by Méira Cook
I shrug, and immediately feel about ninety years old. I mean here I am standing in front of Orthotics Galore and shooting the breeze with an old guy in a smoking jacket and unlaced sneakers. Someone whose age my own is the square root of.
“If that’s a smoking jacket, where’s the smoke?”
“You want to smoke, young lady?” He brightens as if the slow, dopey blood in his veins has suddenly turned phosphorescent. As if he’s a slot machine landing thunk thunk thunk on a triple row of double cherries.
I do want to smoke, and I say so. Smoking is the thing I’m really good at. Everyone has a thing, Kat says, and this is mine. I’m talking smoke rings and torpedoes, I’m talking loop de loops. I’m talking exhaling through both nostrils at once like a street-festival dragon.
We start ambling toward the exit. Glaciers thinking about the possibility of moving could not be more cautious.
“Call me Milt,” the old man says when we finally Zimmer our way to the exit with its practically immovable pneumatic doors that seem to want to trap you in the Mall of Desolation forever. I wrestle one open for him and he gradually inches himself through, blinking into the sunlight, his weak eyes tearing up behind his fishbowl lenses. But even a beat-up old guy in a walker isn’t allowed to stand and smoke within fifteen metres of a public building, so we’re forced to dawdle across the parking lot to the bus shelter where you’re not allowed to smoke either, but everyone does. There are a couple of food court ladies in hairnets already in occupation but they move over when they see us coming. Take a load off, fellas, there’s room for everyone in the smoking hut!
Out on Empress Street, the road crews are using jackhammers to break up the asphalt. The sound keeps getting louder then fading away then ramping up again, like the corny soundtrack to a movie about giant earthmovers coming alive and taking over the world. I tell him my dad’s theory about there being only two seasons in this city and he nods as if he’s heard it before.
“Call me Milt,” he says again, over the noise. “Milt, short for Milton. A terrific poet but not such a good father, if you don’t mind me saying so.”
“Call me Ida,” I say, just for the hell of it.
“Still, he had some very nice daughters. Fine girls,” he says. He opens the bag he’s been clutching for the duration of our acquaintance and fishes out a packet of Marlboros.
Whoa! I think, but do not say.
Milt seems to know what I’m thinking, though, because he knocks me an enormous wink that involves both his eyes and half his face. I’m praying that he doesn’t light a cigarette by puffing at it and then handing it over, all saliva-ed up and mouth-germy. I don’t mind when Kat does that, even when she gets lipstick on the filter, but this guy? He has old man spittle zigzagging at the corners of his mouth. But he doesn’t gum up the cigarette, just lights it off of his own, like a normal person.
Smoking has put Milt in a rambling mood. He starts to tell me about his friend, Mr. Tergusson, who has a daughter he sees maybe once a month. She has enormous feet, this daughter of Mr. Tergusson’s. In fact, whenever his daughter visits, Mr. Tergusson just cannot get over her feet. Where did she get such big feet? his friend often wonders to himself. It’s difficult to believe that he’s fathered such a Labrador in human form. Then Milt who, get this, used to be in men’s clothing and apparel, whatever that is, kindly fills me in on Mr. Tergusson’s waist size (32 inches) and his shoe size (8 in a men’s narrow).
“Ah well,” Milt concludes, “that’s just how it goes with parents and kids.”
I ask him how, how does it go? For some reason I’m mad as hell but Milt just shrugs and blows a perfect smoke ring then shoots an arrow through the middle. The food court ladies clap and he nods in solemn acknowledgement.
“Break’s over,” says one. They grind their butts out and fling them into the long grass beneath the trash can. We watch them dawdle back to the mall, adjusting their hairnets and yawning.
Milt turns back to me. “What about your father?” he asks. “Just a for-instance.”
“An instance of what?”
“For instance, is he a good father, a kind man, a faithful husband?”
I snort. “None of the above, but he’s super fit, so.”
“And into what does he fit?”
I think of all the things my dad fits into: his loft apartment above the gym, his new car, his shiny new life. Everything, I guess, except his old family: my mom and me.
