Episode 3 - a walk in the park

By Alexander Saxton

It was a couple of years ago, she tells me.

It’s still snowing, but it’s warmed up, and we’re both drunk, so when she says, ‘Alright, I’ve got another one’, we both light another cigarette, and huddle closer together under the heat lamp.

(Musical cue) 

One of those El Nino winters, she says, where it’s warm the entire season. It was the warmest february I can ever remember living through, but March first, we get a real bastard of a storm coming in. Temperature drops down to, well, not too bad, only minus six or something, not counting the wind, but cold enough. And it starts to snow like a motherfucker. Shovel the front walk every twenty minutes kind of snow.

I’m at a friend’s place, up near saint clair. At the time I was living in a shitty basement down near bloor and ossington. And I like the snow- I don’t know if I told you that. Usually I hate the winter, but as long as it’s snowing, I’m okay. So it’s not that cold, and I’ve been feeling stir-crazy in my apartment for most of that week, same as anyone does when your ceilings are five and a half feet high and it’s below freezing outside. So that night, I decide I’ll walk home, snow or no. And so I start to walk.

It’s a gorgeous night. It’s cold, but there’s barely any wind, so it doesn’t feel that bad. And the snow’s coming down thick. That part of the city, at least back then, I don’t know how it is now, but then it was a poorer part of town, so all the street lights were the orange ones, you know? Like how you go to a wealthy part of town, and they have these bright white city lights, but then you get to an ethnic neighbourhood or something, and all of a sudden, either the city hasn’t gotten around to it yet, or the local business council or whatever isn’t rich enough to change things, but all the street lights are still this yellowy orange colour. So they’re like that where I am, and the lights are all casting these cones of, uh, illumination down towards the ground, and you can see through these beams of light just how thick and heavy the snow’s coming down. The sky’s light, too. All the snow reflecting the city’s light pollution back down onto iy, I guess. The sky’s a sort of, you know, that orangey purple.

So I’m walking home, and there’s nobody in the streets. Nobody. At the bottom of Oakwood, there’s a backlog of buses. Four or five of them. Half of them are Dufferin buses that I guess got diverted. All of them are practically empty. Everyone’s staying in, because of the winter storm. There’s barely any cars on the road, either. It’s just me and the city, and the storm. 

I don’t know the area well at all, by the way, at least back then. I’d just moved west from around Greenwood and Danforth, and you know how it is with Bloor street- nobody ever goes north of there, right? So as far as I’m concerned, this is all new territory. I don’t know the streets. I’m just sort of assuming that if I head east enough, I’ll hit Ossington, and if I head south enough, I’ll hit Bloor. 

But it’s a nice night, and I like the snow, so I’m taking my time. Exploring the empty city. I’ve got a good pair of winter boots. 

And while I’m walking alone, through these streets I don’t really know, I sort of lose track of time. So I’m not really sure how long I’ve been walking, though it doesn’t feel like all that long, when I come to the park.

I’d been thinking about heading east another block when I came to it, but it looked like a nice park, so I figured I’d stay walking south along its edge for another little while. It looked like it was pretty big, so I was sort of surprised I’d never heard of it, but like I said, I’d just moved west, and even now, I’m not going to pretend like I know how things are north of Bloor pretty much anywhere. 

It seems like my kind of park, though: big old trees, a path leading off at an angle, no playground or wading pool or shit for kids. Just trees.

There’s a certain white noise that heavy snow makes when it lands among the boughs of trees, I’m sure you can hear it in your head right now. You don’t need me to tell you what a soothing sound it is.

So I’m walking alongside this park, listening to the snow in the trees, looking for the name of this park the entire time, but there isn’t any sign posted anywhere. 

After a little while, I glance across the street, and I notice something strange, which is that I’m passing the last house, and starting to walk past parkland on that side as well.

Which is unexpected, because they both seem like big parks, like maybe they’re both part of the same huge park, and I can’t think of any park that big in this part of the city, except for maybe High Park, and I’m way too far east to be walking through High Park.

But like I said, I like the snow, and I like parks, and I like to explore the city, and I like the sound of snow in trees, and I know I’ll hit Bloor eventually, so I just keep walking.

After a couple of minutes, I realize how silent it is. No cars have driven past since I entered the park, and there’s no sound of traffic coming through the trees at all. I can’t remember ever seeing any parks of this size on maps of the city, and I don’t remember anyone ever talking about brown-bagging beers in a park north of bloor, either. Maybe people don’t bike through them in the summer because they’re full of crackheads or something. It’s a thought that makes me start to feel nervous.

And after a little while further, I really start to get freaked out, because I realize how long it’s been since I passed an intersection, and just how large this park I’m obviously walking through the middle of, must be.

