Max's Folly

by Bill Turpin

  Welcome back to Halifax, Max thought.

  An elegant woman in her sixties was addressing him. A nametag on her chest read: Registered Nurse.

  “Max, have a chair. I’m sure he’ll be here in just a few minutes.”

  Max was wearing baggy corduroys that he had never seen before and — to his dismay — a short-sleeved shirt. An old girl pushing a walker ran over his foot on her way to a bank of mailboxes. It could be some kind of hospital, Max thought, but likely worse.

  Palliative care? Fuck!

  The Registered Nurse recognized his surging anxiety. “Max, would you rather wait in your room?” Nothing in her tone suggested another option, such as walking out onto the street and “waiting” in the sunlight.

  Weird as the situation was, Max sensed that he’d been through it before. So he squeezed down his panic and played it cool.

  “Hmm,” he said, indicating that he was thoroughly engaged in the decision.

  A second woman, much younger than the nurse, smiled at him from behind a reception desk to his right. She was sporting purple hair and a nose ring apparently stolen from a shower curtain. “You’re welcome right here with me, Max. I need some male eye candy to greet people as they come through the door.”

  “Eye candy,” he scoffed, instantly fond of Purple Hair. “If I’m eye candy then you, my dear, are a five-course gourmet meal.”

  To Max’s delight, she blushed.

  Max thought hard. Whatever was going on here, he was likely better off in his “room”, where presumably he’d be able to reflect. It was important to hide his confusion, though. The less they know about his difficulty, the better. What would happen if they knew he had a snowball’s chance in hell of finding his “room”?

  “I would prefer my room,” he said to the nurse. “But perhaps you could come with me. My throat has been bothering me. Maybe you could take a look.”

  “Sure.” But she offered no directions to his room.

  Max detected a light breeze pressing against his back, thought quickly, and gambled there was a hall to his rear. He turned 180 degrees and immediately started down the “hallway”, which he intensely hoped was actually there. Striding confidently into a wall would seriously undermine whatever credibility he had in this particular junction of space and time.

  Happily, there was in fact a hallway. Less encouraging was its length, so great that it actually seemed to have a vanishing point. There were countless doors, each bearing an object of some kind: a teddy bear, a toy cat, a crucifix, cloth flowers, another crucifix (almost certainly made from sticks by a grandchild) and so on. Max got it — the adornments were there to help the inmates find their cells. He was in some kind of “home”.

  Not good.

  He spotted a pewter plaque depicting a newspaper press. Max didn’t remember it specifically, but noted that it provoked a sense of familiarity. That could be mine, Max thought. Still, he couldn’t be certain. Never assume.

  Registered Nurse was slowing down, preparing to let Max lead the way. He needed a distraction while he confirmed where his cell was, so pointed to the award and spoke, careful to ensure his tone was neutral as to the ownership of the plaque.

  “Looks like King Kong kicked over an office tower,” he said cheerfully.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” said Registered Nurse. “Where do you come up with stuff like that, Max? You should be proud of that award.”

  Hah! My door it is!

  When they got there, Max pretended to look closely at the award.

  “Well, I guess you’re right, it’s not a building,” he generously acknowledged.

  “That’s a relief,” said Registered Nurse.

  “Yep,” said Max. “It’s clearly an action figure of five executives screwing a newspaper reader. Must be an award from a newspaper chain.” Now he could make out an inscription on the newspaper bag: Lifetime Achievement: Editor.

  “Do you know when I got this?” he asked.

  “Yes. It came in the mail last month.”

  “I presume I have a file here,” Max said. “Have you read it?”

  Registered Nurse nods in the affirmative.

  “When did I retire as a journalist?”

  “Must have been a long time ago,” she says. “Your file said you were a communications consultant. It barely mentioned journalism.”

  “It was only most of my career,” Max says.

  The worst thing you can do to a journalist is give him a lifetime achievement award. It’s like a bullet in the back of the head. But whoever sent him this award waited until he was jailed for having memory problems. Can this get any worse, he wondered.

  The only recognizable object in his closet-sized “room” was the king-sized marital bed, in a sleigh-style frame worthy of a tsar. The Wife’s inflated salary as a university flack had paid for that. There was barely room for end tables between the bed and the walls. There was a window, but another building across the alley blocked most of the light. Max needed only a quick look around to confirm that the Wife was not with him, so there was no comfort in seeing the familiar piece of furniture. It merely reminded him that he was lonely.

  The nurse patted the edge of the bed.

  “Just sit here for a moment and I’ll check your throat,” she said.

  The throat was quickly pronounced healthy.

  Max chose his next words carefully. “Sometimes it feels like palliative care around here.”

  “No,” she replied. “We’ll be sorry when you leave here, but I’m sure you’ll do it under your own steam.”

  “You mean as opposed to feet-first.”

  “Dear lord, you’re blunt,” she said and, with that, Registered Nurse left him alone.

