Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  What did it matter where she was found? One day, two officers came to the door, their hats in their hands. I’m sorry, they said. Her papa went to the city morgue to say, Yes, this one is mine.

  Cold was cold. Case closed.

  After the funeral, Annunciata’s parents continued to decline in their separate but interesting ways. Annunciata had to look after them; what else could she do? She dropped out of college where she was learning to be a business manager and went to work at the Mission where chores were as infinite as the mercy of the Lord, as Miss Leonard would often say. One meal was scarcely over before preparation for the next began. In Annunciata’s dreams the homeless marched toward her, their mouths wide open.

  Blue with cold.

  A door banged behind her and Miss Leonard staggered out of the kitchen, dragging a garbage bag in each hand. “Go home, Angel. You’ve got a lot to do tomorrow.” She meant announcing the resurrection of the Lord, ha ha, but also Easter dinner which was going to be chicken and ham. Surprise!

  Annunciata buttoned herself into her coat and walked to the bus stop. She stood there for some time, staring blankly across the road at the new downtown gym, reading the words “Mr. Big Guy” over and over until they made no sense. The gym had a basement boxing ring, people at the Mission said. But when the 99 bus finally arrived she remembered that she’d promised to collect Imee’s housekeeping money from Mrs. Binder and that she must find the bus that would take her to the Heights instead. The words to a song — Which way, which way, which way is home? — ran through her head although she couldn’t remember where she’d heard it.

  On her way finally, she stared out of the bus window, past the pale imprint of her doppelganger face with its hollow cheeks and eyes, out into the city. On Main, the dusty storefronts flashed by, one after the other, desultory and grimy with the dregs at the bottom of winter, that old cracked mug. The boarded-up Railway Hotel, the methadone clinic, the Healing Circle Collective. “Come In We’re Open For Business,” entreated North Main Denture Centre although, unlike the grinning dentures in the window, the office had been closed for years.

  The bus stopped outside the Neon Factory to let off a couple of passengers. In the wide storefront windows Annunciata watched the neon signs pulse on and off: “Pizza” “Chicken” “Dentist.” Each word singly and in turn, then all together, like the answer to a riddle. Like a lost language she’d once understood and might again some day.

  Four

  Ridgehaven High

  Everyone kept asking Lazar how his mother was. A lot of people and a lot of asking and a lot of shaking their sorry heads when he said, Not too good, I’m afraid, Hariharan — or Bernie or Grandma Minnie. One day Mrs. Boychuk, his homeroom teacher said, “Um Lazar, how is your um mother doing um nowadays?” Her voice was phlegmy, as if she’d accidentally swallowed a raw egg and was too polite to hawk up the yolk. That was just her voice though — she always sounded like she was gargling eggs. Lazar stared her down, high noon style.

  “Good, Mrs. Boychuk, she’s doing good, thank you for asking,” Lazar said because:

  Politeness counts (Maggie a.k.a. Lazar’s mom).

  Don’t let the bastards grind you down (Max a.k.a. Lazar’s dad).

  Irony (Lazar, what he really thinks).

  Blink, blink (Sams a.k.a. Lazar’s brother).

  Maggie was the least polite person Lazar knew, and Max was possibly the most ground down, and Sams had his own problems, so Lazar was inclined to go with (c) Irony, etcetera. He narrowed his bounty-hunter eyes and stared down Mrs. Boychuk just so they were both clear that this stupid junior high corridor lined with rackety, swamp-green lockers was the wasteland at the end of the world where one day he was going to kill her. Snap her chicken neck, just like that. Cut out her heart and pick his teeth with her bones.

  “She’s doing good, Mrs. Boychuk,” he repeated.

  “Well, dear. She’s doing well,” said Mrs. Boychuk, as if the only thing that bothered her about the whole business of Lazar’s dead father and his zombie queen mother was the scandal of Lazar’s bad grammar. Everyone knew about the Binders, everyone in the whole city, probably the world. Just don’t get him started on the kids at Raging Hormones High.

  “Sorry, yeah,” he yelled at her rapidly retreating but still prominent backside. “She’s doing well. Really really really well.” Visibility-wise Mrs. Boychuk’s butt was like the Himalayas. You could be standing on the moon and thinking, holy moly, what is that extraordinary natural outcrop? Lazar didn’t even want to think about what was going on beneath the polyester rub of her triple XL tent dress. Chafing, probably. Stinkiness, for sure.

