I was about to approach them when something hit my arm. The man on the sofa through the doorway tried to say something. There was a garbage can beside me. A live cigarette butt lay at my feet. The guy must have been trying to throw it in the garbage. I picked up the butt and put it in the garbage. I imagined it catching fire, the apartment building burning. When I glanced back at the entrance, Alex was gone.
My head was aching. I sat on one of the kitchen chairs and took a couple of deep breaths.
A girl with spiky hair and her left eyebrow pierced came and asked me if I was Redgy. She was quite thin and her midriff was showing, and her belly button was pierced too.
“I don’t think so,” I said, trying to be witty.
She reached for the bowl of Cheezies in the centre of the table.
“You know someone spat in there,” I said.
“I know. That was my friend. So—are you Redgy?”
“No.”
The girl tossed the Cheezie into her mouth and folded her arms. “Like, then, who are you?”
It sounded like a simple question, but I couldn’t think of the answer. I glanced at the garbage.
“So you’re not Redgy?”
“No. I’m not Redgy.”
“You have an accent.”
I shrugged.
The girl continued to peer at me as she ate the Cheezies.
“Some people think I have an accent,” I said.
“What?”
“I said, ‘Some people think I have an accent.’”
The girl nodded and tossed another Cheezie in her mouth. With her mouth full, she said, “So where are you from—originally?”
When I said, “Here. North Van,” the girl gave me a sarcastic grin. “Seriously, don’t bullshit me.”
“Nowhere. Here.”
She rolled her eyes, and for a moment, was cute.
“Okay, where were you born?”
“Here.”
“How about your parents?”
“I don’t know. Back east. Somewhere.”
“Not England?”
“No.”
The girl shook her head. “It’s weird. You have like this total British accent.”
When I didn’t say anything, she said, “You’re not bullshitting me?”
I shook my head.
Another girl entered the kitchen. She wore a grey hooded sweat top, with the image of a fish-bone skeleton on the back. She took a Labatt Wildcat from the fridge.
“Here, Kristin, come here,” said the girl I’d been talking to. She grabbed the other girl by the sleeve and pulled her over. “Listen to this guy.”
The second girl cracked open the can.
“Okay, say something,” the first girl said.
“What? What do you want me—”
“Just anything. Just say something.”
“I don’t know. Do you—”
“Make up a story. Tell me why you’re here.”
“Okay. I. Came with this girl. Alex. And she’s this girl I met at the library and—”
“You see!” the first girl said to the second girl. “Doesn’t he totally sound like he has an accent.”
“He’s faking it,” the second girl said. She took a sip of the beer.
“You are faking, aren’t you?” said the first one.
I didn’t answer. Alex had emerged from the room with the closed door. She was adjusting the strap of her tank top. The man came out, patted her on the shoulder, said something, then went back into the room.
“Alex,” I said and waved. Her expression changed.
“Where were you?”
“Nowhere,” she said. “Just in there.”
“What happened?”
“Nothing.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing. Just some pictures.”
“Pictures—”
“Hey, how’s it going?” The girl in the fish-bone sweat top hugged Alex, holding the Wildcat off to one side.
When Alex looked back at me, I said, “I think I’m going to go.”
“You’re not feeling good again?”
“I guess not. I can come and get you later if you want?”
“No. It’s okay. I can go too.”
Out on the street, I asked Alex again what went on in the bedroom.
“Fuck! Would you give it a rest! You wanted to come here.”
“I—”
“I’m hungry. I want to go to Burger King.”
Neither one of us spoke as we drove there. When we arrived, she was calm again. As I stood in the line-up I found the lit menu board somehow reassuring.
We ordered Whoppers and milkshakes and sat in a booth by the window. It was dark outside and wet.
4:01 A.M.
“Good evening. You’re on Alan Jacobs.
“I am SO.TIRED. of YOU.”
“Okay—” said Alan, unfazed. “Can you be more specific? Is there something in particular that bothers you about my show?”
“YOU are ssPREADING the devil’s lies. People are becoming POssessed by listening to your show.”
“Well, YOUR’RE listening to my show.”
“I’m what?”
“You’re listening to my show,” Alan continued, deadpan. “Have you become possessed?”
“I need to know the lies that Satan is spreading.”
“I find it interesting that you think my show is causing possessions. We rarely talk about religion on this show. In the last month I can think of only ONE show in which Satanism was discussed.”
“All of your shows have to do with the Devil and His works. UFOs, aliens, extra-terrestrials—these are all Satan flexing his muscles in the end times.”
“So you believe we are in the end times?”
“Yes I do.”
“Do you care to put a date on it?”
“The day and the hour are unknown. But the Antichrist has come—”
“Okay, this IS something I want to talk about. This Antichrist, is he around now?”
“He may not be active—but He’s here.”
“Do you think he’s listening to this show?”
