Night in the World, page 3
Oliver’s mind has gone blank, succumbing to the usual intimidation he feels in his brother’s presence. He steps around a broken chunk of ice and bumps against Justin, who eyes him without comment.
When they were young, Oliver liked to think that he and his guitar-playing, punked-out older brother were cut from the same cloth. Justin got the cutting edge, of course, while Oliver hoped he’d just be cool enough not to be embarrassing. He was the good student, the son with no obvious talent, so he went on to university while Justin — always connected, always planning — launched Ace, made it a success, and at some point arrived not at the fringes of local culture, but its centre. Even so, there was a time when it seemed that Oliver, in his own way, would meet his brother there.
Leverage has no customers, not even a lone drinker at the bar. Justin gives Oliver a tour, observed by staff who attempt to seem occupied. The rooms feel stiff, like the shiny hasn’t been rubbed off yet. By the front windows they sink into oversized pleather chairs, Oliver leaning to one side to ease his back while he reads the chalkboard. He really must make time tonight for his exercises again.
A waitress appears, trembling with energy. “Just bring us the sandwich specials, we can share them. Thanks, Kirsten.” Justin sighs once she’s gone. “It should pick up. Everything takes longer now — everything.”
“It must be tougher than ever to break in these days.”
“It’s always been tough — that’s just business.” A knowing, slightly patronizing smile. “But people keep moving downtown, the city’s growing like mad, so that’s ultimately good.” Same old Justin: seeing the world through the lens of personal benefit. Tory-voting Justin.
“And this is still Queen Street West,” his brother continues. “Ace is still jammed on the weekends.”
“It’s a fixture,” Oliver agrees, wondering if that actually matters anymore.
Ace has been a definitive part of the Queen West strip since Justin opened it. It’s still the only establishment that celebrates the city’s music scene: Toronto music is always on rotation, while framed posters and photos of local musicians and bands hang everywhere — not so up-to-date as they could be, and leaning heavily toward rock, new wave and punk over other genres, but they have authenticity and retro appeal, for Justin is in some of the photos, and the posters are mostly signed. Ace can justifiably be called a landmark: to Justin’s youth, to local pride. Even if the stage closed years ago, the bands replaced by branding.
Justin’s complaining about the red tape involved in running a business these days. He’s drowning in bureaucracy, he says. Costs. Oliver dislikes Leverage already, and not only because of its lame pun on their family name. It feels shallow: concrete floor, traffic signs on the walls, randomly stenciled words and chains — an idea of edgy. Grunge with boutique beef.
“I should have bought the building — Ace’s building — when I had the chance and Stanko was willing to sell,” Justin’s saying.
“Why didn’t you?”
“Timing. It was the nineties, the recession. I thought his price was too high. Not exorbitant, not completely fucking insane, like now, just high.” In the light from the window, the skin under his eyes looks brown and riddled with tiny bumps. He’s grown jowly, and there’s something tired and rote about even his complaints, Oliver thinks.
When lunch arrives, Justin brightens a little. He tucks into a pulled pork sandwich, then leans forward and peers at his brother. “So you’re still at the gym, okay, gotta pay the rent. But what about your writing?”
“Oh, that’s done with.” Oliver opens a napkin on his lap, affects a casual smile.
“Really?” Justin frowns. “That’s too bad. I don’t know if I ever said this, but I admired what you wrote. I mean the last stuff about water. Ahead of its time, it was.”
Oliver nods. Justin hadn’t said anything of the kind, actually. Not ever. He had once offered the unasked-for advice that Oliver should try not to be so dark. “People won’t buy gloom” was Justin’s insight when Oliver spoke of the difficulty in selling his work. And how would Justin have spun an article on water pollution to lend it more sizzle?
It doesn’t matter. He doesn’t want to talk about it. He’d like to be able to talk about their mother, but which mother would that be? Justin always seemed to have a totally different relationship with her. She shared Justin’s interests in stock markets, his politics; she was Grandma, part of their family, while he’s a satellite. Maybe, when you have two sons, one inevitably becomes the daughter, for that seems what he’s always been: the angel in the house, the son who drives and lifts, paints and rakes. Or just the baby child.
