Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

“Depends how much you’re needed. By whom.”

“There’ll be some kind of… gas?”

“We’re businesspeople, not animals. Go shower.”

A shower room as I remember from high school. Steel colonnades stretching ceiling to floor. Nozzles strung round. I strip down and twist the knob.

She will see life as an eternal ten-year-old. The worst fate in the world? Hardly. That this is the most cowardly plan of action can hardly be denied. History is crowded with fathers who’ve fled blood debts. I could try to pay back in increments what I stole. In moments and hours and days. Fifty years paying back what is essentially un-repayable. But I’m not that man. Never possessed that strength. Not for one instant in my existence.

It hurts to deny my daughter her rage. Hurts she cannot scream it into my face. Direct the cold barrel of that hatred at me. Melt the flesh off my bones. My deepest frustration finds itself here. Since anyone can be a father, can’t they? Half the human race. Takes nothing but to find a woman, tell her you love her — or love her truly, if you have that in you. Fatherhood follows. Yet nothing is so easy. I do love my daughter but this much is true: love is a sickness. Some kind of pathogen existing above all explanation.

A peculiar darkness falls through the casement window — a cold hole opening in the centre of the sun — as droplets fall, silver freckles striking my skin. No noise at all. The water. My heartbeat. That cold widening spot in the sun.

Black Box: Fletcher Burger.

The plane is afflicted with vehicular leprosy. Exterior panels flake off, rivets bursting, plates of steel carried off in the jet stream. Grip fast the yoke as it shimmies in my hands. I could let go but to this final end I am selfish. The life you cling to most dearly, worthwhile or not, is your own.

Guilt crushes you into shapes unrecognizable. Hate to sound weak of will but things happen. They happen. And yet I am truly quite sorry.

I pull back on the yoke. The line in the sky separating earth from sky, that sketchy pastel scrim of blue, gives way to darkness. The plane comes apart. As do I. My hands blacken. Whiteness of knuckle through charred skin. My eyes catch fire in a green flash the way phosphorous flares burn in the colours of their dyeing.

How deeply do any of us know our own selves? Ask yourself. We hold a picture of how we wish to be and pray it goes forever unchallenged. Passing through life never pursuing aspects of our natures with which we’d rather not reckon. Dying strangers to ourselves.

First,let me tell you about my boy. Dylan. Great kid. The greatest.

He’s chubby. Chubby-edging-fat. I’ve always been thin and my wife, ex-wife, she’s trim as a willow switch. The charitable genes we inherited reversed polarities in him. Now I don’t mind that he’s chubby but I don’t know what it’s like to be chubby so I’m a stranger to his struggles. My dad suggests a dietician. Too Hollywood. A ten-year-old with a dietician. What next — a PR flack?

Other week he found a grocery bag full of used work gloves at a building site. Sweat encrusted. Worn through at the fingertips. The sheer uniformity— gloves! a humongous bagful! — must have intrigued him. Then days ago he came home with a trash sack slung over his shoulder. Chewing on a Snickers. Two questions, son of mine: why did you pick up that charming sack of trash and where’d you get the candy? His answer: he discovered the candy in the sack, which, naturally, was why he picked it up. Its contents: twenty-odd pounds of chocolate. We drove to the site of his gold rush. The home’s owner, the manager of Haig Bowl skating rink’s concession stand, told me that yes, he’d pitched chocolate bars past their best-before date. They wouldn’t kill anyone. I let Dylan keep five. A finders fee. On the drive home a sugar rush gave rise to one of my son’s parented Deep Thoughts:

“Daddy, would a cloned human being have a soul?”

“Sure, Dill. Why not.”

One vivid-as-hell imagination. He’s been a stegosaurus, a fusion-engineered-saber-toothedrattlesnake (with stinging nettle skin), gas vapour from a 1973 Gran Torino, an atomic mummy, both a llama and an alpaca as apparently there’s a difference. For days he’ll speak in this spur-of-the-moment dialect: “Fitzoey blib-blab hadoo! Wibble-wabble?” His whimsy gave birth to the Phantoids: aliens the size of atoms who colonized a marshmallow he carried in a shoe box. When the marshmallow went stale he told me the Phantoids returned to their home world.

“Wasn’t the marshmallow their world?” “They were on vacation.”

“Budget travellers, those Phantoids.”

You’ve got to carefully monitor his stimuli or he’ll pick up a contact high that lasts weeks. It can be a bit embarrassing, as when he overheard a private conversation between his mother and I and created a jazzy new superhero: Captain Pap Smear. For a minor eternity he shouted, in basso profundo voice, “This sounds like a job for Captain Pap Smear!” and “He seeks out evil and smears it!” Or during his Night Stalker phase, where he deployed his skills at sneaking about — he tiptoes like Baryshnikov! — to catch my wife and I in flagrante delicto . He’d popped up at the end of our bed with a cry of “Yeah HA !” but his brow beetled with perplexity so I’d leapt up chuckling “Ho ho ho!”, girding my hips with a sheet to escort him back to bed.

Lately he’s been a vampire. A manageable fixation. Before that it was No Bone Boy. That incarnation saw him lounging in sloppy poses over sofa arms. Splay-armed on the floor.

“Dinner’s on, Dill.”

“Sure am hungry, Daddy, but”—big sigh—“no bones.”

I’d drag him into the kitchen. Perch him in a chair like a muppet. Head flat on the table.

“Having a no-boned son sucks, huh?”

“Are the doctors working on those space-age titanium bones?”

“Around the clock.”

Next he would slide, sans bones, onto the linoleum. I mean, my kid is method .

The phone callcomes at three a.m. Flights booked: Hamilton to JFK onto Russia. From there by charter to the Sea of Okhotsk. I call Abby.

“It’s Nick,” I whisper. “Sorry, sorry. Alright I bring Dylan over?”

“Mrrrmf fah .”

I pop a Black Cat caffeine pill. Grab a pre-packed duffel. On into Dylan’s room.

“Dill, gotta get up.”

His eyes crack. A stale drool smell wafts off his pillow.

“I’m taking you to Abby’s.”

“Can’t I stay with Mom?”

“Mom’s still settling in up in Toronto.”

He pulls his planet-patterned covers up, squashing Jupiter upon the curve of his chin. “No time for this, buckaroo. Either Abby or grandpa.”

That does it. I bundle him into the car with his “Emergency Away-From-Home Kit”: locomotive to his Lionel train set, a book: Lizards of the Gobi Desert , packets of banana-flavoured Carnation Instant Breakfast which he takes blended with one real banana.

I drive Ontario Street past the GM plant and its stargazer’s constellation of security lamps. Chase a yellow through the intersection of Louth past the Hotel Dieu hospital. A man sits on an ambulance bumper. Bloody towel pressed to his head smoking a cigarette. St. Paul a cold strip hammered flat between shopfronts. Men in snowmobile suits with frostburnt fingers black as cigar butts. Dylan’s touching the inside of his wrist with two fingers.

“What are you up to?”

“Checking my pulse. It’s the most reliable indicator of bodily health.”

Russia. Goddamn. Okhotsk? Sound you’d make choking on a fishbone. These gigs usually go a day or two. Any longer I’ll have to buy local vestments. Waddling about in a bearskin parka, a babushka, one of those furry too-big KGB caps.