The Dead Are More Visible (12 page)

The ambulance and two squad cars flashed into sight, driving east on Ordnance. They would circle around and enter the park from Bay Street, by the hut. They vanished again but their sirens went on ripping the air apart.

“It’s going to be all right, I think,” she said, reaching him.

“If I can just keep my eye.”

“You will.”

“I’m sorry.”

“They’ll have that face of yours up and running in no time.”

She wasn’t sure if this was true. She’d almost said
good-looking face
.

“If I have to go back inside,” he said, slurring the words through purple lips, “I can take it, but not blind. Can I see it?”

“Guess you’d better confirm we’ve got the right one,” she said.

His torso jerked, as if shaken by a single laugh. She opened the bag. “Oh … Jesus,” he said, stared back at by himself. She set her bare hand on his shoulder. His body trembled under the leather. The folds in the lap of his low-crotched jeans were frozen so it looked like he had an erection. He didn’t flinch or look at her—he wouldn’t now.

“Did you hurt Walt, at the other rink?”

“Not like this. Hardly at all.”

“That better be true.” She gripped his hood and pulled it roughly onto his head.

“And for t-t-twenty bucks. Nobody could believe my life.”

With a face like that?
she heard herself think. The crass assumption she now sometimes shared, that life must be a June breeze for the nice-looking. As if her life had been easy in her teen years. Shane would have been all over her then, and she would have craved him for the danger in his look. Why had nature given bad men all the attractive vitality? Like Gavin, years ago. Why did horror and romance so often overlap? She pushed her hand further, around his shoulder, feeling uncomfortably huge next to him. He seemed about to rest his head against her arm, then pulled back. A wall of hard, hot light came at them as the ambulance and squad cars shrieked up behind. To shield her eyes, she ducked her face, got a closer look at him. He seemed to be going into shock. His good eye stared off to where their twinned shadow was fast lengthening over the ice and the shrouded park. The crazy man was lit up at the edge of the headlights’ fanning swath. Turned toward them at last, he seemed to be staring, his posture solemn, noncommittal, his baseball cap in his hands like a mourner. “You’re going to be all right,” she told Shane, though really she wanted to take him by the chin and roughly turn his face toward hers and say, “Look at me.”

[ NOUGHTS & CROSSES ]

an unsent reply

------
Original Message
------

From:

To:
[email protected]

Sent:
April 22, 2007 1:16 AM

Subject:
RE: Hello?

n,

yes yes i did get your email but needed to reflect a little. i’m sorry. and yes i do think it might be best if i pulled back a little now, i seem to need some space to hear my own breathing, my own thoughts, it is hard when we are always in dialogue. i am sorry if this feels abrupt or my reasons feel vague, they just must be. for one thing, as i guess i implied, i have been asked to keep secrets and want to keep my word. i know you understand. you, after all, are one of my secrets.
and as you know yourself and even said, maybe a severing, a temporary severing is what’s best now, for both of you. for everyone involved. please don’t worry about me, i will be all right, i am determined to get through this time. i promise i will get in touch again when i feel i can.

love always,

j

—

n

As in: never again, never again. That phrase with its cardiac cadence. Slight arrhythmia. A certain tunnelled clump of muscle misbehaving, missing steps or taking clumsy extras, a drunk at the top of the stairs in the dark. When you used the abbreviation before, that n, it was an intimate act, an adoring diminutive, as though to make the beloved compact enough to carry with you secretly. You always found me tall for a woman (too tall?). Now it’s as though you want to avoid repeating my full name: Arnella. Nelli. nell. n. To deduct the name down to nothing. Nobody, no one, nowhere, nothing, nought, null, nil.

yes yes

The one thing you would never say in the act was
Yes!
It was always
O no O no O no O no!
when you were getting close, and when I asked if it was because something was wrong, this “thing” was wrong, or was your pleasure
(I would like to think so) intense to the point of pain, you turned shy and said it was “just what came out—you know” (your favourite lazy phrase) “like when a song shows up in your head and you just, like, let it out?” I didn’t press the point. I sensed you retreating into your separate memoir of intimate events. I didn’t ask if that was what
always
“came out,” or only with me. Separate memoirs, former loves. How crowded our bedrooms are these days. (Or not. Not my bedroom. Not these days.) For over a century there was a tunnel extending from the crypt of the main cathedral here down to the Hôtel Dieu, the old Catholic hospital, so the nuns and priests could stay indoors in winter when they were called off to see sick parishioners or perform the last rites. A few weeks ago I read about it and for some reason kept wanting to tell you. Why not now? Forty years ago they decided the tunnel was becoming unsafe. They sealed it off at both ends, but the passageway is still there, thirty feet under Brock Street, totally dark, of course, and empty. Sometimes now when I’m alone it hits me.

