Sarah Court

BLACK POWDER STARDUST

On the day she ordered a police deputy to shoot my squirrel, Clara “Mama” Russell sat on her bed with a baby and a short-barrelled revolver.

I’d come home from school to discover my pet squirrel, Alvin, shot. He’d gotten into the baby’s pram. But Alvin was harmless. The baby wasn’t even hers. I banged on her door. Jeffrey, one of her boys, answered. Well-dressed and terribly clean. Another of her boys, Teddy, would later burn our house down.

“Mama’s pipe is flowing very black,” said Jeffrey. I pushed past him and found Mama with the baby and the gun. Mama Russell, a solid woman. A human dumptruck. But right then, with her radish eyes and bloody fingernails, she looked like a cheap umbrella blown inside-out by the wind.

“Patience Nanavatti, isn’t it? The fireworker’s daughter.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Mama.”

“Yes, Mama.”

A shiny silver six-shooter. I’d never seen a gun. Could have been fake except for how it dimpled the duvet. That way its weight expressed itself. Mama picked it up. She tickled the baby’s foot with the gun’s silver hammer. Then she set the barrel under her own chin. Brought it to the tip of one ear round the curve of her neck. Had it been a razor she would’ve slit her own throat.

“What it is to be a parent,” she said. “Choices. Each more difficult than the last.”

Her eyes snagged on that silver “O” of the barrel as it traced the her upper lip. She seemed perplexed to find it there — in her house, in her hands — and she dropped it.

“Oh! But it isn’t loaded.”

She never did show me the empty chambers.

“You won’t tell anyone. Our secret, Patience. Promise me.”

“I promise.”

The woman angles through racks of OshKosh B’Gosh bib overalls and Jamboree caterpillar-patterned dresses under a display poster of a bugeyed kid heaving on a giant harmonica. She vanishes behind a bin of pickedover boxer shorts.

Wal-Mart. High-intensity fluorescents, elevator music — presently Belinda Carlisle’s “Heaven is a Place on Earth”—the thoughtless seethe as shoppers quest for Windex or paperclips or rotisserie chickens. Spell of consumerism: they find themselves outside with bags of crap viable under these lights but in the sane light of day clearly worthless. Fuck me, they must think, what am I doing with this giant plastic candy cane full of cinnamon hearts?

Myself, I steal. Whatever fits unobtrusively in my pockets. Batteries up to D-cell. Panties, though a woman with too many panties seems debauched. Dr. Scholl’s jelly shoe inserts, even though nothing’s the matter with my feet. Not that I’m poor. Only that walking past the sensors — I make sure to rip off the magnetized tags — girdled with ill-gotten loot, I am satiated. Before long the emptiness crawls back. My existence is consumed, in fact, by emptiness avoidance. I’ll scan nuptial announcements in the paper, don a fugly crinoline dress, show up at churches to insert myself into photographs. It’s an art, fitting unobtrusively into the frame. Time it right and there’s you with a shit-eating grin backgrounding an earnest portrait of total strangers. My crinoline dress and goofy grin cropping up in wedding albums all over the Niagara peninsula; couples will flip through years later wondering: Who the hell’s that? and say: “She must be from your side of the family.”

That woman in kidswear is shoplifting. I can smell my own. Normally I’d watch the rent-a-cops descend on her. Instead I return the Energizers to their hook and trail after. Down an aisle of picture frames: the same cute, blonde, pigtailed girl grins out of them all. Passing through women’s wear I unhook all the bras on the display mannequins: a horde of armless, legless, nipple-less silver torsos in my wake. Catch my profile in a mirrored support column: green eyes beneath brows that fail to reach the inner edge of my eyes give my face a truck-flattened, wide-set aspect. A combat jacket from the Army Surplus. We frumps are the most easily ignored.

I find her in Housewares fingering crockpots. She can’t steal those — tough to convince security you’re afflicted with a crockpot-sized stomach tumour— so I figure she’ll make for Cosmetics. Stuff her socks with eyeliner pencils. She’s really down at the hoof. An air of unconcern about her looks. Except there’s no calculation to it, the way some people go about slovenly as a half-assed statement. No more interest in her appearance than your average bag lady.

She pulls a U-ey at Fabrics. I lose her amidst unravelling bolts of merino wool. I do my best impression of a neurotic shopping for pinking shears—“These ones have the comfort-grip handles,” I whisper. “These are endorsed by Martha Stewart”—until she exits the public toilets.

Wal-Mart’s toilets. Same Wal-Mart halogens, same Wal-Mart paint: eggshell white with a greenish under-hue. The colour of an egg with a stillborn chick inside. Water slicked over the tiles. Had she tried to flush a tampon — a boxful?

A puffy lump wedged down the lone bowl. Mycoloured: I mean to say, the colour of skin. The fact it’s in a toilet prevents my understanding. A baby in a crapper fails to conform to any known reality so remains as unbelievable as satellite footage of that same baby orbiting Saturn. Face down, arms pinned in the guts of the bowl where the plumbing begins so all I see is a wad, not distinguishably human, clogging things.

I reach into the toilet to grip the body and turn it, her, face up. Skin stained 2,000 Flushes blue. I accidentally bonk her head on the lid and hope to Christ I didn’t hit her fontanelle and squash something — her sense of smell? zest for life? — permanently.

