Still New, Part II

Note: As the title suggests, this story is a continuation of “Still New, Part I.”

Levi was on his best behaviour. He asked all sorts of questions about Jill, he made funny jokes, he offered to run to the store and get stuff to make dinner. Once Levi had left, Robin asked Jill, “Is this okay?” though he couldn’t change anything if it wasn’t.

Jill laughed, remembering something Levi had said, presumably. “I’m starting to understand why you like him so much.” Jill rolled up her sleeves and started washing the piles of other people’s dishes in the sink and on the counter. Robin reluctantly dried.

Not only did Levi come back with the makings of a beautiful vegetarian pasta, he’d bought a big bottle of red wine and a six pack of Anchor Steam beer. He explained that when he was living in a San Francisco punk squat Anchor Steam was their beer of choice. Jill asked Levi questions about the squat while she chopped an onion, three cloves of garlic, twelve garden tomatoes. Robin got out pots and mixing bowls and listened, interested in the stories but also feeling peripheral to the conversation. At some point, Levi got warm enough to take off his sweater. At some point, Jill noticed the stick and poke torpedo tattoo on Levi’s upper arm and said how she’d always wanted a stick and poke tattoo.

“You still have India ink?” Levi asked Robin.

“Uh, do you want one right now?” Robin asked Jill.

She was smiling, considering it.

“No pressure,” Levi said.

Which seemed to confirm something for Jill, or reassure her. “Yeah. Okay.” She giggled.

Robin went to his room, which still smelled of him and Jill, and found, crammed into a gap between an old IKEA shelf and the wall, his toolbox full of art supplies. In his high school art class, the India ink was kept in baby jars and half the time when you actually managed to get one of the jars open the ink had turned into black sludge or a block of powder that Ms. Aaron would then add water to in an attempt to return the medium to its original consistency. Robin shook the jar, hoping for it to rattle. It swished. He went to the basement bathroom to open the jar above the sink. Of course, he should be happy that Levi and Jill were hitting it off. What else? Shouldn’t it be that simple?

Did people really decide to get tattoos that fast?

Robin’s roommate, Stephen, opened his bedroom door and walked, rubbing his eyes, towards the bathroom. Robin tried to twist the top off the India ink. Upstairs, Jill laughed. Leaning against the hallway wall outside the open door, Stephen said, “She’s still here, eh? Jill, right?”

“Yeah. Levi, too. We’re making dinner. You want some?” Robin ran the warm water, turned the jar upside down and put it under the faucet.

“Nah. I’m meeting Louisa.”

“Cool.” Blackened water dripped into the sink dying the dried toothpaste and soap scum. Robin tried again to twist the lid free, but the jar slipped in his hands. “I can’t get this fucking thing,” Robin said.

“Want me to give it a try?”

“I don’t actually want it open.”

“Whatever you say.” Stephen yawned as Robin squeezed past him, the bottle dripping grey water onto his cupped hand.

Levi saw the pool of inky water in Robin’s palm. “Paper towels?”

“A dishcloth’s fine,” Robin said.

“It’ll stain,” Levi said.

“I don’t care.”

Levi handed him a dishcloth, then took the jar from him and opened it easily. He evaluated the ink’s consistency by slowly tipping the jar this way and that. “Perfect.” Levi rubbed the jar rim with his finger, removing the black crust from the lid’s grooves. Jill was stripped down to her tank top now, leaning against the counter in front of the microwave Stephen’s father had given them. She was sipping wine and looking at her forearms. “I’ve always wanted a little black bomb.”

Robin nodded and pressed his lower lip up into his upper lip thinking it made him look thoughtful, but stopped himself when it felt like frowning. He wondered at the phrase, Always wanted, wondered what, if anything, he had always wanted.

“I think, like, midway on my forearm.”

Levi was stirring the sauce when he winced and said, “I’ll also need a needle and thread.”

Robin turned to go back downstairs.

“I don’t need it now,” Levi said.

“You’ve got everything under control up here?”

“Can I get you a drink?”

“I’m good.”

