A Quilted Heart

By the same author A Selection of Dazzling Scarves

A MIS FIT BOOK

hSOMNIAC PRESS

Copyright © 1998 by R.M. Vaughan. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or ransmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from CANCOPY (Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency), 6 Adelaide St. E., Suite 900, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M5C 1H6. A misFit book edited by Michael Holmes Copy edited by Jonathan Blackburn & Craig Saila Designed by Mike O'Connor Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Vaughan, R.M. (Richard Murray), 1965A quilted heart ISBN 1-895837-52-9 (bound) ISBN 1-895837-39-1 (pbk.) I. Title. PS8593.A94Q54 1998 PR9199.3.V38Q54 1998

C813'.54

C98-931775-1

The author gratefully acknowledges the generous support of The Canada Council, The Ontario Arts Council, The Arts Branch of the New Brunswick Ministry of Culture, and The Toronto Arts Council. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. Printed and bound in Canada Insomniac Press, 393 Shaw Street, Toronto, Ontario, anada, M6J 2X4 www.insomniacp

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To my family, with love. To Debbie and Dominicfc Murphy'Eden, my other family.

Acknowledgements Thanks and gratitude to Michael Holmes, for his love and faith. To Lynn Crosbie, for her rational outbursts. To Sky Gilbert, a damn good friend.

Author's note Friends may read this fiction and come to believe the persons represented within are themselves, or perhaps other friends. They will be wrong.

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T£/ he origins of the curious radiance are mi scopic. Such little lives — rowdy and happy, stacked thousands deep in the unclean furrows of caulking, or wedged comfortably by the millions between accommodating splinters of broken tile. All around the empty pool, there is life. Half plant, half invertebrate, one colour — lemon green/Human fingers are too round, too giant, to poke or tickle them; only liquid finds them, and from liquid each is fed. Rain water and ice water, the occasional drippy fog from the lake. Urine left by dogs or the surly pool cleaner is a nice treat, but anything wet will do. And with each splash or thunderclap a thankful hum transmits across the grid of alternating squares and diamonds, like electricity restored to a black city. We cannot hear their glee, it is lower to us than the sound of worms. And because they bother no one, they live on in a buzzing peace. Until tonight. Tonight the little devils risk their autonomy, risk a scouring with bleach and chloride, dance foolishly close to a rough death by metal brushes. Tonight a new taste grazes their feelers, a red taste. Iron and sugar and salt, with water to chase the shock. Plus, the liquid sticks, so there is no need to rush and gulp. Tonight, there is blood, and the pool is glowing — green-yellow pulse, yellow-white pulse — and the happiness of our tiny neighbours, as is so often true in smallish towns, makes them targets.

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y51

r™\/mcer Foulard has a headache. He frequently does. One can hit anytime — after dark, before breakfast, in the lumpy bucket seat of the squad car that was requisitioned to him, finally, after seven winters on his feet. The headaches come so often, the boys at the station push their eyebrows together in silent pity when they see him reaching for the aspirins. Poor Foulard. One of the boys, a smarty who took languages instead of hostage negotiation, nicknamed Foulard "casse-tete." The name took, until the captain's Acadian wife wondered why big Foulard was called jigsaw puzzle. Hey Foulard, another headache? Maybe you should see a doctor? The Brindle House is shut for the winter, boarded, boxed and pruned; as if winter could harm bricks, or history. Foulard dislikes Brindle House, it reminds him of conversations at Christmas with

14 — R.M. Vaughan

his aunt Dorothea, the way she hops from subject to subject, making his head tight. Look over by the lamp-post, there's three gables on top of three overhangs underneath five turrets. A toy house for girls. Disney's castle. Right above the pool, above Foulard's head, hangs a whole wall of oval shaped pine shanks, lined up like a thousand closed eyelids, like a bug gone to bed. But only in that one spot. Bricks collide with painted slats, beach stone arches meet stuccoed concrete. No flow, no ease, no grace, Foulard tells himself. Things have to match and go together, make some sense. For instance, see behind the squad car, there's a dozen curly-topped, black stone columns holding up back hallways. Fruity as a butterfly. That would cost something today. It's a plain waste. See the way each hallway is lined with pointy alcoves in mixed wood? Like a church. Look closer — each alcove has a triangular window, done up with painted red sailing ships and pink mermaids, fixed in stained glass, cut to make out water lilies and cat's tails. Money to burn. Foulard stifles a yelp. His shoulder is caught on a branch. Damn those thorn bushes, right by the gate. Watch yourself, Foulard, the thorns are cruel. Winter fat, the thorns wait on long switches, from bushes taller than two Foulards. Crazy goddamn house. Thorn traps blocking the goddamn back

A Quilted Heart — 15

door. Give it a good kick, nobody's watching. Where's your axe? Foulard feels under his jacket, the little wet of blood warms his fingers. Take a deep breath, it's only a plant. Let the rookies hack their way in, earn their keep. It's just a house, Foulard, just a dirty old house. Walk the nerves off. Back by the drained pool, the boys are taking pictures. The flash bulb scorches colours alive. So much blood. Foulard bends down for a good look. By the edge, a dog has made a fudgy mess. Clumsy Foulard. How did the bastard dog get in? Foulard wonders. It took him and three kid cops with a crowbar 12 sweaty, curse-battered minutes to pop open the high fence. Dogs can't climb. Never mind that now. The body first, strategy later. Like all violent men, Officer Foulard believes in the sanctity and inate dignity of the human body. The deceased is stuck, frozen actually, all glassy and white and plastered to the long green slope off the diving end of the pool. One arm is raised high over the head, the other is bent at the elbow, fingers cupped. A mountain climber. How did the poor bastard get stuck like that? Well, we know he didn't drown, Foulard. The pool's as dry as a church supper. Perhaps the body in question, a male person, made a run for it from

16 — R.M. Vaughan

the other end and slammed himself hard on the high side. Say his clothes were wet, that accounts for the sticking. Like a kid's tongue on a January monkey bar. Plus he's knocked unconscious, from the impact. Then the death comes, a sleepy death, full of sand dune dreams. Except, why didn't he just walk out from the shallow end? At the hinge of bone and gum between Foulard's jaw and earlobe, a phantom sewing needle makes its determined, predictable progress to his right temple. Foulard half-shuts his eyes, turns, finds a patch of damp grass under the stringy, naked willow and delicately, girlishly en pointe, wipes the brown dog mess from his shoe. The smell is sweet, like beets or venison. Here we go, Foulard calls to the boys. Get the crowbar.

Marsh Cole, Foulard asks himself, did I go to school with a Marsh Cole? No, no, he's too young. Only 28, by the birth certificate. Born in 1942. Foulard was 14 by then, and a very happy boy. No headaches when you're young — no time to think. Cause of death, dehydration. Foulard took his time spelling out the 'h' and the 'y' part, wonder-

A Quilted Heart — 17

ing about 'i's' and 'gh's.' Died of thirst in a dried out pool. Young fool must have had a curse on his head. Foulard looked down at the torn face on the aluminum table, sorry that the ice took so much good skin in the one place it matters after a fellow's dead. For the funeral, you like to see the face. Any damage lower down is easy to cover. Foulard sifted a tangle of Marsh Cole's breadcoloured hair between his fingers. It would only take a minute to cut, it's so dammned long. He thought of Cole's mother, or the woman he imagined might be Cole's mother, coming down to the county office in her grey fur and a plum shaped hat, with a black purse. He already felt embarrassed for her son's long, radical hippie hair. But then, Foulard, the boy's only got half a face. Let her see the hair, it might give her something to fuss over. Of course, the diary will break her heart. Foulard has to hand it over, it's policy. And evidence. A little black book, covered with some kind of leather curled by the wet. And such filthy goings on inside. Foulard, ask Marsh Cole, is there any use in a dead man's privacy? For a cop, my darling dead boy, whole careers are built on a lot less. Some fellows have gone a long way on lint, half a phone number, and mud between the grooves of shoes.

18 — R.M. Vaughan

Officer Foulard would like to move to Montreal, to wear a captain's cap and carry halfprice tickets to all the shows. So he opens the book and reads, before the doctor comes, before the crying mother with her grey fur mitts, before the duty roster call, before the secrets melt away, like they always do, just when poor Foulard begins to understand the murder's web, the lace of hate and sex and trickery and mistakes, before he's sent down to the Jean Coutu again to scare loitering teenagers off the parking lot. This page does for a start. The handwriting looks like fish tackle. Another aspirin, and focus.

A Quilted Heart — 19

Marsh Cole's Diary Nwember 3, 1970. Brindle House. Magog, Quebec. In conclusion, I prefer to suggest that Samson's death was accidental. And proverbial — don't doubt it was foretold by anyone who ever met him, even by doctors, quietly, behind his back — but the moment, the timing, the horrible and extinguishing and ugly manner by which Samson left me must be presented to the world as nothing smaller than bad luck, but not so big as Fate. Something in between justice and overstatement. I have to protect myself. I believe in ghosts. Everyone does. Rather, most intelligent people glance over the idea of a spectral contribution to their daily lives. Ghosts are an extra, a spice. Ghosts can be a comfort, like wisdom — an adult truth children need to be sheltered from. Each of us has spent half of our earthly lives in the night'time dark, and we've all seen the dark move and shift. Optic tricks. Most people want to hedge their bets — ghosts hide your keys, turn off the fridge, and maybe, in the smarter households, jostle the china, but never kill. To most people, a ghost cannot kill. Murder breaks some ghost code, a hierarchy of physicality that limits the transparent friend to teacup smashing or rocking-chair

20 — R.M. Vaughan

rocking, but never knives. Never unstable porch steps, never poisons. Most people assume, correct' ly, that a ghost, friend or enemy, can at best rattle the cage, tickle the ivories, hide your glasses — there are no earthquakes, mudslides or floods attributed to the dead. But I am not most people, and Samson Brindle is dead.

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D

o you find it odd, perhaps even irresponsible of me, that I've never written about any of the more curious events of my life? Well, perhaps not odd. Let's say exceptional, at least. Considering, after all, that so much has happened in what is really a very short period of time." Samson Brindle preferred to start all of his conversations with an introduction. An oratory, broad and arching, cast into the air and left to float like cigarette smoke. A poison, Marsh thought, a ghastly cloud. The preludes were designed to muddle, to blanket the listener, particularly any auditor Samson suspected was smarter than himself, or at least better versed in recent floods, daring suicides, or political news. Samson adopted a charged tone. The hum of knowing menace common to all men too frightened to leave their homes.

26 — R.M. Vaughan

"I should think anyone would be compelled to make some sort of record, noise, mark," he continued, while Marsh patiently sat out the overture. "Then again, I have not exactly been wanting for things to do," he said, beginning finally, promising revelations. Marsh had long since learned to be patient with Samson. Samson had voice and gait enough for both of them, plus anyone restless enough to visit. Samson and Marsh rarely stepped outside of the Brindle estate; a monstrous, tired looking preGeorgian Revival house with half shut windows and an uninterrupted lakeside view, just to rub it in. The Brindle estate was designed for secrets. Whirling porches and deep verandahs hid the true outlines of the rooms they fronted. High Palladian windows were trimmed with shiny, black stained oak, to reflect the sun back onto curious eyes. The original Brindles demanded the brownstone foundations be two-and-a half times as high as those drawn in the first blueprints, to set the public rooms at the average man's chest, not waist level, and thus dimmish idle passersby on the sidewalk. Exterior masses — woodworked gable bays, shadowy eaves, articulated, compacted towers, and flowered, sandstone cornices — bore no relation, told no stories about the interior volumes sheltered within.

A Quilted Heart — 27

Brindle House was a symbol of the family's aspiration to evade and conquer. Even the street the house graced, or rather occupied, had little to recommend it apart from dozens of spiny willow trees and a few unhappy but intriguing children. Marsh and Samson travelled in the off season, leaving their wasted home with insincere promises to shingle, recolour, wash and otherwise spruce it up when they returned. But the two travellers always returned tired and ill at ease, so nothing was done. A young man or two from the noisy, jumping crowd at the corner store was easily bought to rake the front yard and open a few windows, with the lads' mothers happy to see them doing something like work, and their fathers stage whispering the word "bugger" in after dinner kitchens while they counted the money twice. Both men found the ruin of their home comforting. Because Samson and Marsh were dangerously vain and in some sort of love the place became the ragged spinster each feared was his private fate. As long as neither man lifted a finger, the estate would always be splendidly much older than either, and always in far worse shape. "I have a theory about my resistance to memory, to memoire," Samson continued. "But I suppose it will be alien to you. You have never been put in a position where every given moment, every daily chore, pain, ankle twist, smell of food, drink of water..."

28 — R.M. Vatighan

Oh, shut up, Marsh thought. But still he listened. "Where all the elements of life, the very molecules, actually mattered for once. I realize it's unfair of me to expect you to be engrossed; but each of us has our burdens." Marsh pushed himself into the green felt sofa chair and decided to be as quiet as possible, to unnerve Samson. In turn, Samson felt it best to admire Marsh's saintly constraint and push along with his narration. At 49, Samson was still incapable of letting go of the moment. Like his bottomless stories, his spirals of sentences looping and tightening the very air, Samson was at his most effective when replaying telling events over and over until they lost gossipy immediacy and took on the higher wool of parable. Besides, it was Marsh's job to record. "Truly..." Samson paused. He gently bopped Marsh's kneecap with a rolled Gaelic history magazine that neither could recall buying though neither threw away — both men admired foreign languages, and clutter. "If you'll allow me to speak plainly, Marsh" — Marsh grinned, wondering in which exact configuration the heavens would open — "You figure in my progress, my story, as a sort of appendix, the back pages of a revised edition." "You are the envelope in this missive," Samson swelled. "You cover, shape, perhaps conceal, and

A Qwilted Heart — 29

yet have nothing on the stuff inside. People throw you away, getting at the meat." Marsh whispered a curse. Samson smiled. Marsh quieted. Samson's smile was one of their old signals, left over from when they used to go outside, when they saw people who were not each other. It had meant I love you. Samson bent back in his chair and fumbled for a red pillow. Outside, the August air turned a burned yellow, as if a cloud had passed too close to the sun. A scolding light, Marsh thought. There was news in town of storms, trees torn from the ground and distracted animals entering kitchens to raid cupboards. A baby had been born singing, Marsh heard from the yard boys, and at the drugstore, family photographs came back from the developer blotted with green circles or scored with gold lines, sometimes both. Everywhere, chemistry was unpredictable. Samson found the small pinch in his back he liked most to favour with cushions and became blunt. "When I finally put an end to Sylvain's life, you were, after all, merely the man from the clinic. You hardly had a name. You, Marsh, were a mustache, a pair of brown shoes, a paper bag lunch. Tall and healthy, as a man should be. I erased you. But you came back." Marsh chose a pen from the jade tray by his chair. Samson would begin now, his confessions

30 — R.M. Vaughan

were in order. Such was their ritual, blocked and set. Samson combed his hair absently, waiting. Marsh fished a small black file folder out from under the fat legs of his chair. There was no need to root around, to glance down and double check. Nothing moved very far lately. Samson's haughty airs would settle into foggy trebles, and his stories would rush past or tumble out in an order coinciding with the hour. Marsh would write everything down. It had been this way for months. Or so Samson believed.

