K. K.
© Greggory Moore
For Krzysztof Kieslowski, in memoriam
The sidewalk café was crowded with the usual lunchtime throng. A red-haired woman of 35 sat slouched in her chair, black-rimmed sunglasses shielding her eyes from the unhindered sunlight. A woman reading at a table next to hers looked over now and then as if she thought Katerina was looking at her; but Katerina was lost in thought, her gaze unfocused. She was thinking about the seven-day trip she was about to undertake with her latest lover. The lover, in his mid 50s, was an individual for whom she felt absolutely no passion. They had been involved with one another for two months, and he had already declared his undying love, wanting to marry at the earliest feasible date. Katerina, however, knew that there was no real future with this man. She knew, also, that she had remained with him after their initial two or three trysts because of his apparent adoration of her. Worse, she suspected that his wealth was a sort of magnet that helped to hold her in place; but whenever this occurred to her, she would do her best to put it out of her mind. Seven days and six nights in Acapulco, she intoned internally. Seven days and six nights. She did not notice the man crossing her line of sight. As he passed by her table, the man sent a fifty-cent piece spinning into the air with his right thumb. In the middle of its descent, he slapped it onto the back of his left hand and looked at it: it was heads.
Katerina's lover walked up to where she was sitting. "Hi, honey. You all ready?" He reached down and stroked her hair affectionately.
Katerina had not seen him approach and was startled from her reverie. "Oh. Yes, yes." She picked up her travel bag from the chair next to her, then reached into her purse, looking for money. "Were you able to see Véronique?"
"No, I didn't get a chance. But I left her a note," he replied.
"Father of the year," Katerina breathed to herself as she was standing up.
"I'll take that," her lover said reaching for the travel bag. She allowed it to be slipped off of her shoulder, then placed three one-dollar bills on the table. "Ready?" the man asked. He leaned into her and kissed her on her right cheek. "I'm excited about the trip."
Katerina removed a pack of cigarettes from her purse, shaking the pack twice and pulling a protruding butt-end to her lips. "Me, too." The man softly ran his left hand down her right arm. Katerina smiled at him and lit her cigarette with a blue Bic lighter. "Well," she said exhaling smoke, "shall we?" Her lover's smile became accentuated, and he turned to lead her away. Katerina's travel bag glanced the head of the woman at the next table. The woman jerked forward and craned her head around to look at Katerina's lover, but he was unaware of his faux pas.
"I'm sorry about that," Katerina said as she passed the woman. "He's really clumsy." She took a deep drag of her cigarette and followed her lover into the parking lot, thinking vaguely for a moment about the woman to whom she had just spoken.
* * *
A 35-year-old, college-educated file clerk sat with her back to the sun at the same sidewalk café where she spent her lunch hour every weekday, eating a Chinese chicken salad and reading. She was unable to concentrate on her book, however, because it seemed that the woman at the next table was staring at her. She looked up at the woman from time to time, but the woman did not seem to notice. She's not looking at me, Katerina thought, just spacing out, I guess. She reached for her fork and prepared another mouthful of food (careful to include a sampling of all of the salad's ingredients), then resumed reading after finding her place: Having eaten as a man eats in contemplation of a rich dinner-party, that is having taken a bite "to stay the pangs of hunger," as they say. . . . She did not notice the man crossing her line of sight. As he passed by her table, the man sent a fifty-cent piece spinning into the air with his right thumb. In the middle of its descent, he slapped it onto the back of his left hand and looked at it: it was heads.
A man's right hand softly brushed against Katerina's red hair as he moved past her, and she looked up to see him greet the woman across from her. Katerina took another forkful of salad as she watched the couple talking. She tilted her head slightly to the side so as to be better able to make out what they were saying.
". . . see Veronika?" she heard the woman ask.
"No, I didn't get a chance. But I left her a note."
