Kicking Tomorrow (2 page)

“Have a nice day,” the smiling Child of God said.

“Right on,” Robbie said, saluting with his fist.

Downtown the sidewalks heated up fast – he had to pull a sun-softened blob of bubblegum from between his toes, leaning for balance against the mammoth sculpture on the plaza outside the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. A brass plaque on the sculpture read, Henry Moore –
Woman in Three Pieces
. The gum clung like a sweet leech, a cat’s cradle of gooey gossamer strands between his fingers.

He signed in and received directions at the lobby security desk, but still he got lost and wandered around, his feet flip-flopping
on the cool floors. He rode the elevators up and down for a quarter of an hour. He read the directories, but Dad wasn’t listed by name, and the exact office eluded his memory. Something to do with race horses, hadn’t he once said? Robbie asked a woman in a suit. She suggested Human
Resources
, but when he located it the secretaries looked at him funny. He felt totally out of place. It was like meat storage in there, it was so efficiently air-conditioned, and he was dressed for summer:
Cannabis Sativa
T-shirt, cut-off jean shorts, that was it. He asked a couple of men toting briefcases. They exchanged glances like he was a freak. Making him feel unreasonably self-conscious about his toenails. He made a face at them, steely and pointed as a tactical nuclear missile; what did they expect, the city was a filthy place to live,
K?
They each made several chins at once and threw their hands up. No one knew a Monsieur Bookbinder. Not in this department, anyway. Nor in the next. Nor the next. He opened one door – onto a stuffy half-lit hallway, as it turned out, and a concrete stairwell. Bummer. The door clacked behind him resoundingly. He tried to go back, but it had locked shut from the other side.
Major
bummer. Down the hall he found a series of locked doors, some clanging iron stairs, a smaller airless corridor, twenty more flights of stairs, and finally a reinforced door that regurgitated him onto the sun-bleached sidewalk. He glared up at the skyscraper and pointed at his temple with his index finger to blow his brains out.

Stamping away, he went by the Smiling Idiot Child of God again, passing out his leaflets.

“The truth will set you free! Kohoutek is coming! God is sexy! Can you help with a donation? You look like you’re in need of Salvation!”

“Oh,
fuck
off.”

Away then to the Middle Earth Record Store, the one with a notice in the window that read:

which allowed him at least one small chuckle today. And emerged with a stash five minutes later: two psilocybin buttons, noble Princesses of the Waters, costing him five Bank of Banana dollars apiece. He bought a can of Brador in a brown bag from a dépanneur, chewed and washed one button down…

… aimlessly meandering now, checking out the head shops and record stores, parking himself on a bench to monitor the sidewalks overflowing with American tourists; pretty soon he feels a degree of 4-D
Stoner Vision!
The passersby moving with the pixilated rhythm of models in a Japanese monster movie, and the colours of the set of the world like wet enamel paint. His nose poised over the lip of his beer can, sniffing up the malt aroma along with the cruddy odour of the paper bag, he does his best to resemble someone whose very shadow falls across the sidewalk like a threat: in a menacing variation on the theme of throwing breadcrumbs to pigeons, he tosses grit beneath tourists’ feet. Robbie squinting grimly at these dumb squares:
The Fat, the Ugly, and the Stupid
. He shoots them dry-gulch glares. Next to these lard-legged lumpy-assed cowboys, Montrealers look to him ultra-European, sleek, mellow, and fine…

… in forty-five minutes the air is close and thick, the Earth’s icecaps have melted and the city’s a vast warm fishbowl; the sky is heaving like water’s surface seen from a minnow’s POV, the skyscrapers are dissolving like sand in the sea, clocks are dribbling from their ornate stone housings, people are happy cartoon sea-monkeys with crowns and sceptres. Robbie is swollen, waterlogged, seasick, and his face is numb. He’s flat on his back on the still-damp apron of grass in front of the Church of St. Anthony. Directly above him, in mid-air it seems, is a giant Mickey Mouse hand made of orange plastic, as big as a float in an Easter parade, fixed to a pole. He’s not too surprised, he’s seen a number of these
hands before, all over town, pointing like Flying Fickle Fingers of Fate, drawing people’s attention to pieces of open-air art, parts of an exploded exhibition timed for the Olympic extravaganza. This one’s pointing down at Robbie.
Boy in Three Pieces
. He props himself up on an elbow, looks around. Realizes now he’s lying in the middle of a circle of rocks, a mini-Stonehenge, the shadows cast long in the late-afternoon sun. He glugs down half his beer, eyes closed, loving the way his eyelids flame a brilliant orange, extinguishing to reveal a sliding envelope of blood vessels bright as rivulets of lava, cooling as this ancient place sinks hissing to the sea bed. And again he’s thinking about sweet Ivy, Ivy, Ivy; he wishes he wouldn’t but he can’t help himself, her wrists wriggly-slick like two hot eels as he tries to pull her from the burning school attic for the hundredth time…

