Sarah Court (24 page)

Last night I’d received a call from the American
Express head office asking for further photos of
the Antique Box that had been bought by client
622, a Mr. Starling Bates. The cellphone images I’d
sent were apparently too indistinct. I was told that
Starling maintains a residence in Coboconk.

I’d called my ex-wife to see if she’d take Dylan
for the night. No answer. I packed him up in hopes
of dropping him off through Toronto. Gridlocked on
the Don Valley she told me sorry, she had evening
plans. A date? Jesus. I’m not at all prepared for that.

We stop at a zinc-roofed restaurant, The Dutch
Oven. All Dylan wants is Easter Seals Peppermint
Patties from the coin-op machine.

“Dill, eat something proper. A Denver omelette.”

Dark, fatigued bags under his eyes. I order the
omelette and buy four Peppermint Patties. He plays
with them like poker chips: stacks them, lines them
in a row, a square, a diamond. He isn’t wearing his
cape anymore. I ask who he is now.

“Black.”

“What do you mean—a black person?”

“Black the colour. A cloud of black gas coming out
of the ass of a sick car.”

This helpless sense of frustration and fear. My
kid vomited down a corkscrew slide, then slid down
and sat in his own upchuck. What does that even
mean
?

The sky is blackening by the time we reach
Coboconk. I grab a room at the Motor Motel: five
units in a field outside town. Our room is clean, with
a queen-sized bed. I tell Dylan we could ask for a cot,
but he says it’s okay we sleep in the same bed. I’m not
going to leave him here alone.

It’s dark by the time we reach Starling’s cottage.
All the other units strung around the lake are
winterized and empty.

“Listen to the radio, Dill, okay? And stay put.”

My knock is answered by the dreadlocked guy
we picked up outside Marineland. I follow him
into a vaulted chamber. Starling is in a wheelchair.
His head is bandaged, one eye covered. His hands
similarly wrapped and his legs swaddled in woollen
blankets. His arms shrunken, somehow shrivelled:
alarmingly, they look like penguin flippers. His left
ear is fused to the side of his head as if his skull is
devouring itself.

“Are you alright?”

“It’s painless.” Starling smiles. His body is just so
warped
: like he’s been stabbed in the guts and he is
gradually curling into the open wound. “How is your
boy?”

Had we ever spoken about Dylan?

“Fine. I took him to the zoo.”

“Zoo. Oh my,” says Starling, and smiles. I
immediately wish he hadn’t. “I toiled at a zoo. With
bears. All males. Bear society is a lot like ours, only
the hierarchy’s more bald. One bear, an albino
named Cinnamon, got it worst. He rode a tricycle in
a midwest circus; when the big top folded he came to
the zoo. Undersized, genetically inferior. The others
made sport of him. Every day each bear inflicted
some casual hurt. They pissed on Cinnamon; his
coat went yellow from white. Skinnier and skinnier.
That’s when they took to raping him. A big black
bear, Chief, mounted poor Cinnamon first. The
zookeepers felt this was the natural order. As one
said: Better fuck-er than fuck-ee.”

Starling laughs and laughs. A vein fat as a night
crawler splits his forehead below the bandages. His
fucking eyeballs are sunk so deep into their sockets
it’s impossible for them not be to touching his brain.

“Kids can be that way, too, Nicholas. Singling
someone out for torment.”

I’ll find the goddamn box myself. Doubling down
the hallway, I pass a partially open door. A wide,
dark, metal-walled loft. The box is in the centre lit
by a spotlamp. My camera whirrs as celluloid spools
through the flashbox. Whatever’s in the box seems
to have sprouted fresh appendages.

I take a new angle. Twin facts register simultaneously.

One: Dylan is standing on the opposite side of
the box.

Two: whatever’s in the box has tubes growing out
of it. Wriggling . . .
tubes
.

I lay my hands upon Dylan. Shake him far too
hard. My adrenaline is redlined. My son’s face is as
vacant and bare as the surface of the moon. Blood
drips from my nose into his hair. My heart batters
the cage of my ribs primed to burst right through.

“Did you get all you need?” Starling shrieks after
me. “Did you
SEE
?”

