Big Books Shut
“GENTLEMEN,” I SAID, “I HAVE TO be going.”
The one holding my hat appeared puzzled. The dark-haired one with the sharp face punched me again in the ribs. His tiny hand was hard but there was little force behind the blow. One of those holding me chuckled.
“Wait,” said the boy with my hat.
“What?” the dark one asked.
“Let’s hear what he has to say,” he said, putting one hand on the small boy’s shoulder.
“We don’t listen to them,” the one holding my left arm said.
“They don’t usually talk.”
At that, both of the boys holding my arms let go. There were four of them altogether: the two larger ones had been holding my arms; the leader was holding my hat; and the little dark-haired boy was in charge of harassing and hurting me.
I tried to tidy myself up a bit, to smooth wrinkles from my shirt, for instance, and straighten my tie, but it was little use; the altercation had made me quite grubby.
“My hat please, sir,” I said, and held out my hand.
“We certainly don’t give back hats,” the boy said, and smiled. The others chuckled and I was taken by how the boy seemed to grow with the laughter. His silver tooth was a charming irregularity, not ugly at all.
“Of course,” I said, and bent down to tie my shoe. And the shoe was still tied, mind you. I looked up at the ring-leader, the silver-toothed boy with my hat. “As I say, I’ve got to be going.”
“Of course,” the little dark-haired one said, preparing to kick me.
But I had, by then, taken my knife from my sock, and, as usual, all the boys ran away as soon as one of them was stabbed.
“Some of us have guns,” I told the boy. “You’re lucky.” This little man who was all bravado looked around quickly for his playmates and then began to cry. He clutched his wounded side and tried to stop the tears, or at least the sound of them.
“I’m on my way to the hospital anyway,” I said. “We’ll share a cab.”
“You should have left him,” the taxi driver said. “He’s a filthy rat. He’ll die soon enough anyway. At least if he dies today he will do no more harm.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “He is little. And now he is alone. And afraid.”
I slapped the boy’s hand away. I told him the knife would come out when we got to the hospital. There are regulations. He chattered and whined about the cold, but I told him he was only in shock, not actually cold. Besides, the window, in all fairness to the taxi driver, must remain down while I smoked. The boy screamed at me, almost hysterical.
“Seriously,” I told him. “Shut up and let me relax. I am on my way to my volunteer work.”
“What is it you do?” the driver asked, waiting for the light to turn green.
“Backrubs and so on.”
“The freeloaders?”
“That’s right.”
“My father was a freeloader at the end. Finally, he took care of it himself. He had principles.”
“Ha! We all do, of course. But I know what you mean. Some of us have principles that are absolute. We are not taken in by the soft world around us. Pleasure and so on.”
Birds pecked the ground between the cab and the shop on the left side of the street. What could they be looking for? The sealed surface of the world offered no place for seeds. The youth leaves trash on the ground, of course, and some of it is eaten by birds.
“There will be a new paradigm,” the driver said. “As early as next year.”
“I don’t doubt it, but nothing will change.”
The driver shrugged and we got going as the light changed.
“I don’t know what you guys are talking about,” the boy said through his chattering teeth.
“I told you shut up,” I said. “You’ve got a knife in you. Conserve your energy.”
“About the blood . . . ” the driver said, looking at me in his rear-view mirror.
“It’s fine,” I told him. “I have a form.”
“Of course.” He nodded.
“But you are old,” I said. “Your life is of little value.”
The old man was almost sleeping. His spotted skin sprouted hairs here and there, some wiry and thick, others light as an idea of hair. His breathing sounded like snoring and his back was bony. The skin moved inches as I kneaded — it was like the stockings that hang like shed snakeskin around some women’s thick and veined ankles.
“I say your life is of little value, because of your age,” I told him, leaning down to his ear.
“I heard you, goddammit! I’m getting a backrub. Keep quiet and let me enjoy it.” He relaxed immediately. He didn’t care if my response was positive or negative. He spoke and assumed that was the end of it.
“I am the very one rubbing your back,” I said to him.
He just lay there.
I removed my hands from his back and watched him. His breathing changed slightly and a small snore came from his enormous nose crammed into the pillow.
“Listen, Pop,” I told him, shaking him awake. “I’ve stopped your backrub.”
“All right. Goodbye.”
The man was infuriating. I had been making conversation. I did not have to do that. I was under no obligation to befriend anyone. No obligation at all.
What I was trying to tell him was this: Your life is worth nothing, right? It’s worth nothing until I come by with a camera and take photos or movies. I create a document somehow, showing “this hideous old creature, etc.”
But, the freeloaders don’t listen. They lie there and expect. They expect and they sometimes get what they expect.
My father years ago told me not to expect. It only means you think you know what’s coming next, and you don’t. Hüsker Dü. That’s how he used to talk. He would say something, quote somebody I had never heard of, then say their name quickly in a quieter voice. Hüsker Dü was a band, he told me. Post-post-something. My father.
