Echolocation

by Karen Hofmann

  I have said that the war did not touch my immediate family – my mother and father, Paval and me – so closely. We lived in a bubble of protective data, and we were lucky. Others in my country did not have this fortune. When the trials were beginning to be televised, last year, Paval and I talked about them privately; we did not mention them to our parents, nor they to us. We are all careful with each other, in our family.

  AT THE HUGE TABLE that has been set for us, where my mother and father sit like bride and groom, there is much happiness. It’s an important birthday for my mother. She’s a little older than my father, and there’s a lot of teasing about her great age, her “much younger” husband. I’ve heard the stories, before, but listen now with new interest: my mother, in her mid-thirties, an academic, apparently devoted to her career in mathematics, shocking everyone by bringing home a younger man of a different, suspect, background. My mother says, as she always does: What could I do? He made me so happy. And my father smiles. But for the first time, maybe, I see the wickedness, the sex, in the smile. So.

  My father has given my mother – or rather, they have decided together that this will be her gift – a trip for the two of them back to their country, or rather the new country that our little part of the world has become. And it is not so clear-cut: Though my family lived in one city, though I grew up there, they were both from different places, now different countries. The city where I went to university, where I almost-lived with you, that’s a separate country now, as is the place on the coast where our villa was. It is not as simple as each party gaining what it wanted. There is always loss.

  YOU SAY, I want, I want. The effect on me is of hearing the cry of a newborn: My body responds involuntarily, with a need to respond. Not mother’s milk, but something else, courses in my veins.

  You send an email to me at work and tell me what you will do to me: you will put your mouth here and here, on various parts of me. These parts of my body evidently can read. They send up little flares: We are here! We answer you! My brain, on the other hand, panics: I delete the message from my inbox; then delete it from trash so fast that it has hardly existed. Then I regret. I can never read it again.

  You won’t say I love you. You say that phrase is a commitment, not a proclamation. You do not say that you are mine exclusively. You do not mention the future.

  You say: When you disappeared, it was as if you had taken a fish knife and gutted me. I know the knife you mean; we kept it at the villa, for cleaning catches. I can see it, its sharp wicked purposeful construction. I can never explain why I left without a word.

  At this dinner, my mother’s birthday dinner, there are all the fruits of the sea. It was not on the menu, but here it is: platters and platters of tiny clams, of cloud-soft scallops, buttery prawns, little fried octopus; then sole, salmon, tuna, swordfish, all prepared exquisitely, in the style of the Adriatic coast. Glen, who doesn’t particularly like seafood, whispers, angrily: How much is this going to cost?

  I straighten my shoulders. There must be a war soon, I know: I will have to start it, or it will start itself. It will be an ugly war: Each side will believe that the other is only fighting out of selfish motives. Each will accuse the other of heinous behaviour, but each will also be guilty. It will gut me out, this war. I will lose much of what is important to me.

  Every barb, every irritation, then, can stiffen my resolve.

  What am I to say: that I have been here twice a week for the past two months, arriving in the mid-afternoon, after the lunch service, before the evening preparation. That I know how to let myself in the side door, slip up the stairs, into the offices above the restaurant, where there is room containing only an old sofa, a sink, a toilet, and a small table with yellow legs.

  Whatever I choose for my life now, I will always have that image of the table’s yellow legs in my memory.

  Everyone praises Paval for providing such a feast. The chef, the chef is the hero, Pav says, smiling. The chef does not appear. The platters continue to arrive. Are we recreating the Glass Grotto, or emptying the sea?

  UNBEARABLE OBJECTS

  THE NIGHT BEFORE, Tess had said: Please; you have to. Otherwise it’ll be me. She had not been looking at him; her small head, in its knitted, striped toque, her Rasta-cap, turned away, but he knew her eyes were dangerously shiny, in her pinched little face.

  If you don’t do it, I’ll have to, and Alison won’t get her spa day, Tess said, though he knew this. Lewis has to go golfing, she said. It’s not just a game; it’s some executive tournament. He has to do it. It’s for his job.

