Subject to Change

by Renee Rodin

  His first wife, his oldest child and the three other children, the ones I knew from when they were infants, were all there. They were grown-up and seemed to be doing really well. He’d also, long ago, had another child, who hadn’t been able to attend. The kids who were there had printed up a booklet with photographs of Richard and all five of his children. In the memento mori they’d included a poem of his entitled “I Must Be a Poet.” He had meant it to be funny but there were tears in our eyes.

  BC Rama

  At an anti-war vigil on 4th Avenue packed with pre-Christmas shoppers, I spied BC’s Premier, Gordon Campbell, strutting down the street. In his pea coat and cords he looked kind of ordinary until I saw his dull eyes.

  It was just before he was to bring down the budget. There were ugly rumours about how he was going to shred social services like a sociopath on speed. I asked him, “Would you like to help end the war?”

  When he stopped to take the leaflet I was offering, I leaned up as close to him as I could bear and said, “You’re bordering on fascism.” I was giving him a break, a window of opportunity, a chance to not unleash his harsh ideology. I’d said it softly but he flinched anyhow, his shoulders hunched as he ducked into Soupspoons, an upscale restaurant where he spent a long time. But, Meany Pants and I, we’d had our moment.

  That evening on my way home I almost missed the obviously lost black puppy shivering and shaking by the curb. It didn’t take much persuasion to get him to walk with me into a pizza parlour so I could read his tag. The name and number on it corresponded with George Puil the city councillor who’d been responsible for the recent four-month public transit strike that had wreaked havoc in many lives.

  There was no answer or answering machine at the Puil residence. I was in a tough dilemma about what to do with Buster, this misnamed buttercup of a puppy. Should I rescue him from his master and raise him myself? Or dognap him, hold him for ransom and donate the loot to the Bus Riders’ Union? He was a rare breed of poodle, worth a fortune.

  Salah, the pizza man, was already as enamoured with Buster as I was and pleaded to keep him a while longer. The next day he told me he’d tried calling several times until a member of the Puil family finally came in what he thought was a chauffered limo to pick Buster up. There’d not been so much as a mention of a reward, though he’d taken care of the puppy overnight. Salah was new to the city, so I explained, “Puil is a heartless man.” He said, “Okay, next time we find his dog, we don’t give it back.”

  I’d have stayed for a slice but was late for an appointment on Howe Street. It was to participate in a ninety-minute pitch for time-shares about which I knew absolutely nothing. I’d been solicited by phone. Focus and special sales groups always pay something so if you want to make some extra bucks, listen carefully—you can usually squeeze yourself into their demographics.

  I was accepted for this session by claiming, on their multiple choice questionnaire, that I had an annual income of one hundred thousand dollars. I’d been lured by the promise of two Canucks tickets or a seventy-dollar gift card to Milestones, and opted for the restaurant, since if you don’t spend the whole amount they give you the rest in cash.

  The meeting was about investing in a hotel in Vancouver where apparently nine million tourists visit a year. This didn’t sound accurate to me, but who was I to argue? After a whacked-out video about Vancouver’s greatest tourist hits and a passionate motivational speech by a man covered in evangelical sweat, we were divided into groups of couples to be personally encouraged to invest in the scheme.

  I was the only single person there and got assigned to Sonja, the only middle-aged salesperson they had. She took me to a “typical” room in the hotel across the street. The suite was tiny and tedious, done in tones of corporate beige—even the décor of the bathroom almost put me to sleep.

  I checked out the art on the walls, some of which was alright. Sonja said, “I’m an abstract painter though I don’t look like one.” “What does an abstract painter look like?” I asked, but she wouldn’t tell me.

  Leaving the hotel in the crowded elevator Sonja kept angling to determine my age. It turned out we were both born the same year. “I don’t like getting older,” she whispered. “It’s either get older or be dead,” I whispered back. “You’re a real piece of work,” she snapped quite audibly, but I sensed some affection.

