Mad Hope (3 page)

Brianna opened and closed her eyes rapidly, and swivelled her head around. This was called Taking Snapshots. In this way she didn't have to see it all – the whole world – at once. She was very frightened. There was no climbing down from the pod. When she looked down at the patch of gravelly ground below, she realized what had happened. The pony had succeeded. But where was he now?

‘Tallest free-standing structure in the world,' she said wistfully. It was likely she would be here for a few days, with no food or water, and wild animals pawing at the dirt, their teeth aglow. She didn't mind raccoons so much, but squirrels were dishonest, and there were certain birds whose long beaks made their eyes appear smaller, like cruel glass beads. Maybe she could escape. What was it Alana had said?
You could be anything in the world.
She let go of the bar nearest her and extended one of her arms out, into the atmosphere. It was not so bad. She brought her arm in again, then dangled one leg down, swung it back and forth. But the actual means of escape confounded her; there was too much space between her body and the ground, too much room for disaster.

She felt cold and hungry. She wanted her mother. She wriggled around and felt in her coat pocket. There were some crispy bits of something! Chips? No, old tangerine rinds dried to hard shards. She took them out, sniffed them, then placed them in her mouth experimentally. She would put the moisture back in with her tongue. But it didn't work at all. It was a bit like the sign for the store called the Bay at the mall, with its large, strange symbol that meant B, but looked nothing like a B at all. Why did they have to do that? Make the connections so odd and tattered? She hated the not-B of the Bay with all her heart. She concentrated on this – hating the B – until there was a noise from overhead, flapping and throat-clearing. A crow landed over near the slide. It had come to keep her company. Or to peck at her head. Brianna began to search for her sisters.

There they were – up near the apartment building, talking to a man with a shovel. Alana seemed to be yelling, and the man was bowing his head. Alana was getting the man in trouble! Or maybe the man was saying a prayer. ‘Our father,' said Brianna, ‘who art in heaven, howled be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.' What was it like in heaven? Lime popsicles, Brianna thought. Kind-hearted wolves and old men with moustaches who were gods and angels. A few ladies with big skirts and kittens. All of them floating around howling and humming the songs that were the earth people's lives. And if they stopped humming? Thy will be done. She held tightly to the bars.

Whoopsy-daisy, she thought, and the world wrestled her down.

It was the first time she had woken from an absence by herself, without the wild-eyed faces – of her parents, her sisters, Frances – glistening down at her. She was completely alone, up in the rocket pod, and she had come back. It came as a swift, welcome shock to her that she could do it; she could exist without them.

Down on the ground, the crow was showing off, walking in wide circles around a pile of twigs and dog poo.
Brianna
could hear her mother striding up the street, calling out. She would be rescued soon. She realized she didn't want to be rescued. Brianna, her father once said to her,
you're the kind of girl who Turns on a Dime, aren't you?
She wasn't sure what he meant, but she thought she was doing it now, Turning on a Dime.

All of a sudden something occurred to Brianna: a historical person from a poster at school. She liked the sound of the name; it reminded her of someone old-fashioned, raw-faced and strong, a washerwoman from a fairy tale.

‘Nellie McClung,' she said to the crow, who cocked its head as if irked, ‘the first woman to get the vote.'

Alana

Jordan reached into his backpack and pulled out a bottle of water.

‘Want?' he said, after he'd swigged some.

She nodded, lifted the bottle to her lips and felt traces of his very self slide down her throat as she rinsed her mouth clean. There seemed very little left to do. Still, Jordan picked up her hand, released it onto the bench, then placed his own hand overtop of it.

‘Your hand's so small,' he said.

Alana looked for her hand and could not find it, so she looked out into the evening, which was darkening, the whole sky shuddering with reds. Then she looked for her sisters.

Brianna was still sequestered in the rocket pod, and now she could see her other sister, talking to a man with a shovel, a ­gardener maybe, over near the apartment building. Would it always be like this, the three of them linked like points of light in a lopsided constellation? Susanna was laughing at something the man had said, and he was leaning down to pat her shoulder, like they were in cahoots. That was the last thing Alana needed, for her sister to hook up with some old pervert in a granddad sweater. When they were younger they had played a game called Disappear, designed so that Alana could get some peace. But it was not long before Susanna and Brianna caught on, came blundering in to whatever cocoon Alana had spun for herself, casting off their small squeals and powdery smells, convinced they had won something fantastic. It struck Alana that, of the three of them, she was the only one who truly understood the way things were, and she was overcome by an arrogant upswell of love for her sisters.

