by Mike Barnes
“That would be very nice.”
And sails like a little queen into the dead sea of the station.
2
Barely mentioned in the food court and Judy’s eyes bone dry, yet Maude Wyvern walking beside her daughter, sitting beside me in the front seat of the Honda. Everywhere now. The mortuary goofs ferrying an empty bag.
I almost take the 407 ramp, then remember and jump a lane over to continue down Kennedy.
Tempting, that clear dash to the 404, down to the 401. Home in thirty minutes this time Saturday. But too many dollars to the Spanish-Australian owners watching the video cams. And grime or snow smearing the plate doesn’t fool them. A ninety-dollar fine to learn that lesson.
So take the slow way home, again. Pennies saved…
That’s the discipline. Not one grand self-denial, but a thousand little ones. Just say No. And No again, a dozen times a day. The price of eking out an atrocity windfall. The price of living off the treatment reservation.
The car labouring a bit. Not grinding or knocking, but heavy somehow. The engine stroking in a thickened medium. Nine and a half years, but more than that. Talk to Lucius.
Glad to see you feeling better. Somebody said you stopped treatment.
Somebody should pay closer attention. Treatment stopped me long before I stopped it. Stopped me time and time again. Shaking, drooling, mini-seizures. Shuffling zombie fogs. Muscle twitches, knots, spasms. Pimples head to toe, another drug. Stomach cramps, nausea, diarrhea. And the worst: all-over inner itching, fire ants along the nerves. Lose twenty pounds in two weeks trying to stalk it off.
What choice—or guts—in chucking that? The wonder that you stuck with it so long. On, off, on. Back on. What kind of micro-toilet view of yourself? Stare into it like a cloud of knives. Asbestos breaths of self-erasure. Never forget it.
Or forget you’re sick and need treatment. Somebody said.
But your own, not theirs.
Adjustments and arrangements. Building a platform out of this and that, collecting cast-off boards and piss-stained styrofoam and balls of twine and tugging them into a shelter. Jerry-rigging a new windbreak after each storm.
No more recovery porn. Swear off the stuff. Live within the sickness. Own your shit.
Be a management monk.
No picnic, Judy, living off the reservation. Nothing to envy.
Or—
See the little waif, orphaned girl-crone, mincing stiffly through the wilds of Markville Mall.
Not standing by my bed in a bloodied nightgown, no, the lines of her latest work seeping through white cotton. Not recounting in tape-drone voice her latest rape by the Devil, many devils, the angels’ futile resistance and slaughter. Nor boasting, in a dybbuk’s roar rent by shrill barks of laughter, of an isolated victory. Routing the Red Raper, snapping the wings He flailed like broken umbrella struts, raking her worse than His talons ever did. None of her old forms of violence seems likely now. Twenty years of treatment—drugs and talk and drugs and forms and rooms and drugs and group homes and drugs drugs drugs—have done that much. But done what else? New things, or else exaggerations of the old. Around dull eyes, her face mask-like, waxen. Was it always? I remember more mobility: sly smiles, fierce sudden grins at a joke no one else could catch, pale light flickering sometimes through the glaze, like the flashlight beam of someone trapped deep inside a plastic labyrinth. Still that small churchy voice, just above a whisper. But more spaces than ever between the words, gaps where she waits and searches, hunting pages in a gutted library. Her shaking hands. They always shook—she’d been on top-grade mind-melters for twenty years by her thirties, we both had—and she used to hold them up to her face, watch them tremble, and tell how her own had been lopped off and these quivering things attached to the stumps. The tremor less obvious now but more constant, a checked force. Which sometimes shoots up her wrists and through her body in a spasm, a small intense seizure lasting half a second. And yet here she is. Living off-ward. Looking after her mom. Eating an apple fritter—in nibbles chewed to paste, her chin jerking with each gulp. Answering questions more or less sensibly. Remembering things no one would expect her to—my adjustment? TAL? Stone, weirdest of all. She seems diminished, yet sane. Ailing on multiple fronts, but in acceptable ways. A little shuffling person capable of joining the other snackers in the brash mall. A victory, then?
