The Journey Prize Stories 27 (26 page)

Johnny was wearing a T-shirt that read
No Olympics on Stolen Native Land
, and he had his hair done in the same way as in the commercial, flat, gelled, and neatly parted to the side. He ordered the boring beer. Deb was in my long teal knit skirt—stretching out the elastic waistband and making lumps in the ass—and a floral blouse that really didn’t match. Caro was dressed as a ghoul. His eyes were circled in black and he had long red wounds or tear marks painted on his face. I couldn’t tell if the blood was real or fake.

Deb whispered, I know, it scares me too, but it was Caro’s own idea, I wanted him to be a baby vampire.

His sleeves were firmly pinned to his tattered ghoul costume.

When he started fussing, squirming in the high chair, the other diners started to notice and muttered amongst
themselves. The manager asked me if I knew those people. When I said, Yes, slightly, she said, Deal with it. I took their beers to the table and said, Caro’s rash looks a little better.

Deb sighed, Oh, it comes and goes.

Does he still scratch?

Of course not. He can’t.

They studied the menu and ordered sweet potato fries, saying they weren’t very hungry. I made the kitchen double-size them on my tab and throw in two salads.

Then a party of eight showed up, everybody in costume, including a couple of old white people wearing fake Indian suits, complete with feathers in the headband and beads and faux leather, and Johnny was ready to bust right out of his skin at this point. By the time I got them seated, Deb and Johnny had both gone to the washroom and left the tiny bloody ghoul howling, unable to scratch himself. I couldn’t put food down in front of empty seats. When they came back, Johnny’s hair looking even more like the losing end of a beer commercial than before and Deb with flushed cheeks, the super-sized fries were half cold. Deb sent them back to the kitchen for reheating.

The next morning Deb knocked on my door at eight. Vivian? Do you have any extra Tampax?

I freaked. Don’t you ever go shopping?

I told her to look in the bathroom herself because I was going back to bed.

Deb stood stock still for a second, then spun around and left. Caro glared at me from the Snugli on her back.

When I knocked at their door ten minutes later, with a box of Tampax in my hand, Deb slipped out into the hallway. Inside her place were empty Mason jars, a taxidermied pygmy
owl, a plastic statue of the Virgin Mary. She picked up Caro and set him on the boot rack. Then she took the Tampax, opened the door, and tossed it inside.

She put her hands over Caro’s ears and said, I wish I’d never had this baby. I wish I could go back to the ocean and haul fish.

I said, Come on, Deb, that’s crazy.

Deb said, Not so loud, he’ll hear you.

I whispered, That’s crazy.

She said, It’s not crazy, it’s true.

I said, Well, why not let Johnny Rain have him, then? Then you could do what you want.

Deb said, I didn’t say I wanted to give him up, I said I wish I never had him. There’s a difference. You’re the philosopher, you should know that.

I asked her if she ever expected to get custody of Isaac again, and she said, Who?

Then she said, Oh, Isaac. A long pause, and in that pause Caro threw up, a volcanic milky eruption.

While she cleaned herself and the baby, she said, Isaac wasn’t mine. I lied.

Indeed it is even possible for an entity to show itself in itself as something that it is not
.

I went to bed with Heidegger.

Or still, something good which looks like, but “in actuality” is not
. Φάινόμενον άγαθόν.

It was three o’clock in the morning. A full moon outside.

How the worldly character of the environment announces itself in entities within the world
.

I could see the shadow of their teepee in my yard.

The manifest. That which shows itself in itself
. Φάινόμενον.
Phenomenon
.

It was so wrong, I mean, nice, but wrong. It was a cliché. The Squamish Natives didn’t use teepees, they built longhouses.

And in my dream Deb said, What are you, the teepee police?

I said, But why? Why do you lie to Johnny?

She said, Because I want him to be with me because of how we feel and who we are and not because we feel obliged to love.

The next day Deb needed to borrow five hangers.

Caro was not in her arms. Deb without Caro looked less grounded, less sure of herself. Even I felt unmoored.

Where’s the baby? I asked.

With Johnny Rain, Deb said. He took him to the barber’s for a haircut.

The barber’s? He’s eight months old. He doesn’t even have hair.

