Imperfections Read online

  Copyright © 2012 Bradley Somer

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior permission of the publisher or, in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from Access Copyright, the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, www.accesscopyright.ca, [email protected].

  Nightwood Editions

  P.O. Box 1779

  Gibsons, BC V0N 1V0

  Canada

  www.nightwoodeditions.com

  Author photo: Nenad Maksimovic

  Cover photo: Etienne Girardet/fStop/Getty Images

  Cover design: Jonathan Taylor, PTI Graphic Design

  print ISBN: 978-0-88971-271-3

  ebook ISBN: 978-0-88971-275-1

  Version: 1.0

  Nightwood Editions acknowledges financial support from the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Canada Council for the Arts, and from the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council and the Book Publisher’s Tax Credit.

  for Mrs. Buckingham

  CHAPTER 1

  Russell, Bob and Derrick

  Everyone has heard that old joke at one time or another. We’ve all heard the one about the guy with no arms and no legs in a bush. His name is Russell. It’s really not that funny.

  There are several jokes like this, all of them made by people with four limbs, I am sure. They have basically become chicken-crossing-the-road jokes. There is Bob, the guy with no arms and no legs in the water. There is Derrick, the guy with no arms and no legs in the middle of an oil field. I know there are many others.

  Here is one maybe you haven’t heard. What do you call a guy with no arms and no legs locked in the trunk of a car?

  The answer: Richard Trench.

  Doesn’t make much sense. This joke is more specific to my story. Richard Trench is my name and here I am, reduced to a torso and sandwiched between a spare tire and a gallon of oil glugging around in a red plastic container. Underneath my cheek, leaving an unattractive impression like some chronic skin disease, is a low-grade nylon carpet.

  It’s the kind of carpet they put in every trunk. The kind that is cut and installed under fluorescent lights in a factory by some guy with large, greasy hands and a bored look on his face. This carpet is black and stinks like gasoline. There is a musty undertone, probably from some variety of mould that grows in the damp, dark nylon and feeds on spilled petrochemicals.

  A blanket covers my body. It’s the type of blanket that’s kept in the trunk for emergencies, like when you come across an accident or get stranded on a winter road and need to survive the night, or when you have to transport a torso. It’s not the kind of blanket you would sleep under on a soft bed or even cover your legs with while reading a book in an easy chair. This is a blanket that smells like trunk and is now clotted with blood. Good thing it is the type of blanket you can just throw away.

  There is also a shovel, one that bounces against the back of my head whenever we hit a bump. I have been abused to the point where I don’t care. I have been sedated to the point where nothing hurts.

  I guess what I am saying is things could be worse.

  I saw these things in the trunk when they loaded me in. The last thing I saw was a worm’s-eye view of two leering faces shadowed by the backlight of a streetlamp and the stars in the night sky. The streetlamp cast a halo around their heads and the stars were nearly blotted out.

  “That’s it, then?” one of them asked, not looking at the other, eyes fixed on the trunk.

  “I suppose,” the other replied. “I kind of expected more, really.”

  The first let a hiss escape.

  I guessed it was a laugh.

  “What did you expect, that he’d be filled with gold or something?”

  “I don’t know. Either that or chocolate.”

  Then one of them lifted his arm, rested it on the trunk for a second before closing it. I tried to say something but my mouth was dry and my vocal chords were crusted. I felt like I had swallowed glue. There was a creak from the rusty hinges and the slam and click of the latch catching.

  I am in the trunk of an ’82 Monte Carlo. Maroon. Big eight under the hood with pistons slamming and dirty oil flowing. The kind of engine they don’t make anymore. There is the sharp tang of burning antifreeze from the tailpipe, which rattles in its brackets as we power over bumps in a gravel road. There are rust holes above the rear wheel wells and it’s bubbling like leprosy underneath the paint.

  This is all I can remember. This is what I saw as they took me out of the house on the blanket and carried me like a stretcher down the lawn. It was in the suburbs somewhere. My addled mind reeled with the familiarity of it. The smell of grass in the cool night air. The black and white leaves flicking on and off as they reflected streetlights. Above my head and below the stars, a gentle breeze blew. A dog barked in the distance and, through the bay window across the street, the back of someone’s head was framed by the blue glow of a television set.

  Had my mother known I would have ended up this way, if she could have seen into the future, her son without the arms and legs she had birthed him with, without the perfect ten fingers and ten toes that every mother counts when she first sees their baby… if she could have seen her son locked in the trunk of a car, she might have named him Jack. That would have been more in keeping with the joke than Richard Trench; it would have made more sense. Mind you, nothing is making too much sense at the moment. It really hasn’t for a while.

  The shovel hits me in the back of the head and I try to think of the instant that led me down this path. There had to be one split second where the road forked, where everything turned ninety degrees. In hindsight there is always something you can pick up on, that moment when one reality splits from the next and leads to the point when you look back and think: if I had seen it then…if only I had seen it, I could have done something differently.