If so, why do they still stare? Flee their mundane misery with the kids to ogle the more blatantly undone?
Humping down Kennedy, picking up speed between self-storage places and fenced waste lots fronted with condo graphics, hitting every green until a red stops me at Steeles. Welcome To Toronto. But it’s all Toronto now. From lapping lake to halfway to Barrie. Bowmanville around to Hamilton Harbour. You can drive and drive and never leave the zone.
Stopped behind a bus by Tam O’Shanter Golf Course, I catch a glimpse of fabric strips, maybe a pant leg and a sleeve, gray long undies, all draped over a flaming red bush by a water hazard. Litter to the untrained eye—but someone’s made himself a den and it’s laundry day. Stretched out inside an igloo of bent branches, lined with Glad against the rain, dozing while the pastel duffers loiter nearby, chuckling and cursing and dropping a dimpled new ball.
Enveloped by a blue fart of bus exhaust, I’m off with it. Introduce real hazard to the comatose game. Shank your drive and do a stint living rough. Sleep in a bush with flies and mice and garbage-mad coons pissing eviction on you. Spirit-cowing emissaries. Hack out your time or take a stroke and twitch on Haldol. It’s fun to run with.
But that sludgy drag again when I turn into Agincourt Mall. Some kind of resistance flowing up from the tires to my palms over the wheel.
Circling for a spot, I place a palm on my forehead. Not burning, but warm. Not like fever yet, brains boiling. Just the churning inside, throwing off heat.
A Mr. Stone on the line? Something about confirming an appointment? Yes, he says he’ll wait.
§
No Frills has a good deal on bok choy and gai lan, I bag several bundles of each. Also a five-pound bag of chicken backs and necks that an older butcher fills for me. They seldom put them out anymore, they don’t move even in a discount store. Twelve packs of Mr. Noodle, on sale three for two dollars, and I’m set up for dinner for two weeks. Top-ups of breakfast stuff—coffee, milk, peanut butter, bread—push the tab to thirty bucks. Maintenance on two dollars a day.
§
Lucius, Lucy and Jared have been out grocery shopping too. They’re unpacking the Landscaping & Home Repairs pickup when I pull into the garage on Eglinton. Big smiles from all three. My favourite tenants, no question. Lucius and Lucy almost identical, down to Levi’s and ball caps. Small, strong people. White teeth in round brown faces. Soft, obliging voices.
But tough. Built for long-haul punishment, which no doubt they’ve seen plenty of. Lucius hustling, hustling—Lucy helping when she’s not cleaning houses—yet they stay in 304, a one-bedroom, screening off a corner of the living room for Jared’s bed and desk. Send whatever they can scrimp down south. Ecuador, Peru—the family dispersed. We don’t inquire too closely into each other’s arrangements. The bond is having them. Tight leash recognition.
“Meeting on Monday night?” Jared says, coming halfway to the Honda.
“You got it.”
“Seven o’clock.”
“Yup. Same as always.”
What he knows but has to hear. His frown lines relax a little. A strange little guy, nine but looks seven, paler than his parents, with pointy elfin ears. Teased and bullied to hell and back.
I mention the heavy feeling in the Honda to Lucius.
“Still drive okay? Start up?”
“Yeah. Just… heavy. Sticky, almost. Like someone coated it with tar.”
Looking like he wants to put down his bag of brown bananas and get under the hood now, he tells me he could
be a day or two getting to it. Frown of apology. His busy season. Grass still growing and leaves to rake up, flower beds to cut back. Some nervous types already wanting burlap around their dwarf evergreens. Things slack off after the first heavy frosts, when he puts on the blade and prays for a big dump. That or frozen pipes. Both, in a good year.
“Sure, no rush. It’s just a heads-up.”
§
Up in 501, I get the big stock pot of chicken parts simmering, vegetables washed and draining. Plastic containers lined up, lids behind them, on the counter. Rinsed bread bags for the chopped vegetables. Check my watch: not quite 12:00. Still two hours before I show 305.
