by Méira Cook
Sams and the girl crouch beneath Railway Bridge watching the men, four of them in all. Ragged and filthy, their yellow eyes click in the dark like beads. Why are they angry, the men?
The sun finally loses its battle with momentum and plummets into the river.
“Plop!” Sams says, providing the soundtrack as usual.
“Goodnight,” the girl mouths, popping her Mary Pickford eyes. Good Night Cap. The movie has ended, the film coming loose from its sprocket and flapping against the projector. Sleep Tight Rope!
Sams watches her spin away like a dust mote caught in the projector’s blue beam.
“Ftt!” he says.
Immediately the smell beneath the bridge resumes — unwashed bums and piss and spilled beer and sweet, rotten teeth. The reason the men are angry is a bottle. The bottle is wrapped in brown paper and belongs to one man, although it’s coveted by the others. Everyone wants the bottle in voices that boom and echo beneath the concrete overhang of the bridge.
30.
What happens next is that the men begin to wander about.
31.
List of the Men Wandering About
The first, robust and shouting encouragement.
The second, thinly wringing his hands.
The third, breaking the bottle over the head of —
The fourth — the fourth.
32.
“Whoosh!” says Sams, as liquid gushes down the man’s face.
A jocular mood prevails because one of the men has been vanquished. He lies off to the side, quite still, a new red necklace looped casually about his throat. The remaining three men gather around the fallen body of their companion. They work busily on him, trying to set him to rights, make him good as new. Sams hunkers on the embankment, watching.
But it’s already too late. The hit list is a contract between enemies who love one another.
The leader of the group, the man in charge of mayhem, squats beside Sams and wriggles his crazy eyebrows. He pulls a lit cigar out of his breast pocket then passes Sams the bottle in its brown paper wrapper. Sams nods his thanks all the same, but looks around to see who’s next.
“You bet your sweet life, toots,” says Eyebrows, snatching back the bottle and pressing it upon him. Sams shakes his head vigorously and tries to scramble up the embankment but Eyebrows is on him (like white on), roaring his Old Testament God-roar and whacking him with the bottle.
33.
Another way of looking at it: this is the place where the river divides in half.
34.
The creature is fading fast.
Strictly speaking, he manages to croak. Strictly speaking, you still have two more wishes to go.
Another way of looking at it: this is the place where the mind divides in half. List or lost. Hit or miss. Wish or won’t.
35.
Eyebrows has him down on the ground and is poking him with whatever is at hand: his cigar, his scorn, even the bottle. Sams knocks his head sideways but the older man pulls the bottle from its brown paper bag and unscrews the cap. The bottle puckers its thick lips and Eyebrows latches it to Sams’s lips. Eyebrows wrings his screeching hands and tries to pillow Sams’s head on his lap. A terrible odour comes off this man, a brew of all the worst things that Sams has ever smelled.
36.
List of What He Smells Like
old bandages and armpit fear
cigar butt breath
sweet pink chemicals
garbage bag ooze
walking past Serenity Candles and Soaps
dishwasher on rinse cycle
when a light bulb explodes
bottom of pill bottle
but mostly dogs
37.
Sams twists his head this way and that to get away from the poking bottle and Eyebrows with his electric, whirring muscles and his borrowed smell. With all his heart, Sams makes a wish. But it’s a wish without music, words, intention, hopefulness, conviction, or delusion. If anything it’s the white spaces between words. If anything it’s the black words between stars.
If I had my way, if I had my way, if I had my way…
Once again, Eyebrows fits the bottle to Sams’s lips and pours. Pouring. He’s sweating himself into a melting candle. Fat drops of wax ooze from his pores and fall, burning, onto Sams’s face.
“Smirnoff,” whispers Eyebrows, cradling Sams’s head in his lap. Sams swallows the unspooling warmth until he begins to cough. But, ah — the Smirnoff has been a splendid idea. The men clap and whistle and stamp their feet in a circle around him (Point: Eyebrows).
Time to go.
“Not so fast, slick,” says Eyebrows, that crazy kid. He reaches over and involves Sams in a complicated handshake. Naturally Sams buggers it up — the grip, the hold, the grapple, the grasp. The tricky turn and the double clasp. To tell the truth, Sams is not partial to hands most days and this is looking to be one of those days. But still, he wishes he’d got that handshake right. That he’d grasped it! (Point: Sams.)
38.
There’s a roar overhead and the ground beneath Sams starts to shake. The arches rumble, thunka thunka thunka. He looks up in time to see the red-eyed monster come tearing through the night, pulling its segmented body behind. It takes forever for the monster to end and the bridge to begin again, a single rusty arch flexing into the night.
For the second time Sams wishes to be gone, and all at once he’s stumbling away from the men in their cages of eyes and ribs and grasping hands. He takes the embankment in a couple of ragged strides and, plunging his hands into his pockets, lopes toward the downtown lights.
39.
“You can come if you want,” Bernadette had said. It’s her way of saying, “Suit yourself, my friend,” although “suit yourself” is what she frequently does say because she’s not one to pull a punch. Sams thinks he might as well go. Might as well — can’t stay in the house, what with the creature in its death throes and his mother flaring like a match in her dark room with every dry thought. Smoke blue as her famously blue sailor’s mouth.
