The Delusionist (11 page)

He was waiting at the exit when Connie appeared and the instant he saw her he knew something was wrong. He approached warily. “What?”

She looked small and haggard and there were tears in her eyes. “What do you mean,
what
?”

“It was too hot,” he said, thinking she was insulted that he'd left. “I went for a walk. I missed the second half.”

But she wasn't listening, she wasn't even there. “I blanked,” she said, staring as if shell shocked. “Just flat out blanked. It's never happened before. Ever.”

“Con'. Hey.” A couple of cast members including her leading man stood by the theatre entrance.

She didn't respond, she was looking at Cyril, not accusing but wondering, at herself, at him, at the predicament. “I thought of you,” she said. “On stage. I thought of you. And then  . . .” She put her fists to her forehead. “The reviewer's gonna kill me. He was there. He interviewed Scotty just now. Oh, God.” Her hands dropped to her sides and for a moment Cyril feared she was going to fall to her knees.

“Con'?”

“Be right there,” she called, impatience edging her voice. She faced Cyril and took both his hands and he knew it was over.

“It's okay,” he said.

“Not really.”

“I meant—” But what had he meant?

“I gotta keep my head on straight here.”

“I understand.”

“It's not just me. There's others. This whole tour.”

“Sure. I get it.” He nodded vigorously to show he got the idea, that he grasped how important this was, and that he wasn't clinging, that he was not a burden.

“It's just like last time,” she said, wondering at some strange déjà vu, and Cyril saw them condemned to travel off through the night on separate paths perhaps to meet up again in another ten years. She touched his face as she had on the occasion of their last farewell, in the
IGA
, then she began to cry and they embraced and he felt the leather jacket crinkly and sensual, and he held her tightly and kissed her neck and she twisted in his arms and kissed him long and hard on the lips and then she was walking away.

He watched her. “Hey.” She stopped and turned. “We're not finished, you know.” His tone was not pleading or ominous but a statement, a calm observation of fact.

Her voice was small. “I know.”

TWO

THREE DAYS LATER
Cyril and Gilbert were on a bus heading for Mexico.

Cyril was unshaved, unwashed, red-eyed, hungover. Gilbert was sporting his Fu Manchu and wore a half dozen candy necklaces of the sort they used to steal from the corner store.

Gilbert had spent much of the past decade driving a taxi, losing on the stock market, losing at the racetrack, losing on pyramid schemes, failing at becoming a private investigator, failing at writing pornography, failing at selling real estate, and failing at marriage. Yet his optimism remained undiminished. As he pointed out to Cyril, his portfolio of life experience was growing ever richer and his potential all but unlimited.

“And now we're heading for Mexico,” he said as though it was the crowning achievement.

Mexico, Antarctica, it was all the same to Cyril.

At Bellingham a young marine got on. When he took his seat he nodded through the window to his parents and then faced forward and looked neither left nor right the entire way to Seattle where, exiting the bus he addressed the driver as sir and when asked said he was flying to Saigon. The driver saluted him and the marine saluted back and the driver said, “Do a job there, son,” and the marine said, “I aim to.”

Cyril watched the fellow heave his duffel bag onto his shoulder and go out the station door. He imagined his life for the next year, or however long a tour of duty lasted, and wondered if he'd ever return to board a bus back up to Bellingham where his parents would be waiting. He envisioned training camp, the heft of a rifle, the feel of combat boots as he marched into battle and faced enemy fire, smelled cordite and napalm and maybe got hit, and he saw himself wrapped in bandages in a hospital in the jungle breathing the pinched smell of disinfectant.

They stayed three nights in San Francisco and wandered the streets looking for free love and free drugs. The closest they came to free love was a come-on from a store detective with a five o'clock shadow and eye make-up in a Safeway; the closest they came to free drugs was the pot-thick air around the North Beach campfires. At San Diego they walked across the border into Tijuana where Gilbert got his picture taken holding an iguana. Their room at the Pensione Mondragon cost fifty cents and all night long dogs fought in the street. In the morning Cyril and Gilbert ate tortillas the texture of linoleum, red eggs, and peppered potatoes, all washed down with Fanta. Then they proceeded to explore the market with its bewildering variety of chili peppers and edible cacti, and various ornate madonnas, Cyril resolving that on the way back he'd buy a Virgin of Guadalupe for his mother, one encrusted in seashells and Christmas lights. By midday the streets smelled of pee and exhaust, and the very shadows seemed to cringe from the sun.

