The Death of Small Creatures (2 page)

One

The Dogs of Rome (July 2003)

Moat Lake, Strathcona Park, BC

A lake is the landscape's most beautiful and expressive feature.

It is Earth's eye; looking into which the beholder measures

the depth of his own nature.

– Henry David Thoreau

The moon falls
quickly in the mountains. Here is conclusive evidence, its measurable plummet from three fingers above the ridge of Mount Albert Edward, then two fingers, then one, then no moon anymore.

I lower my hand.

My wrist falls over the cool tin edge of the dinghy. Fingers dip into the suddenly dark lake. A constellation disassembles then reconvenes, Cassiopeia, the upside-down queen. I take a mouthful of red wine, hold it in, bitter wild berries. You never remember the swallow, only how it feels inside. I take an equally long drag of a cigarette, each time surprised to find it lit, anticipating wet ash. Everything here is sacrament—this wine, this lake, this smoke. I whisper,
Strathcona
, raise the bottle under starlight, fall back, close my eyes.

Nothing here trembles. You must be careful.

At the end of the lake, a waterfall, nature's painless traffic. Firelight laps across the sky. Around that dark island, intervals of laughter. The man said a family of bears lives nearby. Nail down the shutters if it gets windy. Tie up the boats. Storms come quickly from down that ridge, hone in upon the lake like a funnel. A man once lost his hand when the wind closed the door on him. They had to chopper him out, couldn't save the hand.

I am thinking of his hand now as my fingers dip into the lake again. This is how two hands meet in deep dark water. This is how it feels.

Six months ago
is the first time, heart pounding, arms numbing into inevitable death, my worst fears confirmed, that death is cold and uncertain and endless. My sister is talking about Rome, her second trip to Italy. We didn't want her to go, imagined a 747 colliding with the Colosseum and blowing it apart the way the planes blew apart the towers. We imagined a ball of fire where the gladiators once battled.

“Do Roman dogs look different than Canadian dogs,” I ask, “like how the birds in Mexico look like pterodactyls?”

“The dogs are thinner,” she says. “The women, fatter.”

“What happened to the dogs?” I ask.

I know I cannot push too hard but must allow her that moment of reprieve when the mind soars above the olive grove inside its current of electrical impulses. I must not cut across too quickly or she will lash out like a whip, etch her pain into my flesh and leave an elegant, flawless gash.

She called me early one morning during this trip, her voice crackled and distant. “I'm standing on the Italian Riviera,” she said. “I'm reading
Smilla's Sense of Snow
.”

Now, on the wall above her fireplace is a picture of the Colosseum, foggy and crumbling at the edges due to overexposure. She learned by accident a civilization is crumbling too, post-September 11, this ghost beyond the Pantheon.

She gives me a small, rough pink stone. “I took it from Ostia Antica,” she says, smiling, “but it's not really stealing.” My sister's smile is sophisticated and innocent. When she was a little girl it was the same. When she stubbornly refused to do what one adult or another demanded of her, her long brown hair swept over a large blue eye. You end up believing whatever she says because she comes at you with her incredible beauty and bearing a secret gift, a stone that can cure a broken heart, or a thimble of Chianti placed in your hand as you enter her home from the rain.

“A piece of ruin?” I surmise.

She unfolds a small square of paper, smoothes it across her thigh. Firelight ripples through blue goblets of cheap Cabernet.

“Here's a map,” she says. “It's not really stealing because you are going to put it back.” She points to the star. “Just where I found it.”

“Is this your way of getting me to Europe?” I ask, rubbing a rough edge, thicker at the base and pointy at the top. It could cut skin, this ruin.

We scribble an itinerary on a napkin for this next journey to Europe—airfare, hotel and hostel rates less one night train to Venice, bread and cheese times fourteen days. We will land in London and stroll through Trafalgar Square wearing Nine West leather boots with three-inch heels, pea coats and white wool scarves, then onto Amsterdam for some light hash and indeterminate forms of corruption. In Italy we will wander cobblestone streets until dusk, drinking wine, seducing men with our blue eyes and Botticelli bodies. We will laugh about it in the morning, like in Mazatlan when she found the Mexican boy draped over my body at the Azteca Inn, his firm round ass afire in a shaft of light through the curtains, blue jeans crumpled at the foot of the bed. How I whispered like a Latin lover, dragging my finger down his rippled abdomen, “No Luis, I will not give you my phone number,” and the translation in darkness to follow, my fingers dragging across the pages of the book.
Sorry. I'm sorry… lamento tener que decirte que… amante… we are, Luis, you and I… los amantes… lost.

