One Brother Shy

by Terry Fallis

  “Please, stop,” I clarified. “We’ve got so much work to do.”

  “Wow! Now that was impressive,” Simone said, standing and applauding. “Sticking up for Ally and all. How quaint.”

  “Abby,” I said not quite quietly enough.

  “I know her fucking name! I was just choosing not to use it,” she shrieked.

  Then she sat back down, still breathing heavily from her exertions. I seemed to have momentarily knocked her berating bully function offline. I sat down, too. Then she spoke very calmly and quietly. It was quite unsettling.

  “MacAskill, I need you to update the weekly status deck so I can present it to the senior management team at one this afternoon on our weekly call. I’ll need the new graphics in there as well as the code status summary and rollout plan. PowerPoint, even if you have to skip lunch to get it done.”

  I frowned. Again, I didn’t mean to frown. It was unplanned and involuntary. It kind of just happened.

  “What’s with the sad face, MacAskill?” she said, pouting. “You got something more important going on right now – and think carefully before answering.”

  To be honest, right now, trimming my nose hair is more important to me, but whatever.

  “It’s Monday,” I said.

  “Oh my, congratulations! Aren’t we doing well on the days of the week? Before you know it, you’ll know all the months, too. Oh, they grow up so fast,” she sneered.

  “I have my lunch-hour appointment every Monday and Thursday. I can’t change it this late,” I replied.

  She rolled her eyes.

  “Jesus, can’t you skip just one session to do your goddamn job, or is lying on a couch for an hour twice a week really all that important?”

  I felt my face grow hot and red. I said nothing. Abby saved me.

  “Simone, I’m sorry about my tone earlier,” she said almost in a whisper. “It’s only 9:30 now. Alex and I can work on the deck together until he has to leave, and then I can finish it up and make it look pretty over lunch. You’ll have it by 12:45. We’ll get it done. Promise.”

  Simone just stared at her.

  “Not one minute later,” Simone snapped before wheeling out of the boardroom and slamming her office door.

  The rest of us slunk back to our crucibles, er, cubicles. Soon after, Simone left the office, likely to have a smoke. When she’d gone, Abby came around to my side.

  “That was fucking unbelievable,” she said. “She is absolutely, certifiably, psycho bat-shit crazy.”

  I nodded and opened PowerPoint to start mapping out the update presentation.

  Abby put her hand on my shoulder.

  “Thanks for at least trying to come to my rescue. That was fecking nice of you,” Abby said.

  I have no idea how that happened or why I stood up. And I didn’t exactly turn the tide, now did I?

  “It’s okay,” I replied.

  “Eye contact, Alex. Eye contact.”

  I turned to look at her.

  “Better,” she said. “I thought you were either brave or a little unhinged in there, but I’m grateful.”

  I think “unhinged” is a reasonably good approximation.

  I turned back to my laptop.

  She said nothing for a minute but watched as my fingers moved around my keyboard creating section header slides to give the presentation some logical flow and format.

  “Hey, you’re an engineer?” she said, surprised, pointing to my pinky ring. “What flavour?”

  “Software engineer.”

  “Right. Now I know why your code is so tight and elegant. You should be running this joint,” she said.

  Maybe on paper, but I’d Hindenburg fast if they pushed me into management. It would be uppercase UGLY in a hurry. Trust me. Surely you can see that.

  “Um, it’s not really my thing,” I replied. “Anyway, thanks for bailing me out on this presentation.”

  “Hey, that might be the longest sentence you’ve ever spoken to me,” she said. “Anyway, it makes sense. After all, our desks are stuck together. I figure that’s a sign we should stick together, too.”

  I’m not exactly sure what you mean by that, but let’s see where it takes us.

  I nodded and she pulled her chair around so we could both see my laptop screen. We worked for the next two hours and by the time I had to leave, we had the presentation pretty well cooked. We agreed it was thoughtful, logical, and comprehensive. It also showed in the work plan at the end that we could deliver the beta by October 9, even though neither of us truly believed it was possible. I left Abby to work her design magic – which she insisted she possessed – on the slides.

