Arborescent Page 2

  He swung his bike into the dado, decorated with a spiral inlay, spraying plaster over the carpet.

  The two were forced to acknowledge each other, and Nohlan once again became his teenage self, so entirely dependent on the interpretation of glances. Here, against his will, he reconsidered the ways he had convinced himself, long ago, that every feeling could be traced to chemicals. He had to remind himself that biology was God.

  The oval-eyed teen forcefully pushed aside his front tire, the brake lever briefly catching her hair as she passed, and then floated away like a helium-filled balloon.

  A woman in her forties chased after her, with the high-stepping gait of a silent-movie stalker: hands held out as though she were leveraging an invisible walker.

  “Zadie!” the woman whisper-yelled. “Stop being such a brat! Come back here!”

  Like a retort that was too late in the formation, the spirit of staircase wit had already gained two flights, and only the girl’s orange fingernails glinted over the banister above.

  Nohlan collected himself, dismissing the scene, and continued to the bottom of the stairs where he found the landlord leaning against the banister. The man was staring at the leafless Mayday tree in the lobby. His sheepskin coat had raised seams and an uneven vermilion dye, as though he’d been doused by an anti-fur activist.

  He cracked a pistachio and dropped the shells to the floor. Already, around his bright white shoes, a substantial pile had formed.

  “Cold outside?” Nohlan asked.

  As the man turned around, Nohlan saw the sadness of a toad in his eyes. Bits of pistachio clung to his gums. “You read my mind,” he said.

  Nohlan, winter-ready, shrugged his bike back onto his shoulder, sweat haloing his forehead where his bike helmet pinched.

  “You haven’t seen a banana around here, have you?” the landlord asked, frowning.

  Confused, Nohlan looked around, half-expecting to find a bowl of fruit.

  The man’s nose was a bulb with a thin bridge. His head was large and round, brow without clear definition, so he was either all forehead or none. His bones seemed made of iron piping.

  Without warning, Nohlan’s stomach kicked, forcing him to rest his free hand against the banister, but before he could regain his balance, the landlord clapped his hand over Nohlan’s and began to ply his knuckles with short, thick fingers.

  “I have a serious question for you,” he said, making unblinking eye contact. “Do you consider me a counsellor or a landlord?”

  “A landlord?”

  “It’s amazing how many people consider me some sort of advisor. I keep saying, ‘You gotta get a job, you gotta get a job.’ Look at us in the working world,” he said, flapping his hand between himself and Nohlan. “Do you think we’re well remunerated? We are nothing more than vassals who ensure the upward flow of cash. I don’t enjoy my job, but I acknowledge that we, the shit-stained rabbits of the world, must ingratiate ourselves to the bears if we are to make any progress.”

  “Well, I don’t consider myself a shit-stained rabbit. But I think I get it. Like just yesterday—”

  “Shh!” the landlord said. He turned towards the elevator, with its enormous Out of Order sign fashioned out of navy crayon. “Did you hear that?”

  There was an empty clang as the elevator cables banged in the open shaft. As far as Nohlan knew, Cambrian Court’s elevator had never worked. A newer addition to the old building, the lift was retrofitted into its exterior, and rather than stopping on each separate floor, stopped on the intermediate landing between them. Still silent, Nohlan watched the number on the panel above the doors to see if it might come to life.

  “It’ll be nice when it’s fixed so I don’t have to carry my bike,” Nohlan ventured.

  The landlord’s expression turned severe. The comment seemed to cause him physical pain; he pressed his fingers deep into his fleshy cheeks so that the colours of his face shifted like liquid acrylic.

  “Don’t expect it,” he said, returning to normal. He patted the top of his right hand, which still pinned Nohlan’s to the rail. “You are always on time with the rent. Thank you. There’s no one I have more scorn for than the tardy. Instead of upbraiding delinquents, I could be sitting in my apartment with my hemorrhoid neatly fitted into my coccyx cushion.”

  “Uh, you’re welcome. I hope you feel better soon?”

  “What do you mean?”

  Nohlan shook his head, and then tried to pry himself away, but the landlord continued.

