Guide to Animal Behaviour (9 page)

He gazed at me thoughtfully for a moment, then swept the marble dust from a sheaf of drawings.

There were eight Mary Magdalenes in crayon, five or six Annunciations, a Holy Family, an Adam and Eve in a garden stocked with moose and beaver and a copy of my
Martyre,
which he said he had seen while working inside the Hôtel-Dieu basement with his master.

All the female subjects were from the same model, a girl just past puberty, half-Indian, by the look of her cheekbones and hair, with breasts like brown hen's eggs and large pale nipples.

He himself had posed for the Adam.

THE OBITUARY WRITER

We drifted along in this empire of death like accursed phantoms.

— de Ségur

1

A
iden is in St. Joseph's, dying of head injuries. Annie has gone Catholic on me. She has quit school and taken a job at a home for retarded children in West Saint John. She works the graveyard shift so she can spend the day with Aiden. Mornings, she visits the hospital chapel for mass. I hardly ever see her.

Of all the brothers and sisters (there are a dozen O'Reillys, counting the parents), Aiden and Annie were closest in age and sympathy, though all they ever did in public was bicker and complain about one another. Aiden was the family clown, a bespectacled, jug-eared, loudmouthed ranter, given to taunting the younger children and starting fights — though he once sang in the cathedral choir and spent a year trying to teach himself the guitar. Annie is boyish and prim. She dawdles over her makeup, ties her red hair back and gets average grades in her university courses. But like many people who spend their lives reining themselves in, she has a soft spot in her heart for eccentrics and outsiders. One always knew that if anything happened to Aiden, it would be hardest on Annie. It is also natural that she should flail about, trying to locate beyond herself an agent responsible for this terrible tragedy. I say “beyond herself' on purpose, because, of course, Annie O'Reilly blames herself for everything first. Then me.

Mornings, in the chapel, she and God are sorting all this out. But I have little hope that He will see fit to represent my side of things.

We live in a brick apartment house owned by a police sergeant who is dying of cancer. He has told me about the operation he underwent, but not that he's still dying. Maybe he doesn't know. I know because the other day, returning from the scene of a fatal car crash on the MacKay Highway, I passed Sgt. Pye directing traffic. Father Daniel, Annie's priest-uncle, happened to be driving with me. He said, “That one's not long for this world. He's full of cancer, just full of it. I've seen enough to know.” I was filled with envy then for Father Dan, for his knowledge of the mysteries of not-life, for his familiarity with the endless, dark ocean on which we float.

That's the sort of wisdom I sought when I first went hunting for a newspaper job. Mostly, though, I type obituaries and make lists of striking names to use in my short stories. Mornings, I rise early and type my dreams on a table beside our bed. Annie sometimes stops by on her way between the retarded home and the hospital. She'll lean on the door-jamb, smoking a cigarette and watching me type my dreams. My habits mystify her. The minutiae of my psyche seem frivolous next to her crippled children and dying brother. She lives in a world of mythological horror. I read my dreams like tea leaves, observing the signs, the motions of the universe as they ruffle the limpid pool of
the unconscious. I want to know who I am before I sink back into the inanimate. I tell her this.

I go to the hospital. Aiden is in the head-injury ward, where old men mutter, fall out of bed or walk into the hall to be tackled and restrained by nurses. Once one of them grAbbéd Annie from behind and tried to choke her, a mad, fragile, leaf-dry, shit-stinking man.

I stand beside her chair and say, “He's in there. He's in there practising for death. It's been a shock. He never thought about it before. There's this little man inside the bombed-out control centre with the frizzed wires and smoking lights, all dripping with goop from the fire extinguishers. He's pressing buttons frantically, trying to get a line out, panicked, not knowing what to do.

“Later, the little man will give up, collect his coat and lunchbox, wrap a scarf around his throat, turn out the lights and lock the door. Then Aiden will be dead. Where will the little man go? I don't know. Home, probably. Back to the infinite split-ranch in the sky, with three pear trees in the back yard and a tire swing for the kids, and wait for his next job. What's the little man's name? He hasn't got one. But he's all there is.”

Annie stares at me as if I were crazy; she prefers to pray. Aiden is taking it about as calmly as anyone, sleeping it off like a hangover. Life.

