Imperfections (8 page)

What was in that tent would change Leonard and me forever, in very different ways. The pieces are all coming together but they can only be seen in hindsight. Leonard and I were too young to realize this. We had the puzzle but not all the pieces were there yet.

I followed Leonard through the tent flap.
 

It dropped behind us with a wet sound.

CHAPTER 5

Tokyo Is in Flames

“Welcome to the big one-oh,” Father yelled, then grimaced over the screaming kids at Bullwinkle's. “Happy Birthday, Kiddo.”

The table we sat at was ringed by Leonard, Auntie Maggie and Uncle Tony. Our table was surrounded by other tables full of kids celebrating similar milestones. Those full tables reminded me that I invited ten kids from school and only Leonard showed up.

In an outer orbit around the tables were banks of coloured spotlights roaming the darkness and large speakers with poor sound quality. These pumped out a static and pop version of “Rock Me Amadeus,” adding to the seizure-inducing quality of light and noise. Falco's lyrics were lost on us.

Occasionally, a comet of a waiter or waitress would fly through and drop off soda pop and food. Invariably, the server was a teenager with a face like the moon's
—
waxy, pale and cratered.

Father was putting on a brave show of enjoying himself so I followed along, pretending like none of this bothered me. If he could put in the effort, so could I.

All the tables faced an animatronics
Rocky and Bullwinkle
show that played every half hour. Boris and Natasha joined the bull moose and flying squirrel halfway through the ten-minute show. The few kids paying attention would boo at the villains. The lights were kept dark even between shows, save for the roaming spotlights. The only thing on the menu was pizza, but there were thirty different kinds of it.
 

Mother was notably missing. Father thought it best if he smiled a lot in her absence and pretended like she had never been there, anywhere, in the first place.
 

“She's gone off to fix her Tanqueray smile,” Father had said the first day she was gone. “She'll be back in a month.”
 

At the time, I figured it was something like a tan. It sounded exotic, like she was lying on a beach somewhere next to the ocean with a dentist or something. I just wished she would have said bye before she left.

Father had mumbled something about her never being able to stand the sight of a full glass.
 

Now, I realize, the grown-ups stopped drinking beer when they hung out, about a week before Mother disappeared. Nobody drank after she returned either, even though Mother often prompted them, following her encouragement with the disclaimer “I'm fine,” in which she dragged out the
i
sound in the word “fine.”

“Here's the pizza,” squeaked our adolescent waiter in his violet-coloured hat and shirt. He plunked it onto the table before wiping his hands on the seat of his pants.

It had taken two shows to get here. Two rounds of jerky mouths opening and closing out of sync with the voices on the loud speakers, two recitations of the same jokes. The machines went through the same dialogues, same script, and the same awkward motions, as they would twenty-four times today, working away in the dark.

“Dig in boys.” Father smiled at me and Leonard.

“Thanks, Father,” I replied, smiling hollowly as well. I grabbed a piece of pizza. It was cold but good.

Leonard watched me for a minute before grabbing a slice. We sat there chewing, looking at each other. He was getting too old for this; he was too cool for this. Everything about him said that he didn't want to be there.

“Happy Birthday, Richard,” Auntie Maggie glowed. She always seemed to glow.

“Yeah, here you go buddy.” Uncle Tony leaned across the table holding a present he had pulled from the seat beside him. “This is from Auntie Maggie, me and Leonard.”

I put the box on the table and tore apart the wrapping paper, saying thank-yous before even seeing what it was. I was so grateful they were there; otherwise, it would have been just me and Father and the overhanging accusations of being a loser because nobody showed up at my birthday party. I had one friend close to my age and I was related to him.

“Hey, Rocky.” The spotlights flared up on the stage and the animatronics Bullwinkle ground into action. “Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.”

I looked at the box. It was a picture of a kid standing on something that looked like a plastic Saturn but the rings were so tight it squeezed the planet enough to make it bulge on either side of its equator.

A girlie squawk came from the floppy flying squirrel. “But that trick never works.”

“It's a Pogo Ball,” Auntie Maggie said excitedly. “You inflate it, stand on the platform, pinch the top part of the ball between your ankles and off you go, hopping.”

I smiled with equal enthusiasm.
 

Nobody could ever see me use this thing.

“Like a pogo stick but a rubber ball,” Auntie Maggie said. “Leonard loves his.”

Bullwinkle pulled a bear's head up from his top hat. A static roar played over the sound system. One kid laughed.

The Pogo Ball was neon pink with a fluorescent green ring.
 

Nobody could ever know I had this.

“I don't have one,” Leonard said.

“And now for something we hope you'll really like,” Rocky flopped precariously to one side of the stage.

“Let's go to the arcade,” Leonard said to me.

“Can we go to the arcade?” I asked.

“Go to the arcade,” Father sighed and started cleaning up around the table, stacking plates and cutlery, crumpling wrapping paper and boxing the remaining pizza from our plates.

As Leonard and I walked past the stage and into the next room, there was a scream and bells started ringing. The room was full of video games, mini basketball games and mini bowling games where you earned tickets for sinking a ball in the right hole. You could redeem your tickets at a booth manned by the adolescent server's clone. In exchange, there were things like a whistle or a toy car, a small plastic army man with a parachute or a plastic dinosaur in a top hat.

Leonard and I worked our way through the crowds and sidled up to the group of kids around the
Rampage
video game. Some kid was playing as the Godzilla-inspired character, Lizzie, and had made it to the Tokyo level. The pixellated lizard jerked her way up the side of a building, punched a window and ate a woman.

