Blind Assassin (116 page)

“Whatever’s eating her,” said Richard. He’d turned his head to look at her out the window, and I noticed for the first time that there was a thinning spot at the back of his head, a round of pink scalp showing through his brown hair. Soon he would have a tonsure.

“Next summer we’ll go to Muskoka,” said Winifred. “I can’t say this little vacation experiment has been a raging success.”

Towards the end of our stay I decided to visit the attic. I waited until Richard was occupied on the telephone and Winifred was lying in a deck chair on our little strip of sand with a damp washcloth across her eyes. Then I opened the door to the attic stairs, closing it behind me, and went up as quietly as I could.

Laura was already there, sitting on one of the cedar chests. She’d got the window open, which was a mercy: otherwise the place would have been stifling. There was a musky scent of old cloth and mouse droppings.

She turned her head, not quickly. I hadn’t startled her. “Hello,” she said. “There’s bats living up here.”

“I’m not surprised,” I said. There was a large paper grocery bag beside her. “What’ve you got there?”

She began to take things out—various bits and pieces, bric-à-brac. The silver teapot that was my grandmother’s, and three china cups and saucers, hand-painted, from Dresden. A few monogrammed spoons. The nutcracker shaped like an alligator, a lone mother-of pearl cuff link, a tortoiseshell comb with missing teeth, a broken silver lighter, a cruet stand minus the vinegar.

“What’re you doing with these things?” I said. “You can’t take them back to Toronto!”

“I’m hiding them. They can’t lay waste to everything.”

“Who can’t?”

“Richard and Winifred. They’d just throw these things out anyway; I’ve heard them talking about worthless junk. They’ll make a clean sweep, sooner or later. So I’m saving a few things, for us. I’ll leave them up here in one of the trunks. That way they’ll be safe, and we’ll know where they are.”

“What if they notice?” I said.

“They won’t notice. There’s nothing really valuable. Look,” she said, “I found our old school exercise books. They were still here, in the same place we left them. Remember when we brought them up here? For him?”

Alex Thomas never needed a name, for Laura: he was always
he, him, his.
I’d thought for a while that she’d given him up, or given up the idea of him, but it was obvious now that she hadn’t.

“It’s hard to believe we did it,” I said. “That we hid him up here, that we weren’t found out.”

“We were careful,” said Laura. She thought for a moment, then smiled. “You never really believed me, about Mr. Erskine,” she said. “Did you?”

I suppose I should have lied outright. Instead I compromised. “I didn’t like him. He was horrible,” I said.

“Reenie believed me, though. Where do you think he is?”

“Mr. Erskine?”

“You know who.” She paused, turned to look out the window again. “Do you still have your picture?”

“Laura, I don’t think you should dwell on him,” I said. “I don’t think he’s going to turn up. It’s not in the cards.”

“Why? Do you think he’s dead?”

“Why would he be dead?” I said. “I don’t think he’s dead. I just think he’s gone somewhere else.”

“Anyway they haven’t caught him, or we would have heard about it. It would have been in the papers,” said Laura. She gathered up the old exercise books and slid them into her paper bag.

We lingered on at Avilion longer than I’d thought we would, and certainly longer than I wanted: I felt hemmed in there, locked up, unable to move.

The day before we were due to leave, I came down to breakfast, and Richard wasn’t there; only Winifred, who was eating an egg. “You missed the big launch,” she said.

“What big launch?”

She gestured at our view, which was of the Louveteau on one hand, the Jogues on the other. I was surprised to see Laura on the
Water Nixie,
sailing away downriver. She was sitting up in the bow, like a figurehead. Her back was towards us. Richard was at the wheel. He was wearing some awful white sailor hat.

“At least they haven’t sunk,” said Winifred, with a hint of acid.

“Didn’t you want to go?” I said.

“No, actually.” There was an odd tone to her voice, which I mistook for jealousy: she did so like being in on the ground floor, in any project of Richard’s.

I was relieved: maybe Laura would unbend a little now, maybe she would let up on the deep-freeze campaign. Maybe she would start treating Richard as if he were a human being instead of something that had crawled out from under a rock. That would certainly make my own life easier, I thought. It would lighten the atmosphere.

It didn’t, however. If anything, the tension increased, though it had reversed itself: now it was Richard who would leave the room whenever Laura came into it. It was almost as if he was afraid of her.

“What did you say to Richard?” I asked her one evening when we were all back in Toronto.

“What do you mean?”

“That day you went sailing with him, on the
Water Nixie”

“I didn’t say anything to him,” she said. “Why would I?”

“I don’t know.”

“I never say anything to him,” said Laura, “because I have nothing to say.”

