Hellgoing

by Lynn Coady

  And if they think I am going to stand here denouncing this and that, they are not smart. If they think I’m going to slap my palm against the light switch and start hollering for doctors and nurses and the pope, they don’t have to concern themselves. If they suppose I could possibly bother with any such nonsense, let them turn around and get on with what they’re doing. Let them do as they please, the whole bunch of them. Eat and smoke and starve and stand on your head as far as I’m concerned. Live and die and do what you want all over the place. I won’t be the one to say a word.

  AN OTHERWORLD

  Falling down the stairs, Erin’s only thought was: Goddamn Sean! Because she knew he would take this as proof that he’d been right about her bicycle accident three months ago, which proved she had some kind of a psychological problem.

  You hurt yourself when you’re upset about something, Sean had said.

  There was a speed bump, she repeated at him. On the bike path. On the hill! It wasn’t even marked.

  I went to get your bike, said Sean, and there was a big sign. Speed bump, it said.

  There was no sign!

  There was a sign.

  I am calling the city, Erin said, and I’m going to complain that there wasn’t a sign.

  There was a sign, said Sean. Go check.

  Without telling him, once the black eyes from her broken nose had dwindled to under-eye smudges and people no longer gave her appalled looks when she appeared on the street, she slipped into the river valley to visit the scene of the accident. Just walking down the same hill made her stomach roil — provoked a visceral remembrance of sailing over her handlebars during the long, doomed oh-no time warp that hitting the speed bump had triggered. She had been playing a lot of computer games that month and, after crunching face-first to the ground, her instinct was to wonder: When did I last hit save? I can go back. It was that feeling of losing, of having screwed up badly in the game and just wanting to quit in disgust and start over.

  Then she stood up. No problem. Bounced to her feet. I’m okay, she thought, I’m fine. Blood started getting everywhere at that point and an overtanned man who’d been leaving the pitch-and-putt with his preteen daughter re-parked his car and rushed over to offer assistance, the grossed-out twelve-year-old wincing in his wake.

  In the stairwell, she landed against her outstretched hand, the same hand she had outstretched to slow herself down after having flown over the handlebars, the hand with all the subsequent soft tissue damage, which had kept her from doing yoga for three months and was only now starting to get better.

  Motherfucker, said Erin in the stairwell — the word echoed in noisy layers. She took advantage of the privacy and crumpled up there for a while, cradling her hand.

  Then she bounced to her feet just the same way she had on the bike path, put her shoe back on and finished moaning quickly. She was already late for the welcome reception.

  Everyone except Erin had arrived by the time she got there, and her dad waggled his eyebrows at her, faux-­jocular. He extended his arm, the better to herd her toward his new accountant and also new best friend and business partner, Frank. Blank-minded and smiling, Erin held out her freshly damaged hand to Frank and next she was shrieking on her knees as Frank staggered backward, staring at his palm as if it pulsed with electricity.

  Motherfucker, Erin said again. It was something she didn’t often say in front of her parents. Cock, shouted Erin. Sean rushed to pick her up and sit her down somewhere.

  THE STAIRWELL, SHE said to Sean back in their room, was very poorly lit.

  Don’t even start that, Erin, said Sean.

  No, I’m just saying, putting aside your theory for a minute, a person can’t really see where they’re going in there.

  Especially when a person is hurling herself down the stairs.

  They were in Belize. They were at this ridiculous resort on Ambergris Caye. Nobody else was at the resort except for the wedding party, even though the place was huge. If not for the resort staff, it would feel like some kind of post-apocalyptic celebration — all other humans vaporized. They had it to themselves because Frank was the owner and because it was off-season, and because her father was Frank’s biggest investor.

  Did you notice, she said to Sean, how Frank wears a diamond in either ear? He looks like a lunatic.

  He is a lunatic, agreed Sean, allowing her to change the subject. Talk to him. Whole other planet. Did you talk to him?

  No, said Erin. I didn’t get a chance to talk to him after he hurt me.

