The Insomnia Museum

by Laurie Canciani

  Do you remember the sea?

  She looked at him.

  Why are you laughing? Do you remember the beach that day?

  It’s so funny.

  What is?

  Walter de la Mare means Walter of the sea.

  So.

  It’s so funny?

  Why?

  Because Walter is a fish.

  She had been working on a plastic toy that made animal sounds when she heard the banging from downstairs. It rattled the cage around the light. Dorothy shouted for her to come down. She went from the desk with her arms out searching the dark for ways through the boxes and the blank street signs and the childish games and the stacks and stacks of magazines and pictures of other families. She pulled herself through it all and went to the top of the staircase and stepped down and looked through the steps to see him at the front door.

  He looked at her and she looked at him. He killed the itches on the back of his neck and his swollen eye bulged green and sad in the dark and his shoulder was pressed against the frame and the light from the segmented glass above the front door cut him into shards. She stepped down and stood in front of him. He wouldn’t look at her.

  Dad.

  Go away.

  What are you doing, Dad?

  I’m. I don’t know. I’m leaving.

  Where are you going to go?

  Away. I’m. I have a big mess in my head. I.

  Come here, Dad.

  No. No. No. No. No. No. No.

  He cried. She cried.

  Dad.

  I can’t do it.

  Do what?

  I need. I’ll be good. If I could just chase the rabbits one last time I could empty the mess from my head. Then I’ll be good. I’ll be right. I can stop the damp from climbing into bed with me. For just a little while.

  You told me not to let you.

  I was just. I was lying about that. Look at my hands.

  I’m looking, Dad.

  I. I don’t. I can’t.

  What do you want to forget, Dad?

  He looked at her.

  You only want a little bit, she said. The world is black and strange down here and you only want to go to the place that nobody else can see. You want to have courage and love and the mind to do it all and you never want to go home again. But Dad. You have to stay here. You have to stay home. Because. Look at me. Look at my hands. Dad, I’m home. I’m home. I’m home.

  8

  Drowned Fish

  THEY LIT CANDLES in the living room. The candles were kept in a box underneath the sink. He collected them from rubbish bags and other people’s homes and they were always handy when the man behind the desk decided that Dad wouldn’t have money for a little while.

  What man behind the desk?

  I hope you never know.

  Is it the taxman?

  Almost.

  She held two candles in her fists and stood behind him and leaned in with the light while he was looking for the fish tank.

  He lifted the fish tank onto the counter that separated the living room and the kitchen and she stood holding the candles that had begun to drip hot wax onto her thumbs. He took the candles. The fish tank was old. She remembered when he’d brought it home with all this clear packaging around it and a card that told them how to set it up. She helped peel off the packaging and fill the bottom with coloured stones and set up little trees that swayed in the water. He told her it was a present and she asked him what she was going to do with a box of water and some trees and funny smelling sand. That’s when he brought home the fish. They lasted only two days before she.

  Since then the tank had grown cloudy and dirty and there was a layer of green that stained it halfway up and went all the way around. He moved some of the stones that had been shoved into a lump and he smoothed everything with his fingers. He pulled out dead trees and turned the stones around and the dust climbed his hands and turned them as pale as the little moons inside his fingernails. He slotted the candles into the little grooves he had made and he lined them up like fat glowing soldiers two by two down the length of the tank. There were eight candles inside the tank when they were done and two on one side of the room and two on the other and one in the hall that was planted in the back of a small metal train that sat on one of the steps and one in the bathroom set on the back of the toilet that had been a pillow for his head so many times these past few. He smiled.

  Remember the fish?

  I don’t want to talk about that.

  Do you remember it though?

  Yes. Be quiet.

  The glow of the candles beat through the tank and fanned its fingers and it was mossy green. Dad pulled the bird from the mantel and opened the doors and stuck a screwdriver in. He pulled the hair out of his eyes and scratched the black and grey hairs on his chin. She stood in the green glow and watched him while he worked. The bird screamed and cried murder murder murder as the screwdriver went deeper. On the TV there was.

  When are you going to fix the screen?

  What?

  She pointed to the TV.

  I don’t know, he said.

  Why don’t you know?

  He looked at his hands.

  Dad.

  I can’t think about that now.

  I want to watch it. I can’t be without it.

  Do you remember the fish?

  Be quiet about that.

  Do you remember the fish, Anna?

  Yes, Dad.

  I thought it would make a good pet for you because a fish can’t run away like a cat or a dog and you always seemed to be afraid of dogs anyway. Fish are easy. You don’t have to feed them that much or that often and they ask for nothing more than that. You just keep them in the tank and keep the water as clean as you can and let them swim in the box around and around. Easy. I thought you’d want company when I went out, you know, and I thought you could talk to them. They were such pretty little things with that black stripe and those big eyes. Do you remember?

  Yes, Dad, I remember. They were little and so was I.

