Stunt (16 page)

In this photograph, the woman's dress rides too high on her thigh, black garter peeking out, straps falling down her arms. She is not trying to provoke. Rather, she does not abide by the rules of civility. And every night she slips away and sleeps beside a fire, and wakes in the morning, a fox covered in soot, only to become a woman again. She has the kind of wildness that everyone else trades in too early.

She did not pose for this photograph. She did not sink into the arms of her beloved. No, she challenged the photographer, his request to be still. Please. By the time he got his shot, she was the only subject he ever wanted. Chin thrust in the air, a slender cigarette in one corner of her mouth, and with its smoke she obscures Finbar, his deranged face. Her eyes catch something and she smiles at it, just outside the frame – always just outside the frame.

The woman is referred to only as Finbar's Queen. The last photograph is her tombstone. Untended.
1918–1945
. She was twenty-seven years old when she died. After that day, Finbar disappeared from view. He never walked the rope again. Now I know what he bargained when he sat down at the oak table with Death.

I walk home from the library. My steps slow and small, a slight bend at the waist, conjuring a balancing pole there that intersects me. Twilight descends. And with it, so do you.

Your hair is combed like a jailbird just released. Your winter coat is off. Your suit is pressed and free of lint and dandruff. Your cowboy boots are polished. You have shaved your beard. Upon sight of me, you hear an entire symphony in your head and you scoop me up in your arms and you dip me and we dance in great lunges and spins. Over the horn section, you shout, ‘Where have you been?'

‘Walking.'

‘Liar.'

‘At the library.'

‘Doing what?'

‘Reading.'

‘About what?'

‘Possibility.'

‘The possibility of a house other than your house? The possibility of a father other than me?' The symphony ends and you fill the silence with fury.

‘No.'

‘Don't leave me again.'

‘I won't.'

‘Promise.'

‘I promise.'

‘Promise.'

‘I just did,' I say, looking around, meeting the eyes on us, ‘What?' making them slink into the next fight.

Later that night, you take me to Our Spot by the Lake and you say, settling into the sand, ‘One day, my darlin', I will take you to the place where I was born. North. It is a pocked landscape, the flesh of a grapefruit, all horizon, an Arctic desert, an uninterrupted curve.' You jump to standing and, in your boots, you are a slow-motion zero-gravity prowl. ‘Everyone bounds a foot and a half off the ground.'

You lift your feet in an astronaut purr,
250,000
miles from the earth, until I ask, ‘What about Mink? Will she come too?'

‘She wouldn't want to, my darlin'.'

‘And Immaculata?'

‘She wouldn't either.'

‘Did you tell them you're going to take me?'

‘No.'

‘Will you?'

And then, not answering, you go on, loose as a marionette, tapping your feet and winging your arms, performing your dance again in miniature. ‘You can trick yourself that you live in space in the north. It's a twin to the moon, Eugenius. It's where the astronauts train for their missions.' And then you stop. ‘What, what are you looking at?' When my eyes should be on you, in your silver suit and matching helmet, defying gravity, a million miles of deep blue around you, they are, for the first time, just outside the frame. Caught on Finbar and his wild Queen, who, together, curl up in me. A secret, they thrive.

For months thereafter, the phone bleats and bleats, the hushed voices of your art dealers and your patrons bent like canes over your casket. They beseech you, but you cannot be reasoned with. After a long silence, you say, ‘Yes, I am here. Yes, I am listening. I have not stopped painting because I am depressed.' And then, cradling the receiver, you pull down the portraits that remain on our walls. ‘It is the looking I cannot do. I cannot stand to look anymore.' You hang up, pacing our floor now covered in faces, and you mutter, ‘Somewhere there is an island full of these things.' Clockwise. When you pace, you pace only clockwise.

