Kissing Carrion (16 page)

—why I ever actually bothered to come back up here again, in the first damn place.

Dust on the floor, dirt smeared black on the dimming windows. That earthy scent. Berkana
in
earth, third reading of four: Unsafe footing, shifting ground.

The rune-books' advice? Hold back a little. Take stock. Try “not to be so pushy,” because—

(
things
)

—could rebound on you.

Jump-cut, moment to moment; lost time, skittering sidelong between action and re-. And suddenly, it's later—maybe
very
late—with the oil-lamp's shine joining a shifty play of firelight across the dusty floor . . . a huge, blood-warm, spark-leaking blaze I must have worked at least a whole half-hour to build, being the woodcraft-unfriendly little city mouse that I am.

(Late.)

The fire, the lamp. And me, looking down at something laid out across my lap, all big and stiff and . . .
furry.

Something with a hood-like, floppy, shaggy head.

Something that smells, worse than the cabin around it. Worse even than my own stink of cold-sweat incredulity.

Something with empty eyes, and sleeves—their seams sutured fast with dried gut—that end in claws.

Something I know—must be—

(Oh, go on ahead and say it, Lee, baby. You
know
you want to.)

The bear-shirt, itself.

(Karl's . . . bear)

—or what little's left of it, at least. After he finally got through with it.

(Ah,
shit
.)

I feel my eyes sting, my head buzz; feel my inner arm hum with sympathetic pain, my Berkana tattoo puff rug-burn raw, just like it did the day Karl let them draw it on me. Make it to my feet, swaying slightly, and watch this terrible artifact I hold unfurl to brush the floor beneath me; Jesus Christ Almighty, but the fucking thing's fucking huge. Big enough—

(—for two.)

Questions reeling through my head, answered practically in their moment of asking: So where'd I
find
this particular haphazard masterpiece of outsider art, anyway? Must've been in that closet gaping open by the bed—the one that looks so very familiar, ‘specially when I squint. And why am I having so much trouble forming these questions, in the first place? Well, the empty bottle by my boot might hold a key, rolling to clack against a few of its similarly empty buddies as I stagger back towards said closet, trailing Karl's precious shirt in the dust—but barely make it to the bed before this subtle numbness in my face and hands spreads southward, felling me onto its rumpled sheets.

And yes, that
is
me crying openly now, all salt and snot. Me knotting tight into a wet-faced human ball, kicking off my offending Docs, shucking the rest of my trendy clothes to crawl inside this dead animal husk; me, slicking this unsanitary parody of a fur coat over my own naked skin and hugging it to me, sobbing.

I think about Karl, and wonder: Was it just too much for him, in the end? My desertion? This latest—last—failure? Or a self-image-destroying combination of the two, that awful morning after . . . cold light of day, the hard death of a lifetime's dreaming, cut with blood-stink and mead-hangover?

Bear-grease on my cheeks, mixing with my tears. Bear-head pulled down over my nose like a mask, toothy jaw flapping to knock against my chin. And Karl's spoor shedding everywhere it touches, marking me with his scent—its sheer bulk so like his, warm and heavy on all my most intimate parts. As I think, hysterically:

Got me under your skin, Karl, baby—down deep in the heart of you. So deep, I'm really . . .

. . . a part of you.

Just like you always said I was.

I still don't know where he went, and maybe I never will. But—wherever he is,
this
isn't with him. Which means it sure as hell can't be where—

(or
what
)

—he wanted so desperately to be.

And the sad fact is, I think I know Karl well enough to know that if he couldn't be what he wanted, then—in the end—he'd probably rather be . . .

. . . nothing at all.

* * *

So I cry myself to sleep, and dream my own dead dream—face-down, tapped out, crushed flat under ten years' worth of retroactive anger and bitter regret. I dream of one more reading, the final one available: Berkana in fire, hot and close as this cabin, sliding swift towards incineration like one of those volcanic islands off Iceland's coast, the kind that rise and fall in a flood of lava and a matter of days. Danger, Will Robinson; you don't know as much as you think you do, not by fuckin' half. So pay attention to detail, or pay—

—the price.

Rune-knowledge, hard-learned, flickering in and out like light through the Yggdrasil's narrow leaves. But paying attention's not exactly top of my list, right at this very moment. Instead, I find myself slipping down fast into a morass of memory crossed with fantasy—”feel” the bear-shirt part beneath Karl's phantom hands as his stubbly profile glides quick across the sweaty small of my back, leaving a trail like the scratch of an open matchbook-cover all the way up my spine. Submerged, swamped, moaning and drooling in my drunken daze, I “hear” him snort and snuffle between my shoulder blades as he pulls me up by the tail, rooting and spreading and puppeting me around in that way he's always liked best. “Feel” my mouth come open as he thrusts inside, coring me, and think:

Oh Christ, Karl, CHRIST . . .

