The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  “Phh. Every glass he raises—and he raises many, as I’m sure you know—should be to the teachers’ union. What other profession lets you stumble around, teaching the young between ‘breakdowns,’ and then puts you out to pasture with a lifetime salary when it all becomes just too much?” He pauses, looks through the air in front of him at something faraway. “Maude. Yes, he was good to Maude. I’ll grant him that. Good to her. For a long time.” Then the judge returns to the courtroom, and the hardness with him. “But not long enough. That’s Sandor in a nutshell. A well-meaning sprinter, forgetting life’s a marathon. He always gave up too soon. He wasn’t a runner, but he was the same in tennis and football, as I recall.” Swirl of the brown liquid in his glass, then he downs it. “Truth to tell, I haven’t seen my youngest son in years. I gather he held his mother against me. Phh. As if I were master of her neurons. But weak men cling to grudges.”

  Old man or no, my hands start to curl into fists. Past time to change the subject. But he does first.

  “Listen”—with that thin smile not without charm, a more than professional warmth. “We can anatomize my fallen children all night long, but believe it or not, I invited you here tonight to help them. Help them from you, quite frankly. You seem to have stirred them up a lot.”

  “Pay me to stop stirring?” I say.

  He doesn’t flinch from the word. “You don’t strike me as too rich to… compensate. Or too stupid, either. Why don’t I refresh our drinks and we’ll put this on another footing?”

  17

  A long, meandering conversation follows, that visits many topics yet does not feel disjointed. More like water flowing down a slope, finding the cracks and gullies it needs to make its way to the bottom. It feels relaxed, even convivial at times—sensations too pleasant to kick against more than feebly. An atmosphere of permission reigns in which, it seems, anything might be said, partly because we are speaking outside of time. Clock time has disappeared, or been paralyzed, and we can ooze like droplets of oil through the gears of its stopped mechanism.

  It’s partly the Scotch, of course. Not making me sleepy, not taking me anywhere near sleep yet, but tucking me back into my body where sleep is at least a possibility, and where I dream with open eyes. I see no pictures: I live them instead. Smoke in the glass is smoke in the fireplace, the warm bloom in my chest is the orange ember in the grate, and fibers of hazy silk enfold me irresistably, building the rich shielded dark in which every transformation is possible. In which, second by second, you change utterly, from something you can’t remember into something you’ve never imagined.

  Our formal business, the purpose that brought me here, is quickly finished. That helps to set us free. “Under other circumstances,” Dr. Wyvern allows, he might well have written me a cheque. “To spare my son another disaster. Disasters brought on, always, by his own self-indulgence. I’ve kept him from taking his lumps before, I’d be ashamed to tell you how many times.” But a cheque to me, not to his daughter. You see, he could never be sure money given to me would not find its way to her, and that he refuses categorically. She saw her last nickel from him long ago.

  I bring up the peculiarity of Wyvern nomenclature that I’ve noticed before. Referring to one another not by their names but by their family roles: father, brother, sister, mother. They might be talking about positions in a company too large or too impersonal to go beyond functions: the VP, the secretary, the janitor… Dr. Wyvern listens, head tilted, fingers laced under his chin, as if to an interesting digression in a lecture. Nodding, he says that undoubtedly some families have to develop ways of calling each other that go beyond given names, names that appear on birth certificates and driver’s licences, names that anyone on the street might use. Especially families bound together by shared sorrows. Families trauma has pushed too close together, while keeping irrecoverably apart.

  “And Judy was the worst sorrow? The worst trauma?”

  “First, and worst. It shattered us, he says, looking into the fire. Shattered our family. It came at the worst time or the best time, I’ve never been able to decide. There’s no right time for catastrophe. You’re always equipped in some ways, unequipped in others. I’d just turned fifty, was entering the peak of my career. My wife wasn’t forty yet, with a son just starting high school and another still wetting his bed.”

  “And your daughter was diagnosed with schizophrenia.”

  My voice sounds strange to me as it says this, ultra-distinct but distant, like an airport announcement. Dr. Wyvern’s voice when he replies is just the opposite: hushed and intimate, like an insect whispering in my ear canal.

