The Delusionist

by Grant Buday

  Cyril stood there until Norm tapped him on the back. “Yoo hoo. Chef Boyardee ain’t gonna stack himself.”

  His shift ended an hour later and he went straight to Connie’s. The evening was still warm, traffic had lulled and downtown throbbed with a tarnished glow. He walked back and forth in front of her house then went in the gate and up the steps and knocked. The sisal mat said WELCOME. The door opened and a small dark figure appeared on the other side of the screen door. Her grandmother pushed it open and looked him up and down.

  “Elle pas d’ici.”

  “Where is she?”He strained for the French. “Ou est-elle?”

  “Haw-lee-wood  . . . da da da da da Haw-lee-wood.”

  Cyril ran all the way down the hill, through the cemetery, past Broadway, across the Cambie Bridge and along to the bus station opposite the armoury. Darting amid the buses he read the destinations: Calgary, Prince George, Seattle. He stepped up into the Seattle bus but she wasn’t there. He checked the waiting room. Families with suitcases, solitary men with duffel bags, a cat creeping along the wall by the washroom. He dropped to a bench and shut his eyes and counted to ten, thinking that when he opened them she’d be standing there. She wasn’t. He did another round of the station. Train. She was going by train. He jogged across the viaduct, in and out of the light of the widely spaced lamp posts, and along Main to the railway station and searched the waiting room and the platforms and even the park across the street and then the station again. No sign of her. He stood with his hands on his hips. He waited there, unmoving, for ten, fifteen, twenty more minutes. If not bus or train then how? Air? It took him an hour to get out to the airport. A flight had left for San Francisco forty minutes earlier—could she have been on it? Or was she hitch-hiking? He imagined her out on the highway, charming a stranger all the way down the coast.

  His mother regarded him with eyes as solemn as gravestones. “You will survive.”

  He didn’t want to survive, there was no point to surviving, surviving was not living it was subsisting, a half-life not worth the effort. He shrugged and said nothing. What was his pain compared to what she’d endured in the war? Anyway, he wasn’t merely heartbroken he was bewildered and embarrassed and even a little ashamed because clearly he wasn’t enough for Connie, or—and this was a shock—maybe he was too much, and would smother her career before it even had a chance to grow.

  And another thing tormented him. When she’d left the store he should have gone after her right away, not waited another hour for his shift to end. Why had he hesitated? What did that say about him? Maybe she’d been out there waiting—hoping—to see if he’d come after her, to see if he really loved her?

  Cyril found himself contemplating suicide. Hanging was too grimly messy, drowning was too wet and cold, pills and booze he’d probably convulse and vomit, he couldn’t bring himself to jump head first out of a tree—certainly not their tree—which left shooting himself, which meant finding a gun.

  As a boy he’d often imagined shooting Hitler and Stalin, sniper style, from the window of a bombed-out building. He’d wait patiently in the rain or snow or dust, through days and nights, though never would his resolve weaken, and then the moment would come when the Fuhrer or Koba raced past to a meeting of generals. He’d take aim. Tick. The rifle bullet pierces the Führer’s skull right behind the ear and the Führer’s head flops forward. Tick. Uncle Joe topples against the shoulder of his aide. Later, in London, Churchill would decorate him, and his mother and father would be there watching, and even Paul would have to give Cyril his due.

  Not that his mother and father wanted reminders of the war. They’d avoided the prairies where so many Eastern Europeans congregated and come all the way out to Vancouver to escape getting caught up in an enclave that might have kept those wounds open. Paul had told him that, one of the few bits of info about the family prehistory that he’d shared. Another was the fact that the word slave came from Slav. “Vikings navigated the rivers from the Baltic into Russia,” he said. “All the way to Kiev, kidnapping locals on the way and selling them to Turks who’d come up from the Black Sea.”

  Ukrainians tended to be tall and fair-skinned; Paul looked like an emaciated Peter Lorre, and while Cyril was bigger and healthier he was no tall blond. “What happened to us?”

  “What happened to us? I’ll tell you what happened to us. While the Turkish slave buyers were waiting around in Kiev they got horny so went to the whorehouses, and guess what happened? Us!”

