by Byron Rempel
“Anna!”
Her door is half open. A grizzly bear on his hind legs, pawing at the door frame. Great heaves of breath. The muzzle comes round. “Anna,” Dmitri exhales. He’s run all the way from the head office at the end of the hall, but when he looks up to see Anna limp in Christophe’s arms his hunt is forgotten. Does everyone in this chamber hear the echo of his heart? He must find his breath. Dmitri leans against the wall, stares at the floor, makes post hibernation grunts. Christophe stands in front of him.
“Will you die?”
“Not yet.” Dmitri looks up at Anna. Finally one side of her mouth smirks. She coughs. The Frenchman’s hands.
“In your turret.” Dmitri exhales operatically.
“We can do this later,” Christophe says.
Anna tries to read Dmitri’s eyes. Does he only see more paperwork, Form A-09, or does he worry that what he’s seen is not harassment, and that paperwork is the least of his worries?
“What’s wrong with my turret?”
“Through window. But. You have no problem, they work on it now.”
“Who they?”
“The man who claims to be your husband.”
Anna rubs her neck.
“A charmed man,” Dmitri says. “Good jokes. Protects your house from trees.”
13. First Response
The kiss was an accident.
They’d rushed to the parking garage. Christophe would drive her through the growing snowstorm to her turret. She’d forgotten her purse in the hurry, and so her house keys. Turned back to get them, came to the garage with her hair sprung free and frizzed in the wet snow. And now underground among the melted snow and coughing cars Christophe’s crisp navy shirt still smelled of early September. The cement pillars and floors had an odor of mocha. Top notes of ginger.
He leaned to put her bag in the back seat. Anna fell towards him, wanted her purse near. He turned back and their lips brushed. Maybe it was their cheeks. Panic ecstatic, Anna yanked a book out of her bag and flapped its pages in front of Christophe’s face. “What was that?”
“What?” He punched buttons on the dash.
She couldn’t name it. Anna held the book in front of her.
“You will know when I kiss you.” An opera aria floated from the speakers.
“My house.”
“I am not a student. Should I kiss you?”
Her hands twitched. A moment later she hit him on the
forehead with the book. Only a paperback. She held it tight. The reviews on the back cover grew blurry in her eyes. Underneath it, Christophe’s breath blew hot and long. Far away a car’s tires protested in a tight turn. His breath was mature wine. When did he find time to drink at school? She lowered the book. His eyes on her. Too focused. She lifted the book again but he threw it and grabbed her hair and pushed her mouth onto his.
The paperback romance lodged under the seat, forgotten for weeks, a talisman.
The diva hit the high notes and everything spun. The garage. The car tires. Christophe reversed and squealed. A horn sounded and they went forward too fast and when he finally let her go they squealed again and she ducked uselessly. Anna groped her seatbelt as they skidded to the pay booth. Out the door and aloft over
the sidewalk and into a foot of powder. Landed and spun, bounced off the curb and swung a dancer through the street, a tail of
honks and screams behind them. And inside the car: “What
the fuck!”
She demanded he slow down, it was a house, a turret, nobody dying—not at the house anyway. And where was he going? The house was just a few blocks that way.
“I will take you to the airport, and then to Spain.”
“The airport isn’t this way.”
“We will go where the snow blows us.” On the Autoroute 10 on the edge of the seaway, too fast but finally straight, she loosened her grip on the door handle and her mind. She remembered suggesting they stop, when suddenly the sky darkened and a hail of longbow arrows began bouncing off the car, which headed straight towards the water’s edge. In a vague distance she heard screaming: “Take cover! The Christians have found us!”
But they were safe in the car against those medieval arms. Whoever had ordered the assault did not know the Moor and his nun. Religions could not interfere. What grew between them was a declaration of decency between a man and woman. They were under attack from those who could not understand the eternal possibilities of romance.
