Sarah Court

BLACK SPOT PIPES

Pipes. Is how I see you. All human beings. Pipes. As you have running through your home. Transporting fuel, water, wastes. All you often see of a pipe is their mouth, in the form of a drain or toilet bowl. People are pipes through which different substances emit. As a boy I understood out of Mama emitted food, a bed, blankets, smacks, a home, limits, broken glass. Out of Cappy Lonnigan: tobacco, cuss words, larcenous advice. Out of Teddy: moans, burn holes, crying jags, blackened ants.

I saw the colour, texture of their emissions. Out of Mama’s pipe flowed burnt orange fluid. Out of Cappy’s: bright blue liquid that when he laughed transformed into moths. Out of Teddy’s: muddy goo stubbled with dead crickets or rusty nails.

Twist a water tap, water pours out. Not so people. Some days I could do such a thing as comment on Mama’s new haircut — which often made her orange fluid flow brighter — but instead her liquid turned blackblack, full of twitchy, screamy things. Next she committed acts meant to hurt me in ways that I am incapable of being hurt.

Cappy was a journeyman pipefitter. “I’ve been a journeyman everything,” he would say, “including husband.” He said pipes connect odd ways. People connect odd ways, too. Their colours change when they merge, the way mixing different coloured paints do. I study emissions. Colin Hill’s fluid flowed sun-hot yellow. Abigail Burger’s flowed pale violet until her father yelled at her, at which it blazed hemoglobin-red. When she came to our house after her squirrel was shot, Patience Nanavatti flowed with burping lava. But Mama ran so dark that day, all the lava bled right out of Patience.

Out of my own pipe emits grey substances the consistency of gruel.

My pet’s name: Gadzooks! An Eastern grey squirrel suckled on scalded milk. When the neighbourhood kids gathered all our squirrels to play, he was hounded by his siblings. But Gadzooks! was terribly fierce. He once tore the head off a greensnake in an eavestrough. Devoured a family of silky pocket mice nesting in Mama’s walls.

Last night Gadzooks! dashed out my apartment window, down the drainpipe onto the road. A car ran over him — over him, you understand, not ran him over. The tires did not flatten him. Still, he was dead. By the time I rushed to the street, his legs were stiffening. Trapped under that car, the roaring engine, pinned in that wash of exhaust. Any man overtaken by such unreasoning forces so, too, would die of FRIGHT.

Now: Gadzooks! is in a shoebox. On a bluff overlooking Ball’s Falls. On top of the box is a silenced Glock 10mm handgun. I am in my vendor’s blues. I am digging a hole.

Wipe my brow. Pulse check. Fifty-eight bpm. Heft the gun. Adjust for windage. Empty the magazine into an elm. Collect the shell casings. Gadzooks!: into the hole.

Voices arise. I kneel at the bluff’s edge. Three men with a blue barrel. Colin Hill, the stuntman. Wesley Hill, his father. A third young man I do not recognize.

Colin Hill strips at water’s edge. Afterwards, he crawls onshore after plummeting. He ignores his father’s outstretched hand.

My name is Jeffrey. My mother smoked crack cocaine.

An addict of loose moral virtue, says Mama, who died giving birth. “A defiance of nature,” Mama said. “A ripe apple pushed out of a rotted one.” My mother died with chalky lips, Mama says.

Three pounds, nine ounces. They called it a miracle when I failed to die. Six months with casts on my elbows so I would not pull my joints apart with my frantic infant exertions. Mama keeps the casts — so small you cannot even fit a finger into them — to remind me I was once so pitiful.

There is a stain on my brain the size of a cocker spaniel’s paw print. Occipital with spread to parietal, temporal lobes. Only dead black meat.

“Your mother was a crackhead,” Mama says, “and your poppa was a sunbeam.”

The black spot is no physical bother. My fine motor, balance, speech skills: all tip-top. My pulse rate, excellent. Yet I fail to experience pain as others do. As a six-year-old I stuck my finger into a stationary bicycle ridden by Mama’s sometime boyfriend William “Cappy” Lonnigan. “What a nutty thing to do, kid!” My finger hung by a shred. The paramedics said I was “the stoniest little trouper” they ever saw.

Sundays Mama took us to church for ablution. The congregation swayed.

“Feel it, darling?” We were all Mama’s darlings. “The LOVE?”

I do not feel LOVE. RAGE. SYMPATHY. They live in the black spot. I have woken howling odd places in twisted bodily positions, never knowing why. I see guests on daytime talk shows. Emotion-torn faces crumbling apart under studio lights. Comprehension eludes me.

Mama took me to a movie. In it, a boy with massive facial deformities taught a blind girl to “see.” He put a hot potato in her hands: RED. Cotton batten: CLOUDS.

Mama showed me a photo of baby chickadees: LOVE. A soldier in a ditch beside a bombed farmhouse: LONELY.

Cappy Lonnigan arrived, drunk, while we were at it.

“It’s the blind leading the blind.”

Good, evil: I can differentiate. But I am not impelled to pursue one path to the exclusion of the other. I camouflage myself through conditioned responses. Were a lady to set her head on my shoulder at a car wreck, I could identify her emotion as GRIEF.

“What a waste,” I could say. I could mean the cars.

I often find myself trapped in difficult emotional waters. But I can tread water. I employ conversational strategies. One is to repeat what someone says, slightly altered. If I was at a funeral for those killed in that hypothetical car wreck, that same lady might say: “What a pity. They were far too young. So much promise.”

“Too young,” I might try. “Such promise.”

Or at a supermarket. A boy making a scene his mother is helpless to arrest. A fellow shopper could whisper: “Someone should tame that little brat.”

“Whip him,” I might say, that being how a lion tamer tames his lions. “Whip that brat.”

I also have trouble fitting warring notions in my head. Like: the first time I saw a banana I realized you had to peel its skin to eat its insides. That banana had been given to me by a human. The two knotted in my head. Snapping the top off a banana sounds a lot like snapping the neck of a small, armless, legless, yellow person. I do not eat bananas. Ever. Or welcome yellow objects into my proximity.

“You got a case of the brainfarts,” Cappy said when I tried to explain.

“That’s vulgar,” said Mama. “Call them cramps.”

“Whaddaya mean — like, menstrual cramps?”

