Guide to Animal Behaviour (11 page)

Aiden's mother will sit by his head in mournful majesty. For a woman who has borne ten children, she is remarkably beautiful, possessed of a serenity I have always envied. I will kiss her cheek and say my say. And shake his father's hand. They will call me Flip in the old way. Annie will not be there — away somewhere, they tell me, sacrificing herself, cooking for the wake. (It is clear to me suddenly, as it must be to everyone I speak with, that I have been desperately in love with her all along.) Nights, her eldest brother says, after the public hours, she comes and sits with him, talking and talking, as if he understands. Aiden, the world. It will seem so strange, the terrible present, the irretrievable past. The world is not supposed to be this way, I will think to myself. The world is not supposed to be like this at all.

I will fly back to Saint John for the funeral. I will have written other stories about the place. I will have made fun of it — the Loyalists, the Reversing Falls, the petty pride. I will have had some vengeance. But when the time comes, I will want to go back. I will always want to go back.

After the viewing, I will take another taxi to visit Lyn Shaheen in an out-lying village called Ketepec, where once (I recall) when I as a reporter, a black bear stumbled out of the woods and was shot to death. She will have married a man in a wheelchair, a man she knew before she met me, a man she returned to because I hurt her. Because I will feel badly about myself, because things have all gone downhill for me, I will try to kiss her when she goes to make coffee in the kitchen, out of sight of the man in the wheelchair. And to my surprise, she will kiss me back, running her tongue over my teeth, licking my face, searching with her fingers between my legs, finding that which she only half-wishes to find, the instrument that offers yet separates us forever from ecstasy.

The next afternoon I will walk the gritty streets from the hotel to the funeral home in silent despair. Annie meets me at the door; she shakes my hand. It is clear that I am nothing to her. And her grief is practical, not mythic as I had expected; she has done with wailing. But I am happy enough just to be near her. Going to Aiden, she proved I could not satisfy her, or that she did not wish to be satisfied, that she had accepted some sad truth about hunger and miracles.

Leaving the family for the closing of the coffin, I head up the hill toward the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, where the funeral mass is to be held, Father Dan officiating. But at the last moment, as I climb the cold, granite steps to the door, I turn aside like one accursed. Instead of waiting for the O'Reillys, I climb further up the low, clapboard canyons of the city to Carleton Street, past the stone Anglican Church, and turn down Wellington toward Germain Street and the South End.

Mrs. Lawson is alive and pleased to see me again. (“And how is Mrs. Cary?” she asks, oblivious to my personal misfortune. Because I am wearing a suit, she thinks I have come up in the world.) Sgt. Pye is dead. Some anonymous corporation has bought the building from his widow, and Mrs. Lawson is in danger of running through her tiny savings to pay the rising rent. Also, the new landlord has made her take in her tables and shipping prints. She tells me that Earl Delamare has been released to a half-way house in West Saint John.

It takes me half an hour to get there by cab, what with a stop along the way to buy beer. (We drive over the Reversing Falls Bridge, with its fine view of the mental hospital and the Irving pulp-and-paper mill.) Earl is watching television with a number of other depressed-looking people. At first he doesn't recognize me (he has a difficult time just tearing his eyes away from the TV screen), but I finally convince him to take a walk through his old neighbourhood. (A social worker confiscates my beer at the door, so the first thing we do is head for the nearest liquor store and buy a fifth of Johnny Walker.)

We walk in silence until we reach Earl's former home, the seat of his many sad memories. There is no one around, so we walk through the yard, peering into windows, eyeing the shrubbery that Earl planted many years ago. For a while, I sit on the grass, drinking from a brown paper bag, while Earl does a little weeding and tells me what it was like to be newly married in this snug little house. The cheerful, domestic tales he tells have the quality of dreams frozen in time.

When a neighbour comes out to ask us what we are doing, we move on. We stop at the Martello Tower (built in 1813 against possible attack from the United States; during World War II, there were anti-aircraft guns mounted on the roof) to admire the sweep of the river, the harbour and the roofs of the city beyond. Earl points out the old shipping-sheds, where he used to work, and the new container port with its vast spidery cranes. A chilly wind is blowing off the bay, bringing with it little runners of mist.

