Help Me, Jacques Cousteau

by Gil Adamson

  “There! You see?”

  “What?”

  “You’re so maddening. I can make you admit things that aren’t true.”

  “Look, I don’t know —”

  “I bet I can make you want me again.”

  “I’m leaving now,” he announces, but he doesn’t move.

  “Sure, go ahead. You’ll go home tonight and you won’t tell your girlfriend anything about this. And you’ll wish you’d taken the chance to kiss me again — no one’s looking, no one would know. You’ll sit there over breakfast and wish you had.”

  He grabs me then, on cue, and kisses me. We both look back at the street and then shuffle into the shadow of a parked van where we can do it some more, pulling vainly at shirts and belts. The sound of people’s voices comes to us from the distance, a small warning, moving closer, then drifting away again.

  Nick stands back to rub his face. “Can we just wait a second, here,” he says, indicating his pants, adjusting himself cautiously. “I have to wait.”

  He leans on the van and watches me while I fix my clothes. His is a remote, disturbing gaze, and I know, with certainty, that I can look forward to another couple of months of mental illness. A car goes by and Nick seems to awaken as the lights sweep his face.

  “I have to go,” he says.

  “And I just have to do this one thing before you do,” I reply, and I slap him hard. It’s done before I know what I’m doing. He gives me a simple, mean look, but he seems almost pleased. I watch him walk away, back to the light and noise, his hands stuffed into his pockets, his cheek burning.

  By the time I get home, all the lights are off, except for the oven light, which glows yellow as I retrieve a beer from the fridge and a frozen cigarette from the icebox. I see the next few months spread out before me like a cold, dark sea, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to wait for everything to return to normal again.

  Our dog pads in and slumps heavily on my feet, forcing me to yank them free. I have no idea why he does this. He came to us after my mother left. Perhaps it was my state of mind then, but I never expected him to stay. He still has a collar around his neck that says he belongs to someone else, someone who moved or at least changed their telephone number. We haven’t even named him, just call him Dog, and it doesn’t seem to matter to him.

  Sometimes I worry about running into Dog’s real owner while I’m walking him. It’s a scene I often imagine in detail: a man hurrying across the street, calling out, the dog pulling on the leash, barking. There will be a warm reunion, followed by an awkward moment, the dog confused, wagging, the dog belonging, for an instant, to no one. Then, the real owner will smile, his hand extended to take the leash. I see myself giving the dog back; I imagine the man thanking me.

  Sometimes, thinking about this, I panic in the middle of a walk and turn back home, hustling Dog past the smells that clamour for his attention — trees, fences, garbage cans, the hubcaps of cars. I feel that the only thing keeping him with me is the leash. But Dog shows no real sign of leaving. The front door of our house is usually open all day, and, when I feel uneasy, I go and watch him sleep in a patch of shade on the driveway, not moving, the sun falling down, and nothing changed.

  THE FUNERAL

  ……………I’VE ENTERED A PERIOD IN MY life where, without thinking, I strike like a cobra. The hotel kitchen boy doesn’t speak English — standing there, red-faced, by the open back door, a cigarette dangling from his hand — but he knows what I’m suggesting. Christmas Eve is tomorrow and I can smell the food being prepared. I haven’t figured out where exactly we’re going to do what I’m proposing, and before I can, I spot my dad and realize it’s time to duck down a hallway, perhaps come back later to work things out.

  There are lances hanging from the walls and dark red tapestries, and beneath them are chairs too stiff to be sat on. Also hung on the halls are paintings of horses that look like overripe fruit, great huge rumps, tiny little hooves. The walls are stone, the floors are stone too, with carpets running everywhere, and there’s stained glass in the lobby.

  “This is crazy,” my mother had said when she arrived, but she sounded thrilled, looking around at the “insane luxury.” Bishop said the place reminded him of horror movies. We stood around, our luggage at our feet, taking in the tourists who came and went, the mounted heads of game animals, the chandelier, the runner carpets snaking away into dark hallways. Castor seemed happy; we were all together.

