The Origin of Species (27 page)

By the seventeenth floor Alex seemed to have come to a region of the stairwell that not even Guy had ever made it up to, half the lights burnt out and a fine dust powdering the stairs that looked like it hadn’t been stepped on in twenty years. He should lodge a complaint about the lights, he thought, and then he thought,
Fuck it
. Those days were done. It occurred to him that maybe his one good fight had come and gone.

He wished he was more like Jiri. Here was a man whose job hung in the balance, whose wife had left him, who was homeless, who had a skinhead son, yet he managed to carry on as if none of it touched him. The latest rumor was that his son had joined a bona fide neo-Nazi group.

“The funny thing is he looks exactly like Jerry,” one of the faculty had told him. “A mirror image. Right down to his bald head.”

Jerry
. That was what the faculty called Jiri, the remnant, no doubt, of some pre-identity-politics self. Jiri would let the name float in the air without batting an eye, as if he was above it, as if it had been neutralized before it reached him.

Alex had reached his apartment. Everything had become a synesthetic blur, the pounding in his head, his sweat, the stink of seafood. He was seeing colors: green for the stink, strobe-light purple for the pounding.

He heard a sound on the other side of the door as he was turning his key and his first paranoid thought was that the landlords had broken in, that he was about to catch them red-handed, planting microphones or stealing his computer files or verifying some snitch’s report that he was harboring a pet. But then he swung the door open and saw what in his deepest heart of hearts he had been expecting all along, Jiri’s bag still planted by the entrance and Jiri himself sitting reading the paper on the sofa, which Alex, for the first time in many days, had pointedly restored to its proper use that very morning.

Moses, though he wasn’t allowed there, sat purring on the sofa beside him.

Alex had to struggle to keep the tremor from his voice.

“I thought you were going.”

“Hmm?” Jiri glanced up from his paper. “Back already?”

“I thought you’d be gone.”

“Oh. I missed my train.”

Any minute, Alex thought, he was literally going to burst into flames with rage.

“Why didn’t you wait for another one?”

“The truth is I never really left the apartment. It was taking so long to get an elevator I just gave up. I thought I’d wait till tomorrow.”

“There’s a train at three-forty. I’ve taken it. There’s another one at five.”

“What’s the difference?” Jiri said. “I’d just as soon wait.”

“The difference is”—Alex tried to restrain himself—“the difference is, I had plans.”

Jiri looked at him over the rims of his glasses.

“Alex, my boy, you’re not saying you had a romantic encounter planned, are you?”

“What I had planned—” But there was no point being evasive. “Yes. Yes. As a matter of fact, I did.”

“Good, good, I was beginning to worry about you! I can arrange to be out, of course, it’s not a problem.”

“Yes,” Alex said, “yes, it’s a problem. I don’t want you to be here.”

Jiri shrugged as if he did not follow.

“As I say, I can go out. The whole night, if you think it’ll come to that. I’ll just take a room at the Y—”

“No, you don’t understand.” This was the point at which he ought to have stopped himself, at which it was still possible for things to end civilly. “I don’t want you here at all. I want my apartment back, I want my desk back, I want my bed. I know you’re going through a rough time, I know your wife left you and your son hates you or something, but that doesn’t give you the right to take advantage of me. It doesn’t give you the right.”

There, he had got it out. For a moment he felt a great lifting.

“Ah,” Jiri said. “I see.”

He looked truly crestfallen. Already Alex could feel his relief seeping away.

“Look, I’m just saying, with all the work and everything—”

“No, no, you’re absolutely right,” Jiri said, drawing his dignity around him. “I’ll take a room at the Y until I find a place.”

He had started packing papers into his briefcase.

“I didn’t mean you had to go this minute.”

“That’s fine, it’s just as well. I’ll come for the rest of my things when I get back from Toronto.”

He rounded up a few odds and ends in the bedroom. He’d left his paper on the dining table—not a
Gazette
, Alex saw, but a
Toronto Star
, folded to a headline that read “Man Attacked in City Park.”

Jiri took up the newspaper and put it in his briefcase.

