The Gallery of Lost Species (27 page)

“Vivienne,” he repeated with slowness, “derived from the Latin
vivus,
meaning ‘alive.'” His look held compassion. “I hope for you she will be all right.”

“She used to be a great painter too.” I slid down from the rock and straightened my skirt. Sensing my throat tightening, I grappled with my inhaler, afterwards taking Theo's stick and offering him my arm. “The trees are different today.”

“Yes.” Theo nodded. “Shadows are cast through fog in three dimensions.” Then he eyed the dome again. “Those voices,” he said. “They drive me to despair.”

FORTY-ONE

W
HEN NOTHING CAME OF
my random late night visits to the Laff or waiting across from the bar through my lunches, I hired a private investigator named Bruce, using most of Omar's money to cover the fee for services, which came to nearly seven hundred dollars a day.

Bruce was in his fifties and had a bleached blond buzz cut, a fake tan, and a small hoop in one ear. He smelled strongly of cologne and wore pants and pastel shirts that had a sheen to them, as if he'd been imbued with a high-gloss lacquer. A toothpick often stuck out of the corner of his mouth, a habit he took up after quitting smoking, he said. The toothpicks were flavoured. When he spoke, bursts of cinnamon, lemon, and spearmint came off him.

I told him about the sighting at the Laff and I mentioned Nick and Liam. At his instruction, we put up posters across the city, hundreds of them on phone poles and light posts and construction site barriers. In restaurants, gas stations, cafés, and bus terminals and any other public space that would let us use their bulletin boards. We set up a blog with a message board and a contact number. Bruce was the contact person, not me, and only he could log in to the messages because he said we'd get pranks and vile notes.

Bruce checked out all the Jane Does in jails and holding cells. Then he scoured the city's hospitals and clinics, parks and shelters. He got hold of Viv's cell records, but the phone hadn't been used since before she'd disappeared. He made calls to his friends on the force in Vancouver. He had access to confidential databases. He had people and connections. But he found no trace of my sister.

Who he did find was Liam, unlisted and living in the suburbs. Once he ruled out Liam's involvement with my sister's disappearance, he gave me the street address.

In a daze, I went to his house unannounced. He'd gone to the farthest outlying neighbourhood of the city, to a rocky place where no plants or trees grew. My body shook in my thin coat as I rang the doorbell. When he opened it, he showed no emotion at seeing me. He just stood there, slack-jawed.

He'd put on weight and his skin was the colour of clay, as though he didn't get out in the sun anymore.

“Edith. How are you?”

“You told me you were leaving the
country
!”

“I'm going in a few months.”

He offered no further explanation. I waited for him to invite me inside.

And the longer I waited, the more pitiful he seemed to me. His feverish look was proof of his unremitting passion for my sister. Since the day he saw her in Lake Louise, all those years ago, nothing had changed.

It was irrelevant that I'd been similarly haunted by Liam since that day. His feelings for Viv were unalterable. I wanted what he didn't have to give me. Mine was a one-sided child's dream.

“She never felt the same way. You wasted years on her.”

“I know.”

I took his hand in mine. “Did you ever love me?”

“I tried.”

His words stung. I turned away from him on the steps, to stand under the sun's tireless, incurable light. It wanted something from us. I stared straight at it, thinking how I would have carved it out of the sky for him. That was how much I loved him.

Then I released his hand and said goodbye.

*   *   *

L
ATER IN THE
day, I wandered purposelessly through endless rooms of paintings and sculptures, until I reached
Portrait of a Young Man.

Liam no longer resembled the boy who'd left me speechless, like when I saw the great grey peaks of the Rockies for the first time. And now I saw that the young man in the painting was agitated, not pensive.

Two men walked by with ladders. The galleries were being revamped. The small oil on mahogany would soon be removed, leaving a pale emptiness on the wall.

In the vaults, I retrieved the unsalvageable wave drawing from the bottom of its box. I stood in a corner where the overhead camera couldn't see me, tearing the rectangle into even strips, pressing a ruler down over it and pulling in a lengthwise movement in the direction of the grain.