  Can’t argue with that. Lewis’s job. No. And can’t argue that Alison – poor Alison – should have a couple of hours of being pampered, that Tess should have this time with Alison, should be able to feel she is doing something good for Alison. Can’t argue that he should put off what he was planning to do with his afternoon and take care of Sack.

  Lying awake at six in the morning, while overhead, small heavy feet thud back and forth over hardwood and hard tile, while a child uses his definitively outside voice over and over. I want. I want. I want. Every goddamn morning: even weekends. And not his child, not his house. The constant reminder: He will never be able to repay them. He owes them, he is living on their charity. He has no further claim on them: not even the basic human right to sleep.

  Sack has grown from a large-headed baby to, let’s face it, a suburban terrorist. A monstrous child. Four years old, completely unsocialized, he careens through the house, wailing, laughing too loudly, demanding. I want! I want! You can’t have a conversation, can’t volley a sentence back without his interrupting. Lewis and Alison’s social interactions are constantly fragmented by this kid, who never, never gets enough attention, and never does what he is asked, and never entertains himself quietly for fifteen minutes at a time. Lewis works, or golfs, nearly all the time. Alison has been sick since Sack was a baby. They keep him in daycare as much as possible.

  Tess says, privately – her only criticism of Alison – that Sack is strung out, over-stimulated, sleep-deprived, but lacking in his parents’ full attention. Do you notice, she says, they only ever tell him to be quiet, to go away? Tess is patient with Sack, tries to engage him in books and puzzles, to cuddle him, and of course he repays her by screaming at her with insane laughter and bashing at her with his big hard fists.

  He and Tess haven’t had children yet: won’t likely, now, Tessa’s ovaries having been presumably chemically fried and irradiated by her treatments.

  I’ll do it, he had said. And then, to make sure that Tess didn’t feel sorry for him, he had leered at her, growled: But you’ll owe me.

  Tess had stared back at him without humour. Grow up, she had said.

  Bad luck. Very bad luck, and against the odds: that is all that Matt had been able to say to his friends, his parents, when they telephoned and emailed him in concern. First Tess’s sister Alison getting sick, then Matt losing his job in the aftermath of the crash. Then Tessa herself getting sick. His car accident, his fault, though there should be some exigency for when you’re driving home at four in the morning after taking your dehydrated wife, who can’t stop vomiting because her insides have been scorched out by the medical mafia’s excuse for a cancer treatment, to emergency, and you need to be at work in three hours. The loss of his and Tess’s house, subprime mortgage, of course. And Alison’s recurrence, the bad news of her prognosis, just as Tess was starting to turn the corner.

  Just bad luck. Misfortune. Temporary setback. No need to take it personally.

  It occurs to him now that Lewis and Alison own one of those top-end jogging strollers. That Sack had been wheeled around parks in one, on visits, in the past. If Matt can find it, he will strap the little guy in it, and he can still have his run. He’ll have to stick to sidewalks and chip trails, but he can still do it. He remembers that sort of harness affair, a five-point buckle. The kid won’t get out of that. He can scream if he wants. Maybe he’ll like it.

  He will g
et up. He tries to move quietly, to shift his weight gradually, but Tessa is disturbed anyway. He stops moving and watches as she wakes; sees, by the sharp light entering the basement window, how, as she rises into consciousness, her face tightens. Asleep, she had looked calm, if not carefree: herself. Now, even before she opens her eyes, a vertical crease forms on her brow, and her lips pull back and thin out.

  Her hair has grown out a couple of inches, and he touches it, catches one of the dark springy curls between his thumb and forefinger. It is as soft and thick as before, isn’t it?

  She opens her eyes, and he lets go of the tendril. Sometimes it’s irritating for her to be touched.

  But then she smiles, slightly, unexpectedly, and holds his gaze, and reprieve floods through him, a great gush of relief that he can’t explain or name. His waking grievance is washed out now, leaving nothing but its shadowy imprint. It is not so bad. Tess is still here. They are in their own bed; their bodies fit like puzzle pieces, like keys in locks. It is not so bad. Is it?

