Lake on the Mountain: A Dan Sharp Mystery

by Jeffrey Round

  The others moved away, leaving him alone to carve out his self-destruction.

  “It’s unfortunate, I agree. But these things happen.” The supervisor moved in on Dan as though he were a dangerous psychopath he intended to disarm.

  “That’s bullshit! Anyone with a history of mental illness is a critical case. This is a fucking tragedy. He should never have been let go without someone telling me or his wife!”

  All his years of service would not buy his way out. The die had been cast, the hammer set to fall with a resounding crash. The incident got him six months’ mandatory counselling and replacement costs for the cabinet. He’d resisted the counselling but, faced with the alternative of suspension, he relented. At least they were paying for the sessions. Reluctantly, he attended the weekly meetings, though it was seldom his work Dan wanted to talk about.

  He approached Queen’s Park, a miniature forest in the city’s heart. A mounted statue of Edward VII towered over crisscrossing paths, transported from Delhi when India left the Commonwealth, like the prize in a prolonged custody dispute from a messy divorce settlement.

  It was here that Dan had slept on the hard benches his first night in the city, while crepuscular figures flitted like moths in the dark. It wasn’t till later he’d learned the intent of the men prowling the darkened pathways like vampires, but in search of a different kind of life-giving fluid.

  Through the trees the sky was a honed blue, a nice ending to the day if you had nothing troubling you, but Dan knew by the time he finished his counselling session it would be dark, in keeping with his mood. After his hour with Martin, he’d walk back across Wellesley to the bars on Church Street and show them the picture of the young runaway. After an hour with Martin, he’d need to spend time in a bar.

  He passed the brown brick residence at Whitney Hall where he’d met Arman and Kendra. After all this time the apple tree outside the porter’s office still flourished in the back courtyard. A few crabbed globes clung to its scaly branches. It felt strange to look up at the corner window and know his son had been conceived there out of his own macho drunkenness.

  Arman was currently in Dubai. A brilliant IT worker, he was shipped from port to port at great expense. He’d slipped out of Dan’s world completely and married a woman chosen by his family, though by all accounts they were happy. Unlike his renegade sister, Arman had no compunction about doing what tradition expected of him. If things had been different in a very different world, Dan wondered, would Arman have been just as happy in an arranged marriage with a man if tradition ordained it?

  Kendra lived a few blocks north on a tree-lined street in a hundred-year-old stone house. She’d become a success too, living life on her own terms and alone, as Dan knew she would. They may have been alike in looks and upbringing, but Kendra was a very different creature from her tradition-upholding brother.

  He crossed through the heart of the university, past St. George and Spadina with their popular student pizzerias, to the euphemistically named Harbord Centre for Well Being, which was actually located on Brunswick Avenue. Like Edward VII, it too had been displaced, but kept its name after being transplanted to this little backwater street, like a deposed royal living out its life in an anonymous hamlet far from the cultural centres of its heyday.

  Dan walked up to the decrepit building that showed at least three colours peeling through a brown topcoat like a bad tan. Someone had made a stab at beautifying the outside by placing pots of geraniums along the windowsills, but these had failed to bloom in the absence of direct sunlight. In fact, Dan wondered if anything could blossom along this rundown stretch of street. The scraggly, light-starved stems presented a pathetic welcome to anyone looking up from the sidewalk.

  He checked his watch: he was twenty-three minutes early. He didn’t want Martin to think he was anxious to see him. On the other hand, there was nowhere else to go in this neighbourhood of shabby student-chic housing. He spent the next ten minutes perusing the walls papered in notices for used textbooks, political rallies, flats to let, roommates wanted (and unwanted), descriptions of missing items with hopeful phone numbers beside them, as well as a plethora of numbers and email addresses of arcane purpose, the relevant notices having faded or been cut off or covered over by others clamouring for attention and demanding to be heard above all else.

