the vet leading her out the back door of the clinic to an idling truck, the truck taking her out of the city to a sprawling acreage, where a group of friendly dogs would race to greet her. It wasn’t impossible. If some people were secretly cruel to animals, couldn’t others be secretly kind?

  Outside the house, Dad killed the engine and pinned me in the rear-view mirror with his eyes. “What were you doing in the shed?”

  My face went hot. “What do you mean?”

  “You said you’d come out of the shed when it happened. What were you doing in the shed?”

  “I … I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know.”

  I shook my head, trying very hard not to cry. Eileen stepped out onto the porch, arms folded, features pinched—a soldier’s wife, anticipating the worst.

  Dad stared at me for a long time, his face devoid of sympathy or love. Then he looked at his watch and sighed. “Well, she’ll be in the freezer by now.” He got out and walked slowly towards the house, leaving me alone in the back seat of the car.

  The alley behind the Chinese grocer was dark, the nearest streetlight burnt out. As I peered up at the lit window on the second floor, I felt like I’d stepped into a magical pocket of private space, like a peep show booth, or a dim confessional. If Kim had come to the window and looked straight down, she wouldn’t have seen me. But it wasn’t Kim that I wanted to see, it was Jasmine. I assumed she was up there, listening to one of Kim’s endless stories, a bottle of tequila on the table between them, something folksy on the stereo.

  It had taken me weeks to find them. The night I threw the phone, Kim’s number jostled off redial, erasing my last connection to her. Ever since, I’d been lingering around her favourite haunts: the thrift store, the library, the seawall. I spent entire days in the dog park, scrutinizing every curly-haired woman I saw. It was by chance alone that I eventually saw both Kim and Jasmine sharing a joint on a fire escape behind the Chinese grocer—a vague, half-second glimpse from the window of a passing bus, sharpening in retrospect like a Polaroid photograph. By the time I got off and doubled back, they were gone, but I’d marked the window they’d been standing by. After our last conversation, the desperate affection I’d felt for Kim had morphed into unadulterated hatred. I hated her for forcing her way into my life. I hated her for leaving. I hated her for stealing Jasmine just when she’d finally come back. Something about the way they’d embraced at the university left no doubt that they’d been more than friends. Down in the alley, I felt like I had a video feed from their apartment wired directly to my brain. I saw Kim put her hand over Jasmine’s, claiming her. I watched her place a single pink pill on Jasmine’s tongue. Then Jasmine got up and began to dance—swaying lazily, while Kim sat back with her knees apart, a faint smile playing around her mouth. I groped at my feet and jerked my hand back as a broken bottle sliced my thumb. Sucking at the cut, I reached with my other hand and found what I was looking for: a decent-sized rock. A shadow passed across the window above me, a subtle change in light. With my thumb still in my mouth, I fixed a bead on the window and threw. The rock bounced off the wall and fell to the pavement with a soft clatter. No one came to the window. No one told me to stop. I felt at my feet again, pushing aside old plastic containers and scraps of cardboard, until I’d uncovered a broken chunk of concrete, heavy as a fossilized egg. I turned it over in my hands, feeling it had been deposited there years ago by an invisible accomplice. The concrete fit the grooves of my throwing hand perfectly. I turned my face up to the luminescent rectangle of the window, plotting the concrete’s trajectory from hand to glass and beyond—through the apartment, past Jasmine, into the side of Kim’s head. And at that instant, with that image in my mind, I threw with everything that I had.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Somewhere outside, car doors slammed. Indistinct voices resounded in the parking lot. I approached the curtains warily, as if they’d been draped over the cage of a wild animal. An unfamiliar car was parked directly below my window. The sky hung low and dark, the streetlights glowing softly. Across the way, the pale man sat in a chair, staring at nothing. A polite rapping came at my door and I tensed, then immediately relaxed, assuming police had finally come. My aim at the Chinese’s grocer had been true. Kim’s window hadn’t shattered, but I’d damaged the glass and now I would have to pay. Not just for the window, but for my intent. A charge of attempted murder would not have been unjustified. After weeks of dread, I was almost looking forward to my confession. But when I opened the door, I found the building superintendent, looking as surprised to see me as I was to see her.

  “Oh,” she said. “You are home.”

  “Yes,” I said, unsettled by the way my voice hung in the air. A fruit fly landed on my arm and I brushed it away. The superintendent tried to peer around me into the apartment and I widened my shoulders to block her view.

  “I just wanted to make sure that you were aware of the laundry situation,” she said.

  “Sorry, what situation?”

  “The washing machines. They’re out of order.”

  “Oh?” The floor shifted under my feet.

  “Thieves,” she said bitterly. “Broke them right open. The repairman should be in later this week. In the meantime, I’ve been telling people to use the laundromat down the block.”

  I nodded, thinking she looked thinner, with dark pouches under her eyes. “Okay.”

  “It’s hard to believe what some people will do for a handful of quarters, don’t you think?”