I cradle her, dripping, to the diaper change station. Root my index finger through her mouth fearing the insane bitch stuffed her throat full of toilet paper. Close my lips over her mouth and nose. I might’ve inhaled her entire head if it wasn’t so bulbous, that being the style of baby heads. Blow too hard and I’ll rupture her lungs. So I’m blowing as if to inflate a fleshed-out plum.

Not a cough, sigh, or puke and all this is now barrelling toward a senseless end. Trying to pour life into a permanently stoppered vessel — had to head the list of Worst Human Experiences. Top five, guaranteed. My fingerprints all over this beautiful dead body.

“Breathe.” Thumb-pumping her sternum. “You stupid little bitch, breathe.”

A gutful of warm toilet water. This wee infant girl’s bawling.

I was told my mother died birthing me. You could say I killed her, though this is the only course nature can unfortunately take. My father survived, but you could say his heart did not. It went hard as pig leather in his chest, with no capacity for much else but me. And Alvin, as it would turn out.

Philip Nanavatti, my father, built fireworks. An archaic livelihood, same as a cobbler. His work funded by cigarette companies who organized a competition, Symphony of Fire, where fireworkers from across the globe set off volleys from rafts floating on Lake Ontario. He was more wizard than artisan. Much of this had to do with what he created. A cobbler mends shoes, a pair of which is owned by everyone and exist permanently beneath our eyes; through natural processes of alignment, the cobbler comes to be seen the same. Fireworks are totally unnecessary. The cobbler is earthbound. The fireworker’s domain is the heavens.

He looked the part of wizard, albeit a modernday variety. A threadbare man who cultivated a beard out of expediency and the rising cost of razor blades. His favourite article of clothing a macrame poncho bought on a Pueblo reserve, which he wore in his drafty basement workroom. Drywall hung with tools whose outlines he traced in black marker. Unlike other handymen whose toolboxes contained spanners and drillbits and lugnuts, my father’s contained pill bottles — he bought them wholesale from a medi-supply company — full of powders, pellets, shards, clusters, and gems all carefully labelled. Sodium D-Line. Potassium Perchlorate. Rice Starch. The indentation of safety goggles permanently impressed into the flesh round his eyes, the way spectacle-wearers have nose-pad grooves on their noses.

My father once found a box of flashcubes at a garage sale. A joyous discovery, it turned out. We returned home with haste, to the basement, where he put the cubes in a vice and drilled a hole through the paper-thin glass.

“Everything on earth is made up of four elements,” he told me. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. All living things are carbon-based. There is a static number of carbon atoms on our planet. No more or less today than a trillion years ago. Things are born, live, expire, break down to component elements. Those carbon atoms go on to be part of new life. Like plasticine: mould a dog, smush it up, mould a cat. The bulk of matter never changes. Only the creations.”

He had me fetch an egg from the icebox. He poked a hole in it to drain white and yolk. He mixed coloured magnesium with the flashbulb powder and funnelled it into the egg. Wadding, a fuse, sealed with a bead of paraffin wax.

“You and I are cobbled together out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. You may have a trilobite’s tail in your elbow, pet. A cell from Attila the Hun in your eye. Your tonsils could have a brontosaurus nail in them.”

“Where did we come from?”

“The simplest answer is the stuff making up all life is hydrogen, whose atoms come from the fusion process taking place at the centre of suns. So I suppose you can say we come from stellar waste.” He touched the tip of his tongue to a canine tooth. “Or from stardust. Better?”

“Better.”

“Stardust, then.”

The park near our house had shuffleboard courts. White sandblasted stone. Dad centred the egg on the court and waved me back to the jungle gym. He lit the fuse and ran with hands tucked over his head: gait of a soldier running down a foxhole.

“A carbonized imprint,” he said after the detonation. “Magical, isn’t it?”

The shuffleboard court was framed with colours, shapes, patterns or their raw inklings. A solar system in miniature: every manifestation of life, insect and beast and plant and forms long extinct or as yet undiscovered helixing into each other, nameless in their complexities. Limbs and stalks, broken angles, conchial whorls, geographic forms that struck as unnatural only as they existed beyond my understanding. The arch of a swan’s neck thinned into an umbilical cord shot through with emerald threads spidering into beetle-legged strands which in turn shattered into violently-coloured orbits. Such designs must exist, invisible, all about us. When the powder in that egg ignited, powerful chemical magnets drew them out of the air to imprint them, recklessly, on the stone.

Who else but a wizard could conjure a sight like that?

Lieutenant Daniel Mulligan is attractive if horsetoothed. He smiles in a manner that — were his lips to skin back to reveal the pink beds his teeth are buried in — might be wolfish. A horse-toothed wolf?

A corkboard-panelled room at the Niagara Regional Police headquarters. Terrazzo tiles scuffed with shoe skidmarks. It’s not difficult to envision them being made by a stave-gutted plainclothesman pivoting on his brogan to smash a telephone book into a poor perp’s skull. Lt. Mulligan picks at a wart on his index finger. Distressingly, it resembles a nipple. A finger-nipple. A… fipple? When I think of his hands upon my body — as I’ve been doing since he came in — I now picture spongy growths like toadstools popping up every place he’s touched.

“The woman. Tell us what she looked like.” “Us?”

“The constabulary working this case.”

“I’m a case?”

Mulligan smiles.

“You’re a good Samaritan. Yes?”

He sets a folder on the table. Patience Nanavatti

on a label affixed to its tab. Cleat-shod music-box ballerinas spin pirouettes up my spine.

“My permanent record?”

