February Read online

  JOHN WAS IN a youth hostel in Tasmania the evening after the astonishing phone call from Jane. He had paid extra for a private room but in the kitchen down the hall there was a woman from Sydney, Australia, along with her daughter, cooking a meal. He wandered into the kitchen, and when he sat down the chair scraped over the tiles.

  He said at once about Jane and the baby. He said about Iceland. He told the whole story. The woman from Sydney chopped onions, one hand on the knife handle, the other on the top of the blade. The knife rocked hard, up and down, and the finely shredded onion piled up, and John’s nose hurt and his eyes watered.

  I’ve been to Iceland, the woman said. I had my throat slit in Iceland. John looked and saw that she had a thick white scar across her neck.

  He had dreamt, the night before, a pedal-operated flying machine, creaky, with some kind of animal skin stretched over the wings. In the dream he had decided to land on the roof of Atlantic Place at home in St. John’s. This was how he practised lucid dreaming. He became aware that he was dreaming and he tried to change the course of the dream. He tried to make it bend to his will. This time he wanted to land the flying machine on the roof of a building a few streets up from his mother’s house. Then he would climb down the fire escape and walk home.

  He had managed to fly, in the dream, to the outskirts of the city. But at the last moment the dreamscape morphed out of his control and he’d crashed in a marsh of bakeapple bushes.

  When I was a student, the woman in the kitchen said, I worked in a cod factory in Iceland. This was years ago. I had a station on a conveyor belt that ran over a light table. I was checking for worms in the cod.

  She took the chopping board to the stove and scraped off the clump of onion and it fell in the pan and the hot oil roared. Checking for worms, fillet after fillet after fillet, she said. She slid the spatula under the onions and they hissed and stuck and she tossed them over.

  Last night, John suddenly remembered, he had also dreamt a fish on a chopping block and he had forced himself, in the dream, to examine the fish very closely so he could see each individual scale, opalescent and silver, tinged with blood. But when he got to the gills of the fish, the skin lost its scales and became pink and wrinkled, and the fish had a baby’s face. He had awoken exhausted.

  The woman’s daughter was chewing gum and she was about seven years old. The child sat with one knee drawn up on the chair, reading a comic book.

  A bloke from England, the woman said. Comes in, decides to joke around, turns the hose on me, he had no idea about the pressure. This was a pressure hose used for cleaning the concrete floor. Everybody in the factory just stopped, the woman said. The machines shut down all at once. She was cupping a pile of bean sprouts and she opened her hands and let them fall in with the onions.

  They were all looking at me, she said. I reached up and touched my throat and looked at my fingers and there was blood, and next thing, I couldn’t breathe. The water from the pressure hose had cut my throat and I couldn’t breathe and I passed out.

  After his father died, John had a vivid recurring nightmare. Every night, for a long time, a presence would seep through his bedroom door. An evil presence, in the form of a cloud, wet and cold. It swirled over his bed, full of weather and stars, and settled on his chest, and as it grew heavier, John felt a paralysis creep through him until he couldn’t move. Then the cloud took on the form of a naked old woman who squeezed her hands over his throat. He’d feel himself suffocate. Sometimes it was an old woman, sometimes it remained a cloud, but always he’d felt awake, alert with terror, and he could not breathe.

  Then John would wake for real, soaking wet, his hair stuck to his face, sometimes screaming. If he screamed, his mother would come and hold him. He began to sleep with his bedroom light on and insisted all the bedroom doors in the house be left open at night. An old woman whose face changed shape; or sometimes there was no face, but she climbed on top of him anyway.

  John’s mother had sent him to the guidance counsellor at school. The counsellor said John had been visited by the old hag. He said that in outport Newfoundland they used a thing called a hag board. A piece of wood with nails driven through one side that you could strap to your chest, nails standing out, and the hag couldn’t sit on it. It was folklore; it wasn’t true. Nobody really used a hag board, the counsellor had said, but the old folks talked about it.

  There was a hag board, the counsellor had said, made by an artist, in the Newfoundland Museum on Duckworth Street.

