The Withdrawal Method

by Pasha Malla

  Both teams came out of the time out fired up. First possession, their big man threw down a huge dunk in traffic, and back the other way we broke their press into a three-point play by Dizzy. Then we got a steal of our own, a few more unanswered baskets, and by the end of the quarter we were tied at 47.

  ALONE IN THE waiting room, I sit with the clock ticking up over my head, getting on three o'clock, and I start to think I should maybe go see if anyone's got any updates at the nurse's station down the hall.

  But I'm paralyzed, stuck there sitting in my chair, Dizzy's postcard stiff and awkward in my jacket pocket. I think about the few times I came back home from school once I moved out and went away to university, sometimes a day early on holidays just to watch Dizzy's games. He dominated the league, scoring at will, but seemed casual about it, only driving to the hoop when games were close enough that he needed to.

  His hair was long everywhere, not just the front, and he played with it tied up in a bun, looking like a skinny blond Buddha out there. In grade thirteen he started showing up to practice stoned, and then to games all pie-eyed and bleary, even dopier than usual. He'd still be in charge, but just a step slower than usual, just a bit off the pace of his former self. Even so, the letters kept pouring in from schools - UBC, Western, StFX.

  When I'd come back for Thanksgiving or Christmas he'd be out all day and night with that same girlfriend and a bunch of kids just like her, all dreadlocks and tie-dye and bloodshot eyes from dope. He missed a tournament one weekend to go to Ottawa for some rally, some protest against something happening halfway across the world. And when he graduated, instead of taking schools up on any of the tryout offers, he headed to Guelph with his lady, lasted a semester before calling university quits forever.

  There was one dinner, though, right at the end of June before high-school graduation, that seems now to mark the end of the Dizzy I thought I knew. The basketball season was a distant memory, and I'd brought Jen to meet Mom and Dad for the first time. They liked her right away, and everyone was getting along and we were talking about moving in together for the summer while we did internships at companies in Toronto. Dizzy sat at the end of the table sneering at us and pushing his food around, barely acknowledging Jen was even there. When I talked about trying to get into drug sales and he muttered something like, "That's ethical," I finally lost it.

  "What the fuck's your problem?"

  Mom and Dad froze. We've always been a calm family - fights happen to people on Tv, not us, and suddenly it was like someone had stepped out of a soap opera and, one by one, slapped us all across the faces. Dizzy shook his hair out of his face, staring at me, and for the first time I saw that the sleepiness in his eyes was gone. He started going off about corporations and the American FDA and unreleased side effects, slapping the table. No one could believe it. He shook his head at me, then turned to Mom and excused himself from the table. "I have to go take my insulin," he said, getting up, then disappearing down the hall.

  It's past three now, by the waiting-room clock, and to shake the memory from my head, I take out the postcard again. Sitting there looking at it, I start to wonder how things changed for Dizzy after all those years creating stories to go with the picture. Was there a point where he ran out of possibilities? Was there a day when he looked at it and didn't see anything, a time when everything that had been hope and glory and a whole universe of fantasy faded, and, just like that, when that image of the greatest player to ever play the game became nothing more than a bookmark?

  THE FOURTH QUARTER of that city final was tight. We traded baskets back and forth, Dizzy on his game, driving to the hole, scooping up their misses under our basket and going coastto-coast, picking passes off, working their press. But Heights came hard too. They were pounding us inside, knocking down open shots, their pressure throwing us off our halfcourt set, making us overly careful, nervous.

  With under a minute to go we were down two, 60-58, and they had the ball, running a weave up top to knock as much time off the clock as they could. Me and Healey were trapping and recovering, trying to force a turnover, waiting for McGowan to holler at us to foul.

  Then something happened. Heights' point guard jabstepped one way and came hurtling down the lane. As he picked up the ball on the hop-step, one of our rookies, a good, solid kid named Leeman, came with the help and got a hand in, tied him up. The refs called it a jump - our possession. McGowan yelled for time and got us in a huddle to figure out a last shot. Not that we had a play. Everyone knew to get one guy the ball and sit back and let him do his thing.

