So tonight, as she has done for the past several nights, she researches a new recipe (for catfish), scans reviews for new movies now playing in theatres (Billy Elliot, Dr. T and the Women), hunts for directions to a new factory outlet (Fabricland) and refreshes her email inbox once every few minutes, to see if her friends from Vancouver or the office have sent her a joke or tame piece of political satire or warm-hearted meditation on post-divorce dating (always with a jab at Marcus, her ex) or advanced age, as if these subjects could be warmly received (age being especially unpleasant, and in no way amusing, though June always emails these friends and co-workers back to express appreciation for the joke or maxim. No, decidedly not pleasant, and not funny, and especially not helped by that godawful raccoon, now crying in what sounds to June like unrefined agony.
At 11:39 p.m., Chris’s name is still red, offline. Forty minutes late. She minimizes the window and hits the RESET GAME option on the e-solitaire screen. The raccoon, or cat, or skunk, or demon, continues its violent protest against dying, alone and cold and likely in tremendous pain. June unconsciously covers her ears, bites her lip. Fuck off, she thinks, without anger, and with a swelling of pity. Please.
She is back to a somewhat stable routine, if a bit stultifying; the nights of wine and crying, hating herself and each of the last twenty-six years of her married life (great, self-pitying bouts of hatred, enormously silly yet undeniably grave) have abated, receded, as more time separates her from the moment of Marcus’s sudden departure, with Chris across the province and increasingly withdrawn into his new world of friends and classes. With her hands on the keyboard, she looks to see if the room can be tidied, but it’s never messy – not messy-messy, in any case, only a tad disorderly; and besides, she rarely sits in the office, it being the square room of masculine efficiency she subtly feels like she is violating (though Marcus has been gone now for five months, it still feels like his room – where he did his work, where he retreated). She stares at the black, flawless oak of the desk. She stares at the forbidding shadow of the closet, the metal shelf, the sticker of Minnie Mouse that Marcus once stuck to the side of the monitor (his old nickname for her). She stares at her hands, pale and ghostly in the ghoulish light of the screen. She turns over the mouse and peers into the plastic casing surrounding the ball, trying to see what roll of lint is causing the jam, but finds nothing, the problem lodged too deeply within the mouse’s arcane inner workings to mend. She realizes that she hates the mouse, but she is afraid as always that she might buy a replacement that doesn’t ‘hook up’ or correspond to the specific systems installed and she’ll end up looking stupid, again. She imagines, in a moment of frustration, that maybe the reason Chris hardly ever appears online is that she has done something foolish to her ICQ configuration, something that limits their time together or blocks her id or whatever. The thought of this – that the silence so obstinate and relentless between them has potentially been her fault, her own technological ineptitude – makes her feel even more frustrated, so much so that she craves a cigarette – a Camel cigarette, the brand she smoked a lifetime ago – and she wants to smoke it in the office and watch the smoke wreath through her fingers before the pale light of the screen. But she hasn’t smoked in twenty years – some thoughts are simply crazy.
Halfway through another game of solitaire, an unwell 11:45 on the monitor and the animal croaking wetly beyond the window, June drifts back to Chris’s LiveJournal page and scans his most recent update. At the end of his last visit home, Chris left for the Greyhound station in haste, leaving his username and password scrawled on a slip of paper and leaving himself logged in to his account on June’s desktop – thus unintentionally giving June access to all of his posts, even those tagged as ‘private’ or ‘friends only’ (needless to say, June was not one of Chris’s LiveJournal ‘friends’). June felt somewhat unethical about reading them, but then again, she rationalized, he left himself logged in on her computer, and he was the one who’d (once again) left her waiting for another forty-five minutes on ICQ. This whole LiveJournal crap was even more bothersome for the hypocrisy of it all: why go on and on about longhand letters when you keep a daily web diary, and one barred from your own mother? June read, and greedily, feeling entitled to know.
