Gifts for the One Who Comes After

by Gifts for the One Who Comes After (v5. 0) (epub)

  Anna B. and I drink cocoa together on break. She fishes around for the marshmallows and plops them on her tongue, wet and soggy, one by one by one. Anna B. has pretty fingers. The nails are clean. She has painted them a bright cherry red. This is not technically allowed but the Santas like red and Anna B. has a fantastic ass so no one says anything.

  Sometimes I try to count up the numbers in my head. There are approximately 47,835 shopping malls or strip malls in America. There are street corners too, on the weekends or after business hours when the commuters are heading home. There are company parties, skating rinks, parades and the like. The numbers add up. It’s a thriving industry.

  Today Sean M. dumped his thousandth Cindie. The Company sent him a card. He got a bonus. He’s much faster than me but his accuracy sucks. There are complaints. Sean M. shrugs them off.

  Anna B. is leaving today. She gave notice two weeks ago. She tells me she will never drink cocoa again. She says chocolate of any sort gives her hives now.

  “What will you do?” I ask her.

  “Who knows?” she says. Her fingernails are still cherry red. I think they are sexy. Anna B. let me kiss her underneath the mistletoe at the Christmas in July party. I never bring it up. We were both embarrassed.

  “Come with me,” she says suddenly.

  “Where would we go?”

  “To the North Pole.”

  I laugh. I can tell she’s not serious. Or maybe she is serious. She taps a red fingernail against her teeth. The idea scares me. But it also excites me.

  “Tell me more,” I say. She stares at me.

  “No,” she says. “It’s a stupid idea. Forget it. You know we’ll never be able to get rid of the smell.”

  “You mean peppermint?”

  “No,” she says. “Not the peppermint, dummy. They’d be able to tell at the North Pole. The Santas would rip us apart. The wild ones, you know? But I miss the winter. It’d be nice to see what it looks like up there.”

  “Right,” I tell her. But the truth is I don’t much like the winter. It makes my lips chap. I’m happier here.

  I have learned something. You can tell the lifers, not because of the look in their eyes. Not because of the way they handle the Santas. But because they have stopped counting. I don’t count anymore. My days have a shape. A rhythm. But they aren’t measured in numbers. Sean M. has given me bonuses, so surely he at least is counting. Mister M. we call him now. He’s been promoted. He’s running the whole damn joint. I suppose it was predictable.

  Then comes the day when he tells us we have been replaced. Still I’m not listening to him properly. It might have been by cheap immigrant workers. Or maybe they’re offloading processing centres to China. Maybe it’s robots.

  Mister M. looks each of us in the eye. He’s put on weight. His belly bulges over a too-tight belt. His chin wobbles beneath his jaw. He told me once he thought about growing a beard but decided against it. That was a mistake. When he takes my hand, his palm feels doughy. It has the weight of a softball. He looks so much like a Cindy it makes me want to laugh but I’m afraid if I do I will split him open because he is that full of shit. . . .

  When I walk home at the end of my shift I smell like peppermint. I have come to like the smell. It is soothing. Snow in the air—light marshmallowy snow that reminds me of Anna B. I hope she’s found the North Pole. I hope they took her in, there. I hope she still fits into green leotards. I miss her fantastic ass.

  On the street I see one of the Santas—a big one, fully mature, broad as a linebacker. He’s collecting money for the Salvation Army. I see a woman drop in a coin. Some children tugging at the fur trim of his cherry red suit. He smiles at them. His beard is white as the snow. A perfect specimen.

  I look him in the eye as I pass. I wonder if he recognizes me.

  “Ho. Ho. Ho.” He says the words slowly. He is sizing me up. My skin starts to crawl.

  I walk past him. The stare lingers but I force myself to keep going. I try not to see if he is watching me. My boot lands in grey meltwater and the distance increases between us.

  One foot.

  Two feet.

  Three feet.

  “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 . . . ”

  THE ZHANELL ADLER BRASS SPYGLASS

  The Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass was a masterwork of beauty: the slim brass mailing tube, the swivelling brass mountings and the gleaming mahogany tripod. When Richard Damaske saw it in the catalogue it evoked images of medieval astrolabes and Antikythera mechanisms, seventeenth-century telescopes and Copernican sextants, the abandoned debris of an era of exploration when the world seemed as perfect and new as an egg.

