Stunt (2 page)

You see with sound.

‘And is more common in the premature,' he concludes, subdued zing.

Me, by three months. A worm.

I trip on the way out of his office and split my lip.

‘Eugenia,' Mink says as if I'm a stubborn stain, and apologizes to the receptionist, thick and square under two sweaters, both buttoned to the neck, nose chapped to a cardinal red. ‘She's an incurable drunk,' and Mink laughs her throaty laugh. The receptionist hands me a tissue from her sleeve, ‘There, dear, you're bleeding.'

Later, you tell me that if I were to surprise you on a busy city street, you would, upon seeing me, hear an entire symphony.

We live in Parkdale, a village in the west end of the city of Toronto, made up of Victorian mansions that used to border the lake. Women with parasols and bathing suits down to their calves, women with consumption, walked the beach, Sunnyside Beach. Now the highway sits on top of us, a beleaguered crown, turning Parkdale into a tired beauty queen. Feathers in her hair. Crinolines in a knot. She is grand. She is slumped. She is a rooming house with clapboard siding, transoms, cornices and turrets. Her voice is parched and playful. She is all invitation. She will take you in when nobody else will. The sun: her chandelier, her tarnished medal for bravery.

A shirtless man steers a shopping cart filled with scrap metal and stereo equipment. He wears a sleeping bag for a scarf. Inside our house, Mink will be plugging her ears, fingers forming an arrow,
What a racket.
The man's right eye is purple and swollen shut, the wet hump of an urchin. In Parkdale, he is not an unusual sight. It is the smooth faces that people stare at, the smooth faces that stand out. Everyone else appears shipwrecked. Everyone else appears collapsed with scurvy. Teeth falling out. Bones splintering into matchsticks. Eyes streaming with blood.

Morning turns into afternoon, the sun slinking slowly west, all sprawl and repose, and taking with it the freshness of the day. Immaculata places a sandwich beside me. Her long wrist, the lace cuff of her dress too short, a mess of blue veins. She has a stricken look, a sixteenth-century face the colour of porcelain. ‘Sustenance,' she says in her nurse purr. She pads away. I look at the sandwich. It is isolation on a plate. The crusts have been cut. I open it. Liverwurst. No garnish. No condiment. This is Immaculata.
My older sister, the proletarian restaurant. She is all task completion. There is no waste. No frivolity. There is no humming under the breath.

Suddenly she is beside me again, the human postscript, panting liver into my ear, ‘When I couldn't find him this morning to give him his coffee I thought he might have spontaneously combusted because that would be just like Sheb and then I saw the kippers and then I thought
strange
and then I realized that he had left and my guess is that he is not coming back and that this is it for a father no more father Euge no more father no more Sheb.' She is so efficient there is no punctuation.

‘Wrong,' I say too late. ‘Wrong,' and I practice standing on an acorn without splitting it. I do it. A perfect shot to the air.
Pow pow.
Maybe you are watching. Please, be watching.

You tell me that an acute sense of smell can lead to impeccable balance. You tell me that this is true of the Asian elephant, and true of me. I set out to prove you right. And while I do, I imagine you, braided wire around your wrists, your waist, your ankles, being slowly pulled up to standing by me, your small army.

Riding on your bicycle to Our Spot,
secret,
every night for this past year, to dangle our lines in the lake and catch nothing, rain, sleet, the last of the snow and ice melting into a dirty cross-section of bone, a blown-out honeycomb around us, I say
Stop
whenever I see the possibility for daring. You do. At first, in alleyways and playgrounds, I balance forgotten balls on my forehead and then catch them with the back of my neck. You clap. And then I perform this same small motion with the slopes of a stranger's roof falling north and south below me. You clap more – now
five people instead of one.
Stop.
You break into an abandoned factory (fist through window,
fuck,
scar), and with a ta-da of your arm, you say, ‘Madame,' and there I use light switches as toeholds. I walk the heating ducts above the sewing machines, crawling with spiders and rust. I do handstands on the seamstresses' chairs. And then I do handstands on the seamstresses' chairs tipped onto two legs. In that sprawling emptied room, clapping, you are a crowd. Clapping, the factory is full and busy.

When I return to you, you bow, believing the daring was your own and you are invincible again; and I take your wrists, and I hold them where the braided wire would have been, the braided wire that pulled you up.

