Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Like white on rice, says Strictly Speaking.

  Sams knows what he means.

  You gotta act fast or they’ll be on you, says Strictly Speaking. Like —

  Yeah, says Sams. (White on rice.)

  12.

  One day, back…

  …in winter, Sams woke unexpectedly, his eyes clicking open in the dark. What had roused him? Was it silence? Was it time?

  The all-night-falling snow stopped falling the moment he opened his eyes. Perhaps it was dream snow all along. Sleep snow, a white weather system drifting through a blank white mind. This was the first time he saw him.

  The creature was crouched in the corner of Sams’s room, picking at the lice in his pin feathers. He had a rode-hard and hung-up-dry look about him.

  Hard day’s night? asked Sams.

  Strictly speaking, the creature replied.

  He looked like a devil on a chain but said he was a guardian angel. In the end it turned out he was only a crummy bastard, sick as hell. His eyes were yellow as liver failure and his wings were peeling off his back as if he didn’t deserve them. He claimed that high living, booze, and dames were the cause of his dereliction but that was just bravado. He was always a game bird. Sams brought him cigarettes to smoke and Scotch to drink and day-old horoscopes to read. No matter how bad the predictions were, the future was already the past by then.

  Spring arrived with a terrible sleep hangover. The creature was dying. He looked chewed up and spit out and he stank to high heaven. That old squatter, death, had found a home in him.

  13.

  Strictly Speaking is still following Sams, flying from tree to tree with an awkward flap of his perforating wings. Although flying isn’t the word for it, not exactly. More like a weary gathering followed by a ragged bundle outward. More like a Hail Mary pass into the vanishing future. He launches himself from branch to branch and somehow sticks, somehow holds. Dandruff drifts from his wing sprouts and a smell like ancient bandages precedes him. The ointment on old, blackened bandages.

  Scoot, says Sams kindly.

  Strictly Speaking opens his cracked beak to reply but what with all the dying he is doing, finds he has no energy for his cursing. Caw, he mumbles weakly.

  Scoot, says Sams but less kindly. Obviously.

  The creature has been practicing his scorn. He is scornful of anyone who might outlive him. (Point: Everyone.)

  Buy a vowel? he offers. The only thing keeping him alive is Wheel of Fortune. It’s mainly Spin Girl, Sams suspects, because whenever she appears he caws himself into a frenzy, trying to buy vowels and solve puzzles.

  14.

  Black Bird Shot, says Sams, and Strictly Speaking flies away.

  15.

  Sams lopes past the high school sports field. “Go Ravens!” reads the scoreboard. “Have a Safe Summer!” Sams hopes to God the summer wins. He is heading to Café D so that he can do his thinking and compile his monthly movie selection. His list.

  “Sams’s Picks” is late again so he has to goddamn hurry up and get it done which is what his boss at the Celluloid Museum told him, in so many words. Actually, in those exact words, also adding some others but stopping when he remembered the circumstances that might have extenuated Sams’s tardiness.

  Thunder Clap Hands, Sams mumbles.

  The café is only two kilometers away, as the crow flies. Strictly Speaking is waiting for him when he gets there. What took you so long? he cackles. One day that crow will die laughing, mort de rire.

  Café D is Sams’s favourite place to do his thinking. He often remains at his table all afternoon, working on his list and occupying valuable retail space. But Dieter is resigned to him. Sams is his guarantor, the tithe he offers up to God. Dieter even allows the kid to buy a glass of milk instead of a cup of coffee, if he has money on him, which today — feeling frantically in his pocket — for some reason, he does.

  Sams slaps down a dollar coin on the counter and Dieter nods hello and pours him his milk. To which Sams smiles his thanks, waving away any fugitive offers of change, as if to say — and grandly — keep it, my good fellow.

  In truth, the price of a glass of milk is greater than your average dollar and has been for some time. But in his heart Sams is a splendid tipper and Dieter, a generous man, bears him no ill will.

  16.

  Because there are so many ways to be sad (obviously), Sams knows he has to be damn careful. Sorrow isn’t what he means and anguish is the opposite. Also melancholy, also unrestrained weeping.

