The Worm in Every Heart (27 page)

So I read too much, and saw too many movies, and played too many video-games, and drank too much, and took too many pills, and made my poor Ma worried enough to burn way too much incense in front of way too many pictures of my various Hark ancestors. Anything to distract myself. I took my Baba's feng shui advice, and moved my bedroom furniture around religiously, hoping to deflect the cold current of my neuroses onto somebody else for a while. Why not? He was a professional, after all.

And I was just a frightened child, a frightened prepubescent, a frightened adolescent—a spoiled, stupid, frightened young man with all the rich and varied life experience of a preserved duck egg, nodding and smiling moronically at the next in an endless line of prospective brides trotted out by our trusty family matchmaker, too weak to even hint around what really got my dick hard.

On the screen above me, bald, dark-goggled punks took turns drilling each other through the stomach, as yet another hapless salaryman turned into a pissed-off pile of ambulatory metal shavings. Japanese industrial blared, while blood hit the lens in buckets. I could hear the audience buckling under every new blow, riding alternate waves of excitement and revulsion.

And I just sat there, unconcerned; crunching my almonds, watching the carnage. Suddenly realizing I hadn't felt that afraid for a long, long time—or afraid at all, in fact.

Of anything.

* * *

Then somebody came in late; I moved my coat, so he could sit down next to me. A mere peripheral blur of a guy—apparently young, vaguely Asian. Hair to below his shoulders, temples shaved like a samurai's, and the whole mass tied back with one long, thin, braided sidelock—much the way I used to wear it, before Andre down at the Living Hell convinced me to get my current buzz-cut.

I never took my eyes off the action. But I could feel the heat of him all the way through the leg of my good black jeans, cock rearing flush against the seam of my crotch with each successive heartbeat.

The screen was abloom with explosions. A melting, roiling pot of white-hot metal appeared, coalescing, all revved up and ready to pour.

Some pheromonal envelope of musk, slicking his skin, began expanding. Began to slick mine.

More explosions followed.

I felt the uniquely identifiable stir of his breath—in, out; out, in—against my cheek, and actually caught myself shivering.

Above us, two metal men spun and ran like liquid sun, locked tight together. The credits were beginning to roll. I thought: Snap out of it, Jude.

Run the checklist. Turn around, smile. Ask him his name, if he's got a place.

Tell him you want to taste his sweat, and feel his chest on your back ‘til the cows come home.

Then the lights came back up, much more quickly than I'd been expecting them to—I blinked, shocked temporarily blind. Brushed away tears, as my eyes strained to readjust.

And found I'd been cruising an empty seat.

* * *

The next day, I picked Carra up at the Clarke, signed her out and took her for lunch at the College/Yonge Fran's, as promised. She looked frail, so drained the only color in her face came from her freckles. I bought her coffee, and watched her drink it.

“Met this guy at
Tetsuo III
,” I said. “Well . . . met is probably too strong a way to put it.”

She looked at me over the rim of her glasses, raising one white-blonde smudge of brow. Her eyes were grey today, with that moonstone opacity which meant she was not only drugged, but also consciously trying not to read my mind—so whatever they had her on couldn't really be working all that well.

“I thought you were taken,” she said.

I snorted. “Ed? He says I broke his heart.”

“I don't doubt it.”

I shrugged. I could never quite picture anyone's soft little musclebox as brittle enough to break, myself; it's an image that smacks of drama, and Ed (though sweet) is not exactly the world's most dramatic guy. But be that as it may.

“Dumb gweilo told me I had something missing,” I told her, laughing. “You fucking believe that?”

Now it was her turn to shrug.

“Well, you do, Jude,” she replied, reasonably enough. Adding, as she took another sip: “I personally find it quite . . . restful.”

* * *

Carra Devize, my one and only incursion into enemy territory—lured by the web that haloes her, the shining, clinging psychic filaments of her Gift. The quenchless hum of her innate glory. Most people want to find someone who'll touch their hearts, enter them at some intimate point and lodge there, mainlining instinct back and forth, in a haze of utter sympathy. And Carra, of course—congenitally incapable of any other kind of real human contact—just wants to be alone; enforced proximity, emotional or otherwise, only serves to make her nauseous. So she bears my enduring, inappropriate love for her like some unhealed internal injury, with painful patience. Which is why I try not trouble her with it, any more often than I have to.

