The City Still Breathing Read online

  ‘You ever seen a dead body before, Em?’

  ‘Brutus brought a busted-up chipmunk in through my window once. It just lay there breathing for a while and then it died.’

  ‘What’d it look like?’

  ‘Like a chipmunk.’

  ‘No, what’d it look like when it was dead?’

  ‘It didn’t look like anything.’

  Something comes toward them, or they’re coming toward something, big and even darker than all the darkness around them. It’s a body, for sure, Elwy can make out the head and the feet. It’s the body of a giant, like those trees in the park, a sleeping giant with a mouth open and hungry. Some little noise comes running up his throat and then Emilia behind him says, ‘Elwy, watch out, we’re gonna hit that island.’

  His heart inching its way back inside him while he pushes up against the rock with his paddle, slowing them down. They paddle around the shore to a low point and Emilia steers them, grinding, up on the sand. ‘Here.’

  Out of the canoe, they climb on hands and knees up a hump of rock, Elwy landing in a heap at the top, panting little clouds. It’s a small island with a couple of trees and it doesn’t look like a giant at all, it’s more like a turtle. They’re on the mound of the shell and it slopes down to a long, low neck.

  ‘You see anything?’ Emilia standing beside him with one hand over her eyes, scanning the water like those pictures of pirate captains looking for booty. ‘Anything?’

  Elwy sees rock, a few trees and lots and lots of water.

  ‘No, you radish, like a body.’

  ‘Can we have the hot chocolate now, Em?’

  ‘In a bit. Let’s look around some more.’

  ‘Why here?’ Elwy throws a rock in the water. ‘It’s just a stupid island.’

  ‘It’s a good home base. You can see all over. We’ll be able to spot it when it surfaces.’

  ‘What if it doesn’t?’

  ‘It will.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Then we’ll bring it back and everything’s gonna be great, you’ll see.’

  Elwy follows Emilia down the rocky mound. They push through a couple of birch trees and climb out along the neck of the turtle, standing on its head. There are names spray-painted and scratched all over the rocks here. Many boys and girls loving many other boys and girls forever. Elwy wonders how you can love forever if you can’t live forever.

  They crawl on their stomachs to the edge where someone has sprayed diving rock in big letters, and right below that enter the void and right below that Slim loves Francie. They peer over the edge into the black water. Elwy thinks about the chicken fingers and plum sauce he didn’t have.

  ‘Can we please have the hot chocolate now?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Why and don’t just say because.’

  ‘Because.’ Emilia rolls on her side to look at him. ‘There isn’t any.’

  ‘But you promised.’

  ‘I didn’t promise.’

  ‘Saying is promising.’

  ‘There was none in the cupboard, okay? We ran out. Dad said it’s not an essential.’

  ‘I’m tired and cold and hungry for chicken fingers and I need to pee and my mom’s gonna kill me if we ever get home and I didn’t even get any hot chocolate and you promised.’ Elwy rolls onto his back with a big huff. ‘We’re never gonna find this stupid body.’

  ‘Don’t say that.’

  ‘Well, we won’t.’

  ‘But I got to.’

  He turns his head to look at her. ‘There isn’t any stupid reward anyway, so why do we gotta find it?’

  ‘I just got to.’

  ‘Is it because your mom doesn’t make you dinner anymore because she left with the Other Man or because your dad doesn’t love you?’

  Emilia’s face gets all scrunched up like he’s just been really mean, the meanest ever, and Elwy didn’t mean to be mean, he was only asking. She doesn’t say anything, just gives him that look and then rolls away, her back moving in and out with her breath. Emilia doesn’t cry, but if she did cry she’d be crying right now. Elwy wants to stop her back from moving in and out so much, but he doesn’t know what to say or do.

  He doesn’t know if she’s hurt or mad, but if she’s mad she might not talk to him ever again. They’ll sit next to each other in class but she’ll pretend like he doesn’t even exist, like she did that one day when he pushed her into a snowbank, except now it’ll be forever and he won’t get to walk her to the metal stairs and he won’t go over to play Commodore anymore. All of his number one favourite things gone like that. And it’s just so awful that Elwy cries for both of them, having to be so alone. And when he’s done crying he stares at Emilia’s back, which has stopped moving in and out so much, and he thinks about all the forevers he has ever known.

