The Opening Sky (2 page)

The guy with the bad skin is back with her toast. He hands her the coffee in a Styrofoam cup. “I gave you my mug,” she says. So he reaches for her mug and pours the coffee into it and drops the Styrofoam cup into the garbage. Without a second thought!

“Wait,” Sylvie says. “Why do you think I’m carrying a mug?” But he’s turned away. She wants to make a fuss but she’s no better than he is. All night she was
aching
for a Starbucks latte. She can’t help it, she’s been socialized like everybody else, she was born the year the Starbucks mermaid lost her nipples.

Emily has her laptop out when Sylvie gets back to the table. Sylvie sits down beside her and starts to eat her toast, keeping her eyes on the screen.

Adieu, Les Isles Maldives
, Emily types. She frowns briefly over the font, picks Tahoma and then switches to Shruti. She takes the title up to seventy-two points and swivels her laptop around so the others can see.

“
Adieu, Les Isles Maldives
,” Kajri reads out. “That’s the name of our show?”

“Why is it French?” says Nathan.

“It makes it more pitiful,” Emily says. Less banal, she must mean. Words are not Emily’s strong point. On the lid of her laptop is a sticker: Earth as a ball of ice cream melting over its cone.

They sit in silence. Emily is waiting to hear from Sylvie and Thea. But Thea has zoned out; she’s gazing down at something. Sylvie leans over to see. It’s her tights. They’re lime green and purple, an intricate pattern that may actually be tessellation. Where did you get them? Sylvie mouths. Pico’s, Thea mouths back, batting her eyes.

“Also,” says Emily loudly and firmly, “
adieu
means ‘to God.’ These islands are being given back to god, for eternity. Not
God
-god – you know what I mean. Anyway, forget the name. The name doesn’t matter for now. What did you all bring?”

“I found a piece about the Maldives government,” says Kajri. She got up around five and went to work in the common room, but still she found time to put on gel eyeliner, perfectly, top and bottom. “The cabinet of the Maldives government actually held a meeting
underwater
. They were wearing oxygen tanks and wetsuits, to dramatize what rising sea levels will mean to their country.”

“No shit!” says Sylvie in admiration. She sips her coffee. She’s finished her toast and yogurt and she’s still ravenous.

“Well,” says Emily to Kajri, “so that’s been done. And for real. Good for them.” She produces a tense, insincere smile. She’s their director because she did the Fringe application; they’re all grateful to her for that, and Sylvie is
not
going to undermine her. She’s not, although it’s stupid and unnecessary to be working on this during Christmas week. Emily is testing her power and they’re letting her.

Sylvie is waking up now, she is tuning in to the fact that this day has actually started, the shortest day of the year. Think of all the other things she should be doing!
Noah
: She should be getting ready for Thursday, when he’s arriving from Guelph (doing her laundry, shaving her legs, finding her only tube of lip gloss).
Christmas
: She has to make her gifts (the little cactus gardens).
School
: Her Evo-Devo take-home; her Human Impact on the Environment paper, currently overdue; the permaculture project she worked on last night. All these jobs are flashing in her mind like icons on a task bar, yet here she sits, staring at Emily with her frizzy hair and her dorky jacket and that look of parental anxiety – a monster they’ve created themselves.

Thea finally comes to life. She lifts her eyes from her tessellated tights and reaches for her backpack. “Observe,” she says. “I went to the trouble and expense of printing this in colour. At Staples. It was in a magazine at my oma’s, and she wouldn’t let me tear it out because it belonged to someone else.” She spreads a two-page article on the table.

It’s about a restaurant at a resort in the Maldives. An underwater restaurant – an acrylic dome five metres below sea level. In the picture, tourists seem to be sitting in a slice of aqua water filtered with light. Silver fish dart around them, hundreds of fish, moving together like a lithe comet. This restaurant is so exclusive it seats only twelve diners. Flat rate US$250 per person, before drinks.

Sylvie and her friends stare in awe. “Lamb,” says Nathan, reading upside down. “They copter in
lamb
for a restaurant with twelve customers.
Fuck
, that’s obscene.”

