Cockeyed (19 page)

I wish I could capture all of Rory's character, give the right anecdotes that might illustrate who my little brother was. I struggle, though. It's not for lack of memory, either. I just don't know how to describe him anymore. If you asked me the day before he died, I'd tell you what I like to recall. He's one of those few people I saw when I could see full and well. But everything is different now. Despite the same stories, he becomes a different person than the one I remember. It's frustrating, how his death interprets our memories of him.

Many people, family friends, even Rory's old school chums, probably can't help themselves. They look at his life through the lens of his overdose. Now, when I say Rory is the funniest person I've ever known, it's still true, but his death draws implications. His overdose wants to explain all of him. It can't, and shouldn't. I learned that first at his funeral. Many reminisced with me and agreed that, yes, he was terribly, terribly funny. It appears Rory's humour staved off a kind of despair I'll never have a name for. Maybe it's true, but it saddens the memory of his wit. More importantly, I don't care. I still remember him as the funniest person I've ever known, not the funniest person coping with depression. The question remains with me, how do you describe the dead as they lived? It's similar to the way blindness can own my life, too. Boy, that Ryan sure is one ambitious workaholic, eh? Yeah, seems he won't let that blindness thing slow him down. Truth
is, I'm a generic workaholic. Even I struggle not to make my eyes the overwhelming logic of who I've become. Memories and understanding always gravitate to these black holes in our lives. What needs to be said, though, is that Rory's death does not understand much about who he was. Something, but not much. The day he died was only one out of the twenty-one years that made him the person I knew. That's important to me.

I will remember him as theatrical and short, eager to please, a little boy with either a grin on his face or an expression full of flat withdrawal. I will remember how, as a young man, his shape lumbered across the kitchen and hunched its shoulders, strong and thick-bodied, with our father's barrel-chest. I will remember a fist the size of the dent in my parents' refrigerator. He was lonesome and loyal to whoever would have him, explosive only with those who could cope. Bipolar, but misdiagnosed for years. I will remember when Dad was barbecuing, and Rory grabbed him in a slow dance, cooing, “Oh, Miles, oh, Miles.” I will remember the time, long after I'd taken up a white cane, Rory let me steer his car while he worked the pedals, just as I'd let him steer when he was a kid. Rory was moral and shocked by injustice. He couldn't understand why Dad sold my car without warning buyers about the oil leak. I will remember the feeling of the thorns tattooed on his inner arm. He always sided with the forgotten and the marginal kids at school. Called my 110-pound sister Fatty, and called me The Gimp. We loved it, but never found the right name for him. So impulsive and so undisciplined. If he was at home, alone, he turned all the lights on. I will remember him
planting tomatoes with my grandmother every spring. He bought the heaviest cigarettes and the filterless brands. Impersonated everybody to perfect caricature. Was restless but left town only once. I will remember his bedroom door, open when he slept, and a light on in the corner. When we weren't laughing, he was at war with himself, so we laughed a lot.

To this day it's unclear what happened. We're only left with speculation, which is more brutal than facts. My parents live in a circle of hell where they bear the punishment for all the unanswered questions, all the what-ifs, and nothing, no amount of therapy, time, or advice to “move on,” can free them. The sketch of my brother above may suggest that the war with manic depression got the better of him one day, but none of us are so sure.

The morning Rory died, my mother was at Langley's police detachment, where she had started working years ago as a cell matron and quickly moved up in responsibility, soon dispatching 911 calls and now supervising dispatchers in the radio room. She always knew what was going on. You could ask her at any given moment where any of her officers were and why. Without looking at her log, she could tell you. Among her other gifts is foresight. She could anticipate the need for backup and dispatch it before she was asked. At times, she even insisted on such precautions, putting safety ahead of any other priorities. Although she wasn't dispatching anymore, mostly training her younger crew, Ma's desk had a computer screen that showed all incoming emergencies. The morning Rory died, she looked at her screen and
saw a call for assistance. It referred to an unresponsive twenty-one-year-old male. The address was Rory's apartment.

