The Strangers' Gallery (6 page)

The note reads: “The thing I am wearing on my head is a gift from a Japanese friend I meet in Spain. Two Japanese girls I meet in Bremen told me that the letters mean, ‘I will do my best,' and that is what I did this summer coming up through Europe. I hope that I will some time see you again.”

4. DR. WINS

You can't tell the mind of a gull.

—Newfoundland proverb

A
nton doesn't seem
to sleep at all. When I got up tonight to use the bathroom, which I seem to do more and more these days, his light was on again and he was reading and smoking. Still, he doesn't sleep in—he is always up before I am—and never naps. But I fear he'll burn both of us to death in our beds.

I have a great fear of fire, a childhood trauma, though the tragedy was another family's and not my own. When I was ten years old, I watched our neighbour, Mrs. Foley, being restrained by two men twice her size, as she watched her two children, a four- and five-year-old, burn to death in her neighbour's house. Mrs. Murphy's darling boy, my friend Rodney, a veritable Harry Houdini at ten, who already in his short life had escaped death by drowning and electrocution, had poured a container of white gas into the wood stove, turning the kitchen into an instant inferno. The gas, a solvent, was being used by his father in renovating their bathroom, and had been stored under the kitchen sink. The house had literally exploded in flames.

Mrs. Foley had left her children with Mrs. Murphy while she walked down the road to the grocery store. It was a cool and windy afternoon in late August. Fall was already in the air, as was talk of another school year. Mrs. Murphy had just lit the stove for supper, and was out in the garden taking her sheets off the line when she heard the noise and saw the smoke and fire. She called the volunteer fire department from Mrs. Foley's, but they were slow in responding. Not that haste would have mattered, in any case.

Rodney had miraculously escaped through the basement door, just as he had, the previous summer, miraculously avoided drowning after climbing and falling from the flagpole at the stern of the boat that was taking him to visit his grandmother on Fogo Island. “Landed on the back of a bluefin and he dropped me off on the beach,” Rodney used to say, when, years after the event, people were still asking him about it. Or, “Fucked a mermaid and she carried me ashore,” and other scurrilous variations. The truth was that he was a good swimmer, and a speedboat crossing right behind the ferry, driven perhaps by one of the same reckless kind as himself, had seen him fall and quickly pulled him out of the water.

On Fogo Island, Rodney had also survived an industrial-strength jolt of electricity. He climbed over a ten-foot-high chain-link fence to get inside the compound of an electrical substation, then up a sixty-foot steel tower, from the top of which an electrical charge hurled him unhurt to the cushiony moss below. In a voice quivering with gratitude and disbelief, Mrs. Murphy described these escapes to my mother. Rodney had lived nine years up to that point, every one of them a life, and now, at ten, had one up on the cat.

Though we were the same age, I wasn't allowed to play “alone with Rodney,” as my mother anxiously put it. I didn't really mind, for he was a tough little bugger, cruel and tough, with that stereotypical pretty-boy disguise: golden curls like a laurel wreath crowning a blue-eyed, small-boned face. But he would knock the wind out of you or punch you in the kidneys without any provocation whatsoever, or, if you did provoke him, during a baseball game, for example, with something as impersonal as a home run, he would kick you in the shins with a workboot as you rounded the bases, then stomp on your foot for good measure in the next inning when he went around. Alone with Rodney, I might have been left behind and burned to a crisp like Mrs. Foley's children, while he scravelled like a rat out the basement door.

I slept in my mother's bedroom that night—my father had been dead four years—with what I imagined was the smell of burned flesh in the room. I could still see Mrs. Foley struggling and shouting, screaming out the names of her children. She was sure she could see their faces in the windows of the burning house. For months I would run past that black ruin after dark, the brick chimney still standing in the middle like a tombstone. Her terror is now set like an alarm in my bones, though as a child, of course, I couldn't even have imagined the intensity of it. It's just as hard to imagine for a childless man.

Even now, lying awake late at night, I sometimes can smell smoke even when there isn't any. But on the third night of Anton's stay, the smoke was real, and it had sent me running to his room and banging on the door. I opened it before he had a chance to answer, only to find him stretched out on the bed in his undershorts, reading a book and smoking a pipe, a nightly routine he was not to break for the entire nine months of his stay.

I've never liked getting up in the middle of the night. Objects, things, seem more manifestly
there
, sharing your house, your home. In the bathroom, Anton's brown-stained partial denture, immersed in a glass of water and half a glass of undissolved baking soda, was very unvainly displayed on the vanity for my viewing pleasure. I moved the glass and the teeth shifted and settled in the soda like an ancient artifact in the molehill sand dune of a display case. Anton is very informal about personal hygiene. Like a tomcat, he sprays all around the toilet bowl and forgets to flush what gets inside. He leaves a mess of toothpaste, mouth sludge, and razor hair in the sink, body hair in the tub, nail clippings on the floor. He thinks nothing of using my hairbrush and leaving it choked with hair. He farts cathartically and clomps about the house in his wooden slippers and underwear after a shower looking for a T-shirt he's mislaid. He is totally unselfconscious about his body. It is not the same with his feelings, which he usually keeps to himself; but complete strangers whom he meets in bars or cafés spontaneously open themselves up to him, pour out their dark and painful secrets, as if he were a brother or a husband or a very close friend.