Katerina couldn't make out what the woman said to this and lost interest in the conversation. She sipped from her water glass and returned to reading, but before she'd gotten through half a page she was jolted by a sharp bump to her head. She irritatedly looked behind her and saw the man to whom she had been listening a few moments earlier walking towards the parking lot with his back to her. He shouldered a white travel bag that bounced in time with his steps.
"I'm sorry about that," came a voice from above her. She turned and saw the woman who had been seated at the next table. "He's really clumsy." Katerina looked intensely at the woman and thought she saw a noticeable torpor in her eyes. The woman followed in her companion's path, but Katerina did not turn to watch the woman's pursuit, struck for a moment by the woman for a reason unknown to her. Odd, she thought. Probably just the glasses. After another moment, she returned to her book, taking a long draught of water as she slowly turned the page with her right hand.
All Cities Are the Same
© Michelle Lauren Kay
“I’m cold.”
“You’re always cold, Sam,” says Lyssa. “Maybe you’re cold blooded.”
But the stale plane air-conditioning is blowing right into my face even though I’ve reached up and screwed off the nozzle. Chilly recycled non air.
We’d been planning the trip since we were kids and in more detail since our convocation. Lyssa would take a week off from her new job at the lab and I would take a week off of being unemployed. We’d fly to Victoria, then rent a car to drive through Vancouver and Calgary - cities that aren’t Edmonton. That don’t revolve around giant malls. A road trip – the pinnacle of freedom for me since before I could drive, yet so far I’d never been further South than the Sylvan Lake waterslides.
It’s night as we fly over Victoria, orange lights quadratically tumbling over each other. So many you can’t see the edges.
Lyssa leans over me to take a quick look. She’s been on planes before. She uprights her chair for landing and takes the copy of EnRoute out of the seat pocket in front of her. “Look,” she shows me a picture of a pair of green snakeskin heels. “I just bought these. Great.”
She means this with no sarcasm. A pat on the back - she's in style.
Cabbing it into the city from the airport, we drag race with the traffic, diesel seeping in through our dark windows. Victoria’s black shining streets are packed with hot girls waiting in line to get into hot clubs. Lyssa, I’m sure, wishes she was in line, too. She’s one of them - those girls who do everything and look good while they’re doing it.
I slide the plastic white card down into the slot of our hotel room door and am greeted with a somewhat poisonous yet professional smell. Inside are two double beds blanketed in kitchen drapes. I drop my bags and dive belly first onto the nearest one, smacking my forehead on the nightstand.
“That was graceful,” Lyssa says.
I go into the bathroom to see if it will leave a mark but am distracted by the tiny bottles of everything you could ever need.
“Don't use that,” Lyssa tells me, coming in and unwrapping a bar of soap to wash her hands. “It will strip your hair.”
We flip through some reality TV and drink expensive little Cokes, then shoot the shit in Scottish accents as we make our way down to the lobby bar.
“I reckon I’d be up for a smidgen of Hag-uss,” I say.
“And some fresh milk from a wee lamb’s teet,” Lyssa adds.
We laugh as the elevator doors slide open to the main floor.
In the tired lights of the faded pastel bar, Lyssa and I settle on a trough of fries and keep eating them even after we’re full. Two old dudes on swivel stools at the bar keep looking at us as Tom Jones serenades us from somewhere up near the sprinkler system. The old dude in the white flipped-up collar who could very well play golf with my dad comes over.
“Can we buy you ladies a drink?” He looks at our fries like he wants one.
“No thanks,” I tell him.
But Lyssa just smiles.
“Where are you ladies from?” he asks. Two layers of wrinkles line his eyes and mouth: the first from his thirties, the second from his forties.
“Edmonton,” Lyssa answers.
Mistake. The guy pulls up a chair. The other one comes over now, too, this one with white crusty stuff at the edges of his mouth - toothpaste, let’s hope.
“And what are your names? What do you ladies do?” they ask.
