No Call Too Small

by Oscar Martens

  —Are you planning to sue me for some kind of childhood abuse? Is that your angle? How much to make you go away?

  Sedrick has opened his chequebook and has his pen ready. Paul looks defeated and goes silent, so I attempt a summary of what we’re working on. Those early lessons have carried through to Paul’s adult life, affecting the relationships in his family, his work, and the larger world. Since Paul’s issues started with childhood, Sedrick’s memory or perspective on that period might help us clarify or correct some of our working assumptions.

  —The case you make is very weak, totally without merit, but since I am in a rush, I’m willing to pay Paul to never again use the following words in my presence: relationship, childhood and issue. I should also mention that it’s not my fault that Paul has done nothing with his life. No wife, no kids, and he works in a toy factory.

  —It is not a toy factory. I make violins. I am a luthier.

  —Use whatever fancy name you like. It’s still making toys. I didn’t raise you to be this.

  —What makes you think you raised me at all?

  Paul tries to justify his existence in a way that will never please his father. Ranta Kosilla of the Cleveland Philharmonic recently ordered two of his violins, but Paul will never win the fight for his father’s approval, because his father knows how much power can be gained by withholding it. Simone does her best to give us privacy, a bit of a trick sitting three feet away but she tries, staring out the window at other planes taking off. Perhaps she is uncomfortable seeing a fifty-four-year-old man cry.

  The story of Paul’s ex-fiancée comes out as it always does, and Sedrick rolls his eyes. I wonder if he has heard it as many times as I have. Sedrick never approved of the woman Paul proposed to when he was thirty-five. He was certain she was an untrustworthy gold-digger and to prove it, he slept with her on his yacht a week before the marriage. He considered it a favour he had done for his son, saving him years of grief. I mean, what kind of woman would sleep with her fiancé’s father? One that was after the money. And she did go on to prove herself by marrying a seventy-two-year-old billionaire shipping magnate.

  Sedrick’s hand still holds the pen above the cheque. Simone is editing addresses in her phone. I start thinking about Kevin Kline, waiting for me at the door with his tail waving slowly back and forth like a question mark, able to tell from the quality of the light that I’m late. I can’t even imagine a positive direction our meeting might take. We should go. Light is failing. Who knows what Sedrick turns into after dark?

  —I don’t want your money. I want you to admit that you hurt me.

  Oh, god. I’ve heard it before, but in the presence of Sedrick it just sounds pathetic. Paul doesn’t seem to know his father at all. Money has a way of making people right. It doesn’t matter what you did; if you end up rich, you must have been right. You dictate a self-flattering, convenient reality and impose it on those around you. No one argues with a billion dollars. Paul renounces the money. He says he doesn’t want it. Sedrick nods his head and believes none of it, the pen still poised.

  —No one ever says no to the money. That isn’t a theory or a guess. In forty years of experience, no one has ever said no to the money. You’ve come to me crying with brave words and all kinds of demands, but you’ll leave with a cheque tucked in your pocket. You think you’re going to be the exception to the rule? Do you think you’re exceptional? Now why don’t you take the cheque and your fag therapist and get on your way?

  —He’s not gay.

  —Wake up! Did you see the way he was sitting? Look at the clothes he’s wearing. Look at the back of his neck. What kind of car does he drive?

  Paul looks at me with a panicked look.

  —I drive a Miata.

  —You see? Even his car is gay! If you’re taking advice from this half-a-man, it’s not surprising you’re so fucked up. I’ve got a whole squad of gays working for me, but I would never let one into my head. You want to fix your head, go up to the cabin and chop some wood.

  We’re done here. This disaster has set my client back months. Forget about wrapping up, or sanding off rough edges. We just have to get the fuck off this plane before it gets worse. Sedrick is busy writing a cheque when the engines start winding up at 4:00 p.m. to the second. Paul stands to leave, taking the cheque as he passes his father, but I pause in front of him, fighting the urge to curse him out. He doesn’t like me but he saw me, noticed the way I sat, my grooming, my clothes. I exist.

