The Opening Sky

by Joan Thomas

  “Sylvie?” says Emily.

  “I didn’t bring anything on the Maldives,” Sylvie says. “I don’t know if I’m sold on it, as our subject. There are other places being ruined by climate change, like Bangladesh and Pakistan, where millions and millions of people live. Or the Horn of Africa. Or our own Arctic. Why did we choose the Maldives? It’s sexier, I guess. Or we think it’s sexier because there is more tourism there.”

  They stare at her. Across their faces flash two signals Sylvie is used to seeing. You’re so smart, Sylvie. Why don’t you piss off, Sylvie?

  “I’m not trying to slow us down,” she says. “Honestly. I’m not being a bitch about this. It’s just that … I don’t feel well. In fact, I have to go right now.”

  Someone’s in the bathroom, looking at her from behind the sinks. What a hot girl, is her split-second thought when she glimpses herself (grungy, sleepless, sick) in the mirror. Noah’s responsible for this, even though he’s still in Guelph. Sex, sex, sex – this rundown tiled bathroom throbs with it. That’s what her dream was about just before her phone woke her up. Not Noah coming home, just sex. Something secret and delicious tugs at her from it. It was like being deep in a colour, or a texture like velvet. It was just a mood. Not a drama, which is what most dreams are.

  She sits on the toilet with her jeans still on, folds herself over with her head hanging down – a private bit of theatre to justify leaving the meeting. She’s in no danger of puking. She’s not sick, she just feels weird. She straightens up and leans into a corner of the tiny stall, and exhaustion crashes down on her like bricks. In a flash her eyes are closed and she’s dreaming again. She’s skimming through a stand of massive trees, a dark, enchanted forest, trees with jocular patches of red hung here and there in their upper branches, trees crammed so close she can hardly slip between them. “Roots to shoots,” she mutters. She pushes her way through the forest and hears a snore, and shakes herself awake. Oh god, how could she fall asleep on a toilet?

  She stands, picks up her backpack, and pushes open the door of the stall. It’s not just that she’s tired, it’s the fucking pill. She should never have started it, and the longer she stays on it the worse she feels. She did it to please Noah. Not that he’d asked her to (he’d probably be against it if he stopped to think it through), but he told her his penis-wearing-a-condom riddle (What is happy and sad at the same time?) and just because of that she ignored her own principles and went to the doctor and asked for the pill. She did it to make Noah happy. And that is wrong in every way – her body is telling her how wrong it is.

  She moves to the sink and turns the tap and watches water run silver over her fingers. What is bad for the planet is bad for the body. And vice versa, she tells herself. She’ll go to the walk-in clinic, she’ll go now. She doesn’t have time. But she needs to get some different birth control before Noah gets home. Go now, she orders herself, banging on the chrome bar of the hand-dryer. Go right now.

  On his noon break, Aiden heads for the footbridge to the park. Across the bridge he swerves onto the river trail, plodding like a pony. He reaches up and sticks in his earbuds (they’re new, he loves them, they fit like a charm) and Tom Waits is growling in his ear. He hits Forward and lands on a guitar riff he knows to his bones.

  Below him the river is clotting into ice. Or is it melting? It’s melting, and the snow that fell in the night is softening, each little origami of a snowflake losing its hold on itself and turning to water. And then everything will freeze, and the city will be a mess of frozen ruts until March.

  Another freak December. A dog turd on the path – Aiden sees it and then, Aw shit, he nails it. Almost Christmas and not cold enough to freeze dog shit. He does his midday mood check, gives himself a seven, but a knot of shame catches when he breathes.

  He thuds along the trail and forces himself back to it, back to his fractious morning, to nine o’clock, nine-fifteen. He was sitting by the desk with his mug of coffee in hand and his first client, Norman Orlikow, dapper as a badger on the pleather couch, was telling a long story about his neighbour dying the week before, during routine elective surgery.

  Aiden listened conscientiously, taking note of Norman’s grasp of medical detail and how much satisfaction he took in displaying it. But finally he gave his chair a cut-to-the-chase swivel. “You were really close to this neighbour?” he said, or words to that effect. That’s when he registered the light in Norman’s eyes. It was triumph.

