Read The Incident Report Online
Authors: Martha Baillie
The Incident Report (8 page)
Again I arrived at Janko's apartment. His skin, and under his skin. What his left toe knew. The smell of him. The orbital smell of him. That our knees spoke willingly. Inexplicably, the taste of raspberries filled my mouth.
A patron reported that a man was lying on the floor in adult nonfiction. The time was 6:00
PM
. I approached the man. Though able to respond slowly, he was incapable of getting up from the floor. He smelled of alcohol, appeared beaten and bruised and wore a hospital bracelet. When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics recognized him as “Stanley.” The man insisted he was not “Stanley,” and declared that “Stanley” does “nasty things” in public. The paramedics helped the man to his feet and escorted him out of the library.
She was of a suitable height for a girl her age, or so it seemed to me, though admittedly I could not quite tell how old she was. Her hair was without character. Her weight befitted her height.
I explained to her that to read the full article she would have to pay, that this was not the fault of the Public Libraries of Toronto, but of the on-line version of the newspaper, the
Sarnia Observer
, if in fact fault was involved, which I didn't believe it was. We are all subject to economic necessity.
Since I could not turn my computer's monitor far enough around to enable her to read the free extract, I read it for her, aloud. For the duration of a moment, she sat and thought.
“What does it say again?” she asked
I read for a second time: “
Runaway Teens Excited Over Toronto Find Disillusionment
. Mother, Dawn Mason, is terrified for the safety of her 15-year-old daughter, Natalie Ford, who escaped from a group home in Sarnia last Tuesday and is believed to have headed for Toronto.”
“Is there a photo?”
“No. I'm afraid not.”
“Aw,” she exclaimed. “But that's what I wanted. All I really wanted was to see the photo.”
“There isn't one. Shall I print out the extract anyway?”
“What will I have to pay?”
“Twenty cents.”
“Sure.”
When the paper lay on the desk in front of her she pointed at the girl's name.
“Natalie Fordâthat's me.” She indicated the woman's name. “Dawn Masonâthat's my mother. She wrote this article.” She pointed to the title. “What does this mean?”
It meant, I explained, that teenagers come to Toronto expecting something great and are disappointed.
“That's true. It was kinda like that for me. Tough at the start, not what I'd sorta imagined. Yeah, that's how it was for me, when I was young.”
She stared at the page a while longer.
“They're just teasing me,” she concluded. “It's much longer. It says 507 words. They want me to pay.”
“If I click on the shopping cart icon, we can find out how much they want. Shall I?”
“Sure. I mean, yes, please.”
I clicked, and the price revealed itself: five dollars.
“Oh, I can pay that. It's worth it, don't you think?”
“I think so. For the full article, yes.”
“I'd need a credit card.”
“Yes, you would.”
“I have one. But not on me.”
“Does your mother know where you are now?”
“Oh yeah. That's old history. I'm a mother now. I have my own children. I'm twenty-two.”
When my mother was my present age, thirty-five, her constant worry was my father. At that time, I was ten years old, my brother seven and my sister five. My father, in that year, celebrated his fortieth birthday. We ate cake and ice cream.
My father did not read the books he collected. Whereas many men drink, he eased his anguish by purchasing books. He imagined that his collection might one day acquire an immense value. Not that he planned to sell his books. It would be enough to have the world confirm that he had recognized their true worth, that he had found and rescued them from possible destruction and that he was their keeper.
Musty volumes stood in piles on the stairs going up to our second floor; they formed a low wall leading to the washroom. Neither the shelves in my parents' bedroom nor those in the living room could contain all my father's books. His collection filled the garage. The car remained parked in the driveway, in every season, no matter the weather. My mother prohibited him from bringing home more books. He hid them under his coat or he waited until she was out of the house.
He claimed he could locate any title in his collection in less than fifteen minutes, though he kept his books in no apparent order. One Saturday afternoon, my brother, my sister and I put him to the test. At first he refused. Then, seeing our determination, he succumbed. We went into the garage ahead of him, selected a book at random, then came out and told him the title he was to search for. In five minutes flat he placed in our hands the exact volume, the gorgeous cover of which had caught our eye:
Great Composers of our Time
. We passed it excitedly back and forth between us. Tiny, brightly coloured mandolins, flutes and violins, unfurling ribbons of musical notes, decorated the dust jacket.
Several more times that afternoon, our father demonstrated his magical knowledge of his collection, delivering to us the very title we'd requested, proving beyond a doubt that within the chaos of his books an order reigned.
Today, for the first time, I met Sheep Woman. She asked me for a book on poisons.
“What sort of poisons?” I inquired.
She leaned forward and whispered, “My daughter is trying to poison me.” Her breasts rested heavily on the Reference Desk. Her bright eyes examined me from between deep folds of skin.
“Then, what you'd like is a book on how to detect poisons?” I suggested.
“Yes,” she agreed. “I have worked hard all my life,” she explained.
She told me that in the region of France where she was born, the soil was poor. Her father was poor, her mother fertile. She was their ninth child, and she looked after the sheep. She knew how the weather behaved, the smell of an approaching storm. One afternoon she'd begun rounding up the flock to bring them down from the exposed hills.
“The dog worked with me, running low to the ground,” she explained.
She, the sheep and the dog had come partway down the slope when the sky became a dark lid. The
sheep were frightened. The sky pressed itself down on the bleating animals and the rain hammered the ground. Then, with a terrible clatter, the lid that was the sky fell off, and rolled, and a white brilliance poured over everything.
