This New Year’s Eve, over at Dan and Rae’s, everyone took turns declaring their resolutions. Dan’s was to run faster. One of the guys, a techie type Dan met when he worked briefly at a computer store, said he wanted a better job. A friend of Rae’s said that she wanted to live in another country — it didn’t seem to matter which one. Henry went last. He could have said he wanted to finish Amy’s damned crow, whose bones, for some reason, stymied him like no other bird he’d reconstructed, but he didn’t want to explain to Dan’s friends what that meant. He felt a prickle of sudden dampness in his underarms. Finally he said he wanted to travel to Russia. This was received with murmurs of “cool” and “awesome.” Rae, one long bare arm draped over Dan’s shoulder, gazed at Henry, perplexed.
Henry likes to throw Dan a curveball every once in a while but this time it went right by him. Dan knows about Mrs. Bogdanov but he probably wouldn’t connect her with Russia. She’s an old lady, and Dan’s world doesn’t really include old ladies.
Henry switches off the overhead light, flicks on the halogen lamp on the table, and parks himself in front of the riddle that is the crow. It is a new year, 2003, and he’s determined to knuckle down — if he takes two or three nights a week to unlock the order inherent in its bones, the crow will be a perfectly handsome skeleton in a few weeks.
He bends into the lamp’s rays, the crisp light revealing in perfect detail the almost weightless, ivory-coloured bones.
Two
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING Henry is making breakfast when the phone rings.
“I’ve got something for you,” his brother tells him. His voice is hoarse, and he’s coughing.
“You don’t sound too good,” Henry says. He waits as Dan takes a drink of something.
“It’s a cold or flu I guess. There’s this mixture that’ll help. I get it from this Asian guy, Jeremy, over on 20th.” The cough, Dan says, is the worst part, and Jeremy thinks this pill — which, by the way, is made from snake bile — will knock it out. Henry’s mind flits to a red-banded snake swimming across the ground, like a single, undulant muscle.
“You have something for me?” Henry looks at his watch. It’s six-thirty. Early for Dan to be up, even when he isn’t sick.
“A DVD. I saw this great show. I’ll tell you about it later. Too hard to talk now.” There’s a crackling sound as he covers the receiver, followed by a phlegmy cough.
Henry holds the phone away from his ear and waits for Dan to come back on the line. The “great show” was probably something Dan’s seen on the Discovery Channel — he’s got a penchant for far-out pseudoscientific documentaries. He’s always trying to convince Henry of “other” possibilities. Other worlds, other dimensions.
“Hank,” Dan almost whispers, “I thought you could go get the pills from Jeremy, on your way to work, then you could pick up the DVD when you drop them off.”
“I have to eat first, Dan.” Henry whisks a couple of slices of toast out of the toaster and drops them on a plate. He knows the pills aren’t going to do a thing for Dan’s cough. “Couldn’t it wait till tonight? Or, why doesn’t Rae go?”
“She’s in Calgary. Anyway, Jeremy’s expecting you — his place is in an old house on Avenue B — it’s kind of a weird blue-green — shit, I forget the house number. Hang on.”
Henry slathers jam on his toast, pours himself a cup of coffee, and sits down at the table, the phone wedged between his ear and shoulder.
By the time Dan comes back on the line and tells him the address, Henry has downed one slice of toast. He gets up reluctantly, leaving the coffee untouched, and slips into his parka, juggling the other slice from one hand to the other. Maybe he’ll hit a drive-thru for a Danish after he drops off his brother’s placebos. Dan’s talking now about his latest run, how fast and far he went. Nine miles? Could that be what he said?
“Wasn’t Rae away last week too?” Henry asks through a mouthful.
“Yeah. That big case about the tailing ponds,” Dan says.
Rae represents an environmental group in their suit against the oil giants and the development of the tar sands. When Rae told Henry about the case at the New Year’s party, she kept saying, fists upraised in front of her as if she were gripping something heavy which she would in no circumstances put down, “This is it, this is what matters.”
