Stunt (11 page)

‘You'll find it spotless.'

‘Thank you.'

‘There's leftover cake in the fridge.'

‘Great.'

‘It's got nuts in it.'

‘No problem.'

‘And the bathroom light works, just give it some time.'

‘Every house has its quirks.'

‘That's our only one.'

I hear a dull chatter. I look back at the house. Termites. They are taking to the wood. They waited for us to leave and, now that we are gone, generations of them are building nests and tunnels. Termites have a king and a queen and they have workers. The workers can feed each other, freeing the parents from this task, allowing the colony to grow, to grow so vastly that it can devour an entire house, slowly winning it over, like children desperate to impress.

Immaculata, not turning around, says, mouth suddenly full of shelves and sharp turns, ‘I won't miss it.'

‘I will.'

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

astronaut looking for the following signs:
pay phone.
gents.
rest stop.
all-day breakfast.
open.
eugenia stunt ledoux.
one mile ahead.

Clotilda and Yufeng's house is for rent. The sign is speared into the grass, a javelin. So is skinny Selene Valadan's. Her laundry line pulled down and, with her children, disappeared. So is Tuberculosis Flo's. The houses are empty, their occupants long vanished and, in their stead, other people, perfect strangers, mill on the lawns. Clumped together in a garden party, a fake fruit bowl, gleaming baubles, they are prospective renters, notepads in hand, necks craned. Under the sky so blue above them, they appear to have been shined. The neighbourhood raccoons should bite their calves and pull them from their reverie.

Zee Mute's silver car is gone, and he, somewhere, takes a turn too fast, thinks
smithereens,
his eyes part-closed, yelling out the refrain that he has finally memorized. He is proud. He wishes to be held tight. He wishes to be heard.

There must have been moving trucks through the night, their red lights blinking, sirens without sound, conversationless men, loads stacked on their backs and shoulders, short of breath, the sweat on their foreheads like bubble wrap, tracking dirt in and out of these houses, these houses that sit like picture frames waiting to be filled again.

Elsie is dead. Her magazine collection pulls against garbage bags hoisted by distant relatives, their weak, cold arms, confused scowls on their faces. She has already been taken away and turned to ashes and placed in a personalized urn. But still there is so much tidying. Like you, she was a collector.

And Marta's house, like the twins', has been chewed through by fire. There is nothing left of it. Only a square black imprint, cinders like ink gone wrong on a page, a messy stamp, one you
would want to do over. The papers flying up are crows. I know that she was in it because as an unemployed existentialist she had no reason to leave. She gave me the rope and then she returned to her dark, where she lit a match and she spun with it between her bookshelves, and they spun with her, her last and most steadfast companions.

My eyes are a vinegar sting and my jaw aches against crying. Why does tragedy have to be so thorough? This time it does happen: my face is stuck through with sadness, and it freezes, just as Mink, with her exquisite hair, warned me it would.

Up the street, across from the church and before the mission, at the corner of King and Dunn, lives my last slab of familiarity, Leopold of the Onions. Mink called him
the Malcontent of Mucusville.
His house is not for rent. His house is not burned down. Though he wishes it were. He prays for it, night and day, he prays for calamity.
Let the lake collect itself into a great tidal wave. Let there be a chemical spill that comes up through the drainpipes. Let me be mistaken for a whale and harpooned.
He does drawings of medieval weapons in his notebook, which he keeps tucked, like a filthy magazine, under his mattress. Crossbows and daggers and spiked balls on the ends of sticks that can be whirled above heads like a ceiling fan; he dreams of them making contact.

There are two signs in his window: BEWARE OF DOGS and HELP WANTED. While his front door opens onto our street, the rest of his house sits facing King Street, a busy thoroughfare of traffic and streetcars. The streetcars clang and whine through the night. So do the prostitutes who congregate there. Their offers and grunts, Leopold's only lullaby. He pulls open the slats of his crooked Venetian blinds and watches them. Their movements, stiff and rehearsed, remind him of a construction site. The hoisting, the lifting, the digging, the pecking. They jerk like heavy machinery. Getting the job done. He plans to give them hard hats and safety goggles. He plans to help them form a union. They know him by name. They pinch his cheeks.

