Guide to Animal Behaviour (18 page)

I touch Larry's cold toes. Once he brought an old woman back to life with a kiss and was mistaken for the devil. He moans a little and makes a smacking sound with his lips. He looks just like me. With the moustaches, we could pass for brothers. I find the black gloves with his glasses on the bedside table.

Slowly, piece by piece, I am taking on the guise of another.

There is something dreadful in all this. I have a deep yearning to get back to solid ground instead of sinking every step, as it were, into the quicksand of semiotic equivalencies.

I think of Ramon and what has happened to Larry.

Everything that is of the Absolute is evil.

The rocks in Larry's room have a strangely metallic quality which I associate with meteorites. I think of the danger of meteorite showers (common events at high altitude), thankful that I am wearing a shower curtain.

The phrase
assaulted by words
comes to mind.

I notice that each of the rocks has a word chiselled into its surface. Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I read the words, “Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I read the words, ‘Turning over the nearest ones with my feet, I read the words …

Black Mesa, or the Future

I notice that the back seat of Esmé's car has been packed as if for a long journey: sleeping bags, backpacks, freeze-dried food, a short-wave radio, canteens, a bottle of whisky, a Bible with several passages marked and the monk's habit disguises.

With a clarity that is like the heat flash of an atomic bomb, I recall the initial message, the sister's prayer.

Dear Baby Jesus, Take care of my brother Ramon who is in the prison and we have not heard from him.

Esmé greets me at her door with a sour look and then begins to weep.

Standing in her living room, with the Chimayo blankets hanging from the walls and the smell of saffron everywhere, I begin to predict the future.

Esmé will marry a man named Yolk who already has a child by another marriage. They will move to Spearfish, S.D., where she will be no happier than she has a right to be.

Larry will die of a disease in his blood.

(I am speaking Spanish so she does not understand.)

I tell her about Ramon, my alter ego, and about the sister who waits in vain.

I try to explain that I am in love with the one who cannot touch me because she does not know me except as the unnamed friend of her brother who, they say, dies in a prison riot.

Fragments of coloured glass cling to the soles of my feet like blood and ink. Every step I take leaves a trace that seems to form itself into a word.

Outside, the sky beyond the Sangre de Cristo Mountains is the colour of dead skin. Already the roads are clogged with pilgrims marching toward sanctuaries hidden in the hills. Some go home with their wives in the evening, only to return the next morning to resume their holy journey. Others trudge guiltily through the night, dragging heavy, wooden crosses, sipping sparingly from water bottles, denying themselves food and love and warmth.

At Pojoaque, the Christians take the right turn toward Chimayo.

Westward, the lights of San Ildefonso sparkle beneath the dark shape of Black Mesa, the Pueblo sacred mountain.

Climbing the cliff-face, Ramon discovers ancient pictographs drawn and abandoned over the course of centuries by anonymous Indian artists: herds of sacred animals, hunting scenes, spirals and winged snakes, humans disguised in skins and antlers, male and female genitalia.

It is a kind of code Ramon finds impossible to break, a mathematical equation he cannot solve. Yet his fingers trace the outlines longingly, as though they represent the walls of some protective haven.

A haven he cannot enter because inside they'll kill him.

From a distance he looks tiny and glows like a salamander.

I start to shiver.

You're cold, says Esmé. Her voice suddenly sounds exactly the way I would expect Ramon's sister's voice to sound.

Gently, she unties the enema bags and lifts the shower curtain from my neck. Naked, I see that I am turning blue from the cold. My body is wracked with chills that move over it like squalls across a lake.

What's going to become of you? she asks.

I don't know, I say. I will be ordinary too, and only dream of love and miracles. I cannot escape the story, I say, though every time I tell it I shall try.

She leads me into the bedroom and tucks me up against her breasts beneath the covers. We sip whisky from a bottle. In other parts of the house, her roomies are waking up.

