The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore (33 page)

Harry had already eaten in the octagonal café. The only empty table sat in a square of sunlight, the chrome chair hot enough to burn. He'd had a hamburger that came in a foil packet, the bun greasy and stale. Harry had opened the bun and looked at the patty,
like boot leather
, his mother would have said, and he was flooded with loneliness. Not aloneness, but the ugly sister of being alone: an amorphous anxiety about dying by himself in a strange city.

All the racket in the café, the cash registers and children and the old woman in the Hawaiian-print shirt with the walker. He watched a child with coloured bows all over her head struggle with a ketchup bottle. She'd had to stand on the chair and finally the plastic bottle farted so loudly she fell over in giggles. Harry had once said, at an office Christmas party, that he did not like children. His remark caused an awkward halt in the conversation that led Harry to believe he was just admitting what all the men secretly felt. He said the same thing at other parties, after drinks, and gradually it became true. He did not like children.

Harry's basement was full of books of philosophy. He'd done a master's and had been absorbed by the elegance and intricacy of Heidegger's arguments. He had wanted to understand time and the idea of how to stand outside of it. But there was no standing outside of time and he found this compelling. Being outside of time was the last frontier.

Though he had been involved in his studies, obsessed even, he abruptly lost interest just before finishing his degree. It was as if he had been having a convoluted dream. He woke up and went to work, first in the insurance company where his father had worked, then at cibc, where he managed international investment portfolios, and finally he set up his own company brokering hedge funds. He had a Tilley hat, his large, very clean Volkswagen Passat, a collection of speculative maps of the coasts of Newfoundland and Jamaica drawn by Captain James Cook, and an austere privacy that was almost a form of religion. He sometimes felt very close to breaking through that retaining wall of time but he could not remember the fine threads of the argument, Heidegger's argument or his own.

Then the gorilla broke out of the trees. It sneezed and rubbed its face with a black hand. A hand like the hands of the bog people. Harry had seen their remains just two days before in Dublin or Waterford or Cork. He couldn't remember. The remains had been behind glass and strangely lit, just like the gorilla compound was.

Someone in the parking lot pointed a cell phone at the gorilla and took pictures. There was a taut, unaligned moment when the crowd believed that the animal was not dangerous. It charged and feinted and circled and everyone ran for the café. They got jammed in the doorway and then they fell through, climbing over the backs of the people who had fallen or been pushed to the floor. They were inside and they shut the door and began pulling the tables and chairs up against the glass walls. Here is what you think about glass in such circumstances: you think it will hold. Glass seems to be the culmination of all that evolution. The retaining wall of time may be made of glass.

The gorilla ran at the wall of the café and doubled back, looking over his shoulder, snorting, bitter and ready. Then there was a woman in the shadowy opening of the path, near the rhododenron, wearing a pink blouse and red pants. She dropped her ice cream cone.

Harry had stepped on a toddler, he remembered now, while he watched the woman back away. His foot in the seat of the stroller and out again. The child's thigh under his shoe. He had stepped on the child in the jam at the café door and heard the toddler scream and then realized he had stepped on it.

The gorilla had disappeared down the path and was back, dragging the woman in the pink blouse, and she was trotting with him and her face was covered in blood. Harry was close enough to see her bra. The pink shirt had been ripped open and she was wearing a lacy bra. It was white and unsexy and he thought he could love her because of how naked she looked. Harry felt she was looking right at him. She was freckled and her hair was a cinnamon brown. She was tall. She looked drunk and sullen and taken over and failed. The red pants might have excited the animal, Harry thought. But he also knew there was no motive in the attack. He saw that this moment had been working itself into existence since the beginning of time. The animal's hitched gait was an effort to escape his own brutality, the pause before havoc.

How slowly the woman lifted her eyes to Harry. She was not asking for anything. She was not asking for mercy or the sort of awed celebrity that sacrificial virgins generate. Harry started pushing his way toward the door. He elbowed and jabbed.

Get out of my way, he shouted. The woman, as if forgetting where she was, and her role, started to walk away from the gorilla. She took a step or two in the other direction and the animal reeled her in, as a partner does in a waltz.

There seemed to be a flap of torn skin over her brow. The blood spurted over half of her face and she did nothing to wipe it away. Everyone in the café had become quiet and still. They all watched the woman and the gorilla.

Harry got to the door and it was jammed, he rattled the grab bar but it would not give. The gorilla moved a paw (it was a paw, after all) over the woman's shoulder and half the shirt came off and there were red marks on her arm and more blood appeared.

Harry banged on the glass. He hammered it with his fists, he screamed and hooted and acted like the gorilla, he gambolled and roared, up on his hind quarters, baring his teeth, hooting, hooting until the gorilla noticed. Its mouth was bloody and it shook its head.

The gorilla dropped the woman's arm and charged the café. The woman didn't run or move or make noise. She cradled her arm. She just stood there.

It hit the glass wall of the café and they watched the wall crumple and shimmer and come down and then the gorilla was inside with them.

It's easy to believe a gorilla is just a man in a suit because we have been led to believe that wild animals can be tamed. That they are somehow related to us, like spoiled children with whom we can try to reason. Everything beyond the glass had slowed down. Harry wanted it all to hurry up and come to a conclusion. He wanted to dominate the wildest, most lawless progress of time, the jerks and unspooling and elastic snaps, the running-out it is capable of. What did the gorilla want with the woman? Harry tried to think his way back through all the cricks and chinks of time toward that moment when the ape became human. The folding and unfolding of every moment in the last seven million years or so, here a claw, here a dorsal fin, a shell, a scale, a lung, a thumb, down through all the space–time wormholes, to the blink of an eye before there's an eyelid, toward the present: a man and an ape, face to face in the glass.