His room was cold then, and my father sat in a chair under blankets, watching the television news. So this is the end, he said. I never would have thought. They have taken my blood. I am now using blood by such and such corporation. I am breathing air by Petro-Canada, and so on.
I took the garbage out for him. I would open the windows, and, later, turn up the heat.
You can afford this, I said.
Why should I have to, he said.
There were back-and-forths, that is to say. It went like that.
Jesus, get some clothes on, I would say when I finally got the blanket off him.
I was wearing that blanket, you asshole.
I don’t remember what my crime was. I don’t know if I am still committing it. I have often been in trouble for wearing my hat. It’s a brown hat. A hat of light brown leather. The leather is raw and worn, the colour of butterscotch, the colour of fine silt that has baked in the sun and is beginning to welcome the first drops of rain. It’s a soft leather hat, and it has a bendable brim around it. It used to be called a cowboy hat. Some cowboy. Some hat. Winston Churchill.
Ten years ago I walked into a bank, wearing this hat. I didn’t see the signs.
Of course, the signs were there. Ignorance is not a defense. Tell that to everyone you meet. It’s a valuable lesson.
PLEASE REMOVE HATS AND SUNGLASSES FOR SECURITY REASONS
Something happened at the bank that day. I never found out exactly what. They watched the whole story unfold on the security tapes and I was the only unusual character there.
I didn’t argue, really. I told my lawyer right off the bat I would plead guilty to wearing the hat. It’s not the hat, he said. It’s the money. It’s the money that disappeared while you wore the hat.
I know that, I told him, I was joking. He didn’t appreciate the humour.
Halfway through our discussion I realised this wasn’t my lawyer. He was a lawyer for the Crown. This is an odd world. I had been saving money to escape somewhere. My father was recently deceased and there were parts
of the world that appealed to me — there were sections of the coast up north, for instance, where all you might see is this white earth, where in summer you would need a hat or die somehow from the sun that never set.
Do you have the money? the lawyer asked and I nodded.
Fair enough. It cost me that much, but I wasn’t in jail. I was sentenced to community service. I have a certain fondness for freeloaders of all kinds, so it worked out. As I say, my father was a freeloader. The taxi driver’s father was a freeloader who could not bear it, and did himself in.
When I heard that, there in the cab, I could not help but compare it to my own father’s situation. Later, near the end, especially. I bought him soft pajamas that went on and off easily. He was barely aware of his surroundings.
The air outside his window was alive with birds, and their words. I held the cloth as he blew his nose. He watched the birds. He looked for them in his limited range of vision, without moving his head, as I held the cloth to his nose. He watched them and smiled as I wiped his nose. I rubbed ointment on his red and chapped nostrils and all the while his hands were folded at his waist, on top of his covers.
These are symbols of birds, he told me. We can’t think of them as having families and relationships. At least I can’t, anyway. I see one blue jay in the frame of my vision and I think it’s the same one that left my sight ten minutes ago. Even if I see two, I think of them as a pair, not as two birds possibly unrelated.
I didn’t know what to say. I listened to him go on about birds. It was the only thing outside the room he cared about.
The hands that held each other lightly on top of his stomach strained lightly sometimes, as if they were dreaming of old gestures. Wild animals dreaming about the way they used to chase the air.
This boy you brought in has died, they told me.
“Forms to fill out, I guess,” I said, laughing.
The woman who told me this wore a white suit. Very official. She nodded because no words were needed. Very good. The slip she handed me had a room number on it. She turned to leave.
“What about my knife?” I asked.
“Go to the room,” she said, and was gone. The entire enterprise had taken one minute. Perhaps she had other work. Surely distribution of these slips of paper was not her only task. The long hallway I was in had many doors. It was practically empty, except for the odd chair.
The room on the slip was just off a kind of foyer, and outside its door there was a long table. A container of knives was on the table.
In fact, my knife was not in the plastic bin. Most of these were casual knives — knives not for killing, or fighting, necessarily, but knives that must have been close at hand when an incident or idea sparked their wielders to slice or stab. In the bin were also two flat-headed screwdrivers.
“My knife is not in there,” I explained to the clerk who sat behind the table. The clerk was oblivious to me, reading his beat-up library book. He was intent upon finishing the current chapter or verse.
I waited a moment, rocking slightly back and forth on my feet, my hands politely clasped behind my back. I heard breathing, or the rhythmic rustling of sheets, or maybe a breeze pushing quietly through the screen of an open window. There was a light curtain across the doorway behind the clerk’s desk. Perhaps he was a kind of receptionist for whatever went on through the doorway — inspections or treatments or people lying quietly to recover, or take a turn for the worse.
“My knife is not there,” I repeated.
The clerk looked up at me, pushing the chair away from the desk. “You better double-check,” he said, standing and stretching, straining his hands toward the ceiling. “Listen, bud,” he said. “Did you ever hear about what used to be here?”
“Sir, I did not. Now, I must be retrieving my knife.”
“You haven’t double-checked,” he said. “Now. This place, this very site, was once a primitive garden, I think.”
