Stanley Park by Timothy Taylor

Caruzo said. “How about a coffee? You got just plain coffee? Coffee?”
    “I think so,” Jeremy said. “Black, right? That will be twenty dollars please.”
    “Damn. Left my wallet in the park.” Caruzo took the coffee and started to laugh at the regular joke they shared. A hiccuping, belching, farting sound. It sent his shoulders jogging, produced white flecks at the mouth corners and, more often than not, jarred a little pendulum booger out to the edge of his upper lip. Sure enough, there was the booger.
    “Oh right, I forgot. You don’t
have
any money,” Jeremy said, slapping his forehead.
    “Hey, I got money. I got money, you know,” Caruzo said, who had now spilled coffee on himself, the counter and the floor. “Just not on me. It’s not on me. Hey Jay, though? Jay, I am a messenger.”
    “Here’s a napkin, blow your nose. How about a seat?”
    He led Caruzo across the room to a table against the brick wall. They sat down together, and Jeremy waited while Caruzo blew his nose, elaborately examining the contents of the napkin. Blew again. It was a big nose, like a sap extrusion on a cedar trunk. His eyes were a faraway storm colour, against which it was hard to pick up the pupil movements.
    Finished finally with the napkin, Caruzo delivered his message. “The Professor is asking after you. Asking after you, Jay-Jay.”
    “I see,” Jeremy said, glancing around the room.
    “Babes in the Wood. It’s all about that, Jay, nothing else. Babes in the Woods, most of all. Needs to know soon, right?” Caruzo was staring at him intently. Staring through him. “Needs to know what you found out soon, Jay.”
    “Fine, Caruzo,” Jeremy said. “Tell him I’ll be down to the library next week.”
    Caruzo was a permanent jangle of ticks and repeated words, but he went absolutely still with this answer and spoke the first complex, non-fragmented sentence Jeremy had ever heard him speak. “The Professor was expecting that you would have done the research by now.”
    It made an impression. Jeremy said, “I promise I’ll do it this weekend.”
    Caruzo nodded slowly and seriously.
    “Caruzo?” Jeremy said, trying out something he’d been wondering. How did you go about asking questions of a person like Caruzo? What did his father hear?
    “Jay?” Caruzo said back, all ears.
    He couldn’t think of any better way of phrasing the question. “What do you and the Professor talk about, Caruzo?”
    “Oh. Phhhhhht,” he shrugged, snorted, boogered on himself again. He was talking through the napkin, eyes bulging from the incomprehensible activity that surged within. “Well, he’s writing. You know. Writing. Always writing. And listening too. Always listening. Listening and writing. Writing and listening.”
    “About what, though?” Jeremy was beginning to see how these conversations could be trying.
    “It’s like Siwash, Jay-Jay.”
    “It is?” Jeremy said. There was always the danger Caruzo would unspool on you. Only once had Jeremy been forced to ask him to leave.
    “He’s, like …,” said Caruzo. He was holding his hands apart now, palms inwards, as if trying to contain something. An idea. Hold it in its invisible box so he could see it. So Jeremy could see it. “He’s, like, counting. Waiting. Counting. Waiting. Like the Professor, only the Professor is writing. Listening. See? The same.”
    Caruzo grabbed his hand. Uh-oh. The brown fingers wound around his own palm, fingertips clamping almost at his wrist. They had no fingernails, Jeremy could now see. Only pads.
    “Signs, Jay-Jay.”
    “Signs?” Jeremy said.
    “Signs and signals. Signals and signs. From somewhere. Signs of life. Signs for life. I believe in the signs, Jay-Jay. I really believe in these signs.”
    Caruzo let him go and they both got up.
    He had customers, more film students. More coffees. Later smelt fritters and house tartar mayo. What was for dinner tonight? Black cod, of course. He was going to have to prep himself a