Three Years with the Rat (19 page)

“The feelings are real,” she says, “even if the events aren't.”

I nod.

“So you
are
deranged, then,” she says.

I smile. “Objectively speaking, yes. Subjectively, I've got my shit together now more than ever.”

She frowns at me, wants to be nonplussed, but I know those upturned corners of her mouth. For once she has no retort. To busy herself she tucks her hair behind her ears and then reaches for the remote control to the stereo. Her lips pout just a little. The song starts. I close my eyes.

How many times have I heard this song? Hiss, whirr, organ, bass, kick drum, simmer, explode. The song crescendos once even before the first lyric is sung, then comes down again and leaves room for a single male voice. He is hoarse and urgent.

There's no fine future waiting

In the depths of the freshwater seas.

I'll find my oblivion

In the place where the water meets the trees.

There is no point in asking

The truth of the vision a man sees.

Shine a light on oblivion

In the place where the water meets the trees.

The song moves in waves, trails off, seems as if it's about to fade, and out of nowhere the voice shouts the refrain again,
In the place where the water meets the trees
. The song builds to an unbearable wall of noise and then stops all at once.

I open my eyes and look at Nicole. Hers are still shut. Her fists are bunched together and pressed against her lips, as when she sleeps. Her shoulders rise and fall with her slow breaths. Then she opens her eyes and stops the CD.

“That's clever,” she says. “I never noticed the reference before.”

“What?” I ask.

“In Iroquois, it's more like
The place where there are trees in the water
, or
where trees stand in the water
, but I suppose that isn't quite as poetic in English.” Her eyes are hazel and looking only at me. “It's the meaning of the word
Toronto
.”

By the time we head back to the Cuckoo, the snow has formed thick white sediment over the city and reflects the artificial light until everything is pink and orange and black. We walk closer together than before and I notice that her mittened hand is within my reach.

“You don't know me,” she says quietly.

“You work as a cook in a restaurant in Kensington,” I tell her.

“Too factual.”

“You spend your weekends volunteering at a soup kitchen.”

“Too factual.”

“You are always reading something good. You're a smoker.”

“I quit about a year ago.” She shakes her head. Snow is piling up on her toque and shoulders. “This is all too factual. It's just content.”

“What are you talking about?”

She says, “You're describing my existence, the content, but not my essence.
Existence precedes essence
.”

“You're an insufferable quoter,” I tell her. “You can be hard on others but you're a good person. When you're asleep you look like you're dreaming about a boxing match.”

She keeps shaking her head and I can feel the space widening between us. “Who am I? What do I really want? What am I afraid of? What do I love? You don't know me at all. At all.”

Her mittened hand is still close, but I don't reach for it. She avoids looking at me and huddles herself for warmth.

“And I don't know why that makes me
so sad
,” she says. Her voice cracks.

We round the corner onto Dundas. The Cuckoo is just a few steps away, where she'll be lost to me again. Did I ever have her?

“You're right,” I say. “I don't know you well enough. But I know you a little. I know that all you really want is to receive what you give. You want someone to think you're always the most interesting person at the party.”

She glances my way. She isn't smiling but she doesn't look unhappy. The toque pushes her hair down and it frames her face. We keep eye contact for a moment and it feels like filling my lungs after I've held my breath underwater.

A moment later we reach the bar. Nicole waves to her friends through the front window and indicates she'll be one more minute.

“Come inside,” she says kindly, then makes a game of it. “That isn't a promise of anything, just an opportunity.”

Following her
is
an opportunity, one that I hadn't considered. It could be a new beginning, free of our past and all its disappointments. This is a chance to get things right with Nicole, to grieve, to heal. We could fall in love again, I could find a meaningful job, and we could be happy. All I have to do is leave Grace and John to their own devices. And Nicole would never know I abandoned them.

“I can't,” I tell her. “Some of my loved ones are in trouble, and in part it was my fault. I need to help them if I can.”

“Well, that makes about as much sense as everything else you've said.” She smiles. “Do you have a plan?”

“I have some ideas, but I've been kind of making it up as I go. To be honest, I've been met with resistance at almost every step of the way.”

“Well,” she says, “you'll always find what you bring with you.”

“Is that Aristotle?” I ask.

She laughs and shakes her head. She grabs onto the lapels of my coat and stands on tiptoes. Then she kisses me on the cheek, once, lightly. She says, “Goodbye, strange boy.”

Without another glance she turns and walks inside. Through the bay window I watch her reunite with her friends, them raising their glasses in tribute, her shrugging and smiling unapologetically. My cheek burns. I smell oranges.

There's no point locking the apartment door behind me. I don't take off my winter coat or my boots or my toque.

“Buddy!” I shout. “Come on. It's time to do this.”

Eventually he crawls out from the folds of the comforter on my bed. I scoop him up and pet him along his snout before placing him on my shoulder.

In the left pocket of my pea coat I place a small pouch full of earth from the dead end near John's childhood home. In my right pocket is my new flashlight, fresh batteries already installed. The photograph of John and Grace is in my back pocket, as is a photograph of Nicole. I consider taking a knife or a hammer or some other violent means, but Nicole's words echo in me:
You'll always find what you bring with you.
In the end I take no weapons.

