The High-Rise in Fort Fierce Read online

  They left her the night of the first snowfall. They’d outgrown her and in truth she feared them. Their smell had changed. They were never cruel, at least not to her, but she found them increasingly hard to trust. She peeked over the edge of the box and watched them trot across the landfill and into the wilderness.

  She was alone in her blankets, hungry, her nipples stretched forever. She whimpered in her sleep, pedaled her paws against the wall of the box.

  The next day she abandoned the box because the smell made her sad. The landfill was transformed under a blanket of snow and food scents were hard to come by. Eventually, she found a dead raven, a bloody hole through one of its wings and into its body. Rejoicing, she rolled back and forth across its carcass. Then she sat down and tore it to pieces. After, she licked her chops, yawned. There was no wind and she fell asleep next to the feathers and bones.

  Then her dreams exploded. She was awake and one of the sounds she heard was her own shrieking. The other sound was like metal and fire, not a gun, but a truck, and all around her snow was crunching and melting. She smelled diesel, garbage, people. She smelled her own blood and felt herself lifted off the ground. She tried to bite but it hurt too much to move. It hurt too much to breathe.

  She was bundled inside the truck and it was a bumpy ride out of the landfill. She whimpered the whole way, falling asleep or dying, she couldn’t tell.

  Later, she woke up. At first, with just three legs, she struggled for balance. She was clumsy and slow. But that turned out to be okay, because she was safe inside the kennel in a room full of kennels that were all full of dogs. People crouched in front of her bed and wriggled their fingers through the thin bars that kept her away from the world, and sometimes she craned her neck to lick them. She whimpered in her sleep because she could feel her hind leg kicking in the snow back at the landfill, all alone.

  She’d regained her balance by the time he adopted her. She liked him right away, could sense the pain in his back, a bundle of it, thick and bulging. He took her to his apartment and brought her up to the roof of the building. Awkwardly, she raised herself to the ledge, responding to his encouragement, and looked out onto the vast expanse of land. She smelled the forest, the lake, the river. The woods were thick and the water was cool. The apartment was warm. She had a big red bed on the floor next to his nightstand, and that’s where she slept.

  IV

  Sometimes, he desired a woman. These were challenging times, and usually he settled for masturbation. In his most desperate hours, he could admit he’d been tempted to involve his dog, though not grotesquely, just her tongue, but he knew he couldn’t cross that line. It would change things between them, and it could become habitual.

  A few summers ago, he saved up his benefits, sliver by sliver, and ate only what he could get from the food bank and the church, frugal in every sense, until he scraped together enough for a trip to Yellowknife. He had a truck, but he was afraid it’d break down and he couldn’t afford the gas for such a long trip, so he hitchhiked with the dog to a campsite. It took twenty-four hours, even though if he’d had his truck it would’ve only taken about ten. Most of the extra time he spent standing on the side of the road outside Fort Fierce, watching vehicles whizz by.

  But he got there. He stood his little tent. A young woman who worked at the campground—who said she worked at the campground—kept hanging around his site and when he asked why, she offered to have sex with him for money, but what she said was, We can be friends, if you can afford it. The dog curled up outside, bothered by the sunlight that persisted for most of the night. It was an embarrassing experience, awkward, hurried, clumsy, but he still conjured the scene from his memory whenever he touched himself, because the humiliation had lost its sting and everything else was just so much pornography.

  Tonight could’ve been a sex night, but less awkward than that one, because he’d staged it right here at home. He’d imagined this for months, ever since he noticed the Welcome Wagon ad in the Northerner. He’d seen the woman in the elevator, figured she may’ve even lived in the building and was positive many of her clients did. They were newcomers, and she brought them small baskets of gift certificates and worthless freebies from local business, key chains and yo-yos and stuff like that.

  She was overweight, but he didn’t mind. He imagined himself naked and slight, smothered in her flesh, his face hot and wet from her breath. They could keep their separate apartments and meet once a month, a tryst of two bodies teasing in orbit.

