Eleanor Rigby

“I think it’s nice.”

“Are those the files Liam asked me to pick away at?”

“These?” She’d forgotten about them while she was doing her sweep. “Yes, they are. Nothing too complex, I hope. You must be kind of wooey from the drugs.” She put the files on the dining table.

“Would you like some?”

She was shocked. “What—your drugs?”

“I was just kidding.”

“Oh.” She fished around for something to say, but my condo was almost entirely devoid of conversation fodder. On the TV screen she saw Thumper frozen on PAUSE. “You’re watching Bambi, huh?”

I tried to be chatty. “You know, I’m thirty-six and I’ve never seen it before.”

“It’s so depressing. You know—Mrs. Bambi being shot and all.”

This surprised me. “I didn’t know that.”

“You didn’t know? Everybody knows that Bambi’s mother gets shot. It’s like Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer—part of the culture.”

I considered this. “You mean Rudolph the Useful Reindeer.”

“Huh?”

“Let’s be honest, if Rudolph hadn’t been able to help the other reindeer, they’d have left him to the wolves—and laughed while the fangs punctured his hide.”

“That’s a grim way of looking at it.”

I sighed and stared at the files Donna had brought me.

She changed the subject. She nodded at a Monet print of lilies at Giverny beside the kitchen. “Nice poster.”

“My sister gave it to me.”

“It suits you.”

“It was left over when she redecorated her office.”

Donna blew a fuse. “Liz, why do you have to be so negative? This is a great place. You ought to be happy with it. I live in a dump, and the rent’s half my salary.”

“Can I make you some coffee?”

“No, thanks. I have to head back to the office.”

“You sure?”

“I have to go.”

I saw her to the door and returned to the movie, and realized that knowing about Bambi’s mother didn’t spoil it. So I was happy.

At the end, I checked the year it was made: MCMXLII— 1942. Even Bambi was long dead by now. He’s soil, as are Thumper and Flower. Deer have up to an eighteen-year lifespan; rabbits, twelve; skunks, at most thirteen. And being soil doesn’t sound like such a bad idea really, moist and granular like raspberry oatmeal muffins. Soil is alive—it has to be in order for it to nourish new life. So, in a way, it’s not remotely deathlike. Burial is nice that way.

William, my older brother and possibly my best friend, waited until the evening to check up on me, right after On the Beach. In the truest sense of the word, I was sitting there speechless as the credits rolled and I contemplated an entire radioactive planet populated with decomposed bodies sitting in their offices, kitchens, in cars and on front lawns. When he came in, I don’t even think I said hello—I merely sniffled, but the verklempt mood fled the moment I saw my two essentially evil nephews, Hunter and Chase, run in after him.

“Lizzie, Jesus, your eyes look like two piss holes in the snow. I can’t stay long. I have to fly to London on a red-eye.”

“Hello, William.”

The twins groaned in harmony, “We’re hunnnnnnngry,” followed by Chase saying to his father, making no attempt to masquerade his feelings, “Aunt Lizzie’s place blows. You said we could go to the arcade.”

I said, “Hello, Hunter. Hello, Chase,” who, as usual, ignored me.

William addressed his sons. “Well, if I’d told you we were going to Lizzie’s, then I’d never have gotten you into the car.”

“You lied!”

“I did not, and if—and only if—you behave, I might still take you to your arcade, so shut the crap up and leave us alone.” William then glanced at me: “I’m turning into Father,” he said.

“Turning? You’re already there.”

The twins had invaded the kitchen and spotted the remains. “Any more Jell-O left?”

“No.”

“I hate coming here.”

“Thank you, Chase. Have some pudding.”

“We can’t eat dairy.”

I looked at William. “Since when?”

“It’s from Nancy’s side of the family,” he said.

“Have some crackers, boys. They’re in the second drawer from the top.”

They looked, saw it was only saltines and slammed the drawer shut. “Hunter, let’s watch TV.” Chase was always the leader.

Within moments, they’d colonized my couch and barnacled themselves onto a pro wrestling event. The noise was cheap and booming, but at least it shut them up.

“You didn’t have to come visit, William. I’m fine. It’s just wisdom teeth.”

