by John Gould
Matt says, “Hey, would you ever want one? Would you ever want a kid?”
But Zane’s drifted off again. Lordy, it’s like travelling with an infant. Matt drives solo for a while, keeping his eyes peeled for a good spot. Up ahead an IHOP. “Come Hungry, Leave Happy.” He pulls in, eases to a stop in the parking lot around back. He turns to Zane. “God’s gracious gift.”
Nothing.
He fishes under the seat, comes up with the water pistol. Nobody around—he points the gun at Zane’s temple, mob-executioner style. “This is it, buddy,” he whispers, “you live or else, “and gives him a squirt. Zane squirms, goes still again.
Death and the other person, the two big strangenesses.
Matt turns the gun on himself. “Th-th-th-th-that’s all folks,” he says, and empties the cartridge into his head—okay, into his hair—in a series of cooling blasts. Then he slips out of the car, tosses the toy into the Dumpster. Zane’s struggling to the surface as he climbs back in.
“Rise and shine there, buddy.” Matt steers back out onto the road.
“You betcha,” says Zane, hauling himself upright. “Hey, we must be getting there.” He unfolds and refolds his map, fusses with his directions.
In terms of actual road names, the folks at the CCCRN have been less than precise. Past town it’s left, then left again, then right, then straight on through. Auto parts, fruit stand, burnt-out barn.
The boys zig and zag for quite some time. Look, there’s an auto parts place—but no fruit stand. Hey, there’s a fruit stand—but no burnt-out barn. It’s as though they’ve been shunted into some parallel universe, a universe in which the landmarks are all slightly skewed. Everything’s the same, everything’s different.
One upside, this new universe is picturesque. Horses graze in their hangdog way, photogenically flicking their ears. Little black birds with red splotches on their wings—red-winged blackbirds?—cling to bulrushes, which tick-tock in the wind as the boys whip past. Fields of gold and green are stitched together at seams of, what are they, maple maybe? Poplar? Willow?
Who cares if they never find the place? This, right here, is just fine. Anirvachaniya nailed it, now is the only time.
“You know what?” says Zane. “I’m not feeling so great.”
Well, fair enough. The guy does look pretty rough over there, a living catalogue of cautionary symptoms. Weight loss, check. Weakness, check. Fatigue, check. “Hey, how about this,” says Matt. “How about we find someplace to crash, spend the night down here? Start fresh tomorrow?”
“Coming Soon,” reads a billboard. And then, in dark haloed script, “Jesus.”
Zane swivels his head Matt’s way. “Let’s get a room, is that what you’re saying to me?”
Matt makes as though to put up his hands, busted.
“What about your dad?”
“One more day won’t kill him.”
Zane nods, lowers the louvres of his eyelids. “Lucky thing I brought my overnight bag.”
“Slut.”
It comes down to this: the Cozy Cubby or the Friendly Farmer. No way are the boys succumbing to the Super 8, the Best Western, the Days Inn, the kind of America they can get at home. After an early supper of red dye number six the Cubby wins out on eeny meeney miney mo. Zane slaps down his credit card, hallelujah. This place may be more Matt’s speed, but that doesn’t mean he can afford it.
“Dibs,” says Zane, tossing his bag onto the nearest bed. He digs out his kit and sequesters himself in the can.
“Some honeymoon,” Matt hollers after him.
The Starlight this ain’t. Matt flops down on his bed, feels the gravitational tug exerted by its divot, the human-shaped hollow created by the last zillion folks to crash here. He fits right in.
Behind the cardboard door the toilet clankily flushes. Before long there’s water slapping around in there, Zane striving to revive himself in the shower. Matt could picture, if he chose, the sheeted water as it reconnoiters the curves and knobs and knuckles of his friend’s frame. Stooped head, absently bulging belly, soapy prick … How odd, really, to be so particular about this, to desire only half the race. Bi—surely that’s the way to go. All the rest of us are fanatics, all the rest of us are gender fascists.
Matt fetches the remote. Oops, failing again. He makes a deal with himself, he won’t flip around, he’ll just punch a couple of buttons and stay put. A brand new spiritual practice, the point being acceptance, acquiescence. The point being to take whatever comes, to find in it a gift meant just for you.
