by John Gould
Erin, like the umgirl, was into glossy magazines. She loved making fun of them, and she just plain loved them, which she hated. Matt fed the habit—he’d filch his mum’s Glamours and Redbooks, deliver them to Erin’s apartment downtown—hoping to foster any weakness in her, maybe save her from her strength. Matt’s most uncanny keepsake of his sister is a questionnaire—“Are You Too Purrrfect?”—torn from a Cosmo or some such and left twisted up in the pocket of her dressing gown at the Toronto General when she died.
Everybody’s going for a crazy swim in the rain, but you’re
a little bloated, so your bikini doesn’t fit quite right. You …
Multiple choice, running the gamut from mellow to maniacal.
Your boss gives you “very good” on your latest evaluation,
but you always get “exceptional.” You …
Your record for multiple orgasms is three. You find out your
best friend’s had seven. You …
Out of a maximum score of one hundred, under fifty was bad, but over seventy-five was even worse. Erin scored a seventy. Perfect. “Good for you, girl. You care, but you don’t drive yourself nuts!” Did the editors really not get the irony of this? That the true perfectionists would catch on to the quiz and nail it, know precisely how imperfect to be? Erin may have missed this point too, of course, irony never having been a strong suit of hers. Could this have been the root of all her trouble, an irony deficit, an irony anemia? Couldn’t Matt have found a way to lend her a little, to effect some kind of transfusion? If you can’t be perfect, best to be nothing—such was Erin’s approach. Couldn’t Matt have convinced her that just doing nothing would be good enough?
“Gööööghœgh!” Up ahead of Matt by a couple of rows there was a baby—an Icelandic one, or so Matt imagined—expressing his glee at having come into existence. In hopes of shushing him his mum hoisted him up so’s he could peek, bobble-headed, over the back of his seat. Matt grinned; baby grinned back, lowering dual strands of drool to the breast of his tuxedo-style bib. He blinked and burbled, a wee demented Buddha. Why do we relinquish that, Matt wondered? Wherefore all this trouble?
After his last trip to Toronto Matt had composed a piece (which the cretinous Nagy had nixed, naturally) about the dangers of in-flight movies. In the last five years there’d been some number of incidents (fifty, was it?) caused by fritzy entertainment units on North American routes. Sparks, smoke, fire. In 1998 a Swissair jet had crashed, killing all two hundred and some odd, after its video system had gone kaflooey. Matt figured it was time to try that material again. He’d start his next review with the numbers and he’d pose the question, Is this movie worth dying for?
Next review? Oh, right.
Matt’s seat belt grabs him, jerks him back against his seat. They’re moving again—emergency lights have faded to a faint pulse in the darkening sky out back—and Jat’s in a big rush, all vroom and screech, a brat in a bumper car. “Jatinder, old buddy,” says Matt, “take it a little easy, wouldja?” Oops, did his inner mimic get the better of him for a moment there? Was there a pinch of Mr. Kumar, of Jatinder himself in the clip of those consonants? How to explain that this is a good thing, him reaching out?
“Just be a minute, sir.” Too late. Nobody gets Matt anymore, how come?
Mumbai. Matt envisions the teeming streets, he and Zane forging through the crowd with backpacks and camera bags. India, that’s where Matt’ll get into gear again. That’s where he’ll get back up to speed on the spiritual thing. The dream of a selfless self, a something sucked back up into Everything—where else would you go to puzzle over this stuff but the land of Krishna, Buddha, all those guys? Ashram, that’s the word. That’s where Mariko always wanted to go, was an ashram. “We could go together, Matt. Imagine leaving all this behind”—a game show–girl gesture taking in the whole of their existence—“and letting things go quiet. Just us and that silence, just you and that silence. What are you afraid of?” She really didn’t seem to know.
But maybe with Zane. With Zane maybe he can trick himself into it, and come back to Mariko all spiritual and serene. Why not? When he and Zane have finished with the AIDS thing, got that covered, they’ll repair to an incensey ashram to make everything right again. Hit the Ganges, wash themselves clean in the filthy river.
