Wallflowers (24 page)

At the Church of Our Lady Queen of Martyrs, you are the nun with gap teeth and two-toned eyes. Heterochromia, she says. One yellow, one brown. Two-Toned carries wood sorrel with both hands like it’s a snake and leads me down white brick steps to the courtyard. She tosses the sorrel into the disputed hedge of the neighbouring vineyard, and I set up the tripod for my theodolite. Hired by God this round, or at least one of His Portuguese ambassadors, to define the property lines between church and grape—A matter to be settled post-haste, said the abbot over the telephone: they’ve cut off the free wine.

The machine is two silver panels on either side of a lens, and when I’m feeling congenial, I call it my Cyclops. I centre my
x
on God and grapes’ distant wall and align my
y
with local gravity. I am Lee Harvey Oswald because my eyes blink through crosshairs. Because
triangulate
sounds so violent.

Two-Toned wears a grey veil and no habit. Rosary beads hook from the belt loops of her jeans, and as she walks, a wooden cross bounces against her hip. You become her when she stands beside a shrub to collect quinces with a priest’s black biretta. She sings Nancy Sinatra and balances the fruit in the hat, the quinces yellow and knobbed like cancerous lemons. And then there’s you in the valley gathering cherries in the belly of your May The Forks Be With You apron, humming something bluesy that neither of us knows the name of.

Two-Toned sees I’m watching her instead of the theodolite and tosses me a quince.

You know how to play with
marmelos
? she says.

I answer, How?

It’s a game for the sea, a group game, catch and swim.
Marmelos
are sour, but sweet with salt water. So the first person pitches and everyone swims, and whoever fetches the
marmelo
first takes a bite and pitches again, and everyone swims, over and over till it’s eaten.

Catch the Quince, I say, how charming. And to think back home we’re stuck spinning bottles.

You have
esposa
? she replies. A wife?

I say, Oh. I say, Not yet, but I’m engaged.

After my romp with Pythagoras in the crosshairs I want the Bigger Picture, the three-sixty, so Two-Toned leads me back up the helix of white bricks to the church’s roof, to the panoramic view. The wall up here is painted blue on white ceramic tiles. It’s a sea mural, bordered by vases and ropes of flowers and pillars that rest on the plump shoulders of cherubs. In the scene, azure women arch from arcs of azure spray, and waves swell over a cliff until my eyes adjust and I realize the waves are the manes of rearing horses.

Two-Toned sits now before a bench stacked with faded tiles and fist-sized jars of paint. I restore
azulejos
, she says, and dabs a blue-slicked brush into the shadow of what might be a cherub’s belly button.

Of course you do, I say. My fiancée restored maps.

I step onto the strip of clay tiles that borders the roof’s edge. I see vineyards and pear trees, plump jade acres that are eventually flattened by the bleached walls of a nearby township. I wager with myself the distance between that steeple and that chimney, and that chimney and me, and me and the ground, and I add up my angles: the angles it takes to join the one-eighty. To leap off the roof into the
y
axis. To bisect my horizon.

ST. PETERSBURG

Palace Square at 4:45 in the ante meridiem inspires me to re-instate the tsar. A city of four and a half million people and I stand with my Cyclops in a forty-thousand-square-metre expanse of silence. The facade parabolas across the square, and I am the focus point to its vertex. The lonely guy in a beaver pelt
ushanka
opposite Triumphal Arch. My assignment: to collect data for a three-dimensional three-sixty online interactive tour map to end all tour maps.

It occurs to me that I’m listening to a series of chinks, and a shoulder check reveals a heavy-coated security guard in a navy blue saucer cap, leaning against the base of the Alexander Column. He’s clipping his fingernails. A grey sliver zings toward me.

A good one, he says, and I don’t know if he means the shot or the nail. The blades chime together again and a clipping drops onto his shoe. I say,
Privet
, and try to recall if it translates to hello or thanks or toilet.
Privet
, he says. I tell him I’m here to collect data. You are map man, he says.
Da
, I reply, I am Map Man. He peers through the wrong side of my Cycloptic lens and says, Eet’s hard? I say, Easier than it looks, and he replies,
Da, da
, the casket open in simple way. He tells me inside is warmer and asks if I like art. So I bag One-Eye, collapse the tripod, and follow him into the far left entrance.