  Two steps from the end of his bed was a bathroom, tiled completely in white and lit with a high-contrast curly-bulb bright enough to belong in a football stadium. The bathroom had all the charm of a freezer chest. Max slid his hands into his pockets. In the right, where he always kept a few bills and change, there was nothing. But in the left pocket he found a pencil stub and a piece of paper, the feel of which told him that it was old. He pulled it out and in the surgical light from the bathroom he could see that in a former life it had been an envelope. Max recognized his own handwriting.

  “Check socks drawer, end table,” it said. The numeral three was also scrawled on it three times.

  Beside the bathroom door was his dresser and in the top drawer were socks and underwear. Max dug down and found an envelope labelled Welcome back to the dungeon. Inside was a note — to himself.

  Do not delay: make sure there are backup copies of this note in each end table.

  He was tempted to go on reading but summoned the discipline to confirm the presence of the other notes.

  Bad news first: if you’re reading this again, there isn’t a lot of good news.

  Reading it again, Max thought. Why?

  You have lost control of the time-jump. There is no telling when a jump attempt will work or where you will land when it’s over. Sometimes they occur spontaneously. Worse, your recollection of previous jumps is fading. That’s why you’ve written this note. This room seems to be a base of some kind. You keep coming back to this situation, but DO NOT STAY here if you can manage it. You’re not dead yet, my friend. Find the Wife in a good time/place and figure out a way to stay there. Be friendly with the people here — most of them are kind — but jump if you can. Otherwise, in time, you’ll get comfortable and you don’t want that.

  The Wife is not here. Check the wall for updates. ESPECIALLY THE CORNERS. When you’ve got a number in each one, you’re good to go. You’ll know what I mean.

  Max snapped his head up to look at the wall, heard an alarming crack in his neck and felt something like a shard of glass slicing into the top of his spine. Evidently he was getting older.

  The wall was covered with terse
notes written in crayon. Max was horrified to recognize his own block printing, the style he used to mark proofs for compositors, printers and assorted ad agencies. He’d spent his adult life honing his prose to be precise and full of meaning, but these scrawls were Neanderthal grunts:

  Purple Hair OK.

  Max gone. Bye-bye.

  Pesto yes; SpaghettiOs, no.

  Big nurse steals pocket change.

  God? Hah! Not here.

  The meaning was obvious: in this location in time, lucidity was not guaranteed. Just the opposite, actually. Thus, his task was to get out of this time and place as soon as he could.

  He looked at the four corners. Two of them bore the number three; the others were blank.

  Max stewed over his own cryptograms until Registered Nurse returned. She had in tow a familiar-looking, athletic man with closely cropped black hair. He wore a wool jacket that carried in a whiff of cool fall air.

  “Max,” she said, “your son is here.”

  He looked too old be the Son, but Max was catching on: stay vague until you figure out who they are and listen carefully for clues.

  “Oh! What a surprise! It’s good to see you . . . son. How was the drive?”

  “The drive was fine, Dad,” he said. “I’m only 10 minutes away.”

  Max parried: “With the traffic in this city, nothing is ever 10 minutes away.”

  The nurse asked: “What should I tell the kitchen? Are you two eating here or going out?”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Max said, guessing that he praised the kitchen regularly. “I love the food here. But nothing beats a meal that my son’s paid for.”

  Everybody laughed a bit too hard, and Registered Nurse departed. Max walked to his dim window, then turned partway toward the Son. He gave him a cagey, sideways look.

  “What do horses eat?”

  “Apples,” was the reply.

  Only the Son would answer that way, of course. Max’s heart opened and, suddenly, his head was clear. Where was I when this fellow became a man, he wondered.

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “If I were any better I’d be dangerous.”

  Max feels a question gnawing at him, but he can’t articulate it. The Son comes up with one of his own first.

  “Your gout okay?”

  Gout? “Not a problem,” Max said.

  The Son was silent. The journalist in Max knows that he can wait him out, force him to break the silence. Long silences are often followed by useful information.

  “Dad, we may have to start looking at a new place for you, a place with more services.”

  Max attempted a menacing tone. “Now why would that be?”

  “It’s your . . . memory . . . sometimes you forget things . . . get confused . . . yesterday you peed in a potted plant.”

  “That wasn’t me,” Max said. “It was years ago. The fisheries minister got so drunk at a fundraiser that he mistook the champagne fountain for a urinal.”

  “You’re in denial, Dad.”

  Max had to concentrate. How do you refute the allegation that you’re in denial? Deny it?

  He was about to make this point when he remembered the notes in the drawers. Stay cool.

  He looked the Son confidently in the eye: “Let’s say that’s true. Do you have a better strategy than denial?”

  Max didn’t wait for a reply because the question that had been nagging him had finally gnawed its way to his consciousness.

  “I need to confirm something. How long has your mother been dead?”

  “About five months.”

  “That fits,” he said.

  “What?”

  “This is my base station in time,” he said. “Not a problem. It’s all good. I’ll find her. How about your sister? How is she doing?”

  The Son deflated a little. Max felt sorry for him.

  “Dad, I don’t have a sister . . . never mind. Time to eat,” the Son declared.

