We Will All Go Down Together (33 page)

“Vvvv . . . iii . . . vvvv . . . .”

No answer, of course; but then, what’d I expected? I could barely hear myself.

As the ceiling sank closer, I
knew
something was looking at me from the end of the bed, and prayed desperately not to regain control of my eyes. Not to see the face I knew was there and waiting for me; not to see the thing that was casting the shadow, which rose so huge and black against the room’s engulfing flames.

The black negative of Dr. Abbott’s Holy Grail: a hypnagogic state induced by oxygen deprivation, exhaustion and fear, liberating every paranormal perception I had at once at the potential cost of a total—fatal—disconnection between body and mind.

Or, to put it another way—Carra’s bag. Coming down.

The pressure bore on me like that half-remembered, half-imagined lake, a freezing weight slicing with deadly accuracy through the ghost-fire’s stabbing pain. Something was with me, in that split second: beyond reason, only barely conscious, collected from the wreckage of lost lives and desperate for an ideal of communication it no longer knew well enough to name. Something trapped here in a shell of memory, slave-driven to find any way out it could, even one which led nowhere but . . . 

. . . into
me
.

And finally, as I managed to tilt my skull to one side, I thought I knew what I had to do; it was like rolling a boulder head-first up a collapsing gravel slope with only your neck and shoulders to support the effort. In the corner of the room, the mirror shone simultaneously bright and black, opaque to the nth degree—the doorway, opened on Dr. Abbott’s oh-so-helpful advice, through which this thing had let me see it for the first time. Through which time itself (perhaps) had sent a backburst-bubble of the original house’s ruin.

Currents stirred, spiralling inwards in fiery-bright lines, pulling my vision towards that empty hole at the mirror’s centre. And as it did, the anger and desperation swelling around me became infused with a terrible, helpless pleading, a childlike, unselfconsciously selfish fear:
Help me, Janis, help me . . . let me in . . . .

But: “No,” I told it, muscles bunching and swelling, finally beginning to gain some purchase in my own limp body. “You’re . . . dead. Go . . . away.”

HELP me!

“
Fuck
I will.”

One arm, pushing up against the mattress. My body, tilting up, like mountains folding out of the earth in some tectonic convulsion. My weight shifting, sliding—with excruciating difficulty—towards the edge of the mattress.

HELP ME!

At the foot of my bed, something sheathed in fire rose up, its shadow falling over me, backlit in its own combustion. It moved and coalesced further, deepened and darkened; leaned over me, its face nothing but a featureless flame-shrouded oval peering down through gathering blackness—

And: “NO!” I screamed out loud, flinging my arm over my eyes. “I DON’T WANT TO HEAR IT! I DON’T CARE! FUCK
OFF!
”

I felt something give around me, inside me, as that shriek came ripping up from within like a tide bursting through a rot-ridden dam. Went rolling over, off the bed, ash bursting up around me in phantom tsunamis; scrabbled on hands and knees towards the corner where I knew the mirror waited, bright bursts of pain scoring me with every move as fire lashed out at me from every angle, cinders falling on my naked legs and half-exposed back. A smell like roast pork filled my nostrils: me, burning.

My hand closed on the mirror—and something, simultaneously, closed a huge and burning grip around my ankle.

Another scream, as searing air burnt the inside of my lungs bright red. I reared up and flung myself at the door to my room, hauling it open with my free hand. Staggered down the hall towards the stairs, seeing myself trailing streams of smoke and ash, clouds of dust settling in stinging glee into my burns. Tear-blinded, smoke-choked, I flailed around for the railing, caught it, hurled myself onto the first step—

—missed it.

My foot came down with that stunning, jarring jolt that kicks us out of sleep, and my knee gave way beneath it. I pitched over with a shriek, curling into a ball, protecting my head with my arms, and managed to land on my side, flipping over and over down the stairs like some fleshy coin, carelessly tossed: wham! Wham! Wham! The house whirled around me, my stomach seeming to simultaneously bounce off ribs, throat, groin. Then I came down on the floor of the vestibule, throwing out both hands to brace myself against the impact—and felt glass shatter in a single, high-pitched, discordant crunch, slicing deep into fingers and palm.

(Uh, ah,
AH
.)