That calamitous December of 1989, when I knew the Hark family money tree had finally dried up for good—after I came out, a half-semester into my first year at RTA, and the relatives I was staying with informed my ultra-trad Baba that he had a rebellious faggot son to disinherit—I moved in with Carra for some melted mass of time or so, into the rotting Annex town-house she then shared with her mother Geillis, known as Gala: Gala Carraclough Devize, after whose family Carra was named. We'd sit around the kitchen in our bare feet, the TV our only light, casting each other's horoscopes and drinking peach liqueur until we passed out, as Gala moved restlessly around upstairs, knocking on the floor with her cane whenever she wanted Carra to come up. I never saw her face, never heard her voice; I guess it was sort of like being Carra, for a while. In that I was living with at least one ghost.

And this went on until one particular night, she turned to me and said, abruptly: “So maybe I'm like that chick, that Tarot-reading chick from
Live And Let Die.
What do you think?”

“Jane Seymour.”

“Was it?” We both tried to remember, then gave up. “Well?”

“Have sex, and the powers go away?”

“It's the one thing I never tried.”

In a way, we were both virgins; I think it's also pretty safe to say we were probably both also thinking of somebody else. But when I finally came, I could feel her sifting me, riding my orgasm from the inside out, instead of having one of her own.

The next time I saw her, I'd been supporting myself for over a month. And she still had an I.V. jack stuck in the crook of her elbow, anchored with fresh hospital tape.

* * *

There were a couple of movies playing that Carra was interested in, so we ended up at the Carlton—but none of their 2:00-ish shows got out early enough for her to be able to keep her 6:00 curfew.

“So what happens if we stay out later?” I asked, idly.

Another shrug. “Nothing much. Except they might put me back on suicide watch.”

That pale grey day, and her grey gaze. The plastic I.D. bracelet riding up on one thin-skinned wrist, barely covering a shallow red thread of fresh scar tissue where she'd tried to scrub some phantom's love-note from her flesh with a not-so-safety razor. No reason not to wear long sleeves, cold as it was. But she just wouldn't. She wouldn't give her ghosts the satisfaction.

I looked away. Looked at anything else. Which she couldn't help but notice, of course.

Being psychic.

“This guy you met,” she said, studying the curb, as we stood waiting for the light to change. “He made an impression.”

“Could be,” I allowed. “Why? Something I should know about?”

She still didn't look up. Picking and choosing. When you see so much, all at once, it must be very confusing to have to concentrate on any one particular sliver of the probable—to decide whether it's here already, or already gone, or still yet to be. Her eyebrows crept together, tentative smears of light behind her lenses, as she played with her braid, raveling and unraveling its tail.

“ . . . something,” she repeated, finally.

We started across, only to be barely missed by a fellow traveller from the Pacific Rim in a honking great blue Buick, who apparently hadn't yet learned enough of North American driving customs to quite work the phrase “pedestrian always has the right of way” into his vocabulary. I caught Carra's arm and spun, screaming Cantonese imprecations at his tail-lights; he yelled something back, most of it lost beneath his faulty muffler's bray. My palms itched, fingers eager to knit a basic entropic sigil—to spell out the arcane words that would test whether or not his brakes worked as well as his mouth, when given just the right amount of push on a sudden skid.

I felt Carra's hand touch mine, gently.

“Leave it,” she said. “It'll come when it comes, for him. And believe me—it's coming.”

“Dogfucker thinks he's still in Kowloon,” I muttered. Which actually made her laugh.

* * *

But we got back just a minute or two later than my watch claimed we would, and the nurse was already there—waiting for us, for her, behind a big, scratched wall of bulletproof glass.

Needle in hand.

