Hummingbird Read online

  The bus rounded a corner and I exercised all the muscles in my lower body to counteract the subtle forces pulling us together. She opened her handbag and took out a book. I glanced over, my anxiety briefly eclipsed by shock. She was reading my novel, the one I’d published two years before—my title on the spine, my name under her hand. If she’d turned to the last page, she would have found a black and white photograph of me standing beside a tree, squinting unpleasantly at the camera. I thought back on the last twenty-four hours, the string of events that had led up to that moment. It was no coincidence. It meant something. I could see that she was well into the book, and leaned in as much as I dared, wanting to know what page she was on, the exact paragraph.

  “Good book?” I asked. My mouth was dry and the words came out all wrong—a click followed by an explosive puhh.

  Jasmine tilted further away, the book (my book!) open in her lap. She was ignoring me by listening to me. Suppressing a wild laugh, I cleared my throat and repeated myself.

  “Is that a good book?”

  Jasmine looked around at the other passengers, looked outside, looked everywhere but at me.

  “The reason I ask,” I went on in a halting, shaky voice, “is that it’s mine. Well, not mine exactly, but—” Jasmine snapped the book shut and stuffed it into her bag. She stood, and when I didn’t immediately make way, she gave me a look of undisguised loathing. I muttered an apology and got up, allowing her to pass. Our bodies met for a moment (her elbow, my abdomen) and she carried on down the aisle. I sat down but she remained on her feet, holding a metal pole and staring straight ahead. When she alerted the driver that she wanted off, I stayed where I was. The puppeteer that had manipulated me onto the bus had abandoned me, my strings gone slack. The neighbourhood out the window looked rundown and neglected, with drug deals happening in front of shuttered pawn shops. Jasmine got off and started walking. The bus kept pace with her for a moment before leaving her behind. An old woman across the aisle stared at me, as if I’d sprouted mandibles and feelers. I moved over to the window and the lingering heat from Jasmine’s seat rose to meet me. I looked out at the darkened street, wondering what bus I was on, and where it would eventually take me.

  The next day, I found a sleepy-looking girl with bleached hair performing in the pink room. The site was up twenty-four hours a day, with the girls working in shifts, taking coffee breaks as they would have in any other job, the live feed going dark whenever one of them disappeared with a paying customer. In the light of day, my humiliation on the bus felt like a simple misunderstanding, something Jasmine and I would laugh about when we got to know each other. I kept the laptop open, puttering around the apartment, making sure the screen was always active and pointed my way. Every time I went out to the balcony for a cigarette, the old man slammed his door. In the low-rise across the way, the pale man drifted from window to window, like a shark in an aquarium.

  By late afternoon, the slamming was starting to get to me. A sarcastic brunette with short hair had replaced the blonde girl in the pink room, gesturing at the camera lewdly, almost mockingly, as the other users tried to provoke her into flashing them. I opened a parallel window and played game after game of solitaire until my right ear suddenly shut off, ghostly fingers sliding through my brain. A distinct, almost holographic image suggested itself between my eyes and the laptop screen: a small, dimly lit room, reproduced art on the walls, an open book in the foreground. A hand appeared and turned a page. Jasmine’s hand. My words funneling into her mind. The vision faded. Next door, the old man was either coughing or laughing. Shaken, I went to the kitchen to scrounge something to eat. When I came back, Jasmine was on the screen. My heart sped up as she singled out my avatar with a friendly hello. I had the feeling that her handbag was just out of sight, my book nestled inside like a favourite pet. I didn’t return her greeting, the medium feeling inadequate for what I had to say. As Jasmine’s shift wore on, she disappeared with paying clients from time to time and I waited patiently, knowing that they meant nothing to her. We had the deeper connection.

  Around midnight, Jasmine sent a goodnight kiss to the camera before disabling her webcam. I changed into clean underwear and slipped a condom into my wallet. I could hear the low drone of the old man snoring next door and thumped the wall just hard enough to wake him. I filled a measuring cup with vodka and drank it quickly, like medicine, then checked the spyhole and stepped out of my apartment. By the time I’d made it down to the twenty-four-hour café, the alcohol was gently rocking me in its arms. I ordered a coffee and settled at the same table I’d sat at the night before, next to the window. A light rain started to fall. I leaped forward to the scene that was about to unfold: a moment of unease, my words coming out perfectly, her face growing thoughtful as she realized what I knew already, that the universe wanted us to be together.

