Corridor Nine

by Sophie Stocking

  After she finishes the dishes the guys start on the study, carrying everything out onto the back porch, the desk, a blue plastic storage box of cables and technological detritus, two squat filing cabinets.

  “Could you put the computer over by my van?” she asks, as they come out carrying the monitor and the tower. Digging through the computer cables, she finds four memory sticks that she zips into an outside pocket of her purse. The filing cabinet holds manila folders, old medical and financial paperwork, and stuffed in the back she finds the plush toys she’d sewn him. A zebra with a string mane, a passable replica of the Velveteen Bunny, a black bear with button eyes. When had she done these? Probably junior high after she’d taken sewing in Home Economics. She remembers Fabian in the kitchen pretending to be one of his favourite personas, the whiney “Little Brother Tim,” holding the stuffed rabbit against his chest and stroking it, talking in that nasal voice. Bernie cringing that her friend should see this. How many fathers elicit stuffed animals from their adolescent daughters? He’d never asked actually, she’d just known all along who the baby was.

  “I don’t need any of this. Chuck it all, dumpster, Women in Need, whatever.” Angus barks hysterically in the van. He must see something.

  She looks up to the toes of the coulee at the far stretch of the yard. Sitting in the willow scrub, a coyote studies her for a long moment, then trots silently north and vanishes into a gully. They still use the old pathway. How many generations of coyote have followed that trail? Maybe even before the first tarpapered shanty of Cochrane. She used to wake at night to their jittering howls, was lulled back to sleep by their family singing, their intimate talk. Bernie puts her hands on the small of her back, stretches her hips forward. The fog clears. Through the cloud she sees the circle of the sun.

  She sticks her head into the living room; Derek is bent over picking up prescription bottles with his skinny hands. He shakes each one and puts it carefully in the cardboard box. “Incredible,” he mutters.

  “You guys need lunch?”

  Derek stops midshake.

  “Yah, that would be great!” says Troy.

  “How about Vietnamese subs? I know a place in Cochrane. Chicken? Beef? Hot pepper, no hot pepper?”

  When Bernie comes back, thin sunlight is brightening if not warming the deck. She bought them each two subs and a Coke.

  “Come out here and eat guys.” They hold the box between them, Troy running his hands through the plastic vials like a child sifting pebbles in the surf. “Why don’t you bring that outside, tell me about what you’re finding,” they look at her, startled, putting the box down behind them on the table. Coming onto the deck, they reach for the food. “Jesus, go wash your hands first, bodily fluids, you could get E. coli poisoning!” Bernie mutters in disbelief as they head for the bathroom. She sets the Adirondack chairs back on their feet, then positions three to face the coulee. The guys shuffle out and sit down. Derek and Troy pull back their hoods and take their sandwiches.

  “Wow, thanks. People don’t usually buy us lunch,” says Troy.

  “Yeah, thanks!” says Derek.

  Bernie watches sideways as Derek inhales his sub. His blond hair is shaved close and a white scar runs through the stubble behind his ear and around to his occipital lobe. She studies a tattoo on his neck. The box lies brimming in front of her feet. She waits until they are halfway through their second sandwich then she pulls her chair around part way so she can see them better.

  “So, can you tell me about, I mean, what was my dad taking?”

  “Mmmph?” says Troy chewing fast to pull the overhanging cilantro and shredded carrot past his lips. He swallows. “Your dad was The Man, eh Derek?”

  “Incredible, he must have had six doctors he was shopping to get this much . . . ” he leans forward and roots through the box pulling out vials. “Look at this, Tylenol Threes, they’re not too hard to get, good old ‘Doors and Fours.’ Whadaya call Percocet?”

  “Tango and Cash,” says Troy.

  “Oxycontin eighty milligrams! Man, that’s gold! He could have sold that on the street for what?”

  “Dollar a mill easy, and there were thirty tabs in a bottle? He couldn’t have been buying it, he must have been doing the doctor shopping himself.”

  “So what sort of drugs are they? Do they do different things?”

  “Mainly the same stuff, but just stronger.”

  “What kind of stuff?”

  “They’re all from opium . . . ” Troy turns to his friend.

  “Opiates.” Derek leans forward and paws through the box. “He did some uppers too, Dexedrine, bennies, but not so much.”

