by Jim Hanas
For the next month, they ran the experiment. As though they were taking part in a high school economics class, each was given a hundred thousand virtual dollars to invest how they saw fit, and whoever had the most money on the first of November would be the winner. The coin never missed. And as word spread in their circle, the coin became more of a focal point at parties. An assistant to a city councilor with some favor in the mayor’s office queried the coin (for this was how they referred to it now, not asking Chris to make a toss but “querying the coin”) about a home she was considering purchasing. Should they purchase stocks in this Canadian gold claim in Borneo? Would the Avalanche win the Stanley Cup this year? And they continued to joke about its accuracy, even as they scribbled the predictions down in their notebooks and went home.
One night, after showing the news anchor and her husband to the door, Rachel said it had to stop. “I know,” Chris said. “It’s like I’ve stopped existing or something. The only reason they come now is for the coin. I could completely disappear, for all they care.” And he was happy that she saw it the same way. But no, she didn’t mean stopping entirely, just that they should no longer give it away for free. Did he realize how much those stocks were making people?
“But it’s just a game,” he said.
They asked for ten percent of the action, win or lose. And the weekends were thus transformed into old spiritualist-style séances, with the pretext of dinner all but forgotten and replaced with Chris seated behind their round dining room table with the coin in his outstretched palm. Rachel bought a new tablecloth.
With her marketing savvy, Rachel was able to increase the circle of their influence, drawing in many of the local celebrities and sports heroes, politicians, and to make it all legit, the chief of police and several judges, because it was practically impossible at this point to remain under the radar, despite having the mayor as a client. Chris wrote the Series 7, Series 63, 65, and 66 exams over the course of a week, which being multiple choice in format meant he had to study nothing, the coin able to answer every question by asking Is it one of the first or last two answers? and then narrowing it down with a second toss.
At this point they were even advising several members of the NHL franchise Avalanche, one of whom even came with a collection of his own good luck charms with which to test the coin; the quarterback for the Broncos; a prominent folk singer seeking help with airplane purchases; the star of a successful television program who wanted to know if he should extend his contract for another two years or immediately make the move to film. Chris and Rachel even began taking their own profits and investing them alongside their clients’, doubling and trebling their take.
They were the talk of Denver. On weekends, their home was the place where everyone wanted to be. During the weekdays, however, they continued to grow apart, as though they were from completely different countries, with completely different cultures and completely different languages, trying to explain to each other proper etiquette. He was feeling more and more separated from himself. He gave up painting, but since Rachel was at work all day he saw no reason to leave the house. And in the evenings, if he could think of no film to see, or over-hyped concert to attend, and she had no pilates class, he would pretend to enjoy her TV forensics or medical dramas, and then they would go to bed and fuck like they were strangers, except on the day that he called her “Julie” by mistake, wherever that came from, after which he made stronger efforts to make her feel special and loved.
One day, he asked the coin — for at this point its power was undeniable, even to him — if they should split. It said no. He queried again. It said no. Again. No. In total, he flipped the coin twenty times, and each time it urged him to stay the course. Had he known the story of Aar, though, he would have known the coin had lost its magic, and was simply leading him to his death.
Letter to Thomas Pynchon
January 27, 2010
T.,
Do you mind if I call you T.?
It’s been some time since I last wrote, but honestly, things have been pretty busy. Laundry, Survivor, it all just creeps up on you.
I’m sure you understand.
Sorry about that last letter, by the way. Was just looking for a little recognition. Probably deserved the response you gave. Although I guess I would have expected something a bit longer than “Fuck you, whiner.” Seriously, what is with that? Death in the family? Geez loo-eez . . .
Of course, I’ve come to believe that the use of certain words makes people seem like assholes. And “fuck” is certainly one of them. Slovenly also comes to mind. And culpability. Ballast. Midichlorian. Bananafish. I mean, what is it with people?
Anyway, I hear you’re really into jazz music. I’ve just now listened to Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours for the twentieth time in a row, and I think I can safely say, with some authority, that that Lindsey Buckingham chick is freaking hot.
C-dot
Acknowledgments
“Hungry Generations” first appeared in the Lifted Brow #4 (www.theliftedbrow.com) in Australia in 2009.
“The Torogeans” first appeared in Strong Words: Year Two, an anthology assembled by indiepolitik (www.indiepolitik.org) in Toronto in 2007.
