Bunny and Shark (10 page)

When the artisan finally shows, approaching you with solemn ceremony, carrying a shoebox in both hands, you hear a quiet respectful applause from the family now trying to sober up fast, an applause that drifts in and out of your consciousness so that you forget where you are. You imagine the claps to be the sound of waves slapping against the sea at night, and those waves sparkling with starlight and boat lights, and you see yourself swimming toward a tall white mast. On two able feet you step onto the ladder of the sailboat. The hoist of your voluptuous body out of the heavy waters, into the crisp night air, is really no more than the young girl having slipped the lever on the La-Z-Boy from upright to recline.

Day twelve dead

(The day a third foot is gifted.)

I
N THE MORNING YOU WAKE
to the sound of snoring, trumpet blares followed by soft retreats, like the flapping of elephant ears. You sense it coming from the row of rooms running one side of the house. For a moment you feel like something has shifted deep inside you. From the heat streaming in from outside you figure it must be deep into the morning. You feel unmoored from everything domestic, your body aches and feels sticky and you want nothing more than to douse yourself in the cool ocean water.

Off in the kitchen, the grandmother is silently moving bottles and glasses from one location to another. There is something eerie about her now, how her body hunches over. She is rocking from side to side but never getting very far.

Your eyes sweep over the dirtied hump. You won't look again. Not now. But the content of the glance, how it looked, stays with you: a rounded spectre, strung with dangling medical tape, streaked yellow and brown from drink stains. Like something someone from the Dark Ages would use to beat up someone else with.

When you try to focus instead on your other, pretty foot, also filthy, but well shaped, with bright red toenails flashing in the sunlight, a scream erupts from the absent foot. The feeling is so visceral all you can do is stare.

The grandmother comes into the room carrying a tray. As she hovers near, you smell the twang of coffee on her breath and pours some of the thick black liquid and passes you both cup and a shiny beige bun. She smiles a wide grin full of blackened teeth that look as if filed around the edges. You sip the sugary liquid and bite into the even sweeter bun. The sting makes your teeth whine. She lets you eat but is eager that you finish.

Her back is oddly very straight now, she primly sits on the edge of a chair on the other side of the coffee table while her eyes flit continuously between you and the shoebox. The shoebox. You recall the face of the artisan: expectant, with lunatic eyes.

She wants you to open it. Without ceremony you pull off the cardboard top and plunge in, pulling out your gift: a stiff prosthetic other-foot.

It is grotesque and beautiful. Ancient and brand new at the same time.

The foot that puts you in the otherworld, the grandmother thinks with awe. You see it in her face. She gasps and claps her hands, golden light is sweeping across her wrinkled cheeks. But at the same time, something in her eye is contagious, and you are looking forward to the ceremony of this foot becoming part of you.

The grandmother swirls the air in front of her with both hands as if whipping something into being. She wants you to put it on.

How? She doesn't say, “Here, let me help you,” but rushes toward you and the foot, undoing a system of leather buckles and brass clasps, a harness that reminds you of horse-riding gear. From it dangles an intricately carved wooden foot looking exactly like your own. The toenails are shaded with a hint of rouge. The foot is arched abnormally high, the grandmother already has the other silver Versace shoe on it.

It horrifies you, and also makes you want to laugh. Which you don't dare do, given the look of reverence on the grandmother's face. On some level you are grateful, but you have to pee and want to get up. Remaining silent, you let the grandmother start the process of unwinding your bandages. At that moment Thule stumbles out of a doorway. When she recognizes what's going on she calls out, “Wait, wait !” and runs the hallway, knocking on each door. Moment by moment, as the bandage comes undone, the family members awaken and sleepily encircle you.

Oohs and ahs over the other foot. Blearily staring at it, you think of the doctor saying you were lucky. Now you see that he meant lucky to have lost your original foot, the one that by now would be completely digested by the shark. The one that now needs to merge with this sculpted object, this thing in front of you that the family is presently stroking and poking at. You have to admit, when the family finally leaves it standing there freely on the coffee table, that the foot does have a magical, yet incomplete quality.

