The Death of Small Creatures (4 page)

I wake in
the night, tender from the day's hike. The upper loft window is flung open above the lake—a circumference of stars where water and sky meet.

Leigh lies naked in moonlight. Soon he will slip out into twilight to fish and watch the sun rise. I roll over and kiss his shoulder, savour the burn in my forearm.

By morning the lake may be whitecapped, sparks from the fire sputtering through poplars. This makes me nervous, though it tempers the mosquitoes and whisky jacks. I prefer a solid unattended flame sealed to the wood, a fluid, uninterrupted burn. But windy days we disperse into private nooks around the island, pass each other silently through sparse trees, fall into books at the water's edge, barely speak until nightfall. We gather for dinner around a new fire, open a few bottles of wine and engage in conversation again. The whisky jacks and mosquitoes return. Everything huddles.

But this morning I dress by flashlight, climb down the ladder and latch the door behind. Leigh's footsteps scuttle over rock in the distance, a cough now and again as the cold air tightens his asthmatic lungs. I love these small weaknesses, anchor myself to them, trace his flesh the moments before making love—an older man's soft stomach, the thick layer of flesh around the waist, wrinkles around the eyes, speckles of grey.

I find him sitting cross-legged overlooking June's Cove, a fishing rod in one hand, a tin coffee cup in the other.

“Hello,” I whisper. He startles, touches his forehead, afflicted.

I scuffle down and join him. He kisses me on the forehead, passes me the coffee. We sit this way for a while in shadows. Every few minutes fish jump, but we never see them. Cliffs curl around on both sides. We look up as the sun refracts off Castle Rock and filters through the forest.

“What are those birds?” I ask.

They have been darting through the air, skimming the water's surface. It occurs to me that they are abnormal, unearthly.

“Those aren't birds,” he says. “They're bats.”

I shudder, having never been in the presence of bats before and not knowing my fright of them until now. I don't like that they resemble birds but are not birds, the transformation imposing upon my impressions and altering the atmosphere without warning, instilling me with fear I've not yet had time to analyze and slot into all my other fears.

“I don't like them,” I say, taking the rod. I cast poorly, only twenty feet.

“Here,” he says, reeling it in. I cast again, a few feet farther.

Although I abhor the idea of fishing, I hope for a snag, some tug on the hook. He will kill whatever I catch, I know, though we've never talked about it. He will slip his finger inside the gills and pull the hook from the puckering mouth, find the appropriate grip under the fins and around its belly, and snap its head onto a rock. I have faith in the quick kill, believing he was born with it, dexterity derived from the unobstructed logic of a boy's body—nimble fingertips exacted upon the various parts of a disorganized world.

Two bats almost collide in the middle of the cove, but stop suddenly, hover, twirl around each other then spiral off in opposite directions, never having touched.

“Why do they move like that?” I say.

“They move by… what is it? Radar?” he says.

The line goes taut. He reaches, places a hand lightly upon mine.

I want this fish, engage briefly in the process of the kill. But a moment later the line goes lax, unravels back to the catch. The rod falls to my lap.

Leigh continues casting as the sun rises above Castle Rock. Voices burst softly over the crest of the hill. A fire crackles. The cove brightens into day, insects and pollen filtering through a haze above the water's surface. The bats disappear.

I think,
sonar
.

I light a
candle and place it on the rain-spattered windowsill. I am eighteen years old, not yet accustomed to the incessant rains of Vancouver Island, faithfully anticipating a first snowfall and a white Christmas like the rest of Canada.

The room smells sweet, the dresser littered with torn chocolate bar wrappers and an empty pizza box. Through the adjacent wall, my roommate's voice moans, a mattress squeaks, a headboard thuds. I lie naked, circling my stomach and breasts, and pant out against the back of one hand while massaging a nipple with the other. My breath repels back, acidic. My throat burns from vomiting again over the toilet. There are tiny purple bruises up my forearm from where I take the weight of my body on the lid of the bowl each time.

I imagine my roommate's delicate body—her flat stomach, her small breasts bouncing tightly as she throws back her long auburn hair.

The moaning grows louder.

I close my eyes and take her place, gyrate on top of the man; the next moment I am a quiet observer in the corner. Sometimes they are aware of my presence, other times not. I climb up on the man behind her, enclose her in my arms and press my hands against her flat stomach. Together, we ride into climax, the motion of searching easing to numbness, as though what she feels (dark and wet) comes back to touch me the same. I imagine her body is my body, that her pleasure is my pain.

