“Sure! But… uh… what?”
I cleared my throat and started over. “I mean: they’re missing? What happened?”
My mom burst into tears and hiccupped an answer. “Nobody knows. They’ve been gone for two weeks. They went off to work one morning and never came back.”
At which point my dad came in.
“Oh! Hollywood, there you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you,” he said, tossing his car keys on the buffet before sitting down next to mom at the kitchen table. Saké got up and came to greet me with a kiss.
“It’s been a while! How’ve you been?”
“Um… Well, I guess. You?”
“I’m OK. I’ll pretend to be sad for a few days,” she said conspiratorially, “’cause the truth is, I don’t really care. I mean: as long as my folks are alive… I wouldn’t like to learn that they’re dead or in pain, or they’ve been kidnapped or whatever, but if they took off like that ’cause they just felt like it, well, good for them. I’m old enough to take care of myself. I came here ’cause the house feels too big for me, all by myself. So I thought I’d crash at your parents’, and they said yes. Other than that, it’s all good.”
Saké had changed a lot, but I wasn’t surprised to see what she’d become. She was wearing a pair of tight black jeans with lots of holes in them and a sweatshirt that was way too big for her, like Jennifer Beals’ on the Flashdance poster, hanging over her shoulder and puffy at the waist. Her hair was dyed black and purple, teased into a bun and styled with a kind of paste or gel, or something.
At that moment, I felt a sharp pain. I had to sit down. Some kind of cramp in my ribcage. Nothing to do with Saké’s sudden return; it just happens to me sometimes, ever since the surgery. When I wake up, mostly, but also when I’m tired or stressed out, or annoyed with something. Or else for no reason at all. Like now, standing in the dining room, after midnight, looking at Saké as she tells me how little she cares about her parents vanishing mysteriously. It’s as if my bones were trying to break out of my body in search of the heart that the doctors took out. To “cure that weariness and gloom we’ve been unable to treat,” they said. Well, I haven’t noticed any change in my attitude since. Besides, I’ve never complained before; I am quite content with my own state of mind. It was my parents who insisted I meet with a social worker when I was in high school, and then with a psychologist in college. And then with a psychiatrist the psychologist referred me to. And then with a second psychiatrist, who realized my heart had stopped beating and sent me to a heart surgeon who wanted to see his name in large print in a journal of experimental medicine. He must be quite pleased with himself: I am the only human being on Earth to live without a heart. He and his colleagues took out a useless organ: my blood flows all the same, and that’s just the way it is. I haven’t mentioned the cramps to my parents because I know they’d insist I make an appointment with the surgeon, and I don’t feel like seeing him again, not before my yearly checkup. When I get one, I find a place to sit and breathe slowly. The pain usually subsides after a few minutes. But if I have to pretend that I’m all right so as not to scare my parents or make a scene, for instance, the cramp can last a little longer, and sometimes the pain is so unbearable that I have to run and hide, coming up with some excuse to leave the room. Since Saké wouldn’t stop talking, telling me how she got kicked out of college, how she’d become a model for a shampoo company, how she’d managed to leave her ex—a small-time crook who’d steal washers and dryers from department stores, paying with fake credit cards—how she’d been admitted to another college; anyway, since she just wouldn’t stop talking, I couldn’t concentrate on the pain and make it go away. I had to get out of the kitchen and lock myself in the bathroom, claiming I’d downed three bottles of water and really had to take a leak.
The pain finally subsided but I stayed locked in the bathroom a good ten minutes longer, listening to Dance Me to the End of Love in the bathtub. At times like these, I want only one thing: to lie on my back and listen to Leonard Cohen. Which reminds me: in grade 10, a mental health professional came to our Personal and Social Development class to talk about the shelter where she worked. Her beneficiaries, as she called them, would listen to the same song or watch the same movie three or four times in a row, without growing tired of it. I don’t know if she meant this was a sign of mental illness, but it hit home. So I listened to Dance Me to the End of Love two or three times over before coming out of the bathroom. Saké was waiting for me at the door.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Listening to music.”
“Ah.”
My mom shouted from the kitchen: “Hollywood, would you show Saké to the guest room?”
“Yes, Mom.”
Saké laughed.
“You still call her ‘Mom’?”
“What else should I call her?”
“Her name!”
I shrugged and walked to the guest room at the end of the hallway.
“There. This is it.”
“Thanks.”
I let Saké into her bedroom and made for my own. But she turned back right away and took me by the arm.
“Wait. You’re going to bed already?”
“No, I’m not tired.”
“Me neither.”
“Want to eat something?”
“Sure! Why not?”
We went back to the kitchen. My parents were still at the table. Mom had stopped crying, but she was still sniffling.
“Are you kids hungry?” she asked, as if she were reading our minds.
“Yes.”
“You should order takeout.”
I looked at Saké.
“Chinese?” she suggested.
Mom got up and opened the drawer where we keep all the restaurant menus.
“You could order from Kim Moon Kim’s, it’s open all night,” she said, handing Saké the menu.
