If I died, what would Kris do? Cremate me? Bury me?
I shot up to the surface.
Taking deep breaths, I got out, towelled myself dry, then lay on one of the green chaises. Tea Party’s “Temptation” had come on. I clicked off the radio and settled back in the chaise. There was a light breeze. The faint drone of a neighbour’s mower and sunlight filtering through the hemlocks made me drowsy. As I lay there, struggling not to drift off, more images of neighbours’ deaths flickered through my memory: the son of Dr. Haroldson, the psychiatrist, who hanged himself from the chandelier in the front hall; the Korean family that after a whole summer day of the RCMP going in and out of their silent Tudor-style house was never seen again; the renter in the house next door who was found asphyxiated during Expo 86—all these things had happened in the summer.
I went inside.
When it started to get dark, I put on a pair of chinos and T-shirt and went down to Burger King for dinner. After, I rented Magic and Sleep Away Camp II.
4
“So—how do you know this place?”
“What?”
“The place, the Cave.”
“Everyone knows about it,” she said. She turned up the volume on the car stereo. “I love this song.”
“Everyone?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Listen.”
The lyrics were about penetration and violation, and I didn’t think I recognized the song. But when the chorus began I remembered Alex playing the song for me in her room, telling me that it was Nine Inch Nail’s “Closer.”
“This place we’re going, it’s not like that apartment on Lonsdale?”
Alex looked at me, her eyes wide. “How do you know about that place?”
“Everyone knows about it,” I said trying to imitate her insouciant tone.
“No—seriously—how do you know?”
“Some girls at your party, they were talking.”
“What did they say?”
“Don’t you have this CD?”
“Tell me,” she said, turning off the radio. “What did they say?”
“Nothing. Just that some guy—”
“They didn’t say anything about me?”
“No. Why? Do you go there?”
“You promise they didn’t say anything about me.”
“Yes—why? Have you been there?”
“Shhh. I want to hear this,” Alex said and turned back on the radio.
“Don’t you have the CD?”
“Yeah. But it’s better on the radio.”
“Why? How?”
“I don’t know. It’s like you’re connected to all those people. The people you know are listening to it.”
“Sure,” I said, but then thought about it and realized it made sense.
The house we were going to that night was owned by a Korean family, but they didn’t live there, they lived in Korea, and no one had ever seen the son who supposedly took care of the house for them.
When we got there it was around nine. Kids had spilled out on the lawn and were staggering and falling in the grey twilight. Two boys in navy and maroon hoodies stood at the top of the driveway hackysacking, while a third boy lay on the grass beside them.
“Shouldn’t we turn him over?” I heard one boy say as I passed. “Isn’t that how Pat died?”
The front door was open and we shouldered our way through the group standing there and went up the stairs and into the kitchen. More high-school kids circled the kitchen island. A bottle of shaken-up Coke stood on it, and they were having some type of argument about alcohol.
“Isn’t, like, Crystal’s mother supposed to get it?”
“Didn’t you hear what I said, Roach? She failed some socials test. Now her mother’s angry at her.”
The girl with the tank top nodded. She stuck out her tongue, and pulling it back, banged her teeth with the metal stud.
“Hey, isn’t he old enough to go?” I heard one of the boys say.
I wasn’t sure if he was referring to me, but I followed Alex down the hallway on the right. In the bedroom at the end two girls, maybe fifteen or sixteen, sat cross legged on the floor.
“Bead!” Alex said to the girl on the left. “Hey—do you know who’s got some pot?”
“Um—” Between them on the floor was a boy, and they appeared to be minding him. “I think Reese has some.”
“Where is he?”
The boy was young, maybe eleven or twelve, and he was naked except for a green tartan kilt. He rolled to the left, and then to the right, and flailed his arm above his head, trying to reach the overturned bottle of Flintstone multi-vitamins behind him. When he rolled to the left the kilt came up, and I saw that he wasn’t wearing any underwear. The penis, small, pale and limp, stuck to the side of his scrotum, and there was no pubic hair.
“Josh! Josh!” the girl on the right said. She pulled down on the kilt. But the boy’s body was lying on the material, and she couldn’t get it down far enough to cover him. “Josh, cover up! We can see your pee pee.”
“Is Garth here?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah he is,” the girl on the right said.
“Garth’s not here.”
The boy got hold of the vitamin bottle. He shook it like a rattle.
“He’s in Surrey. I talked to him last night.”
“I think he’s back.”
“No. He’s not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
Josh held the bottle high over his upturned face. He poured out a bunch of Flintstones and chomped on them with his mouth open.
“I don’t think Josh has any,” Alex said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Oh, my God! Bead. Bead—”
“Check down stairs. I think—”
“Bead. Look—Josh’s eaten the vitamins. He’s eating the vitamins.”
The boy’s face was glazed with saliva and coloured bits of half-chewed Flintstones.
