We Will All Go Down Together (30 page)

“That’s getting worse,” a voice pointed out, somewhat uselessly, from behind me: Carra, wedged into a stall with her Doc Marten’ed feet up on the toilet-paper rack, arms crossed—the sort of position you’d expect to find adopted by somebody smoking surreptitiously, which she wasn’t. Just . . . waiting, I guess.

(For me.)

“Yeah, thanks; noticed that, actually.” I tucked myself away, turning. “Nice show at the demo, by the way.”

She nodded, slightly—gave this contortionate sort of half-smile, half-grimace, rueful and tired. And:

“Ah,” she said, a little sadly. “‘So now you have seen the witch in her true ornament.’”

“Uh huh. And it was supposed to prove . . . ?”

“. . . that when you pop off their brain’s protective seals by sending the conscious mind on a little detour, anybody’s randomly picked natural talent is bound to come to the fore—but Abbott does like to stack the deck, that’s for sure. Which is where I come in.”

“You on retainer here?”

“In a manner of speaking. My Mom needs help, the monetary kind; I can do for myself, most-times, but she takes a little more effort. Ask me what you really want to, though.”

“Are you one of Abbott’s receivers? Is that the group—” I stopped for a second. You always hear about people “gulping,” like that’s as natural for human beings as it is for frogs, or something; it’s not, especially so in this case. Try more like dry, and loud, and hurting.

But Carra didn’t seem to hear.

“—you should be in?” She finished, for me. “That’s what the Institute is here for, supposedly. So they can run you through a bunch of hoops, show you flash-cards, get some sort of chartable number to work with. Me, on the other hand. . . .” A sigh. “Look, what is it you think I want from you, Janis? Your
thesis
?”

Prim: “I’ve got no way of knowing what you want. Ms. Devize.”

“I told Abbott this was a stupid venue to test his ‘Mental Radio’ in, right back when he first suggested it: Toronto the Good, five-into-one megacity, with death on top of death on top of death almost anyplace you look. And take it from long experience—being dead doesn’t tend to concentrate your mind, except in very specific ways. Think about . . . burning, for example. . . .”

(Some kinda guy, big and thin, no face. With his head on fire.)

Yeah. That’d be a real conversation-stopper, probably.

“So . . . yes, sometimes miserable things happen in this city of ours, like pretty much all the fucking time. And you’ll never know why, not even if you’re ‘lucky’ enough”—a stress on the word, like Abbott with “skeptic,” but considerably more bitter—“to know who to ask, because
they
don’t even know why. Because they can’t remember anymore, and they just don’t give a good goddamn.”

She was shaking now, ever so slightly, and I have to say that scared me on a far deeper level than any overt display of histrionics could have: like she was just trying to school herself into being able to finish, without caring much whether or not I thought what she had to say was bullshit.

“I don’t know what’s in your house,” she said, finally. “I haven’t been there, and I never will, because I don’t have to. Because all I have to do is look at what it’s doing to you.”

I stood there, feeling the rash burn. Watched her sit there, shaking. Until—

“Look,” I told her, “I just don’t think it’s as bad as it must seem. To you. I mean . . . I. . . .” I trailed off. Then, weakly: “I haven’t even
seen
anything, you know?”

Not—to speak of. Not
really
. Not—

(uh)

There was a long pause; Carra bowed her head once more, let her hair fall forward again. Returning, through its protective veil—

“Not
yet
.”

It took a few minutes to find the best place for the mirror Abbott had given me; I eventually set it on its end in the corner of the room, directly across from where I sat to sketch, at the foot of my bed. With my foolscap positioned over the rough planking, my ass jammed against the wainscoting between bed and wall, I could lean forward in relative comfort to draw, shade, and pencil, while at the same time being able to simply flick my eyes towards the mirror and see this tiny version of myself repeating my own movements, a blurred homunculus-echo.

All the while, thinking:
This is bullshit. This is never going to work. Abbott has no idea what he’s fucking around with
—

(But what did that make me, exactly? Renting myself out to play a part designed specifically to shore up his idiocy, his hubris?)

