Yes.
Please have a seat.
I sit. Reader’s Digest has an article about introverts. They are being interviewed and forced to tell their secrets. This will be good for them. I feel a longing to be an introvert. To have an extrovert draw me out. Where is my extrovert.
Dr. Overli-Domes appears bald and white-clad from behind a closed door.
Audrey Flowers!
I stand up.
Sweet Jesus in the garden you’re all grown-up.
I try to make myself seem smaller.
Come.
I follow him to the orange chair. Ah, the old orange chair. The examination room is the same except now there’s a TV embedded in the ceiling, showing cartoons. Just watch and relax, he says and disappears.
Charlie Brown’s Christmas. I yawn.
I sit up. He’d better not be leaving the room so he can turn on the X-ray machine. Dentists do this. Leave the room and X-ray you. Just let me rest this piece of equipment against your cheek—I’ll be right back.
No, no X-rays. He is just getting my file from Ingrid.
So what, he says. You only come round here once every blue Christmas.
I’ve been away.
Yes. You and everyone and his brother.
I explain that I had a fall and my teeth are now impacted.
Fall from a horse, he says, still looking at my file.
No.
It was a horse last time.
Yes. But not a fall.
I have written here: Kicked in the face by an equine.
He looks in my mouth. Gasps. Hand to chest. Oh yes, the Swiss bridge. I’d forgotten the Swiss bridge. What a thing of beauty. Your dad paid a pretty penny for that piece of hardware, as I recall.
He snaps on his gloves.
I look up into his glasses. The amazing thing about sitting in a dentist’s chair, if you are not distracted by the cartoons in the ceiling, is that you have a singular opportunity to look deep into someone’s eyes for a long, long time, without them being able to stop you. Their eyes are almost, but not quite, meeting yours. Their eyes are meeting your mouth. They are so absorbed by the Swiss bridge. They are so in love with the Swiss. They don’t notice you noticing.
Impacted where, he says.
Dr. Overli-Domes patched me up when Rambo kicked me. He kept humming that song “All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth” and winking at me. Later my dad thanked him profusely for coming in on a holiday. And Dr. Overli-Domes said, What in God’s name was she doing getting kicked in the face by a horse on Christmas morning.
Dr. Overli-Domes is one of those doctors who is really nice to kids but as a rule dislikes their parents.
My dad hung his head.
He and Uncle Thoby and Verlaine all hung their heads in the waiting room.
I was cleaning out Rambo’s hind hoof, I told him. And I was singing “O Tannenbaum” a little too close to that hind hoof.
Dr. Overli-Domes smiled down at me.
He didn’t mean to kick me, I added.
The temporary bridge felt like a highway overpass. Concrete and huge. He said, Don’t you worry. We’ll order you a nice new one from Switzerland, won’t we Dad.
My dad nodded.
Verlaine perked up. All things Swiss are indeed superior.
Later, when the new bridge was installed, I thought about how weird it was that my teeth had been somewhere I hadn’t. Which led me to start flying the plane in the basement to Zurich.
Now Dr. Overli-Domes says, That a stye.
So he has been sneaking looks at my eyes.
Yeah.
He rolls his chair over to the sink and washes his hands. Antibiotics clear that right up.
I would not say no to some antibiotics, were you to prescribe them.
I’m a dentist. Not an oculist.
So.
That would not be ethical.
Oh.
But I can tell you not to touch it. Leave it alone. Don’t drain it.
I drained it already. I like draining it.
Styes happen when you’re run down, he says. You been run down.
My dad was run down.
He looks over his shoulder.
A chain-link fence holds GOLEM prisoner. In case it tries to sneak away before they can tear it down. It looks blindfolded and beaten. It looks small. New condos gnash beyond the fence. You’re next, they taunt. You’re next. Some of the condos say hotel in sly lower case letters.
Meanwhile the school walls say THUG LIFE, all upper case. Some thugs with difficult lives have scaled the fence with spray paint.
My eye waters.