  It being a Sunday, hardly any pedestrians were out. The streets were wet and shining. I nursed my drink, eyes never leaving the window. By one o’clock I’d begun to feel conspicuous. By one-thirty, I understood she wasn’t going to come. As I walked home through the cold drizzle, criss-crossing the street to avoid occasional pedestrians, my disappointment twisted back on relief. In retrospect, I couldn’t imagine any realistic scenario in which my accosting Jasmine on the street ended well. Still, the next night I headed down to the café the moment she finished her shift. And the night after that. I could have gone directly to the building with the coloured rooms, but it felt important to wait for her in the exact spot I’d first seen her, as if that location alone held the power to render us visible to one another. Night after night, I travelled down to the café, and every time she failed to appear, I experienced the same bittersweet mingling of disappointment and relief. I didn’t want to see her, I wanted the possibility of seeing her. The fact that at any given moment, she could have been thumbing through my novel was enough. I would watch her. She would read me. There was reciprocity there. Whether she knew it or not, we had a relationship, and it bound us together as surely as a solemn vow.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Soft music floated through the gymnasium—a pan flute mingled with rolling surf, the distant cry of sea birds. Mr. Taylor had dimmed the lights and was pacing between our exercise mats, reading from a script. “Picture a beach,” he intoned. “The sun on your face. The warm sand beneath you. A gentle wind ruffling your hair …”

  Someone in the gym snorted. Mr. Taylor ignored them and kept reading. Two feet to my left, Nikki Pederson lay breathing evenly—hands on her stomach, feet bare. To say that I liked Nikki would have been a wild understatement. She wore safety pins in her ears and sleeveless T-shirts printed with grinning demons and flaming skulls. She had big thighs and small breasts, and her hair—a 1980s frozen waterfall—gave her at least three inches on me. Shuttered away in my room, masturbating into gym socks, I mainly thought about her mouth: how it looked when she laughed, or chewed gum, or smoked outside in full view of the teachers.

  “Above you,” Mr. Taylor read, “the sky is filled with colourful balloons. Those balloons are your restless thoughts. Wave goodbye to them. Let them float away …” He paced between the mats, frowning at the paper in his hand. “Wonderful. Now I want you to relax every muscle in your body, starting with your feet …”

  Nikki flexed her toes.

  “That’s right. Let all that pent-up tension go. Now relax your ankles …”

  With every named part, I grew increasingly tense, a map of Nikki’s body unfolding as he moved from calf to knee to thigh. When he came to the genitals—when he actually named them—not one of the Grade Nine students around me made a sound. I was having trouble breathing. Nicki shifted on her mat. I didn’t so much want to have sex with her, as I wanted to smash into her, to be pulverized by her.

  “Be in the moment,” Mr. Taylor read. “This moment of perfect stillness …” He let the waves play for a few minutes, then stopped the boom box and turned on the lights, giving us a minute to collect ourselves. Nikki stood up and
stretched like a cat, arms up, butt out, drawing the attention of every heterosexual boy in the class. Even Mr. Taylor was watching her, his usual gruff manner returning as he sent us off to the lockers. I picked up my shoes and carried them past the girl’s change room, seeing just enough to know that it was a fundamentally different space: lavender walls, gleaming white floors. In the comparatively dingy boys’ locker room, I sat on a bench in front of my slate-grey locker and made the walls disappear. In my mind’s eye, most of the girls in the next room were changing quickly, as if ashamed of their bodies, but Nikki stripped fully naked and strolled to the showers, pausing just long enough to glance over her shoulder and give me an inviting smile.

  “Felix.”

  I looked over at Mr. Taylor, standing by the door.

  “Get a fire under your butt, son.”