As we swing down St. John Street toward Dufferin Row and the Digby ferry landing, we turn up our collars for warmth and drink deeply from the bottle. We joke about taking a return trip on the ferry, drinking our way to Digby and back in the ship's bar. Earl is in an upbeat mood, and to my surprise, I find my own spirits beginning to rise. But the ferry slip is empty, and we change plans in mid-stride, heading past the gate and plunging down to the empty shoreline.

The tide is out. The beach is strewn with bits of driftwood twisted into anguished forms, rusty pieces of machinery, shards of coloured glass and cobbles worn smooth and round by the action of the waves. We pick our way carefully toward the headland and the breakwater that stretches away from it into the fog. We shiver in the heavy, moist air. Just past the foot of the breakwater; we come upon an abandoned concrete bunker, built to protect the harbour from the threat of German U-Boats.

Dusk is falling, but we can no longer see the lights of the city for the fog. We are conscious of the city, rushing with cars and people (in spite of everything, I have not forgotten Aiden's funeral), just across the cold, gray water, but we are temporarily isolated from it. As we sit huddled together against the bunker wall, peering at the point where the breakwater disappears, it is as if we have entered some other alien, yet beautiful, universe.

TURNED INTO A HORSE BY WITCHES,
PORT ROWAN, U. C., 1798

1

O
ld widow McMichael is one.

I set a trap at the foot of my bed, a contraption of beams and pulleys bolted to the floor. It has nearly been the death of me, twice. Oncet my wife's dog Sally got her paw caught coming to wake us in the morning.

Sometimes we wake up and there is the tell-tale smell of ashes and urine all over the cabin.

I believe there are certain precautions everyone should take. Never marry your daughter off on a Friday nor make soap when the moon is turning. Plant your cucumbers in the second quarter if you want pickles for the winter. I keep a good supply of horseshoes about the place.

Oncet I had my gun and was climbing the ravine to hunt deer, when I espied Mrs. McMichael on the path ahead of me. The dog whimpered and would go no further, so we came home. The dog has never run a deer since. It is well known that witches will ruin a good dog by peeing up its nose.

2

I am a medical man. I had a practice in Philly that was ruined by the rebels and you-know-who. After the war, they took my house because I would not say the oath of allegiance. Dr. Rodney has it now, but I saved my bag and walking-around instruments.

I rowed all the way from Niagara with the wife, a cow and eighty apple trees wrapped in burlap.

The sunlight off the lake is hot and bright, and the water looks like quicksilver. Sometimes you cannot tell where the water ends and the sky begins. The first winter ice blew up off the lake and killed half my orchard. Indians took the cow, but I believe it was an honest mistake.

At first there were no other white people and even now my practice is extended.

The wife has given birth to a son, who is whole, which is lucky considering the evil we have been through.

3

We are for Henry Alline and the New Lights.

When he was eight, my boy fell into a trance in a field, trying to save a cow that had hung herself on a line fence — a clear case of witchery. I nailed him a box, and the wife prayed and aggravated over him for three days, after which he sat up and asked for a sup of maple syrup candy.

I was about to wallop him with a fence paling, when he espied Elder Culver on his knees at the foot of the box and cried out that he had been in Heaven talking to angels. He begged Elder Culver to baptize him and let him witness for the Lord at the next camp meeting.

The wife said, Praise Jesus and don't beat the boy.

Prior to this, the boy had shown little inclination toward theological subjects.

4

Oncet I woke from a nap to see a young girl in a white shift, strolling in the orchard.

When I approached, she turned to greet me with a shameless invitation. I could see her tiny breasts and nether hair through the cloth of her shift. With a cry of dismay, I realized I had left my Bible on the table.

She made me mount behind her on a fence rail, and we flew across the lake to a place called Dunkirk, where she changed me into a horse and tied me in a stable. Through chinks in the stable wall I saw a hundred witches cavorting with the Beast around a roaring fire.

They brought me water in a bucket and fed me oat straw and carrot greens.

When I awoke I was in my own bed and the wife said I had been there all night.