  Then Sonja and I recognized Nancy Greene, champion skier from a while ago, and I said to her, “You were a hero to my children.” Ms. Greene’s eyes glazed over—I guess she’d heard it all before. But she got real animated when Sonja engaged her on some Whistler business.

  At the office to collect my Milestones coupon and while helping myself to coffee and cookies, I caught Sonja evaluating me with her boss. “How do I rate as a potential time-sharer?” I asked. She said, “I gave you six out of ten.” But I knew she was lying.

  Predation

  I was sitting on a bus in Seattle bound for Vancouver. I waved, blew a kiss and mouthed an endearment. My son Daniel, slightly embarrassed by our prolonged farewell, attempted to appear nonchalant, but it was obvious he cared too.

  Just as the bus pulled away I noticed I was being watched by a boy sitting quite close to me, at the very back. “Mothers …” I said and we exchanged smiles. He was perhaps in his mid-teens, maybe a couple of years younger than my son, with whom I’d been visiting for a few days before he was due to move to New York.

  As I gazed out the window at the green farmland, I started to get anxious about returning home since that meant dealing with a multitude of moths that had invaded my kitchen about a week before I’d left for Seattle. They’d entered with the oats I’d bought at a bulk food store and had rapidly embedded themselves in rice and other grains, all of which I had to throw out.

  But still they lived on. Trapping each individually and ushering it out of the house proved to be pointless because for every one I removed, a dozen more sprang up to take its place. Even the cedar-scented balls that were supposed to repel the insects seemed to act as a fertility drug.

  I was busily plotting a new strategy about what to do with them next when the young man who’d watched me say goodbye to my son was suddenly by my side. He was lanky, handsome in a brooding way, wearing fashionably baggy cutoffs, which were creeping down his hips and clinging to his calves. He asked if he could sit with me and the moment he did he began to weep.

  I managed to calm him down enough for him to tell me “I’m only eighteen,” that’s how he said it, and that he was “very scared.” He was coming back from Seattle where he’d met the girl he’d been corresponding with for months on the internet. She’d been driving him back to get the ferry to Victoria, where he lived, when her car broke down, so he’d had to take a bus to Vancouver instead.

  He was afraid he’d come in too late to catch a bus to Victoria, and that he’d have to spend the night alone in Vancouver where he knew no one. He said, “The worst thing is that my mother will be very worried because she knows I can’t take care of myself.” Just when I thought he was going to hit me up for hotel money, he pulled out a thick wad of cash, which I cautioned him to put away. “Why not call your mother,” I suggested. “I lost my cellphone and don’t know how to make long distance calls on old phones,” he said. I promised I’d help him when we got to Vancouver.

  He had an air of discomfort about him but said, “This look I have, so sweet and innocent, is just to get across the border. I’m a musician and when I perform I pattern myself after Sid Vicious.” He told me Johnny Rotten named Sid that after his hamster, “Vicious,” that had no teeth, and couldn’t chew his way out of a paper bag. “Sid was like that too, very unaggressive except on stage. My new girlfriend is Nancy, the groupie, and I’m Sid Vicious, but I don’t do drugs,” he said. Again he broke into long sobs until I held him and he gradually fell asleep with his head on my chest.

  The bus had been completely quiet, and everyone could hear our conversation and his crying. Every few minutes someone would
twist around to gawk at us. This included the bus driver, who didn’t hide his relief that it wasn’t him who had to deal with this kid. Nervous that he’d hit someone or something when he took his eyes off the road, I’d signalled that all was okay.

  When the bus pulled into the once majestic, now garishly lit station at Main and Terminal in Vancouver, the boy and I dashed around looking for the connecting bus to Victoria but all the wickets were closed and the buses sat empty as husks.

  At a payphone the boy asked me to talk to his mother on his behalf because he was too stressed out, but just as the operator placed the collect call, a man in his early thirties approached us. He was dressed in a sports shirt, dockers and a baseball cap. It was unlikely he was the boy’s father since he was too young, of a different race, and his tone was very formal when he asked, “Are you ready?”

