The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

He groped his way up onto a roof mountainous with ridges and slopes, and found Connie lying in a valley and staring at the sky. He stretched out next to her, their shoulders touching, the asphalt shingles hot beneath their backs and the rest of the world far away.

  She said, “The Big Bang happened but didn’t happen anywhere, space was born with the Big Bang. Something can happen nowhere.”

  Cyril tried grasping that.

  “We have to free ourselves from the restraints of three dimensional space.”

  Cyril stared into the boundless blue and felt his brain straining to comprehend the concept. The restraints of three dimensional space  . . . He wondered if God set off the Big Bang the way he and Gilbert set off firecrackers at Halloween, for the hell of it, for the noise and the light and the plain old fun of seeing what would happen. Maybe God was a bored old guy looking for a diversion from the monotony of eternity. His hand was only inches from Connie’s hip. What would happen if he put it on her thigh, or—and here the world reeled—undid her zipper? The very thought made his pants tighter. He slid his hand closer.

  “Sometimes I come up here at night.”

  His hand crept closer still.

  “I’d sleep up here but I sleepwalk.”

  He imagined her walking in her sleep, arms out like a zombie. “Do you wear pyjamas?”

  “Cyril,” she said, mock appalled. “Now and again. I suppose you’re going to tell Gilbert.”

  “I don’t tell Gilbert anything,” he lied, even as he vowed never to tell him this. Then he told her how Gilbert was looking for a way to commit suicide.

  She considered this a long time, which caused Cyril a spasm of angst thinking Connie might approve, that it might make Gilbert interesting. She said, “He asked me out last week.”

  It was as if the air had been sucked from his lungs. His fingertips clutched at the gritty shingles to keep from plunging off the roof into the sky.

  She patted his knee. “Hey, don’t worry. It’s no contest. I said no.” Then she added, “Maybe he could do a swan dive from his roof.”

  “Maybe I’ll push him off,” said Cyril, who was not at all shocked by Gilbert’s betrayal. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d tried stealing from him. They were best friends but they were competitive. Who was taller, who was stronger, who could spit further, piss longest. “Why does your grandmother want to be France Nuyen?”

  “Because France Nuyen is beautiful and exotic.”

  Cyril’s mother said invite Connie to supper. He was wary. His mother hated Russians and Germans, and was sceptical of Austrians, Hungarians, Rumanians and Turks, and despised the Commies, so what did she think of the Chinese?

  Connie expressed no reaction when she entered the Andrachuk’s living room and saw a weeping Virgin the size of a garden gnome on the cabinet in the corner, the dozens of Virgin Marys on the mantel, the painting of the Madonna and Child, the Bibles and the candles, the Nativity scenes embroidered on the cushions. Seeing it through Connie’s eyes it took on a strange and alien aspect, and Cyril found himself sniffing the air fearing it smelled of the cabbage his mother insisted on cooking. When his mother entered the room she halted at the sight of Connie, who was wearing a short-sleeved white blouse, pleated plaid skirt, flat-soled black shoes. Cyril waited fearfully. His mother’s chin was elevated and her eyebrows up. She smiled and opened her arms and embraced Connie. Soon they were chatting like old friends, the weather, the neighbourhood, Connie’s plans.

  “Vould—would—you like tea?”

  “I’d love tea.”

  “Cyril,” she said, not looking at him. “Tea.”

  He retreated to the kitchen and made tea, returning a few minutes later to find his mother and Connie on the couch, knee-to-knee, holding hands. He set the tray on the table. The teapot was in the shape of a pumpkin with matching cups.

  “Pour.”

  He poured.

  “Ekting,” she said, nodding as though it was an interesting concept. “You get job, ekting?”

  “Ma.”

  She turned and considered Cyril. “What job you will get?”

  “I’m fine.”

  She nodded, the corners of her mouth down, eyebrows up, as if to say that was an amusing opinion though as naive as every other idea in his head. She turned back to Connie. “He has no direction. His brother is CGA.”

  “CGA.” Connie nodded as though, like ekting, that too was an interesting concept.