Matt taps his chest. It’s still there, Zane’s letter stowed in his breast pocket, scrumpled road map–fashion from a few months of folding and unfolding. An actual letter, mail with no e in front. Zane’s hand is ludicrously masculine, a parody of maleness—it couldn’t get any more erect without lifting right off the page. Nothing limp there, nosiree.
Dear Matt,
I don’t want to make a big deal out of this, but there, I already have. Maybe if I put it into words that will help me get it out of the way. Which is what words are for, isn’t it, mister kritik? To sort stuff out, pass judgment on it and put it behind you?
Please.
I told you last time you were in Toronto (thanks for dins btw, but you should have let me pay) that I wasn’t just HIV slash anymore. I’m AIDS. It’s a technical thing, T cell count and whatnot. For the moment I’m fine, but I’ll feel like fugging hell very shortly. On this point everyone’s exquisitely clear. They want me on the cocktail of course, but here’s the thing. I’m not doing it. I’m just not. I’m telling Nico, and Mercedes, and maybe probably my parents in a while, and nobody else.
Oh, except you. It isn’t fair, is it? It’s asking too much. Maybe that’s what good friends do, they ask too much?
And there’s more to ask, but not yet.
Matt’s already reread the letter once since leaving home, to help kill time in the departure lounge in Vancouver. Reread isn’t quite right: he ran his eye over it, the way you run your eye over the lyrics of a song you’re already stuck with, the lines of a prayer that’s long since been rutted into one of the folds, one of the rumples of your brain. Not prayer exactly, but … what’s that word? Mariko was forever brandishing it during her Zen phase, got it from that Roshi guy. It starts with a k and it means something that promises to mean something but then doesn’t. A puzzle that possesses and then stymies you, silences your mind and makes way for … something. Some jolt of immanence, of wordless oneness.
Koan. Koan? Koan.
This time, in the cab, he doesn’t even bother peeking, just rewinds and replays the letter in his head.
I can’t explain this decision but I’ll try anyway. I want to live close to the truth, Matt. The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me. Can I know this world while I’m still in it?
And so on, another page and a half of this kind of infuriating swami-speak. Nothing about Shanumi, the Nigerian woman whose long slow drugless death he’d just finished filming. Nothing to suggest that this is in fact the oneness he craves—oneness with the whole damn suffering world. Mercy disguised as monkishness, protest disguised as spiritual surrender …
There, right there. That feeling again, as though Jatinder’s just taken a big bump way too fast. Not a no-feeling but a feeling of nothing, of nauseating absence. An agonized weightlessness that heaves all Matt’s viscera up into the hooped barrel of his chest. This is the sensation that hits him whenever he obsesses too long and too intensely about Zane, about his loopy friend and his loopy plan. This is his body’s way of warning him off, of—
“And here we are, sir.”
Oh, very funny. Cabbie humour at its best. They’re still out in the burbs—a Legoland of grey concrete, the grumble of jets still audible through the cab door as it swings wide—but the portico at which Jatinder’s just pulled up couldn’t get any swankier. Matt glances about, half expecting red carpet, the clamour of paparazzi. A minute later he’s being bellboyed into the hotel’s hushed lobby, having bid Jat a contrite adieu and pressed on him an extra twenty, about half the cash left in his wallet.
Jeezuz aitch. Acres of marble, royalty-ready wing chairs, sprays of big-stamened blossoms, this place is the definition of crazy. M
att knows he ought to flee but he can’t seem to do it. He’s been pinned, somehow, nailed to the here and now. He exerts himself to appear unimpressed by the place, to appear, as his dad would put it, swave and deboner. The name? McKay. Matt McKay. The supermodel at the front desk gives him his choice of the last two rooms. Would he prefer the Deluxe, or the even deluxer Exclusive? Much in the manner of a doomed beggar blowing his last few bucks on a bottle of the good stuff, Matt goes Exclusive. Why? Why not? “No, it’s just me tonight, Cheryl.” He grins rakishly, inducing Cheryl to crease ever-so-slightly the confectionery glaze of her lipstick. The moment is lost, though, when she’s obliged to give his non-platinum, nongold credit card a withering glance. If she only knew.
