Mad Hope (6 page)

‘Yeah,' she says, ‘I don't know. Has he talked to you about his mum and dad?'

‘No,' I say, ‘not in so many words.'

‘Sometimes I just think what the fuck, you know? I mean, they shot them in a church. I mean, if God sees everything, why'd they think they had to do it in His face?'

‘They weren't thinking about God,' I say.

The baby begins to whimper. Taisie picks him up and latches him on to her breast.

'What have I gotten you into?' she says, and for a second I'm not sure if she means me or the baby, and then I realize she means all of us, herself and her hapless, handsome boys. ‘They wanted to believe they
were
gods.' Tears gather in her eyes but do not fall. ‘I need to transfer to a soft seat.' She winces and shifts. ‘Hemorrhoid,' she adds, standing up.

We walk over to the couch in the living room, where she does a strangely graceful combination squat-lean in order to sit, then winces again.

‘Where's your doughnut pillow?' I say.

She wipes her face energetically, like it's a window she's having difficulty seeing through, and points in the direction of the kitchen. ‘Maybe Martin,' she says. ‘Martin might work.'

When I come back with the pillow, the baby is barely suckling, his face mashed into his mother, his little paws relaxed.

‘He's asleep,' Taisie says.

‘Yes,' I say. I give her the pillow. ‘I'm not sure you want me living here, Taise.' I look down because I can feel the truth writhing like a live thing in my throat. ‘I'm very selfish,' I say.

‘I know,' Taisie replies, ‘but you sure can dance. Can you take him?' She pulls the baby away from her body and holds him out to me.

‘Okay,' I say. ‘I'll put him down.'

I walk up to Taisie's room and over to the bassinet. I place the baby on his blanket and he opens his eyes, looks up at me, or at the space between us. The baby is still not quite of this world; he stirs like a fugitive who has been hiding in a cave and can't yet absorb the strength and significance of the light. I think of what he has to look forward to, his limbs forcing their way through the atmosphere, finding ways to move to the music he hears.

‘Hello, Baby,' I say.

There is something I had been meaning to tell Joe for a long time. I look into Baby's face as I tell it: ‘The funniest thing ever happened the summer I was nine years old. My parents rented a cottage up in the Gatineaus in Quebec, and a bunch of us from the cluster of cabins would spend our days on the dock, cannonballing and ass-cracking our way into the evening. But our favourite scenario involved a man walking into nothingness. He'd begin where the dock met the shore, swinging a briefcase, or miming a tip of the hat – he was a businessman with a devil-may-care walk. One of us would take up the narration:
One day, a man was walking down the street.
The businessman would begin his stroll down the dock, whistling or waving obliviously.
When, suddenly, the street ended.
The businessman would step off the end of the dock, a look of ­complete and utter surprise on his face before he hit the lake. God, we'd roll around on that dock hiccupping and hyperventilating until we couldn't talk, until we couldn't breathe.'

I stop to wrap the baby up in a blanket like a giant burrito, like Taisie showed me. I place my hand on the baby's head, feel the soft down and warmth of him as I tell him how the story ends. His eyes are still open; when I begin to speak again it is easy to believe he is listening to me. ‘When the businessman hauled himself up and onto the dock – hair plastered to forehead, lake water rolling down neck, streaming between innocent shoulder blades – we would watch him shake himself dry. Then the businessman rejoined the group, someone else staggered up and it started all over again ... '

The baby's eyes are closing, then opening, closing then opening. I leave my hand on his forehead until I am sure he is asleep.

Wanted Children

‘
DID YOU SEE THIS?
' Paul cocked his head to the side then skewed it aggressively towards his laptop, which he had perched on a pile of old newspapers on the kitchen table.