  “All right,” Richard said when Danny had finished tearing through the blue-and-silver wrapping paper. “Tonight, Dan-o, tonight we’ll get this baby set up and I’ll show you something . . . something that’ll just knock your socks off.”

  “No one says that anymore, Dad.”

  “Sure, they do, buddy. You still have socks, don’t you? Yes? Good. Then be prepared to have them knocked off.”

  Danny grinned. He was pleased immeasurably by the gift, but pleased also by the way his dad smiled at him. It had been months since his dad had smiled like that.

  And so he was almost buoyant with happiness when he nodded off to sleep that night, the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass gleaming in the moonlight like the abandoned relic of some Martian exploration team, and that happiness stayed with him the next morning as he slung his backpack over his shoulders and marched off to North Preparatory Junior Public School. But when Danny came home that evening and he found his dad slumped at their makeshift kitchen table with the morning’s newspaper beside him that feeling wavered.

  “Not tonight, okay, Danny?” his dad said, barely looking up. “Can’t you see that I’m . . . it’s just. That thing cost a lot of money. God, over five hundred dollars, what was I . . . And now I have to—” he broke off. “Can you just go play in your room? I’ll get you for supper in a little while.”

  “Sure, Dad,” said Danny. “We can do it later. We can do it tomorrow.”

  But the next day when Danny came home from school he found his dad in the kitchen, shirt soaked into an atlas of water stains. A pipe had burst on the floor above them. The water was beginning to seep through, first in little trickles and then in gushing streams. There was no thought for the Zhanell Adler Brass Spyglass then. Danny spent the evening emptying copper pots and bowls as the ceiling turned the colour of a winter storm blowing in.

  “Isn’t this fun, Dad?” Danny asked as he heaved about with a massive soup pot. “We’ve got to bail faster or else we’re going to go under!”

  “Damnit, Danny! Just be careful where you put that,” his dad replied, and as an afterthought: “Wash your hands! The last thing I need is you getting typhus and your mother breathing down my neck about it; who knows what’s in these pipes?”

  In the wake of the nautical disaster and the subsequent evenings spent unpacking soggy boxes and blow-drying old clothes, Danny forgot all about the spyglass, but on Friday evening when he trudged through the door, he was surprised to find his dad in his bedroom, the miraculously pristine box folded down and the thing itself pointed out his window, nestled between his fraying, navy curtains.

  “Sorry, Dan-o,” his dad said, “I know things have been. Different. It’s not easy for you. Nor me—ha, but you know that, yeah? But tonight I’m going to knock your socks off just like I promised. Okay, buddy? Even if they don’t say that anymore. Tonight is all about you.”

  “Okay, Dad.”

  “C’mere.” And Danny did, and his dad hugged him in one, tight burst of affection before settling him in front of the eyepiece. “Would you look at this? Just look. She’s a beauty, isn’t she?”

  “Sure, Dad,” Danny sai
d. “A real beauty.”

  “You don’t get this quality for nothing, not for cheap, no. Not the double-refracting lenses. Not magnifying up to sixty times the naked eye . . . and, erm, helical focusing rings.”

  “What’s helical focusing rings?”

  “Well, helical . . . like, uh,” his dad squinted. “Like a helicopter, you know, but with rings.”

  Danny smiled. He imagined great spinning blades, he imagined infrared sensors and, and extradimensional something or others. “It’s great, Dad, really great. Thanks. The best present ever.”

  At that his dad flushed a deep shade of red that made the faint traces of his beard stand out, and he smiled such a proud, excited smile that Danny couldn’t help but grin too.

  “Let me show you.” His dad adjusted the knobs. “There. Just stand and look into the eyepiece. It should be set up for—”

  “Wow!” exclaimed Danny. There it was, the sky awash in a swirl of colours. “What is it?”

  “The Orion nebula.” Danny’s dad frowned. “Is it okay? It says the light pollution makes it hard, you know, but maybe, well, maybe we’ll be able to take it out to the field by Papa’s place. You’ll get some real good images there, I’m guessing.”

  “A nebula,” Danny breathed. “Wow. Is that what it really looks like? Am I really seeing into space?”

  His dad chuckled. “Of course, buddy. Well, mostly. That’s not what it’s like now. It says that everything you’re seeing, it’s already happened. Something to do with the way light travels. What you’re seeing is how it was.”

  “Oh,” Danny said.

  His dad stumbled, seeming to sense his son’s disappointment.

  “Don’t worry, if we get a really good night, I bet you can see something over a million years old.”

