Seeing Red

by Shawn Sutherland

  She reaches into my pocket and pulls out my phone and programs her number into my contact list. Placing it back in the palm of my hand, she kisses me again.

  “I think you will.”

  I stand there on the front steps and watch as she enters the lobby without looking back. Will I forget this moment? What’s the point of going out and meeting people if you have no recollection of it? How many times have I made a connection, promised to call somebody, only to never speak to them again? There are so many questions swirling around my head. I don’t know how to feel. I wonder if Sofia and I would actually have any chemistry if we were sober, if we’d even be able to make it through a date, and why she chose me over an entire club of suitors. Many of them were better-looking and better-dressed. What did she see in me? What does anybody ever see in me? I hope I still remember her in the morning.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I’m sprinting down the sidewalk, trying to shake off the effects of the drugs and alcohol while searching for an ATM so I can buy some late-night food and pay for a cab home. As I’m running, I inadvertently trip over a pylon that’s been left on a patch of weathered concrete. Angered, I pick up the pylon and hoist it above my head and attempt to throw it onto the roof of a nearby store. It almost reaches, but the base of the pylon catches the corner of the wall and it comes crashing down. I try another throw. Same result. Then I hear a man shouting gibberish at me from across the street; he runs out in front of oncoming traffic and a taxi has to slam on the brakes to avoid plowing into him. He’s rushing toward me. Why? I’m confused, in a daze, and all I see is a shadow, an apparition approaching me from the darkness. I hurl the pylon at him and yell “Eat pylon!” but my throw misses the target by several feet.

  He’s close now. I watch the shadow leap up onto the sidewalk and then his right hand shoots forth and hammers me on the left side of my face, slightly below the eye. I’m so numb from the alcohol that I barely feel any pain; I simply stagger backward and grab onto the shadow by his collar. To my surprise, this apparition is nothing more than a stocky, college-aged Korean kid with spiky black hair and a beige shirt. I cock my fist and press him up against the wall.

  “Now why the fuck would you do that?” I shout. Maybe I accidentally flirted with his girlfriend tonight, or maybe his family owns this store, or maybe he just wanted to punch somebody—I don’t know, but I’m guessing the latter. He gawks at me without answering. His mouth is wide open. His eyes appear vacant and stunned. He doesn’t try to push me away or even raise his hands to defend himself. He doesn’t react. I realize he might be even drunker than I am.

  “I said, why did you do that?”

  In the corner of my eye I see a girl running toward us. She grabs onto his arm and starts pulling with both hands, trying to drag him away from me, but I won’t let him go. I want retribution. I want to imprint four knuckles into his goddamn forehead. But, for whatever reason, my arm begins to relax, and I refrain. I think about what happened earlier at the bar with Natalie and all the anger I felt and I look into her eyes and I can’t bring myself to hit him. I let go of his collar and they both fall backwards to the ground. Then I slowly stumble away, watching as she scrambles to get him into a taxi.

  When I reach up to feel my face, I find a swollen lump about the size of a quarter below my left eye and there’s wet blood all over my fingertips. I didn’t realize he had caused so much damage. Enraged, I run toward them, intent on evening the score, but they’re already in a cab and driving away. I chase the car down the yellow line in the centre of the road until they’re out of sight; my sprint gradually slows to a crawl and then I come to a standstill, admitting defeat. I pour some gin from my flask onto my hand and rub it into the wound and it stings, so I take another swig to ease the pain.

  I need to wash this blood off my face. The lake can’t be very far from here. I start heading toward the water, following the road south all the way across the bridge overlooking the old railway tracks and underneath the Gardiner Expressway. At the last intersection before the waterfront, a police van parks beside me as I’m waiting for the light to change. Inside, there are two officers; one of them pokes his head out through the passenger side window. He’s balding with a comb-over and a big moustache.

  “Hey you!” he hollers. “You’re the one who’s been kicking over all the mailboxes!”

  “Uh . . . I’m pretty sure you’ve got the wrong guy.”

  “No! I know it was you.” He pauses for a moment and examines my face. “What the hell happened to your eye?”

  “Some asshole punched me! He’s the guy you should be looking for. He’s got spiky hair and a fat, stupid face.”

  “Oh, well then! We’ll keep an eye out for him.”

  The two cops chuckle at each another.

  “Can you give me a ride home?” I ask. “Or at least drive me to the bus stop?”

  “No!”

  “Well, I’m just gonna kick over more mailboxes then!”

  “You better not!” he shouts as the van pulls away. I scan the intersection for any mailboxes, but, finding none, I cross the road and continue southward toward the water.

  Past the sidewalk, I see a small metal sign nailed to a piece of wood resting a few inches off the ground marking a dirt path through the shrubbery. The sign reads: SPADINA QUAY WETLAND. I follow the path as it curves through the bush and leads me onto a stone walkway running alongside the waterfront. There are boats docked to the left of me and a small park to the right; I stumble as far as I can until I find six black benches at the end of a wide pier. With absolutely no energy left, I stretch out and collapse onto one.