  He could never tell when Paul was lying or being brutally honest. For as long as Cyril could remember his older brother had banked on Cyril’s naïveté: heads I win, tails you lose, chocolate milk came from brown cows, cats were female dogs, the moon was the sun with its back turned, they used to put bells in coffins so that if you got buried alive you could ring for help, Hitler was a vegetarian. Some of it turned out to be true and some BS. The Lone Ranger and Tonto were homosexuals. That one had thrown him for a loop and he’d never watched the show the same way again.

  On television there were WASPs and Italians and Irish, as if the whole world was comprised of those three groups. Movies were a little more diverse with some token Jews, Negroes and Chinese sprinkled around the edges, though scarcely any Eastern Europeans at all, and if there were they were Commie spies or coal miners: sweaty, grimy and grim, like Stanley Kowalski, the lummox in A Streetcar Named Desire.

  Subhumans. Untermenschen. The Nazi term for Slav, beasts destined to serve.

  The first time Gilbert heard Cyril’s parents speak Ukrainian he was appalled. “What’re they doing?” he’d complained, the disgust in his voice tangible, his nose wrinkling as though the very language itself did not merely sound strange but smelled strange. Gilbert McNab’s view was that the world spoke English, only Krauts and Commies grunted like animals. And there was more than merely the language, there was the cabbage and garlic. Gilbert grimaced and waved his hand in front of his face. “Farts.”

  FOUR

  SIX MONTHS AFTER Connie vanished Cyril finally got hold of a gun thanks to Gilbert’s grandmother. Cyril had known the old lady for as long as he could remember, a tiny, trembly woman with an enormous head covered in wispy hair that looked like the dust that collected under beds. She spent her time in the middle of the living room couch sucking butterscotch sweeties in front of the TV; her Glaswegian brogue was all but incomprehensible, as if she was talking with a sock in her throat. When she died a jewellery box went into the coffin with her. Gilbert became obsessed with it, imagining money, gold, diamonds.

  For weeks after she was buried Gilbert brought flowers each day to her grave. Sometimes Gilbert popped over in the morning on the way to school; other times he went over late at night. Her grave was right next to her husband’s, Gilbert’s grandfather, who’d blown his own brains out.

  Cyril’s mother, who had no great opinion of Gilbert, remarked with wonder upon his devotion. “There he is again,” she said, peering out the kitchen window at Gilbert’s silhouette. “He loved her.” There was bewilderment in her voice. Cyril too was surprised. Gilbert had always referred to the old lady as what’s her nuts. As in, what’s her nuts was crabbin’ at me again. Or, what’s her nuts was in the can all night. Or, what’s her nuts hit me with her fuckin’ cane.

  It was March, 1963, and as the days got longer Gilbert’s visits got later and later so that he was often there at midnight or beyond. Cyril was careful not to pry.

  While Gilbert attended his grandmother’s grave, Cyril lay awake wondering what Connie was doing at that very moment in Los Angeles: working late at some waitressing job, rehearsing lines for a part, or—and this caused his gut to knot—was she with a lover, her leading man  . . . He imagined going down there and finding her. He could support himself by sitting in parks and drawing portraits. He’d seen guys doing that here in Stanley Park on Sundays. Not a glorious artistic career, but down there in LA, in Hollywood, he could get discovered. He envisioned Elvis Presley or Steve McQueen strolling
by with a starlet on their arm pausing to admire Cyril’s stuff and maybe even getting their own portrait done: word would get around and just like that Cyril would be made. It happened all the time in Hollywood, didn’t it? He thought of Natalie Wood’s character in Gypsy. Whenever he watched TV he paid particular attention to crowd scenes and peripheral characters, thinking he might spot Connie, but there weren’t many Orientals on television, just Fuji on McHale’s Navy and some extras on The Hawaiian Eye.

  One night Cyril saw Gilbert pushing through the hedge into the cemetery packing something long over his shoulder. Cyril got dressed and went on over to join him. A chill drizzle fell and downtown glowed cold and grey. As he approached he heard dull thumps and muted cursing, so circled cautiously around the grave and saw a head on the ground—Gilbert’s head. All manner of explanation raced through Cyril’s mind, the chief of which was that Gilbert had been decapitated, though the reality was that he was standing in a hole.

