Stunt (15 page)

I think about the girl with the rope.
Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods, between the jackfruit and the betel nut, bamboo creepers, the jamun and the mango.
When the flood comes to wipe out her village, she talks to her rope and it rises while
she stands on it, lifting her to safety. Below, cats wrap themselves around their owners' sandals, scamper up legs, sit on shoulders and then vault to higher ground. Bats come out like kites. Rats and dogs start to claw up chimneys, the sides of buildings, nearby hills. ‘Watch the animals,' you said to me, ‘always watch the animals.' The village is the sound of scurrying. No shouts, no hollers yet, only the sprint of animal paws. And then suddenly a groan, and the mud-brown water barrels down on them, rounding up umbrellas and wedding gowns, gulping trucks and bodies and boats. A boy rides the current on a bare mattress. He screams and it sounds almost like exultation. And then everything disappears. The earth is coated anew. It is a planet for the girl to discover first.

The wind picks up again, and I have the sensation that I am being watched. Heartbeat-footsteps-heartbeat-footsteps-heartbeat-footsteps. My mind is mice scrambling across floorboards.
Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you'll find out for yourself.
I light a match. The wind so strong now everything is bantam-weight; the match is blown out. I stretch my arms in front of me, a sleepwalker miles from home, groping the dark, fingers reading it because my eyes cannot. This is the Great Unknown. I inch along the road, night tying my ankles tight together. Something waits for me here, and I have yet to bump up against it.

‘Hello.'

Is it a string of children holding hands, so still they were cut from paper? Is it two black storks stumbling and pirouetting? Is it a crater? An open mouth? Your hundred daughters? Dressed in suits, hair cut in slices? A hunched figure in the ditch. Is it
you? Holding your breath. Boo. I blink, lids hard shutters, but nothing will clear.

A rustle in the woods. The snap of a twig. I stop. Clocking.

‘Sheb?'

The trees stretch out in a conspiracy-whisper around me. In them, movement. Unmistakable. Blood thumps in my ears. My heart pounds, a fist against a coffin, so loud that if someone called out to me, I would not hear them. I make out a man. Your dimensions. He moves so quickly in the woods that he is a forest fire leaping a highway and becoming two fires.

‘Sheb.'

I chase you. The branches are crabs, curled and thick lines, they toss me, biting through my suit. You wanted to die a hero's death, you told me. You wanted to be gored by a bull. ‘What an epitaph, my darlin', to have a set of horns through your rib cage,' you would say, ‘what an epitaph.' This is how I feel as I fight my way toward you: horns through my rib cage.

But there is nothing there – only the sound of your voice in my head,
Stunt,
a vapour, a velvet, a million birds I cannot name. I could vanish here. My onions, my withering, browning, hollowed shrine hanging above me. Or I could walk into the water, an inky twin to the night, and let it steal me away. No. I smooth my suit down and I walk back to the road. I am determined to return to my home.

‘He says he's not painting anymore.' Mink is on the recliner in the living room reading the
World Weekly News,
her hair singing under the light. On the cover, a boy in a diaper is waving. The caption reads: Boy Freeze Dried By Parents. Mink drops it, stands and shakes out her legs. Brow unknit, she heads to your studio so quickly that she makes the sound of an arrow shot to the wind.

You have left the door unlocked. ‘Hm.' Mink walks in. Partly finished canvases are propped up against the walls, work lights on, photographs fingered on the edges, half-broken stereos and eight-track players below, garbage that you combed the streets for (
Thursday night is garbage night!
) and came close to repairing, the projector and the sheet that shone our movies. Boxes are piled high and dusted over. An ancient civilization to be excavated and reassembled. Gallery openings, invitations, packs of matches, yellowed receipts from the Waverley Hotel and the Spadina Hotel for Men, train tickets, newspaper clippings and unfilled prescriptions – all of which I would handle like thousand-year-old tools.

