Because if she still loves you on a Tuesday in the rain

This is a first draft, and more an experiment (for me) with a narrative perspective than an effective piece. If you've got a minute, I'd love to hear what you think. If you're pressed for time, treat yourself a bit - scroll down and read about Zev.

Bill didn't know what had made him so irritable that afternoon. He hadn't meant to say all those things to the bus driver, because he was sure the poor craggy man's mother was a perfectly nice woman, and quite chaste, and quite dead. In fact, he doubted, unless she was quite an athlete, that she could even execute the acrobatic feats he had attributed to her.

A honking car jolted him out of a crosswalk. His wandering mind had carried him all the way down the Oak Street hill, far past Jenny's Consignment Shop and its pruning merchandise and its almost anachronistically curvaceous cashier. He couldn't really go back unless he had a mind to buy something, and even rummaging through the mothball-drenched store made his stomach turn. The cashier was 60, he was sure, and it was just the reek of preservatives that kept her looking collegiate and taut. Still, he got goosebumps whenever she smiled at him. He tried to make a point of peeking in each day, and giving a shout of hello in fair weather when the door was propped open. Except some days he blundered past and he was ruined for a whole 24.

“Hello, Bill.”

Bill's mind had a habit of going a different way than his feet, and while he nurtured the image of the cashier's red lips, his feet had carried him into the doughnut shop. Where Debbie worked.

“What can I get for you today, Bill?” Debbie the doughnut girl asked.

Bill thought of the horrible coincidence that to get at something so sweet, he had to penetrate something so sour. He recoiled at the word, “penetrate,” fearing something Freudian, and it must have shown in his face, because Debbie inquired,

“Is everything alright today, Bill?”

And she didn't use the insipid tone that Customer Service Training manuals advocate. She was asking after his health and state of mind. Like she could somehow comprehend, or even assuage the problems that afflicted him. Bill found it repulsive, but then he had been irritable all day, and again, it wasn't like the time she asked him whether he wanted a little extra sugar, and seemed to put a wink on it. It wasn't nearly like the time she asked if he would share his table during her coffee break, with the sly innuendo of a burgeoning advance. That had required a full vocal response – almost a sentence. This could be taken care of with a grunt.

“Un-hunh”

“So what kind of doughnut today, Bill?”

It was a trap. He wanted the manager's special. He always wanted the special, because he always appreciated variety, but this was her way of getting him to say it to her. To say special. To open his mouth and say,

“If I cared as much about my choice of doughnut as you care about your face, I'd probably be eating the puss-filled crater-to-be on your nose, but because I have a powdered-sugar's granule of self-respect, I think I'll go for the goddamn manager's choice. And when you give me the medium coffee, I'd appreciate if you could just give me the sweetener packets to handle myself – I don't want any sweet things slipping accidentally into my coffee.”

When he added it up, he was probably irritable because of the persistent cough from the two-week cold, the two cars that splashed him while he went trudging towards the bus (one ruining his white shirt) and the fact that after a month and a half without a date, the only woman that gave him the time of day was a pimple-faced, lard-loaded doughnut girl he dumped in the 10^th grade. John was happy that his hands could work independently of his mind, for they had already laid four dollar bills on the counter and waved a “keep the change” in the kind of man-in-charge way he wished his squeaky speaking voice could meet. Those confident hands reached up and pulled his flat-brimmed Yankees cap over his eyebrows while his feet plodded over to skulk arrogantly by the pick up counter. He appreciated the shelter from the stares of the other customers and the strident stern gaze of doughnut Debbie as she placed a napkin, and two Equals into his bag beside the chocolate glaze on his special pastry. He tried to fight off the creeping thought that his disgust may have been misplaced; he cocked his own shoulders to ward off the sting to his pride, but then, she said it.

“Have a good evening, Billy.”

The bitch was crazy for him. It didn't matter what he did - this was inviolable ga-ga. And in front of the droop-jawed clientele, he orchestrated all his limbs in a cool, smooth strut.

