The Cloaca (3 page)

The hippy mother did get those. She was smiling still, but it was a smile that didn't mean anything, like when a car in front of him would forget to turn a turn signal off.

“Do you mind if I just leave this here?” she asked, and anyway bent down and set the soiled bundle on the bottom step of his porch.

“Just so long as you don't set it on fire,” he said, and laughed.

“Right. I promise not to,” she said. “But thank you. And, again, I'm sorry. She already… And I was just going to… Anyway, I'm sorry and thank you.”

She turned and walked back across the lawn, picking leaves out of her hair.

“Don't forget your baby,” he called from the porch. He took another sip from his mug and made a surprised, sour baby face, expecting it to actually be coffee, forgetting about the Canadian Club. The only club he'd ever belonged to, his wife used to say. She had thought she was just a riot, that woman. Now, there was someone he'd like to cram into a booth. But not a booth with money. Maybe a booth full of razor blades or something. How easily could those become airborne?

“Got her, thanks,” the mother said, gathering up her squirming girl.

He watched her put the kid into one of those hippy slings that he was starting to see regular people use now, too, and he watched her go, watched her bum as she went.

“Cloaca,” he said.

“Cloaca!” he yelled. “It was the cloaca!” he yelled at her. Down the sidewalk, the hippy mother turned to look at him, then turned away and moved off a bit more swiftly.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling good, feeling like he had sneezed that sneeze out, or like he had suffered water in his ear all day from a swim and finally it was trickling out now, all hot and amazing.

“Cloaca,” he said.

He had come out for the paper when he saw the shitty baby on his lawn. Now he squatted and sorted through the rolls that had built up by his door and found the one with the most recent date. All these people had died somewhere because of something, he read.

He picked out the business section, shook it out as he stepped down the steps of his porch, fluffed the paper, and then spread it next to the bundle the hippy mother had left him. With his bare toe, he nudged the wad of cloth onto the paper and wrapped it up.

He breathed in. There was the sweet and pungent smell, the complicated scent of baby shit. Any smell you miss, even if it's a bad one, is a good one.

Wadding the newspaper and the cloth full of shit into a ball the size of a softball, he walked to the end of the driveway, and then he threw it. The wad landed with a light heaviness onto his neighbour across the street's roof.

Opening his nostrils and opening his lungs, he hoped for that autumn smell, but still it was baby stench. He smelt his hands, but it was not his hands. It was all over the air now, that baby smell.

Another whirl of wind came and tossed the salad of dead leaves on his lawn. The leaves flirted around him, and he began to grab at them. He snatched all he could out of the air, stuffing them into the pockets of his bathrobe, and then into his robe so they scratched his bare chest.

The wind died and he stood there with the heap at his feet, his pockets full and his chest bulky. A leaf had landed in his mug. He could drink around that.

“Cloaca,” he said, feeling pretty okay about himself.

For something like five years now the man who was what amounts to this woman's first love has been dead, and she's only finding out now. To alert her, there was no shiver along an ethereal web of life connecting everyone, as there maybe should have been, or as this woman at least hoped there would be when something like this happens. Her heart didn't even murmur in sympathy the moment her one-time heartthrob's own heart quit its throbbing. This woman's sister had to tell her, mention it—his passing—in passing.

“There's something with you,” says this woman's boyfriend that night.

“Jonathan Brandis is dead,” she admits. “He hung himself.”

“Hanged,” her boyfriend whispers, then fits his hand back between this woman's thighs, his hot, wet face back into her neck.

The day after she finds out about Jonathan Brandis, this woman's subway is delayed. An expensive-looking woman on the platform beside her explains that someone has jumped. “Don't worry,” the expensive woman says, trying to be nice. “It happens so much that they can clean the mess up like that.” And she snaps her fingers.

This woman is late for her interview at the gallery. A reception job for the summer. “I'm so sorry,” she says, rushing finally to the reception desk. “My train was delayed.”

The current receptionist looks up from a crossword puzzle, a woman this woman remembers meeting through her boyfriend. “The buses, too?” the receptionist asks, not recognizing this woman. Her head is shaved bald and she has a spider web tattoo there where her hair would be and she is not sympathetic in the least. “And the taxis?”

The receptionist has filled in only one clue of the puzzle, this woman can see. “Torpor.”

This woman doesn't get the job. Not because she was late, necessarily. She blames her unsuitable phone voice. Callers never know whether they're speaking with a fancy-ish man or a gravelly woman, and they get uncomfortable. Her boyfriend uses words like throaty, and smoky, and loves the daylights out of it.

She takes the streetcar to her apartment and showers without getting her hair wet. Smoking the shake of her stash mixed with tobacco, she watches the news for some mention of the man who jumped. On the news there is nothing but death reported, just not this one death. Maybe there wasn't any man after all. Except that expensive woman had seemed so sure.

