He set the fork back down. The sun was in his eyes and he thought briefly of being interrogated under a bright light. Melissa watched him expectantly through her sunglasses.
“She’s leaving the former boyfriend, etcetera,” he said.
“And making a fresh start.”
“Actually, there’s more to it than that,” said Melissa.
Zane inspected his fork again. Let’s see what she comes up with this time.
“I’m starting my whole life over again.”
“Like what?”
“I was a stripper. I did porn movies.”
In the silence that followed, it seemed that the sun shrank appreciably toward the horizon.
“I don’t know if the Flames are going to do anything this year,” said Jim. “You can’t ride Iginla’s coattails forever.”
Zane had never, until now, wished that he paid more attention to hockey. Connie shot Jim a look of contempt and then addressed Zane as if Melissa no longer existed, all of her wispiness blown away.
“What the hell is wrong with you?”
“It’s a good story,” said Zane.
“A good story?”
“It’s a great story.”
“I can’t believe you.”
“I’ll go wait in the car,” said Melissa, an announcement to which no-one responded.
“It’s not such a big deal,” he said.
“It’s a big deal to me.”
Zane motioned at the screen door, through which Melissa had now disappeared.
“She’s a good kid, Connie.”
“This is my home.”
“Did she soil your carpet?”
“I have a sixteen-year-old daughter!”
Connie’s chair slid back and teetered as she stood. Her balled-up paper napkin hit the table and bounced into Zane’s lap.
“I’m not a baby, mom,” said Amanda.
“Please excuse us.”
“You think I’ve never been on the Internet?”
“Amanda, would you please excuse the grown-ups?”
“And I’ll be happy to excuse you, too.” Amanda departed.
Zane picked up the crumpled napkin and put it on his plate.
“Let’s not overreact,” said Jim.
“Oh, I’m sure you liked Lucas’s little friend just fine, didn’t you?”
“Connie.”
“Maybe you’ve seen her before?”
“This is between you and Luke.” Jim followed Amanda.
Every man for himself. At this time, the Captain asks that you identify and proceed to your assigned lifeboat station, and please refrain from running like hell on the quarterdeck. It had come time to announce a dignified departure. But first, there would be a certain amount of verbal abuse.
“Do you ever stop to think of the harm you do?” Connie began clearing up the remains of supper. Fortunately, none of the dishes were breakable. “Do you ever stop to think of the mess you leave behind?”
As if to underscore her point, she knocked over the salad bowl, swore, and then started to cry. Zane leaned down and started picking up lettuce from the deck, couldn’t think where to put it, stood there stupidly with his hands full of salad.
“You’re overreacting.”
“Oh, I’m overreacting.”
She made an ineffective attempt to sweep the remains of the salad up off the table. Leaves of lettuce stuck to her fingers as she tried to drop them into the bowl, and she swatted at them in frustration.
“You bring this whore to dinner, and I’m overreacting?”
“She’s not a whore.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, this goddamn porn star.”
“She’s a good kid.”
“She’s a good kid?” Now the potato salad took flight. Mayonnaise on his face. “Amanda is sixteen years old!”
Two years out of the university dorm. Two years from frat house parties, from wet T-shirt night, from come on baby, be a good sport, the pictures will just be for us. I won’t put them up on the Internet, honest. Which is where kids get their sex ed these days, in any case. The angel at the gates raises his flaming sword and says, hey babe, yer kinda cute. Before you split town, whyn’t you and me get to know each other better? What, you’re going to listen to your mother?
“She could learn a lot from Melissa,” said Zane, and Connie hit him.
The blow took him by surprise and she was screaming at him and clawing at his face before he realized what was happening, and he pushed her back, hard. She went back over a deck chair and fell. Everything stopped except the tears.
Well, now you hit a girl. Zane felt blood running from his nose and he touched his hand to it. There was blood all over his fingers and he held them out for her to see. His hands were trembling and he didn’t care.
Connie sat on the deck amidst the salad.
“Get out of my house!”
Zane went back through the sliding door and through the house, cupping his hand under his nose to save the carpets. In the kitchen, Jim hunched over a bowl of strawberries, and Zane waved to him with his free hand.
“I’m really sorry about this,” said Zane.
“I guess you miss dessert.”
Jim pointed his fork at the strawberries, and looked down on them as if they had been carelessly broken. He had defeat in his shoulders. Zane heard the sliding door open again. He made for the front door.
Amanda stood by the passenger window of his car, talking to Melissa.
“What happened to you?”
“Long story.”
Connie shouted to Amanda to come in at once. Amanda scowled, and stayed put. Zane opened his door to get in.
“Anyway, remember that,” said Melissa.
“I will. Bye, Uncle Luke.”
You say goodbye to your niece with blood streaming from your nose where her mother punched you. It is theoretically possible to sink lower, but no one has yet explained how.
Connie shouted at Amanda again. At the front door she told her mother to lighten up. Zane started the engine. He was getting blood on his new cloth seats.
“What was all that about?”
“Girl stuff,” said Melissa. “What happened to your nose?”
“Girl stuff.”
