Monoceros

by Suzette Mayr

  — You’re not sick, his grampa says. — And even though you are of legal age to make your own decisions, I say off you go to make a life for yourself. Stop being a bum.

  Ginger lying on his bed, lying on papers and books and gym clothes. Romeo and Juliet.

  If only.

  He should have.

  How could he.

  How could she.

  Ginger stands at the bus stop swaddled in scarves and toque and his grandfather’s greasy red coat because he was shivering and the coat is the warmest one in the house, his grandfather impatiently manipulating and dressing him like a mannequin. Ginger in the old man’s coat and clumpy Sorel boots. The inside of his head is pudding, and he’d like his grandfather to just tell him what to do every minute of every day for the rest of his life. Ginger’s car refusing to start this morning because no one’s plugged it in. He throws up diamonds and rainbows.

  If only.

  He should have.

  Ginger watches the crest of the hill half a block away where the bus is supposed to appear because he cannot manage walking the eight blocks to school. Blasts of wind flick and whip at his face, in the crevice between his scarf and the neck of his coat.

  He retreats backwards through the snow into the bus shelter, he steps on cigarette butts, old bus transfers, a Tim Hortons coffee cup, frozen mucus horked from a passerby’s mouth. The wind rushes past the entrance to the shelter, the snow fans upward and dervishes in tiny tornadoes. His legs and the wind buckle him backward, and he slides onto the bench, then onto the floor. A book kicked under the bench.

  The Pride and the Joy.

  The air rushes up from the ground to his face, and he spews out a loud sob. He told Furey, how many times, he didn’t want to read that damn book even though Furey wanted them to read it together. He pulls himself up, back to sitting, on the bench.

  The cover half buried in snow.

  — This your book? asks a voice.

  — Huh? says Ginger.

  — Your book, says the man. He wears a purple toque and matching gloves.

  — Here, he says, handing the book to Ginger. He sits down, his puffy silver coat brushing against Ginger.

  The man in the purple toque has sparkling cheeks. The man looks back in the direction the bus is supposed to come, the rising sun glinting stars on the man’s cheeks, his tiny gold hoop earring.

  Max

  It’s been exactly one week, but for Max it’s been years since:

  Patrick Furey took his own life and threw the school into chaos.

  Walter magically emptied, cleaned and replaced Max’s ashtray on the windowsill next to the back door leading to the porch.

  Joy has already loaded Max’s desk with mail when he toes off his boots at the office, and an enraged mother is on the phone complaining that her son only received 37 percent on an essay and she’d researched and worked on that essay all night. Joy informs him that on Friday there was a social studies class without a teacher— the substitute never came in, and the class never got taught. Another mother has written him a letter to say that the school doesn’t have enough religion in its curriculum and she’s considering contacting the bishop. Oh, and the Spanish teacher’s just found out she’s three months pregnant and wants him to give her stress leave and find someone to fill her place right this instant.

  When he flicks on his computer, Grizoms spill from the monitor; when he opens his desk drawers, Grizoms tumble to the floor. They jump up into his nose from his wastebasket, crawl up his pant legs, burst up out of his shirt collar, burrow up his sleeves.

  He dials Walter’s office phone. A Grizom pops out of the receiver.

  — Mr. Boyle, he says into the voice mail. — I need to see you in my office at your earliest convenience to discuss this year’s graduation guest speaker. Max’s voice a Grizom squeak.

  He hangs up. The phone rings immediately, jarring as a slam.

  — A Crêpe Suzette for you, says Joy. — That’s a cute name, don’t you think? Very funny person. Love his sense of humour.

  — Who?

  — Girlfriend, murmurs the line. — You didn’t come to my show at the Galaxy. I’ve talked to my mechanic, and our car accident frakked my starship but good. You owe me $2,495.62 for the damage.

  — Ahem, says Max, — of course. To whom should I make out the cheque?

  — Clement Michaels. M-I-C-H-A-E-L-S. C-L-E-M-E-N-T. May the force be with you, honey. Live long and prosper. No such thing as heroes, just a bunch of ones and zeroes. Get us out from under, Wonder Woman. Why don’t you come drop your cheque off at my house, Max? Share a bottle of wine? A cup of java?