Judd is burly and beside me. We hold on to the fence and lock our elbows against a wind that would like to make a chain-link impression on our faces. The only colour is the red of Judd’s hair. And his van. And the syncopated hazards.
Hey. Jesus is still stuck like a corkscrew in the roof.
What happened to Catholic. It used to matter so much.
Judd and I share many fond GOLEM memories. We share the boiler room/cafeteria. (He shows me his scar from a pipe.) We share Principal Pouvoir, whose real name turned out to be Dave Power. We share Miss Daken, with her math biographies. We share the song “God Is a Surprise!” (Surprise, surprise! God is a surprise! Right before your eyes! He’s baffling to the wise!)
We share the red parachute.
Oh the red parachute. The red parachute was the best. How it billowed and filled the gym and you could run under it and pretend the red ceiling would last forever. Judd says he once tried to steal it, but was caught red-handed. Ha. He’d had this idea of taking it up to Seagull Hill and unfurling it.
Holy Christ. You’d have been carried out to sea.
I’d still be out there.
I look sideways at him. It’s almost Christmas. Isn’t there somewhere he has to be.
Family’s in Florida, he says.
They left you alone at Christmas.
We don’t celebrate Christmas, he says.
How come.
We’re Jewish.
Since when.
Since always.
But you went to GOLEM.
So did you.
I thought I was the only non-Catholic.
Nope.
But I’m an atheist, I say. I’m a Frenchly submerged atheist.
So am I. A Frenchly submerged Jewish atheist.
Interesting. With a business called Christmatech.
He smiles. That’s right.
The furniture store, which may seem magical to some, is a kind of hell if you hate overhead light. Which Judd really, really hates. Yes, there are rooms within rooms, but the light in each room is the same.
Imagine living in one room that pretends to be many where it is perpetually high noon and people are always coming through the door and you want to have gunfights with them but you are not allowed. Also, you are not allowed to eat on the furniture.
Judd very early developed a love for the dark, for chocolate, for stoplights.
He remembers being in his car seat, eating a Milky Way bar, and loving the green of Go. The red of Stop. The yellow was weak and needed more pixels. He invented, while still in his car seat, a new stoplight that incorporated the whole spectrum. A red light that graded slowly to purple, then to blue, then finally to green. So you knew when green was coming. And a green light that faded to yellow, to deep orange, to red.
Apparently he used to say to whoever was driving, The light is blue. Get ready for green.
He says birds and some reptiles have four kinds of cones in their eyes for seeing colour. We only have three. Which means they can see colours we can’t.
Imagine what a peacock looks like to a peacock.
If he were a superhero and could have one power, that would be it. He would take the extra cone.
Even his hazard lights make him happy.
So do traffic jams at dusk on a highway.
And Christmas lights.
Upstairs in his room abo
ve the store, he works for as long as he can without turning on a light, so that the room fills up blue. That is the only way to invent Christmas lights.
Okay, he does have a single halogen desk lamp. But he keeps it on the floor.
What is it about overhead light. He doesn’t know. But it is soulless. Think of the interior light of a car. Think of noon on a sunny day. Soulless.
I nod. I have to agree.
The light outside GOLEM is white, even though it is dark. A stretched, baseball-stadium kind of light. It makes our faces bright and our eyes dark.
The van that thinks my dad is alive continues to blink the rhythm of its heart.
Judd says he remembers my dad now. He, Judd, had his D-434-model lights plugged into the van’s cigarette lighter outside Canadian Tire. My dad came out of the store with a dancing snowman, the kind that shakes its hips. It was still dancing in the bag.
It is like the van has this gravitational pull for some people.
My dad came over and introduced himself and stared at the lights. He asked if they were LED, and Judd said, Light-emitting diodes are so last year.
Which made my dad smile. Christmatech, he said, reading the van. He bought three strands.
Are you cold, says Judd. Viens ici.
I move my hands in a sideways climb (what Cliff would call a traverse) along the fence until Judd’s right arm closes behind me like a gate. The wind dies down.
