Circle of Stones (6 page)

He drops to his knees and reaches into his inner jacket pocket. He pulls out a dollar-store scrub brush and a small spray bottle filled with soap and water. He squirts and rubs grime away on the pedestrian side of the long concrete barrier separating sidewalk from traffic until the name JENNIFER appears.

“Where are you?” he says out loud. “How can I find you?”

He adds more soapy water to the
J
, making it bigger and more stylized. It was Aaron who introduced him to reverse graffiti, as a way of tagging without having to worry about getting caught. It's not illegal to clean something, even if doing so leaves a name or a design. Once, early in first term he and Aaron reverse graffitied a crashing Zeppelin on a long, blank exterior wall at BC Place Stadium. It was Aaron's idea, but Nik did most of the work while Aaron took smoke breaks.

“I need to gain perspective,” he kept saying, as Nik rubbed with the brush until its bristles were splayed, his knuckles raw from scraping concrete.

Remembering this, Nik imagines asking Old Aaron, “Do you really want to be an artist?” He can't think of what Old Aaron would say. It doesn't matter what New Aaron's long-winded spin on it is now. Clearly his real answer is “no.” It makes Nik wish he had more artist friends. He feels like the only one.

A fast-moving car splashes a spray of puddle water near him. Nik stands and looks down the full length of the pedestrian lane crossing the bridge. He could reverse graffiti a whole message for Jennifer here.

But somebody's up ahead on the bridge, heading toward him. When the figure sees Nik, he or she turns around and starts running in the other direction. Nik takes chase, but can't keep up in heavy boots and a cumbersome jacket. If it were Jennifer she wouldn't run away from him. Unless, he realizes, he is in danger. He stops for a moment at the side of the bridge, the light traffic whooshing past him. Wind pushes at his damp hair. His pants flap. He puts his hands in his pockets and stares at the moving ink below, experiencing vertigo powerful enough to change his mind. Everyone knows how easy it is to jump off a Vancouver bridge. In the worst possible scenario, Jennifer is lost in the depths of False Creek. If he knew for sure she was gone and not just disappeared, he'd make a memorial for her somewhere in Stanley Park by the sea. Like what he saw on the island with his grandmother, but on a city beach. He'd make it safe, covering it with wire netting so her memory would be protected. Then he'd let the office towers watch over her, as yachts boated past. Maybe he'd even lie down next to her. He'd stay there until time turned science fiction and urban erasure swept over them, obliterating like the tide.

Nik feels his head nod forward. His stomach rumbles and jolts. Someone taps him on the shoulder. He spins around.

What Nik believes happens next is that no one is there. He thinks Jennifer is an electrical current and can be radioactive when she wants to be. He thinks Jennifer is sending him a message. He thinks he's sitting down comfortably on the bridge. He thinks Jennifer's message is that she needs him. She's desperate, in danger. He promised his grandmother. He hears a ringing sound in his ears. Nik believes he is reaching into his pants pocket, palming Jennifer's cellphone, flipping it open.

“Hello?”

Nik believes he is falling through a large pothole in the bridge. As he drops down toward the inky darkness, he drops the phone. But then he feels something around him, pressing into him. He reaches out and feels fishing net. Something small and hard hits him on the thigh. The cellphone is caught up with him and he grabs it back. Cars rumble on the bridge overhead. Waves crash below. He's entangled in a spiderweb. It's a trap.

“Hello?” he says into the phone again, desperate for clues. But no one is there. He puts his hands in front of his eyes. He realizes he can't see.

Nik waits. Fishing wire presses in harder each time he moves. He tries painting a giant web, but the spider keeps returning. He starts counting seconds and gets to 4,537. That's when he hears a large splash below. He feels the net sinking slowly down toward the ink and begins to tremble, preparing himself for the icy plunge. He wishes for his grandmother and gulps air, trying to fill his lungs. In the frigid water everything goes silent. He is so numbed by the cold he hears the splash of impact before he feels an abrupt tugging. He kicks and struggles as the fishing net is reeled in and lands with a soft thud on a hard surface. He's in a boat. A large figure bends over him in the shadows. The person smells like mildew. Something strikes Nik on the head. Everything turns black.

What Nik experiences is not all real. What actually happens is that a large, bald man appears. He tackles Nik and drags him toward a waiting car. He forces Nik into the passenger side of the car to question him, but Nik's head keeps nodding forward. Every time Nik's body goes limp the man punches him. Then the man's cellphone rings. Nik hears the man say hello before falling out of consciousness. The man revs his engine and drives away. He presses down hard on Nik's back with one thick arm so he won't be seen with a passenger, and drives with the other arm. The man drives quickly then stops the car in a deserted part of Stanley Park. He drags Nik out of the car, across the beach, and into the frigid ocean.

