Hummingbird

  “Hmm,” I said, thoughtfully. My initial excitement faded as I turned the page, confronted by organs of every size and colour, some circumcised, some not, some flaccid, some erect. Not one stood out as being remarkable in any way. I might as well have been looking at a catalogue of noses, or elbows. I turned another page.

  “I try to make sure that there’s no doubles,” Zoe said. “To keep it fair.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Well …” She frowned to herself. “Having a hundred pictures of the same man would defeat the whole purpose. It isn’t a turn-on for me. The way I see it, I’m doing these men a kindness. They want someone to look at them. So I look.”

  I kept turning pages, feeling increasingly ashamed, as if I’d taken every one of those pictures myself. When I came to the end, I sat with the book in my lap.

  “Do you think I’m strange?” she asked, timidly.

  “No.”

  “Really?”

  I tried to find her eyes behind the dark lenses. “I’m pretty strange myself.”

  “Like with the time travelling?”

  “For starters.”

  “Where do you go?” she asked, intrigued.

  “To the past, mostly.” It felt odd, discussing it so frankly. “But every once in a while I see things that haven’t happened yet.”

  “The future.”

  “More like a possible future. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just crazy.”

  “I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said decisively. Although we hardly knew each other, I found her confidence reassuring. “Did you see all this before it happened?” she asked. “Coming here? Meeting me?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “So … what happens next?”

  Still holding the penis album, I looked at Zoe, seeing my own face reflected in her dark lenses. I shook my head. “I’m not really sure.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  The chestnut trees lining the sidewalk gave almost no shade. The humidity added ten pounds to my clothes. I wasn’t sure where I was going but felt that it must have had something to do with Zoe. We’d been seeing each other for weeks. Whenever I felt lonely or out of sorts, I’d stop by her place, and feel instantly at ease, consoled by the sight of her eccentric sunglasses and unkempt hair. She’d put on coffee and we’d commiserate about the awfulness of our lives before moving to her bedroom and having urgent sex. I never felt pressured to stay the night, or to visit more often. In fact, she seemed to have no expectations of me whatsoever, accepting my erratic arrivals and departures with perfect equanimity.

  I came to an abrupt stop. If I’d been going to Zoe’s place, I was heading in the wrong direction.

  “Excuse me,” a woman behind me said.

  “Sorry,” I muttered and kept moving.

  The sidewalk was crammed with attractive young people, swinging their naked limbs confidently through space. Wearing long sleeves and jeans myself, I slogged downhill until I came to a pit in the earth, surrounded by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence. On one side of the fence, half a dozen men in hard hats and orange vests lounged around smoking as a large back-hoe tore up the ground. On the pedestrian side, my next-door neighbour, the old door slammer, stood watching them intently, his hands knotted in the wire. As I hurried past, I heard him mutter, “Kill it.”

  The ocean must have been close. I could smell salt and decay. The sun burned on the back of my neck. I wanted to shrug off my clothes and leave them heaped in a pile on the sidewalk. As the seawall came into sight, along with dozens of joggers, bikers, and rollerbladers, I stopped in the middle of Coast Road, not realizing where I was until a horn blared. I hurried the rest of the way across and a red pickup roared past, the exact make and model that I’d seen on the night of the storm. The driver looked similar. Even the intersection was identical. I looked out past the seawall, half-expecting to find a tidal wave rolling in, but the water remained calm, the sky clear. The truck parked at an angle on the road, and the driver—the living image of my father—got out with what looked like camera gear and walked off down a sloping path to the beach. Gravity and light. The air in my lungs. As I approached the truck, I saw a little film canister wedged between the windshield and the dash. The passenger window was open. No one was looking my way. I walked up to the truck like it belonged to me, alarm bells jangling in my head as I punctured the invisible membrane between public and private space and snatched the film off the dash. The maneuver took all of three seconds, but the world changed dramatically in those three seconds. No one shouted or confronted me, but people suddenly looked uneasy, as if sensing my transgression. Inanimate objects leaned towards me: buildings, street signs, vehicles. I jammed the film in my pocket, then jogged across the street and ducked down a side road, nearly falling more than once as I looked over my shoulder, expecting the red truck to come roaring around the corner, the driver leaning grimly into the wheel. After a few blocks, I forced myself to slow to a normal pace, taking the long way home, through a trendy neighbourhood filled with coffee shops, where I stopped and pulled out the stolen canister, confirming that it in fact held a roll of used film. As I snapped the canister shut, a harsh cry rang out, and a dark shape swooped down from a tree, passing inches from the top of my head. A crow, flapping over the treetops. It hurled itself back down at me and I ducked and kept walking. I tried to keep a casual pace, as if nothing unusual was happening, but the crow buzzed me again, and people on the surrounding patios were starting to take notice. On the fourth pass, the bird made contact, raking its claws across my scalp. Abandoning any pretext of calmness, I covered my head and ran, past rows of townhouses and character homes with pristine lawns. Whenever I paused to look up, a dark flurry battered my face and drove me on. People were staring now, accusingly, as if I’d antagonized the bird, and deserved to be attacked. I sprinted the last few blocks to my apartment and slammed through the front doors, spinning to face the crow, who’d landed on the welcome mat outside. “Go away!” I yelled through the glass door.

