"You cut off her wings, but it doesn't make her any less monstrous.
"One thing I can tell you, you're pretty special: Most real people never
see us. You saw me right off. It's like *Dracula*, where most of the
humans couldn't tell that there was a vampire in their midst."
"Van Helsing could tell," Krishna said. "He hunted Dracula. You can't
hunt what you can't see," he said. "So your kind has been getting a safe
free ride for God-knows-how-long. Centuries. Living off of us. Passing
among us. Passing for us."
"Van Helsing got killed," Alan said. "Didn't he? And besides that, there
was someone else who could see the vampires: Renfield. The pathetic pet
and errand boy. Remember Renfield in his cage in the asylum, eating
flies? Trying to be a monster? Von Helsing recognized the monster, but
so did Renfield."
"I'm no one's Renfield," Krishna said, and spat onto Alan's lawn. First
fire, then water. He was leaving his mark on Alan's land, that was
certain.
"You're no Van Helsing, either," Alan said. "What's the difference
between you and a racist, Krishna? You call me a monster, why shouldn't
I call you a paki?"
He stiffened at the slur, and so did Alan. He'd never used the word
before, but it had sprung readily from his lips, as though it had lurked
there all along, waiting to be uttered.
"Racists say that there's such a thing as 'races' within the human race,
that blacks and whites and Chinese and Indians are all members of
different 'races,'" Krishna said. "Which is bullshit. On the other hand,
you --"
He broke off, left the thought to hang. He didn't need to finish
it. Alan's hand went to his smooth belly, the spot where real people had
navels, old scarred remnants of their connections to real, human
mothers.
"So you hate monsters, Krishna, all except for the ones you sleep with
and the ones you work for?"
"I don't work for anyone," he said. "Except me."
Alan said, "I'm going to pour myself a glass of wine. Would you like
one?"
Krishna grinned hard and mirthless. "Sure, neighbor, that sounds
lovely."
Alan went inside and took out two glasses, got a bottle of something
cheap and serviceable from Niagara wine country out of the fridge,
worked the corkscrew, all on automatic. His hands shook a little, so he
held them under the cold tap. Stuck to the wall over his work surface
was a magnetic bar, and stuck to it was a set of very sharp chef's
knives that were each forged from a single piece of steel. He reached
for one and felt its comfort in his hand, seductive and glinting.
It was approximately the same size as the one he'd used on Davey, a
knife that he'd held again and again, reached for in the night and
carried to breakfast for months. He was once robbed at knifepoint,
taking the deposit to the bank after Christmas rush, thousands of
dollars in cash in a brown paper sack in his bag, and the mugger -- a
soft-spoken, middle-aged man in a good suit -- knew exactly what he was
carrying and where, must have been casing him for days.
The soft-spoken man had had a knife about this size, and when Alan had
seen it pointed at him, it had been like an old friend, one whose orbit
had escaped his gravity years before, so long ago that he'd forgotten
about their tender camaraderie. It was all he could do not to reach out
and take the knife from the man, say hello again and renew the
friendship.
He moved the knife back to the magnet bar and let the field tug it out
of his fingers and *snap* it back to the wall, picked up the wine
glasses, and stepped back out onto the porch. Krishna appeared not to
have stirred except to light a fresh cigarette.
"You spit in mine?" Krishna said.
Though their porches adjoined, Alan walked down his steps and crossed
over the lawn next door, held the glass out to Krishna. He took it and
their hands brushed each other, the way his hand had brushed the
soft-spoken man's hand when he'd handed over the sack of money. The
touch connected him to something human in a way that made him ashamed of
his desperation.
"I don't normally drink before noon," Adam said.
"I don't much care when I drink," Krishna said, and took a slug.
"Sounds like a dangerous philosophy for a bartender," Adam said.
"Why? Plenty of drunk bartenders. It's not a hard job." Krishna
spat. "Big club, all you're doing is uncapping beers and mixing shooters
all night. I could do it in my sleep."
"You should quit," Alan said. "You should get a better job. No one
should do a job he can do in his sleep."
Krishna put a hand out on Alan's chest, the warmth of his fingertips
radiating through Alan's windbreaker. "Don't try to arrange me on your
chessboard, monster. Maybe you can move Natalie around, and maybe you
can move around a bunch of Kensington no-hopers, and maybe you can budge
my idiot girlfriend a couple of squares, but I'm not on the board. I got
my job, and if I leave it, it'll be for me."