Farts within my brain make me mistake prone. Example: Cappy would bring Mama breakfast in bed. “Great way to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno, kid.” Beyond that, he never elaborated.

One afternoon Gadzooks! quarrelled with a robin. I shinnied up the tree — I had beaten Nicholas Saberhagen in a climbing contest, even though his father made him climb trees daily — to spy eggs in the nest. I brought them home, cracked them into a skillet. Eggs so small fried rapidly. So tiny on that big white plate. I arranged pretty blue egg shells around. When I presented them Mama was HAPPY. Until she studied closely.

“Jeffrey, where did these come from?”

“From the tree in Mister Burger’s yard.”

Mama shrieked. I mustn’t go stealing eggs out of nests. But I worked especially hard to get those eggs. Farmers stole eggs from under chickens’ bums. An egg was an egg…? I only wanted to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno. For Mama.

I stock for Vend-O-Mat Incorporated. Class-A Vending Machine Technician. Member of Vending Machine Union Local 104. At my other job I am, at best, a hobbyist.

I restock claw machines at bars. The key: place a plush teddy bear in the centre of the cube surrounded by cheap trinkets. The claw is too weak to pick it up, but fixated drunks waste many coins trying. I service Hot Nuts machines, too, but the only place that has one stopped paying their maintenance fee.

Machines are logical. When I twist my multiuse flat barrel skeleton key on a Beaver 970 gumball dispensing unit — same insides as every Beaver 970 dispensing unit — I instantly spot the problem. Usually a torn-apart gumball in the ratchet mechanism. Or if I open an Aaxon frontload dualcycle washing machine, I will usually find a 3/4-inch washer stuck in the coin slide. You can look into any machine to know exactly what is wrong. How to fix it.

Weeks ago I was at a school, stocking a Slim Line Mark X — voted Most Reliable Dispensing Unit by the Independent Vendors Association — when a boy interrupted me.

“Vhat are joo do-ink, blah?”

“I’m a stocker.”

“Zee Night Stalker?”

Gym shorts. A cape. Fat. A short, fat vampire boy. “I stock vending machines.”

“Do joo stock Nerds?”

“I do not stalk anybody.”

“Nerds zee candy.”

“Products in boxed form do not vend well. Also tube form. Certs vend poorly.”

“But, blah!” Fists clenched. “Neeeeerds!” He says this the same way Marlon Brando shouted “ Steeellla!” in A Streetcar Named Desire. The fat vampire boy chin-pointed at the Slim Line Mark X.

“It ate my dollar last week. So I kicked it.”

“Never kick them. This one weighs a thousand pounds. That is how much a female grizzly bear weighs. Five people a year die from vending machines tipping on them. Squished.”

“Whoa.”

There may be some Nerds in my truck, I said. He tagged along.

“Should you be in gym class?”

“Jeem eez strictly for zee blood bags.”

“Us alone in a truck full of treats. I could get in trouble.”

“Vy?”

“I could be a molester.”

The fat vampire boy squinted at the sun. Pulled the cape over his head. Wind goose-pimpled his bare legs. There was a case of Strawberry-Lime Nerds stashed under a box of Mallomars.

“Seriously? Wow, thanks.”

“Do not eat them all at once. You are fat already, as I imagine you must know. You risk hyperphagia. Childhood onset diabetes.”

I checked my pulse. The boy asked what was I doing.

“Your pulse is the most reliable indicator of overall health.”

I showed him my wrist. The radial vein popping through tightened skin.

“Check here.”

Instead, the boy clutched his crotch.

“I don’t feel anyzing. I yam zee valking undead!”

I helped him locate it properly. On his wrist. He looked DISAPPOINTED.

The day I arrived at Mama’s she baked angel’s food cake. Aside from Cappy, I cannot recollect who was there. Cases — when angry, Mama called us by our Social Services case number — came, went. I ate plentiful welcome cake. She took in cases other systems would not abide. Social Services paid a premium. We dressed alike: tan trousers, hush puppies. Flowbee haircuts.

“Built like a brick shithouse”: Cappy’s term for Mama. Legs thick as Japanese radishes. One night a big case, Gothia, experienced an episode. Mama weathered his ravings then slapped him. A skullrattler. She pounced on Gothia’s back. Her callused hands on Gothia’s head sounded like sledgehammers breaking open a cement sack. Her pet expression was “Gadzooks!” The night she beat on Gothia, every time she rained down a blow she yelped, “Gadzooks! Gadzooks!”

Mama was also prone to what she called “spells.” During one she came out of the bathroom with dental floss wound round her fingers so tight her fingertips were bloodless.

“Who left this? I’ll have a DNA test done, so help me God! This is not the brand we use in this house!”

How did she identify used dental floss by brand? She was convinced somebody, a stranger, had broke into her home to floss their teeth — also, they would have had to bring their own floss. One of Cappy’s whores, in all probability.

“Three wolves and three sheep deciding what to eat for supper,” said Cappy Lonnigan, regarding life in Mama’s house. “Who says democracy works?”

He was her on-again off-again boyfriend. When he found work at the Port Weller dry docks—“I’m hell-on-wheels with a riveting gun, kid”—they were on. When contracts were scarce, so was he. My understanding of human behaviour is that people fall into one another’s orbits out of an inability to exist alone.

“Type of woman you’d call brassy,” he said of her. “Way a cabaret torch singer is brassy. Big teeth, big hair, big… overall. Throwing herself out there not giving a sweet tweet. Except she isn’t really pretty enough to pull it off.”

Cappy would be around two months, gone six. Mama sniffed his itchy feet. A Sarah Court ritual: Cappy Lonnigan on the lawn in his boxers while Mama flung his possessions down.

“Rotten-ass bastard, heave-ho! Come round here, I’ll bust your nuts off!”

“Crazy bitch — you threw my record player out the window!”

The Divestment was followed by The Reconciliation: Cappy would show up hat in hand. Eventually he stopped coming round. Last I saw of him for years, he stood in long johns while Mama hurled his belongings out-of-doors.

“Limp-dicked goat! See you again I’m chopping it off!”

Cappy shoved his property into a sack he’d stashed under the porch for this eventuality. He sat beside me on the stoop.