  “Hello, Felix,” an icy voice behind me said.

  I turned to find the superintendent standing in the middle of the lobby.

  “I’m sorry,” I gasped. “This bird …”

  “I got your note,” she said, ignoring the crow altogether.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your note. I have to say, it came as a bit of a surprise.” Her hair was fuller than I remembered, her hairline unnaturally low and slightly askew. “No, not a surprise,” she corrected herself. “A disappointment.”

  I looked at her more closely, noting that her eyebrows had been painted on and that she had no lashes at all. She hadn’t even glanced at the crow parked outside the door. “Three years.” She advanced on me slowly. “Three years you’ve been with us. You’d think after all that time we would have earned some loyalty.”

  I took a step back, having no idea what she was talking about.

  “I don’t think,” she continued evenly, “that you understand how lucky you were to find us. You’ll never see a rent so reasonable. Not in this location. A ten-minute walk to downtown. A twenty-minute walk to the ocean. Free parking. Free hot water …” She kept coming until she’d backed me up against the wall. I could smell the illness radiating off her, her clothes hanging loose on her frame, her eyes shimmering with eerie light. “It’s not that we’ll have trouble replacing you,” she assured me. “We won’t. There’s a long waiting list. Oh, you should see our waiting list … I just wish you’d had the courtesy to tell me to my face. I wish—” She broke off, seized by a sudden, violent coughing fit. I circled around her, just as I would have circled a rabid dog. Her wig fell off and lay at her feet in a little black heap. Her face was pale and shining.

  “I’m sorry.” I hovered at the door to the stairwell, unsure what I was apologizing for.

  The words seemed to give her renewed strength and she straightened, looking ageless, almost beautiful, her scalp covered by a dark fuzz, her skin so pale she was nearly tr
anslucent. “Yes,” she said. “You are.”

  I wrenched open the door and began to climb, hearing the hydraulic arm catch behind me, bringing the door to a slow, hissing close.

  Pain stabbed at my right ear the moment I arrived in my apartment. I pressed my hand against the side of my head and looked around, sensing another presence, some activity that had recently, and abruptly, stopped. Everything in the kitchen and living area seemed to be in order. I moved to the bedroom and listened at the closed door. A faint scratching came from inside. I thought about the rat, wondering if it had grown tired of waiting to be fed and had come looking for me. I slowly opened the door and found the room lit by dozens of tea lights, Zoe lying on the bed like a pale starfish: blindfolded and naked, her arms and legs fastened to the bedframe with short lengths of rope. She lay so still that for a moment I wondered if she was alive at all. Then I noticed the slight rise and fall of her chest, and the tented note on the bedside table: Happy Birthday.

  I wanted to untie her and throw a blanket over her, shocked that she’d thought this would please me. She hardly participated in sex at the best of times, lying perfectly still, always asking the same tentative question afterwards: Was that okay? I walked around the bed, wondering how she’d managed to tie herself so firmly. I held my open hand just above her navel. I didn’t touch her, but slowly moved my hand up her torso, gliding above the skin to her small breasts and unusually long neck. A strange violence entered me as I cupped my hand around the base of her throat, a desire to apply pressure. She didn’t move, allowing me to keep my hand there. I pulled back and she arched towards me.

  I prepared myself and climbed on top of her, trembling with lust. I put both hands around her throat—the blindfold like some dark gathering force, pulling me into her head. I climaxed almost immediately, then let go, seeing red marks where my fingers had been moments before.

  “Jesus,” I said softly.

  Zoe was breathing quickly, her eyes still obscured. I rolled off her and loosened the knots at her wrists and ankles.

  “Did you like that?” she asked, taking off the blindfold.

  I couldn’t answer, or even look at her.

  She slipped on her prescription sunglasses. “What is it?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry … I thought you’d like it.”

  “I did like it.”

  “Then why are you mad?”

  “I’m not mad.”

  “You seem mad.”

  “Can we drop this, please?”

  I sat on the edge of the bed and she fell silent, her expression unreadable behind the dark lenses. I hadn’t liked what had happened. I’d been consumed by it, having tapped into something sadistic and cruel that made me doubt everything I’d ever believed about myself: that I was, at heart, a decent person. It was true that I hadn’t hurt her. Nor had she seemed to mind. But this wasn’t about her. It was about me. I stared at my hands, going over everything that had happened since I came to on the sidewalk, the way a wasp explores a piece of rotten meat. The truck, the crow, the superintendent. And now this.

  “What are you thinking about?” Zoe asked.

  I jumped, having forgotten she was there, then shook my head. “Nothing.”

  “Are you having second thoughts?”

  “About what?”

  “Moving in with me.”

  Was that what was happening? I couldn’t imagine what life with Zoe would look like. As it was, she barely existed for me.

  “No,” I said. “I’m just … distracted. There was a crow on the way home. It kept coming after me …”

  “It must have been protecting its nest.”