  —You don’t get a cheque.

  —You don’t get my respect.

  —You’d respect me if you got a cheque.

  As soon as I step off, the ladder is hauled up to the closed position and the jet starts moving. Paul wants to know why I lied to him. Announcing my orientation is not part of my relationship with a client. I wonder what difference it makes. I’m a professional listener. How would that be affected by whom and how I love? What has changed in the last hour? I was keen to meet someone who turned out to be a jerk. Paul had false assumptions about his counsellor. The only one proceeding through his day with some certainty, all assumptions and predictions intact, is Sedrick Prudhomme, jetting to elevations far beyond the common man.

  The sixteen-year-old me worked hard to get a night at home with my father. He never seemed to do much except watch TV, but when I asked for some time for the two of us he seemed anxious, as if he were sacrificing half a dozen more exciting options. Mother had agreed to go to her weekly bridge night and stay a little longer than usual. I didn’t even have to say the words to her the night before. She had known since I was eight. I left my body and watched me and my father sit in the kitchen with our hands on the table, each word out of my mouth one word closer to the three words I needed to say: I am gay. You could pile up hundreds or thousands of words in front of those three and it would not weaken their devastating force. The bomb dropped. The mushroom cloud flashed its brilliant beauty. The shock wave knocked down everything. All that was left was fallout.

  Dad slouched, looking at a spot in the centre of the table. He got up, pulled a suitcase down from the back-closet shelf, and started stuffing some of my clothes into it. He put it on the front steps and went to his office. A few minutes later, he came back to where I stood in the hallway. He wouldn’t look at me as he held out a cheque in one hand and pointed to the door with the other as if I were a badly behaved dog. I took his cheque but didn’t look at it. I didn’t want to see how much it was worth to him to get rid of me. I walked to the door, turned around, ripped his cheque into tiny pieces and blew them off my palm. Traumatic yes, but also an invigorating renewal.

  Paul sits as close to his door as he can. He ignores me when I ask him if he needs a ride somewhere and I have no empathy, sympathy, or interest in him right now. The angel of healing and reconciliation has been shot dead, or maybe sucked into the intake of a jet engine. Do I owe it to the world, to my profession, to continue treating my homophobic client? More crying and a continuing refusal to look at me. Paul gets out when we reach the main terminal. I stay in the back, waiting to see what the driver will do. He looks Chilean, short, slightly overweight. He is texting someone on his cell phone while he waits for me to leave. I get out, open the front door, and get back in.

  —Look at me. Do you see me? What do you see?

  —I see a man.

  I reach out to touch his cheek and he moves his head away. I stop my hand but don’t put it down. Some of the stiffness seems to leave his body, and I touch his jawbone. The Chilean has looked at me. He is no longer a part of the car’s driving mechanism, and I am no longer cargo. He sees me. He sees a man.

  KILLERS ARE USEFUL

  AN IDIOT STAGGERS INTO CAMP IN THE middle of the afternoon. I tell him to stop but he keeps coming, reaching for me with a crazed grin. After I knee him in the groin, I realize he was trying to shake my hand. A gentleman. I’m alone and Kayla has the gun but it seems this one, curled up like a baby on the ground, is not a threat. A search of his briefcase confirms
that he is, in fact, an idiot. He has a ziplock bag of money, a box of memory sticks, a cell phone, and some clothes. Most people this dumb are already dead. Sometimes a group will send a scout into our camp to count people, food, weapons, but I have the feeling this one’s a lone straggler from the city. If he came straight down the Lougheed Highway he’s very lucky. If he went overland, through the bush, over barbed wire, across the Pitt River, then it’s been a tough slog and he deserves credit. He stops moaning long enough to speak.

  —I mean you no harm.

  Definitely the funniest thing I’ve heard all month, idiot crawling in the dirt, assuring me he’s not a threat.

  —May I have some food?

  —No.

  —Please. I’m very hungry.

  —How about this? You sit there and shut up and I won’t cave your head in.