In that car, headed towards that guard rail, the world would change. The shift would happen in increments. Nobody would notice at first. A kiss. A poem would spread through traffic. A promise everlasting. On the commute home, lives would change. Wives would come home to husbands not with bread and milk but with heaven in their hearts. Children would capture fireflies and teach them to sing. Fathers would return from unholy wars and never leave. And it would all have begun here, in the seconds before the car burst through the confines of the road and dove to the murky unconscious of the seaway.
And they would witness the transformation, the infidels. They would lay down their pikes and swords and crossbows, make of them a pyre and watch them burn till the smoke curled around the penthouses and watchtowers. Up from the seaway, over the Pont Champlain, down the 15 past the suburbs and farms and over the New York border, a tsunami of caridad would wash away the emptiness and fill the world anew.
“Stop.”
He slammed the brakes. The world sped up again and spun in snow whirlwinds. Cars out the window spilled in all directions until with a gentle nudge she and Christophe bumped up against a
barrier. Fading horns in the distance. An opera chorus.
“What do you want?”
Anna couldn’t speak yet. She tried even breaths, slowed her heart. She remembered her turret lay in ruins.
“What does everybody want?” Louder this time, through a Bellini flourish. Backed by a steady rhythm of cars. One hand loose on the wheel. The other tapped buttons as the opera got louder. His eyes stared ahead, then closed as the diva plucked the remaining notes from her sheets. His free hand bobbed to conduct. Anna turned to him. Those were tears.
Paris. That was what she wanted. Not Spanish mountains, or grants, or tenure. She missed their Paris and didn’t know anyone in Paris and she didn’t have any money to move to Paris, but it was all. She needed to tell him. That Spain and history and gender had all been an accident, that she’d never found the logic to settle on the Seine. That a life of adventure and love—or peace and contentment, she wasn’t sure—but to be kissed, and to risk her life as she knew it…
“I want to go home,” she said.
They didn’t go home. They didn’t go to Spain. He kissed her.
[
Chainsaw rumbles at his feet, a whiff of gasoline in the air, on the floor an accident of blood-red oil: she will find him like this. While he wraps his arms around the trunk of a three-ton intruder, a lovesick lumberjack. Seventy-five-inch circumference, easy.
Soon, he figures, she’ll walk in and catch her ginger soufflé hair in the branches. Jackson Zaporzan cleans his fingernails with twigs and rubs sap over blistered hands. A hero in blue coveralls. Things in hand. Another heritage building rescued.
Snow still snakes through the roof. Frost crackles down branches, nestles on twigs that sprout loose-leaf papers from Anna’s desk. On the floor a paper mosaic shifts. Zap’s finger dusts frames on the wall, watches the women in photos shimmy. All those maidens and no texture of man in the room. He shuts down the chainsaw and slides through Anna’s new forest, fingers locked behind his back. The shattered frames he brushes into a pile. Showers them into a box. They are aunts with secrets, grandmothers never met. Loves realized and love with mold on the edges. He plucks tiny shards from the ends of his fingers when finished with the broken frames and with a sleeve, wipes the wall of his blood path.
&n
bsp; Slow. Sharp. Separation. He’d heard it from his shop behind the house. The unnatural break-and-enter through the turret window. In jeans and undershirt he’d ignored the cold, and with one step into the courtyard identified the beast. Icicles flaked off its branches and teased the hair on his arms. He would not shiver. Slate tiles lay in the snow beside shattered wood. Zap couldn’t see the base of the tree from there, but it didn’t matter. He didn’t consider how it fell. He considered how to fix it. The tree had missed his roof, but a snapped branch lay in front of his shed. At first he thought it was an abandoned antler. Felt the contours with his bare hands, flexed it to test the humidity, scanned it for disease. He stowed it inside the workshop among the warm odor of cold storage. Zap gassed up the chainsaw, collected a space heater and extension cord, and pulled on his coveralls. Left a message with the history department. She would be there in minutes. He didn’t know what he could accomplish by then, but the important thing was a first response. Medical. Ecological. Emotional.