He’d had all the girl stuff he could take. He put it in reverse and backed out of the driveway without looking, into the path of a black convertible that swerved, honked, and then came to rest alongside him. The driver shouted something. He was about forty-five, with thin sandy hair. Zane gave him the finger.
The other driver opened his car door and started to get out. Zane put it in gear and waited until he started coming around his car, and then punched it hard. His tires left rubber on the pavement. In his rear view, he saw the sandy-haired man giving him the finger, and he fought down the urge to put it in reverse and go back and beat him into the ground. It was necessary that somebody display some maturity.
“All things considered,” he said, “I feel that was a successful visit.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I don’t remember a lot of the details, but somehow, I ended up here. I’m forty-six years old, somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, driving down the Trans-Canada to Vancouver with a would-be actress-cum-small-time porn model sleeping in the passenger seat. This would have all the makings of a first-rate, high-grade mid-life crisis were it not for her black eye, split lip, and stitches, not to mention the apparently irrecoverable failure of my erectile apparatus. This, at least, has guaranteed that our relationship remained platonic, regardless of what my intentions might otherwise have been. And to be honest I’m not quite sure what my intentions are. The trouser snake awakens in hospital to find himself paralyzed; he seeks a new vocation, but his talents are limited, and his motivation poor. It’s a cruel fate.
You’re not going to remember much of this trip. You’ve slept through half of it. But I guess Saskatchewan and Manitoba and southern Alberta really aren’t that memorable anyway. They’re just flat and endless. So you can wake u
p in Vancouver like a victim of amnesia, a woman without a past, without an identity. And then you can make that fresh start everyone yearns for. You can look out at the dismal Vancouver grey and find it all fresh and bright and beautiful.
But that’ll never work in the end. The past always bubbles back to the surface. A man without a past digs for one, an orphan seeks his parents. Driven by a tragic curiosity, the cat digs too deep in the litter box; the anti-personnel mine coughs up a furball. You’ll always have that hockey scar. No matter how many gaps remain in the story, the final frame is somehow connected to the first.
You asked why I took this job, with Rich – I should say, that job – and I said it was because I answered an ad. You think I’m being facetious, that I’m simply being evasive, but that’s a truthful answer. It’s the only truthful answer I have. Do you ever really know why you do anything? Why did you answer Connie flat out like that, when you made up stories for everyone else? I don’t know, and neither do you. We just do things. The rest is our excuses.
So: it is a fact that I answered an ad, and I prefer to deal in facts. Anything else gets us into dangerous territory. You can’t believe half the shit you hear, and the shit you make up, you can trust less. You start in on that, you end up trading on trust, and that’s a slippery currency. That particular account is well overdrawn.
I’m sure you’d like a nice, pat explanation for my life. Something to tie up all my loose ends: I left it all behind after witnessing unspeakable horrors, etcetera, that left me reduced to a whisky-soaked shell. You’d like to think you’re in some tale of sin and redemption. I guess we all like to think we’re walking through some grand, redemptive story. Well, we’re all going to be disappointed. Disappointment is one of the two fates that we must all eventually meet.
I ran out of horror a long time ago. You start with conviction, and then you just end up sad. You know you aren’t going to stop anything. You’ll be off to cover another war tomorrow and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that until you retire, until you just give up and leave the job to the next quixote. You realize that all the things you thought and believed were all bullshit. You just get tired out, and you can’t feel anything anymore but a kind of distant sadness.
God looks down on his children and shakes his head. Free will, he thinks – what was I smoking when I came up with that one? You drop one tab of acid, eight days later you got snakes in the Garden of Eden.
Anyway, I don’t know why I’m here. All explanations are suspect, especially your own. I don’t know why I do anything – I don’t think anyone really does. Maybe, if I was to trust the self who keeps the razor blades out of reach, I could say that this is all part of some plan I don’t fully understand. But that kind of talk starts to get religious, and you can’t trust that.
Maybe I’m not keeping the razor blades out of reach at all. Maybe you’re my razor blade. Maybe I’m just trying to slip one past my guardian angel. You get down to a certain point and you just want to wipe out hard. You just want to go down like a plane on fire.
Who knows? Not me. We’re supposed to be sticking with the facts.
The fact is my agency fired me over an assignment that didn’t work out. Or maybe it was a string of assignments that didn’t work out. Maybe it was more than that. Things got a little fuzzy there, for a while.
It was Jack who called to cut me loose. I think he felt he owed me that, to do it himself. I’d been with him a long time.
I’d blown an assignment to follow the Democratic campaign, down in the States. Jack wanted the kind of masterwork Elliott Erwitt had made of the Republican convention, which was like Hunter Thompson had figured out how to develop film in an LSD bath. Erwitt cast the powermongers and kingmakers of the great republic of the free and the brave as fat, backslapping hicks out of a small-town chamber of commerce, a bunch of used car and kitchen appliance salesmen. It was all done with an ultrawide. It was brilliant.
I didn’t give Jack brilliant. I couldn’t find anything to shoot. To me, all those people were just jackasses shouting slogans and waving signs. There was no point in it. I’d told Jack I was done with wars, but maybe I was just done. What Jack got was a collection of boring snapshots.