Jordan had removed his hand from hers to root around in his knapsack. He hooked a wire and plugged up the ear closest to her, then held up the other earphone by its lead so it swayed in the air between them. ‘Want?' he said again.

‘Sure.' They sat there listening. Traffic surging and surrendering up on the main street, Drake doing his thing, Canada geese honking their way to some sunshiny shore. Alana felt something like happiness, but rougher. She could not be happy; she was alive, with tomorrows prickling up the back of her neck. On the hill, Susanna was still talking to the man with the shovel. She had pulled a notebook from her bag and was showing him something. Jesus,
her homework?
Alana could hear her mother's voice soaring through the twilight.

‘Who's that?' said Jordan, jerking the earphones away. ‘Holy shit. That's not your mother, is it? God, how old
are
you, anyway? She's not coming up here, is she?'

Alana shrugged.
Of course.
But she knew this first call was only a warning; there would be others, there were always others.

‘Fuck, bitch, are you even, like, listening to me?'

Alana stood up on the picnic table to get a better view of Susanna's pervert. He was bending down, gesturing towards something bunched at his feet. It was a bag of dry leaves. No, a sleeping bag made of plastic. He pulled the bag closer to where Susanna was standing. The bag was heavy – there must be rocks or tools inside. Or a body. Then the man tried to show Susanna what was in the bag, and it could be that Susanna
saw
.

‘I'm outta here,' Jordan said, and shouldered his knapsack. And Alana ran. She zipped like a cursor between a row of gleaming parked cars, skirted the apartment building, came up over the crest of the lawn and lunged for Susanna. She pulled her away from the man, down the street towards home. When she was sure they were safe, she stopped and clamped her sister's head hard into her soft tummy, saying, ‘It's okay.' And, ‘You're
okay
.' What Alana meant by this was something akin to what her father told her when she used to regale him with her schoolgirl sorrows and grazed knees, before she started curling her eyelashes and carrying tampons like switchblades in her back pocket. What she meant by this was: Buck Up, Kid. This Is Only the Beginning.

My Friend Taisie

‘IN MY NEXT LIFE
,' I tell Taisie, who is drying a glass pitcher with a tea towel covered in tiny Eiffel Towers, ‘I will come back as a dancer.'

‘Thomas,' she says, ‘you
are
a dancer.'

‘Exactly,' I reply, flexing and pointing one exquisite foot. ‘I am already a dancer.' And I am thinking, that's how good it feels, that's how unlucky you are, all of you who have never danced. It is smug and mean of me to have these thoughts, but it is also the truth, and I believe that the truth, while not always possible to speak, is essential to the evolution of the spirit. Joe always said that if you can't say something out loud, you can say it to your Self and if you are lucky, your Self will listen, head cocked, eyes heavy-lidded and entranced.

Taisie picks up a sticky note from the counter. ‘I have to remind myself of things these days,' she says. The note says,
Register yourself at Sears, 6th floor Help Desk.

Joe used to leave me notes around the house. Like:
What, according to you, is the funniest thing ever?

‘Let's go and get me registered,' Taisie says, turning, one hand tucking a piece of blond hair behind her ear, the other cupped under her hard, distended belly. ‘You get Anton.'

A few things you need to know: 1) Anton is six years old and black. Taisie, who is white, recently single and pregnant, adopted him officially last year after his parents died. Taisie likes having me here because my mother was black. I am a role model. My father was white and a class-A asshole, so I'm not sure what that says for white parents and black children, but this is something I keep to my Self as opposed to sharing with Taisie, who is my friend and should therefore be supported. 2) The problem with Anton is he sees Truth everywhere, and hasn't yet learned how to tell it to his Self in confidence. This truth-telling thing is a problem with most kids who live in housing projects; they don't yet know how the rest of the world tamps down reality with dreams of condo furniture and vacations in Belize. 3) I am here with my friend Taisie in Toronto because Joe is dead. He jumped off the Capilano bridge almost six months ago. They found him in a heap at the bottom, water flowing around and over him like he was just another weird-sized boulder plunked down by God.

I hold Anton's hand on the escalator to the baby department in Sears, the two of us following our reflections in the panels of mirrors as we go up. It is surprising, always, to see myself like this, even though I am accustomed to tracking my likeness in dance studios, assessing and appraising, stalking and chiding my wayward feet, correcting my one drooping shoulder. But here is my static self, moving, but not
movement
, mired instead in the terrain of splendour and surface. It's shocking the way my profile – the high, rounded forehead, the dark, fierce eyebrows and full protruding lips – tails me, less like a shadow than a spy, daring me to smile or to age or to duck suddenly from view.

