Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  Vince gets into his car and hurls the bag with the medicine violently into the back seat. Two of the envelopes tumble onto the floor and under the seat while he is driving. He can already hear Raymond complaining about how he’s tired of trying a new alternative treatment every few weeks and visiting every quack in the city. He stops at the store to pick up some candles for Raymond, the stress of the day heavy on his chest like a boulder, and then decides to drive to the liquor store for a bottle of red wine. Why not? He deserves it.

  The lights in the liquor store buzz unpleasantly. While he is standing at the till, the room begins to spin and Vince has to clutch the counter to balance himself. He is seized by the vision of Raymond’s lifeless body lying on an ambulance gurney, under a wrinkled grey sheet. The body is still warm as it is wheeled out of the apartment by paramedics who, without speaking, walk stiffly into the elevator across the clay tile lobby, out the front door, past the staring people on the sidewalk. A breeze ruffles the sheet and, for a moment, it looks as if Raymond is still alive. Vince cries out and runs after the gurney, but no one hears him. All he can do is watch as Raymond is guided head first into the ambulance and driven away.

  It’s as if the devil himself is squeezing his throat. He can’t breathe.

  “You okay?” asks the cashier.

  Vince nods and hurries out of the store with his wine, trembling.

  When he arrives home he finds Nestor playing his fiddle for Raymond, who is sitting on the couch, grinning but too sick to clap. Country music. God. At least today he didn’t come home to find Nestor cutting cantaloupe into animal shapes or drawing happy faces on their tissue boxes. Any childish act Vince finds them engaged in irritates him.

  “Come, join us,” Nestor says, motioning to Vince, his foot tapping.

  “No, I can’t,” Vince says, closing the door and marching to the dining room table with a stack of papers. For the next two hours, he sits at the table pretending he’s marking, trying to hide how isolated he feels.

  Later that evening, as they curl up in bed, Vince runs his hand down the length of Raymond’s wasted body. His body still craves Raymond, has never stopped. Vince rings Raymond’s nipple with his tongue to try to arouse him – this man who at one time had been able to come almost on command – but Raymond breaks out into a cold sweat. The way it dampens the downy line of hair that runs from the top of his chest to below his belly button makes Vince ache in the pit of his stomach. Raymond pants, his breath jagged. Then his slow hands are like spiders on Vince’s leg, his lips chapped as they move toward Vince’s cock.

  “Come here.” Vince touches Raymond’s face, spotty with exertion. His head is clammy with the effort of it all. “Never mind.”

  Raymond hasn’t been able to maintain an erection in weeks. And now, neither can Vince. They cuddle, but there is something new between them, separating them, as palpable as a stiffly starched bedsheet. After a few minutes Raymond pushes away.

  “If you want,” Raymond says, staring at the ceiling, “to visit a prostitute, I don’t mind.”

  The clock ticks noisily on the night stand. Out the window, ambulance sirens drone, and then the terrible silence, the heavy darkness of the bedroom engulfs them again.

  “Why would you say something like that?” Vince finally says quietly.

  “You know why.”

  “I love you.”

  “And I love you too, that’s why.”

  The words volley back and forth over the net. But then there is no net. Just a wall. And the words hit it and fall.

  “Why don’t you ever talk to me about Charlie anymore?” Vince says.

  “You know you don’t like it when I talk about him.”

  “But I’m here.”

  “I shouldn’t put so much on you.”

  Vince tears back the covers and gets out of bed. In the bathroom he takes two tranquilizers. In spite of his arsenal of sleep aids, Vince can’t sleep. Sometimes he stays up late to research what his eyes can’t deny and are forced to acknowledge daily: Raymond’s deteriorating vision, his incontinence. He reads medical texts on alternative treatments and outcomes and wakes up feeling terrible the next day.

  When he manages to fall asleep on his own, he sometimes finds himself dreaming about them committing suicide together. On a cruise, stepping out over the Pacific, or taking cyanide pills on a beach, a curious seagull the last living thing they see. These dreams of the various ways they could take their own lives are just another reason he forces himself awake.