  ‘Why do people got to die, Em?’

  And for a second he’s so sure she’ll have the answer. She’ll be able to tell him. But she can’t because she’s snoring.

  Elwy rolls onto his tummy and stares into the water. His reflection lying there on top, Elwy with his favourite toque and his wet teary face. He leans down close to stare into his mirror eyes. There’s something white there, a white dot in his left eyeball. A speck growing larger, expanding in his eye, filling it, oozing across his cheek.

  Then he realizes it’s something past his reflection, something rising from down deep.

  It rises slowly, taking shape as it gets closer. A body, so white it almost glows like the stars on Elwy’s bedroom ceiling. A naked man. His hands stretching above him, reaching.

  Zombies. He thinks about zombies in old black and white films and the teeth and the biting and the blood but he can’t move. Dad, he thinks about Dad and the coffin all closed up and Dad white and naked like this inside, white and naked in the water. Me, he thinks about himself lying in the water, so cold and so alone and nobody looking for him.

  But it’s not him or Dad or any zombie, it’s a man. He can’t make out the face because the hair is waving back and forth in the water, dark like seaweed.

  A man rising from the bottom of the lake and he’s going to break the surface of the water and keep on going, all the way up into the sky and through into outer space. Only two ways a body can disappear and one of them is magic.

  They got to find him, not because of any reward or for anybody’s dad or mom, they got to find him because he’s all alonely out here. He’s got no name and nobody’s missing him and that’s just, that’s just a Hell of a Thing.

  ‘Get up.’ He’s shaking Emilia. ‘We found him.’ She’s still snoring so he shakes her harder. But when he turns back, the man isn’t breaking the surface, isn’t heading for outer space. He’s sinking again, back down to the bottom, shrinking into Elwy’s eye, hair waving as he goes. Goodbye.

  Emilia wakes to the sound of Elwy whistling, not a ghost at all. She never would’ve thought, her best friend in the world, a real whistler. And she doesn’t hush him, she just lets him go on and on. Forever if he wants.

  12

  Fuck this place.

  Fuck that guy and his boots.

  Fuck me.

  Fuck my nose, fuck this blood. Fuck this hurts.

  Fuck Francie for leaving me. Fuck Heck wherever he fuckin is. Fuck Martha and her stupid waitress job and all her stupid waitress friends. Fuck her for waiting on Van and fuck him too and all the years without him.

  Fuck this acid.

  Fuck photography. Fuck art. Fuck making a difference. Fuck trying to change people, trying to affect things. Fuck beauty.

  A universe of fucks, a lifetime of fucks, fucks stretching off to infinity. Fuck is the limit of what Slim Slider can think, say or feel as he pulls himself up off the mattress and tries to find something to wipe all this blood off his face. A triangle of broken mirror hanging on the wall tells him he looks like shit. Worse shit than usual. He touches his nose. It’s practically the worst pain he’s ever felt but he’s pretty sure it’s not broken.

&
nbsp; He uses the edge of the blanket to clean his face and then digs around until he finds a pair of his old red Chucks lying in the corner. Lacing them up on the mattress, looking around this place – his place. The paint already starting to flake, and him and Francie just painted it in the summer. Yellow, she said, like margarine on toast.

  Him and Francie, Slim and Francie – there, a photo of the two of them hung up with a tack, taken at the folk festival down at the lake. His arm around Francie, her smiling so big her face might crack. A good day in the middle of a bunch of good ones.

  Fuck the good days.

  He pulls the tack out and brings the picture closer, closer, so close he gets a soft whiff of vinegar from the photographic paper. So close he’s staring into the faces of Slim and Francie a year younger and trying to find the story of how those people back then become us now. Slim and Francie carving their names on all the rocks and benches all over town with hearts around them. Slim and Francie leaving town in the red Dart, heading for fame in the big city. Slim and Francie still stuck here, the snow settling down around them, suffocating them in another hard winter in this cold town.