  Turns out that one day last summer, the neighbour’s dog, a possibly illegal pit bull cross, had lunged at Norman as he innocently walked by on a public sidewalk. So Norman called the police. Two officers came but they wouldn’t take the incident seriously. There was a scene on the street, people gathered. The dog made nice, rotating its ugly stump of tail, and the neighbour cracked jokes and rolled his eyes in a private signal to the cops that what they were dealing with here was the local nutbar. And now the neighbour has died.

  Norman paused, shiny eyed. “You know what’s really strange?” he said. “Since the summer, three people I know have … passed. Tom Spokes – you might have heard of him, the guy who was killed in that freak accident on the Osborne Bridge? His SUV jumped the guardrail, d’you remember? And Nancy Sylvester, my old piano teacher – she had an embolism. And now this gentleman. And you know, it’s kind of bizarre, but a few weeks before each of them passed, we had what you might call a run-in.” His face was thoughtful, almost reverent. “It’s true, you know. I only just realized it last night. At one time or another, every one of those three people treated me like dirt.”

  Man has no greater happiness in life than watching his neighbour fall off a roof. But Aiden knew this was something else. “You believe the deaths of these people are connected to the way they treated you,” he said.

  Embarrassment rejigged the lines of Norman’s face. “Ha! Like I have that kind of power. Ha ha, I wish! Of course I don’t think that, Doctor Phimister.” He’s been in therapy a long time, Norman has, with other people.

  Aiden said, not for the first time, “I’m not a doctor.” He let a beat go by, put down his coffee. “I wonder if you haven’t felt humiliated at one time or another by pretty much every person you know. Then when somebody dies, you see this sort of cause and effect. You feel vindicated, as if they were being paid back for how they treated you.”

  NORMAN (gone very still): That would be sick. It would be. Really sick. Is that the way you see me?

  AIDEN: You’re the one who linked the three of them. I’m just trying to make sense of what I’m hearing.

  NORMAN (eyes round and black, as if he were summoning up the furies): Are you trying to humiliate me, Doctor Phimister?

  AIDEN: No, I’m trying to help you understand yourself.

  NORMAN: I don’t think so, Doctor Phimister. I think you’re trying to humiliate me.

  AIDEN (grinning like an ass): Maybe I should start watching my back. I might be the next to die. From no real cause.

  That’s when the histrionic bastard jumped to his feet and started kicking. First at Aiden’s wire wastebasket, then at the weeping fig, knocking it over. Then he stomped out into the waiting room and kicked in the privacy glass by the door, putting his boot through the middle pane.

  Can’t you joke? Aiden asks himself, shifting his weight to the balls of his feet as the trail rises. No, you can’t joke, at least not with Norman Orlikow. Who’s got his precious diagnosis from the DSM – he waved it like a diploma the first time he came to the office. Social Anxiety Disorder. Who did actually say he wished he had the power to kill people who offended him. He did! Aiden should work with a tape recorder for instant playback, the way the police do.

  No, Aiden should watch his own reactivity.

  Steve Earle in his earbuds now, and Aiden’s by the English Garden, the flowers are mounds under the snow, and he turns his mind to the most troubling hour of this troubling morning, to Odette Zimmerman. Who appeared in the doorway annoyingly early, while Aiden was still pickin
g glass out of the carpet in the waiting room. “Don’t ask,” he said.

  She lowered herself into a chair and watched him, amused in her haughty way. She looks like the woman who walks into the private eye’s office at the beginning of a film noir: she’s got the widow’s peak, and the scary eyebrows, and the severe, dramatic way of dressing, and you know without a doubt that what you’re about to hear has bugger all to do with the real story. She’s a cultural historian, Odette, though she doesn’t have a position at the moment, she’s reduced to displaying her erudition to bus drivers and the paper boy and, of course, to Aiden. She was caught shoplifting – that’s why she’s in therapy. A filet of Arctic char, then a lava lamp from a second-hand store. As acting-out behaviour, none of this interested her much. She tried to intellectualize it: wasn’t the lava lamp about something called thing theory?

  This morning she launched into one of her pontifications as soon as they’d moved to the office, holding her gaze aloft as though she were reading the words off the ceiling. One minute Aiden was listening for the vital thread, then the next minute he was completely at sea. “Anyway, last night it came to me, crystal clear,” he surfaced to hear her say. “And I don’t know why it took me this long to see it. I need to tell him. We’d both be so much better off if I just spoke my truth.”

