Consumption (16 page)

It was summer in the city and raining in a hot, steady drizzle. The water hitting the pavement around him steamed as it fell and carried the street dust out of the alleys in an orange slurry of cigarette butts and plastic pop bottle caps. The air, however, was washed clean; in this heat it would otherwise have smelled like a charnel house.

Balthazar’s fur-lined parka, poking out from his canvas pack, caught the cabbie’s eye as the scent of the untanned sealskin
kamiks
deep within his luggage caught his nose as they unloaded the cab. Balthazar paid the fare, gave a twenty-dollar tip, and pulled his trunks to the doorway and out of the rain. The doorman emerged from his office apologetically. His name was Samuel Tillman and he was accustomed to Balthazar and his travels. He hauled the trunk
out of the lobby and into the elevator. As they rode up, he inspected Balthazar’s gear silently. “How cold is it up there right now?” he asked, a bit of a ritual with them.

“Fifteen below.”

“Heavens.”

“It isn’t so bad. It’s getting warmer every day.”

“The AC in my apartment is out and I haven’t slept in three days. I wasn’t thinking that there was anything bad at all about the idea of fifteen below.”

“It’s easier to stay warm there than it is to stay cool here.”

“I believe it.”

Then they were at his floor. They made their way to his apartment door, swaying and banging and staggering with the weight.

“Did you ever think about getting one of those dolly things?” Balthazar asked.

“And render myself immediately dispensable?”

Balthazar dug his keys—unused for three months—out of his pocket. When the door was open he gave Tillman twenty dollars and then they lifted the trunk onto the throw rug in the front entrance. Tillman backed out, Balthazar pulled the throw rug/steamer trunk aggregate far enough away from the door to shut it, and then he dropped everything he was carrying in a great mound.

He looked around his apartment. Apparently he had been in a hurry the day he had left. Apparently he had had a convulsion of some sort while holding most of the undergarments he owned in his arms. An unstable slope of letters and magazines had fallen through the mail slot. There were spiderwebs on every window sash and the hollow chitinous bodies of dead roaches scattered across the hardwood floors. He leaned over the mound of mail—veins of home furnishing magazines and medical journals running within a substrate of Audi pamphlets. Here and there were personal letters, which he picked out. The occasional bill—he had paid most of these in advance, but whenever he went up north he usually forgot something. He scanned for final-notice stamps.

As he walked toward his washroom he shed clothing. He ran the taps long enough to rinse out the carpet of dust that had grown in the tub. Then he ran the cold water until the tub was almost full and climbed in, nearly flooding his washroom in the process. For the first time since he had left Rankin Inlet he felt as if he could fully exhale.

After he bathed he walked dripping into his bedroom and extracted clean clothing from his dresser, the non-flannel textures feeling strangely supple against his skin, a cotton shirt and linen trousers sitting on him lightly. He stepped into a pair of leather shoes that had once been shined and, grabbing a handful of the more interesting-looking mail, walked into the night. It was almost midnight now, the city still accelerating.

At the Burger King down the street from his apartment—the empty cardboard box from a Whopper with cheese and onion rings in front of him—he leaned back and looked out the window at the night. There were no stars visible, no aurora borealis, only a dark absence hanging above him and the other ten million people around him on every side.

His brother, an English teacher in Newark, had written, inviting him to visit his niece. He seemed to be under the impression that a) his mail was being forwarded to the Arctic and b) there were no telephones up there. Balthazar had no idea how such a distance had crept in between them. He would have to speak to his mother about that, see if she understood. But he’d actually forgotten to tell her that he was going north this last time, and there was a succession of postcards from her retirement community in Arizona, chiding him for not returning her calls. His father lived in Seattle and had not written, as he had not in several years now. His mother asked Balthazar in one of her cards if he had any news from him. They were all in trouble, Balthazar thought, if he had become the glue that held them together.

Simionie picked the kettle off the stove and poured the boiling water into a billy, the aluminum cylinder stained black from years of wood smoke and orange pekoe residue. Tea brewed in it was flavoured like smoke. He stirred it with his knife as it steeped, staring at the tea bags swirling together in the water. Victoria watched him and the cloud of steam rising out of the billy in the frozen air and lighting up in the thin light poking obliquely through the window.

They spoke in Inuktitut, the soft, palatal consonants of that language lapping against the walls of the cabin. Simionie was telling her a story about his grandmother who had disappeared off the boat. “She was walking with her first husband on the land south of Repulse Bay in
1945
and he slipped on a stone and broke his ankle.

“She carried him on her back, twenty feet at a time for two days and then she couldn’t lift him any more. He kept trying to get up and walk but his foot became more and more mangled and then it turned black. She stayed with him until he died and then she walked to the coast and found her uncle’s fishing camp. She said she never felt right after that.”