  The building’s elevator was perpetually out of service. He took the three flights of wheezing, complaining stairs that announced visitors by their tread. Dan imagined the long queue of clients — timid or brave, world-weary or hopeful — who passed over this threshold and down the hall to the large oak panels behind which the eminent Martin Sanger and his dry, probing intellect waited. Dan had experienced moments of both hope and resignation as he approached these doors, but today he was what he usually was: irritable and angry at having to be there.

  He reached the office and let himself in. The receptionist listened, blank-faced, as he stated his name. He wondered if she really didn’t remember him when he walked through these doors every week at this time, or if this was part of his training to help him learn to be patient with what Martin had labelled his “perceived stupidity of others.” Dan waited while she looked down at her appointment book, nodded as she discovered his name and asked him to take a seat.

  He watched through the glass as she bent to speak into the intercom to relay notice of his arrival to Martin’s office. She always struck Dan as nervous and unhappy. He wondered if she was also a patient here. Maybe reception work was how she paid for her therapy. This was the only time Dan saw her. She was gone by the time his sessions ended, and he emerged to a semi-darkened waiting room, as though she’d been compelled to take the light with her wherever she went.

  Dan settled into what he’d determined was the most comfortable of three waiting room seats: a faded green club chair. Or in this case the least uncomfortable. The room was silent, with that surprising mixture of stillness and anticipation. From one floor above, he heard a sharp humourless laugh followed by a thump. A car passed outside the window and then, after a pause, another. He wondered why there was no music to provide comfort or distraction. Maybe this was part of his therapy too, his little wait in limbo while he was observed through a spy hole in the opposite wall.

  He went over the list of topics he had lined up, imagining Martin’s reactions. The tale of Steve and Glenda would elicit an anticipatory glance; it might also earn him a point for compassion at having met with Steve at four a.m. to talk over his troubles. He could follow this up with his annoyance at Bill’s unreturned calls. No point in mentioning the lousy drivers he encountered daily in the city. They were par for the course; no one was exempt. He could also mention Ked’s new friend Ephraim, the ruffian. Or would Martin think he was being racist? He could simply not mention the boy’s colour, if it came to that. But wasn’t this session supposed to be a safe place for Dan to unburden himself? Didn’t he have the right to express concern over his son’s future?

  If that failed to feed Martin’s interest, he could delve into his childhood, that old stand-by. Martin seemed to like it when he did. During their initial session, the awkward getting-to-know-you of pre-interrogation invasiveness, Martin had asked him what triggered his anger as a child. Dan couldn’t remember being angry as a child and Martin seemed to think that in itself was unusual. How could anyone get through childhood without experiencing anger? It spelled repression. Try being the child of a violent alcoholic and you’d probably repress your anger too, Dan said.

  “Then why do you think you’re so angry now?” Martin had asked.

  “It beats depression.”

  Martin pencilled furiously on the sheet in his lap. After that, he brought up Dan’s early years till Dan was sick of rehashing his childhood, as though the key to who he was now lay in some mysterious past time that had had the door closed on it forever and could only be viewed by coming to this man’s office and peering inside its cage like visitors to the zoo.

  In fact, Dan seldom tho
ught about his childhood. He’d come a long way from his past and he intended to keep on going as far as he could. The best thing you could do with the past, he told himself, was forget it. Though if everyone thought like that, he’d be out of business. His job depended on other people wanting him to dig up the past and conjure it before their eyes: the young wife who hadn’t returned from a trip to the bank; the father who left work and was never seen again; the sixth-grader who ventured out between Algebra and French and dropped off the face of the earth.

  It wasn’t till his third session that Martin asked him about his mother’s death when he was four years old. Dan replied truthfully that he recalled little apart from a gathering of relatives in his apartment and the hush around them whenever he came into the room. He remembered briefly being shipped off to a neighbour’s, and later being given Popsicles before returning to live with his father.

