“What is it?”
I kept my face away, but she’d know anyway. “Give me a minute.”
Her warm hand on the back of my neck, curious, but protective and reassuring. Her lips and a kids’ joke close to my ear. “What did the Englishman say to the two-headed giant?”
“I’m twenty-eight years old,” I said. Too old and too young.
“ ’Ello ’ello.”
The following Sunday there was a message from Kevin Lock on our answering machine, inviting me and Kendra to a slide show in the basement of his grandmother’s house in Millgrove Township. Kevin had been away for almost a year, first in India and later in Nepal. Kendra was reluctant to commit. C’est Ça was closed on Sundays and we generally had dinner with her parents on that night. Plus she wouldn’t know anyone and she wasn’t able to drink. She’d met Kevin once or twice when we’d first got ten together, when my old tribe was less scattered than it was now, but she might feel like a stranger, she said. I secretly hoped she’d stay behind.
“Does it matter to you if I come?” she asked me.
“Of course it matters.”
Kevin’s parents had both died in a car accident when we were kids and he moved to Millgrove after that, to live with his grandparents, but he kept going to school in Hamilton. He took the Greyhound back and forth, like an adult. Sleepovers at his house were as good as visiting the moon. His grandparents lived on a small acreage surrounded by potato farms, a fifteen-minute walk from where the bus let us off on the high way. Things that were unthinkable in the city were routine here: hundreds of newts rising and sinking in the cavern of a flooded culvert, the yipping of coyotes at night, and the sense, really, that just beyond the trees at the end of the farm across from Kevin’s place – the furthest we could see from his bedroom window – was a gasping wilderness where feral dogs ran down unfortunate wanderers and chewed them into un recognizable piles of bone and hair.
We’d stayed friends through high school and university, but it was those mornings, always winter in my mind, which were the zenith of our time together. At least that’s how it is looking back on it. The line that Kevin lived on was gravel and the snow accumulated in bowed drifts on both sides of it. The wind coming off the fields was bitterly cold and I’d wrap my scarf around my face, breathing through the damp weave of the wool. At the end was the warmth of the bus, and all of those grown-ups facing forwards. We’d take our seats and the driver would pull away from the slushy curb where we’d been waiting. He’d always say, where will it be today, boys? New York, sir. Africa, sir. Atlantis, sir.
We arrived late and rang the doorbell at Kevin’s grandmother’s house in twilight. Kevin was at least ten pounds lighter, had the drawn look of someone just recovered from an illness. His hair was long and he wore a thick shirt open at the neck, a loose string of yellow beads prominently dangling. He said hello to us at the door, kissing Kendra on both cheeks and taking my outstretched hand and holding it between both of his in welcome. He’d been to eastern monasteries and he had the hat to prove it.
“I thought Buddha would be fatter,” Kendra whispered to me when we were all settled in the darkened basement.
“He’s sucking it in,” I said. Whoever else could make it was there. Peter Bell was with a man I didn’t know. Calvin May was stretched out regally, occupying an entire sofa by himself. Kevin’s younger brother Robbie had graduated high school in the spring and still lived with Granny Lock. Since he’d been only four when his parents died, Robbie had simply gone to the local Millgrove schools his whole life. He was pure Millgrove. He had bad skin and lumbered around in long hair and a rasta tam with a resigned and crazy authority.
At the back of the room, manning the projector, was Ajla, the woman Kevin had brought back with him from Nepal. Though there was a fire in the woodstove and the basement was very warm, Ajla was wearing an elfish woollen hat with beaded flaps flipped up from her ears and a bent Suessian peak. She’d wedged her long body yogi-like behind a table in the rear of the room. The cord for the slide projector disappeared under her legs and arms, compacted into a knot under the table. She watched the proceedings with eyes so soporifically heavy and unblinking that she seemed to be sleeping with eyes open until Kevin asked her for a new slide and apparently without movement the machine was engaged and the picture advanced.
