The Adjustment League (18 page)

But closer. Closer each time.

Let's get smashed 1 June

Let's get smashed.

His statement of intent at cocktail hour. Sometimes with a grin. A fist pump. Or just, on occasion, matter-of-factly. An alcohol athlete's quiet discipline.

How I miss him sometimes! Fiercely, in sudden attacks or spells that leave me weak afterwards. Often for the same things I feared him for all my life.

The gestures and words that fell me with longing are the same ones that gave me the constant jitters in his presence.

Remembered presence pierces a screen, an overgrowth, a shell—cracks a hole, through which the past blazes. And is not past.

Weakness, afterwards. A frailness, dream-likeness, about what I am about.

It is so terribly hard to believe in death.

§

A bang on the door startles me out of reverie. No need to ask who it is. Only one person announces himself that way: one thud of a closed fist. As if any gentler or more prolonged summons would injure his dignity.

Beside the Owner stands another, younger Owner. A possible purchaser of the building interested in taking a look around. It's the first I've heard of it—but then, why would I be informed? Despite having different facial features, they might be carbon copies. Suits of slightly different cut and colour assert the same level of class, of membership. As do the quality haircuts: one a rich white, the other silver and black—but the same careful shaping twice a month. Though I see him only once or twice a year, my Owner changes remarkably little. Aging coddles him, leading him by pinsteps to a handsome viewing.

“This is the Super,” he says. As a farmer would say to another inspecting his land: This is my scarecrow. Knock him down, or keep him, when the field is yours. In the meantime, patchy as he is, he scares some birds. Adding to me, “Someone's made a mess on the wall beside the garage.” I nod, to show how his wind makes my head sway, activating my button eyes and my grim, stitched mouth.

And, after a few more words to the other, he leaves.

Showing the potential buyer around the five floors, then the basement garage and utilities room, I make sure he sees, while pretending to hide, some of the sixty-year-old building's defects. Crumbling plaster mouldings in the underlit hallways. Patches of bubbling paint from insidious damp. Gouges and scratches and scuff marks in the halls and stairwells, clustered from waist to shoulder height, legacies of many hasty departures. The many windows—the middle three apartments on each floor—facing into the wall of the Favorite or the Latimer—with only the end units offering a view of Eglinton or houses with treed yards. The undersized water heater, rust spots at its base. The bumpy, pitted garage floor, its concrete eroded by overhead dripping and flash floods down the entrance slope.

I could show him more, of course. And should. His eager investor's face is fading—its brightness dimming, glumness overtaking it—and I should do everything in my power to hasten its collapse. If a new Owner installs a new scarecrow, where in the city will I live on eight hundred a month? Under Snag's bench? In Mrs. Rasmussen's laundry room?

But I can't rise to the practical matter of looking after myself. This deep into an adjustment, this far into a window, the future is too unreal. Even at the best of times, it's only a few prudent hedges against disaster. Keeping clear of glass as lightning approaches, quickening your steps ahead of an oncoming truck—these hardly qualify as long-term planning. Basic battenings of hatches, so as not to seduce catastrophe: that's the level of my care.

“Christmas Music” blots my mind to Owner finagling. So do the dead and living mingling underground, shuffling around stairs that lead yet further down.

And so, too, does
Around Toogood Pond
. Musing about the voice in it—the book turned over in my lap—when the Owner's rude bang fetched me back from a long way away.

A different voice. Different from any I've heard. At least in this adjustment. Someone in crisis and looking, looking actively, for help. Pleading for it. With courage, but also with humility.
Humility
. Probably the last word I'd associate with the Wyverns. Not even with Judy, who crumbles inside a shell of defensive arrogance—who is condemned to make others ghostly, crepuscular, in order to deal with them at all.

The slickster in his Rolex-running office. Digging in people's mouths. Trapping them in his camera.

The burly baby in the bar. Black fishpond eyes. Ladykiller. Scribe on the side.

Surprises, new views, all around.

Still… a difference here. Here in this voice.
What?

Something not yet spoiled.

§

Mid-afternoon, I head out. Breaking my resolve to stay put all day, I make an absurdly early supper, jazz ticking away. A quiet composition for just bass and drums, throbs on a couple of notes while sticks tick rapidly against the kit rims. Double-time of a heart fused to detonate. Melt the broth block, warm it to bubbling, add the baggie of chopped vegetables. Boil the ramen, rinse. Add them. Watching it all, thoughtlessly. Thrums and ticking.

A long drive that also contravenes management protocol. Two hours of here and there, up and down. Wasting gas in the service of no errand, no search. Just to get to dark.