The crucifix above my bed bears down upon me—the sinewy body of Christ.

I think of the crucifix my grandma wore around her neck, and her cigarette smoke twirling to the ceiling, sliding across like Moses' plague of the firstborn. I think of my sister absently stroking the fur of the orange kitten purring in her lap, and Grandma's voice for the third time calling, “Will you come and eat your dinner?”

Their moaning stops. I open my eyes.

I wrap a sheet around my body, cross the room, pick up a knife and hold it over the flame until the tip blackens and the wooden handle burns.

I think of the kittens mewing in piles of laundry in Grandma's back porch, their fur the scent of fabric softener. And withdrawing the knife from the flame, I press the tip firmly into my flesh.

Here.

We are left
to close up camp, nail down the shutters, tie up the boats and empty the latrine. It is a windless hot day.

I sit on the wooden steps tossing Cheezies into the space ordained as whisky jack feeding ground. Food littered the area when we arrived—a secret human offering, a proposal between man and nature. No one questioned it. The whisky jacks came with great expectation each day around nightfall, so we succumbed to their want and gave them what we had. But now as I toss the bits into the clearing, the gesture seems wasteful, as though my absence at feeding time will diminish the sacrament, and all it will be is whisky jacks and garbage.

Leigh fries a battered fish in a black cast iron pan on the gas stove, brings it to me on a metal plate. He has already eaten his, sits back full-bellied in sunlight with the tin coffee cup in his hand.

“One last dip?” he mumbles.

I cut into the fish, its new breaded skin. Its insides blossom white and flaky, emit steam.

“Are you sure you cleaned it?” I ask, fearing bones or remnants of feces.

He laughs. “Yes, I'm sure.”

I place it on the step as he drifts off to sleep. Part of me longs for it, to eat it the way the others do, consume it with the same sense of delight and pride as when a thing is sought out and found in the most primitive way. But as I think of June's Cove and the casting of the line, it is less a conquest and more of an impingement upon nature—my mind a lure sifting through the black-green waters, and a fish in passing snared by my hook. I would rather we met in a place where one body can enter the other without implication, each consoling the necessity for loss, as lovers, for love and hunger.

I slip away to the pond instead and discover the murky water has cleared. The slate in the middle stares back, wounded, but having come to occupy this place by some accidental plummet from the sky. My mind glides across the sparkling surface, propelled by an expectation of flowers, something faintly sweet, diluted rose water.

And closing my eyes, I fall in.

In Rome my
sister was free, thieving among the ruins. In Rome, a civilization had already fallen, and what remained could not fall again. She moved across the cobblestone streets with this knowledge inside her, wandered into churches as if she too was a Roman.

“Did you ever love David?” I ask.

“Yes, I loved him,” she says. She has turned to a picture of us sitting around the tree at Grandma's house on Christmas morning. I am smiling gleefully, the orange kitten in my lap. “Did you know all orange cats are boys?” she says.

“Is that true?” I say, remembering where he hit the wall above the piano, the wall not altered, the cat only slightly.

In winter the house creaked, ice clenching its foundation. Icicles fell from the porch into drifts of snow like darts of wind. Sometimes the piano made a sound, every so often a high-pitched ting from within, as if it could no longer contain its desire to play itself, imbued with a frustration it would never be able to rid itself of. Blossoms rustled in summer, and in autumn came the
thwack thwack
of leaves at the windowpanes. In spring, footsteps made a sound in the wet green turf on the porch.

She closes the album and tells me she sat at the foot of Michelangelo's
David
and wept. “At the end of a long corridor you come to an ordinary doorway… and within, an ordinary room,” she says.

But what you find stuns you, brings you to your knees. You expect something to scale, perhaps the size of a real man, but instead he is twenty feet tall, so perfectly proportioned and fraught with expression that real men become manifestations of an original. You weep because you know you can never return.

Journal

October 27, 2008

Spent the day looking for Easy Boy. We have put up posters all over the place and have hand-delivered more notices and placed them in people's mailboxes. I ache for this cat, miss him terribly, am worried.

On another note, it is awful at home right now. I am officially broke, no more income coming in.

This could be bad.

October 30, 2008

I am super high on NeoCitran, DXM; I am writing this while high. I have written most of these journals while high.

I have decided to put a full stop on the prescribed medication because it's making me fat. I think Leigh is repelled by my body now.

