by Su Zihan
Do It Over The Birdbath
by VICTORIA HETHERINGTON
The day before Tyler died was warm enough to brighten the ice with rain, and back and forth across the widened hospital sidewalk extended family members and friends carried trays of food and blankets and a pot of flowers brightly pink, uncovered.
Tyler’s mother invited all the kids in our class over the evening of his last birthday. Maybe all the adults in the glassed-off dining room, eating beans and raisins to be polite — maybe they knew he would die in the morning.
As the cake glowed I glimpsed white socks and his head of hair as his father carried him in.
Ten years later I’m struggling into the least dirty dress I can find, feeling pinched and late. I hide my credit cards under my mattress, as I sense the kind of night it’ll be.
Once I’m drunk and planted you have the gall to lean back and say, after a pause, “So. What else?”
And I realize it’s been five dates already: the heavy summer has aged into early fall, and we’ve witnessed it together, in a sense, still young and unfamiliar with life’s foreclosures, and isn’t that something else? Isn’t it lots else? How could we ever run out of things?
You take me home to a depressing low-slung building near the very same glittering built-up downtown hospital – Tyler’s hospital, I think childishly – its glass tunnels extending out in all directions with newly yellow leaves slathering them and I ask, What is it like to live here, right here?
And you say: “I’ve seen more people smoking outside that hospital than anywhere else,” and I say,
“Wow, crazy,” meaning,
“I’m waiting for, but not expecting, an accompanying profound insight,” but also thinking, maybe I’m being mean, or dismissive, because if I look hard enough, that in itself has meaning: it’s a distinct social ritual conducted within an unlikely and charged social setting to which endless people are bound, horrifically bound, in tight aching familial orbits and deep palliative pools of sleep like Tyler’s —
And you say: “Crazy? Do you think it is?” meaning,
“What, you think you’re smarter than me?” or
“You’re down to fuck anyway, right?”
And I say, “I’m so excited to see your place, John,” meaning
“Yes to both,” and you usher me inside.
+
The walls hum and vibrate with scattered dancing light and shadow as your completely bald roommate plays a video game involving a gigantic machine gun attached to the TV with its wires trailing through an open and nearly empty pizza box, and I look at his feet curled together in white-enough socks jerking together with each successive vigorous round of killing.
And he says, “Oh, hey,” meaning,
“Oh, tits,” and you guide me to the kitchen, turning on the light, and evidently read my stricken face, because you say, “Dylan and I happen to be extremely busy and I find hiring cleaning women unethical, so.”
And I say, “That’s OK,” meaning,
unfortunately, just that, because I’m lonely and so heartbroken and I’d fuck just about anyone, and suddenly I understand I don’t like you at all, and you don’t like me either –
‘So what else?’ So everything else!
So everything else until we’re fucking dead!
+
Alone in your shower, feeling witnessed and hastily scraping grime and smoke and spit from my hair, I wonder which of the shampoos your completely bald roommate uses. Dylan.
And empirically I discover your household’s hands-off attitude towards domestic labor extends to laundering the towels, and pat myself down with flaking toilet paper, flushed and naked in the mirror. Dylan?
And on my way back to your bedroom I hear you murmur "…I love you," into your phone, and stand thinking, thinking, then turn back around.
Dylan sits on a kitchen stool, drumming on the counter, his knees knocking and heartbreakingly thin, and he takes in my wet hair, my face no doubt still faintly toilet-papered in places, and as we stare at each other, I’m seized by a flash of deep knowing: Dylan. We grew up together; I knew him when his brother was dying. Dylan and Tyler. Leukemia. My god.
“Hey?" he says, meaning: "What?”
“John’s just…on the phone,” I say.
I sit down beside Dylan, amazed at the breadth of his body, the clamshell-like muscle at the base of his shaved, nicked skull, which flicks as he turns to press START on the microwave.
“Did you win the game?” I ask, and he shrugs, and we sit, waiting for the microwave to finish, and I’m amazed at what I really want: proximity.
“So what do you do?” I ask, maybe meaning,
“So how did you cope?” and Dylan shrugs again.
“I’m still in school. Astronomy.” He nods toward the night sky through the window — “Because look at all that shit.”