Why are we here. Because the school soon won’t be. Because we have a memory that needs feeding.
When I tilt my head back, my ponytail bunches on his shoulder and his cheek touches my cheek. We have cold cheeks. He says into my ear, how is my chin, my forehead, my teeth, my eye. He is so sorry I fell down his stairs.
My dentist prescribed antibiotics.
All I have to do is turn around and a new chapter begins. You know that feeling. When all you have to do is let go and turn around.
I left a tortoise in Oregon, I say.
That can change, can’t it.
Christmas Eve and Uncle Thoby has not called. Other people call and impersonate him. Well, not on purpose. But the Hear Ye 3000 rings in his voice: Are you there. Yes! Do you feel like answering. Of course!
Rush to pick up. And then I am stabbed in the heart when it is not him. It is Murph asking how I like my new door hardware. Really, some people take customer service to an extreme.
I get a shock every time I touch it, I tell him.
Then it’s doing its job.
Right. Well, thanks for asking.
There must be a way to disable this ring.
Verlaine calls with an apology—or with what for her amounts to an apology. She says that since Uncle Thoby has foutre le camp, I should not be alone.
Foutre le camp. I always confuse that with coup de foudre. Foutre le camp is what Cliff did. Coup de foudre is what I feel when I look at Judd’s hair.
Uncle Thoby has not bolted from the campsite, I tell her. He will be back anon. And I’m not camping alone.
I’m wearing my dad’s CRYNOT bracelet and I jingle it, loudly, while Verlaine says she did not mean to upset me when I came over with my Clue scoresheet of suspects in Wedge’s disappearance, but—what is that noise, Audray.
Nothing.
Sounds like bells.
I have an investigation to carry on. I should go.
But it is Christmas Eve.
Yes. Well.
And she reminds me of the Christmases-past tradition whereby she would pick me up on Christmas Day (after the Flowers had opened their stockings and watched and ridiculed the Queen’s address on TV), and we would head over to the Before Building to feed the lab animals and then out to the stable to groom Rambo. And when I got home, if my teeth were intact, I would find Uncle Thoby and my dad asleep on the sofa because I had been such a bundle of energy since six o’clock in the ante meridiem and they were exhausted. Wake up! Wake up!
I cut her off. I don’t want to visit my Christmases past. Not today. Not with her. In fact, I am thinking of not capitalizing Christmas anymore. That is how much it hurts. So can we wait until Boxing Day to do the Before Building.
But Audray.
Gotta go.
And I hang up.
I reread the bracelet. What is Heparin. It says we were supposed to inject my dad’s body with Heparin.
My legs ache. I sit down at the table. They ache from waiting. They ache from wanting to run.
The phone rings again and I assume it’s Verlaine so I don’t answer. But it’s Patience. She leaves a message. I half-expect her to say, I have your mouse. How much are you willing to pay. But no. She says, How is the Grief Bar working out for you.
Oh. I had forgotten the Grief Bar. I head upstairs. It is one of the things I pack and take to the Civil Manor. Where I will be spending Christmas.
I am the only guest. Quelle surprise. Doreen is still watching TV, the same old TV, deeper than it is wide. I check in during A Christmas Carol. The real one. Starring Alistair Sim and Byrne Doyle. When I mention to Doreen the resemblance between Jacob Marley and our local Conservative candidate, she looks over her shoulder and says, Blessed Christ, you’re right.
It is early on in the movie, in the Christmas Past, when Scrooge and Marley are acquiring more than half the shares in Fezziwig’s company and Marley says, Your servant, Mr. Scrooge, and bows his head.
Dead ringer for Byrne Doyle.
What room would you like.
Can I have 205.
Yes, honey.
No. 203.
Her hand moves to the left.
How has Doreen made a go of it all these years. The place looks the same. The orange carpet with the part down the middle. I drag my carry-on bag down the path.
