The Adjustment League (15 page)

“Goo goo ga ga. Moo goo guy pan.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means how scintillating a conversationalist were you your first three years?”

“Three…?”

“Of your life. Let me guess. For the first nine months you had as much to say as a tapeworm. And behaved pretty much like one, a barely moving parasite sucking the host dry. And then you spent a year shitting yourself and howling when you wanted food or felt the slightest discomfort. And then learned a few monosyllables so you could command more accurately and babble bad imitations of human speech.”

“That's a pretty cruel parody of human infancy.”

“Is it? We begin as bedridden invalids requiring total care. Don't you think a lot of people stuck in a room with this gibbering thing might want to stick a gun in their mouth?”

“You're the one who's babbling.”

I am a bit. No question. But not as much as Sandor thinks. Adjustment radar is taking me somewhere, sensing what I need to find so I can blunder towards it.

“I knew my mother,” he says. “Even as a child, I knew her.”

“Did you? Knew her dreams and hopes? Her secret history?”

“Not as I came to later. But yes. She was always a person to me.”

“You must've been a prodigy then. Most infants know a tit and a diaper changer. If those vanish, they won't lose any sleep, as long as the milk and fresh linen keep coming.”

“You've got a dark view of things. An ugly view.”

“It's been said. Many times.”

“Look. There's no need to get all inhuman about this. We're not talking about abstractions, and we're not talking about infants. Every person—every adult person—needs to be recognized. Known for who they are. Or do you want to tear that down too?”

I don't. Or I do, but only because it makes me see things—a little storm of pictures, like a paperweight blizzard—I can't stand to see.

“You're walking with a friend,” I say. Channelling a philosophy TA I recall with sudden vividness, a bright figment from my nine weeks as an undergraduate. He liked to launch his thought experiments abruptly, though he marred the effect by smirking, a mistake I don't repeat. “Someone close to you, an intimate, who suddenly loses consciousness. Falls down from a stroke and just lies there. Not responding. Eyes rolled back, tongue lolling. Do you walk away because they're no longer aware of precious you?”

“Of course not. You're being silly again.”

“Am I? You'll help someone in a coma if they get there suddenly. But your mom entered a coma gradually, over years. And there you draw the line.”

The black eyes, and the thing that rises in them. Not anger so much as knowledge he absolutely can't accept, can't let close or look at even momentarily.

“No, I draw the line here. At talking to you anymore. That was my mistake.”

I stand up. Stay with fingertips grazing the table until his eyes come up from his empties.

“It was, you know. For once we're in perfect agreement.”

§

All the Kims mobilized for my departure. Ella looking past me at poor Sandor. Father off his stool, cards set aside for his sorrows-of-the-world face, fingers lightly curled, like he might have to dial up an early lesson and knock me on my ass. Mother out in front of the bar, between me and the door, reminding me of a promise not kept.

Back at the table, I extend my hand.

“What's this?” Sandor says.

“I promised we'd end amicably.”

He shrugs, reaches across.

“Not like you're grabbing Ella's ass. I want to feel it.”

He clamps down hard, I feel plenty, then tries to withdraw his hand. I hang on to it. He's strong all right. Shoulder. Chest. A lot of weight.

“That's enough now. We're done. I'm not playing—”

“Shut up and squeeze. Give it to me. And listen.”

He does. The thing in his eyes comes up, actually swirls at the surface, rippling the black, and he crushes my hand in his, putting everything he's got behind it. Two, three seconds. Then we both hear it. Muffled pops, like sticks snapping in a wet sack. Not loud, but making it over the TV and voices in the front room. He drops my hand. “The hell was that?”

“My little finger. Maybe the one next to it too. You
are
strong, you know. Though they're pretty primed.”

“You fucking lunatic.” Slurring finally, drunk all at once as the reservoir floods his brain.

“Right. That's something to keep in mind. Along with this: Did you see my face, what it did?”

“I'm not blind. I didn't see a fucking thing.”

“That's the other thing you need to remember.”

Heading out, I sneak a peek at the hand. The fingers straight and normally aligned. I'll pop the baby one back to skew as soon as I get home, maybe tape its neighbour. The kitchen counter edge the usual popping station. Start the heat-ice cycle. A costly demonstration. Stupid probably, though it took shape faster than thought.