I look for warmth in him by touching all over his warm body. It is a safe, well-rounded goodness that I find in touching him, but it is flimsy and means virtually nothing to me at the same time. I have always gone for men who seem to only love me halfway, whose conservatism is unwavering even in the wake of that hot-headed passion I cultivate and demand in the relationship. In other words, I go for cool men then push them to the brink, testing them, trying to break through the cool facade that first attracted me to them.

I will take a few days to wean myself more gradually off the Effexor, because it is a bitch to stop cold turkey. You get nauseous and dizzy, can't see straight.

It has occurred to me that since seeing Dr. L I have not gotten better, I have gotten worse. I have felt less anxious, perhaps, but only insofar as I am utterly altered and over-medicated. (But to be fair, my DXM use probably screws up the positive effects of any of my prescribed medication.) I may just be in a state of flux, preoccupied with the newness of my personality in its underwater sluggishness. What I have considered to be a decrease in anxiety may just be the medication assaulting the other stuff of which I am comprised. What I thought was decreased stress has perhaps manifested from medically induced self-distortion. Who the hell am I now? Who was I before? Do I risk becoming so medicated through both prescription drugs and DXM that I may never find my way back again?

On another note, I took that job earlier this week, working weekends at the library up at Royal Roads University, but I called and retracted my acceptance of the position today. Leigh is going to kill me. I am so completely fucked financially. But I simply cannot go back to that kind of work, anything resembling office administration. After seven years of it I have reached my saturation point, even though circumstances are dire, desperate even.

I have a student loan payment due on the very near horizon and other bills pending. There are still those parking tickets. I just bounced a cheque for twenty-eight dollars. Sorry
Prism
magazine. And I turned down a job?

But I am not well enough to work.

What would happen if I just fell silent, if I became dumb and mute for the remainder of my life? Would this be a perfect defence or a life wasted?

I am tired of talking, tired of trying to prove myself, tired of feeling like a complete zero.

I had the weirdest epiphany the other day; it was so ordinary and obvious that it can scarcely be called an epiphany, but it was.

I thought,
Maybe I can just choose to be happy
.

November 4, 2008

I saw the neurologist today, Dr. Barale. Nice guy. It was kind of pointless. He mentioned the abnormality on my frontal lobe. I keep meaning to ask if it's the left or the right lobe. I asked him what the spot on my brain means, what it means to me?

He said, “That's a good question.”

But the question went unanswered. He said it was inconclusive, but again asked me if I'd had any seizures. I said no, couldn't help feeling that everyone is completely off-track where my mental health is concerned. I have never had a seizure in my life. Why are we talking about seizures? I just want to be happy.

He has scheduled me to have an MRI. I will have to wait for three months. And he's going to do another EEG to further understand the spot on my frontal lobe.

It was all so unsatisfactory.

November 11, 2008

Sometimes when I hear a car screech to a halt, I have this urge to know the exact pressure between the tires and the road, to understand precisely the force applied, the resistance created, everything working together to make the car stop. I crave it, to understand the friction.

My desire to know these various unknowable frictions, forces, interactions and so on is ultimately rooted in and aggravated by the unknowable dimensions of death, or rather of what happens after death. I search for evidence of some ultimate consequence at the end of the line, of some ultimate consequence (Is there a God?) that makes the randomness relevant.

I mean, I'm getting high on cough medicine. I take it in order to feel altered, as I've said so many times, because the ordinary quality of my sober living environment is intolerable. The early signs that you are overdosing on DXM is in fact the getting-high part. In other words, if you are high from DXM, you are overdosing. A common short-term effect from using DXM, for me, is disassociation, that out-of-body sensation. Someone described this feeling as having her soul ripped from her body. It's not a relaxing experience, so it is in essence counterproductive to my desire to feel positively altered. But it is preferable to the horror of this depression. It's a cycle. I get high. It terrifies me. I come down. I sober up. I get depressed. So I get high again.

DXM is also a depressant (and yet it is described as an opiate, similar to morphine). It can suppress the central nervous system, you can stop breathing, your heart races, your temperature spikes. Long-term effects include brain damage. I'll stop there because, well, it's brain damage right? What could be worse? Of course, you can die.

Still seeking a new doctor, who I will then have refer me to a new psychiatrist, possibly the one that the neurologist guy recommended. I am wary of those mind-altering medications and will be more cautious in the future. Oh, the irony, I know.

November 14, 2008

My throat is sore today. I have a blood spot on my eye from throwing up, sort of hidden under my bottom lid. My eyes are oddly red.

I have left the house only a few times in two weeks. I have not walked anywhere far in months. It has been a strange and dangerous year.