  —

  As I made the seven-minute drive to my appointment, I gnawed on baby carrots. I liked Wendy Weaver. I liked her a lot. She wasn’t exactly warm and friendly, but after nearly nine years together, I knew she really cared about my situation. With Dr. Weaver, my reticence evaporated. My inner voice was actually outside and audible. Or as she would put it, “We’ve succeeded in achieving an ‘inside-out’ relationship.” The goal was to overcome my chronic shyness and build more and more inside-out relationships. Right now, I’m up to three: my mother, Dr. Wendy Weaver, and in the last year, Malaya Matiyaga, even though she’s very quiet. I’m almost completely relaxed with all of them, but with no one else. With others, I still cling almost unconsciously to my invisibility strategy. Head down. Just blend in. Don’t draw attention to yourself. Fade into the background. Transparent. Invisible.

  “Are you close to going inside-out with anyone else?” Dr. Weaver asked after I’d settled into the chair opposite her.

  “Well, I think I can see moving towards that with Abby in the office,” I replied. “But it’s going to take a while. She’s a little intimidating. Then again, I still find Smurfs a little intimidating.”

  Dr. Weaver smiled and flipped back in her notes.

  “Abby. Abby Potts. Your desk-mate, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Are you continuing to formulate your conversational responses to people you meet in everyday encounters, even if you’re not saying them out loud?”

  “Yep. It’s kind of become a habit now. I think I’m getting pretty good at it, and quicker, too.”

  “But you never say your lines out loud?” she asked.

  “Hardly ever, unless I have no choice. I’d certainly say them out loud if I were with you or my mother. In fact, sometimes, at the end of the day, I even re-enact the conversations I should have had for my mom. Of course, I play both parts.”

  “And what does your mother think of this?”

  “She thinks I’m funny and pithy, and that I should stop performing them for her and actually do it live when the opportunity presents itself. She thinks it’s been long enough, that I should just go full inside-out,” I said. “But I’m not ready for that. I’m not there yet.”

  “But at least we’re all in agreement on the long-term goal,” she said.

  I nodded.

  “You loved acting when you were growing up,” she said. “Both you and your mother told me you were very good at it.”

  “Well, I was good at it until, you know…” I added.

  “But why were you good at it? Why did you succeed at acting?”

  “I just felt comfortable slipping into someone else’s shoes and inhabiting their character. It was fun shedding all of my own instincts, beliefs, and mannerisms, and becoming someone else. It was a challenge. I just liked it. Loved it.”

  “What about now? Do you still like to act?”

  “I do have fun when I’m performing some of my crazy scenes from work for my mother. She says I’m very convincing as my delusional and deranged boss.”

  “But you feel comfortable doing it?”

  “Well, for my mother, yes.”

  “Have you ever acted for anyone else?”

  “Not since that night,” I replied. “Not since Gabriel.”

  “Hmmmm. I wonder how you’d feel now if you were acting in
front of others?” she mused.

  “Well, I have difficulty speaking at staff meetings, so I’m pretty sure I’d be terrified if I were actually acting.”

  “Really? Interesting. When you try to muster the courage to speak at a meeting, you’re being yourself. If you were acting, you’d be somebody else, as you said, inhabiting a different character. Those are two different scenarios,” she said.

  “I guess. Maybe, but I’m not sure I see the relevance of it.”

  “Let’s just park that thought and perhaps come back to it sometime,” she suggested. “Have you given any more thought to the ‘closure therapy’ I put on the table a couple of weeks ago?”

  “I’m not ready.”

  “Not ready to think about it, or not ready to pursue it?”

  “Both. I’m just not feeling it. I don’t think I could do it. I’m not ready.”

  “Just to clarify. Do you mean you’re frightened of it, or you just don’t think it would accomplish anything?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I’m just not there yet.”