He flips it open. “Says here you peed your pants in grade five gym. Kidding. That whole ‘permanent record’ stuff, it’s bullsh — malarkey. If everyone left that kind of paper trail, paper-pushers would get biceps big as grapefruits shoving it around.” His laugh indicates the paper-pushers of his acquaintance are shrivelled of arm. “You’re nervous.”

“Trying to remember if I peed my pants in grade five.”

“That’s not germane to the investigation.”

He directs my attention to a wall-mounted TV. “Security tapes. Took awhile to get clearance — big conglomerates.”

Footage: iron greys wash into gauzier greys. Spots of polar whiteness. Humanoid shapes move herkyjerk: the world’s most tedious nickelodeon show. The woman is a dark, jagged, lumpen apparition ghosting through the frame.

“That’s her.”

“Right, we’ve ascertained as much. What we’re interested in, Ms. Nanavatti—”

“Patience. Please.”

“Details, Patience. The description you gave the onsite officer… you told him”—reading directly from the page—“the perpetrator seemed to be enveloped in malaise. He’s also transcribed your claim she didn’t have an evil heart.”

“She was confused. Or ill.” Tapping my skull. “You know…”

“Descriptions such as ‘having the eyes of a hunted animal’ aren’t valuable from an investigative standpoint.”

“She looked… like she could use a friend?”

Mulligan rubs his forehead as if a toothy determined something were trying to tunnel out. His pleading expression softens the contours of his face. More handsome than the last guy I dated. An indemand sessional musician, he said. He performed the guitar riff that plays over the Seven-day Forecast on the Weather Channel. He couldn’t come inside me. Retarded ejaculation; I looked it up. A phobia based on insecurity. Fear of losing control. Or of infection, which seemed more likely: he told me he’d slept with a groupie “on tour,” afterwards spotting a pubic louse drowned in the bus toilet. A tiny banjo with pincers, he said. We worked on it. We’d have sex and when he was close I’d get out of bed and stand in a corner so he could masturbate. Next I sat in bed while he jerked off. We worked all the way up to him spurting on my tummy. Soon after finishing inside me the first time — he wore two condoms — he moved to Portland to join a jam band.

“Are you an artist, Patience?” Mulligan asks. “What is it you do for a living?”

I hand him a glossy leaflet out of my purse. A naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars over her nipples. A large pink star over her crotch. EZWhores-For-Fone! 1-976-SLUT (UK: 976-SLAG)! The Original Phone Sex Maniacs! Fetish Cellar! Sissy Training!

Imagine attending a dinner party at an acquaintance’s home and using the washroom but instead of the bathroom door you mistakenly open the door to a closet full of mannequin parts. The look on your face at that moment is the same look Lt. Mulligan wears right now.

“I’m only an operator,” I tell him. “I facilitate caller interactions.”

He slips the leaflet into his blazer pocket. “Ah.” “The woman had brown eyes.” Brown is the most common shade and nothing about the woman was remarkable. “Dark brown.”

He scribbles this down. I ask what’s going to happen to her.

“We have to locate her first.”

“I don’t mean her.”

“Yes, right. Baby’s at the General Hospital. Tests, that kind of thing.”

“Can I see her? It may jog something.”

“I’ll check.”

“Will you go out for a cup of coffee?” Compelled to clarify: “With me?”

“My wife would not approve of me sharing coffees with strange women.”

I’d seen his wedding ring. Many people are married. Not all happily so.

“Great fireworks displays,” my father said, “should expand within a viewer’s mind.”

The Mushrooming Imprint. My father’s phrase. It describes the effect any disciplined fireworks engineer should strive for. All displays leave a stamp upon the sky: only gasses in their dissipation, as unremarkable as fumes exiting a tailpipe. The Mushrooming Imprint was created when viewers closed their eyes as the lingering afterimage evolved. You could go a lifetime, eighty or ninety firsts of July, never seeing The Mushrooming Imprint.

Myfather’ssignaturefireworkwas‘Bioluminescence.’ “Some creatures produce their own light, Patience. It’s called ‘cold light,’ as it produces no heat. The anglerfish has a glowing bell dangling off the front of its face on a pole of skin, like a man holding a lantern before him in a storm. Smaller fish are enticed into attacking the bell and the anglerfish”—he brought his palms sharply together—“chomp! Deepsea fish cannot exist in sunlight. If you one netted one and dragged it to the surface, its skin would turn to jelly and slide right through your fingers.”

“Bioluminescence” began by affixing pellets of nitrate fertilizer to monofilament fishing line using a dab of superglue. My father tied these to wooden dowels suspended in a refrigerator box containing a dog’s breakfast of camphors and chlorides, the concentrations of which were guarded even from me. The box sat in our basement—“The Fermentation”— and when its seams were cracked the powders had drawn up to coat the pellets. Gumball-sized with patinas invidious to their creation. Some were riots of colour with rips of magenta and gold. Others dusty under camphorous wraps. They went into honeypots packed with black powder.

Each ball, wearing dozens of chemical coats, blasted skyward on a tight trajectory. They bounced off one another; each collision peeled a coat. Every carom and ricochet sent the spectacle higher as it burnt brighter. The balls had a brief life span as combustion and contact peeled them down to their fertilizer cores, which burst with a faraway sound not unlike milk-doused Rice Krispies.

Closing your eyes — as spectators did, instinctively — you would see The Mushrooming Imprint. Think of warm breath on a winter windowpane: tendrils of radiating frost, each unique to the breather.

