DAY 5: The Bleeding of a Dead Body

It was believed that, at the approach of a murderer, the blood of the murdered body gushed out

When I awoke I could somehow tell, despite the lack of any light beyond the dim glow of a battery-powered exit sign, that it was morning. Tanya’s arms were wrapped around me, but slackly. She hadn’t moved, didn’t seem to have blinked, even, all her live-long night.

I closed my eyes and felt every touch I’d ever received come alive on my skin, remnants of my latest dream.

This time I’d been walking down Denman Street with, absurdly enough, an ice cream cone in my hand when the world flung itself apart. Waking up was beyond anticlimax; it was a kind of betrayal. And I felt resentful to be back.

Lying there, I saw the previous night’s mother and son in my mind’s eye, and behind them the mother and daughter from the Safeway. It’s an image that resonates through centuries, between cultures, between species, even. Mother and child, far up Birchin Lane with the longest gauntlet of all to run.

‘What are you thinking about?’ Tanya asked in a dull voice.

‘You don’t want to know.’

‘Why not?’ she asked, suddenly suspicious.

‘It’s nothing, Medusa. Just…nothing.’

‘Stop calling me Medusa, Paul. It makes me sound like a monster. Why can’t you call me ‘darling’ or ‘honey’ or something normal? Why does everything have to be one of your stupid geeky references?’

I didn’t reply, and after a silent while we gathered ourselves together and got going. Crawling out of our hiding place, a jammed together nest of chairs in an empty conference room, we entered the echo-straining silence of an aftermath.

We made for the loading bays, away from the splatted facts of the halls up front. Maybe my ribs weren’t broken after all; this morning I could limp a little better, could almost fake a sleep-depraved shamble. Following Tanya down the hallway, I saw a large dark patch on the back of her jeans; during the night, she’d pissed herself. I sniffed myself and winced. Hair and nails growing, skin slowly shedding. We were ridiculous factories, producing smells and oils and shit and piss. Better things went into us than ever came out.

‘There were footsteps all night. People kept running past. Guns. God, all sorts of horrible sounds. I can’t believe you slept through it,’ she added spitefully, as angry at the word ‘slept’ as she was at me.

I didn’t reply, didn’t feel fully tethered to Tanya’s ragged world. Rather, I felt like a slowly-inflating balloon, tugged at by clean winds. But what would come of it? Would I eventually bulk up to God-size, or would Death creep in, pin in hand, and burst my bubble?

We emerged into chill light, shading our eyes, and saw how, overnight, new structures had risen alongside Vancouver’s green glass towers. We wouldn’t have been able to see this new architecture with our old eyes, mind you: we saw them with our new ones. Sharp white spires of thought, thin as needles, pierced the sky, pierced everything on the ground. All my precious orphan Nod-words were crawling closer, each with their own particular, pressing agenda: chokepear, chatterpie. Yesterday’s Blemmye had only been the herald of this new world, a Silver Surfer to the slowly-advancing Galactus whose gargantuan form was drawing nearer and nearer to our blue sky.

‘Tanya, I…’

But that’s all I said. In the time it took those two words to leave my mouth, I grew sick of my voice, physically ill from intent.

A billion miles over to my right, Tanya didn’t seem to have noticed that I’d spoken at all. In the sunlight, the skin around her eyes was cracked and dry as a riverbed. She scowled at me, then quickly turned away. I pictured middle-aged couples with nothing left to say to one another but with years and years of life left to live out, sitting in shamed and furious silence beside one another. In restaurants, in cars, on holiday beaches.

When we were about halfway back to our apartment, we came upon a crowd surrounding a woman standing atop a concrete bench in the middle of one of those tiny roundabouts the city installed back in the 1980s to slow traffic and dissuade johns from cruising for hookers.

‘I know how to sleep!’ the woman cried. ‘I know!’

She was in her forties, with the look of someone grown thin and old waiting for something that she’d known all along was never really going to come her way. Even if nothing was coming, you still had to wait: those were the rules. And if you were waiting anyway, you inevitably ended up pretending that your vigil wasn’t really in vain. To salvage a little dignity. And besides, maybe if you faked it long enough, you’d get lucky and hope would pop up like a morning mushroom on a dewy morning, suddenly whole and instantly there. No one could really say it was impossible, not really. No one knew for sure.

Anyway, this woman had grown tired long before the world ended: I could see it in her anonymous hair colour, in the way her jeans fit, in the list of her shoulders.

Her audience pressed close, trampling the ranks of city tulips festooning the roundabout.

‘I know how!’

No one believed she knew anything. Her eyes were too red and raw for her to be in possession of some magical sleep recipe, but the crowd seemed willing, for now, to go along with the charade. With TV over, they were here for the freak show.

She swept out a knife and held it high. I looked around for a cop, but we hadn’t seen one all morning. Just an abandoned uniform in a heap on a bench.

‘This is how!’ she cried, then took the long thin blade, held it toward her wide open right eye with one hand, then reached out and slammed the palm of her other hand into its base, driving the blade in to the hilt.

The crowd dilated spasmodically as the woman fell, a dropped doll.

What was left laying there mid-roundabout did look a lot like sleep. She lay on her back, the smooth wooden handle of the knife pointing straight up from her face like the gnomon on a sundial. No blood just yet, just a little clear liquid running down one cheek like a tear. Soon ravens would come and be unkind to her.

The crowd kept spreading; I grabbed Tanya’s arm and pulled her along as fast as I could manage, trying to stay ahead of its thinning perimeter.

‘I won’t tell anyone, Paul,’ she announced suddenly, in a tattletale voice. And then she was angry. ‘Don’t be so fucking paranoid!’

