When Fox Is a Thousand Read online

  The air in the room was cold. She could feel it in her nose. The thick russet sheets smelled decidedly of the two of them, of their skin, but also slightly stale, the way the smell of a person stays with his or her garments even if they haven’t been worn in weeks. The sheets smelled of sleep, dark and warm and motionless. They had been sleeping like this, side by side, for months, but Eden never touched her while they lay there, although he took her for candlelight dinners and invited her to sleep over night after night. He kissed her sometimes in the daytime. Not on the mouth, but on her neck, or along the jawbone, tongue and teeth breathing her in, slowly, snake-lazy, wanting something but not sure what.

  It had happened recently. Was it yesterday? A match flared in her mind’s eye and his breath couldn’t take her in the way it used to. Her blood did not spread like a wine stain on a white tablecloth the way it might have in the past, but gathered, pounding, in her chest.

  In bed at night, the bed to which he had invited her, he lay beside her coolly, careful not to let a hand or knee brush accidentally against her. He lay closed and tight, turned away from her, snug up against the cool white wall as though it were an infinitely more desirable lover. She was conscious of it as a game now. The smell of Diane’s hair burned in her nostrils. In the morning he made her good French coffee and she lay in bed and smelled its familiar smell and wondered why she kept coming back.

  She lay in bed and smelled the smell that was almost like chocolate, only bloodier, that was almost like earth, only sweeter, and remembered with some consternation the night she tried to touch him.

  It had been some six months ago, the weekend before Halloween. Enough of summer clung to the trees that the air was still warm, although the thin blue odour of winter hovered around them all evening. She wore a mask he had made for her out of feathers and fake pearls that gleamed like a thousand tiny artificial moons, and fake emeralds that reminded her of the sea. The mask was shaped to make her resemble a large jewelled pussycat. A gauzy dress billowed about her, suggesting the power of flight. Dressed as a bird with a long blue-green beak and great white wings folded gently against his back, he walked beside her. They moved quickly away from the Yaletown warehouse party to where his car was parked. They smelled of sweat and cigarette smoke and the traces of vomit that stay with you hours after you’ve used a toilet where someone has been sick. They walked through the dark night, the thin blue hand of winter guiding them past their alcoholic blur towards the alley where the car was parked. She was cold. The diaphanous dress floated about her and she thought of a snowstorm in the mountains.

  “Are you warm enough?” His voice broke the rushing silence of the night most unnaturally. It was not as though it were really all that quiet. The sounds of the city, traffic in the distance, streetlights humming, someone singing drunkenly several blocks away, were all part of the landscape, but his voice broke the flow abruptly.

  “Are you warm enough?” Because her mask was down, he couldn’t see how her cheeks were pale as snow, not pink and ruddy the way the cheeks of some women go when they are cold. He couldn’t see how pale her small, bony hands had become.

  “Are you warm enough?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m cold.”

  He put the heat on in the car, but she didn’t shiver or stamp her feet in an attempt to take it in.

  “Stay at my place tonight. I’m too tired to drive you home.”

  He made hot chocolate the European way, grinding solid chunks in the coffee grinder and melting it into hot milk. She stood behind him. The broken black and white tiles on the kitchen floor felt cool, ragged and strangely pleasant against her bare feet. She had taken off her mask and left it on the coffee table in the living room, so she stood in her bare feet in that gauzy white dress and watched him.

  “You look cold,” he said. “This will make you feel better.” He stirred the warm milky concoction that was just beginning to bubble. “Doesn’t it smell good?”

  She couldn’t smell anything except the traces of unburnt natural gas that had escaped from the stove before the blue flame had a chance to catch them.

  He took a wire whisk out of the second drawer. He sunk the rounded end into the pot and whisked gently, not noticing how the metal handle was getting hotter and hotter, until suddenly his hand burned and he dropped the utensil in shock. It sank to the bottom of the pot.

