Specimen & Other Stories (5 page)

“Like some tea?”

“Sure.” Anything to get the taste of fish
out of his mouth.

She started a fresh fire and filled a
stainless-steel IKEA kettle from a four-liter container of water.
When the water had boiled, she dropped a handful of something into
it to steep. She took a pair of small Chinese cups from a plastic
milk crate and poured them each a cup of tea.

After the wine, Stanley was quite thirsty,
and he drank three cups of tea. He didn’t really like it at first,
but it grew on him. It tasted like bong water with a hint of
peppermint. After the third cup, he felt his ears pop, as if he’d
just taken a fast ride up the elevator to the top of the CN Tower.
The tension in his head trickled out of his ears and ran down his
spine like the residue of an ayurvedic oil massage.

After a few minutes, the ground beneath him
seemed to come alive. The dirt was shape-shifting. He saw his own
face smiling up at him, and then an ant crawled up his nose and he
faded away into the dirt. The earth was translucent and
three-dimensional. There were more faces down below, and he caught
fleeting glimpses of Martha and Isabel and Gary and Joan and a
woman with whom he’d had an affair during his depression, and other
lovers and people from his past all the way back to high school and
they were all naked and crawling over each other like worms in a
compost heap. And somewhere far below, like large fish in deep
water, he saw the dead Mohawks who’d lived and died and been buried
here beside the river.

The next thing he knew, he was naked on the
ground and Callie was naked on top of him and they were locked in a
dance that was timeless, a fusion of souls for a purpose that only
God could understand.

When he woke up again, he was alone inside
her shelter. His limbs felt soft and feathery, like somebody had
turned down the gravity, and he was in danger of floating away. He
grabbed a tent-pole just in case he started to lift off. He felt
seriously jet-lagged, as if he’d been on an inter-planetary flight
and had lost his luggage and walked out of the terminal, not only
into a different time zone, but a different dimension.

After a while, he crawled outside. The sky
was still light but the sun had disappeared behind the valley
ridge. Thunder to the south. He watched the subway trains pulsing
across the viaduct, sending the little people back home for a night
of television and torpid sleep before they returned to work for the
System.

He heard voices off in the bushes. An
exchange of greetings, a few polite words at first, then questions
without answers, the bark of a command, an angry retort, a rising
crescendo of shouts, a snarl, a scream and then silence.

He didn’t get up to see what it was all
about. Shit happens. Although naked as a bird, he felt safe here.
He was light, eternal and free. If something threatened him, he’d
just fly away.

It was almost dark before Callie returned.
She threw down a stick the size of a baseball bat and went into the
river. As she passed him, he saw her palms glistening with
something red and luminescent.

“Is that blood?” he asked.

Crouched in the shallows, washing her hands,
she said over her shoulder, “Picking berries, I got juice all over
my hands.”

“What was all that shouting?”

“Some guy tried to pick from my bush. I
scared him off.”

She came and sat near him. She took a bowl
from her milk crate and set it on the ground. From the pocket of
her dress she took a handful of red berries and dropped them into
the bowl. She nudged the bowl in his direction.

“What kind of berries are these?”

“Don’t know. I’m not good with names.”

Stanley tried one. It was sweet and sour
with an aftertaste of iron. Not what you’d call a dessert berry,
but it seemed nutritious enough. He continued eating them,
reflecting that, aside from his breakfast fish, this was the only
other thing he’d had for food today.

“You don’t want any?”

“I ate some while I was picking.”

A dull fire grew in Stanley’s belly where
the berries coagulated. His testicles felt heavy. A primal drumbeat
began in his lower spine. He looked down and saw he had another
erection. Good grief, what was going on? Despite his nakedness, he
saw no need to cover himself.
Out here on the perimeter, we are
bone, ejaculate...

The sky grew dark. The full moon came up.
Callie made a small fire.

“Glass of port and a cigar?” she asked
him.

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m all out of Puerto Fino and Macanudos,”
she said, “but I have something just as good.”

