Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

Specks. Specks . Thousands upon thousands. I cannot see for their accretion.

Pipes.Is how I see you. All human beings. Pipes. As you have running through your home. Transporting fuel, water, wastes. All you often see of a pipe is their mouth, in the form of a drain or toilet bowl. People are pipes through which different substances emit. As a boy I understood out of Mama emitted food, a bed, blankets, smacks, a home, limits, broken glass. Out of Cappy Lonnigan: tobacco, cuss words, larcenous advice. Out of Teddy: moans, burn holes, crying jags, blackened ants.

I saw the colour, texture of their emissions. Out of Mama’s pipe flowed burnt orange fluid. Out of Cappy’s: bright blue liquid that when he laughed transformed into moths. Out of Teddy’s: muddy goo stubbled with dead crickets or rusty nails.

Twist a water tap, water pours out. Not so people. Some days I could do such a thing as comment on Mama’s new haircut — which often made her orange fluid flow brighter — but instead her liquid turned black black, full of twitchy, screamy things. Next she committed acts meant to hurt me in ways that I am incapable of being hurt.

Cappy was a journeyman pipefitter. “I’ve been a journeyman everything,” he would say, “including husband.” He said pipes connect odd ways. People connect odd ways, too. Their colours change when they merge, the way mixing different coloured paints do. I study emissions. Colin Hill’s fluid flowed sun-hot yellow. Abigail Burger’s flowed pale violet until her father yelled at her, at which it blazed hemoglobin-red. When she came to our house after her squirrel was shot, Patience Nanavatti flowed with burping lava. But Mama ran so dark that day, all the lava bled right out of Patience.

Out of my own pipe emits grey substances the consistency of gruel.

My pet’s name:Gadzooks! An Eastern grey squirrel suckled on scalded milk. When the neighbourhood kids gathered all our squirrels to play, he was hounded by his siblings. But Gadzooks! was terribly fierce. He once tore the head off a greensnake in an eavestrough. Devoured a family of silky pocket mice nesting in Mama’s walls.

Last night Gadzooks! dashed out my apartment window, down the drainpipe onto the road. A car ran over him — over him, you understand, not ran him over. The tires did not flatten him. Still, he was dead. By the time I rushed to the street, his legs were stiffening. Trapped under that car, the roaring engine, pinned in that wash of exhaust. Any man overtaken by such unreasoning forces so, too, would die of FRIGHT.

Now: Gadzooks! is in a shoebox. On a bluff overlooking Ball’s Falls. On top of the box is a silenced Glock 10mm handgun. I am in my vendor’s blues. I am digging a hole.

Wipe my brow. Pulse check. Fifty-eight bpm. Heft the gun. Adjust for windage. Empty the magazine into an elm. Collect the shell casings. Gadzooks!: into the hole.

Voices arise. I kneel at the bluff’s edge. Three men with a blue barrel. Colin Hill, the stuntman. Wesley Hill, his father. A third young man I do not recognize.

Colin Hill strips at water’s edge. Afterwards, he crawls onshore after plummeting. He ignores his father’s outstretched hand.

My nameis Jeffrey. My mother smoked crack cocaine.

An addict of loose moral virtue, says Mama, who died giving birth. “A defiance of nature,” Mama said. “A ripe apple pushed out of a rotted one.” My mother died with chalky lips, Mama says.

Three pounds, nine ounces. They called it a miracle when I failed to die. Six months with casts on my elbows so I would not pull my joints apart with my frantic infant exertions. Mama keeps the casts — so small you cannot even fit a finger into them — to remind me I was once so pitiful.

There is a stain on my brain the size of a cocker spaniel’s paw print. Occipital with spread to parietal, temporal lobes. Only dead black meat.

“Your mother was a crackhead,” Mama says, “and your poppa was a sunbeam.”

The black spot is no physical bother. My fine motor, balance, speech skills: all tip-top. My pulse rate, excellent. Yet I fail to experience pain as others do. As a six-year-old I stuck my finger into a stationary bicycle ridden by Mama’s sometime boyfriend William “Cappy” Lonnigan. “What a nutty thing to do, kid!” My finger hung by a shred. The paramedics said I was “the stoniest little trouper” they ever saw.

Sundays Mama took us to church for ablution. The congregation swayed.

“Feel it, darling?” We were all Mama’s darlings. “The LOVE?”

I do not feel LOVE. RAGE. SYMPATHY. They live in the black spot. I have woken howling odd places in twisted bodily positions, never knowing why. I see guests on daytime talk shows. Emotion-torn faces crumbling apart under studio lights. Comprehension eludes me.

Mama took me to a movie. In it, a boy with massive facial deformities taught a blind girl to “see.” He put a hot potato in her hands: RED. Cotton batten: CLOUDS.

Mama showed me a photo of baby chickadees: LOVE. A soldier in a ditch beside a bombed farmhouse: LONELY.

Cappy Lonnigan arrived, drunk, while we were at it.

“It’s the blind leading the blind.”

Good, evil: I can differentiate. But I am not impelled to pursue one path to the exclusion of the other. I camouflage myself through conditioned responses. Were a lady to set her head on my shoulder at a car wreck, I could identify her emotion as GRIEF.

“What a waste,” I could say. I could mean the cars.

I often find myself trapped in difficult emotional waters. But I can tread water. I employ conversational strategies. One is to repeat what someone says, slightly altered. If I was at a funeral for those killed in that hypothetical car wreck, that same lady might say: “What a pity. They were far too young. So much promise.”

“Too young,” I might try. “Such promise.”

Or at a supermarket. A boy making a scene his mother is helpless to arrest. A fellow shopper could whisper: “Someone should tame that little brat.”

“Whip him,” I might say, that being how a lion tamer tames his lions. “Whip that brat.”

I also have trouble fitting warring notions in my head. Like: the first time I saw a banana I realized you had to peel its skin to eat its insides. That banana had been given to me by a human. The two knotted in my head. Snapping the top off a banana sounds a lot like snapping the neck of a small, armless, legless, yellow person. I do not eat bananas. Ever. Or welcome yellow objects into my proximity.

“You got a case of the brainfarts,” Cappy said when I tried to explain.

“That’s vulgar,” said Mama. “Call them cramps.”

“Whaddaya mean — like, menstrual cramps?”

Farts within my brain make me mistake prone. Example: Cappy would bring Mama breakfast in bed. “Great way to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno, kid.” Beyond that, he never elaborated.

One afternoon Gadzooks! quarrelled with a robin. I shinnied up the tree — I had beaten Nicholas Saberhagen in a climbing contest, even though his father made him climb trees daily — to spy eggs in the nest. I brought them home, cracked them into a skillet. Eggs so small fried rapidly. So tiny on that big white plate. I arranged pretty blue egg shells around. When I presented them Mama was HAPPY. Until she studied closely.

“Jeffrey, where did these come from?”

“From the tree in Mister Burger’s yard.”

Mama shrieked. I mustn’t go stealing eggs out of nests. But I worked especially hard to get those eggs. Farmers stole eggs from under chickens’ bums. An egg was an egg…? I only wanted to spice things up in the ole sack-a-reeno. For Mama.