as if we were still inside the poem, “And now I must sleep.”
I lay on the small bed, an X-Men quilt pressed over my body, surrounded by the noises of Andreas’s menagerie: gerbils snuffling about their cage and goldfish darting between the folds of their aquatic world. If I opened my eyes I could watch the shadowy movements of a mobile, cut-out reptiles painted a fluorescent green. If I breathed in I could smell the woody nest of the small brown desert rats. The room bristled with animal life and it seemed possible that I would never sleep again. My mind was speeding crazily. I was buckled inside this cramped apartment when I wanted to roam the city streets and find out where I was. The new life was just out of reach, a tantalizing metre or two away, while I was trapped by stucco walls. The gerbil raced crazily on the rungs of his exercise wheel, wood chips flying, his small body brimming with nocturnal energy.
Why does it matter if it’s four o’clock or five o’clock to the prisoner? The cell is like a sick room, where days are measured by the arrival of a nurse to take your temperature, or the regular howl of a fellow patient as dawn breaks.
I needed to create the image of a clock, of a world which ran by time and breathed time, a world which still existed. As a child in school we used to cut out cardboard hands and pin them on our scruffy hand-drawn clocks.
“At what hour do you eat lunch?” the teacher asked, and we dutifully rotated the hands to point at the correct numbers. We could lie. We could correct time, and even shoot the hands backward. We could even, like the fat boy we all called Bimmi, crunch up the hands and stuff them in our mouths.
In Santa Clara I was lucky enough to have a cellar window that aimed onto the street. Why didn’t I cry out? Because my prison was actually (as Marta never hesitated to point out) a safe house, and I dared not attract attention. A blind man went for bread every morning, tapping his cane along the cobblestone. Perhaps he was a bit mad, for he would mutter profanities and become furious if the landscape changed in any way. One time the waiter from the tiny café next door dragged his sandwich board a foot further into the walkway, and the blind man stumbled against it. What a racket! The air was blue with curses involving donkeys, children, and natural disasters. I strained to hear, half-delighted and half-appalled. Tap-tap, tap-tap. In that sad basement room I creaked off the mattress and rose, snapping at the waist of my underwear. It was the point in the morning when only the bakery was open and only the blind man was up and about. Later, it was children going to school. The little ones were first, shrieking and scampering, throwing a ball to the pavement, chewing gum and passing around sticks of licorice — a distinct smell which entered my cave. Fifteen or twenty minutes later the older children sauntered by. They didn’t care if they were late. They were tired, yawning heavily, reluctantly pawing off sleep.
I became an olfactory expert and recognized women by the way they smelled. I didn’t see faces, but when, against all rules, I lifted the bottom of the window an inch or so, then the curtain as if it were the hem of her skirt, I could watch those slim ankles march by. A strong rose fragrance accompanied one particular woman and I learned to wait for her. Sometimes, despite the inhospitable cobblestone, she wore high heels, red patent leather, or black. My entire erotic life was contained in that pair of feet, viewed for no more than a second or two, but imagined for the rest of the day. Sometimes, on her way home from work, she stopped by the chicken place. I recognized the succulent smell of Hugo’s rotisserie-roasted Pollo Loco and could easily picture her conversation with old Hugo and how his skin would graze hers as he poured change into her waiting hand. His stand was directly across from the Avenida San Sebastián metro stop a block away. She walked quickly after her purchase, lured by the smell emanating from the bag and her own fatigue, which drew her towards home and the moment when she could slip out of her shoes (now a little spotted from the day’s journey) and draw her stockinged feet up onto the sofa. She would flick on the TV to the telenovela starring that girl with hair down to her ass, and plunge her fingers into the greasy bag.
I wondered if my own image might flicker across the screen: Most Wanted Man.
Wanted, yes, but never by the right people.
On rainy days bicycle wheels splashed through puddles. Car exhaust pumped through my window, making my eyes smart, yet I sucked in the complex flavours of diesel fuel avidly. This was the world, my only world now. There was a man who had a bronchial condition, and when he passed my window he scraped his lungs with a deep, phlegmy cough. The hacked-up mucus landed with a splat, inches from the bars: it was a sound I dreaded.
I hated him, the Phlegm Man.
As I loved the woman with the red shoes. My Angel. They were all mine.
And in this boy’s room in Canada, even the desert rat finally fell asleep in his nest.
2
RITA LEANED OVER TO POUR FROTHY MILK into my coffee cup and I stared down the front of her blouse. This was an unexpected gift, buoyant cleavage for the just released prisoner and I was grateful, painfully so. She licked milk off her finger and smiled.
“Enough?”
Her son was watching, his spoon dangling into a bowl of Mini Wheats, hair drooping over his smooth round face.
“Yes, thank you.”
“How long’s he staying?” the boy asked in a mopey voice.
“Just through the weekend,” his mother replied. “Then he’ll be moving to the campus.” She looked at me. “Syd called about lunch later today. He asked if you were nice. I said you were.”
“Do you think I am nice?” I asked the boy, who shrugged and said, “I guess so.”
His mother and I laughed, a nervous clatter. I was handed soft rolls with a tub of jam to go with the dish of eggs. It was easy to be astonished by the presence of such food in my hands as I sat in this modest kitchen in this city at the edge of the continent.
The walls were decorated with copper moulds of leaping fish and Andreas’s scribbled drawings. Welts showed where the plaster had been repaired and painted over. On the tiny counter were several appliances, their cords crammed into a single outlet. I hadn’t eaten in a kitchen since I was a child, only in formal dining rooms with sober mahogany furniture, or in restaurants and cafés. I had expected something entirely different, that I would be sitting at this moment with a group of men wearing suits in a high-ceilinged room, stacks of documents shuffling across a table, self-important throat clearings and speeches.
Andreas ate one Mini Wheat at a time, tilting it this way and that in his teaspoon, then prying at its lacy strands with his teeth. His small body was clothed in seersucker pajamas displaying pictures of rearing horses, and he stared at me with his mouth full of cereal. When I smiled, he flushed and looked away.
The professor lived on a wide, tree-lined street.
“This area’s very expensive now,” Rita assured me as we parked next to a mailbox. “Sydney bought years ago, before the Hong Kong money flooded in.”
To my eye, the houses were not imposing, mainly wide bungalows coated with siding, or the ubiquitous grey stucco. Yet there was a cared-for look to the lawns, which were rimmed with flowers and rows of clipped shrubs, and the cars belonging to these householders were of the understated but expensive breed. The air seemed cooler here, more perfumed.
“You’ll meet the lot of us today,” Rita said, reaching behind to grab the bottle of wine from the back seat. “The entire board of the Vancouver branch of the Alliance.”
It