“Bring it on.” This was Stanley’s new motto.
If in doubt, try it out.

“
Carpe diem
, right?”

She went into her shelter and came back with
a bottle of tequila and a hand-rolled cigarette. She’d taken off
her dress and donned a single necklace of small white cowrie shells
that looped around her breasts.

She lit the cigarette. Stanley caught the
distinctive whiff of his old friend,
ganja-man
, whom he’d
come to know so well during his brief flirtation with depression
seven years ago. They’d remained casual acquaintances since then,
and although he never invited
ganja-man
home, now and again
he’d run into him at the party of an acquaintance and they’d have a
wonderful time together.
Ganja-man
always brought out the
rebel in him, and inevitably he’d act like an idiot, and say
something risqué to the hostess, or grab someone’s ass, and then
Martha would have to drag him home, like a bad dog who couldn’t be
trusted not to hump the small children of friends.

They passed the joint back and forth, and
toasted the moon and stars with swigs of tequila straight from the
bottle. She pointed out Jupiter in the same part of the sky as the
moon.

“It’s fucking beautiful,” said
ganja-man
through Stanley.

“On a clear night, I can see Uranus,” she
said.

Stanley doubled up in laughter.

Callie stood and began to dance. Her body
moved like a cobra, her rippled belly undulating, her limbs all
moving independently, as bone-less as snakes. As she circled the
fire, its light cast shadows of her arms upon her torso, and it
looked as if serpents were wrapping themselves around her.

Stanley had been born with a stick up his
ass, so dancing had never come naturally to him, but
ganja-man
was always up for it, so in a few moments he was
on his feet too, circling the fire with Callie, bobbing and weaving
and swinging his dick in the moonlight. The fire burned down to
embers and still they danced under the light of the moon. Stanley
howled like a wolf until he was hoarse, prompting residents in his
neighborhood to call their pets in and make 911 calls to report a
wild animal, possibly a rabid coyote, on the loose.

Stanley’s throat was raw.
Mas tequila,
por favor
, cried
ganja-man
, who never quite knew when to
quit and call it a night. He drank from the bottle and danced.

Time passed. The moon sailed over their
heads like a volleyball in slow motion. People came out of the
bushes to watch. A guy in a pair of sweatpants and a leather jacket
held together with duct tape. A woman wearing nothing but a beach
towel. An old man with a fungus on his cheek the size of a muffin.
A couple of kids who looked like they’d just run away from prep
school. A woman with a nest of hair that might have housed a family
of bats.

The tequila went the rounds until it was
finished. More smoke, more dancing, more howling...

The police showed up. Callie and the others
scattered into the bushes, leaving Stanley alone, dancing naked in
the moonlight. After a brief struggle, he was handcuffed and led
back to Pottery Road and a waiting patrol car.

Bearing absolutely no identification, not
even a set of keys for his house, Stanley’s claim of civil service
employment and home ownership in Riverdale was greeted by cop
cynicism and outright disbelief. They took him to the Don Jail and
put him in a holding cell for the night, where he wrapped himself
in a blanket and fell into a restless and hallucinatory sleep.

In the morning he awoke to the mother of all
headaches, vomited some tequila-flavored berry bile into his cell
toilet and screamed like Kafka on meth until a jailer came to see
what all the fuss was about. After a cup of tea and some burned
toast, Stanley was allowed to make a phone call.

Isabel arrived an hour later with a bathrobe
and a pair of sandals. She substantiated Stanley’s identity and
fabricated a story for the desk sergeant that her friend suffered
from bouts of premature dementia, and sometimes got lost in his own
neighborhood. She drove Stanley in her Audi back to his place,
where he retrieved the front door key hidden inside a fake stone
under the hedge for situations something like this.

Stanley called in sick, slept for 24 hours
and woke up on Thursday with an epiphany. By the end of the week
he’d moved all of his personal stuff out of the house on Browning
Avenue, across the Don Valley and into Isabel’s place on Hampton
Park Crescent.

