Joyland

It was insistent, the corpse, in the daughter’s careful execution of the process, as if the octopus was asserting its physical presence all the more that she cut into it.

Doctor, exactly how many autopsies have you performed in your professional career?

I can only attest to my activities on certain days, communications with the dead often arise in memory gaps, and rather than involve myself in some ridiculous pursuit, I’d prefer to just say I’m usually making my way to church in the morning.

When did you first observe the body in question?

I’m not sure I can admit such things without contradicting myself. The environment around here, it seems to be withering. Can you feel a certain deadness in the air?

What condition was the body in when you first saw it, Doctor/Daughter?

I told you over lunch, where Kaiser buns seemed to sprout cucumber through a sheet of spinach, what I thought about Alec Melnyk, the man who measured headstones with a candy coloured yardstick and took the dead out of their tombs. He was gaunt inside roomy flannel, neatly tucked into a good pair of Levis, with the cheekbones of a lettuce eater. I said he was in love with Mrs. Chenets.

“Yeah, they must have had a secret affair” I said as midday light bounced around the cafe.
You were unimpressed.

“Before or after she married Mr Chenets?” you asked skeptically.

“All along” I said. “I mean he must have had a high school sweetheart. He couldn’t have just lived alone at his father’s farm and worked the fields all his life. At some point he started grave digging. There must be some mystery to him and he doesn’t seem tragic or sad enough for a lover to have died on him I can guarantee Alec Melnyk is or was in love with Mrs. Rebecca Chenets.”

I was once in love with a revolutionary who, for the life of him, could not tell a joke.

He would omit important details – that the rabbi was wearing a duck, for example, or that the little old lady was still a virgin – declaring these particulars to be pointlessly offensive and espousing that a good joke should charm and not harm its audience.

To prevent him from bombing as he had over and over again in front of our well-mannered friends, family and comrades, I encouraged him to try simpler comedies: sight gags, one-liners, knock-knocks.

“What about a homonym?” I offered, “Or a pun? After all, you have such a good ear.” I made a comb of my fingers and pushed his hair back behind one of them to underscore my point.

He bent his head forward, shook his graying layers free, and sighed. “Just because people don’t laugh at my jokes doesn’t mean I’m going to compromise my beliefs.”

       We lived in a two-and-a-half bedroom apartment a block west of the housing project. There was no walking through the ghetto east and south of us, so the shortest way to the university’s east campus was north, then east, then south. Straight east the unknown could slow you down.
       I walked Anne to school as part of the agreement that let me stay in the half-bedroom—my share of the utilities, some cookin’ and cleanin’, and Anne. I guess she never had a man take care of her before—that was probably why she fell in love with me. She had held men’s arms as she walked, and she already knew all about men’s arms when she held mine, but she was interested in the other parts.
       There really wasn’t a whole lot to do. Mostly, I had to make sure that she got to and from school okay, so we walked north, then east, then south every day, her cane clicking to a rhythm that fit my steps.

Patty boards the train in Calgary on her way back home to Vancouver and takes a seat near the window. Other passengers heft their bags into the overhead storage compartments and free themselves from their winter coats, scarves, and gloves. She rests her head on the window and reminds herself of what she has been telling herself all weekend, that when she gets home she is going to tell Steve that she wants a divorce. Across the aisle, a man wearing a brown suit takes a seat and folds his jacket with two precise creases. He places the bundle on the empty seat beside him and gives it two pats, as if the jacket were a beloved dog. He opens an attaché case on his lap and pulls out a stack of papers. The train has pulled away from the terminal and snow-covered farmland moves by.

“Beautiful isn’t it,” the man says.

Patty nods her head, “Yes, it is.”

The reason I ended up alone in Marta’s closet was that being caught by her parents would have changed everything, and in those days we were particularly careful not to spoil the arrangement we had with them. This was the second time we’d come close.

Marta was the girl in high school who liked drugs better than makeup, whose pale oval face implied a melancholy most of us weren’t yet capable of. I still remember things about her closet: how it smelled like rubber and milk, how the piles of shoes beneath me made it difficult to be still. Her parents had come home unexpectedly and were in the next room speaking idly to each other. Their voices had a peaceful quality, and it became clear to me that they were recalling a memory from many years ago.

“The bees were out that night. Do you remember all the bees?” Marta’s father asked her mother.

“I don’t,” she said.

“There were bees.”

         A natural bog is the designated water trap of the thirteenth hole at British Hills Country Club in Wheeling. It’s a deep, mysterious body of water, and besides a few thousand golf balls that disappear annually in its muddy depths, nobody quite knows what the bog contains: perhaps bodies of dead golfers who’ve been known to disappear around these parts, perhaps even something tantamount to the Loch Ness monster. In any event, this bog, also known as Golfer’s Bog, is something of a tourist trap. It’s a golfer’s trap, too, of course, which is part of the reason hole thirteen is a par six, but every now and then you can see people who have no interest in golf whatsoever standing on the muddy banks of the bog, peering into its murky depths. They like to stand there and watch the huge, mammoth-sized resident carp roil to the surface in the afternoon sun, their small mouths making sucking sounds until evening when they sink back down to the fathomless depths like old rotted logs.

excerpted from the forthcoming novel The Man With the Divided Back

There are only three cities in North America which can claim to be the location of a presidential assassination and Buffalo is one of them. In 1901, Buffalo hosted the Pan-American Exposition, and instead of being remembered for its exciting display of electric lights, its fabulous exhibition posters which have since become vintage collectors items, or its carefully designed buildings, gardens and walkways, it became known as the place where President McKinley was shot twice and subsequently killed by a very thin and quite angular anarchist from Detroit named Leon Czolgosz.

1.
Sauntering down Aisle 6 at the 24-hour Dominion grocery store, Lee is cradling an overly large zucchini. It sits inside the sleeve of his thick pea-green parka, where he is pretending to house a broken limb. He conjures the cast’s hard shell and the way he’d have to lay on the couch watching daytime TV instead of dishwashing for eight hours at a time. He considers breaking his elbow, a swift snap. Then it wouldn’t be a lie.

Lee has a strange relationship to the truth. The truth sticks her tongue in his mouth obsessively. She runs her hand up his leg, almost, whispering, Why are you shoplifting a zucchini, you fucking idiot? Lee suspects he has latent Tourette’s, what with these voices coming in sharp spurts, accompanied by a shudder or a shoulder tick.

I woke with a start but lay still, waiting for my quickened breathing to slow, the hairs on my arms to settle. Crisp new celadon-colored cotton sheets rough against naked legs. I fell asleep while reading. Draped over my shoulders a shawl clung like a needy boyfriend. The down-filled comforter wound around my torso, trapped me inside its cocoon. A hint of lavender linen spray, aroused by perspiration, lingered in the creases of my pillowcase. Except for Colin’s steady breathing beside me, the bedroom was silent.