Dusk finally settling, I pull up near Woodbine Beach. Walk the empty boardwalk, deserted save for a couple of power walkers pumping wrist weights. Strike out past the beach volleyball poles, across an expanse of sand and damp flats sprigged with grass. Climb the hill into the trees and curving asphalt pathways.

Opposite the inlet with the moored boats, a shoreline tumble of squarish boulders, like giant play blocks. Nearly always deserted, and is so now. Settle low among the nightcool rocks, back to one, a waiting throne. Sighting south across the giant, wave-chopped lake.

Night arrives.

Freighter far out, hung with lights. Plume of whitish smoke thins quickly in the wind, detaches from the ship. Wisp after wisp. Brief, fading signals. Dandelion filaments, departing one by one.

Curious how the book ends abruptly. A last entry, nothing special about it, and turn to a blank page. No closure, summation, conclusion, epilogue. Even treating the book as a collage—returning again and again to bits that glitter out at me—I was expecting a more definitive wrap-up.

And many of the last scenes peaceful. Placid almost to the point of complacency. Especially after the desperation early on. A short description of riding with his mother around Unionville. November. The pond walk too cold. The colours Maude loved done. And her increasing difficulty staying upright, even with the walker. Motor skills going, balance going. She prefers to drive around looking at the big, well-kept homes.

“These are likable houses,” she remarks at one point. And the author comments on the strangeness of the words she recalls as well as forgets. Her sudden surprising eloquences, dotting aphasic stretches like reeds in a spreading desert. Like her “profound” on another day.

But reading—reading over his shoulder, so to speak, for who else will see these reflections delivered to the bank's charity bin?—you wonder if the author hasn't missed something more than accidental eloquence.

These are likable houses.

What you say maybe if you're thinking of houses—homes—that aren't likable. Never could be. And not necessarily her present home either. After all, she was looking at what most people would consider dream homes—solid, spacious. Brightly painted and decorated, landscaped impeccably. Like the one she raised her children in probably. But
likable
.

Making my way back, across and down the grassy rise, leaving the paths to cut between pines and spruce trees. Their needles fragrant in the dark. Startled sounds from clumps of bushes, scuttlings in close-knit groves. Sparks from cigarette ends, from a small furtive fire. Clank of bottles, an urgent whisper as I near. Silence as I pass. And then the reassured giggles, a male voice cracking wise, reclaiming the dark den with its females.

Every sound a spark. Spotted flares I wend through to stay dark
.

The beach, palely glowing without moonlight, a great scorched plain.
Likable houses
. The more I think of it, the more it gives me a chill. Like the chill I felt looking at “Christmas Music”—a chill that seemed to come not from the pictures into me, but from my bones out, seeping to meet it. But along with the chill, battling it, someone trying to stay warm in a meat locker. For days I've thought of the Wyverns in terms of rot. Bad smells. Stains. Crawling things.
But isn't cold the true sense you get from them?
Like breaths from an open refrigerator when you stand near it. Cold of something missing. Nothing colder than a vacuum. Maude under her blanket, Judy placing her crossing talismans. Fuel for the ferry over frigid black.

Cold. Corrupt. Crypt. In crypt. Encrypt.
All terms meet.

How you know an adjustment is brewing.

§

I park the car in my spot in the garage, pause on the lobby stairs and head back out. Still not ready to rise to the eyrie I said I wouldn't leave today. I set out on a twenty-minute walk, the big lopsided rectangle up Chaplin, across Roselawn and down Latimer to the short bar of Eglinton. Midway along Roselawn, however, where the streetlights fail outside the Jewish cemetery, I change routes and cut down the path, gravestones behind wrought iron to either side, that ends at North Preparatory Junior Public School. Where election cards tell me I'd vote, if I voted. With difficulty I scale the fence, locked at sundown against vandals who topple stones, deface them. Hebrew squiggles and bars on a sign above—just shapes to me.
Good. Signs among graves should be inscrutable.

A path, a ribbon, through the sleeping dead. Where two trees arch darkly over the exit gate, playground equipment on asphalt beyond, I pause. All day the dream that woke me before dawn has returned in vivid slivers, taking on a title in my mind as if it were a book I'd read:
Dream of the Exquisite Fetters
. Once again, it comes back—the people shuffling and mingling in the dim grainy light, me trying to cut the elaborate metal sleeves from their wrists, snipping off Maude's finger instead—but this time it returns with a difference, a way of seeing it so altered it stops me in my tracks.

