“Look,” I said, “We talked about this last night. We’ve been talking about this for weeks. My answer is the same as your mom’s: no way. Sorry buddy.”
It wasn’t a new argument. Tom looked up at me under the visor of his Jay’s hat, but I kept my attention focused on the crossing lights. I didn’t have to look down to see his face set resolute, against a world of perpetual frustration that every twelve year old has to struggle with.
“I should be able to take a train by myself,” he said, “I do it every weekend when I come to visit you.”
“Sure,” I replied, “To Ajax or Oakville, not Edmonton. If you want to go to Edmonton, your mom or I are coming with you. It’s as simple as that.”
He snorted twice; first through his nose, then a second time through his mouth, frustrated at the inability of the first snort to accurately convey his disgust. We’d had this conversation the night before over dinner and I knew his lack of progress was aggravating him.
“Anyway,” I said, “You don’t even have a place to stay. You think you’re just going to sleep at someone you’ve never met before’s house?”
“It’s called a motel,” he said.
“It’s called money,” I said, “Motels cost money.” I laughed a bit and put my hand on the top of his head to ruffle his hat. He ducked and took a step back. I put my hands in my pockets, “Like I said, if you want to pay for your mom or I to go out there with you and stay in a motel, that can be your Christmas gift.”
“I told you last night her mom said she was fine with me staying there for the weekend or whatever,” he said, “They have a spare room.”
“Did her mom tell you that?” I asked.
He was quiet for a moment. Then, “No.”
We walked the next block in silence. The Jay’s game had lasted for the better part of the afternoon, but it was only now I noticed myself feeling tired as the beer I hadn’t felt during the game began to wear off. I’d thought the divorce would be harder on Tom than it was, but he’d seemed to get through it with only what Dr. Nakashimi had described as “healthy” lingering resentments. I’d found out about Claire from Nakashimi, which was when the silent weekends Tom had spent locked away in the condo’s spare bedroom typing furiously had suddenly made sense. ‘She’s just a friend!’ he’d said when I’d asked and I’d laughed, quietly grateful that of all things he’d had a girl his age, whom he’d never met in person, to help him talk things through.
I stopped for a moment and let Tom catch up. “People aren’t always the same way you think they are,” I said.
“What do you mean?” he said. He took off his hat, pushed his hair back, and then put it on again.
We were closer to the condo now and the sun was beginning to set. It wasn’t cold but I kept my hands in my pockets and looked up at the skyline. “Edmonton is just a long way to go for someone you’ve never met in person. Sometimes the way you want people to be isn’t the way they are, even if you really think you’re sure about it, and that’s people you know in person. Buddy, I just don’t want you to get your hopes up, spend a lot of money, and then be disappointed when things aren’t the way you expected.”
“Dad,” he said, “I’ve talked to her on Skype. I know she isn’t some creepy old guy —I’ve practically met her in person. You can talk to her mom and find out if it’s okay!”
“Sure, but you still aren’t taking the train alone -hey, don’t get pissed off, I’m not being unreasonable,” I said and smiled a bit by accident.
“I’m not pissed,” he said.
“I can tell,” I said, then added, “You’re pretty easy to read when we’re right here, Tom, but when we talk on Skype there’s a difference, you know. It’s harder.”
“I’m just thinking about how to get there without spending money,” he said quietly.
I did my best not to laugh. “If you find a way, let me know, because I’d love to travel without spending money. ”
“Thanks Dad,” he said.
I paused for a moment. “There are all those other girls you know at school, your friends,” I said, “I just don’t get why you’re so dead-set on traveling across the country to meet this one who you’ve never met. What if she lives in a trailer park?”
“Dad!” he said, “She doesn’t live in a trailer park and I just do, all right? She’s different than my friends here. Maybe you’re too old to understand or something, it’s not hard. She’s just different.”
We were at the condo now and I swiped my key FOB to open the door to the lobby. “Okay, okay,” I said, “let’s talk about this later.”
We rode the elevator in silence. Inside the condo Tom sat on the couch with his laptop and turned the television on. I took my shoes off and went the washroom. I peed, wiped down the bowl and flushed, then poured a glass of water and took a slow breath. I looked in the mirror and was angry that I still looked the same. Nothing had changed, but when I’d seen Heather last she’d said I looked younger. I set the glass down on the counter and went to watch T.V. with Tom.