His most recent entry described his plans for earlier tonight: he was heading to his friend Gloria’s apartment around seven to watch a taped copy of this week’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer. June had never met Gloria, though by scanning previous entries she gleaned that she was in Chris’s journalism program. In fact, June had yet to meet many of Chris’s new friends from Ottawa, and certainly no one from this new group described online – Chris, Gloria, a homosexual (!) couple named Ian and Blake, and another boy named Corm (sometimes described by Chris, in what surely must be some inside jest, as ‘cute’). Chris referred to the five of them as ‘the Scooby Gang,’ which immediately sounded too twee and dainty for Chris, who’d spent his high school career in the dungeon-warmth of his basement bedroom with sci-fi and fantasy books and movies and comics, and gawking, greasy-haired role-players. Referencing Scooby-Doo was definitely weird for Chris; she felt it must be in some relation to Buffy (in June’s estimation, a show so silly and ironic that its actors and writers must be laughing at their audience). Chris’s new friends are definitely ironic, and artsy (all arts majors, or artists, or writers), and queer, and aggressively sexual and drunk and nonchalant about drinking and drugs and partying, and all of this comes out through the cheeky, affected style that Chris uses to compose his journal entries. Lots of Oh, hello theres to start entries, or ta tas to sign off. Black slang that would hardly suit the bookish boy from two years before: things were pimpin’ or wack or da bomb – then shifting bizarrely into an uppity sort of British vocabulary – Chris was chuffed to see his friends, knackered when tired or daft to have missed a class. It was peculiar in general for Chris to even maintain such a self-exposing, extroverted platform – this is not the kid who left for Ottawa, not the nerdy, morose boy who hardly ever talked about girls and whose sense of humour was more darkly absurd than irreverent and ‘saucy.’ By now, Buffy should have been long over; he should be home. The most likely situation is that Chris has forgotten about their ICQ date, or selfishly prioritized his friends over his promise to his mother, but June begins to conjure that third, more distressing option: perhaps he is hurt, or in some kind of trouble. He isn’t used to living on his own, after all. She stews, clicking the glowing solitaire cards in time with one of the raccoon’s more hiccup-like wails.
If she ever catches Chris online without a pre-ordained meeting time – if something in the arrangement of planet and zodiac actually arranges to have her sitting in these rare, late-night moments at the same time as him – half the time she can tell he’s absorbed in work because his typed responses are slow, staggered, similar to the way he spoke when he was fourteen, in bass monosyllables, as he stared down at his plate at dinner and his father ate noisily and heartily beside him. When he is so obviously distracted she waits for each of his responses with what feels like divine patience, eventually giving up on any opportunity for meaningful conversation with an ominous ache somewhere in her gut, and tells him that she loves him and that she (lying) really needs to go, which, ironically (an irony not lost on June), elicits his only quick response (see ya!) during their entire stilted conversation. Sometimes she gets angry, thinking that if he were doing something so important or distracting, he shouldn’t have signed on in the first place. Or thinking, Jesus, who does he think I am, some girl chatting with her friends in the dark? There’s no one else here, he knows he’s the only name on my list.
But those odd instances of real conversation keep June coming back, hoping for that feeling of privilege and elation, the happy noise her fingers make on the keyboard that means the computer is really being used and enjoyed. She can simply sit and type, careful to never minimize their dialogue box between responses to avoid accidentally closing it. She won’t, under any circumstances wh
atsoever, leave the room – even if her bladder fills in protest or the phone rings, someone calling without thinking that after a long, purposeless day at work she might not want to speak with anyone at all. She’s done enough talking in the last five months, enough 2 a.m. phone calls with wracking sobs and avowals, to never again waste another minute. She can’t leave the room. If she stops typing for the brief length of time required to pee or to tell her sister she’ll call her back, he might get distracted, or he’ll exit the conversation with only a brief love ya mom, gotta go, and she’ll be unable to tell him once again to be careful or that she loves him, or, worse still (things could always be worse, worse), he might simply leave, and she’ll be forced to message Hello? You there? Where are you? until she can’t wait any longer, has to log off.
