Stunt (20 page)

‘Did you hear that?' you asked.

‘No.'

‘A bell is ringing.' And then you looked at me with a love in your eyes, but the love could have belonged to anyone.

I open the door to Room
12
. Propped on its kickstand is your bicycle. The black frame, broken toe clips, rearview mirror duct-taped to the yellow handlebars, the wooden Canadian Butter box bungee-corded onto the rear rack. You are not here. But your bicycle is. I run my hands over it. The grease of the chain. You have not been on it for days – nothing of you lingers, nothing.

The walls are covered with framed needlepoints. So clustered together, I can barely make out the bold floral wallpaper behind them. You came home with a suitcase full of these once after a three-week stay in the hospital. You were wearing socks with the hospital name and address printed on them. I remember the stink in the corridors: hot food and industrial cleaner, and that you wanted to host picnics on the weekends because there were more suicides on the weekends, and if people were together on a blanket, sharing sandwiches, they might forget to kill themselves. Your needlepoints were all portraits of other patients, their pupils bumpy to the touch. The doctors told you, ‘Even here you try to be the best.'

A silk nightgown is laid out on the bed. A toothbrush, toothpaste and ivory comb are on the bathroom counter. The bath is drawn. I skim my hand through the water. Still hot. Lavender oil. In the bar fridge, there is a block of cheese wrapped in wax paper, a jar of olives and a corked bottle of white wine. One linen napkin. French bread on the desk with a knife, grainy mustard and maple cutting board. Samuel told me that scissors make the divots in French bread; he was a cook for bush camps near Nanaimo and baked twenty loaves at a time. He ordered flour in fifty-pound bags. He stored vegetables underground in a dugout called a cache,
and mashed hundreds of potatoes with bags over his feet because to do them by hand would have taken too long. The firefighters were hungry. Once, he had to give all of his French bread to a black bear mad with starvation. The berries were late and so the bear stalked the camp. Samuel could not believe how much the bear liked his bread. And that it did not kill him.

Otherwise the room is made up of the standard fixtures: a double bed, a suitcase stand, a rack with hangers, a Gideon Bible in a bedside table. The suite part of the room consists of a couch in an alcove. I check the drawers, between the mattresses, under the pillows, but there is no note, and there is no second map.

Samuel tucked the same book under his pillow every night, the idea being that the contents would drift up and lodge in his mind. There was a prophet who learned everything this way. The Sleeping Prophet. And Samuel thought: try.
Teaching a Stone to Talk.
Annie Dillard. He had to keep elastics around it or he would lose all of its pages. Sections were starred and underlined, some drawings beside them; this made me think he had spent time in prison, and there, in his cell, he had only this book.

Reading it, he said, we had to wear
3-D
glasses. We put them on – one red square, one blue over our eyes. My head in his lap, the smell of two bodies rooted together in the air, he read his favourite part to me early one morning when there was no food left in the
Station
but a small envelope of saffron picked by Mennonites. We filled our mouths with the expensive flower. ‘Could two live under the wild rose, and explore by the pond, so that the smooth mind of each is as everywhere present to the other, and as received and as unchallenged as falling snow?'

‘We could put raven feathers behind our ears and call ourselves the chief of something.'

‘Ravens.'

‘We could untie the anchor lines.'

‘Float out past the Sunfish Cut, Snake Island, and into the open water.'

‘We could look for the steering wheel.'

‘We could take the dogs.'

‘We could find another island and you could teach me every language you know.'

‘Only the dirty words.'

‘How do you say
Where is the bordello?
in Finnish?'

‘We could invent our own language.'

‘Only the dirty words. We could live however we want, Samuel.'

I walk the length of his spine. His skin is bronze next to mine.

‘What did you shoot with your arrow?'

‘A fox. He was sick. He was going to die too slowly. The hastening of a natural law. Some things cannot last here, Eugenia. It is just too crushing.'

And then, carefully keeping the pages in order, Samuel backtracks. ‘I could very calmly go wild.'

‘More.'

‘I could very calmly go wild.'