  It was a Wednesday evening in August. Paul had moved out at the beginning of the summer yet still showed for supper three or four times a week. This turned out to be one of those evenings.

  “Acting?” said Paul over the boiled potatoes and roast pork. “Acting like what?”

  Cyril gripped his butter knife ready to stab him.

  Connie regarded Paul with lidded eyes. “Like a queen, of course.” And then, waiting just long enough for awkwardness to set in, she added, “Either that or I’ll open a laundry.”

  No one breathed much less spoke. Then Connie laughed. Paul was so surprised his habitual sneer melted and he too laughed, long and loudly.

  They went to see Gypsy. Even in the privacy of the theatre’s darkness Cyril tried not staring too hard at Natalie Wood’s thighs and cleavage, yet he need not have worried because Connie was so rapt she forgot he was even there. They sat in the seventh row, her favourite row, the perfect row, just close enough but at the same time far enough away that your neck didn’t kink. She sat deep in her seat, gripping the armrests, absorbing the silver screen’s transcendent radiance. There was Natalie Wood in pink feathers squaring off against her mother, Rosalind Russell, clad in black. “Look at me, momma. Look at me. No education. From Seattle. Look at me now. I’m a star!”

  Seattle, just down the road from Vancouver. Cyril remembered going to Seattle in the Nash Rambler, the top down, his dad’s wrist draped over the wheel, his mother in sunglasses and a polka-dotted scarf, Paul happy watching the American countryside spinning past even if it was identical to that north of the border.

  When the film ended they remained in their seats while the others moved in a slow herd up the aisles and lit cigarettes. Only when the theatre was empty and the lights came on did Connie seem to breathe again. She blinked and stood, slowly, and when she looked at Cyril he had the eerie sensation that she didn’t recognize him.

  “You okay?”

  She didn’t answer, she turned and headed up the aisle. They were out of the theatre and down the street when Cyril took her hand. She hadn’t said a word since the lights had gone down at the start of the movie. “Hello.”

  She looked at him, and in a perfect Rosalind Russell—deep and sinewy—said, “I was born too soon and started too late.”

  It was uncanny: she was Rosalind Russell, taller, older, with a sweet and agonized scorn in her eyes. All the way home she riffed bits of dialogue. Not Wood’s, but Russell’s. Striding ahead she whirled to face Cyril. “You like it, well I got it.” Clenching her fists at her sides she shook her chest. “How do you like these egg rolls!”

  The last Monday before school resumed they bussed to Kits Beach. Freighters filled the harbour and limp-sailed yachts sat on their own shadows. As they walked along the sand Connie brushed her palm against the back of Cyril’s head feeling the bristles of his crewcut while he stroked her hair as though petting a mink. The beach was crowded but they found a secluded spot at the far end by a log, dropped their towels and plunged into the water. He caught her around the waist and lifted her high and they rolled and wrestled.

  Baring her teeth like a shark she asked, “Would you eat human flesh?”

  “Only if I didn’t know whose it was.”

  “Yeah, that makes sense.”

  “And only a woman. This is a weird conversation.”

  “You think so?”

  “Kind of. But I wouldn’t mind taking a bite out of you.”

  She pretended to slap his face. He caught her hand and kissed it giving the palm a quick lick. She put her
licked palm to his cheek then pinched his earlobe at which he caught her thumb between his teeth as if to take a bite. They swam to shore and waded out holding hands. She was wearing a backless one-piece displaying a surprisingly curvy figure. Her nipples stood as stiff as light switches beneath the sunflower yellow suit and Cyril desperately wanted to touch them. He quickly turned away and lay face down on his towel.

  “Can you do my back?”

  She was kneeling over him holding a tube of Coppertone. When she was on her stomach Cyril got up and poured the oil where her suit dipped to the small of her back. She moaned as he massaged it in, feeling the smooth surface of her skin, the bumps of her spine, the gentle ridges of her shoulder blades, the rise of her hips, and, within inches of his hand, her bum under the taut wet fabric and below that her parted thighs. He did the backs of her knees and her calves and stopped at the soles of her feet which were coated in sand. He envisioned sliding his fingers between her toes and then sucking them slowly one by one. He quickly put the cap back on the oil and lay down, his face turned away, studying the tiny fragments of broken glass in the sand, breathing the hot scent of the sea, feeling the towel against his cheek, and trying to will away his erection. He should have dug a hole in the sand to make room for it because it felt as if he was lying on a rolling pin.

