My phone was ringing. Missed it the first time around but it rang again a minute later. It was her. She said she was in trouble. That didn’t make any sense.
She said she’d left my apartment, but there was something wrong with the freight elevator.
Take the stairs, I said.
Too late for that, she said. She’d been in a huff. Couldn’t get the barrier to slide up. Finally lost patience and jumped over it. The elevator wasn’t there so she fell three floors. Landed in the basement and broke her hip.
Call 911, I said. I’m stuck at the Humber Loop.
She said, You think 911 can help that the elevator’s coming down right now?
I said, You think I can?
She said, Maybe you know some tricks.
I said, Don’t jump over the barrier.
Then there was this horrible sound coming into my ear and I realized I wasn’t holding the phone anymore. Had to go poke around the dandelions under the electrical tower till I found it. There was one message. I checked it. It was from the first call she’d made. She called me baby and told me she was sorry and she was in trouble and could I call her. Is that the way it is with people? Do they hate you until they’re dying? And then they don’t hate you anymore?
Do you ever find yourself wishing you could just have an aneurism? Allow the vessel in your brain to just pop and let you go? Is there some kind of higher state of concentration that would allow you to do that? Could it be learned? That’s the feeling I had, right then, standing beside the snack bar with the sign on the wall that said, Don’t feed the pigeons. Every square inch of wall, a urine trail leading away. Going exactly nowhere. Nowhere to go and nothing to take me and a cargo that won’t fit anyway. That’s how I feel, standing at the Humber Loop. Been told that bass players live a long time. Like elephants with their ears that grow large, encouraged by low and gentle music. I’m still waiting for that. I’d like to feel that.
Lab rats
by Ibi Kaslik
Volunteers needed for psychiatric study.
Generous compensation offered. (416) 539-4876.
Dufferin Mall
Outside the Dovercourt 7-Eleven, K. watches police cars roll by from the nearby station. Young Portuguese gangsta impersonators with peach fuzz glance at K. in disgust from their souped-up Honda Civics as K. pops his skateboard into his hand like an ejected tape. He sips on his Blueberry Buster Slurpee, as if the life-giving fluid might suddenly be stolen away from him. K. sneers at the teens and smiles at the cops; he conducts most of his life in this territorial, animal way, though there are few things he possesses — a few good soul records, a signed copy of Paul Auster’s Moon Palace — and only small bits of earth he inhabits. He sips and slurps until his lips are blue as a death mask and he has given himself brainfreeze.
He pulls out the wadded piece of newspaper that Christmas gave him and studies it for a moment before jamming it back into his oversized shorts. He slaps his board on the concrete and begins to roll down Dundas, past Brazilian bikini shops that look obscene and unseasonable, given the cool climate and great distance from anything resembling a beach; past heavily stocked hardware stores and stunted middle-aged men and women sloshing their words together as if there are shells caught in their mouths. He crosses Dundas and makes a sharp left with his board, as if cutting through waves, on Gladstone. He uses the momentum of the hill to avoid Dufferin, its swath of train tracks bisect east and west; he scales up and down residential streets for an out.
K. hates Dufferin Street but is especially distressed by the Dufferin bus, which makes him feel like a homicidal dumpling. One of the most reliable ways to elicit murderous tendencies is to ride the overheated, fart-smelling bus up into the very heart of humanity: Bloor and Dufferin station, where no one believes in standing in line for anything, let alone a TTC ticket or a bus. There’s nothing sadder to K. than watching immigrants climb onto the bus at the Dufferin Mall — or “The Duff,” as Christmas calls it — with their crinkling Wal-Mart bags. The glorious Ethiopian queens stuffed into cheap, inadequate jeans. The baby carriages, the economy-sized flats of toilet paper and family-sized boxes of pizza-pops stuffed and the greasy stench of McDonald’s fried turds on everyone’s hands.
“But why do you hate The Duff? You can get anything at the Duff!” Christmas likes to remind him, when he gets all nauseous and depressed by the prospect of needing something from the inner-city excuse for a shopping center. Christmas is right, though, it’s truly incredible what capitalism has made available even and especially at the Dufferin Malclass="underline" You can get your photograph taken in a booth and receive a series of stickers with your image reproduced in cartoon form, you can also get corrective contact lenses, a prepaid phone with pink kittens speaking in Japanese characters, tensor bandages made of hemp, not to mention a ten carat diamond from Peoples Jewelers, cigarette filters in bulk, and a herb and garlic bagel the size of your head.
It would be all right by K. if he never had to step into The Duff ever again, though he knows Christmas could not live without its peopled, impoverished absurdity. Anxiety clutches at K.’s throat as he weaves his way through the well-maintained Parkdale streets to meet Christmas for lunch in Roncesvalles. They’re hooking up at Christmas’s favorite Polish dive, a dank, wood-paneled place called Krak where the soup specials are alternately beet or dill pickle and you can get a full schnitzel dinner for $4.99. Despite Krak’s reasonable prices, K.’s funds have been nearly depleted since he left his job in advertising to go back to grad school to study pre-colonial African history.
He now understands the sour expressions his colleagues made when he made his announcement about his “life transition.” At first he thought they were transmitting muted jealousy, then settled on the fact that it was the mildly dyspeptic superiority all people in advertising projected. But now he knew that their shocked faces were actually saying: Dude, are you ready? There would be no more Calvin Klein shoes, no more impromptu tapas lunches at Lee’s, no more all-night cocaine parties on the rooftop patio of the Drake Hotel (or “The Fake,” as Christmas liked to call it), no more reckless, whimsical spending of the salary he had earned, for almost a decade, by shuffling in and out of an elevator in a gentle hung-over state. There would also be no more abuse from a crisply tanned woman, whose skin bore an unmistakable resemblance to chorizo, named Marlene, who liked to accuse him of not collating pages correctly before big presentations.
As he slows his board down, he notices Christmas inside Krak, studying what appears to be the weekly newspaper with an intensity she reserves for restaurant experiences. Her ponytail is high up on her head, as if she’s a very young child and an inept but well-meaning male relative has coiffed her with thick kitchen elastics. K. stares at Christmas through the dirty window; there is something wan and estranged about her: She is almost unrecognizable. Her eyes seem pulled too far in opposite directions, but this illusion ends the second she turns her head and smiles at him heartily, pointing at the menu. He’s imagined it. Christmas looks as good as ever. It’s just stress, he thinks, plunging his hand into his shallow pocket, only to find his last crumpled tenner and the same wrinkled newspaper ad Christmas has spread out onto their table.