Once More with Feeling

by Méira Cook

  Sometimes Lazar wondered what their story would be called, the story of the Binder family. If anyone cared. He had some thoughts on the matter, naturally.

  “Fifty-Seven Punchlines”

  “Binder peculiaris”

  “One to Swallow All the Light Bulbs and the Other Three to Hold the Room Steady”

  “Lucky Unlucky”

  “That Kettle Was Broken to Begin With”He favoured (e) but would probably have gone with (d) just to be tactful. The trouble was there were so many possible contenders it was difficult to choose the right one.

  “Multiple Choices”

  Whoa.

  “Big Night,” said Sams suddenly. No one was expecting a suggestion from Sams, and the Binder family went quiet. They fell silent. This does happen and not just in books. Actually, the falling silent didn’t happen that often in their family because Maggie was a yeller and a talker and a laugher and a weeper, so most opportunities for reticence were lost in the crackle and roar of her, but occasionally she was what is called taken aback and then a blessed feeling of peace descended and spread over the Binders like bread upon the waters.

  “Why Sams, I am quite taken aback,” Maggie said. Maggie and Max and Lazar stared at Sams. Sams gazed at his plate. He looked past the point of there being any point to his looking. Paint dried, grass grew, worlds collided, stars died and were born again. The remaining Binders waited him out because the thing about Sams was that he definitely wasn’t any of the things other people called him. To wit:

  Thick as a brick.

  Mad as a hatter.

  High as a kite.

  Dead as a doornail (zombie-wise).

  Although, like most people, he was some of those things some of the time: crazy, dead, dumb, and stoned being relative terms.

  “What he is,” said Lazar’s father, “is lacking in ambition, volition, stick-to-it-ness. He’ll never change.”

  “What he is,” said Lazar’s mother, “is eighteen. He’ll grow out of it.”

  Imee said something about the devil (but softly) and Grandma Minnie said something about upbringing (even more softly) and after that — after everybody had had their bloody two-and-a-half cents (Maggie, not at all softly) — the jury was still out. In Lazar’s opinion they were all wrong. Sams was about seven feet tall and thin as a wire. Double the height of anyone else in the family and a quarter the width. The postman, Max used to say when anyone asked who Sams resembled, but he stopped after a while because everyone knew Hariharan, and anyway Hari was short too.

  Lazar’s dad had read tons of books and he did the daily crossword in minutes flat and the sudoku even when it was rated “diabolical,” but about Sams he was just purely bewildered. It was Maggie who’d always been partial to Sams, who tried to get him to stop biting his nails and eat protein and air out his room occasionally. She worried about drugs, but the fact was that his hands had always shaken. (It’s just a tremor, the doctors told them when Sams was twelve, a physiological tic, means nothing.) And despite the two or three nerves he lived on and the way that he hardly seemed to talk anymore, not to his family anyway, and being out all night and asleep half the day, Sams was an amiable fellow. He never laughed (shy maybe, maybe sad), or seemed to eat (faddy), but he was always willing to help out around the house when he returned from whatever Middle-earth he inhabited, to stumble around in the kitchen dropping things and trampling small creatures underfoot.

  His brother was anxious, Lazar reckoned. More so than anyone he’d ever met, including:

  Weird kid in world events class who still can’t say his name without stammering. (It’s D-Daniel.)

  Kid behind the counter at the 7-Eleven whose fingernails bleed they’re so bitten.

  Franny Glass, this girl in a book he’s reading.

  Lazar Binder. (Surprise!)

  Sams was more anxious than any of those people, probably more anxious than any two of them combined. Sometimes Bernie or Imee could calm him down but mostly he looked like a dude who was saying the Jesus prayer in his head all the time, he looked like someone returning a kettle that was broken to begin with. He looked as if he was trying to remember to think of other things, which he always was anyway, but furiously. Not furiously in the sense of angrily, but furiously in the sense of applying himself with great concentration, which most people didn’t do, thought-wise, but there you go: Sams wasn’t like most people.