Old Mrs. Lawson who lives on the floor below persists in leaving her door ajar. She treats the landing as a parlour and has decorated it with antique tables and ornately framed prints of Saint John harbour in the days of the sailing ships, the port a forest of spars and sheets. When she hears me climbing the stairs, as likely as not she will think of an excuse to ambush me and talk. Sometimes her stove won't start — she'll tell me she hasn't had a hot cooked meal in a week. Sometimes she'll gossip about Sgt. Pye who bought the building from her after her husband's death.

Once she told me about the tenant who used to live in the apartment Annie and I share. (She insists on calling Annie “Mrs. Cary,” though I have told her a dozen times we aren't married. As in, “Is Mrs. Cary still keeping those late hours? Mercy me!”) It turns out that our bed was a deathbed, something I had long suspected, though for no particular reason. Frank Beamish, a retired foreman from the sugar refinery, died there in his sleep a month before we moved in. Of course, Sgt. Pye cleaned and redecorated the place, but, said Mrs. Lawson, she can't help thinking she senses “something” above her head late at night, when the distant foghorns sound.

I think of Aiden in his bed, and Frank Beamish and Annie in bed with me (yes, there is a symbolism attached to beds, those banal loci of love, death and dreams) and my strange dreams since we moved in. This bedroom of broken dreams.

Mornings, when I type my dreams, my mouth is bitter and clogged with dead cell detritus. It floats in the air. Those motes you see in the sunlight in the window. Annie used to be a sack angel — that was her revolt, everyone's really, the only thing we do to reverse the current, twisting and snapping our backs like salmon struggling upstream, against the flood of time, to spawn and die. We would beat together like fighters in a ring, like tiger-moths against the killer light, and Annie would expire, whispering, “I love you. I love you.”

She was a technical virgin when we met, though she had had a lover in high school, an older girl she met playing badminton. When this girl left for Montréal to study nursing, she began writing Annie passionate love letters. Annie panicked, burned the letters, flushing the ashes down the toilet, drawing back from the aberrant entanglement, the suck and slop of emotion, the dark flow. She became prim. At a party, drunk and ironical and somewhat provoked by her coldness, I put my hand down the back of her pants and felt her ass. “I don't know what to do,” she said. “Why are you hurting me?” Later, I made her bleed. “I love you,” she would say, and die. “I love you.”

After sex, she becomes formal, embarrassed, shy and neat, with every hair in place, her back straight. I sometimes laugh at her, laugh in her face. I say, “Abandonment is a commentary on primness, just as my dreams are a gloss on obituary-writing.” She makes a sour face, reties her hair and takes an extra fifteen minutes with her makeup to drive me mad. We both understand that I am titillated by her dual nature and her lesbian past. I am a lover of paradox, of
outre
juxtapositions and jokes — this is the way we talk about death.

Across the landing, there is a single room Sgt. Pye rents to a middle-aged black man named Earl Delamare. Earl is the colour of dust, or he is one of those black people whose skin always looks like it needs a quick buff-up with Lemon Pledge. Earl lives on welfare and a disability pension for some back injury. He's unmarried. He has never spoken to Annie or me. The first week or two after we moved in, he would open his door a crack whenever we came or went — dusty skin, white eyeball. It gave Annie the shivers. She would shake her shoulders and skip out of sight, either down the stairs or into the apartment.

Now that we hardly ever come and go together, I rarely see Earl. Though mornings, when she stops by for a visit, Annie sometimes remarks that he is still there, watching. When she is cranky, she'll accuse me of being friends with Earl, or make believe we are twin brothers, or one and the same person. The truth is Earl and I don't get along well, this in spite of the fact that we have never even spoken to each other.

Nights, now that Annie's away, Earl will get drunk and stand outside my door shouting obscenities, taunting me about my lost sweetheart. I do not respond — at first, because I was afraid of him; now, because I am not afraid of him — which only infuriates Earl. He rants on the landing, getting drunker. (God knows what Mrs. Lawson thinks is going on. Perhaps this is the only “something” she senses.) He creates complex plots out of whole cloth, accusing me of devilish connections, quoting
Revelations,
speaking other names I do not recognize. He says he's going to call Sgt. Pye and have the police put an end to my racist cabal, before my friends and I burn him out. Lately, he's been going on about some mysterious group called the
Numero Cinq,
which he thinks is holding meetings in our apartment.