“He may very well be.”
“Okay—if you’re out there, Antichrist, please call in.”
My thoughts were racing as I lay in bed that night. I breathed deeply and started to touch myself, tried to focus my thoughts on Alex or Alex’s mother or any woman I could think of. But couldn’t. I pictured the fat boy at the party astride Luke and the expression on Luke’s face as the fat kid drove the tube into his ass. I pictured myself in the room with the closed door. Alex on all fours. The man with the Celtic tattoo telling me what to do.
Just as in the day’s of Noah.
Give it time
Just as in the day’s of Noah
My little cock can go where big cocks can’t
We know who told him to do that
You know, THOSE pesky thoughts
The feeling wasn’t going away; the feeling was only intensifying.
I got out of bed. I paced the room. I went down the hall to the kitchen—I wished someone was home, someone to talk to. I thought about calling Kris, but I didn’t know where she was, only that she was somewhere in the Okanagan—she’d left no contact information. The air in the kitchen was stupefying. I walked in circles, tried to find a cold patch of tile to stand on, then went outside by the pool. The air was cooler there. It was quiet too. I looked up at the black shape of the mountain under the blue sky, the dim glimmer of the Skyride going down its face, the lights of the chalet at the top illuminating the low-flying clouds like the glow from the mouth of a volcano to which people were sacrificed; then out over the treetops at the shimmer of the city and the harbour. There was a breeze. For a moment I thought I w
as going to be okay. But the feeling returned. It wasn’t as strong as before though, and I went back inside, leaving the door ajar, and turned on the TV. It was tuned to MuchMusic, a Rusty video playing. The remote sat on the coffee table and I reached to switch the channel, but the song came to the chorus. Unlike the verse, the chorus was poppy and catchy, and as I continued to watch, the feeling gradually subsided.
The video was a parody of The Midnight Cowboy, and I thought of Joe Buck.
When the video ended, I realized that it was going to be okay, that I was going to be okay.
Damien was at the pool table in the centre of the room when I stepped out of the elevator. He was leaning across the table, throwing the one ball against the bumper and catching it when it bounced back. The room had a high ceiling and there was a skylight: there were bars on the skylight. This—Damien had once told me—was the ward reserved for the seriously disturbed.
When he’d called the previous night, I knew something was really wrong because he’d done something that he had never done before: he didn’t make me guess where he was—he just told me.
There were problems with his medication, and they were going to try something different. But what most worried him was another patient. The patient, an older woman with a “Woodstock Forever” T-shirt, had threatened to cut his head off.
“Hey,” he said, noticing me. He dropped the ball in a pocket.
“Do you want to play?”
He shook his head and stepped back from the table.
“I brought you something—” I’d thought he’d catch on right away.
He looked puzzled.
“A gift.”
Still a blank expression. But then he smiled wanly. “Oh yeah. Yeah, thanks. But I can’t do that. They think that’s what might be interfering with my medication. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I said, shrugging.
In the room to the right of us, there was a woman in an easy chair watching television. She had her back to us, and she seemed to be tearing something in her hands.
“So is that her?” I said, not actually thinking that it was the woman he’d told me about.
“Shhhh,” Damien said, suddenly very nervous. “Keep your voice down.”
The woman looked to be in her late forties. She wore a green terry-towel housecoat, and had very short hair that appeared to have been dyed orange.
I couldn’t see from where I was standing whether she was wearing her “Woodstock Forever” T-shirt.
“Come in here,” he said. He led me into the kitchen area. From the fridge he took out a small cup of Dairyland raspberry cocktail.
“You want one?”
Ignoring the sign that said that drinks were for patients only, I nodded.
“I haven’t seen these in years,” I said, peeling off the foil cover. “This girl I used to play with, her mother would always—”
“I’m not joking,” said Damien. “I’m really scared of that woman.”
“The woman in there?”
He nodded and told me that that morning she’d been standing over his bed with a pair of scissors.
I laughed.
“Fuck—I’m serious!” he said. “She said all this crazy shit. Like she knew I was a dirty pervert. That I was masturbating about her and she—she was going to fucking cut it off.”
It was difficult not to laugh again. “Then why don’t you just tell the nurse?” I said.
“They don’t do fucking anything,” he said desperately. “They’ll just talk about adjusting my medication.”
We were still talking about the woman when a male nurse approached us. He was pushing a cart with paper cups on top.
He checked a list on a clipboard, then said in a saccharine tone. “Okay, Daniel. Time for the ol’ medication.”
Damien took the paper cup from the nurse and shook it. He turned it on its side and shook it again. The nurse just stood there, watching.
“What’s this?” Damien said, pointing to a large blue pill.
“Daniel, that’s your medication.”
“This is Androcur. I’m not supposed to be on it. They changed my medication.”
