The Hour of Bad Decisions

by Russell Wangersky

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Whatever you think,” as if he couldn’t really understand why I’d made the trip in the first place. Smart man. It gave me a chance to turn the car towards the highway, a chance to drive myself to distraction.

  I hope Anne doesn’t start putting together where I am, and try to sort out which clients it is I’m supposed to be seeing. She might decide I was making it all up to see a lover, although how there could possibly be anyone I’d want more than her, I’ll never understand. I think about her and my right hand goes straight to my left, turning the warm circle of my wedding ring around and around its finger. Three or four times every evening on the road, I think about the warm curve of her back, her calves, what she’d look like, standing naked in front of me in yet another hotel room shower, and then I deliberately force those thoughts out of my mind, because I’m afraid I’m setting the stage, drawing her out of the wings and making her part of the main event in yet another night of dreams.

  I felt a little giddy when I reached the end of a long, sunlit Nova Scotia day. I’d driven three hours or so in a rental car, pulling over when my eyes got heavy. The drive would normally take an hour and a half. Every time I pulled over, the moment I went to sleep, I was awake again, terrified.

  I stopped, waiting, in a parking lot, looking for the chimney swifts. I hope I’m waiting at the right chimney, a standing brick column in a Nova Scotia town, the building torn down but the unused chimney kept as a swift hotel. They’re nothing special, just a bird I’ve never really seen up close before, with the benefit that they deliver themselves right to you.

  Wolfville is where a former hockey player lives, a player whose finances I stickhandle while he runs a sports bar he’s decorated with his own sports memorabilia. It’s a good idea – if you want to see his Stanley Cup ring, you can, and you can have passable clam chowder and cold draft beer while you’re doing it. And he serves his own bar most nights, and doesn’t mind having his picture taken with patrons. It was not a project I would have recommended, but I certainly would have been wrong about that one. It made money from the start. Darren doesn’t hold that against me, and I move the rest of the money he saved from eight years in the majors around and bring him a pretty solid return. Right now, it’s a return he’s happy to just reinvest.

  At dusk the swifts return after flying all day without a rest, file straight into the chimney by the hundreds and disappear – there is an archetypal story about where the birds over-winter, how, in the 1940s, scientists banded them with metal bands, tiny metal rings. And then an anthropologist working in Peru found a tribe wearing necklaces of small metal circles – the bird-bands from scores of swifts. The swifts hang in their Wolfville chimney by their claws and by quills in their tailfeathers, and I can’t help thinking how apt it is that one man’s scientific curiosity is another man’s dinner.

  Sleep is a scientific curiosity, too, but I’d much rather have a meal of it.

  I check in at a rather formal Annapolis Valley inn, a hotel made out of a rich man’s house, so that many of the rooms have fireplaces, and many of the bathrooms are an afterthought, the tubs claw-footed late additions with new copper piping coming up ragged through old bedroom floors. My bed is old and suits the room, and the mattress sags into the box spring so that you feel as if you are falling into a human-sized hole. It is rapturously uncomfortable, and I spend hours looking at the ceiling, at the pattern in the plaster, until finally I fall asleep for a few moments, just long enough to dream about tying complex, tight knots around someone’s thin wrists – and their neck.

  Then, the next day, I leave the car at the airport and fly to a big hotel in downtown Toronto. Holed up in one of a thousand faceless rooms, I feel like a worker-bee, trapped inside a hive. It’s a concrete box with a king-sized bed, an iron in the closet, and an automatic coffee maker with enough coffee for precisely two pots – one decaffeinated, one not.

  This time, my client doesn’t even have time to see me on such short notice. He’s doing a building deal, one of those complicated shuffles that involves zoning, city council, and buying land before its owners realize the potential might change – so I go out alone for Thai food, spicy chicken that leaves my mouth burning for hours. The client doesn’t really understand why I’m there, or what there is to talk about. I could hear irritation in his voice, a tone that says, politely, what-exactly-are-you-doing-here?