  “Schizophrenia. There’s a disease with the perfect name, for once. A poet might have named it, someone like yourself. Schizophrenia. It sounds like mumbling in a foreign language. An alien language. Which is exactly right. The person you knew is gone, vanished before your eyes, though she still looks much the same—at least at first. Leaving this alien mumbler, whisperer… screamer. But the illness itself wasn’t what hurt us most. We were a medical family, after all. And I consulted my colleagues in psychiatry. Not a specialty I’d ever had much use for, but I respected them more—a little more—when I saw what they were up against. It was all the things my daughter did to me, did to us, that hurt the most. That finally forced me to give up on her and bar the door. Running away from home one morning. Not a note, not a word for my wife. Taking up with boys, men—God, squadrons of them. Abortions courtesy of our new socialist health care system. Drugs. Street drugs she took, and prescribed drugs she didn’t. Hateful letters, phone calls. Visits at two in the morning. And then just when you’re ready to give up the ghost—our daughter is gone, she’s died, we tell ourselves in the middle of the night, we have to accept that—she’s at the door, she’s turned the corner. Clean clothes, clean hair. A new resolve. Back in she moves. For a few weeks, a month or two. Usually just long enough to decide what to steal from us. Her mother’s jewellery was a favourite. Small. And her mother willing to look the other way far longer than I was. You see—I knew her. And by certain looks I’d catch, which my wife could never believe, I knew that if the illness was using her, destroying her, there were times, not infrequently, when she was using it. When she’d do exactly as she pleased and call it sickness. Of course, soon enough, it would be. And I never knew which was worse: sickness through and through, or sickness as a robe you wear.”

  A long sip, a long look into the fire. “It broke our hearts. She broke our hearts.”

  There is no communication between the compartments of the mind. People will say anything, and seldom are they lying.

  “But you can’t be a stranger to this yourself, can you?” says the close, whispery voice. “To these kinds of matters? My son didn’t supply many details, but I know you knew my daughter from the hospital.”

  “Not a stranger, no,” booms the voice in empty space. Empty space that, I notice now, is pierced by a visual tunnel, at the end of which sits Dr. Wyvern, a small shape in a telescope ring, surrounded by velvety shadow trailing veil-like shapes across him. Closing window stuff. But coming on fast. The Scotch a drastically bad idea.

  “And forgive me, but since we’re speaking frankly—besides your facial disfigurements, your movements are quite stiff, even for a man of late middle age. I saw it briefly in your gait, I see it even in the way you sit, raise your drink. A stiffness in your neck and shoulders. How you carry yourself. Pronounced swelling around your knuckles. Your little finger. Advanced osteoarthritis—from repeated traumas, I’m guessing. Yet I’m also willing to bet you don’t see a doctor for any of your conditions. Am I wrong?”

  “I have a low opinion of doctors, it’s true. But then, by their words and actions, they’ve had an even lower one of me. Ask Max.”

  “My son’s not a doctor, he’s a dentist. We’ve been over that.”

  “There’s a doctor in front of his name, same as yours.”

  Dr
. Wyvern sniffs. “There’s one in front of a professor of Art History too.”

  The Empress staring at me with one unblinking eye and the corner of another. Blood streaming from the mangled flesh of her face. It’s not seeing, it’s a memory of seeing. There’s no mistaking the two. And is it that distance, the space that memory allows, that makes me wonder if she’s tearing herself loose at such cost not just to be free but to warn me? To be with me somehow. On the stairs. And Gwen’s voice saying: He’s just like his father. To warn me too?

  Hard to imagine two more unalike. Yet not strange—not at all—to find them here together. Acting in concert. Why not strange? The question flits and vanishes, a moth.

  Wake up, they say. Wake up and tear the cocoon before it dries.

  “Was it only dealing with unconscious people that perverted you?” I say to the old man slumping with half-closed eyes beyond the tunnel, our knees almost touching. Forming the question feels like stages in a grammar exam as I assemble it, deliver it, and start working on the next: three phases that extend in time like a complex construction project. “Or was it perversion that made you want to only deal with people who couldn’t deal with you back?”