“Mother said you looked pretty bad. And pretty depressed, too.”

“She did?”

“It smells like an ashtray in here.”

“I smoke sometimes. And Leslie came for a visit.”

“That would explain it. Let’s open those godawful curtains. Where’d you find them—a Greek bingo hall?”

The curtains came with the place. They were mustard yellow, with orange-and-gold brocade, and I suspect the contractor’s wife chose them.

“William, stop. I know how dreary it is, okay?” Was my place really that depressing? On the carpet I saw two small, faint ovals from where I over-cleaned bits of the carpet—a slice of pizza that landed the wrong way, and a Sharpie pen I dropped while wrapping Christmas presents.

“Nancy couldn’t make it. She sends her wishes,” my brother said.

“Send her mine as well.” This was a joke, as William’s wife, Nancy, and I don’t tolerate each other. I told her once at Thanksgiving that she wore too much perfume. Her riposte was that my hair looked like a toupée, and our relationship never recovered. This kind of rift only ever widens.

A squawk came from the couch. Chase had pushed a button on the remote that somehow obliterated the TV’s ability to receive a cable signal, and white noise blared at full volume, setting my remaining teeth on edge. The boys argued over whose fault it was, and then screamed about how to fix it, finally deigning to ask me. I pretended not to know, in hopes it might speed their departure. William manually turned off the TV, and swatted each of the boys on the back of the head. “We’re in someone else’s house, you little jerks.” The boys began to sniffle, but then William said, “Nice try, you little crybabies. Tears may work on your mother, but don’t try that on me, okay?” He turned to me. “Jesus, Lizzie, do you have any Scotch or something?”

“Baileys. From Christmas.”

“Why not?”

Chase asked, “What’s Baileys?”

“Something you’re not getting,” his father replied.

The boys went quiet, too quiet. The room’s air felt warm and bloated, just waiting for a lightning bolt—which I then delivered. I said, “Did your father ever tell you that I once found a dead body?”

Their eyes bulged. “What?” They looked to William for confirmation.

“Yes, she did.”

“Where? When?”

“Lizzie, it was in, what, grade six?”

“Five. I was the same age as you two are now.”

“How?”

William said, “If you two would just shut up, maybe we’ll find out.”

I handed my brother his Baileys. “I was walking on the railway tracks.”

“Where?”

“Out by Horseshoe Bay.”

Hunter asked, “By yourself?”

Chase looked at me and said, “Aunt Lizzie, do you have friends?”

I said, “Yes, thank you, Chase. In any event, it was summer, and I was picking blackberries—by myself. I rounded a corner and I saw a shirt in the fireweed on an embankment. People huck all sorts of things from trains—mostly juice boxes and pop cans—so I didn’t pay it too much attention. But as I walked closer, I saw some more colour there—a shirt and then shoes. And then I realized it was a man.”

That much was true. It was indeed a man, but I only gave the boys my PG-13 version of the event. They were the same age I had been when it happened, but somehow Chase and Hunter seemed younger than their years. Look at me—here I am being biased against them in the same way people were against me throughout the dead body episode.

Here’s what happened: It was August and I’d been quite happy to be by myself for the entire afternoon, taking several buses out to Horseshoe Bay, having a quick cheeseburger at a concession stand near the ferry terminal, and then hiking up steep hills and piles of blasted rock to the PGE rail line. I was wearing a blue-and-white gingham dress, which I hated, but it kept me cool, and a day’s walk on the rails would kill it with oils and chemicals and dirt, so I could live with it for one more day. You might ask, what was a twelve-year-old girl doing alone in a semi-remote place near a big city? Simple answer: it was the seventies. Past a certain age, children just did their thing, with little concern shown by their parents for what, where, when or with whom. Chase and Hunter probably have chips embedded in their tailbones linked up to a Microsoft death-satellite that informs William and Nancy where they are at all times. But back then?

“Mom, is it okay if I hitchhike to the biker bar?”

“Sure, dear.”

It was a baking July day, all scents were amplified, and I smelled something quite awful. Actually, I immediately guessed that the odour was that of a partially decomposed body. Knowledge of this smell must be innate. As I approached it, I was almost happy; I liked to think a short lifetime of detective novels, TV shows and secret visions had prepared me for this moment. A crime to solve. Clues to locate.