“Anyway—”
“Did you hear me?”
“Well don’t spaz about it.”
“He could die.”
“Trish, you can’t die from Flintstones.”
“Yeah! You can! My cousin ate them, and he had to have his stomach pumped.”
In the kitchen I told Alex, “I’m going to stay here.”
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. Why?”
“You look sad.”
I shrugged. “I’m fine.” I noticed a sofa through the doorway behind Alex and pointed. “I’m going to wait in there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Uh huh.”
Sitting on the sofa, I pulled out the Smirnoff I’d brought and unscrewed the top and took a swig. It wasn’t cold enough and I sputtered. I took another one. I put the bottle back in my pocket and looked around the room. It was supposed to be some kind of family room. But the walls were decorated with faded pages cut from a porno magazine, and on the far wall I thought I saw one of Kris’s calendars. I couldn’t imagine any Korean family living here. The stereo in the corner was on and the first notes of “Born on the Bayou” wobbled out of the speakers. The fat boy on the couch adjacent to mine stared psychotically at the rug. He sipped a Super Big Gulp, and then swore under his breath. Two other boys were playing Super Mario on an old Nintendo. All three of them were dressed in baggy plaid shirts, and I felt like I was in some sort of grunge video or a scene from the movie Kids.
Another boy entered the room. He also wore a plaid shirt and held up a Handycam to his face. He turned down the stereo and approached the fat kid, videotaping him. “Hey Chris,” he said. “Say something really sick.”
“Fuck you, Cory.”
“Come on. You can do bet
ter than that. Just one thing.”
“I fucked your grandmother last night.”
“That’s better. Did it feel good?”
“Yeah.”
“As good as your mother?”
The fat kid kicked out at the boy with the Handycam, but that boy had jumped back, keeping the Handycam fixed on the fat boy’s face.
I had the bottle out again and I took another sip. It was getting easier. I needed to use the toilet.
In the washroom, I was afraid to touch anything. I pulled down my sleeve and handled everything through it. I remembered Vincent, Damien’s psych-ward roommate, and worried that I was turning into him.
When I got back to the family room, Josh the boy from the bedroom was there. He was in the middle of the room and was doing an awkward sort of dance, holding the hem of his kilt with both hands and swaying it back and forth. After doing this for maybe a minute, he lay with his face on the floor and raised his ass high in the air. He wiggled it back and forth, and the kilt fell over his back. Behind him, the two boys now watched some kind of home movie on TV.
“Watch this,” one of them said. On the screen someone vomited into a toilet bowel.
“Gross,” the other said.
“Hi. What’s your name?” a girl said, sitting down beside me. She was the one from the kitchen, the one in the scarelet tank top and spiky hair who couldn’t understand why the other girl’s mother wouldn’t run liquor for them.
For some reason I was reluctant to give her my real name, and said, “Paul. And yours?”
“Roach.”
“Roach?” I said, certain that I’d misheard.
“Yeah, Roach. My parents call me Rachel, but don’t call me that. I hate that name.”
For a minute, neither one of us said anything.
In the middle of the room, the fat kid had got off the sofa and stood over Josh. He’d found a cardboard tube somewhere, like the ones that posters come in, and began to spank Josh’s bare ass with it.
“Who did you come with?”
“Alex Murphy,” I said.
The girl looked up as if thinking about it. Again she stuck out her tongue and was tapping her teeth with the piercing.
“She has short blonde hair,” I said.
The fat kid had stopped spanking Josh with the tube, and instead tried to push it into Josh’s ass.
Josh, his face still on the floor, feigned an expression of pleasure, and he wiggled his ass back and forth as if trying to assist the fat kid.
My little cock can go where big cocks can’t.
“I don’t think I know her,” the girl said. “Listen, is it true you’re nineteen?”
“Uh. Yeah,” I said, and waited for her to ask me to get them alcohol.
“Isn’t that illegal?”
“What?”
“That girl and you—you know.”
“What do you mean?”
For a half-minute, the girl didn’t respond, then jumping up, said, very emphatically, like she was acting some role, “Don’t worry. Your secret’s Safe. With. Me.”
Before I could say anything, she’d skipped back into the kitchen.
The fat boy had given up and gone back to the couch and the Slurpee. One of the boys who’d been watching the TV now picked up the cardboard tube. He poked Josh’s bum with it. But as he did this, Josh reached around and grabbed it. He yanked it from the boy’s hand. The boy stepped back as Josh jumped up. Josh hit the boy surprisingly hard on the side of the head with the tube. The boy ran into the kitchen, Josh chasing him
The feeling the vodka had given me was gone. When I got the bottle out again it was half empty.
Give it time.
Alex didn’t want to go home. She lay in the backseat of the car and insisted I take her somewhere.
“Where do you want to go?” I asked.
“I don’t care. Anywhere.”
Horseshoe Bay seemed as good as anywhere.
