Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  It’s a mild night, with patches of starry sky showing, when Gerry leaves to go home. A few taxis prowl the streets now, and cars, moving slowly, wear invisible banners that proclaim they are on official family visit business.

  He goes to bed early because he has to be up early in the morning. Melanie, Darren and Diana have gone home. Tanya, Duane and Gretchen are watching Miracle on 34th Street on TV. Vivian is sitting at the desk in the kitchen with a glass of white wine. She’s talking to her brothers and sisters around the province and the country. He kisses her on the top of the head as he heads off to bed. Sometime late that night he feels her settle beside him with a tired little grunt. He leans back against her and sleeps.

  five

  JANUARY 2004

  On a cold, bright Saturday morning, Gerry is up and doing odd jobs. The project for this morning is taking the Christmas tree to the pile in the park where the city mulches them. Vivian took the tree down the day after Old Christmas, but then it snowed and now Gerry has to pull the snow-clotted tree out of its drift by the front walk. This isn’t a bad thing. He’s dressed for the cold, and the snow that falls on him as he heaves the tree onto the roof rack of the Honda is a diamond shower. There’s something vaguely satisfying about the boatswain work of throwing ratchet tie-downs over the tree and cinching it down tight to the roof. Gerry believes the ratchet tie-down is right up there with the opposable thumb in humankind’s ascent from the swamp.

  The world seems a comfortably loose fit to Gerry this morning. The kids have gone home, leaving Vivian and him alone. This morning he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom naked, something he couldn’t do for the two weeks of Christmas. One morning, Gretchen had found him in the kitchen in his underwear, making coffee. He’s used to being the earliest riser and had thought everybody was still asleep. She gave a startled herbivore squeak and ducked back down the hall in her long housecoat and red-top grey work socks. Through the rest of the day she avoided meeting his eyes. Gerry had no idea grey Stanfield Y-fronts were so sinfully disturbing, but, out of respect for her sensibilities, he wore old sweatpants and a T-shirt to make the coffee for the rest of the holidays.

  In any event, Gretchen and Duane and the kids have been herded onto one plane, and a couple of days later Tanya left on another. When she went she took a down-filled peaked cap with knitted earflaps that had somehow followed Gerry since he had worked in Labrador.

  “You never wear it,” she said.

  “Who would?” Gerry asked. The hat had been a joke, presented to him at a Christmas party where everyone exchanged gifts under ten dollars. There was a knitted “willy warmer” with it. He’d modelled that for Patricia. They were in one of their patches of getting along at the time. It was a lot too big.

  “It’s nice to know you didn’t have a personal fitting,” she said as they climbed into bed. “Maybe you’ll grow into it.”

  “I believe I am right now,” Gerry said. “See what you think.”

  “Hmmm...”

  However, later on, she vetoed the hat. “It lowers your IQ by thirty points,” she said when he proposed to wear it to go snowmobiling. “You look like the Mackenzie Brothers, Great White North.”

  Gerry drives the Christmas tree to the park and tosses it on the pile. It lands with a dead rustle. Around the main pile of trees, some people have dumped theirs at a distance. He wonders if they feel they’re unworthy of the main heap, or if they’re shy. Some of the set-apart trees are wrapped in those giant, plastic tree condoms that are supposed to contain the shed needles. Maybe their fastidious owners expect special treatment for their trees, designer chipping.

  Gerry gets back in the Honda and heads for the mall.

  A little later that morning, Gerry sits in the mall food court, drinking Tim Hortons coffee and eating an apple fritter. The sugar sticks to his fingers like candy leper scales. The too-hot paper cup melts it into a thin suburban varnish, a tacky morning shine he’s not displeased with.

  The tall, accordion-stalked cherry picker that the mall staff uses to reach the ceiling putters around. It purrs electrically through the pinball-machine décor of the food court. The maintenance people are taking down the last of the big hanging Christmas decorations. The mall is getting busier. Eventually the machine whirrs off to hide, kneeling in an alcove, a depressed, agoraphobic, electric giraffe.

  Gerry eats his fritter and looks around at people packing away the doughnuts and oily wafers of hash browns. They treat their arteries to three-egg breakfasts. In a morning mall you can pretend to be grownup enough to eat anything with impunity.