“You just take them and I’ll ask Doctor Bennett.”
There was a garbage can beside us. Damien dropped the cup in it.
“Oookay Danny.” The nurse wrote something on his clipboard. “Have a nice day.”
“That’s what I fucking hate about this place,” Damien whispered when the man was gone. “Now I’m going to be in all this shit. Fuck!”
After that, he wanted me to leave. I said that I could stay and help him talk to the doctor. But he said it was better if I wasn’t there.
I tried to figure out what I should do. It was hard to know how seriously to take what Damien had said about the other patient. He had a habit of exaggerating things, and I didn’t even know if he really believed what he said, or just wanted to shock me.
The last thing that I remember was his feet. I was staring down as he told me about how the nurse was a “fag” and probably wanted him to get killed anyway: his feet, in the paper hospital slippers, lined up perfectly with a seam in the linoleum floor.
At the end of that week I received a very strange phone call from Cam. Unlike the other calls, which came late at night, this one came in the afternoon. For most of it he just whimpered on the other end of the line, saying that a fortune cookie had said that it was going to happen. The question of what was never answered. The only response I got to any question was that he was tired of being so insecure.
After about five minutes of this, the line went dead.
“Are you there? Are you there?” I heard the click that really meant the line was dead.
I was on the portable phone and I went back to my bedroom and hung up. For a few minutes I just stood there, listening to the muted sound of the rain on the shed’s roof—the hollow smacking sound each drop made as it hit the plastic cover—then walked back down the hall and into the living room. It had become dark while I’d been talking on the phone. The streetlight outside was now on, and coming to the window, I noticed that the light made the wet black surface of the driveway shine.
What was I supposed to do?
My hands felt shaky as I flipped through the stations. The rain had let up outside. I turned my wipers off and slowed for the intersection, images of a pedestrian’s yellow coat and a red stop sign floating on the wet pavement. Kitchener was the next street. I turned right. There was no parking in front of Maria’s house, and I cruised down one street and over another, and finding a spot, pulled into it. As I walked back, I kept telling myself to be calm, I didn’t know for sure that it had been Maria.
The week before I’d gone to The Railway to see a band play and was certain that I’d seen Maria in a booth with Sadie’s friend Hugh, at least I thought I had. It was hard to tell because she’d had her face turned to him. But he had that sport coat over her lap, and that hand doing something under it. I’d been afraid she’d see me, and had gone to the washroom before I could make sure. When I’d come out, they were no longer there, but I couldn’t find any couple in the club that looked like the couple I’d seen.
At the gate in front of the house, I hesitated. I remembered the evening that I first unlatched it. The pink twilight. The warmth of the air. The cat weaving between our legs.
The front room was dark. I tried to see if anyone was in there, then opened the gate and climbed to the porch and knocked. Cuban music came faintly from the other side of the door. I stood on my tiptoes. Down the hall light shone from the kitchen. I knocked again. A dark figure appeared in the lit doorway. I thought it was Fernando, then that it wasn’t, then saw that it was. He’d grown a beard.
The music became louder as the door opened.
“Sorry—”
He shook his head.
“Is Maria in
?”
“She. She gone.”
“When is she going to be home?”
“She. She moved.”
“Where?”
He shook his head.
I remained standing there, so finally he said, “Wait.” He gestured with his hand for me to stay outside. He closed the door and disappeared through the lit doorway down the hall.
When he didn’t come back right away, I wondered if he was going to return. The kitchen doorway darkened with shadow, and he appeared and walked toward the door and opened it.
He handed me a slip of paper. “This. Her address.”
“Thank you,” I said. He’d scratched the address out faintly in pencil.
I walked in the direction he’d pointed. I didn’t know the area, but I hoped that unlike the streets in North Van, these streets connected.
Light spilled out of the pizzeria at the corner of Commercial and Kitchener. In the steamed window a couple my age was holding hands.
The next street was the street written on the piece of paper. I turned right and began to check the house numbers. The house whose number matched the number on the paper was almost identical to the house I’d just left: three stories high, a porch in front, a garden fenced with wrought iron.
I opened the gate (also identical) and walked through the garden. The trees were still dripping from the rain earlier. Soon it would be fall and they would be losing their leaves. I climbed to the porch and knocked. A joke Maria had told me came back to me: Kill me, just don’t leave me.
With the ringing of a bell and squeaking, the door swung back.
A woman in her early thirties peered out.
“Sorry. Someone said a Maria, a Mexican girl, lived here.”
The woman turned and shouted into the house. “Maria, someone’s here to see you.” She did this so casually I wondered if other men had come to the door asking for Maria.
When she turned back, her bangs fell in her eyes. She used her little finger and cleared them out of the way. The other hand was still holding the door. Her bare legs and the oversized UBC sweat top made her look young, but there were lines around her eyes.
The Video Watcher Page 10