  That night, it’s a simple dream, but absolutely terrifying. I’m cutting meat into small cubes, the way you would to make chili, but there’s something wrong about the meat, something you can’t really put your finger on, something familiar about it. And it’s cold to the touch, and that makes everything infinitely worse.

  I wake up and it’s still dark, so I wrap myself in the bedspread and go out and sit on the cold concrete of the balcony to wait, shivering, for dawn. The sun comes up pale over the city, the horizon almost silty with smog, and I watch the light change through a palate of soft smudged colours, pinks and browns and bruise, until finally it’s time for the taxi ride to the airport. I’m thinking about sleeping pills now, wondering whether or not they’d give me a clear, clean slate of sleep or whether they’d just trap me down there, half asleep and half awake, so that I’d feel like I was drowning in the dreams, unable to surface because of the drugs. That idea seems so frightening I’m not even willing to chance it, not willing to risk opening my mouth and not being able to make any sound come out.

  Four hours on the plane and I can’t wait to get off. Two teenaged girls next to me when we get on at around six, and they’re both sound asleep within minutes of takeoff. They don’t need headsets or movies, and they sleep the sleep of the dead, their mouths agape and their legs stretched out in front of them, unmoving. I get to watch them occasionally mutter and shift, and once in while they open their eyes briefly and then their lids flutter shut again. I hate the fact that it’s so simple for them, and I want to shake them gently and tell them that they have no idea what a benefit the simple pleasure of sleep is.

  In the mountains, I’ve given up on even the pretense of seeing clients. I’ve flown into Calgary because it was the first flight out of Toronto that I could make, slapping down a credit card and bolting from the city as fast as I could. After that, another rental car and a drive into the mountains.

  I check into the first resort hotel I come across in Banff, it’s got “Villas” in the name but I can’t even remember the rest – and the room is strikingly familiar, except for the mountains outside my window. The hope is that I can distract myself from the nightmares, that I can beat myself into exhaustion in the thin mountain air and then just topple over. It’s a long shot, I’ll admit. Maybe two hours’ sleep in Toronto, so things are getting a bit scattered now.

  In the bathroom, I have two beer in an ice bucket, and when the melting ice falls with a slightly musical clatter, it’s like I have company without any of the bother of making conversation. They say you shouldn’t drink when you’re having trouble sleeping – I don’t know if that applies to nightmares as well – but I’m tempted to simply pour the liquor into myself – drink until I gag, until I just fall over, to wake up later with a mouth full of too much spit and a head that feels as if it’s packed with painful gauze.

  Instead I go up into the mountains, the dust rising in clouds around my feet on a trail following the prints of other walkers, and, eventually, the small, sure prints of mule deer as well. The air is as dry as the dust here, and once I get high enough, I can see the coil of the Bow River heading down through the valley, and the mountains are all bright white where the sun hits the stone. I notice that everything feels like I am touching it through saran wrap, as if I’m not quite reaching it. There was a restaurant one of my clients took me to in Toronto once, a steakhouse where they brought out all the possible cuts of meat on a cart, each cut wrapped tightly in saran so that it couldn’t leak and make a mess. It had a kind of surreal effect: meat without really being meat. I can’t explain it, but I suddenly
feel distanced from things, and I wonder if it is the lack of sleep. It’s got to be – it can’t just be the air, although I notice it feels like I am pulling the air into me every time I walk up even the slightest incline.

  If I sit up late enough, perhaps my sleep will be black this time. But I now know that you can sleep in armchairs, and be just as tormented as if you are laid out flat.

  And in the high, thin, dry Rocky Mountain air, I open both bottles of hotel hand moisturizer and rub it all over my arms, my back, my chest, trying to stop all of my skin from sloughing off in flakes. I feel like a burn patient, absolutely raw. Peeling. It’s funny: the thought passes through my mind that my entire skin might come off the way a lizard sheds, leaving a perfect sleeve of me behind. For some reason, I find the idea hysterically funny, and I laugh until I can barely breathe.

  That night, I dream of a perfumed shape behind a backlit curtain, a shape that’s dancing, and that is eerily familiar. Nothing remotely frightening in that, except my job is to find the narrowing in the shape that is a neck and squeeze it hard.

