Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  “That is not true,” Jeremy said. “Tell me that is not true.”

  “Yellow ones. She buys them by the dozen, I think, so I can’t even pretend I’ve lost one.”

  Glenn said, “That is classic behaviour, just classic. It goes right back to the Old Testament – you should be teaching this stuff.”

  “That’s got to be the exception, though. Flip-flops?”

  Glenn shook his head and put his big hands out in front of him. “It comes down to this: in every culture and every race, women preserve the status quo. That’s what they do, that’s their role. Women protect the nest. Which is not even a bad thing – someone has to do it, right?”

  “That’s an interesting point, that’s a very interesting point,” Phil said.

  “What men are supposed to do is go out there and explore. We map out the territory and fight off invaders. That’s the deal. So you’ve got raising kids and keeping the house versus what, walking on the moon? Curing diseases? Fighting wars? It’s this,” he formed a small, invisible mound with his hands on the bar, “versus this.” He spread his arms wide. “It’s in Shakespeare, the Bible. Old Testament. It’s probably in the Koran. In fact, I know it is: those guys don’t fuck around when it comes to women. Not saying they’re right.”

  “You’re saying Phil’s sister is like a terrorist?”

  “Not at all. Exactly the opposite. She doesn’t want anything broken.”

  Phil started giggling. “No, no, no. She’s . . . she’s more like one of those mothers in Rwanda who put their babies on their backs and went out to hack people up with machetes.”

  He made a slashing motion with the edge of his hand.

  “I don’t know about that,” Glenn said, taking a wary drink. “Anyway, all bets are off when you’re talking about friggin Africa. Christ, we’re way off the map now.”

  * * *

  Less than a week before one of their shared birthdays, Phil dropped to the floor in front of a classroom full of bored business and cosmetics students being forced to read about a boxing match between Ernest Hemingway and Morley Callaghan. An invisible flying punch caught him between his ribs and the world turned white. He lay there for almost a minute before anyone thought to do something. Finally, an ambulance was called, and he was taken away to the hospital.

  The news threw everyone at the Shack. Some of the waitresses cried. Even Tyler seemed upset. Charlene bought a large card for people to sign. She liked Phil: he reminded her of some of the absent-minded teachers she’d had in high school. There was one in particular: a science teacher who was always burning himself with something, and who had two sweat patches under his armpits that might as well have been sewn right into his shirt. For a while he had a thing for Charlene, mostly because she was his most attentive student, though she only showed interest in his lectures to be polite. He zeroed in on her, and then lost interest once her test results showed she had no actual aptitude for the subject.

  When the card came back to her, she was shocked at some of the things in it: the messages were bad enough, but the crude cartoons were worse.

  “What if his daughter sees this?”

  “We can give him two. This one and a nice one,” Jeremy said.

  He said he would deliver the cards to Phil in person, and she volunteered to accompany him. Patty asked if she could come along, too – she had a friend on the same floor recuperating from a hernia operation, so she could kill two birds with one stone.

  “Don’t say that when we’re there,” Jeremy warned her.

  On the elevator ride to Phil’s floor, Patty talked about the time, years earlier, when her husband had been knocked down by a mild heart attack, and was taken to the very same hospital. They had tickets to go see the musical version of The Lion King, which she had been dying to see for years, and he went and had an attack a few days before. It was too late to even cancel.

  In the hallway, a man in a wheelchair accepted the lunch being handed to him by his wife, piece by piece: juice box, egg salad sandwich, granola bar, banana. Across the way, an elderly woman held a stained Snoopy doll by the throat, as if it were responsible for whatever was ailing her.

  “I swear some of these people were here when I came to visit my Shawn that time,” Patty whispered.

  Phil’s room had two beds. One was empty and stripped of sheets and pillows.

  “This is alright,” Jeremy said, looking around. “You’ve got the place to yourself.”

  He had to stop himself from shouting. Something about hospitals made him act as though everyone in them were deaf. Phil was thin and pale, more so than usual, and his hair was standing up. He looked like a broom that had been enchanted and brought to life, only to fall ill before it could complete any of its appointed tasks.

  “It was supposed to be shared,” Phil said, looking happily at the cards that Jeremy had brought him. “The other guy gave up the ghost just before I got here.”

  Charlene’s eyes went wide, and she put her hand over her mouth. The empty bed was propped up in the sitting position, as if the other patient had been violently ejected the moment he died. Jeremy moved closer to the open door.

  “Still, that’s a kind of luck,” he said.

  “When can you go home?” Charlene asked.

  “There’re not saying anything yet.”

  “It was exactly the same when Shawn was in here,” Patty said. “They ask you all kinds of questions and do a million tests, but can’t answer a simple question. Nothing has changed.”

  Jeremy noticed a new-looking air purifier humming away on the floor next to the bed.

  “That’s handy. Who got you that?”

  Phil smiled brightly. “That was Glenn! He was in here yesterday. He said he’d had one when he was in for an operation some time – he thinks it saved his life.”

  “That’s what you do, good for him,” Patty said, though she had never liked Glenn.

