Knife Fight and Other Struggles Read online

Robert inched along the dry timbers until he reached the stoop to his front door. The overhang kept the space of his vestibule clear of silk, so Robert didn’t have to do much more cutting. He stumbled up the stairs and grabbed the door handle.

  “I’m here, Sharon,” he whispered. The door wasn’t locked—it wasn’t even closed properly—and Robert yanked it open. It banged against the wall with an oddly muffled crunch. “I’m—”

  He couldn’t finish.

  The walls, the floor, the ceiling of the living room were blanketed in them. They crawled over the floor lamp, tiny bodies making an uneven pattern of curling silhouettes on the shade. They blacked out the three oil paintings on the wall over the Coleman, and they utterly covered his leather recliner, like a new, writhing layer of upholstery. The sofa’s stuffing was laid bare, and more worms burrowed into it.

  Robert began to tremble. His mouth opened, and he shut it again as quickly: the idea that the worms might get in there, too. . . .

  Oh Jesus, oh God. Robert felt himself unravelling.

  Robert’s eyes widened, and the scream that should have come through his mouth forced its way instead through his nostrils. The canisters of insecticide fell to the floor, and Robert’s hands grasped at the lapels of his own shirt, and tore.

  The shirt came away in a cascade of buttons. He threw it across the room. He yanked his belt undone next, and stripped off his jeans—they were filled with worms, as bad as the shirt, and when they hitched over his boots he nearly screamed again, fell into the worms at his feet. But somehow he managed to stay upright and, jeans at his ankles, kicked the boots free. Then he kicked clear of the jeans as well, and bent to pick up one of the insecticide canisters from the bag at his feet.

  Robert dug his thumb into the nozzle and found the pin. The Contents were Under Pressure—that was only the first in the long list of fine-print warnings that ran down the side of the insecticide canister. When Robert pushed the pin in, the insecticide came out in a cool, spreading vapour that made Robert’s eyes sting. He coughed only once, and turned the spray onto the summer worms.

  By degree, the cabin’s living room and kitchen filled with billowing, stinking white mist. It settled on the glass of the mirror on the bathroom door like a frost, hung in the air like a stratum of cigarette smoke at an all-night poker game. Robert coughed again, three times. His thumb was getting cold, and he felt the stinging spread to the quick under his nail. Snot dribbled from his nostrils, running fast over his thin, clamped lips. He kept up the pressure.

  The spray got to the ceiling worms first, and they began to fall. Robert felt them land on his shoulders, in his hair, but he resisted the urge to scrape them away. He’d have to let go of the insecticide for that, and it was still heavy with product.

  He moved forward into the living room, spraying as he went. His vision was beginning to blur, but he could hear well enough. And the sound that he heard was the pitter-pat of worms, falling all around him in a solidified rain. Robert wanted to laugh. If only he could open his mouth . . . He giggled through his nose instead, and thick strings of snot fell onto the backs of his forearms.

  This was his land. His home.

  My roots, Robert said to himself, and noted with satisfaction that the worms were coming down from the walls now too.

  “Stop it.”

  The voice was quiet, pained, and it was only after it came three times that Robert remembered Sharon.

  He still had to struggle to make himself lift his thumb.

  The voice came from the bedroom. Robert was dizzy from the fumes, and his ears had started to ring now as well, but he could tell that much.

  “Stop.”

  Robert had a hard time staying upright—I should open a window, that would air the place out. He coughed some more, tasted salt and copper in the mucous this time. The bedroom doorframe came up under his outstretched hand as the house lurched, and took his weight. He guided himself past it, into the cabin’s other room.

  “Sharon.” The word came like a bark. It hurt in his chest, but he said it again.

  “Sharon.”

  He couldn’t see a thing in the bedroom. The light was out, and his eyes felt like they were going to burn out of his head.

  Robert stumbled through something on the floor and stopped the spinning house again, this time grabbing the bedside lamp as it passed. He flicked it on with his insecticide thumb.