Robin’s sewing kit wasn’t immediately visible in the big junk drawer in the center of his desk. He’d moved the desk from his childhood home to his first apartment then to this apartment without once dumping out or sorting through the stuff in any of the drawers, and so it occurred to Robin, as he started noisily running his hand through the junk, that he was stirring years of accumulated odds and ends. The noise was lovely and Robin was enjoying himself until the pad of his right finger found the sharp end of his grandfather’s RCAF wings. It felt like someone had poured a big old Gatorade tub of ice-cold regret over his shoulders. Robin slammed the drawer and sat on his bed with his finger in his mouth.

Robin heard her feet on the stairs, but figured it was Stephen going up. Jill knocked at the door. “Are you okay?” She was holding a bottle of beer in one hand and her wine glass in the other.

“I just stabbed myself on a pin. I can’t find my sewing kit.”

Jill held out the beer. “Levi thought you might like this.”

“Just put it on the desk. Thanks.”

She set the bottle down, sat beside Robin and kissed him on the cheek. “Come on.” Robin half turned his head towards her. She tried to get her tongue in his mouth. He waited until she stopped then waited a breath more before he stood up and reopened his junk drawer. “It should be in here.”

Stephen walked by the open door of Robin’s room, his clothes in his arms and a towel wrapped around waist. “Steve. Have you seen my sewing kit?” Robin asked more to open the room up, so that it included people other than just he and Jill.

“Shit, sorry. Yeah.”

“Actually?”

Stephen returned holding out the small pouch, his other hand hanging onto the towel’s knot.

Robin stood to grab the pouch. “Thanks.”

Jill stood too. “Oh my God, I— ” She looked down at her left forearm.

“You what?”

“I can’t wait,” she said. She put her arms around his neck and tried to look into his eyes. She stood on her tiptoes and tried to pull him down to her. “For the tattoo or to fuck you later.”

Robin gave a single nod and fought back his smile.

Jill bit his shoulder.

“Ouch,” Robin said.

“You’re so hot.”

Robin handed her the sewing kit and sat back down on his bed. “I’ll be up in a minute.” He checked his finger. The injury was disappointingly mild. “I gotta grab a Band-Aid.”

“Want me to bring your beer up?”

“Uh,” Robin shrugged. “Sure.”

His Lorazepam was in the same dusty wicker basket as the Band-Aids. He put the bottle in his pocket.

Dinner was delicious. Levi knew something was wrong anyway, but when Robin didn’t have a second helping, Levi asked his friend, “Is everything alright?” In that context it sounded like maybe a joke about how much Robin usually ate, so Robin played it that way. He stood up and patted his stomach, “I know, right? Maybe I’m getting sick.” No one laughed. Robin and Levi did the dishes together. When Jill went to the bathroom, Levi told Robin, “I don’t need to do it, you know. I can make up some excuse.”

“You mean the tattoo?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s fine. It’s good.”

“You sure?” Levi leaned over to try and make eye contact.

Robin met his eyes, then quickly looked down at the dish he was drying. “Admiring my beautiful eyes?”

“They’re not bad.”

“The way everybody’s always trying to gaze into them.”

Levi laughed.

Robin bared his teeth.

Jill came out of the bathroom.

Levi asked Robin if he had any rags or, better, some old towels. He did. They were the first round of hand-me-down towels he’d ever received from his mother who seemed always to be finding newer, fluffier towels that she just couldn’t resist purchasing and which pushed the coarsest of her fluffy towels out of her linen cupboard and into Robin’s apartment. “These are too nice,” Levi said when Robin handed him the pile.

“Have you felt my new towels?”

“But these aren’t rags.”

“You can have them when we’re done, provided they aren’t covered in carbon and gore.”

“I hope there isn’t gore,” Jill said.

“They’re just to protect the couch,” Levi explained, “but they’re nicer than the upholstery.”

“But easier to replace,” Robin reasoned. He spread out the towels. Levi helped.