Come sunset, her boyfriend arrives with sushi and beer. In their circle this woman calls him either her lover or her partner, or simply by name, but she still can think of him only as her boyfriend. Those other terms sound too pretentious to her. They suggest a level of intention and participation that this woman is not yet willing to consider, or at least not yet willing to admit.

Always she wakes up before him. She waits around in bed for him to rouse is the sort of woman this woman is. She will read a book or sketch or just lie there. This morning she watches her boyfriend sleep. This is the first man she has seriously shared a bed with ever. At the start she watched him as a kid will incessantly inspect the first dollar they've earned for themselves, and a little of that disbelief and fascination still lingers. He looks to her like he sleeps as if he knows he's being watched is how perfectly and quietly he sleeps.

She checks in on his penis. Mostly the thing will be as asleep as its owner, but this morning it's awake and beating. This woman conducts a test. She puts her ear to her boyfriend's chest with the attention of a safe cracker but can't discern a delay between when his heart thubs and when his wiener throbs. That's how fast his blood must travel.

This peeking is weird, but she knows he wouldn't have a problem if he found out. This woman wonders about how into it he'd be. Worries as much as wonders.

With no job for the summer yet, this woman's hands are a mess with time. Though her parents are covering her costs during the school year, they refuse to support her during the summer. Her options were to either get a job in the city or come back home, move back into her high school bedroom for a few months. Part of her trusts, though, that the support won't be cut off.

June days in the city are heavy as a wet sweater, and leaving her apartment with no clear purpose has lately required unprecedented gumption on her part. After JB and after this man on the subway she didn't know from Adam—if there even was a man—this woman spends her mornings trolling the obits for announcements where the cause of death isn't mentioned. There are scores of them, and she imagines every single one is a suicide. Like when she found all those maggots in the apartment. The act of discovering the first one seemed to spawn a crawling, writhing heap of others. And now, all of a sudden, the world is full of people killing themselves.

Instead of working on her painting or looking for work, this woman reads on the computer about dolphins in captivity who dash their brains to mush against the walls of their tank. It goes that a dolphin named Kathy swam up to her trainer one day, looked at him in a meaningful way, and then dove back down for good. Dolphins lack the involuntary breathing reflex that humans have, that matter-over-mind pull that would have forced a man to surface in this case. Kathy the dolphin stayed at the bottom of her container and died without a fuss or shiver.

JB worked with a dolphin on SeaQuest. Could there be a connection?

This woman feels like she could cry, but doesn't make it there.

She watches him in rented movies.
Ladybugs
,
Sidekicks
,
The Neverending Story II
. They aren't as good as she remembers them. In
Sidekicks
, JB overcomes his asthma through martial arts. How is this possible? Even under the redheaded tutelage of Chuck Norris.

Pausing the movie, squatting before the TV, she searches his angular, adorable face for some explanation. This woman can't get over how girly JB was, how beautiful. His dirty blonde hair, his popsicle-stained lips, a blush to his cheeks like he has just come in from the cold. This isn't attraction, only the memory of attraction, which, in itself, is stirring.

As she did not that long ago with pictures torn carefully from her teenybopper magazines, this woman plants one on the frozen frame.

How bad could things have gotten?

In the dust on the screen, the blotch of her smooch is not at all in the shape of her lips.

On the internet she finds a quote from Schopenhauer. “It will generally be found,” he said, “that where the terrors of life come to outweigh the terrors of death a man will put an end to his life.”

“You have a fine body,” he says over breakfast. All morning her boyfriend has been goading her into being naked with him. The muggy day is on his side. “What's the big stink?”

On most Sundays, when he stays for the morning, he won't dress at all. Naked when he makes breakfast, naked when he reads The Star on the couch, naked when he does the dishes. She wears underwear to weigh herself even is the sort of woman this woman is.

She has seen old pictures and for his whole life he has been attractive, whereas her features are something she had to grow into, make the best of, and will eventually grow out of. That airy gap between her front teeth, that pike of a neck, those lucent eyebrows, those papercut lips. Bangs were a revelation, curtains she could draw over a pimpled forehead that some girls in her high school had called an eighthead. But in bed with him, when he's astride her, those bangs can't help but fall to the side, which wouldn't be a problem if he didn't always have his eyes wide open as he fucks her. In a perfect world, she would be on top and her hair would cover her face, except this woman has trouble moving up there, can only really shift around like in an uncomfortable easy chair, and also hates the way her breasts dangle and the way her stomach bunches. In a perfect world he would be blindfolded, or they would do it with a sheet between them, or she would just feel good about herself. In a perfect world JB would not be dead.

“You have it better than most people,” she says.

“Better how?” Wet cereal falls from his mouth and into his naked lap, and even this doesn't strike her as at all slovenly.

