by Méira Cook
The front door key lies where it has fallen, on the cracked flagstones of the front path, after Lazar, in his clumsy rout, knocked it out of his father’s hand. Didn’t even see me, thinks Max. What am I, a ghost?
He limps stiff kneed to the sidewalk and slumps down, his feet in the gutter. He props his elbows on his thighs and lets his head drop into his hands, closes his eyes, tries to sort through his various anxieties. There is the matter of his son’s icy hands and no gloves to be found. There is the boy’s un-zippered parka, his toque-less head. The backpack beneath which Lazar staggers every morning will do him an injury, no doubt about it. And now the searched-for key lies abandoned. Max picks it up and absently pockets it.
He tries to remember what Lazarus was like as a little boy. A demon on the soccer field, he seems to recall. Go number 21! Or wait — wasn’t that just a story Maggie used to tell about a kid and a ball. But whose kid? Whose ball? Memory is secretive, it hides behind a door. Knock, knock. The door inches shut. Who’s there?
What death is, Max is beginning to suspect, is being caught in the present tense forever. A grammatical limbo. The past is imperfect and the future is conditional, but every day the front door opens and who should walk out but Maggie, burning, then Lazar, staggering, and then — hours later, but Max has nothing to do except wait — Sams.
Sams in his cracked leather jacket with his long, streaming hair and his hands shoved deep in their pockets. Sams, loping.
Who’s there?
For a long time Max turns up as he has never, in life, turned up. The truth is, like most of the men in his family, like most Binder men, he’s loved his sons and tried to understand them (failed, mostly), and railed against their place in his wife’s heart (silently), their foreseeable place in the world after he’s gone (subconsciously). But he’s never been one to throw a ball or bait a hook. Mostly he’s just done what dads do: snooze in front of the television, grumble about bills, kid around, try to pat a passing back, ask about school when he remembers, and hope to God somebody will need something from him someday.
Advice, cash. A kidney.
But turning up is not what he’s been best at.
These days he not only turns up but he arrives early, his bones ringing like the iron tracks across Railway Bridge when a locomotive approaches. Some mornings he shakes so hard that the world is a blur until noon. Some mornings the trains that have been running through his head all night keep going. Some mornings he wakes up frozen almost to death on the sidewalk in front of the shuttered house. His feet in the gutter, waiting.
The thing is, he is terrible at death. Face it, a bumbling goof! He can’t even haunt anyone, although he raps and bangs at the door between this world and the next. He is nothing — the wind comes off the river and blows straight through him. He was all flesh once, Max is certain of it. Very little in the way of spirit or soulfulness. Clumsy, untidy, an ugly bastard, but impossible to ignore. Now he’s gone and mislaid his own death.
As the days pass he grows less hungry, less cold, less short of breath. Less agitated, less lively, less hopeful. His feet are wet and his knee is painful and inflamed. Also — and he hardly likes to mention this — he’s begun to smell. Ripening, always ripening.
It embarrasses him, this stink of his bodily corruption. But what can he do with himself, his body. This bag of bones and gas and greening flesh. He avoids heated interiors, walks upwind, burrows into his winter coat. Still, dogs tend to congregate around the Max-shaped hole he’s hollowed into the world. The dogs snuffle and burrow in a grotesque parody of affection, their ears cocked.
A crow flaps up beside him, settles in a tree. Don’t be a bore! it advises. That’s what death’s for! Shut the damn door!
* * *
Max positions himself carefully on the train tracks just off Highway 9. It’s his third try and he’s full of ire, pumped up with righteous indignation. He’s chosen his position after careful consideration, some on-site observation, and a painstaking study of the CPR timetable. No doubt about it, the Great Western Line is the way to go. Although their trains are notoriously unpunctual and inclined to dawdle at level crossings, they can be depended on to gather speed on the open prairie. Besides, the GWL Express Freight is the only locomotive with enough heft and momentum, with enough conviction, to wreak sufficient damage upon a man of his ambiguous stature.