“How’s the case going?” Henry asks now.
“Lots of progress, I guess. If I ever saw her I’d know more.”
“Dan, I’d better let you go if I’m going to get over there in time.”
Henry delves for his keys in the pockets of his parka and shoves his feet into his winter boots. Through the plate-glass kitchen window he can see the old apple tree in the backyard. The snow is so deep that it’s swallowed the tips of the low-hanging branches.
“Hank, I’ve just decided. It can wait till after you finish work this evening. I mean, it’s fucking cold this morning.” Dan interrupts himself to cough again, a painful hacking sound. “This’ll calm down soon,” he says. “I just got off the treadmill.”
“Christ, Dan, can’t you give it a rest?”
“It felt good,” Dan says. “Actually it hurt like hell, but I played through it.” He laughs and coughs, and then there’s a choked silence.
Henry can almost feel the effort in his brother’s solar plexus as he tries to suppress his cough. Don’t cough, don’t cough, don’t cough. That was their mother’s mantra when she was trying to convince you that you were getting better, that you could, if you made an effort.
“I’m gonna get the pills now,” he says and hangs up. He takes a last bite of toast, turns off the coffeemaker, and heads for the door.
Dan’s sudden change of heart — get my pills, no don’t get my pills — is par for the course. While it may be that he doesn’t want Henry to suffer on his account, making a special trip to get the pills in this weather, Henry suspects that Dan wants to tough it out, to do battle with this flu as part of his he-man training.
FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, Henry stands on the steps of a rundown wartime house with his toque pulled down against the minus thirty-eight wind chill. His eyes are watering from the cold. He pulls off a mitt and raps hard again with his bare knuckles, then turns his back to the north wind. He’ll need the stupid pills himself if he has to wait here much longer.
The house is opposite one of the most notorious bars in the city. He looks across at smeared windows covered with faded decals. Canadian, Blue, Pils, Bohemian. There’s a sign posted on the door that says “no shirt, no shoes, no service,” and someone has added, in big red wobbly letters, “no refunds.” Henry would laugh if his cheeks weren’t numb with cold.
When he hears the door open, he turns and a slim brown hand thrusts a bottle of pills at him. Henry pulls his wallet out but the guy who must be Jeremy waves his money away because, he says, he owes Dan for a new hard drive.
“Cold, eh,” Jeremy says with a shy grin before closing the door.
IN THE SEVEN-THIRTY A.M. DARK, Dan and Rae’s house seems dull because you can’t see that the siding is painted a rich forest green, that the heavy oak front door, saved by Rae from an old house that was about to be demolished, is stained a lustrous brown. Henry sits in his car, watching a chickadee dart in and out of a bare thicket of caragana. The wind is fretting grains of snow off the drifts.
No lights seem to be on, so maybe Dan’s gone back to bed.
Henry takes the pills out of his jacket pocket. The glass bottle is heavy, the label covered in minute Chinese characters. He squints at the tiny script, looking for a list of ingredients but there isn’t a single word in English.
Henry rings the bell, his shoulders hunched against the wind. A slim grey feather hangs suspended inside the branches of the cedar next to the door. Sneaking a bare hand out of his pocket, he traps the feather between thumb and forefinger. A dab of yellow along one edge seems to pulse in the dim light, the bird itself long flown south. He’s wondering where Amy is at this moment, if she has a new boyfrie
nd, when the door opens and Dan teeters there, on the threshold, clutching his white cotton robe tightly across his chest. He’s had his hair cut — sheared off — and is now crowned with a nap of fuzz. His wide jaw, the single dimple in his left cheek, those intense blue eyes — he’s even better looking with his hair reduced to a ruddy haze.
Henry waves the feather under Dan’s nose. “Myrtle warbler,” he says.
Dan hauls Henry into the house by the arm — a scythe of cold air sweeps in behind him, the feather flies from his grasp and sifts to the floor so lazily he can’t quite believe he’s lost sight of it. And when he looks up, Dan is gone.