  When she died, what little connection Dan had had with his father died along with her. His father seemed to have frozen over, ice covering the distance between them. It had stayed that way till his death ten years ago, though the ice was all on Dan’s part by then. Even Kedrick’s birth hadn’t changed things. There’d been just one family visit, a brief, guilt-tinged appearance supervised by Dan’s Aunt Marge, made at her request. Dan had watched, wary, as his father took the boy in his hands and sat him on his knee. The scar on Dan’s right temple throbbed, the one he’d gotten when his father threw him against a doorjamb returning home late from school not long after his tenth birthday.

  Since then he’d successfully covered the past with a shroud, convincing himself it had few holds on him apart from the ones dictated by genetics. As far as he was concerned, the legacy was unremarkable on both sides of the family. He was the son of a miner who was also the son of a miner. His father’s relatives had lived in Sudbury for more than three generations. His mother had migrated there from Manitoba, no one seemed to recall why or when, and had been variously a waitress, a beautician, and a cashier at Woolworth’s until her early death from pneumonia one Christmas.

  As far as Dan knew, he was the only one in the family who had attended a post-secondary institution. He’d never been in trouble at school or with the law. Until he left home, he’d never lived anywhere but Sudbury. The only home he recalled had been the second floor of a rundown walk-up in the Flourmill District, an area uniquely devoid of distinctive features apart from the six squat cement cylinders that had lain unused for decades before being turned into a museum of dubious distinction not long after Dan was born.

  “Do you have any nice memories of your father?” Martin asked unexpectedly one day.

  Dan thought about it. After a moment, he nodded. “My father was sometimes nice to me when he drank. That and Christmas. Usually the two coincided. I guess he was sentimental about certain things.”

  “Did it change after your mother died?”

  “That was when he stopped drinking.” Dan paused. “You’d think it would be the opposite, wouldn’t you? You might expect that he’d drink more when she died.”

  “Would you?”

  “Yes, a normal person would.”

  Martin ignored the jibe, if he noticed it.

  “My father didn’t drink for a long time after she died, but he started up again during a mining strike in the late seventies. The strike went on for nearly a year. That’s when I realized he resented me. Otherwise, I suppose he could have sat around getting drunk instead of working to support me.”

  Of his parents together, he had one small memory that might have been nothing more than a dream. A Christmas tree filled with lights and tinselly ornaments figured prominently. A glittery green and red bird with a shiny fibreglass tail caught his attention. He recalled reaching up and stroking it, only to have his hand slapped. From there, the memory shifted to an argument between his parents that seemed to go on a long time while he cried. He recalled his father’s angry outburst as a hush overtook the house. Outside, snow was falling. Later, a worried knocking had come at the door, followed by a strange pathetic scratching. The details were hazy. There might have been more crying. Somewhere in there was the knowledge that his mother was not coming back. Then later, definitely more crying, this time from his aunt. Whatever else was there faded out of memory. He’d dreamed the event many times and took it as being symbolic of the death of his mother rather than any sort of reality.

  How did he feel after having the dream? Martin asked. Terrible, of course. Dan wondered why Martin had to ask. What child wouldn’t feel terrible on losing a mother? He wanted to ask if Martin had been glad to lose his.

  Remembering his parents’ arguing wasn’t surprising, since that was the hallmark of their relationship, according to his Aunt Marge. She and her daughter Leyla were his only remaining relatives. He remembered the matronly Marge with fondness as the aunt who snuck him into the Empire Theatre for Saturday matinees and as the woman who raised him after his mother died. He thought guiltily of her now — she’d been in poor health for several years and he hadn’t seen her in some time. His cousin Leyla he recalled as the first person in his sexual landscape, a dimly lit mural of touch-and-feel one night when they were forced to share a bed. He’d been impressed by the size of her breasts. In the family, it had been touted that “Leyla failed grade eight because she went boy crazy.” He always smiled to think of it. He’d carried on the tradition, he supposed.