“Maybe you could dig up a couple of boxes later and leave my books in them,” he said. “To speed things up a bit.”

“Sure. Sure.”

He added a few extra underwear to his bag, neatly folded and pressed from the cleaners, then donned his trench coat.

“So. Thank you, then. I’m sorry if I overstayed my welcome.”

Whatever goodwill Alex might have earned over the previous weeks seemed cast to the winds.

“Call my office when you want to discuss the proposal,” Jiri said, all business now.

After the weeks of lingering it took Jiri all of five minutes to clear out. Alex felt a chill at how abruptly the matter had ended. It seemed only now that he understood that something like a relationship had been forming between the two of them while Jiri had been there, a twisted, unbalanced one, maybe, but a relationship nonetheless. What he remembered, watching Jiri go, was the glow that had come off him the night of the Scotch, as if he were a shaman or wizard sent to guide him.

The elevator, miraculously, arrived almost at once. Jiri stepped into it without looking back, straight-shouldered and undiminished.

I
t was well past his appointed time when Alex finally managed to make his way down to Esther’s to collect her for her swimming. Molly, Esther’s new helper, stood waiting for him at her open door.

“Twenty minute I am waiting,” she said. “You say you will come at three.”

Every time he saw Molly—Wamalie, her real name was, though Alex was the only one who ever called her that, a courtesy she showed no sign of appreciating—he felt his aversion toward her surge anew.

“She would have been fine if you’d just left her on her own a few minutes.”

“And what her father will say, if she tell him?”

In the three months now that Molly had been looking after Esther, Alex had yet to get a proper bead on her. He disliked her, yes, but hadn’t been able to determine whether this had some basis in reality or was just him sulking over territory or being racist. He quizzed Esther on her constantly, as innocently as he could manage, since Esther worshipped her, but so far nothing he’d gleaned had established definitively whether she was an abusive power-tripper holding Esther in a kind of Stockholm-syndrome thrall or a godsend who’d brought Esther back from the brink of despair. This much he knew, that she showed up five mornings a week precisely at seven, and from then on took over Esther’s life with all the force of an invading army, bathing her and dressing her and feeding her, escorting her to her doctors’ appointments and to her physio sessions at the Royal Vic, attending classes with her at the university, where she worked her tape recorder for her and held open her books and for all Alex knew browbeat
her professors into giving her passing grades, all of this before she left again at three with the same promptness with which she’d arrived.

She seemed to loom there in Esther’s doorway, though she didn’t stand more than five feet.
Molly Svengali
.

“I hope I didn’t keep you from an appointment,” he said coolly.

“No appointment. Only my cousin’s daughter, she is coming home from school, no key.”

All Alex’s sanctimoniousness drained away. Somewhere in the city, probably in a gang-infested tenement in the squalid lower reaches of Point St. Charles, some innocent little Filipina was cowering alone now in a darkened hallway because Alex had been late.

“I’m sorry,” Alex said. “I’m sorry about that.”

“Is okay, she wait.”

Esther was parked in the living room in her wheelchair trussed and prepped, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her cheeks done up with a bit of rouge to hide her pallor, a gym bag draped over the arm of her chair holding, Alex knew, a towel, goggles, a bathing cap, an extra pair of underwear, and a child’s sippy cup filled with orange juice.

Her vision had grown erratic since her last exacerbation and it took her an instant sometimes to make out when someone had entered her field of vision.

“Sorry I’m late, Es,” Alex said.

“Oh, Alex! Are you late?”

The wheelchair had been a shock. One week Esther had been getting around fine on her cane, her usual social-butterfly self, the next she was flat on her back in a hospital bed hardly able to move.

“I can’t believe it, I just blacked out,” she said when Alex went in to see her. “Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever blacked out like that?”

Alex could hear the fear in her voice. When by the third day she still wasn’t able to get out of bed she began to panic.

“I can’t do it, Alex,” she said. “I can’t stop walking. I just can’t. I might as well be dead.”

By then the slow procession of reality mongers had started coming through, her doctor, the hospital staff, her mother. Her mother was the one who had found her, collapsed on the floor of her apartment unable to get to the phone.

