Fiction:
Investment Results May Vary
By Zsuzsi Gartner
Dan and Patricia O’Donnell are always searching for the best of everything. Here they are now. Patricia—her long dark hair tied back in an impossibly sleek braid, hair pulled so tight her eyebrows look as if they’re about to boomerang around the room—partially reclines on what appears to be a chaise longue. Dan leans against an old-fashioned exposed radiator by an open window, one loafer-clad foot crossed in front of the other, looking like one of those guys in high school Lucy always wanted to hump on the leg like a crazed standard poodle. You know, dry-humping away, knees locked, eyes bulging, just to get that self-satisfied smirk off his face. Dan and Patricia’s teeth are preternaturally white, Boraxed incisors gleaming. Their ceiling soars above them at least 16 feet. A crudely painted saddle—a swollen lily Georgia O’Keefe-inspired, over the seat—vies for wall space with pressed-tin skeletons dangling on wires. The single orchid in an intentionally crooked raku vase on the edge of a spotless glass table scream wabi-sabi pretensions with twice-weekly maid service. And the light. The light in the room is fantastic. Vermeer, all business, hands on his hips, directing the sun.
Of course, there’s the Berber rug. Not a Paul-Bowles-got-wasted-on-this-rug Berber, but creamy, white wool, Yaletown Berber.
Lucy, sitting crossed-legged on her basement suite’s futon couch, fennel tea cooling on the upturned milk crate draped with a beach towel, really does want to hate them. She has already started that ascent to the dizzying heights a decent bout of righteous anger can transport her, that place where the air thins, the blood grows hypoxic, and you can muse on your own demise in an oddly detached manner, but the fine print gets in the way. Dramatization, it reads in tiny white type at the bottom of the magazine ad. The clients’ names and story are fictitious and intended to be an illustration of services available through Merrill Lynch. Investment results may vary.
Still, there’s that light and the unnerving placement of naïf objects d’art. And Patricia, coiled to spring even in repose. It’s as if Jeff Wall has done an ad for Merrill Lynch. The People You Will Never Be So Kill Yourself Now (Cibachrome, 2006).
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Another house on the North Shore has been swallowed by the mountainside. A stunning cliff-edge post-and-beam completed in 1956. It’s been happening with alarming frequency lately. There are those who find these disappearances—what else to call them?—less dramatic but more frightening than the mudslides triggered by torrential rains that have destroyed both houses and their inhabitants. Those tragedies could be ascribed to foul weather and bureaucratic ineptitude. Those incidents are always well attended by debris and rescue squads and grim-looking television news crews who are secretly elated by the great fucking visuals (a direct quote).
What happens is this: You leave for work in the morning and on your return, there is the peeling arbutus, with the tire swing still dangling from the lowest branch, the rope slightly frayed, but not so much you’ve ever noticed. There’s the cedar hedge that hid the partially dissembled Triumph Twin in the carport that you will now never ride down the I-5 to the Coast Highway, cruising all the way to Eureka to visit that chowder shack where you met (so never mind the clam chowder tasted like it had been stewed in an ashtray, you’ll always remember ambrosia). There’s the empty koi pond, so incompatible with the wandering black bears and the fat, happy raccoons—ghost fish flickering in the shallows. The upturned blue box is still curbside. And in the spot where your house once stood is a long, dull pucker, a barely perceptible seam where the earth has hastily knit itself together.
And no insurance policy in the world with a clause to cover what has happened.
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It’s difficult to say just how badly Lucy is sweating inside her Olympic mascot costume, as even under ideal circumstances Lucy is the Lance Armstrong of perspiration. If there were an Olympic medal for sweating, there’d she be, on the tier of the podium closest to heaven, her Athens-vintage Roots™ singlet plastered to her body, brandishing gold. She blames her Eastern European heritage, something hirsute and unfavourable along her ribbon of DNA, combined with a childhood of pork fat, too many root vegetables, and polyester stretch pants. Yet there is something distinctly working class about excess sweat, which is why she’s never followed up on her mother’s suggestion (may she squirm in eternal unrest) that she have some of her eccrine glands removed. I secrete therefore I am, Lucy liked to scoff. And really, is there anything more bourgeois than elective surgery?
