"The Robber Bride" - читать интересную книгу автора (Atwood Margaret)

VIII

Not surprised, because people don’t die. Or so Charis believes. Tony asked her once what she meant by die, and Charis—who is made nervous by Tony’s way of pinning her down, and frequently gets out of it by pretending she hasn’t heard the question—had to admit that they did go through a process that everyone was in the habit of calling death: Certainly some fairly terminal things happened to the body, things that Charis would rather not dwell on because she hasn’t decided whether it would be better to mingle with the earth, or—through cremation—with the air. Each of these possibilities is appealing as a sort of general idea, but when it comes right down to it, to particulars such as her own fingers, toes, and mouth, then less.

But death was just a stage, she tried to say. It was just a sort of state, a transition; it was—well, a learning experience.

She isn’t very good at explaining things to Tony. She usually stutters to a halt, especially with Tony’s huge and slightly chilly eyes fixed on her, magnified by those glasses, and with Tony’s little pearly-toothed mouth slightly open. It’s as if Tony is amazed by everything Charis says. But amazement is not—she suspects—what is really going on in that delicate head of Tony’s. Though Tony never laughs at her, not up front.

“What do you learn?” said Tony.

“Well, you learn—how to be better, next time. You join the light,” said Charis. Tony leaned forward, looking interested, so Charis fumbled on. “People have after-death experiences, and that’s what they say, that’s how we know. When they come back to life again:”

“They come back to life?” said Tony, her eyes enormous. “People pound their chests. And breathe into them, and warm them up, and, and, bring them back,” said Charis. “She means near-death,” said Roz, who often tells Tony what

Charis means. “You must have read those articles! It’s a number lately. You’re supposed to get a sort of son et lumiere. Tunnels and fireworks and baroque music. My father had one, when he had the first heart attack. His old bank manager showed up, lit like a Christmas tree, and told my father he couldn’t die yet because he had unfinished business:”

“Ah,” said Tony. “Unfinished business:’

Charis wanted to say that this wasn’t what she meant, she did mean after death. “Some people don’t get as far as the light,” she said. “They get lost. In the tunnel. Some of them don’t even know they’re dead:” She did not go on to say that these sorts of people could be quite dangerous because they could get into your own body, more or less move into it, like squatters, and then it could be difficult to get them out again. She didn’t go on to say this, because it would have been futile: Tony was a proof addict.

“Right,” said Roz, who was made very uncomfortable by this sort of conversation. “I know people like that. My own bank manager, for instance. Or the government. Dead all right, but do they know it?” She laughed, and asked Charis what could be wrong with her delphiniums, because they were turning black. “It’s a mildew,” said Charis. That was how Roz handled the afterlife: perennial borders. It was the one subject about which Charis had a good deal more hard data than Tony did.

But when Zenia appeared at the back door, in the rain, this is what Charis thought. She thought, Zenia is lost. She can’t find the light. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s dead. What would be more natural than for her to show up at Charis’s house, to ask for help? Help was what she had come for, at first.

Then of course it turned out that Zenia wasn’t Zenia at all, but only Augusta, home for the weekend and slightly forlorn, because—Charis suspected—some other plan of hers had fallen through, something involving a man. There are men in Augusta’s life, Charis divines this; though they are not produced, they are not presented to Charis. Most likely they are in the business course too, fledgling entrepreneurs who would take one look at Charis in her not yet fully organized house and run like crazy. Most likely Augusta heads them off. Maybe she tells them her mother is ill, or in Florida or something.

But Augusta is not completely lacquered yet; she does have moments of soft guilt. That time, she’d brought a loaf of bran bread with her as a peace offering, and some dried figs. Charis gave her an extra hug and made her some zucchini muffins, and a hot-water bottle for her bed, as she used to do when Augusta was little, because she was so thankful that Augusta was not Zenia after all.

Still, it’s almost as if Zenia really has been here. As if she came and then went away without getting what she wanted. As if she’ll be back.

When she materializes the next time, Charis will be expecting her. Zenia must have something she wants to say. Or no. Maybe it’s Charis who has something to say; maybe this is what’s holding Zenia to this earth. Because Zenia’s around, she’s around somewhere, Charis has known it ever: since that funeral. She looked at the canister with Zenia’s ashes in it, and she knew. The ashes might be in there, but ashes were not a person. Zenia was not in that canister, or with the light either. Zenia was loose, loose in the air but tethered to the world of appearances, and it’s all the fault of Charis. It’s Charis who needs her to be here, it’s Charis who won’t cut her free.

Zenia will appear, her white face looming in the glass oblong, and Charis will open the door. Come in, she will say, because the dead can’t cross your threshold unless you invite them. Come in, she will say, risking her own body, because Zenia will be searching for a new flesh dress. Come in, she will say, for the third and crucial time, and Zenia will drift through the doorway, her eyes cavernous, her hair like cold smoke. She will stand in the kitchen and the light will darken, and Charis will be afraid.