  “Come again?” Aiden said.

  “Dante,” Odette said, lowering her gaze to the altitude of Aiden’s forehead. “I just need to tell him how I feel. The way we are with each other right now, it’s always there. It’s the elephant in the room. It’s not good for either of us.”

  Dante. It was her son she was talking about, her eighteen-year-old son. A month into therapy she’d announced, “I’m very tuned in to my sexual attraction to Dante. Very. He walks into the room and I am instantly aroused.”

  The shock and revulsion Aiden felt, it wasn’t just for what she’d said. It was the exhilaration in her eyes, the level of self-involvement that would let her reveal something like that with no inhibition. He knew she read psychoanalytic theory for fun; in her mind, she and Aiden were consulting, peer with peer, over a fascinating patient. This lust for her son she seemed to regard as her Freudian bona fides. “You can’t control what you don’t own,” she was fond of musing, a sentiment Aiden could hardly dispute. Since she dropped that bombshell, he’s worked hard to keep the focus on her, on how she can deal with her sexuality in healthy ways, but she’s always been more interested in parsing the strands of this anarchic attraction, as though there might be a treasure at the end, some big psychoanalytic payoff.

  So, this morning. “Better it should be clear between us,” she said.

  “Odette,” Aiden said. He leaned forward and took her hand, something he never did – in six or eight years of counselling he had never before touched a client. But he held her wrist hard to get her attention. She finally met his eyes, already resentful.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “That would be a huge mistake. It would be extremely damaging to your son. It would deprive him of his mother. These feelings of yours have nothing to do with him.” He could feel his anger in his nostrils. “Tell me this,” he said. “You chose your last appointment before a two-week break to drop this. Why?”

  “It just came to me.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’ve set your mind on this. You don’t want to give us a chance to work it through. You’re asking me to ratify a decision you’ve made to act destructively.”

  “So feelings are bad? That’s what you’re telling me?”

  “Acting on them can be. You’re an adult. It’s infantile to think we’re entitled to act on every feeling.”

  Finally she promised not to talk to Dante about it over the holidays. That was the most Aiden could extract from her.

  As soon as the door closed behind Odette, Aiden picked up the phone, punched in Edith Wong’s number, and left a message. She’s a good colleague; they do a lot of consulting. Don’t obsess, he tells himself now, plodding between stands of red dogwood poking through the snow. Have a little trust. She brought it to therapy first.

  He overtakes two women, passes them in a show of strength. He jogs by the shack – the homeless shack hidden in the trees on the riverbank. Simple living. His thoughts jump to his daughter, to Sylvie at Lower Fort Garry, the job she had as a kid. As a historical re-enactor – what a great job – it was 1832 the whole summer. He was away a lot, doing the intensive for his counselling program, but when he could, he got up in the morning and drove her there. She’d sit in the car braiding her hair with nimble fingers, holding each pigtail in her mouth while she fixed it with a white ribbon. No elastic bands back then.

  “Was that in your handbook?”

  “Nope,” Sylvie said. “I figured it out.” She was about eleven at the time, she was under some sort of child-labour contract.

  The path curves into the forest and the city falls away – just him in the bush. Twelve trees per person in this city. He reaches up and squelches his iPod. Sometimes you hear chickadees along this path. Today all he hears is his Adidas on the gravel, plod, plod, plod, plod. His feet have trod, have trod, have trod, and all is seared with trade, bleared, smeared with toil, and wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell. Ah, fuck Hopkins, you can’t run to Hopkins, all those sprung rhythms. Running, you gotta have the old iambic. Ta-da, ta-da, ta-da, ta-da. With tears he fights and wins the field, his naked breast stands for a shield, his camp is pitchèd in a stall, his bulwark but a broken wall.