In the bath, my blood slows to a sap. I look down at the marks on my skin from my hours with Samuel. They pulse. I hope that he is doing the same. When I watched him gut the fish on a
boulder, in the rain, huddled under my suit jacket, making a seam with his thumb, the perch still breathing through its gills, even though its heart jumped in Samuel's palm, I saw that the same life could take place in two locations, and that perhaps this is what love is: the heart of a fish in a palm keeping time with the throbbing body beside it.

I did not tell him where I was going or when I would be back. He will not ask questions until many hours later. He is patient that way. He does not implicate himself in the course of other people's lives. Samuel uses the pay phone by the ferry dock to call his parents on his birthday and theirs. Otherwise, it is impossible to contact him aside from knocking on his door. He does not, living on the water, have an address. He has not had one for a long time. He prefers to land on other people's doorsteps with offerings from his travels: a child's string instrument from Moscow, the best green tea from Yamanashi and, once, a nurse's uniform from a junk shop in Paris. He is good at finding things.

Our last night together, before Samuel finally fell asleep, he showed me a photograph he had taken of a tree beside a Buddhist temple in Kamakura. From it hung prayers, handwritten on slender squares of wood. This is how I feel, crawling into a motel bed in a stranger's nightgown beside a ghost circus, at the other end of this day. Like a tree choked with wishes. I wonder whatever happened to the ordinary moments in the world. To pouring water into a glass, to your feet hitting the floor when you wake up, to the sound of a key in the front door. To thinking that the person across from you will be there the next day and the day after, that your closeness is not an invention but a truth, an unconquerable truth.

Morning creeps in, a grey spectre through the blinds, and I am trying to break the French bread in half. I am hungry. First, I notice the weight of the loaf, and then its refusal to be broken. It is a stubborn bone. I try to break it over the edge of the desk, against the busy walls, the bed frame. I pull at one end and then the other. Clumps of bread fall to the floor and I feel like I am tearing apart prey. I am all urges.
I could very calmly go wild.
I am the bear and when I die, they will find a small hard skull in my stomach.

There is something buried in the loaf's middle. They used to do this in wartime. ‘Wives would send their soldier husbands brandy buried in loaves of bread. Mercy is about small gestures,' Cupid told me when she finally woke up, her dog stretching open beside her. It had been three days. Portrait on your easel complete, you stepped away from it and she came to. You cried when she did. Your only magic trick. She chanted, ‘Thank you.'

I pull out a bottle and free the cork from it and see, inside, a scroll. I cannot, with my fingertips, pull it out. I run to the receptionist's office. She is still in her blue gown. Her eyes are ringed red. Upon request, she hands me a pair of tweezers – first looking through every drawer in her heavy desk, books teeter-tottering, and then disappearing behind her black curtain, ‘I know they're here some somewhere.' The cat that sits by the door has green feathers around his mouth. Last night, in the summer heat, he ate the bird.

The receptionist lets me hold her.

I pull the scroll free from the bottle.

38 Crescentwood Rd.
Scarborough, Ontario

Another map. Hand-drawn perfectly. No asterisks. From here, it is an hour's ride.

I step into my boots and wheel out of the motel room like a daredevil on a motorcycle through a tunnel of fire. My balance is impeccable. It is only halfway that I realize three things: I am still in the stranger's nightgown, flaring silver behind me. Your seat has been adjusted so that my legs can reach the pedals perfectly. And I have never actually pedalled a bicycle before.

I know the receptionist is waving even though I am long out of view. She will remember me as the girl who smelled like love-making. It had been some time.

I drop my bicycle and walk the nettled path to the front door. The sun through the willows bleaches the edges of everything. I knock. There is no response. I knock again. Still nothing. Did Finbar die in the night? Have I missed him? I try the handle. The door is unlocked. I push it open and step through. I take in a sharp breath, the long-anticipated moment suddenly real. Instead of the world I imagined, rooms crocheted with spiderwebs, plates stiffened with the remnants of meals, fish skeletons, corks, pits, ashtrays, dog hair, curtains pricked by moths, cluster-fly mounds on windowsills, a house that has not had a woman's touch for too long, it is immaculate. Keys are assembled and hanging from one hook. Shoes are lined up in the front hall. The oak floors are polished. The shoes are too. Persian carpets. Colour-field paintings. The house is a model of propriety. Even ascetic. If Death has been here, he has licked the place clean.