40.
“Insomnia is the devil’s white night,” she says every morning. Sams suspects the creature of having crept into his mother’s room one night and bitten her in her sleep, or at least in her neck. Some mornings his mother’s neck is pocked with mouth-shaped bruises that she tries to hide beneath turtleneck sweaters or scarves. Maggie is definitely edging toward vampire status in Sams’s estimation. He’s not looking forward to the day that he will be obliged to drive a stake through her heart in order to save his little brother and the rest of humanity.
Ah, who’s he kidding? Sams could never hurt Maggie, and Lazar probably doesn’t need rescuing, and Sams is certainly not up to the task of saving humanity, which his dad used to say was going to hell in a Hand Basket Case. Sometimes it seems that whatever Max cared about least had the power to rile him up the most, Sams being the exception that proved that rules don’t apply in families.
41.
Sams sets off, the alcohol flaring in his veins. He cuts up from the river and heads south, soon passing the Law Courts and the Memorial Gardens. On top of the Legislative Building the statue of a golden boy flaps his golden wings and turns into a crow. Oh boy, Strictly Speaking is at it again.
By the time Sams reaches the art district with its galleries, nightclubs, and open-air restaurants, he is what Imee calls jumpy. “Jumpy as a skipping rope,” she used to say. Everywhere he looks he sees strange sights. People gathered on street corners, in doorways, or in the foyers of buildings. Some are clustered around installations: sculptures and wire cages, trees hung with dead rabbits. Young women lower themselves into vats of red paint, young men throw knives and swallow swords and breathe fire. Set themselves alight, then blow themselves out. Everywhere music plays: bright, jagged shards of
jazz, the paisley swirl of Cuban drumming. Sams claps his hands over his ears and leans in a doorway, panting.
42.
Sams leans in a doorway, panting. Jumpy, all right.
His disorderly synapses are firing blanks. The soundtrack isn’t quite synched up; everyone’s mouthing what they’ve already said, snapping their elastic red mouths this way and that.
“No, no, no!” cries a woman, pulling her lover close. “Yes, yes, yes!” she entreats, shaking her head in revulsion.
All at once the music separates into distinct syllables of rock, hip, pop, hop, rap, jazz. The music scintillates like a thousand points of light that you can only see whole if you stand far away. Possibly on the moon.
Everywhere Sams glimpses bones beneath skin, wine stains on gleaming teeth, tattoos shackling ankles and wrists, punctuating the spine’s long sinuous sentence. Oh pale green fracture of the world’s sprain!
He hears the woman say, “Come here, darling.” He hears the man say, “Get away from me, you whore.” Sams recognizes Weary and Restless, those ancient lovers, running toward and away from each other. Come, go, stay, leave, but sweetheart, you bitch you bitch you bitch.
“Excuse me, what’s the time?” someone asks. Sams flashes and flashes and flashes his wrist (no watch). But time keeps being asked of him.
43.
Bouquet of Nuit Blanche
· exhaust, exhaustion· adrenal glands
· acidic wine breath· gutter fruit
· perfume like a rose headache· scratch and sniff of the mind
· old smoke, old lungs · bright food frying
· dust burning off· electrical circuits
· wafts of intergluteal cleft · like dead flower water
· scalp, feet, groin· pheromone stink, stink, stink
44.
“…la nuit blanche,” he hears, rising to the surface of his oceanic lostness. “Or as they reported in the Sun, blanched nuts.”
“Don’t let me get started on the cutbacks! But at least we’re finally doing something for the arts. It’s nice there’s a night like this for the community, bien sur?”
“It’s all about how to connect. Do we discuss art or literature? Politics? No, we exchange a small obscenity.”
“If you go down to the Exchange you’ll catch some kind of unauthorized lovemaking troupe. Yeah, totally spontaneous.”
“Hey, dude, watch out for the —”
45.
— oops! Sams nearly gets clipped by a city bus, the lit-up words Sorry Not In Service blazoned across its unapologetic orange forehead.
46.
“Gone,” he mumbles. It’s Sams’s third wish, his last wish. He wants to find somewhere dark to hide, a burrowing place in the nuit blanche, the terrible white night. Somehow he finds himself shambling, headed for the alleyway behind the video rental store.
47.
Done! cries the creature from inside his dying.
48.
La nuit blanche can’t penetrate the darkness in the alley behind the Celluloid Museum. Even the moon is too high above and far away to see between the buildings with their rounded edges like playing cards. He sits with his knees drawn up and his arms braced about them. Patiently, he goes through an entire deck of cards in his head but comes up deuces. He rocks and rocks until he finds ballast. Until his body is an empty sieve for his mind to pour through.
49.
The truth is he hasn’t finished his list. Nowhere near. The truth is he doesn’t care a Dam Burst Balloon. His boss is the Hell’s Angel Cake, and he — Sams — is Dead Man Cave for the next hundred years.
Well, okay, he thinks, rocking. Okay Corral.
50.