Back at the motel Dylan won’t move. The heat’s
drained right out of him. I reef the motel covers back
and lay him down fully clothed. He’s not shivering
or moving much at all. I head outside for our bags. A
pickup pulls into the neighbouring unit. A woman’s
laughter plays out its open windows. Three people
get out of it.

“You make loving you hell,” the taller and ganglier
of the two men says.

“Husha, dumb dog,” says the woman, before
stepping inside with the other man.

I go back inside and get into bed with my son.
His face is grimed with sweat. I flatten his hair with
my palm. Touch my lips to his head. His knapsack’s
open on the tabby-orange carpet. Inside are bits and
pieces of things he’s stripped apart. Everything in
Ziploc bags. Orderly and arranged.

“What do you hope to accomplish doing this?” I
ask him hopelessly.

“I’m going to put them back together,” he says.
“In different ways. I have all the pieces. I’ll put them
back together and make them even better than they
were before.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Dylan. You don’t have
the skill or know-how. None of this stuff was made
to go together any differently than how it came out
of package. When you take it apart with no idea how
to put it back together, you end up with junk.”

He sits up. Unlaces the hiker boots his mother
bought. Clodhoppers. He starts tugging the thick
laces through the eyeholes. I want him to disagree
with me, shout at me, but he’s concentrating on his
boots. Stripping them apart, too.

“We’ll find a new school. It’ll be okay. I promise,
Dill. Swear to God.”

After
awhile
the
silence
turns
mammoth,
oppressive, so I take a shower. The yellow water
reeks of sulphur the way all water does this far
north. Lewd goings-on come through the pressboard
walls. The rhythmic knock of a headboard. A man
shrieking: “Sweet darlin’ Sunshine!”

I return to an empty room. The door’s wide open.
I step outside with a towel wrapped round my waist.
The tall gangly guy sits outside the adjacent door.

“Did you see a kid come out?”

“Ain’t seen nothing,” he tells me wretchedly.

I step back inside. Dylan’s hikers sit at the foot of
the bed. Laces tugged out, tongues lolling over the
toes. The utility closet door is ajar. I open it.

Next to my argyle sweater hangs my son on a
noose of knotted bootlaces. Dylan’s face is as blue as
a sun-bleached parking ticket . . .

My son
has a birthmark on his shoulder. It looks like
a pinto bean. During his Steam-Powered Android
phase this birthmark became his “on” button:

“Power up Android Dylan,” I’d say, and press it.
Dylan’s head would rise, arms cocked stiffly by his
sides. “Android . . . Dill . . .” he’d go, in robot-voice, “. . .
needs . . . pudding . . . for . . . power . . . cells.”

At recess another boy told him if you had a
birthmark it meant your parents hadn’t wanted you
born. Dill agonized over it all day.

“Dylan, that boy’s a creep,” I told him. “How could
your mother and I not want you born? You’re the best
and most precious thing in our lives. Believe me?”

“Okay. I believe.”

. . . Rip
the hangar rod off the wall, plaster dust and
the jingle-jangle of hangars. Dylan’s knees crumple
as he falls face-first tangled up in my sweater. I try
to pry the noose off but the laces are dug so fucking
deep into his throat. A sobbing tension in my chest,
agonizing compression pulsing ever-outwards. My
vocal cords splinter as I let it loose. Blood’s blurring
into the whites of his eyes. I claw my fingers under
the laces and my shoulders pop loosening them. My
son’s not moving but oh so warm. Prop one hand
under his neck and open his airway as I’d been
taught at Red Cross training. Settle my lips over his
and blow. My breath disappears into the dense loaves
of his lungs, circles around and back into my mouth
with the taste of stale mucous and something else,
slick and vile like gun oil. This cold throttling terror
is sharp and blistering as blowtorched masonry nails
clawing the surface of my brain.

Specks.
Specks
. Thousands upon thousands. I
cannot see for their accretion.

Pipes.
Is how I see you. All human beings. Pipes. As
you have running through your home. Transporting
fuel, water, wastes. All you often see of a pipe is their
mouth, in the form of a drain or toilet bowl. People
are pipes through which different substances emit.
As a boy I understood out of Mama emitted food,
a bed, blankets, smacks, a home, limits, broken
glass. Out of Cappy Lonnigan: tobacco, cuss words,
larcenous advice. Out of Teddy: moans, burn holes,
crying jags, blackened ants.