  Sharon lay curled on the bed, underneath the comforter she’d brought with her. Robert blinked, tried to focus his eyes on her—it seemed as though she lay in a mist, thicker even than the vapours he’d sprayed in the living room. Christ. How much had he sprayed? Robert felt normalcy returning to him, and with it, a sickening realization of exactly what he’d done. The poison must be everywhere by now. The worms fell here too, landing on him, the comforter. On the mist over Sharon’s face, suspended. . . .

  “Oh Sharon, honey.” He set the insecticide down on the night table. As he reached down to touch her, the realization chilled him:

  Sharon was enshrouded in silk. As his fingers pushed through it, Sharon’s eyelids fluttered, and she shifted slightly under the comforter.

  More deliberately this time, Robert set about pulling away the silk. Sharon blinked her eyes open, and as her lips parted, he stopped pulling.

  “Bobby.” Her voice was gummy, and it had a sleepy drawl to it. “Stinks in here.”

  Robert yanked the remainder of the threads clear. His vision started to double, but he could make out Sharon’s arm as it came up to him. It was so thin, he thought. In his doubling vision, it seemed to undulate, as though boneless. Silk wrapped it like the lace sleeve of a bridal gown.

  “I’m glad you came back,” she said. “I was almost ready to go to sleep without you.”

  “I’ll always come home,” said Robert. Her fingertips felt rough as they brushed the back of his neck, and her touch left a sting behind on his sensitized skin.

  “You’re late, though.” Sharon’s eyes glittered, and Robert thought: I’m an idiot with this woman; she makes me slow.

  “I took Allan to the hospital,” he said. Sharon’s hand moved up through his hair, drew him down onto the bed. “I know you wanted me back soon. I’m sorry.”

  “You should have come,” said Sharon. Her hand came over his scalp, leaving it cool where she passed. “Time for bed.”

  “Honey—”

  —we have to get you out of here, Robert would have said. But at that instant, her hand appeared over his forehead. Clutched in its fist were clumps of brown hair. They were bloody at their roots.

  “Jesus!” Robert’s scream sounded high, distant in his own head.

  He pulled back, but he wasn’t quick enough: Sharon’s other hand shot out and grabbed his left wrist. She smiled and her lips collapsed inward. As they parted he confirmed it: her mouth was a pink and black pit, toothless. She pushed his bloody hair inside.

  Robert yanked at his wrist, but her fingers dug into the flesh there like a tightening noose. He felt his pulse quicken, even as his vision started to grey. The lump of hair and blood travelled down Sharon’s elongated throat like a rat through a python.

  The worm, Allan had said when Robert asked what had done this to him. Not the worms, not the tent caterpillars, but a singular creature. He said he had been eaten by the worm.

  Sharon’s free arm lashed at him again, but Robert wheeled back fast enough to avoid it. The arm cracked like a whip in empty air, boneless. His hand was going purple in her grip, but he pulled back anyway. With his free hand, he grabbed the insecticide from the night-table.

  “You drew them here, didn’t you?” he asked.

  She mumbled something—butterfly?—but her mouth had taken on an odd “O” shape, and the word mushed.

  Robert hoisted the insecticide canister onto his hip, and pointed the nozzle at the bed. His heartbeat thundered in his ears, and the hand that she still held felt t
hick, numb. He moved his thumb over the nozzle.

  “Allan warned me,” Robert said, and pressed the pin.

  The mist spread before him. Her fingers unravelled from his wrist, and Robert stumbled backward under the force of his own weight. She reared out of her bed. She was naked under the covers, although her body was growing indistinct—her breasts, small to begin with, had shrunk to boyish proportions, and her hips had disappeared in the sinuous curl of her torso.

  Robert shook the blood back into his hand then gripped the bottle two-handed. He felt the chemical as it settled on his bare scalp—certainly, he could remember that one of the cautions on the packaging was to Avoid Contact With Open Wounds. The manufacturers were right—it stung like battery acid where his scalp bled.