Forty-five minutes on she still hasn’t showed. He wouldn’t leave his house wounded and alone for so long. If he cleans up too well she’ll never know how he’s saved it. But over the days, the weeks (these tree invasions took time), she would see his innate craftsmanship. And he would see her. They would see each other. They would see through each other. She would let him see inside her, and he would let her see inside him, and when he held her… when they took off their clothes…. Something knocks on the house. But it isn’t her door. The tree settling on the roof. Or his helper in the next room.
“What you doing? Get in here.” An orange cat pads into the turret. Rochester, né Buster. Cat follows him everywhere anyway, no matter what name he uses. They argue, but the cat never loses. Zap bends to start the chainsaw again and Rochester flees. Better if they’re too busy to notice Anna arrive. More natural like.
Because she is natural, he knows that, and it all comes out in her bushfire hair. Zap pulls branches away, leaves them in a corner. That is attractive, that simplicity underneath the professorial coating. If he’d studied psychology, maybe he could tell himself why. But he hasn’t studied psychology, hasn’t studied much of anything in school. So he doesn’t tell himself a thing, only cuts branches, and when a pile gets too unwieldy he binds it together with thinner branches. The cat crawls into one, so Zap fashions an exit near the top. One of the few things he does remember about school is his English Lit teacher in junior high, when he was alone with her in the classroom and stood in the sunlight beside her wood desk and breathed in the musky perfume that rose from the desktop or the pencil shavings or the perfume between her breasts, because he hadn’t read an assigned book and never read any books, and she was curt with him, and for a reason he couldn’t remember his young boyself began to cry. That comes back to him now, while he kicks fallen twigs together and cuts back this beast. What department is that memory from—History, Psychology, Education?
Still no sound at the door. Branch piles fill the turret so he piles them in corners of other rooms, around windows, down stair railings. He threads through with ladders and ropes and a plastic tarp that sends Rochester scrambling to a corner. The cat is skeptical. Unblinking eyes look at the hole in the ceiling, then at Zap. Fur fluffs with a shake. You can see your breath in this room. Pick out distant sirens in the city, hear the old wind wheeze.
Maybe he looks like a monster, from a cat’s-eye view. Up on a ladder, draped in plastic, a ten-foot blue cryptid with flapping wings. Grunts and groans and mutters as he struggles to close the hole. But Rochester smells Zap, that old wood and leather smell, with a stain of dark chocolate and a memory of grilled steak, and so he stays. Tiny drifts form in the edges of the turret before Zap fills the hole and sheds his monster.
Zap stands back with cold hands in pockets and nods. Rochester disagrees. The patch is garish and noisy and the winter wants in.
“It’s temporary,” Zap explains.
You the king of temporary, Rochester says.
“It’s necessary. Where is she?”
Rochester cleans snow dust off his paw. He believes Zap has not done a solid job on purpose.
“You can’t burst into someone’s house and make permanent changes.”
Because then they won’t need you back.
“This from a professional at making people need them.”
Nobody forced you to feed me. Rochester tucks his legs under his body.
“Speaking of sustenance, I wonder if our Anna has a little something in the fridge.”
Coffee-flavoured yogurt and yellowing arugula and grape jam. Zap spreads some of the jam on rice cakes and breaks off bits for Rochester, who is unconvinced and holds out for thin-sliced raw fondue beef. You know the kind, Rochester says, that falls apart in your mouth? None of that there?
“Or carpaccio,” Zap says, lifting the cat onto the counter. “Or any flesh at all. How does she make it through the winter?”
Without conviction Zap searches for a beer, even a warm one. Two hours have passed since he left a message at the university. He makes do with an open bottle of white wine, foregoes a glass to avoid doing dishes. He doesn’t want to be presumptuous.
Back upstairs the tarp still flaps, but with the door closed, that world is contained. The bulk of the tree trunk still rests against the outside of the house. Tomorrow. Proper equipment. And the owner present. A few papers still flutter in the branch piles. Zap begins to pluck them from the enchanted forest. He only glances at the words before stuffing them into Rochester’s former hiding hole. A fine nest.
