Blind Assassin (39 page)

She’ll be wearing a fur coat. He’ll despise her for it, he’ll ask her to keep it on. Fur all the way through.

Last time he saw her there was a bruise on her thigh. He wished he’d made it himself.What’s this? I bumped into a door. He always knows when she’s lying. Or he thinks he knows. Thinking he knows can be a trap. An ex-professor once told him he had a diamond-hard intellect and he’d been flattered at the time. Now he considers the nature of diamonds. Although sharp and glittering and useful for cutting glass, they shine with reflected light only. They’re no use at all in the dark.

Why does she keep arriving? Is he some private game she’s playing, is that it? He won’t let her pay for anything, he won’t be bought. She wants a love story out of him because girls do, or girls of her type who still expect something from life. But there must be another angle. The wish for revenge, or for punishment. Women have curious ways of hurting someone else. They hurt themselves instead; or else they do it so the guy doesn’t even know he’s been hurt until much later. Then he finds out. Then his dick falls off. Despite those eyes, the pure line of her throat, he catches a glimpse in her at times of something complex and smirched.

Better not to invent her in her absence. Better to wait until she’s actually here. Then he can make her up as she goes along.

He has a bridge table, flea-market vintage, and one folding chair. He sits down at the typewriter, blows on his fingers, rolls in paper.

In a glacier located in the Swiss Alps (or the Rocky Mountains, better, or on Greenland, even better), some explorers have found—embedded in a flow of clear ice—a space vehicle. It’s shaped like a small dirigible, but pointed at the ends like an okra pod. An eerie glow comes from it, shining up through the ice. What colour is this glow? Green is best, with a yellow tinge to it, like absinthe.

The explorers melt the ice, using what? A blowtorch they happen to have with them? A large fire made from nearby trees? If trees, better to move it back to the Rocky Mountains. No trees in Greenland. Perhaps a huge crystal could be employed, which would magnify the rays of the sun. The Boy Scouts—of which he had briefly been one—were taught to use this method to start fires. Out of sight of the Scoutmaster, a jovial, mournful pink-faced man fond of sing-songs and hatchets, they’d held their magnifying glasses trained on their bare arms to see who could stand it longest. They’d set fire to pine needles that way, and scraps of toilet paper.

No, the giant crystal would be too impossible.

The ice is gradually melted. X, who will be a dour Scot, warns them not to meddle with it as no good will come, but Y, who is an English scientist, says they must add to the store of human knowledge, whereas Z, an American, says they stand to make millions. B, who is a girl with blonde hair and a puffy, bludgeoned-looking mouth, says it is all very thrilling. She is a Russian and is thought to believe in Free Love. X, Y, and Z have not put this to the test, though all would like to—Y subconsciously, X guiltily, and Z crudely.

He always calls his characters by letters at first, then fills the names in afterwards. Sometimes he consults the telephone book, sometimes the inscriptions on tombstones. The woman is always B, which stands for Beyond Belief, Bird Brain, or Big Boobs, depending on his mood. Or Beautiful Blonde, of course.

B sleeps in a separate tent and is in the habit of forgetting her mittens, and wandering around at night contrary to orders. She comments on the beauty of the moon, and on the harmonic qualities of wolf howls; she’s on first-name terms with the sled dogs, talks to them in Russian baby talk, and claims (despite her official scientific materialism) that they have souls. This will be a nuisance if they run out of food and have to eat one, X has concluded in his pessimistic Scottish way.

The glowing pod-like structure is freed from the ice, but the explorers have only a few minutes to examine the material from which it is made—a thin metal alloy unknown to man—before it vaporizes, leaving a smell of almonds, or patchouli, or burnt sugar, or sulphur, or cyanide.

Revealed to view is a form, humanoid in shape, obviously male, dressed in a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of peacock feathers, with a sheen like beetles’ wings. No. Too much like fairies. Dressed in a skin-tight suit the greenish-blue of a gas flame, with a sheen like gasoline spilled on water. He is still embedded in ice, which must have formed inside the pod. He has light-green skin, slightly pointed ears, thin chiselled lips, and large eyes, which are open. They are mostly pupil, as in owls. His hair is a darker green, and lies in thick coils over his skull, which comes to a noticeable point on top.

