Happiness of Fish

by Fred Armstrong

  When he was drinking, Gerry had found himself capable of sliding towards a belief in some hypercritical Presbyterian deity with a grudge, particularly towards him. He pictured a giant Ian Paisley on methamphetamines.

  Sober, Gerry had found the human edges of his gods blurred and faded. He worried about anthropomorphizing gods. The more he looked at religion, the more he thought of Mickey Mouse and a real mouse. Why was a three-fingered, glove-wearing mouse who behaved like a human the archetype? Mickey was only remarkable as a literary figure, aping people. A real mouse that could pass like vapour through a wall crack or found a dynasty in a nest of rags was surely a truer god.

  Without drawing any very definite conclusions, Gerry began to contemplate the infinite and came up with a sort of Mobius strip of reasoning. There might be one god, and everything, real and imagined, was part of it. On the other hand, every thing, real and imagined, might be a god in and of itself. The gods would be like bacteria, omnipresent, simultaneously infinitely weak and strong, a benign presence in your gut or an epidemic wiping you out.

  Gerry slid through the last months of “The Longest Fall” in a growing fatalism. In January, after the lab got their containers right, the DNA testers told him there was nothing wrong with him. He started a new year with a mental Wile E. Coyote whew of relief. The falling boulder had missed him. The brakes had grabbed at the edge of the cliff. Still, the fatalism stayed in what he hoped was a kind of positive way. It made Gerry leery of anybody who traded on the fear of death or offered help in transcending it.

  “Shouldn’t religions just say we’re all going to die? We’re in good company so get over it.” Gerry and Vivian were talking over coffee one night. “Isn’t dying a miracle too?”

  “I’m not going to worry about it,” Vivian said. “When you go, you go.” She went to the cupboard and took down a package of Oreo cookies and put them on the table between them. “I knew there was nothing wrong with you,” she repeated her mantra. “I would have known.”

  “I didn’t know,” Gerry said. “Everything felt sort of unreal for a long time there, like this thing was the reality and everything else was just illusion.”

  Time makes you cocky. Sitting in the mall now, Gerry recants a bit on what he said then. The mortality of then seems less real or maybe mortality is getting less real generally. Maybe the line is blurring. Gerry thinks of the sweaty preacher, shouting in his geometrically pressed suit, verbally trying to re-draw, indelibly, Gerry’s line.

  Gerry doesn’t deal with the line, or Oreo cookies or long falls the next time he writes something for his group, but he does have a go at bringing his George into the more recent past.

  Fragment: Mortality at the Mall

  There was a piece of the AIDS quilt on display at the mall, under the floating banners of the optimistic puffins. The puffins looked bullet-proof, smug that they don’t get AIDS. They just get their heads stuck in the plastic rings off six-packs and strangle or get oiled and freeze. Those are the occupational hazards of the heroic life of a small bird in a big ocean.

  George looked at the quilt, which was made up of squares dedicated to the dead. He found he knew two of the squares, both mourned by families who had embroidered clouds and mushrooms and a smiling pink and orange cat. Brothers and sisters and a mother did those squares for two men who were a poet and a teacher, respectively. The loves of their lives don’t seem to be mentioned, unless they’re squares themselves, names that George doesn’t recognize.

  A pretty, youngish woman was passing out literature at a folding table. She worked at something or other at the university and George had known her for several years. Still, he did not know what her relationship to the quilt and the people on it might be.

  “It’s so sad,” she said. “There are so many.”

  Undeniably there was a quilt-full there on display. George thought he recalled having heard that the national quilt was football-field size. He had a First World War vision of emerald soccer pitches full of Flanders Field crosses. Still, he felt vaguely that the dozen or so friends or acquaintances of his who had died, or were dying, of AIDS, didn’t nearly match the numbers he’d lost to other life-style martyrdoms, heart attack, gunshots, pills or crossing the street three-parts pissed.

