Craig Davidson - Sarah Court

He scribbles this down. I ask what’s going to happen to her.

“We have to locate her first.”

“I don’t mean her.”

“Yes, right. Baby’s at the General Hospital. Tests, that kind of thing.”

“Can I see her? It may jog something.”

“I’ll check.”

“Will you go out for a cup of coffee?” Compelled to clarify: “With me?”

“My wife would not approve of me sharing coffees with strange women.”

I’d seen his wedding ring. Many people are married. Not all happily so.

“Greatfireworks displays,” my father said, “should expand within a viewer’s mind.”

The Mushrooming Imprint . My father’s phrase. It describes the effect any disciplined fireworks engineer should strive for. All displays leave a stamp upon the sky: only gasses in their dissipation, as unremarkable as fumes exiting a tailpipe. The Mushrooming Imprint was created when viewers closed their eyes as the lingering afterimage evolved. You could go a lifetime, eighty or ninety firsts of July, never seeing The Mushrooming Imprint .

Myfather’ssignaturefireworkwas‘Bioluminescence.’ “Some creatures produce their own light, Patience. It’s called ‘cold light,’ as it produces no heat. The anglerfish has a glowing bell dangling off the front of its face on a pole of skin, like a man holding a lantern before him in a storm. Smaller fish are enticed into attacking the bell and the anglerfish”—he brought his palms sharply together—“chomp! Deepsea fish cannot exist in sunlight. If you one netted one and dragged it to the surface, its skin would turn to jelly and slide right through your fingers.”

“Bioluminescence” began by affixing pellets of nitrate fertilizer to monofilament fishing line using a dab of superglue. My father tied these to wooden dowels suspended in a refrigerator box containing a dog’s breakfast of camphors and chlorides, the concentrations of which were guarded even from me. The box sat in our basement—“The Fermentation”— and when its seams were cracked the powders had drawn up to coat the pellets. Gumball-sized with patinas invidious to their creation. Some were riots of colour with rips of magenta and gold. Others dusty under camphorous wraps. They went into honeypots packed with black powder.

Each ball, wearing dozens of chemical coats, blasted skyward on a tight trajectory. They bounced off one another; each collision peeled a coat. Every carom and ricochet sent the spectacle higher as it burnt brighter. The balls had a brief life span as combustion and contact peeled them down to their fertilizer cores, which burst with a faraway sound not unlike milk-doused Rice Krispies.

Closing your eyes — as spectators did, instinctively — you would see The Mushrooming Imprint . Think of warm breath on a winter windowpane: tendrils of radiating frost, each unique to the breather.

My father was a genius. Narrow of scope, but nevertheless.

I asked my father how creatures came to exist at the bottom of the sea. He said over trillions of years weaker specimens got pushed down deep. Relegated to blackest waters.

“Darwinism, pet. Big eats small. Nature has its hierarchy. They didn’t end up there of their choice. Who could want to live in the dark?”

Yet the colossal squid hunts the darkest ocean channels and will attack sperm whales, sharks, even orcas. Prehistoric Megalodon, ten times the size of a great white shark, is believed to still exist in volcanic trenches along the sea bed. As a child it was the darkness between fireworks that enthralled me. The ongoing dark of an unlit sky. Even today I’ll wake in the still hours of night to stare pie-eyed into the darkest corner of my room. Dimensionless black like a hunger. Some organisms are happiest at bonecracking depths, guided by lights of their own kindling.

“Ms. Nanavatti?Patience Nanavatti?”

“This is she.”

“Donald Kerr. From Wal-Mart. The legal end of the boat.”

I picture him hogfaced in a southernfried lawyer getup. Those white suits that incorporate the sweat of their wearers to set the works aglitter like a stretch of sun-dappled shoreline.

“We’re calling to see how you’ve been since your… little incident.”

“We’re calling?”

“I mean to say, we, the legal team. May I first of all say, kudos! Were it not for your calm in the eye of the typhoon, a young life would have been snuffed. A toilet. Dear God . Happens every day, Ms. Nanavatti; that’s the horrifying truth. Babies left in Arby’s dumpsters and worse. The other day one poor dear was found in a crack den — you’re familiar with crack, Ms. Nanavatti? The inexpensive derivative of co caine ? — in a crack den, Ms. Nanavatti, behind the radiator , Ms. Nanavatti. Good Lord,” he says, as if in horrified realization at the past fifty words to exit his mouth. “Mainly women commit these acts. As I’ve noticed in researching the incident you were involved in. The hero of! I mean not to impugn your sex; yours is the better of mine, as anyone associated with reprobate behaviour will attest. You try to make sense of it, Ms. Nanavatti. I mean myself, a man, a father. Beggars reason. An ongoing struggle between mother and child? The mother’s way of saying, I bore you into this world, chum, and I can as easily take you out ?”

I smile. Not at the grisly bent of Donald Kerr’s mind, but at the fact a company of Wal-Mart’s stature has retained such a colossal wingnut as legal council.

“I never thought of it that way.”

“Who would? Crazyperson talk! This job’ll do that to the best of us — not to claim I ever was. Have you children, Ms. Nanavatti?”

“Not as yet.”

“Flummoxed to hear it. Scalded, electrocuted, burnt to bones. Horrifying to do to anyone, let alone an infant. Donald,” he scolds himself, an old dog beyond better breeding. “Again, I apologize. Some at this firm believe I ought to retire, Ms. Nanavatti. Rumblings I’ve become an eyesore and embarrassment.”

“Are you calling in reference to a problem?”

“Oh-ho-ho, heavens no! It’s only… have you much familiarity with the law, Ms. Nanavatti? Law suits ? Citizens of our great land have it into their heads they’re karmically entitled to gross financial recuperation for every petty inconvenience. It’s a finger-pointing, me-first, I-was-wronged-so-gimmegimme legal system. Give a jackal a bite of meat and it’ll come ripping for your jugular!”

He apologized for this second outburst. I was beginning to like Donald Kerr.

“Ms. Nanavatti, you may recall that dizzy old grandma — sorry, sorry; everybody’s got a grandma— that dotty old darling who dumped McDonald’s coffee in her lap. A cool mil for a first-degree burn? Buy plenty of calamine lotion. Marinate in the muck. Okay, maybe her coffee was a touch hot. What’s the alternative? Serve it cold? Nonsense! Consider your — our — situation in this light. A baby nearly dies in a washroom. Not any old washroom: the most successful retail chain in the free world. Not flukily or through folly of its own devising. Maliciously. What can my client do? Video cameras in their bathrooms? Fah! Customers will worry about seeing themselves on those Girls-Caught-Peeing websites. No bathrooms, then? Let shoppers tinkle into the pockets of winter coats? Building codes dictate sanitary washrooms in retail outlets. It’s one ittybitty word, safe , at issue. Are the bathrooms safe? Insofar as there is nothing innately dangerous about them. Wal-Mart’s hardware section isn’t innately dangerous until someone grabs a hammer and brains somebody in Electronics. Nothing innately dangerous about coffee, either. Still, one clumsy dingbat made mucho hay off a cup of coffee. There’s always that nickel to be shaved.” Donald Kerr laughs a sporting laugh. “Bleed the beast but leave enough to keep the heart pumping to bleed it a little more!”