This Is All a Lie

by Thomas Trofimuk

  Ray looks at the woman’s vehicle. It’s a Cadillac Escalade – massive and gaudy. And expensive. Eighty thousand dollars, at least, the last he checked. One of his guys had accidentally dropped a rather large branch on an Escalade three weeks ago and Ray had looked up the price of a new one.

  “Tell the nice lady to fuck off, Ray. You have five seconds.”

  The Escalade’s window is up and the woman is back behind the steering wheel already.

  “Fuck off,” he says to the white wall of her vehicle.

  “Louder.”

  “Really?” Ray raises his window.

  “Yes, really.” She is standing at the railing, holding the vase shakily, with one hand.

  “Fuck off,” he says again, louder than before.

  “Good boy,” Nancy says. “I could get used to this, Ray. You know, having all the power.” Nancy leans out over the railing and watches the small, white rectangle move slowly down the block.

  “I don’t like it when you talk to strange women,” she says.

  “So I noticed. But in her defence, how could she possibly know I was talking with you?”

  “I could tell by her voice that she was interested in more than a parking spot.”

  There are times in Ray’s life when he will be in the middle of a conversation and realize the person he’s talking with has just said something so incredibly ridiculous it will verge on the concept of insanity. This is one of those times. But then, this entire thing has been on the border of insane.

  “So, I think the black lace, La Perla stockings and wide suspender belt – you know the lacy one? What do you think? You always leaned toward the white for some reason. I used to think men liked black lingerie the best, but you ruined that assumption.”

  “Shut up.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “Shut up,” he says.

  “But if I shut up, then what will we have, Ray? All we have are our voices. I talk and you listen. You talk and I listen – well, I half-listen because I don’t give a fuck anymore.”

  “If you don’t care anymore, then why are you keeping me here?”

  “I’m not keeping you here,” she says.

  “Yes you are. You threaten to jump if I leave. You keep talking about dying. You keep talking about jumping…”

  “…we all have to die eventually,” she says. “And today is a good day to die.”

  Black Elk. From Black Elk Speaks, Ray thinks. He read the book in university. It’s a quote from Black Elk. She probably doesn’t know she’s paraphrasing Black Elk.

  “Today is not a good day to die,” Ray says.

  “Do you fear death?”

  “I fear your death,” he says.

  “I’m not keeping you here, Ray – you are. Your guilt. Your sorrow. Your fucked-up sense of honour. That’s why you’re sitting there.”

  “Maybe,” he says.

  Ray closes his eyes. He can hear the wind moving in the leaves of the elms – the hushing sound that could be the ocean. He envies the wind. It moves through the upper branches and beyond. It is barely concerned with gravity. It touches what it wants to touch, when it wants – and then it’s gone. It moves beyond here.

  * * *

  Ray’s not certain but he thinks this is the longest he’s ever been on the phone with anyone. His voice is scratched and dry, and his head is pounding – a throbbing sort of pain at the temples. He really wants this to end gently, with kindness, with compassion. His mind whirls with all the possible scenarios. One of those is Nancy insisting on more of the Viking story.

  He tries to imagine what would happen next. Perhaps Ingmar gives the ring to Eira from Ribe. So Eira is the woman who was wearing the ring and she was the one they found in 1904, buried in the Viking grave fields at Birka, west of Stockholm. Ingmar gave her the silver ring with the glass stone. He kept it in the folded envelope of a chart for four years, keeping the chart hidden, waiting for an opportunity.

  He’d tried to trade for it in Constantinople but the man didn’t want to let it go. It was a pink-violet coloured stone that reminded Ingmar of Eira’s lips. Eventually, the man, a silversmith, decided the ring was not worth his life and so it became Ingmar’s. It became his constant companion – a reminder of Eira and everything he felt for her.

  By the time Ingmar gets around to giving Eira the ring, she’s married and has two children. Ingmar returned home from the southern lands and his new daughter was already two years old, and his son, eleven. He had not seen his daughter, whose name was Sassa.

  Ingmar stops in Ribe first because he is delivering silk from Persia. Ribe is famous for its hot springs and this is where Ingmar goes once he has concluded his business. He is at the hot springs, already in the water, when Eira arrives. She drops her dress and slips silently into the water before she sees him.

  “Where is your husband?” he says.

  “Who’s there?” She sinks down into the water until just her head is exposed and squints into the mist. “I thought I was alone.”

  “You look well.” He wants to hold her face in his hands and kiss her, and not stop kissing her. He saw only the hazy ghost of her as she entered the water through the rising steam. Her black hair woven into a single cord and reaching down her back. Her breasts more lovely than he could imagine – heavy and round.

  “Ingmar?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  She inhales quickly and it makes a sound. Eira is embarrassed by this inhalation – she is irritated that her heart was so easily uncovered. “Are you well?” she says, bringing as much cool dignity to her voice as she can muster. “Are you whole?”

  “It was a long journey. But yes, I am well and whole.” He had new scars but these were insignificant – the wounds had healed months ago.

  She moves closer to the sound of his voice – at least, she moves in the direction of where she thinks his voice might be coming.