  “We’re all sad. Those of us in these waters, but one thing’s for certain,” he said, crushing Nohlan’s knuckles like a stress ball. There was a notable crunch of pistachio shells with each shift his weight, like the breaking of rodent bones. “It’s cold today, warm again tomorrow. The chinook will come. And then it will pass. Warm one day, cold the next.”

  He released Nohlan and then awkwardly hobbled towards his apartment, as though he were wading through an invisible pool.

  Still standing on the stairs, Nohlan tried to reframe his agitation. He looked up at the elevator doors, closed and quiet, but suddenly the image of a breathy esophagus full of cables and squeaking wheels, but palpably flesh and bone, entered his mind.

  Feeling untethered, Nohlan went to wipe the sweat off his forehead when he was struck by a smell utterly familiar and implacable, but at first unidentifiable in how everyday (doughy, raw) it was. Another whiff jogged his memory: his knuckles smelled of semen.

  Nohlan turned on Cyberia’s Open sign, unlocked the register, de-smudged the screens, and sprayed compressed air over the keyboards. Snow or ash? Through the cataract of the calcium-stained basement window, Nohlan watched the soft fall of sandy flecks and the legs of passersby—mostly boots, jeans or dress pants, long coats, but, every so often, bare calves and high heels.

  In the café’s halcyon days, the name Cyberia commented on the ostracism of nerds. Nowadays, it seemed like an ironic comment on the cybercafé’s emptiness. After the boom of the early 2000s, demand for internet cafés petered out. Now they were as empty and rare as arcades. The few surviving cafés like his had a niche; Cyberia served the tech-illiterate seniors who lived in the low-income brick residence across the street.

  At noon, Russell, a Santa-looking man with a large beard, yellowed and stained, hobbled down the stairs and wiggled into one of the egg-shaped swivel chairs. Without fail, he displayed his right hand, missing the entire index finger and the top joint of the ring finger, and hooted, “One time I convinced a bunch of Palestinians I was a bomb maker!” His guffaw was a rollicking spit-filled holler.

  Every Monday, Russell arrived at a quarter to ten and inveigled Nohlan into helping him type raunchy emails to his snowbird lover. Russell’s crusty pink lips swelled and puckered as he dictated his email, slowly masticating the words “mack daddy of mammaries.”

  “I should give you privacy,” Nohlan said.

  Russell contemplated, running his hand against the grain of his thick beard. “You skittish?”

  “No …”

  “You’re sheltered,” Russell announced, prodding Nohlan with one of his intact sausage fingers. He shifted his massive bulk, which seemed suctioned to the chair, and Nohlan became only too aware of how large and meaty this man was. “We don’t live in some chick flick, boy. I’m not going to wait around to bump into a woman who needs my help. You gotta be willing to go out and spearhead whales for her!”

  Despite himself, he thought of Psychic Celine. Nohlan always met her in the darkness, when the particles of air were dense and cold enough to enclose the city: the gloomy hours of a wintery morning, or a snowy lunch hour. He felt a jealous possession rise in him every time he thought of her. After Russell, there were no other customers, so Nohlan tacked up the Gone Fishing sign and wandered Kensington.

  Psychic Celine owned Celestial Bodies, located in the middle of the bong and bead stores in Kensington Plaza. She sold healing stones, incense, and guides to spiritual machinations. She also provided one-on-one o
r group meditation sessions, tarot card readings, chromotherapy, and psychic interventions. The tattoo on her forearm read, Dark is a way and light is a place.

  “Hey there, Pisces Moon,” Psychic Celine said, as Nohlan approached.

  Her musician boyfriend with long greasy hair and a receding hairline kissed her goodbye and then waved at Nohlan: “Hey, champ.”

  “Off to a gig?” Nohlan asked.

  Psychic Celine and the musician laughed.

  When it was just the two of them, Celine grimaced and said, “There’s going to be a chinook.” She was always ready to convolute in prophecy, even if a weatherperson had already done the job.

  Despite the overcast sky, she wore large dark sunglasses to dampen the light reflecting off the snow. With her heavy fauxfur coat and braided red hair, Psychic Celine struck Nohlan as a modern Viking shield-maiden, cigarette in hand. She gripped a yellow-and-blue beaded sling attached to a calabash, which she lifted to her mouth, her throat bobbing as she swallowed, guzzling as if she’d just finished a ten-kilometre run. Her whole frame seemed a condition of compromise; the frizzes of her hair caught spots of light that resembled Jupiter’s moons.