An almost full moon shone down as we drove the highway, some DJ on one of the stations playing Harvey Danger’s “Flagpole Sitta” over and over again. As always, I had the windows down.
When we got back from Horseshoe Bay, I headed to take Alex home, but she didn’t want to go there.
“Is your dad home?” I finally asked.
She didn’t answer, but after a pause said, “He wants to meet you.”
At my house I lay on my bed while Alex paced my room.
There were posters on the wall from the days when my grandparents operated a drive-in in northern BC, and Alex paused for a long time in front of the one for Ice Man.
“NO rhyme, no reason, just death,” she said, reading the caption.
“The poster’s from my grandparents’ movie theatre,” I said. “My grandparents, they used to own a drive-in movie theatre—in the seventies. Ice Man was one of the movies.”
Alex went to the bookshelf and looked at the titles.
“Wow, have you read all of these?”
“Yeah. Most of them.”
She pulled out Animal Farm, a hardcover I’d inherited when our neighbour, who was some kind of book collector, died.
“We had to read this one in school,” she said. “It was so boring.”
“You didn’t like it?”
“I only read half of it. Then—I think I lost it.”
She pushed it back.
“What’s this one about?” she asked, pulling out a copy of Sons and Lovers
“Um… it’s about this guy with this really domineering mother and—“
“There’s this one book,” she said, replacing Sons and Lovers, “Farid told me it has all this really dirty—”
“There’s a lot of books like that.”
“But this one’s really famous.”
“Ulysses?”
“It was something about cancer.”
“Tropic of Cancer?”
“Maybe.”
“You can get it at the library.”
“Doesn’t it have all this sex and stuff?”
“Yeah. But you can still get it at the library.”
“Why are you reading this?” she asked, looking alarmed. She’d pulled out Durkheim’s Suicide, an edition with a blank red cover with “suicide” written across it in bold white letters.
“What?” I laughed, thinking that she probably thought it was some kind of how-to guide, with diagrams on how to tie nooses and put them over your neck. “It’s just a study on suicide. I had to read it for a Sociology class.”
“Still—it looks really weird,” she said, pushing it back on the shelf.
I began to think about the book and said, “It says there’s four social reasons why people kill them themselves. If they don’t connect with the people around them… if they—”
“You like books?”
“Sometimes. Do you?”
“No, not really,” she said.
She turned around and walked toward me. There was a strange expression on her face.
“Here, let’s do something.”
She got down on her knees in front of me. She looked up at me. She unbuttoned my jeans and tried to yank them down.
“Get up.”
I had my hands on the bed behind me and I lifted my butt up. She pulled down my jeans, then my boxer shorts—it happened so fast I didn’t have time to feel embarrassed.
“This would be better if I had the stud,” she said.
“What—what are you doing?”
She didn’t seem to hear me.
“What are you doing?”
After another moment—my penis still flaccid—she stopped.
“What? Don’t you want me to do this?”
“I don’t know.”
Still on her knees, my penis still in her hand, she studied
me.
She stood up, wiped her lips on her sleeve and sat beside me on the bed.
“Why? Don’t you like me doing that?”
“I don’t know.”
Another pause.
“You’re not gay are you?”
“No.”
She smiled, looked away, then back “But you don’t like me doing that?”
“So, how’s their marriage?” Kris asked. We had been out looking at condos that morning and were now having brunch at Earl’s. Somehow the subject of Alex had come up.
“Who? Alex’s parents?”
I’d made the mistake of mentioning Alex’s father’s absences, and Kris had become fixated on the state of their marriage. Kris nodded.
“Is that important?”
“It is, if it’s falling apart,” she said casually.
I felt a dropping feeling in my stomach.
She signalled the waiter to bring more coffee. “It never hurts to know when people are looking for new houses.”
“Don’t you mean a home?” I said, referencing her advertising slogan: When a house is a home.
Either she didn’t get the dig, or chose to ignore it.
The waiter came with our main order. Kris’s eyes stayed on him as he set her eggs Benedict in front of her. He was maybe two years younger than me, but was muscular and had a neatly chiselled haircut. After he left she said, “Is he sleeping with her?”
I thought she was talking about the waiter, then remembered the conversation was about Alex’s parents.
“What do you mean?”
“Do they still sleep in the same room?”
“Should I hide in their closet?” I said, glancing at my bacon. Kris didn’t respond, and when I looked up she was glaring.
“Don’t be sarcastic with me,” she hissed. She tried her eggs, and dropped her fork loudly on the plate. “Every time I come here I have to go through the same shit,” she said, as if to herself. She looked toward the serving station. “If they’re going to get divorced then the house might go on the market,” she said, trying to catch the server’s eye. “Or they might be looking for separate apartments and townhouses. It never hurts to know these things—for heaven’s sake Trace. Fuck! Grow up! Do you think you’re the only one suffering here? Act like—”
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