  She came to the door wearing an apron from the grocery store, which thanks to the food bank and church, he hadn’t visited in ages. They were tight together in the tiny entrance, and with the door open he heard someone shouting angrily from down the hall. Her basket of junk bridged the space between them. She glanced at him. He saw recognition register in her eyes, knew immediately that she’d placed him as a local, not a newcomer, and he regretted his carnal agenda as a stiffness visibly gripped her back and shoulders. He shrugged, the jig was up, but gestured for her to come inside, anyway. Silence surrounded them, epic, as in space. And bleak. And black. But then the dog came sniffing around, burying her nose in the woman’s crotch.

  He’d planned to tell her about the universe and everything he’d learned since he bought his telescope with the small settlement given by the fish plant. He vowed not to unpack the details of his accident, not even to broach the topic, because his dad worked at the fish plant, too, and so did his mom, and he was loyal. Plus, he didn’t want her sympathy. He wanted her to learn about space. He wanted her amazement.

  She was snuggling the dog, bent over in the entrance, huge and stroking the dog’s ears and pursing her lips so that the dog could lick them. Celestial bodies, he said, leaning against the wall, are for the most part flying away from one another, and even those flying towards each other will eventually pass and continue in opposite directions. He made a futile hand gesture and said, In fact, the only thing the Earth was approaching was the sun, and it’d crash into that, like all the other planets, and that was all there was to it.

  She stood up, nodded, and said, Sounds lonely out there.

  There’s the Dog Star, though. That’ll be one of the things that passes us by someday.

  We’re conversing, he thought. He was alive. He led her into the apartment, saw everything as if from her eyes: telescope erect and pointed out the window; kitchen clean for a bachelor pad, only a light load of unwashed dishes; television playing Seinfeld reruns on mute; dog’s teddy bear on the floor in front of the couch, balls of stuffing all over the floor. Yes, in here, he was alive.

  They sat on the couch, next to each other, and he turned the volume up on the television. She smelled like no-brand hair conditioner, faintly of lemons, chemicalized. There was a sparkle on her cheek, twinkling, and she stared straight into the TV, like a camper into a campfire.

  Wanting to touch her, he allowed his knee to lever out, to hover near hers, the distance too great for him to bridge alone. He shifted closer to her, infinitesimally. Maybe she didn’t notice. Maybe she was too intent on the TV screen.

  Trembling, he extended his hand and brought it to rest over her knee, careful not to squeeze, trying somehow to be ambiguous, as if the gesture could be interpreted as an accident, a confusion of her knee for his, but also, in the event that she was likewise curious, a come-on, a proposal, something lewd.

  There was a moment of uncertainty from which infinite futures were proposed, kaleidoscopic in arrangement and variety. There could’ve been love of several sorts: torrid, bothered, heady, eternal, doomed. There could’ve been a collision of lonely bodies, a buckling climax of heat and gas, and then a scattering of debris into all corners of every possibility. Or there could’ve been a near miss, no changes to report.

  The woman jerked her knee away.

  The bathroom? She giggled, but warily, and lifted herself to her feet, face flushed.

  Embarrassed, he transformed his hand, still floating where her knee had been, int
o a gesture aiming down the hall. She hurried away.

  He sat there, facing the TV, stoic, like stone. Dismayed, he listened to the floor creak under the woman’s feet. She was in the entrance, not the bathroom. The dog sprawled across the floor next to the TV, eyes lolling in their sockets.

  He summoned his will, stood up, turned around, approached the front door. The woman roughly shoved her arms into her jacket. She yanked her boots over her feet. He scrolled his mind for something to say, a way to reverse their trajectories back to the couch, but there was nothing to hold onto here, and she finished dressing without looking at him, walked into the hallway without turning back, left the door open and rushed to the elevators, moving steadily away.

  After, in the kitchen, he opened the first drawer and took out his rolling machine and tobacco pouch. He rolled one cigarette too loose, lit it up, and drew deeply. Do you want to go on the roof? he asked the dog. Do you want to watch the stars? The dog didn’t answer, didn’t come wagging up to his ankles, and so he crossed the room to the other side of the couch, and she was sitting there with blood running out of her nose. She sneezed, and then the blood was on the floor.

