The Cloaca (11 page)

The new baby had been a surprise for Danny and Hannah. The first one they had planned and striven for, like working an arduous summer job to save for some grand purchase. But finding out about this new one was like finding out about a fat inheritance left to them by a relative that they didn't even know. Danny insisted that, if all went well, they would move, raise the child out of the city.

“Because something's happening to this place,” Danny said, finding that explanation enough. The day Hannah lost the baby and the night Danny got attacked had become all one incident in his mind. “It's not like it used to be,” he offered, when he saw that his first reason hadn't satisfied Hannah. “It's changed.”

Danny's brother turned them onto a new development on the outskirts. Theirs was the first new home sold and when they went to see where their new life would be it was the country still.

“Vertiginous is a word?” Danny had leaned in and said to Hannah.

“Vertiginous is a word,” Hannah confirmed.

“This is just so frigging vertiginous,” he whispered, putting his arm around her. A little in awe at all that green, all that country. Verdant was the word he had been looking for, Hannah guessed, but vertiginous was still a word. The question was what was complicated.

“Yes,” she agreed, “it is that.”

Danny and Hannah went ahead with the building, with the new life. To give complete attention to the pregnancy and whatever came from it, Hannah quit her job at the post office. The women she worked with, mostly widowed grandmothers who needed something to fill their days, had thrown her a party and made her a going-away cake. On the cake had been a stork dressed as a mail man, a bundle hanging from its beak that looked more like a full diaper than a baby. “I'm confused,” Hannah had said when they brought it out.

“Better get used to that!” the old women laughed.

Days after Hannah and Danny were all moved in, they discovered that theirs was the first and only house built before the builders ran into building problems. The work had been forced to stop.

For what was promised to be better pay, Danny left his manager's position at the vacuum store he'd been at since Hannah had met him, and took a job in the secondhand sports equipment store his brother owned, Extra Innings. In the mornings he drove into city and drove back home in the gloaming. And Hannah stayed put, holding the boy in her as tight as she could. It seems like every time Hannah phoned the store, her brother-in-law would answer. Evan would explain that Danny was with a customer just then, or that he had gone to appraise some equipment that a high school was culling. When Danny phoned her back he asked the reason for the call. “What is it?” he asked. It baffled him that someone would call for no reason.

Friday nights he would stay at Evan's house in the city, supposedly so they could hit garage sales early Saturday morning. Evan's house was also where Danny's drums had been permanently stowed. And Evan's house was also where there wasn't a wife, anymore, where Danny and Evan could work on their music. It was with each other, and a guitarist named Nic who Hannah had been dating at the time, that they had played as Bastard Hymns. Around Toronto they had shared bills with a handful of bands that went on to various degrees of success. The best the Hymns had done was placing a song on the university radio charts. A song that had been written by Nic, for her. “Hannah Spelled Backwards,” supposedly about her dyslexia. With that one whiff of success, Nic had left the band, broken up with Hannah. These were the days Danny meant when he referred to The Good Old Days.

During one visit to the doctor's, Danny couldn't get past the word “fontanel.”

“That's a weird word,” he had interrupted. “Fontanel? Sounds more like a black lady doo-wopp group.
The Fontanelles
.”

“Dan,” Hannah had said.

“What?” he shrugged. “‘Black's' not bad is it?” He looked to the doctor. “You can say ‘black,' can't you?”

For the remainder of doctor visits Danny was able to make he either stared into space, or lazily inspected the model womb. “I'd have to say,” he said once to the womb while they waited to be seen, “That you've been a model womb.”

Bundles of healthy, green lawn arrived on a flatbed and were rolled out like carpet for them. Their yard was green, but all around them was desert. Churned earth, chomped earth, upset earth. Hills of dirt, holes of dirt. There had been old, lost plans for some of this land to become a cemetery. Nothing further would be built until that got sorted and until then there were just all these holes. For the living, or for the dead.