The wooden box is the only object left in my living room. It is only slightly less impressive and perfect than it looked in John and Grace's apartment. The edges are rounded and smooth to the touch, and the grain of the wood is beautiful. When I reach the side with
the handle, I slide open the panel and look at the cube's crystalline interior. It is flawless aside from my image. I crouch and step inside.

On my shoulder, Buddy taps at me with one of his forepaws in a slow, steady rhythm. He learned this behaviour from my sister, or perhaps from John, while living in the sterile laboratory.

“Sorry, Buddy,” I say. “I don't have any sugar pellets for you.”

He continues to raise and lower his paw. It's a gentle feeling and it calms me as I stand on the glass inside the box. Through the open panel, I take one last look at the basement apartment, the little world I once built.

I think of John and Grace.

I think of Nicole.

I think of all the resistance that preceded this moment.

And then I let go.

I close the panel of the mirrored box and lock myself inside.

Grace used to boil a kettle just before she sat down to supper. When she finished eating, she'd put her plate in the sink and bring the kettle, a mug, and a jar of instant coffee to the table. I usually stayed to watch her heave one large spoonful of instant coffee into the mug and pour the water in slowly. I would say nothing, only breathe deeply and enjoy the rich smell of her after-dinner ritual.

On the table would be a small container of spoons, and from it she'd carefully consider and draw one for stirring. While the coffee was still spinning, she would add cream, only a pale thread at first but eventually undermining the deep colour in the mug. When it had stopped swirling, Grace would dip her spoon just under the surface and ladle out a small pool. This tiny serving of coffee would absorb all her attention until the steam was nearly gone and she put the spoon to her mouth. Only then, after her satisfactory first taste of instant coffee, would she look to me, smile, and acknowledge my presence. Some days, she would dip that spoon in again and pull out a
little coffee for me. I hated the bitterness, that liquid ash, but I would never refuse such a moment of sharing.

Of course, I am not at my lover's table and this is not our kitchen. This is the psychiatric wing of Toronto-Bathurst Hospital, walls the blandest shade of green one could imagine, two simple and hard beds, an ancient oak desk that was likely donated by a wealthy benefactor, a single window that does not open. These spoonfuls of coffee, delicate and full, are not in Grace's hand but rather in my own. The mug is not one of her handcrafted discoveries but is instead labelled as property of the hospital. There are no jars full of spoons, and in fact there are no metal utensils or nail clippers or anything with which one could puncture, stab, or in general wound oneself. There is only the thick double door that keeps out the human din, entered and exited only with permission of the front staff, and the beautiful quietude that such a barrier provides. This is a space where I can sleep.

—

About two months after she disappeared, Grace started visiting at night. The first time, she was in the broken mirror of our spare bedroom. She was standing alone, arms wrapped around herself as if she were cold. She lifted her head, illuminating her face, and I had no doubt that it was her. I checked the room, but she wasn't there; only her reflection remained, looking at me, lips moving, saying something. I pressed my ear against the shattered glass, but of course I heard only my pulse.

She looked different each time she visited. Some nights she was filthy, her clothes torn and her face smudged with dirt. Other nights she was clean, dressed in simple, fitted clothes I did not recognize. Seemingly at random her hair grew and
shrank, frizzed and flattened, greyed and browned. And for about a month, she haunted me with no obvious purpose or motivation. Her face was always inscrutable.

Then the whispers began, as polarized as her appearance. The first time she woke me to say, I shouldn't have closed myself off from you at the end. Another night she said, You're a fucking pathetic, lying, worthless human being. You were never on my team. She vacillated from love to hate, praise to scorn. The whispers became increasingly frequent, almost nightly occurrences, and the anticipation was as bad as the experience. I found myself waking every few hours even when she wasn't around, terrified that she'd come again, terrified that I might have missed her.

I never responded to her, never replied or spoke. Giving words to it would have made it real, an impossible terror; or worse, it would have shattered the hallucination, taken away any last connection to her, even if it was caused by prolonged wakefulness.

I'd long since stopped going to the lab, so there was nothing to keep me in the city. I stayed in a few motels for a few weeks, visiting tourist towns around the Great Lakes in their off season, and for a short time I thought it had worked. Then one night in Grand Bend I awoke to her shouting. You can't escape me, she said. You can't just run away from your mistakes.

The next morning, I took a few buses back to the city and out to my parents' house in Oshawa. I told them I was taking a spring break. My mother complained about the dark circles under my eyes, but she was enthusiastic about feeding me, and excited to have me as unpaid labour for the gas station. My father was happy to have my mother's attention off himself and, of course, to commiserate with me later over his evening television.

Nights, I would lie in my childhood bed and watch the headlights of an occasional car pass by my window. Inevitably Grace would come, speak to me so quietly that she must have been standing beside the bed, although I could see nothing of her on my side. I took my mother's compact mirror from her bathroom and kept it under my pillow. Some nights, when Grace's voice would come to me, I would flip open the compact and see nothing. Other nights, her lips would be next to my ear, whispering. Only some of it made sense.

