Consumption (24 page)

It started snowing that night and by Sunday a full blizzard sat on the place and just howled. Everyone made it back into town okay.

Johanna’s telephone rang as she was returning to her apartment on the following Friday afternoon, her arms full of book reports and exams. She dropped them in a great cloudburst of paper and picked up the receiver.

“You sound flustered,” Doug said.

“I just got in.”

“Everything okay?”

“Yes. Hey, can I call you back in five minutes?”

“I’m not at home.”

“The office?”

“Nope.” His evasiveness irritated her.

“Where then?”

“The Rankin Inlet Airport?”

“What?”

“Surprise!”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“I’ll come get you.”

“Whew.”

“Place has you a little frightened?”

“A little. There’s an archway made of caribou antlers outside the airport door here.”

“I’ve stopped even noticing that.”

“You should hurry.”

“I’m on my way.”

In the airport Doug was sitting on one of the benches wearing an enormous bright-yellow down coat that ballooned off him as if it were inflated. When he stood to greet her it hung below his knees. And he held his arms out akimbo like a child in a snowsuit. Johanna smirked.

“I said, ‘I want the warmest coat you have.’ ‘The
very
warmest, sir?’ he said. ‘The very warmest,’ I said. ‘It won’t be cheap or fashionable.’ ‘I don’t care,’ I said.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d drop in for a visit. Spontaneous, like.”

“What did you think I would say if you had asked me beforehand?”

“No.”

“So, maybe, this is a bit of an intrusion.”

“I was hoping the coat would inspire some pity for me.”

“Do you have luggage?”

“Right here.”

“Let’s take it to my place.”

When they stepped through her doorway, Doug whistled as he took in the items lying on the kitchen table: her sealskin boots, rabbit-fur hat, and windpants. A VHF radio was charging in a wall
outlet, and a fishing rod stood in one corner, a large, green and malevolent-looking lure hanging from its tip.

“It’s about what I pictured.”

“So let’s talk about why you are here.”

“Impulse. Same reason you are.”

“Except that you’re here because of
your
impulses, and I’m here because
of your
impulses.”

“Those damn impulses.”

“Well, I would agree.”

Then he stepped forward and kissed her, his mouth just touching hers, barely perceptible but felt everywhere, all at once. She breathed in and she was done for. He pushed himself closer and they were up against the door, and near parboiling themselves in goose down. She was hungrier than she had allowed herself to understand, and when his hands reached her hips, she bit her own lip and then, when that didn’t work, she bit his.

From a distance it would have looked like violence. He held her wrists above her head, her arms straight up and against the wall; she lunged at him and her forehead struck his lip, splitting it, blood running down his chin and over the front of his throat. He kissed her hard, and when he pulled away blood was streaked over her mouth like an angry welt. Her lips chased his, as he arched his neck backwards; she caught him by his bloody throat, and kissed him there, where the windpipe dives under the sternum. He let go of her wrists and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, shuddering, as she bit him again and again.

In the coffee shop the following afternoon they sat not speaking, staring stuporously at one another. They each had bruises along the length of their collarbones and the pressure of their trousers on the front of their pubic bones was painful. Everyone in town knew that Johanna had a visitor. The teenagers crowding the coffee shop studied him and, especially, they studied their teacher’s look of exhausted satiety, a look the kids knew well, being young and living in a place with limited diversions.

When they got back to her apartment the door had only just clicked behind them when they began pulling each other’s clothing off again, shaking their heads as they did so. They paused only to fish out the tube of personal lubricant from Johanna’s coat pocket, which they had picked up at the grocery store. Evidence of more foresight that she would have guessed her benumbed brain capable.

She put him on the plane the following day. They said almost nothing to one another as they walked from her car to the airport. When his plane was loading he turned to kiss her and the next thing they knew an apologetic flight steward was poking him on the shoulder. She felt so happy she had become stupid. Her thoughts did not extend beyond the intense and unprecedented pleasure of this moment. She felt bite marks all over her body, the muscles along the inside of her thighs ached, and her shoulders and knees were made of gelatin.

As his airplane took off she felt as if a film had been pulled off her. Off her entire body, and from her mind, or whatever portion of it houses desire.

The Igloo Hotel in Baker Lake had been a thumping, slamming, and flatulent particleboard-panelled box for the week that the construction crew had been in town. Balthazar had groaned inwardly at the noise and imposition of having to share his lodging with chainsmoking, enormous Albertans who smelled of wheel-bearing grease and spoke of only one thing: the prohibition on alcohol in this and all the other hamlets along Hudson Bay. When he returned from the nurses’ station after work on Friday to find the building disgorging itself into three awaiting GMC Crew Cabs, his pleased surprise was soon displaced by the silence of the hallway as he walked its length to his room.

He had to stay on in Baker Lake for the weekend to attend clinics scheduled for Monday and Tuesday before he could return to
Rankin Inlet. And he would have nothing to do. The nurses were accustomed to not having a doctor in town, preferred it actually, and he knew they would not call him in over the weekend for anything less serious than a decapitation.