One week before you leave, you take me to the library. You breathe as though you have just been bullfighting. You have something to show me. You pull down a heavy book, the whole row with it, thud, thud, thud, not even noticing the bluster, and there in the stacks you say his name.
Finbar,
you say it in a whisper,
Finbar. Finbar
is a spell.
Finbar
is something you do not wish to disturb. You leaf through the book reverently, a family album. With it in your hands, you are no longer an orphan. You are the son of something. Something brave. Again and again, that week, we go back to the library. We go back to the same book.

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

Again and again, the librarian tells us stiffly that we cannot take the book home. Even when you empty your pockets and
offer her tobacco, spare change, a comb. Even when you plead with her, on our last day together, that Finbar is your father – the father who left you, twenty minutes old, in the maternity ward of a Kapuskasing hospital the night of the fiercest snowstorm the town had ever seen.

‘Your father?'

‘Yes, Eugenia. My father.' You stun even yourself with the announcement. And when it is made, it is like someone new has slipped into our room. With the exception of my birth, this is your quietest moment. Not used to it, I break it.

‘But you have never mentioned him before.'

‘It just came to my attention.'

‘How?'

‘You.'

And, in the hush of the library, you mime doing a handstand.

Finbar is a tightrope walker. The high wire. He ruled it flamboyant and firm. You show me photographs of him again and again, commenting on your likeness – though Finbar has what Mink would call
a face only a mother could love.
To me, he looks battered. Swollen in burls and hard waves like his bones are punching him out from the inside. They shoot through him, thoroughbreds in a gallop – his face, hooves in motion. I imagine running my hand over it. I imagine it shifting under my touch.

With your palette knife, you carefully cut the photographs from the book. When we are banned for life from the library, you tell the librarian, ‘You have a neck like a stem, which, if I was intent on destroying flowers, I would snap.' And then you hold the cut pages up to your face, a mask, and you say, ‘Boo,'
and then you laugh, and then you say, ‘Boo hoo hoo.' The librarian, shaking, frostbitten, says, ‘Beat it, buster,' and you repeat, ‘Buster,' and then we do beat it, with the push of a broad man in a blue uniform, cut pages falling from the book like bulky snowflakes, photographs of Finbar stuffed in your pockets.

When we get home, we close the door to your studio and we iron the crumpled pages flat with our hands, the tightrope a straight line again. Here is Finbar in nothing but dark tights. Swarthy, a handsome musculature, he pushes a baby tiger in a wheelbarrow on a wire the width of your thumb across Niagara Falls. The baby tiger and Finbar appear to be roaring at each other. And grinning. They appear to be in love. They are
160
feet above the gorge. Water churns below them: a death soup. Here is Finbar between two skyscrapers, cooking breakfast on a small stove, the classic: eggs over, bacon crispy, a potato onion hash, strong coffee. I imagine him lifting the coffee to his mouth, staining it. The wind gathers between the buildings. He salutes an airplane overhead. Here he is again, with a woman sitting straight-spined on a chair on his shoulders, flanking Florence, spires crooked behind them. She is tall, remarkably tall. Like you, she is instantly someone you want to know, someone you want to be shuttered in with. She waves to the crowd gathered below. Contrapuntal. They are dead quiet. A frieze. She flutters. Her dress is bandages and they are coming undone.

You tell me, ‘The woman on the chair fell to her death seconds after that photograph was taken. Some drunk shook the wire.' And then you punch the wall of your studio, your fist immediately gloved in blood like you just birthed a calf. The blood is thick and it sticks to everything you touch. Making my cheek, my neck, my hair, me, red as you tell me, ‘Some drunk shook
the wire. Some drunk shook the wire.' Two scars form on your knuckles. Of the seventy-two scars on your body, there are only four that I was there for. This moment accounts for half. I wrap a towel around your hand and I kiss your knuckles through the reddened towel, and with my new, worried mouth I pretend I am a queen in wartime. You do too. And then you lean in, your moustache now balsam-waxed in the style of his, straight across your face, a right angle in a world without right angles, Finbar's words, not your own, ‘The trick is to have a stunt that no one else can perform.' I see the words in the space between us. The lettering is gold and ornate.

‘Did Finbar fall too?'

‘He tried.'

