Greetings from the Vodka Sea (11 page)

Near closing time a Chinese boy came into the store. He went straight to the magazine rack across from the sales desk. He seemed familiar; he did not notice Diane stare as he leafed through the hockey and bodybuilding magazines. Diane recalled the skinny, boyish face of the ambulance attendant; it was him, she was sure of it. After a moment, the boy reached for one of the adult magazines. They always did this, linger a while in the sports section before pawing the adult magazines. After looking at four or five, the boy selected one and moved towards the counter, trying to hide his erection with the magazine. He stopped on the way to select a bottle of cheap shampoo. They always did this. The boys never bought just a magazine. They always bought something else as a cover, an excuse.

When the boy reached the counter, Diane said “Hello,” asked, “How are you?” The boy grunted. “Fine.” He looked away. Diane could see that his hands trembled. She grabbed the magazine and turned it to read the price, her fingers scarcely an inch from the strip of bare skin between the waistband of the boy's track pants and the bottom of his t-shirt. On the cover was a picture of a young woman with auburn hair, just like Diane's. Her mouth was open a tiny bit, and she held her breasts with both hands as if she suddenly had to stop them from spilling out onto the floor.

“Goodbye,” Diane said, as the boy turned to leave. He stopped at the door.

“Goodnight.” His voice was calm. He did not turn around.

Diane thought about the Chinese boy on her way to the hospital. She imagined that his name was Ricky. He was twenty-four years old, although he looked much younger. Ricky sat beside her in the car, and she ran her free hand along the inch of bare skin just above the waistline of his track pants, then she undid the string that held the track pants up and slipped her hand inside. His penis was slender but very hard. She imagined that she took him to the empty yellow house and that he kissed her by the big window in the kitchen, and that he held her wrists in his strong, small hands when they made love, he held her wrists away from her body so firmly that she felt she could not move. She was under his control. And as they made love Ricky growled obscenities at her: “This sleep,” his voice was hesitant,“is a paradox. We sleep and wake. The eyes are shut, but there is much physiological activity: gross muscle movement, vocalization, erection of the penis . . .”

They lay side by side a long time in utter quiet. Diane believed that only in such silence could they communicate.

There was no doubt about it. Dougie's wrist was narrower, a good centimetre smaller all round. His index finger measured 0.5 cm shorter than on Thursday. Dr. Sidhu said it was to be expected, the boy's body atrophied. “The muscles and tendons, they get no work, see? They contract, they withdraw to give the appearance that the boy shrinks. He probably is in fact shorter than when he came to us.”

Diane imagined her son growing smaller and smaller, his skin drying and cracking, mud in the sun, until he was a fragile insect tiny enough to fit in her apron pocket. She saw herself hop around the kitchen, tea in paw, a kangaroo mother and her larva.

“I'm sure it's for the best,” Mrs. Flannigan said. “It's almost like a miracle, if you think about it. It's almost like a miracle in reverse.”

Diane felt sick. Why do I even let her come with me? She excused herself and left the doctor and her mother-in-law standing in the waiting room. She ran to her son's room and dropped on the end of the bed. Diane was crying now, the tears just came. She shook her son by the shoulders, first gently, then with increased force until his head swung with such violence Diane feared she might snap his neck. “Wake up! Wake up, god damn it!” She let his head drop to the pillow. She put her hands to her throat and cried. Not loud, just the short, irregular breaths of a woman gasping for air.

Little Doug was looking at her, she felt it. If she lifted her head, his eyes would be open, silent emerald eyes, just as she remembered them. He did not speak, just looked at her, his eyebrows furled in a puzzled expression. Diane felt for his hand. “Hello?” she said. He seemed alert and calm, there was no mistaking that he was awake. Diane heard his head turn on the dry linen. He was looking out the window. Then his breath stopped, his eyes closed and his breath stopped. The mother opened her eyes.

Little Doug was awake. Little Doug was dead. Those were the simple solutions. Big Doug was fat and insensitive. Diane was adrift in her loneliness. Little Doug was awake or dead or something at least that was not lost somewhere in between, something that was not this shrinking energy, diminishing at every moment until it became invisible existence. Little Doug was awake or dead, those were the correct solutions, the perfect, disappointing conclusions; but still he went on sleeping.

Diane lifted her legs onto the bed, she lay on the bed, wrapped her arms around her son. She closed her eyes. Let me sleep, dear God, let me sleep. She reached in her pocket for the small bottle of pills Dr. Sidhu had left her. A moment later she felt herself drift away, she felt her skin retract as the slow air-conditioned wind blew across it. She imagined herself falling asleep, shrinking in half-lives until she was visible only to the eye of a seagull, an atom-woman entwined in the arms of her sub-molecular son, the invisible particle lost in the space of a secret lover's fist.

The Raindrops, Not Unlike Her Tears

W
hen I last saw Marlene alive she said that everyone has a claim to fame, even if it's something trifling — she used words like that, “trifling” — it's righteous (righteous!) in the eyes of Our Lord. Perhaps that's why they rubbed her out. She thought too much.