Alan retreated to his porch and sipped his own wine. His mouth tasted
like it was full of blood still, a taste that was woken up by the
wine. He set the glass down.
"I'm not playing chess with you," he said. "I don't play games. I try to
help -- I *do* help."
Krishna swigged the glass empty. "You wanna know what makes you a
monster, Alvin? That attitude right there. You don't understand a single
fucking thing about real people, but you spend all your time rearranging
them on your board, and you tell them and you tell yourself that you're
helping.
"You know how you could help, man? You could crawl back under your rock
and leave the people's world for people."
Something snapped in Alan. "Canada for Canadians, right? Send 'em back
where they came from, right?" He stalked to the railing that divided
their porches. The taste of blood stung his mouth.
Krishna met him, moving swiftly to the railing as well, hood thrown
back, eyes hard and glittering and stoned.
"You think you can make me feel like a racist, make me *guilty*?" His
voice squeaked on the last syllable. "Man, the only day I wouldn't piss
on you is if you were on fire, you fucking freak."
Some part of Alan knew that this person was laughable, a Renfield eating
bugs. But that voice of reason was too quiet to be heard over the animal
screech that was trying to work its way free of his throat.
He could smell Krishna, cigarettes and booze and club and sweat, see the
gold flecks in his dark irises, the red limning of his eyelids. Krishna
raised a hand as if to slap him, smirked when he flinched back.
Then he grabbed Krishna's wrist and pulled hard, yanking the boy off his
feet, slamming his chest into the railing hard enough to shower dried
spider's nests and flakes of paint to the porch floor.
"I'm every bit the monster my brother is," he hissed in Krishna's
ear. "I *made* him the monster he is. *Don't squirm*," he said, punching
Krishna hard in the ear with his free hand. "Listen. You can stay away
from me and you can stay away from my family, or you can enter a world
of terrible hurt. It's up to you. Nod if you understand."
Krishna was still, except for a tremble. The moment stretched, and Alan
broke it by cracking him across the ear again.
"Nod if you understand, goddammit," he said, his vision going fuzzily
black at the edges. Krishna was silent, still, coiled. Any minute now,
he would struggle free and they'd be in a clinch.
He remembered kneeling on Davey's chest, holding the rock over him and
realizing that he didn't know what to do next, taking Davey to their
father.
Only Davey had struck him first. He'd only been restraining him,
defending himself. Alan had hit Krishna first. "Nod if you understand,
Krishna," he said, and heard a note of pleading in his voice.
Krishna held still. Alan felt like an idiot, standing there, his
neighbor laid out across the railing that divided their porches, the
first cars of the day driving past and the first smells of bread and
fish and hospital and pizza blending together there in the heart of the
Market.
He let go and Krishna straightened up, his eyes downcast. For a second,
Alan harbored a germ of hope that he'd bested Krishna and so scared him
into leaving him alone.
Then Krishna looked up and met his eye. His face was blank, his eyes
like brown marbles, heavy lidded, considering, not stoned at all
anymore. Sizing Alan up, calculating the debt he'd just amassed, what it
would take to pay it off.
He picked up Alan's wine glass, and Alan saw that it wasn't one of the
cheapies he'd bought a couple dozen of for an art show once, but rather
Irish crystal that he'd found at a flea market in Hamilton, a complete
fluke and one of his all-time miracle thrift scores.
Krishna turned the glass one way and another in his hand, letting it
catch the sunrise, bend the light around the smudgy fingerprints. He set
it down then, on the railing, balancing it carefully.
He took one step back, then a second, so that he was almost at the
door. They stared at each other and then he took one, two running steps,
like a soccer player winding up for a penalty kick, and then he unwound,
leg flying straight up, tip of his toe catching the wine glass so that
it hurtled straight for Alan's forehead, moving like a bullet.
Alan flinched and the glass hit the brick wall behind him,
disintegrating into a mist of glass fragments that rained down on his
hair, down his collar, across the side of his face, in his ear. Krishna
ticked a one-fingered salute off his forehead, wheeled, and went back
into his house.
The taste of blood was in Alan's mouth. More blood coursed down his neck
from a nick in his ear, and all around him on the porch, the glitter of
crystal.
He went inside to get a broom, but before he could clean up, he sat down
for a moment on the sofa to catch his breath. He fell instantly asleep
on the creaking horsehide, and when he woke again, it was dark and
raining and someone else had cleaned up his porch.
