All the Anxious Girls on Earth (6 page)

“So,” she said, “I heard you’re down in L.A. now. Doing TV.”

“Yeah, well,” Guy Gregory said, and then looked towards the hockey-playing hosers. He watched them for a few seconds and then sighed. “I miss that kind of thing down there.”

“What kind of thing?”

“Real people.”

Lewis almost snorted.

Guy Gregory looked down on her like he wanted to pat the top of her head. As if she were a Pekingese with an unfortunate face and a bandaged paw or a cripple auditioning for the chorus line of
Show Boat
. “I heard about what happened to you. Jesus Christ. Or, HeyZeus, as they say at Taco Bell.”

“Yeah, well,” she said, trying his studied nonchalance on for size, her rising panic a large insect in her throat, a scarab twitching.

“Could happen to anyone,” Guy Gregory said. “You know, I think I slept with her once, but I really can’t remember for sure.”

Lewis looked hard at the ground between Guy Gregory’s feet. There was a small fissure, a crack, a seam in the earth. Maybe if she wished hard enough, it would open up to swallow him whole like a python would a goat. Suck him in and spit out his bones and hooves for organic fertilizer.

He crouched down, tugging at the knees of his khakis, until they were face to face. “What did it smell like, if you don’t mind me asking? All that hair on fire, that burning flesh.”

Her hand swung out before she even realized what she was doing, propelled by a thick, sulfurous laugh that came from deep in her throat. A laugh edged in blue flame that should have melted the flesh right off his face. Lewis hit Guy Gregory hard in the nose with the heel of her hand, knocking him out of his crouch, and ran. She slammed into one of the dog men, wheeling him around, sending his bag of freshly gathered shit into the air. The mans chocolate Lab chased her up the street, yelping indignantly, but stopped obediently at the curb as Lewis jumped into the intersection, dodging a cyclist who was pumping hard, running a red. He shot her the finger. An aging VW microbus, dragging its back bumper, red long johns for curtains in the back windows and bumper stickers all over it
(Hemp!
—SUBVERT THE DOMINANT PARADIGM—
Hey, Magic Happens)
, slammed on the brakes. The driver stuck his head out the window and yelled in a reedy voice, “Move to Toronto, bitch!”

Several blocks away Lewis finally stopped. She rested against a fence, wiped her hair away from her face, and saw that there was blood on her hand.

“Did you feel it?” Lila asked. Lewis lay on the bed, the telephone receiver cold against her ear, trying to figure out whose voice she was listening to. “You weren’t at home or work so I figured I’d find you there.”

“Lila?”

“Did you feel it?”

“What?”

“The earthquake. You didn’t feel it?”

“Maybe it was the nine o’clock gun.”

“It just happened this morning. You’re not still in bed? Its after ten.”

Lewis didn’t answer. She couldn’t remember how long she’d been sleeping. Days, hours, weeks. The sheets were damp. She had come straight to the Entercom building after running from the park. She showered for a long time, until the water ran like ice pellets down her back and the man downstairs cranked his Rachmaninoff No. 3—London Symphony Orchestra, André Previn conducting—up to full volume to show his displeasure, and then she crawled into bed without even towelling off, without looking out the window, without waiting for the nine o’clock gun, and plunged into a sleep of desert rest, a parched sleep during which someone tried to teach her how to milk a cactus, thrusting in a dull kitchen knife again and again. Now her tongue felt like a suede shoe, a Hush Puppy rammed to the roof of her mouth.

“It was only preshock,” Lila said. “It’s all over the radio. The CBC had this guy on who said there’ll likely be another one. He sounded excited, like he was talking about hockey play-offs or something. They say to stay in a basement if you can. You know, sleep in a doorjamb. Oh, Lewis, I’m so worried about the old house.”

“Why?” Lewis heard voices in the hallway. A nanny
collecting the children of the couple in number 1732, her usually laid-back Jamaican patois strained to a terse, urgent staccato.

“I went by yesterday, after I went to look for you at the park.”