  Then he’s back in traffic, he’s jogging on the spot at the stoplight, and then he’s at his building. Sweat worms down his face and his runners are sopping. Somebody’s plastered cheap Christmas crap all over the elevator; tinsel droops like cobweb onto his head. He’s riding up with an MBA in a tailored suit. Sixteen floors of tax lawyers and marketers and accountants and real estate tycoons in this building – the whole block hums with mercantile intrigue. And there at the centre of it, in a cloister of secrets and tears, sits Aiden Phimister, Bachelor of Arts (Psych./Eng.), Master of Arts (Eng.), Master of Family and Individual Therapy. The MBA sharing the elevator doesn’t look at him, but no doubt he smells him, he feels Aiden’s heat. They’re two different species, sensing each other in the woods and veering in opposite directions.

  The winter sun is a white disk behind the clouds when Sylvie slings her backpack over one shoulder and starts down Ellice Avenue. Christmas wreaths hang from the light poles, shreds of limp plastic, the colour of camouflage gear. Who thinks that sort of thing is a good idea? Pine boughs, Sylvie thinks as she walks swiftly along the slushy street, refreshed by her tiny nap on the toilet, and her mind veers to her botany project, her brilliant permaculture design – the globe artichokes and borage and Swiss chard and kale growing in free and happy collaboration, the strawberries for groundcover and the flowers to attract predator insects to keep the pests down, and no wasteful rigid rows like the garden she planted when she was young. A warm light fills her mind, the light of Dr. Hillsborough standing in his office doorway, saying, “I think you have a gift for this.” And then an ugly image snaps its jaws, a flash of recall from just before sleep swamped her this morning. The words “Replace Existing File,” and herself clicking on them. She’d opened a new window with her rough draft – her lame, pathetic rough draft – looking for a paragraph she’d deleted. Had she ever, once in the night, saved all the new work she had done?

  She’s just past Lockhart Hall. She wheels around, runs back, and dashes up the steps. On a bench in the wide, empty common area she yanks her laptop out of her pack, boots it, taps frantically on the control pad. Neglected_garden.doc. She scans the first paragraph. “Oh god!” she gasps. UNDO, UNDO.

  Benedictor is where she hoped he’d be, working in a study carrel just outside the library.

  “Oh god, Benedictor,” Sylvie cries. “I’m so glad you’re here! I did something so, so stupid!” Her laptop is still on; she’s been running through Lockhart Hall with it open in front of her like an acc
ident victim. She sets it on his desk. “Look. My botany paper. It’s due tomorrow. But look.” She scrolls down. “Oh my god, it should be twelve pages! My tables – where are my tables?”

  He gets it instantly. “You saved an old version on top of your new one.”

  “Oh god!” She weaves her fingers through her bangs, clenches them. Now she does feel like puking. “I did so much great work yesterday and in the night. Oh god. Oh, I’m so stupid! It’s like, I saw Replace and my brain was on drugs or something.”

  “That’s bad, Sylvie. That’s really bad.” He looks at her gravely.

  “I know, but it was six o’clock in the morning. I haven’t slept since, like, last week. Oh, Benedictor, can you get it back?”

  “I don’t know. I can try. Can you leave it here?”

  “Yes. Yes!”

  There’s a half-eaten egg sandwich on plastic wrap in front of him. He was probably up all night too. She can see his kindness in his face. She can see him wanting to reassure her, but he’s so honest he can’t. Instead he raises a hand to give her a high-five. When their two hands touch, they could be an Olympic symbol, his so black, hers so white. She loves him. She should date him. If she hadn’t found Noah, she would.

  At the clinic she asks for Dr. Rodham. He’s away, but she can see someone named Dr. Valdez if she’s prepared to wait an hour. She’s prepared – she can study anywhere. She finds a chair in the crowded waiting room and pulls out her Evolutionary Development handouts. Evo-Devo, Evo-Devo, her mind chants. It would make a great name. Or, like, Eva Diva.

  Dr. Roadster, she calls Dr. Rodham. Of course he’s away. He’ll be driving along the California coast in a convertible with a blond beside him. Sylvie’s seen him twice. The first time, last August, when she came to ask about going on the pill, the nurse put her in an examination room to wait. Through the wall she could hear a guy talking on the phone. He was trying to rent a car at LAX. “Honda Fit?” he said in a disgusted tone. “What do you have in the Porsche line? What about a BMW? A Z4? You don’t have a single bloody roadster?” Finally he hung up and then the door opened, and he came in flashing a smile that had nothing to do with happiness or friendliness. His teeth were over-whitened.