they were sleeping, the only one he brought a glass of water to after she woke up. Jennifer was the only girlfriend who mattered.
Nik has had a lot of girlfriends. He has to think hard to remember all their names. Jennifer is the only one who reverberates in his mind. Like part of her lives there.
Nik paints Jennifer one body part at a time. A dissection. Conjuring Jennifer whole is too ruptured. He dabs black paint on a white canvas. He is painting Jennifer’s right eye, the brown one, except each segment is detached from the rest, as though the eye is glass, slowly shattering. He has already sketched the retina, cornea, iris, lens, and blood vessels in pencil. This is a more literal rendering than the one of Jennifer’s blue eye, which Nik depicted as a cobalt smudge in a glass of water. He is planning to paint her optic nerve next.
On the other side of the door Aaron is banging on something and shouting. Nik turns his iPod on, inserts earbuds. Ambient electronica pours in. Jennifer’s right ear was one of his first paintings in this series. It fills an entire wall in his room, as though her auditory canal is a giant snail shell. Big enough for Nik to curl up and fall asleep in. He gazes at the ear mural and sips a ration from the bottle of Crème de Cacao his grandmother gave him. At four in the morning Nik realizes he might as well keep painting and stay up for his nine o’clock class. He has one amphetamine left.
During Cultural Theory, Nik draws the bridge of Jennifer’s nose in his notebook. He writes the due date for his next assignment beside it. The only reason he is passing this course is because Jennifer was helping him write his papers. That was something they used to fight about.
“It doesn’t make sense that I need to know how to write in art school when all I want to do is draw and paint,” he would say.
“It’s part of the business,” Jennifer said, which made Nik feel agitated.
“I shouldn’t have to explain what my art is about,” he said. “People should see it and feel it.”
She always sighed and told him to think realistically about his career. She said that what everybody always said about being an artist was true. You need to have more than talent. She believed in fame and success, sacrifices and selling yourself. Nik would analyze the curvature of her bottom lip as she spoke, or the philtrum groove underneath her nose. Then he’d get back to work. He began to think Jennifer would always be there to do the writing. But then Jennifer started talking about taking big risks. The importance of growing and changing. He didn’t know what she was planning, or what she wanted. It scared Nik enough to cut his reading week break short and return to Vancouver. He wanted to hold her in his arms and keep her there, safe. He had promised his grandmother he would look after her. He replays in his mind how much his grandmother’s hands shook, how her voice quavered when she asked him. It wasn’t like her to get emotional — she had always taken care of him — and her frailty startled him. His agreement made him feel, for the first time, like a man. But what his grandmother was saying was there was a right way to be in the world. He didn’t ask her how. He felt like part of his promise was to figure it out.
Late one night, a few days after he returned from the island, Jennifer laid out her tarot cards on Nik’s futon mattress. He didn’t want his cards read again, but she said it was time to tell her own fortune. She piled her thick, dark hair onto the top of her head and fastened it with two chopsticks. She sat cross-legged at the foot of the futon and adjusted the placement of the cards with delicate arms. Nik watched her wrists. The precise movements of her nimble fingers. Jennifer closed her eyes and said an incantation in Hindi, a secret verse from the aging mystic who sold her the deck in Gastown. She told Nik it was a very good sign that she never saw the mystic’s street stall there again. Nik reclined on the bed and kept still so he would not disturb the cards. He was hoping for a long rumination. A detailed story about the two of them that would make his head prickle as Jennifer told it. Then affectionate kisses. Instead, she said “Hmmm.” Nik looked at the cards, with their fantastical, airbrushed images, but the symbols weren’t obvious. There were cups, wands, and strange medieval figures. He didn’t know which card Jennifer was perplexed by. Nik anticipated a riddle. A new special little game they’d play, then answers. Instead, Jennifer put the cards away into their purple velveteen pouch and lay down. Nik felt a new, unspecific distress take shape, sculptural in the corner of the room. He fell sound asleep with his arms around her.
The next morning when Nik awoke, Jennifer and her cards were gone. Her resin-scented dance bag was gone. So were her high-heeled boots. She left everything else: her black ruffled scarf, her cellphone, her book bag made from recycled rubber, her red candles, the collection of aromatherapy oils she carried around in a red satin box. He assumed she had gone to an early dance rehearsal and didn’t want to wake him. He was upset she didn’t wake him. He wondered why he didn’t hear or feel her leave. How she’d slipped from his arms. He was angry at himself for not waking. She didn’t come back that evening or the next.
He couldn’t text or call her — she didn’t have her phone. He wasn’t sure why she left so many of her things behind. The sculptural feeling grew and darkened. Nik called her roommates but they said they hadn’t seen her either. They said she owed rent. Nik was confused, and with every day that passed, he became more afraid. He spent as much time as possible in his room waiting for her. He kept her cellphone charged. He went to the Vancouver police station to file a missing-persons report, but without Jennifer’s help he had difficulty filling out the forms. He would draw her face in the margins and have to start again. It took two weeks before Nik understood Jennifer was not coming back.
On the way to his afternoon Anatomical Drawing class, Nik slips his hand into the leg pocket of his black military-style cargo pants and feels for Jennifer’s cellphone. He always carries it with him in case it rings.
It hasn’t yet. For awhile there were text messages about dance rehearsals and classes. Nik deleted them. Then they stopped and he wished he hadn’t.
After class Nik buys a coffee at the stand outside. He’s been putting almost all of the money his family gives him into his Jennifer Fund, a savings account devoted to Jennifer-related art supplies — and now his one-man search. His stomach lurches, but he doesn’t have enough change left over to buy a sandwich. Hunger is the cost of not being convincing enough to the police. He was told he was not a spouse or a relative. His story was questioned. Nik doesn’t know who Jennifer’s relatives are. She told him she wanted to live completely in the present. That success depended on now. She never talked about her past. When he was with her, Nik didn’t think of his either.
Nik thuds up the rickety back stairs to the Rumble Shack. The third-floor light is still burned out and in the dim he has trouble getting his key into the lock. He puts his ear up to the rough wooden door but doesn’t hear anything. There’s always music when his roommates are home. Kendall practises bass. Aaron broadcasts erratic noise loops from his computer. Ilana, who somehow figured out the Wi-fi password for the neighbours downstairs, hosts an Internet podcast from her bedroom. The key finally slips into place.
Nik flicks the light switch and snaps the door shut behind him. The apartment reeks of cigarette smoke and something stale and rotten. Unwashed dishes, old garbage, and uneaten takeout remains are the norm in their grubby kitchen. Nik leaves his boots on, steps on a dirty blue hoodie left on the hallway floor, and over a broken canvas frame that’s had its painting kicked through. He strolls into the living room and turns on the overhead light. There’s a half-melted, oversized candle on the paper-strewn coffee table. On a long piece of dowel stuck into the candle is the rigid body of a dead rat.
Nik knows Aaron is responsible. Not for the catching, or perhaps even the killing. Aaron doesn’t make things happen. But certainly for the retrieval. And the reclamation. Aaron’s performance art is always convenient. Or lazy. Nik wonders what grade the rat will earn.
The decomposing rodent is what smells rank. Nik grabs his silver Zippo. He lights a stick of Ilana’s incense. Then another. And another. The sticks fit into gaps in the high, cracked baseboards and into the splintered grooves of the smashed bookshelf. He slips two into the knife-gouged frame of the old wooden TV box.
Nik retreats to his room. The metal chain and padlock with which he secures his door while he’s