Love Letters of the Angels of Death (16 page)

Eighteen

You're laid out under the lights, your head held in a brace, mouth wide open. The man in the mask and goggles is leaning over your face, his nose hidden but just inches from yours. Behind the safety lenses, his eyes are wide and alert – not a trace of social recognition in them. This deadened human closeness – it must be what we mean when we call things “clinical.”

There's a bitter taste of bleach at the back of your mouth where your tongue sprouts out of the walls of your throat. And there's a sound, deep inside your head, travelling into your brain through the Eustachian tubes that connect your pharynx to your ear canals. The sound is a scrape, scrape, scraping that goes on and on somewhere within your jaw.

“So now we're using our tiny little files here to grind out what the drills couldn't get at. Would you like to see what the files look like?” he has asked you.

“No, I'm good,” you've answered, all in vowels around the rubber dam clipped to your numbed gums.

He had paused before he clamped the dam on you. He'd flicked a glance at his assistant. “See if we still have the paediatric-sized one.”

It's one of our secrets – that inside your head is a mouth like a child's. And I always hate it when anyone else finds out – even people like him.

You rolled your eyes at me when you realized it. “Professional dental care is not intimate.” That's what you told me. But how can it not be? The warmth, the pink, moisture, the smell – not even our kids know you that well anymore.

In the dentist's chair, they've left the lead-lined X-ray apron draped over your shoulders and chest, all the way down to the tops of your legs. They tell you it's for convenience, because they have to keep taking X-rays – making sure they've obliterated every last cell out the canals in the roots in that one, evil tooth of yours. But lying underneath the apron, you suspect the hot heaviness of it is actually there to treat your low-grade shock. It's coming and going in sickening, suffocating waves. The apron makes you think of one of those heated blankets you've only seen a few times before – the ones taken from special cupboards in the backs of emergency wards or out of ambulances at the scenes of car crashes.

It's not a standard dental cavity gone amok that's brought on this root canal. In fact, today is the first time you've ever had a tooth filled at all – the first time you've heard a dental drill working anywhere near your mouth. It's strange, but you're going from having completely virginal teeth to having a full-on root canal in one afternoon.

Somehow, your teeth just never succumbed to cavities – not even when you were a kid, not even when you had a full set of braces. Your teeth still don't get cavities, though you only floss on the weekends. Like a real Holy Incorrupt Saint, your mouth simply does not decay. Against all time and nature, your teeth are glistening, white, and beatified.

Even if your teeth don't rot – not like mine – it turns out they're still susceptible to rare degenerative conditions. The dentist says one of the bicuspids in your upper jaw – one that looks completely pristine from the outside – is actually in the middle of a slow, inexplicable fit of suicide.

“Internal resorption,” the dentist called it. He actually sounded a bit excited when he picked it out of your X-ray during your routine check-up. “It's one of those ironic diseases. We're all supposed to love irony nowadays, aren't we?”

You wouldn't fake a smile for him – not about this.

“You see,” he explained, “the tooth thinks it's trying to repair itself from some kind of internal stress – a bit like a broken bone.”

“I didn't know teeth could do that.”

He nodded. “That's right. They can't. But this one is trying its darnedest. Unfortunately, the cells it sends to fix things end up taking the tooth apart. It's like they get stalled in the demolition phase and never make it to the repair phase – since, for teeth, there is no such thing as a repair phase, really. It's strange, all right – and rare. But it's not cancer,” he added, not quite
out of nowhere.

It left us startled, wondering how we got to be talking about cancer at all. The dentist really didn't know that much more about your tooth disease himself. The best he could do was to send you home with a brand new article photocopied out of
The Western Journal of Dental Sciences
.

That was our regular dentist – the one who seems to be away on scuba diving vacations for half the year. This new dentist, the one leaning over you now, is a specialist. From behind his mask, he asks permission to show your X-rays to his colleagues. And for a few days, you and your rare tooth disease will be hot stuff in the local dental community.

Across town from the endodontist's clinic, in my office, I'm sitting in front of a computer screen, worrying about your appointment. I made my mark working in a northern boomtown when the kids were just babies, and my company rewarded me with a junior vice president position here in a city on the plains.