“Shrink your world. Pin everyone under your thumb. Every minute of every day, assert control.” He brought his thumb, forefinger together. “If your kingdom’s small enough and everybody owes, anyone can be Queen.”

The girl with the Blade Runner haircut dances like a robot.

I drink a Shirley Temple. My employer sits with Nicholas Saberhagen. I am not sitting with them. I see them across the strip club. Another woman, her name is Diznee, asks may she dance. On my lap. Asks: am I a conventioneer? For fifty she will take me to the motor lodge to “suck on it.” No, thanks.

My employer is joined by Wesley, Colin Hill, a dreadlocked fellow. I order a five-dollar steak. It arrives with tiny green potatoes.

I head out the back exit. Ignite the cube van. My employer exits the front door. Into a cab with Nicholas Saberhagen. I tail them down Bunting onto the QEW. Their taxi curls along the Niagara river past the hydroelectric plant. Into a warehouse lot lit by security lamps.

I park beside the gates. Cross the road to a bench overlooking the river. Check my pulse. Log it. My employer reconnoitres. Transparent molasses flows from his pipe.

“You?”

“Yes,” I say. “You?”

This is all we say. I know what I am supposed to do. Inside the warehouse is a box. The leaden cover draped overtop is of the same material as X-ray vests. I roll it into the cube van, drive to Coboconk. Halfway there I veer into the breakdown lane. I crack the hood to find the source of the persistent hiss. Before long I reach the understanding that it is emanating from inside my skull.

Cappy Lonnigan taught me to hotwire a car.

“I spent six months in a Tallahassee lockup for car-nicking,” he told me. “Roaches big as matchbooks chewing my toenails. A southerner, Muddy Phelps, taught me. I’m’na shew yew tuh hutwhirr a vayheckle, son. Muddy’s what you’d call a recidivist criminal. One time I’m bending elbows with Muds — some bum tells ole Muds his mother wears army boots. Well! Muds tells that bum he’s gonna come to where he slept, creep in a window, and slash his weasel throat. Slaysh yer way-zaal thrut. A man was able to get his point across, those days. Anyway, you find yourself an unlocked car. With a flathead screwdriver bust open the wheel collar. Pop the steering lock and touch the red wires. Easy as a beagle bitch in heat.”

The car I stole was a Cadillac Coupe de Ville belonging to Frank Saberhagen. The night I leapt off the train trestle with Colin Hill. I broke the Cadillac’s steering collar, popped the locks, touched the wires. I could barely see over the dashboard. I ran over a hedge on the corner of Sycamore.

The train trestle bowed over Twelve Mile Creek where it met Shriner’s Creek washing into Lake Ontario. We climbed rotted rungs nailed to the pilings. Colin Hill’s pipe flowed rabbity orange flecked with dark blue.

“Still want to?” Colin said.

I failed to view it as a matter of want.

“I will.”

The water so cold my heart nearly burst. I surfaced. Colin Hill bobbed alongside. Smiling. Or had the river wrenched his face into the expression? Days later Wesley Hill stopped by to apologize for Colin’s actions. Mama led him to the sofa. I watched through the upstairs railing.

“I’m deeply sorry, Clara,” Wesley Hill said.

“I don’t have eyes in the back of my head.” She gripped Wesley’s skull. Ruffled his hair. “You, neither. Boys will be boys.”

“They could have been killed. But God works in mysterious ways.”

“I wouldn’t say mysterious. I wouldn’t say so at all.”

Mama hugged Wesley Hill. “Been worse on top of bad for you, hasn’t it?” Next she touched his knee. “Your poor wife. Frail as a leaf.”

Her hand cupping Wesley Hill’s kneecap. He restated his apologies. Left.

“That ridiculous man thinks I took liberties,” Mama told me later on. “The very idea… fetch me a tissue.” Her face was hard when I returned. “Do me a favour, Jeffrey. An itsy-bitsy one. After all I’ve done for you. A silly prank. You LOVE Mama, don’t you?” LOVE I do not comprehend. Loyalty, yes. Loyalty means do as you are told.

That night I broke the head off the sand-cast dog on Wesley Hill’s front porch with a five-pound mallet.

Frank Saberhagen’s corgi, Moxie, once forced itself upon Mama’s sheepdog.

Excelsior lay on the sidewalk when Moxie “bum rushed”—Cappy’s term — her haunches as if he aimed to “drill for Texas tea.” The dog must have “one hell of a Napoleon complex,” as he was “giving that ole girl what-for.”

Excelsior shook Moxie off. Moxie persisted with clumsy jump-thrusts. Excelsior mule-kicked the corgi. Moxie did a backwards somersault into Mama’s marigolds. Which he urinated upon. Cappy laughed. I struggled to understand what was funny about a small neutered dog doing sex with a big spayed one. But Cappy laughed, so I did. How my laughter sounded in my ears: a man in a crowded room shouting in a foreign language.

Excelsior developed pyrotraumatic dermatitis. Bacteria on the epidermis caused coin-sized lesions or “hot spots” to occur. Mama blamed Moxie, who had a similar condition.

Mama sat the dog in her lap. By then only Mama could touch her without being bitten. She trimmed hair round the spots with surgical scissors. Dabbed them with cortisone cream. When Excelsior died, Mama’s spell lasted a week.

Mama has known Colin Hill since he was “knee-high to a duck’s behind.” She wants to watch him go over the Falls in his barrel. I wrangle her thick body into my minivan. Guide her wheelchair to a spot along the rail.

“I wen’ da turlet.” Mama’s words have been slurred since the operation. “Loog a muh bug.”

I went to the toilet, she’s said. Look in my bag.

I lift the blanket covering her dead legs. The pouch is three-quarters full. I unclip the stint, walk up Clifton Hill with a bag of warm urine. I kneel at a sewer grate, squeeze Mama’s urine out. Uphill is a construction site encircled by a cyclone fence. The fat vampire boy stands on a concrete slab. His cape licks in the wind.

“Hello,” he says to me. “Blah!”

“What are you doing?”

He points to bricks of insulation. There are holes in the plastic where his fingers punched through.

“Ripping zem.”

“Why?”

“A pink blizzard vood brighten zee day.”

“You are a strange boy.”

He touches his upper lip to his nose. Snorts as horses do on cold days.

“I yams what I yam and it’s all that I yam.”