  We’re at a hotel in the mountains where every guest seems to speak a different language. We’ve taken four adjoining rooms in the old wing: my father and brother together; Castor and Netty; Mum and me; and Bishop with his most recent woman, the overweight Auntie Merry. My grandparents can’t come because they’re not talking to each other again.

  The trip was my uncle Castor’s idea. He owns the hotel, or part-owns it. No one really knows where Castor gets his money or what he does with it. Whatever the case, the staff know who he is. They murmur to him in various languages, he’s allowed to make his way through the staff hallways, and he gets memos and his mail brought to him. It was his idea to invite my mother, who arrived with a small yellow bag, took one look at my father — whom she clearly hadn’t expected to see — turned back to Castor, and said a word I’d never heard her use before. My father looked stricken. Castor threw his hands down in disgust and wondered why he had even bothered.

  We were all together for the first Christmas since anyone can remember, and right away we heard that someone in the hotel had died. So we’ll be going to the funeral in town. My dad heard about it first, of course, but he’s not clear on who died.

  “Typical of this family,” my mother says. “We’re going to a funeral, but we don’t know whose.”

  The hotel is jammed with people. I watch a woman wearing the largest fur I have ever seen drift close to the bellboy, and kick him as she passes. From the bellboy’s dull glare, I suspect she does this a lot. My father is roaming the lobby, talking to people and finding out as much as he can. He speaks passable German and French. He finds out what people do for a living, how much they make, and why they’ve come to the hotel. I spot him by the huge front doors, working on a fat man from some place where they like suede a lot.

  “Any idea who died?” I ask my uncle Bishop. He’s sitting on the pool table reading a European royalty magazine. His face says he’s never seen anything so disgusting.

  “Parasites,” he blusters. “Breeding and sleeping in late and sipping brandy.” He picks up an amber-coloured drink next to him on the pool table’s felt.

  “Look at this so-called man,” he says. “Look at the state of him. His head must weigh fifty pounds.” He marches off in disgust to show my father. As soon as he’s gone, I guzzle what’s left of his drink.

  I’ve managed to convince the kitchen boy to come up to my room. I have him on the bed and I am lying on him. He’s laughing and trying to unbutton his white uniform. I jump up and pull the heavy curtains closed and the room is sunk in darkness. When I go back to the bed I have to be careful not to knee or elbow him. I’m hoping my mother, who shares my room, doesn’t come in. But she’s downstairs in the lounge with the rest of the family. That’s where I was too, until I spotted the kitchen boy wandering down the hall with his paper crown.

  Later, the kitchen boy, whose name is Hans, shows me a back stairway the staff uses. On the door to the stairs there is a big sign in four languages saying an alarm will sound if opened, but Hans pushes the door open anyway and shows me where the wires have been grounded on an overhead pipe. We sit in the stairwell and he teaches me the German words for all kinds of body parts, and before too long, I begin to wish he’d go away. My mind drifts off to a young man I saw earlier, standing by the concierge, looking lost.

  “Dad —” I start, dodging people coming in the front door. “Dad, do I have to go to this funeral? I might not feel well. Maybe it would be better if I stay in my room, read a book …”

  My father is l
ooking over my head. “Hmm?” he says, giving me the bag of wrapped presents he’s carrying. I watch him wander off to sit with my mother. To a stranger, my parents would look like any married couple. Their looks are similar; they have the same lilt to their voice, the same upright way of sitting. By now, even their handwriting looks similar. But my mother smiles at my father in a polite way, a smile she reserves for strangers. I feel myself floating a little, sick, as if the air has become gas, and I turn and flee to the other end of the enormous lobby.

  I find Andrew standing at a wide bank of windows, looking out at the mountains, which glow red-hot along the peaks from the last of the sun. I hand him the bag of presents and he takes it willingly, holds it like a briefcase.

  “You know what?” he says, “A woman just went by and kicked me.” People stream past us, murmuring in German or Italian, men wheeling luggage dollies, children in their best winter clothes.

