Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  Probably, he seemed to say.

  That evening me, Brendan, and Renaud, the building super, went to The Miracle for a drink. It was the kind of night you know you’re going to see people who look like famous people. Renaud ordered a pink frothy drink from a woman with a neck striped from self-tanning. A strange guy sat down next to me and asked if he could have a sip of my beer. He was probably about my age, twenty-eight, but he looked fifty-five.

  “Listen, is the night a time, a place, or a thing?” he said.

  “It’s a noun, that’s for sure.”

  “It’s a state of mind,” Renaud said.

  The Miracle didn’t have a bar license, so Maryse, the owner, would serve a provisional sort of buffet with the drinks, half a bagel and a sliced-up apple, or a handful of potato chips and some Babybel cheese. Then she’d go to her armchair in the corner and nod off, her turtleneck pulled up over half her face. This time it was a stale tortilla and a bowl of salsa. Maryse shrugged apologetically as she set them down. “The economy,” she said, “you know.” She was wearing a shirt that said I’m Kind Of A Big Deal.

  We smoked those cigarettes that come in two sections, smokes and filters. You put them together yourself and save a dollar. We knew a guy who knew a guy who one time opened his pack to find both sections were cigarettes. It was pretty much the most exciting thing to happen that year. In every pack there are always a couple more filters than cigarettes, and we would save them up for the day when we too would be beneficiaries of the universe’s generous nature.

  I still had the envelope with me. I put it on the table, where it quickly started to look like an Olympic flag. Next to us two young guys were discussing the method of staying out until the very end of the night, when the bar is about to close, at which point you get to take home the drunkest girl there.

  “I know that method,” one guy said. “It’s called ‘Last Man Standing.’”

  “No it isn’t,” said his companion. “It’s called ‘Taking Out the Trash.’”

  “Last Man Standing.”

  “Taking Out the Trash.”

  Brendan got up to stoke the jukebox. It was playing mostly French tear-jerker songs. I knew what he was going to put on, and I kind of hated him for it. I hated both of us.

  On the other side of the room I saw the woman who owed me ten dollars. She was sitting at the bar with a blond man who looked like one of the Norwegians from Twin Peaks. I went over and tapped her on the back.

  “I know what you’re going to say,” she said. Her accent was gone.

  “How’s the baby?” I said.

  She laughed. Brendan’s song came on—it was The Eagles.

  “Do you want to dance?” I said. She smiled and came into my arms. She was taller than I originally thought; her head fit just under my chin.

  “I got a degree today,” I said. “A master’s in political philosophy.”

  She laughed again. Brendan started to sing along.

  Horseman, Pass By

  Hall was dying. Alex didn’t think he would last the night, so he sat up with him, trying to get him to drink a little, stroking his head and whispering comforting nonsense. Kept everyone out of the sickroom, as he called it, insisting his housemates take off their shoes and turn their music down. Even if Hall made it to morning it wouldn’t be long. The tumours were as big as Texas.

  It was to be expected, things being what they were, but what was going to happen to Oates?

  Alex felt queasy at the thought of Oates’ impending aloneness. Like the elderly couple together so long that your partner’s face is more familiar than your own, the rats had been together from birth and had no concept of what it meant to be single, unique. Quite likely Hall thought himself to be a white rat and Oates a black, when in fact it was the other way around. Soon Oates would not even have that much; any concept of his own identity would fade with the removal of Hall’s body. He would sleep alone in his pile of chips, a fat white comma with no reflection, the last of his kind.

  They were five living in the house, seven if you counted the rats, which no one did except Alex. So five, in a kind of practised and cautiously maintained intimacy. They occupied each others’ territory like resistance fighters in a European forest, listening for snapped twigs that signalled coming disaster. They knew each other’s routines, the creaking chairs and bedsprings, the toilet flushes and rhythms of dishes by the sink. They knew each others’ footsteps, each with their own character.

