by Méira Cook
5. Sams took off all his clothes during Nuit Blanche. But he was okay when the police officers arrived and they kind of knew him from before so they drove him home in a blanket which was gross — the blanket, I mean, smelling of all the night’s piss and throw-up.
6. Oops. They drove him home in a cop car, obviously. The blanket was what he was wrapped in. Sams kept trying to tell me about it but I stopped listening because sometimes it’s easier to cope with the voices in Sams’s head than at other times and this was neither of those times.
* * *
Area Development Programme
Nakonde, Muchinga Province
c/o World Vision Zambia
Hey stranger,
This is going to sound weird but I was wondering what your people think about dying. I mean, are you guys curious or thrilled or scared to death, ha ha, or what? With me it’s the pain thing, like everyone says. But also, I mean what happens if, you know, if it doesn’t take.
Like the other day, Ms. Ramirez got us to read this story for homework. Only Jackson Riley (the boy with two last names) threw up in third period on a bet, and there wasn’t time for class discussion. And the next day, when Ms. Ramirez said take out your books, people, Jackson grabbed his stomach and started gagging again and Ms. Ramirez said — expletive-expletive-expletive — that was it. She’s on sick leave, if you’re interested, and the sub they got for us is an ancient dude, Mr. Patchett, who wears a lousy toupee and wants us to concentrate on “Commas, ladies and gentlemen, the pause that refreshes.”
I don’t know if you’ve read this Poe guy in Eng Lang Studs but let me tell you, bro, he writes a humdinger of a tale.1 You know more about sisters than I do so I won’t go into how freaky that Madeline chick is. I think the best part of the story is at the end, though, when the no-name narrator escapes. When he turns to look back and, just like that, the house splits apart and sinks into the earth.
I don’t have strong feelings about commas but Mr. Patchett doesn’t have strong feelings about discipline, so we get along fine.
Here are some examples of our getting along:
Heh-heh, so the cat ate your homework again, Binder.
Electricity out in your street? Happens, happens.
Yeah, no, those printers run out of ink all the time. So just try to catch up, eh.
Once I even told him that I was excused for the afternoon on account of my dad’s funeral. But didn’t he already — em? Yeah, I said. But he rose from the dead and now we have to bury him again. It was a good exit line so I left, and naturally the genius didn’t try to stop me. I walked out the door and down the corridor and out of the school. And I didn’t look back once. It wouldn’t have worked in any case. Just looking back can’t make a school building split apart and sink into the earth, so.
Sams and I used to play this game called Would You Rather? Fly or be invisible? Survive a zombie apocalypse or watch all the zombie apocalypse movies ever made? Magically receive one perfect wish or three pretty good wishes with only minor catches? Or how about five tricky wishes but with the option to renew?
Anyway, this whole death thing is a big matzo ball2 so I’ve thought of some questions to “focus your thoughts, people.” 3 Would you rather die young, no pain, or die of old age but suffer? Would you rather dream about worms or flames? Would you rather go through purgatory with the possibility of heaven or just go out like a light? Would you rather know for sure there’s nothing after death or live in misguided hope? Would you rather be haunted by a ghost your entire life or be stalked by a psycho killer for three weeks? If the ghost, someone you know or someone you haven’t met yet? If the psycho killer, violent but funny or useless but dumb?4 Would you rather have the power to go backward in time or forward? And if backward, to kill Hitler or buy shares in Microsoft? And if forward, to turn back time or stay there forever? And if forever — see how it works?6
No sweat, bro. Don’t worry if you can’t answer all the questions. They’re what Ms. Ramirez used to call “prompts to get your juices flowing.” 7
Salutations from the House of Binder,
L. (aka no-name narrator).
1. What my dad would probably say.
2. What my gran sometimes says.
3. What Ms. Ramirez always used to say.
4. Think of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson talking about eating a Royale with Cheese (funny) vs. Peter Lorre talking about absolutely anything (dumb). 5
5. What Sams would say, I bet you anything.
6. Answer key: young, none (ugh), light, hope, psycho killer (prob.), haven’t met yet, funny (cancels violent), forward, Hitler (obv.), forever.
