The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  Back at home, I slit the taped flaps of the addressed envelopes, just to check that the USBs haven’t been damaged or exchanged for others in transit. Any trip through a chain of hands is a descent into Wonderland, with every kind of distortion and substitution possible. Nested inside their folded paper and bubble pack, however, the sticks look perfect, shiny and damning. Dollarama self-adhesive labels in the centers, Max’s name and office address printed on them.

  I re-seal the Star’s, and then, as I’m about to do the same to the one to the police, inspiration strikes. Take that stick and transfer it to the new envelope, the one going to the Globe. For the one to the police, I’ll use the stick that’s been giving me heart trouble—the one crawling with nasty centipedes. And I’ve got a better address label than the Dollarama white sticker.

  A few minutes later, it’s ready. Max’s gold-and-black address label from the envelope with his Mother’s Day card. Sliced off carefully from the corner where Gwen attached it, centered under clear tape on the third stick.

  At 6 p.m., when I’m sure the last pickup has come and gone, I drop the three envelopes in the mailbox outside Shoppers. ExpressPost delivery is next-day within the city, so starting from tomorrow morning, I’ve got till Thursday to make something happen with Max. That seems unlikely, though, and at the moment I haven’t a clue as to how I might proceed. It’s peaceful, all the same, to watch the red mouth swallow the three packets and close with a metallic gulp.

  Goodbye, Judy’s brother.

  §

  The white dog isn’t there, but a glance at the railing where he gets tied reminds me that Sandor is my next stop. He checks in at the Queen’s Arms in less than half an hour. Hard to believe it’s been a week since our last tête-à-tête. Seems like yesterday, seems like a year ago. Time in a closing window behaves like Silly Putty, stretching and squishing. Like an Eglinton Avenue mini-verse, Big-Banging out, Big-Crunching back.

  After only a couple of blocks, though, I slow and then turn back. I don’t have a plan with Sandor. What’s more, I suspect—it’s been dawning on me all along—that, while he’s more interesting than the principal players, in terms of this adjustment, he’s peripheral.

  All the questions I had for him fall out of my head. Leave swirling vacuum behind.

  §

  Time in Big Empty is nasty tonight. Wrapped in the sleeping bag, I know I’m not asleep, and know equally I’m not really awake—and not being either place a human being is supposed to live, and knowing it, feels horrible. I sit up at times to give my state a cause, but it doesn’t work. Sitting helps explain why I’m not asleep, but it doesn’t explain why I can’t wake up.

  Even worse, I’m utterly alone for the first time in a while. No matter how still I lie, breathing deeply with my eyes closed, I can’t meet the milling people, dead and alive, on the first floor down. Much less the Empress in her niche on the stairs below. Or the shyer, unseen shapes sensed even deeper. I can’t find any stairs at all, or any means of descent. Not even an Ugly Dream.

  I might as well be a flagpole sitter, perched above my life.

  To escape it, I head out again. It’s just after one. Closing Time. My feet take me towards the Queen’s Arms without a plan or even the ghost of one. Empty Mind—nirvana, supposedly, if you’re trained for it. Chinese water torture if you’re not.

  Follow him if he’s on foot. Get a fix on one more Wyvern, at least.

  But there’s no fix on their kind of refrigerator, I realize on another mental track. On any refrigerator. It’s either open, displaying what’s spoiling slowly, puffing cold breaths out at you… or closed and sealed, a smooth white humming. Spotting it in a corner tells you jack.

  Leaning against the wall of the Petro-Can across the street, I see Sandor emerge at 1:25. Right behind him, the blonde and her husband. That’s a surprise, on a Tuesday. Don’t any of these people have to get up for work? None of the other writing group members emerge, it was a mini-session. One of the groups within the group—the core one, I’m gathering.

  As they pause outside the door, the blonde links arms with the men on either side of her. The streetlight catches her upturned face as she laughs at something Sandor says, leans her head briefly against his shoulder, her husband smiling along. Lynette? TAL Lynette? Even allowing for plastic surgery and diets and gyms and whatever other transformations twenty years can permit, there’s no way I can make it work. Can’t match this stunner tossing her hair with my chronic ward weeper.

