The Adjustment League (3 page)

Got to him before he got her name out. Someone must've heard the bang when he hit the wall. Multiple hands scrabbling with his to pry mine from his throat. The neck brace he wore for a few days gave him more gravitas, an unslouched gait and flaring jowls that reddened when we passed. Keep it, I might have advised him, if I'd had a voice.

§

What is it about the mentally ill that tells you they're off? Watching Judy walk towards me, I know that no one seeing her—and heads do turn, holding their stares for longer than curiosity permits—would mistake her for whatever they call normal. What is it, though? The unnaturally stiff spine and stately, mincing steps? A queen forced to walk a narrow ice bridge in armour. The child-like size and sex-toy hairstyle—but with puffy, mealy skin… aged doll, child crone. Her seeming obliviousness of, utter disengagement from, the other customers—which yet conveys an animal's tense, secret-sense monitoring of their exact positions and potential movements. A general sense—weirdest of all, this—of being scooped out, hollow, at her center, with all that's left standing sentry at the periphery. Guards around a pit operation. Is it just me seeing this? No, the other heads, young moms especially, their eyes narrowing as they track her, then turning back with renewed patience to mind their children, shushing their ruckus, helping them eat.
There be monsters.

§

Without sanity dictating the script, you can start anywhere. The relaxation of lockstep bathes you in a mild euphoria. Seductive. And addictive. And dangerous: you can drift so far out on warm currents of dissociation, it's a hard desperate flounder to get back to programmed encounters when you need them.

“What did your father do? As a career, I mean.” Thinking of the wedding photo on Maude's bedside table. The groom already silver-haired, his black-haired bride beaming up at him. A long absence of widowhood, followed by the progressive absence of dementia. Long years of emptying. “He looked… distinguished. A professional, I assume.”

“He put people to sleep.”

Poetry or prose? The primal question with Judy.

“An anaesthetist?”

“Yes. The Sandman.”

We work down more of our donuts with coffee.

“How long did your mom live at Vivera?”

“Two years and two months. Two and two, very true. She moved in in August.”

“Who took care of her?”

“I take care of my mother.”

“You do?” I can't keep all the surprise from my voice. “Where do your brothers live?”

“In Toronto.”

In Toronto, but AWOL. Letting their damaged sister shoulder the load. At least in Judy's version. An adjustment is beginning to take shape. Or the outline, the need for one—a dull ache somewhere behind my eyes, like the first intimations of a pressure headache.

I push it back, like cramming a gelatinous genie back into its bottle. There isn't time, for one thing. Stone would be the first to remind me. Four weeks ago, perhaps. But this window's closing. And I pick them more carefully than I used to. Conserving energy with age. And what's here, after all? Asshole families nothing new. The rule, except in Dreamville. If you find these things remarkable, have another coffee.

Which I do. So does Judy.

“Do you still see Stone?” Out of left field again. But this time I don't wonder at her memory. Or her telepathy. All our wardspeak's coming back. All the invisible antennae fluttering, the warders blundering about with nets.

“I'll always need to see Stone.”

“When is your next appointment?”

“Two weeks, maybe three. In about two weeks. The schedule varies, but we always start in early November. Then I'm his till at least the New Year.”

Nothing wrong with her memory. Horrible to contemplate, given the splinters of her mind.

Does she remember seeing snowflakes behind me, as I remember seeing them over her shoulder beyond a window reinforced with heavy wire diamonds?

“That is not what killed my mother,” Judy says. Bringing me out of a long spell of singling out faces and evaporating them. The food court filling like a sink. With only the very young and very old looking content, settled in their lives. Everyone else, especially those with kids, looking more or less like murder. Not for the first time, I'm glad to have a face that sends stares packing.

“That is not in fact what kills her.”

“What isn't?”

“Tch.” A teacher's frown. “Heavenly choirs.”

So strange, these formal and tangential memos, without contractions and with small clear spaces sheltering them. As if she never found a home in English, though she has no other address.

Or is self-absorption all the key that's needed? Living in an all-consuming drama that only occasionally needs to be spoken aloud. Another is part audience, part bit player—part neither, just someone left out in the lobby, catching stray bits of dialogue when an usher opens the door. You haven't begun to fathom mental illness until you grasp the monstrous self-absorption it inflicts on its victims—like a giant snake, it forces us to swallow ourselves whole, digesting every facet of what we were in slow coils of peristaltic rumination.

“I am glad to see you feeling better. Someone said you stopped treatment.”

