The Empty Room

by Lauren B. Davis

  “I’m very sorry my work hasn’t been up to snuff. I promise you’ll have no further cause for complaint, for any reason,” Colleen said.

  “So you’ll take the help we’re offering?” asked Minot.

  The woman must watch those reality shows on television with the snot-flying, tearful interventions for hopeless addicts, thought Colleen. She had the vocabulary down. Colleen had seen a few of them herself, enough to know that if you watched to the very end, the drunks and dopers all got thrown out of rehab, or left early, and ended up back on the bottle or the needle within months. What was the point, except to make the snivelling family members feel better, if only briefly?

  “I’ve told you my work won’t be a problem. I think that’s all I should have to say.”

  Moore blew out his cheeks and said, “So, you’re telling us you won’t go into treatment.”

  “I’m telling you you’ll never have to worry about me and alcohol.”

  “That’s not good enough at this point, Colleen. Your choice is rehab or having your employment here immediately terminated.”

  “So, you’re telling me you care about me so much you’d fire me, leave me without a paycheque or references, with my mother in extreme difficulty and me her only caregiver, with no one to help me. That’s what you’re telling me and you think that’s right, that it’s moral?” She heard the steely control in her voice, and she knew herself well enough to recognize the fury saddling up and getting ready to ride.

  “Will you go to rehab, Colleen?” said Moore. “Say yes now, or I’m afraid this interview is over and you will be escorted from the building. Am I right, Ms. Minot?”

  Minot’s expression of concern was like that of a bad soap-opera actress. So much care in it. So much practiced compassion. It felt as though something very heavy, like stones or bags of wet sand, lay over Colleen’s shoulders and chest. The weight held her down, made it hard to breathe. Screaming was an option. Baring her teeth and snarling like a cornered leopard was an option. Spontaneous combustion was an option. And for one swift second it occurred to her there was another option: she might merely toss the bags and the sand and the stones right off her shoulders and let them hit the floor with the sound of thunder and earthquake and the very heavens splitting asunder. The floor would open and swallow up all the terrible crushing mass, and bury it in the ground, dust to dust. It was possible. She had a fleeting sense of how light she would feel, how she’d float up to the ceiling a hope-filled thing, and it wouldn’t matter if she needed help or if these people pitied her or felt they were better than she was because just letting it all go would be such an enormous relief.

  And then Pat Minot said, “That would be a great shame, but yes, I’m afraid that’s the way it is.”

  The way it is. Yes, that’s just the way it is and nothing would ever change and people are who they are and so they ever will be. Colleen knew then that she was never going to get out from under the load of her own life. We play our parts. It is inevitable. She was not the sort of woman who would go to rehab, who would hand over her power to a bunch of strangers who were paid to pretend to care about her. She would not, could not show them who she really was. Her skin crawled. The very concept filled her with self-loathing. Whatever weight had shifted now lurched and settled itself again, right over Colleen’s heart.

  Colleen stood up and smoothed the front of her pants. “Well, then. Fuck you very much,” she said.

  The room was silent for a moment, and even though Colleen’s head felt as though it might pop like the mercury in an overheated thermometer, she got considerable satisfaction from the looks of true astonishment on Moore’s and Minot’s faces. They really hadn’t seen that coming, had they? She was able to arrange a small, self-contained smile on her lips, and for the first time since she woke up that morning, she felt a kind of dignity and control. Thus, she chose to think of it this way: things hadn’t been good at this job for ages, and though she’d miss Harry, Max (well, maybe not Max, not after he’d said whatever it was he said about her) and Michael, she’d find somewhere else, somewhere better. And who knew, Harry might very well go to bat for her and protest her firing. Yes, that was a real possibility. Even Michael. He liked her. The possibilities spooled out in front of her like a yellow brick road.

  “How sad,” said Minot. She stood and faced Colleen for a moment, then turned and opened the door. A security guard stood in the hall, waiting. “We’ll just walk you out then, shall we?”

  The smile slipped from Colleen’s face. What did they think she was going to do, go berserk, pull a gun out of her bra and shoot them all? Dignity and control, my ass, she thought. Humiliation like a riptide threatened to knock her legs out from under her. Maybe it wasn’t too late? She glanced at Dr. Moore, but his face was aubergine. She felt a little weak.

  So, that was that. She tossed the packet of tissues on Moore’s desk. “I want my things from my desk.”

  “Of course,” said Minot. She gestured that Colleen should precede her through the door. Then she changed her mind. “Actually, would you just wait here a moment, please. Derek, stay with Ms. Kerrigan, will you?”

  The security guard nodded and Minot disappeared.

  The moments ticked by. Colleen kept her eyes on the antique instruments in the locked cabinet. The mysterious devices of weather divination. They looked medieval, and she imagined torture chambers and trials by fire. A scene from a film she had once seen flashed through her mind, set in Elizabethan England, in which a man was dangled above a huge cauldron of boiling oil. The executioner asked him which he preferred, head first or feet first. It would make no difference, of course; death would come either way, horribly and in shrieking agony. Would she want to get it over quickly, head first, skin peeling off her face, eyes bursting, lips and tongue and throat searing and … or feet first, hoping to pass out from the pain before the oil reached … Why was she thinking of that now? Derek the security guard stood with his thumbs tucked into his belt. Executioner. Pitiless. Unreachable.

