A Matter of Life and Death or Something

by Ben Stephenson

  And how, complementarily, she put up a barrier of faux-numbness to protect herself from how hurt she was by my every move. What about how it was all my fault? And how my numbness escalated in secret, only peaking and revealing itself to me far past all turning points when on that one night, in front of her house, after a full two-hour walk of stubbornness and looking for things and pushing her further and always further, when in an honest attempt to right all wrongs, I pulled her in and said I love you. What about how she couldn’t answer—What about how you just didn’t answer?—and immediately started trembling because of how much you were straining to see it in me—to believe it—but WHERE HAD IT GONE OR WHAT HAD IT TURNED INTO? What about how you said nothing and went inside as if you would lock the door? THERE’S NO WAY TO TELL how we both knew how far my version of the word “love” had shifted towards the past tense—how much it sounded like WANTED—

  THERE’S NO WAY TO TELL THIS

  there’s no way.

  CAT

  Last night I was actually out, at a bar, dancing with people. It was this Thursday night thing, and it was fun, for a while. I like dancing with people. With people who don’t care. People whose dances don’t care. I went with June, or I mean, she had called me and told me I should go. I actually did. She was with people I didn’t know. It was alright, I just got into this zone where it didn’t seem to matter whether I was there or not? I was pretty drunk. I think that was it—I was probably drunk, but it was fun to just dance silly under the coloured lights, and then eventually everyone moved outside for a cigarette and I followed. It was the exact type of situation that makes me wish I was a smoker, and I asked for a cigarette and someone gave me one, I lit it, immediately coughing like an amateur and standing with the rest of the small crowd, everyone talking about nothing. I wasn’t talking, though. I wasn’t hearing. I was somewhere else—nowhere exactly. Then I was around the corner of the brick building in the dark, looking for a spot hidden behind anything to pee and smoking the stupid cigarette which was so fun to let slowly kill me, and there was a cat. There was a cat in the alley by itself, no collar, no people. It didn’t really look dangerous, it wasn’t a mangy stray wrought with rabies. It looked pretty, and scared.

  I tossed my cigarette and got down on my knees on the pavement and made myself very small and unthreatening—one thing that comes naturally to me—and I slowly held my hand out, rubbed my thumb and finger together and said come here you, cat, come here please now and the cat twitched its grey head to one side, flashing its white whiskers in the dim light, moving an inch closer, with one paw, then another, then strolling over, keeping focused orange eyes on this shrunken man kneeling in the alley, but still moving its soft angular head to the man’s hand, then sliding its feathery grey cheek along it, marking the man. I scratched behind the little cat’s ears for a while, its eyes narrowed to tiny black wisps, sound holes in miniature violins.

  Then I picked it up and it didn’t care. I held the cat and stood up in the alley and walked back around the corner to the people. They all lit up when they saw me with the little guy, and some of them petted it and whispered things to it in human languages it didn’t speak. When they spoke to it they didn’t expect replies. The cat didn’t need to carry on a conversation or be in on the jokes. Everyone just enjoyed the cat for what it was: a cat. They hung around touching it, scratching it, gently tugging its whiskers, giving it kisses.

  But then the cat was struggling. It’d had enough holding and prodding and love and confusion for one night, for seemingly a lifetime, and it was squirming and shifting its weight, swimming in the man’s arms, with me determined, telling it no with my mind, No, stay, you have no idea how good I will be for you. Stop squirming. Aren’t you a stray? You can be mine instead. Look, it will be better for you: I will feed you and give you shelter and all the things essential to being a cat. I will give you so much, everything—until it brought out the claws and teeth and I had to release my grip. The quick thing fell to the sidewalk, absorbing the impact with front paws, and rear, and shot across the street and into another part of the night.

  That was weird: I was just staring out the window—I’m eating pizza downtown—and I was looking right at these two people and not noticing, I was zoned out and just blurry and the seeing and recognizing parts of me weren’t connected on any level, but then they connected and after a while I noticed these people were staring at me too, like they’d stopped in the middle of the sidewalk across the street, and they were waving at me? I waved back, and they laughed and waved more and then kept going on their way. It was that red-haired girl from that film history class, and her friend I always see around. Why would they wave? People are friendly. Maybe they thought I was someone else. Maybe they were there last night, I can’t remember.

  Inside the bar they were all dancing again. I danced too but it wasn’t the same. I was suddenly so aware of everyone there and so convinced of something, it’s hard now to remember exactly what its shape was, I was just like bombarded with self-consciousness, my body was foreign, I tried, but it just wasn’t going to be one of those nights—those moments of uncautiousness and epic foolishness, shamelessness... it wasn’t one of them. I was moving my arms and legs, hips even, instead of them moving me. I was swaying and trying to just be funny, like everyone with all their glad smiles; I was there in the same moment with all of them, making the same motions, being turned the same reds and yellows and greens and oranges under the same lights, but I wasn’t really there anymore and then I couldn’t decide if I’d ever arrived. And there was something else there now, larger, and hitting me more with every stab at movement, with every beat. Had the cat caused it? Had anything? I was listening to the music and then dancing, and in that separation was this tremendous effort that was leaving a large part of me—my heart?—so blatantly out of it all, so I went outside and started my walk home. I had to go.

