Sarah Court (14 page)

“That was unex . . . pected,” Starling gasps.

“I’ll call you an ambulance.”

“No ambulance.”

“You need a doctor.”

With his good arm Starling digs a cellphone out
of his pocket. Speed dials number one.

“Come now.”

He hangs up.

“I have an employee who . . . handles this sort of
. . . thing.”

Matilda has crawled into the darkest part of the
room. When James calls she creeps to him on her
belly, grovelling the way dogs do when they believe
they’ve behaved poorly. The clipped stub of her tail
wags weakly. The hatchet wound is shockingly wide
and it shocks me more, somehow, to see Matilda—
less flesh and bone than bloodless fibres coalesced
into the familiar shape of a dog—hurt this way. The
shining off-pink ligaments banding her rib cage
whiten as they flex.

James picks her up. “Fuck me. She’s light as a
feather.”

I tell him to wait outside. The flap of skin covering
Starling’s eye has folded back. Pale and membranous
as the inside of an eyelid. The eye underneath has no
cornea, iris, or pigment.

“Will you be alright?”

He manages a grisly smile.

“Bugs, Fletcher. A million slipper-footed space
bugs. Walls of my guts. Cores of my bones. Churning,
Fletcher. Softest churning you can imagine.”

“I have to go.”

“So go. But don’t take . . . my car. You didn’t . . .
win.”

“Fuck off,” I tell him solemnly. “I’m taking it.”

I fishtail the Caddy down the dirt road. Moths
drawn to the phosphorous glow of the headlamps
smash on the windscreen. Matilda’s shovel-shaped
head pokes from a mummification of towels. Her
eyelids are ringed with blood.

“I can’t bury another dog, Fletcher,” James says.

Black Box: Daughter

The emergency crash slides deploy ten thousand
feet above sea level: slick yellow tongues sucked
into the engines, which explode in twin fireballs.
Shrapnel punches through the fuselage. The
hiss of decompression as air inside the cabin is
drawn outside. Pinhole contrails stain the blue
sky.

This one time, when Abigail was a kid. The
playground at the school round the corner from
Sarah Court. Sunday: parents airing their kids
out after church. Abby on the swingset. This
churchgoing man set himself in my sightline.
Calling in an abrasive baritone to his own child:

“Down the slide! Down the slide!”

I couldn’t see my daughter past this man
in his church suit. I wanted to kill him. An
animalistic response. You don’t stand between
papa bear and his cub.

Karma’s a mongrel. Its blood isn’t pure and
it fails to flow in a straight and sensible line. It
bites whoever it can and bites randomly. It tallies
debts but makes no attempt to match them to
the debt-committer. Spend your life totalling
black smudges upon your soul thinking in the
end they’re yours to bear.

Capillaries burst beneath my fingernails.
Looks as if I’ve had them painted candy apple
red. My eardrums explode. Instruments shatter
at the same instant my jawbone tears free of its
hinges. The air’s full of silver flecks: my fillings,
added to blobs of mercury from split dials.
Pressure works around the hubs of my eyes, in
back, rupturing the ocular roots. I go down in
blackness.

Total muscular failure.
The bread-and-butter
technique of powerlifting.

The theory behind total muscular failure is
simple: max out your poundage until it is impossible
to lift without assistance from your spotter. Easy to
spot lifters who embrace the technique. They’re the
ones who’ve reached familiarity with the “zonk out”:
passing out during your final rep. Acolytes of total
muscular failure trust their spotters implicitly.

The first medal Abby earned was silver in the
clean-and-jerk at the Pan Am Games. Bronze
initially, until the gold medalist’s urinalysis proved
she was whacked out of her tree on Anavar.

Around this time Abby had found her first true
love. Danny
freaking
-Mulligan.

He blew his MCL on an end-around sweep the final
game his senior season. He enrolled in arts college,
grew hippy hair, majored in modern sculpture.
Particularly galling was the fact he made a point of
buying not only a mattress but also underwear, all
used, from the Sally Anne.

“He doesn’t care about brands,” Abby told me. “A
total esthete.”

“Sounds filthy. His used bed could have mites.”

