Missing
The moment Tracy and I returned from Pusan, we set out to rediscover our affections and repair our strained bond the only way possible. We separated. Within days of landing in Vancouver, Tracy booked a flight to Saskatchewan. She wanted to see her family. “A couple of weeks,” she said. “I just need a couple of weeks.”
Four weeks later, I flew to the prairies for a visit, hoping to size up the situation. I needed to find where Tracy’s head and heart were at. Both were staying put in Saskatchewan. “Maybe another month,” she said, truly uncertain where she wanted to be or what she wanted to do, other than not be in Vancouver with me.
I waited some more, but when an email of hers mentioned a job in a clothing store, I knew I had to evaluate my own direction. I’d lived for the past month in a basement suite roughly the size of my left lung. Take a deep breath, and my subterranean digs emptied of oxygen. And mildew spores. Cash was running low, so I’d applied for a job as an administrative assistant for a nonprofit arts group. Without question, my organizational skills were as sharp as my vision, and I had no office experience to speak of. Luckily for me, none of this surfaced during the interview.
“Ryan, pretend it’s a rough morning for a sec. Handle this situation for me. When you arrive at work to open the arts resource centre, several people are already at the door. Two clients want immediate help with grant applications—you know those artists, they just can’t wait!—and a third wants to use our library, which isn’t open till noon. Entering the office, you hear the phone is ringing and see the message light is blinking. The fax machine looks jammed again, and we’re expecting an important document. Among the people waiting is a courier with a package you need to sign for. Think about it, though. The lights haven’t been turned on yet, and the sign put out front. The alarm needs the code within a minute, too. So, wow, rough morning. I’d like to know what you’d do first.”
“First I’d tell everybody how weird this is. I’m in the same test situation from my job interview. What are the chances?”
I started the next day.
I’m still surprised how easily offices fall apart. Within a month, what hadn’t emerged during the interview began to show. My filing system, for one thing, exhibited terminal signs of stress. My system involved three piles of paper: the first for “Things That Need Attention,” the second for “Things That Also Need Attention,” and the third for “Things That Probably Matter But I Don’t Know What To Do With.” The third pile towered. Throughout my days I accomplished close to nil, despite putting in a solid eight hours. My ability to read print and find documents in filing cabinets was so slow that it pained even me. The only positive was that I always appeared to be reading or looking for files. I was busy, just not productive. You’d think I typed a lot, too, but it was usually the same page, sometimes several times over, if I couldn’t find the white out. Not that I looked hard.
Even though I accomplished little, my eyes and brain ached by five o’clock, unable to keep up with the visual demands of a day. I didn’t fit, couldn’t do what was asked of me, and didn’t want to. Clearly I wasn’t trying to make things better for myself, just using my old tactics of denial and avoidance. I wasn’t really working or living. I was waiting for Tracy to come home. When she took the job in Saskatchewan, though, I realized that my filing system would collapse, perhaps even kill me, before Tracy would return and resume her old role. It was time to do things for myself, for the first time in a long time. I needed to find my own pace and forget the pace of a life lived at the end of another person’s elbow.
To start, I quit my job and re-enrolled at Simon Fraser University, ready to complete my graduate degree. That was where I belonged. I even took a job there, as a teaching assistant. Now I always used my cane, was up front with my professors and students that I was mostly blind, and asserted that it might take me a little longer to read assigned books or to grade papers. Accommodations were made. Nobody flinched, and nobody fired me or threatened deportation. I encouraged myself, willfully, into living within my abilities and my body. I began to assert the need for help, but only when I really needed help. It felt good. Blindness proved easier to manage when I wasn’t worrying about its burden on Tracy.
Maybe she understood that from my emails. I can still remember all the work I put into those few lines a day, sentences clotted with overwrought attempts at charm. I wanted them to register how relaxed, adjusted, hopeful, motivated, and satisfied I felt, excepting her absence. Maybe all that was enough to remind her of the young man I’d been before my self-imposed apathy and helplessness. Only she knows. Whatever magic transpired, one day, nearly half a year after we first landed back in Vancouver, Tracy appeared on my doorstep, a surprise, suitcases in hand.
