The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life (23 page)

“You can all just fuck off!” Emma screamed, nearly hysterical. “Just go to hell! Dig deep enough and maybe you'll even find yourself there!” Emma wiped the tears from her face and picked up her bag to leave. She was so angry she could have skewered them all though the bellies and roasted them on a spit.

Then she heard Rocker's parting shot: “And another thing, Emma. In addition to patience, the most important thing about archaeology is teamwork.”

Emma emerged from the subway an hour later and walked in dazed defeat down the summer street, sticky with spilt Coke and black tar and soft pink gum. She passed asbestos-lined buildings constructed in the architectural oblivion of the sixties, hot-dog vendors with
Eastern European accents, blue-eyed women with shrill laughs and arms full of books.

She pushed herself through her door and crashed into bed, muddy boots and all. Oliver was right, she'd realized, as she stormed away from the site. People did lack vision. The thought of being like Oliver was enough to make her want to chuck herself out the window, give up altogether. She cried a bucketful of tears and took three extra-strength Tylenols and fell into a deep and disturbed sleep instead.

Vision. Perspective. Dreams
. Under a tickertape of Oliver's words she dreamt what felt like a recurring dream, although she was sure she'd never had it before. She was eighteen years old, but she had a head full of grey hair and yellow teeth and people kept addressing her as Oliver, or Mr. Taylor. She was in the airport and she wanted to shave her legs because she was going home, but she couldn't find her razor. She was searching for it in the bottom of her carry-on luggage, but all she could find was a giant breadknife with serrated edges stained with dried blood. She didn't know where the blood had come from. Perhaps she'd killed a rat in the back seat of the taxi on the way to the airport. She hoped she hadn't killed anything else. She was sure that if she licked the blade she'd be able to tell if the blood was that of a four-legged or two-legged animal.

The airline clerk was denying her entry. The picture in her passport was the girl she remembered being—Emma just after she'd first dyed her hair black—but they were addressing her as Sir, and telling her the passport she was carrying obviously belonged to someone else—someone younger and female. She was perplexed.

Blue suddenly appeared at the check-in. “It's okay,” he said, winking at the woman behind the counter. “I can vouch for her. She's legit.”

“But, Blue,” Emma stammered as he led her away from the counter by the arm. “I don't understand what's going on.”

“Just look straight ahead and keep a low profile,” he said under his breath. “And don't do anything
unnatural.”

She had no idea what he meant by that so she just kept putting one foot in front of the other. But they weren't walking. They were sliding across the waxed floor and she could feel everyone stop and stare. When Emma turned to look back she saw they had turned to stone, Oliver and Elaine among them. Their fossilized eyes remained glued to Emma and Blue.

She felt Blue's hand beginning to crumble, turning to dust in her grasp. She screamed so loud that she stirred up the residue of a thousand crumbling bodies, leaving her shoeless and blind in the midst of a black cloud. Perhaps this is what it is to spontaneously combust, she thought. Perhaps this is what they mean when they talk about the origin of the universe being a big bang. There wasn't even a single whisper in the dark surrounding her. Not a shadow or an echo. Just the sound of her heart beating. Cardiac Morse code.

She awoke fourteen hours later, unsure where she was. She could sense the existence of parallel universes and multiple pasts. Dreams spill over borders, overflow the eavestroughs of places, threaten to pollute. Dreams could remind her of places she didn't really want to revisit because they felt dangerously incomprehensible, or incomplete. Being called a lezzy at thirteen because she had a best friend named Maxine who called herself Max because she wanted to be a boy. Kissing Blue under the porch because she thought boys didn't like her. And Oliver, who sent postcards from outer space.

She picked up the phone and called her brother, the first spoken words between them in too long. It was two a.m. in Banff, and he was slightly drunk, but he did his best when she told him that she'd fucked everything up and couldn't go back. He said things like: “Come on,
Emmy, don't be so melodramatic. Don't freak out. So this dig thing didn't work out. There'll be others. Why don't you just go home? Maybe you'll discover an ancient burial ground in the backyard. Fucking acres of arrowheads and bones and fossilized racoon shit. And you can take all the credit for the discovery. Didn't the Hurons used to torture their captives by pulling out their fingernails? What could be more exotic than that?”

