by Sam Shelstad
Alice imagined Frank as a little kid but could only picture the bat-faced man in front of her, just smaller.
“And nobody cared about the owl part of it,” Frank continued. “Or they didn’t believe me. I kept telling them I found the body because I followed the owl but they just thought I was traumatized or something.”
“Well yeah,” Alice said. “I mean, of course.”
“But it was frustrating, you know? I mean, the body was a big deal but people die all the time. It was the owl that was interesting and yet everyone was worried about the little boy who found the corpse. They thought I was scarred by it or something but I wasn’t. What had affected me was this owl.”
“Because it wasn’t just that you found the body,” Alice said. “It was that you were, like, meant to find it. Because this strange owl led you there. That was the amazing thing. You saw something magical.”
“Yes!” Frank clapped his hands together and moved one stool closer so that his knees were almost touching Alice’s. “It was magical.”
“People always focus on the wrong things.” Alice realized that she probably sounded a little drunk. And she was a little drunk and would be unable to drive back to Toronto now. But it was true what she had said—people always focused on the wrong things. Like the girls at the office who tried to make a charity case out of her when she was fine. When she and Tillman were together the world felt enchanted. Here was this thing that made Alice happy or was at least something exciting in her life but Laura and Kate and Brenda and the others all tried to help her anyway. How after Tillman moved away they tried to set her up with Steve from the office who was a dullard. Which, no offence to poor Steve, was a little insulting.
Alice and Frank talked about their jobs, their parents and the music that played over the bar’s speakers. Hotel guests poked their heads into the room as they passed through the lobby but nobody came in. The bartender put a few chairs up in the back.
Alice offered to get the next round but the ugly man said he had to drive home. He walked around behind the bar and put on his coat.
“Come on,” Alice said. “There’s a couch in my room; you can stay here. Let’s have another.”
Frank took off his coat and sat back down. Alice felt a hand slide over to her left knee but she didn’t slap it away. She just closed her eyes and pictured Tillman—he had beautiful hands.
Sketch Artist, Boxer, Party Planner, Baker
On a Greyhound chugging westward, squeezed up against the window by the flabby arm of a sleeping farm boy, Doug Sachs struggled against the darkness of it all. Maybe things weren’t so bad, he thought. You’ve got to see these things as opportunities to grow: The worse things are, the better they will be. This would be good. He had helped so many people through their bleakest hours and this was quite an accomplishment—but what of his own battles? He could now see that it was time to turn his healer’s gaze inward.
The farm boy was drooping towards him, closer and closer, breathing hot hamburger breath onto his neck. Doug tried pushing him away but the big boy was out cold and wouldn’t budge. Wish I could’ve taken the car, he thought. But again: an opportunity. Lemons/lemonade. Despite the discomfort, taking the bus now meant he had time to prepare for his homecoming.
His mom would inevitably blow things out of proportion: Carol kicked you out? What did you do? What the hell is wrong with you? That kind of thing. But there were subtleties and nuances and complications involved and it would take finesse for Doug to unpack and lay out the delicate details of the situation for his mom to see and understand. Which was no problemo. Finesse he could do.
He looked out the window at passing cars; people inside on their own journeys, both geographical and spiritual. He was an hour outside of Ottawa. In another four hours he would change buses in Toronto. It would be five more hours until Sudbury followed by a ten-minute cab ride to his mom’s building. He would sleep on her couch for a few days—a week, a month. As long as was needed to come up with a flawless action plan.
In Sketch Artist, Boxer, Party Planner, Baker, his self-help book, Doug encouraged the readers to picture their problematic situations as a human body. Try to give everything that’s going wrong in your life a face and clothing and expressions, he advised. Gather the confusing, messy, shitty things that keep you awake at night, stitch them together like a Frankenstein’s monster and stick a name to it. That way you have a single adversary to overcome, which is encouraging. This is from “Sketch Artist,” the first of four steps in Doug’s system for tackling dilemmas.
He decided to call the current situation “Norman.” Sorry, old Norman! he thought. I’m taking you out!
Doug made a list in his head of all the bad things that made up Norman.
Carol, his wife, finding a photograph of her older sister, Karen, tucked underneath his side of the mattress.
How he, when confronted by Carol about this photograph, confounded her suspicions by failing to produce any kind of explanation, because it was difficult to explain an already tricky situation when suddenly confronted with a picture that he had been actively hiding from the very person waving it in front of his face and
stared at, pondered and examined for a rough estimate of five hundred hours.
really, there was nothing to say. He was completely obsessed with his wife’s sister.
How, when Carol left the room to see if the photograph had been plucked from her own family album (it was), he had failed to seize this opportunity to think of something to say that might assuage his wife’s reasonable concerns and
instead, upon Carol’s return to the room, said, “You’re not going to tell your sister, are you?”
Carol telling her sister about the photograph.
The message he then left on Carol’s sister’s voicemail which amounted to, Hey I know your whole family is kind of rallying against me right now and that we haven’t shared but a few sentences in the five years I’ve known you and that you probably think I’m an unstable creep but what say we take a secret trip to the Dominican together?