  I follow them as they cross Avenue and stroll west on Eglinton. No sign of a car. A local job. Local at every turn.

  No sign of the white dog either. Whole families might subsist, and probably do, on dog-sitting wages in this neighbourhood.

  I keep well back and on the other side of the street. The Face perched on six and a half bony feet draped in shabby commando—an illustration for Do Not in the undercover manual.

  When they turn up Castle Knock, I have to cross over, but I stay at least two blocks back. They’re engrossed in conversation. Have been every time I’ve seen them.

  They turn left on Crestview, and just when I reach the corner to pick them up again, they stop. Brief hugs from Sandor, who heads off right up Shields Avenue toward Roselawn. The couple keep going west on Crestview. Holding hands now, which they weren’t before.

  On impulse, I decide to follow them instead. Telling myself I can always find a drunk—but really, it’s because it’s the first clear impulse I’ve had in hours, and it’s a joy just to obey.

  The blonde has a narrow waist and generous hips below her short plaid jacket. A languid rocking in her gait. Following her, I am suddenly somewhere else. Sometime else. Padding in sock feet after wide slow hips in a plaid housecoat as she shuffles in fluffy slippers down a corridor smelling of overnight disinfectant to the breakfast room. My eyes on her hips lust’s fading silhouette, seeking solid flesh to become body again, to live on Earth. Lynette no more than the nearest, faintest chance.

  Somewhere in the afterlife of crazy, Brad is doing a Putin riff to celebrate.

  And then—just as suddenly—I’m back. Tracking two strangers down an empty autumn street smelling of cinnamon and damp. Knowing there’s no meaning in the vision that just snared me—used to strange news from my head, especially in a closing window. But worn out from just that: the meaninglessness. Being in a blender that whirls and whirls, making nothing. It’s why crazy at sixty feels like ninety.

  They don’t go far. Two streets on, at Castlewood, they take a right, following a parallel path to Sandor’s, up a gentle rise toward Roselawn. Castle and Rose parts of a lot of place names in the neighbourhood—in a lot of wealthy neighbourhoods, I imagine. Shields fits in there too somehow.

  They stop on the sidewalk in front of a house a few down from Roselawn. A trim brick bungalow with Tudor-ish mullioned windows that would set you back, with agents’ fees, a million dollars. But why stopping? Why not heading in?

  I get close to the side of a helpful maple, stand in its deeper shade, a hand on its cool bark.

  They have what looks, from a block away, like one of those earnest couple palavers which are necessary to decide how many people are going to go down the driveway and in the front door. Without hearing a word, the negotiations are as clear to me as if I’m taking part in them.

  The comfortable closeness of their bodies, combined with a certain weariness in their postures, a slumping seriousness I associate with health food stores and passport offices, tells me this is not a new couple debating, with fear and excitement, whether to go through the door for the first time, but an old couple deciding, in spite of history, whether to go through it yet again.

  In a short time, without any sign of anger or protest from the guy, they hug and kiss, mostly air, and he goes to his car parked a little way up, gets in and drives away. She waves from the front step as he leaves, then enters her, perhaps formerly their,
home.

  I stay a little longer by the maple, liking it there. Spying what we called good climbers just above my head—stout horizontal boughs arranged in comfortable rungs—and wishing I had the spryness to ascend.

  Wrapping my head around the fact—which feels like unsettling confirmation more than news—that I’m less than a five-minute walk from where I was twenty-four hours ago, sitting with my back to a gravestone—and about the same distance from home.

  16

  8:30. Green light blinking when I come in from the balcony. Chill hours out there felt endless. No sleep, no stairs. Dawn finally grudging a view of Latimer brick, the brown-orange of a scab. The firehouse door, the sun finding it from over Shoppers, the bright red that wells when the scab’s torn off. But not flowing—halted instantly at the moment of trauma’s gush. No scabbing, healing over, scarring—just an ever-fresh picture of bleeding. Never opening, not once through the long night. No sirens. I plug in and listen.