Christ but I've missed this, you could-be-dead-for-all-I-know Nazi nutbar of mine—missed
doing
this,
with
you—

But: It's not true, and I know it, even as the charge begins to build. It's just my fume-filled mind tricking me, my body looping back into those painfully pleasurable patterns of hurt and hunger it knows so well. And the idea that I could be such easy prey, even for my long-lost lover's ghost . . . the mere idea of me overtaken by dumb ecstasy, rucking the sheets and howling, then sagging forward like I've just been disemboweled: A corpse myself, skinned and gutted and left to soften like the splayed remains of some—

(bear's)

—last meal—

Jesus, it all just makes me so damn . . .
mad
.

And I come awake, mid-spurt, amid smoke and mess and oh
fuck
, are those
flames
? Fucking cabin's on fucking fire, how the fuck did
that
happen—like I kicked the oil-lamp over in my sleep and it hit the rug, spread and sparked across those bare pine boards where my boots fell and shit, can't believe I'm gonna have to run
barefoot
through this crap—slamming hard into the wall where I think the door should be and bouncing, spinning into that filthy screen, my Berkana-arm punching through in a spray of wounds, broken metal threads already hot enough to cauterize on contact—

Stumbling out into the cold night air, with pine-needles stabbing the soles of my feet; turning back, squinting and gasping, to see the whole damn thing engulfed beyond saving. Shivering in the bear-shirt, clutching myself. Thinking—

Hey, look, boys ‘n' girls . . . a real live Viking funeral, just like on TV. Everything Karl ever had, gone up in flames—

—all except me.

More questions, though, as the ash flutters upwards: Where're my glasses? Inside, of course—unsalvageable by now, mere melted slag. But . . .

. . . I can still see.

And that smell, mounting, that back-of-the-throat strong stink—that must be me too, right? Burnt hair, burnt flesh, burnt bear-hide. Looking down to confirm it and seeing the charred palms of my hands poking from the bear-shirt's paws, my shins already swollen with water-blisters . . . but why can't I
feel
it? And—what—is that—

(
other
)

—smell?

At which point I turn again, further, towards the first shadowy rim of trees, and see the bear come out of the woods.

Five feet at the shoulder. Twelve standing up, clawed hands tentatively drooping inward, childish as a Tyrannosaur's vestigial clutch. Its fur is sandy, touched with dull hints of gold; its muzzle matted with blood and honey, underbelly-fur shaggy with burrs. I can smell its breath from here, even over myself, over the fire: Old bees, fresh carrion. Honey-sweet blood-reek.

The bear is huge. The bear seems hungry. And its tiny eyes, so dull and atavistic, which widen almost beyond the limits of their narrow orbits as they turn my way—as it catches my (familiar?) scent, and moans with goony ursine lust—

—are blue.

(Karl.)

Karl, in
his
shirt, in “his” bear. In his
natural animal form
.

(That bastard.)

Because if this is Karl's shirt I'm wearing . . . and that's
Karl
, then . . .

. . . I have been seriously screwed.

Find your bear, kill it. Wear its skin—

Yeah, okay, got it. But once you put it on, once you change—

(as is becoming
more
than obvious)

—you can't ever take it off again.

Which makes this not Karl's shirt, then, at all. Made
by
Karl, for certain-sure, back when he still had hands—imprinted with his musk, his enticing flavor, before he traded his tender human skin for the far less permeable coat he now wears. But not on his own behalf. No.

Because just like he said that night I ran away and left him—holding his knife, alone in the darkness—this bear whose hide I wear now,
this
bear was meant—

(—for me.)

The final puzzle-piece, gut-feeling intuition made explicit. Bears are predators, omnivores, opportunists, pure and simple; they don't tend to think strategically, if they think at all. And in the wild, just like everywhere else, the only animals who lay traps for other animals . . . are humans.

Giving that kid the key, making him wait. Making
me
wait, and brood, and convince myself I wasn't thinking about Karl at all—even though I rarely thought of anything but—for seven long years. Then sending it to me, and sending me up here, where the trail was strongest—where my memories would finally rise up, break their floodgates forever, knock me down and drag me under like a dark, sweet, dreadful tide—

(Bastard, you
bastard
, you)

—but that's no good. Gotta stop that, right fucking now, before the final phase of Karl's plan kicks into gear. Before he provokes me into battle.

(Fuckin' “battle.”)