In that single instant of shock and silence, I could see again. Everything was clear. No roar of burning from upstairs, no smell of fresh-burnt wood—only shards of silvered glass winking up at me, bright and empty, from the gashes they’d opened in my red right hand.

A snap, a crack—time, popping back into place with a sick-making wrench, like some dislocated shoulder. And then Vivia came pounding down the hall, screaming my name, dropping to my side, babbling questions I couldn’t possibly hope to answer. Finally pulling out her cell phone and stabbing the 911 buttons, tears streaming down her face.

I wanted to reassure her, poor creature—to tell her I finally knew what’d been going on all this while, that I’d faced my fears and lived to tell, that I’d cracked the house’s back and made it say uncle. That everything would be fine from now on, because . . . I’d stopped it.

I was wrong, of course: I didn’t, hadn’t; there was more than sufficient proof of my actions’ consequences already lying in wait just ’round the corner to reveal itself, but not of the crazy victory I felt singing through my half-cooked veins. Not of
that
, no.

Not hardly.

The half-hour version of
Frottage,
which Vivia eventually cobbled together from my unfinished thesis, premiered at Toronto’s Fringe Theatre Festival the year after that; it took honours, got overwhelmingly positive reviews, and was a contextual “success” (even taking into account the fact that no one who came to see it could possibly have paid more than ten bucks a pop).

It’s not going too far to say it was primarily her/my play’s cultural fallout—rather than her talent, considerable as it’d always been—which got her into a prestigious new writers’ retreat, sponsored by the intentionally outré Theatre Passe-Detout, where she was taken under the wing of local scenester Haroun Farang-Geist. With his mentorship, she was able to spin the show out yet further, garnering a limited run at the Detour; a year after that, the Bravo!Fact Video Arts Fund offered her $20,000 to make
Frottage
into a 54-minute TV special.

This next step, however, proved problematic for two reasons: first because, in order to expand it any more, she’d have needed my help, but I was already in the midst of taking a medication vacation in the Clarke Psychiatric Institute. And second—because that also happened to be ’round about the same time Vivia had her first bi-polar episode, precursor to several years of hideously predictable chemical back-and-forth: step one, go nuts. Step two, take your meds. Step three, feel so much better you stop taking them. Step four, go even more (inventively, alarmingly, self-destructively) crazy . . . 

Repeat. Repeat. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Doesn’t happen to women, usually, let alone to people past the age of majority. Yet there she’d be, near the end—phoning me up at five in the morning to tell me how much she’d always loved me, to ask me if I’d ever loved her back. To say: “Euclid, Jan-gal—wasn’t that a time? Best work you ever did, you dumbstruck Mainland cunt, and you couldn’t even finish it.”

And I’d just allow as how she was right, calmly, wincing at the way she wasn’t even trying any more to hide the Maritimer accent she’d once worked so hard to eradicate—at the way she didn’t even seem aware of it any more. Knowing exactly how goddamn embarrassed she’d be, if only she could hear herself played back without her brain supplying some sort of permanent laugh-track.

Thinking to myself, as I twisted the phone-cord ’round my wrist ’til it knotted, and nodded like she could see me while I did it:
Oh baby, oh Jesus. It’s like taking collect calls from Captain Highliner on a bender
.

It took six months before I changed my number without telling her, but somehow, she always seemed to find me again. Up until I stopped answering the phone at all, that is.

Six months after that, I was rummaging through a Queen Street Starbucks’ recycling bin for the Entertainment section when an article caught my eye. It said former playwright and director Vivia Syliboy had thrown herself head-first into the St. Clair Ravine, probably because the Don Valley Parkway—much nearer the halfway house where she was living on her own recognizance, at the time—had finally put up those anti-suicide screens on either side of its too-low marginal wall.

After I checked myself out of the Clarke, I dug up the results of Dr. Abbott’s “Mental Radio” experiment, which had already been published. No names, naturally, but it was fairly easy to figure out which case study was mine . . . they did put in reproductions of every sender’s drawings, after all.

Turned out, the man they’d paired me up with—Henry Goshaugh was his name; another sensitive, from Carra Devize’s control group—had died before he could fully complete his part of the experiment. A little more exploration turned up the facts: he’d developed a massive undiagnosed tumour in his abdomen, which broke open unexpectedly, flooding his insides with poison. Peritonitis, internal bleeding. He died in his sleep, and when they did the autopsy, they found foreign human DNA—amniotic fluids not his own, in other words—infecting the imploded ruin of his pelvic region.

