Omphalos

by Gerald Lynch

  He’s freeing a loved daddy from a hated mommy. That’s the profile. Start there, start over.

  On the canal the cutely toqued skating girls moved their feet as if trapped in cross-country ski tracks, and they had to bend way forward for balance. The showboating boys clowned bravely till they fell hard. Drunk or stoned, or both, so unhurt. God still looks after fools and drunks.

  Kevin himself would turn up back home a sodden drunk. An energized alcoholic again, he’d been warned by Chief Thu that a medical leave was the talk of HQ. Kelly and son Bill, adult children still living at home, were also always drunk. First-time loser Kelly, still smarting from her public humiliation by Judge Mender, would be drumming words at loser Bill with her fist. Amateur alcoholic Cynthia would already be sleeping it off, then somnambulant in the morning.

  Not that Kevin had taken much notice of these radical changes in his family. He’d never been beaten either, and in the Widower case not only Kevin Beldon but his family had been beaten to distraction and drunkenness. Soon to be beaten to death.

  Out on the small balcony Kevin continued smirking down at himself and shaking his head: Old man, how do you stand on those albino batons? How much longer will you stand? Because there was another push on downtown. Same old story: HQ wanted new blood, more people of colour, more recruits self-defined as uncommitted genderwise, more women in charge. What they didn’t want hanging around was Detective Kevin Beldon, old Whitey. Or they didn’t want him till they were up against it, with the Macro howling for blood. As on the Widower.

  Old fool. Patsy. In the end all you did was take the heat on the Widower case, the official fall, and you brought Kelly down with you. You’re still falling. And the Widower remains at large.

  He would have to confront that bathroom mirror soon. It was close to eleven and he’d promised to meet Kelly for lunch at the Dow’s Lake Pavilion. Eleven and still not dressed, shuffling about in his scratch-arse jockeys. Old man. And Sunday. He’d come to hate Sunday mornings especially.

  What don’t you hate, old fool?

  I don’t hate smart women or hard-working people of any colour, though everyone conveniently assumes I do. I only dislike being around the sexually ambiguous (they creep me out), but they can do whatever the hell they like on their own for all I care.

  In the near future, the very last joke will be told, its punch line: And the old white guy couldn’t stop apologizing and crying.

  Na. Dr. Randome would have a field day with such self-pity, encouraging more and more of it.

  Last time they’d spoken, Kelly said that Mom had been afraid of him. Nonsense, he’d snapped. Kelly had lost her cool then, probably because she’d been angry over what he’d just said: that she always bossed Bill around. Which he’d said only because she’d said…Ah, to hell with it! He must make an effort to be more of a father to his daughter, less of a competitor. Dr. Randome was already helping him there. He must show his daughter how much he loved her.

  A tall order, Doctor, for this father-daughter combo.

  He moved closer to the balcony rail, touched its rusting metal with his thighs; it moved, and he looked down. It was the only new experience he enjoyed, standing on his little balcony like this. But enjoyed was tame, because he was actually exhilarated to be perched in mid-air with lots of space below and all of space above. It was opposite of the recurrent nightmare that had tormented him for a bad year now, where he was crawling through a narrowing space, somewhere underground, a crawl-space in rock, pursuing something he must apprehend but didn’t want to know, chased by something vaguely familiar, a monstrous thing, hot on his tail. He was wedged tight. Breathing became impossible…until he woke up with a big gulp like a throttling horse.

  Kelly said it was “sleep apnea,” and that he could die in his sleep. He’d managed not to say “good.”