***

When the Pennsauken Police Department arrived at the dock, the anxious water taxi driver was already attesting his innocence, shouting in broken English about how the body had just washed up against his boat as he was getting ready for the first morning cross to Philadelphia, and nobody wanted to deal with the Camden police about a body. The surly detective was far more interested in the perfectly penned note pinned in the bull’s-eye center of the forehead, the old-fashioned ink uncannily preserved.

The art of drowning

The analogy with captivation makes it seem

voluntary, as if while the lungs are

bursting with emptiness, the mind considers a bit of coral

or a rock formation

to be more persuasive than life

But life is long you say

the analogy works the other way - we

cannot help our drowning

of course, many people think like you

and their bloated bodies surface daily.

I don't have a title; it is kind of long and maybe unfinished

Sitting under the protection of the smeared Plexiglas and moisture warped timetables of the bus-stop shelter, Zev Fellman munched on a soggy rice cracker and dabbed at his nose with a hankie. From the curb, I watched him, far enough to pretend otherwise, my sneakers filling with rainwater. My mother had told me repeatedly and as recently as that morning that I ought to be nice to Zev. He really is such a sweet boy, she had said. And I was such a sweet boy. She had smiled too, patting my shoulders and shaking her head as if she still couldn’t believe her good luck. And Zev wasn’t really so bad, was he?

But Zev was that bad. To my mother, who didn’t have to attend Mission Hill Elementary except for the occasional parent-teacher conference or school play, we were all such sweet boys. She didn’t realize that Zev smelled like steamed vegetables and that he carried around his inhaler with a tube of cortisone cream in a velvet bag with a drawstring. She didn’t have to watch him at recess ruin game after game of kickball and she didn’t have to listen to him cry afterward, conspicuously stomping his L.A. Gear, a trickle of salty snot in every instance left to dry upon his upper lip. She didn’t understand just how frequently he corrected Ms. Morgan during homeroom grammar exercises or how he always ate his lunches in the bathroom.

My mother didn’t see this because she was an adult but she also didn’t see it, I suspected, because she had found a new friend in Sophie Fellman, Zev’s prematurely aged, rice-cracker and hanky-plying mother. Zev had enrolled at Mission Hill while we were both in the second grade and up until the present moment I had been perfectly happy to dispassionately ignore him. To the extent that he was aware of it, this arrangement seemed to suit Zev too. We rarely spoke at school. For what it may have been worth to him, I generally allowed him without too much comment or critique his poorly timed histrionics and flamboyantly zealous literacy and unabashed respect for our teachers, despite the popular consensus among all of the other boys that these qualities were all unquestionably gay. I was, after all, a sweet boy.

But things had begun to change that previous June when the major city newspaper and eight-year employer of my mother’s consumed and absorbed, like a bloated, debt-ridden bacterium, the even further indebted employer of Sophie Fellman, the City Observer, spewing in its wake, among a few million dollars in unsatisfactory severance packages and the region’s remaining journalistic standards, my mother and Mrs. Fellman, bound by fate and unemployment.

And so by early September, when the news of such things could prove to be a social liability for me at school, the two women, one the last editor of the Herald’s once and former metro section, the other, a food and culture critic for the defunct Observer, found themselves working and wincing with defeated resignation for the same thinly distributed neighborhood news-journal, the Twin Valley Lookout.

I cannot say how or when the predictable process that drew my mother closer with each workday to Sophie Fellman began. I cannot say when the cool civility of their working acquaintanceship blossomed into the dependant friendship of the newly and inadequately re-employed. What I can say is that one day I came home to find Sophie Fellman sitting and drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Mrs. Fellman, who I knew by sight as a frequent volunteer at our school and by smell as vigorously reminiscent of a dentist’s office, had introduced herself as Zev’s mom, which was unnecessary, and then proceeded to tell me about all the great things she knew about me. She knew all of these things, she was eager to remind me, because her son had told her these things. This, along with her habit of braying loudly when nothing at all was funny and sitting with her legs too far apart, made my stomach hurt.