Nothing takes long enough. The trouble with speed-up. The hours stretch, or there are more of them. Minutes multiply like mushrooms, and lost for wholesome ways to fill them, you start looking elsewhere. Everywhere.
I make a cup of green tea and take it to the armchair by the living-room window. Lean forward, hands around the warm. The new EMS station across the street below. Next to it, old fire station 135 with the red door. Cars and buses cutting and gunning along Eglinton, two lanes either way. Slamming for the lights at Chaplin. Condo tower on the southwest corner, high and plush. Chaplin slicing diagonally down into the cake of Forest Hill.
A good view, still. Well worth the top-up to the Owner.
I take care of my mother.
Sipping Luck Yu, I can feel myself drifting toward an adjustment. And feel myself pushing against the drift, since I don’t know if an adjustment’s called for, or, if it is, if I’m the person—the person with the time—to make it.
Adjustment. Such an easy word to say. Like tapping a loose part into place, or straightening a crooked picture. Except that people, especially the loose and crooked, seldom sit still for their tapping. Or resist the urge to tap back.
It’s wise to recall first principles.
An adjustment occurs when a deserving target intersects with a mood of black fuckitness. But be careful. In a world howling for adjustments, you can’t make all of them. And you can’t make even one unless you have the window—time and means (especially mental means)—you need.
So—go carefully at the start. Move slowly across the ice of status quo, pushing your poles ahead of you. Is there a crevasse demanding your attention? A spot the snow pokes through and tumbles into, a place of nothing, darkness under white skin. And can you find the deep black crack inside yourself that matches it?
Nothing to undertake without due thought. Without due caution.
§
Sometimes an adjustment leads to an arrangement, though it’s never cause to take one on. Lucius and the Honda, Jared and my lessons: two adjustments and a few arrangements hiding behind our little exchange in the garage, though you have to peel it back to see them.
The Civic a gift from a woman whose husband had been banging her around for years, then harassing her when she finally walked. She didn’t want him banged back, preferred a gentler eye for eye. Swore she didn’t love him, was over that long plague, but was sick of hurt and had found a kind of religion too.
I took my time with him. Fixed it so his locks wouldn’t work, at home or in his office. Not all of them, just some. Then his car wouldn’t start. Then it fixed itself. The computers in his start-up crashed. Then his life settled down for a while. I let him breathe easy. Then pieces of his mail went missing. Three different religious cults got it into their heads he was a lapsed member dying to return to the fold.
I’d put him down for a while, then remember and pick him up again. Like a hobby duck, whittled at in the garage over a winter. He must have thought the gods were taking random pisses on him. But he was too consumed with self-regard to imagine that they wanted to take long bloody shits and were being restrained.
The Civic, just a year old when she gave it to me, a kiss-up gift the time he broke two ribs. Bruises not in visible spots just got roses. Gross red bunches of them—two dozen, three dozen. It still had two years on the warranty.
And ran well, needing only basic maintenance, for two years after that. It wasn’t until four years ago that the heftier bills began. The same time Jared was starting school. And already struggling, as I learned from his parents in the halls and garage. Bullying from the other students. Taunting, teasing. In class, in the yard.
I’m no teacher. Which Lucius saw, but Lucy couldn’t or wouldn’t. “Many books… all the time books,” she said about my library armloads. And useless to tell a desperate mother how, unless a complete dolt, any time-server collects a magpie learning from the landfill hours.
Until one day she’s at my door, peering up through slitted eyes. Too zeroed-in for tears. “What means identified?” Handing me the form, with its boxed summaries. Keywords in Bold: dyslexia, probable ADHD… processing… 2nd percentile. Sign-offs in three different pens.
What means identified? What you never want to be. By anyone or anything, especially a school. Spotted and slotted and sidelined before you’re past the starting gate.
What Jared and I do, twice a week, is too pleasant to be called instruction. Which is no doubt why it’s working—slowly, with many flatlines and fallbacks. We read together, me the left-hand page, him the right. Shy, shit-eating grin from him when he draws a page with just a picture or a two-line chapter end. Then we turn to writing. He tells me things and I record them, printing without capitals or punctuation. He takes them home to copy and correct.