This is where a lifelong commitment to battling environmental degradation has led her. She is a 38-year-old woman lumbering around Granville Island Public Market dressed like a roly-poly Vancouver Island marmot, an animal that in real life is about to tip into the abyss, but who crookedly grins from all the banners spanning the city’s bridges, and whose smaller but no less roly-poly Beanie Baby™ version is clutched by American and British and German and Japanese children passing through upgraded security at the Vancouver International Airport, children who ( kids will be kids ) Olympics organizers are counting on to relentlessly badger their parents to bring them back four years from now for The Games ( cue visual of Eternal Flame .)
Community service they call it. Her week-long jail sentence has been commuted to this: a month of waddling through zombie-like crowds anaesthetized by all manner of smoked salmon tidbits. Lucy waves in what she’s decided is a jaunty manner, giving the finger from safely inside a fat, plush paw to anyone who has a crease ironed into her professionally laundered jeans or looks even remotely aware of what a stock option is. Armies of pigeons swoop low overhead at regular intervals in eerily coordinated phalanxes. Toddlers lurch erratically at the birds that land on the wharf outside the market. Gulls screech and dive for rogue fries with the precision of heat-seeking missiles. In the distance, a guitarist is trying to bring a Roberta Flack tune back from the dead. There are many who call this paradise.
Two teenaged girls stop in front of Lucy. It’s fall already, but they wear halter-tops, nipples on high alert like shark fins patrolling the dangerous fabric, and too much kohl, making their porcine eyes look even smaller and meaner. By now sweat has puddled in Lucy’s sneakers, moisture squelching between her toes as if she’s been traipsing through Burns Bog. She still has over an hour left to go. One of the girls starts poking at Lucy in the lower belly. “He’s soooo cute. Aren’t you cute” She makes her mouth go all round and tight, and bends over feigning a blowjob. The other one holds her sides and shrieks in that way only 14-year-old girls can.
To hell with this, Lucy thinks. She really wants to whack them, to wreak revenge for thousands of bus passengers and moviegoers who’ve been held hostage over the years by potty-mouthed, hysterically shrieking post-adolescent girls, and in fact raises a padded hand to start swatting at them—already picturing the crowd parting like the Red Sea while some heroic German tourist, Heinz, a tool-and-die maker from Mönchweiler, drops his smoked-salmon kebab or salmon fajita and springs forward to wrestle the crazed Olympic mascot to the ground— Sayonara community service, hello jail! —when, at the edge of her field of vision, which is pretty limited considering the marmot head and the sweat stinging her eyes, she sees Dan and Patricia O’Donnell. Not a couple with a vague resemblance, but them. Or a perfect simulacrum. Patricia is sniffing a fennel bulb. She holds it out to Dan and then laughs as the licorice-scented fronds tickle his nose and he lightly shakes his head. The moment looks scripted (cue tinkling laughter) and Lucy can’t help but glance over her shoulder for a camera crew and klieg lights. A small boy in a private-school uniform stands between them, reaching for the fennel. As the three walk away, hand-in-hand, a luminous arc of white light envelops them. A trick of the late-afternoon sun.
No. A vision. But Lucy, who’s been a determined unbeliever for years, no longer has the vaguest notion of what it means to be confronted by a vision.
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Honey Fortunata (her real name) sings “Sweet Dreams are Made of This” as she manoeuvres her new lease-to-own Hummer along the Upper Levels Highway. It’s been her anthem ever since she heard it on Martha Stewart’s Apprentice . “Everybody’s looking for thomething ...” The slightest trace of an accent, people often mistake it for a lisp, creeps into her voice when she’s feeling emotional.
