by Byron Rempel
When the phone rang on schedule, Zap assumed it was the kidnappers with the demand for ransom.
“Anna’s house,” he said through a mouthful of rice and white wine.
There was no sound. Zap was prepared to save Anna’s life by either paying the ransom or preferably tracking down the bastards.
“Anna’s husband here. What do you want?”
In the background the muffled bark of an impatient pug.
Zap held his breath. Still nothing. “I’m a retired policeman. Trained in sniffing trails.”
Somebody let out a quick breath on the other end. “Sure you are. This is Anna’s mother.”
“Ah yes. I’m here to fix her door.”
“Anna’s not married, though.”
“Not yet. But marriage is my ruse to throw the kidnappers off the trail.”
“Kidnappers! Is Anna there?”
“Is that you rang all afternoon?”
“Otto, stop that. She always calls Sunday afternoons. If she doesn’t come by. Sometimes we have tea, and sometimes she stays for supper. But she doesn’t do that so much anymore.”
Zap asked if they ate little sandwiches for tea, or leaned more toward sweets.
“Lately sweets. Does that mean something?”
“I see,” Zap said, and nodded sagely, as he thought an investigator might do.
Dotty held the phone away when rice cake crunched in her ear. Her daughter ate on the phone all the time too. Always at least three tasks at once.
“Does she have any enemies ma’am?”
“I don’t think she gets out enough for that.”
Zap insisted that everything hinged on the door. If it closed properly, she would avoid this unwanted attention. Professors, with their high salaries and public lifestyle, were juicy targets
for loonies.
“There was a French professor who took her to Paris.” Dotty hadn’t trusted that country since the Vichy government.
“Hm, hm,” Zap said.
“He may have wanted to steal her research. They do that.”
“Ha,” Zap said. “The Frenchman doesn’t present any danger as far as I know.”
“How far do you know?”
“Not so far as I’d like.”
“She doesn’t answer her cell phone. I get an automatic message that she’s not available.”
“I get that too.”
Dotty thanked him for his interest and it was a pleasure speaking to him and sorry to take him away from his door, but…
“Otto! Bad dog.”
…would he be a dear and tell Anna to call her mother when she came home?
Zap was now part of the family. He tilted his head to one side. Married. He tilted it to the other side. Met the mother-in-law. Immediately his head drained of blood and floated ten inches above his body. He brought it down to his knees. The air was hot in Anna’s house.
He should help out. Put away the rice cakes, although there was only one broken one left. Wipe the wine off Anna’s paper. Get the toolbox. By the time he popped the doorknob off the phone rang again.
Zap’s head shook.
Three seconds later someone thumped on the door.
“Nobody home,” Zap said. “Go away.” Through the doorknob hole nothing but a winter coat, dark blue, shell buttons. Did kidnappers dress like that? Did kidnappers make house calls for ransoms? Jehovah’s Witnesses. And pamphlets.
“Put them through the hole.”
“But this is the house of Professor Anna Hill?”
Quiet. Three fingers wriggled through the hole.
Zap whacked them with a wrench.
A string of Gallic curses followed, none of which blasphemed the church. The Frenchman.
The blue coat had backed away from the door. He cleared his throat. Zap saw his hands. They held no pamphlets, but the one that rubbed the injured fingers held an envelope. The Frenchman backed away till Zap could see his face. Couldn’t see his eyes behind the sunglasses. The man smoothed his hair and looked down at the steps.
“We thought it better,” he tried again, “at the history department.” Christophe bent down to look through the hole, but kept his distance. The door stayed pushed shut from inside. Tiny attempts at thaw dripped from the roof above.
Christophe let out a short laugh. “It has weighed on us. I have hardly eaten since then.” Inside his pocket was a depleted packet of French antacid tablets. “At least not anything of worth.”
Zap took his hand off the door. He watched it swing open an inch. Not properly balanced. More problems.
Christophe put the fingers of his good hand on the edge of the door to push it open. “We completed our ski trip before Anna resurfaced.”