“I’m Lyssa.” She extends a hand. “I work in a lab for Gerber’s doing testing for baby formula.” She looks at me with teeth. “This is my best friend, Sam.”
“I’m unemployed,” I smile.
“Sam’s an actress. She just finished a role in a stage play.”
“Goonies,” I tell them. “I was Sloth.”
“No you weren’t,” Lyssa says. “You were the cheerleader.”
Thanks Lyssa. Because that will get these old guys to go away.
More questions from them as I listen to Lyssa be nice. But then Lyssa is a nice girl. You’d never know she has her clit pierced. After five eternal minutes I stand, “I’m going up to the room,” I announce.
Her upper lip disappears as she simply says: “okay.”
I pass out watching some reality show about nobodies who want to be somebodies and am awakened to the thumping shut of our heavy hotel door.
“Why did you leave me alone with those guys?” Lyssa rifles through her bag.
“Why didn’t you just tell them to get lost?”
“They kept wanting to talk to me. They wouldn’t leave.”
“That's their problem,” I shrug. “Isn't it?”
“I was trying to be polite,” Lyssa says, violently brushing her hair with a found purple brush.
“And I wasn't,” I reply.
She goes into one of her pouts where she presses her lips together too hard and keeps them that way.
We’re already sick of each other and the trip hasn’t even started. Maybe we’ve been friends for too long.
I fall asleep in my make-up.
* * *
Our rental car the next morning is a blue Mitsubishi which Lyssa volunteers to drive then does so with her headphones on. I stare quite happily out the window inhaling the real new car smell (which smells entirely different than air freshener New Car Smell).
“Skip lunch at the harbour?” Lyssa takes off a headphone to ask.
“Fine,” I say. “As long as you do a loop through downtown.”
She's been here before. I haven't. She drives towards the ocean, then rolls through the main streets. Looking at things go by in the soft drizzle, I realize - Victoria is more similar to Edmonton than different, besides the ocean and the harbour and all that stuff. The kids dress the same. There are still the same places to go: Second Cup, Wendy’s, Tim Horton’s. I roll down my window to look at the faces, see if people are just dressed the same or if they really are the same. I can’t tell.
At the ferry loading terminal, Lyssa and I mutter necessary things to each other:
“How much is it to board?”
“Do they have a cafeteria?”
The cars sulk up the ramp. Lyssa shimmies our car two inches from the one in front of it. We shovel ourselves upstairs to the upper deck - fingerprinted windows and the smell of gravy. Once we get going, the bobbing is almost unnoticeable.
The first non-essential thing Lyssa says to me all day is in the ferry cafeteria, while we eat rubbery clam chowder to tell me I’ve spilled on my shirt. Actually what she says is: “Hon, I think you spilled.”
She knows I hate that. Hon.
The ferry trip is long and grey and I have a lot of time to think about what I’m looking for on this trip and what it was I was looking for when I decided on that bachelor's degree in drama. Mom's been calling me up with advice: “maybe you have to pick something you can do, Sam, not something you necessarily want to do.”
“Maybe I don’t want to end up like you,” I said to her the last time. I felt bad after saying it, though it was true.
How can I be an actor if I can’t even pretend that my own mother doesn’t get to me?
The ocean spreads out like a grey prairie through the plastic ferry windows. Finally I’m in motion yet I still feel stuck.
* * *
In Vancouver it's still raining. We check in at a Holiday Inn in East Van to save money so we can shop Robson. Taking the bus downtown, somehow we’re talking again and even laughing at our bus driver who's wearing such short shorts he looks like he has no pants on. He barrels us through tunnels of trees pantslesssly.
“Pants would just slow him down,” I say.
Lyssa does her Judy Jetson laugh.
As the city thickens so does the air.