We took our time. She would find her own apartment, and we’d give things another try, close but apart, independent and bound. Not too this, not too that. The Goldilocks theory of commitment. If I could bottle and sell whatever time and method resurrected us, I’d have my own infomercial. In the summer of 1998 I graduated and, after a job interview conducted with my fly down and my blindness, well, out in the open, Capilano College hired me and secured computer technology to help me with reading and teaching. I’ve remained there, grateful and content, ever since. What’s more, Tracy and I found a nice apartment with old wooden floors and cherry trees out front. We moved back in together. We may have had a few remaining ghosts, but we had space to spare and plenty of storage.
The morning of May 12, 1999, I sat in my office, with a stack of unmarked essays on my desk. For me, procrastination always begins with voice mail. I decided to check the messages at home.
Two new messages. Both were marked urgent, so I felt vindicated in having decided to waste time. When I pressed the button, both messages replayed my father’s voice in my ear. His tone was terse, flat, yet somehow alarmed. Both messages shared the identical phrasing, too. “Ryan, it’s Dad. Call my cell right away.” No goofy “Yello,” instead of “hello,” or “Bbye now,” as he always says. Something was off. I called him back and tried not to sound a little worried.
“Hi, Dad. What’s going on?” He didn’t answer, so my worry grew. “Dad? You there?”
Instead of words, his voice whimpered under his breath. It was gutshot. A pained and quiet sound. A thin, bleeding moan I’d never heard before.
“What happened,” I barked.
He began to weep quietly, then more of that moan. He couldn’t answer, so without missing a beat, I jumped ahead and cut to the worst bone. “Who?” I said. Just, “Who?”
The phone went quiet. I couldn’t tell if he was still there but carried on anyway. “Who, Dad? Who? Is it Ma?”
The cell phone rustled in my ear, the sound of it changing hands, then I heard a new voice, a woman’s. She said, “Here, Miles, let me talk to him.”
“Ma?”
“Ryan?”
“What’s—”
“Ryan, it’s Auntie Angie. I’m—I’m so—”
“Where’s my mother, Angie?” I felt cornered and disoriented, as if pushed into a cave. My eyes grew starry and buzzed with panic. “What happened, Angie?”
“I’m so sorry, Ryan. It’s, it’s Rory,” she said.
My body flooded with relief. This wasn’t about my mother—it was about somebody else. Then, almost immediately, my little brother’s name registered, and my relief hardened into an icy guilt. Angie continued to talk. She delivered the news as straight and clear as she could, as if teaching a child something new and difficult to understand.
“Ryan, listen to me. Rory took some pills last night,” she began. She spoke slowly. “We don’t know much more at this point, but I’m here at the hospital with your parents, okay? Everybody did everything they could. He’s gone, hon. I’m so sorry, but he’s gone.”
“Gone?”
Something heavy arrived. Comprehension, its freefall, then a kind of pain that knocks you away from words. Your mind moves far from your body. You don’t know if
you are alive anymore, you are so numb, so empty, so blown.
“Rory? But, but he can’t . . .” I searched for an argument, the one to cheat death with. I couldn’t find it.
“I’m so sorry, hon.”
“Is there a note?”
“Can you leave work, Ry? Your parents need you, hon. Come to Langley Memorial Hospital. Everybody’s here. Your mom, dad, Mykol, and Erin are all here.”
The list of names nauseated me. Already Rory was disappearing. He was at the hospital, too, yet not there, among my family’s names. I’d recited that list the same way all my life: Mom, Dad, Rory, Mykol, Erin. A name was missing. The new order sounded alien and its expression empty. This wasn’t my family.
“But I don’t know how to get there,” I said, “We don’t have a car.”
“Can you get a taxi?”
“Did he leave a note?”
“No, hon. There’s no note.”
“But Tracy’s at work.”
“Pick her up on the way, okay?”
“Who’s there, Angie?”
“Listen to me, Ry. Call a taxi, then pick Tracy up at work, then come to the hospital. Okay? I’ll wait for you out front.”
“But I don’t have any money. I can’t take a taxi.”
