All We Want Is Everything (17 page)

She’s given up on patterns and shamans. She just wants to get the stains out fast.

“I need them!” Peter screams. I drag him with my good hand toward the old den at the back of this failing house. We spent three weeks reinforcing its walls with two-by-fours and old deck furniture before Peter moved in. The ceiling is covered with soundproofing and insulation. Peter has pissed in every corner, so we bleach it once a week. The chemical scent rushes out in a cloud as I open the door. There is a mattress on the floor with a plastic bucket lying beside it. Peter is pleading with me now. His hands are groping at my waist, but we don’t feed him much these days. His muscles are shrivelled. You can see them through the skin.

The door is heavy. I invested in a fire door after he broke the first one down. Sometimes the lock slips and he sneaks out, but usually we maintain a vigil. Dina talks about surveillance footage, but I don’t want any evidence of this. I don’t want anything to remain.

“Give them back, let me take them. I need to plant them!”

I slam the door, twisting the lock with what’s left of my right hand. Peter is screaming again.

“I need them! I need them!”

I know it’s just a matter of waiting. Dina and I are expecting our first yowling ball of flesh this summer. The doctor says it’s going to be a boy. She wants to name him Aldous. I don’t ask her why. I want to name him Peter. Maybe give that name a second chance.

“They are mine! Someone needs to plant the weeds!”

I can hear my brother’s fists banging on the walls. I try to ignore the sound and turn on the TV. I watch the nightly news as they survey the bloody markings my brother left behind. The reporters have begun to call him the Great Satin. One newscaster giggles at the name. The camera zooms in close on the letters, but it avoids the headless rabbit corpse. I close my eyes and flex the remains of my right hand. Sometimes I can pretend the fingers are still there.

“Let me out, you stupid fuck! I need them!” my brother screams from behind our homemade padded walls. The lady on the TV talks about the recent graveyard transplant. A few corpses have gone missing, but authorities assure the community all the bodies will be recovered in due time. Dina is trying to sleep in the bedroom wearing industrial ear protection. Her door is leaning open. The headset looks like someone melted orange rabbit ears onto her skull. She says she wants to move, says she wants to leave this place. I’ve told her all of this is temporary.

“I need them!”

Given time, everything dies.

A weed whacker wakes me up at four
am
and I know it’s Harley again. He’s trying to get the Bulgarian family out of Unit 16; they have been sleeping with earplugs for the past two weeks of this ongoing siege. Harley doesn’t wanna call the cops because he still has a few plants growing in the ceiling of Unit 5. Last week he told me that he could taste the buds whenever he pushed his head up into the panels. The moisture makes the ceiling tiles sag over my bed.

I roll over and try to cover my ears with a pillow. The Woodson stands in a long row of motels down Kingston Road, boxed in by the One-Nite Inn and the Cardinal House. In the former outskirts of the city, now overgrown with townhouses and gas stations, these little shacks pay down the mortgage by renting out rooms equipped with hotplates and beer fridges, stuffing Eastern European families into twin bed suites with no hot water and calling them homes. My neighbours routinely bash their bodies against the wall while their three kids pretend to sleep in the same room. A couple days ago we were all trapped in the elevator again, but I didn’t bother to bring it up. Everything smelled like meat and chlorine. A man with a moustache kept slamming his fat hand against all the buttons every time the elevator rattled. Two tiny kids stared at their feet and poked each other. The Woodson only has two floors, but the stairs are filled with broken furniture and car parts Harley hasn’t figured out how to sell. I always take the elevator.

Chlorine filters through the entire place. Harley says the pool keeps everyone happy. He skims forgotten underwear, plastic bags and loose Kleenexes out of the water every morning. I search the bottom for change each night before I go to bed and try to figure out who goes swimming with coins inside their pockets.

The weed whacker hits the side of the building and shrieks out some displeasure. Raccoons respond from the roof next door. The Bulgarians remain fast asleep. They refuse to pay for the fish stolen from the aquarium in the lobby. Harley says he has it on video and suspects the oldest one sold it to another family in the One-Nite next door. Harley could smell it frying.

I open my window and look down into the courtyard. Harley’s got orange headphones over his ears, the kind I used to wear on the farm when we fired up the combine. I try yelling to him, but he keeps restarting the weed whacker again and again. He pokes the whirring wire end against the building again to make it scream so I slam the window shut.

Outside in the hall, the air-conditioner and ice machine compete with one another to shake the wallpaper loose once and for all. Every six minutes, the ice machine’s compressor kicks over like a police boot punching through the door. Harley tells all the tenants they’ll get used to the sound. He calls it ambience. He said the same thing about the fish.

