Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

As he took blood from K., and asked him about his hobbies (“Have you heard of this rollerblading craze, Ken, or are you more the intellectual type?”), K. tried to revert the questions back to the doctor.

“So, my friend Christmas tells me this is a drug-testing study, but I see here these are tried and true oldies — clonazepam, amitriptyline — so what are you testing, effects?”

The doctor smiled at K. condescendingly but didn’t answer. Bot plugged up a vial of his blood with a small black stopper, and a nurse, who looked like she’d been sucked into a vacuum from a planet of porn stars and then deposited into the orange room with K. and the doctor without any instructions, came to take his blood away. She nearly tripped on her big white platform nurse shoes that seemed to be very impractical, given her occupation.

“Dr. Bot? What effects are you testing?”

“I like Christmas,” Bot said, leaning casually on the counter, which contained a large glass jar with a ridiculous amount of cotton swabs in it. “She’s very spontaneous, what I call a free thinker, a truly free thinker. There really are no predictable patterns of thought going on there whatsoever, I find it fascinating. Have the two of you been dating long?”

K. sighed and studied the fold in his arm that was tightly sealed with cotton and tape, it was slowly bruising into a light green color. The doctor was obviously full of prevarications, wasn’t allowed to, or wouldn’t, talk.

“Everything you need to know about the study is in the forms, Ken,” Bot said, as K. pulled his hoodie on carefully and tucked his skateboard under his pricked-up arm. “Okay, see you tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. sharp.” Bot turned back toward the window, which displayed the varied gruesomeness and decrepitude of College and Spadina: It was the only place in the city where you could get rolled by crackheads, buy six white miniature eggplants for $1.99, and see female U of T students in Uggs rushing from their psychology classes to get hammered on vodka ice coolers at O’Grady’s Irish pub, all within a six-block radius.

“Ken,” Bot said, without turning around, “you didn’t sign the forms.”

“Oh, sorry,” he said, catching the door with his foot, “I forgot.”

K. had eaten three Hungry-Man TV dinners he’d gotten from the Price Chopper and was feeling a little ill. As Christmas’s voice hummed along the telephone line, he thought about what a good decorator he was. Small white, twinkly Christmas lights, it’s all about the Christmas lights . He sprawled his long body out on the floor and examined the layers of delicately latticed thumb-sized lights. As long as things stayed relatively dark — or “ambient,” as his favorite show, Decorate This, Girl! , described it — you couldn’t tell that most of his furniture came from the Ikea dumpster and Lansdowne’s Value Village.

“Obsyline,” Christmas said, her voice cutting through his fantasy of the triplet horse-faced decorating girls visiting his dank subterranean rooms and throwing his world into a renovating frenzy.

“K., did you hear me? The new drug is Obsyline. I Googled it, there’s nothing about it, except that it’s in the Valium family. You were right. Looks like that’s what Bot’s using on you.”

“Sounds like a combination of obvious and Vaseline ,” he said.

Impatient, Christmas sighed, “Yeah, I guess it does.”

“Well, whatever it is, I have these naps for hours, and I wake up feeling like someone’s taken a shovel to my skull.”

Two weeks had gone by since K. started drug testing with Dr. Bot and he’d been too exhausted to do anything with Christmas after the long afternoons of sleeping; watching women with unmovable hair negotiate badly attended fundraisers on soap operas; responding to Dr. Bot’s lengthy and often nonsensical surveys (“Would you describe yourself as lethargic or woozy? How many pistons in a diesel engine? Can you think of a word that rhymes with orangutan?); eating the semi-comestible tuna fish sandwiches that tasted like fancy cat food; and flying a green video airplane through an obstacle course on what appeared to K. to be one of the first computers ever built.

“Let me come over, at least,” Christmas pleaded, “I miss you, K.”

“Hello, who is this?” K. asked officiously. “Who am I speaking to, please?”

Christmas laughed and hung up. She pulled on her itchy Guatemalan mittens. Fall had turned, suddenly it was crisply unforgiving outside. She would stop on Queen Street, on her way over, to buy a boneless chicken roti from the Roti Lady for K. to take to work tomorrow. A little Caribbean might help, that shitty institutional food was enough to make you murder someone.

To say that K.’s apartment was a disaster would have been a compliment. There was Beefaroni on the low ceilings and two weeks worth of unlaundered gitch cobbled out an enchanted trail toward the bathroom. Stacks of papers, magazines, and take-out menus were splayed across the floor in fanlike phalanxes. In the middle of the kitchen floor was a rank-smelling can of opened baked beans which even K.’s cat, Soya Sauce, eyed with outrage.

“On that decorating show I watch, they say never to sacrifice your personal mementos and sense of style for the overall aesthetic, even if—”

“Where are your skateboards?”

Christmas had opened up a closet and found it stuffed with duct tape, rolled gauze, and an enormous vacuum cleaner, which had all the technology of a NASA telescope. Boxes of Lean Cuisine and Hungry-Man fell on her head. “Where is your record collection, Ken?”

K. looked at Christmas and frowned. Who was this girl with so much brown hair? It was everywhere. On her sweater, on her face, stuffed behind her ears. Why was she rifling through his apartment? Why was she wearing so many bangles? Bangles. Is that what they were called? What an odd word for bracelets. How very British. Only the British could have a snooty word for bracelets. What skate things was she talking about? What records?

“What records?” he asked cautiously, as if he knew her answer already and was merely testing her. Christmas turned then, from the mess, from the close, fusty food odors of the kitchen. She focused on K.’s vitreous stare.

“What the fuck?” She took a step forward and picked at something dry and scabrous just above K.’s ear. A clean strip of his curly hair had been shaved away for a series of crude incisions.

“Ow!” K. flinched, slapped away her hand. He took a step back, nearly slipping on an open Food magazine featuring a section on crème brûlée recipes. In a trembling voice, one that fought for patience and the concomitant emotion of understanding, K. asked her again, “Who are you?”

Christmas held a tiny thread in her hand, one of K.’s stitches. Attached to it was a pinkish bit of matter the size of a dust mote. Which memories had Bot taken? Which had he left? Where was the part of K. that cried to Bob Seeger songs? Where was the piece that liked the cheese on his open-faced grilled cheese sangers a little puckered? Where was the memory of K.’s drunk mother climbing onstage with a magician so that she could be sliced in two like the assistants with curler-wrought hair, wearing spangly costumes and flesh-colored tights?

K. held onto the cuff of her sweater lamely. His mouth formed a weak “o” as he breathed out his final question. Again, he wanted to know who she was. Instead of answering him, Christmas shook him off, picked up a heavy knife from the kitchen island covered with pizza boxes, ants, and ashtrays, and stabbed her best friend: first, in the liver, then in the kidney.

He bled in her lap until morning. She sat in the dark listening to the people on the first floor shower, then make a noisy breakfast of smoothies and cereal. When she was sure they’d left, she pulled a fleece blanket over K. and left his apartment, her itchy autumn sweater soggy with blood.