So Long Been Dreaming (12 page)

Eden Robinson wrote “Terminal Avenue” in Vancouver, Canada on the number 9 Broadway bus between Commercial and the University of British Columbia over a period of two months. It was the third anniversary of the Oka Uprising, the salmon wars had just heated up, and the B.C. television helicopters were scanning the Fraser River looking to catch native fishermen “illegally” fishing. She is the author of a novel,
Monkey Beach
, and a collection of short stories,
Traplines
. She is currently working on another novel,
Blood Sports
, and the screenplay adaptation of
Monkey Beach.

Terminal Avenue
Eden Robinson

His brother once held a peeled orange slice up against the sun. When the light shone through it, the slice became a brilliant amber: the setting sun is this colour, ripe orange.

The uniforms of the five advancing Peace Officers are robin’s egg blue, but the slanting light catches their visors and sets their faces aflame.

In his memory, the water of the Douglas Channel is a hard blue, baked to a glassy translucence by the August sun. The mountains in the distance form a crown;
Gabiswa
, the mountain in the centre, is the same shade of blue as his lover’s veins.

She raises her arms to sweep her hair from her face. Her breasts lift. In the cool morning air, her nipples harden to knobby raspberries. Her eyes are widening in indignation: he once saw that shade of blue in a dragonfly’s wing, but this is another thing he will keep secret.

Say nothing, his mother said, without moving her lips, careful not to attract attention. They waited in their car in silence after that. His father and mother were in the front seat, stiff.

Blood plastered his father’s hair to his skull; blood leaked down his father’s blank face. In the flashing lights of the patrol car, the blood looked black and moved like honey.

A rocket has entered the event horizon of a black hole. To an observer who is watching this from a safe distance, the rocket trapped here, in the black hole’s inescapable halo of gravity, will appear to stop.

To an astronaut in the rocket, however, gravity is a rack that stretches his body like taffy, thinner and thinner, until there is nothing left but X-rays.

In full body-armour, the five Peace Officers are sexless and anonymous. With their visors down, they look like old-fashioned astronauts. The landscape they move across is the rapid transit line, the Surreycentral Skytrain station, but if they remove their body-armour, it may as well be the moon.

The Peace Officers begin to match strides until they move like a machine. This is an intimidation tactic that works, is working on him even though he knows what it is. He finds himself frozen. He can’t move, even as they roll towards him, a train on invisible tracks.

Once, when his brother dared him, he jumped off the high diving tower. He wasn’t really scared until he stepped away from the platform. In that moment, he realized he couldn’t change his mind.

You stupid shit, his brother said when he surfaced.

In his dreams, everything is the same, except there is no water in the swimming pool and he crashes into the concrete like a dropped pumpkin.

He thinks of his brother, who is so perfect he wasn’t born, but chiselled from stone. There is nothing he can do against that brown Apollo’s face, nothing he can say that will justify his inaction. Kevin would know what to do, with doom coming towards him in formation.

But Kevin is dead. He walked through their mother’s door one day, wearing the robin’s egg blue uniform of the great enemy, and his mother struck him down. She summoned the ghost of their father and put him in the room, sat him beside her, bloody and stunned. Against this Kevin said, I can stop it, Mom. I have the power to change things now.

She turned away, then the family turned away. Kevin looked at him, pleading, before he left her house and never came back, disappeared. Wil closed his eyes, a dark, secret joy welling in him, to watch his brother fall: Kevin never made the little mistakes in his life, never so much as sprouted a pimple. He made up for it though by doing the unforgivable.

Wil wonders if his brother knows what is happening. If, in fact, he isn’t one of the Peace Officers, filled himself with secret joy.

His lover will wait for him tonight. Ironically, she will be wearing a complete Peace Officer’s uniform, bought at great expense on the black market, and very, very illegal. She will wait at the door of her club, Terminal Avenue, and she will frisk clients that she knows will enjoy it. She will have the playroom ready, with its great wooden beams stuck through with hooks and cages, with its expensive equipment built for the exclusive purpose of causing pain. On a steel cart, her toys will be spread out as neatly as surgical instruments.

When he walks through the door, she likes to have her bouncers, also dressed as Peace Officers, hurl him against the wall. They let him struggle before they handcuff him. Their uniforms are slippery as rubber. He can’t get a grip on them. The uniforms are padded with the latest in wonderfabric so no matter how hard he punches them, he can’t hurt them. They will drag him into the back and strip-search him in front of clients who pay for the privilege of watching. He stands under a spotlight that shines an impersonal cone of light from the ceiling. The rest of the room is darkened. He can see reflections of glasses, red-eyed cigarettes, the glint of ice clinking against glass, shadows shifting. He can hear zippers coming undone, low moans; he can smell the cum when he’s beaten into passivity.

Once, he wanted to cut his hair, but she wouldn’t let him, said she’d never speak to him again if he did. She likes it when the bouncers grab him by his hair and drag him to the exploratory table in the centre of the room. She says she likes the way it veils his face when he’s kneeling.

In the playroom though, she changes. He can’t hurt her the way she wants him to; she is tiring of him. He whips her half-heartedly until she tells the bouncer to do it properly.

A man walked in one day, in a robin’s egg blue uniform, and Wil froze. When he could breathe again, when he could think, he found her watching him, thoughtful.