  Yeah. You were little once.

  I didn’t mean to do it.

  I know. You shouldn’t worry about that. It was my fault. I left them here and I left you alone with them and I didn’t tell you everything you needed to know and you were so prone to being stuck too much in your own head back then. I couldn’t. It was my fault. You thought you were doing something good.

  I took him out of the tank and I let him dry in the sun. I thought that maybe he didn’t want to be in the box.

  But what happened when he left the box?

  He drowned. He drowned because he couldn’t breathe.

  So, I think you should walk towards me, Girl. I think you should come and sit down really close so I can take you back into the living room again. I think you should stop crying and you should look where you are. I love you so much. I don’t want to see you drown. I want you to stop what you’re doing and I want you to sit next to me so close and nice. I want you to see what you’re doing. I want you to look where you are. I want you to take your hand from the handle of the door.

  She looked at him and then she looked at her own feet that were pressed against the rolled up carpet that lipped up over the bottom of the front door where her heels were tucked. A cold wind came around it and moved like fingers in her hair and along the ribbons of wallpaper and dusty cobwebs and boxes and through everything stacked along the walls of the insomnia museum. Even his hair stirred above his head.

  Anna.

  What?

  Don’t go.

  9

  Somewhere Over the

  Somewhere Else

  SHE STOOD WITH one hand on the handle and.

  Dad was crying again. Fuck’s sake.

  Look at your hands, Dad, she said, and she liked the grown up in her voice. They’re the loveliest two hands I’ve ever seen because they belong to my father. Don’t cry, Dad. You’re not to blame.

  He stood up and he killed the itches on his arm
and on the back of his neck where there was a blooming rash that had got worse this last hour.

  She thought about it.

  If you loved me as much as I loved you I don’t think we’d be here.

  What does that mean?

  You know.

  I love you.

  I know.

  I want to keep you safe?

  There’s no life in that.

  There’s no life out there.

  There’s more life in the space behind this door than.

  How do you know?

  I can see it.

  Where?

  I can see it all over your face, Dad.

  I’m just scared.

  I know. I am too, but I think that when I’m scared I feel most like I’m living. I think I have to be scared. I can’t be protected. I have to go away. I have to be more than you and me.

  Don’t go, he said. Wait. Wait until you’re a bit older. I’ll teach you things about out there that you’re going to need. I’ll let you go when the time is right. I promise. If you go now you’ll die.

  Dad.

  Daughter.

  You don’t see it. I’m dead already. Nothing moves on. There’s no time because you taught the bird not to tell it. There’s no reading because I don’t know how. I sleep, I eat and I live right next to you on the floor and I wait for you to come home and we fix things that don’t need fixing and all for what? What does it mean? I’m dead, Dad. I’ve always been dead because I never started living.

  They looked at each other. Dad had stopped crying and she had opened the door enough to smell the air on the outside and to catch noises that she had never heard before. There were chimes and a buzzing and a revved up machine and a catching sheet of metal and the barking of dogs and the voices of other people. Clear. Loud. There were others and they fought and played and spat and there was swearing. There was the word fuck shouted a million times over and over. There was nothing more to say. Dad had stopped being Dad long enough for her to see that he was only a man. He was an old man with blooms on his skin and bad teeth and a beautiful face and tired shoulders and he stood apart from her, like a stranger.

  I love you, Dad, she said. Thank you.

  She didn’t leave for a while and when she was ready she closed her eyes and let her thoughts rest awhile on the bodies of the moths in her feet. Her feet were bare. The thoughts beat like drums. She looked at them and thought that she would need shoes and she thought on that and decided that she would need socks and a coat but she had none of those things because there was never any need for them. Thoughts of Mum came next. She thought on Mum and she thought on the fish and there was a knot in her stomach that twisted and she knew that the bad blood had started. She cried but she didn’t know why. She felt the cold air and she listened to the noises and she shivered and threw her hands over her face.

  You can come home now, he said behind her.

  I can’t. I can’t go back but I can’t go on either. I don’t know where the fuck I am. I’m. I don’t. I can’t. I’m hurting so much. I’m on fire and I can’t put it out. What’s wrong with me? I can hear the ringing. Can you hear that? What is it? Is it me? What am I waiting for? I think it’s the sound of living going away. I think I’m.

  I can hear it too.

  She closed the door a few inches and she turned to look at him and he was searching through the piles packed up along the walls. He threw his hands in front of him and he dragged the stacks of nineteen seventy-two and nineteen eighty-three whatever magazines down in great clumps that fell in a wave by his feet. He tore at the flesh of the house and wiped his eyes in the paper that he ripped from the walls. The dust came down like that painful snow from the. She heard the head of Plastic Jesus nodding on the plastic neck and she heard the glass jars in her bedroom all singing with the long captured noises from years gone by. The ringing grew louder as he turned over all the mess he had collected and stacked and the museum whined as the weight was moved from one place to the next. In the living room the black roses bloomed on the ceiling and crept over the lip of the doorframe to the hallway and the little descended light.

