Outside, it was beginning to get dark, the sun already down over the hill across from the station. Barry imagined everyone else in the newsroom at the same party, beer or wine in their hands, talking about the week that had gone by. “That was a killer week” and “I can’t survive another one like that.” Barry imagined being there, standing up, drinking and laughing like everyone else. Asking the new girl, National News Melissa, if she’d like to go out on a date, because they’d be almost equals away from the office, like soldiers in the same unit at the same rank, even if she was on the way up and he was at best treading water.
He imagined, just for a moment, that she’d actually said yes, and how they’d go to a restaurant and then back to her place, leaning back together on a modern and spotless designer couch, maybe even having sex in an everything-firm, everything-shaved TV kind of way: clean and gymnastic, seamless, sweatless coupling.
What I need, Barry thought, is a support group.
A bunch of the weekend and night staff from across the country, all getting together somewhere to grouse about how we’re all being treated. What would we call ourselves? The Deadenders? Creatures of the Night?
But it could never happen, he thought. He knew they were out there, at least one at every single station in the country, but he didn’t know any of their names.
Eight o’clock, nine, ten. A break until midnight, a signoff to the international service at one, then home to the dead air that the night shift knew so well, Barry thought.
He got off work at the bendy part of the night, the time when he knew he should be sleeping but all his synapses were still firing, like live wires shooting off sparks. He knew it would be another three hours before he could go to bed without just lying there and staring at the ceiling.
When he got home, three hours of mindless television usually worked the best. A movie with subtitles, or something so mind-numbingly dull that every five minutes shut off a whole cubic inch of brain. But not quite the sheer pounding stupidity of infomercials (“And that’s another chicken, perfectly, pull-apart cooked”) but close.
Barry sometimes drove home so exhausted at the end of his shift that he would circle his own block, passing the driveway and forgetting to turn in — yet still unable to go to bed without spending some time disconnecting first.
They should pay us for that time, too, he thought, because it’s a waiting game you lose if you get your timing wrong and wake up on the couch with the television still yammering and a stiff neck, the growing light of morning all over the floor like something bright had spilled.
Alcohol was always an option, but never a good one: cotton-mouthed, thick-headed mornings that didn’t start until eleven-thirty were a bad idea, worse still if you’d gotten a couple of drinks in before getting amorous ideas and fondling awake a soundly sleeping spouse who would have to be up for work at seven. Then apologizing, and doing it again a week or so later. That kind of thing could only go on for so long.
And Barry knew all about that: he still had a fleshy ridge-and-dent on the finger where his wedding ring used to be, but at least after eighteen months the tan had finally evened out.
Helen kept the house.
He’d tried once or twice to meet someone new, but his hours just made it impossible. On the nights he was off work, his internal clock made him feel out of sync with the rest of the world: going out for a few drinks in the evening felt like an alcoholic’s morning straightener.
Barry felt the need to connect with some other living human the way he imagined a determined salmon must feel, heading upstream. He’d even tried to make small talk with Melissa, breaking the ice with “I liked the report you did on the tent caterpillar infestation.”
She had smiled back at him — that thousand-watt National News smile that’s essential for a television reporter. If you’re the interview subject, that smile almost makes up for the way they drop you like a dead fish as soon as the interview’s over, he thought. A brilliant but empty smile, carefully crafted to promise nothing.
“Sorry, but I’m on deadline,” she’d replied brightly. Even though he knew she wasn’t. She turned back to her screen where she was reading the posted lineup for the national news as if she had a role to play in it. Barry wondered how she’d gotten access.
She’s just waiting, he thought, just craving the chance to end a live report to the national desk with “Thanks, Peter” or “Thanks, Wendy.” You don’t even see the anchor you’re thanking anyway, Barry knew. You just see the big staring glass eye of the camera lens looking back at you, then the cameraman leaning out and giving you a thumbs-up when the network has dropped the satellite link.