Along with churches and shops there were cantinas, and inevitably Gilbert led the way through a set of swinging doors to a table set with a shaker of cayenne and a plate of quartered oranges. Mescal and beer arrived. The drill was basic: shake cayenne onto orange, bang back mescal, bite orange, gulp beer. On their third round Cyril began to feel like a beached raft being refloated on an incoming tide. For the first time in days he was able to forget his misery and look around, and what he discovered was that no one in the cantina had any shoelaces, or rather that one man had them all. He was a fat man at his own table in the middle of the room, with a heap of laces before him, and he was now regarding the newcomers with interest. With a downward wave of his fingers he indicated that Cyril and Gilbert were to join him.

“Give to me your shoelace,” he said to Cyril.

“Why?”

“Give to me your shoelace.”

Cyril looked to Gilbert who, for once, had no advice. Anxious not to offend in a foreign country, Cyril took the lace from one of his Converse All Stars.

“You are strong?” enquired the Mexican.

“No stronger than anyone else, I guess.”

The fat man had heavy-lidded eyes and a smooth face and a long black moustache and black hair that hung straight down. “You can break your shoelace I give to you two dollar. I can break your shoelace you give to me two dollar. Is a new shoelace, yes?”

Cyril had got them recently. He nodded.

“Bueno. Try.”

It occurred to Cyril that either way he ended up with a broken shoelace, nonetheless he wound the end of the lace around each hand, took a breath and yanked. The lace held. The Mexican laughed the long low laugh of a man who knew his territory. He had beautiful white teeth, not one of them gold.

“Con permiso.” He took the shoelace, looped an end around each forefinger, held the lace up for Cyril and Gilbert to see, then popped it. He did this simply, easily, with a mere toss of his wrists. “Two dollar.”

Cyril paid and they rose to leave taking the broken halves of his lace, but the man said that it was now Gilbert's turn. When Gilbert had tried, failed, and paid, it was Cyril's turn to try again. “No, no, you win.”

The man was sad. “But you are in Rome. You must do as the Romans do. It is the rule. Do you not go by the rule? Everyone here has gone by the rule. You are too good for the rule?” Cyril looked around at the other drinkers who were watching with shy interest, their laceless shoes loose on their feet. The fat man wore white pants, a white shirt, and a red sash for a belt. And he was, Cyril noted, wearing sandals that required no laces.

When they departed, eight dollars poorer, shuffling their feet so as not to lose their shoes, it was evening and shadows filled the streets.

Five days later they reached Mexico City. The cars were foul but the people were gracious and the architecture grand. Cyril's mother had urged him to go to the
Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
, on the hill where a Mexican Indian convert had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary. He and Gilbert dutifully took one of the
VW
Beetle taxis. The driver was unimpressed by Gilbert's attempt to bond over the fact that they were both cab drivers, perhaps suspecting Gilbert of trying to get a reduced fare.

Cyril sat in a pew and watched worshippers approach the altar on their knees and thought of his childhood catechism classes where he learned of saints and martyrs who put stones in their shoes or crawled over gravel so as to share the agony of Christ. He remembered Father Krasniuk saying each of them had their own guardian angel. “He's there to protect you,” he assured them. “You can't see him, but he's there.” Father K was young and brisk and smiled a lot and Cyril had liked him. A picture book in catechism class showed a man in a cauldron of boiling oil. There he stood, relaxed, leaning one elbow on the cauldron's edge, chatting with an astonished Roman centurion. Another showed Daniel in the lions' den, the lions as meek as kittens. “That's faith,” said Father K, “that's God. He protects His children, and we're all His children.” He smiled broadly as he related this Truth. “Have faith. He's looking out for us.”

But even at the age of nine Cyril had been doubtful, for if God and the guardian angels were looking out for us then why had they let Stalin come to power? Why had God and His helpers permitted the Holodomor during which millions of Ukrainians starved to death? He was about to ask about this when Frank Stepanik barfed, diverting everyone's attention. Cyril went home and asked his mother but her answer was to grow teary and embrace him so tightly that Cyril very nearly suffocated, as if she was trying to squeeze the very question out of him for he was better off without it.

After the
Basilica de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe
they went to Trotsky's house and saw the desk where he was ice picked in the back of the head. Trotsky had come to Mexico to escape Stalin, but as Cyril's mother had said—and said again—no one escaped Stalin. He recalled how, back in 1963, when the Free World was mourning the assassination of
JFK
, his mother wore the grim smile of the vindicated. The Russians may have withdrawn their missiles yet they'd countered with Lee Harvey Oswald, and only the naive could have expected anything less. And clearly the Americans were naive, out maneuvered by the serpent Stalin operating from beyond the grave via Kruschev who, she had no doubt, was in communion with the arch Soviet Satan by seance and every other Rasputin-like medium who had slithered up from the Moscow sewers.

