A Tapless Shoulder (4 page)

“
I don’t know what to tell you, love,” Katie said, with a
bit of strain now showing on her face. “You
should
get
him to help you with the roof this summer as payback, that’s what
you should do.”

“
Yes,” I said
nodding; “yeah, I think that’s a great idea.” I had nearly
forgotten all about the roof, and welcomed its distracting
qualities back into my mind.

She smiled in
agreement and then said, “I think I’ll try to get a run in before
you leave.”

My sulk broke
upon hearing her say that,
look at that gold, stuck right here in this diamond.
I smiled and said, “That just won
you the
T.B.I.A
.
(pronounced
te-bi-uh
): Today’s
Best Idea Award.
You get a
high five
.”

The Stupid
Room was not to be mistaken for the room without a name.

The room
without a name was quite small, too small in fact to be turned into
a washroom even though it had a sink in it, and having a washroom
there would have been just so perfectly convenient. It instead was
a room the size of a utility closet that one could walk into to
place something on the shelf on their left or on their right. Or,
depending on the item and their attachment to it, they could throw
it on the floor beneath either shelf. Seeing as that, in my
opinion, only made perfect housing for spiders, I tried to avoid
that option and pile things carefully on whichever shelf looked
like it was holding less at that moment. Needless to say; the room
had become storage to many things we had run out of room and use
for. There were mostly tools and items of that nature on the left
shelf, including some bulbs and various plugs for various items.
The second shelf held a PlayStation 2 and all its components and
controllers, a scrapped Xbox 360 Nate had claimed he could “modify”
to play copied games or
something to that effect
, an overflowing bag of dead batteries, the empty box for a
George Foreman grill (though I vaguely recalled Katie saying her
parents wanted to try it so she may have sent the grill their way),
some champagne flutes and an electric heater I had apparently
forgotten we owned.

In time, I
would go on to petition to have it changed to the Tool Room even
though the tools were heavily outnumbered now by miscellaneous
items. My argument being that I simply did not mean that kind of
tool. And by petitioned I meant stated, and by stated I meant that
when I referred to that room I just called it the Tool
Room.

Where am I
going with this? I’m going past it, around the corner of the
laundry room, and through the finished basement to the Stupid Room.
The Stupid Room held a small children’s table with two chairs, an
easel, a large corner shelf, a book shelf, an overflowing toy box,
which kind of lent to the fact that, yes, there were toys all over
the floor as well, but, more importantly, there was also a
treadmill. The door to the stupid room has been removed, and do not
be mistaken, the room was not nearly as large as it
sounds.

I was
standing in the family room, looking into the Stupid Room at Katie.
She was running on the treadmill. She ran on it every day. I came
down to say something to her once, and have watched her every day
since. She knows I think she is sexy. She knows I think she is
beautiful and smart. She’s funny, and I don’t think you can be very
funny without being smart. But enough about her brains already. Her
bum had… I really wish I could capture the magnitude of that
perfect, most glorious bouncing bottom in motion. Granted, I may
have not been paying attention elsewhere, but nothing had called
out for my attention, nothing said anything relevant, until that
bum bounced on that treadmill and demanded I recognize it as the
beautiful fine art that it certainly was.

Now I stood
and watched her run, completely lost in reverie. She wore
headphones. I stood, quiet and still. It was as though her bum
wanted to jump up and down on its own, slightly trailing the
movements of the rest of her body, up and down, up and down, hard
and rhythmic. I was in awe. All of me was silent in every way.
Nothing else existed. The kids were tearing through the room,
smashing toys into toys, sending those toys flying into other toys.
And when something did hit me, it only registered as a near miss. I
noticed none of it. In a way, I theorized, by not interrupting the
boys, I kept them busy. I saw nothing but that bounce, bounce,
bounce. That was my therapy. I knew every day I would be okay if
that moment was in there somewhere. It made me thankful. Bounce.
Bounce. Bounce. I was okay; it was my moment, true and pure. If she
stopped running it would be okay. I had been there. I could be
there anytime I wanted when I shut my eyes. I was there now, and
now and now and now, up and down, again and again. She was running
and looking at me through the door, while I stood, staring. I
smiled at her, and mouthed the words, “You running on the treadmill
counts as foreplay.”

“
So
why
didn’t your number show up on my
phone yesterday,” I asked looking at Nate, feeling I was done with
staring blankly at the road ahead. “I thought you were my dentist
calling me back, they always come up private caller. So it was
private yesterday, but not today – what’s up with that?” I asked
again, just to relate my confusion.

“
I forgot to
block my number today,” he said like it was obvious.

“
Oh. Okay, so
let me try to get this part, at least, straight,” I squinted,
rightfully so, I felt, “you get a prank call,”

“
You don’t
know that,” he said matter-of-factly.

“
You’re right, sorry, moving on, for the moment, just humour
me, okay, you’re
threatened
, happy?
Someone who could be anyone, whether they just met you or have
known you forever, maybe even raised you,
calls
and says,
‘you’re dead’, okay, fine, but then you call me and block your
number so it doesn’t come up on my phone? See; I don’t think I get
that,” I said slowly in case it may have helped him understand the
fact I didn’t understand. “Why the hell would you block your
number
from me
when you were supposedly calling me
for help? See how that kind of makes maybe no sense at all? That
just, I don’t get it, Nate. I’m trying, I really am, man. But…
okay, Nate, it’s that fucking look of astonishment that I am going
to punch you in the face over. I am trying, hard, here, to
understand what you say along with the things you do, but nothing
is coming together for me, at all, like not one sensible thing is
within eyesight of another. Do you know what I
mean?”

The look on
his face told me he didn’t. “This is big, man, this is something,
like, I don’t know, but real… it’s really, finally, happening.” He
glanced at me, quickly. Evidently driving as erratically as he did
required a good amount of concentration.

