Happiness of Fish (10 page)

Gerry gathered that something about protein levels, or maybe the
gout medication, caused funny test results. He hoped he'd been diagnosed with a case of excess gravy or lobster. The doctor seemed a bit disappointed, scientifically speaking, that Gerry hadn't been fooling around in Japan. However, he sent him off to the hospital for a DNA test.

Gerry turned up at the hospital lab on a Monday morning and ran into half the people he knew. There seemed to be any number of greying boomers in to be jabbed or scoped or X-rayed.

“Just in for a little blood work,” Gerry said for the fifth or sixth time.

“Me too. My damn cholesterol is through the roof.”

Somebody else complained about the smell of bacon and eggs leaking from the hospital cafeteria into the lab waiting area.

“I've been fasting since suppertime.”

Gerry reflected on what constitutes a fast. He'd only had a cup of black coffee since yesterday's supper.

Eventually he was shown into a little stall and gave a piece of paper to a harried-looking, plump woman in a lab coat and rubber gloves. Did they wear rubber gloves all the time now, or was it just for people suspected of picking up Japanese cell rot in the fleshpots of Tokyo? Gerry felt toxic.

The woman wore a chunky crucifix pendant.

It's a judgement on you, you pervert! he imagined her thinking. Her eyes and lips seemed tight as she whipped a rubber tube around his bicep. Still, she filled a vial of blood with mosquito painlessness and her rubber touch on his wrist was human and comforting.

In the end he had to go back three weeks later and give another sample. It seemed that the wrong sort of container had been used to send his blood away to a lab in Ottawa and they needed a fresh specimen. On another Monday, a cheerful girl with a stud in her nose and a green streak in her hair smiled at him warmly, took another vial and the waiting started again.

While he waited out the tests through the fall, Gerry thought about being nine years old and realizing he was going to die. He'd been home from school, sick, and watching old tear-jerker movies on TV while he lay under a blanket on the couch. He can't remember the name of the movie now, but someone was being brave about dying. It didn't fizz on Gerry at the time, but late that night he awoke, sweating, terrified and
terribly aware that he was going to die. It was not the first he had heard of death. His father's mother had died when he was four.

“Your nana's gone to heaven,” his father had told him early one morning. “She just went to sleep.”

He had accepted that, but never related it to himself. Now the full realization struck.

“It's a bad dream,” his mother said when she heard him crying and came in.

“Nothing to be afraid of,” his tobacco-scented father said and sat on the side of the bed with him, waiting for him to go back to sleep.

Gerry couldn't say what frightened him. He couldn't bring himself to tell anyone. Maybe he was the only one in the world who had realized the awful truth or maybe his parents knew and had been keeping it from him. He couldn't decide which scenario was worse. Eventually the terror tired him enough to sleep.

Like gradually fading echoes, the terror returned at longer and longer intervals through a year or two. Gerry listened to Sunday school portrayals of heaven. Their eternal family reunion had some attraction, but late at night he tried to imagine just not being.

In his “Long Fall,” Gerry woke late at night again. Sweating and scared, he waited to put a face or name on fate. He knew he was afraid of pain. If death was going to hurt, he was afraid of it. He felt guilty too. He was terrified that he'd shared his mystery plague with Vivian. He worked as much as he could, threw himself into putting the boat away for the winter, and watched himself for symptoms, physical or spiritual. He watched himself for a tendency to bargain: Can anybody reasonably say more than ‘This is what I want to happen, but if something else happens, I hope I'm unconscious'?

On weekend mornings, Gerry wandered the fundamentalist fringes of TV, trying to keep himself appalled into disbelief. Duane and Gretchen had just joined a new congregation back then. When Duane called home, he was hot to trot about someone called Pastor Bob Herder.

“He's from home,” Duane told them. “And there's always something going on at his services. There's music and it's all sort of simple and clear. You're with The Lord or you're not. Pastor Bob spells it all out.”