There are those who would view the Hummer as capitulation, but Honey tends to look on the bright side—that’s how she stays afloat. She kept what her favourite British children’s stories used to call a “stiff upper lip” when her mother left seven-year-old Honey with her grandmother in Davao City and flew 15 time zones across the Pacific to take care of another woman’s children. The lip barely quivered at age 15, when she didn’t even recognize her own mother on the international arrivals level of the Vancouver airport, or the girl only four years younger than Honey herself whom her mother told Honey was her sister. That same lip, encased in sensible matte-finish Taupe by mac , stayed the course when her mother died and when her little sister Charity decided that sliding her crotch up and down the pole at No. 5 Orange was preferable to skipping classes at Van Tech while Honey worked days sorting processed meats into neat stacks at Subway and studying nights for her real-estate licence.
Let the other agents travel in packs like cowardly hyenas or pimply-faced teen-aged boys with pants riding the barrens of their non-existent buttocks. Let them retreat in fear, taking jobs in cubicles on the 19th floor of a securities company. Honey Fortunata, snug in her Kevlar pantsuit, behind the wheel of her bulletproof high-mobility multi-purpose vehicle (civilian version), is on her way to close on the $2-million-plus split-level on Decourcy Court. And no thwarted buyer taking pot shots at real-estate agents is going to stop her. She’s even had the RE/MAX logo painted onto the driver’s side door—the #1 in We’re #1 in West Van! forming what could be construed as a perfect bull’s eye at her left breast.
From her dashboard, above the combat-grade instrument cluster with its eerily glowing global-positioning device , a hollow plastic Virgin Mary filled with holy water from Cap-de-la-Madeleine, hands open at her sides, smiles wryly at Honey as if to say, Let me tell you about stiff upper lip.
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Dan and Patricia are everywhere, spreading like toxic mould. On the #14 Hastings bus a few days ago, Patricia looked primly at Lucy from the dimly backlit panel ad, eyebrows winched skyward, as Lucy glared back. If you’re looking for the best of everything, sister, you’re on the wrong goddamn bus . Dan still had his smirk, but didn’t meet her eyes. He looked out past her at a young woman in a Happy Planet T-shirt that appears to have been designed for an eight-year-old, shakily crunching Doritos, sallow pad of her stomach over-exposed between the well-worn shirt and her low riders, studded white belt pockmarked with cigarette burns, a rail yard criss-crossing her inner arms. Lucy could’ve sworn Dan had to adjust his pants at the crotch.
Even the billboard at the entrance to Granville Island, just yesterday advertising the delights of the Vancouver Aquarium and its imprisoned Beluga population, now shows the couple, toothy smiles fully engaged, in their kitchen, an assault of stainless-steel surfaces and grey-blue slate. Patricia is posed to slice the fennel bulb. The knife in her hand glints under halogen light, while Dan leans across the cooking island, as if whispering something naughty in her ear. Here’s the really weird thing. They look less like Dan and Patricia than the real Dan and Patricia Lucy saw last week on the wharf outside the market.
It was only much later that night when she was trying to get back to sleep around four a.m.—the time she often wakes and can’t remember which side of her chest houses her heart, even though it’s thrumming so violently she fears the landlady will start pounding on the floor above her bed, yelling, “I thought I told you to keep it down!”—that it dawned on Lucy: The real Dan and Patricia O’Donnell were not Caucasian like the ones in the ad, but Chinese. Tall for Chinese, but unmistakably Chinese. Odd that she hadn’t noticed.
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How do you measure disbelief? How many cubic tonnes of topsoil and almost impenetrable glacial till and granitic bedrock must be removed without recovering a single wall stud, newel post, or fragment of ceramic tile, how far into the sub-strata must you delve without a trace of the chef-quality Amana gas range or your collection of stubby beer bottles (bought at auction), how many heavy equipment operators must make limp jokes about digging a hole all the way to China and shake their heads at your evident derangement as you ask them to excavate just one metre deeper, how many times must your daughter sob, but I don’t want a new Costa-Rica-Survivor© Barbie, I want MY Costa-Rica-Survivor© Barbie, before you—who are actually allergic (your term) to anything that smacks of the supernatural, who gag-wretches at the words chakra or aura, who rolls eyes skyward when anyone speaks of faith—accept the unfathomable? Your house, all 3,217 square feet of it, and its entire contents, have vanished without a trace.