  HE HAS JUST FINISHED mowing the lawn, and has worked up a sweat. Lewis and Alison own, of course, a fashionably retro reel mower, which has to be pushed up the slopes of their half-acre lot, and which, he suspects, needs sharpening. The soft spring grass wraps itself around the spiral blades rather than suffering itself to be cleanly lopped off. It is hard going. Typical, that Lewis and Alison would plant themselves on a piece of property this ostentatious, run the furnace and/or the A/C, the washing machine, the dishwasher, the automated sprinklers, day and night, without compunction, pouring hundreds of gallons of treated, detergent-poisoned water down the sewers, and drench the lawn with toxic chemicals – and then buy a reel mower. Typical.

  He wheels the mower back to the garden shed, leaving a slap of bruised green along the sidewalk. He’ll have to sweep that up, too.

  Tess saying to him, tiredly: You do chores like a child. Who do you think is going to finish the job for you?

  His back aches; he’s spent too much time sitting, lately, looking for jobs on the internet, and might as well admit it, watching clips of old TV shows on YouTube. They don’t have a TV now; it’s been sold. A big flat-screen HD, two years old. Had they got twenty cents on the dollar for it?

  But the hills on this sunny May day stretch out around him, in their first tender green, rolling away north forever: first the deposits of suburban lots fanning along the lower reaches; then, beyond those, the golf course, mineral-green; and beyond that meadow and forest like something from a child’s picture-book, clean and sparkling, a quilt of tints. He can taste in his body how it will feel to set off loping cross-country, to expand his lungs, to have the muscle-ache wake his cramped body, to drive the ground in through his foot soles.

  But first he must finish the list of chores Lewis has given him, via Alison, via Tess. The complicated, stilted dance of ownership and debt and gratitude. This afternoon – and it will be sweeter for the waiting – he’ll strike out across the hills, with Sack in the stroller, free for a couple of hours.

  He breathes deeply, down to what Alison and Tess would call his root chakra. (He won’t think about that, the amount of money a hitherto sane and logical person will spend on alternative bullshit when they are dying.) He sweeps the chewed-up grass from the sidewalk and hoses off the smears. He clips the hedge, getting into it, doing a nice symmetrical job, lacerating himself with cedar fronds. He finds the ladder, cleans out the gutters (packed with fall leaves and a bird’s nest), trims the edges of the lawn where it’s trying to invade the tri-coloured gravel of the shrubberies, yanks out the grass and dandelions that have insinuated themselves in-between the little pink-flowered bushes and the prickly green bushes.

  He’s no gardener. He had hardly been able to turn it down, though, when Tess (or Tess’s and Alison’s mother) had brokered the arrangement: he and Tess to live in Alison’s and Lewis’s basement suite in return for looking after Alison and Sack and the yard.

  He hunts down the barrel where he’s supposed to put the clippings and finds it half-filled with water and rotted leaves and the deadheads and stalks of flowers. Tess had come over in the fall, when they’d still been in their own house, to help Alison with the gardening. Then the barrel was abruptly abandoned, he thinks, left in the winter rain to brew a foul, slimy soup.

  Where to dump something so disgusting, in a yard so manicured?

  The far side of the shed, where the grass doesn’t grow, where there is some soil. If he can drag the barrel there. It needs holes punched in the bottom or something. He’ll do that later.

  As he pours out the stinking mess, two objects more solid than the rest drop out onto the ground. He pokes them with the shovel tip: dead rats?

  But then recognition: leather and cloth, blackened by mold, the fingers stuck together in what looks like an anguished clench. Gardening gloves, borrowed from Alison, last fall, and forgotten, uncharacteristically, by Tess.

  That he can feel such intense, sudden pain still surprises him. He feels seared out; he imagines that the sadness and fear, the unpleasantness of the procedures, Tess’s withdrawal, his deep shame at their financial predicament, have all burned out his capacity for anything other than irritation and grievance, but here is emotion again, waiting for him in the bark mulch. The unbearable images: Tess’s bald head and eyelids and pubis, her small perfect lost left breast.

  Breathe, breathe, he tells himself. He breathes through his mouth: The smell of the anaerobic compost makes him retch.

  He hoses the barrel out, finds its lid, punches a couple of vents with a screwdriver, sets it up behind the garage. Surveys his morning’s work: a good job.