  Gilbert greeted Cyril cheerfully. “Hey, buddy.”

  “Hey.”

  “Dump this, will you?” Gilbert hoisted two pails of dirt up and out of the hole onto the grass.

  Cyril lugged the pails to the hedge and emptied them. When he got back he heard the thump of a shovel blade striking wood.

  “Drill.”

  Cyril found a manual wood drill in a gunny sack. A dull grinding followed.

  “Saw.”

  Cyril passed down the saw and soon came the rasp of steel teeth on hard wood.

  “Mask.”

  Cyril found a gauze mask smelling of vanilla extract. The furious sawing resumed. Half an hour ago he’d been in bed and now it seemed he was robbing a grave. Cyril knew he should go home, just slip away quietly, but the lure of Gilbert had always been the lure of the unexpected, the mildly larcenous or outright criminal, and it overrode any qualms regarding sacrilege or fear of punishment, divine or otherwise.

  Gilbert crawled out of the hole with a small wooden box. He saw Cyril's horrified expression.

  “It’s not robbery. She was my grandmother. It’s family property.” They covered the hole with boards and sod. Tools clanking, they retreated to Cyril’s basement where Gilbert gave the enigmatic wooden box a shake: whatever was inside was padded. Now Gilbert took needle-nose pliers from the sack and with one twist cranked off the lock, splintering the wood in the process. He lifted the lid revealing a velvet cloth of royal blue with gold trim then, like a groom about to raise his bride’s veil, he lifted the edge of the cloth: a pistol. Old, perhaps army issue, it had a grooved Vulcanite hand grip. Gilbert opened the cylinder and discovered four bullets. He and Cyril looked at each other in exhilarated terror. An empty gun was hardware; a loaded gun was a weapon. Each turn of the cylinder caused a rich steely click. Gilbert weighed the gun’s lethal heft and his eyes gleamed at the range of dark possibilities now open before him. Yet one realization dominated the rest. He looked at Cyril and in a voice of quiet wonder said, “This is the gun my grandfather killed himself with. It has to be. Why else would what’s her nuts have kept it?”

  Cyril had no idea why else. But a different thought hit him. “Hey, now you can kill yourself.”

  “Yeah,” Gilbert drawled. “Could do.”

  “Temple or mouth?”

  Gilbert blew air. “Probably doesn’t make all that much diff. Temple I guess. Don’t much like the idea of sucking on a pistol barrel. Might do it in the cemetery on a full moon.” Then he grew philosophical as he gazed at the gun. “Of course, I would like to lose my virginity first. Maybe I’ll meet her when I’m standing there with the gun to my temple,” said Gilbert—her being the girl who finally took pity on him and gave him sex— “And her heart goes out to me because she recognizes the depth of my soul and sees that I’m noble, that I’ve got potential, that I’m a fucking genius, and she talks me out of it. And she’s like the daughter of some shipping magnate who hates me at first and threatens to disown her, but I show him what I’m made of, that we’re similar him and me, and I’ll be his protégé, and he’ll take me on and I’ll inherit everything.”

  It was an impressively impassioned monologue. Maybe Gilbert should have tried acting, though he might have connected with Connie. The only thing worse than losing Connie would have been losing her to Gilbert. Cyril thought of Gilbert calling Connie up and trying to steal her away from him. Cyril had never said anything, though he didn’t forget. “Then you won’t need the gun and you can lend it to me.”

  Knowing how heartbroken Cyril had been, he said, “Maybe if you only maim yourself and Connie hears about it she’ll come back.”

  “Actually, I was thinking of shooting Darrel.”

  Darrel was Cyril’s mother’s boyfriend. They’d met at a Christmas party at the Ukrainian Hall and for reasons Cyril was having difficulty understanding his mother had been seeing him for three months. On Fridays Darrel took her to the Legion and on Sundays he came to dinner, with the result that Cyril had come to dread Sundays. That she should be having sex constituted the deepest imaginable betrayal of his father, even if he had been dead ten years. Cyril understood that she was lonely, but he did not understand that she should do anything about it, certainly not with a guy like Darrel.

  “Hey, bub.”

  “Hey.”