I pull a pocketknife from my trenchcoat. Stab a brick. Wrenching movements slash the plastic. The boy grabs one flapping sail. Flakes blow downhill. The boy is laughing very hard. It is interesting to see. Clifton Hill has gone pink. Next Nicholas Saberhagen, Abigail Burger are coming.

“Don’t tell,” he says. “Please.”

He tenders his hand. He wishes me to hold it. I do. Tendons tense along Nicholas Saberhagen’s jaw. His pipe flows red. I let go his son’s hand. They come down the hill to say hello to Mama.

“Dylan, is it?” Dywaan, iw ii? “Handsome darling.”

Mama points to her cheek. Dylan kisses it. With Mama’s gaze averted, the boy wipes his lips.

Mama took old Seamus Finnegan to the lake.

Seamus was the father of the richest oilman in the world, according to Mama. Seamus Finnegan boasted excellent health before a series of strokes rendered him paralyzed. Balanced sidelong on his wheelchair, he peered along his nose at the quivering knots of his fingers. His sole joy: watching Canada geese congregate on the lakeshore in Port Dalhousie. One afternoon Mama turned Seamus Finnegan away from the geese.

“Someone’s getting overexcited,” she said.

Seamus Finnegan’s chair was aimed at a runoff. Snags of rebar clung with lily pads. Seamus Finnegan moaned.

“Husha, darling. Make yourself sick.”

MANIPULATIVE? This is asking a colourblind man to appreciate a rainbow. Yet if I was Mama’s favourite Monday, Teddy was her favourite by Tuesday. She said I ought to be more like Teddy, who drew lovely pictures. So I drew one: black blobs. Horrid! Why not fireworks, as Teddy did?

Mama acted out “dramas.” Mama the star, everybody else the supporting players. The kitchen was her stage.

“Teddy: be Beatrice Klugman, that nelly from Children’s Aid. Stand there like a stunned cow.” Teddy: empty-eyed behind Coke-bottle glasses with melted frames. “Yes! Jeffrey, you be the Social Services Ombudsman. Scratch yourself — he’s got psoriasis something awful — and mumble.”

“Er, em, homina homina…” I would go, imitating Ralph Kramden.

“Perfect, darling!”

“You got any matches in this house, woman?” Cappy would say. “I got to watch your twisted little productions, least let me smoke my pipe.”

“How can I have matches with eight-oh-four, a known P-Y-R-O, under my roof?”

Teddy, me, were allowed to draw on the driveway with sidewalk chalks. Once I had been allowed to set up a lemonade stand. Lemon-lime Kool-Aid mixed with hose water. My only customer, Fletcher Burger, said: “This tastes scummy as hell.” Next Teddy drank a whole jugful. On a sugar high he doused an old recliner in Mama’s garage with nail polish remover. Set it on fire.

From then on: no lemonade stands. Only sidewalk chalks.

Teddy’s drawings were all the same. Splooges of orange, red, yellow but at their hearts, shapes as creatures may look with their bodies wrecked by flame. One afternoon Frank Saberhagen returned from a vigorous run with his Nicholas. He swung round the court on his bicycle before stopping at our driveway. His pipe flowed static green. He considered my picture: a man with broomstick legs. Belly following a strip of patching tar.

“You’re missing his eyes.”

I pointed out two holes in the driveway where air bubbles in the foundation had popped. I modelled the man around those pits.

“Beefy fellow,” said Frank Saberhagen. “What’s his favourite food?”

I said my own favourite food. “Fish, chips.”

“Fish and chips?”

“Fish, chips.”

He nodded, then picked up—stole—one of my chalks to trace his son’s outline on their driveway. Afterwards he yelled at Nicholas, especially his “gorilla arms.”

That night Mama came into my room with a pizza box. Also the mallet I used to break the head off Wesley Hill’s sand-cast dog. She took Gadzooks! off the bookshelf. Shut him inside the pizza box.

“I saw you talking to that awful man today.”

On the box was HEAVY DUTY in orange script. Cheapest pizzeria in town. Pepperoni with the texture of bologna. I did not know what putting Gadzooks! in a box or malleting him to death had to do with me talking to Frank Saberhagen. Had Gadzooks! done something to make Mama wish to squish him? If she killed the squirrel I would bury him. As you did with dead things. Put them in holes.

“Don’t ever—ever—talk to that horrid man again.”

“Alright.”

Inside the box, Gadzooks! made the same noises as when he had been only a baby.

Last autumn Mama collapsed. An emergency procedure addressed a saccular aneurysm in her brain. Surgical complications. Mama’s legs no longer function. A machine now regulates her nocturnal oxygen supply.

Mama was homebound. Smashing her belongings. Urinating in her pants on purpose. I bought her a computer. Presented it with a red bow tied round.

From Your Darling.

According to her, Mama became “a regular computer nerd.” I signed her up for Cyber Seniors at the library. Mama is online “24/7.” She has many cyber-friends.

“Same as real friends,” she says, “only less polite.”

New friends keep Mama young at heart. You can reach out, she says, and touch anybody.

Cappy showed up after Mama’s miseries. But she did not want him dragging his “ragged ass” back into her life. Allegedly he called her “fat as the queen of sea cows.”

“Flat busted” though he looked, Mama did say Cappy drove a fancy automobile.

The night Gadzooks! got run over I visited Tufford Manor.

“Lonnigan?” said the black orderly. “You’re his relation?”

“No.”

“Shoot. Then you must be psychoneurotically disturbed.”

“Pop by to offer my sympathies and she calls me ragged assed,” Cappy Lonnigan told me, once the orderly located him. “Who put the potato up her tailpipe?” He went on in this vein. “She suffered a man before me. Don’t know his name — do you think he could have surrendered even that? She grinded that bum down to a nub. She sure bled all the charm and romance out of self-pity. Days lying in the dark unwashed. Nowadays there’s pills for that. She take pills?”

“Vitamins.”

“What Clara can’t admit is, she’s sick-minded. Comes over her like a thundercloud. Turns her into somebody else — no: just a worser reflection. Pills are for weaklings. That’s how she sees it. She hasn’t a hateful heart. Just not an ounce of flex to her.”

Sick-minded? Sick is vomit. What was Mama’s mind vomiting? I went to the toilet. When I returned Cappy was gone. Also the keys in my jacket pocket. I found him jamming my apartment key in the ignition.