“Monster (A Play in Five Acts)” first appeared in We Are the Friction, fiction/art collaborations compiled by Edinburgh’s Sing Statistics (www.singstatistics.co.uk) in 2009.
“Letter to Thomas Pynchon” first appeared in Thomas Pynchon’s inbox on December 16, 1998.
Copyright © Natalee Caple, 2011
Published by ECW Press
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All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Caple, Natalee, 1970-
How I came to haunt my parents [electronic resource] / Natalee Caple.
Short stories.
Electronic monograph in EPUB format.
ISBN 978-1-77090-001-1
Also Issued As:
978-1-77090-000-4 (PDF)
I. Title.
PS8555.A5583H68 2011a C813'.54 C2011-901086-0
Developing editors: Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis
Cover design: David Gee
Typesetting and text design: Troy Cunningham
The publication of How I Came to Haunt My Parents has been generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
These stories are for Cinderella Dragonslayer
and SuperCasey/Dash, and for my beloved Jem.
Ten Things My Mother Told Me
If you tell a lie to your mother the next elevator that you get on is going straight down to hell.
If you don’t let her take out your splinters with a pin they will work their way into your bloodstream and travel up to your heart and pierce your heart and then you’ll die.
Don’t sit on the escalators because your hair will get caught in the teeth and you’ll be skinned.
If Santa finds you awake on Christmas Eve, he eats you. That’s why he’s so fat.
If you hold a bottle of glue up to your ear you can hear the horses.
Boys hit you because they like you.
Your uncle did not go to jail, he became an astron
aut and he is still living on the moon.
One good way to get rid of warts is to bury a pound of bacon in the backyard and wait for it to rot.
If you have sex before you get married all of your children will be bats.
I met your father when I was taking a walk in the forest. He was a monkey sitting in a tree and he threw a coconut down and hit me on the head and knocked me unconscious and when I woke up I was a housewife.
How I Came to Haunt My Parents
IT WAS IN THE SUMMER that I should have turned nine and we were at the big house that sat above the lake. The staircase in the house was so long that I recall it taking half an hour to cross from the top floor to the bottom.
My little brother Evan and I walked the dog along the shoreline in the morning and in the evening before dinner. The sound of the water washing the little stones and rubbing the grasses together made me calm and made him happy. Our little dog was a brown terrier cross and he chased the seagulls into the water with a particularly military responsibility. His name was Pocket, but I can’t remember who named him or why he was called Pocket.
The summer I disappeared it rained almost every day and the lake got so stirred up and rose in big swells so that it was possible to imagine it was an ocean or a sea. We scavenged the shore for treasure, but mostly we found pop bottles and newspapers turned to mulch. The air smelled of worms after the rain. Pocket was new and teething and he nipped and roughhoused our hands and feet so we took him for many walks to tire him out and distract him. I was in love with him and smuggled him into my bed because when he was sleepy he would not bite, but would instead curl snug against my neck and huff warmly into my ear.
Evan had a black eye when we arrived. The boys at school had been giving it to him for being small. Evan was born two weeks late but still he only weighed six pounds and he had stayed small. If you asked him about it he wouldn’t tell you who had hit him. He still thought of those boys as his friends. I thought that was a sign of how childhood was like prison.
One day we went out late because it had been pouring in the morning. We left for our walk just before lunch. The ground, which was half sand half stone, was wet and it sucked at our feet as we walked. Water eclipsed the shore and we scrambled in the weedy excess of the space between the trees and our usual path. Seagulls barked back at Pocket. Twenty minutes from the house we let Pocket off his leash thinking that it was too mucky for him to run far from us. He headed into the trees. We walked on. Evan whistled Pocket back once or twice to check that he was still close by. It was getting dark again and I wondered if we would make it home before it rained, but I had a curious feeling that I wanted to get caught in the storm. For a few minutes I was lost in a fantasy about being swept out onto the lake and clinging with Evan to an overturned boat while Pocket barked for us on the shore. I imagined my parents with wet clothes plastered to their bodies, leaning into the squalling wind and screaming our names over and over again.
“Pocket! Pocket! Pock—eettt!” called Evan. “Wheet, whheeet, whheeeet,” he whistled. “Pocket. Here boy. Come here, Pocket. Come here right now!”
