When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

Mercy was at the bottom of her second cup of coffee when Artemis got back to the coffee shop.

  “Ready to head back to Vancouver?” she asked Mercy.

  “Guess so. You buy anything?”

  She pulled out the figure, unwrapped it, and placed it in front of Mercy. The ivory woman gazed dreamily into Mercy’s saucer. Artemis thought about the silver box. But there was no point worrying about it now.

  The little red hatchback Mercy had borrowed from her mother hummed along the highway. Artemis was sleepy, but every time she closed her eyes, the car seemed to swerve dangerously.

  “Are you tired? Do you want me to take over?” she asked Mercy.

  “I’m wide awake. I had two coffees in the museum, remember?”

  There were fewer lights. The stars drifted even higher. The car slid out of the lane. A truck pared close and Artemis’s eyes jerked open again. Mercy was still in control.

  “Come on a youth group picnic with me next Saturday.” Mercy’s social life revolved largely around the church, one reason Artemis kept her distance.

  “I told Eden I’d help him on a shoot.”

  “Didn’t realize you two were so close. I thought he was just using you for your notes.”

  “Is it his fault he has something better to do than suffer through Frank’s boring lectures? And we are close. I’ve known him since high school.”

  “What’s our story? Border’s coming up.”

  “Why not just tell the truth?”

  “What about the ivory thing you got?”

  “Oh yeah. Don’t say anything about that. Just tell them about the museum.”

  The border guard waved them through after the minimum number of questions. They cruised down the 99. Artemis strained to stay awake.

  “I don’t like doing that,” said Mercy.

  “What?”

  “Lying.”

  “When did you ever lie?”

  “Five minutes ago.”

  “Come on. That’s just the border. It doesn’t count.

  Her name is Artemis Wong and it suits her, since she belongs to no one. Her friends call her Art, or sometimes Artless, depending upon the degree of guile she is capable of in any particular situation.

  You say: A funny name for a Chinese girl. I will correct you. Chinese-Canadian. Make no mistake, because her name is a name that marks a generation of immigrant children whose parents loved the idea of the Enlightenment and thought they would find it blooming in the full heat of its rational fragrance right here in North America. So here she is, with a good mouthful of a first name to go with the short, crisp monosyllable last – Artemis, the virgin huntress. It’s Greek. Think of her out on a moon yellow night, arrow notched taut in a bowstring and the taste of blood in her mouth. How seriously her parents considered the effect on destiny in the act of her naming, I don’t know. They had their pick of the pantheon. They could have called her Syrinx and had her running in terror from musically inclined men with hairy legs. She might have been more docile, vegetative even. But she would have had a tune to hum to herself then, high and reedy, remembering river banks. If they had called her Persephone they could have kept her, for half the year anyway, tending a fruitful garden. Though it is true that every fall her memory of them would drown in the icy River of Forgetfulness as she went into the underworld to live with her dreary husband, six bleeding pomegranate seeds glistening in his open palm. It might have been easier, for as it is she remembers nothing of them at all since they were forced to give her up for adoption when she was six months old. The name, which her adoptive parents decided to keep, thinking “Artemis Spinner” would never suit her, became her only keepsake. That and a trunk she looks into only reluctantly.

  They could have picked the Roman equivalent, Diana. It would have been easier for teachers to get their tongues around, especially on those first nervous September days when they complained about not having much practice with foreign names.

  In grade four, she thought of changing it. Diana Wong. Or Diane, even; much simpler, and really, what difference would it have made to her family? It’s not as if she would have been scorning the namesake of some ornery, forgotten grandmother way over in China with her funny high-collared suits and shuffling shoes.

  But now she’s kind of glad she didn’t. It’s an aesthetic, like fortune cookies, or spaghetti noodles in hot dog soup.

  “Come with me. You can help with makeup.”

  “Can’t. I told Mercy I’d meet her at the library.”

  “So stop by there first and tell her you changed your mind.”

  “But I have work.…”

  “Work, schmerk. I’ll help you with it later.”