  Which was a stupid thing to say because it led them directly back to the topic at hand.

  This was Erin, Sean had come to understand. This was what Erin did. Help me; get away from me; ow that hurt; come here.

  SEAN DIDN’T THINK it was that she didn’t want to be getting married to him. He had his theories, but he didn’t think that was it. He thought it could be attributed to how her father was running the wedding like one of his golf weekends, and also relationship issues leftover from Ames.

  Ames was the man with whom Erin had spent her twenties “being hippies together,” as she described it. It had been such an obvious move of rebellion against her father it was embarrassing — Erin herself said that. Listening to Erin talk about her past, you would think she was the most self-aware person on the planet. Which is to say, not someone prone to hurling herself down flights of stairs and blaming it on the lighting. So she and Ames lived in a cabin on the Sunshine Coast, grew vegetables and kept bees. They weren’t dropouts, they told themselves, dropping out was negative, a turning away, and this was a turning toward. They wanted to live authentically, like Henry David Thoreau, whom Ames was very into. Ames kept journals like Thoreau did, and made money working up and down the coast doing carpentry for his fellow authentic-­livers, often getting paid in loaves of bread and baskets of blackberries that he could have picked himself in about twenty minutes basically anywhere on the coast.

  He called himself a “woodworker,” never a carpenter. This was Erin’s scornful joke. She’d had a lot of grim fun, in the two years Sean had known her, at Ames’s expense. Erin told Sean that, authentic living aside, Ames had nurtured ambitions to be an actor. Ha ha. He thought Hollywood was bullshit, as you do, but great acting, like woodworking, was a marriage of craft and art. Ha. And, okay, the truth was, acting was not an entirely unreasonable ambition for Ames. He was, Erin admitted, “beautiful,” all rangy limbs and the obligatory mid-nineties shaggy dis­habille, a look that still made Erin a little giddy, like when she came across old photos of Kurt Cobain or the Soundgarden guy. Every once in a while Ames would take the ferry to Vancouver to audition for something or another, but all he got was extra work and the occasional gay come-on. Gays loved Ames, confided Erin. I mean, of course they’re going to love a good-looking guy, but there was something about Ames, they just adored him.

  It went to Ames’s head, long story short. He finally met, claimed Erin, one too many people who just adored him. There was an agent who promised to get him modelling work, and actually accomplished this. Ames returned to the coast one day with a pair of $400 sunglasses holding back his hair.

  We have to move the hives, Erin told him, the bear is back.

  God, said Ames, removing the sunglasses and gathering his hair into a ponytail at the back of his skull. It was a gesture meant to get across great depths of torment. I can’t deal with the hives anymore. I mean, Jesus, Erin. As if the hives were her fault.

  Then Ames sat Erin down and described all the ways he had become unhappy with her.

  It was embarrassing because of how Erin had renounced everything for Ames and his sinews and the vegetables and bees and their lame voluntary-simplicity cliché. Erin remembered being twenty-two and telling her father she pitied him in response to his telling her she was being slutty and throwing her life away. Then her father decided to say what he did, and she said what she said in response. It was one of those detonator moments — a conversation that implodes time and space and o
pens up a kind of portal, like in video games. You pick up a coin or open a chest; you say the right thing, or say the wrong thing. And next thing you know the world around you shudders and gives way, depositing you into a completely new dimension, an otherworld.

  What happened was that Erin’s father, Ron, decided to impart to his daughter the axiom about no one wanting to buy a cow that gives its milk away for free.

  Maybe, Erin told him — vibrating like a kettle on the boil — maybe the cow just wants to get milked.

  You have to know Erin’s family to understand how a comment like this would land.

  You are never going to understand anything about real life, Erin told her father in the strangled, white-lipped silence that followed. It was a silence that would endure and thicken between them for the next five years — that was the portal she had tipped them into. The portal to a silent world. You are so caught up in your traditionalist dogmas, she said to dumbstruck Ron.

