Текст книги "If I Fall, If I Die"
Автор книги: Michael Christie
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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
14
September arrived the following week and demanded their begrudging return to school. The boys claimed the rearmost desks, where they whispered about the map they’d yet to decipher and the byzantine skateboard tricks they would someday master. Their new teacher, Mrs. Gustavson, wore a beach-worth of shell jewelry, smiled emptily, and spouted in a sugary voice lots of his mother’s words, like creativity, gifted, and self-esteem. Will trusted her about as far as his mother could go for a jog.
In the first week, when Will was picking up an exercise he’d narrowly passed from her desk, he said, “Thanks Mom,” instantly scorching himself with embarrassment.
At recess, Mrs. Gustavson asked him to stay behind. “I couldn’t help but notice what you said there,” she said.
“Yeah, sorry,” said Will. “Old habit.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. In fact, I’m quite flattered,” she said, pausing as if something was sinking in other than the death knell of boredom and the senseless squander of recess time.
“You know, Will,” she continued, “I must confess something to you. I’m a great admirer of your mother’s work. And your father’s, of course. But I saw The Sky in Here when I was in university, and it made an indelible impression on me,” she said, as though they were sharing some great secret.
“I’ve never seen it.”
“Really?” she said, shocked. “But you must be very close?”
“You could say that.”
“Well, she’s modest, I’m sure. But I know some people who will be very pleased to hear Diane Cardiel is safe and sound and back living in Thunder Bay. She must love having a bright, creative fellow like you around the house,” she said, smiling falsely, and Will bristled. Jonah had more creativity in his right leg than all the students at his school combined, and though she was brand new, Mrs. Gustavson already acted as if he wasn’t there.
“Is this over yet?” Will said, wounding her visibly, before racing outside to find Jonah.
Now that they were in the seventh grade, their classmates talked of group trips to the roller rink and declared doomed loves in bubble-lettered notes and three-party phone calls. None mentioned how last year’s grade eights had disappeared like planes into the clouds of high school, an ascendancy death-like in its impenetrability. Happily, the mysteries of what to wear and say and when to put your arm around a girl and how to properly manage a vagina were of zero relevance to Will and Jonah, who were content with the mystery of Marcus and how, exactly, one could possibly ollie over a fire hydrant.
To endure the flavorless hours, the boys reacquired the necessary talent of kill-switching their minds, slowing their pulses, holing up in private mental dens. They perfected a communication exclusive to their eyebrows, while lazily doodling skateboard graphics and complex ramp arrangements on their velcro-flapped binders. In class they were cheetahs napping, borderline catatonic, preparing for the bell’s merciful peal.
At lunch they shunned the cafeteria to go skateboarding off school property. These days Will could manage the occasional weak ollie—the trick’s true alchemy still outpacing his understanding. There in the parking lot of the grocery store that still delivered his mother’s food, Will drank a throat-searing two-liter carton of iced tea while Jonah practiced heelflips, landing again and again on his sideways board, folding his feet in half and pouring himself to the oily ground.
“You always get the same thing,” said Jonah, “ice tea and salt-and-vinegar chips.”
“I know what I like,” said Will, though the truth was the towering neon of the grocery shelves and the sheer glut of choice they presented baffled him. While they ate, some high-school-age hockey players shouted “Skater fags!” from a gunning pickup truck, almost obligatorily, kept at bay only by the fearsome legend of the Turtle Brothers. Rather than the designer sweatshirts and safety pin–tapered jeans of their peers, the boys donned the flannel button-ups and work pants that abounded in Thunder Bay’s thrift stores. The pants were constructed with thick polyester that survived their worst spills and were cheap to replace when they didn’t. At school, hockey players had started to sneak up behind Will to yank his pants down, so they both wore webbed belts cinched tight around their bruised hips, even though Jonah was never subjected to the indignity.
After school, with the map folded deep in Jonah’s backpack, the two ventured downtown, into the crannies of the city that no upright citizen had reason to frequent: loading bays, alleys, abandoned industrial buildings, check-cashing places, the parking lots of windowless strip clubs, closed gas stations, and listless strip malls. The concrete and the bustle brought forth new memories of days spent careening around Toronto with his mother, the glint of subways, the towering buildings, his hand caught warm in hers.