Barry spent the next day thinking about his place in it all. At least there was a live show on Saturday morning, another living breathing host in the building, but only until ten. After that, it was just Barry and the empty newsroom again. Barry sat down at the senior producer’s desk, wondering what it would be like to have his job. He woke the computer up from its sleep and opened the email.
The first thing he saw, not unsurprisingly, was that Melissa was leaving. Not for a national news job, but for something closer to the nerve centre in Toronto, a lateral move except for the change of location. That was the other option, he thought: if you can’t move up right away, keep moving, don’t grow regional moss. Barry felt a pang of regret, then scrolled his way through the rest of the exchange, a back-and-forth between the producer and the regional director. Then he saw his name. The producer described Barry as “workmanlike” and said outright what he’d suspected anyway: that the hiring to replace Melissa should bypass even interviewing Barry, so they could keep him on nights where “we’ll never find anyone else.”
“Even the new j-school grads won’t touch it,” the email said. “It’s career kryptonite.”
Barry spent the rest of his Saturday shift going through the motions. The day stretched out in front of him like a race yet to be run, one where he knew he wasn’t going to finish anywhere better than last. He didn’t update any items. He just read them, looking at the microphone and trying to imagine people listening. He couldn’t imagine a single one.
Sunday afternoon at one — that’s when Barry decided the best time would be. He’d take matters into his own hands, he’d rebel, he’d strike a blow for himself and all the other Deadenders. It had come to him late Saturday night, his shift over, the daylight all fled, his living room lit by the television and a single table lamp, two heavy-poured Scotches in. He sat on the end of the couch where he always sat, and determined that, for once, he’d make the decisions, instead of being bounced along by the decisions of others.
On Sunday afternoon, precisely at one, he did exactly that.
Barry sat in the news studio and waited until the green light came on under the microphone, breathing softly, and then watched the second hand on the big clock sweep slowly through the minutes: one, two. The light stayed green: he didn’t say a word. Barry didn’t know what he expected. He wondered if the phone would ring later and someone would ask him why there was dead air instead of a newscast. Maybe they would just chalk it up to technical difficulties, he thought, the switch that didn’t get flipped, the program or hard drive that shut down on an aging server somewhere. Three minutes, four, five.
Barry reached forward and turned the microphone off. It was quiet in the booth, the soundproofed walls eating up even the sound of his breathing. Barry gathered up his scripts, all on the thin green paper with the large type, and went back upstairs.
He had drawers to open, a spoon to steal, emails to read. He wondered what Melissa would think about the dead air. What she would say about his breathtaking lack of professionalism, about the deliberate implosion of what little career he had left. He wondered about just how foreign it would seem to her. He stopped and thought for a moment about his slightly-too-long hair, his scuffed shoes, the aging cable-knit sweater that was always either on his back or on his chair.
All of me must be foreign to her, he tho
ught. Foreign and inexplicable. “I am the revolution, Melissa,” he imagined saying to her.
But then no one called into the newsroom to complain about the missing newscast.
Just to make sure they got the point, he was silent through the two o’clock news; three o’clock and four as well.
Monday morning, he sat in his living room, anxious but ready, looking across at the telephone, waiting for the call that asked for an explanation or simply told him to come in and meet with Yogurt Spoon, the senior producer.
At four, he was still waiting. At four-fifteen, he felt the lead edge of all defiance running right out of him.
Barry packed his lunch bag and went to the front hall to get his shoes.
The revolution, he thought, is over.
Collections
Leo saw her through the glass front door before she saw him, but only just, the light from outside backlighting her and marking her as a stranger before his hand was even on the doorknob. She was a small woman with a clipboard, and she was either someone to do with the election or someone collecting money again, he thought.
By then, Leo was close enough to the door that she would have been able to see him as well, even if he was only a dark shape behind the glass. Too far away to be recognized, he knew, but too close to pull back without being noticed.
He opened the door.