I’d never seen a dead body before. Kids at school had seen car crashes, which made me jealous, but this? This was murder, and a grisly one at that. The man’s body had been severed at the waist, the two halves positioned at a right angle. The corpse’s lower half was wearing a floral print skirt and knee-high boots, and the top half was wearing a plaid lumberjack shirt. The face was untouched, a quite handsome man’s face, grey at this point, in spite of thick makeup: flaking foundation, mascara and one false eyelash, still attached. Flies buzzed all around. I wondered who this man had been, and why he’d been wearing a skirt.

The skirt. Here’s something shameful I’ve never told anybody before: I took a piece of alder branch, stripped it of leaves and then went over to the lower half of the body. I needed to lift up the skirt and see whether the—well, whether the bottom half went with the top—and it did—with no underwear, either.

Who could have done this to him? I looked around, and nary a weed or daisy stem nearby had been bent or bloodied. There was no evidence that the cutting and splattering had occurred on location. Even to a twelve-year-old, it was pretty obvious the body had been dumped. I stood there in the heat, suddenly thirsty. I remember that it was the corpse’s makeup that confused me more than the body, or even the skirt.

I am not a callous person, and have never been. I imagine most people might have vomited or looked away, but I simply didn’t. That’s how coroners must feel. I can only imagine that one is, or is not, born with squeamishness. Surgery scenes on TV? I’m in. To be blunt, finding the body seemed to affect me about as much as an uncooked roast.

And also—and this is something I didn’t pinpoint until years later—being that close to something so totally dead made me feel … infinite—immortal.

I was standing there immobile for maybe five minutes before I heard a train off in the distance, coming from the north, from Squamish. It was the Royal Hudson, an old-fashioned steam train refurbished and converted into a tourist attraction, chugging down the Howe Sound fjord. I stood beside the body amid the fireweed, chamomile and dandelions to await the train’s approach. I kept looking between the body and the bend in the track around which the train would come, as the steaming and chugging came closer and closer.

Finally, the Royal Hudson huffed around the bend. I stood in the middle of the tracks, the scent of creosote from the trestles burning my nostrils, and waved my arms. The conductor later said he almost popped a blood vessel seeing me there. He clamped on the brakes, and the squealing was unlike any noise I’d heard until then. It was so shrill it collapsed time and space. I think that was the moment I stopped being a child. Not the corpse, but the noise.

The engine stopped a few cars past the body and me. The conductor, whose name was Ben, and his partner jumped down, cursing me for pulling such a prank. I simply pointed at the severed body.

“What the—? Barry. Come over here.” Ben looked at me. “Kid, get away from this thing.”

“No.”

“Look, kiddo, I said—”

I just stared at him.

Barry came over, took a look and promptly vomited. Ben came closer, and he dealt with the corpse simply by not looking at it. Meanwhile, I couldn’t look at it enough. He said, “Jesus, kid—are you some sort of freak?”

“I found him. He’s mine.”

Barry radioed the authorities from the engine. Of course, the tourists were gawking from the train’s windows, snapping away. I suppose these days photos would be posted on the Internet within hours, but back then there was only the local papers, none of which were allowed to publish either news or photos of the body until the next of kin had been found and notified. And so, while the passengers tried to hop out of the cars to check out the action, Barry was able to feel useful screaming at them to get back in. By the time the authorities arrived, he had the cheese-grater voice of an aged starlet.

The police asked me questions. Had I moved anything? Had I seen anyone? I kept my peeled alder switch a secret. But other than having found the body, my role was limited. I just watched it all. The one question they didn’t ask was, Why would my parents allow me to pick blackberries so far away from home all by myself? Again, it was the 1970s.

The police complimented me on my coolness, and once the scene calmed down a bit, Ben offered me a ride in the engine back to the PGE station in North Vancouver. The police wanted to drive me home, but I pleaded my case and was able to ride the train. I have yet to equal the sense of mastery over my destiny I had during that experience. Me at the helm of this million-pound chunk of fate, pounding along an iron track—God help whoever stood in my way. It was supreme. I was alive! I was not a corpse!

