Milo digs in the fridge for the mayo and opens a can of tuna. ‘Have you seen Robertson?’
‘No. I went over to find out when Tanis wants me to stain the deck.’
‘Was she all right?’
‘Pretty quiet. I told her about Sarah Moon Dancer’s Family Healing Circle.’
‘And?’
‘She said she’d Google it. She don’t realize how hurt she is.’
‘Who does?’ Fennel says.
‘It’s so sad,’ Pablo continues, ‘because Sarah empowers families to embrace their gifts and abilities. She believes that every soul and every body bring with them divine wisdom on their Earthwalk. Where’s Robertson’s dad, Milo?’
‘How should I know?’
‘Weren’t you friends?’
‘Far from it.’ Milo mashes mayo into the tuna.
‘Does he know you’re in love with Tanis?’
‘I am not in love with Tanis.’
‘He stole her panties,’ Pablo informs Fennel.
‘No way,’ she says. ‘That is, like, so totally romantic.’ They stop talking and start necking. Milo takes his tuna outside and sits in one of the Muskoka chairs. Sammy didn’t give a date. Apparently in the world of Reality Check, Sammy and Birgit go where the action is. If something more exciting than The Reunion of a Lifetime comes up, Gus will be bumped. They paid Milo only a thousand down.
The silence next door verges on haunting. Usually, on warm nights, Robertson and Sal are out playing fetch. The drawn blinds darken the yard normally illuminated by the light spilling through the sliding doors. Milo knows that no amount of knocking and pleading will cause Tanis to yield. He considers throwing a rock at Robertson’s window but fears he might break it. Besides, the noise would frighten the child. No, Milo must watch and listen and try not to think.
‘You fucking Mexican!’ Wallace bellows.
‘We can’t help our feelings, Wally. You’re not the boss of me.’
‘You call me that again and I’ll fucking kill you!’
How insane with jealousy will Wallace have to get before he strangles Pablo? Does he have one true feeling for Fennel or is it all a pissing contest? Does Milo have one true feeling for Zosia, or Tanis for that matter? What is a true feeling? Sammy and Birgit advised him to show his true feelings on the show. ‘Don’t hold back when you see your father,’ they said, ‘cry if you want to.’ Pablo urged Milo to show his true feelings to Tanis. Sitting very still in the Muskoka chair, Milo tries to feel his true feelings about anything: the newly risen Gus, Zosia, Tanis. Killing a child.
In college, a Buddhist harmonica player told him all that mattered was what he was doing in the moment. ‘All the other stuff is meaningless,’ he said. ‘Don’t believe your thoughts, your thoughts aren’t real. Just because you think it, doesn’t mean it’s real.’ So how do you recognize a true feeling if you can’t trust your thoughts? Do you trust a hard-on? The hockey player who dated the coltish runner told Milo, ‘When she stops giving me a boner, I’m gone.’ A boner is an undeniable feeling, yet men are frequently criticized for thinking with their dicks. Why, when it’s a true feeling? More true than Milo’s relentless, untrustworthy thoughts chattering, contradicting, accusing. ‘Don’t label yourself,’ the Buddhist harmonica player cautioned. ‘The more you label yourself, the more you limit yourself.’ Milo’s only label was president of the Quitters Only Club. The students with more ambitious labels went on to ambitious jobs with labels. They clung to their labels like bits of wreckage in a tumultuous sea. What is Milo supposed to cling to? Pablo says Tanis doesn’t realize how hurt she is. How can she realize it if she can’t trust her thoughts?
He climbs onto the trampoline and bends his knees, springing upwards, expecting to land on his feet, but the tramp jumps up at him, knocking him on his ass and bouncing him perilously close to the edge. He crawls to the centre of the tramp, stands and bends his knees only slightly to propel himself skyward. Again the tramp slams back at him, pitching him onto his belly. It looks so easy when Robertson does it. Several more tries toss Milo to all corners of the trampoline, alerting his cracked rib despite Vera’s pills.
‘You have to keep bouncing,’ Robertson coaches from his window. ‘Pretend you’re on a drum.’
Is the thrill Milo experiences when he sees the boy a true feeling?
‘Flap your arms,’ Robertson instructs.