  I wonder whether bitchiness and aggression are signs of early pregnancy. My period is late, very late, but how late is late enough to announce that there might be another joining our group? Kayla comes out of the bush with Rob and Eric. Amin and Ben are still upstream testing a fishnet made of wool. Kayla makes the intruder spread-eagle and searches him, something I forgot to do. No surprises, anyway. There used to be more demanding fools like this one, desperate to tell their stories, thinking we would care. You will never hear one of these leeches offer to show you how to handload 12-gauge shells, or remove plaque from teeth, or butcher a pig, or smoke fish. No. They all want something for nothing. Eric takes the shotgun from Kayla and rests it against the intruder’s forehead.

  —Please don’t kill me.

  —Shut the fuck up and listen to what I have to tell you. My name is Eric.

  —My name is—

  —You don’t have a name until you do something useful. You can share one meal with us if you go down to that farmhouse and find something we need.

  —What do you need?

  —Think. You obviously didn’t do much of that before you left home, so this is your second chance. Think very hard about what might be useful and bring it back to us.

  No-Name starts stuffing his things into his bag, but Eric waves the end of the barrel in his face.

  —Leave it.

  No-Name will get his stuff back, but he doesn’t know that. Eric seems to enjoy this, some stranger twisted by anger and fear, powerless to negotiate or reason with the guy who has a gun pointed at his head. No-Name is a worm, potentially trouble, definitely a pain, but I feel for him as he backs away from our group, leaving behind his most important things, things he thought would help him survive, things that gave him the feeling he had some control over his world. From the back he looks like a well-dressed version of my ex-husband. The suit jacket looks tailor-made, and the shoes! Italian slip-ons with tassels! Hunched over and beaten, the pathetic idiot leaves our camp on his way to the farmhouse. I grab the shotgun from Eric and catch up to him, suddenly protective of such an easy mark. Eric shouts after me.

  —Don’t help him. He’s got to find something on his own.

  No-Name seems frightened at first, less so when I crack open the breech of the gun and hang it over my forearm. Away from camp, I start talking and can’t stop, energized by this new person, someone whose personal tics I have not catalogued, who can tell me something new about himself or the world. In the city, people dropped garbage out of their windows, and then the rats came. He tried to persuade them to dump their garbage in the bay where it would be taken out to sea, but he couldn’t even get them to dig holes for their own shit. There is an attractive man in there, underneath the beard, the dirt, the BO. Maybe he’ll be able to charm Old Lady Templeton, but we’ll probably have to do some kind of chore, heavy lifting that’s too much for the old man, or something in the barn. Those expensive shoes will be covered in pig shit by the end of this.

  His name is Anthony, never Tony. I’m sure he was once respected in his world, but out here we’ll call him Tony if we want to. We’ll call him Mary, or Scumbag, or Leech, or Donor if we want to. He’ll learn. We find a Ford Windstar on the side of the road where it ran out of gas. It hasn’t been here long, but there’s nothing I can use except a Coffee Crisp I find wedged into the backseat. I split it with Tony on the condition that he doesn’t tell the others. When we get to the farm I leave the shotgun on the steps, knock on the door, and step back thirty feet. I wait a couple of minutes and then try again. The door is unlocked but the stench knocks me back.

  —Something is rotting in there, Anthony. I hope you have a strong stomach.

  He does not. He’s bug-eyed and sputtering when he comes out: corpses, eaten, flies, blood. Tony doesn’t seem to realize we’re well past the point of calling someone else to do something we’d rather not do. I wait for him to get over it. He’s drooling with his head between his legs, just short of puking.

  —You heard what Eric said, right? You have to get something useful or you’re not eating with us tonight.