Even though there is nothing in there but the birth announcements, you still spend your days in the studio with the door locked. Do you go through them, discovering again and again that you have the birth announcement of everyone in the world but you? Or have you dug a hole in the floor? Do you follow a slender tunnel every day out to a place built of logs on the fast water where the air is always wet? Dressing and undressing, dressing and undressing. Or drills. Dropping to the ground. Pretending disaster. Or sleeping. But you rarely sleep. There is too much to discuss, to read, to taste, to invent, to rage against, to fall in love with. I press a glass to the door, my ear against it. There is no sound. You are not learning how to play a new instrument or how to speak a new language. You are not tumbling. You do not even cough. Or light a match. You do not shuffle your feet. And you do not speak – which makes me wonder if you are even there, so accustomed am I to your fit of words.
I am copyrighting our land! I am unplugging everything! I am reminding myself of my hunter-gatherer instinct in the urban colossus! I am making a saddle in the tradition of the Sioux!
No. Every night, you return to us with the same expression on your face. Is it just a replica
of you that opens the door, and he has been made mild after witnessing something he cannot quite explain?

Despite your excommunication, the smell of your work clings to you the way a doubt clings. Urethane. Turpentine. Linseed. Oil paint. When Mink asks you, after you have kissed the tops of our heads and joined us at the dinner table, spilling whatever sauce is on it, ‘So what did you do today?' you invariably say, ‘I levitated.'

One night, after your usual exchange, Mink slaps you square across the jaw.

‘Don't,' I say.

‘Hit me back,' she orders.

You lift your arm. Immaculata gasps, ‘Don't.' And then you pull Mink into you, quicksand, and you hold her until all of the lines that kept her taut break. She goes soft. Her face slumped in your chest, Mink laughs until she cries real tears – the tears she used to cry only for champions.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

echo!

A low hum and the island street lamps click on, coating the night green. The light of swamps. The smell of wet fur. Ten feet in front of me is a fox. Her furtive eyes, the yellow of an unvarnished trophy, are set on me. She does not flinch. So close, I can smell the gristle in her teeth. She walked ice floes last winter to get here, gliding and pouncing between them. A red streak, she rode them into shore. I listen to the rhythmic pull of her breath. A pendulum. It feels like a drawing in. I am fading, being carried off, to be spread through the woods in a hundred holes beneath the ground.

I shout and flail my arms. I jump up and down. In Darlington, you taught me:
When trapped in the woods and faced with a bear and the bear snorts, make yourself bigger than you are so that it does not confuse you with prey.
This is what I am doing. Making myself bigger than I am. The fox looks at me. I am foolish. She will not show her teeth and lunge at me, taking my throat with her, sinews stretched like a cat's cradle between us. She has other plans. And she is busy.
Come on.
She begins to trot, her body a sleek flare, and then she turns her head to see that I follow. I do. Along this strip of road, she leads me a few hundred feet to a clearing.
Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods.
The street lamps click off. Night rushes in again, an iodine spill. The clearing blinks with fireflies. They are maniacs of light. The fox bounds between them. They illuminate my surroundings. I do not know whether she stays to watch, her eyes and the pulse of the bugs indistinguishable.

The pines are pulled back, slingshots with the wind. Two maples bow into each other, their tops bent heavily in conference like elders, like lovers. Beneath them, there is one square for the moon to burn through. It is lanced by shadow. It is the face of Finbar, his bones punching him out from the inside, other lives clambering for space. He is telling me to go. I tie Marta's
rope between them. It is the width of three of my fingers, one of yours. Life must be caught up to. This is a moment that has been chasing me and finally I am alongside it. Vertigo. The stars come out. A million white knuckles. A nervous sky.

I kick off my boots, climb the tree and step up onto the rope. That quarter-inch dare to the air. One foot. It is taut, braided sinews to the underside of my arches. I lift the other foot – standing distilled to such a fine point. I fall. I fall again and again. I fall, Immaculata would count,
sixty-one times whoa,
without ever taking a step forward. This last time, my stomach catches on something: a piece of glass, half-buried. I wince. It will become my second scar.

You have seventy-two. You would roll up a pant leg, slip off your boot, pull your shirt down below your shoulder and tell me their stories. Some are long and wide like flattened worms. Others are mashed and spread, desperate beggars. Some are small divots, darker than your skin, where teeth and corners dug into you. Still others look like zippers. Two look like eyes. Three are dark blue from leeches pulled off your toes. But on your left side, snaking over your lower ribs and splitting into a trident shape, is your most tremendous scar. Suffered in a fall when you were a rodeo king in High Level, Alberta, arm in the air, stomach pulled in, the hard shell of a crustacean. You told me you sewed that one yourself. This was the only night you drank. Now anyone would have pegged you for a drinker. Probably whisky and a dark ale. But this was your only dabble. Bourbon. Old Crow. You called it
rotgut.
You said it nearly killed you. Spent the next day retching on your hands and knees. I run my fingers over the mark of the stitches, too exaggerated, the seams too thick. This body is one you had to work to keep on.