I do not tell Annie any of this. Perhaps none of it's true.

I tell her, “Without someone else we cannot exist.” Of course, I mean this in the contemporary sense — the Other.

She hasn't forgiven me for taking a newspaper job. Or, more precisely, she hasn't forgiven me for being content, for burrowing into the warm mud of the daily press, like an ancient fish into its river bed, and waiting. She prefers my previous incarnation as a discontented junior lecturer at the university at Tucker Park, where we met — long hair and tattered jeans, waving my unfinished dissertation like a toreador's cape, the student's friend. Because she cannot bring herself to rebel, she adores rebellion in others — in this way all love is pathological. But I have grown tired of drawing attention to myself.

Moreover, it was her father who introduced me to the city editor. Of course, Annie worships her father, that gruff, taciturn patriarch. Yet their relationship is difficult, and she yearns for independence. Her father found Aiden jobs, too. The summer before Aiden worked on the Digby ferry as a deck hand to earn his university tuition. But Aiden made a show of accepting the job under duress, with an air of knowing his father had laid something on the line to get him hired, to which extent the father was now in his son's power.

Aiden boasted he could always go back to cutting pulp in the woods. But the last time he did this he nearly cut his foot off with a chain saw. Aiden's body is an archaeology of his experiences: the chain weal on his cheek from a fight with a biker, the knife scars on his arm from the time he and a friend intervened to stop a gang rape on the night beach at Mispec, the thick diamonds of white skin on his knuckles where he smashed his hand through the kitchen wall after an argument with his father.

Now Aiden is dying; he's only nineteen and, though we live together, I don't see Annie anymore.

The librarian is a fey, blonde woman named Lyn Shaheen. She wears wire-rim glasses and has long, thin breasts of exceptional whiteness. For weeks I went to the library hoping only to catch a glimpse of her out of the corner of my eye. One day I screwed up enough courage to speak. I said, “I'm writing a book, a novel, you might say. I need music to go with it. In the text, I mean. I need something mad, something eerie.” She looked at me strangely, but led me to the record collection. Mussorgsky, she thought.
Night on Bald Mountain.
Cage, she suggested. But no, experimental music would be too rational. Lyn Shaheen. I played the records.

In truth, I am writing a novel. It's about a woman with epilepsy, a rare form of the disease in which the fits are triggered by the sound of music. The young woman is a concert cellist who develops seizures in her twenties following a car accident. Out of pity, her lover murders her. On subsequent visits to the library, I have told Lyn the plot of my book. We have had coffee together at the Ritz restaurant next to the bookstore on King Square. We have kissed in the street, though I was terrified one of the O'Reillys would see us and report me to Annie.

I don't want to make this depressing for you. This story does have its lighter moments. For example, Aiden lying dying in St. Joseph's has convulsions (not necessarily funny in themselves), which the doctors attempt to control with drugs. Occasionally a message fights its way from what's left of his brain to an arm or a leg and some macabre incident will ensue. Annie and I will be sitting next to the bed when, suddenly, Aiden's right leg shoots up to attention, exposing his catheter tube and waxy, shrunken genitals. Flustered, Annie will jump to her feet and try to press the leg back down on the bed. This always reminds me of those silent-movie slapstick routines. I half expect Aiden to lift his other leg as she pushes the first down, or his arms to fly up over his head or his torso to rise.

Dying, Aiden has preserved his sense of humour. I am with him in this, considering irony to be the only suitable mode of comment on our universal disaster. I try to explain this to Annie. I try to tell her that if she would see Aiden as a different sort of symbol, she could remain in
love with me, we could get back into bed together. Instead of praying to Christ, she could go back to being Christ every night.

I have always envisioned myself as the Roman soldier offering the sponge of vinegar, gambling for the robe, sliding his spear into His belly — irony, detachment and the ultimate kindness — that Roman soldier was the only interesting character in the whole drama, the only person who refused to react within the religious or political scheme of things, the only non-fanatic.