Bellevue Square Page 3

  On some days, I ate pupusas and continued my little friendship with Katerina. I kept her off the topic of my “miracle” sister, and eventually she told me more about herself, about her home and where she grew up in Guatemala. By coincidence, she’d come to Toronto when Ian and I came with the kids, within days of each other, we discovered. “Now we’re like twins, too,” she told me. “We become Torontoners almost on the same day!”

  Miguel had stopped harassing her. But when I went to sit at the back of the shop, I would face the front so I could tell her if her sometimes-lover came in. In none of my brief visits to Katerina, however, did Ingrid ever come in.

  And she seemed to be staying out of Bellevue Square, too. Or maybe she was avoiding it. It certainly felt that, if she existed, she wasn’t all that interested in meeting me. But now that we knew about each other, there was no reason not to put the mystery of our lookalikery to rest.

  Within this time, I’d worked out a general taxonomy for the park. Many homogenous groups had formed. I identified, in discrete subsets: obsessives, paranoiacs, zombies, professional clowns, hair eaters, weepers, chatters, schizos, aliens, psychotics, dipshits, ferret keepers, goths, takeout eaters (a hugely varied group in and of itself), tourists, police, masturbators, shouters, air-guitarists, CD sellers, city workers emerging from the ground, and cat walkers, to name a fraction.

  The volume of a person’s voice appeared to be a barometer of their sanity. The silent, dirty, downcast men holding furred paper cups, with sooty eyes and scars for mouths, were the ones who developed a sudden taste for murder once in a while. Even the ones who were usually alone joined up with others from time to time. On a typical afternoon, one of these broken types, say Jimmy, will be making some terrible noise, roaring so loudly you can hear his voice shred—but in rage or grief or desolation? He’ll slump against a tree in his blue shirt not dark enough to hide the filth on it, his beard going down to his navel. I’ve seen or imagined little black mice scurrying around in that beard. It’s impossible to know what the face under it looks like. The first time I saw Jimmy, he was reading Us magazine in the shade of one of the willows. I looked at the cover a moment too long—Tom Hardy was on it and I have a debilitating weakness for Tom Hardy—and Jimmy said, “They’re just like us!” I pretended not to hear him, but he called to me. “Hey. Don’t be scared. Celebrities are just like us, so it follows we’re just like them. They live our secret lives out in the open and we hide their public lives in our thoughts.”

  One afternoon, a young couple crossed the park to see him. The woman, a girl really, gave him a king can of Brava. She wore a polka-dotted skirt over black leggings. She told him how the cops knew it was him and he better get off the streets. They left and he walked back and forth over a worn patch of grass smoking a bent cigarette and sucking at the beer with flared lips. He finished it and pulled his shirt off. I saw the knobs of his vertebrae range up and connect to the base of his skull. He crossed the park and sat under another tree. Immediately, two dipshits came over and sat right in front of him and I braced myself for violence, although nothing happened.

  (The dipshits are the ones with glue dripping from their noses. I guess Jimmy knows they’re worse off than he is. He’s got a nice warm bed if he wants one, a five-minute walk from here, and he’s not really an addict, he’s sick. The addicts are sick too, but the glueheads, specifically, burn off their personalities, while there’s still a Jimmy in Jimmy. Or so he’s told me. The dipshits sleep in the park. From time to time there are fights at night, so you have to stay out when it’s really dark, like after the bars have closed. Gluehead violence is common. Punks come and roll them where they’re sleeping, but they don’t wake up. Not because they’re dead, but because getting mugged is not enough to wake them.)

  Even with its menaces, the square’s playground has kids in it. Kids in the wading pool, kids on blankets sitting in the grass. Lunatics are a hazard if you live downtown, but your kids still want to go to the pool, right?

  I stayed a watcher for much of these weeks in Bellevue Square. I remained apart from the passersby and the regulars. I was different because I didn’t belong; that’s what I told myself. One afternoon I was sitting on the wall and struggling with a corned beef sandwich on a paper plate. I don’t like to drip on myself or eat messily. If something I’m eating falls apart, say a taco or an ice cream cone, I get angry. I know (because I’ve had therapy) that I get angry at myself because I no longer have my father around to get angry at me. For being a slob or a clumsy moron.