That was the first visit. After that, she was back at least once a week for coffee. And then it was for dinner. My mother picked me up from my father’s house after their first outing. She let me choose the radio station on the ride home, which made me nervous. I looked out the window and pressed my knees against the inside of the car door. And then as we waited at a red light, the back window fogging up with our breathing so far mercifully uninterrupted with speech, she turned the volume down and told me how nice it was to have a friend, how things could be difficult sometimes and that sometimes just having someone to talk to can make a big difference.

“You understand that, don’t you?”

I shrugged. “Green light,” I said.

But she smiled anyway, accelerating and giving the back of my neck a quick pinch. I understood, I’m sure is what she was thinking. Divorces can be so hard on a kid.

The night that followed was worse. I was watching T.V. after dinner and my mother came out of the bathroom and excused herself for just one moment.

I sat up and looked at her.

“I said, excuse me for just one moment,” she said again.

She fidgeted and looked away. I didn’t understand. I was watching T.V. and she was my mom and there was nothing to excuse. “Excuse me” is something she said to people on the bus or at the supermarket or to the mailman whenever she had to squeeze around him in the hallway. “Excuse me” is something she said to strangers.

“I just need to run out for a quick second.” She paused at the door. “Everything is okay.”

Out the bay windows I watched my mother cross the street to the Fellman family’s small white car. The engine was off, ticking and clicking as it cooled, and Sophie Fellman was sitting in the driver’s seat. I watched my mother get in, and then I watched, in the copper-colored streetlight that filtered in through the car windows, as she started to cry. I watched Mrs. Fellman reach her thick, wrinkled arms across the center divide of the car interior, letting them drape around my mother’s neck, looking like bags of wet oatmeal. The two sat like that in the car for over a half-hour and I sat too, watching out the window and watching one show and then the next flicker on the glass in front of my face and realizing that this small white car was the same one that I saw every day at school. Every day it would arrive promptly at the bell and every day Zev would tuck his backpack in the trunk and climb in the backseat, always in the backseat, even when nobody else was riding up front. And I thought about how my mother had said “excuse me” to go sit in that car, a car that probably reeked of steamed vegetables and rattled with half-empty inhalers, and she had gone there to cry.

Soon after that, the two were discussing the possibility of Zev and I getting together. Mrs. Fellman began referring to us as “you boys.”

And so, flicking my big toes back and forth inside my wet socks and watching the wrong bus go by for the second time, I stayed outside the shelter of the bus-stop and away from Zev. I looked at my watch. My father had given it to me for my birthday a month before. Across its face, a ninja threatened me unenthusiastically with a katana. The hands of the clock weren’t even swords, which seemed to me like an obvious oversight on the part of the manufacturer. It read three-thirty, but it was much too dark out for that.

“My mom had a chiropractors appointment today,” Zev said, rice-cracker crumbs falling from his mouth. Or at least not looking up, this much I assumed. I pushed the mode button on my watch. The screen display on the right began flashing the month, 11, and there was the sound of tearing fabric that was probably supposed to be the swinging of a sword. I pressed mode again; another sheet was ripped in half somewhere behind the ninja, who did not seem particularly concerned. I pressed it again and again. Maybe with the distance between us and the cars and wrong busses splashing by through the puddles and my understandable fascination with this spectacular new watch, a watch that my father had purchased for me even though it had violent imagery which Zev was probably forbidden to see, maybe I couldn’t hear Zev talk about his mom and her chiropractor. Maybe he would give up.

“She has a bad lower back,” Zev explained. I imagined him wiping his nose unsuccessfully with a hankie. I imagined that day’s lunch still stuck in his teeth, slowing decomposing against his swollen pink gum-line, tainting his every word with an unspeakable odor. I didn’t turn around; I kept pushing the button. Rip Rip Rip.

“Sometimes it will act up when she’s exercising or moving her plants, but sometimes it just flares up for no reason at all! Like she’ll lean down to pick up her keys and…”

And then from around the corner five blocks away, the bus finally emerged, its window wipers batting furiously across its flat face.

