“The truth now,” he whispers to me. “Tell me what you see.”
I feel Conrad staring at me, hear him say, “Nothing there, Troy. Nothing.”
I gaze down at an empty road, scraped raw by grader blades, patches of earth seeping a greasy dampness. A burr of murky light bristles on the horizon.
“Just a road,” I say. My own voice sounds weird to me, like it’s coming from a ventriloquist’s dummy.
“But roads don’t just happen,” coaxes the old man gently.
“No.”
“So tell me, who else is in the photograph?”
It’s no different from staring into the blank television screen. The snow shifting, forming faces of famous people locked in the circuitry from old programs. The hiss of static turning into favourite songs, guitar chords whining and dying.
“He’s playing head games with us, Troy,” Conrad warns. “Fuck him. Fucking lunatic. Fucking crazy old coot.”
The old man leans in very close to me; I feel his alpaca sweater brushing the hairs on my bare arm. It’s like static electricity. “Tell the truth,” he murmurs. “Who do you see?”
I hold my breath, and then I say it. “You.”
“Yes,” says the old man. When he does, I sense Conrad rising to his feet, sense his shadow staggering between the two of us.
“And my head. What do you see above my head?”
“Enough of this shit, Troy,” Conrad says.
I look at the picture, the old man’s shaky finger guiding me to the pale grey froth on the horizon. He rests it there, the phantom light crowning his nail.
“Light.”
“The aura.”
“The aura,” I repeat numbly after him.
Conrad boots the album out of my hand, sends it flying across the room, pages flapping. The old man and I dare not lift our heads. We just sit there, listening to the ragged sound of Conrad’s breathing. It goes on a long time before he says, “You think I don’t know what you’re up to, Troy? Just don’t try to fuck with my head. Just don’t.”
The old man and I sit with bowed heads, listening to Conrad and Finty pass through the house, their voices getting louder, more confident the closer they get to the back door. Then it slams, and the old man’s head jerks up as if it were attached to the door by a wire. Conrad and Finty hoot outside. I listen to their voices fade away, and then I realize the old man is talking to me.
“I knew you were the one to tell me the truth. I knew it at the back door when I saw all that generous light coming …” He pauses, touches my head. “Coming from here.”
And I’m up and running through the house, colliding with a lamp, moving so fast the sound of breaking glass seems to have nothing to do with me. Out the screen door, hurdling my stolen bike, clearing the broken spokes, the twisted wheel rims that Finty and Conrad have stomped. I’m running, my scalp prickling with tiny flames, I feel them, the flames creeping down the nape of my neck, licking at my collar, breathing hotly into my ears.
And Jimi, two months from being dead, is out there in front of me, stage lights snared in his hair, a burning, beckoning bush. And a young road builder is standing on a blank, unfinished road, his head blooming pale grey fire.
And here I am, running through the late-afternoon stillness of an empty suburban street, sucked down it faster than my legs can carry me, this hollow, throaty roar of fire in my head, that tiny point on the horizon drawing me to where the sun is either coming up or going down. Which, I have no idea.
Tick Tock
CHARLEY BREWSTER’S HANDS hadn’t given him a moment’s grief for nearly forty years, had behaved themselves, and then, after the young couple moved into the apartment next door, they began to torment him relentlessly.
His first encounter with his new neighbours occurred during a pillow-ripper of a blizzard, the air thick with fluffy flakes that stuck to everything they touched, tarring and feathering Brewster from head to toe as he trudged home. In a brief pause in the wind, the heavy snowfall thinned, and he caught a glimpse of a moving van parked in front of The Marlborough. A comically mismatched pair, one resembling an elf in a ski jacket, the other a gorilla in a parka, was struggling to wrestle some large, unwieldy article into the lobby of the building. A strong gust set the snow seething again and the duo vanished, swallowed up in a white whirlwind. Brewster lowered his head into his collar and plodded on.