Unbelievable. A being from Outer Space. Who knows how long he has lain there? Decades? Centuries? Millennia?

Surely he is dead.

What are they to do? They hoist up the block of ice that encases him, and engage in a conference. (X says they should leave now, and call the authorities; Y wants to dissect him on the spot, but is reminded that he might vaporize, like the spaceship; Z is all for getting him out to civilization on a sled, then packing him in dry ice and selling him to the highest bidder; B points out that their sled dogs are taking an unhealthy interest and have begun to whine, but she is disregarded due to her excessive, Russian, female way of putting things.) Finally—by now it’s dark, and the Northern Lights are behaving in a peculiar fashion—it is decided to put him into B’s tent. B will have to sleep in the other tent, along with the three men, which will provide some opportunities for voyeurism by candlelight, as B certainly knows how to fill an alpine climbing outfit and a sleeping bag as well. During the night they will take four-hour watches, turn and turn about. In the morning they will cast lots in order to reach a final decision.

All goes well through the watches of X, Y and Z. Then it is the turn of B. She says she has an uncanny feeling, a hunch that all will not go well, but she is in the habit of saying this and is ignored. Newly wakened by Z, who has watched with libidinous urges while she has stretched and clambered out of her sleeping bag and then wiggled into her padded outdoor suit, she takes her place in the tent with the frozen being. The flickering of the candle puts her into a drowsy state; she finds herself wondering what the green man would be like in a romantic situation—he has attractive eyebrows, although he is so thin. She nods off to sleep.

The creature encased in ice begins to glow, softly at first, then more strongly. Water runs silently onto the floor of the tent. Now the ice is gone. He sits up, then stands. Without a sound he approaches the sleeping girl. The dark-green hair on his head stirs, coil by coil, then lengthens, tentacle—it now appears—by tentacle. One tentacle twines itself around the girl’s throat, another around her ample charms, a third tightens itself across her mouth. She awakens as if from a nightmare, but it is no nightmare: the space being’s face is close to hers, his cold tentacles hold her in an implacable grip; he is gazing at her with unprecedented longing and desire, with sheer naked need. No mortal man has ever looked at her with such intensity. She struggles briefly, then surrenders to his embrace.

Not that she has much of a choice.

The green mouth opens, revealing fangs. They approach her neck. He loves her so much he’ll assimilate her—make her part of himself, forever. He and she will become one. She understands this wordlessly, because among other things this gent has the gift of telepathic communication.Yes, she sighs.

He rolls himself another cigarette. Will he let B be eaten and drunk in this fashion? Or will the sled dogs heed her plight, break loose from their tethers, tear in through the canvas, rip this guy to pieces, tentacle by tentacle? Will one of the others—he favours Y, the cool English scientist—come to her rescue? Will a fight ensue? That might be good.Fool! I could have taught you everything! the alien will beam at Y telepathically, just before he dies. His blood will be a non-human colour. Orange would be good.

Or perhaps the green fellow will exchange intravenous fluids with B, and she will become like him—a perfected, greenish version of herself. Then there will be two of them, and they will crush the others to jelly, decapitate the dogs, and set out to conquer the world. The rich, tyrannical cities must be destroyed, the virtuous poor set free.We are the Flail of the Lord, the pair of them will announce. They will now be in possession of the Death Ray, put together from the spaceman’s knowledge and some wrenches and hinges looted from a nearby hardware store, so who will argue?

Or else the alien is not drinking B’s blood at all—he’s injecting himself into her! His own body will shrivel up like a grape, his dry, wrinkled skin will turn to mist, and in the morning not a trace of him will be left. The three men will come upon B, rubbing her eyes sleepily.I don’t know what happened, she will say, and since she never does, they will believe this.Maybe we’ve all been hallucinating, they will say.It’s the North, the Northern Lights—they addle men’s brains. They thick men’s bloodwith cold. They will not catch the ultra-intelligent alien green gleam in B’s eyes, which were green to begin with anyway. The dogs will know, however. They will smell the change. They will growl with their ears back, they will howl plaintively, they will no longer be her friends.What’s got into those dogs?

It could go so many ways.