  The moment of sleep, the tipping point between consciousness and oblivion scares him: a siphoning of self. Every night he feels that he’s about to lose something vital and urgent, and he can’t let go. Still, he wishes he could rest, find some peace.

  “Don’t worry,” Raymond says, cradling Vince in his arms and stroking his hair. “Sleep now, sleep now,” he begins to croon. “It’s going to be okay.”

  Vince wants to say, “You don’t have to be a hero.” But he doesn’t, because he understands without understanding that this rebellion is all Raymond has left.

  The next day, while Nestor rushes to and fro, Raymond strains for breath as he pulls his oxygen tank trolley toward the kitchen. Would Vince like a cup of tea?

  “Let me do it,” Vince says.

  “No,” Raymond says.

  “Sit down,” Nestor says, but his tone is not unkind.

  Vince leads Raymond back to the couch and strokes his arm, hurt that this caress is all he the comfort Raymond will allow him to give in front of Nestor.

  “Stop clucking,” Raymond wheezes, “and fussing.”

  “You stop,” Vince says. “Stop showing off.” Then he adds quietly, “It’s okay, Raymond. You can drop the bravery tactics. You’re among friends.”

  Vince hates how Raymond insists he’s strong enough to walk on his own though his breath is laboured, his skin steeped in a patchy rash. The way he sometimes trembles with the sheer effort of pretending his illness isn’t as painful as it is. The way he fights to remain who he used to be. Vince wants to console him but can’t, because Raymond won’t acknowledge his despair.

  His efforts to maintain an outward façade of strength are as much a show as his old drag performances at the Boom-Boom Room on Davie Street. Raymond was performing as Connie Chiwa, in nothing but satin shorts, pasties, and a blond wig, swaying his hips to “Where the Boys Are,” when Vince walked in, twenty years ago now, and fell in love with his narrow thighs and bitchy banter. It wasn’t true that Vince resented all of Raymond’s performances, begrudged him his time in the spotlight, his flamboyance, his relish for life. It wasn’t jealousy – after all, after eight months of dating, hadn’t Raymond begun performing as “Miss Taken”?

  Finally, now, it seems as though Raymond has found a new role to play – the martyr, the saint.

  “Now, get up,” Nestor says, flashing his big white smile. He helps Raymond onto the bed, but only as much as he needs to, allowing Raymond to hold on to what’s left of his dignity and strength.

  Today Nestor has come to install a syringe driver in Raymond’s arm. Vince had been feeding morphine to Raymond in an eyedropper, and Raymond chasing the bitter liquid with lemonade. But since Raymond’s nausea has gotten worse, he can no longer keep the oral dose down. So Raymond will now receive a round-the-clock morphine drip through a small pump that only Nestor can set up. The battery-operated unit is covered with buttons, and beeping and flashing lights.

  Nestor turns a vial upside down and draws a day’s worth of morphine into the syringe. He fiddles with the buttons to provide the correct time-release dosage, then attaches the syringe to the long worm of plastic tubing connected to the machine. “Every day I will come and put more medicine in it,” he says. He secures the syringe with a rubber strap to the top of the pump.

  “What if it stops beeping?” Vince says.

  “No problem, no problem. You just call me.”

  Nestor takes the other end of the tube and, with a needle, inserts it
into Raymond’s arm, leaving the hollow plastic tube under the skin. As the syringe pumps morphine into Raymond, Vince watches as his facial muscles relax and his eyes become too heavy to keep open.

  “You can carry the pump in a small bag,” Nestor continues. “Attach it to this belt, when he wants to move around.” He finishes by putting some gauze over the tubing in Raymond’s arm, taping it securely, and rolling Raymond’s pyjama sleeve back down.

  After Nestor leaves, Raymond sleeps and Vince tidies the place, putting the furniture back, the bed in the corner where it belongs. When he moves the nightstand, he drops a framed photo of the two of them in Sutton Hoo, but even though there’s a crash, Raymond doesn’t wake.

