by Kris Bertin
You make up your mind in there, huh? He asks.
Yeah, I tell him. Nice bathroom.
It needs some good hard work but it’s a good deal, he says.
That it is, I say, knowing immediately he’s the one who wrote the description on Kijiji. In it, good described the room, the building, the courtyard, and the balcony.
He stands around for a minute, looking at the money. He didn’t ask for a specific amount, didn’t mention anything about a deposit. No paperwork of any kind has been filled out. He pockets the money instead of counting it, scratches his swollen chin and clears his throat. Looks at me.
You—what’s your name again?
I’m Rick.
I expect him to tell me his name but he doesn’t. He doesn’t do anything except make for the door, the floor shuddering underneath him. I think he’s gone at first, but later I see him in the hallway, smoking a cigarette near an open window, January air rolling in. On the floor next to him is a bloated stack of newspapers and magazines. He’s reading an Auto Trader with one hand, and there’s a red New Testament facedown in his lap.
I move in.
My door is too wide for the doorway, but also too short. The floor is half that kind of zigzag woodblock flooring and half linoleum with no clear division between them. The bedroom is on a down slope and it’s small, almost too small for my bed. Two pipes stick out of the wall and there’s one coming up from the carpet, sealed up with hard, yellow foam. There’s a crack in the bathroom wall so big I can see the back of the fridge one room over. The view from the window is mostly of the wrought-iron sign for the building: CARTER ARMS, and beyond that, the elementary school across the street. Already, I can hear something in the walls. Already, I know it’s a rat.
I find the balcony. There’s a loose section of fake wood panelling leaned over the glass sliding door. Only after I try to get outside do I notice that there’s a handwritten note that was stuck on the glass, now fallen onto the floor:
DO NOT GO ON BALCONY
I get the door open with a screwdriver and go out. It’s cemented into the building just fine, but the railing is loose as hell. I stand in the cold and smoke a pipe. I do this every day. I don’t work. I don’t do anything else. I spend nearly every hour in my apartment, lying down and looking up at the lights. Trying not to think about my mother or father, or what my friends are up to. Or sometimes I’m in the hallway, reading something from the landlord’s pile. Other times I wade through slush and sit on the picnic tables in the courtyard and look at the building. It’s there that Serge from 204 comes out to meet me and I’m told things about the building, whether I want to hear them or not, whether I acknowledge his existence or not. Our conversation is an explanation of the world around us that could stop and start and pick up where it left off. A looped recording at a historic site in a toque and scarf, following me around:
Carter Arms was built in the forties, and has never been up to code because of war shortages. My apartment actually used to be the electrical and storage room. My bedroom was a bathroom, and my bathroom was a closet.
The landlord is just the landlord, not the owner. The owner is Mrs. Tremblay, who lives on the fourth floor, who was born in this very building. She’s got some kind of muscular disorder and can’t move around, so no one ever sees her.
Our floor consists of me, Serge, our landlord, our landlord’s ex-wife, and a single mother and her son in 201. He says the landlord’s ex-wife will sleep with me if I go there. That’s all I have to do, just show up.
I nod, grunt, and say uh huh to him. Mostly I stare ahead and don’t say anything, try to affect some smaller muscular disorder of my own. I hadn’t counted on someone like him being here, someone trying to be pals, and I don’t know how to deal with it. At night I can see the white glow of his kitchen coming through the crack in the bathroom, his fridge humming at me. Can hear him shuffling around in there, making little snapping sounds. His fingers or gum. Or maybe a fly swatter.
One night, after a long soak in the tub, I realize they’re cards. He’s playing solitaire.
One day, a kid on the stairs asks me why I’m living here.
The second floor? I ask.
Crater Arms. You white but you ain’t old. We got white guys but they all old.
Crater Arms?
The building, stupid.
Yeah, right, I say, then try to make my way past him.
So why? He shouts down at me. Two more stairways down he shouts it again, and when I go out the door he’s hanging out the window saying hey mister hey mister. When I come back later, he’s gone, but there’s a note under my door that says U SUCK DICKS. It’s colder than usual so I stay in my clothes, then get in a sleeping bag and get all cocooned. I want to sleep but all I can think about is crater arms, crater arms. I see them, a pair of women’s arms, plump and white with red chunks out of them. Holes, craters, golf-ball-sized pieces of her eaten away. At some point I realize they’re my mother’s arms and, in one of those half-dreaming moments, I say (or maybe think) it’s spread to her arms.
The next day I try to put on clean clothes, but the rat has shit in every drawer. They’re dry little turds you can just shake off, but he’s shat on my underwear too, which is just too much for me. I go back to my house, take the bus there, but it’s so empty and so much the same as it always was that I can’t take it. I take Mom’s picture off the wall, but it leaves behind a weird kind of space so I put it back and go home to Crater Arms in my father’s Acura.
I catch the landlord reading the Bible again, smoking. I don’t ask to join him, but I do, taking out my pipe and lighting it. I stand while he sits and after a while he says it’s funny that a young person would be smoking one of those.
I tell him my father did, but quickly change the subject.
You’re religious, I say.
