White dogs = Death comforters. They’re in my dreams everywhere, and that’s why you wake up crying.
Most wonderful friend? Isn’t it obvious?
Most inspiring movie? Chinese Ghost Story 1. It’s the perfect love story. Really.
Most chilling Christmas carol that scared us (me more than you): “You better not shout/ you better not cry/ you better not pout/ I’m tellin’ you why….”
Last kiss with mild tongue: At the airport, yesterday. You’ll never guess who. (Okay, it was Rhonda. Are you mad?)
Most inspiring book intro: The Lover. Read it to me over and over and over.
Best alternative to coffee: cappuccino.
Worst pick up line: “We were wondering what the view from your bedroom window’s like” (Can you believe that worked?).
Strangest neighbours growing up: Patrick and Huey. No last names as we recall. Always lighting things on fire and jacking each other off. Both were uncircumcised so their peenees looked like nightmare creatures that were somehow captured but always shy. The brothers kissed. With tongue. They had pink eyelids and hair so white it glowed in the dark. One had asthma; both were bad seeds. They fucked us up!
Best secret joy: My collection of throwing knives. Plus, the feeling when we are sharks on Zadaxin weaving our way through three-lane traffic: me in my Jag, you in yours.
Biggest toy question: Where do all the old toys go? Back to Taiwan, or what?
Fave drink: Old Tyme Jamaican Ginger Beer though the Australian Ginger Beer is better. (Note to ourselves: Must find out brand name in Sydney, Oz, and see if they import to Canada using kegs. Further, call Jamaican bodyguard and get him to fuck you-know-who up some more. Get him to use the bathtub this time and let them scream underwater.)
Chronic all time fear: Being vomited on in public and it’s hot and I have to walk all the way home without you.
Funnest time in hospital (so far): When my appendix blew a week to the day yours did and we had to share Room 4. (I still don’t believe the night nurse went down on you, silly boy.)
What keeps me awake lately: Ever since you told me there are blood stains in every ballerina’s right shoe. (As always, I just have to see it for myself). I imagine the purple stain inside the first shoe I inspect is the purple our palms have become, is the darkening black of our livers.
Favourite picture: You and me in the parkas Mum made us. Snow falling. We can hear each other grow at night.
Best idea for a web site that will make us our second million: www.o-faces.com. People will send in their orgasm faces to us, hopefully more women than men as men look like they are doing something violent and wrong or as if they have just been murdered by their best friend and are thinking, “Of all people—you?” There will be no consoles, no blink links, no bullshit. We’ll show the ecstasy, show the open mouth closed eyes “bring me thunder so hard I see lightning” look, show the “Oh my God you’re inside me and you’re magnificent and stronger and fucking me harder than my mother has ever been fucked and I love it and it’s like I’m riding a horse upside-down and I’m shaking I’m shivering I’m bucking and my legs are over your shoulders and I can feel your bad boys smack against me!” look.
Fourth saddest affliction: I’m getting those tiny polyps or cell formation or whatever they call them on my neck and I strongly feel that it is our laundry soap transferring contamination through my collar. I see this affliction on other men everywhere and feel like we are a growing tribe. You, of course, are beautiful and immune.
Strange urge: To get you stoned thru hash cookies which other bi-curious twins have baked together.
Best feeling: My Levi’s 100% cotton V neck T-shirt and my boxers you bought me for Mother’s Day, coffee (three creams, brown sugar) in the moon and stars mug you got me for Christmas, Saturday (any season), fresh haircut, (I can feel the breeze against the back of my neck and I feel like Velcro). You walk in, your enchanting smile, the Jag’s gas tank’s full, vacuumed interior, my clear skin, great tunes that make me remember I’m not second best, filed nails, nasal passages clear (no blow or cheese the day before), new knife, no pills needed, it’s our birthday, the laundry’s done, you’ve ironed my shirts, my warm 501’s in the dryer, and you hug me before we even say hello and when we do it’s in Dypthia, our secret language, our secret way, our language of forever, the language only twins know.