  I’m glad I am alone, because my body feels so slick that I would burst from a lover’s arms like a water-melon seed from between her fingers. And besides, my hands feel dangerous.

  I sleep again, I’m sure for only moments, and I dream of pulling saran wrap tight over someone’s mouth, and I wake up thrashing.

  It throws me out the door into the Rocky Mountain cold, and a thin mist has come down like a curtain with the night. I see shapes on the road that I can’t be sure are there. Two deer, a mother and young, and I see the grain of the asphalt, the way it knits together into a whole, and I think that is important, but I don’t know why.

  Trying to go without sleep is a bad idea – ridiculous things seem sensible, and you come up with solutions you’d never consider otherwise. Rationally, I know it’s a bad idea, but I don’t think I have many options at this point.

  After twenty-four hours, it’s like spending a day fasting for medical tests – clear fluids only – and waking up the next morning and feeling fantastic, giddy, purged.

  Over breakfast, someone tells me that the mountain valley is supposedly so filled with energy that native tribes would only pass through, refusing to stay. Now hail pelts down outside, and it’s late May – I bet the natives were more concerned about the weather.

  Big eagles fly up the valley here, and I try to talk sensibly on the phone about what I’m seeing. Bald eagles, not that rare, but they are set high against a backdrop of snow-toothed mountains, so that their clockwise lazy turns define the bowl of the valley. That message doesn’t seem to communicate well.

  “When are you coming back?” Anne says on the phone, almost pleading. She is talking slowly, as if she thinks I’m not getting what she’s saying. Maybe I’m just talking too fast – I don’t know.

  I want to shout over the phone line “I’m keeping you safe!” but I can’t find a way to make the words make sense.

  After I hang up, I realize I’m shaking again.

  The drug store has three kinds of wake-up pills, the sort that students take before exams to try and make up for all the studying they haven’t done. I buy one of each, take double the recommended dose of the first box and wash it down with a black coffee.

  Perhaps there is a reason I’m not meant for the company of others.

  But I can only do this for so long. Sitting on the balcony watching the rain fall, I see a face in the falling drops, even though I am awake. My fingertips feel like they are fizzing, like I have my hands in club soda. The housekeeping staff keep rattling the door-knob – I think it’s the housekeeping staff, but I’m not going to check – I’ve got the Do Not Disturb sign up, but they keep coming. I see the shadows of their legs through the crack under the door – I don’t know what they’ll do if they get in. They’ll see my bed hasn’t been slept in and they’ll call someone. I pull the covers back, but it looks like an invitation. I make the bed again. Try to make it look untouched then. I have to keep coming back, straightening the edges, pulling the ripples in the comforter until it all lies flat.

  Maybe Anne has called them – she must not understand.

  I just won’t do it. I won’t sleep. I will hold on as long as I can, and I will beat these dreams. I’m flying south tomorrow, towards the us West Coast, still hoping.

  A simple night, but longer than I expected. Easier to watch the television with the sound off, to watch those yabbering mouths clapping open and shut, because the noise clatters around in here as if the whole place were ceramic tiles. Phone off the hook – when the message light begins flashing too brightly, hurting my eyes, I put one of the pillows over it. Don’t need pillows anyway. Waiting to drive to the airport early. Jumpy now – I go for a walk in the night again, and even the silence is oppressive.

  The drive, no problem – I don’t remember any of it, except for the billboard with the smiling woman. For some reason her stare almost puts me off the road, like she’s trying to talk, like the bright lights of the sign are pulling the front of the car like a new kind of gravity. I can talk to myself, I don’t need company – sometimes I talk too loud.

  The things you learn: screaming on planes, they don’t like it. I was only asleep for a moment – I let my guard down.

  In the dream I was cutting with a knife and smiling – I saw myself smiling. Red rooms and a deep thrum like a heart beating, but not my heart.

  I phone home when I can, but I have to hold my teeth tight together to sound like myself. Sheer willpower, to make the words come out as close to normal as possible. To me, it sounds like someone else talking.

