We Don't Listen to Them

by Sean Johnston

  — I don’t mind, Jenny said. You can rent it from me. That’s okay. We’ll pay you a bit at a time.

  — Just cash. My whole life’s off the books right now, Roy said.

  — Listen Morty. How can we get it back on the books? How much money do you need?

  — I don’t know, he said, and I could see he was getting agitated. He didn’t shake or anything. He wasn’t going to lose his temper. His eyes just looked a little wider, a little wilder, and he looked away from my daughter.

  — Let’s just do one step at a time. Don’t worry, I told her.

  — It’s true. He’s good. He knows about money, Jenny told him.

  — I thought I could quit this drinking if I thought it would kill me. If I thought it would give me a disease.

  — Daddy you have quit.

  — You never really quit, I said.

  — So you have been in a program?

  — No.

  — You just said you could quit.

  — If it might kill me I could.

  — It is killing you. It could easily kill you. You’ve quit.

  — It’s not that simple and you’re missing the point, I said. What I was trying to say is if love is all it is, if love would cause me to die, if love were the dangerous thing . . .

  Where do the roots of my own quitting come from? How far back do they go? I know I am one to talk. I was saying something I am not supposed to say. The danger’s unclear with booze. I am saying I would use a clean needle, I would stop shooting up, if it would possibly kill me, but I would not stop love. I mean that even knowing about AIDS I could not stop love.

  The day we met Troy at Tim Horton’s went terribly for me. I was a wreck, but I was steady. I had had some drinks in the morning. I had some tomato juice. I told Jenny I was all right. Jenny’s mother seemed as if she was all right too.

  — Yes, Harold, she said. It’s good to see you too.

  I couldn’t keep my end of the conversation up then. I don’t know how people do it sober. I couldn’t do it even with the edge off. I kept looking at her neck, which had that pebbly leather look that old skin gets. I kept remembering the smell of her skin when she and I were together. I would hold her neck sometimes when we made love. My fingertips would move along its tightest line, from the hollow where her neck met her chest, to the point of her chin when she stretched. I got lost in a fog of nostalgia. I was afraid of virtually everything and so I hardly noticed Troy.

  As a matter of fact, I only noticed when he got up to go outside and smoke. He was too skinny. His own neck was jagged and sore, with its Adam’s apple sheer tenderness in the air. He left a wadded-up serviette on the table. It was white, but part of it was grey and wet. It expanded slowly, like a white reptilian heart, but that’s where it ended; it didn’t contract. It was like a heart, but it was not a heart.

  I finished my milk. I needed a drink.

  — How are you, Harold? she asked, as Jenny and Troy stood outside. Jenny didn’t smoke but she couldn’t leave Troy to shiver on his own. Out the window I saw how perfect she was. He had blue, whiskered cheeks, silver and pockmarked, but hers were pink and clear. She looked muscled and sleek just by smiling. He shivered and his smile looked like a desperate gesture, weak and furtive.

  Mary asked me again.

  — How are you, Howard? And her pity was clear. Are you drinking? she asked.

  — You know me, I told her. How can you ask that?

  — Jenny is great, she said.

  — She really is, I agreed. But I don’t know if this is such a great idea.

  — What?

  — Telling her about Troy.

  — She’s not stupid. She’d find out.

  — She’s got too much to worry about, I said.

  — Like you, you mean? There is a question mark there out of courtesy. It wasn’t a question, it was an accusation, but I suppose she had the right. I’m sure she had the right.

  It went like that from there. Pretty soon I didn’t answer any questions. Pretty soon I had nothing to add and we sat there with her trying her best and me just waiting. Jenny and Troy had gone down the street. He was smoking a filtered cigarette when they got back. I was sure it had been a hand-rolled earlier.

  She went and bought him cigarettes. I’m sure of it. She gave, you see, right from the beginning.

  I took my little silver flask from my pocket and drank from it right there in the Tim Horton’s.