  Bernie looks at the chicken satay sub wrapped in red-and-white checked paper. She should eat something, so she unwraps it.

  “What’s so great about opiates?’

  Troy looks at her out of his left eye, his head tipped back as he drinks the Coke. He splutters midswallow. “What’s so great about it? I don’t do it too much now, eh Derek? You gotta be careful chasing the Dopamine Dragon.”

  “Yeah, you don’t want to be chasing the rush man. But your dad must have paced himself, maybe he took breaks. If you don’t snort it or smoke, you can go a long time.”

  “Okay, but how does it make you feel?” The guys glance down at the last of their sandwiches in their laps, smiling. Troy pushes Derek’s shoulder.

  “Imagine this, it’s the middle of the winter somewhere, and you know it’s really fucking cold outside, but you’re inside, in a cabin in front of a roaring fire, wrapped in a blanket with the girl of your dreams. It’s like that,” says Derek in his husky voice.

  “Warm and tingly all over, you’re totally safe and relaxed, not a care in the world.”

  “It’s like being a baby in your momma’s arms.”

  “Yeah, it’s like that.”

  Bernie nods. “Okay” she says. She can’t stomach more so she picks the cilantro and the carrots out and eats that. “Why don’t you do it very often now?” “So addictive man! Gets too expensive, Angie got sick of me being stoned or asleep.”

  Derek pipes up, “Gives you wicked constipation too, and when you don’t have it you feel like shit, nervous all the time.” Bernie exhales.

  “Okay, well. Interesting to know.” I guess that explains the Metamucil, she thinks. “How much longer will it take to clear out the rest of the house?” She looks at her watch, it says two o’clock. She will have to phone Peter to pick the kids up from school.

  They finish at five, leaving the house still dirty but empty except for her grandmother’s furniture.

  “So, Jeanie will send you the bill,” says Troy “and if you need help with the basement, we can come back.” He watches her with his recessed eyes, waiting. She has no cash in her purse, but that’s just as well. They’d probably spend it on “Doors and Fours”.

  “I want to tip you guys. You’ve been great, but I’ve got no cash. Could you follow me into Cochrane?” Bernie drives with the wheezing Topaz trailing her, but she doesn’t go to a cash machine. Instead she stops at Mark’s Work Warehouse and takes them shopping. They pick out new hoodies, and she gets them socks, gloves, and down vests. Troy picks an orange one and Derek navy blue, “don’t want to be too matchy matchy,” he says. Outside on the sidewalk she hands them their clothes as they scuff their feet on the concrete, thank her, and shake hands.

  “Take care guys and keep warm. Winter’s coming.” Bernie gets into her van and sits for a minute with Angus’s snout resting on her shoulder. In the rear-view mirror, she watches them rooting through their shopping bags. Then she starts the van and drives home.

  “Shall we go in, then?” Bune inserts the blue key into the vibrating apparition of the door projected on the Membrane.

  “But the Dark! If you puncture the Membrane, we’ll . . . ” Bune pushes the door, which swings away and opens to black. The fluffy clouds keep progressing left. When they reach the door frame, they vanish but then re-emerge in perfect time on the other side.


  “We’ll fall!”

  “I can fly, remember, I’ll carry you. I am eager to see the place where your greatest achievement was brought to fruition. What did you call it?”

  “Liberation from feeling . . . ” mumbles Fabian. “Why can’t we just stay here, and I’ll tell you?”

  “A little field trip will be invigorating and informative. Come!” and with a swoop Bune scoops Fabian, clasping him in arms of steel against his chest, and steps to the threshold. “Whoopsy!” and he falls backwards through the door. Fabian screams and squeezes his eyes tight shut. They are falling, then the angel rotates so Fabian is face first into the abyss. He must not look. Whump, the wings open and catch them. He listens to their slow confident sweep; he and Bune seem to hover, taking lazy curves and dips like flotsam on the water.

  “Open your eyes now, I have you. You can’t fall.”

  “I don’t want to look. Where are we? In the Black, in the ocean? I’m not a good swimmer.”

  “No, in your old home. You are perfectly safe. Open your eyes and see.”

  Fabian finally looks and jerks so violently that even Bune is surprised and has to change his grip.

