The Blondes (27 page)

“You want me to go deeper?”

“That’s it, Hayes,” he said, placing his hands on his knees, blinking behind his glasses. “See if you can. See if you can go deeper.”

The next week I ran into him in the hallway. Meaning, we literally collided. As if he’d planned it. I was coming out of the department office with some papers from the students I was TAing, and he was turning the corner sharp and fast to go in there. I put my brakes on, and he grabbed me by my elbows, and then we were chest to chest—except that he was taller, so we were technically chest to gut.

“Oopsy!” he said, which was comical, except for the way he looked down at me. Behind his rectangular spectacles, his eyes were bright, desperate. “Could you …?” he asked. “Just a moment while I get this in?” He ducked into the department office.

I stood there, shifting from foot to foot. But when he came back, I wasn’t ready for what he said to me. He walked me to the end of the corridor, and when we turned the corner we were alone, just for a minute in the middle of the day. He seized my hand and looked at me, then, fearing someone would come by, dropped it. Just that little beat of skin. We didn’t go into his office. “I have some extra time next week.” His tone was placid but his eyes were bright. “My wife, Grace, is going for three days on a press circuit in New York for a television show she’s been working on. Yes … it will just be marvellous for her, such an opportunity,” he said, his voice suddenly rising animatedly as a pair of students rounded the corner and passed us. He said he was thinking of going up north for a few
days. A little escape. “Who can think in the middle of the city?”

The students turned the corner to another wing, and a door opened and closed in the corridor we’d just left.

“It’s—it’s nice that you have that escape,” I stuttered. I wasn’t sure why he had waylaid me for this.

“You could have it too, couldn’t you?” he said, glancing down. I remember I watched his lips saying the words. “You just need a place to go to.”

Maybe Moira was bang-on in her assessment of me. I didn’t protest. I didn’t walk away. I could have.

He stepped back and pushed his hand up through his hair. He rubbed at his chin. “How’s that thesis coming along?” he asked as another professor, Dr. Webber, edged between us and continued on.

There was something really dirty about crossing all the lines. I’d been alone most of my life; you would think I wouldn’t need to have a secret. When you’re alone, your whole life is a secret, isn’t it? In any case, that was how we wound up pretending to be lovers, in love, driving north in December with a shopping bag full of expensive cheeses and a plastic tub of sundried tomatoes, and brown-paper-wrapped sausages, and bottles of wine with trendy labels.

My memory of it was that after that day in the hallway I had tried to forget what he’d said to me. Then I was standing in my shower at home and I closed my eyes and saw his mouth again, moving around the words, and the next thing I knew I was remembering kissing him the previous fall. I wanted to be wanted, even in a cheap way.

Then just like that, it seemed, we were on the highway. Half a year before you were conceived. The sun was slanting down and little flurries of snow caught the light. It was before the holidays and Karl had finished his marking. For someone so inept he could be awfully organized when it came to deception. With the exception of the hand-squeeze in the hall, there hadn’t been a single touch between us since that night in his office, when I lay across his lap and he stroked up under my skirt. To suddenly be riding in his passenger seat made me feel light-headed. My stomach felt like a fire pit, scorched and empty, as if something had already burned there and might again.

We were passing a Levi’s outlet mall about an hour beyond the city when Karl looked over and said, “Hayes, it’s good to see you here in my car,” as if I had been instantly beamed there like a character on
Star Trek
. Hayes—he was still calling me by my last name! “It’s good to know there’s more and more to you.”

I don’t know that there
was
more and more to me. I feel that in the past year there’s been less and less of me. I’ve been reduced to leaving behind everything I know, fleeing to New York, the purpose of my study about as legitimate as Wanda Kovacs saying she was going to do research in India at the height of the epidemic.

I want to be a better person. I want to think I will provide a better example for you than anything in my past might suggest. Maybe that’s why I’m sitting here, sorting it all out aloud. So I won’t have to tell you when you get here, my little amoeba. So I won’t have to tell you any of it.

The border guards informed me that the Canadian government had declared a state of national crisis, and quarantine for at-risk travellers was eight weeks. When I asked them if I would have access to health care, they told me to get on the bus, please. When I told them I didn’t need to enter Canada and could I please remain in the United States on my student visa, they told me I was being taken to a quarantine building outside of Hamilton, Ontario, where clean bedding and meals would be provided for me at the expense of the government, and did I understand,
ma’am
? I said I would like my cellphone and my computer and my belongings, please. I said that they couldn’t impound my rental car, that it had to go back to the rental chain or I’d have legal troubles to the tune of $30,000 or whatever the price of the vehicle was, and that this was the last thing I needed right now on top of my student loans, on top of being stuck in limbo, on top of—They said, calm down, Miss Hayes, we’re going to ask you to just calm down.

They put me in a room with nothing in it but a couple benches that were affixed to the floor. Eventually there was a group of us, all glaring at one another. The guards loaded us onto a bus, and off we went.
Fuck
, I thought,
Hamilton!
I leaned my head against the window and tried to remember Moira’s music. She’d played me some of it the previous day, her iPod plugged into the car stereo. I had one or two little licks caught in my brain and I played them to myself as if on repeat, the chime of her mallets a soundtrack, as I watched
Ontario-green flash past. It was futile to be home. I could hum the music for you. It goes
hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm, da da da. Hmm-hmm, hmm-hmm, da da da
. And that’s all that’s left of Moira.

