The sidewalk is crowded with lunchtime shoppers; they avoid bumping into one another without seeming to look, as if they’re covered with cat whiskers. Tony weaves in and out, past the vegetable stores with their star fruit and lichees and long crinkly cabbages set out on stands at the front, the butchers with their glazed reddish ducks dangling in the windows, the linen shops with their cutwork tablecloths, their silk kimonos with good-luck dragons embroidered on the backs. Among Chinese people she feels the right height, although she is not unaware of how she might be viewed by some of them .. A hairy white foreign devil; though she is not very hairy, as such things go, or very devilish either. Foreign, yes. Foreign here.
It’s nearly time for her to get her hair cut, at Liliane’s, two blocks up and around the corner. They make a fuss of her there: they admire, or pretend to admire, her small feet, her tiny molepaw hands, her flat bum, her heart-shaped mouth, so out of date among the pouty bee-stung lips of the fashion magazines. They tell her she is almost Chinese.
Only almost, though. Almost is what she has always felt; approximate. Zenia has never been almost, even at her most fraudulent. Her fakery was deeply assumed, and even her most superficial disguises were total.
Tony walks and walks, up Spadina, past the old Victory Burlesque—which victory, whose victory, she wonders—now stuck with posters advertising films in Chinese, past Grossman’s Tavern and across College Street, where the Scott Mission offers Christian soup, to more and more people with less and less money. She can walk all the way home, she has no classes today. She needs to regroup her forces, she needs to ponder, she needs to plan her strategy. Though how much strategy can you plan with so little to go on? For instance, why has Zenia chosen to resurrect herself. Why did she go to the trouble of blowing herself up in the first place? For her own reasons, perhaps; nothing to do with the three of them. Or with the two of them, with her and West. Still, it’s bad luck that Zenia spotted her in the Toxique.
Maybe Zenia has forgotten all about West by now. He’s small game, pleads Tony silently. A tiny fish. Why bother? But Zenia likes hunting. She likes hunting anything. She relishes it.
Imagine your enemy, say the experts. Put yourself in his place: Pretend you are him. Learn to predict him. Unfortunately, Zenia is a bugger to predict: It’s all in the old children’s game—scissors, paper, stone. Scissors cut paper, but break on stone. The trick is to know what your opponent is concealing, what fist or nasty surprise or secret weapon he’s hiding behind his back. Or hers.
The sun declines and Tony walks along her own quiet street, scuffing through the fallen leaves of the maple and chestnut trees, back to her own house. Her stronghold. In the waning light the house is no longer thick, solid, incontrovertible. Instead it looks provisional, as if it’s about to be sold, or to set sail. It flickers a little, sways on its moorings. Before unlocking the door Tony runs her hand over the brickwork, reassuring herself that it exists.
West hears her come in, and calls down to her. Tony checks her face in the hall mirror, settling it into what she hopes is her normal expression.
“Listen to this,” says West, when she’s climbed the thirdfloor stairs.
Tony listens: it’s another noise, much the same—as far as she can tell—as yesterday’s. Courting male penguins bring rocks, held between their rubber-boot feet; West brings noises. “That’s wonderful,” she says. It’s one of her more minor lies.
West smiles, which means he knows she can’t hear what he hears but likes her for not saying so. She smiles back, scanning his face anxiously. She cheeks each wrinkle; each lift and inflection. All is as usual, from what she can tell.
Neither of them feels like cooking, so West goes around the corner for Japanese take-out—barbecued eel, yellowtail, and salmon sushi—and they eat it sitting on cushions; in front of the television set in West’s third-floor study, with their shoes off, licking their fingers.
West has the TV in there so he can play videos on it in which sounds are rendered as colours and wavy lines, but they also use it for watching old movies and junky late-night crime series. West usually prefers the movies, but tonight it’s Tony’s turn to choose, and they settle on a rerun of a cop show, high on the offensive-and-tacky scale and punctuated with bursts of gratuitous violence.
Tony’s students would smile if they caught her doing this; they’re under the illusion that their elders and teachers can’t possibly be as frivolous and lazy-minded as they are themselves: Tony watches as a woman brushes her freshly washed hair, and as another extols a new sanitary napkin, curved to catch the drips. She continues to watch as, for the hundredth, for the thousandth time, one man prepares to kill another.
Such men always have something appropriate to say before throwing the knife or breaking the neck or pulling the trigger. This may be just a screen phenomenon, a fantasy of scriptwriters; or maybe men really do say such things, under such circumstances. How would Tony know? Is there an urge to warn, to gloat, to intimidate the foe, to boost oneself into action? Dieu et mon droit. Noli me impune lacessit. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Don’t mess with me. Challenges, battle cries, epitaphs. Bumper stickers.
This man says. “You’re history.”
Tony has compiled a mental list of these televised synonyms for death. You’re toast, you’re fried, you’re wasted, you’re steak, you’re dead meat. It’s odd ‘how many of them have to do with food, as if being reduced to nutrients is the final indignity. But you’re history has long been one of her favourites. It makes such an exact equation between the past—any of the past, all of the past—and a deserved and shoddy oblivion. That’s history, the young announce, with selfrighteous scorn. This is now.
There’s a close-up of the bug-eyed fear on the face of the man who will soon be history if things go the way they’re going, and then the scene shifts to a view of nasal passages, with smile-button medicated orange bubbles percolating through them.
“This is awful,” says West. Tony doesn’t know whether he means the cop show or the cross-sectioned nose. She mutes the sound, and takes up his large hand; holding two of his soysauced fingers: “West,” she says. What is it she would like to convey? You’re so large? No. I don’t own you? No. Please stay?
Mutt and Jeff; he sometimes calls them. Ttum and Ff~j, Tony replies. Cut that out, says West. When they go walking together, they always look as if one of them is on a leash; but which one? A bear and its handler? A poodle and its trainer? “Want a beer?” says West.
“Applejuice,” says Tony, “please,” and West unfolds himself from his cushion and pads down the stairs in his sock feet. Tony sits watching a new car scream around, silently, in the mountainous desert, overlooked by flat-topped buttes. Good ambush country. She has only one decision to make right now: whether or not to tell West. How could she put it? Zenia lives. And then what? What would West do? Run from the house, without his coat, without his shoes? It’s possible. Tall people’s heads are too far from the ground, their centre of gravity is too high. One shock and they topple. As Zenia said once, West is a pushover.
On a hunch, she gets up and tiptoes over to West’s—desk, where he keeps his phone. He has nothing so coherent as a phone pad, but on the back of a discarded sheet of musical notations she finds what she’s afraid o£ Z.—A. Hotel. Ext. 1409.
The Z floats on the page as if scrawled on a wall, as if scratched on a window, as if carved in an arm. Z for Zorro, the masked avenger. Z for Zero Hour. Z for Zap.
It’s as if Zenia has already been here, leaving a taunting signature; but the handwriting is West’s. How sweet, she thinks; he just left it there for anyone to see, he doesn’t even know enough to flush it down the toilet. What is not so sweet is that he hasn’t told her. He is less transparent than she thought, less candid; more perfidious. The enemy is already within the walls.