“How’s Gwynn taking things?” he asks. He barely knows his niece, who must be seven or eight by now.
“Oh, she’s fine,” Justin says. “A bit sad, you know. But she’ll be okay.”
“And you?”
Justin’s eyes meet his — startled? — then slide away. He combs a hand through his hair. “Mostly, Bro? I’m just fucking tired. Tired of this world. But that’s not going to change.” He pushes his plate aside, looks around the empty room.
“Only if we do,” Oliver says, but his brother seems lost in thought. The old Justin would have risen to this bait, been ready for an argument. Even a political debate would be better than silence.
Perhaps a personal conversation between them is simply no longer possible. After all, how long’s it been? Since before Gwynn, possibly before Justin’s marriage. As children their age gap often got in the way, but for a few brief years as adults they became brothers for real; then that faded. There was no break, no big crisis that pushed them apart, just the gradual assumption through time of their respective natural positions. Justin’s a big-canopied tree on a hill, which has only a distant relationship to its kin in the valley.
Justin pushes his plate aside. “Not to rush you, Bro, but we do have ground to cover.” He brings out a file from his leather satchel and slides a document across. Oliver picks up the will and stares at the gothic font. It looks like a film prop. He’s never read one before, and given zero thought to its contents. He scans the first page: florid legalese, all-caps shouts, his mother’s name bolded, Justin’s, his own. There they are, what’s left of their family: united in black and white at the end of days, before their final separations.
He sets the paper down, reluctant to take in more, and just nods while Justin starts to talk about their mother’s investments and savings, about putting the Oakville house on the market. Oliver knows this needs to happen but it feels premature, almost prurient.
“Alright, that was easy,” Justin says, and to Oliver’s relief, seems done. He leans back in his seat and gazes at him with a soft smile. Waiting for something.
“What?” Oliver says irritably.
“The next part’s going to be weird for you, Bro.”
“It’s all been weird.”
Justin takes a breath, smiles again. He’s genuinely nervous, Oliver realizes, and his own gut tightens.
“There’s the house on the island. She never sold it.”
Oliver stares in disbelief. No joke, Justin’s saying, explaining how this impossible statement can be true. Oliver listens yet can’t really hear; there’s surging in his ears, the room wavers, his breath comes in little puffs.
“Hey Bro, you okay?”
It can’t be true. He removes his glasses to wipe his face. Tears. He can’t stop them. A napkin in his fist, damp. It’s too much, it doesn’t make sense; his heart hurts and his breath hitches.
This past was closed, knotted, forever shut. They left it behind when Dad died. Mom took them away, and that house and life slid into the abyss of childhood dreams. Home for real, a place of beauty and belonging — he’s never found that again. As an adult he came to accept that long ago, and set aside such hopes.
• THE LAKE •
3
IN THE PHOTOGRAPH, Hilted Arches perches on a leaf. It’s black and brown and deep dark green, with markings like pale lichen — as if a little spot of soil had grown wings. Gabe doesn’t actually need the image; she knows Hilted Arches. When she closes her eyes, she can picture the white reniform spots and the fine and curious pattern of dark “arches” along its fringe.
Melanchra. Melanchra . . . adjunct? Adjuncta.
Her eyes flutter open. Turn the picture over: correct! Check the box on the list. Check the time: past eleven?
She rubs her face and sits up straight. Just one more stack after this, then bed. Really.
Next!
This moth shimmers like moss lit from within. The Hologram, one of her favourites. Diachrysia balluca. Another check. And that makes two hundred.
When she picks up the next stack she reverses them, so she sees only the scientific names written on the back.
Parallelia bistriaris. The Male Looper. A veined leaf. Quick look to confirm, check.
Tegeticula yuccasella. Yucca. An ermine robe.
Cucullia asteroides. The Asteroid, another fave. Body of a broken twig.
Cosmopterix pulchrimella. Chambers’s Cosmopterix. Four wind-whipped, white streaks. Crazy looking thing.