  They’ve never been travelling types, venturing only as far as Chilliwack, Hope, the Okanagan Valley – places they could drive to in a day. But eight months ago, after the doctors had told them they were stopping treatment, they had gone to England for the first time. Raymond had been fascinated by early medieval England since his university days and he begged to see the burial mounds of the Anglo-Saxon pagans, still visible after 1,500 years. “The extravagance. Sometimes, entire ships were buried.”

  Vince hadn’t at all been sure about Sutton Hoo. For all its archaeological significance and similarities to Beowulf’s landscape, Sutton Hoo was essentially a graveyard, a monument to memory, and wasn’t that a bit maudlin given the circumstances? “But don’t forget,” Raymond said, “Beowulf was a hero who proved his strength against impossible odds.” He winked. “Can’t you see the resemblance?”

  In the visitor’s centre, Raymond looked at the famous masked helmet found in one of the burial mounds: so seemingly insubstantial, just a rusted piece of iron with two holes where the eyes would have been. “It looks so small,” he said. “You think he was a small man?”

  “Maybe. People were smaller back then. Poor nutrition.”

  Raymond leaned closer to the glass case. “It’s hard to believe a man once wore that. Did he have children? Who was he? How did he die? Was he happy? All lost, you know.” He pulled away from the glass case and turned to Vince. “What happens to stories like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Peoples’ stories. Their lives. People fall into the timeline and then fall out again. What happens to things they leave behind?”

  “If you’re lucky, you have kids that don’t throw it all out, or sell it and vacation in Florida with the money. Maybe they keep your records or books. Or maybe it ends up in a museum like this.”

  “I’m not talking about artefacts. They’re almost meaningless.” He rubbed his eyes, something he always did when trying to clarify something in his mind. “Take our loft, for instance. It used to be a glass factory. It was a place where people worked and talked and maybe fell in love. A secretary and one of the truck drivers, let’s say. Maybe our living room is where their romance blossomed. So they have their first kiss there. Then let’s pretend they get married and have babies. So what happens to that?”

  “To what? You said. They have a baby.”

  “No, the moment of the kiss. It existed. Then it was gone. What happens to that moment? Where does it go? Is there some kind of eternal tome, a repository of events? Is someone keeping a record of them? Is there someone who knows what happened to everyone? Even saying something like ‘they kissed’ seems so stupid and reductive. One day our living room won’t exist anymore. But that doesn’t make what it was or what happened in it any less real, does it? Is there a word for that? What do you call something that no longer exists in reality?”

  Vince thought about it and after a long pause said, “A memory.”

  Raymond lowered his head. His breathing was loud and laboured. “Memory is not the right word. It’s deeper than that. Besides, what about when those memories are gone. What do you call it then? The moment of the kiss when no one remembers it?”

  Vince had chewed a hole in his lip. Raymond had to stop working himself up. He put his arm around Raymond’s shoulder. “You hungry?”

  “I want to remember everything. Thing is, I don’t even remember what I had for breakfast.” He laughed dryly.

  That evening, they had returned to their hotel and made love. He remembers how they took their time. They were slow and gentle with each other, their lips full of hunger and tenderness.

  While Raymond continues to sleep off the effect of the morphine, Vince sits in the wingback chair, masturbating. Two weeks of pressure explodes into Vince’s climax, bringing him a temporary release.

  He shuffles to the kitchen and picks up a dish rag, hard and crusty from hanging over the faucet, and after he wipes himself with it he notices his hand smells like bleach. He tosses the rag into the garbage can under the sink. It looks suspicious, so he hides it under some plastic food wrappers. He turns on the faucet and lets the water rinse what’s left of his traces down the drain.

  “Woodlands,” Raymond says, waking up, as though continuing a conversation from earlier. “We’re going to Woodlands tomorrow.”

  “What for?”

  “I might not be well enough to go later.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea right now.” Vince doesn’t say in your state.

  “Nestor says all the dead are buried there.”

  “Does Nestor think you should go?” Vince asks defensively.

  “No. He doesn’t think it’s a good idea, either.”

  “But you want to.”

