Boy Lost in Wild

by Brenda Hasiuk

  “We have to take him back. The results were inconclusive, whatever that means.”

  “I’ll take him,” I shout.

  “No, I’ve got nothing until after lunch. I can go.”

  Her tone of voice means there is no arguing. She wants to speak with Mehta herself, ensure nothing like this happens again.

  But sometime soon, I will share the heartache, Jagat, the hollow, physical ache, of when she disappeared. After three more nights of lovemaking, I arrived to find no one but a jet-lagged sessional lecturer peering at me suspiciously through the peephole.

  “I came back early. I don’t know where she is. I think she goes to the shelter sometimes.”

  I had no idea what shelter she might have been referring to, and my pride was badly bruised. I went into the lane behind the apartment, where a giant bin overflowed with burst garbage bags that occupants had sent down the chute attached to their fire escape and Gypsy Joan had gleefully dubbed The Esophagus, and vomited like a street drunk. I had risked everything for her, had opened my heart, shared my triumphs and my guilt, and she had simply left.

  I waited. I wandered. But after maybe three weeks, the hollow ache hardened into dull, pulsing anger, at her, and at myself. My love had been on the pill and so I had not used protection, god knows why. Perhaps it would’ve made the whole thing seem premeditated rather than predestined. But the AIDS crisis was at its height and I lived in fear of infection, of having to tell your mother of my transgressions. To this day she does not know that I delayed our wedding by six months not because the hall was double-booked, but because I was anxiously awaiting test results that would put me in the clear.

  “Raj, darling, what are you doing? You’ll be late. It’s 8:20.”

  I shut the water off, reach for the towel. For months after Gypsy Joan left me, I never felt truly clean. “Yes,” I shout through the door. “Yes, I know.”

  The next day, the phone call comes. The lump is nothing, or whatever it is, it means nothing, and will most likely disappear on its own. I pat you on the shoulder the way a father does, kiss your thick, lady-killer hair.

  “I wasn’t worried,” you say, grinning at me slyly. “Were you?”

  “No,” I say. “No. But it’s different when you’re a parent. Some small part of me always worries. Your mother’s the same. A more calm and intelligent woman you’ll never meet, except when it comes to her children.”

  She crosses her arms, pretends to be insulted, but her face is pure joy.

  You stride across the kitchen in your running shorts and bare chest, the world your oyster. You are leanly muscular, a grown man, but there’s something about your state of undress that reminds me of when you were still toddling, still reaching for my knees with your pudgy little paws.

  Perhaps you didn’t even notice that I threw a few coins in that girl’s fedora as we walked from my brother’s office. Perhaps you had no idea that I was trembling, never mind needing to know why. You seem such a profoundly driven and disciplined young man. Perhaps you’re not prone to my particular weaknesses. And yet I still can’t help feeling that you of all people might need to hear my story.

  You see, most people would assume that because of this youthful love of mine, I am, deep down, an unhappy man—that I’m someone who still longs for the passion and the freedom I once knew, no matter how briefly, and can never have again. But they would be wrong.

  Over the years, I’ve come to see my first love as the silly and affected young thing that she’d first been from afar. Because you see stereotypes, too, aren’t necessarily untruths, and it’s like this young woman used them as her yardstick. What would a wild child who sponged off idealistic students be like? She had made an art, or at least a con art, of being Gypsy Joan. And the thing is, much to my sorrow, this has only made me love her more. All those hours of heavy conversation and not once did I try to understand her. Where was her family? What frightened her? How wounded must one be to choose the world’s most persecuted, the most despised, the most hopelessly lost people as your guide? How deluded?

  Gypsy Joan was lost, and not just to me. She was a lost soul and I doubt she ever found what she was looking for. I live with this painful knowledge every day, Jagat.