Then there’s your dog. A formerly amiable Wheaton terrier who circles the perimeter of the yawning pit, endlessly snuffling at the loose earth, snapping at anyone who comes near, possibly mourning in his canine brain a soggy tennis ball left on the mat by the back door, or a beloved chew toy (the peppermint-scented Orbee bone) that felt so good against his aging gums, or simply an ambient memory of a sweet spot in the master bedroom where the late-afternoon September sun edged through the skylight and onto the kilim where he wasn’t technically allowed but where he whiled away the empty hours in a kind of existential bliss.
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Lucy holds a pair of ski poles awkwardly in her lumpy paws and pretends to slalom in slow motion through the Granville-Island crowd watching Byron from England, a flame-juggling comedian who specializes in homophobic jibes. People step back to clear Lucy a path and smile good-naturedly, children point and yell: “A bear!” (Fact: The marmot is actually a rodent, but no one on the Olympic Committee wanted kids pointing and yelling, “A rat!” so they’ve erred on the side of the ursine. After all, who, except for those trying to save the doomed Vancouver Island marmot, has actually ever seen one?) But there’s this one guy, a large man laconically eating fries from a paper cone, who doesn’t budge. Just gives her a look Lucy knows all too well because she’s seen it staring back at her in pale, aggrieved reflection from SkyTrain and shop windows and her own bathroom mirror. Greetings fellow misanthrope, now get the hell out of my way! The noise in her head is like one of those fireworks kids launch all through the night at Halloween, a high-pitched squealer that ends, not quite with a bang, but a loud pop.
She heads straight for the French-Fry Guy as if he’s the finish line, poles flailing to the left, to the right, to the left. A woman yells, “Curtis!” and yanks a Jack Russell on an extendable leash out of Lucy’s way. Poles high in the air now, well over her head, sweat coursing from her armpits like ill-fated bison streaming over the last rise at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. With a warrior cry, Lucy slams into the man and bounces backwards off him as if she’s a character in a Saturday-morning cartoon. You can practically hear the requisite Boing!
“Mascot busts a move!” someone announces, deejay-style . Lucy’s head should be cracked open, her durian fruit of a brain fouling the sea-spiked air, but the marmot suit has cushioned the fall. She starts staggering to her feet to scattered applause, woo-hoos!, and the insistent, machine-gun laughter of someone going off their meds. The salmon-eaters think it was all part of an act.
As she straightens, Lucy sees the same little boy in the private-school uniform from last week standing in front of her, like a miniature security guard in his blazer with its cheesy crest. The light behind his head is dazzling, reminding her that it hasn’t rained for several weeks; the reservoirs are unusually low and residents have been asked to share baths and take short showers. Dan and Patricia no doubt still fill their Jacuzzi tub to the brim, hot water tumbling unchecked from the gilded modernist faucet. Lucy pictures Dan sliding in behind Patricia, kneading the knots in the small of her back as she releases a tight little sigh, reluctantly, as if she’d never willingly let go of anything. The sun fires the tips of the boy’s hair into a spiky penumbra, a hazy crown of thorns. He gazes up at Lucy with something approximating concern in his eyes and reaches out.
A little hand in hers. It would be so easy.
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Never make the mistake of showing how much you really want something. That’s Honey’s philosophy. She reels in uncommitted buyers by appealing to their unclothed desires. If you want four competing bids above list price on your aging ranch-style on Eagle Harbour Road , you go ahead and give Honey Fortunata a call. Because Honey knows what to watch for and Honey doesn’t talk too much.
That childless couple in their mid-30s, the wife who hovers a little too long in the doorway of a child’s room? That 58-year-old workaholic who seems disproportionately interested in the empty carriage house out back and mentions having gone to Emily Carr a lifetime ago? Honey knows just what to do. She calls them to come and take a second look, the sellers are very motivated (real-estate code for getting a divorce ).
