Where She Has Gone (11 page)

There was a knock at the door, then a woman’s voice.

“Hey, what’s going on in there, your thing get caught?”

Then laughter.

“Maybe he’s playing with it.”

“Who is he, anyway?”

“I think it’s Rita’s brother.”

“Hey, Rita’s brother. Cute sister you’ve got.”

When I came out, a group of them was clustered outside the door.

“He must feel like he’s in Holland,” one of them said, though not unkindly. “Lots of dykes.”

I looked for Sid. Somehow he’d managed to insinuate himself into a group of four or five women in the living room.

“I’m not telling you I’d do it,” he was saying. “But maybe that’s more a social thing because of the way I was raised.”

“Whoa. Mr. Philosophical.”

And yet it was clear he’d won them over, the group of them focused on him as on some mascot or prize.

Rita passed around us making her way to the kitchen. Then for a moment she was alone there. I came up to her as she was bending into the fridge and instinctively reached out to touch her. She flinched.

“Oh. It’s you.”

“Look, Rita –”

But the thing seemed impossible. She stood at the fridge door, inert, half-turned from me, and for an instant the same repulsion, the same spasm of loathing, seemed to pass through us, the kind of loathing only siblings could feel, intimate and humiliated and searing.

Sid came into the room.

“Hey, guys, what’s up?”

For the first time he was showing an edge beneath his casualness, the need to know what his status was.

“I’ve got to bring these drinks out,” Rita said, and was gone.

“Everything okay with her?” Sid said.

“I don’t know. Yeah.”

“A little heavy on the make-up, I’d say. It’s not her style.”

I noticed now the cake that had been set out on the kitchen counter.
HAPPY 20TH
, it read.

“I have to go,” I said.

“It’s up to you. I think I’ll stick around a bit.”

I passed John on the way out. I had the sense suddenly that he’d been keeping an eye on me the whole time I’d been there.

“You’re not feeling any better?” he said.

“Sorry?”

“Your friend. He said you weren’t feeling well.”

“Yes. No. It’s just a cold or something.”

“Ah.” He seemed to want to hold me there, to impart something to me. “Well. Perhaps we’ll see each other again.”

Outside, I realized my head was spinning. I was dimly aware of feeling feverish and sore, but still with the sense that my body had nothing to do with me any longer, was just a burden, something I might slough off at any moment if I could only find the way to unshackle myself from it. It was like reaching a point just beyond pain, just beyond the bearable. In Africa, once, I’d walked for miles in sub-Saharan heat stupidly trying to make my way to a remote Dogon village; and at some point the weight of my pack, my aching muscles, the desperation in me at having gone wrong, had given way to this same dizzy feeling of detachment, the sense of floating in the present moment without recourse.

Along the street, the windows of the houses shone with curtained light. Each window was like an eye I passed by: this was where I was not, each seemed to say, curled in front of a television or fire with children, a lover, a wife, my life staid or nearly over or still all quivering possibility.

One of the neighbourhood’s regular street people had come out to squat in the doorway of a College Street bank, the mysterious burgeonings of great stuffed garbage bags and burlap bundles tied with twine heaped up behind him. He was one of the crazy ones, a regular at the psychiatric institute across from my building, moving in and out of it like the cats we’d had on the farm who’d hole up a few weeks in the warmth of our boiler room, then run wild again. Eddy called him José, which simply might have been some private joke of his since the man didn’t look especially Latino,
didn’t look like anything at all except a street person, with that generic look street people had, the acned skin, the clotted hair. Sometimes he would spread out bits of paraphernalia on the sidewalk before him like fetishes, a broken picture frame, a candle stub, a chipped statuette of the Virgin.

He was rocking on the balls of his feet, rocking and rocking.

“Spare any change?”

No eye contact, no sense of connection, the words coming out like a sort of tic. He pocketed the coins I handed him without looking at them.

“Thank you.”