  — You said you weren’t drinking, she said.

  — I’m falling off the wagon just now, I told her. First one in eight years, three months, and seven days.

  She pinched her lips together and tossed me a tract, a small pamphlet. It was not a charitable, Christian gesture, mind you. It said fuck you, I’m through. The funny part was she was through years before. We both were. Pretending we weren’t for the sake of this tiny meeting in a doughnut store made no sense.

  I put the flask away as Jenny walked in. I popped in a gum and smiled.

  Jenny smiled the whole drive home.

  — I thought it went well, she said. I think you and Mom get along well. You know she’s not seeing anyone?

  What a surprise, I thought. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t say much to her when she got in one of these moods. I was cold so she had the heat on, but sometimes she’d put her window down a bit and breathe in the cold air like a gullible animal, then roll it up again.

  — We had the best talk out there, Dad.

  — I’m really glad, Jenny.

  — I think he’ll be okay.

  — Yeah.

  — He’s off to Vancouver. He’s got a girlfriend who moved there.

  — Really, I asked, trying to imagine her, a sick woman with big eyes and no smile. The kind that would look right through me. The kind that would look right through the world as it passed by.

  — I think she’s going to some kind of art school.

  — Oh, I said.

  What a surprise, I thought. An artist, a dead poet soon.

  — Well maybe a change will do him good, I told her.

  — What do you mean?

  — A change is always good, I told her. I don’t know, just a cliché, I guess.

  She didn’t want to talk about anything that was wrong with him. Then a few months later she told me she was transferring out to her company’s Burnaby branch.

  Of course things were clear afterwards. There was a lot of fog in between. Roughly what I remember is this; that my daughter wasn’t sleeping. That she was in danger of losing her job. That Troy was taking money and that she cried every time we spoke on the phone. The only thing that got her home was his death. I pretended it was me she was coming home to, but when a man’s sober he sees things more clearly.

  Once a week Morty would come by and sit in the kitchen for a while, listening to Jenny tell him stories. I’d give him an envelope. I’d put it on the table in front of him and he wouldn’t look at it.

  — It’s your money, Morty, Jenny would say. No need to be ashamed.

  — I’m not. Of course, he said, waving his hands in the air.

  — Fine, just let him take it how he wants, I told her, and he glared at me. He didn’t like me, though I managed his money. He didn’t like to think so. He’s a drunk, I heard him tell Jenny. No, she said. Don’t say that. He’s worked hard. He’s my father.

  For my part, I never forgave him for reading the postcard. I stopped reading the letters, too, after that. I’m not a hypocrite. Jenny’s been a good example. I don’t know how she would have done it, but I kept hoping Alice would try and track us down. I kept hoping I’d walk into the kitchen someday and see two young women holding each other, and this new Alice, clean and strong, telling my daughter it would be okay, it was not her fault.

  Have At It

  THE BOY WAS TALKING ABOUT A simple reordering of this world he lived in. He was asking his father’s advice and, so that it might come to some good, so that he might hear it, and try to understand it, he set down hi
s orange milkshake and stopped sucking on the straw. He put his hands on the edge of the red table between them.

  His father was looking out the window of the restaurant. Rain rolled down the glass and steam rose from the window’s edges near the floor. He was looking out into the parking lot, where two dogs sniffed around the fence at the edge of the property. They were looking for what? Some kind of specific scent in the urine of some beast, or some tinge of blood where some winged creature had touched, and left?

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” his father said.

  “I mean what now?” the boy said.

  “It’s not that simple.”

  Of course not, the boy thought, and pulled his tray back toward him. His father hadn’t touched his own meal yet. The standard cardboard box was open on his tray, the red and blue logos on its lid hidden because of the fries that held it down. He’d ordered some kind of fish sandwich, a fish sandwich of some kind, why? Nobody likes fish sandwiches.

  The boy pulled a fry from his own pile and dipped it in ketchup.