  Now, in the stink of the trunk, I think I’ve figured it out: that specific moment.

  It started under the fluorescent lights, while standing on the polished white linoleum tiles in the menswear section of a department store. The store was peppered with mannequins wearing suits and others wearing sweater vests. A muzak version of ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!” played quietly from speakers hidden somewhere in the rows of clothing.

  “Hey.” Someone was trying to get my attention.

  I don’t know how many times it had been said, how long this person was trying to get me to notice, so I apologized.

  “Sorry, hi.”

  “Ain’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  That was it, that second, the moment that led to the trunk. Nothing after that could have changed the outcome. These were the last words before everything went wrong. They seem normal enough really. In my line of work I had heard them so many times I didn’t think they would be the point where the world started tilting awkwardly to one side, never to right itself again.

  “What’s that?” I have learned to feign distraction, it prolongs the moment that, admittedly, brings me some joy. I had been noticed; someone recognized me.

  “You look familiar.”

  I never even considered that those moments would be the bridge from my old life to this one, this new life with four bleeding stumps, lying on a low-grade nylon rug with the typical denizens of a trunk as my only companions: a gallon of oil, a spare tire, a blanket and a shovel.

  Oh, there is also the stink of exhaust and gasoline from a rarely tuned engine. I can only imagine the freedom of the clear night breeze passing a short distance away, on the other side of the thin metal trunk, a breeze that sweeps across the car and swirls, invisible in the darkness of ou
r wake, a darkness not quite as complete or oppressive as that of the trunk.

  I think we are out of the city now, out of the suburbs. There was some stop and go for a while but now the engine has been running at the same pitch for some time. Outside, I imagine the moon and stars as the only things to light our way as we tear across the empty terrain. Perhaps a coyote watches us pass from a distance, its eyes two spots of light floating in the dark, before it skitters off into the scablands.

  It strikes me that I don’t know where my limbs are. They aren’t in the trunk with me.

  Anyway:

  “Ain’t I seen you somewhere before?”

  “What’s that?”

  “You look familiar.”

  “I’ve done some modelling.” Smile and wait for the eyebrows to rise in response.

  “No kiddin’.” A pause. A head cocked to one side in examination. “Yer the tank-top guy, right? The one on the boat.”

  This is a reference to one shoot I did for Jungo undergarments. That promotion was everywhere. I saw myself on the sides of buses, the backs of newspapers, the billboards near the airport, and even those little advertising slips that fall out from between glossy magazine pages.

  The Jungo shoot was about eleven years ago. Those were prime days. The idea for the shoot was that there was this sexy and insanely beautiful guy on a boat (that was me) and he was wearing loose pyjama pants and a white tank top while pulling on a rope to tighten a sail. The boat actually sat on a trailer in the middle of a parking lot. The shot was angled skyward so none of the background, the rusted VW, the graffiti on the building at the end of the lot, the homeless guy sleeping in a puddle of piss near the dumpster, none of that was visible.

  The sun was a bank of bright white lights run by a noisy generator. The wind tossing my hair came from a giant fan, towed behind a pickup truck and powered by the same noisy generator. The water droplets on my arms and face were a sticky glycerine solution. The world was in colour but the picture was black and white. It was all completely fabricated and it was the best world to work in.

  “That’s me, all right. That was a while ago though.”

  “Yeah, I remember that. Musta been early nineties.”

  The Jungo shoot was in the mid-nineties, actually. 1994. Grunge was in full swing. Pearl Jam validated plaid jackets and workboots as a statement of individualism that everyone was wearing. Pulp Fiction reacquainted us with the genius of John Travolta and, at the time, we were all still blind to the fact that genius is actually all about being in the right place at the right moment. It was the year of the Lorena Bobbitt trial. That year the world learned an important thing: a severed penis could be reattached and still function. That year, Dow Corning was served a class action lawsuit that would eventually be backed by half a million women unhappy with their breast implants. Actually, they weren’t just unhappy: their tits were poisoning them.

  There was a pause in the conversation.

  “You see that mannequin?” I pointed across the menswear floor to a wool trench coat supported perfectly by the slender shoulders of the plastic torso. “That one over there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s me.”

  Wait for it.

  “Really?” Comparing eyes flit from plastic to flesh. “The face ain’t yours.”

  “It’s my face.”

  “I don’t know. It don’t really look like you.”

  “It is my face,” I say. “It’s just… stylized. You know? They made the nose sharper.”

  That mannequin had been cast twelve years ago—I was eighteen. If you have ever shopped that big department store, the one that has Seniors’ Day the first Tuesday of every month, you have seen me, too. Sure I have put on a few pounds, fleshed out since they cast that, and my smooth, alabaster belly wouldn’t work as well as a washboard now.

