Sarah Court (6 page)

“Patience. Please.”

“Details, Patience. The description you gave the
onsite officer . . . you told him”—reading directly
from
the
page—“
the
perpetrator
seemed
to
be
enveloped in malaise
. He’s also transcribed your claim
she didn’t have an evil heart.”

“She was confused. Or ill.” Tapping my skull. “You
know . . .”

“Descriptions such as ‘having the eyes of a
hunted animal’ aren’t valuable from an investigative
standpoint.”

“She looked . . . like she could use a friend?”

Mulligan rubs his forehead as if a toothy
determined
something
were trying to tunnel out. His
pleading expression softens the contours of his face.
More handsome than the last guy I dated. An indemand sessional musician, he said. He performed
the guitar riff that plays over the Seven-day Forecast
on the Weather Channel. He couldn’t come inside
me. Retarded ejaculation; I looked it up. A phobia
based on insecurity. Fear of losing control. Or of
infection, which seemed more likely: he told me he’d
slept with a groupie “on tour,” afterwards spotting a
pubic louse drowned in the bus toilet. A tiny banjo
with pincers, he said. We worked on it. We’d have sex
and when he was close I’d get out of bed and stand
in a corner so he could masturbate. Next I sat in
bed while he jerked off. We worked all the way up
to him spurting on my tummy. Soon after finishing
inside me the first time—he wore two condoms—he
moved to Portland to join a jam band.

“Are you an artist, Patience?” Mulligan asks.
“What is it you do for a living?”

I hand him a glossy leaflet out of my purse. A
naked woman, red-haired and busty. Pink stars
over her nipples. A large pink star over her crotch.
EZWhores-For-Fone! 1-976-SLUT (UK: 976-SLAG)!
The Original Phone Sex Maniacs! Fetish Cellar! Sissy
Training!

Imagine attending a dinner party at an acquaintance’s home and using the washroom but instead of
the bathroom door you mistakenly open the door
to a closet full of mannequin parts. The look on
your face at that moment is the same look
Lt. Mulligan wears right now.

“I’m only an operator,” I tell him. “I facilitate
caller interactions.”

He slips the leaflet into his blazer pocket. “Ah.”
“The woman had brown eyes.” Brown is the most
common shade and nothing about the woman was
remarkable. “Dark brown.”

He scribbles this down. I ask what’s going to
happen to her.

“We have to locate her first.”

“I don’t mean her.”

“Yes, right. Baby’s at the General Hospital. Tests,
that kind of thing.”

“Can I see her? It may jog something.”

“I’ll check.”

“Will you go out for a cup of coffee?” Compelled
to clarify: “With me?”

“My wife would not approve of me sharing coffees
with strange women.”

I’d seen his wedding ring. Many people are
married. Not all happily so.

“Great
fireworks displays,” my father said, “should
expand within a viewer’s mind.”

The Mushrooming Imprint
. My father’s phrase.
It describes the effect any disciplined fireworks
engineer should strive for. All displays leave a
stamp upon the sky: only gasses in their dissipation,
as unremarkable as fumes exiting a tailpipe.
The
Mushrooming Imprint
was created when viewers
closed their eyes as the lingering afterimage evolved.
You could go a lifetime, eighty or ninety firsts of
July, never seeing
The Mushrooming Imprint
.

Myfather’ssignaturefireworkwas‘Bioluminescence.’
“Some creatures produce their own light, Patience.
It’s called ‘cold light,’ as it produces no heat. The
anglerfish has a glowing bell dangling off the front of
its face on a pole of skin, like a man holding a lantern
before him in a storm. Smaller fish are enticed into
attacking the bell and the anglerfish”—he brought
his palms sharply together—“chomp! Deepsea fish
cannot exist in sunlight. If you one netted one and
dragged it to the surface, its skin would turn to jelly
and slide right through your fingers.”

“Bioluminescence” began by affixing pellets of
nitrate fertilizer to monofilament fishing line using
a dab of superglue. My father tied these to wooden
dowels suspended in a refrigerator box containing
a dog’s breakfast of camphors and chlorides, the
concentrations of which were guarded even from me.
The box sat in our basement—“The Fermentation”—
and when its seams were cracked the powders had
drawn up to coat the pellets. Gumball-sized with
patinas invidious to their creation. Some were riots
of colour with rips of magenta and gold. Others dusty
under camphorous wraps. They went into honeypots
packed with black powder.