  “And what am I going to say to her?”

  Mercy sat by the fountain filing her nails as she waited. Her grown-out perm fell half over her face. Beside her, the ubiquitous student’s canvas knapsack in faded forest green slouched like an ill-fed companion beast.

  “I’ve decided not to work tonight.”

  “Because you’re hanging out with Eden. Fine.”

  “That’s not the reason.”

  “Whatever. God will be your judge. Not me.”

  “Nothing is going on, you know.”

  “Then why bother?”

  “It’s hard to explain. There’s this … quiet.…”

  His stride was long and quick. Artemis found herself lagging behind him, following rather than walking beside. He made no attempt to slow down to accommodate her; in fact, he hardly noticed she was having trouble. He puzzled her. His treatment of her was inconsistent. Sometimes, like two nights ago when they had gone to the campus pub together after class, he was gracious and attentive, buying her drinks and regaling her with stories about his childhood years in Indonesia, where his grandfather had been a foreign diplomat. His large, crooked mouth spread into a mischievous, comically diabolical grin as he told a story about how he’d learned his first words, none of which were particularly polite, from an Englishwoman’s mynah bird. And then there were times like this, when he requested her presence, but then seemed to forget she was there. An exasperated “Slow down, will you” perched on her lips, but she didn’t know how to get it out without seeming whiny. She caught up with him at the top of the steel stairs, at the door to his studio. There she gave him a scowl that he didn’t acknowledge. Instead, he turned his head to see who was coming up behind them.

  Making a tremendous racket that echoed like a drum chorus in the empty stairwell, up clambered a young man, perhaps her own age, certainly younger than Eden. Little round silver glasses sat crookedly on a slightly hawkish nose. As he ran up the stairs, his chin-length hair flopped endearingly up and down like a puppy’s ears.

  “Sorry I’m late,” he panted when he arrived at the top.

  Eden smiled and looked him briefly up and down. “Get in there now. I’ll show you how to set the lights.”

  The model was waiting in the studio when they went in. She lay stretched out long as a cat on the tattered green couch that was missing most of its springs. She was a tremendous woman. Legs thick and muscled as a man’s torso, arms that could hold up the world. Eyes set deep into the sockets, a strong nose, perfect lips. Her hair was a fine white-blonde, the same colour even in the thin wisps at her temples. Natural, not dyed. It was so pale it could almost be called colourless. There was a transparency about it, as though it might almost not be there at all, yet at the same time it was rich and luxuriant. Her breasts pushed against the fabric of an otherwise elegant scoop-necked floral dress.

  “Found the key under the mat,” she said. “Not a very original hiding place.”

  “I guess not,” said Eden in a soft voice Artemis had never heard before. His careless nonchalance fell away like a useless garment. She had never seen him purse his lips before, but pursed they were, tense with some unspoken terror or awe. It was strange to see that unusually large mouth lose its crooked, cocky grin, the ever-smirking corners turn down and lie still. He poured the woman a vodka tonic, sharp
and colourless. He poured one for Artemis too, then one for the floppy-haired boy, then one for himself. The woman got up and went behind a screen to change, taking her drink with her. Artemis moved to the couch. The impression of the woman’s body remained, although any heat she might have left had already dissipated. Eden remained standing, drink in hand, absently, or was it nervously, eyeing the screen.

  “How am I supposed to get into this?” the woman called out.

  “It unfastens at the back.” Eden took a large sip, put his drink on the table, and shuffled off to the corner where the light stands were stored in large black cases.

  They could hear the dress open like a door on a squeaky hinge.

  “You really want me to wear this?”

  “It’s more comfortable than it looks. It’s lined.” He unfolded a step ladder and began to set up a key light, relaxing noticeably now that his hands were occupied. He lifted a stand out of its hard black case and extended it to its full height, then clamped a light into place. The head of an alien on a long metal neck. He paid no attention to the floppy-haired boy fidgeting in the corner, waiting for direction.

