Three Years with the Rat (15 page)

“Oh, come on,” I say and turn around, but she's not on the sidewalk. Instead it's just the mindless bustle of Bloor Street, unaware of the events taking place or the absence of an entire apartment building. I take a breath before I look back to the glass. Officer 2510 is no longer in the reflection, no longer visible anywhere.

Some great tether is unravelling and my body is floating further and further from anything recognizable. I stand stock-still in the flow of human traffic, my eyes now on the pavement at my feet. It feels like someone is breathing on my neck, watching me.

Slowly, carefully, I extend my arm in front of me and curl my hand until it's a fist. Then I extend my middle finger into a nice, rigid line. “Go fuck yourself,” I scream.

The pedestrians around me flinch as if they've just heard a gunshot.

A moan slips out of me, some scared and lost sound.

“Hello? Scruffy?”

“Shit. Sorry, Lee, I meant to call Brian.”

“No, no. You got the right number. He's just out getting us some beer and left his phone here.”

“Can you leave him a message to check in on Buddy over the next couple of days?”

“Sorry? ‘Buddy'?”

“My rat. He'll understand. Tell him my apartment key is under the mat.”

“Sure. You all right, young 'un?”

“Hmm. Yeah. Don't worry about it. Big plans for you three tonight?”

“Two, not three.”

“No Steve?”

“That's sort of exactly what I'm trying to say, young 'un. No Steve.”

“Do you mean ‘no more Steve'? As in forever?”

“As in ‘indefinitely,' anyway.”

“Jesus, Lee. Are
you
all right?”

“Everything changes, Scruffy. It was a long time coming.”

“Listen. Can I ask you a weird question? You know John and Grace's apartment?”

“Whose apartment?”

“Grace. As in my sister.”

“I don't think I even knew you had a sister. You sure I've met her?”

A pause.

“Scruffy? What's up?”

“Look, Lee, I have to go. Please just give Brian the message.”

There is only standing room on the subway heading south. I lean myself against one of the filthy chrome handrails and feel every bump as the cars grind over the tracks beneath.

At Union Station we spill out of the subway like a head wound, then flow up the stairs and into daylight. Every face is pointed in the same direction: upward, outward, homeward. I buy my train ticket out of town from the unremarkable lower floor of Union and make my way to the platform. There's a free seat on the middle level of the train, the small section that connects the stairs between upper and lower decks. I sit facing east, shoulder to the window. The train fills but I don't look at the other passengers. Instead I stare out the glass.

The sprawl doesn't end, but instead shifts in form and function. Near to the train tracks are trees that whip past my viewpoint so fast as to make them phantoms. The background is industrial space, old factories that have been appropriated for beer and re-appropriated for yuppie first dates. We reach the edge of the city
and the background changes to cramped residential neighbourhoods, their yards littered with the evidence of childhoods past: bicycle frames, rusted swing sets, swimming pools emptied for the year and covered in a film of dead leaves. Soon the landscape is changing again, this time into three-level townhomes that look like sanatoriums, the last of which bump against another block of industrial buildings. It is all manufactured hideousness.

And then, for a minute or two before we reach my stop, the train veers south and bursts from a layer of scratty trees and the only thing I can see is the blinding, brilliant surface of Lake Ontario, seemingly endless and capped with small diamonds of light. Across the lake, the sun has broken out of the clouds and casts intense beams across the water. There is the faintest froth where the waves rush onto the pebbled shore and the grass just beyond it looks alive and intensely green despite how cold it must be outside. An occasional tree still flickers past my vision, next to the train, but otherwise this image of the shimmeringly perfect and endless lake persists long enough for me to realize that I've been holding my breath all the while. Out there no fate is fixed and nothing is wrong with the world. Out there shows me that peace is a possibility. Then the gnarled and leafless trees swallow up the view and the train turns a little northward, toward the highway, and again the scenery becomes grey cement and empty transport trucks.