A Quilted Heart — 31

Marsh Cole's Diary. August 23, 1970. Brindle House, Magog. Samson on again. Talk in town of storms. On days like this I miss the clinic, the filtered air. Referrals, receipts, aspirins, kindness. Samson charmed me, and I have always wanted to be a writer, even an invisible one. I'm the paid ghost in this house. Samson loves me, I feel it, he's only unkind because he can't remember how else to talk. And he's lived an extraordinary life — the parts I've paid attention to, at least. Must remember to nod more when he's talking. There is death in this house, and I don't mean just my ambition. You can smell it. No, not in that way, not in the simplest sense. Nothing is rotting, no severed limbs under the stairs; nothing that was once with us has stopped. Lately. But I sense the event. It leaves a tingle in my throat, like dry sugar. He is here. Sylvain. And then he isn't again. But Sylvain leaves a trail. Lately, I have to make sure to keep busy. When I'm not cornered here in the parlour taking Samson's dictation, there is a lot to clean. He is in the dust, he swirls under my nose, across my cheek. Getting rid of Sylvain could take years. The doors are locked, the countertops swept for crumbs, water drops sponged from the sink and all his

32 — R.M. Vaughan

clothes are packed with tissue paper and string. But I'm losing ground. I saw him last night. I want to leave this house, just for a day. Leave the door open and walk to the bakery behind the magazine store, buy a dozen frosted angel cookies and feed them to myself one by one. I want to be healthy and childish. I want to feel full, not heavy. I want Samson to meet me at the door and take me up to the bedroom he's so afraid of now and get on top of me again. I want to feel Samson write his name inside my body. I can't remember what my body felt like when it moved through the streets, equal to the winds and uneven pavements. Sylvain is asking for his clothes back. He wants to split everything fifty-fifty. Sylvain doesn't understand. He won't let me talk about his death. Sylvain finishes all my sentences before I do. I'm not certain where he ends and I begin. That's Samson's fault, keeping all this stuff around, it attracts the dead. It's not fair, I didn't kill him.

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en Samson thought of Sylvain, which occurred often, almost hourly at first, he recalled Sylvain's tall, weary voice. Sylvain held forth — on art, film, the quality of cooking oil, history — with resignation. Sylvain's voice took hold of a space. Samson once watched him visibly darken a bus shelter at high noon with a simple, unnecessary story about government corruption. Sylvain was a charged, vertical cloud that threatened to flatten and cover the land with rain. Fittingly, he was only twenty-two when he died. Samson and Sylvain met at a smart gallery owned by rich friends of the Brindle family. Samson's loyalty to the hundreds of acquaintances belonging to his long-dead parents was legendary. Samson had inherited an entire social schedule and condition, and saw no reason to fight or betray his luck — until he stopped going outside altogether.

38 — R.M. Vawghan

The gallery was a white, cold rectangle lit by aluminum potlights. Samson had grown up in gilt, in panelled rooms where paintings sat like pet reptiles under tiny lamps. Annoyed, he stared down the exaggerated, hotly-painted works and watched the guests chatter at the corners of the frames, as if warming their hands. The art reminded Samson to vote, to cleanse the lakes of sewage, to halt rapid urbanization. A row of eleven portable typewriters, some sealed in wax, some in concrete, the rest painted silver, cut the gallery in half. It was a new year, and Samson was bored. Then he found Sytvain. Sylvain hunkered — as exhausted as Samson, but for opposite reasons — behind a huge grey and scarlet canvas depicting Lester B. Pearson. Like the Child of Want under The Ghost of Christmas Present's robe, Samson thought, and offered Sylvain a drink. Sylvain's black hair and thick nose appeared to be a political choice in a room smoothed by pale and aqualine features. Perhaps I'm the waiter, his face said, but I'm off-duty and I hate you. The French are so bratty, Samson thought, and brought over two glasses of port. Sylvain made an undecided face, and gulped the drink. That Sylvain was badly mannered meant nothing to Samson; Samson's entire family was well-mannered, and all of them had died young. Because of this, Samson was attracted to the lean-to sort of mind, to hand-cut personalities propped up against the elements with just enough

A Quilted Heart — 39

room for one. Samson's friends were singular, generally affected peasant tastes, and grew miserly late in life. For Samson, schooled in the best graces, in a drowning world too laden with jet and china to swim, such rigour signalled survival. At once, Sylvain made Samson feel both acutely superior, as if he was a falcon surveying the fields below, and peevishly diminished, small as a stone. He's like a trip to Butan, Samson marvelled, the air is thinner around this boy. Months later, after Sylvain moved in and became sicker and sicker, Samson believed he could actually see this other air. One awful day, Samson put his hand under Sylvain's hot head to lift him up for water and the warm air around Sylvain's face stretched the brown morning light into long, particled waves. The room bent and crumpled, as if under pressure. Samson dropped the glass. Horrified, he watched the rolls of light solidify, right to parallels, and furl down the hall. Samson absently palmed Sylvain's novena ring from the end table and passed it from hand to hand. The silver magnified, tripled, grew fat and heavy under the strain of pulled air. Samson tucked the ring between the bed covers and prayed. If this force turns inward, turns on me, will I be pulled apart, stretched like hot toffee and snapped when I'm cold?

40 — R.M. Vaugkan

Sylvain Oulette moved in to the Brindle House two weeks after the opening. Sylvain had nothing except an Air Canada carry-on full of dirty clothes and a complete set of Rousseau, which he promptly stowed under Samson's bed. Samson had three generations' worth of objects he never looked at, even when he ate off of them. Sylvain was mesmerized by the gluttony of the Brindle legacy, and quickly forgot himself politically. Sylvain explored the house, Samson took up smoking. Every hour, Sylvain ran to Samson holding out a first edition of Bulwer-Lytton, or a Lalique nude of a woman with a lamb, or a white gold pen set. The house was bottomless. Samson made gentle, dishonest efforts to recall each treasure's long and cousined history. But before Samson could finish, Sylvain was already looking into the next open room, where there was, how extraordinary, a Georgian bronze of Cicero or a stack of allegorical plates. Sylvain was too young to be an antiquarian — he wanted to play. It keeps him around, Samson thought, and so their love accrued. Pillared and gabled, the Brindle House dominated Winsome Street from the south and the east, casting the same long, levelling shadow the family had cast for decades. Until Samson. Samson was the last male of the family; new triumphs and a streamlined, twentieth-century bossi-

A Quilted Heart — 41

ness were expected of him. But it was too late for the blood, and he failed early. Nevertheless, the thought of selling Brindle House frightened Samson. Like all people with inherited pleasures, Samson was neurotically superstitious. Technically, he could never be made less than rich, by neither disaster nor stupidity. But his mind relentlessly scripted elaborate scenarios of degrading poverty and complementary sickness — the first act of each drama beginning with the sale of the estate. Although it was true that no Brindle brave enough to move out had ever lived past the age of 30, it was also true that Brindles in general died young. But the myth of the house curse at least offered hope through a simple remedy — stay put and live. So Samson knew the house would outlive him, as it had so many previous Brindle men, and that it was protective of its legend and acquired rights. Every day, the Brindle estate grew more permanent, became more of a last, best example of a lost kind, all in opposite and cruel proportion to Samson's increasing irrelevance and anonymity in the world. To break out, to walk away, would deprive the house of its patiently won victory, and the house, in turn, would surely take revenge, if only because the laws of physics favour the larger party. Unless there's a lever.

42 — R.M. Vaughan

With every room Sylvain casually dusted through and raided, Samson felt less intimidated by his unlucky geneology and its enormous casings. The house began to lose mass, and Samson grew closer to the pivot — Sylvain. Sylvain treated the house like an old safe, only the contents were valuable. He heretically pronounced architecture merely the ornamentation of shelter. He laughed at the gingerbread moldings, named the upstairs parlours Grisly, Awful, and Flammable, and openly advocated the violent removal of entire walls. The house did not retaliate. It did not even groan in the wind. The Brindle curse, it appeared, was undone by shock. Samson had found both a lover and a son. In two weeks, Sylvain finally reached the attic. It was empty, so he decided to stop playing pirate and return to work. Sylvain directed plays, a skill he was uniquely suited for, as his intellect was subordinate to his instincts. He saw the world in colour and music; words tired him, and he did not know that many. Sylvain infuriated actors by neglecting to watch them while they were on stage. With his head between his fingers, he shuffled around on his chair, tapped the floor with the heel of his shoe, and blew out cheekfuls of air in a bored sulk. If

A Quilted Heart — 43

only they'd shut up, he'd think, and listen for the closing music. Sylvain's career was built on setting inappropriately brassy arias against the most delicate scenes in chatty plays. When Verdi failed, he simply numbed the audience with sudden blasts of misdirected light. Anything to kill the text. He was happy and notable, and the few critics who stumbled home after his plays only to realize they had been cheated were all gay men who wanted to kiss his dark face. Sylvain lived a bully's fantasy, believing he was loved because he got what he wanted. Samson jealously offered to invest in Sylvain's latest production — a new play about two murderously competitive men who met once a day on a frozen pond and speed skated until one of the two collapsed. The play was three hours long. The middle hour consisted of two actors silently miming repetitive skating actions under projected images of bread knives and, unaccountably, Maria Callas alighting from an airplane. When people walked out, Sylvain applauded and flattened his shirt front. He was a proud papa at a spelling bee who notices only that his illiterate son's shoes are polished, his hair freshly combed. Luckily, the play was a first effort by a handsome young man who worked in an office, and Sylvain's critics merely shifted their gaze. The new

44 — R.M. Vatighan

boy was salvaged, and equilibrium was restored to the critical sphere. Sylvain found himself locked out of rehearsal halls and hugged too tightly at parties. He had been given the theatre's equivalent to the Mafia kiss, full on the mouth. Samson was quiet and generous in victory. The Brindle house reclaimed Sylvain's attention. He began his second exploration from the bottom up — camping, and staying, in the wine cellar. Humiliated, Sylvain drank his wounds clean. He ended his nights pelting bottles at phantom critics he met in the long, vaulted hallways. Samson took up oriental cooking. In the hazy mornings-after, Samson petted Sylvain's forehead and brought him a volume of Brecht to calm his nerves. He is mine now, Samson thought. He only needs a hobby. "I'll give you twenty-thousand dollars to write a book," Samson declared one morning during the third week of Sylvain's binge. "I don't know how to write a book," Sylvain whined. And then, imagining the inevitable end of the wine cellar's stock, he asked, "What kind of book?" "Surprise me, it's been years since anyone did. You can start tommorrow," Samson said, returning to his toast. Sylvain squirmed in his chair. How hard could writing a book be? "Maybe a history," Sylvain tethered.

A Quilted Heart — 45

"Splendid. Very important things have happened in the past." "Or a novel?" "That will show them up, won't it? Novels last forever." "I've always hated the way plays just end, and everyone goes home. And you never hear from them again. It's so Philistine." Sylvain was getting his wind back. "And the audience is so selfish, everything's for them them them." "Hateful people," Samson muffled through a forkful! of egg. "They should just stay home." "They're afraid of me." "We'll set you up in an office. Do you like the third floor, facing the pool?" "I showed them a mirror, and they ran screaming, like pygmies." Samson counted out two hundred dollars from his wallet. "You'll need a typewriter, and some ribbons and carbons and paper." Sylvain took the bills, thinking of cigarettes. He'd need a whole carton. No sense in breaking the creative flow with trips to the corner store, he thought, already feeling authorial. "I've always liked the cherry wood desk in the lower library, the way it looms over a room. Very inspiring. Feel free to move it upstairs," Samson offered. "Does the two hundred come out of my fee?"

46 — R.M. Vawghan

Sylvain Oulette The natural truth is Sammy liked to get fucked by, and now and then throw a fuck into, young guys with long hair and bad skin. Anything else between us was the same as friends helping friends. I could be a giant fake about the whole scene and tell you we were two Romeos, but that's bull. I was in theatre, so I was practically raised by liars. And Samson came from this secret, paranoid family, so he knew how to spread shit himself. We sniffed each other out instantly. We were like two negative ions, we smashed together to make something positive. We worked, for a while. The thing was, Sammy lied like nobody I ever met. Sammy lied in a whole other tune, in collosal orchestras of crap. It was super entertaining. He gave out a freaky kind of truth lie — like we both knew we were smoking on each other but it didn't matter. What mattered was how well you articulated your story. And the sex part was dastardly, just how I liked it. Samson liked to put me on his knee, after a big dinner, and comb out my hair. He'd get real quiet, combing and straigtening and combing. The back of my head looked like a piece of slate, flat and black. I'd feel him getting hard underneath me. If I moved or scratched myself or went for a Players he'd squeeze my arms, hold me in place. I loved it.