My father was a genius. Narrow of scope, but nevertheless.

I asked my father how creatures came to exist at the bottom of the sea. He said over trillions of years weaker specimens got pushed down deep. Relegated to blackest waters.

“Darwinism, pet. Big eats small. Nature has its hierarchy. They didn’t end up there of their choice. Who could want to live in the dark?”

Yet the colossal squid hunts the darkest ocean channels and will attack sperm whales, sharks, even orcas. Prehistoric Megalodon, ten times the size of a great white shark, is believed to still exist in volcanic trenches along the sea bed. As a child it was the darkness between fireworks that enthralled me. The ongoing dark of an unlit sky. Even today I’ll wake in the still hours of night to stare pie-eyed into the darkest corner of my room. Dimensionless black like a hunger. Some organisms are happiest at bonecracking depths, guided by lights of their own kindling.

“Ms. Nanavatti? Patience Nanavatti?”

“This is she.”

“Donald Kerr. From Wal-Mart. The legal end of the boat.”

I picture him hogfaced in a southernfried lawyer getup. Those white suits that incorporate the sweat of their wearers to set the works aglitter like a stretch of sun-dappled shoreline.

“We’re calling to see how you’ve been since your… little incident.”

“We’re calling?”

“I mean to say, we, the legal team. May I first of all say, kudos! Were it not for your calm in the eye of the typhoon, a young life would have been snuffed. A toilet. Dear God. Happens every day, Ms. Nanavatti; that’s the horrifying truth. Babies left in Arby’s dumpsters and worse. The other day one poor dear was found in a crack den — you’re familiar with crack, Ms. Nanavatti? The inexpensive derivative of cocaine? — in a crack den, Ms. Nanavatti, behind the radiator, Ms. Nanavatti. Good Lord,” he says, as if in horrified realization at the past fifty words to exit his mouth. “Mainly women commit these acts. As I’ve noticed in researching the incident you were involved in. The hero of! I mean not to impugn your sex; yours is the better of mine, as anyone associated with reprobate behaviour will attest. You try to make sense of it, Ms. Nanavatti. I mean myself, a man, a father. Beggars reason. An ongoing struggle between mother and child? The mother’s way of saying, I bore you into this world, chum, and I can as easily take you out?”

I smile. Not at the grisly bent of Donald Kerr’s mind, but at the fact a company of Wal-Mart’s stature has retained such a colossal wingnut as legal council.

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Who would? Crazyperson talk! This job’ll do that to the best of us — not to claim I ever was. Have you children, Ms. Nanavatti?”

“Not as yet.”

“Flummoxed to hear it. Scalded, electrocuted, burnt to bones. Horrifying to do to anyone, let alone an infant. Donald,” he scolds himself, an old dog beyond better breeding. “Again, I apologize. Some at this firm believe I ought to retire, Ms. Nanavatti. Rumblings I’ve become an eyesore and embarrassment.”

“Are you calling in reference to a problem?”

“Oh-ho-ho, heavens no! It’s only… have you much familiarity with the law, Ms. Nanavatti? Lawsuits? Citizens of our great land have it into their heads they’re karmically entitled to gross financial recuperation for every petty inconvenience. It’s a finger-pointing, me-first, I-was-wronged-so-gimmegimme legal system. Give a jackal a bite of meat and it’ll come ripping for your jugular!”

He apologized for this second outburst. I was beginning to like Donald Kerr.

“Ms. Nanavatti, you may recall that dizzy old grandma — sorry, sorry; everybody’s got a grandma— that dotty old darling who dumped McDonald’s coffee in her lap. A cool mil for a first-degree burn? Buy plenty of calamine lotion. Marinate in the muck. Okay, maybe her coffee was a touch hot. What’s the alternative? Serve it cold? Nonsense! Consider your — our — situation in this light. A baby nearly dies in a washroom. Not any old washroom: the most successful retail chain in the free world. Not flukily or through folly of its own devising. Maliciously. What can my client do? Video cameras in their bathrooms? Fah! Customers will worry about seeing themselves on those Girls-Caught-Peeing websites. No bathrooms, then? Let shoppers tinkle into the pockets of winter coats? Building codes dictate sanitary washrooms in retail outlets. It’s one ittybitty word, safe, at issue. Are the bathrooms safe? Insofar as there is nothing innately dangerous about them. Wal-Mart’s hardware section isn’t innately dangerous until someone grabs a hammer and brains somebody in Electronics. Nothing innately dangerous about coffee, either. Still, one clumsy dingbat made mucho hay off a cup of coffee. There’s always that nickel to be shaved.” Donald Kerr laughs a sporting laugh. “Bleed the beast but leave enough to keep the heart pumping to bleed it a little more!”

“I’d better have my people call your people,” I tell him, and hang up.

Afterwards I decide to take a walk. The sky is threatening so: galoshes and an umbrella. After two blocks the clouds withdraw. Sunlight paints the neighbourhood. My feet, trapped in militarysurplus rainboots, are sweating furiously. Mormon kids from Glenridge Academy pedal by on bicycles: boys and girls dressed the same, riding the same sized bikes with matching white helmets following their headmistress. Ducklings waddling after their mother.

At the elementary school children are out on recess. Pierced upon the chainlink fence are pop cans and pudding cups. A girl with a mouthful of orangepulp-clung braces holds out sticks to three friends. “Whoever gets the shortest stick we’ll hate for the rest of the day.”