But Pocket didn’t come. A rumble and crack of the sky made me stop Evan by catching his shoulder. Together we looked across the water and we saw a curtain of rain descend and begin the rapid traverse towards the shore. The line of rain was so clear it was like a deliberate advance. Since we couldn’t leave Pocket, we entered the forest hoping every minute to find shelter from the rain that was now tearing leaves from branches and bending the long grass and pelting our heads and shoulders and arms.
Inside the forest, under the trees the sound of the rain was muffled. Stray drops broke through the thick mesh of leaves. We found Pocket almost immediately, sitting up straight on a very large black rock. The rain was so hard the bugs were hiding. Evan and I joined Pocket on the rock. Evan was shivering.
“Are you cold or are you scared?” I asked him.
“I’m cold,” he said. “I’m a little bit scared.”
The wind whistling at the top of the trees made me nervous because it sounded like a person whistling.
“Who is that?” Evan whispered. “Do you hear that? Someone said Baked Alaska.”
“It’s the wind.” I said curtly.
“I’m hungry. Let’s go home.”
So we exited the forest and picked our way across the pocked sand and flattened grasses to the house. When the side of the house came into view it struck me that the whole thing was leaning towards us almost as if it was listening. Evan sniffed beside me and I looked down to see that he was going blue around the lips. I carried Pocket in my arms so that we could move faster and so he would not run away again. Not far from the house Evan grabbed my hand and squeezed it tight and pointed at something. It was a shiny black ball sitting there in front of us. It was about the size of a baseball, but it looked like a ball from our father’s pool table. Evan wouldn’t move or let go of my hand so I handed Pocket to him and stretched myself until I could grasp the ball. The little white face had a window in it and a word floated in the window. The word was Yes. As soon as I held it Evan threw my hand down, released Pocket and ran to the house.
When I arrived at the front door I could hear my parents arguing in their standard way about nothing.
“Who would put a lion in a coconut?” my father accused. “How would a lion even fit in a coconut?”
“I thought it was a metaphor,” my mother answered, throwing something hard against something soft and then making noise with the cutlery in the drawer.
“For what?”
“A sexual innuendo then. What does it matter if I want to sing the wrong words to myself?”
As I stepped into the doorway of the kitchen all the air sucked out of the room, whispered past me into the great hall. My mother leaned against the sink in bleached jean shorts, a revealing T-shirt and an apron that said: Kiss the Cook. Her hair hung over her eyes, shielding them from me. My father collapsed into a chair and leaned back until its front legs left the floor. He was wearing his golf clothes even though there wasn’t a golf course for towns and towns and towns from there. It was a way of protesting. A way of saying, I’m not really here with you. His smile, when he looked at me, was embarrassed. It said: I know my daughter shouldn’t hear me talk to her mother like an idiot. I know I’m being a bad guy, but I’m not really a bad guy.
“I found something,” I said.
EVAN WOULD NOT SLEEP IN the room with me anymore. So he slept with our mother in the room down the hall from me and our father slept in the room below me. I could hear his loud snores vibrate through the wall. I woke up over and over again the first night. I clicked on the bedside lamp since there was no one else to wake. I asked the ball questions and shook it and read the answers. Then I tried again to sleep.
“Will my parents get divorced?”
Yes.
“Is there anything I can do to stop them from getting divorced?”
Yes.
“What can I do to stop them from getting divorced?”
“Best you don’t know.”
“Will Evan get bigger?”
Yes.
“I mean will he stop being runty?”
Yes.
“Will I be tall?”
Probably not.
“Will I get married?”
Unlikely.
“Do you like being an eight ball?”
Eventually.
“Will purple monkeys fly through my window tonight and tear up the sheets and leave me buckets of money?”
No.
“Will I live to be one hundred?”
Definitely not.
At 5 a.m. the birds started to bustle and hassle each other. I felt cold and so I stood to close the window. On the lawn in front of the house a man lay sleeping on his back, his scrappy clothing soaked around the edges with the dew. He looked like a
sad clown without his makeup.
“Dad! Dad! There’s someone in our yard!” I yelled, panic rushing up my skin. I stomped my feet on the floor. My father charged into the room in his pajama bottoms, grabbing the window frame to stop himself from falling out of the open window. I pointed to the body below.
“Christ,” he said. He turned away and started to trudge back to his room.
“Aren’t you going to make him go away?” I asked.