7. She means creative juices. No relation to what Jackson Riley means when he torments homely chicks by sticking his middle finger in the air, then sucking (the juice, geddit?). Hey, here’s another one: Would you rather be surrounded by jerks who hate your guts or losers who like you?
* * *
Area Development Programme
Nakonde, Muchinga Province
c/o World Vision Zambia
Yo bro,
You haven’t asked but I wouldn’t say she’s getting worse exactly, my mom. And not better either, if you really want to know. But certainly more peculiar, which in our family is an adaptive measure. Binder peculiaris.
Take soup, for instance. Like I said before, my mom is a nasty cook and the only good thing about her never being home anymore is not having to eat the crap she used to scrape out of tin cans and mix together to the moronic delight of our father who, I might have forgotten to say, is dead and no longer a fan. But just the other night, late, I hear her bashing about the kitchen, and when I go down I find her making soup and digging through the shelves, muttering butter beans, butter beans in this way she has, as if something’s missing, some damn thing has fallen out of the world again and if she can only find it she can calm down and go to bed. I got the hell out of there because I so did not want to get into a discussion of what she’d actually lost, like the other day when I tried to help her find her reading glasses and it turned out she was really looking for her lost youth.
The huge pot of soup was still there in the morning, curdling on the burner, with a disgusting wrinkly milk skin over top. The soup was what Grandma Minnie would have called a mixed blessing: it was terrible but at least there was a lot of it.1
I couldn’t deal with the milk skin so I tried to yank it off with a fork but the skin suddenly came alive and began to fight for its life like one of those movies Sams doesn’t watch anymore. Creature from the Black Lagoon meets The Soup of Death. So there I was, bent over the kitchen sink, gagging and running the faucet at full blast when who should walk in? She stood there in the doorway, my mom. I want to say more in sorrow than in anger, but the truth is they were equally mixed, a neck-and-neck race to the finish line of sorrow-anger. She looked tired, as if she’d been up all night, but also like — I don’t know — cracked from side to side.2
Here we go, I thought. She was clutching at her throat, her eyes getting that red-rimmed, watery look. Then she gave herself a sort of shake. Like she was a dog and its owner at the same time. Like she’d taken herself by the loose skin at the back of her neck and brought herself to heel.
I felt bad on account of being such a terrible son, the badness rising and trying to get out of my clenched throat. There were these two kinds of badness: guilt and nausea, and my body was saying choose!
I’m really sorry, Mom, I said after I threw up again in the kitchen sink. And I was. She was sad because of all the things she’d lost but mostly Sams who was a lost soul. He slept all day and roamed all night, and his room smelled of the lion’s cage at the zoo, as if something was trying to die inside it. He was starving again so every morning I put a plate of food outside his door. He wasn’t a dog but what else could I do? He was thin as an electric current and his hair was falling out, I think.
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br /> My mom said, Oh Laz, in a helpless sort of way.3 She wrung out a wet dishtowel and pressed it to my forehead and turned the burner down on the soup which was already beginning to form a new wrinkly skin. God, you couldn’t stop it — it was like some sort of monster, growing new cells before it sloughed off the old ones. I still hadn’t eaten breakfast so maybe it was the hunger that reminded me of this story that Ms. Ramirez made us read last term.4
Let’s have some soup, Mom, I said.
Don’t be silly, Lazar, she said. Just pour it down the drain.
After she left I grabbed a Pop-Tart from the freezer but there was no time to shove it in the toaster because the bus driver, wearing his little yellow school bus, screeched up to the house and leaned on his toy hooter.
Cé—li—ine! Get in, Céline! he yelled as soon as he saw me. And, Sit down, Céline! Shut your yob, Céline! No fucking eating in my bus, Céline!
I sucked my frozen Pop-Tart anyway, pretending that it was a Popsicle while he yelled himself hoarse all the way down the block. I mean what was he going to do? He wasn’t allowed to stop the bus and pretend to punch out kids anymore on account of his anger issues and shitty distance judgement and what happened to that Daniel kid who also used to get on his thin little oxygen-deprived nerves.