  “It was on purpose, too,” he says. I tell Andrew that I think the woman especially likes kicking young men. Andrew is gangly and tall, his hands and elbows grown wide, his face solemn, thoughtful. He nudges me and points out the woman in the crowd. She’s a sight: a strange, over-stuffed creature in a grey fur, wandering amongst the party dresses and overcoats and steamer trunks and huge potted trees. We observe her as she navigates the lobby, passing by several skiers, a desk clerk — all young men. She does nothing to them. We follow her progress until she disappears down one of the low, dark hallways. Andrew looks at me in dismay, the bag of gifts dangling.

  “What did I do?”

  There’s a phone call in the middle of the night. My grandparents are fighting — in Nevada.

  Bishop and my dad hand the phone back and forth like a hot potato and hiss at each other:

  “No way, I do this too often!”

  “Well, don’t look at me!”

  “Take the damn phone!”

  “I need a drink,” Castor says, looking on. We’re standing in the hallway outside my father’s room in our pyjamas, everyone’s hair in a wild mess and pillow marks on our faces. Poor Merry is trying her best to melt into a corner; her pyjamas are like kitchen curtains, frilly and see-through. I can tell Andrew is in shock at the sight.

  Bishop is speaking to my grandmother, holding the phone in a death-grip.

  “No, don’t! Mother, don’t put him on! … Hello, Father.”

  “I need a drink!” Castor says.

  “Of course you are, Father. No, just because you’re seventy doesn’t mean you’re dead, however … you … how much?”

  “Oh God!” says Castor.

  “… in two hours?”

  “It must be those bastards again,” Castor says.

  “Nooo!” my mother trills with enjoyment. “Not the famous Moe and Joe?”

  “Who’s Moe and Joe?” Andrew asks.

  “Don’t,” Dad says to Mum. “Don’t you laugh.” She turns away and fiddles with the belt of her housecoat, her shoulders jiggling.

  Bishop is squirming now. I can hear my grandfather’s tiny voice from the receiver. He’s telling Bishop that he loves him, and Bishop is wincing, swearing silently. I strain to hear the small, thin sounds coming from the receiver, try to picture my grandparents in a desert casino: the lights and mirrors, the spill of change overflowing cups and pouring to the floor, and outside, the cars cruising past the splendid marquees, their tops folded down, rolling through soft desert air.

  Castor gives up on finding a drink, and snatches the phone away from Bishop. “Father, listen to me! Just tell them no and go get your — What? … I know you love Mother.”

  “Who are Moe and Joe?” Merry whispers.

  “And I love you too, Father.”

  “Jesus!” says Bishop. By now, I’m wide awake. I badly want to get on the phone with my grandfather, maybe get him to tell me he loves me too. I wonder what it would feel like.

  Castor puts his hand over the receiver and hisses, “They’ve got his car. Again!”

  Dad flops down on the unmade bed, his hands between his knees.

  “Oh, sure,” Bishop mutters, “he tells you about the car, but does he mention it to me?”

  Finally, Netty strides across the carpet and takes the phone.

  “Gerald?” she says. “This is Netty speaking.” Her voice is like a silk handkerchief floating down through the air. “Gerald,” she says, “do try to concentrate.”

  When it’s over, my grandfather has agreed that he’s an ass. Netty holds some kind of power over him. She’s single-handedly trussed him up in an invisible straitjacket, made him promise to go home quietly. After that, Dad and his brothers go in search of a bottle, and the rest of us file back to our rooms.

  I lie awake and gaze at my mother — she’s smiling even in her sleep — and I try to picture Dad and Mum together among the twinkling lights, rolling some dice. I puzzle for a while over whether it’s hot in Nevada. With my father and his maps and charts, I probably should know, but I don’t. After a while the image of my parents erodes and I see, instead, my father alone in Vegas, with his pockets inside out. I roll over, then turn my mind to other things, such as: if the hotel we’re in has ghosts; if the ghosts are angry; if they died while in love or if they died in pain; or if they too had wanted to gamble and no one would let them. I wonder what kind of ghost my grandfather will make, because it’s obvious he’ll be one for sure. Then I wonder what kind of ghost I might be.

  The next morning, Christmas Eve, my mother comes into our room, puts a cup of coffee on my dresser, and sits down on the bed with me.

  “How long have you been up?” I ask, grabbing the coffee.