‘See what?' Beth refused to turn from her careful work at the counter. The naturopath had said six drops of the kava-kava root tincture and three of the impatiens, star of Bethlehem, cherry plum, rock rose and clematis. In spring water. She squeezed the top of the dropper delicately. Two drops, followed by a narrow quicksilver dribble. Could the dribble be considered a drip? How many drips in a drop? How many snowflakes in a snowbank? There was a joke in there somewhere. The precision of it all, the crucial measurements and ratios, the equilibrium and relative concentration and dilution – it was doing her in. But the naturopath had said it would help her regain a sense of her place in the world, settle her nervous system, her overactive mind and frequently, inappropriately aroused nether regions. She would feel better, centred, the healer had promised.

Beth smiled. The water clouded, then cleared. She lifted the glass to her mouth, opened her throat and let the mixture slide home. It tasted like moss, mould, cheap perfume sunk deep into cheaper upholstery. She gagged and grabbed the edge of the sink, then closed her eyes without thinking – as if shutting off one sense might dull another – and listened to Paul like he was bearing a message from a fleeting and inconsequential dream.

‘Beth, I'm serious, this is serious.'

Beth opened her eyes and looked out the window. It was summertime in Bloor West Village, and the purple finches, with their wine-speckled plumage, were regular visitors to the feeder.
As if they've been dipped in raspberry juice,
she remembered reading in a guidebook. The birds flitted and pecked, then retreated from a domineering grackle.

Paul whistled through his teeth and Beth watched him sit back hard in his chair. ‘Check this out,' he said. Something had scared him, and it was this that finally drew Beth to the screen.

It was an abstract, staged photo, something someone with too much studio time and grant money had cooked up. A black river – a river of tar or paint – with creatures rising sluggishly from its depths. Swamp monsters – perhaps it was a movie trailer? Beth shook her head. ‘So?'

‘It's Cuyabeno,' Paul replied. ‘It's your river, Beth.'

The trip had been Paul's idea. They'd been trying for two years to conceive, then stopped, then succeeded, then miscarried. Then there were too many options dangled before them, too many well-meaning, putty-faced friends at the door. Paul began to clear out corners in the basement, Beth took long walks in Etienne Brulé Park. The park was a long strip of winding land on either side of the Humber River, one-time superhighway for the coureur de bois of the park's name. Brulé was only twenty-three when he became the first European to see Lake Ontario from the mouth of the Humber. What must he have been thinking as he stared out into that inland ocean, surrounded by his Huron comrades? Beth imagined a watery portage trail suddenly opening up into all those steely grey waves, a pristine September sky. The fall of 161
5
: Toronto was nothing more than a carrying place, a spot to heave burdens onto strong backs and into hardy canoes. Yonge Street, longest street in the world, that broad boulevard of strip clubs, fast food, head shops and hairdressing salons, had nothing on the Humber in its heyday – explorers, missionaries and traders vying for bewildered souls, the softest of fur pelts, the prospect of getting there
first
. Oh, it was romantic and incorrect, she knew, but when Beth visited the park she often thought of Brulé, and would forego the two landscaped paths for the less manicured trail that ran right smack up against the river's edge.

The alternative was the commercial strip on Bloor where for weeks they'd attempted to distract themselves, buying crumbly, extravagantly priced cheeses from the new high-end deli, top-of-the-line B.C. and Australian wines from the
LCBO
and organic beef from the butcher. Quaint, functional and quietly fantastical, their neighbourhood had an air of the hobbit – hobbit with Eastern European roots, as some of the lingering Ukrainian bakeries and specialty shops could attest. Even the homeless folk tipped their hats with one hand while they held out the other for change. The buskers strummed mournful Ukrainian folk tunes on battered guitars, and on Sundays the loudspeaker at Saint Pius X played stately choral music, designed, it seemed, to chide and cajole the wayward. Filtered through a subpar sound system, the music crackled and snorted as it met the street. But God was already smiling on Bloor West Village; there was no pressing need for prayer.

