On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light

by Cordelia Strube

  “Is your leg hurting really badly?” Irwin asks because Forbes is only supposed to smoke marijuana when the pain is intolerable.

  “Come here, son. Pull up a chair. I want to show you something.”

  Irwin sits on the footstool Forbes uses for his bad leg.

  “Check this out.” Forbes scrolls through photos of people Irwin doesn’t recognize.

  “Are they your friends?”

  “Nope. What do you think they all have in common?”

  “Are they part of a fandom?”

  “Kind of. They all look like normal people, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Every one of them is an organ recipient.”

  Irwin stands up so fast he knocks over the stool. “Gross, I don’t want to look at that.”

  Forbes enlarges an image of a young freckled woman with curly red hair wearing nerd glasses. “She’s had a lung transplant. She was born with cystic fibrosis and was supposed to die. But then someone gave her their lungs and she didn’t. Do you want to watch her video?”

  “No way. That’s freaky.”

  “It’s not freaky at all. She talks about how tough it is to know someone had to die for her to live.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “The point is two people could have died. Her as well the donor. This way only one person had to die. Your brave sis saved a life, son.”

  “I’m going home.”

  Forbes closes the laptop. “Not till you have some ice cream. Chocolate chip, your fave. Go help yourself.”

  Irwin could use some ice cream after Uma’s stir-fry. Heike tried to stop him from leaving before dessert. Uma cut up something she called dragon fruit that had spotty white insides and green skin with tentacles. She told them it was delicious with goat yogourt from the farmers’ market. Donald, looking worried, adjusted the glasses on his nose. Irwin, having managed to swallow tofu and kale, excused himself, kissed the top of Heike’s head and said he’d see her tomorrow.

  He heaps a generous serving of chocolate chip ice cream into his bowl. Lynne never buys ice cream anymore because she says it makes him fat. When he was little she let him eat bowls of it to put weight on. Now that the hormones have hit, she wants him to take weight off.

  He sits on the footstool with his ice cream. “Do you think I’m overweight?”

  “No way, dude. You need a little extra padding for emergencies.” Forbes pinches the fat around his own middle. He is talking louder, which means he’s getting stoned.

  “I think I might have broken through the membrane,” Irwin says.

  “No shit. What’d you see?”

  “Harriet. She was sitting on the kitchen counter, and then she was in the pool when I was swimming.”

  “Slick.”

  “I might have imagined her.”

  “Was she active?”

  “What do you mean ‘active’?”

  “Was she doing something or was it like a snapshot?”

  “She was swinging her legs the way she did to annoy Gennedy. And then she was swimming with her noodle.”

  “You’re on your way, man. Congrats.” Forbes inhales on the spliff and holds the smoke in his lungs.

  “Do you mean, for it to be real, she has to be doing something?”

  Smoke drifts from Forbes nostrils. “Yep. Like it’s not freeze-frame, you know what I’m saying? Freeze-frame’s like a flash, right. Like a memory flash. Next you got to get in there and interact with her.”

  “That would be amazing.” Irwin sucks on a chocolate chip.

  “It’ll happen, man. Just keep working on your focus.” Forbes saying “man” frequently indicates he’s getting really stoned. “I was just in my AU as a matter of fact. With a hot chick. She was hairy all over, which you’d think would be a turnoff but she was so ripe, you know what I’m saying, like, she wanted me so bad the hairiness didn’t matter. It was kind of exciting because I couldn’t see what she looked like under all that hair. I had to move my hands all over her, like, really feel her, and she was making these noises, oh man, it was juicy.” He takes another toke, holds it in his lungs and squints at the coffee table. “You know what drives me nuts is how we think we know what stuff is.” Smoke drifts out of his nose and mouth. “Like, we think that’s a table, right, but who says it’s a table, who came up with the table word in the first place? I mean, why do we have to label everything?”

  Irwin shrugs, eating his ice cream quickly because he wants to leave before Forbes makes no sense at all.