Chytonix palliatricula.
Gabe recognizes the name. She knows that she knows this moth. But no image comes to mind. The name doesn’t mean anything to her, that’s the problem. Who the hell knows Latin? There’s nothing in the words to connect to, so it’s like reading a serial number, a bar code.
With a sigh Gabe flips the card. The Cloaked Marvel — of course!
It’s late, she should get some rest, but the names, the freakin’ names, she’s got to get them straight. She swivels to look at the wall behind her. Pictures of moths cover it entirely, rising from the quarter-round just above the carpet and fanning into branches: hundreds of index-card-sized photos of small creatures perching on leaves, twigs, bark. In black felt pen the common name appears on the border of each, the binomial name on the reverse. Gabe’s gaze sweeps along the thick Noctuidae branch to which Chytonix palliatricula belongs. Though she can’t remember the tribal name either. Tribe Xylenini? Orthosiini?
They find no purchase in her mind, these scientific names. Only by this rote repetition has she been able to press them into memory, bit by bit. And even then, it’s like pressing pieces of paper to skin, sticky notes.
Now her whole life depends on that paper.
* * *
IN THE MORNING Gabe scrapes ice off her car, letting it idle to warm. Temperatures will rise to eleven degrees in Whitehorse, Yukon, today, while here in Peterborough, Ontario, it’s sunk to near minus-thirty. Gabe grunts as she reaches across the windshield, straining against tight yet indispensable layers of clothes, pausing to wipe her nose. The cold engine chutters and chugs. The sun looks like a stained penny lost behind the clouds, and offers no heat.
Downtown, a group of people without the luxury of being deterred by deep cold, mostly young men, has gathered on the steps of the shelter like on any other day. The dealers have struck up stiffened poses in their usual doorways. At a red light, while exhaust billows from the dripping tailpipe of the pickup ahead, Gabe watches a man without gloves talk on a phone. His dry grey hands make her wince.
Twenty minutes south of the city, she pulls up to the park entrance. A chain has been strung permanently across it, hers the only vehicle. Some years ago the Serpent Mounds Park closed for winter and never reopened. The Band cited failing infrastructure and lack of public support. The guard booth is rotting, the electronic parking arm broken and the road impassable from storm damage.
After a couple last swigs from the thermos, Gabe cuts the engine. Wind whistles and moans around the car. She pushes the door open.
With snowshoes clasped to her boots, she hikes into the former campground, following a buried vehicle pathway through the woods. Posts used to mark the defunct site grid, but someone has removed them, perhaps for firewood. When she arrived last November the ground was littered with beer bottles and other refuse, and she brought along bags for cleanup whenever she visited. Now the place looks magical: a great white blanket danced over by rabbit feet, deer hooves, bird claws and coyote paws, and her. She warms up quickly by lifting her feet, her breath like steam, the nip of the air on her cheeks a spirited lover, teasing. It’s so joyful to be here that she stops, grinning — seized by the sheer magic of this place, this day, her body’s vigour and the fortune that’s hers to be alive and here right now. From a cedar to her right two large dark wings lift: an osprey, heading into deeper cover.
The same hike almost every day since she returned to Ontario. Rice Lake has always acted like a magnet on her, like she’s in orbit around it.
She emerges from the trees near the Mound, raised to overlook the lake. In the snow it looks like any other hill. Gabe climbs to the top, reaches into her pocket for the container of birdseed, opens it and scatters the contents with murmured thanks. Then the other pocket, the bag of cornmeal. Her gesture made, she turns and sweeps her gaze across the expanse below.
The lake is frozen and snow-covered, its southern shore lost in a motionless white haze. In the middle distance the wooded islands look stony, like archaic temples or hoary dreams of the slumbering land.
The Serpent and other mounds in the park were raised by the Mississaugii centuries ago. They chose this place for their dead to rest: not in a heaven above, but a heavenly embrace right here. This place has been beloved for millennia; perhaps that’s why she, whose Irish-Black-Acadian ancestry is a trail of forgotten crumbs, feels more at home here. It’s easy to slip out of time and current worries on these visits too: to imagine the lake as young and fresh, the Mound builders just over the rise preserving fish, tending fires. Or to scry in the mists and oak leaves’ dry rattle a future when all today’s turmoil has been resolved, and healing and peace brought to this beleaguered world.