  And now to set out on his run, to shed this week, this year, of unhappiness.

  He doesn’t dare take his eyes off Sack, so has to inveigle him into the garage to look for the stroller, telling him that they’re going to do something interesting. Sack whines that he wants to watch TV. The garage is full of junk – discarded IKEA furniture, mostly, as Lewis and Alison are buying real, hand-milled wood things now – and discarded appliances, replaced, still in good working order, by flashier models. Matt roots past cabinets, a washing machine and dryer. Enough stuff here to start two or three couples off in their first apartments. A project for him, probably – to get this all cleared out.

  There’s the navy nylon canvas of the jogging stroller, just where he’d remembered seeing it. He has to shift a sofa stacked with dining room chairs and lamps to get at it, but there it is. Bingo.

  Our getaway vehicle, he says to Sack.

  It’s broken, Sack says.

  Indeed, it is. One of its back wheels has been snapped cleanly off, right through the axle. It’s still lying there, covered with oily garage-type dust.

  So. That is that.

  Sack hollers in protest: I want that! when Matt throws the stroller back into the corner, so Matt pulls it out, broken wheel as well, and drags it into the yard for Sack to play with. Unbearable to be inside on such a day. Sack pushes the broken stroller around the yard, ramming the azaleas.

  Ah, Buddy. Don’t do that.

  Why not? Sack says. His grin is nihilist.

  Hey, why not? Matt says. A few broken shrubs. Who will notice? And Sack will tire of it soon.

  The afternoon trickles by. It is agonizingly slow. The day is beautiful, the first really warm day of April. The hills seem to pulse with freshness, just out of reach.

  He digs through Sack’s toys, piles an armload of stuff in a plastic tub, lugs it and the protesting Sack back outside. Locks the doors. Sack hollers and hollers, but when Matt dumps the contents of tub onto the lawn, squats down to look.

  Matt picks up a remote control replica, the exact model and colour of the car he’d bought himself, a congratulatory prize, just before getting canned from his job. He and Tess had given the toy version to Sack for Christmas, the year before this. The wires have been pulled off, as well as one of the wheels.

  I had this car, he says to Sack. Do you remember? I liked this
car too much.

  Sack grunts.

  A strange fluke, that Tess and Alison had both got breast cancer. Not even the same kind of breast cancer. Not a genetic connection: They’d had the test. Just randomness. Just chance. Alison first, a few years ago. And then it had come back. Alison has maybe six months left; he’s looked it up.

  But Tess will get better. Is better.

  He’d known Alison first – had known her before she and Lewis had gotten serious, when Lewis was still trying out a lot of different women, trading up, maybe. Sometimes he, Matt, the lesser-achieving sidekick, had dated the ones Lewis discarded. He’d been interested in Alison, had waited for her to turn to him in pique when someone else caught Lewis’s eye. But Lewis had decided to park himself there. Maybe Matt had been too obvious in his appreciation, had made Lewis notice Alison’s qualities.

  Alison and Tess are small, dark-haired, quietly expressive women. Second generation Greek-Canadian. Tess is the older by two years. He’d met her at Lewis’s and Alison’s wedding; they’d been paired as attendants. That had been that. Tess had been like Alison only more so, the cool sinuousness, like something sleek moving in dappled shade.

  You can’t see anything of them in Sack, who is not in any way an endearing child. Sack is all Lewis, though Lewis has better table manners. But Lewis has no time for Sack.

  Matt releases the next toy he has snatched up out of the tub: a half-sized bat and ball. He sees that they don’t work together. The bat is actually meant to be used with an electronic game. It’s weighted, but only plastic; it’s meant to be swung at a virtual ball. The ball Matt has is from a different game. Matt can hear a rattling inside the bat.

  You can’t play with that, Sack says. It’s broken.

  Matt laughs.

  That so, he says. He tosses the ball up, smacks it with the bat, which makes an ominous ting but remains intact. The ball arcs a little way and falls. Sack retrieves it, shrieking, and grabs at the bat. Matt lifts the bat out of his reach and sends the ball into the side of the garage, smack.