She stares at a LiveJournal entry, a nightscape photograph of Chris standing amid boys wearing bowling shirts (definitely ironic, she thinks) and khaki pants. Another boy rests his jaw on Chris’s shoulder, a thin arm draped across his shoulders. Chris’s dyed-black hair falls over his eyes and beer sloshes from a bottle, frothing over his black-painted nails. This is the person typing out the affected journal entries, the new voice he’s taken up to introduce himself to the public: so different from what June knows is his real voice, which now and then comes ringing through the words on ICQ. This makes June most happy – and in full awareness of how it sounds, how wretched and pathetic she is to be feeling this way – that a chat window, a stupid uh-oh sound bite, and her son’s broken grammar can lift her up from the solidness of the room, its square corners, its darkness. It makes her feel that life is indeed long and still holds an element of excitement, that they’ll have many more years together, aging gracefully into better and more loving communication, that this separation and ongoing dispute is only a short, temporary adjustment. This makes her forget her office, the insipid interns waiting on her decisions, the work that is increasingly monotonous and cruel and completely uninteresting. It makes her forget her hands, wrinkled and pale and fat. It makes her think of a time when Marcus was younger, when he loved her, when his small habits were cute and sweet and not yet robotic and false (my Minnie, he used to say). June craves those moments of real conversation with such an intensity that if she could – if a legitimate exchange was guaranteed at least once a night – she would spend every evening like this, waiting in the dark, playing e-solitaire over and over, drinking decaf and surfing the web.
At 12:01, she finds herself growing restless. The animal – louder now, as if crawling toward the garage – makes a sound that June imagines to be a satanic effort to swallow its own tongue. She stands and makes sure the window is closed – it is. She sits back down, frowning through the screams. She realizes that a concession must be made – that she can’t sit before the monitor all night, let alone another hour. She waits another sixty seconds, watching his name, imagining Chris in danger somewhere, stumbling through the city. Then she drags the cursor across the screen, signs out from the Messenger window and shuts down the computer. The screen drains of colour, as if cooling down, losing its heated definition. Then it slips to black. June has to feel her way toward the door.
She brushes her teeth in the yellow light of the bathroom, washes the makeup from her face, rubs a swath of white skin cream beneath her eyes. She undresses drowsily and slips into her flannel nightgown (the air having turned cold, spiced with the crisp smell of dried leaf, autumn rot). In the days and weeks leading up to the divorce, Marcus might have still been watching television in the basement, or maybe working with his papers spread across the dining room mahogany. She would know if he were in bed, reading. She’d know by the way he’d cough and clear his throat in his slow, shaky rattle. If he were in bed before her she would climb in beside him and roll to face the closet and the door. He might ask a few prodding questions, and she’d answer impatiently – unless, of course, she’d made contact with Chris and was able to tell him some detail about their son that would make him really listen. Tonight, with Marcus downtown in a twenty-floor condominium tower, she lifts the sheets and rests her head on the pillow, too tired to read, to think. She turns off the lamp on the night table on her side of the bed. She closes her eyes, imagining the pattern of Marcus’s breath, the turn of a page.
Even with her ear buried in the pillow, June can still make out the ragged gasps of the animal. She decides it must be a raccoon – it has that squealing pitch, that almost-human scream, grating sporadically against the wave-like roar of her heartbeat, the tempting weight of sleep. She closes her eyes and tries to relax every muscle, until her body feels as thick and heavy as the nightgown around her. But her thoughts turn, vividly, to a memory, 1985, maybe ’86 or ’87: the way she used to put Chris to bed in similar flannel pyjamas, only patterned with He-Man or Star Wars characters, his specific companions in sleep. And just when her door was shut and the night seemed to close in for good, he’d rush back into their room, jumping crazily on their bed in wild, smiling transgression. She imagines him jumping, throwing his stuffed animals. He’d owned a stuffed raccoon, too. Or no – was it a fox? A bear? Something small and grey and furry, his arms around it constantly, there as protector and friend at night. Suddenly it was very important to know what it was, to tell the difference.
The raccoon manages to scream, wetly, every few seconds. The noise is too irregular, she thinks, too full of surprise, variation in pitch, to sleep through; and she was never a deep sleeper. But the noise also seems too ridiculously cruel to bear, so bottomless and wretched – some strange caricature of suffering. There again, the wailing. How long will she have to wait and listen? Marcus would have no trouble snoring through this, she thinks resentfully, but she sees herself writhing, at the end of her wits, until the hours begin to slide away in gradual terror and morning takes on a malevolent light.