The door slammed shut, but this time Christophe pulled his fingers out in time. A single drop of melted snow fell on his head. Christophe ran his hand through his hair again, left a grey tuft sticking in the air.
“I am a professional colleague.”
“Good for you. I’m Anna’s husband.”
Zap watched Christophe back away from the door, lean against the railing, cross his arms.
“I’m sure you are. Although since she is not currently married, you are the handyman, at best.”
Zap didn’t answer, but gripped his wrench tighter.
“So I will leave this here. I drew up a list of Anna’s ski errors, in the hope that she could benefit from her mistakes. In point form.” He began to push the curled envelope through the door knob hole. Zap, who deemed that it could well be a list of ransom demands, pushed it back.
For a while they competed over the envelope, until finally Christophe tore it out, turned around and started down the stairs to the street. On the sidewalk he stopped and fished for an antacid tablet. This city was filled with Barbarians.
“The thing with doors,” Zap said, “is that they think themselves perfect, but are in fact as sensitive as old queens in winter castles.” He wanted to add more, about the latch alignment, and loose hinges, and re-drilling holes with a three-eighths bit, but Christophe was on his way back up and Zap slammed the door shut again. He peered through the hole. “No more love notes,” Zap said.
The door flew open towards him after Christophe kicked it in, and would have made a bloody mess of his face had there been a doorknob. As it was Zap’s nose fit into the hole, and his wide forehead absorbed most of the blow. Still, the hit knocked him spread-eagled on his ass, unleashed a cartoon flock of benign birds that circled above him, and left him squinting into a Sunday afternoon sun partially eclipsed by a massive and well-coiffed planet of a head.
The planet yelled and pointed. Zap looked up at the flaring nostrils and teeth and finger pointed down at him and tried to make sense of the words. “What have you done to…where in your putain Montreal apartment…” The face grew red as Mars, the feet kicked at everything in their way, including Zap’s legs, his toolbox, the doorknob. “I have confronted doors with hardware hundreds of years older than this… I have battled men and women who hold more power than you can fathom… divine vengeance… Blaaam! ... insolence, what shame….” Or something like that—Zap had to translate quickly, and with the disadvantage of a slight concussion. In his other hand, he realized, he held a sanding block to ward off any more blows.
The phone rang again. Zap used the interruption to run up the stairs.
“Oh, I’m glad I got you,” Dotty said.
“Hey Mom,” Zap said.
Christophe came up the stairs. He took another tablet from his pocket.
“It’s Zaporzan. Jackson is my…”
Dotty was out of breath. Her daughter, she confessed, got into unusual situations ever since childhood, even though they—Anna’s father included, at least until the Great Blizzard of nineteen
ninety-three—had done all they could to remove external s
timuli.
“Oh yeah.”
Christophe had found the last rice cake. He crunched near the phone, his sunglasses still on.
But they had tried, Dotty said, to direct her towards the safety of being a teacher, which meant she had to read a lot of books. But that apparently safe outlet led to more unusual situations, and… What she wanted to say was, thank you. At least somebody took care to shim up her daughter’s frail home.
Anna’s apartment swirled when Zap closed his eyes. When he held his forehead his fingers came away with blood.
Dotty let out a long breath. Anna had called, and she was waiting at the emergency room at the hospital but she wasn’t kidnapped or on her deathbed or anything of the sort.
“She’s all right,” Zap said, and touched Christophe’s shoulder. The Frenchman jolted backwards and was gone.
“Although there might,” Dotty said, “be some toenail issues.”
8. Stranded With A Stranger
Her proud protestations were birdsong. The cowboy wrestled her girdled waist. His paws peeled her off the mud road and slung her behind the saddle. Their fate was inevitable: she cursed and snubbed all help, and he was the last law in the runaway mine town. Anyone could see transformation coming like the cavalry. The train would make its run, and the abused miners get their payday, and the bandits their tombstones. Yup, that’s how life would be from now on little lady, you got black and you got white, and you better learn ’em now. That’s how life was each time this old Western played on Anna’s TV.