I was the one you let purr into the studio. I was the one who named your paintings. Your last opening: I was the one grinning beside you, my flight pattern an imitation of yours, my Lilliputian body. Every time you had to shake a hand, you let go of mine. Returned quickly to it. Your impossibly long stride through the gallery, your gait one that I could swing between, the slap of your boots on the marble, musk in the air having returned from the other side and translated it for us. Your paintings were divine stunts. Shake my hand. Touch me. I rode on your
shoulders, the two of us forming the grand back of an elephant, an epic sauntering through the crowd. Everyone parted for us. Sometimes you lifted me in the air with one hand. I would spread my arms, born from your palm, and people would look on, the innate surprise of seeing a Siamese creature.

Your paintings were the bison and pregnant mares of cave drawings to me. Carved into limestone, scattering under the light, they were your effort to make a record of the human experience in all of its relentless motion. They were your attempt to be still. Alongside your collection of birth announcements, the story of our hunt was up to you.

Mink moves in the swift unblinking manner of nurses, impressively looping thick rope around your half-finished canvases, your sketchbooks and your brushes. Now deemed useless materials. Now corralled. She bags your tubes of paint, palettes, books, your trinkets, your photographs, ticket stubs, scraps and articles. The knife, the rope and the bags were in her black cardigan pocket, cashmere. Did she know that you would come to this decision? Was she just biding her time until you made your announcement? She does not seem disturbed by it. It is as though all of your friends have died and Mink does not see this as loss – only that with their deaths, you have been returned to her, and that all of the time you might have spent with them is now free to be spent with her – and she will win you and charm you and heal you so that you forget all about death, you forget all about the others. She will wipe you clean.

She brings out the toothbrush for the second time. And then she hauls everything out to the curb. It makes a tidy heap.
No one touches it. It reads too much like a hex. Your last portrait sits on top. A left eye, floating.

When the garbagemen come in the dawn in their orange suits and their safety gloves, you do not watch them make away with your work. But Mink, a fanatic for the solid line of completion, does. She stands by the window, and when they drive away, she makes a sound, a tickle in her throat. The only thing left, at my insistence: the birth announcements. Laid out like the beginnings of a city.

In the backyard, below the apple tree, a mound at her feet, shovel propped against her side, hands raw from digging, Immaculata holds Urszula aloft and calls to me, ‘Eugenia she is ready to be buried now or else!' The cat is a mascot for herself – both of them resplendent in their white beaded headbands, their smoothed coats.

I bolt from the house, a drunk with a destination, white sunglasses frames crooked on my face. I run up the street, past the church, past Leopold of the Onions, his finger up, ‘Wait,' past the prostitutes, ‘Honeychild,' ‘Sugarlumps,' ‘Sister Pain,' and past the mission. The sky is the blade of an axe, and below it the city dwellers are hurried and desperate, just short of clawing each other. I weave between them and stop in front of the library, hands clapped over my ears. Parkdale's shipwrecked drape the stairs. I step over the men, pickled, parka-ed and tossing prayer and insult to the wind.

I open the door. Quiet as a capsule. The librarian looks up at me, her head a bird-twitch. I bird twitch back and wander the stacks. It has been three days since you locked yourself in your bedroom. Even when you are at your most unreachable, there is always a sliver, a hole that only I can crawl through. Threading a needle. But not this time. I need another world, one that will force me to forget the red swell of your eyes, the soundless marathon of your mouth, your vow to stop painting. I find the heaviest book in the place and pull it down. It is a cannonball in my hands.

Black and leather-bound. The lettering, gold and ornate. Trilled at the edges.

I. I. Finbar Me the Three,
Handsome Funambulist and Colossal Menagerie:
An Unofficial Autobiography

On the back cover: ‘The trick is to have a stunt that no one else can perform.' The words stop me dead.

The book smells of mould and mildew; it has just been brought up from a basement and placed here by a drowned woman with palm leaves for hands and snails for eyes. I hear her wet call. The centre of it falls open. Photographs. Glossy and dated long before I was born.

1914
. Finbar's first walk. In the posters around Avening, Ontario, a farming town northwest of the city, he billed himself Boy Wonder. Not yet thirteen years old, he stands on the wire, arms outstretched, a scarecrow thirty feet above a field of corn. A small crowd is gathered below him. Stalks to their chests. Arms crossed over, they are arguing against the very thing they are seeing. The rest of his hometown are in their shops and kitchens staring at their radios. In petrified silence, they listen to the first moments of the War to End All Wars. The Russians are mobilizing. The townspeople's faces fall. But Finbar, triumphant, does not.