“My dad says its because she doesn’t stretch,” I stared at the street and waited. When Zev spoke again his voice was clear and soft. I could almost feel his rancid breath on the back of my neck.

“But she says it’s because of stress. Like your mom and her eczema problem.”

I turned around. Zev was standing directly behind me. There was no food in his mouth or stuck in his teeth. His hankie was folded and tucked neatly into his pocket. The dark sky and pouring rain made the skin on his face look clean and ghostly pale and the fat crowded around his face, beset around such a calm expression, made him look almost dignified.

Behind me, a pair of slowing tires hissed against the water on the street and cautiously cozied up against the curb. I imagined the bus idling behind me, its doors sighing open. Quickly I would turn, hopping the three steps in a single jump to where the driver sits with no expression, not knowing me or anything about me. I would brandish my bus-pass at him like a katana before turning to Zev and letting him know: “My mom doesn’t have a problem.” Then I would wedge myself past the sad and similar looking people standing at the front of the bus, disappearing behind a jungle thick with damp coats and hanging purses. And into that brightly lit silence I would leave Zev behind forever, waiting at the curb.

But turning, it was not the bus, but a small white car I found waiting. Rolling down the passenger-side window, a narrow faced man was leaning over the emergency break and smiling at me. He wore glasses and a beard and a single eyebrow.

“You better hop in, the bus is coming,” he called out over the noise of rain and traffic.

Zev walked to the back of the car and opened the trunk. I remained at the curb.

“Your mother mentioned that I would be picking you up today, didn’t she?” The man was still looking at me and I looked back. “I’m Zev’s father,” he said. “Didn’t your mother tell you about this?”

My mother had not told me about this. Zev was still standing behind the car with the trunk open waiting for me. His mouth was open to. He looked like an idiot.

“My mom doesn’t have a problem,” I said. Or maybe I screamed. The rain was coming down hard and loud now, it was stinging my cheeks and bringing tears to my eyes and suddenly, rumbling behind the Fellman family’s car, the bus honked. Inside I could see the bright white lights of the cabin full of people, soaked and with no room to sit.

“We really need to get out of the bus lane now,” Zev’s father said. His voice was calm and deliberate, like the slow, rhythmic tapping of a hammer on a nail. It was the tone of voice that let me know that I had become the problematic center of attention. Because now Zev and Zev’s father and the honking and expressionless driver and the thousands and thousands of adults standing in the bright white lights of the bus aisle were staring at me. And so with the back of my throat aching, I walked around to the back of the small white car, put my bag in the trunk, and climbed into the backseat.

20. Wandering

The village lay at the end of a small road that left the main highway around a quiet lacebark. The little road passed into a forest, rose up, descended amidst white pine roots knotted like the grasping hands of a crone. Here men did not go, only donkeys and other animals heavy with toil and accustomed to pain. The path came to a pond and then gently exited into a valley, but one knew already what was coming before coming to there, for the village could be heard before it could be seen. The dead air of autumn that had settled upon it was punctuated by ecstatic wailing and the beat of drums made from hide.

Nobody saw the older man who walked off of the path and into the clearing, and who wore the rough canvas shawl of a beggar with flax sandals. Nobody saw him stalk through the tall grass toward the village. Nobody heard his footsteps. In the village all eyes were turned inwards, and all minds were carried away by their bodies. The people were as if possessed, such was the fever that beset them. Doll-like, their bodies inexplicably broke from the ground without tension and yet with bestial power. There was no order to it, no reason except that of the drum, whose thunderous appeal was steady, and at whose call the villagers broke one-by-one into violent paroxysms.

The man’s face bore signs of great age, and he was not handsome. He did not smile, nor did he frown, and was not given to fidgeting. He was of great height and soft complexion, and seemed all the more so before these people, short-of-limb but thick and hardy, and rough and dark from labor in the open fields. Their clothes were crude but suited them; he seemed accustomed to his rude attire but unfit for it--costumed.