“
Really real – what do you mean,
finally
?” I
asked as yet another shoulder came between me and the main
attraction.

“
You know,” he said, not knowing just how mistaken he was,
“you go through life with no cares and shit, then,
boom
, something happens, something like this, and you have to,
you know,
care,
I guess. I don’t
know.”

“
No, you don’t know, I don’t know, um, that sentence didn’t
know either. It was all like ‘Hey, where’s my information?’
Man oh man, Nate… buddy,” I looked
around at the cars parked outside
Raises The Bar
. I
wondered why we had gone back there of all places and if I really
cared or if I just wanted something else to be annoyed
at.

The inside
of
Raises
was still the same dark square broken up by the
same spots of light that were still trying in vain to reach one
another. There were some regulars set at the bar, two of whom
looked in our direction, and one even nodded at me like repetition
was all it took to enter into alcoholic brotherhood with him. I
nodded back as if to say, soon, my friend, soon. And even I
wondered what I meant by that.

“
Really Nate,” I said as we slid into our seats, “I should
have known it was you, it for some reason almost always is. ‘Meet
me at
Raises
,’ ha ha
sucker
, I’m fucking outta here.” I pretended, poorly, to be
him.

He was
looking around the room like I wasn’t in it, like I just
wasn’t
right across the table from him, and hadn’t said a
thing. I must have been surprised, for I didn’t know what to make
of it. “Hello?” I asked, wondering how it was he had gotten lost
inside his tiny head.

“
What?” he asked like my first five minutes of saying stuff
didn’t count,
fart sniff shoe
bomb
, doesn’t matter; I’ve
got four minutes and twenty seconds left on the clock,
far-sighted milk pants…
bling blap bloop
.

I waited till
his slow-moving face focused on mine. The dad in me wanted to tilt
his head down and try to smooth his hair out; it looked like he’d
been holding it just above his head, contemplating pulling it out.
I took a deep breath. “Okay, let’s go over this again, okay, let’s
just figure this shit out,” I said ambitiously, thinking it might
help grab hold of his attention.

“
How are we going to do that? Someone called me on my cell,
private number, they just fucking said, you’re dead, man.” He said
each word as though it had been interrupted by the last and like it
surprised him there was another word to follow. He collected
himself, before adding at a slower pace, “I know, big deal, right,
but then there was an insane laugh, like another guy in the
background, with this laugh I’d never heard before, but it was
that, man, that scared me the most. It just sounded
so…
insane
; you should
have heard the guy. It just really… threw me, man; it would have
thrown you too.
It was
insane
.”

I looked at
him blankly before saying, “I woke up like seventeen different
times today, and my face was the alarm clock each time. Okay and
now with that said; what the hell are you talking about, and why
are you telling me? Oh,” I sighed heavily, “and
when
were
the shots fired?” He turned his head ever so slightly, and I was
quite impressed by how much so little could imply. “Seriously
though, Nate, have you met our friends, they are us: they
are
crazy
. And then what phone did you call me from?
Why’d it come up private?” I thought I would revisit the topic to
see if maybe it made more sense now that I was somewhere else and
minutes older.

“
Star
sixty-seven,” he said as though that were all the information I
would ever need, for anything.

“
Uh, okay, and, again, why would you star sixty-seven
me
?” I asked.

“
Because of the phone call, man, I had to go stealth mode
on
everyone’s
ass,” he said with confidence as
though it truly was a sensible statement.

My face
twitched. “Right,” I said, “of course, stealth mode, asses, yeah,
man, I hear you, that’s… very clever.” I stared at him, rather
impressed with the routes in his head he insisted on taking,
hey, look, rocks!
“So what about this, uh, call you
got, what’s going on with that?” I tried to resume direction,
wishing to skip over the painful parts.

He looked at
me for a long moment. I began to feel I knew what it was like to
actually feel gravity pull at me. He was
still
just
looking at me, and I him.

“
Was it you?”
he finally asked.

“
Yes,” I said like I was the epitome of disinterest. “Wait,
is that why you got me to wait for you here and
not
to
show up last night?” I asked like it
maybe
may have made
sense had that been the reason.

“
No,” Nate
said looking away, then back, “I just thought it was you for some
reason, but then didn’t, and I knew you’d come and help me, but
then I thought again that maybe it was you, and then I just didn’t
know and I split. So, was it you?” he asked like he really and
seriously did not know.

I looked at
him, I was a blank sheet of paper, while Nate here had a mouthful
of black ink and was a spitting splattering mess when he talked.
“You know what,” I said, sounding considerably calmer than I
actually was, “I don’t think you got a phone call at all, I think
you believe you did, but that… this is just part of the deception
going on in that head of yours, and you’re not even aware of it.
You, my friend, sensed the future,” I nodded my head,
“
I’m it
,” I whispered quickly. “Man,” I expelled,
“
I am not at a loss for
words
; I just have nothing to
say.
Does
that
make
sense to you? I say that because you, you are doing the opposite.
At first I thought you were off your fucking rocker, but now it’s
like… you set something in motion. Here you are
saying
this stuff about
someone wanting to kill you; meanwhile I start to think, hey, I
should kill this guy, he’s an idiot who knows he’s an idiot,
who
wants
me to kill him. I think, right now, I could very
well be
a
murderer
, a murderous
murderer. I never realized it hurt to say that word that many
times. Anyway, do you see where I’m going with this? That ‘one plus
one,’ do the math – stuff – thing. Sorry, I meant that last part as
a question,” I paused to let him
not answer
and stare
at me. “Anyway, yeah, I probably have to kill you now since it was
your idea and you are obviously far too insane to be having those,”
I said and made some dull stabbing motions toward him.