“So if the lines are streets, the Xs must signify something, because there are like thirty of them,” said Will, sitting on a bench, turning the map over and over in an attempt to orient themselves. “But what could be possibly valuable enough for Marcus to use it to leave Thunder Bay forever?”
“Ain’t no buried treasure anywhere down here, Long John Silver,” Jonah said, gesturing to a squalid apartment block with crotch-yellowed underwear hanging from the window like the flags of surrender.
Will had made no mention of the solemn promise to his mother he was breaking by coming to the waterfront. But he’d seen plenty of boys his age walking around, and none of them looked immediately endangered.
“Think we need to worry about the Butler’s wolves?” Will said later, fighting again to keep the image of a fanged snout clamping over his other thigh from his mind. Lately, each time he left the house, he’d been liberally dousing his entire body with deodorant, in the hopes it would mask his scent.
“Bah, we’re small potatoes,” said Jonah. “Plus we can outrun his wolves on our boards.”
They tried penciling various street names onto the lines, but, frustratingly, downtown Thunder Bay was a grid with no defining abnormalities. Each time they thought they’d located an X, what they found was uniformly unremarkable and decrepit: another abandoned building with an old, plateless car parked out front. The boys rifled the glove boxes of the cars and staked out the buildings with no luck. “Some treasure,” Jonah said.
But when riding his skateboard, even the “rusty ruin” of Thunder Bay sparkled with vitality and potential in Will’s eyes. While investigating the map, they happened over perfect skateboard terrain: painted curbs surrounded by smooth concrete and perfect sets of stairs with no cracks at the top, where the boys would return again and again after security guards had shooed them away. Surfers rode waves, which were already beautiful, but skateboarders made things beautiful: the ugly, discarded nooks and leftovers of a place, the abandoned, unused architecture that people preferred to ignore. Beneath their wheels, these dead places became sites of wonder.
At times Will wondered what special genius allowed Jonah to nimbly launch himself from the summit of any stair set without a stitch of Black Lagoon in his body. It had something to do with the possessed gleam he’d get while maniacally attempting a trick for hours until he’d mastered it. Jonah was channeling something, Will figured. An anger, maybe. Equal parts joy and fear. He resembled the skateboard titans of Thrasher more and more each day.
Will couldn’t discern if it was the sight of a White kid and an Indian kid together or the velocity with which they disregarded every traffic bylaw and trespassing ordinance on the books that caused pedestrians to recoil as they zoomed past. As much as it seemed like a suicide attempt to passersby, skateboarding was precisely the opposite: it was about mastery—a seizure of control, not a loss. That the board did their bidding—danced or flipped or spun successfully beneath them—afforded the most sublime pleasures of their short lives. Even after his most crushing falls, Will was learning to greet the pain, to wade out into its eddies and unexpected pools. To feel it pull parallel with another, worse pain inside him—born of the fact that his mother was wasting her life Inside or that his heart could give out any minute. And these pains aligned themselves, matched tempos, a kind of duet. Will would listen to the minor chord of it ring in him and find comfort in the sound.
After spending every weekend downtown, the boys grew well acquainted with Thunder Bay’s maniacs, its miscreants and castaways, those wandering its alleys and vacated streets with nothing better to do, and Will was terrified and fascinated by the harm the Outside could inflict. There were the drunks, some Indian, most not. Many were friendly, overly friendly, and Will would shake their hard, smelly hands while Jonah always kept his distance. Fresh and noxious with Neverclear in the early afternoon—they either came from distant reservations or once worked for the elevators, the railway, the mills, or the lakeboats. They often called to Will and Jonah with equal parts admiration and contempt. “Let’s talk to youse two boys,” they’d slur with dim mustardy eyes, waving them closer. Some would even ask to try their boards, claiming they’d possessed great balance in their day. The boys watched solid, railway tie–driving men drop to the pavement like toddlers. Sometimes they’d ask for change, which Jonah hated most of all. “How about you change your clothes first?” he’d mutter after they’d left.