Were a man standing here as I am, rainboots and an umbrella on a cloudless day staring intently over a schoolyard, you’d think he was a molester. But onlookers would peg me as deranged or more likely, wistful. She wants a child. I’m fairly certain I could be a molester.

My gaze is drawn to a fat boy in a black cape. Sitting alone on a teeter-totter. The sight strikes me as emblematic of futility possibly cosmic in scope. He’s eating candy shaken from a brightly coloured box. Nerds. I haven’t eaten Nerds in decades. Abruptly I wish to taste the world as a child. At the supermarket I stride past a bin of multicoloured spuds—BOUTIQUE POTATOES ½ PRICE! — to the candy aisle. Scan for floorwalkers before prying the lid off a tub of gummy worms. Oh! Too bloody sweet. How do kids eat this garbage? On to the baby aisle. I may look motherly in that my surroundings support that viewpoint. By placing me against a forest backdrop I’d look outdoorsy. Or in a rubber room: bonkers. Lord, all the diapers! Ultra-slim: what sort of parent is so paranoid about their baby’s girth they need to buy low-profile turd-collectors? Super-absorbent with moisturelock gussets. These ones claim to be completely redesigned. How does one completely redesign a diaper without Mother Nature first redesigning the human excretory system?

Baby food. Strained Bananas and Prunes catches my eye. It was all my father ate his last months. He said it hurt him to eat. I thought he meant hurt his teeth or belly, but the act inflicted more of a philosophical pain. Fuel for a motor that idiotically kept running. Mashed fruit: our first and last spoonfuls. The first from our parents and the last from our children.

“Perhaps you’ll have a child,” my father said towards the end, “and I will become part of them. A carbon atom in his eye or a vessel of her heart.”

“That’s stupid. Don’t talk that way.”

“It’s a loop. Continuous.”

“And everything and everyone must be on this blessed loop? What about… televangelists?”

“Yes, pet.” His chuckle dissolved into a hacking fit. “Even them.”

It isn’t stupid. It’s the most unselfish theory of the afterlife I know of: instead of your spirit floating intact upon a cloud, you particalize into millions of fresh lives.

A jar of Blueberry Tapioca goes into my pocket. Wax Beans and Vegetable. Fruit Medley. At home I arrange them in a pyramid on the table. The answering machine flashes.

Lieutenant Mulligan from the NRP. It’s been approved for you to view the baby…

I had a pet squirrel. I wanted to name him Alvin, after the cartoon character. My father preferred Ming Fa, after a fireworks guru from feudal China.

Alvin entered our lives in the jaws of Excelsior, Mama Russell’s sweet-tempered sheepdog. She deposited the red, squealing, saliva-slick blob on our lawn.

At the house of our neighbour, Frank Saberhagen, there once stood a pine tree. The tree failed to jibe with Saberhagen’s post-divorce aesthetic: he’d ripped out the sod, salted the earth, and carpeted his yard with shaved white schist imported from Egypt. The pine was plagued with bark weevils. Needles gone brown. Only the doctor’s macabre taste kept it alive.

A brain surgeon who’d assisted on the groundbreaking Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, Saberhagen evidently found it cathartic to set aside the scalpel in favour of the double-bitted axe. A fluid tornado of a man with the tight-packed frame of a circus acrobat, he’d stood shirtless, axe in hand, boots gritting on the schist comprising his front yard — a horticultural perversity rendering him persona non grata in the neighbourhood — taking crazed strokes at the tree. For all his deftness in the operating theatre, Saberhagen was a bungler when it came to lumberjacking. The axe blade ricocheted off the trunk. Pine cones pelted his head.

“Give ’er hell, Quincy!” called his neighbour, Fletcher Burger. Saberhagen’s nickname was based on the coroner played by Jack Klugman in the series of the same name, the morbid suggestion being Saberhagen was such a poor surgeon his professional dossier included as many corpses as the fictional coroner.

Observing the flailings of his owner was Moxie: a vile-tempered corgi Saberhagen had been forced to accept during his divorce proceedings. Whereas in many divorces custody of a pet is viciously quarrelled over, the Saberhagens’ quarrel was over who would be obliged to shuffle the dog off its mortal coil. The ex-Mrs. Saberhagen — who at a block party was heard stating that her then-hubby possessed “All the personal charm of a deathwatch beetle,” and went on to characterize him as “giving about as much back to the world as a drainpipe”—was victorious. The flatulent, oily-coated, grumpy old dog became Frank’s tortuous burden.

Moxie was deeply disagreeable. He constantly escaped Saberhagen’s yard by digging under the fence. Nobody would pet him on account of (a) the corgi’s furious digging occasioned some breed of canine skin disorder manifesting in a greasy hide that stunk of rotting fruit and (b) Moxie snapped at anyone who petted him, anyway, providing less incentive to perform what was already a revolting kindness. Cross-eyed and splenetic, Moxie pissed on marigolds and harassed birds at their baths. Saberhagen no longer responded when his pager flashed: Neighbour called. Dog loose again.

Saberhagen eventually delivered the pine’s deathblow. The tree split up its trunk and toppled. Moxie was splayed on the porch with Nick, Saberhagen’s son. Cross-eyed as he was, the corgi did note the clutch of baby squirrels tipped from their nest. He bounded off the porch to gleefully gulp down three or four.

Their frightful dying squeals compelled Excelsior to leap off Mama Russell’s porch into Saberhagen’s yard. Crazed on squirrel meat, Moxie lunged for the much larger sheepdog’s throat. Excelsior seized the corgi by his scruff and whipsawed her head to fling Moxie a good ten feet. The dog’s ungraceful trajectory took him over the tree; he hit harshly and rolled as tumbleweeds do.