Nobody was home to witness my enigmatic arrival in a strange man’s car. It wasn’t until I had to jump up to reach for the house key in its hiding spot on the top brick that I realized I’d clutched my Tupperware container of blackberries perfectly level for over four hours, with not a single berry spilled.

When I told my story at the dinner table, everybody just rolled their eyes and assumed I was being morbid. Mother said, “You need to be around people your own age more.”

“I don’t like people my own age.”

“Of course you do. You simply don’t know it yet.”

“All the girls my own age do is shoplift and smoke.”

Dad said, “No more dead body stories, dear.”

“It’s not made up.”

Leslie said, “Tanya wants to be a stewardess after school ends.”

“The body is real.” I went to the phone and dialed the police station. How many fifth-grade students know the phone number of the local police station by heart? I asked for Officer Nairne to confirm my tale.

Father took the phone. “Whoever this is, I’m sorry, but Liz—What? Oh. Really? Well I’ll be darned.” I had newly found respect.

Father hung up the phone and sat back down. “It seems our Liz is on the money.”

William and Leslie wanted gory details. “How far gone was he, Lizzie?”

“Blue cheese gone?”

“William!” Mother was being genteel. “Not at the dinner table.”

“It actually looked like the roast pork we’re eating here.”

Mother said, “Liz, stop right now!”

Father added, “And you weren’t going to eat those blackberries, were you? I saw them in the fridge. The railways spray the worst sorts of herbicides along the right-of-ways. You’ll get cancer from them.”

There was a charged silence. “Come on, everybody, I found a body today. Why can’t we just talk about it?”

William asked, “Was he bloated?”

“No. He’d only been there overnight. But he was wearing a skirt.”

Mother said, “Liz! We can discuss this afterwards, but not, I repeat not, at the dinner table.” Father said, “I think you’re overreac—”

“Leslie, how was swim class?”

So there was my big moment, gone. But as of that night I began to believe I had second sight that allowed me to see corpses wherever they lay buried. I saw bodies everywhere: hidden in blackberry thickets, beneath lawns, off the sides of trails in parks—the world was one big corpse factory. Visiting the cemetery in Vancouver for my grandmother’s funeral a year later was almost like a drug. I could not only see the thousands of dead, but I began to be able to see who was fresh and who wasn’t. The fresh bodies still had a glow about them while the older ones, well, their owners had gone wherever it was they were headed. For me, looking at a cemetery was like looking at a giant stack of empties waiting to be handed in for a refund.

Bodies. Oh, groan. I’ve always just wanted to leave this body of mine. What a treat that would be! To be a beam of light, a little comet, jiggling itself loose from these wretched bones. My inner beauty could shine and soar! But no, my body is my test in life.

William hustled the boys out after I finished the tale of the body. For once in their lives their Aunt Liz had, for a moment or two, fascinated them. I suspect that for a time Hunter and Chase thought I was a sorceress, too, albeit a boring sorceress with no food in her fridge.

My relief that they’d gone was akin to unzipping my pants after a huge meal: it was one of those few moments that being by myself didn’t mean I had to feel lonely. When I think about it, I’ve never actually told another person I’m lonely. Whom would I tell—Donna? Everyone in the coffee room? Leslie and William, who feel duty bound to keep checking in on their spinster sister? I maintain a good front. I imagine the people in my life driving in their cars discussing me …

Is Liz lonely?

I don’t think so.

I think she’s like one of nature’s castoffs.

She genuinely enjoys not being around people.

She’s very brave in her own way.

Books always tell me to find “solitude,” but I’ve Googled their authors, and they all have spouses and kids and grandkids, as well as fraternity and sorority memberships. The universally patronizing message of the authors is, “Okay, I got lucky and found someone to be with, but if I’d hung in there just a wee bit longer, I’d have achieved the blissful solitude you find me writing about in this book.” I can just imagine the faces of these writers, sitting at their desks as they write their sage platitudes, their faces stoic and wise: “Why be lonely when you can enjoy solitude?”

Gee, in a lifetime of singleness I’ve never once toyed with the notion of locating solitude for myself.