Yeah. Well, yeah, he coughs up and swallows some phlegm. I mean, I don’t know which one is right or what have you. But there is a god, I know that.
I nod and take a few puffs.
How do you know? I ask casually.
Maybe you should talk to a minister. He looks embarrassed, clears his throat again.
I’ve talked to them before, I say. I want to talk to you.
After a moment or two, he takes me to 203 and knocks on the door. It opens immediately, and another fat person’s there in the doorway, almost bigger than he is. She has short, curly hair and thick glasses. Introduces herself as Michelle, and invites me to come in. Her place is tidy, bigger than my room, but it’s almost more empty than mine. It seems like after the separation she was the one who got the new place. The other kind of emptiness.
I’m sat between her and him, given tea and a big plate of cookies from a package. He tells her to tell me about her experience, and she gives him a look, like maybe he’s out of line telling anyone about her experience. But she tells me about it, and only after does she think to ask if I believe in Jesus Christ. I tell her my mother did, but my father only believed in god. He said all that other stuff was a cash grab.
And what do you think, she asks.
I think you’re probably telling the truth, I say.
I stare at the ceiling and think about her story for days. About the time she thought she was pregnant but when she went to the doctor it turned out she had a tumor as big as a softball. Said she didn’t believe in the Bible or anything before that, but saw god the night before her surgery, standing in the corner of her room.
He’d been tall, maybe ten-feet tall, and was glowing green. He had a beard and long hair and wore green robes, but didn’t speak. He came over, made her husband disappear by raising his big green eyebrows, then drove his hands into her stomach. After that, the operation yielded no results. They found zero tumors. None.
I didn’t ask what that meant to her, or what she thought about all of it. I just listened. To me, it seemed much mo
re convincing than anything I’d ever read in a bible. She said that God didn’t seem like he was a spirit, it was more like he was a real thing, like he was really there in the apartment, walking around. Like if you examined the floor you’d come away with some evidence. Fibres from his robe and a footprint of crypto-zoological proportions.
I go out to buy rat traps and run into the kid again. Ask him if he’s ever seen anything in the building.
Like what? he says.
Like a ghost, I say.
Yeah I saw a ghost. Had a backwards hat on and shit.
Was he green? I ask.
Hell yeah he was green. He was hella green.
I live here because my parents died, I tell him.
And they ghosts now?
Maybe, I say. I don’t really know.
We stand around for a minute. He tells me his name is Jamie. I tell him mine is Rick. Do you want to go buy rat traps?
Sure, he says. We drive to Canadian Tire and buy twelve of them. Spend all afternoon setting them up, playing with them, throwing balls of paper at them and setting them off so they jump in the air. By eight o’clock, he has to go home, and there’s no sign of god or the rat by then.
After a couple weeks I catch up with my best friend, the one I can’t afford to keep hiding from, and the two of us go out for breakfast. There isn’t really a lot for me to say, but he says a lot of what he’s expected to. Am I okay, how am I doing, and how am I really doing? That kind of stuff. I tell him I’m doing good, and I try to explain that even though it seems like I’m doing nothing, I actually feel like I’m accomplishing something.
What are you doing? He asks.
If god was a real guy, I say, that would mean he lives in a real place.
That doesn’t really answer anything, he says.
And so I tell him that maybe he shouldn’t ask so many dumb fucking questions then. I say something like:
I’m doing whatever the fuck I’m doing and if I wanted you to know all about it, I’d tell you.
Then we sit around our Breakfast Slammers, not talking.
It was a cruel thing to say, and it’s almost been long enough that I probably can’t get away with saying things like that anymore.
In my head, we don’t argue, don’t part ways then and there. In my head, the way it goes is we go back to the house, and we get on top of the roof and talk about things. Not the way things are now, or even the way things used to be. We just talk about things, like movies and books, motorcycles. We would find rocks on the roof that we’d thrown up there before and have a contest throwing them as far into the woods as we could. I would get a déjà-vu feeling, or maybe a being-watched feeling.
I knock on Michelle’s door, and go in. We don’t have sex, but I sit there and have her read to me from the Bible until I get tired and ask her about seeing god again. She tells me her story again, and, as a bonus, tells me about a friend of a friend who was planning to kill himself by jumping off a bridge.
An eagle landed on the bridge, perched on the rail, right next to him, she says.
Eventually I ask her. If god’s a real guy, could you go where he lives? And get there without having to die?
Maybe through prayer, she says.
I think if someone else had said it to me, it might’ve seemed like a bullshit answer. Like maybe you need to change the way your mind works, I half-ask.
She doesn’t really answer, but I wasn’t really asking her anyway.
In the hallway, Jamie says he heard a snap in my apartment.
We go in, and the trap near the radiator is upside down, blood sprayed on the metal.
I turn it over and there he is, at peace. One of his little pink hands is curled into a ball, the other has a couple little fingers raised.
Looks like he’s asking us a question, Jamie says, and he’s right. The expression on its little brown face is genuinely inquisitive, searching our huge faces for some kind of answer.