  It had turned windy, and the sandwich was coming apart in my hands. For a reason lost to time (I should ask Ian’s mother), it’s traditional to make a corned beef sandwich with two asymmetrically cut pieces of bread that had been nowhere near each other in the bag, arranged into two sandwich halves, and held together by flimsy toothpicks. I’d removed the toothpicks and lathered mustard on the bread. I sat with my knees pressed together, using the second half of the sandwich to weigh the plate down on my lap.

  The first half was scrumptious, even though some of the meat squelched out and fell onto the plate. I started on the second half, and this time the two peninsulas of rye that were holding the meat in place were so insubstantial that much of the sandwich fell apart at the same moment as the wind blew my plate into the playground.

  I looked down at the splat of pink meat and streaky mustard on my jeans and muttered: “You idiot.” In my mind, I continued: “You can’t even eat a sandwich. Look at all this wasted food, you pig.”

  My inner scold was interrupted by the appearance of two feet in dirty Adidas in my line of vision. I looked up into a pair of hands holding napkins, and above them, into the eyes of a man I had named Zippy because he had a small head and a protruding nose. He was dressed in what he always wore, a black quilted parka vest, with a camera around his neck. He said, “I hate when that happens.” I accepted the napkins, and he sat beside me.

  “Thank you.”

  “I put the plate in the recycling because it was dirty and the pigeons will eat the bits of meat and I’m a photographer. My name is Ritt. I’ve seen you twelve times.”

  “I’m Jean,” I said.

  “Are you from the bin? The loony bin?”

  “No,” I told him. “Are you?”

  “I’m a member of that establishment. I perform there often.”

  “What do you perform, Ritt?”

  “My photographs. I have more napkins and I also have photo albums and a two-terabyte SDXC card. Do you need more napkins?”

  “I’m good now. Thanks for your help. That was good timing.”

  “Can I show you something?” He had a photo wallet in his hand and he unsnapped its clasp. “These are ginna blow your mind, I swear.” It was an album of flowers, snapshots in plastic sleeves. “Ten point two pixels. Crystal clear, high fidelity.”

  “Interesting,” I said, although it wasn’t. He flipped slowly through, giving me enough time to take in his portraits of rhododendrons, tulips, and hyacinths. There were sprays and starbursts of white hydrangea. “Do you take pictures of people?”

  “People don’t hold still. You get blur and you get double exposure and people aren’t interesting! People are people, you know, like the song. Being good looking, an example of humanity, doohickeys with eyes in ’em? That doesn’t mean you’re a nice person! Look at hands and feet, if you want to know someone, hands and feet, and corpuscles. That’ll tell you the truth, hands and feet.” He put a finger beside his nose. “And corpuscles.”

  “Did you take all of these in the market?”

  “Most of them.”

  “This one?” I asked. It was a picture of deep pink lotuses floating in a small pond. I could almost smell them. It was a low-angle shot taken in someone’s garden and in the distance, people sat around a glass table, eating dinner. “There are people in this one. And were you at this dinner? It almost looks like you’re hiding in the grass.”

  “A fence,” he said. “I took it through a wo
oden fence.”

  It was a good photo. It had an aura of memory to it, as if I’d been in that garden. Then something about it began to bother me.

  He said, “This is art, you know. If you see something and take a picture or write it down, it’s art because you’re the one that did it, you know? Before I took pictures of these things, they were only things. Do you believe that art exists?”

  “Oh. Sure,” I told him, and then I saw it. I recognized one of the people at the table: a woman with long hair who even through the photoblur I recognized, although it couldn’t be. “Oh god,” I said. I took the album out of his hands.

  “Hey—!”

  I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, the way my therapist had shown me. I looked more closely. It was me. I recognized the shirt, the earrings, even my posture. But I didn’t know any of the people and I’d never been in that garden. I was sure of it. I didn’t want to puke on Ritt’s flower album so I flipped away from the lotuses and started counting my breaths. “Sorry,” I said.