“Wake up, Nik,” the man says, plunging Nik's head under repeatedly. “Tell me where Jennifer is. I know you know. I've seen you with her before.” The man tries to hold up Nik's limp body. He slaps Nik on the face then lets him drop back down into the water. The man picks up his cellphone and dials while he watches Nik bob around then begin to sink. “Yeah,” the man says into the phone. “I've got him. I don't know what he's on, but he's fucked. Not going to make any sense for at least a couple of days. Probably not worth my time.”

The man sees Nik is starting to struggle in the water. He pockets his cellphone, tugs at Nik's jacket, and pulls him ashore. He heaves Nik's body onto a wet log. He punches Nik hard in the face then clutches his bruised knuckles. “Ow, that one hurt.” The man swears, leans down to pick Nik up, then stops. He looks at Nik's heavy leather jacket. He tries to remove it, but something sharp stabs him in his hand. He leans down and tugs at Nik's boots until they slide off. He throws both boots into the water like footballs. Hard and far. Then he heaves Nik over his shoulder and dumps him into the backseat of his car. The man looks down at Nik's wet, thin body. He peers at Nik's swollen face. He slams the door shut. “Fuck,” he says. “He's just a fucking kid.”

He gets into the driver's seat and speeds away.

Nik wakes up on a front lawn, head sore, body aching and stiff. Confused, he looks around, sees rectangular houses, hears car doors slamming, engines revving. In the distance he can see the coastal mountains. He can smell salt water. He's still in Vancouver, but in the suburbs. It's morning. Nik doesn't know which suburb he's in or how he got there. He doesn't realize his boots are missing until he stands. Water droplets trickle down from his still-sodden pants and chill his dirty bare feet. He checks one pants pocket for his wallet, which he still has, and the other for Jennifer's cellphone, which he doesn't. The figure on the bridge last night was a clue, but Nik wasn't fast enough. He couldn't catch up. He has vague memories of a net and a boat but can't make any sense of his garbled thoughts. His head aches worse than any hangover he's ever had. He touches his forehead and looks at his fingers. Dirt. Water. No blood. Nothing gushing.

He begins to walk. Pavement and pebbles stick to the bottoms of his feet, wears them raw. Then he walks on soft front lawns and bedding plants until he gets to a major street. A car horn blares at him and he steps back, cautioned. He'd started crossing the intersection without waiting for the light. Backing up onto the sidewalk, he blinks and rubs his eyes. He locates east from the location of the murky sun and heads in that direction. It doesn't take very long for him to find a mall.

Inside, the polished floors are cool and soothing on his feet. Many of the stores are still closed, their windows darkened like retail caves. The first shoe store he comes across has an oversized red sign and sells sporting goods. Its fluorescent lights make everything green and surreal. Nik examines the items on a sale rack by the door. He picks up then puts down a pink skipping rope, a sparkly green child's ball, and an oversized catcher's mitt.

“Can I help you?”

The voice startles Nik and he drops the mitt with a clatter. Leaning down to pick it up is difficult, his limbs aching, knees unwilling to bend. He looks up and sees an androgynous clerk wearing an all-white uniform that resembles a karate suit. There's a halo of something bright around the clerk's face. Eyes that look like two black pebbles in the middle of a white oval. For a moment Nik thinks the clerk is an angel. But there's an overwhelming stench of dirty salt water emanating from his still-damp clothes. That seems real enough. He puts his hand on his head again where it throbs. This time he feels a crust of dried blood. This discovery makes him dizzy. He grips a plastic shoe rack and holds steady. Now he can see what he's looking for. His eyes dance up and down the display twice, three times, four times. He points to a pair of black running shoes with a small white insignia.

“Size 12?” he asks. The clerk's oval face bends forward in a nod. Nik sees eyelids open and close around the pebbles. The clerk hovers, then floats away, disappearing down a flight of stairs Nik hadn't noticed before. Nik sits on a white vinyl bench and fishes a pair of cheap white tube socks out of the basket beside him. They are too small for his feet, but when the clerk returns, he, or she, bares bright, gleaming teeth. Nik understands this forced smile is relief. The clerk is glad Nik is wearing the socks.

The clerk drops the shoebox at Nik's feet and then steps back, well out of whiff range. Nik waits for the clerk to say something reassuring or sales-like. Instead the heat vent clicks on, blasting a growling roar. He flips the lid off the box, peers at the shoes inside. The clerk fades out of his periphery.