  John could also see, the counsellor had said, the doeskin dress and moccasins of Shawnandithit, the last of the Beothuks. Shawnandithit’s skull had been taken off to the British Museum and lost during the bombing of London, along with lots of other skulls that had been collected from all over the world like trophies. Hundreds of skulls, the man had said, in glass cases, and the roof caved in and the glass popped and all the skulls rolled together and that was it, you didn’t know who was who.

  They got me to the hospital, the woman told John. She was slicing a deboned chicken breast into thin strips. And sewed me up.

  I have a bottle of wine, John said.

  Wine would be nice, the woman said. The child turned a page of her comic book and blew a bubble that burst over her nose and chin like a mask.

  It was dark all day and all night in Iceland, the woman said. She was reaching up into a cupboard but could not reach. She drew a chair over and climbed on it and got the plates. I never saw the sun, she said.

  John knew he should have helped her but he was thinking about Jane’s phone call. He was thinking about Jane hanging up and how he had no way to get in touch with her.

  The woman put three plates on the table along with forks and knives, and she lifted the lid on a pot of basmati rice. A huge billowing of steam lifted up. The lid was hot and it clattered into the sink.

  Just watching all day for worms, the woman said. The stink of fish. And then my throat. The British guy on top of me, his hands around my throat. Holding my throat together.

  The school counsellor, it seemed, had wanted John to know he was right to be afraid. There were very real things in the world to be afraid of. He had taught John some lucid dreaming techniques. These will help you cope, he’d said.

  There’s more, John had told the counsellor. He shifted in his chair, one leg kicking the desk in front of him rhythmically. She does stuff.

  Sexual stuff, the counsellor had said.

  It’s terrible, John had said.

  You orgasm, the counsellor had asked.

  Yeah, that, John had said.

  I hope you like ginger and chili, the woman said. This is a dish with lots of hot spice.

  Where’s the father, John asked. The little girl’s father?

  I don’t have a father, the little girl said. She turned a page of the comic book.

  When I was in Iceland, John said. It was twentyfour solid hours of light. We never slept.

  … . .

  Joke, 1981

  CAL WOKE TO somebody hammering on his door. Men shouting the rig was going down. She’s going down. He leapt out of bed to hit the light switch and his feet were wet. Water rushing under the door and more water through the door frame and the door was jammed. Something was holding the door shut and he banged on it with his fists and must have hit the lamp because the light was rocking on the bedside table, and he shouted, Let me out, there’s a man in here, let me out.

  Cal told Helen about it over a plate of spareribs. The door gave and there were the boys, killing themselves laughing. They were doubled over. They had poured a bucket of water through the crack and held the door shut, listening to him bawling.

  There’s a man in here, there’s a man in here.

  Killing themselves, Cal said. Laughing on the other side of the door.

  Helen put the plate in front of him. She had parboiled the spareribs and then dumped a full bottle of barbecue sauce over them and left the ribs in the oven on low heat for the whole day, and the house was fu
ll of the smell. It was his favourite meal.

  Often it was just the two of them in the kitchen and Helen would have a beer. Cal would look down at the plate before he touched it. His arms resting on the table.

  It looked like he was giving thanks, Helen thought, but he was taking the time to recognize that the floor was solid under his feet.

  The rig was big enough that the men could not feel the water moving beneath them, but they felt a marked difference in their balance when they came on shore. Cal would let the plate sit in front of him and he would notice how solid the floor was, and the table and the house and the ground beneath the house.

  Then he would pat down the mashed potato with his fork. He always started that way, patting the potato, rallying the peas into one corner with the side of the fork.

  Helen made sure to feed the kids early on the first night Cal was off the rig. The children would practically knock him over when he came through the door. They’d tackle him. John climbing onto Cal’s neck, Cathy with her arms and legs wrapped around his leg, Lulu flat on the floor clutching his ankle. He’d stagger into the living room with them clinging to him. Or he’d come through the door and they’d keep watching TV. They’d move towards him with their heads turned towards the TV. They would keep watching and they’d hug Cal loosely without even knowing what they were doing.

