CRIME AND PUNISHMENT

was the only novel I read the summer I turned seventeen, I said, and I read it nine or maybe only eight times, it's a very big novel, a bible. And that was a hot summer, and kids with baseball bats drove around the country-side sabotaging picnics and bbqs, and the gunslinger sun pistolled and raked the baseball pitches in Centennial Park into acres of burnt bristling grass and, not stopping there, no, baked the earth so hard you could see your reflection in the dirt. And the scuffed balls bounced high across the hard yellow fields. Eleven old people died in their homes around our town if you count the dusty farms over to the east as part of the city. Later that summer I saw a seagull drop out of the sky. The bird’s wings had simply stopped moving, it must have believed itself to be an albatross. Or maybe it was just heat exhaustion. Trying to cool off in the basement, I watched a television adaptation of Crime and Punishment. I was in love with a dark-haired girl who had spent the spring sitting on the front steps of her parent's verandah, but the heat had driven her indoors, and there was no point in me being outside. My favourite song that July was off a compilation album from Asthmatic Kitty. "Go To The Crossroads" is two voices chanting tags from Dostoevsky over clashing piano lines and static, it's beautiful, it fades to black with the repeated diminishment, "Blood on our hands," four words circling high and away and falling down again. I got a tattoo at the end of August, lanky copperplate reading CHRIST IS RISEN across the top of my chest. Three hundred dollars on my body forever. Must have been the heat. I’m not saying this was a good decision, me getting that tattoo, but the sun had seared Rodion Raskolnikov into my brain and I was only seventeen and mostly missing the point of Crime and Punishment.

NO, WAIT A MINUTE, SAID EARLY.

He took his glasses off and rolled over to scoop up a set of ironwood knuckles on the night table. A dark-eyed friend of his had bought them in Thailand or Malaysia or some small jungle-black island in the South Pacific. The wood was as warm as honey, but pointed, four little pyramids of pain or panic on a clutch of bunched fingers. Early turned and launched himself at Ben like a small boy jumping off a dock, a dark lake and a hot summer sun.

Wait a second, I said.

The first backhand knocked Ben’s glasses into a pile of laundry. The second backhand drove up his nose, tossed the keys back into the car and strolled through the front door, shouting for a steak dinner. Ben snorted and shook his head and clutched Early close but Early managed to keep his right hand free and laid into Ben like a surveyor zoning a field, mathematical, precise, mapping out future suburbs of bruises. I lunged and grabbed Early’s right as he drew back and managed to pin his hand down on the bed, Early and Ben piling mountain and mountain on top of me. I tried to wrench those wooden knuckles off Early’s hand, but he balled his fingers up and started lashing out with his legs. His knee angled hard and bashed me across the bridge of my nose. I shook the sting off and twisted those wooden knuckles hard as I could, driving them into Early’s own hand until he shrieked and lay still. Ben staggered to his feet and pawed around for his glasses. They were unbroken, a miracle, tipped into a rank pair of Calvin Kleins under the plush chair in the corner. We were all breathing hard, Early most of all, pressing his injured hand underneath his arm.

Early, said Ben.

Early screamed and rushed Ben, bundling the blond giant into the doorway. But the bedroom door had been knocked shut during the fight. Ben let himself be pinned for a moment and then pushed Early away, maybe pushed a little hard. The man straightened and pirouetted, he half-danced half-flew into a short bookshelf. A trade paperback of Hellboy: Seed of Destruction fluttered to the hardwood floor.

Get out, Early screamed again. Get the fuck out of my room.

Alright, I said, We’re going. We’re leaving right now, okay? Ben shouldered his way up the stairs, I followed him.

Who expects that, said Ben. His voice was a bit raggy at the edges, blue eyes bewildered. He tweaked his glasses and brushed back the flutter of hair across his forehead. Just wrestling, right? He exhaled stertorously.

Whatever, I said. Early doesn’t have any brothers, so no one ever told him not to be insane. Or beat him when he was.

My hoodie lay on the edge of the sofa, its hood caping, zipper flickering. I fished a pack of Craven A Menthols out of the pocket and went outside. The light was grey and fading, a smell of rain in the air. A black bank of clouds crept doubtfully over the edge of the city, the autumn early in their darkening shadows, and the dark branches of the trees in the street looked like a thousand hands warding off a slab of piano. The girl across the street banged the door shut behind her and pitched down on the top step, bringing her legs together tightly as she sat. A slim white cigarette glowed in her fingers. I put a cigarette between my lips and flicked the lighter.