Yeah, that'd be about his style, that racist son of a racist
bitch
. I mean, what's the definition of Valhalla—Viking heaven—if it isn't getting to fight the same worthy opponent . . .

(and that'd be me)

. . . over and over, world without end, amen?

Which is why, to be frank, I'd be a hell of a lot more worried about these burns of mine if I couldn't already feel them healing.

So I stand here trying to rip the shirt off, before my own inner Grizzly has a chance to really sink its hooks in me—but Goddamn it all, I just can't. Feel it sealing fast, the claws clicking in and binding to my fingers. Feel my broken knuckle ache and blaze, a white-hot arthritis-flower just about to bloom, like it's going to rain and never stop. Feel my mind getting bear-slow, bear-petty. Bear-

(angry)

Yeah. 'Cause my blood's up, and I'm panting, and that bear—

(
My
bear?)

—if I didn't suspect it was physically impossible, I'd say that bear was fuckin' well
smirking
at me.

And: Ah, but Lee, that treacherous little inner voice whispers teasingly, soft as rot—if you really didn't
want
to wear it, then you never should've put it
on
. You know what I'm sayin'?

I mean, if the shirt fits . . .

(Oh, fuck
you
, you fucker.)

Lowering my head, lips peeling back over teeth, all sharp and white—sharp
er,
whit
er.
Feeling blood in my head, my face, my heart. Feeling my cock jump, bone-harden, and my pulse pound like a war-drum. And wondering, with what might be my very last—intelligible—thought: Is this how they felt, the
berserkgangrs
? When they chewed the edges of their shields flat and bloody, then tore off their mail to reveal the fur beneath? When they threw their swords aside and ran into the fray, like they were finally going home after a long, long journey in the upright, lying, divided world of men—biting, clawing, changing, gratefully—as they went?

History in motion, good Swedish stock. “A part of my heritage.”

(The very
best
part, to be exact.)

I feel my jaw seize up, shallowing—my words deform, as a groove carves itself down the center of my tongue. And snarl, with my last human breath:

“Well, fine. You want me back this bad, huh? C'mon on ahead, motherfucker. C'mon and—”

(—
take
me.)

. . . he howled fearfully:

Said he was a wolf: Only the difference

Was, a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside,

His on the inside: Bade them take their swords,

Rip up his flesh, and try . . . .

—-John Webster,
The Duchess of Malfi

CONTRARY TO POPULAR
belief, no security guard is automatically issued a gun. You have to pass a special six-month training course for that, which hardly anyone ever does, because they make you pay for the privilege, as with so many other things—your P.I. license, your uniform shirt, your on-site shoes (black, thick-soled, equally presentable for PR or plain old patrol duty), your First Aid expertise, even your clip-on tie, with its risible little cloisonné company insignia. And since the unspoken rule of security is do exactly as much as your bi-weekly direct deposit check dictates—no more, often less—I'm sometimes surprised anyone ever ends up packing heat at all.

Besides, as everybody who's seen an action movie knows, the security guard is always the first to go if anything actually does happen. So the best you can do is just ride each shift out, calm but cool, taking your mortality as a given: become a Zen master in 365 easy steps, for only seven bucks an hour.

So no, I don't carry a gun, just like I don't drive. I'm a Toronto girl, after all, downtown born and bred; quite frankly, I've never had to go anywhere that required me to learn how to do either.

I got my security job for exactly two reasons: Because I could speak and write fluently in English, and because having a certain quote of female guards was necessary in order for Saracen Security Limited to retain its licence under the new Ontario government (of the time), which supported the idea of job equity. This is how I ended up drawing my current site, subsequent to spending a week at 1088 Dupot, the events of which tenure comprise much of the following story.

And since I was originally referred to Saracen by a friend of my ex-fiancé Colin, who had worked her way through Theater at Ryerson, by taking night shifts at some deserted office building in Scarborough, I guess that's yet another thing I have to thank him for.

Like so many others.

* * *

Much later, sitting on the couch with Colin, watching him trying to be calm— fingers knit, and shaking—as the music wove gilt swooping arcs around us, effortless trailing ribbons of sound, I thought: So this is the end of everything. And then, no doubt misquoting Shakespeare's
King Lear
:

 

What, will my poor fool ne'er come again?

O never, never, never.

 

My teeth dancing. My cut heart twitching at our feet, pumping painful gushes of dust. The whole room shimmering with a kind of heatwave, a pricked-bubble haze, seconds after the pin. No explosion, simply absence.

Except, of course, that everything was still there, untouched. And so was I.

“I don't get it,” he said, over and over. “I mean, I . . . just . . . don't get it.”