At 12:25 she sits up and turns on the lamp. She slips into a pair of slippers and walks out of her bedroom, descending the curving flight of hardwood stairs. She reaches the quiet gleam of her stainless-steel kitchen and gazes over the indistinct furniture of her living room, caught in white curtains of moonlight. She can hear the animal’s cries coming from somewhere near her hedges – the place where she grew tall, healthy tulips during last year’s summer (a summer literally in another century, she thinks, the twentieth century, the last). She drifts to the cupboard, finds her flashlight and tests it in the murk of the foyer: on off, on off, casting mean shadows upon the door.
What the hell are you doing? The question comes breathless and sharp. Are you going outside? She imagines standing on the porch, the surrounding horror-movie glow of porch lights, the sharp white stones of the driveway beneath her slippered feet, the flashlight before her to ward off whatever it is – something dangerous, rabid, a skunk? Then what, June? Are you going to call somebody, some animal rescue centre, to come stitch it up? Not likely – with those noises, and for this long, it’s obviously too far gone to save. Or she can speed up its suffering, end its misery. By bashing in its skull with a shovel, a rock? June knows that there is no chance she’d be able to. She can bury it, she thinks, when it’s all over. At least she can give it that, but it’s only the glimmer of consolation. What June really feels is relief: relief in her inability to make such a decision, confront something so elemental, and the guilty relief that she can stay inside and try to sleep.
She shivers, feeling tired, precarious. She can hear the mountains of dry leaves swirling in the wind, roaring up the drive with the sound of rakes scraping concrete. She imagines the animal, the blood on the soil. And she feels sure, all at once, that Chris’s stuffed animal wasn’t a raccoon. That it was probably a wolf – nothing so defenceless, so pathetically vulnerable as the dying mammal outside. Something savage and noble to protect Chris from monsters and nightmares, but only if he went back to sleep, if he stopped jumping on their bed. It wasn’t bad behaviour or willfulness or rebellion – he did it only to postpone the moment of separation, the lonely privacy of dreams. It’s bee
n lodged in memory for over fifteen years, but it isn’t something she’s ever brought up. One memory that she knows is private, classified, something just for her – liable to be banished if ever shared with Marcus or even brought to words.
It was part of the long, rich record of June’s secret life. Just as waiting, as she has done tonight – and as she has done for many, many nights – has become a long thread in the tapestry of her memory. She remembers living in a cramped ninth-floor apartment during her third year of university in Vancouver. She shared the two-bedroom with another girl: someone who spread herself across the city, in clubs from school and on dates with boys. June studied while she partied; she felt there was always something to shore up, something to save. And on many nights, June would sit alone on their balcony watching the night rain lance the city into steam and puddle, blurring the lights from downtown into vivid smears of blue and yellow, while she smoked and thought and waited, and an enormous, indescribable ache churned inside her, equal parts lonely and exquisitely sweet. Her roommate would return home in a great convulsion of dropped bags and cigarettes and conversation, cackling over what disasters or triumphs occurred among the night birds, and the exquisite core would diminish and harden and fuse to what June knew was her real life: the secret, most precious part of her, and forever private.
The best nights of my life have been spent alone, waiting, she thinks. And keeping the pleasure and hurt of the waiting, the loneliness, to myself. She thinks of Chris’s storming of the bedroom, the jumping and throwing. Secret things.
‘I’m going to give you a gift, Chris,’ she mutters, and climbs the curving stairs, shuffles into the office and again boots up the computer. She waits through the screen’s deliberate awakening, impatient to see the cursor move at her command. Once it’s on, she opens her internet browser and heads to her email account. And she begins to compose a message: typing out the memory she has of Chris leaping on the bed and throwing the stuffed animals, taking her time to make sure it’s just the facts, without embellishment, without undue sentiment. It takes her about ten minutes of thinking, typing, allowing the animal’s death throes to fade to background noise while she works. When she is almost finished, she takes a moment to give herself some distance from the email, drifting almost automatically to the ICQ window, to the e-solitaire screen, to LiveJournal.com.
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