  You could blame it on his height or his goofy way of loping about on the backs of his heels, thought Lazar. You could point out that he was practically seven foot and skinny and had always been the kind of kid to just about jump out of his skin every time a car backfired or a dog barked its rotten head off, but Lazar’s theory was that if you went ahead and named your first-born son Samson then you were asking for trouble.

  Here are some of the names that Maggie and Max decided not to call their eldest son:

  Not Adam created in the image of God.

  Not David or Jonathan or Saul, all men of royal blood.

  Not even Noah who got drunk and was a jerk to his daughters but in the end saved all those animals.

  Not Lazar short for Lazarus (they were saving that one).

  On his first day at Bible Thump Elementary, Samson was beaten up by some kids who held him down and shaved his head. After that they beat him up and shaved his head whenever they saw him coming although, to their credit, they also went out of their way to search for him. Sams stopped talking halfway into September and wore a toque all the way through the end of June. Lazar’s dad tried to chivvy his son along but Sams was helpless against the bristly little gangs of preschoolers who roamed the hallways armed with safety scissors, disposable razors, a literal imagination, and a devastating grasp of the Book of Judges.

  “It’s your fault,” Maggie yelled at Max. “You’re the one who wanted to name our son after some motherfucking idiot in a poem by that cunt-bubbling excuse for a shit-faced fuckety rhyming loser.” That was how Lazar learned that Samson was named after a character in a story by some guy named Milton instead of being named after some guy in a story by — well — God.

  On the positive side, Lazar’s mom was brilliant at swears. The best he’d ever heard. Here’s how good she was; she could swear:

  Alphabetically, A through Z and back without repeating herself.

  In iambic pentameter.

  In twelve different languages (three of them dead) and five different alphabets.

  In American Sign Language and Morse code and semaphore.

  Of course (a), (b), (c), and (d) were all fancy swears — party pieces, Maggie called them. Most of the time she just did her ordinary, everyday swears as they fell trippingly off the tongue. Max was a great admirer of her talent.

  You there, you with the stars in your eyes, he’d often sing.

  Quoting something nobody ever heard of, as usual. Some song.

  “It’s your fault, you Jackass! You Knucklehead! You Lummox!” Maggie yelled at him that day (the day of Sams’s biblical haircut).

  Max, who had the normal amount of guilt, shame, and pity molecules zooming through his bloodstream, was downcast. But what could he do? The boy had been named, his name had been witnessed, signed, and sealed. Max was a professor of literature, for goodness sake.

  “You can’t suddenly rename a character in the middle of the story,” he told Maggie. “Imagine if Shakespeare had changed his mind halfway through Act III and renamed the old guy King Cheer?”

  “I don’t care about shit-eating Shakespeare,” said Maggie, “or motherfucking Milton or, if it comes to that, you.”

  The argument raged all evening and most of the night. Max slept on the living room sofa although actually he didn’t sleep a wink, he said. Just lay in the dark while all around him the wind blew on a lonely moor and his eyes watered and his cheeks cracked, which was a
reference, Lazar reckoned, to something that had gone before or to something that was still to come and that he would understand much later and have the satisfaction of saying, Aha! His dad called it the Loony Tunes effect.

  Of course Lazar was only a toddler at the time. So how did he know so much about Samson’s hair and where Max slept and how Maggie swore and all those private conjugal conversations? Here are some distinct possibilities:

  Lazar is an old soul, a time traveller.

  Maggie is a compulsive storyteller.

  Max is an unreliable narrator.

  Sams is a pod person implanted with a human brain.

  But Max wasn’t the only one who didn’t sleep. The next morning Maggie, who had hatched a plan, took her still silent, still balding son firmly by the hand, walked him down the block and through the park and up the hill to school, and deposited him in the kindly hands of his first-grade teacher, Mrs. Bender-Pollock.

