Greedy Little Eyes (18 page)

Prior to this job, like, say, when she was working as an office temp in glassy high-rises downtown, Fern could not have imagined anything so staggeringly dull as six hours spent lurking in department store aisles, lips opening and closing like those of a dying guppy, the same words falling out over and over,
Would you like to try a Lindt Swiss Milk Chocolate Truffle
? Not that one really need ask when holding a wicker basket full of eyeball-sized gobs of chocolate. All day long, hands open under her nose and lips demand more—for their children, husbands and mothers,
visible and not. During the lunch rush today, they lined up all the way out of Candy and into Gourmet Foods.

It’s not even three o’clock yet. Fern breathes and stretches to keep from trying out the Kick Boxercize she’s learned from infomercials and booting down six-foot displays of Mon Chéri and Ferrero Rocher. She prays for one of those lonely old mall-women to come and talk preserves with her, talk about her sons, her hip replacement. The air prickles her nose as though something might just haul off and happen any minute now. She breathes slow and deep, tries to think serene thoughts as she turns around into a breathless shopper’s face.

Fern laughs softly and steps back. The woman
oops
es and
oh
s and touches Fern’s arm, setting her purse at her feet, gasping, her heavy bosom heaving. “Oh Jeez.” Her hand flits off Fern’s arm, then lands again. “You got any idea what’s going on in the mall, hon? There’s a bloody jewellery heist upstairs!”

Fern smiles and waits for the “highway robbery” punchline. “No,” she says. “I haven’t heard a thing.”

“Yes! I’m tellin’ you, right upstairs. The cops are there and the two guys got those, uh, those black toques that go right over your face. They have a hostage! A girl your age, they’re using her like a
human shield.
”

She says
human shield
like it’s something rich and exquisite, the way she might say
movie star
or
diamond tiara.
Or perhaps that’s just the way Fern hears it.

“Upstairs? Now?”

The woman nods, quivering from her cheeks to her arms.

“They have a
hostage
?”

More nods. The woman lets go of Fern’s arm and takes a chocolate from Fern’s basket. “Oh Lord,” she says, still catching her breath, pulling the wrapper’s ends, letting it spin itself open, then popping the brown ball in her mouth and sighing as though it were a sedative. She pats Fern’s hand in thanks and walks away.

Fern scans the floor for the supervisor from the food distributor’s office who just might have picked today to come in to check that her smile is in order, and that she insist the customer eat the candy there on the spot thereby upping the chances that they might buy buy buy.

No supervisor in sight. She drops off her basket behind the candy counter, mumbling to the clerk—whom the store dresses in a white doctor’s coat, as though he really is doling out sedatives—that she’s going to the bathroom.

Police have blocked off the escalators and stairs to the second floor of the mall. Fern gazes up longingly past pissed-off teenagers who demand to know why they can’t go upstairs. The officers don’t seem to be parting with any information and Fern swallows the lump of desire in her throat. She imagines the hostage in the thief ’s arm, his free hand holding the gun out in front of them. Fern can feel his arm there across her own chest, can feel herself being pulled backwards along the glossy mall floor. He’d bring her to the getaway car and they would tear out of town, him, her and the driver, diamonds falling in her lap, biting into her thighs with their sweet toothy ridges. She looks at her watch. One more hour of candy-flogging.

The problem with voyeurs is they think it’s all about them and their greedy little eyes. They never stop to think about the exhibitionist. Ask any old exhibitionist you like, and they’ll tell you: exhibitionism is
by
the exhibitor
for
the exhibitor. Fern sits on her couch, watching the six o’clock news, and bites into another cracker with cheddar as she carves out this new theory of demonstration and spectacle as though it were a letter to the editor.

A performance artist named Martin Flash is the second lead story tonight, the pink underside of his cape snapping in the wind as he calls out over the small crowd in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery: “In exactly one week, I will perform living art, here, at the bottom of these very steps which were once the steps of the Vancouver Courthouse, the steps to so-called justice, the steps on which we are left to scramble in despair like so many rats.” With a flourish of his long bony hands, he presents a fat black rodent encased in a clear container the size and shape of a five-pin bowling ball. Flash goes on to say that seven days from now at exactly 4 p.m., he will drive a steamroller over this rat between two art canvases. Fern titters at the screen but feels queasy. The crowd is beginning to heckle as Flash picks up his ball of rat, bows to the cameras and strides off. She pictures herself in that steamroller beside him, the crowd screaming as the two of them make history and the six o’clock news together.