Ramon quits the ledge of hieroglyphs and begins to scale the bare heights of the mesa. The only thing that feels good and safe is to keep moving, to keep climbing.

Restless, I disengage myself from Esmé's embrace. I find my clothes and start to dress. She crosses her arms over her breasts and frowns. Her hands are shrouded in long, black gloves. It's dreadfully cold. I wince as I pull my shoes on.

She catches my eye.

Her nipples are black and erect like nailheads. She has tiny, androgynous breasts. Her ribs press outward against her skin like the bars of a cage.

Dona Sebastiana.

She has become, or always was, that which I desire and fear most (also the woman to whom, years later, I say these words).

Her eyes glow with anger as I slip through the door.

Outside, the pilgrims are thronging the roads.

I step up beside a man whose knees are buckling under the weight of a redwood cross. The bark has been peeled away, and the wet wood shines like blood.

The Dream of Life

This was a sort of daydream, which is to say, the mind dancing. The meaning of a story is only another story. The past is the meaning of the future. The future is the meaning of the past. The end is the sense of the beginning. But what is love, and what is the meaning of meaning?

Esmé was the one with her feet on the ground.

Recalling the pathetic note pinned to the sacristy wall, she filled the car with fried chicken, sodas and coffee, and together we drove to the prison (Jerusalem) where friends, lovers and relatives waited (like pilgrims) before the gate. They were mostly poor people, Indians, blacks and Chicanos. (We have ordained that the poor and the speechless will commit our crimes for us. All unknowing, torn by fear and anger, they make the sacrifice.)

In their sad eyes, I could see the wounds.

There was no one I would have taken for Ramon's sister. Nevertheless, I found a certain peace there, as Esmé knew I would, among the sinners. We understood that we had stumbled onto a holy place, a nexus where the plane of agony (Eternity) cut the plane of signs (Time).

Ramon had not escaped.

No one escaped.

That day or the next the prison authorities announced that all the inmates (dead ones, live ones and the ones with their heads cut off and stuck between their legs) had been accounted for. For them, at least, the riot had a satisfying statistical resolution.

The New Jerusalem remained inviolate upon the plain below the town.

Smoke rose from the ruined cell blocks. Sometimes, when the wind changed, a light, white ash would fall upon our heads like a blessing.

A black preacher began to speak. In his sad eyes, I could read the wounds.

We sang a hymn, and the dead were everywhere.

With the smoke rising and wet snow falling around us, we knelt in the mud and began to say the only words that could ever mean anything.

Father, I stretch out my hand to Thee.

No other help I know.

If Thou withdraw Thy help from me,

O Lord, whither shall I go?

But when I stand up, I am not changed and in my heart I am raging again. I am full of desire and hate. I want to throw myself away. I want to be the worst kind of son, so that when God finally takes my hand, it will prove that He really does love me. I want His forgiveness, His love, to be a test, not a reward. To me, that is the true meaning of the word
Father,
that I belong to Him, that He cannot abandon me, that He cannot cease to cherish me even though I cause Him the worst pain. Undeserved love is the only love I want. It's a horrible contradiction, I know. My impulses are all chaotic and self-destructive. I throw myself into the abyss, shouting, “Save me! Save me!” The terrible images of the prison riot only serve to excite and inspire me. They are a clue, a sign that something real has happened here. Emotional fallout is as tell-tale as the clicking of Geiger counters over ancient atomic bomb sites (Trinity). What I mean to say is only this: at the moment of slaughter, the killers (Ramon) were most open to themselves. This is often what it takes for a man to know the world. And when you ask yourself unanswerable questions, you come back to the beginning, like the man with his penis in his mouth. The truth is our bodies (lives, histories) are our metaphors, and the worm gnaws us all.

WOMAN GORED BY BISON LIVES

1

D
ays, while my husband is at work, Susan and I make love on the couch in her parents' basement. It is a desperate thing to do, and we are both a little stunned by it. But something has pushed us to the edge of caring.