  The effect on the thing in the bed was similar. The “O” of her mouth expanded like an iris, and her eyes glittered black. Her mouth made a sound like stop, but Robert kept spraying. She stretched back, her hands touching the wall behind her, and with a quick undulation, she was pressed entirely against the wall. Robert’s thumb slipped as he watched her crawl up the sheer surface, toward the ceiling, but he found it again and the spray resumed. He coughed and spat bloody phlegm onto the bedspread.

  The creature hung over him, face to the ceiling, and Robert lifted the canister over his head. The chemical rained down on him, and the mist grew, and his hands became numb, and by quick degree the room darkened.

  Sharon’s hands slipped from the ceiling then, and for a moment she dangled by her knees alone. At first he thought she was going to fall—a great worm, dying in the spray.

  But she surprised him. Her arms flew forward, and in a single motion knocked the insecticide from his grasp and wrapped around his chest. She descended, round mouth wide, as the darkness finally overtook him.

  Robert woke in blackness. He was on the bed—he felt the comforter, the pillow beneath his bare scalp. But the room was utterly dark, more so than he had ever experienced. Hand trembling, he reached for the lamp. He found the switch, but when he pressed it, the darkness remained. He pulled his hand back quickly. The pain of that simple movement was excruciating; his fingernails were gone, and the raw nerves underneath howled. The skin of his arm felt like it had been scraped along asphalt. He opened his mouth, and when he spoke his voice sounded like an old man’s.

  “Hello?”

  The house was silent—even the sound of the caterpillars was absent. Robert repeated: “Hello? Who’s there?” but got no better results.

  He was alone.

  He chuckled at the thought. Lynn, and Mary, and Laura, and now Sharon—they’d all taken what they needed. The chuckle turned into a snorting guffaw. They’d all stripped him bare, left him in his cabin, on his land. Here where his roots were.

  Robert got himself under control and tried to sit up in bed. The effort it took was Herculean, and he had to sit for a minute after that to get his wind back. Lynn had gone back to the city, Mary had gone back to the States, and Laura . . . she had just gone. Where would Sharon go? Where would she fly?

  Gingerly, Robert lowered his feet to the floor. He sat there for some time in his new, silent night, straining to hear the beating of her wings.

  KNIFE FIGHT

  Not many outside the confines of the political wing at City Hall would guess it, but our new mayor is an expert with a knife.

  He has been practising since he was a boy—from the day he first laid eyes on the eleven-inch bowie knife jammed hilt-deep into a tree stump in the family’s ancestral woodlot, and withdrew it, claiming it as his own then and forever.

  The concrete of his father’s basement workshop floor is still flecked with tiny, reddish-brown dots, a Jackson Pollock record of the young mayor’s apprenticeship, those nights when he was too slow, or worse . . . too quick. Those days are long past, and now the mayor is neither. He is merely bold. He is an expert.

  Since the hour of his swearing-in, the mayor has kept the knife in the desk drawer next to his chain of office, wrapped in an oilcloth tied with thin leather straps. There it slumbers, six nights a week. The seventh—Thursday—the mayor carefully unwraps it, holds it to the fading afternoon light to see that its edge remains keen and, in the company of his older cousin—the one who oversees road repairs in the west district—the mayor steps into the elevator that takes him straight to the parking garage.

  And so it begins.

  In the beginning, the waiting crowd had been small indeed—comprised of a handful of senior staff and five city councillors, each hoping to become the mayor’s deputy and thereby enjoy the attendant perquisites and honours. They had been there since three p.m., stripped to the waist and greased with goose fat, not daring to speak, barely breathing. The mayor’s cousin had reviewed the rules with each of them, which he called “Robert’s Rules of Knife Fight.” It is said that the city clerk, leaning against the planning commissioner’s SUV, snickered at the procedure, and that this—not political differences—was the reason for her dismissal at the next meeting of council.

  The mayor’s cousin explained the rules then, as he has at each subsequent Thursday.

  1. There are only ever two combatants in a knife fight, and each combatant is allowed a knife.

  2. The knives are to be provided by the combatants, in a keen, clean condition free of rust. Other objects—scissors, hammers, axes, surgical instruments—shall not be considered knives for the purposes of the knife fight.

