“How many numbers?”
“I don’t know. I don’t have it.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m on the portable. In the washroom.”
“Oooookay…” she said. “Well, make sure you get them all. It’s important.”
“What day did you say you’ll be home?”
She gave me the date and asked if I had made reservations for Harrison.
I tried to think what the safest answer would be.
“Trace!—I’ll be furious if this is the first year we don’t go to Harrison for the long weekend, and all because you can’t—”
“Yeah, I know! I know!”
“Okay,” she said. “I just want to make sure those reservations are made. How’s UBC?”
“I finished.”
“When?”
“Like, two weeks ago.”
“How about money? Do you need me to put more into your account?”
“I’m okay.”
“You sure? After L.A. I’m not sure when I’ll be near a bank machine again.
“I’m fine.”
“Just checking. I should go. I love you.”
“I love you too.”
After I hung up the phone, I called the hotel in Harrison and made the reservations for the Labour Day long weekend. Fortunately, there was still a vacancy. Each year we meet my other aunt and my cousin Emily at Harrison to spend some “family time.” It’s the only way, Kris says, she can tolerate them.
The messages on the machine were mostly from my friends. One from Alex inviting me to the party I’d just attended; two from Cam reminding me that he was returning on the 5th; a two-day-old one from Fahid (this guy who I hadn’t spoken to in a year) telling me, “Quick, turn to 39. There’s this documentary on Radiohead.” And one more from Cam reminding me he was coming back. After I’d erased these, I replayed the ones for the company. The first message was from a man called Sun Young Lee—at least I think that’s what his name was—and he said that he was interested in property in North Van, but only in the Handsworth catchment area. The second one was from Michael Daniels, this “associate” of Kris’s. I recorded these in the notebook, then pressed erase.
When I went to the doctor’s appointment that afternoon he said that things were fine. My blood work had come back and everything appeared to be normal.
When Damien had called near the end of May, he’d wanted me to guess where he was, and I’d thought of where he could be, then realized that it was a joke, a reference, an allusion to what he said the first time he called me from the psychiatric unit.
I hadn’t heard from him again, and had assumed that he was out of the hospital. But a week after Alex’s party, he called.
“Guess where I am?”
“Still?”
“I’m going to be out soon. Maybe another week or so. What are you doing tomorrow night?”
“Nothing. Do you want me to drop by?”
“Can you bring a six pack?”
“Are you allowed?”
“Get me whatever’s on sale… Molson Canadian… TNT… whatever.”
The next night, after stopping at the Cold Beer and Wine Store, I went to visit him. The evening was clear and warm, and it reminded me of the time I had previously visited him there, one year before. It had been the night he and I were supposed to be attending our grad.
I remembered the walk down the glassed-in corridor, the evening light grainy and soft filtering through the long bank of unwashed windows. I remembered being surprised that the nurse on duty that night—a psychiatric ward nurse—knew who my friend was. I remembered waiting in the lounge area, hearing glass breaking, joking to myself someone had gone crazy—not actually thinking anyone had gone crazy, just thinking someone had dropped something. I remembered Damien’s mother running down the hallway, remembered her shouting, “He’s broken the window! He’s broken the window! Help—please!” And I remember the excitement I felt, and the guilt I felt later for feeling that excitement.
Damien was sitting on the edge of the bed, his headphones on. The music was loud and I could tell the song was Sabbath’s “Paranoid.” He banged his head in time with the music and slapped the drumbeat on his thighs. Around him on the bed were Slayer and Nirvana CDs, and on the bedside table, An American Nightmare, Jeffrey Dahmer’s biography.
I was standing just inside the room when he noticed me. “Hey,” he said. He turned off his Discman and pulled out the ear buds.
“Should you be reading this?” I said. I’d gone over and picked up Dahmer’s biography.
“What?” He smiled sheepishly. “It’s interesting.”
I replaced the book.
“Are we going somewhere? I got the beer.”
Damien got up, and took a bag of Drum tobacco and a Zippo lighter from his green jacket on the chair.
As I waited for him to stretch on the paper slippers they gave him in place of his shoes, I noticed his roommate standing by the window, a lanky guy about our age. He wore a purple tracksuit with its hood up and its sleeves pulled over his hands, and he appeared to be wearing black woollen mittens.
I nodded in greeting, but I don’t think he saw me.
I was suspicious when Damien said he was allowed out of the hospital, but I didn’t argue with him. When we got to the car, the beer was still cold. He cracked the first one open, and turned the radio to a station playing Young’s “Cinnamon Girl.”
When I glanced at him, I got the feeling he didn’t want to talk.
The fresh leaves on the alders, the sun setting over the city, the amber skies greying—the evening was identical to that evening a year ago, and the idea that time never began and never ended came into my head.
“Have I showed you this?”
Take it easy, don’t think about it.
“Trace?”
He held the Zippo with the Playboy insignia. “My dad got it in the duty-free, coming home from San Diego.”
“Is he home now?”
“He’s in Hawaii. Or maybe Maui, I can’t remember.”
The sun was shining in my face. I sighed, lowering the visor.