Eventually adding, in a slightly more aggrieved tone: “I mean, I
said
I was sorry.”

Like he was annoyed, was disappointed, with me for being so obtuse as to actually believe him when he told me our love was just a little more trouble than he felt like going to, anymore.

I twisted the (dis)engagement ring on my right hand and bit my tongue, hard, ready to bleed before I'd let myself agree again to this impossible fucking dream, this useless fucking ostensible marriage of ours, to salve his aggrieved and swelling eyes.

* * *

When I first applied to work as a security guard, the boys down at Saracen made me take a detailed—but apparently routine—psychiatric test, much of which involved checking “yes” or “no” boxes next to a series of statements, like these:

 

I enjoy life. (Yes.)

I would enjoy working with dogs. (No.)

 

Next came a multiple-choice, aimed at identifying the best type of site to assign me to. It contained my single favorite question, which ran thusly:

 

Would you be more likely to prefer a site where:

A) You had a lot of personal power, but were required to deal with people all the time,

Or one where:

B) You sat in a room by yourself, doing a repetitive task, seeing and dealing with no one
.

 

Being misanthropic by nature (when it comes to my choice of straight-up, purely-for-the-pleasure-of-rent-payin', uniform-wearin' asshole jobs, at least), I checked the latter. I told Colin about it, laughed, and forgot.

But it wasn't until two years later, when I turned up at 1088 Dupont, that I ever considered it possible someone had actually taken this response into account.

There were a lot of firsts for me on that site—my first night shift, from 2345 to 0800 hours. My first site outside. My first site with no partner, and no one coming to take over after I booked off, either, since the only reason they needed anyone on site in the first place was to make sure nobody ran off with the construction company's expensive equipment before morning. Up until then, I'd mainly guarded college campuses, a couple of office buildings.

But 1088 was none of these things . . . yet. 1088 was a work in progress.

Lit mostly by the giant neon crucifix on top of the church across the street—an extra implication of moonlight occasionally smearing down through the clouds, touching its incomplete lines with snail-track grey—1088 looked like a serial killer's dream house: Stately Dahmer Manor, replete with shallow trenches and stacks of dry cement bags, a bleak theme park of prospective murder and burial scenes. Below, nude walls held up the faceless, backless concrete doll's house: Above, girders barely made a roof, let alone an upper floor.

“So,” I delicately asked my trainer for the night, former site S.O. Sonny Rehan, “are those holes up there just left . . . open . . . all the time?”

He laughed. “Oh, yeah, man. I wouldn't even bother going up there. Seriously, I mean. Saracen got no medical plan—you break your neck on patrol, nobody's gonna care but you.”

Sonny, a gangly young Sikh from Kenya, had spent much of his career with Saracen so far assigned to 1088. And since both his parents also worked for the company (mother staring down potential shoplifters at the Eaton Center, father wrangling illegal immigrants up at the airport), he knew every angle there was, not to mention how they could best be taken advantage of. Now, after two years' weekend training and a written recommendation from his site supervisor, he was off to fresher fields—the far more lucrative double shifts of Dispatch, where he could spend his time tagging lucky winners for the same shit work he'd finally escaped. But he wasn't gone yet, and a surfeit of solitude had obviously made him talkative.

“You know that part in
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
where they eat the chilled monkey brains, man?” he demanded, at one point. “We used to do that—my uncles, my Dad and me. Little grey bush monkeys. Hold 'em still, saw off the top of the skull, then just go at it with a spoon while they're still kicking. Nothing like it, man.”

Sonny gave me the grand tour. He read me the site standing orders, which required me to make a complete patrol every forty-five minutes—checking specifically for squatters, vandals or thieves—before returning to the portable office where I was to sit between said patrols, filling out my Daily Occurrence Report and reading day-old tabloids. He pointed out the “cop button,” conveniently hidden just under the lip of my desk, which had to be pulled out and pushed back in with a special key that looked like a taken-apart can opener.

“How long does it take them to get here?” I asked. “I mean, usually?”

“Five minutes. Probably.”

I looked at him. “Probably?”

Sonny shrugged. “Oh, man, depends.” Adding, cheerfully: “But I never had to push it more than twice, anyways.”

These, then, were the major drawbacks of 1088, according to its most regular custodian:

1. No lights on the upper floors of the building.

2. Permanently open holes in said floors, so big even a novice such as myself would notice them.

3. No interior toilets.

4. No flashlight on site.

This last item frankly amazed me.

“First two months on the site, man, I put in a request at end of every D.O.R.,” Sonny said. “They had to call and tell me personally there were no extra flashlights anywhere.”

“It's like some bad fucking horror movie.”