Honest truth: I tried touching you-know-whose hand when you were fucking her on the top bunk and I was on the bottom. Couldn’t you remember I had written my first ever love letter that said: “I have only one thing to say: (turn the page) I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.” I mean it’s okay—I just wish you had waited….
Most fascinating thing about our hepatitis is it fascinates me about as much as people who have never had nosebleeds, dentists who’ve never had fillings, or people who have only seen televised snow.
Final wish: If you die without me, can you just please think about me when you leave and remember us as children? You know I won’t be far behind.
Breath of fresh air: If you add up both our years, we’ve now retired and we’re old and feeble and we can get bunk beds again when we start to get really sick. Who knew all our suck-and-fuck tours would come to an end in the feast of our hunger in Ocho Rios? Let Jamaica eat itself. Yeah, those twins knew they had something. They must have.
I get top bunk this time (or you can, if you’re going to pout). We’ll just pretend it’s our appendicitis again but that it’s spreading and we’ll beat this thing with our Autoimmune Twin Power of Wound Healing.
Last Rites: Bury us in Fort Smith. I want Amazing Grace by Daniel Lanois on repeat. I want to be buried with you. I can’t believe we turned 30 a week ago. I want for us peace and quiet forever together alone and to whisper in Dypthia, We were gorgeous. Everyone said so. We were never ashamed of our beauty. I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you I love you.
Love always,
U2
A Darling Story
Our love has made us old, Lance thought as he sank back into the couch and adjusted the bag of frozen peas in his track pants. Oh he was swollen and tender. It felt like the surgeon had stomped on both of his testicles before stuffing them back inside his scrotum six months and a week earlier. And every day they swelled until the pain was beyond agony.
“You good?” Duane asked.
Lance winced and nodded as he shifted in his seat and waited for the hash brownies to cradle him, to sink him into the couch and vanish him for the night. “Where did we get this?”
Duane lit another candle. “Compassion Club.”
Lance let out a long breath and watched the candlelight flicker on the walls. “I thought you needed a doctor’s note or something.”
“That’s Compassion on Wheels. Compassion Club doesn’t care.”
“They come all the way out to White Rock?”
Duane ran his hands over Juanita’s hips and kissed her gently. “They do.”
Supper had been magnificent but quiet. Duane and Juanita had prepared a salmon feast that could have fed three more couples: there was also baked halibut, fresh potatoes, corn and a salad that Shari had put together in the way only she could. Juanita kept glancing at Shari, and Duane, the peacekeeper, had done his best to raise everyone’s spirits by talking about what they had learned at the couples retreat. Lance had tried to keep up but the gnawing agony between his legs and the wall of resentment between him and Shari had been too much. He had faded in and out of the conversation, stirring his food rather than eating it.
Duane was Gitxsan. He was an architect and slowly making a name for himself in the industry. Juanita was Haida and was in line to take over as vice-principal at a local elementary school. Both Duane and Juanita volunteered with various Downtown Eastside causes. This, somehow, was their ticket int
o the hash brownies situation, Lance thought. They had a gorgeous townhouse. Their home was filled with the artwork of Roy Henry Vickers, Chris Paul, Susan Point, and George Littlechild. There were plants everywhere and Lance inhaled deeply, picturing himself breathing pure vitamins. Lance watched Duane and Juanita lean into each other as they hugged. They’re going to have beautiful children, Lance thought before glancing at Shari, but Shari looked away, tucking her feet under herself.
“So how are you two doing?” Duane asked.
“We’re sorry about the news,” Juanita said and looked directly at Lance.
Lance felt the heat of the buzz start in his fingers. Over the four years that he and Shari had known Duane and Juanita, they had become closer. They were allowed to ask. Lance and Duane were sweat brothers. The Dogrib did not sweat, but Lance was one of the helpers. He and Duane had shared many conversations about their partners as they helped prepare the feast and sweat at UBC. He let Shari field this one.