#
The mountain path had grown over with weeds and thistles and condoms and
cans and inexplicable maxi-pads and doll parts.
She clung to his hand as he pushed through it, stepping in brackish
puddles and tripping in sink holes. He navigated the trail like a
mountain goat, while Mimi lagged behind, tugging his arm every time she
misstepped, jerking it painfully in its socket.
He turned to her, ready to snap, *Keep the fuck up, would you?* and then
swallowed the words. Her eyes were red-rimmed and scared, her full lips
drawn down into a clown's frown, bracketed by deep lines won by other
moments of sorrow.
He helped her beside him and turned his back on the mountain, faced the
road and the town and the car with its trunk with its corpse with his
brother, and he put an arm around her shoulders, a brotherly arm, and
hugged her to him.
"How're you doing there?" he said, trying to make his voice light,
though it came out so leaden the words nearly thudded in the wet dirt as
they fell from his mouth.
She looked into the dirt at their feet and he took her chin and turned
her face up so that she was looking into his eyes, and he kissed her
forehead in a brotherly way, like an older brother coming home with a
long-lost sister.
"I used to want to know all the secrets," she said in the smallest
voice. "I used to want to understand how the world worked. Little
things, like heavy stuff goes at the bottom of the laundry bag, or big
things, like the best way to get a boy to chase you is to ignore him, or
medium things, like if you cut an onion under running water, your eyes
won't sting, and if you wash your fingers afterward with lemon-juice
they won't stink.
"I used to want to know all the secrets, and every time I learned one, I
felt like I'd taken -- a step. On a journey. To a place. A destination:
To be the kind of person who knew all this stuff, the way everyone
around me seemed to know all this stuff. I thought that once I knew
enough secrets, I'd be like them.
"I don't want to learn secrets anymore, Andrew." She shrugged off his
arm and took a faltering step down the slope, back toward the road.
"I'll wait in the car, okay?"
"Mimi," he said. He felt angry at her. How could she be so selfish as to
have a crisis *now*, *here*, at this place that meant so much to him?
"Mimi," he said, and swallowed his anger.
#
His three brothers stayed on his sofa for a week, though they only left
one wet towel on the floor, only left one sticky plate in the sink, one
fingerprint-smudged glass on the counter.
He'd just opened his first business, the junk shop -- not yet upscale
enough to be called an antiques shop -- and he was pulling the kinds of
long hours known only to ER interns and entrepreneurs, showing up at 7
to do the books, opening at 10, working until three, then turning things
over to a minimum-wage kid for two hours while he drove to the city's
thrift shops and picked for inventory, then working until eight to catch
the evening trade, then answering creditors and fighting with the
landlord until ten, staggering into bed at eleven to sleep a few hours
before doing it all over again.
So he gave them a set of keys and bought them a MetroPass and stuffed an
old wallet with $200 in twenties and wrote his phone number on the brim
of a little pork pie hat that looked good on their head and turned them
loose on the city.
The shop had all the difficulties of any shop -- snarky customers,
shoplifting teenagers, breakage, idiots with jumpy dogs, never enough
money and never enough time. He loved it. Every stinking minute of
it. He'd never gone to bed happier and never woken up more full of
energy in his life. He was in the world, finally, at last.
Until his brothers arrived.
He took them to the store the first morning, showed them what he'd
wrought with his own two hands. Thought that he'd inspire them to see
what they could do when they entered the world as well, after they'd
gone home and grown up a little. Which they would have to do very soon,
as he reminded them at every chance, unmoved by George's hangdog
expression at the thought.
They'd walked around the shop slowly, picking things up, turning them
over, having hilarious, embarrassing conversations about the likely
purpose of an old Soloflex machine, a grubby pink Epilady leg razor, a
Bakelite coffee carafe.
The arguments went like this:
George: Look, it's a milk container!
Ed: I don't think that that's for milk.
Fred: You should put it down before you drop it, it looks valuable.
George: Why don't you think it's for milk? Look at the silver inside,
that's to reflect off the white milk and make it look, you know, cold
and fresh.
Fred: Put it down, you're going to break it.
George: Fine, I'll put it down, but tell me, why don't you think it's
for milk?
Ed: Because it's a thermos container, and that's to keep hot stuff hot,
and it's got a screwtop and whatever it's made of looks like it'd take a
hard knock without breaking.