Which was why, once I’d finished the drawing, closed my eyes to clear my head then looked at it again, the vast rush of relief I felt was spiced with more than a touch of chagrin. In the wood, I’d found an image of an old boot, lying on one side with one lace pulled out so far it sidewindered from end to end across the paper . . . and that image alone, clear and sharp, was exactly what stared up at me.

I decided to not tell Abbott, not immediately; the guy irritated me enough without that smug veneer I knew he’d celebrate being proven right by adopting. It was worth eating a little crow, though (if only by myself), in exchange for the ability to trust my own hands again.

Aaron and Vivia both remarked on my fresh new rush of energy over the next few weeks: pure relief, immediately channelled back into both my thesis and my own art. I found my head crammed with new images, sketching them well outside the set daily transmission time, too eager and excited to notice their overall bleakness: a half-demolished house, broken-ended planking thrusting up like jagged brown teeth. Blackened figures lying in a row, peculiarly boneless and shaded, as if about to dissolve like smoke. A child’s toy engine melted like a snow-sculpture in hot sun, like plastic in fire.

And if my temper also got steadily worse over those same weeks, who could blame me? It’s hardly abnormal, when you’re under increasing deadline-oriented pressure, to reach the point where you “suddenly” decide it’s not worth putting up any more with the countless usually unmentioned irritations and idiocies other people produce, the endless stream of petty bullshit everybody around you thinks is so God-awful important.

It’s easy to tell yourself that warning signs are something else, at the time. To ignore the mounting tension, forgetting the most basic tenet of cause vs. effect: how things can strain only so far before they—

(snap)

Five weeks after I’d begun using the mirror, Abbott switched the schedule so that I was supposed to transmit at 11:00
P.M.
; he staggered the hours for each sender/receiver coupling to keep us from getting too subconsciously accustomed to a particular time of day. In the yellow light of my half-burnt-out overhead, sky black beyond the window, I was drawing something I was pretty sure was going to be a wheelchair by the time I was finished, peripherally aware of my doppelgänger across the room following along with my motions: light brown hair dangling forward to hide my face (and who did
that
remind me of?), tiny pencil moving furiously over the whitish-grey paper. A ghost sitting cross-legged, the mirror a doorway through which images passed like water through a sluice.

And: in the back of my head, Max Ernst, talking about himself—a THIRD VOICE manifesto so close to what I was doing, it was sort of . . . scary. Saying:

“My eyes were avid not only for the amazing world which assailed them from the exterior but also for that other world, mysterious and disquieting, which burst forth and vanished with persistence and regularity in my dreams: to see clearly has become a necessity for my nervous equilibrium. To see it clearly there is only one way—to record all that is offered to my sight.”

Classy
, I thought.
Perfect. Gotta stick that between sections thirteen and
. . . 

At that same second, something in the mirror—moved.

I stopped moving, stopped breathing. Flash-frozen. While a vast black shape like a congealed shadow seemed to flow past behind my silvered shadow-self, moving with smooth and unhuman (
ape
-like, somehow) stride. A wash of night, far taller than anything the room could have actually held.

There was a gleam of greenish-white light from its ill-defined head; a reflective glimmer, as through heavy fathoms, like the flirtatious residue of some coy, over-the-shoulder glance. And then it was—gone. “Passed on,” probably in both of the phrase’s more well-known senses.

I flung myself over and away from the wall, of course, hands instinctively flicking up to shield me from nothing: nothing in the mirror, nothing in the room, nothing anywhere but in my own sick head. And then I doubled over as the itch between my breasts flared to scraping, agonizing pain, like embers roused to fire by the same hot gust of wind making my thesis’ printed-off pages flap: ripped my T-shirt off and clawed with my nails at the raw skin under my breasts ’til I went deep enough to draw blood.

I sank down, panting, itch lost and forgotten, as the pain shifted to something much cleaner and harsher. Warmth trickling down my stomach, my eyes were magnet-drawn back across the room to the mirror—empty of everything but my own face, a white-eyed cartoon, all taut lines over a limp, shocked blankness.

Break the mirror
, something whispered inside me.
That will end it. Close the doorway. That’s what doors are meant for, right? To let things in, then shut them out again.