The strength of the sound was unexpected coming from so weightless and delicate a thing. The bunker-like room amplified the vibration of the fibres as they broke apart.

I swallowed each piece as though it was a thin slice of cake. The paper tasted of age and dust. Each bit stuck to the roof of my mouth like a Communion wafer.

I rubbed out the accession number pencilled on the mat board. Then I disposed of the board and the tissue paper, in a stack on the floor where faulty frames and glass panes were set aside for cleaning staff to clear away.

The dryness of the paper stayed with me, as I sat wrapped in my double layer of lab coats in the half-light on the cold stepping stool. My mouth and throat were parched, my tongue swollen. I wondered what it would be like to die of thirst.

FORTY-TWO

I
N A BARN ON
the city's Experimental Farm, there lived two goats. These were no common goats. They were genetically modified silk-spinning goats.

Theo said I should see for myself, so I asked if he'd accompany me there on Saturday morning. I looked forward to our outing all week. Other than Raven, I had no friends. Yet in my serendipitous encounter with Theo, I'd made an ally of sorts, regardless of how few words we'd exchanged.

I drove past the arboretum and botanical greenhouses, parking along the road by a cornfield where farmers sold pumpkins and gourds, displaying stupefying oranges and deep yellows against a grey sky. I was early, so I walked around to where families sat at tables, scraping the thick shells in preparation for a carving contest. Children made a spectacle of scooping out the insides and throwing the muck onto newspapers.

The smell of fresh pumpkin reminded me of our damp Mechanicsville basement, and I got wistful for the years when Henry would drive us to a patch outside the city limits, to pick out our Halloween lantern. The breeze carried the scent of burning leaves, and the pumpkins on the roadside—some whose flesh was broken to pieces in the gully—ignited a homesickness inside me. An ache for a distant time I couldn't get back.

The farmers gave out salted seeds. I sucked on them, running my hands along the cool, ribbed skin of the melons. I picked up a pumpkin and hugged it. Hold still, it seemed to tell me. Hold still and don't let go.

I bought a miniature pie and ate it and then I bought one for Theo before making my way onto the property. This farmland in the middle of the city was an anomaly. There was a sci-fi factor about an experimental place for agriculture and livestock. No one could say for sure what testing and studying went on there.

I found Theo leaning against a fence enclosing cows.

Each cow had a small round window in its side, like a window on a ship. Theo said the hole led straight to the cow's stomach, for scientists to poke into for research purposes.

I wasn't squeamish, but it was disquieting, watching those cows. “Show me these goats so I can call your bluff,” I told Theo.

He thought this over and guffawed. “That's very good.” He tipped his hat to me. Under his wool coat today he wore an umber bow tie, attuned to the season.

Theo parted the grass with his cane and I followed him to a barn. The musty, warm air of animals, manure, and hay engulfed us as we entered the Agriculture Museum. The supernatural goats were in the back. I took Theo's arm so he wouldn't get knocked over by the roving bands of hyperactive kids.

We walked through a petting zoo of pigs, sheep, horses, rabbits, and turkeys. At the last stall, a label much like the Gallery's art labels read:
Spider (Transgenic) Goats.
I ushered some rambunctious boys out of the way so that we could get up close.

They looked like regular little white goats. They bleated and butted and pushed against our hands for food. One balanced on a log while the other tested the fence.

“These are GM goats,” Theo said.

“General Motors?”

“Genetically Modified. They were created with spider
DNA
in them. Engineered to produce spider silk in their milk.”

“For health and science, the sign says.”

“And for making military-grade textiles. This protein is ten times stronger than steel. There is great profit to be had in bulletproof vests and parachutes. Great profit in warfare.”

I deliberated whether I might be stronger inside if I drank silk milk. Or ate cobwebs. Damien Hirst would pay a lot for such goats.

“I come here when I am trying to make sense of human nature.”

“You visit an unnatural place with unnatural animals to do that?”