  One fall, when Alex couldn’t take it anymore, he moved into a housing complex for deaf students. It would be quiet as a churchyard; he imagined learning to meditate. Of course, there was a serious flaw in his reasoning. Deaf people see no reason not to put up shelves at midnight, to vacuum, to run a few k on a treadmill. The building was a constant clamour of humming, muttering, thunking somethings and clattering other things. “Sometimes they watch TV for the picture,” Alex said, “and they have no idea the volume is on full. And you think, I guess I’m going to have to bang on the wall now. But then you realize.”

  He moved back in a season later, chastened, and with a pair of baby rats he’d rescued from a pet store, who had been destined to be food for an eight-foot python. “Alex Prole’s Bourbon Folly,” the housemates had called them, though he hadn’t been drunk when he bought them, only a little buzzed, a state that was less about intoxication than expansion.

  Now he sat with one hand inside the cage, stroking Hall’s ears that were even thinner than paper, ears like what you would use to clean a gold ring or something else valuable and easily scratched, while Oates nervously chewed extrusions in the corner. You’d have to say he chewed nervously, because what else could he be feeling, anxiety comprising maybe eighty percent of his emotional range. The cage smelled a bit, it was true, but it was a hearty, musky tang that Alex liked, nothing at all like halitosis. “Yes it is,” Sally said. “If it were coming from Sara Bronsky you’d love it,” he said accusingly, and she rolled her eyes and gagged, waving around a lit stick of incense like a holy thing.

  The only other pet they’d had was a hamster that someone’s sister had got tired of. They used it to trim the lawn. Sally would set the top half of the cage on the grass and let the hamster go at it. Every hour or so she’d move the cage over a foot. In a day the lawn would be patchy and the hamster logey and irritable. One day someone stole the hamster, leaving the cage. Who would do such a thing, the housemates wondered. “Stole” was probably a kind guess.

  Alex looked up to see Marcus in the doorway, holding two bottles of Cheval Blanc. He tilted one at Alex, who shook his head. Marcus sighed and flicked his bangs out of his face.

  “Well, hang in there, buddy.”

  “When did you start saying ‘buddy,’” said Alex. But Marcus had already gone.

  Marcus and Alex had known each other since junior high, having bonded over a love of absurdism, read and practised. They met in the after-school improv club, where they discovered a natural rhythm existed between them, a kind of organic Bugs Bunnyish anarchism. While other kids worshipped Nirvana and Skinny Puppy, their master and commander was Samuel Beckett, followed closely by Kafka and Tom Robbins. Like knights of old they were sworn to oppose a common enemy, The Tyranny of the Dull Mind, which covered teachers, parents, Scout leaders, authority figures of all kinds, suck-ups, brown-nosers, teachers’ pets, celebrity worshippers, potheads, homecoming kings and queens, organized religion, and the Media, except for a handful of community radio and television shows they enthusiastically endorsed.

  One of their favourite games was called Hangman of the Absurd; it was modelled on the original Hangman, with a few minor modifications. All the answers were the sort of phrases one would find in William S. Burroughs, or the beloved Robbins, or nowhere at all. For example: Sylphs in Small Cars. Pandemonium Pimple Garage. Anarchy Among the Marmosets. Additionally, when your opponent guessed a wrong letter, instead
of a body part you drew whatever you felt like: an ear, a banjo, a porcupine. The game ended when the phrase was filled in or guessed, or the drawing was deemed to be complete. Depending on the length and difficulty of the phrase and the patience of the person doing the drawing, the game could last up to an hour, or the length of their chemistry class.

  One day in early fall Marcus went to pick up Alex for the yearly tryouts for the improv team. Alex was sitting against his locker, the hood of his sweatshirt pulled almost over his face. He didn’t move. Marcus waited.

  “Improv is for brown-nosers,” Alex said.

  Marcus waited.

  “The real possibilities are out there in the streets.” He handed Marcus a flyer.

  “Radical Cheerleading?”

  Alex looked up. “Are you in?”

  At first they hung around the back of the demonstrations and marches, but it wasn’t long until they were a common sight in the front lines, each holding the end of a banner, or playing timpani and tuba, or taking turns hoisting a political effigy on their shoulders. They had an energy that everyone loved, though to each other they could never resist riffing on the chants, which they agreed sounded boring and fascistic.