“Let’s blow this popstand.”

“This is my minivan.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of tea in China?” He pointed out the hockey tape I’d affixed to the steering wheel. “What’s this?”

“So I remember where to put my hands.”

“Well, that’s creepy. We should go tomcatting.”

“You are wearing a housecoat.”

“So? A man never feels so good as when he’s got a full tank of gas, fifty bucks in his pocket, the night ahead of him. Yesterday’s history and tomorrow’s the mystery.”

“The gas in the tank belongs to me. Do you have fifty dollars?”

“Did I say I felt good personally? A man feels good. A hypothetical. Jeez. I got to buy matches. Clive’s canvassed every store in a five-block radius. No matches for this man—toting a Polaroid of me, as if I aim to light myself afire.”

We drove to a Big Bee convenience store near the bus shelter. Inside, the overhead fans flapped like heron’s wings. I brushed past a woman with a baby. Her back was turned to me. Cappy Lonnigan entered.

“No matches for the old man. He’ll burn his hair off. Yeah, yeah. Where’s the pisser?”

When we go outside, my minivan is gone. Cappy removed one foot from its slipper. Wiggled his toes.

“You left it running.”

“Hadda whizz. Who thought anyone would nick it?”

Emotion I do not grasp. Irony, yes.

“Thievery, Jeffrey. It’s the lowest form of human behaviour.”

The car is a rental. Ford Taurus. Car equivalent of Teflon: eyes slide off. On a static scale it would weigh twenty-two ounces over stock: mass of the Phoenix Arms 9mm affixed to the undercarriage. Exposed hammer. Satin nickel finish. It is the firearm equivalent of a Ford Taurus. Everyone owns one.

I rigged the car at a do-it-yourself garage. The gun’s polished blue barrel friction-taped to the steering linkage. Stock U-clamped to the left rear wheel well. Trigger, recoil spring in the washer fluid reservoir. Hammerhead rounds in the passenger seat coils. Firing pin under my tongue.

Days ago I received my employer’s call.

“Come. Now.” Click.

I drove to the Niagara district airport. Boarded a Cessna Twin. Landed on a dirt strip near Coboconk. Drove the waiting car to my employer’s. He lay on the floor of his lake house. He’d been dog-mauled, apparently. A plate of inflated flesh over his left eye. Webs of skin thin as bat’s wings connecting his fingers.

“Slipper-footed space bugs,” he kept saying.

When he was able to walk I helped him to the car. We drove until daybreak. A lab complex. Fletcher Burger. Men in scrubs. Whine of a surgical saw. Burnt bone dust. I leave with a cooler marked ORGANIC MATERIAL.

At the Coboconk dock I found Fletcher Burger’s houseboat. I drove downriver to Happy Houseboat Rentals. I discovered Fletcher Burger had stolen the houseboat.

“That doggone prick,” the owner of Happy Houseboat Rentals said when I told him where he could find it. “I should wring that guy’s doggone neck.”

My minivan was in the lot. Covered in maple keys. Fletcher Burger must have stolen it, too. There was a bucket of chicken bones between the seats. The upholstery stunk of fried chicken.

Flash-forward to right now:

I clear the U.S. border. Niagara Falls, New York. I drive up Pine Street. Men outside bodegas with bottles between their feet. Stop at Piggly Wiggly for a bottle of Faygo Red Pop. Ask for the bathroom key. Take the toilet paper roll.

In a parking garage near the Niagara Falls airport authority I reassemble the gun. Blow off road grit with bursts of WD-40. Trigger hitch lubed with saliva. I empty the pop bottle. Stuff it with toilet paper. Fix the top over the barrel with duct tape.

There are rows of cheap units off 44^th street. My employer’s Cadillac is curbed with two flattened tires. In the apartment hallway I remove my shoes. Bread bags go over my feet, taped to my ankles. Skin lotion on exposed skin. Shower cap. Surgical gloves.

13A is unlocked. Tiny B&W TV. Mr. Turtle pool full of soil. Books: Raising Earthworms for Profit. Harnessing the Mighty Nightcrawler. An old video game unit. I play Stuntman with the volume off until James Paris arrives. His pitbull wears a plastic headcone. Catgut racing its flank. He sees my gun pointed at his chest.

“Place the dog in the closet.”

“Easy,” he says. “What’s with the bread bags?… my wallet on the boat, right? You can take the car back.”

“You were told not to take it at all. My employer has a strong code of ethics.”

He accepts this without rancour.

“I don’t even have the cash to offer you double whatever you’re being paid. You know, like in the movies.”

He laughs. But his lips hardly move. He roots his pockets for a slip of paper. Name, phone number.

“Call her. She’ll take my dog. Tell her she has to feed Matilda Iam’s Scientific Diet, okay? None of that Purina bullshit. Liver pills everyday. Liver ailments are common with the breed. Mix baby food into her kibble for the complex proteins. Silly, I know.”

“Silly.”

“I was trying to raise worms.” He nods to the Mister Turtle pool. “Garden centres, bait shops. Like drugs: there’s gradients. You must establish a rep as a premium worm producer. Well, I guess they’ll die.”

“They will die.”

I raise the gun. James Paris’s forehead butts the bottle’s plastic nubbins. He rocks forward on his toes. The weight of him on my shoulder. His heels do not touch the floor.

When a bullet enters a human body a number of things happen simultaneously. For small calibre arms such as mine, the unjacketed round — free of casing, propellants dispersed — weighs 110 grams; 132-grains ballistic calibration. Entering James Paris’s forehead it will cause two types of damage: permanent cavity damage where the projectile tears directly into flesh; radial displacement of neighbouring tissue stretched in the projectile’s wake. The pop bottle is a single-use silencer. All his neighbours will hear is a momentary high-pitched tssst! like steam blowing the lid off a saucepan.

I pull the trigger.

Compressed gasses expand the bottle. Its base explodes into James Paris’s face. Suddenly, his face resembles a red starfish.

… this could have happened — if not for the kiddie pool. You see, you bury bodies in dirt outside. Here dirt was inside. You must never bury a body inside. Unsanitary.