The next time the train slows into a station, I stand and exit. The scenery is still sprawl, but everything in the suburbs is wider, more spacious, somehow gaudy in its girth. I transfer onto a bus that takes me north, past the buzzing highway, the bloated mega-stores, the vast parking lots, and finally into the unending residential zone.

The bus leaves me on a corner next to a gas station. Here, the grass is dead and the sky is grey and the lake is far, far from sight. I walk off the main road and breach the heart of the suburbs.

It has taken about two hours to return to my mother's home.

The house is an unremarkable structure, speaking both absolutely and relatively. It is grey brick and blue-grey aluminum siding, with the same blue-grey painted across the garage door. If it didn't have an angled roof, it would be a box. There is a small wedge of lawn on either side of the driveway, too small for anything but a patch of ornamental grass. To the left and right of the property are exactly the same model of house, one in tones of beige, the other a ruddy colour, and their yards are similar in size and shape. My mother's house is in the middle of a street that endlessly repeats and it would be nearly impossible to notice if it disappeared forever.

It was my home for years but still I choose to knock on the door, then ring the bell when my mother doesn't answer. I peer through the thin pane next to the door, and finally I see her come down the stairs into the foyer. She is in a bathrobe, her hair is frazzled, and she's practically screeching when she opens the door. “Jesus Christ, sweetheart, why don't you visit me anymore?”

It doesn't take me long to notice the changes.

I take off my shoes and jacket, mutter acknowledgement of my mother's incessant chit-chat, and say, “Where are Grace's things? I need to look through them.”

My mother is puzzled. “Whose things?”

I grit my teeth. “This is a three-bedroom house, Mom. Who lived in the third bedroom?”

She tucks in her chin, her eyes wide and surprised like Grace's. “What the hell are you on about, sweetheart?”

I demand an answer with my silence.

“Nobody,” she says. “Why would I rent out the third room? This is our home.”

So now I don't have a sister. I want to be more surprised than I am.

“Christ, you used to have so much fun here,” she tells me. Meanwhile she picks at something stuck to my shirt, loosening it with some saliva on her thumb and forefinger. “I wish you'd come home more. This is
nice
.”

She flutters around me and prattles away but I hardly listen. Any information I could have gleaned from this house has disappeared along with Grace's possessions. Still, it may not be a pointless journey. I dig my hands into my jeans pockets and feel the nub of the flash drive demanding my attention.

I interrupt my mother mid-sentence. “Gotta check my email. Back in a sec.”

Before she can say anything I've left the foyer. I boot up the computer in my mother's office and plug in the key. The Telemetrics file turns out to be a text file, full of mostly unlabelled numbers. Still, one piece of information is clear and pertinent: the computer's timer shows that Buddy was in the box for a few minutes, whereas the readout of Buddy's timer says he was gone for almost a day. The little rat's data suggest a way to reach my vanishing sister.

I take a walk around the block to get some air. Outside, the sun has disappeared below the horizon and the streets are lit by the yellow glow of the lights above. I pass the park where I played as a child, the houses of old friends, and approach my old school. For a moment I stand in the teachers' parking lot, where I got into my only fight and lost, and with a jolt it comes to me:
Thornton.
His name is a word I haven't tried yet, a potential cipher, an obvious possibility that hadn't occurred to me. I call a taxi.

“What the hell do you mean you're leaving?” my mother says when I get back to the house. “No. You can't leave. You only just got here.”

I deflect, feign some excuse, and give her a perfunctory kiss. Then I hop in the cab and head to the train station.

Hours later, back at home in Toronto, John's notebook reveals its next section to me when I use that piece of shit Thornton's name as the key.

A few minutes down the street from Shifty's is an old church with a park bench in front of it. During the day, the bench is a favourite spot for the homeless of Toronto; at night, though, the area is almost always empty and perfect for quiet summer conversations, despite being just a few feet from College Street and all its bustle.

Grace and I sat there talking on the night I met her. Well, not talking, exactly. She and I just sat there, with me staring at her and her smiling blindly into some memory or idle thought. Of course, her absent gaze was probably because I was looking at her so intensely. I doubt I have ever looked so hard at anyone as I did that night.

