Love Enough (10 page)

But an embrace each day and a kindness each week can be very difficult. Nothing simple about it. Anyway, June found out Sydney could not do it. People can’t be mindful constantly. Sydney started missing days, missing weeks and tried to make up again with “things.” June of course was disappointed. She reasoned that perhaps, if someone could not give her an embrace a day or a kindness a week, perhaps there was something wrong with her. That Sydney couldn’t do this made June sad. June thinks small things are deep and big things are shallow. So a little hole opened in her heart. She has a complicated system of feeling. She thinks if someone is so unaware of hurting someone, it stands to reason that if you tell them about it they’ll be hurt themselves, since it will be a shock to them, they will crash when they understand how callous they’ve been. That would be a mountain of pain, June thinks, so she said nothing to Sydney, as she goes right on missing more and more days of embraces and more and more weeks of kindnesses.

No use going over that fight, June thought. She felt a small excitement. She could help Bedri, hide him, help him to leave town. It never occurred to her to tell him to go
to the police himself. What good would that do? But regarding the thugs outside, in a minute she would open the front door and pretend to be dusting a mat. She folded her duvet, settling it beside the couch. She was wearing Sydney’s shirt and a sleeping sarung. The Sri Lankan lover had given her one thousand sarungs, then he’d gone back to being a Tamil Tiger. Only last year she heard that he was in London giving someone else one thousand sarungs. He was writing a Sociology of Everything, and would send her e-mails on irrelevant matters concerning this every week. Each e-mail subject line ended with an exclamation point. Well, she had one thousand sarungs and if only for that he had not been a complete waste of time, they were a presence, an extravagant after-image of a fact. Love is love. It wears off. At the end there is a certain wonder at how you had become caught up in the domestic drama of it all—the immediate thrust and parry, the minutiae of emotional pain, plus a feeling as if you were once mad or as if you now need a transfusion of some kind of rare blood. At least she felt this way after each lover, needing some sort of rare blood to recover, as she first did when she was twenty, with the subway lover.

And that time with Beatriz. Beatriz sleeping was the rarest sight. June might have seen it only a few times.
Then the sheets were alive and secretive. A skin. Beatriz turned the sheets into skin. A thin translucent skin, some trembling substance June could touch but not enter. June wanted her to open the sheets and let her into what must be the incandescent atmosphere of this skin. So in those few moments when she came awake in the night, she wavered between watching the anomalous event of Beatriz sleeping and waking her with teeth in her back and rough hands tearing away the sheets’ skin, between Beatriz’s thighs.

To unravel that skin and to look at Beatriz, June was not quite sure what would happen. Would she catch her raw and even more dangerous, lethal perhaps? Beatriz did not look vulnerable in sleep like most people, she looked more of herself, more cool, more smoky, more clandestine as if she did not even allow her dreams to tell the truth. “I have held many people’s lives in my hand,” she told June. “I have held someone dying. Death is nothing and living is everything.”

Sex with Beatriz was wordless and bruising. June felt every area of her body touched and scraped with Beatriz. Sydney talked throughout. June would stamp her lips or her fingers on Sydney’s mouth in an unaccountable remembering of that brief time with Beatriz. She had returned to
Estelí. Was she killed by the Somocistas or was she now a bureaucrat, or a politician? Beatriz may not have even been her true name. When the Sandinistas won, June had searched the newspapers for the face of Beatriz riding into Managua in a jeep. She had not found her.

June chose dramatic lovers. Perhaps they expressed some drama going on inside her. It absorbed her how her lovers seemed to live in the world so immediately, as if all depended on the present moment that they were living. As if there was never a moment of contemplation needed. Meanwhile all she did was contemplate.

She opened the front door and shook the front mat just to let the dealer and his customers across the street know that they had been noticed. Perhaps that would make them move along. The windbreaker looked across at her, then went back to his business. She stared at him trying to cut his shiny, bubbled jacket in two with her look. Behind her she heard steps on the staircase. “Thanks, Miss June,” she heard as Bedri rumpled past her going out the door. “Wait!” she managed to get out but he had run down the stairs and onto the pavement. She thought of calling him again as he hustled up the street but she didn’t.