  “Have you ever dreamt of the ghost sleeping on top of you?” Psychic Celine asked.

  When he shook his head, she said, “It’s like sleep paralysis. You can hear everything, but you just can’t wake. The night is bathed in light, as though every night were similarly warm and bright. A chlorine smell fills the room, but you don’t know where the light and smell are coming from. When you open your eyes there’s a ghost lying on top of you. Mouth to mouth. Nose to nose. Face to face. And as the smell becomes stronger, the boundaries between you and the ghost disappear, until you can no longer tell if you’re you or the ghost on top, looking down.”

  She stood nose to nose with him, but Nohlan was uncertain which role they were each playing. Was she playing herself and he was the ghost? Or had the ghost already replaced her?

  “In the months after putting a loved one to rest, it’s common for the greedy spirit to come back to this plane,” she said, patting his shoulder. “You should watch that in the coming days you don’t let your father in.”

  Headlights blossomed in the sheer snow; the alley lay deep in the shadows. Just before telling Psychic Celine that he would spearhead a whale for her, he remembered that she was an animal activist.

  Instead, his stomach made a wounded cry. “God, what’s wrong with me?”

  “It’s called borborygmus,” she said.

  “Barber’s Christmas?”

  “Bor-bor-yg-mus,” she said. “It’s the medical term for the burbling that seems to come from the stomach. The guts make this wavelike motion called peristalsis. It’s also how worms crawl. The pressure produced displaces the fluid or gas built up in the system, creating gurgles … Can I listen?”

  Nohlan clutched his guts, urging them to quiet down. “No, I’d rather you—”

  Without asking again, she yanked up his jacket, exposing him to the elements, and pressed her ear to his stomach. The warmth of her face and the arm that she had to wrap around him to support herself flooded him with sensations. At one point, he heard her let out a long exhale, which was followed by a plume of smoke.

  She stood up and said, “Good news.”

  Nohlan frowned. “Well? What’s that?”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “I could have said as much.”

  “But you are going through a major transformation. A metamorphosis, if you will.”

  “Like one of those bug sacks?”

  “Are you talking about a maggot? Or chrysalis?”

  They stood staring at one another, and Nohlan fought off the need to run away.

  Amid the cloud of smoke, Psychic Celine crushed the butt into a mound of snow, as though she had just sacked a monastery at Lindisfarne. Then, she hugged him softly.

  “I’m sorry for what you’re going through,” she said.

  Nohlan tried not to sink into her. He wanted to guard against his jealous possession, protect his connection with her. After all, he had long reasoned love away. All perception was coded by genetics and hormones. DNA and upbringing. Power and sex. Why should his chest tighten because Psychic Celine was in romantic cahoots with a lead singer? There were no true feelings, only the romantic myth fuelled by chemical fluxes. It had to be nothing, he thought, satisfied by the numbness that accompanied reductivity. After all, to love someone would be to drive them away.

  Cambrian Court was an eighty-year-old sandstone building located in downtown Moh’kins’tsis. Once named Totts Block after a jeweller-watchmaker who owned it, the building fell into disrepair in the 1970s when the owner’s ten-year-old daughter passed away. In the nineties, a contractor purchased it and changed the name but was unable to tear it down because of a city-wide ordinance. And so Cambrian Court became a halfway house for the bedraggled, existing as nothing more than a half-hearted commitment to historical preservation.

  For Nohlan, Cambrian Court was as unique as a gutted piano or a spokeless bicycle: the magic of the neglected, the romanticization of the underdog. Similar to Nohlan, the building-cum-canvas beckoned for a transformation, and the geologic period for which it was named contained possibility: the Cambrian period being the mass proliferation of multicellular life that began the Paleozoic era. Here, Nohlan felt a fecundity in the sweaty plaster walls that he imagined would translate into prosperity. An explosion into being! A sense of hopefulness far from the brink of extinction: the possibility of a boom.