And so on, nattering at each other like cave men puzzling over a
walkman, until Alan was called upon to settle the matter with the
authoritative answer.
It got so that he set his alarm for four a.m. so that he could sneak
past their snoring form on the sofa and so avoid the awkward, desperate
pleas to let them come with him into the shop and cadge a free breakfast
of poutine and eggs from the Harvey's next door while they were at
it. George had taken up coffee on his second day in the city, bugging
the other two until they got him a cup, six or seven cups a day, so that
they flitted from place to place like a hummingbird, thrashed in their
sleep, babbled when they spoke.
It came to a head on the third night, when they dropped by the shop
while he was on the phone and ducked into the back room in order to
separate into threes again, with George wearing the pork pie hat even
though it was a size too big for his head and hung down around his ears.
Adam was talking to a woman who'd come into the shop that afternoon and
greatly admired an institutional sofa from the mid-seventies whose lines
betrayed a pathetic slavish devotion to Danish Moderne aesthetics. The
woman had sat on the sofa, admired the sofa, walked around the sofa,
hand trailing on its back, had been fascinated to see the provenance
he'd turned up, an inventory sticker from the University of Toronto
maintenance department indicating that this sofa had originally been
installed at the Robarts Library, itself of great and glorious aesthetic
obsolescence.
Here was Adam on the phone with this woman, closing a deal to turn a
$3,000 profit on an item he'd acquired at the Goodwill As-Is Center for
five bucks, and here were his brothers, in the store, angry about
something, shouting at each other about something. They ran around like
three fat lunatics, reeking of the BO that they exuded like the ass end
of a cow: Loud, boorish, and indescribably weird. Weird beyond the
quaint weirdness of his little curiosity show. Weird beyond the
interesting weirdness of the punks and the goths and the mods who were
wearing their subcultures like political affiliations as they strolled
by the shops. Those were redeemable weirds, weirds within the bounds of
normal human endeavor. His brothers, on the other hand, were utterly,
utterly irredeemable.
He sank down behind the counter as George said something to Fred in
their own little shorthand language, a combination of grunts and
nonsense syllables that the three had spoken together for so long that
he'd not even noticed it until they were taken out of their context and
put in his. He put his back against the wall and brought his chest to
his knees and tried to sound like he had a belly button as he said to
the woman, "Yes, absolutely, I can have this delivered tomorrow if you'd
like to courier over a check."
This check, it was enough money to keep his business afloat for another
30 days, to pay his rent and pay the minimum-wage kid and buy his
groceries. And there were his brothers, and now Ed was barking like a
dog -- a rare moment of mirth from him, who had been the sober outer
bark since he was a child and rarely acted like the 17-year-old he was
behaving like today.
"Is everything all right?" she said down the phone, this woman who'd
been smartly turned out in a cashmere sweater and a checked scarf and a
pair of boot-cut jeans that looked new and good over her designer shoes
with little heels. They'd flirted a little, even though she was at least
ten years older than him, because flirting was a new thing for Alan, and
he'd discovered that he wasn't bad at it.
"Everything is fine," he said. "Just some goofballs out in the street
out front. How about if I drop off the sofa for six o'clock?"
"KILLED HER, CUT HER UP, SLICED HER OPEN," George screeched suddenly,
skidding around the counter, rolling past him, yanking the phone out of
the wall.
And in that moment, he realized what the sounds they had been making in
their private speech had been: They had been a reenactment, a grunting,
squeaking playback of the day, the fateful day, the day he'd taken his
knife and done his mischief with it.
He reached for the phone cable and plugged it back into the wall, but it
was as though his hand were moving of its own accord, because his
attention was focused elsewhere, on the three of them arrayed in a
triangle, as they had been on the hillside, as they had been when they
had chanted at him when the knife grip was sure in the palm of his
hands.
The ritual -- that's what it was, it was a *ritual* -- the ritual had
the feel of something worn smooth with countless repetitions. He found
himself rigid with shock, offended to his bones. This was what they did
now, in the cave, with Davey sitting atop their mother, black and
shriveled, this was how they behaved, running through this reenactment
of his great shame, of the day Danny died?
No wonder Darrel had terrorized them out of their home. They were beyond
odd and eccentric, they were -- unfit. Unfit for polite company. For
human society.
The phone in his hand rang. It was the woman.
