Pearl

“Pearl” is the last in a series of stories I had published in Glass Buffalo magazine.

This story was inspired by Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1, an unbound novel where the reader can shuffle the pages and read them in any order. As my final creative writing project in the University of Alberta’s English department, I did a similar exercise - sending my classmates and professors 18 pages that they could shuffle and read in any order/amount that they wanted.

The result of our workshopping was “Pearl”, a story assembled from pieces.

Read below, or check out the publication on Issuu (page 46).

Pearl

Mise en abyme
(Edmonton, 2018)

It’s a dry well. Our neighbours dug out a long straight shaft, built a handsome circle of stones around its lip. But they never found water. And now he hides at the bottom on his darkest days - when he falls through a pore on the surface of his own skin. Tries to escape himself.

“Hey.”

I speak softly but my voice is magnified by the geology. Enhanced by the darkness.

“Hey,” he replies.

“What are you doing down here?”

“I couldn’t get it dark enough.”

There is a darkness inside of him. An impossibly dense speck of blackness lodged between the hemispheres of his brain. Incredible force presses in from either side. One day, I know, it will pop open. When this happens it will destroy him - blow off the rich life-giving layers at his surface. Raze him until he’s mirror-smooth and glassy. A desert.

I touch him and he flinches.

“Come on. You’re freezing. We need to get out of here.”

“I like the feeling of sand.” He scoops up a handful, pours it out. Grains hiss like a rainstick as they crash back into the planet. There will be no convincing him. He needs this. But that’s why I’m here: to retrieve him when he gets lost.

“Come here.”

His cold bony fingers find mine. He needs to eat more. When was the last time you ate? Can you remember? What did you do today?

I form an image of him in my mind’s eye and I shrink away from it. I expel all my memories of him, because all my versions are corruptions of his real self. Right now.

I let my fingers explore him. Run down his shoulder. Up his back. The ridges of his spine, his neck. His cold skin heats up for me. I touch him as lightly as I can. The slightest possible connection of our skin.

I can’t stand it. I can’t make that point of contact small enough. It’s too powerful. It rips me open. Crushes my chest. I can’t breathe deep enough. I can’t get enough air into my lungs. I am so overcome by him. His smell. His collarbone.

I wrench at the rope that connected us to the surface. Pull it down, coiling onto us. No way up now. We are here. Together. I peel off my clothes so I can be like him. I fold myself around him.

“Oh,” I say. It’s all I can say. “Oh.”

I shiver and cry that we can’t be closer.

We stay there forever. The bottom of the well. Nothing changes there. Until one shining moment when the sky reminds us that it exists. A dime far above.

The sun spears down at us. Someone has grabbed it from the sky and wrung it out. Juiced it like an orange and poured its nectar down onto us. We evaporate together. Our bones are bleached. Any trace of separation is burned away. We cannot see. We are one.

52-Card Pickup
(Rome, 2010)

My travels have taken me to every corner of Europe, but I’ve become stuck in the eternal city. Nowhere else is like Rome. The original cosmopolis. I mingle with travellers and locals, make friends and enemies and lovers. I imagine myself a fixture of the social scene. Marcello, wandering through a week’s worth of posh parties.

TThis one is particularly fun, hosted by a spoiled degenerate brat I met at a bar called The Yellow on Via Palestro. The rich, handsome scion of a very old family.

“Now,” he proposes, holding up a pack of cards and drawling in the accent that makes the girls and boys swoon, “we have played all the games we can think of. There is no more variety in this pack of cards. But my American friends,” he indicates the couple beside him that he’s probably fucking, “say we have missed one. So you will all meet me on the roof in ten minutes.”

His paparino bought him the penthouse of Rome’s tallest tower, exiled in the outskirts.

Up top we see the city laid out to our east. He wets his finger in his mouth and lifts it into the air.

“There is a wind off the sea,” he says. He wiggles the cards in his hand. “Whoever gathers the most by midnight wins.”

We wait with bated breath as he shuffles, pauses, grins.

“Andate!” he screams, and throws them up, glittering in the sunrise. The wind catches them and they scatter like dandelion seeds, carried out towards the ancient city. The race begins.

I’ve picked up four when I come to The Pantheon, the great domed temple. Hadrian’s enduring monument. As I enter I see a flash of light. A card flutters down through the oculus in the roof. It must have been perched on the edge of this hole, dislodged by a stray gust as soon as I approached. It swirls through the air and lands in the hands of a man. An Adonis. I blush but my prosecco-lubricated tongue manages to slur out the words.

“Ciao, mi dispiace ma questa carta è la mia.”

“Sorry, I don’t speak Italian.” His tired, dark eyes are wells of sadness in his pristine face.

I want to fuck him and hold him and comfort him. I want to hold his hand. Make him smile. Drive him wild.

“Oh sorry. I just said, I need that card.” I point at it. He flips it over. The King of Hearts.

“Why?”

“It’s for this game. I was at this party…” The richer details of his face emerge. Every second that I look at him some new plane of his beauty unfolds. His hair. His jaw. His lips.

“Never mind. It’s not important. Do you want to get some gelato? I know the best place.”

His turn to blush. He looks down. “Oh. Uh, I don’t know. I just got here…”

“Then you need a friend who knows the city! Say yes. You’re in Italy, you’re on an adventure.”

He looks up, smiles. “Okay. Sure. Yes.”

He passes me the card. Our hands touch. The sun comes out from behind a cloud and shines down through the oculus. A perfect circle of light.

The Unfinished
(Florence, 2011)

“Wow. He’s even bigger than I expected.”

I look down from the statue of David, lick my lips lasciviously and wink at him. He rolls his eyes and turns away from the colossal statue.

“Come on, that’s not what I wanted to see.”