It was barely summer, then. The air was getting warmer but it was restless, and it came in bursts that would cause her hair to dance around her face. The Toronto skyline was reflecting off an overcast ceiling, painting the city in bright reds, and I wished I had my camera to preserve something of the night.

Instead, my memory was all I had to capture those first moments. Her cheekbone and lips were caught by the white light of the fire station just across the street. She wore a small summer dress that left her legs bare. This was before her obsession with wearing layers upon layers, before she starting losing what little weight she had; the woman was not yet lost in the clothes. Back then she was light, ethereal, and delicate. Because of the breeze, I had given her my black spring jacket to wear, and she kept the zipper undone. A small, thin necklace cut across her skin and hung just above the line of her dress, and my eyes kept moving back to that meeting of silver and fabric, no matter how hard I tried to be polite and look at the rest of the city.

I shuffled in my seat, my knees wide and my hands clasped between them and pressed on the bench. I could hardly sit still. She leaned back and her beautiful legs slid forward, one dangling over the other. Still she looked away, something a little restless behind her half-smile.

Finally I spoke up and asked her what she was thinking about.

She took a good, long time before saying something like, Imagine this was the last time you'd ever see me. Imagine this was all you got.

I pointed out that the way in which she phrased her words suggested she wasn't going anywhere. Then I panicked: did I sound smug? Or like the nerd I used to be?

In any case, she laughed, one hard Ha. Her family's laugh
,
I would later learn. She repeated, emphasized: Imagine, John. This is your last chance before I leave. What are you going to do with it?

I told her I'd use the opportunity to convince her to stay.

She said, If you did, it would be a waste of time for both of us. I'm not the type that stays.

She turned to me and said, Be more creative.

It was a challenge.

She said, What are you waiting for?

Without thinking I stood up, reached out, grabbed her hand, and pulled her up. Her face rushed to me, her nose near my collarbone. I could smell the darkness of her hair and feel her nervous vibration finally dissipate into stillness next to me. It was a challenge. Then, catching even myself by surprise, I started running down the quiet Toronto side streets, pulling her along.

—

Hours before, the three roommates had proven nearly inseparable at their party. Lee, Nicole, Grace.

Lee had her hair drawn back and was wearing gloves with cut-off fingertips and tight jeans. She was too interested in conversation with her friends to notice the attention she was gathering from the young men around her. The only time she broke away was to chastise people for pulling her records out of their sleeves and getting fingerprints all over the vinyl.

Nicole, on the other hand, was acutely aware of the male gaze and enjoying shooting down their flirtations. She was the only one at the party wearing a party dress. She could have acted like the archetypal vixen, pouting her lipsticked kiss or thrusting her curvy hips, but instead she was demure and coy in a very authentic way. There was a moment between us, an instant with her eyebrow raised and me politely declining, and then there was no attention from her at all.

And there was Grace.

When I think back to that party, I imagine Grace standing stock-still in the middle of a hundred bodies buzzing and flitting like a sped-up film reel. Small, skinny, wide-eyed, clearly beautiful and brilliant Grace, nervously glued to the shoulders of her roommates. I had no doubts as to why men would be attracted to Lee or Nicole, but for the first time in my life, I felt something visceral in response to a woman. Here was the girl I had seen in a vision, no longer a reflection from some hallucination, but real, corporeal, and directly in front of me. What I felt for her was a need.

—

Grace and I ran down that dark street with our hands pressed together and the skirt of her dress flapping gently behind her. Her sandals clopped in rhythm. Three or four times I actually howled, something between a laugh of surprise and a whoop of victory. Her hand was soft and firm with good bones and no intention of letting go. She was smiling with her teeth, perfect and monstrously white under the street lights. Amber-tinted houses passed, then a lonely parking lot, then a street corner. We entered Kensington Market along a path I'd never taken before.