“We’re coasting, hey, Lance?” Shari said. It wasn’t a question. Her cut hair only accentuated her sharp Dene features and Lance closed his eyes because it was too painful to look at her and not be able to touch her or comfort her. The distance between them was too thick, too fiercely protected, and they had run out of words for each other. She had not spoken to him on the hour-long ride out here. Lance had watched Vancouver sweep into Richmond and Richmond grow into fields. He’d seen horses, and felt a quiet peace knowing the ocean was to his right.
Lance thought of Duane and Juanita. They’d just returned from a rediscovery camp for couples and couldn’t stop kissing each other. They have found their way, he thought. And we have lost ours. Lance wanted to reach for his coffee but couldn’t. Ever since he learned that the six-month reversal test was a bust, he was now back on the coffee in a big way. He had been sipping tea from his acupuncturist that tasted like bog water that was supposed to promote fertility, but that was all gone now that his infertility was confirmed. Each sip of coffee now seemed to lighten the sorrow he felt in his bones for a little while.
Since the reversal, his orgasms had grown stronger, but he hadn’t told anyone—not even Shari. There was a team of people who’d been cheerleading them on: his doctor, his surgeon (who was the best in the province), his acupuncturist, his homeopath, their couples counsellor, his counsellor, her counsellor, his friends (Duane being the head cheerleader), his brother, her friends (he assumed mostly Juanita), her sister, their friends—and the team all agreed on two things: 1) he had to start talking to Shari about this; if he didn’t, he’d lose Shari; 2) Shari had to forgive him for something he did long before he met her. She had to or she’d lose him.
“The road to pregnancy can either make or break a couple,” his acupuncturist said. “Sometimes the wish is not the reality. The key is you have to talk through it. You have to do the good hard work, and you have to do it together.”
The good hard work, Lance thought. All talk of buying a home together was frozen; all talk of a traditional marriage was off; what used to be a full fridge of groceries was now littered with a few basics. Lance often ate alone.
“I’m scared,” he whispered and closed his eyes.
“What?” Shari asked.
“He’s stoned,” Duane said.
“I feel like a broken horse,” he said.
“Cheap date, Lance,” Shari said. “This party’s for you.” And there was that edge, that how-could-you tone, as he called it.
Lance sank into the couch and started to drift. He’d scoffed when he caught Shari sneaking a puff every once in a while at parties or outside a pub, and he’d refused to join her at Duane and Juanita’s when they hosted hash brownie parties, but, after the urologist suggested adoption or sperm donation, Lance pretty much surrendered to depression. They’d learned together that the scar tissue from his vasectomy was too thick and that nothing life-creating could get through. Lance had this vision of squeezing semen through a scissored fortress of bone spurs every time he ejaculated. And, worse, he now had an infection of some kind. Something was trying to squeeze through the scar tissue and it was agony.
“Bring on the hash cookies,” he’d said to Duane when he called to see how things were. And he and Juanita gladly obliged.
Lance had gotten a vasectomy during his first marriage when he told himself that any children would be an absolute burden, a never-ending series of chores and doom, a life of thankless duty, a kiss goodbye to anything luxurious. Truth be told, his ex-wife, Larissa, did not want children. Her upbringing had been terrifying. After four years of watching her try every form of birth control, it was apparent that her system was too fragile to handle anything more. She had a latex allergy; foam was like paint remover to her; she tried five different kinds of the pill, and Depo made her “bipolar” for the six months she felt it leaching through her blood stream. And her terror became his. He sank within himself and let himself remember for a second the dread around “period time.” If Larissa was a day or two late, there would be no sleep, tears, terror. It was during the horrible afternoon when her IUD had implanted itself into her uterine wall and became infected that Lance made up his mind. Sitting in his car on a rainy afternoon outside St. Paul’s Hospital as Larissa underwent day surgery, Lance decided that he would get a vasectomy. He did not want to bring a child into the world with the woman he loved if she did not want a baby. What he did not know was that Larissa was having an affair with a colleague. What was worse was she let him go through the operation while cheating on him. Crueler still was that Larissa and her colleague were now parents: they’d had twins.