In order not to see the skin of your stump, which the grandmother bathes with water from a bowl, you study the otherworldly foot: its milk-stained finish made to match your skin colour, its familiar shape around the toes. A mimicry of your toes locked in static repose. A mirror-image replica of your right foot. Did the foot that got eaten alive actually look exactly the same as the right one? It doesn't matter. At a glance, and with the harness hidden under pants, the foot is deceptively real.

You heart leaps when you think: this foot will never age! And then crashes: how will I swim with this foot? A vast grin spreads across your face, imagining yourself kicking hard wearing the Versace heels. You get it now. No, no, the purpose of this wraithlike foot is to be worn to a party. Not the party of last night, but another party. The family has made you an otherworldly foot that will strut you into the bastard's annual bash. A foot to face the man at last. Just that.

Out of the bedroom steps the young man. Alone and blinking at you. You smile back, as the grandmother presses the wooden foot into place against your stump. It's a perfect fit.

Day thirteen dead

(In which Bunny blows up a

superyacht.)

“A
RE YOU READY?”

“Ready.”

The young man takes your arm and you make your first steps. It's four o'clock in the afternoon. Thule and the girls have spent the last hours doing your makeup, pressing your red silk jumpsuit, placing both your feet into the strappy silver sandals. But it is only with the young man at your side that you stand up and feel the full sensation of walking on your otherworldly foot.

Your hips wobble at first. You can't imagine letting your entire weight fall, even for an instant, onto the side where there is nothing but this garish, toy foot.

“Let it rest, let it rest there,” encourages Thule. You cling to the right side of your body, the grounded part of you, feeling immoveable, stuck. “Go on,” everyone seems to say at once, and as your weight comes forward onto the toe, you let your knee bend as it wants to do.

“Good, now kick it through,” says Thule.

“Don't twist on the foot. Press your hips into it. That's the lady doin' it. Look at that.”

And you feel no pain. Kicking it through becomes easy with each step, with each repeated motion you are reminded of your body as it once was, fluid and calm, pushing through water on the way to the next sailboat. So distracted by your immediate success and the thrill of being free again, you don't notice how your arm drifts out of the young man's grasp, or how your velocity picks up. Up and down the hallway you go, greeting the orange ball of the Miami sun as you pass it. In a swivel action that you marvel at, you meet the door at the far end of the kitchen, the door you first entered while bleeding like a stuck pig, and realize how much you want to exit it. You're rushing to get there.

“Whoa,” says the young man, but you ignore him, push his hands away. You feel yourself tipping forward too much, as if you might fall, but you are so hell bent on doing this you find a hold and catch your balance. The wood of the door is warm. You watch your silver-sandled alien foot lift itself as if disembodied from you. But still cooperating, it takes you over the threshold.

“Lady, nobody gets up on a wooden foot without days of practise. Look at you.”

Look at me, you think. You walk feeling fierce and ready. Your agile card-dealer's fingers grip the ropes of the young man's muscly upper arms, but not for stability. You think of dancing with him that night. But more: you could go on your own now, if you wanted.

/ / /

All that was known was that the bastard wanted to meet the young man, that he had a proposition for him regarding the young man's ties to the family lands. You were aware of the bastard's purpose, of the maps. What you might never know is why the bastard didn't include you, why he felt you had to be eliminated in his quest for more.

The boardwalk leading to the dock is strung with tiny, white lights. You grin at the fact that the party is being held on Jablonsky's superyacht, and that you are the mystery guest. As you jostle slightly down its three steps, you feel some doubt. Your foot has minimal bend at the ankle, and the young man adjusts, trying to make your gait more supple. You'd agreed the entrance would be seamless and ceremonial.

“You okay?”

“Okay,” you say, but the anticipation of seeing the bastard eye to eye wells up in you like a storm.

