Authors: Jason McIntyre
Then, akin to a joke, he added,
Will you run away with me to Madagascar?
Her lips parted like melted wax and she laughed.
We can do day trips to Mozambique and Kenya. We can grow our hair into dreadlocks, open a tattoo parlor in Tana or Nosy Be, and live on the beach with the locals.
Her eyes glowed at his silliness and it
had
been an attempt at humor. But nevertheless, he wondered: where had such a question come from?
He didn’t rationalize what he had done the night at Lake of Bays, nor did he excuse it. It was one of a few things that would haunt him for a long time and he wished, as he did with so many other details, that he could turn around and face it again. Face it and make a different decision. Or make a decision at all, instead of just letting his hands ball up into fists and make the decision for him. How could someone so rational do something so horrible without even seeming to think about it? Consequences didn’t exist at that moment. Mankind possessed no morality for those few seconds. The entire world, in fact, had gone to a distant soil. And he had just swung outwards.
Some days he felt like he hadn’t stopped swinging until the moment he met green-eyed Caeli. And on others he came to the eventual realization that he was still swinging long after that.
<> <> <>
Pain was in every extremity. He was shuddering with it, teetering. He tried to lay still under his hospital sheets, but there were spasms in every corner. The orange curtains were a blaring beacon, throbbing with their own light, generated from somewhere within.
The words of Malin Holmsund struck again, out of the dark. They came back at him. And he heard them like a crackling recording played beneath the sheath of his skull.
“
God. Do you believe in Him?
”
“
Should I?
”
“
Have you ever been in love?
”
“
Are the two related?
”
<> <> <>
Caeli studied languages. French, German, Spanish, Italian, even Latin. But her first love was English. English poetry, and the vivaciousness that could be discerned from its lines on the page.
She had a distrust of boys, and particularly of boys who did not read much and who wrote poorly. She always told herself that for her to fall madly in love with anyone he would have to understand Keats and read some of it to her before bed.
Her parents died of asphyxiation when Caeli was eleven. They both worked nine-hour days then shared a night job cleaning offices to keep the bills from piling up. It was at the night job, at offices overtop one end of a food processing plant in Scarborough, that they passed out. A CO2 chamber had ruptured, spilling the gas, a silent, odorless, colorless, entirely senseless predator into the stairwell and through the ventilation.
Often, in her early teens, Caeli would wake from a bad dream, one in which she was her own mother. Feeling exhausted and drained, yet strangely happy, she would look over at her husband across a vinyl-covered office chair to smile at him. But he would already have fallen down and then the air in her lungs would fade as well. The world would turn blue at the corners and she would turn away from him then, in a blur, crawling,
clawing
, across gray industrial carpet, reaching for the window latch above the desk, beside a rolodex of phone numbers. But her hand would sag, and only leave a swiped smear of grease across the glass as it fell away. Caeli always burst awake from her dream. It always filled her with tears.
She was sent to live with her only relative, her father’s brother, a welder who was also the on-site manager of a small row of duplexes. From the age of twelve to fifteen, she put up with his smelly hands, whiskers and dirty fingernails. They crawled up and down her body, starting one night after her birthday party, and things got considerably worse over time.
Finally, at fifteen, a slight girl with pale skin, large green eyes and brown hair, she ran away from that awful set of twin houses and unkempt lawns, and found refuge in the Catholic Church.
Until the age of eighteen she lived in a public youth home, a care house for the underage, where she studied a great deal and earned a partial scholarship for university. She worked when she didn’t have a school book open. And when she didn’t have a school book open, she had open a volume of Keats, or Cummings, or William Blake—her favorite of his was
Songs of Innocence
.
She was twenty-one when Sebastion found her.