In the Winter Palace you are Elizabeth Petrovna in
Portrait of Elizabeth Petrovna on Horseback Accompanied by a Negro Servant
. The painting hangs at the end of a gilded hall: velvet carpet, vaulted ceilings, pillars that drip gold leaf and angel hair. You’re jaunty in a tricorn hat and riding coat, avocado green, wide cuffs, white gloves. Tall-piped boots that end above the knee, a length disproportionate to the foot on the stirrup. The mare’s tail flows like it’s been brushed in the mirror one hundred strokes a day, and the Negro Servant is clad like a
petit prince
: white tights, pink sash, gold-braid blouse. Far cry from the Maasai warrior who led our camel in sandy circles from Museum to Genuine Maasai Village, his toes chalky inside the tire sandals, heels white from dust and callus.

Behind me, the guard says I’m not me, this horse isn’t mine, and I am not a cabman. I turn from you to respond with an arched,
Come Again?
brow, and he says, Whether you hit an owl with a stump or the stump with an owl, it’s the owl who suffers. I smile diplomatically and ask, Where’s a good place ’round here to eat?

At Vlad’s Vodka House, you are the emaciated barmaid who calls herself a countess. She sits across from me over a beer-ringed tablecloth, linguine legs folded under her chin like a spring. She brought me six rounds of vodka On Zee House and said, I have six more rounds. Vant to see?

Russians plop
O
’s from their mouths like teaspoons of caviar.
O
. Go. Go, says the Countess as she thrusts the butt of her .44 calibre into my palm. She clasps my wrist, guides the gun’s muzzle up her throat, traces it along her lips, and plays Lifeguard, Mouth-To-Mouth. She says, You first. She says, Take a spin. Her breath reeks of pickled cabbage. I say, No,
nyet
. The barrel is long and dainty, the revolver older than Tsar Nicholas II. I say, What a handle! Is it walnut? Six cylinders, she says, one in six. I’m Not Scared. Go.

The pub is empty save the fat man counting cash and smoking cigarettes on a bar stool. The Union fell twenty years ago, but Vlad has yet to update the decor, the walls cluttered with portraits of Uncle Lenin and posters I can’t read that shout Who Are You With and Workers Unite and Nowhere But Mosselprom. When the Countess grins, her lips stretch like the Neva River in an upside-down map of Petersburg. Coward, she says. My turn then. She flips the revolver in my hand so that the muzzle stares me in the third eye.

You and I had propped the card table five klicks west of Mission Harbour Station. We poured Earl Grey from the claw-footed pot of your mother’s silver service. The tea party an ad hoc finale to the binge that followed our final finals of undergrad—rum gulped from globe glasses sharpied with rhumb lines, the twenty-sixer of Lemon Hart a cherry to top our two-scoop geography degree sundae. The loose leaf had oversteeped from the truck ride, but the tannins tasted familiar and vaguely reassuring. Truth or Dare, you had said after we ran out of rum, but if you choose Truth, you’re a sissy. So we perched stiff and English, arrow spines, ankles crossed tidy, and we spoke in the Queen’s tongue, in Henry Higgins, all Rain in Spain, How Now, Brown Cow—I asked for the sugar If You Please and you replied Of Course, My Squashed Cabbage Leaf. When the tracks trembled with the weight of the a.m.
Canadian
barrelling eastbound from Vancouver, we stared at ourselves in the reflections of one another’s eyes, dared to sip tea when our ears buzzed with whistle. I blinked first, charged you and the table from the tracks—though in the end we had a good twenty seconds. Enough time for you to thumb a penny from your pocket and plant it on the rail.

And now my ears buzz with the Europop that leaks from the sound system, the mouth of the tsarist revolver pinned to the bridge of my nose. The backs of my arms prickle when the Countess lights a cigarette, and I realize that now the hand on the grip is my own. I close my eyes and see the city projected against my eyelids, a tourism
montage: onion domes that blister jewels, cavernous ceilings painted with kings for kings, rearing bridges, rearing horses, all of it drenched in the ghoulish mirage of you.