No matter what you say, I do think about you while I'm at work when you're not actually within my field of vision. I've left my cell phone on my desk beside my keyboard just in case you need to call me from the dental clinic again. I keep picking it up to make sure it's still on.

“Brigs,” you said when you first called me from where you were hiding in the stairwell outside the posh misery of the endodontist's office. “I think I might leave. I don't think this is unfolding the way it's supposed to.”

“Did they start yet?”

“No. I haven't seen any sign of the Great and Powerful Oz. But his receptionist is trying to get me to sign this form saying I've been properly informed about a whole bunch of stuff no one has ever informed me about.”

I stand up. “Well, don't leave yet. Go back inside, get them to explain everything, and hang in there. It's okay.”

The empty air on your end of the phone is hollow and funny. You're still in the stairwell, trying not to cry, and I can tell you hate yourself.

“Aw, it's okay,” I say. “In two hours, it will be all over.” And then I can tell you're hating both of us.

I try something else. “Come on. Remember when Aaron cracked his back tooth wrestling with Scottie? And he was too little to tell us there was anything wrong until it was all abscessed and dangerous?”

You sniff. “I know, I know.”

Aaron's accident was years ago now, when he was just a toddler. We had to take him to a paediatric dental specialist – a dentist who could drug kids to sleep before treating them. The dentist wasn't in the room yet when the anaesthesia team gathered to press that tiny black gas mask over Aaron's nose and mouth. Flat on his back on the table, the boy was frantic – like he was fighting for his life. He was sure he was being killed. It didn't matter that you were standing right there telling him not to struggle and not to be scared. He thought he was dying even though it was you who held his shoulders down and looked into his eyes while the doctors turned on the gas. And when his body went limp, you didn't believe the anaesthetist when she told you Aaron was already asleep. How could he be sleeping when he was still making that noise after you let go of his shoulders – a high, repeating, rattling alarm sounding through his open mouth? She called it a “little hiccup” – said it happened all the time. And then, while someone threaded a tube down his throat behind her, she smiled at you and showed you the door. Once you'd finished betraying your son, you were just in their way.

“Your tooth is in serious trouble. And the problem's not going to just go away on its own, right?” my voice says over your phone in the stairwell of the endodontist's office building. “You don't want to lose it – not when you're awake, not in real life.”

“I know. I know.”

“So go.”

You promise you'll turn off your phone and head back inside the waiting room. The receptionist tries not to look smug as you hand her the waiver forms, dated and signed.

I'm on my feet at the sight of you coming through the door of my office. You've come all the way up to the top floor of the glum, brutalist building where I go to work every day. You've been hoisted up in the elevator, you've come through the glass doors of the office and smiled at my secretary with the half of your face you have the power to move, and you've made your way down the hallway to find me. Now you're sliding your arms inside my suit jacket and closing them around my ribcage. I'm crushing your face into my chest with one hand and pushing the door closed the other.

“Are you okay?” It's as stupid a question as it ever is, but I ask it anyway – just like we all do.

You turn your face, resting your cheek against me so your mouth is free and you can speak – lopsided and woolly. “I went in there and lay still while he hollowed out my living tissue and packed me full of plastic and silver. I just lay there like a cadaver for hours and let him do it. And near the end – I started slipping. My brainstem got all slow and sick, and I had to consciously tell myself, ‘breathe and breathe and breathe,' every single second.”

I run my tongue over the ceramic crown anchored in my own mouth. “Yeah, it's always kind of an awful procedure.”

Your hands are on my forearms, your elbows straightening, forcing a distance between us. “Brigs – he was embalming me. They just did one tooth this time but I know eventually it will all be finished. He was trying to get the dead off me so I could be presentable among the living again.
Embalming me.
I never wanted that
.
I'm meant for burning, not for emptying out and keeping.”

There's nothing to do but laugh. I do it quietly and carefully and – mostly importantly of all – kindly. “Hey, don't think about it that way,” I say. I'm sitting down, bending into my big vice president's chair that still feels to me like a prop in a play I'm acting out. I'm pulling you with me, onto my lap. No matter what you've just been through today, your body feels like it always does to me – like it's supposed to feel. “Cadaver,” I scoff. “But you're all warm and soft. You're not dead. Though you might still be in shock – and a little bit silly, maybe.”