  Then again, perhaps this is an old man’s story, or at least of a man who is no longer young. I look at you standing tall there by your still-beautiful, beaming mother. You’re eager to get out there, race the lanes of our leafy neighbourhood—so fit, so alert, so ready—and I have a feeling you wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  Sandwich Artists

  Five Facts

  1. Red hair is still honoured amongst Moslems, as the Prophet Mohammed himself was reported to have red hair.

  2. Iran is home to one of the world’s oldest continuous major civilizations, with historical and urban settlements dating back to 4000 BCE.

  3. In the last decade, Iranian-Canadian women have dominated Canada’s national beauty pageant circuit.

  4. The word “paradise” comes from the Persian for “enclosed garden.”

  5. In September 2011, Cryos International, one of the world’s largest sperm banks, announced that it would no longer accept donations from red-haired men due to low demand from women seeking artificial insemination.

  * * *

  The minute they see each other, they think the same thing: UGH.

  Casey has been on the job for six shifts and is getting the hang of grabbing just the right fistful of lettuce, not too much so it spills out the side, not too little so they don’t think you’re being stingy with the rabbit food. Kye is giving Dorri her first-day tour.

  “This is the drink machine,” he says. “Just push the button—small, medium, large, extra large—and it does all the rest.”

  He says this as if he’s showing her the space arm. Kye is easily impressed, acts as if being assistant manager at a subway sandwich counter inside a hardware outlet doesn’t make him a sad case. The place isn’t what you’d call busy, more like half-hungry customers trickle in after loading up on drywall or fake designer lamps, but even if it was hopping, he would still be a sad case.

  Casey only knows Dorri as Scarf-face, a name his friend Rowan came up with. He watches her follow Kye around with the same smug, disinterested expression she has in the hallways at school. She pretends she has no idea who Casey is, and for all he knows, maybe she doesn’t. He’s always been a blend-in kind of guy.

  “Of course, when working with food, we like hairnets,” Kye says, as if it was a given that everybody likes hairnets. “But I guess you’ve got yours built in there, so you’re good.”

  Dorri fakes a smile. She does recognize Casey. She also recognizes that this is their supervisor’s, or whatever he is, pathetic attempt at levity. His nervous energy is grating, a radio turned up to eleven and caught between two stations. His chewed fingernails leave her wondering where he spits them.

  “Yup,” she says, patting her headscarf like it’s been a good boy. “I’m always prepared.”

  Before he leaves for the night, Kye delivers his words of wisdom. He goes over the close routine three times, managing to be both incoherently fast and long-winded. Dorri stops listening halfway through round number two. Kye tells her he’s leaving her in Casey’s capable hands, as if Casey’s been there six years instead of six shifts.

  “Friday nights usually mean it’s steady,” Kye says. “But not in July. Too many cottagers.”

  Finally, he throws an enormous empty-looking backpack over his shoulder, waves wistfully as an explorer leaving his mates behind on a deserted island. “Good luck, kids.”

  Dorri crosses her arms, takes a deep breath, tries to remain calm. “What an asshole.”

  Kye is barely out of earshot. By the look on her face at school, Casey had assumed she was an uptight religious bitch, but it turns out she was just a bitch-bitch. He waits until Kye is safely outside, gliding past the window on his twinkletoes. Kye walks like his heels are too delicate to hit the pavement so he has to glide
along on the balls of his feet. Together, they watch him stumble over a discarded pack of gum, watch him give them the thumbs-up sign.

  “I don’t know,” Casey says. “More like a moron.”

  Dorri doesn’t respond. It has begun to sink in that this is perhaps the last place on earth she would choose to spend a summer’s night; that it’s possible the smell of processed sandwich meat will seep into her pores until dogs start following her home; that she’s stuck in an over-air-conditioned, underlit counter cage with a nearly grown man named Casey.

  The year before, it had gotten out that he was named after one of the puppets on an old kids’ show called Mr. Dressup. This was the kind of information that, no matter how friendless you were in class, you couldn’t help finding out about. That was how it worked: school forced you to share precious brain space with people and subjects not of your own choosing.