Gradually he realizes that he’s not alone in the alley. Further along on a loading dock, squatting, his pals from the railway bridge are playing strip poker. Groucho, Chico, Karl, and Harpo throw down their cards and jeer at one another over poorly executed bluffs and badly played hands. Groucho is the worst, with his dollar store mask and corny patter. Only his cigar is real and he twirls it with gusto, blowing smoke rings and wriggling his eyebrows.
“Too rich for my blood,” he keeps saying. “My blood ain’t the heiress it once was.”
Each of the poker players wears a nametag on his shirt. Hi I’m Groucho! Hi I’m Chico! Harpo! Karl! Chico’s name is upside down, and Karl’s is scrawled in the invisible ink of history, and Harpo’s is obscured by his dripping red necklace, but Sams knows who they are. He’s been watching them all his life. Whenever Groucho makes a joke he twirls his cigar and stares hard at Harpo until the poor fellow obliges him by taking up a plank of wood and hitting himself, or falling head over heels from his perch on a crate, or just wearily banging his head on the ground without creativity or the zest to inspire it. Pain is what Groucho requires of him, a dulled spirit, blood if necessary.
Sams is enjoying the movie. It’s a hit, as far as he’s concerned. The Marx Brothers are first rate in his book but Chico is his favourite because of accents and a talent for beseeching. Truth to tell, he’s long suspected Groucho of this subterranean river of cruelty. The beetling brows, the sharp tongue, the twirl of his glowing red ember. Sams leans forward, for once neither restless nor weary.
51.
“Two pairs,” yells Karl. “I’m out!” He yanks off his corduroy pants and is down to a wife beater and a pair of Y-fronts.
“Ring ring,” says Groucho, twirling. “The boys’ department just called. They want their underwear back.”
“Ha, ha,” yells Chico. “One-a more-a dumb-a play and you’ll be down-a to your crooked-a yellow worm-a.”
“Nah,” says Groucho. “He’s still got his vest, his beard, and his ideology.” He stares hard at Harpo but the poor son of a gun is fresh out of innovative self-mutilating ideas and merely bangs his head with the flat of his palm, pleasing no one, least of all his brother who shoves him into the cards and flicks cigar ash at him.
“Fuck you!” yells Harpo, silent no longer. He launches into Groucho and begins to pummel him (a hit!). Meanwhile Chico, who has misplaced his accent in the melee, hollers cartoon encouragements from the sidelines. Biff! Bam! Kapow! Karl pulls down his Y-fronts and dances around the fray, yanking his member and threatening to piss on the proles.
Sams suddenly becomes aware of scattered applause from the open windows of the Celluloid Museum, where faces cluster, and even in the darkest reaches of the alley strange voices shout Bravo! Encore! Da Capo! Splendid!
“Okay, boys,” says Groucho. “One more time.”
52.
In the endless nuit blanche in which Sams wanders, the white night without end, Strictly Speaking dies again and again. The lovers, Weary and Restless, stir from their ennui and run toward each other with open arms. Dieter slams down another glass of cold milk. It’s exactly the right colour, and exactly the right temperature, and as Sams tilts his head back to get the last drop, he hears that sick old dying creature flapping its black wings one last time.
53.
Fade to white.
54.
Sams’s Picks
The Wrong Man (1956)
Le Retour de Martin Guerre (1982)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Darby O’Gill and the Little People (1959)
A Kiss From Mary Pickford (1927)
Dead Alive (1992)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
A Night at the Opera (1935)
Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
City Lights (1931)
The Song of Bernadette (1943)
Big Night (1996)
Les parapluies de Cherbourg (1964)
55.
Sams’s Word
— — — — —
56.
Buy
a vowel, dummy, says the crow.
Eight
Camp Beaver
Nathan was touched by the way that kids always got sex slightly wrong. He’d been camp director for ten years now, so he’d seen some things, but the looming sum of what he’d seen could never quite topple those moments when he slouched, transfixed, hands in pockets, before some kid’s screwy version of what adults got up to.
Inside cabin #3, the walls were a snide cross-hatching of names and initials and telephone numbers, of speculation and intention, of hearts, arrows, exclamation points, and the occasional well-endowed stick figure. At the end of August when all the kids left, the last motorboat chugging its allowable quota of sun-blasted, over-oxygenated children to the mainland, Nathan and his cleaning crew took occupation of the island. They were the Oompa-Loompas of Pleasure Island — nobody saw them arrive and only Gunnars, who owned the motor launch, was witness to their departure. They trawled the paths and cabins and outbuildings, roughly setting the island to rights, hauling the canoes to their winter grounds (the shed), dry docking the vast inflatable water slides, emptying bottles of bleach into the latrines, heaving in the docks, and finally dismantling the banner that fluttered throughout the summer, welcoming children to Camp Beaver.
Beaver was the name of the camp, the name of the island, and the spirit animal that the original counsellors had blithely appropriated in order to exhort campers to patriotic feats of industry and endurance. The camp had been named in an earlier, more innocent era, and now they were stuck with it: Camp Beaver! Naturally, unwholesome variations on the name abounded, but Nathan was the only one who called the place Pleasure Island, and then only in his head.