  We took our time off the inbounds with their pressure, working the ball back and forth in the back-court before we crossed half and set up our zone offence. Thirty seconds on the clock, and everybody in the gym knew who we were going to. I had it up top, dribbling over to the wing where I knew Dizzy would come swinging through for the pass. Heights were playing us tight, though, and he got the ball farther out than he usually liked - right up near the hash mark. The rest of us spread the floor, and Dizzy squared up, triplethreat, with one of their guys right in his face. The clock was counting down - twenty-six, twenty-five, twenty-four - and right before the five-second call he put the ball down, hair in his face, and started to move in.

  We waited. No one wanted a pass. Their zone was laid flat out, waiting for Dizzy to go outside so they could bring the trap and he'd have to swing it back around to someone else. And, for whatever reason, my little brother gave them exactly that - he brought the guy up the sideline, into the corner, and then there were two on him, and the rest of us realized we had better rotate around to give him another option.

  I came off a screen from Healey, wide open at the top of the key. Dizzy looked at me, still working his dribble with two defenders closing in on him. His eyes met mine. My hands went up. Eighteen seconds on the clock, seventeen. And then he went around the back, split the trap, and he was at his sweet spot, a step in from three, right where he'd made a living all season.

  But, for whatever reason, he didn't shoot. He looked at me again quickly and then took a step backwards so he was beyond the arc. And then, like he'd been a bomber from out there all his life, he let fly for the win.

  I heard McGowan yell, "No!" and then there was just silence as the ball made its way to the hoop, my teammates and I just watching, no one crashing the boards. It came down off the front of the rim, bounced up off the backboard, rim again, before falling out. One of the Heights guys nabbed the rebound, but we were so dazed we didn't even think to foul, and it was one quick outlet pass, and another, and their point guard was up for two at our end to put it at 62-58 and out of reach.

  "MR. CALDER?"

  I look up and it's the little doctor with the clipboard, slight and brown and sort of bowing at me, like he's a butler or something.

  "Yes?"

  "I'm Dr. Singh."

  I stand up and we shake hands.

  "I've got some good news," he says. "We were able to save your brother's right foot. Just some pustules, some minor infection."

  "Oh, good." Right away, this seems a dumb thing to say.

  "He's in recovery, a bit disoriented, but otherwise doing fine."

  "Yeah?"

  "We told him you're here," Dr. Singh says. "He said he'd like to see you."

  Dr. Singh bows again and then he's off down the hall at a decent clip, and I have to hurry to catch up. I've still got the postcard in my hand, although now I realize that it's bent and folded like Bettis's magazine.

  AFTER THE GAME I sat in the locker room with my shoes off and uniform still on. Clark was crying a bit, and McGowan put his arm around our big man and told him he was proud of how far he'd come, and to the other guys he said they did a great job and that he was looking forward to next year.

  But I sat there, remembering that look Dizzy had given me before he shot, almost apologetic, but something in it that seemed cocky, superior - like, "This one's mine. Sorry." And then the miss and he'd gone shuffling off the court while th
e clock ran out on our season.

  He'd got changed and was sitting there in jeans and a hoodie, reading Che across the change room. Eventually he looked up and I caught his eye. He slung his gym bag over his shoulder, stuck his thumb in the book to keep his page, and came across to where I was, sitting beside the door.

  "Good game," he said to me, his palm out for five or a handshake.

  I just sat there, offering nothing.

  Dizzy smiled then, that one side of his mouth turned up at the corner. He flipped his hair out of his face. "It's just basketball, man," he said. Then, as he opened the door to head outside, my brother looked back at me with the same expression as the one he'd given me on the court - not arrogance, I'd misread it before. This was a look of distance. Once, when we were kids, I'd been sent to fetch Dizzy from the ravine. I'd stood up top, looking down, watching him pile branches on top of one another in the valley, whispering to himself, pointing here and there as though he were directing other people. When I'd finally called out, "Dinner!" he'd gazed up at me with the same look he gave me then in the change room, like I was part of a world he didn't care about belonging to. Just as I had back then, I couldn't take it. I had to look away. Dizzy waited for a moment in silence like he was going to say something else, but instead just shrugged, then ducked out the door and was gone.

