Sparrow Nights (16 page)

^{C H A P T E R}        
13

D
on’t worry, I’ll get back to it. But indulge me for a second. Let me jump ahead, maybe a year, to an evening class where my future wife, who was taking a course in modern French poetry, introduced me to a longish short story. Now Chekhov, as I’ve learned, is an acquired taste; almost no one gets him the first time through, and for all their fussing I’m not sure the Russians ever have.
En tout cas
. She gave me this story, I now realize, because she was flirting with me. She had a crush on me not because I was handsome or brilliant, I was neither, but rather because I was her professor. Some people are just like that. Thank God. I was flattered. I tried to read the story, but it was flat and rather depressing, and I was just about to put it away when I came across the words “sparrow nights,” a Russian expression, apparently, that describes a night of dementia and torment. When I came across those words, I didn’t like it. Don’t misunderstand me, I didn’t feel compelled to kill her too, but it made me jump. For a few seconds I wondered if she was playing a kind of game with me, if maybe she knew what had gone on in my house that summer night and was giving me a bit of a wink. My Lord. A night of the sparrows indeed. Green smoke drifting through the air, cicadas chirping in the backyard. There was blood everywhere. Everywhere. I started to clean it up, but it was between the floorboards, between the kitchen tiles.

By morning I even thought of killing myself. I cocked the gun; the spent shell casing flew out and rattled onto the floor. I wrapped my lips around the barrel, but the taste of the metal and the cobwebs made one hesitate. Let us remember the
commitment
part of suicide. No getting up and walking away after that one. And then an extraordinary thing happened: I saw Emma Carpenter walking down the centre of the street. This was no hallucination. She was walking very casually, sipping a can of pop through a straw. I stood still as a snake. She didn’t look over, but when she got abreast of my house, she dropped the pop can with a clank and threw out her arms. She stretched out those thin arms like Jesus Christ on the Cross and she drifted down the street.

I fell asleep. Mind you, I only slept for an hour, maybe a bit more, and when I woke up I was feeling a tad anxious. But it took a few seconds to remember why. Like a house of bricks collapsing on one, that was the sensation. It was, you see, exactly as I’d always dreamt it would be. I sat bolt upright. I jumped out of bed, I ran into the living room and there it was, indeed, a dead man on the carpet. Just like the nightmare. The thing I’d worried about happening had actually happened. And no gun either; he’d been bluffing. I, on the other hand, looked, well, rather bad, to say the least. The banker’s light over the door, the dumdum shells. The bullet in the back—they would gas me for that one alone. Just remember, I told myself, you can always kill yourself later.

I dragged the body into the kitchen. I dragged it back into the hall. I did everything but put a lampshade on its head and ask it to dance. I dragged the poor bugger down the stairs,
bang, bang, bang
, went his head. I tried to stuff him in the furnace, but his shoulders were too wide.

I showered and I remember snapping open the shower curtain a half-dozen times, expecting to see a blood-spattered Donny in the bathroom doorway. Finally I left the curtain open altogether. But the body. I had to do something about the body.

I had an old-fashioned furnace, an oil burner, with a big door; you could open it and see the flames inside. But it was too narrow by six inches. So I did what you would do. I didn’t call the police, I didn’t put a gun in my mouth. I dried my hair under the hair dryer, things moving rather rapidly, shaved, brushed my teeth and took the streetcar—for some reason the streetcar seemed less suspicious, less the act of a guilty man—out to the identical hardware store where I had bought the rat poison. I bought an axe and a tarpaulin and putting them in a taxi—one doesn’t carry an axe on the streetcar—I returned home. When I lifted Donny onto the tarp, I noticed a wallet in his back pocket, attached to his belt by one of those silver chains. I pulled it out and opened it. Donny Most, that was his name. What a strange name. I stuffed it back under the body and then stood up and took a deep, deep breath. This part is not very pleasant, so skip ahead if you want, but it had to be done. I chopped his arms off at the shoulder. And then he fit. I stuffed him headfirst into the furnace, clothes, boots and all, and tossed his arms in after. Then I shut the door, went upstairs, turned up the thermostat to ninety and opened all the windows on the ground floor. I heard the furnace go on below. Then I went out and sat in the park. It was a lovely spring day, but there was something wrong with the colour of things, as if my attention was so electrically focused on the body in my furnace that it quite drained the colour from the world around me. It reminded me of Emma, actually, of those days when I wandered around in the spring sunshine waiting and waiting and waiting for the phone to ring. The world had looked like that then too.