I looked out the window at all the crappy suburban houses with their stupid Home Depot colours and their birdfeeders and their dumb Christmas lights still strung up around the eaves, and their melting snowmen out front. Mr. Tergusson was outside, brushing snow off his ugly old Chevy. He saw me and saluted with two fingers against the visor of his baseball cap like we were goddamn marines or something, but I looked away. The frozen Pop-Tart began to melt so that the frosting came off on my fingers and somehow got onto my jacket leaving this yucky pink trail. The thing is, it wasn’t a big deal. It wasn’t a Popsicle or a cinnamon roll or the icing from a dead kid’s birthday cake. All it was was my life so far — a flare of sugar and a sudden crash.
’K, bye.
Laz
1. This is an old person’s joke and my gran’s personal favourite. It’s only one sentence long. Here goes: The food was terrible and such small portions! Cue creaky old person laughter.
2. Ms. Ramirez once made us read a poem by this Victorian dude called Alfred Lord T. and at first it was crap and we all moaned and threatened to prong our eyeballs out every time she put on her poetry reciting voice but then I started to dig it — I really did. It wasn’t exactly rap but I’m thinking that Kendrick and Kanye and those guys might’ve gotten their swagger from being forced to read bros like Alfred Lord T. in high school. Maybe.
3. My mom’s been standing there for a while but I haven’t forgotten about her and I hope you haven’t either. There were just some things I had to get off my chest. Soliloquizing, Ms. Ramirez called it. (See Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5.) Another thing Ms. Ramirez used to say was that Hamlet would have unexpected relevance to our lives even in this post-modern age. Jackson Riley said Ms. Ramirez could stuff herself in an envelope and post herself to Denmark for all the relevance she had to his life. There was a lot more of this stuff going on during ninth-grade language arts, and if you really want to know, Hamlet wasn’t one of Ms. Ramirez’s greatest successes. Everyone climbed onto their desks and cheered when Laertes ran Hamlet through at the end and Jackson started this vampire chant — more blood, more blood — whenever anybody got killed, which in the final scene was everybody. But guess who turned out to be spot on about relevance?
4. That story by R. Carver I told you about. Absolutely everyone liked the story although it made Courtney Segal cry her eyes out. What I liked about it was that it combined a dead kid with No Pity At All. And at the end everyone shared cinnamon rolls, which was both unexpected and awesome. I mean think of your favourite thing to eat and then put it at the end of a story that doesn’t seem to be heading toward cinnamon rolls. Winner.
Father Michael came by this morning on his way to the airport. He was all in black, spiffy and band-box elegant, with a Pardon me, ma’am snap to his hat brim.
He sat at the kitchen table and accepted a cup of tea, requesting two tea bags and wringing both dry. A drop of milk to turn the tea a tawny orange hue, and three heaped spoonfuls of sugar, which he stirred in briskly. I remembered how he’d stood at the kitchen sink three nights ago, downing glasses of tap water, and understood that this cup of builder’s tea, made to his exacting standards, was his gift to me in the form of a confidence: I am a man who likes his tea, who likes his tea made so, who drinks his tea in three gulps and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand afterward. To some men even a person is too small and inadequate a gift, and to others a small habit judiciously exposed is gift enough.
He’d had a busy few days, he told me. But he’d accomplished his mission, which was to search out the grave of Pat Ngunga. He’d said a prayer and sang a traditional mourning song, but mostly he sat beside her and talked to her.
“Aloud?” I asked.
“Of course aloud. She’s not a mind reader.”
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask what you two chatted about.”
“We talked about the weather, mostly. And snow, a little. She was most enthusiastic about snow. And she asked me to wish you the happiest of birthdays.”
“Huh, bit late. But tell her thanks.”
He showed me a Polaroid snap he’d taken of the grave. “Now her mother will have two photographs,” he said with some satisfaction.