  WALKING DOWN THE hospital hallway, Dr. Singh bopping ahead of me in the dim light, that's not the way I want to remember my brother, not now. I want all those moments I can tell other people about, those moments when I was there and so close to being a part of his life - our post-up games in the driveway, running pick-and-rolls to perfection, me driving and dishing to him for the spot-up jumper. I want the kid at the beach, spinning and giddy and tumbling in the sand.

  Dr. Singh stops at a door and peeks in through the little window. I'm still a few paces down the hall. When he starts to open the door, I pause. By now Dizzy's postcard is little more than a crumpled, papery mush in my hand.

  I look to my right, into another room just like the one I'm sure my brother's in. Sitting on a chair with his back to me is Bettis, and lying in the bed in front of him is a pale, pretty woman with a bald head. He's got both of her hands in his, held up to his mouth, and his big shoulders are heaving, shuddering like a glacier run ashore. He's weeping, but his wife's looking at him with a smile on her face - the tired, sad smile of someone saved.

  I turn away and Dr. Singh has disappeared. The door to Dizzy's room hangs open, an invitation, with a triangle of pale yellow light slanting into the hallway from inside.

  But I don't move, not yet. I stand thinking about my brother, lying there in bed. In my mind the image starts to play out as a film. I see myself going in, sitting down in an uncomfortable chair at the foot of his cot, saying hello, not much else. My parents arrive. After some discussion, I end up staying the night. Dizzy and I don't talk much - he fades in and out of sleep, I huddle under a blanket in the chair; a breakfast comes he doesn't eat, then a lunch. I call Jen and we talk and decide that I should stay out here for a while. The days go by. Some nights I stay at the hospital; others, I sleep in my old bed at my parents'.

  Meanwhile, Dizzy would be getting better, but our conversations would still be minimal - me asking if he needed anything, if he was feeling okay, whatever. Maybe I'd even bring in tapes of old NBA games, although I can't imagine we'd watch them. They'd probably just lie in a pile on the side table between a few vases of flowers, him never acknowledging them, me never suggesting we put them on. The nurses would come in and I'd look away while they changed the bandages where his foot used to be; if he was sleeping they'd ask me how he was doing and I'd nod and say, "Good." But mostly I'd just sit there with him. And sitting with him, I feel myself hoping, might just be enough.

  I start to move down the hallway, toward Dizzy's room, toward the light shining out of it and the soft murmur of Dr. Singh talking to my brother. I'm thinking now about how, eventually, Dr. Singh is going to say that Dizzy is okay to leave. I see myself collecting his things, and through the window of his room a winter morning - sky like a white curtain, bright. I see me and Dr. Singh easing Dizzy into a wheelchair, some paperwork filed, some talk of prosthetics, good luck. And then I'm wheeling my brother down the hall, through the doors of the hospital, into the light, outside, where the snow's just starting to fall.

  BEING LIKE BULLS

  IT TOOK THREE weeks in a row of no one coming in before the place really got to me. My parents' old shop had always been full of stuff that, even back when we still got tourists through, I couldn't imagine anyone would ever want. Junk. Everywhere, piled up on shelves or hanging from display racks, all with more or less the same tacky logo splashed across the front in neon script: Niagara Falls, Ontario. It might have been gradual, building up over time, or it might have just been that something snapped. But suddenly everything my eyes landed on - the coffee mugs, the key chains and pencils and snow globes, the T-shirts and sweatshirts and jackets and hats, the daytime postcards with the water flowing green and frothing white over the edge, the sunset postcards burning orange, the nighttime postcards all purple and blue - came needling back into my brain. Simply put, the place was a museum of crap. So I got my jacket on, closed up, and drove over to CanAm Tower.

