by John Gould
And he was fine as he trod the long chute, the syringe that injected them one by one into the glossy body of the machine. He’d boarded last (why submit before your time?) and was therefore required to do the excuse-me shuffle, back in Economy, with the girl in the aisle seat to get to his window. Yep, still fine. Better than fine, he actually felt a little fizzy for the first time in ages. Did this mean it was really over, his time with Mariko? The end of each relationship brings with it, Matt’s noticed, a euphoria that’s the flip side of the one he felt at the start. Fission, fusion, they both give you a buzz. For a little while, at least, the raw shock of grief can be made to look like rapture.
Girl? Young lady? She was old enough to have two little hummocks tenting her tube top, young enough to have that “UM” sign hung like press certification around her neck. Matt, moronic in these matters, put her at eleven. If he had a daughter, might she be this age? Eleven from 2003 is 1992, so Caitlin? No. Nosiree. Of all Matt’s women, Cat was the most motherly, but also the most appalled by the prospect of …
All Matt’s women, yeah, good one. Not counting Hanna-and-Helena—would that be one or two?—he’s had four. Four, at forty-four. What a farce. This sexual stinginess will help scholars of the future (so Matt fancies, when he’s up for a rueful laugh at his own expense) dice his life into neat chunks or chapters. The way they do with Bergman and his films for instance, into the Harriet period, the Bibi period, the Käbi period, the Liv period. Kritikal Stages: The Life and Work of Matthew McKay. No, but seriously, could a guy get any lamer? Four partners, four potential mums for all his phantom kids.
Miss Unaccompanied wriggled into position, scissored one goose-pimpled thigh over the other. She’d rack up a greater roll call of lovers by the time she could vote. Vote? By the time she could drive.
Back at airport security Matt had chatted briefly with a young woman, a twenty-five-ish Goldie Hawn type who’d inspired in him the predictable little sexual frisson. Hey, a guy gets cuckolded (is that still the word when the other man’s a woman?), the coast is pretty damn clear, no? But what Matt did about it, as always, was nothing. Why is nothing what he always does? Matt’s never bought into Mariko’s notion that what makes him so unadventurous with women is virtue. More like some kind of hard-wired fidelity fetish, is what he figures. Today, though, as that young woman raised her slender arms for the brute with the beeper, it occurred to him, why not? Why shouldn’t this seeming backwardness be a sign of resolution, of character? Mariko’s always thought more highly of Matt than he’s thought of himself. She’s righter than Matt about most things, so why shouldn’t she be righter about this too? Such were his musings as Goldie was led to the counter and directed to open her backpack. From it she produced a huge, a monolithic blue dildo, which she was made to switch on to prove it wasn’t stuffed with explosives. As the thing writhed and bobbed before her Goldie looked back at Matt, and she giggled …
“Sorry.”
“What? Oh, no worries.” The umgirl, still squirming, had dinged Matt in the arm. Of more concern to Matt were his legs. What the heck was he supposed to do with them? Back in her sketching phase, Mariko had once dashed off a pen-and-ink nude of her husband and magneted the resulting masterpiece (it really was quite good, unnervingly so) to the fridge. The Matt up there was all appendage, a knot of torso from which great squiggles of limb flew off. Mariko had labelled it “My Beautiful Man,” and she’d meant it—she was never ironic in her adoration of Matt, never ironic about much of anything. To Matt, though, the drawing was a perfectly apt caricature, a right-on view of how ridiculous he was—a view of which he was reminded, now, by the grinding of his knees against moulded plastic.
He tight-crossed his legs, scrunched them up against the fuselage. “First trip?” he said. Buddy-buddy with just a hint, he hoped, of the avuncular, of the warmly uncle-ish. How do you not sound like a creep to a kid alone? How do you come off as unscary to a child who’s heard the lecture, seen the film?
“Um, no,” she said. “I do this trip all the time.” She freed her hair from its ponytail, held out a hank so she could assess its colour (black with arteries of orange, a Halloween motif), or perhaps the condition of its tips.
“Right,” said Matt. “Of course you do. Routine.”
