Toronto Noir Page 11
K. hates Dufferin Street but is especially distressed by the Dufferin bus, which makes him feel like a homicidal dumpling. One of the most reliable ways to elicit murderous tendencies is to ride the overheated, fart-smelling bus up into the very heart of humanity: Bloor and Dufferin station, where no one believes in standing in line for anything, let alone a TTC ticket or a bus. There’s nothing sadder to K. than watching immigrants climb onto the bus at the Dufferin Mall—or “The Duff,” as Christmas calls it—with their crinkling Wal-Mart bags. The glorious Ethiopian queens stuffed into cheap, inadequate jeans. The baby carriages, the economy-sized flats of toilet paper and family-sized boxes of pizza-pops stuffed and the greasy stench of McDonald’s fried turds on everyone’s hands.
“But why do you hate The Duff? You can get anything at the Duff!” Christmas likes to remind him, when he gets all nauseous and depressed by the prospect of needing something from the inner-city excuse for a shopping center. Christmas is right, though, it’s truly incredible what capitalism has made available even and especially at the Dufferin Mall: You can get your photograph taken in a booth and receive a series of stickers with your image reproduced in cartoon form, you can also get corrective contact lenses, a prepaid phone with pink kittens speaking in Japanese characters, tensor bandages made of hemp, not to mention a ten carat diamond from Peoples Jewelers, cigarette filters in bulk, and a herb and garlic bagel the size of your head.
It would be all right by K. if he never had to step into The Duff ever again, though he knows Christmas could not live without its peopled, impoverished absurdity. Anxiety clutches at K.’s throat as he weaves his way through the well-maintained Parkdale streets to meet Christmas for lunch in Roncesvalles. They’re hooking up at Christmas’s favorite Polish dive, a dank, wood-paneled place called Krak where the soup specials are alternately beet or dill pickle and you can get a full schnitzel dinner for $4.99. Despite Krak’s reasonable prices, K.’s funds have been nearly depleted since he left his job in advertising to go back to grad school to study pre-colonial African history.
He now understands the sour expressions his colleagues made when he made his announcement about his “life transition.” At first he thought they were transmitting muted jealousy, then settled on the fact that it was the mildly dyspeptic superiority all people in advertising projected. But now he knew that their shocked faces were actually saying: Dude, are you ready? There would be no more Calvin Klein shoes, no more impromptu tapas lunches at Lee’s, no more all-night cocaine parties on the rooftop patio of the Drake Hotel (or “The Fake,” as Christmas liked to call it), no more reckless, whimsical spending of the salary he had earned, for almost a decade, by shuffling in and out of an elevator in a gentle hung-over state. There would also be no more abuse from a crisply tanned woman, whose skin bore an unmistakable resemblance to chorizo, named Marlene, who liked to accuse him of not collating pages correctly before big presentations.
As he slows his board down, he notices Christmas inside Krak, studying what appears to be the weekly newspaper with an intensity she reserves for restaurant experiences. Her ponytail is high up on her head, as if she’s a very young child and an inept but well-meaning male relative has coiffed her with thick kitchen elastics. K. stares at Christmas through the dirty window; there is something wan and estranged about her: She is almost unrecognizable. Her eyes seem pulled too far in opposite directions, but this illusion ends the second she turns her head and smiles at him heartily, pointing at the menu. He’s imagined it. Christmas looks as good as ever. It’s just stress, he thinks, plunging his hand into his shallow pocket, only to find his last crumpled tenner and the same wrinkled newspaper ad Christmas has spread out onto their table.
K.’s not sure what has convinced him to submit to the study. Maybe it was Christmas’s enthusiasm about the project: “It’s nothing, they give you a bunch of placebos and they let you play video games all day to test your reflexes. They feed you cream cheese and cucumber sandwiches. You love cream cheese.” She had beamed at him insanely. Her excitement seemed disproportionately high considering the fact that they were discussing selling his brain to science. Plus, her face still hadn’t arranged itself properly. She had that kind of asymmetrical European look to begin with, all sharp curves and sunken cheeks, so it always took a minute or so to decide whether she was stunning or mannish. Today, the shocked expression didn’t seem to leave her face. Also, there was borscht on her lower jaw, smudged and organic like some forgotten assassination detail.