  On a parallel street two blocks down, the cat was finally slowing down its run. It was thinking of the man who had snatched it up. The way he had held on. It was so forceful, wrong. The cat had enjoyed being petted by the man and his friends and had felt safe for a time. But when the man continued to hold on, when the man wouldn’t let go

  But when the man clutched and refused

  when he couldn’t accept

  when he couldn’t give up

  when he didn’t understand

  when he just wouldn’t let go, the cat had to get away.

  It remembered the scent of the man.

  It would be more careful around this kind of man in the future.

  PART OF THE REASON WHY IT RAINS

  TWO DAYS after my interview with Mrs. Beckham it was a Saturday, and Max and Maxine and Simon and me all went on a trip. We woke up early and took Max and Maxine’s little green car and sped down the highway. Simon sat up front beside Maxine, who was driving. Uncle Max sat in the back seat with me, and me and him played a game where one person draws a scribble on a page, without thinking about it, and then the other person has to make a drawing out of it. The game was Max’s idea, and it was really fun. Uncle Max handed me back my sketchbook with the next scribble he’d just made.

  “Good luck with that one.”

  The scribble was one lonely line (that was the rules), but it zig-zagged and curved around and made all these pockets in between. It was a real mess of a scribble. I turned the page around to look at it from all angles. On one side, the top was pointy so I thought about making it into a NASA rocket, but it was too fat on the bottom. Then when I turned it another way, two of the points kind of made legs, or I could have made them into legs, I mean, except they were spread out legs at stupid angles. The point of the game wasn’t really to make famous masterpieces or anything, but I couldn’t see how to make anything at all out of the scribble. Then, I drew a tiny dot at the end of the line, and put wings on it. I passed it to Uncle Max.

  “What’s this?” he as
ked.

  “It’s a fly. The scribbly part is just the way the fly decided to fly.”

  “Looks like we’re going to have to make a new rule, smart-guy.”

  After that, I drew a really hard scribble for Max and he made a bendy telescope out of it, then I made a pair of shoes that had three shoes instead of two, where the middle one wasn’t left or right, just middle, and then Max made a jaguar with five legs. We kept making drawings like that for probably an hour. It was hard because we were driving on the highway and the car bumped our pencil around. Max was actually pretty good at drawing. Not as good as me, but I wasn’t surprised. It’s hard to be as good at drawing as me. But his drawings all had this thing about them where you could tell they were all drawn by Uncle Max. They looked like they were drawn by him. I liked that.

  “So how exactly do they make the syrup at this place?” I asked, after we had stopped scribbling.

  Aunt Maxine’s eyes looked at mine in the rear-view mirror.

  “They use taps—well, I don’t want to tell you everything and take the magic out. It’s breathtaking there. You’ll see.” When she talked her eyes went from looking at me in the mirror to looking at the road and then back again.

  “How would you like it if I stuck a tap in you,” Uncle Max said, and pushed his thumb into the side of my shoulder. He pretended to turn a faucet sticking out of me. “Would you let us make Arthur syrup?”

  I laughed. “No.”

  Uncle Max pulled the tap out of my arm.

  “That sounds like something the hermit would do,” I said.

  Simon turned his head around and looked at me because I knew I wasn’t supposed to say mean things about the crazy hermit even though everyone else did constantly. And I said it because Finch once said he heard the hermit made smoothies out of people’s bone marrow. And he was so evil he even had a shadow in the dark.

  I rolled my eyes at Simon so much that I could see my brain upside down like a fishbowl with my annoyed thoughts floating in it upside down and I said “Sorry” in a voice that meant I wasn’t actually that sorry.

  Out the window it was sunny. It was one of those weird days where it’s really sunny but also really wintery. Back at our house, winter was pretty much over, but the farther we drove the more wintery it seemed to get. Along the side of the road there were still some little snow piles with pebbles on top, like clean salt that had put pepper on itself for some reason. Farther off the road in the forest there was still a couple inches of snow, like a blanket around the bottoms of the trees so that only their roots were hidden under the white. It looked like the trees were just stabbed into the ground like birthday candles into that shiny kind of cake icing that’s the good kind you have to boil. The car bumped along and I watched it all whiz by. The sun made my forehead sweaty.

  “I hope this place is more civilized than that pigeon farm you dragged me to,” Max said, moving his head to find Maxine’s eyes in the mirror.

  Aunt Maxine smiled. “Oh lord,” she said.

  “What pigeon farm?” I asked.

  Aunt Maxine’s green eyes spied mine in the mirror. Her yellow hair was blowing on the left side because her window was just barely open at the top.

  “Oh, I took your uncle on a beautiful trip a few years back, but he apparently won’t let me live it down.”

  “Beautiful?” Uncle Max laughed, “If your idea of beautiful is me getting chased out of a barn by a lunatic with an axe, then yes, it was—”

  “Maybe that is my idea of beautiful,” Maxine laughed. “Maybe it’s my definition of beautiful.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Your aunt used to date this insane—”

  “I have an old friend who breeds pigeons on a farm, as a hobby. His name’s Peter, and he has all these really extravagant—”

  “He belongs to the National Pigeon Fanciers Association,” Max said, and he looked at me and rolled his eyes into his brain.