Johnny needed to do some faux father-son bonding. They’ll never come back. Or they’ll return for the wrong reasons.

I pulled a couple of Darryl’s crisp white serving shirts off two hangers and dropped them on the closet floor. I handed Deb five wire hangers.

How’s the essay coming? Deb asked.

Slowly.

Read me something.

I started reading. “Appearing is a not-showing-itself—”

Deb interrupted. So did you tell Johnny?

Tell Johnny what?

You know, that Caro really is his baby.

Deb was squinting at me, searching my face.

It’s none of my business, I said.

Then she asked if I had a pair of scissors. I found some heavy-duty shears. She was holding her thick braid in her hand.

She said, I want you to cut this off.

But why?

Because I need to know if Johnny loves me only for my hair.

Nobody loves someone because of hair, I said. And even if he does, at least he loves you. You don’t test love, Deb, you don’t question it.

She let the braid drop. She sighed. I better not. Last time I trimmed my hair Caro was inconsolable.

One day, Deb told me that Caro understood everything. I said, don’t be paranoid, he’s only a baby. But Caro seemed to be staring out the window, toward the teepee, in such a self-conscious way that I felt a chill run down my neck. Did he understand? I mean, not just phrases like
go potty
or
bad boy
, but concepts, circular concepts of loss and betrayal and identity and love?

We decided to test him.

I said, Dog. Caro didn’t react at all.

Deb said, That’s insulting, try something harder.

I said, Global warming.

Caro looked at me.

I continued. Is climate change a result of carbon emissions caused by human intervention or a naturally recurring phenomenon based on sunspots and earth tilt?

Caro yawned and closed his eyes.

Deb put her hands over his ears. She whispered, I need to borrow your car.

I handed her my car keys.

She whispered, It’s Caro’s eight-month birthday, I want to get him a xylophone.

But can he play with it? I asked. I mean with his arms pinned.

Probably not, she said sadly.

He’s sleeping, I whispered. Why are we whispering?

He’s not sleeping, he’s pretending, she whispered.

Caro snored then, a small delicate snore. His mouth dropped open and a bit of dribble slipped down to his chin. Deb swooped it up with her thumb and put it in her mouth. Besides, I have to go to the doctor. I think I might be pregnant.

Caro yelped. His eyes flew open and darted around madly, looking for something to soothe him, and he finally focused on one of Darryl’s large oil female nudes, very buxom. He immediately relaxed, closed his eyes, and apparently fell asleep. But he wasn’t kidding anybody anymore.

He dreams about things you can’t even imagine, Deb said.

What kind of things? I asked.

A lot of times I think he dreams that he’s a rabbit.

Sure enough Caro’s nose started to twitch, and Deb covered his ears and said, I told you he was faking.

I asked if he always struggled in his restraints and she said, Sometimes he’s still, but I know he’s only trying to trick me into believing he won’t scratch. Regular babies can’t feel pain you know, Deb said.

I wasn’t so sure.

I mean they feel it, but they don’t know where it’s coming from. But Caro knows. He knows exactly where it’s coming from.

Caro sneezed.

He’s coming down with something, Deb said. I gotta get him in bed and put some onions in his socks to draw the fever.

I went to the cupboard. Is one enough? I asked.

Sure, she said and left with my car keys and one onion.

I phoned Darryl. I really needed to unload. The anniversary dinner, the cold fries, the fake blood, Johnny confronting the old people in their Indian suits, Heidegger, the onion. I was gonna tell Darryl I was ready for him to come home. I knew we could work it out. I missed him a lot. A lot, lot. He told me he was going out with Melanie, the bartender at Milestones.

That night I cried my eyes out, and the next and the next. I needed twenty minutes of teabags and ice cubes on my eyes before I could go to work. I thought about suicide. I thought about Europe. I thought about razors and pills and lighthouses in New Brunswick. I thought about climbing up the Angels Crest trail to the top of the Chief and jumping off. I wrote imaginary notes to Darryl:
Dear Darryl, Go fuck yourself
. I thought about all those nights he had stayed up late to cook pad Thai for me because he knew how sick I was of eating fried sweet potatoes at the restaurant.

Deb called to tell me the commercial was on. I hung up on her. I was getting a fever. I called Deb back and left a message, Where’s my fucking onion? I felt hot and sweaty. My unit was so damp the walls leaked. A mushroom was growing in the corner of my rug.