  Though at the top of the old brown-brick apartment building on Metcalfe Street, he was still only three floors up. Not much traffic anymore anywhere any time. A few languid Sunday drivers, chauffeurs mostly, whose SUVs bore red diplomatic plates, and a couple of squeegee kids pestering them. The street kids, with their rags tied about them like modern lepers, had been banished here from the downtown ByWard Market (vestigial tourism). Usually he couldn’t tell the boys from the girls, but this pair was clearly male and female, or the over-exposed girl was obviously a girl. The boy hung back, the girl approached the driver with her squeegee held up like cute surrender, smiling an eyebrow-raised question that could have been a pouting invitation. If the driver signalled anything but disgust, the car was swarmed by the squeegee boy. The girl worked only the driver’s side, her torn billowing top like tissue paper. Then it was the big pout again and the palm out, with the boy lurking behind like a muzzled threat. Kevin could just make out the pained face of the driver as he realized he’d fallen for the old hidden-accomplice trick of kids hitchhiking.

  Kevin tilted back his head, closing his eyes on a wan smile. He was remembering the time he and this girl Cynthia Sheridan had broken from their graduating class’s outing to War of 1812 sites along the St. Lawrence River, and hitched home to Ottawa through the country north of Belleville on a blistering day towards the end of June.

  All through high school the distance between them had closed without their doing much, just watching each other, often smiling small, sharing test information the day before, nothing personal, but a growing closeness. On the outing’s stop at the site of the Battle of Crysler’s Farm, standing beside him in a bouquet of sun and fresh water and aroma of growing green things, she was the only one who’d laughed aloud when he’d answered Shitty Brick’s question in a good imitation of Shitty’s own adenoidal voice, saying that Crysler’s Farm was where the pioneers had, like, planted the first cars. Go wait at the bus, the reddened Brick had ordered — right arm horizontal, pointing — both of you.

  Soon as they were safely away from the school bus they’d smoked a joint, then giggled themselves silly for an hour or so, bumping, pushing each other away…until finding themselves lost on a hot gravel road of oil-smell, dust, and sore soles. Coming down.

  He’d watched her for a bad half-hour from an itchy ditch abundant with Queen Anne’s lace and large grass like razors, suffocating real weedy smell, fearless mosquitoes and indistinguishable buzzing, as the two of them executed the hidden-accomplice trick.

  He saw her again now: standing there in the blazing midday sun, her long chestnut-brown hair unmoving and shining like the polished nut itself, with one slim hip hardly jutting in her tan corduroys, thumb out and no car in sight forever. Slowly she’d filled his dizzied vision. He blinked hard and hitched his head, wondering if it was the weed still, the grass, the marijuana. It wasn’t. Strange to remember, it was the view of her back had done it, nothing sexual (he didn’t think), just the utter vulnerability, her total dependence on him in that moment exciting a growing desire to protect her, to hold her. She’d be lost without him…and he without her, he realized in quiet shock — like an arrow through eyes to heart — so stunned by his sudden love that a handful of mosquitoes fed to their ruby-bellied fill on his hairy red forearm.

  They’d been picked up by a beefy trucker in visor-curled tattered cap and jean jacket with raggedly cut-off sleeves, who’d insisted that she sit between them when he’d made to get in first, and whose massive upper arm had caused her to lean away, into him. Still warmly confused from his moment of recognition, he’d grown faint at times from the Noxzema odour of her browned right arm — he could still smell it — her forearm’s fine fair hairs like a new secret between them. He’d breathed with her breathing, as the pressure of her bony, sinewy, and soft body cooked him further, or them together. …No, nothing sexual, it was still just Cynthia Sheridan. But oh what pain a sustained erection could be at seventeen-and-a-half through a bouncing two-hour ride home to a whole new world.

  He popped his eyes before it got any worse. This morning’s sky was suc
h a blue as made him imagine he was seeing deeply into friendly space, a welcoming eternity. He couldn’t look away. Then a stranger feeling about that pale-blue sky, the beginning of one of Detective Kevin Beldon’s famous hunches.

  Bad news was coming, big-time crime, homicide. Action. Good.

  Yet you’d suspected nothing before Cynthia’s —

  How many goddamned times a day must I say that to myself! Leave me be! In the near future…In the near future…In the near future…I will die.