  Darrel was stretched out full-length on their couch, one of his mother’s embroidered pillows under his head, shoes off exposing his red and blue diamond-check socks, ankles crossed. He was vice principal and Guidance Counsellor at some high school. Short and portly, with male pattern baldness, Darrel favoured western wear: string ties, cowboy boots, and shirts embroidered with lariat motifs. No one resembled a cowboy less than Darrel, yet not only had he grown up on a ranch, he was a war hero, having won a Distinguished Service Medal, and for two years he’d been a kicker for the Edmonton Eskimos. The first time they met, Darrel had demonstrated his kicking prowess by setting up Cyril’s football in a convenient knothole on the back porch then sailing it out across the alley and into the cemetery. It was January, and he’d made the kick in his socks. He’d stepped back three paces, given his arms a shake, then darted forward with the precision of the expert and kicked. Darrel already had a Players out of his pack and fired up when the ball binged off a gravestone fifty yards away then rolled another thirty down the slope. “Not half-bad for a fat old fart, eh?” Cyril was stuck with the chore of retrieving the ball. When he got back he found Darrel and his mother necking. His mother—necking. In English class they were reading Heart of Darkness, and two words came to mind: the horror. Cyril stashed the ball in the basement, determined that Darrel would never touch it again. If only he could dispose of Darrel as simply.

  Darrel said, “Got you some info here.” With his chin he indicated a stack of catalogues on the coffee table.

  Cyril picked one up. The University of Toronto. There was also one for Dalhousie, for the University of British Columbia, and for Simon Fraser University, a new school right here in the Lower Mainland due to open in the fall. Cyril had no intention of going to any of these places. “Great. Thanks.”

  “You’re most very welcome indeed young sir.”

  Cyril’s mother had squeezed herself onto the end of the couch and positioned Darrel’s feet on her thighs. The gallant Darrel gave her the cigarette from his mouth and lit another for himself. She’d never smoked before; now she puffed away like a pro, wrist cocked in a burlesque of elegance.

  Darrel was indicating the catalogues again. “How about pharmacy? I’d go in for pharmacy if I was your age. No sticking your fingers in unsavoury places like doctors and veterinarians, if you get my meaning. But you’ll need to work on your math and your chemistry,” he warned. “I hear you’re not exactly an academic. Not that that’s an insurmountable hurdle. Wasn’t for me, and I was a lousy student. Ds and Cs all the way. Most everyone had me pegged for a broom jockey. But when I finally got a direction—” He nodded slowly as if to say look out, a bull was on the charge. “I worked hard. Direction. That’s t
he key.”

  Cyril tried to look enthralled by this gripping saga.

  “All you need is drive; drive and direction. They go together. I know it’s tough. Seems uphill all the way. But you don’t want to end up in Fraser Mills the rest of your life. You don’t want to end up on the green chain.”

  The green chain was the quicksand of jobs—put your toe in and it sucked you down and you never escaped. And it was easy to fall in because of that union wage: one, two, three, you had a car and a wife and a mortgage and it was bye-bye dreams, see you in forty years when you retired, unless, that is, the job killed you first, or took off your arm, and left you like a war vet in the legion watching the bubbles in your beer, boring everyone with your tale of woe.

  “I can recommend a tutor,” said Darrel. “Ooh  . . .”

  Cyril’s mother had begun massaging Darrel’s feet and was now cracking his toes, working her way from the smallest to the biggest. She’d never rubbed his dad’s feet.

  “Yeah,” admitted Darrel. “You’re at a tough age. Big changes. Big decisions. In the Norse sagas a man’s soul is but a bird in a storm.” He sighed smoke and watched it drift.

  Their existential reflection was broken by the sound of footsteps on the back porch. Paul appeared with Della, the woman Cyril had first seen in the café last summer. They were now engaged. Della had just finished nursing school and was already working at VGH. She’d been a swimmer and had broad shoulders and narrow hips and tonight she was wearing toreador pants and a matching jacket. She and her mother-in-law promptly disappeared into the kitchen.

  “We’re sorting out number two son’s future here,” Darrel informed Paul. Darrel was upright now and had discovered that his rye on the rocks was empty. He jingled the ice in the glass as if ringing a bell. “Pardon me, miss. Any chance of a refill?”