reflect a little

Five days of this little reflecting. Here is what gnaws me, besides the after-effects of five days of little reflecting on your part and much waiting on mine. What gnaws and haunts me is: whatever passed through your mind in those five (plus) days, all the stuff you decided not to voice, reconsidered, revised, rejected then retrieved, reneged on again, at last deleted. I want it
back, the full census of your reflections, a crammed CT-scanful, all those references to me, I can’t accept that they’re gone, neural flickers like email never sent or lost in transit somewhere in the digital ether we’re all adrift in now. Or: whispers of a couple passing in that tunnel before it was sealed. A pair of nuns, let’s say, lovers on the down low, erotically revved up by the proximity of illness, death. Death’s weirdly elating ultimacy. Did they have torches? A medieval image, cinematic to the point of camp: dark figures hunched, capes wafting, torches in hand, flapping down limestone corridors propped with timber stays for safety, as in a mine shaft. Our lovers must feel unnerved, even so. They are crossing so many lines. The anxiety of the crime makes one notice other dangers everywhere. And safety measures always seem to whisper:
some day we will fail!
It feels safer where there are no measures. And either way, in their presence or absence, no safety.

i’m sorry

Sorry, maybe, because there
were
no reflections? You’d made up your mind? You’re sorry that you stalled about breaking the news, is all? They say that from the bottom of a deep hole you can see the stars shining even at noon. I never trust those little factlets from the
Globe;
still, it’s good news for the dead.

and yes i
do
think it might be best

Italics mine. But even without the italics (it’s my ethnic
privilege to overuse them) your implication here is that
I made the suggestion in the first place!
Actually, of course, I did: “If you need me to pull back now, I will.” Naturally I didn’t mean it, though. Didn’t want you to
accept
. Wanted you to say
O no O no O no O no!
What’s more,
you must have known I didn’t mean it
—you just pretended to take the words at face value to give yourself a convenient out. Lovers are the world’s only honest people, according to certain poets and sages. Ho ho ho. I’m nostalgic for the salad days, grad and postgrad in the late ’70s and early ’80s, York and UBC, when it was an article of faith (if not experience) in our circle that straight lovers, bourgeois lovers, were the only dishonest ones.
T[he] on/lie dys/honest ones
.

That stage of life when confidence depends on culprits.

Oh, to have both back.

i seem to need some space

But, but I thought we were bitter opponents of platitudes, you and I; we agreed that our love was
not like any other love
(italics mine, quotation yours, email 64, line 17: I am now chief archivist of your intimacies), and to consecrate and, as you would say, “honour” this singularity, we agreed that we would never speak of our love in clichés. We smogged the air with exalted vows like that. Teenage summer lovers in a song by the Boss. So, maybe a return to cliché is a neatly symmetrical way to shut things down … to
deconsecrate
our love, the way
they do with those churches whose flocks have died off or moved to Palm Beach, and the buildings are converted to meeting halls or museums or daycares. Ever wondered how they deconsecrate a cathedral? I really should know, after a quarter-century in my field. (A century, one learns, is a small thing.) A choir assembles for the last time, chanting in discord, an infernal chorus. At the altar a bishop exhausts the full roster of religious obscenities. The organist, wild-eyed, riffs on anthem-rock standards, Queen, Gary Glitter, The Sweet, as if playing at a hockey rink.

j, my j, you’ve
recanted
.

Shouldn’t “recant” mean to sing again?

to hear my own breathing

If I woke in the night, the precious nights I had you here, I was always taken aback at how hard it was to detect your breaths. Even when you were deeply out (pretty much always) your breathing was delicate; once or twice I almost panicked, you know how the mind works at night, and there were always those footlights of unease around our meetings, fear of your husband interrupting our, uh, tutorial with a call, so that panic would feed on puny fears and several times I actually put the back of my hand to your open mouth to feel the breaths. Then my mouth next to yours to breathe them in. That close, I found you breathing, of course, calm and profound, with a faint sighing wheeze in your lungs, under your bare breasts, which were pillowed
one over the other as you lay furled on your side. Your breath smelled fine, spicy, with a subtle finish of garlic and Syrah. Then one night it changed. That’s how I knew we were coming to an end. More conventional signs had materialized as well—your canned laughter, diluted gaze, undilated pupils—but
that
was how I knew: the last two nights your breath turned unfamiliar in your sleep. Changes deep inside, where I couldn’t reach. I wonder about the air in that blocked tunnel, after forty years of disuse. Is oxygen stable or does it deteriorate over time? I wouldn’t know. Your husband would. Could toxic fumes have seeped in through the limestone? If the ends were unblocked tonight, could we still walk through it and breathe? How long does a closed-off tunnel remain a possible route?