"You know, I'm thinking that maybe I should come back in with a tape
measure and measure up the sofa before I commit to it. It's a lot of
money, and to be honest, I just don't know if I have room --"
"What if I measure it for you? I could measure it for you and call you
back with the numbers." The three brothers stared at him with identical
glassy, alien stares.
"That's okay. I can come in," and he knew that she meant, *I won't ever
come in again.*
"What if I bring it by anyway? I could bring it by tomorrow night and
you could see it and make up your mind. No obligation."
"That's very kind of you, but I'm afraid that I'll be out tomorrow
evening --"
"Friday? I could come by Friday --" He was trying to remember how to
flirt now, but he couldn't. "I could come by and we could have a glass
of wine or something," and he knew he'd said the exact wrong thing.
"It's all right," she said coldly. "I'll come by later in the week to
have another look.
"I have to go now, my husband is home," and he was pretty sure she
wasn't married, but he said good bye and hung up the phone.
He looked at his solemn brothers now and they looked at him.
"When are you going home?" he said, and Edward looked satisfied and Fred
looked a little disappointed and George looked like he wanted to throw
himself in front of a subway, and his bottom lip began to tremble.
"It was Ed's game," he said. "The Davey game, it was his." He pointed a
finger. "You know, I'm not like them. I can be on my own. I'm what
*they* need, they're not what *I* need."
The other two stared at their fat bellies in the direction of their fat
feet. Andrew had never heard George say this, had never even suspected
that this thought lurked in his heart, but now that it was out on the
table, it seemed like a pretty obvious fact to have taken note of. All
things being equal, things weren't equal. He was cold and numb.
"That's a really terrible thing to say, George," is what he said.
"That's easy for you to say," is what George said. "You are here, you
are in the *world*. It's easy for you to say that we should be happy
with things the way they are."
George turned on his heel and put his head down and bulled out the door,
slamming it behind him so that the mail slot rattled and the glass shook
and a stack of nice melamine cafeteria trays fell off a shelf and
clattered to the ground.
He didn't come back that night. He didn't come back the next day. Ed and
Fred held their grumbling tummies and chewed at the insides of their
plump cheeks and sat on the unsold Danish Modern sofa in the shop and
freaked out the few customers that drifted in and then drifted out.
"This is worse than last time," Ed said, licking his lips and staring at
the donut that Albert refused to feel guilty about eating in front of
them.
"Last time?" he said, not missing Felix's quick warning glare at Ed,
even though Ed appeared to.
"He went away for a whole day, just disappeared into town. When he came
back, he said that he'd needed some away time. That he'd had an amazing
day on his own. That he wanted to come and see you and that he'd do it
whether we wanted to come or not."
"Ah," Alvin said, understanding then how the three had come to be
staying with him. He wondered how long they'd last without the middle,
without the ability to eat. He remembered holding the infant Eddie in
his arms, the boy light and hollowed out. He remembered holding the
three boys at once, heavy as a bowling ball. "Ah," he said. "I'll have
to have a word with him."
#
When Greg came home, Alan was waiting for him, sitting on the sofa,
holding his head up with one hand. Eli and Fred snored uneasily in his
bed, breathing heavily through their noses.
"Hey," he said as he came through the door, scuffing at the lock with
his key for a minute or two first. He was rumpled and dirty, streaked
with grime on his jawline and hair hanging limp and greasy over his
forehead.
"Greg," Alan said, nodding, straightening out his spine and listening to
it pop.
"I'm back," George said, looking down at his sneakers, which squished
with grey water that oozed over his carpet. Art didn't say anything,
just sat pat and waited, the way he did sometimes when con artists came
into the shop with some kind of scam that they wanted him to play along
with.
It worked the same with George. After a hard stare at his shoes, he
shook his head and began to defend himself, revealing the things that he
knew were indefensible. "I had to do it, I just had to. I couldn't live
in that cave, with that thing, anymore. I couldn't live inside those two
anymore. I'm going crazy. There's a whole world out here and every day I
get farther away from it. I get weirder. I just wanted to be normal.
"I just wanted to be like you.
"They stopped letting me into the clubs after I ran out of money, and
they kicked me out of the cafés. I tried to ride the subway all night,
but they threw me off at the end of the line, so I ended up digging a
transfer out of a trash can and taking an all-night bus back downtown.
"No one looked at me twice that whole time, except to make sure that I
was gone. I walked back here from Eglinton."