In my apartment, the feeling again of intrusion, of a presence. I checked every room: nothing. I was dreamy now with fever, truly ill. I was vaguely aware that the bed was contaminated in some way but wasn’t sure how to deal with it; in the end I spread my sleeping bag over top and crawled inside. It was only as I was turning out the light that I noticed the parcel on my desk, what I must have been clutching the whole evening like a talisman to bring it back to where it sat now, Rita’s gift.

I threw up several times in the night, stumbling from my bed each time the churning began in my stomach to kneel half-dazed at the toilet while I retched. In the end I was reduced to dry heaves mainly, though they seemed to still for a few minutes the world’s mad reeling; but back in bed it would start again. In my confusion I imagined I was in a storm at sea, that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, crawling up to my bunk while beneath me my mother sighed and slept slowly bleeding to death.

At some point in the night, a real storm started up. Rain, wind, through the slit I’d left open in the bedroom window; I had the presence of mind to pull the window shut but the room seemed to have ingested the storm by then, seemed filled with an incessant rustling of paper and a mad ringing like the clashing of a thousand glass pendants. Outside, blue light flashed against a wash of black, light and then thunder, a great gnashing and scraping of fissured sky. I was a boy
again, thinking the world a tiny ball and the sky a vast firmament that enclosed it: with each flash, each peal, the firmament cracked and for an instant heaven’s forbidden light blazed through.

Around dawn I fell into fitful sleep. There was a period of dreams then, though more like half-waking memories that had somehow got tangled up in the logic of dreams: I was en route to the Dogon village again only now it was raining, in the distance great monoliths of smoothed rock, foursquare and vast, towering up from the landscape like stones the gods had dropped; and there was a mystery to solve, and a ritual whose end was the expiation of some ancient crime. When I arrived at the village – had this happened? had I ever arrived there in real life? – the villagers were all in their separate homes in the cliff face, caves really but also a sort of hotel. I went from home to home, conducting my interviews; but in each place it was the same, the same indifferent, evasive shrug, the claim that there was no ritual, no culprit, no crime.

Rain and more rain: it continued on through the day and into the evening. I got up briefly to make food, my stomach like a pit that had been scoured, then dug deeper. Outside, the rain formed a continuous sheet on the roads, rivering into the sewage drains and sloshing up over the curbs as cars passed. Jose was holed up in an open shed at the back of the service station across Huron; he was in his usual stance, squatting, rocking, his eyes doing reconnaissance along the street while his bundles and bags sat heaped around him like precious spoils.

I called Rita’s.

“She’s out.” Elena’s inscrutable tone, and at once the paranoia in me: she knew or would know, was like a time bomb from which, in moments or weeks or years, all the outrage at what had happened would be unleashed.

“Do you know where she went?”

“Dunno. I thought she might be at your place.”

A pause.

“You sound sick or something,” she said.

“Yeah. Just a flu.”

I slept. The racing of my mind had eased: it seemed to have worn itself out, to have entered some new, limbo-ish place where there was only fatigue, only the dreamy relinquishing of no way out. I had a vision that Rita had come and was tending to me, that she was there on the bed wiping fever sweat from my neck, my brow, with a heated cloth. There was a chipped enamel basin on the night table, a crucifix on the wall. At the door, a sound of hooves against cobblestones, the grind and complaint of cartwheels: someone was coming for us, in an instant we’d rise and ride off together into golden afternoon light.

When I awoke, Easter Sunday, the fever had dimmed. The apartment looked as if the storm of the previous day had ripped through it: there were clothes strewn about in the bedroom, a couple of vomit-flecked towels on the floor, a heap of bedsheets, the ones Rita had bloodied, bundled in a corner; in the kitchen, pots of half-eaten food on the table and dishes I couldn’t remember having dirtied piled up in the sink.

I couldn’t form my thoughts around any plan. On my desk were spread the pages of a paper I hadn’t finished, more than a week overdue now, then beside them a stack of library books, also overdue. My mind was fixed somehow on that
overdueness, the nickels and dimes of it, the vague forces lined up to punish me. I stood staring at the pages I’d written out, with their slanting blue scrawl, the evidence that I’d formed thoughts, made decisions, considered one thing more important than another; and then at the books with their arcane titles, their careful systems of words. I had the sense I’d been tricked in some way: none of this mattered, there was nothing holding the systems in place.