Five minutes later Matt steps into an elevator, and is joined there by a woman who smiles more toothily than she really needs to at Matt’s goofy “Goiiiiiing up!” Matt grins back. He feels even better now, or at least he feels different: his flesh has turned from baggage to buoy. He takes in the woman’s round, curiously symmetrical face, her lobe-length eggplant hair. Big brown eyes, almost buggy—she won’t quit looking surprised. Pretty? Or what they used to call handsome. She’d have been possessed of a tomboy beauty as a kid, which the boys around her would have mistaken for homeliness until it was way too late. She isn’t as much of a sore thumb here as is Matt (the cords, the crumpled collar shirt), but she doesn’t look quite at home either. Her outfit’s smart but not hoity-toity—more along the lines of Holiday Inn, say. She isn’t Matt’s age, maybe Mariko’s? Even younger. She’s bustier than Mariko, and tushier too. Venus of Whatever, the goddess Mariko’s into these days, she’s one of those. She’s short enough—not much taller than tiny Mariko—that Matt can regard his own face over top of hers in the mirrored wall, the two faces stacked as though on a totem pole.
Is he really that lean? It’s as though his vertical hold has slipped, elongating him, stretching him like gum on a lifted shoe; it’s as though he’s been sick six months rather than six hours. His is an El Greco face (this thought has struck him many times since his Europe tour with Zane, so many galleries), all beak and cheekbone and deep, doleful eye. Apostle What’s-His-Puss tallying his sins. Beautiful?
The woman says, “Are you with one of the groups?”
“Nope,” says Matt. “Solo.”
“I see.”
“I applied to a group. I applied to all of them, actually. Ectomorphs for Christ. Quitters Anonymous. No go.”
Again with the laugh. Is that how you know somebody’s into you, they over-laugh at your jokes? In the old days Mariko laughed till she snorted, which made her laugh till she peed.
Strange day today. A day of strangers. Could you make a new life this way, tell a lie and live it, let it be true? “Manifesting,” Mariko calls it—she uses it to find parking spots. You concentrate long and hard enough on something and it just happens. “What about you?” he says.
“Actually,” says the woman, “I’m … yes, I’m with one of the conferences. Astronomy? Quantum stuff, you know, quarks and photons, the whole … Sorry.”
“No, that’s okay. So like, the Big Bang and all that?”
Not the swavest of pickup lines but look, the woman’s smiling in such a way—lowering her head, leaning in just a little—that Matt finds himself reaching out to steady her, a gesture that turns into a fleeting caress. He cups her shoulder the way a smart shopper might cup a cantaloupe, in search of just the right give.
“Oh,” she says, as though he’s said something she should have thought of herself.
Five minutes after that—or maybe it’s fifteen, twenty—Matt’s braced behind her, pants around his ankles, as she bends over his unmussed bed up on the eighth floor. She’s got her skirt hoisted to her hips. The position was her idea—he’d been agonizing about his maybe virus, his OUZZ or LIKK or DMDM, didn’t want to pass it on by getting all kissy. She put a gentle hand to his forehead, let out a sizzling sound. He said, “This never happens.” She smiled, and she turned …
What Matt ought to be doing right now is he ought to be arriving at Zane’s door.
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there? …
In the old days the boys could keep this going long enough to drive everybody berserk. Endurance doesn’t seem to be Matt’s strong suit tonight, however. His tipsy exhilaration, his celibate stint on the couch … With this stranger he’s suddenly, ecstatically a stranger to himself. Could this be the whole point of the thing? Another way in, another way out? A teensy suicide, a tiny little surrender?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Banana.
Banana who?
Knock knock.
Who’s there?
Orange.
Orange who?
“Orange you glad …”
“Oh yes.” She reaches around to rake his rump. What with the height mismatch he’ll have to … maybe if he just …
The scent hits him hard, the scents: hers, his. He recognizes neither one, his fever-body is that foreign to him. New woman, new man.
Number five. And, in at least a handful of ways he’s already thought of, a first.