  3. Combatants shall arrive stripped to the waist, and well-lubricated so as to keep the knife fight from becoming a wrestling match, which is unseemly.

  4. Goose fat is considered an acceptable lubricant for the purposes of a knife fight.

  5. Victory in the knife fight is usually decided by the drawing of first blood.

  6. Combatants shall avoid their opponents’ faces, hands, and throats, confining their strikes to parts of the body usually covered by appropriate business attire.

  7. In the event that both combatants draw blood from one another in the same instant, the knife fight shall be considered a draw and entered into the Records as such.

  8. To the victor go the spoils.

  The knife fight remained a well-kept secret for many months. It is true, we wondered at the selection of the new deputy mayor—a stocky, dull-witted rookie councillor from the slaughterhouse district who was unable to finish a sentence without uttering a profanity and crumpled his briefing notes without reading them. And more than once we had seen a blossom of red erupt on the white blouses that the new budget chief wore to the committee meetings regarding capital allocations for the coming fiscal year. And we had wondered at the propensity of the new chair of the Transit Commission to press a fist to his mouth and shut his eyes during breaks in meetings—as though holding back tears at some awful recollection.

  But who cared about such things in the larger scheme? Not us, not at first.

  The first year of the mayor’s first term was successful by any account. The budget chief not only balanced the books but was able to deliver a modest property tax reduction for the elderly and lay down plans for a swimming pool and target range, creating the first two-thirds of a much-needed triathlete program in the underprivileged slums lining the west riverbank. Our editors wrote supportive editorials as the deputy mayor announced that the Association of Suburban Golf Courses would open up in the winter months, for the final third. The new light rail line servicing the old, blue-collar municipality of Smelt received all the funding it needed from a new federal grant program, announced by the Transit Commission chair in tremulous tones.

  So we filled our newspapers and broadcasts and blogs with triumphant stories of the mayor’s success. We remained silent on the price that his council seemed to be paying for that success. Perhaps we intuited the truth: getting too close to the story might mean crawling too close to an edge.

  A knife edge.

  Tabloid reporter Stan Bollixer broke t
he story. Nobody should have been surprised, yet we all were. For few outside the jungles of El Salvador knew it at the time . . . but Stan also was an expert with a knife.

  The carbon-steel butterfly knife Stan keeps in the pocket of his jeans has been with him nearly as long as the mayor has possessed his bowie knife. But Stan was a grown man when he first wielded his blade; when we asked him later why he kept it so close, he would say only that it had saved his life enough times that he owed it a good home.

  No doubt: Stan was an old hand, with sound instincts. He’d come to City Hall during the election and had watched our mayor from the start of the campaign. In the newsroom, he’d predicted that the mayor would prevail, even when the polls placed him a distant fourth. Stan recognized something in the man’s eye, in the way he handled metaphor in his speech . . . in the way he moved.

  He recognized a predator, and he recognized prey.

  So Stan went to work on the mayor, the way a reporter does. He started asking around with his police contacts and located an arrest report from twenty years earlier, when the candidate, then just a lad, was caught knocking over tombstones in the nearby town of Reamington. The story made the front page and sent the future mayor’s campaign into a flurry of damage control that proved unnecessary: for who among us has not, in the naïveté of youth, mocked death with a well-placed boot and a war cry?

  Stan pressed on. The mayor was but a lowly school trustee prior to his ascendency. Stan dug up the mayor’s voting record and discovered he had voted to ban several well-regarded texts from public school libraries, that he had voted for his own salary increase—not once, but three times. Stan discovered a formal complaint, alleging that the mayor had arrived inebriated and used salty language during a Parent-Teacher Association meeting to discuss the refurbishment of playground equipment.

  None of it stuck. With each article, the mayor’s public approval rose. The campaign stopped even responding to Stan’s reportage, and the week before the election the campaign manager sent Stan a thank-you note on gilt-edged, embossed stationary that seemed very expensive, in gratitude for all his support. Stan wrote another story based on the note, questioning whether the mayor was operating within campaign spending guidelines, given the opulence of the gesture. Three days later, the mayor was elected.