“Are you hurt?” She touches his shoulder, her first confirmation that he’s real. His body is hard under her hand, and cold.
He’s crying—vegetable tears.
Four perfect wedges tremble on the board.
We all must live in the kingdom of The Devil until the coming of the kingdom of God. More than any of them in the house, Abby understands this. Daily and steadfastly, the righteous must resist the allurements of the world and the whisperings of Satan. Evil wants us. It wants to rule us completely. Unlike those who freely do the bidding of The Devil, the righteous yearn for the other kingdom, the kingdom of truth and grace which will come to pass when we are ruled, not by sin, but only by Christ.
Darcy sits at her desk paging through her address book. She stands beside Him, close enough to get a noseful. It’s a burnt smell, cigarettes and brimstone. She’s never had a man in her room before, not even Todd.
“The most important part of the knife, Abby, is the blade. Who’s this Reverend Aden—How do you say it?”
“Adenauer. I used to go to his church.”
“Ours have the traditional high-gloss finish. Best time to call him?”
“Not on Sunday. Or Wednesday night.”
He doesn’t even write it down. He remembers everything, except the actual numbers, of course. Everyone who has warned her about Darcy, including Reverend Adenauer who periodically devotes an entire sermon to Him, has told her to expect Him to be whip smart.
“The wedge-lock handle ensures a non-slip grip. What’s Wednesday night?”
“Bible study.”
She lets Him take her address book after they’ve gone through it. He explains why He needs it. “When I call these people, I give your name. Because they know and trust you, they trust me. More importantly, they trust my product. You trust my product, don’t you Abby?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Your satisfaction means everything to me.”
That night, Darcy calls her into the living room where He and Shauna are watching TV—not the black-and-white one that was put out in the alley, but the big box of colour Darcy moved in with. “Hey! We’re watching Three’s Company. Come on.” Darcy has cable. He pats the place next to Him and smiles.
Abby would prefer not to sit beside Shauna, but she does, because this is where He asked her to sit. On either side of her Shauna and Darcy laugh at the program exactly where the unseen audience laughs. Abby doesn’t get it. It’s as if the program is in another language.
Out of the blue, Shauna grabs Abby’s wrist and shakes it. “Will you stop doing that?”
Doing what? Abby wonders. What was she doing?
Abby stops in the kitchen doorway after Three’s Company. Shauna smiles, very nearly caught in the act. She’s just taken the last scoop of Abby’s Skippy and scraped it into the garbage. Her hand is still in the fridge, replacing the empty jar. It’s for Abby’s own good. If she didn’t lie in bed all day eating peanut butter, she wouldn’t be so fat. Waddling up to Stong’s is the only exercise she gets.
Abby sways from foot to foot, patting her bangs, probably trying to decide whether or not to be in the same room as Shauna again. Her blonde hair is frizzy. When the light is right, it’s a wiry halo flaring round her impassive pudding face. Shauna sees the radiance now.
Abby turns and shuffles off.
The next morning Abby has to go to the store. With Abby out of the house, Shauna goes to her room, which is across from Todd’s, with the bathroom in between. She opens the door and steals a glance around at the unmade futon on the floor, the desk piled high with books and dirty plates. In the corner is an unmarked cardboard box.
Shauna goes straight back to Todd’s room. “Guess what. Abby bought knives.”
He plucks the earplugs out. “What?”
“Abby bought knives from Darcy.”
“Why? He left a set in the kitchen.”
“Exactly,” Shauna says.
Todd’s room was a den when a real family lived in the house. He shivers and, turning in his chair, sees Darcy standing at the sliding glass door that leads to the deck. Darcy’s trying to see in, hands bracketing his eyes, but because it’s brighter outside, Todd isn’t sure if Darcy knows he’s there.
He can’t believe it! Darcy tries the door! Outraged, Todd tears out his earplugs and leaps to open it. “What do you think you’re doing?”
Darcy steps inside. “I just wanted to see your space.” He picks up Todd’s graduation picture, chudders a finger along the spines of Todd’s books. “Fish Locomotion?”
“That’s my thesis topic. Fin action in Sebastes paucispinis. Listen. Your cheque came back NSF this morning.”