  One day, every member of the student body just knew Casey’s mother was the school secretary and had spilled the beans about how she’d named her only son after a doggy puppet. The next day, despite yourself, you were taking note of him in the hall: a pudgy body on a skinny frame, pimples on the neck, light reddish hair that would probably fall out early. Casey the puppet: affable, geeky, forgettable, and his friend Rowan, the über-irritating genius-boy/Asperger’s case.

  Calm, Dorri says to herself. Calm, calm, calm. Keep your eye on the ball. “Is he always like that?”

  Casey turns down the temperature on the cast iron urn of “Homemade Soup” that gets delivered from some warehouse every morning. Kye likes to keep it scorching, but the night before some pot-bellied plumber had threatened to sue Casey for scalding his tongue, lower lip and chin.

  “Pretty much,” Casey says. “But as far as I can tell, he’s never really here at night.”

  A chubby-armed woman wearing too much makeup for a hardware store stops by the display of cookies. She hugs a round yellow planter, and the sunglasses perched on her head strangely resemble a second set of ears. She clicks her tongue and keeps going.

  “Winnie the Pooh,” Dorri says. “Don’t you think? A grotesquely made-up Winnie.”

  Casey is still fiddling with the urn, not exactly sure if he’s turned the temperature up or down. “What?”

  Dorri takes a deep breath, but it doesn’t help. “Nothing,” she says. “Forget it.”

  For the rest of the night, they make no further attempt at real conversation. Casey helps her void a soda that tasted flat to a picky guy with a comb-over. He shows her how to heat a meatball supreme. They’re all business, which is just fine with both of them.

  When Kye had told Casey someone new was starting, Casey couldn’t help hoping it might be someone interesting, because he never learned. He knew damn well that things usually turned to shit. He knew any girl he was even half-ass interested in wouldn’t be caught dead with their tongue in his mouth. He’d accepted that his sex life was a date with a dirty sock and computer screen. But somehow he never stopped hoping, because one summer some measly thing did happen. Two years ago, they’d rented a cabin at Grand Beach, his parents and him and Rowan, when they were almost fifteen, and he’d got it on with a seventeen-year-old near Lanky’s french fry shack. He’d known she was seventeen because her grad date had gone off with her cousin and she was crying her heart out over bottles of hard lemonade. They hadn’t actually had sex, but they’d come close, and she’d run her fingers through his hair, told him she loved carrot tops, made him show her his chest to see if it was just as orange. “You’re so young,” she’d cooed, and he thought he might explode into flames.

  Hell, he would’ve settled for a half-decent guy on his shifts, someone other than Rowan to hang out with. Nearly all his life he’d known Rowan, and all that time Rowan had been a pain in the ass, and yet there he was, always there, and Casey did nothing to get rid of him. Was it too much to ask for a co-worker with maybe some connections, who knew somebody other than the same old, same old?

  Apparently it was. Because he got Scarf-face. Who, as it turned out, actually had a name almost as lame as Casey, but who still had the same unibrow, the same skinny ass, the same bitchy expression. Rowan had told him they actually ban those headscarves in France because it’s a violation of human rights, a slap in the face for the achievement of separation between church and state. Canadians didn’t have to pray in schools anymore. We didn’t have to wear a stupid uniform. Why did she always look so frigging smug?

  As the night wears on and the measly trickle of customers slows to a drip, getting the cold, modestly covered shoulder begins to get to him. He is a live-and-let-live guy. He couldn’t give two shits what she wore on her head. Half the time, people got their panties in a knot about absolutely nothing. You might as well just go ahead and avatar yourself permanently, Rowan liked to say, since everything out there is just a game anyway. But ignoring someone right beside you, minute after mind-numbingly boring minute, staring out into the garbage-strewn parking lot like it was the frigging ocean at sunset, wasn’t just too weird-ass for words. It was rude.

  Twice, Casey’s father has won City Transit Driver of the Year, and if there is one thing the big, friendly doofus has taught his son, it’s that a little bit of chatter never hurt anyone. And besides, he wasn’t the one who’d brought up Winnie the frigging Pooh.

  He begins putting cheese slices away for the night, slamming the mini fridge drawers as hard as he can. “So do your parents make you wear that thing?”