Immaculata thought you made them up. She told me this once, rocking back and forth on her blistered heels, bottom lip sucked in under her teeth, her expression fretful; she did not know how to introduce me to the idea. It was a line out into the unknown. When she saw my response, she exclaimed with a consolatory smile, ‘He is so clumsy Eugenia he is a total klutz think about it!' I called her a liar and she said, searching my face, ‘I'll leave you alone excuse me,' and then, the human postscript, she added, ‘That is not to say his stories are not true to him.'

Possessed now by precise strokes, I step onto the rope. With one foot and then the other, I stand. I lift my left foot – the empty air heaving around me – and I step forward. I do not fall. With that, the world loses its squares and its contours. It lengthens into the blurred landscape from a speeding train. Hurtling through, brain waves in sleep, the pace of the planet quivering – all shapes are stretched into vast lines of colour. I am drowned out. And turned to light. A lightness that is secret, a most vivid secret.

I reach the end. I linger there, my heart in my ears – the footsteps of an elephant. The tightrope is the darkroom, images suspended and becoming themselves before your eyes.

Around me, there is only the white puff of cottonwood seeds, floating like shrunken clouds. I am thousands of feet in the air and I am suddenly a giant. In the silence, I hear a line snap. It is the line between us. The one that bound me to you.
Snap.
And with that snap, a mysterious pool takes shape. It does not have any echo or reflection. It is indifferent. It is aloneness. Finally, aloneness.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

1. a successful trip begins long before you
arrive at your destination.
2. plan in advance.
3. study relevant maps and literature.
consider buying pocket-sized versions.
4. familiarize yourself with local customs
such as dress, food, religion and dating.
5. choose sites to visit, e.g., shrines and arenas.
6. finalize itinerary.
7. finalize travel arrangements and book
accommodation in advance.
8. consult relevant dictionary.
9. practice local phrases, e.g., what time is the bus?
do you have a vacancy? which way is east?
where is the nearest hospital?
10. stock up on local currency.
11. pack lightly.
12. once you arrive, find your local
tourist information office.

This night, the fifth night, I dream about someone other than you.

Finbar stands at his dresser. A cockroach on a cufflink. The house is half-eaten by spiderwebs. Everything is under a hide of dust. The floorboards are splintered and buckled. I can hear his long yellow nails clacking against the pencil as he writes to me, tapping out a code. He folds the letter and seals the envelope with his tongue. Fried egg, Scotch, fish. He addresses it, stamps it, and then he looks through his mottled window. The pods are still there, burst by branches, gauze nests in the willows.

After all the women left Orphan Stadium to scream in their parents' living rooms, delivering Finbar's children with their linen nightgowns on, Finbar held a funeral for his penis. He made a paper boat, phallic in shape, and he set it off in the outdoor sink. Naked, he lit it on fire and thought he heard a dirge being sung. Then he returned indoors and he let the place rot. Himself too. There was no reason for upkeep, no bodies to steer into bed and impress. He spent his days writing longhand, his
Unofficial Autobiography,
the empire collapsing around him. He needed a record of his life before the cataracts, those argent spaceships, took over his eyes completely.

Finbar steps outside. The house is a hulk in the wild. Fields stretch out around it, overgrown with the season. Grass lifts from the gravel, mohawking the road that leads to it. Scorched poles where torches once burned spot the ragged setting like matches snuffed out. Beside the kitchen window, propped open with a wooden spoon, cans are piled high. His dinners. Mostly asparagus. Some oysters. Vines and creepers, Orphan Stadium is being grown over. A plot untended. There is a hand-painted sign on the front lawn, faded now, that says VACANCY. Finbar put it
up after his Queen died all those years ago. Now, in his slippers, smelling of sawdust, dead mice and woodsmoke, sauce in his beard, he checks the mailbox – just in case the girl had something to add. No. Empty. The only mail he has ever received here: birth announcements – cut and clipped neatly from the newspaper. All of them, sons. And none named for him.