<> <> <>
She lived not too far from the university and not too close to the pub where she worked, a small, dirty place,
Pilate’s Purple Pill
—where middle-aged, blue collar men avoided their wives and tried to squeeze her rump as she turned towards the bar. If they managed to, though, she let them; found it was better at the end of the night when she counted up tips. She had been fired from a handful of jobs for slapping those pawing, filthy fingernailed hands. But she needed this work, and so she let it go, convincing herself it was innocent enough.
It was only a hand
, she told herself,
not anything viler
.
It could be worse, had been, but it’s not. Not anymore.
She lived alone in a small, attic apartment, one tiny bedroom, small kitchen with a two-burner stove and a squat fridge that sat under a slanted roof. The house was eighty years on, perhaps older, divided into small suites after World War II, when housing was in short supply. Mrs. Morgan bought it some time after, 1960 perhaps, and had the main floor reverted to one home. But she kept one basement suite, and the attic’s separate entrance—a long and narrow flight of metal stairs ran to it up the back wall of the house, making the kitchen doorway and window sit in a covered hollow. Aside from a small pension, the rent money from these two apartments was her only income.
Until her sixties, Mrs. Morgan tended the back garden with care and diligence. When Mr. Morgan died and her hands got bad, the garden grew less and less important. Now it was a giant, weed infested, tangled overgrowth of green and mottled brown. But ever-present specks of red, yellow, orange, blue, pink and mauve returned each year, a thriving slew of color—growing without human care, even surpassing what it might have done had there been a set of fleshy hands to bind things, stake things, and feed things.
Even as the tangles and thorns from the garden pushed out against the fence, and got closer, it seemed, to the back windows of the old house, there was still a pristine patch of velvet grass in the middle of it all that found a hollow of sunshine from overhead. Old Morgan had a boy from the neighborhood come by in the summer with his father’s lawnmower and clip the lawn nice and neat every few days. It was a soft green cloak across the ground and a rounded shaft of gold light fell across it at its center. On summer afternoons, lost in the day together after early classes, Sebastion and Caeli would lie together on a blue and white blanket under the azure firmament, tangles all around them. Above them: only sky, and a few dark veins of tree branch tracing the edges of a view towards heaven.
<> <> <>
Once, during the summer months, when evenings were still warm enough for shorts and sleeveless shirts, the two of them laid in the garden until long after dark, when clouds finally obscured the vision of a crescent moon. Mrs. Morgan forbade Caeli to bring young men upstairs, though, Sebastion supposed, the old woman would have been powerless to stop them—she couldn’t even climb that metal staircase at the back of the house anymore. The light from the partial moon had disappeared but there was always a kitchen light on in the main floor shining out on them. Sebastion imagined the eyes of Mrs. Morgan somewhere inside watching every move, every leg that fell across every other. In his mind, he saw the woman quivering with anger, shaking a little as she brought a tea cup to her lips. It made him smile in his mind.
Mrs. Morgan, Caeli had told him months before, had posted a notice on their Church’s bulletin board, advertising the upstairs apartment. Among other requirements, the white sheet tacked to the board cited that only “...
a God-fearing white girl with her head in her studies...”
need apply. And that, in a sense, summed up Caeli though perhaps only to the outside world. Inside her lived an ironic appreciation for wild abandon. There was a sensibility that might allow her to actually run away to the beaches of Madagascar with Sebastion. That is, if he ever asked with the appropriate note of seriousness in his voice. Sebastion knew that his Caels had many more facets than just those of a bible-choked school girl.
Morgan was a constant reminder to Caeli that her rent was at a drastic cut-rate, that an equivalent home in her neighborhood with anyone else would be much more expensive. Caeli was lucky, in other words, for such an opportunity and she should not do anything under that roof of which Mrs. Morgan, and more importantly, God, would disapprove.
