by Méira Cook
What happened to us, Max, how did we unravel?
Was it the wear and tear, the this and that, the now and then? The dear old ineffable there-you-go-again? Was it the things said in anger that couldn’t be taken back or the failure to be taken aback, no matter what? You had the habit of transparency, of disappearing for days at a time, even if you went nowhere (you never went anywhere), even if you were there all the time staring dreamily into space, your hands loaded onto your knees. The absent-minded professor!
“What?” you’d say when you caught me glaring. “What?”
“God, Max, you are such a damn ghost.”
“Maggie, Maggie . . .”
“No, I mean it — you’re not even here, you don’t really exist, do you? Do you?” And I’d poke my finger at your chest to indicate the likelihood of its going right through you.
But you always came back to me in the end. After a couple of days of that long-distance stare you’d sigh, give yourself a shake, and travel all the way back to that Max-shaped hole in the world you’d vacated. You there, you with the stars in your eyes, you’d sing. And we’d bumble along for a while as the boys grew and the seasons changed and the world swung around on its axis. You always came back to me in the end except, of course, for the last time. Which, as I recently told Lazar, is the point at which sane folks stop searching for what they’ve lost. But where did you go to, my lovely? And where are you now? No, I mean it, Max, because something doesn’t sit right. The world is out of kilter and I blame you for it, and not just instinctively.
The thing is, I sense you hovering, hazy and out of focus, waving your arms about. Look at me! Look at me! For weeks now, months, I’ve felt hailed. Something, someone at the corner of my eye, snapping like bunting. There you go, slouching through the world, hitching up your pants and scratching. Christ, do ghosts itch? I’ll bet yours does. Sullied world, eh, sullied world.
Go away, Max, go back to the grave. I mean it.
We don’t need you anymore, if we ever did. Lazar is growing up or older at least, which he’d do with or without his father’s ghost panting behind him. Remember me, remember me, remember me. And the problem of Sams isn’t ours to solve, says the Rajah.
Poor Sams, woozy with the new meds and too sluggish with whatever his shrink prescribed to “take the edge off, and I’d be happy to write you a script too, Mrs. Binder, these are difficult times.” Poor Sams, slouching at the kitchen table and scratching at his lists. Staring vacantly into space for hours at a time then tugging hold of a passing word and committing it to paper. The medication came with its usual slew of merry side effects, one of which was to intensify the shakes so that by the time Sams had rattled and banged his way down the length of the page we were both exhausted. His jerky movements and inner whirr reminded me of a wind-up toy, and I wondered if Sams was suffering from nothing more than mechanical failure, if he was merely broken.
“Come now,” I said. And I held his wrists. But they were awfully thin wrists, Max, mere twigs in the wind.
“Come now,” he replied, so softly that I knew he was no longer talking to me.
I poured him a glass of milk and helped him angle it to his mouth. But two pairs of hands create twice the mess, which was what your other son pointed out when he came crashing into the kitchen to investigate. Down he plunged with a dishtowel in one hand and a bin liner in the other. So damn irritating that I had to stop myself from hauling him up by the cowlick.
“Stop that, Lazar,” I yelled. “Just relax.”
Lazar gave me a reproachful glance but got up, brushing down his jeans and adjusting his manhood. Sams immediately lunged at my cup of tea and carouselled it off the table.
“Christ, Sams!” yelled Lazar, trying to step out of the way.
I was struck by the swiftness of Sams’s action, the narrowing gap between thought and its accomplishment. There was something ungraspable in his expression, something I should have understood, as he looked down at his brother who was, yes, back on his knees at our feet, dabbing at the liquid seeping into the rug and glaring at Sams with humid disapproval.
“Twice risen,” said Sams. “And once more to go.”
We both stared at him and he stared right back, the old clear-eyed Sams look for once. I said “Hmm?” and Lazar said “Huh?” and Sams said nothing at all while the fridge hummed and the basement dryer knocked companionably and all the electrical circuits in the house continued to pull light and warmth into the kitchen. Then he pointed at his brother.
“Him,” he said flatly. “Lazarus, twice risen. And once more to go.”
And then Sams smiled. A smile that lit up his face like an advertisement for grace. A smile that shone like two eternal flames in the centre of each pupil. A smile that I remembered from long ago but one he’d lost the knack of all these years. A smile that banished the ruin of his twitching body and greasy hair. A just-cut grass and skinned knee smile.
“Don’t call me that,” Lazar yelled. “Ever, not ever.”
Sams flailed from side to side and we both lunged for him but Lazar got there first, wrapping his arms around his brother from behind, his voice soothing. Sams was rocking, trying to shove his fingers and then his hands in his ears, trying to thread his entire body through his ear holes. It was horrible to watch but the Rajah had said he was only trying to comfort himself, the worst thing we could do was interfere.
“The worst thing we can do —” I began, but poor Lazar was finding that out for himself.
Sams was in terrible pain, anyone could see that. He was like a beaten dog, ripples of terror came off him in waves. Lazar was still crooning don’t, don’t, don’t, so I grabbed him by the arm, trying to pull him away from Sams who swung out wildly. Lazar, caught off-balance, went down catching his head with a crack on the kitchen counter. He twitched once and went still.