The couple returns and when the wife looks into the bedroom again she sees a pine crib with an Ann Geddes photograph above it of a baby dressed like a bumblebee. The room smells of talcum powder and a limitless future. Bewildered, she turns to Honey and says, “I didn’t notice a baby’s room before!” Honey smiles and says, “You went through so quickly last time.” The workaholic returns to find the carriage house partially transformed into a painting studio. “Excuse the mess,” Honey says, shrugging, “but the owner has this lucrative little hobby.”
But even Honey makes mistakes. That day two months ago when she finally tracked down Charity—her sister walking down Blood Alley with the herky-jerky marionette steps of an addict, small untethered breasts straining against her Happy Planet T-shirt, while Honey negotiated with her pimp and dealer, who told her Charity had ripped off some very scary people and was only alive because of his personal munificence (although he called it something less poetic)—Honey had said, “Name your price.”
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“I didn’t know marmots could drive!” The boy twists and turns in the passenger seat of Lucy’s car, punctuating each breathless pronouncement with body language. He has proven to have an insatiable appetite for all things marmot and an endless arsenal of exclamation marks. It’s as if he’s cornered the market on enthusiasm and is doling it out without regard for the niceties of supply and demand. Lucy envisions the look on Patricia’s face as she turns from applauding Byron from England’s Houdini-like escape from a straitjacket and padlocked chain to find her Crackerjacks prize of a son gone and feels a rare frisson of self-satisfaction.
She is finding it hard to keep her paws on the steering wheel and shoulder-checking is impossible with the mascot head still on. She doesn’t usually drive if she can help it, and her late-70s Toyota Corolla is practically in its death throes, but this morning she was running late after a savage bout of insomnia and trying to make her shift by bus was impossible. The walk back to her car, parked on a side street just outside Granville Island, had felt impossibly long, with the boy chittering away at her side as he trotted to match her pace. But there were remarkably few people about and she thinks no one saw them get in the car and pull away.
It seems he’s only in kindergarten—what kind of people would put a five-year-old in a uniform, complete with blazer?—and that his teacher, whose name sounds something like Miss Peach (the boy talks so fast Lucy can’t make out everything he’s saying) has made the Vancouver Island marmot the official class animal. “There’s only about 100 of you left in existence!” Lucy nods. She tells him she’s come to the city as an ambassador for her fellow marmots, to make people understand that they have to stop hacking away at the old-growth forests and destroying their habitat. “And they sent you because you’re the biggest!”
“And because I’m the only one who could drive a standard,” Lucy says as the car judders onto her street just off Commercial Drive. Breathing in her own expelled carbon dioxide in the confines of the car is making her giddy, as if her brain cells are multiplying too rapidly, spawning an over-populated subsidized-housing project in her skull cavity.
In front of the just-completed reno on the corner, a hired gun in a surgical mask is blowing leaves from the lawn and the sidewalk with a backpack blower. They gust madly, whirling like the calendar pages in Citizen Kane before settling into the gutter. Lucy can remember when there was a clear divide in the city, a line in the sand all parties respected. West of Main was where you found the leaf blowers, east of Main people still retained a genetic memory of how to wield a rake and a broom. But when property prices started spiking wildly there began a drift of Westside sensibilities to her neighbourhood, along with their implements of destruction.
“Satan’s little helper,” she says.
“What?” says the boy.
“The two-stroke terrorist.” She points towards the leaf blower.
The boy’s eyes go wide. “My dad has one of those.”
She doesn’t answer, letting him draw his own conclusions. The boy sucks in his lips until his mouth disappears. Lucy can feel the sweat pooling in her ears as the car grinds to a stop in front of her place.
It’s the leaf blowers that undo her every time. They’re the reason she’s trapped in this sauna-hell of a mascot outfit in the first place. That day in early September, as she hurried along Napier to her shift at the food co-op, there was a woman out in front of the new heritage-style infill that towered over its neighbours, blasting a blower back and forth across her lawn as if she were divining for water. In her tidy silver-grey pageboy and batiked sarong wrapped around her sturdy, middle-aged body, she exuded an almost obnoxious serenity. The grass, smooth as a green sheet yanked tight over the yard and tucked with hospital corners, appeared spotless save for a few stray leaves from a Japanese maple. Lucy stopped, ignoring the warning in her head that was whooping like a car alarm, and stood on the sidewalk with her hands on her hips.