  “Dr. Wyvern will see you at his home at—”

  “No, Gwen, fucking hell, not this—” The voice continuing imperturbably through my outburst. I’m growling at a machine. I play it back again, holding the receiver out from my face, the woman’s voice issuing from the top bulb. End it, and jab the first six numbers of the office, before I stop and slam the phone into the cradle. Bang—plastic hurting plastic.

  Dunbar Road. The address fits. A bit rich maybe for a normal dentist, even a busy one, but not for one flipping condos since his twenties, and with who knows what family money on top of that. An inheritance from his father, gifts before… Normally, one might think, the husband of a woman institutionalized with a chronic condition would leave all the funds for her unforeseeable care costs, let the children wait and split what’s left when she passes. But “normal” goes out the window when the husband’s willing to pack his wife away after a suicide attempt. A man like that—good at putting awkward things out of sight, paying for quality locks to keep them there—might just decide her care was worth exactly so much, set it aside for Max and Sandor to mind, and let the kids play with the rest.

  Not the kids. The boys. Judy was packed away long ago.

  The Wyverns, through their mouthpiece Gwen, sending me down another false, if more plausible, trail? I decide not. It feels right. Sweet Rosedale scent. Ivy-coddled brick and cocktails on leather loveseats. Lois’s roots. And a neighbourhood I got to know so well in the first couple of years alone, creeping up and down its streets on my searches, sensing she and Megan would heal awhile in the family nest before venturing further, that I half-believed I lived there. A sense of borrowed home even last week, stopped on one of those leafy streets for the first time in ages.

  A city of neighbourhoods. More than an empty civic slogan once you know Toronto. Forest Hill, Davisville, Rosedale, Riverdale, The Beaches. Regent Park, St. James Town, Chinatown, The Annex. Yorkville, Koreatown, High Park, Bloor West, Corso Italia—just a smattering, and you haven’t even left Old Toronto. Etobicoke, Scarborough, York, North York and beyond… all subdivided into their own enclaves, each with its characteristic look and feel, customs, ethnic make-up, architectural styles, street life or lack thereof, languages, codes of conduct, levels of income and aspiration. Fitted close together, some as small as a few blocks long and wide—a few steps and you’re in a new zone, no passport needed.

  Except—you’re always stamped with where you really belong. You can visit anywhere, but any neighbourhood not closely resembling your own will clock you as an outsider. No passport is asked for because you’re wearing it, speaking it, doing it. Displaying it with every move you make and don’t make.

  No job is truly local. All adjustments occur on foreign ground.

  §

  Snag’s in a place I’ve never found him before, the corner of Dundas and Ossington. I’m a while tracking him down, following some false steers from other vagrants. He’s sitting with his legs outstretched with his back against the wall of the TD branch across from St. Christopher House. People have to step around or over him, but he hasn’t got his baseball cap or coin can out. His gaze looks glazed and muddy, his thick hair matted and greasy. Snag goes through long periods where someone meeting him might well ask why he has to be homeless. No one would ask that today. Beside him, Sammy is curled but not tightly, ears pricked, hardly shivering. A plump woman with rosacea covering her face and patches of her bare, goose-bumped arms is sitting beside them. Close enough that I assume they’re together, though they don’t exchange a look or word while I’m there. She’s sitting cross-legged, the crotch of her gray sweat pants stretched to make a little triangular table. On it she’s fiddling with a key chain, trying to fix it maybe.

  “Judy?” Snag says. Seeming to come to my question, to me, from a long way off. “You mean Sandy? There’s a Sandy who does hand and mouth in the park sometimes.”

  Sandy? The only connection I can make is with The Sandman, Judy’s anaesthetist father. But why would Judy, who barely inhabits one name, need another?

  “When I say small, I mean tiny. Four foot eleven maybe. Ninety pounds. If that. Quiet little voice, whispery—when she does speak—and almost never any expression. Moves like a ghost, sort of gliding. Spooky.”