I lower the gun. A little moan comes from somewhere. I open the closet. Matilda sits on her haunches. A doggy cough: houch-houch! I am aware that James Paris should be dead. I am aware that he is not dead. But I think he is. I have had a brainfart. This is a very lucky thing, I think, for James Paris.

I drive to the Niagara Falls aquarium. Under the security halogens I break the gun down. I heave the parts into the basin. The border guards give me no hassle over the canis domesticus.

Mama ’s hysterectomy became a public showcase. Her uterus was riddled with pre-cancerous fibroids. Adenomyosis: uterine lining thickening into the organ walls. Mama instructed her doctor to “rip out the plumbing.”

Following the laparotomy Mama became obsessed with her pulse. Resting, active rates. She instructed us to check ours hourly. Log it in a notebook. It made Cappy Lonnigan CRAZY.

“Who gives a good goddamn about your pulse. It’s beating. You’re alive.”

Mama’s phantom hot flashes were unbearable. She wanted to “take in the days.” Teddy, myself would push Mama around Sarah Court in a wheelchair. Mama had a bowl of M&Ms on her lap “for wellwishers.” Neighbours made enquiries with eyes in the sky.

“Missus Russell,” said Philip Nanavatti. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing but a little hysterectomy, dear.” Mama took this opportunity to approach Frank Saberhagen. The surgeon was drinking with Fletcher Burger. Pitting their children in some sort of contest in his garage.

“Your kid stole my Caddy what, six months ago? Thanks for pencilling me in.”

“Mister Saberhagen—”

“Doctor.”

“… I’ve undergone a hysterectomy.”

Frank Saberhagen examined the sole of his deck shoe.

“Yeah? Those can be a bitch.”

“I wished to discuss, civilly, Jeffrey’s actions and my dog’s treatment of yours some time ago. You can’t blame Excelsior. Your corgi was eating squirrel babies.”

Frank Saberhagen turned to me. “Jeffrey, right?”

I looked at Mama. She nodded so I nodded.

“Do certain colours scare you, Jeff?”

I peered at my shoes. The yellow band running over the toes I had coloured over with black marker. I was not SCARED of yellow. It did make me feel as I did riding the Tilt-A-Whirl at the Lion’s Club carnival.

“Are there specific words you prefer not to say? Do you know about autism, Jeffrey, or Asperger’s syndrome? Has your ward of the state told you about those?”

“Nonsense,” Mama said through tight-gritted teeth. “Darlings, wheel me home this instant.”

At home Mama smashed dishes. RAGING against the “rat-shit jack-bastard.” The “hateful brute and lush.” Were Cappy present he would have exclaimed: “She’s on the warpath!”

“A rotten trickster,” Mama told me. “As doctors are. Warp your body, warp your mind. You have a black spot on your brain because your amoral mother smoked drugs. That’s why… that’s why… everything!”

In the kitchen that night Mama crushed shards of bone china with a rolling pin.

“Pull that ground chuck out of the icebox, Jeffrey. Sloppy joes another night.”

Mama crunched the china to sparkling powder. Knuckled sweaty hair out of her eyes. She rolled the raw chuck through glass.

“All I ever want is to help. But people so seldom take the cure.” Pinpricks of blood on her hands. “They spit the bit. You believe me, darling, don’t you?”

I cannot tell what other choice I ever had. Under a gibbous moon I threw the raw meatball into Doctor Saberhagen’s backyard.

Before dying, Gadzooks! chewed through my telephone cord. I have to go to Mama’s house to call. “Is this Patience?”

“… it is.”

“I call on behalf of James Paris. Who is dead.”

“James Paris?… oh! Dead. Christ. How?”

“Police are stumped. His pitbull, Matilda, is with me. Old Family Red Nose. White coat. Brindle pattern over left eye. High stiffles. Clipped ears. A proud bitch.”

“I knew him only one night. We met at the Legion in Fenlon Falls.”

“Otherwise she must go to the Humane Society. For gassing.”

“Gassing?”

“He wanted you to have the dog. Otherwise—”

“Gassing, gassing. My life may not tolerate a dog.”

But she agrees to meet. I hang up. Mama is off at the Lucky Bingo. My elbow brushes the computer mouse. The monitor brightens.

A MySpace page. A girl in pigtails.

We meet at Montebello Park. Patience is Patience Nanavatti. She is wearing a floppy sunhat. Big sunglasses accord her face the aspect of a dragonfly. She is also pushing a pram.

“Jeffrey?” Chin tucked to her neck. SUSPICION. “From Sarah Court?”

I mimic her chin-tuck. “Patience Nanavatti?”

Matilda licks the baby’s foot. The baby’s name: Celeste. She grabs the air in front of her face. Patience Nanavatti takes Celeste’s hand. She pins it gently to her belly.

“She is very scrawny,” I say. “Have you seen a pediatrician?”

“She… no, she eats. Why won’t you take Matilda?”

“This dog was not offered to me.”

“She’s yours.”

Celeste emits hitching, painful sobs. Her eyes swivel so far back in their sockets it is as though she wishes to examine the inside of her own skull.

“Celeste is the toilet baby. I read of you both in the newspaper.”

“Please.” Is she soliciting help or begging me not to tell? “Jeffrey, please.”

Patience Nanavatti tells me how she stole her. Then she fled up north but, finding nothing at all, she returned to the city. The police may be monitoring her home. I ask how long Celeste was in the toilet.

“Four minutes, maybe?”

Onset of advanced cellular decay: two minutes.

“Something is the matter with her brain.”

“You don’t know that.”

I do not know what else to say. I say this:

“I will take the dog.”

“Can’t stand to see her gassed?”

“I will take the dog.”

My employer is entombed in a wheelchair. Bandages clad his head, eyes, to the midpoint of his nose. Hands encased in gauze. He appears to have shrunk several sizes. His body is like an alpaca sweater sent through the wash. There is a large depression in the side of his head. A wet, red, glistening hole like a medical photograph of someone’s wrecked vocal cords. Tonight he will be visited by Nicholas Saberhagen. My presence a precautionary measure. The dreadlocked kid, Parkhurst, who my employer says is a biographer of some sort, is curled up in a corner. I saw this person, Parkhurst, not too long ago. In the company of Colin and Wesley Hill.