Gabriela, the baby, is upstairs sleeping, while Susan's mother does housework or watches soap operas. We keep our clothes on, manacled at the ankles by a tangle of underwear, jeans and belts. And when Susan comes, I press my palm across her lips to keep her from shouting out her joy.

I don't know if we are in love. But we are both in need of solace, and our sex is a composition of melancholy and violence, as though we are seeking to escape and punish ourselves in the same act.

The walls are decorated with hangings Susan made during a university art class. The weaving is sinuous and convoluted, with objects embedded or hidden in the loosely spun wool. They are analogues of a spirit which remains secret from me even at the height of passion. Her loom stands idle at the end of the room.

After sex, we lie together on the couch, our tops rucked up so that our breasts crush together, hot and soft, smoking dope and holding slides of Susan's work to the light. I profess to see themes, leitmotifs and images, and it is true that her work excites me with a mixture of admiration and anxiety (what is hidden; what is lost). But my insights are all superficial, and I cannot connect the woven mysteries with the woman who whispers or the woman who is Gabriela's mother.

Except during sex or when she is crying, Susan's face is expressionless. This is one source of my fascination with her. My own face is endlessly mobile and gives everything away. But Susan is always reserved, watchful and hidden. At first I took this for a sign of maturity and intelligence. She is tall and graceful, and her silence gives her the appearance of inner poise. I say
appearance,
because it is all a mask. Not even a mask, for the word
mask
implies that it is something she can put on or take off.

Susan's face is forever sad, and her sadness is her strength. Sadness has schooled her in waiting. Her expressionless face conceals her naïveté, her confusion, her lack. She is stunned — that's what her face means. She meets what she cannot understand with a blank stare and a few graceful gestures.

A photograph of Susan pregnant — suddenly, I see the significance of the objects hidden in the wall hangings. When I say it, she becomes angry.

Gabriela's father abandoned them before the baby was born. He is a violinist from Toronto. They met when he came to play in the city symphony. How they fell in love, how she became pregnant, seems now unclear in Susan's mind. What is clear is the way they finished. She has told me the story over and over. It is her national epic. It is how her life became the way it is: the baby, her return to Saskatoon and her parents' basement, the idle loom, her job in the composing room at the local newspaper.

The violinist wanted to marry her, she tells me. But his mother interfered. The three of them met — Susan pregnant, expressionless, watchful; the violinist cracking the knuckles of his sinewy, red hands; his mother fierce and excessively thin, calling Susan “my dear girl.” The mother said he must not become entangled (like an object in one of Susan's pieces) so early in life or his career would suffer and he would end up mediocre (as she had done). “What she really meant,” says Susan, “was that she could not bear to lose him, that he should take a different way.” Now he is first violin in another town, his career is mediocre, and he writes wistful letters to Susan and his daughter.

Susan has learned to suffer in silence because there is nothing to say. The violinist and his mother took her voice, and she only dreams of saving enough money to move with Gabriela to a cabin at Pelican Narrows in the north. We make love quietly, secretly, in the long summer afternoons, while the baby sleeps and my husband works at his job at the oil company.

Susan has slept with one other woman. This was in Vancouver in her student days. The woman was her best friend, and they did it once, after a session posing nude for a photography class. “For lust,” she says. “In the morning, when we woke up, I couldn't wait to get her out of my bed, out of my house. Do you understand?”

I have red, curly hair which I wear wild. I dress in faded blue jeans and hiking boots and a worn-out bomber jacket which used to belong to Danny, my husband. I wear three rings in my left ear and a butterfly tattoo above my pubic hair. Susan and I met during Louis Riel Day, when I rode a friend's quarter horse in the annual relay race and came second. She had Gabriela in a backpack and a bandana tied round her head. Her wire-rimmed glasses mirrored the crowds, the dust, the slick wet canoeists and sweating runners.