  In the food court, Gerry writes in his Chinese notebook, the pleasures are all guilty.

  Gerry is drowning some guilt of his own in apple fritter sweetness. Walking to the food court through the mall, he has dodged an old drinking buddy. He spotted the man, and the woman who looks after him, and angled behind a pillar, keeping a mall-width between them. The man’s name is Paul. He wears pastel, elastic-waisted jogging suits and sneakers with Velcro fasteners because other people dress him now. There is an egg-sized dent, edged with shiny white scar, in the side of his head. It shows through the prison haircut that Paul has grown back since they whipped him into hospital to make the dent and scar, to remove the tumour and pull down the shades in his eyes.

  The woman with Paul is his daughter. Her name is March, and Gerry supposes she must be in her late forties now. She leads Paul around the mall with a competent hand on his elbow. Gerry recalls that March is a potter. She has practical hands. On this sunny Saturday, under the skylights, she moulds their slow way around the mall out of plastic air.

  Gerry hopes today’s cowardice is temporary. On other days he has stopped where March sits Paul on the wide ceramic edge of a flowerbox while she fetches them cups of tea. She blows on his, making sure it’s cool enough, like a drink for a small child. On other days they have spoken, although it is the same conversation each time.

  “It’s Gerry,” March says, nodding at him, willing him into existence for her father. “Gerry Adamson.”

  “Gerry?” It is always a question.

  “Yes, Gerry,” Gerry says helpfully, joining in to see if force of numbers can help win the argument behind the furrowed brow.

  “Oh yes, Gerry... That’s right.”

  Paul is always pleasantly surprised, even relieved. He always says that it’s right, as if to convince himself that he’s solved the puzzle. Still, he seems a bit shy, a bit embarrassed about how long he’s had to let Gerry’s name wander in his mental pitted no-man’s land before it could be recognized as a friend.

  The mall has been redecorated now, but some years ago it was hung with huge banners of puffins. Gerry used to jot down notes about them. They struck him as immensely remote, ethereal and smug, looking down on the mall with their heraldic silken eyes with the accent çirconflex marks over them. Quizzical, avian Groucho Marx stares followed Gerry as he waltzed a sense of his own mortality around the mall.

  In another bright January some years ago, Gerry got confirmation that he was not going to die right away. He had suspected as much, but the fact that there was doubt had created what he still thinks of as “The Longest Fall.” It’s a bit of a silly play on words really, fall the season and falling, vertigo dream-falling where you watch the world rush up, at, and past you. He pictured falling where you waited an agonizingly long time for it to end with a thump, a splat, some cartoon noise or sudden black silence.

  “The Longest Fall” actually began in late July in a fit of conceited altruism that Gerry now thinks of as tempting fate. The blood donation centre called to remind him he hadn’t given blood in more than a year. It was the summer holiday season. Wouldn’t he please drop by?

  Gerry was babysitting early morning newscasts that summer while someone was away on vacation. He went to work early and had the summer afternoons off. He would shiver in shorts at four-thirty in the morning and emerge into a noon like a warm shower. Warmth and steady work made Gerry feel benevolent i
n a summertime-smug sort of way, full of life, sneakily inclined to flaunt it. It was good to be finished work for the day and the only one in shorts and boat shoes among the people in ties giving blood on their lunch hours.

  He filled in the new, longer questionnaire at the clinic. He was vaguely smug that none of the dangerous behaviours of the past decade seemed to apply to him.

  Certainly not the last decade.

  Gerry gave his pint quickly, chatting with a man from the offshore business in the next armchair. Gerry had interviewed the man a couple of times, but on this day they talked about boats. The little agitator machines rocked the blood bags beside the chairs as they chatted. Afterwards he ate a couple of doughnuts and drank a cup of sweet tea. Then he drove to the sailing club and spent the afternoon fitting a new oil lamp in the cabin of his elderly sailboat.