The chestnut tree

I look back over what I’ve written and I know it’s wrong, not because of what I’ve set down, but because of what I’ve omitted. What isn’t there has a presence, like the absence of light.

You want the truth, of course. You want me to put two and two together. But two and two doesn’t necessarily get you the truth. Two and two equals a voice outside the window. Two and two equals the wind. The living bird is not its labelled bones.

Last night I woke abruptly, my heart pounding. From the window there was a clinking sound: someone was throwing pebbles against the glass. I climbed out of bed and groped my way towards the window, and raised the sash higher and leaned out. I didn’t have my glasses on, but I could see well enough. There was the moon, almost full, spider-veined with old scars, and below it the ambient sub-orange glow cast up into the sky by the street lights. Beneath me was the sidewalk, patchy with shadow and partially hidden by the chestnut tree in the front yard.

I was aware that there shouldn’t be a chestnut tree there: that tree belonged elsewhere, a hundred miles away, outside the house where I had once lived with Richard. Yet mere it was, the tree, its branches spread out like a hard thick net, its white-moth flowers glimmering faintly.

The glassy clinking came again. There was a shape there, bending over: a man, foraging in the garbage cans, shuffling the wine bottles in the desperate hope that there might be something left in one of them. A street drunk, impelled by emptiness and thirst. His movements were stealthy, invasive, as if he was not hunting, but spying—sifting through my discarded trash for evidence against me.

Then he straightened and moved sideways into the fuller light, and looked up. I could see the dark eyebrows, the hollows of the eye sockets, the smile a white slash across the dark oval of his face. At the V below his throat there was pallor: a shirt. He lifted his hand, moved it to the side. A wave of greeting, or else departure.

Now he was walking away, and I couldn’t call after him. He knew I couldn’t call. Now he was gone.

I felt a choking pressure around the heart.
No, no, no, no,
said a voice. Tears were running down my face.

But I’d said that out loud—too loudly, because Richard was awake now. He was standing right behind me. He was about to put his hand on my neck.

This was when I woke up really. I lay with my wet face, eyes open, staring at the grey blank of the ceiling, waiting for my heart to slow down. I don’t cry often any more, when awake; only a few dry tears now and then. It’s a surprise to find I’ve been doing it.

When you’re young, you think everything you do is disposable. You move from now to now, crumpling time up in your hands, tossing it away. You’re your own speeding car. You think you can get rid of things, and people too—leave them behind. You don’t yet know about the habit they have, of coming back.

Time in dreams is frozen. You can never get away from where you’ve been.

There really was a clinking sound, glass against glass. I climbed out of bed—out of my real, single bed—and made my way over to the window. Two raccoons were pawing through the neighbours’ Blue Box across the street, turning over the bottles and cans. Scavengers, at home in the junkyard. They looked up at me, alert, unalarmed, their small thieves’ masks black in the moonlight.

Good luck to you, I thought. Take what you can, while you can get it. Who cares if it belongs to you? Just don’t get caught.

I went back to bed and lay in the heavy darkness, listening to the sound of breathing I knew was not there.

The Blind Assassin: Lizard Men of Xenor

For weeks she trolls the racks. She goes to the nearest drugstore, buys some emery boards or an orange stick, something minor, then strolls past the magazines, not touching and careful not to be seen looking, but riffling through the titles with her eyes, on the lookout for his name. One of his names. She knows them by now, or most of them: she used to cash the cheques.

Wonder Stories. Weird Tales. Astounding.
She scans them all.

At last she spots something. This must be it:
Lizard Men of Xenor. First Thrilling Episode in the Annals of the Zycronian Wars.
On the cover, a blonde in a quasi-Babylonian getup, a white robe tightly cinched under her unlikely breasts by a gold-link belt, her throat wound in lapis jewellery, a crescent moon in silver sprouting from her head. She’s wet-lipped, open-mouthed, big-eyed, in the grip of two creatures with three-fingered claws and eyes with vertical pupils. They’re wearing nothing but red shorts. Their faces are flattened disks, their skin is covered with scales, a pewtery teal in hue. They shine slickly, as if basted; under their grey-blue hide their muscles bulge and gleam. The teeth in their lipless mouths are numerous and needle-sharp.

She’d know them anywhere.

How to get hold of a copy? Not in this store, where she’s recognized. It would never do to start rumours, by strange behaviour of any kind at all. On her next shopping trip she makes a detour to the train station and locates the magazine at the newsstand there. One thin dime; she pays with her gloves on, rolls the magazine up quickly, caches it in her handbag. The newsie looks at her strangely, but then men do.