+
by Su Zihan
You appear in the kitchen doorway, anxiety etched like bad dreams over your face. Dylan calls you over and we sit, sharing a joint, blowing its sweet smoke out the window, looking through his thick glossy textbooks, reading about orbits and stars. I can tell from your eyes that, mostly, you're just looking at the pictures, very stoned. Eventually you goes to watch TV, and Dylan reads from the book:
“If you lived on a platform floating in Uranus's atmosphere near its north pole, you'd have continuous daylight for half of its orbit of the Sun, or 42 years. Then, after a very gradual sunset, you'd enter into a 42-year-long night. I can’t believe it — a night that long.”
“Me neither,” I say. I can’t.
“What?” he says, and I realize I’ve been staring at him, a little too high, imagining his skull beneath his skin.
“I was wondering how often you shave your head.”
“Like four times a week.” he pauses, then says: “I’m a little overdue.”
“Can I try?”
Wordlessly he gets up and retrieves a razor from his room, and we pause: John’s whistling in the bathroom. “Do it over the birdbath,” he says.
+
We wrap on our coats and step outside, smoking and shivering and craning upwards, and the city night sky seems bleached gray-purple, speckled with faint stars. He sits in a plastic lawn chair, and bends his neck over the silty birdbath. I grip the back of his head with one hand. His living head. Tyler. I think about Uranus, its atmosphere, and the unfathomable black of space; but passed time, grade six, and Tyler feel unimaginably further. The moon, the roof, and Dylan’s dreamy upturned face swim sickeningly close. Unmoored and trapped, I say:
“Oh my god.”
“Yeah,” he says. The tendons in his neck tighten up and I drag the razor along his scalp.
“Let’s say you were born alone on the atmospheric platform, at the start of a day/night Uranus epoch thing. Would you prefer to be young for the day or for the night?”
“Day,” he says, keeping still. “I love the morning.”
And I remember hearing that Tyler died in the morning, but at three, as dark as it is right now. He didn’t see the real morning: gray and then white — and then riotous — but maybe he heard the early, early bird noise through the winter vacuum. I tap the razor against the birdbath rim. I hope Tyler woke to hear the birds, and forgot the talk of low blood count creeping round the glass dining doors — those sparrows hailing the dark new morning, as yet innocent, innocent for as long as he would know it —
+
Dylan lets me finish, and when it is done we look at his shucked skull a bit at a time using both of my smudgy makeup mirrors. I watch the peeled and shiny and slightly bleeding skin that goes all the way over his head.
“You get used to it,” he says.
“To shaving your head?”
“Yes but also, I don’t know – anything. Yeah, shaving your head. And loneliness. Or someone in bed. As long as it’s every day. Because you feel like it’s always been a certain way, and it’ll never change and that if it changes you’ll die — until it does.”
“Until it does.”
“And then there will be more days of something different, one at first, and then more and more, one on top of the next. And then you’ll barely be able to remember how you lived before, when it was different.”
And we’re quiet, looking up again. He asks me: “What about you? Day first, or night?” And the answer comes over me like a shadow: night. I imagine months of dawn tendrils painstakingly blessing my forty-one- point-six-year-old eyes with miraculous sight. I imagine joyfully learning of the two dozen moons pushing swift shadows along my platform, circling the green gaseous world with me 90000 kilometers up. (Don't we all trade youth for knowledge anyway? And probably it's the lucky ones among us who learn anything at all.) I imagine thinking and aging alone on my platform, with the passage of years changing the methane-rich sky to red, as if in sympathy. Then growing dimmer and dimmer, assisting my months-long farewell to the moons, my old friends, and to my own rich age of sight, of experience.
Some time later I open the front door as quietly as I can, as the TV reverberates and the sound goes funny in the narrow hall. I find you sitting on the couch by yourself. “I thought you’d gone,” you say, bleary-eyed like a little kid on New Year’s, on Christmas Eve, waiting through the early hours of the morning. These are the hours for a child’s version of adults, for their cushioned quiet and for the otherworldly too; the realm we always expect to enter as we age and never really do.
Victoria Hetherington is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Toronto. She last wrote in these pages about something to come home to. You can find her website here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.
"Holland Road" - Mumford & Sons (mp3)
"Not With Haste" - Mumford & Sons (mp3)
The new album from Mumford & Sons is entitled Babel and it will be released in the United States on September 25th.
by Su Zihan