Trauma dreams its own logic. Mine believed, truly, that if I couldn’t go to the hospital, Rory couldn’t be there. Angie and I carried on this way, trying to sort through my shock, to get me in a cab. When I hung up the phone, I walked across the hall to a colleague’s office. Maria, a good friend, stood in front of her bookshelf, looking for something. She said hi and sounded like a smile as I shuffled into her office. I didn’t know what to do or how to begin. Angie’s instructions were gone. I aimed for Maria’s blur, wrapped my arms around it, and said, “My brother just killed himself. Can somebody help me go home?”
Maria and another colleague, Sharon, drove me to my apartment. We walked together to the car, my friends on either side, each holding an arm, guiding and hugging me at once. Soon I was in a taxi. From our apartment I’d called Tracy at work and told her what happened, imitating Angie’s calm as best I could. Neither of us cried or said much in the cab on the way to the hospital. We held hands, and I fought the urge to grip Tracy’s, though I felt that if I didn’t, I’d blow out the open window. “I’ll be okay, I’m going to be alright,” I repeated. It felt like a test, to see, each time, if the phrase could ever be true.
I wish I could capture all of Rory’s character, give the right anecdotes that might illustrate who my little brother was. I struggle, though. It’s not for lack of memory, either. I just don’t know how to describe him anymore. If you asked me the day before he died, I’d tell you what I like to recall. He’s one of those few people I saw when I could see full and well. But everything is different now. Despite the same stories, he becomes a different person than the one I remember. It’s frustrating, how his death interprets our memories of him.
Many people, family friends, even Rory’s old school chums, probably can’t help themselves. They look at his life through the lens of his overdose. Now, when I say Rory is the funniest person I’ve ever known, it’s still true, but his death draws implications. His overdose wants to explain all of him. It can’t, and shouldn’t. I learned that first at his funeral. Many reminisced with me and agreed that, yes, he was terribly, terribly funny. It appears Rory’s humour staved off a kind of despair I’ll never have a name for. Maybe it’s true, but it saddens the memory of his wit. More importantly, I don’t care. I still remember him as the funniest person I’ve ever known, not the funniest person coping with depression. The question remains with me, how do you describe the dead as they lived? It’s similar to the way blindness can own my life, too. Boy, that Ryan sure is one ambitious workaholic, eh? Yeah, seems he won’t let that blindness thing slow him down. Truth is, I’m a generic workaholic. Even I struggle not to make my eyes the overwhelming logic of who I’ve become. Memories and understanding always gravitate to these black holes in our lives. What needs to be said, though, is that Rory’s death does not understand much about who he was. Something, but not much. The day he died was only one out of the twenty-one years that made him the person I knew. That’s important to me.
I will remember him as theatrical and short, eager to please, a little boy with either a grin on his face or an expression full of flat withdrawal. I will remember how, as a young man, his shape lumbered across the kitchen and hunched its shoulders, strong and thick-bodied, with our father’s barrel-chest. I will remember a fist the size of the dent in my parents’ refrigerator. He was lonesome and loyal to whoever would have him, explosive only with those who could cope. Bipolar, but misdiagnosed for years. I will remember when Dad was barbecuing, and Rory grabbed him in a slow dance, cooing, “Oh, Miles, oh, Miles.” I will remember the time, long after I’d taken up a white cane, Rory let me steer his car while he worked the pedals, just as I’d let him steer when he was a kid. Rory was moral and shocked by injustice. He couldn’t understand why Dad sold my car without warning buyers about the oil leak. I will remember the feeling of the thorns tattooed on his inner arm. He always sided with the forgotten and the marginal kids at school. Called my 110-pound sister Fatty, and called me The Gimp. We loved it, but never found the right name for him. So impulsive and so undisciplined. If he was at home, alone, he turned all the lights on. I will remember him planting tomatoes with my grandmother every spring. He bought the heaviest cigarettes and the filterless brands. Impersonated everybody to perfect caricature. Was restless but left town only once. I will remember his bedroom door, open when he slept, and a light on in the corner. When we weren’t laughing, he was at war with himself, so we laughed a lot.