She hugs the magazine to her all the way back in the taxi, smuggles it up the stairs, locks herself in the bathroom with it. Her hands, she knows, will tremble turning the pages. It’s a story of the kind bums read on boxcars, or school-age boys by the light of a flashlight. Factory watchmen at midnight, to keep themselves awake; salesmen in their travellers’ hotels after a fruitless day, tie off, shirt open, feet up, whisky in the toothbrush glass. Police, on a dull evening. None of them will find the message that will surely be concealed somewhere within the print. It will be a message meant only for her.

The paper’s so soft it almost falls apart in her hands.

Here in the locked bathroom, spread out on her knees in hard print, is Sakiel-Norn, city of a thousand splendours—its gods, its customs, its wondrous carpet-weaving, its enslaved and maltreated children, the maidens about to be sacrificed. Its seven seas, its five moons, its three suns; the western mountains and their sinister tombs, where wolves howl and beautiful undead women lurk. The palace coup stretches its tentacles, the King bides his time, guessing at the forces deployed against him; the High Priestess pockets her bribes.

Now it’s the night before the sacrifice; the chosen one waits in the fatal bed. But where is the blind assassin? What’s become of him, and his love for the innocent girl? He must be keeping that part for later, she decides.

Then, sooner than she’s expecting it, the ruthless barbarians attack, spurred on by their monomaniac leader. But they’ve just made their way inside the city gates when there’s a surprise: three spaceships make a landing on the flat plain to the east. They’re shaped like fried eggs or Saturn cut in half, and they come from Xenor. Out of them burst the Lizard Men, with their rippling grey muscles and their metallic bathing trunks and their advanced weaponry. They have ray guns, electric lassoes, one-man flying machines. All sorts of newfangled gadgets.

The sudden invasion changes things for the Zycronians. Barbarians and urbanites, incumbents and rebels, masters and slaves—all forget their differences and make common cause. Class barriers dissolve—the Snilfards discard their ancient tides along with their face masks, and roll up their sleeves, manning the barricades alongside the Ygnirods. All salute to each other by the name of
tristok,
which means (roughly),
he with whom I have exchanged blood,
that is to say, comrade or brother. The women are taken to the Temple and locked into it for their own safety, the children as well. The King takes charge. The barbarian forces are welcomed into the city because of their prowess in battle. The King shakes hands with the Servant of Rejoicing, and they decide to share command.
A fist is more than the sum of its fingers,
says the King, quoting an archaic proverb. In the nick of time the eight heavy gates of the city swing shut.

The Lizard Men achieve an initial success in the outlying fields, gained by the element of surprise. They capture a few likely women, who are shut up in cages and drooled at through the bars by dozens of Lizard soldiers. But then the Xenorian army suffers a setback: the ray guns on which they rely don’t work very well on the planet of Zycron due to a difference in gravitational forces, the electric lassoes are efficient only at close quarters, and the inhabitants of Sakiel-Norn are now on the other side of a very thick wall. The Lizard Men don’t have enough one-man flying machines to transport a sufficient assault force to take the city. Projectiles rain down from the ramparts on any Lizard Man who gets close enough: the Zycronians have discovered that the Xenorians’ metal pants are inflammable at high temperatures, and are hurling balls of burning pitch.

The leader of the Lizards has a screaming tantrum, and five Lizard scientists bite the dust: Xenor is evidently not a democracy. Those left alive set to work to solve the technical problems. Given enough time and the proper equipment, they claim, they can dissolve the walls of Sakiel-Norn. They can also develop a gas that will render the Zycronians unconscious. Then they will be able to have their wicked way at leisure.

That’s the end of the fist instalment. But what’s happened to the love story? Where are the blind assassin and the tongueless girl? The girl has been all but forgotten in the confusion—she was last seen hiding under the red brocade bed—and the blind man has never turned up at all. She riffles back through the pages: maybe she’s missed something. But no, the two of them have simply vanished.

Perhaps it will turn out all right, in the next thrilling episode. Perhaps he’ll send word.

She knows there’s something demented about this expectation of hers—he won’t send a message to her, or if he does, this is not how it will arrive—but she can’t free herself of it. It’s hope that spins these fantasies, it’s longing that raises these mirages—hope against hope, and longing in a vacuum. Perhaps her mind is slipping, perhaps she’s going off the tracks, perhaps she is coming unhinged.
Unhinged,
like a broken door, like a rammed gate, like a rusting strongbox. When you’re unhinged, things make their way out of you that should be kept inside, and other things get in that ought to be shut out. The locks lose their powers. The guards go to sleep. The passwords fail.

She thinks, Perhaps I’ve been forsaken. It’s an outworn word, forsaken, but it describes her plight exactly. Forsaking her is something he might be imagined as doing. On impulse he might die for her, but living for her would be quite different. He has no talent for monotony.

Despite her better judgment she waits and watches, month after month. She haunts the drugstores, the train station, every chance newsstand. But the next thrilling episode never appears.