Me, I hardly think at all, and if I do think, it's just about nothing. I'll try and guess the weight of someone walking by, a stranger. I'll remember the lyrics of a song popular forty or fifty years ago, when I was young and the world was my oyster. I'll speculate on the number of shovelfuls of dirt in a certain kind of pit or hole, say, a shallow grave.

I enjoy manual labour.

Me and Marlene were something, though, in those days, by which I mean in the days when she was still alive. We were two of a kind. Two peas in a pod, so to speak. Between us, we must have weighed . . . oh, twenty-three stone, which is I don't know how many kilograms. We met at public swimming. She sat down beside me in the whirlpool bath and just spoke up, saying that hot water was “a tonic for the soul” and that it “girded the loins.” I do not hazard a guess at what she meant by that, “girded the loins.” I replied only that I found the water very hot that day, very hot indeed. One hundred and three or four degrees. “Enough,” I said, hoping to sound like a man who did not think too much, yet was of some intellect, “enough to perhaps, ah, boil an egg.”

Marlene nodded and, under the cloud of bubble, slipped her hand into my shorts. She said nothing until a few moments later, when my stuff rose and swirled at whirlpool's centre.

“I believe that a man's substance is in that wad. A man's essence. With every squirt and shot a man's essence is depleted. Only so much at a time, but eventually . . .”

She meant to say, “it adds up,” but didn't need to finish. I understood.

What a man does is important, it's a part of who he is: the outcome of your income is to become a someone, I always say. Myself, I am a service worker. I provide a public service, which is not to say I don't get paid — I get paid very well, thank you, for the service I provide. I'm only saying that my work is of benefit to others. I, in a word, bury things. Animals. Small things, mostly. Any thing. I should say I am retired, I'm a retiree, but in fact I am kept quite busy almost without end burying things. I have a truck, such as it is, which is one of the qualities Marlene liked most about me. “Gordon H. Fawcette, Inhumation Engineer,” I think of writing on the door of my truck, although it reads in fact “Gordon H. Fawcette, Yard Maintenance.” That is enough. I am known. I have a reputation.

Marlene shook her red hair and sort of sputtered like a sputtering thing when I told her what I did for a living. “What kind of a work is that for a gentleman . . .”

She was forever not finishing sentences.

“It's so . . .” she said.

“It's what I do,” I answered. I said that one day, if she liked, I would bury her. “You have such delicate bone structure, such a lovely hunched posture, such beautiful, white, almost-translucent skin, slippery skin, I bet, in the right sort of, ah, climate. You'll bury well someday.” I was only flirting, of course. But I meant it. I truly believed that she would bury well one day. Little did I know how wrong I was. She would not bury well. Not well at all.

Because I am known, because I have a reputation, people are forever calling me up. The evening Marlene died I was up at an acreage in the hills providing an estimate on the interment of a yellow greyhound. The owner had left the dog parked in the hot sun. “You can't think of everything,” I said, by way of a comforting word, implying that man could not know in advance that dog would die if left in a car parked in the hot sun. “You can't think of everything.” The fellow said, “Sure,” and indicated that he wanted the job done quickly as possible.

“How much will it cost?” He looked me in the eyes. His face was very asymmetrical, the one eye round and awake, the other almost closed. Squinted. His hand gripped my wrist. “How much?”

“I don't know. I'll have to think. Thirty, hmm, maybe thirty- five.”

“Thirty-five!”

“That's the going rate, sir. That's how much it costs to bury something these days.”

The man huffed and counted out deliberately, “Five. Ten. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty. Thirty-five,” as if each bill were his last breath.

“That dog's cost too much already,” said the man (I estimate him to be five-foot-eightish, one-hundred and sixty-four or -five pounds, a muscular build, Marlene would say “sinewy”). “That dog's a hole in my pocket. Even dead. A hairy fucking hole in my pocket. Where are you fixing to bury it?”

“Hmm?” I had heard but wanted to seem uninterested, for there was something in this fellow's manner which didn't sit well with me.

“I said, where are you going to bury it?”

“Don't raise your voice at me, sir. No need to shout. I may be a retiree, but I am not deaf. And I am not your servant, either. When you address me I would appreciate it if you would keep a civil tone, sir. I expect I will bury this dog in the meadow by the gravel pit. However, this dog is not an easy one, not an easy dig at all. You've waited too long, sir, if you ask me. His body is stiff and all extended, all layered out, if you know what I mean. No, this one will not bury well at all.” I gave a look, that look, you know, the one everyone has, the one that says, damn you, we're on my turf now. The man glared back at me. But it wasn't his look. I mean, I know that he was thinking,
stuff you, I'll bury the dog myself
, but in one tick I looked at his hands and he looked at his hands and we both knew that these weren't hands for dead things. These were not the hands to lift and turn soil. These were not the hands to cradle dead flesh like a suckling, carry the flesh from car to hole. These were not the hands to snap a rigored joint so that it would fit into that fresh-dug hole. These were not the hands to clasp in momentary prayer, to ask for blessing and forgiveness in the passing of another of God's humble things. These were hands for the opening of the wallet, for the counting by fives — five, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five.