‘Look,' says Anton, touching his own face in the reflection. ‘I'm on the move, like a motorbike man.' He presses his fingers into the mirror the whole way up.

Taisie leads like the proud prow of a ship, belly first. We follow her to a computerized kiosk whose inset screen asks questions when you touch it.

‘Is this how you register?' I ask, encouraged by the apparent efficiency of the operation.

‘Yes,' she says. ‘Do I want a message to appear on the registry printout?'

‘You mean like
Save the whales?
' I say. ‘Or,
Help, I'm pregnant and my shoelaces are undone?
'

‘No,' she says. ‘Not like that.'

Once joyful and quick to laugh, Taisie is now prone to bouts of humourless intensity when her attention is not flitting like a debutante between topics. It's the hormones, I know, but it can make things a drag or a crapshoot.

‘What does this say?' says Anton, pointing to an onscreen option.

‘
Thank you for your generosity
,' says Taisie. ‘You're right, that's a good one.'

The machine stutters out a printed page with instructions and a password.

‘Are we done here,' I say. I sound like a police officer or a patriarch and for some reason this pleases me.

‘No,' says Taisie, patient in an angry way. ‘Now we choose. But first we need to go to that counter and get a registry gun.' She points in the direction of a large sign that reads,
One Day Clearance Now Extended
, and embarks on her mission with the kind of determination only the very pregnant can muster.

If Anton is at all alarmed by this, he does not say. He takes my hand again and we set off after her.

The woman behind the counter is interested in names. ‘If it's a girl?' she says.

‘It's a boy,' says Taisie. ‘We already know.'

‘You can never know,' says the woman at the Help Desk. ‘You can never know for sure. My nieces are Celine and Connie, pretty names and original. You can almost be certain they'll be famous when they grow up.'

‘Yes,' says Taisie. ‘But you can never know for sure. Where do I get my gun?'

The woman frowns and points, then busies herself cleaning out a small plastic receptacle used for receipts. Under the receptacle is a stack of shiny magazines with pictures of smiling, sordid people. She is obviously dazzled by creepy celebrity, this Help Desk woman, but she has a point. For example, my Joe was the kind of guy you were glad they named Joe. It's a short, friendly sort of name, simple, with no awkward dangling bits. It has a kind of happiness and stability built in. You don't expect a person like Joe to die because there's no particular reason for it. Other people you can imagine it, although you might not wish it on them: the piano teetering on the balcony before sailing in cinema slo-mo down onto Sarah's unwitting form, or the ice working its way free from the overhang to deal its glancing sidelong blow to Luke – someone tall with a shaved head. The cancer nosing its diligent, mutant way through Alison, with its inception … where? They never really know, do they, and when they know, they still shake their heads or slap their notebooks shut and sit there close-mouthed and wide-eyed. Or the plane that panics mid-air: a banana up the exhaust pipe or a disgruntled man to blame. The man is unhappy because someone he knows, perhaps someone named Joe, has died, or been made president, chief, prime minister, leader of the pack. Or not been made president, chief, prime minister, leader of the pack. He's upset, so he brings a bomb, or snips a wire, or points a gun at the pilot's temple.

And then all those people in the plane's belly have a moment, or three, or maybe even a whole half-hour, just to weigh things up. And I imagine it's a bit like those times when you look up in the middle of an exam, in the midst of all those pens scratching furiously, everyone so intent on Lear's crappy decision or how to deal with the remainder in the long-division question, or the nature of a world where so many men feel the need to point their guns at pilots' temples, and you wonder, unhurriedly, what brought you to this particular moment in your life. And maybe you ask yourself why your name is Aline and not Oxana or why you were born human and not, say, salamander. Joe shouldn't be dead because his name's Joe, and he was a soft walker was Joe, a soft, soft walker.

Anton tugs at my hand.

‘Look, Anton,' I say. ‘I think that's the stroller with the ejectable seat.'

He eyes me warily. I do a little merengue move to mollify him. ‘Let's go check it out,' I say. ‘Please.'

He drops my hand, but saunters his way towards the display. ‘We'll be over there,' I say to Taisie.

‘Okay,' she says, with some small hate in her voice. ‘But I'll need you later to pick out outfits.'

‘I am nothing,' I say to Anton, as we clip and unclip various stroller accoutrements, ‘if not good at picking out outfits.'

‘Okay,' he says. ‘I'm gonna sit in one.'

‘I think you're too big, honey,' I say.

