Parallel Rivers Read online

  He half-raised his hands to his eyes. He tried to recall the wet slap of mortar, of the trowel, the grate of bricks, the limpet mine, the ship’s hull, the shovel and the detonator.

  He made a deep angel in the snow, skinny arms and legs swimming. His body forgot to live. There followed a purring time of winter studs and chains. And then his name changed. His name kept changing. He could no longer say, As sure as my name is. It kept changing. From his forehead flowed dark, though the street he was on had four lamps along the righthand side. The third lamp was smashed; the others gave spiritless light. There was nowhere to go. The house to his left fell flat on the curb, without even a flurry of dust, though the weather had been dry for weeks. A swank vehicle was gliding into the opposite end of the street, Rolls Royce Silver Cloud, with no motor noise, no lights. Blueprinted. Smooth. His name was William. He put forward his leg, dragged the other after it, swung that leg forward. The car parked. Walking took a long time to master. His name was Alex. He thought of nothing. The broken lamp, glass crunching underfoot. Nothing happened. His name was Geoff. The Rolls Royce. Raoul. His left hand on the driver’s door. Help me. A woman sitting inside. Could be. Adrian. The door handle.

  Sometimes you get a story, surefire, because a guy told you and you remember the guy, he was a good friend. A strange story needs telling. A bridge needs crossing. I don’t completely comprehend it. Well, let’s say I just know the story well.

  From his forehead flows dark, an easy flow, blackness, and three lamps shed light on the street into this dark, a fourth is smashed, the house crumples to the curb. A Rolls Royce Silver Cloud stops at the opposite end. He walks to the car. There’s a woman in the driver’s seat. Help me. His hand touches the door handle.

  What happens when three lamps shed little light on the street? The house on the left will fall. The Silver Cloud will pull round the corner, park at the curb. He’ll grasp the door handle.

  You know what’s coming next. You’re thinking I’m telling my own story, maybe you’re right. Maybe you’re right. I can’t figure why I’m always telling this one, except it’s in my head. Anyhow. This is it. The Rolls will turn. It’s all that’s left of the world. There’s a woman in the driver’s seat. In the gloom, the left hand will shed the right. The right will fall and, in the end, grasp snow.

  TWENTY NIGHTS IN JERUSALEM

  1

  On the plane, I pass a note to the pregnant woman beside me. To Sheba, Queen. I plan to make love to you below decks amid casks of gold, in hotel boiler rooms, on hills of spice at the Apple Exchange. We will cavort by almug pillars where the grass grows high and two harts play. We will wear death masks.

  Huh, she says, struggling the seat belt around. Not my fault we missed Christmas.

  2

  Shaved and washed, with unkissed mouth, I fall asleep jetlagged to enter my father’s last night.

  In the gloom he dreams the death of giants over and over. At the foot of the bed, unmarried, untried, peeking from a crimson blanket, curls Abishag, pale with love. The mouth that goes down like wine, the breasts like grapes.

  Be strong, I say.

  I’m not sure, replies Father.

  Remember, I say, the scent of lilies? Remember when one closed eye and one chain from her neck were cause for lust?

  On consideration, the chain and the glance are never enough. I’ve been king for years, I realize, my own man. But as usual I have a strange woman in my chambers, in the darkest corner of the throne room. This thirteen-year house is defiled; it reeks of missing gold and the myrrh from three hundred virgins, the ones Dad unlocked. The house expects love and still finds rape, taker of the veil.

  Chains, I muse.

  How beautiful! says Anne. Look at the minaret. Aqua!

  3

  Tonight in Tel Aviv they say a cold front is coming. Father’s death is accompanied by strands of Abishag’s fragrant hair streaming towards the harbourside a whole block away to encircle someone’s iced daiquiri as the merchant ships set sail. Sheba, must you leave me to virgins? Across the café table Anne begins to laugh. Her teeth are links in a chain as white as sheep. She is the Rose of Sharon. I am solemn and nervous as confession, left to observe the twitchy public.

  4

  How do I cut a baby in half? How can the son (it will be a boy) suckle its father’s breast? My father keeps dying at the crack of dawn and now the bones of my bones knit in my Canadian Sheba, seven months home. I know my son will die, will be laid out on deck and covered by a canvas tent, launched upon the Red Sea. To journey no farther than your gifts journey, Father: the Gulf of Suez to Africa.