  It is amazing how easily the body can be compartmentalized. Without even thinking, the eye will deconstruct a face or a body, notice little imperfections in an isolated feature and ignore the whole. It takes the subconscious mind mere seconds to do it. Some believe it is inherent, in our genes. Some say we are looking for physical perfection, good breeding stock.

  There is always something wrong.

  I think he’s hot, but his lips are too thin. I think she’s hot but her eyes are too close together, too far apart, different colours, and on and on. I do it myself. Like a mechanic, I can tear down a face or a body and rebuild it, noting everything that needs tweaking or tuning. I am probably more astute than most with such things—being in the business, I look for works of art.

  Down the aisle, a clerk is undressing mannequin-me. She has taken off the wool coat. The mannequin-me stands on a display so, to remove the more personal articles, she is forced to mount a chair. She looks me in the eyes. Her hands glide deftly over my smooth, plastic skin as she removes a smart sweater vest. She runs an open palm down my chest and across my abdomen and she shifts her position slightly, rubbing her knees together once, one past the other.

  The clerk climbs down from her perch. Her eyes level with the mannequin-me’s beltline, she reaches out and pauses. Her cherry red fingernails grasp the fabric on either side of the button. Her tongue breaches her bubble gum lips, a fleshy petal tilting toward the sun. It slides to the corner of her mouth leaving those lips glistening, slick and seductively puckered. She smiles before drawing her hands together, the button slipping out of the buttonhole. The clerk looks up the length of mannequin-me’s body. She pinches the zipper and pulls the tab slowly and the pants loosen from mannequin-me’s hips.

  “Yer nipples that pointy?”

  “No. That’s stylized too. My nipples are normal.”

  “Oh.”

  You have seen me naked. If you have been around when they were changing the mannequins then you have seen me naked. They took a few liberties with the nose, the nipples and the face. Still, that moulded plastic body has caused many a blush on Seniors’ Tuesday.

  “So, what you been doing lately?”

  That hurts. It prompts the words “nothing” and “looking for work.”

  Lately, I have this feeling of panic.

  “Things are still moving along nicely. I’ve decided to do less modelling and take more of a management role. You can’t stay beautiful forever, right?”

  Lately, I have this tightness in my chest. Makes it hard to breathe.

  It’s like I’m trapped in a car that has driven off a bridge and into a lake and the water is slowly leaking in through the cracked windshield. This is okay because there is still lots of air for the moment but the problem is that there is someone else in the car, some big fucker with strong hands around my neck choking the living shit out of me so I can’t even enjoy the last, sweet bit of air before the car fills up. I can just feel the water pressing against my skin. I have been trying to get back the five years that saw my career shrivel.

  Modelling is a cruel thing. You have passed your prime before you hit thirty. At a time when other people’s careers are just blossoming, yours wilts. Your friends, the ones who went the doctor/lawyer/accountant route, have just been promoted. They are married. They have a kid or two. They have just bought a house and a new car. They have retirement savings. They have a dental plan and an expense account. They get paid vacations and flex days.

  There are many things that older models wind up doing. We see them every day. Me, however, I would rather be homeless than get a paycheque pointing at green screens for a weather channel or telling people that I lost twenty pounds of unwanted fat on some diet. I would rather die than peddle an orthopaedic shoe or do a commercial spot for all those starving kids in Third World countries. Who has the time to save the whales and polar bears? I have been planning a comeback. I have been working hard toward it. I have a plan and I was about to get it underway.

  It worked for John Travolta.

  The essence of genius is being in the right place at the right moment.

  My agent called me “quixotic.”
r />   I have no clue what that means.

  “So, what you been doing lately?”

  “Things are still moving along nicely. I have decided to do less modelling and take more of a management role. You can’t stay beautiful forever, right?”

  “No… you can’t stay beautiful forever. It ain’t like there’s a fountain of youth or nothing to make you immortal.” A chuckle. “Right?”

  There was something sick in the laugh, something desperate. The words were spoken too quickly, as if trying to convince me of something that wasn’t true. This should have been a clue.

  “True.” I smiled uncertainly.

  “The body of work you left behind’s admirable, though. In itself it kinda preserves an immortal youth, right? Kinda like a time capsule.”

  This should have been a clue.

  “Oh, you know my work.”

  Vanity blinds.

  CHAPTER 2

  Every Tree is Known by Its Fruits

  Memories are an unreliable fiction. Different people remember the same things in different ways. Even so, memories construct a core truth for a person no matter how unreliable they are. I remember my birth. Well, I am not sure I really remember it or I have just imagined it so vividly and repeatedly that it became a memory for me.

  I remember my mother being beautiful.

  Psychologists also say that our response to beauty is something crawling around our subconscious mind, a little goblin working behind the scenes. They say that in the first ten minutes of life, babies can follow the outline of a face and after a few days they can recognize their mother. They say that babies react more favourably, form a stronger bond with people who portray health, people who have symmetrical faces, and all of the other things that form beauty.

  My mother was definitely beautiful.