* * *

After which I went straight home, through this neat and pretty city I now call my own—even though, having long since defaulted on my student visa, I am actually not supposed to be anywhere near it, let alone living in it. Straight home to (surprise!) Chinatown, just below Spadina and Dundas, off an unnamed little alleyway behind the now-defunct Kau Soong Clouds In Rain softcore porno theatre, whose empty storefront is usually occupied by either a clutch of little old local ladies selling baskets full of bok choi or a daily-changing roster of F.O.B. hustlers hocking anything from imitation Swiss watches to illegally-copied Anime videotapes.

Next door, facing Spadina, the flanking totem dragons of Empress' Noodle grinned their welcome. I slipped between them, into the fragrant domain of Grandmother Yau Yan-er, who claims to be the oldest Chinese vampire in Toronto.

“Jude-ah!” She called out from the back, as I came through the door. “Sit. Wait.” I heard the mah-jong tiles click and scatter under her hands. It was her legendary Wednesday night game, played with a triad of less long-lived hsi-hsue-kuei for a captive audience of cowed and attentive ghosts, involving much stylish cheating and billions of stolen yuan—garnished, on occasion, with a discreet selection of aspiring human retainers willing to bet their blood, their memories or their sworn service on a chance at eternal life.

Grandmother Yau's operation has been open since 1904, in one form or another. She's an old-school kind of monster: Lotus feet, nine inch nails, the whole silk bolt. One of her ghosts brought me tea, which I nursed until she called her bet, won the hand with a Red Dragon kept up her sleeve, and glided over.

“Big sister,” I said, dipping my head.

“Jude-ah, you're insulting,” she scolded, in Mandarin-accented Cantonese. “Why don't you come see me? It's obvious, bad liars and tale-tellers have got you in their grip. They have slandered my reputation and made even fearless men like you afraid of me.”

“Not so. You know I'd gladly pay a thousand taels of jade just to kiss you, if I thought I'd get my tongue back afterwards.”

“Oh, I'm too old for you,” she replied, blithely. “But you'll see—I have the best mei-po in Toronto, a hardworking ghost contracted to me for ninety-nine hundred years. Good deal, ah? Smarter than those British foreign devils were with Hong Kong. We will talk together, she and I, and get you fixed up before I get bored enough to finally let myself die, with a good Chinese marriage to a good Chinese . . . ”

She let her voice trail away, carefully, before she might have to assign an actual gender-specific pronoun to this mythical “good Chinese”—person.

“I don't think I could afford your mei-po's fees,” I pointed out, tucking into my freshly-arrived plate of Sticky Rice With Shrimp And Seasonal Green. To which she just smiled, thinly—patted my wrist with one clawed hand—and went back to her game, leaving me to the rest of my meal.

A fresh ghost brought me tea more, bowing. I bowed back, and sipped it, thinking about Toronto.

Hong Kong was everything my Ryerson fuck-buddies ever thought it would be—loud, bright, fast, unforgiving. When I was five years old, my au pair took me out without calling the bodyguards first; a quarter-hour later, I buried my face in her skirt as some low-level Triad thug beat a man to pulp right in front of us, armed only with a big, spiky, stinky fruit called a dhurrian. Believe me, the experience left an impression.

In Toronto, the streets are level, the use of firearms strictly controlled, and swearing aloud is enough to draw stares. Abusive maniacs camp out on every corner, and passersby step right over them—quickly, quietly, without rancor or interest. It's a place so clean that U.S. movie crews have to import or manufacture enough garbage to make it pass for New York; it's also North America's largest centre for consensual S & M activity. But if you stop any person on the street, they'll tell you they think living here is nothing special—nice, though a little boring.

The truth is, Toronto is a crossroads where the dead congregate. The city goes about its seasonal business, bland and blind, politely ignoring the hungry skins of dead people stalking up and down its frozen main arteries: Vampires, ghouls, revenants, ghosts, wraiths, zombies, even a select few mage's golems cobbled haphazardly together from whatever inanimate objects came to hand. There's enough excess appetite here to power a world-eating competition. And you don't have to be a magician or a medium to recognize it, either.

“Dead want more time,” Carra told me, long after yet another drunken midnight, back in her mother's house—both of us too sloshed to even remember what a definite article
was
, let alone try using it correctly. “'S what they always say. Time, recognition, remembrance . . . ”