The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  “Don’t you like Mr. Nichols? Did he do something to make you angry?” I can’t really remember the cop except for an impression of solemnity and weariness, mostly from his voice. My foster parents, faceless, standing behind him—one very still, one shifting nervously.

  “I like him. He’s a nice man.”

  No shock like the truth. Not a phrase yet, but a fact flaring in the old cop’s eyes.

  Grounded on Hallowe’en, which I’d planned to skip anyway. Few adults, then or later, able to guess what might actually constitute punishment to me. They’d have to be bent themselves.

  §

  Dr. Wyvern stares up from my lap, having pushed the Big Man off the front page for the first time this month. The Star and the Sun both used the same photograph. Not one from his self-tribute gallery and not one he would have approved. He’s smiling blandly, a little vacantly, perhaps on a public panel. He’s in his sixties, no doubt at the height of his influence at the university and hospital, his opinions sought and courted. The Globe went with one more suitably sombre, but with his mouth partway open, as if a question has stumped him or he’s been caught between expressions. All are obviously photos on file for a public figure, rather than a shot selected by a family who has more than enough on its hands today.

  ROSEDALE RAMPAGE! screams the Sun. The Star only slightly more subdued: Rosedale Slaying Shocks Community. The subheadings differ slightly, but use variants of the same key words: “prominent,” “respected,” “doctor,” “professor,” “dead,” “murder.” No sign of “victim,” curiously. Is it only for the poor?

  These are the late afternoon editions. It was still just the Big Man on my first trip to Shoppers. Either because the body hadn’t been discovered yet, or because the police were giving themselves time, before an official announcement, to search for the “person of interest” both articles refer to.

  Run, Judy, I think. Though it’s not really how I imagine her—not as a person fleeing, a fugitive. More as a force pervading the city, a wild but diffuse radical element, beyond pursuit or capture. Bizarre as she is, she might seem hard to miss, an easy target for trained detectives, but they won’t find her quickly, she lives too far underground. Learned invisibility is the deepest disguise. A cicada is a big, odd-looking insect, but when it burrows under the earth for its seventeen-year sleep, no one scouring the surface has a chance of seeing it.

  Other than the fact of a homicide, and its characterization, perhaps by a junior officer caught off guard, as “gruesome,” the focus of this first coverage is on the status and achievements of the deceased, and the shock and dismay of his neighbours, granted disproportionately lengthy quotes. The paucity of detail, along with the scant mention of the rest of the family, gives me hope that the murder has already been folded into a wider investigation, with multiple arrests made or forthcoming.

  Eventually including—to dig a little more greedily in the candy jar—others from the same social echelon who enjoy the Wyvern holiday classics. Connoisseurs willing to pay for special, hard-to-get bootlegs from a special, hard-to-locate source. Without ever having seen them or any evidence of them, I sense these others, a complexity in the Wyvern aroma, a deepening of its stink.

  It starts, I assume—this special new smell—with a change in Max’s status with the police. Summoned, the shell-shocked son, sometime between this morning’s lattes and lunch, from his routine Thursday office to the scene on Dunbar Road. Standing near where Judy and I sat, staring with a white and frozen face at the bloody ruins of his father. The Sandman by then a curled small castle, locked in rigor, red paint thrown down its walls.

  Max standing in that special cleared space granted the bereaved, from custom if not respect, and, especially in the case of cops, to see what he’ll do in it. A space, a little stage on which to do and say wrong things, while cop eyes note the flicker of false gestures and expressions from the wings. Family kill each other, every day. Don’t look far until you have to.

  Is Sandor there?

  No, not yet. Max at the top of every list the cops turned up: Executor in the suede packet in the corpse’s lap, first name on the list beside the phone, in the Contacts book. The name the funeral home card in the deceased’s wallet has on file. Max has to get there first, remove the pictures, pictures, pictures. Yes, Dad, yes…

  So, a little disconcerted, eyes flicking from the thought-tumble behind them, when he’s stopped from reaching for the blood-soaked suede packet. “…my father’s will… I’m his…” “I’m sorry, sir, but that was found with your father’s body. It’s evidence at a crime scene at this point.” “Of course, I understand. I’m sorry, it’s just all so…”

  Is that when it first flutters into Max’s big brain that I might, for the moment, have my uses? He sent me to the old man—like a weak teacher referring an incorrigible student to the principal—to get disappeared. Which still has to happen. My eviction from Planet Wyvern is long overdue. Meanwhile, though, if I was greedy dolt enough to abscond with all the family pics, well, at least that’s one way of keeping them from the cops.

  If he could just X-ray through the suede and confirm they’re missing. Relief tingling as conviction gains, delicate tendrils twining around dread, that I wouldn’t have left without grabbing the extra leverage. All my threats of disdaining a payoff and sending Christmas Music to the cops just self-righteous shtick and bluff. Holier-than-thou crapola from a classic friend of Judy’s. Embarrassing, really, these clowns she hooks up with. Just as he and Vivian decided the other night, after the poetry-and-dementia farce.