And I’m starting to get cold.

That’s when I notice the house. The first one I’ve seen in about fifteen minutes. At first, I don’t think it’s a real house. It looks sort of like a place for historical re-enactors. Shabby, built of logs, that sort of thing. In the gloom, I can’t make out the blue heritage plaque, but I assume it’s there somewhere.

Weirdly, for the time of night, and the weather, there’s someone sitting on the porch.

As I start to get closer, I see that it’s a woman in a dress, and again, it looks like an old fashioned kind of dress. There’s something wrong with her face, though. In the orange streetlights, it runs dark, but I see closer up that her nose is bleeding freely, and that a thick, inky streak is running from her nostrils, over her mouth, and down to the collarbone. And I think, maybe she’s not getting the help she needs because of the storm. So I call to her, is she alright. And the sound of my voice seems to startle her, like really startle her, like it’s crazy that someone would be walking past in the middle of the city. And after she pulls herself together, she waves me off and says, no, she’s okay. 

But with head injuries, I feel like you have to be sure. So I come up to the bottom of the stairs leading up to the porch where she’s sitting, and I ask her what happened. And she looks away to the side, and she says she fell.

And that’s when I realize what’s going on.

This isn’t a historic reenactment thing, or something. This is someone’s house. Maybe they’re conservative and religious. Or if it is a reenactment kind of place, it’s one with a fucked up working situation, because this woman is obviously a victim of abuse, and has obviously just been struck in the face by her abuser.

And so, you know, my mom’s a social worker, so I go up on to the porch, and I crouch down beside her and I say, hey, you don’t have to lie to me. And she just stiffens right up in her dress and overcoat, and she tells me that she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. 

Well, if somebody doesn’t want help, then there’s nothing you can do about that. So I stand up, and I tell her that nobody has the right to hurt her, and that there are organizations that are set up just to help people like her, and that I know how to put her in touch with these organizations. And I give her my card.

And as I give her my card, I hear a noise from inside the house, and the woman goes pale: paler than she already is from the cold, and she tells me that I should leave.

And I look around, and I see how far I am from, well, civilization, and so I do what she says. I back down the steps, and keep heading off into the cold.

I make it halfway back down to the street when she catches up to me.

I want to go, she tells me. I want to leave him behind. And I say, now? and she says, right now. So I say, alright, let’s go. So she puts her arm through mine, and we start to move.

I ask her how far we are from bloor street, but she tells me she doesn’t know the roads that well.

And a little while later, we hear. . . we hear someone shouting behind us, and she grabs my arm tighter, and we hurry faster.

The snow’s still falling, but not fast enough to hide our footprints, not from someone right on our tail. So I keep urging her to run, but the snow’s thick, and we’re both pretty short, and so the going’s slow.

After a few moments, I think I can hear someone crashing through the woods behind us. And a chill drips up my spine, because a moment later, even through the muffling snow, I start to hear shouting, deranged shouting, shouting that just keeps creeping up and up the octaves into a pitch that no healthy person ever feels the need to use. The woman looks at me, and her eyes are wide, like, I don’t know, like a dog’s eyes when you take it to the vet. And she says to me, it’s my husband.

Have you ever been truly scared? I mean, the kind of scared where you know you’re in danger for your life, and you want to be brave, but what your heart and your brain and your body are doing to respond to the situation are totally beyond your control? 

It’s like, there’s this little capsule in your head, and that’s you, or at least the part of you that thinks of itself as you. And this little voice, floating in this little capsule in your head, is watching and making notes and judgments, and trying to control things, but it doesn’t have any, ah, any grip over anything. It’s just this impotent little source of chatter that never stops sharing its irrelevant remarks, but you can barely hear it over the sound of blood thrashing in your ears.

That’s what it was like when he came out of the trees.

I heard, or I felt, him step into the clearing behind us, and reality turned to smoke in my fingers. When you’re faced with something like that- you lose the ability to focus, you lose track of details. It’s like the whole world is put through a blurred filter, and you’re screwing up your eyes to try and be able to see straight, but you can’t, no matter how hard you try. You’re trying to slow your breathing and heart rate, but they won’t be slowed.

He comes out of the woods behind us, screaming her name. He’s in his shirt-sleeves in the snow, and he’s a big man, and his face is red, but I can’t tell if it’s from the cold or if he’s drunk. He starts to stride towards us, and he’s shouting and swearing at her, and I look at her and she’s just gone catatonic. And this whole time, that little voice in that little capsule starts making all of its little observations. It’s telling me things like, oh, he’s probably about six foot one, maybe two hundred and twenty pounds, at the rate he’s moving, he’ll probably be here in about eight seconds, that snow that he’s walking through looks really soft, I wonder what it will feel like to have my neck broken, nonsense like that. It’s as though, consciousness, in a situation like that, is just this silly appendage that isn’t worth anything, so the body cuts it off from control, because it puts stupid emphasis on useless things. But the program’s still running in the background, and after the fact, all you can remember is these silly little notions that it had. And you want to remember more, but all of the important memories are too traumatic, so your brain takes them apart and stores the different pieces of them in different cupboards. 