  He sits up straighter in his chair. Obviously he feels the Scotch far less than I do. If it’s just Scotch. Keen and ageless as a gray-eyed hawk, he looks poised to swoop down upon a field mouse or sit a final exam.

  “I’m an organized person. Careful. Always have been. You should try it.”

  “I know you are,” I say, and find an adrenaline surge of fluency. “Your photo wall can tell me the day and even the hour you summited Kilimanjaro. The day the College of Physicians and Surgeons awarded you your specialist’s degree. I know another wall, probably in the kitchen, can tell me where you’re eating Christmas dinner, catching your next flight to the Caymans. Yet Maude’s got—Maude had—a calendar two months out of date on her wall.”

  The old man covers his face with his hands and hunches over. Overcome by emotion? Or by the need for a private place to work at seeming so? No way to tell. Griever and actor identical behind the screen of hands. Long, laboured-sounding breaths, but no tear trickles down a seam in his sunken cheeks. Eventually, he lowers his hands to prayer position, chin behind fingertips, and murmurs of his wife’s long struggle, his despair at witnessing her decline. “You see, she was a depressed person, deeply depressed and for many years. I’m afraid I wasn’t always the help I should have been. Out of my depth with psychological ailments, and too busy and tired, wanting a cocktail and my supper when I finally got home and not understanding if they weren’t waiting for me. Selfish. All ambitious people are. But she was a brave person, my wife. Possibly the bravest person I’ve known. The day her dementia was confirmed, she told me in a way she felt relieved. She’d known there was something wrong with her mind for years, something besides her ‘dark pits’ as she called them, and she thought she was going crazy. Like Judy, she didn’t need to add.”

  It’s a strange story to listen to while remembering Danika’s account of Maude being sent away after her suicide attempt, long before her diagnosis of Alzheimer’s, which she heard with Danika and discussed with her over lunch. Like watching two films of the same event. There’s no doubt which one I trust, but it’s a question of vividness. The one I trust is a memory in my head, a memory of a conversation with pictures I supplied, and the one I know is false is acted by a real man showing the devoutness of remembered pain right in front of me, full colour, full sound, I could reach out and touch him if I wanted to.

  Dr. Max Wyvern Sr., emoting on the stage of his illustrious life. Judy and her secret dramas in which you play a role in her time, according to her needs. Something deeply alike binding father and daughter, for all the deep and terrible differences dividing them.

  After a bit more in the same vein, his voice trails off and he lets his hands fall into his lap. Closes his eyes and seems to go to sleep. His thin lips parted. His chest beneath the cardigan rising and falling slowly. Like a baby after it has cried itself completely out.

  Like looking at a death mask, except for the slow breaths. The throat wattles, the liver-spotted skin, waxy beige beneath the snow-white hair. Flesh all but melted away, just a stretching of wrinkled parchment over the surfacing juts of brow, nose, cheeks, and chin.

  The sight jolts me into speech, though the voice I hear is thin and slurred.

  “Wakey, wakey, Sandman. Time to come down off Bullshit Mountain.”

  Opens his eyes slowly. Like an owl summoned at the wrong time of day.

  “I wasn’t sleeping, I assure you. There’s a world of difference between sleeping and pondering.”

  “What was your great brain pondering this time?”

  “Where I’m going to put you. This house, spacious as it is, is already crowded. Fifty years of life in it. Most of the nooks and crannies have long been filled up. Including the extras I had to create myself. And you’re… bulky. Not broad, certainly, but very tall. An inconvenient length, let’s say. You’ll be forcing me back to basic anatomy. Never my favourite subject, I’m afraid. And many long years between me and the lab.”

  “You talk too much. And we both know you’ve stayed in constant practice with anatomy. It’s what your skinny ass has lived for.”

  Aluminum. The colour of his eyes. The faint blue shine it gets when buffed.

  “Come to me, boy,” says the mouth below them. “It’s time you saw a doctor.”