At this very moment, Max can see the GWL Express chugging along the line toward him. He stands with his legs braced on either side of the tracks. He’s trying to keep his spirits up because it’s his third consecutive day. On the first day, the freight didn’t hesitate but barrelled straight through him, resulting in a hollow, nauseous feeling in the pit of his stomach. On the second day, the engine seemed to give a lurch as it hit him, albeit a tentative lurch, a lurch in the shape of a wobble. Then, once again, it ploughed through his middle, the freight train sturdy as ever, belting its way west, apparently unaffected by his ghostly suicide attempt.
Still alive, or at least not quite dead, Max is tired of being a ghost, sick at heart and weary of soul. He wants nothing more than to kill himself, requiescat in pace. But this second death hasn’t been easy to accomplish. Far from it. At first he merely throws himself off various structures: highway overpasses and trees, a small building or two. But nothing ever happens except for a gentle bounce, the ground rushing up to meet him, and then a slow fade to white.
But Max persists, hurling himself from his overpasses and trees and buildings, bouncing and fading to white, his knee throbbing. Frankly, Max is afraid of heights. He longs for death but he would rather not die of fright. If he had a particle of courage he’d clamber to the top of the highest bridge in the city, take a deep breath and throw himself into the river. And yes, he’s clambered, hung over the railings, shuddering at the thought of that secret riverine current moving swiftly below its thin skin of ice.
How much time has he spent hanging over the rusty trestle of the disused railway bridge while a breeze tousles his greying hair? His necktie blows over his shoulder, stiffening then going limp with every change in the wind’s direction. He peers at the water and calculates the impact of accelerating bodies intersected by gravity. Suddenly he remembers the dragging boats of last summer, the woman weeping on the banks of the Red. With every spasm of his heart the river recedes.
As always, Max falls back on his literary resources. That old reflex. He contemplates a bullet to the head (Hedda Gabler), briefly agonizes over poison (Madame Bovary), a sleeping draught (Lily Bart), hanging (Antigone), drowning (Ophelia), arson and jumping off the roof (Bertha Mason), swallowing fire (Portia), or waking up (Lady of Shalott). Why are all his suicidal mentors women? he wonders. And mostly written by you lot, Maggie would have pointed out. Men! You can’t wait to kill us off.
He has few resources, is the problem. A shortage of guns, poison, fire, courage. In the end the trains lure him (Anna Karenina), the trains panting and gasping across the Prairies, bearing their clattering miles of boxcars and their bloody-minded spirit of free enterprise. There’s something fateful about trains. Perhaps it’s their propensity to trundle by on double tracks, swerving neither left nor right. Or their arrowing off-ness into the distance as lines of cars idle at level crossings, their drivers drumming on their steering wheels and cursing. Or the feeling he invariably has on seeing a train disappear down the tracks: that it is he who has grown smaller and irreparably distant.
So here he stands for the third time. Quivering with nerves, legs braced, as the GWL Express bears down on him. This time, Max vows, he’ll keep his eyes open. This time he’ll lunge open-armed to meet his fate. Perhaps if he tries hard enough he’ll get this death right. I think I can, he reminds himself grimly, staring down the approaching engine. At once he catches the glance of the engineer sitting up in the cab, who doffs his cap and waves. The locomotive ploughs through his middle but this time to some purpose because in its headlong progress i
t knocks him off his feet and, with an audible thwock, sends him rolling like a bowling pin into the wet ditch. He scrambles up the embankment, soggy and winded, to watch the engineer hanging from the cab, receding into the distance, waving his cap and shouting into the wind.
Good luck, Comrade! it sounds like.
Oh God, thinks Max. Not another bloody ghost.
But he’s heartened by the impact he’s finally made upon the freight. His tumble into the ditch. Maybe tomorrow? What did his mother always say? Something about tomorrow.
Tomorrow is waiting for him. Tomorrow he will begin.
So he is dead, okay. But why does the cold morning air burn in his nostrils? Why do ice crystals glitter like diamond dust? Why does the mica that falls about his shoulders stir him as if he is a snow globe, and shaken? Why does the wind make him shiver and search for the hunch deep within his coat? Pull the water from his eyes and the blood to the surface of his cheeks? Overhead a crow rustles in the trees, refusing to transform into an angel.