Fetters, I called the patterned metal sleeves. It was the word they came with in the dream. But fetters are to bind, to restrain, and Maude and her husband moved their arms freely. And
fetters
? Rusty iron shackles in old movies, or, in modern ones, serviceable steel. Not chased and filigreed bands of precious metals. Not
exquisite
.

Where would you find such things?
On the arms of ancient warriors, in their tombs.

No one in those underground rooms asked me, not by word or sign, to remove the metal sleeves. I went to work with my shears—shears that left welts and lopped-off parts—because I thought the need for release was understood. Was it, though?

They could be saying, with their precious metal sleeves, not
Release me
, but
See. This much I gained. This much I won
. They could be saying that.

That or another message. Or many messages. Or none. None fathomable to me.

And yet your answer is to mangle the precious bands? Lop off a finger? Stopped between the graves and swing set, barred from both, I feel, as if they are tangible things standing with me, solitude and strangeness. And recognize too, as if it is my oldest friend, my infinite capacity to be a fool. A fool whose folly it is to descend into darknesses I don't understand and wrestle there with powers I'm not remotely equipped to reckon with. Only to blunder about in hobnail boots, breaking, breaking…

As the adjustment builds to what it must
…

11

I meet the
Empress
on the second level down.

After a first steep flight, the stairs become more shallow and begin a gentle curve. They are wider too. She is sitting in a niche in the wall near the bottom. Sitting in a high-backed chair—tiny as she is, and straight-spined, she looks enthroned, which must be why
The Empress
flies into my mind. Peering down to find my footing in the gloom, I almost miss her.

She shows her face in shadowed profile. A half, two-thirds of it perhaps, with a somewhat flattened aspect, like that of a playing card, which may be a function of the dim, grainy light that robs things of dimension. White wispy hair straggles to her shoulders on the side facing me, bare scalp shining through it. Her skin finely wrinkled like tissue paper folded and unfolded innumerable times—but then smoother where it crosses the bridge of her nose and where her forehead merges with shadow. Her hair too—unless I am mistaken—begins to change on the far side, becoming thicker, yellow mixing with the sickly white. But I can only see the start of this.

She wears a simple white shift, high-collared, which falls past her feet. She is very tiny. If I used all my strength, and made a plate of my outstretched palms, I think she could sit or stand upon it.

The single eye turned to me regards me with a terrible intensity. No expression in it I can read. Just a pure, fixed, unwavering gaze.

My eyes flinch from it, rove up and down the stairs. But the movements, the restless shiftings above and below, have stopped. The people I met above, and the ones I sensed below, have moved further into the shadows and gone still. They are afraid of her, I realize. She emanates a power that clears spaces around her. I feel it keenly myself, along with an urge to climb up or down, to put more distance between us. But I can't move.
I'm stuck here with her
.

With the thought comes the realization that she is trying to turn. There is a quivering tension in her chin and delicate jawbone, a straining. It is partly this concentration of effort that gives such implacable intensity to her eye, vacated by everything but the will to turn.

Yet, as my eyes adjust a little to the gloom, I see what makes her struggle impossible. The far side of her partially turned chair and body are fused with the stone. She is part of the niche, grown into it. What I am seeing is the part that still remains free, trying with an unceasing effort to break loose or at least resist the pull toward greater incorporation.

§

A butterfly wing 29 July

“My inspiration,”she used to call it. “My,” she still says fondly, “my”—but can't retrieve a word as long as
inspiration
. Nor does she add the explanation she used to, especially in the hard days (hard years!) at Rosewell. “If that little thing can fly all that way and back again, then surely I can get through my…”—trailing off without specifying what it was she had to get through.

It sits on her bedside table at Vivera. The piece of her I most want to keep when she is gone. Though sometimes—not very often—I will find it stuffed in a bureau drawer, socks and used Kleenex pulled over it. Next visit it will be out again.

She must have been in her sixties when she found it, lying on the ground at the cottage. A single monarch butterfly wing. A mark of her, to pick up and preserve it. Who else would have?

L framed it perfectly, in a four-by-four-inch shadow box with a border of dark wood. The single, orange-and-black-veined wing, floating behind glass. A thing detached, alone, and yet not senseless. A remnant of flight. An emblem of it. And of fragile beauty preserved.

And, too, “my butterfly” is the name she hit on long ago for J. “Always flitting, always restless. Touching down… and then off she goes again.”

The nickname angered J in younger years, though it might not now, when she is trying to come to terms with the inner furies that whirl her from place to place, situation to situation. Coming to terms? Or just growing quieter, worn out by the long fight?