Using rubbing alcohol Robin fetched from his dusty wicker medicine basket, Jill cleaned the area on the inside of her forearm that she wanted Levi to tattoo. Levi burned the tip of one of Robin’s sewing needles, then wound a thread around the needle so that it would hold some ink and he wouldn’t have to return to the well after each poke. Robin moved an easy chair from the corner to where he figured Levi would want to sit, then left it there when Levi said he would prefer something less comfortable. Robin fetched his wooden desk chair from downstairs. Before returning the easy chair to its home in the corner, Robin swept up the jackrabbit dust bunnies he’d uncovered and discovered a die hiding in the dust bunny warren. He picked the die up and dropped into his pocket, where it struck the Lorazepam bottle and reminded him of his planned escape route.

Levi carefully created a sketch of the bomb he proposed to draw. Jill loved it, she said, but she wanted Robin to look at it, probably, Robin realized later, because she was past the point of objectivity, but so was Robin only for different reasons.

Jill’s energy was mesmerizing. She seemed more upright, somehow. Sparks were flying off her teeth. She was moving faster, but it looked like the correct speed, like everybody else was moving too slowly and it took Jill’s excitement to help Robin see it. And that observation, maybe, was what kept Robin from taking the pills that so slowed him down, what made him sit and watch as his best friend held his new girlfriend’s arm and drove an ink-coated sewing needle into her again and again, the two of them, Levi and Jill, lock-focused on a tiny patch of her skin. Again and again Robin rolled the die on the floor in front of the easy chair, not noticing what numbers came up, just enjoying the sound and the distraction. When Stephen came upstairs to get a glass of water and to leave, he said, “I thought you guys were playing a game up here. Hi Levi. What are you doing?”

Levi looked at Jill then at Robin and gave each a second to answer Stephen’s question before Levi decided it was okay for him to tell Stephen, “I’m giving Jill a stick and poke tattoo.”

Stephen took a few steps closer, but kept a distance meant to be respectful and craned over Levi and Jill to see. “That’s cool.” He turned with his dirty cup. “Whoa, who did the dishes?”

“Jill,” Robin said. “And Levi.”

Levi was too focused on his work to say, And Robin, like he normally would have. Which was right, Robin figured.

Stephen left his cup beside the sink before putting on his Converse and coat. He stood in the doorway and said, “Well.”

“It was nice to meet you, Stephen,” Jill said, her smile reminding Robin of the baby-faced sun on that fucked up kids’ show.

“Yeah, nice to meet you, too. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

Jill looked at Robin, still smiling like that sun. “I hope so.”

Robin rolled the die again.

“Have a good night,” Stephen said. He closed the door and the remote control resting on the PlayStation rattled.

Robin rolled the die.

“We should play a game after,” Jill suggested.

Levi squinted to see the time on the microwave. “What time is it, Robin?” Really, he was asking if he should stay.

“Uh, eight-thirty.”

“I’ve got an early start tomorrow,” Levi said. “I’m working on Anita’s film.”

“Cool,” Robin said.

Jill asked who Anita was and Levi and Robin explained that she was the one person in their film production class, a class they’d been in for three years now, that was certain to make a career in the industry. The conversation dried up quickly in the heat of Levi’s focus and Jill’s excitement and pain.

Robin got up for a drink, his body feeling like a flat, grey photocopy and tingling like there were ants crawling on him. He shook his head and rolled his shoulders. The beer Levi had sent downstairs for him was sitting on the corner of the counter. He drank it as quickly as he could, its warmth making it feel like oatmeal in Robin’s mouth. Once his eyes had finished watering, he got a cold one from the fridge. “Can I get anyone anything?”

Levi and Jill both just wanted water. It made Robin angry. He realized that he had only slept, like, four hours or something in the last—the water ran as he did the math—the last close to thirty-six hours.

At Levi’s request, Robin set one glass of water down beside Levi’s chair. Jill took a big, thirsty sip then set the cup by her feet. Robin returned to the easy chair and held the still cold beer against his chest until his hand started to numb. He reached out and was able, without improving his posture, to put the bottle on top of the VCR. He closed his eyes.

When Jill woke him, it was over. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” Robin said, sitting up.

Levi walked into the living room from downstairs. “I put the chair back. The towels are folded up on the chair.”

Robin blinked heavily.