Sebastion was on his back with a chewed blade of green grass in his mouth. He had been staring at the edge of cloud running jaggedly across a gray and tan spot on the moon, when he suddenly rolled on his side to face Caeli, who, cross-legged beside him, looked up from a worn blue- and black-covered book. Keats, he knew it well, in fact had memorized all the ear-marked pages of her copy. It was dark there in the garden, but that light from the kitchen illuminated their faces and the pages of the book enough to read them both. He asked her if, on a hot summer night, she would offer her throat to the wolf with the red roses. His eyes widened in mock spookiness. Then he smiled. She did too.
Is that from a poem?
She asked.
Sort of. From a song. Jim Steinman.
I don’t know that one.
She paused, looked down at her open book, clearly in thought. Then she looked back at him, her eyes smiling.
And what is modern love?
she asked. With barely even a pause, he responded,
It’s a doll, a dressed up doll.
If Caeli was the type to gush, or to become giddy, like some girls at that age still would have, she might have done so right then. She didn’t. Because she wasn’t. Her smiles were cool and collected, but discreetly mischievous nonetheless. She did, however, let out a little squeal—it had started to rain and several cold drops on the back of her bare neck and shoulders had startled her. So, those candied clouds, dark and fluffy, had glided across the moon for a reason. The rain started coming down fast, in giant, cool drops, spattering their faces and the covers of books. The two would get soaked in another half minute, and so in a flurry, they gathered up their things—remnants of a picnic, the blue blanket, and those books—and fled up the metal stairs to Caeli’s attic apartment in an effort to outrun the rain. As his foot squeaked on the tell-tale middle step, Sebastion couldn’t help thinking that Mrs. Morgan would be livid downstairs. He smiled.
<> <> <>
Caeli and Sebastion talked about so many things—that was the basis of their relationship. That and laughing until they each were crying, streams of tears running down their squinting faces. Their lungs would ache, their abdomens would strain and their throats would be raw. But the silliness always started serious. Talking was at the root of everything. Talking was the path on which they wandered to all the big topics. Even still, they only talked about her religion—which was so important to her—on a handful of occasions.
Once was in the evening leading up to the first time they made love. And, surprising to Caeli, it was Sebastion who brought it up. He wanted to understand where she stood on the subject since most devout Catholics he had known—particularly the girls—were adamantly against sex before marriage. At least, he mused to himself once, that’s what they told
him
.
Caeli told him that there was an all-encompassing foundation to her church, something on which her entire faith was built. And by that word,
church
, he knew she meant her religious beliefs en masse. It was a sweeping word, yet subtle, one she often used, as though that other word,
religion
, had a taint of the ages on it. He assumed she avoided its use for his sake, that maybe, out of the two of them, the taint was only in his mind. That all-encompassing foundation, she said, was this: the church is a gift, a
chosen
gift, a
given
gift, but not an imposed limitation. It was not forced by anyone. Not even by God.
Right now I’m with you Sebastion. We love each other and, like my gift of the church, I’ll take the gift of you in every way I can. We find what we need. And I found you.
<> <> <>
And so they made love under a red sunset, began there, and carried on through for hours in a series of embraces that lasted into the dark of the night. The angle of a hip fit precisely with his own. The roundness of a shoulder felt like a clean drop of water. The velvet of an eye looking directly into his was the warmth atop a sun-crested hill. A wind kicked up, spitting leaves and loose dirt across the road, against the walls, and onto the windows. It caused branches to scrape the shingles of the slanted roof above their heads in a natural rhythm. And, at one point, as Caeli straddled atop Sebastion, rhythm of bodies matching rhythm of nature, the porch light across the street—the one that never went out—flashed like a strobe in the shaking, swaying shrubs that filtered it. The light fell on Caeli as she moved, on her hair and on her body, made her glow from behind in pulses, as though there was light bleeding from her every curve. She looked angelic above him with her hands on his chest and that light on her shoulders and the edge of her face. The purple orbs of liquid, highlighted by flares and pinpoints of silver, washed through his sight like never before. But Caeli melded with them to create one flowing image in front of his eyes. She never disappeared from his sight. Not once.