Sonny grinned. “Can be.”

* * *

When I look back on how I was with Colin—what I did, what I said, what I allowed to be done . . . it all seems so . . . improbable. Like a fever dream. The shed cocoon of my own sweat, facing from bed sheets hung up to dry: Invisible ink run backwards, wilting from the flame of clear-headed examination.

I tell myself I loved him then, which I know to be true. I tell myself I had no control.

I tell myself it was love, as though that mere fact explains anything.

* * *

I called Colin that first night, before I performed what was to become my normal “patrol”—stepping outside the portable, walking around the building (keeping a careful space between me and it), peering inside and scanning for any moving shadows, before retiring to falsify the D.O.R. My fingers sped through the flat little song of his phone number. He picked up on the third ring.

“House o' Colin.”

“Hiya.”

What did we talk about? I couldn't tell you if I tried. Probably the dog we'd bought together. Probably the movie we'd seen last night. I know we didn't talk about how we were supposed to get married in three months, our agreed-upon deadline, to commit to each other and stay together the rest of our lives—even though my mother couldn't stand him, and his mother wouldn't even acknowledge I existed. Except for that one time she'd taken him aside, during our sole joint visit to homey old Brantford, and told him, “You know, Colin—you sleep with trash, you become trash.”

I know we didn't, because we never talked about any of that. Not even when we broke up.

* * *

Ever since I was a child, I've had a running debate with my mother over whether or not there's something “wrong” with my bladder capacity—a nagging fear reinforced by a nightmarish visit to my grandmother that ended with her counting every time I went to the bathroom during the night, giving us a full report in the morning, and telling me (very seriously, in her Scots-Canadian burr), “You really shude think aboot consoolting a doctur, Lee. It's jist nut nermal.”

But I'm a big girl now, supposedly. So after I'd held it in for about three hours, I decided I'd rather take my chances with one of the portasans than risk getting fitted with a colostomy bag.

Inside this unlit, upright plastic coffin with a septic tank, however, I found not only no toilet paper, but an overwhelming stink to boot—a nose-and-mouthful of warm European cheese, the kind so bad you can barely stand to taste it, let alone smell it. Not to mention I was desperate, but couldn't let go . . . which actually had less to do with the situation as I've painted it above than with an overpowering feeling of being watched.

You know how it is sometimes, when you're caught unaware—that impassable glitch between reflex and realization? You're seconds from sleep, dreaming a busy daytime street, until you feel yourself step in the gutter and jerk awake again, bruising your foot on the bedboard. The plate's left your hand, and you know you'll never catch it. But you can't stop yourself from jumping, even as it slowly arcs down to break apart on the floor.

A flash of movement, right at the edge of my vision. Next thing I knew, I was up—standing so quickly that the whole portasan gave one big jerk—and out. I strode behind the nearest truck and squatted, scanning the bushes: There was nothing to wipe myself with but leaves, naturally, which seemed more than a little sixth-grade, so I pulled the tail of my shirt free, planning to use it and tuck it back in before I could think about what I'd just done. And I sat there on my hands, listening to my heart hammer in the hollow of my throat—my breath ragged, like I'd run a mile through some seashell.

My throat was sore. My lungs felt full of blood-warm mucus. But all I could think of was the figure I thought I'd seen loping past in the crack of dark between door and jamb, its face the barest Pierrot mask, two smudged eyes in a white oval, with an uneven red thumbprint for a mouth.

I sat there on my heels, knees pulsing with fatigue, and felt the warmth drain out of me, spurt by uneven spurt.

Under the truck, a shadow in its shadow, some pile of half-crushed stuff nested by the back tire. Having nothing else to focus on, I stared at it until it resolved into a calcified cache of turds—animal, presumably, given their location. Except that I could see a glinting twist of metal protruding from one cracked fecal egg. A bright, bent hook topped with a ragged glass sliver.

It looked like a chewed-up earring.

Then the church across the street's neon Passion Tree winked out, and I decided to call it a night on external patrols.

* * *

Night shift is different from anything you've ever worked, though it doesn't usually feel that way: After the first day, your clock turns with an audible click. But it's not a simple thing. You lie awake in what now passes for darkness, with the most opaque towel you can find triple-folded and draped over your eyes. Breathing slow. When it finally comes on you, you sleep like a dog—mouth open, tongue like old flypaper by the time the alarm goes off. A noose around every limb, pulling you downward.

When the phone rang, I was still dressing.

“Late dinner sound good about now?”

“Sure. Muggs okay?”

“Sure.”

I peeled sleep from one eye, struggling to keep my thoughts stacking up in a straight line.