Stanley Park (21 page)

He might have stopped there. Not many parents (or godparents) are prepared to think of a heart attack as being a
risk at this age. But arterial inflammation followed. There was a coronary aneurysm with blood clotting. His heart stopped at about 9:30 p.m. while Jeremy and Olli were sitting together with him. Margaret was in the hospital chapel crying.

Trout disappeared into intensive care in a frenzy of clinicians. They formed a valence ring of icy professional intensity around the stainless steel gurney as it careered down the centre of the hallway. Nurses and patients jumping to clear a path.

Olli ran off to find Margaret, his hair standing straight up on one side. He’d been napping when the monitor lines went abruptly flat.

Jeremy went back into the empty hospital room. Stunned. He remembered sitting back down heavily in his chair. His face dropping into his hands.

It was a prayer, he supposed in retrospect, though it had just two words. His face hit the palms of his hand, found that comfortable personal place that permits pressure on the eyeballs and the sealing off of all light. And he said aloud, muffled, hot on his hands: “Oh, God.…”

“Hello,” Jeremy said when he got to the top of the spiral staircase. Trout was sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor of the first loft. His newly painted dollar was lying on the floor next to him, and Jeremy could see past him into Olli and Margaret’s bedroom area. There was the sleigh bed.

“Howdy,” said Trout, not looking up. He was pumping the keys of a Game Boy, using body English to influence the movement of his onscreen character. Jeremy sat down cross-legged on the floor across from him and put his glass on the hardwood.

“Christ.” Trout let the Game Boy flop to his side.

“Hey, language.”

“They’re all dead,” Trout said with a frown, checking the screen again. “Nowhere near the high score.”

“Let me try.” Jeremy took the hand-held computer game.

The game consisted of a burning building on the right-hand side of the screen, and two fireman with a catch mat between them, who moved across the remainder of the screen. When the game began, little babies in diapers were thrown from the various windows up the side of the building. You manipulated the firemen to run back and forth across the playing area and catch them. A dropped baby produced a tiny bleat, the same sound you’d get from stepping on a squeeze-toy.

Jeremy looked up at Trout before beginning. “Your dad gave you this?”

Trout nodded.

“OK,” he said, launching the game.

It was harder than it looked. While Jeremy scuttled his firemen back and forth across the screen, babies vaulted out the windows of the burning building, falling in their different arcs towards the pavement. He caught one in three at the very most, and within fifteen seconds the screen faded to black to signal his failure. Trout was laughing at his elbow, holding his arm and squealing.

“Is that funny?”

“Yup,” Trout answered. And then, no doubt parroting Margaret, he added: “Although macabre.”

Jeremy put the game aside. Trout still held his arm, but grew thoughtful. “Peggy says I can’t play soccer this year,” he said finally, dealing with something that had apparently been on his mind.

“You’d better not call her that,” Jeremy said, lowering his voice. Impulsively, he got up and went over to the loft rail. Leaned far over and looked down at her. She was finished trussing the quails.

“How you doing down there?”

She leaned her head back and looked straight up at him. She smiled. “Fine. You?”

He made a face.
Not bad
.

Trout had gathered up the game by the time Jeremy turned around.

“I can’t play soccer because I have a damaged heart,” Trout said. “When I was little, I got sick with a sickness and part of it made a small damage in my heart. Mom says I can’t feel it but I still have it there.” He put his index finger in the middle of his chest to show Jeremy where.

“Right,” Jeremy said. It made him think of how the imprint of the sick kid made Trout who he was. There was a quiet mystery learned in hospitals, impressed by rough, dry sheets, chrome bars, random pains and intravenous needle bruises. Picked up from the vibration of inarticulate prayer, who could know? Jeremy found himself, on occasions like this one, thinking of Trout as
wise
. Wiser than an adult.

“You’re my godfather,” Trout announced.

“I am indeed.”

“You were there.”

Jeremy nodded slowly. “I was there. But you’re here now, so we made it.” He stuck out a hand, which Trout shook.

“I feel it sometimes,” Trout said. “Like a wobble in my heart.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Why, do you have a damage in your heart?”

“Oh, well.…” Jeremy stalled on the question. “No, not seriously.”

“Does it ever beat funny?”

You had to watch what you said with Trout. It was a bit like being interrogated. He quietly pressed, and before you realized it he was getting somewhere.

“Not any more,” Jeremy said. “We should go downstairs.”

“I think I remember it. When I was little and I got sick.”

“You were very little. People don’t remember things from when they’re that little.”

“I do. I remember things.”

Jeremy frowned. Did you encourage this line of fantasy
by asking questions? There were undoubtedly books on the subject, cookbooks for child rearing.

Trout was looking at him evenly, appraisingly. Then, like an adult might if they thought they were boring you or confusing you with a certain conversational angle, he changed the subject. “I’ll show you something in my room,” he suggested.

He led the way, clutching his game in one hand and his painted dollar in the other. Jeremy followed him up the narrow side-stairs to the second loft at the rear of the building, glass in hand, wondering when Benny would get there.

It was a tall, square room at the top and back of the building, where the huge freight elevator had once been. This structure had been incorporated into the warehouse conversion, with each suite in the building getting a slice of the elevator shaft, the outside wall of which was then replaced with a large, paned window. Since the top of the shaft had housed the elevator winch and motor, the penthouse had a taller, even more dramatic room, below which Vancouver’s False Creek stretched out at your feet. The room was dark now. Trout walked to a spot on the wall and pulled a heavy switch that brought on three lamps hanging on cords from the twenty-foot, iron-beamed ceiling.