And on every street corner and in every tidy parkette, Beth spotted the strollers. They were little buggies of anguish – their sturdy wheels and bright utilitarian fabric, their multitude of clipped-on accessories and cushioned interiors. She wanted to puncture their tires, spray-paint their protective sides, slash their
UV
-blocking visors. Paul knew this, he saw this, and he said, ‘Let's go away. Somewhere where people don't think this way, the way we think. So obsessed with achieving the “supposed to.”'

Beth had nodded, semi-entranced by Paul's ability to imagine quick fixes and act on them with a kind of jittery intensity, a follow-through she had never mustered. When he suggested Ecuador, the emerald light and mercurial moisture of the rainforest, she had shrugged, then wondered sheepishly, ‘Isn't it a bit, I dunno, cliché?'

‘It won't be cliché for long,' he said grimly. ‘It will be gone.'

‘That's what I mean,' she said. ‘It's like we're peering in at a dying, caged animal, isn't it?'

‘Maybe,' said Paul in a way that suggested he hated himself, ‘there is a way of helping.'

He looked like he wanted to stick forks in his eyes, so Beth agreed. Paul had a friend who had been through the region with an
NGO
and gave them tips and details: what to bring, whether to tip or haggle, which immunizations to endure and delicacies to sample, that sort of thing. They were to spend two weeks in the Amazon basin, in Cuyabeno National Park.

The trip had been literally breathtaking, fourteen days and nights when Beth spent whole minutes trying to teach herself to breathe again. Was it the humidity or simply the intensity, the drama of it all? They called it the world's pharmacy, an Eden: sweet balm and scourge, the innocence and viscera of new beginnings. But it was also something more sinister and random, something cloying, squawking and stealthy. To say it was unlike anything Beth had ever experienced might have been inaccurate – there were woods in northern Ontario whose fog of blackflies and sneering impenetrability maybe came close. But where the native people of her northern province had been decimated or interned or suffocated by white man's guilt, these jungle lands were still inhabited by their original denizens – men and women with wide, implacable faces and smooth, rubbery skin who clambered up the banks of the river with regularity and ease, clutching plastic jugs of gasoline, babies strapped to their backs with long strips of cloth. Miguel, their tour guide, was such a man. Short and compact in body, barrel-chested, with a few uneven black sprigs of hair for a beard, he had a thin, rosy scar along his jawline and the haircut of a more urban, moneyed man. When he smiled, Beth noted his strong, small, pointy teeth.

This was in a café in Lago Agrio, waystation for travellers, frontier town for the desperate and entrepreneurial. She and Paul had been waiting a long time on a patio, clinking their cups of Nescafé against their saucers.

‘Do you think that's him?' Paul pointed towards the street, where a mocha-skinned man was pulling a trolley towards their patio. They were to expect a guide who spoke five languages, a war veteran, friendly and ‘uninhibited,' the eager teenager who booked their trip had reassured. But the man with the trolley was not the right man, and neither was the man cradling a basket of fresh mangoes. When Miguel appeared, it was from within the rendezvous restaurant; he was everything they might have expected and nothing they had anticipated. His arms made his T-shirt bulge with their baseball-sized biceps, and he was sporting cheap orange flip-flops, which he continued to wear for the duration of the journey, exposing his long, yellowy-tough toenails and making the rest of the tour group, in their beige, super-tread hiking shoes, feel subtly, wonderfully mocked.

On the bus to the oversized, motorized canoe that was to take them to their campsite, the dust from the window made Beth cough, and the rutted roads caused the bus to jump. The inside of her head was all jangly with priorities and survival, and she felt sunburned although she had not been sitting in the sun. She nodded to the two Germans who had joined the group, and then pushed past Paul, who was nodding off, a thin line of spittle reaching downwards from his bottom lip to the strap of his day pack, which he had, wary of pickpockets, left attached to his back.

‘Do you mind?' She motioned to the vacant aisle seat next to Miguel.

‘Not at all,' he said. ‘You are welcome.'

She sat next to him, not speaking, trying to catch her breath.

