Greetings from the Vodka Sea Page 18

  “Yes. She was a bitch too.”

  Dimitri’s wife smiled for a moment, then sighed. “He has so many children.”

  Dimitri woke shivering. He had slid off the couch so that only one leg, the one with the shoe at the end of it, was elevated. His tie had folded onto his face. He pulled himself to his knees, then pushed up to his feet, using the couch and coffee table for support. His head throbbed, and he wondered for a moment if he might not vomit. This is why he never drank. He picked his jacket and Grimms’ from the floor and stood tottering. He saw the light on upstairs in the bedroom.

  Dimitri’s wife lay facing the wall, the down comforter pulled over her shoulder. Dimitri slipped onto the bed and softly shook her, realizing at that he was still elegantly hammered.

  “I want to know the truth. If you had any secrets, you’d tell me, right?”

  “But then they wouldn’t be secrets. Besides, even if I told you any, you’d forget them by morning. That’s why I love you.”

  The wind blew against the house. The floorboards creaked. “Did you hear that?” Dimitri asked, his voice hushed. “I believe there is a presence in this house trying to communicate with us.”

  “Yes. And it’s saying, shut up and go to sleep.”

  Dimitri removed his tie and dropped it on the floor.

  “I have a confession to make. I threw the book you gave me in the fire. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I did it. I can’t believe I would do something like that. Sometimes I can’t believe the things that go on in my head, almost on their own. Almost without me being aware of what they’re doing.

  “Really?” She was very tired.

  Dimitri nodded. “I’m sorry. It was a lovely gift, it really was.”

  “I didn’t know the fire was plugged in.”

  Dimitri shrugged. “Perhaps I stuffed it down the Garburator, then. My recollection is hazy at best.”

  She turned her head to get a better look at him. “That’s all right,” her voice was dreamy. “I’ll get you another. Chapters had a sale on limited first editions.”

  Dimitri sat on the edge of the bed and undressed. Sometimes he wished he had a thousand secrets he could tell his wife. Sometimes he wished that she did not know him so well, that maybe she did not know him at all. Instinctively, she knew the number of hairs on his back, the weight of his breath, the sound of his spine when he turned his head.

  Dimitri lay down and turned off the lamp on the bedside table. “I think there is a presence in this house trying to communicate.” He spoke in a whisper.

  He closed his eyes and imagined himself sitting on a tropical beach, surrounded by antique books with perfect, uncut pages.

  “Honey?” Dimitri’s lone wife rolled over and put her arm around his waist.

  “Yes dear?”

  “Surprise me.”

  Dimitri lay very still for a long, long time, then reached over and touched his wife very gently on the cheek.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “they all lived happily ever after.”

  Mitzou

  Sometimes you chase the stick; sometimes the stick chases you.

  — Canine proverb

  Mitzou, the bichon frise, began growing shortly after Kevin moved out. Psychologists have noted that perhaps the unusual developments were related to the move. It marked a significant change in the family dynamic; with Kevin gone to the New York School of Divinity, Paul and Deborah Wallace were officially empty nesters. Kate had moved out two years before, having taken a job as a telephone repairperson in Albuquerque, and Rosalita hadn’t been seen since the night she left in a huff in her boyfriend Joaquim’s yellow Ferrari. There’d been pictures, sure: Joaquim and Rosalita at the Grand Canyon; Rosalita and Joaquim on the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower (which Deborah always called la tour Eiffel, much to Paul’s annoyance), with Joaquim comically, and rather dangerously, hanging from the railing by one hand; Joaquim, Rosalita and megastar Jack Nicholson taking in a Lakers game at LA’s Great Western Forum. But while pictures spoke a thousand words, they never said quite the right words, and this, in all truth, left a bitter taste, a chocolate-covered espresso bean minus the chocolate coating, in Paul and Deborah’s emotional mouths. But that didn’t explain Mitzou, the bichon frise, despite what some mental health professionals whispered to one another behind closed and bolted office doors.

