Stunt (14 page)

I reach into my pant pocket to retrieve what I managed to sneak out under Immaculata's watchful gaze: the box of
REDBIRD
matches.
Best to go into the woods alone, Eugenius, then you'll find out for yourself.
And a black-and-white photograph of you. I took it on our camping trip to Darlington. It is the only one I have. Rain is skidded across your face. Blackflies too. A cigarette dangles from your mouth, you are mid-story. I pin the photograph to my back. Surely someone will recognize you. Sheb Wooly Ledoux. Surely you were that well-known. I pin the photograph to my back. Just in case I cannot find what I am looking for.

{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}

from the
last whole earth catalog,
the ‘treaty for outer space'
prepared in geneva 1966
includes this clause,
senate approved 88 to 0:
if an astronaut lands on another country's soil he must be
returned safely, promptly and unconditionally.

A heap of wedding dresses lies on the stairs of the Salvation Army, exhausted swans. Washed up in them, sirens spit from sea froth, is a pair of drunks, their hair long and white, sneakers falling off, jeans too. Sherry nocturnes lift from their skin, their faces puffed with sleep. Noses bulbous, eyes shut like those of fresh babies, the men hold hands. Their breath skims the surface, short and quivering. Under the midday sun, they are the red of boxing gloves, then the brown of spittoon, then the black of asphalt. They are birthday candles, drooping and sloping wax, and they are burning up here.

In them, I see Finbar. His wooden teeth, his wandering eyes, the silvery disks that traverse them. At a round eighty years old, a death ripeness warms over him. It walks between his rooms. Curling a fingertip here. Whitening a hair there. Eating a vertebra. All of it the crook and hue of ash. But the desertion he hates to name is this one: his senses are going. His mouth is so bland now, given what it once was, pressed up against the hipbones of women, searching their crevices, their earlobes, his tongue in the small of a back reading the imprint of a button – knowing where it was made and from what wood, what shell. He could, at one time, smell a woman in an airplane flying overhead; the sky itself had turned to steeple – a steeple of rose blossoms, juniper and anise, and below it, he worshipped. Swaying on his property, grass to his waist, he nosed that roof of woman, and he waved with two hands, hungry, so hungry, save me, save me from this body, so sick with lament.

Worse, though, is his mind. What was once a steel trap for the birthdates of warriors, the Latin etymology of names and the sequence of Baudelaire's
Les Fleurs du mal
is failing. He was a raconteur of delirious proportions and, everyone agreed, the
performer of the best party tricks. He could loosen a pair of silk stockings from across a room. By the time he got home, his pockets would be spilling with them. Shed snakeskins. He would press them to his nose and guess the wearers' addresses correctly. He could seduce anyone's wife. Within twelve words, she would be climbing up on a table and loosening a hook from an eye. Within twenty, his son-of-a-farmer hands steadying her ankles, she would be stepping out of her petticoats. He could strip a duchess and be given her crown while she was being sworn in. He could make a woman come or cry, depending on his whim. He could ruin your life in a morning if he felt so inclined. But now the small has become too big, the big too small. When Finbar looks for something, it sneaks out of view never to return, his mind migratory as driftwood. He is losing operas to breadcrumbs.

After his beloved fell, Finbar never walked the rope again. He was forty-five years old – probably your age now. He retreated to the woods, his location unspecified, but early speculation pegged it to be near the Alaskan border, in the dredges of an abandoned mining camp, a radius of eighty miles uninhabited around him, to feed on his grief. Despite his isolation, and that Cubist face, Finbar had visitors. It was said that any girl who walked past his gates would be undone – the tinker's daughter, the tailor's, the chief's – and they would all re-emerge with child. Finbar planted his seed and his seed spread, giving his house the provocative moniker Orphan Stadium. He was an illusionist, nowhere and everywhere at once.

When Finbar grew bored of the girls, their bodies lustreless in the pitch of morning, he kicked them out of Orphan Stadium
and they hanged themselves from the willow trees that surrounded the fiery yawn of his home. Not suicides but graduated lovers. Fallen daughters, they suspended themselves in lighted husks, iridescent pods. Promises. Offerings. Fireflies in cases, waiting to be cracked open again, by him. Illustrious I. I., carnivorous I. I., natural disaster, demigod and host to a kingly erection that was rumoured to last for entire days. He was inexhaustible. The girls would show him their breasts when he took out the garbage. If he took out the garbage.