I walk down the hall toward the elevator; the hallway is free from the mechanical torture going on outside. The T-shirt I’ve got on says Reddon Raiders. It’s long enough to cover the holes in my boxers, but it still smells like manure and guilt and all the other stuff you find back home. Reddon is miles away from Kingston Road; no one asks about that place. Bulgarians don’t inquire about family history or question young men they just met about the girls they used to take back into the fields. I don’t have a phone. Don’t have any calls about hospital bills or visitation rights or all the tests they want me to take for proof of whatever.

I pay for my room on a weekly basis and let Harley tell me all about his uncle who owned the place. Apparently, this uncle used to do a lot of laps in the pool and died at forty-seven in the middle of a backstroke. He fixed Chevys and worked with some Armenians to skim the local bingo hall. Harley was the one who found him floating in the shallows. Harley says it was the best thing that ever happened to him and I believe it. He spent most of the inheritance on hydroponic lamps and a tattoo of his dead dog Chuckles.

There is a baby in the hallway.

It stands right in front of me and doesn’t blink. The ice machine kicks over again, but the baby doesn’t move. It cocks its head and follows me as I back slowly towards my door. Things like this aren’t supposed to follow you. The baby only wears a diaper. It teeters back and forth; tiny feet sink deep into the shaggy orange carpeting.

“Uhm, hey buddy, err… Baby? Where’s your Mom?”

The baby takes a few more steps toward me and then falls directly onto its face.

“Shit, shit, shit… Okay, you okay?”

I lift the sweaty little bundle off of the floor. Its sticky face is covered with carpet lint. Drool drips onto my shoulder. The baby sags between my hands like a sack of dead leaves.

“Can you tell me what room you came from? Tell me something.”

The baby only groans and clucks into my ear.

I consider banging on doors, calling out names, all the good things I should do and then I remember the fat man in the elevator and the smell of his skin. The kids refused to look me in the eye as we sat there for an hour waiting for Harley to pry the door open. Sometimes you hear things in the dark. Harsh and splintered things in the wet air that float through the Woodson.

I avoid the elevator and take the stairs two at a time, dodging the broken chairs and discarded
Penthouse
issues stacked up on the landing. The baby babbles over my shoulder, but the words are just syllables strung together; they don’t display a pattern. The baby is wet and I can feel something leaking onto my skin. It’s deadweight against my chest. A bit of fur rustles in a pile of paper under the last set of stairs, but I ignore it and step out into the lobby. Moist air coats my face and the empty aquarium belches hot bubbles toward the ceiling. The NO VACANCY sign hisses every time a fruit fly ventures close to its neon heat.

Inside the manager’s office, the clock reads 4:15
am
and there are pictures of Harley with various tattoo models. He has printed his face onto the images with women straddling his chest and pressing inked fingers against their pursed and puckered lips. Harley’s face is the same in every picture. Some of the women have been cut into jagged pieces and line the edges of the frames. Harley is smiling.

I sit the baby down on a beanbag chair in the corner. Piss soaks my shirt, but the baby still refuses to cry. Its eyes follow the lava lamp in the corner as the red goo combines and separates over and over again. I search for the phone and try to avoid all the nachos littering Harley’s desk.

“Yo, what are you doing in the office, man? What’s with the fuckin’ baby? You know the Eurotrash still won’t give up, eh? I even tried tossing rocks at the windows, but they are holed up in there good and tight. I’m thinking of breaking down the door tomorrow—middle of the night covert ops shit. Maybe a baseball bat or something. Who are they gonna go to anyway, right? Illegal shits got no choice. I’ll ask Lazlo about it tomorrow when he has new tenants for me.”

Harley has the orange headphones tucked around his neck. The weed whacker dangles from his left hand. The baby continues watching the lava lamp in the corner.

“Just looking for the phone, man. Found this frickin’ baby upstairs just all by itself. Just standing there. Freaking crazy, man. Just standing there. You got a cell or something?”

Back in Reddon, we had a calf get out one night. Somehow it slipped through the gate and headed toward the iced-over pond all the cattle drank from in the summer. Nobody heard anything at the time. We found the hole in the morning; a jagged gash splintered in every direction by the animal’s weight. It went down deep. I didn’t bother looking for a bottom.

“You want the phone? You calling for what? I don’t want any cops in here, man. You know I got my projects going on and stuff. I got a lot of fingers in a lot of pies. Unit 5 isn’t even close to done yet and I still got my community service for the parking lot fight. Just go knock on some doors or something. It belongs to someone. It has to belong to someone. It’s a baby.”