Emma didn't tell her brother what was worrying her most—that she was dreaming up things that didn't and couldn't possibly exist. Just like Oliver. But Blue was trying, and maybe he was right. They had plenty of ruins in their own backyard—not Huron, mind you, but their own. Maybe Oliver had buried family heirlooms underneath the raspberry bushes. Maybe Elaine had laid to rest all that they had ever shared in that patch of dirt at the end of the garden where the sun refused to shine.

Amy was trapped between Blue's knees again. It was the second time that week. She was near the foot of the bed, under the duvet, and Blue had her in a headlock and she could barely breathe. He was fast and furiously asleep. Rather than startle him, she gently stroked his calf and called out his name. She had worked her way through terms of endearment—babe, baby, Lou, honey, sweetie—by the time he woke up and released her.

He started to cry. He'd done it again. He could only say that he was sorry, that he didn't mean to hurt her, that he didn't know why, that he loved her.

“It's okay,” she said, trying to calm him. But it did worry her. Blue had started dreaming wild dreams, and shouting his way through them. They were epics, with casts of machete-wielding thousands raping and burning women and fields. “What's worrying you, Blue?” Amy asked every time he awoke shouting. All he could do was stare ahead blankly and shake his head.

As soon as he'd asked her to marry him, Blue had become afraid. He began having difficulty with the promise of the promise to pretend.
He worried that as much as he wanted to marry Amy, marriage might actually be the gateway to hell. The first step on a slippery slope that plunged down into a torrid sea where a man and woman yelled in a kitchen and a husband became a hermit and a wife became an alcoholic. And babies came into marriages, they couldn't help themselves. And maybe fatherhood sent men flying into strange psychotic fits where they decided to build bridges and Eiffel Towers because they couldn't seem to do anything right in the day to day.

He could hear Oliver mocking him:
You actually believe someone loves you enough to want to marry you? And what about when you fuck it all up? What happens then? You'll be forced to go into hiding. There'll be an army out there. An army too big to defend yourself against
.

Rather than think about it, he found it easier to take the edge off the night by having beer for breakfast. When Amy went to work, he drank even harder stuff. The nights when he accompanied Amy were no different, just three times as expensive. As a consequence, he wasn't saving nearly as much money as he'd hoped. And that scared him even more. So he drank even more in order to assuage the fear that he would drink his way through money that was meant to take care of them. If he couldn't take care of them, he'd lose Amy, he knew that.

In the bruised circle of his reasoning, Blue become withdrawn and sullen. Whenever he accompanied Amy to the club these days, he just sat by himself at a table downing beer after beer. He would exchange a few words with one or two of Amy's friends and sometimes buy Larry, the manager, a beer. He generally ignored the customers, which was the safest thing to do because it could make you a little sick when they started to drool out of the corners of their mouths, but one night, after a week of bad dreams where men in gas masks were killing babies, someone caught his eye.

A balding middle-aged guy sat in the corner staring at Amy, and Blue watched his buggy eyes follow her everywhere around the room. “Creep,” Blue muttered to himself. He had the look of the kind of pervert who would pay a kid to bend over. He motioned for her to come over, and held out his money—a couple of bills stapled together at one end—for a dance. After exchanging a few words, she started to move her hips in time to the music and peeled the straps of her dress off her shoulders and down the little length of her body. She spread his legs with her knees and danced her way down between them, her cleavage under his nose, her hair sweeping over his head and his shoulders. He kept his hands in his lap the whole time, like he was protecting himself. His bug eyes protruded further and further. Drool trickled out of the corner of his mouth.

