Stunt (19 page)

Sa-mu-el Sta-tion. Five syllables.

Inside their boarded-up house, Immaculata is preserving a red squirrel. Slats of light come through the windows as if she is always standing beside a film projector. Leopold watches her. His face is so radiant, it melts. After she makes lunch, Immaculata brushes her teeth while she pees, as she used to do, and Leopold sits on the edge of the bathtub, as I used to do. He thinks he sees her blossom and then die and then he panics that she will leave him. He says ‘No' aloud.

‘What is
no
?'

‘Will you ever leave me?'

‘No.'

He is comforted, though he still wishes for
forever.

Mrs. Next Door dips a cotton ball in Immaculata's rubbing alcohol and then pushes it, astringent, against my skin.

It stings. ‘Ow.'

‘I'm sorry.'

‘I don't think it's infected.'

‘Just to be sure.'

She retracts her hand and chimes, ‘All done.' Something about the timbre of her voice sets her off. Her head fills with sirens. A stitch of agony sprouts between her eyes. Together, we sink in the damp grass, possessions grouped around us, listening to the
plink plink
of construction nearby. Mrs. Next Door pulls me to her. She smells like Mink's closet. I realize then that she is wearing all of Mink's clothes. Because they do not fit, she has had to layer them to cover herself: a sweater on top of a shirt on top of a dress on top of a leotard. Her arms are long and bone-thin. A praying mantis. They tackle me, her hug too strong. I try to tear away but she will not let me.

So I surrender. Ear against Mink's black cardigan, cashmere, I listen to her ragged breath, its effort; she is resuscitating something. Dew beads the grass below us. The world is made up of points, and while we can see each other from a distance, up close we are all indecipherable.

Mrs. Next Door suddenly steps back and reaches into the pocket of Mink's sweater – where the rope once was, the knife,
the bags that captured your studio. Behind her, my nightgown stirs, discounted, on a hanger. She hands me an envelope.

‘Is there anything else?' I ask.

She shakes her head, ‘No. Time to go,' and I watch her walk back into the house. She locks the door behind her.

Ms. Eugenia Ledoux.

Finbar's hand.

Inside the envelope is a key with a black vinyl tag marked
12
and a map to a motel called the Bedou Inn. The map is hand-drawn. If this were a war, its artist would be a prized draftsman. There is a note asterisked in the bottom corner:
check-in 3 p.m.
It looks to have been formulated during turbulence. Finbar, his eyes washed-out discs, turning the edges of everything into bathwater. The map tells me that the motel is on the Lake Shore. East. Here, in Toronto. When I expected to be boarding a train, coat brass-buttoned to my neck, travelling for entire days, climbing mountain passes, breathing frost and leaving time zones, when I expected the bite of Alaska, the Bedou Inn is probably only an hour by streetcar. This is disorienting, my projected journey so foreshortened. A dog barks from a rooftop above me. It sounds like collegial agreement. This is when I notice that there is no postage on the envelope. It was delivered by hand.

When I leave the
Station
this morning to go to
101
Dunn Avenue for the last time, mail or no mail, Samuel is asleep in the middle of the floor, his arms and legs starfished open, lungs lifting and falling like soft cymbals. He talks in his sleep, a language that I do not know. The consonants ponderous in his mouth, I press my ear against it and experience the most gentle form of possession. He is wearing his wool socks; I can see where he darned them on the heel.

We pull the mattress down from his bunk and we spend three days there, rain seeping in through the glass pyramid above us. The
Station
rising with the water level, Samuel checks the bilge pump and loosens the anchor lines. He plays records and he dances with the pluck and possibility of a colt. He pours Scotch for me in a mug and then adds ice from a bag labelled Iceberg Ice. We clink our mugs together and propose movements:
The Tenderness Movement! The Retirement Movement! The Movement Movement!
I watch him in still lifes:
Man Waltzing Half-Naked. Man Clowning as Though for a Photograph. Man Snagging Heart Like Soft Paw.