They began to eat, and one could see their bodies in their food. They dined on boar with great savagery, so that one knew death, if cruel, was still mercy for the creatures. They left the interloper alone, though perhaps he was no longer invisible to them. Their hands they made as claws, and they came away from the victims full of marrow, bone and blood. They ate the creatures to the skeleton, and then that, too, they broke to bits, and soon nothing remained. He, though, ate nothing, and was alone.

Now they were full, and their spirits tired. They made fires and rested around them. There was murmuring, laughter; some brought balls of rubber, and games were played with them, each side in turn winning and being vanquished according to etiquette. The night was a sure occurrence. It was plain that many times before it had been this way, and there was no uncertainty that, under the same moon and when the air was cold again, that this would come to pass once more.

The man walked the grasses, circled the village. It was treacherous and painful. Many times he fell, and his feet bled from the cruel underbrush. It was dark, then. The fires burned low, flickering over the sleeping faces of the village. Now the villagers were still; some smiled from their dreams, some snored. Only he, the outsider, moved, so restless in that somber night as to seem foolish. He stopped, suddenly, when the last voice slurred into sleep, looking to the path and to the woods. The village he looked at again. No one looked back, and he disembarked the way he had come.

In the morning it was commented amongst the women that a stranger’s footprints had been seen leading from the pines. This, they attributed to the spies of a neighboring tribe, and at council war was agreed to. The men girded themselves, cutting the branches of the youngest trees and drying them in the sun. Many died with purpose, and did not see the moon or feel the chill of the night again.

The following year the festival came again, but was quieted by the loss of those killed, and he who did not belong.

The Great Empty North

Canadians grow up on survival fiction. While I can't say for sure that the same isn't true for Americans, there are a number of books, songs, stories, and movies that circulate in the blood stream of Canadian schoolchildren about the glory and danger of nature, the big empty thing that occupies most of our country. Trappers who live out in the woods killing mounties and beavers, kids who live for months at a time with no one around off their own instincts, stuffy, arrogant British explorers poisoning themselves and their crew on polar bear meat, that kind of thing. I wrote this, which I tentatively peg as the first chapter in a larger, ill-defined work in my head, thinking about my cottage, about nature, about the whole idea of the "outdoor adventure" lifestyle which was, when I last lived in Calgary, the source of a nice paycheck. I like the idea of a group writing blog, and I also like the idea of criticism from you guys, especially those of you who write more and better.

------------

1.
Daniel looked out over the stream, the wreckage of the plane, and the smooth stones and pebbles that made up the creek bed. There was some question in his mind as to how long he had been there; he was conscious for sunrise, watching the last flames of the planes engine flicker away, but he could not remember anything before that.

Was I on this plane?

At first, it didn't look like he had been. His clothes, hastily purchased at the Mountain Equipment Co-op only days before, were completely unscathed. Earlier, as he crouched over and stared incredulously at the burning wreckage of the Cessna, he remarked to myself that, stripped of its more traumatic elements, the image could be appropriated quite easily to an outdoor clothing catalogue. Get Back to Nature, it might say, in thick confident lettering, focusing the reader's attention on the serene, focused expression Daniel's face. The implication: Look how human this human is. Why aren't you this human? Of course, this human wasn't serenely focused at all. If anything, his face was two or three steps behind his brain, which was slowly piecing together the what, why, how, when, and where of his present situation.

His brain was also notably behind. It would be well after lunch (he guessed by looking at the sun) before he felt the ache of his broken ribs, and the long, superficial gash that stretched down the back of his arm surprised him almost two days later.

Daniel had often thought of living out in the woods on his own. "Survivalism", he always joked, was something of a hobby in his family. First, it was an occupation, as generations upon generations of individuals who contributed the necessary genetic data to make Daniel hunted, and traveled, and lived, as we would now put it, "close to nature". Now, drowning in material comfort, the Millers occasionally felt the need to head away from the cities and towns they occupied, heeding a call they say they hear and say they can not ignore. Thus, a hobby, like model train building or pederasty.

