In the Skin of a Lion - Michael Ondaatje [27]
He positions Clara on the bed and tells her not to move. Then he takes off into the room – at first using his hands for security then ignoring them, just throwing his body within an inch of the window swooping his head down parallel to shelves while he rushes across the room in straight lines, in curves, as if he has the mechanism of a bat in his human blood. He leaps across the bed delighted at her shriek. He is magnificent. He is perfect, she thinks.
He mutters to her as he moves – “Watch this tray” – as he flings it up and catches it. “And this eggshell on the floor which I’ll crush like the bones of Stump Jones. You are so beautiful, Clara, I’ll never go blind. I want to go to sleep gazing at your face each night. I couldn’t be satisfied with just touching you, smelling you.” He throws an apple into her lap, rips the date off the calendar. “I practised some nights when you were asleep.” He leans forward and bites the apple, chewing and talking.
She refuses all this and moves off the bed, positioning herself on the northeast corner of the rug. She puts her palms against her ears to stop hearing his endearments and stands there with her elbows sticking out. He is moving, almost frantic, now yelling his love. She can still hear him, and presses her palms tighter against the sides of her head, and closes her eyes. She feels the floor shudder under her, feels she is surrounded, contained by his whirling. Suddenly she is hit hard and her left hand jars against her skull, knocking her over.
She gets to her knees, dazed, and looks around. Patrick is grabbing a part of the sheet towards his face. He is snuffling, blood begins to come out of his nose onto the sheet. The blindfold is around his neck like a collar. He looks up at her and, as if he can’t see her, turns back to the sheet as he continues to bleed.
– You moved. I told you not to. You moved.
She still cannot stand up from the pain and the dizziness. She knows if she tries to stand she will fall over again. So she sits where she is. Patrick is bent over watching the sheet in his hands.
So much for the human element, he thinks.
All his life Patrick Lewis has lived beside novels and their clear stories. Authors accompanying their heroes clarified motives. World events raised characters from destitution. The books would conclude with all wills rectified and all romances solvent. Even the spurned lover accepted the fact that the conflict had ended.
After Clara leaves him, Patrick cleans his room on Queen Street obsessively. Soap crystals fizz in a pail, the mop slices the week’s dust. Then he sits in the only dry corner where he has previously placed cigarettes and smokes the Roxy, dropping ash into the bucket beside him. The room smells like a clean butchershop. The furniture – a table, a chair, and an iguana cage – is piled on the bed at the street end of the room.
Sometimes he leaves a book in this corner. He has already smelled the pages, touched the print’s indentations. Now he can devour it like a loaf of bread with his bare hands. He wipes cigarette ash off his arm and opens Wild Geese. “It was not openly spoken of, but he family was waiting for Caleb Gare. Even Lind Archer, the new school teacher, who had come late that afternoon all the way from Yellow Post with the Indian mail carrier and must therefore be hungry, was waiting.” Clara wiping his forehead with her handkerchief. “The rocker seemed to say, ‘Caleb! Caleb! Caleb!’ It amused the Teacher, rather wanly.” Her ear listening to the skin that covered Patrick’s heart.
He feeds the iguana, holding the vetch an inch from the neutral mouth. Only the eyelid sliding down changes its expression. An animal born of another planet. He strokes the jaw with the flower. Through the window he sees men appear in the blue Toronto sky, inching into the air, scaffolding it. Pieces of Clara float around him.
A kiss at Union Station, her mouth half-open.
– I’m sorry to ask you but I can’t take it across the country, will you keep him?
– What is this, a door prize?
– Don