Ghosted (19 page)
Authors: Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall
“We’ll offer them a drink.”
Mason felt at peace. He looked at Willy’s body, laid out in the blue sheen, an alien landscape. Her right half, the one that felt nothing, was lush and pulsing and strong. Her left side was not withered, but utterly passive, moved by the shifting water. It was difficult to fathom, that everything she felt was inside of there.
“How do you feel?”
“Good.”
Mason kissed her. She tasted like cantaloupe.
He pushed her gently to the side of the pool, then held her as they smoked some heroin, a cigarette. They sipped more whisky.
“This is the first time I’ve done it,” said Mason.
“What? Swimming with a cripple?”
“Heroin,” he said.
“Careful. It hits you harder if you smoke it. And I’ll probably need help getting out of here.”
“What happened to you, Willy?”
“What do you mean?” she said. And he didn’t ask again.
He held her head as the water lapped against his chest. “I’ll tell you something I don’t tell anyone,” he said.
“Why?”
He felt like he was close to flying, but not in a blissful way. More like he was rising through air, pulled by the sky—and at the same time in water, tugged gently downward by tides.
He thought he was going to tell her about Warren and Sissy and the awful things he’d done for money, but then he was talking about the swallows instead. He described it all—stomping down with his boot heels in the morning. And then the afternoon:
“I stayed angry long after they got back from the lake. I helped set up for Aunt Jo’s birthday party and I just got angrier. At dinner I sat at the kids’ table. Everybody thought I was being sweet, but really they were the only ones I could bear to look at. My cousin Sarah sat with me—she was eighteen at the time—and we kept sending one of my nephews over for bottles of wine. I drank a lot—kept looking up at those fucking nests: the six of them left. Nobody even noticed—I’d killed them all for nothing. Anyway, I’d been drinking all day. Sarah was drinking too….” Mason felt himself slipping, the stars reflected in the water. “Have you seen
The Man from Snowy River?”
“Yes,” said Willy. “I love that movie.” Her voice seemed far away.
“You know that scene?”
“With the horse, of course …”
“Down the cliff …”
“Of course …”
“Down …”
The cliff
.
“Mason!”
The stars were shaking above him.
You’ve let go of her
.
He felt himself falling.
You’ve let go of Willy!
It was only a few seconds, but by the time he had her in his arms again he was crying. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry….”
She was gasping. He held her, crying.
They caught their breath.
“It’s okay,” she sputtered.
“I don’t know what happened …”
Willy said nothing.
“I can’t believe I let go of you. I’m so fucking sorry …”
“Forget it.”
There was silence, then the rippling of water. “I’d like another hit,” she said.
Mason pushed her slowly to the poolside and rested her swaying against his belly in the water. He reached his arms out, dried his hands on his black suit, scooped her pipe into the ziplock, and lit it.
“You’re good at that,” said Willy, then took a long drag. “You could probably shoot me up sometime.” The smoke trailed from her lips and he kissed her.
And now she was kissing him back. Her arm was out and so was his, pulling them along the side of the pool, all the way to the shallow end.
The corner was long and sloping, like a submerged wheelchair ramp. Willy lay against it, legs in the pool, hips at the waterline, her breasts like the moon’s reflections. Water shed from Mason as he rose, out of the pool and into Willy. He thought he might die, the pleasure was so great. She held him with all her strength—the side that felt nothing pulling him in deeper to the one that felt all. And then they were gone together.
“I don’t think you’re ready,” said Willy.
“For what?”
“To tell whatever story you were trying to tell.”
He gave a laugh. Willy smiled. They smoked some more at the edge of the pool, drinking whisky too, until Willy began to talk.
“It was 1985. I was six years old …”
Above twelve hundred hotel rooms, beneath twelve million suns, Willy floated in the dark as she told her story. Her voice, the heroin, letting her go, being inside her—Mason was focused like never before. And as she spoke he could see it happening.
It is 1985. She is six years old, in her daddy’s apartment in Scarborough. She is sleeping—then suddenly awake…
There’s something wrong. Her stuffed monkey, Randolph, is slipping off the itchy orange couch and she pulls him back under the sheet—soft with a Bay blanket on top … Something else is wrong. The lights are on. It’s bright, but not just from the lights … There’s a fire—right where she’s looking—through the door into the bedroom. His bed is on fire
.
“Daddy!” she screams. And there he is, rushing through the
door, right in front of the couch, across the room and back again. But it’s like he can’t hear her. There is music playing. She can hear it now, and it sounds like the xylophones in music class—she’s never heard them in a real song—with a weird voice yelling: “It’s gone. Daddy. Gone—the love is gone …” It is the Violent Femmes. (She knows that now, but didn’t then.)
“Daddy!” she shouts, as loud as she can—and he turns and leaps towards her, picking her up into his arms. She’s holding Randolph and they’re whooshing across the room. The breath is gone from her. She is relieved to be in his arms. They’re whooshing back across the room the other way, and in front of them the whole bedroom is on fire. She sees flames like tentacles, reaching through the door, and her daddy isn’t saying anything. He’s turning again, back across the floor and there’s just the weird voice singing: “Tell by the way that you switch and walk. I can see by the way that you baby talk …”
The xylophones are even louder now—and when she starts to scream it comes out like coughing. We have to get outside! She holds Randolph with one arm, banging on her daddy’s shoulder with the other
.