  — I’ll send it through the mail, barks Max, and he hangs up quickly, the plastic receiver clattering into its base.

  — Some fun! says Joy through the doorway.

  Max’s briefcase on the floor, his keys hung up, his winter coat sagging from its hanger in the suddenly roomy hallway closet. 8:45 p.m. and the school day is over. The lights still off. Max’s real life just begun.

  — Walter’s moved out, Max whispers into the phone, in the dark, on the floor, his knees up near his chin. The leftover Ethiopian lamb from the fridge twists in his stomach. He hopes he isn’t going to throw up. He is curled against the cabinet doors below the kitchen sink, a cabinet doorknob jabbing the back of his head, cutlery he still hasn’t picked up poking his buttock. Maybe a spoon.

  — How do you feel about that? asks the voice on the other end of the distress line.

  — The house is so empty, whispers Max. — Like an abandoned steel mill. And he didn’t even ask for a goodbye kiss.

  — It sounds like you’re feeling lonely.

  The fridge bursts into a loud hum, his stomach groans. The streetlights glare through the windows, angle the shadows so that he’s in a house he no longer recognizes. He pushes the phone harder against his ear. The voice hasn’t hung up. He can hear breathing.

  — I don’t know what to do, he whispers, his voice choking, the sea rushing upwards into his throat in a freak tide.

  — It sounds like you’re feeling indecisive. What are you willing to try tonight, to make yourself feel better? asks the voice.

  — I like watching Sector Six.

  — The television show?

  — Yes.

  — Well, that’s a really good start. Can you watch some episodes of Sector Six? Do you have a Sector Six DVD and a functioning DVD player?

  Above the sound of the fridge’s airy machinery, he can hear a car roll by in front of the house, the light screech of a loose fan belt dimming as the car drives past and away. The streetlights beaming in their dangerous geometry can’t pin him down if he just stays where he is, on the floor, in the dark, tucked into the L of the kitchen cupboards. The fridge’s low hum and the yowling in his stomach shattering his ears.

  Maybe he should kill himself too. Just because he is principal of a school, a middle-aged man, doesn’t mean he’s a superhero. Maybe Patrick Furey had a good idea. He can’t remember which boy Patrick Furey was. Like walking every day for years past the same row of houses and then one day one of the houses is a hole in the ground and you can’t remember what it looked like. He and Walter were rolling along perfectly until Patrick Furey killed himself, detonated and blew up into a supernova, ruining their Tupperware life. This child. There are no children. They never had children. Walter joked about having a baby with Max a few years back. His belly big enough. Borrow a female badminton friend’s womb. But Max just wiped clean the television screen, snickering.

  — Who is in your support system? asks the voice.

  A colleague at work, a French teacher who quit after one year to stay at home and have babies, once announced to everyone in the main office that people who don’t have children are people who refuse to grow up. Which means that Max has been a toddler his whole life. But he has to raise and educate children every day and he is glad when he gets to leave the school at the end of the day. Organizing 1,600 parentless children a day enou
gh already.

  All those unnaturally red cheeks arranged in front of him. All those oversized feet and hands— like clown feet and hands— and crusty, acned foreheads. The goth ones, their black lips, their skin plastered with white pancake makeup, the ones who look dead.

  Folded on the floor, Max notices the Starship Monoceros magnet clinging to the empty plane of the fridge door. The streetlights angling the shadow cast from Colonel Shakira’s toy-sized ship, distorting the shadow of the ship, so that it’s almost the perfect size for Max to step into and fly away.

  He returns the telephone receiver to its cradle. Switches on the television.

  Second Monday After Furey

  Gretta

  Your Pilates instructor asks how you can go on. You go on because you go on. Because your son is dead, but you are alive, and killing yourself is not an option. Your brother, your nephews, nieces, cousins have left to go back to their own children, their jobs, so of course tonight is Halloween because that was his favourite day even though October is eight months away and you flip the kitchen calendar forward to October, the happiest month. Halloween should be a statutory holiday, your son always said. You buy chocolate bars and jelly beans, fill a scrubbed clean bucket with water and bobbing apples. You put on a black witch cape and coned witch hat you uncover in the basement. Your husband retreats to his library, switches on the CBC radio. You smell pot. Coward.

