Heroes (11 page)

“So it's agreed then that Kant's entire theory of the Categorical Imperative — his whole system of ethics, in other words — can be clearly and indubitably attributed to the fact that he never got his rocks off.”

“Okay,” Bayle said.

“Right, then. So. On to less abstruse, but no-less-significant matters. Married?”

“No.”

“Alternative lifestyle?”

“No.”

“Girlfriend?

“Yes.”

“Ah ha. Name?”

“Jane.”

“Jane. Hmmm. Dark and solemn, or fair and winsome?”

“A little of both.”

“Dark and winsome?”

“The other one.”

“I see.”

A short break in the exchange while more drinks are ordered and served and Warren explicates his understanding of Plato's theory of love as contained in
The Symposium
and Bayle once again agrees without qualification to whatever Warren says. (Bayle, when soused, believing that talking about sensation-hating Plato when one was good and loaded was only slightly less obscene than arguing about the existence of God when a beautiful woman was in the room.)

Bayle was:

(a) a crude materialist with a longing for subtler notions;

(b) simply drunk;

(c) all of the above.

“Politics?” Warren continued.

“None.”

“Religion?”

“None.”

“Hobbies?”

“Nope.”

“How fascinating. Breast fed, by any chance?”

“You mean recently, or as a baby?”

“Your call.”

“No.”

“No to which?”

“No,” Bayle said.

“I see. Right, then. Mother and father both still alive?”

“Just mother.”

“Brothers or sisters?”

Bayle didn't answer.

On the television, the redhead in the Supergirl costume pins, and then bites on the forearm and refuses to be detached from, the stocky woman in the Daniel Boone coonskin hat, cheekless leather chaps, and pink thong. The bartender asks, “Another round for you and slugger here, Rev?” and a vodka on the rocks and Jack Daniels arrive though both are, at the moment, not yet needed.

“To repeat,” Warren said. “Brothers or sisters?”

Bayle didn't answer.

Warren finished his drink. “Don't worry, you always get a second chance with all the really important questions.”

Bayle looked up from his own drink. “Really?”

“Maybe. I don't know. I just made that up.”

A little before eleven Bayle suggested they cut out for somewhere else, having remembered Davidson saying that was when he usually dropped by Larry's. Bayle felt a little guilty for having turned down cold the old man's afternoon invitation for a drink later at the bar and then showing up there just a few hours later. “Any other places around here worth checking out?” Bayle said.

“No need,” Warren said. “Ample refreshments back at my
place. Vehicle's in the lot out back. Just let me settle up my tab with Jake, what?”

Paying Warren as little notice as he did anyone else in the bar, Jake, the bartender, presented Warren with a white slip of paper which Warren only perfunctorily scanned over before hastily initialling and handing back. Warren turned to Bayle beside him at the bar. “Are we off, then?” he said.

But in the three or four minutes it took them to leave the air-conditioned bar and make their way through the parking lot's maze of mostly pickups red, white, and blue and reach Warren's red Ford Ranger, they both decided it was pretty late and to call it an evening and promised to get together again before Bayle left town the next week. Warren sat inside his truck but didn't turn on the ignition, both hands hanging loose over the wheel, staring straight ahead at Kellog Avenue and the blue neon of the Bunton Grocery store across the road. Bayle stood beside Warren's driver's side window.

“Bake sale at nine a.m. for the Christian Women for the Restoration of Capital Punishment Fund,” Warren said. “Counselling at eleven.” Bayle didn't know whether to say he was sorry or simulate some sort of interest. Instead, he watched with Warren the traffic on Kellog roll by through the evening muck of warm black damp.

“It wouldn't be so bad, you know — the counselling, I mean,” Warren volunteered. “It's just that... I mean, everybody carries around their own pain, God knows I know that. And talking about it can sometimes help, I know that too. It's just that, well, it's just that's it's, well ...
so fucking boring.
I mean, if there was something I could really sink my teeth into, just one person I could really reach, one person I could really help ....”

