Not a cough, sigh, or puke and all this is now barrelling toward a senseless end. Trying to pour life into a permanently stoppered vessel — had to head the list of Worst Human Experiences. Top five, guaranteed. My fingerprints all over this beautiful dead body.
“Breathe.” Thumb-pumping her sternum. “You stupid little bitch, breathe.”
A gutful of warm toilet water. This wee infant girl’s bawling.
I was told my mother died birthing me. You could say I killed her, though this is the only course nature can unfortunately take. My father survived, but you could say his heart did not. It went hard as pig leather in his chest, with no capacity for much else but me. And Alvin, as it would turn out.
Philip Nanavatti, my father, built fireworks. An archaic livelihood, same as a cobbler. His work funded by cigarette companies who organized a competition, Symphony of Fire, where fireworkers from across the globe set off volleys from rafts floating on Lake Ontario. He was more wizard than artisan. Much of this had to do with what he created. A cobbler mends shoes, a pair of which is owned by everyone and exist permanently beneath our eyes; through natural processes of alignment, the cobbler comes to be seen the same. Fireworks are totally unnecessary. The cobbler is earthbound. The fireworker’s domain is the heavens.
He looked the part of wizard, albeit a modernday variety. A threadbare man who cultivated a beard out of expediency and the rising cost of razor blades. His favourite article of clothing a macrame poncho bought on a Pueblo reserve, which he wore in his drafty basement workroom. Drywall hung with tools whose outlines he traced in black marker. Unlike other handymen whose toolboxes contained spanners and drillbits and lugnuts, my father’s contained pill bottles — he bought them wholesale from a medi-supply company — full of powders, pellets, shards, clusters, and gems all carefully labelled. Sodium D-Line. Potassium Perchlorate. Rice Starch. The indentation of safety goggles permanently impressed into the flesh round his eyes, the way spectacle-wearers have nose-pad grooves on their noses.
My father once found a box of flashcubes at a garage sale. A joyous discovery, it turned out. We returned home with haste, to the basement, where he put the cubes in a vice and drilled a hole through the paper-thin glass.
“Everything on earth is made up of four elements,” he told me. “Carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen. All living things are carbon-based. There is a static number of carbon atoms on our planet. No more or less today than a trillion years ago. Things are born, live, expire, break down to component elements. Those carbon atoms go on to be part of new life. Like plasticine: mould a dog, smush it up, mould a cat. The bulk of matter never changes. Only the creations.”
He had me fetch an egg from the icebox. He poked a hole in it to drain white and yolk. He mixed coloured magnesium with the flashbulb powder and funnelled it into the egg. Wadding, a fuse, sealed with a bead of paraffin wax.
“You and I are cobbled together out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. You may have a trilobite’s tail in your elbow, pet. A cell from Attila the Hun in your eye. Your tonsils could have a brontosaurus nail in them.”
“Where did we come from?”
“The simplest answer is the stuff making up all life is hydrogen, whose atoms come from the fusion process taking place at the centre of suns. So I suppose you can say we come from stellar waste.” He touched the tip of his tongue to a canine tooth. “Or from stardust. Better?”
“Better.”
“Stardust, then.”
The park near our house had shuffleboard courts. White sandblasted stone. Dad centred the egg on the court and waved me back to the jungle gym. He lit the fuse and ran with hands tucked over his head: gait of a soldier running down a foxhole.
“A carbonized imprint,” he said after the detonation. “Magical, isn’t it?”
The shuffleboard court was framed with colours, shapes, patterns or their raw inklings. A solar system in miniature: every manifestation of life, insect and beast and plant and forms long extinct or as yet undiscovered helixing into each other, nameless in their complexities. Limbs and stalks, broken angles, conchial whorls, geographic forms that struck as unnatural only as they existed beyond my understanding. The arch of a swan’s neck thinned into an umbilical cord shot through with emerald threads spidering into beetle-legged strands which in turn shattered into violently-coloured orbits. Such designs must exist, invisible, all about us. When the powder in that egg ignited, powerful chemical magnets drew them out of the air to imprint them, recklessly, on the stone.
Who else but a wizard could conjure a sight like that?
Lieutenant Daniel Mulligan is attractive if horsetoothed. He smiles in a manner that — were his lips to skin back to reveal the pink beds his teeth are buried in — might be wolfish. A horse-toothed wolf?
A corkboard-panelled room at the Niagara Regional Police headquarters. Terrazzo tiles scuffed with shoe skidmarks. It’s not difficult to envision them being made by a stave-gutted plainclothesman pivoting on his brogan to smash a telephone book into a poor perp’s skull. Lt. Mulligan picks at a wart on his index finger. Distressingly, it resembles a nipple. A finger-nipple. A… fipple? When I think of his hands upon my body — as I’ve been doing since he came in — I now picture spongy growths like toadstools popping up every place he’s touched.
“The woman. Tell us what she looked like.” “Us?”
“The constabulary working this case.”
“I’m a case?”
Mulligan smiles.
“You’re a good Samaritan. Yes?”
He sets a folder on the table. Patience Nanavatti
on a label affixed to its tab. Cleat-shod music-box ballerinas spin pirouettes up my spine.
“My permanent record?”
He flips it open. “Says here you peed your pants in grade five gym. Kidding. That whole ‘permanent record’ stuff, it’s bullsh — malarkey. If everyone left that kind of paper trail, paper-pushers would get biceps big as grapefruits shoving it around.” His laugh indicates the paper-pushers of his acquaintance are shrivelled of arm. “You’re nervous.”
“Trying to remember if I peed my pants in grade five.”
“That’s not germane to the investigation.”
He directs my attention to a wall-mounted TV. “Security tapes. Took awhile to get clearance — big conglomerates.”
Footage: iron greys wash into gauzier greys. Spots of polar whiteness. Humanoid shapes move herkyjerk: the world’s most tedious nickelodeon show. The woman is a dark, jagged, lumpen apparition ghosting through the frame.
“That’s her.”
“Right, we’ve ascertained as much. What we’re interested in, Ms. Nanavatti—”
“Patience. Please.”
“Details, Patience. The description you gave the onsite officer… you told him”—reading directly from the page—“the perpetrator seemed to be enveloped in malaise. He’s also transcribed your claim she didn’t have an evil heart.”
“She was confused. Or ill.” Tapping my skull. “You know…”
“Descriptions such as ‘having the eyes of a hunted animal’ aren’t valuable from an investigative standpoint.”
“She looked… like she could use a friend?”
Mulligan rubs his forehead as if a toothy determined something were trying to tunnel out. His pleading expression softens the contours of his face. More handsome than the last guy I dated. An indemand sessional musician, he said. He performed the guitar riff that plays over the Seven-day Forecast on the Weather Channel. He couldn’t come inside me. Retarded ejaculation; I looked it up. A phobia based on insecurity. Fear of losing control. Or of infection, which seemed more likely: he told me he’d slept with a groupie “on tour,” afterwards spotting a pubic louse drowned in the bus toilet. A tiny banjo with pincers, he said. We worked on it. We’d have sex and when he was close I’d get out of bed and stand in a corner so he could masturbate. Next I sat in bed while he jerked off. We worked all the way up to him spurting on my tummy. Soon after finishing inside me the first time — he wore two condoms — he moved to Portland to join a jam band.