“It’s gone, Daddy, gone. The love is gone. It’s gone, Daddy, gone. The love is gone. It’s gone, Daddy, gone. The love is gone away … Gone away …”
The fire is spreading. Willy is yelling and coughing in her daddy’s arms. He stops and turns, not towards the door to the hall but past the couch instead, to the rickety screen door out onto the balcony, which screeches as he pulls it open
.
Willy gasps. They’re finally outside, seven storeys above the ground. The night air rushes into her lungs and suddenly, instead of a scream, she’s got a question. Her daddy clutches her tighter—then lunges forward, over the railing
.
“I don’t know if he was trying to kill or save me.”
Mason held her tight.
Notes on the Novel in Progress
You can explain it all later, for fuck’s sake.
If things are moving, don’t slow them down.
He drove his fedora slowly. He wanted to be going fast, but the Dogmobile wasn’t meant for highways. He turned down the country road. The cart bounced. He checked the time and switched on the radio. Stevie Nicks was singing about a white-winged dove. He lit a cigarette, trying to calm his nerves. Whatever was happening, he was pissed off at Soon. His first sleep in days and he’d woken up to this:
From: [email protected]
Subject: Soon rather than later
Cocaine’s not as good the next day, is it?
Now’s the time, I know.
I’ll meet you on the Jackson.
Twilight cut through the windshield as he approached the bridge. There was no one to be seen. Ahead was a parked rental car and a camcorder, like toys plunked down by a giant hand.
He stopped and got out. Clouds moved fast overhead. He bit hard on the end of his cigarette. There was a Post-it note stuck to the tripod.
If you find this camera please don’t touch it. If your curiosity is too great for that, I ask you to make the footage public. If you are Mr. D, then hats off to you
.
I’ll see you, Soon
.
Mason didn’t like this one bit.
The camcorder’s battery was dead. He checked that the digital card was still in it, then stepped to the railing and looked down. Hundreds of feet below, white waves were churning and he could see something purple snagged among the rocks: Soon’s gypsy leather coat. That had been Mason’s idea:
unbutton as you turn, so they can’t see the harness. When you dive, the coat is a flourish behind you. It’s a cape! It is wings!
By the looks of it, he’d done it well: unharnessed on his own then left the coat behind. Towelled off. Changed his clothes—the wet ones in a backpack with the bungee—then walked to Fort Jackson to take the Greyhound who-knows-where. The act of disappearing.
When Mason got home, Willy was asleep. He plugged in the camcorder, connected it to his laptop, poured a drink and pressed Play.
The screen is dark then flashes to light. No voice, but the sound of birds. Images come into focus, turning: the top of a railing, parts of a bridge, another railing, a vista of far-off trees and open sky, the roof of a nondescript car, 360 degrees. The bridge appears desolate.
A
kitcha kitcha
sound. Fingers. Then the camera is steady. Bootsteps, a chest. A man walking backwards away from the camera, flashes of light over his shoulder, his face …
And now Soon is standing in the middle of the screen. We see him from the knees up, a deep purple coat, his back to the railing, behind him sky.
He stares for a moment into the camera. And then he begins:
“They’ll come for you. You’re sure of it. When it comes down to it, they’ll come for you—over the hill, bugles blowing, when the wagon is surrounded and the ammunition spent …
“The ancient Greeks could have used linear perspective. They had the means—a hand sticking out of its frame. But they figured it was better, I guess, to leave the hand on the wall. The ancient Greeks could have painted in oil. Instead, they used it to coat the bottom of their boats. So their boats wouldn’t sink. So they wouldn’t drown
.
“They’ll come for you. When the air is burning, when the flames reach the top window …
“The most perfect frescoes we have from ancient Rome are on the walls of Pompeii. Preserved when the volcano blew—the destruction of an entire city: ash shadows on the sidewalk, burnt black like Hiroshima, goodbye. But we have the art. We have the Art! Now we can see how the rooms, like Venetian works of the fifteenth century, open up—as if there’s something
past the surface, something beyond the walls, other than silhouettes framed, drowning in shadow
.
“They’ll come for you. When there’s no more time, and the eyes are staring in circles, your feet above the ground… They’ll be there, through the town square, splitting the noose with an arrow, cracking the hangman’s head with a rifle butt …
“Trabeated architecture; post and lintel. A noose. Postmodern; doors open both ways. If it’s abstract, you’ve got to ask yourself, abstracted from what? Is drowning an abstraction of swimming?
“Buckminster Fuller built a geodesic dome over an entire Japanese city to control its environment. So it could drown in its own air
.
“They’ll come for you. When you’re going down for the third time and there’s nothing but the waves overhead, crashing and rolling, the incredible weight of your own body, going down …
“Rembrandt. The greatest portraitist ever. He lost everyone he ever loved—wives, children—they all died. Until all that was left was statuary. He loved the stuff so much he would have sold his soul, his fingers, for Medusa’s head. Paid for a shipload of classical statues: his entire life savings. The ship sank. Bronze and marble men clinging to each other, scratching at the crates, down and down … After that he painted his own face, a visual penance, reflected over and over until he died
.
“Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: His whole life in paint: nudes in the studio. Torn banners and empty mornings. His own self in soldier’s uniform, his right hand missing, a bloody stump. The Nazis declared it degenerate art. Made him watch as
they destroyed his entire collection, then left him alone to kill himself
.
“Mark Rothko lived for colour. Painted every colour to its fullest. Each producing its own light—a source, a well of blood. Every fucking hue. Then he began to run out. In the year before he committed suicide, all of his paintings were grey. Painted himself into a box, into an ocean
.
“They’ll come for you. When you’re going down for the fourth…”