Degrees of Nakedness (9 page)

Sometimes Julian is asleep when Marika gets home from work. If there’s no supper cooked for her she’ll eat white bread and butter with spoonfuls of granulated sugar. Julian likes to cook for her and she likes what he cooks. But she’s also happy to eat bread and sugar. She makes coffee and folds the bread and sinks it into her coffee. The soaked bread topples and she catches it in her mouth. The cats slink in from all the different rooms of the apartment and curl around her feet, or on her lap. She lifts the kitten and puts it inside her jacket. If Julian
stumbles down the stairs, half awake, and he sees Marika bathed in the light of a fashion show on TV with her sugared bread, he feels that he has failed her. The failure makes him even sleepier. He can’t keep his eyes open.

Marika is not one for dwelling on the past. Julian knows very little about her past. Not that she’s secretive. It’s the kind of conversation that bores her. Marika has a powerful charm. She’s a chemistry professor, but most of her friends are artists or writers. At parties, for conversation, she offers crystallized stories about nature or the stars. If someone interrupts her to ask about her parents, or something back in France, she answers in short sentences, faltering.

She thinks of memory only as a muscle that must be exercised to keep the whole mind sharp. She is interested in sharpness. If asked, she can recall exactly what she did on any date two years before. She will remember what she wore, what Julian wore, what they ate, the content of any conversation that occurred on that day. But this is just a game.

Marika thinks about infinite tracts of time, about meteorology, about hummingbirds, about measuring the erosion of coastlines, and whether the continents could still lock together like a jigsaw puzzle, or a jaw grinding in sleep. She thinks about the Tower of Babel, or about fish that swim up the walls of fjords as if the walls were the lake bottom. What such swimming against the stream does to their skeletons. When she isn’t thinking things like this, she watches soap operas, or drives in her car, or she and Julian make love.

Julian has watched Marika simulate theoretical galaxies on the computer. She has found this program mostly to amuse him. He has seen two galaxies blinking together, dragging their sluggish amorphous bodies toward each other across the black screen. Each blink represents a million years, until they pass through each other. The gravitational pull of each galaxy affects the shape of the other until some stars are clotted in the centre, and the rest spread on either side of the screen like giant butterfly wings. Marika has shown him thousands of things like this. She has described the path of the plague in the Middle Ages, drawing a map on a paper napkin at a donut shop. She told him that in Egypt they have found the preserved body of a louse, on the comb of Nefertiti. A drop of human blood, perhaps Nefertiti’s blood, was contained in the abdomen of the louse. They have discovered many things about ancient disease from that drop of blood.

Julian collects the stories Marika tells him, although they often lose their scientific edges. He can’t remember how old the louse was. For some reason the only thing he remembers about the plague is a medical costume, a long robe with the head of a bird. The doctor looked out through two holes cut in the black feathered hood, over a protruding beak.

When he is awake, Julian pursues the morals of these stories, something other than what lies on the surface. Just as he can’t imagine how much time it took to create the universe from a black hole, he can’t get at that hidden meaning.

Recently Marika contracted a virus that caused a nervous disorder. If not diagnosed, this disease can spread quickly through the body and destroy the tips of all nerve endings irreparably. It started with a numbness in Marika’s left cheek. She had it checked immediately. Of course, she had access to the best medical care in Toronto. The disease was arrested before any serious damage was done, but the nerves in Marika’s saliva ducts grew back connected to one of her tear ducts. Now when she eats her left eye waters.

Julian has begun to suspect that Marika doesn’t talk about her past because she is afraid she will seem like an old woman. It was her eye, filling of its own accord, that started him thinking this way. The eye is the first sign of Marika’s age. When her eye waters he’s filled with fright. That fright causes its own involuntary response in him. He’s remembering things he hasn’t thought about in years. He has noticed that the skin on Marika’s face looks older than before. The pores are larger. There are more wrinkles. The soft white pouches beneath her eyes are larger. That skin seems as vulnerable to him as the flesh of a pear he is about to bite.

He was going through their wedding photographs. Julian took them himself, so most of the pictures are of Marika. She is wearing a white silk jacket, cut like a lab coat, and the apartment is full of white blossoms. Her face looks so much younger that for a moment he has the feeling the photographs have been doctored.

They’re eating a dinner of lamb and fresh mint. Marika’s knife is whining back and forth on the dinner plate.

“Could you stop that noise?”

Marika’s body jerks, as if she didn’t realize he was sitting beside her.

“I was lost in thought. Thinking of crabs.”

A tear is running down her cheek.

“In Guatemala,” she says, “there’s a species of crab that burrows into the ground and brings up in its claws shards of ancient pottery.”

She lays down her knife and wipes a tear off her cheek with the back of her hand.

“The crabs descend beneath layer after layer to different cities that have been piled on top of each other, over time. Each city is hundreds of years younger than the one below it. The crabs mix the pottery shards together, all these ancient layers mixed together in the light of day. You really know very little about me. You know nothing about science.”

Julian notices that both Marika’s eyes are watering now and realizes she’s crying.

In his dreams the stories Marika tells him are fables. He dreams about a crab that presents him with a jacket of glass shards that came from a wine bottle he once threw at Olivia. Olivia wears a cloak of stars. She opens her arms and the cloak is wrenched away from her, leaving her naked. She becomes two women, a blurred image, Marika and Olivia both.

That night Julian leaves the house at midnight and walks for hours. Outside the Royal Ontario Museum the moonlit gargoyles are covered with burlap bags, and look like robbers with nylon stockings over their faces. A group of five people dressed in cartoon costumes emerges from a church basement. They skip across the empty street and get into an idling mini-van. A man in a Pink Panther costume trails behind. He has removed the head of the costume and carries it under his arm. The man’s own head looks abnormally small against the giant pink neck of the costume. Julian takes a picture of him.