Several stragglers looked our way, but we looked mad enough together, and any kindling suspicions soon evaporated.

A block from our apartment, two blocks from Stanley Park, a shocking sight. Five children stood clustered together on the sidewalk. Children like from before, not like the ones we’d seen all morning lurking in alleys, crouched and lidless with terror. These ones were smiling, just like the boy in the ER and the little girl behind the Safeway. A little grubby, but otherwise they appeared unaffected by the chaos.

Tanya and I stopped in our tracks, like record player needles when a late-afternoon storm hits and the power goes out. In the ensuing silence, the children nudged one another.

‘Who are they?’ Tanya asked in wonder, briefly emerging from her fog.

‘I’ve no idea.’

The oldest was a girl of around ten who wore a T-shirt and pink shorts. The youngest was a boy with longish blonde bangs who couldn’t have been more than two. He held the older girl’s hand and stared shyly at me. These were fellow Sleepers, clear-eyed and unconcerned. As we stood facing one another in our aquarium of silence, the oldest girl kept looking toward a row of shrubs that stood outside a stucco Vancouver-as-California condominium complex.

I cleared my throat.

‘Are you okay?’

The other four looked to the oldest girl, who stared at me for them all.

‘Can I—?’ I began, but they turned and ran, fluttering down the sidewalk toward the park and the slow-waving willows that ringed the perimeter.

Across the street, a young man with no shirt and tangled black hair raised a quivering arm in the direction of the children’s flight, looked in our direction, and opened his mouth silently. Then he turned and began to plod after them, but much too slowly to ever catch up.

Then a sound from behind the scraggly row of shrubs that had attracted the children’s attention: giggling.

The little girl we discovered playing hide-and-seek behind the shrubs wouldn’t tell us her name; like the other children, she either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak. She wasn’t silent in a war-traumatized way, but in a shrugging, nothing-much-to-say manner. A pretty little thing, around four years old, with blonde hair and a wide brow—Alice In Wonderland-ish. She returned our smiles and didn’t flinch from Tanya’s touch when she picked her up.

When we got her home, placed her on the couch and began to pelt her with questions, she simply replied with a bemused tilt of her head. It was as though our enquiries about names and the whereabouts of mommies and daddies weren’t quite up to snuff, but she was too well-mannered to tell us.

We called her Zoe, Tanya having plucked the name from a mental list of future-children names that women seem to carry around inside themselves like eggs. Women. Eggs in their bodies, babies in their eyes.

From the moment we’d peered over the hedge and seen Zoe bouncing a small pink ball on the fractured concrete, Tanya had taken fevered possession of her. She scooped her up and marched the final block to our apartment without waiting for me. As I followed, Zoe watched me, her round face bobbing sombrely on Tanya’s left shoulder. The feeling that we were living out our lives together in fast forward was intensified by our sudden acquisition of a foster child.

‘Well, if you won’t speak, little missy, maybe you’ll eat!’ Tanya said, a little too brightly, her haggard face working up to a smile.

She emptied the cupboards, lining up our twin jars of tahini, a jumbo box of Corn Flakes, dandruff-y carrots, bread, and apples on the breakfast bar. The child hopped off the couch, ambled over, and picked up the box of cereal which she proceeded to shake like a giant, ungainly maraca.

‘So you like Corn Flakes, do you?’ Tanya asked, then headed over to the fridge and removed our last jug of milk. She opened it and sniffed, screwed up her face in disgust, then brought out a box of granola bars instead.

As Zoe munched away happily, Tanya came and sat down beside me. I put my arm around her. She flinched and began to pull away, but then something changed and she snuggled in toward me.

‘It’s almost like she’s ours, Paul.’

‘Almost,’ I replied, not liking the direction Tanya was taking this.

‘Do you think we would have had a family?’

‘Don’t say “would have”.’

She sighed in exasperation but didn’t pull away. ‘I don’t know if we would have. Do you think we would have stayed together and got married?’

‘I would have married you, even if I had to do it on my own.’ It was a feeble attempt at wit, but it worked. She giggled and swung her legs up onto my lap.

‘Maybe I would have married you. You’re pretty cute. Especially when you’re being all serious and writerly. That’s when you’re at your silliest, Paul. Do you know that?’

‘Now I know you’re going crazy.’

Tanya leaned in and gave me a hot kiss under my jaw, on my jugular.

‘I love you.’

‘Love you too, Paul. You would have been worth marrying. Me not so much, maybe.’

‘Don’t be—’ but she hushed me and we sat together in silence as Zoe, our truncated hypothetical future, munched away. That was the last real conversation we ever had, and I’ll take it with me as far down this road as I end up travelling.

When it got dark, we lit candles. They didn’t help the weirded-out atmosphere. Coupled with the screaming and smashing sounds from out on the streets, the twitchy yellow light only served to make our apartment seem like the den of some urban Satanist. When she could wriggle free of Tanya’s hugging arms for a few minutes, Zoe entertained herself by silently wafting her hands back and forth across the flames. Eventually we managed to persuade Zoe to blow out the candles and two thirds of us called it a night. Tanya put Zoe to sleep in our bed, I crashed on the sofa, while Tanya sat in the dark and waited for dawn.

At about four in the morning I was awakened by the sound of someone shouldering the front door. I ran out into the hall and found Tanya already there, flat against the wall with our longest, pointiest kitchen knife clutched in her right hand. We stood there for a few moments until the banging stopped. Voices were raised in dispute, something got slammed on the ground, then footsteps and hawing voices echoed down the hall.