The Disinherited (31 page)

“It could rain again,” the nurse said. “Mr. Zeller said he’s often seen weather like this, nights that it rains and clears every few hours. He’s used to the weather I guess.” The nurse had begun to shift her attentions, moving to the centre of the more obvious need. When he was home he would remember her, waking up early in the winter mornings, the light grey and blue through the frosted panes; he would see her silhouette there, in the frost, recall her constant movements, straightening and comforting herself in the chair beside his bed, always touching him, talking. Maybe when he came back he would ask for her again, special, he wondered if people did that, requested to receive the final comforts from their favourite nurse. By then he would have become part of the story, one of the few who had resurrected themselves from serious illness to return to, well, non-hospital life, whatever that meant to her, standing up instead of lying down, living in suspended animation between bouts of being born, being sick and dying.

“Tired tonight,” Richard Thomas said. He stretched again, careful and slow, still hesitating to move quickly in any direction, afraid something might pop or strain. The nurse put her hand on his shoulder and stood up. He liked the way that felt, a woman’s hand now, not just a blanket. Her fingers were long and capable, strong, always
there
, through all the distractions.

“I’ll see you later,” she said.

“Later,” Richard Thomas said, adjusting the sheets and blanket around his shoulders again, enjoying the summer luxury of settling down to sleep with cool rain-fresh air. He woke up as the night was ending, the light a delicate pink, like a rare flower, pink, turning his room into a large still painting, the bricks and windows in the courtyard pink and blue and purple, the colours soft at first and then flowing together, deeper, the air warm and heavy, carrying the scent of this remarkable morning. He sat up slowly in his bed, letting the day possess his body, swung his feet to the floor, through a moment of pain in his groin and stomach, gone as quickly as it came, stood up to open the window and as he lifted it, felt it again, this time across his chest, like a bar, knocked him back onto the bed, but it was all right, he wasn’t even breathing hard, there was no residue, the window open wide now and the air seemed a presence, everything connected by the warmth and the colour — his blood, the bricks, the glass, the planet turning slowly into the sun. This time the pain took him to the floor, exploding in the centre of his chest and shooting out his neck and head; even as he fell he knew that part of him must fight it, reached up with his arms so that when he was down he could start to drag himself up again, from his knees, his hands on the sill, the pull of his body through his shoulders and back, couldn’t lift his own weight, saw himself wrestling cows and bulls in the barn, easily pushing them into stalls and bales, animals ten times his size, the pain now intense heat, still in the same place, pulsing in the centre of his chest, filling his body with blood. And again, hammer and anvil: in the echo Simon moved, skinny and clothed in preacher’s black, walking slowly towards him in his polished black shoes, contented and complacent, smoking his pipe, pointing it at him, shaking it like a long righteous finger, turning away. Richard Thomas
coughed. There was blood, thick and red, catching on his lower lip and hanging down like an extra last limb. Coughed again,
goddamn
, would a person have to drown in it? His hands were on the window ledge, hooked over it, holding himself up to the pink morning light, still trying to get onto the bed. He got his elbows up on the ledge, tried to pull. He could feel his back bumping into the mattress, pushing it away. A car drove into the courtyard, stopped. A door slammed. Something moved in the corner of his eye. Richard Thomas coughed again. It tore apart his throat; he gagged and tried to spit the blood. The pressure built up but didn’t hold. It rose and then relaxed, slashed open, coughed free a long red waterfall. Footsteps. A sudden gust of wind brings tiny noises from the courtyard, birds’ claws against the metal car roof, damp black toes like needles in his veins, stones and sand colliding, the sound of a wine glass being set on polished wood. Falling. The forest rising all around, swallowing the light. Leaves and earth.