Then there were the crazies: the man who believed he was a policeman and wrote them fake bylaw infraction tickets for skateboarding on donut shop napkins; fixed to his jacket was a sticker—THIS ACCIDENT HAS BEEN INVESTIGATED BY THE THUNDER BAY POLICE—which he’d push forward like a badge. The woman who only walked backwards, peering over her shoulder with a smudgy makeup mirror. The withered guy who had a voice like a child and strung sentences together like beaded necklaces: “Who are you what are you doing where’s your helmet why are you here you boys are going to kill yourselves.” The carnival-size woman they called Anti–Old Lady because she hated everything. “Do you want a hug?” they’d call to her from safe across the street. “I hate hugs and I hate you!” she’d screech, shutting her eyes with pure loathing. Will listened intently to them all, marveling at their variety, noting their voices and syntaxes, but despite their shared insanity, none bore any resemblance to the Wheezing Man.
But then their first stroke of luck: Will spotted the Bald Man hurrying along the sidewalk with a rolling dolly, on it a small steel drum. Silently the boys lifted their skateboards and followed at a distance, soon arriving upon a spot on the map they’d investigated previously, where they’d found a sun-faded purple car, the color of diluted wine, out front of a shuttered brick laundromat. The Bald Man pulled his dolly beside the car, taking a quick glance around before levering open the gas tank and feeding the mouth of a section of green hose into the tank. He put the other end to his lips, spat, then stuffed it into the barrel at his feet. He waited like that for a few minutes, glancing around, the boys watching him while tucked behind a used car lot’s sandwich-board sign. Then he capped everything up and pushed the dolly off toward the lake.
When he was gone, the boys approached the car and opened the tank.
“Why all the secrecy for siphoning some gas?” said Jonah, lowering his nose to the opening. “At least now we know what those garden hoses were for.”
“I have an idea,” Will said, searching a garbage-strewn alley, where it didn’t take him long to find some discarded drinking straws. He crumpled the ends and fit three together into one long tube. “One time I made the Eiffel Tower like this,” he said. “My mom loved it.” He stuck the straw in the tank.
“After you,” Jonah said with disbelief.
Will pursed his lips and sucked. Into his mouth flooded a gulp of burning death and antimatter and the purple fumes of a hundred melting G.I. Joe figurines. Will gagged and nearly vomited while a good amount continued to napalm his throat and claw its way down into his belly. “When is this going to stop?” Will said weakly, doubling over, a lingering aftertaste like whatever was in Mr. Miller’s mug.
“Ah, give it a second,” Jonah said pinching the straw from Will’s grip. “You don’t have Indian tastebuds.” He took a sip and smacked his lips. “Whew!” he said. “That right there is grain alcohol like I’ve never tasted. There’s something extra to it”—he clacked his tongue—“A kick. Like nailpolish remover and model glue. Neverclear, I’d bet anything.”
“Butler must be hiding it around the city in the gas tanks of abandoned cars!” Will said hoarsely, now feeling as if his mother had duct taped a few dozen hand warmers to his belly.
“Okay, so Marcus was stealing hoses for the Butler. Then he got the idea to take the map so he could use it to find the Butler’s stashes of Neverclear and sell it himself. Something like that would generate enough money to kiss Thunder Bay good-bye forever.”
“Maybe it worked. Maybe Marcus did it?” Will said, still recovering.
“Then why is the Butler still offering a reward?” said Jonah. “No, the Butler and the Bald Man must’ve remembered where this one was without the map, or we would’ve seen them do this weeks ago.”
“But if all those Xs are cars with Neverclear stashed in them—”
“—it means there are gallons and gallons of this stuff out there,” Jonah said. “Which means the Butler still really, really wants it.” Jonah cinched the straps of his backpack.
“Shit,” Will said, swearing credibly for the first time, but still too afraid to enjoy it.
Relaxation Time
With Will back at school and afterwards riding his skateboard out who-knows-where—she was mentally replaying his promise to avoid the waterfront thirty or forty times per day—Diane had been forced, under threat of starvation, to answer the door herself. While signing for a large, heavy box, she made the mistake of glancing over the courier’s shoulder, out into the white radium glow of the pavement, at the brown delivery truck chuffing in her driveway, and the desolate infinity of it threw up a squall in her chest. But she felt her knees hold, and no icy sweat broke over her like that first time it came while she was shoveling the driveway.