‘I am not too big,' says Anton, climbing gracelessly into a ­jogging contraption
on sale
for
one thousand dollars
. He perches himself on the seat and initiates a quite passable shimmy in the hopes of getting his bum to fit. ‘I'm a baby,' he says, clenching his teeth, still wiggling.

‘You're not,' I say. ‘You're a little man.'

‘I'm a baby,' Anton says. ‘You need to know that I am a baby.'

‘Anton,' I say, detesting myself for the low, measured voice I have adopted, for the parent who possesses me. ‘You are going to hurt yourself, and probably me, and break that ridiculous
chariot
, and I will have to give up dancing and get a day job with medical insurance in order to pay for the painkillers and the department store will never, ever let us shop here again.'

He looks nonplussed and somewhat regal, silent and oversized.

‘Or ride the escalators,' I add.

‘Okay,' he whispers. ‘But I'm still a baby.' He rolls defiantly out of the stroller.

We find Taisie staring at a shelf full of pastel-hued receiving blankets, shaking her head. She turns to us, exhausted, panic playing across her face. ‘I can't decide,' she says.

‘That one,' says Anton, pointing to a green and yellow package called Blankies.

‘Yes,' I say. ‘Blankies.'

‘Okay,' says Taisie. ‘I need to use my gun.' She waves the contraption at the price tag, but nothing happens. ‘Stupid gun,' she says, shaking it.

‘Stop calling it a gun,' I say. ‘It's a wand.'

‘I think it's a gun,' she says, examining it. ‘I think they call it a gun. Here, you try.'

I take the wand from Taisie and aim it carefully at the bar code. The end of the wand flashes red like a dragon's eye and bleeps.

‘Magic,' I say to Anton. ‘Sears-style. Where's Taisie?'

Taisie is examining a shelf full of baby bottles and breast pumps.

‘I cannot believe there are no glass bottles,' she says.

‘Aren't they too heavy?' I ask.

'Yes, but no. I mean, they are but plastic is very dangerous. It can lead to cancer and developmental delays and birth defects. There's a hormone that leeches out into the liquid. Very bad news.' She reaches for a box, reads the back, then shakes her head. ‘Plastic is bad. Bad plastic.' She slams the box back down on the shelf and waddles purposefully over to the Help Desk.

I look at Anton. He looks back at me in a way that suggests he knows what I am thinking:
Plastics don't kill people, people kill people
.

On the way home Anton falls asleep in the car, propped up against an overturned, second-hand bassinet.

‘Maybe we need a pet,' says Taisie, changing lanes. ‘Now that we're like a family. A dog?'

‘Fish, maybe,' I say. ‘It's good to start small. We had two fish when I was little. Names: Rhubarb and Custard.'

‘Why?'

‘We had no idea at the time – just heard the names on a British
TV
program and thought they sounded exotic. But our cat ­understood.'

‘What? Oh.'

We are stopped at a light, two lanes of traffic to either side, parking lots and scraggly trees beyond them. It's funny: when I am in the west of this country, I miss the east, or the centre-south-east, I guess I should say, in deference to Maritimers, who are tetchy when it comes to geography although magnanimous in almost every other respect. Then once I'm back in Toronto I feel sort of sad and full, like I've just eaten too much dinner I didn't deserve. It's the simplicity of this landscape, the comforting stodginess of ill-used space on the fringe of the city. In the fall especially, it feels like home; too chilly to walk to the mall and who would want to anyway? Joe. Joe would want to.

‘Did you bury them?' Taisie taps my leg.

‘What?' I say. ‘You don't bury fish.'

‘I don't want a pet,' says Anton from the back seat. ‘Please don't buy a pet.'

I turn around to check on him. ‘You okay, buddy?'

‘I don't want a pet,' he says.

‘Let's have pizza tonight, eh, boys?' Taisie says brightly. And to me, whispering, ‘With hot peppers. They say spicy food and sex.'

‘Spicy food and sex what?' I say, frightened.

‘Hurry things up,' she says, rubbing her genie-bottle belly. ‘Don't worry, I know. This much
T&A
must be like total reverse-sexy for you. Just the hot peppers.'

‘Green or red?' I say.

‘Red,' says Anton from the back. ‘I like red.'

On the day of the shower, Taisie puts me in charge of baking miniature frozen quiches and lets Anton vacuum the living room even though the machine keeps sucking up coins and bobby pins and other clanky things even the most technologically advanced Hoover is not designed to digest. I stop her as she dashes by me with a tray of crustless sandwiches.

‘Mmm, I love these,' I say, grabbing an egg salad on white from the edge. I observe as she rearranges the remaining sandwiches to close the gap. ‘Are you nervous?' I say.