  With a twinge, George realized that, flying in the face of reason, fewer people he knew were dying anymore. There was a time in the early ’80s when he seemed to go to a wake every week. He had been drinking then and he hung out with older men with stories to tell. He brought his wife Paula along for them to be courtly to. They told their stories and he sponged them up with the beer, although sometimes the sagas were cut off in mid-cycle. Paula, whose father died when she was fifteen, wept at a number of funerals for men who would have been about his age.

  Somewhere along the line, though, all the older men had gone.

  “You’re like the medicine man of a lost tribe,” she told George as he kept scouring empty tables for myths in the beer puddles. Eventually he was starting to act out the sagas himself. At thirty-five or six George was acting very middle-aged. He drank too much too often and steadily in-between.

  “You’re the scribe for a civilization that only has a past,” she said, variations on a theme. By that time, she may have been quoting the man she eventually left him for.

  In the Saturday mall, the pretty girl from the university handed out her literature and mourned or quasi-mourned on the shopping centre frontier of mortality. George wondered if, perhaps, she was going through her wake-a-week period now, as his had slowed. He wondered if that was reason to rejoice. If you hang out with people who do not die, does immortality threaten? George remembered the silly twist of logic they had played with in high school when they talked about deductive reasoning. If you haven’t died on any day so far, on the basis of the statistical data, it should be less likely you’re ever going to.

  George sat at a Tim Hortons table and prepared a list for the next Saturday supper stir-fry in a potentially eternal series: shrimp, snow peas, broccoli...

  six

  JANUARY 2004

  Sitting in the Honda on the bald hill over the sea, Gerry feels the buffet of the wind outside the closed windows. He listens to the wind bang at the wire garbage container in a wooden crib that keeps it from flying off this hilltop to Ireland. It’s like a boxer warming up on the heavy bag, tentative shots at first, placing the target in space and muscle memory. Then it settles down to a piston-regular hammering.

  Gerry has the radio tuned to CBC FM and has his notebook open. Vivian would say he is wasting time. Patricia would have too. If the two of them ever decide to get together and hold a seminar on Gerry, his tendency to go off and do nothing by himself for hours could provide the keynote address.

  “Where have you been?” Vivian asks. “How can you just drive around all day?”

  “Where did you get to?” Patricia would ask. She’d ask after late nights at the legislative press gallery, or election road trips, or when she came back from visits to her family in Toronto or the summer courses she did: painting for the handicapped, French immersion in Quebec. Eventually, though, she stopped worrying about the answer. She joined an amateur drama group. They were doing Bolt’s, Man for All Seasons. She designed the sets and costumes and played a servant. When the play went out of town to the provincial drama festival, she went to bed with the man playing Richard Rich.

  Where did you get to? Gerry thinks now.

  Whatever the women he has married think, Gerry would deny doing nothing. Today, for example, he’s chronicling the toughness of the garbage container in the wind. He’s keeping an eye on the sea to make sure it’s still there. He comes from a family that took a proprietary view of the universe. It’s not that they felt they owned it. The arrangement was more of a long-established stewardship. It strikes Gerry that they should have had esoteric job descriptions like the titles in some Confucian bureaucracy. They should have been “The Comptroller of Fog” or “The Warden of the Sunrise.” He takes a ch
ildhood fragment to the writing group.

  Fragment: Ancestral Voices

  In spring, in the city in Ontario where he grew up, George’s family joined the flow towards the river. They joined the clumps of twos and threes and the giggling, officious tribes that went to watch the swollen river. They went to see the ice break up. They went for the annual morality play of the river flooding the house-of-cards shacks where people had camped on the edge of the wartime boom and stayed.

  In the prissy ’50s, the shack dwellers seemed shabby, tattered and hung-over for whole seasons. However, in the summer when the ice was gone, they jumped triumphantly off bridges and ramshackle docks. They yelled defiance, with green Liberty torches of foam-trailing beer bottles in their hands. Their summer-night ferocity made their spring inundations seem a small price to pay.

