Frozen
by Michael Richardson

In Michel’s fourth year in the city of Montreal a man froze to death outside his apartment. Michel knew he was dead as soon as he saw him, pressed into one of the broad alcoves along the front of the building. The man’s face was white, his eyes were closed and there was snow in his beard. Michel pulled off his gloves, touched ice-cold skin. He held his hand in front of the man’s nose and mouth. No breath, only the frigid morning air numbed his fingers. If he did not leave soon he would be late for work.

Michel looked down the street. A dark shape dug furiously at the brown-white snow to free a car. He looked at his phone but called no one. Two cars passed, driving slowly through the slush. The minutes stretched. The dark shape finished shovelling, the car door clacked shut and the vehicle pulled away. It was snowing now and white collected on Michel’s shoulders, on the rough brown blanket wrapped around the body, on the dead man’s wool hat. He stood there long minutes. No one came. Nothing happened. The body was still there. With cold fingers he wiped the snow from the man’s face and left for work.

It was after nine and Metro Frontenac was quiet. Michel put two dollars in the battered cardboard coffee cup held out by the man at the foot of the escalator. The carriage floor was wet and the air full of the damp stink of winter in the city. An old black woman clutched an oversized handbag and looked through him. A man fell asleep on the seat next to him, slumped into Michel’s shoulder and didn’t wake when he got off at Peel. Outside the snow had stopped only moments before and Michel left clean prints on the steps of his office building.

It was a busy day, no one asked why he was late and he didn’t tell any of his co-workers about the frozen man. He said nothing after work when the others pulled him to the bar across the street for the Leafs-Canadiens game. Pressed in by the loudness of strangers, slapped backs and red faces, Michel clutched his beer until the puck hit the ice, bodies surged, the room roared. His beer was warm. In the middle of the first period, with Montreal scoreless and the crowd on edge, Michel slipped out through the hot bodies and into the cold street. The door closed, the noise cut off.

Back at his building the body was visible under a half-layer of white. He stared. Someone brushed past him and into the building. The snow started again, he went upstairs and in the morning the body was still there.

Michel wiped the snow from the man’s face and saw the pale scar that sliced from the corner of the left eye to where it disappeared into the dead man’s beard. It was the only distinguishing feature in an otherwise ordinary face. At close range the scar lacked any interruption, was startling clean and succinct in its division of the face. Later that day, Michel stood at the mirror in the washroom at work and traced the same path, warm fingertips on warm skin. The door opened and he jerked his hand away. Une bonne victoire pour les Canadiens, non? The voice was loud in the tiled room. Michel hurried out without answering, his hands still wet.

That afternoon he left work early. It was already dark. Michel ignored the Metro and took the long walk through the centre of the city, snow shifting underfoot like half-wet sand. Along Saint Catherine and in the Place des Arts he peered into the darker spaces at the foot of buildings and the narrow corridors between the facades that demarcated the perpetual construction of downtown Montreal. The wind picked up and it began to snow. No one looked at him, faces down against the cold in the early dark. The wind cut down the long street and flung snow flat through the air. Flecks of cold bit into his face. His cheeks stung. When he reach his building, Michel crouched beside the body where it still lay and stared at the face and the long scar until his knees became sore and he slumped against the wall. The brick against his back seeped cold. His lungs burned. Someone stopped, key in the door. Ça va? He waved them away, pulled himself upright and went upstairs where he lay staring at the spidery lines in the white plaster above his bed for a long time before falling asleep.

On the third day, Michel woke early and lay in bed until the light was almost gone. The body was still there and untouched. Michel cleared the snow away and cracked the ice where torn blankets and cardboard bedding had frozen to the concrete. The limbs were rigid, the body heavy and clumsy as he dragged and pushed it through the door and up the stairs, breathing hard.

The coffee table wasn’t large enough, so Michel pushed back the small table in the kitchen and laid the body out on the floor. He sat and watched the closed eyes, touched the cold cheek. It took a long time to thaw, but when he was able Michel trimmed the beard with scissors, then shaved what was left to the waxy skin. He saw now that the long scar ended abruptly, just below the jaw line. There was no clue to its cause. He chopped at matted chunks of hair and when the man’s clothes had melted, he cut away the tattered snow pants and the layers of jackets and sweatshirts slowly ripening in the warmth. There were no other marks on the body, the skin strangely odourless. He wiped it clean and dressed the man in a dark blue wool suit that was too large at the waist. No shoes fit. He left the feet bare.

In a neat row on the kitchen counter Michel laid out the contents of the man’s pockets. Nine business cards for an assortment of restaurants. A crumpled cup. An old key. A photograph folded twice that tore where the image had stuck to itself when he tried to open it. A smudge of sky, the driveway of a house, six feet cut off at the knees: all that was left of the faded image. He stood in the kitchen and looked down at the dead body with no name stretched out on the floor. The skin was pale where he had shaved it. The scar silver in the warm light.

The stove clock read 5:06 pm. Michel placed what was left of the clothes in a plastic bag and went downstairs to leave it in the small room under the stairs where it would wait until garbage day. Outside, he brushed back the snow that had covered the alcove. The concrete was hard and cold under the layers of cardboard. He lay down, pulled the remaining threadbare blankets tighter and watched his breath mist in the night air. Two people entered the building in quick succession. Time passed and then came the young mother from 3C across the hall. She paused then turned quickly away. After that, no one looked at him. It started to snow. Feathery white settled on him. At first it melted on his cheeks, still warm from the apartment. Then it didn’t. The temperature fell, the air froze and in the morning Michel was dead. It wasn’t until late that afternoon that the smell of a decomposing body escaped to the hall outside the third-floor apartment in which, until the night before, Michel had lived for three and a half years in the city of Montreal.

 

MICHAEL RICHARDSON is working towards a Doctorate of Creative Arts at the University of Western Sydney. His work has been published by The Santa Fe Writers Project, UNSWeetened and InSight. Until recently, he was the only Australian speechwriter in Canadian politics.

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