For a moment we were all silent, listening to the echo of the years die away. Then Sams started rocking again and the fridge began to hum. Lazar lay there, his eyes closed. And while that god-awful crack was still ricocheting off the inside of my skull, I remembered a long ago mini-soccer game when this brute of a boy (too old for mini-soccer, surely) decked the ball smack into Lazar’s little head and down he went. Get up, get up, get up, I thought, wringing my hands beneath my pullover. Barely down when he was on his feet again, our boy, brushing grass from his hair and punching his fist into the air: I’m all right!
The crowd went wild. The crowd went wild! They roared as one, they laughed and bellowed and chanted. Go number 21! He played like fury for the rest of the game, although a goose egg was already swelling above his eye. For the remainder of the season it became our war cry, our cheer. Every time a kid went down: I’m all right! The boy struggling to his feet, one arm punching wildly at the air. And, I’m all right! the crowd would yell, would always yell, are yelling still in some dog-eared corner of my memory in a bright green soccer field of the mind.
Lazar was lying with his head canted oddly against the kitchen counter but I could see his eyes fluttering. Get up, get up, get up, I thought, wringing my hands, always my first line of defence. I knelt beside him, fumbling at his hairline where a thread of blood was spinning out and trickling down his forehead. He shook his head woozily like a boxer after one too many punches trying to knock the ringing out of his head and the sense back into it.
I flew to the faucet to run a glass of cold water and when I looked back he was already on one knee and then the other, pulling himself upright by way of the kitchen table. Sams had stopped rocking. He was looking at his brother; we both were.
“Lazarus thrice risen,” I said as he pulled himself to his feet.
“No more to go,” Sams agreed.
And again.
When the doorbell rang on Sunday afternoon I ignored it. Sams was upstairs in his bed, drifting in his zombie limbo, and Lazar was in the basement, stewing. He appeared to be torn
between doing his laundry and setting the house alight. Equally torn. I could hear him lighting matches and flicking them at the walls.
The doorbell rang again. I was reluctant to answer. I’d given up not-smoking one last time and it was taking a toll. My bathrobe was grubby and my breath was sour with the particular anomie of Sunday afternoons: tottering willpower, snow falling, too much coffee, too many cigarettes, more snow. The windows tuned to the static between television channels.
Then the pop-in, the drive by, the uninvited — whoever it was — began to rap upon the door like the Gestapo searching for Anne Frank. Fine, you asked for it, I thought, banging downstairs and throwing open the door.
“She’s in the attic,” I yelled.
The man who stood there, his hand raised to knock, cut a formidable figure. It was the raised arm and the utter regularity of his face, as if he’d been folded down the middle to make two identical halves like those paper valentines we cut out as kids. And it was the smooth dark chocolate of his skin, as if he’d been poured into a mould and left to set, seventy percent cacao bean with a glossy finish. He was all in black — trousers, coat, hat, old fashioned briefcase in one hand, umbrella in the other (he would later refer to it as his “brolly”) — and this sobriety set against the falling snow gave the impression of a more courtly age, an earlier monochromatic time.
“In the attic,” he said slowly. “You keep her in the attic?”
Clink. The penny dropped. “Ah, you’ve come to sell me another child.” I narrowed my eyes at that World Vision lackey. “Well, you should know that the last one didn’t exactly pan out.”
The huckster hesitated. “No, on the contrary.” He spoke formally, giving each word its due. “On the contrary. I have come to find a child.”
“Excellent. I have two. You can take your pick.”
“Two? But I have come for only one.” His accent, I now noticed, was evocative of sub-Saharan Africa with an Oxbridge polish and a liturgical lilt.
“Well, come in and take your pick. Don’t expect me to choose.” I was bewildered but intrigued, a welcome change from my usual state of out-and-out bewilderment.
He hoisted his rather battered briefcase and leaned his brolly against the front door. Although he carried no brochures, no clipboard, no portable credit card machine, I was suddenly punchy, so angry you could have melted me down and poured me into whatever fight was looming. For no reason that I could explain my life had begun to unravel the day that first World Vision charlatan knocked on my door. My visitor stepped over the threshold and held out his hand, at the same time whipping off his hat. I took the one and shook the other.
“Father Michael Akashambatwa, Missionary of Africa, at your service.”
“Huh. A man of the cloth.”
“A man of God,” he corrected me gently.
“What can I do for you, oh man of the Cloth God?” My rudeness had no effect. He neither smiled nor frowned.
“Am I to understand that you keep her in the attic?” he asked.
“Yes. I keep Anne Frank in the attic with the other Jews,” I snapped, wondering when we could drop the Gestapo joke.
“But I have not come for Anne Frank,” he said. “I have come for Pat Ngunga.”
Clunk. The shoe finally dropped with a thud that was much louder than the earlier penny-dropping incident had been which, if you’ll remember, was a mere clink. A tinkle on the surface tension of time. But it would be some time before the other shoe dropped, and the sound that shoe made was as loud as the roar of acceleration ripping through the sound barrier. A sonic boom.
Only you.