But I shit oat straw for three days and my digestion has not been up to much since.

5

I am old now. The wife has been called to her reward and is buried under a rock in the orchard.

My boy had four sons — John, David, Michael and Cornelius — and five daughters — Elizabeth, Sophronia, Catherine, Susannah and another whose name I cannot recall but who married Edward Bowen.

My boy is a blacksmith and a deacon in the Baptist Church. In 1802, they made him constable of Walsingham. For a person who spoke face-to-face with the Lord when he was eight, he has not amounted to much.

I like the one who married Edward Bowen the best. She is named after her grandmother.

The McMichael place has been empty twelve years and there are raccoons in it.

Before she died, the old widow fell into the habit of walking to my yard gate and waiting for me to espy her. I believe she derived some pleasure from my terror and stuttered imprecations.

There are no witches in Norfolk County now. They have cut the forests down and killed the bears, and Scotch shopkeepers have covered the land like a blight. Whisky has come into disrepute. And there are too many men and women like my boy, people of middling stature who have the Lord's ear.

A MAN IN A BOX

1

A
woman followed me home to my box today, claiming to be my wife. I did not recognize her.

According to notes gummed to the wall of my box (n wall, ur quadrant, very early notes scribbled in a vehement hand on curled and faded yellow stick 'ems — vestiges of an earlier denizen, no doubt, unknown to me personally), there once was a wife who abandoned her husband (referred to as “I,” “me” and “the innocent in all this”) for the manager of a Toys R Us store in Paramus.

This is the only reference to a wife I can find in any of the texts affixed to the cardboard walls of my home. It doesn't seem possible that this is the same woman. I don't even know what a Toys R Us store is, nor have I ever been to Paramus.

The woman seemed distraught. She tried to speak with me. But I have a policy against addressing people I don't know personally.

Personally, I don't know anyone.

My closest acquaintances are the dirty man with the beard in the next box (we share a common wall) and an elderly black woman who camps under green plastic garbage bags, from time to time, at the end of the alley. I have never spoken to either of them.

Stick 'em #131108 (on the s wall, there are several dozen numbered notes, printed in careful, resolute ballpoint ink) mentions a theory about the verbal origin of certain diseases (shingles, bad smelly farts, fibrodisplasia ossificans and plantar warts) and advises against exchanging words without a physician's certificate.

I am not the sort of man to be stampeded by medical gossip. I don't recall having read of this particular pathogenesis anywhere else. But in my study of the numbered stick 'ems, I have found them, on the whole, to be measured, rational and strongly argued.

Therefore, a word to the wise.

My name is It. The woman called me Tom, a clear case of mistaken identity. I find no reference to anyone named Tom on the walls of my box.

Some of the stick 'ems are so old they have fallen down (especially those which hang upon the wall I share with the dirty, bearded man; he brushes against his side of the wall in a most annoying fashion, deliberately, I think sometimes, causing it to bulge inward and shed its burden of yellow papers). I have gathered these up carefully and keep them safe in another box, formerly used to store a pair of size 9
½
shoes (I can still smell the fresh, clean leather smell — it makes me feel very rich). I never know when the writer of the words might return to claim his property.

Some of these oldest notes bear the scrawled initials T.W. It could be that Tom, the woman's husband, used to live in my box. Perhaps he even built this fine cardboard home.

This might explain her tearful insistence.

I could not, however, find the words to reveal my thoughts to her. I racked my brains while she stood outside weeping and I crouched inside thinking. But I had forgotten the first thing about communicating with another person.

Did I address her as “my dear madame” or “Hester” or “you fucking pig”?

I wanted to be polite; I wanted to make a good impression. I wanted to open myself right up to her so that she could see she was mistaken and yet not be embarrassed about it. (Often in the streets, I see myself coming along and only realize when we have passed that it was some other person entirely. If a man can have this much trouble simply distinguishing himself from casual passersby, how much more difficult must it be to keep track of someone named Tom?)

In vain, I switched on the penlight attached to my cap to facilitate indoor reading (in the interests of conserving heat, there are no windows in my box; this also has the effect of increasing the amount of useable space for stick ‘ems) and perused notes at random, searching for a hint as to the proper mode of address.