The struggle, the fight, the rescue. The death of the alien. Clothes will be torn off in the process. They always are.

Why does he crank out this junk? Because he needs to—otherwise he’d be stony flat broke, and to seek other employment at this juncture would bring him further out in the open than would be at all prudent. Also because he can. He has a facility for it. Not everyone does: many have tried, many failed. He had bigger ambitions once, more serious ones. To write a man’s life the way it really is. To go in at the ground level, the level of starvation pay and bread and dripping and slag-faced penny-ante whores and boots in the face and puke in the gutter. To expose the workings of the system, the machinery, the way it keeps you alive just so long as you’ve got some kick left in you, how it uses you up, turns you into a cog or a souse, crushes your face into the muck one way or another.

The average working man wouldn’t read that kind of thing, though—the working man the comrades think is so inherently noble. What those guys want is his stuff. Cheap to buy, value for a dime, fast-paced action, with lots of tits and ass. Not that you can print the wordstits and ass: the pulps are surprisingly prudish. Breasts and bottom are as far as they’ll go. Gore and bullets, guts and screams and writhing, but no full frontal nudity. Nolanguage. Or maybe it’s not prudishness, maybe they just don’t want to be closed down.

He lights a cigarette, he prowls, he looks out the window. Cinders darken the snow. A streetcar grinds past. He turns away, he prowls, nests of words in his head.

He checks his watch: she’s late again. She’s not coming.

The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read. Not by any other person, and not even by yourself at some later date. Otherwise you begin excusing yourself. You must see the writing as emerging like a long scroll of ink from the index finger of your right hand; you must see your left hand erasing it.

Impossible, of course.

I pay out my line, I pay out my line, this black thread I’m spinning across the page.

Yesterday a package arrived for me: a fresh edition ofThe Blind Assassin. This copy is merely a courtesy: no money will result, or not for me. The book is now in the public domain and anyone at all can publish it, so Laura’s estate won’t be seeing any of the proceeds. That’s what happens a set number of years after the death of the author: you lose control. The thing is out there in the world, replicating itself in God knows how many forms, without any say-so from me.

Artemesia Press, this outfit’s called; it’s English. I think they’re the ones who wanted me to write an introduction, which I refused to do, of course. Probably run by a bunch of women, with a name like that. I wonder which Artemesia they have in mind—the Persian lady general from Herodotus who turned tail when the battle was going against her, or the Roman matron who ate the ashes of her dead husband so her body could become his living sepulchre? Probably the raped Renaissance painter: that’s the only one of them that gets remembered now.

The book is on my kitchen table.Neglected masterpieces of the twentieth century, it says in italic script under the tide. Laura was a “modernist,” we are told on the inside flap. She was “influenced” by the likes of Djuna Barnes, Elizabeth Smart, Carson McCullers—authors I know for a fact that Laura never read. The cover design isn’t too bad, however. Shades of washed-out brownish purple, a photographic look: a woman in a slip, at a window, seen through a net curtain, her face in shadow. Behind her, a segment of a man—the arm, the hand, the back of the head. Appropriate enough, I suppose.

I decided it was time for me to phone my lawyer. Or not my real lawyer. The one I used to consider mine, the one who handled that business with Richard, who battled Winifred so heroically, though in vain—that one died several decades ago. Ever since then I have been passed from hand to hand within the firm, like some ornate silver teapot fobbed off on each new generation as a wedding gift, but that nobody ever uses.

“Mr. Sykes, please,” I said to the girl who answered. Some receptionist or other, I suppose. I imagined her fingernails, long and maroon and pointed. But perhaps these are the wrong kind of fingernails for a receptionist of today. Perhaps they are ice blue.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sykes is in a meeting. Who may I say is calling?”

They might as well use robots. “Mrs. Iris Griffen,” I said, in my best diamond-cutting voice. “I’m one of his oldest clients.”

This did not open any doors. Mr. Sykes was still in a meeting. He is a busy lad, it appears. But why do I think of him as a lad? He must be in his mid-fifties—born, perhaps, in the same year Laura died. Has she really been dead that long, the time it’s taken to grow and ripen a lawyer? Another of those things that must be true because everyone else agrees they are, although they don’t seem so to me.