“Kris isn’t home either.”
“Where is—Are you okay?”
“What?” He was staring at me.
“Yeah—I don’t know,” I said, looking back at the sunset. Take it easy, I told myself. “Somewhere in the States, she’s flying around looking at…” I shrugged. “Condos?”
“Are you going to have a party?”
I shook my head, then asked, “Who would I invite anyway?”
Damien didn’t respond.
“Maybe we should invite your roommate.”
“Vincent?”
“Is that his name?”
“Uh huh,” he said and finished his beer. He set the empty can on the floor and pulled off another one.
“I bet he gets a lot of action.”
Damien belched. “How about that girl you knew, the one that’s really hot.”
“Sadie? And do what? Hey, Sadie—” I made my voice sound dumb, “Do you want to come by and hang out with me and my friend and listen to some old Nirvana CDs.”
Damien burst out laughing—I felt better. The Zippo was lying by the gear shift and I picked it up. I ran my finger over the insignia, then flipped the lighter open and lit it.
“Here—don’t waste the fluid.”
I handed it back to him. “You talked to Cameron?”
He shook his head.
“He called me last week,” I said. “He’s coming back next month.”
“So?”
Not sure why I’d mentioned it, I went back to looking out at the evening, watching the light fade on the city’s glass towers.
Before we returned to the hospital, Damien drank another three cans. As I he
lped him stagger down the hall to his room, I was frightened that a nurse or someone would notice us. When we came into the room, ‘Vincent’ was still at the window—I got the feeling he hadn’t moved once.
I helped Damien into bed and covered him with the blanket. As I started to leave he mumbled something.
“What did you say?” I said, leaning down.
“…I get out of the hospital, we’ll go out.”
“Sure,” I said.
As I stepped back out into the twilight, I did whatever it took not to think. I gathered all the empty cans out of the car. A bus stop was nearby, and I jammed them in the trash receptacle attached to the pole. When I got back to the car, I lowered all the windows—even the ones in the back—and drove.
A few minutes later, I was racing along 15th Street to Grand Boulevard, then up the east side of Grand Boulevard, toward Lynn Valley. Damien’s comments had got me thinking about Sadie. I’d met her the past fall at UBC, and there was a period around Christmas when I guess I was kind of obsessed with her. I would go over to her house two or three times a week and write essays for her women’s studies classes, while she got ready to go clubbing with some guys who invariably were called Mike or Steve or Brad. In the spring, we kind of fell out of touch, and I hadn’t seen her since the end of term. But her house was close by, and when I reached the intersection with Mountain Highway I turned left on impulse, and started up the steep road.
I didn’t expect her to be home, but the black Volkswagen her parents had bought her was in the driveway. I passed the house and turned left on Kilmer, and parked.
It was almost night. Vancouver twinkled over the dark treetops.
Her mother answered the door almost the moment I rang the bell. She was wearing the blue terry-towel track suit she always wore. “Tray,” she said, mispronouncing my name. “Come in. How are you?” Her Slovakian accent made her hard to understand.
“Fine,” I said. “Good. Is Sadie in?”
I stepped inside and leaned down to undo my laces.
“Sadie,” she shouted, then turned back to me.
“Are you finished school?”
“Two weeks ago,” I said.
“Sadie—she told me she finished the week before.”
“Everyone has different exam schedules.” I followed the mother into the front hall.
“I don’t know. Sadie never tell us anything—Sadie!”
At the foot of the stairs I fiddled with my car keys. Dinner plates were still on the table in the kitchen and her father was watching a hockey game. The smell of Maggi sauce was in the air.
The woman started to call “Sadie” again, but Sadie was at the top of the stairs.
“What?” she shouted, then noticed me. “Trace. Did you tell me you were coming?”
“No. I was at the hospital.”
She pouted—“Look at me.”
I was—she was wearing a pink terry-towel tracksuit, her hair in curlers—actually, I preferred the look of her when she wasn’t dressed up.
“You’re fine,” I said.
“Come up. I’m just getting ready.”
In her room, I lay on the pink canopy bed while she sat at the matching bureau and finished her hair. The radio was on, playing “Go West” by the Pet Shop Boys.
Taped to the nightstand was a prayer written in Slovakian. Sadie’d told me her mother used to make her pray every night. Each time I was in the room, I’d try to figure out the pronunciation of the words.
Sadie, her back to me, hummed along with the song as she took curlers out of her hair. She had her hands raised over her head. “There’s this girl there, she’s so fucking hot. She’s kind of short? Blonde hair? Yeah—that’s her!” It was strange to think of the things guys said about her at UBC; now she was just a girl.
A few minutes passed without either of us speaking. I picked a People magazine off the floor and flipped past the glossy photos of Ricky Martin and Enrique Iglesias to the pages showing women.
“So, what were you doing at the hospital?” Sadie asked.
“A friend of mine, he—”
“Don’t you think she’s hot?” She pointed to the picture of Jennifer Lopez I’d turned to. “I mean, I’m not a lesbian. But she even turns me on.” After that comment I didn’t bother talking about Damien. I asked instead what she was doing tonight. She said not much, that she and some friends were getting together at the Avalon, that if I wanted to come, I could come, that there would probably be people from UBC there.