And one of the things that this weedy voice says is, this is the part where you stand up to him and he goes away. So I step between him and the woman, and I try to think of something to say, but my brain feels overloaded, sluggish, and all I can think of is, ‘leave us alone.’ And even that doesn’t come out right. I try and steady myself, square my chest and shout it, but all I can manage is this small and shaky voice. And the little mind in the little capsule bobbing in my head is filled with contempt for me. 

The man doesn’t even seem to hear me. He doesn’t look at me, he just keeps coming through the snow towards us with his hands that look like they’ve just been cutting raw meat. And he’s shouting, I’m going to kill you. I’m going to break your neck and leave you out here to get buried in the snow.

And I run.

I shout at her to run, too, and she does, but she’s wearing this long dress, so she’s not able to keep up, and he’s fast. I hear a shriek behind me, and I half-turn to see that he’s tackled her. He rolls her over and forces her face down into the snow, and I can hear her moaning and trying to get her face up so that she can breathe, and he’s shouting into her ear while he holds her head down in the snow, calling her a bitch and a cunt and a whore and telling her he’ll kill her, he’ll kill her parents and her sisters, too, if she tries to leave him again.

And I take a step back towards them, and I try to shout something, but no sound comes out of my mouth. But he looks up at me with these bloodshot eyes, and irises that look black in the yellow-orange light. And he gets to his feet and starts to come after me, and he’s fast.

I run like I’ve never run before. I don’t look back. I can hear him just behind me. I can hear his breath rasping in the cold. I just run. By now the snow’s almost knee-high: it’s hard going. My lungs feel like they’re full of battery acid, and I trip and fall down this steep hill, and I get snow down the neck of my jacket. At the bottom of the hill, I struggle to my feet. I’ve lost one of my gloves, my hand is red from the cold. I catch a glimpse of him sliding down the hill after me, and I set off running again. I’m on open ground, and I realize that I’m out of the park, I’m running across an intersection, and there’s a convenience store right in front of me, still open, even though it’s a storm and it’s past eleven at night.

I collapse against one of its walls and look back behind me, trying to catch my breath. He’s standing across the street from me, still in his shirtsleeves with his red hands and forearms and his dark, red-rimmed eyes. His breath comes in thick cones of fog, and his shoulders are pumping up and down with exertion. We look at each other for a long moment, and those dark eyes feel like they’re going to swallow me up. I’m trying to find any hint of, just, anything, any consciousness, compassion, anything I could latch onto as a signifier of our common humanity, but there’s nothing. Maybe a capsule with a small voice in the deeps of his head somewhere, bobbing along on a black sea of rage.

He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a balled-up wad of cloth, and tosses it overhand. It sails through the air between us, unravelling so a strip flutters behind it like the tail of a comet. It arcs over the powerlines, first white in the streetlights, then dark against the light-polluted sky, then light in the lantern glow again. It lands just in front of me, throwing up a little cloud of powdery snow, which drifts away and resettles. I reach out for the cloth. Only a second on the ground, and a layer of snow has already begun to settle on it. I pick it up. It looks white and black under the yellow sign of the convenience store, but I can see its subtle stripe of cornflower blue, feel from the sticky weight at one end what in better light would be red. It’s a strip of his wife’s dress, tacky with her blood. I look up again, and he’s walking back up the hill. The last thing I see of him is his white shirt disappearing into the shadows under the trees in the park.

(musical cue)

She flicks her cigarette butt away to fizz out in the snow. That’s the end of her story, apparently. ‘So what happened next,” I ask her. She says she finds her way home, pours herself a glass of straight vodka, and picks up the phone to call the police. But then she realizes she doesn’t know where to send them. So she pulls up the google maps of the area. But she can’t find the park. And she calls people who live in the area, but they don’t know of any big parks, either. And the next day, when the sun’s shining on fresh-fallen snow, she retraces her steps finds the convenience store.

But across the street from it, there’s only a little parkette, with a playground and a wading pool. Kid shit. It’s no more than fifty feet across.

So that’s it, I say to her. It was all just a dream, or something.

Yeah, probably, she says. Then she presses something into my hands and shakes the snow from her hair and opens the door. A burst of warm air and music wafts out of the bar as she disappears back inside.

I look down at what she’s handed me.

It’s a piece of cloth, and in the yellow glare of the streetlights, it looks like it’s black and white.