  It began simply enough. Paul and Deborah noticed something was up. Nothing they could put their fingers on, mind, but something. A kind of lethargy perhaps, but lethargy wasn’t exactly the right word. Reluctance. Yes. A kind of reluctance to get on with it, whatever it was that a bichon frise might get on with. Mitzou no longer wolfed her dinner down, taking on, instead, a mewing disinterest. They tried different brands — of course they did — and switched from dry to soft to straight-from-the-can to butcher fresh and back again. But the spark, the Itness with which Mitzou once enjoyed, once attacked her din-dins was lost. And the malaise didn’t stop at dinner. The old tricks, she was not up to them. Her “sit” (or “zitz!” as Deborah coyly, annoyingly preferred; he had come to loathe her fluency in Eastern European languages) was half-hearted, more a free-form expression of a sigh than a sit; her “speak!” (“mówi!”) was alternately guttural or whiney, lacking its usual — and here’s that word again — spark. Paul could still hear her bark in his mind’s ear, sharp and thick, like a little electrical shock, the kind of shock he got from the bedroom door handle on a cold morning when he wore his socks instead of his slippers, only magnified two hundred times. Once she was fetching, now it was out of the question. Paul might throw a stick or Mr. Tinkles, the plastic postman toy with a bell inside, her favourite chewy, but Mitzou would barely raise her eye. Before — well, before there’d be no stopping her. But after the . . . reluctance set in, there was no getting her going.

  “Maybe she’s just overtired,” Deborah said in the evening as they lay on their heated king-sized waterbed.

  “That’s your explanation for everything,” Paul said rather tersely, then added, “lamb chop.”

  “I know. I was just thinking. Maybe she’s not sleeping well. Maybe all she needs is a good sleep.” Deborah rolled over and shut her eyes. A moment later she was snoring loudly. Paul looked over at her and thought, for just a second really, how easy it would be right now to kill Deborah, smother her with a pillow or put his hands around her neck and squeeze. She’d struggle, of course, Paul had seen enough TV to know that. He leaned over and kissed his wife and returned to his book: Churchill’s massive History of the English Speaking Peoples.

  “She’s not overtired,” he said under his breath, and he repeated the sentence once more in his own head, just to be certain.

  And then Mitzou grew. At first Paul and Deborah were encouraged by the change. It provided a rational explanation for her . . . reluctance. She had been storing up energy, banking her reserves; what dog — what person — would not have done the same? The growth itself was odd, to be sure, but not unprecedented. Her grandfather, Ovid, added ten pounds and six inches from tip to tail when he was six years old, while her maternal great-great aunt Magellan, if the rumours were to be believed, had extensive growth spurts at age four and again at age twelve (bichon frise are an exceptionally long-lived breed; sixteen or seventeen years is the norm, and twenty-three-year-old specimens are not uncommon). But Mitzou didn’t stop at a few pounds or a few inches. She grew and grew, like an unchecked credit card debt or some cursed pet in a comical, cruel folk tale. Soon she was the size of a mid-to-big-sized dog, a standard poodle, say, or a fuzzy sheep dog, the kind that used to figure prominently in Disney films and other family pictures.

  The vet assured them it was biochemical. “The hormones are out of balance, and this is causing her unusual growth.” He had a deep, quite voice and several diplomas on his wall including, Paul noted, a baccalaureate from the New York School of Divinity; surely this was a good sign.

  “When will she stop growing?”

  Dr. Tomlinson ran his hand through
his beard. “It’s hard to tell in a case like this. Days? Weeks? Years?”

  And over the coming days, weeks and years Mitzou grew and grew and grew. They tried a range of remedies: hormone therapy, vitamin therapy, laser therapy, behavioural therapy, acupuncture, obedience school, even, in a fit of desperation soon regretted, exorcism by a disreputable-looking priest who had demanded payment in advance.

  Nothing helped.

