The Coward

by Jarred McGinnis

  Jack watched, shaking his head and smiling.

  ‘Important business meeting today. Got to look the part. My project is being reviewed. It could mean that head of regional sales position in Topeka I’ve been gunning for.’

  ‘Are you talking horseshit?’

  ‘Mostly. I did the webpage and graphic design for this new service the company is launching and the project is being reviewed today.’

  He looked unsure. His eyes looked around, anywhere but at me.

  ‘Are you still getting pains?’ I was worried about Jack and knew he wasn’t telling me the whole story.

  ‘Yes, and I’m seeing a doctor next week. That’s not it, though. I want to say I’m proud of you.’

  My eyes teared up and it was my turn to avoid eye contact.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I’m sure I’ll figure out a way to screw it up soon enough.’

  ‘That’s my boy,’ he joked.

  When I arrived at the office, Bruce examined my outfit and hair without comment.

  ‘How’d the review go? Did they like my stuff?’ I asked.

  Bruce turned around. He looked disappointed.

  ‘What? Did I do something wrong?’

  Bruce typed a few sentences in an email and clicked send.

  ‘Bruce. Jesus, don’t leave me hanging. What did they say?’

  ‘They were very happy with your work.’

  ‘Great. But what?’

  ‘Let’s go for a walk.’

  ‘Are you breaking up with me?’

  Bruce marched past. We walked through the parking garage and followed a dirt path on the other side. Bruce turned to see if I was managing but didn’t say anything. As we followed the path, Bruce picked up stones and shoved them into his pockets until they were bulging obscenely.

  At the path’s end, erosion from rain and run-off formed a miniature Grand Canyon. Channels had cut through the layered topsoil making valleys and crooked fingers of ridges and escarpments. A grey tree stump rested ten feet down at the bottom. The centre rings had rotted out.

  Bruce emptied a pocket of rocks and handed me one. He threw his rock into the stump’s hollowed centre. It clacked against the stones already inside and bounced out.

  ‘That still counts,’ he said.

  I threw a stone, but it flew wide.

  We took turns. When I had hit the mark, we nodded to each other.

  ‘When they built the office, they cut all the trees out,’ Bruce said. ‘Then this started to happen. The erosion will slowly work its way up that path and they’ll have to spend millions making sure the parking garage doesn’t drop into the hole like the stump. I told them that would happen.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘The project is finished. You’re fired. I tried to get them to hire you as permanent, but they said no. They are required to pay a release fee to the agency and they don’t want to. I’m sorry. We finished ahead of schedule. You could have had another month of work.’

  Bruce thrust out his hand. I shook it.

  ‘You did a good job, but you need a degree. This is how companies think. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Don’t be. Erosion shall be my revenge.’ I smiled.

  Bruce looked out over the yellow scar of dirt.

  ‘Yes. Revenge.’

  We shook hands again and I went to the Filling Station coffee shop.

  ‘I’ve been laid off,’ I said to Sarah.

  ‘That sucks,’ Sarah said, clearing a table. ‘How about a free coffee?’ She tucked loose strands of hair behind her ear. Jack was right.

  ‘Do you want to go on a date with a jobless loser?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be the first time.’

  ‘Did I mention that I don’t have a car and I live at home with my dad?’

  ‘Are you already married with kids? Or gay? Those tend to be the guys I fall for. What time do you want me to pick you up?’

  35

  At Elysium, a secure psychiatric unit for adolescents, our days began by lining up for a small paper cup. Mine held 600mg of lithium: pink pills with a metallic taste that gave the edges of my thoughts a down-feather softness.

  As we waited for the counsellors to give us our prescriptions and check under our tongues, I bitched along with my fellow inpatients. I grumbled and complained, but the truth of it was being an inpatient was the summer camp kids like me never got. I happily did as I was told and played all their therapy games. When the unit was decorated with curses, screams or thrown chairs, my hands would shake with memory, but the bruises were no longer mine. Except once.

  Aster was permanently locked in the time-out room and could never be left alone. She wanted to die. The irritant of living inflamed her every cell. Veteran inpatients traded Aster stories like baseball cards and, after I was there for a week, I got my own, a rookie all-star one.