Jeremy took in the familiar sight from the doorway. The metal walls, planked halfway up. Trout’s bunk bed against the left wall. His overflowing toy shelves against the right. Strewn between, across a huge Amish rope rug that covered the polished concrete floor, a drifting chaos of toys and games, childhood equipment across a truly impressive range. Toy cars, a train set, board games, a basketball hoop, an arsenal of Nerf guns, floor-hockey sticks, a soccer ball, monkey bars built into one wall, bubble hockey, foosball, super-destructo dudes of an impossibly wide variety. Plus the tools and the output of Trout’s artistic project: watercolours and brushes, an easel, smocks and clean-up clothes, dollar bills strewn through the room randomly. Dropped where they had been finished.

The fourth wall was the window, which started at a low sill and stretched in foot-square panes up to just below the ceiling. Here was Trout’s small desk and chair, set up in front of the glass. Empty but for a pad of paper.

Jeremy shook his head. When visiting Trout’s domain, he often found himself wondering if the room in total spoke more to the indulgent inclination of parents at this particular point in history, or the scattered, broadband enthusiasms of their children. Both, doubtless. Olli would buy the toys, not Margaret. Trout would play with them in short bursts, curious as to what they had to offer before laying them aside. He would paint when in the mood, and then, for some portion of the day, Jeremy imagined, the boy would drift on his own thoughts in front of the window.

Trout was pulling the soccer ball out of a rubble of Lego. “Jeremy,” he called out sharply, snapping Jeremy from his thoughts.

Part of the room against the left wall had been cleared of toys.

“You play goal,” Trout instructed, dribbling the ball inexpertly between his feet. Jeremy saw that a goal had been paced off against the wall, with the bed and a stack of books serving as posts.

“Trout,” Jeremy said, remembering what he had been told about Margaret’s take on soccer. Physical exertion was obviously still a concern.

“Go on,” Trout said, waving his hand towards the goal. “Chicken.”

“Hey! Me, chicken?”

“I think so.”

“Just one shot. Don’t run around. Just shoot the ball.”

“I don’t need to run around.”

“And just one shot, right?” Jeremy reminded him.

“I don’t need more than one shot either.”

Jeremy put his drink down next to the door and moved
across into the goal mouth. When he was standing roughly equidistant from the bed and the stack of books, he turned around to face the boy. Trout was regarding him seriously, motionless, some feet back from the black and white ball.

“All right,” Jeremy said.

Trout didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes from Jeremy’s. Like he’s trying to hypnotize me, thought Jeremy. Like he’s trying to read my mind and guess which way I’m going to move.

“Are you really ready for this?” Trout said.

There were another few seconds of silence during which his godson continued to hold him, locked in a stare. It brought to mind not the psychological battle between goalie and penalty-kicker, but the sense he had known once before of having been selected. Acquired. Trout had turned his head in the womb and regarded him much as he did now, with some kind of steady certainty and knowing.

“Come on, shoot,” Jeremy said. “Chicken.”

Jeremy didn’t play soccer, but he had to guess that the shot Trout then unleashed was somewhere near the top of the power bell-curve for shooters between three and four feet in height. Trout took a two-step run up and fired, his leg making a compact arc. His instep struck the ball squarely. The ball rocketed towards Jeremy. It might have taken half a second in total, but as he raised his arms to catch it (to defend himself, really; it looked like the shot might take his head off) the ball spun sharply to his right, diving down as if guided on wires, and slammed into the plank wall with a dull, resonating boom.

Jeremy hadn’t moved. His hands were still up in front of his face. Trout was now circling the room at a sprint, aping the curious vaunting behaviour of soccer players the world over, arms outstretched in front of himself, gesticulating to an invisible crowd, ululating.

“All right, all right,” Jeremy said. He was unreasonably winded.

“You have to move one way or the other,” Trout said when he stopped running. Not winded. “Right or left. You can’t just stand there.”

“Oh yeah?” Jeremy said.

“Well, the other guy won’t shoot straight at you. That would be dumb.”

He had a point. Jeremy retrieved his drink and they went downstairs.

The quails were good, Jeremy thought, although he ate methodically. Not thinking about the food very much at all until he was finished and he remembered to compliment Margaret.

“Excellent,” he said, nodding at his plate. She could handle herself fine in the kitchen, although Olli was a little slow to remove the plates after eating. It was something Jeremy drilled into everyone who worked for him:
Remove the remains
. He believed what Claude had once told him: “The finished meal produces a period of natural reflection: Am I full or am I still empty? All this carnage, this evidence that we have tried to fill ourselves, all of it complicates our reflection.”

Jeremy was reflecting. Fortunately, Benny and Margaret were hitting it off, and Olli was distracted. By Redmond, Jeremy thought when he caught his friend eyeing the wine bottle.

The conversation swung to Trout in due course, just after he had been sent to bed. About a new school he was attending. About his illness. Margaret explained Kawasaki’s to Benny.

“Systemic inflammatory mucocutaneous lymph-node syndrome,” she said. “In most cases it passes entirely after a single acute phase. In some it lingers, a persistent chance of recurrence.”

“Tell her,” Olli said, chiding.

“One and a quarter percent chance of recurrence,” Margaret said. “That happens to be the number. After six years, the probability drops slightly.”

Across the table from Jeremy, Benny shook her head and made a sympathetic face at Margaret.

“What about a warning if it’s about to recur?” Jeremy asked.

“None. If it happens, it happens,” Olli said, and he picked a piece of radicchio from his plate. “He turned about this colour the first time—I really don’t want to go through that again.”

“Does he remember it, do you think?” Benny said.

Jeremy lifted his head from the remains, which continued to complicate his reflection.

“He thinks that he does,” he said, looking at Benny, then Margaret. “He told me.”

Olli got up to clear plates. “We circumcized him too. I hope he doesn’t remember that or things are going to get complicated between him and me.”