Emerging from the alley, the dealer and his clients had noticed the movement. Now they looked at her, lazily. She
had pried into their private life, and now they were having a look at hers. Not interested enough to stay and judge, they hurried in the next direction themselves.

B
edri’s knuckles were a faint violet. The veins of his eyes were violet too. He could smell violet when he pushed the door open and saw his sister.

His sister worked in a hair store. Whenever Bedri went to see her, he opened the door laughing and after that he could never get more than half of what he wanted from her. If only he could control his laughter, he knew, Hela would feel sorrier for him and give him what he asked of her, but he couldn’t help himself. The hair store on Weston Road was tiny. Packets of hair in plastic wrap hung from the ceiling. The ceiling was so low in the store that the
packets of hair hanging from it gave him the sense of being at a taxidermist’s, though there were no bodies, no heads attached to the scalps. He couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity. His sister herself wore variations of these packets. Sometimes Hela wore Indian hair, sometimes Korean, sewing it into her scalp. Sometimes the hair was red, sometimes black. He asked her if she wasn’t afraid of some disease or injury to her brain. He told her she would probably go bald if she wasn’t careful.

This time he didn’t laugh walking in. Hela was with a customer, a girl with long tiger-striped fingernails. He kept his violet bruised hand in his pocket, wiping his face with the other. He tried to act like a customer until his sister was finished and her customer left with three packets of hair. Hela picked up her purse and he wished that she hadn’t. He read himself in that gesture. He usually came here for money, sometimes fighting her for it, grabbing her purse and running out. He saw their childhood and who he wished he had been to her, someone to count on instead of someone who always asked for money. He stood dejected.

Hela dug in her purse. She was grateful that he hadn’t made a scene as he usually did, losing her a good sale. She brought out a small knot of money and simply held it out toward him, without blame, without love. She wanted him
to leave quickly. He saw this. He wanted to stay. He wanted to have her want him to stay. He grabbed the money with his free hand failing and failing at finding a way to say, “Let me stay, Hela.” No way he could say that in a pure unviolent way. A way without bruises. He left the store, stood outside for a few seconds looking at her through the glass front. She went back behind the counter. He saw relief on her face. She looked out, sensing she was being watched but he was gone. He was down the street near the traffic lights when he heard his name, his boy name, called—
Qualbiwanagoow! Goodhearted One!
—the name they all called him until he objected to it when he turned fourteen. The sound of it now filled him with hopefulness. And the sight of Hela waving him toward her made him run back like a boy, like a good-hearted one. She had heard him, she had heard him even if he hadn’t said it. Let me stay, Hela. His injured hand bounced in his jacket pocket but the pain was nothing to him—his older sister was calling him back. When he got to her Hela said, “Don’t go to Ma’s work. She’ll get fired if you do.” She said it with venom, and thrust another knot of money toward him. He backed away from her and the money fell onto the pavement. She bent to pick it up and he turned and walked back from where he’d come.
Qualbiwanagoow! Goodhearted One!
Qualbiwanagoow! Goodhearted One!
He heard her calling him again but he didn’t turn around.

His family was afraid of him, he thought, and that made him sad and desperate. He should go to Montreal with Ghost. He should disappear from them altogether. They would like that, he thought. His hand hurt again. Maybe it was broken. He pulled it out of his pocket. The violet had turned to blue. The second finger could not bend, the wrist, the whole hand was swollen. It hurt but it seemed to belong to someone else. The pain was big and dull and the more he looked at the hand the more foreign it seemed. He came to a bus stop and something made him hold his hand out for the people standing there to see. He reached the hand out to a girl with round white earphones. She didn’t understand, brushed him away and turned back to her music. He paused, rebuffed, as if he had expected her to hold it. The two other people at the bus stop moved to a place away from him. He stood for a while, his hand still outstretched, then he turned and began running down the street with his hand extended.

He ran full out down Weston Road. He could hear a blue sizzling, a sound like twigs lit and crackling as he ran. He felt as if he was a fire burning through air. And he ran making sure the fire kept going until all the twigs were burned.