Milo flaps his arms. ‘Ask your mum if you can come out and play,’
The lovebirds, chased out of the house by Wallace, climb onto the tramp.
‘What are you doing?’ Milo demands.
‘We just want to try it,’ Pablo says, jumping in time with Milo.
‘I won a bronze medal for tramp,’ Fennel informs them, also joining the beat. If they break the rhythm, Milo will be jettisoned. ‘I can do somersaults,’ Fennel offers.
‘Oh, this I gotta see,’ Pablo says.
‘No,’ Milo protests, feeling as though he is on a runaway train. Fennel spreads her legs and touches her toes in the air, displaying her thong. Next she hugs her knees to her chest mid-jump. Pablo, leaping in sync, applauds. Milo looks up mid-bounce and sees that Robertson is gone from the window. Perfect. He will join them. Tanis won’t object to him playing with Pablo, her trusted handyman. The lovebirds bounce holding hands. Milo, for Robertson’s sake, keeps jumping, although his legs are starting to burn.
The sliding doors open and the madwoman hobbles out on her crutches. ‘What do you think you’re doing? This is private property.’
‘We thought Robertson could join us,’ Milo says, spotting the boy behind the doors.
‘This is private property,’ she repeats. She has never referred to boundaries before.
‘Slow down, guys,’ Pablo orders. ‘We all have to slow down together or we go flying.’
‘Get off the trampoline!’ Tanis shouts, waving a crutch. If she had both legs she would be hauling them off it.
‘It’s okay, Tanny,’ Pablo says. ‘We just thought we’d try it.’
‘Get off it.’
‘I want to play!’ the boy screams from behind the door. ‘Why can’t I play?’
With the bouncing subdued, Milo is able to sit on the tramp. ‘We’ll keep an eye on him.’
‘You must be joking,’ she says. ‘Get off my property.’ The boy howls, banging his head into the doors. ‘Stop that,’ she orders. She never speaks to Robertson this way.
‘You can’t lock him up,’ Milo pleads.
‘Don’t tell me how to look after my child. Get off my property or I’ll call the police.’
‘Police are fascists!’ the boy shrieks as sobs tear his throat.
Pablo takes Milo’s arm and helps him off the tramp. Fennel jumps down in one swift movement. ‘We’re sorry, Tanis. We had no idea.’
‘Well, you do now. Keep out.’
‘You can’t do this,’ Milo protests. ‘He needs to be outside.’
‘What he needs are people capable of taking responsibility for him.’
‘I will do that. You know I will do that.’
‘I know you build wigwams, steal hamsters and kill children.’ She hobbles through the doors and wedges her body between Robertson’s head and the glass. The boy’s cries are only slightly muted as she slides the doors closed.
‘It’s like she’s possessed,’ Fennel says, swilling a G&T.
‘What’s she mean about you killing children, Milo?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘She’s totally changed,’ Pablo observes. ‘She don’t even look like Tanis.’
‘It’s really sad,’ Fennel concludes.
‘She loves him more than breathing,’ Milo says. ‘She told me that once.’ He tried to imagine what loving someone more than breathing would feel like. He wasn’t aware that he loved breathing, although he understood that if he stopped he would be dead.
He tried calling Christopher but the hospital switchboard claimed he has no phone.
Pablo massages Fennel’s feet
. ‘Sarah says special-needs kids carry a powerful medicine with them.’
‘Totally,’ Fennel agrees.
‘She says you have to honour the dance of the physical, mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of a kid with special needs.’
‘The problem with the politically correct term “special needs,”’ Milo says, ‘is that we don’t know what those special needs are.’
‘Maybe they should be called unknown-needs kids,’ Fennel suggests.
‘If we knew what their special needs were,’ Milo continues, ‘we wouldn’t have to torture them day in and day out. We could set them up with what they specially needed and let them be.’
Stu phones in a panic because the queens want Milo to be Nazi set dressing tomorrow. Milo hadn’t realized they’d started shooting. ‘Do I have any lines?’
‘Not at the moment. You’re replacing Guard Number Twelve and might get upgraded. Seriously, they liked your energy. Why didn’t you tell me you speak German?’ Stu hangs up before Milo can ask what happened to Guard Number Twelve.