  Our session unfolded as it usually did. Wendy asked questions. I tried to answer them. She’d prod and probe. I’d think harder and talk some more. It was comforting and, I assume, therapeutic for me. I felt safe in her office.

  “Okay, I’m watching the clock here. I don’t want your boss to have a meltdown,” Dr. Weaver said, closing my file in front of her. “Any more Gabriel dreams?”

  “Plenty. And sometimes I don’t even remember having them.”

  “How do you know you’ve had them?”

  “I’m not sure. I know it sounds weird but I think I can somehow sense Gabriel. It’s just a feeling sometimes when I wake up. But it’s there.”

  —

  I slipped back into the office at 1:02 and was relieved to see that Simone was at her sleek desk bent over her computer with her headset on. The senior management team call had obviously started. I could just make out a rather colourful PowerPoint slide on her screen. I sat down in my chair, gathered myself, then, before I lost my nerve, popped up so I could see Abby over top of the partition.

  “Um, hi. How’s it going?” I said, affecting nonchalance and immediately regretting the somewhat unlimited scope of my inquiry.

  She looked at me and kind of grinned in a tired, put-upon way.

  “How’s it going? How’s it going, you ask? Well, lunch? Didn’t get one. These new jeans? Too tight. I put vanity before comfort. My hair? No time this morning, as you can see. I put coffee before vanity. This white shirt? Just noticed this stain on the arm. Clearly I put coffee, well, I put coffee on my sleeve. These shoes? Well, they’re killer comfortable, but Simone said they look like really bad bowling shoes. Other than that, it’s going okay. Thanks.”

  She continued to smile up at me. Despite the harsh fluorescent lighting and anarchic hair, her face at that up-tilt angle was really quite beautiful.

  Wow, you’ve had quite a day so far. Hey, here’s an idea. In honour of those funky but comfy shoes, why not click your heels together three times and we’ll skip out for the p.m. and go bowling?

  “I kind of meant the PowerPoint for Simone,” I said.

  “I know. The PowerPoint. The deck is just fine. I made your coding update and work plan look screamin’ pretty and I even put a few builds into the slides. Simone is easily impressed by furking bright shiny objects, and by bullet points that fade in and out. But I stopped short of sound effects. She had it in her little Tyrannosaurus claws with plenty of time to spare.”

  “Thank you. I really appreciate it,” I said, and lowered myself back down behind my padded wall.

  “No worries” came drifting over the partition.

  —

  I entered our apartment just as Malaya was folding a tea towel and slipping it over the oven door handle. She stepped towards me offering an open palm. I swung my open palm to meet hers.

  “Tag,” she said and smiled.

  “Tag,” I replied.

  It’s a thing we did every morning and every night that had its roots in the TV tag team wrestling I would sometimes watch as a kid. It was shift change in the MacAskill hospice.

  “Everything cool?” I asked.

  “She’s a little tired, but in good spirits. The oxygen tank will need to be changed before she sleeps. Don’t forget.”

  “Right,” I said, looking around the spotless living/dining room area. “Malaya, the place looks, well, spotless again. You know you don’t have to do housekeeping. Right? That’s my job.”

  “I know, but your mother is sleeping a lot and I get bored. It’s no trouble.”

  “Saint Malaya.”

  She grabbed her coat, stuck her head into Mom’s room to say goodnight, and then slipped out the door.

  I washed my hands in the kitchen sink with antibacterial soap I’d bought at the medical supply store. It smelled rather clinical but was recommended by one of Mom’s many doctors. I towelled my hands dry.

  IPF is a bitch, a real bitch. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. To break it down, idiopathic means the cause is unknown. Pulmonary, as you might expect, relates to the lungs. And fibrosis is a fancy word for scar tissue. In other words, for no apparent reason, my mother’s lung tissue began thickening about four years ago. Scar tissue formed, severely compromising her lung function. And inexorably, unrelentingly, it got worse. To be clear, and perhaps a little crass, my mother has been slowly but steadily suffocating for the last four years. Most IPF patients don’t live beyond four or five years after diagnosis. I can’t think of a worse way to go than to have your breath taken away from you. Breathtaking and heartbreaking at the same time.

