spread out bits of paraphernalia on the sidewalk before him like fetishes, a broken picture frame, a candle stub, a chipped statuette of the Virgin.
He was rocking on the balls of his feet, rocking and rocking.
“Spare any change?”
No eye contact, no sense of connection, the words coming out like a sort of tic. He pocketed the coins I handed him without looking at them.
“Thank you.”
In my apartment, the feeling again of intrusion, of a presence. I checked every room: nothing. I was dreamy now with fever, truly ill. I was vaguely aware that the bed was contaminated in some way but wasn’t sure how to deal with it; in the end I spread my sleeping bag over top and crawled inside. It was only as I was turning out the light that I noticed the parcel on my desk, what I must have been clutching the whole evening like a talisman to bring it back to where it sat now, Rita’s gift.
XIII
I threw up several times in the night, stumbling from my bed each time the churning began in my stomach to kneel half-dazed at the toilet while I retched. In the end I was reduced to dry heaves mainly, though they seemed to still for a few minutes the world’s mad reeling; but back in bed it would start again. In my confusion I imagined I was in a storm at sea, that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, crawling up to my bunk while beneath me my mother sighed and slept slowly bleeding to death.
At some point in the night, a real storm started up. Rain, wind, through the slit I’d left open in the bedroom window; I had the presence of mind to pull the window shut but the room seemed to have ingested the storm by then, seemed filled with an incessant rustling of paper and a mad ringing like the clashing of a thousand glass pendants. Outside, blue light flashed against a wash of black, light and then thunder, a great gnashing and scraping of fissured sky. I was a boyagain, thinking the world a tiny ball and the sky a vast firmament that enclosed it: with each flash, each peal, the firmament cracked and for an instant heaven’s forbidden light blazed through.
Around dawn I fell into fitful sleep. There was a period of dreams then, though more like half-waking memories that had somehow got tangled up in the logic of dreams: I was en route to the Dogon village again only now it was raining, in the distance great monoliths of smoothed rock, foursquare and vast, towering up from the landscape like stones the gods had dropped; and there was a mystery to solve, and a ritual whose end was the expiation of some ancient crime. When I arrived at the village – had this happened? had I ever arrived there in real life? – the villagers were all in their separate homes in the cliff face, caves really but also a sort of hotel. I went from home to home, conducting my interviews; but in each place it was the same, the same indifferent, evasive shrug, the claim that there was no ritual, no culprit, no crime.
Rain and more rain: it continued on through the day and into the evening. I got up briefly to make food, my stomach like a pit that had been scoured, then dug deeper. Outside, the rain formed a continuous sheet on the roads, rivering into the sewage drains and sloshing up over the curbs as cars passed. Jose was holed up in an open shed at the back of the service station across Huron; he was in his usual stance, squatting, rocking, his eyes doing reconnaissance along the street while his bundles and bags sat heaped around him like precious spoils.
I called Rita’s.
“She’s out.” Elena’s inscrutable tone, and at once the paranoia in me: she knew or would know, was like a time bomb from which, in moments or weeks or years, all the outrage at what had happened would be unleashed.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Dunno. I thought she might be at your place.”
A pause.
“You sound sick or something,” she said.
“Yeah. Just a flu.”
I slept. The racing of my mind had eased: it seemed to have worn itself out, to
He was rocking on the balls of his feet, rocking and rocking.
“Spare any change?”
No eye contact, no sense of connection, the words coming out like a sort of tic. He pocketed the coins I handed him without looking at them.
“Thank you.”
In my apartment, the feeling again of intrusion, of a presence. I checked every room: nothing. I was dreamy now with fever, truly ill. I was vaguely aware that the bed was contaminated in some way but wasn’t sure how to deal with it; in the end I spread my sleeping bag over top and crawled inside. It was only as I was turning out the light that I noticed the parcel on my desk, what I must have been clutching the whole evening like a talisman to bring it back to where it sat now, Rita’s gift.
XIII
I threw up several times in the night, stumbling from my bed each time the churning began in my stomach to kneel half-dazed at the toilet while I retched. In the end I was reduced to dry heaves mainly, though they seemed to still for a few minutes the world’s mad reeling; but back in bed it would start again. In my confusion I imagined I was in a storm at sea, that I was back on the ship that had brought me to Canada, crawling up to my bunk while beneath me my mother sighed and slept slowly bleeding to death.
At some point in the night, a real storm started up. Rain, wind, through the slit I’d left open in the bedroom window; I had the presence of mind to pull the window shut but the room seemed to have ingested the storm by then, seemed filled with an incessant rustling of paper and a mad ringing like the clashing of a thousand glass pendants. Outside, blue light flashed against a wash of black, light and then thunder, a great gnashing and scraping of fissured sky. I was a boyagain, thinking the world a tiny ball and the sky a vast firmament that enclosed it: with each flash, each peal, the firmament cracked and for an instant heaven’s forbidden light blazed through.
Around dawn I fell into fitful sleep. There was a period of dreams then, though more like half-waking memories that had somehow got tangled up in the logic of dreams: I was en route to the Dogon village again only now it was raining, in the distance great monoliths of smoothed rock, foursquare and vast, towering up from the landscape like stones the gods had dropped; and there was a mystery to solve, and a ritual whose end was the expiation of some ancient crime. When I arrived at the village – had this happened? had I ever arrived there in real life? – the villagers were all in their separate homes in the cliff face, caves really but also a sort of hotel. I went from home to home, conducting my interviews; but in each place it was the same, the same indifferent, evasive shrug, the claim that there was no ritual, no culprit, no crime.
Rain and more rain: it continued on through the day and into the evening. I got up briefly to make food, my stomach like a pit that had been scoured, then dug deeper. Outside, the rain formed a continuous sheet on the roads, rivering into the sewage drains and sloshing up over the curbs as cars passed. Jose was holed up in an open shed at the back of the service station across Huron; he was in his usual stance, squatting, rocking, his eyes doing reconnaissance along the street while his bundles and bags sat heaped around him like precious spoils.
I called Rita’s.
“She’s out.” Elena’s inscrutable tone, and at once the paranoia in me: she knew or would know, was like a time bomb from which, in moments or weeks or years, all the outrage at what had happened would be unleashed.
“Do you know where she went?”
“Dunno. I thought she might be at your place.”
A pause.
“You sound sick or something,” she said.
“Yeah. Just a flu.”
I slept. The racing of my mind had eased: it seemed to have worn itself out, to
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