A Quilted Heart — 47

I felt like a pure work of art, something you had to be careful with, fuss over. Nobody did that for me, nobody ever. Nobody will again. When Sammy finished with my hair, he'd lay me out flat on the mattress. He pressed my hair straight out in a circle on the pillows. Black halo, dark angel. Then one of two things went down. Depending on his mood, Samson either took off his pants, stripped me quick, and rode on me till he shook off all over my chest, or he just stood by the bed, opened his fly, and pulled himself till he shot on the carpet. Truthfully, option number two was sometimes easier for me, even if my rocks went cold. Looking up at Sammy's sticky face on top of me — well, you know, gravity is cruel. I was scared he'd blood rush and croak, like in cartoons when the temperature gets so hot the top knob on the thermometer pops off. He survived, because he's built to last. Samson Brindle is good stock. I miss it now, the physical contact. Human syncopation. I miss getting down, rocks blasting. And the gentleness, our toe-to-toe games, simple bed warmth, I miss them too. But sentiment won't save Samson.

48 — R.M. Vavghan

"In fairness, both of us went rather mad." Marsh had drifted away again, and Samson decided to change tack. "Crazy as field mice, really, the two of us hunched up in this canyon of a house. Sylvain at his book, and me, well..." "Just crazy?" Marsh snipped. Samson kicked Marsh's chair and crossed his legs. How ragged my slippers have become, he thought, creased as paper bags. "Do you need a fresh pen?" he asked. Marsh waved him on. "It started with the rugs. My decline. And the black paper over the windows. This house is beautiful, but designed for another time, a time when people minded their own business. The doors are not flush with the floor. Sounds pass between rooms like snakes. And Sylvain was always dictating out loud, to himself. I tried to seal him in, with paper and Persian carpets. I really just wanted him to shut up; but after all, I'd started it. So I convinced myself that I was creating a healthy vacuum for his creativity. Not that he needed any. "He came home from the stationary store that afternoon with a pearl blue Olivetti and a dozen boxes of the writer's tools. Carbons and pens and the lot. The delivery boy had to help him carry it all home. Such a snot, I paid him off quick before he got in the house — the boy, I mean. Sylvain was already ensconced. The next morning it start-

A Quilted Heart — 49

ed, the clicking. All day. Beginner's luck, I thought, but the next day was the same, and all the days after. There really isn't that much in the world to write about, is there? "The rugs helped. I rolled them under the doors. No click-click anymore. And then I blacked off the windows so people would think someone had died. We never went out, Sylvain wouldn't leave his office. Clickety-click. Well, one can't just cut the world off without a plausible lie. "And Sylvain grew in the dark, he heartened in airlessness. Despite his habits, which he was never really true to, Sylvain was ultimately an ascetic. He got into the act, and even surpassed my efforts. Sylvain could seal up a room tighter than a fist. In the west sitting-room he cut the head off the cheeta rug so he could roll it into a door jamb. I didn't dare ask what he did with the head. I found it stuffed face-out in the mailbox, with the afternoon letters filed neatly between its teeth. It pays to tip the postman at Christmas. "But it wasn't enough, closing the house. Sylvain drove me nearly insane. I wanted him with me, and I tried to imprison him, but there was no need. He was already self-contained, a perpetual engine. It was no fun anymore. He was better at depriving himself than I was at walling him in. He took all the joy out of ownership. I started Sylvain on that damned book out of my own self-

50 — R.M. Vaughan

ishness, and it turned him into a brat worse than I ever dreamed possible. "Delivery men were at the door at all hours. If Sylvain wanted something, he called the store. And I paid. It's surprising what can be delivered today. Eyeglasses — you used to have to be fitted for a pair. Pants too. Huge dictionaries arrived from the library, for one word at a time. Then another fellow would come and retrieve the damned things. One day he ordered a house plant because he couldn't remember if the veins in the leaves were chevronic or splayed. Drugs too, from the worst sort of people with nervous twitches and handmade jewellery. Every profession and artisan represented itself at my door. "Except doctors, of course. "You see, Marsh...you must understand, he was winning. And I couldn't have that." Outside the house, a child ran through the dark hedges, calling after a dog. Marsh heard the sounds of branches breaking, a dog cornered, a stick thumping against fur and dog bone. A child crying, hating himself. "I went mad," Samson said. "I'm not prepared to defend my actions. They're outside of cause and effect. Sylvain ordered a book on medieval poisons, for his reasearch. When the library boy came to collect, I gave him another book; a collection of verse, in Italian, to throw

A Quilted Heart — 51

him off the scent. You can't imagine the strain — Sylvaln had been upstairs for weeks. I was invisible. I was furious." Marsh looked up from his notepad. Samson's voice sounded like tiny pellets of buckshot. Consonants cured in a waterless mouth. Marsh wanted a blanket, a wooly shield. Outside, the boy and the dog played fetch-the-stick. "I lived around him," Samson continued, "a mouse behind a wall. He demanded that all the lights in the house be kept dim, even with the windows blacked. I squinted under miserable forty watt bulbs and veiled lampshades. The blinds had to stay closed until noon. He threw newspapers back into the street or onto the roof. He had all of our appliances altered, stuffed with foam so that the humming wouldn't remind him of time passing. Clocks were given to delivery boys, priceless clocks, and of course the television was thrown away — the programming was too methodically scheduled, too time driven." Samson waved his fingers over his lap, the signal for Marsh to stop taking dictation. Samson patted his fat chest. In the quiet, happy barking pulsed through the shutters. Marsh massaged his wrists. He's lying. The house is crammed with clocks. "I'm not murderous by nature, Marsh. I just wanted Sylvain to come down out of that room

52 — R.M. Vaughan

and put his head in my lap, to ask me for a glass of water or a sandwich, maybe a back rub. I was a tender poisoner. At first." Samson tucked a raspberry hankie under his eyes. A small, circular muscle in his abdomen kicked twice and folded. Samson was a breakable gossamer monster. "What keeps you here, listening to me, avoiding everything else in the world?" "Everything else."

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MarsK Cole's Diary September 6, 1970. Brindie House, Magog. Sylvain's ghost is getting bolder. He's starting to pop up in the daytime now. From behind doors, under the table at breakfast. Like a little kid. He thinks he's being funny, but it scares the hell out of me. Still, he's looking a little better, a few months less dead. Yesterday the ghost asked to read what I was writing, but I was firm. He said he wanted to see what lies Samson was telling, so I told him to just sit in and listen if he's so interested. Monsieur le phantome, however, says he can't be in the same room with Samson. It's a rule. I'm not going to show Sylvain my notes. I wonder if ghosts can read, with the perspective shift and all? Is this world as blurry to him as he is to me? Can he turn pages? I guess what he really wants is for me to read my notes to him. I can't do that, since I haven't written down a word Samson's said in months. He's such a natural liar, he hardly needs an audience, it's all true to him. As long as my hand crosses back and forth over the page, Samson will never check. Whatever begins with love needs a fixed ending. I believe that. The slack tide comes too fast: resentment, aging, wanting your own socks in your

54 — R.M. Vaugfian

own drawer, unforgiven scolds. It's Newtonian, equal and opposite reactions. Difference follows Love. Better to manage than fight natural laws. I'm going to end this Milton's daughter game with Samson. The fun's gone out of it. I'm nervous all the time, a little bottled hurricane. I don't feel like a man anymore, what with pacing and sitting, listening and not listening. I'm rot. Accusing, untraceable rot. Like Sylvain's ghost, or Samson's poisons. I was bored at the clinic. Samson wore bright colours. It was that simple. And the way he held Sylvain, with his mysterious illness. At the funeral, Samson read from Hamlet: 'A was a man, take him for all in all, I shall not look upon his like again. Then Samson stood by Sylvain's grave and floated a single chrysanthemum down to the casket, one petal at a time. It took ten minutes. People were so uncomfortable, especially all those actors. Limited attention spans, but good at crying. I fell in love with Samson right there, watching his disappearing magic flower act. I half expected Sylvain to rise up and applaud. I guess the spell worked, but why me? Samson told me later he imagined each petal was a brick. I don't believe him. I fell in love with Samson because Samson made the world wait. I could never do that. Now, it's all I do. Samson's autobiography defeats time

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and space. Or maybe it's this cursed house. I've even stopped answering the phone. Samson will finish soon, he's not even fifty — how much more life story can he make up? Samson, be careful. Everyday, Sylvain asks me to kill you. Next time he vaporizes over my plate, I'm going to suggest he hang quietly off the coat rack in the closet while Samson dictates. Technically, that's not in the same room. Let him listen for himself. I've done my share. It's beneath a man to gossip with the dead.

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S

amson smoothed the folds of his tartan blanket and worried an unsnarled, threading corner in his mouth. He watched Marsh. Marsh looked anxious, his eyes fixed on dark patches between the furniture and behind curtains. He turned his face to the ceiling, as if it might open up for a parade of angels. Or fall in and crush him. "I want you to close off the pantry today," Samson snapped. "You spend too much time in there by yourself. I can hear you chattering. Counting the canned goods or whatever it is you do." "I'm improving my memory," Marsh lied. "It's a game. I close my eyes and try to recall the contents of the shelves, precisely. I want to do my job properly. I want to get the details of your story under my skin." Marsh had just spent the first half of the morn-

60 — R.M. Vaughan

ing listing to Sylvain all the reasons why Sylvain must leave him alone, forget Samson's autobiography and return to the netherworld. Now Samson was at him, too. I'm just the secretary, Marsh told the spirit, but Sylvain was unforgiving. Marsh's soothing, common logic, so useful in his years of calming tearful mothers and reassurring old men at the clinic, had no effect on the nagging dead. Sylvain's ghost was not susceptible to rhetoric, or sense. Much like the live version, Marsh suspected. When he disliked what he heard, the ghost raised one accusing, gauzy finger and let out a broad, whining fog horn howl. Marsh would have been frightened if he had not found such scenes embarrassingly overdone. The melodrama of Sylvain's afterlife struck Marsh as untidy, unoriginal, and relentlessly earnest. What must his plays have been like? The prospect of regular, badly managed domestic scenes with a corpse left Marsh irritated and catty. He grew used to Sylvain's visitations, and began to critique the spook theatrics. Too much back lighting, not enough green in Sylvain's hazy glow, no sulphur or dank airs. Sylvain, Marsh concluded, failed as an unholy presence. By the time Sylvain began to appear daily, Marsh had replaced a natural, instinctive fear of the dead with high-flown speculative aesthetics, and, subsequently, insanity.

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"Besides, Samson," Marsh added, flying through the lie, "where will we keep our food, under the bed? You've already closed the cellar, the top floor, and the garage." "People who talk to themselves will talk to anybody," Samson replied, threatening Marsh with their contract — in exchange for no credit upon publication, and his absolute silence, Marsh got all the royalties. Marsh tried to glare Samson down, and failed. Had Samson heard two voices? Marsh wondered if his conversations with Sylvain were strictly innerear. Perhaps the two old lovers were working together, to trip Marsh up on the details. Marsh imagined fat Samson and filmy Sylvain meeting in the closed-off wings of the estate, giggling over Marsh's mumbled excuses for not completing Samson's book, plotting what ridiculous apparitional shapes Sylvain would take next to the fireplace (solid, transparent, in chains?), or how best to pop out from between the pages of a dictionary like a spritz of seltzer. Maybe the two conspirators held riotous spectre parties, packing the third-floor sitting rooms with careening dead Brindles and Oulettes. Maybe the dead were a good time crowd. Marsh pulled himself back into the conversation, back to Samson's disappointed face. "And it does nothing for my creative confidence, you going off to confer with the angels,"

62 — R.M. Vaughan

Samson continued. "If you intend to lose your mind, I need to make arrangements." Marsh exhaled, pressing his hands together in silent thanks. Samson knows nothing. Samson just thinks I'm mad. Samson calmed himself, filled his mouth with dark port, and began again with his exacting account of the nothing-to-do-world he constructed around himself while Sylvain wrote his novel. In the day hours, Samson recalled, he wandered east to west across the sealed estate, listening to Sylvain pacing and typing. Samson's efforts at closing up rooms became an increasingly precise science; he found pinpoint holes everywhere and ripped down earlier, flawed attempts. He bought caulking guns and thick rubber tarps. He considered stone work, but relented when he realized someone would have to be hired to do the masonry. Outsiders were part of the problem. Outsiders and light. Because Sylvain resented sleep, the turning of the earth's cheek to the sun, or the moon, offended him. It had to be cloaked. He only ate when Samson refused to leave the room holding a full tray. Then he forced his food in with one angry hand, with regret for lost time. Sylvain set up a second typewriter on a marble stand by the toilet. He slept in his clothes, on the floor by his desk, wherever he fell. Or so Samson said.

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"Did you stop making love?" Marsh asked. "No. Quite the opposite. I learned a startling truth about sex — it is communication, not the lack of it, that kills lust. This noisy foolishness about the world turning on talk between lovers is a sham." Over Marsh's head, the ceiling began to thump and whistle. "We enjoyed our best sex after a week of knowing nothing about what was in each other's heads. I never failed to satisfy Sylvain's natural curiosity." Sylvain's desk danced heavily across the upstairs floor, then it dropped. The ghost was angry. Samson blustered ahead, oblivious. "And he adored me, far too much." The ceiling slats began to melt and reshape into a convex, hot orange globe. A raging, crushing sun. Marsh cowered, he wanted to cry. Samson politely asked if he was warm enough. Stay next to Samson, Marsh thought, Sylvain can't be in the same room with Samson, no matter how angry he gets. Those are the rules. Or so Sylvain says. Samson trudged along the muddy path of his memory, pulling up discordant, unflattering weeds. "But poor Sylvain was not very good at the mechanics of sex. He had no mercy for his occasional dysfunctions. I was patient." The orange globe swelled, grazing the tops of the bookshelves.