Sitting up an hour later, he’s coming down a little, and look now, tottering along in his direction: Rosie. Balanced precariously on a pair of purple Candies, desperately short-sighted, scrunched-up paperback in one hand, pencil in the other busily underlining, Rosie periodically looks up at the world with her repertoire of perplexed expressions, stepping off sidewalks with the abandon of a person stepping off a cliff, recognizing objects only at the last minute – apologizing to a car – all the while having, it looks like, some intense dialogue with the spirits of her fuzzy universe;
listen to this, sky; listen, flowers; listen, lovely old building
. Robbie lies back on the grass hoping she’ll go by.

She doesn’t.

“Bob, hey wow! How ya DOIN? I can’t believe my eyes, you’re just the PERSON! I was just thinking; why do men have to spit in the street? I mean
what
, do they have more
saliva
than women?”

She plops down on the grass, her temples streaming with perspiration. Robbie examines her closely, still seeing the world in flashes through a mushrooming fish-eye lens: in the beautiful
metal sunset – copper and sodium flashes, nickel and cadmium sparks – the pores of her cheek are big as pockmarks, and each one contains a drop of radioactive rainbow water…

She crosses her legs like scissors, reverses them; and again, and tucks a hand snugly between her thighs. Only to unfold herself as if she’s been found out doing something wrong.

“Wow,” she says when she sees his eyeballs shuttle. “First time I see you in MONTHS and you’re
already
making me self-conscious. You should know I DO that,
Bob
, because of my DADDY. I’ve always embarrassed him sitting this way. But I
like
to when I’m feeling forlorn. I want to have a baby.” She tilts her chin up proudly, sweeps her hair behind her ears, pulls it out again, wraps it around her fingers and sucks the end of a tress. Clacks her gum, squints at the street, and pushes her other hand between her thighs. Stops. “I know I
know
, don’t LOOK at me like that – I’m just a chamber of horrors, aren’t I? In my own abusement park.”

Robbie sticks his index finger to his temple and cocks his thumb back to blow his brains all over the Church of St. Anthony’s lawn.

“You never called,” she says, resting her head on his shoulder. “And now I can see that you hate me. I’m not
blind
, you know.”

Rosie’s fleshy and pink as the gum she loves to blow. And she smells of the stuff, which she chews with a vengeance. Robbie catches an image of the time she once bit her lip too hard in anger, the gum appearing between teeth streaked with blood like ruddy marble. Now she’s obviously fresh from an afternoon shift at L’Enfer Strip; she resembles an ancient Egyptian vampire–black lipstick, black leather mini-skirt, slashed black tank-top (nipples as large as raw bee-stings, he sees so close, and the stitches of her bra strap spun from crackling plutonium), pale white flesh showing through slashed black tights, jet black hair spiked upwards with sugar and water – just like, she says, these so-called
punks are
starting to do in England.

“Hey, Rosie,” Robbie says lazily. “Check this. See the Queen on the dollar bill? And on the back, the Prairies divided in two by the infinite road?” (The paper money’s opening up to him like a Cinerama screen. He doesn’t know about her, but he can even hear the wind combing the wheat…)

Rosie squints. “Uh huh.”

“Watch as I roll it.”

“Oh, I don’t do that stuff, thank you. My metabolism’s
way
too speedy. I know cos I’m reading about the eerie case histories of feral children. Also, anorexia nervosa, amenorrhea, coela-canths, the Gaia hypothesis, and Velikovsky’s startling predictions which have actually challenged contemporary science. What do you think?”

“Pay attention, Rosie, please. Look into it, like a telescope.”

“Yeah,
OK
, so?”

“See the Queen standing by the road now with her thumb out?”

“No.”

“Farm out! She must’ve hitched a ride.”

