Transits (7 page)

He was forced to move back home two weeks ago. Each evening he isn't working, his mother has sedated him with mashed potatoes, followed by rum and Thirty-one's. The cards slapping softly on the
vinyl tablecloth make Andy think of luck, or lack thereof. When the cuckoo clock shrieks twelve times, his mother kisses him on the cheek and they both go to bed. She takes a certain delight in his being here. A widow's loneliness is part of it, he supposes, although they've always lived in the same city. He suspects that his mother sees this as an opportunity for her son's life to form a different kind of story. How else would one be able to start over, bake a life with ingredients from scratch? The way his mother sees it, Andy's been dealt an ace.

He can't sleep. The shape of his days has been violently obliterated. The way he visualized a week had always mirrored his coil-bound planner: neat, identically sized blocks lined up in a row. Saturday and Sunday shaded in grey. Monday and Friday had their edges, a sharp breath in, a breath out. He was afraid his hours and thoughts would spread and bleed without a mold to constrain them. It was satisfying, like concrete being poured into a steel grid to form distinct squares of sidewalk and then drying—something to walk on. The systems in his apartment were containers to keep things that might otherwise evaporate or escape. His shoebox system, his bookcase system, his filing system.

The time before the fire, along with the exact contents of each system, is no longer clear. Andy cannot name the things he was saving in any precise list. It is possible there were ticket stubs, cartooned napkins, polaroids or paper cranes, but he cannot be sure. Each item is like a word stuck on the tip of his tongue.

On the night of the fire, Andy made his way home in the wee hours, suspicious his steps might be forming a swerving line. His voice was next to gone from talking above the pub noise. His legs and lungs ached after the climb up the steep incline to Gottingen street. He aimed himself towards his home, near the MacDonald Bridge that spanned the murky harbour separating Halifax and Dartmouth. There had been mention among Andy's co-workers this week of a bridge jumper, but he hadn't read anything in the newspaper about it. Disaster is ubiquitous enough at the hospital where he is a porter that it doesn't usually warrant lengthy discussion.

The nature of a disaster, Andy figures now, head on his pillow, is that it is not predictable. That night, he had admired the graffiti stenciled
on the sidewalk. He saw floating smoke, like grey wool being pulled apart, against the dark sky. Banjo strings plucking brightly through an amplifier still pattered in his head. Earlier, when the evening was just beginning, Andy had walked towards the bar feeling pretty good. He'd passed a cabbie leaned on his parked vehicle and gazing up at the silver bursts of Canada Day fireworks. Andy had felt almost sacrilegious for not stopping, for ignoring the spectacle. Maybe the smoke was residue from those fireworks, he thought, resisting a wave of vertigo.

Time seemed to slow down as Andy walked. It was about three a.m. Friday morning. He would sleep hard for a few hours, and then get up to look out his window at the group waiting for the 8:11 bus with their zippered laptop cases and travel mugs. This sight always comforted him. He worked irregular hours, so it seemed important to have some footing in the nine to five day most others seemed to operate by. If he were to soften, succumb too much to his own liquid comings and goings, he might lose touch with the outside world completely, might find himself swallowed up by the fog hanging ghostlike in every pocket of the city. The trees thickened and the smoke faded in and out of sight. Andy looked forward to drinking his coffee when he woke up. Maybe go through some of his old drawings, linger there.

The burning stench didn't fill Andy's nostrils until he turned onto his street. Even then, he didn't imagine it might be coming from his home. The evening he had just passed had been so familiarly round, looping around to blend seamlessly into other evenings like it, that a plot twist did not seem possible.

Beams from the fire truck glowed long in the air. Andy's neighbours, most of them strangers, stood in socks or bare feet on the street behind yellow tape. Their eyes zeroed in on Andy as though he carried an answer. The liquor inside him leapt and rushed to his head. He saw no red or orange, only black and grey and streams and streams of water flying from the firefighter's hoses. Andy recalled the words “No Pets” from his lease while observing the ferret, the cat, and the Chihuahua clutched in tenants' arms. He hated knowing strangers' small indiscretions. He felt the exhilaration and dread of everything falling away. A scrap of burnt paper drifted lazily to the ground.