64 — R.M. Vaughan

"And later, when he was back up to speed, he was unkind with me. He wanted something from me a simple fucking couldn't give him: Revenge. Bloody, operatic revenge." A curling, bottomless yowl rushed out of Sylvain's office and down the upstairs hall. Sylvain's desk crashed in rhythmic sequence, rising and falling end on end. A goblin see-saw. "The skin on my legs would bruise horribly from his hands. I found his hair coiled inside my ears, across my throat. How Sylvain hated himself afterwards. He would cry, and read me pages of his book. He called it 'Our book,' and supposed I was fooled." The fireball hissed red steam. Lampshades spun. Shut up, shut up, shut up, Marsh silently begged Samson. Why can't you see it? Samson calmly ate a lemon cracker, remembering the last time he'd made love to Marsh and regretting the comparison to Sylvain. As good as milk, was Marsh, and all a Brindle deserved. Marsh panicked. Cracks formed on the globe's skin. From inside, tiny flames licked for air. Marsh's bladder filled with agitated, frightened urine. The tip of his penis seized, as if rubbed with mint. Marsh bolted for the door, the smell of burnt hair trailing his flight. Samson looked up from his plate. Oh, have I been thinking out loud again? Milk, he thought, and grinned cruelly. Samson removed his day-

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glasses. His eyes drifted restfully up to the beautiful flowered ceiling, wanting out of their tired, dishonest head.

Autumn darkened and iced. The flowers closest to the ground, the calendulas and the allysum, outlasted their tall neighbours, cosmos, mallow, nigella, only to be crushed under the booted feet of the pool cleaners. From his window, Marsh watched a worker pick yellow petals out of the grid of his sole, as if it were shit. Everyone, he concluded, hates surprises. Weeks had passed since Sylvain's first frustrated attack. The occasional kick from the ceiling grew into a predictable, tantrumed stomping. Why couldn't Samson hear the windows shake? Small coins of old paint dropped from the beseiged ceiling, whole sections of tempera roses and vine leaves, and collected on Samson's pale hair, in his tea cups. Still, he saw and heard nothing. Garlanded in white plaster and lead paint flora, Samson took on a sneaky, beneficent tinge, a rundown imam glow. Samson enjoyed the protection of the innocent, at a liar's rate, paid out in lost time and fat.

66 — R.M. Vaughan

In still moments between Samson's voice and Sylvain's war drums, Marsh understood that he'd complete Samson's biography, and that he need never worry about getting it right, making an honest record. Samson will never read his own lies, Marsh told himself, and ducked a triangle of plaster. Samson will not live long enough. Marsh was already inhabiting and shaping his life after Samson; a taker's life, the survivor's reward. Marsh listened now to all of Samson's artful assertions, his new and rehearsed lies, the pathetic tilting from memory to remembrance, analysis to nostalgia, but heard only the clear, belled tones of his own future. A future well-lived, in inverse proportions to Samson's dishonesty. Marsh leaned over and brushed fresh plaster off Samson's shoulder. Samson took Marsh's hand, squeezing unfelt thanks for a misunderstood affection, and wishing Marsh would stop needlessly dusting him off every half hour. Obsessive-compulsive, Samson thought. The bastard is already half gone, Marsh told himself, and I'll finish him.

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Marsh Cole's Diary October 10, 1970. Brindle House, Magog. I figured Sylvain was due again last night, so I slept with my notes under my ass. Not very dignified, but who can he tell? I don't have any dead friends. Not yet. He always catches me in bed. I'm practically embarrassed to scratch myself. Can he read through skin? His ghost clothes were different this time, a better fit. Sylvain seems to have resources in the next life he could have used in this one, and he is becoming increasingly theatrical. He perched on top of my stack of Sunday newspapers and told me my little newsprint mountain was an allegory. No wonder his theatre career hit the skids. Then he did this trick with paper cocktail umbrellas. He pulled them out of the air, three of them, blue, green, purple, and they floated and twirled around my head. He ordered me to dance. I worried I'd get my eye poked out. I think he's trying to seduce me. Sylvain says I have responsibilities, I'm abusing my position. By which he means, show me your notes. Sylvain asked me if I valued my time on earth. The umbrellas turned upside down and spun in a tight circle across my face. The ends were pointed and sharp. I felt like the axel in a Ferris

68 — R.M. Vaughan

wheel. Did I value my time on earth? Did I? The dead like to repeat themselves. Sylvain says, how can you stand to listen to Samson's fairy tales? He and Samson hardly touched each other, it was all lies. So 1 said, if you know that much about it, why do you need to see my notes? And then he turned all greenish brown and watery, an angry puddle. My guess is Samson's autobiography is like a celestial rope — it keeps Sylvain tied to the house. Maybe he wants to read the notes backward, to break the spell. But I don't trust him to just waft back to the underworld and leave me alone. He'll want revenge, on both of us. I'm not without pity for Sylvain, but I have my own plans for Samson and me. I want my completion money. But Samson will never finish his story, and since I don't really love Samson anymore, I guess I'm going to kill him. Crazy middle-aged bachelor recluses are supposed to die early. It's a Brindle family tradition. Samson's executors can't wait to sell off the last of the last of the Brindles. They'll get their share, nobody will look twice at me. I don't love Samson anymore, he cursed my life. I explained this to Sylvain, and he turned solid again. Happiness is tangible. He was a handsome boy once. Sylvain says he'll kill Samson if I show him the manuscript. No way, I said, Samson first,

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then the notes. That way, we're both free. So he gets brackish again, and says he'll set the house on fire and lock the doors, he'll bury us in a mudslide, he'll pull out the roof beams and crush us, he'll snap a tree across the sunroom and impale us. And then he curses in French. You'll die with your lies, he screams, and blows out the rose window. I was right, he's stuck here. I threw the umbrellas down the stairs.

70 — R.M. Vaughan

Sylvain Oulette I remember the fruity smell of earth, my first sensation after death. Earth, the scratch of new clothes, and hairspray. My last sensation before death — the fat, lemony zinc taste of the poison Samson fed me — was gone, because the embalmers brushed my teeth and my tongue. They shaved my crotch too. Crazy, no? So I'm in my satin coffin and I feel calm, calmer than I ever did alive, and I'm telling myself, Sylvain, boy, you did alright. A comfortable, clean box. A fresh shirt. An eternity of peace and quiet. I had all those good sensations, a real highclass, baby-in-a-quilt feeling for maybe one minute. Or maybe one year. I can't say one way or the other with certainty. Time is different now. It moves, how can I put it, up and down, not along a line. You learn to jump to when you want to be, not where. And you have to make your way through the ghost crowds, the dead elbows and the dead shoulders, the whisper yelling. Being dead is a long walk in a big forest with no trail, all whip branches and frustration. Except you don't bleed. My point is, I was happy and cozy being dead when the jump came and I was pulled out. Zoop! The jump, it's super cool. Feet first, you fly up, transparent. Upside down head rush. Wood and silver paint, big rocks, mud and tree roots and

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green grass, Samson's sadness petals and bugs — 1 passed through it all. The sun hits me on the toes, chest next, finally my face. I do a flip to right way up, I see the sky, round and dirty black. Place looks the same and I'm kicking again, friend, but this time it is beyond, just absolute. My theory is, the opposite of birth happens. You don't separate, you absorb. There's no sudden autonomy, like with babies, but agreement. There's this moment where you have to figure out how to float just a half inch off the ground so your feet don't sink in the sidewalk. Then, right on, you can go anywhere you fucking want. I went back to Brindle castle, my future mausoleum. I didn't understand the rules at the time. If you go back to the place you died, you're stuck. I met one of Samson's ghost uncles, the bug collector, Tarken Brindle, 1912 to 1947, and he told me the whole system is based on gravity. Each person has a specific gravity ration that he leaves behind, and if you get magnetized to your old gravity again, you can't break away. Unless the house falls in. Uncle Tarken came back to see his three thousand pinned beetles. Pretty dark buttons. That was around '48, and man, he is still haunting. I came back to get my novel. I knew Samson was going to publish it under his name. My life's work. You see, nobody named

72 — R.M. Vaughan

Brindle ever did a worthwhile thing on this planet, or after, and Sammy bums on this every day. I figured he'd really crash when he couldn't find the manuscript. Fair trade for killing me. Like I said, though, I get back and I can't go nowhere else. I had this great plan to put my book back in my box, like Zola did with his secret chickenhawk book about boy whores, or my mother did with her coral earrings that my sister wanted. We call it taking our death taxes. But I can't leave the grounds, can't get back to my coffin. I tried to climb a tree out, go over the wall. The pain was horrible, like starvation spins and bone fever. So I hid the manuscript instead, behind that plaque Ramses Brindle erected in the wine cellar to commemorate the heroic Brindles offed in the Zulu wars. Man, were the vets pissed when little nephew Ramses showed up later on our side. He should have hung it in the library, because all the war boys came back to visit their monument and now they're stuck forever in the cold cellar. They nearly beat the vapour out of Ramses. That's another rule, never visit your own monuments. Lesson number three; stay away from war heroes. They are cranked on full. Samson will never find my novel, he's afraid of the basement. Don't know why, all his loving family's down here waiting to say hello. The bastard.

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I'd drag him down there myself, but here's another problem — I can't be in the same room with him, I get too close, the poison taste floods my whole head and I shrink, my legs go gassy and my stomach glows hot white. I'm fucked. My first day back, I tried to push Samson off a ladder in the library and I turned gooey and had to crawl back to my office. Super humiliating. Uncle Tarken explained the dilemma to me. No direct action, no body checks. The ghost body is particles and waves, magnetized. Evil is the same, static and light. If the ghost body gets too close to an evil it knows, the particles get charged and repulsed. Me and Sammy, we're like warm and cold clouds banging together in the sky; somebody turns into rain. I'm the weaker vessel. Samson still has water in his body. He still has a body. I think now maybe Sammy and me were fixed for tragedy. I'm bossy by nature, aggressive. Samson was supposed to shelter me. I wrote, he kept the world out. That was our deal. I loved Sammy because I didn't have to compete with him — he'd already given up. Samson was emasculated by the time he was ten. Look here, little Samson, the Brindle coat of arms: three cormorants and a pear. Always remember. And this is a portrait of your great-grand uncle, young man; he was a high court judge, until he was shot.

74 — R.M. Vaughan

That plate you are eating from was given to cousin Efrom Brindle by the Due d'Orleans. I always had to race in life, Samson inherited the track. Still, the sex was foxy. The first time we kissed, it was by a river at night. A thick lawn stretched along the bank, crammed at the ends with alders and milkweed. We walked home from this gallery, and Samson had a flask of sherry. Sammy's a girl with liquor. Brown bats kited around, whistling when they caught a June bug. Sammy was drunk, pushing a bike. He finished his sherry, but he kept going back to the flask, the way drunks do. "It's empty, man, maybe you should give up," I told him. "You sound like a fun date." "Look at the bats, Mr. Brindle, having a dog fight. I don't find bats scary, do you? Nothing that small is frightening." "So take me home." I set my hands down hard on his pillow. I raised his ass up with my knees. He gurgled, like a baby. My tongue traced the veins on his neck. He put his arms around my shoulders and crossed his legs over my back. Our stomachs bumped, his fat against my bones — we were so different. I spit on my hand and slicked my cock. He spit on my other hand and I rubbed it down his crack. He opened. Everything vibrated inside of him, he was electric.

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My toes seperated, like a cat's paw when you press the pad. Gorgeous waves of tension, shaking, relief. I sat on the knotted rug while Sammy slept. He whistled in his sleep, in tune. I got in bed, for one more. Samson woke up, smiled, lay flat on his belly. His skin smelled like blue sparks. Look, I didn't understand the signs, OK? Nobody can see the evil particles. Nobody alive. I let Samson into my blood. I was only twenty two. "I trust you can find my house again tommorrow night," he said. "I'm a bat."

76 — R.M. Vaughan

Marsh Cole's Diary October 21, 1970. Brindle House,, Magog. Samson's concern for his autobiography is changing. He piles on the details, but he's clearly lost. He can't replace Sylvain's novel with these pointless lists of Brindle ancestors. Where is that goddamned manuscript? Sylvain must know. Maybe he'd trade — Samson's life for the novel. I could publish it under my name. Samson doesn't notice anymore when I stop taking notes. Thank God, I think I'm developing bursitis. Another reason for revenge. This morning at breakfast Samson took two silver butter knives and propped up the end of the tablecloth, making a tiny proscenium arch. The salt shaker was Samson, the pepper mill was Sylvain. A lot of mumbled dialogue followed, with Samson doing Sylvain's voice in a squeaky pitch that sounds nothing like the froggy, dead version I hear. 1 guess people change. The play concluded with Sylvain the pepper telling Samson the salt some garbled nonsense about bitter tastes and lemons. With that, Samson unwound the top of the mill and tipped over its trunk, spilling pepper corns in a black, dramatic circle. Sylvain's death, I took it. Upstairs, the smashing started. Sylvain's applause. The ghost found Samson's Civil War pic-

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torial plate set and smacked it against the floorboards in chronological order. McClellan at Antietam, Bragg at Perryville, the death of Stonewall Jackson at the battle of Chancellorsville, all the way to the freed slaves. Whoosh, crack, whoosh. The china bellyflopped and raced across the hardwood. I counted fourteeen plates, six bowls and what I think was a gravy boat before I realized that Samson was watching me stare at the ceiling with my mouth open. "Your plates, all of your plates. The Lincoln soup tureen," I sputtered. "I expect you'll want a few things some day, when I'm gone, but must you literally drool at the windfall? It's not very attractive." He hadn't heard a thing. I wasn't surprised. "Samson, I'm overtired. It's all this paying attention." "You'd never know." Samson left me to clean up the pepper. I buried it in the soil around Samson's favourite potted jade tree, with a little toothpick cross. I took a broom and pail upstairs and swept the powdery shards. After lunch, I found a tiny china portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln propped up next to the cross in the planter. A headstone. Sad Mary Todd, she went insane after Abraham's death. Sylvain and I are developing a rapport.