  “They’re for sale, you know. You can’t just have them.”

  “Oh yeah? Can I buy the lotus picture?”

  “That one? I like my daisies better.”

  “The lotus speaks to me. How much?”

  “Two? Bucks?”

  “I’ll give you five.”

  “Wow.” He got the picture out before I changed my mind. “Have you heard a band called A Band Called?”

  “What? No.”

  “They’re good, but you have to like caterwauling. Do you want any other pictures?”

  “No. But if you see this lady again,” I said, showing him the woman who had to be Ingrid, “I’ll pay you five bucks per picture.”

  “Right on,” he said. He leapt up to return to whatever he’d been doing before he rescued me from my sandwich and gave me my only solid lead.

  Ritt erased the fourth wall between me and them. I began to notice parkies more; they were people who, in addition to being troubled, full-on mad, or lost, were also persons with beer preferences, party affiliations, kids, and manners, too. They were entire, and they were sick or addicted or in the thrall of an awakening or fervour. There were the drunks, of course, and they are ghastly and scrubbed-out people. But almost everyone I met or spoke to in Bellevue Square was a decent soul. As was my new friend, Katerina. It was as if the park and its environs had been, at least temporarily, made into a mysterious little paradise for me, with entertainment and pastimes and the promise of something marvellous, something absolutely marvellous coming, something that would bring with it the answer to the wrong.

  —

  Once I began to interact, I joined the ranks of regulars. It felt strange for only a very short time, being brought into their circle, but I realized I already had a place in its ecology. I was paying for sightings, real, false, and rumoured, as well as ones that were convincingly told, and I spread prosperity in a thin, useful layer. I became a resource, and in return, the people of the park and market opened up to me. Everyone had a role to play. Miriam, who owned the sidewalk space in front of the recessed fire hydrant beside the synagogue, put herself in charge of ensuring we all got milk. I took a carton of 2% every time I was there. Why not? I was paying for it.

  Cullen became my most “regular” informant. He’s an old man with a fanlike grey-and-black beard. A custodial figure. He brushes off the seating areas with a copy of the day’s Metro; keeps his eye on the wading pool. I heard he once rescued a child from it, but he was still taken away by the cops. Because a black man rescuing a white child and all that, he told me, like he accepted it. I couldn’t see him harming anyone, but I don’t really know what happened. He’s peaceable enough. His uniform is faded jean overalls with a woollen shirt underneath to keep his rangy body warm, even in summer. His work entails going around the benches as well as sitting-stones and the wooden playground wall, in a kind of lazy surveillance. When he’s idle, he stands on the Augusta side of the park, near the south corner, looking up the street expressionlessly. He’s told me this is his “no-mind” time. He thinks nothing, he sees nothing. “It’s my practice,” he’s told me. He’s the only one Miriam doesn’t give milk to. He says it’s because she’s a racist bitch, but I think they were once an item, a long time ago. I have a feeling for these sorts of things.

  Cullen is a social type and he likes to stick around after he gets paid and tell me disconnected stories from his life. He told me his mother always knew when a storm was coming because one of her dogs would wait at the basement door. The other was deaf and got struck by lightning. Also, he said he taught biochemistry at the University of Toronto, but quit to “study chemicals in their natural habitat.” His sightings have been disconcertingly consistent. His Ingrid shops for fruit, weighing oranges in her hand and knocking melons, but never buying. I’ve asked him why she never buys and he says she might be allergic. He claims to have spoken to her only once, and just the first time, when he greeted her thinking she was me, and she asked him to move along. “She has a hungry look,” he told me. “I don’t think she’s really after fruit.”

  “What do you think she’s after? It can’t be me. I’ve been coming here a month without a single sighting.”

  “I’m not sure, but she may be after my great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s magic horn.”

  “Your what?”