I’ve watched Harley pull underwear out from the pool; I’ve found tiny T-shirts clogging the drains inside the bathrooms and spotted broken action figures with no heads standing in the windows on the second floor like damaged sentries.

“At four in the morning? You don’t just have a baby wandering around and no one noticing, Harley. You don’t just see that on a regular goddamn day. Where is the freaking phone?”

“Don’t call the cops, man. We still gotta work stuff out with Lazlo and his friends. Look. We will figure it out. Just keep it here and I’ll figure it out or whatever. You don’t wanna do anything stupid anyway. You need to breathe. You need to leave it here with me. Go for a walk. The baby ain’t yours anyway. How about I call Lazlo? He knows all the families in here. He’s the one who brings ’em in here in the first place. I’ll let his greasy face sort out this mess.”

Eventually the frozen calf floated back to the surface; its body remained trapped under the ice. One eye stuck to the other side, staring up into the snow until we tried to clear off the pond for shinny. It stayed there throughout the winter months. We found other ponds, but sometimes stumbled back toward the calf without thinking. Its pupil seemed to swallow everything whole.

“Just give me the goddamn phone, Harley. Lazlo is a freak. I don’t wanna deal with him.”

You couldn’t avoid its gaze.

“No.”

I took Cheryl there after she told me about everything. I told her this is what happens sometimes. That sometimes we make mistakes. She told me I was stupid. Told me the calf only drowned because it was alone. People aren’t alone, Cheryl said. People aren’t ever alone like that. I asked her if the other cows would have pulled it out if they had the chance, asked if they would’ve made a chain together or fashioned a rope out of their tails. She just shook her head and turned back toward the house. I waited until she pulled out of the driveway in her Oldsmobile before following her footsteps through the snow. A few months later I heard from the hospital and left for the bus station with my hockey bag and three hundred bucks.

“It’s a baby for Chrissakes. Just give me the goddamn phone, Harley. I’ll meet them outside. Lazlo won’t have to know about any of this—”

A weed whacker looks a lot bigger when it is swinging towards your face. Bits of wet grass hit my skin. I stumble back toward the wall and grab the lava lamp, tearing it free from its socket. Harley is shrieking something about rent control and fire code violations. I notice his pupils dilating as he fires up the weed whacker. It spits and coughs grey clouds into the air as he swings it across the room again. The lava lamp sails toward Harley’s head and the baby starts wailing as I scoop it up into my arms. The calm flow of the liquid splatters across Harley’s bearded face when the lamp shatters. I slam the office door behind me as he swings the whacker against the wall. I run toward the courtyard, screaming for some help, but my voice is hoarse and we all lock our doors in this place. The baby is soaked, a wet towel against my chest. The concrete slaps against my bare feet. I can hear women waking up and running showers in the dark. I can hear men pulling on boots and untying stubborn laces with their curses. Kids remain quiet in the darkness, waiting for some meagre sunlight to expose what it can inside this place.

The courtyard is empty and the pool is still. Small gnats drown slowly across its surface; they are drawn by the smell. The door clatters open behind me and the weed whacker shrieks as Harley bashes it against the concrete. They will tear this place down some day and find all the things we tried to hide inside the walls on Kingston Road. All the families smuggled on planes and booked in twin bed suites. With flashlights in the dark, they will find every one of us hiding behind ice machines and shower curtains, asking for a second chance, a bargain, a reprieve, a pardon for all the things eventually discovered between mattresses and deep down inside the drains. Harley tries to fire up his machine again; he screams that we all need to settle down for a second and I feel its wet wire nip at my back. The courtyard leads nowhere. All the windows I can see remain shut and blinded.

I jump into the pool.

The water is warm. I try to find the bottom with its endless coins, but I’m still holding the baby to my chest. I want to linger at the bottom, to wait out Harley until he gets tired or stoned again, but I can feel the baby shake against my ribs. Its lungs are too small; everything is too small. They found Harley’s uncle floating here after Harley called the police. Lazlo said these things happen sometimes, happen to certain men. I know Harley can’t bring his weed whacker into the water. The surface is glowing above us, but nothing kind waits up there.

There is a weight inside my hands and I can feel it beating. I push off the bottom of the pool with both feet, holding the little body above my head. I try not to think about the other little bodies inside this place, stashed here by men and women with numerous passports; all their files are sorted by date of birth. I don’t know if Harley will wade into the water with his broken tools before someone calls the police. I don’t know if anyone will call the police. I realize I don’t know a lot of things, that I don’t want to know a lot of things—I see only fragments from that elevator ride flickering on and off again. Water breaks above and chlorine burns my eyes.

The baby starts to shriek because it’s not alone.