Thea sits with her big head tilted, soaking up their amazement. “So,” she says, “I thought we could do a scene in the restaurant. The customers order all these imported things, they sit with fish swimming around them, they’re all like, ‘Awesome! Wow!’ and then gradually the fish disappear and the walls are smeared with tar balls.”

“How would we do that? The fish, the tar balls.”

“Black light.”

“Is there even offshore drilling in the Maldives? Does anybody know?”

“Or is it on a tanker route?”

“That’s not the point,” says Sylvie. “We’re totally missing the point.”

Thea throws a dark look in Sylvie’s direction.

“Okay,” Emily says. “Before we get too obsessed with the restaurant, let’s finish going around.”

It’s Nathan’s turn. “All right,” he says. “Get this. I found an article where the journalist is like, ‘These beautiful islands are being destroyed by the excesses of the Western world.’ And at the end he goes, ‘This is a paradise. Go and see it, jump on a carbon-spewing plane today, because it won’t be there tomorrow.’ ”

Silence settles over them. This is their problem: reality always tops them. Behind them the espresso machine roars on. Nathan’s
eyes dart eagerly from one of his friends to another. And our other problem … thinks Sylvie, but then she can’t think. Her mind goes back to high school grad night, a year and a half ago, when they went to the Pancake House in the grey light of dawn. Over a platter of French toast Nathan suddenly teared up and asked them not to call him “The Groom” anymore. And so they don’t. Now they call him “Ken,” behind his back.

“Sylvie?” says Emily.

“I didn’t bring anything on the Maldives,” Sylvie says. “I don’t know if I’m sold on it, as our subject. There are other places being ruined by climate change, like Bangladesh and Pakistan, where millions and millions of people live. Or the Horn of Africa. Or our own Arctic. Why did we choose the Maldives? It’s sexier, I guess. Or we think it’s sexier because there is more tourism there.”

They stare at her. Across their faces flash two signals Sylvie is used to seeing.
You’re so smart, Sylvie. Why don’t you piss off, Sylvie?

“I’m not trying to slow us down,” she says. “Honestly. I’m not being a bitch about this. It’s just that … I don’t feel well. In fact, I have to go right now.”

Someone’s in the bathroom, looking at her from behind the sinks. What a hot girl, is her split-second thought when she glimpses herself (grungy, sleepless, sick) in the mirror. Noah’s responsible for this, even though he’s still in Guelph. Sex, sex, sex – this rundown tiled bathroom throbs with it. That’s what her dream was about just before her phone woke her up. Not Noah coming home, just sex. Something secret and delicious tugs at her from it. It was like being deep in a colour, or a texture like velvet. It was just a mood. Not a
drama
, which is what most dreams are.

She sits on the toilet with her jeans still on, folds herself over with her head hanging down – a private bit of theatre to justify leaving the meeting. She’s in no danger of puking. She’s not sick,
she just feels weird. She straightens up and leans into a corner of the tiny stall, and exhaustion crashes down on her like bricks. In a flash her eyes are closed and she’s dreaming again. She’s skimming through a stand of massive trees, a dark, enchanted forest, trees with jocular patches of red hung here and there in their upper branches, trees crammed so close she can hardly slip between them. “Roots to shoots,” she mutters. She pushes her way through the forest and hears a snore, and shakes herself awake. Oh god, how could she fall asleep on a toilet?

She stands, picks up her backpack, and pushes open the door of the stall. It’s not just that she’s tired, it’s the fucking pill. She should never have started it, and the longer she stays on it the worse she feels. She did it to please Noah. Not that he’d asked her to (he’d probably be against it if he stopped to think it through), but he told her his penis-wearing-a-condom riddle (What is happy and sad at the same time?) and just because of that she ignored her own principles and went to the doctor and asked for the pill. She did it to make Noah happy. And that is wrong in every way – her body is telling her how wrong it is.