You sit across my thighs, shoulders rounded, staring out the window at the dirty, concrete parking garage across the street. I glance at the closed door and think about sliding a hand inside your clothes. But this isn't that kind of play. And I know it's best just to keep still and wait. When you finally move again, it's to wipe at the numbed corner of your mouth. You look surprised when your fingers come away dry – no blood, no spit, no fluid of any kind.

And I can see the light returning as you shrug. “Silly – maybe. But Brigs,” you look into my face, still faintly sad, “what if my head really did fill up with cancer? I mean, don't you ever worry about losing me?”

I sit back. And I know I don't worry about losing you – ever. I don't know why. Maybe I've seen you wrestle your own death too many times – there in those hospital delivery rooms when the tiny blood vessels burst in your face and you lose the power to speak and the portal to the world outside this one opens through your flesh – but then you just live on through it. Or maybe that's not it at all. I don't know. But I can tell – I can tell just from your pressure and warmth against me, across my legs, against my shoulder – that I won't ever live one moment here without you.

Nineteen

The year I graduate from university is the year we move house together for the first time, right out of the capital city. There's nowhere for us to go but north, to the oil sands mines. It's the only way to pay back all the money we borrowed to finish the nine years of university we have between the two of us. And the only way to get to the oil sands by land is on Route 63 – that one, jammed, two-lane highway through the wilderness. So we're careening through the boreal forest right along with the logging trucks and the industrial wide-load trailers and the Mustangs that run on booze and testosterone. Through their windshields, the men see the silhouette of your long hair in the driver's seat of our car. They come up fast, staring at you through the glass – in spite of me and the kids in their car seats and the fact that you're pregnant with Levi, our third son. The men are leering sideways as they cross over the solid yellow centre line to pass us. Maybe you'll get used to it over the next few years, but I never will.

The sight of farmland ended hours ago. It was encroached upon by the forest until the sprawling ranches shrunk to nothing more than a few small herds of red cattle foraging between the aspen trees.

“No more pastures,” I announce – quietly.

In the backseat of our small, economy car, the kids are starting to get restless in their five-point harnesses – pinned down by mazes of nylon straps and plastic clips at their shoulders and hips like little chimpanzee astronauts. It's too bad that when they're awake, they don't have any of that sad, stoic astro-chimp sense of resignation. Before we left the capital city, some of your grittier friends suggested you drug the boys with an over-the-counter anti-nauseant so they'd sleep through most of the trip.

“Nah. If they're anything like me,” you said, “pills won't settle them down.” The boys are sleeping now, but not because you drugged them – I'm pretty sure.

We're still an hour south of the Fort McMurray town-site when the road climbs, rising out of the green trees and into the old, burnt forest. Back when we were kids, a colossal forest fire ate up hundreds of hectares of the land south of the city. The crest of this hill is where the flames burned right up to the gravel shoulders of the highway, climbed to the tops of the tall, thin trees, bending them over the asphalt in a hellish, orange-red arch, clawing out for the fuel of the treetops on the other side of the road. The policemen stood in the middle of the highway, behind their barricades, with the bulldozers and the teenaged forest-firefighters who rubbed at their eyes and leaned against their shovels. And they all just watched it go.

When it was over, nothing came after the fire to finish off what was left of the tree trunks. Years later, all these thin, charred trees still stand like grey skeletons for miles and miles along the highway, right where we can see them – the Incorrupt Saints of the boreal forest world, or whatever. Something must be happening, some slow natural entropy that will eventually topple every one of them. It's probably hidden low, near the knee level of the burnt trees, where aspen saplings are reclaiming the land by inches every season.

It's hard not to wind up getting maudlin out here in The Old Burn, even though everyone in this country knows that wild forests are supposed to burn themselves up from time to time. It's a natural part of their life cycles, or something. Maybe making it into an analogy for the human condition is starting to get a bit trite. But you're pregnant right now, so you like the idea of things that can only be fruitful while they're being consumed. On good days, you don't mind that you live your life set on fire. The heat keeps you fine and fluid, white as molten steel. But on bad days, you are ash – grey and weightless, floating in the air over the dry old bones of the forest, drifting down onto the scorched spruce tendrils, moving only with the creaking of the dead trees.