“I thought you might like to know,” she said loudly over the ear-splitting roar of the blower, “a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars!” The woman didn’t even glance her way. Lucy strode onto the lawn, yelling, “I said , I thought you might like to know that a leaf blower causes as much smog as 17 cars!” The woman trained the nozzle on the one remaining red leaf, which quivered slightly but stayed where it was. Lucy wrenched the leaf blower out of the woman’s hands and aimed it up at her face. The pageboy lifted off the startled woman’s scalp before she could grab it. The wig hovered overhead for a few seconds like an antediluvian bird before blowing off and snagging on a bare branch of the maple. The woman stood there, impossibly wide-eyed and bald, a Japanese anime character, as Lucy screamed about carcinogens and decibel levels and the end of civilization while wielding the leaf blower like an AK-47. Later, Lucy would recall that this was the moment she understood how something like Columbine could happen.
The woman pulled pale-pink wax plugs from her ears and, backing away slowly, said, “I’m going to call 911.” Or maybe just mouthed the words before Lucy lunged.
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Honey Fortunata is turning onto the Caulfeild exit when her cell phone rings. It just rings—no “La Macarena,” no Beethoven’s Fifth, for Honey is not a person who indulges in whimsy. As she listens to the voice at the other end, Honey’s lip actually begins to tremble so hard that she has to press two fingers to her mouth to still it. The house on Decourcy, the one she was just about to close on, has joined the ranks of the disappeared. Honey clicks shut her cell and pulls over. She takes increasingly shallow breaths and watches as her commission on $2.7-million does this funny thing. It sprouts wings, white, downy ones like a Catholic school-girl’s version of an angel, and flits up and out of the Hummer, right through the windshield as if the glass were permeable, and hovers for a moment above the gleaming hood before tumbling up into the unnaturally clear sky, along with Honey’s chances of finally buying back her sister’s life. A clear, operatic soprano sings out, startling the silence. Honey fumbles with the stereo, but the music is not coming from the speakers. For the first time in her life a thing very much like the chokehold of fear closes around her throat. The aria is coming from the Virgin Mary on the dashboard—her voice like a young Jessye Norman singing “ Ave Maria .” What look to be real tears are trickling from her painted blue eyes and Honey finds that she, too, is crying.
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Of course, there are those who say, “The mountain is angry.” The disappearances now number in the high hundreds, and as downtown hotels fill up with the moneyed homeless, letters to the local papers speak of Gaia’s revenge or God’s displeasure. To have voiced these beliefs in the wake of the Asian Tsunami or Hurricane Katrina would have invited instant censure. But here the victims are people of means, not the already downtrodden, so the notion that they’re being either cosmically punished or held up as a warning to us all? ( Vancouver Sun editorial, October 16, 2006) is debated in the mainstream media by pundits with straight faces. And that slurry twittering you hear around every corner? That’d be the sound of schadenfreude .
Unlike those who act as if they’re on speed-dial to the earth goddess—those men on recumbent bikes and those women who rub baking soda into their fuzzy armpits and think foetal-monitoring machines are the work of the devil—you, who’ve always harboured a secret penchant for Greek mythology, you know full well that Gaia is in fact the daughter of Chaos.
There is talk of healing. And even though you are a rationalist and the idea of pantheism gives you advanced heartburn, you invite the chief of the Squamish Nation to say a few words over the hole where your house had stood, a place that was once tribal land. The event, under its own steam, becomes rather ecumenical, with smudge sticks, button blankets, trickster stories, and didgeridoos . As your dog howls forlornly, the elder quotes from Chief Seattle’s famous 1854 speech . It is the order of nature, and regret is useless. Your time of decay may be distant, but it will come, for even the White Man . . . We may be brothers after all. We will see.