He strokes my feet, birds flying out of corners. I take him in my mouth – the flashbulb of temper, the devotion of strangers. He tells me, fingers in my hair, my mouth open against his collarbone, tasting salt and blowtorch and gold, his thigh hard between mine like the top of a fence, ‘I believe in the skills of one's hand above all else. Technology is about to rule us, Eugenia, but when it implodes, these skills will be all that matter.' He never abbreviates my name. We feed each other with our fingertips. Beets and fish and bread and pie until there is nothing left. We stumble and interrupt, pulling each other from the mattress to the kitchen counter to a squat by the door, speaking to an ankle bone, sharp like a scythe, the crevasse behind an ear, eyes
squeezed shut and wet in corners, the down on the back of a neck, the birthmark beside a belly button. We have been separated for too long and we have to rush to tell each other things and we do not want to forget one. We refuse sleep. If we succumb to it, we could lose each other in the night. Samuel Station describes tracking wolves and living for one year in a weather station and how a woman told him once, ‘You are so solitary.' And she was right. He is solitary. His worst nightmare is to be in a room full of people. Unless they are dancing.

And then he asks, as I climb the first rung of the ladder and he comes up behind me, forehead between my shoulder blades, hands rough on my hips, I tilt them back toward him, body quivering, the needle of a compass, ‘Do you think that we are really alone in this world or are we twins who eventually find each other, completing puzzles?'

Not looking at him, I say, ‘I don't know yet.'

Stepping off the tilted dock, first time on land in three days, I adjust my stance. Water laps the shore behind me, an obsession. I recall the sound of the metal detector against my heart. I reach into my breast pocket and fish out a gold necklace. Marta's locket. I see her tearing it from her neck, so hard she breaks the skin. I open it. No photograph. Blank canvas cut to fit. No self-portrait. You could never stand still long enough to finish one. You explained that your own face just made you want to run. I throw the locket into the lagoon. A small shock against the water. Your limbs striking the surface of a pond. The locket will sink and travel, be found one morning and melted down.

I walk south from the streetcar stop toward the Bedou Inn, the city thinning out around me. A reverend hurries by me. His skin tobacco-brown, hair dyed margarine-yellow, white boots and a black hat, a suitcase on wheels that won't quite close because of the hotplate nudging its zipper. In his pipe-cleaner arms, he holds out a cat for an aegis. It is Sirloin the cat, with his one lazy eye, the sign still on his back:

I have been abandoned.
Please be kind.

As they pass, the reverend mutters to me, ‘God works, God works' – not like God works in a factory or God works in a disco but like God was broken and now God works.

You told me once that you nearly killed yourself but that at the last moment God saved you. You knew that you had to die outside the house so as not to scar us forever, so you called a taxi and you opened the passenger door, noose already looped around your shoulder. ‘Rosedale Ravine, man.' You planned on hanging yourself from a
130
-year-old tree in the place you found most beautiful in the city. You had looked. And, like a dog, you wanted to die alone in the woods. You thought being alone was brave – more brave than being with other people. You tied the noose while watching Clint Eastwood play Marshal Jedediah Cooper in
Hang 'Em High.
Taking note of the technique for both of us, parroting a prisoner in the hole,
it snaps your neck like a dried-out twig,
and soon after demanding, ‘Unlearn that, unlearn that right now, Eugenia!' On the way to the ravine, a fog descended upon the city, blurring it and then hiding it. It became
impossible to find anything. Cars put on their blinkers and then finally pulled over, obsolete robots. An open road, and the taxi driver saw it as adventure. And for some reason, he wanted to impress you. Maybe it was your eyes. You had fighter eyes. Clint Eastwood eyes. He persevered until apologizing, ‘I could try to get you back home.' But then he could not do that either. Finally he stopped the taxi and let you out, saying, ‘Good luck, man.' He did not charge you, which struck you as chivalrous, and maybe even lucky. You stepped out onto the curb. You thought maybe this was heaven. Heaven is so private – you cannot really see anything but your own hands in heaven. And then you looked down and saw that you were standing on a path and so you followed it and vowed that its end would be your home. When you pushed open the front door, you were looking at the three of us looking at you, noose looped around your shoulder. You were home and this is when you started to believe in miracles.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

stunt,

you cannot move between two points
without a belief in the other end.

your,

s

The Bedou Inn is a small motel, twelve rooms in total, located where the Lake Shore meets Cherry Street. Rectangular, built of brick, it is reminiscent of a freight car dislocated from a train. The motel is beside the empty site where the circus pitches its blue-and-yellow-striped tent when it comes to town and people weep under it because they see other versions of their kind in flight. A mess of rail yards around it, mostly industrial land, one diner kitty-corner called the Canary, the smell of grease and sugar, OPEN glowing in its window.