I miss you.

I will fucking kill you if you tell my brother anything.

Thank you for what you did to Thornton.

You will always be weak.

How are you doing, my love?

—

I stopped sleeping altogether.

The memories of that period become jumbled, mixed in with each other. My mother became suspicious when my week-long break turned into months, when I made no attempts to leave the house except to work for her. In that time, I must have finally said something about Grace's disappearance; even her name became enough to get my mother upset. Meanwhile, Grace began visiting multiple times a night, her mood alternating more wildly than ever. There was an incident at the gas station involving a small fire, but the details are confused in my memory. My mother sent me home to bed.

It was still light outside when I lay down, still noisy with suburban activity, but the next thing I knew it was a black, silent night. Grace was near me. I could feel her breath on my cheek.

In a hoarse voice she said, You could have been here with me this entire time. You could have been the one to bring me here. You knew where there was an entrance, but you were too chickenshit to do anything about it. That first night in Bellevue Square, you mumbled about being able to see strange things. You had been given such a gift and you were miserable about it!

Then, almost immediately after, she spoke again, only this time in my other ear and her voice seemed smooth, calm. She said, I'm sorry for all of this, John. It isn't simple, here. I miss you.

I was delirious, exhausted. I began to shout: Where are you? What do you want from me? Why did you go to the dead end? Why are you doing this to me? Please come back to me.

I fumbled over my words and I pounded my fists against the floor. I had kept my mouth closed for months and now I couldn't stop screaming. Please come back to me. Please come back to me. My parents came to my room, shouting at each other, What is wrong with him? When I finally quieted, my mother looked at my father and said, I told you that girl was trouble. Before her, he had a good job. Remember?

I calmed myself, told them I'd had a nightmare and sent them back to bed. When I was sure they were asleep, I packed my belongings and walked the five kilometres from my parents' new house to the neighbourhood where I had grown up.

It was dawn when I reached the dead end. The sign still stood where it always had, a defiant diamond just out of range of direct sunlight. A small, dirty patch of land remained undeveloped between our old subdivision and the new one, and it seemed remarkable that no one could acknowledge the absurdity of a dead end between two finished communities. Its secret remained kept even after all these years, except to Grace
and me. A few times, I had visited this site to collect tiny samples of earth, to secretly supplement Grace's rat research, and it had felt harmless. This time, the threat of the place was palpable.

I walked across the empty street, stepped from the curb, and approached the threshold of the dead end without hesitation or pomp. Something around me lurched and turned over as I stood next to the sign, caused light to briefly bend and shimmer around me. Something was furious with me, with my desire to cross. And it dawned on me, although I was more tired than I had ever been: if I crossed that threshold, I would be at the mercy of those forces. I might find Grace on the other side but I would be powerless. This was someone else's entrance.

And that was when the plan started to form, a simple variation on the research with the rats. If I built my own entrance, I could cross to the other side on my own terms. I could control this phenomenon. I couldn't use the earth from the dead end anymore; I had to find another solution. I walked away from that threshold and took the next train back to Toronto.

—

It's been a false start, of course. Those first nights back in the city, I stayed up waiting to be terrified and comforted by the ghost of Grace. She didn't come. I took to walking the streets until dawn, trying to tire myself sufficiently to sleep, but no amount of walking could suffice. It was with horror that I realized her absence was worse than any awful thing she could have said to me, any scare she could have delivered. What little grip I had on waking life slipped completely.

I knew better than to try sleeping pills, knew their harmful and cumulative effects, but try them I did. I tried them and tried them and tried them. Then one evening
I awoke.
I was so happy to have slept that at first I didn't realize I had been hospitalized. Someone had found me in the hallway of our apartment, face down on the stairs. When the nurse came to my hospital bed, she tried to comfort me by telling me that no one had stolen my possessions while I was unconscious.

The emergency team quickly decided I needed the mental health team, and a few referrals later I found myself here. Each night I sleep more than the previous one, and it has been glorious. I spend days looking through the window. Outside are lovers, wanderers, streetcars, and the first hints of summer. I tell my psychiatrist about the distance I feel between everyone and how I don't want to believe it's right or normal. For a time, Grace was here and that distance was closed, and even her apparition (or hallucination, as I describe it to the doctor) was better than no Grace at all. I make instant coffee five times a day, and I sip it from the plastic spoons the ward provides. I build my strength each day by degrees. I write these fragments of my life to remind myself that they were real, not simply some manifestation of my grief, and I encode them so the doctors can't read them. I listen, and I wait.

There have been no unusual reflections, no whispers in the night from Grace. In fact my world has become much more mundane. Her brother visits me in the hospital from time to time, and I can't help but pity his need for approval from those he thinks more intelligent than himself. Like a puppy, he's loyal and eager to please, but his presence makes me lonelier than I thought possible. I can't decide which is worse:
being absolutely known by the unknown, or being absolutely unknown by the known.

Each day I tell them all I am feeling a little better, and in a sense it is true.

I can't wait to leave this place and start building my entrance. I can't wait to have control. And I can't wait to see that other side with Grace.