Recalling your voice now, deep like it is made of dirt and syrup and you have to summon it up from your toenails all the way to your throat, I wonder, is Finbar, eighty years old, asleep in a pile of dead women's dresses, still a spell? And if so, am I, in preparing to meet him, just an egg waiting to be smashed?

When you introduced me to Finbar, and you dipped your fingers, caked, cracked and stained mustard-seed yellow, into balsam wax, making a ruler out of your moustache in the style of his, I did not tell you that I beat you to him. For this past year, when you locked yourself away for days at a time, to claw the dark, to fall into your mattress, the feathers and cotton coagulating in parts, cutting into you,
cut me, this bitter rind, taking root,
his
Unofficial Autobiography
became the one book that I could recite by rote. It was not the titillating details – the grocer's daughter, the piano tuner's, the auctioneer's (though these were an education unto themselves) – but his training that captured me, and that, in a way, made me his own. You were not the only one to leaf through the book like you had discovered your family album.

What you saw as miracles – balls caught in the crook of my neck, roofs walked, chairs tipped and climbed, a handstand on a crane – you did not know were the result of hours spent stretching and lifting and making myself strong, a perfectly stacked axis, all in the method of Finbar, all in the anticipation that one day I too would step onto the wire.

I reach Ward's Island just as night falls – netting over a mourner's eyes. From here, Toronto is a vision of the future. Bright and tall, the buildings big as the first computers. Sheet lightning pitchforks the sky. Whenever we saw lightning, Immaculata would recite a passage from
A Handbook of Renaissance Meteorology.
She would address that effusion of light, describing it to itself, intimating it did not understand its power, ‘This burns a man inward and consumes the body to ashes without harming the garments it stays the youngling in the womb without harm to the mother it consumes money the purses remaining whole.' When you vanished, this is what I feared I would find: your suit laid out, ashen and rumpled on the floor of your studio, the effigy of a disintegrated man. I could not help but feel that you were the conduit for a phenomenon, a punishing force I could not begin to give words to.

Your hands would always shake, but the moment your brush touched the canvas, they were still. Painting, you finally left the atmosphere. Your paintings were you. Melancholic voluptuaries, they were paintings your collectors would kill to bed, to love, to know. Paintings they could never tire of but would instead tire of them. You did them in one sitting, convinced that
people need to experience the making of the thing.
Always working in the same method – from the top left corner down. Your subjects with their pipes, their mutts, their mandolins, lay naked and corpulent, legs spread wide. Others were bony, their eyes closed, your sink in the corner, its pipes exposed. One woman slept beside her thin dog. You called the woman Cupid. She slept for three days. You hated when people posed. Somnolent Cupid and her dog, the hull of her ribs, the pink-blue ribbon of his tongue, were perfect.

You layered the paint so thickly your paintings would never completely dry. Leaning in, too close, viewers were immediately clowns, the ends of their noses turned red, yellow, grey. They wanted to creep into your paintings. To live them. To be their slashes and gouges. They did not know the danger of their wish. That you had barely come through their making, and that if you were anywhere but that magnificent hall, rushed by admirers, their stained noses a black comedy, you would collapse and tell me that the sea level was rising, and soon it would reach your bed.

Lake churning white beneath, the islanders descend the ferry by bicycle. They pull carts behind them filled with groceries and children and various supplies: wood, soil, plants. Blackbirds hop around them, music notes that have jumped from a page. One boy eats ice cream from a carton with a toothbrush. He has a friar's haircut and a squiggle for a mouth. A girl fans a fly from her arm. Her eyes are a washed-out brown, as if, in a low mood, she added too much water to them. The islanders' skin is blushed, radishes. They do not lock their doors. They do not have basements. They have ninety-nine-year leases. They are a different kind of settler. A blackbird lands on my head, its sure scrawl against my scalp. Welcome.
Bird's nest.
Mink would laugh.

Toronto Island is a sandspit. From above, it appears as a collection of rocks smoothed flat for luck by a nervous hand. Marbled by water, it is composed of fourteen islands in total, the archipelago coming together in a thick hook shape at its western end. The island was formed over the course of
10,000
years. After the Scarborough Bluffs were bullied into being by the last ice age, Toronto deaf under a kilometre of ice, the bluffs were
carried by wind and currents to form a peninsula. The night of April
14, 1858
, a storm broke the peninsula's neck, separating it from Toronto for good and founding the island. It was, like so many things, born out of a natural and lengthy violence.