  Sams drums his fingers against the table — a word is coming to him. This is how all his lists begin. (They begin and then they begat.) The word begats the list, the list begats exhaustion, exhaustion begats visions and monsters, visions and monsters begat sleep.

  Liquid trembles at the rim of a slightly rocking glass. He downs his milk in a couple of gulps. His head still thrown back, he wipes his mouth against his sleeve and blinks up at the ceiling of Café D.

  What is a list? A reminder, an autobiography, a chronic disability. A cross-hatching of pencil marks stippled with grubby pink eraser flecks. Time jerking through its sprockets at twenty-four frames per second. For Sams, lists are what keep him from cracking into all his shiny pieces.

  He likes to have his word in place before he begins, although (obviously) the object of the list is to conceal the word from view. Perhaps the word will come to him if he continues with his list and his thoughts and his milk. Unfortunately his milk is finished, but maybe?

  Sams cocks a hopeful eye at Dieter who either pretends to, or does not pretend to, ignore him, but either way.

  17.

  Or a list can be a method of elimination. A hit list.

  18.

  The man at the next table smiles at Sams as if he recognizes him from somewhere. He wears a heavy coat and his shoes are soaked. It’s summer, not a cloud in sight, no rain for weeks. He’s like a visitor from another time (winter) and place (again, winter), carrying his own weather system around with him.

  The man smiles at Sams but his sadness streams out of him like tickertape. His sadness is a long white scarf looped around his neck. For a moment Sams thinks he recognizes him, but no.

  19.

  Bernadette stops by his table to drop off a coffee, compliments of the house.

  “Hey, Samson, ça va?” Sams and Bernie have known each other forever, having both grown up on Magnolia Street although, as soon as she could, Bernie fled that neighbourhood of leafy trees, and after-school piano lessons, and kids playing street hockey, shouting Car! Car! Car! in the dusk.

  “Hey, Samson. Ça va?” she repeats in case he hasn’t heard her.

  Sams is mightily startled and mightily pleased although — as always seems to be the case — the second doesn’t cancel out the first but merely lopes along beside it.

  “Hey, Je m’appelle Bernadette.”

  She bursts out laughing, the way she always does when he calls her Bernadette. She’s Bernie, has been since she could swing her first punch, although she eventually got tired of beating him up. Sams is Sams: a leopard with permanent spots, an old dog resistant to new tricks. Sometimes he calls her Song of Bernadette, and sometimes, as today, she is Je m’appelle Bernadette (both movies), and sometimes he sings, “There was a child named Bernadette,” or “Bernadette, people are searchin’,” (both songs), because he has known her forever. In retaliation she calls him Samson, although she won’t let anyone else do that. And sometimes she just sings the chorus to that song, he knows the one. Very softly: If I had my way, if I had my way, if I had my way…

  “Whoa, haven’t you finished your lineup?” she exclaims. She means his list (obviously), which Sams is scribbling on a paper napkin, both sides. There’s a stack of paper napkins beside him, at the ready, because you never know.

  “Working on it,” he says.

  �
�Utopian Game Theory?” she asks hopefully, trying to guess the theme of his upcoming list. “Heat Wave? Misplaced Patriotism?”

  Misplaced Patriotism is because of Canada Day, just passed, and American Independence Day coming up, which Sams understands (he almost always understands Bernadette). Alternately, she could be thinking of the weather, Hermann Hesse’s birthday, or the exact midpoint of the year, which today just happens to be.

  You never know.

  20.

  There are exactly 182 days on either side of July 2nd. Today is a drain the year has been circling. If it was a leap year the middle would be July 4th, but no.

  Sams likes middles, perhaps to excess. Movies have taught him to be wary of the darkness that waits in ambush on either side of the year or the screen. Instead he tries to live inside his head, that bright lozenge of flickering light. But sometimes the light gets out and escapes, c’est la vie.

  He’s given up trying to figure out where the story ends and he begins.

  Perhaps that’s why he likes middles. They are the no man’s land where the angels are still working the angles in the service of wings, and Darth Vader is nobody’s father yet, and the zombies are merely on their way to being up to no good. Sams lives in the exact centre of the North American continent, in no danger of falling off the edge of anything, least of all reason.