  Tra-dish-onalist dawg-mas, Erin said to Sean, that was my big phrase back then. I thought it was just so clever. When Erin described herself saying things like this now, she did it as a parody. She adopted her “lumpy granola” voice, a grating singsong delivery, nasal with self-­righteousness — as if every sentence she uttered should end with an emphatic “man” or “dude.” Sean found it a little ruthless. Stop it, he laughed. You can’t beat yourself up for being young.

  You weren’t being an idiot when you were in your twenties, Erin accused.

  I was being my own special kind of idiot, answered Sean. In fact, at the start of his twenties, Sean worked at a UPS call centre that had opened the very spring he graduated from university, and counted himself lucky. He banked his paycheques and rented a studio apartment in a concrete high-rise and took the bus to work. He applied for promotions within the company and bought mutual funds and had his first house by the time he was twenty-six, just in time to get married to a woman from his office to whom he now referred by no other name except “The Beast.” Later, after he divorced and went back to school, he met people like Erin, people who structured their twenties around snowboarding trips and the obtainment and usage of pot and had gone to Burning Man and had multiple sex partners and had taught in Japan and volunteered in Africa and sailed in sailboats around the Gulf Islands, and that’s when he started feeling like his own special kind of idiot. Now he was forty-two.

  By their second year of living together, Sean was spending every weekend tricking out their basement dungeon. It was his engagement present to Erin. But from the moment he set it up, he found the busywork of tinkering around down there gave him almost as much pleasure as the purpose it was intended for. He liked puttering and experimenting in his time off, looking up stuff online, inventing new things for them to try. Erin started calling it Satan’s Workshop. He’d ordered plans for bondage furniture and so far had built his own whipping chair, and he’d also bought an old church confessional pew from the antique mall and sanded and stained it, drilled holes and added hooks and straps and turned it into a kind of sicko kneeling structure which Erin, with her Catholic background, loved. Now he’d moved on to a Saint Andrew’s Cross, which was the biggest thing he’d ever done. He’d held off on this project for a while because the dungeon had metastasized to such a degree after Erin moved in, and was getting harder to pack up whenever they had friends over wanting their inevitable tour of the house. The last time Erin’s parents had come to visit, it had taken all weekend to find a hiding place for everything. Her father had insisted on seeing Sean’s “workshop” and then laughed at Sean as he looked around at the pristine tools hanging on their hooks.

  This place is immaculate, Ron said. Give me a break, please, Sean. You don’t so much as lift a hammer down here.

  Sean had no idea what he would do with the Saint Andrew’s Cross when the time came. Likely he would just end up throwing a tarp over it and hoping no one got curious.

  DID YOU AND Ames ever do this kind of stuff? Sean wanted to know after Erin moved in.

  Ames and I had twenty-something sex, she said. Where you do it constantly and think you must be having a blast.

  You weren’t enjoying it? You don’t have to say that, you know.

  You think you’re enjoying it, said Erin. There isn’t a lot of difference, at that age, between thinking you’re enjoying something and actually enjoying it.

  Then how do you know the difference? said Sean.

  You know later, once you’re really enjoying it.

  Then how do you know you’re ever really enjoying it? They were lying in bed, having one of the lazy, pointless conversations of which they had so many early in their relationship. Where the actual subject under discussion didn’t matter because all they really wanted was to feel each other’s voices buzzing in their bodies.

  How do you know you don’t still just think you are enjoying it? said Sean. Like right now?

  Because of having an orgasm, said Erin.

  But, come on. You had orgasms!

  Erin stretched then, sending her limbs in all directions like the da Vinci drawing. I didn’t even know what an orgasm was in those days.

  Sean understood she wasn’t being literal. He knew he was paying more attention to the conversation than Erin was; than it really merited. But he wondered: Is this a compliment? Or what is it?

  OKAY, STOP STOP stop, said Erin. They were celebrating one year of being engaged and it was their first time using the basement in a serious way. Sean could tell that she meant it. They didn’t have a safe word, because that made it seem too hardcore. Too much like people who dressed up in masks and rubber, who said mean things to each other, like in movies.