  Boy. Yet I do. I try to. A feeling of pouring sand in my head when I lean forward. Slush where my legs were when I try to stand. The leather seat cushion puffs—haa!—when I sink back into it.

  “Midazolam.” My voice a reedy blur, all boom and distance gone.

  Shakes his head tolerantly. “You keep confusing me with a dentist. An anaesthetist has a few more resources than someone who pulls teeth.”

  My brain sends signals to my legs—Stand! Run! Kick!—but nothing happens. Not even a muscle twitch. Just the slush where my legs were, a cold jelly, rising.

  The pouring faster in my head. Sand pouring through it, or my head pouring through sand. Grit swirl across vast spaces behind my eyes, the bright narrowing tunnel in front of them, like a tube sharpening focus as it closes. Dr. Wyvern at the end of it: hands clasped, fingers interlaced, his face all pious absorption as he observes the stages. So familiar, yet so individual—no two cases alike. Cold jelly below my neck.

  Getting what you came for, after all.

  §

  A click. Clicks. Faraway.

  Checks his watch. “That’ll be Iris, I expect. Later than usual, but she almost always forgets something essential, even for an overnight. Back she drives with her sister to pick it up.” A searching look from the end of the tube, quizzical. All the intake docs I’ve met in the peering eyes, furrowed brow. “She’s discreet, always. Lets herself in and out. I don’t think you’ll have a voice, or much of one, but go ahead and try if you want.”

  A lie. But why bother now? Muffled sounds from the next room. Someone moving. Drawer, cupboard. Wooden slides and knocks. No Peach and Lemon this high up. Qualified fruit only.

  It’s the last clear thought I have. After that I’m all eye.

  An eye watching a film, or many films, with fizzing white between them. Either I’m losing consciousness at times, or else my mind simply blanks, balks white, at what it’s taking in.

  Seeing Judy, red and white, glide into the room and up behind her father. She doesn’t rush, yet he gives no sign of registering her presence. Hand on his forehead, a small priest’s blessing, and then something very long going back and forth, back and forth, under his chin. A long, long carving knife with a bone handle. She saws but doesn’t strain, he must keep it sharp. She might be bowing a violin.

  I close my eyes and greet a sickly jubilance in the dark. TAL rides again. Judy taking it further than you ever dared. Who else? Lynette nearby, conn
ected somehow. Oh Brad, if you could see us. I feel a falling sensation, an all-over plummet inwards from the cliff of my skin. I open my eyes to make it stop. Judy still sawing unhurriedly. Back and forth. Back and forth.

  Blood sheets the front of him, drenching his shirt and cardigan. Sprays when she hits the artery. One jet hits my knee, another the floor between us. Then they fall closer to him. He makes a brief high sound, a whistling hiss. The blood pours down, pooling in the leather triangle between his thighs, soaking into his slacks.

  An interval of fizzing white, the longest yet it seems, but beyond it Judy still tilting his head and sawing again, or starting, time is looping on us. Dull white gleams through the red as she exposes the knobs of his spinal cord.

  Watching, I am frozen in stone. You are the Empress. This is where you live.

  His head lolls back on a rind of skin. Perpendicular to his body, it perches on the top of the chair like a thing set there, staring up at the ceiling, blood running along the leather and away down the chair back.

  Judy gives the head a gentle push—or he moves it a last time, to hide his terrible wound—and it flops forward to hang at another impossible angle on his chest, dangling from its skin shred, his features lost in gore.

  It’s over.

  I never saw his eyes, the expression in them. They were tilted up at Judy.

  His hands rose just once, halfway, then dropped back into his lap. As if to say, All right then.

  The blood on the knife the same red as her jumper. She doesn’t seem to notice it trickling past the guard and down the bone onto her hand. Her white frilled blouse again, filmy scallops swirling around her chin. Antic now with spatters and mad red polka dots.

  She’s peering intently to my left, as if someone or something a little taller than herself is standing there. Smiling shyly, almost demurely, as if what she sees is nodding approval. She holds the knife aloft, awaiting further instruction.