  “Pigeon breeding is a serious pastime,” Maxine said.

  Simon was squinting and looking at Maxine too, listening.

  “... You have to be very dedicated and patient. If you do it right, Arthur, you can make all these incredible types of pigeons, ones like you never see in nature. They have very curious genetics, with all these different traits they can get. Strange coloured ones, oranges and yellows, spotted ones, some with puffy feathers covering their feet, some with little hoods on their necks. Some of them are really skinny, or have big bubbled-out chests, and long white wings, almost anything you can imagine. The neatest pigeons you’ve ever seen, and almost as many types as there are types of people, really. Except, they don’t so much look like pigeons anymore, more like little roosters or cockatiels, or—”

  “Some of them are born blind, and only live a few short months,” Uncle Max said. “Some of them can barely stand up they’re so horribly deformed. They’re doomed, but man they look pretty.”

  Aunt Maxine made a big sigh.

  “Well it’s the truth!” Max said.

  “Max got into a fight with Peter about it,” Maxine said.

  “I asked him some perfectly legitimate questions.”

  “You asked him what gave him the right to play God.”

  “I don’t think that’s a quote.”

  “Anyway Max got chased out—”

  “With an axe.”

  “He happened to be holding the axe at the time. You don’t harass someone who’s holding an—”

  “Either way.”

  Maxine took a loud breath and everyone was quiet for a second. I usually get confused when I try to figure out if Max and Maxine are fighting for real or for fake, so I didn’t try too hard.

  “Anyway,” Maxine said, “I haven’t heard a word from Peter since.”

  Simon laughed. “So how exactly do they get these different types?”

  “Of pigeons? Well, that’s the thing.” Maxine steered us out into the other lane for a second to miss a pothole. “You have to be very careful and do a lot of research, because if you breed the wrong ones, I’m not sure, but say if you breed two rare ones, they can just default back to the plain old grey pigeon. The rock dove. So there’s a whole math and science to it.”

  “But what, they isolate them in couples and mate different combinations?” Simon asked.

  “Yeah, they have all these little cubbyholes, oh it’s so fascinating, I wish you could see it Arthur. Maybe someday, if someone hasn’t completely burnt our bridge.”

  “Arthur doesn’t want to see that freak show anyway,” Uncle Max said, lightly elbowing me in my side and smiling.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it would be fun?” I didn’t know what to say ’cause Max was putting me on a hot seat.

  Max held his hands over his heart and pretended to faint a little. “You’re killing me, Arthur!”

  “Sorry, Uncle Max.”

  I watched the window and I was confused about why Max was so upset about the pigeons. I mean, it did sound pretty messed up and weird, but also it sounded exactly like what humans did. Well grown-up humans anyway. They did lots of research about each other and were very careful and then got sexy in cubbyholes in different combinations. Then lots of normal grey ones came out, and sometimes really pretty ones, but they were all doomed in their own ways. Like, they were blind, or could barely stand up, so they fell over all the time. Some of them looked exactly like the two pigeons they came from and some of them didn’t so much, and others of them got moved to a different cubbyhole somewhere else, because the pigeons they came from didn’t actually want them around. And those ones were so small they couldn’t even remember whether the pigeons they came from were grey pigeons or blind pigeons that fell on their faces, or why they had to get moved. I didn’t know why Max seemed to think it was so out of the ordina
ry, and it made me feel confused because usually grown-ups never cared about things that were messed up. Maybe he was just pretending to care about it to make the drive go by.

  “It’s okay Arthur, I’m joking.” Uncle Max reached his arm forward and gently tickled the back of Aunt Maxine’s neck through the hole in the headrest. “You know I’m joking, right?”

  Aunt Maxine sighed one more time but in the mirror I saw her smile, and kind of roll her eyes a bit, but not far enough to see her brain or Uncle Max upside down. She said “Of course.”

  Then she started searching around the car with one hand while she was still driving. She swept along the dashboard, felt around in some drawers in the front of the car, then reached over and opened the glove compartment. I kept my eyes on the road through the windshield and held on tight to my door handle. The car swerved towards the ditch a bit and Uncle Max made a kind of girly scream.

  “Be careful!”

  “What are you looking for?” Simon asked, so that he could find it for her and she could go back to driving and making sure that we didn’t all get killed. He found a tape for her and put it into the tape player. It was a woman with a beautiful voice like a soft bird and she played a funny banjo. I liked it.

  (Max and Maxine’s car listened to tapes instead of CDs. Aunt Maxine was a teacher; she taught grade one, but she had also taught grade three before. She liked grade one better. She was in charge of twenty-three kids that were all six years old. She showed them how to read words and print words and add up numbers and all that easy stuff, and when they got things right she bought them all ice creams and when they got things wrong she put them in the corner, because that is what it’s like in public school. If I was in public school, I would have been in grade five, but Maxine had never taught a grade that high. That didn’t mean I was smarter than her though; Maxine was actually really smart.