His divorce had ruined him. He spent the first eight months on his couch watching movies, crying into a towel he kept close by. No words from family or friends helped. He felt alone. Worse, he could not imagine anyone wanting to be with him ever again now that he was sterile.
A year after his divorce was finalized, he’d met Shari and that all changed. Shari was what he’d always wanted but thought he’d never find: Chipewyan, a northerner who knew who she was and where she came from, ultra-feminine from a family of matriarchs, a woman who was born to create a home for a family. Growing up in Lutsel’ke, she was learning her language and culture and was a master weaver of both cedar and birch bark. Her grandparents were medicine people, “the last of the chanters” as she’d once told him. She had been married before to a Gitxsan and had lived in Hazelton for some time. She was working on her PhD and they’d met on campus.
Lance taught storytelling and was working on his PhD as well. They’d met and moved in together within a year and a half and, after two years of living together and discussing a traditional marriage and having a family, Lance had gone for the reversal. At first, Shari was a saint. She’d been a great nurse after the operation and had gone beyond the call of duty, but, after his first test, six weeks after his reversal, when the urologist said the results showed no movement and that the tubes were still swollen, something changed in her. Immediately. They’d gone home together in the car and she was quiet, so deeply quiet. Lance pleaded with her to say something, putting his own terror on hold. “Please baby. Say something.”
She stared straight ahead as she drove, her cheeks flushed into fierce blades of red. “What do we do now?” was all she asked. And that was when the silence in Lance crept inside of him, and the fear. Fear that he was powerless, powerless in that what he’d decided for Larissa was now final for him and Shari. The next morning, Shari had called in sick and left for the day, leaving Lance filled with dread. When she returned that night, she had cut off her long hair and moved like an old woman. Every trace of anything to do with a baby was put into the nursery room they had prepared together and the room was locked. All the picture frames celebrating babies, the little moccasins she had made—everything was gone. She stared through things and retreated into a world of deep misery.
“She is grieving her dream,” Greg, his counsellor, told him
. “Are you?”
Lance could only stare at his hands. He had retreated so far inside himself that he had no words for anyone when they questioned him directly about how he felt. He’d freeze. He’d freeze when he was talking about it with Shari; he’d freeze when he was talking about it with his acupuncturist; he’d freeze when he tried answering anyone. He would have no problem when he started the conversation, but direct questions locked him up.
Lance began to float a whisper above his body and the buzz bloomed behind his cheeks. He could feel a luxurious heat lift off his ears and he didn’t care if the sun rose tomorrow or not. No. He was sterile and had an infection of some kind. He was sitting on a bag of frozen peas and it felt like he had three swollen balls. Shari resented him for his past life. The cold fear of his future had gripped him completely on the way home in the car after his three-month test result when the urologist had sat them down and said, “The tubes are still not clear.”
“How do I build a home without children?” Shari had thrown her hands up and started crying in the car. “How do I live without children? Why was I born if I can’t be a mother? Why? You tell me, Lance. I’m piggybacking my future on your past with that white bitch, and she has twins with the man she cheated with. Where’s the justice in that?”
Lance froze once again and looked down. “I’m sorry,” was all he could say.
“What are you apologizing for?” she’d asked. “I don’t need an apology.”
“Well, what do you need?” he had asked, confused.
“I need you to make it right!”
“Shari, I’m doing the best I can.”
“Well, it’s not working, Lance. It isn’t. Fix this for us. You need to fix this and you need to fix this right now. And I need you to bloody well talk to me.”
“I don’t know how to fix this, okay? I do not know.”
“Well, can I just be a bitch and ask why the fuck you didn’t bank some sperm?” She started crying into her hands.
The Moon of Letting Go Page 17