I have tried to call Toff’s number, but I get nothing. Not even a recording. Just dead air, or a siren sound. Now I try again. And again. I flop on the bed. The ceiling still reminds me of his beard.
I imagine them, Toff and Uncle Thoby, in a prolonged fist fight. It began at the airport in Montreal and has now alighted in London. It is the kind of fight that in cartoons is represented by a cyclone with the occasional fist or leg flying out. That is why Toff is not answering his phone. He has lost his phone in the cyclone.
But of course none of this makes sense because Uncle Thoby would not hurt a fly. And Toff would snap like a stick if you pushed him.
Meanwhile Grandmother is playing solitaire in her hospital room, in no real danger.
I fall asleep and have a quick montage of Uncle Thoby with a Drosophila melanogaster bouncing over his shoulder. He turns his head and regards it with fond exasperation. You again.
I wake up to the phone ringing. It’s Doreen. There’s a young man here to see you.
Does he have red hair.
Does he ever.
Kissing on the bed, all that.
Sweaters off.
Judd’s white T-shirt glows in the light of the PIETY sign and the D-634-model lights, which are heaped on the table like a distant Zurich.
His hand on my ponytail. His lips on my cheek. His Christmas gift the red parachute. How did he get it. He went back to GOLEM and cut a hole in the fence. He can be a thug with a life too.
My fingers curl over his collarbone.
I am kissing someone who believes my dad is alive. Only I’m not. Because Judd had to refit Clint’s dispatch office with the new-model lights, a project that took an entire day, and Clint told him. Clint told him my dad is dead, so now there is no one who matters who doesn’t know.
T-shirts off.
He doesn’t ask me why I lied.
Cassiopeia on my shoulder. He maps the constellations. Cassiopeia is shaped like a W. Here, here, here, here, here. He connects the freckles. He will put my shoulders into his star table, he says.
Speak astronomy to me.
Class G2V yellow dwarf.
What’s that.
The sun.
Come hither.
I am hither.
Come
hither closer.
I have a strong sense of déjà vu around you, I tell him.
If you want a feeling of déjà vu to last, you should keep very still.
Really. Is that true.
In the shower Judd notices the Grief Bar. I try to hide it but it slips out of my hands and then, in my attempt to grab it from between his feet, I slip and fall. Actually I don’t fall right away. I flail around. Judd tries to catch me. But I am too slippery. I crash at the bottom of the tub.
I’m humiliated, I say.
Oh no. Judd kneels down.
Don’t read the soap.
Baby, I already know.
Is it weird to love someone for selling your father Christmas lights.
No weirder than loving someone for falling down the stairs and putting a cowboy hat back on, even though she is bleeding from the chin and her eyes are tearing up.
We eat takeout Swiss Chalet. He asks how the investigation is going. I tell him about Humouse House and my dad’s archnemesis, Lionel de Tigrel. I have a few local suspects too. Verlaine thinks I’m off my rocker. She says I have no motive.
A mouse worth two million, Judd says, licking his fingers. And a trip to Stockholm. I think you’ve got motive.
It is so refreshing to hear someone say that!
We drink milk from matching blue cartons.
Cheers.
Did you get your GOLEM file in the mail, I ask.
Yeah.
My IQ was a bit disappointing.
Mine too.
But you’re a Christmas light inventor!
I know. I sure showed them.
Twinkly eyes.
Well, mine was more than a bit disappointing.
That’s because they can’t measure what you are.
I stop chewing. Really. What am I.
I don’t know. But I wish there were more of you out there.
Judd has big arms on the table. And I am allowed to touch them whenever I want. And he is allowed to touch mine. And I am allowed to pull him by those arms back onto the bed.
I call home to see if there’s a message from Uncle Thoby. There isn’t. The power flickers. The wind sings B-flat. Judd says the wind is tugging at the wire on the isthmus.
The what.
The isthmus.
As in have yourself a merry little.
As in the skinny strip of land that connects us to the rest of the island. It is always windy on the isthmus. And all our electricity has to cross it. On one wire.