  Shutting his eyes he struggled to think of something boring, his job stocking shelves at the iga, making sure all the labels faced out, like good little soldiers: canned soup, canned peas, canned tomatoes. Tomatoes. Tomatoes was another word for breasts. But the cans were hard and cold and clammy, just like the IGA where everyone looked deathly pale under the fluorescent lights, especially Norm, the Assistant Manager, a humourless goof who did not appreciate Cyril turning all the labels to the left or to the right, but what else could you do to entertain yourself in such a boring job, a job that Norm seemed to regard as a calling? The pressure in his groin began to ease.

  “You’re burning.”

  His eyes opened and he looked up to find Connie leaning over him, smelling sweet and creamy with lotion. “I’m okay,” he said.

  “Your back’s going to get blisters.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Cyril, turn!”

  When he did her eyes widened.

  “What did you expect?” he said, sullen, defiant, embarrassed.

  She drew her finger down the middle of his chest and stopped at his belly button. “Anything less and I’d be insulted.” For a long moment they remained that way, looking at each other, her finger circling his navel. He reached up and put his hand on her breast. Her nipple hardened under his touch and she put her hand on his and held it there—then she pushed it away. “I’m sorry, Cyril,” she whispered, “but I’m saving myself for my leading man.”

  THREE

  THE NEXT DAY was the start of Grade 12 and Connie didn’t show, nor was she there the following day or the day after. She missed the entire week. Each afternoon Cyril detoured past her house but saw no sign of her. Friday he went up the steps and knocked but there was no answer. Cupping his hands around his eyes he peered through the stained glass yet saw nothing.

  When he got home he went into the basement. It faced south and the windows were large so it had made a good workshop for his dad. Cyril was ten when his father had died, and he had become obsessed with everything his father had used: razor, brush, hacksaws, screwdrivers, level, chisels, a wood drill with its various bits. Studying each item, weighing them in his hands, smelling them, he was convinced they were imbued with something of his father’s essence. He put his father’s welding mask on and looked at the world through a grey tint. Was it possible that the mask, having spent so much time on his dad’s head, held his dad’s thoughts? He began drawing all these things, as if by recreating them he recreated him, or so it seemed, so it felt, and over the years he filled sketch pads with drawings of hammers, saws, torches, boots, subject matter to which he continued to return. Now Cyril had an easel in the basement, his sketch pads and boxes of pencils and charcoal sticks, as well as a mirror and some lights.

  He scuffed around the basement wondering what was up with Connie. Wasn’t he her leading man? The night she’d come over for supper she’d wanted to see where he worked. That had sounded so mature, so committed: “Where do you work?” As if art was his job. She had looked at everything with great care. When she saw the welding mask she’d put it on and went all stiff like Gort, the robot in The Day the Earth Stood Still.

  He looked at the jam jars suspended from a plank shelf by a screw through each lid. The jars contained nails and screws and washers and hinges and nuts and bolts. The September sun angling in ignited the hardware in each jar like a row of light bulbs. The basement smelled of metal and concrete. His father’s welding equipment stood darkly in a corner: canisters, tubes, torches, even his overalls hung on a nail, all of it as it had been, untouched, as though to interfere with it would be a form of desecration, an unholy attempt to erase his memory. Cyril knew his mother still came down and put her face to his overalls. He’d seen her through the window, leaning there, face to the cloth, an image out of the bible. Cyril had done the same. They worshiped secretly in the cavern of the basement like members of a persecuted sect.