  “I’m sorry,” his father said.

  “Don’t be sorry,” the boy said. “Will you finish that? You should eat.”

  “You can have it.”

  “I have to grow,” the boy said, apologizing to himself for eating the fish.

  Outside, while they were walking to the car, a woman about the age his mother had been was getting out of her car. The car’s windows were tinted and dark. Nobody could see in; how could they see out? This was the kind of question he used to ask his father. He cupped the cigarette in his hand, which swung down by his hip, but the lady saw it.

  “How old are you?” she asked.

  The boy politely declined to answer. He nodded and shrugged as he’d seen so many sad men do on TV.

  “Are you this boy’s father?” she asked his father.

  “Excuse me, ma’am, but my parents are none of your business. I am quite precocious and I would like to see you try to stop me from smoking, or limit my transfats, say.”

  “It’s okay,” his father said, putting his hand on the boy’s head. “He’s eight or nine.”

  The woman was indignant.

  Oh Jesus, the boy thought. This could be it. And for smoking, no less. Foster care was the last thing he needed.

  “I was only kidding,” he said. “I am not too precocious.”

  The father smiled at the woman.

  “It’s a candy cigarette,” the boy said. “It’s my father’s cigarette, actually, if this is my father. Have at it, old man,” he said, handing it to his father, who smoked it the best that he could and smiled weakly, and they tried to move on.

  Inside the van, the air was still and warm, but they kept the windows up. It smelled of hand lotion. Before the boy’s mother had died, she’d liked hand lotion. She liked keeping her hands soft. She was soft. She liked the smell and she liked being completely clean. And she was clean.

  “I don’t really like hand lotion,” his mother had told him. “I need it. My skin will peel off.”

  The boy laughed because it was ridiculous. “Like a plant. Like an onion?”

  “You won’t laugh when you’re older. Everything is different then. It all changes.”

  “I bet it’s different now,” the boy said. “Technically, it is different both times, so right now shouldn’t be considered the norm.”

  “That’s the other thing,” his father said, smiling at him in the rear-view mirror. “You’re the last person who should be talking about norms.”

  “What a thing to say to your son,” his mother said, hitting him on the shoulder. “He’s normal. If not . . .”

  “It’s okay, Mom. Who wants to be normal? There’s no such thing. Perhaps your friend driving the van has forgotten that?”

  “Call him your dad. You’re confusing him.”

  His father did his best dumb-guy face in the mirror and the boy couldn’t stop laughing.

  It goes back to this: they are reordering the world. They are believing some things continue even though the mother does not. Continue. Don’t forget, the boy thinks, she was your father’s wife, and that’s why you want to keep him somewhere in the mix too. But he stares at everything as if it were exactly the same. When they play Frisbee, he catches and looks at the blue disc as if it’s a puzzle that he can’t be bothered to solve. When they eat, he looks at his food as if it’s a chair.

  If he were really the kind of boy that he is when he speaks, he would know what to say to his father. He would know what to say about the time he opened the bathroom door and saw the shape of his joined parents behind the plastic shower curtain. He saw their silhouettes part and his father reach out to rinse the shampoo out, then cry as hair came off in his hands.

  The boy wants to see him through the rain-glazed window of the fast food restaurant investigating the edges of the property, sniffing for excrement, sickness, and blood. He wants him to cry like a boy his age and then come back inside, or step out of the steam like he did that day, when he pulled the shower curtain aside and saw him.

  “Your mother is dying,” he said. “And I’m sad.” Then he retreated back into the shower, where the two silhouettes embraced again.

  “That’s ridiculous,” the boy said. “We have to do something.”

  His parents ignored him, so he yelled. “Have you exhausted all the possibilities?!”

  They just held each other, sobbing, as if they were more afraid of him than this spectre that had just been raised.

  “There are new treatments every day!” he screamed.

  In response, the water continued its dirty drumming on the floor of the tub when it missed his parents’ bodies.