  There had been a bad list on the rig a few weeks before it went down and the men all went running for the same lifeboat. They ran to the wrong boat. Each man had an instinct about the direction to take and it was the wrong instinct. The rig was the size of two football fields, and try to imagine how small in relation to the ocean around it. The crew had scheduled safety drills but they didn’t show up. They slept in. Men who had been on the night shift stuffed towels over the speakers so the announcements about safety drills wouldn’t wake them. They slept through.

  The men were afraid of the helicopter, especially when the fog was thick. If they muttered in their sleep it was about the helicopter. Nobody could imagine the rig going down. The men broke bones or lost a finger. That was common. They were expected to keep on working if it was just a bad sprain or a minor break. A severed pinkie didn’t get a lot of sympathy. That was an occurrence they saw every month.

  There are men who would kill to have this job: that was the wisdom they worked under. And: the helicopter was a terror. But it was impossible to imagine the whole rig capsizing.

  If the men did imagine it, they did not tell their wives; they did not tell their mothers. They developed a morbid humour that didn’t translate on land, so they kept it mostly on the rig.

  Cal patted the potato and told Helen about the men pouring the water through the door so that his feet were wet, but Helen didn’t get the joke.

  That’s not funny, she said. And Cal looked up and saw her and didn’t see her.

  They all knew they weren’t safe. Those men knew. And they had decided not to tell anyone. But it leaked out of them in larks and pranks and smutty puns, and it leaked out sometimes in a loneliness that made phone calls from shore hard to handle. A man would get his wife on the phone and have nothing to say. Great swishes of static and silence.

  Helen was busy with the girls. She could not think about the rig because she could not think about it. And John was a handful. Cathy was having problems with schoolwork too. Helen made sure the spareribs were so tender the meat was falling off the bone. She had a case of beer and she made sure the kids were in bed early. It wasn’t for Cal exactly. It was so she could sit down opposite him and watch.

  This was not a meal they had together, because she’d eaten already. She’d eaten with the kids because she was hungry and because she preferred to just watch him.

  He would look down at the plate before he picked up the fork and he was still on the rig in that moment and he could feel the ocean under him, though it was a kind of motion he never noticed when he was actually on the rig. It was a motion he felt only on land, and usually when he was dreaming. He could feel the bed sway while he slept, but only on land. It was the absence of the motion that he felt.

  He picked up the ribs in his fingers, pulled the meat off, and he licked his fingers. He licked his thumb first and then his index finger and his ring finger, and he took his time. He was mostly absent while he ate, not aware, intent on the food. He put the bones on a saucer.

  Cal had two separate lives, and when he and Helen had the money together they were going to buy a convenience store with gas pumps. They had gone over it, and if they both worked at a business like that they were pretty sure they could make ends meet. They were certainly putting money away. But they didn’t speak of those plans. Because if they talked about Cal giving up the rig, they were admitting the risk. And it was something they had agreed never to admit.

  … . .

  Jane, November 2008

  JANE TAKES A bus into Toronto from the airport, and then a streetcar towards a hotel she remembers staying in before, but she goes the wrong way. She gets off and crosses four lanes of traffic, dragging her luggage. It is almost dark and very cold and she has a number of books in her suitcase. The sidewalks are full of ice and the wind is at her back. Her hair stands out straight around her face. Snow swishes across the asphalt in thin veils, coiling and twisting up towards the sky.

  She had asked a man pushing a shopping cart for directions and now he is following her. His cart brimming over with garbage bags full of pop cans and plastic bottles, the wheels plowing through slush. Jane had given him money and he’d shoved the bill into his jeans pocket without looking at it.

  The man speaks in a kind of stage whisper, his eyes shooting back and forth, watching the crowd on the sidewalk, his words a melodic, insistent patter about dolphins and the beauty of marine life, the sway and flow of the ocean, and the creatures that break the surface, flying up out of the water and splashing down. He makes an undulating gesture with his hand, whistling through his teeth, blowing hard bursts of breath through his wet lips like the sounds of a dolphin frolicking in the waves. Coast of Mexico, he says, shaking his head as if he can see it stretching out in front of him.