My mom called the restaurant and placed our orders before going to bed. Saké chose beef chow mein, my dad, shrimp chop suey, and I went for vegetable fried rice. We waited playing cards, then we ate our food listening to a stupid show on the radio. I’d wanted to put on a record, I’m Your Man, but Dad had insisted on listening to what those people had to say. As I expressed my doubts about hotlines, my dad, for form’s sake, told me to shut up and eat. Saké seemed to think we were behaving like idiots. Still, I thought it was weird that her parents’ disappearance should leave her so cold. I didn’t want to ask her about it and I was hoping my dad would; instead, he asked what she’d been up to. She talked about her work as a hair show model and about her studies in cinema, sculpture and graphic design, and then she stopped and stared at me for a while without saying a word.
“Hollywood! You have to come to the studio with me on Monday!” she blurted out. “I’m sure they’ll want to sign you on. We never have enough guys in our shows, plus you have crazy hair. They’ll want you for sure!”
I pouted as I tossed my Styrofoam tray into the trash, and I left the kitchen to go lock myself in my room. I took off my clothes and lay down over the covers because I was hot. I pressed my iPod earbuds in and listened to two whole Leonard Cohen albums, New Skin for the Old Ceremony and Songs of Love and Hate, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I put my clothes back on and quietly left the apartment.
Outside, I walked over to the grocery store and stepped into the phone booth near the entrance. I dialed Chokichi’s number. He lives close by, so he came to meet me right in the parking lot.
“There you go,” he said, handing me a small bag. “Ten Gardenal tablets. Just take one. It works better up the rectum, but I suppose you’d rather swallow.”
I paid; he pocketed the cash. He stayed and we talked for a while, sitting on the narrow strip of sidewalk between the parking lot and a flowerbed that had seen better days. I told him about Saké. He mentioned a mutual friend h
e’d had a fling with a few days earlier, after trying out a shipment of contraband Viagra. Chokichi is into trafficking. He’s a petty independent drug dealer and a trusted friend. My only friend, in fact, for lack of a better term.
Chokichi left around 4 a.m. I went home, took a Gardenal and fell asleep about twenty minutes later.
I woke up at 1:30 p.m. My parents had gone to work hours earlier. Saké was nowhere to be seen. She’d left a note for me inside the fridge:
Hollywood,
I’m off to school. I have multimedia production until noon and sculpture in the afternoon. Your mom said you’d be working until 10 at the graveyard. Seriously? What are you? A tomb raider?
Anyway, in case you’re interested, I’m going to a friend’s house tonight to watch an Asian horror flick her boyfriend brought back from Thailand. I’ll come and pick you up around 10:30.
See you tonight!
Saké
I folded the note and put it in my pocket. I poured myself a glass of chocolate milk and took a straw from the utensil drawer. I sat down in front of the TV to watch a documentary on Jupiter’s Great Red Spot, a massive anticyclone that was first seen almost two hundred years ago and still looks the same today. The scientists who were interviewed compared it to a never-ending hurricane with winds raging at over 550 kilometres per hour. The more they study the phenomenon, they said, the less they understand it.
∷
I finished work earlier that night because no burial service was scheduled in my section on the weekend, which meant no lot to weed, no digging to authorize, nothing complicated to do. I raked the aisles, picked up some rocks and, once I was sure that nobody could see me, took a few seeds out of my jacket pocket and planted them in front of two or three gravestones. Green beans. It came to me a short while ago. Since summer is everlasting, or has been for the past ten months anyway—twenty-five degrees Celsius last February and no ground frost in over a year—in short, because Montreal is turning into Los Angeles, it’s easy to grow beans anytime, and the wheat is always golden. I bought a big bag of Phaseolus vulgaris, a common bean, at the market. I try and plant seeds in front of at least two gravestones after every shift. At this rate, in a few months, when the seeds have sprouted and the plants have grown, my whole section will be like one big bean garden. Unless winter comes back, bringing an end to the soon-to-be year-long summer.
I walked home instead of taking the metro or the bus because it was nice and hot out and I was in no hurry. I went into a café that was still open and bought an avocado and alfalfa sandwich that I ate while I walked. I stopped in front of our building to pull up some dried-up shoots. Ours is the only building on the street not to stand directly beside the others. The landlord, who had it built about forty years earlier, had always wanted to live on a farm and grow grains. So he had it stand off the street, a few metres away from the neighbours, and he planted wheat all around. It’s really ugly, all the more so because he’s too old to look after the crop, but won’t get rid of it. I look after the “garden” in exchange for a bit off the monthly rent. My parents made the deal with the landlord a few years ago to teach me “the feeling of satisfaction that comes with a job well done.” I was a teenager then, and they thought I was going off the rails because I never talked to them. I pull up dead plants and sow a few seeds when the garden looks like it needs it. I’m not sure what type of grain it is. I’ve never taken the trouble, after all these years, to look into what we could do with all those plants. I just gather the stems, without pulling out the ears, and leave them in front of the landlord’s apartment door. The wheat vanishes every time, without me seeing whether he’s picked it up and brought it in himself or whether the janitor gets rid of it when he sweeps our hallway. What I like most about the work is how it lets me see the sparrows up close as they eat the grain. I can watch them for hours as they pick at the wheat, hopping and chirping around.