“Oh really? Yeah, I guess he must be kind of a let down after having been with me.”

“Ugh you’re so dumb,” he says. But he grins.

He walks me down the gallery, through an aisle lined with blocky statues. Each one is only partially finished - faces and limbs strain to escape from the marble.

“I don’t like these ones at all, they’re terrifying.”

“They’re called The Prisoners,” he says. He looks at all of them, spending at least ten minutes studying each one. As if he can will the figures out of their prisons after hundreds of years, just by looking intently enough.

I get bored very quickly but I don’t want to interrupt what seems to be a quasi-religious experience for him. I mutter a silent prayer of gratitude when an announcement says that the gallery is closing.

“Let’s have Mexican food,” I say, and pull him into the restaurant off the cobblestones.

We’re instantly decked out with sombreros and maracas. Calaveras hang from the walls. Halfway through my tostada I notice that he’s staring at me.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he says. He leans forward and wipes some guacamole off my chin.

“Oh thanks.”

“It’s just, Mexican food in Florence. That’s crazy.”

“It’s really good! Don’t you think?”

“Yeah, I love it. I would never have come here,” he says. “But I’m glad you made me.”

He hesitates a moment, then stoops down and roots through his bag. He re-emerges with something rectangular bundled in tattered jade silk. He settles his dark eyes on mine.

“What’s that?”

“This is something I’ve never showed to anyone before. This is my favourite book.”

He unwraps the bundle and exposes a thin wooden box. He takes the lid off the box and pulls out a grubby pile of curled pages.

“It’s the autobiography of a young woman travelling through Italy. She has all these bizarre experiences and doesn’t really learn anything from them or become a better person. All this time I’ve been doubling back, skipping forward, reading out of order. I never want to finish this book. It’s not finished, it’s only a manuscript. There’s a beginning and an ending to a story, but mostly it’s all middle. Like life.”

He doesn’t pause. He holds it out to me. I wipe my salsaed hands hastily on my pants.

“Some days, this is the only thing that kept me alive,” he says.

Ink
(Edmonton, 2021)

The manuscript was heavily annotated even when I first saw it. He’d scribbled in the margins for years, dreaming of travel, like his author-mentor - dissolving, depressed but throwing herself into strange situations. Hoping something would stir her heart. Extract her black speck. When the margins were full he wrote between lines. Forced printed words to break apart to accommodate his own thoughts.

Now the pages are black. All black. Saturated with ink. Heavy. Fragrant.

I found him. But not fast enough.

I don’t know what I did this time. I don’t know what it was that finally

I don’t

The bridge. Wait for a windy day. Break the fence. Break the law. Walk out on the tracks high above the valley, the shallow river.

Come do something risky with me do something wrong do something spontaneous. Go to Italy and eat Mexican food. Call in sick and go skating. Fight and smash things and get little pieces of glass in your back when we fuck to make up and spend two hours watching Indiana Jones and picking them out with tweezers.

I hold the black pages high above my head.

I’m sorry. I couldn’t

save you

my fault

I throw them over the edge. The wind catches them, those fat dense sheets of paper. A thousand books written on top of each other. Pouring out his soul, trying to hold it off.

They spiral into the river and release their ink into its water.

For the next week it’s on the news. How could the river be black for a week?

Pearl

There’s a black speck inside of him. Deep at his core. It’s tiny, but it’s heavier than the whole planet. It’s hidden under layer after layer of perfection - smiles and jokes and joys, kisses and compliments, kind acts, hot nights, bright laughs tinged with desperation.

The black speck waits, underneath all his happiness. He can be fine for months, and then it twists a micrometer and he’s lost for weeks. It’s a dirty secret. It’s a slow poison. It’s cruel and it’s vicious and he’ll never let you see it. But it’s down there, at the root of all his misery.

“It’s only a cultured pearl,” I say as I’m on one knee. “It’s not a real pearl.”

“I love it,” he says with a smile.

“I love you,” he says through tears.

“Yes,” he adds as an afterthought.

He is perfect. It scares me sometimes. Sometimes I suspect that he isn’t real, because he is so perfect. Sometimes I imagine that he’s an automaton, designed specifically to please my tastes and satisfy my needs - no matter how undeserving I am. It could be a conspiracy.

But I know that this is not true. I’ve seen him bleed.

“Oh god! What have you done to yourself? I’m calling an ambulance.”
“No, no, I’m okay, don’t, I don’t want to go there, I’ll be fine.”

His only flaw is that he is in love with me. He’s always been attracted to little tornados of chaos. Things that tear apart perfection. Things that rip holes in flawlessness. Disintegration, fracture, and decay. Treacherous images that imitate his flawlessness, but are only façades. Strip away their veneers and they’re nothing but little misshapen lumps of clay. Never what they seem.

“THEN MAYBE YOU SHOULD JUST GO!” he screams, slamming the bathroom door.
“Maybe I will! I can’t live like this. It’s suffocating. You’re too perfect. You’re too good to me. I’m always gonna be the asshole. I’m never going to remember your birthday, or how you take your coffee. I’m always going to be selfish, and distant, and fickle. And you’re just going to keep giving me second chances. And one day it’s going to kill you.”

I know what I am now.

I’m the little piece of silt. The black speck that gets lodged inside of him. Activating his defence mechanism. Autoimmune response. The more inconsistent, rude, unthinking I am, the more perfect he becomes. The harder he tries. The guiltier I feel.

“Good morning,” he kisses me.
“Sorry, my mouth must be gross… listen, about last night.”
“Don’t worry about it. You were right. It was my fault. I’m sorry. Have some pancakes.”

He built up this beautiful gem around a foreign body. Irritant. He isolated it, imprisoned it in layer after layer, behind lock after lock.

But it’s still in there. Deep down.