Bending forward makes Nik's head ache. It takes him several minutes to tie the laces. At first the shoes feel like Styrofoam — much lighter than his old boots. Nik lifts his feet up and down, one foot after the other, testing how fast and nimble they might make him. He imagines running after the figure on the bridge. With these shoes he could catch him. Or her.

“They look ridiculous,” Old Aaron whispers to him.

“I don't care,” Nik says out loud.

“I wouldn't buy them if I were you,” Old Aaron says. “They're not cool.”

“I need these shoes!” Nik says.

“Don't waste your money then!” Old Aaron says. “One quick sprint out that door and they're yours. C'mon, let's rock 'n' roll.”

“I am NOT going to steal them,” Nik says.

“I didn't say you were,” says the clerk.

Nik tries to focus. It takes a minute before his vision clears. He realizes the clerk is a thin woman with short blonde hair.

“If you buy them you can keep the socks,” she says, stepping back even farther. “Although I'd probably let you keep them either way.”

Nik can see her eyes now. They're brown. And fearful. He takes his wallet from his pocket, tries to smile. The clerk retreats to the cash desk and stands behind the cash register, waiting. Nik pays for the shoes out of the Jennifer Fund. He's shaking and shivering as he keys the PIN number into the handset. He needs these shoes to be able to catch up to Jennifer's captors. He needs to work faster to find her. He needs to be able to run.

I
miss Vancouver. Being high. Or low. Outrageous. Raging. Staying up until dawn and sleeping all day. Saying whatever I wanted, doing whatever, fucking whomever. But the months ago of it already feel like years. Professor Moreland is scrawling her office hours on the dry-erase board in red marker, and I think about once when I was high and Ilana put glitter on my eyelashes and everything I looked at turned into fireworks. An astral sparkle none of the brain-dead idiots here will ever see. I make angry scratches in the dull finish of the writing desk with the end of my pen. I wish I knew where Nik was. I miss him the most.

I jot Moreland's numbers down in my new notebook, even though I know I won't need them. I figure I got at least a
C
on the first assignment. We were supposed to describe one of the CanLit books we've read so far and it only took me a couple of hours. English classes are easy. All you have to do is read books then write about them. It's not like having to paint or create something, which can take days. Or forever.

Moreland calls up Karen Ang, Paul Banerjee, and then me, Aaron Chase. She hands back my assignment and glares over the frames of her black plastic reading glasses. I grab my paper and my backpack and get out of there. I don't look at my mark until I'm down the hall, clear of any classmates. There are a lot more red circles and scratches than I'd expected on the first page. I flip to page two, where I see
D-
in unnecessarily large script. That bitch.

I put on my coat and bolt off campus. This puts me smack in the middle of the busy, grubby mess of Toronto's Yonge Street. Vancouver's grimy, too, but everyone stares at the water and the mountains and goes into denial. Only real difference is there's scads more people here. That makes it a good place to hide. Forest for the trees. I push through dazed shoppers walking super slow like they're mentally incapacitated. I get halfway to the subway then remember those office hours I wrote in my notebook. Guess I need them after all. My mom and dad are funding this little back-to-school operation. The deal is I've got to get a C average or they'll kick me out of the house. I'm pretty much on Plan Z at this point, and totally broke. Plus I don't want to have to make an extra trip back downtown. Might as well get the business over with. I grab my cellphone out of the pocket of my jeans to check the time, ignoring the new text messages from Ilana. Moreland's got half an hour left.

I boot it back to campus. More people are waiting to get on the elevator than can fit, so I huff up a couple flights of stairs and navigate the hall maze to Moreland's closed office door. I wait for a few minutes. The door opens to let out a stressed student with the huge plastic food container and nondescript clothes of a science major. She's probably picking up a prerequisite.

“Next,” Moreland says from behind her desk.

I stride in, toss my coat and bag on the floor, and slump down in an orange guest chair. Moreland pours steaming water from her electric kettle into a latte-sized mug. A nauseating fruity herbal tea aroma fills the tiny, book-cluttered room.

“And you are?” Moreland asks. She never seems to remember her students' names. She calls us all “you.”

“Aaron Chase.”

“You're here because you don't like your grade, I imagine.” Moreland crosses her legs and leans back in her chair. She's got a boxy black jacket on over a blue T-shirt. Her scary-short haircut makes her look like a male model. Everything about the way she looks, moves, and speaks is intimidating.