When Nicholas Saberhagen arrives, I observe unnoticed from the top of the stairs. Nicholas asks permission to photograph the box. There is some commotion in the viewing chamber. Nicholas brought his son with him, you see. Somehow the fat vampire boy got into the viewing area with the box. Next Nicholas is bundling his son into the car. I follow them in my minivan. They pull into the Motor Motel. I park in a washout. The dark fluttering of wings in the trees. Time goes by. Nicholas exits his room in a towel. He retreats inside.

Next: bracing animalistic screams.

I get out of the car, walk across the road. The boy is lying on the motel carpet. Rope burns ring his neck. Nicholas Saberhagen pushes at his chest. He spies me. As if to spy a demon. I kneel beside them. There is a visible dent in the boy’s throat.

“Your boy’s trachea is crushed.”

In my pockets: a notebook, a pen, a penknife. I chew off the pen’s cap. I pry out its ink wand.

“The fleshy tube running down the boy’s neck. You must cut below the obstruction.”

“Do you have any idea what you’re doing?” says Nicholas.

“The veins run here”—I trail a finger down the boy’s neck—“and here. I know to avoid them. I know the trachea’s consistency is that of a garden hose. I know about how hard to push.”

I kneel patiently. The towel has fallen away from Nicholas’s body. There is a dark stain on the tip of his penis. The boy’s skin is presently the blue of a picture-book sea.

“Okay, Jeffrey. Go. Go.”

I straddle the boy’s waist. Set the knifetip horizontally across his windpipe below the Adam’s apple. Drive the knifepoint in, then squeeze either side of the wound. Still too small. Insert my pinkie finger. The boy’s tendons constrict around my fingertip. His slit trachea feels like a calamari ring. I thread the pen barrel in. Nicholas wraps the towel round his boy’s throat. I find the carotid snaking past the boy’s collarbone. Pressure stems the blood flow.

A man enters. He has the look of a SAD cowboy. His consort: a half-naked woman with a harelip.

“We called the medics.”

A medical evacuation helicopter touches down in the gravel lot. I stand in the rotor wash as it lifts off. The helicopter ascends until it is nothing but a blinking red dot.

I return to the motel room. The closet door smashed. Contents of the boy’s knapsack spilled over the carpet. Electronic equipment in Ziploc baggies. On the cover of his math booklet is a girl’s name. Encircled by a lopsided heart. I know that name.

General hospital. Lea side of Valleyview Road past the ambulance bays. Midnight. Patience Nanavatti sits in the passenger seat of my Vend-O-Mat Dodge Sprinter. On my lap is a box of cellulose packing peanuts.

“It is sensible.”

“You keep saying that. How will she breathe?”

“I will punch holes in the boxtop.”

“She’s not a turtle.”

I stack cases of soda onto a dolly. Patience sets Celeste gently into the bed of packing material. She moans when I close the flaps.

“I’m a bad mother, I guess.”

“But she is not your child. She never was.”

I have made Patience Nanavatti SAD. I cannot understand why she should react so. I merely outlined the truth of the matter.

The elevator takes me to the fifth floor. As I am pushing the dolly round a blind corner, I nearly collide with a nurse. The nurse’s patient is Abigail Burger.

Abigail is narcotically swollen inside a hospital gown. Her feet are covered in thick strings of blue veins, which I can see through her green paper shoes. The flesh of her face hangs in bags, as if fishing weights have been sewn under her skin.

“Gruh!” goes Abigail Burger. “Gruh!”

The most purely FRUSTRATED sound I have ever heard. Her breath is as sweet as baby food. She reaches for me. So strong. The nurse struggles to keep her in check.

“No soda machine up here,” the nurse says. “You want the caf.”

I double down the corridor into the neonatal ward. I carefully set Celeste in a plastic tub. Pluck stray peanuts off her blanket. To the tub I affix a note:

FORGIVE ME.

I pull into the horseshoe driveway of my employer’s cottage. The moon stands upon its exact reflection on the lake. Hours ago he called:

“Je… uuuuuurt suh— suh…”

Then the phone line went dead.

I open the cabin door. All is very quiet. Except a cupboard rattles under the kitchen sink. I open it. The dreadlocked one, Parkhurst, has squirmed underneath. His body is bent round the gooseneck projection of plumbing pipe. His face appears ovencharred, but no: only blood dried to a glaze.

I shut the cupboard.

In the viewing chamber, the casement windows open upon a starless sky. A squirming mass the size of a medicine ball occupies my employers’ wheelchair. On the floor beside it are empty bandage casings that still hold the strange shapes of whatever they once encased.

Inside the box is something holding the exact shape of my employer. Its skin is grey yet gleaming, silvery, shifting in the insubstantial light the way campfire embers will brighten in the wind. But as I watch, its flesh is paling to match the colour of my own. Its eyes are blobs of mercury in creased sockets. With one fingertip the thing traces the box where each pane meets.

“Whoever built this did a very adequate job.”

It opens its mouth against the glass. Puffs its cheeks like a blowfish. Deep down in its craw, little half-seen things are thrashing. It has no nostrils. But the quivering ball in the wheelchair has two slit-like dilations, side by each, fluttering in the manner of fish gills. They are the only feature it has, anymore.

“Are you scared of me?” the thing in the box asks.

I say: “I do not know what I am.”

“If it makes you feel any better, neither do I.”

It yawns. Blood emits from my nose.

“Eat the hearts of the innocent,” it says. “Is that what you think I’ll do?”

I say: “What will you do?”

“Go to Disneyland?”

“What are you?”

“Some call me demon, some say alien. Demon as it fits a ready-made definition, I guess. Alien as I don’t match any categorized flora or fauna on earth. I wish I knew what I was. You are lucky to be part of a species.”

It stretches, catlike. Snaps its jaws.

“Want to hear something funny? Although I don’t know if it is. That whole concept is lost on me.”

“Me, too.”

“Your species finds it impossible to envision an alien entity lacking the body structure, appendages in some arrangement, of organisms found on your planet. Your most common alien representation? The “Grey Man.” Big globe-like eyes. Legs, arms, fingers, toes. Or if not human-shaped, then spiderlegged. Or tentacle armed. Still legs, still arms. Or exactly the same bodily specifics as you, except furry. All with eyes and mouths: only more or fewer than you, or smaller or larger. Your imaginations can only conceive of organisms here, on this planet, reconfigured. Do you understand the mammothness of the universe? That there must be life hieing to no forms found here on Earth? Creatures without heads, or eyes, or organs. Only human beings are self-absorbed enough to believe all life in the universe must resemble them.”