They were staying in a hotel whose floors were slanted due to earthquake damage and whose ceiling fan squeaked like tormented mice. The one window was tall and narrow with slatted wooden shutters. It offered a view of construction cranes as well as battered billboards left over from the Olympic Games four years earlier. Cyril had brought a sketchbook but so far had been too depressed to open it. What he did was walk. He walked the streets from church to church and gallery to gallery, sometimes with and sometimes without Gilbert, trying not to brood over Connie, which was as impossible as turning his back to his own mind, though at least the sights, sounds, and smells of the strange city kept him half a step ahead of it as it taunted him like a spurned beggar.

One afternoon he wandered into an exhibition of Goya etchings and studied the peasants and witches and soldiers, moved by the squat and awkward figures. In a second-hand bookshop with a gritty stone floor and dark wood walls he found an old edition of Da Vinci's drawings. Though the book was discoloured and musty with decay, Cyril bought it and took it back to the hotel room where he stared at the master's drawings as if at a math problem. Such majestic confidence in the lines, each one a gesture of absolute command. Had he worked quickly or with patience? Had he hunched close to the paper or stood back? Had his hand done the work or his head? He stared as if to imprint individual lines into his mind so that he might reproduce them like lines of verse. Experimenting, Cyril found he could draw dynamic lines like whiplashes, stinging with energy, yet how to control them? When he went for control he lost verve and the lines were timid.

Next to the hotel was a desiccated park and across from it a shop that sold Bibles, Virgins, and crucifixes plus it had a life-sized Christ made of clear glass standing in the window. Next to this shop was a bakery. One morning Cyril went in and bought a box of
pan dulces
then sat in the park feeding them to the birds whose flit and murmur diverted him from thoughts of Connie. Two nuns stopped before the window of the religious shop and admired the glass Christ. They leaned close, stepped back, put their heads together and nodded in agreement as if to say yes this was the Saviour for them. Cyril had a pencil but had left his sketchbook so drew the nuns on the lid of the
pan dulce
box. He found himself coordinating each line with either an exhalation or an inhalation, and was cautiously pleased with the results. Usually he held his breath when he drew.

Gilbert joined him, a bottle of Fanta in one hand and a Styrofoam container of tripe and salsa in the other. He held it tantalizingly under Cyril's nose.

“No.”

Leaning to admire the sketch of the nuns, Gilbert nodded his approval and then told Cyril, not for the first time, that he should go into forgery.

“You think so?'

“You're never going to make any money selling nuns. Unless they're fucking. Let me show you something.”

Cyril accompanied him down the cobbled street to a shop that sold birds. There were parrots, minahs, and macaws. “They'd cost a fortune back in Vancouver.”

Cyril did not debate this because for one thing he assumed it was obvious and for another he didn't really care; he was more interested in the way the wire converged in such perfect lines at the tops of the cages.

“I could ship them home and sell them,” said Gilbert.

Cyril did not debate that either, because he was busy admiring the lines of the feathers, arranged in perfectly tapering patterns, thinking that if you were looking for proof of a divine Being—a Being with an artistic eye—you'd do better to consider those feathers than stories of guardian angels.

“Birds,” said Gilbert, nodding slowly, nodding knowingly, as if it had been clear all along.

Lines, thought Cyril.

They bussed down to the coast and found a fishing village by a river where flamingos strutted and flocks of small green parrots burst from the jungle on one bank and disappeared into the jungle on the other bank. During the afternoon heat everything went quiet; even the sunlight on the water settled into a molten slumber. By evening the mosquitos swarmed and the bats tumbled, and at night the jungle woke with whoops and shrieks and the ringing of cicadas; by dawn they were replaced by the yelps and trills of warblers and gulls along with the dry-throated squawk of grackles. All morning, pelicans glided silently along the line of the breaking surf.

They rented a house with a corrugated metal roof, mud walls, and a packed sand floor. A bare bulb dangled from a wire, there was a hotplate, and when they were thirsty they drank boiled river water cooled in a stone cistern with a wooden lid. Nearby stood a thatch outhouse twitchy with rats.

One evening as they swayed in their hammocks Cyril asked, “Can we change?” He'd voiced the question as much to the night as to Gilbert and expected no answer from either.

“No, but we can become more deeply ourselves.”

Gilbert's response had come so quickly, with such assurance, that Cyril set his bare feet on the ground on either side of the hammock and sat up to look at him. It was too dark but he could hear Gilbert's hammock rope strain against the post like ship's rigging.