The quarantine area was actually a brand-new grade school, one level with a flat roof, save for the gym. It was only a stone’s throw from the main road and tucked behind it was a subdivision that no one had moved into yet. Hamilton has quickly become a satellite city to Toronto, but I guess it had started developing too fast, and this part was still deserted—unsold. The homes looked alike, tall and thin as supermodels, in various shades of sand and slate, with garages that shot out in front on the right sides. The driveways hadn’t been poured. They all had gravel with wood beams set in the sod, curving up to the houses, like mouths that were missing teeth. At night, I would gaze across the field and see two or three houses with their lights on, a good distance off, through the twisted cul-de-sacs, and the rest black peaks against the night sky. But when the guards first unloaded us, I had no idea why they’d chosen the place.

The bus pulled through a chain-link fence and let us off in the parking lot. There was already a truck there, and workers were unloading army cots, which they carried through the double doors of the gym.

“Isn’t this cute?” an older woman in a blue blouse with a yellow rope design on it said when we were marched into the school and assigned to our classroom: room 8. The cots had been set up around the walls and the core of the space
contained an informal area with a rug and chairs in a size better suited to teddy bears than adults. Outside room 8, desks were stacked along one hallway, right side up and upside down, clean and gleaming, unused, ungraffitied, fitting together like dentures. The classroom whiteboards still had plastic over them. There weren’t any textbooks. I walked over to the shelves that ought to contain them, and took my jacket off and threw it on a bed, using the only possession I had to claim a space for myself beneath a window. We were told—for our own protection, and to prevent the spread of SHV—we weren’t to leave room 8, and there were men positioned in the hallway who would stop us if we tried. Bathroom breaks would be assigned and we would go in groups.

Periodically throughout that day, more buses brought more women. We were all women, of course, and I noticed that all the soldiers were men. It made sense, really. They weren’t at risk of active SHV. Room 8 seemed intent on sticking together. We’d glared at each other at Customs and on the bus, but now that there were others arriving, people began talking, pairing up, making friends, and staking out space for themselves. We had status as the original load in this particular quarantine. A small group shuttled off to the bathrooms under stern supervision from two uniforms. The women came back tittering and moaning at the size of the toilets, the dividers that didn’t reach their eyes. In a fog, on the second bathroom run I walked with the other inmates, which was how I thought of the lot of us. I noticed we passed a library with a spine of unfilled shelves down its centre. The fluorescent tubes for the lighting
hadn’t been put in yet. There were just some plug-in construction lamps lying around. Then we were in the ladies’ room, and the men were hollering, “Hurry up, let’s go, let’s go!”

There was another redhead in room 6. Unlike me, she’d left hers gleaming, a bright Popsicle orange. The rest of the women were blondes or grey-hairs. Apparently, the elderly were more susceptible to SHV. All of us were white, except for one woman who had high cheekbones and an eye shape that indicated she might be First Nations, or partly so. Her hair had been dyed pitch black, but there were natural gold roots along her part. It didn’t matter—by the end of that first evening, all our hair was gone.

By late afternoon, the guards had turned the library into an impromptu lab. Under the new institutional glow of fluorescents, a weedy-looking private with a scarred lip greeted each of us silently with an extended hand. He shaved our heads and bagged the hair samples, marked them, and filed them. His latex fingers jerked my head around, and the clippers bit and pinched, but I didn’t cry like some of the others did.

“This is a jug fuck,” the private said grimly over his shoulder to the soldier who’d brought me in. “This whole place. Wait and see.”

“What? You don’t like the split arse?” the other soldier shot back, grinning.

“It’s not that … But that SHV is going to tear through here faster than a shack hack.”

Two female soldiers in spacesuits were brought in to
supervise while we shaved our own pubic hair. They were the only women we’d see, besides one another, the entire time we were there.

That night, the women in room 8 gathered in the miniature circle of chairs, some sitting on the piece of carpet, some at the ends of their beds. It was harder to remember their names and keep straight who was who after the shaving. We all looked like clones, just fatter or thinner, with longer noses or bigger teeth. Needless to say, I didn’t attend this impromptu meeting, although I could certainly hear it from my bed. We’d been labelled high-risk, and I had to assume that many of them were higher risk than I was.

Back at the border, when I told Customs I’d been pronounced clean after the JFK incident, they told me they would look for my paper trail from my time at the clinic with the other pregnant ladies. “In Jamaica, Queens,” I told them, “outside the airport.” I hoped they’d clear me soon, and I didn’t want my chance to get out mucked up by hanging too closely with this lot. In the end, of course, my request would be lost, like everything else. But during the initial week, I still had hope.

The first order of business was the food. As at the airport, we’d been brought fast food and this was not sitting well with the older women, some of whom had dietary restrictions. It seemed like almost everyone was older than me—Karl’s age, but further away, sociologically speaking. These women were thinking ahead and they knew they didn’t want to eat
hamburgers for the entire eight weeks we were to be there.

“Haven’t you seen
Fast Food Nation
, dear?” the ropey-bloused woman—whose head shape, it turned out, was poolball round—said to a mawkish teenage girl who had been picking her hangnails and seemed to be alone. Later I’d find out she’d been travelling between divorced parents. She was ten years younger than me, but I felt closer to her than any of the others.

The second order of business was bathing, a difficult proposition when all we had were birdbath-sized sinks. And the third issue was that of contacting family members.

A great number of suggestions were raised at the third point, but none of us knew what to expect during our incarceration and we wound up saying, “Let’s make a note to ask about that.”

We had a lot of security and two health-care workers on hand. One woman kept going into the hall to try to talk to the men stationed there. They were gruff and treated each of us as if we were akin to the disease itself. The inquisitive woman was about thirty-five, and had arrived at the detention centre with a crew cut. When she came back, she said she’d got some answers because the major liked her. We’d heard his answers through the door and they’d sounded like grunts for her to get back into her room—but in her defence, she did relay some useful information.