But she won’t back down, she won’t back away this time. What did they do with Billy? she’ll ask her. Zenia is the only one who knows.

Charis goes back upstairs and gets dressed for work, trying not to look over her shoulder. Sometimes she thinks it’s not such a great idea for her to live alone. The rest of the time she likes it, though. She can do what she wants, she can be who she is, and if she talks out loud to herself there’s nobody to stare. Nobody to complain about the dustballs, except maybe Augusta, who gets out the broom and sweeps them up.

She steps on another thumbtack and this one hurts more, so she puts on her shoes. When she has all of her clothes on she goes in search of her reading glasses, because she’ll need them at work, when she’s making out invoices, and to read the menu at the Toxique.

She looks forward to that lunch. She wills herself to look forward to it, although there’s something tugging at her, some intuition ... a sinking feeling. Not something violent, like an explosion or a fire. Something else. She often has these feelings, but since nothing ever comes of half of them they aren’t dependable. Shanita says it’s because she has a Solomon’s Cross on her palm but it’s fuzzed over; too many wispy hairlines. “You are picking up a lot of stations,” is what Shanita says. “Cosmic static:”

She finds the reading glasses under the tea cosy in the kitchen; she doesn’t remember putting them there. Objects have a life of their own, and the ones in her house move around at night. They’ve been doing it more, recently. It’s the ozone layer, probably. Unknown energies are getting through.

She has twenty minutes to walk to the ferry. That’s ample. She goes out the back door as a matter of course; the front one is nailed shut, with plastic sheeting on the inside for insulation and an Indian hand-woven bedspread over top of it, in a paisley green-and-blue print. The insulation is for winter. In the summers she takes it down, except last summer she didn’t get around to it. There’s always a bunch of dead flies underneath the plastic, and she doesn’t enjoy them a lot.

The air on the Island is so good. Compared, that is. At least there’s usually a breeze. She pauses outside her back door, breathing in the comparatively good air, feeling its crispness fill her lungs. Her vegetable garden is still pushing up the Swiss chard, there are still carrots and green tomatoes; a rusty-orange chrysanthemum blooms in one corner. The soil is rich here; traces of henshit still linger, and she digs in compost from her compost heap every spring and fall. It’s almost time to do it, now, before the first frost comes.

She loves her garden; she loves kneeling in the dirt, with both hands deep in the ground, rummaging among the roots with the earthworms slipping away from her groping fingers, enveloped in the smell of mudpies and slow ferment and thinking about nothing. Helping things grow. She never uses gardening gloves, much to Augusta’s despair.

Shanita says her grandmother used to eat dirt, a handful or two every spring. She said it was good for you. (Although it’s been impossible for Charis to figure out exactly which grandmother she means: Shanita seems to have more than two.) But eating dirt is the sort of thing that Charis’s own grandmother might have done, because that grandmother, grubby and terrifying though she had been, was a woman who knew about such things. Charis hasn’t got around to trying it herself yet, but she’s working up to it.

At the front of her house there’s more to be done. She pulled out the lawn last spring, and tried for a sort of English cottage effect, which she thought would go well with the house itself, with its white clapboard and slightly falling-apart look; but she planted too many species and didn’t thin out, nor did she weed—as much as she should have, and what resulted was a sort of scramble. Mostly the snapdragons won; they’re still blooming, some of the tall spikes fallen over (she should have staked them), with leggy offshoots coming up from them. Next year she’ll put the tall things in the back, and have fewer colours.

If there is a next year, that is. Next year she may not even have a house. The Island’s war with the city is still going on. The city wants to tear down all these houses, level everything, turn it into a park. A lot of the houses here went that way, years ago, before people dug in their heels. Charis sees it as envy: if the city people can’t live here themselves they don’t want anyone else to be able to do it either. Well, it kept the property prices low. If not for that, where would Charis be?

And if no one lived on the Island, who would ever be able to look at the city from a distance, the way Charis does every morning at sunrise, and find it so beautiful? Without such a vision of itself, of its loveliness and best possibilities, the city would decay, would crack apart, would collapse into useless rubble. It’s only sustained by belief; belief, and meditation, t13e meditation of people like her. Charis knows this for a certainty, but so far she has been unable to put it that way, exactly, in her frequent letters to the city councillors, only two of which she has actually got around to mailing. But just writing it down helps. It beams out the message, which gets into the city councillors’ heads without their awareness. It’s like radio waves.