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62)

y r ^ o o r boy, Foulard whispered, gone to the world. It comes from not having children, he decided, from not having anything outside of yourself, another voice. Foulard wondered if he had seen this Marsh Cole around the village? All the young fellows today looked the same to him — loud shirts worn with exaggeration, high shoes, wide belts the size of car tires, and always the stringed hair, worn dirty across the shoulders. Foulard sometimes hated to arrest the troublesome ones, the ones who smoked pot or talked too much about bombs and the English. After all, he couldn't think of them as men, as adults, they were too silly and flowery. Like boys in a school play, educated Peter Pans. Foulard read the papers, he knew what was what; Montreal was on fire. Everybody acting badly, cops too. What was the good of turning a car upside down in the middle of traffic, or smashing windows on St. Laurent? Why beat up on students with paper signs and tin whistles? Bad behaviour on both sides only made more work later, with long forms to

82 — R.M. Vaughan do up and strings of headaches. Foulard liked talking to the young guys he brought in for questioning, so he could figure out which family a boy belonged to, where his father worked. It made sense; half of good policing was talking and listening. When the captain told him to enforce the War Measures Act, Foulard took two days off to settle himself down. Back troubles, he told the captain. Headaches again, everyone guessed. War Measures meant you had to arrest people for nothing; for walking home at night alone or for walking around in groups, for being too noisy or for not coming out of your house often enough. War Measures made normal behaviour seem sneaky, like you lived in a world of snakes. When Foulard returned, the station was doubled up with soldiers. A fat army man who smelled like gun oil put a huge map of Magog on the wall over the Captain's desk. With a red marker he cut the village into long rectangles. Every man on the force got a half rectangle. The mayor made a wild speech. A cabinet minister was missing! The English were scared to go shopping on rue Principale! Foulard's half rectangle was mostly the lake. Would he have to get on a boat? No, no, Foulard, not yet. Go patrol the beaches for seditionists. Kids with long hair, anyone speaking French. Rumours about American Indians from Vermont selling guns to students dusted the town. The mayor hated

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Indians. After three days, Foulard stopped reporting the kids he caught naked in the elephant grass. Magog was dull and overexcited. Regulations kept the population tense but gave them nothing to do. Nobody went to the movies because the TV news was too good, and then the government shut down all the entertainment anyway. Hockey rinks, bars, boat races, tennis courts. No public gatherings. It made for a long day, full of false alarms. Imagined bombs ticked in forgotten garbage bags, sometimes two or five a day. When little children played Martians or chased cats in backyards, not knowing any better, they scared the old couples, who called the police. Foulard drove the kids home. If they cried, he bought them a Mr. Freeze. It wasn't their fault. Marsh Cole's death was a relief. A real crime, with a whole dead body to worry. No more phantom terrorists. But maybe this Cole boy was in with the FLQ? Bien sur — that would frig things up. Foulard looked down at Marsh Cole's ice eaten face, his ribbon lips. No, Foulard thought, the kid's too delicate, made up of soap and water. Nothing about Marsh Cole's corpse said guns or bombs or even pop bottles filled with gasoline. Nothing signalled danger. Except that he was dead. Foulard sat down on the high stool by the autopsy table and opened Marsh Cole's diary again. He found a pen on the scalpel tray and started under-

84 — R.M. Vaughan

lining sentences. Foulard knew better; evidence is inviolable. He remembered the way his instructor said the word inviolable at the academy, with firm seduction. But nothing was foolproof. Look at the poor fucker on the table — rich, white, English, and still mysteriously dead. Foulard wondered if he and this Marsh Cole would get along, be friends in other circumstances? Foulard glanced again at the young man's ruined body. It was beautiful and weak. The stem of a lily. He'd hate me, Foulard decided, he'd surely hate me. Only children make friends with giants. Foulard straightened his posture. Be grateful for what you have, he told himself, and went back to his page. Sure, it's a bad turn for anyone to die, Foulard rationalized, but from my end, it makes for an interesting break. Cole and me, he concluded, we'd hate each other anyway. For an instant, Foulard had a nervous desire to give the dead man a strong, painful handshake; a good wrist snapper, just to show this Marsh Cole he was onto his high hat ways. A real big man's bad bastard grip. The skinny little faggot was asking for it, and worse. He was built like a daisy. Meanness sweated up Foulard's neck. He grabbed four dead fingers and cracked the rigor. The wet pop between the knuckles was calming. Foulard moved away from the body. What if someone came in? Evidence was inviolable. In the corner of Foulard's left eye, a nerve jerked

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and bubbled. Read faster, Foulard thought, before the headache shuts your eyes. He underlined a long paragraph, something about green lights and dancing furniture. More fantasies, more spirits. Foulard underlined one word: conterminous. Foulard's English worked at the syllables. The end of time? To be against ourselves, a duel between two, two against the middle? The headache swallowed Foulard's left eye. He closed the diary and waited. Foulard absently thumbed the pen top. The spring coil felt loose and unsure, the compressor wobbled in the cap. The pen was marked 'Town of Magog' in faded, silver capitals. Foulard licked his index finger and erased what was left of the letters. Now I'm a radical too, he thought, smiling. The headache eased across his forehead and down the hairline to his right temple. Everything was reduced to light or simply not light. He looked up and down Marsh Cole's body once more before his right eye shut with liquidy spasms. It was light, white and cobalt, like propane flame. Then it was not. Murder, Foulard thought, this fellow was murdered. I'm an X-ray. Cole's body is glowing with rage. The dark behind Foulard's eyes settled. Gold clouds formed and clustered in piles over his retinas. He relaxed his shoulders. He breathed in slow, calculated trickles of air, filling his lungs with blocks of wind from the bottom up. Foulard's chin pivoted on his shoulder. His head felt top-weight-

86 — R.M. Vaughan

ed. Foulard held the seat of the stool with both hands. He wrapped his calves around the aluminum legs. His shoes felt big and far away. It was coming, the burst. The headache peaked at the top of his head, a scalding cap. Molar nerves spun hot pinwheels along his jawline. Foulard made a tiny, flat shriek in his throat. Everything stopped. The pain shifted to his neck. Foulard opened his mouth. He unstuck his cakey tongue with new spit. He fumbled to wipe his eyes with one hand, unsure of his balance. The gold clouds burned out orange, then velvety cream. The pain began, mercifully, to sluice down his spine and die in a series of fluttering blips off his tailbone. It was almost over. His senses were returning. He unsnarled his legs from the stool. He smelled menthol cigarettes and coffee with sugar. "Why are you still in here?" The voice was quiet, puzzled. Foulard jumped off the stool, his eyes slow to roll back into the centre of their sockets. His feet were icy and clumsy. The coroner stood next to Foulard, rooting through his lab coat for a pen. "Feeling alright?" he asked. Foulard shoved the diary between his belt and the small of his back. He tossed the pen onto Marsh Cole's stilled chest.

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The coroner emptied his pockets and cursed. "Having another of your spells, eh Foulard? Why don't you let me write down the name of a guy I know in Granby?" The man jangled scalpels around the autopsy tray, swearing and snorting. Foulard backed out of the examining room, switching the diary to his front pocket as he turned for the door. The coroner did not watch him go. Foulard walked outside to his patrol car, turned on the map light, and read Marsh Cole's diary. The coroner forgot what he was looking for, and turned on the radio. More arrests in Montreal, the prime minister meeting with the armed forces later today. Good on them, the coroner said out loud, good on them. Neither man noticed the purplish change of light.

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Marsh Cole's Diary November 3, 1970 Samson made extraordinary demands in bed last night. Tricks we haven't done in months; early love, honeymoon games. Let's play Mother and Son, let's play The Gift of the Magi, let's play L/ncie and Truant Nephew. What he means is, let's pretend we're new. With costume changes yet. By the time I fell asleep, I felt bloodless, without minerals or hope. I hate desperation, it makes even the smallest, tender gestures ugly. For all his blustering, Samson's just a tired child fighting sleep. He uses me the way truckdrivers use sugar and loud music. 1 keep him awake. When he was on top of me, Samson put his fingers in my mouth, like he always does, and my teeth went dry. I tasted bakers' yeast, or stale chick peas: a stunted, chalky funk at the back of my cheek. This morning, my tongue was peeling and brown. 1 figured he'd been washing with carbolic soap again, his pores are crammed, and then 1 found the red shells under the bed. Castor bean shells, big as paper weights, from the back garden. They're poisonous, of course. I went hunting for Samson and 1 got lost in the south hall, the unheated section where the servants once lived. The scale of the house changes back

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there, the world is reduced. Narrow hallways, half ceilings, thin windows, built-in cabinets. A model of Predestination economics. The tinker's caravan parked behind the opera house. It would be inviting and homey if it wasn't haunted. Sylvain's ghost pulled all the furniture apart in the cook's kitchen. He made a Japanese dry garden. The table and chair legs were arranged in four lumpy, asymetrical piles and the chair bottoms made a round fence around a pond of bent nails. The nails were raked in interlocking circles, imitating waves, ripples of grey iron. The table top was suspended from the pot rack, for shade. To make a deer scare, he left the faucet dripping in a copper bowl. Sylvain's garden was restful and unclean, a demonic yet meditative act of vandalism. Ghosts live in contradiction. He is finding new ways to frighten me. I no longer simply react; I smile and marvel, and then the trembling comes. When I found Samson, I was fluttery; breakfast was cold, and Samson was hellish. How could I disappear for three hours without so much as a good morning, he asked. I know I was gone only a few minutes. Samson frigs with the clocks, the liar. One day I'll catch him.

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POST SCRIPT — I read a fascinating article today in Contemporary Psychology called "When You Do A, I Feel B, I Want You To Do C", and it's helped me to really get a grip on why I need to express my negativity toward Samson through murder. The first exercise is to make a list. It's called a Mission Statement. 1. I watched Samson slowly poison Sylvain and stayed out of it because I wanted Samson for myself. I am an accomplice. Samson knows. If I simply leave Samson, he will tell. I cannot go to prison, I am too impressionable. 2. I want Sylvain's book. I will publish it and become famous. Samson has first dibs, but Sylvain might give the ms. to me if Samson's dead. I promise to dedicate the book to Sylvain. 3. I do not fear the possibility of Samson's ghost. A dead Samson is practically redundant. When I murder Samson, Sylvain will protect me. Sylvain gives me flowers made out of spoons and forks, he mows the back lawn grass into fluted arabesques that spell out my name. He flirts. He tickles my feet with ball lightning. He calls my name at night, all night. We'll finish Samson together. 4. Samson might get me first.

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From the autobiography of Samson Bundle. Chapter 12, "Paris, not in the Springtime."

IN

gog was blooming. The stone fences broke open, spilling Michaelmas daisies, knotweed, and touch-me-not onto the gravel sideroads. Tall, pink boys, home from Bishop's or McGill, jostled shirtless behind lawn mowers and sometimes from the tops of horses, angering their fathers with their new, fat sideburns and green slacks. Cold ice-cream from road stalls pained tender front teeth, while spinsters with seamless lineages sold antiques to newlyweds and male pairs from Montreal. People wore white, young people wore orange and lemon yellow. Nobody spoke French and, even more miraculously that summer, nobody was married outdoors. I was content, Sylvain had just failed as an artist. The day he finally cleared out his clothes and books from his stale, rented room in the city, we drove back to Brindle House the long way, through the townships and around the lake.

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Sylvain wanted to swim. I watched from the rocks. Sylvain's limbs were unbending in the water, his flesh a dry, nicotined argument against ablution. But in he went, needing weightlessness, the simpler, girlish threat of lake grass between the legs. He's a boy, I told myself, he needs me. Sylvain eventually came out, clean and smiling, with a leech on his calf. We pulled up to the north hall where the climbing wisteria was just opening over the front plinth. I had had the foyer redone that spring in pale yellow with gold brocade. The new stair runner was a lush, woven broadloom in canary and baize green. "Looks like the view from the bottom of a lily pond," Sylvain said, "the kind of room you can drown in." I took him by the hand and led him to the kitchen garden. It was hot in the shelter of the gables. Orange plume poppies came apart in the wind. The wild garlic was sweating and burned inside our noses. I pointed out the two parcel-gilt, bronze leopards I'd bought the week before and set deep in the brushiest corners, back to back. Sylvain bent to the largest of the two and patted its gold spine. His reflection curved, he smiled. We had green tea outside on the whitewashed iron table, and Sylvain asked polite questions about the house, the grounds. Later, I took him up

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to his room and put him under a fresh sheet. I came to wake him for dinner but he was already awake, propped up by the window, staring at the dark tangles in the garden where the leopards sat. I kissed the back of his neck. He caught my left nipple roughly between his teeth and shook his head. Blood came. Sylvain made a low, snarling sound in his throat, then turned back to the window, the leopards. "Sympathetic magic," I asked, feeling a little hot-headed, and sexual, and needing a clean shirt. "You started it." I left him alone. Clearly, life with Sylvain wasn't going to be all cakes and cider. But I expected disturbances with him — it was a portion of my love. I wanted someone to manage, a lover who needed both affection and force. I was tired of choosing to play one or the other and then waiting to grow tired of my job. It has been my curse in life to be able to foresee, literally envision within the first ten minutes of a new love affair, the exact situation or conflict or even habit that will grow between myself and my lover and bring the damned business crashing down in tears and torn letters. I was determined, this time, to disabuse the prophecy. When I found I could not, I broke Sylvain instead.