“She knew,” J says one day, completely lucidly. “A mother always knows.”

I'm not so sure of that. In fact I have no opinion about it, either way. And no way of ever knowing, now.

I only know Mom used the name “butterfly” for the daughter her husband had wronged so deeply. The daughter who left home one morning at age fifteen. And should have left, or been taken, at least a dozen years earlier.
What a catastrophe!
friends said, honest well-wishers, when she was diagnosed. But catastrophes come also as blessings to the crimes they disguise.

The daughter who shows up now at unexpected times, journeying from the remote places where she lives, to be the other child that visits.

Sleepwalker 20 August

You should write a book on caregiving. I've been thinking a lot about it. You're the one to do it, I'm sure of it
… etc. L says it many different ways.

The tickle of flattery—smart start-up publisher asking you to write a book!—soon swamped by preposterousness.

Write about it while I'm still living it? If I'm riding the train to burnout, that sounds like the Express.

Yet something in the idea, far-fetched as it is, sticks to me, won't quite let me go. It comes back to me at intervals. I question it to make it go away.

Does L not know what this is like? (No, think of the losses in her early life. Her grinding struggles still.) Is she trying to buck me up, keep me in the game? (No, she brings it up too often—suggesting angles, frames of reference… real help. She really is thinking about it.)

Finally, around the summer solstice—feeling a half year out of sync with the dazzling early dawn, the long humid sunset—I give it a whirl. Whirl exactly the wrong word. I just relapse into what everyday life has become—caregiving from any and all directions—and take notes on whatever occurs.

At first I do it to put the idea to rest. To be able to tell L honestly,
well I tried
, and get her—and me—off the subject.

And then the first surprise: not only do I have things to say on the subject and the energy to say them with, but saying them makes me feel better, lighter somehow.

Two months later, I'm still going. Feeling a little stronger, a little lighter—though nothing else has changed, just this new job added. But
my
job. Really? Is that it?

Feeling skeptical. Grateful. Cautiously amazed.

Spending cash I didn't know I had. Waiting for notice of the overdraft.

I turned 52 five days ago, but I feel like a boy trying to wake up to the truth of his life.

Is that my brand of insomnia? A sleepwalker caught wandering between bed and waking?

Anything can happen to such a person. (Anything except rest.)

§

A help or hindrance? Am I deluding myself to think that reading these entries brings me somehow closer to the secrets of the Wyvern freezer? And does it matter either way? Deluded or not, helped or hindered—
Take them down
.

Though who to take down (besides the obvious), and how…

The Sandor I meet in these pages. Like the self-confessing, sparring guzzler I met in the Queen's Arms—yet different. Spruced up, cleaned up—chaos laid bare, but given a shave and a haircut, a new suit of clothes. Like people in wedding pictures—presented almost beyond themselves. You recognize them, but…

And the L he keeps mentioning. His publisher, from the last entry. But also the one who framed the butterfly wing. A counsellor, an advisor. An all-purpose person in his life.

Dangerous to know too well someone you might have to adjust
. There's that too. Like a surgeon chatting up the patient in pre-op, getting his life story. Not done on principle.

Hard and sharp
—what a knife needs to be.
Firm
—the hand guiding it.

§

Outside Ukiyo-e, Nicholas and Simone, looking and behaving pretty much as they were last Saturday on the construction site. Senseless irate voices, pushing and shoving. Oblivious of any audience and yet at the same time theatrical—the drama that moves inside and never closes. Same weird impression of a gender swap. Tall, leathery, toothless Simone in her greasy black suit, shoving with real malice. Meek and pudgy Nicholas, a head shorter, hunching inside his plaid jacket, pushing back half-heartedly, an open palm at her chest for every two or three hard, well-timed cuffs. Pedestrians scoot to the curb around them, like they did with Birdy's birds.

They give no sign of recognizing me. Step aside to let me through, then resume their hassling. Do they know or care they've just been bounced? A young Japanese guy standing by the door, looking uncomfortable. The chest and shoulders for bouncing, but not the appetite for trouble the job requires. Ukiyo-e for high-end, intimate dining—two-hundred-dollar sushi sequences, with the parking ticket on the Benz just another item on the bill. A waiter probably. Or a sous-chef, from his apron.

Two young men, Malaysian or Filipino perhaps, leaning against the glass of Obsession next door, playing with their cellphones. Too engrossed to take notice of this minor ruckus. They look like gym and fashion nuts. Silk shirts in pastel colours clinging to sculpted torsos, crisply pleated dark pants tight in the crotch. A purple-gowned mannequin behind glass between them.