Andy was sure this paper was one of his portraits. He was never good with faces, so that became his thing: portraits without faces. Instead, he sketched a hovering hat, pair of glasses, moustache, the curve of an ear. His drawings were not meant to replicate. They evoked. This was how he kept straight all the odd and wonderful people who had passed through his life. It wasn't that he needed to see any of them again, these friends that had scattered after claiming their degrees, but he needed to remember they existed. He did not want to lose that time when the calendar spinning was OK, because he was always with others. They sat and smoked and slept on couches. They interrupted one another with their ideas. Fingers massaged Andy's neck, a hand took his hand. They dressed up and danced in the living room. This much, he can conjure, but the specifics are now muddy, watercolours running into a brown pool.

Standing on the street that night, Andy subconsciously gravitated towards Lila, the only tenant he knew. They have been acquaintances since they were both six years old. She has always simply been there: in his classrooms, in line at the grocery store. The day they ran into one another, stepping out of their adjacent apartment doors, she'd exclaimed over the “crazy coincidence.” Andy was not impressed. It was a city of coincidences.

When Lila saw Andy that night, she grabbed his arm and teared up. “What's going to happen to us?” she asked, her voice cracking. Lila wore a red kimono and flip-flops, and her hair was up in sponge curlers. Her young face contrasted with the clothing of someone much older.

Andy disliked these tears. He had no idea how to comfort Lila. His sense of hearing faded in and out; he wasn't sure his feet still touched the earth. He wasn't used to being exposed in front of a group of people. Things had gone wrong in his life before, but never in such a concrete, literal way. Lila's question was a good one. Andy felt sorry for her. He felt sorry for the damage to the businesses below the apartments. The aromas of warm pizza dough and samosas, the steady thump of giant dryers that he often mistook for the approaching steps of a visitor: gone.

Lila's pale face was lit up by the twin beams of the fire truck, a wet and slippery moon. The image filled Andy's mind until he couldn't see anything else. Viciously, he wished it gone.

In his mother's guest bedroom, Andy feels like a geranium hovering between clay pot and garden, roots dangling immodestly.

Before the fire, he had projects: a shelf he was building, a transistor radio found at a yard sale he wanted to fix, the first lines of a drawing of the bus stop. There must have been more he was working on. Andy did remember worrying that he'd never finish. Had he even wanted to finish? Logically, nothing was going anywhere, so if he just kept putting one foot in front of the other, he would look up one day and see he had done everything he wanted to do. Now, there was no evidence that he'd been doing anything at all during the hours he spent by himself. He had no witnesses for those times.

A sound comes back to him: Lila's voice magnified in the shower, through the walls, the words unintelligible, creating an otherworldly, underwater echo. This isn't what he's looking to recall, but it's a start.

He clears a blank canvas in his head and tries mentally to sketch the people he likes to remember, no one more important than the other, but he can't. A few black lines appear and then dissolve, like an Etch-A-Sketch.

He manages to rise in time to make his four o'clock shift the next day. His t-shirt clings to his skin by the time he reaches the hospital. Nurses in blue suck cigarettes by the curb. On the ninth floor, the receptionist is saying into her phone, “You're speaking to a beaten angel. Give me another day on that.” She waggles two fingers in Andy's direction.

As he wheels his first cart onto the elevator, Andy's nerves smooth somewhat. At least the work rhythms have not left his body. He's safe here; nothing could burn this place down. It is an invincible kingdom of generators and solid walls, awake twenty-four hours a day, undisturbed by a blizzard or a hurricane. Bells, whistles, alarms sound at the first sign of danger. Each emergency is documented with its own meticulous record.

Andy exits the elevator and pushes his cart down a green corridor, alert for speeding gurneys, shuffling patients and lost visitors. Steering takes practice. It's a wordless traffic system of yielding, balance of cargo, knowing when to accelerate and when to merge. If he wants his day to pass at all, Andy must immerse himself in these
small never-ending details. He speaks to the occasional nurse, rarely a doctor.

Each of Andy's past workplaces has had a strong smell: chocolate factory, diner kitchen, plant store. The smell here is of rubbing alcohol, sour breath and urine, coffee and the hand disinfectant from pumps attached to the walls.