We walked along the riverbank together, away from the people (Danny was cooking steaks and burgers for some men's club he belongs to), Susan, quiet, indolent and graceful (later she confessed her nervousness, how she was so afraid of not making a good impression), and me, hot from the sun and the race. We crossed the railway bridge to the university side and hid among the trees. Susan put the baby down to play and undid her shirt to let the sun touch her breasts. When I kissed her, her eyes widened, her breath quickened. She took my hand and laid it between her breasts.

Danny is a sad man. He knows what's going on — up to a point. He knows I'm bored because he's bored. He doesn't like himself, so he's not surprised that I don't care much either. He plays ball in the summer, hockey in the winter. He's joined the Lions because his father was a Lion. Once a month he drives to the family place in the Qu'Appelle Valley for the weekend to check on his mother and talk to the neighbour who rents her last half-section of land. The old house needs paint and the barn is beginning to collapse.

He loves the place, but he could never earn enough money farming to make a go of it. He doesn't even like farming. He's got a good job publishing an in-house magazine for an oil company, but he's not a company man and hates the work. He dreams of selling up and moving to a cabin in the mountains to write a novel. But every novel he starts is about himself and he gets bored with it after the first four or five paragraphs.

He married me because I was different from the farm girls he knew growing up, those earnest, practical girls in jeans and white blouses. I almost laugh when I think of how he stared and stared at my tattoo. It's amazing what a tattoo will do to counteract the effect of a plain face and red hair. He thought I'd be the spark his novel was missing, the novel of his life. I married him for his bomber jacket. In this way we fall in love with things rather than people. It's only after you're married that you discover the recalcitrant baggage of personality attached to the bright, attractive object.

“We're at our best,” says Susan, “when we have nothing to lose.”

One day we take Gabriela and a picnic and drive north toward Prince Albert. We drink wine from a bottle along the way. The sun glares off the windshield, the wine bottle and Susan's glasses. She gives Gabriela a sip of wine and removes the little girl's shirt in the back seat.

We drive to Batoche and visit the battle site, then head for a nearby park and hike into the woods. It's a weekday so there is no one around. We take off our clothes and the baby's clothes. We lie together on a blanket with the food and wine around us, the hot sun warming the three of us, the naked baby crawling over our hot bodies.

Susan's cheeks are flushed. When I touch her, she shivers. For a while, we lie together, Susan with her back to me, my hand caressing her hair, her breasts, her sloping belly. Gabriela plays in the leaves. Later I take pictures of
the mother and daughter together, then Susan pushes me down on the blanket and kneels between my legs and kisses me.

We get dressed as the afternoon wears on and drive further to an animal park where there are bison. Susan wants to see them; I want a photograph. There is a herd of cows and calves and one lone bull with a matted hump, but they are too far away for a decent shot. Gabriela and Susan walk a few steps, hand in hand, along the fence, pausing to pull up grass and hold it between the wires. I focus and focus, but nothing satisfies me. I am hot, light-headed from the wine and sun, anxious because all I can think of is the three naked females like goddesses under the hot sun.

It is difficult to describe precise states of mind. My style of abandonment is sentimental and hopeless. Sex is only a variant of nostalgia. I am so unhappy with Danny. I feel a quiver between my legs; I want something from Susan, something no one can give, want only perhaps that the afternoon will go on and on.

All at once Susan turns back to me and points the way we have come. A woman with a tiny Instamatic camera in her hand has crawled clumsily over the fence and is walking across the short grass toward the grazing cows. Her husband and two children stand outside the fence watching. I am looking through the viewfinder; Susan whispers something. I swing and sight the bull. He, too, is watching the woman with the Instamatic. His hooves drag at the earth. Shreds of old wool dangle in dusty hanks from his shoulder hump, like Susan's wall hangings.