  Mrs. Boychuk was getting divorced, was the rumour, and Lazar envied Mr. Boychuk, whoever he was. The other thing he knew about Mrs. Boychuk was that she had a son called Frankie. Frankie was only eleven years old but he was already a soccer star, according to his mother. The king of Grover Park Fields FC she always told her class. Lazar used to love soccer when he was young but, despite the unknown Frankie’s much-vaunted athleticism, he most certainly did not envy that kid. For one thing he’d probably end up at Ridgehaven High one day, where his mother would point him out to all her students.

  “Have you met my son, Frankie? He’s the king of Grover Park Fields, you know.”

  Ridgehaven High (Go Ravens!) was one of those high schools that parents sent their kids to because they were “lucky enough to live in the catchment area.” The catchment area was the Heights and the school district was South Central, and the luck was because nobody had been stabbed on school property or died during grad, in recent memory, and nobody’d been busted with anything more dangerous than weed in the last twelve months. Most of that was true if you didn’t count the crosswalk outside the gym as school property (stabbing incident), or the grad after-party of 2011 (permanent brain damage due to DUI). The part about drug busts was true, though. Ever since Gary Woo set up shop in his Camaro outside the 7-Eleven on Academy, none of the kids needed to exert themselves to procure speed or opioids (Gary could hook you up with weed too, but he was having difficulty with quality control).

  Lazar’s theory was that the school retained a certain retro glamour on account of this kid who’d grown up to be a famous rock star after spending one term as a mediocre student at R. H. High, before his parents moved to the States. Not right after, obviously. His parents moved first and lots of stuff must have happened in between, but that was the rumour, anyway. None of the kids listened to Neil Young, for God’s sake, and most of them didn’t even know who he was, but every time “Harvest Moon” came on the car radio, you knew that some dad somewhere was congratulating himself on being smart enough to live in the right catchment area.

  Anyway, back to Mrs. Boychuk. The thing about Mrs. Boychuk — who always signed her full name where most teachers just scribbled their initials (it killed Lazar) — the thing about Mrs. Catherine Boychuk, was that she wasn’t the kind of teacher who let a kid goof about, or mouth off, or fool around all on his own. No, instead she jumped right into the idiot pool with him. So next thing, of course, was that Lazar ended up in Mr. Bubel’s room for a chat, young man, nothing serious. Mr. Bubel was his real name, if you can believe it, but they were supposed to call him Mr. B, for obvious reasons. Actually, nobody but the grade sevens cared about his dumb name anymore because:

  Some things are too easy.

  Some things are too damn easy.

  How many jokes can you make about some poor dude called Bubel?

  Plenty.

  An alternate way of expressing this equation would be:

  b but not d

  c if b

  all of the above

  except a

  Lazar went with (c) and (d), an apparent contradiction that proved the exceptional rule. In other words: Mr. B was the school guidance councillor and sex ed teacher. He was also in charge of high school socc
er (where they were supposed to call him Coach Bob) and intermediate drum line (where they were free to call him dufus because nobody could hear a thing above the racket). Those were all his “hats,” as he called them. Sometimes he wore one hat and sometimes he asked permission to “change hats.” “In the current job market you have to be flexible, people,” he often said, flexibility being key to soccer drills and synchronized drumming but not necessarily to sex ed, unless you ignored all that stuff about No meaning No, and just saying No, and what part of No don’t you morons understand?

  So, really, not that flexible. Thank you very much, Courtney Segal (“My Slutty Dress Does Not Mean Yes!”), for pointing that out.

  The first time Lazar did his patented Mr. B impression for Grandma Minnie she practically laughed her head off. But then she sobered up and said that flexibility was good advice, all things considered. She was just speaking as a grandmother, though. Wearing her grandmother hat. Then she yucked it up so hard that the only way to describe her would be “lolololol!” But that was long ago. Grandma Minnie was too sad to laugh much anymore.