“Sorry.” Lewis wondered why Lila hadn’t called the flip-flop woman or one of the tribe of other jolly blue-tongued do-gooders.

“I went by and I saw that someone was living in the basement, just as I thought. If a candle tips over, you know, that’s it. This, this person wouldn’t come out. I saw her flatten herself against the wall when I looked in with my flashlight. I yelled through the basement window, but she wouldn’t answer. I understand about squatters’ rights, you know, but this house, it’s so fragile. And the smell in there, it’s weird. Sweet and sour. I didn’t want to go in, not by myself. I don’t want a confrontation. I think I’ll have to call the police.”

She felt Lila drifting away, like a helium balloon that slips from your hand when you’re not paying attention and tumbles end over end on a breeze over rooftops, growing ever smaller.

“It’s not even your house,” Lewis said.

The children at the school for the deaf are the first to sense that something’s happening. It’s recess and they’re out in the playground when they all stiffen for several seconds, even the girl hanging upside down on the monkey bars, her braids dragging in the sand. Then they start signing rapidly, little fingers fluttering, small fists
smacking into palms. The birds rise up and darken the sky all over the city.

Carnivores and lacto-vegans cling to each other as tectonic plates shift and groan beneath them. Chum salmon leap through the massive cracks in the concrete at the foot of the Cambie Street Bridge, chum that haven’t been seen here since the 1920s, chum the size of raccoons and grinning like gargoyles. The old polar bear, the only animal left in the zoo, left waiting there to die, scrambles for purchase as the warm slab of concrete underneath his nicotine-tipped fur buckles, and he slides into the churning moat, wailing as only polar bears can. The ocean spits deadheads, sending logs rocketing through the city like battering rams to crack open the massive walls of the new library, The Bay, GM Place, St. Pauls Hospital, splitting heads as they whistle by like heat-seeking missiles. All over the Lower Mainland, film sets collapse as the earth heaves and honey wagons shoot into the sky, their contents raining down like some stinking vengeance for a long-forgotten crime.

Piles of baby skulls, smooth as china cups, heave out of vaults below Shaughnessy mansions that once housed convents. Nudists scramble madly up the cliff face from their beach, clutching at branches and swollen arbutus roots, brambles tearing at their pubic hair and genitals, as the ocean roars behind them, a towering inferno of water swallowing pan pipes, arthritic dogs and coolers of dope and sangria. They’re shocked, not because the end has come, but because it’s so Old Testament when they had thought it would be man-made—
a cold, clinical apocalypse so that they could say,
We told you so
.

Suddenly, there’s no cliff and they’re all clutching at air.

Lewis hurries along the street, looking for the green-haired girl.

When she finds her, she knows the thing to do would be to make their way together, as quickly and calmly as possible, back to the apartment in the Entercom building.

Then the thing to do would be to lock the door and wait for the city to crumble.

J
ust a flutter and then he was gone
. Daisy was mourning her brother. She had been mourning him for almost a month now, ever since her mother had told her he’d died. Her mother couldn’t understand what the
fuss
was about. She was sure she’d told Daisy ages ago, but Daisy just doesn’t
listen
.

Jack sat, not without a flush of guilty pleasure, at a tiny marble-topped table outside L’Imperio, having lunch with Daisy’s mother. His breaded veal sandwich, the meat covered with slick tongues of sweet, roasted red pepper, was so good he tried hard not to stuff it all into his mouth at once in case he started to choke. Irene actually cut each of her agnolotti in half with a knife and fork and paused between bites to make another point. For fun, or effect, Jack wasn’t sure, Irene always called him Jacques. Although, the way she pronounced it, it
sounded like “shock” and made him feel like a live wire quivering from an exposed light socket, or a wet finger on a car battery, his hair up the back of his neck singed from wild brush fire. Alive and dangerous—shiv clamped between his teeth, ready for combat—that’s how Jack felt around Irene. She’d had a mastectomy last year and, since then, Jack frequently found his eyes travelling across her boyish body, trying to picture the exact angle of the scar and finding the thought of running his tongue along the seam disturbingly sexy.
Ohmegawd, your own girlfriend’s own mother!
the little anal Jack in Jack’s head said, as if everyone didn’t have wayward thoughts. As if everyone didn’t think one thing and then do altogether another. As if the whole of civilization wasn’t precariously balanced on a funeral pyre of lies.