The segment cuts to some reaction sound bites. Owen Almond from the Life Is All Right movement announces that Martin Flash is a sick individual and that, as long as he is chairman of LIAR, not a single hair on that rat’s head will be harmed. Almond goes on to say that the mandate of LIAR is to expose abortionists and murderers and these sorts of so-called artists for the liars that they are. Looking straight into camera, he says, “Freedom to kill is a lie.”

Fern reaches beside her for another cracker to go with the last slice of cheese, her eyes on the screen as a girl with pink dreadlocks and a pierced eyebrow shrugs into the reporter’s microphone and says, “He’s just some loser trying to get attention.”

“It’s not the rat, it’s the message!” Fern shouts at the pink-haired girl. She thinks for a moment. “A decent exhibition is the only thing that brings the obscure from darkness into light.”

She is sitting on a rock, has given up—the sand is liquid and soupy and can’t be walked on. She’s tried and her feet sink. She slipped in up to her knees the last time, like she was in quicksand, the type that swallows you up to your neck and then holds you there, lets you hover until some passerby reaches out with a stick and drags you to safety. At least that’s how it used to work on
Gilligan’s Island
, but perhaps in real life there would be no hovering.

Sand and rocks and ocean—she is stranded there and the only living things she sees are green pokes of grass sticking up
through the wet sand. Until he appears. Just like that, he comes toward her, but he’s not wearing his cape. He’s a regular guy in jeans and a T-shirt and he’s walking just fine. His nose is a real beak—it’s large and hooked and she wants to touch the bump and slope of it with the tip of her tongue. He walks across the soup to her without a care; he walks on quicksand like Jesus on water. He asks her if she would like a hand and she says yes, yes please. He bends and picks her up, cradles her in his arms. Each step he takes, each time a foot dips into the silt, it becomes a bird foot, clawed with short webbing, and each time he pulls one out, toes again, human. She looks into his eyes. “Where did you learn to do that?”

“I saw it in a movie,” he tells her. And she is in love.

At the supermarket the next day, Fern is giving out mini-paper-cups of non-alcoholic cider and she’s cold and frustrated. Too much bloody air conditioning, she thinks, who needs to be this cold? Her mind strays nervously to Martin Flash and how he appeared to her as a bird-man in her dream. She’s never dreamed about a person having bird-like qualities before. Never. Only herself with the whole egg-laying business.

Fern has always assumed she is a bit nuts with these egg dreams. She remembers the very first one, when she was a teenager. She’d always had the feeling she was waiting to perform some big, important task, that even though she didn’t know what it was, she was late—she was missing it. The sense of it niggled at her, constantly
there in the back of her mind while walking home from school, having a bath, doing sit-ups in the middle of P.E. class—she
had
to get going, now.
Hurry the hell up
was the general gist of the feeling. It drove her to distraction and confusion and then, wham, the first dream: birds. Dream birds were creating something monumental and they sent for Fern, because they desperately needed her help. She had to make a journey and on that journey she would learn her purpose; she would know what she was meant to do. She walked along, cutting through the backyards of strangers, giddy with anticipation.

Then—Grab. Shake. “What are you doing? Fern? What’s wrong?”

Oh for god’s sake, I’ve got to go, she’d wanted to say, but there she was in the kitchen all of a sudden, her mother touching her shoulder and demanding answers to foolish questions when anyone could see that Fern was almost
there
, it was just around the corner.

She tried to push past her mother, brush her off with “The thing—I gotta …
Thing
!”

Fern’s mother grabbed hold of her with both hands then, voice rising, “What’s wrong with you? Are you
on
something? Fern look at me! Are you on drugs?”

She never forgave her mother. How could she? But now this Martin Flash with his rat. Him turning into a bird the way he did, it had to be a sign. A premonition of some kind.

She filled the cups with raspberry and apple-lime cider, and thought of Flash standing before those screaming people, hating him, threatening him. She
saw his webbed feet again, carrying her away. She thinks of that Jesus poster, the one with the single set of footprints. Something was gelling in her mind but she couldn’t quite make it out yet. Maybe if she could just talk to Martin Flash, find the missing link, it could all make sense.

“Are these on sale?”

Fern squinted up. “Huh?”

“
Performance artist, Martin Flash, or The Flash as he’s known in some creative circles, announced three days ago that in one week’s time, that’s the tenth of July, he will act out what he calls the ultimate human experience when he drives a steamroller over a rat. Here to comment on this increasingly controversial stunt are animal rights activist Ryan Turner as well as …”