You feel the young man's unwavering loyalty as he leads you through the crowd, which turns to look at you both as you pass. Beaded dresses parting as you approach, nighttime sunglasses tentatively lowered. In your periphery you see Coke-Bottle and Jablonsky turn, their shoulders joining in a twinned shudder. A glass of champagne hits the floor, its smash lost in the noise of the band. The ragged melody goes on and on. Like nothing is wrong, nothing has changed, drowning out the series of gasps as your identity comes into focus.

Then the tension behind all of the eyes not-seeing you, blocking your way should you want to jump overboard and out of this. But you don't really feel it anymore, the impulse is historic.

Now, like a sheet ripped open, the group parts and turns its back so that you walk alone with the young man along a strip of deck, toward the apex at which he, the bastard, stands, puffy-eyed and elegant in white.

His eyes flit for a half-second your way, the recognition is there, you see it, the sort of recognition that will know you and deny you all at once. And then he carries on.

“Finally we meet.”

“This is . . .” the young man begins to say, you've rehearsed it this way, that he would introduce you by your full name and watch the bastard cringe. But he stops, the three of you stay quiet.

The slow motion of taking in every inch of your husband. You are tall in Versace. You look at him eye to eye. He has aged. The breeze has undone his careful combing, his hair sits up like a flimsy box on top of his head. A hint of a smile crosses your lips. He sees it and coughs.

You catch a movement across the deck, the split-second flash of a woman at the rails, tossing her hair, and you know: it's Her. The bastard's new girl. A version of you. But younger.

And suddenly you feel the great weight of yourself and the familiarity of your man right there in front of you and you want to reach out to him. To take his hands and pull him into you.

And you read in his eyes a blank ferocity, and the sting you feel deepens as his hair falls into a position you know and love, and his face shifts, taking on a quizzical look of pride – for the woman he once adored, then killed off. Tried to kill off for reasons only the two of you alone will ever know, but you managed to survive against all odds. The respect is palpable. He almost sees it as a testament to his own ruthlessness. He dares you to challenge the bulletproof script in his head, the one he switched around on you, the new one which he has repeated to himself over and over, as to why you were erasable, why this situation was exceptional, how he is exceptional, even rare. “No, no, Bunny, you have not been replaced, my darling.”

Toss of lush blonde hair in your periphery. It might as well be a photograph of you two decades ago, pushing your butt out to the crowd, having a cigarette break between deals. The smoke spins outwards, away from her beauty, and you feel her youthful confidence, a confidence that sears. “It's all our lot, lady, get over yourself.” The plotlessness of competing with this unknown woman. You shift your weight to the new left foot. A pain erupts there: an ecstatic tide soaring up through your leg. Your eyes turn to slits that hold the bastard's gaze, but then soften, and you look at him as you always would have. A plain and simple look between two people who have known each other a long time. His eyes drop and he sees your beige foot. His lip curls at the sight of it. He turns away to the rails. The blonde is fiddling with her purse.

It's okay, I get it, you don't see me. You're disgusted.

You laugh a little, though not at him.

A squeeze from the young man.

One last meaningful look at the bastard and you follow your impulse: to lean in to kiss him goodbye.

The moment is suspended, to be recorded by everyone who watched: how you fell a little too deeply into each others' embrace, to the point of forgetting all falseness. Fell so that your vision of a wall of flames transporting the superyacht into the island's history books of Epic Accidents prophetically encircled you and him first, concealing a kiss like a fugue, like a tsunami which couldn't even touch the firewall containing and exposing the love within your hate, and how in that transcendent state the stiletto of your Versace accidentally stepped on the bastard's slipper and pierced both shoe and foot all the way through. You didn't feel a thing because, naturally, it was the otherworldly foot's doing.

You see tears shroud his eyes. He leaves you and walks to Her. As he reaches her side, half-stumbling into her arms, you watch it take shape: a cartoon-sized teardrop painted blood red by the coloured bulbs of the band's lighting system.