This is not what makes our reputation, he said. This is not what made your reputation.
What made my reputation was the suffering of others. I suspect that in fact, what made my reputation was a great deal of luck, that becoming the great Lucas Zane was largely a matter of continually being in the right place at the right time. It’s my good luck to be there when your luck turns terminally bad. But I was beginning to think that my luck had run out. And I found that I didn’t much care.
So I told him, maybe I just got lucky all these years.
Bullshit, he said. The magazine is pissed. They don’t pay a Lucas Zane rate to get the same crap they could get from some guy from the Upper Plodsville Herald.
I said nobody can be on his game all the time.
Bullshit, he said. What you gave us was a few weak snapshots.
I’m sorry, I said. His pause demanded a response, and there seemed little else to say.
You’re sorry, all right, he said. What’s really pissed everyone off, is you spent most of your time locked in your hotel room, coming out only to get drunker in the hotel bar.
It was true enough. I had certain ghosts to keep at bay. More importantly, I simply didn’t give a shit. I was pretty much adrift. But I didn’t feel any inclination to communicate that information to Jack.
I know what you’re up to, he said.
This declaration took me by surprise. I hadn’t thought I was up to anything in particular.
What am I up to?
Let’s say this: memory is the one thing you can’t preserve in alcohol.
I could picture him, rocking back in his chair, tremendously pleased with himself. Yes, Jack, you’re such a fucking wit.
And the other thing it won’t preserve is your career. In that respect, it’s a solvent. Do you know where your career is?
In the toilet, I said.
You pretty much don’t have any career left to flush. This isn’t the first time. The word is getting out: Lucas Zane is a head case.
What do you say to something like that? In my business, you can become a drunk, but you can’t become a head case.
Anyway, I’m not a head case. I just don’t care anymore.
Problem is, though, you say you’re not a head case, that’s denial, and denial means you must be a head case. So, I was now a head case. I let him stew.
You are in a whole fucking barrel of pickles, he said, and so am I in respect to your future here. So I’m going to tell you how it’s going to be.
How it was going to be was, in short, you’re fired. I’m not about to keep risking the agency’s reputation and my own putting you on assignments you’re just going to screw up. I’ve gone on long enough watching you try to get back in the game, and enough’s enough. I’m tired of getting burned. We’ll continue managing your stock, fair enough, but for assignments, you’re on your own. Nobody’s going to touch you at this stage. Even Canadian Press won’t have you shooting at their lousy seventy-five bucks a day.
Jack took many more words to say this than were strictly necessary. And throughout it all, all that was running through my head was Mick Jagger singing “Not Fade Away.”
“I’m a-gonna tell you how it’s gonna be,” sang Mick, in time with Jack’s recitation of my numerous shortcomings. Something here was fading away, all right, but I found that I didn’t really care. All things must pass. Fair enough. Get on with it.
One last thing, he said. At that point he’d already said entirely too many last things, none of them complimentary.
Don’t hock your cameras to buy booze, because if you ever do come up with a story, if you ever do get back on track, I will still be here.
That’s fair, I said. I felt I owed him that much. And the thing is I actually felt relief. Like a weigh
t had been lifted. It’s a cliché but it’s true.
You have an immortal fucking eye, Zane. You just need to find a reason to give a shit, he said.
After he hung up I put the phone down and walked over to the window and looked out at the city. I was living in a condo downtown, by the harbour, an expensive place with a view of the city, of the centre of all the bustle and rush that fires the hearts of those who are fully caught up in the blood sport of commerce. Everything that mattered was there, where everyone who mattered could see it. I looked out on that and it was as pointless as a hamster on its wheel.
I stood there for a while and probed, experimentally, at how it felt to be unemployed, like you might probe with your tongue at the socket of a pulled tooth, to determine if the painkillers were still doing their job.
Evening was coming on and the city was outlined in electric lights as the sky faded to a deep, dirty blue, with the last sunlight illuminating the glass of the tall buildings in gold. The evening crowd was moving in to hit the bars and theatres, tail lights streaming red down the Gardiner while the outbound stream of workaholics headed home, stockbrokers and lawyers and commodity traders, people who worked until dark each day to justify their salaries, seemingly for no reason other than to buy yachts which they could find time to use only once a year. Hamsters.
I didn’t have a yacht. Didn’t have much, in fact, other than an expensive downtown condo, a closet filled with cameras and lenses, an extensive collection of photography books, and the kind of expensive but minimalist furnishings that you set up to warn visitors that they’re now in the presence of Good Taste, just as the condo proclaimed that I was a Major Photographer, a success in a field in which most people survive, perforce, on ramen noodles. I was never one to accumulate things, mostly because with the life I led I had no time for them. The place was basically empty. I had spent twenty-two years on the hamster wheel for this.
Now, I was no longer a major photographer, at least, not in the current sense. Now I was a legacy. And it didn’t matter how hard I jammed my tongue into that bloody mess of gums. I didn’t feel a thing. I was done and that was fine by me.
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