“That’s good,” Jay said.
Jay’s eyes roved around the room, as if they were trying to find something they could rest on for a little while, but weren’t having any luck.
Dean stood up.
“I’ll swing by in a couple of days,” Dean said. “Before you head out east to meet Janet.”
“All right,” Jay said. “I’d like that.”
They shook hands.
“Dean,” Jay said. “What I said there, I didn’t mean it. I appreciate what you did. I know what you gave up for this.”
“I know,” Dean said. “It’s all right.”
“I still have a lot of friends in this city and if you decide to stay in Toronto I can still help you.”
“Thanks,” Dean said. “That means a lot to me. Thanks.”
Then Jay shook my hand, slowly.
“Nice to meet you, Terrell,” he said. “I appreciate all your hard work.”
“No problem sir,” I said.
“I hope you feel better soon.”
“Thank you.”
And then he ushered us out.
A moment after the door shut, Dean looked at me.
“Let’s get drunk,” he said.
My stomach balled up. I wanted to say: it’s your life, but just think about it for 24 hours. Just take that and ice it, table it, stash it away. The booze will still be there tomorrow if you want it. But man, the hurt on his face. The naked pain. And those silences playing on the laptop, the sound of Dean’s voice (no matter what you say, I’ll never really know).
I didn’t have the heart.
“All right,” I said. “Fuck it.”
49
We ended up at this high-end sushi place in Yorkville. On a weekday, at three pm, the place was deserted. We sat right up at the bar, eating edamame and wasabi beans and pounding sake bombs. The chef kept smiling and nodding at us, like he remembered us from somewhere and wanted to come up and say hi, but was too busy.
It’s a lot of fun to watch those guys work up close. Everything he needed was right in front of him in separate little containers. Nothing ever spilled. He did most of the work with his sharp knife, which he regularly dipped in water. Smoked eel, raw salmon and tuna, rice, seaweed, roe. The tips of his fingers were wet and he shaped everything with practiced, effortless motions. Nothing stuck to him.
One platter after another appeared in front of us, and we attacked it like it was a race. Or more precisely, I attacked it like it was a race, a race in which I was intent on lapping my opponent, numerous times if possible.
We started out laughing our heads off, mostly about stuff from back in California. Parties we went to, the stupid shit the idiots we worked with used to do, the trip we took to Vegas and Arizona together. But after a while it dawned on me how many of those stories involved booze, or in Dean’s case, harder stuff. It suddenly seemed like all our stories could have been adequately summarized by saying: ‘We got so wasted.’ And all of the laughter sort of just dried up as it was coming out of me, and I felt pretty full, and drunk.
Still, the waiter set down another black dragon roll in front of us, and a bottle of hot sake.
And then I realized that although I’d been kicking Dean’s ass in the eating competition, he had been kicking mine in the drinking competition. He never seemed to be rushing, that was the thing. He just poured, and drank. Poured, and drank. Methodical, like the man behind the counter, who was still smiling at us like we were somebody he used to know.
“How often do you think about Tanya?” I asked.
Dean shrugged.
“Not that much. I wouldn’t say that time heals all wounds. But things do move on, even if they don’t really change.”
“I didn’t think about her at all,” I said. “I gotta say, I don’t know what you see in these girls.”
“Other than the obvious, you mean.”
“Yeah, other than that. You’re a nice guy. Why do you fall for them?”
“I don’t really fall for them,” Dean said. He took a drink of sake and although it looked pretty casual, he drained half his cup. “Not really. It’s more like a fixed idea. This physical reaction, even though I know it’s wrong.” His gaze wandered across the wall. “Maybe it’s something about saving them. Damsel in distress.” And then he looked back at me. “But look how that worked out. Twice now.”
“What was all that Jay said to you at the end there? About how he could help you out?”
“Well,” Dean said, “I’m a 45-year-old articling student. I spent the last month running around doing this shit instead of working. The guy who was looking out for me retired. The police are investigating me for obstruction of justice.”
“You’re going to lose your job?”
“I’m just not going to get hired back,” Dean said. “So I’m up here in Canada with no connections or anything. A little old to be starting a whole new career.”
“Damn man,” I said. “That’s fucked up.”
“So what do I do?” Dean said. “Go down to California? I don’t know man. I came up here for a reason. I have a lot of the wrong kind of connections down there. The kind of stuff that could get me in real trouble.”
“Dude, don’t do that,” I said. “Don’t go back down that road. You’re a good guy, man.”
“Am I?” he said, and looked at me.
“Yes, for sure,” I said. “I know it.”
He fiddled with his chopsticks.
“Thanks,” he said.
“What’s Tina saying?”
“She says the kids miss me.”
“What’s she doing down there?”
“Not much, I don’t think,” Dean said. “I’m going to call her tomorrow. I guess it would be possible to get things going again but I just feel so used up. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes,” I said.
Dean sighed.