Anna’s feet floated on a pillow on the coffee table beside a cloud of lemon ginger herbal tea, and she feared for her life as she’d known it. She kept lists. Schedules were posted on her walls, her weekly planner was lifeblood, but she’d never thought of herself as a slave to routine. She’d once been called a free spirit (by a scientific boy who ran from her interest in anatomy experiments). But now the inability to get up and go to the bookshelf without a thousand needles piercing her toes was enough to revolutionize her life.
Not only did her handicap rob her of necessary habits, it also forced her to face all the inadequacies sprinkled through her papers. And the more her toes blackened, the closer the monstrous deadline for the Journal of Medieval Torture and Academic Suicide staggered. That date—that beast—attacked her paper, ripped open her reason and exposed her conjecture. On her couch she wielded a yellow pen to highlight each mistake and failure.
As a student, if she couldn’t craft a proper paper she only feared a flunk and a second run at the class. Now there were few chances of do-overs. She could miss her one shot at a professorship and then look at twenty wasted years behind her. When one started to meander down that path of self-doubt it wasn’t deadlines but all manner of little demons that popped out of the hedges. A nasty one nagged about the loss of her house if she couldn’t meet the mortgage. An identical hideous twin whispered about the inevitable little death when she would have to move back to her mother’s house. But she could not ignore the mammoth in the room: the next twenty years alone and with enough time to stare at the result of her inability to love. Might as well begin now. Anna began to relive each thing she said and did with Christophe in the woods, and mark them in her mind with yellow, until the grey day was filled with dyed streaks of fluorescent sunshine.
Anna limped to the window to see if there was any real sunshine. There wasn’t. But it was something to do. She pulled her bathrobe high around her neck when she saw the snow. A few stray students navigated the sidewalks. She began a game: if she saw a woman alone she would get to work on her paper. A man alone, and she imagined him on his way to see her for a secret rendezvous. A couple… there were no couples. Anna relaxed her hold on the bathrobe around her neck. All lovers were inside the houses down the block, warming each other against the winter’s breath. Her toes burned.
Anna pressed a button and the new sheriff and his western world went mute. She pried open the maw of her laptop.
Yet neither completely exhaustive nor authoritative is the Tawq-al-hamamah, the “Ring of the Dove,” the tenth-century Arab treatise on transcendence that masquerades, perhaps even to its educated composer, as a manual on love. The seemingly incongruent pleasures of the flesh here are first secret, then adulterous, and ultimately inspirational.
Behind the computer screen a cowboy stumbled through an Arizona landscape of dust and sand. A close-up of leather chaps, his hand brushed them clean. His chin unshaven, his mouth breathing in the hot air. That’s what Coleridge Park needed, a square-jawed sheriff to round up students, keep the streets free of snide French professors, grab Anna by the waist and put her on the right track. She felt her neck and shivered, though her skin was warm under the robe.
The heroes of the desert romances are normatively the poets themselves, which may explain, without the exclusion of other motivations, the tendency towards abstraction and away from earthly motivations.
Earlier, after her bath, she’d turned up the heat in the living room. Now the sun prepared to slip behind Mount Royal for its late afternoon siesta, a last glimmer atop the trees. A pair of dark eyes on the TV, with a bead of sweat between them. Unflinching eyebrows. The cowboy writhed through the dust on his belly.
In the sources, the romance poets of the Occitane who followed inevitably used the construction of love as solace; yet a reading of both interpretations reveals that in both cultures the poets “omitted the final solace” not out of a sense of shame or awkward prudishness for the sexual act, but instead out of an inflated respect for a pure communion, a spiritual lust.
She couldn’t do it. The sun glared at her and she couldn’t see the screen for a second, nor the TV. The only thing she needed was that grant to research in Spain, and with it, tenure. Her hand shielded her eyes, and she let it glide over her eyelashes, her nose, her lips. Tenure, and someone to come home with. She sank deeper and pulled a cloud blanket off the back of the sofa, fluffed it over her feet. Anna placed the laptop on her legs. That, and a transporting love. She paused the cowboy as he lifted his head, and opened a blank file.