“Are you getting sleepy?” I ask it in a near-whisper so the boys won't be disturbed.

“No danger of that,” you answer. “You know I can't sleep in a car. Heck, I can hardly sleep in a bed these days.”

I close my eyes and settle back into my seat. “Just let me know if you need me to do some driving.”

“Nah, I'm good.”

Just when it seems like any remnants of the civilization we've come from are long gone, you're waking me up to point out the big sign on the side of the road announcing the city limits. Beyond it, the forest opens up, and the highway falls into a valley made by an enormous river. It's called the Athabasca. It's on its way out of the Rocky Mountains and into the Arctic Ocean, and it's wider than just about anything else like it on the continent. There're only two bridges spanning the Athabasca River inside the city. One goes north, to the petroleum plants where I'll be spending nearly every day for the next five years. The other heads south, back to everyone and everything else we've ever known.

We find our new neighbourhood, up in the roads running in concentric circles on the wooded hills above the city's flood plains. It's a brand new trailer park where we've mortgaged a half million dollar strip of land with the mobile home bolted to it. Right now, my mother is still alive, down in the south of the province watching courtroom television and eating potato chips in her own trailer park. But her neighbourhood is nothing like this one. There's no vertical aluminum siding here – no harvest gold refrigerators, no peeling paper wood veneers, no orange shag carpet. Instead it's full of skylights and Jacuzzi tubs, walk-in closets, and guys who pay more in annual income taxes than my Dad has ever earned in a year.

We've arrived here a little too early to meet the realtor with the big white goatee – the man who has the keys to let us inside our new home. But it's been a long drive, so we get out of the car anyway and walk around on the hard clay ground that was spread over this land – stiff and brown as refrigerated peanut butter – to fill in the unstable spaces where the muskeg used to be. The kids find a pile of boulders heaped behind the trailer and begin the serious work of climbing all over it. We sit on the wooden step built up to the back door out of new green arsenic-wood and wait for the realtor. I look down at my watch again. He is late now.

There's just the smallest trace of a smile around your mouth as you look up at me from the bottom step.

“Don't say it,” I grin.

“I'm going to say it.”

“Okay then.”

“Mistah Kurtz, he dead.”

In the narrow street, huge red and white buses – touring coaches kind of like the ones rock stars travel in – are roaring between the rows of diesel pickup trucks parked along the curbs. The open space in the centre of the asphalt is like the eye of a needle. And the buses thread themselves right through it, all over the trailer park, dropping off men still wearing hard hats and blue coveralls mucky with grease and striped with reflective safety tape.

One of the men from a rock star bus stamps up the stairs of the trailer next door – the one with the front door facing ours. He bawls out a greeting to us in a heavy Newfoundland accent. The sound of it brings out the borrowed Atlantic Canadian accent of your own, and in a few sentences you're talking way louder than you usually do, breathing in instead of out when you say “yeah,” and referring to our trailer as “she.”

I've just waved goodbye to him, and our new neighbour has one boot inside his trailer when we both stop and jerk our heads to look at you. You've let out this incredible, horror movie scream. Even our little boys have turned from where they sit on the boulder pile to see what's the matter with you.

“What is that?” you say, still almost in a yell. One of your hands has all your hair gathered into a ponytail while the other one is pointing at the ground, to the wooden planks laid down on the clay as a makeshift walkway.

The neighbour looks over and laughs – making it even harder for me to figure out what he's saying to us. I'll get used to the sound of accents like his soon, but for now I'm still ignorant enough for it to take two repetitions – each louder than the last – before I understand that he's identifying a big black bug sitting on the walkway. He calls it a tarsand beetle and claims it'll bite us.

I crouch as I creep up to the black creature waving its antennae on the walkway. It's a large beetle, all right. It's big enough that I might have believed someone if they'd told me it came here all the way from the Philippines. Its whole exoskeleton is matte black, as if it is truly made out of tar. What's most striking about it are its antennae. They're twice as long as the rest of its body, making the entire bug about five inches long in total from tip to tip. It's probably the biggest bug I've ever seen in Canada – but I still think you've overreacted.