  Why am I not a woman, to feel the triangle opening, see the blond shroud of a sail, a wraith on the horizon outdistancing the death-thrall?

  5

  I guess those red motes dance hot down there as the moon spins.

  Yep, she says, real hot. Her body has the whiteness of a lily in thorns. She aims the sodden napkin and I no longer have my pole of flesh.

  What we’re trying to do in this place, she says, is something we’ve never done before.

  Well, I’m trying to understand my part — I pat her belly — and trying to come to grips with my father.

  All right, she says.

  I lie awake and wonder what she’s doing here.

  The Shulamite moves her body on the periphery of my gaze, spice between her breasts, nipples apple-redolent beneath silk, soft red mouth below the veil. In the vineyards she is dark among the twisting vines, dark against the milk-white sky. The womb her hips pronounce is woven hope with debt and we spend and spend. I run this way, into one frame, head a June rose to break that frame — push through parent universe, through petals, red and white, blood and skin. Shulamite, I—

  What did you say? Anne mumbles.

  6

  I am the shepherd drawing at the map table inside the tent. My eyes, washed in milk, set free doves in cedar branches. Yet swords churn beneath banners. Pomegranate temples are laid waste. The war is love as strong as death. The vineyards have been salted. The desert, where the gouging wind has shaped a saline tower, is fair as the moon, clear as the sun.

  7

  In our room at the King David Hotel the radiator won’t shut off, the window won’t close. I draw quietly with my Eagle Canadiana lemon yellow pencil crayon, number 506, while Anne is sleeping. I have the radio turned low. Outside it’s very loud. The sky has a plane. Scratching like sand on inflamed skin. The drum I hear must be the pulse of the gone sun aching to return. I colour my roofscape yellow. Night takes deep breaths, stealthily closing, terrible as an army. I recall that fleeting look you gave me, Father, and wonder if there is any peace inside this room.

  8

  I light a cigarette. Paris is clear and the music is jazz-born in wet black streets.

  Anne’s mouth is sweet red wine, her belly seven months bloated. She smiles and hums softly. Her tribe miles away, her garden shut and her fountains sealed. Her hair still holds the scent of spices: spikenard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon and mandrake. She lifts her teacup. A hair is curled round the rim. We are under the spell of the turtle’s voice.

  My moon, she says.

  9

  She talks of trying to rock the baby to sleep. I mention the burning of beacons when a child dies at sea. The falling of besieged walls. An old man dying in the light of his own achievements.

  I feel terrible, she says. She crosses the room to the window. Listen to that crowd, she says. I want to go home.

  I help her from the window back to the bed.

  I feel sick, she says. Will you rub my temples?

  10

  Surely, she says, you don’t want our baby cut in half?

  No, no, I say.

  11

  She’s too hot to sleep. She leaves the hotel room, is gone for hours. When she returns, she’s frightened.

  Shabbat square is full of people. They’ve turned over a dairy truck.

  Toward dawn, we hear chanting and I imagine the foetus
sailing those streets, past luminous buildings, toward the Old City, into the white hills. Muezzins calling from a dozen Mosques.

  We’re safe here. Soon it will be morning.

  12

  A pleasant dawn: a narrow cobalt-blue sky.

  13

  Sleep.

  14

  I smoke too much. My terracotta fingers kill the butt and I empty my pencil crayons onto the carpet. Light green, grass green, emerald green and violet. Light blue, ultramarine, lemon, and canary yellow. Brown, orange, and midnight black. Carmine and scarlet, crimson and magenta. No cobalt blue.

  15

  The young man inside the drum-belly kicks against my palm. No love of death here. I listen to a soft ornamental voice singing from the minaret and hear a story of pillars and swords, an armoury under a ceiling latticed with rolled gold.

  16

  I light a cigarette. I turn up the radio.

  Electric guitar spills out of the window with the smoke. Much cooler this evening. I take her in my arms. Of the shadows, armies remain. A soldier rehearses the dusk. Echoplex waves flow through the air. We are caught on aloe spines, remembering lilies and grapes. We have moved into still, other tenses. Thud of blood, vine strand.