“Fucking vertiginous,” Hannah would say, looking out the window at the sandy wasteland. Uncertain of when they could begin again, the builders had left behind their machines. In the honey haze of morning and the muzzy redness of evening the machines were stalled, dark hulks in the distance. The dumb bulk of their bodies, the slim, hooked swanness of their necks. All those heads, all those jaws. Agape, unmoving, waiting, and pointless.

No city buses ran that far out then and Hannah relied on friends from the city to come pick her up. They were all new mothers. Had the first baby taken, Hannah would be a new mother along with them, would be going stroller jogging with them, would be going for morning coffee and discussing the effects of caffeine on breast milk with them, would be going to matinees that catered specifically to new mothers. But her friends were so consumed with all these young mother activities—somehow finding time in there to raise the children—that making it out to the outskirts always seemed impossible. So in the mornings Hannah watched TV. If it hadn't been for the boy in her, she would have had beers. In the afternoons she would step out and stroll the aimless landscape. Neon orange stobs jutting from the ground were the only suggestion that this was supposed to be somewhere. There was no sound out there. Well, there was sound: the hurry and scurry of animals, the chirp of birds, the chirrup of insects, the roll of cars on the faraway road, planes flying that she couldn't see.

Hannah climbed to the top of the dirt hills and surveyed the land. From that vantage her house did not look like the first to come. From there it looked like the last to go, the last tooth in a rotted mouth.

Once, Hannah found a cat lying on its side, breathing slowly, its mouth hanging open. It was fat and lustered like a plush stuffed animal. It had a collar on. Back when she and Bethany had found the fox, Hannah asked how her sister knew it was dead. “Because if it was alive it would be running away from us right now.” Hannah crouched by the cat and watched the body move, presumably with maggots and rot gasses, never quite convinced that the thing was really dead. Amazed that the tumble of decay inside could so resemble life. She came back to that spot the next day and the cat was gone.

Hannah went to the machines. She would go and feel small next to them, feel new in the world, recent to this. She climbed on top of them, using the teeth of the tires as steps, and sat behind the controls. One afternoon she climbed aboard a machine with the keys still in it. The key chain was a little plastic gorilla, its arms up, its fangs bared, the white paint of its eyes faded and gone. She flicked the gorilla and it swayed and dangled like a hung man. She gripped the butt of the key and felt the capacity for doing wrong.

When Danny was home he was anxious and Hannah knew why. It was the distance and it was his bowels. Hannah had figured out that Danny couldn't go in the house, couldn't shit with her within nose- and earshot, even after seven years together. Back in the city he had had a ritual. Come eight o'clock he went for a drive, every night. One night she had followed him on her bike. She found his car parked at the Tim Horton's down the road. She waited twenty minutes and finally he came out without a coffee, just one of his drumming magazines rolled up under his arm, a skip in his step. So now he was squirming, holding it all in.

In all her and Danny's talk about divorce, it had never seemed like a thing they would do. Hannah wondered if it was a generational stubbornness. Her parents' generation had been so keen at making a relationship look so much like love, but had not known how to actually turn it into love. Now they all wanted out. Hannah's parents had waited for her to get married before divorcing. “We wanted to know you'd be taken care of,” they'd said. Growing up watching that, suffering it, Hannah's generation seemed dead-set on learning how to be happy living miserably. It didn't have to look like love, it just had to be love. In his way, Danny had been right about their marriage. The answer was easy, was love, but the question was what was complicated.

“How do you and Brian do it?” Hannah had asked her sister. Whenever she talked about her husband Brian it sounded like she was complaining about some friend who had been crashing at her house for fifteen years, putting a baby in her from time to time and letting the dishes pile up.

“Do what?”

Every day for two weeks Hannah returned to that giant claw with the keys still in it. She went and she sat behind the brains of it, tickling the gorilla, pinching the key. She felt urgent there, tense. There was a tightness inside which she imagined helped hold what was now the boy in. She never turned the key.