  “It’s a control thing, right?” Forbes squints at the table. “Like, I know what it is, therefore I control it. Kind of the I-think-therefore-I-am bullshit. Thinking sucks, man. Like, they’re just thoughts. We treat them like they’re meaningful and real and all that, but they’re just thoughts, man. Like, what if I don’t think that’s a table. What if I just look at it and go, okay, that would be a good place to put my coffee down. You get where I’m going with this? And what if I don’t think that’s a chair.” Forbes waves at the chair with the fatty pinched between his fingers. “Like, I just look at it and go, that four-legged thing would be good to set my ass down on, you know what I’m saying? Like, why’s it got to have a name? We’re fucking shackled by our thoughts, man.”

  Irwin finishes his ice cream and cleans the bowl in the kitchen sink. He washes the other dishes as well because washing dishes with only one leg is difficult. He hears Forbes coughing, which sometimes happens when he smokes pot. “Animals don’t need labels, man, they just go around and say, okay, I’ll eat this because I’m hungry. Okay, I’m tired and the sun’s gone down so I’ll sleep. Like, what’s with the clocks? Clocks are doom, man.”

  The first thing Irwin notices when he gets home is the open wine bottle on the table. His mother and Sydney aren’t in the living room but the balcony door is open. He picks up the plastic container from PetSmart that he remembered to set out with water and DE chlorinator this morning. Often he forgets this step which means he can’t clean the tank because the water he puts the fish into should be room temperature. He puts the container on the bathroom floor then hurries to the aquarium to unplug the bubbler and the filter. He removes the tank lid, remembering he forgot to turn the tank lights off last night which means Betty and Bob couldn’t sleep. He carries the tank to the bathroom, finds his net on the hook behind the door and gently scoops up the fish and places them in the PetSmart container. He’s always wondered how they feel about this. They swim around briefly then stop, as though they’ve figured out there’s no point in swimming around. He shakes some food flakes into the water to keep them busy. It saddens him that he has never bonded with Betty or Bob. When Gennedy first brought them home, Irwin sat on a stool watching them but didn’t tap on the glass because that would be rude. He waited for them to swim over and acknowledge him, but they never did. They always look as if they’re waiting for something to happen: escape, death, a new fish. It’s only a two-gallon tank, not big enough for more fish. The important thing is that they get along. Some fish kill each other, Irwin learned online. Male bettas are really pretty, but they can’t coexist with other male bettas or gouramis or male guppies. Flashy fish are killers. Betty and Bob are boring, but at least they don’t murder each other. Although they do shit a lot and dirty the water quickly. Forgetting to clean the tank is cruel, Irwin knows. He’s making them choke on their own shit.

  He empties most of the water from the tank into the bathtub and scrubs the sides with a J-Cloth then gets out his gravel vacuum and sucks the muck out of the substrate. When he was little, to make Betty and Bob like him, he overfed them. This caused them to shit even more, and algae grew on the sides of the tank and all over the gravel. He had to do many water changes to get rid of the green slime. Now he only feeds them at night.

  Next he grabs the old Ocean Spray bottle marked by Gennedy with two lines; one indicating the amou
nt of conditioner required, and the other, the amount of water. He measures out the right amount of each and empties the Ocean Spray bottle into the tank. He repeats this procedure until the tank is full, periodically checking the water temperature with his thermometer. Betty and Bob barely move in their PetSmart container while they wait for something to happen.

  “Oh, there you are,” Lynne says. “Were you over at the German sow’s again? How is the so-called intellectual? Spending more of the asshole’s money no doubt.”

  “He says she has to tighten her belt and lower her standards a little.”

  “Oh, well, in that case, I’m sure the child support cheques will start rolling in.”

  It’s easy to hate his mother for chopping up Harriet when she’s smoking and drinking.

  “Let me guess,” she says. “She still hasn’t paid you for babysitting.”

  “Can you get out of the way? I have to put the tank back.”