Triumphantly, she dragged the box through the hall into the kitchen. Normally she left packages in the entranceway for Will to open when he returned, but the heft of this one intrigued her. She fetched the key from its hiding place, unlocked the knife drawer, and removed a small paring knife. After carefully splitting the tape, she lifted a stack of film canisters from the box, each entombed painstakingly in foam, all battleship gray or mint green—six in total. Next she unearthed a newly minted hardcover book, published by the National Film Board, entitled Diane Cardiel: A Filmography. Inside were lushly published still images from her films and many essays, including one called “The Constructedness of Public Space in the Age of Anxiety.” Folded into the book was a letter from the director of the NFB, stating that they’d reissued her entire filmography two years ago but had been unable to locate her. Until a former student of his named Penny Gustavson, who was now an elementary school teacher, had recently informed him that Diane was living back in Thunder Bay. Perfect timing, he said, because the NFB was mounting a running retrospective in Toronto and Montreal next spring and would like to invite her to speak. “I understand, however,” he added tactfully toward the end, “that travel may be problematic.”
A retrospective? Weren’t those for the dead, or at least the near dead? It struck her that she was now widely regarded as a relic, an oddity. But had she been away that long? Long enough for the mildew of enigma to grow upon her? Even if she could make it there, somehow, people would ask what she’d been doing all this time, what work she’d done. “Oh, hiding in my house, watching my son paint,” she’d be forced to say. Of course she’d write the director to say she couldn’t go, but as she turned the book in her hands, she couldn’t avoid feeling some blush of pride at the crisp handsomeness of it, and at the care and delicacy the director had exhibited in his letter, which seemed intended for a person much more eccentric, fragile, and important than herself.
While reboxing the canisters to hide them in her closet, Diane noticed that Jonah and Will had left the 16mm projector set up in Cairo. Though it was nearly time for her usual 10:30 Relaxation Session, she found herself threading her first film—The Sky in Here—into the take-up reel. She made tea, snuffed the room’s lamps, drew the curtains, and coaxed the projector into a clatter.
As the film played, Diane sat quietly, her mind not so much absorbing the images as turning inward to reconstruct the person who’d shot this film, who’d synced the sound and spoke the now precious-sounding voice-over, astonished by how foreign to herself she’d become. After the first film ended she loaded another, watching them in the order she’d created them, fascination creeping into her, each film a missive from a dark region of her self she’d left unconsidered for so long.
She had such feeble command of the period after she’d watched them pull the first tatters of her brother’s body from the lake. Oh, how did she ever survive it? In the days following, she’d cried with such force she learned to navigate their house by feel, a grief so fierce and depleting her whole body felt like a turned-out pocket.
When she gathered the strength, she phoned Whalen’s house and spoke to his father for the first time. He said his son hadn’t been home since the accident, and he begged Diane to tell him where he was.
The number of the funeral home sat on her table for a week. Arranging her brother’s burial was the kind of task that grief should impel a person to do, but she couldn’t lift the receiver without fear of screaming into it, and was too proud to ask her father’s old coworkers for help.
There was still no sign of Whalen. The truth came out about how they’d been swindling the Native crew, and though Whalen’s father claimed he hadn’t laid eyes on his son since the night of the accident, the common belief was that to avoid scandal he’d changed Whalen’s name and packed him off to a university dorm somewhere back east, his head now buried in a law book. On some level she’d been preparing for Whalen to abandon her all along. As she suspected now she would have done herself had Charlie made it to university, and they lost the thrill of secrecy, left only with backgrounds and lives that could never be properly woven together.
It came then to Diane that with both Charlie and Whalen gone, and with no real ties to Thunder Bay left, for the first time in her life she was completely free to do as she pleased. She could leave, tonight, and though she wouldn’t have Charlie to answer her questions or roll up his sleeves and fight her battles, she also wouldn’t have him watching over her and correcting and interrupting and sucking the light from every moment either. It pained her to say it now, but a long-crushing weight had come off her chest, and while she hadn’t known it at the time, her brother’s accident assembled inside her a kind of engine of courage.