  I was padding past the time-out room when its door exploded open. Aster slammed her square body into mine and sent me bouncing off the wall. Counsellor Andy was on the floor. He’d torn her hospital gown trying to stop her and the loaf of her right breast hung out. She wheeled around and stared murder at Counsellor Andy then opened her mouth like a sword swallower and stabbed at the back of her throat with a toothbrush. She stabbed. She stabbed again. A fountain of vomit and blood erupted. Counsellor Andy tackled her and wrestled with her slippery limbs as Aster thumped her fists against his chest and cheek.

  I met Fritz later that day, a skeleton with a fading blue Mohawk hanging over one eye. He was sitting cross-legged and whispering at the seam of Aster’s door. A ‘Caution: Slippery When Wet’ sign marked the freshly mopped spot of her suicide attempt.

  ‘Is group now?’ he asked.

  I nodded, and we walked to the day room, sitting across from each other as everyone took turns doing daily personal inventories: how we felt, what we wanted to accomplish in our therapy sessions and stating a positive word for the day.

  My word for the day was ‘enthuse’.

  While Bulimic Carol spoke, an acid casualty, Redneck Ian, took out his glass eye and stuck it in his mouth. Fritz and I were the only ones to have noticed, and we traded smiles. Ian parted his lips, and the eye moved toward Carol who was reminding herself that she was beautiful, she was a princess. The glass pupil slowly surveyed the rest of the group. I tittered and its gaze snapped to me.

  ‘Shh. Carol is sharing now. You had your turn,’ Counsellor Kate admonished.

  Fritz giggled, and the eye watched him.

  ‘Oh my god!’ Carol screamed.

  ‘Ian!’ Counsellor Kate yelled.

  The eye spun in its mouth-socket then disappeared. Ian gulped. The mid-schooler named Tracey, who always cried in her AA meetings, squealed.

  ‘Ma’am, I swallowed my eye.’

  Counsellor Kate stood up, panicked.

  ‘Just kidding.’ He spat it into his hand.

  ‘Ian! You apologise to Carol for this interruption,’ Counsellor Kate said.

  ‘Ma’am, I was just giving it a wash. My eye gets right dirty. It’s all the porn.’

  Everyone in the circle laughed.

  Counsellor Kate led Ian away, lecturing him about the sacredness of the group circle.

  ‘I don’t think this should interrupt our therapy session, do you?’ Fritz said. ‘My positive word for today is “Papadopoulos”.’ He pointed to me – ‘Enthuse’ then himself – ‘Papadopoulos.’

  For weeks we were inseparable. Fritz, a couple years older than me, knew about the things I wanted to know: Church of the SubGenius, G.G. Allin and the Murder Junkies, The Anarchist Cookbook. Everything important to a fifteen-year-old who longed to be cool rather than strange.

  When you are inpatient, it’s easy to get to know another person. The doctors and nurses and other inpatients define you. You trade diagnoses with handshakes. Prescription lists are your business cards. The disease they hand you becomes your identity: Bulimic Carol, Alcoholic Tracey, Bipolar Me. Outside the facility, I had never had the comfortable certainty of having all the �
�because of’s spelled out.

  I was inpatient because of self-harming and psychotic episodes, because of the death of my mother and because of the years of physical abuse by my alcoholic father.

  Fritz was inpatient because of drugs, because of falling in love with an older man named Jerry, because of his dad molesting him. Fritz didn’t believe in ‘because of’.

  Fritz explained the way we were: ‘From the weight of pain, we singing diamonds are made.’ I never asked him what he meant, because I needed it to be true.

  I told Fritz everything and told him truly. He wasn’t interested in fixing his own life, but he knew what to say to make me want to improve mine. His room was across from mine. Sitting cross-legged in our doorways and chewing his nicotine gum, we talked to each other until lights out.

  ‘What was all that yelling about today? I heard you. Don’t take it out on your dad,’ he said. Fritz’s minty nicotine talks did more for me than the pink pills or Counsellor Andy’s nine-to-five concern. It was another month of wait-and-see and I needed it.

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘You bottle up everything and pretend like nothing hurts you. You take on all this guilt until you explode. He’s trying to help you, your dad. How many times have you been in time-out this week?’