‘You are having some difficulty, some respiratory difficulty?' He turned towards her, face creased with concern and something else: amusement or mild lust?

‘I'm fine,' she said, and took in a big lungful of air, right down into her diaphragm, as she'd learned in a few yoga classes and tricky situations.

‘Good,' he said, and went back to his book.

Beth closed her eyes, but that made her dizzy, so she opened them. It was difficult now she was sitting on the aisle to find a place to look. Straight ahead meant a row of seatbacks, brown vinyl and grimy, the blond Germans and various black-haired people sitting in them. It meant absorbing the reality of the interior of the bus, a rollicking, wretched press of passengers, bulky bags, boxes and bound chickens. It meant considering which qualifications, exactly, were required to drive a bus in this – she nearly thought
godforsaken
, but settled on
strange
– country. And looking outside, well, that would involve craning over Miguel to the window so that her head was positioned directly above his crotch, her shoulder pressed against his.

Also, Beth was experiencing traveller's terror – the pervasive notion that each moment that passed represented a small treasure trove of noteworthy difference and that she would
never pass this way again
. She pivoted her body and her breast grazed Miguel's arm. Muttering an apology, she squinted out at the side of the road. Outside was both hazy with dust and excessively green. The foliage looked prehistoric – gigantic ferns bowing chaotically to the palms reaching high up into the cloudless sky. This was it: the jungle. Miguel shifted to turn the page of his book and she felt obliged to speak. ‘What are you reading?'

He closed the book to show her the cover, a sepia-toned watercolour of a barn with a fair-haired woman standing in the ­foreground looking to the horizon. In the top corner of the book was a gold seal, one of Oprah's marks –
Book Club
, it exhorted. Miguel was watching her. She had no idea what to say. She was ­flabbergasted; the man at the tour agency had told them Miguel still had a bullet in his thigh from fighting in the border dispute with Peru. Finally she settled on, ‘Any good?'

Miguel nodded eagerly. ‘Very good, and it helps me to practise, to stay fluent, use new words.' He opened the book to the page he was on. ‘What does this mean?' He pointed to a word and underlined it with his finger.

Beth looked at the word. She did not know what it meant. She took the book from Miguel and read the blurb on the back. A multi-generational saga set in the American Midwest with a complicated, malevolent patriarch at its core. ‘Must be dialect,' she said, shaking her head. ‘Sorry.'

‘It's okay,' he said.

But she knew she had fallen in his estimation. She looked out the window again. There were black pipes running alongside the road that seemed to be made of the same plastic used to make heavy-duty sports-drink bottles. The pipes didn't look very serious, especially next to the profusion of vine and leaf that surrounded them. They passed a length of pipe covered in white spray paint. Beth caught the word OXY repeated in messy, angry capital letters. ‘What is that?'

Miguel closed his book, placing a purple bookmark in its pages. ‘Oil pipelines,' he said. ‘My people, the people of the river, the Siona, they want the oil companies out. They're sabotaging our home. We have stopped them before,' he said. ‘We are well-organized, and although it is not entirely in our nature, we protest peacefully.'

‘Is it true you have a bullet in your thigh?' Beth blurted, somewhat fanatically.

Miguel nodded. ‘My partner was not so lucky,' he said.

From across the aisle, Beth heard what sounded like a deliberate sniff from Paul. Perhaps it was warranted. But she was mesmerized by Miguel's offhand manner, his apparent obliviousness to his own glaring, gaudy contradictions. Beth wondered where Miguel was now, six months later. She envisioned him paddling valiantly, hopelessly, through the unthinkable sludge his river had become. Or maybe not. Instead: in a hotel room in town, his head between the legs of one of the other ‘uninhibited' citizens of El Oriente. The women of Lago Agrio had been as colourful and intent as the jungle birds; their tight green leggings, pink stilettos and bands of quivering exposed flesh spoke mostly of joy and heat.