  He puts the photo back up, jabs the tack straight through his heart. Outside the slag is cooling off and the shack is going dark, the orange light fading across the wall. Slim and Francie fading away. Francie out there god knows where with his jacket, Slim lying back on this mattress as the dark comes down. Fuck Francie. Fuck Slim.

  A loud crack. The window above him shatters, glass showering him as he instinctively covers his eyes. He thinks, Rock, somebody threw a rock, that asshole with the boots came back – but then another crack and a hole appears in the wall at the foot of the mattress. Through it, he can see the black hills ringing the shacks, the snow coating the ridge.

  And up there, a small flash from the snow, then another crack. A hot whisper by his left ear and the photo of Slim and Francie is torn in two.

  He rolls off the mattress, glass crunching beneath him, cutting parts of him he’ll feel later. He grabs the Polaroid bag off the chair and vaults through the broken window.

  He hits the ground and leans his back against the tin siding of the shack, waiting for more cracks but none come. Holding the camera against his chest like it’s a pistol and him Lee Marvin. A dim orange glow from the slag hangs for a minute and then fizzles. He waits for the cover of darkness before he creeps to the corner of the shack.

  He peeks around the edge. Scanning the ridge, looking for any sign. Nothing. He ducks back and fumbles through the camera bag, coming out with an old zoom. He holds the lens up to the Polaroid iris with shaking hands.

  He leans out again, bringing the camera up this time, pressing the viewfinder to his eye. He goes left to right, searching for any movement, any shape in all that slag. He’s shaking all over the place and he balls his right hand tight to kill the tremor. But his finger catches the shutter and off goes the flash.

  Up on the ridge he gets the strobe of an answer and the crack follows after. Something hits the ground about two feet in front of him, kicking a handful of dirt up in his face. He spins back around the edge of the building. Behind him all that slag and somebody trying to kill him, straight ahead the lights of Gatchell just over the horizon. Ready or not here I come. He puts his head down and runs, thinking about Lee Marvin dodging bullets in any war movie he’d seen back when they still had money to rent a VCR.

  He crosses the highway, slides on his ass into the ditch and then breaks for the Delki Dozzi complex, following the chain-link and staying away from the open field, the baseball diamond, skirting the tennis courts and making for the shadows around the clubhouse.

  He pushes through into the sick yellow dim of a washroom. Across stained tile and into a stall, closing the door and turning the latch. He sits on the toilet seat and pulls his feet up after him. He tries to focus on the smell of old piss, the graffiti all over the stall, the clunking sound of the water pipes – anything to stop waiting to hear the door open.

  He pulls a marker out of his pocket, pops the cap and starts doodling on the wall. Writing Slim plus – and he’s going to put Francie, out of habit, purely out of habit. But fuck Francie. Slim plus nothing.

  They could be in Toronto right now. Out of here. On the way to anything else. If they’d accepted him at the art school. If Francie hadn’t gone apeshit. If the acid hadn’t been bad. If Heck hadn’t blabbed. If that asshole hadn’t found him and taken the boots. If if if – if everyone and everything else hadn’t fucked up.

  There’s the groan of the washroom door and his lungs choke up. Footsteps across the tile, one, two, three, so loud in this quiet, four, five, and stopping right outside the stall. Slim closes his eyes, waiting for the crack. The crack and then the end, wondering if it’ll hurt and if Francie will cry when she finds out.

  ‘Slim?’

  Not a crack, but a whisper. He opens his eyes. Two shoes standing outside the stall. Two too-familiar white high-tops. ‘Heck?’

  ‘Fuckin jeepers, Slim, I thought it was you but I wasn’t sure.’ The stall door rattling. ‘Hey, open up.’

  ‘Keep your fuckin voice down, Heck.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, sure thing.’ The door rattling again, Heck whining, ‘C’mon, man, lemme in.’

  ‘I told you to leave me alone.’

  ‘Aw, c’mon, man – I was worried. I was down by your place, watchin the car in case – then I got nervous so I headed up to the hideout.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Told you – I was worried.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Cause of Francie and all that and the way you tore off.’

  ‘That’s why you’re worried.’