Maybe he needed little convincing; after all, K. had blown the last of his savings on tuition, several required books for grad school, most of which had the words Bone and Civilization in their titles. Then there was the small matter of his exorbitant west end rent—why did he pay nearly two thousand dollars to live in a basement apartment that smelled like mothball dog and had a moldy ceiling, why? Just so he could pay seven dollars for a G-and-T and catch ageing, pseudo indie-rockers deejaying Bowie songs at the Beaconsfield? Really?
He sighed and pushed in the big institution doors of the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health. This was why he was going: because he was desperate. Desperate for cash. And there was nothing more obscene than fretting about money. According to Christmas, this study paid better than any of the other guinea pig gigs did—Christmas should know, she survived on weight-loss-ad modeling gigs (Christmas was the “After” model) and these drug-testing studies. She claimed starving herself and wearing long-sleeved shirts in the summer to cover her track marks (how else would they monitor her blood during the studies?) was a small price to pay for being a “professional nothing.”
K. announced himself at the desk and was directed to the eleventh floor by a woman in scrubs with cartoons of pigs in scrubs on them. Before K. could ask her about the pigs, what internal logic or reference they signified, what insight into the mysterious world of Western medicine they hinted at, the young nurse/receptionist, who looked about twelve years old to K., said, “Wait a minute, are you involved with Dr. Bot’s study?”
K. nodded as she flipped through a bunch of papers and answered the telephone in a chirpy yet business-like manner. She typed something into her computer and the printer spat out a fluorescent blue wrist-band, the kind you get at hospitals, all-inclusive hotels, stadium gigs: human-style branding. He examined it carefully and verified the spelling of his name, his date of birth, his gender, and his allergies (yes, penicillin). The brown-haired girl snapped it on his wrist eagerly, as if hungry for physical human contact with someone lucid. He gave her a floppy kind of smile and began shambling down the hall, as if he’d already ingested some Valium or other painkiller and was in the foggy world of decision-free living.
It wasn’t until the elevator bell rang out, and the formaldehyde smell had been absorbed completely into the back of his throat, that K. realized he hadn’t once given his name: He’d failed to fill out a single form that would alert anyone to his allergies, or his June birthday.
Dr. Bot was bald and overly friendly in the way that people are when they know others fear them. As he explained to K. what the study would consist of—two weeks of drug- and alcoholfree living, daily blood samples, and some hand-eye coordination tests (“You like Xbox, Kenny? Well, this is a little older, but the same idea.”)—and handed over some documents describing the types of drugs they’d be using, K. watched the way the gloomy institutional light flounced off various parts of Dr. Bot’s perfectly proportioned cranium. He wondered if its shine was accidental or purposeful and if the doctor intended his incredible globular centerpiece to be admired, or whether it served as pure distraction for his nervous subjects.
As he took blood from K., and asked him about his hobbies (“Have you heard of this rollerblading craze, Ken, or are you more the intellectual type?”), K. tried to revert the questions back to the doctor.
“So, my friend Christmas tells me this is a drug-testing study, but I see here these are tried and true oldies—clonazepam, amitriptyline—so what are you test
ing, effects?”
The doctor smiled at K. condescendingly but didn’t answer. Bot plugged up a vial of his blood with a small black stopper, and a nurse, who looked like she’d been sucked into a vacuum from a planet of porn stars and then deposited into the orange room with K. and the doctor without any instructions, came to take his blood away. She nearly tripped on her big white platform nurse shoes that seemed to be very impractical, given her occupation.
“Dr. Bot? What effects are you testing?”
“I like Christmas,” Bot said, leaning casually on the counter, which contained a large glass jar with a ridiculous amount of cotton swabs in it. “She’s very spontaneous, what I call a free thinker, a truly free thinker. There really are no predictable patterns of thought going on there whatsoever, I find it fascinating. Have the two of you been dating long?”