She packed a bag, locked the house, and walked along the creek to the highway. For months she hitchhiked south and west through a series of uncelebrated American roads. During that time she slept beneath interstate overpasses, drank from eaves troughs, ate wild raspberries and plates of all-day breakfast she’d treat herself to. She had sex with an unhappily married civil engineer who smelled like Whalen in a long aqua-colored car, then a few others as easily as talking to them. She rented weekly-rate motel rooms in a few insubstantial towns, inventing new names for herself in each one. It was during this period she’d made all of her life’s most monumental mistakes, seizing every possible occasion to endanger her mind and body, as though Charlie’s death had stripped her of the capacity to fear for her own safety. But like a plant that benefited from rough treatment and neglect, she felt more herself than she ever had in Thunder Bay.
From a pawn shop she bought a Nikon camera and a 50mm lens. She preferred photography to sketching: the immediacy, the immersion of seeing, the endless hunt for the perfect subject. She shot empty taverns, derelict train cars, abandoned bicycles, crude underpass graffiti, broken people milling around Greyhound stations, all of it—she wouldn’t realize until later—somehow touched by decay.
Eventually, after a time living with a separated beekeeper outside San Francisco who measured his food with a hanging scale and refused to orgasm for spiritual reasons, she made her way back to Canada and enrolled in some arts courses while working at a city-run day care in Toronto. She bought a smelly wool duffle coat from a thrift store and an acoustic guitar, which she plucked nightly until her fingertips hardened into thimbles. In her classes she painted murky watercolors, molded lumpy sculptures, stained glass, fired ceramics, even crocheted—her capricious interests dragging her from one artistic disappointment to the next. An instructor told her that she was cursed with the aesthetic sense to know her work was dull but lacked sufficient skill to fix it. Yet she was not discouraged. It was so much easier to fail without her father or her brother peering over her shoulder.
She came across a book on the history of cinema and after reading it in one caffeine-fueled gulp, she enrolled in film full-time. Her dedication captured the eye of her instructor, yet when called upon in class, either her voice faltered or she talked in tight, senseless circles. Near the middle of the semester, a friend from class brought her to a club popular with U of T grad students, where breathtakingly awful poetry was read as they quaffed Pernod and water. Arthur was an architecture student with tortoise-shell glasses and a clumsy girth. He had a Beach Boy wholesomeness that in a sea of Dylan and Sartre imitators infantilized those around him. Without her brother to speak for her, Diane had become a blurter—offering too much, too quickly, her sentences like a verbal yard sale—and found Arthur’s habit of thinking long and hard during conversations soothing. That night she fell into his circle and drifted to a party at an off-hours theater space, where Diane drained six cans of a tasteless beer popular in Thunder Bay that Arthur’s friends drank for its “working-class authenticity.” Soon after, she kicked Arthur in the side of the knee—hard enough to topple him to the carpet—to prove some point about pain tolerance and gender. Minutes later, she was dragging him to a secluded futon with such verve that her mind didn’t return to her body for days after.
It was a mutual friend who later told Diane that Arthur was married to a woman who’d been his English professor when he was an undergraduate. In a rushing daze Diane called this woman at the university, impersonating the dean’s clerk. Her office was slated for renovation, Diane said. When would she be next out of town at a conference so they could schedule accordingly?
Diane waited weeks until the proper time to ring his bell. Her reward was a week of cab rides to converted lofts in the East End, where they smoked hash from comically large faux-Arabic pipes. Arthur got drunk enough to stand on couches and say, “Friends, countrymen. This is essential,” launching into speeches with full awareness of his own silliness, the discussions always devolving into the drug-addled men questioning meaning itself, which went down the conversational drain of Derrida and deconstructionism before the women cradled them off into the night.
Unlike Whalen, Arthur was so brazen with their meetings, it wasn’t long before he parted from his wife and Diane quickly fixed herself at his new apartment. His fridge was full of Polaroid film and homemade pickles bought from a Polish neighbor, sketches of cities and plazas spidering over every square inch of wall. He sang her “Factory Girl,” complete with a Jagger fish-mouth, and delighted in her working-class tales of Thunder Bay. He surprised her with a photo of the old elevators—including Pool 6—in Le Corbusier’s Towards a New Architecture, who admiringly wrote that they were “the first fruits of the New Age.” It was as disorienting to her as finding a portrait of Theodore or Charlie displayed prominently in a museum.
She hungered for Arthur every waking minute, and when he left to fetch Korean takeout or cigarettes, she would count seconds and watch his apartment door with the same rising panic as when watching Charlie drop into the grain bins. Arthur’s world tolerated her as a pretty curiosity. His stature, both physical and intellectual, was enough to shelter her from comments on her attendance at an unremarkable college and her dearth of artistic accomplishment.