“Yeah. What's up with this?” I toss my paper onto her desk.

Moreland plucks her reading glasses from the top of one of her massive paper stack towers and looks at my assignment for a long time, considering she's already read it. I stare at her wiry shoulders. She's fit for someone so old. I wonder what she looks like when she takes the jacket off.

She finally looks at me. “Did you read the book?”

“'Course.” I cross my arms, realizing she already thinks I'm an idiot. I clear my throat and try to stop thinking about her mysterious, older-woman breasts.

“Let me see your copy then.” She flings an arm in my direction. I'll bet she has those muscled Madonna contours in her arms that thin older women have.

I fumble in my backpack and retrieve my paperback of Ondaatje's
The English Patient
. Moreland plucks it out of my hands and gives it a quick flip.

“That's what I thought.” She hands it back with a smug look. “What were you doing when you read it?”

“I was probably on the subway.” The tea stink might as well be laughing gas. I can't think fast enough to fabricate a convincing lie. “I've got this long commute.”

“And?”

“Well, I listen to music with my headphones to block out all the stupid chatting.”

“That's skimming, Mr. Uh —”

“Aaron.”

“I need you to do a
close
reading of the book.” She lifts up her hardcover version and holds it in front of me like a child's picture book. I watch as she slowly turns through the pages. It's a mess of underlining and scrawls in different ink. It looks so personal she might as well be exposing her internal organs. “If you want to do well in my course, you have to learn to mark up your books.”

I stare at the book and nod. I'm no longer turned on. I'm paying attention. Weird. Moreland looks at her overlarge silver watch and makes a shooing motion at me with the back of her hand.

“If you're interested in a less insulting grade, re-read it in a quiet place with no distractions and mark it up. Then come back and we'll talk.” I feel her watching me as I fumble to gather up my paper, book, backpack, and hoodie.

I head to the subway in a daze. I'm already halfway to Mississauga when I realize Moreland didn't go critical about my writing skills. All I've got to do is read the book again and underline stuff. Write in the margins. I can do that.

Subway in rush hour, GO train delay, forever wait for the bus. I endure it. Suburb maze, stink of backyard barbecue, deathwish kids on skateboards. My parents' house is the only one on the block that needs a paint job. I open the front door and peer into the dim. My dad's already sitting on the sofa in the front room with his beer, watching
Jeopardy
reruns.

“That girl Ilana called for you,” he says to me. “What is 1976?” he adds to the TV. “She says it's really important this time, so I gave her your cell number again. Oh, Science for $400. Daily Double!”

“Yeah, whatever.” I make sure to hang my coat on the hook by the door and take off my new Timberland boots so my mom doesn't yell. “Just keep telling her I'm not home.”

“Well you weren't,” my dad says, still staring at his latest prized plasma screen. “What is hydrogen?”

“Well, even if I am, tell her I'm not.” For an otherwise healthy guy my dad watches way too much TV. When he first got this new flat screen, he booked off work for two whole days just to watch it. Guess when you're a self-employed chiropractor you can do whatever you want. I could handle that lifestyle. It's obviously way easier than trying to be an artist. Too bad I don't have any science credits. I'd never get into chiro school.

Not that I want to wind up like my dad. The man never
does
anything.

“Supper's in the fridge,” Dad says. “Mom left a burger for you. Salad, too. Oh, what are T-cells? Yes!”

I sigh and head to the kitchen. I already know it's not a real burger. My mom's been taking yoga classes after whatever she does at her downtown government job. That means natural this and organic that and a lot of tofu. Our dog Stan, a tired old basset hound, is sprawled out in front of his empty food bowl. He barely lifts his head when I walk in. When I try and feed him the soy patty he sniffs at it and looks away. I throw the patty into the compost bin and grab a bag of vegetable chips. I head downstairs into the basement.

My room, if you can call it that, with its half-finished walls and exposed wiring, is at the back of the house, beyond a jumble of broken appliances, old sports equipment, and a stack of televisions. You can trace the years with our failed consumer goods. Elliptical trainer, dead Discmans. Cellphones the size of shoes, old iMacs, a never-used breadmaker. The mangled frame of the second-hand Casio keyboard I threw down the stairs when my high school band broke up is mostly buried. The corpse of the electric guitar I left behind when I headed out west is somewhere under the mess.

I've forged a path through the clutter that follows a crack in the concrete floor to my room, but my parents always trip on stuff when they come down here, which isn't often. I step through the roughed-in two-by-four framing marking my doorway, jump over the heap of back-to-school clothes my mom bought me, and flop onto my unmade bed. The chip bag lands on my pillow, my school bag on the floor.