Usually, he brings home just the stories they tell him, but once in a while, the storytellers as well. One day I came home from work to find an elderly woman sitting on a lawn chair in the front garden with white canvas bags in a circle around her feet. Anton had met her on the street lugging home groceries, which he offered to carry. Walking past our house, they stopped for a rest, and Anton went inside to get her something to drink. The woman was grey all over—hair, skin, and clothes—with an innocent, if sorrowful, face. And whether by way of explanation or apology or simply introduction, she turned her head and repeated, or incanted, in a childlike way, “I told him my husband turned to stone. My husband, Malcolm, turned to stone, turned to stone, turned to stone.” And what I felt at that moment was neither bewilderment nor surprise, but an unsettling sense of déjà vu.

Once, in a crowded department store at Christmastime, I was doing some last-minute shopping, sizing up a small kitchen appliance on a bottom shelf—a waffle iron, I think it was—the top of which was shaped like a toilet seat, and even lifted up like one. I was crouched down at a child's height, with shopping bags all around my feet, when a toddler whose mother was also looking at something on the bottom shelf approached me cheerfully and held her small white bear up to my face. “Baby Ted,” she said, telling a childless and uncomprehending stranger, whom she had not yet been warned to avoid speaking to, about the emotional ties that bound her to the earth. They were perhaps the only two words she knew, but sometimes two words, even no words, are enough. Though the child and the old woman were a lifetime apart, on their faces there was the same look, set in their eyes like the warm light trapped in the amber eyes of the bear: an absolute assurance that this stranger understood.

Fibrodysplasia ossificans progressiva, or FOP, was the clinical name, Anton informed me that evening. He'd gone straight to the library after walking her home.

“Bone, not stone,” he said. “Her husband turned to bone. The strangest disease they know. Muscle, ligament, and tendon become real bone, marrow too. A new skeleton comes around the old one. No one knows why, though the first case reported was in 1692. But then, why did Gregor Samsa turn into a hard-back insect? ‘What happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.'”

After Anton had been here a couple of weeks, I had to call in Mrs. Somerton ahead of her time. She was still there in the afternoon when I got home from work, flat on her back on the chesterfield with her feet up on the cushions. Though she was a far cry from Anton, after more than a year of conscientious housecleaning, she had graduated to a certain level of informality around the place.

“I'm sorry, my love,” she said, “but I had to lie down. I'm after cleaning it from top to bottom, but it took me all day.”

I thought she was going to say because of the mess, but she said it was because of the pain in her side. Her hernia was acting up again.

“I s'pose I'll have to let him put me in after all,” she said. “Dr. Crowley's been after me for the past five years. But, Sacred Heart, he wants me to go into St. Clare's, and I'm frightened to death to go near that place. The bathrooms don't even have sinks in there, and they had a case of that flesh-eating disease, I heard.”

“No, I don't think it was that,” I said. “But it was some kind of strange bacteria they found,” I added, not too reassuringly.

“Well, it was in the paper, my love, and whatever it was it don't make you feel too safe. All the ones I sees comin' out of there look even sicker than when they goes in.”

No, I've never liked getting up in the middle of the night. My own body is starting to give trouble, like Mrs. Somerton's. At what age does the prostate begin to tighten its grip? I thought it was in your fifties or sixties, not your forties. Why does urination take so long late at night? You'd expect the muscles to be relaxed at that hour, but they're tensed as if for another fire alarm. It's worse than standing at a urinal in a public washroom at some big event, with curious urinators on either side of you and a pawing impatient pack at your back.

Tired of standing, I sat down on the toilet seat, tucked Its Eminence between my legs and pointed it back into the bowl. The muscles usually relax when I do this, but the womanliness of the act makes me self-conscious, even alone and half-asleep late at night. I didn't have my glasses on, but I tried to focus my eyes on the set of burgundy towels on the rack behind the bathroom door. Mrs. Somerton had arranged them as a floral display, a still life: the bath towel, a sort of background wash; the face towel in the shape of a hanging basket; and the face cloth, an open fan or scallop shell set in the basket. She'd worked at a hotel for many years, where she'd been taught clever arranging tricks like this, along with exasperating habits that she's been unable to break, though I've mentioned them to her a thousand times. She tucks the top sheet, for instance, in under the mattress, so snug that it's impossible to kick out. I have to get out of bed and lift up the mattress all the way round. I'm six-foot-two, and my feet hang out over the edge.

Sitting and staring at this towel display, like some esoteric object of meditation, seemed to do the trick. My bladder began to drain more quickly, but my muscles tensed again as an alarm did sound—a loud shout from Anton's room at the end of the hall. I tightened the drawstring of my bathrobe and ran down to find Anton crawling around on the bedroom floor in his undershorts, hissing and moaning, with blood all over his hands and arms.