On Sunday he met Martha at the airport. On
the way home, he pretended to be spontaneous and stopped off in the
Distillery District for a late brunch at a decent restaurant where
on a crowded terrace he told her he was in love with Isabel and was
moving out. He’d thought it would go smoothly but when Martha
exploded with fury and assaulted him with a water carafe, he’d been
forced to flee for his life, leaving her to pay the bill. Once
again, he had to phone Isabel to come fetch him.

The next week, he engaged a lawyer and began
the process of dissembling his former life. In exchange for keeping
her hands off his fat government pension, Martha got the house on
Browning Avenue and Stanley got peace of mind. Slowly he let the
news trickle out to friends and family, and he began to show up
publicly hand-in-hand with Isabel, whose oozing sexuality caused a
swirl of speculation, envy and recrimination within his social
circle.

A creature of habit, Stanley quickly resumed
the routines that had laid the foundation of a successful life. He
worked a diligent 8-hour day, which in government circles qualified
him as an over-achieving brown-noser. He followed a prudent diet,
foregoing fast foods for brown-bag lunches of whole grains, lean
meat, fresh veggies and fruits rich with anti-oxidants. And every
day he rose at six AM to go for a one-hour jog along the tree-lined
streets of Rosedale.

Except once a month, usually right around
the time of the full moon, he went for a run down into the Don
Valley, where a wooded trail led to a quiet place on the
river...

~~~~~~~~~

The island appeared in the distance, a smear
of tan and green between the dark blue sea and the pale blue sky.
It looked to be only a dozen miles in length, lying very low on the
horizon as if hoping to escape notice.

Peter Flutterman in a white cotton suit and
a straw hat stood on the foredeck, one hand gripping the deck
railing as the boat crept up on the island. At his feet were a
large suitcase, two portfolio-sized briefcases and a tubular case
that looked as though it might contain a fishing rod.

As the boat approached the landing, a man
came down to the end of the dock. He was wearing faded blue pants
and a white shirt whose tails hung loose from his belt. A pith
helmet sat low on his forehead. He looked to be in his mid-forties,
the same age as Peter, although it was hard to judge with a full
beard covering so much of his face. In any event, he looked
well-preserved, unlike the typical islanders weathered by sun and
wind.

The boat bumped up against the dock. A
deckhand slung a rope that slithered snake-like across the dock.
The bearded man picked it up and wrapped it around a capstan. As
soon as the boat was secured, the deckhands formed a line and began
transferring a series of boxes, barrels and bales from the hold to
the dock. From the cabin, the captain waved silently to the bearded
man, lighted his pipe and shook out a newspaper to read.

Peter picked up his tubular case and stepped
over the gunwale. The bearded man reached out a hand to steady him
as he stepped onto the dock. One of the deckhands added his
suitcase and briefcases to the chain of dock-bound items.

The bearded man embraced Peter. “It’s been a
long time, brother.”

“Walter? Is it really you, with a beard like
a pirate?” Peter shook his head in wonder.

“And what about you, with cheeks like a
baby’s bottom?” Walter touched the back of his hand to Peter’s
face.

Peter tried to conceal his embarrassment. He
wasn’t used to being hugged and touched, even by his long-lost twin
brother. “Where’s your staff? We need help with this luggage.”

“We’ll manage all right by ourselves.”
Walter picked up Peter’s two briefcases, leaving his heavy suitcase
where it lay.

“I’ll need that,” Peter said.

“My staff will fetch it when they bring up
the load of provisions. Let’s go up to the house and get you
settled in.”

They walked up a footpath towards a large
house framed by palm trees. Beyond the house was a quadrangle
formed by long sheds. As they approached the house, a butterfly
gyrated across their path. Peter dropped his case and chased it
with his hat but it rose into the air and fluttered into the trees.
Peter donned his hat in dismay, feeling foolish he’d been so
overcome by excitement that he hadn’t extracted his butterfly net
from its case.

“You needn’t have bothered,” Walter said.
“You’ll see dozens more when we go into the jungle. You’ll catch
them two at a time.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Of course you do. It’s the only reason you
came.”