And then one afternoon she turned the key. The hulk shifted and jerked beneath her. It coughed to life, as if clearing its throat for the horrible song that it was about to sing. A spire of fetid black smoke farted out from somewhere, filling the cab and making Hannah cough. Inside of her she felt the boy shift.

Hannah turned the ignition off. She could hear the repercussion go out long and become small in the incomplete distance.

A week later the boy came. Hannah took a taxi to the hospital because Evan wasn't sure where Danny had gone. After all that time of holding him so tightly in, she had had to force the boy out.

“Birth is just the first step in a life of letting go of a child,” Bethany had told her with a sigh. “It's just the first step of a child wanting to get the hell away from you.”

Three days later she came home with the boy, with a wriggling pink grump of a thing. And all around was activity. The machines had come back to life. In the dirt fields the disembodied gullets gorged. The builders were building. Hannah was stuck at home with the boy, stuck there among the grumbling of the yellow herds and the hammering of the sun-browned men. Hannah let the men in to use the bathroom. They felt no need to hold it in around her. They passed through, tipping their hard hats, grinning at Hannah. Some of the older workers hovered over the boy, made faces at him. “We're short a guy today,” one of them joked. “Mind if we borrow this one here?”

“You can keep him,” Hannah joked back. Had she not had the boy there, her conversations with the men would have been flirting. With the boy, they were just adults being adults.

Danny didn't seem to know what to do with the boy. “I don't think he likes me very much,” Danny admitted. The boy would cry and writhe whenever Danny picked him up, or made a move to pick him up.

“Of course he likes you, Dan. You're his father.” As soon as she had said it, she realized that that made no sense. There were no promises.

He would stare at the boy, like he was trying to figure out what it was. One night she found Danny hovering over the crib. Hannah put her hand on Danny's back and her chin on his shoulder, kissed his cheek. It felt fully like a family to Hannah, until Danny spoke. “What celebrity would do his voice in one of those baby voice-over movies, do you think?”

They stared together at the sleeping baby, Hannah slowly removing herself from Danny.

“Orson Welles is dead, right?”

In three weeks there was another house just like Hannah's and Danny's and the boy's. In a week there were two more. By the time the boy had enough hand-eye coordination to hit Hannah on purpose, nowhere had become somewhere. And then someone started smashing all this glass in the street.

In the silence now, the music began again, like someone had turned a key. It bellowed and it screeched, a wailing rumpus. The boy cupped his hands to his ears and made a humdinger of a face with his fat. And then the key was taken out and there was quiet again. And there is no place more quiet than where noise has just been. But the boy kept his ears cupped, not trusting that it was done, not trusting that there wouldn't be more.

The garage door was open and the boys in the Fancy Dans faced out to the street, pretending they had an audience. Hannah waited at the bottom of the raked driveway, waited there with all the glass. The boy kept his ears cupped. The guitars squealed like one car scraping against another trying to park, the drums thumped insistently. Hannah could imagine that in their imaginations this was all spectacular. She had never particularly liked Bastard Hymns. They hadn't been very good, which was why they never went anywhere—not, as Danny always suggested, because it was all who you knew. But Hannah had loved watching them practice, loved watching them love every minute of playing their derivative songs, each the star of his own music video.

To be polite, she waited for the song to finish. Then Hannah would go to them, maybe tap a little applause. “Sounding good, guys,” she could say. Hannah wouldn't ask them to quit it with the music, she would just ask about Danny. “I don't suppose you boys have seen my husband?” But for now she waited for them to finish, there at the end of the driveway, at the spot where parents wait for their trick-or-treating kids. But the fracas kept running forward. First the vocals stopped, then the guitars, and then the bass, until it was just the drums.

Hannah climbed the drive and looked in. The boy followed behind her, squeezing the sides of his head like he was trying to crush it. Hannah looked in and the boy butted her in the bum. Hannah felt for him with her hand as she looked into the garage, and he bit her. Was this the wonder everyone kept talking about?