So I sat in the park on a bench. It was the same bench I had kissed Emma Carpenter on, that summer night a hundred years ago. An old woman sat beside me. For a second I thought of striking up a conversation with her, but I was afraid I smelt of alcohol and I didn’t want her to remember me for any reason at all. So I sat silently, watching a cat batting a flower with its paw. A gentle wind blew across the park; it was coming from my house and I thought for a second I could smell human flesh burning. It struck me like a blow in the chest. I looked over at the woman. Could she smell it too, Donny burning up in my furnace? People say that human flesh smells like chicken when it’s burning and that’s precisely how it smelt. It made me very uncomfortable until it occurred to me that it
was
chicken, that somebody was having a barbecue in a backyard. I could feel things starting to speed up again, and by now the world around me had turned almost black and white, the colour sucked from the grass and the budding trees, everything the colour of dirty swallows. I thought about going to the liquor store for a bottle of bourbon, but—and I know how this sounds—I was afraid of getting drunk and doing something foolish. But that smell, that burning chicken.

Finally I couldn’t stand it any more. I went for a walk. I walked all the way down to the lakeshore. I ran into Serrault in Kensington Market. I nodded rather formally. It was uncharacteristic of me; I tend to lean toward the excessive when greeting people, if only to show I’m not frightened of them, but Serrault noted I was out of form and, with a private smile (such good manners), steered his boyfriend into a cheese shop. I took the back streets after that, but it didn’t help. It was one of those peculiar days when you run into everyone who ever made you uncomfortable but whose feelings you don’t want to offend. So I just kept waving and smiling, never breaking my stride, the way I’ve heard movie stars do.

I got down to the CN Tower. I walked all the way across the parking lot and touched it with my fingers, like it was home base, the way you do when you’re a kid, and then I went into a small bar a few hundred feet away that overlooked the train yard. It was a rickety little joint, only a half-dozen tables, and I sat by the window. I hadn’t had a beer in fifteen years, but I did that day. And I liked it, big and frothy, and oddly comforting, just the bulk of it, and for about thirty seconds, partway through the second pint, I felt my shoulders come down and I yawned. I
yawned. Tu m’entends?
But it didn’t last. I could feel my thoughts beginning to hurry on the way home. I resisted the temptation to run the last few blocks just to get it over with, a terrible, chest-constricting urgency compelling me forward. But when I cleared the top of my street, expecting to see police cruisers and yellow tape wrapping my house like a last-minute birthday gift, I saw nothing but a quiet street on a spring day. I started across the park I’d crossed that day Emma left me. I think I even stopped and stood on my tiptoes to see if there was anyone on my porch. No one. Not a soul. I walked by the house, stealing a look at the front door. You could hardly tell it was busted and for a second, a dream second, I hoped … well, you can imagine what I hoped. But then I saw a split in the wood near the doorknob and I knew the whole thing was true.

I didn’t go in. I couldn’t face, not for the moment anyway, the thing in the furnace. So I kept walking. I walked all the way up to Dupont and I went to the beer store. It was Saturday afternoon, the place full of men in baseball hats, their cars pulled up with girlfriends in the passenger seats; old men bought little six-packs and took them home to rooming houses. I ordered a dozen long-necked beers. Something about their shape relaxed me. I must have seen someone somewhere drinking one, down in Mexico, someone young and easy. I carried them down the street on my hip, like homework. My Australian neighbour was in his driveway, lying under his car, tinkering, but his radar was so sharp he detected me and scrambled out.

“Having
another
one of those days?” he asked, and I replied with a roaring laugh. Really, it sounded like a car backfiring. But I was loath to provoke trouble—some days one sees the world as a potential character witness—and I stopped for a few moments for a chat. But I could see I wasn’t pulling it off. I was running on a kind of octane, which, because I’d been in my own company for so long, had begun to seem rather normal but when out in the world must have struck people as … somewhat off.