  “What do we want?”

  “Surrealism!”

  “When do we want it?”

  “Shoehorn!”

  They went to different universities, Marcus to the highly ranked Ivy League–ish one where, he joked, his classmates were too privileged to realize how privileged they were. Alex went to the other university, the one promising education “for the real world,” with its mosaic of outrageously hip art students, grungy activists and business school fledgling tycoons. They found a five-bedroom two-floor apartment together, with a massive yard in which they planned to grow their own food, build a greenhouse and host weekly bonfires. Three housemates moved in—Sally, J-J-J-Jenny, and Lynnie.

  J-J-J-Jenny’s stutter was selfish, a way for her to take up three times her share of airtime. An only child, she sang musicals in the shower. Sally was a performance artist and Lynnie was training to be a midwife. Sally stayed the longest, and was the most unaccountably bitter about it. Things you would think were comforting, like watching the kids next door grow up, just made her angry. “It just said hi to me,” she said once, “and I was here when it was a fucking tadpole.” She and Alex became close quickly, which Marcus attributed to their shared homosexuality.

  Marcus still did theatre, still went to protests, and though he had moved beyond Tom Robbins, he kept his anti-establishment tendencies. He had discovered James Joyce; his new mantra was I will not serve. This he wrote on the inside cover of all his school notebooks, tall and narrow with mottled black and white covers, and he planned to use the money his parents would give him for his next birthday to get a tattoo, non serviam, on the inside of his left wrist. He saw himself as a kind of undersea creature, silently floating through the seas of upwardly mobile neolibs and fascist hippies and doctrinaire professors, attached to nothing, absorbing what he needed in order to explode, when the time came, in a spray of ink and radicalism. When would it come, and how would he know it had arrived? He wasn’t sure, but he waited with tentacles extended, supple and aware, listening for earthquakes under the seabed.

  Alex, meanwhile, had become an ideologue. Or so it seemed to Marcus, who saw his roommate less and less often. When he did, Alex seemed distant and preoccupied; he was starting to get a haggard and fanatical look about the eyes. He communicated mostly by pamphlet—he was in the habit of handing them out to the housemates like the young well-muscled guys Marcus would see on Ste-Catherine, with flyers for clubs with loud names like Boom and Shaker. Protests, demos, manifs, workshops, sit-ins, skillshares, occupations, benefits and benefices—they floated from Alex like dandruff. It wasn’t that Marcus was indifferent to the causes but he resented being treated like street traffic in his own house. Sometimes while making dinner he would hear the back door open and Alex’s boots thunk off in the hallway. Marcus would offer a how’s-it-going as Alex passed by, only to be received with a grunt and, when he turned around, a stack of multicoloured photocopied squares on the kitchen table. Alex spent all his time at work or with his rats. Marcus liked animals too but there was something unwholesome about it, a flinty-eyed focus as of a saint or cult leader.

  He would not serve, no, but who was he not serving? Stephen Dedalus had his Ireland, his priest-ridden dirt-poor fatherland, his own father squatting his consciousness like a golem. Marcus’s background seemed flabby and permissive by comparison: Liberal middle-class parents who let him do as he pleased, a city whose watchwords were fun and excess and live it up and why not, where God was dead and everything was permitted.

  The enemy as far as he could tell was so huge and remote and all-pervasive as to be insurmountable. At every turn he stocked its armoury, fed its coffers. But he would not let himself be defeated by it, not yet.

  I will not serve. I will not serve. I’m not going to take it. No, I’m not going to take it, I’m not going to take it, anymore.

  Then there was Flipper Week. That was when Alex, who by then had dropped out of university, decided that the cause of humanity’s problems was rooted in opposable thumbs. “Think about it,” he said. “Tools, civilization, slavery, capitalism, war. None of it possible without these.” He wiggled them. As an experiment in what he called de-digiprivileging, Alex started taping down his thumbs with duct tape. His dexterity limited thus, his life became simplified, and he felt, he said, “free as an otter.” He could still perform most tasks, albeit slowly and with some difficulty. He could walk, type, hold a beer bottle two-handed, eat. He couldn’t ride a bike, use a can opener, brush his teeth, or answer the phone. What did it matter? He was de-volving and it felt right. A week turned into two and the edges of the duct tape started to fray. His hands became glued over with sweat, grime, and hair. Alex took to gnawing the tape absentmindedly, like one of his rats. Sometimes he would sit staring into space, one flipper in his mouth and the other in his lap, where one or the other of the rats worked it over, making little clacking sounds with its long amber teeth. The sight made Marcus shudder.