  “It’s really great you remembered to clean it, peanut.”

  “Where’s Sydney?” He lifts the tank and moves past her. She follows him.

  “On a date with some computer geek.”

  “You’re drinking her wine all by yourself?”

  “She wouldn’t mind.”

  “Did you ask her?”

  “She’s getting a deal here, Irwin. Four hundred bucks for a room plus full use of the apartment. Give me a break.”

  “It just seems rude to drink her wine without asking.”

  “You think everything’s rude. I don’t know where you got that from, Mr. Goody Two Shoes. Vino is the only thing that relaxes me. All day long I’m wound up trying to figure out the money thing. There’s this tightness in my chest 24/7 from trying to figure out how we’re going to make it. It’s like this spring coiled up inside me.”

  She wouldn’t talk like this without vino.

  “And the spring,” she continues, “coils tighter and tighter and I’m scared it’s going to spring loose and blast me and you and everything else away.”

  “What’s drinking Sydney’s wine got to do with it?”

  “It’s got to do with the fact that I’m tense all the time. Surely a saint like yourself can allow me a glass of wine.”

  “I’m not a saint, and you’ve had more than one glass. It’s not even yours.”

  “Where do you want this?” She waves Betty and Bob around in the PetSmart container. He didn’t realize she was carrying them.

  “Put it down,” he says, more harshly than he’d intended. “You’ll hurt them.”

  “You can’t hurt fish. How old are these anyway? Seriously, how long do they live for? I’m going to go broke paying for fish supplies.”

  “Ten years. I told you that already. They can live for ten years.”

  “Oh my lord, what kind of life is that?”

  “What kind of life is yours?”

  “Excuse me?” She puts the hand that’s not holding the wineglass on her hip. He can tell she’s lost more weight because her skinny jeans sag off her.

  “What kind of life is yours?” he repeats. “Smoking and drinking other people’s wine, and hating your jobs and your exes, and feeling wound up all the time, and chopping up my sister.” He did not mean to say this. He had no intention of mentioning it. The battered look on her face frightens him but he can’t stop himself, just as he couldn’t stop himself jumping off the diving board to escape Conner and Taylor. He wants to sink down, down into forgiving coolness, where it’s quiet and no one can stare at him.

  She grips her wineglass with both hands as though afraid she might drop it. “What are you talking about?”

  “You know.”

  “No, I don’t know.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I did not chop up your sister. What are you talking about?”

  “You let them cut her up and put her organs in Ziploc bags.”

  “Where do you get these ideas? From that low-life?”

  “He’s not a low-life.”

  “I can’t believe Sydney told you. I knew I shouldn’t have said anything. Why did I trust her? I should know by now not to trust anybody.” She collapses on the couch and covers her eyes with her hand the way she used to when she didn’t want Irwin to see her crying. He doesn’t care. The hateful, gurgling sea monster inside him shifts its bulk.

  He plugs in the bubbler and filter, carefully lifts the PetSmart container and pours Betty and Bob into the tank. He sprinkles a bit more food before fitting the lid onto the aquarium and turning off the light so they can get some sleep. “I’m going to bed.”

  “No you’re not, young man. You can’t accuse me of chopping up your sister and just walk away.”

  “If I die, are you going to let them chop me up too?”

  “It’s not chopping up, Irwin. They’re very careful about harvesting the organs.”

  “Stop saying that word, it’s not like she was a vegetable. And anyway, how do you know they were careful, were you watching? I don’t want to be a donor. Don’t make me a donor. Harry didn’t know she was a donor.”

  “She did.”

  Irwin looks directly at her to make sure she isn’t lying. When she lies, her eyeballs shift slightly. “She did?”

  Lynne nods and her eyeballs don’t shift. “Harriet didn’t cling to life like the rest of us. Death didn’t scare her, I guess because she saw so much of it. She understood why we were on donor lists. She saw all the sick kids in hospital. You didn’t notice because you were little.”

  “I noticed they died when their parents took them off vents.”