K. sighed and studied the fold in his arm that was tightly sealed with cotton and tape, it was slowly bruising into a light green color. The doctor was obviously full of prevarications, wasn’t allowed to, or wouldn’t, talk.
“Everything you need to know about the study is in the forms, Ken,” Bot said, as K. pulled his hoodie on carefully and tucked his skateboard under his pricked-up arm. “Okay, see you tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. sharp.” Bot turned back toward the window, which displayed the varied gruesomeness and decrepitude of College and Spadina: It was the only place in the city where you could get rolled by crackheads, buy six white miniature eggplants for $1.99, and see female U of T students in Uggs rushing from their psychology classes to get hammered on vodka ice coolers at O’Grady’s Irish pub, all within a six-block radius.
“Ken,” Bot said, without turning around, “you didn’t sign the forms.”
“Oh, sorry,” he said, catching the door with his foot, “I forgot.”
K. had eaten three Hungry-Man TV dinners he’d gotten from the Price Chopper and was feeling a little ill. As Christmas’s voice hummed along the telephone line, he thought about what a good decorator he was. Small white, twinkly Christmas lights, it’s all about the Christmas lights. He sprawled his long body out on the floor and examined the layers of delicately latticed thumb-sized lights. As long as things stayed relatively dark—or “ambient,” as his favorite show, Decorate This, Girl! , described it—you couldn’t tell that most of his furniture came from the Ikea dumpster and Lansdowne’s Value Village.
“Obsyline,” Christmas said, her voice cutting through his fantasy of the triplet horse-faced decorating girls visiting his dank subterranean rooms and throwing his world into a renovating frenzy.
“K., did you hear me? The new drug is Obsyline. I Googled it, there’s nothing about it, except that it’s in the Valium family. You were right. Looks like that’s what Bot’s using on you.”
“Sounds like a combination of obvious and Vaseline,” he said.
Impatient, Christmas sighed, “Yeah, I guess it does.”
“Well, whatever it is, I have these naps for hours, and I wake up feeling like someone’s taken a shovel to my skull.”
Two weeks had gone by since K. started drug testing with Dr. Bot and he’d been too exhausted to do anything with Christmas after the long afternoons of sleeping; watching women with unmovable hair negotiate badly attended fundraisers on soap operas; responding to Dr. Bot’s lengthy and often nonsensical surveys (“Would you describe yourself as lethargic or woozy? How many pistons in a diesel engine? Can you think of a word that rhymes with orangutan? ); eating the semi-comestible tuna fish sandwiches that tasted like fancy cat food; and flying a green video airplane through an obstacle course on what appeared to K. to be one of the first computers ever built.
“Let me come over, at least,” Christmas pleaded, “I miss you, K.”
“Hello, who is this?” K. asked officiously. “Who am I speaking to, please?”
Christmas laughed and hung up. She pulled on her itchy Guatemalan mittens. Fall had turned, suddenly it was crisply unforgiving outside. She would stop on Queen Street, on her way over, to buy a boneless chicken roti from the Roti Lady for K. to take to work tomorrow. A little Caribbean might help, that shitty institutional food was enough to make you murder someone.
To say that K.’s apartment was a disaster would have been a compliment. There was Beefaroni on the low ceilings and two weeks worth of unlaundered gitch cobbled out an enchanted trail toward the bathroom. Stacks of papers, magazines, and take-out menus were splayed across the floor in fanlike phalanxes. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a rank-smelling can of opened baked beans which even K.’s cat, Soya Sauce, eyed with outrage.
“On that decorating show I watch, they say never to sacrifice your personal mementos and sense of style for the overall aesthetic, even if—”
“Where are your skateboards?”
Christmas had opened up a closet and found it stuffed with duct tape, rolled gauze, and an enormous vacuum cleaner, which had all the technology of a NASA telescope. Boxes of Lean Cuisine and Hungry-Man fell on her head. “Where is your record collection, Ken?”
