Craig Davidson - Cataract City

Later, when I staggered home, I saw that a fire had been stoked in front of my apartment door. Twigs and random trash remained, plus the stink of kerosene. The fuel had burned off without igniting much else; there was nothing but a twisting scorch mark up the door. Bovine? It seemed like the kind of half-assed statement he’d make.

The landlord charged me for a new door. His reasoning: the damage had been perpetrated by my enemies, whom I’d rightly earned and whose reprisals were both unsurprising and — in his unvoiced but palpable view — completely justified.

Eight years went by, the passage of time conspicuous only by the sly pressures it exerted — the lines carving around my eyes and the yellow tinge to my teeth most noticeable when I shaved, my cheeks silked in white foam. One morning while flossing I’d caught a carbolic stink off the waxed floss and wondered: was this how you became acquainted with the smell of your sick, aging self?

I often woke from nightmares that drained from my brainpan like glue, scratching the undersides of my eyelids like motes of fibreglass. The most common one involved dogs flying out of an unending greyness, same way sharks appear out of silty water. Sometimes every one of those dogs was Fragrant Meat, his head bashed in from a truck’s grille.

Sometimes I hated this damn city. The sense of omnipresent failure triggered a breed of nausea in me. With it came that feeling of being inside a prison cell with elasticized walls. If I wanted to leave again, Cataract City would let me go — happily, in all likelihood — but if I stayed, it would constrict: an anaconda squeezing me until I couldn’t draw breath.

I came to sense a sinisterness about the city, too. It wasn’t anything you could pinpoint — how could a city be evil ? A city was just concrete and steel and glass, feeling no pain, retaining no memories. But then houses are made of the same stuff, and people go around claiming they’re haunted all the time.

At first I’d told myself it was just me. I’d been away too long, returning under a dark cloud. But as the days bled past I recognized that it wasn’t me — or was me, partially at least, because I’d inhabited these streets before, bearing the infection I’d harboured since birth.

I’d stay up at night, imagining a vast sea of poison underneath the city. A churning sea of lampblack-coloured ichor burbling, leaching into the soil as it spread the infection.

Part of that was the job. Want to see the ugly side of any city? Start carrying a badge. I would cruise ours at night, an embalmed moon throwing its light upon weed-strewn lots and sagging rowhouses long vacant of human habitation. I’d listen to the wind whistle through those empty skeletons, singing off exposed nailheads and around flame-thinned beams with a low mournful sound. Empty houses have this look to them, or at least they do in Cataract City: like faces ravaged by leprosy. Shattered bay windows resemble leering mouths; punched-out second-storey windows look like avulsed eyeballs. Darkness had a way of transforming everyday sights into nightmarish apparitions. It did the same when Dunk and I spent those nights in the woods.

Sometimes I’d drive into the farmland on the outskirts of town. A rot-toppled silo lay in the fields to the north, isolated beside a decaying granary. A long, dark tube softening into the earth like a giant earthworm half smashed under a boot. It had torn up rags of fibrous earth when it fell; the rags, still attached to the silo’s hull, fluttered like curtains as the wind blew over a carpet of withered seeds: a sound like the pattering of tiny feet.

If I squinted, sometimes I’d see odd movement in the silo, deep in that brooding darkness. I’d think so, anyway. Who —what ? It’s not something I’ve investigated. Or ever will.

Something’s the matter with Cataract City. To live here is to be infected with it. And you don’t even know how sick you are. How can you, when we all share the same poison?

For eight years my life was locked in stasis — I may as well have been frozen in a cryo-chamber. I became jaded, a stranger to myself: a desk sergeant with the Niagara Regional Police, tracking down child welfare beefs with a rotating cast of pantsuited social workers. Putting bad men in jail only to see them sprung by a showboating defence lawyer or some give-a-fuck judge. The system was broke — most systems were — and I was just one gear spinning imperfectly within it.

After work I’d hit one of the bars along Stanley Road, prop myself up on a stool with the rubadubs, listen to country music on the jukebox and inhale the sour whiff of spilled beer. Then I’d go home to the shoebox apartment, the unmade bed, empty bottles queued along the windowsill like giant bullets in want of a revolver, and the dripping faucet that I couldn’t quite rouse myself to fix.

Every so often I’d pick a convenient start point — New Year’s Day was popular — and say: Time for a change, Stuckey! Get a membership at the Y, show up for pickup basketball with the old men and high-school dropouts, can a few jumpers and get a little groove going. But soon the six pins and quartet of screws holding my knee together started to burn with smokeless heat; I’d gimp to the bench, my resolve already eroding.

I’d see old faces around. Duncan’s mother, Celia, waiting at the bus stop after her shift. Wearing a pencil skirt and support hose — hot date with the mister? — varicose veins bulging up the backs of her calves. I drove past without stopping, feeling the weight of her gaze on me. Sam Bovine would wash up in the drunk tank as reliably as the tide, usually around the holidays. He’d pass out in the holding cell, tinselly Christmas garlands noosed around his neck. One night he showed up outside my apartment screaming incoherently, although the gist was clear: you’re a turncoat, Stuckey, a scummer and a snake . I rang Dispatch and when the cruiser arrived Bovine stared at my window, wounded and pissy. I had the officers drive his drunk ass home.

I saw Edwina once, a few months after Duncan’s arrest. Driving past their old house, ostensibly on a neighbourhood sweep, I’d spotted a FOR SALE sign on the lawn and a U-Haul trailer stacked with boxes. I slowed down, knuckles whitening on the wheel. Ed walked out the front door with a gooseneck lamp, Dolly padding at her heels. She’d held on to her wintry beauty — although it was flintier now — retaining that bodily wildness both Duncan and I had surrendered to.

A moment came back, plucked free of time. Ed and me in the coatroom at Derby Lane, the usual dog track smells — wet greyhound, cigar smoke and the alkaline tang of dog drool — overmastered by the smell of her: clean and electric and somehow witchy, the taste in your mouth as a thunderstorm darkens the horizon. Her body was dewy and obliging, which was odd seeing as she was so often distant, untouchable. But back then she had softened as I braced her against the wall, coat hangers jangling round our ears with a musical note. It was not at all how I’d imagined it but still good, so very good, the youth in our bodies electric — I thrummed with it, fumbling but sincere, nervous lightning popping off the tips of my fingers — as she socked her head into the crook of my neck, smelling of Noxzema and Export A cigarettes, of sweat and the dust of the track, biting my throat with her small, even teeth. Laughter bubbled up inside me — the hysterical, uncontrolled giggles that had plagued me as a boy, concentrating first in my belly and fluttering up my throat like antic butterflies. The more I tried to tamp them down the worse they got — like when Bruiser Mahoney signed that Polaroid BM and that sick, insulting laughter had boiled up in me. I’d felt that same fear in the coatroom. You weren’t supposed to laugh when a woman nuzzled your neck, so I’d stifled it— Shhht-SHHHT! — the snort of a horse. Ed stared at me cockeyed for a second before we kissed — and it had been warm and spitty and sloppy like a first kiss ought to be.