I looked at the slightly damp forehead of the young man. Perhaps his chubbiness is what made him sweat. His watch strap cut slightly into the soft flesh near his wrist. He might have tried harder to appear official. He was a clerk and doing nothing but reading a book. He might address people more properly.
“You might know this, chief,” he said, suddenly showing interest in me. “What were those things? You know those things where they grew things. I know garden is wrong but you know those plants they have now?”
I knew what he meant, though I had never been near one. There are stacked drawers of synthetic soil. They contain power and light and water. They are stacked around the hydro plants, producing foods.
“They were called farms,” I said to him, taking a deep breath. Surely he and I were together on one thing — he worked here and so did I, though in differing capacities and for different reasons. “Now, let’s address the matter of my knife. I will take it and complete the appropriate forms. If necessary, after my work with the freeloaders tomorrow, I can return to your department.”
The word department seemed to make him smile and he looked around the foyer, yawning, and pointed again to the plastic bin of knives.
Now, there is the question of my knife, where is it and so on, but there is also the question of this man who will no longer talk to me. Things are different in this world than they used to be, I agree. But it is much more than the way we get our food. It’s the rules we have invented for ourselves. It’s the rules we are given to live under. Rules we know or don’t know by habit and do not question.
What is stopping me, for instance, from walking right past this man and into the back room, the room that is hidden by the sheet, or curtain, over the doorway?
He has no gun.
I’m in trouble with the law already, really — witness my daily work with the freeloaders. He has only an old-fashioned telephone on his desk to communicate with the other security types. But the time it would take, to punch in the numbers, to have it ring somewhere else, to have it answered by exactly the person he needed to answer it — surely that would take longer than this man would need to subdue a man like me?
Especially if he is some kind of martial arts expert.
But he seems reasonable. Perhaps he would listen to reason.
Or perhaps he would begin with the terrible windpipe-crushing hold and move on to reason from there.
But why would I stand and wait for my knife while he ignores me? Why is this the sort of rule I would follow?
These are the rules I am talking about. I have emerged somehow, this day, into a world where I am expected to abide by all these agreements made in my absence or even with my tacit approval, given only perhaps by my not screaming no and refusing the smallest encroachment on my rights sometime years ago. And that may have been only my right to not accept a discount, say, offered by some political group that did not represent itself as political at all
“This was once some kind of open space,” the clerk said, taking his watch off and rubbing where it had been. He looked at me while he rubbed. He continued to look at me as he clasped his watch-strap together again and laid it on the table.
“Where?” I asked, because he continued to stare at me as if waiting for some kind of answer, though he hadn’t asked a question. This was once some kind of open space — what kind of a question is that? That’s not a question.
“Right here,” he said, smiling and opening his arms. “Right here. That’s the thing about it. It was once all open. It was all an open space and everything lived in the open air.”
“It sounds fantastic,” I said.
“I bet it was.”
“Now, I have to be going. Perhaps you can help me find my knife?”
“I would like to,” he said, sitting down and returning his attention to the book he had been reading.
“Why don’t you?”
But he didn’t answer. He was smiling into his book and he was the kind of guy, he really was the kind of guy who could do only one thing at a time, I suppose, so I reached over and p
ut my hand on his shoulder.
He swatted my hand away and looked up at me surprised.
“I need to find my knife,” I told him, but just then the phone on his desk rang. He held his hand out to me with its palm open as he picked up the phone. I suspected it was someone calling from just behind him, from the doorway he was guarding.
I turned from the man, rather than look into his pudgy palm. This could be anywhere, I thought. Of course, I had never been to this part of the hospital before, but I was amazed by the plain empty corridor. There were no chart boxes on the walls by the doors. There must be people through the doors, and these would be sick and sleeping or worried and waiting or simply doctors sorting through files or scribbling notes or entering data and slamming big books shut.
My father had been in just such a building, in the end, but was I imagining things or did the buildings used to be full? Was there not bustling, in those days? Were people not brushing past you, barely looking up from the clipboards in their hands?
Now there is no one about.
I turned back to the clerk, but he was gone. The phone was hung up and the man was gone. The book he was reading was on the desk, face down. The cover simple: one of those once-elegant cream-coloured hardcovers that is part of a series of great books. I picked it up. The title was centred on both the front and the back: As For Me and My House. Never heard of it. I was aware of the sound of my own breathing. I was alone with this bin of knives and the doorway behind the clerk’s desk.
Fair is fair. I will get my own knife, I thought, and stepped past the table. At the curtain I stopped and looked around. What kind of crime would I be committing by entering? There is no way to tell. In the old days, there were signs everywhere you looked. Even if you ignored them, there were still signs.
There was no sound of footsteps.
When I entered the room, I relaxed and forgot the clerk. The room was a shambles, you might say, and surely the man at the desk bore some responsibility for that. His credibility was severely diminished right then. I was certain he neglected his work to read his great book and ask questions about things that happened a long time ago. Things that had nothing to do with us now.
We Don't Listen to Them Page 5