  His father had died in 1955. It was not a dramatic death but quiet, like the man himself: he went to bed one night and did not wake up, slipping through a secret door. Cyril’s last glimpse of him was in the casket in church, crucifix in his folded hands, carrying an iron flower to the Lord. One of his earliest memories was watching him cut steel with a welding torch. Cyril wasn’t supposed to be watching because his father had warned it would damage his eyes, but unable to resist he’d opened the door that led down from the kitchen and peered between the steps, and for the next two days beautiful yellow spots hovered in his vision as though sunflowers were blooming in his eyes. For years afterwards, whenever he visited his dad’s grave he’d stare into the sun to relive that.

  “At least he outlived that bastard,” his mother would always say.

  Cyril didn’t have to ask who that bastard was. Uncle Joe. Koba the Dread. Any time his mother saw a picture of Stalin in a newspaper, book or magazine, she burned the eyes out with a match. It didn’t matter where she was, the waiting room at the doctor’s office, the library, a store, out came the matches. More than one person had shouted in alarm and yet she carried right on. Cyril remembered the day he came home from school, up the back steps and into the kitchen and was met by the smell of burning newspaper. There were his dad, his mother, and Paul hunched over a paper speaking low and intense, as if plotting. When they saw Cyril they went quiet. He’d come stumping up the steps but had nonetheless surprised them. Their expressions—round, flat, uncomprehending—said he was a stranger. It was as if he’d stumbled upon their campfire in the forest. Occasionally his dad would start speaking to Cyril in Ukrainian and then catch himself and halt as if he’d let a secret slip, and quickly shift to English. Yet over the years Cyril had heard enough to pick up some of the language, and the afternoon he discovered them hunched over the newspaper he heard Paul say, “Toy proklaty zdoh.”

  “Who’s dead?”asked Cyril.

  “No one,” said Paul. “Get lost.”

  “Stalin,” said his dad.

  Cyril’s mother and Paul embraced and sobbed and remained locked together swaying side to side while Cyril’s father watched with an expression as unreadable as his welding mask. He needed a shave and his hair was messed and he was in his working greens, and yet here he was, home an hour early. He went to the window. He was about five-foot-eight and broad across the shoulders. Cyril had inherited his sharp chin and large dark eyes. Exhaling hard as if at the end of an ordeal, his dad put his hands on his hips and gazed out, not at the cemetery but at the sky. It was March, almost spring, the sun bright and daffodils blooming. “See.” He pointed to a flock of starlings swooping from one maple to another. “The birds are free again.”

  It was two weeks before he saw Connie
. She showed up at the IGA on a Friday evening carrying an open package of red liquorice whips. She held the package out and he took one. Then she slid the crinkly package up under her black t-shirt and tucked it in. “You won’t rat me out will you?”

  “Norm’ll nail you before you hit the door,”said Cyril. He tugged up the hem of her shirt and adjusted it to hide her loot, and as he did he glimpsed her pale smooth stomach, felt its heat against his hands, and wanted to embrace her, but she stepped back out of range.

  “Aiding and abetting,”she warned.

  He’d happily lose his job to win her again.

  “So hey,”she said, “what happened? You kinda just vanished.”

  “Me?”

  Ignoring his shock she twirled her liquorice whip like a lasso. “You drawing?”

  Drawing? What was she talking about? “Yeah, some. Sure.”

  “You’re an artist, man. You should draw.”

  “I’m not an artist,”he said, grimly. “I’m just some guy who draws.”

  She frowned. It was as if an unresolved question had been answered, and Cyril immediately regretted his maudlin statement. She folded liquorice into her mouth then chewed and swallowed and said, “Then that’s all you’ll ever be.” She stated this as if it was a simple if sorrowful fact. For a full minute neither spoke. The muzak drifted down like nerve gas and the fluorescent lights hissed. “Anyhow,”she said with exaggerated offhandedness, “I’ve come to say goodbye.”She painted a horizon with a slow pass of her palm, “The distant land of Holy Wood calls to me, kemosabe. I must cross many mountains and fight many battles.” Then her shoulders sagged and her eyes grew moist and she reached and stroked his cheek. “Besides,” she whispered, voice thickening, “if I stay here I’ll never get away, I’ll never make it.”She quickly walked off up the aisle. Before going out the cold glass door with its poster advertising two-for-one frying chickens she turned and aimed her finger at him like a six-shooter. “Draw.” Then was gone.