  “Meet Sams,” she said. “He’s new in town.”

  Mrs. Bender-Pollock nodded. She was old. Too old to argue or look surprised or not know better. So, okay. Sams.

  It was a bloodbath, it was a massacre, it was a crazy playground brawl. These were some of the names that the other kids called Sams:

  Sams-I-am

  Green Eggs and Ham

  Baldy Stupid Head

  Yo Mama’s Got a Fat Ass

  All that year the teachers called Sams dear sometimes, and um sometimes, and oh dear I didn’t see you sitting there off by yourself, most of the time. But by then the Tergussons had moved in next door and Bernie Tergusson — who understood all about names and the trouble they caused — had taken Sams under her wing. She was Bernie (not Bernadette) and he was Sams, and she would beat up anyone who said different. She was a skinny, dark-haired kid with long legs, a slip of a girl who punched far above her weight category and kept punching until somebody yelled uncle.

  She was also ornery as all get out, Lazar’s dad said admiringly. On Heritage Day when the kids were supposed to bring in traditional foods, Mrs. Bender-Pollock suggested that Bernie ask her mom to fry up a pan of bannock to represent her mother’s people. Uh-uh, said Bernie, unconvinced. Instead she hauled in a can of Red Bull spiked with vodka and a jar of green M&M’s, which she claimed were the traditional food of rock stars and roadies, her actual people. Lazar was crazy about her.

  As for Sams, he remained silent and put all his energy into growing. Growing up, growing tall, growing his hair back to its righteous Samson locks. Growing the hell out of there. By the time Lazar was in junior high, Sams was back to speaking — or as much as he ever would — and the length of his side locks made up for the brevity of his commentary, as his dad would often say, who clearly had just the opposite problem. Twice a year Sams allowed Bernie to trim his hair with a pair of nail scissors, only she wasn’t allowed to go above his shoulder blades. But he’d never pulled his hair back into a crummy ponytail and Lazar was proud of him for that.

  Quite a ways back now, Sams made his unexpected suggestion and the Binders fell silent, and peace descended upon the family like bread cast upon the waters. In another sort of family, Lazar reckoned, peace might have lasted a while longer. A father might have cogitated, a mother might have mulled it over, and dishes might have remained on the table and not gone crashing to the floor. But they were not that sort of family.

  “Hmm, ‘Big Night,’” said Max. “Oops!” (That was because of the Surprising Chicken sliding off the table and splattering on the kitchen floor in oily lumps of curdling cheese.)

  Maggie was super excited, though. “Oh Sams,” she said, “what a wonderful name! What a wonderful non-literary name!”

  That was to get at Max, of course, but they all knew that Sams’s suggestion didn’t come from a book. It came from a movie because that was what Sams did: he watched movies. Even when he wasn’t sitting hunched over his computer, Lazar had the feeling that his brother was downloading movies from an unverifiable cosmic source and live-streaming them inside his head. That would explain his blank gaze, at least, and the way his foot was always tapping in time to some unheard but urgent oddball musical score.

  When he wasn’t watching movies, Sams worked in a retro video store. The Celluloid Museum it was called, where “Sams’s Picks” had collected an unexpected cult following. There were these freaky fans that turned up at the store on the first Wednesday of every month when “Sams’s Picks” came out, Bernie told Lazar. To witness the magic.

  Sams liked old movies and zombie movies best because black and white was his favourite colour (old movies), and the subtle gradations of existence between being dead, being undead, being immortal, and dying slowly of being eaten alive his favourite theme (zombie movies). The way Sams saw it:

  Zombies can’t die, that being the first principle of zombie-hood.

  You can’t kill what was never alive unless…

  But they do. Apocalypse survivors and vigilantes and hot girl warriors blow their heads off.

  …unless you are killing the death in them.

  So that they can finally die.

  What happened after Sams made his surprising contribution was what always happened with the Binders:

  Maggie says, “Oh! ‘Big Night,’ tell us all about it, Sams” (excited as hell).