Henry kicks off his boots and drops his coat on the back of a chair, then, hearing movement in the bedroom, walks down the hall toward it.
Dan is kneeling in front of the small TV at the foot of the bed, rifling through the drawer in the TV stand. On the bedside table, there’s a glass of water, grubby with fingerprints, and a smaller glass containing some pinkish residue. Tinctures in tiny opaque brown bottles are scattered across the dresser, where Rae’s silver earring stand, an ornate, curlicued tree, has been shoved to one side.
“Dan, here are the pills.” Henry holds out the bottle and Dan turns to face him, two DVDS in plastic cases in his hands.
“I can’t remember which one it is,” Dan says, staring at their labels. His husky voice makes him sound like a much older version of himself.
“Which what? Your pills —” He rattles the bottle in Dan’s direction. “Dan!”
Dan’s face is pallid, his lips drawn back in a thin line.
“Jesus, Dan, you look like hell.”
“Thanks.” Dan grins, and gestures toward his head. “Must be the new cut. Don’t I look swift?”
“Swift?” Ah, Henry gets it now. The haircut is supposed to make Dan more aerodynamic.
“I mean swish.” Dan’s eyes are a flat, watery blue.
“Very nice.” Henry can’t imagine that Rae approves; how often has he seen her run a hand absent-mindedly through Dan’s curls while she’s sitting beside him? “I thought the shaved look was out. Especially now — today, I mean. You know that it’s been minus thirty for a week? You’d freeze your frontal lobe if you went out like that.”
“I’d wear my snow pants,” Dan says.
Henry isn’t sure if this is meant to be a joke.
“Take both of them.” Dan tosses the DVDS toward Henry. They drop onto the bed with a clack of plastic on plastic.
“Great. Thanks.” Dan has a new toy, a DVD recorder, and Henry is no doubt in for a barrage of ridiculous shows Dan thinks he should watch. Who really built the Pyramids? Aliens from planet Zorax or a race of giant lizards? “You know I don’t have a player,” Henry says.
“One of these is so very cool, totally cutting edge.” Dan sheds his robe and scrambles up the length of the bed. “Medical breakthroughs that are going to change everything. The other one — I dunno.” He’s wearing saggy white boxers and the shirt from a pair of bright green pajamas.
“Dan?”
“Yeah?” Dan’s wrestling with a mess of blankets he’s trying to rearrange on top of the duvet. He looks cold, and, if possible, sicker. Dan’s near-naked skull is like a dirty orange light bulb, a not-so-bright idea his body has had.
“Never mind,” Henry says as he sits on the edge of the bed. He helps Dan straighten the covers and then passes the pills to him. Glossy magazines fan across Rae’s side of the bed. Magazines for runners — Fast Track, Runner’s Universe.
“My cough’s better this morning,” Dan says, “but these’ll help my stomach too.” He pours out a bunch of pills — about ten, it looks like.
“Whoa,” Henry says.
Dan raises his eyebrows, his mouth full of water and pills.
“How long have you had this?”
Dan is still swallowing.
“This bug. How long have you had it?”
Dan pops more pills into his mouth.
“Jesus, how many of those are you going to take?”
“Three days,” Dan says, and gulps more water. “I woke up in the night, Monday, with a bad headache and a fever. And a sore throat. Yesterday I got the cough.” He wipes his mouth on his pajama sleeve. “And today the fever’s worse.”
Dan puts his glass down with a thump and lies back, gazing away from Henry, toward the blinds on the window.
“Rae’ll be home by suppertime?” Henry sees Rae arriving home in her big faux sheepskin coat, full of conquering energy, calling out for Dan as she hangs the coat in the foyer closet, calling again as she follows his voice down the hall, discovering him in bed and laying herself down, fully clothed, alongside him.
Suddenly Dan launches himself to the far edge of the bed and vomits.