The small cottages that dot Ward's and Algonquin islands could be wrapped in wool, and, smoke piping through their chimneys, converted into warm, square kettles. Trails are worn between them. Their light is Marta's light, golden and trembling. Maybe she is here. Lit matches in her hands, lending halos to her wrists, skimming over dog bones and the discarded lines of poems. Maybe this is the afterlife and the afterlife is incandescence, and I will spend the next two days playing dead.

The islanders ride past me, their loads shuddering over the wooden slats as they climb the bridge to their cottages. They bid each other goodnight. I wish for them to stop. To pluck me up and to drop me into their carts, to invite me in and swing their arms around me like ivy. But they fly by in a broad front, determined to return to their homes, far away from that vision of the future.

It is so quiet here without the noise of the city – and without you, your dissertations, renunciations, your strivings, disappointments, your cries in the night, your telephone calls to strangers. You would dial
operator,
offer up a city,
say Toledo,
and you would guess a last name, and then you would be connected,
hello Toledo!
and you would converse with Toledo about their favourite food, favourite pastimes, favourite music.
Favourites! Portal into a stranger!
And to everything, you would say,
Me too!
It was so easy for you to slip, a cat smoothing himself under a fence, into another person's heart. You would never call again, even though you would repeat their number back to them, slowly,
deliberately, as if you were making a note of it on your forearm. But it was just an accident in the first place, one you could never recover. Plus, there were so many other strangers. So many other cities.
Say Calcutta. Say Huntsville. Say Buenos Aires.
So many other fences to get under.

Lake Shore Avenue cuts through the island, from its eastern to its western point. I follow it. My boots are the only percussion against the pavement. Otherwise, it is completely abandoned. No trucks. No bicycles. No geese. Its surroundings too. Dirt and scrub and sky. A scrupulous minimalism. I am a fleck between civilizations. Shot from a cannon, wandering a land that I do not know. I pass the fire station, the fountain, the public washrooms and the lockers checked orange and blue. I can smell the charcoal and the meat from the day's picnics. A sunbather's blanket lies crinkled in the sand. A ball. A harmonica. A shoe sideways in the grass. Did everyone have to tidy all at once and leave in a hurry? Was there a great rush, and they had to run, dropping their things and only half-dressed? Or maybe everyone is hiding. In the fountain. Behind that poplar. Under that table. Maybe they saw me coming and this emptiness is a game. I look down. A mound of apple cores.

Past the filtration plant, and past the lighthouse, all the props of human living are suddenly gone. I could sleep here, hidden and safe beneath the brambles, but I don't. I go on – pulled by a fishing wire looped around my waist, one hand, rough and sure, a black thumbnail, winding it on the other end. If someone did come upon me, my searching face, they would guess
amnesiac
and then they would spin me around and pronounce,
Look, her only clue,
about the photograph pinned to my back. Not knowing what else to do, not knowing you, they would send me on my way.

I wade deeper into the dark. It coats my skin and begins to claim me as its own. The air is cooler here, fever-wet. I know that there is a lagoon nearby; I can smell the tall grasses, the mulch at the surface of the water. The lake is on my left. It laps the shore, tired. Its edge cluttered with the refuse of the day. At this end of the island, near Hanlan's Point, there used to be homes. Two hundred of them. A baseball diamond. A fairground. A dancehall. A theatre. Three hotels. I hear the flounce of a long skirt brush through the grass. The breath of a boy running through laundry lines to the carnival, coins skipping in his pockets. A hammer slung from a leather belt. An enamelled dish dropped on a stair. A girl peeling cucumbers for a sandwich. For a moment I can see all of them, their shadows bristling and hungry. And then, with a snarl, they are gone. This night: a black that is vacancy. The houses were bulldozed. The only evidence that anyone ever lived here at all is the walls built at the shore to battle the strength of the lake, which always threatened to drown them. Now some plastic bags are caught in the branches. They inflate with the wind like store-bought ghosts. The horn of the last ferry sounds. Everything stops just for that moment to listen.