Victoria nodded and he poured the tea into their mugs. He added evaporated milk and some fly-specked sugar. He handed her a mug and sat down beside her on the bench beneath the window.

She said, “My grandfather used to help Dr. Moody in Chesterfield Inlet. One time a boy walked into town to get Moody, and he rode back on my grandfather’s dogsled, showed them the iglu where his mother was having a baby. The baby was breech, and stuck. I guess they finally got the baby out, but the woman’s uterus was so worn out by that point it couldn’t contract any more and she just kept on bleeding until she died. My grandfather slept with the baby on his chest that night, and carried him back to the town. He offered to raise him, but there were relatives who wanted the baby. He’s in Chesterfield Inlet now, Okpatayauk Iqapsiak—did you ever hear of him?”

“He moved here just a few weeks ago. Is living with Elizabeth Angutetuar.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Our parents must think we are children. The easy lives we live now.”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Lucky.” Simionie swirled the tea in his mug, watching the slurry of sugar and tea.

“They’d be wrong,”

“Would they?”

“They’re the lucky ones. Comfortable now, but not dependent on that comfort.”

“There’s only one generation that can be like that, though.”

“Yes.”

“Do you want more tea?”

“Yes, please.”

The little cabin was now steamed up so thickly that the light was diffused as if through sea water. Simionie lit a cigarette to accentuate the effect. They both laughed. Then Victoria asked him to put it out because it would leave a smell. They stopped laughing and he did.

Robertson lifted Marie off the chesterfield, where she had fallen asleep watching
Hockey Night in Canada
. The Montreal Canadiens had beaten Pittsburgh and all was right with the world. She had begun breathing heavily in the third period. Victoria and Justine had long since gone to bed and Pauloosie was out on the land with his grandfather, learning how to build an iglu properly. Robertson was touched by his daughter’s attempt to keep him company, and after he had turned off the television he watched her breathe for many minutes. As he leaned over her to kiss her, he paused to smell her breath, sweet and cool. Why did children’s breath never take on the scent of what they’ve eaten, he wondered. He glanced
at the half-full bag of ketchup-flavoured potato chips on the coffee table beside them.

He carried her down the hall, past his and Victoria’s room, past Pauloosie’s malodorous den (they must speak to him about whatever he was keeping or curing in there), and opened her door with his sock foot. Justine was revealed in her bed laying with her face turned to the wall and breathing lightly. He laid Marie down, and pulled the covers up to her chin. She turned onto her side and coughed lightly. He touched her cheek. There was something wet on his finger. Even in the dark he could tell it was blood.

TEN

ROBERTSON HATED
what he had been called here to do, and he hated the place where he had to do it. Layers and layers of grey Toronto skyline stretched out from the meeting-room windows, devoid of any contour or texture except asphalt, yellow haze, and carefully aligned rows of nursery-planted and regularly replaced trees. He had flown through here in
1967
when he had immigrated, and had spent a week staying in a boarding house on Bathurst Street. In each of the interviews he had had with immigration officials, he was advised to stay on in the city—it was where the future lay, the jobs, the careers. Robertson had looked at these men and wondered how they could be so daft about their own country. Toronto reminded him of nothing so much as the postwar cities of northern England: stolid and sad and restrained, bars emptying at eleven with relief. He couldn’t wait to get out of there.

It was a different place now, more different each time he returned. In the 1970s, the place had exploded with immigration. There was more colour and far less melancholy in the city, and the scent of rotis and curries and jerked goat hung in the air.

As he had ridden in the taxi from the airport, Robertson found himself resisting his own reappraisal of the place and realized that he had become, in an important way, old. As if his interaction with his son hadn’t already made that point. But more pressing to him
was his concern about Marie. She had been his favourite for years. In her diffidence and solitary habits he recognized himself as a boy, and he saw for her a future that would take her far from her home, just as he had been propelled from his. He hoped it wasn’t evident to Pauloosie and Justine how he felt about their little sister, but at the same time he knew that it probably was. The matter of favourites in families is complicated. In this instance, as usual, the favourite was the one who needed it the most. Pauloosie had been asserting his self-sufficiency since before she was born and Justine bore down on her own life like a train on a track.

On the walk from his hotel that morning he had thought about how elusive Pauloosie had become. When the boy was still young, Robertson had hoped that his son would continue to draw him into his wife’s culture, and he would draw his son into his own. Instead, especially since the stillbirth, the two became steadily more mysterious to one another. Just as Robertson’s own father had become to him, until Robertson had ebbed out of his birth family like the tide, impassive in the face of any special effort by his old man at Christmas or when he had come home from the pub drunk and affectionate.