The frenzy of the keystrokes had built up before she really knew she was angry, chewed-down fingernails clackering dervishes before battle. Like an old woman awoken by an off-key snore, it was only a break in the rhythm of her typing that startled her into an abrupt self-consciousness. Katherine looked down at her hands. They were trembling in the cold of the air conditioning and she was gritting her teeth. If someone had come by her desk just then and commented on the off-kilter oscillation in her cheerful voice she wasn’t sure she’d be able to hold it together. It wouldn’t do to have people thinking she couldn’t handle the recent deadline crunch anyway. Her fingers had fallen mechanically into QWERTY and she took a deep breath. The region of the brain that processes smells is located beside the hippocampus but all she could smell in the office was ozone without recollection.
Katherine closed the new email window and stared at a spreadsheet of numbers that made sense to her with reassuring immediacy. Bill had come by earlier with a page-long spec sheet of data updates and reports to run, offering a blandly discreet task that had nevertheless been a reprieve. But the report data had been sent and now all that was left was the ominous tranquility of that empty email composition window. She’d left Harry three weeks ago. The breakup had been anything but emotional. He’d watched her cry and shake with the silent omniscience of a surveillance camera and had only said he understood as she left the apartment. She was living with Dawn until the end of the month, but hadn’t heard from Harry until yesterday. He’d left two messages on her phone, or one message that had been too long to fit into a single voicemail. The uncanny discontinuity of his rambling expulsion of emotion had saved it from any kind of emotional impact, and Katherine listened to both messages multiple times with a comforting detachment.
She’d tried calling once but hung up before the call could be completed, suddenly terrified that her voice would convey none of the emotion that had languished unattended for the last three weeks. Dawn had said she needed closure, but Katherine knew that a single conversation could never have manufactured the words that she needed to say. Instead she’d autopsied those last four years with emails; each unsent tirade a scalpel, each discarded analysis a bonesaw, each deleted plea an enteretome. A corpse could only be exhumed and reburied so many times before it crumbled away, but she had never been able to hit send. Every word typed had codified anew that lonely and desperate fury and self loathing and always it had fallen short by some critical word or metaphor; that fervour in her keystrokes and all the teary snot of premonition she’d swallowed back seemed untransferable through words per minute. Now there was either nothing left to type or nothing left to type about. She’d analyzed all the figures, knew their startling complexity but the tears never really came and from the shore of the playa Katherine cast another hook and caught another email. In this detachedness she was free to feel what she wanted; a telephone call could never have drawn out so many facets of suffering for so long.
Katherine wiped at her eyes reflexively and blew her nose with tissue generously supplied by her company. She typed with all the vehemence that remained after two days of practice. All that was left now was exhaustion, but to send this email would be to codify nothing, four years of friendship and fucking turned into radio static, a golden record cast out aimlessly out into space with only the hydrogen atom for reference. She hit send, then went to the bathroom to cry.
sidewalk
I can feel the sandwich sitting cold in my stomach and the radiant sidewalk seeping through the soles of my Oxfords. It’s too hot to go outside today, I said, but we walked to the restaurant for lunch anyway. I don’t feel hungry much these days. I blame it on the heat. I push my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose and all around us the pulse of sound and smell is distorted like the air rising from the hood of a car. I know there is no oasis here, only exhaled breath heavy with exhaust particulates. They say that riding your bike to work is like smoking half a pack of cigarettes. I smoke my cigarette mechanically. The city holds on to everything.
I wonder what it would be like to touch tree bark and not think of stucco. Once there was meaning here, profane rituals when the sun was only a god. You are speaking but the city has taken all the words falling out of your mouth and replaced them with the sounds of wind whistling through radio antennas. Entombed beneath us are the bones of pixies, gnomes and trickster spirits; you can hear the whispers of their husks in phone static and dropped packets. A homeless man looks through me and asks for change or a cigarette. I oblige him both without words because I have nothing else to give anymore. You’ve walked on unaware. I know the tremble of time but I have no equation anymore to describe the space around me.
I catch up before you notice I was ever left behind. The sidewalk is cracked here, a shoot of grass or some species of weed pushing up through the concrete. I stoop for a moment and pick up a piece of the debris to feel the weightlessness roll in my hand. You give a summer smile when I try to lob it into a rainbow-slicked puddle hiding under the curb but it falls out of my hand and only settles back into stasis. “Isn’t it a beautiful day?” you ask.