  The receptionist stirred in her glass cubicle and glanced nervously about as though she sensed a seismic tremor coming down the hall. Dan looked at his watch. It was exactly seven. Martin opened the door and nodded.

  “Come in, please, Daniel,” Martin said in the same spiritless tone he always used.

  Dan followed Martin to an office almost obsessively devoid of personality. Eggshell walls and off-white trim enclosed a cream-coloured carpet with a glass table placed precisely in the centre. On a desk in the corner, a whirling screen-saver offered glimpses of what outer space might look like from the POV of someone heading resolutely away from earth. Not drowning — waving goodbye. A narrow window looked out onto the pitch of other rooflines. A Piet Mondrian reproduction — a quilt-like abstraction of crosshatches — offered the only colour in an otherwise almost obsessively bland room. It floated on the wall above Martin’s head like a cartoon image of the contents of his mind.

  The client chair seemed purposely set at a lower angle than Martin’s. Dan sat and studied the thin face he couldn’t quite bring to mind outside this unremarkable room. “Invisible” didn’t begin to cover it. Even Martin’s wardrobe seemed designed for camouflage. An oatmeal vest covered an ecru shirt tucked into light-brown trousers with immaculate creases. Half the time in these sessions Dan spent wondering what made this man so indistinct he could disappear right before your eyes. The shrink who shrank. Maybe if Martin lost his temper or betrayed an emotion, he might give off some vital signs.

  After the formality of offering Dan a glass of water, which he always refused, Martin sat back with his hands tented and eyed Dan over his fingers.

  “So what brings you here today?”

  As always, Dan was tempted to say it was a choice between seeing Martin and losing his job, and that he almost hadn’t come. Instead, he went into his preamble about his late-night talk with Steve Jenkins and his uncharitable neighbour, Glenda. Before he could get far, Martin cut him off.

  “How do you feel about that?”

  Dan wanted to say, “I think she’s a selfish cunt. The kind who makes living in this city even more unbearable.” Instead he said, “It’s not fair. Here’s this poor schmuck who loves his wife more than anything and she’s taking advantage of the situation.”

  “So you feel a sense of injustice,” Martin said, with a flash that might have been interest kindling behind his eyes.

  Dan nodded.

  “Do you see how you’ve removed yourself from the emotion and put yourself at a distance?”

  “How is that?” Dan said. He was unsure whether agreeing wi
th Martin’s assessment might be a good thing. Surely feeling an emotion was better than observing it?

  Thankfully, Martin was willing to enlighten him. “It’s a rational judgment you’re making about the situation. You’ve separated yourself from the emotion to view it with detachment. Whereas you might normally feel anger over a perceived injustice, you’ve distanced yourself. I think that’s good.”

  Dan tried to look pleased.

  “How are you feeling about life in general these days?” Martin said.

  “Good. Fine. A little less irritable than usual.”

  “Why is that?”

  Dan reflected. “Bill and I are going away for the weekend. We’re going to a gay wedding.”

  Dan had stopped hypothesizing on Martin’s sexuality and simply assumed he had none, though Martin always showed a keen interest in anything to do with Dan’s sex life. Sometimes Dan went on at length when Martin showed curiosity, feeding him tidbits of information to see how he would react, though he’d tired of the game quickly.

  “This will be the first time we’ll be together for an entire weekend,” Dan continued.

  “And you feel positive about this?”

  “Yes,” Dan said, surprising himself.

  “Is it a matter of feeling you have more control over the relationship?”

  “Not really. Bill’s always been in control of the relationship — when we see each other, for how long, et cetera.”

  Martin inclined his head. “I seem to recall you once said he was in control of every aspect of the relationship except for the bedroom….”

  Dan leaned in. “Well, he calls the shots there too, more or less. What I meant was, he lets me be in control when we have sex.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  “Obviously I’m willing to go along with it or I wouldn’t be with him.”

  Martin waited.

  Dan cleared his throat. “I’m learning to be patient,” he said.