  “Funeral day,” she says, not answering. “Thanks to your father.” I’m ready to defend my father, like a fool, but Netty is standing in the doorway with Auntie Merry. Merry looks haggard, trapped here with all of us. She tugs at her sleeves and pats her shirt down. Netty casts her eye over me, takes in the tie-dyed T-shirt I use as a nightie.

  “Did your father buy you that?” she asks.

  I pull the sheets up. “No,” I say, insulted, “I bought it with my own money.”

  “Oh good,” says Netty. “I thought maybe he’d lost his mind.”

  All the women, me included, take the elevator down to the lobby. My brother is there, sitting behind a computer at the front desk. His hair is still unbrushed, standing up like flames. The two clerks watch as I approach.

  “Their root directory is screwed,” Andrew says, and one of the clerks beams and pats Andrew on the back, enthuses in Italian.

  No one knows where Andrew gets it, but he can walk up to any machine and fix it. He has never been seen reading a computer magazine, and yet he knows what’s current, what’s defunct, he knows machine languages. He puts a finger on a squiggle in a senseless wall of squiggles and says: “That should be one backslash, not two.” The same holds true for more primitive machines: toasters, furnaces, cars. He bends over the oily mass of pipes and hoses in my father’s car, grimaces, points at an unidentifiable steel lump. “You bought it used?”

  After breakfast we find out more about the funeral we’re attending. We’ve all been asking around, but without success. It seems that asking “Who died?”— especially when language is a barrier — can have unexpected results. Castor was told it was an entire family who perished in a fire, down in the city, nearly a year ago. Which clearly made no sense, as they’d already have done a funeral by now. Auntie Merry assumed it was one of us who had died, someone she hadn’t met yet. Bishop thought he’d met a father with a missing child, so maybe the child was presumed dead … but it turned out the man was just showing him snapshots of a perfectly alive grandchild.

  My father was able to sort it out, and now he explains it in detail while my mother squirms and sighs and stares at me as if I am responsible. In fact, the man who died was named Otto, and he was the organist at the church directly across from the hotel. He was eighty-seven years old, had dozens of children with several different women, and ate dinner a
nd drank every night of his adult life in the hotel. He was a fixture, a local character, and now he is dead, and everyone in the hotel is invited to his funeral.

  In the afternoon, Andrew and I descend the hill, following the road into town, our cheeks numb and our fingers screaming in our pockets because we made the mistake of whipping snowballs at tour buses and parked cars until the cold got to us. I like it when my brother lets me hang around with him, but still, I’m distracted, thinking about the phone call last night, and feeling sorry for old men who can’t do what they want anymore.

  “Do you think Granddad is crazy?” I ask Andrew.

  “Yes,” he says.

  “How can you be sure?” I ask. I’ve been troubled by the suspicion that I’ll end up like my grandfather — gambling, scaring the crap out of strangers, telling ridiculous stories so many times that I start believing them myself. For instance, I’m afraid to get my driver’s licence. My grandfather was law-abiding at first, and then, one day, he parked right on the sidewalk, a boulevard of broken saplings behind him. It’s been that way ever since.

  “Oh, he’s crazy all right,” says Andrew, warming to the subject, “but Granddad was probably normal once, like you or me.”

  “Oh, no.”

  “I blame old age, I blame TV. You know, before TV, people had much higher IQS?”

  “But what if —”

  “It’s true. Some dogs have the same IQ as a four-yearold human. Depending on the breed. And scientists think that some brain diseases come from too much …”

  I’m so horrified, I tune him out. If it happened to Grandfather, it might happen to me. My worst fear would come true; I might not be me, after all. I might be someone else, someone really unpleasant, just waiting to pop open and spray all over the place, like a bad can of pop. I’ll be old and crazy and never get a date. I’ll be paranoid. Broke. Write abusive letters to the Queen. I’ll never leave my house, squint through the drapes when the mailman steps on my porch. I’ll stand over a boiling pot of water and hear messages about all the bad things Danny Kaye is saying about me. It’s horrible. I look over at Andrew for help and only then realize that he’s been trying to get my attention.