She showed him something that looked like an identification card, palming it so quickly that he barely saw the photograph, then tucked it face down under the clip on the clipboard.
“I’m with the Lung Association,” she said.
“I’ll get my wallet,” Leo said, letting his eyes stray down over the clipboard quickly, trying to read if there were other donations from the neighbourhood, the entries upside down on the sheet. “How does $15 sound?”
“That’s great,” the woman said, staring at him and then past him down the long hallway as he turned to get his wallet off the kitchen counter. He was already wondering what was going through her head, what she was thinking about the open hallway and the dark arched cathedral of the staircase, wondering what kind of snap decisions she was making about the house, about him.
He’d been asleep when the doorbell rang, the television on and a blanket thrown over his feet, and he was still shaking cobwebs out of his head as he picked his wallet up — black smooth leather, a Christmas gift from Liz.
Liz was on the road again, somewhere in big-city Africa with only scattered Internet connections and occasional Skype calls that sounded like she was yelling at him through a long cardboard tube.
Leo was peering inside his wallet, walking back toward the woman at the door, counting the bills, thinking he’d have to make sure there was enough left for the groceries, when she spoke.
“You wouldn’t believe the guy I ran into on Signal Hill Road,” she said all at once. She also said it with a kind of finality, like she’d already decided that he wouldn’t, in fact, be able to believe what she was going to say. Leo didn’t even have a chance to answer.
“I mean, I’m a volunteer, donating my time, out in the cold and everything. And here he is, saying he’d give me $50, straight up, if I let him touch my cooch.”
“What?” Leo said, his head still cloudy from sleep.
“My snatch. He said he’d give me fifty bucks if I let him touch my snatch. Said it right out there on the street, cars going by and everything. Dirty old man.”
She was a small woman, barely up to his shoulder, grey strands scattered in the straight blond hair that hung down just past her ears, and when she smiled, he thought he caught a glimpse of one bad tooth, high on the right side of her upper jaw. The kind of tooth you’d only get a chance to see when she smiled. The rest of her face was thin, her chin pulled back too short as if her jaw was set too deep in the joint. Leo was trying to imagine anyone saying something like that to her, and trying to picture the sort of man who would have made that kind of offer.
“You wouldn’t ever say that to anyone, would you?” she said.
Leo shook his head quickly. Behind the woman, the wind had rushed up the street, handfuls of grey-brown leaves skipping crisply over themselves, their dry points scraping along the pavement with a scratchy hiss that made it seem like the street was suddenly crowded. It was an ordinary Sunday afternoon, the houses opposite were quiet, everyone indoors.
“But then again, I’ll bet you don’t have to be paying a woman to get her to let you put your hand on her snatch,” she said, and Leo looked out through the door, to see if there was anyone else nearby on the sidewalk, as if by some bizarre impossible chance Liz had just pulled up and climbed out of the car and heard the whole conversation. Liz wasn’t expected back for another week.
The woman waved her hand dismissively, as if nothing she’d just said even mattered.
“If he was younger like you, I suppose I would have called the cops. And I would have let him have it right between the eyes, because I can take care of myself. But he was just an old drunk, so what are you going to do? What’s your name?” she said, her pen poised over the clipboard, and suddenly Leo didn’t want her to know.
But he told her anyway, he didn’t see any way out of it, and she took the address down from the number over the door, brass tattletale numbers at least a couple of inches high.
“They’ll send you a receipt in a week or so — anything over $10, and you’ll get a tax receipt. Postal code?”
He gave her that, too, even though it felt a little bit like undressing, and she carefully wrote it down. She clipped the pen under the clasp with her ID, using the hand that had held the pen to push stray hairs back behind her ear.
“I wasn’t going to tell anyone, right? What’s the point? But then I went ahead and I told my uncle. He’d had a few drinks, and now him and Justin have gone up there looking for the guy,” she said, her eyes fixed right on Leo’s. He noticed that the woman didn’t seem to have to blink.