When she reaches the dock the ferry is already boarding. People are going on, singly and in twos; there’s something processional about their entrance, in the way they step from land to water. Right here was where she last saw Billy; and also Zenia, in the flesh. They were already aboard, and as Charis came heavily running, gasping, hands on her belly to hold it attached to her, it was dangerous for her to run like that, she could have fallen and lost the baby, the ferry men were hoisting up the gangway, the ferry was hooting and backing out, the deep water churning to a whirlpool. She couldn’t have jumped.

Billy and Zenia were not touching. There were two strange men with them; or there were two strange men standing nearby. Men in overcoats. Billy saw her. He didn’t wave. He turned away. Zenia didn’t move. Her aura was deep red. Her hair blew out around her head. The sun was behind her, so she had no face. She was a dark sunflower. The sky was hugely blue. The two of them got smaller, going away.

Charis doesn’t remember the sound that came out of her. She doesn’t want to. She tries to hold the image of the two of them receding, a moment of time stilled and devoid of content, like a postcard with nothing written on the back.

She walks to the main deck and settles herself for transition. In her cardigan pocket she has a crust of bread; she will feed it to the gulls, who are already circling, eyeing her, crying like hungry spirits.

Maybe you don’t enter the light through a tunnel, she:thinks: Maybe it’s a boat, as the ancients said it was. You pay your fare, you cross, you drink of the River of Forgetfulness. Then you are reborn.

The place where Charis works is called Radiance. It sells crystals of all kinds, big and small, made into pendants and earrings or just raw, and seashells; and essential oils imported from Egypt and southern France, and incense from India, and organic body creams and bath gels from California and England, and sachets of bark and herbs and dried flowers, from France mainly, and Tarot cards in six different patterns, and Afghan and Thai jewellery, and tapes of New Age music with a lot of harp and flute sounds in them, and CDs of seashores, waterfalls, and loon calls, and books on Native Indian spirituality and Health Secrets of the Aztecs, and mother-of-pearl inlaid chopsticks and lacquered bowls from Japan, and tiny carvings of Chinese jade, and recycled handmade-paper greeting cards with arrangements of dried weeds stuck onto them, and packets of wild rice, and non-caffeine teas from eight different countries, and necklaces of cowries, dried plant seeds, polished stones, and carved wooden beads.

Charis remembers this place from the sixties. It was called The Blown Mind Shoppe then, and had hash pipes and psychedelic posters and roach clips and tie-dyed undershirts and dashikis. In the seventies it was called Okkult, and had books on demonology, as well as on women’s ancient religions and Wicca and the lost kingdoms of Atlantis and Mu, and some unappealing bone artefacts, and smelly—and in Charis’s opinion, fraudulent—bundles of ground-up animal parts. There was a stuffed alligator in its window then, and for a while it even sold fright wigs and horror makeup kits, with fake blood and glue-on scars. That was a low point for it, although popular with the punk set.

It changed again in the early eighties. That was when Shanita took over, when it was still Okkult. She quickly got rid of the stuffed alligator and the bones and the demonology books—why borrow trouble, she says, and she didn’t want any run-ins with the animal-rights folks, or any Christian weirdos spray-painting the window. It was her idea to start up the crystals, and to change the name to Radiance.

It was the name that attracted Charis. First she was just a customer: she came in for the herbal teas. But then the sales position came open, and since she was tired of her job filing reports at the Ministry of Natural Resources—too impersonal, too much pressure, and besides she wasn’t very good at it—she applied. Shanita hired her because she had the right look, or so Shanita told her.

“You won’t bug the customers,” said Shanita. “They don’t like to he pushed. They like to just sort of float around in here, know what I mean?”

Charis did. She likes to float around in Radiance herself. She likes the way it smells, and she likes the things in it. Sometimes she does a trade, taking goods—at a discount price—instead of pay, much to Augusta’s disgust. More of that junk? she says. She does not see how many more Japanese lacquered bowls and tapes of loon calls Charis really needs. Charis says it isn’t a matter of need, material need that is. It’s a matter of spiritual need. Right now she has her eye on a truly lovely amethyst geode, from Nova Scotia. She will keep it in her bedroom, to ward off bad dreams.

She can picture Augusta’s response to this geode. Mom! What’s this hunk of rock doing in your bed? She can picture Tony’s interested scepticism—Does it really work?—and Roz’s maternal indulgence—Honey, if it makes you happy I’m all for it! This has:been her problem all her life: picturing other people’s responses. She’s too good at it. She can picture the response of anyone—other people’s reactions, their emotions, their criticisms, their demands—but somehow they don’t reciprocate. Maybe they can’t. Maybe they lack the gift, if it is one.