  “Don’t worry, everything’s fine. One meeting in Seattle, and a couple of days on the coast.” Keep it light and simple – it would be easier if I had written down what I want to say, but it’s hard to read my handwriting anyway – I’ve been keeping track of the wake-ups I’ve taken, but some of my notes look like little vibrant coloured snakes. And sometimes the hairs on my legs all shiver at once, like a fairy wind, like a bug is crawling up towards my knee. I slap at my legs absentmindedly, before I realize what I’m doing.

  “Will you be back for David’s birthday?” Anne sounds like she’s been crying: her voice is thin and dry, and it wavers from word to word.

  A sharp pain, that. Birthdays – remembering David’s face at seven, watching the wonder of him open presents at two. The image is as strong as if he were toddling along right there in front, a vivid colour slide show of a tiny perfect boy. As clear as if it were happening right then – I’m sure my eyes are open, and I’m sure I’m still staring at the back of the phone booth. He toddles towards me, clutching a stuffed Big Bird, his hair the bright platinum curls it was until he turned three. So clear that I could almost talk to him. But he’s thirteen now, fourteen in three or four days.

  “Of course I will.”

  I think I left my luggage at the airport, either that or it was stolen from the trunk of the rental. I don’t remember getting it back, but I’m not sure where they take it when you just leave the flight. I’m thrown off the plane in Calgary before they can even close the doors, and I can see from the anxious faces of other passengers that they’re glad to see me go.

  Getting another rental car is easy, because the computer’s in the way and she can’t really see my face. My face like steel now, because I can’t stop grinding my teeth, like rolling a fistful of marbles together in your pocket so that they grind with a vibration that is almost a noise. Almost a colour, really, a sheet of white with curved vertical black lines. I can find cards in my wallet, the plastic necessities. Driver’s licence, visa card, “here are your keys,” and out to the lot for a mid-size, burgundy this time, and I try putting the seat all the way back – just in case – put it up again and all the way back, looking at the dome light and the fabric of the inside of the roof, and when I sit up again, the lot attendant is staring at me, and I wonder what he’s heard. When he picks up the phone, I wonder who he’s calling, so I turn the
key, put the car into drive, and whip out of the lot so fast that I almost nudge a pile of luggage two cars down. The radio searches for its own stations, so I turn it up as loud as I can. Power windows. I open them all. The air rolls in my ears like shallow thunder.

  Getting out of Calgary is hard, the houses all look like teeth in a big head, all cream-coloured and virtually identical. The problem with coffee is that you piss almost as much as you drink, and I’m pissing on tangles of wildflowers, small blue nodding ones on long blue-green stalks, on small daisies and yellow flowers – bright little suns – that I’ve never seen before. Down below me is a driving range, and I can’t tell if the green is unusually speckled with odd round flowers, or whether the golfers have buckets of yellow golf balls. That’s funny, too, and I piss for hours.

  Then I lose a day – a whole day, only it’s night again and I’m still driving. I should have warning lights on the car, like those “Wide Load” banners, front and back. “Danger – Sleepless Driver,” and somewhere I’ve crossed the border. It’s funny: I can think of the border guard’s hat, the pole-barricade, and that he asks a lot of questions – but I can’t remember the questions, or what I say. There are other flashes – a firetruck screams past me, going the other way, and I see a firefighter in the jumpseat, facing backwards, driving towards danger, looking bored.

  Sometimes it’s the interstate, wide and straight and surrounded by heavy trucks, and sometimes smaller roads, trees right up to the shoulder and looming. Can’t decide which I like better. On the big roads, the trucks passing make me twitch and lurch suddenly towards the shoulder. It’s like finding someone right behind you, whispering in your ear, when you didn’t know they were there. On the small roads – too close to the centre line, always, sometimes across it all at once because you can’t help but feel you’re being pulled into the ditch. Can’t decide – drop the cups over the seat into the back, or pitch them out the window. Giggling uncontrollably at that. Bought a whole pie somewhere – half of it is on the passenger seat, no seatbelt. Not much of a conversationalist, though. It’s depressed – it’s blue. It’s blueberry. Christ, that’s funny. My fingers are stained blue – must not have bought a fork.