Excelsior rooted through the branches to recover the remaining squirrels. That all four fit safely in the pouches on either side of her teeth was the first oddity. The second was that she dropped them on four different lawns. One she left at the Hills. One she left at Mama Russell’s house, where it was taken in by her “boy,” Jeffrey. One for Abigail Burger. Alvin given to me.

“The momma squirrel won’t take it back now,” my father said. “Your scent’s on it. It’s tainted. The mother might eat it. Mothers can be like that. In the animal kingdom.”

We packed a shoebox with cotton batten and set Alvin beneath a gooseneck lamp. I was concerned this may scald him: his pink skin put me in mind of the flesh under a fresh-picked scab. His paws so much like tiny human hands. I wished he would open his eyes so I might intuit what he wanted. But when his eyes did open they were inexpressive black bulbs.

Each day Alvin remained alive, often barely so, I took as a breed of miracle. My father filled an eyedropper with cornstarch-thickened milk and fed him. He’d squirt hypoallergenic soap into his palm, set Alvin in the bowl of his hand to clean him with gentleness bordering on reverence.

“So fragile. Bones like sugar.”

A covering of black fur filled over Alvin’s body. His tail, a nippley nubbin, came in bushy. He never grew quite as big as a squirrel should.

One afternoon he dashed out the patio door. My father pursued—“Alvin! Come to your senses!”— and, spying him in the crotch of the backyard elm, jabbed a banana on the end of a stick as an enticement. When the squirrel refused, Dad mooned by the window, yet he soon turned philosophical. Not an abandonment, he reasoned, but the animal’s natural predilection.

“Squirrels live in trees. Gather nuts. As they’ve always done.”

“Sorry I left the patio door open, Dad.”

“Never mind, pet. Recall the old saying: ‘If you love something, let it go.’”

Overjoyed as my father was when Alvin returned that night, he resolved to let an animal be an animal. Mornings Alvin bolted out his squirrel-door — a miniature doggy door my father installed — to dash across the fencelines attaching yard to yard. Plaguing, in the inimitable manner of squirrels, the local canine population. Even Excelsior chased Alvin, who chattered cheekily from a high bough while the poor sheepdog howled.

Later, Alvin was shot dead with a revolver.

Mama Russell took in troubled children. Her “boys,” they were known. Teddy and Jeffrey spent years in her care. Others who broke curfew or broke into neighbours’ houses were sent away. At the time of Alvin’s death, Social Services remanded an infant into Mama’s custody until a foster family could be secured. Mama named him Carter, though she had no right. Afternoons she paraded baby Carter round the court in a pram. Alvin, naturally curious, stole into the pram. I pieced this together afterwards.

Mama swatted at Alvin, who scrambled up a tree. Mama called the police. A cruiser was dispatched. A deputy not long on duty unloaded on Alvin with his service revolver. Centre of mass, as they teach at the academy.

A squirrel weighing that of a bar of soap. Annihilated. My first attempt at parenthood culminated with a squirrel so blown apart there wasn’t much to bury.

“You mustn’t give your heart to wild things,” my father said that night. “Or take on burdens of care more than you need to.”

“But aren’t I a burden?”

“I had no choice with you, pet. And was glad not to. But.” Spoken with finality. “But.”

Take the hospital elevator to the pediatric ward. The evening shift nurse — body garrulous in heft but her face having none of it — eyes me in my military surplus parka. REYNOLDS stamped in black on the breast pocket.

“A fine thing, what you did,” she says, after I identify myself. “Lucky you were there.”

The compliment comes off backhanded: as if my managing to rescue the baby was as unbelievable as my having landed a harrier jump-jet on a cocktail napkin. The nurse glides past darkened delivery rooms on soft-soled shoes silent as a razor blade through a bowl of water. A mesh-inlaid mirror runs the length of the nursery. Inside I am struck by the smell of new life.

We’re all rotting. Your body hits a peak at eighteen, maybe, and that perfect bodily zenith lasts how long? A day, or a few hours of that day? Next, descent and decay. Strains and aches and dimming sight. Stuff yourself with carcinogens because you’ve surrendered to the inevitability of collapse. You get winded climbing a flight of stairs. Following that, lumps and lesions to ice your heart. The Big C? Hold the whole tortured works together another fifty years and you’re granted the merciful stillness of the grave.

But the nursery is stuffed full of showroommodel humans. Brand-spanking new, factory-fresh rolled off the assembly line. Impregnated with that new-baby smell. Assaulted by pound upon pound of sprightly, helpless baby-meat, I fleetingly wish I was some breed of vampire. A youth vampire. Flap round the nursery on talcum-powdered wings poking my head into hermetically-sanitized tubs to hoover the youthful essence out of these helpless things. Partake of their luscious and nourishing, sinfully yummy esprit. Drain these beautiful babes until I was a child again and my organs no longer on the rot, cherubic as I dash away shed of my too-big clothes. I’d flee barefoot from a nursery full of withered crepe-paper baby husks.

“So small,” I say, peering at my little toilet baby. “Was she…”

“A preemie?” The nurse shakes her head. “Only malnourished. Think of a plant under a porch: it’ll grow down there in the dark and damp. Just not so well.”

“May I have some time alone?”

“Make it quiet time. If one wakes, they all wake.”