Vivian and Gerry hadn't told the kids that Gerry was waiting out a
test for possible biblical plagues. He wished someone would spell it all out for
him
. Whoever was going to do it, it wasn't going to be Pastor Bob. One day, Gerry found him in a non-prime afternoon spot on the religion channel. He was a bossy-looking, puffy man in a suit, yelling about Jesus. A soft-cover bible splayed out of one hand like a doomed sandwich. Gerry thought he looked like a clothing clerk complaining about a spoiled hamburger. Bookmarks dangled like derelict lettuce. Pastor Bob's auctioneer yelping was muted by the clicker in Gerry's hand, but visually he seemed to pulse towards the screen. He'd radiate little auras of sweat in bursts at the camera. Then he'd recoil behind his pulpit to appreciate the importance of what he'd said.

Gerry watched the congregation with their hands held aloft like roller-coaster riders showing off. To improve the reception, like moving the rabbit ears on an old TV? he wondered. To show you're open to catch the ball? He listened to the commercial-paced pulse of the music. He hated it, but it wasn't just churches like this one, what his parents would have called holy rollers. He found he was getting less and less tolerant of churches, period.

When he was drinking, Gerry had found himself capable of sliding towards a belief in some hypercritical Presbyterian deity with a grudge, particularly towards him. He pictured a giant Ian Paisley on methamphetamines.

Sober, Gerry had found the human edges of his gods blurred and faded. He worried about anthropomorphizing gods. The more he looked at religion, the more he thought of Mickey Mouse and a real mouse. Why was a three-fingered, glove-wearing mouse who behaved like a human the archetype? Mickey was only remarkable as a literary figure, aping people. A real mouse that could pass like vapour through a wall crack or found a dynasty in a nest of rags was surely a truer god.

Without drawing any very definite conclusions, Gerry began to contemplate the infinite and came up with a sort of Mobius strip of reasoning. There might be one god, and everything, real and imagined, was part of it. On the other hand, every thing, real and imagined, might be a god in and of itself. The gods would be like bacteria, omnipresent, simultaneously infinitely weak and strong, a benign presence in your gut or an epidemic wiping you out.

Gerry slid through the last months of “The Longest Fall” in a
growing fatalism. In January, after the lab got their containers right, the DNA testers told him there was nothing wrong with him. He started a new year with a mental Wile E. Coyote
whew
of relief. The falling boulder had missed him. The brakes had grabbed at the edge of the cliff. Still, the fatalism stayed in what he hoped was a kind of positive way. It made Gerry leery of anybody who traded on the fear of death or offered help in transcending it.

“Shouldn't religions just say we're all going to die? We're in good company so get over it.” Gerry and Vivian were talking over coffee one night. “Isn't dying a miracle too?”

“I'm not going to worry about it,” Vivian said. “When you go, you go.” She went to the cupboard and took down a package of Oreo cookies and put them on the table between them. “I knew there was nothing wrong with you,” she repeated her mantra. “I would have known.”

“I didn't know,” Gerry said. “Everything felt sort of unreal for a long time there, like this thing was the reality and everything else was just illusion.”

Time makes you cocky. Sitting in the mall
now
, Gerry recants a bit on what he said
then
. The mortality of then seems less real or maybe mortality is getting less real generally. Maybe the line is blurring. Gerry thinks of the sweaty preacher, shouting in his geometrically pressed suit, verbally trying to re-draw, indelibly, Gerry's line.

Gerry doesn't deal with the line, or Oreo cookies or long falls the next time he writes something for his group, but he does have a go at bringing his George into the more recent past.

Fragment: Mortality at the Mall

There was a piece of the AIDS quilt on display at the mall, under the floating banners of the optimistic puffins. The puffins looked bullet-proof, smug that they don't get AIDS. They just get their heads stuck in the plastic rings off six-packs and strangle or get oiled and freeze. Those are the occupational hazards of the heroic life of a small bird in a big ocean
.

George looked at the quilt, which was made up of squares dedicated to the dead. He found he knew two of the squares, both mourned by families who had embroidered clouds and mushrooms and a smiling pink
and orange cat. Brothers and sisters and a mother did those squares for two men who were a poet and a teacher, respectively. The loves of their lives don't seem to be mentioned, unless they're squares themselves, names that George doesn't recognize
.