  “Shit. Oh well, I think it’s done anyway.” He turned off the heat and pulled two matching ceramic mugs from the cupboard. Wrapping a grimy dish towel around the handle of the pot in order to avoid burning himself a second time, he carefully poured some chocolate into her mug. He had already forgotten about the wire whisk, which tilted out of the pot and crashed to the floor.

  She laughed affectionately.

  He shook his head, chuckling at his own forgetfulness. He filled the other mug too and then handed the first one to her.

  She took it from him and the warmth which emanated from its smooth irregular surface felt good against her cold hands. She held it for a few moments without even testing the temperature, so sure was she that it was too hot to drink.

  Knowing that it was too hot to drink, he lifted it to his mouth. The hot liquid entered his throat and he coughed and sputtered.

  She laughed, still just holding her cup. Tentatively she raised it to her mouth and a sweet odour assailed her nostrils. She breathed it in, savouring, but something was not right. She continued to inhale gently, trying to ascertain the problem. It was not the smell of chocolate, but the iron and bleach odour of blood.

  “Something wrong?”

  “No. I guess I’m just tired. Okay with you if I drink this in bed?”

  “Sure, I guess,” he said, picking up last week’s Georgia Straight and glancing through the contents to indicate he wouldn’t be accompanying her just yet. Secretly relieved, she got up from her chair, holding the cup as far away from her as she could without alerting him to the fact that something was out of place.

  She placed the cup on the bedside table, close to the wall, so that when she sat back, propping herself up on the buttery-soft down pillows, she couldn’t see it. Still the odour of blood lingered insistently in her nostrils. From the floor she picked up two old issues of Vogue and an issue of Elle that a friend of his who worked in a salon had passed on to him for her benefit. She flipped through them absently with her cold fingers, looking at the pictures of slim beautiful white women in well-cut clothes posing in faraway locations. She wanted to go away. Maybe it was the cold that made her feel this way, she wasn’t entirely sure. There was a series of photographs of a tall, smooth-cheeked, blue-eyed model. Her brown hair was cut in a short bob and she wore long waistless dresses in pale colours on location in China. The model stood among a crowd of people in blue Mao suits, pushing bicycles. On the other side of the page she stood in a park among old women doing tai chi. There was something irritatingly delicate about the way she held her arms. Still, Artemis lingered over the pictures. Propped up on the pillows, with pictures of a brown-haired model in her lap and the bedside lamp glowing soft yellow, she began to doze.

  He climbed over her to the other side of the bed. The blood and iron odour raced through her brain. She could barely discern how, far away on the other side of the bed, his breathing had already evened out, slow and shallow. She got out of bed and took the cup to the kitchen, holding it as far from her body as she could. She dumped the chocolate into the sink, stubbing her toe on a rough edge of broken tile.

  Still cold, she slipped back into bed. He was still breathing slowly, the gentle rhythm punctuated every now and then by a dry, drawn-out gasp. She lay flat on her back, her eyes wide open, staring up at the ceiling, looking at the familiar brown water mark there shaped like a spaceship.

  I’ll never be able to fall asleep, she thought to herself as she lay with her eyes wide open. The smell of blood was gone by now. The water mark did nothing spectacular. In her wide-awake alertness, a kind of sleep began to come, the kind where you can neve
r be sure if you are truly sleeping or not. She let herself drift slowly into it, an oarless boat slouching into a long watery tunnel. He breathed slowly and she noticed a warmth coming from his body. Something smelled like chocolate, ever so faintly, then stronger. She had a craving for something sweet. She rolled towards him, pressed against his back. In his sleep, he elbowed her in the ribs.

  She put a hand on his belly.

  Feigning deep sleep he pushed her away, as a baby might shove aside an unwanted blanket. Then, as though reconsidering his tactics, he turned over and his eyes froze hers like a deer through the sights of a rifle.

  “It can’t be like that between you and me.”