Lately, Julian thinks about a memory lit with a big number one candle, a wax monkey wrapped around it. Julian carried the cake. He could feel the yellow of the flame under his chin, like the shadow of a buttercup. He could see his daughter’s face buried in Olivia’s blouse, both their party hats sticking off the sides of their heads. There was a blizzard outside and Julian felt like they were wrapped in white tissue paper. He left a few days after that. He hasn’t spoken to either of them since.

Julian remembers things he didn’t notice when they happened. He remembers a party in the country. Someone had shoved a hotdog wiener through a hole in a screen door, and every time the door slammed the hotdog wagged obscenely. It was the night he met Olivia. At midnight everyone went skinny dipping, the sound of diving bodies swallowed by the dark water. He was drunk and naked. When it came time to get out of the water he suddenly felt embarrassed. He asked Olivia to give
him a hand, so he could hold a towel in front of himself. When she did haul him out he managed to drop the towel and got caught in the skittering path of a flashlight.

When Julian gets home from his walk he finds Marika asleep on the couch, a bowl of chips resting on her knee. She has fallen asleep in the middle of the night with her wrist hanging over the rim of the chrome chip bowl. The phone is ringing. Julian nearly trips over one of the cats in his rush to get it. It’s ringing near Marika’s ear. She doesn’t stir.

Olivia’s heels click down the hall through the loose pools of fluorescent light. It’s Monday and the Topsail Cinemas mall is mostly deserted, except for the games arcade which shoots out synchronized pings and buzzes. Most of the stores have been in various stages of renovation all winter. Someone has been going at a cement wall with a jackhammer. Chunks of cement have fallen away and rusted bars stick out.

When Olivia turns the corner she sees the exhibit by a taxidermist from British Columbia named Harold. He’s standing next to a chair, one hand on his hip, his index fingers looped through his change apron. When he sees Olivia he becomes animated.

“Step this way beautiful, beautiful lady. Let me take you on a whirlwind tour of purgatory’s wild kingdom. Here you will see beasts miraculously wrested from the claws of decay. They
have looked death in the eye. They have been consumed by death, but they are not dust. Thanks to the strange alchemy of embalming fluid and my own artistic wizardry, they live. They live.”

He does this with a little flourish of his hands and a slight bow. Then he sighs as if he has used up all his energy. Pinching his nose, he says, “Two-fifty if you want to see it.”

Olivia is twenty minutes early for the movie, so she says, “Sure, I’ll treat myself, why not, it’s my birthday.”

Harold has a thick mop of black hair with silver at the sides; his body is very tall and thin. One of his eyes is lazy, straying off to the side.

The display takes the shape of a mini-labyrinth made of ordinary office dividers. At each turn the viewer comes upon another stuffed animal.

“Most of them are from endangered species. But the truly unique thing about this exhibit is that these animals have all been hit by trucks. Trucks or cars. Every one of them. Please don’t think I would ever hurt these animals for the sake of the collection. I collect them only after they have been killed.

“I’m different from those taxidermists you see on the side of the road during the summer, of course. I’ve seen them in this province, in Quebec and Alberta as well, lined up in roadside flea markets next to tables that display dolls with skirts that cover toilet paper rolls. Those guys have a few birds, maybe, a couple of squirrels mounted on sticks, a few moose heads in the back of the station wagon. I take my work seriously. I’m always trying to get a lively posture.”

Olivia has stopped in front of a moose. The moose is making an ungainly leap over a convincingly weathered fence, one end of which had been neatly sawed off for the purposes of the exhibit. The moose is raised on its hind legs. Its head and neck are hunched into its shoulders, as if it were being reprimanded.

“This moose looks funny.”

Harold points to the neck, saying, “A less experienced man might have stretched the neck forward, and if I wished to be true to a moose in this position, that’s what I would have done. I took this artistic license with the moose because it died on the hood of a station wagon. The antenna of the car, unfortunately, entered its rectum and pierced the bowel twice, like a knitting needle. After that I felt this moose should be preserved in an attitude of shame.”

“Are you serious?”

“I travel the continent with these animals, setting up in strip malls all over the United States and Canada. I have a license. It’s educational. Ottawa pays me. I am very serious. People have to know what we are doing to our wild kingdom. I try to respect the animals as individual creatures. Every sentient being deserves respect. Some of these species may never roam the Earth again. They’re dead, of course, but I have preserved them. My part is small, I guess. I’m like a red traffic light. That’s how I see myself. I do my thing, I make them pause for a minute, before they march off into extinction. It’s a chance to say goodbye. We can’t forget what we’ve destroyed.”

The last animal is a polar bear. The office dividers are set up
so that you come upon it suddenly. Its head and forepaws tower over the divider, but Olivia has been looking at a stuffed mother skunk and suckling skunks on the floor. When she walks around the corner she almost bangs into the bear. The animal’s coat is yellowed, its jaw wide.

“She scared you,” chuckles Harold and he pats the bear’s coat twice, as if it’s the bear that needs reassurance.

“This polar bear is my drawing card. The only animal not hit by a truck. This bear was shot. It wandered into a small town here in Newfoundland. It had been trapped on an ice floe. Starved. Dangerous. A mother bear separated from her cub. At seven in the morning a woman was putting out her garbage. The bear chased her back into the house. There was only an aluminum screen door between them. She got her husband’s shotgun and when the bear crumpled the aluminum door, just like a chip bag, she shot it in the throat.”

Harold parts the fur of the bear’s throat. He has to stand on tippy toes to do so. Olivia can see the black sizzled hole, the fur singed pink.