It was easier to think this when the animal was outside the building, holding the arm of the woman it had mauled. It was an it out there, full of thingness, and unthinking. But inside the café, among them, there was something human in the beast's posture; it appeared humble and curious. Its expression changed: it looked befuddled by inappropriate love and it bent down on one knee, a low bow, and fell face forward, onto the floor. Its stink reached Harry. What an impressive stink. It had been shot with a tranquilizing dart.

People left the café through the broken glass wall; there were police blocks and yellow tape strung from the trees, white work suits and vests with reflective tape on their backs.

Harry moved from one ambulance to the next. He broke through the little crowd and found the woman with the cinnamon ponytail. She held a paper cone of water but she didn't drink from it. A paramedic with yellow rubber gloves was moving his hands down her legs. Another paramedic was sewing up her arm. She was watching the needle, her cinnamon lashes downcast.

Then she looked up at Harry. She did not recognize him.

Harry woke in his hotel bed at four in the morning and could not figure out, in the absolute darkness, where the walls were, where the bathroom was, which door was the closet. He was unsure of which city he was in, or whether he was in a city or a rural area. Hotel rooms he'd slept in over the last five years swept through him. He'd made an effort, in each new city, to visit the tourist attractions. He prided himself on knowing something of the history. He had been to castles and he had followed the young guides and gathered the facts.

Harry had seen the face of the toddler's mother in his dream — the child he had stepped on during the crush at the door of the café. Harry could see her face and he saw that she hated him. But he had been given a chance to explain himself and in the telescoping dreamtime he was able to articulate who he was and what had led him to the zoo and how nothing was his fault. The mother's absolution was pure. He woke tangled in the damp coarse bedsheets and he kicked out of them and stood up by the bed.

I am grateful to the following people who read these stories in their early incarnations with love in one fist and a hatchet in the other: Edna Alford, Ramona Dearing, Eva Crocker, Steve Crocker, Susan Crocker, Michael Crummey, Jack Eastwood, Mark Ferguson, Roger Greenwald, Michael Jones, Mary Lewis, Kevin Linder, Nan Love, Beth Ryan, Medina Stacey, Stephanie Squires, Larry Mathews, Lynn Moore, Jane Urquhart, Claire Wilkshire, and Michael Winter.

Thank you to Jared Bland, Beverly Daurio, and Martha Sharpe for their fantastic editorial expertise and encouragement.

I am indebted to Laura Repas and Matt Williams and Anne McDermid for the work they do sending books into the world.

And many thanks to powerhouse Sarah MacLachlan, who expects the best and makes it worthwhile.

Thank you to Jane Urquhart for providing an introduction for these stories. I am deeply honoured.

Thank you to Steve Crocker for absolutely everything.

I have published stories in Canadian literary magazines and newspapers such as
Coming Attractions
,
Prism International
,
Canadian Fiction Magazine
,
The Malahat Review
,
The Fiddlehead
,
The Walrus
,
Chatelaine
,
Elle
,
The Journey Prize Anthology
,
This Magazine
, the
Toronto Star
, and
the Globe and Mail
. I am grateful to these publications for providing homes for stories and creating an audience for short fiction.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts and the Newfoundland and Labrador Arts Council, whose support made this book possible.

LISA MOORE
is the acclaimed author of the novels
February
and
Alligator
.
February
was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and was named a
New Yorker
Best Book of the Year, a
Globe and Mail
Top 100 Book, and a
Quill & Quire
Top Book.
Alligator
was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize for Canada and the Caribbean, and was a national bestseller. Her story collection
Open
was also a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize and a national bestseller, and it won the Canadian Authors Association Jubilee Award. Lisa Moore lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to
publish Canadian-authored books, a mandate that continues to this day even as the list
has branched out to include internationally acclaimed thinkers and writers. The press
immediately gained attention for significant titles by notable writers such as Margaret
Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, George Grant, and Northrop Frye. Since then, Anansi's
commitment to finding, publishing and promoting challenging, excellent writing has won
it tremendous acclaim and solid staying power. Today Anansi is Canada's pre-eminent
independent press, and home to nationally and internationally bestselling and acclaimed
authors such as Gil Adamson, Margaret Atwood, Ken Babstock, Peter Behrens, Rawi Hage,
Misha Glenny, Jim Harrison, A. L. Kennedy, Pasha Malla, Lisa Moore, A. F. Moritz, Eric
Siblin, Karen Solie, and Ronald Wright. Anansi is also proud to publish the
award-winning nonfiction series The CBC Massey Lectures. In 2007, 2009, 2010, and 2011
Anansi was honoured by the Canadian Booksellers Association as “Publisher of the Year.”

Launched to mark our forty-fifth anniversary, the A List is a series of handsome new editions of classic Anansi titles. Encompassing fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, this collection includes some of the finest books we've published. We feel that these are great reads, and the series is an excellent introduction to the world of Canadian literature. The redesigned A List books will feature new cover art by noted Canadian illustrators, and each edition begins with a new introduction by a notable writer. We can think of no better way to celebrate forty-five years of great publishing than by bringing these books back into the spotlight. We hope you'll agree.

The Outlander
· Gil Adamson

The Circle Game
· Margaret Atwood

Survival
· Margaret Atwood

The Hockey Sweater and Other Stories
· Roch Carrier

Five Legs
· Graeme Gibson

De Niro's Game
· Rawi Hage

Kamouraska
· Anne Hébert

Civil Elegies
· Dennis Lee

The Selected Short Fiction of Lisa Moore
· Lisa Moore

Poems For All the Annettes
· Al Purdy