“What are you thinking about, David? Where is this going?”
Corpses beheaded, enclosed in an airless crypt, the death of romance. He said nothing.
“Turning death into metaphor isn’t murder, David. Perhaps murder preceded, but the display is romantic. Don’t you see? Get rid of the heads, let the bodies embrace. It is passion over reason, David, as it should be.”
His wife was leaning across a kitchen table, challenging him. He had not seen her in a dozen years and they had been divorced even longer. He knew he was in a dream. He felt defensive. He roused himself, trying to wake up.
“Stay here, my darling. Don’t leave me. We can work this out together.”
He stifled an answer, refusing to give her presence validity.
“Don’t you love me? Do you love me?”
He had no answer.
“Talk to me, David. Tell me about loving forever. Show me the perfect kiss. How delightful, David — an eternal instant. How abysmally sad.”
He tried to find her eyes, but they were empty sockets. Her lips were tightly clenched but the voice was clear and unnervingly familiar.
“Two heads, David, kissing forever. It’s all in the head. Reason over passion, don’t you see? Drop two heads down a chute, no telling what they’ll be up to, perpetually falling. Didn’t you ever wonder about heads in the guillotine basket? Between decapitation and the end of consciousness, did they exchange glances? What secrets and jokes passed among them, David?
“Was that our problem, David? Minds and bodies didn’t come together? We couldn’t tell secrets from jokes!”
Morgan spoke at last and his voice was like thunder.
“I do not love you, Lucy…”
The sound of his words resounding through the loft awakened him. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling, inconsolably lonely.
Thoughts gathered of the ring and the crucifix and gradually filled the emptiness. Did the conjunction of such potent talismans lead to death, or was death merely the prelude to staging the scene in anticipation of eventual discovery? What variables were manipulated for our benefit, he wondered, and what for the author’s own? And what were the gratuitous contributions of history, of time passing? He could have no way of knowing our ways of seeing, so far in the future.
Morgan tried to reconstruct the character of the killer. That seemed the key to understanding his crime. It would have taken considerable strength to manhandle the corpses, even if they had been killed and prepared on the premises, which seemed probable. He would have had to understand something of carpentry and plastering. It’s unlikely a woman of the day would have known these things, but an observant male might be familiar with the procedures without himself being in a trade.
Given the killer’s morbid imagination, combined with meticulous patience and sanguinary determination, he must have been fairly mature — most likely a British immigrant, as were most of his neighbours — and literate. He would have grown up reading the Graveyard Poets in England, or at the very least been an aficionado of Italianate novels like The Mysteries of Udolpho. His tableau has all the elements. But it is a Gothic mystery in reverse: it invites a kind of archaeological speculation rather than fostering terrors and suspense.
The cabinet! It had been placed over the sealed opening of the crypt; it had been bolted to the wall. Like an ostentatious padlock on a hidden door. It invited discovery, exposure of the secrets it purported to conceal. This was a flourish of the criminal mind, fiendishly confident, taunting posterity.
Morgan had come full-circle: character and crime were inseparable.
He was fully awake now, but not rested. After getting up for a pee, he settled back under the covers. It was a day off and a Saturday. The two didn’t always coincide. He thought he might walk over to the old neighbourhood later on, if the sidewalks were cleared. It had changed profoundly, yet it was still called Cabbagetown, and here and there he could see remnants of when it was a sprawling, working-class slum.
On the margins it had degenerated into a needle park of prostitution and derelicts. But in the heart, among the designer townhouses transformed from dilapidated tenements, he could see a familiar wall or a window, and suddenly he would be back with his dad, walking him to the streetcar on the way to school, or racing around corners and churchyards with other kids, pretending they had bikes.
Morgan smiled at the ceiling. He did not think of himself as having a deprived childhood. Fred and Darlene did what they could. They were in a subclass now known as “the working poor.” His dad was employed at the Toronto Transit Commission streetcar yards and his mother picked up seasonal jobs, usually around Christmas when she could get work in restaurant kitchens, and in the summers when she did housecleaning for people in Rosedale away at their cottages.
He did not actually know what his father did with the TTC. Whatever it was, it was the same job he started with forty-five years before retirement — the same job he so desperately missed for the following three years until he died. Some of his friends at his wake said that he died of a broken heart.
He was not present at his own wake. Darlene waited until he was buried before she invited a bunch from the yards over for beer and sandwiches, along with their wives, most of whom she had never met.
His mother had her own friends. They were denizens of Cabbagetown, like herself, proud of their British heritage, narrow-minded and loving. Children were the focus of their lives, and as the children grew up, the women grew fat and smoked as if tobacco were oxygen, and many of them drank. He shrank from his generalization, knowing how close it was to the truth.
Morgan surprised his teachers and puzzled his parents by staying in school and by winning a scholarship to the University of Toronto, and even more by accepting. The only one not surprised was Morgan. At seventeen he knew he was smart. He knew his parents were smart as well, and that made him bitter. Whenever he purged himself of esoteric facts over dinner, they were indulgent, if sometimes baffled. But when he explained to them the most complex aspects of high-school science or the arcane intricacies of literature and history, they immediately understood.
Not that they talked a lot, especially to each other. For the most part Darlene and Fred lived parallel lives in a mean environment and conversed mostly through their son. When I left, he thought, they had nothing to say.
He moved into a grotty room on St. George Street close to campus. His most intimate associates were a band of mice whose presence he entertained with grudging congeniality. After catching one in something called the Mouse Motel and watching it lurch about, trying to free its feet from the gluey substance on the miniature floor, he abandoned all thoughts of extermination, kept his food securely stored, and occasionally bought the mice cat kibble for treats.
In the summers he worked at high-paying roughneck jobs in the north, and while he visited his parents from time to time he never again stayed overnight. By the end of his four years as a student, he had almost fallen out of the habit of visiting them altogether. In the winter of his last year the three of them got drunk in a squalid familial gathering he never wanted to repeat.
He didn’t tell them about graduation. At the end of the summer he left for Europe in search of a personality that would bring the disparate parts of his being together. After two years he came back. His father died soon after his return, and his mother died a year later.
Morgan’s mind teamed with small images of a world gone forever. He could smell the tobacco scent of his mother making corned beef and cabbage, her hair wisping down over one eye. He could hear the tired stomping of his father coming up the front steps, see himself running to the door to meet him. He could feel the safe embrace of his bedroom, listening to the television drone downstairs while reading about dinosaurs or space travel or pyramids, and later, as he got older, about cultural theory and quantum mechanics.