  Brave Tony puts his hand back on the doorknob and that’s as far as he gets. I send him out to search the barn. My turn to visit the Templetons. They’re both at the kitchen table. He’s facedown in a plate of potatoes with a bullet in the back of his head and she’s on the floor, curled around the legs of a chair, footprints in her blood leading to the door. The rat that comes out of her mouth looks a little territorial. The kitchen has been stripped, but the last guests may have left something upstairs. In her closet, the wardrobe is intact, but how much of the smell will her clothes absorb and for how long? Will there ever be a time when I’m desperate enough to wear the clothes she wore? I can see Tony from the bedroom window as he stands, looking lost, near the barn. There is nothing left. All the bedding has been taken, all the sheets and towels. I could rip off some wood from the barn but there is no shortage of wood in the bush. Back in the kitchen I’m annoyed at the waste of it, the selfishness of those assholes who left the Templetons here to rot instead of dragging them outside. Somebody could have lived here, but not now, not with a colony of rats, their small black turds everywhere, the stench of rotting guts working its way into the wood. They could have used the old geezers to fatten a pig or something but no, a bullet in the head and good-bye.

  I take the toaster. The shiny metal covering can be cut into fishing lures, the cord split in two and used as rope, the tiny, thin wires of the heating elements used for … I don’t know, but I’ll think of something by the time I get back to camp. Eric isn’t going to be impressed but maybe this will be enough to get Tony fed. Why I would care I don’t know. Tony meets me at the door with a big smile. The great provider has a shirt pouch full of muddy, beautiful potatoes and carrots. The main garden behind the house was torn apart months ago but there’s a tiny hidden plot that sits in a fallow field, far from any road, path, or building.

  Tony is okay. We celebrate back at camp, everyone taking turns smelling a carrot, patting Tony on the back. Tonight the fire is bigger than usual and Ben comes back from the cache with two cans each of tuna and beans. Together with the vegetables, they make a feast. In the morning, Eric offers to help Tony pack his things, a much gentler eviction than usual. Tony has forgotten the exact terms of his stay here and seems to think he can convince us that he is useful enough to stay.

  —There are more potatoes and carrots. I can show you where.

  —We already know where they are. You showed Tanya, remember?

  —I have money. I have $900,000 on this disk.

  —You might as well have 900,000 buttons. No, I take that back. Buttons would be useful. You don’t know what anything is worth. A laying chicken is worth a piglet. A jar of vitamins is worth some antibiotics. A rifle is worth a plow. A fishing lure is worth a tube of fire starter.

  —I can tie knots.

  That’s enough to make Eric shut up for a second. I say we’d use less rope on the tarps if we knew how to tie proper knots. It would help with traps and fishing, too. Eric seems annoyed by my defense of the leech, and there’s something else in his look, too: ownership. He cra
wled under my covers while the others were searching for the headwaters of the stream and he restarted feelings I thought were dead forever. But then he came inside me. Of course he did. Every morning after, I prayed for my period. Eric is shaking his head, turning the others against Tony. Knot tying would be good, but it could be taught in an afternoon and the group would need something of lasting value.

  —I have a boat.

  Tony’s fifty-foot sailboat might have been pillaged for stores by now but most likely the important gear is untouched. There are easier boats at the False Creek Marina and much richer targets on shore. The boat has three double cabins and room for more in the central cabin. It makes an excellent fishing platform and comes stocked with two complete sets of dive gear and traps for crabs and prawns. More importantly, it’s big enough to make an ocean crossing, to Hawaii for example, which is where the prevailing winds would take us. It’s the perfect climate for outdoor living, no more cold and wet for eight months a year. Eric and Ben take turns finding holes in the plan, countering with reservations, problems, doubts, but I’m already on the beach with a warm wind blowing off the ocean as the baby nurses, soon old enough to eat finger bananas and chunks of sweet, warm pineapple as we fall asleep in a hammock to the sound of swishing palm leaves.

  —I will go with you.

  Everyone looks at me, then Eric, to see what he’ll do.

  —If you leave here, you leave with nothing.

  It would be more accurate to say that they have nothing if I leave. I do most of the cooking, including the drying of meat and long-term storage of vegetables. I scavenged our bedding during the November riots when the truck still had gas. I’m the one who picked up Ben and Kayla by the side of the road as they waited to be stripped of everything by the next person with a gun. I follow Tony to the stream, where he is on his hands and knees drinking from the toilet section, unaware that clean water is thirty feet upstream. I tap on his shoulder as he slurps away like a dog.