  “Yes. To help Charlie.” Raymond confesses that for weeks now, the ghost has paced the floor of their bedroom nightly like a man looking for something he’s lost. “A hopping ghost,” Lucille had called it, the first and still only time she had come to visit them. A po. A ghost without a tomb of its own. “That’s why I can’t sleep.”

  Raymond turns over in bed and sighs. As the light shining in from the window falls onto his half-closed eyes, he looks strangely at peace, resigned. “Maybe I deserve it.”

  It was at Sutton Hoo where Raymond told him something he’d never said out loud, but which Vince had suspected for years. Leaning over the masked helmet, Raymond confessed he felt responsible for his father’s death. Though the doctors called it heart disease, Raymond said, “I know what it really was. He died of disappointment. Heart disease is really just a broken heart.”

  Is that what Raymond believes? That Charlie has been sent to punish him because he didn’t live up to his father’s expectations?

  Vince can’t stand the self-pitying look on Raymond’s face. He can’t say no. He sits beside him on the bed. “If you want to go, then it’s up to you, not Nestor.”

  Then he adds, “Besides, if it turns out ghosts are real, it means you can come back and haunt me.” He says it as a joke and doesn’t expect the hard knot in his throat.

  Raymond looks at him. He says nothing for a moment and then, unexpectedly, he smiles. He begins to rub Vince’s shoulder. “Of course I’ll haunt you, baby, of course I’ll haunt you.”

  The next day, Nestor insists on accompanying them. He insists on bundling Raymond into a sweater and a hat with ear flaps and pushing his wheelchair down to the car park.

  “You don’t have to come,” Vince says.

  “The more the many-er,” Nestor says. “What are friends are for?”

  In the car park, Nestor gives Raymond a notebook and some drawing pencils for some art-therapy practice before getting into the car.

  Once on the road, Vince smiles, obstinately hopeful. He reminds himself to cherish the small victories, like having Raymond out of the house, by his side. This moment is all they have. Though Raymond prefers to muse about the past, Vince knows the present is what matters. Raymond may wonder about what happens to things that fall out of the timeline, but time doesn’t exist on a line. It pops, Vince thinks, in a series, flashes of present followed by flashes of present and so on to infinity: a whole field of fireflies. Now you see them, now you don’t.

  What if they can’t find the grave? What if there’s no headstone to to
uch or to pull dandelions away from or to leave the carnations they’ve brought with them? But he doesn’t say anything to Raymond about his concerns. Who is he to take away Raymond’s hope?

  As they drive down East Columbia, Raymond draws a picture in the passenger seat, spiral binder and graphite pencils on his lap. He is sketching a self-portrait. The cellophane wrapper around the pink carnations crunches as Nestor shifts in the back seat.

  “You’re no artist.”

  “Genius is so often scorned,” Raymond says.

  By the time they get to Woodlands, Raymond has finished his picture. It’s not a self-portrait but a sketch of someone who looks strangely like him, but not how he looks now, nor how he used to look. He’s smudged the graphite outline of the face and body so that the man in the picture looks as though he’s underwater, his edges blurred, the way a pebble might look at the bottom of a fast-moving stream.

  “Who’s that?” Vince asks, taking the keys out of the ignition.

  Nestor helps Raymond get out of the car and into his wheelchair. “It’s not very good, is it? It started out as Charlie, but it doesn’t look like him at all.” Raymond puts the sketch under his arm.

  In the bright sunlight, Raymond points to something on Nestor’s cheek, a small cut.

  Nestor shrugs. “A patient. He threw a candy dish at me because he thought I was stealing from him.”

  For the first time, Vince thinks of Nestor in other people’s houses. It surprises him he’s never pictured this before. Or wondered about Nestor’s other clients, what he has to contend with.

  “That’s terrible,” Raymond says. “Promise me you won’t go back there.”

  Nestor nods noncommittally.

  “Promise?”

  They begin to walk toward the main building, Vince pushing the wheelchair, the handles slippery in his sweating hands.

  Derelict buildings brood in the fierce sun. In contrast to the ragged lawn, a cheerful billboard on the site of the old hospital announces the coming of new condos.