An accusation, clearly. And beyond that: a judgement and a sentence.

Either way, not requiring an answer.

We leave when Judy begins checking her watch repeatedly, murmuring of “lunch” and “noontime pills.” Clocks, meals, meds: treatment. But she spurns my offer of a drive to her group home off Danforth.

“My brother bought me a GO pass. So I could visit her.”

One way of making sure someone does.

“Fine, but that works like tickets. You won't lose anything if I drop you off this time.”

“Max told me to use the pass.”

Max.
With that prickle of adjustment asking to be scratched.

Yet, when I drop her at the Kennedy GO station, she walks in her slow stately way around to my side of the car. I roll down the window.

“Could you pick me up tomorrow morning? They told me I have to clear her room.”

“What time?” No reaction. “How about ten o'clock?”

“That would be very nice.”

And sails like a little queen into the dead sea of the station.

2

Barely mentioned in
the food court and Judy's eyes bone dry, yet Maude Wyvern walking beside her daughter, sitting beside me in the front seat of the Honda. Everywhere now. The mortuary goofs ferrying an empty bag.

I almost take the 407 ramp, then remember and jump a lane over to continue down Kennedy.

Tempting, that clear dash to the 404, down to the 401. Home in thirty minutes this time Saturday. But too many dollars to the Spanish-Australian owners watching the video cams. And grime or snow smearing the plate doesn't fool them. A ninety-dollar fine to learn that lesson.

So take the slow way home, again.
Pennies saved…

That's the discipline. Not one grand self-denial, but a thousand little ones. Just say No. And No again, a dozen times a day. The price of eking out an atrocity windfall. The price of living off the treatment reservation.

The car labouring a bit. Not grinding or knocking, but heavy somehow. The engine stroking in a thickened medium. Nine and a half years, but more than that. Talk to Lucius.

Glad to see you feeling better. Somebody said you stopped treatment.

Somebody should pay closer attention. Treatment stopped me long before I stopped it. Stopped me time and time again. Shaking, drooling, mini-seizures. Shuffling zombie fogs. Muscle twitches, knots, spasms. Pimples head to toe, another drug. Stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea. And the worst: all-over inner itching, fire ants along the nerves. Lose twenty pounds in two weeks trying to stalk it off.

What choice—or guts—in chucking that? The wonder that you stuck with it so long. On, off, on. Back on. What kind of micro-toilet view of yourself? Stare into it like a cloud of knives. Asbestos breaths of self-erasure. Never forget it.

Or forget you're sick and need treatment.
Somebody said.

But your own, not theirs.

Adjustments and arrangements. Building a platform out of this and that, collecting cast-off boards and piss-stained styrofoam and balls of twine and tugging them into a shelter. Jerry-rigging a new windbreak after each storm.

No more recovery porn. Swear off the stuff. Live within the sickness. Own your shit.

Be a management monk.

No picnic, Judy, living off the reservation. Nothing to envy.

Or—

See the little waif, orphaned girl-crone, mincing stiffly through the wilds of Markville Mall.

Not standing by my bed in a bloodied nightgown, no, the lines of her latest work seeping through white cotton. Not recounting in tape-drone voice her latest rape by the Devil, many devils, the angels' futile resistance and slaughter. Nor boasting, in a dybbuk's roar rent by shrill barks of laughter, of an isolated victory. Routing the Red Raper, snapping the wings He flailed like broken umbrella struts, raking her worse than His talons ever did. None of her old forms of violence seems likely now. Twenty years of treatment—drugs and talk and drugs and forms and rooms and drugs and group homes and drugs drugs drugs—have done that much. But done what else? New things, or else exaggerations of the old. Around dull eyes, her face mask-like, waxen. Was it always? I remember more mobility: sly smiles, fierce sudden grins at a joke no one else could catch, pale light flickering sometimes through the glaze, like the flashlight beam of someone trapped deep inside a plastic labyrinth. Still that small churchy voice, just above a whisper. But more spaces than ever between the words, gaps where she waits and searches, hunting pages in a gutted library. Her shaking hands. They always shook—she'd been on top-grade mind-melters for twenty years by her thirties, we both had—and she used to hold them up to her face, watch them tremble, and tell how her own had been lopped off and these quivering things attached to the stumps. The tremor less obvious now but more constant, a checked force. Which sometimes shoots up her wrists and through her body in a spasm, a small intense seizure lasting half a second. And yet here she is. Living off-ward. Looking after her mom. Eating an apple fritter—in nibbles chewed to paste, her chin jerking with each gulp. Answering questions more or less sensibly. Remembering things no one would expect her to—my adjustment? TAL? Stone, weirdest of all. She seems diminished, yet sane. Ailing on multiple fronts, but in acceptable ways. A little shuffling person capable of joining the other snackers in the brash mall. A victory, then?