Charis walks away from the ferry dock, up to King and then Queen, sniffing the turgid city air, so different from the air on the Island. This air is full of chemicals, and also of breath, the breath of other people. There are too many people breathing in this city. There are too many people breathing on this planet; maybe it would be beneficial if a few million of them would make the transition. But this is an appallingly selfish thought, so Charis stops thinking it. Instead she thinks about sharing. Every single molecule that Charis is taking into her lungs has been sucked in and out of the lungs of countless thousands of other people, many times: Come to that, every single molecule in her body has once been part of someone else’s body, of the bodies of many others, going back and back, and then past human beings, all the way to the dinosaurs, all the way to the first planktons. Not to mention vegetation. We are all a part of everybody else, she muses. We are all a part of everything.

That’s a cosmic insight, if you can keep it at arm’s length. But then Charis has an unpleasant idea. If everyone is part of everyone else, then she herself is a part of Zenia. Or the other way around. Zenia may be what she’s breathing in. The part of Zenia that went up in smoke, that is. Not her astral body, which is still hovering near earth, and not the ashes either, which are safely in that canister under the mulberry tree.

Maybe that’s what Zenia wants! Maybe she’s bothered by her partial state, some of her energy in the canister and some wafting around. Maybe she wants to be let out. Maybe Charis should go to the cemetery some night, with a shovel and a canopener, and dig her up and sprinkle her. Mingle her with theUniverse. That would be a kindly thing to do.

She reaches Radiance at ten to ten, early for once, and lets herself in with her key, and puts on the mauve-and-aqua smock that Shanita designed for them so the customers will know they aren’t customers themselves.

Shanita is already there. “Hi, Charis, how’re you doing?” she calls out, from the stockroom at the back. It’s Shanita who does all the ordering. She has a knack for it; she goes to crafts fairs and takes trips to little-known corners, and finds things, wonderful things that no other store in town has. She seems to know in advance what people will want.

Charis admires Shanita a lot. Shanita is smart and practical, as well as being psychic. Also she’s strong, and also she’s one of the most beautiful women Charis has ever seen. Though she isn’t young—she must be well over forty. She refuses to tell her age—the one time Charis asked her, she only laughed, and said age was in the mind and in her mind she was two thousand—but she’s getting a white streak in her hair. That’s another thing Charis admires: Shanita doesn’t dye.

The hair itself is black, neither curly nor frizzy but wavy, thick and shining and luscious, like pulled taffy or lava. Like hot black glass. Shanita coils it, and winds it here and there on her head: sometimes on top, sometimes on one side. Or else she lets it hang down her back in one thick curl. She has wide cheekbones, a trim high-bridged nose, full lips, and large darkly fringed eyes, which are a startling shade that shifts from brown to green, depending on what colour she’s wearing. Her skin is smooth and unwrinkled, an indeterminate colour, neither black nor brown nor yellow. A deep beige; but beige is a bland word. Nor is it chestnut, nor burnt sienna, nor umber. It’s some other word.

People coming into the store frequently ask Shanita where she’s from. “Right here,” she says, smiling her ultra-bright smile. “I was born right in this very city!” She’s nice about it to their faces, but it’s a question that bothers her a lot.

“I think they mean, where were your parents from,” says Charis, because that’s what Canadians usually mean when they ask that question.

“That’s not what they mean,” says Shanita. “What they mean is, when am I leaving.”

Charis cannot see why anyone would want Shanita to leave, but when she says so, Shanita laughs. “You,” she says, “have led one damn sheltered life.” Then she tells Charis about the rudeness of white streetcar conductors towards her. “Move to the back, they tell me, like I was dirt!”

“Streetcar conductors are all rude! They say Move to the back to everybody, they’re rude to me!” says Charis, intending to console Shanita—although she’s being slightly dishonest, it’s only some streetcar conductors, and she herself hardly ever takes the streetcar—and Shanita throws her a glance of contempt, for being unable to acknowledge the racism of almost everybody, almost everybody white, and then Charis feels bad. Sometimes she thinks of Shanita as a dauntless explorer, hacking her way through the jungle. The jungle consists of people like Charis.

So she stops herself from being too curious, from asking too much about Shanita, about her background, about where she’s from. Shanita teases her, though; she throws out hints, changes her story. Sometimes she’s part Chinese and part black, with a West Indian grandmother; she can do the accent, so maybe there’s something to it. That might be the grandmother who used to eat dirt; but there are other grandmothers too, one from the States and one from Halifax, and one from Pakistan and one from New Mexico, and even one from Scotland. Maybe they are stepgrandmothers, or maybe Shanita moved around a lot. Charis can’t sort them out: Shanita has more grandmothers than anyone she knows. But sometimes she’s part Ojibway, or else part Mayan, and one day she was even part Tibetan. She can bewhatever she feels like, because who can tell?