Rory lived at the time with a new girlfriend, a woman I'll call Robin. He'd met Robin only weeks earlier and had separated only weeks before that from Paula, his girlfriend of many years and the mother of their one-year-old son, Gavin. Rory's moods and impulsiveness had driven him away from his young family. He'd voluntarily moved back home with my parents to ensure that Gavin and Paula would have a more stable environment. Rory saw his son every day and never raised his voice or lost patience. It wasn't easy, though. He worked hard not to let his black dog loose on anybody that couldn't understand or forgive him. That included his wee son, whom Rory loved most in the world.

Robin was the sister of my brother Mykol's girlfriend, but we'd never met Robin before. She'd lived for years as a heroin addict, marginal even to her own family. Recently she'd emerged from rehab and had moved back to Langley to live with her sister and Mykol. The idea was to get away from her old life on the streets of Vancouver. Rory took to her immediately. Both were people trying to change themselves, and both were lonely and struggling.

My mother's foresight wasn't limited to her work. “You know, Ror, maybe you and Robin should slow down a bit,” she'd say, among other things. But Rory, unlike the officers Ma dispatched, didn't listen. He was also twenty-one, not a child anymore, and thoroughly bullheaded, like me. He moved in with Robin in typical style. On impulse.

One day Robin received an inexplicable gift: unsupervised access to a Langley doctor's office. Her mother, of all people, handed over the keys. Robin's mother cleaned the office at night, except on this one occasion, when she asked her addicted daughter to cover a shift. Robin, fresh from rehab, would be alone for the night in a room full of drugs and prescription pads.

What she found, while cleaning and without any difficulty, were two bottles of pills the doctor had left in a box under his desk, along with many other loose narcotics. The box of pills had belonged to various patients who'd either passed away or recovered from their illnesses. The extra medications had been returned for proper disposal but had never been disposed of, as required. Robin pocketed one bottle of Valium and one bottle of liquid morphine in capsule form. To say she felt tempted would imply an inner debate I can't say Robin knew how to have with herself. She brought the pills home and showed Rory her luck. Bad idea. She didn't know Rory at all. To know him is to suspect, at the very least, that a morphine score on the part of his new girlfriend was not his idea of hitting the jackpot.

Only Robin knows what happened next. Rory was neither a user nor an addict, yet it was her drugs that killed him. Her numerous statements during the investigation recall a different story every time and are riddled with contradictions. According to the police, that should come as no surprise, even if she had nothing to hide. An addict's first instinct is self-preservation. Honesty is too dangerous in that pursuit. The only fact her statements share is this: when Rory learned
about the drugs, they fought and fought hard. She claims Rory was furious and told her to return the drugs. I've also heard he tried to take them away, to flush them down the toilet. Another statement says he wrestled away some pills and crushed them in a showy rage. Whatever the manner, we know they fought, and at the end of the day, Robin gave Rory two Valium and told him to go to bed. She said the pills would help cool his jets, while she slept on the couch. The autopsy revealed no Valium in his system, though. She'd given him morphine.

The toxicology report showed an amount roughly equivalent to two pills. It was just enough, just marginally enough for his age and body weight, to shut his system down. According to one of Robin's statements, he went to bed angry, and in the morning, he was snoring heavily. She couldn't wake him, so she left him to sleep some more. The next time she tried to wake him, he wasn't breathing right.

So much doesn't make sense and never will. Why would he take the very drugs he was so angry about? One story says he asked for the Valium, another that she put them in his hand and said, “Here, take these.” Did he know what the pills really were? Did she know? Was it a deliberate switch, to get him to try the morphine? Maybe she thought he'd like it and let her keep the pills. Or was it just the most costly mix-up of his life? And then back again: why would he take anything he was that opposed to? Two pills is not a suicide, either. What is it we're left with? Little and nothing. Death. Unreliable accounts and a cruel set of contradictions. We stare into the facts, but nothing takes final shape. Just this sketchiness, just
our inferences, our conjectures, the same way I look at the world and navigate through its smear, hoping the errors won't hurt too much.