Only you in all the world! Who else would think of making a gift of a person? The perfect gift.
Oh Max, oh Max, I could weep. You always believed in her. But, my darling, what did you think we would do with the poor girl? Having hauled her halfway across the world on a wing and a prayer.
Implacable, Father Michael sat at the kitchen table and allowed that a wing and a prayer was a fine start. He didn’t expand upon this fascinating insight, although I would have liked to hear his thoughts on wings and prayers, which I had always assumed were the exit wounds of faith and not the flight paths of cockeyed optimism. But Father Michael, upright and spotless as his conscience, was a formidable figure. He’d travelled for a day and a night and then “half again another day,” he told me, and come directly from the airport by “taxi cab fellow.” Yet he was starched and correct, his edges precise. I was suddenly unbearably tired. One wheel down and the axle dragging, as you used to say.
He asked for a glass of water and I rushed to the fridge, scrounging in a panic for whatever I could find to set before him: a slice of pizza in its smeary takeaway box, two cans of diet cola and a tin of butter beans (so that’s where it got to!), the leftovers from one of Lazar’s cooking experiments congealing on a plate, and a litre of date-compromised milk. None of it looked very good so I whipped him up one of my Cheez Whiz and sweet pickle sandwiches. He thanked me politely then filled a drinking glass from the tap and, still standing at the sink, sluiced the water down before filling the glass again. He did this three more times — drinking and refilling, his Adam’s apple bumping up against his throat — before washing his glass and turning it over on the draining board. When he returned to the kitchen table he retrieved a manila envelope from his briefcase, sliding it across to me as if I would know what to do with it.
He made no comment, only saying that I could look at it later if I wished but if not, not.
I sat across from him in my nubby pink bathrobe, grasping the two sides closed, there being no buttons left with which to barricade my already discredited modesty. My sadly neglected hair (unwashed, in need of a cut) was already tumbling from the couple of wooden chopsticks I’d used to skewer a messy bun to the top of my head. I could smell myself, a heady brew of unventilated kitchen, cigarettes and insomnia, the rankness of my ropey nerves. Too tired to get up and open a window, I limped over to the casement anyway, where I was defeated by the broken catch you’d promised to fix. For a while I struggled with the window but eventually gave up and filed it under one more thing the fuck about which I did not give.
Father Michael told me he was a Catholic priest who had received orders abroad and returned to his homeland to attend to the spiritual needs of his countrymen. Then he put his fingertips together and arranged himself in a listening attitude but since I had nothing to say we sat staring at each other while the afternoon flickered out and settled into evening, the streetlights coming on along Magnolia Street. Like the Rajah he was evidently one of those aggravating people who are as comfortable sitting in their own silence as an untrained puppy in its own muck. Over the rumble of the washing machine on rinse cycle, I thought I heard Sams turn over in his bed. I thought I heard Lazar flick another match at the basement wall.
“Have you taken a vow of silence?” I finally asked.
“I am a Jesuit priest, not a Benedictine monk,” he explained, a distinction he must have realized was lost on me because he finally said: “Yes, I can speak.”
“Huh. You don’t seem to be much of an orator.”
Silence.
“You know, a chatterbox.”
He nodded as if in agreement. “My people say Ukutangila tekufika. It means there are no shortcuts in life.”
“Your people?”
“The Bemba people who live in the Northern and Luapula Provinces of Zambia.” He waited a beat and then smiled. “My other people say the same thing but take much longer to do so. Do you know Matthew 7:13?”
Suffice it to say I did not. “Suffice it to say —” I began, but Father Michael, despite his intolerance for shortcuts, cut me short.
“Enter in by the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many are those who enter by it.”
Huh. A bible jockey. Well, then. I gripped an
imaginary mic and gave it my best shot. “This for my shortcuts and my dead ends, and my dead friends, and my demons, and my lack of feelins’ this evenin’,” I sang. Or attempted to sing. You know I can’t carry a tune to save my life. And if you’re interested in my unexpected grasp of hip hop, you might remember that our youngest son has a carrying voice and a tendency to hit repeat when he’s in the shower or the doldrums.
Father Michael stared at me for a long Benedictine moment. His meaning was clear: he was here to discuss a dead friend not a dead end. There were to be no shortcuts and any lack of feeling was all on my side.
“Where is she now?” he finally asked. “Where is Pat Ngunga?”
For a while after the accident, the girl the papers called “the Hitchhiker” had floated in the careless limbo of Jane Doe–land. No one came forward to claim her and she was too battered from the accident to be of use even to first-year anatomy students. I believe the word they used was compromised. Eventually some Christian burial society consented to haul her away. Which is what I told Father Michael, not necessarily in those words. He sat very still, his head bowed and his large hands clasped on the table in front of him. He lifted his head and I saw that he was crying, which shocked me. Not the crying so much as his expertise in accomplishing this feat without effort or strain. Two tasteful rivulets of tears descended from the corners of his eyes and flowed down the faint marionette lines beside his nose, but his demeanour remained sanguine. The effect was that of watching a statue weep. Without any warning I began to sob, noisily, messily, and entirely without the sang-froid of Father Michael Akashambatwa.