A patch of sky could be glimpsed intermittently through the moving clouds…and from it a shaft of golden Spanish sun filtered down through the dust, seemingly guiding a lone figure on horseback along the narrow spine of a hilltop. A piercing shriek, followed by what may have been a laugh, entered the shaft of light, seeming to break it apart. Something dark circled above the ridge, something feathered and beaked. The falcon could see over the next hill, still four times as high as the tallest spire in the complex. The falcon, who could spot the twitch of a mouse from that height, saw no movement in the courtyard. At mid-afternoon in the Kingdom of León, it was hardly unusual.
The man on horseback, his tattered robes and scarves still now in the breezeless expanse, stopped and raised a hand above his eyes against the harsh Spanish sun. He followed the movements of the bird—knew its motions so well as to converse with the beast yet a mile away. And the bird said: all is quiet, all you seek are sleeping, or dead.
Chilled, the falconer continued on, his saluki sniffing out the more earthly concerns. Then the dog stopped, and the man heard what the dog heard too. A collective moan from the dry sands; the whole nunnery full, chanting our morning matins, accented by the desperate cries of a pack of wolves.
I, Angeles the nun, knew before anyone else of the imminent arrival of the Morisco Falconer.
Anna looked up. Darkness had crept into the room. The cowboy was frozen in place on the TV. The paragraphs took an hour at least. She’d hit a literary black hole. Couldn’t remember anything. Had been there in the desert with the Falconer, had put her in first person. She peeled back her blanket and touched the sheen of perspiration on her stomach. She traced it around her belly button, underneath her pyjamas. Her hand fell between her legs. She was wet. Anna looked around, in case any cowboys or falconers watched. They didn’t. She slid her fingers inside. Her lips parted, br
eathed in the hot air.
Images flashed through her mind too fast. Her breaths came faster and turned into whispers, and the whispers into incantations. At the murky edges of pleasure another voice joined her, then a chorus of gunshots. She bolted upright, pulled the blanket to her chin. She’d hit the television remote. The gunslinger had come to life, evaded attack, and given way to a commercial. A family sang the praises of soap.
She stared at the images, her mouth agape. Let out a breath. Her legs were weak, both from the surprise and from stretching them hard to the floor. Her toes burned more than ever. She fell back again, swallowed. The computer screen cast a blue light on the coffee table.
Anna smiled. One day of enforced vacation and she turned into a hedonist. Her work morphed into fantasy and her fantasies to sex. She didn’t move from beneath the comforter. Maybe unhealthy. Back at the University, did everyone know she was incapacitated on this couch, that she avoided work, got too excited about old movies, wrote romances? She’d be excommunicated by the Inquisitors. And what kind of role model was she for Audrey? A young, easily influenced… Anna flipped off the blanket and stood up. She had to text Audrey now. She hadn’t arranged for her class tomorrow. Either cancel or give an assignment or Audrey would take it. On her way to find her phone Anna bumped her toes and crumpled into a simpering mess.
Audrey calmed her with a reply, told her to rest, everything was taken care of. She and Dmitri had arranged a guest speaker. Wonderful, Anna replied. So easily replaced. Nice to feel indispensable. But it did calm her, because after only two days she was so far from the University that when she looked out her window she expected to see another city on the horizon, or two moons rising, or a vast and barren expanse of desert stretching from Coleridge Park to the black sky.
A Morisco Falconer. Now she was sure, the Romance hero would be Morisco not Moor, a blend of the two cultures, so much more intrigue to it, and representative of the rivalry and bitter… No. The appearance of Moriscos, Muslims who publicly converted to Catholicism for safety reasons, would put the story somewhere in the early 1500s, specifically Charles the I’s decree in 1512. But that would be a little late; perhaps an earlier unrepentant Moor in around 1000 when Alfonso pushed the kingdom of Léon past Salamanca, or even earlier when Ramiro “the Devil” made a no-man’s land of the Rio Duero that separated Christian and Muslim…. Anna stopped herself. What had the woman on the plane said? Keep your history on a leash. And clean up after it.