  In the spring melt, the shabby-heroic cabins occupied a perilous no-man’s land between the gnashing ice teeth of the river and the road where the water lapped complacently, halfway across one lane. Here and there, front and back doors were left wide open to let the water flow through.

  A five-year-old George walked in incongruous new galoshes beside his father, sidewalk superintendents of the flood. Years later he wonders why galoshes should have been new in the spring. He decides it was because they were on sale at winter’s end.

  In summer, George and his family roamed the woods and dusty back lanes where the grass grew between the ruts. They commented on the wildflowers, the dust, and the frog chorus backstage in the marshes. They timed the long electric-razor swan song of the cicadas, telling them summer was almost over. In fall, they trekked into the hills to the north of their city to oversee the colour changes. George feels that he can remember them dragooning the blushing, self-bonsai-ed sumacs into ragged lines along the ridges. He dreams they held tuning forks aloft to trigger the sky-slide of golden poplar leaves in crisp afternoons where the frost still defied the sun under the trees

  Occasionally George’s four maiden aunts would travel considerable distances to babysit nature somewhere else. They drove, with plaid car rugs in a 1952 Chev, to discipline the tides of Maine and the autumn hillsides of Vermont. On liners, and later in airplanes, they journeyed to supervise the white cliffs of Dover, the Alps and at least one coral island. They tried Florida once, but gave up on it. You only got palms and sand organized when hurricanes blew them away, and there didn’t seem to be any proper progression of seasons. The aunts were devoutly deciduous. They also said the fruit was overrated.

  “I’d have given my eyeteeth for a nice Mac apple,” one said, dismissing Florida for all time.

  It’s not just by the ocean or on the fall hills that George remembers the magic proprietorship of the aunts. Aunt Louise looms largest, as she did in the flesh. She comes to him sometimes at the mall. Aunt Louise taught him about artefacts. She was the family keeper of photos, pressed flowers and old dance cards. Shrunken heads and scalps would have been her department too, if they’d had any.

  A sign on the booths near the food court seems to bark. “Photos! Four poses! Three minutes! Two dollars!” Next to it, another sign offers full colour in four-and-a-half minutes for just a dollar more. The curtains on the photo booths are cut short so you can’t pop in and run off porn-to-go unless you can levitate or Yogic-fly above the hem of the short curtain. Either that or you don’t mind having your oeuvre, your style and your anatomy critiqued by the coffee drinkers in the food court.

  Years ago, he went with Aunt Louise to the photo booth at the old railway station in his hometown. The pictures are much more expensive now than they used to be. He seems to remember them being a quarter, although you only got one picture. That picture came out of a slot, newborn-wet with vinegar-smelling chemical, in a little chromium frame. When the cardboard backing dried, you pried out a prop-piece to stand your portrait up, or a cardboard loop to hang it. The picture was supposed to be art. Today’s pictures are more utilitarian. They come in strips and can be cut up to put on licences and ID’s or mailed to friends or stuck on the washroom wall.

  Next to the photo booth of fifty years ago stood a machine like a one-arm bandit. It had the alphabet and the numbers, zero to nine around its face. It had a pointer like a single clock hand and the bandit lever on one side. If you put in money and moved the pointer around, you could print letters on a metal disk, pierced with a star-shaped cut-out and stamped with a four-leaf clover and a crown. You could identify your luggage and purchase good luck for a quarter.

  George believed the machine actually transformed the quarter. He didn’t think of it paying for the disk. He thought of it being widened, pierced, and engraved as a sort of free magic service. The silver of the quarter returned to you in the talisman.

  It’s been fifty years since Aunt Louise and George made a talisman or had a picture clink down into the slot of the photo booth. The impossible-to-understand station loudspeakers intoned echoingly over their heads. George was about six, tagging along with the big woman in the tweed coat with the brooch of painted leather oak leaves and trillium that felt the way dried mushrooms feel now. Aunt Louise understood magic and history. She saw the sense of crossing the gypsy’s palm with silver. She provided the money. History was frozen for a quarter while you waited and the loudspeakers made liturgical announcements about arrivals and departures. Their voices were underwater Latin in the big, echoing, Victorian temple of a railway station. They sounded like history: “Ancestral voices prophesying...trains.”