  “She was brain-dead, baby, how many times do we have to go over this?”

  “People can be in comas and get better.” Just the other day he watched a movie where a guy got shot in the head, went into a coma and woke up perfectly fine a week later.

  “Not in real life, sweet pea. Please come and sit with me.”

  “I don’t want to. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.”

  “Please don’t be like that. How do you think I feel about it? I live with it too, you know. Day in and day out I don’t know where she is. I gave her away and now she’s all over the place in bodies that reject her. That’s the part I didn’t understand. Nobody explained to me that the bodies hate other bodies’ organs. They try to kill the organs. So my precious little girl is where she’s not wanted, all alone, far from me, fighting for survival all by herself.” She covers her eyes with her hand again. “I can’t help her, can’t protect her, can’t love her. I’m a fuckup, a total fuckup as a mother, and as a wife, and as a provider. I’m a total fuckup. And I’m so sorry.”

  Irwin’s noticed that when adults admit to making a mistake they start talking about themselves, and not the people or person they have wronged. His mother is waiting for him to say she isn’t a total fuckup. She is waiting for him to feel sorry for her, and forgive her. That’s not going to happen.

  “Good night,” he says.

  “Irwin, you can’t hate me for this. I did what I thought was right. Now I have to live with it. I’m sorry. I had no idea I would never stop worrying about her in strangers’ bodies. But I do, all the time. It haunts me. I want her back so badly. I want to hold her and tell her how much I love her, and say that I just didn’t understand.”

  “What?” He stares into her watery eyes in the same way he stares at Betty and Bob. He expects nothing.

  “What do you mean ‘what’?”

  “What didn’t you understand about Harry?”

  “That she needed me. She always seemed so strong and self-reliant. She was independent and very stubborn. It was like she didn’t even need a mother.”

  “You made her that way.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying she got that way because you were a total fuckup.”

  “
It’s because I was looking after you all the time, sweet pea. I was so worried about you. You were so sick, and we never knew if you were going to make it.”

  This is another thing he’s noticed about adults. Even after they say they’re sorry, they still pin the blame on somebody else.

  “I should have died,” he says. “I wish I’d died.”

  “Don’t say that.” She jumps off the couch and hugs him to her bony frame. “Never say that. I couldn’t live without you, sweet pea. You’re my miracle baby.”

  He pulls away from the smell of wine and cigarettes. “I’m getting a headache. I’ve got to go to bed.” This will make her leave him alone because a headache could mean a seizure’s pending.

  “Okay, sweetie, do you want me to get you some hot milk or something?”

  “No. I just need to lie down.”

  “Of course, baby. I love you so much, my sweet boy. And I won’t donate your organs. I promise.”

  She seems so brittle and irrelevant to him standing there with her hands held out, begging for a love he can’t feel. He can hardly remember who she was, or who he thought she was. He stares at the family photos on his dresser and mourns the loss of what she meant to him. She meant almost everything. And now she means almost nothing.

  He tries to sleep, listening to her movements, waiting for her to go to bed. But she watches Titanic. When Céline Dion sings “My Heart Will Go On,” all he can think about is Harriet’s heart in a stranger’s body that is trying to kill it. When Lynne finally goes to her room, he creeps to the bathroom to brush his teeth, determined to maintain good oral hygiene as per Dr. Du’s instructions. Over the years, medications have made Irwin cavity prone. Every time Dr. Du finds decay, Lynne throws up her hands and shakes her head like Irwin did it on purpose.

  He flosses and uses the Soft-Picks, considering taking meds to numb his feelings, but then he’ll have itchy eyes and headaches. His muscles might start twitching and he’ll start forgetting things. On Prozac he forgets entire incidents that other people remember, like Heike’s birthday party at Laser Quest. “How could you forget?” she demanded. “It was the sickest thing ever.” She told him his vest didn’t activate so nobody could shoot him. “It was like you were bulletproof,” she said. “You were walking around superhuman.”