  The lake is calm and tranquil. To my right, a monolithic building once used by the Canada Malting Company looms heavily in the background, like a mummified corpse, stained yellow from time and rain and rust. Across the water, the lights of the island airport blink and flash, but all I can hear are the subtle waves pressing against the docks. I decide to remove my leather jacket and wear it like a blanket and suddenly I’m no longer cold. Before I fall unconscious, I feel my phone vibrating in my pocket: Doc is texting me to ask if I slept with the Armenian girl. No, I tell him—I’m actually lying on a pier bench and I might die here. By the time I press Send, my eyes are already closed.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  When I sleep, I dream Rachael is still alive. It’s only when I wake that she disappears again. In my dreams, it was all a misunderstanding: she’s alive and well and I was simply mistaken. It’s the first day of July and we’re watching fireworks go off by the water like we did when we were kids, and she’s telling me about how they were better last year and the night sky is bright and clear.

  In the real world there was no sign of Rachael anywhere. No phone calls, no emails, no trace of her left on the internet. Sometimes, when I was drunk in the middle of the night, I would type her name into search engines and find nothing. She trusted me with every password she ever had—occasionally, she would ask me to check her email for her when she was away from the computer—so once, late at night, I tried to login to her email account. The old password still worked. There were thousands of unread messages. She hadn’t clicked on any of them. It wasn’t a prank, a mistake or a delusion. She really was gone.

  My father died nearly three years before she did. After his funeral, I locked myself in my room for several weeks. I received many consolatory messages from people saying things like “everything happens for a reason” and “he’s in a better place now,” but Rachael was the only person who actually came to visit. She took time off work and stayed with me, cramped inside my tiny apartment. I was living by the ocean at the time and one day we walked along a gravel path by the edge of the water and she suddenly gave me a long hug. I asked her, “What was that for?” and she said, “Looked like you needed one.” We were in our own little world. She told me things she said she would never tell anyone else. “Don’t you trust anyone else?” I asked h
er. “No,” she said. In our brief time together, I felt like I was at peace again. Like I was home.

  Rachael talked me through it. She wasn’t afraid to call me on my bullshit either, often criticizing me for trying to laugh everything off and keeping my feelings bottled inside. She said I was emotionally detached and she was right; I took stock of what she said and genuinely tried to improve, to get better. She encouraged me to be confident, to trust in myself, and she always stayed patient with me, despite my tendency to disappear for weeks at a time or to drive people away entirely. Somehow, we always came back to each other.

  On the last day of her visit, I accompanied her to a hotel lobby where the airport shuttle bus was soon to arrive. We talked about when we’d see each other again and what we wanted to do in the future. It was a beautiful sunny day.

  “If I could do anything, I’d run a coffee shop,” she said. “I’d sell coffee by day, and you could turn it into a bar at night.” I told her I liked the idea, but I wasn’t ready to settle down in one place. I had to do something important first, something special, something that would make her proud, like become a musician or a journalist or travel the world working in international development. At the time, I thought I could do anything. That was the thing about Rachael: she made you feel like you could do anything.

  “When I leave here, you’re not gonna disappear for weeks again, are you?” she asked. “No,” I said, “I’ll be in touch.” She told me I should have more faith in people, rely on them more, and not try to live through everything on my own. I responded with my usual stubborn posturing, assuring her I didn’t need anybody. After losing my dad I didn’t want to depend on anyone like that ever again. I thought relying on others made you weak. “I can take care of myself,” I said. She tilted her head to the side with affection and perhaps a little pity and said my life sounded lonely.

  The shuttle bus pulled into the driveway. I held her close as we said goodbye and then we kissed one last time. As she was walking out the door, she turned back to me and said, “You should come home.”

  “I will,” I said. “But there are some things I want to do first.”

  “By yourself?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I want to travel, too, but I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. I’d miss my family and friends too much.” Then she paused for a moment before adding, “The timing never seems to work out for us.”

  She boarded the shuttle and I watched her take her seat and stare out the window as the bus drove away. I planned on inviting her to Toronto to see my new apartment once I settled in, but that never happened. And it never will.

  I was lying on a pile of pillows and blankets in the centre of the room when I received a phone call from an old friend at three o’clock in the morning. He told me Rachael had died in her sleep. They didn’t know why. She suffered from epilepsy and they thought it might be related to that. I hung up the phone and once again locked myself inside for weeks. I didn’t go to the funeral. I couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move. I tried listening to music, but nothing sounded right. It felt like my chest was hollow and I hated myself for not being there for her. For ten years she was the one constant in my life. Now, the memories of the time we spent together are only in my mind. Nowhere else. When I’m gone, those memories will disappear too, into thin air. Did they ever really happen? Did I dream them all? What if everything I remember about her was merely imagined?

