by John Gould
It was the rocket connection, the space-travel connection that inspired Matt to bring up his crop circle experience, the surreal day he and Zane spent in Wiltshire. The Dadinator pooh-poohed the whole thing, but something obviously stuck. He started taking a sneaky sort of interest, snipping out articles, taping TV specials. When he retired he became a full-fledged buff. The books began to pile up, subscriptions to newsletters, memberships to international networks of aficionados. It was shortly after he buried Matt’s mum that he upgraded from hobbyist to nut, his fascination crossing over at times from odd into scary. He was way too intrigued by Heaven’s Gate, for instance, the San Diego bunch who committed mass suicide so’s to hitch a ride on a spaceship hiding behind the comet Hale-Bopp.
Matt gushes all this to Kate, and more besides—they’re on their third circuit of the block, so no shortage of time. Alienation, wasted years of guilt and resentment, standard Absent Father poppycock.
“What about your sister?” says Kate. “Were they close? You said your dad was a bit intense with her.”
“She was good at sports and stuff, his stuff, so he was all over her.”
“Huh. Whereas that’s usually the boy.”
“Right.”
“How did she die, your sister?”
“She stopped eating.”
“Oh.”
“Dad never talks about it. Not to me anyway, he never did.”
“Pressure,” says Kate.
“Pardon me?”
“It’s just … Is it that he blames himself?”
“What do you mean?”
“For your sister, what happened to her.”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Do you blame him?”
“Sure. It’s all his fault, everything is.”
“I’m not saying—”
“Hey, up ahead, that guy’s pulling out.”
“Dad? Hello?”
No answer—well, no kidding, the old man’s downstairs in the condo’s common room, Sunday afternoon whist. Matt snuck a peek on the way past, just to be certain. Yep, there was his dad, a craggy old gaffer in his for-good green track suit, angled in between two pleased-looking old ladies. His oxygen bottle squatted alertly at his side, a glossy guide dog. He had his fan of cards clutched to his chest, as though he imagined his opponents might be practising some sort of high-tech surveillance.
“Weird,” says Matt. “I’ve never walked into this place empty before.” He clicks the door shut behind them.
“So why are we here, if your dad isn’t?”
“Just … I’m not sure.”
“I see.” Kate peers around. “Nice place. A little … what. Spartan?”
Indeed. The Dadinator’s has to be the most bric-a-bracless apartment Matt’s ever seen. Almost everything from his old life—the life that included his wife and his daughter—is gone. There are neat stacks of crop circle books, crop circle magazines. There’s a handsome old print positioned strategically on a wall here and there (a jet on the horizon, a propeller picturesquely rusting in the sun) the way it might be in a B&B, to create the impression of home. Otherwise almost nothing. It’s as though the place has been hit by a whiz-bang new bomb, not the kind that destroys people and leaves stuff but the other way around, a bomb that leaves people and destroys stuff. Destroys tchotchkes, Zane’s word—the trinkets that trap memory. Spartan is right. Spare. Sp.
Of the few things you could call a keepsake, Matt’s favourite is the snow globe. Yep, there’s old Saint Bernard, not the dog but the guy, patron saint of climbers and travellers. He poses in an alpine pass, crossing himself with one hand as he pats his trusty pooch with the other. This bit of kitsch was a gift from Erin to their mother, who was wild about St. Bernards without ever having had one of her own. Matt picks it up—a reflex, a ritual—and gives it a shake, pauses a moment to watch the flakes settle on that teensy upturned face.
This is not a young man’s apartment. By the front door there’s a pair of ancient slippers, sheepskin rendered fluffless by years of shuffling. In the master bedroom the oxygen concentrator huddles in its usual spot, its long plastic tube coiled as if the Dadinator’s been successfully reeled in and released. In one corner of the living room there’s a black-and-chrome rowing machine upon which the Dadinator set out, a decade or so ago, to circumnavigate the globe. He made it as far as the mouth of the St. Lawrence before the emphysema really kicked in. He’ll bob breathlessly there, one presumes, for whatever’s left of his life.