  It was difficult not to draw the conclusion that if you named your kid Bubel you set him up for a lifetime of demonstrating how to fit a condom onto a banana (roll don’t pull), or the correct way to insert tampons (slide don’t push). This one time, Lazar confided his theory about the destiny of names to his dad and Max looked thoughtful for about five minutes. “In that case perhaps you’ll become a bookbinder,” he eventually replied. “And your brother can work with mummies or, um, corpses.” Lazar had no intention of becoming a bookbinder but he wouldn’t rule out embalming for Sams. His brother already had a mortician’s stoop.

  Those were some of the random-shaped thoughts that fell into the wrong places in the Tetris game of Lazar’s mind as he waited for Mr. B. He was slouching against the wall outside Mr. B’s room where kids were supposed to go if they were having problems at school “or even at home, guys, you know you can always blah blah blah,” was what Mr. B said every year at general assembly. In the history of the school, the world, the twenty-first century, no one had ever voluntarily gone to see Mr. B because:

  He’s a guidance councillor, for one thing.

  Ditto, for another.

  Some animal has laid down and died in his gut is what his breath smells like.

  He hangs cheesy poster art on the walls of his room. “If You Love Something Set It Free” and “Today Is the First Day of the Rest of Your Life.”

  If Lazar really believed that today was the beginning of another whole rotten life to get through, he’d hang himself, which is what a kid called Tony Aiello did. Problem was, Aiello took a moment to text his ex-girlfriend, so they managed to cut him down in time. Sort of in time — he ended up brain damaged and inclined to seizures with pop-out Kermit eyes.

  But why make it so difficult? Lazar reckoned he could swipe his mom’s vast supply of Ativan, cut it with a handful of whatever kids were currently into (fentanyl, oxy, diet pills), and wash down the whole jumpy cocktail with his late dad’s favourite single malt. Minus the Scotch and the meticulous planning, he knew a girl who did just that. Brittany Lam was her name and, guess what, still is, because she texted a bunch of her friends to say Later, peeps. Goodbye, and So long, and Life is brutal. LMAO and YOLO.

  “Question,” said his dad after that little episode. “What did suicidal kids do before there was texting?”

  “They died,” said his mom.

  If Lazar ever saw his mom for more than two blurred minutes a day he’d like to ask her what she meant. Did she think that dead kids could live on in virtual reality, surviving as a billion pixels of shimmering light? Did she mean that, even if you deleted your profile and your tweets and your Instagram account, you still existed on someone’s timeline or screen grab or the Facebook page that stayed up forever after you actually died? Or maybe she just meant that without technology, without being connected to some digital life force, kids died. It was as simple as forgetting to charge your phone.

  Sometimes he wondered if all the new electronic identities, the hundreds of ways to be yourself or someone else, were confusing death. Maybe death just didn’t recognize anyone anymore. Because the fact was that kids were certainly having trouble dying these days. It was slightly spooky, something in the wind or the water, but the kids in this city were having real trouble going down and staying down. There was a guy in another school, Matthew Somebody, who tried to shoot himself with his dad’s hunting rifle and missed, mostly, and although hardly anyone knew about it, even next-door Bernie once tried to cut her wrists in the bath (too little, wrong direction, some neat scarring though, she told him), and a chick in band knew someone who stepped in front of a train.

  “Yeah, that might work,” Lazar said.

  “Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” she yelped. “A freight train in the middle of the day? In the middle of the afternoon?” Her name was Sami Fisher, one of the cool kids. Lazar knew the names of all the cool kids and all the suicidal kids but hardly any of the others. Maybe “cool” and “suicidal” were his specialties, but then they were probably everyone’s, even Sami Fisher’s. She definitely didn’t know Lazar’s name though, because she gave him a Who do you think you are? look.

  They were all hanging out behind the gym, waiting for Mr. Dubchek to finish smoking and let them back into the band room where they’d continue to fishtail their way through the swoopy skids of “Louie Louie,” a perennial favourite of beginner band. But Lazar was the one who said, Yeah that might work.

  “They saw him from ten miles down the line,” Sami said. “They saw him from like Saskatchewan. Someone had to get down from the train and hike to where he was. God, how embarrassing.”

  “Yeah well, that’s life in the big city,” Lazar’s dad used to say. He complained all the time about how the trains stopped traffic dead. His dad turned out to be an expert on dying in the end, but who could have known? Once Max had been voluble on the subject of how traffic was the only thing those trains stopped dead.