I called in sick and the manager said, Oh don’t even come back. I emailed my prof for a deadline extension. He emailed back,
R U serious?

Then one day Johnny Rain phoned and said he needed me to babysit. Deb was running late, grooming a spoiled Shih
Tzu, and he was going to an anti-Olympics demonstration. I told him I was in no condition to babysit. He said he’d wash my windows in payment. I said, for chrissake I wouldn’t charge you for it, I’m just saying I can’t. I’m not reliable, I’m not safe to be around babies or sharp objects. He hung up.

I soaked in a burning hot bath. I cried and watched myself in the mirror, crying. I looked so good I couldn’t figure it out. I hacked my hair off with the shears. I stuffed it all into a manila envelope and addressed it to Darryl. I wrote a note that said,
Here’s a souvenir, Asshole. Love, Vivian
. I glanced over at Heidegger lying open on my desk.
Being-alone is a deficient mode of Being-with
. Then the light dimmed. I looked up to see Johnny Rain outside my window, standing on the top rung of an aluminum ladder, smearing sudsy water in a looping pattern on the pane. Caro was strapped on his back in a baby carrier, blinking at me through the smudged wet glass.

When I stepped outside later, on my front step were a box of Tampax with four missing, three quarters of an onion, my can opener, five hangers, my car keys, my skirt, my hairbrush. Even one fifty-nine-cent stamp.

Johnny Rain was sitting on his bike in the street, revving it. When he saw me, he took off. In their apartment Caro was seated on the floor, surrounded by puzzles and hammers, things that popped and whistled and dinged and swung. His arms were pinned to his sleeper and his face looked like a topographical map of Russia in pink. The TV was on, playing a tape of the beer commercial. Caro was staring at the commercial, watching his dad get passed over by the gorgeous babe because he was drinking the boring beer. Caro had a
note pinned to his shirt that said,
Vivian, there’s mashed avocado in the fridge for when I get hungry
.

I laid
Being and Time
on the floor, next to a pop-up Sesame Street toy thing.

I found the coffee I had lent Deb three weeks before, but no coffee maker. I sat on the floor next to Caro and watched the beer commercial, then rewound it and played it again. And again.

I told Caro about my plans to climb to the top of the Chief. I told him that cliffs were hard and air was thin and gravity was almighty. I explained to Caro that Darryl had semi-sorted out his sexuality and was now dating Melanie the bartender at Milestones. I told Caro how hard it was for me to even say her name out loud. I told Caro that it doesn’t matter what beer you drink, it will never help you get the right girl. I told him that his mother was working late at Pet Fabulous and as soon as he was big enough she’d take him fishing on the ocean. I told him he’d outgrow his rash. I told him that the question of the meaning of Being must be formulated. I told him that it was snowing on top of the mountain, and what I wanted more than anything was to climb up the slope with my snowboard on my back and then stand at the top of fifteen hundred vertical metres and look away through the clouds to the Pacific in the distance and then slide and curl and bank down as fast and furious as I could until I was scared to high heaven and drenched in fine snow. I told him that Johnny Rain was his one true father. I told him Dasein always understands itself in terms of its existence, in terms of a possibility of itself: to be itself or not itself. I told him fear has three aspects: what we are afraid of; fearing; why we are afraid.

I unpinned Caro’s arms.

When Deb came home she looked at Caro and said, Oh, you told him.

She started kissing Caro’s wounded face and his eyes closed in feigned sleep or bliss, and when she lifted her head away from him and turned to me, her lips were bright and vivid with his blood, as if she had smeared them with lipstick, as if she were going somewhere.

Charlotte Bondy
is from Toronto and has an M.Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Her stories have appeared in
PRISM international
and
The Moth Magazine
. She is working on a collection of short fiction.

Emily Bossé
completed her Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing at the University of New Brunswick in 2014. “Last Animal Standing on Gentleman’s Farm” was her first piece of published fiction when it appeared in
The Fiddlehead
. Her first full-length play,
COCAINE PLANE!
was produced by The Next Folding Theater Company in March 2015. She is currently working on several plays and a collection of short stories entitled
Here Comes Happiness
.