  Vivian. God, he’d like to see her—needs to see her—now, and from the gurgling in his stomach it’s got to be past one—but you don’t check your watch or take a sec to call your girlfriend, not with your father bled out three feet in front of you. Not with several pairs of cop eyes fastened to you, none of them even pretending to roam.

  Steadily, the scene becomes more crowded.

  Forensics. Tech guys, photogs. Funeral home people, called by someone, told they aren’t needed yet. Print dusters. Juniors outside to secure the scene, fend off neighbours, media as they twig.

  Several tries to reach Sandor, his phone ringing off the hook. Finally a constable is sent to rouse and inform him. Reports back. A weeping wreck. Drinking all night, looks like.

  Another constable sent to inform the sister. Who has no telephone of her own? A mentally unstable person, very fragile, Max informs them solemnly. Back now, alone. Apparently she’s AWOL, the landlady at her group home hasn’t seen her in two days.

  Oh, really? A person of interest.

  And Max, overhearing while a cop with slow handwriting asks him questions he’s already answered, feels relief like elation, these little gas bubbles collecting on the inside of his chest, hollowed like a drum by fear. See, Viv, he imagines telling her later, the nut jobs do have their uses occasionally. My sister a placeholder for her friend. Until we get what’s ours. And then he can get what’s his. Feeling more than a little giddy—freaked-out giddy—at how they might just have walked right to the edge of a crumbling cliff and still jumped back in time.

  And later, back home finally, giddiness persisting—though mellowed a bit, wine and a pinch of something harder with Viv—when a rap on the door startles. Trick or Treat? Not even gray yet.

  Two men. Big. Suits. They’d have got here sooner, except the brass insisted on mapping out a careful approach, given the reputations of the people involved and the possibility, a hunch gaining in some minds, of a large, far-reaching investigation. And, too, a few of the usual turf squabbles between Sex Crimes and Homicide, even though Homicide has priority until their part is down. There was that, as usual, too.

  “We have a few questions we’d like to ask you, Dr. Wyvern.”

  “Questions? I think I answered every possible… It’s been a terribly long and difficult day, as I’m sure…” It’s upsetting how thoughts trail
off and die in front of the butcher’s block faces. “Um… here?”

  “Unless there’s somewhere else you’d like to talk?”

  It’s pleasant not to have a clue how things went down, when any way they might have gone down is pleasant.

  And when even clueless speculation stops you thinking how your own day’s gone down. And down…

  I woke up a couple of hours after returning home, cored. Not from real sleep, but from a mud-like stupor that was only partly a madman’s chemicals seeping slowly out of me. I lay on the mattress a long time, staring at the ceiling.

  Eyes open or closed, I saw no stairs. No Empress. I couldn’t reach them, or her. I felt unspeakably alone. As if the planet had been blasted into dust and I’d been left behind as its janitor to sweep it up.

  This is the last adjustment, said the voice, the one I’d heard last night. But it has to finish first. And I had a premonition I’ve never had before, not just of an adjustment that isn’t finished but of an adjustment that won’t ever finish, it can’t. It brought me to the point of shaking all over. My hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my chest, my back, my head, my neck—all of me. Like leaves in a wind that won’t stop. Except I had no trunk or branches. Just leaves.

  And still now, replaying the day as I sit on Lucy’s chair and dole out Smarties and plastic-wrapped suckers, every moment I find again in memory feels stale and unreal—like loops of waking dream I sleepwalk through, and sleepwalk through again remembering. Until, at last, I find the only place—I reach it—that’s dark enough to wake, and know myself awake, in.

  Gwen’s voice when I call, around noon: “Hello, you’ve reached the office of…” No change.

  But when I call again, a couple of hours later, a new voice, young and crisp: “We are sorry but the dental office is closed due to urgent family circumstances. We apologize for any inconvenience. The office will reopen at a date yet to be determined. Patients with issues of urgent concern are advised to…”

  The Wyvern dismantling underway.

  No sense of triumph, not even of satisfaction.

  Don’t feel anything.

  It all—the whole adjustment—feels like something that happened a long time ago, helped along by hands unrelated to my own. Something that had nothing to do with me.

  “I have something to atone for,” I say to Stone. Standing in Big Empty, my shirt off. Hearing the formality, a ceremoniousness, that always comes into my voice when a window’s almost closed and our meeting is drawing near.

  You need to pay, says Stone, who never lies. Yes you do.

  Using the fine-tipped X-Acto, which has the sharpest blade, I score a series of parallel horizontal lines in my chest, beginning just below my shoulders and ending just above my navel. Six lines in all, about an inch-and-a-half apart.

  Through them I score vertical lines, top to bottom, four of them, about two inches apart.

  For a brief time, as the lines go bright red and, dabbing with the shirt, I can keep up with the bleeding, my chest is a crimson checkerboard. But the flow increases and, even blotting quickly, it becomes a general smear.

  Later, when it has stopped and crusted over, I clean up the boxes with water and alcohol as best I can. But I can’t get too close to the lines without reopening them. So the grid effect is crude, and bumpy. Rust-coloured now, too. Not bright anymore.