The old battle-axe has left with one of the boys, her first night's sacrifice. The six that remain, three on a side, are talking in low voices, subdued by his departure and the start of their short lives' ceremony. Above them, the hockey players have hit the showers and the Big Man is spinning slowly under splintered light, a pale sweating mass, maudlin as a hog's head scalded and oiled to hang swaying above the parsley. Headline margined by Hizzoner:
Mad Monk Rides Again
. “Next time po-lice,” says the lotto-monk as I open the door left-handed.

8

5:30 a.m. Another
complete protein breakfast after another shredded night. Courtesy of another Ugly Dream. Plus coffee. Call it a tie, Stomach versus Mind.

The Ugly Dreams get tedious fast. Such relentless variation within such a narrow range. A robot shuffling an endless pack of snuff pics.

Look closely! Be a miner. Study a rock face long enough and it'll show you its glints—copper, nickel. Aluminum. Iron. Silver, who knows? Whatever it's got. Fool's gold even.

Strange, how Lois's voice lives on in my head. Saying things she never said or could have, since they apply to circumstances I'm living now. Her voice
then
. Who knows what she sounds like now? Maybe her paints and easel are long gone and she lives for home decor, sharing a giggle with Megan as they stretch Daddy's Platinum at Au Lit followed by a sushi lunch. (Megan never got a voice I can hear, though her mouth flies open in what looks like a laugh and she leans to whisper in her mother's ear. Even the fluent prattle she'd worked up to is gone. Nothing before or after that last, earsplitting wail.)

My own voice, then. Lois-in-me.

Just because something's ugly doesn't make it interesting. Tedium's not a mask for meaning. (Though perhaps a privileged upbringing helps you believe so.) Sometimes it's just being stuck in someone's grotty TV room, watching looped torture trailers while he fiddles in the kitchen fixing something to eat.

No, stick with it. Look!

I start in on a second coffee. Feel its acids push breakfast on its way. 6:10. Stomach's got a long haul before the supper screw arrives with a bowl of veggie-noodle broth.

But then, after a while, dammit, I do begin to see. Lois smarter than me, always. Her parents just too dumb to realize it. Especially Jordan. Too impressed by Jeopardy-like mental stunts, prizing them over true insight. The flash of quick-draw over slow, bull's-eye aim.

Seeing comes gradually. Like the lightening of the fall sky. 504's dragging steps to the elevator, an early shift. But as I replay what I can retrieve from last night's dream—they're hard to recall as separate episodes, they blur into one über-spew like the
Saw
films—I begin to see a difference. Feel it, sense it, more than see. Not in the elements themselves, which are as repetitive and loathsome as ever. Body parts, turdwater sludge, wrecked and seeping passageways. Low-budget slasher set in derelict septic station, backup generator gloom.

The difference is in me. Pursuer and pursued. But neither diving through the blood and shit nor rising above it—instead, becoming one with it, dissolving my boundaries from it, realizing it was me all along. I was it. Or whether it was or wasn't me or I was or wasn't it makes no difference and never has.

Once I am part of it, then—
then
—the next thing can happen.

I will pass through
.

That hair-thin glint shining in the rock face.

Before I leave, a short communion with Maude's artifacts in Big Empty. Not expecting much, which is exactly what I get. It feels like a duty call. Surely, since she is smoke and ash, these paltry things—all that is left of her—will want to speak to me. To someone.

I sit awhile on the floor in the middle of the room, where, with small shifts of my head and eyes, I can take them all in. Nothing. Then move closer, sliding along the floor. Pick up a couple of them. The butterfly wing. Max's card. The “Christmas Music” USB.

Nothing's changed. Which tells you something, I realize, heading down in the elevator. Whatever set you going wasn't affected by Maude's hasty cremation—no hastier than any other aspect of her death. Murder had only flickered as a possibility—one form, not the most likely, what you sensed might take. A shape, a face, it might wear.

What might wear?

The Wyvern bad smell. Something off. Which floated reeking on a breeze.

Found its way to my nose.