Darcy sits on Todd’s futon and tests it with a failed bounce. “You’ve got the best room, Tom.”
“My name is Todd.”
Darcy points at the Vaseline on the bedside table. It takes a moment for Todd to decode the leer. “What? It’s for my hands!”
“That’s what I thought.”
For the rest of the summer Todd will stew over this remark. He’ll peer again and again inside the black hole of Darcy’s laugh. If anything, it makes the skin on his hands flake faster.
“You better write another cheque,” Todd says.
Todd is unsecretly pleased that the cheque bounced; he’s smug. It means he was right about Darcy. Later, when Todd is stirfrying for himself and Shauna, Darcy comes to the kitchen with his cheque book. Todd tells him, “You can add on the five-dollar service charge.”
“I was just about to offer to do that. How do you like the knives?”
“What?”
“The knives.”
“They’re fine.”
“The majority of people don’t know how to sharpen a knife. They don’t want to know how. That’s what I especially like about this product, Tom. These are ceramic-coated blades. They never need it.”
“What?”
“Sharpening.”
“I added your name to the chore sheet last week,” Todd says. “We rotate chores monthly. Another thing, we have an informal system based on honour when communal supplies like toilet paper and dish detergent run out.”
“See? Now that’s a keen edge. But check this out.” Darcy digs in the front pocket of his jeans, wriggles out a fistful of pennies and places one on the cutting board. He disarms Todd of the knife.
The flash, the lightning strike of the blade, blinds Todd momentarily.
Penny halves ricochet.
When did Abby choose The Devil’s kingdom? Not the day she voted for Darcy as a housemate, but back in January when they phoned her about the vacancy at the School of Theology residence. She’d been waiting since September to move there, but now she said no. All that fall Danny and Shauna’s noisy lovemaking had driven Todd and Abby out of the house for long rainy walks. Todd’s room was under Danny’s and he’d come and knock on Abby’s door.
A knock. She starts awake. “What?” Croaky, sleep-clogged.
“It’s Todd. Can we talk?”
Six months she’s been waiting for an explanation, but now she finds she doesn’t care. Todd opens the door. She draws her knees to her chest, staring straight ahead.
“What do you think of Darcy?” he asks the tangled top of her head.
Abby says nothing.
“I don’t think it’s working out,” Todd goes on. “His first cheque bounced.”
“The second won’t.”
“He’s on the phone almost continually. Every night that TV of his is blaring. That’s got to bother you.”
Abby meets his eye. He dares make reference to her feelings? They held hands! When she went home for Christmas, Todd drove her to the airport and kissed her goodbye—on the lips! He called her in Saskatchewan twice, saying he missed their talks. “They’re driving me crazy,” he told her. “Earplugs,” she advised.
He had intentions. He did! He said, “Let me be frank, Abby. As a scientist, I can’t accept the Bible as a literal truth. But I could accept it on another
level.” She’d had no illusions about bringing him to Christ. She wanted a boyfriend so badly.
He clears his throat. “So you don’t agree we should give him notice?”
“Does Shauna?”
Todd would have complained to Abby about Darcy’s undone chores too, but as Shauna has yet to get around to hers that would be disloyal. Last night Todd swept the kitchen for Shauna and found nine penny halves. And now that he’s seen the state of Abby’s room, the true state of Abby, he can no longer avoid the cold clutch of guilt. In a skewed act of contrition, he gets out the vacuum and runs it over the entire downstairs, except for Abby’s room. With a violent snapping and crackling, a month of dirt and dust and penny halves is sucked up, his own skin too, filling the vacuum bag to bursting.
He initials the chore sheet on Shauna’s behalf, grabs his wallet and walks the four blocks up Dunbar to Stong’s and Shauna in her forest green tunic. The open sides are secured by ties. Stong’s it reads. He’s still working up the nerve to ask her to bring it home.
Two packages of toilet paper, onions, carrots, green pepper, zucchini, a can of tomato sauce. The cashier rings it up. “Spaghetti tonight?” he says to Shauna, who puts it all in a bag. Her breasts are a gentle curve of green. The smock ends at the top of her slim thighs. He wants her to be naked under it. “Can I talk to you for a second?”