98 — R.M. Vawghan

Falling into Sylvain's madness became easy, a simple act of nurturing. Sealing up the rooms was Sylvain's idea, but I mastered the technique. Brindle House has been mine since birth, and true disrespect relies on intimacy. When I papered over the door to the solarium, committing the palmettos to a slow, juiceless death, I mixed egg white and canned milk in with the paper fasting for a drummy tightness. While Sylvain stopped up doors with rugs and old coats, I perfected the ground brick and encaustic method. Sylvain went crazy, I decided to keep a hand in the game. But I grew bored. Conspicuous self-abjection oppresses my sensitivities. And Sylvain stopped coming to bed at night. I decided a vacation would be best for both of us. Sylvain refused at first, but I told him to bring his manuscript, and we negotiated that he would write for a set time of seven hours a day. Sylvain was set on Paris. "Changing climates when you travel is unnatural," he said. "The colour of my work will dilute. I can only travel laterally." "Lateral to here is the Mediterranean," I corrected. "I meant spiritually," he said, and took my fingers hard in his hands, the way one does to make children stop kicking at table. It was in a Paris hotel, I forget which one, that

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Sylvain became violent, and I began to poison his food. What to say about Paris? It was grey and petulant, with a bright red scarf. No one spoke of the student uprisings, and the government endorsed paid laziness. There was too much silver on the women, and those who were not fat were long faced and rattish. Boys took heroin under their eyelids or, in faggot circles, on the slits on their cocks. Arabs were universally hated, and fights broke out at orange stalls over Algerian repatriation. I hate Paris, but Sylvain was entranced; he liked the world to be ugly and snappish, to need a good slap. Sylvain spoke pidgin English to the hotel clerks, mockingly pleading for biggy-biggy toweltowels or more eaty-eaty. When we ate at restaurants, he demanded that waiters fix drinks in front of him, "So they can't water it down in the kitchen." He argued roughly with a Cassini shop girl over the true cost, in real supply-demand ratios, of a cashmere sweater. With each new fracas, Sylvain brightened. A child of France, many times removed, Sylvain Oulette proved the axiom that the only thing the French hate more than foreigners is each other. He became so lively that by our second week he had renegotiated his writing time down to four

100 — R.M. Vaugfum

hours a day, then to two. He bought cheap historical postcards by the handful and sat in the back of our rented car shuffling the images into alphabetical and geographical subsets, and later, with some cleverness, orders of cultural importance. Sylvain schematized seventy-two postcards by their degree of involvement, direct or casual, for or against, in the beheading of Louis Seize. I believe he made most of this up, but it was better listening than the local radio. Ultimately, it was the postcards that set him off, in our eleventh hotel. I was in the bath, waiting for hot water. I could hear Sylvain muttering over his cards in the next room — statistics on Girondin voting patterns in the National Convention — and I waited impatiently for the siren blare of the fetid, lead-clogged pipes to start again and block out his nonsense. I realize now that Sylvain needed to make a map, to secure order inside his head, before he could write again. I fooled myself that his compulsion was merely a meditation exercise, that he'd soon start back to work and be happy — not hurtful. I believed that Sylvain's madness would calm when we got back home, forgetting that I'd been convinced he'd be better as soon as we got away. It must be a joke, I told myself after the assault. A sexual prank. I needed to think so. With Sylvain it was usually hard to divide games from threats.

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When I got out of the bath Sylvain had rolled all of his postcards into tubes and stacked them, lo cabin style, to form a tall, hollow square. The ends of his index fingers were red from wrapping the cards into tight cylinders. "Samson, take off your robe," he said. I giggled, half hard. He jumped at me, I fell forward. Before I freed myself, he worked five postc ds u into me. He sat on my back facing my beh d, with his knees pressed full on my shoulders, freeing his hands. He closed my mo th shut roughly with his feet. A molar chipped. The pain was intoxicating. I almost didn't feel what he was d ng lower down, inside. Perhaps he bit my left hand, perhaps I did it myself. I kept one of the cards. A reproduction of a pornographic political cartoon from 1794. Robespierre and Saint-Just, masturbating a wasted Republican elephant. The rest I tore into wet squares and flushed down the toilet without incident. I told the concierge that I'd cut myself. I paid for the sheets. We took another hotel. I slept in a chair on the balcon At the Algerian market, I bought wormwood, lemons, and pulverized mountain lion whiskers, the poison favoured by discontented Bechar wives. I am not a passive person. The quickest way to kill Sylvain was obviously a staged accident, along

102 — R.M. Vaughon

a roadside, at some cliff or crag. The police expect men like us to disappear, high strung as we are, restless and oversexed as dogs. The police would make my explanations for me, laughing. But Sylvain's murder deserved craftmanship, a considered response. I did not choose poison because I'm afraid of physical violence; rather, I prefer means over ends, the aroma to the meat. I wanted the brat to suffer. Two days later, Sylvain started writing again. He complained about a weightless feeling, and it made him sit down to his work. I promised myself he'd get the final dose only after his book was finished. I intend to publish it as my own, whenever it turns up. Sylvain mistook my forbearing manner for fear, and was glad of the upper hand. "Why don't you make it a novella," I asked from the balcony. And then I can kill you sooner. I let my eyes follow the knotted, shrunken streets, the copper and green Seine, the desperate poor. You see, when you resign yourself to murder, every vista is full of potential.

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Sylvain Oulette Now that I'm here, in the in-between groove, a thinking beam of dust, I can see my living past with clarity, and I know that Samson has only ever had one choice in life — to wait for his own weaknesses to do him in. Marsh is the opposite, he's waiting for the strength to make his own catastrophes. But little Marsh has more stomach than you'd see first kick. For instance, I'm only allowed so many tricks and light shows to work with, and I gave out some of my best, to put a righteous fear of God into him. Cold spots, ringing bells, blue glows, the old unconsuming blaze, bodies in the window. Then, just when I'm ready to pump him for Samson's book of lies, Marsh calls a priest. That is moxy. The number was really dial-a-prayer, but he looked so cute bluffing I had to let it slide. Besides, Samson would never let a priest into his house. He barely lets the grocery boy in, which is a mistake if you ask me because I've seen the grocery boy. Samson hates RC's. For instance, when we were in Paris, Sammy wanted to visit St. Basil's, but this seminarian says sorry, the place is closed, Holy Father is doing a special mass, and Sammy says, "I don't care if she's doing her nails, I came to see the frescoes." Sammy

104 — R.M. Vawghan

grew up English, and rich, surrounded by Catholics who mopped floors for a living. He naturally sees everything outside of his space as ornamental. Like me. The day I moved into Brindle House I felt I had already given up way too much. Love and sharing and foxy sex aside, the pad was his first and can still be his later. I was overwhelmed by Sammy's material history, and I hated how he and his house had grown up as one mind. There was no such thing as a simple, unstoried glass of water, and 1 need, needed, the basics, for their honesty. Soon, what was true between us and what wasn't truth became irrelevant. Jive and more jive. The rnaments won, hands down. Samson and I gave ourselves over to that sad brand of grandeur and sham that plagues Marys like us who can't just be queers and special enoug So, poisoning me in Paris was the logical conclusion. Sammy was bored. It hurts to know you have become someone to endure, so I greased him out a bit with the postcards. But I never hurt rt Samson, n ot really, not above average. What's fai r? I'm the one in Judgement Day threads. I know now that our actions are set, fixed before we're raised.. One of the benefits of death is you get to o read your calendar. I did not want to go Paris. I was frightened of free time. I was up to fifteen pages a day, I think I even wrote on the plane. Six pages

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And Paris is the only place on earth that mimics the afterlife. There is no taste to the food. No colours, no indigenous intelligence, everybody's tired all the time. Paris is not a good place to rest a paranoid state of mind. Paris is not a city, it is a system of cells; horribly disorganized, outgrown cells. There are only two types of surfaces in Paris, granite and gilt. The eye jumps between the two continuously, searching for a restful middle ground, a bit of American understatement, a concern for blending. Naturally, the people of Paris are super mad. Nobody speaks below a shriek, private property is jealously guarded, and crime is regarded with the same shrugging, comraderly resignation act they use for the daily soccer scores. Food is a filthy necessity, like shitting, and kept in its place — unless you're rich. Our final hotel was a faked out copy of a Moorish villa, complete with blackened, sticky orange trees. In the centre courtyard, monster goldfish swam in a blue-glazed pool, nibbling dumbly on the soft parts of their dead mates. The flaking heads and bellies made the water white. Samson and I were running out of hotels. As soon as the Arab mothers in the neighbourhood heard about the two womenless princes in room 112, every skinny-assed Arab kid within ten blocks was at our door asking if we needed any extra special assistance. All men under twenty in

106 — R.M. Vaughan

Paris are for sale, but Sammy likes Algerians best. After an initial frenzy, we each took up with our own special boy, Samson's was small and red haired, and liked Samson to teach him the words in the Herald Tribune. My boy was named Falah, after his father. Falah came from the desert, where his family owned a well and a dozen bag-ugly daughters. Falah was poor and seventeen, but he understood debits and credits. He was over six feet tall, unusual for a desert child, and was matted in cool places with dense, curly black hair. He already carried a full beard. His weight against my back felt like a gritty, wet plank. We talked very little, and I liked Falah precisely because I saw no potential in him whatsoever. He did not distract me. Samson suggested we switch boys, but Falah declined. One night, after Samson's boy took us to his cousin's halal stall for a beggar's dinner of vinegary lamb and yellow beans, the four of us walked around the quarter and bought English newspapers. We took a table outside the Cafe Danemark and drank chocolate tea. Samson showed off by feeding his boy gummy honey cakes, the way old women do with dogs. Falah sat silent, humiliated or furious, I couldn't tell. He rose, pushed in his chair roughly, and told me in super polite French that he was ready to give me my fucking now and

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could we please go back to the hotel and begin to get it on. Samson laughed like a bitch and slapped Falah's ass hard with a newspaper. Falah pushed Samson over in his chair. Sammy nearly shit. Falah and I left together. Falah was shot by the police two nights later. He was caught stealing a pair of pants from the hotel laundry. He ran too slowly. Samson's boy believed Samson paid the police for the job, and he fucked off for good. I believe it now, too. After Falah died, the boys cleared out of the lobby. The word was out. Samson changed our room for one with a double bed. He suddenly had no cash to give me for pocket money. I mysteriously lost my passport. Samson sent my only pair of shoes out to be polished, for hours. He followed me everywhere, juiced up on bad paranoia. The only time I could get by myself was when I was writing. Samson sat out on the balcony, waiting for my typewriter to stop. He smoked and ate honey cakes and stared at the ass-end of Paris. I called out words for him to spell, to see if he was awake. He was always awake. He was plotting my murder. And 1 went in super high style. Samson fed me bloodied beef in sour wine sauces, quail with pomegranite marinade, strong teas and tarrish Scottish beer. Samson jolted my digestive system

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into shock. He practically force-fed me, since he was paying. I felt like I'd been gouged from the inside. Sammy had spent months at home making me delicate, now he could break my body open with no effort. He was priming me for the poison. Samson kept me from writing, too. He locked my papers, my typewriter, even the hotel pens in the concierge's safe. He claimed the chamber maids were thieves. He never fucking left me alone, never let me think. He knew by now I could form whole pages of my novel in my head and keep them for later, so he played the radio constantly. Every night we went to a new play or film. Plots became jumbled in my head, I forgot the colours of my own characters' eyes. I started buying postcards. A cathedral with green glass windows stood for the hero of my book. Two views of Mirabeau's apartment became the hero's lovers. I pocketed lemon rinds from my drinks and wrote whole pages on the backs of cards with lemon juice and a toothpick — a prison trick 1 saw once in a freaky old Claude Rains film. It's easier for Samson to say now that I was the crazy one, that I performed some rape shit on him on the hotel bed. But how could I have had the physical strength? Unless he wanted me to. The poison tastes like the skin of ripe cheese, with lemon to cover. The mountain lion whiskers massage their way through the bottom of the

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esophagus and needle down to the aorta. You die from a quilted heart, the wormwood is just a distraction. The vomiting is a freaking event — your stomach makes a stream of sparkly bubbles while your spine wobbles in place, like a boned snake. All light turns to yellow, green at night. The visions are surprisingly accurate. We returned to Magog, me in a wheelchair. Samson cried in my lap and read me E.F. Benson stories. Since I was incoherent, I was really hard to entertain. The clinic could do less than nothing. The doctors begged Samson to take me to Montreal, but he said I was too weak. Samson took me back to the clinic three times, for appearances. He made his eyes red with snuffed matches before we got out of the car. Marsh knew. I tried to catch his hand, make out the word "poison." He nodded, told the doctors I wanted water. Samson asked Marsh where he bought his tie. I heard conversation, Samson and Marsh. Conversation, not angry whispers, not sobs, not panic. 1 gave up. Marsh fudged my records, told the clinic he called specialists when he didn't, folded prescriptions into his pocket, waited me out. I was dead in six days. Marsh helped himself to Samson. Now, Marsh baby, you can do something for me.

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amson says to Marsh, move in with me, my house is a gymnasium, a ballroom, a canyon, and I'm so alone. The house needs new blood, and wasn't the funeral elegant? Marsh looks at his future, sees only swabs and tongue depressors, snot and blood and broken feet. Sometimes at night, Marsh cries because Sylvain is dead, because he helped. Marsh moves in. The companionship of murderers is scarce in Magog, and Marsh wants to stop sleeping with tears. The village doctors and the town doctors leave Samson to his grief. The village doctors want a new clinic: Brindle money can build walls. The town doctors are children of mothers who cooked and fathers who gardened for Samson's father and uncles. Brindle generousity payed for their training, and there is talk of a Brindle endowment, a Brindle wing, new ambulances. Marsh writes "exhaustion" on Sylvain's death certificate.