It took all Blue's resolve not to walk over and punch the guy in the middle of his perverted face. Most men looked at strippers like they were unreal, you could see it in their faces—they knew at some level that it was the women controlling them, not the other way around, and that it was over when the song ended. A live porn video—without the possibility of pressing rewind. Then there was the occasional fuck like this who couldn't separate the fantasy from the reality—would creep around outside the club at the end of the night, tell a woman she'd been asking for it all night long, wouldn't give it up until he erupted in violence, and left her small and broken.

Blue stared at the bastard. He saw the possession in his ballooning eyes. He could see him imagining Amy fractured, split, splayed on concrete. He bit his tongue. Drew the bitter metallic taste of blood into his mouth. Held it there like it was venom.

When the song faded into a finish, Amy climbed back into her dress. But bug eyes held out another stapled wad of money for a repeat
performance. She peeled off her dress and started to perform for him again. Blue was getting really angry now. “Fucking pervert,” he spat, drops of blood cascading down his chin. When the second song ended and she had climbed back into her dress, the bug-eyed bastard held out yet another wad. “Oh, no fucking way,” said Blue. As soon as Amy started to dance again he slammed his beer down and stood up. Amy looked over and glared at him. Blue puffed up his chest, pulled up his slouching jeans, and walked over to them. He pushed Amy aside and said, “Time's up, buddy.”

Amy stood there awkwardly with her arms folded over her breasts. “I can handle this, Blue,” she said quietly.

The guy looked smugly up at Blue and said, “I've paid for this. It doesn't stop until I say so.”

“You don't fucking own her!” Blue shouted.

“Well, for as long as I pay her, I do,” he sneered.

“Blue, it's okay, I can handle this,” Amy interjected.

“As long as you pay her, she owns your dick, asshole!” Blue shouted. “And if
she
doesn't cut it off, I will.”

The man had stood up by this time, and he was doing that “oh yeah” tough-guy stuff, when Larry came over and told Blue not to interfere. “Business is business,” he said to Blue. “I'll bar you from this place if you keep interfering.” Blue backed down then and Larry gave the man his money back and said, “Maybe some other night.”

“She can keep it,” the man said, pulling on his coat.

“I don't want it,” said Amy, walking off in disgust.

After a day and a half of silence between them, Blue finally said he was sorry. But she was still mad. “You just can't do that, Blue,” she said. “I don't want you around me when I'm working if you're going to act like a jealous asshole.”

“It's not that. I wasn't jealous. It's just that guy. That guy is a fucking creep. I swear, he looks like some kind of child molester or something to me. Bit of reality problem, you know?”

“Blue, so the guy looks a little weird. He didn't try and touch me or anything.”

“What's with those bills he passes to you? It's creepy the way he has them all stapled together.”

“How should I know, Blue? Everyone's got strange habits. Even you. Sandwiching your girlfriend's head between your knees while you're asleep?” she shouted. “It's not exactly normal!”

“But I don't have any control over that!” he shouted. “You know that,” he said, his face falling.

“Well,
that
scares me more than anything! Certainly more than a bunch of bills stapled together.”

After one more night of anger between them, Blue started making an effort to draw Amy close again. He apologized over and over, said he would never interfere when she was working, asked her if she still wanted to marry him.

“Of course I do, you goof. I'm mad at you, but that doesn't mean I don't want to marry you. What about when we're married and I get mad at you? Or you get mad at me? Doesn't mean the whole thing's over.”

He was amazed by the things that came out of her mouth. Are we even the same species? he wondered. We might both be from Niagara Falls but we're certainly not from the same world.

Just when things seemed to be getting back to normal, though, Amy realized they were nowhere near normal at all. She picked Blue's jeans up off the floor and a knife fell out of his pocket.

“What are you carrying this around for?” she demanded.

“Just in case.”

“Just in case what?”

“We need protection.”

“I don't think this is the way to handle things,” she said. She couldn't imagine him ever using the knife. But she didn't understand why he'd even want to give himself the option.

Blue got really angry then, yelled that she didn't understand him, that some things he just had to sort out on his own, that she didn't know what was going on his head.