1920
. Here is Finbar, now ‘I. I. Finbar Me the Three,' a young man of nineteen in striped tights and leather shoes. Pitchforks, scalpels, razors and butcher knives spike the ground silver. He walks above them, blindfolded. ‘Inexhaustible!' Finbar balances on one foot, a line of flame leaping below him. And then, most stunning, is Finbar's first ascension,
160
feet above the whirlpools of Niagara Falls. The surface is a scramble of hard waves. It is the white of molars, stealing itself away and then feeding itself back into being. Finbar walks in a sack. And then he does somersaults on stilts, and then he hangs from his bare feet, a prehistoric bird.

I enter the photograph; the division of time and place dissolves. It is as if Finbar has already met Death and so Death
does not hover about him. Finbar, in his tights and his leather shoes, crossed a room, pulled back a chair and sat at Death's oak table. He pinched the ends of his moustache smooth and he bargained. He bought time. With what, I wonder. What did he have to give away to do this? The shoreline is thick with people. I hold my breath, body pressed between them, and there I am taught for the first time: possibility.

‘Please refrain from speaking in the library.' The librarian is beside me. So close, she fogs my face. She grew up in a farmhouse, an only child, looking out at a river, with her aunt's appendix in a jar on a shelf in her bedroom. ‘You are talking to yourself.'

‘Oh?'

She lifts a finger to her lips. ‘Sh.'

I nod. Her hands are chapped and packing-plant-clean, nails painted black with press-on moons and stars. The ‘sh' one is taped.

‘I understand exuberance.' She is small, my height, with a soft stomach. You could punch it down like dough and feel her spine there at the bottom, a ring recovered from a lake. She crosses her arms, reading my mind.

‘I'm sorry,' I say, cancelling the thought.

‘It's all right.' She studies my face. ‘Do your parents take care of you?'

We speak to each other in low tones, like we are an endangered species and do not want to be found out. We twitch and then she returns to her desk.

In the photographs, dated from the mid-forties to the mid-sixties, Finbar is always a figure in the distance, his face inscrutable –
a lantern in a snowstorm. I see that he is strong and broad. True to his farm stock. He could clear an entire field of stones and build a fence with them in an afternoon, fell a tree and carry it out of the forest on one shoulder. I see that he walked the beams of his barn while his family slept, swallows spiralling into a smoke signal through a hole in the roof. I see that he used sheep and then horses and then steers for weights, having hypnotized the animals with whispers into their keen ears. In the dark, he lifted them, steam coming out of their nostrils, their brains on fire. His chest always bare – I can imagine his vanity.

When I turn the page, I see his face for the first time. It is grotesque. As if he survived a great storm, but his features, after being bashed by the air, were not returned properly to their places. He was never reformed. His cheeks hang slack in pouches from bones that look stolen from a strongman's thigh. His jaw is puffed wide and then tapers too long near his clavicle. His lips and nose are purpling fruit. And, skull mushrooming above and below them, Finbar's eyes appear to be two black points. Period. In them, there is only one thing: the power of a man who gets his own way. His hair is thick and blond. It hangs down to his shoulders. And his moustache, the only fine line. When Finbar looked in the mirror, wax on his fingertips, this is where he focused his attentions. Upon sight of him, Mink would have stifled a laugh and then she would have grown very quiet and stared. You would beg to paint his portrait. And then you would wish that his face, that squall, were your own.

The second-last photograph is of Finbar standing beside a woman, pale and long as an icicle. Freezing or melting, one can never be sure. I can see that, in her, Finbar finally found someone more powerful than himself. Finbar's arm clasped around her
waist is a python. If it were not there, she would be kicking up dirt. The woman is not exquisite, but if she were in a crowded room, she would be the only one you would want to look at. Her eyes: too close together and ringed with coal. Her nose: Roman. Her cheekbones: too high into her temples. Torso too short, legs too long, breasts heaving and full on such a thin frame. With these proportions, her clothes never completely fit. It is like she is always soaking wet, having just emerged from a lake no one else can find.