  There really was something weird about the sky. It looked sectioned by the finest tracery of grid-work. He shortened focus and saw that he was looking through a spider’s web, which was attached from the overhang to a brick corner. He raised a hand — but didn’t disturb the web. He shivered in the heat. Peered into the corner and spotted the big-headed spider, waiting in the shadows like hooded death itself. He glanced back at the squeegee kids and recognized their seemingly aimless ambling as again setting up the hidden-accomplice ruse: female on distracting display, male in reserve. A trap.

  Kevin’s throat drained, he could hardly swallow.

  He looked up at the empty sky, and appreciated the way the webbing organized the blue immensity, reminiscent of the way the MYCROFT bots constructed an investigation grid at a scene. And as he was humming with satisfaction at this powerful intimation of action — a case! — from the upper right corner in his double focus came a moving dark dot, the spider — or no, because it painstakingly drew a straight white line across that geometry of navy sky and dark grid; it drew on, a jet contrail, bisecting the whole woven sky like some nightmare shuttle.

  He shivered again, he was shaken.

  Cynthia had taken up weaving for a spell, one of her periodic hobbies. It was around the time he’d exploded over the latest stupid thing son Bill had done. Quit university, that was it, only a few months short of the Ph.D. that would have made his career. All brains and no common sense, no discipline, no ambition, their Bill. Then later in bed, all anger gone, Cyn had said that Kelly and Bill were the warp and weft of their lives. And told him what that meant: he couldn’t touch them without touching himself, hurt them without hurting himself, or love them without loving himself, and vice-versa. So he’d learned a little about weaving and a lot about patience and love from Cyn. …Then she’d gone and shredded the whole fabric of their life as a family.

  What kind of love was that, Dr. Randome?

  “You must learn to forgive Cynthia, Kevin, if you’re ever to forgive yourself.”

  “Yes, Doctor, but with all due respect, learning to forgive myself is not what’s made me mad. I need to understand why she did it.”

  “The why may never be answerable, Kevin, though we will keep trying, together. You have made a courageous beginning today. And call me Ewan, please.” He sang lowly: “Tell me why-y-y-y you cried…”

  “What’s that?” Afraid he’d missed something.

  “Beatles. You’ll learn, I hope, to tolerate my obsession with the Fabs.”

  “Are you sure that’s Beatles?”

  “From A Hard Day’s Night, when the Lennon-McCartney genius was at its symbiotic best. Trust me.”

  “Oh yeah: and why you lie-ie-ied to me. I think I do trust you already, doc…Ewan. Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

  “That’s good, Kevin. I like a joke, as you’ll also come to find. And I like you too, Kevin.”

  For a moment on the balcony he maintained focus on both, near web and distant sky, then added in the middle third, the shuttling jet, and he chilled yet more deeply. A low-level current thrummed him. He had never felt it, his gut-feeling, this strongly before, a triple-take hunch, an old dick’s multiple orgasm. He clenched his sphincter and curled his toes as if to hold the balcony’s concrete floor, waited for the rush to pass.

  Cynthia was wrong: it wasn’t the old fire on Kevin’s red head had been his secret weapon but his hunches, the so-called factioning. And equal to factioning was his ability to ignore the obvious and focus simultaneously on numerous probabilities; to see more than one opportunity, to consider contradictory motives; and to do it all at the same time. Sky and web and shuttling jet. Three events on different planes woven into one collapsed view. Always only one solution, that was key.

  Yet you’d suspected nothing before your own wife’s suicide.

  Time passed.

  Yes, some big-time crime was cooking up in this dry heat. At least one drought was about to end. If his official communicator were operative he’d call Frank Thu downtown for news, he was that certain (Dr. Randome encrypted his calls through Omphalos MIST — Multi-Informational Secure Transmission; he really shouldn’t have taken Ewan’s call on the hopeless public bud). But he’d had his secure police communicator decommissioned, had only an ancient pager for business, which made his official life all one-way. Frank asked him repeatedly to have his communicator reactivated; it had become impossible to consult with Kevin on tricky cases, and Frank still needed to. But that was one of two things Kevin Beldon would never do. He’d never liked being available to the hyper-connected world: try this, support that; Kev, I believe Bill’s been picked up DUI again; I think I can fix it, but this will have to be the very last time. Etc. etc. ad infinitum…

  And he would never touch his gun again.