Tall green buildings, Asian tinges, drawn on sidewalks, garbage in the street, bums under the garbage. An unhurried rush. The smell of old rain. I have this feeling like: okay, this is new. But when we get to Robson Street and see all the same stores we have at West Edmonton Mall the newness begins to dissipate. This is fantastic for Lyssa who picks out a pair of those pointy toed boots that make your feet look like pizza slices so she can look the same as every other girl walking down the street. The shopgirl behind the counter is one of them, too. One of those girls. Boobs so big they look like they hurt, eyelashes like spider’s legs, gold bangled arms, a sweet expensive smell. You just know under the counter she’s wearing a pair. She takes Lyssa’s credit card and sings: “so just sign here, Sweetie.”
Lyssa does so and sings back: “I love your top!”
“You do?” Shopgirl can't believe it - she has style? “That’s really sweet of you to say.” Shopgirl's eyebrows have melted into a heart.
“I just love it,” Lyssa says once more.
It’s a contest. Whose voice can go the highest?
I stare at them horizontally and wait for them to finish, then drag Lyssa down to a basement thrift store to try on hats from the forties - the ones you pin into your hair so it looks like you just hatched out of an egg. I try to figure out if I can pull one off in front of the mirror.
“But maybe not with jeans,” says Lyssa.
I buy the thing and wear it, jeans and all, as I walk down Robson beside her and her clones. I can feel her feeling embarrassed for me. Even though we’ve never seen these people before and will never see them again. I wonder if they can tell we’re from Edmonton. That we come from a city with a very big mall that has a pirate ship and a tank of depressed dolphins.
I turn to Lyssa. “Whaddy’as want from me Frankie? You wants me to wear a newsboy cap when I ain’t got none?”
This is another one we do. Brooklyn ghetto. Lyssa takes a while to respond and I’m not sure if she’s going to, but then says: “you look real swell, shu-ga. You’ll be a real dimepiece for the fellas.”
We swing through Stanley Park now, Vancouver's Central Park. The dark green branches of the tall trees bob and wave like ladies in aqua size. Though it's brisk out we stop at the empty kiddie pool by the beach to get Oreo ice cream.
“My treat,” says Lyssa.
The ice cream is good mixed with the salty air, the contrast of the dark cookie crumbles and cold vanilla ice cream. I try to think of what I like about Lyssa. She laughs like a crazy person. Makes good French Toast.
“You wants we should cut across here?” I ask her in Brooklyn-speak, referring to our bus stop on the other side of the street.
“No, let’s wait for the light to change,” she says, no accent.
Biting into the cone of my ice cream, it’s stale. I chuck it in a bin.
Across the street from the bus stop, some kid follows his mom too closely from behind, when she stops bumping right into her butt. I laugh a little and consider telling Lyssa, but don't.
On the bus Lyssa talks on her cell phone as I watch the clouds come over the glass buildings. Some people would think this is beautiful, I consider. But is there such a thing as manmade beauty? All I see is people stacked on top of each other too close to think. And I get that feeling again, the one I had in Victoria: so what? A city is a city is a city. But then what’s a road trip without destinations?
At night Lyssa and I shower and get ready to go out. With her mirror face on, the one where she looks like she’s eating dill pickles, Lyssa applies liquid eyeliner with lab-precision. Actually, I don’t know how she does it; I use a pencil and about eight Q-Tips. I sit on the bed combing out my wet hair. Lyssa stops and looks at me in the mirror. “You look so different without make-up,” she says.
Worse, she means.
I finish getting ready in the bathroom.
“Can you slow down a bit Sam?” she asks as we walk to the bar.
“I guess I’m just a fast walker,” I say and walk so fast I miss the street we have to turn onto.
“This way, Hon,” Lyssa calls to me halfway down the block, her voice extra velvety and spectacular.
The bar, Luv Affair, is Lyssa’s choice. Girls mouthing the words to Top 40, guys staring at their t and a. We check our coats and, seeing two pink slushy Margaritas walk by, order some. The bartender makes them in front of us, drizzling in the tequila like he's writing his name with piss in the snow. He switches the blender on and yells over it: “twenty eight dollars, Ladies.”