The leader of the sheep ran off, followed in blind obedience by the rest of the flock. The dog raced this way and that, barking and biting, attempting to redirect their course. As for her, she scrambled alongside, shouting, the rain turning her dress into a second skinâan awkward webbing between her legs.
The rocks glowed; and between the slick stones, the trampled grass and the mud also glowed. There was nothing that did not glow. They came upon the old well. The leader of the sheep plunged into its comforting darkness and silence. The flock followed. Heaving into each other, pushing, trampling, they clambered over the low lip. Their luminous wool was tinged, for an instant, a sulfurous yellow against the dark sky. Then they vanished from sight.
“When the last of my father's sheep were drowned and I couldn't hear any more bleating from inside the well, I walked away.”
She did not go home. It was dark as night, and then it was night. She walked to the nearest city.
Years later, she would own her own shoe store, give birth and raise children. Years later, she would hear a ringing in her ear.
“I said to myself, âFather is slapping me for losing our sheep. He is the one making my ear ring.' But it couldn't have been him, because I never went home. I didn't give him the chance to beat me.”
After the storm, she did not see her parents again.
“Once, when I heard the ringing in my ear, I imagined that my mother had a telephone at last, and wanted to speak to me. I worked hard. I was the proprietor of my own store. What happened to my parents and to my brothers and sisters? I don't know. Sometimes in the street, when people squeeze together and crowd down the stairs, rushing underground to the subway, I hear bleating. My daughter tells me to rest. She wants me to rest forever.”
Though I searched, I could not find a book on detecting poisons. I returned from the shelves, empty-handed.
“I'm sorry,” I apologized. “I'm sorry, we don't seem to have a book on poisons.”
Sheep Woman leaned forward and whispered, “I will continue to refuse to eat the food my daughter prepares for me. She will never succeed in killing me.”
I was ten years old when my father, who did not believe in God, became concerned by the fact that my younger brother and sister and I were receiving no religious education. My father had been raised an Anglican. His faith had held firm for the first twenty-eight years of his life. Then an event had occurred that caused his beliefs to collapse.
I asked about the event and was promised an explanation at some future date. It was a Sunday evening. My father placed a Bible on the table and announced that we must decide for ourselves, that we ought not to be impeded from believing, simply because of his own inability.
From then on, every Sunday, following dessert, seated at the head of the table, my father read, with an amused expression, a brief passage from the Bible. It was his expectation that for twenty minutes we'd exchange our views on the meaning of the story we'd just heard.
We, his progeny, ranged in age from ten to five. My brother formulated his opinions by kicking my sister's leg under the table; and when my brother tired of this pastime, he'd slyly offer to take his plate to
the kitchen, and on his return journey he'd drop a cool metal spoon, a fork or an actual ice cube, something cold and unexpected, down the back of my sister's shirt or dress, causing her to squeal as it slid along her warm skin.
“Progeny” was a word I'd only recently discovered, and quite by chance, in one of my father's unread books. Nobody knew I possessed it. It was mine. I was quite certain that one day it would prove usefulâa source of surprise and defence. In the meantime, it added to my definition of myself. My skin felt tighter, my bones more solid. No matter what anyone said to me, I would not melt and form a puddle at anyone's feet. Neither my brother nor sister suspected the existence of such a word as progeny. It had a pleasing sound.
I watched my father drink his tea and wondered if it was really a single event or many that had caused him to lose his faith. I wondered if he'd felt a joke had been played on him, that someone had dropped something very cold and slippery down the back of his shirt, and that the shock and sudden discomfort of such a joke had dislodged his beliefs. I did not believe in God, and so had no faith to lose.
A young patron, suspected of previous thefts, was caught at 10:30 this morning in the act of stealing a brand-new
Mad
magazine. He was warned that his behaviour was ill-advised. The magazine, though slightly torn, was reinstated in the collection.
The time was 1:00 in the morning, and I pulled the sheet up to my chin. Beneath the sheet Janko's hand warmed my belly. He told me that as a child he'd been uncertain of his existence.
There was a person who answered to the name Janko, who was followed about the house by his mother; or perhaps she was not following him but cleaning the stairs and ironing the sheets and scrubbing the bathtub and calling out his name from habit, asking about his schoolwork, his friends, his socks and his hat, the food in his stomach; but for whatever reason, always, she was there.
Everyone knew Janko, whose father worked for the post office, who had three sisters and two brothers, who lived with two of his grandmothers and one of his aunts, who read too much yet did not do well at school.
But there was a boy whose name was also Janko, whom nobody knew of. When this boy sat at the table not speaking, they could not hear his thoughts. When he twisted a piece of wire around an old wine cork until it became a doll, and handed the tiny figure to his youngest sister, nobody knew what this Janko was thinking or who he was.
This morning, for the first time, Suitcase Man spoke to me. The time was 11:15. He bowed, set his suitcase on the floor and sat down. Without preamble he began.
He was a biochemist, he explained, and, shortly after his arrival in Canada as a visiting professor, he'd left his office and gone down the hall to speak with a colleague. He returned to find a note resembling a grocery list tucked inside a book on his desk. The note had appeared during his absence. He grew alarmed and studied it carefully: “Milk, onions, bread and tea.” He preserved the note, and from that moment on took great pains to lock his office door during even his briefest absences. Several weeks later a similar note appeared. Again it resembled a grocery list and was written in a hand that was not his own. His alarm increased. Whoever was attempting to communicate with him in this veiled and threatening fashion possessed a key to his office. Straightaway he requested that the university change the lock on his door. They granted him his wish and changed the lock. More notes, all of a similar nature, found their way into his office: “Tea, garlic, bread, lemons.” He asked that the lock be changed again.