Kevin stood at the front, beside the images projected on the white wall and narrated through a series of photographs. “There,” he said – and the shadow of his unwavering finger hung across a white sweep of mountain. “This is taken from halfway up the pass and the little blur here is a cow who’d hurt its leg. The shepherds were leaving it behind but tying prayer flags to its tail to keep predators away. It was just being tortured by the dogs nipping at it while it hobbled around.”
“I could ea-ea-eat a fuh-fucking cow at the present moment,” said Robbie Lock. “That I could do.”
“Quiet, Robbie,” said Kevin.
“Yes, put a sock in it, Robbie. Filthy,” said Granny Lock.
Granny Lock’s yellow mutt, Sam, was parked between Robbie’s thighs with a nose up on his lap and Robbie was digging ferociously into the fur behind his head then rolling Sam’s long, soft ears up and down with his fingers.
The slide machine rolled forward and forward and forward.
“This is the Abeneri step well in Rajasthan …”
“This is the restaurant at the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary …”
“This is a group of men gathered around an asphalt cutter in Kathmandu …”
“And this is the gompa at the Root Institute in Dharamsala, about a week before His Holiness the Karmapa Lama arrived. This is where we lived for eight weeks.”
Kevin’s voice took on an annoying tone, soggily nostalgic as if stunned with beatitude. The term “His Holiness” hung unnaturally in the air like a puff of burnt kitchen grease.
“I could eat a fucking asphalt cutter.”
“Robbie!”
Kendra grumbled beside me.
There was a soft “huh” noise from the back of the room – like a sup pressed sneeze – and the woman, Ajla, shifted in her position behind the slide machine.
“Press the button again, Aj’?”
Calvin May, for sure, but the rest of us also, snuck glances at Ajla when we could. Because there was more to her than just a trip to Nepal. She’d been in Dubrovnik when the Serbs laid siege and had been smuggled out by boat, bereft of everything but a bundle of money stitched into the sole of her shoe and her father’s platinum cufflinks in her stomach. So Kevin’s letter had said. She’d seen terrible things. Her body was scarred. There was a pink ridge riding up from the back of her neck like two lines of plasticine pressed together. I wondered if this continued up into her scalp and interrupted the growth of hair there and so she was shy to go hatless. She was a real live girl from the war.
“So this is Kopan abbey,” said Kevin and paused. The photo was of an ugly wall with several westerners dressed incongruously in the saffron robes of Buddhist monks and posing for the camera. There was a sign in the centre of the shot, a painted board that said, “Kindly refrain from killing stealing lying sexual contact and intoxicants.”
“We all took turns washing dishes.”
I remembered Kevin’s bed in grade seven – so stocked with pornography under the mattress that it had a noticeable arch. And his condom stealing pathology – the arms and legs of his grade six graduation suit puffed with hundreds of Trojans and Durex Superthins bound to live out their lonely years and expire in Kevin’s dark closet.
“We were here for three months. It changed my life. It really did.”
Afterwards, we wandered around the living room eating sliced gouda on pumpernickel squares and drinking whatever there was to drink. Peter Bell made strange small talk, quickly excused himself, and drove off with the man he had come with, back to his condominium in Toronto. “What happened to Peter?” Calvin said to me. “You’d think he was the boss at an office mingler – and since w
hen is he so out?”
I shook my head.
“He’s a prick,” said Calvin. “He’s always been a prick – he’s just a rich homo prick now.”
Kendra had settled into a sofa with her ginger ale and I glanced at her, made a show of rolling my eyes. We were having a silent war over the drink in my hand. She was irritated that she couldn’t and I could – that she was talking strollers with Granny Lock while I was being an asshole with Calvin May.
“The problem with Peter,” continued Calvin, “is that he’s not creative enough to enjoy his money. He’s rigid in his thinking. He knows everything there is to know about tax law but he learned everything else about life from men’s fashion magazines. And you,” Calvin poked a fin ger into my chest, “are no fucking better.”
“What?”
“God, man, the first time I’ve seen you out of the house in five months is at a freaking slide show. There’s not even a child yet. You’re deteriorating. You’re whacking off to Ikea catalogues.”
“Keep it down.” Calvin, drunk even before the first slide had been cast on the wall, was flinging arcs of saliva as he spoke.