She moves to the sink and turns the tap and watches water run silver over her fingers. What is bad for the planet is bad for the body. And vice versa, she tells herself. She’ll go to the walk-in clinic, she’ll go now. She doesn’t have time. But she needs to get some different birth control before Noah gets home. Go now, she orders herself, banging on the chrome bar of the hand-dryer. Go right now.

O
n his noon break, Aiden heads for the footbridge to the park. Across the bridge he swerves onto the river trail, plodding like a pony. He reaches up and sticks in his earbuds (they’re new, he loves
them, they fit like a charm) and Tom Waits is growling in his ear. He hits Forward and lands on a guitar riff he knows to his bones.

Below him the river is clotting into ice. Or is it melting? It’s melting, and the snow that fell in the night is softening, each little origami of a snowflake losing its hold on itself and turning to water. And then everything will freeze, and the city will be a mess of frozen ruts until March.

Another freak December. A dog turd on the path – Aiden sees it and then, Aw shit, he nails it. Almost Christmas and not cold enough to freeze dog shit. He does his midday mood check, gives himself a seven, but a knot of shame catches when he breathes.

He thuds along the trail and forces himself back to it, back to his fractious morning, to nine o’clock, nine-fifteen. He was sitting by the desk with his mug of coffee in hand and his first client, Norman Orlikow, dapper as a badger on the pleather couch, was telling a long story about his neighbour dying the week before, during routine elective surgery.

Aiden listened conscientiously, taking note of Norman’s grasp of medical detail and how much satisfaction he took in displaying it. But finally he gave his chair a cut-to-the-chase swivel. “You were really close to this neighbour?” he said, or words to that effect. That’s when he registered the light in Norman’s eyes. It was triumph.

Turns out that one day last summer, the neighbour’s dog, a possibly illegal pit bull cross, had lunged at Norman as he innocently walked by on a public sidewalk. So Norman called the police. Two officers came but they wouldn’t take the incident seriously. There was a scene on the street, people gathered. The dog made nice, rotating its ugly stump of tail, and the neighbour cracked jokes and rolled his eyes in a private signal to the cops that what they were dealing with here was the local nutbar. And now the neighbour has died.

Norman paused, shiny eyed. “You know what’s really strange?” he said. “Since the summer, three people I know have … passed. Tom Spokes – you might have heard of him, the guy who was killed in that freak accident on the Osborne Bridge? His
SUV
jumped the guardrail, d’you remember? And Nancy Sylvester, my old piano teacher – she had an embolism. And now this gentleman. And you know, it’s kind of bizarre, but a few weeks before each of them passed, we had what you might call a run-in.” His face was thoughtful, almost reverent. “It’s true, you know. I only just realized it last night. At one time or another, every one of those three people treated me like dirt.”

Man has no greater happiness in life than watching his neighbour fall off a roof. But Aiden knew this was something else. “You believe the deaths of these people are connected to the way they treated you,” he said.

Embarrassment rejigged the lines of Norman’s face. “Ha! Like I have that kind of power. Ha ha, I wish! Of course I don’t think that, Doctor Phimister.” He’s been in therapy a long time, Norman has, with other people.

Aiden said, not for the first time, “I’m not a doctor.” He let a beat go by, put down his coffee. “I wonder if you haven’t felt humiliated at one time or another by pretty much every person you know. Then when somebody dies, you see this sort of cause and effect. You feel vindicated, as if they were being paid back for how they treated you.”

That’s when the histrionic bastard jumped to his feet and started kicking. First at Aiden’s wire wastebasket, then at the weeping fig, knocking it over. Then he stomped out into the waiting room and kicked in the privacy glass by the door, putting his boot through the middle pane.

Can’t you joke? Aiden asks himself, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet as the trail rises. No, you can’t joke, at least not with Norman Orlikow. Who’s got his precious diagnosis from the
DSM
– he waved it like a diploma the first time he came to the office. Social Anxiety Disorder. Who did actually say he wished he had the power to kill people who offended him. He did! Aiden should work with a tape recorder for instant playback, the way the police do.

No, Aiden should watch his own reactivity.