“Instead of preserving existing organisms, they try to make new ones.” Theo coughed into his handkerchief.

Sugar and Spice were fighting for my hand, licking it and gearing up to chew. I pulled it back through the bars, wishing I'd brought sanitizer.

“There are tens of millions of living species on this planet.” He turned his back on the goats, despondent. “Most have yet to be catalogued. So many we will not find before they die out.”

“I have the same problem at work. With Avalon.”

He didn't seem to hear. I could tell he was lamenting his cryptids again. We petted the goats on the head one last time and left the barn.

I led Theo to the greenhouse for tea. We washed our hands and found a table by a bed of cacti. I pulled the small saran-wrapped pie from my purse and got a paper plate and a plastic fork at the concession. Theo feigned pleasure eating his dessert, but his large fingers were stiff today, moving with painstaking slowness.

Drinking his tea, he held his cup with effort. Then he asked after Viv, calling her by name. It meant something to me, that he remembered.

I told him how sick she was. How she had disappeared and there was no news. I admitted that at night I lay awake debating if this was her destiny or a calamity that would pass. Ultimately, my gifted and accomplished sister had been dealt the bad hand, not me, the mediocre and inept one. This twisted fluke devoured me.

Theo observed the people all around us. His response was so delayed I didn't think he'd say anything. Eventually his eyes rested on a cactus sprouting a tubular flower. I was counting the awl-like needles when he spoke.

“This week I had a light bulb go,” he told me. “Then they all went out, one by one, in different rooms. Some were used much more than others, and there were various kinds—halogen, fluorescent. They all went out within days of one another.”

Many would say he was another old man yammering on. Yet I respected his philosophies and anecdotes. Even if I couldn't always decipher their meanings, like messages from a fortune teller.

“The question of what is fated, what is chance. You mustn't waste your youth as I did. Why, why, why. It brought me no repose.”

I asked why there was no point asking why.

“I had a friend who collected turtles. She had no end of tribulations. But the turtles gladdened her.”

“Should I collect silk-spinning goats, do you think?”

“Find what brings you pleasure to monopolize your mind and fill you.” He nodded to the cactus. “Like water sustains that one in dry earth.”

That was what Liam had done. Filled me up. I'd never get that feeling back.

I scolded Theo for comparing me to a barbed plant. “Pumpkins bring me pleasure. I'll grow pumpkins,” I told him, even though I got what he was saying.

His crinkled lips formed a smile. “Like Cinderella, then. Do what you must to find sleep.”

FORTY-THREE

S
IX WEEKS INTO MY
sister's disappearance, Constance came and went like a travelling performer, returning home for a day or two with an hour to spare or less, between finalizing the sale of her condo and packing.

She called for lunch or coffee, waiting for me outside Pierre's downtown high-rise, the image of a bygone age in her leopard print coat and her turban cap with a brooch fastened to its centre, her shapely legs off to one side and a faraway expression on her painted face. My mother's canvas of her costumed life:
Self-Portrait: Hat, Purse, Gloves.

What I thought was her handbag turned out to be Mira beside her on the bench, in an aviator hat and goggles. The dog rested her head on her paws and didn't react when I approached.

“She needs a walk before we go to the restaurant,” my mother said.

We made our way toward a park. Mira doddered along on the sidewalk, sniffing her surroundings every few metres. When Con passed me the leash to remove her gloves, she eyed my dry, cracked hands.

“I have some lotion for that skin of yours. Mirabelle's doctor prescribed it.” She opened her purse and held out a tube of ointment.

“You want me to use dog's cream?” I looked down at Mira's patchy coat. The four-pound dog was shivering. My mother scooped her up and tucked her under an arm.

“It's not for dogs. It's for udders,” she replied, petting the dishevelled Mira. “I tried to bring you back some oranges,” she continued, “but the customs boy wouldn't let them through.”

“That's okay.”

“He said the peels were the problem, not the oranges.” I pulled the gate to the park open so she and Mira could enter.

“I peeled them in front of him with a lineup behind me, and I gave him the bag of peels.”