  “Ms. Kerrigan?” Minot was back. “You can come through now.”

  Colleen refused to turn and look at Moore before leaving. Followed by Minot and Derek-the-Executioner, she walked stiff-legged and jerky, the trembles in her gut making any effort at grace impossible. She made her way to the office that was no longer her office. Sylvia wasn’t there and Colleen supposed Minot had arranged that to prevent a scene. Colleen thought now she might well want to make a scene. It would be lovely to finally tell Sylvia what she thought of those boots, and those ridiculous turquoise glasses.

  Two cloth shopping bags lay on her desk.

  “You can put your things in there,” said Minot.

  At least we’re being eco-friendly, thought Colleen, if not people-friendly.

  There was surprisingly little to take. A small carved turtle one of the First Nations students had given her last Christmas, a framed photo of a winter landscape with late-afternoon light slanting through the trees that Colleen had clipped from a magazine because it looked so peaceful, a little leather notebook in which she had meant to write down her thoughts, two paperbacks, one of Celtic fairy tales, the other called New Paths Toward the Sacred, an old address book, a pretty fountain pen she’d bought herself and a glass paperweight in the shape of a star. On the bulletin board above her computer was an old Bloom County cartoon in which three little boys and a penguin contemplated the vastness of the universe and their place in it. One boy held up his thumb and index finger, measuring a minuscule space, and said, “That’s the portion of the night sky at which they pointed the Hubble telescope for a week, the equivalent of a single grain of sand, and inside they found galaxies, thousands of galaxies with billions and trillions of stars and more beyond that.” “And so what,” one of the other boys asked, “is the centre of it all?” “Me,” said one boy, and “Me,” said the other.

  Colleen left it where it was.

  “Do you have everything?” asked Minot. She held out Colleen’s red coat
.

  “I have a mug in the kitchen. I want that.” She grabbed the coat and put it on, and was about to leave the office when Derek stepped in front of her. “Really?” she said.

  Minot shrugged. “What does it look like? I’ll get it.”

  The mug had a saying on it: Peace is not the absence of chaos or conflict, but rather finding yourself in the midst of that chaos and remaining calm in your heart. “Never mind,” Colleen said.

  She opened the bottom drawer of her desk to get her purse. The bottles of vodka were gone.

  “It’s no bother,” said Minot. “Which one is it?”

  Colleen picked up the shopping bag. “Get out of my way,” she said to Derek.

  He moved aside and she walked down the hall, her purse on her shoulder and the depressingly light shopping bag dangling at the end of her arm. Derek walked behind her. People she knew—Ann from the Registrar’s Office, Brian and Eric from Political Science—passed her, smiled tightly and looked first confused, and then—with telling swiftness—embarrassed.

  Did everyone know? Colleen thought how pleasant it would be to stroke out right there and then. One could never summon an aneurysm when one needed it.

  Harpreet, the handsome, turbaned Sikh from the Department of Statistics, looked up from the papers he carried and said, “What’s up, Colleen?”

  “Not a great day,” she said, and kept walking.

  He looked about to say something else and then, glancing at Derek, stood with his mouth slightly agape and let her pass, as though she were a criminal being perp-walked into court.

  In the elevator three students, two girls and a boy, disregarded Colleen and Derek, focused as they were on texting, their thumbs flying furiously over the tiny keyboards, their ears plugged with headphones. What did it matter? Colleen was largely invisible to the students now anyway. She was a middle-aged secretary, totally ignorable. Or, more correctly, she used to be a middle-aged secretary.

  They exited the elevator at the ground floor. At the steel and glass exit Derek said, “Let me get that for you,” and held a door open.

  This small gesture of kindness created an unexpected prickling behind her eyelids and she was afraid to thank him for fear her voice would break.

  She stepped out onto the open concrete plaza in front of the building. Students and professors hustled by, arms full of books and papers. Other sat on benches drinking coffee and chatting. The hot-dog cart from which Colleen had occasionally bought her lunch was already set up by the curb. The trees, encircled by metal benches, had lost their leaves and looked frail and brittle under the cloud-heavy sky.

  “Do you want me to get you a cab?” Derek asked.

  Did she want a cab? She supposed so, since even the idea of getting back on the subway caused a cramping panic in her chest so strong she was afraid she might scream. But where would she go? What did one do in a case like this? She saw herself standing on the Leaside Bridge, her red coat flapping in the wind. Not long ago, two University of Toronto students jumped to their deaths. It would be quick and final, and she’d still be part of the university community.

  “I don’t,” she said, and kept walking.

  Goodbye, job.

  The question now became, where should she go? What was the post-firing protocol? She didn’t want to be seen just standing on the sidewalk, hopeless, lost and, she suspected, alarmingly red of face. Everyone she looked at walked with purpose; they all had somewhere to go, something to do, lives to lead. Even that crazy person across the street, wearing shorts, a T-shirt with holes in it, flip-flops and what looked like a helmet made of tinfoil, even he strode along with such speed—arms pumping, chin thrust forward—that he gave the impression of intent.