I went out. The streets looked scrubbed, hosed down, from the previous day’s rain. It was still overcast, the air liquidy and thick, wisps of fog rising up from the pools that had formed in parking lots and on front lawns.

At the back of my mind was the thought that Rita hadn’t returned my call; and then I was ringing her doorbell.

Elena came to the door.

“Hey, Vic.” She gave me her sardonic smile. “Happy Easter.”

There were footsteps in the background, then a woman’s voice.

“Who is it?”

“Rita’s brother.”

She was coming toward us down the hall, an older woman, hair wiry and streaked grey, who I recognized from the party.

“Suzanne,” Elena said, by way of introduction. This was probably as far as she’d ever gone in allowing me into this side of her life.

“Hello, Rita’s brother,” Suzanne said, but didn’t extend her hand.

They were both dressed in sloppy house clothes, jeans, tattered sweats.

“Rita’s out,” Elena said. “She went for a walk.”

“Did you say I phoned?”

“To tell you the truth, she got in pretty late last night.”

“Where did she go?”

“I dunno,” Elena said. “Maybe she had a date.”

Suzanne laughed.

“You know, boy meets girl,” she said.

I couldn’t get my mind around any of this. The thought that kept forming in my head was that it was Easter Sunday. But none of this was like Easter, everything was out of whack.

“You should ask him in for a coffee,” Suzanne said. “He looks a little beat up.”

“No. Thanks. I should get going.”

When I got home my shoes and socks were completely soaked, though I couldn’t remember stepping in any water. The fever began to come on again, a dark glow at the back of my brain.

The phone rang. It was Elena.

“Just thought you might want to know that she’s back.”

“Is she there?”

“She’s in the shower. I’ll tell her to phone you.”

But no call. They were playing a game: Elena was in on it, Suzanne, perhaps even Sid. At some point I had the impression again of an urgent ringing and clanging, the jangling pouring-forth of a million nickels and dimes. But by then I was back in the fever’s darkness, burrowing through its conduits and tangled paths trying to trace there the connections, the careful, deliberate scheme being laid out for my downfall.

It was Tuesday morning before I surfaced again, the apartment filled when I awoke with a glare of morning light like at
the instant of a bomb blast. The only sign that I’d lived through the previous day was the apartment’s increased ruin, more half-eaten food, more clutter. At some point I’d moved my sleeping bag from the bed to the couch and set up a sort of encampment there; there was dirty cutlery on the coffee table, and a blackened pot with some sort of noodles and sauce congealed at the bottom. In my mind, the residue of dreams: backwoods and marshy, ramshackle settlements, dark dirty rooms, half-naked children streaked with grime. A sense of the thin line between human and beast, of order broken down, of being pushed back to the outer rim of the known world.

Then, in the half clarity of wakefulness, a sort of revelation came, the understanding that there was no way to think this thing through. I could only act, headlong, could only push forward bloody-mindedly until something had come together or been smashed.

I went out again. This time I came at Rita’s house by circling around to the cross-street just beyond it. I hadn’t showered or shaved, must have been in a state by then but was aware of my body only as a kind of machine, something to move me from place to place and be forgotten.

I waited at the corner. I knew Elena had a class at ten, Rita not till mid-afternoon. The minutes ticked by, nine-forty-five, nine-fifty; then finally Elena emerged from the door, a book bag on one arm. Seeing her secretly like that, as she swung her bag up, as she pulled the door shut to lock it, still her staunch, unswerving self though she was alone, I had an insight: that Elena was what she was right down to her sinew and bone, while Rita was changeable, shifting, someone who blended
into things like camouflage. For an instant I couldn’t even call up an image of her: there was a blank in my mind like a photo that had failed, that showed a background, a setting, but where her likeness should have been only empty space.

I waited till Elena had disappeared down the street, then rang the bell. Footsteps, then Rita’s voice, tentative, wary.

“Who is it?”

“It’s me.”

Her eyes flashed fear when she opened the door: I must have looked crazed.

“Are you all right?”