  Staring down at it, I feel a clammy kinship, almost an identity, with the blood-soaked old ghoul curled in his chair—as if Judy’s bone-handled carving knife, as weirdly magic as the rest of her, operates in two dimensions and at two different speeds, opening one man’s throat as I watched, and now, a half day later more or less, completing the job remotely, slicing the chest of his doppel-target… wound without end, amen.

  Mid-afternoon, I pick up Around Toogood Pond and read some passages from near the end.

  It’s no longer possible to tell myself I’m reading it because it’s part of an adjustment. Or because it tells me things—suggestions, hints—about a man who interests me, who is a mystery I can’t resolve.

  I’m reading it for company. To preserve my connection to a human shore I’m leaving, swept on a current that was always there but which is quickening, surging for open water.

  Faces 23 August

  Yesterday a quiet day. It felt as if we were out walking on a long thin peninsula, narrowing as it went, far away from the long shoreline of her life. She asked me questions that were—I was going to say terrible in their extremity; but that is not how they felt. A sweetness suffuses anything so utter.

  “Was this my husband?” She had moved the photo of their wedding dinner to her bedside table. She seems to rotate her pictures according to what needs to be brought forward, brought back—taking the best care she can of her diminishing stores of recollection. “And is that the same man?” Of a photo taken a few years later. “Uh… huh,” she says when I show her one of a family dinner. That strains credulity, the middle-aged men and the elderly married couple.

  Once, early on in Vivera, she turned to me, and with a curious shy courtesy, said, “You’ve always lived very alone, I guess. Tell me, did you have any help from your mother and father?” “You’re my mother,” I said. And she looked startled, and covered it with a laugh. But she knew what had happened—in that moment she did. In fact she said, “That’s what’s happening to me. I forgot for a moment you’re my son. I thought you were just a nice gentleman. Helping me.”

  I felt challenged more than saddened. For fifty-two years she has given me abundant notice of my identity. It’s time now to be a nice gentleman.

  Guide lines 16 December

  What I say, carefully, wanting to get it right for myself too: “The thought I’m guided by is that this lady has been disrespected enough. However late in the day it is, it’s not too late to give her the treatment she deserves. The buck stops here.”

  That seems to satisfy L. She nods. And it satisfies me too, I realize. It’s a guideline to try to hold to.

  Vivid dream again last night of trying to kill him. With a long knife, flashing in the sun, as we splashed and floundered in a stream of variable depth.

  After hearing me talk of the sudden waves and longer spells of dislocation, of dream-likeness—leading to disorientation: Where am I? How did I get here? What am I doing now and what am I supposed to do next?—Dr. P gives me a name for it (which helps). “It’s called de-realization.”

  It can be a consequence of anxiety, apparently, often related to post-traumatic stress.

  And I told a story about a man I’d known who discovered, in his mid-twenties, that he’d been adopted. That his parents, with whom he’d had and continued to have a warm relationship, were not his blood parents. He felt, he told me, the ground shift and dissolve under his feet. So that even elements of ordinary reality became dubious, became things he couldn’t be sure of: chair, table, wall. Who he was. Who the person next to him was.

  Hours later I realized—it seeped into my awareness—that there was no such man in my real life. He was a figure slid in from dream: more true than real, more honest than a lie.

  A curious book, Sandor’s. Curiouser and curiouser each time I read it.

  Sipping Luck Yu on the balcony, staring above Latimer brick, I consider it. Chill cobalt, with low, shouldering gray clouds. No witches on broomsticks sailing before them yet.

  A man caring for his mother. Suffering with her, devoted to her. Then not.

  A man flailing, while analyzing his flailing.

  Different men, not quite matchable. Slides that don’t quite overlay, not exactly. Do anyone’s? More or less. You can be scattered but still of a piece, sort of. Glob of mercury dropped, running off in tiny beads. But this guy—this author—with loud leviathan in the bar, trouble cresting from his deeps?

  Is this what writing means, Lois?

  To stop no pain, but comment on it sens
itively?

  To be a dolt, but deftly.

  Atrocious pastime. And nothing in it to declare—only to strongly hint, to tantalize—that he knew anything about the mayhem in the family vaults. All that induced paralysis and rape. Did they, too, speak to the poem?

  And L—Lynette, as I gather now—the one he confides in, is consoled by. And? What more? Listening to his trials, does she tell him of her own on a locked ward? Tell him of Judy? Me? TAL? How could she? How could she not?

  Close my eyes. Shift my hands to grasp new, cooler sections of the railing.

  Breathe. Slowly. In, out. In, out.

  A kind of gray. A shadow world… but without features.

  No stairs. No Empress.

  No nothing.

  Mid-afternoon, I give up and enter the empty in Big Empty. Sit in the cool, back to the wall. Pull the door closed. Megan’s closet. Her dark. Though it draws me like a lodestone through each window, I resist its pull as long as I can. Knowing that when I reach it, Stone waits just beyond.

  It’s all right to be here. You’ve waited long enough.

  Desperation the price of admission. It’s all she ever asked of you. Street sweeps, endless drives and walks in search of, circling, backtracking, peering—futile, yes, of course, but essential. Pointlessly crucial. Need more than a word. Not just four simple letters, a burped syllable.

  More than that or nothing at all.