  “Tell me why we’re here like this so often then.” Still the smell of good European chocolate. Her words were empty of desire, driven by a simpler need to unstring the tension that hung unspoken between them.

  “Because we’re good friends.” His sincere gaze still wouldn’t release her.

  This morning he brought coffee to her, sweet and milky. He knew she liked it this way, just as he knew she wouldn’t eat oranges until after her croissant. And as he knew there would be stray strands of black hair caught in the sheets if he was not careful to vacuum after she was gone. He leaned towards her neck, still warm and sour with sleep. As he leaned, he fell into the slit of light coming in through a narrow gap between the curtains. She caught him out of the corner of her eye.

  “Don’t,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  She couldn’t stand the thought of it, the heavy languid presence that would burn there, promising nothing. “I just want to drink my coffee.” She paused. “You got a cigarette?”

  “You never smoke.”

  “I want to this morning.” But she knew when she lit it that all she really wanted was to see the match flare briefly in the cup of her hand.

  He got up and flung the curtains wide. The restless sunlight rushed in, flooding the bed and gushing onto the floor.

  “You never showed me any of those photographs.”

  “Which ones?”

  “Of me and Diane.”

  “I didn’t? I’ve sent out all the prints, I think. Might have a contact sheet around somewhere, though.” He rummaged through the mountain of papers and prints on his desk. “Are you sure I didn’t show you?”

  “You’ve obviously had too many other things on your mind,” she said, trying not to sound reproachful.

  She knelt over the makeshift light table he had constructed from a piece of plexiglas and a wooden fruit box. He gave her a little magnifying glass embedded in a plastic cup – a loupe, he called it. A little circle that tightened around the image of her and Diane pouting ridiculously for the camera. In the one where Diane’s hand burned against her thigh her face held a stupid, self-conscious smile, all teeth and embarrassment.

  “I look terrible.”

  “Some of them are all right. You look almost like the real thing.”

  “I am the real thing. Except that the clothes don’t belong to me.”

  “They should, shouldn’t they?”

  Something jerked inside her. She gave him an odd little smile.

  “You know what? I’m going to give them to you.”

  “You don’t want to do that.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “I was just being snarky. You shouldn’t part with them so lightly.”

  “I think you should have them.”

  “What would your father say?”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?”

  “What would I do with them? I can’t exactly wear them on the street. Besides, have you any idea what they might be worth?”

  “Do what you want with them. I think you should have them. Really.” His eyes caught hers like a surveillance light. She struggled to break free of his gaze.

  “We shouldn’t do this anymore.”

  “I know. It’s weird, isn’t it?” He paused. “Maybe one of us should go away for a while.”

  “Yeah, but which one?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s the problem, isn’t it? We don’t know what to do, so we just keep going.”

  “We’re not so different from other couples.…”

  “Except that we’re not a couple.” She drained her coffee cup. She leaned into the cigarette and took a long drag, drawing her cheeks in as she pulled, so that he could make out the shape of her skull.

  “Yeah. I don’t know why I can’t … why I don’t want to, you know … I’m sure it means something.”

  She took a final puff of the cigarette and stubbed it out in the saucer of her coffee cup. She picked up her jeans from where she had modestly dropped them the night before and slid her legs into their clammy depths.

  “You want a clean T-shirt?”

  She shook her head. “I want to be on time for class. You coming?”

  “I don’t think so. Take good notes, okay?”

  “You’re such a scammer.” She pulled her fingers through her hair a few times and tried unsuccessfully to avoid brushing against him as she made her way to the bathroom.