“Do you know what a black box is Terrell?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“It’s an expression. Have you heard it before? Do you know what it means?”
“No.”
“A black box is a system where we know the input and the output but we don’t know its inner workings. Like a machine where if you drop an orange in, juice will come out, but you don’t know what’s inside. Like, is it a juicer, or a trained woodchuck, or a dimensional portal to another universe filled with flashing knives and whirling machines? We don’t know. We can’t see into the thing itself. We can only look at what goes in, and what comes out, and guess.”
I absorbed this.
Dean drank and continued:
“There are lots of black boxes in this world. Whether it’s a comic sealed in plastic or a complex financial product. Or the human heart. We don’t know what’s in them. We look at the input and the output, and we guess. But we don’t really know. You say something to a girl, she cries, and you can guess what she’s feeling. But you never really know.”
50
I drove up behind Anthony Burke while he was jogging and honked my horn. He glanced back, saw me waving, and slowed down and took out his earphones. When I rolled down the passenger side window he came up and leaned in.
“Hey,” I said. “I’ll take you out for breakfast.”
When I drove up to Tim Horton’s he said: “You’ve got to be kidding me” and we drove on to a fancier brunch place, one of those self-consciously independent places where you can trace the lineage of everything on your plate or in your cup. Anthony ordered something with egg whites and grilled vegetables. I got the waffles.
“I’m sorry man,” I said.
“You were just doing your job,” he said as he spooned raw sugar into his espresso.
“Are you going to get divorced?”
“Of course not,” Anthony said. “If she wanted to leave me she’d have already done it. My life is just very unpleasant right now.”
“Well, I’m glad.”
“That my life is unpleasant?”
“No, sorry. That you seem well-adjusted about everything.”
He shrugged his shoulders and drank his coffee.
“Why don’t you leave your wife?” I asked.
“For Anna Herowicz?” he asked. “Leave the mother of my children for the dick-painter? Do you want to think about that on your own, for a second?”
I laughed.
“No, well, for anyone.”
“I love my wife. Just because I slept with another woman doesn’t change that. You still want to have sex with other women after you get married. That’s not an excuse, it’s just a fact. You fight that temptation or you yield to it. Either way, you’ll have your regrets. I guess I sort of got to have my cake and eat it too, but trust me, she’s doing her best to make me pay for it. She told my parents, and our kids, and everything.”
“Yeesh,” I said.
“But this too shall pass,” he said.
“I was thinking about you said, about what’s left when you cut the bullshit out.”
“Oh really?” he said, seeming genuinely interested. “Did you think of anything?”
“Well, I was going to say love.”
“Oh man,” he said, and rolled his eyes.
“But now I’m not so sure.”
“Love is the biggest bullshit pile of them all.”
“Not if it’s real love,” I said.
“Oh, spare me. Like there’s this ‘real love’ out there where you never get tired of fucking your wife. You look like you get around a bit, Terrell. Have you seen any sign of this ‘real’ love yet?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe I had it a couple of times.”
“Every time you’ve been in love it was real, Terrell,” Anthony said. “Here’s the thing. The truth is that the universe is very big, and very old, and doesn’t care about us, and nothing we do matters in a cosmic sense, and that we’re all going to die. Anything that makes us forget that truth for a little while is basically bullshit. It’s something we make up, or, if you like, something we invest in, to make ourselves feel good. To make the universe a more personable place.”
“That’s pretty cynical.”
“It’s existential. Look, I believe in love, and art, and all that. But you just can’t interrogate it too much. Or you’ll be left on your own.”
He sipped his coffee for a while and then motioned to the bandage on my head.
“What happened to your head?” he asked.
I told him the whole story, more or less. The whole time he paid close attention and seemed very interested. I thought it was just more of his shtick, the good listener thing (probably how he scored chicks). But at the end of it he told me it was a great story, and he thought he could help me find a publisher.
It’s not any easier to know where to end your story than where to start it. I could tell you what Dean and I are doing at the time I’m writing this, but that wouldn’t be the end. It would just temporarily bring you up to date. I wanted to tell the story of what happened to Brucie, the real story, and I did. You’re more likely to get this sort of thing right if you set limits on what you can expect to truthfully and accurately relate, and not push it too far in every direction. If you’re honest with yourself about what you can ever really know…
About the Author
The Black Box author Cliff Jackman is also the author of Deeper, a superb collection of short stories probing beneath the surface of our ordinary lives and unthinking assumptions to the startling hidden truth.
Considered by some to be Canada’s answer to Steven King, Jackman is an important literary discovery who brings well drawn characters into stories that contain more than a few sinister twists and turns and unexpected outcomes.
Jackman was born in Deep River, Ontario, and raised in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. He received a Bachelor's in English from York University, a Master's in English from Queen's University, and a Bachelor of Laws from Osgoode Hall Law School. Jackman is a practicing lawyer who lives and works in Toronto.
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The Black Box: A novel Page 19