And the mountain in answer? Not so much as a burp.
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“Is this where you live?” the boy asks as they round the side of the house to the entrance that leads to Lucy’s basement suite. She tries to see it through his over-privileged little eyes. The back fence, chicken wire, sags low with the weight of accumulated morning glory, now dying, revealing a rutted back alley strewn with KFC carcasses raccoons have freed from garbage bags. There’s more than one abandoned easy chair, the stuffing festively mounding out like popcorn.
Next door, her neighbour, a well-muscled, mulleted 30-something on permanent disability from complications involving a cuckolded husband and an illegal firearm, practices his nanchukas. He’s part of a subterranean tribe of basement dwellers that emerge blinking into the mid-afternoon light from their illegal suites like small nocturnal animals, long after those with more conventional circadian rhythms have scattered for the day.
“Cool,” the boy says.
The man looks over and grins. “Wherever you go, there you are.” The guy has a paperback of Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan spread-eagled on a vinyl lawn chair beside an ashtray; a roach clip holds the still-smouldering twist of a joint perched on its rim. He tokes for medicinal purposes, he’s confided to Lucy more than once, as if she gives a shit. As if every second house on the street wasn’t a grow-op. Lucy is tempted to tell him she’s the one who blew the whistle on the operation the Grow Busters pot squad raided two blocks over last year, the one that turned out to be a federally licensed medical-marijuana site—even thought it isn’t true. She just wants to knock the co-conspirator look off his face, the one he always gives her when they happen to come up out of their suites at the same time.
He either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care that Lucy is dressed like an over-sized rodent, but he’s very interested in the kirpan fastened to the boy’s belt. There’s also a cloth covering the small bun on the boy’s head. A patka , a sort of pre-turban turban for Sikh youths, the boy had explained to Lucy in the car, as she madly tried to recollect if his parents had looked even remotely Southeast Asian. When had she stopped looking at people, really looking rather than simply noticing the things about them that drove her crazy?
“Little man, they let you wear that to school?” the neighbour asks. The boy pulls free the dagger and starts citing some kind of BC Supreme Court case. “So, when you have a culturally diverse society,” he concludes, “rights and obligations sometimes conflict!” He doesn’t realize she’s not a real marmot, but he can sum up a legal argument as if reciting a nursery rhyme. Lucy wonders, not for the first time, whether the child is some kind of idiot savant.
The guy shows the boy how to wield the nanchukas, holding one wooden stick firmly in his fist while deftly manipulating the one on the other end of the connecting chain. The boy makes a feeble pass at twirling the weapon, while the guy carves the air with the kirpan.
“Careful,” he says, “I’ve noogied myself more than once and my head’s probably a lot thicker than yours.”
Dwayne, Darrin, Dork? Lucy has lived beside him for eight years and still can never remember his name.
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It should be mentioned that the mountain has not swallowed a single sentient being. The disappearances never occur when anyone is at home. The mountain has an uncanny sense of timing. The nanny will have just rounded the corner with the twins when she remembers she should have packed the rain cover for the stroller. She turns back. I was only gone for a minute . Looking heavenward, crossing herself over and over as if she has a nervous tic.
Cockatiels, cats, dogs, hamsters, boa constrictors, and once, a miniature goat—all manner of bewildered pets have been recovered at the scenes of the disappearances. The only human witness, a girl of four who had been left to play in the sandbox while her older sister took care of business with the boy the next door, has been rendered mute. When asked to explain what happened, she forms a cup with her hands and smiles beatifically. The experts say post-traumatic stress disorder , while her mother insists her add has been cured.
Does anyone remember that aggrieved musician of Hamelin Town? Can anyone besides this enraptured girl hear his cunning tune?
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Lucy wakes from what must have been a catnap; there’s still some light coming through the ground-level windows. Her head is muzzy, the inside of the mascot suit a moist cave, no doubt incubating new single-cell life forms by now. The TV is on. The Simpson’s in perpetual rerun just ending, Lisa has saved Springfield yet again, and is wearing yet another medal bestowed by the mayor. The boy is static in front of the set. The evening news leads with a missing-child story.