  When Gerry cleaned out the family home he found an old railway station picture. The photo had turned almost khaki with chemical discolouration. His face was very low down in the khaki picture. The spinning swivel seat did not go high enough to bring his six-year-old face to the frame. His mother also gave him a metal baggage tag.

  Why had she saved something like a gaudy aluminium washer for forty years?

  Why does Gerry have it in his wallet as he sits in the Honda and watches the wind buffet the garbage container, high above the sea?

  seven

  FEBRUARY 2004

  Gerry has never been quite able to figure out what sort of dynamic exists between his present wife Vivian and his former wife Patricia. From time to time Patricia seems to surface between them like an uncharted, derelict wreck, drifting through their day-to-day sea lanes. Most often, she breaks the surface when they are arguing, as they are on this early Sunday morning. They have just come home from a Valentine’s party that Gerry found dull and endless. It was thrown by a woman Vivian works with. At some point in the evening, there had been nearly two hours of charades.

  “We’re a wild bunch, aren’t we?” a lacquered-looking woman asked Gerry as they sat in a furnished basement watching a fat man in his sixties in a sweatshirt with a picture of a timber wolf on it. He was trying to act out the phrase “positive Pap smear result.” His hands fluttered vaguely between his crotch and his mouth.

  Gerry looked at the woman to see if she was being sarcastic. She had an uncommunicative face. Possibly she couldn’t move it for fear of cracking.

  “Aren’t we just a wild bunch?” he said. “I dare say the orgy will start right after our friend there has a stroke and we all get through yelling ‘tits’ and giggling.”

  He said it with more brightness than he felt, but apparently not enough. It wasn’t the right answer. She immediately suspected he wasn’t a good sport.

  “He’s quiet,” she said, turning to Vivian and speaking in front of him. It was as if Gerry were unconscious and “quiet” were a fatal medical condition. She was the long-suffering nurse, breaking the bad news.

  Patricia looms between them as they bicker in the car going home.

  “I suppose you liked all her friends,” Vivian snaps. Gerry has just observed that hell is probably endless charades with the same herd of self-satisfied people.

  “She had the honesty to admit that some of them weren’t everybody’s idea of an exciting evening,” he tosses back.

  “You should have staye
d together,” Vivian sniffs. “You’re always thinking about her.”

  At home, she pours herself a stiff nightcap but drinks only half of it before she goes to bed in silence. Gerry is left to contemplate what she said.

  Patricia and her new husband, Brian, moved back to town some years ago. Brian teaches in the university’s faculty of education. They have twins with the everything-old-is-new-again names of Charles and Charlotte. The twins were born a year after Patricia and Brian got married, a year and a half after she and Gerry broke up. They were in Winnipeg at the time. Brian was on some kind of academic exchange. In the world series of breeding, Patricia had slid home, just out of reach of her biological clock.

  “Fertility drugs, probably,” Vivian muttered.

  However they were conceived, the twins are nearly eighteen now and tower over their parents. Gerry and Vivian have run into them with Patricia and Brian at the mall. Charles looks at him with well-bred, dumb distaste. It’s as if he feels that Gerry had ignored a “reserved” sign stuck on his mother. Charlotte is friendlier and more curious. She seems to be weighing him up, wondering about the decisions her mother made. For Gerry to exist, neither her mother nor her father can be as straightforward and uncomplicated as they appear. Perhaps she’s storing Gerry up for some future argument on choices, mistakes or fidelity.

  Gerry would have to admit that he was interested to see Patricia when she first re-appeared, but he’s sure there was no real stirring of desire.

  “You had to feel something,” Vivian insisted at the time. She still does, occasionally, when they’re bickering.