He has almost reached his destination when he notices a woman in a wheelchair gliding towards him. She clearly knows where she is going. Patients navigate the halls confidently, while visitors and day appointments stumble and stop to read signs. Andy shifts his cart flush against the wall so the woman will be able to pass him easily. He nods at her. She is his age, maybe younger. A cotton ball is affixed with a band-aid to the inside of her right elbow. A birthmark covers most of her left cheek, rose-shaped. Her speed doesn't falter but she gives him a slow, familiar smile.

After she has passed, Andy feels sick. Does he know her? He feels sick because he can't remember. Were they introduced at a party? Is she a friend's sister, suddenly ill? Andy looks behind him, but she is gone. Was it something more? Did she spend the night in his bed once, in the winter, and trace her name in the window condensation? Did she get up for a glass of water, wrapped in a sheet? All he can see is the mattress covered in inky soot, bloated with moisture.

Andy grips the cool bar of the cart. The birthmark, how could he not remember that? It was the colour of red grapes. It would have a finer texture than the rest of her skin.

Trying to retrieve information from his memory bank is like trying to catch a fly with his fist.

His shift ends at midnight, and Andy chooses to run back to his mother's. He does not run regularly, only sometimes when his muscles feel clenched and in need of release. Tonight it is really his mind that feels clenched, around the present. He runs over the white lines dividing parking spaces, past the signs and arrows. At this hour, all the stoplights blink yellow. He runs through a crosswalk and approaches a corner where two stores stand side by side: second-hand books and second-hand clothes. Déjà Vu, reads the sign on the clothing store. Lila owns this store. She used to leave handmade fliers by the mailboxes in their building. Andy is startled when he thinks he sees Lila
standing in the display window, but as he passes it is only a featureless mannequin, sporting a blonde wig and polka-dotted dress.

Lila in grade two, in a jumper and pigtails. The picture snaps into Andy's consciousness suddenly and neatly. She sang to herself,
the bear went over the mountaainnn… to see what he could see.
Seven-year-old Andy swung his velcroed feet, annoyed, concentrating on colouring a sky. He wanted to finish before the bell, but his wrist was getting sore.

Andy is on his mother's lawn and he can't breathe, so he stops abruptly, gulping in the mossy air. It's like he has just flipped open one of his mother's fat photo albums and there he is, naked in the tub, or eating cake with his fists, some scene he has never tried to remember before. What about running past Lila's store had allowed his mind to scan backwards?

The next morning, Andy looks at himself, impressionistic in the wavy reflection of the toaster. The heels of his mother's slippers swat the hexagons on the kitchen tile.

“I almost forgot!” She is waving a manila envelope. “This came for you.” She hands him a letter opener with a mallard duck on the end.

Andy slices open the envelope. A typed letter and some forms.

“Anything interesting?” his mother asks. The ends of her sentences curl hopefully.

He skims. It's from his landlord. He reads: “Dear Mr… fire caused on first of July two thousand and two by an internal error…blah blah, you should be eligible for insurance… etc.”

“Well, that's marvelous news.” The skin around his mother's eyes crinkles, more than it once did, when she smiles. “I wonder what he means by internal error? The oil furnace, I'll bet. The girl down the way was saying how her sister had a problem with hers.”

Andy's heartbeat quickens as he begins to read the forms. They are going to make him face his shot memory. FIRE PROOF OF LOSS, is the title.
A loss occurred on the ___ day of ___, 20___, at ___ A/PM, caused by ____________.
Next, there is a table. He is meant to fill in each item he lost, its cash value, and add up a total loss or damage at the end. He tries to think in the way the insurance people must want him to. He didn't own any expensive technology. The hospital had
computers he could use if he wanted. His stereo was ten years old. He had a sizable CD collection. How could he prove he'd lost what he said he did? What if he claimed to have owned a hot tub, a pony, and three diamond rings? How would they know otherwise?

To enter Lila's store, he has to step through a curtain of clicking beads. Circular racks groan reluctantly as customers muscle them around. A border of faded record sleeves frames the walls. A teenage girl, whose tattoos spill out from her sleeveless blouse, releases a hat from a hook near the ceiling while an elderly lady waits, clutching her purse.