“I’m having a bout of insomnia,” I said, hoping that might explain the rather driven look of my features. The skin on my face seemed a size or two too small for my skull, as if in washing it the night before, it had shrunk like a new cotton shirt. I made my excuses, laughed wildly at a parting remark of his, and hurried home, head down, praying not to encounter the woman with the red hair. Today would be the day, if such a day existed, that she would confront me with the killing of her dogs, and I was sure I’d shatter like a vase.

I closed the door behind me and went into the living room and sat on the couch and opened a bottle of beer, still cool from the chiller, and drank it rapidly. It was only a few seconds before I again had the impression of momentary calm, as if the situation was somehow dealable-with. Knowing, as I did, that this was probably a trick, still I toyed with the idea of how I could prolong it—if only for a few weeks—until habit set in, until the thing in the furnace became merely
one
of the facts of my life. Albeit a king-sized one. A jumbo concern, so to speak. Until then what I needed to do was stop myself from acting, from responding to wave after wave of panic, the acting out of which would almost certainly ruin my life. Well, easily said indeed. Still. Going to the police now was obviously out of the question. They would throw a butterfly net over me and I would remain under it for twenty-five years. But after my clumsy experience with my neighbour I knew I had to stay out of the public eye for some time. Until I stopped looking and behaving like an escaped animal.

Lord, it was hot. I realized after a few moments the furnace was on. I turned it down. I heard it click. The house fell silent. I phoned the French department and left a message on the answering service; a bout of strep throat, I said, be off a week, want to give you all plenty of notice. Pip, pip, consummate professional and all that. Then I got down to business. I washed the living-room floor; I washed the kitchen floor; I cleaned up the shattered vase. I was very thorough. But things were again going way too quickly, more avalanches of poetry and old songs from high school and shouts from boys I’d known in university. Lord, the sound of a boy’s voice across a cricket pitch at sunset. How haunting.
Darius, come with us. We’re going to the pub. Do come!
I checked my watch. It was after five. The sun over the yardarm. Safe to have a drink now. An honest day’s work behind us. Oh yes, let’s not flirt with trouble; perhaps, I reasoned, today is not the day to address whether I do or do not have a drinking problem. I went to the fridge and got a beer and put two in the freezer and then came back and put my feet up on my desk and stared out the window. It was a spring evening. I drank the beer, then one from the freezer. So cold, it was like putting out a fire. I held it to the side of my face. My God, I must have a fever.

I was drinking the third beer when my eyes fell on a photograph, a framed black-and-white picture my Spanish roommate had taken of me in France that year I lived in Toulouse. He had caught me sitting at the dining-room table, looking up a word in a dictionary of Old French, and I’d looked up at him and smiled, but you could see by the smile—or I could—that I was distracted. I had been reading
La Chanson de Roland
(in the original, I add snobbishly) at that very moment, but what I had really been doing was thinking about Raissa Shestatsky. Even though there was precious little to think about, at this time every evening in Toulouse a kind of anxiety about her had clutched my young chest, as if she might just be starting the evening, getting ready to go out and meet her boyfriend, everything moving toward that midnight point where they would go back to his apartment and make love, my lovely naked Raissa on her hands and knees … my sacred, lovely, inviolable Raissa. But looking at the photograph, I raced ahead months to the coffee we had when I got back, to the strange yawn that had interrupted the story she was telling, that had signalled my heart’s end to her. Looking at my worried, anxious face in the photograph, I realized that if I could only stop from self-destructing over the next little while, if I could just keep a lid on this body in the furnace, I had a chance of returning to earth. I had survived Raissa; I could survive this.

To that end I rose quickly and went into the medicine cabinet, took my entire supply of sleeping pills and flushed them down the toilet, not without, at the last second, a moment’s terrible doubt that almost threw me to my knees in an effort to suck the water from the toilet bowl. I may even have contemplated disassembling the water pipes in the basement and licking their insides. But the body was down there and I wasn’t prepared to go down those stairs to find a bloody and intact Donny, somehow rescued from the oven, standing, his heart in his hand, in the dark, waiting for me. No.