Carol kicking him out of the house.
And finally, the cherry on top:
The hulking mass of the sweaty farm boy in the neighbouring seat closing in, ready to crush him into a sad little diamond.
So that was Norman. The next step in Doug’s system would be difficult to complete because a crowded bus was not an optimal space for “Boxer,” which involved yelling and punching. The idea was that once one’s troubles have been compiled and personified as part of “Sketch Artist,” the next step was to express and release one’s “surface anger” by verbally and physically abusing an inanimate object representing the figure imagined as part of step one. Carol had sewed together a featureless doll for this purpose, which he had left back at home, but his neck pillow would suffice for now.
The washroom at the back of the bus was Doug’s best option for privately abusing his neck pillow—he could mutter insults over the racket of a flushing toilet, throw medium-strength punches out of view of the other passengers and even give little Norman a swirly—but the farm boy had him trapped in his seat for now. Doug took the pillow from his neck and turned towards the window where he could secretly bite into it.
Fuck you, Norman! Doug whispered through clenched teeth. I hate you and hope you die and rot in hell and get bit by strong teeth like mine every fucking day! He gnawed on the pillow, making threats and cursing at a volume just below that of the hum of the bus until he began to drool all over the armrest. And that was step two. His surface anger flew out the roof ventilator and he was calm.
By leaning into the window, Doug had caused his seatmate to shift further towards him so that the farm boy’s face was now on his shoulder. He tried nudging him off but the big sleeping head was like a concrete slab. Doug wasn’t really bothered by this, however. Nope. He had bitten his pillow and was now able to calmly observe the situation for what it was.
Step three, “Party Planner,” was about carefully plottin
g a series of actions which, once performed, would defeat the antagonist imagined in step one of Doug’s system. First, you try to visualize the most desirable outcome to your troublesome situation. Then you work backward to figure out a reasonable chain of events that would make this outcome happen. Factor in all limitations, account for variables and use logic to derive a solid, workable plan. Depending on the scope of one’s adversary—Norman, for example, was a giant—it often helped to work a small, easily fixed problem into the overall dilemma. That way you can get the ball rolling. The farm boy would be this ball, Norman-wise.
Doug cleared his throat but the boy kept on sleeping. Next, he tried kicking the guy’s legs—still nothing. Then he reached into the seat pocket for his water bottle and poured a tiny amount of liquid on his fingers which he then flicked in the farm boy’s face. After five or six good flicks, the farm boy awoke and moved back into his own space.
Step one: complete.
Step two: complete.
Doug had zero surface anger because of step two plus peak confidence levels from defeating the farm boy mini-problem which would allow him to plot Norman’s demise with a razor-sharp, clear and methodical mind.
Unpinned, Doug reached down between his legs and retrieved his phone from his bag. No calls, no texts. He texted himself the word “hello” to make sure his phone was working. It was. He went into his photo file and brought up the snapshot of the picture of Carol’s sister. He wanted a handy digital copy of the tactile photograph on his phone so he could sneak peeks on his way to work, at work, on his way back from work, etc. Carol had come home early from craft night while he was taking the snapshot so he had tucked the original photograph under the mattress before she walked into the room. That night, by chance, Carol decided to change the bedding before Doug had a chance to put the photo back in its album. This was further proof that the whole situation was a good thing: the dumb luck of his wife finding the picture during such a brief window of opportunity was a sign that things needed to change. And change was good. According to Doug’s book, “We would all benefit to be more like the bum on the sidewalk, always asking for change.”
At first, looking at the photo of Carol’s sister was harmless fantasy. Doug would stare at Karen until her tight Disney sweater and sly smile were etched into his brain and then hop in the shower. It was fun to sneak in a little danger while Carol was at work and flirt with taboo. Karen wasn’t especially attractive; it was the excitement of playing evil that drew him toward the photo. Soon it became a ritual: once Carol left the house, Doug would pull out the picture and go through scenarios in his head.
Karen coming over, teary-eyed and confessing her spicy passion for Doug, whom she would call “Lil’ Tamale.”
Climbing through Karen’s apartment window at night with a box of condoms in his teeth and rose petals in his pockets.
Carol in a coma—he and Karen acting out a sexy nurse/patient scenario in the adjacent hospital bed.
Eventually, the fact that the photograph was of his wife’s sister, or even of a woman, had become irrelevant. What excited Doug about the photograph now was that it was this thing he had stared at for so many hours. If you pay attention to something long enough it takes on a certain aura, Doug realized. There was a religious quality to the photograph now. Carol’s sister had the presence of a god or a prophet.
Doug didn’t need any gods or prophets, however. He had his system. And as the bus swept past fields and silos and little towns full of people who desperately needed Doug’s guidance, he began to plot his triumph over Norman.
After changing buses in Toronto, Doug had a seat to himself and he fell asleep against the window for an hour. When he woke up, a heavy rain was pelting the roof of the bus. For a moment, Doug thought the rain sounds were the withered, knocking hands of Third World children trying to get on the bus and instinctively reached for his bag. When he came to, he pulled out an organic apple oat bar and chewed half.