By now, of course, if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t always believe what you read in the newspapers, you know I haven’t been telling the whole truth. You might even think, damn you, that I’ve been lying. I won’t say you’re wrong. I’m not a particularly honest man, as far as honest men go, which, let’s face it, is not very far. But in the photographs I have from those days, the slick film bruised by the sticky weight of the magnets on the fridge, you can barely see the marks on Ben’s cheekbones, small red shadows like flowers on a mountain, or tiny hoof prints across his face.

I HATE PERFUME

Lucy wears a crisp clean perfume called M#2 Black March. Twigs and new leaves on a path through a birch forest, cold windy weather, the sound of someone friendly in a white clapboard house and dark trees rising beyond a deep green hillside. She gets these bottled aromatic dioramas from a little boutique off Whyte Ave, one of those shops with deep-set creamy doorways ribbed with crown moulding and dark glass and which sells thin purple leather belts and cardigans sewn with delicate epaulettes and white blowzy tops with crimpled tuxedo collars and also glass conch shells and pencil skirts and square-cut topaz rings, peridot, glamourine. Sometimes she wears a different scent called At The Beach 1966. The owner of the shop is a brisk business woman with honey-coloured hair falling smoothly over one eye and she imports these plain glass minikins from a perfumer out of Brooklyn or maybe he lives somewhere in Pennsylvania. His name, delightfully, is Christopher Brosius and he used to work for agencies and companies from Manhattan and London and Bangkok. The woman showed me a photograph of the perfumerie once, a small sweating brick front on a wide street in a deserted section of the city, a white sandwich board propped in front and stencilled with navy blue letters reading

I HATE PERFUME.
You smell good, I said. I can smell you from here. I wish there was a more elegant way to say that. Smell. You smell good. Sounds so harsh, doesn’t it?

That’s the Old English for you, she smiled. I think those old one syllable words are perfect. They mean what they mean. Sincere words. Not like you. Lucy rolled over and spread her arms wide on the bed, the late afternoon sunlight through the white lace curtains pooling across her dark hair and the white pillows.

Sincerely, you smell good, I said.

She smiled. Sincerely?

You know you do.

Sincerely?

Okay, sure, I said.

Sincerely, she said and laughed and flung her arms around me and pressed her face into the crook of my neck.

Sincerely, I said.

[photo source]

NOT TO BE ESPECIALLY ENID BLYTON

about things, but there were five of us and we moved into a house for a year—flip open Five Run Away Together—that house with the golden door buried in the central hallway and the wonderful bond of unity. We were Bazum and Ben and Early and Aurora and myself. I say we were and not we are because I don’t believe I’m the same person, anymore. That Roland is dead forever. Certain things may be the same, of course, or hardly changed. I still, unfortunately, slur my esses slightly when I particularly wish to speak well. And Bazum has kept her critical sharp eye for other people in the room, and Aurora still embarrasses herself in front of horror films, and I talked to Ben on the phone the other day and he still likes to speak in catchphrases. Things happened, and other things didn’t happen, as is always the way, and this is how they did or did not come about, how circumstances gathered together like a fish and another fish and another, until there is a school of fish, a silver cloud of uncountable mackerel drawing in all other gleaming bodies. And the black shadows of ships cape overhead as we flicker below, our mouths widening in the dark and we dart in a different direction forever. And the part of me I know is changed by the parts of me that I did not know. But what do you want? What do you expect? Others were changed by themselves, also, and together we changed each other. Not always pleasantly.

THE GIRL IS A GOOD LOOKING

girl, she has sleek blonde hair and a snub nose, large lake-water eyes. Her dark jeans are cut very low and tight, and she wears a grey off-the-shoulder sweater over her flat French film-star breasts, and red or green or dull white slippers. Bare ankles, of course. Whether she wears any jewelry or not, a piercing in the nose, the lip, the ears, the navel, I never know, because I never cross the dusty summer pavement and speak to her, and she never crosses the cold spring road and talks to me. But we smoke cigarettes together, Player’s, Kools, and sit in the early morning or evening, or late at night, summer or snow falling or rain or a warm breeze, me on this side of the street on my wooden stairs, her on that side of the road on her concrete steps. I don't know anything about her, though, nothing else. She might be royalty, maybe, maybe a queen.