Sometimes a slow dance, tonight a toppling – the sun sets decisively and night sweeps in, all dark majesty and menace. A Cheshire grin. The air: teeth. I eat the liverwurst sandwich. It is wood chips. It is ashes. I can hear the vacuum cleaner inside. It is the sound of accusation. Mink is cleaning. We have not spoken yet. There is no need. I will be gone soon and with my absence there will be one less thing for her to worry about. She will have to wait a few weeks, but then she can turn my bedroom into an exercise studio.

Across the street and five doors down, Meatball Marta draws her curtains closed. Of all the neighbourhood women, she is my favourite, the one whose affections I court. Her face is that of a film starlet reclining on a divan. Skin like butcher paper, lithe as an electric eel, she has a Polish accent even though she has lived here since she was a girl. When she speaks on the telephone to her relatives in Warsaw, it sounds like
cream eternity cream eternity cream.
She could have state secrets and a fan made of peacock feathers. She could have a young lover in riding pants. On her bed is a buffalo hide, a lantern shaped like a phoenix above it. Her apartment is full of candelabras. They are bronze and ornate, borrowed from Renaissance paintings. Mink calls her
the spinster in loungewear.
Marta is always dyeing her hair and apologizing to me for being moody. She collects old books. The Everyman's Library. Her apartment is sinking from the weight of them. They are stacked in her attic. She says, ‘I am unemployed. I am existentialist. I have no reason to leave the house.' I go there to look at the engravings in the books and to admire the adventurers, tall at the helms of ships, heading into the great unknown. Surely that's still on someone's map, somewhere: THE GREAT UNKNOWN.

Now her lights flicker yellow, like gnomes live there and they are bustling beside a great hearth, like her hovel is the one you find when you are lost in the forest and need a heel of bread. For a moment, I want to go there and have her pat my head and speak to me in her hard syllables, bricks of gold. I want her to calm me. But I don't dare. I could miss you.

I see what you are thinking. Why you didn't come earlier. It is all clear. As the outlaw says, cocksure, swayback, wet toothpick in the teeth, I must be under the cover of darkness to be wrapped in a horse blanket and stolen away.
Pow pow.
Now is the time. I know all about night, its roominess. I watched the movies with you, our fingers tangling in the popcorn. You would roar alongside the lion and then the movie would start and you would sink to a squat and fall still as a disciple. That black-and-white stutter broadcast on a sheet in your studio: cowboys liver-spotted with dirt loping through teepees; mistresses in nightgowns, purse-sized rifle clutched in hand, boss-lover's blood seeping into the carpet below; a spy on his elbows inchworming under a French window. You would cry for a thing downed, for a thing won. You could not distinguish their world from ours. I could. But I would pretend the delusion. ‘Huzzah,' you would say, ‘huzzah.' Cigarette stem ghosting the air. ‘Huzzah,' I would answer, like a good catch, ‘huzzah.'

The last time I visit Marta, one week ago, she pats my head as she always does. She wears an oval locket around her neck. It is new. She will not let me see who is in it. Her hair is Chicago
Night Life Black and matted and she has not dressed even though it is evening. Her cheeks are flushed like she has been tilling a field of stone or weaving wool to make garments for hundreds of children. She is full of children. They are quiet hills growing inside of her. She smells like she is fermenting. When I ask her if she has a fever, she says, ‘No, I am sanguine.' When I ask her if she is pregnant, she says nothing and pulls a book down for me, the shelf teetering as if it is a beginner stilt walker.

The book is about a girl three oceans away who invents a language for a rope. The girl transmits a series of desires and commands to her rope and, to her astonishment, it rises an inch off the ground, and then a foot, until it coils up and lassoes itself through the air, coming back to her feet, and it dances for her and then it dances with her and then she thinks she hears it chuckle.

The girl feels a closeness with the rope that far surpasses anything she has ever felt with human beings, even her grandmother, whose kindness is never cumbersome. This closeness, like an undertow, makes her go toward the rope and away from everything else. She repeats these conversations with the rope a thousand times a day. Always away from her home and her school so that she will not be mocked or called mad. Always in the same untravelled clearing in the woods, between the jackfruit and the betel nut, bamboo creepers, the jamun and the mango. Until she does not have to have any other conversations. One day, she looks around as everyone eats their meals and laughs and wears certain shoes and ties their hair the same way and she wonders, missing her rope:
When did I become so different from everybody else?