Henry hurries around the bed, trying not to inhale the hot wave of sick smell, almost tripping on Dan’s robe. Relieved to see a plastic bucket and that Dan’s aim has been true, Henry tentatively lowers his hand onto Dan’s shoulder. The heat of his brother’s skin is like static through the damp cotton. Dan retches and spits a couple of times, then lowers himself back onto his pillow. There’s a line of sweat on his forehead and his lips are dry and sore-looking.
“Do you want —” Henry stops himself from recommending ginger ale, his mother’s universal tonic, which they both hate because it reminds them of being sick.
“Shit,” Dan moans.
The shadow of a beard on Dan’s face might be Henry’s own shadow, falling across his brother years ago when they were boys and still shared a room. Dan was lying in bed, propped up against a heap of pillows, his face fuller then, with a childlike mobility that he hasn’t quite lost. Henry had been about to go out the front door to catch the school bus when Dan yelled something about a message he wanted Henry to deliver to a friend. Sweltering in his overcoat and boots, Henry stood over Dan as he wrote the note, his words almost tearing through the paper. He gave the note to Henry but before he had a chance to pocket it, Dan asked for it back and tore it up. There was a big tournament at school, a volleyball tournament that Dan was supposed to play in, and he was frustrated almost to the point of tears because he had to miss it. Henry had been astounded that anyone cared so much about a game.
Henry grasps the bucket by its wire handle and ferries it quickly down the hall to the bathroom. He averts his eyes from the brown slop and the red dots he might see in it as he dumps it into the toilet and flushes it away. Setting the pail under the Jacuzzi tub’s chrome swan-necked faucet, he cranks opens the hot water tap, letting the pail overflow with steaming hot water before he empties it down the drain.
He washes his hands, and with the smell of the lather — lavender — for a moment Rae’s in the room. Her narrow oval face with its look of concern for whoever or whatever she’s looking at. Henry takes a deep breath and dries his hands. Moistening a facecloth with warm water and wringing it out, he carries it and the clean pail back to the bedroom.
Dan looks marginally better after he scrubs his face, wipes his hands, and offers Henry the balled up cloth in his upturned palm. Henry plucks it away with two fingers and returns it to the bathroom.
Back in the bedroom, he sits down again.
“Well,” he says.
“Not exactly,” Dan murmurs. He sips from a glass of water and Henry can almost taste the sweet silk of water after the acid of bile.
“No work for you today.”
Dan is silent, his eyes half-closed. His ears very white and exposed.
“Where’d you get these?” Henry asks, picking up the magazine closest to him — Running Life. On the cover, two sweaty men in neoprene are plunging across a finish line. The man in front has his arms flung over his head in victory, his eyes bulging unnaturally.
“A guy who runs with me sometimes.” Dan looks blankly at the ceiling as Henry leafs through the glossy pages. Articles on what to eat, what to wear, and a sidebar called “Going Bananas,” about the benefits of eating bananas during a long run.
“Ev
er had runner’s high?” Henry asks.
“A few times, on a really long run.” Dan shifts his legs under the duvet.
Henry glances at the clock on Rae’s side of the bed. He has to get going or he’ll be late for work.
“I think this is going to be a big deal,” Dan says.
“Should you go to the doctor, maybe?”
“I mean the running.” He swipes a hand across his eyes. “I don’t know, I just think it’s gonna be really amazing.”
Mere weeks after Dan’s anguish over the missed tournament years ago, he gave volleyball up in favour of basketball, which attracted more fans, he said. “You were going to tell me about runner’s high,” Henry reminds him.
“It comes when you’re exhausted. I mean, really exhausted. Your legs are stripped — literally.”
Henry has a vision of Dan’s legs with long strands of muscle hanging off the bone as he runs on and on, his knees and ankles held together with nothing but stringy loops of cartilage.
“You’ve got nothing left and your legs are screaming, and all you want to do is stop.” He coughs into the crook of his arm. “All of a sudden you’re, like, invincible. And everything is — I don’t know — hyper-clear. Every tree you pass, every person, every inch of the ground — it’s super bright. You feel like you can run and run and never stop.”
The Afterlife of Birds Page 2