Shauna steps away from the checkout and covers Stong’s with folded arms. “What?”
“I want to give Darcy notice.”
“Why?”
“Are you serious? He’s been here a month and has yet to do a chore. Here I am buying toilet paper again.”
Shauna rolls her eyes.
“I don’t trust him. He sells knives.”
“You didn’t like Danny either.”
“Untrue! Maybe not at first, but after I got to know him I thought he was all right.”
Danny was President of the UBC Anarchist Club, an oxymoron if Todd has ever heard one. He called Todd’s attempts to organize the house “fascistic,” but after he broke up with Shauna, Todd had a lot to thank him for.
“You should get to know Darcy,” Shauna says.
“Have you gotten to know him?” Todd whimpers.
Shauna hopes Todd will be out when she gets home, but she knows she hopes in vain. He has no life apart from her and his precious fish.
“Shauna!” he calls the second she steps in the door.
She finds him on his knees in the bathroom fastening something to the wall with a screwdriver. Danny’s poster, still taped above the toilet, asks if their bathroom is breeding Bolsheviks. Looking at it now, Shauna barely feels pricked.
Todd’s handiwork: three toilet-paper holders labelled Todd, Darcy, Abby.
“What about me?” she asks.
“You’re with me.”
Shauna bolts upstairs. Across the hall the phone cord disappears under Darcy’s door. She hears him talking. Boron carbide. Corrosion resistance. A thin hard coating. Though the words mean nothing to her, she feels an almost irresistible persuasion in his tone. “I vacuumed for you!” Todd calls up the stairs. She slams her door and collapses onto her foamie, the way she learned in Stage Techniques.
Danny didn’t believe in deodorant, yet she preferred his BO to Todd’s soapy smell. Darcy smells like a brush fire. He speaks in the low rumble of a gathering storm while Todd’s voice peaks insecurely at the end of every sentence. Why is dirty sexier than clean? Bad sexier than good? Mean sexier than nice? She and Darcy have been watching TV together every night and if it weren’t for the thumb-twiddling lump of Abby between them, who knows what might already have happened?
The next week Todd hands Shauna an envelope from Sears. “Look who it’s addressed to. Who is Thomas Dickson?”
“They sent it to the wrong address.”
“What a coincidence!”
“Maybe it’s for one of the guys downstairs.” Two silent Chinese post-docs rent the subterranean downstairs suite.
Todd snatches the envelope back. “The bed. The TV. Then this scheme with knives. Now we find out he has an alias!”
“Give it here,” says Shauna, slipping on her sandals.
She clacks out the kitchen door and down the deck stairs to the basement entrance. It opens onto the mildewy laundry room they share with the post-docs, the air a potpourri of garlic, Tide and ginger. The one who answers Shauna’s knock wears a dress shirt buttoned to a choke. He nearly falls back when he sees her. She has this effect on people, which is why she thinks film is the better medium for her.
“I’m Shauna from upstairs.” She can tell he knows. He’s probably been watching her all this time. Men do. She hands him the envelope. “I’m just wondering if this is yours.”
No way is his name Dickson.
Perplexity lifts his glasses. He takes the envelope over to the window in the kitchen area. “No. Not mine.”
“What about your friend?”
He comes back, shaking his head. “Sorry.”
“Oh my God!”
Startled, he looks over his shoulder to see what is worthy of her gasp. Not the wok on the stove. The knife block on the counter.
That night Shauna comes into the living room where Darcy is warming up the set for Dallas. “My dad’s birthday is next month,” she says. “Will you take a cheque?”
“Cash, cheque, credit card, flesh. Let’s go upstairs, Shauna.”
Her whole body tingles when he says it.
This was Danny’s room. It used to be that whenever she came across something of his, which was several times a day—he left for Nicaragua with only what would fit into a backpack—she would take that ride again: shock, hurt, despair, rage. Danny: a Method actor’s motherlode.