At what point, precisely, did the term Dadinator become honorary, ironic? He really was, once upon a time, a substantial slab of a man, not quite in Schwarzenegger territory but close. The decline must have been gradual, but it felt brutally sudden. There was a day Matt walked into the McKay home and beheld an old man edging down the staircase towards him, manifestly conscious of his brittle bones, of the tile floor lurking maliciously at the bottom. When Matt extended his hand that day, for the standard cordial shake, the Dadinator ignored it and came in for a hug instead. It had been, at that time, at least a quarter-century since they’d last embraced. No, the funerals, Erin’s and then Matt’s mum’s—there’d been brief contact on those occasions too, wonderful what death can do. That day at the bottom of the stairs the hug was a stiff affair, a quick clasp, almost as though the guy were simply steadying himself against gravity. It left Matt struggling for air, winded by the weird combo of euphoria and remorse.
“So this is your mum?” says Kate.
“Yep. And me, and my sister, and my dad.” The usual four photos lined up on the mantel. No group shot, no arm-slung pose at park or poolside, just these four solemn, solo portraits.
“You look like your mum. The … elegance?”
“I am like my mum, mostly. Does that make me a fruit, do you think?”
“For sure. And Erin looks like your dad.”
Bizarre, but true. Despite being completely unrelated to him, Erin really did look like her father. The resemblance is particularly striking in these two photos, the wartime shot of the old man when he was young—greasy and grinning beside one of his planes—and the teenybopper shot of Erin in her swimsuit at Georgian Bay. It’s all there: the thoroughbred build, the ruddy complexion, even that faint constellation of freckles across her nose. Only the hair, that whisk broom of red bristle, hints that Erin wasn’t the real McKay.
Was she actually (here’s something Matt’s pondered from time to time) any kind of earthling at all? She was so consistently disappointed in earthly life, you figured she must have got her expectations elsewhere. You pictured her arriving in this solar system through some galactic snafu, some snarl of interplanetary red tape. Sure, there were earthly factors for which you could blame her distress. The abiding not-rightness of being adopted, for instance, of being unrelated to her family. The borderline abusive way her adoptive father expressed his adoration for her—a fanatical coach turned crazy fan—and then the bizarreness of falling for her real coach, the loathsome Mr. Skinner, a slick Johnny Weissmuller type twenty years her senior. Finally, of course, the humiliation of being dumped by that icky father figure, dumped not for his wife but for another swimmer named Nicky Lewis, who swam the hundred free in whatever and who hadn’t done anything so silly as to get pregnant, jeopardize her girlish figure …
So yeah, there was some crap to contend with. The thing is though, there’s always crap. Looking to justify a moment of despair, who can’t come up with a pretty decent catalogue of misery? No, the World, that seemed to be Erin’s problem. Life on Earth. Which made her tenderness for the earthbound Matt even more uncanny.
Aside from the shake of the snow globe there’s one other little ritual Matt routinely performs here at the Dadinator’s place. Makes himself perform, more like. Tucked away in the china cabinet there’s that wooden box. He lifts it out today, as usual, holds it a moment in his hands. Pine and what, walnut? Inlaid checkerboard-fashion like a Rubik’s Cube. Matt remembers his dad sequestered in his basement shop, labouring in
furious solitude night after night in the wake of Erin’s death. The box always startles Matt with its weight. How can human remains be so fine, so dense? Flour, icing sugar, it’s got that sort of heft to it.
“Whatcha got?” Kate’s peering at him, puzzled. Then—something about his expression as he glances up?—“Oh, my.”
Matt swings shut the cabinet door. This wasn’t the plan—there was no plan—but it feels as though it ought to have been. He strides into the kitchen, rummages around for a big paper bag, bundles his treasure up inside. How much longer will his father keep himself occupied downstairs? Matt does a quick check-around—covering his traces, a thief buzzed on the beauty of his thievery—and they slip away.
Matt and Zane starved themselves for a little while once. They got the idea from Ms. Jaworski, grade ten, who had them study up on Bangladesh for Current Events. “What are the causes of the famine, class?” Well, war, drought, flooding, global food and oil crises—cripes, that famine had everything. “Can you imagine,” wondered Ms. Jaworski in her wide-eyed way, “what it would be like not to have food?”