Each ball, wearing dozens of chemical coats,
blasted skyward on a tight trajectory. They bounced
off one another; each collision peeled a coat. Every
carom and ricochet sent the spectacle higher as
it burnt brighter. The balls had a brief life span as
combustion and contact peeled them down to their
fertilizer cores, which burst with a faraway sound
not unlike milk-doused Rice Krispies.

Closing your eyes—as spectators did, instinctively—you would see
The Mushrooming Imprint
. Think
of warm breath on a winter windowpane: tendrils of
radiating frost, each unique to the breather.

My father was a genius. Narrow of scope, but
nevertheless.

I asked my father how creatures came to exist at
the bottom of the sea. He said over trillions of years
weaker specimens got pushed down deep. Relegated
to blackest waters.

“Darwinism, pet. Big eats small. Nature has its
hierarchy. They didn’t end up there of their choice.
Who could want to live in the dark?”

Yet the colossal squid hunts the darkest ocean
channels and will attack sperm whales, sharks,
even orcas. Prehistoric Megalodon, ten times the
size of a great white shark, is believed to still exist
in volcanic trenches along the sea bed. As a child it
was the darkness between fireworks that enthralled
me. The ongoing dark of an unlit sky. Even today
I’ll wake in the still hours of night to stare pie-eyed
into the darkest corner of my room. Dimensionless
black like a hunger. Some organisms are happiest at
bonecracking depths, guided by lights of their own
kindling.

“Ms. Nanavatti?
Patience Nanavatti?”

“This is she.”

“Donald Kerr. From Wal-Mart. The legal end of
the boat.”

I picture him hogfaced in a southernfried lawyer
getup. Those white suits that incorporate the sweat
of their wearers to set the works aglitter like a stretch
of sun-dappled shoreline.

“We’re calling to see how you’ve been since your . . .
little incident.”

“We’re calling?”

“I mean to say, we, the legal team. May I first
of all say, kudos! Were it not for your calm in the
eye of the typhoon, a young life would have been
snuffed. A toilet. Dear
God
. Happens every day, Ms.
Nanavatti; that’s the horrifying truth. Babies left in
Arby’s dumpsters and worse. The other day one poor
dear was found in a crack den—you’re familiar with
crack, Ms. Nanavatti? The inexpensive derivative
of co
caine
?—in a crack den, Ms. Nanavatti, behind
the
radiator
, Ms. Nanavatti. Good Lord,” he says, as
if in horrified realization at the past fifty words to
exit his mouth. “Mainly women commit these acts.
As I’ve noticed in researching the incident you were
involved in. The hero of! I mean not to impugn your
sex; yours is the better of mine, as anyone associated
with reprobate behaviour will attest. You try to
make sense of it, Ms. Nanavatti. I mean myself, a
man, a father. Beggars reason. An ongoing struggle
between mother and child? The mother’s way of
saying,
I bore you into this world, chum, and I can as
easily take you out
?”

I smile. Not at the grisly bent of Donald Kerr’s
mind, but at the fact a company of Wal-Mart’s
stature has retained such a colossal wingnut as legal
council.

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Who would? Crazyperson talk! This job’ll do
that to the best of us—not to claim I ever was. Have
you children, Ms. Nanavatti?”

“Not as yet.”

“Flummoxed to hear it. Scalded, electrocuted,
burnt to bones. Horrifying to do to anyone, let
alone an infant. Donald,” he scolds himself, an old
dog beyond better breeding. “Again, I apologize.
Some at this firm believe I ought to retire, Ms.
Nanavatti. Rumblings I’ve become an eyesore and
embarrassment.”

“Are you calling in reference to a problem?”

“Oh-ho-ho, heavens no! It’s only . . . have you
much familiarity with the law, Ms. Nanavatti?
Law
suits
? Citizens of our great land have it into their
heads they’re karmically entitled to gross financial
recuperation for every petty inconvenience. It’s a
finger-pointing, me-first, I-was-wronged-so-gimmegimme legal system. Give a jackal a bite of meat and
it’ll come ripping for your jugular!”

