Janine Armin - Toronto Noir

He was right because she answered quickly. She’d been doing paperwork, she said, and was glad to hear his voice, but asked if she could put him on hold. Before he could answer she was gone, and some quirk in the Lakehead’s wiring left him able to hear everything happening at the front desk. The receptionist fought off the drunken advances of two men on their way from the bar to their rooms. “When did she get off?” one of them asked. “Shortly after she comes up to see us,” the other one slurred, and the two of them cackled, thumped at the counter. When Maria came back on the line she apologized; she had been in the middle of a massive calculation: trees and hectares, hectares and trees. He told her what he’d heard.

“I know those guys,” she said. “They’re fucking assholes.” They were hunters, and in their orange coveralls you could at least see them coming, she said.

“Too bad the moose can’t,” he said morosely, and they shared a sad, distant-from-each-other laugh. “How much longer will you be?” he asked.

She didn’t know. “It depends. Whenever it snows, and if that snow stays on the ground, we’ll call it a day.” The TV flickered across the room and he told her it looked like the Americans were stuck with Bush, and she produced a sound that suggested to him a wince.

By the time he woke up this morning, CNN had retracted their initial election result forecast, and Al Gore had similarly retracted his concession. It was a shock. The future of the world had changed while he slept. Thrown, he beheaded two soft-boiled eggs and sat with them in the kitchen. Cholesterol be damned. He unfolded the Globe and Mail and began to read. Then it came to him. He had bought the CD and hadn’t heard it yet. It was still in his briefcase. He found the bag in the front hall and wrestled with the wrapper. He slid the new disc into the player. The neighbors in the condominium below wouldn’t appreciate this at 8 in the morning, but he turned up the volume anyway, stopped at six and then nudged it past seven. This was his home. He could do that.

It began. The heart is a bloom, shoots up through the stony ground . He liked it.

He recounted this series of events for Eleni in the gallery. She had moved from the desktop into her chair. Poured herself some wine. She sat across from him and swivelled back and forth. It was good of her to indulge him like this. Since he arrived three people had come in and looked around. One of them, a woman in shin-high green suede boots, had looked over the price list and hung around expectantly, but Eleni had ignored her, which must have been hard. These photographs cost three thousand bucks each; it didn’t matter how good they were, they wouldn’t sell themselves.

“And then what happened?” Eleni said.

Donny rubbed his face vigorously. He knew he should extrapolate from what had happened rather than giving her the literal details. Interpret it. Physician heal thyself. He could do that, perhaps. Decide what it meant even as he began to tell her. Talk himself out of this dumb funk. But what he actually said was, “The second song.”

She leaned forward, put her elbows down on the desk, rested her chin on the hammock she made of her palms, and squinted at him. Donny thought she may even have closed her eyes completely.

“The rest of the album, in fact,” he said. He felt a need to shore up his case and thought that might do it.

“You don’t like it,” Eleni said. She spoke quietly.

Did she think he was crazy? Or merely pathetic. He was sinking in her esteem, getting himself crossed off all sorts of lists. The snow outside was gathering on the road now.

He ploughed on. “It’s shit.”

“So? Big deal.”

Donny shrugged. “I don’t know. It threw me. It’s thrown me. I feel strange.”

“Let down,” she said.

“I suppose.”

Eleni got to her feet. She smoothed the front of her skirt. “I can feel that wine,” she said.

Donny held up his glass. Eleni was moving away. She was in the gallery again. Maybe his time was up. She had run out of patience.

He apologized for coming.

She paused; she had been hasty and he could see that she knew it. She told him not to be stupid. “I love seeing you. But this... this music thing,” she said, “seems very small . I know it doesn’t feel that way to you, but...”

“I know.”

He felt about twelve years old. As if he had presented her with a broken toy. Like what had happened was apocalyptic.

He mumbled another apology that she said was unnecessary. She said they could talk about it some more if he liked, but he couldn’t do it; the room was too warm for him now. There was, inexplicably, too much of a contrast with the world outside. Strange that he hadn’t noticed it before. Eleni took hold of his elbow and smiled, tried unsuccessfully to hold his gaze.

When he pulled open the door to leave, a small silver bell on a brightly colored wool strap tinkled brightly. A woman in a long mink, clutching a gray-eyed poodle in a fitted red jacket, turned sideways to squeeze past him. Eleni would be pleased, he thought. Maybe not about the dog — he assumed that was something she would frown on — but this woman seemed to be in a hurry and she didn’t look at him. As he stood in the open doorway, she seemed to focus already on the polar bears. She wanted them; he felt he could discern that with certainty from the movement around him, the expensive scent he lifted from her as she headed in the opposite direction. He had diagnosed her intent, he decided. It was as real to him, as clear, as the flu.

He continued blindly along Queen, but after a block he cut up into Trinity Bellwoods Park and sat in the cold on a stiff and creaking bench. He wasn’t alone. Two old men conversed in Portuguese. One of them reached absentmindedly into a plastic bag and cast handfuls of breadcrumbs and rice onto the white path. He looked into the gray sky, watched as from the corners of it, from the furthest points, pigeons collected, swarmed, homed in on him. Soon the path was alive with them. They clambered over each other. Their golden eyes, storm-cloud wings.

Streetcars hauled themselves west. Men in plaid jackets scampered about on scaffolding behind siding that advertised two-story loft spaces. In the dusty doorway of a dilapidated store that seemed to be called Textile Remnants, a woman bulky with layered tweed overcoats arranged a bed of boxes and torn blankets. Hypothermia, Donny thought. Head lice. Schizophrenia. Absentee votes.

He needed to leave. He had arranged a squash game for 6 o’clock because he didn’t want to go home to an empty apartment. He knew that if he did, he would stand in the doorway to the kitchen picturing the contents of the refrigerator, taking inventory of the booze, wondering what to drink and eat and in what order. How much was too much? What constituted moderation for today’s stressed professional? How much did he weigh? Where the hell was Maria and when would she come home?

The pigeons startled at his rising. The Portuguese men with the bread eyed him suspiciously. It was cold; he had no reason to be here. His was a different language. He passed behind their bench rather than in front so that the birds would settle again. The rice blew about on the ground. But it wasn’t rice. He paused. It wasn’t bread either. It was some sort of animal fat. And maggots. The grains of rice were actually maggots. And the breeze had died. The creamy mass of them squirmed on the ground.

Donny was on the streetcar heading east. Back toward the towers, the winter noise and end-of-day hubbub. His squash game was in the basement of a hotel. He peered grimly into the failing light. The noise of the carriage, the electric click and spark of it, was comforting somehow. There was the atomic and tinny buzz of a Walkman behind him. The smell of french fries. But then, with a start, he remembered another patient: Adam Govington. Damnit! He had completely forgotten about Adam’s appointment.