Max is waiting for the bus. Up until now he’s led a life full of the usual amount of things waited for: his wife to forgive him (again), his sons to grow up (finally), his head-scratching students to confide their reluctant answers. Term to end, summer to begin, the Messiah to come. But all this waiting hasn’t prepared him for the toe-tapping boredom, the existential what-now? of his frequently postponed death. His mind is like an old Polaroid camera, slow to bring memories to the surface. The images emerge tentatively, deepen in colour, finally resolve, finally set. Now he remembers waiting for the 18 bus on weekday mornings. Back then he was always reading, a paperback stuffed in his coat pocket, the pages dog-eared.
When the transit bus finally arrives, he steps aside for a woman to enter, then shoulders his way through the huffing concertina doors behind her. But when the woman sits down and pats the seat beside her, Max is startled. Who, me?
“Hey there, neighbour,” the woman greets him when he sits down.
Max peers at her — is it? It can’t be. “Theresa?” he ventures. “Theresa Tergusson! Well, howdy . . .”
“Howdy, yourself,” she says, a little peevish at not having been recognized earlier. Max has turned so pale that she puts a consolatory arm about him. “No need to startle, honey,” she says. “Haven’t you ever seen a ghost before?”
His old neighbour is looking well, handsome as ever, and when she smiles her whole face smiles too: her clever, complicated eyes, the funny little gap between her front teeth, and the dimples in her cheeks.
“I’ve been waiting a long time for you to notice me,” she says.
Max is shocked. “Where’ve you been hiding yourself, Theresa?” he exclaims.
“In plain sight, honey.” She smiles again. “Think about it. All you need is belief.”
Belief, Max thinks, belief? Is that the answer? Should he plant himself in front of the next freight train that comes by, with enough conviction in his heart to make an impact? Stand astride the tracks like a colossus? Fling himself unflinchingly at the single red eye of his death as it thunders toward him? He thinks he can. With each hopeful thought, he imagines the happy little engine of his demise chugging closer. Absently but fondly, he smoothes a lock of Theresa’s hair behind one of her neat ears.
“No, it doesn’t work like that,” she snaps. “Sorry.”
Scalded, Max snatches his hand away. But Theresa is talking about death and intention and the ability of the GWL Express to yoke the one to the other, and not at all about absentminded but fond tousling.
“It’s not up to you, honey,” she tells him. “That’s the thing you’ve got to remember.”
But Max is unconvinced. Free will is his thing. He’s been teaching Paradise Lost for years.
Theresa sighs. “Unfinished business,” she explains. “Theirs not ours. Ghosts are what other people can’t let go of. Bastards, eh? Turns out everyone has a grudge.”
She pats his hand kindly. “Oh, honey,” she mourns. They rock together in the swaying interior of the 18 bus. “You think you got problems?” she finally says. “It’s been more than a year already and will that bastard give up and let me go?”
Riley Tergusson, she means.
Wisely, Max decides not to inquire into what is no doubt a long-running and far-reaching marital feud. No good can come of interfering between a husband and his ghost wife. Instead he exclaims: “How’s my dolly? How’s my singing nun?”
Bernadette, he means. He’s always been partial to that fierce girl, who has a talent for survival that her mother once seemed to possess and her father’s crazy ten-gallon sense of humour.
“Fine, I guess. I haven’t seen her in a while. You know how kids are.”
Actually he does, having two of his own, neither of whom seems anxious to welcome his dead father back into his life. “Sams offered me a cup of coffee once,” he tells her. Although honesty compels him to admit that his oldest boy had mistaken him for an itinerant at the time.
“Are you telling me that Sams saw you?” Theresa is astonished. She twists in her seat, grabs him by the lapels of his coat, shakes him as if to try and wake him from his dream.
“He actually saw you?” She’s almost shouting now.
Max passes a hand over his eyes. Oh God, now what?