I looked at the unfinished drawing, crumpled on the floor; thought of never being able to trust what I was seeing again, of being unable to draw at all or what else might appear in the mirror, the next time I tried this. And then—

Then, I thought of an invitation. One I’d never once imagined I’d seriously accept.

Clutching my T-shirt to me, I made myself straighten, grab my robe. Forty-five minutes, a shower, a frustrating search for our misplaced White Pages and a quick jog down the block later, I found myself standing in the vestibule of Kali’s all-night donut shop on Bloor, flipping through what was left of their pay phone’s ragged book for the not-exactly-in-everyday-use last name “Devize.”

Just as I expected, there was only one entry in the entire city: DEVIZE, G. and C. So I fumbled out a quarter, put it to the coin-slot . . . and hesitated.

12:35, the electronic display flashed;
A.M.
, not
P.M.
What was I doing, phoning some scary freak I’d met in a bathroom after midnight—not long, grant you, but after? How did this make any sense?

I looked down at my feet, trying to clear my head. And there, my eyes met the fresh stains on my new T-shirt, still oozing, from where I’d just skinned my own breastbone over a hallucination.

Carra’s phone (I hoped) rang three times. I braced myself for the switch to a voice-mail or answering machine, but it didn’t come. A fourth ring, fifth, sixth, seventh. By eight, I was finding it hard to breathe.

On the eleventh ring, a click of pickup. A pause.

“I—” I started, and couldn’t get any further. The word like a stone in my throat, jammed shallow, impossible to dislodge.

And: “I know,” she said. That’s all, dry and remote as usual . . . but at the time, Christ. Jesus!

“Come over,” Carra told me; I felt myself nodding, though it wasn’t like she could see me, or anything. My nose and eyes burning painful fever-bright, for just a second, as that deceptively thin strip of flesh separating my sweating cleavage from my thudding, aching heart.

2:25
A.M.
, by my watch. The house was an Annex side-street sideshow attraction, a rotting two-storey duplex slightly folded in on itself as though in pain, like some tumorous parody grafted onto the side of its far-healthier twin. The front door opened just a second before I raised my hand to knock—Carra, naturally enough, in stockinged feet and a much-decayed T-shirt (thigh-length, just about) advertising some long-defunct ’zine called
SHE: Tough Movies, Tougher Women! A Walk on the Wild Side of Cat-Fight Cinema!

“Sorry to call so late—” I started, but she cut me off.

“Not like I wasn’t up already.” Pointing: “Through there. I’ll be down in a minute.”

“Through there” proved to be what I took as Carra’s bedroom/office, maybe five feet by six and choked with stuff that mostly looked stacked for sorting so long ago she’d forgotten to get around to the stocktaking part of the exercise. A 1950s Barcalounger chair played double duty, set up square where the bed should have been; one wall was literally papered in what proved to be—at closer examination—water, electricity, and TV bills going back before either of us had been born, arranged into patterns dictated by level of urgency.

The vanity, wedged kitty-corner to a bulging closet, held thirty or so sample-sized bottles and tubes of perfume, all covered in dust. Pinned to its grimy mirror was a studio photo of a girl who might or might not have been Carra, wearing a black leotard, in the proprietary embrace of a woman who might have been her mother (Geillis Carraclough Devize, the file told me later, called “Gala”). Books were laid out all over the bed, some in teetering or half-spilled piles—paperbacks, hardcovers, old cloth-bound ones with gold lettering on the spine.

I picked one up—a copy of Shakespeare’s
Henry IV, Part I
—and opened it, recoiling from a sudden spill of yellow-spotted early Polaroids; left to mark the page, perhaps. I checked the text I’d opened it at: Welsh nationalist leader/magician Owain Glendower and stammering Brit firebrand Hotspur (
My liege, I did deny no prisoners!/But I remember when the fight was through
) holding themselves a little mediaeval pissing contest.

GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.

HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man,

But will they come when you do call for them?

Or as H.P. Lovecraft once wrote, along startlingly similar lines in
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
:
Doe not calle up any which ye cannot putte down.

Bending, I retrieved the Polaroids, flicking through them. All starred girl-who-was-Carra—her eyes closed, a little older, same leotard—and something else, something that seemed to be forming in the corner of every photo: a blurry, globular, mucus-white excrescence, like faces under water.