Lucius keeps the Honda running. And Lucy stays in my kitchen for the hour I’m with Jared, making something spicy that will freeze. Just because I’m Socrates doesn’t mean she’s willing to leave me with her son. A wise woman.
Keeps her focus. Wide lens and small. Whereas Lucius—like most men, he can get stuck on a mower blade or grease pan, forgetting the whole for the part. They make a good team.
People ask for adjustments all the time—it’s practically all they talk about, if you listen—but just the asking isn’t reason enough. In fact, sometimes the adjustment needed is opposite to what the asker wants. Like the student pleading for rescue from a persecuting TA. A jealous terror dyke, sabotaging her GPA, derailing her law school plans. When I found out this student had been plagiarizing her essays, I dug through library stacks for two days to find her sources, then made sure copies with highlighted sections got to the TA. No payment on that one, other than the satisfaction of hearing she’d been hauled before the Dean and bounced from the faculty. Her family would buy her a second chance—they’d bought her the first—but the price would climb. And it wasn’t the plagiarism that wound me up. It was the teary self-pity she’d played me with, running me around inside, wasting my energies. That awoke the anger I needed to make an adjustment. It stoked the fire that had scorched the inner terrain, exhausting combustible materials, so it had to locate the right class of fuel outside.
Though fire a flawed analogy, since fire always produces ash, and ash always has its uses—as fertilizer, as insulation to bank the next fire. Metaphors teach the eye nothing. Still, they point as far as can be seen and help you conjure what’s around the bend.
How did I get into them? When? I can hardly remember, and don’t entirely trust the dates and events that do come to mind. It felt like a drift, but an inevitable one. Fresca left me with intimations of something dim and ancient—old patterns, old ways of being in the world—rising into sharper focus, becoming more acute and willed. The more I learned about an area, or areas, of myself that were beyond adjustment, the more I sought out outer adjustments that could still be made. That sounds simplistic, like a formula. But sometimes the simple is simply true, or the start of truth. And plenty of formulas describe a certain class of events with perfect clarity.
§
The stock’s ready, I turn it off to cool. A rich fug of poultry permeates the space. The smell of home, some would say. Though the smells of long-term rental are the smells I trust, the ones most likel
y to let me sleep.
I turn on the counter radio, tuned to CJRT, while I chop the vegetables and measure them into two-cup bags. I’m not a jazz buff, though I’ve become a moderate fan. The pop stations drove me there, a refugee from groove-paralysis. At 91.1 the DJs actually love the music, which gives them a sense of adventure. Dust off the backlist, play the new bands live. Here’s a quirky new take on an eighty-year-old standard. Whereas Classic Rock—the soundtrack of my childhood—is dead and stuffed and mounted on the rec-room wall. Hendrix fronting mindless cinder block. A hundred decent tracks by the Stones, yet they punch the same five out at you. New Rock’s not much better. Different bands, same handful of hits. Tire hum of given up.
So listen to the jazzheads. A quartet now—who knows who—ticking and thrumming and tinkling and beeping time into its atomic elements.
Listen and stir. Skin detaches from flesh, flesh from bone. Carrot bits, onion. Stir, stir. Stir to stretch two hundred grand into a lifetime. Stir because you’ll never work again and psychosis doesn’t come with a pension plan.
§
The phone rings as a voice is telling me the sun is shining. I buzz them up.
“Are you the super?”
“So the Owner keeps reminding me.”
Stiff smiles, hers fading first. Late twenties, cookie-cut from Condo Life. Their visit not off to a good start: slice of nameless gray between the Favorite and the Latimer, lurching ancient elevator box. And now me. But you have to see a scope-out through. You never know.
A few minutes later, they’re glad they did. 305, like the other units, looks better inside than out. No Name Towers reverses the norm, that way. Gray slab of door, but behind it three large bedrooms and wide windows, parquet floors, passable appliances and plumbing. Experienced hunters, they have no trouble mentally erasing the tacky furnishings and installing their own. I leave them to explore, burbling in low voices about space and light, while I hang back by the door.
After a few minutes, the guy comes back to confirm the rent I gave him over the phone.