SATURDAY
Dear Zane,
REASON NOT TO BE GOOD #2
Virtue is the denial of nature, of excess, of exuberance. Virtue wants us to be other than what we are. Virtue is cruel, and cruelty is a vice. Virtue is vice. So smarten up.
Matt
No birth control, for instance, that was a first. With Kim last night—with Kristin last night?—Matt had no protection. She didn’t use anything either as far as he knows, no goops, no gadgets. Matt’s always been scrupulous on this point, an avid non-reproducer. Always? Well, there was that one brief interlude with Mariko, that one patch of happy madness that went nowhere. Other than that, though, he’s thwarted every attempt his body’s ever made to repeat itself, to give the slip to its own mortality. And now? He scores some babe in an elevator and badda-bing, he’s on his way to being somebody’s dad.
This isn’t quite the first thought to strike Matt when he wakes up in the hotel. His first thought, as a shiv of light slices through the gap in the theatre-weight drapes (a baby squinting down the birth canal), is more along the lines of #@*!? A comicbook coming-to. He’s rewinding and fast-forwarding, striving to locate the scene he was watching just before he drifted off.
Time to buy a clue. He sends a hand out to recce the bedside table. This produces a clinking sound, one mini-bottle against another, gnomish chimes. Matt’s fingers move on to explore the corduroy casing of the clock radio, which (quick peek here) reads 11:11 in red LED. Then they close, ahhhh, around the comforting fistful of plastic with its Braille of buttons.
Remote control.
Matt’s been waking up in the wrong room for a couple of months now. He’s taken to flipping on the tube first thing, there in his study, so’s not to have to contemplate where he is or why. The idea is to pre-empt all thought, to silence his mind—the way meditation might do, for instance, if he could ever get back the gumption for that sort of thing. Another little death, another puny suicide, goodbye, cruel world. Well, not silence his mind, maybe. Jam it though, drown it in disorder. Neutralize it with input, the way a hacker will when he bombards a server with a zillion gibberish-filled emails. Gunnysacked north of last armpit station each night of pylons …
It was originally supposed to be a work thing, the home theatre in Matt’s study (its screen about the size, as Mariko observed, of the pick-your-own-lobster tank in a spiffy restaurant). Matt’s rationale for investing in the system was that he could run, in the distraction-free confines of his own sanctum, important antecedents of
any film he might be reviewing. He could refresh his impression of, say, Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and Asta Nielsen’s Hamlet and Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet and Maximilian Schell’s Hamlet and Innokenty Smoktunovsky’s Hamlet and Richard Burton’s Hamlet and Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet and Derek Jacobi’s Hamlet and Mel Gibson’s Hamlet and Kenneth Branagh’s Hamlet and Campbell Scott’s Hamlet in preparation for reviewing Ethan Hawke’s Hamlet. (Hamlet, now there was a guy who knew how not to do anything. There was a guy who knew how to spend himself pacing his bone cage.) Mariko bought into this notion, and didn’t so much as roll her eyes when the mammoth Visa bill materialized. This would have been early Sophie days, after Mariko had twigged to what was going on between the two of them but before she’d sprung the news on Matt. Raising the question, goodness or guilt? Which of these was motivating his wife to be even kinder than usual? Was there any way to tell the difference, even from inside?
Nowadays, at any rate, the big draw is cable. Matt keeps adding channels to the package, tier after tier—it takes longer every day, Mariko gripes, to establish that there’s not a blessed thing to watch. For Matt, though, this search, this daft scanning is precisely the point. He’s found that if he slows his breath and keeps his body perfectly still (the meditation motif again) he can click for a good half-hour before he needs to pee.
There’s an added benefit, too, to this new rig. Mariko’s morning noises? Matt can drown them out. Why start each day, he figures, in a paroxysm of nostalgia? The quaint creak as his wife rummages through the closet for her robe, the gentle slap of her bare feet across the hardwood hall. The pensive interlude as she composes herself upon the potty, and then the crooning from the shower, to which Matt used to sing lamely along from the kitchen. Show tunes mostly, Hoshi’s thing, her mum’s thing. “I Could Have Danced All Night.” “I Loves You Porgy.” “I Cain’t Say No.”