Leopold used to come by our backyard to kick rocks in his white marching boots with the red tassels and unravel his soot-smothered world with the ferocity of a forgotten veteran. His life: an ambush. We would listen to him, you and I, struck still. We were his only audience. As he spoke, to show him the effect
of his words, you would unbutton your shirt and then you would scratch your skin. His story was written there and it was unbearable. You would scratch your skin until it bled. Until you were a man who had been lashed. And you would shout vows to him, to punish those who hurt him, and to make his life right. Leopold would be jealous. His sadness was so much better worn by you. He felt almost undeserving of it.

Other days, when he showed up, you simply shook your head and closed our door firm and tight, leaving him a specimen petrified against the glass. Once, I heard you talking to one of your special men, and you told him something that Leopold had told you, but you told it as your own. You believed that it was. You mistook everyone's suffering for your own.

As we walk by Leopold's house today, without our identification, but with our shoes on, he knocks quickly on the window. Tersely, he lifts one finger and he mouths,
Wait.
We do. He has had his eyes fixed on the street for days, the four days you have been gone, and he has not blinked once. He opens his door and emerges from a hallway black as tomb.

He is wearing gardening gloves and a wide-brimmed hat to protect his skin from the sun. He carries a bag of onions. That hoary voice, a teenaged seafarer, ‘I have a lot of onions.' He hands them to me with the delicacy of a dowry. He smells of sperm and sunblock. His hair falls straight and pink-blond as newborn mice, his teeth giant white blocks, scrubbed headstones. His eyes are intent, wet, the colour of mashed peas.

‘You're so sad. I get sadness,' he says.

‘Thank you.'

‘I am sorry for your loss. It is most difficult for those left behind.' He would have researched what to say. Read about bereavement etiquette at the library. ‘My deepest sympathies.'

‘Thank you. We need onions.'

‘I thought you might.'

Immaculata nods in agreement. She sees Egyptians buried with flowering onions stuffed in their eye sockets and their pelvises, their chest cavities, their ears. They believed the strong scent could resuscitate the dead, that a corpse wearing a garland might gasp. Leopold does a deep bow in Immaculata's direction. It is surprisingly chivalrous and assured. Is he a knight? Does he have cavalry? A chain-mail tunic? He has caught glimpses of Immaculata but never spoken to her. Always in her white dresses, a stray feather, and once, notedly, walking the length of our street in her nightgown, her arms full of groceries. He followed her with his telescope, the wind picking up and pressing itself against her. He wished he were the wind. She is someone whom, up close, he cannot believe is real. She is see-through. Words, his only effect, always seemed too base. He turns to me.

‘You look the same only different.'

‘We know.'

‘You've grown old.'

‘We're eighteen.'

‘How?'

‘Grief.'

‘I get grief. Have you read Kafka?'

‘
The Metamorphosis.
'

‘Bingo.' And then, eyeballing us, ‘But hey, it suits you.'

‘Thank you.'

‘Welcome to the club.'

‘Thank you.'

‘It sucks.'

‘You're getting a moustache.'

‘Thank you.'

Leopold fingers his upper lip. Goose down. He smiles to himself. Finally, the magi. Just in time. He turns to Immaculata, puffing his chest.

‘What a night will do … So the twins, eh? They have to wear tight white nets over their bodies and faces for a whole year. Their skin will fall off if they don't.' A green bubble bullfrogs from his left nostril. He wipes it away with his T-shirt, which reads ATLANTIS.

‘They tried to make pastry, now they have to live in the suburbs.' He sneezes. It sounds like
hatchet.

‘Excuse me. I have a chill.' By way of explanation, ‘Delicate constitution.'

‘I understand.' Immaculata's first and most miraculous words to him, the ones he has been waiting to hear his entire life.

Emboldened, he goes on. ‘Well, really it's a lung disease, but when I use the word
disease,
my mother thinks I'm feeling sorry for myself so she says, “Oh, are you trying to get through to the complaint department? Oh, just hold the line,” and then she beeps sporadically and no one ever picks up. I'll die young. Long before her. I'm about halfway through my life. Can I move in? I only have a notebook and an oxygen tank. I call it Leopold Junior because children are the future.' He laughs in excited, lumpy howls.