I smile without expecting the fury that wells up inside of me. Then I want to strike you, push you down, break those coffee teeth and ask what is beautiful about the entropy of this stillness and then everything is gone. I can’t hold on to anything anymore. A woman with a baby stroller walks past us on the sidewalk. I move out of the way or like a ghost pass through her and then we are in the condo, where the weight of heat lifts from the scoliosis of my cybernetic back. A fifteen year old girl on Oprah had built six wells in Africa and had recently been kidnapped and held for randsom. The thought of inflicting myself on reality like that makes my hands tremble. When I die I won’t be buried, I’ll just crumble away.
just a game
I’d just ordered Chinese when Alex sent a text that he’d be late. The software company he worked for was almost at a major release and he’d been putting in a lot of late nights to meet deadlines. I texted back, “Okay,” then got a beer from the fridge. It was Friday night and I stood in the kitchen for a while, looking at the potted plastic plant in the corner near the knife block as I drank. Alex and I had been what most people would call best friends since grade one. I’d probably spent more time slumped on his basement couch playing Super Mario, Final Fantasy and Soul Caliber than I ever had with my family. The stories of those games were our dialogues, the characters our sounding lines.
I threw the empty beer bottle into the recycling and opened another. The apartment still smelled like laundry detergent, my clothes hanging air-dried on the curtain rods, and I busied myself with clearing the week’s detritus of junk mail, bill envelopes and burger wrappers from the coffee table. Alex would need space to set up his gaming equipment. We’d probably play Modern Warfare tonight but it didn’t really matter. Our friendship had been founded on a veneration of Super Mario Brothers that bordered on the religious, but now constituted a network of games so reticulated it could be traced only by console age – NES, SNES, PlayStation, PS2, Xbox 360.
I threw the grocery bag of garbage to the door. The light filtered in wrinkled through button shirts and with the garbage gone from the table I couldn’t be sure I really lived here anymore. I could hear the T.V. clicking quietly in the hum of the aquarium pump and whir of the computer in the other room. In that sudden vacuum I wanted only to sit down on the couch and surrender into a complete abandonment of the world. I took another drink and turned on the news and learned nothing that I hadn’t already read online. I checked my email and chatted on Facebook for twenty minutes then turned the news on again. They were talking about the oil spill. An engineering professor was being asked about the methods used to seal the leak and I watched the technical diagrams float like ghosts on the screen. I turned the news off and played Xbox - not what I expected to play with Alex but something more profane.
My phone rang. It was the delivery guy. I pressed nine to let him into the building, saved my game and stood up. I got another beer and leaned against the counter as I drank it. When the door knocked I answered, taking the boxes of Chinese with a ‘Thank you’ and an awful tip. My phone vibrated: Alex was on his way. I closed the door, waited for five minutes and then took the garbage out to the chute. When I got back I put the Chinese on the counter and changed the channel to the Food Network.
I was drinking on an empty stomach and the alcohol had already gone to my head when Alex showed up, a twelve-pack, 24-inch monitor and Xbox held precariously between both hands, profound circles stamped under his eyes. His glasses were crooked and his hair, always thin, looked like a shadow.
“What’s up man,” he said. He smiled his wobbly smile, “Ready to kick some fuckin’ ass tonight?”
I said ‘yeah’ and nodded. He asked me if I was drunk and set the monitor and Xbox down on the coffee table. I said no. I put the Chinese in the microwave and pressed reheat.
Alex put the twelve-pack in the fridge and took out one of my beers. He put a coaster on the coffee table and sat on the couch, taking a long drink from the bottle. Work was shit, he said, he hated the major releases. I’d had to stay late that day as well, but not as long as him. A client had reported a bug in the financial module we’d created for them. He laughed when I told him but I didn’t believe it.
We ate at the coffee table in a refuge of familiar silence. I was finishing the last of the chow mein when Alex cracked his knuckles and wordlessly plugged in his monitor and Xbox.
“I heard there’s a new system update today,” he said, “supposed to stop a bunch of hacks and shit.”
I grunted with my mouth full, then stood up and got two more beers. I left the delivery boxes scattered on the coffee table, occupied with remnants of General Tao and lemon chicken balls. I put one of the bottles in front of Alex and started up Modern Warfare on my TV, drinking more beer as I watched Alex set up his console. That was our setup these days, him with his Xbox and monitor on the coffee table, me with my Xbox and TV.
“Let’s do it,” I said. Alex laughed again and we high-fived before putting our headsets on.