  The woman stepped out from behind the screen. The dress was made of polished steel. Sharp and dangerous.

  “I can hardly fucking move.”

  Whatever she had been to any of them when they arrived, now, in the constricting dress, she became something terrible and frightening, something more alien than human, a giant insect inside a hard carapace. Eden flicked a switch. Hot white light poured over her. The dress glinted. A thin, high-pitched whine that must in actuality have come from the lights seemed to emanate from the dress’s sharp angles. Only Eden seemed immune to the monster he had created. The wide mouth spread into a familiar grin. He pressed a button on the boombox and Bryan Ferry’s insistent, sinister music crashed out of it.

  With the woman locked in her stiff dress and the music pounding as though a giant heart pumped beneath the floor, Eden too became someone else. No longer a mischievous imp or a nervous boy, he moved with a kind of muscular fluidity, positioning the lights on their cool steel stands, adjusting their intensity and tone. He pointed the floppy-haired boy in various directions – connect these wires, flick that switch, move that case. And each time the boy jumped to it, although he struggled under the weight of a lighting kit almost as big as he was. Eden’s mirthful hazel eyes had paled to a sharp unearthly green. There was something about the way they caught the light that was disconcerting. Every now and then he would look up from his work to eye the model, safely contained within the steel dress. She tossed the last of her colourless drink down her throat and, lighting up a cigarette, turned to Artemis.

  “Are you the one who’s supposed to do my makeup?”

  Artemis got up to fetch the case. Eden had explained what to do, assured her that with hands as steady as hers, she wouldn’t have any difficulty. True, the makeup wouldn’t be as good as if he could afford to hire someone, but it would be all right. The model wasn’t a professional either. He had spotted her at the bus stop last week, had been so stricken by her height and figure and by her large, deep-set eyes that he had followed her onto the bus despite the fact that it didn’t go anywhere close to where he lived. In nervous tones he told her how unusual-looking he found her. He asked if she would like to pose for him. He had been astonished at the effectiveness of his own charm.

  She might seem intimidating, he had said, but she had never done this before, so she wouldn’t know what to expect. It had made sense when he asked Artemis to come along, but now this prodigious woman in that terrible dress did not exactly present an approachable figure. The woman couldn’t sit, so Artemis beckoned her over to the ladder Eden had used to set the first light. She climbed until her face was level with the woman’s face. She took a bottle of foundation that said Fair Ivory from the box and shook a little pool of pale, skin-coloured liquid into her left palm. It glistened against the lines and creases.

  An intimate gesture, touching a stranger’s face. Her skin was surprisingly soft and downy, covered with fine golden-white hairs that were only visible up close. Artemis smoothed the liquid on, then dusted green and silver shadow on the mothy lids of the enormous eyes and traced their edges with a black pencil. With a fine-haired brush she painted in lips.

  “Powder,” called Eden. “Lots, or she’ll shine like a Christmas tree.”

  There was Fair Ivory powder too. Eden flicked on the fill light. When Artemis opened the box, a little powder rushed up the tunnel of light that she and the model stood in.

  “Close your eyes,” she said.

  The heavy green lids lowered.

  “Perfect,” Eden whispered, suddenly close behind her.

  She jumped.

  “Didn’t mean to startle you. She looks great. You should be a pro.” His hands were empty and his eyes nervous again. “I’ll just finish with the lights and go load up.”

  Artemis brushed pink across the woman’s cheeks as Eden adjusted the lights one last time, casting an odd blue beam to make a pool in an unexpected place on the floor. He slipped film into the camera, wound and clicked it into place.

  The woman strode into the lights. She moved, large and brilliant against the white backdrop. He raised the camera. She turned and rolled with surprising grace given the restrictions of her costume. He snapped steadily, confident now that there was a camera between him and his subject. He stopped every now and then to give her directions – “Arm a little higher,” “Tilt your head farther to the left” – or to the floppy-haired boy – “Fix her sandal strap,” “Get rid of that wire behind her.”