Whereas Charis is stuck with being white. A white rabbit. Being white is getting more and more exhausting. There are so many bad waves attached to it, left over from the past but spreading through the present, like the killing rays from atomic waste dumps. There’s so much to expiate! It gives her anemia just to think about it. In her next life she’s going to be a mixture, a blend, a vigorous hybrid, like Shanita. Then no one will have anything on her.

The store doesn’t open till eleven, so Charis helps take stock. Shanita goes through the shelves, counting, and Charis writes down the numbers on a clipboard. It’s a good thing she found her reading glasses.

“We’ll have to bring down the prices,” says Shanita, frowning. “Stuff is not moving. We’ll have to do a sale:”

“Before Christmas?” says Charis, astonished.

“It’s the Recession,” says Shanita, pursing her lips: “That’s reality. This time of year, we usually, have to re-order for Christmas, right? Now, just look at all this!”

Charis peers: the shelves are upsettingly full. “You know what’s moving?” says Shanita. “This thing:”

Charis is familiar with it, because she’s sold a lot of them lately. It’s a little pamphlet-like book, a cookbook, done on grey recycled paper with black-and-white fine drawings, a doityourself home publishing effort: Pot Luck: Penny-Pinching Soups amp; Stews. It doesn’t appeal to her, personally. Pennypinching as a concept she finds very blocking. There’s something hard and grinding about it, and pinching is a hurtful word. True, she saves candle ends and pieces of wool, but that’s because she wants to, she wants to create things with them, that’s an act of love towards the earth.

“I need more stuff like this,” says Shanita. ‘Fact is, I’m thinking of changing the store. Changing the name, the concept, everything.”

Charis’s heart sinks. “What would you change it to?” she asks. “I was thinking, Scrimpers,” says Shanita.

“Scrimpers?” says Charis.

“You know. Like the old five-and-dime, all cheap stuff,” says Shanita. “Only more creative. It could work! A few years ago, you could trade on the impulse buy. Mad money, you know? Folks were flinging it around. But the only way you make it through a recession is by getting people to buy stuff about how not to buy stuff, if you know what I mean.”

“But Radiance is so lovely!” cries Charis unhappily.

“I know,” says Shanita. It was a lot of fun while it lasted. But lovely is luxury goods. How many of these dinky toys you think people are going to buy, right now? Maybe some, but only if we keep the price down. In these times you cut your losses, you cut your overheads, you do what you have to. This is a lifeboat, you know? It’s my lifeboat, it’s my life. I have worked damn hard, I know which way the wind is blowing, and I do not intend to go down with the sinking ship:’

She’s defensive. She looks at Charis, her gaze level—her eyes are green today—and Charis realizes that she herself is an overhead. If things get much worse, Shanita will cut her, and run the store by herself, and Charis will be out of a job.

They finish taking stock and open the door for the day, and Shanita’s mood changes. She’s friendly now, almost solicitous; she makes them both some Morning Miracle, and they sit at the front counter drinking it. There is not exactly a stampede of customers, so Shanita passes the time by asking Charis all about Augusta.

To Charis’s discomfort, Shanita approves of Augusta; she thinks Augusta is smart to be taking a business course. “A woman needs to be prepared to make her own way,” she says. “Too many lazy men around:” She even approves of the furniture scrapbook, which Charis herself finds so grasping, so materialistic. “That’s a girl with a head on her shoulders,” Shanita says, pouring them out more tea. “Wish I’d had one, at her age. Would’ve saved myself a lot of trouble.” She has two daughters of her own, and two sons, grown up. She’s a grandmother, even; but she doesn’t talk much about that part of her life. By now she knows a great deal about Charis, whereas Charis knows almost nothing about her.

“My pendulum went funny this morning,” says Charis, to get off the subject of Augusta.

“Funny?” says Shanita. The pendulums are sold in the store, five different models, and Shanita is an expert at interpreting their movements.

“It just stopped,” says Charis. “Stock-still, right over my head.”

“That’s a strong message,” says Shanita. “That’s something real sudden, something you weren’t looking for. Maybe it’s some entity, trying to get a message through. Today is the cusp of Scorpio, right? It’s like, the pendulum is pointing a finger and saying, watch out!”

Charis is apprehensive: could it be Augusta, an accident? That’s the first thing she thinks, of, so she asks.

“It’s not what I get,” says Shanita reassuringly, “but let’s just see.” She takes the Tarot she keeps under the counter, the Marseilles deck she favours, and Charis shuffles and cuts.

“The Tower,” says Shanita. “Sudden, like I said. The Priestess. An opening, something hidden is revealed. The Knight of Swords—well, that could be interesting! The Knights all bring messages. Now, the Empress. A strong woman! Not you, though. Somebody else. But I wouldn’t say this is Augusta, no. The Empress is not a young girl.”