When he reached his building, he saw the movers were a young couple unloading a U-Haul. A waif-like bit of a girl, grimly latched on to one end of a mattress, threw him a despairing, hopeless look, enormous brown eyes swimming with tears. Her partner, furiously shoving and jerking the other end of the mattress, had his back to him, and all he could make out of the man was a grotesquely swollen torso and a massive column of neck that tapered into a shaved head shaped like the nose cone of a missile.
Bodybuilder, Brewster thought. Then added and prick to his snap assessment when a ferocious, eggplant-purple face swung round on him, shot him a hostile glare before swivelling back to the wife, girlfriend, whoever she might be. “How many times do I have to say it?” the man hissed at her. “Back straight, lift with your goddamn legs!”
She strained unsuccessfully. Brewster asked if he could lend a hand. The man muttered something that he didn’t catch, but the tone made his meaning clear. Piss off. Mind your own business.
With a shrug, Brewster sidled past the two, took the elevator, his toe tapping the floor with annoyance. He had no doubt about where those two were headed, the suite adjacent to his, a one-bedroom that had been standing empty ever since old Mrs. Carpenter had keeled over mixing pancakes on a cold, bright Sunday morning six weeks before. The gossipy super had reported that he had found her with a wooden spoon clenched in her hand, her face freckled with dried batter.
Brewster suddenly found himself deeply regretting the old lady’s demise.
He let himself into his apartment, stowed his dripping boots and coat, poured a Scotch, and wandered over to the balcony doors. Across the river, the lights of the Arts Tower burned wistfully in the midst of the falling snow, feeble sparks nestled in a bed of white ash.
He was doing his best not to let the young fellow’s rudeness get to him, doing his best not to obsess on what sharp-tongued comebacks he might have unleashed. He recognized his tendency to brood and was trying to keep things in perspective by reminding himself how little a sullen neighbour really counted when weighed against all the advantages living in The Marlborough offered.
One, his apartment was within easy walking distance of campus, a big bonus since he didn’t own a car. Two, its rents were high enough to keep out university students and their party-hearty habits, but not so pricey as to be beyond the means of someone who, after thirty years, was still stuck at the rank of assistant professor. Three, the majority of the residents were sedate retirees who lent the building an atmosphere that Brewster appreciated, gave it the air of a waiting room in a sleepy train station in some black and white movie of the 1940s, a place where people spoke in polite, hushed voices, where everyone minded his own business as they patiently awaited their moment of departure.
There had been a time when he had avoided acknowledging that, above all, it was the sleepy train station ambience that had decided him The Marlborough was the place to hang his hat. What he told people was that he believed that living downtown near restaurants, galleries, delis, and cinemas would keep a man in late middle age a little fresher, extend his shelf life. But the truth was he seldom stuck his nose into any of these places. Most of his evenings were lullingly the same. He had a few drinks, ate a microwave dinner off his coffee table, marked papers, fiddled with the next day’s lectures, then watched sports on TV or listlessly skimmed a novel. The only books he cracked nowadays were ones he had read before. Knowing what was going to happen, how things were going to grope their way to their inevitable end, gave him a gratifying sense of omniscience.
But that night it proved difficult for Brewster to slide into his usual
groove. No sooner had he finished dinner than a series of jarring hoots coming from the hallway prompted him to picture a crew of no-neck, slope-shouldered gym apes arriving on the scene to help their iron-pumping buddy set up house. A leaden-footed clumping to and from the elevator, a series of hollow booms, and loud clunks from next door put him further on edge. Next, the telltale heart of a boom box’s bass began an aggressive thumping, a beat to get the movers’ blood up, to whip them into even more energetic feats of furniture tossing.
It wasn’t until midnight that the noise subsided and the last boisterous goodbyes echoed the length of the fourth floor. Peace descended and Brewster took himself off to bed.
He woke to a high-pitched yelping, the hysterical yap of a puppy entangled in its leash. His first bewildered, wandering thought was, But The Marlborough is a pet-free building. He flopped over on his side and peered into the radiant face of the alarm clock. Three a.m.