‘We've abandoned camp.'

‘Dammit. This life is a curse.' He slams the lawn with his marching boot, barely an indentation, and draws in a thick wet breath. ‘One moment please.' Then he coughs. Immaculata is
mesmerized, having never heard such a noise. He is a wolf, an infirm. She pictures iron lungs and spontaneous tracheotomies. The word
pleurisy
fireworks across her brain in ornate curlicues. Leopold's lungs are full of sodden garbage, sand and spilled cans. They are a shoreline that has never been raked. ‘The air is still smoky,' he says, and with that he walks backwards – hushed, out of a nursery.

Leopold's nose starts to bleed. His fingers bunch around its base. By the time he gets to his house, his hands are streaming with blood. He pulls out a bundle of keys, thick as a caretaker's. He lifts one finger, ‘Wait.' We nod. He unlocks the three locks on his front door with great exertion, his arms those of a jerking bird. His world: stubborn clocks, stuck and ungreased. He evaporates behind the door. Immaculata sees him blue as the underbelly of ice, occupant of a rectangular cabinet, toe tagged, rail-thin. She needs a metal bowl and a steaming cloth. She needs him all to herself.

Leopold closes the door quickly behind him as though a fresh litter might follow. Outside, pollen lolls, a yolk. Dandelion heads everywhere. Bloated flies hovercraft. Immaculata traces the air in front of us and, looking at Leopold, says, ‘It's summer.' He smells of shaving cream. There are small cuts above his lip. Still in the wide-brimmed hat and gardening gloves, he has changed his T-shirt: EASTER ISLAND. He also wears a leather motorcycle jacket, black with heavy buckles. It hangs on him, a downpour, making him the abandoned frame of an umbrella. He tugs on its cuffs.

‘Better.'

‘Aren't you hot?'

‘No,' he sniffs. ‘Yeah.'

‘You shaved.'

‘I had to. It was ungainly. So. Dig my jacket?'

‘It's a bit big for you.'

‘I'll fill it out. It's my mother's boyfriend's, Rolf. But I call him Lady Hips. He thinks he's so tough because he has a pet viper but he's got the hips of a lady, makes waffles in his underwear in the mornings, all swishes. Rolf.'

Leopold's mother is a wrestler. She is the colour of Tang. She is built in thick swipes of beef and muscle. Her fight name is Death Trap Susie. The Death Trap is her signature move. It involves a scissor kick and the insides of her thighs. She has two pit bulls, Prince and Princess. They are trained to kill. The dogs spend most of their time chained in the bathroom, climbing each other's hard backs, trembling and salivating. The only one they love is Leopold.

‘She dates only guys whose names sound like body functions,' Leopold says. Immaculata laughs, throwing her head back. Her hair parts. The pearl. ‘Rolf. He has a truck dealership called Rolf's Wheels. He is all engorged digits. He keeps his particulars at the dealership. Even the viper. Didn't want to feel domestically beholden. “I'm not your father,” he said to me the first time he came over. “I know,” I said, “I know,” and he said, “I'll never be your father,”and I said, “I know, Rolf, it's cool.”

‘The only things he moved into the apartment were dirty bumper stickers. They're everywhere. Like locusts. The mirrors, the toaster oven, my dresser, even my snare drum for marching band which now says on one side,
For a Small Town, This Place Is Full of Assholes,
and on the other side,
If It Swells Ride It.
He sleeps with his gym bag. I think it is filled with suck-candy and ammunition. Mom thinks he's the jackpot. But every time we see a woman, any woman, even if she's elderly and blind, he punches me in the arm. Not when Mom's around. When she is, she's always doing these little claps after he says anything. We're supposed to go to Disneyland this summer,
clap, clap,
but I know I'll get lost or kidnapped. My mother would cry for three days and then feel relieved, having the apartment all to herself.
Clap, clap.
She could drink cocktails with her waffles, which she can't do when I am around because “Oh, I look at her sideways” and “Oh, I'm no fun.”' He imitates her voice. It is lower than Rolf's.

‘Last year I tried to kill myself but it didn't work. Now I'm studying auto-hypnosis. I dream of invisibility. I want to appear present, hand up, here, but be elsewhere, frothy surf, bird songs. Get it?'