Rosie frowns, snatches the bill to examine it closer. Robbie rolls his eyes in disbelief. Then he drifts off, reflecting grimly on the fact that not a single American has side-stepped that menacing shadow of his all afternoon. The shadow has lengthened, he’s feeling smaller. He shrugs and woozily thinks, I seem tame to Yanks because they’re so jaded. Well, who wants to be like them. I’m glad I’m a decent fucken upstanding Canuck. Then he timbers back onto the grass and blacks out.

It was dusk when he was shaken awake. Two men were standing above him: a priest and a cop. He knew the cop.

“Glorious sunset that was. A real Michelangelo,” said Officer Gaunt, ever affable, smiling behind his scrawny shrub of a beard, his red eyes watery like he’d been laughing till he cried. Even
when his beloved German shepherd had keeled over (Robbie’s first unsavoury thought on awakening) after some asshole had mixed Drano into his dog food, Gaunt persisted with his relentless bonhomie. And now he was making an extra-nice face for Robbie’s benefit and holding open the rear door of his car like a chauffeur.

“Where’re we going,” Robbie called out from the back. “Dog pound? Pick out a new mutt?”

His tongue curled up like a snail. Up front, just the sound of the two-way and the cruiser’s engine straining up Côte-des-Neiges’ steep incline towards Beaver Lake. He stared at Gaunt’s red neck, splotchy where the regulation cut was freshly clipped. The short hairs on the nape of Robbie’s own neck creeping, like someone was petting him the wrong way.

“Hey, sorry ’bout your woof,” he said, leaning forward all contrite with his nose divided in four by the grill. “Wonder what asshole would of done a fucken thing like that.”

They had come around to the north side of the mountain, taking the long way home for sure, overlooking the Notre-Damedes-Neiges cemetery now. The smog was a purple haze above the gravestones. Gaunt pulled the cruiser over. A couple of cars drove past. Robbie slunk down in his seat.

Gaunt rested his arm on the top of the front seat and turned, speaking over his shoulder. “Why do you deliberately make life tough on yourself?” His trademark tones of exasperation. “With all your privilege, lad.”

“Hey, hey – you a cop, or a parent?”

Gaunt scratched his beard and sighed. “So tell me, since we’ve not yet had the pleasure of a heart-to-heart. I’ve been asked to ask you – how’d you manage to – you know – do what you did?”

The base of Robbie’s spine slick beneath his T-shirt now. “I dunno. What?”

“Jesus crawl back on the cross for comfort. Just
tell me
, please.”

“Oh. Rescue my girlfriend you mean? Too much, am I getting an award?”

“No, not in a manner of speaking. Though that was a very heroic thing you did there.”

“Have you heard from her?”

“No, but her father says, and I quote, if you so much as dream of her he’ll recommend you get a horsewhipping.”

“Yeah, so. I could care less. He already made a pitch for that, fuck. Luckily my Dad sent him a memo which said that horsewhipping is against family policy.”

“You and Ivy ever spend time in the attic?”

“The… 
school
attic? Uhh, let me think. Uhh, no.”

“Never?”

“Never.”

“Not even once?”

“Never, I said.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m sure.”

“Sure you’re sure?”

“Fuck, I was in class the whole time, ask anybody… can I go now?”

Gaunt turned the ignition, pulled the cruiser back onto the road. “Okey doke,” he said, and sighed.

In five minutes they were in front of the Bookbinders’ home. Robbie could see, with some relief, that no cars were in the driveway and the lights in the house were off.

“Fuck off now, do,” Gaunt said, smiling in the dash light like a satanic butler. “There are people, you know, myself included, who worship the ground that’s coming to you.”

Later that night, while Dad snored and Cournoyer scored to clinch the Habs a reprieve in overtime, Robbie was upstairs
snooping. Ears primed like a bat’s, he pulled out forbidden drawers and tried on a few dainty ensembles. Not as much fun as it sounds; Mom so mistrusted him that the antique armoire was almost certainly booby-trapped – drawers left open and shut with only
apparent
randomness, bras and stockings flung in with only
apparent
abandon. It made him knot his cheeks and gnash his teeth and lose his boner to be forced to remember so many sneaky details, to put everything back exactly where it was in the first place. And did sweaty fingers leave visible stains on satin panties? Would his big feet leave an impression in silk stockings? Would his animal toenails make them run? And would Mendoza, the family dog who is now panting and slobbering at the bedroom door, somehow stool on him?