Last night she’d wanted to lift her head and pound on the wall for Tuyen to stop chiselling. But she only turned, putting her foot to the wall, and dreamed, If you expect that I should ease some ache in you … She wrote it down in her sleep, as a bit of paper from Tuyen’s wrecked room floated toward her. She grabbed at it and, in grabbing, woke up, got up, the feel of paper on her fingertips. She felt thirsty, went to the refrigerator, found a beer, and went back to her bed, closing the window and reaching for her notebook.
The chiselling stopped momentarily. Tuyen was listening to her move around the room now. Carla eased her body down quietly onto the bed—Tuyen had heard her, she was sure, and might come over, and she didn’t want that. She sat quietly, her quiet and Tuyen’s attention holding up the wall between them. She didn’t want to talk. She waited stealthily until she was sure that Tuyen understood. She didn’t want to tell her about sitting with Jamal in the Mimico prison. Her brother had sent her speeding through the city with the random logic of an element, and she felt she was unravelling. She wanted that heat in her brain to subside. She heard Tuyen chiselling again, and she put the beer to her lips, drinking it all at once like water, slaking the thirst that light gives you.
Waking up and finding herself halfway on the futon and halfway on the floor, and knowing she was late for work, Carla decided not to go. That decision made her spring to her feet, take a shower, and get dressed. She would call the Asshole—that’s what she called him, the dispatcher at Allied Swift Packages. What would be the use of going to work anyway? It was Monday, and sometimes she liked to take Monday off just to go in the opposite direction of the world hustling past her with its Monday morning anxieties. No one wanted to be where they were, which made them all rude and unhappy. Monday was the day of mistakes, which is also why she was glad to be off the road, her bicycle weaving in and out of traffic, trying to negotiate opening car doors and being squeezed at right turns. Mondays, she preferred to walk. By Tuesday the city had calmed down in acceptance of the fact that it had to work, that it had no choice.
Today she herself would have been careless.
“I can’t come to work today,” she said, surprised at the strength of her voice.
“Why?”
“I just can’t,” not finding a plausible reason she could give him other than she was late and still so fresh from a dream that it was too disturbing to deal with the real world. He was at the beginning of a new sentence—“Look, Carla, it’s Monday, we need”—when she cut him off—“I’ll see you if I see you”—and hung up. She didn’t care if he didn’t give her good calls, she didn’t care if tomorrow when she got in he made her wait longer than anyone else or gave her short runs. It was Monday, and she wanted to walk against the current of the city.
She washed her face compulsively again before leaving, trying to remove the phantom blessing of the lamppost from her forehead. She rubbed her face with the towel, still feeling the stroke of light on her, and left the apartment quickly, trying to ignore Tuyen’s open door. Lately she’d found Tuyen’s attentions too attuned to her, too burning, too difficult. Something was changing ever so slightly between them and she felt uncomfortable, uncertain about what it was.
Waving Tuyen away, she got a coffee at the Mars deli and drifted along College Street in the direction of Yonge.
FOUR
TUYEN’S DOOR HAD BEEN OPEN when Carla left. She was still knocking and chipping at the wood of the sculpture, but she was watching for Carla. The sculpture spread tall like a totem over her belongings. She was working on cutting small stick figures into the body of it. The figures were bending and standing in uneasy positions; some were headless in an extreme agony, or was it elation?
She knew that lately she’d been too intense with Carla. She couldn’t help herself. She had done a slow muscular dance around Carla; at first she herself not knowing what it was in all its fullness. But now she’d felt a kind of urgency, a sense that Carla was opening to her. Yet it could all be her vanity, she thought, laughing at herself just as she glanced up, seeing Carla move quickly to the stairs. Tuyen almost said something, then changed her mind, seeing Carla’s body flatten against the wall trying to avoid her. Carla passed, waving a defensive hand, declining the unspoken invitation. Despite herself, Tuyen came rushing to the door, calling to the bottom of the stairs.
“C, Jackie and Oku are coming for coffee, don’t you want to stay?” Carla waved a hand. “Come on. How’s Jamal? Okay?” she asked. “Check you later?” A little hope in her voice. “I have something to ask you. Can I come with you?” She couldn’t help saying it. Carla shook her head, no. “Later,” she heard Carla barely mumble.
Last night Tuyen had called Jackie and Oku to ask them if they’d talked to Carla. She’d said that she had a bad feeling and that Carla wasn’t answering her phone or the door.
“So what’s new?” Jackie answered. “You know how she is. Bipolar. But I’ll try her, okay?”
Jackie was breezy about everything. It was her way of keeping things together. The breeziness was the surface; underneath Jackie was frantically setting all the disturbances in