§

The white dog's in its usual spot, chained to the railing of the wheelchair ramp outside Shoppers. It's had a shampoo, its white hair brushed and silky, the gray streaks silvery. A Samoyed, I thought, the first time I saw it, though its tail is not so bushy and arched, it hangs down normally, and its eyes are not the black I'm used to in that breed. Icemelt eyes of palest blue gaze up at me. The Forest Hill crowd are “dog people,” self-described—every kind of breed and size, except mutts, often pulling a Filipina maid who has two or three leashes wrapped around one hand, turned-out plastic bags at the ready in the other. A half hour later she'll pass going the other way walking the kids, again juggling multiples, maybe a toddler on a tether and twins in a double stroller. And the dogs' bright coats and milk-white teeth and shiny clipped nails—one little Scottie has its facial hair shaped once a month, beard and eyebrows trimmed, and wears tasselled vests in varied plaids at any hint of a chill—convince you that personal grooming has reached its acme with these pets. Until you meet their owners.

I go in to see what reaction I'll get from the blonde, Sandor's friend, after I left her consoling him Sunday in the Queen's Arms.
Rubbing his back in slow, practiced circles.

Minutes after opening, the place is already packed. The neighbourhood's favourite store, no question. And since Tuesday is Seniors' Day, anyone under sixty-five makes up for it on Wednesday. Management recently enlarged the food section, which takes up four aisles, with a deli corner of pre-packaged trays where photo-processing used to be. One lady in the parking lot recently bubbling to another about how she buys all her food there, “I don't need to go anywhere else.” Standing by a high-end Lexus, jazzed about drugstore groceries.

Money almost touching in its idiocy sometimes. It literally doesn't know what to do with itself.

Standing midway inside, where the line-ups snake and snark—outside of Walmart, no cashiers toil more miserably—wondering which aisle to try, when she comes straight up the one I'm facing. Gives me the Infinite Tunnel all the way. No change when I start towards her, none when we pass. She stares at a vanishing point on an imaginary horizon, betraying no awareness that Ichabod Crane after a razor brawl is bearing down on her. The same spooky freak she's seen haunting these premises before. The same one who hassled her friend three days ago.

The Infinite Tunnel is a learned human skill. More common—more needed—in urban environments, but especially prevalent in Toronto. In neighbourhoods like mine it's one of two default ways people meet, the other being cries and cheek brushes if they know each other. Still, it's quite a feat of avoidance when done perfectly, and the blonde is an artist. As we pass she peers down a canyon that goes on to forever, rock walls rearing up on either side, so she can't see someone right beside her even if she wanted to.

I'm not bound by the same rules, of course, so I check her out as we pass. Pale pink lipstick. Autumn's halfway tan between cottage and the Caribbean. Forty-five? Fifty, even. The work is that good. Some dulling and thickening of the skin that nothing can hide—the dew that burns away and is gone—but none of the lines, even faint, that should come with it. An effect a bit jarring. Double vision. Like the teenage teeth that gleam from old celebrity mouths, and would from hers if she smiled.

Gray skirt and blouse, darker gray pumps. Tasteful, but not hiding the curves. And able to hold her full shopping basket a steady six inches out from her side. Gym work, plus the skiing and swimming. Tennis. No concessions to gravity yet as she walks away unhurriedly.

I watch her until she turns the corner. I don't know why she catches my eye so often. God knows, there's no shortage of cryogenic cheerleaders in the neighbourhood. Yes, she rubbed Sandor's back after I upset him in the bar. But she's been trapping my gaze from the first time I spotted her. Two, three years ago? Something about her… It's not lust, certainly. Sex is a toy I stowed in the cellar ages ago. I remember clearly the joy it brought when I played with it, without ever feeling the impulse to retrieve it. Still, I stare down the aisle at the space where she was, trying to locate the faint itch I can't scratch.

Since I'm there, I pick up a pack of plain white envelopes on sale. Also more Advil for the hand Sandor rearranged. The fourth and fifth finger knuckles still red and swollen, throbbing slightly, though already headed back to normal. The trouble with multiple dislocations: things pop back into place almost as easily as they pop out, since the place they pop back into wasn't the right place to begin with. A twinge in my jaw reminds me to pick up a box of salt. Warm saltwater gargles to try to stave off the infection that's setting up camp at the base of Saturday's kicked-loose tooth. Giving me a real dental problem where I invented one.

The trouble with lies. There's no such thing really. Just dress rehearsals in parallel universes, waiting for their break in this one.

§

The funds are at the bank. The cashier apologizes for the delay, then makes a face when I ask for the first four hundred in ten-dollar bills. Says he has to get a key for “so many bills of one denomination.” A trip of four steps to a cabinet behind him.