  21.

  Bernadette is still puzzling over the key to his list. The one that will explain everything. Also, she’s mad as a hornet about the upcoming American election and the low-life, no-account Republican candidate who doesn’t stand a chance but has the power to arouse anger. Sams ought to do a list on resistance, she tells him, resistance in the movies. She immediately looks abashed. Sams’s list is not open to debate or interpretation, everyone knows that.

  But Sams doesn’t take offence. She is just Bernadette; she likes to act tough and mostly succeeds, but she has a weak spot for the way history tries to wedge itself inside time. Either one or the other is the wrong shape, he wants to tell her. Either history or time.

  Give her credit, though — she never goes Dead Fathers? She never goes Highway Accidents? She never goes Strange Passengers? Ever since her mother died last year, Sams can see that something has broken in her.

  Not open but apart.

  Now she squints, craning to read his list upside down, so Sams turns it around for her and Bernadette goes, “Oh, sad movies.”

  It isn’t, but tant pis. Nobody’s ever gotten the point of his Picks, which is how Sams likes it. They all think they have — his fans — which is how they like it.

  “What’s the saddest movie you’ve ever seen?” he asks anyway.

  “Umbrellas of Cherbourg, hands down. No contest.” She starts to tell him why, which has to do with unrequited love (obviously) and how beautiful that French actress was. Catherine Deneuve, right? But she can’t remember the actor’s name. The male lead. Agh! There’s snow at the end, so much snow. Deneuve stops at the gas station with her daughter, which is most likely his daughter too, and at first pretends not to recognize him. Or maybe she really doesn’t recognize him — is that possible? Bernadette can’t remember.

  “Which would be sadder?” she wonders.

  “Not recognizing him at all,” says Sams (obviously). “And him not recognizing her.”

  “Well, one of them has to recognize the other one. Otherwise what’s the point?”

  Sams shrugs. Not recognizing is the point. He remembers the movie and the way the wallpaper always matched the girl’s dress — sometimes exactly, sometimes with subtle variations. He doesn’t know what this means — that the girl is a piece of scenery? That the walls are alive? Perhaps that when you’re in love everything coincides with itself, everything is a perfect match.

  “Wait a minute,” Bernadette says. “They do recognize each other. Of course they do. At least I think they do. Why can’t I remember?”

  Sams doesn’t know. He’s never been in love. There is something in him that won’t break, or maybe breaks but all the time and in the wrong place.

  22.

  The snow begins to fall when the lovers recognize each other. So much snow.

  23.

  “Hey, Samson, are you coming tonight?” asks Bernadette. “Come, if you want.”

  Sams nods. Nods, again.

  “Agh,” she reminds him. “Nuit Blanche, you goof.”

  24.

  The man at the next table is still staring at Sams. Which would be sadder: pretending not to recognize him or not recognizing him? Sams shrugs. He himself is not the sort of fellow who looks like someone anyone knows.

  25.

  Bernie has gone off, singing to herself. “If I had my way, if I had my way, if I had my way, I would tear this old building down.”

  26.

  List of What Happened at Café D

  Dieter nods at Sams (not smiling).

  Sams goes, Hello Dieter.

  Sams buys his milk and tips Dieter.

  Dieter nods at Sams (smiling).

  Sams drinks his milk, begins his Picks.

  Man in overcoat looks at Sams, but no.

  Bernadette brings Sams a coffee, compliments of the house.

  Bernadette goes, Ça va, Samson?

  Bernadette goes, Umbrellas of Cherbourg, hands down.

  Come if you want, says Bernadette.

  Goes off singing.

  Sams works on his Picks.

  Overcoat man looks at Sams but Sams is the wrong man.

  Sams gives the man the cup of coffee that Bernadette had brought him. Compliments of the house, he goes.

  Sams wishes he could get more milk but —

  He doesn’t have his three wishes yet so —

  No more milk.

  27.

  Sams is back in the flow of time, back in his dolorous mind, back on the street. A girl in an evening dress and gold sandals floats by. She looks like someone he ought to know. At first he thinks, Bernadette? But, no.

  Was that Spin Girl? asks Strictly Speaking, appearing suddenly from nowhere.