“They bleach everything before selling it.”

“I can’t believe it.”

“Isn’t he fantastic?”

“No, I mean I can’t believe there’s a place actually
selling pre-worn gitch.”

Danny invited her to drive cross-country in a
VW bus he’d bought at Junkyard Boyz in Welland.
I forbid her. We were in up her room. She tore blue
ribbons off the walls. Chucked trophies out the
window into Saberhagen’s backyard. During the
commotion I’d grabbed her. She pushed back so
hard I went down on my ass. If she’d known how to
translate that strength into violence she could have
beaten the living shit out of me.

“I quit! I’m through lifting.”

Danny and my daughter reached Moose Jaw
before the minibus broke down. The trip convinced
Abby that Danny’s posturings were more affected
than esthetic. He later dropped out of college to
join the police force. I didn’t hound her. If she really
wanted to quit, well, what could I say? My thinking—
hideous, but I’ll say it—went along the lines of
Pavlov. My daughter is a rational and complex being.
Still. If you’ve imprinted it deep, sooner or later that
creature will ring the bell itself.

“I want to work him out of my skin,” was how she
put it.

Forget about Danny the way you’d slap a coat
of paint on a roomful of sour memories. We buried
Danny Mulligan under a fresh coat of muscle. That
was many years and several coats ago.

So it went until last September. I’ve come to
divide my daughter into separate entities: pre-
and post-September Abbies. She’d sustained a
shoulder injury. The shoulder is our most fragile
joint structure: a cup-and-socket mechanism as
precarious as an egg balanced in a teaspoon. The
only curative for a ruptured shoulder is rest. But
every muscle possesses a memory. Should you train
to a peak and for whatever reason quit, your muscles
retain a memory of that peak. Olympic-level athletes
surrender, on average, ten percent capacity every
week. But muscle remembers.

Her layoff included a Mexican bender with old
high school cohorts. She returned with a shocking
heft.
Puffed wheat
: my thought as she cleared
Customs at Pearson International. This big ole,
tanned ole Sugar Crisp. Someplace in Mexico my
daughter lost her fire. Along came that September
afternoon at the YMCA.

“Bench press, Abs.”

Her legs: a pair of cocktail swords. Goddamn the
defeatist workings of the human body. She’d rubbed
her wrist. I remember all of it. Crystalline.

“Feel that.”

A nubbin of cartilage floated free where her wrist
met the meat of her palm.

“Olympic
trials
next
month.
You’re
goldbricking?”

“What did I say? I just said, ‘Feel that.’”

Abby dusted her palms with chalk. I slapped on
45s. Abby bench pressed it easily. The old striation
of muscle beneath a veneer of vacation-flab. Two
more plates. She shook her wrist loose. Clenched and
unclenched her fingers.

“It’s just tightness, Abs. Loosen up.”

On the eighth rep of her following set Abby
abruptly hit total muscular failure. At the same
time and at the very height of extension Abby’s right
shoulder and left wrist broke. Her wrist re-broke:
she’d first broken it years ago leaping from a house
on fire. She zonked out. The sound of my daughter
breaking
apart—greenstick
snap
of
her
wrist,
fibrous ripping of her shoulder socket—shocked me
on such a purely auditory level that the bar slipped
through my hands.

Four forty-five pound plates. A weight bar
weighing
forty-five
pounds.
Two
safety
clips
weighing an eighth of a pound each—225¼ pounds
fell the distance of a child’s footstep onto my
daughter. Her windpipe would have been completely
crushed had the bar not been checked by her chin,
the bone of which broke into several pieces. Her
eyes closed, then opened. They say she likely never
regained consciousness. Only body-shock trauma.
Blood hemorrhaged into both eyeballs.

I heaved the bar off her throat. Dislocated both
shoulders doing so. She rolled off the bench. Her
skull hit the rubberized weight mat. Her eyes tiny
stoplights. Jaw hanging open. A dent on her throat
where the bar crushed the cartilage-wrapped tube of
her airway. Fingernails ripping at her neck hoping
to gouge deep enough to let air in. My brokenwristed, broken-shouldered, broke-chinned, redeyed daughter crawling on the shockproof mat of
the downtown YMCA. I grabbed for her. Abby’s hand
swung wildly. My nose burst. Blood all over. Every
part of her flexed so hard.