  I was alone in the locker room. The other boys had scattered. I looked at my watch. Chemistry class was about to start. I hauled on some jeans and hurried back out into the empty gym, where I ran into Nikki emerging from the girls’ locker room, her hair wet, her mouth lacquered with purple lip gloss. Our eyes met. In some parallel universe we were wrestling on the gymnasium floor, our clothes blown from our bodies, students and teachers gathered in the bleachers to watch. She wanted it as badly as I did. I couldn’t have been carrying all that desire alone. But of course, Nikki didn’t look the least bit excited to be sharing the empty gym with me. She held me up for the briefest moment, like a shirt from a sale bin, then tossed me back down, her indifference absolute.

  A glowing screen appeared in front of me. Suddenly, I wasn’t standing anymore, but sitting in front of my open laptop, watching a woman do something creative with a large purple dildo. She looked uncannily like Nikki. I set the laptop aside, my head pounding. I’d fallen so deeply into the past that it took me a moment to regain my bearings. I raided the cupboards for painkillers and returned to the computer with a reckless dose of Tylenol dissolving in my stomach. A puzzled emoticon sat in the middle of my screen. I refreshed. Nothing happened. I restarted the entire machine but the coloured rooms had gone dark. My watch alarm went off, reminding me that Jasmine’s shift was about to start. I tried to access her site in twenty different ways without success, my headache growing steadily worse, in spite of the drugs. At one in the morning I drank my vodka and headed downtown. The café was empty. I took my usual spot by the window, nursing my drink until one of the baristas came over.

  “Waiting for someone?” she asked.

  I blushed and shook my head. The girl had three studs in her lower lip, her head shaved on one side. She reached into my eyes and rummaged around in my heart, fingering the contours of my secret. I got up without a word and walked stiffly to the door, understanding that I would never be able to go back.

  The next day, Jasmine’s website was still down. I went to the bathroom and stared at the mirror for a long time before deciding I should eat something. My cupboards were empty, the fridge bare. I moved to the balcony and lit a cigarette, grinning fiercely to myself when the inevitable slam came. The smoke took the edge off my hunger, but I soon found myself back in the kitchen, opening and closing cupboard doors. There was no getting around it. I had to go the store.

  I took down my last bottle of vodka and finished it without measuring, then knocked the wildly protesting voice out of my head with three firm blows from the heel of my hand and made my way to the bus stop at the end of the street. A woman in a headscarf sat on a bench a few steps away, joggling an infant in her lap. The second hand on my watch moved incredibly slowly. I tottered on the curb, feeling as if I were standing on a diving board, an empty pool yawning beneath me. My chest hurt. I put my hands in my pockets to keep them still. I wanted to scream at the woman on the bench to stop looking at me. Eventually, the number six bus pulled up and I forced myself to climb on, finding an empty spot near the back. I looked out the window, seeing Jasmine everywhere: on the sidewalk, on the street, in the windows of passing cars. My fellow passengers scrutinized me mercilessly, and I cupped one hand to the side of my face to shut them out. The massive form of the supermarket appeared and I grabbed the cord on the wall and stumbled off the bus. The automatic doors whisked open. I crossed the threshold and a subtle change in air pressure confused my inner ear. The ceiling yawned above me, cross-hatched beams dotted with sinister black cameras. I struggled to dislodge a grocery cart from a jammed-up line until a teenaged boy in a blue vest yanked one out for me. “Thank you,” I muttered and pushed the cart deeper into the store. One of the casters seized up every three steps, making a terrifying grinding noise. As I rolled past a wall of blaring cereal boxes, the pain in my chest intensified, migrating to my back and spreading across my shoulder blades like wings. The fluorescents added a fourth dimension to my fellow shoppers, rendering them hyper-real, bristling with whiskers and pimples and bloodshot eyes. I snagged items off the shelves at random—mayonnaise, sunflower seeds, raspberry-flavoured Kool-Aid. Every box or can that found its way into my hand involved a decision I didn’t feel equipped to make. I grabbed spices that I knew I’d never use, abandoned produce in the wrong bins, forgot, then remembered, then forgot, to look for toilet paper, doubling back repeatedly, to the consternation of foreign-looking employees. And all the while, Jasmine haunted my peripheral vision, slipping out of view every time I tried to look at her directly. The alcohol burned out of my system. The workers exchanged secret codes over the PA and gathered behind glass display cases in the deli and the bakery to watch me. After three passes of the checkout lines, I approached a surly cashier who slammed my things into plastic bags, while I stared at a spot on the counter, tics fluttering and jumping all over my face. With four bags in each hand, I stepped out of the store and found my bus just pulling away. I slumped and trudged over to wait for the next one. How, I wondered, had things gotten so difficult? I’d made it through high school and several years of university. I’d held normal jobs, worked alongside other human beings, slept with at least five different women. But the world had gradually forced me out, the way the skin forces out a sliver of wood. And now that I’d been rejected, I had no way of finding my way back.