I let you hear it in my voice. “For cryin' out loud–it's just a big beetle.”

“Kill it!”

“Oh, for heck's sake. Someone's going to hear you screaming and call the police.” I'm bringing my shoe down on top of the beetle. It's not even trying to get away. It just lies there, exposed, feeling up toward the sole of my shoe with its antennae.

The beetle's dead now so you let yourself get a little mad at me. “It–was–in–my–hair.”

That is creepy. “But you're fine now,” I say. “Aren't you?”

You just shudder.

There's a huge, mucus-white Cadillac SUV lumbering over the curb and into the yard. Its driver is our realtor. He's out of his vehicle and coming across the clay with a set of keys on one of his brokerage's fancy custom key fobs. He looks like he could be a Hollywood version of a plantation owner from the southern United States – but he's still just a northern boomtown realtor. He doesn't say anything when he sees the squashed tarsand beetle smeared by its ivory coloured guts against the wooden walkway – although he does take care not to step on it himself.

The bug stayed stuck to the wood for days afterward – long enough for you to start calling him “Gregor” and wondering out loud which of the oil sand projects he used to work at before he was changed.

We've been living in the city for a few months when one of the tarsand beetles finds his way (“Her way,” you correct me, “the biggest ones are the females”) inside our trailer. You're in the kitchen packing a lunch for me to take to “the plant” when I hear the bread knife hit the countertop as you start to scream. By the time I've spun around to see, you're standing by the counter in your undershirt. The T-shirt you were wearing is lying on the linoleum on the other side of the room.

The whole trailer shakes as I stomp back toward the kitchen. “What is it?”

“It's – in my shirt.”

I let out a long breath. “Tarsand beetle.” I stoop to gather up your shirt, heading to the back door where I'll shake out the bug and flick it back into the air.

The boys have come running and are standing at the edge of the kitchen, looking on with a fear a lot like your own. You never meant to do it, but you've made them afraid of the tarsand beetles too – though it's hard to take the boys seriously when they can't stop calling them “Tarzan beetles.”

I'm standing in the doorway, calling back into the trailer over my shoulder. “It's okay, boys. Even the biggest beetle can't hurt you.”

“Yes. Daddy's right. It can't hurt anybody. It just surprised Mummie.” You force a little laugh. “Brigs – I am so stupid. I'm sorry.”

I close the door and hand your shirt back to you. You hesitate but you take it, pinching the hem between two of your fingers like it's contaminated with some kind of biohazard now. I'm not surprised when you don't pull it back over your head. You're standing half-dressed in the kitchen, all flushed and ashamed. And I'm glad this happened at home, indoors, in private, because you would have done exactly the same thing if you'd seen a tarsand beetle perched on your shoulder, sorting through your hair, in the middle of a grocery store or at the park or in a restaurant or anywhere else.

I shake my head and pull you into me. “You've got to stop this.”

“I know. I am so sorry.” You're nodding against my chest. When I let you go, you throw your unsalvageable T-shirt into the laundry hamper.

As our first northern winter begins, all the bugs retreat into stasis somewhere in the forest. At the height of the cold half of the year, the daytime temperatures peak at no more than minus forty-five degrees Celsius. The snap lasts for two whole weeks without a break. It's so bad the steering fluid in the car freezes, and you keep Scottie home from kindergarten even though the schools are still open. The schools are always open. The scarcest resource in this town isn't money. It's childcare. There are some shift workers who will drop their kids off at the free-childcare utopia of the public school and head off to plants no matter what the weather. If those kids ever found the doors to the schools locked – well...

And then one day, while Scottie is away at kindergarten, you hear on the radio that his school is “in lockdown.” At a construction site a few blocks from the schoolyard, a giant beetle appeared, looking exactly like a man. It scuttled into the cab of a bulldozer and bolted itself inside. They say it used to work for the contractor who owns the machine, so it's got keys, a stash of potato chips, a bottle of rye, and a sawed-off rifle it brought from home tucked under its puffy down coat that morning. Every few hours, the beetle fires off a shot, aiming into the frozen ground in front of the line of police cars that have gathered to pen him in. The shots keep the cops from losing interest in the standoff.