  Charlene gave Phil the nicer card and made Jeremy hand him the one that had been vandalized. Phil grinned like a little boy at the cartoon boobs. There was already a homemade card from his daughter on the nightstand, next to a pile of empty containers of applesauce – the only thing he could eat at the moment, he said. Everything else hurt his throat. He didn’t even like applesauce.

  “When you get back to the Shack, there’s a 10-inch steak waiting for you, buddy. On the house.”

  Phil laughed, then coughed and turned red enough that Jeremy and Charlene began to worry they might need to summon the nurse. Patty didn’t seem to notice.

  “What I really want is a beer,” Phil said when he’d recovered.

  “Now, should you be drinking?” Patty asked.

  He said it was fine; it wasn’t a bad attack, just a Death Knock.

  The other three looked confused.

  “You’ve never heard that? Really? My mother used to say it when I was a little kid. After my grandfather died of pneumonia, my sister got it, too, less than a year later, and I was so scared she was going to die just like him. My mother told me Death sometimes knocks on your door just to see if you are home. If you’re old enough, you might forget and answer the door by accident. Or even on purpose, if you’re so old that all of your friends have already gone.”

  “That’s so sad,” Charlene said.

  “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard, buddy,” Jeremy said.

  “Is it? I still sort of believe it, to be honest.”

  “Now you’ll have me scared to answer my door!” Patty said.

  After a half an hour or so, Phil began to float away, his eyes closed, and his chin touched his chest. On the ride back down in the elevator, Patty listed off all the teachers she knew who’d had heart attacks. There were a lot. Even the ones who’d been mean to her did not deserve it, she insisted.

  “I’M NOT SURE I BELIEVE IN SURPRISES. ON SOME LEVEL, YOU ALWAYS KNO
W WHAT’S COMING.”

  – Theo Hendra, in an interview with GQ

  Jeremy was unable to shake the thought that what had happened to Phil meant Death was no longer a far-off threat or an abstract concept. Death was a pack of wolves that had started going after people in his own group, which meant anyone could be picked off at any time. It would start with the weakest and most vulnerable, like Phil, and make its way up the chain until it got to him.

  “You know in movies when one of those little laser dots appears on a guy’s forehead just before he gets shot?” he asked Charlene. “That’s me sometimes.”

  “You’re waiting for a Death Knock?”

  He truly wondered if he was.

  “Most of the time – you know me – I’m the happiest guy around. But then something like this happens and I can’t get it out of my head.”

  She asked him how long it’d been since he’d taken time off – not a day or two here and there, but a week or more away from the bar.

  Right away, he said: “Three years. Remember I had that stomach flu? I couldn’t get off my couch for almost four days, and could barely walk for a few days after that. Had to run the place over the phone.”

  “That doesn’t count. I mean, when’s the last time you did something fun, just for you?”

  “That’s easy: last night, and every night this week,” he said, smiling. “This is my permanent vacation.”

  But she was right. He sometimes found himself fanta­sizing about having a small cabin somewhere – something close enough to get to within an hour or two, but far enough away to be out of the gravitational orbit of the bar and the city. He imagined standing on the shore of a body of water as clean and clear as a new contact lens. He wanted to stand there and feel as though the scene laid out before around him – rich kids buzzing from shore to shore on Jet Skis, a chainsaw revving somewhere way back in the woods, water folding brightly over the rocks, birds talking shit in the trees – had been created exclusively for him. He imagined stepping into a pond and pulling a plump fish from the water with his bare hands, roasting it in a fire pit, and eating it while standing on the rocks, the warm evening wind cleansing and soothing him, bringing the sound of kids tumbling in the lake for a swim and the smell of reeds and campfire smoke. He wanted to sip at bourbon that tasted like it had been distilled from all the colours in the woods around him, and to spend evenings watching the sun char the sky and fall behind the trees at the other end of a kidney-shaped lake.

  His sister had a cottage, an ostentatiously wooden place on a strip of land near the bottom end of Algonquin Park. Marie and Brian bought it after their first child was born, Brian’s family cottage in Quebec being too far a drive for a little baby and a recovering mother. Jeremy got invited out every summer, and would spend his time sitting by the fire pit in a wooden chair that might as well have been scalloped out of a tree especially for him. He would sit there, too sick with resentment and envy to move, waving off the children’s pleas to be thrown into the water by their uncle. Each night, Marie and Brian would collaborate on a meal that looked as though it had been created for a photo spread in a glossy magazine. They’d have to wait while Brian took pictures of each heaping plate and bowl with his phone. When the kids were asleep, the three adults would sit around the fire.

  “I need a place like this,” Jeremy said, staring out into the darkness.

  “Everyone does. If people could see this kind of thing a couple of weekends a year, you wouldn’t have anyone going nuts shooting people or blowing up airplanes. It just wouldn’t happen.”

  Brian raised his glass to toast the sentiment. The lake shimmered its agreement.

  “You should loan your place out as a retreat for troubled youths.”