“Maybe it’s you,” Charis says, and Shanita laughs and says, “Strong! I am a broken reed!” She puts down another card. “Death,” she says. “A change. Could be a renewal.” She crosses that card again. “Oh. The Moon:”

The Moon, with its baying dogs, its pool, its lurking scorpion. Just then the bell tinkles and a customer comes into the store; she asks Charis for two copies of Pot Luck, one for herself, one for a gift. Charis agrees with her that it’s very useful and not too expensive, and that the hand-done illustrations are sweet, and tells her that yes, Shanita is truly stunning but she’s not from any place except just plain old Toronto, and takes the money and wraps the books, her mind elsewhere.

The Moon, she thinks. Illusion:

At noon Charis takes off her flowered smock and says goodbye to Shanita—it’s her half-day, Tuesday, so she won’t be back after lunch—and heads out into the street, trying not to breathe too much. She has seen bicycle messengers wearing white paper nose masks, like nurses. It’s a trend, she thinks; maybe they should order some for the store, only coloured and with some nice patterns printed on.

As soon as she walks into the Toxique her head starts to crackle. It’s as if there’s a thunderstorm around somewhere, or a loose connection. Ions are bombarding her, wavelets of menacing energy. She brushes her forehead, then shakes her fingers to get rid of them.

She cranes her neck, looking around for the source of the disturbance. Sometimes it’s the people who come in to deal drugs on the stairs going down to the washrooms, but none of them seem to be around right now. The waitress comes up to her, and Charis asks for the corner near the mirror. Mirrors deflect.

The Toxique is Roz’s latest discovery. Roz is always discovering things, especially restaurants. She likes eating in places where no one from her office would ever eat, she likes being’ surrounded by people wearing clothes she’d never wear herself. She likes to think she’s mingling with real life, real meaning poorer than her. Or that’s the impression Charis sometimes gets. She’s tried telling Roz that all life is equally real, but Roz doesn’t appear to understand what she means; though maybe Charis doesn’t put it clearly enough.

She glances at the leopard-skin tights of the waitress, wrinkles her nose—these clothes are too tough for her—tells herself not to be judgmental, orders a bottle of Evian and some white wine, and settles down to wait. She opens the menu, squints at it, rummages in her bag for her reading glasses, can’t find them—has she left them at the store?—and finally locates them on top of her head. She must have walked along the street like that. She puts them on her nose and scans the daily specials. At least they always have something vegetarian; though who knows where the vegetables come from? Probably off some irradiated chemical-saturated agro-business maxi-farm.

The truth is that she doesn’t much like the Toxique. It’s partly the name: she considers it damaging to the neurons to spend time around such a poisonous name. And the clothes on the waiters, the servers, remind her of some of the things they used to sell in Okkult. At any moment there could be rubber scars and fake blood. But she’s willing to eat here once in a while for the sake of Roz.

As for Tony, who knows what she thinks of this place? Tony’s hard for Charis to read; she always has been, ever since they first met, back in the McClung Hall days. But most likely Tony would have exactly the same attitude if it were the King Eddie, or else McDonald’s: a kind of goggle-eyed, incredulous note-taking, like a Martian on a time-travel holiday. Collecting specimens. Freeze-drying them. Sticking everything into labelled boxes. Leaving no space, no space for the unsayable.

Not that she doesn’t like Tony. No, wrong. There are quite a few times when she doesn’t like Tony. Tony can use too many words, can grate on her, can rub her electrical field the wrong way. But she loves Tony all the same. Tony is so calm, so clearheaded, so grounded. If Charis ever hears any more voices telling her to slit her wrists, Tony is the one she’d call, to come over on the Island ferry and take charge of her, to defuse her, to tell her not to be an idiot. Tony would know what to do, step by step, one thing at a time, in order.

She wouldn’t call Roz at first, because Roz would freak out, would cry and sympathize and agree with her about the unbearability of it all, and would be late for the ferry as well.

But afterwards, after she felt safe again, she would go to Roz for the hug.

Roz and Tony come in together, and Charis waves at them, and there’s the flurry there always is when Roz enters a restaurant, and the two of them sit down and Roz lights a cigarette, and they start talking at once. Charis tunes out because she isn’t that interested in what they’re saying, and just lets their presences wash over her. Their presences are more important to her anyway than what comes out of their mouths. Words are so often like window curtains,* a decorative screen put up to keep the neighbours at a distance. But auras don’t lie. Charis herself doesn’t see auras as often as she used to. When she was little. when she was Karen, she saw them effortlessly; now it’s only at moments of stress. But she can sense them, the way blind people can sense colour through the ends of their fingers.

