What Had Become of Us (3 page)

I would die without you, Pieter said to me.

No.

I would drink.

You drink now.

I moved further and further away from the racket of the crane. What must it have sounded like, I wondered, these huge trees ripping up the earth, trees crashing into other trees, splin-tering with thunderous cracks. Did the small forest creatures under the roots look up, their roofs removed, their vulnerability exposed, and notice death looming with each new crash? The reactor chimney smoke swirled into a mini-twister, thrown this way and that in a smoke dance. I sat down amongst the fallen trees and ate a sandwich that I had stuck in my jacket pocket. It was a squished pair of bread slices with a thick smear of fresh butter, two speculaas cookies in between.

I could no longer see Pieter or the crane. When the buzz of Pieter's saw cut out for any length of time, I counted off the minutes it took for him to roll and smoke a cigarette. If the silence lengthened, I became alarmed, and a bilious anxiety rose in my stomach. He had become everything to me; we were inseparable. Perplexing death images dissipated only when I stood close to Pieter; when we were in bed together I felt complete. The night after the accident, Pieter and I crawled like maimed animals under the duvet. I had sorted his clothing in the upstairs laundry, held the blood-soaked cloth up to my face. I had no idea what I was doing. I had read once that Madame Curie held her husband's brains in a handkerchief for days, not able to bear the loss of his mind. I put one little bloodied wood chip into my mouth (the metallic taste of Erwin melting on my tongue), and then I shoved Pieter's sullied clothes away from me into the washing machine. I watched them agitate clean. I should have built a shrine around them, I thought later, as Pieter whimpered in bed next to me. I was not asleep; I was heartlessly alert when Pieter held me close and made love to me. It was Erwin's face and his body that came to mind.

Does it bother you that I loved him?

I am not a jealous person by nature.

I felt this comment as a heavy burden. It weighed on me. Not as guilt but as something more tangible, as if I were somehow responsible for propping it all up, holding us on the earth. Everything had an enormous heaviness. My legs moving from tree to tree were magnetized and grounded; I could not fall. The Doem laboratories had repatriated loads of vitrified nuclear waste in barrels deep in the ground; they'd dug a series of a hundred tunnels seventy-six metres beneath me, deep under the Tertiary clay that itself created a non-porous shield against any possible leakage. The little fishes bumping into the wire mesh. Erwin's hand on my throat. Even laughter carried weight. I felt the world had a boundlessness that I could not escape. And this depressed me.

Even sorrow is fleeting, Pieter said.

That's not my experience.

The crane operator was the closest when I fell. He clambered out of his machine, as quickly as his giant body allowed, to help me. I had screamed. Pieter was further away and took longer to arrive. Paul's hands were enormous, like grizzly paws. They lifted me as if I were a bundle of dried sticks. I had been listening to the sweet whine of Pieter's saw off to my left and back. I had looked up into the sky before giving the tree my full attention. There was a single bird grappling with the air currents. It spun midair and regained flight balance, seeming to enjoy the inevitability of its own weakness. I looked carefully along my tree, and I sliced it through. The tree became an instant catapult, grabbing me by the midsection. It hurled me in seeming slow motion in an arc some ten metres through the air before I dropped at full force into another log, spine first. I expected to die and braced myself for this inevitability. I held the spinning blade of the chainsaw as far away from my body as possible, reasoning that if I dropped the tool it might cut me in half. The space around my eyes in that instant of airborne thrust was shattered into a million quartz-like shards. In the strange expansion of time before I landed (the awful shock of pain; the catapulting tree flinging about trying to find its central calm), I sought to explore these gem-like splinters, their texture, their variegated edges, and imagine a way they might fit together to explain to me what I had become, and then wonder whether, if given the time, I could look through this clear stone of my creation to determine what had become of us.

 

photo: Miriam Berkeley

 

KATHRYN KUITENBROUWER is the author of the bestselling novel
All the Broken Things
and the novels
Perfecting
and
The Nettle Spinner
. She is also the author of the short story collection
Way Up
. Her writing has won a Danuta Gleed Award, the Sidney Prize (USA), and has been nominated for the Amazon.ca/Books in Canada First Novel Award and the ReLit Award. Her short fiction has appeared in
Granta Magazine
,
The Walrus,
and
Storyville
. She has taught and mentored students through The New York Times Knowledge Network, The University of Toronto School of Continuing Studies, and the University of Guelph MFA in Creative Writing. Kathryn has recently completed a residency at Yaddo and a fellowship at the Virginia Centre for the Creative Arts.

 

Copyright © 2003, 2014 by Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer.

 

All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). To contact Access Copyright, visit
www.accesscopyright.ca
or call 1-800-893-5777.

 

Series edited by Martin James Ainsley.

Cover and series design by Chris Tompkins.

Art direction and page design by Julie Scriver.

 

 

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

 

Six@sixty / edited by Martin James Ainsley.

 

Short stories compiled to commemorate Goose Lane's sixtieth anniversary.

5. What had become of us / Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-86492-853-5 (set : pbk.).— ISBN 978-0-86492-793-4 (set : epub).—

ISBN 978-0-86492-860-3 (v. 5 : pbk.).— ISBN 978-0-86492-736-1 (v. 5 : epub).

 

I. Ainsley, Martin James, 1969-, editor. II. Kuitenbrouwer, Kathryn, 1965- .

What had become of us.

 

PS8321.S59 2014 C813'.010806 C2014-902978-0 C2014-903186-6

 

 

Goose Lane Editions acknowledges the generous support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF), and the Government of New Brunswick through the Department of Tourism, Heritage, and Culture.

 

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