We found ourselves in Bellevue Square, a cluster of small trees, a patch of unremarkable grass, and some sand that could be called a playground only by definition. The park was abandoned and waiting for us. There was a bronze statue of the King of Kensington, gentle and frozen in place, and he stood over two park benches near the entrance. In his sincerity and humble appearance I always felt something like pride and
pity mixed together. He was our spectator, silent, hands held out in a gesture of friendship.

We slowed ourselves into a walk and it was clear that we were both enjoying the heavier breathing. She looked at me and smiled hard enough to crease the corners of her eyes. Our hands were still clasped together.

I told her that the King of Kensington welcomed her.

She said, I'm sure he welcomes everyone.

Not true, I said. I had a co-op placement down the street, and I have to tell you, sometimes those arms are pushing people out of Kensington, not drawing them in.

And are they going to push me out of the market or draw me in?

In, but they won't be able to make you stay.

She said, See, now you're getting it.

She pulled me to her, put her palms on my shoulders and pressed her right cheek against my chest. I took a deep breath and told myself,
remember this moment.
Wisps of her hair made my nose itchy. The collar of my jacket was bunched up on her downy neck and her hands barely poked out of the sleeves. The new muscles I had built wrapped around her and I felt a pressure in my neck disappear. I would not move until she did.

Across the street was a row of houses, silent and sleeping. I saw us mirrored in someone's kitchen window, my ridiculously rigid stance, the slender silhouette I held in my arms, the King of Kensington. But there was more.

In the reflection, countless shadowed figures had surrounded us and were witnessing the whole event unfold. Dark shapes stared at us from the glass, intent on ruining this perfect moment. I hadn't seen them since the dead end, years before. But here they were again, shuffling in that unsettled way they
had before, and I was certain it had something to do with meeting Grace.

Do you see that? I asked.

She looked up at me and I pointed with my chin to the reflections in the windows.

Everyone's asleep, she said.

In the reflection. Figures. Do you see?

She turned back to me, confused. She had seen nothing. How could she have been on the other side of that threshold but have no knowledge of it? I pulled her close again and kept my eyes on the mass of figures shuffling toward us in the windows. They were encircling us, draining the light from all around us.

I see strange things, I told her. Once before, I saw this. And again tonight.

She recited, Research suggests an association between creativity and psychological instability.

I'm not particularly creative, I said. I'm not sure if they're real, but twice now I've seen people watching me.

The people on the other side of the reflection shuffled together and swallowed up our image until there was only an inky blackness.

She said, Did you know Nicole and I had a bit of an argument over you? We always argue, of course. That's what best friends do. But these days, I find myself irritated with her all the time. And your arrival in our little social circle didn't help one bit.

She pressed her smile against my chest.

I'm trying to tell you something, I said.

I heard you. Don't worry. Crazy can spot itself from a mile away.

I asked, And why are
you
crazy?

She separated her body from mine and I wondered if I had ruined the moment. She frowned and lowered her head and cast her face in shadow. She asked, Can I trust you to keep a secret?

I cleared my throat and said, Yes, you can.

Then ask me again.

It took me a moment, and then, Why are you crazy?

She put her hand on the back of my neck and pulled me close. She kissed my cheek once, lightly, and whispered, Because of the things a man did to me when I was thirteen. Because my mother and father pretended the whole thing didn't happen. Because I have murder in my heart.

And before my mind could catch up with her words, her whole attitude changed. She straightened, she laughed again, Ha, and she hid everything else away.

She said, Now please stop looking at me like what I just told you defines me. Go back to being the handsome boy with the nice shoulders. And kiss me.

I obliged her. It should have been a perfect moment, but it wasn't.

When I opened my eyes again, we were the only ones reflected in the window.
Not yet,
I thought.
Tonight, she's mine.
And I chased that perfect moment until I found it in her lips. We stayed in the park until the sun threatened to break the horizon, until the clouds broke to a deep-green sky, and until the need for a long sleep couldn't be ignored any longer.