The frantic cries abruptly ended. Or maybe he had only dreamed them. But then a hoarse bellowing started next door. Brewster sprang out of bed and padded into the living room, where an enraged bawling set his heart anxiously chugging in his chest. The sort of noise that a bull on the killing floor of a slaughterhouse might make, it definitely qualified as a 9-1-1-category din.
Brewster flicked on the living room light, picked up the phone, and was on the point of dialing emergency when everything suddenly went silent in his neighbours’ apartment. He pressed his ear to the wall. Faint sounds of movement could be detected over there, a series of sub-aquatic, muffled bumps of the kind that you heard swimming underwater in a pool.
He waited, minutes ticking by. Nothing. He unstuck his ear from the wall, perched himself on the edge of the sofa in uncertain vigilance. So what now? What’s the drill, the etiquette of reporting a disturbance after the disturbance has ended? Officer, those two were carrying on like crazed beasts over there. Sure, the zoo’s gone quiet now, but I think you ought to roust them out of bed, issue a stern warning that any more disturbances of that sort won’t be tolerated.
How would that fly with the cops? Well, he was pretty sure it wouldn’t, as you might say, soar. He would be written off as a pesky wing nut, a busybody prosecuting a feud with his neighbours.
Maybe he’d got it all wrong. Maybe what he’d heard was a housewarming fuck. The date of possession carnally celebrated. But no, that yipping had had a fearful, pleading note to it, had sounded just the way that girl’s face had looked when her partner had been chewing her out for her lack of oomph with the mattress.
There was a time when Brewster would have shot over there to confront the situation head-on, but now he was a little more cautious, prudent. Besides, the current wisdom seemed to be that even though people had an obligation to report domestic disputes, they had no business trying to intervene in them. That was irresponsible and inflammatory, that was pouring gas on a conflagration. These days even the cops tiptoed onto the family battlefield with extreme caution, wary of getting blown off some wife-beater’s doorstep. So after considerable mental hemming and hawing, Brewster finally slunk back to bed, only to pass the rest of the night wide awake, alert for sounds of trouble.
Locking his door the next morning, he spotted the young couple entering the elevator. They were holding hands like honeymooners, a sight that lightened Brewster’s good-citizen’s conscience, but his relief was almost instantly replaced by a surge of annoyance at the loss of a good night’s sleep. “Hey,” he called out, “hold that elevator!” But just two steps short of the elevator, the doors slid shut on the smirking face of Mr. Muscles. The fucker had deliberately punched the button on him. Brewster was convinced of it. What was the message there?
Waiting for the elevator to clank back up to the fourth floor, Brewster wondered if Eva, who during the year he’d been seeing her had increasingly claimed the right to direct the improvement of his character, behaviour, and demeanour, wasn’t right when she claimed that his face was an open book, that whatever he was thinking was written all over it. One glance at his mug might have been enough to alert the button-puncher he was about to catch some blowback for creating all that racket the night before.
Down in the lobby he ran his eyes over the bank of mailboxes. The super loved his label gun and had already replaced Mrs. Carpenter’s name with the names of the new occupants: Dina and Melvyn Janacek. At least if there was any more uproar chez Janacek, he wouldn’t have to risk challenging steroid-charged Melvyn face to face. He would be able to get his number from information, call him up, and read him the riot act. That is, if the Janaceks were listed. Maybe they didn’t even have a landline. A lot of people their age didn’t.
Bleary-eyed, he spent the morning plowing through first-year English essays. After several hours of scrawling extensive suggestions to his students on how to improve their essay-writing skills, tips that would be inevitably and blithely ignored, Brewster began to experience something akin to writer’s cramp, twinges of discomfort that went scurrying up and down the tendons of his right hand. Soon he was feeling discomfort in his left hand too, as if some instrument like a darning hook was plucking at the nerves. This defied explanation since he was not using that hand at all; it simply lay quietly at rest on his desktop.
His first class was at eleven o’clock. As he lectured, the joints of his fingers grew noticeably more painful, began to involuntarily, spasmodically clench and unclench. The students had spotted this bizarre tic and were obviously fascinated by it in a way they had never been fascinated by anything he had had to say about American literature.