Your heart hardens and then, strangely, opens itself to the night air and the clear view of the prow skimming over the black waters towards an even blacker horizon. The yacht has already long pulled away. The crowd of friends and acquaintances are following the bastard's lead. You are there, but to be ignored. The tension is thick and emboldening in the way that exile is beyond solitariness. It makes you fearless. Only the neutral figures, the waiters, don't know to ignore you, and they bring you glass after glass of champagne, which you sip but mostly throw out to the oncoming waves. The young man left your side long ago, though you do see him looking down at you from the upper deck and you share a look of complicity. His eyes flash in recognition: of the euphoria, at some freedom you share. At the wildness that has overtaken you. And somehow his is a more ancient understanding of what it means for you to wear the otherworldly foot. Even though, you think, he is still too young to know.

As you turn to the prow, where the mist is rising, a vision intervenes: a wall of fire lighting up the ocean. Behind that wall, a thrash of swimmers moving in every direction into the invisibility of the night.

You nod into the mist long enough for it to make a film of saltwater on your face. You'll make sure the young man gets away on the dinghy, you know it's there.

Your shoe sparkles in the moonlight. A dagger. Holding the rail, you sway it this way and that, gyrating your hips to the music, digging your heel into the deck to feel out your weight. Majestic and robust. The foot radiates melodic power. It knows the music better than you and now you are its vehicle.

Confusion, then horror from the sidelines as you let go of the rail and dance openly, wildly, and deeper into the space of the decks. The percussionist spurs you on with her beat, she plays into your awkward movements, matching your strides as they clip, then fall, then catch. Gasps break out and someone reaches out to stabilize you. You feel arms grabbing at you, which you bat away but also fall into, you are tossed from old friend to old friend. You see their eyes, concerned or terrified, and their jeweled hands fumbling for you or pushing you away, not wanting to touch you. You are aware of a contrast in your skins. Theirs, silky and maudlin, encumbered by links of gold chain, while yours is strident, burred, as if you'd grown a layer of rough hair. In your mind, you lick their arms. Kick them with your lurid prosthetic. Their drinks crash to the floor as you bump and falter and flail, you are dizzying them within your extended power of the music gone wild. You feel the young man, distant but there, smiling, as the drummer's grin grows from wide to enormous. Some of your old friends are getting into it, they like it even, and approach you again and again until you find them in the mass of bodies.

It is then that you pitch yourself against the bastard's girl, who screams when you touch her. In that second of contact, you smell your scent roll away from you onto Her. Pagan sweat washing over Dior Poison perfume. You want to drown Her with the reek of you, the horror of you, to rub your own nose into the young bulbs of her tits that bust out of her dress. In a way, you kind of love Her. Want to warn Her.

“Only one woman on the raft,” you say to Her as she weakly brushes you off.

It will be a night fire. The ropes cut free.

A sunrise rescue.

Jablonksy is there, smiling at you. And she nods. You nod back at her. The young man is there. He takes your hand and pulls you away from the dancers who have forgotten you. Now it's the drummer girl who hammers their bodies into a Dionysian state, you laugh and mock high-five her, as your old friends throw off their jackets and stamp on the broken glass. Even Coke-Bottle. Even the bastard's girl. Only the bastard watches you with dead eyes as you lean into the young man's arm to go down the narrow stairs into the galley. On your last step you turn and see the bastard limp off, a spittle of dried blood marking his slipper.

“Here, eat this.” The young man feeds you their lobster and their caviar, butter and blackness dripping from his fingers into your mouth. You gorge on their hors d'oeuvres, ripping cellophane off the platters, letting blots of mushroom sauce and sizzled potato fall all over the galley floor. You gulp down their bubbly. All of it drips from both your mouths as you laugh and kiss and then laugh so loudly the staff runs in the other direction.

But reporting you is pointless. You are a ghost of flesh now and into forever. You cannot catch me, you think.