He complied by draping an arm over my shoulder and steering us both to face the large picture window that looked over the farm next door but was now more a mirror on the living room. It was snowing lightly against the pane and so on us too, me and my friends, Robbie at the counter with a sloshing mug of pilfered Tio Pepe, Kevin and Kendra now on the couch behind a two-foot stack of photographs. Everyone there but everyone sitting also in the dim stubble of a corn field and paying no heed to the snow whirling all about us.
“You know,” said Calvin, “I always thought the first one of us to have a kid, do a wedding, would be Kevin, and look what he’s done. Ajla – did you see her slink off to the bedroom?”
Ajla had disappeared into Kevin’s bedroom immediately following the slide show and hadn’t come back out.
“She doesn’t speak, you know. She barely seems to move – just glides around one plane higher than everyone else.”
“Oh, come on, Calvin. She’s been through hell.”
“I know. I know it. The real deal.”
“It’s a Buddhist thing – a sort of vow of silence, or maybe between the bombs and the death, the gong ringing in the mountains, and then finding herself parked in front of a plate of fresh scones in a basement with a bunch of twits like you, she’s simply shell-shocked.”
‘ “Simply shell-shocked,’ ” Calvin mocked. He closed his eyes a moment and they circled up slowly in their purple sockets when they reopened. Calvin’s vaporous breath washed over me.
“Since when does Kevin give two shits about the Dalai Lama and his furry hat? It’s a fucking set-up – he’s done it to get into her pants. That scar must slip around her body like a freaking piece of lace. Kevin Lock. She doesn’t know Kevin Lock. Imagine. Lodged with her in a rocky monastery in the mountains. The whole thing gives me a hard-on of ses quipedalian proportions.”
“You incredible pig.”
“What? Me? You’re forgetting yourself. Who blew the hundred dollars his grandmother gave him on lap dances at O’Doul’s? Who kept Tammy Summers’s panties in a box in his sock drawer until he was nearly twenty? Will no one,” said Calvin, spinning around to face the room, “join me in a toast to the original pig and the Karmapa Lama?”
Robbie, from behind the sofa: “To the pa-pa-pa pig!”
Calvin passed out early on the couch in the basement and Granny Lock booted Robbie from his room so Kendra and I could spend the night. At eleven-thirty there was only me and Kevin and Granny Lock sitting around the table in the kitchen. Granny and I were polishing off the last of the sherry, but not Kevin – who said he’d sworn off booze for good in Nepal. He was doing the dishes.
“Isn’t that astonishing?” said Granny, clearly not buying it.
“I haven’t had a drink in seven months.”
Granny shot me a look.
“It’s the truth.”
Kevin’s sobriety was especially irritating under the kitchen’s blueing fluorescents. I wanted us to be in the living room, looking over the empty field.
“Remember,” I said, “those times, when we’d flood the garden over in the winter and we’d play shinny on the weekends with your neighbours? Piping Whitesnake out the window on a ghetto blaster.”
“Sure, yeah, of course,” joined Kevin, “Blasting Whitesnake with the Bevinses. But that was just that one year.”
“No. It feels like it was forever – like it was a whole world of time.”
“That’s the way of things.”
“Come on.”
“When Ajla and I went to an initiation in Dharamsala, His Holiness …”
“I have to tell you, Kev,” I said, “I can’t get used to this.”
“Well, it was very atmospheric. There were thousands of monks gathered on a field – and the rain and lammergeiers circling overhead in the greyness for hours. You have to imagine it. We ate under flapping plastic tarps and the great birds landed and pecked around us like geese. His Holiness forgot some of the items he needed for the ceremony – a scarf and a box – but he continued with the initiation without them. Someone asked him afterwards what was going to become of the traditions of Buddhism if we stopped valuing the old ways of doing things in favour of a more Western, easygoing kind of approach.”
“Don’t say ‘His Holiness.’ ”
“He said everything was going to disappear. Buddhism would be reduced to its most basic truths – emptiness and compassion.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“ ‘The greatest medicine is the emptiness of everything.’ ”
“What does it mean? Sounds canned. Sounds self-help. Sounds B.S.”