The girl re-ponied her hair, gave Matt an appraising flash of her pale grey eyes. Mascara, but just barely—a marvel of understatement, of near-ascetic restraint. Twelve? “My mum’s on the west coast,” she said, apparently not detecting anything overtly spooky about the dork next to her. “My dad’s in T.O.”
“Going to see Pops, eh? Me too.”
The girl shrugged. She fished the in-flight magazine from the pouch on the back of the seat in front of her, started poking at buttons overhead in search of the reading lamp. The way she cocked her head … Shanumi having her one good eye checked, blinking up into the light. Matt can’t seem to quit watching Zane’s latest documentary—he screened it again last night, his fifth time, or maybe his sixth—and it’s giving him flashbacks now, haunting him like a bad trip. Shanumi seaside, toddler glued to her thigh, bowing her balding head for a pastor or priest …
“Please,” said the umgirl, tossing grimly through the magazine in search of the program guide, “please tell me I haven’t seen the movie.”
Just then a flight attendant happened by and leaned beaming into their little space. “You two are at the emergency exit,” she said. “That means you’d be first, okay, sir? You’d be the first one out.”
Which is when the fever made its presence felt. Something about that phrase First one out, a prophesy rendered irresistible by its sheer lack of content. It produced in Matt a shiver, and then a prickly sweat across his brow under the flap of his floppy hair. First one out. Bergman could have done something with that, brought it to dark life on film. Buñuel.
“Breathe normally.” The flight attendant was into her pantomime now, in sync with the safety spiel. “Always secure your own mask before assisting someone else.” It brought to Matt’s mind a bit of fortune-cookie psychology his high school girlfriend, Charlotte Tupper—the first of his four—once fed him. Smidge of truth to that, but could you really do it? Say he and Mariko had had a kid, say that one false alarm had turned out to be true. She’d be, what, two now? Three? Did they really think he’d help himself to air while she starved for it?
“Flight attendants, please take your positions for takeoff.” Matt grabbed a last peek at the serrated mountains north of the city. Then he sat back and waited for the drone and the roar, for the G-force to flatten him against his seat, relieve him of weight. It was his favourite bit of every trip, one of his favourite of all feelings. The feeling of being … what? Held. Overpowered. The way mystics must feel overpowered by their gods and goddesses, the way women in bodice-rippers must feel overpowered by their raw-jawed ranchers, their sternly tender MDs. Matt gave himself up, briefly, to something so much bigger than himself that there was no contest—something that could kill him if it had a mind to, and to which he could offer up, in supplication, only a stupefied sigh. This feeling, too, was more intense today. Too intense. He was being crushed, coal into diamond. He was all nerve, a gem of pleasure-pain, a nugget of achy joy. And he was dripping like a can of cold pop.
Was this the thing called “being sick”? It’d been so long. The acronymed stuff, that’s what you had to watch out for. SARS was ancient history, there’d be something new by now, BIMP or GOOP or WACK or Christ knows what. Some critter would be carrying it, pig or hen or house cat (had Toto, Matt’s full-figured tabby, not been just a little off her kibble of late?), and would already have passed it on to a few humans. Not the standard victims this time, not the young or the old or the poor or the gay or the addicted, but the Matts of this world, white, middle-aged, straight.
Last trip to Toronto, Zane had invited Matt to an AIDS fundraising gala, “Grief Resolvable and Unresolvable.” There was to be music—Death and the Maiden, other dismally gorgeous classics—plus movies, c
utting-edge stuff like Zane’s. “Special Guest Zane Levin”—that would have been down at the bottom of the poster someplace, where the with-it people would know to look. Theatre folks were scheduled to read out the names of artists who had died of AIDS, or were living with it. Nico, Zane’s partner (ex-partner?), had described the list of infected artists as “infinitely long.” Matt bought a ticket but then bailed. “My dad’s had a … The old man needs me to …”
That list must have horrified Zane, but would it also, Matt wondered—gulping and yawning, praying for his ears to pop—have offered him some comfort? The sense of camaraderie? He could look further back too, check out all those creative consumptives, Keats, Chekhov, Chopin. What was it with art and disease? They were the same thing, could it be that simple? There were tons of sick artists because art’s a disease. Certainly artists use disease—this was a point Matt had already made in a couple of his movie reviews (Elephant Man, Rain Man) with his usual gusto and grouchiness. And what about this, what if artists have to be sick so they’ll have something to say? Keats without his fevers, Dostoevsky without his fits, who’d care? Maybe Zane on the antiretroviral cocktail wouldn’t be sick enough. And maybe Matt was privy to these wonky, wow-man insights today only because he too was burning up.