  Motherfucker, said Erin. Whoo.

  Sean looked at the cane in his hand. I didn’t do it hard, like at all, he said.

  Whoo. It really hurt, said Erin.

  They had just bought it. Erin read about it online. It was fancy and expensive — rattan with a leather grip. Sean had offered to slap together something similar in his workshop, but Erin said it couldn’t just be some stick from out in the yard; it had to be rattan.

  But I thought —

  Ha ha, yes I know, said Erin. But it really hurts.

  It should only hurt a little bit? This alarmed Sean, because it contradicted the rules as he understood them up until now.

  No, said Erin. It should hurt. But it shouldn’t really hurt.

  This made Sean think back to their conversation in bed in the early days of their relationship. Really versus not really.

  Let me up, said Erin, becoming restless. I have to pee, sweetie.

  ERIN WENT FOR a walk by herself along the beach the morning of the wedding. Frank’s two dogs, a pair of excitable, flap-eared mutts who had the run of the resort, came with her uninvited. They were the happiest dogs in the world, it seemed — they couldn’t believe their luck, living here on the beach with Frank, meeting new people all the time, having each other to play with. They managed to accompany Erin and play frantically with one another throughout her entire walk. It was not as peaceful and meditative as she’d intended it to be. The dark one would chase the light one, then the light one would whip around and they would face off, crouching in the dried seaweed, communicating with lolling tongues. The next instant, the light would be after the dark. They’d jump in the surf, cool off, splash, pretend to bite one another. Then they’d notice Erin had gone a bit farther down the beach than they preferred her to be, and would run to catch up.

  You guys are exhausting, Erin said.

  Approaching the resort, she ran into Frank. Erin and Frank hadn’t warmed to one another at the reception the night before as a result of Frank crushing her hand. He’d steered clear of her the rest of the evening.

  There she is, said Frank now. They were the only two people on the beach. Our child-bride.

  Erin was thirty-eight. Hi, she said.

  Frank was as bald as a stump and the size of the diamonds in his ears really did make him look crazy. He looked like a big
bald infant wearing lady’s jewellery. The dogs were overjoyed to see him and capered, whining, about his shins.

  How are you liking the place? Frank wanted to know, waving his arms down around his knees to make sporadic contact with the dogs.

  It’s beautiful, said Erin. And it was, kind of. But she was coming to believe she wasn’t a Caribbean sort of person. It all looked great from a distance but the turquoise ocean turned out to be warm as urine and when she got in it her eyes and mouth burned with salt. Also the white sand made her impatient. She found it hard to believe it wasn’t artificial — silicone or something. She was tempted to ask Frank if they manufactured it somewhere and had it shipped in, but when she’d mentioned this possibility to Sean the night before he’d laughed until he couldn’t breathe.

  You have to be honest with me now, said Frank, spreading his arms toward the ocean. Does it get any better than this?

  No, said Erin. It doesn’t.

  Frank stooped to palm a coconut and the dogs went even crazier, perhaps thinking he was going to throw it for them, or maybe just because he’d put his face, momentarily, at their level.

  Your opinion as a bride is very valuable, Frank told her, frowning as he straightened, either to indicate sudden seriousness or else back pain. So I appreciate hearing that. I plan on weddings being the engine that makes this little operation run. And it’s all about making the bride happy, after all.

  I think people will love it, Erin told him, which was not a lie. She didn’t love a lot of the things everybody else seemed to love. She used to think that had to mean other people were wrong. But she didn’t believe that anymore, Erin realized—at some point she’d stopped assuming she was right and everyone else was wrong. Now she figured she was likely as wrong as the next person. But Frank took her statement kindly and beamed his stumpy sunburned pleasure at her, diamonds sparkling on either side of his head. He held the coconut aloft.

  I will plant this for you, Frank declared. The first bride to grace our Caye. He began to clamber up a dune in search of an appropriate tree-planting spot as the dogs freaked out at his feet.