If so, why do they still stare? Flee their mundane misery with the kids to ogle the more blatantly undone?

Humping down Kennedy, picking up speed between self-storage places and fenced waste lots fronted with condo graphics, hitting every green until a red stops me at Steeles.
Welcome To Toronto
. But it's all Toronto now. From lapping lake to halfway to Barrie. Bowmanville around to Hamilton Harbour. You can drive and drive and never leave the zone.

Stopped behind a bus by Tam O'Shanter Golf Course, I catch a glimpse of fabric strips, maybe a pant leg and a sleeve, gray long undies, all draped over a flaming red bush by a water hazard. Litter to the untrained eye—but someone's made himself a den and it's laundry day. Stretched out inside an igloo of bent branches, lined with Glad against the rain, dozing while the pastel duffers loiter nearby, chuckling and cursing and dropping a dimpled new ball.

Enveloped by a blue fart of bus exhaust, I'm off with it. Introduce real hazard to the comatose game. Shank your drive and do a stint living rough. Sleep in a bush with flies and mice and garbage-mad coons pissing eviction on you. Spirit-cowing emissaries. Hack out your time or take a stroke and twitch on Haldol. It's fun to run with.

But that sludgy drag again when I turn into Agincourt Mall. Some kind of resistance flowing up from the tires to my palms over the wheel.

Circling for a spot, I place a palm on my forehead. Not burning, but warm. Not like fever yet, brains boiling. Just the churning inside, throwing off heat.

A Mr. Stone on the line? Something about confirming an appointment? Yes, he says he'll wait.

§

No Frills has a good deal on bok choy and gai lan, I bag several bundles of each. Also a five-pound bag of chicken backs and necks that an older butcher fills for me. They seldom put them out anymore, they don't move even in a discount store. Twelve packs of Mr. Noodle, on sale three for two dollars, and I'm set up for dinner for two weeks. Top-ups of breakfast stuff—coffee, milk, peanut butter, bread—push the tab to thirty bucks. Maintenance on two dollars a day.

§

Lucius, Lucy and Jared have been out grocery shopping too. They're unpacking the Landscaping & Home Repairs pickup when I pull into the garage on Eglinton. Big smiles from all three. My favourite tenants, no question. Lucius and Lucy almost identical, down to Levi's and ball caps. Small, strong people. White teeth in round brown faces. Soft, obliging voices.

But tough. Built for long-haul punishment, which no doubt they've seen plenty of. Lucius hustling, hustling—Lucy helping when she's not cleaning houses—yet they stay in 304, a one-bedroom, screening off a corner of the living room for Jared's bed and desk. Send whatever they can scrimp down south. Ecuador, Peru—the family dispersed. We don't inquire too closely into each other's arrangements. The bond is having them. Tight leash recognition.

“Meeting on Monday night?” Jared says, coming halfway to the Honda.

“You got it.”

“Seven o'clock.”

“Yup. Same as always.”

What he knows but has to hear. His frown lines relax a little. A strange little guy, nine but looks seven, paler than his parents, with pointy elfin ears. Teased and bullied to hell and back.

I mention the heavy feeling in the Honda to Lucius.

“Still drive okay? Start up?”

“Yeah. Just… heavy. Sticky, almost. Like someone coated it with tar.”

Looking like he wants to put down his bag of brown bananas and get under the hood now, he tells me he could be a day or two getting to it. Frown of apology. His busy season. Grass still growing and leaves to rake up, flower beds to cut back. Some nervous types already wanting burlap around their dwarf evergreens. Things slack off after the first heavy frosts, when he puts on the blade and prays for a big dump. That or frozen pipes. Both, in a good year.

“Sure, no rush. It's just a heads-up.”

§

Up in 501, I get the big stock pot of chicken parts simmering, vegetables washed and draining. Plastic containers lined up, lids behind them, on the counter. Rinsed bread bags for the chopped vegetables. Check my watch: not quite 12:00. Still two hours before I show 305.