The baby’s name card affixed to the tub: JANE DOE #2. I section her sleeping face in search of the woman who’d tried to murder her. But that woman exists in my memory only as a tangle of emotional drives. Her face is my own face. The face of everyone I’ve even known. She made a premeditated choice to dump this life in a retail chain toilet. Abdicate her responsibilities in such vicious fashion. How had she seen her life changing? Your own defenseless child— how deep must you core into any heart to find that mammoth well of expedience?

Unbutton my coat. Cradled in stirrups of my own creation — oversize suspenders accommodating a cardboard papoose — is a doll I’d stolen from a toy store.

Teddy, another of Mama Russell’s boys, set fire to my father’s workshop and burnt to death in our basement. Dad was mailing a package. I was in my bedroom with Abigail Burger, Fletcher Burger’s daughter.

Teddy was a pygmy pyromaniac with burn scars on his arms pink as pulled taffy. He wore boxy black glasses with melted armatures. He’d soak ant hills in lighter fluid and set them ablaze. He said things like: “My penis is two and a third inches long” or “Anacondas have one twelve-foot-long lung” or “My mama had a nerve disorder. And Poppa is a sailor.” He was known to eat his elbow and knee scabs. Cut holes in his trouser pockets so he could squeeze his testicles. Mama had Teddy wear linen gloves so he wouldn’t break the skin as he throttled them. He shimmied through our basement window while Abigail and I ran our squirrels through a maze of shoe boxes and toilet paper rolls.

Abby was my only real friend. Her father, Fletcher, had the bombastic and overbearing demeanour of an East German gymnastics coach. Forever dragging her off on bike rides or nature hikes that unfolded more like the Bataan death march. Of orangutang proportions, he was often seen in a sweatsuit with a digital stopwatch strung round his neck.

“Abby!” he’d call. “Bike ride!”

“I don’t want to ride my bike.”

“Who’s that talking? Is it Flabby Abby?”

“I’m not flabby.”

“You will be, my dear, if you don’t ride your bike.”

Fletcher was fanatical about his daughter’s fitness. Abby became a champion powerlifter. Her father credited much of her success to his “Energizer Bowls”: brown rice, broccoli, and amino acids concocted in massive batches and stored in a chest freezer in the garage. Abby said the last few bowls sat in the freezer so long they tasted like “a doomed Arctic expedition.”

The explosion shuddered the entire house. Volcanic wind blew up the ventilation ducts. Spumes of burning dust. Abby and I went to the window. The lawn sparkled with glass. Flames climbed the siding from blown-apart casements. Our squirrels scrambled down the downspout. We followed suit. Abby fell and snapped her wrist. A hole burnt through the roof as it collapsed into the foundation.

Teddy’s carbonized skeleton was later doused by firemen. Hands heat-welded to my father’s steel workbench. Skull pushed back on his spinal column from the force of the blast.

Insurance covered the rebuilding costs but my father assumed the neighbours blamed him. We moved away from Sarah Court, resettling way across town. Not long after the fire, my father told me I was adopted.

“Patience, sit there on the couch. A bit of a bomb I’ll be dropping.”

Less a bomb than a grenade lobbed between us — a grenade he’d feared would shatter my psyche, sense of self, my whatever else. It occasioned in me nothing but curiosity.

Where was I adopted?

“An institution north of here. I wasn’t an ideal candidate but a solid citizen.”

How did I end up there?

“Nobody saw the need to tell me. People do take on burdens that overmaster them.”

Why take me in?

“You needed adopting. I was in a position to do so.”

Did it ever scare you — being a father?

“There should be a training guide for new fathers. Either your head’s screwed on tight and gets unscrewed, or you come into it a wreck and fatherhood is a centralizing circumstance to an even greater crackup. Fatherhood destroys some men.”

He offered to help track my parents down. I’d no urge to find them. My father was Philip Nanavatti: this fact as cleanly connected to me as each finger at the end of each hand. The circle closed upon itself and I was content within its circumference. That I may still have a mother was no different than discovering I had an extra organ. A tiny sac or bladder that contributed nothing to my health nor brought about any sickness. A surgeon could excise it, yes, but since it was benign and I could quite happily exist with it somewhere within me, why bother?

“Your mother was not a bad person, pet.”

I never thought of her as bad. My mother is any one of a billion women in as many conditions. In prison or a boardroom or an oil sheik’s harem. A housewife in Paramus, New Jersey. A roller derby queen going by the name of Cinnamon Kiss in Poughkeepsie. A cipher, as the woman who stuffed baby Jane into a toilet was a cipher.

My mother died birthing me.

The only worrisome quality to not knowing your parents is you don’t truly know yourself. You never know what you are capable of, as you cannot see your roots. The skews of their braiding. What they touch, or fail to.

It’s that time of evening where the sun rests at that particular point in the sky: hitting your eyes directly, sunlight robs the world of dimension. Buildings become black cut-outs hammered flat by the refraction of the sun. A shape darts onto the road. I swerve, no thump, missing it.

Jane Doe sits in a car seat facing away from the dashboard. Otherwise if I crashed, accidentally or on purpose, the passenger-side airbag would deploy to crush the little-bitty bones of her face. I hit the QEW highway, going east. A squad car rushes past in the opposite lane. The highway wends past Niagara Falls to the Fort Erie border. It suddenly occurs to me that my mental state is not up to explaining Jane to the border guards.