Dan’s face is slack, a spent stocking. Please don’t hurt our son . But Patricia. She looks straight at Lucy and threatens to rip her entrails out. Not so much in words but in an understanding that passes between them. Her teeth now a serval cat’s, a guttural hiss issues from deep in her throat. Lucy’s striated flesh already clings to her yellowed incisors, and she’s crunching down on her bones as if they’re pretzels. Muscles roll like small ball bearings under the skin of her jaws.
“I never knew my Dad was such a good actor,” the boy says with evident admiration. “But Mom —” he sighs and shrugs his shoulders, palms turned up, like a badly mugging child star, Jonathan Lipnicki maybe. Lucy has told him his parents had been enlisted by Miss Peach to go along with the pretend abduction in order to bring media attention to the marmot cause. “You have a very nice burrow here, you know!” he tells her as he waits patiently in front of the TV for any word about the official class animal.
Lucy rummages through the cupboards, looking for something a child might want to eat. Clumsy paws knock a large jar of pickled beets to the floor. Glass pierces beet flesh, vivid purplish-red juice is everywhere. “Fuck!”
The boy looks up from his vigil on floor. “You’re not really a marmot, are you?”
She tries to whistle through her teeth. He’s informed her—more than once already—that the Vancouver Island marmot has a singular whistle when it’s in distress.
Lucy sits down on the floor across from the boy. She twists off the mascot head, the frigid basement air hitting her face and neck. She’s instantly congealing, skin shrink-wrapping her bones as it dries. “You’re not really a child, are you?”
On the news there’s a story about another one of those disappeared houses and an aerial shot of the North Shore starting to look as unpopulated as it did back in the 1950s, or so the reporter says, in way that implies this is somehow a bad thing.
The boy lifts the marmot head from Lucy’s lap and plops it onto his own head.
Years later, when Lucy thinks about any of this, which will be less often than you might think, it’s not the look of feral hatred in Patricia’s eyes or Dan’s crumpled sock-puppet face that she remembers, but this, a boy’s small hands gripping the matted plush of the marmot head to keep it from toppling off, his breath amplified inside the cave of the empty mesh skull, and inside her own skull the echo of the insistent plink, plink, plink from the bathtub faucet that never stops dripping, the grunts of her neighbour through the thin walls as he hurtles exotic weapons at an unseen enemy, her own mother’s snorting laughter, jostling Lucy’s head as it lay in her lap, when the nun held up the Nazis’ distributor cap and said, “Reverend Mother, I have sinned” while the cathode glaze of the late-night movie washed over them, mother and daughter, the bowl holding the crumbled remains of ripple chips on the coffee table, and the Family von Trapp escaping over the Alps to Switzerland, to asylum, to a type of freedom in neutrality, and Lucy, then only seven, maybe eight, not really thinking, not knowing, that maybe life would never get better than this.
The boy exudes such calm despite his proclivity to exclamation. Maybe all children were like this and she’s forgotten. She could surround herself with more children. She could be like that old woman who keeps hundreds of cats who will feast on her body when she dies, scrapping over the choice bits, the desiccated liver, tender, swollen kidneys, ballooning up around her spine, her heart like a dime, cold and thin.
Then, a muffled, “ Pee-Yoo! It really stinks in here!”
On the news, an impeccably dressed woman with long, dark hair is down on her hands and knees, scrabbling at the earth with her bare hands, flinging hunks of sod through the air and keening, while onlookers watch from a safe distance. A huge vehicle, like the ones US soldiers used during Desert Storm, is parked behind her, engine thrumming, a red, white and blue real-estate sign painted on its side. Somewhere, someone is singing a haunting aria.
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It’s about the things you want. Don’t let anyone tell you differently. It’s about the things you can’t have.
Is it so terrible to want what you can’t have? Can someone tell Lucy that? Huh, huh, huh, huh? Anyone?