Saké was waiting for me upstairs, in our fifth-floor apartment. She was in my dad’s armchair in the living room, drinking orange juice and watching the evening news.
“My parents aren’t back yet?” I asked.
“Yeah, but they’ve gone out. To the movies.”
“Ah. Well… Still on for tonight?”
“Absolutely! Rajani emailed me the trailer for the movie. A bit dumb, but oh so gory!”
She got up and I followed her into the study. She ran the trailer for me.
“A bit dumb? Your run-of-the-mill low-budget horror flick, but in Thai.”
“Just you wait and see. They’re about to take part in this satanic ritual. They’ll stick hooks into their skin all over their bodies, even into their eyeballs.”
I waited. In the end, she was right: the movie was pretty gory, really disgusting. I wasn’t too keen on watching it, but out of curiosity, I asked her what time her friend was expecting us.
“We can leave now, if you’re ready.”
“I’m ready. Where does she live?”
“Not too far.”
We walked to Rajani’s. She rented the basement of a small townhouse with her boyfriend, a computer, IC, or electronics engineer, or all three at once; an engineer, at any rate. Rajani studied Medieval Latin and History at university, up on the hill. She and Saké had met in college, before Saké was expelled. We talked a little before putting on the movie. Actually, Saké was the one who talked. Rajani asked questions, and I listened. Arnaud, Rajani’s boyfriend, was making goat cheese pizza for us to eat during the movie. I tried to swallow a couple of bites like everybody else, but was put off by the graphic scenes. Saké ate at least three slices. After the movie, Arnaud told us about his trip to Thailand. He’d been sent by the company he worked for to set up a complicated-sounding computer system in a call centre slash electronics factory, and he’d taken the opportunity to travel a bit. He told us in great detail all the things he’d seen over there—beaches, islands, a vegan festival where he’d tasted a bunch of new fruit and vegetables, a secluded monastery where he’d meditated in the country’s northern mountains—and even though it was fascinating and all, I couldn’t manage to show any enthusiasm. I nodded a few times and asked one or two questions so I wouldn’t look like I was bored to death. On the way home, I asked Saké how I’d done.
“With what?” she asked.
“The conversations, tonight in general.”
“What? Didn’t you have fun?”
“I did. But usually I don’t do so well in that kind of social setting, especially not with people I just met.”
“It’s all good. I didn’t notice a thing.”
We walked quietly for a while.
“So you don’t go out a lot, eh?”
“Meh.”
I waited a few minutes before explaining.
“I have friends, I go out a little, but most of the time I’d rather be alone.”
“Are you kidding? We used to get along so damned well!”
“I know, but we haven’t seen each other in a long time. I just forgot how, I guess.”
Soon we were back in front of our building. Saké had only been living with us for a day, but it felt like she’d been there forever. That was how she acted anyway. She unlocked the door to the apartment using the key my dad had had cut for her earlier that day.
“I really liked Rajani, and Arnaud’s nice, too.”
“Yeah, they’re cool… Goodnight now!” she said, slamming her bedroom door.
I did the same. I lay down on my bed still wearing my clothes and put a Joni Mitchell album on the old record player my dad had given me a few years before, along with his whole record collection. I grabbed the book from my bedside table. Mitchell’s biography, where I’d read that she’d dated Leonard Cohen for a while. I focused on the part about how A Case of You came to be, and I listened to it three or four times over. I knew I was going to be obsessed with it now for the next few weeks. I lik
e sad stories, ones filled with sorrow.
Hollywood
Underground poem #3
like elevator music
to kill time
and since dreams are forever the same
I will sing like a poorly tuned piano
so as to keep the night and
hotel rooms company
After the sandman
They both take hours to fall asleep, except when they use chemicals to hurry things along. Then they meet, one lying down, the other sitting at the foot of the bed. The thick curtains let just a chink of light filter through, a bluish glow that cloaks the furniture, even more nondescript in the dark, bags lying open every which way, the impersonal prints against the wallpaper often dreadful, even in the most luxurious hotels. One talks about a movie he’s seen a thousand times, and the other about a record he’s just picked up at a second-hand store. They are motionless, or nearly. Their relationship is intellectual, no need to use their bodies. They know it won’t last, that day will come to replace night and they’ll both disappear, but they also know that they will meet again at nightfall, perhaps in the same place, perhaps in another room, in another hotel, what difference does it make?
If they both got up to part the curtains and look out the window, even the city lights wouldn’t stop them seeing that outside the sky is raging and the stars are flying past each other at breakneck speed, trailing clouds of extraterrestrial dust in their wake.
Xavier
I woke up in the middle of the night, like every night, and made my way to the bathroom to drink some water. I’d caught a chill from walking in the storm and now my throat was tight and I had trouble swallowing. I washed a few pills down with water, company samples, whatever was handy. Just like every night for some time now. It didn’t bother me that my sore throat might affect my work the next day. I just wanted to get back to sleep. Get back to my dream.
Listening for Jupiter Page 2