Patience has never been Theresa’s strong suit although she hid it well back then, white-knuckling it through all her husband’s goading. Now she is actually digging her fingers into the sockets of her eyes with frustration. “You’re telling me Sams saw you, he saw you?”
“No, but you don’t understand. Not me. He didn’t see his father — it wasn’t a, a Hamlet kind of thing. He just saw some stranger coming at him and he must have thought — well if he thought anything at all. You know what Sams is like. Kind-hearted, but.”
Theresa can’t help it. She really can’t. She clenches her fist and punches him in the chest with all her strength and, ghost to ghost, it isn’t half bad.
“Ooph!” Max says, the pain overlaying an earlier and more violent pain where once a steering wheel had pierced his chest cavity. He sits for a moment, wounded in body and spirit, rehearsing the highlights of his last reply: Hamlet. Panhandler. Kind-hearted.
Nope, it’s a mystery. Theresa is in full spate.
“…bloody recognize you or not. But if he saw you, your own son, I mean that’s remarkable you, you fool. The rest of us — we’re ghosts, we just fade away.”
“Well, that’s what I’m trying to do actually,” Max says bitterly.
“Good luck to you, honey,” Theresa snaps. “If you figure it out —” She stares moodily out of the bus window for a moment then turns back to him.
“They all harbour grudges,” she repeats. “And, by the way, you smell like someone who wants to be left alone.”
With that she gets up and pushes past him, slamming out the bus at the next stop. Max can’t blame her. As always, Theresa speaks the truth. He stinks.
And then, one day, the city falls silent. It happens every year but it’s always shocking, as if nobody can quite believe what will happen next. It’s the beginning of the silence that will deepen with every turn of the weather’s screw until all that can be heard is snow on snow, no footsteps, no echoes.
Max limps through a neighbourhood near the old hospital one night. He hunches into his coat for warmth, his frostbitten hands in his pockets. As he passes he gazes into all the lit houses, living out his lonesome, half-dreaming moth life. He sees families eating supper, women in their kitchens, kids squabbling. The red eye of a cigarette, circling. Flicker of a hockey game on TV, the blue glow of a computer screen. A father coming home late, sometimes drunk, sometimes violent. Max can do nothing; he can’t even walk away. He stands there watching, in agony.
But tonight is different, tonight is still. Instead of flitting from room to room, keeping busy, people stand in their windows lik
e chess pieces. Gazing out. The silence becomes increasingly eerie when, suddenly, the wind gusts and the first flakes start to fall. The snow has finally come to unlock the iron cage of winter.
Nobody is out except for a group of refugee kids in their donated winter coats. The children peer up at the sky and when the snow begins falling they pull off their mittens and hold out their hands. They whirl in circles, shrieking when the snow touches them, but their whoops of fear and hilarity blow away in the wind. Max stops to watch the children, following the direction of their gaze, his head craned back as far as it will go, forcing his eyes to stay open so that he can see the snowflakes funnelling down.
Snow and the intervals between snow. At first it falls like musical notes, the air full of a quivering, atonal pitch. And then it falls like nothing he can name — there are no similarities anymore. Everything is changing, turning from water molecules into ice crystals. Max begins to whirl with the children, his sudden, unexpected delight the last stop in the transformation of snow into joy.
There’s an oily shimmer of broken dreams in the dawn sky above the Binder residence. A family lived there once, intact, more or less happy. By and large. All in all. Maybe you remember them, but probably not. Best not.
Morning again and Max is waiting. It’s all he knows how to do and it’s the only thing that assuages his grief. The house wavers in and out of focus. Everything is out of step, out of time. Nothing rhymes.
The trouble is he can’t quite remember how it all ended. Bits and pieces come back to him. Snaps of colour and snatches of song. If you want to bring me down. Luggage lost, stolen purse. Bunting snapping overhead. Better get in line. A young woman trying on jackets, no mittens. Pink plastic puppy, yellow Hydro truck. Sun in his eyes and the dark sobbing of angels. Who if I cried? And something stuck in his chest, like a hard crust of love he’s swallowed down the wrong way. Heartburn.