All Darcy has for furniture is the bed, sheets slippery, oil black. There are no blankets. Doesn’t he get cold? He opens a box and lays out the knives. “The inclusion of the cutting board is a limited-time offer, Shauna, so you’re wise to purchase now.” Afterward, while he packs the box back up, she writes the cheque. It’s a lot of money, a big chunk of next semester’s tuition, but she’s always been a daddy’s girl.
“Write your SIN on the back, Shauna.”
She stares at him. “What?”
“Your social insurance number. Jot it on the back of the cheque if you don’t mind.” He pats the bed and Shauna sits, lowering her gaze. “I want to tell you something. Promise you won’t laugh.”
Not for a second does she believe he’s sincere. It’s as if they’re running lines together. “I promise.”
He caresses the cardboard box. “It may sound strange, but I feel a calling. I want to help. Sometimes I can’t sleep thinking of all the people who have only ever owned a cheap dull knife.”
Shauna thinks of Danny picking coffee so the Nicaraguans can take up arms and defend the revolution. She thinks of Abby praying on her knees. Even Todd claims that his research may one day have a practical application. All Shauna’s aspirations are self-serving.
“If you know of any others I can help, all I need are phone numbers.”
When he puts his hand on her arm, she seems to lose all feeling in it.
Being there with Darcy finally undoes Danny.
It may be that Shauna is cocooning her hygiene products in toilet paper before disposing of them, or that she’s one of those people who uses a metre when four or five squares would suffice, but Todd doesn’t really think it’s any fault of Shauna’s that he’s at the end of his roll already while Darcy’s is untouched. He’s also troubled, deeply troubled, by the Sears bill lying unopened on the hall table for a week. It could be that Sears made a mistake, but Todd knows this isn’t the case. He knows because Darcy is so obviously the criminal type. But if Darcy notices Todd has opened the bill the jig will be up, so Todd carefully steams it and uses one of Darcy’s knives to pry the seal apart.
Among the long list of items purchased under the name of Thomas Dickson are a Simmons Beautyrest mattress and box spring and the Sony Trinitron. So
whom do they have under their roof, Darcy Roach or Thomas Dickson? Or someone else?
He picks up the phone to call Sears. “I’m sure they are dull,” says a woman’s voice.
“You can have them sharpened if you want to go to that trouble and expense, but the knives I’d like to show you, Mrs. Adenauer, never need sharpening. You deserve optimum corrosion resistance, Mrs. Adenauer. You deserve a durable edge. I have your address. I could come over.”
Every hair on Todd’s body rises as he replaces the receiver.
Later that evening Todd leaves his door open while he studies. The women are with Darcy, drawn like dumb animals to the canned laughter and flashing lights. Though the sound of The Cosby Show makes concentrating difficult, he doesn’t put in earplugs. He can’t concentrate anyway so he closes his book and begins to peel tiny strips of skin off his hands, half enjoying the sting. Tiny beads of blood well up. He licks them off.
Darcy finally goes to the bathroom. Todd gets up from his desk and waits. “Thomas?” he calls as Darcy heads back to the living room. Darcy walks right past!
Todd unclenches his hands and sees the bloody mess he’s made.
That night, a strange sound. Though softer and coming closer together, it reminds Todd of the thud he heard the night Darcy moved in. In the hall, he hears it as a rhythmic thumping coming from Abby’s room. He pictures Abby beating her forehead against her desk, but it just goes on and on, Todd standing in the dark, listening, trying to figure it out, his heart racing to match the pace.
A different sound, a long inhuman groan.
“Abby,” he whispers at her door. “It’s me, Todd. Are you all right?” He thinks about asking her to go for a walk, but doubts she’d accept. It’s three in the morning.
A tiny voice: “Yes.”
The officer will take Todd aside and ask if he knew what was going on. Todd will feel like a louse.
The light wakes then blinds Shauna. She sits up blinking. “What are you doing?”
“My eczema’s flared up.”
The malady is less annoying to Shauna than his pronunciation of it. EC-zema. Also, his name ends in two d’s.
Todd scoops Vaseline out of the jar, smears his hands. He wriggles into the buttercup-coloured gloves, flexes fingers, shuts off the bedside lamp. “Sorry I woke you,” he says, laying a cold rubber hand on her waist.
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 9