  Enflamed, he punched through the spider web. It drifted dreamily, till its filaments settled like threads on the brick. The spider was nowhere to be seen. The inclination to contact Dr. Randome had cooled. The urge to contact Frank Thu continued to grow warmer. Something was about to break big.

  He left the balcony door open behind him. Bring in all the bugs, the spiders and the flies, hungry maternal mosquitoes too. Bring the heat. They would need Detective Inspector Kevin Beldon again. His medical leave was about to end big time. Bring it.

  Chapter 3

  In the bathroom mirror Kevin’s bellybutton looked wider and deeper, like an absence consuming him from within, himself his own black hole. He was thickening round the middle again, was all. And here he’d been sure he would never gain back the weight. The selfish flesh was not so weak as the sensitive spirit, it looked.

  But who isn’t selfish? It’s the contradictory accusation everyone hurls when love dies. You’re so selfish, you never think of me! Forget friendship, sacrifice, love. These days, sweet Jesus, we can lay down our lives only for our solitary, poor, nasty and brutish little selves.

  Who isn’t selfish? Cynthia. Wasn’t. The lone exception that proved the need for the rule of law. Genuine charity, that was Cyn. Based on no philosophy, no politics, no psychology, not even much religion. Just that best human wish to get along decently. She would have faced death alone for those she loved… Would have? She had. But not for those she loved. For her own self. Saved up all her selfishness for the one big blowout.

  In the near future we all face our selfish ends alone.

  As the funeral reception at their Lundy’s Lane home was winding down, Bill had stumbled in from the kitchen, from a loudly whispered argument with his sister, and found his father in the study. Frank and Claire Thu had been bearing the burden of the small talk. Bill steadied his bloodshot eyes and fixed Kevin sitting against the mahogany desk. Even talkative Frank silenced as Bill marshalled his depleted reserves.

  He roared like a wounded animal: “You never think about anyone but yourself, not me, not Kelly, and especially not Mom!”

  Frank took a step towards him, his right hand coming up like a traffic cop’s: “Now Bill, we’ve all been through an emotional wringer. Let’s you and me go up to your room and have one for the road. Don’t fight me on this, son.”

  Bill’s eyes hadn’t shifted as he continued hurling abuse and accusation, spilling his whisky on one of his mother’s Celtic rugs:

  “If you’d just accepted the fact that you were beaten for once, that the Widower had won, Mom would still be alive today! You wouldn’t be a fucking widower! B
ut no, not you, not the great Kevin Beldon! You can’t even see what’s going on in your own family! If you’d paid any attention to me and —”

  “That’s enough, Bill,” Kelly said calmly, appearing at his back, holding against her black silk suit a tray containing one skin-burst mini sausage. Her auburn hair was done tightly; her eyes were clear and dry.

  Bill clamped his jaws and like a kicked hound looked around fearfully. He bumped against the pocket doors to the living room, lurched for the front door, and bounded down the steps.

  That was the last time, in a bad year, that Kevin had heard from his son.

  When he turned on the bath faucet nothing came. He put his finger up inside the spout and found it dry as a dead man’s mouth. He reached round the door frame and touched the pad that said APTWA, accessing the large vacuum flask of recycled reserve on the building’s roof. Standing in the bath he turned the alternate shower control to full. Eventually some cloudy water trickled out, then a little more. It smelled strongly of chlorine. He had five minutes, after which he’d have to wait a week for his unit to be serviced again (so to speak, he almost managed to smile).

  Electrical power they had in abundance, all nuclear-generated (nothing renewable had compensated since the UN’s severe restrictions on fossil fuels): power for A/C and cruising the Macro till you were freeze-dried and distracted to death. But little water since the Second Drought. With less and less well-paying employment, electrical vehicles had never surged. People walked a lot more and smelled the worse for it, though Kevin was bothered only by the stronger perfumes.