The next two hours passed with a quiet effortlessness of trash talk and cursing, Alex and I drinking more and more beer as we gunned and died and resurrected ourselves away from the magnitude of any physical reality. I’d lost track of my kills and deaths, drunk with ethanol and abstraction, when Alex stood up, controller gripped tightly in one hand. He’d been killed by the same player for the fifth time in a row.
“You little motherfuck!” he shouted. His eyes bulged and focused on nothing, his face flushed and splotched. “Fuck!” he shouted again and hurled his controller to the floor.
I predicted the controller would mirror his outburst and explode into a thousand fragments on the floor. But it did nothing but bounce under the coffee table and lay still. I exited from the game but kept my headset on, controller in hand.
“Jesus dude, it’s just a game,” I said. My face flushed immediately with an alien regret, but the silence that followed was eclipsed by the ambient music drifting from the television.
Alex stood there, breathing raggedly in the fluorescent twilight, and I was terrified that he would start to cry real tears. He finally sat down and I took off my headset. I put my controller down and was about to apologize for something but couldn’t find the words.
“Liz and I broke up last night,” he said in a stranger’s voice. Liz was his first girlfriend. Alex had met her in University and they’d been dating for the five years since.
“Fuck man,” I said. I wasn’t sure if I knew this Alex. “You all right?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”
He grabbed the last lemon chicken ball with his fingers and ate it, then stood up and got another beer out of the fridge. “If you want to talk or anything,” I said.
He sat down on the couch and picked up the controller from the floor. “I’m okay,” he said, “just didn’t really expect it to happen like this.” He licked his lips and nodded to himself, then took a deep breath.
“Sorry man, you want to keep playing?” he said.
“Sure,” I said.
ephemerality and wall posts
Carl took a seat at the back of the viewing room after helping himself to a Dixie cup of punch. Jeff had been the second person at work to die in the last three weeks. First had been Irene Palmerston from QA and her heart attack. Jeff, a DBA, had fought valiantly against a testicular cancer that had metastasized. There had been an apologetic email sent out to the office. The funeral home was a ten minute drive from work and Jeff’s family had scheduled the viewing on Friday during business lunch hours. Carl had played poker with Jeff a couple times over the years at company casino nights and had stumbled across the urge to pay his respects. He’d worked with Irene every day for three years but hadn’t gone to her funeral and there hadn’t been a viewing. People were always dying and being born and he hadn’t wanted to ask for time off.
The room had the subtle chemical scent of new carpet and chlorinated flower bouquets that gave Carl a headrush. He’d avoided the body on his way in and had so far done his best to avoid noticing it at all. All around him strangers, Jeff’s family and friends, were filling into the room with somber shoes and napkins of finger food, taking seats, checking their smartphones and pagers and shushing their children. Carl checked his watch then took out his Blackberry to check the time while he waited for the service. He posted a message on Jeff’s Facebook wall, ‘RIP buddy, office won’t be the same without you.” His watch and his Blackberry were one minute apart and the incongruity was unsettling.
Tony arrived just before the service was about to begin. He was wearing earphones and said Hello as he sat down next to Carl.
“Jesus Tony,” Carl said.
“What?” Tony said. His face twitched and he took out the earphone on Carl’s side. “They’re not on, I just leave them in when I’ve got my phone with me,” he said.
“Besides,” Tony said. He looked over at the corpse in the coffin, “Jeff would have wanted it this way.” He paused and put the earphone back in as the service began.
Carl’s Blackberry was vibrating again but he ignored it. It wasn’t alone; like a fury of garbled hymns the mobile devices in the room all seemed to vibrate at once as the service progressed. Jeff’s widow made a short speech before she was overcome by tears. When she had sat down again her eight year old son looked up from his Nintendo DS and gave her a hug. She sniffed and wiped at her eyes then regained her composure with a deep breath.
After the speeches Carl and Tony stood up to pay their respects. Tony still had his earphones in but nobody seemed to notice. Carl refilled his Dixie cup and took a butter tart and napkin. The vibrations of his Blackberry were giving him vertigo. Jeff lay in the coffin, looking more ebullient than when he’d been alive. All the bloating and delirium had been kneaded from his face, the heavy bags drained from under his eyes. Under those latexed eyelids Carl thought his eyes would still be bloodshot, but if they’d hooked up his chest cavity to a cycling air compressor nobody would have thought to look. Tony put his hands in his pockets and rocked on his heels with a mouthful of unspoken words. Carl finished his butter tart and stared at Jeff’s body with the frenetic interest of a science fair exhibit. Jeff’s widow shuffled over, introduced herself and said, Thanks for coming. Jeff was a great guy, Carl said, The office was really going to miss him.