Beep-beep-mboop-boop. Jatinder’s cellphone plays the Cuban classic “Guantanamera.” One world? “Yes, hello,” he murmurs, then switches tongues. “Hi honey, I’ve just picked up my last fare”—Matt’s speculating here. “Some wound-up white guy who wants to play let’s-get-along. Oh and look at this, a fricking accident.”
Yeah, look at this. People are climbing free of two vehicles munched together in the merge lane ahead. A souped-up Mustang or Camaro has buried its snout in the flank of an SUV. Bad omen, except that everybody’s up and barking at one another so maybe a good omen, could you see it that way?
“Sorry about this, sir,” says Jatinder. He pockets his phone, cranes for an angle out.
“No, no worries,” says Matt. “What can you do?”
Not much. Ten minutes Matt’s been in T.O. and it’s total gridlock.
And he’s headed the wrong way anyhow. This should really be the ride to Zane’s place. Surprise! And then what? Hey, I’ve thought about snuffing myself the odd time too, you know. Though it’s just the once that Matt’s ever been serious, a couple of months ago, a week or so after Mariko opened her mouth and said, “Sophie.” Serious? In the sense that he actually saw his own death, saw his body inert, vacant—and slumped over in a beanbag chair, oddly enough, the crappy corduroy one he and Zane shared when they were roomies way back when. But I thought about Mariko, what it would do to her. And I thought about Dad. And I thought about you.
Mariko. MAH-ree-koh. It’s true, if she’s the reason for Matt to kill himself she’s also the reason he can’t, or one of them anyway. Might Zane be persuaded to feel the same way? Matt’s why he got sick, Matt’s why he’s got to save himself …
“Jatinder?”
“Sir?”
“I was just wondering, could you maybe teach me to say something?”
“Say something, sir?”
“Just like hello or something.” Maybe if he tagged along. Maybe if he talked Zane into doing an India trip together, the two of them saving people by capturing the disease on film. Death to life, presto chango. The magic of movies.
“Hello?”
“But I mean what language is it where you come from?”
“Hindi.”
“So hello in Hindi.”
“Namaste.”
“Namaste.”
“Namaste.”
“And goodbye?”
“Namaste.”
“Oh, so it’s like aloha or something, you say it for both. Namaste.”
And then they could go beyond that, catch some yoga-type enlightenment on film too. What a trip—death and transcendence, Zane’d pretty much have to stick around.
“Shanti,” says Matt. “That’s Hindi too, right?”
“Yes, sir.”
“My wife uses it. To sign off letters and things like that.”
“Peace,” says Jatinder. “And silence. Your wife speaks Hindi?”
“No.”
Not hardly. Matt pulls out his cellphone, punches in his home number. This’ll be his first call—he’s only just given in, permitted Mariko to buy him the damn thing, hook him up to what she hails as “the great big world.” God help him.
“Hi, you’ve reached Matt and Mariko, please give us a massage.”
That voice, the one uncomely thing about his wife. Put her in a kimono, jab a couple of chopsticks in her hair and you could pass Mariko off as a Hollywood geisha bending demurely to tip out the tea. Her voice, though, is that of a pickled hussy ordering one last round of shooters on ladies-only night. It’s a thrilling shock, that voice, emerging as it does from such an aerial vessel. It’s still, after seven years, a serious turn-on for Matt. When he isn’t irked by it he’s undone.
Beep.
“Yeah, hey,” says Matt. Now what? “Um, I’ve landed, and I just … I meant to get Toto her shots this week, would you mind? I miss her already. I miss you both.” Christ, break down and weep why don’t you. If you have Sophie there while I’m gone, tell her to keep her grubby hands off my cat. And if Nagy calls, tell him to take his pissant little paper and shove it up his ass. “I don’t know, I’m feeling kind of weird, I think I must be sick or something. But everything happens for a reason, right?” Ahhhhhh! “Anyway, gotta go. Bye.”