I return to St. Catharines and park at the Big Bee convenience store near the bus depot. I pull in beside a minivan, unbuckle baby Jane, and enter the store. I microwave pablum in one of the baby bottles I’d bought. Another customer scans a low shelf with his back to me. I spy a pack of fireworks next to sacks of expired dog kibble. The microwave dings. I dab pablum on my wrist. Outside a man hops into the minivan and peels off. I angle the bottle so Jane’s lips clasp round the nipple. Press her warm body to my chest.

Tufford Manor is set off Queenston street. With its bevelled wrought iron gates inset with seraphim, its faux-granite facade shielded by second-growth willows, you’d be forgiven for mistaking it for an upscale condo complex. Until you noted the proliferation of walkers and wheelchairs and oxygen canisters. Orderlies with the air of bored cattle wranglers.

The one behind the desk is a large black man. Above the starched white collar of his uniform, his head seems to float disembodied, in the style of a magician’s trick.

“Patience,” he says.

“Nice to see you, Clive.”

A man so ancient it is conceivable he’d seen his

first military engagement during the Boer War staggers into the lobby in his sleeping flannels. His body’s all shrivelled up like a turtle that crawled under a radiator.

“Where’d you sneak off to?” Clive spots the box of wooden matches tucked under the old man’s arm. “Give them here, Mister Lonnigan.”

The old man, Lonnigan, stashes the matches behind his back. They poke past his hipbone.

“Don’t make a nuisance,” Clive says, gently wresting them away.

“You sadistic bull Negro.”

“What have I told you about that trash?”

“Big as a bull, sadistic, and you’re a Negro.” Lonnigan pronounces it Negra. “Where am I lying?”

“You speak to wound. The preferred nomenclature is African Canadian.”

Lonnigan’s jaw juts. “When are you gonna fix my record player?”

“It’s been bust since they rolled you in.”

“You said you’d help.”

“Tomorrow,” says Clive. “Go on, now, give me peace.”

“Visiting hours are over,” Lonnigan says to me.

“Why fret every little thing, Mister L? Lighten up. You’ll live longer,” I say.

“Here’s a nudie club bartender telling me how to live. I lived plenty enough.”

“Nine-tenths of the time he’s demented,” Clive says to me. “But there’s that other tenth.”

Clive folds his arms across his chest. A puzzled but not aggressive gesture.

My father died seven months ago. His body’s interred up the road. His room presently occupied by someone else.

“I saw these fireworks and thought of Dad.”

“Long ways off the First of July, Patience.”

“Bad idea?”

Clive unknits his arms. “Long as we aim them over the golf course I can’t see the harm.”

The courtyard: clean-swept and hemmed on three sides by balconied terraces. Clive wheels Lonnigan out. A patchwork blanket is draped over the old man’s legs.

“Mr. L chummed around with your father,” says Clive.

“Didn’t know you were his relation,” Lonnigan says. “That your baby?”

Lonnigan appears to have forgotten we all start out so small. Jane grasps his index finger in her tiny fist.

“The grip on him. Be a ballplayer.”

“He’s a she.”

“I’ll be damned.”

Clive wrestles a stone flowerpot into the centre of the courtyard. Windows brighten about us. I angle a roman candle east over the golf course.

“We need matches.”

“How about it, Mr. L?” says Clive. “You got some matches for the little lady?”

“Skunk. You rotten skunk.”

“I smoke,” Lonnigan says after Clive’s gone inside for some. He cups his neck while he talks, as if to keep in fingertip contact with his heartbeat. “Cherrywood briar. Got the tobacco but they won’t let me lay my hands on matches. My doc’s a wet-behind-the-ears little sonofabitch shaver. Bastard still wears dental braces. Taking my marching orders from a, a, a — a brace-face. Pipe but no matches. Like to give a man a gun but no bullets. Don’t grow old, is my advice to you.” He gives this same warning to Jane in a high baby voice: “Don’t… grow… old.”

Clive returns with a Zippo. Coloured balls of fire arc over telephone poles at the courtyard’s edge. Lonnigan’s eyes close. Eyelids thin as tissue paper wormed with red capillaries.

“When we were kids,” he says, “we’d find bullets in the fields. Battles had been fought there, you see. We’d take our spades”—he clarifies—“I mean spades as in shovels. Not that we had slaves the colour of Clive here who did our digging.”

“I’m sure Patience appreciates your meaning, Mister L.”

“… took our spades and dug up whatever the “… took our spades and dug up whatever the 30 slugs. We’d pry the slug-heads off, tap the powder onto a slip of parchment, twist it into a sachet and light the bugger. That was our fireworks.”

Screaming Devil, Volcano, Hearts of Fire. Residents occur on their balconies. Me, an old man, Clive, a child whose life I’d first saved and now stolen. If it isn’t quite the picture I’d framed in my head… had there ever been that picture?

“Fire hazard,” calls a fear-stricken voice from one of the surrounding balconies. “Fire hazard!”

“Calm down, missus Horvath,” says Clive. “Nothing but fireworks, and see? Landing on the golf course.”

“Fire haaaaaaaaaaazard!”

“Large Marge. She’s big as a barge.” When I ask Lonnigan if that’s who had voiced her concern, he chuckles. “No. That’s the other Marge yelling.”

Clive lights the Burning Schoolhouse. Cathartic for some. I never hated school. The baby’s weight against me. Exhale of her lungs.

Close my eyes. Against the canvas of my lids the schoolhouse burns on. Fresh trajectories and possibilities. Each one of my own summoning.