  ‘Yeah, man.’ The door rattling like a sack of bones. ‘And that bad acid.’ Heck’s greasy mullet pokes through under the door, squirming in with his big shiny ski vest like a slug. ‘What happened to your face?’

  ‘Someone’s trying to kill me.’

  ‘You got into another fight?’

  ‘No – yeah, but now someone’s trying to kill me – with a gun.’

  ‘Aw, man.’ Heck bursts immediately, big tears coming down his cheeks, only the ten millionth time he’s seen his friend cry. ‘I’m,’ sob, ‘fuckin,’ sob, ‘sorry,’ big sob, ‘Slim.’

  ‘What’re you sorry for?’

  ‘I went back to Top Hat for some Rygar and that’s where he found me – I don’t know how he knew me and I didn’t want to say nothin – ’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘ – but all he did was look at me and I swear – I fuckin swear, Slim, his eyes were red – no fuckin lie – just like they said, and one look and I knew he was gonna kill me right there – my guts all over Rygar and ten quarters in – ’

  ‘Fuck – who, Heck? Who?’

  ‘ – so I fuckin spilled it, Slim – I told him about the hideout and he just walked out – ’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Milly.’

  Slim feels his heart stop – it just literally fuckin quits on him – and he leans back, hitting the handle, and the toilet goes off, water thundering and him and Heck both scream. Thank fuck at least it gets his heart started up again.

  ‘Jyrki fuckin Myllarinen.’ And he whispers it, like a ghost story, like the name of the bogeyman, like any louder and he might pop right out of the drain and kill them both.

  Heck sits on the piss-coated floor, the silence drawing long and tight, ready to snap until he can’t take it anymore. ‘You think it’s true what they say he did to his parents?’

  ‘I dunno.’

  ‘Into little bits? With a hacksaw?’

  ‘I don’t fuckin know, Heck.’

  ‘I thought it was total bullshit, but then I saw him. He’s big, Slim, like seven feet – ’

  ‘He’s not seven feet.’

  ‘He’s big, man. And I think he’s got red eyes, just like they said.’

  ‘Okay.’ Saying it like cut-the-bullshit and stands up like he’s got a plan.

  Heck looks up at him wi
th big eyes. ‘What’s okay? Nothing’s okay, man.’

  ‘We’re gonna go for the car.’

  ‘You can’t go out there.’

  ‘Well, we can’t sit on the toilet all fuckin night.’ Heck starts the waterworks again. ‘Look – we’ll be quick, stick to backyards.’

  ‘Where’re we gonna go – the cops?’

  ‘No way.’ He pulls Heck to his feet, all sloppy and dripping.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I’ll figure it out.’

  ‘Aw, man – I don’t wanna fuckin die.’ Heck sinks to the floor again.

  ‘Cool it.’ He twists the latch and swings the door open, going to the cracked mirror to look at himself. ‘He’s after me – not you.’

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Heck pulls himself up, relieved – almost happy.

  Slim runs some water and rinses the rest of the blood off, wipes his arms where the glass bit in and pulls that lock of hair down to cover the black eye that’s forming.

  ‘Slim?’ Heck still lingering in the stall, like he’s at home base in there. ‘Why’re we in the girls’ washroom?’

  They jump the sagging fence into the backyard of Slim’s apartment building – everything quiet. They slip up the laneway and peer out at the street, snow still piling up and no footprints anyplace. Houses up and down the street sleeping in the blue glow of the TV. The red Dart sitting there, waiting for them.

  ‘I wish your mom was home.’ Heck looking at the dark windows on the first floor.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I dunno. She’s your mom. Maybe she could do something.’

  ‘Well, she’s at work – so shut up.’

  Slim crouches, giving Heck the signal to hold back, and scampers for the car. Pulling the door open, sliding inside. Then waving Heck in beside him.

  The car purrs and they roll out onto Logan and down the street. He keeps an eye on the rear-view, but no one’s back there. He catches his puffy eyes and reaches into the glovebox and grabs his Wayfarers. When they get to the edge of Lorne, the traffic’s running thick in both directions and he breathes out. He swings a left and they sink into the crowd. Olly olly oxen free.