That was five miles away, a good forty minute walk in the night and the
cold and the dark. Greg pried off his sneakers with his toes and then
pulled off his grey, squelching socks. "I couldn't find anyone who'd let
me use the toilet," he said, and Alan saw the stain on his pants.
He stood up and took Greg by the cold hand, as he had when they were
both boys, and said, "It's all right, Gord. We'll get you cleaned up and
changed and put you to bed, okay? Just put your stuff in the hamper in
the bathroom and I'll find you a change of clothes and make a couple
sandwiches, all right?"
And just as easy as that, George's spirit was tamed. He came out of the
shower pink and steaming and scrubbed, put on the sweats that Adam found
for him in an old gym bag, ate his sandwiches, and climbed into Adam's
bed with his brothers. When he saw them again next, they were
reassembled and downcast, though they ate the instant oatmeal with
raisins and cream that he set out for them with gusto.
"I think a bus ticket home is about forty bucks, right?" Alan said as he
poured himself a coffee.
They looked up at him. Ed's eyes were grateful, his lips clamped shut.
"And you'll need some food on the road, another fifty or sixty bucks,
okay?"
Ed nodded and Adam set down a brown hundred-dollar bill, then put a
purple ten on top of it. "For the taxi to the Greyhound station," he
added.
#
They finished their oatmeal in silence, while Adam puttered around the
apartment, stripping the cheese-smelling sheets and oily pillowcases off
his bed, rinsing the hairs off the soap, cleaning the toilet. Erasing
the signs of their stay.
"Well," he said at length. "I should get going to the shop."
"Yeah," Ed said, in George's voice, and it cracked before he could close
his lips again.
"Right," Adam said. "Well."
They patted their mouth and ran stubby fingers through their lank hair,
already thinning though they were still in their teens. They stood and
cracked their knuckles against the table. They patted their pockets
absently, then pocketed the hundred and the ten.
"Well," Adam said.
They left, turning to give him the keys he'd had cut for them, a gesture
that left him feeling obscurely embarrassed and mean-spirited even
though -- he told himself -- he'd put them up and put up with them very
patiently indeed.
And then he left, and locked the door with his spare keys. Useless spare
keys. No one would ever come to stay with him again.
#
What I found in the cave,
(he said, lying in the grass on the hillside, breathing hard, the taste
of vomit sour in his mouth, his arms and legs sore from the pumping run
down the hillside)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and she held his hand nervously, her fingers not sure of how
hard to squeeze, whether to caress)
What I found in the cave,
(he said, and was glad that she hadn't come with him, hadn't been there
for what he'd seen and heard)
What I found in the cave was the body of my first girlfriend. Her
skeleton, polished to a gleam and laid out carefully on the floor. Her
red hair in a long plait, brushed out and brittle, circled over her
small skull like a halo.
He'd laid her out before my mother, and placed her fingernails at the
exact tips of her fingerbones. The floor was dirty and littered with
rags and trash. It was dark and it stank of shit, there were piles of
shit here and there.
The places where my brothers had slept had been torn apart. My brother
Bradley, his nook was caved in. I moved some of the rocks, but I didn't
find him under there.
Benny was gone. Craig was gone. Ed, Frankie, and George were gone. Even
Davey was gone. All the parts of the cave that made it home were gone,
except for my mother, who was rusted and sat askew on the uneven
floor. One of her feet had rusted through, and her generator had run
dry, and she was silent and dry, with a humus-paste of leaves and guano
and gunk sliming her basket.
I went down to the cave where my father spoke to us, and I found that I
-- I --
I found that I couldn't see in the dark anymore. I'd never had a
moment's pause in the halls of my father, but now I walked falteringly,
the sounds of my footsteps not like the steps of a son of the mountain
at all. I heard them echo back and they sounded like an outsider, and I
fell twice and hurt my head, here --
(he touched the goose egg he'd raised on his forehead)
and I got dizzy, and then I was in the pool, but it didn't sound right
and I couldn't hear it right, and I got my clothes off and then I stood
there with them in my arms --
(his hand came back bloody and he wiped it absently on the grass and
Mimi took hold of it)
Because. If I put them down. It was dark. And I'd never find them
again. So I bundled them all up and carried them over my head and I
waded in and the water had never been so cold and had never felt so oily
and there was a smell to it, a stagnant smell.
I waded out and I stood and I shivered and I whispered, "Father?" and I
listened.