“That’s way too much,” I laugh.
“Well, that’s the price,” he says, meaning that we watched the show and now we have to pay.
“No way,” I say. “I’ve never paid for that much for a drink in my life.”
“It’s okay,” Lyssa leans over and says to him.
“No seriously, that’s ridiculous, Lyssa. We’re not paying that.”
“I’ll pay, it’s okay,” she says.
The bartender takes his money, I defeatedly take my glass, and Lyssa takes hers and goes to dance to Tainted Love.
I watch her dance as some redheaded guy tries to shag her from behind. Consider going up to her and suggesting he might be Haymish, our long lost Scotsman bother. I watch her give him a hug. Watch her be polite. She probably thinks it will get him to go away. But it only encourages him in his attempt to mate with her from behind. Lyssa pretends he isn’t there, smiling at him largely when she has to. That’s the problem with being nice. Sometimes you nice yourself right into a slut.
The Top 40 girls look around to see who’s looking at them, shake booty in their uniforms: ankle biter jeans, too much jewellery and dagger-pointy boots. I think of a joke I heard: these days, even if you’re one in a million, there are still thousands of you. I just don’t understand, how changing the shape of your foot is supposed to make you look hot.
Lyssa comes back, drink empty. “God. That guy will just not get the hint.”
“You need to be more direct,” I tell her.
An evil Clingon line forms down the middle of her brow. Haymish looks over at us. She gives him her mirror face.
It was simpler back in grade six when the drama was played out between our Barbies, and Ken wouldn’t speak unless we let him, which we didn’t do much because he was boring (under his underwear a second pair of ginch melded to his genitals). Lyssa and I get along better when we pay less attention to each other. More attention to making shit up.
When we leave the bar, it’s rained again and there’s a liquid static in the air. Lyssa is having trouble navigating the puddles in her killer boots. She walks up on the balls of her feet. Like a Barbie.
“We’re in Vancouver!” she yells on her fourteen dollar a drink buzz.
So we are.
* * *
Over the next few days, Lyssa and I keep it business-like – no accents, no laughing, just general questions and comments like: “this is good pasta” and “where's the blow dryer?” We set off for Calgary with this delicate balance between us.
Today, I drive. The endless suburbs of the lower Vancouver mainland go on and on with trees and houses and people and people and people and people and people. One long human smear. The more of them there are, the less of me there is.
I ask Lyssa: “so what do you think of Vancouver?”
“It’s nice,” she says.
I wait.
Nothing else.
This is her answer.
“What about Victoria?” I ask her.
“It was good,” she says. “It was fun.”
The Vancouver clouds dissolve into rain. Maybe I should pretend to be like Lyssa and all those other girls who arrange their lives so they don’t have time to think, to form opinions.
“Hon, you’re speeding a bit,” Lyssa says.
I slow down.
It almost eludes me that she’s just called me Hon again.
“Sam,” I remind her.
“What? Oh.” She pauses. “Sorry. I know you have a thing about that.”
Is it all in my head? The way she is to me?
Silent red flashing lights start to trail us. I slow down to let them block the road in front us, then watch the rental car's windshield wipers go back and forth, back and forth, as the cop writes out the ticket. Lyssa sits rubbing the Clingon dent between her eyes.
“Do you want me to drive?” she asks, too softly, once we’re back on the road.
I shrug no and remind myself of a guy.
“Weren’t you paying attention?” she asks.
I stare straight ahead.
“You know, I try so hard with you…” Lyssa says.
The roads zoom past us blindly. It would be safe to say I’m speeding again.
“Maybe you don’t need to try so hard,” I say.
“You’re never happy are you?” Lyssa asks. “I mean, do you even want my friendship, Sam?”
At the moment I don’t.
I don’t want to be one of those girls - a honey calling pointy boot wearer.