He didn’t stop for the traffic light. He only saw his hand out in front of him, and then a school bus skittering alongside him seemed to disintegrate in speed. They were both speeding, he and the school bus, and now he felt like laughing. The school bus stopped but he didn’t and he ran across the intersection at Jane without looking. It was a wide street. He ran over the middle verge and he noticed grass and a paper carton and then more asphalt. A red car went around his legs and a grey car rode on his left shoulder. The big lemon face of a semi-truck trailer came toward him and he dodged it and he heard a curse as if from underwater. A car drew alongside, blowing its horn. He followed his hand moving ahead of him. His feet were light and even in his heavy shoes he felt so very light. The Audi glided beside him like a small lake beside a highway. He felt like the highway, slender and fast. The horn from the Audi fluted. He heard shouting from a bird flying by, or a small plane. A plane, he decided, hovering to pick him up. He thought if he could get his hand up in the air he would be taken up, but he couldn’t reach. He kept running and the lake beside him moved along with him. It was grey like an Audi, and rippling.

Weston Road wound its way before him and his legs began to melt. He thought they were burnt away and he felt sick to his stomach. He stopped and leaned over, vomiting.
The lake slowed beside him. He heard Ghost’s voice saying something and he tried to put his hands to his ears.

“You’re freaking out, man! You’re tripping!”

Tripping, tripping
, he heard, but he wasn’t tripping, he was falling, he was tumbling in pain.

“Man up, Money.”

He heard “man” and he straightened his upper body and ran at the Audi, kicking it.

“Blood! Blood! Blood, come! Let’s go!” Ghost sounded wounded, beseeching, and Bedri opened the door and got into the lake. They sat in silence for a few minutes. The lake water lapped around them. Then Ghost said, “Let’s roll man, let’s roll.”

“Whatever,” Bedri said, not hearing himself say, “Whatever,” but thinking he said, “Fuck, help!”

Ghost laughed and Bedri said, “What is so funny, I said help.” And Ghost heard, “What the fuck you laughing at, I said roll.”

All the way along Weston, they misheard each other that way. The car floated and Ghost put the music on, Bedri turned it off. They did this all afternoon. The car is a vault and they are locked in it with themselves and all the jewellery of their gloominess and their aimlessness. The steering wheel is gritty with sweat and dirt and the grist from their
hands mixed with the grist of the guy he beat up—his mouth and face—all this damage is like gold dust to them. The CD player is playing Gnarls Barkley and they’re singing the part about the echo and space.

On the back seat of the Audi now is Ghost’s coat. There’s no money in it, or not a lot. Lia had given him the coat and he thinks he’d better keep it because he’ll probably never see his sister again. At least, not for a long time. In the trunk there’s one side of a shoe that belongs to Ghost’s mother. Ghost is keeping it. It’s from Mercede’s best pair and he took one side just to piss her off. It lies there like a bearer bond in the vault.

Bedri squeezes his eyes shut and open, he thinks they’re swollen too. His hand is stiff and he pulls it from his coat pocket and notices that it is wrapped around the money Hela gave him. The money looks like newspaper or a subway transfer, or a receipt from a store and not at all like money. His coat is grungy and makes him hot and he gingerly takes it off, pulling the right sleeve gently over his wounded hand. He throws the coat in the back seat on top of Ghost’s and notices a juice box, but then it looks like a brick and then like a metal bar. There’s also a chocolate wrapper with a half eaten chocolate next to the metal bar, and there’s a roach smoked halfway down. He sees a feather
coming through the nylon threads of his jacket, a small grey feather and when he looks closer he thinks he can make out the bird it’s attached to—a small grey bird. “There’s a bird in the back seat,” he says, picking up the roach and squeezing the lighter into the socket of the car. Ghost sucks his teeth, pulls out the lighter and passes it to him.

“You are soooo tripping, Money, where were you running to?”

Bedri lit and sucked on the roach. He knew the bird was there. He could see with the back of his head, the bird working its way out of the material of the jacket. He held his breath trying to make much of the residue of weed in the roach. The bird skitters out making a flittering sound, a sound with an “f” and a “z” in it. He passed the roach to Ghost who took it and sucked the rest of the residue out. “That’s good,” Ghost says from his clenched nostrils.