  If things went as planned he would go straight into a postgraduate program and from there a professorship; before long he would be tenured and could immerse himself entirely in theory. He had thought his life plan was something Alex would admire—maybe it would even inspire him to quit his job at the call centre. But Alex had shown indifference, almost discomfort, whenever Marcus talked about his future. He wondered if Alex could be jealous. Then he pushed the thought down; it had some nasty pleasure in it, like sniffing a fart.

  Alex walked down Van Horne Avenue, which ran parallel to the train tracks separating Mile End and Outremont from Parc Ex and Petite Patrie. It’s a city of divides, he thought, St. Laurent marking the East-West Anglo-Franco schism, east of St. Laurent a phrase indicating all that is foreign and unfathomable to an émigré from Out West: Elvis-themed laundromats, seniors in tiger print pants and purple bouffants. Van Horne, or the train tracks it mirrors, splits north from south, the complicated system of fences and overpasses forming a bottleneck that slows the flow of trendseeking twentysomethings into the old-man coffee clubs of Little Italy. At one historical point the split may have worked to keep the immigrants of Montreal North—the Haitian, Pakistani, Ethiopian, Congolese, Ghanaian, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Jamaican population—from crowing out the older arrivistes of Mile End, the Greek, Portuguese, Ashkenazi Jewish, Quebecois pur laine. But now the barrier works the other way, as the young clamour ever north.

  Named for the railway CEO who dreamed it into being, Van Horne should have been a majestic avenue of luxury hotels, café bistros and microbreweries. Other Van Horne creations, like the Banff Springs Hotel, the Windsor Arms, and the Queen E, occupy their railside territory with gloomy grandeur. But Montreal’s Avenue Van Horne, opening with a cold storage warehouse where the stre
et juts diagonally from St. Laurent, continues on a distinctly unglamorous arc. It was possible, Alex noted, to walk blocks along Van Horne without passing a single retail enterprise. It was all warehouses and abandoned-looking apartment buildings and empty lots. There were so many empty lots that you started to imagine a taxonomy of them, as if they could be ordered from a catalogue. The feral lot, waist deep with burdock, goldenrod and ragweed. The unsold lot, pincushioned with À Vendre signs. The shy lot, the defiant lot, the who-gives-a-fuck-anyway lot. The lot that doesn’t know it’s a lot. The fresh lot: until last week it held a building, and now it lies open, unnerving as a freshly dug grave. A square of sky sits uncovered, a vintage area of space that hasn’t been seen since the building went up in 1936. And see, it’s been perfectly preserved—you can’t tell it from the rest of the sky around it.

  Finally the sign for the muffler shop appeared, and Alex was back in civilization. Docteur Silencieux smiled from the billboard, something sinister in his name and his handsome, reassuring face. Alex gave him a nod and continued on to Parc.

  Alex carried a small cardboard box carefully in front of him. The box’s weight was satisfying for its size. It had a density and a diminutive heft.

  Inside the box was Alex’s rat, Hall.

  At the end of August the yard had that kind of late-summer post-coital exhaustion; the plants seemed overripe and limp, verging on rot, but with enough bloom left that you remembered it. The flowers on the chestnut tree were gone and the leaves had darkened to oily green; there was a smell like campfires.

  On the back porch, Marcus and Sally were drinking some of Marcus’s homemade beer, tossing bottle caps over the fence into the neighbouring yard. Someone was barbecuing and it reminded Sally that all she had eaten that day was a bowl of lentil soup.

  “Where’s Alex?” Sally said.

  “Burying his rat.”

  “Oh.” She ran the back of her hand over her lips. “Simon or Garfunkle?”