Milt is gazing at me from behind the magnification of his enormous spectacles. His eyes are curious and bleary like the eyes of a sleepy, but intelligent, burrowing animal, a gopher or a chipmunk. “And what about your alleged friend?” he burrows.
“Yes, he fits with Kat,” I say. “He’s her boss at the gym, but they’re good friends too.”
“Your father is a friend of your friend?”
“Yeah, well, I don’t have any friends so he gave me one of his.”
“Huh,” Milt says. “A new world.”
I think of Kat — her latex skin and her nylon hair and her double double Ds. She is ten years older than me and fifteen years younger than my dad. She fits in between us, where my mom used to be.
“Yup, yup. Being a father, it ain’t easy. If you don’t mind me saying.”
“How many kids do you have?” I ask.
“One living, two dead,” he tells me.
After that we just smoke for a while. Milt blows three smoke rings in a row, the first one already beginning to waver and break up before the last is fully formed. A bus comes by but doesn’t stop. There’s no one at the bus stop anyway, except us two, and my natural tendency toward invisibility is enhanced by the presence of this old guy beside me. Two dead, I keep thinking. How did he manage to lose two kids? Tragic, my mom would say (hand over her mouth). Life, eh, my dad would say (shrugging). OhEmGee!!! Courtney would text, spelling out the letters (her thing), three exclamations minimum. But Kat would probably just go, “How careless is that?” and be on her merry way.
It’s hot out, after the air conditioned mall. The sun is like a pinball, zinging off every windscreen and side mirror and metallic surface in the parking lot. I’m trying to wriggle out of my hoodie when Milt puts out his hand and I think, Here it comes.
“Easy does it, Ida,” he says.
I am so grossed out that I want to vomit. I flick my cigarette away and get up to leave. The old man is clutching at my tank top. The veins in his hands look like they’ve been badly knitted, and his nails are thick yellow ridges, like rinds of hard cheese. Which is when I realize that, benefit-of-the-doubt-wise, he was probably only trying to prevent my tank top from riding up over my head. I’m flooded with shame and guilt and wish I was dead. Luckily this is such a familiar feeling that I’m immediately comforted.
“Slow down there, Lady Godiva,” Milt says. He lights us both another cigarette and passes mine over. We sit there in the noisy, dusty, fumy parking lot, staring into space and smoking. I don’t know how I’m going to get home and I’m just considering hitting up Milt for bus fare when he points. “Lookie, lookie, here comes cookie.”
“So you did see her,” I say, and he taps the side of his nose with his finger. Kat comes skipping toward us.
“There you are, my adorable Dora. Vamanos! Let’s blow this two-bit Popsicle stand.”
“A pleasure to meet you, young lady.” Milt shuffles to his feet and holds out his hand. “You can call me Milt.”
“Milt!” yells Kat. “Milt, Milt, Bo-Bilt, Banana-Fana Fo-Filt, Fee-Fi-Mo-Ilt, MILT!”
“Ha, good one,” says Milt. “And I’ll call you Hit and Run, eh. I’ll call you Locomotive.”
Kat cottons on. “You can call me the Reaper,” she says. “You can call me Euthanasia.” She takes him in, from his monster-truck sneakers trailing their fraying, knotted laces, to his smoking jacket that looks bald and shabby in the sunlight. Milt flour
ishes his green silk handkerchief and wipes his forehead. Then he grins, as if to indicate that she is an unreliable child but ho-boy, one smart cookie.
“O indignity, O blot!” he exclaims in a quotey sort of voice. He goes on for a long time, one hand on his red velvet breast. When he’s finished, he beams at her. “My namesake, Mr. John Milton.”
Without missing a beat Kat starts to sing our current favourite song: “You jerk, you jerk, you are s-uu-c-h a jerk!” She blows through the chorus twice, really belting it out, then takes a bow. “My idol, Ms. Kim Stockwood,” she deadpans.
“Stockwood…Stockwood…Do I know her father?” Milt asks.
Kat catches my eye and makes the international sign for This-guy-should-be- locked-up, or perhaps it’s the one for That-is-one-totally-rad-smoking-jacket. Who knows? The thoughts that used to flash between us, fast as text messages, are on a half bar, and the signals have begun to waver and break up.