“I didn’t know where to put the ink so I left it on your desk. And I washed the needle.”

“What do you think,” Jill said, presenting her arm.

It was a sloppy, pointillist bomb, the black ink already a little blue on Jill’s angry skin. Levi had done a great job with the shading, giving an illusion of volume. “It’s good.”

“I love it,” Jill said.

“It’s small enough that you could always cover it later.” Levi was being modest.

“No way.”

They covered it with gauze Levi found at the bottom of Robin’s wicker medicine basket. Jill and Levi hugged, Jill energetically thanking Levi. As he hugged Robin, Levi said quietly, “Have a good night.”

Robin tried to say, “Thanks,” but was interrupted by a yawn.

In his bedroom, Robin lay down on top of his covers. When he felt Jill tug at his belt, Robin opened his eyes. As she pulled his pants down, her grin shifted into some more focused look. To Robin’s surprise, his body responded to her immediately.

They were like new people.

After they finished, they both finished, Jill lay against Robin’s shoulder and thanked him and kissed him on the cheek and thanked him again before they each fell asleep.

Toronto, Jan 2016

Emoji sequence: Reuben McLaughlin, brilliant writer, editor and friend; publisher of Pilot

Story: Lee Sheppard, other publisher of Pilot

New Love

I sorta loved my Art teacher and I really loved Art so at first I thought Heather was talking about raku, which I remember from a graduation party that my Art teacher hosted at her house for all her Art kids. She’d set up a kiln and some tables with clay so that we could create raku pieces. I don’t really remember the process. I remember that it was cold out, despite it being late June, and that even with my sweater on, I stayed near enough to the kiln that I at least believed I was getting some heat off it.

But Heather, my companion, my date maybe, was talking about chakras suddenly and the colour of the root chakra, which was at the base of the spine, and I started to understand that she wasn’t talking about some Japanese technique for making cool looking tea cups. Near Bloor and Christie, maybe right across from Tacos El Asador, there is some diagram of a silhouette in lotus position with seven circles of colour from her crotch to the top of her head. The red one always looked, to me anyway, like it was censoring her labia or anus, though I knew enough not to vocalize that thought and if I even had, I knew enough to do it apologetically, like, I’m sorry to be ignorant of these ancient understandings that I just don’t get, but.

And Heather was still explaining about the chakras and about her understanding of what each one was, and we were still waiting in line for the Ferris wheel and the CNE was crazy this year so there were families and groups of other teenagers and kids running around, seemingly supervision free, playing maybe tag or something, then breaking the illusion that they were unattended and racing back to nag their lagging family to hurry hurry hurry off to whatever, the cotton candy place or the food building or that ride there or there. 

There was this big guy who was giving me the creeps a bit, standing against the temporary fence that kept people out of the area around the Ferris wheel. Something about the way he was still and watching for something. Of course I reasoned that he could just be waiting for someone, that even some dude with sausage hands and sagging sacks of skin under his eyes was just as likely as me to have someone to meet at the Ex. There was a blob of mustard on his chin and he was trying to wipe at it, but his dense bristles of facial hair seemed to want to keep it there. I imagined him scrubbing at it with a toothbrush.

“Yellow is the colour of power,” Heather was saying. She touched me at the base of my rib cage. “It’s associated with right here. Your solar plexus.”

There was a terrible coughing, then people were shouting for help. The man who’d been creeping me out had dropped to the ground.

Heather said, “I have first aid training,” then left the line.

I stood there for a bit. The Ferris wheel had stopped and the people on it were looking over the edge of their little eight-sided pods with the eight-sided roofs to see the fallen man. After a few minutes, during which people’s compassion quickly became irritation at that guy for being so inconsiderate as to come to the CNE to collapse, it became clear that Heather would not be coming back from the ring of people around the man and I couldn’t see her head at all, so I looked behind me at the impatient faces and braced myself to squeeze by. I employed a steady chant of “excuse me, pardon me,” as protection against the stinking eye.

The same chant worked as a wedge so I could drive myself to the center of the thick donut of people which had, at its open heart, the unseen man and, I hoped, my date. She was holding the man’s head on her lap, her hand against his chest, and speaking to him quietly. The man was holding onto her forearm.