What she senses about Tony today is coolness. A transparent coolness. Tony reminds her of a snowflake, so tiny and pale and fastidious, but cold; a mind like an ice cube, clear and square; or cut glass, hard and sharp. Or ice, because it can melt. In the school play, Tony would have been a snowflake: one of the smallest children, too little for a speaking part but taking it all in. Charis herself was usually cast as a tree or a shrub. She wasn’t given anything that involved moving around becauseshe would have bumped into things, or that’s what the teachers said. They didn’t realize that her clumsiness was not the ordinary kind, not poor coordination. It was just because she wasn’t sure where the edges of her body ended and the rest of the world began.

What would Roz have been? Charis visualizes Roz’s aura—so golden and many-coloured and spicy—and her air of command, but also that undercurrent of exile, and casts her in the role of one of the Three Kings, wearing brocade and jewels, carrying a splendid gift. But would Roz ever have been in such a play? Her early life is such a jumble, with all those nuns and rabbis in it. Maybe she wouldn’t have been allowed. Charis herself gave up Christianity a long time ago. For one thing, the Bible is full of meat: animals being sacrificed, lambs, bullocks, doves. Cain was right to offer up the vegetables, God was wrong to refuse them. And there’s too much blood: people in the Bible are always having their blood spilled, blood on their hands, their blood licked up by dogs. There are too many slaughters, too much suffering, too many tears.

She used to think some of the Eastern religions would be more serene; she was a Buddhist for a while, before she discovered how many Hells they had. Most religions are so intent on punishment.

She realizes that she’s halfway through her lunch without having noticed. She’s having the grated carrot and cottage cheese salad, a wise choice; not that she can remember having ordered it, but sometimes it’s useful to have an automatic pilot like that, to take care of the routines. For a moment she watches Roz eat a piece of French bread; she likes to watch Roz eat French bread, cracking it open, burying her nose in it—This is so good, Oeis is so good!—before sinking her firm white teeth into it. It’s like a small prayer, a miniature grace, what Roz does with bread.

“Tony,” says Charis, “I could really make something good, with your back garden.” Tony has a great space back there, but there’s nothing in it except patchy lawn and some diseased trees. What Charis has in mind would be fixing up the trees, and making a sort of woodland, with jack-in-the-pulpits, violets, mayapples, Solomon’s seal, things that grow in shade. Some ferns. Nothing that Tony would have to weed, she could never be depended on for that. It would be special! Perhaps a fountain? But Tony doesn’t answer her, and after a moment Charis realizes it’s because she hasn’t spoken out loud. Sometimes it’s hard for her to remember whether she’s actually said a thing or not. Augusta has complained about this habit of hers, among others.

She tunes back in to the conversation: they’re talking about some war. Charis wishes they wouldn’t get going on war, but they often do these days. It seems to be in the air, after a long time of not being there much at all. Roz starts it; she asks Tony questions, because she likes to ask people questions about things they’re supposed to know about.

One of their lunches a few months ago was all about genocide, and Roz wanted to talk about the Holocaust, and Tony launched into a detailed thing about genocides through the ages, Genghis Khan and then the Cathars in France, and then the Armenians being butchered by the Turks, and then the Irish and the Scots and what the English did to them, death after horrible death, until Charis thought she was going to throw up.

Tony can deal with all of that, she can handle it, maybe to her it’s just words, but for Charis the words are pictures and then screams and moans, and then the smell of rotting meat, and of burning, of burning flesh, and then physical pain, and if you dwell on it you make it happen, and she can never explain this to Tony in a way that Tony will understand, and also she’s afraid they’ll decide she’s being silly. Hysterical, a nitwit, a flake. She knows they both think that sometimes.

So she’d got up and gone down the dark splintery stairs to the washroom, where there was a Renoir poster on the wall, a rounded pink woman drying herself leisurely after the bath, with blue and mauve highlights on her body, and that was peaceful; but when she’d gone back upstairs Tony was still in Scotland, with the Highland women and children being hunted down in the hills and spitted like pigs and shot like deer.

“The Scots!” said Roz, who wanted to get back to the Holocaust. “They’ve done very well for themselves, look at all those bankers! Who cares about them?”

“I do,” said Charis, surprising herself as much as she did the two of them. “I care:” They looked at her in amazement, because they were used to her taking mental time off when they talked about war. They thought it didn’t interest her.

“You do?” said Roz. her eyebrows up. “Why, Charis?”

“You should care about everybody,” said Charis. “Or maybe it’s because I’m part Scottish. Part Scottish, part English. All those people who used to kill one another so much.” She leaves out the Mennonites because she doesn’t want to upset Roz, although the Mennonites don’t count as real Germans. Also they never kill people; they only get killed, instead.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry,” said Roz, contrite. “Of course! I keep forgetting. Stupid moi, thinking of you as pure creme de la wAsp.” She patted Charis’s hand.

“Nobody’s killed them recently, though,” said Charis. “Not all at once. But I guess that’s how we ended up here:”

“Ended up here?” said Tony, looking around. Did Charis mean the Toxique, or what?