Tiny bones. A few milk-teeth.

It was just about the same place his womb would have been, if he’d been a woman. Except, of course, that he wasn’t.

I saw Henry Goshaugh’s drawings, too. They didn’t look much like mine. They were very . . . exact.

Studying them, I got the crazy idea (oops! Don’t say that word, not out loud) that . . . he’d been seeing the right thing, while I was the one who’d been misinterpreting. Like Mary Sinclair and her horse-headed thing that’d really been a roller-skater’s upturned leg.

I never remember seeing a face in my frottage. I never remember putting a face in my drawings. But Henry had: the same face, over and over and over. And over.

It’s hard for me to look at. Because I’ve never seen it, ever—but nevertheless, it seems so very . . . 

. . . familiar.

Once my doctors thought I was well enough to be trusted on my own—or with minimal supervision, to be more accurate—I moved into a place on Fibonacci Street, possibly named after the man who developed the geometric series based on the ancient Greek “golden mean” of architectural design . . . a ratio which also matches the proportions of an ideal-perspective human body, and turns up again and again in a whole host of biological and astronomical phenomena.

Some mathematicians advanced the Fibonacci series as proof of a consistent, divine design to Creation, back during the early phase of the Renaissance; I have vague memories of at least one case of heresy declared against a hapless Fibonacci advocate who absolutely refused to admit that God’s infinite power could never be even theoretically calculated by something as innately limited as mere human knowledge. So they tortured him ’til he recanted, then burnt him at the stake: proof positive that what most human beings want isn’t so much convincing evidence to support their arguments, but enough reasons to warrant going on arguing.

“You should write about it, you know,” Vivia said, during our final phone call.

And: “What the hell would I say?” I asked, amazed at the very idea. Because I don’t know what happened, exactly. I never did, and I probably never will.

No records can tell me when the top floor of 676 Euclid burnt down in the first place, let alone why, or who might have died in that conflagration. No amount of psychoanalysis or cheap séancery can ever prove what really might have happened to me, up there—whether the wreckage of what might once have been a person (or persons) wanted to get into me or just get the fuck out of the house, any way it could.

But I do know this: when I found myself in the old neighborhood last week, pulled there by some sticky, invisible filament of entropy, I discovered that it had burnt down again. That there was nothing left of the hot room I once wrote and drew in, measuring my time by wet breaths, but a smouldering layer of broken wood and glass.

Maybe this time they won’t rebuild it.

—he was inside when it burnt down, that last time. Asleep on the first floor, so they got him out fairly easily, though he
was
almost too drunk to move.

Which is why he never heard the alarm, why he never stirred when black smoke filled the room around him. Why he still sustained damage to both lungs from smoke inhalation, so bad he’s needed an oxygen puffer ever since, and probably will for the rest of his life.

A comparatively easy escape, as such things go, you might think—especially having heard my story, or Vivia’s, or Carra’s, or even poor Henry Goshaugh’s. But I never had the gall to say that to him, to dare trying to trump his pain with my own, like some kind of masochistic pissing contest. What the fuck for?

Life’s too short.

Throughout that entire last spiral downwards—i.e. during my sojourn at the Clarke and after—I’d find myself appearing, intermittently, on Carra’s doorstep. It was never like we planned it or arranged dates; I’d simply show up, usually whenever I literally couldn’t think of anywhere else to be. And Carra, of course, was always waiting—having known I was coming, in that same tragic way she knows almost everything. Except how
not
to know.

It was like we’d skipped courtship entirely, slipping headlong into classic Old Married Couple rhythms; we’d sit around pretending we were normal people, drinking tea, watching TV or videos (though her programming choices were exactly as inevitably, predictably odd as one might have assumed, given our previous interactions—the birds and the bees of
Microcosmos
or
The Iron Giant
’s bittersweet will to self-determination, spliced crossways with sample-heavy experimental shit like
Tribulation 99
or the Survival Research Laboratory). No matter the viewing fare, however, we were still more normal by far than Carra’s mother Gala, whom I never met, but often heard perpetually stumbling around upstairs like a moth in a jar. Sometimes, we talked awkwardly around what had happened to me; mostly, we didn’t even try.