  Nohlan Buckles’s apartment had thick moulding around the ceiling, heavy wood window frames, and an old coil radiator; the unit felt more like a seaside cabin than an urban apartment in Cowtown. His possessions were a leather sofa and a ten-gallon fish tank, with a single koi named Frank. A board covered the fireplace, and a single shoot of bamboo grew from a yellow ceramic pot on the mantel.

  With the sound of the flush, pants still around his ankles, Nohlan turned to catalogue a green sprig quietly dancing in the fresh, still-spinning water. This verdant leaf pirouetting around the porcelain basin had a single vein and four leaflets. “How did you survive?” he asked it, thinking of his body as a labyrinth and this leaf as the American gladiator who’d braved the obstacle course.

  After all, much like blood in urine is a sign of bladder cancer, could a sprig in the toilet be evidence of sprouts in his stomach? Hadn’t he eaten a watermelon seed last summer? Pumpkin seeds in October? What about the time he guzzled olives, pits and all, from a free spread at a talk on eco-friendly fracking?

  His stomach burbled; he imagined his belly harboured a raging microcosm complete with its own climate and weather patterns. Had his process of becoming nothing given way to new life? Did the green sprig emerge from the recesses of a black hole?

  Time allows frogs, sinkholes, and big bangs to become facts, just more parts of the natural order. So why not the process of becoming a tree? Indeed, even after his father exploded, Nohlan’s initial hysteria calmed to a soft simmer, and then into a shrug of acceptance. No doubt, his father’s explosion was nothing more than matter turning into energy. Nothing more than the nature of E = mc2. Similarly, he could be a vehicle for nature.

  Nohlan pictured his father as a shadowy no-face, but he could clearly see the television persona: the bright-eyed host, with his simple cable-knit sweaters or blue suits.

  The host of a breakfast program called Up and at ’Em, Nohlan’s father used to be something of a local celebrity. By the time Nohlan woke most mornings, his father had left the house and was already on TV. Nohlan would eat breakfast with his mother while watching his father talk to guests: an eagle trainer from the zoo, Boy Scouts doing a bottle drive. Nohlan was still amazed at the ease with which his father performed sincerity; his father was a professional at pretence, seemingly fascinated by talon length and pop bottle refunds.

  Despite being tech-illiterate, his father couldn’t stop talking about the online video that led to h
is ousting and early retirement. At home, his father ranted about the kitten-filled content, the lack of imagination, the decline in journalistic standards. Where was the political commentary that he had neatly interwoven between interviews with beekeepers and the Slip-’N-Slide races? It might have been okay, if his father weren’t so prone to old-tusker mode. After the scandal, whenever a camera would roll up on him, he would decry the “mountebanks” who were determined to force “superior men to genuflect before the mob.”

  His father’s magic show had always mesmerized Nohlan; the convex lens managed to transform the foul-mouthed patriarch into a patient host, and somewhere within this act was a secret to self: with the right mechanisms of behaviour Nohlan could become not just anyone, but someone.

  “Can I tell you a story?” Psychic Celine said one day, while they were smoking outside Celestial Bodies.

  Nohlan shrugged.

  She clutched her fur coat tightly around herself and hmmed as though a Rube Goldberg machine had kicked off in her mind. “Back when I lived in Arizona, my mom left me in the desert.”

  “What? By accident?”

  “No. Probably, she wanted to kill me.” She laughed.

  Nohlan remained quiet but didn’t know what to do with his hands, opting to pick at his ear.

  “Don’t look so down, Nohlan. It was a long time ago. Anyway, my mother had this old Jeep. Its seats were loose and ripped, and the shocks were in rough shape. She was sixteen when she gave birth to me, see? She’d tell me how she wanted a child, but ‘not like this.’ I still remember that crappy old Jeep because my dad had bought it for her, which is really all I knew of him. My mom was so small she had to hug the steering wheel to her chest. She used to rap the windshield with her knuckles whenever she was in traffic, as though she were testing for weak points in the glass.”

  Celine seemed nonplussed telling the story, yet Nohlan wondered if he saw a tremor course through her body.

  “I was eight, but I realized what was happening. Probably from the moment I got in the car. Just from how my mother was acting. How she was all promises and excitement, like we were going to a theme park. Even now, I’m sure that if I had put up resistance, or cried, she would have turned around. But I guess I had a fantasy of fear then.