Stick 'em #119735, s wall, 11 quadrant:
She hath the loyalty of a windsock, the passions of a he-goat and the judgment of a golf tee. I have fixed her wagon though. I have put the darning needle through her diaphragm.

Stick 'em, unnumbered, ceiling collection, sw quadrant:
The male organ is a thing of wondrous beauty but requires strict attention in matters of hygiene or it will drop off. Other names for male member are my little man and one-eyed trouser snake.

Ed. Note: It is clear from internal evidence that the wall stick 'ems, taken as a whole, are a composite work. I have identified no less than eighteen distinct authorial styles to which, in interests of future scholarship, I have given the following provisional designations: A, B, C, D, rabbit dick, Leffingwell, Quisenberry, T.W., Ronald, hammer toe, heartsick, Hester, my little man, Arturo Negril Q and W, Edward Note and Z.

It is not obvious from the texts when any of these notes were written or the events described therein occurred. But the numbered stick 'ems clearly relate to a partial concordance on the s wall (11 quadrant) where water seepage has destroyed alphabetized listings from the letter F on. I myself have begun a reconstruction of the missing indices in conjunction with an overall cross-referencing to include unnumbered stick 'ems, boxed stick 'ems and a stack of old issues of the
NEW YORK TIMES
which I use as a mattress (also a tattered paperback biography of Julio Iglesias, with the last fifty pages missing, which I found in the corner).

Mysteriously, several articles have been clipped from the newspapers and have disappeared. At some point, I intend to visit a library and track down the lost news items so as to include them in my global concordance under a separate heading for non-existent words, words thought and not said, words better left unsaid, forgotten words, words said in haste and regretted, words said too late to do any good and words said when there is no one to hear them.

My name is It. I know no other.

A woman followed me to my box, claiming to be my wife. She addressed me as Tom, a clear case of mistaken identity. She had red hair.

My closest companions are the dirty, bearded man in the next box and an elderly black woman who camps occasionally under a tent of plastic garbage bags at the end of the alley. I speak to neither of them; we guard our privacy.

The red-haired woman tried to crawl into my box after me, and I was forced to use violence to protect my property.

I blacked her eye for her.

She crawled in after me on all fours, resting her gloved hands on the foot of my newspaper pallet, and said, “Tommy, we have to talk. I know you're coming around to the apartment at night and ringing the doorbell and running off. Lance followed you in his car. We have to talk.”

So I blacked her eye for her.

Boo-hoo.

I was nearly undone by the gross intimacy of it all, the closeness of the red-haired woman, with her bosoms hanging down, her rump in the air (I could, of course, only imagine this), the smell of her pomatum mixing with the foetid, cardboardy smell of my box, and the casual and familiar way she referred to Lance.

She backed out with a kid glove over her eye, whimpering.

Hester,
I thought, in a fugitive sort of way, not knowing of whom I cogitated.

She sat splay-legged against the front of my box, with her feet standing up at right angles to the damp pavement, nursing her eye and sobbing. Her back made the inside ul and ll quadrants (e wall) buckle alarmingly (the ur and lr quadrants had been cut away to facilitate ingress and egress, i.e. the door). A half-dozen stick 'ems dropped off, making a papery clisp-clisp sound as they fell.

I was overwrought and upset at the intrusion (Stick 'em LOAT #81:
A man's box is his castle.)
and the outrageousness of her insane accusations, not to mention the implication that unseen spies were shadowing me to my very doorstep and the horrifying thought that total strangers might have free access to the premises in my absence.

The dirty, bearded man coughed in the next box, a kind of sniggering cough, a cough that screamed collusion with my enemies.

Hester,
I thought again, uncontrollably.

Her breasts, I'll have to move,
I thought. I have begun renumbering the numbered stick 'ems using a system of my own devising, prefixed by the letters LOAT, an acronym for the phrase List Of All Things. Hence, for example, Stick 'em #131108, under the new system, becomes Stick 'em LOAT #92.

The LOAT system itself raises a host of philosophical and grammatical — not to mention medical, lexicographical, numerological and gnostic — questions, questions which I intend to deal with in a separate preface to the LOAT Concordance.