Nothing takes long enough.
The trouble with speed-up. The hours stretch, or there are more of them. Minutes multiply like mushrooms, and lost for wholesome ways to fill them, you start looking elsewhere. Everywhere.

I make a cup of green tea and take it to the armchair by the living-room window. Lean forward, hands around the warm. The new EMS station across the street below. Next to it, old fire station 135 with the red door. Cars and buses cutting and gunning along Eglinton, two lanes either way. Slamming for the lights at Chaplin. Condo tower on the southwest corner, high and plush. Chaplin slicing diagonally down into the cake of Forest Hill.

A good view, still. Well worth the top-up to the Owner.

I take care of my mother.

Sipping Luck Yu, I can feel myself drifting toward an adjustment. And feel myself pushing against the drift, since I don't know if an adjustment's called for, or, if it is, if I'm the person—the person with the time—to make it.

Adjustment
. Such an easy word to say. Like tapping a loose part into place, or straightening a crooked picture. Except that people, especially the loose and crooked, seldom sit still for their tapping. Or resist the urge to tap back.

It's wise to recall first principles.

An adjustment occurs when a deserving target intersects with a mood of black fuckitness. But be careful. In a world howling for adjustments, you can't make all of them. And you can't make even one unless you have the window—time and means (especially mental means)—you need.

So—go carefully at the start. Move slowly across the ice of status quo, pushing your poles ahead of you. Is there a crevasse demanding your attention? A spot the snow pokes through and tumbles into, a place of nothing, darkness under white skin. And can you find the deep black crack inside yourself that matches it?

Nothing to undertake without due thought. Without due caution.

§

Sometimes an adjustment leads to an arrangement, though it's never cause to take one on. Lucius and the Honda, Jared and my lessons: two adjustments and a few arrangements hiding behind our little exchange in the garage, though you have to peel it back to see them.

The Civic a gift from a woman whose husband had been banging her around for years, then harassing her when she finally walked. She didn't want him banged back, preferred a gentler eye for eye. Swore she didn't love him, was over that long plague, but was sick of hurt and had found a kind of religion too.

I took my time with him. Fixed it so his locks wouldn't work, at home or in his office. Not all of them, just some. Then his car wouldn't start. Then it fixed itself. The computers in his start-up crashed. Then his life settled down for a while. I let him breathe easy. Then pieces of his mail went missing. Three different religious cults got it into their heads he was a lapsed member dying to return to the fold.

I'd put him down for a while, then remember and pick him up again. Like a hobby duck, whittled at in the garage over a winter. He must have thought the gods were taking random pisses on him. But he was too consumed with self-regard to imagine that they wanted to take long bloody shits and were being restrained.

The Civic, just a year old when she gave it to me, a kiss-up gift the time he broke two ribs. Bruises not in visible spots just got roses. Gross red bunches of them—two dozen, three dozen. It still had two years on the warranty.

And ran well, needing only basic maintenance, for two years after that. It wasn't until four years ago that the heftier bills began. The same time Jared was starting school. And already struggling, as I learned from his parents in the halls and garage. Bullying from the other students. Taunting, teasing. In class, in the yard.

I'm no teacher. Which Lucius saw, but Lucy couldn't or wouldn't. “Many books… all the time books,” she said about my library armloads. And useless to tell a desperate mother how, unless a complete dolt, any time-server collects a magpie learning from the landfill hours.

Until one day she's at my door, peering up through slitted eyes. Too zeroed-in for tears. “What means
identified
?” Handing me the form, with its boxed summaries. Keywords in Bold:
dyslexia,
probable
ADHD
…
processing
…
2
nd
percentile
. Sign-offs in three different pens.

What means identified
? What you never want to be. By anyone or anything, especially a school. Spotted and slotted and sidelined before you're past the starting gate.

What Jared and I do, twice a week, is too pleasant to be called instruction. Which is no doubt why it's working—slowly, with many flatlines and fallbacks. We read together, me the left-hand page, him the right. Shy, shit-eating grin from him when he draws a page with just a picture or a two-line chapter end. Then we turn to writing. He tells me things and I record them, printing without capitals or punctuation. He takes them home to copy and correct.

Lucius keeps the Honda running. And Lucy stays in my kitchen for the hour I'm with Jared, making something spicy that will freeze. Just because I'm Socrates doesn't mean she's willing to leave me with her son. A wise woman.

Keeps her focus. Wide lens and small. Whereas Lucius—like most men, he can get stuck on a mower blade or grease pan, forgetting the whole for the part. They make a good team.