Pablo rests his head in Fennel’s lap. ‘Maybe we should get Sarah over here. She only charges, like, a hundred an hour or something.’
The door swings open and in stomps the carnivore. ‘What are you lot up to?’
‘Who won?’ Pablo asks.
‘We did, of course.’ She has only been here a week and has already found a bridge partner. Within minutes she’s munching crackers and cheese. ‘Where’s Wally?’
‘Upstairs,’ Pablo says.
Vera thrusts crackers and cheese at the horizontal Pablo. ‘You’ll get indigestion eating at that angle.’
Pablo sits up. ‘Vera, Fenny and me have something to tell you.’
‘You’re having it off.’
‘We couldn’t help it,’ Pablo admits. ‘We love each other.’
‘She’s all the stars in his firmament,’ Milo adds.
‘I thought as much. What’s to be done? Just make sure you don’t hurt my Wally.’
‘He’s pretty worked up about it,’ Fennel says. ‘The truth is I never was his girlfriend. Milo hired me to act like his girlfriend so you’d be happy. That he had a girlfriend, I mean.’
‘He’s not a pansy, is he?’
‘Definitely not,’ Milo hurries to assure her, then wonders if, in fact, Wallace is a repressed pansy, which would explain his overcharged bullish nature.
‘I had a cousin went that way and nobody down the pub would talk to him.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with homosexuals,’ Fennel says.
‘Didn’t say there was, ducks, just nobody down the pub wants to talk to them.’
Nazi Guard Number One is a marketing consultant.
‘Then why are you doing this?’ Milo asks.
‘I’ve always wanted to step on the boards,’ Number One says. ‘A childhood dream. You know what they say, better late than never.’
‘So you can just take time off market-consulting to be a Nazi?’ The boots feel tight but Milo doesn’t admit this, fearing that the harried wardrobe woman will alert the queens, who will send him back to junk removal.
‘The fact of the matter is,’ Number One says, ‘I pick and choose my clients, make my own sched. Are you an actor full-time?’
‘Yes,’ Milo asserts while recognizing the absurdity of such a statement. Does being an unemployed bad actor full-time qualify as being an actor full-time?
‘Have I seen you in anything?’
Milo takes a handful of Smarties from the catering table. ‘I did a Canadian Tire ad a while back.’
‘Cool. My agent’s setting me up with some ad agency contacts.’
‘Very good,’ Milo says, which makes him think of Zosia and her positivity. She wore an amber ring from the Baltic Sea her mother gave her. When she missed her mother she turned the ring inward and held the amber against her cheek. Now her mother is ‘really sick.’ What can this possibly mean: cancer, a stroke, heart failure?
‘The fact of the matter is,’ Number One says, ‘I’ve got the acting bug bad.
I’d like to do some theatre. The real stuff. I’m taking acting workshops. Pretty intense.’
Number One’s costume and helmet fit perfectly. On first meeting, he made it clear that he’d been on set the longest of the guards. He warned Milo to watch out for Guard Number Eight who, according to Number One, made a pass at him.
Milo’s helmet fits loosely. A glum wardrobe assistant lined the rim with felt but still the helmet slides down his forehead. Even in tight boots and a loose Nazi helmet, the sight of himself in a full-length mirror startled Milo. They’d buzzed off most of his hair. In uniform he looked like just another Nazi out to torch homes and murder women and children. He saw himself riding a tank into Gus’s village, rounding up the Jews, marching them to the pit and ordering them to remove their clothes. When the prop master put a rifle into Milo’s hands, he levelled it at his reflection and had to say, ‘You talking to me?’
Prisoner Number Ten, in tattered stripes, grabs a handful of mixed nuts. ‘Does anybody have the time? They made me take off my watch.’
‘They made everybody take off their watch,’ Number One says. ‘It’s a period picture.’
‘Does anyone know what happened to Guard Number Twelve?’ Milo asks.
‘They didn’t tell you?’ the Prisoner asks.
‘What?’
‘Heart attack,’ Number One says. ‘Keeled over right in the middle of a march.’
‘A nice guy too,’ the Prisoner says. ‘He kept asking if he was hurting me.’
‘Did they try to revive him?’ Milo asks.