  “But she can’t steal it because I don’t have it yet! Charles is bringing it to me. One day! One day Charles will bring me Katterfelto’s Horn!” His shiny eyes became distant, his mouth frozen in a half smile. It seemed to me he was in a place that was beyond madness. He was ecstatic.

  ON MAY 15TH, I did a tally of all the people I had individually witnessed in Bellevue Square, comers, goers, and stayers. Among my most interesting sightings was a drunken teenager making out with the Al Waxman statue, as well as a man sitting in the grass with a bottle of Vaseline and a single, disgusting Q-tip, which he inserted into his nostrils loaded with petroleum jelly. I also saw people getting each other off under blankets and a nudist who was ushered out of the park by police officers. But none of these people had been Ingrid. To be precise, by the middle of May, Ingrid Fox had not been 4,233 people.

  WE ALL KNOW that bad things are coming. Advice: don’t get too comfortable. Read short books, don’t see your doctor too often. Example of this: on one of my visits to my old GP, Gary Pass, I learned the name for the bony protrusions that had started to poke out of my skull. They were aneurysmal bone cysts, benign (1997). Then Pass pronounced I had polyps. They flourished in such places as my armpits (2001, 2006, 2010), my cervix (2007), and my rectum (2012). It’s no small thing to have a half-dozen growths fried off your cervix, but I would take that over two in the fundament. Paula, my sister, called the second operation “Fire Below.” She’s been allowed, since 2007, to make fun of my aches and pains because she has a case of the brain tumours. Paula used to live in Phoenix with her husband, Chase, but now she and Chase are quits and she lives alone in Phoenix, convalescing or dying. Nine years after diagnosis, the tumour has doubled in size, but she lives on. It’s inoperable. We keep our Skypes on and I have a huge data plan on my phone, which means I can talk to her while I walk down the street if I want. I’m all she has now. Our deadbeat father died last year, and our mother alternates between Toronto and Key West, where she cures herself to kid leather six months out of the year. Once in a while she’ll go see Paula, but my mother has a life. She says you shouldn’t have to take care of your kids past their eighteenth birthdays.

  During times of peace, when people are surviving from one week to the next, a kind of holy feeling comes over me. I try to live by the belief that almost everyone who is likely to make it through the day does, and although this is an argument for some ordering presence, I’m sure it’s not one we’ve thought of. You can’t talk about God around Ian. He’s a piercer of fictions. He knows too much, and he doesn’t hide it from you. Men want to be right. Let them, I say. It drives him crazy wh
en I won’t take the other end of the rope. “Okay, you’re right” are three devastating words.

  Mostly he is pleasant about issuing corrections. He is capable of a warm, giving smile. It can be dangerous to ask him for advice or even just his thoughts on something because he fancies himself an expert on just about everything. I guess he is. After my first few fruitless weeks in the park, I wanted to know how detectives found stuff out.

  “You mean how they solve crimes?”

  “Yeah.”

  He closed the magazine he’d been looking at and put on his thinky face. “Well, it’s different depending on the type of crime, but the two most important things about a crime is the scene of the crime itself with its attendant evidence, and witnesses. Detectives and specialists collect evidence from the—”

  “How do you find witnesses? Isn’t it hard sometimes to find people who are willing to talk?”

  “Often, yeah.” He paused. “Why are you asking?”

  “I was just wondering if the way they look for witnesses in movies and on TV is really how they do it in reality. Knockin’ on doors, ‘scuse me, ma’am…”

  “There’s lots of that. Anyone hanging around the crime scene is worth talking to. They might know whose house it is, whose car it was, what the victim’s name was, and so on. You take notes, write down people’s names. You have to keep your ear tuned for inconsistencies in people’s stories. Are there hours missing from their day? And watch where their eyes go.”

  “What do you mean, where their eyes go?”

  “If they won’t look at you, or, conversely, they won’t break eye contact, something’s wrong. People’s faces twitch, too, when they’re trying to control their responses.”

  “And that means they’re lying.”

  “Not necessarily. But they might be hiding something. You have to reassure them they’re doing the right thing cooperating with the police.”