Displacement by Michael Marano

cancer away.
    I stopped below Catherine’s building, palms damp, heart fluttering, as if I wore another body, like a coat, over the one full of tantric expectation: another body that I formed through the act of looking
at
and
through
her home. I leaned against a tree and unslung my book-bag, the final emblem of my youth, for I’d die at the age when I was expected to start carrying a briefcase. The bag clattered from the shiny metal instruments inside that I’d purloined from an undertakers’ supply house—the keen blades that would help Catherine and me fix our relationship better than any couples’ counsellor could.
    I lit a cigarette to kill time as I watched her place and collected myself . . . as I collected
more
than myself into myself. The cigarette was an icon, potent as the caduceus of a healing god: a symbol of danger, the smoke of which I drank into my lungs to steady the nerves of the secondary body surrounding me, so that it could take the power I’d need to intrude on Catherine’s home with my presence before I intruded on her body with a blade of near-impossible fineness.
    I don’t smoke, of course. But I had to try as many new things as possible in the weeks I had left. It made the ritual act of
watching
richer, gave the flavours of October air a new depth, like the essence of heat-aged cedar. The iconic danger of the cigarette rose up to dance with the breath of a time of reaping, when sheltering darkness gives its grace to those who are blessed to walk within it.
    October has always been like a mistress to me. I love the new sublimity of the weather, the first frost, the painted sunsets, the decorations for Halloween. Everything becomes a mystery.
    To stand and
watch
, during a season when masks and all their terrible power are themselves masked as child’s play, made the deep-water shadows on the street seem like velvet, made the stone fences and oaks more solid. The neighbourhood was a tomb to the dead middle classes that had lived here. The disappearance of the people that had defined the place made it seem haunted, like land that had belonged to mound-building Native Americans.
Absence
made the reality here worn as the sole of a cracked boot. I could walk more easily through fiction and myth tonight than I could on any other night on which I’ve killed. The geometry of the street (with its once-sturdy single-family homes and duplexes cut into condos and high-end apartments with fire-code ugly stairways of steel) was made fragile as a light-sleeper’s dream by what October whispered upon it.
    I was going to miss October.
    I heard the shuffle of feet through leaves.
    No one was there. October air changes sound. It was a kid on a side street, or a cat chasing mice through mist-damp piles of yard cuttings. Let it stalk. For that was what I now did, enrobing my form as the summoned demon of the vindictive ex-lover, the dangerous Phantom who possesses women, who is the monster lurking within facile love songs about “making you mine,” the stalker who terrifies through his harnessing the Deadly Sin of
vanity
. A different vanity than that which makes homes sanctuaries that Dark and Shadowy Men can violate. It is a deeper vanity than that, and much more potent.
    As I finished the cigarette, ceremoniously throwing it in the gutter, I scanned Catherine’s five-unit building that had been a two-family duplex, making sure my escape routes were viable as I remembered them should Catherine have time to scream. It would be easy to swing from her balcony to the fire escape grafted to the side of the once house-like house. Depending on the situation, I could go down to the street or up to the slanting roof. From the roof, I could jump to the next building. If I missed the jump, what did I lose? Six months? A year of medical bills I couldn’t afford?
    I went to the front door and rang her apartment. She buzzed me in.
    Like old times. Only now, I didn’t enter with a bird’s-nest lump of dread in my