  “A million years old? Really?”

  “I promised I’d show you some really good stuff, didn’t I? And here—” His dad picked up something off the bed. “A journal. To record what you see. It’s already got your name inside it.”

  Danny fingered the velvet of the embossed stars and rocket ships before flipping it open. “To Danny Damaske. From Richard Damaske. Lots of love for your twelfth birthday, buddy. Dad.”

  “Well, you deserve some really good stuff, don’t you? A little magic?”

  “It is magic.” Danny wrapped his arms around his dad. “Thanks. Just wait ’til Evan sees this! It’s gonna knock his socks off!”

  “I guess it’s sort of cool,” Evan said. He was reclining on Danny’s bed, his arms haphazard, one covering the fringe of bangs his mom couldn’t cut quite often enough. “I mean, my dad would never get me something like that.”

  Evan was in the same grade as him, but his birthday was in February so he had already had a good long time to get used to being twelve. For Danny, twelve was still new. Twelve was still exciting. But for Evan, halfway to thirteen, twelve was already kid stuff.

  “It has helical focusing rings,” Danny said. “It can magnify up to sixty times the naked eye.”

  “Huh,” Evan allowed.

  “It’s . . . ”

  “It’s a bit queer if you ask me. I mean, what do you want with something like that? What does your dad think you are, a queer?”

  “What do you mean?” Queer was what they called Pete Cartwright, the new kid from Manchester who had been jumped up a grade.

  “I mean, that’s why my dad wouldn’t get me one. He’d be worried it would make me queer.” Evan rolled onto his stomach. The afternoon sun knifed across his face and revealed a landscape of acne craters and freckles.

  “You don’t want to try it?”

  “What for? It’s daytime. It’s not like there’s any planets or anything, except, I mean, for the sun, and that’d just, I dunno, burn your eyeball up like a toasted marshmallow if you looked at it through that thing.”

  “What about something else? What about . . . ” Danny searched for something definitively not queer. “What about if we look into Sarah Englemont’s room?”

  The moment the words were out if his mouth it was like someone was turning a radio dial in his head, and what had been a muzzy static of pre-adolescent longing suddenly jumped into sharp relief.

  Sarah Englemont.

  This was new territory for Danny. He knew some of the other boys from class liked to look at the magazines they sneaked out of Mac’s Milk. They all had hiding places—under the bed wasn’t good enough, that was a well-known fact. Nor was under the mattress or in the sock drawer. Jammed behind the headboard, taped underneath the dresser, that was better. Sam Stenson, whose parents were both fanatical clean freaks and vacuumed the whole house top to bottom twice a day, had hollowed out an old encyclopedia with a penknife. With all the cleaning, his parents never got around to reading much.

  Over the last few months, Danny had watched Evan gain admittance into the secret cadre of boys who had been twelve for some time, sharing their winks and nudges, trading greasy, glossy centrefolds at recess. Sometimes Evan, with a glassy-eyed look, would try to tell Danny about big titties and nipples as round and hard as gumballs. Would tell him about the time he found an inflatable plastic doll with “Bride To Be” magic-markered onto its chest discarded behind Spadina Station, and how there had been a hole down there, and he was absolutely sure it had been filled with cock slime.

  Danny didn’t quite get the point of these stories, but sometimes when Evan was done Danny would think about how Mrs. Pembridge’s breasts hung like half-filled balloons, and how sometimes when she quizzed them on vocabulary and spelling he might see the beads of sharp, little nipples poking out against her blouse. Then he would feel the same sweaty, glassy look steal over him, and he’d have to keep his workbook over his lap.

  The thought came to him again.

  Sarah Englemont.

  Sarah Englemont was different. Even at twelve, Danny could tell there was a difference. With Mrs. Pembridge you didn’t want to feel that way, you didn’t want to think about breasts and beady nipples. But Sarah was twenty-three. She used to babysit Danny to help pay for university when his family had lived across the road in the apartment beneath hers. Back in the days when his parents used to do things like “date nights.” Back when they could share the same space without wanting to kill one another.

  Sarah Englemont was like . . . she was like the way you felt on a hot August day when the smog and humidity sunk into your skull and made you drowsy. She was like when you ate so much Halloween candy you knew you’d get sick but for just a moment the world was all shimmery. Sarah Englemont was like that. Except she wasn’t only that. She was . . . she was. . . .

  “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 way 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 E
nglemont 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.

  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.