I glance at the new laptop my parents bought me for returning to Toronto. It's sitting on a swanky glass-topped study desk I asked for, but never use. I reach for the computer then hesitate. All the new messages are probably from Ilana. I unzip my bag instead, retrieving
The English Patient
and a black ballpoint pen. I flick the lamp on, open the bag of chips, and lean the pillow against the wall. The first few sentences are about boring weather and trees. Nothing to underline. But I click my pen and underline the phrase “the penis sleeping like a seahorse.” Later I start circling Caravaggio every time he's mentioned. He's a tricky guy. A thief. I don't get what his story is.

I'm still reading and marking up my book when my dad yells down the stairs a few hours later. His “Aaron, get up here!” freaks me out. Dad never shouts.

I get out of bed and I'm lightheaded from standing up too quickly. I see little sparkles in my periphery that remind me of tripping hard in Vancouver. I loved the randomness of those experiences. Life here is as paved-over flat as the suburban streets.

When I get upstairs, Dad's turned the volume off and the captions on, something he only does if Mom is mad about something. I turn, expecting to see her, but instead there are two uniformed police officers standing in the foyer.

“They say they have some questions for you,” my dad says without looking at me.

“I'm Officer David, RCMP,” says the athletic-looking guy, and I wonder if that's his first name or his last.

“Smith.” The burly female officer says her name and stares straight through me. “We have some questions about a missing person. A Mr. Nikholas Miklos from Vancouver.”

Fuck. Forest for the trees was a stupid plan.

I lead the officers into the kitchen. Smith steps over the immobile dog. I'm not going to tell them to take off their boots, even though they're leaving tracks on the floor. They keep their jackets on, which is good. Maybe a short visit. A few easy questions. My pulse surges like a cocaine rush, but I try to fake normal. I've got plenty of practice doing that. It's moronic to say when you're tripping. Everyone knows drug stories are only cool after the fact. I gesture for the officers to sit down at the table our family uses to stash mail. I clear a space of flyers and bills so the officers can set their notebooks down. I don't offer them anything to drink, though. I don't want to them to feel too comfortable when I'm secretly freaking.

“As I'm sure you know, Miklos has been missing since early May,” Smith says, not wasting any time. “We understand from his family he was depressed.”

“We also know you were one of his roommates.” David flips his notebook open.

Both sets of eyes turn toward me, as though I will volunteer something. I lean on the back of my wooden chair, feel it wobble.

“Can you tell us why you left Vancouver?” Smith's pen is poised over her notebook.

“I wasn't doing great at art college.” That's not the reason, but it's not a lie, either. “My parents sent me some money and I got a plane ticket to come home.” I shift in my chair and try to think how long it's been busted. Two, maybe three years? I don't want my story to wobble so I think fast. “I was pretty close to Nik, so when he left I missed him. Our apartment wasn't the same.”

Smith and David look at each other, as though signalling.

“Did you know Miklos's boots were found in English Bay?” Smith leans forward.

That's a hard punch. “Nope.”

“The family now believes it was suicide,” David says. His words collide like a minor guitar chord then hit me with the impact of a boot kick in the colon.

Nik.
My brain takes over and the shit-my-pants feeling goes away. This story they're feeding me is fiction.

“No.” My hands are fists under the table. “I saw him. I was on the city bus in Vancouver a day or two before I left and I was sure I saw Nik walking down Main Street. He was wearing running shoes. I got off at the next stop, but by the time I walked back he was gone.”

Smith writes this down in her notebook.

“Black running shoes,” I volunteer. “It was weird, because that's definitely not something he'd wear. We were in art school and running shoes aren't arty or cool.”

“And that was the last time you saw Mr. Miklos,” Smith says, turning it into a statement.

“Yeah.” I try to think of the exact date. “Probably the last week of spring term sometime. A weekday.”

There's another uncomfortable pause.

“Was Miklos on drugs?” Smith asks, scanning me with her eye lasers.

“No. He was really driven. So was his girlfriend. They were always too busy working on projects and stuff.”

“What do you know about Jennifer Alleyn?” David asks.

“She was Nik's girlfriend. He was really into her.” I think for a minute. “She was a dancer, or something. I don't know what kind, though.”

“Have you ever seen this man before?” Smith removes a snapshot from her notebook and places it in front of me. It's a large bald man standing in front of the door of a club. He looks like a bouncer. I hand the photo back to Smith. I'm queasy. I recognize him.