  The letter arrived about three weeks later among a handful of bills and fliers. It was bravely bureaucratic. Anomalous result in test for humano-T-cell leukemic virus, it read. The writer told Gerry he shouldn’t worry. He should contact his family doctor for another blood test. If that came back the same, a DNA test should be arranged. The writer jumped to a wrong conclusion about what might be worrying Gerry just then. We regret we are no longer able to accept donations of your blood.

  Gerry was sitting in the kitchen, waiting for the kettle to boil when Vivian came home. He was sitting still with difficulty. He wanted to fuss or move, if not actually run. Vivian had been showing a house. She looked reassuringly businesslike in her khaki slacks, blazer and short, easy-care hair.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, although he hadn’t said anything.

  “Intimations of mortality,” he said, trying to joke. “Look at this.”

  He passed her the letter. He wondered if he had this thing. Had he given it to her too? They’d been married for ten years, the second time around for both. Now he wondered wildly about the drunken inter-regnum, “my midlife crisis,” as he called it. Had he done something murderously stupid? How latent was latent?

  Vivian read the letter while he poured tea for them. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” she said. “I’d know. I’d know or I’d have it too and I just got my insurance medical and there’s nothing wrong with me. So did you. There’s nothing wrong with you.”

  “I guess I’m not that worried,” Gerry said, hoping for a virtue he wasn’t sure he had a claim on. “For once in my life, I’ve got a clean conscience. I haven’t sowed any wild oats for a while.”

  Clichés like “wild oats” seemed to be what were called for. He meant fucking around. He had done his share when he was married to Patricia, but this time it was true, he had nothing to confess.

  But what about before? a sly, legalistic mental voice demanded nastily. Do you have a conscience or a calendar?

  Gerry wriggled mentally, skewered on internal gallows humour.

  “It’s going to be a nasty shock to the insurance people if they let a terminal case of Dutch elm disease slip by them,” he said. “This could cost them big bucks.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Vivian repeated, a blunt, affirmative mantra.

  There’d better not be, Gerry thought, or I’ve given it to you. How can I be sure I haven’t killed us both?

  The need to prove themselves right or wrong made them touch, then hug in the kitchen as the afternoon sun made diagonals through the Venetian blinds over the sink. Vivian always said she wasn’t a fan of passion in daylight, but now they were tugging at each other’s clothes. They did a conjoined, clumsy bear-waltz down the hall to their bed and almost frightened themselves with their fierceness. They were amazed at how much they wanted each other, at how they shouted when they came. They yelled like swimmers jumping into the ice-coldness of their mortality, daring the letter to be everything it threatened.

  Afterwards, they lay and listened to the sibilant whisper of the neighbour’s lawn sprinkler. In the early evening they felt the sweat and tears dry on them in the breeze from the open window.

  “There’s nothing wrong with you,” Vivian said again with her face against his neck.

  It took all autumn to prove Vivian right. Their family doctor did another blood test for Gerry and got another anomalous result. Gerry asked him what it was he might be getting.

  “There’s the good kind we just treat as ordinary leukemia,” the doctor said. “The other kind paralyzes you.”

  Leukemia good, paralysis bad, Gerry thought in a Homer Simpson voice. The doctor went on to tell him that people who have had unprotected sex in Japan are the most likely candidates.

  “But you do have gout,” he said, studying Gerry’s records.

  Gerry gathered that something about protein levels, or maybe the gout medication, caused funny test results. He hoped he’d been diagnosed with a case of excess gravy or lobster. The doctor seemed a bit disappointed, scientifically speaking, that Gerry hadn’t been fooling around in Japan. However, he sent him off to the hospital for a DNA test.

  Gerry turned up at the hospital lab on a Monday morning and ran into half the people he knew. There seemed to be any number of greying boomers in to be jabbed or scoped or X-rayed.

  “Just in for a little blood work,” Gerry said for the fifth or sixth time.

  “Me too. My damn cholesterol is through the roof.”

  Somebody else complained about the smell of bacon and eggs leaking from the hospital cafeteria into the lab waiting area.

  “I’ve been fasting since suppertime.”

  Gerry reflected on what constitutes a fast. He’d only had a cup of black coffee since yesterday’s supper.