Jeff’s widow left and Carl checked his phone again. Six people had Liked his wall post. The phone shook in his hand like an angry grub, another message reminder.
He walked out of the viewing room and went outside, mistaking his sweat for rain. But the sun was out in almost unbearable force and he wiped his forehead, then trembled for a bit and reached for his Blackberry. He felt dizzy and checked his messages. It wasn’t work, it was the veterinarian’s office. His dog had died. He’d been struck by a car the day before and hadn’t pulled through after the surgery. Carl called the veterinarian’s office.
“Sorry to hear about Descartes,” the vet tech said.
“Oh,” Carl said. Yes, they could donate the body to science, and thanks for the hard work.
He hung up and stared at the keys on the phone for a while before Tony came out and lit up a cigarette. He’d taken his headphones out and they stood there for a while in silence, looking at the row of hearses baking in the sun like silicon wafers.
“He was fuckin’ stupid anyway,” Tony said.
Carl’s Blackberry vibrated again but he didn’t pick up.
lettuce
The fervour of the produce isle is almost overwhelming without a certain diligence. Remove your focus from the bruises, the brown edges, the wilting, and you can lose yourself in the clamor of exhaled breath and cell phone vibrations. I never wanted to be a programmer. I tell people I buy my suits at the thrift store, carrying on the mediocre legacy of half a dozen old dead men, but really I buy them from the cheap men’s stores in the shopping mall. The drought –or is it a flood?- in Brazil has decimated the yellow onion selection. I pick one up. The skin is coarse and crinkles to my touch but the outside is wet. I can’t tell if the wetness is from its own mistreatment or that of the onions around it. With a casual intensity I throw it back to the pile. A cooking onion acts as a sufficient substitute.
Some days when my sleep is lacking I will pay attention to the conversation beside me, a stooped middle aged woman talking wirelessly on her cell phone while grabbing at the first mesh bag of garlic she can get her hands on. I will get distracted and notice the weight in her laughter and the frown lines around her mouth as she speaks. Today I put the onion in my basket and shuffle away from the cloying perfume. I don’t need green peppers, but I do need mushrooms for the spaghetti sauce I want to make tonight, the same basic meat sauce I make early in the week to put in the fridge and take to work for lunch until Friday. The mushroom selection is better than the onions. Two women are examining the criminis, speaking in what I guess to be French. I look at the portabellas. I can listen to their commentary only because it is like a puzzle to me; I do not know the French word for ‘mushroom.’ The reaffirmation of alienation in their encrypted language is comforting. You can never truly understand anyone. As I select three portabellas I guess at their exchange.
‘Select the ones at the back, s’il vous plaît,’ the woman with the studded earrings says.
‘Oui, the freshest ones. But let us avoid these ones, the slimy ones. They are about to spoil. How much do we need for the aperitif?’
‘Only a few handfuls.’
The commonality of this experience is bearable now only because it is chained to inaccessibility by language. Without it the thought that all around you a dozen or more people are simultaneously experiencing analogous cognitive processes is almost insufferable. I move on to the salad section, in my analysis a moment of indecision, an eternity of unique solitude. When I graduated with the computer science diploma that hangs on my cramped office wall, I said I would work anywhere, I would be happiest in the most discrete and cloistered of places so long as I was left undisturbed and uncompromised. Some days there is only the hum of server racks and the clackering chatter of yellowed keyboard keys in echo to my algorithms and optimizations. Those days are when I feel most like myself and when I most loathe its abstraction.
I abandon the packaged salad- iceberg lettuce is on sale, laying heaped on a stack of wooden crates, quarantined. I pick up a head. Wrapped in plastic and at room temperature it has the texture of dehydrated skin. The reason for the sale is obvious, the outer leaves are wilted, slightly brown, turning to a plastic translucency. There is another woman across from me, my age or slightly older. Her hair is blonde, face tired from an expiring youth, a soccer jersey pulled too tightly across small breasts. I am already thinking about AM 640 talk radio, diet cola filled to the breaking point with vodka, heart racing amidst radio static to a muted and clammy unconsciousness. I realize I am staring and she realizes it too, looking up at me with leaded eyes that quickly stumble and fall back down to all these heads of lettuce. My mouth opens to speak but all that comes out are forms in overwhelming silence. Old memories of desire in texture and crunch disappear and I walk away. Logically a salad can be substituted any way.