  “If I thought it was needed, I would. But it’s not. Right now, the government is sitting on so much land they’re not even doing anything with. It’s crazy. There’s probably enough for everyone in the country to have a little spot like this. Or share one, at least.”

  Brian raised his glass again.

  On his way home from Marie and Brian’s cottage one time, Jeremy pulled over to look at a cabin with a For Sale sign out front. It was barely dawn, and there were no cars in the driveway, so he walked up to peek into the windows. There was a raft moored in the lake, about 50 feet from shore. He pictured himself sitting on it in a lawn chair, dozing and waving at passing canoes. On the lake side of the cottage he looked into a small window he guessed to be for the kitchen, and immediately drew back, his heart frantic: inside, standing next to a steaming kettle, were two elderly women, both completely naked and embracing each other in a lingering hug. He stood for a moment, waiting for the inevitable shouting to come from inside, but everything was silent. They hadn’t seen him. A sand-coloured chipmunk approached the toe of his shoe, sniffed it, then stood on its hind legs to consider his worthiness as a source of food. After a minute, he carefully stepped away from the building and walked in a wide half-circle back to where he had parked the Jeep, his entire chest burning with a desire for the exact kind of raw intimacy he had just witnessed.

  * * *

  “I will say this for getting married,” Jeremy said to Glenn and Phil, “you at least know you won’t die alone. That’s gotta take the sting out of it a little, I think.”

  Neither of the two divorced men jumped in to agree.

  “Maybe if your carbon monoxide detector’s not working, and your furnace starts leaking in the night,” Glenn said.

  “That’s just awful,” Jeremy said. Phil agreed.

  “I’m talking about dying together – that’s the only way it works. Otherwise, only one of you gets the benefit of the arrangement, because one of you goes first.”

  Jeremy admitted he hadn’t thought of that.

  “Some ancient societies solved that problem by burying the wife with the husband, whether she was dead already or not,” Glenn said. “There are probably a few nasty fuckers out there who still do it.”

  Phil said that he had made one of those agreements where two people promise to marry each other if they were still alone at 80. Back when he was in teaching school, one of his closest friends was a woman who had moved back in with her ailing parents, and thus had trouble maintaining a decent social life. “She was also more than a little overweight, but really smart and fun,” he said. When Phil knew her, she hadn’t been in a serious relationship – any relationship, in a long time. One time when they were both out celebrating the end of a particularly thorny assignment, they started talking about the future, getting old, all the rest of it. That’s when they made the pact – it was her idea, though he signed on right away. When they reached 80, if neither of them were married, they would marry each other and wait out their last years together.

  “You plan to honour that?” Glenn asked.

  “That’s the thing: she got in touch with me a couple of years ago when her parents finally died. Not even sure how she found me. She’s married and has two little kids.”

  Phil looked down into his drink, suddenly glum. “I honestly didn’t think I was going to be the one who got left out,” he said. “She’s a lot thinner now, too.”

  “Oh buddy, a lot can happen between now and 80.”

  “You’re right: I might end up married again myself by then.”

  “I was thinking more like her husband could bite the dust.” Glenn nudged him on the shoulder and chuckled. “More likely scenario there, right?”

  Jeremy asked Charlene, at a quiet point in the day, if younger people still made those kinds of pacts, or if they were something that had become extinct. She surprised him by saying she knew at least four people who’d sworn themselves to one, and had heard about a few more. One of her best friends had pledged herself to the woman she’d been roommates with in university, though neither of them were particularly gay. At that age, they figured, it wouldn’t matter much what they were.

&nbs
p; “I hope it happens,” Jeremy said.

  That would mean neither of them find somebody in the meantime, she reminded him.

  “What about you?” he asked. “Is there someone out there who’s got you as their old-age insurance policy?”

  She said there was not, unless you counted Kyle, of course.

  “I’m picturing Kyle as a senior citizen,” he said.

  She laughed. “And?”

  “There’s a guy who won’t be sitting around watching butterflies, put it that way.”

  Charlene agreed, and said it was one of the things she admired about him. “He has always been like that – totally unable to relax. He makes me feel so lazy sometimes. I once said he should paint the living room on one of his days off – we were fighting about something, and I said it just to bug him. By the time I got home, it was all done. He was pulling off the last of the tape when I walked in the door. I would never have done something like that.”

  “Good for him. Why wait? But did he do it because he’s such an on-the-go kinda guy, or just to get back at you?”

  “Probably both, but the room still got painted. It looks pretty good, too. He’s a good painter.”

  Why was he so obsessed lately with getting old and dying, she wanted to know.

  He had to admit that he didn’t know for sure. All he knew was that he kept catching himself feeling as though he had run out of time to do certain things. It was something he had never thought about before – he never cared about time at all. Most of the time, he still didn’t. But there were those moments when he would feel as though big life possibilities were drifting past him, and vice-versa.

  “But look at all you’ve done, look at what you’re doing – you’ve got the Ice Shack.”

  It was true, he said. Most of the big life possibilities he truly cared about could be found within those four walls. And anyway, age was a matter of outlook.

  “It’s all up here,” he said, and tapped his temple with the tip of his finger.