Is it true? Missing, is that what he’s doing about Mariko? He’s missing Toto, no question there. She spared them the custody battle, padded down the hall and established a new favourite spot at the foot of Matt’s futon. Her nonstop attention, almost vapidly intense—this may actually be what’s kept Matt from offing himself so far.
Two ambulances have manoeuvred their way to the scene of the accident, but nobody seems to need strapping down. Mercy, this is the word in Matt’s mind. Between two warehouses he spies a stretch of superhighway, folks howling into the city or out of it, three-six-twelve lanes of jointed steel. From up above, as the jet angled in tonight, Matt noted the spaghetti junctions, the cloverleafs. They were E.T. geometry, they were space-invader hieroglyphics—a cursive script in which earthlings were caught but which they couldn’t possibly decipher.
At the other end, as the jet lifted off, the streets of Vancouver had been so bright and glinty he had to turn away. The umgirl had woggled her jaw once or twice to deal with the altitude, old pro, then pulled out a music magazine. The articles (Matt snuck glances, making as though to check for the drink cart) were mostly about rappers, hip-hoppers, but the cover was all David Bowie, one of the boys’ old favourites. At film school Zane had designed his own T-shirt, “A Lad In Zane”—he was just coming out at the time, way out—as an obeisance to Aladdin Sane, the Bowie album. Hey, maybe that was it, maybe the guy was just insane, just bonkers. Maybe Zane had simply lost his mind.
One flew east,
And one flew west,
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.
Matt grinned, tried to stop. Why did his skin feel so funny? He hugged himself—steady, old chum—and tugged his travelling book from his briefcase. What he did first, actually, was he dragged out Mariko’s screenplay, the slab of computer printout with which she’d presented him before they left the Lair this morning. As she’d handed it over she’d offered up all the standard authorial disavowals. “It’s really not very … I know it isn’t exactly your cup of …” She. She’d actually titled the thing She. Sheesh. Matt turned a few pages, tried to be pleased. How long is it going to take him to get happy about this, about his wife’s (his ex-wife’s?) disturbing new accomplishment? A little longer, it would seem.
Matt grimaced. He stashed the manuscript and pulled out his real book, the snoozer he’d brought along for the ride, another gift from his dad. The Dadinator’s never been anything but baffled and miffed by Matt’s thing for movies. Back in
1944, movie crews helped with Operation Quicksilver: they built a phantom invasionary force (rubber, plywood, papier mâché) in northern England to fool Jerry into anticipating a D-Day landing at the wrong spot. According to Matt’s dad this is the one and only meaningful gift cinema has ever made to civilization. Otherwise it’s all pretty fruity. Over these past few months he’s nonetheless taken to clipping out articles, ordering books and disks and shipping them to Matt complete with scribbled endearments. “Thought of you when I saw this …” Damned if the old guy isn’t going soft.
Crowd Scenes. A glossy little hardback, the book toured some of cinema’s most memorable hordes—DeMille’s Israelites at the parting of the Red Sea, hippies at Woodstock being warned off a batch of bad acid—and griped about Hollywood mobs, how Hollywood uses them to endorse its humdrum heroes. Pretty standard critical crankiness, but still gratifying. Matt saved his most intense scrutiny, though, for his bookmark, a shopping list in Mariko’s incongruously chunky hand.
coffee de and reg
moo
scones if they have ww
toto’s feline feast, 6 cans
twine
Twine would be for Mariko’s sunflowers, so last spring. Sophie, back then, was just another funky young thing slinging coffees at the café, as far as Matt could tell. Them were the days.
Matt allowed his eyelids to flutter shut. He had that flying feeling, not just in the juddering, jet-fuelled sort of way but in the soaring way, the way he did as a boy, up over that dream-Toronto. Like a bird but without the flapping. He’d read once that a flying dream always gave you a hard-on, but he couldn’t recall whether or not this was so. Today it seemed to be giving him a hint of one—a dream of an erection, say—but also a sweetly excruciating awareness of each knuckle of his knobby spine. Each vertebra was a frame of film: if he could just get them all arranged in the wrong order, the perfect reverse, he could go back …