“O-kay,” Kat says, cracking herself up at the memory of a long ago joke. “Je suis désolée but it’s time to go. Allons-y, Chop?” She’s standing in front of the sun with her long legs and bright hair that, just this minute, has burst into flame. Her fierce and terrible beauty. She looks like the mannequin angels of my remotest longing.
I stand up and shuffle after her.
“Goodbye, Ida,” Milt calls. “Maybe we’ll bump into one another again.”
I’m halfway across the parking lot and Kat is going on about Ida — “I’da thought you had better things to do than pick up dirty old men, Chop!” — and yakking about her bra status, when I remember something. I turn and run across the parking lot, swerving to avoid toddlers and traffic and old women driving their dead husband’s enormous cars. My heart is pounding and I can feel the blood jackhammering at my temples, but he’s still sitting there, leaning forward on his walker and staring into space.
He doesn’t say anything and neither do I. I balance on my haunches before him and grab hold of his right foot in its giant trainer. With one knotted, trailing lace in each hand, I make two loops, tie them in a butterfly, then double knot the bow. When I’ve finished one foot I get busy on the other.
Dog Days
Seven
The Celluloid Museum
1.
Loping. Sams is loping. He likes the sound of the word because of its loopy, jerky, slightly jolting yet satisfyingly stride-along shape. It is the talisman that gets him safely past two-dog house and its black roar. Which is what he has to pass on his way to the movie rental store — there is no other way, strictly speaking. Speaking less strictly, there are other ways and plenty of them — detours, back lanes, alleyways — it’s a neighbourhood after all. Loping loping loping, thinks Sams with each loopy, jerky, slightly jolting, satisfyingly stride-along pace, and two-dog house and its black roar recedes into the distance.
2.
Weary and restless are the two main feelings Sams feels. Mostly alternating but sometimes doubling up, so that a day of weariness will be followed by a night of exhaustion. Or else a night spent loping through the city streets, faster and harder as morning approaches and he grows desperate, will somehow fail to tire him, and he’ll spend the next day spinning on his bed beside the dying creature and the phosphorous glow cast by his dying. But worst of all are the times when weariness and restlessness meet in the middle like ancient lovers running toward one another from opposite ends of the bright jerky screen that is projected directly into his head from some unassailable God-like source.
Sams squeezes his eyes shut to escape the terrible movie. But all afternoon the lovers Weary and Restless embrace and part and reconcile and die in each other’s arms.
Tonight he knows he has to get away before the midnight screening, so he’s on the road by well before. Well before is because he doesn’t wear a watch. Nights like this a watch wouldn’t work anyway — time slows or stops or starts to tick backward. Pages tear off the kitchen calendar, the sun yoyos across the horizon, moons wax and wane in the Etch-A-Sketch sky. His blood turns magnetic and time hangs heavy as a row of knives on a kitchen strip. The last thing he wants is to be responsible for the world’s endless fall. But well before means he has to wait a spell because the days are lit at both ends and burn down swiftly. And all day, light pours out of things, out of the mouths of things (dogs, people on the other end of the leashes of dogs, cars, birds, kids in strollers crying, windows, Imee pointing at the mad, light-breathing daffodils, kids in strollers laughing, mailboxes).
3.
But mainly dogs.
4.
Sams throws a blanket over the creature and bolts. Tries to bolt. The creature is dying but not swiftly or with grace, decorum, good sportsmanship, punctuality, avoirdupois, or any appreciation for the comfort of others. Not with wisdom gleaned from experience or joy snatched from pain, either. So it goes, so it goes.
5.
Who He Is
A creature, a thingummy. Dying.
Sams doesn’t know why or even, strictly speaking, who.
A found creature, a lost soul.
Found him in the corner of his room one day.
Not dying fast enough.
Finders keepers.
Resembles a crow with a rook’s head.
Call me anything you like, it says.
6.
The problem of his hunger still consumes him. (Ha-ha, good one, Sams.)