  The boy nodded, picked up his guitar case, which was the only baggage he had, and started to leave with the man. I hung up the phone and chased after them. “Do you know this person?” I asked, alarmed that the boy might be going off with a total stranger, though that’s what I was to him too.

  He nodded again and they began walking at quite a clip, with me running alongside to keep up. I was hoping for some explanation, but there was utter silence from both of them, and neither of them made eye contact with me. When they reached the man’s late-model compact car, they got in, still without acknowledging my presence, and drove off.

  That the boy had sucked me into the vortex of his crisis and then left me high and dry confounded and infuriated me. When I hopped into a taxi and the story came spilling out, the driver launched into his theory that, “It’s the internet that makes people crazy, people meet too soon and too intimately in unnatural circumstances.” We had a bit of a discussion over this, but when he asked me if I thought the X-Files stories were true, I stopped talking to him and he spent the rest of the trip chortling to himself.

  By now I was too drained to care. Along with the wrench of saying goodbye to my son and the machinations of the boy on the bus, I’d had little sleep. The neighbours in the apartment below Daniel’s had been leaving the building too and had spent several nights with their bass blasting. Our requests that they tone it down fell on deaf ears, probably because their own music had destroyed their hearing. I was longing for the peace and quiet of my own bed and was also ravenously hungry.

  As soon as I got home I made a beeline for the kitchen, for the canned soup, the only impossible-to-infest food. I braced myself to be swarmed. But when I finally opened the cupboard door there was not a moth in sight.

  Terra-ism

  Everyone remembers where they were when they heard the news. I was in my father’s tiny, sweltering apartment in Montreal, having breakfast, when the radio bulletin came on just after 8:45 a.m. I still don’t know who to ask forgiveness from, but when I first heard about the World Trade Center, all I felt was excitement that something had managed to strike that icon of imperialism. Not a thought entered my mind about people, the office workers, the cleaning staff, the visitors, the people who were in the building.

  I headed for the TV and watched as eighteen minutes later the second plane slammed into the south tower confirming the first crash had been intentional. Then the Pentagon was in flames and there was news of a fourth hijacking.

  Whatever this was, it was not going to end.

  With the serenity reserved for calamity, I began to search the television footage for my sons, both of whom live and work in New York City—both of whom easily could have been there. Noah worked for a company that rented several floors of the WTC though they also had offices in other parts town. Many times I was sure I spotted my kids among the frenzied crowd running for their lives away from the crumbling monoliths.

  I tried and tried, but couldn’t get through. The calls that ricocheted back and forth between family members were a balancing act: concern for Noah and Daniel’s safety, confidence that they were okay—and clarity. When I said to my daughter, Joey, in Toronto, “It’s like war,” she said, “It is war.” For about three hours my life stopped and when my sons were at last able to contact me, my knees buckled with relief and gratitude. My children were safe. Nothing else mattered.

  Before long I was overcome with revulsion as I listened to the various kneejerk reactions. Dick Cheney proclaimed, “America has the best system in the world, we are the best country.” His words exemplifying insufferable arrogance. A sycophantic preacher declared of the victims, “They’re in heaven now and don’t want to come back.”

  After that, not a moment of escape. My father, usually indifferent to television, was mesmerized by the coverage, and to my suggestion he turn it off, he replied, “No, no, this is really good.” This was not a political but a spectator’s statement. His fascination with the visuals of the event, played over and over, epitomized Susan Sontag’s concept of “disconnect”: that we view actual violence with the dispassion and distance with which we watch Hollywood disaster films.

  The next day the street my father lives on was roller-coasting with stories. In just an hour I met a woman weeping on the sidewalk because she’d lost seven relatives at the WTC, giggled almost hysterically with a shopkeeper about her nephew whose employers, the New York Rangers, rented a stretch limo to get him home, choked back sobs as the appliance repairman told me, with tears pouring down his face, about his brother and sister who had recently died, in their thirties, of leukemia after surviving the war in Beirut. They’d been killed by chemicals. Collateral damage.