  “In truth,” she says, “I have birthed two children and my body is more than I would like.”

  They are silent except for the sound of the water.

  “He went west,” Eira says. “To Iceland and beyond.”

  “Who? Who went west?”

  “My husband.”

  “Yes. He is a good man. A brave man. So I have heard…”

  Her voice is whisper. “He’s not you,” she says. Her hands find him and they are kissing. Her lips are soft and Ingmar is lost. They explore each other, hands searching and caressing, discovering what they can’t have in the slow-motion water. They do not stop kissing. They are innocent and surprised by each other’s bodies. They are aroused and excited, and at the same time, they both understand it is a dangerous and forbidden country they’ve entered. It starts to snow and still, they are kissing. They create a new world in the hot water, with the swirling steam and falling snow – a world in which they are the only two inhabitants. A world in which all they feel is protected by the slow water. When they stop kissing, Eira’s face is raw from his beard, and she is crying softly. “Tell me about the east,” she says. “Please. Tell me anything. Everything.”

  They are embraced in the pool, the snow falling steadily, the moon a soft, hazy thing, and it is so quiet. They wait inside the silence. If he speaks, the spell will be finished and they will be on their way out of the cocoon. If she speaks – if she again asks for something from him, it will be over. She does not try to make it work in her head – because it can’t work. She has children with a good man. She is a wife. She is the daughter of a chieftain. Eira keeps her mind on the feel of being with him, the water and the snow pin-pricking her face. Ingmar does not let his mind venture forward either. Tomorrow, he tells himself, will take care of itself. Tomorrow, he will sail home to his family. This is different than tomorrow. He wants to make love with this woman but if he does this thing, tomorrow he will wake up and trim his beard and his refl
ection in the washing bowl will not be the reflection of an honourable man.

  “In Persia,” he says. “Women wear veils. They are hidden and mysterious.”

  The next morning before boarding his ship, he sends Eira the ring. He folds it into a chart. A servant delivers the chart and Eira discovers the ring. She slips it onto her finger. She will never remove the ring from her finger. Her husband will think it was a gift from her father. She will see Ingmar only one more time and by then he will be an old man.

  * * *

  Ray picks Adam Farnsworth up in front of his house just after 4:30 a.m. Adam stows his briefcase in the back seat and puts his seatbelt on.

  “I’m not sure why we’re up this early,” he says. “I don’t know what you expect to show me…”

  “Trust me, Adam.” Ray hands him a chrome go-cup of coffee.

  They listen to the radio. There’s a story about a new dinosaur discovered in Alberta, an Ornithomimus that had feathers like an ostrich. After the dinosaur story, there’s a news report about a missing airplane – somewhere in the Indian Ocean, they lost an airplane full of people. When they arrive at Crescent Avenue, the light is just seeping into the sky. The sky is a reserved pale blue – a graduated band of pink at the horizon.

  “How the hell do you lose an entire airplane?” Adam says.

  “We’re here,” Ray says, pulling over and killing the engine.

  “Now what,” Adam says.

  “Now we go for a walk.”

  Adam gets out of the car and looks up at a canopy of elm boughs. The light is subdued.

  “Is this why we’re here?”

  “The map is not the territory, Adam. We can talk about trees and the beauty of trees until we are blue in the face. You have to see them, and smell, and feel what it’s like under these trees. You have to experience the ground underneath to really know them. You have to experience this light.” Ray sips his coffee and Adam does the same.

  They walk along Crescent. They walk on the crumbling sidewalk under the massive elms and when the trees end, they cross the street and walk back toward the car. Ray doesn’t say anything. He lets the trees make their own argument.

  Back in the car, Adam doesn’t say anything – not right away. He taps out something on his iPad and slips it back into his briefcase.

  “You let me know what you need,” he says. “We’ll find a way to make it work. I just sent you a reminder to send me a schematic of your average elm tree and its root system.”

  “Thank you, Adam.”

  “You’re right that trees aren’t mentioned in the guidelines for building sidewalks,” Adam says. “They ought to be.”

  “Is there a way we make that happen?”

  “I don’t see why not. Just show us where your protected root zone is and we’ll stay away from it.”

  “You seem really sure about this,” Ray says. “I know the way this bureaucracy works. It’s slow to change and in the next year, we’re about to build a lot of sidewalks.”

  “And re-build,” Adam says, smiling.

  When Adam smiles, Ray sees the nine-year-old – it’s a kid’s smile, mischievous and playful. “Well, I wrote the guidelines,” he says. “So amending them shouldn’t be a problem.”

  * * *

  Ray opens his eyes. He has no intention of sharing this with Nancy. She seems to be reading her own overlaid version of the story anyway. Perhaps it’s stupid to think that his Vikings did nothing but kiss and touch each other in that hot spring. Perhaps this flirtation with lust is worse than if they’d made love. Now, there is an unfinished thing; a perfect, challenging, unflinching, and unfinished thing.