114 — R.M. Vaugfum

Marsh makes the estate whistle. Doors are unstuck, black paper is steamed off windows, for a little while rain water slants in from open porch doors again, some dead plants are replaced. Samson joins in, huffing and red-faced with work. The boys are happy, Huck and Tom in a cave. Samson finds a single page of Sylvain's novel and reads it; baited, he finds another the next day, and three more the next. Marsh is busy dusting portraits. More messages come. A page is tucked under a mat in the downstairs bathroom. Two more sit on the foyer demi-table, under Samson's keys. There is a page on every step of the servants' stairwell. Samson is delerious, Marsh is carefully waxing the teak chess table. Samson finds an entire chapter rolled up in the medicine cabinet, beside the tweezers. He was going to pluck his temples back to solid brown. Seven origami chrysanthemums float in the toilet, the typing is familiar. Samson likes what he reads. Another chapter is discovered on a lily pad, bundled with black ribbon. In the teapot, just in time, Samson finds a single paper sentence. Who the hell is responsible? Samson wonders. Marsh is noisily pickaxing the lock off the trap door to the widow's watch. But on the sixth day, the paper river dries. Samson looks in vases and behind books. He snaps

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out the rugs, hoping for strays. He hurts his knees looking up flues and cuts his palm on a chandelier crystal. He sends Marsh down to the wine cellar, but Marsh returns with two bottles of red and complaints about cold patches. In a desperate moment, Samson flaps his family bible back and forth; it is full of pre-Confederation pounds, but no novels. That night, Samson and Marsh make love for the first time, telling themselves they are clean and free and safe. Samson enters Marsh, then Marsh goes into Samson. Somebody cries enough, sleep comes easy. At breakfast, Samson can't find his scraps, the pages he folded in white tissue and wedged in a leather folder. Is Marsh playing horrible tricks? Samson has never yelled before, so Marsh cries. Later, Samson brings him grapefruit in bed, they kiss, and Marsh agrees the mattresses need turning. Was it all a dream, a guilty mirage? No, Samson decides, Sylvain's book is real, but Marsh is a liar, a disingenuous changeling. And I must keep him here, Samson thinks, in this house, until he slips up. He'll need a job, Samson figures, an at-home employment. Dictation of Samson's autobiography begins on a Friday, for luck.

116 —R.M. Vaughan

From tKe autobiography of Samson Brindle. Notes for Chapter 13: working title "The Potboiler of Qold." Artists die in Paris every day, but Sylvain was contrary and held out for home. The airplane attendants squished against the seats opposite Sylvain, avoiding the leper's touch. Passengers requested headphones. Sylvain finally fell asleep, and I took my chance to intrude on his novel. The story, as much as I discerned, turned on the hero's pathetic inability to stand with his decisions. At the same time, the hero was physically prevented from lying. When he lied, his stomach boiled, and he lost fistfuls of hair. Sometimes the novel was set in a medieval Europe ruled by hysterical popes. Entire chapters were set aside to essay such diverse subjects as the history of Papal incontinence, or coin production in Salzburg, or the metaphoric consequences of the discovery of plankton. One chapter was set in choral bars, with accompanying footnotes on the allegorical lineage of various types of shoes. Buddhism reared its dumbed, smiling head, alongside a lengthy discourse on llow as a sexual aide. I flipped along and found an interior book set during the filming of George Cukor's The Women, as told by Metro Goldwyn Mayer's staff hairdresser. Rosalind Russel was given a bizarre, eight page

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monologue, in which she confesses to screwing R.B. Bennet on a wood pallet in an ice-fishing shack. I worried over a short chapter in French, but gave up when Itranslated the words "cream cake," "partcleie phyysics," and "Butanese royalty" in the same sense nce without making any reasonable connections. Dream sequences involving preteen boys in scrappy coastal towns plagued the narrative arc, as didintermtent paragraphs of clinical information on intestinal parasites, typed in red ink. Clearly, Sylvain wanted out of his own book. He tried to write himsself out, and when that failed, he turned the dementia I had created to foster his talent back on me. Sy ain hhad lways had a playfullyvio olent streak --he w wasslapping lover. In quieter times , id let him learn my t3nder spots. i regr ed my vulneraty, myness, and and now, w, don an airplane, Sylvain regretted his fishis fists. He trto apologize, somewhere over Labrador,dor, to spell outs contrition with a wet finger on aon a paper napkin, to give ms throw-awayy. I sorry. i watched theremarkabl scrubland pullmel past me and closed my heart. How dear and helpful Marsh was when we arrived thatht at the clinic. His necktie was aas a hopefulrple and lime harlequin. Sylvain was was glass thin and sweaty. The orderlies snickered at my tears, I morized their nametags.ags I suppose I was truly upset. So much finally

118 — R.M. Vaughan

came to an end that I forgot how hard I'd worked for the denouement. Sylvain's death became, f a moment, more frightening tha an unchanging future. Marsh held my shoulders ith both hands, and Sylvain was pronounced dead. I put aside the coffee Marsh had made for me and asked him to drive me home. Romance is the addition of small gestures. I dislike the term murderer, it is inappropriate. Murderers are people who dot understand style.yle Murderers are without grace, and are only charming when mentally disturbed. I wa rought up to be graceful and am perfectly sane. Murderers are indiscreet. As soon as Sylvain was in the ground I threw away all of his wastrel belonging Marsh was very good bout the funeral arrangements. He only made me angry once, at the reception,en hen be askewhat Sylvain had been in life. "Short" short lived," I told him, and took a plate of apple squares to Sylvain's dirty, hungry friends. I tied Sylvain's novel into a thick bundle and locked it in a tin box. I sealed the rim and corners of the box with paraffin and linen. I may have been temporarily psychotic. The box sank to the leaf-choked bottom of the lily pond without releasing a single bubble. On the floor of the pond, darting leaves and silt settled into a muddy pentangle.

A Quilted Heart — 1 1 9

I'll read it in the spring, I promised myself, when I'm calm. From front to back. The complete, hellish pinwheel of words. After I'm rested. The manuscript has since disappeared, but scraps turn up in odd places.

120 — R.M. VaugKan

Sylvain Oulette M bea ul novel, my storm of words. Samson is too thisee himselfhind the hero's veils, vels,els, too self-absorbed to notice his signature on every page. Where did he suppose I got so much bullshit from, whose voice does he hear behind my crazyass fables? I burned candles at his feet for so long, he forgot the smell of wax and smoke. My b utiful novel, underground, behind a wall. No one will ever read it again, and I can't make another. I'm not supposed to be dead, I'm supposed to be famous. Can you understand my rage for getting even, for balancing the score ? Can you imagine what you will do when your life finally falls away and you are left behind, just a dispersed mass, inexpressable waves and ions, reduced to signals? Well, I'll tell you what you'll do, you'll roar and jingle and oppress and whisk by and manifest and fog and thump. And it will come to nothing. You will remain, at best, a freaky twinge, a dreadful speculation, at worst, a white sheet celebrated by children and quacks. The spooky pixel. When you get here, see if you need to ask me why I'm so unforgiving, see how open you remain to change. Remember, please, that everything was hocked from me; sense, action, progress, love, industry, just to please an old queen's soured heart.

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Samson's evil is a weight, a polarized anchor I have to yank from the mud to set myself free. I will leave this house, and I will take Samson with me, and he will die the way I died — begging, disbelieving. I'm not a monster, for fuck's sake, I'm the murdered party. Remember, I was b ried with a shrunken, razored heart. I was buried in silence. I'm entitled to strike back, to me ce I have this to s f forgiveness: it doesn't work when you're de . Forgiveness depends on forgetting, on a spreading plain between event and ef ct, between blood and clots, on time's fat. But the dead see time as rot, as futile compilation. We're immune to optical illusions, probably because we're kiin. we're peripheral visions as big as the bowl of hen. We outfox the livlaws of laws of parallax. When we move, we see everyth g we left behind and everything in front equally and clearly, perspective damned. Clemency is impossible,ble, because we can't second guess. Sometimes, when I feel thin and filmy, I pass my hand into my beautiful novel, strum the winched lines of words, cup the fat handfuls of sentences, watch my life work choke beetles behind wet cellar bricks, and I get all solid and tight, curdled with hate. I tried to break the novel, tear it into whole thirds at once. I could not. I worked on smaller sections, chapters and half chapters, but even a quarter inch of pages was too thick for my ghost

122 — R.M. Vawghan

grip. I set my hands to one page, a damp page, scored with erasures. It defeated me. I was super-frustrated, so I went to Marsh's room, to w tch him sleep, for vicarious peace. I held his han and then his hand made a scrunching fist. I laid across his chest and tried the other paw, and his two hands came together and pulled downward in opposite directions. Ripping ghost paper. This is how I discovered the godsend of possession. That night, Marsh and I screwed around like foolish hellions. Cartwheels between rows of bisque teacups, piss in the aquarium, curling fork tines over the gas ring, spunk on Samson's morn' ing paper — the full-tilt juvenilia of demonology. I have dearer jobs for Marsh now, I've refined my anger. Marsh has seamstress fingers and a butcher's grip. Killer's hands. and so will 1.

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MarsK Cole's Diary November 10, 1970. Brindle House, Magog. Brindle House. No, no, not anymore. The Brindle line is complete. I s uld run, pack up and run. Thouse is mine now. I'm waiting forfor thee poundto start, the men to come,n with bigwith big faces and fat arms and long black flashlights. They'll come to the front door. The leaves haven't been raked in eeks. The house is mine now, do I have to let them in? Samson would forbid it, Samson would ask about stamped papers and orders from judges. Samson know all the judges,y used to playplay bridge, right over there in tmoking rng room. Samson would deman his rights s a citizen. Samson would glare the ounders back down into the yellow grass. Samson would protect me. Samson is dead. Oh my god oh my god please help me please oh god please help me please. It's three o'clock, Samson will want tea in fifteen minutes; a roiling boil, warm the cups with the top water, tea into milk never milk into tea, no metal must ever touch tea, sweet brown hard cookies, candied ginger or lotus root. Samson, I'll bring the tray up to your bedroom, the silver tray with the carved frogs and the grapes, Grandmother

124 — R.M. Vaughan

Norville-Brindle's tray, and you'll shake yourself awake and take the first sip, like always. I can't breathe, Samson, I can't make my lips open wide enough. The air hisses in between my teeth but I'm gagging, Samson, gagging on nothi . My spit is gummy. I'm really scared, Samson, and you're still bleeding. Everything is ruined. I'm goin downstairs to wait. 7:30 pm. Samosn's bedroom, I'm staring, sometim p ying, but he is still. His left leg points straight out, toward the window, the shoe is off. His right foot is turned awkwardly up to the ceiling, the leg is doubled under his stomach. The blood from Sa son's forehead is all over his water-blue pants, spots and trails of wet azure, purple where it's dry. The right arm is turned down, hand in a claw. The left arm is folded over the neck. Protecting the head. Samson looks like he crashed through the window, but that's not true. Samson has a cake knife fixed in his right cheek, displacing his nose. The bridge bone snapped out of the skin, it's hard white and lined, like horse hooves. There's a red hole in Samson's forehead, about the same width and style as the cake knife, I assume. The blood spout. Samson has a mixed expression on his face. The muscles on the right side got caught in the cake knife and sped upwards. He's smiling, or doubt-bt-

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ing. Samson's lips look like pencil shavings; clean lines on the bottom, wavy scallops on top, a crying mouth. His eyebrows are riding high; surprised, or catty, forever. Wi they settle? I have to pull the cake knife oan elk horn handle, circled in circled in silver. It wasding gift, never meant to bet to be used at all. One of u will scream. November 13. The worst is over. I wanted Samson dead, and now Samson is dead. But it's not my fault. I was in the pantry, eating Ritz crackers straight out of the box, and I heard a low, whirring sound. A spinning top buzz. So I hid behind the two way door and pulled the light chain. I saw the gold clouds lightbulbs make against darkened retinas, one piled onto the next, hypnotic. I smelled lemons, probably a cracked jar of marmalade. I jumped out after the whirring passed the door, my fists ready. Samson was on his knees, holding his face. The floor was dark underneath him, dark and spreading, a collapsing star. Samson's spilled his coffee, I thought, and he's overreacting. Cherry coffee, too thick for a tea towel. Why is Samson screaming? I bent doto pick him up, the knife handlendle smacked meder the chin. Samson ran fromfrom room to room. He was a horror to watch. My flailing, broken bird. I walked behind him, calling his

126 — R.M. Vaughan

name. He swung blindly at me with his hands, blood tickled my face. Samson threw himself up the stairs. I stayed four steps back. Samson found his bedroom, but the knife handle jammed between the open door and the frame. He thumped the door helplessly with his feet. I set him free. The sounds of bones cleaving and wood slivering are very close. Samson aimed his body at the bedroom window. I couldn't let that happen. He was easy to hold back, and later, hold down. I sang out his name, the way the angels will. He was breathing too fast, his tongue was blueberry blue. I covered his mouth. Blood flew out of his nose and splashed down my shirt sleeve, so I pinched his nostrils closed with my other hand. He squeezed my right calf, the way babies do when they try to stand up. I shook him loose, and he died. I stayed with him for awhile, until my legs started to tingle and numb. I was hungry again, and went back down to the pantry. The crackers were spread out nicely on a tray, in a star pattern, with cubes of havarti and pieces of salmon on top. I must have made the tray before, for Samson. I must have. Samson's tea snack, a spinster's wake.

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o now you know, Foulard. It's all in the boy's diary. Murder for murder for murder. Go, go to Brindle House. The streetsobody knowsbody knows but you. Find the body. Sadle will make will make you a captain. The car starts cold, a good sign. Clear the parking lot. Quiet and smooth. No need for backup, not yet, but a sniffer dog might help. Forget it, the chief takes the dog home at night. Just drive. The roads are mucky with frost. Trees bend low in the cold, hugging their trunks. Swipe the heater tab over to full red. Blow the cold out. Warm air on your lap, unde your seat, smells like dust and gasoline. The backs of your ears are pin-prickly. Not now, NOT NOW. Tamp it down, keep your teeth together. Please God, no; please not now. Just drive. There, there's the old clutterbox up ahead. Behind the high gate. Brindle's folly. When you

132 — A Quilted Heart

were a kid, old lady Brindie chased you off that gate with a broom-handle. She got in a few good whacks. She called you habby trash. Imagine her big shithouse now, swarming with nosey cops, ambulances, habby trash neighbours, even reporters from Montreal. Hundreds of flashbulbs cracking horrible streaks across the lawn, invading the master bedrooms, recording your face. Your hero's face. The front door is blocked. Kick it, shoulder it. Plyboards and new nails, old bills, letters, and black paper fly inside. Flashlight sweep — black paper on the walls, over the windows, looped on curtain rods. The labour of madness. It's like being inside a Christmas present. Run upstairs, look for dry blood. Th bedroom is cold. Don't think about Marsh Cole, don't think about the sad dead boy on the slab. He's a killer, find the evide e. Here, on the floor, brick brown swirls, flat maroon shapes. Hard as lacquer. Frozen, not dried. No body. Sweep the kitchen, sweep the library. No Samson Brindle. Go through the sun room, out to the pond, the garde No floaters, no fresh mounds. Back inside, the fireplace is packed with ashes. But not enough to make a man. You're panting now, Foulard, because you have run the length of the estate and back, because you are overweight, because there is only the cellar to see. Wine bottles,gs, canned food, and heat. A. A July kind of heat. Take off your coat. He has to be

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here. Pace the length, flash light your feet. Pace the width. The floor is warped, but undisturbed. Damn, damn. You have to start all over, Foulard.u idiot,IDIO you've got to go through procedure met dically, like a reasonable man. No more runniINGaround. You'll begin again in the bedroom, look for sticky trails. Trace the path of death. But sit down for a minute, think it out. Where does a dead body go? Sit here, by the box o ld papers. Turn the flashlight off, save the batteries. Did you check the kitchen? Yes, yes. Think a minute. Put your head between your knees. Let the hea lanket your muscles. If you look up now, Foulard, you'll see it. Not Samson Brindie's violated body, of course, but something better — a black miracle. On the wall, radiating in five dendritic points from behind a brass plaque: a limey, glowing lichen star. Blink, its gone. Two hours later you are back in your car. Your fingers are stiff and cranky with cold, and your neck is twisted sore from peering up into chandeliers and down under the ends of beds. You are tired, and not smart enough to be captain. The station house is bright and quiet. The coroner is in the back, taking a wizz. The Cole body is still dressed, still waiting for the knife. Slip the diary back into his jacket. Stay a second. Frisk the suspect. Where is Samson Brindle, young man? Forget it, leave the dead boy alone.