  Whoa! thinks Sams. Why didn’t he recognize her? Electric Eel Pie! Surprise Blow Fly! Stun Gun Shy!

  Buy a vowel, says Strictly Speaking. Rolling his Eye Ball Bearings.

  28.

  “What now?” asks Sams, trying to keep the exasperation out of his voice. Trying but not succeeding (obviously), because Strictly Speaking swoops down from his tree, snatching weakly at Sams’s wrist with his claws. It’s the weakness that gets to Sams, the way that weakness always does. He bends down and puts his ear to the creature’s rotten stinking beak.

  Strictly speaking, you get three wishes, he mumbles. Can’t beat that with a stick, kid!

  Then he starts to laugh. Mort de rire, mort de rire.

  Sams can’t think of anything he wants, not one wish springs to mind. Unless — if the creature would just die in peace. Buy a vowel and solve the puzzle. Cash in his chips, spin the wheel, and disappear forever into the High Jump Rope, the Long Dash Light, the Get Lost Horizon.

  His black tongue lolls from his beak. Spittle collecting in the corners. Long loops of drool.

  Strictly speaking, he croaks, you get ’em whether you want ’em or not.

  Sams wishes the creature would go and, just like that, he does. Whoa, looks like Strictly Speaking can grant wishes after all! Just when you thought he was fading fast, his crooked current growing weaker every day, he pulls this last fast one, this peccadillo, this prank.

  29.

  So, Sams. Sams pulled back to earth through the funnel cloud of his longing. Sams loping toward the river, hunched in his cracked leather jacket. His long hair, thinner than before, his frame likewise. Crikey, the wrists on him! The way they poke out of his sleeves, red and knobby.

  There is a place in the city
where two rivers meet. That’s one way of looking at it.

  Sams makes for this place, the rivers’ fork. He stands on the riverbank and watches a boat pulling against the current. Overhead the sun is trying to set, a helium balloon having the usual trouble with buoyancy. He makes out shadows moving in the gloom beneath Railway Bridge: four men, a girl in a navy jacket and hiking boots. Jeers and hisses greet him as he hunches down beside her. She’s an unstable sort of girl, coming into focus and then blurring again. Sams squints, frames her between the rectangle of his viewfinder hands, adjusts his imaginary shutter speed. But there is no keeping that wavering girl in his sights. She ducks under the lens and creeps closer to him, clutching at her jacket. He wonders if she’s cold.

  “On the contrary,” the girl says, reading his mind. “I am cool as a pickle.” Her words hang in the air. Today is the opposite of winter yet her words hang in the air like breath clouds.

  “But thank you for inquiring,” the girl adds hastily, and Sams — who doesn’t remember asking — understands that she is burdened with good manners, which are a curse and an affliction, as inopportune as blushing.

  She’s a silent movie sort of girl. Enormous eyes take up half her face and she has the ability to talk without saying a word: Help, a train is coming! Oh, woe is me! How dare you, you brute! The girl blushes through the black-and-white film stock. She can’t help blushing; it’s a reflex, the consequence of being who she is (well brought up) colliding with her circumstances (existential fading).

  One cool customer! she assures him (silently). Then she opens her eyes wide, as if she has just regained her sight after years of blindness. Yes, I can see now.

  “You look like someone I know,” the girl explains. Sams is pleased as punch. He’s never looked like anyone someone knows before.

  Only she can’t remember who, she admits, looking as if she is about to cry. She’s been wandering the city for so long, she tells him, and forgetfulness is catching up with her.

  Sams knows what she means. “What’s the saddest movie you’ve ever seen?” he asks, he hopes helpfully. Helpfully is his aim. But the girl has never seen a sad movie, she has only seen Mr. Groucho Marx and his brothers. Sometimes the missionaries allowed the kids in her village to watch Mr. Groucho Marx and his brothers on a sheet hung outside the infirmary. She is a great admirer of this Marxist Brother family, she tells Sams. They are full of hijinks and shenanigans to do with how many people can fit into a small space. Which she appreciates, having to share a room, as she does, with all her sisters. They are the Ngunga Sisters, she informs him proudly, although not movie stars. (Point: Girl.)