Within days of Rory's death, Robin's ex-boyfriend, also a junkie, moved into the apartment. My father and sister arrived one afternoon to gather Rory's things. Robin's boyfriend, flopped out on Rory's couch, was playing my brother's Sega games.

Acquiring knowledge is one way my mother grieves. For years she has wrestled in private with her sadness about my eyesight. But that battle, like any of hers, quickly translated itself into practical action. After my diagnosis, she couldn't help me through the process of going blind. I'd moved out too quickly. Instead, because she needed to help, she immersed herself in all the literature and research. To this day she knows more about the science of my retinas than I do. Occasionally, and cautiously, she updates me about clinical trials I would otherwise ignore. We both know my psyche can't afford to place all hope in the remoteness and bureaucracy of scientific progress. A life is not best built around the idea that maybe the cure is near. But my mother is out there, following it on my behalf. The moment a solid breakthrough blips on the radar, I'll get a call.

That's what she does when one of her family is in trouble. She does everything she can to get some control back for those who seem helpless or lost. Hers is a generous will to power, through knowledge. For years she'd done everything she could to help Rory, too. Nutritionists, psychologists, psychiatrists, physicians, even dance lessons to help Rory
develop a different relationship to his body and nervous energy. Based on what she knew, she developed her own approach. If he was furious and manic about something, Ma would send him downstairs to write her a letter before they'd talk. Writing gave him clarity and tempered his mood beforehand. And what moods they were. I remember when she quietly dispatched my father, like one of her officers, to disconnect the starter in Rory's car, a necessary tactic before she confronted Rory about something he'd done. Ma didn't want her son taking off at fifty miles an hour, past the elementary school, in a pissed-off rage. “If he bolts,” she said, “a run will do him good.”

Of course Ma was out the door, chasing after the 911 call, already sharing blame for something she could never have foreseen or prevented. When she arrived at Rory's apartment, she burst through the bedroom door to find paramedics trying to resuscitate her son. A couple of hours earlier she'd phoned the house, and Robin had said he was sleeping, although it was late. It's been six years, and still Ma will be busy with her rose bushes, or scrubbing the day's forks and knives, then prick with black thought. How close she came to insisting Robin wake Rory up. Maybe the difference of those two hours would have made all the difference. Nobody knows. As if anybody could have seen it coming. If foresight and hindsight had their own eyes in our bodies, my mother would have blinded hers by now. I would help her do it, too, just to give her some peace.

By the time Tracy and I arrived at the hospital, everybody except Auntie Angie had left. Nothing more could be gained
or hoped for there, so my parents and brother and sister had gone home, to our family house, to—to what? To rage, to pace? Do what? Make dinner? Stare at nothing? What do you do inside the vacuum?

Daily I'm accosted by things that hurt: chairs, half-open doors, sandwich boards, even dogs, the ones I sometimes discover with the tip of my cane. Usually accidents are small, but sometimes they're hefty, landing me in a clinic or the emergency ward. Often I go to work looking like a boxer, bruised and mulched by whatever my face hammers. The bodies of the blind grow more and more conditioned. We rebound from the world, suck up the sting, and push ahead. It seems inevitable in our character to carry on, like the Terminators of this world. I defer to the wisdom of the blues. As my friend Harmonica Slim says, when I'm particularly bruised or gashed, “Well, kid, you ain't good looking, but you're hard to kill.”

Maybe that's why, driving home in Angie's car, I promised myself that I could do the same now, carry on for my family. I would take the lead. Let them rest, lose their minds, whatever they needed. I would be one step ahead, thrashing about, clearing the way for them. Arrangements needed to be made: phone calls to family, Rory's friends, Rory's landlord and bank, the coroner. A mountain of pebbles needed moving. Even the tiny but insurmountable stuff had to keep up. Groceries, meals, dishes piling in the sink. Whatever it took, I'd do it or keep things going. But not a tear until I was done. That was the promise I made and kept. It was selfish, too. I needed to know that when my family looked around, they'd
see somebody holding it together. I hoped the image, even the illusion, would be of some comfort.