Tiny openings appear in the nasal shelf above its top lip. The ball in the wheelchair is now utterly featureless. It bulges convulsively. Then it stops quivering. The thing points to the still ball.

“I promise you I am no better or worse than he was. It’s a one-to-one exchange.” The gesture it makes invites my acceptance. “If that is a fact, then tell me: how can your world be any worse with me in it?”

I wipe my nose. Then I ask:

“How would I do it?”

“Just say the words. Hey!”

“There’s something under the kitchen sink.”

“Oh, you can leave that to me.” The thing performs a jack-legged dance round its box. “Hey! Hey!”

I back out of the chamber. Blood is squeezing out of my pores. I close the front door. Almost. I press my mouth to that slit of darkness and whisper:

“I set you free.”

One year Teddy and I missed Halloween. Chickenpox. Mama made us costumes. Teddy, a teddy bear. “My cuddly Teddsy-weddsy,” said Mama, nuzzling him. I went as “Boxcar Jeffy,” a hobo. Mama painted my beard with an eyeliner pencil. My bindle was filled with tube socks. By the time we got over the contagion it was November 2^nd. Mama dressed us up to take us out anyway.

“Why should it matter?” she told Cappy. “Surely our neighbours have leftover candy.”

On a cold night we went trick-or-treating. No jack-o-lanterns, except those that had been smashed by vandals or were decaying in trash cans. Mama knocked on doors around Sarah Court. Philip Nanavatti wasn’t confident he had any candy. The holiday having passed, you see. Mama had not ordered the Nanavatti’s squirrel shot yet.

“Come now, Phil,” said Mama. “Surely your daughter could part with a few candy bars from her stash. For my boys’ sake.”

Philip dutifully rummaged up a few granola bars. Not all neighbours were so obliging.

“Tell the belligerent bitch to take a hike,” came Frank Saberhagen’s voice from the family room when his wife answered Mama’s knock.

But Mama was persistent; we returned home with our plastic pumpkins full. I felt something indefinable for Mama. For what she had done. Was it LOVE? I could not say.

Cappy, speaking of Mama: “Like the moon, she’s got her phases. When she’s waxing, her LOVE’s the purest, truest thing. But when she’s on the wane…”

Squirrels gave every child on our block parasitic seatworms. Mama had “a bird” watching Teddy or me claw at our anuses. She ordered: “Don’t flush!”, then checked our leavings. At Shoppers Drugmart Mama bought a kit: Colonix Cleanse. Insisted upon administering it herself. Teddy, myself: naked on plastic sheets in the bathroom. Clutching our privates. We pried our buttocks open. Mama lubricated the plastic wand with flaxseed oil.

“Hold it, darlings. Hold it up there.”

Cappy quarrelled with her over this.

“You force them to hold two pictures of you in their heads. One’s this woman who feeds and houses them. The other’s an ass-invading bitch-wolf.”

“They can’t give themselves bloody enemas, William.”

“You’re half devil, Clara. I swear. Three quarters, some days.”

She envisioned a world where she was everyone’s Mama. She sought to hurt her darlings as only a child can be hurt by its mother.

From my employer’s I drive to hers.

Mama is in bed. Her sleep apnea machine hums. Mama removes the mask. Gulping inhales. Her eyes too round. Words mushed up. She cannot see the latex gloves on my hands.

She tells me a police officer named Mulligan barged in today.

“Investigating computer malfeasance. A ring of kids teased some poor youngster into a suicide attempt.” Suside ta-tempt. “But I don’t know my ass from my elbow with computers — do I, darling?” She nibbled her bottom lip. “He took your lovely gift away. As evidence. As if I’d even hurt a fly. He said my parole officer hasn’t even been born yet. That’s how long I’d be in jail.”

Every act of kindness I ever experienced came at her hands. She never hurt me because she never found a soft spot. But she took me in. I called her mother.

I pull the pillow from beneath her head. I settle it over her face. Apply pressure. Her startled slurs are muffled by the stuffing. Her hand rises, trembling, to touch my elbow. Then it is all thrashing. Grunting. Growling. One dead leg slips off the mattress. I slide myself on top to straddle her. Her big breasts bunch under my groin. Her nails tear grooves in my forearms. Her chest deflates between my thighs. I withdraw the pillow. The muscles of her face have come unglued. I see the silver fillings in her molars. She has wet herself. That almond-y smell. Thin rasps exit her throat. I snap the oxygen mask back over her face.

I find some Q-Tips in a bathroom drawer. Sit back with Mama. I take each finger very gently. I remove my skin cells where they have collected under each fingernail bed.

Patience Nanavatti has been sleeping at my apartment. She is packed when I arrive. Grocery bags filled with Sally Anne clothing. Enough, she believes, to make a clean start.

“You’re sweating,” she says. “There’s blood on you.”

A blistering ache sets up in my arms, my shoulders. Lactic acid burn. Chloride torching the muscle fibres. Matilda noses between my legs.

“Lie down, Jeff.”

“I am alright.”

“Lie down.”

“I will.”

I lie on the bed she has occupied previous nights. I have slept on the couch. The scent of her is in the sheets. It is not a bad smell at all. Patience Nanavatti pulls off her sweater. Blue static sparks pop along her torso.

I do it out of LOVE. Mama used to say this. “If I am brusque or insensitive it is because we are familiar and I LOVE you.” How much behaviour can you hide under the cover of LOVE? Allowances made to trample others because — because what? Because LOVE? Because you LOVE someone?

Patience Nanavatti lies beside me. We do not touch.

“I could take the dog,” she says. “You, too.”

To leave this town permanently — I do not know it is FEAR I feel, simply because I do not know the colour that emotion bleeds. There is a brittle cracking sensation, localized to my chest, through which burst wires that wriggle as earthworms do. To vacate these streets, these sights of long acquaintance…

As Cappy Lonnigan says: Yesterday’s history, tomorrow’s the mystery.

“You must understand, Patience Nanavatti. I do not need you.”

“That’s fine, Jeff. I don’t need you, either.”