I
n Toronto at night, shuttled from the train to the subway and then disgorged by the subway onto Bloor Street, Erik finds himself an alien again, the lights and faces jumble together into tangles of features and eyes. He stops on the street. A man in a short-sleeved shirt pushes against him, shoving him to the edge of the sidewalk so that his back is against a building. He can feel the rough brick through his shirt, catching on the wounds he has brought with him. He feels like it is the first time in the city but not that he is young. And now that he has made his second landing in Toronto and is of the city, not just a visitor, it is immediately a ghetto for him; there is nowhere left to go except other cities which would all be the same city. Bloor Street is forgotten but already familiar, as familiar as all of its possibilities, the cabs double-parked at the tavern across the street, the woman who has stopped and is staring into the window beside him, the ten-year-old boy trying to ride his bicycle through the sidewalk traffic wearing his cowboy hat and with a baseball mitt dangling from the handlebars. Erik begins walking again and goes to a corner where there is a phone booth. Inside the booth the walls are decorated with various offers of insertion, short poems and flights of fancy. The telephone books were once placed between hard covers and hung from counters beneath the telephones. Only the covers and small bits of pages remain. Erik dials the operator and asks for Valerie’s number. While he is waiting for the operator to look it up, he thinks that he must
know it, that it will come to him just as he is told. In the adjoining booth a man is shouting into the telephone. Even though it is summer and night-time, the man is wearing a heavy black wool coat and sunglasses. The operator gives Erik the number and as she speaks he remembers it. The man has oily black hair and hasn’t shaved for days. “I’m not paranoid,” he is shouting. “Look.” His voice drops. “A man has to have friends. I have friends. I don’t have to put up with this.” He pauses to let the inevitable logic seep through to the listener. “Please,” he says. “I won’t bother you. I just want to come over and see your cat.” Erik walks out of the phone booth. The crowds are moving in both directions on the sidewalk, pushing him into a decision, demanding that he somehow organize an entire life, a destination, at least an attempt at appearances. All the faces are different. He doesn’t look away as people approach him and they look back at him, as if he might be someone they know. He goes into a restaurant and sits at the counter. The waitress is Chinese and very young. As more people come into the restaurant she nods at them, saying hello to each one as they push past the counter to the booths at the back. Erik realizes that he should have sat in a booth too, only bums sit at the counter. He sees one with a newspaper on the seat and slides into it, the red vinyl upholstery immediately sticking to his shirt. There is a strange smell in the air, a smell of combined foods and spices and grease that adds up to nothing at all except dirt. He flips through the menu. There is no item on the menu that resembles anything he has been eating. He orders a cheeseburger from the beautiful young waitress and lights a cigarette. The neon lamps in the restaurant are tinted blue and pink. He has to go to the washroom. To get there he must descend a flight of steps, make innumerable turns in the damp restaurant basement, following signs and arrows. Finally he has arrived: a long trickle of urine has reached out from under the door. Inside the bathroom there is a toilet and a sink. Both are filled with wadded-up paper towels. On the walls of the toilet are written more offers and a few modest verses: all traditional and rhymed, some illustrated. He pees holding his breath and then goes back quickly, following the backwards arrows and running up the stairs. In his
booth the cheeseburger is waiting for him. A glass of water and a napkin. It looks good; he realizes he is hungry. There is a bottle of ketchup beside the napkin dispenser and he lifts the top bun off the cheeseburger. A slice of pre-cut cheese is partly melted onto a bumpy hamburger patty. The corners of the cheese have dripped all the way down to the bottom of the bun, pinned over the meat like a tarpaulin. On top of the cheese is some green relish and a small mound of chopped onions. Erik picks up his knife and spreads this all out evenly, adding ketchup and spreads that too. He takes a sip of water. It tastes flat and stagnant, laced with chlorine. He bites into the cheeseburger and through the bun and relish he can taste the hot lumps of meat, fried to black charcoal and grease. The salt and spices cut through the food and burn against his tongue and the roof of his mouth. To finish he has to light a cigarette and smoke it while eating.