Then back up the boot and over to Spain, though she may go ahead to Africa for a few days, come back adorned in copper jewellery made from the remnants of trinkets gathered from minefields by one-armed children.

I place the stone in the middle of the itinerary and fold the napkin around it; when I go home I will place this in a Guatemalan penny purse and nail it to the wall above my bed.

“We'll have the time of our lives,” she says. “You won't regret it.”

I lean back and stretch my arm along the top edge of the couch. Lanterns sway in a breeze under the porch eaves. Her cat Bronte licks a paw and strokes her white cheek.

Then suddenly it comes, encloses around me—a prickly warmth. My palms sweat, and my heart beats fast.

I understand in this moment that death is a steady calculated eclipse, a hot examination of what you once were in the living, and you are dying, and that is death dragging you along a bright fringe of moon.

I lean into the fire.

“Are you okay?” she says.

Is it true a cat can see a ghost? Bronte, is this my ghost you see? Everything, suddenly, is transient. This is the point of entry and exit, a temporal rift. It is impossible to have so little choice, this ushering off.

You never think this day will come.

I will not
step into the pond at the top of the island, its pollinated yellow skin and murky insides. Few have entered, maybe the odd hiker exploring beyond the trail. It is a publicity I can't bear, my body out here, midday, though I am hot and hungover. The others glide across the dark green stretches, silver-skinned and smiling. A woman's body occupies space proportionate to what surrounds it. She feels smaller in a dressing room perhaps, but in the wilderness she bloats and swells.

“No, I'll wait out here,” I say.

I have come here with Leigh. His black swim trunks balloon in the water. He floats on his back, eyes closed, muttering something. I want to kiss him, the cold wet lips, lay his head in my lap.

After the others leave, I see him more clearly and take comfort in the process of displacement, the clear line of where he once was and where he goes, and what reconvenes around the place just occupied. If he moved through air this way, I would not lose him. I would welcome silence, speak less and sleep naked from time to time. There would be no more questioning of his motives, why he wants to date a younger woman like me. I would enjoy the sunlight upon our hardwood floors, and the prism hanging in the window, refracting rainbows across the rubber tree plant, filtering through my secret longings.

Do you love him, or is it fear? You are almost thirty.

He climbs onto a flat slate under the surface, pulls off his swim trunks exposing the shrivelled cold white penis and shouts an exhilarated
whooo
as wind meets his body. A thousand little mouths exalt. How quickly he dries. A few rivulets of water spiral down his arms, chest and hard muscular calves, and for a moment I understand the relationship between water and flesh—wanting and indifference at once.

“The others are leaving for Mount Albert Edward,” I say. “Shouldn't we go?”

Off he dives into the centre of his gravity, splash, deep, into a cliff of light, as the water reconvenes.

My sister runs
three red lights, one hand pressed firmly in the centre of my chest as though to ward off further accidents, my heart a magnet for collision. I press my palms on the dashboard. To touch is important. My mind stretches horizontally to cover every uncertainty of this process, to organize the details—stop signs, street lights, cars, the canopy of tree branches and stars over Richmond Road, my sister's voice. Her words become tangible shapely things I pluck from her lips and keep inside.

But by the time the car slows outside the doors to the emergency room, my pulse has slowed. Only a faint trace of vertigo remains. I remove my hands from the dashboard and begin to feel foolish, fear it has been some slip of the mind, and wish I had arrived with an open sore, a small deep gash in the Achilles.

We sit in the parking lot like this for a moment. “Wait,” I say, “just wait.”

“Tell me what's happening,” my sister says.

“I'm feeling better,” I say. I hear leaves rustling, pulling me back down to earth.

A few years before I had arrived in this same parking lot after injecting cocaine with a guy named Leo at the Inner Harbour. He had long red hair and smoky breath. I told Constable John I thought he was beautiful, that I loved him. All the cops laughed. The doctor came and opened my gown, slid the stethoscope inside, prodded down to the butterfly tattoo and ran a finger across the small, raised burn mark above it.

“Did you do this?” he asked, examining the scar. He asked about coffee and medication, do I frequently do drugs, when was my last period. I believed him too, that it all had something to do with blood rising to the level of the heart, leaving my uterus dry, that it was as simple as bodily neglect and too much coffee.

“Yes I did that,” I said.

The body heals quickly, remembers little, absorbs the damaged cell back inside. A new cellular memory replaces the old. We are left with a scar—an omission, a lie. A compulsion emerges to damage the self to remember who we are, the body a minefield of potential regeneration, excavation and reinvention. Out there, wars are fought and civilizations born. Men return safe with the solace of missing limbs, and women with whatever's left.