She never mentioned Zenia: to dwell on her might be to invoke her. But when Zenia died, when she was blown up and safely encapsulated and planted under a mulberry tree, Tony no longer needed to fear the doorbell. Zenia was no longer’ a menace, not in the flesh. She was a footnote. She was history.
Now Zenia is back, and hungry for blood. Not for West’s blood: West is an instrument merely. The blood Zenia wants to drink is Tony’s, because she hates Tony and always has. Tony could see that hatred in her eyes today, at the Toxique. There’s no rational explanation for such hatred, but it doesn’t surprise Tony. She seems to have been familiar with it for a long time. It’s the rage of her unborn twin.
Or so thinks Tony, removing the vestiges of Otto the Red’s fallen army with her tweezers, installing the Saracens in their freshly captured territory. The flag of Islam flies above the corpse-strewn Italian beaches, while Otto himself escapes by sea. His defeat will inspire the Slavic Wends to make another looting and pillaging foray into Germany; it will motivate uprisings, rebellions, a return to the old cannibal gods. Brutality, counter-brutality, chaos. Otto is losing his grip.
How could he have won this battle? Hard to say. By avoiding recklessness? By drawing the enemy out first to estimate its strength? Strength and cunning are both essential, but each without the other is valueless.
Tony herself, lacking strength, will have to rely on cunning. In order to defeat Zenia she will have to become Zenia, at least enough to anticipate her next move. It would help if she knew what Zenia wanted.
Tony turns out the cellar lights and climbs the stairs to the kitchen, where she runs herself a glass of water out of the spring-water dispenser foisted on her by Charis. (As full of chemicals as anything else, she knows; but at least there’s no chlorine. Eau de Swimming Pool, is what Roz calls the Toronto tap water.) Then she unlocks the back door and creeps out into the yard, into its flora of dry thistles and tree trunks and unpruned shrubs, its fauna of mice. Raccoons are regulars; squirrels make untidy nests in the branches. Once they had a skunk back here, hunting for grubs, rolling up what vestiges of turf remain; once a chipmunk, miraculous survivor of the neighbourhood gamut of cats.
It refreshes Tony to sneak around at night, from time to time. She enjoys being awake when others are asleep. She enjoys occupying dark space. Maybe she will see things other people can’t see, witness nocturnal events, gain rare insights. She used to think that as a child, too—tiptoeing through the house, listening at doors. It didn’t work then, either.
From this vantage point she has a novel view of her own house: the view of a lurking enemy commando. She thinks about how the house would look if she or anyone else were to blow it up. Study, bedroom, kitchen, and hall, suspended in fiery mid-air. Her house is no protection for her, really. Houses are too fragile.
The kitchen lights go on, the back door opens. It’s West, a gangling silhouette, backlighted, his face indistinct. “Tony?” he calls anxiously. “Are you out there?”
Tony savours his anxiety, just a little. True, she adores him, but there’s no such thing as an unmixed motive. She waits for a moment, listening, in her moonlit weedy garden, blending—possibly—with the dappled silvery shadows cast by the trees. Is she invisible? The legs of West’s pyjamas are too short, and so are the arms; they lend him an untended air, like that of a Frankenstein monster. Yet who could have tended him—over the years, and apart from finding some pyjamas that would fit—better than Tony? If she had done it unwillingly she might deserve to feel aggrieved. Is that how grievance works? I’ve given you the best years of my life! But for a gift you don’t expect a return. And who would she have given them to otherwise; those years?
“I’m here,” she says, and he comes outside and down the back porch steps. He has his slippers on, she’s relieved to see, although not his dressing gown.
“You were gone,” he says, stooping down towards her, peering. “I couldn’t sleep:”
“Neither could I,” she says. “So I did some work, and then I came out for a breath of fresh air.”
“I don’t think you should wander around outside at night,” he says. “It’s not safe.”
“This isn’t wandering,” she says, amused. “It’s our backyard:”
“Well, there might be muggers,” he says.
She takes his arm. Under the thin cloth, under the flesh, within the arm itself, she can feel another arm forming: the arm of an old man. His eyes shine milky white in the moonlight. Blue eyes, she’s read, are not the basic colour of human eyes; probably they grew from a mutation, and are therefore more prone to cataracts. She has a quick vision of West, ten years older and stone blind, herself leading him tenderly by the hand. Training the seeing-eye dog, arranging the library of books-on-tape, the collection of electronic noises. What would he do without her?
“Come inside,” she says. “You’ll catch cold:”
“Is anything wrong?” he says.
“Not a thing,” she lies pleasantly. “I’ll make us some hot milk.”
“Good,” he says. “We can put some rum in it. Look at that moon! There’s been men playing golf, up there.”
He is so ordinary, so cherished, so familiar to her; like the smell of the skin on her own forearm, like the taste of her fingers. She would like to hang a sign on him, like the metal ones for liquor bottles or the plasticized ones at conventions: Gnissapsert On. She hugs, him, standing on tiptoe, stretching her arms as far around him as they can go. They don’t reach all the way.
How long can she protect him? How long before Zenia descends on them, with her bared incisors and outstretched talons and banshee hair, demanding what is rightfully hers?
Weasel Nights
XXVIII
Charis follows Zenia and the man who is not Billy along Queen Street, at a distance, dodging around her fellow pedestrians and occasionally bumping into them. She bumps into them because she feels that if she takes her eyes off Zenia, even for an instant, Zenia will vanish—not like a popped soap bubble, but like someone out of a TV kids’ cartoon, turning into a bunch of dots and dashes and beaming herself off to some other locale. If you knew enough about matter you could walk through walls, and maybe Zenia does know enough; although any such knowledge must have been acquired by her in a sinister way. Something involving chicken blood, and the eating of still-alive animals. The collection of other people’s toenails, pins driven in. Pain for someone.
Zenia must feel the stun-ray intensity of Charis’s gaze burning into the small of her back, because at one point she turns around and looks, and Charis darts behind a lamppost, almost braining herself in the process. When she recovers from the bright red sensation in her head (It’s not a hurt, it’s a colour) and dares to peek, Zenia and the man have stopped and are talking:
Charis wends her way a little closer, leaving a trail of hostile glances and muttered comments on the sidewalk behind her and smiling weakly at those who, with frayed cuffs and hands held out and the swollen, sunken faces of those who eat too much refined sugar, ask her for the price of a meal. Charis doesn’t have any small change, having left it as a tip at Kafay Nwar; she doesn’t have very much money, period, although more than she thought she’d have after lunch, because it was Roz who figured out the bill and her accounting procedures always end up with Charis paying less, she suspects, than she ought to. Anyway, Charis doesn’t believe in giving money to panhandlers, being of the opinion that money, like candy, is bad for people. But she would give them some of her home-grown carrots, if she could.