  TWENTY-FIVE

  A month after Rachael died I grew tired of living like a recluse, so I loaded up the Widowmaker with a few essentials and drove south. It was sometime in August and the weather was warm. I had no plan or destination in mind—I just knew I wanted to get out of the city and be closer to the water. I didn’t get very far. That first day, I came across a small town on the northern coast of Lake Erie called Turkey Point. A long beach ran alongside the main street from end to end, and separating the town from the sand was a metre-high wall made out of two layers of grey rock. I drove by a quaint motel with a green roof next to an old orange arcade and a food stand where they sold burgers, ice cream, poutine and two-dollar rounds of mini-putt. There was little else aside from the road, the sky and the water. Several boats had anchored a few yards away from the shoreline, proudly displaying flags of different provinces and countries. Some played the radio while their occupants jumped in and out of the water, while others were dead silent, reveling in the calm. I parked on the side of the road and found a spot at the edge of the beach where I leaned up against the rock wall wearing nothing more than a pair of blue trunks and sunglasses. Occasionally, I would go for a swim, but there was a lot of seaweed at the bottom of the lake and it slithered against my feet, so I mostly floated on my back and looked skyward.

  On the second day, after having slept in my car overnight, I returned to the same spot and soaked in the sunshine. I passed the time by reading a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury, including one called “The Lake,” which I read and re-read several times. Suddenly, I heard someone call out from behind me, “Hey! You there! Can you help us out?” and I turned around to see a tanned, middle-aged man hollering at me from across the street. He had long, curly hair, an unkept goatee and a bare potbelly. He and three other men, who were all so baked from the sun that their skin looked golden brown, were building a wooden frame for a new house. “We need a little help here, my man! It’ll only take a second.”

  I closed my book and plodded through the sand, crossing the road to where they were working. The man gave me directions on where to stand and what to lift. I grabbed onto the bottom of the frame and he said, “Okay. On three. One—two—three!” and then the five of us mustered all of our combined strength to hoist that wooden monstrosity into the air. Eventually we managed to prop it upright, and I steadied it while they hammered it into place. “Phew, alright! Thanks a lot, my man.” He extended his arm and I shook his hand.

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” I said. Then I returned to my spot on the beach and read my book and spent the next couple of hours lying alone in the sun.

  At night the anxiety attacks returned. My heart was palpitating and there was a sharp, piercing pain inside my chest that I knew only alcohol could relieve. I went to the small pub inside the motel and expected the room to be full, but the place was nearly empty. Two elderly men were quietly watching a baseball game on TV and a group of forty-somethings had congregated at a table in the corner where the bartender was busy chatting with them. I pulled up a stool at the bar and hunched over the counter and proceeded to order several rum-and-cokes.

  “Can I get another?” I asked the bartender. She unenthusiastically obliged me before heading back to the table to continue conversing with the locals. I was about to call it a night by ordering a bunch of shots and drinking them all in succession before passing out in the backseat of my car when I heard two people walk in. One of them was the long-haired, potbellied man from earlier, and the other was an even older fellow with a paper-thin frame, a green trucker’s cap advertising a small town drywall company, and a denim jacket that smelled as if it had spent a lifetime smothered in cigar smoke. They approached the bar and the first man recognized me. “Hey! It’s you again! How ya doing, buddy?” he asked, patting me on the back. “I owe you one. What’re you having?” It was then I realized he reminded me of Jeff Bridges—albeit a loud, Canadian version.

  “Oh, that’s alright.”

  “No, I insist! Hey! Judy!” The bartender looked up from the table. “Can we get two Molsons? And put his next one on my tab.”

  “Only if you promise to actually pay that tab.”

  “I’ll pay it when you . . . stop . . . lookin’ so good!”

  She laughed. “Flattery. Nicely done.”

  The man turned to me and extended his hand for the second time that day. “My name’s Walton and this is my friend, Dick. Don’t bother talking to him, though . . . he’s a grumpy old c
unt!”

  I nearly spit the rum out of my mouth.

  “Oh, piss off, Walt!” Dick replied. “I’m watching the game here.”

  “See?”

  “I’m Ethan. Nice to meet you.” I lifted my glass and nodded my head as if to say “cheers.”

  “Where’re you from, Ethan?”

  “Uh . . . I just moved to Toronto about a month ago, actually.”

  “Ooo, the Big Smoke! Did you come all the way out here by yourself?”

  Normally, I might’ve been annoyed by someone like Walton, but, on that particular night, I was just happy to have somebody to talk to. I hadn’t spoken to another soul in weeks.

  “Yeah. I had to get outta there.”

  “Oh I would too, if I lived in Toronto. I’d run for the goddamn hills. A young guy like you shouldn’t be sittin’ here all by himself though. How old are you?”

  “Twenty-three.”

  “Whoa! Twenty-three! At your age—Christ, we’re talking thirty, forty years ago now—I was off backpacking through Europe. Me and my buddy brought a tent and we hitchhiked from place to place, sleeping in people’s yards. We really knew how to keep it cheap. You ever been?”

  “No. Not yet.”

  “Oh man, you gotta go! It’s unreal. I’ve been back a few times since. You can hop from country to country like that” —he snapped his fingers— “and they’re all different. Sweden was my favourite, bar none.”

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “The women! They’re all blonde, they can speak English, and they’re super smart. I felt like I needed a master’s degree just to keep up with ’em.”

  “So why the hell are you still in Canada?”

  “Good fuckin’ question! Well, I got married a few years back, so that means I have to stay away from the ladies now. Right, Judy?” he called out.