  Jane excuses herself and ducks into a grocery store. She is hungry for something raw and sweet. Mist shoots down with a hiss from an overhanging shelf onto a bank of red cabbage and pale lettuce and bok choy and fennel. It drifts down onto the dirty beets and broccoli, and she runs her hand over the ruffle of wet herbs, the smell of earth and cilantro.

  Jane passes over the green apples and buys a single peach that comes in a fluted paper cup of dark purple. She is ravenous. There are three tables gathered under the sputter of a nearly broken fluorescent light and she takes a napkin from a chrome dispenser and rubs the fruit. The peach is so soft it is almost rotten and she bites it right to the centre. The pit bleeds a deep crimson stain into the orange of the flesh. She tries not to think of the texture of the peach skin; the fuzz gives her shivers like someone walking on her grave. Juice dribbles down her chin and she can feel a flutter from the baby. Her chin is sticky, and her fingers, and they smell like summer. The tips of her ears sting from the cold, and as she rubs them they begin to burn. It is as if the baby has felt the erotic pleasure of the peach and has kicked out to tell her.

  Back outside, the man with the shopping cart is waiting for her. The wind takes the heavy door of the store from her hand and smacks it against a cinder-block wall, and Jane struggles with the suitcase. One of the wheels is stuck in an iron grating. The man leaves his cart and grabs the suitcase, twisting it through, and then the shoulder strap of her laptop bag breaks.

  And boom—she knows. She does not want to have a baby by herself. The world is full of suffering. It is dark and cold. She is afraid of all that could go wrong. She needs a father for the baby. She needs John O’Mara.

  She thinks of that morning with John in Reykjavik, the Independence Day parade streaming past him, the brass and the drums and a glockenspiel, the crowds jostling against them both. How exhilarated they had been. He’d
gone back to find her scarf. She’d dropped her scarf.

  The dolphin man is going up the stairs of a streetcar backwards, dragging her suitcase.

  What about your shopping cart, she shouts. The suitcase bounces and jitters up the steps, and the streetcar’s folding doors clamp shut on it and open and clamp shut again. Then the dolphin man is inside, knocking his way to the back, the suitcase smashing against knees and hips.

  Mexico, yeah, Mexico, he whispers. He squishes his way through to the back of the streetcar, and he sits next to a woman who gets up and moves, and he slides to the window seat and slaps the seat beside him, and Jane sits next to him. The man has a pitted complexion and he is unshaven. His front teeth are grey and soft looking and a few are missing. He speaks to Jane as if they are deeply involved. He speaks as if his life depends on convincing her of something obvious and urgent.

  Surfing off the coast of Mexico with a pod of dolphins, the man says. Hundreds of those babies, they were just playing with me, man, leaping out of the waves, they were dancing, those fellas, they really knew how to have fun.

  Jane saw so much of this craziness while writing her thesis on the homeless in New York. She interviewed two hundred vagrants, an ethnography of indigence in the slums and projects. She discovered that the cold and the rain, hunger and loneliness, made people delusional. It was no more or less complicated than that. The world fell away from them or it blew through them. Scraps of dreams blew through.

  This man will sleep outside tonight, Jane knows. The streetcar’s brakes wheeze and there is a crowd waiting at the next stop. Someone dings the bell and the cold rushes in and swirls down to the back.

  Jane thinks of John the morning after she first slept with him. She’d wanted a lamb kabob and he had found her one and then he said: Your scarf. Where’s your scarf? And she touched her neck. The booming drums, and then somehow he ended up in the middle of the marching band, and he bent down, and when he stood up he got knocked on the head by a tuba. The members of the brass section scattered and the parade got backed up. There were unharmonious groans from the trumpets, and then they reformed the tight marching lines, eyes bulging with consternation, cheeks full of spittle, and John had her scarf. His fist shot up in triumph: the scarf of shantung silk she’d bought for herself in Santa Fe.