I blew air through my fist like a trumpet – “Do dooo doo doooo!” – wanting to get a rise out of Kevin.
“But I feel it. I know how it sounds. But it isn’t canned if you feel it.” Kevin hung the tea towel neatly over the loop on the oven door. “It’s a decision to feel it. That’s the thing. There’s no getting around it. You just decide. Ajla calls it surrendering.”
He swept his hair up then into a broom on the top of his head. It stuck straight up into the air and made his face even longer and thin ner than it already was. If Granny Lock hadn’t been with us at the table I would have punched him in the stomach and rolled him out the back door into the snow.
The night after Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated I found myself on the bad porch of an old friend’s childhood home. I’d stolen a cigarette from Robbie’s jacket in the closet. Glorious night – the moon full, or nearly, and the fresh snow glowing in the cups of every leaf it could find. I was drunk and painting swirls in the snow that had fallen onto the wooden railing. Years ago, I’d helped Kevin and his grandfather lay flagstones at the head of the laneway, at the approach to the stairs. There was a kind of lichen that had grown in the tiny shallows between the set stones. When I walked down onto it, little rhyzomatic tufts crunched slightly under my shoes, and I paced back and forth, thrilling in the soft sound of it.
Everyone knows that anyone can go anywhere they want, can leave or turn around or wait as they wish. A thousand little commitments make it feel impossible but it’s not, and I was playing drunken dare games with myself on this theme. Walking one step then another out towards the laneway tunnelled by giant windbreak spruce on either side.
I’d only just reached the drive when I heard a sound and there was Sam, one leg up and urinating on the woodpile. A way off there was a slim shadow against the snowy field, waiting on Sam and smoking quietly, like me. Neither of them had heard me, and after Sam had finished his business Ajla began slowly walking out into the frozen cornfield, Sam reluctantly following.
Though I was hidden, I yelled after her, emerging from the lane in my drunken stumbles. I thought how maybe this would remind her of something horrible following her through a different night. I knew it be fore I even did it, cruel in the name of
curiosity.
But she wasn’t afraid of me – only sized me up and said nothing. As inside I thought she looked overdressed for the warmth, outside she wore nothing more than the same thin sweater and hat.
“In the summertime,” I said, “You should see this in the summer time. I mean it’s just wild with fireflies. In June … We never even said hello, back at the place there.”
She opened her mouth a fraction and pointed into it, shaking her head.
“Right.” We were walking now out into the field, Sam exactly one foot from my heel. The corn was long harvested but there were still rows of thick yellow stalks tipped against each other like broken fences every four feet. “Does it feel to you like we’re the last soldiers on the battlefield? Sorry. Drunk.”
We reached the hub of an ancient tractor wheel she’d been aiming for and sat down on the treads of cracked rubber.
“I’ve got a memory of those fireflies like you wouldn’t believe. There’re so many of them in June – so much light you think it would be noisy.” Which is how it had been, at least, half a lifetime ago, when I’d half believed that firefly light really was the flickering lamp-shine of some otherworldly place. “I’m sorry, you know; I’m sorry if I scared you back there. I don’t think I did but you know, if … And for being so drunk and stupid. You must already hate Kevin’s friends.”
Sam had settled himself in front of me – looking uncomfortable on the hard ground – and was aggressively shoving his head between my hands and my thigh. “What are you doing, Sam? Go find some rotten meat. Go snuffle.”
Besides pointing to her mouth, Ajla hadn’t communicated anything at all that indicated her feelings about my company. I’d just followed her, like Sam. And she looked at me when I spoke the way I looked at Sam when he barked. Which is to say, aware of me, but entirely unconcerned with what I was trying to say. But now she pointed behind me and up, and I turned.
There was weather in the sky, a razor-straight line of cloud advancing from the glow of Hamilton and the east. It appeared as a blackness that erased the stars, which then shone along the entire front as the moon spread its light while being eaten, like a burst balloon of white. She’d seen terrible things.
The Journey Prize Stories 23 Page 7