But now is not that time.
This is the time of crisis. Rupture. Grief. This maelstrom has been building for a while, and though she’s fumed and ranted about the forest fires, plastics, acid rain, chemical pollutants, radiation, destabilized weather, and loss of so many species forever, and though the downward human spiral has made her vision blur and bones ache with sadness and rage, she’s dithered away her time. And now — hello — she’s thirty-five. It’s time to get serious — do something that matters, for fuck’s sake, in a corner where she might make a difference.
She was never a strong student. Finishing her undergrad became a running family joke — What’s the major now, Gabe? She can still hear Jenn’s groan when Gabe told her the news: that she was moving back from Halifax to enroll in grad school.
“For moths?”
Yes, dear sister, moths.
“Have you even paid off your student loans?”
Yes she paid, every goddamn dollar, and that’s left her with squat, after working full-time for years. Jenn came around; she always did. And in November Gabe left the apartment that was two blocks from the ocean, and her job at Parks Canada, and all the great friends she’d made out east. Traded that life in for “coming home,” as Jenn called it: to the city Gabe gladly fled after high school, and the house she’d grown up in, now renovated by Jenn and her family, and a bedroom in the basement vacated by one of her sons.
A wind comes off the lake, dusting Gabe with snow. Her feet and fingers are going numb; she’s been still too long. Her thesis supervisor expects her later this morning, to discuss Gabe’s project proposal — a Dr. Hegyi, whom she has yet to meet in person. Gabe claps and stomps to get her blood flowing, then with a last loving look at the lake, heads down to retrace her tracks.
This is not the year to linger, to meander dreamily as she’s always loved to. She’s got to take off these snowshoes and hit the concrete.
THE CAR, the highway, the wider highway. Fields replaced by industrial parks, malls, new housing developments jammed right up to the road, and then, an invisible threshold where the city takes over and she’s inside Toronto, all grandly entangled schemes gathered around the traffic grid.
The campus, the parking lot, the laneway to the Earth Sciences building, more coffee? Bad idea. She’s nervous enough. The staircase, the grey hallway lit by fluorescents, the department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, office doors all looking alike.
“Dr. Hegyi?” This door stands ajar and Gabe raps.
“Yes!” An arm waves her in. “Just a moment!”
Gabe sits in a chair near the door while Dr. Hegyi types. Cycling helmet on the desk, a carrier bag next to it. Snow flurrying outside. Seriously?
“I’m thrilled to meet you, Gabrielle,” Dr. Hegyi says, pushing back from the screen still looking at it, then turning to her, standing but not getting much taller, and reaching out a hand. Tamara Hegyi, honey bee specialist and director of the university’s Bee Evolution, Ecology and Protection (BEEP) Lab, has the plump cheeks of a child, a girl’s sweet smile, short greying hair, and rimless glasses around bright eyes. Gabe guesses that she’s not much older than herself.
“I go by Gabe,” she says.
“Gabe it is. Now I was just responding to Professor Brimer, I made him aware of you and he’ll be joining the committee. Which is one down, one more to go, but Brimer was the crucial one, the one we needed the most. Not that the other member won’t matter! Of course they will. Now he mentioned several studies he thinks you should include in your literature review. I asked him to forward them and oh — I didn’t copy you on the email. Well I’ll send them on. Now I’ve read the draft project proposal you sent, and it’s just fine.”
Dr. Hegyi pauses to smile at her again.
“That’s a relief.”
“Yes, no worries, Gabrielle — Gabe, you’re on the right track. And I didn’t get a chance yet, but I’m going to send it back with comments. You’ve a clear idea what you want to do, that’s good, so to get ready for the committee we’ll just flesh things out a bit more on why and how. Are you looking at disturbances, spatial or temporal dynamics, that kind of thing.”