  “Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Snag says. “And spooky covers a lot of people. Including you.”

  No light in his eyes, neither of hostility nor humour, and no hint of smile or challenge in his mouth, which moves like a puppet’s. Dead man and straight man worlds apart.

  “Strange dresses. Too long or too short.” Snag’s mouth moves around the words as if he’s chewing them. As if he can’t quite feel his lips. “And loads of make-up. Heavy.”

  “Maybe, yeah.” In certain phases. “It sounds like it could be.”

  Snag shakes his head heavily, like it’s filled with sand. “Don’t think so, man. Your girl hasn’t showed up.”

  A bank employee opens the glass door and approaches, timidly but with obvious intent. I don’t stay to watch.

  §

  Lucius knocks on my door at 6:00, just as I’m about to go down and ask if we can move Jared’s session up a bit in view of my appointment at 8:00. The car, I think when I open the door, but Lucius looks too uncomfortable.

  “Jared doesn’t feel well. Maybe getting a bit sick. He says they give him a lot of homework today. So maybe better skip tonight. Okay?”

  Unpracticed at lying, Lucius gives me both excuses he and Lucy considered, forgetting to run with just one. But the glances he flicks at the splintered jamb tell me the real reason he and Lucy would rather keep Jared at home and away from me. Only yesterday you let creeps in to harass people and break things. Time plays ever more fantastic tricks when you stop sleeping. Everything happens in the same instant, an instant that can last eternities. Yesterday morning, later tonight, finding Maude and Judy eleven days ago—these don’t stretch out on a string in sequence, but jumble and compress into something more like an atom, elementary particles zipping and jumping shells, trading places and energies, popping into and out of existence in a mostly empty zone of forces and probabilities.

  §

  Leaving just after 7:00, I find Jared waiting for me on the third-floor landing. Lucy is doing the laundry down the hall. Jared pretends he was just doing his homework while waiting to help her fold. He’s a demon folder, able to turn fabrics of any size and shape into perfect rectangles.

  “Don’t you want to know how a prisoner escapes?” With his squinting frown, as if I cancelled the lesson.

  “Of course. Have you figured out a way?”

  “I always knew the way. I created the dungeon.”

  He hands me his writing book and pencil and we finish “The Bone Dungeon” that way, sitting side by side on the top stair. This time, I refrain from asking questions until the end.

  if you follow the trails made by the birds long enough you will hear a strange
scrunching sound it is a very strange sound of quiet munching and also soft slithering like a snake but much slower and heavier like something very big and wet moving slowly over the floor you may also notice that the floor of the cave is wet and sticky with a kind of slimy clear glue under your feet this is from the snail who you will now meet he is in a clearing with many broken bones he is very large about the size of a lion or small bear he looks like a normal snail with horns and little eyes and stripes on his neck but what is very peculiar is that he has no shell his back is the same as the rest of him the snail lives on tiny green lichen that grows everywhere on the walls and floor of the bone dungeon the lichen is microscopic that is why everyone just sees bare stone and is starving or else breaking clear bones to drink drops of nourishment it is also why everyone is trying to escape but the snail has never tried to escape and has lived there forever when he hears you approach he will stop feeding and ask you one question do you eat other animals if you say yes he will lower his head and start feeding again and you will wander forever and never leave the cave if you say no he will show you the way out and you can return to where you live

  “Are you going to give some more details about the escape? How the prisoner gets out? Where he has to go or what he has to do?”

  Jared looks pained. He always does, more or less, even when he’s smiling, but certain questions seem to intensify his suffering. Disabled, or learning disabled, is a strange term to apply to him—a crude approximation at best—when his difficulty seems more like one of translation, not just of words but of thoughts and feelings. Of constantly meeting people from another world, or many other worlds, and struggling to find crude signs and gestures that will allow some sort of rudimentary exchange.

  “Getting out is easy,” he says. “There is nothing hard or interesting about it. The only difficult thing is answering the snail’s question.”