  My mother had always been immensely practical. She accepted her very short-straw diagnosis with stoic dignity, good humour, and clear eyes. It was amazing to witness. There was no self-pity, no “it’s not fair,” no “why me?”, no deep depression. None of that. Just a resolute acceptance, a stalwart dedication to her treatment plan – in all its ultimate futility – and a pragmatic approach to her inevitable demise. All the plans were in place. She’d insisted.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said as I entered her bedroom.

  I could hear the very faint hiss of oxygen as it pushed its way into her recalcitrant lungs. She’d been on oxygen for so long by that stage that I barely noticed the tube crossing her face, or the prongs in her nostrils.

  “Alex,” she said, looking up from the book she probably wasn’t really reading. “How are you? How was your day, honey?”

  The same banal questions that families around the world ask one another in the evenings, yet if the doctors were right, I’d only need two digits to count the days till this nightly ritual stopped.

  “It was fine, Mom. How are you feeling?” I sat down in the familiar bedside chair and squeezed her hand.

  “Never better,” she wheezed. This was her standard response. Then right on cue, following her script, she continued, “Any prospects?”

  “Well, now that you mention it, I’m starting to get to know my desk-mate, Abby. She’s really quite unusual. She’s brash and bold, and routinely scares the…scares me. But I find myself liking her.”

  “Ask her out,” Mom replied, again on cue.

  “Mom, I’m not on the market right now. You know I’m still searching for…you know.”

  My mother stirred and turned slightly so she could hold my eyes with hers. It was either a stare or a glare. I’m not sure which, until I was sure which. Okay, it was a glare.

  “Alex, you’ve tried to find her. You’ve looked for years. You don’t know who she is. You don’t know her name. You don’t know where she is. You don’t even know if she’s alive. And you have no way of finding her. Time to let go, honey. Ask out the scary one.”

  “Mom, she was there. She helped me make it through. It was in her eyes. Pure empathy. In that short trip from drama to trauma, I think we somehow bonded that night in a way that was, I don’t know, unusual. I could feel it. It was different. She never looked away.
Not once. She was with me all the way down. I can’t forget that.” I paused and my mother waited for me. “So I’m still looking. I actually have a few Facebook leads that I’m running down.”

  “Alex. It’s time to move on and find someone to love. You know what’s happening here with me, right? Please find somebody.”

  “Mom, I hear you. I understand. But you are my focus right now. I’ve tried to tell you, finding a girlfriend is just not a priority for me right now.”

  “Well, make it a priority,” she said, trying hard to keep her eyes open. “What about calling up Cyndy? You two were good together.”

  “Mom, please. That ended a very long time ago. I can’t go back there.”

  She carefully slipped her hand under her pillow, sighed in the laboured way an oxygen-deprived person sighs, and brought her hand back into view. She opened her eyes and looked at me again.

  “Alex. I need to talk to you about something else. Something important. Very important. But I just don’t have the strength or the air to do it now,” she said.

  “It’s fine, Mom, it’ll keep.”

  “Not for long, it won’t. Promise me you’ll wake me up in the morning. It has to be done, before you go.” She was whispering now.

  Just before I left her, I changed the oxygen tank and made sure the hose was delivering a steady stream of oxygen. She nodded that it was working. She held out her hand. I slipped mine into hers. It felt thin, fragile, and cool.

  “Tomorrow morning. Promise me,” she said, her grip relaxing.

  “Promise.”

  It was dark. Pitch black. I was cold, uncomfortable, scared, but calm, resigned.

  CHAPTER 2

  When I opened my eyes the next morning, I instantly knew I’d just had the dream again. I had no true, vivid memory of it, just its now familiar residual sensation. I knew by how I felt in that instant my consciousness flickered to life for the day. It always but briefly left me a little undone. But I’m used to it now. Nearly ten years is a long time to be haunted by the same dream.