  “Get out of my house!” screams Fabian. “Don’t touch my stuff, get them out of here, get them out!” he twists back to look up at Bune.

  “Easy, you’re dead. You don’t need any of that now.”

  “They’re stealing my pills! You have no idea what I went through to get those.” They are floating somewhere close to the ceiling though the ceiling seems higher than Fabian remembers. Two mangy vandals in hoodies are moving through the living room picking up medicine vials and putting them in a box that is now almost full. A woman with curly red blond hair comes into the living room and talks to them.

  “Bernie! That’s my daughter. Why is she speaking to them, why is she allowing this?”

  “I think they are cleaning out your house, since you are dead.”

  “Oh,” Fabian sighs deeply. “I guess so.” Then brightening, “they won’t find anything anyhow. I used them all up. Now she shows up, eh? She’s been gone for seven years, but now she shows up for the pickings.”

  “You were not in contact with her?”

  “No, she left. They all leave.”

  “Hmm, let’s see,” says Bune. The living room begins to shift and flash, furniture changes and moves, days and nights fly by, people walk in and out, children play a piano, sprawl on the carpet with Monopoly, lounge in chairs reading. The flashing stops. Sunlight and order fill the room, plants grow on bookshelves, and a woman with glossy black hair vacuums a carpet intricate as a Persian garden. A black cat sleeps in a patch of sun on the couch.

  “Oh God, I don’t want to see her. That’s Margaret, that’s my wife. That’s the rug we brought home from India.”

  “She left then?”

  “Yes, the children grew up and she left. She said she couldn’t handle my depressions, what she called my ‘paranoia’. She took the bloody rug too.”

  “Let’s fast forward a bit.” More flashing and a new era of gloom and mess, the curtains closed, only the cat and Fabian come and go from couch to kitchen, to bathroom and bedroom, then a flurry of tidying, a new black leather sofa is moved in, a large potted fig tree, the curtains are opened. On the couch Fabian and a woman roll in an embrace. The living room seems to breathe the light and a rhythm of regular life for a time, some speeding days. Through all the seasons the occasional red blonde frizz of Bernie’s hair. But then darkness and mess descend again.

  “Who was that other woman? The gentle quiet one.”

  “My girlfriend Serena, I thought she was too insecure to ever leave me, but she did. She started going to counselling.” Bune zooms forward in time, then backwards as if searching for something in this piling mess, a clammy darkness only punctuated by Fabian and the cat.

  “I can’t even find your daughter at this point. She stopped coming to visit . . . ”

  “Yes, it shows that even the ties of blood don’t prove reliable. Margaret only married me, but I was Bernie’s father.” They hover now and look down. Fabian sleeps on the couch, the cat curls in his customary spot at his feet, but no sunlight warms him.

  “So, I’m finding it hard to locate this pinnacle of achievement you speak of so glowingly. Too be honest, your home seems gloomy and chaotic, grim even. Certainly, you were not much of a housekeeper . . . ”

  Fabian laughs.

  “But that’s the brilliant thing about it. I have hidden it. It has nothing to do with mundane physical reality. I carried inside of me a golden alternate place to dwell. I met Margaret in college, and I discovered my great insight around the same time.”

  “Well let’s go down there. You must show me.” They slowly rotate from parallel to horizontal and then descend until their feet hit the soft layers of Costco carpets, gritty with kitty litter and coffee grounds. Bune walks to the couch and leans over the sleeping rotund and balding man. “Where exactly?” he looks over his shoulder at Fabian.

  “It felt like about here,” Fabian rubs his solar plexus in a circular motion. Bune stretches out his hand and lays it flat on the man’s sweater-covered chest, and then his hand descends until it disappears up to the wrist. For a moment he waits, feeling around and then slowly he pulls it back out, leaving the sweater unscathed and intact. He holds aloft in his hand a glowing orb, shooting out intermittent sparks of pink and gold static electricity.

  “Yes! That’s it! Now I see what it looks like. It looks just how it felt! So beautiful, so pure, and so faithful. I could always return there.”

  Bune sits on an ottoman, his wings dangling behind him and his legs outstretched. He studies the orb.

  “It’s very pretty.” Gently he jiggles the ball, and then lightly, sitting more erect, he begins to toss it from hand to hand. Fabian is perched on the arm of the sofa to the left of the cat.