  Casey has no way of knowing that he isn’t far off about the concrete ocean vista. Dorri’s neighbour, Rain, has been trying to teach her meditation techniques so she can chill the hell out. But that’s easy for Rain to say because she’d learned to chant a mantra before she could talk. And it’s easy for Rain’s parents because they’d inherited some money and could spend a lot of time on spiritual whims.

  Dorri shakes her head and pops a black olive in her mouth. “Uh-uh.”

  This is not what Casey expects. Not the answer, and not the olive. “Then why do you wear it?”

  Dorri helps herself to a medium cup and pushes one of the magic buttons. Iced tea descends as if from the heavens until it spills over the sides, pooling at a grated base that lacks proper drainage.

  “You pushed large,” Casey says.

  Dorri pats the little puddle on the floor with her shoe. “No shit.”

  “So why do you wear it?” Casey asks.

  Dorri shrugs a big exaggerated stage-shrug. “Because they hate it.”

  Casey gets the mop and slops up around her brown suede clogs. They look like something dirty hippies might wear. “So you don’t have to?”

  She has to stop herself from asking don’t have to what? Rain has warned her that there is a fine line between good angry and too angry. “Do you know any Iranian history?”

  Casey keeps mopping, spreading iced tea all over the puke-yellow tiles. This is not same old, same old. Scarf-face didn’t wear that thing because of some strict Muslim daddy. She didn’t talk like an uptight chastity case. She stole from her employer before she’d even finished her first shift.

  “No,” he says. “I mean, I know they’re crazy over there. Like they burn flags and try to get nukes.”

  She starts laughing then, not exactly at him, but like she’s at a loss, like that’s all there’s left to do.

  And the whole way home on his bike, in the frigging tepid rain, he keeps hearing it, that laugh, keeps seeing her laughing face, the way her unibrow stitches together like a worm crawling on a wet sidewalk. The way her lips seemed so hugely pink and her teeth so headlight-white against her dark skin. He can’t get over that she of all people is called Dorri, a good name for an animated fish or the adorable dwarf in a storybook. He has no idea yet that in Farsi, Dorri means sparkling like the sun, a fact Dorri views as more of a sick joke than a blessing.

  There was so much those two, Casey and Dorri, didn’t know. Enough to fill shift after shift under a fluorescent sky, an eternity of dead Friday nights be
hind the counter/cage.

  They don’t talk about the fact that he lives north of Portage Avenue, where the aging housing stock is filled primarily with what the government likes to call “working families,” along with a good helping of crazy cat ladies, Hells Angels chapters and socially assisted renters who come and go thrown in. Or that she lives on the south side, the mud-bottomed river side, where “professional families” fix up their aging housing stock with custom-made stained glass and kitchen renos that maximize a property’s market value. They don’t talk about the fact that Casey’s mother is the sunny school secretary with a bad haircut and big mouth, or that his father once played on the national water polo team and now drives a bus. Dorri never mentions that her parents are both professional flautists, the only Muslim members of the symphony, who, truth be told, probably worship music more than Allah.

  But they do talk. Casey asks questions to fill the empty, high-ceilinged space, to hear a voice that isn’t Rowan’s. Dorri answers because she can’t help it. There is so much to explain.

  “Why are you working here if you hate it so much?” Casey asks.

  Dorri salts the cucumbers and helps herself. “I need money. A lot of money.”

  Casey tries not to bite. There are times he thinks she says things just to reel him in, to play up her mystery. She tells him she wears the headscarf because she hates superficiality, hates the way our consumer society treats women like objects. Then the next minute she tells him plastic surgeons in Iran perform more nose jobs than in any other country in the world. She says she hates the extremists and their perverted view of Islam, then she says she quit piano lessons because music is not really a traditional part of Muslim culture.

  But like his dieting mother with a piece of cake that isn’t even close to her favourite kind, Casey bites anyway. You have no mind of your own, Rowan has told him. You’re a cipher.

  “Why do you need money?” Casey asks.