A book hides under the remains of Anna’s jumbled desk. Something about Construction on the cover. He bends down to retrieve it. Rochester joins the investigation. Stuck in as a bookmark, a ripped piece of lined paper. Zap pulls it out. A name (Auntie Pearl), a phone number (Montreal). Sticks it in his pocket.
That was a marker, Rochester says. Is there for a purpose.
“Knowing where you are is overrated.”
They argue about this regularly. Discord began with Rochester’s insistence on leaving his mark. Zap is more in favour of the brain’s ability to abstract territory. Rochester counters that this is all well and good if you have a prefrontal cortex. Zap wonders why if cats have such an acute sense of smell they have to leave such exaggerated markers.
What’s the book, Rochester says. Don’t debate something you’re ignorant of.
Zap scanned the back of the book. “Sounds like fun. ‘When otherwise pure Christian crusaders grilled and devoured dead Muslims’…what the… ‘the true birth of Arthurian romance lies in cannibalism. After reading this brilliant book, you will never read Medieval banquet scenes the same again.’
Zap looked at the title. Empire of Flesh. He threw the book as if it had bitten him, and Rochester had to scurry again.
“Sounds like your kind of romance,” Zap said. “In the alley, middle of the night.”
I’m sorry we didn’t find that carpaccio now.
Zap tugs at a loose end of the plastic tarp, and Rochester finds a branch hideaway. Anyway, the cat suggests, we all follow instincts. Though some instincts are more productive than others.
“Sounds like someone might need to be fixed.”
Rochester is ready to rebut that it ain’t broke, but he has lost Zap’s attention. After the disappointment of the cannibal romance book, Zap is focused on a new find. He looks over his shoulder. Door open. Silent downstairs, still. Her loss if she doesn’t come home right away when her house is under attack. He’ll clean up a few things. Like this, hanging on the wall beside the broken shelf. Something mannish, finally. A leather bag curls at the corner flaps, clasps of brass, much too heavy to hang off a nail that size. He lifts it. The nail comes along, and a puff of panel board dust too. Zap traces his steps back to Anna’s solid wood chair and peels back the flap.
More paper. These people. He lifts out the first leaf, printed with
a title. In the dark of winter’s early sunset it’s difficult to read. He holds it under the desktop lamp that struggles on the same extension cord as the space heater. The Moor of the Falcon. The title is crossed out and underneath is handwritten The FalconMoor. Beneath that, printed in a luxurious font: by Anna Eden Hill.
“Eden,” he says out loud. A spell descends on the turret, snow turns to bougainvillea petals, walls give way to palms and vines and Mount Royal outside evolves into a South Pacific waterfall wrapped in bands of mist and sun. Zap pulls out the rest of the pages. Birds pass by the window, begin as pigeons and end as parrots. Each page is pulled and flipped; fingers are licked, DNA left.
It takes forty-five minutes and the rest of the bottle of white wine, whose bouquet is greatly helped by the persistent smell of cut tree. The snow in the corners of the turret turns to rivulets and he has no thought of being caught or surprising Anna. Rochester is asleep in a branch tower. But Zap figures it out. Out of all he reads and skims and rereads, he returns always to the same clear meadow:
his hand over my mouth smells of leather and pine. His leg is between me, pressing down. I don’t resist.
This trap of pages from the pulp of Anna’s heart: it is him.
14. Anna Eden Elsewhere
Christophe holds her shirt in his hands. He hovers over the sink. His kitchen. Anna Eden elsewhere, in media res.
Perhaps she could have spent more on lingerie. On his sofa she’d resisted him with feral instinct, and made him baptize his mohair blanket and her in serious Pomerol, a full glass on her white silk.
He brings the shirt to his face. Forest fruits, vanilla, racy.
She says she can’t smell it fully. But she stands there in brassiere, shivering as the ice clicks outside on the window. Bordeaux. He had pulled her rusty red ringlets and he knew she liked it. Christophe held the silk in one hand, saddened by waste, captivated by aromas of minerals and clays, the welcoming nose of a nervous woman with mocha undertones and a mouthful of plump fruits on the palate. Ready to drink now, may be cellared for later.