Room
12
is the corner room and the receptionist tells me in a sharply articulate voice, ‘It is the only suite here, the only suite at the Bedou Inn.'

Sitting behind a teak desk on a chair that swivels, reading glasses strung round her neck, the receptionist wears a midnight-blue taffeta gown that gathers at her waist. She slept in it. No stockings. It is just too hot. She wears black ankle boots that point at the ends. They look to be too big, perhaps even a man's; she stuffs the toes to make them fit. Her hair is thick and grey, to the shoulders, and evokes the heaps on the beautician's floor. Her body is an elegy. A cat balance-beams the edge of the desk. Another one sits by the door. And another sleeps, curled, a closed fist, in her lap. The air is full of dander. A standing fan in the corner makes it tremble.

Books are piled high around her. They are imitations of her face: opened, read and closed too many times.

‘I used to have a lover who read Rumi to me in translation.' She lights a cigarette even though one is already burning in the overflowing ashtray, the waft of sweet wine rising with the smoke. ‘But he died.'

‘Are those his boots?'

‘Yes.' She laugh-coughs. ‘He slept with them on for a year. So that they fit perfectly. His feet. Not mine.' She laugh-coughs again. It is the sound of a tuba under water.

A tattered black velour curtain hangs behind her. Its bottom is fringed white with cat hair. I can make out a cot covered in Indian prints and what appears to be a green budgie flying free. It is her one wild thought. She would have taught her cats to go against their natures and not kill the bird. ‘It is so rare to meet three-dimensional people these days, don't you think?'

‘Yes.'

‘Like they are extinct.' She strokes the cat in her lap, her touch darkening its coat for a second. ‘Are they?'

‘No.'

‘That's a relief.'

‘May I ask you please who made the arrangements?'

‘I haven't a clue.' She huffs booze and bites her teeth together to stop herself from saying anything more and then she looks at me, eyes blue as the marrow of fire, moves her hand like she is lifting a heavy canvas off herself and her tamed cats. Ta da. She is dismissing me. I close the door to the sound of her muted chatter, finishing our conversation with her cats, Rumi, ‘We are going to sky, who wants to come with us?'

There is a milk truck parked in front of Room
2
. Otherwise the lot is empty. Some silver trash bins and a single shoe. If only the shoes had agreed on a meeting place. Three plastic chairs are set out between the rooms. Once people sat on them and read to each other.

As I push the key into the lock, I wonder what will await me there in the gloom: a crepuscular Finbar in sultry repose feeding
himself grapes, a baby tiger at his feet, or you, a bag messily packed with clothes that will no longer fit me?

Your last night at home, when you joined us at the dinner table, folding a green bean into your mouth before sitting down, Mink asked you as she always did, ‘So what did you do today?'

You answered as you always did. ‘I levitated.'

For the first time, she said, ‘Show us.'

‘I can't.' You explained, ‘I have to be alone to do it.'

‘And where do you go when you levitate?'

‘Nowhere. Yet.'

‘But then –'

‘But then, I am going to levitate into outer space. I need to see where I came from. Don't you?'

I sat there letting the question echo sepulchral in my bones.

And then Mink said, ‘Thank you, Sheb.'

Without the war between them, our parents were suddenly weightless. We hurried into their laps, sinkers keeping them in place.

‘But what about us what will we do when you're in outer space what will we do without you our family would be uneven,' Immaculata pleaded.

‘I'll send postcards,' and then you winked. Newborns contort their faces in sleep, practicing to win their parents' love. I gave you my most convincing face.