  Why would your boy kill himself with only four months left to go until graduation? Just four months and his problems at school would all have been over. Who was that monster who gave him the gold locket? You want to kill that sicko. And the guidance counsellor squirming like a grub with the box of your son’s things in his hands, you want to step on him, and the principal who didn’t do his job, and all the parents who still have children, those abominations wheeling strollers in the mall, and giving birth to brand-new boys, imitation teenagers, and your baby snatched away by the neck.

  You slam the front door open and stand on the threshold, opening your arms to the street. No goblins. His favourite costume was Little Bo Peep, he went in Bo Peep’s dress three years in a row until you decided what had been cute was getting old. You told him he was getting too old to dress as a girl and now he’s dead too young. Your biceps straining under the weight of bags and bags of chocolate bars.

  Third Monday After Furey

  Faraday

  Faraday crunches on an apple in the cafeteria at lunchtime, her back to the door, which is the same as sitting with her back to a supernova because she won’t know until it’s too late if evil has exploded in to engulf her. But she feels more naked and withery facing the door to the cafeteria, the courtyard at her back. She doesn’t want to see the evil come in, she only wants to know when she has to, at the very very last minute. At least if she faces the courtyard and anchors her attention to the bare, single tree stretching and spreading its branches, the patch of brown grass bordered by brick and concrete, she can imagine that maybe one day she could be eating her apple or her tuna sandwich, or eating a bag of sour cream and onion chips, and her unicorn would leap from the school roof to the foot of the tree, nickering and pawing the concrete, the patchy grass, as if waiting for her to claim it, the alicorn finally in her hands. Because the Saturday Jésus asked her out on a date, she said no, and that fact has to puke on her sometime soon. She sits at the end, the very edge of a long table of kids who don’t mind. As long as she doesn’t try to talk to any of them. On the other side of the cafeteria, Fumiko sometimes smiles and waves and once asked her by the chocolate bar rack if she’d picked out a dress yet for graduation. How Faraday wishes she had the strength and the fortitude to stand up from this table and walk without slipping in spilled french fry gravy to Fumiko’s table. Sit down with Fumiko at her table. She clenches her fist, bites into her sandwich. She doesn’t have the strength. Sitting here, even if it’s at the end of the table, is better than gorbing it alone.

  Saturday night near the end of her shift, Jésus came back to the Tim Hortons, gunned into the drive-thru, ordered a sour-cream-glazed Timbit, and shoved a picture of a narwhal at her. — Thank you very much, she said. — It’s a picture of a narwhal, she said, stupidly.

  She peered at the fine print at the bottom of the page. — And you ripped this out of an Encyclopedia Canadiana.

  — The mighty narwhal, said Jésus, Timbit icing dabbed in one of the corners of his mouth. — That is correct. Otherwise known as the Unicorn of the Sea! They’re an endangered species, he said, as though concluding a book report.

  She stood in the window of the drive-thru, the paper in her hand. The car behind Jésus’s truck honked.

  — There are … , she said, — there … there are … reasons why…I have to stay a virgin, she said.

  — Unless you plan on being a nun, that’s seriously fucked, he said.

  — I know, she sighed. — D’you want a doughnut? she asked.

  — What kind?

  — Um, grape jelly? It’s on me.

  — Okay, he said.

  Her supervisor Morris bustled up behind her in a cloud of sweat and icing-sugar. — What’s going on here? He poked his head out the window. — You again?

  Jésus screeched away.

  Now, in the cafeteria, if she sees him, she’ll have to think hard about what corners of this room she can scuttle into, then wait for the next Ice Age when she can surface again. She blabbed to him that she was a virgin!

  Dr. Linus Libby once asked her in his pink soapy way if it bothered her that she had no best friend. She answered of course not.

  — Why are you crying? he asked.

  — I’m remembering how our rabbit got eaten by a coyote. She dabbed at her eyes with her sleeve.