  Dave and a new girl I hadn't seen before were out in the parking lot having a smoke. They both had their uniforms on, navy blue jumpsuits stamped with the CanAm logo: the stars and stripes and maple leaf styled into a yin-yang sort of thing. Cross-border solutions, it said along the bottom. Their belts dangled various paraphernalia: flashlight, walkie-talkie, nightstick.

  The nightsticks Dave and I used to joke about - until one morning just before dawn he caught some pickers trying to drag an old fridge out of the pit and bashed one of them into a coma. The guy had been from one of the camps out in wine country and for a while things got pretty dicey: while Dave's victim was still in hospital a few of his pals snuck into town one night and beat two American pit workers to near death. CanAm responded by equipping its night security with tasers and instructions to zap first and ask questions later. But the picker came out of the coma and things settled down. Instead of being reprimanded, Dave was just put on the day shift at the top of the tower, told to radio in if he saw anything suspicious.

  I came across the lot, waving. Dave nodded back. "Busy day?"

  "Right," I said. "Something like that."

  The girl - her nametag read Kaede - was plugging her nose with one hand and smoking with the other. She was young, mid-twenties or so, and when she grinned at me I was surprised to find myself grinning back. Looking away, I scratched at my elbow through my jacket. "Cold out today," I said.

  Dave turned toward me and I could smell the liquor coming off him in waves. Nine thirty in the morning, so this was probably remnants of the night before. Lately I'd been staying in, reading magazines and falling asleep by ten. "Kaede," he said, in a weird, slow voice, "this is my good friend Aagyapal."

  "Paul's fine," I told her, eyeing Dave.

  "Hi, Paul," she said, fingers still pinching her nose, breathing smoke through her mouth.

  Then she checked her watch, took one last drag, smiled again at both of us, and wandered off down the street, flicking her butt over her shoulder. It spun there on the pavement in the wind, sparking orange, until a bigger gust snuffed it out.

  "Cheery girl," I said.

  "Japanese," Dave whispered. He punched my shoulder, seemed like he was about to say something else, paused, and eventually added, "But totally speaks English fine." Kaede moved off in the direction of Rainbow Bridge until she was out of sight.

  I shivered. "Mind if I come up? Some October. Feels more like January."

  We shot up the tower in the elevator, the view spreading out beneath us. In the observation room Dave sprawled on the couch in the corner while I gazed through the south-facing windows over that end of town. It was empty, nearly derelict. Nobody along any of the little avenues that used to be so full of tourists
, nobody down the end of the boardwalk where folks would line up to watch the river come crashing down over the edge, nobody at the coin-op viewfinders tilted on haphazard angles from the last time - months ago, now - that anyone had fed a loonie in to spy on what was happening below.

  "Those fuckers were hogging the pool table again last night," Dave said, stretching. Then he laughed. "I feel like my old man -'Send them back to their own country."'

  Way down below, two bulldozers plowed their way through a heap of trash. A group of workers followed, shovels at the ready. "It's not like it's their choice to be up here, man," I said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, they work for the same company you do; they get stationed wherever they're told. Even you, right? They could have you over on the American side. But you're here."

  "Thank Christ for that," Dave grunted. "Pauly, you should try to get on with security. They're looking for people right now - I guess the pickers on both sides are getting pretty out of control again. But a little guy like you they'd never make work nights. You'd be on days like me and Kaede and you wouldn't have to do shit."

  "And I'd do what with the shop? Sell it?"

  "Oh, fuck. Here we go. How long have we been going through this shit with you, man? There's got to be a point where you just let go. And what about money?"

  "Don't worry about me and money." Dave didn't need to know that my parents had stashed enough of their income away that I could go right through to a doctorate without a dollar in loans. He'd have thought "trust fund" and then I would have heard it - especially now that I was living off their hard work and not going to school.