“Shock,” Irene said, laying down her fork and knife like a crucifix across her plate, “I think you should tell Daisy that if he had lived, I wouldn’t have had her ten months later. I wasn’t ever crazy about babies. One was, is, enough.”

“I couldn’t tell her that.”

“Imply
it. Emphasize the
implications.”

Irene didn’t even bother with a prosthesis, and yet, unless you knew, you couldn’t tell. Daisy, on the other hand, Daisy would look lopsided.

“I think she’s mourning what he might have been.” Jack found it strange to be solemnly repeating Daisy’s own words. They were like alien food in his mouth, lightly braised monkey brains. He felt brave—an anthropologist in the field who’s determined to adhere to
some throwback tribes incomprehensible rites. Like the indomitable Shirley MacLaine drinking ox blood in Africa, eyes impishly twinkling, gag reflex in admirable check. He holds a small metal shovel with serrated edges and cracks down hard on the monkey’s skull as the elder tribesmen clap him on the back. His interpreter tells him he’s the first white man to be so daring. The monkeys grey matter squishes into the spaces between his teeth and threatens to rush back out his nose.

Irene snorted. “He would have been chunky and insecure like Daisy. And, unlike Daisy, to give her credit, he’d still be living at home with me because mamas’ boys are like that and I would certainly have had the bad luck to raise a mamas boy. Shock, puppet, don’t act so nonplussed, I’m just being
realistic.”

That morning Daisy had stood looking out the living-room window, griping about a couple of four-wheel drives with frat-house bumper stickers parked facing the wrong way up the street. “There’s no reason for it, there’s lots of room on the other side,” she had said. “Those assholes just do it to be annoying.” Then her shoulders started shaking and she pressed her forehead to the glass and sobbed, her tears making crooked tracks down the dusty pane before settling on the even dustier windowsill. Jack, sitting there behind her cross-legged on the old kilim rug, gently stretching his groin which he’d pulled trying to hacky-sack with some guys ten years younger, had joked, “Do you want me to go out there and beat them up?” That had only made her cry harder. He just sat there not knowing what to do. Not
knowing how much more of this he could take. So when Daisy pulled herself together and left for work, wobbling towards Bloor on her old Fred MacMurray bicycle, blue plastic milkcrate full of press kits bungee-corded to the back fender, artificially black corkscrew curls bouncing in her wake like rogue bedsprings, he called Irene to tell her he was worried about her daughter, who also happened to be the woman he thought he loved.

Now sitting here discussing Daisy’s seemingly pointless tears with her mother outside a bright, busy cafe made them seem less sad and more wacky. More typically Daisy. Beside them sat a couple of competitive cyclists, their Easter ham-sized quads in electric-blue Lycra splayed out from under a too small table. Their shins and calves were shaved aerodynamically smooth. What was it about speed? Jack wondered. What was it that made some people want to be fast, to be first? Jack could smell the men’s sweat as they sat there drinking expensive Italian mineral water, their million-dollar sweat, and the funny thing was, it didn’t smell any different than his own plain tap-water sweat. It was a thought that gave him comfort as he tightened his stringy thigh muscles that fit, with room to spare, under his table. Once he started tightening, though, some reflex took over and he couldn’t stop. He clenched his toes inside his roomy Keds, he clenched his abdomen, his butt muscles. He tried to keep his face relaxed.

“She feels guilty, I think,” Jack said, as he clenched his sphincter. Sometimes this went on for hours as he sat at his desk, until he thought he was going to scream. It was
always the same order: quads, toes, stomach, butt, asshole. At the end of it all he felt exhausted. He’d never told anyone, there didn’t seem to be a way to tell.

“For what?!” Irene looked genuinely surprised.

“For living.”

“You know, I’ve never felt guilty a day in my life.”

“For losing the baby?”

“For
anything
. Have you?”