We sat quietly watching the snow fall. It had snowed gently but continuously since I’d seen him disappear into a cab, the snow forming fondant mounds and peaks on the roofs of houses. I asked Father Michael if we ought to prepare for a blizzard of Biblical proportions. I expected him to reprimand me, to remind me of the covenant, but he said only that God had given up testing humankind. No more Noahs, he said. Not even in the district of Nakonde, where three days of rain would fill the rivers and the water tables and the wells but also wash away roads and crops and cause mosquito larvae to hatch in standing pools. He shrugged. What you lose on the swings you win on the roundabout.
I asked him if Nakonde hosted many carnivals, what with all the swing and roundabout action, and he said yes, matter of fact the annual Nakonde District Fair was underway as we spoke.
Whoa, a joke! Father Michael confirmed his levity and my astonishment by grinning, which was when I noticed that he was not the entirely symmetrical being that I’d once thought he was. There at the corner of his mouth, buried deep, a shallow dimple dented his left cheek.
I wanted to see that dimple again so I told him your favorite joke, Max. You know the one although, naturally, you always forgot the punchline. The old Jew haranguing God: I’m so poor, I’m so luckless. Grant me a favour and I’ll never bother you again. Just this once, let me win the lottery. On and on, day after day.
Poor, luckless, favour, lottery.
“Yes,” Father Michael said, leaning forward. “And what was the Lord’s reply?”
Here goes then, my darling. From me to you by way of Father Michael. Once more with feeling.
“There’s a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning and a deep voice booms out. It’s God. ‘Max,’ he says. ‘Max, meet me halfway. Buy a ticket!’”
Father Michael let out a bark of laughter and flashed me his dimple. “Buy a ticket!” he repeated wonderingly. “Yes, that would be most advisable.”
We were still laughing when Lazar, who had been standing in the doorway for who knew how long, cleared his throat and said, “Um, Mom?” He was staring at Father Michael but talking to me, boy code for Who is this fine fellow and why is he sitting in my chair?
“Lazar, this is Father Michael,” I said, flapping my hand from one to the other. “Father Michael, Lazar.” I hadn’t yet told him the story, the story being too big, too improbable, too loopy to imagine, let alone relate in the time between when Father Michael first k
nocked on the door three days ago and his current magisterial presence at our kitchen table.
“Do you remember —” I began then stopped because I had no idea what to say. Do you remember our World Vision child? Do you remember the boy-girl called Pat? (The one you wrote all those letters to?) Do you remember your old man? The more I floundered the quieter the kitchen became — Lazar frozen in the doorway, Father Michael motionless at the table. They formed a tableaux vivant that came to life when Father Michael rose from his chair and stretched out his large, ministering hand.
“Good morning, Lazarus.” Father Michael stared at our son. “Since you don’t look like your mother, you must resemble your late father.” Again, he peered into our son’s face so intently that the boy flinched. “He was a good man,” he continued, undeterred. “He was a good man and you are in the process of becoming one. Possibly both.”
Lazar stared, shook the hand. Stared. I thought he would object to the name Father Michael had called him, that old taboo, but he seemed to be trying to work out a riddle.
“Good and a man,” Father Michael explained kindly. “Both things.”
I looked at my son and saw that he was, indeed, becoming a man, his jaw squaring off and his shoulders broadening, his muscles ropy and hard under the skin of his arms. His acne was clearing up and his face, which had almost shed its sullen adolescent cast, revealed a new sweetness that reminded me of the little boy he’d once been. The one who’d asked me what a good mistake was. “It’s something you don’t even remember regretting,” I’d told him, smiling at the memory. “You have to know you made a mistake, though.”
Lazar smiled at me, his face softening. And suddenly, there he was: my baby, my boy, my almost-gone. All three ages in one.
There’s not much else to tell, my love. I drove Father Michael to the airport so that he could catch his flight to Toronto and from there a Heathrow connection to Lusaka followed by a twelve-hour bus ride to Nakonde. A day and a night and half again another day. Mrs. Ngunga will be grateful to receive these photographs, was all he said. The gratitude of Mrs. Ngunga being beyond me I fussed a little, offering to buy him chewing gum or a newspaper. He refused all my blandishments, politely but firmly. It was his habit to use whatever free time was allotted him to pray.