I heard the sound of the water I'd disturbed, lapping around my ears and
up on the shore. I smelled the sewage and oil smell, but none of the
habitual smells of my father: Clean water, coalface, sulfur, grass, and
lime.
I picked my way out of the water again and I walked to the shore, and it
was too dark to put on my clothes, so I carried them under one arm and
felt my way back to the summer cave and leaned against my mother and
waited to drip dry. I'd stepped in something soft that squished and
smelled between my mother and my father, and I didn't want to put on my
socks until I'd wiped it off, but I couldn't bring myself to wipe it on
the cave floor.
Marci's eye sockets looked up at the ceiling. She'd been laid out with
so much care, I couldn't believe that Davey had had anything to do with
it. I thought that Benny must be around somewhere, looking in, taking
care.
I closed my eyes so that I wasn't looking into the terrible,
recriminating stare, and I leaned my head up against my mother, and I
breathed until the stink got to me and then I pried myself upright and
walked out of the cave. I stopped and stood in the mouth of the cave and
listened as hard as I could, but my father wasn't speaking. And the
smell was getting to me.
#
She got him dressed and she fed him sips of water and she got him
standing and walked him in circles around the little paddock he'd
collapsed in.
"I need to get Georgie out of the car," he said. "I'm going to leave him
in the cave. It's right."
She bit her lip and nodded slowly. "I can help you with that," she said.
"I don't need help," he said lamely.
"I didn't say you did, but I can help anyway."
They walked down slowly, him leaning on her arm like an old man, steps
faltering in the scree on the slope. They came to the road and stood
before the trunk as the cars whizzed past them. He opened the trunk and
looked down.
The journey hadn't been good to Gregg. He'd come undone from his winding
sheet and lay face down, neck stiff, his nose mashed against the floor
of the trunk. His skin had started to flake off, leaving a kind of scale
or dandruff on the flat industrial upholstery inside the trunk.
Alan gingerly tugged loose the sheet and began, awkwardly, to wrap it
around his brother, ignoring the grit of shed skin and hair that clung
to his fingers.
Mimi shook him by the shoulder hard, and he realized she'd been shaking
him for some time. "You can't do that here," she said. "Would you listen
to me? You can't do that here. Someone will see." She held something
up. His keys.
"I'll back it up to the trailhead," she said. "Close the trunk and wait
for me there."
She got behind the wheel and he sloped off to the trailhead and stood,
numbly, holding the lump on his forehead and staring at a rusted Coke
can in a muddy puddle.
She backed the car up almost to his shins, put it in park, and came
around to the trunk. She popped the lid and looked in and wrinkled her
nose.
"Okay," she said. "I'll get him covered and we'll carry him up the
hill."
"Mimi --" he began. "Mimi, it's okay. You don't need to go in there for
me. I know it's hard for you --"
She squeezed his hand. "I'm over it, Andy. Now that I know what's up
there, it's not scary any longer."
He watched her shoulders work, watched her wings work, as she wrapped up
his brother. When she was done, he took one end of the bundle and
hoisted it, trying to ignore the rain of skin and hair that shook off
over the bumper and his trousers.
"Up we go," she said, and moved to take the front. "Tell me when to
turn."
They had to set him down twice before they made it all the way up the
hill. The first time, they just stood in silence, wiping their cramped
hands on their thighs. The second time, she came to him and put her arm
around his shoulders and gave him a soft kiss on the cheek that felt
like a feather.
"Almost there?" she said.
He nodded and bent to pick up his end.
Mimi plunged through the cave mouth without a moment's hesitation and
they set him down just inside the entrance, near a pair of stained
cotton Y-fronts.
Alan waited for his heart to stop thudding and the sweat to cool on his
brow and then he kicked the underwear away as an afterthought.
"God," he said. She moved to him, put her arm around his shoulder.
"You're being brave," she said.
"God," he said again.
"Let it out, you know, if you want to."
But he didn't, he wanted to sit down. He moved to his mother's side and
leaned against her.
Mimi sat on her hunkers before him and took his hand and tried to tilt
his chin up with one finger, but he resisted her pull and she rose and
began to explore the cave. He heard her stop near Marci's skeleton for a
long while, then move some more. She circled him and his mother, then
opened her lid and stared into her hamper. He wanted to tell her not to
touch his mother, but the words sounded ridiculous in his head and he
didn't dare find out how stupid they sounded moving through freespace.
And then the washing machine bucked and made a snapping sound and hummed
to life.