  So he lunged at their dark shapes and pounded at them with his fists. The shower curtain gave way and he fell into the tub on top of it. They stared down at him, one on each side. They were naked and his Spiderman pajamas were soaked. He looked up at their wide eyes and kicked his feet all over as fast as he could.

  “You dumb fuckers! Stop the water! This is stupid.”

  The Expert

  I SAW AN EXPERT CREATING A distraction. I didn’t care what my attention was to be diverted from; I wanted to see this disturbance. She was down by the wishing fountain, on the other side of the river. Beside the fountain was an iron sculpture you will swear is a dinosaur from one angle, a scale-model pickup truck from another, but when she sat down on her little stool, it was a piano.

  Where did the sound come from? Where did her fingers touch that old rusted sculpture to make such music?

  She closed her eyes.

  I was the only one listening. A young boy stood beside me briefly, looked at me, then left. He had the same blank face the whole time. An older woman with blue hair jogged by slowly, toward the people stretching in front of Brainsport. I smiled at her. I said isn’t this wonderful? I used an exclamation point instead of a question mark, but who could hear me over the large sound of the piano?

  The old lady shook her head no and kept jogging.

  Okay, fine. I will listen by myself. It was hard for everyone in those days — we were all supposed to be aware. A distraction expert had just as difficult a time as the real deal, the criminal or the legislator, the mediocre artist or the lobbyist.

  I didn’t care. I stood and watched this magnificent creature turn this cold block of rusted iron into a child’s toy piano. I beamed at her as she turned that toy piano into a real, black and white piano.

  As the expert finished up, the stars stayed hidden in the clear day’s sky, the birds softly wondered their own polite questions, and she stood and stepped away from the sculpture. I was on my knees in the fountain, gathering change to give her.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a crowd of people murmuring. Hacky-sack players; mothers with babies strapped to their bodies; salesmen with BlackBerries and invisible phones; service industry types with smudged aprons; the whole gamut. Above the crowd, city officials nailed a minor celebrity to the door of a church
.

  The expert walked toward me and sat on the edge of the fountain. She took her sandals off and turned to face me, lowering her feet delicately into the clear water.

  “It gets harder every day,” she said.

  “You distracted me.”

  “You’re in love, that’s all.”

  I looked up at her from where I knelt in the fountain. Was it really so easy? Did her thin black hair do me in by simply hanging, bluntly cut and brushing lightly her neck where the skin of her shoulders ducked in under the white of her dress? Was it her eyes, which I swear I never looked into, afraid to get too close? But here, a stone’s throw from the real action, I was sure I was brighter than that.

  “Nonsense,” I told her, and held both hands out to her, open and full of coins. “I think it’s mostly silver.”

  She smiled and waved the money away, dismissing the coins, not me.

  “We will dry our money here,” she said. “If it’s taken before we get back, well . . . it was never ours anyway.”

  I set them on the edge of the fountain, on the lip of concrete that jutted up in a circle to hold the water in. I stood anxiously. We were going somewhere. I didn’t even notice, at the time, the crazy way she talked about money.

  “I will tell you what I am a distraction from,” she said.

  “Shhh,” I told her. “I don’t want to know.” And I put my finger to her lips.

  She started again: “But you have wormed your way into my heart.”

  “No,” I said. “Let’s keep it real.”

  “Please. No clichés,” she said, closing her eyes and pressing the back of one hand to her forehead. She swooned. At least it seemed like swooning. I don’t know. It was a gesture from black-and-white movies. It was as if she loved clichés, but didn’t want to.

  We were facing each other in the dark room at the bottom of my building. She was tempted to faint. I was tempted to catch her and race with her slender body in my arms to the exit, to the stairwell, up twenty-five flights of stairs, and up, up to the roof of the building where all the stars were visible, and all the sky in this flat world. We could spin in each other’s arms, all the colours could bleed into each other and our breath could leave us.