  I know it’s here. We used to have one.

  One what?

  Where did I put it?

  I remember something.

  Can’t go far. Nailed down. Red.

  I remember something.

  He searched until he found a black thread between a stack of thick books and a box of empty video cases and old remote controls with missing buttons and black tape that went around and around. He pulled the thread away from the wall and held it in his hands and yanked it over the fallen mess and followed it. She came away from the door and stood in the hall but she didn’t let go of the handle.

  What is it, Dad?

  Never you mind.

  Dad.

  Think on the noise and let me know how loud it gets.

  Okay, Dad.

  She stretched from the door and left her twisted little finger holding the handle and she watched Dad as he moved along the stacks kicking and shoving and praying that the ringing wouldn’t end. Sober. Sober. Sober. He pulled on the string and twisted it around his fist and pulled again and a pile of boxes came down from a tall stack next to the bathroom door. He stopped. They were both still. He looked at her and she looked at him and she didn’t leave the handle but stretched as far back into the hall as she could without letting go.

  What is it, Dad? What’s that on the wall?

  It’s the phone.

  She couldn’t remember the phone from her girlhood but in her head she knew there would be a voice trying to speak from a plastic mouth and a place to listen and buttons to push. The phone was nailed to the wall and covered in dirt and dust and when he put his hand on the handle attached there by a spiralled cord something black and small ran from a crack underneath it. She stretched. Watched. Dad looked back.

  Answer it, Dad.

  Come into the hallway.

  Answer it.

  Come back home.

  It’s going to stop.

  Come in.

  She stepped into the hall and closed the door behind her and felt the cold air die away and the staleness and the heat and the heavy dark return. The little light above the door made a crown on the top of his head. The noise from the outside was muted by the wood and the walls.

  Pull the handle, Dad.

  Dad lifted the handle and turned towards the little black box with the numbers and the chimes and the voice that she knew would be there. He pressed it to his face and he rested his hand on the wall and he pulled the hair out of his eyes and he talked.

  Hello. Yes. What? No.

  He looked at her and she looked at him. His hand pressed on the top of his head and his face twisted and his eyes darted from the phone to his hand to her where she stood in front of the door. He sobbed into the back of his hand and chewed on the inside of his cheeks. His breath caught in the hollows of his throat.

  He nodded but said nothing and then he talked with a high trembling voice and said okay. Okay. I know. Yeah that’s fine. I can. Um. I’ll do something. I. I don’t know. Could you help me do that? I don’t think I can stand there and say those things when. Yeah. Okay.

  He returned the handle to the black box and he looked at his hands that were holding out some imaginary thing in front of him. She let her little finger slide off the handle and she stepped towards him and he threw his hands over his face and she pulled them away. He looked at her. His eyes were dewy and pulsing and he cried like a boy with his bottom lip trembling and his eyes fighting to turn away. He slipped to the floor and she went down with him and kissed the sweat off his head and wiped his eyes with the end of her tee shirt.

  What’s going on, Dad? What did it say? Please talk to me.

  He looked at her.

  What did it say?

  I can’t. I. Um.

  What, Dad?

  Your Mum died.

  10

  Your Little Dog Too

  HE WOU
LDN’T TALK.

  The door was closed and the world and its tired little noises went on exactly as they had before. He sat on the floor with a deck of cards in his hand that he had fished out of some box when she had not been paying attention. He shuffled the cards in one hand and folded one behind the other with a flick of his thumb and a bend in the wrist. The tattoo on his thumb winked at her. The piles of junk began to bend and sway under the weight of his unravelling and everything sank to the floor where they both sat staring at the shape of the dark that folded along the cracks in the ceiling. He wouldn’t talk, but his eyes talked plenty. They had a distance in them. They were the startled and hopeless and accepting eyes of a man hanging from a bridge.

  She held his hand that rested on his thigh and she lifted his arm across her shoulder and she sank deep into his chest and brought her hands to her face. She bit the nail that wasn’t there and she sucked her thumb like a baby. The dark closed around them. The doll bird told them it was time for something but she didn’t know what. Time to think. Time to remember. Time to grow. Time to forget. Mum was the world and the moon and the stars and the water and the dark and the noise of outside and the pipes and the falling snow and the wood and the paper dolls and the light and even though nothing was different, everything had changed.

  *

  He wrapped the black tie around his neck and she held the mirror so he could check if he was still as handsome as he had been when he was last with Mum. He wrapped it around twice and pulled it and the collar of the white shirt was drawn together underneath his neck. She picked the tight globs of dust off his shoulder. He combed his hair behind his ears with his fingers and looked at his chin and his cheeks that were sprouting with a black and white garden.

  Should I shave?

  Depends.