She took a black crushed-velvet top out of her closet. As I waited for her to return from the washroom, I paced the room and debated about whether I should go to Avalon. It would probably just make me feel lonely, but I wanted to go.
A beige bra hung off the back of the chair, and I bent down and examined it. I imagined her nipples pressed against the inside of the cups, and flipped the tag and read the measurements on the strap. 32 B. I repeated the number a couple of time trying to remember it.
It was strange—I could never really imagine Sadie having sex. I knew she had sex with guys, she was beautiful, and I was always seeing her in partial stages of undress, but when it came to the actual visuals, there was a blind spot.
Black and white model photos were wedged in the right side of the mirror frame, and I leaned forward to study them. They’d been taken when Sadie was fifteen, before she’d stopped growing and was told she was too short to model. When she told me, I’d remembered a quote by Hitler from the History 12 textbook: “the Czechoslovakians are a vile race of dwarfs.” She looked happy in the photos.
Ten minutes later Sadie came back in the room. Before going to the washroom her face had been pale and featureless, like a young girl’s. Now, with lip gloss, rouge and eyeliner, it looked like the faces in the magazine.
On the drive down to the club, I asked Sadie if she was going out with anyone and she said no. She had broken up with Steve just before the exams, and she wasn’t going to date anyone for a while. She wanted to leave her summer open, she said. The drunken chant of Offspring’s “Self Esteem” came on. She asked if she could change the station, and flipped to one playing Ace of Base’s “All That She Wants.”
At the Avalon there was quite a group of people—some I knew; some I didn’t—and they’d pushed the tables together to form one long table. I sat down in what looked like an unoccupied chair, and Sadie sat next to me. As she’d predicted, people from UBC were there, and I waved at Hugh and Anna at the other end.
I was about to ask Sadie if she wanted anything to drink when I felt a hard tap on my right shoulder.
“That’s my place.” The guy was large, and bulky, and he wore a backwards Raiders hat and a down vest.
I tried to think of something to say.
“Leave—or I’ll make you.”
I went to the other end of the table to join Hugh and Anna and Paula. Hugh, whose real name was Hugo, and was either French and spoke Spanish or Spanish and spoke French—I couldn’t remember—was dressed (as he always dressed) in light blue jeans (holes in the knees) a tweed jacket and a scarf; and he was talking to Anna, a Polish girl, who apparently modeled and who, when I met her the previous fall, had been going out with a guy called Bruce whom she’d said she loved and would marry and whom two weeks later she had to break up with—because she was in love with Hugh. As I sat down next to them I held out my hand for Hugh to shake. I guess he didn’t see it. I turned to Anna and asked how her summer was going. “Great!” she shouted in a tone that suggested she hadn’t heard what I’d said. She kept smiling and I couldn’t think of another thing to say, so I said “Lemon,” a word I once used to describe an English professor we both had and both disliked and which always made Anna laugh.
Anna laughed.
Hugh turned back to her and stroked her cheek and said something in… French? Spanish? English? Polish? At the other end of t
he table Sadie was on the lap of the guy who had told me to move. He massaged her thigh while flirting with the brunette across from him. Someone tapped my shoulder. It was Hugh. He shouted something, and after shouting it two more times, Anna told me that Hugh was wondering if I could get them two margaritas. As she said this, she patted my arm and smiled. At the bar, there was a crowd. It took me twenty minutes to get the drinks. Hugh and Anna had gone when I got back. When I found them, they were in the corner. I approached, I stopped.
Hugh’s tweed coat was over Anna’s lap, his hand was working under it. Anna’s face had an earnest expression, her eyes half-glazed, her mouth half-open.
Back at the table, I drank the margaritas.
“Having fun?”
Paula was Chilean, and once told me that if she didn’t shower everyday she got B.O.
“Uh—”
“I’ll talk to you in a second,” she shouted, getting up. “—gotta go pee.”
The moment I got out to the parking lot, my mind cleared. The margaritas had done their job. The cold spring air felt good.
The club’s sound system still thumping in my head, I drove up Keith Road, past the Catholic school I went to in junior high. A house beyond it had my aunt’s real estate sign on its lawn.
On Lonsdale, I turned left. The highway led West, to Horseshoe Bay. I stamped the accelerator, lowered the front and back windows. All the stations that night were playing the Pet Shop Boys’ “Go West”—I finally turned the radio off and put on Led Zeppelin’s “Dazed and Confused….”
I pressed repeat.
The last week in May, I didn’t do much. Each day I slept later and later, the thick blanket in the window stopping the sun from waking me. At first this had bothered me, my seeming purposelessness, but slowly I grew used to the rhythm of the days and the routine of killing time.
After the night at the Avalon I hadn’t expected to hear from Sadie again—actually I didn’t want to hear from her again. But she called the night before I was to pick Cam up from the airport. I was sitting on the sofa watching Maniac when the phone rang, and without pausing the movie, I grabbed the portable. “Patterson Realty,” I said.
The Video Watcher Page 2