I saw the colour, texture of their emissions. Out
of Mama’s pipe flowed burnt orange fluid. Out of
Cappy’s: bright blue liquid that when he laughed
transformed into moths. Out of Teddy’s: muddy goo
stubbled with dead crickets or rusty nails.

Twist a water tap, water pours out. Not so people.
Some days I could do such a thing as comment on
Mama’s new haircut—which often made her orange
fluid flow brighter—but instead her liquid turned
black
black,
full of twitchy, screamy things. Next she
committed acts meant to hurt me in ways that I am
incapable of being hurt.

Cappy was a journeyman pipefitter. “I’ve been a
journeyman everything,” he would say, “including
husband.” He said pipes connect odd ways. People
connect odd ways, too. Their colours change when
they merge, the way mixing different coloured
paints do. I study emissions. Colin Hill’s fluid flowed
sun-hot yellow. Abigail Burger’s flowed pale violet
until her father yelled at her, at which it blazed
hemoglobin-red. When she came to our house after
her squirrel was shot, Patience Nanavatti flowed
with burping lava. But Mama ran so dark that day,
all the lava bled right out of Patience.

Out of my own pipe emits grey substances the
consistency of gruel.

My pet’s name:
Gadzooks! An Eastern grey squirrel
suckled on scalded milk. When the neighbourhood
kids gathered all our squirrels to play, he was
hounded by his siblings. But Gadzooks! was terribly
fierce. He once tore the head off a greensnake in an
eavestrough. Devoured a family of silky pocket mice
nesting in Mama’s walls.

Last night Gadzooks! dashed out my apartment
window, down the drainpipe onto the road. A car
ran over him—over him, you understand, not ran
him over. The tires did not flatten him. Still, he
was dead. By the time I rushed to the street, his legs
were stiffening. Trapped under that car, the roaring
engine, pinned in that wash of exhaust. Any man
overtaken by such unreasoning forces so, too, would
die of FRIGHT.

Now: Gadzooks! is in a shoebox. On a bluff
overlooking Ball’s Falls. On top of the box is a
silenced Glock 10mm handgun. I am in my vendor’s
blues. I am digging a hole.

Wipe my brow. Pulse check. Fifty-eight bpm. Heft
the gun. Adjust for windage. Empty the magazine
into an elm. Collect the shell casings. Gadzooks!:
into the hole.

Voices arise. I kneel at the bluff’s edge. Three
men with a blue barrel. Colin Hill, the stuntman.
Wesley Hill, his father. A third young man I do not
recognize.

Colin Hill strips at water’s edge. Afterwards, he
crawls onshore after plummeting. He ignores his
father’s outstretched hand.

My name
is Jeffrey. My mother smoked crack
cocaine.

An addict of loose moral virtue, says Mama, who
died giving birth. “A defiance of nature,” Mama said.
“A ripe apple pushed out of a rotted one.” My mother
died with chalky lips, Mama says.

Three pounds, nine ounces. They called it a
miracle when I failed to die. Six months with casts
on my elbows so I would not pull my joints apart
with my frantic infant exertions. Mama keeps the
casts—so small you cannot even fit a finger into
them—to remind me I was once so pitiful.

There is a stain on my brain the size of a cocker
spaniel’s paw print. Occipital with spread to parietal,
temporal lobes. Only dead black meat.

“Your mother was a crackhead,” Mama says, “and
your poppa was a sunbeam.”

The black spot is no physical bother. My fine
motor, balance, speech skills: all tip-top. My pulse
rate, excellent. Yet I fail to experience pain as
others do. As a six-year-old I stuck my finger into
a stationary bicycle ridden by Mama’s sometime
boyfriend William “Cappy” Lonnigan. “What a nutty
thing to do, kid!” My finger hung by a shred. The
paramedics said I was “the stoniest little trouper”
they ever saw.

Sundays Mama took us to church for ablution.
The congregation swayed.

“Feel it, darling?” We were all Mama’s darlings.
“The LOVE?”