  A soft rustling came from the apartment behind me and I looked over my shoulder. When I turned back, the superintendent was watching me closely.

  “Was there something else?” I asked.

  “Well, now that you mention it, there was one other thing. Mr. Colombo—he lives next to you, you know. He mentioned that he’s been hearing noises from your apartment.”

  “Oh?” I glanced down the hall at his unit, feeling him on the on the other side of his door, listening.

  “He said he heard the sound of, well … someone being emotional.”

  “I see.”

  “Apparently, it’s been disturbing his sleep. Now, I don’t mean to pry, but I was wondering if you’re—”

  “I’m fine,” I said, more sharply than I’d intended.

  “Well. If you need anything …”

  “I appreciate that.”

  “All right. Have a good night, Mr. Mallory.”

  I shut the door and fruit flies swirled around me, then settled on the walls. I wondered how they perceived me, if they recognized me as a fellow creature, or if I was just some colossal force of nature to them. I leaned in close to an individual and stared at its tiny red eyes. I let it feel my breath on its wings. When it didn’t move, I slowly raised one hand and e
xtended my index finger. I paused with the tip of my finger millimetres away from its delicate exoskeleton. Then I lowered my hand and looked around, overwhelmed by the thought of returning my apartment to a state of livability.

  The old man next door was watching an action movie, the bass vibrating through the wall. I grabbed a bottle of wine from the counter and took a long slug. Warm fingers pushed up my spine. I carried the bottle into the bedroom and stopped. A large pile of change shone on the nightstand. No pennies, no nickels or dimes. Only quarters. I stared at the money, then turned off the light and eased into bed, listening to the staccato pulse of machine-gun fire next door. Eventually, the old man’s television went quiet. I watched the interplay of light and shadows on my ceiling, unable to sleep. Kim had lost the power to hurt me, the hurled rock having broken whatever spell I’d been under, but Jasmine still tumbled around in my head. As I began to drift off, a faint, whispery sound came from out in the living area. I held my breath, hearing it again, a match rasping against a strip of phosphorous. I went out to investigate and the sound intensified, growing urgent. Something was trapped in the cupboard under the sink, scrabbling and banging about. The longer I stared at the door, the louder the noise became. With my heart thudding in my ears, I gripped the handle and pulled. The garbage can under the sink had been knocked over, rotten food and scraps of plastic everywhere. In the middle of the pile, not looking the least bit afraid, sat a large grey rat. It glared at me defiantly, like an old man who’d been disturbed on the toilet. “Sorry,” I said. The rat watched me for a moment, then seemed to decide I wasn’t a threat and shuffled off to one side, as if inviting me to join it in the cupboard.

  “No,” I said. “That’s all right.”

  The rat gave the rat equivalent of a shrug and returned to its feast. I shut the cupboard door and fell back into bed.

  I woke to the sound of the building collapsing around me. The windows bucked and shuddered. Outside, giant apes were pounding on the hoods of cars, flipping over garbage bins, scaling the walls of my building and heaving at the framework. Coming fully awake, I recognized the storm for what it was. Hurricanes didn’t generally happen on that side of the continent, but gale force winds occasionally roared in from the sea to batter my windows and fling debris around the parking lot. The appliances were dark, the power out. I pushed to my feet and headed for the balcony door. The entire neighbourhood had gone black. Bright shards of insanity flashed through my head. A spray of coins across linoleum. The superintendent on her hands and knees, naked from the waist down. An ancient hand reaching out of a heating vent. A hard gust hit the building and the sliding door bowed inwards. I pictured it exploding, blowing glass into my face, my eyes. I stayed where I was, willing it to happen, wanting to be sucked into the night like a stack of paper blown from the window of a speeding car. The glass unflexed. Feeling compelled to be out in the thick of the storm, I threw on my jacket and stepped out into the pitch-black hall. The walls sighed as I felt my way past the old man’s unit and down the stairs to the main level. I shoved at the back door and the wind pushed back. On my second try, the wind ripped the door from my hands and threw it against the side of the building. I staggered out into the parking lot, dodging plastic bags and billowing sheets of newspaper. The sky was bright orange, the road littered with branches. Looking up, I saw the pale man at his window with a lit candle. He raised one hand and I headed for the road. I clambered over an uprooted tree and jogged past a streetlight fluttering on a wire like a paper clip on a string. The wind filled my head, my jacket ballooning behind me as I made my way through the empty streets, heading downhill, towards the ocean. Whitecaps flared in the distance. But as I approached the road that hugged the coastline, terror jolted me to a standstill. The ocean had breached the seawall. A line of darkness surged over the road and stopped just short of the spot where I was standing, then drew back and slipped out of sight. Beside me, a flag banged at the top of a pole. I felt like a sleepwalker, woken to find myself in true mortal danger. A red truck glided past me on the street, the driver oddly familiar. I thought about waving him off, but he approached the T-junction at the end of the road so confidently that I assumed he knew what he was doing. The moment he made the turn, another wave flooded the road. The water couldn’t have been that deep, but the back end of the truck started to drift. I could see the driver fighting with the wheel. The sea retracted, hauling in its catch. The truck spun in slow motion. For a moment, I could hear the faint drone of a car horn over the roaring wind. Then the truck reached the edge of the seawall and went over.