The mustard spot was gone.

A second man with the consciously relaxed face, the bedside manner brow, of a doctor, was on his cell phone. He stood up and stretched onto his tiptoes to see over the now thinning ring of people. When he started waving, I looked where he was looking and saw people parting for a slowly approaching ambulance.

I started saying, “Heather, Heather,” but I was speaking quietly, not wanting to disturb the people beside me, so of course she couldn’t hear. I tried to move into a spot where if she looked up she would see me, but I was conscious of not wanting to obscure anyone’s view either. When Heather looked up, it was at the sky. It was as if she, as if all of what was happening, was underwater and that seeing that sky was what she needed to breathe.

By the time the ambulance arrived and the paramedics broke through the congregation of onlookers, my eyes were wet with admiration and overwhelming affection for Heather. When the man was forced to let go of Heather’s hand so the paramedics could put him on a stretcher, he moaned and reached for her, his hand flapping desperately. I knew before it happened, that Heather would get into the ambulance with him.

The paramedics closed the door on Heather and the collapsed man and the ambulance started to move. I followed along behind it, keeping pace easily with the honeycomb bumper. My plan was to walk the ambulance all the way to the hospital, but as we neared the borders of the fairgrounds and the crowds thinned it picked up speed and I began running, realizing that of course I couldn’t keep pace with it. 

“Where are you going?” I shouted. The siren’s scream lowered in pitch as the vehicle moved away. “Which hospital are you going to?” The ambulance disappeared over a hill up Strachan Avenue. The busy street didn’t answer my question, though a few passersby turned, looking over their shoulders and hoping, I suppose, to be able to acknowledge, to recognize, that I was shouting at someone or something real. As I trotted up Strachan, I nodded at people and smiled with tight lips, a sort of Thanks-for-checking-on-my-sanity-type nod and smile. One lady stepped into the bike lane and nearly got hit by a cyclist, so eager was she to get out of the way of the crazy guy that was, of course, me.

At the top of the hill, I had to rest. The siren’s cry blended with the sound of a GO Train passing underneath me. I strained by eyes to try and see the ambulance at the lights by King St., but it wasn’t there. If the ambulance had turned right, they’d be going to Toronto Western. If they’d gone left, they’d be going to St. Joe’s.

My watch wasn’t helpful on the subject of where they’d taken Heather, though I checked it anyway. I texted Heather, “Which hospital?” though I didn’t expect a response. I stood there looking at my phone as an irritated woman in a designer tracksuit discouraged her pug from sniffing my stationary feet.

On my way to the corner of Strachan and King, I thought about what Heather had done and my legs felt wobbly, maybe because of all the running I had just done, I guess, but I think because of the surge of admiration I felt for her. I mean, reiki I didn’t give a shit about, honestly, and Heather was too calm and levelheaded and nice to really rank amongst my greatest all-time crushes, at least up to that point. But here was someone who would hold the head of a stranger, a kind of gross stranger, one of only two people in a crowd of at least hundreds who was even willing to help. My heart beat fiercely at the thought.

The siren’s song had disappeared beneath the city’s sounds by the time I got to the intersection. I went over to the streetcar stop where there was a cluster of people waiting. “Hi, uh. Um, did anyone— Did any of you see an ambulance come through here?” There were a pair of short ladies with buckets of cleaning supplies who looked Filipino and maybe legitimately didn’t know how to answer me, but, I mean, there were a lot of people, the rest of the people, who looked at me for a second, then made a point of staring past. “Which way did the ambulance go?” It was actually one of the Filipino ladies who pointed east.

“It went that way?” I held out my arm.

She nodded.

“Thank you, thank you.” I left quickly because I was crying again, this time with gratitude. Toronto Western, then.

I checked my phone. Still no texts from Heather. “Coming to Western,” I wrote and sent.

It’s really not that far a walk, you know? My phone says it’s under two kilometers. My phone also says it should take 20 minutes, but I made it in, like, 10.