“Are you happy?” I ask Lyssa.
“Of course,” she says.
But then, it’s easy to fake it when you don’t know you’re faking it.
This is why I suck at acting.
At the next gas station, Lyssa gets out and separates our stuff with a perfect invisible line down the middle. Hers on one side, mine on the other - space in between.
We agree to take a shortcut through Jasper to get home as fast as possible. Skip Calgary altogether.
It doesn’t matter, I guess.
Everywhere is pretty much the same anyway.
She waits for the rush of the tide
© David Barnes
I call her on the phone, remote. She sits with a cat purring in her lap, sorrow rises in her voice, tidal. And after, a little joy comes like the sun breaking through in the late afternoon. Everything else has stopped. The estuary swallows all sound save the wind in the grass out on the saltings. She waits for the rush of the tide to tell the time, so days move in six hourly rotation.
“But I don’t trust him,” she said.
At my end of the line I nod, uselessly.
“What will you do?”
We leaf through the pages of possible futures. Outside, the rising water trickles through the channel into the oyster beds. The horse chestnut trees on the far bank begin to burn with autumn.
Here in the city the pale sunlight slants through the streets. I lose 2 minutes of evening every day in the countdown to winter. The air is chill already, biting in the wind.
She calls me and asks,
“Do you miss her?”
Do I? Like a room, unchanging except for the gathering dust.
“I don’t have any regrets.”
Six months since I broke with her and I don’t want to see anyone else. Her face in my memory slowly fading.
“I deleted her phone number.”
“But you know where she lives.”
“If she still lives there.”
For a week now, everyday, I read one of her old letters and throw it away.
The distance from her in time telescopes further and further.
“Why didn’t it work?”
If I met her again, in the street, what would happen? We would get a coffee, there would be that slow magic, that intensification of time and awareness. We would have so much to talk about. And we would lose ourselves in the conversation like I never did with anyone else.
And she would still be thin, not only physically. I would be frustrated. And she knows my anger and knows what she does not want. It could never work. So it fades, or lies sleeping and one day it will be forgotten. This connection that goes deep but can go nowhere.
So I see other girls, pretty or quirky, fat or thin or beautiful. And none of them really touch me. As though I’m behind glass, somewhere else. And after a few days, I lose interest.
Why didn’t it work?
“She was never sure what she wanted.” My eyes are on the sky, disconnected from my words. “I didn’t want someone so afraid, so thin inside. Like she was starving. She would be a heavy weight round my neck…”
She registers this, takes it in. She gets what I mean and accepts it.
“And she… she was trapped in her own thing.” I break off. “What did you do this morning?”
“I brought in the wood… I saw the seal again, coming up the estuary from the sea. His black eyes, hard and wise. Watching.”
In the city the shops are full of winter coats. Everything is about being cosy. Soon they will be selling mulled wine in all the cafés.
“He phoned me today.”
“And?”
“He wants to see me. He’s sailing over.”
I hope that she doesn’t see him. I just wish it was over between them once and for all so I don’t have to go through her suffering. This long drawn out thread she’s hooked on, the little he gives her never enough. She accepting too little, like an orphan child.
“He called me and we spoke. It was like nothing had happened.”
“He’s superficial. He lied to you.”
Silence.
“He’s not who I thought he was when I married him.”
In the gap between words, holding the phone, I know she’s there. We hold this silence between us.
“Are you going to see him?”
“Yes.”
I took the last letter with its pain and its poetry and recycled it. I felt as though I was tearing something out of me. It is a point of pride never ever to contact her. Later, I drank hot chocolate by the park, hunched over the café table, the cold wind whipping round my legs. I felt lighter.
In the night, in the house in the estuary you hear the owls. The fire crackles in the stove and the cats walk along the roof beams, picking their way like high wire artists. The fire throws their shadows across the underside of the roof, eerie and distorted. Like curious children.