  It was a relief when the woman was gone, the lights were down again, and the floppy-haired boy had vanished into the night. In the cool darkness, he kissed Artemis between the eyes like she was a small child and breathed in the smell of her hair. They walked out to the street together, into a light spring drizzle. He took her hand, swung it vigorously back and forth, and recited lewd limericks he had learned as a teenager in boarding school until she was in stitches and gasping for air.

  “Tired?” he asked when they came to the street corner where his car was parked.

  “Not really.”

  “Me neither. Come to my place. I’ll make Irish coffees and we can watch the late movie on TV.”

  On his open king-sized futon, they sprawled on their bellies in front of a rerun of Blade Runner on one of the American channels.

  The man who made eyes was Cantonese. Her heart hiccupped as she watched Roy and Leon descend on him, life-like machines with human souls. They disconnected him from the suit in which he lived, climate controlled, making it possible for him to work in his icy cave, where the eyeballs cooked contentedly. Leon grabbed an unfinished eye from the tank and perched it on the eye-maker’s shoulder while Roy slugged out questions. The eye-maker whimpered and grovelled. Later, Artemis felt the urge to bury her head in Eden’s shoulder when Roy went to crush Tyrell’s skull. Eden must have sensed her discomfort because he grabbed her hand.

  “Say ‘Kiss me.’ “ Deckard slammed Rachel into the wall.

  “Kiss me,” she stuttered. He kissed her.

  “I want you. Say I want you,’“ he snarled.

  “I want you,” she murmured.

  The geisha on the video billboard put a breath freshener into her mouth. In the blue light emanating from the screen, Eden rolled away from Artemis. She looked down the length of him, a full six feet stretched out on the futon. He hooked a leg over hers, turned his head and smiled. His leg weighed into hers, water into water. He leaned over and brushed his lips against her neck. She closed her eyes just as Deckard shot down the snake woman. Eden moved back to his original position, but her eyes remained closed. In a few more minutes, she was asleep.

  They awoke late in the morning with the TV news muttering in their heads, still dressed in the previous day’s clothes, wrinkled and stale. They barely made it to class.

  It is other foxes who are strange, not me. They with their short
lives and busy litters, caught in their petty rivalries and dreary surface-bound forays for ordinary meat. They go under the earth just to sleep, have only enough of an inkling of the vast possibilities that exist there to scare them. They do see themselves in me. That recognition is precisely what terrifies them, what causes them to hurry back to their mates and cubs, their animal carcasses and shallow dwellings as though to say, “See, here are the things that make us civilized, here are the things that make us not like her.”

  When it amuses me, I laugh. When it hurts me, I laugh. And because laughing is not something foxes generally do, they twitch their noses in disgust and hurry away. I don’t really care where they rush off to. They’re silly to think they can hide from me in their pathetic little fox holes, clay dry and dug barely deep enough for dreams. They run away, but I don’t run after them. I go to the hillside where all the graves face hopefully south. I go to look at beautiful corpses. Sometimes I choose the frail ones, with pale skin and snakes of black hair, small feet and long, intelligent hands. Other times, I choose them sturdier, those who in life would have been red and laughing.

  See how gentle I am, warm muzzle against stone cheek, breath sweet as embalming wood. It is just a matter of breath, a matter of sighing into the proper hollows of the body. I am a glass blower, swelling this fragile form with the shape of life, lucid and eternal.

  The word, I believe, is animate, although I much prefer inhabit. In this act I cease to be a mere animal. Nor am I a parasite. To inhabit a body is to create mass out of darkness, to give weight and motion to that which otherwise would be cold. And I, too, become warm inside an envelope of human flesh, less nervous and hungry.

  But most wilt after a matter of hours, giving me barely enough warning to escape. There is no time for the gangly newness to wear away no time for the grace that comes with knowing one’s own limbs, possible symphonies in the muscles. I used to be able to inhabit the same body for longer than a night – a few weeks, a few months even, as I did to become the housewife’s neighbour. But in time the body loses its shape. The synapses wear thin, refuse to accept any further commands.