  He fussed over her. Forgave her the mess. Rolled her onto her back and stroked her belly, touched, as he did, so she knew it was okay, the stump of her missing leg. Her tail thumped lightly against the floor. She yawned. She was too tired to go on the roof, so instead he curled up beside her and cuddled her to sleep.

  V

  He bundled the dog into the passenger seat of his truck and already she was shitting herself, whining, filling her chest with air and blowing it out of her nose in failing staccatos. The smell was mind-bending, like she was rotten inside and could no longer cling together.

  It’s okay, he whispered hoarsely, frantic, terrified. He closed the door and rounded the truck, slipped in the wet snow falling from the sky and gathering on the icy ground. He climbed into the driver’s seat and immediately his back twisted in spasms, five hours to go before they got to the vet in Alberta, early morning by then—all night long, he would have to drive all night long—and he hadn’t made this trip south in many years, not since his injury, because usually he could wait for the vets to come to Fort Fierce—they had a low-income program. But this was an emergency. He had to go now. He told this to the dog, slapped the dashboard, tried to smile, and just where were all the bends in the highway? She shuddered, whimpered, closed her eyes.

  The truck tires worked the slush and he careened through town, headed for the highway, which was lit only by his headlights. The movement of the truck, the rising rumble of the engine, seemed to lull her into sleep. Retching, he opened the window, a gust of cold, wet air refreshing him as Fort Fierce receded in the rear-view mirror. Wet snow pelted the undercarriage, tinkled and roared. He squirmed in his seat. He switched from high beams to low, switched two or three and now four times, but couldn’t seem to penetrate the sleet. He stared uneasily through the windshield, which was weakened by long, serpentine cracks.

  Outside, the dim suggestion of forest streamed by on either side.

  Hours farther south, when finally the truck began to go off the road, he was not surprised. Not even panicked. The moment was so imbued with cosmic inevitability that he retrieved evidence of its coming from all the major and minor events of his past, the way the couch groaned when his father sat down after work, smiled, turned on the TV; the way he had to clean flakes of tobacco left all over the kitchen table after his mother rolled her day’s worth of cigarettes; the clownish sound of the forklift horn before the pallet creaked and broke and knocked him on his back at the plant. And he remembered tinkering with his telescope and he remembered rubbing shampoo on his penis in the shower and he remembered a few of his fits, and then a few more, and then he remembered meeting his dog at the pound and taking her home, and that was what he decided to hold onto. That was a good memory, uncluttered by guilt.

  His back was bursting with pain as the truck ploughed into the light bush ahead of the treeline. In spite of the present weather, the thickening snowfall, the season this far south had been warm enough to prevent the banks from getting too big on the sides of the highway, and the truck didn’t bottom out in the ditch but rattled forward, snapping little trees at speed. The dog didn’t wake up, vibrating in a pool of foul-smelling discharge.

  It must’ve been nearly morning. The truck hadn’t slowed much when it hit the thick and icy trunk of a maple tree. The dashboard collapsed inward and his body launched forward, slammed into the seatbelt and whipped backward, even as the dashboard crumbled across his knees. His legs and back went instantly numb. The windshield shattered as his dog crashed through it, her body arching into the night, into the driving snow, his headlights illuminating all the flakes as they corkscrewed madly past the animal, and he was unable to make eye contact as she went hurtling into the night.

  Everything was still and the engine was dead and maybe that sound was one of the wheels still turning.

  The snow fell thicker and thicker. It blew through the windshield and a drift formed over his chest and on the dashboard. After a time, his headlights began to dim. He was exhausted, unable even to feel his cheeks, but still he stared into the snow, searching for his dog, who surely would come back and warm him up, so long as he was patient.