“It’s still early,” Alex said. He didn’t want to seem on the side of the naysayers, even if in his heart he was. “In a week we’ll be going out for cappuccinos again.”

But a week later she was still in hospital. By then a chair had arrived, and a physio had started working on getting her used to it. Esther acted as if all of it was merely temporary, as if she was just humoring everyone. By the time she came home, wheeled up the steps at the front of the building by her brother Lenny—there was nothing like a ramp there—she was treating the chair as a lark.

“Look at my new chair,” she said to people. “La-di-da.”

But alone with her, Alex would see how the life drained out of her sometimes. He’d always thought of her stubbornness as an intrinsic part of her, but now he saw it was something she actually had to make an effort for. It was scary to think what her life might be like without it: there’d be only the pit then, only one bad thing to look forward to after another.

There had seemed no question of her going back to her swimming. Before the exacerbation, this had been an article of almost religious faith, her daily hour in the building’s pool. In the water, Esther was transformed—it was something about the weightlessness, the way the water held her. She was strangely in control; you had to look, and look again, to see the bit of unsureness in her. The first time Alex had seen her, he’d felt as if he were looking at a stranger: this was Esther, whole. She’d done a lap, had turned smoothly, done another, just a woman in the water. It had been hard to bear the intimacy of it, as if he’d stolen a look at her naked, or as if he was the one who was standing naked.

“You didn’t think it was true,” she’d said afterward. “You thought you’d have to jump in and save me.”

But after the exacerbation she didn’t mention the swimming anymore. It was only from Lenny that Alex learned Esther’s physio had actually been pushing for her to go back to it, and she was resisting. This was a new Esther, a scary one.

“I’m just so tired, Alex,” she said. “I’m so tired.”

“Just try it. It can’t hurt to try it.”

Alex stood watching from the pool deck the first time Lenny took her in again. At one point she slipped from Lenny’s grasp and went under and came up hacking and panicked. Alex hurried over to help Lenny lift
her to the side of the pool, crouching there at the pool edge while she clung to him, clammy as a sea thing, her coughs merging into her sobs.

“It’s hopeless,” she said. “I can’t do it.”

But she went back afterward, using a kickboard to help her, and slowly she began to get a feel for the water again. After a couple of weeks, with the board, she could manage a lap or two entirely on her own, and some of her old spirit began to return. She started using a walker sometimes to get around her apartment, though she didn’t talk about fighting the chair anymore—it was real, it was part of her life. Sometimes it happened after exacerbations that people made total recoveries, Alex had read about it in one of Esther’s pamphlets, but he never heard her give voice to that hope. Something had shifted in her, gone underground. She didn’t use her hands much around people now, as if to avoid the embarrassment of some mishap, but the old Esther would never have cared about that, would simply have surged on like a freight train.

Then there was Molly. It occurred to Alex that you couldn’t possibly help feeling like a sick person when you had someone treating you like one eight relentless hours a day, cutting your food up for you, scolding you for every little bit of initiative, forever reminding you of your limitations and prohibitions and special ailments. But a symbiosis had developed between Esther and Molly that Alex couldn’t quite figure; what looked like mere bullying to him seemed to function for Esther as a sort of cult-like catechism.

“She only lets me watch an hour of TV every day,” Esther boasted. “And if I want to sleep in, I have to do it on the weekend, she says my father’s not paying her to watch me sleep.”

When Esther returned to her swimming, Alex wondered at first if it wasn’t Molly Svengali who’d somehow been behind it. But no: it turned out that Molly, pigheadedly, would have nothing to do with Esther’s swimming. Alex put it down to sheer resentment, that Esther had dared to have something beyond Molly’s control. But the one time Molly agreed to come to the building’s pool to watch Esther swim, at Esther’s repeated bidding, she hugged the walls the entire time, clearly scared out of her wits of the water.

“You see?” Esther called from the pool. “You see? Alex didn’t believe it either!”

Molly stood clucking and shaking her head like an old mother hen.

“You never tell me you are a fish,” she said, letting a grudging smile escape her.