K. looked at Christmas and frowned. Who was this girl with so much brown hair? It was everywhere. On her sweater, on her face, stuffed behind her ears. Why was she rifling through his apartment? Why was she wearing so many bangles? Bangles. Is that what they were called? What an odd word for bracelets. How very British. Only the British could have a snooty word for bracelets. What skate things was she talking about? What records?
“What records?” he asked cautiously, as if he knew her answer already and was merely testing her. Christmas turned then, from the mess, from the close, fusty food odors of the kitchen. She focused on K.’s vitreous stare.
“What the fuck?” She took a step forward and picked at something dry and scabrous just above K.’s ear. A clean strip of his curly hair had been shaved away for a series of crude incisions.
“Ow!” K. flinched, slapped away her hand. He took a step back, nearly slipping on an open Food magazine featuring a section on crème brûlée recipes. In a trembling voice, one that fought for patience and the concomitant emotion of understanding, K. asked her again, “Who are you?”
Christmas held a tiny thread in her hand, one of K.’s stitches. Attached to it was a pinkish bit of matter the size of a dust mote. Which memories had Bot taken? Which had he left? Where was the part of K. that cried to Bob Seeger songs? Where was the piece that liked the cheese on his open-faced grilled cheese sangers a little puckered? Where was the memory of K.’s drunk mother climbing onstage with a magician so that she could be sliced in two like the assistants with curler-wrought hair, wearing spangly costumes and fleshcolored tights?
K. held onto the cuff of her sweater lamely. His mouth formed a weak “o” as he breathed out his final question. Again, he wanted to know who she was. Instead of answering him, Christmas shook him off, picked up a heavy knife from the kitchen island covered with pizza boxes, ants, and ashtrays, and stabbed her best friend: first, in the liver, then in the kidney.
He bled in her lap until morning. She sat in the dark listening to the people on the first floor shower, then make a noisy breakfast of smoothies and cereal. When she was sure they’d left, she pulled a fleece blanket over K. and left his apartment, her itchy autumn sweater soggy with blood.
She took the Queen car. It was filled with pierced and tattooed indie warriors, drunks, who reeked of urine and mouthwash, and a few finely polished high-earners who’d been too lazy to take their Beamers to the car wash. Christmas hated all of them. She got off at Spadina and walked north, up through the stench and crowds of Chinatown, toward the CAMH, clutching the thick chopping knife in one hand, a lock of K.’s curly brown hair in the other. She was going to finish this now.
Inside the Centre, on the eleventh floor, Dr. Bot unwrapped a sticky blueberry muffin and blew on his Tim Horton’s double-double. He looked outside his window. He could see her, his favorite little rodent. The one who managed to scurry away from his blade, the one who’d always woken up before he could shear that beautif
ul hair and lacerate that fine-tuned, if lazy, brain. He watched her move into the building with determined steps. Her hair was messed, sweater soiled and lopsided.
I’ve killed a lot of rats to reach you, he thought, as he sat back in his ergonomic chair and waited for her.
THE EMANCIPATION
OF CHRISTINE ALPERT
BY NATHAN SELLYN
Toronto Airport
Isabella Gauthier’s husband Carl was still warm in the grave, and she had forgotten how to live alone. That spring was a rainy one, but those first weeks without him rolled forward so slowly that it seemed fitting they took place underwater. So she ran errands, to keep herself busy. On that day alone she had met with the lawyer, had the car’s oil changed, boxed up all the books in Carl’s office, and eaten dinner at the bowling club. But she still found herself home at 6 with nothing to fill the hours before she might find sleep. So she watched the hockey game with the sound off and a record on, then sat down to read her magazines in his chair by the window. At just before 11, she removed her glasses to rub at her eyes. When she put them back on, she noticed the headlights in the street. Six, on three matching black sedans.
The cars all arrived together, but could only find two parking spots, and so the last in the convoy drove on, beyond the block of town houses and out of Isabella’s sight. The others parked and cut their engines, but their doors remained closed. Tinted windows made it impossible to tell who sat inside. Isabella reached over and turned off her reading light. Yet nothing happened. The sedans lay still, waiting, like a pair of polished steel crocodiles feigning sleep by the riverbank.