Lazar comes home from school hauling a carrier bag full of groceries. He munches Pop-Tarts from an open box while he fries something on the stove, stirring and salting, rustling a recipe torn from the Riverview News. Scratching his chin and chewing his bottom lip. The sweet pink chemical smell of the Pop-Tarts makes Sams’s eyes water.
“Oh, right,” says Lazar when he lifts his head from the stove. He throws the box of Pop-Tarts into the freezer where all the terrible smells are stored and thumps a couple of plates onto the kitchen table. His brother’s been dragging home groceries every night, fretting over vegetables and oozy packets of butcher-wrapped meat. Bottles and jars of Sams doesn’t like to say what. It reminds him of a movie he’s seen. Two brothers in a kitchen.
“Hey, Sams,” says Lazar. “What’s eating you?” (Ha, good one, Lazar.)
7.
So, two things then, thinks Sams, still loping.
There is always food.
He is always hungry.
Do these two things cancel each other out? Are they a contradiction or a syllogism? What would Lazar do? Sams tries multiple choice.
There is always food but he is always hungry.
All men are hungry.
Sams is a man.
Therefore Sams is a liar.
Sams is vexed, his spirits brought low. Long story short — nothing seems to fit anymore. Not his blinds that fail to keep out the seeping day, and not his bedroom window that, every evening, transforms into a rectangle of swarming light. Not his room or his bed or his pillow, not his jacket or his jeans or his skin. Everything is too big or too small, too hot or too cold, too smooth or too lumpy. All of creation has boiled down into a lukewarm bowl of Not enough and Too much and Try again later, pal.
8.
Hopelessly confused, Sams, still loping. The sky has cracked into a jigsaw that won’t fit together, quite. One piece always missing, some bit of cloud no one can find. The wind crackles with electricity; gravity is losing its hold on things. Hence, the drifting trees. Also, some houses are beginning to detach from the street and float upward. Those ones, at the end of the block.
9.
List of Things that Don’t Fit
too much light
words into word-holes
hands into pockets
photo in magnetic refrigerator frame (keeps falling)
doors in doorframes (keep banging)
Greetings From Your Wor
ld Vision Child into envelope provided
skin and skin’s faulty shrink wrap
dog into god
10.
A crow moves in a branch above Sams. Caw, it says. And then, White food.
Oh, thinks Sams, of course.
It’s Strictly Speaking come to the rescue again. Occasionally Strictly Speaking manages to transform himself into a raggedy old bird and fly reluctantly to Sams’s rescue, but mostly he is a sick and dying creature panting in the corner of Sams’s bedroom. Where did he come from? Heaven knows. Heaven or its counterweight, Hell.
Old crow, old creature! No faith in human nature, no wishes to bestow. And the mouth on him! But he’s useful every now and again. Today he bundles himself awkwardly from branch to branch beside the loping Sams, come to remind him, come to say —
White food.
Oh yeah. Sams shudders as he recalls the ferocious clashing colours that tumble in Lazar’s grocery bags. How they hiss themselves to a frenzy in hot oil then languish hideously on brown rice.
All the bright and quarrelsome food! He’s forgotten that he only eats white bread, white cheese, white meat, and the albumen of hard-boiled eggs whose poisonous-looking yolks he knocks out with the tip of a spoon. His gaze averted, his breath held. His favourite meal is a glass of milk.
That’s just the way things are.
11.
“Oh, leave him alone, Max,” Maggie would say. “Pick your battles, sweetheart.”
“Okay,” Max would pretend to give the matter some consideration. “I pick food, I pick goddamn nourishment. I pick normal hemoglobin levels and vitamin intake and the kid not dying of rickets. I mean look at him, just look —”
The two of them would both be staring at him now. “He can’t help it,” Maggie would try to explain, but by then Sams would be long gone. Sometimes this elsewhereness was physical — sometimes he’d manage to grab his leather jacket in time and slide out of the room, the house, the world, shrugging off their attention with an impatient movement of his shoulders. But at other times he was just too damn weary or clumsy or lead footed, and then he was left high and dry, stranded with the two of them in their fond argument. So it behooved him to think fast and act faster.