To this day it’s unclear what happened. We’re only left with speculation, which is more brutal than facts. My parents live in a circle of hell where they bear the punishment for all the unanswered questions, all the what-ifs, and nothing, no amount of therapy, time, or advice to “move on,” can free them. The sketch of my brother above may suggest that the war with manic depression got the better of him one day, but none of us are so sure.
The morning Rory died, my mother was at Langley’s police detachment, where she had started working years ago as a cell matron and quickly moved up in responsibility, soon dispatching 911 calls and now supervising dispatchers in the radio room. She always knew what was going on. You could ask her at any given moment where any of her officers were and why. Without looking at her log, she could tell you. Among her other gifts is foresight. She could anticipate the need for backup and dispatch it before she was asked. At times, she even insisted on such precautions, putting safety ahead of any other priorities. Although she wasn’t dispatching anymore, mostly training her younger crew, Ma’s desk had a computer screen that showed all incoming emergencies. The morning Rory died, she looked at her screen and saw a call for assistance. It referred to an unresponsive twenty-one-year-old male. The address was Rory’s apartment.
Rory lived at the time with a new girlfriend, a woman I’ll call Robin. He’d met Robin only weeks earlier and had separated only weeks before that from Paula, his girlfriend of many years and the mother of their one-year-old son, Gavin. Rory’s moods and impulsiveness had driven him away from his young family. He’d voluntarily moved back home with my parents to ensure that Gavin and Paula would have a more stable environment. Rory saw his son every day and never raised his voice or lost patience. It wasn’t easy, though. He worked hard not to let his black dog loose on anybody that couldn’t understand or forgive him. That included his wee son, whom Rory loved most in the world.
Robin was the sister of my brother Mykol’s girlfriend, but we’d never met Robin before. She’d lived for years as a heroin addict, marginal even to her own family. Recently she’d emerged from rehab and had moved back to Langley to live with her sister and Mykol. The idea was to get away from her old life on the streets of Vancouver. Rory took to her immediately. Both were people trying to change themselves, and bo
th were lonely and struggling.
My mother’s foresight wasn’t limited to her work. “You know, Ror, maybe you and Robin should slow down a bit,” she’d say, among other things. But Rory, unlike the officers Ma dispatched, didn’t listen. He was also twenty-one, not a child anymore, and thoroughly bullheaded, like me. He moved in with Robin in typical style. On impulse.
One day Robin received an inexplicable gift: unsupervised access to a Langley doctor’s office. Her mother, of all people, handed over the keys. Robin’s mother cleaned the office at night, except on this one occasion, when she asked her addicted daughter to cover a shift. Robin, fresh from rehab, would be alone for the night in a room full of drugs and prescription pads.
What she found, while cleaning and without any difficulty, were two bottles of pills the doctor had left in a box under his desk, along with many other loose narcotics. The box of pills had belonged to various patients who’d either passed away or recovered from their illnesses. The extra medications had been returned for proper disposal but had never been disposed of, as required. Robin pocketed one bottle of Valium and one bottle of liquid morphine in capsule form. To say she felt tempted would imply an inner debate I can’t say Robin knew how to have with herself. She brought the pills home and showed Rory her luck. Bad idea. She didn’t know Rory at all. To know him is to suspect, at the very least, that a morphine score on the part of his new girlfriend was not his idea of hitting the jackpot.
Only Robin knows what happened next. Rory was neither a user nor an addict, yet it was her drugs that killed him. Her numerous statements during the investigation recall a different story every time and are riddled with contradictions. According to the police, that should come as no surprise, even if she had nothing to hide. An addict’s first instinct is self-preservation. Honesty is too dangerous in that pursuit. The only fact her statements share is this: when Rory learned about the drugs, they fought and fought hard. She claims Rory was furious and told her to return the drugs. I’ve also heard he tried to take them away, to flush them down the toilet. Another statement says he wrestled away some pills and crushed them in a showy rage. Whatever the manner, we know they fought, and at the end of the day, Robin gave Rory two Valium and told him to go to bed. She said the pills would help cool his jets, while she slept on the couch. The autopsy revealed no Valium in his system, though. She’d given him morphine.
Cockeyed Page 14