Inside, my helpful reservation bird is taking a scolding from a suited man on the far side of the restaurant. Hair half-hiding her lowered face, his cheeks flushed. A busboy, also blushing, is filling in at reception. He greets me with a blank stare. Beyond him, two boys busy cleaning a booth, an assistant manager with his jacket off supervising, hands on hips. Third guy down on his knees, sweeping up with a dustpan and little brush. Obviously, Nicholas and Simone made the most of their half hour. Over on the right, in the raised section, Max and Vivian have been moved to a table for two next to the wall. While the busboy peers confusedly at the reservation book, I head on up.

White shirt and tie materializes instantly.
Mess after mess, Christ what a night
. “Sir?” he says to Max. While I'm pulling up a chair from the next table.

“It's all right, Takeshi,” Max says. “He's only staying a minute. Could you bring us another cup, though?”

Max has decided to play it cool, at least to start that way. Vivian doesn't have to play. Her charcoal eyes disconcerting in their almond settings. Cinders surrounded by the flames of striking beauty. Neither is surprised to see me.
Judy's friend—the Face in the chair—Wednesday's underclass barrage—now Nicholas and Simone
… it doesn't take a Holmes.

Two ceramic saké flasks on the table, patterned with cranes and leaves. One on the house probably for the debacle in the booth. A waiter brings my cup. When Max reaches to pour, I reach across his arm for his water glass. Take a deep gulp, set it down beside me.

Brief flares behind his porthole lenses, but a weary smile beneath. Has coached himself, or been coached, to except some crap along established lines.

Max wearing a Clash T-shirt, earring back in his right lobe. Forest Hill Peter Pan. Grubbing out in ripped jeans and Nevermind on the weekends, telling himself he's still hip, still a rebel. Vivian far less confused. Soft cream sweater with lozenge peephole below her throat, silver band necklace, matching bangles on one wrist. Knows who she is, where she is, what she is. Rare in these parts.

“Nice place,” I say, looking around the half-filled room. Diners focused a little too resolutely on their plates. “Classy. Though myself, I'd ditch the dinner jazz and put on some Christmas music.”

No future in poker for Max. None at all. He maintains basic composure, but little tells flicker randomly over his face, like pings on a radar screen. Vivian, though, she'd take every hand. Turning her saké cup slowly between sips, pearl nails light on the rim, cocking a polite bored ear at the men's conversation.
In it all the way. Player and producer
.

“It's a little early for ‘Jingle Bells',” Max says. “We haven't even made it to Hallowe'en.”

“Never too early for old standards, Doctor. No timetable at all for some pleasures. Fortunes built on the fact.”

“Are you a carols tycoon?” Max manages it lightly, cocking an eyebrow. Feeling his way onto familiar ground. Nothing these people imagine unbuyable.
How they'll come down
. “And here I thought you were just a poor man with crumbling teeth.”

A mental case like my sister
, he hardly needs to add.

“Tycoon? You underestimate the religious impulse, Doctor. I'm a man of conviction. Hymns to the Almighty are not for sale. Even if I had a catalogue of them, I'd still be forced to give them away.”

“Charitable impulses. Admirable.”

I shrug. “Like they say, it begins at home. These old tunes, they go from hand to hand naturally. Always have. Me, I'd just be giving them a larger push. Widening the circle, so to speak.”

Vivian's stopped turning her tumbler. Looks up at me. Then, longer, at Max. Who's sitting with his spine pulled tighter, sipping too rapidly at his saké. Crumbles in the crunch, she should know. Why be with him otherwise?

“You know what it means, don't you? Ukiyo-e?”

Max raises a palm. “Good food? High prices? You got me.”

“Close. It means ‘Floating World.' It's what you live in. What you've always lived in. And it's time you came down to Earth.”

Now I pour myself a cup of saké. Raise and hold it in my hands, warming it, but take care not to bring it to my lips.
Level time, just now. No stairs. No sights beyond this room.

Max drains his cup, sets it down with a little clunk. “Disregarding this preamble about Christmas carols—”

“Christmas music.”

“Christmas whatever. Which I confess is going right over my head. But I'd have to be an absolute idiot not to recognize that ever since you popped up in my sister's life—the day my mother died, no less—you've dedicated yourself to pulling weird stunts in mine. Only once in person, acting the fool in my chair, but it's pretty obvious which petty disturbances you've been behind, right up to half an hour ago. You have—I'm sure I'm not the first to say it—a certain signature. The thing I'm still fuzzy on is why. What you want.”