  Sams goes quiet, hangs his head and shakes his hair into his eyes. Gnaws his thumbnail (skittish).

  Max says, “Your mother asked you a question, son” (is there a word for “wants Maggie to be happy”?).

  Lazar goes, “That wasn’t really a question, Dad” (is there a word for “leave Sams alone”?).

  Max says, “That wasn’t really any of your business, Laz” (snappish).

  Maggie goes, “Sams?” (hopeful).

  But Sams was already gone, swift and sweet as sugar lightning and Maggie too (after him), and then there was just Max looking at Lazar, and then there was just Lazar.

  After he cleaned up the mess on the kitchen floor, Lazar googled Big Night and it was just as he thought: a movie about these brothers who owned a restaurant and all the crazy, exciting things that you wouldn’t necessarily think happened to guys who owned a restaurant. Sometimes life hummed along for the restaurant brothers, and then suddenly there were broken dishes and people yelling and, ho hum, food on the floor. It was a “lyric to the love of food and family,” a “feast of friendship,” a “delicate repast about our recent past.” Strangely, there were no zombies in the movie but apparently it featured a poignant scene involving risotto. Lazar didn’t know anything about risotto but he was pretty sure that his mom couldn’t make it and his brother wouldn’t eat it.

  He would’ve shown his mom the movie reviews but really, why bother? The moment Sams spoke she’d made her decision — Big Night! — and Lazar couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t such a bad name, quite good in fact, but even if Sams had come up with Salmonella.com or Botulism Today, she’d have fought for it. That was just the way things were with his mom when it came to Sams.

  All this was last year, though. Shortly afterwards, Lazar’s dad got killed in his car with some girl the papers called “the Hitchhiker,” and his mom went crazy for a while. That was when Lazar learnt the most important thing about death: when someone died they never came back, you could never ever see them again, they were gone forever.

  After his dad died it was as if he could suddenly see again, as if he’d taken off the Coke-bottle glasses he’d been wearing for years. He began to notice things and what he noticed was that kids died, they had been dying all this time. Sure there were all the uncommitted kids he knew who had returned from the dead — broken some of them, self-important or embarrassed or depressed. But then there were the others, the boy that Mr. B tried to tell them about during Teen Suicide Awareness Week, and Imee’s daughter, and a young girl who had just washed up on the banks of the Red.


  All this time kids had been dying and it was the kind of dying that stuck. It wasn’t like zombies or vampires or this story his English teacher made them read where a girl was buried alive and came back to kill her brother. For a long time after the accident Lazar missed his father so much that he kept seeing him everywhere. But it was never his dad, just a man who looked like Max, a figment in his peripheral vision. Then one day he realized that he’d stopped seeing him and that was death too.

  Bernie said that ghosts weren’t lost souls like everyone thought. They were the sum of all the guilt and longing felt by the person who was left behind. Whoever saw the ghost was the real ghost, she said. Since Mrs. Tergusson had died last November Bernie knew the score, Lazar reckoned. His own mom must have been riddled with guilt and longing because she went around for months with a ghost-stricken look. There were dark circles beneath her eyes and she stopped eating or caring what anyone else ate. The three of them hadn’t sat down to a family dinner since they got the news, which was fine actually because Lazar couldn’t imagine what they’d talk about.

  “Pass the risotto, please, Sams.”

  “Delicious risotto, Mom. Top notch.”

  Anyway, his mom went crazy for a while but she’s better now.

  “She’s doing good, Mrs. Boychuk,” Lazar imagines saying the next time the teacher asked. Mrs. Boychuk would open her mouth to correct his grammar and Lazar would narrow his bounty-hunter eyes and blow her away in the swamp-green post-apocalyptic wasteland of the locker-rattling school corridor. Mrs. Catherine Boychuk’s head would explode and her eyes would swivel in their sockets. Brains would spatter, and blood would gush, and nerves would short like fuses.