“You've never been ugly,” she says.

“That's not fair to say.”

Months ago—nearly seven of them—he approached her as if she was put there for him to take is how they got together. It matters very much that he chose her at his vernissage, that his work was what was being held up to where the light could get at it that night. She still hasn't asked him about the women in the show's paintings, their bared bodies all perfect in their specificity, or at least perfect in his renderings. She worries about being seen as a worrier. One body was hulkingly obese, another delicately emaciated, the next scarred by an appendectomy, still another so pregnant that the belly hung over her crotch so that it appeared to have an evil goatee. Whoever those women were, or had been, it was only their bodies, after all. Her boyfriend had replaced their heads with a cat head, an elephant head, a chimp head, a dolphin head, to roaring success. All the women at the show agreed.

It matters very much that he was being followed that night by all the other young first-year, moody-looking artist girls, with their bangs like hers, and their glasses like hers, and their layers of sweaters like hers, who were saying
vernissage
for the first time in their lives too, and who had also helped themselves to a few too many second glasses of the complimentary wine. It matters a stinking ass-load that he had and will always have seven years on her. It matters that he is muscular without having to try, and that his teeth were never askew enough to need braces, and that he had a fading black eye at the time. And though things are going well enough between them now, this woman can't forget that she began—looking back—in such a detestable position of flighty girlyness. All of this matters more than she wants it to.

“Why are you on about this anyway? What's it to you if I'm nude or not?”

“Because being the only one naked feels silly.”

“Then put some pants on for fucks sake.”

“The Shrew's Dilemma” is what this one's called. This woman's boyfriend warns her about naming a painting before she's finished, let alone even begun. But it's basically all done in her head. She sees a series. Big canvases, loads of blood. This woman has never painted blood before, and can't wait. All the reds, browns and purples to mix: rufous, sangria, rust, sinopia, Tyrian—maybe even a squidge of her own life stuff in there. She thinks that from now on gore might be her thing.

The story goes that three shrews are placed under an overturned tumbler. Shrews have a metabolism that leaves them always needing to eat, so the shrew lives his entire life in search of food, making him—regardless and in spite of his size—one of the most terrible predators when you're talking mammals. And somehow three of these guys get trapped beneath a tumbler. Two of them waste no time eating up the third. A few hours pass and, without batting a beady eye, the hungrier of the remaining two turns on his friend. This final captive is observed proudly cleaning his whiskers afterwards is how few scruples he has with cannibalism. In no time the last man standing is hungry again and gets an eyeful of his own tail. Starting there, the shrew is supposed to eat himself to death.

“What do you think?” she asks him. This morning she is trying to make the three shrews trapped beneath the tumbler adorable enough without anthropomorphizing them, but still can't quite.

He is sitting in just his underwear on the windowsill, his legs dangling out, clipping his toenails into the alley below. “Well, what are you trying to say with it?”

“I guess it's a comment about life,” she says.

“What about life?”

“I don't know.”

“Well,” says her boyfriend, swinging around to straddle the sill. “There's your problem.”

“So Jonathan Brandis is dead,” this woman tells a friend over lunch, a girlfriend, who laughs. This girlfriend has a government grant to make a short film that Rick Moranis has apparently expressed interest in coming out of retirement to do and so is paying for the meal. “He hanged himself.”

“You mean the teenybopper guy? Are you serious? I used to love that guy. That's hilarious.”

When she was tacking pictures of Jonathan Brandis to her walls her older sister was pinning up Kurt Cobain. Cobain seemed then to this woman an older, uglier, more morose version of Jonathan Brandis. When Cobain opened the back of his skull with a shotgun, her sister carved
Kurt
into her own arm. She laughs about it now, this woman's sister does, how dramatic she had been, but there must have been some legitimate wound left, even if it was misguided or put on. In as much as she was capable of love at that age, she loved Kurt Cobain. When her sister laughs she must be laughing at herself, like when this woman sees a photo from when she was ten, wearing a pink tracksuit that she loved, and can't help but titter, nervously.

“Why's that hilarious?” this woman hazards to ask her friend. Like her boyfriend, this friend is a few years older than her. This woman fell in with this older community all on account of him. Months now, and she has not exactly gotten over the certainty that they make fun of her behind her back and that a split with her boyfriend will mean a split from everyone.

“It's hilarious because it's Jonathan Brandis, I guess.”

“But you loved him.”

“Maybe not like you did.”

“You said ‘love.'”

“Puppy love.”

This woman chews on it, watches a soiled man with a green beard stagger past the window, his eyes wide and amazed. She hasn't been in the city long enough to look past the homeless. She has no urge to help, just can't help but ogle them.

“And the way you love now is different,” she comes around to say.

“I've grown up,” the friend says.

“And you'll keep on doing that.”