Whoosh,
a passing automobile on Kellog. The air conditioner sticking out of the side of the cinder block cement wall of Larry's hummed and dripped. The “B” in the Bunton Grocery sign across the street flickered and buzzed. As if with reluctance, Warren started up the truck, put it into gear, and slowly backed out of his parking space. He stuck his head out the window.

“I say, Peter,” he said. “Kept meaning to ask you all night: What's all this slugger business Jake referred to?”

For a second or two Bayle honestly didn't know what Warren was talking about. Then, remembering the evening before with Davidson, “Oh, that,” he said. “Just had too much to drink and took a swing at some guy when I was here with Harry last time.”

“Because?”

“Because?”

“Because why?” Warren said, head still hanging out.

“Nothing. Because nothing. Hey, listen, I'll give you a call before I ship out back north, okay?” Warren waved goodbye and left Bayle to the short walk back to The Range he said he needed to clear his head.

Walking alone through the dark, unfamiliar streets, Bayle wondered about nothing. Wondered about nothing all the way home.

A
WEEK
after Bayle and Patty had gone downtown together to the library they never made it to, Bayle's mother called him up wanting to know what had happened. Bayle thought she was talking about Patty and him staying out all night and Patty not coming home until the next day, so he reminded her that they'd called to say she was staying over at his place and not to worry.

“I know that, Peter,” his mother said. “I'm the one you woke up at two in the morning and told, remember? But what
happened?”

“Nothing.”

“Something
happened.”

“What do you mean? Nothing happened,” Bayle said, moving the cursor up a paragraph on his computer screen. He was basically done his final paper for his seminar and just needed to go over it one more time before presenting it tomorrow morning at nine.

“All I know is that maybe she wasn't one hundred percent herself before then, but since that night with you she's ...
it's like she's not there,
Peter. And she won't see me. She won't. She must go to the bathroom when I'm in bed asleep because I swear I haven't... I haven't seen my baby girl in ....”

Bayle's mother lectured, cajoled, harangued, hectored, and told-you-so'd, but she didn't cry. Bayle's mother did not cry. That just wasn't something she did. It was one of the things Bayle had always liked about her.

“Look, I've got to go,” Bayle said. “Patty's going to be fine. I'll come out and see her soon.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“When, Peter? There's something's wrong with her, something's —”

“I've got to go. I'll come as soon as I get this essay I'm working on done.”

“Something's wrong with your sister, Peter.”

“Quit saying that. I've got to go.”

“Come and see her, Peter.”

“I'll come as soon as I can.”

Bayle's nine o'clock seminar the next day came and went with him being granted a twenty-four hour extension. Upon re-reading his paper after he'd gotten off the phone with his mother the night before, the section on Hume had seemed to him a little confused. He spent the next thirteen hours in the Robarts cafeteria drinking bad coffee and reading and making
notes on Hume's
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion,
and then another eight more at home drafting pages of new material he eventually decided not to use. He finally made it to Etobicoke two days after his mother's phonecall, but Patty wouldn't let him in her room to see her.

Bayle came into the kitchen, a cold pot of tea sitting on the table in front of his mother. He sat down.

“Well?” she said.

“She told me to go away,” Bayle answered.

“I told you. She won't see anyone,” his mother said. “She's been like this for over a week now.” Looking up at Bayle, “Peter, I don't ....” The choke in her throat cut her off. For the second time in three days Bayle's mother was on the brink of doing what she didn't do.

Bayle got up from the table and stormed down the hallway, pounded on Patty's bedroom door.

“Cut this shit out, Patty, and open up the damn door.”

Patty didn't answer and the door didn't open so Bayle pounded again, harder and louder. His mother came down the hall to see what was going on.

“Go back in the kitchen!” Bayle yelled.