  Eventually he was shown into a little stall and gave a piece of paper to a harried-looking, plump woman in a lab coat and rubber gloves. Did they wear rubber gloves all the time now, or was it just for people suspected of picking up Japanese cell rot in the fleshpots of Tokyo? Gerry felt toxic.

  The woman wore a chunky crucifix pendant.

  It’s a judgement on you, you pervert! he imagined her thinking. Her eyes and lips seemed tight as she whipped a rubber tube around his bicep. Still, she filled a vial of blood with mosquito painlessness and her rubber touch on his wrist was human and comforting.

  In the end he had to go back three weeks later and give another sample. It seemed that the wrong sort of container had been used to send his blood away to a lab in Ottawa and they needed a fresh specimen. On another Monday, a cheerful girl with a stud in her nose and a green streak in her hair smiled at him warmly, took another vial and the waiting started again.

  While he waited out the tests through the fall, Gerry thought about being nine years old and realizing he was going to die. He’d been home from school, sick, and watching old tear-jerker movies on TV while he lay under a blanket on the couch. He can’t remember the name of the movie now, but someone was being brave about dying. It didn’t fizz on Gerry at the time, but late that night he awoke, sweating, terrified and terribly aware that he was going to die. It was not the first he had heard of death. His father’s mother had died when he was four.

  “Your nana’s gone to heaven,” his father had told him early one morning. “She just went to sleep.”

  He had accepted that, but never related it to himself. Now the full realization struck.

  “It’s a bad dream,” his mother said when she heard him crying and came in.

  “Nothing to be afraid of,” his tobacco-scented father said and sat on the side of the bed with him, waiting for him to go back to sleep.

  Gerry couldn’t say what frightened him. He couldn’t bring himself to tell anyone. Maybe he was the only one in the world who had realized the awful truth or maybe his parents knew and had been keeping it from him. He couldn’t decide which scenario was worse. Eventually the terror tired him enough to sleep.

  Like gradually fading echoes, the terror returned at longer and longer intervals through a year or two. Gerry listened to Sunday school portrayals of heaven. Their eternal family reunion had some
attraction, but late at night he tried to imagine just not being.

  In his “Long Fall,” Gerry woke late at night again. Sweating and scared, he waited to put a face or name on fate. He knew he was afraid of pain. If death was going to hurt, he was afraid of it. He felt guilty too. He was terrified that he’d shared his mystery plague with Vivian. He worked as much as he could, threw himself into putting the boat away for the winter, and watched himself for symptoms, physical or spiritual. He watched himself for a tendency to bargain: Can anybody reasonably say more than ‘This is what I want to happen, but if something else happens, I hope I’m unconscious’?

  On weekend mornings, Gerry wandered the fundamentalist fringes of TV, trying to keep himself appalled into disbelief. Duane and Gretchen had just joined a new congregation back then. When Duane called home, he was hot to trot about someone called Pastor Bob Herder.

  “He’s from home,” Duane told them. “And there’s always something going on at his services. There’s music and it’s all sort of simple and clear. You’re with The Lord or you’re not. Pastor Bob spells it all out.”

  Vivian and Gerry hadn’t told the kids that Gerry was waiting out a test for possible biblical plagues. He wished someone would spell it all out for him. Whoever was going to do it, it wasn’t going to be Pastor Bob. One day, Gerry found him in a non-prime afternoon spot on the religion channel. He was a bossy-looking, puffy man in a suit, yelling about Jesus. A soft-cover bible splayed out of one hand like a doomed sandwich. Gerry thought he looked like a clothing clerk complaining about a spoiled hamburger. Bookmarks dangled like derelict lettuce. Pastor Bob’s auctioneer yelping was muted by the clicker in Gerry’s hand, but visually he seemed to pulse towards the screen. He’d radiate little auras of sweat in bursts at the camera. Then he’d recoil behind his pulpit to appreciate the importance of what he’d said.

  Gerry watched the congregation with their hands held aloft like roller-coaster riders showing off. To improve the reception, like moving the rabbit ears on an old TV? he wondered. To show you’re open to catch the ball? He listened to the commercial-paced pulse of the music. He hated it, but it wasn’t just churches like this one, what his parents would have called holy rollers. He found he was getting less and less tolerant of churches, period.