To name only one:

1) What is the relationship of the LOAT numbers to the original numbers? Take, for example, the stick 'em in reference, LOAT #92 (a brief, yet scholarly disquisition on the theory of word-borne disease vectors), formerly designated as Stick 'em #131108.

Divide 92 by 131108 and you get .000701. Multiply them and you get 12,061,936. Are these results simply random arithmetical products or do they refer in some obscure way to other, lost or as yet unnumbered, stick 'ems?

Do the walls of my box conceal a hidden pattern discoverable only on mathematical grounds?

2) Why have I been able to trace and renumber only three hundred and eighty-seven numbered stick 'ems, when my predecessor or predecessors were able to number them in the hundreds of thousands? Does this mean a vast trove of painstakingly inscribed notations has simply disappeared?

It has occurred to me that the dirty, bearded man and the elderly black woman, with her sinister green garbage bags, are not above suspicion in this regard. It could be that they have entered my box on occasions when I have been out foraging for food and deliberately stolen or rearranged my stick 'ems in order to torment me.

Thinking about this possibility often drives me to despair. Someone meddling with my stick 'ems, even the slightest pencilled alteration to a text, would render all my efforts otiose. The text must be pristine and untouched for me to be able to read the correct meanings into it.

The uncertainty caused by thoughts of lost or stolen stick 'ems or false entries (of comic or sadistic origin) causes me to alternate between profound fatalism and extreme paranoia (see relevant psychological notes — s wall, both u quadrants).

The red-haired woman went away, but I was a shaking wreck.

Her sobs and the texture of her sturdy brow and cheekbones against the knuckles of my hand had left me completely undone and exhausted.

A fragmentary thought crossed my mind —
Depleted by passion
…

Then I realized the words were a phrase on Stick 'em LOAT #153, sw quadrant, ceiling collection (I noted with satisfaction how easy it was to use the new system) which read:
Depleted by passion, the successful lover withdraws into himself after coitus in order to recuperate the energies discharged into the amourous and unassuageable female. The cycle repeats itself, though each time he becomes weaker. His very success creates in her the desire, the lack, the absence, into which he, driven by instinct, throws himself again and again until released from this onerous duty by Death. The female is apparently able to have multiple organisms without any ill effect whatsoever.

There were several LOAT cross-references, this being a key text, alarming in its implications, including a reference to LOAT #1107, a little etymological essay which I had written myself on that troubling word “organisms.”

I felt better after reading this and spent the remainder of the day supine on my
NEW YORK TIMES
mattress, staring at the stick 'ems above my face. After a time, the penlight on my hat went out and I was in the dark. It was better thus. In the dark, I could brush my fingers ever so lightly across the stick 'ems as if they were a woman's nape hairs I happened to be caressing.

In the morning, when I awoke, I discovered that several ceiling stick 'ems had fallen on me in the night, dry and quiet as autumn leaves. I urinated in an old milk carton and spent a happy hour with my glue pot re-sticking the stick 'ems in their proper places.

Ed. Note: Here follow several unnumbered stick 'ems to be cross-referenced using the key word “morning.”

Mornings, now that it is cold, the dirty, bearded man and I rise late and sit at the doors of our respective dwellings, stuffing old newspapers under our clothes for added insulation. Wordlessly, we pass individual sections back and forth. He is a shallow fellow, dressing himself in the
POST
or the sports and business sections of better papers, to the exclusion of all else. I myself love the feel of the
TIMES BOOK REVIEW
and the Tuesday
SCIENCE TIMES
next to my skin.

The ink rubs off, leaving snippets of articles and headlines on my chest, back and thighs. When I go to the mission for my monthly shower, I often enjoy reviewing past events in the mirror, before getting under the water. The chance juxtapositions and inter-cuttings make a kind of found poetry that is often delightfully witty.

Of course, there were other men at the mission who use newspapers for underwear. The dressing room is the next best thing to a library reading room. Certain lower class types sport huge headline smears from the tabloids. Others bear smudged, yet incisive, economic analyses from the
WALL STREET JOURNAL.