“Because of wars,” said Charis, unhappily; it’s an insight she doesn’t like much, now that she’s had it. “In this country. Wars of one sort or another. But that was then. We should try to live in the now—don’t you think? Or at least, I try to:”

Tony smiled at Charis with affection, or the closest she usually got to it. “She’s absolutely right,” she said to Roz, as if this were a noteworthy event.

Right about what though, Charis wonders. The wars, or the now? Tony’s standard response to the now would be to tell Charis how many babies are being born per minute, in the now she’s so fond of, and how all that excess birth will inevitably lead to more wars. Then she would add a footnote about the crazed behaviour of overcrowded rats. Charis is grateful she isn’t doing that today.

But she has it at last, the thread: it’s Saddam Hussein and the invasion of Kuwait, and what will happen next. “It’s already been decided,” says Tony, “like the Rubicon,” and Charis says, “The what?”

“Never mind, sweetie. it’s just something historical,” says Roz, because she at least does understand that this is not Charis’s favourite topic of conversation, she’s giving her permission to drift off.

But then it comes to Charis what the Rubicon is. It’s something to do with Julius Caesar, they took it in high school. He crossed the Alps with elephants; another of those men who got famous for killing people. If they stopped giving medals to such men, thinks Charis, if they stopped giving them parades and making statues out of them, then those men would stop doing it. Stop all the killing. They do it to get attention.

Maybe that’s who Tony was, in a previous life: Julius Caesar. Maybe Julius Caesar has been sent back in the body of a woman, to punish him. A very short woman, so he can see what it’s like, to be powerless. Maybe that is the way things work.

The door opens, and Zenia is standing there. Charis goes cold all over, then takes a breath. She’s ready, she’s been readying herself, though lunch at the Toxique is the last place she would have expected this, this manifestation, this return. The Tower;thinks Charis. A sudden event. Something you weren’t looking for. No wonder the pendulum stopped dead, right over her head! But why did Zenia bother opening the door? She could have walked right through it.

Zenia is in black, which is no surprise, black was her colour. But the strange thing is that she’s fatter. Death has filled her out, which is not the usual way. Spirits are supposed to be thinner, hungry-looking, parched, and Zenia appears to be quite well. Especially, her breasts are larger. The last time Charis saw her in the flesh, she was skinny as a rake, a shadow practically, her breasts almost flat, like circles of thick cardboard stuck against her chest, the nipples buttoning them on. Now she’s what you would call voluptuous.

She’s angry, though. A dark aura swirls out from around her, like the corona of the sun in eclipse, only negative; a corona of darkness rather than of light. It’s a turbulent muddy green, shot through with lines of blood red and greyish black—the worst, the most destructive colours, a deadly aureole, a visible infection. Charis will have to call on all her own light, the white light she’s been working so hard at, storing up, for years and years. She will have to do an instant meditation, and what a place for it! Zenia has chosen the ground well for this encounter: the Toxique, the chattering voices, the cigarette smoke and wine fumes, the thick breath-filled air of the city, all are working for Zenia. She stands in the doorway, scanning the room with a scornful rancorous glance, pulling off a glove, and Charis closes her own eyes and repeats to herself. Think about the light.

“Tony, what’s wrong?” says Roz, and Charis opens her eyes again. The waitress is moving towards Zenia.

“Turn your head slowly,” says Tony. “Don’t scream:” Charis watches with interest, to see if the waitress will walk right through Zenia; but she doesn’t, she stops short. She must sense something. A coldness.

“Oh shit,” says Roz. “It’s her.”     ,

“Who?” says Charis, doubt beginning to form. Roz hardly ever says “Oh shit:” It must be important.

“Zenia,” says Tony. So they can see her too! Well, why not? They have enough to say to her, each one of them. It isn’t only Charis.

“Zenia’s dead,” says Charis. I wonder what she’s come back for, is what she thinks. Who she’s come back for. Zenia’s aura has faded now, or else Charis can no longer see it: Zenia appears to be solid, substantial, material, disconcertingly alive.

“He looked like a lawyer,” says Charis. Zenia is coming towards her, and she concentrates all her forces for the moment of impact; but Zenia strides right past them in her richly textured dress, with her long legs, her startling new breasts, her glossy hair nebulous around her shoulders, her purple-red angry mouth, trailing musky perfume. She’s refusing to notice Charis, refusing deliberately; she’s passing a hand of darkness over her, usurping her, blotting her out.

Shaken and feeling sick, Charis closes her eyes, struggling to regain her body. My body, mine, she repeats. I am a good person. I exist. In the moonlit night of her head she can see an image: a tall structure, a building, something toppling from it, falling through the air, turning over and over. Coming apart.