  A low-frequency pulse hit my ear and I looked up, expecting to see a helicopter, but the sky was empty. The next bus arrived, and I climbed on with difficulty, setting my groceries down and folding into myself—eyes shut, head against the vibrating window. The soft darkness pulled me down. I opened my eyes in the back seat of a station wagon. Stars out the window. A bright racing moon. My sister was sleeping across from me, a large dog on the seat between us. In the front, my father gripped the wheel with one hand and a Styrofoam cup with the other. I stared at the back of his head, sensing that he wasn’t my father at all, but a stranger wearing my father’s body, and that he was taking us somewhere unspeakable. The painted lines on the highway faded and vanished. The darkened fields we’d been driving through turned to water. The stranger caught my eye in the rear-view mirror, the lower half of his face illuminated by the glowing lights of the console, and I covered my mouth with both hands to keep from screaming.

  Something jostled me and I raised my head.

  I’d just missed my stop. I grabbed at the cord and quickly gathered my things. An orange fell out of one of my bags and rolled down the aisle. No one picked it up. On the walk back to my building, I thought about that orange. I hadn’t bought oranges. In fact, I couldn’t remember buying half the things bulging out of my bags. Another bus roared by. The sky went grey. Tiny flecks of rain hit my face. I struggled to control my breath, letting myself in the back door and lurching up the stairwell two stairs at a time. I’d nearly reached my floor, when I ran into the superintendent heading in the opposite direction. She gave a brief cry of surprise, her hand flying up to her chest.

  “My goodness, you nearly gave me a heart attack!” She looked at the bags in my hands. “Doing some shopping?”

  I nodded and gave an inane laugh. The superintendent was in her early fifties, a fair bit older
than myself. From my vantage point, I had a clear view of her sturdy calves and several additional inches beyond, up the hem of her skirt. That she’d made occasional appearances in my masturbatory fantasies suddenly felt significant. “I was actually hoping I’d run into you,” she said. “I’ve been trying to track you down for weeks. I was starting to get worried …” She seemed to realize how that sounded and gestured broadly. “We’re a family here. We have to look out for each other … In any event, I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but we’ve had a complaint. It seems your new neighbour, Mr. Colombo, is extremely sensitive to smoke. Now I understand that this might be a small inconvenience, but I wonder if under the circumstances, you might consider indulging your habit elsewhere. Down in the parking lot, perhaps?”

  The handles of the plastic bags cut into my fingers. My forearms strained with the weight of the groceries. I considered letting them go, watching them tumble down the stairs.

  “He has a puffer,” she explained. “Normally, I wouldn’t ask, but it’s a health issue.”

  “No,” I said quietly, but firmly.

  The superintendent smiled quizzically, as if she’d misheard me. Before either of us could say anything else, new voices echoed in the stairwell and two men in jogging shorts came trotting down from the floor above. I forged ahead with my groceries, noting the sharp tang of hand cream and the warm air pushing out of the superintendent’s lungs as I sidestepped past her.

  Half a minute later, I was back in my apartment, breathing hard, staring out through the spyhole, the bolt and chain thrown. I turned on the lights and looked around the room. Something was different. The curtains across the balcony door were open. I wouldn’t have gone shopping without closing them any more than I would have neglected to lock the front door. It was more than habit. It was a compulsion. I strode across the room and saw the pale man at his window, arms at his sides, jaw slack. I swept the curtains shut, leaving my groceries by the door. It was all happening again. The paranoia. The terror. Something thumped the floor in the unit above, and I ducked dramatically. I went over to the laptop and opened it with trembling hands. I hit Jasmine’s bookmark, wanting to see her, needing to see her, but the site failed to load as usual.