His mother put her hand to her mouth and suddenly looked every one of her fifty-nine years. “Peter, what's —”

“Oh, just go back,” a weary voice, Patty's, managed from behind the still-closed bedroom door.

Bayle put his arm around his mother's waist and walked her back down the hall to the kitchen. He poured her a cup of tea and kissed her on the top of her head.

Back at Patty's door he could hear the lock in the bedroom door turning. He waited for it to open and Patty to let him inside. And the door did open. But Patty stood in the doorway with arms folded across her chest in her housecoat, bare feet, and with hair so dirty it positively gleamed in the light of the hallway. Bayle's scalp itched just looking at it.

Forcing a smile, and as cavalier as he could, “So what's with the hibernation act, sis?” he said. “You've got your
seasons mixed up, you know. Winter is for sleeping. Summer is for going boy crazy and hanging out at the mall all day.”

“Do you want something, Peter?”

“As a matter of fact, yeah, I do. I want to sit down. I come all the way out here to deepest, darkest suburbia and you don't even offer me a seat on your messy floor.”

Patty blocked his way into the room.

“Go sit in the livingroom,” she said. She went to shut the door but Bayle stopped it with his hand.

“Let go of my door,” she said.

“Not until you tell me what's going on,” Bayle said.

“Nothing's going on.
One hundred percent absolutely fucking nothings going on.”

“Don't tell me that, something's going —”

“What's going on is I'm trying to shut my door!”

She threw herself against the door and Bayle didn't resist, door slamming shut in his face. He heard the lock snap back into place.

Bayle stared overhead at a long ugly scar of a crack in the plaster ceiling. He knew that the plaster was white, but the hall light gave the entire corridor a jaundiced yellow glow. He knew she was on the other side of the door listening.

He rested his head right against the wood. Softly, “Have you had a chance to do any painting yet?” he said. “God knows you bought enough stuff that morning to keep you in paint, varsol, and brushes for the next ten years.” Bayle knew she was listening. “Don't forget: you promised to let me have the first self-portrait.”

He waited for an answer that didn't come and walked back to the kitchen. Flicked off the hall light when he'd reached the carpeted end.

His mother looked up from her cup of tea.

“Nothing,” Bayle said.

The two of them sat at the table staring off in their separate directions.

Finally, “Has she been painting?” Bayle said. “I mean, I
know she hasn't come out of her room to do it, but have you smelt any paint fumes or anything like that?”

“Patty's never painted,” his mother said.

“I know,” Bayle answered, before going on to describe to her the early morning shopping spree at Picasso's on Spadina the week before and Patty's sudden enthusiasm for all things artistic. Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Helen Frankenthaler: all names Bayle had never heard Patty mention before, and the closing of the subway doors at St. George the only thing that had finally managed to shut her up.

“Now it makes sense,” his mother said. Bayle looked up from his hands.

“It was last Monday,” she said. “The afternoon after Patty stayed over at your place. She finally came through the door a little after one and sat herself right down at the table and got out a bowl and spoon and the container of milk and ate nearly an entire box of Corn Flakes. When I asked her where she'd been — because when you'd called you said she was coming home early the next morning — she said she fell asleep on the subway and when the subway man woke her up at the Kennedy station it turned out she'd been riding the car back and forth for close to an hour. Well, naturally I was upset. And when I told her that that was a good way for a young woman to get herself violated, she said she already had. She said that while she'd been sleeping someone had stolen all the parcels she'd bought downtown that morning with you. When I asked her what had been in them, what had gotten stolen, she just keep on eating her cereal. But after she was all done eating and had put away the milk and cereal and had washed and dried her bowl and spoon, just before she went to her room — the last time I've seen her since then, now that I think of it — she said, Well, it looks like nobody is going to be doing any self-portraits around this house after all.'”

T
OLD NOT
to think of a pink elephant, one thinks of a pink elephant, the stronger the insistence not to, the larger and pinker the animal imagined.