He had been looking forward, he realized, to the prospect of grumpily listening to the inane conversation of the Albertans, as they played cards and chewed tobacco and told obscene stories about women of their acquaintance in Yellowknife. Now he was alone in the hotel, and would only be joined for a few minutes at mealtimes by the cook, Martha, an elderly Inuk who spoke no language he had ever heard and delivered white ceramic plates of sodden mashed potatoes and pork chops as resilient as Tupperware to his table. By the time he set down his stethoscope on the bed and began to contemplate the two days stretching before him, he heard her slamming the door as she left for home. It was five-thirty. The manager, Brian, who surfaced from time to time during the middle of the week, was out on the land fishing. Through his window, Balthazar could see light snow beginning to fall obliquely in a rising wind.

He wandered through the darkened hallways, turning on lights. In the kitchen he found a plate of turnips and corned-beef hash with a sheet of Saran Wrap over it, a little cloud of condensation in the centre, with a similarly filmed pitcher of orange Kool-Aid beside it. He carried his meal into the dining room, sat down at the long table, and wearily peeled off the Saran Wrap. He probed the food with a fork, then ate it, in the absence of any alternative, and drank the Kool-Aid like it was medicine. The squeaking of his knife and fork on the plate echoed through the empty dining room. There was a television mounted on the wall, but Balthazar could not find the remote, so he carried a chair underneath it, climbed up, and reached for the controls. Perched on the chair on tiptoes, he cycled through the satellite package until he found the news. He climbed down and resumed his efforts against the corned-beef hash.

Ronald Reagan was having his final meeting as president with Margaret Thatcher. The two of them looked like desiccated mannequins
carved from weathered walnut as they grimaced out at the news photographers from the podium. The broadcast shifted to English soccer hooligans brawling in Marseilles and then to floods in the Mississippi Valley.

Balthazar went into the kitchen to boil some water in order to make instant coffee. He put his dishes in the sink and walked back to his room, carrying his coffee mug. He turned the television on there. He was agitated with boredom and it was only Friday evening.

He opened his suitcase and found his medical journals. Every time he turned a page his eyes rose and he surveyed the room. If he could, he would have simply lost consciousness until it was time to get up and go to work Monday morning. He could happily do without the next two days of his life.

Restless, he shoved his journals back in his suitcase and got up to pace. In the shadowed hallway, the night glow shone in through the small square windows, built high up on the wall so that they wouldn’t get covered with snow in the winter. Outside was an opaque swirling mass: a storm rising quickly. It had stormed twice a week since the fiasco of the town meeting. Everyone was happy that they had enough meat. The Ikhirahlo Group had announced it was holding a special Christmas party that year, flying in Stompin’ Tom Connors as entertainment. The paltry attendance at the town meeting had been taken as acquiescence to the mine going ahead, and the South Africans had been delighted. Stompin’ Tom was the least they could do.

Balthazar watched the storm coalescing through the window and his spirits sagged. He wished he had scheduled this trip differently, wished he were back in Rankin Inlet listening to obscure music with the priest. There it was: his principal companion in life was a priest who scarcely knew him, whom he knew even less.

He brooded on the state of his apartment when he had returned home last time and, worse, when he had left it again. He lived like
an adolescent. What could be so difficult about the idea of washing all the dishes in the sink before leaving town for three months. Or even, for God’s sake, draining the dishwater from it?

The wind rose higher and Balthazar thought about the hotel manager, out on the land this late in the year. He did not know whether Brian was with one of the local families, or whether he even had a tent. He assumed he must. Storms happen all the time and people mostly survive them. Then the whole building shook and he thought, But how?

A storm as big as this meant that nothing would happen in the nursing station for several days. When the wind settled and the air cleared, there might be business: hunters and fishers caught by surprise, straggling in with frostbite.

In moments such as these he had long been in the habit of contrasting his brother and sister-in-law’s life to his own. He had always thought of them as exemplars of competence and structure, and had wondered why order should come so easily to them and not at all to him. They got up in the morning and started looking around for bills to pay, laundry to wash. He woke up in the morning and wished he hadn’t.

This time that picture didn’t hold. He tried to imagine his brother drinking, Angela yelling. But still. They both went to work, they kept their house up, attended the parent-teacher meetings. What was the difference between him and practically everyone else he knew?

Back in his room, moving robotically, he unzipped his toiletry kit and unwrapped a leather case. Inside was a handful of plastic syringes and ten vials of morphine sulphate, some alcohol pled-gettes, and a rubber tourniquet. He tied the tubing around his bicep like he was performing a religious ritual. He tore the alcohol pled-gette open with his teeth and swabbed the crook of his elbow. His brachial vein bulged purple in the weak light. He stripped off a syringe wrapper and broke open the glass morphine vial. He drew out ten milligrams, holding the vial to the light and flicking the syringe, watching the bubbles in the cylinder break loose and float
up toward the needle. He pushed on the syringe until all the bubbles, and a thin stream of water and morphine, sprouted from the needle point. By this time his arm was starting to feel cold. He straightened it and slid the needle into his skin. There was a dimpling, which Balthazar watched, anticipating what was to come, and then the needle pushed through and into the vein. He could feel a subtle popping as the tip of the needle found its place. He drew back on the syringe and watched a crimson flower open in its barrel. He slowly pressed on the plunger and watched the crimson flower crumple, fold in on itself, and disappear. Even as the syringe was half-empty, he felt a metallic taste in his mouth, and then there was a warmth settling over him, crawling up his arm and sliding down his chest, filling his skull. Happiness was upon him.