“I’m Mary,” she said, and put her hand out to shake his. Not knowing what else to do, Leo shook her hand, noticing that it was small and dry, but cold. In his peripheral vision, a burgundy van came into view and then accelerated past. Two more cars drove after it. It had been a noisy sort of fall day: the wind had been rattling in the newly bare trees, even a couple of half-hearted, sudden flurries of corn snow, more ice pellets than flakes, that the wind had carried in front of it like a thin sheet blowing along the road.
“How old are you? Forty-five, forty-six maybe?”
Leo felt there was no easy way to separate himself from the conversation.
“Forty-eight,” he said. Forty-eight and married for twenty of them, he might have added, but he didn’t. Forty-eight and well preserved in that three-times-a-week-at-the-gym kind of way that he almost felt was expected of him. Leo couldn’t figure out why he was even thinking about it.
“My uncle — that’s my uncle Peter, by the way — broke a guy’s arm once in a bar fight. People think of it the way it is on television — bang, bang, guys swinging at each other’s faces with big meaty fists, jaws stuck out — but it wasn’t anything like that at all. His friend Justin said my uncle had him hold the guy’s arm out over the bar, and then Pete swung a chair down from right over his head onto the guy’s wrist. Not like anything’s going to happen except broken bones. And cops.”
She looked at him, shook her head. “Guy had a pin put right into the bone to hold it together afterwards, but I heard he lost all the strength in it anyway. My uncle and Justin and a few beers, that’s a really bad combination every time.”
Then she smiled, a bright, fixed smile that didn’t hold any happiness at all, but that looked like she had practiced it carefully, dismissively. And that was, he thought, exactly what it was — a signoff, a goodbye, a thank-you-very-much, so other words weren’t even necessary. But then she spoke again.
“Hey, you don’t smoke, do you?”
Now she was holding the screen door open even though he’d already let go of it, one hand on the
door and her other arm holding the clipboard in tight against her chest like a shield.
For an instant, Leo wasn’t sure if it was a trick question, or what the right answer was — whether he should say yes and let her bum one, or whether he should say no, because she was collecting for the Lung Association after all, and she should be against smoking. He had the urge to tell her that he didn’t smoke, and not only that, but that he was a runner, too, so he was probably in better shape than most people. Even though he still kept a pack of smokes in a kitchen cupboard, behind a row of cookbooks that never, ever left the shelf unless he needed to reach for the pack so he could go out on the deck for a quick, lung-filling release. He did it even though Liz always smelled the remains of the smoke as it hung around him, and always called him out on it, even though it was never more than one.
“No,” Leo lied to the woman at the door. “No, I’ve never smoked.”
“Good for you,” she said cryptically, although there was something about her face that suggested she knew he was lying. A dissecting look — a look he knew well, a frank stare that un-layered skin and flesh, a look that reached right down to honest bone. She pulled her arm away from the screen door and let it slam closed. He watched as she walked away. She crossed the street, moving with a short, compact, contained stride. While he stared, she went past the front door of the house across the street, then passed the next one, too, and then she turned and waved, catching him flat-footed. He closed the inside door quickly, and she vanished behind the frosted glass.
At that moment, he was absolutely certain that what she had really wanted was for him to ask her inside out of the cold. That she had stopped at his house on purpose, by design. He had no idea how he knew that, but the bells were ringing in the back of his head, a clear thought that he should never, ever think of letting her inside, not even for a moment.
Later that afternoon, down in the basement, Leo was putting shelves up when he thought he heard the doorbell ring again. Liz had let him know that she expected the shelves to be up before she got back. She had a way of suggesting things that made it clear they weren’t suggestions at all, more like directions cloaked in a softer sleeve merely for politeness’ sake. He’d thought about the way she always invited him to make a choice, while ensuring that there was no real choice at all. He felt as if he were led by the nose, and helpless every single time.
The Path of Most Resistance Page 8