‘Oh yeah, all that jazz.’
‘You saw it?’
‘We all saw it. It held up shooting.’
Milo tries to visualize Number Twelve dying of a heart attack but all he can picture are actors dying in movies. ‘What was it like seeing somebody really … die like that?’
The Prisoner chews nuts. ‘Depressing.’
‘I thought he was faking it,’ Number One says. ‘Trying to get upgraded. Only three of us have lines.’
‘Are these his boots?’
The Prisoner looks closely at the boots. ‘What size are they?’
‘Ten.’
‘Possibly. He wasn’t paricularly large.’
How apt. Milo had an English prof who frequently said how apt when Milo did poorly on assignments. How apt that the headless body is walking around in a dead man’s boots.
He calls Tanis during lunch. When he phoned from home she didn’t answer, thanks, no doubt, to caller ID. ‘It’s me,’ he says, expecting her to hang up. A gaping wound of a pause festers between them. ‘I am so very sorry about everything,’ he says. ‘I was just trying to help him. He was so happy in the debris hut. You should have seen him, he was ecstatic building that thing and I knew if I forced him to go home he would start screaming or bolt or something.’
Why won’t she speak?
‘And I … you see … well, I keep thinking about that orca at Sea World killing his trainer. He’s going crazy in the tank. I mean, imagine being a whale in a tank. That would be like us being trapped in a bathtub. I mean, whales don’t normally kill humans, but there he is, banging around in the tank, turning psycho. Do you know what Jacques Cousteau said about dolphins in tanks? He said watching dolphins in tanks is like watching humans in solitary confinement.’
‘What’s your point?’
‘I’m scared that, locked up, Robertson might turn violent and hurt you.’ He can’t say that, in solitary confinement, the boy is bound to go insane.
‘He would never hurt me. Please don’t interfere.’ She hangs up. Once again Milo is suspended in time and space, unable to touch what matters to him most. In a dead man’s boots.
During his first big scene, he takes his frustration out on Prisoner Number Six with the butt of his rifle. ‘That hurts,’ the fallen man in stripes protests. The fight coordinator demonstrates again how Milo is supposed to fake the blows, a
llowing the prisoner to react. ‘He acts the hurt, get it?’ the coordinator demands. ‘You act the blow, can you do that? Act?’ His disdain for Milo causes his jowls to twitch. ‘Got it?’
‘I thought I might whistle in this scene.’
‘What?’
‘Whistle. You know, it’s just another day’s work for a Nazi, all this killing and torturing. I thought my character might whistle while he works. Could you ask the director if he thinks that’s a good idea?’ Milo is hoping to attract the director’s attention, get upgraded and therefore move up the pay scale. He hasn’t met the director, has only seen him in the distance making theatrical gestures and kissing the dogs.
‘It might be an interesting juxtaposition,’ Milo elaborates, ‘a Nazi guard whistling a happy tune while he’s sending people to their deaths. It’s just a thought.’
‘No thoughts,’ the fight coordinator says.
Christopher is no longer in Trauma ICU. After chasing several nurses and waiting patiently until one of them finally agreed to look up Mr. Wedderspoon on the computer, Milo located him on the geriatric floor. Apparently there are no beds available on the orthopedic floor. He is in a ward with the demented and incontinent. ‘Doesn’t his insurance cover a semi-private room?’ Milo asked yet another uninterested nurse staring at a monitor.
‘He’s on the waiting list,’ she said.
The moist old men have their TVs on but don’t appear to be watching them. A frighteningly thin patient in a plaid bathrobe curses his bowel as he repeatedly shuffles to and from the toilet. Christopher seems unconscious, although not comfortably sleeping. Beneath his newly crooked nose is an unfamiliar scowl. The splint and the external fixator are still on his legs, the catheter continues to leak fluid, but the chest tube has been removed. Milo sets a carton of frozen yogourt on the table and checks the phone. He dials his home number and immediately hangs up when Vera answers. He pulls a chair close to the bed and waits.
‘You again,’ Christopher murmurs. This is what Mrs. Cauldershot used to say.
‘How are you?’
‘Never been better.’
‘I had your phone hooked up.’
‘Why?’
‘In case you want to call somebody. And somebody might want to call you.’
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