  It’s been hours. He’s been talking with Nancy for hours. It’s time to end it. He needs a good ending to their conversation – an ending that will allow him to sleep – an ending that will allow him to look in the mirror in the morning and not cringe.

  * * *

  In March, the Kapitán is sitting outside the dacha with a book and a cup of tea when a bird that is smaller than a crow but looks like a crow lands three feet away from him, on the handle of a broken wheelbarrow. He hears it before he sees it. The sound of its wings scares him. He looks up and all around at the sky and then finds the bird. It’s a jackdaw. He identifies it later that day by looking in the Audubon book called The Bird Species of Russia, which is one of the books on the shelf inside. In addition to this jackdaw, there are hooded crows, robins, nuthatches, Siberian tits and a tawny owl living in the forest around the dacha. He is not entirely certain about the owl. It could be a boreal owl. He only saw it once, in dim light. He starts to carry the bird book with him anytime he goes outside.

  The jackdaw sits and watches Anatoly, as if it’s waiting for him to do something. This bird, while related to crows, is greyish in colour and does not have the oily black sheen of crows or ravens. Anatoly’s first impulse is to shoo it away. But there is something off about it. It has one blue eye, and one green. This can’t be normal. It has to be a genetic glitch. He decides that if this odd-looking bird can tolerate his company, he will reciprocate. He pulls a small chunk of bread from the piece in his pocket and tosses it toward the bird. The jackdaw looks at the bread in the grass, then at Anatoly but doesn’t move.

  “Don’t you like bread?”

  The bird tilts its head, as if it’s trying to understand.

  “It’s good bread,” he says. “Are you not hungry, bird?”

  The jackdaw continues to watch Anatoly, and only when he gets up to go inside does the bird lift into the air. Anatoly stands in the doorway, half-turned and watches as it disappears into the forest.

  The jackdaw becomes a regular visitor. It comes each morning when light begins to fill the small dacha. It squeaks and caws outside Anatoly’s bedroom window. The bird waits as he lights a fire and boils water for tea. With his tea sitting beside him on a stump, the steam twisting into the cool morning, Anatoly will tell the bird about the book he is reading. “Tatyana Tolstaya. Do you know this writer, bird?”

  The bird seems to be listening.

  “This book is called On the Golden Porch. It is set not too far from here, which probably explains why it is in the dacha. The woman in the book is too dominant for me. I prefer the husband, who is called Uncle Pasha. He is a clever illusion. His life on the surface is dull, filled with routine and following orders, but the depth and richness of his true life is heartening.” Anatoly never forgets to put something aside for the bird, a chunk of bread, a sliver of cheese, a bit of sausage.

  Some mornings, Anatoly and the jackdaw sit in silence, as if they are waiting for the sunrise. As if they are waiting for the warmth of the sun to ease them into the day.

  One morning in early April, Anatoly staggered out the door and fell at the bottom of the stair. He’d finished Tolstaya’s book the day before and started drinking soon after. The bird watched and waited for him to wake up, and it was there when he opened his eyes. “You are a good bird,” he said. “I am glad you waited. What do you want to talk about today?”

  On the morning of April 4, the jackdaw does not fuss outside Anatoly’s window. It does not come. It does not caw or scratch at the window pane. There is only the delicate sound of sparrows, and tits, and nuthatches in the forest, doing what they must.

  4½

  Madame Chernakov

  Yup. That’s right. Vikings. You know this is another broken promise, don’t you? Yet another lie. You had to know this was going to happen.

  * * *

  koan

  [koh-ahn]

  noun, plural koans, koan. Zen.

  a nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating.

  * * *

  Chapter 8. At the top. The day of the week is wrong. June 6, 2008 was not a Tuesday. It was a Friday. Does this throw all the dates
and days of the week into question for you? Or maybe this confession convinces you that the author has being paying attention to these sorts of inaccurate details all along. Does it matter? Maybe it should.

  * * *

  You have a healthy distrust of people who are always announcing how much they love their wives or husbands. The ones who are repeatedly saying aloud how much they love each other, how they adore each other – how beautiful they are. You think about Queen Gertrude in Hamlet – The lady doth protest too much, methinks. It’s as if they are trying to convince themselves – and the rest of the world – that they love this much, adore this much, or worship this much. Liars! Ray and Tulah are not like this. There has always been a cool vibe between them, even when they were living through those times when couples don’t like each other, but still love.

  Ray and Tulah were in Toronto one year for the Toronto International Film Festival. They stayed at the Intercontinental on Bloor. At a movie showing, one of the producers of the film they were about to watch offered up a long, drawn-out introduction, during which he mentioned how much he loved his beautiful wife three times, and how grateful he was that she supported him, and again, how much he adored her and how gorgeous she was. Ray cringed for the man – felt embarrassed for him. He does not trust people who show off their love this way. It’s meaningless braggadocio.

  * * *

  absolution

  noun

  act of absolving; a freeing from blame or guilt; release from consequences, obligations, or penalties.

  state of being absolved.

  Roman Catholic Theology.

  a remission of sin or of the punishment for sin, made by a priest in the sacrament of penance on the ground of authority received from Christ.