  “There were plenty of other people around. It had no problem with them.”

  “Maybe you looked particularly threatening.”

  “I don’t think so. This was personal. It was trying to deliver a message.”

  “What kind of message?”

  “I don’t know … That I don’t belong in the world. That I was put here by mistake.”

  Zoe didn’t laugh or contradict me, instead frowning sympathetically. “I’m sorry.”

  It was a novel sensation, being understood. In many ways, talking to Zoe felt like talking to myself, which might have explained why I felt so ambivalent about moving in with her. I went over to the window to look for the crow. When I turned around, Zoe was still on the bed, tears sliding down her face. “Sorry.” She took off her glasses and wiped the tears away, viciously. “I just wish we weren’t both so damaged …”

  I knew that I should have said something comforting, or gone over to embrace her, but felt physically incapable of doing anything of the kind.

  She put her glasses back on, looking like she had something terrible to say. “I think … I love you Felix.”

  I fondled the film canister through my pants pocket, a reciprocal declaration stirring in my chest. I considered letting it out, wondering if it might actually be true. But at that precise moment, a snap resounded in the kitchen, followed by a panicked scrabbling noise. I stared at Zoe, then hurried out to the kitchen, throwing open the cupboard under the sink. “Shit.”

  “What?” Zoe asked, coming out a moment later in one of my shirts.

  “There’s nothing there.”

  Zoe looked relieved. “It got away?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “I don’t understand.” She squatted beside me and peered into the cupboard. “Where’s the trap?”

  “It must have dragged it into the hole with it.”

  “Could it do that?”

  “It’s a big hole.”

  We stared at the cupboard for a minute.

  “What are you going to do?” Zoe asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  I was less concerned with the fate of the rat than its timing. I’d been on the brink of telling Zoe that I loved her. The words had been in my mouth, and the trap had stopped me. If the rat had been killed outright, I would have taken it as a clear warning not to move in together. If it had escaped, I might have seen it as a more hopeful sign. But this quasi-escape to what in all likelihood would be a slow death in the walls was harder to interpret. I gave Zoe a strained smile, feeling an almost fatherly affection as I looked at her, standing there in my oversized shirt. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll start packing.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  I was able to walk most of my things over to Zoe’s apartment, one box at a time. The superintendent came out of her unit to watch in silence, arms crossed. Once I’d cleared out everything I could carry, I dropped my key in her mailbox, leaving my damage deposit to cover the cost of removing my larger pieces of furniture and repairing the hole in the bathroom wall. The last I saw of the superintendent, she was standing at the building’s front door, looking not at me, but at the sky, with a haunted expression.

  At Zoe’s place, I immediately carved out a workspace for myself in the kitchen and started to write. When she wasn’t on her own computer, Zoe skulked around, trying not to make too much noise. I took to wearing earplugs to shut out the sound of her typing or shifting in her chair or nibbling dry cereal, but the knowledge of her constant presence in the apartment was impossible to erase. In bed, she remained passive and undemanding, never failing to accommodate me, but never showing any outward signs of pleasure. Every so often, I checked the penis album, and found that she was still collecting photos.

  The pictures I’d stolen from my father’s look-alike remained hidden in their canister, tucked in the hip pocket of whatever pants I happened to be wearing. I hadn’t brought them to a developer, fearing they’d know the film wasn’t mine, but I touched the canister often as I struggled to find my way into my third book, erasing and rewriting the opening paragraph hundreds of times, telling myself that when I got that much right, the rest would come. One morning, after weeks of failure, I’d finally begun to close in on a solution, when a tap on my shoulder broke the spell.

  “What?” I snapped, tearing out my earplugs.
<
br />   “Sorry,” Zoe said. “I just wanted to tell you that we’re out of milk.”

  “So?”

  “Well, I’ve been sick all day, and I was hoping you could …”

  She was hunched over in a flannel nightdress, looking paler than usual. Anxiety gnawed my gut at the thought of going out, but I felt bad for not noticing she was sick and reluctantly agreed to run the errand. On the way to the corner store, I paused in front of a one-hour photo mart. A businessman weaved around me. “Point of no return,” he muttered into his cellphone. I watched him disappear into the crowd, then looked at my uncertain reflection in the photo mart window and stepped inside. A shifty-eyed Eastern European woman took the stolen film from me and I emerged a minute later with an incriminating stub. For the next hour, I walked the streets under an overcast sky, trying to lose a dark car with tinted windows that seemed to be shadowing my every move. I returned to the photo mart, expecting to be tackled at the door by police, or at the very least, confronted by the woman who’d developed the film, but she gave me the photos indifferently and returned to her magazine. Resisting the urge to tear the envelope open then and there, I brought it back to the apartment and tucked it under my shirt on the elevator ride to the sixteenth floor. Boris barked when I came in and I angrily shushed him. Zoe stepped out of her room, looking relieved.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “You’ve been gone a long time.”

  “Sorry,” I said, trying to keep the envelope under my shirt from crinkling.

  She looked at my empty hands. “Where’s the milk?”