It’s maybe the first nice day of spring that I wake up to an alarm. And on top of that there’s a different sound—a pitter-patter kind of splattering sound. When I get dressed and go into the living room there’s a narrow beam of rusty water dribbling out of the sprinkler. There’s no clear indication of what’s actually happening, but I get dressed anyway. I take a minute to think about what I should try to save incase there actually is a fire, and all I can think to take is the paper skeleton I’m making Jamie for science class. It doesn’t have all two hundred and six bones, but it has the ones that count. It has little brass fasteners and can fold up.
Everyone’s in the courtyard, looking up at the building, but it doesn’t seem to be on fire. Jamie is there with his mom, clutching his Xbox. He’s telling his mother he forgot his other controllers, but she says she doesn’t care. She’s trying to squint at the building, figure out if it’s on fire or not.
And my games, he says. Then he looks at me and repeats it, so I give him the skeleton.
He looks at it, says thank you, then shows it to his mother.
Eventually the landlord comes down, out of breath. He’s followed by Michelle, wheeling forward Mrs. Tremblay, who’s draped in white blankets like a bride. I don’t think any of us have seen her before, or at least it seems that way, because everyone’s looking at her. She takes up all our focus, like she’s even bigger than the apartment building.
Her skin looks smooth and soft, and her hair is long, almost down to her waist. She looks tired, her head tilted to one side like it’s heavy. But she’s beautiful. She’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in maybe my whole life. I realize I’m surprised that something like her was here, all along, just a few flights of stairs separating her and me.
Michelle tells us it’s okay, everything’s going to be okay, but it sounds like it’s coming from Mrs. Tremblay, speaking without moving her mouth, speaking directly into my mind.
EVERYWHERE MONEY
I quit because money was everywhere.
Inside my clock. In the hollow base of my bedside lamp. In a Ziploc bag sunk to the bottom the litter box. Taped between every single page of every single issue of Motocross magazine from 2006 to 2010. My framed and signed Hulk Hogan picture had so much cash in it that it couldn’t stay up with a regular-sized nail. My iron had six thousand dollars under the heating plate, and when I plugged it in by accident, I nearly burned down the place. Cash I didn’t hide ended up chewed apart by my ex’s rabbit, so it all ended up inside, or attached to, or buried under something. It was like a house crawling with cockroaches or ants or some other thing that gets inside of a place and just takes over.
It was my ex, Tan, who got me the job. We came to Montreal together, with nothing but our love, a rabbit, and her connections to various fucked-up crooks and lowlifes. She joined up with people who stole credit cards. I guess regular people or the newspaper would call it a fraud ring or something. She wouldn’t give me any details about it. All I knew was she got a job as a manager at a fancy club, but her real job was doing something equally fancy with customers’ Visas. I knew it involved the point of sale computer where all the orders were rung in and paid for, and the little USB she had on her keychain alongside a bottle opener and a tiny Mr. Potato Head missing all of its removable features. I got the idea that she was doing a more sophisticated version of my job—that I was in an entry-level criminal position and she was a semi-pro just waiting to get scooped up into the big leagues.
At my work, we got seventy-five dollars for every bank account number we nabbed, plus an on-the-books ten-dollar hourly wage with MGCI Global, which logged every hour you did as if you were in an office doing cold calls for forty-five hours. On top of that, you made a percentage on however much money they yanked out with the account number you gave them. There was no way of knowing how much cash they actually would withdraw from an account once they gave the authorization, but it wasn’t unusual to have an
extra grand or more in my wad at the end of the week.
I was told our boss Marcel had more offices all over the city, separate cells of scammers with no connection to one another, sometimes in actual call centres, or even working from home with a little scrambler/computer thing that plugged into your phone and randomly autodialled suckers for you. This was an option offered when we took sick days.
Our little operation was in a downtown office complex between a real estate agency and a dentist. We’d go in from noon to maybe seven, and at the end of it send off an encrypted email with the account numbers. A week later the boss personally delivered all of our money from a messenger bag bloated with cash. The wads—and I’m not exaggerating here—were as big as submarine sandwiches.
It’s easy work. It’s the same thing as every message in your email’s junk folder, every letter that has YOU HAVE ALREADY WON printed on the envelope. You tell people they won some money from a contest (which they didn’t enter), then tell them they need to give you a smaller amount of cash in order to free up the larger sum. Most people didn’t fall for it. Most people would laugh and hang up, or else get pissed and start swearing at you—call you human scum, whatever. But some people didn’t. Some people would give us their bank account number and authorize a cash transfer that they thought was for something like forty bucks in order to get their cool million, and our company—if you could call our company a company—ate their life savings. And that was it. Easy.
I quit because of our boss, Marcel.
He was only five-foot-seven, but he must’ve weighed two hundred and thirty pounds and was definitely on steroids. He was thick and wide-backed and veiny—but wore leisure wear from the seventies. Turtlenecks and polo shirts with slacks up to his ribcage, big-lapelled jackets that bunched weirdly on his huge body. He supposedly ran the whole show, and was personally involved with everything and everyone from the ground level up. It seemed like he was making it easier for the police to nab him, but I guess he had his own reasons for doing it.