He apologized for this second outburst. I was
beginning to like Donald Kerr.

“Ms. Nanavatti, you may recall that dizzy old
grandma—sorry, sorry; everybody’s got a grandma—
that dotty old darling who dumped McDonald’s
coffee in her lap. A cool mil for a first-degree burn?
Buy plenty of calamine lotion. Marinate in the muck.
Okay, maybe her coffee was a touch hot. What’s
the alternative? Serve it cold? Nonsense! Consider
your—our—situation in this light. A baby nearly
dies in a washroom. Not any old washroom: the most
successful retail chain in the free world. Not flukily
or through folly of its own devising. Maliciously.
What can my client do? Video cameras in their
bathrooms? Fah! Customers will worry about seeing
themselves on those Girls-Caught-Peeing websites.
No bathrooms, then? Let shoppers tinkle into the
pockets of winter coats? Building codes dictate
sanitary washrooms in retail outlets. It’s one ittybitty word,
safe
, at issue. Are the bathrooms safe?
Insofar as there is nothing innately dangerous about
them. Wal-Mart’s hardware section isn’t innately
dangerous until someone grabs a hammer and
brains somebody in Electronics. Nothing innately
dangerous about coffee, either. Still, one clumsy
dingbat made
mucho
hay off a cup of coffee. There’s
always that nickel to be shaved.” Donald Kerr laughs
a sporting laugh. “Bleed the beast but leave enough
to keep the heart pumping to bleed it a little more!”

“I’d better have my people call your people,” I tell
him, and hang up.

Afterwards I decide to take a walk. The sky is
threatening so: galoshes and an umbrella. After
two blocks the clouds withdraw. Sunlight paints
the neighbourhood. My feet, trapped in militarysurplus rainboots, are sweating furiously. Mormon
kids from Glenridge Academy pedal by on bicycles:
boys and girls dressed the same, riding the same
sized bikes with matching white helmets following
their headmistress. Ducklings waddling after their
mother.

At the elementary school children are out on
recess. Pierced upon the chainlink fence are pop cans
and pudding cups. A girl with a mouthful of orangepulp-clung braces holds out sticks to three friends.
“Whoever gets the shortest stick we’ll hate for
the rest of the day.”

Were a man standing here as I am, rainboots and
an umbrella on a cloudless day staring intently over
a schoolyard, you’d think he was a molester. But
onlookers would peg me as deranged or more likely,
wistful.
She wants a child
. I’m fairly certain I could be
a molester.

My gaze is drawn to a fat boy in a black cape.
Sitting alone on a teeter-totter. The sight strikes me
as emblematic of futility possibly cosmic in scope.
He’s eating candy shaken from a brightly coloured
box. Nerds. I haven’t eaten Nerds in decades.
Abruptly I wish to taste the world as a child.
At the supermarket I stride past a bin of
multicoloured
spuds—
BOUTIQUE
POTATOES
½
PRICE!
—to the candy aisle. Scan for floorwalkers
before prying the lid off a tub of gummy worms. Oh!
Too bloody sweet. How do kids eat this garbage?
On to the baby aisle. I may look motherly in that
my surroundings support that viewpoint. By placing
me against a forest backdrop I’d look outdoorsy. Or
in a rubber room: bonkers. Lord, all the diapers!
Ultra-slim: what sort of parent is so paranoid about
their baby’s girth they need to buy low-profile
turd-collectors? Super-absorbent with moisturelock gussets. These ones claim to be completely
redesigned. How does one
completely
redesign a
diaper without Mother Nature first redesigning the
human excretory system?

Baby food. Strained Bananas and Prunes catches
my eye. It was all my father ate his last months.
He said it hurt him to eat. I thought he meant hurt
his teeth or belly, but the act inflicted more of a
philosophical pain. Fuel for a motor that idiotically
kept running. Mashed fruit: our first and last
spoonfuls. The first from our parents and the last
from our children.

“Perhaps you’ll have a child,” my father said
towards the end, “and I will become part of them. A
carbon atom in his eye or a vessel of her heart.”