  There was a matted clot of her own hair already caught in the drain of the copper-stained sink. It was cold and slimy against her fingers as she pulled it out and dropped it into the toilet. The hot water faucet didn’t quite work properly, but she knew where to stand to avoid the initial spray that shot out between the washer and the turning mechanism before any water actually came out of the tap. She turned the cold on and let the water run until the temperature of each had thoroughly blended and then splashed her face a few times. She had to take two toothbrushes, his and hers, from the pink plastic cup before she could fill it. She brushed quickly and resisted the temptation to help herself to a dab of his cologne as she did on many of the too-frequent mornings she woke in this apartment. Not so long ago it was a scent that entranced her, leathery and pungent, calling up a longing she didn’t understand. She would have to remember from now on, she decided, to carry with her the bottle Diane had given her.

  “Take a croissant with you,” he said, holding one out, already slit open and stuffed with grape jelly. He himself thought grape jelly was a disgusting North American habit and had told her so on numerous occasions, reminding her each time of his aristocratic French mother. “And this,” he said, proffering an elegant brown paper bag with straw handles from some upscale shoe store. The thing inside it had the weight of flesh.

  She raised an eyebrow.

  “The smocks.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He nodded. She stepped into her boots and walked out the door, which he held – formally and strangely – open.

  In the bright spring sunshine, she hurried towards the bus stop, stuffing the croissant into her mouth as she walked. The bus pulled up and she had to run to catch it. She didn’t open the bag until she had settled down, finished the croissant, and licked the last sticky traces of jelly from her fingers. The smocks and matching pants lay in the bottom of the bag, carefully rolled, like little rabbit carcasses, quite limp and dead.

  It is a miracle I have made it as far as I have. When I was young, foxes were a persecuted species, I can tell you. It is true that foxes don’t enjoy the reputation they once did. Or perhaps enjoy is not the right word. Suffer from, more like. When I was a cub, foxes were thought of as a general evil, to be avoided at the best of times, smoked out of our holes and shot, or poisoned at the worst. The situation became even more dire after the invention of gunpowder, although by then I had learned to leap through trees and fly as fast as sound, so it wasn’t so much of a worry for me as it was for later generations.

  Now there are many who have forgotten us altogether. It is a relief not to be so ill-regarded, although sometimes, I must admit, a little humiliating to be so much forgotten. I had once hoped for my own little temple, as in the old days, when the few who placed faith in us would build small shrines beside the road. But I have long since given up on that.

  The summ
er my grandmother was killed by a merchant’s son, my older cousin and I vowed revenge. At first we just picked off the family’s chickens, and later stole their New Year’s goose, but none of this satisfied us. I had yet to learn the key to a well-orchestrated haunting. At that point I did not yet have powers of transformation or any practical experience as to how it was done. My cousin said she knew a few easy tricks we could try. She had picked them up by trailing her mother into the village one night. I was scared to go with her, but she said not to worry. She would take care of everything.

  On a full moon night, we visited the merchant’s wife in her chamber. My cousin leapt up onto the bed, crouched over her face, and blew cool air into her nostrils. Between each breath she muttered some strange words I didn’t understand. I remained riveted to my place on the floor. When she had repeated this procedure for the third time, the woman vanished.

  “She hasn’t gone far,” said my cousin as she slid into a crack between the wall and the floor. We found the woman asleep in an empty guest room on the far side of the complex.

  Over the next few days, we watched her through the windows of the house. She wandered about, muttering in a strange language. She said things that made my cousin giggle, but I understood none of them. She walked through closed doors and solid walls as though they weren’t there at all, even in bright daylight. The merchant and his son were noticeably upset.

  After a few days, though, the symptoms became less acute. She would say ordinary things about the weather or the house in conventional Chinese. She occasionally passed through walls, but increasingly she would bang into them whenever she tried. By the end of the week, she had given up and gone back to using doors in the same manner as everybody else.

  “We have to go back,” said my cousin.

  “I’m afraid we’ll get caught,” said I.

  “Nonsense.”

  The son and the cook slept in the same room as the mother now, each with a big cleaver close at hand. When I saw them I wanted to turn around, but my cousin scoffed at me and called me a coward. “Think of it as a challenge,” she said. “If you want to become immortal, I’m sure you’ll have to go through much worse than this.”