Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Last night I’d received a call from the American Express head office asking for further photos of the Antique Box that had been bought by client 622, a Mr. Starling Bates. The cellphone images I’d sent were apparently too indistinct. I was told that Starling maintains a residence in Coboconk.

I’d called my ex-wife to see if she’d take Dylan for the night. No answer. I packed him up in hopes of dropping him off through Toronto. Gridlocked on the Don Valley she told me sorry, she had evening plans. A date? Jesus. I’m not at all prepared for that.

We stop at a zinc-roofed restaurant, The Dutch Oven. All Dylan wants is Easter Seals Peppermint Patties from the coin-op machine.

“Dill, eat something proper. A Denver omelette.”

Dark, fatigued bags under his eyes. I order the omelette and buy four Peppermint Patties. He plays with them like poker chips: stacks them, lines them in a row, a square, a diamond. He isn’t wearing his cape anymore. I ask who he is now.

“Black.”

“What do you mean — a black person?”

“Black the colour. A cloud of black gas coming out of the ass of a sick car.”

This helpless sense of frustration and fear. My kid vomited down a corkscrew slide, then slid down and sat in his own upchuck. What does that even mean ?

The sky is blackening by the time we reach Coboconk. I grab a room at the Motor Motel: five units in a field outside town. Our room is clean, with a queen-sized bed. I tell Dylan we could ask for a cot, but he says it’s okay we sleep in the same bed. I’m not going to leave him here alone.

It’s dark by the time we reach Starling’s cottage. All the other units strung around the lake are winterized and empty.

“Listen to the radio, Dill, okay? And stay put.”

My knock is answered by the dreadlocked guy we picked up outside Marineland. I follow him into a vaulted chamber. Starling is in a wheelchair. His head is bandaged, one eye covered. His hands similarly wrapped and his legs swaddled in woollen blankets. His arms shrunken, somehow shrivelled: alarmingly, they look like penguin flippers. His left ear is fused to the side of his head as if his skull is devouring itself.

“Are you alright?”

“It’s painless.” Starling smiles. His body is just so warped : like he’s been stabbed in the guts and he is gradually curling into the open wound. “How is your boy?”

Had we ever spoken about Dylan?

“Fine. I took him to the zoo.”

“Zoo. Oh my,” says Starling, and smiles. I immediately wish he hadn’t. “I toiled at a zoo. With bears. All males. Bear society is a lot like ours, only the hierarchy’s more bald. One bear, an albino named Cinnamon, got it worst. He rode a tricycle in a midwest circus; when the big top folded he came to the zoo. Undersized, genetically inferior. The others made sport of him. Every day each bear inflicted some casual hurt. They pissed on Cinnamon; his coat went yellow from white. Skinnier and skinnier. That’s when they took to raping him. A big black bear, Chief, mounted poor Cinnamon first. The zookeepers felt this was the natural order. As one said: Better fuck-er than fuck-ee.”

Starling laughs and laughs. A vein fat as a night crawler splits his forehead below the bandages. His fucking eyeballs are sunk so deep into their sockets it’s impossible for them not be to touching his brain.

“Kids can be that way, too, Nicholas. Singling someone out for torment.”

I’ll find the goddamn box myself. Doubling down the hallway, I pass a partially open door. A wide, dark, metal-walled loft. The box is in the centre lit by a spotlamp. My camera whirrs as celluloid spools through the flashbox. Whatever’s in the box seems to have sprouted fresh appendages.

I take a new angle. Twin facts register simultaneously.

One: Dylan is standing on the opposite side of the box.

Two: whatever’s in the box has tubes growing out of it. Wriggling… tubes .

I lay my hands upon Dylan. Shake him far too hard. My adrenaline is redlined. My son’s face is as vacant and bare as the surface of the moon. Blood drips from my nose into his hair. My heart batters the cage of my ribs primed to burst right through.

“Did you get all you need?” Starling shrieks after me. “Did you SEE ?”

Back at the motel Dylan won’t move. The heat’s drained right out of him. I reef the motel covers back and lay him down fully clothed. He’s not shivering or moving much at all. I head outside for our bags. A pickup pulls into the neighbouring unit. A woman’s laughter plays out its open windows. Three people get out of it.

“You make loving you hell,” the taller and ganglier of the two men says.

“Husha, dumb dog,” says the woman, before stepping inside with the other man.

I go back inside and get into bed with my son. His face is grimed with sweat. I flatten his hair with my palm. Touch my lips to his head. His knapsack’s open on the tabby-orange carpet. Inside are bits and pieces of things he’s stripped apart. Everything in Ziploc bags. Orderly and arranged.

“What do you hope to accomplish doing this?” I ask him hopelessly.

“I’m going to put them back together,” he says. “In different ways. I have all the pieces. I’ll put them back together and make them even better than they were before.”

“It doesn’t work that way, Dylan. You don’t have the skill or know-how. None of this stuff was made to go together any differently than how it came out of package. When you take it apart with no idea how to put it back together, you end up with junk.”

He sits up. Unlaces the hiker boots his mother bought. Clodhoppers. He starts tugging the thick laces through the eyeholes. I want him to disagree with me, shout at me, but he’s concentrating on his boots. Stripping them apart, too.

“We’ll find a new school. It’ll be okay. I promise, Dill. Swear to God.”

After awhile the silence turns mammoth, oppressive, so I take a shower. The yellow water reeks of sulphur the way all water does this far north. Lewd goings-on come through the pressboard walls. The rhythmic knock of a headboard. A man shrieking: “Sweet darlin’ Sunshine!”

I return to an empty room. The door’s wide open. I step outside with a towel wrapped round my waist. The tall gangly guy sits outside the adjacent door.

“Did you see a kid come out?”

“Ain’t seen nothing,” he tells me wretchedly.

I step back inside. Dylan’s hikers sit at the foot of the bed. Laces tugged out, tongues lolling over the toes. The utility closet door is ajar. I open it.

Next to my argyle sweater hangs my son on a noose of knotted bootlaces. Dylan’s face is as blue as a sun-bleached parking ticket…

My sonhas a birthmark on his shoulder. It looks like a pinto bean. During his Steam-Powered Android phase this birthmark became his “on” button:

“Power up Android Dylan,” I’d say, and press it. Dylan’s head would rise, arms cocked stiffly by his sides. “Android… Dill…” he’d go, in robot-voice, “… needs… pudding… for… power… cells.”

At recess another boy told him if you had a birthmark it meant your parents hadn’t wanted you born. Dill agonized over it all day.

“Dylan, that boy’s a creep,” I told him. “How could your mother and I not want you born? You’re the best and most precious thing in our lives. Believe me?”

“Okay. I believe.”

… Ripthe hangar rod off the wall, plaster dust and the jingle-jangle of hangars. Dylan’s knees crumple as he falls face-first tangled up in my sweater. I try to pry the noose off but the laces are dug so fucking deep into his throat. A sobbing tension in my chest, agonizing compression pulsing ever-outwards. My vocal cords splinter as I let it loose. Blood’s blurring into the whites of his eyes. I claw my fingers under the laces and my shoulders pop loosening them. My son’s not moving but oh so warm. Prop one hand under his neck and open his airway as I’d been taught at Red Cross training. Settle my lips over his and blow. My breath disappears into the dense loaves of his lungs, circles around and back into my mouth with the taste of stale mucous and something else, slick and vile like gun oil. This cold throttling terror is sharp and blistering as blowtorched masonry nails clawing the surface of my brain.