The nights shrieked with drugs and sex and overcomplex conversation that ended in screaming matches as often as bed. Everyone was making a film, writing a book, the air a stiff meringue of ideas. It was as though you could pluck one down, staple your name to it, and attain national recognition by that time next week. She set up a desk at Arthur’s place and dared to construct a few poems, little bowls of word-salad she threw together hastily enough to disavow attachment to them. At Arthur’s urging, she read them to a few slit-eyed friends dozing on a shag carpet.
Then for her birthday Arthur gave her a 16mm camera, a Bolex he’d bought in the park from a smacked-out chess player named Steve. She wandered the city alone, shooting quick bursts of whatever caught her eye, recording snatches of sound with a reel-to-reel slung over her shoulder. A streetlight, some trash, people on benches. At the time she was enthralled by Richard Avedon’s photographs: coal miners with blackened faces shot against white, angelic backgrounds, the effect rendering his subjects eerily otherworldly, transcendent. Everyone is worth noticing, the images said and always put her in mind of Charlie and how even today she’d give everything for a photo like this of her brother, with his light-chipped eyes, slanting grin, and grain dust in his coarse hair.
Then one September day she walked to Union Station, closed her eyes for nearly half an hour, deciding that the person she saw when she opened them would be her first subject. She threw her eyes open and asked a young woman if she could film her face, dead on, looking into the lens. The woman kindly complied and after some nervous smiles and hair fiddling, gave her thirty golden seconds of raw vulnerability. She repeated this with twenty others.
When the film was developed, however, a good portion proved unusable: a milk of ghostly light spilled over each frame. Diane was devastated. She’d changed the canister improperly, and light had leaked into the black felt bag while she switched reels.
Arthur pulled a favor and arranged some free late-night time on an editing machine at the National Film Board. “Make something at least,” he’d said. There she found some usable clips and a few nice frames she managed to duplicate as stills. But it wasn’t enough. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she spotted a nest of cut footage in a waste bin nearby. Nearly in tears, she asked another editor if she could use it. “Knock yourself out,” he said.
She spliced these unwanted clips, intercutting them with her own shots of the city and people at Union Station. She laid the sound she’d recorded of a crowd roaring at a hockey game over a shot of a person sleeping. The sound of a fistfight over lovers walking, a baby gurgling over documentary clips of a bullfight, trains shunting over shots of trash. It was the public invading the private, the inside invading the outside, and the effect was disorienting. When she showed it to him, Arthur declared her film genius, adding that it was about anxiety and public space and love and dread, which confused Diane but still flushed her with pride.
A premiere was organized. The film, which she’d titled The Sky in Here, drew effusive praise from those who cared about that sort of thing. They said that it had captured the “anxiety of the age” and compared it to Joan Didion’s essays and the films of Arthur Lipsett, both of which Diane had always loved. She won a first-film award and quickly made a few more works in a similar vein with money from the Film Board and the Arts Council, garnering still more awards and praise.
During that time she and Arthur discussed marriage at length and decided against it. Reasons like resisting the patriarchy and his previous marital debacle were tossed around, but in truth, they were both skittish about commitment, the drift toward entrapment. Though she never found words to tell Arthur about Charlie or her parents, she suspected he knew she couldn’t stand to do any more losing.
Arthur had gone to private schools and had never held a job, something the closeted Marxist in him hated to admit, but after graduation he landed an office remodeling, then a small park and a community center. He soon developed a name, which he snidely claimed was the only thing one actually built as an architect. Then came the plaza in Copenhagen, and almost overnight Arthur was inaugurated as the high priest of plazas—the great facilitator of urban renewal and community. He was described as visionary, a “starchitect”—a word they had once only used with the tongs of irony. He designed increasingly significant structures: galleries, libraries, public buildings, first in Europe, then throughout North America, Asia, the Middle East. Arthur would do anything to get his projects built: spew flurries of pseudo-intellectual claptrap, employ the theories of far-flung psychoanalysts, the folklore of African hill tribes—anything to entice funders and investors. It was during this rise that she’d become pregnant, and Arthur did his utmost to hide his trepidation.