  Thy teeth are like sheep in their whiteness, I murmur, as we sleep, only a belly apart. Thy willow-body is supple. A scent of spring in the cargo on the mountain of spice. Safe, safe.

  She holds me at arm’s length. Too hot.

  17

  Queen of Sheba? Yeah, he used to call her that. An endearment left over from when she was pregnant with me. They were there for the uprising. He was working on a thing, on Solomon — the Bible, you know. No, she told stories, not him. Every morning the muezzin woke them up. I was right there, swimming in circles. She told me I never slept. I guess they must’ve been terrified. A peacock flew up and perched on their windowsill one morning. “A prince,” she said. I’d like to set things straight, though, set things straight, just for the record — he never had an original idea. My little finger’s bigger than my old man’s penis.

  18

  In Bethlehem, we drank Pernod by a window overlooking a terrace, watched the café sign disappear in gales of blowing snow again and again. On the table between us we spread a map of Palestine, a crimson pencil in a fold across the Jordan River, its point in the Dead Sea. Sudden tear gas in the crowd confused us. We thought it too cold for trouble. My God, she said. Naked Abishag scenting shepherd under all my finery.

  This feels real, she said.

  We smiled at each other. We ordered another round. I touched the feathers twined in her hair. I watched the flecks in her eyes. Such dark eyes.

  19

  I’m in the dark. Midnight black. Listening to the chanting, listening the radio to sleep. She’s in premature labour. Above the Sinai, flying Lethean Airlines, my pencil crayon glides down to trip the light fantastic on the runaway runway. No planes are to take off. It’s January. Look both ways and stop, just past Red, just before Sea.

  No dream. The searchlights search. The desert is gone. Planes have landed. The lights flare and dwindle. The breeze in the room is cool with hidden smoke.

  The curtains weave shadows. I can’t see across the room. I’d like to hear a baby crying, but not yet.

  20

  I wipe clean the four-paned window set into the aluminum door. In the depths, on a steel cot covered with a crimson blanket, Anne holds our baby to her breast and smiles.

  The most wonderful dream, she says, when I’m allowed to join her. I am a princess returning home from a ball and I meet a little English boy pulling a cart filled with milk bottles beside a stream and it’s nearly dawn. Frost glitters on the paving stones. I ask him where he’s taking his milk. He touches my hand so gently and says, “Down the lane to Hampstead Heath, then I deliver to Brazil, to China, to New Zealand and Canada and Germany, Switzerland and India.” His face is beautifully serious. “And Africa?” I ask. “Of course,” he says. “But, I’m just going to Africa,” I say. He lifts two crates from the cart, places one on the other and I take them up. The bottles don’t feel heavy, they feel light. He begins to pull his cart away and I don’t want him to leave. “I’m always on this route at this hour,” he says. I watch the back of his small head. He’s already some distance down the road.

  THEATRICAL REMOVALS

  THROUGH THE ONLY LIT WINDOW ON the ground floor of a dun-coloured building — the only lit window in the whole block — Jake sees an empty cupboard and a cot.

  On the side of the room farthest from the window, the boy lies on the worn ticking of the mattress, reading a book. Half an hour ago the girl, astonished by the resonances between this night and the novel she’s reading, made a surprised noise in her throat and handed the book to the boy. Now she leans against the cupboard, looking into the street. Overhead wires divide the dark sky from the pools of light cast by lamps hanging from every other pole. The dim buildings across the way seem malevolent presences. The well-manicured boulevard in front of the old warehouse gleams: a green plane belonging to another universe. This scene, too, reminds the girl of one of the scenes from the novel.

  The boy skims through to the main action of the story, which takes place at night in a desolate area of small businesses just like this district. A tramp is struck down by a pale blue TransAm driven by some girl who, directed by her date, is going to— But the boy, hardly able to keep his eyes open after such a hectic day and less impressed by the coincidences than the girl, reads no further before falling asleep.

  What is that sound? She presses her fingers against her eyes and the view before her is imprinted on her lids, the TransAm drifting out of sight, leaving the clear image of the tramp slumped in the gutter on a pile of new-mown grass. An engine running, a car idling.