I focus on the woman again, asking myself what dream has led her onto the buffalo prairie. A few moments before, we passed the couple with their children and heard her speak sharp words in a British accent. She is wearing a denim skirt wrapped around her bulging hips, a hooded sweatshirt, pink running shoes and thick glasses. Her lank hair flaps at her sunburned cheeks like crow wings. Her husband points, drawing the children's attention to their fearless mother.

I begin to shoot film as the bull dips his huge, awkward head and snorts. He trots in the woman's direction. She turns awkwardly and begins to run toward the fence, emitting high-pitched yips of panic, her Instamatic flapping on its wrist-strap. At the moment the bull reaches her, I stop winding the film forward; I shoot and shoot, exposing the same frame over and over.

2

Susan dies. This happens a year after we watch the bison gore the English tourist north of Batoche. She probably had the cancer even then, or so the doctor said. Danny leaves me sometime during that year, I forget when, though he still comes around to sit and visit. He does just sit, saying nothing. He still has nothing to say. But he has this impulse to comfort me with his company. He goes away angry because I can't be comforted, because I am outrageously inconsolable, because I have lost everything, because I just sit there smoking dope, sucking peppermint candies and crying in a room where the walls are covered with Susan's artwork.

The last one, the piece she did between the time we watched the bison gore the woman and the time Susan died hangs above my pillow. It's a bag woven of binder twine, frayed burlap and burst milkweed pods with their parachute seeds trailing down. Mornings I wake with milkweed seeds on my eyelids — usually I have dreamed Susan is kissing me. You can see the contents of the bag through the loose weaving: one of Gabriela's baby shoes, a dried up butterfly, photos of Susan and the baby naked, a plastic laminated newspaper headline. The bag was empty when she finished it; I am the one who placed these relics inside.

I develop the photographs from the afternoon at the bison park. I do this the same evening. Susan is as anxious as I am to see once again what we have seen: that lumpish, stupid woman, with her crow-wing hair, trotting toward the buffalo herd. Clearly, what we see in her is what we fear most in ourselves — ugliness and exposure.

But the pictures are a disappointment. The woman is too far away; the pictures are all sky and scrub prairie like the prairie snapshots amateurs take. The frame of multiple exposures shows only a tangled blur of movement, tiny bison legs, like fragments of prehistoric cave paintings, and an arc of white which could be the woman's face or her thighs.

The newspaper the next day tells the story: WOMAN GORED BY BISON LIVES. They are an immigrant family, freshly arrived from Saffron Walden. He is a fireman; she, a housewife. They had never seen bison before, had no idea they weren't as tame as cattle. Climbing that fence, the woman had simply wanted to get a better shot to send to her parents.

The bison's horn had severed an artery in her thigh, a potentially fatal wound — we had seen this and the aftermath: wardens shouting and flagging their arms to shoo the animals away, a man's hand pressed roughly against the wound, the tourniquet band twisted deep into her floury flesh, the husband's pale face as he held both children and looked about in shock.

Susan cuts out the article to keep. We go to the hospital to visit the woman the bison gored. Her name is Ruth Hawking. We bring her flowers, chocolates (she looks like she eats a lot of chocolate) and magazines (magazines with photographs of thin, glamorous models). We go waltzing in with our gifts and shoo her surprised husband out the door. We say we read about the accident in the paper and thought we would like to cheer her up. Susan has made a special get-well card out of the photographs I took, gluing them together, end to end, in sequence, so that they unfold in an accordion panorama. When the woman sees the photographs, she starts to weep. The message on the card reads: WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

This is a cruel thing to do, but we have temporarily lost perspective. Actually, we are in the hospital for Susan's tests. Gabriela is with her grandmother; Danny is at the oil company. Susan and I are stoned. Her glasses keep falling down her nose. Last night I made her swallow five pearls so that the internist would have something good to look at when the X-rays were developed. “One thing,” she says, “if this is bad, don't ever let me get un-stoned.”