There were two ambulances parked outside and I stopped behind the bumper of the one with the same markings as the one Heather went in and I knew that it was the ambulance I was looking for. I went and stood in the waiting area for longer than it took me to see that Heather wasn’t there. I panicked. If I hopped on a streetcar, I thought, maybe I could get to St. Joseph’s in 20 or 30 minutes. I texted, “At Western. Where are you?”

She wasn’t in the bathrooms, either. A woman in scrubs approached me. “Hi, can I help you?”

“Yeah, um,” I said. “It’s sort of weird. My girlfriend, or my friend or whatever—”

The woman in scrubs was nodding for me to go on.

“—Heather is her name, she came here, at least I think—”

“Was she hurt?”

“No. She was with a big, older guy with thick fingers and all this dense stubble. He collapsed at the Ex.”

She kept nodding, though she was looking off at other people now and didn’t seem to notice that I’d finished.

“Are they here?”

She was still nodding. “From the Ex, yeah. They’re just,” she held up her arm and was about to tell me where to find Heather when there was this horrible screaming. 

“My fiancée!” Two ducking paramedics wheeled a bloody person right past the reception. “That’s my fiancée!” A police officer had his hand against the chest of the screaming man. “Let me go with my fiancée!” He had a bike helmet in each hand. One helmet was a mess of red and road grit, its plastic shell peeled like an orange skin as if by some absentminded monster. Suddenly, the woman who’d been talking to me was standing behind the policeman and speaking quietly, trying to soothe the screaming man. “I need to be with my fiancée!” He grabbed the policeman’s wrist. “Why don’t you go out there and find the fuck that did this to her instead of keeping me from my fiancée?”

No one noticed me come in. There was a station in the center of the large Emergency Room with computers, the nurses and doctors moving in private purposeful orbits. Most curtains were closed. The bloody fiancée had been swallowed up by the quiet order of this place. I was walking around looking for Heather’s purple Converse under each curtain, when I was again asked, “Can I help you?” by a woman in scrubs.

“My grandfather,” I lied, “he fell at the Ex. Collapsed. They said he was brought here. With a girl.”

“One minute,” she said. I stood there while she whispered something to another woman in scrubs, this one wearing reading glasses. “Okay,” the woman said as she approached and held out a hand. “This way.”

The collapsed man, his eyes closed, looked much less disgusting under the hospital’s sheets. Heather gave me a tight smile and put her phone down in her lap. “You found us.”

“Yeah. Hi.”

“Hi.”

I opened my mouth because I was here now and I thought I should say something. “Is he okay?” I asked.

“Well, you know.”

I nodded.

The man coughed and shifted in the bed.

“I can wait outside,” I told Heather.

“You don’t need to. My parents are coming.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I looked at my watch again.

“I’m sorry,” Heather said. “I was having a good time.”

“Me too.”

“I’ll text you. When I’m free again.”

I nodded. “That’s great. Yeah. Thanks.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“We’ll talk.”

“Can I get you anything?”

“No. I don’t think so. Thanks.”

I nodded again. “I’ll see you.”

“Kay.” She picked up her phone. Why hadn’t she texted me back?

“Later,” I said.

I wasn’t ready to leave, though. I sat down in the waiting room. There was a baseball game on the TV. I hadn’t followed the Jays since grade eight. They were doing great I knew. I pulled my phone out and called up my texts to Heather. They had all been delivered. I texted, “Sure you don’t need anything?”

The shouting man with the bike helmets was gone and everyone was quiet like he’d never been there.

My phone buzzed. “No. I’m fine thanks. Thanks for checking up on me. I’m really fine. I can’t wait to see you again.”

I smiled and my diaphragm bounced a laugh past my lips. I looked up at the TV feeling overwhelmingly happy. I stayed to watch two innings and focused on taking deep breaths and keeping an eye on the Emergency entrance, hoping to see Heather’s parents arrive.

When I left, the sun was still warming the north sidewalk along Dundas so I walked home as happy as I could remember being in a long time. 

Toronto, October 2015

Emoji sequence: Harmony Trowbridge,  whose idea it was to combine the two sequences.

Story: Lee Sheppard