“May I tell Mr. Sykes what it concerns?” said the receptionist.

“My will,” I said. “I’m considering writing one. He’s often told me that I should.” (A lie, but I wanted to establish in her easily distracted brain the fact that Mr. Sykes and I were as close as two peas in a pod.) “That, and some other matters. I ought to come into Toronto soon, to consult him. Perhaps he could give me a call, when he can spare a minute.”

I imagined Mr. Sykes receiving the message; I imagined the tiny chill that would run down the back of his neck as he tried to place my name, and then succeeded. Goose feet on his grave. It’s what you feel—even I feel—when coming across those small items in the paper concerning folks once famous or glamorous or notorious, and long thought dead. Yet it appears they continue to live on, in some shrivelled, darkened form, encrusted with years, like beetles under a stone.

“Of course, Mrs. Griffen,” said the receptionist. “I’ll make sure he gets back to you.” They must take lessons—elocution lessons—to achieve just the right blend of consideration and contempt. But why am I complaining? It’s a skill I perfected, once, myself.

I set down the phone. No doubt there will be some eyebrow-raising among Mr. Sykes and his youthful, balding, Mercedes-driving, tubby-bellied cronies:What can the old bat possibly have to leave?

What, that is, worth mentioning?

In one corner of my kitchen there’s a steamer trunk, stuck with tattered labels. It’s part of the matched luggage set from my trousseau—clear yellow calfskin once, dingy now, the steel bindings marred and grimy. I keep it locked, the key sunk deep in a sealer jar filled with bran cereal. Coffee and sugar tins would be too obvious.

I wrestled with the jar lid—I must think of some better, easier hiding place—and finally got it open, and extracted the key. I knelt with some difficulty, turned the key in the lock, lifted the lid.

I hadn’t opened this trunk for some time. The singed, autumn-leaf smell of old paper rose to greet me. There were all of the notebooks with their cheap cardboard covers, like pressed sawdust. Also the typescript, held together by a crisscross of ancient kitchen string. Also the letters to the publishers—from me, of course, not from Laura, she was dead by then—and the corrected proofs. Also the hate mail, until I stopped saving it.

Also five copies of the first edition, with the dust jackets still in mint condition—tawdry, but dust jackets were then, in the years just after the war. The colours are a garish orange, a flat purple, a lime green, printed on flimsy paper, with an awful drawing—a faux Cleopatra type with bulbous green breasts and kohl-rimmed eyes and purple necklaces from navel to chin and an enormous, pouting orange mouth, rising up like a genie from the writhing smoke of a purple cigarette. Acid is eating into the pages, the virulent cover fading like the feathers of a stuffed tropical bird.

(I received six free copies—the author’s copies, they were called—but I gave one of them to Richard. I don’t know what became of it. I expect he tore it up, which was what he always did with pieces of paper he didn’t want. No—I remember now. It was found on the boat with him, on the galley table, beside his head. Winifred sent it back to me with a note:Now look what you’ve done! I threw it out. I didn’t want anything near me that had ever touched Richard.)

I’ve often wondered what to do with all of this—this cache of odds and ends, this tiny archive. I can’t bring myself to sell it, but I can’t bring myself to discard it either. If I do nothing, the choice will be left to Myra, tidying up after me. After her first moments of shock—supposing she begins to read—there will no doubt be some ripping and shredding. Then a struck match and none the wiser. She’d interpret that as loyalty: it’s what Reenie would have done. In the old days trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there’s ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

Perhaps I should leave this trunk and its contents to a university, or else to a library. It would at least be appreciated there, in a ghoulish way. There are more than a few scholars who’d like to get their claws into all this waste paper.Material, they’d call it—their name for loot. They must think of me as a fusty old dragon crouched on an ill-gotten hoard—some gaunt dog-in-the-manger, some desiccated, censorious wardress, a prim-lipped keeper of the keys, guarding the dungeon in which starved Laura is chained to the wall.

For years they’ve bombarded me with letters, wanting Laura’s own letters—wanting manuscripts, mementoes, interviews, anecdotes—all the grisly details. To these importunate missives I used to compose tersely worded replies:

“Dear Miss W., In my view your plan for a ‘Commemoration Ceremony’ at the bridge which was the scene of Laura Chase’s tragic death is both tasteless and morbid. You must be out of your mind. I believe you are suffering from auto-intoxication. You should try an enema.”