The last time Marlene and I made love she talked about the rain. “The thunder is God's wrath,” she said. “The rain is Jesus' tears.” I could hear the heart moving in the body beside me. I could feel through her ribs a heart thump like a cricket in a child's fist.

“You know the splendid thing about man, the wonderful thing? He's so incomplete. So full of absolute possibility. So dignified, so low.” Marlene sighed. “But I'm not saying much. I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said . . .”

“I know what you mean,” I said, my head laid neatly on her soft bosom, and I as snug as a trowel in a mound of fresh-dug earth. “I mean, there's just so many of them. Men, I mean. The world is so . . . full of them. Yes. I don't think you could count each and every person on this, God's earth.”

Marlene kissed me several times, but she was like a distant thing, like a distant radio station, maybe, that keeps drifting in and out of tune.

Let me describe the gravel pit where I came to bury the greyhound. It is wedge-shaped, a parted-jaw-shaped pit on the edge of the forest. We call the forest “the forest” only by way of identification. It is in fact not a forest at all but a collection of yellowy shrubs and stunted birch trees. The forest is about two hectares long and one half-acre wide. The pit itself is perhaps three hundred yards long and only fifty-six feet wide, one league at its deepest point. The “meadow” is the grey field around the gravel pit, a field of mud, mostly, the colour of old writing paper. The meadow is cheerful the way rain is cheerful when you have nothing to do but sit around and watch it. I always bury my things here when I bury them. The ground is soft, once you crack the dry surface, and limey. Good for decomposition. That's the problem with many burial sites; they are so full of dead things that the soil loses its energy to break them down. The earth is of two minds: it can preserve or lay waste.

As I dug the hole for my canine client I started thinking, which, as I believe I said, is not my habit. But digging — manual labour — brings out the philosopher in a man, and if that be a sin, then let us hope it is not too great a one (more's the sin to speak one's mind in excess, I suspect). In any case, I was on my fifty-sixth or -seventh shovelful when I began, uncontrollably, to speculate on the density of man. Destiny, I should say. I'm not sure what brought on this particular topic, the destiny of man, although I suppose that burying the dead brings out that particular philosophical bent. So I began to speculate on the destiny of man, his purpose, if you will. I had a lot of digging ahead of me (circa fifteen thousand shovelfuls), for, as I explained, this dog was not to bury well. What tender rack of meat is man, I thought. What a globe, what a tedious globe, is man. He lives only to cause grief, for with every man who lives and dies, some, um, grief is caused. The only good is that a lot of bad soil gets good fertilizer. Alas, what trifling, righteous, tedious stuff is this planet man! Then I thought of an orange tabby I had once buried, on commission, in the back yard of a certain local alderman. Half-cut I was, for this was in my younger drinking days, and working quickly to capture the last rays of sun. When I returned the next morning to inspect my work I discovered a mound of fresh-turned earth and four stiff paws growing like cactus. The problem was quickly solved with hedge-clippers, but I remember thinking at that time, such is the fate of man, my puss, for what is man if not semi- decomposed, semi-interred, fifty percent this world, fifty percent the next? I can tell you with certainty that such thinking surprised myself, for in those days, my younger drinking days, I thought rarely, if at all.

As I was placing the greyhound in his pit and thinking of nothing at all but a warm bowl of soup, I heard the slow approach of a car. Out of prudence, I moved to the cover of forest and watched. (Black. Four-door. Stops. Two men get out, remove something from the trunk. Light cigarettes. Laugh, etc., then depart.)

I crept over. Here lay Marlene. Her body was naked. Over her head was a plastic bag, tied around her neck with a yellow nylon cord. Her blue face smudged against the plastic, and I could see that her lips were parted, as if she died mid- sentence. Hmm. She was dead. I did not stop to question why, for the answers were unthinkable, even for an aging man given perhaps to occasional rumination. Hmm. I really wasn't surprised to see her. Really. Like I think I said, she was always thinking. Always expressing herself on this and that. I suppose I had loved her, but — hmm. These were the ones the men in black cars got first. The men in black cars were attracted to people like Marlene. People like Marlene were electric light bulbs to people like the moth-men in black cars. People like Marlene, who express themselves and whom you might have once loved. Meanwhile, people like me get left alone for the most part; we keep our thoughts to ourselves, buried under an acre of turf. Preserved.

I took it upon myself to give her a decent end. After all, such things are expected of me. I have a reputation. It is my claim to fame. And as I started to say, I think, some time ago, Marlene was not to bury well. She had the posture all right, and the inclination. But I'm afraid I had to snap some things to get her to sit right in the earth. The ground, too, seemed harder, each shovel heavy. Perhaps I loved her once. Rain, I think, began to fall. The distant sound of thunder. It was, um, God's wrath. The raindrops, not unlike tears I suppose, were my sorrow.