  “Take it from me,” he’d say, “don’t bet your life against the two-fifteen Prairie so-called Express.”

  Lazar was beginning to notice a pattern. It seemed to him that the kids he knew were lousy at dying. At best, inefficient. They kept killing themselves and rising up from the ashes and yes, some of them lost an eye in the process (Matthew Somebody), or a rep (Brittany Lam), or a ton of blood (Bernie), or what was left of their minds (Tony Aiello), but he couldn’t remember the last time a kid went down and stayed down. Zombie-wise they had a lot going for them, he thought.

  He imagined the movie of their lives: the burnt-out, wasted city. The trains hanging off the broken-in-half bridges. Silhouettes of the ruined Ferris wheel and dangling rollercoaster cars at the Exhibition Grounds. The carousel still cranking out the syrupy canned music of an innocent time which, since it had never existed, lent the scene a terrible, deranged nostalgia. And in the distance, the river chugging its freight of zombie body parts and gnawed-to-death pets, half-consumed cattle spinning in the current. The army of the walking dead was on the move, pitchforks in their entrails, their eyeballs revolving in their sockets like ball bearings.

  He was so lost in his end-of-days scenario that he barely heard Mr. B calling him into his room with its accelerating goofiness (posters and window plants and cozy corner padded with beanbags, so freaks and losers and kids who hadn’t adjusted to their meds could kick back and zone out). There was a soccer poster behind Mr. B’s desk featuring Cristiano Ronaldo leaping up to head a ball into a net. It was a new addition to the resource room but Lazar wasn’t surprised. Ronaldo was Mr. B’s favourite soccer star because he played with his head and his heart, as Mr. B often told the stoners and burnouts who wandered in there and couldn’t get out again until he’d lectured them on how anything was possible if you jumped high enough or ran fast enough or worked hard enough. The Ridgehaven JV soccer t
eam hadn’t won a game in, like, ever, but if they did it would for sure be because of some phony poster that had probably started out life as an advertisement for Nike.

  “Where would you like to sit, young man?” Mr. B asked, eyeing his padded corner hopefully.

  Lazar told him he’d prefer to stand, and Mr. B’s mouth went oh and he started to cycle into a REM episode, blink-wise.

  “Oh,” Mr. B said again, this time out loud, and he searched the room for a place where they could do their standing together. Eventually he just decided to stay where he was, although he kind of hunched down as if to say, Any minute you’re going to want to sit down, Mr. Binder, any minute now. And when you do, I will be ready for you.

  So there they were, the two of them — Mr. Bubel and Mr. Binder — hanging out in the middle of the afternoon under the flickering resource room lights, which made everyone look sick as hell. Mr. B was wearing his “Let’s rap, pal” hat, and his “I hear you, dude” grin, which along with his Monday meme T-shirt (“Saskatchewan! Easy to Draw, Difficult to Spell!”) completed the outfit of a natural born halfwit. Lazar suddenly remembered how once, while delivering a public service announcement about teen suicide, Mr. B began to tear up. The grade nines listened in silence, but not a good silence. Perhaps they’d grow out of their callous ways, or perhaps they’d always remain hard at the centre: rows and rows of them like a box of the sort of chocolates nobody really wants to eat.

  “Blah blah blah,” Mr. B said, and Lazar took a step back because, the truth was, Mr. B’s breath reeked. In fact, Mr. B’s breath was so revolting that actually Lazar was kind of impressed.

  At least twenty cups of coffee a day went into the making of the halitosis cloud that surrounded Mr. B. It killed Lazar, really it did, to witness what a sorry bunch those teachers were. If you thought about it, any eleventh grader with a learner’s permit could walk into school with a Grande in hand while his teachers, poor demented souls, had to guzzle whatever dripped out of the staff room coffee machine. In a movie, it would be the liquefied brains of their students. In a movie, the teachers would sip the evil coffee all day long and it’d be like a sort of blood transfusion only it wouldn’t make them younger, just crankier and paler and ever more inclined to gaze thoughtfully at the adolescent necks of their innocent students. In a movie, the coffee would be a sinister, bubbling elixir of brain chunks accompanied by oozy-stew sound effects: THL—RR—UP! URP—GLUNK!