  Fritz and I were playing Slap Hand in the hallway. His hands, long and eloquent, rested lightly on top of mine. Counsellor Andy came up to us and seemed pissed off.

  ‘Fritz, Aster is asking for you.’

  ‘Can I go in or do you have to strap her down?’

  Counsellor Andy gave him a look like he should know the answer to that and continued down the hall.

  Fritz took my hand and led me to Aster’s door. We sat cross-legged before it. Fritz leaned close to the seam. ‘Aster?’

  A moan, achingly slow, an infectious sadness with it, came from under the heavy door. A sniffle. She was crying.

  ‘Aster, you are the gathering of darkness against which they shut their doors and light their fires. But those who dance beneath you naked and unafraid shall see your multitude of stars.’

  ‘Fritz?’ Aster’s voice asked.

  ‘I’m right here. Go to sleep. I’m watching over you.’

  I opened my mouth. Fritz put his finger to his lips. We sat there quietly for a few minutes.

  ‘What happens to her when you leave?’ I whispered. Fritz had seven days left. He had been in for the full ninety they gave druggies compared to the thirty days they gave me for being just crazy.

  ‘I don’t want to think about that,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll be out a week after you. We should hang out.’

  Aster moaned Fritz’s name.

  Fritz nodded, but he shushed me again before leaning in to whisper at Aster’s door.

  A couple days later, we were at the day-room window, waving manically at the pedestrians below and, if they waved back, we licked the window and pretended to masturbate. It didn’t take long for Counsellor Kate to stop our game but, instead of calling us both into her office, she told Fritz to follow her. We didn’t see each other for the rest of the day and, after dinner, I sat in my doorway waiting until lights out.

  I cornered him the next morning. ‘I need to talk to you. Meet me in the day room.’

  ‘I’m late for my appointment with Dr. What’s-his-face. You should talk to Kate.’

  In a world that consisted of locked rooms, two hallways, a nurses’ station, a day room and occasionally a yard with a high fence, it was difficult to avoid a person. Fritz managed to avoid me very well until his discharge day. When he tried to say goodbye, I told him to fuck off.

  After he left, I moped around for a few days, which earned me an increase in dosage.

  ‘Hey, hey, boy,’ Aster’s voice called from the time-out room.

  Two crescents of eye white appeared in the slit window.

  ‘Hey, hey, boy. Fritz loved you.’

  ‘Aster, please get away from the window,’ a voice said from within the room.

  The crescents disappeared.

  ‘Fuck you, fuck you, motherfucker,’ Aster said.

  36

  Everything about Sarah’s house was a home, a single-storey 1930s Craftsman style, pale green with forest green for trimming. A postcard for this street would have Sarah’s house at its centre. Children would be playing baseball watched by a golden retriever and a dad watering his lawn. The card would read ‘Wish You Were Here’ and mean it. Beneath the eaves, the entire front of the house was a deep porch. A table with chairs was on one side of the door and a swing bench on the other. The broad steps up were lined with clay pots full of blue flowers cowed by the heat. An oak tree, stately and in full leaf, shaded the house. Its shallow roots had cut through the decades-old sidewalk; it reminded me of travelling through Canada as a roadie for a friend’s band and stopping to watch a frozen river break up.

  As Sarah pulled into the driveway beside the house, I thought about those steps and the inevitable awkwardness of having to be carried up them.

  She pulled the emergency brake. I sat embarrassed as she pulled my chair out of the trunk. Clunk. She slotted a wheel into place. Clunk.

  She knocked on my window.

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Yeah, just drifted off.’ I locked my wheels, transferred over, adjusted my feet, fixed my pants, and didn’t make eye contact.

  ‘We’ll go through the back,’ she said.

  As we passed a window on the side of the house, she rapped the pane. From inside a tinny high-pitched voice howled with unrestrained child’s glee. At the back of the house, her mother stood at the top of a long wooden ramp. I was surprised as much as relieved that I wasn’t going to be dragged upstairs.

  ‘Hello, Jarred.’ Her mom’s eyes had the same mischief as Sarah’s. Her hair was short with blonde highlights.