At noon, the weight of the lunch on his cafeteria tray made him wince when he lifted it. By early afternoon, a dull, unremitting background ache had lodged in the bones of his hand, broken by sudden bursts of acute, electric pain, as if a file was sawing on them. The intensity of these symptoms worried Brewster; he began to wonder if maybe some sort of esoteric virus wasn’t running amok in his body. Deciding that he needed to see a doctor, he rang up the university hospital’s clinic. Somebody had cancelled an appointment and there was an opening at three o’clock.
After manipulating and probing his hands, the doctor asked a few impatient questions, wrote out an order for X-rays and a prescription for Tylenol 3, and told him to book another appointment. The receptionist was able to squeeze him in on the upcoming Friday. Brewster had the X-rays taken and the prescription filled in the hospital pharmacy, went directly home, swallowed two Tylenols, stretched out on the sofa, and watched his hands do a spastic dance on his sternum.
He had always prided himself on his high pain threshold, but that threshold seemed to have shrunk to a pitiful nothing. The medication was giving him no relief; the agony kept looping in his hands like some gruesome CD track programmed to endlessly repeat itself.
Turning on the TV, Brewster muted the sound and stared blankly at the screen. The local news was just concluding when he heard the Janaceks out in the corridor shrilly arguing over which one of them had been responsible for paying a bill. Their door clapped shut with a gunshot-like crack.
He lay there urging himself to get a grip, get his ass off the sofa, and hustle up something to eat, but anything besides lying there and riding out the pain felt beyond him.
Next door the dispute was escalating, the volume rising.
“Please, Melvyn. Please, Dina, not tonight, kids,” Brewster murmured. “Give it a rest.”
Melvyn was telling Dina how he was going to fuck her up but good if she didn’t shut her mouth. Dina was daring him to Go ahead, big man. Do it, just do it.
Melvyn did it. Something collided with the wall that separated the two apartments with enough impact to send Brewster’s print of Scafell Pike, a souvenir of a walking tour he had taken in the Lake District thirty years ago, crashing to the floor.
He snatched up the phone, dialed information. They had no listing for any Janacek at that address. He called the building superintendent but got no answer, only his voicemail. All avenues of redress blocked, he sta
ggered to his feet and roared, “What in the name of Christ is going on over there!”
And received Melvyn Janacek’s prompt reply: “Mind your own business! Fuck off!”
He called 9-1-1. Ten minutes later the police arrived, a male corporal and a burly female constable. Brewster explained to the officers that he suspected Melvyn Janacek of bouncing his wife off walls. With each bit of incriminating evidence he provided, the policewoman fondled the nightstick slung in her belt a little more eagerly. God bless you, thought Brewster, you’re itching to use that billy club, aren’t you? Here’s hoping he tells you to fuck off too. Here’s hoping one thing leads to another and that he finds himself on the receiving end of a righteous smackdown.
The cops left to question the Janaceks. Twenty minutes later they were back. The corporal informed Brewster that Dina Janacek had assured them that everything was just fine; she couldn’t guess what their neighbour had thought he had heard. Her husband hadn’t touched her.
“Well, I’m no expert on the psychology of this, but isn’t that typical of a victim of abuse? Isn’t that what women often do? I mean, protect the abuser?”
“I saw no indications of physical harm. Constable Ramage here took Ms. Janacek aside and questioned her privately and she repeated her claim that she had not been subjected to violence.”
“Okay, what about that?” Brewster was now appealing directly to Constable Ramage, hoping to get a more sympathetic hearing from a female ear. Stabbing his finger at poor Scafell Pike, forlorn on the floor and surrounded by splintered glass, he said, “If he didn’t toss her into the wall, what knocked that down?”
Constable Ramage hooked her thumbs in her belt. Brewster suddenly realized that now she was annoyed with him. “I have no idea. But there’s something else that came up when we were interviewing Mr. Janacek. He said somebody keyed his car. Said to ask you about that.”
Daddy Lenin and Other Stories Page 2