After a period of time that had no obvious beginning, Daniel stood up and took a look around. In every direction, mountains, each one jutting a fair ways above the tree line. To the north, across the stream from him, there was a clearing stretching about 20 metres in to a dense wall of pine trees. The grass was a greenish-yellow, broken in places by shocks of orange lichen and grey-black rock, and it stood in strong contrast to the dark, impenetrable green behind it. Flying bugs of various shapes and sizes darted around the grass. From where Daniel stood, they all looked like fuzzy golden specks, shifting around randomly in the sun.

There, Daniel thought dumbly, is where I will set up camp.

I can't rush this. These things take time. Daniel stood at the edge of the river bed, trying to prioritize. Well, I probably need food, and some kind of shelter. Even in his thoughts, Daniel's delivery was underwhelming. He thought of all the survival stories he'd read and watched, and of how the antagonist was always very careful and deliberative. Even children (The Hatchet, Brian's Winter, The River), it seemed, were able to tap into some long dormant voice in their head. They just had to listen, and someone (themselves) would tell them what to do. But for Brian, that wasn't happening. He couldn't pick out a single place that would offer him good shelter, nor could he think of a good food source.

If I had a gun, Daniel mused, I could go find a moose, shoot it, and then cook it over a fire. I can definitely start a fire, I just need a good enough reason.

This certainly wasn't the dumbest idea Daniel had ever come up with, but it ranked competitively, somewhere alongside agreeing to travel north into the Rockies in the first place. For a man in his 20s, Daniel had accumulated an impressive collection of bad decisions; more impressive, still, that he had learned very little from them. If pressed on it, Daniel would describe the trajectory of his life, from childhood in Calgary, to university in Kingston, and then back West to a comfortable and meaningless career in the mining industry, as wholly inexorable. He was dragged (but not kicking and screaming) from institution to institution to occupation, led forward in life by something that he couldn't quite describe. That something was upper middle class wealth and privilege, but he preferred the notion that destiny had made a place for him at some grand dinner table in the future. Beyond that, the gentle, steady force that he imagined guiding him provided Daniel the ability to avoid painful, deep introspection. He was a man of faith, but he wasn't spiritual.

Clouds began to gather in the morning sky. A less absorbed individual would have worked this observation into a hypothesis: it's going to rain. Daniel, however, just kept thinking about a gun.

Would the pilot have kept one? At that, Daniel turned and faced the quietly burning wreckage. He hadn't thought about the pilot at all until now. Guilt and horror washed over him. He ran over to the plane and peered into the front.

It was a small float plane, with no more room than was necessary for the pilot (Dave) to fly Daniel up to the mine for a week's visit. Daniel peered through the charred frame of what must have been the cockpit window; everything was cooked black, beyond recognition. If Dave's body was still in there, Daniel reasoned, there's no way I would know it. He must be dead. He thought about a burial, or some kind of service. Daniel knew from their conversation in the plane that Dave was Cree, born and raised on the Tsuu T'ina reservation just outside of Calgary, but he wasn't sure how that should factor in.

Another blanket of hot shame enveloped Daniel. He had left a man to die, and he couldn't even remember it. Almost instinctively, he knelt down, and began to weep. Not far from him, two gray jays fought it out in a tree. Clouds continued to gather: within the hour, it would start to rain. On his elbows and knees, on the smoothed out pebbles in front of the burning metal bird, Daniel tried to make what he was experiencing seem real, but he couldn't.

On vous présente le blog

While the Chorography is an excellent for Sol to blab about Hannukah and me to threaten the lives of public figures, it doesn't do much for my creative itch. I dedicate this little blog to what I hope will be the abundance of good fiction that it will produce. Nothing is really off-limits; story formats can be short, long, or even in fragments. If you have a good idea, throw it up in whatever way it comes to you. The comments section should be a tool for everyone's favorite, constructive criticism. That's all, really.

Oh, and the name is in homage to Robert Walser, whose profound loneliness produced some of the most eccentric, and yet magnificent, portraits of quotidian madness.