  Tap my right foot on the gas then my left foot on the high-beam button and chew slowly, let’s say thoughtfully, on a bitten-off fingernail, smoke creeping along the dash. Once I worked for a blacksmith. So that’s dishwasher, gandy dancer, automobile painter, blacksmith’s apprentice, cabdriver. Can’t picture me young, betcha. Ten years hard labour. But I never touched her, your Honour! You’re dirty, Lucy said, and I’ve had enough, me and the baby’re moving in with Mama. So she did. Flick the fag into the night, knuckles to my mouth and blow through them into my palms. Yeah, I saw the blonde climb out of the TransAm, the boy panting at her heels. And the dirty sod peeping at them through the window, ankle deep in fresh grass. Licking his lips. Wiping his hands on the back of his pants. Stinking pisspot. They’re only kids. None of my business. A fare’s a fare and he left a twenty when he told me to wait. Chew the skin behind each fingernail. Ah, thank God it’s spring. Things could be worse. In spring I’m never cold, though wet’s possible, a good soaking, a downpour when I’m limping between the cab and some apartment block. Quick, my kingdom for a change of clothes, a fresh pair of undershorts. What’s the sky doing? If it were to rain, I’d count my blessings. Once my dad gave me a rabbit called Ears. Ears came out sniffing when I called. O the pain of my back. I never get out of the taxicab if I can help it, never say boo to a passenger, not one word. Sure, they never greet me either. If one were to say howdy, then I’d say howdy back. Yeah, that’s what it takes. That’s a start. Anyway, I know my job — follow that car — it’s pure kneejerk. Sometimes, when I turn a corner, I’m a NASCAR dude, lips set and heart like a child’s. You’re a beautiful baby, Papa’s sunshine, that’s what. So that’s cab driver, peeping Tom, let’s see, doesn’t matter, not a tinker’s cuss. Tinker, tailor. Used to know that one. I saw the kid hide the girl’s keys on top of the closet, the young swine. The old fart. The sullen deadbeat. What a phony accent. What a stink! I wish — No. I have nothing to say, your Honour. Open the curtains wide, sweetheart. Let’s see you. Never happen, pal. But we’re mesmerized, old bastard and me. What will we do? Nothing. Where will we go? Nowhere. Count my blessings anyway. The rabbit, Lucy, our baby girl. I’m no bum. I own my own taxi, and it’s warm, the meter�
��s up to fifteen-fifteen. I could leave now and take a five-buck tip. Always ahead of myself. They wipe their little noses on the grass, rabbits, nip the blades with their teeth. Ah. She’s taking her clothes off. Good. The blonde’s taking off her clothes and me and the drifter and the boy watch her and soon we’ll know something. Spring will change to summer and that pile of grass will turn to hay, bleached by sun, burrowed in by mice night after night. Long days will pass and the hay spawn mouse and spider and fly in the heat from the hay, hotter and hotter, till the stack explodes. We’ll all know something. She leans so softly and sweetly into the room. And the boy will show her his lucky horseshoe.

  Jake stares through the window at the leggy blonde he’s been following. He knows this girl, knows her house, knows her car. Feels the tense veins beneath her milky skin, the highways that taper for mile after cool mile. This boy seems a thin satellite, a wisp, in her presence. When the boy’s hand rises to stroke the girl’s breast, the book falls from her grasp.

  The boy gets up on one elbow, licks the indentation of her right thigh, his free hand clutching at her wrist, pulling her down to lie beside him. Afterwards, he walks to the window.

  Is she bored? He can’t tell. He watches her turn the pages, watches her eyes following the lines, left to right, top to bottom.

  Keep driving. Now we’re accomplices. We don’t talk about it. He wants to make out. I’m so not into that. What kind of thing is hitting the old guy? I’ve seen him before. A creep, but he never does anything. I guess I’m okay but my neck hurts. After the dance, in the TransAm, we have nothing to say. But he gives me this look. Like we’re really going to do this. I’m like okay, all right, whatever. He’s shocked it’s my first time, and it hurts and really, I could be anything. Anyone. No one. It’s like a roll of loonies sliding in and out of me. I’m thinking wow. So strange the way it all seems to connect. This lonely business area, taxi idling across the street. He’s pretty cute, though not so tough, and he’s sweating like a mechanic even though the room’s cool. The old man just bounces off the windshield. We warm ourselves up, but the heat doesn’t last. A silhouette against the glass, is he facing me or facing outside? I can’t tell. It’s all right for him, he wasn’t the one driving.