So the boys stopped eating. Matt told his folks he’d be at Zane’s place for dinner, and vice versa. They roamed the streets, alert to symptoms—dizziness, heightened senses, what is hunger like anyway? They cruised the cemetery feeling ghostly, insubstantial. Talk about your cheap buzz.
Later on, down in Matt’s basement, they cranked up Erin’s Concert for Bangladesh album. Erin was there that night, in on the secret. And the next night, and the next. “My Sweet Lord.” “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Was the music a touch more intense than usual? By the second night for sure. And by the third …
But that’s when they started eating again. The fast was mostly Matt’s idea, and it was all his idea to end it. What freaked him out was that he didn’t feel hungry anymore. His stomach had quit grumbling, he could think about a burger and not crave one. This weird, desireless limbo—it wasn’t famine, but it wasn’t someplace Matt wanted to spend much time either. He wanted to, actually, but he didn’t want to want to. Why could he never deprive Erin of that yearning? He tried, but trying was nothing. You don’t try to save somebody, you save them.
Slabs, obelisks, wonky Celtic crosses. Alphas and omegas, crosses and crowns—Matt’s always loved checking out the monuments here at Mount Pleasant Cemetery, and the doleful little inscriptions they bear. Back In The Arms Of Jesus. Sleep On Dear Daughter. Greater Love Hath No Man. Daddy.
“Glenn Gould’s here someplace,” he says. He endeavours to hum the opening aria of the Goldberg Variations, the notes chiselled into the great man’s tombstone—tya, tya, tya-ta-da, da-da—but oh dear. They’ve picked up provisions from the froufrou deli across the way, and a bottle of white from the local-only winery next door. They’ve worked their way along various paths far enough now that the foliage is baffling the traffic.
“I took piano till I was fifteen,” says Kate. She mimes an arpeggio in the air. “I was really awful.”
“And Foster Hewitt. And Banting and Best. And Mackenzie King.”
“Do you think he talks to living people now?” says Kate. And then, since no guffaw seems to be forthcoming from Matt, “See, when Mackenzie King was alive he talked to dead—”
“Yeah, I get it. How about over there? And Northrop Frye.”
“Northrop,” says Kate. “You don’t hear that name much, do you?” She does that thing where you flap the blanket out, let it float down flat. There’s a Starlight Executive Inn logo in the corner, a dollar-signed S emanating little black rays of light.
“Not many Fosters these days either,” says Matt. He starts unpacking the grub.
“Foster,” says Kate.
“Or Maximilians.” This way an angel, that way a dove.
“Maximilian,” says Kate, working at the screw-topped wine. “Max.”
She’s one of these people who’s kept her kiddish flexibility. She sits with her bum on the blanket, knees flexed out in the shape of an M. With lunch some days at home Matt will tune into The Yoga Way with Anirvachaniya!, and this is the kind of stuff Anirvachaniya does. Twisty, tortuous. Anirvachaniya, Anirvachaniya will occasionally explain, means inexplicable. It means that things don’t begin or end, exist or not exist. It means that you’re not going to die because you’re already nothing now. Matt likes the tricky postures but his favourite bit is when she just meditates, just sits there with her Lululemoned legs folded neatly up under her, the way he used to fold his in his meditating days. Now and then she’ll toss out a koan, a puzzler he’s supposed to mull right along with her. “Who are you when you aren’t thinking about who you are?” Blow a guy’s mind, why don’t you. Or this one: “Now is the only time,” she’ll say, but she’ll say it over and over again. Now, now, now …
Sophie, so says Mariko, does yoga too, a special kind that’s all about breathing, uses the breath to slow down time. The real adepts—scrawny guys squatting in Himalayan caves—can apparently stop time, even rewind it. Matt pictures Superman in the movie, saving Lois Lane by whizzing around the planet backwards until it slows, stalls, shifts into reverse. What Sophie wants to save is of course the planet itself. Stop the world and start to repair it—peel the oil off the blackened duck, pull the giant cedar from the stack of two-by-fours.
“Max who?” says Kate.
“Maximilian Sweet. Died 1959, the year I was born. I was sitting on him when Zane told me. The HIV thing. Just over there, you follow that road.” Lilies, ladders, sprigs of ivy and laurel.