  At the cafeteria table, she splits open the top of her milk carton, drinks from the spout and tries not to splatter milk on the table or her chin. She dabs at her mouth with a paper napkin. She drinks her milk and eats her cheddar cheese and mayonnaise sandwich; she’s already pulled out the slimy shreds of lettuce her mother sneaks in. She floats, a silent, sparkling island at the edge of the long laminated table babble about boys, football, boys, hate her, girls, hate him, graduation, hate her. But it’s all right as long as she hangs on to her tree. The dead boy used to sit eating his cheese and lettuce sandwich alone too, in the corner next to the main door, but she remembers it wasn’t because he was a loser so much as that he was going to be a rock star or walk on Mars one day. She yanks at the sandwich with her teeth. A slice of cheese, slippery with mayonnaise, slides out and slaps her chin. Or maybe he never ate here — how would she know, she never cared, never paid attention to anything he did until it was too late— and was one of those people who walk around with pizza wedges the size of half a pizza, half-in, half-out of their mouths, from across the road. Maybe he ate brie garnished with pear slices at home, the way that one ex-boyfriend of Uncle Suzie’s used to. He would never have condescended to eat in the clatter and pettiness of the cafeteria with Faraday and the rest of them. She would have eaten cheese sandwiches or pizza or brie with him if he’d asked her to. She would have picked the lettuce out of her sandwich and listened to him talk about how sad he was, and she would have said that one magical sentence that would have changed his mind and saved his life. She would have said: It’s worth it. Or: It gets better. Time heals all wounds. Let’s call the cops right now and get Petra arrested. Abracadabra.

  Faraday scratches her nose and hopes no one’s taking notes on how she flipped that piece of cheese onto her chin. She imagines the dead boy sitting cross-legged at the base of the tree.

  She is a cardboard cutout of herself. She is a magical, special being with huge beauty and power, this body her sad earthly vessel. The tower she has built around herself growing upward, thickening.

  Her back to the door, she hears before she sees Jésus and his entourage clatter into the cafeteria. Her chest seizes, she’s succumbing to hypoxia. He’s probably fresh from robbing a grave or burning down a casino. She kno
ws people who travel in clots. George M. hangs out with some kind of goth slash emo crowd; he says he eschews categorization as a rule because it limits his life choices. Really, all George M.’s friends just wear the colour black because they can’t colour coordinate. She wants to cry because she doesn’t know how to prevent the inevitable Jésus punchline.

  But Jésus and his cousins slide around her, as though she were a palm tree in a hurricane, as though Saturday night were a pathetic, almost-erotic dream involving too many doughnuts and a boy who basically told her he would have given her a torrential orgasm if she weren’t such a nun.

  — Neigh, Jésus cups into her ear as he passes, and the boys nearest Jésus snort.

  She has no doubt in her mind at all the unicorns will come, but even though she can hardly admit this to herself, she hopes they are worth it.

  Max

  In the house at night, he can hear the plant roots stretching in their pots as he skims through the hallways, up and down the stairs, spreading dust from the decrepit carpet in the basement to the upstairs kitchen and living room floors. Timetabling spread out on sheets in front of him on his desk— better to work than lie alone in bed.

  Today at work, his gleaming computer monitor, his gleaming phone that keeps ringing and ringing, he can hear the breathing of a boy who killed himself. And a man in his late forties, so late that it might as well be early fifties, whose secret husband has left him. He trudges back to his office from the washroom, and in his office sits Jésus, what a surprise.

  Max sighs as he scrolls through names and phone numbers for Jésus’s home number. Jésus García Hernández, followed by the phone listing. God, how he hates talking to Jésus’s mother. Why does it suddenly feel like every day is Monday?

  When he retires he and Walter are going to drive without a map and stay in cheap but clean motels all over Alberta and BC even though Walter prefers plane travel. This is Max’s plan. They will do a tour of every big statue or icon in Alberta: the biggest kielbasa, the biggest perogy, the biggest Ukrainian easter egg, the biggest crow, the biggest truck. Then they will go on a men’s cruise and down sambuca shots, two old trolls in love in their Bermuda shorts. They can eat in a restaurant close to wherever they call home, maybe go to a Christmas Mass at the same church at the same time and sit beside each other in the same pew. When they retire.