Things were looking up, Doug thought. “Party Planner” was going extremely well. Not only had he designated a plausible ideal outcome for the whole Norman thing, he had already thought up five possible routes toward reaching it.
The outcome he had come up with was only one compromise away from his first imagined ideal outcome, which was very good. Someone following Doug’s guidebook will usually dream up some romantic, blissful outcome and then whittle it down, compromise after compromise, until a more modest and realistic outcome can be decided on. For example, some guy’s problem might be that he wants the respect of his father. The guy is unemployed and always asking his dad for money. He’ll imagine this perfect outcome where his father respects the hell out of him because he owns a giant, successful company. But then he’ll realize he can’t own a company because he doesn’t know anything about business so he thinks, Okay I’ll be some kind of hot shot executive that doesn’t need to know all of the business stuff. But then he’s not sure if that kind of position exists so he settles for an assistant, then clerk and on down the line until he decides to become the guy who mows the lawn out front of the building. The guy with all the keys on his belt who has to pull dead birds out of the big fountain in the garden. And that’s the plausible ideal outcome for this guy who wants his dad to be proud of him—to become this maintenance man. Because at least he’s working now, even if it’s not in an office on the top floor.
Doug’s first imagined outcome to the Norman situation, before compromise came into the picture, was that his wife would take him back. Her family would forget everything and the sister would see him on the side—they’d go on secret Dominican trips and give each other leg massages under the table at family dinners. But that would never work. Carol’s sister didn’t like him and that was that.
To compromise, Doug cut Karen out of the picture and made it simple: the ideal outcome for the Norman problem would be for everything to go back to the way it was. He would be with his wife and her family would forgive and forget. He’d stop obsessing over that damn picture too. A basic “reset” outcome. And this was all within his reach because he had already cooked up five rough plans for achieving this outcome:
Claim Ignorance: Gee, Carol, I have no idea what that photo was doing there! I was so confused by your reaction to finding it I thought I’d just let you run with it for a while. It was clear you needed to work some things out. Hope you’re all better now. And someone called up your sister, pretending to be me, and left a weird message? Who would do that? Let’s go watch something relaxing on the computer and forget all this madcap nonsense, am I right?
Misdirection One: In the background of the photograph, behind Karen in her Disney sweater, stands a man in a tiny swimsuit. Kind of muscular and not bad looking. If Doug were to claim a mysterious attraction to this man and explain the mattress-tuck as a necessary measure while he explored these confusing feelings of possible homosexual leanings there would be many benefits. Carol’s lefty family would be too afraid of being seen as insensitive to continue rallying against him; he could pass off the sister-loving stuff as a ploy to hide his embarrassment during this time of self-discovery. He could later explain away the whole thing by claiming a hormonal imbalance due to an overdose of estrogen, because of all the soy he’d been consuming in his shakes at the gym.
Misdirection Two: He was hiding the photograph because he was turning Carol’s sister Karen into a knight. He had planned on taking pictures of all their friends and family out of the album—one by one, so Carol wouldn’t notice—so as to scan the faces and make a chess set for Carol’s birthday. She was to be the Queen and he the King. The other family members would be pieces on the back row and their acquaintances would be pawns. He didn’t want to ruin the surprise and so he let his wife jump to conclusions while he finished off the set. Only problem: he would actually have to make this chess set using whatever pictures he could find online since he didn’t have access to the photo album. But not really a problem because he could do it.
Shadow Doug: It was
n’t me, Carol! I just plain wasn’t myself for a minute there. Because of work stress or allergies or a hormonal imbalance due to all the soy.
Hidden Camera Hoax: He could make a video where he would place the photograph in the mattress, turn to the camera, say “Shhh” and leave the room. Then an actress who resembles his wife but whose face couldn’t really be seen because of the camera angle would come into the shot and re-enact finding the photo. Then Doug would come back into the room and he and the actress would go through the whole fight (as best as he could remember and choreograph). He would have to be wearing the same clothes he wore at the time. When the fake Carol left the room, he would come back in and hold up a sign saying “Gotcha!” and give a big thumbs-up. He would show the video to Carol and she would think the whole thing was a crazy prank that went haywire.
All Doug had to do now was pick a plan and follow through with it. That was called “Baker,” the following-through step. If a plan was solid, one only had to stick to it and the plausible ideal outcome would become a reality. Like a baker—just follow the recipe.
The sky was full of dark clouds and the rain made an enormous racket as it dinged the roof of the bus but Doug had the advantage of being an optimist. The clouds and the rain were not for him but the gloom spelled out impending disaster for Norman. He could see Norman quivering at the sight of nature gathering together and conspiring against him under Doug’s supervision. Norman wasn’t a giant at all; he was just fat. He was that big fat farm boy. Greasy and foul and fat and easily dominated by Doug. All he had to do was flick his fingers and Norman would back off.