  “Be respectful! Don’t chuck it around. What if you drop it!”

  But Bune hums quietly to himself as he performs his little juggling act. In one hand now, he sets it spinning in a circle, catching and re-catching. Fabian gnashes his teeth and growls. Bune switches to the other hand.

  “I just wonder . . . ” Now he chucks it high in the air and with each catch when it comes down, the orb deflects a bit, distorts into first a flattened oval and then something more irregular. Bune gives it a really good chuck and it hits the ceiling, smack. Fabian roars in rage as the orb explodes into a mass of tentacles and erratic tongues. The thing falls into Bune’s hands with a wet squelch and gives off a long, low whine.

  “Ah, I thought so,” says Bune. “It was initially in its defensive position, like a hedgehog, but now it has uncurled so we can see the true form.” He puts it down on the floor and wipes his hands on his cloud gown.

  “What have you done to it? You’ve broken my beautiful orb, now it looks all . . . ” The thing is moving, amoeba-like across the gritty rug, its various tongues take turns acting like the foot of a snail, while the tentacles wave and search about, sniffing and snuffling desperately.

  “It appears to have no vision, but an excellent sense of smell.”

  “Mehhehheh,” moans the thing. The tentacles envelope but then spit out bits of kitty litter as they come to them. Fabian creeps higher onto the back of the couch, never taking his eyes off it. The cat wakes up with a hiss and runs into the kitchen.

  “Well it doesn’t like to eat kitty litter. Ah, yes, it can smell its host now, it’s making a bee line.” The thing tumbles forward, eagerly tripping on its assorted tongues until it reaches the man’s hand hanging over the edge of the sofa. Several tentacles rise, pull back and then slap forward with certainty, suctioning onto his wrist and knuckles.

  “Mehhhhh” it whines, pulling the hand angrily. “Meh” The man opens his eyes as his hand is dragged away from the couch by the insistent amoeba, his arm stretches and finally he falls on the rug, gets to his hands and knees, and begins to crawl. Finally, he stands. The thing sli
mes its way up his leg, wraps tentacles around his abdomen, pussyfoots to the centre of his chest, and with a burp burrows out of sight.

  “Euew!” says Bune. He walks to the couch and picks up Fabian, holding him in the crook of his arm, but facing out so he can see. The man stumbles around the living room searching. Whenever he finds a prescription bottle, he shakes it, but all are empty. At last, under a couch cushion he locates one that is full. He opens it with shaking hands and puts a tablet under his tongue, sits down on the couch, head in hands, and then reaches for a box of matches and a stick of incense on the coffee table. He lights it, jams the unlit end into a half-eaten apple, and then lies down on the couch. He rolls over, his back to the room.

  “Well! Have you had enough then? Do you want to go?”

  Fabian nods wordlessly, yes.

  When Bernie returns to the house, lemon cleaner and residual incense mutate in the air. Jeannie sent over a cleaning crew to wash things down yesterday, and now all the surfaces breathe and flex, a little raw, the particulate skin of Fabian’s last seven years so suddenly stripped away. Bernie opens cupboards to witness their emptiness. He is not here, not here, not here. With nothing to investigate, Angus lies down with a grunt, rolls over and sprawls on his back. A soft wind blows through the kitchen door. She thinks of her studio in the backyard, waiting to be sorted out. But she will go to the basement to see what has to be done next and then she will leave.

  “Come on Angus.” Bernie walks to the eight-panelled door in the wall to the left of the range. She twists the pressed glass doorknob and pushes, stretches her arm into the dark to find the beaded chain on the wall to her left, pulls and hears the familiar ‘ca chunk’, the tiny clatter when she lets go of the chain. The bulb flickers into action and Angus scrambles down the stairs into the mildewy dank. As she descends, Bernie trails her hand over the cemented stone foundation. When they were dating Peter had waxed ecstatic about these footings, triple the width of a modern foundation to compensate for the instability of piled river rock. At the bottom she walks and opens the small door to the cold room built under the stairs. Pulls another light cord. Empty, except for a box of canning jars and a straw broom worn to an angle. She turns off the light. Pivoting, Bernie walks into the basement proper, trying to remember where the next light switch is, and bangs face first into some implacable barrier.