  Paul and Deborah did not enjoy owning a big dog. Besides the obvious problems (food bills, waste disposal, etc.), there were serious personal consequences. At first their friends tried to be supportive, making humorous remarks about food bills and waste disposal, referring to her — at first jokingly but, over time, less so — as Clifford and consoling Paul and Deborah whenever they expressed concern for the mental health of their “li’l Mitzi.” But gradually, almost proportionately in fact, their friends grew distant. Hostile. It was a kind of frightened hostility, Paul reckoned, not unexpected in the face of something as unusual as this, as unprecedented. Mitzou was a big dog and getting bigger all the time, like a boil on the face that wouldn’t stop growing or a heartache that expanded exponentially each day. Mitzou’s breeding didn’t help, her bichon-friseness. A snappy breed at the best of times, affectionate, yes, and intelligent, but stubborn and high-strung (they’d known this going in) and, if the truth be told, almost impossible to housetrain (this had come as a surprise). Paul had hoped that the essence, the bichon-friseness, would dissipate as she grew larger. But she remained a little dog in a big dog’s body — yappy, snappy, snippy, hyper — if not more so, as if her essential bichon-friseness grew along with the rest of her. And who could blame her if it did? She certainly hadn’t asked to become a big dog, and it must have been terribly frightening for her. (It was Kevin who reminded everyone that this whole experience was just as stressful for Mitzou as it was for the family, and as Paul nodded in agreement he realized that perhaps the move to the New York School of Divinity hadn’t been such a bad one after all.) In any case, this expanded, exaggerated bichon-friseness (Mitzou was drifting dangerously close to self-parody, Paul admitted to himself) did not sit well with Paul and Deborah’s friends and acquaintances. In a small dog these little quirks were one thing; they were, well, little. In a big dog it was a whole nother story: they were big quirks. Paul was no longer certain who was the master of the house.

  Paul had never wanted a bichon frise in the first place. There was something . . . unmanly about the breed. Not that manliness was an ongoing issue for him (at least he hoped it wasn’t). It’s just that he felt — what was the word? — silly. Walking that little tiny dog, and he such a big man himself, something of a sportsman still, a wrestler in college, a big man with big hands, wrestler’s hands. A hound dog was more suited to him, or a black lab. That was it, a black lab with a red bandana round his neck, with a soft mouth for collecting birds and a laid-back attitude for lazing by a fire or sleeping in the Sunday sun. The bichon frise, that was Deborah’s idea. And why? If the truth be told, Paul had always suspected that the dog was nothing more than a status symbol. He hated to say so, but his wife was in many ways a shallow person (of course, that’s what you get for marrying a beautiful woman, some might say). They’d got Mitzou when the breed was popular in certain circles, just as it reached the apex of its popularity, in fact, despite Deborah never having expressed the slightest interest in owning a dog before. Paul tried to appear happy when she brought the dog home, at least tried to not appear unhappy for the sake of the kids, but he almost shit his pants when he saw how much she’d paid for the thing.

  “Twelve hundred dollars for a lousy . . . I’m not made of . . .”

  It was one of those conversations.

  But in time Mitzou grew on him, metaphorically speaking. He accepted the inherent comedy of their relationship, the amusing size difference often accentuated by the tiny raincoats and mufflers Deborah insisted the dog wear for walkies in inclement weather. In time he grew fond of the pet, quite fond, and not despite her foibles but, to use a cliché, because of them. She was like a glacier or the military-industrial-congressional complex: never changing, or changing so imperceptibly over time as to be more a comfort than a concern. But now, of course, she was changing all the time, changing in an unpleasantly predictable way: getting bigger.

  At first, Paul and Deborah talked about it. A lot. In fact, for a long time — months and months — it was practically the only thing they talked about. And when they weren’t talking about it, they were talking around it or towards it or to avoid the topic altogether, which is not much different from talking about it. Of course, other people talked about it too, at the start. Politely, at least when Paul and Deborah were in earshot. The press also took an interest: an article in the local paper, and a television news crew had come down from New York to film Mitzou, who uncooperatively licked herself the entire time the cameras were there. The report never made it to air.