  I

  I was grateful for the fires ripping apart the boreal nowhere of Northern Alberta, loved it when the inferno blew smoke all the way up to the driftwood shores of Little Raven Lake. On those days, the sun was just a feeble orange ball in a matte-grey sky, flecks of ash spiralling down like snow. I’d get out of the apartment on days like that. I’d think about how it must feel to be right inside the burn, like standing right in the middle of it all. Was it super bright? Or was it so smoky you couldn’t see shit? I figured it was probably both, but more often the latter. I’d think about that as I walked through the town’s playgrounds and under its few bridges, my pockets full of lighters and candies. I was looking for someone, but I didn’t know who. I was selective by nature. I took my time. Whoever it was, she would be my first.

  But there hadn’t been many days like that since I got to Fort Fierce. They were mostly hot without night, without the reprieve of sunset, which back south took the teeth out of a summer, so you could beat the heat with a spray bottle and a mouthful of ice cubes. No such shit up north. I thought of Jen all the way down at the equator, sun set every day at six, all year round, and me way up where it hardly set at all, just dropped below the horizon for a couple hours, still bright even from there. Papa would’ve had something to say about that, some rough-palm bush wisdom. But we weren’t kids anymore, and anyway the high-rise wasn’t much of a canoe.

  “What time did Jen say she’s coming?” He still smoked, even though he could hardly breathe. The ashtray beside his bed was like something scooped up from the forest fires and flown in on a Cessna, and his room smelled weirdly adolescent.

  “She said next week, Papa. She said hang in there.”

  I’d put tinfoil over all his windows to keep the sunlight out. I learned this because they did it down at the pub, where it worked well enough, but now it was like my pupils were permanently dilated and even artificial light got on my nerves. Norman looked at me funny when he came for the rent, twice now since I got there, and he asked after Papa, and Papa told him to fuck off, said he’d rather talk to Norman’s father, and when Norman said his dad had taken an extended vacation, Papa reached out and gave his shoulder a feeble squeeze before returning to his bedroom.

  “Is that you keeps turning the lights off in the hall?” Norman asked me, and he had this overgrown moustache, mouth full of bristles, which he chewed like straw. “Thought I seen you the other day by the switches.”

  I pretended to have a hard time with English. “Eh, non. Non. Eet is, uh, not, uh, me.”

  He slowly blinked his hooded eyes. He took the cheque, dirt and grease stuffed under his fingernails for the rest of his life. A guy like Norman, I looked at him
just once, just one time, and I knew he was a man burdened by guilt. You think he would’ve appreciated a little darkness.

  II

  One morning it smelled like the fire had reached the apartment, like Papa’s furniture was kindling. The air was streaming ashes, like ribbons from the handlebars of a little kid’s bike, but they’d been raped of their colour, and they drifted downward like paper snakes. Not for the first time I wondered just what it was the fire burned. Trees and shit, sure, but what else was in that forest? Animal carcasses. Maybe even people. I thought about that on the balcony with a cup of instant coffee. The town was inhaling little flecks of who knew what. We were thirteen stories high, a view of the river and the pine swaying on the far-side bank: behind that veil of gummy needles some Indian reserve with cheap cigarettes and too many kids. I watched a little girl twirling in the parking lot, hands stretched out and black hair leaping off her head. A Native girl, maybe twelve, and I saw her up close in the elevator once. She had black eyes that kind of glistened. You saw yourself in them, but only vaguely, so you didn’t have to turn away.

  Behind me, Papa was coughing. He was standing inside on the cratered floor, feet planted in a beam of wan daylight. His housecoat hung off him like fur peeling off the stray dogs I sometimes fed under the bridges. He coughed and spat on his own floor. He uncurled his fingers and there was a doobie in his palm. He lit it up so he could eat breakfast.

  We didn’t know what was actually wrong with Papa because he couldn’t imagine submitting himself to something so indecorous as medical testing, to gorgeous young women and their questions and their reports and their computer screens and their utensils stuffed into his body, taking pictures. A guy like Papa, so ludicrous with pride and machismo, he was worried one of the tests would go up his ass and turn him out a fag.