“Oh,” says Kate. “That’s big. That’s huge.” By way of consolation or commiseration she tops up Matt’s glass. This is what Zane did too, twin ropes—black and caramel, Coke and rum—writhing in the air.
What was the segue? How did Zane lead into it? They’d been doing Shakespeare, bad English accents. Matt’s was particularly deplorable. “Alas, poor Yorick, sorry, Alas, poor Sweet!” He gave Max’s headstone a tender caress. “Hey, remember Higgs? Grade ten?”
“Eleven,” said Zane.
“Alas, poor Sweet. A fellow of infinite jest, of something something something.”
“Most excellent fancy,” said Zane. “Here hung those lips that I have kissed. I’m HIV positive.” It can’t have been that quick, obviously, that clean, but it did come out of nowhere, a non sequitur that sounded horrendously right. They clinked jars, for some reason toasting the revelation. What else should they do?
“Wait,” said Matt, “does this mean the government has to score your weed for you from now on?”
“I think so.”
Matt made as if to pinch a roach between thumb and index finger, toked heavily. “And you’ll deal me in, yeah?”
“Count on it.”
The mourning started later. It didn’t fully kick in, actually, until just a few months ago, the day the letter arrived: “The truth is the I-less world, the world minus me.” Then it was the classic grief rigmarole, the five stages Mariko had drilled into Matt’s mind way back at the start of their relationship, when he was getting over his mum. Denial, of course—even Zane couldn’t be this daft, this dimwittedly zealous. Then Anger, big time. Predating the postcard campaign were a few brutal diatribes, never sent. “Who do you think you are, you selfish, sanctimonious twat?” type thing. Matt’s hoping the postcards can be construed as Bargaining. He’s made a pretty decent start on Depression, which will just leave Acceptance—and then he can get on with the business of feeling like shit for a few years.
Before Zane there was Matt’s mum, and before his mum there was Erin. Zane got the Anger that time too. Matt disbelieved his sister’s death until she’d gone ahead and croaked (her favourite term for it), so she wasn’t around to soak up the anger herself. Matt and Zane, freshly gradded, were in the midst of making a movie. The point was to prove they were real filmmakers, not student-types who’d give it up as soon as the last grade was posted. Hocus-Pocus—or did they end up going with Hoodoo?—starred Bernard, the McKay family cat, and it was all about his reli
gious life, the various forms of worship through which he tried to coax the Radiator to let there be heat. The niftiest of these practices was a sort of davening Matt induced with bits of walnut muffin, Bernard’s favourite.
What brought on the scrap was the soundtrack. Matt wanted a voice-over internal monologue—stream-of-feline-consciousness kind of thing—through which the film would register the gradual ratcheting up of Bernard’s religious fervour as the cold night wore on. Zane wanted to let the visuals speak for themselves, and enhance them with a touch of Gregorian chanting courtesy of Jean Michel, his beau at the time. His very first beau, a big deal—which made Matt’s attack on him and his “cornball, girly-man countertenor” doubly vile.
Matt’s ashamed of many moments, but not of many more than that one. He tried explaining things to Zane a couple of times—that the anger simply hadn’t got itself turned all the way around yet, that Matt was still busy figuring out how best to punish himself—but it never helped. He hasn’t made a movie since.
This goodness thing, were there warning signs? Could you root around in a person’s past and discern virtue in some rudimentary form?
Midway through grade four Zane’s family was new to the neighbourhood, having just upgraded from someplace out in the burbs. At about the same time another new kid appeared, Rosie Shum, the school’s first Asian student. Matt happened to be sitting next to her in the lunchroom the day the bullying got started. The other new kid—Zane, what a dumb-ass name!—happened to be on her far side. Zane with his big nose and his freakshow two-tone eyes.
It was Stan Gardner, a sixth grader revered for starting grass fires, who leaned in close to Rosie and drawled, “There sure is a nip in the air today.” Then he staggered off in hysterics. (It was another month before anybody figured out where Rosie was really from, and started in on the Chink thing.) Perhaps Rosie didn’t look sufficiently stricken, because one of the other girls made as though to come to her rescue. “It doesn’t even make sense,” she said. “Why would a Jap be called a Nip anyway? Jap? Nip? Jap? Nip?”