The waitress takes his money at the counter. While looking out the window she punches a button and the change comes whirling down into a metal tray. Then Erik is back on the street again, still undecided, the food intact and foreign in his stomach. He begins walking one way, stops, turns around. His feet get tangled with the wheels of a baby carriage and he hurriedly extricates himself, pushes to the inside of the sidewalk. He finds himself pressed against the glass window of the restaurant, looking in, looking at the waitress who is again operating the cash register and now smiles at him. Erik decides he will walk for one mile and then turn around, come back and ask the waitress what she is doing when the restaurant closes. He steps into the sidewalk traffic again, this time confident, purposeful, thinking that now, with Richard dead and the farm sealed off from him, he is truly marooned in the city, that the other years were only time passed waiting for this. He has lost the habit of averting his eyes. The faces, each one framed and clear like the figure of Rose Garnett stepping through the school house door, the wild curving of her spine already evident in the way she bends towards her child, the faces snap by, one by one, each time the eyes surprised as his own, hold for a moment, stick and solidify in apparent recognition and then slide around in hesitation before
coming back to ask the question; and each set of eyes carries its own hallucination, stamping its existence on the city as if truly believing it was something more than one of the millions of peripheral existences that the city pulls into its edges, make-believe destinies that it uses to fuel itself. The eyes stop and then move on, the lives briefly displayed and then buried again beneath the summer clothes and tanned faces. He has the image of thousands of bowls of jello, overturned and running together in the heat. He is walking awkwardly, stopping and starting with every person that passes him, his stomach now knotting around the ground meat and spices, sending out warnings, a fine layer of sweat that seems to have clogged all his pores, is choking his lungs and sealing his body like a small building closed down with a fatal disease. He wonders if the school house has been boarded up, if Rose Garnett drives there on weekends in her red Italian car.

“Do you have a cigarette sir?” A girl stops him. She smiles and curtsies eager to please at this distance. Erik reaches into his pockets and shakes his head. She is attentive, smiling he thinks because she has finally in the middle of the night run into someone even more disoriented than herself, this thirty-first of August night that is already midnight and turning into a September morning, that soon will be getting too cold for shirtsleeves and will eventually demand some combination of shelter and stamina. Their hesitation is suddenly so gigantic that they are both embarrassed, reach for each other and turn away at the same time, finally are standing on the street gripping each other’s arms, looking sideways. They are standing beside a movie marquee: naked figures sprawled huge and sexless across a poster, gaping mouths: SEX IS FUN stamped across their genitals in red ink, an irrevocable promise that makes the movie obsolete.

“No,” Erik says. “I was just going to get some.” She looks at him, looks away, already forgiving him and starting to move on. He slides his hand down her arm and turns her elbow, feeling twice her age (later he finds out she is seventeen and four months pregnant, possessed, therefore, by his estimate, of several times the life he is), feeling that by turning her so they face
in the same direction he is making some kind of commitment, obscure but definite, and can sense in her the expectations she must have of his mastery, at least age and money must make him a protector, and then walks with her to a new restaurant, taking his hand away again so she may have her choice. When they are finally sitting down and he has bought the cigarettes, he tears off the cellophane and opens the package expertly, crisply, passing them to her as a matter of great urgency. And she accepts it in the same way, withdrawing one of the cigarettes and then, after ritually tapping its end on the table, inserting it in her mouth like a cork plug. Her hand goes below the table and reappears with a lighter. She proffers the flame and Erik, alerted by something which has cut through the cacophony of restaurant stimuli and people, is aware of the presence in her of death, with the same certainty it had existed in Richard Thomas, but in her it is a weapon and not a fate, a weapon she wears without knowledge or care. Her hair is thick and tawny, her smile wide. In this moment she is confident, pulled out of the street and into a series of gestures and rituals she knows well, turning the cigarette in the ashtray so the ash falls off neat and whole: in a few minutes it is dotted with these small circumcisions. They drink their coffee and talk about the weather. “You’ll want to stay with me tonight,” she says, looking confidently at Erik and then averting her eyes, afraid.

“All right.” They finish their coffee and she leads him back onto the street, down along Bloor Street until the taverns and stores thin out to a smaller, quiet street that runs off it, like a tributary. The halls of her house smell vaguely of antiseptic. She lives in the attic.