Ruletka
, the Countess says. Spin the cylinder. I push the thumbpiece until the chamber clucks open, roll the cylinder, and count holes until I find one with a bullet. Eyes closed, says the Countess, so I shut my lids and rotate the chamber back and forth with my thumb, trying to not track rounds. My palm folds the chamber back with a
click
and with a
click
I tap the hammer and squeeze the trigger and:
click
.

ARUSHA

At the centre of Africa between Cairo and Cape Town, a dove-haired woman sniffs mangoes from a wooden wheelbarrow. The vendor peels oranges with a machete and speaks to a woman shucking corn on the pavement beside her bowl of embers. Follows Her Nose wears high-waisted khakis and a white sleeveless blouse, and she looks like someone sixty who passes for forty-five, her cheeks slack without droop. I watch from my tin chair at the patisserie to see if she checks avocados like you, light squeeze in the palm of your hand. She does not.

Mount Meru looms over the city as crisp and conical as a bent elbow. A Maasai elder saunters up Sokoine with a gait steady enough to continue him north over the slope. Land Rovers and
dala-dalas
maelstrom ’round the roundabout—a herd of metal elephants, Carousel Africa on Stampede Speed. The murals on
dala-dala
windshields read like an atlas index: Hollywood, Jerusalem. Da Bronx. The elder is unfazed by the whirl of steel, our world of steel. As he threads through vehicles, his earlobes swing like balance balls. A Rover barrels behind him and I lose sight until he arrives whole on the other side. He hoods his blanket over his head and ambles away under a canopy of sidewalk trees.

At the primary school in Mianzini I sit opposite the headmistress with clouds in her hair. She lounges in a donated recliner, seventies velvet stretched over cushion like grafted skin. Her girl aerosols the cloud from an aluminum can, massages puffs into the black nest of her weave. She looks queenly in a burgundy pantsuit, luminous and rotund, buxom cheeks and eyes that chirp. Sit, she says, take bites and chai. After a flutter of Swahili a second girl sails into the office with a blue Thermos and donuts, umbrella-patterned
kitangi
knotted around her waist. She stirs my tea and plugs the wet spoon back into the sugar bowl. Outside the screen door, a wire-haired baby rolls in the gravel with a newborn pup. Her giggles rise into the banana leaves like bubbles inside a glass bottle of Fanta. Last time, you sat beside me, and I remember you drank Fanta instead of chai because you thought the carbonation might Do Your Stomach Good, like ginger ale, because you felt a Touch Queasy, and I remember that the Fanta haloed your lips orange. Headmistress says,
Pole, pole sana
, which means she is sorry, very sorry for my loss, or her country’s mosquitoes, or your distaste for repellent, the way it made your palms so sticky-like-skin-under-Band-Aids, or for my cod liver cheeks, the grey bags beneath my eyes.

In the room we rented on Fire Road, I dragged our bed onto the balcony because your muscle joints could brand cows, because inside was too, too, too, too, because the oxygen between walls clogged your throat. Seven p.m. and the sun on its way to the other side of the world, sub-equator sky as unfamiliar as a friend after a car crash, stars scrambled like dice. Yahtzee. The stone pillars of the front gate were spiked with broken bottle glass, amber and green triangles that glinted with the occasional sweep of the guard’s flashlight. Your head in my lap, hair like an oil spill, wet black knots splayed across my thigh. I cheered you with puns. Your cheeks hot, eyelids a-flutter. A map is like a fish because they both have scales. You don’t have to understand everything about geographic information systems, as long as you get the GIS of it. How do geographers find the girl they’re going to marry? They datum.

I fingered through your knots, memorized the curls, calculated the angles between cowlicks. Your hair streamed in kinks, black rivers that wound east and west and north from your skull, two centimetres above scalp level. Lush plains, low elevations, save the downy helices that corkscrewed from the coast of your ear. I wanted to preserve you, to shade you from direct sunlight, store you in optimal humidity within an acid-free frame. I wanted to make you a legend.