A pretty, youngish woman was passing out literature at a folding table. She worked at something or other at the university and George had known her for several years. Still, he did not know what her relationship to the quilt and the people on it might be
.

“It's so sad,” she said. “There are so many.”

Undeniably there was a quilt-full there on display. George thought he recalled having heard that the national quilt was football-field size. He had a First World War vision of emerald soccer pitches full of Flanders Field crosses. Still, he felt vaguely that the dozen or so friends or acquaintances of his who had died, or were dying, of AIDS, didn't nearly match the numbers he'd lost to other life-style martyrdoms, heart attack, gunshots, pills or crossing the street three-parts pissed
.

With a twinge, George realized that, flying in the face of reason, fewer people he knew were dying anymore. There was a time in the early '80s when he seemed to go to a wake every week. He had been drinking then and he hung out with older men with stories to tell. He brought his wife Paula along for them to be courtly to. They told their stories and he sponged them up with the beer, although sometimes the sagas were cut off in mid-cycle. Paula, whose father died when she was fifteen, wept at a number of funerals for men who would have been about his age
.

Somewhere along the line, though, all the older men had gone
.

“You're like the medicine man of a lost tribe,” she told George as he kept scouring empty tables for myths in the beer puddles. Eventually he was starting to act out the sagas himself. At thirty-five or six George was acting very middle-aged. He drank too much too often and steadily in-between
.

“You're the scribe for a civilization that only has a past,” she said, variations on a theme. By that time, she may have been quoting the man she eventually left him for
.

In the Saturday mall, the pretty girl from the university handed out her literature and mourned or quasi-mourned on the shopping centre frontier of mortality. George wondered if, perhaps, she was going through her
wake-a-week period now, as his had slowed. He wondered if that was reason to rejoice. If you hang out with people who do not die, does immortality threaten? George remembered the silly twist of logic they had played with in high school when they talked about deductive reasoning. If you haven't died on any day so far, on the basis of the statistical data, it should be less likely you're ever going to
.

George sat at a Tim Hortons table and prepared a list for the next Saturday supper stir-fry in a potentially eternal series: shrimp, snow peas, broccoli...

Sitting in the Honda on the bald hill over the sea, Gerry feels the buffet of the wind outside the closed windows. He listens to the wind bang at the wire garbage container in a wooden crib that keeps it from flying off this hilltop to Ireland. It's like a boxer warming up on the heavy bag, tentative shots at first, placing the target in space and muscle memory. Then it settles down to a piston-regular hammering.

Gerry has the radio tuned to CBC FM and has his notebook open. Vivian would say he is wasting time. Patricia would have too. If the two of them ever decide to get together and hold a seminar on Gerry, his tendency to go off and do nothing by himself for hours could provide the keynote address.

“Where have you been?” Vivian asks. “How can you just drive around all day?”

“Where did you get to?” Patricia would ask. She'd ask after late nights at the legislative press gallery, or election road trips, or when she came back from visits to her family in Toronto or the summer courses she did: painting for the handicapped, French immersion in Quebec. Eventually, though, she stopped worrying about the answer. She joined
an amateur drama group. They were doing Bolt's,
Man for All Seasons
. She designed the sets and costumes and played a servant. When the play went out of town to the provincial drama festival, she went to bed with the man playing Richard Rich.

Where did you get to? Gerry thinks now.

Whatever the women he has married think, Gerry would deny doing nothing. Today, for example, he's chronicling the toughness of the garbage container in the wind. He's keeping an eye on the sea to make sure it's still there. He comes from a family that took a proprietary view of the universe. It's not that they felt they owned it. The arrangement was more of a long-established stewardship. It strikes Gerry that they should have had esoteric job descriptions like the titles in some Confucian bureaucracy. They should have been “The Comptroller of Fog” or “The Warden of the Sunrise.” He takes a childhood fragment to the writing group.