I’ve checked out all the books on the subject, books ranging from the trailer park to the ivory tower: Finding Your Achey-Breaky Soulmate to Deconstructing the Inner Dialogue—Methodologies of Navigating the Postmodern Self. The writers of these books that tout loneliness cures universally trot out a dusty list of authors through history who have dared to discuss loneliness as a topic, but they could never just say loneliness. It has to be a tree or butterfly or pond—dead nineteenth-century gay guys who wrote about trees and lakes and who probably had huge secret worlds that they never wrote about. Or …

It occurs to me that I sound like a bitter old bag.

But when your central nervous system is constantly firing away like a diesel generator, relentlessly overpowering subtle or fine emotions, how are you supposed to derive solace from stories of oneness with nature written by those old-fashioned writers, about hiking and breezes in the trees? If they were alive today, they’d all be in leather bars.

A day passed. I was still drugged, but it wasn’t fun or verklemptish any more. By Friday morning my face had shrunk back to its old shape. I’d run out of videos, and I was tempted to phone Liam and ask to come back to work for the day. But then, around seven in the morning, the phone rang. It was the RCMP, asking if I could come to Lions Gate Hospital.

“Excuse me?”

“There’s been an incident, Ms. Dunn.”

“An incident? What? Who?”

“Do you know a Jeremy Buck, Ms. Dunn?”

“Jeremy Buck?” It’s not like my memory bank of contacts is very big, so I was quick to say no. “What does this have to do with me?”

“If you could just come to the hospital, Ms. Dunn. We had a young man brought in here last night, an overdose case with some bruising and a few cuts.”

“What?”

“He had no ID on him, but he had a MedicAlert bracelet around his wrist saying that, should anything happen to him, you were the person to be notified. It had your phone number on it. Which is how we came to contact you.”

In one searing moment it dawned on me who Jeremy was. This was the phone call I’d never allowed myself to imagine.

“Ms. Dunn?”

“Sorry …”

“Ms. Dunn, can you—”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes.”

The officer told me the hospital room and wing numbers.

I’d always wondered if this day would ever come. It felt like the fulfillment of a prophecy. My mind was blank while I went through the motions—dressing, going to the car, driving along Marine, Fifteenth, St. George’s, then entering the parking lot, walking in through the automated hospital doors—the elevator, the smell of disinfectant, the harried staff.

When I asked the reception desk nurse about which hospital wing was Jeremy’s, she signalled an RCMP constable toward us. He told me his name was Ray Chung, a nice man who shook my hand and asked me to follow him. And so I did, down a yellow-lit hall and around a corner, mostly staring at his feet marching ahead of me on the polished aggregate flooring. We entered a darkened room, passing through a veil of thin and overly washed blue curtain.

A doctor stood in front of some Venetian louvre blinds. She was clearly impatient, and her head was haloed by the dozens of hair wisps that had escaped hours ago from her bun. “I’m Valerie, Dr. Tyson. I’m the duty doctor. This guy here related to you?”

Constable Chung nodded toward the man on the bed—a handsome guy, early twenties, large, fair skin, with dark, slightly curly hair and just enough of my family’s head shape to quash any doubts about who he was. This was him. This is who he turned out to be.

I walked over and touched his hand. This woke him up, and he started: “It’s you.”

“Yes, it’s me.”

He sat up and looked around the room. “Wait—something kind of weird happened here.”

“What?”

“I think I was dead.”

What was he talking about? “As far as I could tell, you were only asleep.”

“No. I was dead. I know I was.”

I looked at Dr. Tyson, who said, “Technically, Jeremy, you were dead, for maybe a minute or so when you first came in this morning.” She looked at me. “Around five.”

I was surprised. “He was dead?”

“We used the paddles on him.” She made a hand gesture like a defibrillator.

I looked back at Jeremy, who seemed disturbed. “I didn’t see the light—you know—that light you’re supposed to see when you die. I just saw a blob of darkness, and I was being pulled into it.”

None of us in the room knew what to say to this, so Dr. Tyson used medical science to stabilize the mood, to make it clinical. “We found traces of cocaine and Rohypnol in your system. That might account for anything unusual you may have seen.”