I glanced around the crowd of kids and wondered quickly if any of them would have come to my birthday party if they knew me. Were they here for someone else's party? I wondered what the other boy had said or done to get so many friends to show up at his party.

In the meantime, I decided, they were all at my party. That thought brought a smile to my face, a smile that was returned by a girl standing close to me. She looked familiar.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hi,” I replied, stealing a quick glance at Leonard. He was busy watching the screen.

“He's doing really good,” she said, tossing a quick glance and a raised eyebrow at the boy playing.

“It's my birthday,” I said.

“Happy birthday.” She smiled. “What's wrong?”

“Only one person came.” I pointed at Leonard. “And he's my cousin.”
 

The girl gave me a sad look and reached out for my arm. We stood awkwardly, her hand on my arm, and watched the boy tear buildings down, swipe helicopters out of the sky and throw a city into chaos. She kept her hand on my forearm while the city collapsed; people were dying. The giant lizard hammered away at a tank, people ran screaming in every direction and her touch calmed me. Her arm resting on my forearm was all I could focus on. I stole the occasional sidelong glance at her calm face, flashing yellow and blue in the arcade-lit fires of Tokyo burning to the ground. I also stole the occasional glance at Leonard, not sure what I would have to endure having wilfully let a girl touch me but, at the same time, something kept me from moving away from her.

There was a collective groan from the group of kids. Lizzie had been shot off the side of a building. The electronic lizard's expression was a mix of pain and sorrow, as if it wasn't ready for death, it still had things it wanted to do and death had come too soon. There were still so many people to eat and buildings to smash up. Add to that the pain of falling ten storeys after being shot off of a building—it was unfair.

The crowd started to disperse. Leonard looked my way and gave an almost imperceptible frown, catching the girl's hand on my arm a second before she said goodbye and wandered off to a clutch of girls at a bowling game. Before Leonard could say anything, Auntie Maggie was on us.

“Let's get a picture of you guys,” she said and dragged us toward a photo booth.

“I want to play
Rampage
, though.” For all his newfound toughness, Leonard sounded very close to whining.

“Come on, you'll look back at this picture in twenty years and laugh,” Auntie Maggie said. “Trust me on this.”

I didn't have that much time. I would fall one year and four limbs short of Auntie Maggie's prediction. Not knowing this then, I trusted her.

I went along, my feelings torn between Auntie Maggie and Leonard, wanting to get a picture but wanting to be cool too. The cooler I could be, the more kids would come to my eleventh birthday.

Just as I finished that thought, Leonard and I were stuffed into the photo booth.

I could hear Auntie Maggie dropping coins in a slot. Two dollars for four photos. The booth was cramped. The backdrop was red and white vertically striped fabric.

“There, now you boys smile,” Auntie Maggie told us, reaching up and dropping the booth's curtain behind us with a wet sound. The flashbulb fired.

It took a few moments for my eyes to adjust to the dim tent interior. I stood there dumbly next to Leonard. I could hear the carnie breathing close behind us, the rusty nail scraping quietly against his teeth as he shifted it slowly in his mouth. There were other people in the tent—some big, adult bodies moving around in the shadows. Their murmurings were hushed and seemed to pause for a moment when we entered, as if we were expected but had arrived an hour early. Outside, the noises of the midway were muted to the point of being distant screams in the darkness.

Somewhere in the dark came the tinny sound of an organ grinder churning out a variable speed version of “The Entertainer.” The air was thick with a distinctly male smell, the musty smell emanating from the straw-covered ground, cigarette smoke, body odour and a sharp tinge from booze-soaked breath.

As my eyes adjusted, they were drawn to a series of dim cones of light, areas spotlit by weak overhead lamps. The milling shadows of people crowded the perimeter of each area. The crowd moved slowly, in a predatorial circle.

“Feel free to take a look around, boys,” the carnie growled from close behind us. If a voice could leer, his did. “I'll be around if'n you want to be talkin' to me about anythin', but, in the span, take in these marvels of nature.”

“Come on.” Leonard grabbed my hand and led me to one of the spotlit areas.

We wove our way through the bodies to the crowd gathered around the base of one watery pool of yellow light. We worked our way through the cluster of towering people. There was a constant stream of mumbling and the occasional subdued laugh and snicker.

We stopped at a sign that read:
The Mighty Mite. The World's Smallest Man
.

Beneath the light, behind a low, handprint-smeared Plexiglas wall, was the Mighty Mite. He was about half as tall as me. He was shirtless. His tiny torso was top-lit by the spotlight, accentuating the frail fingers of ribs wrapped around his chest.

The Might Mite, a primordial dwarf, one of a hundred in the world, was two feet tall and weighed twenty-one pounds. He had a severe overbite, a cone-shaped face ending in the point of his nose and a presence that likely instigated every pixie legend in the world.

He sat at a tiny table playing solitaire, his bird bones manipulating a deck of cards which seemed as big as a book in his stunted fingers. A cigarette smouldered in an ashtray on the table, giving a blue haze to the air in the enclosure. A small black-and-white television set sat at one end of the table, playing a fuzzy soap opera.

Occasionally, the Mighty Mite glanced at the television set, then focused on his card game again.

“Ugly little thing,” someone in the crowd said.

“Like a real person,” came a reply, “only smaller.”

There was some snickering.

The Mighty Mite must have been able to hear the comments but gave no indication. He glanced at the television, reached out with his stubby fingers and took the cigarette from the ashtray. He brought the cigarette to his lips and took a long drag. He coughed a high squeaky noise.