“Dear Ms. X., I acknowledge your letter concerning your proposed thesis, though I can’t say that its tide makes a great deal of sense to me. Doubtless it does to you or you would not have come up with it. I cannot give you any help. Also you do not deserve any. ‘Deconstruction’ implies the wrecking ball, and ‘problematize’ is not a verb.”

“Dear Dr. Y, Concerning your study of the theological implications ofThe Blind Assassin: my sister’s religious beliefs were strongly held but were scarcely what is called conventional. She did not like God or approve of God or claim to understand God. She said she loved God, and as with human beings that was a different thing. No, she was not a Buddhist. Don’t be fatuous. I suggest you learn to read.”

“Dear Professor Z: I have noted your opinion that a biography of Laura Chase is long overdue. She may well be, as you say, ‘among our most important female mid-century writers.’ I wouldn’t know. But my cooperation in what you call ‘your project’ is out of the question. I have no wish to satisfy your lust for phials of dried blood and the severed fingers of saints.

Laura Chase is not your ‘project.’ She was my sister. She would not have wished to be pawed over after her death, whatever that pawing over might euphemistically be termed. Things written down can cause a great deal of harm. All too often, people don’t consider that.”

“Dear Miss W: This is your fourth letter on the same subject. Stop pestering me. You are a drone.”

For decades I took a grim satisfaction in this venomous doodling. I enjoyed licking the stamps, then dropping the letters like so many hand grenades into the shiny red box, with the sense of having settled the hash of some earnest, greedy snoop. But lately I’ve stopped answering. Why needle strangers? They don’t give a hoot what I think of them. For them I’m only an appendage: Laura’s odd, extra hand, attached to no body—the hand that passed her on, to the world, to them. They see me as a repository—a living mausoleum, aresource, as they term it. Why should I do them any favours? As far as I’m concerned they’re scavengers—hyenas, the lot of them; jackals on the scent of carrion, ravens hunting for roadkill; corpse flies. They want to pick through me as if I’m a boneheap, looking for scrap metal and broken pottery, for shards of cuneiform and scraps of papyrus, for curios, lost toys, gold teeth. If they ever suspected what I’ve got stashed away here, they’d jimmy the locks, they’d break and enter, they’d knock me over the head and make off with the boodle, and feel more than justified.

No. Not a university then. Why give them the satisfaction?

Perhaps my steamer trunk should go to Sabrina, despite her decision to remain incommunicado, despite—this is where it festers—her persistent neglect of me. Nevertheless, blood is thicker than water, as anyone knows who has tasted both. These things are hers by right. You might even say they are her inheritance: she is, after all, my granddaughter. She is also Laura’s grandniece. Surely she will want to inform herself about her origins, once she gets around to it.

But no doubt Sabrina would reject such a gift. She’s an adult now, I keep reminding myself. If she has anything to ask me, anything to say to me at all, she’ll let me know.

But why doesn’t she? What can be taking her so long? Is her silence a form of revenge, for something or someone? Not for Richard, surely. She never knew him. Not for Winifred, from whom she ran away. For her mother then—for poor Aimee?

How much can she possibly remember? She was only four.

Aimee’s death was not my fault.

Where is Sabrina now, and what can she be seeking? I picture her as a thinnish girl, with a hesitant smile, a little ascetic; lovely though, with her grave eyes blue as Laura’s, her long dark hair coiled like sleeping serpents around her head. She won’t have a veil, though; she’ll have sensible sandals, or even boots, the soles worn down. Or has she assumed a sari? Girls of her sort do.

She’s on some mission or other—feeding the Third World poor, soothing the dying; expiating the sins of the rest of us. A fruitless task—our sins are a bottomless pit, and there’s lots more where they came from. But that’s God’s point, she’d doubtless argue—the fruitlessness. He’s always liked futility. He thinks it’s noble.

She takes after Laura in that respect: the same tendency towards absolutism, the same refusal to compromise, the same scorn for the grosser human failings. To get away with that, you have to be beautiful. Otherwise it seems mere peevishness.