  For want of a better idea, Colleen began walking up St. George toward Harbord and the Robarts Library. As she crossed the intersection, a gust of cold wind caught her and she realized her coat was unbuttoned. She stopped in front of the library building, put the bag down and did up her coat. Bag lady. Is that what she was? Is that where she was going to end up? She picked up the bag and walked faster.

  All around her people went about their business and chatted with each other, jostled and joked, and not a single one knew her world had just imploded. She looked at her watch. 10:00. How was that possible? Had everything really just happened in a mere half-hour? The unfairness of it, the injustice, rushed up from her stomach and filled her mouth with an acid burn. She was going to vomit. She stopped. Leaned against a utility pole and dropped her head. She breathed through her mouth. The sidewalk dipped and swayed under her feet.

  “Are you okay?”

  Colleen looked into the eyes of a woman about her age, wearing what appeared to be construction-worker clothes: plaid lumber jacket, stained down vest, droopy jeans and Timberland boots. The woman’s hair was cut like a man’s and her face was heavily lined.

  “I don’t think so.”

  The woman put her hand under Colleen’s elbow. “You gonna puke? Pass out? You need an ambulance?”

  “No, no.” Colleen pulled herself up and took a deep breath. “Just a bit of the flu, I think. Bit of a shock. I’ve had a shock.” She was babbling. The woman might just call 9-1-1 if she kept this up. “I think I need a taxi. I should go home.”

  “You sure? Yeah, you look a bit the worse for wear, you know?” The woman grinned. “Been there myself a morning or two.”

  “I’m fine.” Colleen pulled her elbow away.

  “Right,” the woman said. She stepped to the curb and whistled loudly through her teeth. “Got one.” A cab slowed in front of them. The woman turned back to Colleen. “There you go. Ginger ale and pickle juice is my advice. My Polish grandfather told me about the pickle juice. Works a charm.”

  If she couldn’t find any battery acid, Colleen vowed to try it. She got into the cab. “Thank you,” she said, for she believed the rituals of courtesy functioned as a privacy screen at times like this.

  The woman saluted and moved off.

  The cab smelled of pine air freshener, coffee and wet wool. “Where to?” the driver asked.

  She didn’t want to go home. She wanted to talk to someone who would tell her everything was going to be all right and that the university was full of assholes. But everyone she knew was working. She gave the driver her address on Davisville. It didn’t occur to her until they reached Bloor that she might not have enough money in her purse to pay for this. How much would it be? Twenty dollars? Twenty-five? She scrambled in her purse and found her wallet. It contained sixty dollars. The question was, did she want to spend all that on taxi fare, today of all days? The answer was, why the hell not?

  “Driver,” she said. “Change of plans. Drop me at Yonge and Eglinton.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  Colleen looked at the photo identification tag on the back of the driver’s seat. The name was Abdullah Elbaz. She doubted he would approve of the stop she intended to make. She wondered if what Minot had said was true. Were her pores really secreting alcohol? Could everyone smell it on her?

  She couldn’t tell if this odd, distanced feeling she had now was due to shock, from which she acknowledged she must be suffering, or some remnant of the hangover. She watched the world slip by outside the taxi window almost as though it were moving and the taxi were standing still, as though the scenery—the Varsity Blues Stadium, the fractured architecture of the Royal Ontario Museum, the little Church of the Redeemer nestled against all that glass and steel, the ragtag shops, the train bridge, the apartment buildings—all of it was on some enormous conveyor belt, making the city and all it contained—every person and shrub, every building and trash can—an experience to be had but not something to which one became attached. A little bubble world. She moved along behind glass and metal and no one knew her or why she was in the cab in the middle of the morning, heading to a liquor store. This was not the way she had thought she’d spend the day. This wasn’t the way she had thought she’d spend her life.

  MAGIC FAIRY P
OTION

  The first time Colleen got drunk, she was fourteen. Danny Gibson’s parents had gone away for the weekend and under such circumstances a party was practically mandatory.

  Okay, maybe Colleen was only there because Tricia and Crystal—the two popular girls, one dark and curvy, the other blond and willowy—were going and they let Colleen tag along, but still, she was there. Daniel was sixteen, tall and athletic, and had once been accidently pierced through the calf by an arrow his next-door neighbour shot, which gave him an air of manly, warrior-like glamour.

  She remembered so clearly the moment the drinking started. One minute they were all in the yellow kitchen, everyone giggling with pot-induced hilarity, as Danny displayed his talent for making the kitchen “work.” He turned on the blender, the toaster, the radio; he made the oven’s timer ring, and through some secret knowledge given to him by his father, who worked for the phone company, he dialled a special number and a moment later the phone rang, although no one was on the other end. The kitchen looked possessed by the ghost of Betty Crocker. Seemore, so named because he had so many holes in his jeans and you could always “see more” of him than anyone else, had apparently dropped acid and sat cross-legged on the kitchen table while examining a cut-glass ashtray with transcendent concentration.