  Waves advanced a third time, the trees along the road all bending in the same direction, away from the sea. I tore my eyes from the spot where the truck had disappeared and sprinted up the slope, letting the wind carry me past darkened houses and storefronts, over the fallen tree and back to my building, where the remains of a heavy clay pot were strewn about the parking lot. A chained garbage bin kept arrhythmic time to the storm. The pale man’s window had gone dark. I felt my way up the stairwell and down the hall to my unit, where I locked my door, picked up the phone, and dialed 911. A bored operator came on the line. I gave her a rough outline of what I’d just seen and she repeated the story back to me in a skeptical monotone.

  “Yes, that’s right,” I said.

  “You saw a truck drive off the seawall at the intersection of Coast and Bank.”

  “It didn’t drive off. It was pulled off.”

  “Pulled off.”

  “That’s right. By the waves.”

  “I’m not following you.”

  “From the storm,” I said, impatiently.

  The operator went quiet. “When did you say this happened, sir?”

  “I don’t know. About twenty minutes ago. I can’t say exactly. My power’s been—”

  I broke off. The power had been restored. The lights might have been off, but my appliances were all humming, and the clock on the stove read two in the morning. I couldn’t hear the wind anymore. In fact, the apartment couldn’t have been quieter.

  “Sir,” the operator said. “Would you mind going over this one more time with me?”

  I carried the phone to the window and pulled back the curtains. The parking lot was well lit and still as a museum display. The strewn garbage was gone. The tree I’d clambered over to get to the road was standing where it had always stood.

  “Sir?” the voice said in my ear.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake.”

  “A mistake,” she repeated

  “I fell asleep on the couch. I was confused. I must have been dreaming.”

  “Dreaming.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Sir,” she said after a long pause. “Would you like me to connect you with our mental health department?”

  “No, no,” I said. “I’m just … I’m sorry for disturbing you.”

  The operator was reluctant to let me go, asking if I’d been doing any drugs, if I was under a psychiatrist’s care. I repeatedly assured her that I was fine and hung up, still standing at the window, staring at the magically restored tree. My face was raw from the wind, my ears ringing. Eventually, I became aware of the answering machine blinking on a side table. I had messages waiting, twelve of them, the most the machine could hold. I turned on the overhead light, momentarily stunned by the state of the apartment. It looked like it had been ransacked, with hardly a square inch of floor space to walk through, the walls smeared with grime, clouds of fruit flies swarming all around me. I sat down amid the filth to listen to the messages, starting with the most recent. A tinny version of my sister’s voice filled the room.

  “Just got back from the service. It was nice, I guess. Still waiting for you to call. Seriously, Felix. This is getting ridiculous.”

  A flutter of dread went through me at the word “service.” I skipped to the preceding message.

  “Leaving for the funeral home now. I don’t know if you’ve been getting these messages, but I hope you�
�re going to be there. I really don’t want to have to do this alone …”

  On the next message, Eileen confirmed what I’d already suspected. Dad was gone. I listened to message after message, all from my sister, hearing her grief unfold in reverse order, from acceptance to denial, and back further, to the anticipation of grief, when she’d first learned how serious his diagnosis was, how little time he had left. Finally, only one message remained. I pushed the play button, expecting to hear my sister’s voice again. Instead, after a few seconds of dead air, I heard my father, sounding weak and defeated, his voice barely louder than a whisper. “Felix—”

  I stopped the machine. Until that moment, I’d felt strangely detached, as if learning about the death of a minor character in a novel, an event that had been foreshadowed and brought to fruition at exactly the right moment. But the sound of Dad’s voice touched something dangerous inside of me, something I wasn’t sure I could survive.

  A sudden, insistent scratching came at the kitchen cupboard. The rat was awake. I’d been feeding it for weeks, out of fear, throwing table scraps directly into the cupboard under the sink and quickly shutting the door, not wanting to see the animal, imagining it must have doubled or tripled in size. I threw a shoe at the cupboard and the scratching stopped. I began to erase the messages, pushing the delete button savagely, the evidence against me shrinking with each jab of the finger. When I came to the last message, I hesitated, then pushed the button one more time, erasing Dad’s final words to me before I’d even heard them. Then, just as methodically, with the same buttonpressing motion of my index finger, I went around the apartment crushing every fruit fly I could find, climbing onto furniture to get at the ones on the ceiling. A few tried to escape, but for the most part they seemed to have no instinct for self-preservation, passively awaiting their destruction. By the time the sun rose, I’d killed more than I could count. Not daring to rest, I gathered the surface clutter into garbage bags, hauled my dirty clothes to the basement, and crammed them into the newly repaired machines, using the quarters from my nightstand. That done, I stalked down to the corner store and purchased some cleaning supplies and a large rat trap.