  Daniel said, “Yesterday was the most beautiful day of the year, the sky was the bluest, the air clear and crisp. Today it’s raining. Natural literature.” Noah told me. “I almost took a job at the WTC. Where I would have been, on that floor, everyone, they’re all gone.”

  Suddenly it all hit home. It became a feat to focus on even the most basic daily activities. I’d wake up in the middle of the night shivering, hoping I’d had a bad dream. But I never did emerge from the horror, how we had been blasted into living like the rest of the world, never to be able to take peace and security for granted.

  In tandem with the earthshaking news of September 11, my family’s tragedies were being played out—personal quakes with their own aftershocks. My father’s biopsy confirmed he had lung cancer from exposure to asbestos during the war when he had worked on the conversion of a ship into a hospital ship. Abe is an otherwise healthy eighty-seven-year-old, and had he not lived this long the cancer wouldn’t have surfaced.

  Before he got sick, my father had spent his time with his friend, Dahlia, eighty-five, who had been diagnosed a couple of years earlier with Alzheimer’s. Since he needed to rest at home, Dahlia was alone more and couldn’t remember to wait for the companion her family had hired to help her. She began to leave her apartment daily to shop for meat to cook, though her stove had been disconnected because she’d been forgetting to turn it off, and to buy ever more ham for her overstuffed cat, Queenie. Concerned strangers would phone to say they’d found Dahlia wandering around frightened and lost, sometimes miles from where she lived, asking us to come for her. My father’s was the only number she could recall.

  After several such incidents, Dahlia’s anxious children had arranged to move her into a residence, sans Queenie, on September

  12. They told her that the images she saw on television of the towers burning were really of her former apartment building on fire. The owner of the boarding house, a converted Victoria mansion, insisted that she be isolated for the initial week to quell her rage, after which she was allowed to receive visitors.

  Dahlia’s new house was an obscenity of drabness. The chirping of the recorded birds and the permanent Christmas lights twinkling in the living room only emphasized the gloomy atmosphere. The walls were the colour of rotten mushrooms and the windows were lined with vertical metal bars. Dahlia, who’d kept a lovely and light-filled apartment, was usually lucid enough to know she was in hell. She begged to be released from the prison to which
she had been condemned.

  My sister Sandy, who lives, as I do, in Vancouver, stayed in Montreal for two soaringly hot months before she had to get back to her job. Cooped up we sometimes roared over family foibles. But mostly we fought, in hisses and hushes, about everything from the smallest daily irritations to the most profound issues of our sibling relationship. We pitched primal battles in whispers. At any other time these fights would have resulted in weeks of excommunication from each other as we licked our wounds. But since we had to get on with caring for our father, we learned to forgive each other very quickly. It was good exercise.

  Abe had the only bedroom, so Sandy and I took turns sleeping on the sofa in the living room and in the kitchen on an air mattress, which is a marvelous invention once you become familiar with its peculiarities. If you lie motionless and distribute your weight evenly, it’s fine. But if you reach up to pull a bagel off the counter, or roll over to turn off the lamp beside you, some unexpected part of the bed will slowly but surely rise up and, with a loud farting sound, punch you.

  When my father was told he had cancer, I said, “Dad, you’ve been living with it for a long time and you can still live with it.” At this stage there was no treatment. I hid my anguish.

  Three different doctors subsequently told me, and I’d phone to tell Sandy our father was lucky if he had a year left. Abe himself never asked about the prognosis. Instead he went into denial and began to look and feel much better. However, he was starting to rely on me for things he could easily do himself, like address an envelope, or make an appointment.

  Thanksgiving, my favourite holiday, was coming and I wanted to spend it with my sons, in New York. I’d always been enthralled by its energy, but the city had become a war zone, which I wanted my children to leave. I also needed to test whether my father would be able to cope on his own.