Banks. The less they do for you, the more they resent doing anything at all.

Though the cashiers are low rungs in the Great Chain of Less. Mixing surly cookies and Rice Krispie squares on their off hours, digging out musty paperbacks from closets for another laughable charity drive—there's one going today in the waiting area. For Hodgkin's Disease, this time. A loonie from my roll buys me bad coffee from the urn and a cupcake with sparkle frosting. Sign behind the donation bowl:
Scotiabank is pleased to match donations dollar for dollar
. Which should set them back about fifty bucks if the baked goods sell out. It's too bad the Hodgkin's people can't afford to throw it back in their face.

Books no one in their right mind wants. Personal finance guides—relax after work studying
Ready, Set, Retire!
Dog-eared airport thrillers. Astrology and personal healing. Various Dummie's Guides. Even a couple of high-school textbooks, for chrissakes—does no one even screen the stuff?

Around Toogood Pond
. A thin, small-press paperback by Wun Wing. The author's name makes me think of Chinese poetry, but Toogood Pond was where Danika said she took Maude for walks. Where the photo of her was taken, though not by Danika.

For Grace, with fond memories
inside the cover, above Wun Wing's scrawl.

I add two more loonies to the bowl—five of them there now—and button the book in a lower jacket pocket.

Apparently, Grace recalled things differently.

§

Snag's not far from where I left him Saturday, at a broken picnic table someone dragged into Trinity Bellwoods. The bench on one side is smashed. Wild swings with a crowbar, it looks like. Snag's straddling the other side. Sammy curled on the canted top, shivering in the warm sun.

“Who's he?” Nearby, a guy is lying face up on flattened cardboard, as still and straight as a body on an embalming table.

“Oh, that's Flatbread. He's no good to you. Total night owl. Prowls to here and gone all night, then does his coma thing all day. People step on him and he doesn't move. Coupla' kids were making a game of it until I set them straight.”

“Well, you're the boss. Hire the crew you need.”

Snag jerks his head at Sammy. “Even a scared-shitless pup?”

“Absolutely. Especially if you've fed him lots of fiber.”

That gets a wet, rattly chuckle. I hand Snag his envelope first: sixty dollars—fifteen times four hours—as my foreman. Then three forty-dollar envelopes. Then, on second thought, two more. All have Max's name and office address on the front. “Three should get you started for today. But just in case.”

“Any special instructions this time round?”

I think about it. Does it just feel different because I want it more?

“No. Be creative. Pour it on. Bring him the world.”

“You got it.”

At the sight of the white envelopes, denizens of the park have appeared and started towards us. One from behind a tree, one rolled out from under some bushes, another just walking across an open space. I can't help but think of zombie flicks, scenes of the undead shuffling and jerking toward the camera, faces raised on unnaturally stiff necks to catch scents of the living.

I point to the bush-man, linebacker-sized in a lumber jacket, swinging dirty yellow dreadlocks on a short thick neck. Like a bull working himself up to charge. “How about him? Can we put him in the picture? Any skills there we can use?”

“Christof? Skills, I don't know. Initiative for sure.”

“Good. He's hired.”

As I'm walking away, feeling good about things, a thought stops me and I go back. The undead are closing, tightening their ring. I've barely begun describing the pigeons and their prophet when Snag cuts me off.

“Birdy. Sure, I know Birdy.”

“Birdy?”

“Yeah, Birdy. He's a little unpredictable. Unstable. Even by my standards.”

“Perfect. He's hired.” I start away, turn back yet again. The first arrival's reached the broken bench, a girl with raccoon eyes, wearing a stained pink halter top, a rose tattoo blooming up out of one large breast. She puts a hand on Sammy's shaking side. “Hey, he's actually warm, your dog. Seriously. Like toast.”

“Sorry,” I say to Snag. “I start off telling you it's your crew, then make your first two hires for you.”

His grin is half wince. “No worries, bro. You forget, I worked in the real world too.”

After a little walkabout, I get the car and go back home. I hadn't expected to return till dark, but forgot that putting something in motion isn't the same as letting it take effect. I strike a couple of tenant-requested repairs off the list in my notebook, change a hallway light bulb. Clean up a garbage can that someone tipped in the garage. That takes me to almost 4:00, two hours before my debrief with Snag.