  But in time everyone simply stopped talking about the situation. Mitzou the bichon frise grew and grew and grew, reaching unheard of dimensions without remark. Paul and Deborah went on — persevered — as if nothing had happened. They’d speak to her — “No!” (“nej!”); “Hurry up!” (“požurite!”); “Come” (“”) — assuming an air of normalcy, but they would not speak about her. In fact, in time they barely spoke at all, particularly to each other, because everything they could say or would say or might say would have somehow, in either a positive or negative sense, brought them back to a discussion (or non-discussion, which was just as bad if not worse) of the big dog. Paul, desperate, wondered if Deborah felt the same. At night, alone together in their king-sized waterbed, that enormous heaving tongue between them, Paul sometimes tried to reach across the gulf of dog and hold Deborah’s hand or a strand of her hair, for even a strand of her hair was warm in his fingers, vibrant, like a high vibrato note from a gypsy cello, and comforted his big, big hand.

  And then Mitzou was gone. It happened shortly after Kevin returned from the New York School of Divinity. They did not check the kitchen or the back yard, they did not post bulletins on telephone poles in the neighbourhood, they did not check the lost and found ads in the paper. They just quietly held their breath, for days it seemed. They did not want to dare to believe that the big dog was gone and awaited her return at every moment. But they did not see her again. “I miss the big dog,” Paul thought of saying once or twice. But he never did.

  Kevin took up his old quarters in the back bedroom. He brought word of Kate, who was doing well keeping the good people of Albuquerque connected, and a long, long letter from Rosalita, with whom he’d spent several wonderful months on a motor holiday in the south of France. Of course, psychologists suggested that Kevin’s return to the family nest triggered the end of the big dog. But Kevin speculates that the dog had not disappeared and in fact had not stopped growing, and that perhaps she only reached a particular critical point at which volume and density and mass and light converged to render the object (the “dogject” as Kevin jokingly called it) too vast to contemplate, invisible to the naked eye, although perhaps visible through sophisticated X-ray, gamma-ray or ultraviolet-light sensing equipment. Paul, in keeping with his newfound respect for the intelligence and insight of his youngest, tended to agree, and at night, for months afterwards, he clung to his wife like death in case the big dog came back and tried to nuzzle her way between them again.

  The Medusa Project

  Étienne’s hands were trembling. He’d come to rely on their steadiness, his ability to control them. He was a heart surgeon, after all. And now he’d lost his composure like a stupid schoolgirl.

  His hands had let him down.

  . . .

  Paul Antiphon says hello.

  That was it. Nothing really, a trifle. And the Pole had trifled with him before. So why did it strike a chord this time? Perhaps it was the surgical precision with which he threw out the name. There was a Paul Antiphon, at least there had been (although the chan
ce of his saying hello was negligible). Clearly the Pole just threw out the remark to see his reaction. He had a name, but at this point it was just a jumble of sounds. Madrn needed Étienne to translate. Madrn needed Étienne to make sense of the sounds.

  They’d seen each other on and off for years, perhaps ever since Étienne had come to Toronto. There was something quite unlikable about this fellow, something mostly about the eyes. Small eyes, dark but not pleasantly so, placed too close together, lending the journalist an air of imbecility. They said Madrn had escaped his country through a daring midnight flight in a handmade hot air balloon; they said that, for a time, he’d worked for the Polish branch of the KGB, building up the confidence of the state as all the while he plotted his escape. None of this played in his favour. Étienne did not trust this cultivated air of mystery. A man with something to hide does not advertise.

  “We should talk sometime, hmm? We should get together and talk about the old times in Quebec City. I’ll bet you have some stories to tell . . .”

  Étienne arched his eyebrows and smiled, feigning fond remembrance of those Quebec summers.

  “I’m a very busy man, Mr. Madrn,” he said, in a perfectly modulated tone. But his hands — his hands were trembling and trembled still as he rode the subway home.

  . . .

  “Let’s talk, hmm?” he says. His French is a tad too cultivated. “We can talk, comrade, can’t we?”

  He could smell jet fuel now, they must be near the airport, must be heading east.

  He takes that to be a good sign.

  The van brakes sharply, sending Madrn sliding forward to the front of the box. He can taste blood in his mouth and feels his lip with his tongue. He is cut, all right. But it is nothing.

  He tries to peek out of one of the air holes to get a sense of where he might be. They were the first thing he’d noticed, the air holes. That meant they wanted to keep him alive.