134 — R.M. Vaughan

Go get some coffee, steal yourself a free candy bar out of the vending machine. Tilt the top end of the box forward, then smack the display cage with your palm. This time it's a Caramilk. Stretch out on the waiting room couch. Unfold the squares of typed paper you found under Marsh Cole's fancy French cuff. Wave to the coroner. He snorts back. You are just as clever as you ought to be.

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Marsh Cole's Diary November 14. I refuse to blame myself. Wanting a bad thing to happen and committing a crime are TW DIFFER processes, with very different consequeNCESSAMS had an accident. I burned our clothes, so there is no evidence of my mercy. The worst is over, I outlived my killer. All curses are reversible. When I close my eyes, the gold clouds spin me to sleep.

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IN

rsh undresses by the fireplace. Kindled by Samson's gorey suit, the fire is a phosphorus white. Marsh is naked, he touches his cock absently. No, Marsh tells himself, have some respect. Marsh dresses in fresh underpants, checks the curtains for thin spots, peekable holes, and, reassured, balls his blood-hennaed pants, shirt, socks, and briefs into the fire. Marsh watches, expecting to cry. Instead, he wonders aloud how to burn a large Iranian rug. Marsh is easily distracted from the drama of his own grief, but it is there, waiting to come out. Marsh cleans the cake knife in the servants' kitchen sink, vulnerable in his underpants and fresh shirt, and tears finally break. The knife is spotless, but Marsh washes it again, once more, with a second full sink and more green dishsoap. Microbes, he tells himself, the police can find microbes. But it is really the jolty shake of crying he

140 — R.M. Vawghan

wants to repeat. Later, he vomits, after wiping Samson's face. A tooth floats out of Samson's mouth and onto his cold chin. Marsh vomits again. Down on his knees in the master bathroom, Marsh remembers he is fresh out of disinfectant, for the walls — or the doorknob, anywhere flecked with Samson — and panics. The panic crests, and Marsh soon falls asleep with a bath towel for a pillow. Thirty-nine hours later, Samson begins to smell. But it is mid-November, and the Brindle grounds are hard cake. Marsh considers hiding pieces of Samson behind the parged wall in the first basement, but since he knows nothing about mortars and stucco, he relents. Besides, he cannot cut Samson into quarters. Marsh is too sentimental, and far too knowledgeable about how the dead come back. He trembles at the prospect of being haunted by a rattling thigh or a floating, radiant collar bone. Trembles, and giggles. Samson is heavy in death. Marsh must lift Samson's legs onto the bed first, and then his head. How perfectly Samson's mattress is shaped to Samson's body, even after e rigor has set. An old, ratted mattress, nobody would question its disposal. Marsh breaks the rayon seams with a pair of tin snips. The blue stuffing pores out, salted with years of dander. The dust is swampy, layering the bedroom like smoke. A fireless funeral pyre. Marsh

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fetches green garbage bags and twist ties for the stuffing, but is afraid to open a window, despite the dust; Samson's fetor is an alarm bell. The mattress is hollowed, and the body slips in once Marsh cracks Samson's legs and arms into a convenient coffin posture. The next morning, Marsh buys driveway salt and ten pounds of cloves at the supermarket. He tells the cashier he is making cloved tangerines, as ornaments. Christmas is coming. Marsh buys tangerines too, just in case. The cashier winks at the packing boy. Faggots, she signals, and it is explanation enough. Stuffed with cloves and salt, Samson's canvas tomb is sown tight and readied for the town dump. Marsh finds two pine end tables and kicks off their legs. Nobody has only one thing to throw away. Nobody innocent. A cord of old bricks and three years worth of National Geographic round off the staged fall clean up. Marsh calls the truck man, whose son used to weed the rose garden for Samson's mother, and the man takes five dollars to carry Samson to his final rest. The truck man figures Marsh is too skinny for real work, and helps him with the heavy double mattress. "How is Mr. Brindle," the man asks. "In Morocco, for the winter," Marsh says, looking away, back to the bedroom window. "Asthma," he confides.

142 — R.M. Vaughan

"Terrible disease," the man says quietly, thinking: Like hell, it's the boys he's gone for. Better over there than fiddling with one of ours, the man tells himself, and drives away, chased by a lingering, miry feeling he choses not to explore.

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Final Pages of Marsh Cole's Diary December 9, 1970, Brindle House, Magog, Something is not at ease inside of my mouth. Maybe it's a bad tooth, or a gum disease, or the plague. I amrsty, but whatever I drink water,WATER vod , tea,le juice, melted chocolate — no NO matthe strength of s taste, all I can taste isTEIS terrible, warm, sharp lons. Lemoand a backA BACK taste, close to meat — duck or moose — a brown, greasy mEAT.TURNED BLACKblack. MY TONGUE IS NOT COAYEDTHERE IS NO BLOOD unsettlLEDBIin my throat. I'm not coughing. The thirst is ming. I dream about swimming and AND wake up with headaches. I have to shit every half hour. Powdery, cold shit. I tried freezing my tastebuds with icecubes untiIL tTHE nerves in my molars throbbed down into my SHOULDERSThe brandy I took afterwards tasted likeLEMONS,gain, and dried horse hair. I've scalde my to gue with hot water, rinsed my mouth with bleac and soda, swirled vinegar and basil around m onsils, gargled eau de Lisbon and Brut. The flesh inside my cheeks is pocked with canker sores, the corners of my lips are opened and cracked. My gums are soft, my teeth bend, my breath is caustic. I choke back drops from the tap, licks of con-

144 — R.M, Voughan

densation off bottles. The taste burns pinholes and nettles. I wonder if I'm dying? Forgive my handwriting, I'm holding the pen with my index and ring finger. My thumb will not respond anymore. When my legs twitch, my head bobs, and I can't keep words to the lines. I'm sorry. This morning, I painted my tongue with hot paraffin, and I burnt my writing hand on the pot handle — my handwriting is reduced to swipes and babyish chops, so please be generous. The paraffin didn't work, it broke off in scales. And it tasted like lemons. On a brighter note, I've discovered Sylvairis man' uscript. A wonderous book, a kaleidoscope. The pages are not numbered, but it doesn't seem to matter. At least they're typed. I found the ms. under the arbutus tree three days ago, in a metal strong box., I was so excited, I realized later I'd forgotten to put on my boots, or socks. My feet were stung blue from the snow. I'm a bit distracted lately. I can't remember moving from room to room. Or why. I forget why I went outside in the first place. I'm lucky, I guess. My hours, the darkening days, have no connection, no natural flow. Except when I'm reading Sylvain's beautiful book. I'll be better soon. I had a pack of syringes sent over from the pharmacy. The look of me scared the new delivery boy--he wouldn't ;TWAIT FOR tip. I'm practicing filling the cylinder with water,

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and I marked a circle around my tracea with iodine. When I finish reading the novel, I'm going to arrange the pages in a sensible order, retype the whole text, I've got all winter, and then publish it under my name. Damn this sickness, I have work to do. My whole life has been a bumbling series of bad trades — good chances for poor luck. Not anymore. I have my passport now. Goddamn my useless fingers — (illegible four paragraphs, crude drawing of a leopard in the left margin of the page, I 1/2 inches by 3 inches) December 10, 1971. (illegible) he promised, he promised me (illegible line) I trust him. I'm so tired. I need help. My hair is coming out in my hands. Nothing else works, nothing works at all (illegible) (illegible) bitter (illegible, page is torn).

146 — R.M. Vaughan

Sylvain Oulette Marsh, baby, come down to the pool. It's super refreshing. The watTER IS C. 1 promise you, no more blisters, no feEVER.A CUg water, honey boy a bubbling sweet trickle. Melted sugar popsicles. Fill your cheeks, spit, do it again. In ith the good, out with the bad. Remember the wATERsa y rules: empty stomach, buddy to buddy, never swim alone, extTENDyour reach. Spit again. Now open your throat Marsh, all the way down to the dIAPhram, like an opera singer. My super star. Now drink. Good boy. Slowly. Let it slide, fall to your stomach. Dizzy? Hold yourself close t the wall, the spins will fix. Cold, yes, it's a nice cold drinK.I promised you so. C'mon, take some more. Flush yourself out. We're alone, you can pee here. There's no shame. Marsh, why are you crying? My baby. We'll change your pants. Ready for another drinky? A sip? Open up. I know, I know, I know, shhhh. It hurts. Finish up your water and we'll go back inside. You can light a fire, put on your slippers. We'll read together. One more big swallow, and we're all done. There we are. I'll wait for you here, by the diving board. You climb out when you're ready. Did you get enough? Are you full now? Pull, Marsh, pull yourself up. Give me your hanD. Don't cry, baby, don't cry.

A Quilted Heart — 147

EveERody falls. Let's have another go, give me your hand. Pull. Pull harder. Almost, baby, almost home. Oopsy. C'mon now, stand up. Fight, Marsh, fight. I'm cold too, but I made it out and so can you. Give me that hand again. There's my boy. What a good strong hand. Up we go. Oh, that's a disappointment. Fourth time's the charm. Alright, you rest a minute. It's a gorgeous afternoon. BrRIGHTno wind. I suppose we'll get snow tonight. YOUtake a little breather. I'll be here, waiting. Just put your hand up when you're ready. For Christ's sake now, that's crazy talk. You'll get home. Yes you will. I'm here to see to it. We have plans, Marshy, you and me. Glory days are coming. Wipe your face big fella, no more cryinG. Reach, baby, reach. My hand in thine, a loser walk with thee. Stretch out, out. I'm right here, can't yYOUfeel my fingertips? Higher, Marsh, you're so close. Closer. Don't be scared, it's just a cloud passing under the sun. Just black dust and water. I can see you fine, really. You're almost home Marsh. Concentrate on me. Don't worry, we can turn all the lights on when you make it over. Close your eyes, it helps. The dark cloud isn't going to go away, it's sky wide. Swallows the sun, the way you did to me. Hold my hand Marsh, we'll leave together. I forgive you. Don't be afraid. Like I told you, everybody falls.

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y57

("^/fficer Foulard fingers his temples. The veins are flat and cool, a good sign. A doctor told Foulard to keep his temples open to the fresh air, to not push the brim of his hat so low on his forehead. The circulation of bodily fluids, the doctor said, is not to be impeded. But Foulard is a shy man, and needs often to cover his eyes. When he was a green cop, Foulard suffered from jags of giggling, even over parking tickets. He was mistaken for a man without heart. The coroner pushes into the autopsy room. Foulard follows, tucking his hands into his wide coat pockets, out of respect; as if to say, I have touched nothing, not a fibre. ThHEoroner is impatient with the police. His science is pure, he is a lapidarARf the human form..DERECon, however, is simply catching dumb crooOOKSWdumber luck. The coroner scans Marsh Cole's orpse for evidence of police corruption. Pity, the dead boy

152 — R.M. Vaughan

appears unmolested. The coroner so wants to yell at Foulard. Most people do. Squinting flatfoot bastard, the coroner thinks, looking over his shoulder while he unbuttons Marsh Cole's shirt. Foulard watches. The coroner unbuckles Marsh Cole's belt, slides off the dead boy's pants, then socks and briefs. Foulard leans impatiently against a wheeled tray of saw blades and forceps, bumping a scalpel off the table. I'll need those, the coroner sighs, meaning: leave me to my f king work. But Foulard can't go yet, he needs to see Marsh Cole mad nto lesser pieces, into hunks. Marsh Cole is still o present, too alive, and Foulard likes to sleep thoughtlessly. Tonight will be Marsh Cole's true funeral. The coroner opens Marsh Cole's chest with a diamond-bit saw. Foulard tilts his head, counter to the light. Nothing escapes. No fogs, no vapours, no watery beasts. Foulard takes his hat, nods to the coroner, and is waved away. What did you expect Foulard, a lantern head, dancing fairy speckles? Foulard takes the longer road home, around the lake and past the BrindleE Etate. Deep in his ves pocket, next to the wrapped caramels he keeps for lost kids, Foulard is hiding thTHE TWOges of folded, typed paper. He stole them from under Cole's shirt cuff, while the coroner was in the can. Looks like poetry.

A Quilted Heart — 153

Foulard will read the pages again, when he gets safely home. There are no lights on at Brindle House. Mr. Samson is still on holiday, people will say. Until the police find his body. Foulard is due for a vacation too. Maybe more. You SEEM,, on the spot where the typed paper touched Marsh Cole's wrist, the dead skin was fever hot. But that couldn't be.