  ‘Oooh. That’s beautiful.’

  ‘It’s Jack the grumpy orchid. Jarred gave it to me,’ Sarah said.

  ‘My dad grows them.’

  ‘It’s beautiful for a grumpy orchid. Well, Jarred, I hope you’re hungry.’ Sarah’s mom moved her hands and spoke as if she was signing a demagogue’s speech and not describing the recipe she found online for potatoes, assuring Sarah it was vegan-friendly. Sarah’s dad appeared.

  ‘Hello, Jarred. Welcome to our home.’ Her dad spoke like the host of a children’s tv show. I bristled, thinking he was being patronising, but it was how he spoke to Sarah and his wife. It was a voice of patience and kindness and seemed ill-fitting on a broad-shouldered man well over six feet. He was bald with a neat copper-flecked white beard.

  ‘I hope you’re hungry,’ he said.

  The house had a hallway for a spine, crammed with photos, paintings and shelves filled with knick-knacks. A handrail ran the length of the hall. The air was filled with the promises of cooking onions, roast chicken and potatoes. Every room we passed was painted a different colour. I felt at ease in this house amongst this family.

  ‘That’s my room,’ Sarah said as we passed one with eggplant walls and a messy bed.

  ‘That’s my dad’s office. He’s an architect.’ The back wall was all window, the desk and computer sat before the view of a vegetable garden. Shelves of books hid the oyster-shell walls.

  ‘This is my brother Marco’s room.’ She pointed to the closed door.

  She knocked.

  ‘Sarah! Come in!’ The voice pronounced the words with a deaf person’s imprecision.

  We entered a room of sky blue. By the window in a hospital bed an unshaven face lit up on seeing Sarah. The sunken, wet eyes were huge in their sockets. He had the tight skin and lips of an unwrapped mummy. He stretched his arms, opening and closing his hands.

  ‘Sarah,’ he squeaked.

  ‘Marky Marco.’ She took his hand into hers and kissed his fingers.

  ‘Sarah.’

  ‘This is Jarred,’ Sarah said.

  Marco held out his hand. I took it and gave it a shake. A tiny tremor of pressure and I und
erstood he wanted to pull me closer. He struggled to lift himself. I hugged the shirtless Marco, felt the thin soft flesh stretched across sharp scapulas, the knotted rope of vertebrae and ribs. The feverous heat. The skull rested heavy on my shoulder. I wanted to weep but I wasn’t sure why.

  ‘Nice to meet you, Marco.’

  He formed a smile, teeth bared from a flash of pain he didn’t name.

  Sarah talked to him and he nodded unsteadily, blinking tears, limbs tremoring. I looked about the room: shelves of latex gloves, stacks of diapers, boxes marked sterile and an angry red plastic container stamped ‘Biohazard’. A cabinet-sized dialysis machine of tubes and buttons, a 1970s vision of the future, sat beside the bed. An old and battered wheelchair, not intended for the punishment of the outside world, waited in the corner.

  ‘Bye, Marco. Nice to meet you,’ I said.

  In the dining room, Sarah’s mother and father were setting the table.

  ‘Dinner won’t be long now,’ her mother said.

  A screech came from Marco’s room. I looked at Sarah, afraid something was wrong.

  ‘He’s singing along to the radio. He’s obsessed with R&B. I think that’s En Vogue.’

  ‘That’s TLC,’ her dad said, putting a bottle of wine on the table.

  The screech came again.

  ‘See,’ her dad said and sang along with the chorus. Sarah, her dad and mom were all smiling. I didn’t know what was wrong with Marco, if he was going improve or for how much longer he would live. But there in that moment, the entire universe shrank to this family listening to the high-pitched off-key singing of a pop song and despite everything, right there right then nothing was wrong. Nothing was wrong at all.

  After the food was delivered to the table, Sarah’s mom barely sat down before she popped up for something else. She was either dishing out more food or getting napkins or checking on Marco. Sarah only ate the vegetables. After the meal, we were in the kitchen, wrapping leftovers, washing or drying dishes. Sarah’s dad gave pecks on the cheek to Sarah’s mom and thanked her for a fantastic meal.