*The generator's dead,* he thought. *And she's all rusted through.* And
still the washing machine moved. He heard the gush of water filling
her, a wet and muddy sound.
"What did you do?" he asked. He climbed slowly to his feet, facing away
from his mother, not wanting to see her terrible bucking as she wobbled
on her broken foot.
"Nothing," Mimi said. "I just looked inside and it started up."
He stared at his mother, enraptured, mesmerized. Mimi stole alongside of
him and he noticed that she'd taken off her jacket and the sweatshirt,
splaying out her wings around her.
Her hand found his and squeezed. The machine rocked. His mother rocked
and gurgled and rushed, and then she found some local point of stability
and settled into a soft rocking rhythm.
The rush of water echoed off the cave walls, a white-noise shushing that
sounded like skis cutting through powder. It was a beautiful sound, one
that transported him to a million mornings spent waiting for the boys'
laundry to finish and be hung on the line.
*All gone.*
He jerked his head up so fast that something in his neck cracked,
needling pain up into his temples and forehead. He looked at Mimi, but
she gave no sign of having heard the voice, the words, *All gone.*
*All gone.*
Mimi looked at him and cocked her head. "What?" she said.
He touched her lips with a finger, forgetting to be mindful of the
swelling there, and she flinched away. There was a rustle of wings and
clothing.
*My sons, all my sons, gone.*
The voice emerged from that white-noise roar of water humming and
sloshing back and forth in her basket. Mimi squeezed his hand so hard he
felt the bones grate.
"Mom?" he said softly, his voice cracking. He took half a step toward
the washer.
*So tired. I'm worn out. I've been worn out.*
He touched the enamel on the lid of the washer, and felt the vibrations
through his fingertips. "I can -- I can take you home," he said. "I'll
take care of you, in the city."
*Too late.*
There was a snapping sound and then a front corner of the machine
settled heavily. One rusted out foot, broken clean off, rolled across
the cave floor.
The water sounds stilled.
Mimi breathed some words, something like Oh my God, but maybe in another
language, or maybe he'd just forgotten his own tongue.
"I need to go," he said.
#
They stayed in a different motel on their way home from the mountain,
and Mimi tried to cuddle him as he lay in the bed, but her wings got in
the way, and he edged over to his side until he was almost falling off
before she took the hint and curled up on her side. He lay still until
he heard her snore softly, then rose and went and sat on the toilet,
head in his hands, staring at the moldy grout on the tiled floor in the
white light, trying not to think of the bones, the hank of brittle red
hair, tied tightly in a shopping bag in the trunk of the rental car.
Sunrise found him pacing the bathroom, waiting for Mimi to stir, and
when she padded in and sat on the toilet, she wouldn't meet his eye. He
found himself thinking of her standing in the tub, rolled towel between
her teeth, as Krishna approached her wings with his knife, and he went
back into the room to dress.
"We going to eat breakfast?" she asked in the smallest voice.
He said nothing, couldn't will himself to talk.
"There's still food in the car," she said after some silence had slipped
by. "We can eat that."
And without any more words, they climbed into the car and he put the
pedal down, all the way to Toronto, stopping only once for gas and
cigarettes after he smoked all the ones left in her pack.
When they cleared the city limits and drove under the viaduct at
Danforth Avenue, getting into the proper downtown, he eased off the
Parkway and into the city traffic, taking the main roads with their high
buildings and stoplights and people, people, people.
"We're going home?" she said. The last thing she'd said was, "Are you
hungry?" fourteen hours before and he'd only shook his head.
"Yes," he said.
"Oh," she said.
Was Krishna home? She was rooting in her purse now, and he knew that she
was looking for her knife.
"You staying with me?" he said.
"Can I?" she said. They were at a red light, so he looked into her
eyes. They were shiny and empty as marbles.
"Yes," he said. "Of course. And I will have a word with Krishna."
She looked out the window. "I expect he'll want to have a word with you,
too."
#
Link rang his doorbell one morning while he was hunched over his
computer, thinking about the story he was going to write. When he'd
moved into the house, he'd felt the shape of that story. All the while
that he'd sanded and screwed in bookcases, it had floated just below the
surface, its silhouette discernible through the ripples.
But when Adam left Mimi watching television and sat at his desk in the
evening with the humming, unscuffed, and gleaming laptop before him,
fingers poised over the keys, nothing came. He tapped out an opening
sentence,