‘Hello.' My voice is meek. Barely audible. The chalk of dust in my throat. I catch myself in the hall mirror. I touch my hand to my cheek – a sudden febrility. ‘Hello,' I say again, needing to sit down, which I do on the sheen of the floor. Sun thumps in my head. I look back at my footsteps from the front door; they are the tracks of an animal, a stray. I take off my boots and place them on my lap. Spit onto my palm, and rub away at the footprint closest to me. I hear a creaking from the top of the stairwell. I pull myself along the floor to see what it is. There, leaning into the curved banister, standing in elegant repose, is not the man from the photographs – ancient and maimed as I had envisioned him – but a mummy, perfectly, seamlessly wrapped.

You vanished once before. From your adoptive mother, the nurse, Plump Marie Legros Ledoux. A big-pawed scrubber, firm tugs at collars and sleeves, she attended your birth with two other nurses whose faces were much more sour than hers. While you were finding your way into the mortal world, a slender cut at six pounds thirteen ounces, Marie's husband, the maternity-ward doctor, Sheb Ledoux, was picked off the road by black ice. He was not injured, but he was stuck in the ditch. He observed that his eyes were being iced over. He found a pack of matches in his pocket but they were wet and his hands would not work. He started singing a number he saw performed once by a big-breasted bottle-blond burlesquer. He felt impossibly hot. He stripped and was quickly turned white with falling snow.

You were precocious, the nurses all agreed. Most infants are pinched and whining, blind fighters, but you were not. You winked and flirted. Candlelight, soft-shoe, the nurses were thoroughly seduced. Especially Plump Marie who, the next morning, found herself both a widow and a mother.

When you were old enough, you cooked Plump Marie breakfast and left her this note, poor penmanship, always lowercase, on her kitchen table, its brown porcelain top and rust-speckled legs:

gone to save the world,
sorry mother,
sorry
yours
sheb wooly ledoux
asshole

Later that day, Plump Marie was found in her socked feet on her front stoop, staring down the lane, a cob of corn in her right hand, one meagre bite taken, her usual petal-pink lipstick left behind in a smear. French songs about flash-pan loves replayed until they formed bulbs exploding in her head. Veins of white shock collapsed her. In an accident of translation, her obituary listed the cause of death to be failure of the heart.

After you told me this, your stubbled face striped with tears, you left these words in my ear:
Abandonment is a contagion, Eugenia. Abandonment is a curse.

‘You have been unconscious for the better part of a week. So boring for me, my Fata Morgana, when I expected pyrotechnics, but still, welcome, welcome to Orphan Stadium.' Eyes shut, my lids are a pitch against the world. The smell of shaving cream and balsam wax.

‘Lucky for me and you – other wise I would have had another corpse on my conscience – I have some medical know-how.'

I open my eyes and there it is, that spoiled face, moustache sculpted so adroitly across it, his hair, now white, lion-thick and still long to the shoulders. He rubs my right hand, pressing my fingertips between his. He is beautifully assembled in a dark suit and silk tie. The tie is pink and bronze, a column of flowers. A dog pants at his feet like the other end of an obscene phone call. Finbar calls the dog Tulip. I run my left hand over Finbar's cheek. An unfinished encaustic. Before ironing. There is something familiar to it. Not from the photographs, which we studied so closely, but in another sense. It reminds me of the story Samuel told me about a poet lost and frightened in Cairo. Just when she
was about to cut her trip short, the Queen streetcar went by – Toronto's old streetcars had been shipped to Egypt. And instantly she was at home. This is how I feel looking at Finbar – he is the Queen car passing me in a strange land.

‘You fell in love, didn't you? Ah, the battle.'

I look out the window. Finbar's house is propped up on the Scarborough Bluffs. Toronto Island's raw materials. Made of white sand and clay, the bluffs are built like corrugated castles, the work of extravagant children. In certain early lights, they are copper. Their drops are sheer and if you have vertigo you will swear that, standing still at their edge, you are swaying.