When the ambulance arrived an attendant slit
her throat below the crimping. Threaded in a tube.

Our cerebral hemispheres begin to corrode one
minute after oxygen is cut. Hypoxic encephalopathy.
Cerebral hypoxia. More simply: black holes eating
into the fabric of our brains. Wesley Hill, old
neighbour and friend: his job was pulling people
out of Niagara Falls. If they had been under too long
it was no different than pulling turnips out of a
garden. A Niagara Lobotomy. Abby’s neurologist—
not
Saberhagen—said
Abigail
had
surrendered
sixty percent neural capacity. Blood surging into her
ocular cavities bulged and burst the corneal dams.
She’s blind.

A week afterward purple bruises blotched my
shoulders where they’d been pulled out of joint. The
local rag painted me a monster. Dredged up Over and
Out. My ex-wife secured a temporary restraining
order that, following token legal wranglings, would
become permanent. I cried easily at things of no
importance.

That evening I found Saberhagen on his back
porch shooting at squirrels with a pellet gun.
Working on a Flatliner. A booze-puffed texture to his
face. He’d been relieved of duties as neurosurgeon
at the General. His scalpel had slipped a fraction.
When the blade is inside a patient’s head, a slip is
catastrophic. A patient may forfeit his childhood or
sense of direction. Saberhagen, participant in the
famous Labradum Procedure at Johns Hopkins, was
disbarred from the operating theatre.

I said: “Why shoot the poor things?”

“Eating seeds I laid out for the birds. I’m not
running a squirrel soup kitchen. How are you
faring?”

“Guess I want to die, Frank.”

“If that happened to my kid I guess I’d want to,
too.”

He went inside to fix us drinks. When he sat
again, he said: “The very definition of freak accident.
I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“A hell of a thing to happen, is all. Abby’s such a
good gal.”

The evening shadows grew teeth. Frank said:

“Remember
that
kid
who
burnt
down
the
fireworker’s house?”

“Philip Nanavatti. The kid’s name was . . .”

“Teddy. Wasn’t a bad kid. Just fucked up. In
animals, there’s what’s called a biological imperative.
What they’re hardwired to do. We’re the same except
that little bit smarter. We’re not too smart as a
species. Just enough to screw ourselves up. That
kid, Teddy . . . burning things was his biological
imperative. I was there when firefighters drug out
what was left. A carbonized skeleton but Fletch,
I swear: that boy died happy. Abby jumps out the
window. Breaks her wrist . . . we do it, too. Break
things. Ruin ourselves then ruin everything around
us. Those closest we ruin worst. Ninety-nine percent
is good intentions, I think. We want good things for
others. To do good ourselves.”

Charter members of the Bad Fathers Club, the two
of us. Men with matching polarities—we habitual
if accidental brutalizers—amplify what’s worst in
ourselves. Seeing it reflected in each other somehow
justified it. All these years me thinking I wasn’t so
bad and my only evidence being my neighbour, the
surgeon, was cut from the same cloth.

“Could she be fixed, Frank?”

“Her brain can’t.”

“Eyes?”

“If you had a donor.”

“Ever done eye surgery?”

“Eyes are the newspaper route of the surgical
world.”

“Could you do Abby’s?”

“The Eye Bank’s wait list is long as hell.”

“What if you had a donor?”

“. . . as a matter of skill, yes. I could. Changing
sparkplugs. Thing is, I can’t. Red tape runs round
that sort of procedure.”

“It’s the two of us speaking.”

“Even on a purely conjectural level I’d need to
know you were serious. Not only serious about the
procedure. About everything. Your frame of mind.”

“I’ve stopped buying green bananas.”

Frank searched my face. Finally, he said:

“There’s a loose consortium of businesspeople.
Most surgeons know of them. For a price, you can get
an organ. Only rule: don’t ask where it came from.
And it doesn’t come cheap. Eyes won’t be all they’d
take, Fletch.”