  Max didn’t want to hear anything more about why there might not be sister. “Good. I could go for a big glass of draft, too.”

  “The doctor thinks alcohol’s a bad idea.”

  “Bad for who? Bad for the doctor’s theories, I expect. But not me. Anyway, if you’re right about what you say, it can’t do me any harm, can it? I mean, the arse is already out of ’er, right?”

  The Son smiled. “We’ll get something deep-fried, too, with extra salt.”

  Max’s core warmed and softened.

  “And I’ll get a new ball for you,” Max said, recalling a different time-space junction where he and the Son were walking home from a school event, snow crunching under their feet. The Son pointed to the half-moon burning high and white surrounded by pinpoint winter stars. He said it looked like a father walking home, with a new ball for his son poking part way out of the pocket of his greatcoat. The Son said it made him feel safe. Max hoisted the boy onto his shoulders and that’s the way they walked the rest of the way home.

  The grown Son placed his arm on Max’s shoulder and they walked out to the glass door. The Son waved to Purple Hair and punched a four-digit code into a security pad. Max couldn’t see it all, but was pretty sure it started with a 3.

  Inside his pocket, he found the pencil stub and, pinning the paper scrap against his thigh, scrawled an awkward 3 on it.

  1969

  Friday Night

  at the Strip Club

  >MAX HAD NO doubt he was jumping to Montreal. The grey concrete of the Metro tunnel flashed by inches from his window. When the train stopped, he stepped out of the car and into, of all places, a strip club named Goldpussy’s.

  Max is embarrassed by the rapt attention his three roommates are devoting to the spectacle before them.

  It’s Friday night with nothing happening on campus, so they’re all downtown drinking beer at the 007-themed club.

  His friends have cajoled him into sitting near the stage, which Max hates because it costs a lot in tips and the view is better suited, in his opinion, to medical texts. Max loves looking at naked women; he just prefers to do it with a degree of decorum.

  But two beers into the evening, a naked dancer in red sequined heels strides over, turns her back, and offers them the Holy Grail of the strip club experience. The Roommates go nuts and toss money on the stage for her to pick up. Max averts his gaze, but discreetly, because he doesn’t want to hurt the girl’s feelings. He pretends he’s turning away because he has to sneeze, and finds himself looking right into the face of an attractive older red-head sitting alone a few tables away.

  And she is looking right back at him. No question about it. And she is beaming at him, the way his high school algebra teacher used to beam at him when he solved quadratic equations. (It occurs to Max that his former mentor would probably be disappointed to see him in a crummy nightclub with his face just a couple of feet from someone’s bare behind. “You were such a promising student, Max, and now this!”)

  A while later Max is gazing toward another part of the club when he sees the red-haired woman again, still beaming directly at him. He tells himself to stop fantasizing. The woman is easily 10 years older than him and ’way out of his league. But, not long after, Max sees her smiling warmly at him again, this time sitting alone on the other side of the club, her round face A-framed by the legs of a stripper.

  Max has to search the room to find her the fourth time. He spots her near a corner, much farther away, but this time she nods slightly and holds up her beer glass to him. Max’s friends don’t even notice when he abandons them and gingerly walks to her table. As he does so, he envisions the gas-lit lecture hall: “And so I submit gentlemen, the straightforward approach is best in these situations. Just walk up confidently and ask: ‘Excuse me, have we met?’ ‘Eureka,’ the audience yells. ‘Hear hear! Well done, Max!’”

  Thus prepared, Max instead cir
cles behind her and says to the back of her head: “Do you come here often?” As is his habit, he realizes the words are wrong, but not until he’s in mid-sentence.

  “Well,” she says, turning to him and still beaming. “I work here some nights, so I guess you could say that.”

  Up close, Max can see that she is without question the most beautiful woman in the world. Hair the colour of copper, bright green eyes; her expression open and curious. But Max, his ears burning bright red, is the biggest clod in the world. He wobbles under this clash of insights.

  “I think you’d better sit down,” she says, motioning toward the chair right next to her.

  Max sits and clears his throat: “So, are you one of the bartenders?”

  “No.”

  “A cook?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Umm, dancer?”

  “The word you’re probably looking for is ‘stripper’,” she says. “And part owner.”

  It seems only natural to Max that strippers should have the same power of speech enjoyed by other humans, but Max himself is mute while his brain works to process the reality of it and deal with the assortment of hormones and other complex molecules flooding his bloodstream.

  “So, whoever you are,” she says, “I’m feeling kind of lonely tonight and want to know if you’ll go out for a drink with me.”

  “My name is Max,” he croaks.

  “Maxie! That’s a great name. I’ve always wanted to know a Maxie. Shall we go?”

  Max glances at his friends, who are busy contorting their necks, and decides not to bother saying goodbye.

  He and the Dancer step carefully down a dark, uneven stairway with a landing at the halfway mark. It features a crude spray-painted “X”, reputedly marking the farthest a bouncer has ever tossed a patron for touching a stripper. For Max, it feels like a point of no return on a journey into the unknown.