Documentary channel, just his luck. Something about midgets. They’re looking perturbed, troubled. Or is it dwarfs? Hey, munchkins, these folks are from Oz. In their dotage now they muse about their days on-set, the sexual shenanigans, the harsh conditions off-screen. They marvel at all the disasters that went into the making of the masterpiece, remembering especially the day the Wicked Witch got burned, caught up in the puff of her own disappearance. “Fourteen writers, five directors, the whole project was ridiculous. I don’t believe things are ever meant to be, but that movie?”
This is where A Day at the Beach will likely end up too, Zane’s documentary. It’s the rough cut Matt’s been watching (Zane bubble-packed him the DVD), and he’s been more deeply moved and shaken with each encounter. The final product has yet to make the screen. When it appears it will be by far Zane’s best and most impactful piece of work.
Shanumi, “have mercy on me” in Yoruba. Shanu for short. You can’t forget her, it isn’t an option. She’s beautiful in a slightly eerie way, her teeth white and wonky, her face a diamond that gets harder and harder, more and more severe as the virus scalpels away her flesh. Adamantine, good word. The first thing you see her do is bury, with the help of her mum, her son Ifedayo (“love has turned to joy,” something like that). He died an infant—his papier-mâché-and-tinfoil coffin is about the size of a trumpet case, maybe an alto sax. The local cemetery (where Shanu has already buried one of her other kids) is chockablock, so they scoop out a little grave by the side of a road. Nearby, a magic-markered sign in English: “Raping a virgin will NOT cure aids.” Then back to the shack (cardboard with bamboo accents) on the beach of this slum suburb of Lagos.
Shanumi’s beach is in some ways reminiscent of Matt’s beloved Kits Beach in Vancouver. Turds aren’t forever being cast up onto Matt’s beach, true. Matt’s beach doesn’t boast hundreds of huts housing thousands of gaunt outcasts, nor does it boast corpses, nor a shifting corps of pubescent hookers. Both beaches are near the heart of big cities though, and both peer across narrow bands of sea at pricey high-rises. Both are patrolled by gangs of crabby birds. Both are on the same planet, planet Earth.
Style-wise the documentary is pretty stripped-down. There’s a fair bit of slo-mo, which adds to the elegiac tone. It cries out, or so Matt imagines, against the passage of time. Rather than just memorialized, might death be undone, inverted? There are structural reversals of time—you meet Ifedayo in the flesh after you see him buried in his little box. All the key AIDS impacts are there, the masters-thesis signifiers—the fragmentations, the formal discontinuities, the disruptions of temporality and identity you’re to look for in AIDS-influenced art—but then they’ve always been there in Zane’s stuff, so what are you to make of that? The testimony of talking-headed experts is kept to a minimum. The chairman of Such-and-So emphasizes the feedback loop of poverty and infection. Dr. Whosit argues for the link between treatment and prevention, since only treatment will disrupt the stigmatizing link between infection and death, and since only the offer of treatment will lure folks in to be educated about how to protect others. Minister Thingamajig, incandescent with rage and sorrow, sermonizes about the global war-making budget, wonders if a tiny fraction of it couldn’t be worried free for the succour of the suffering zillions. There’s virtually no voice-over, just the odd subtitle pulsing in the lower left. A very modest slew of stats. Not much in the way of music either—an occasional passage of tuneful bonking on a two-head
ed djun-djun drum (an hourglass tipped on its side), the odd burst of call-and-response chanting heated up with funky Afrobeat. This makes room for an unsettlingly intense soundscape: water being wrung from a rag, the tattoo of a coughing fit, driftwood being snapped for kindling, murmured snatches of English and untranslated Yoruba. Laughter, too, when the children are suddenly haunted by the ghost of play.
How did Shanumi get infected? No way to know. The broken pop bottle with which she was circumcised may still have been bloody from the last girl; the man who took her (when she was thirteen) as his wife may have passed on the virus before he disappeared. Since then Shanu’s been surviving on prostitution, so there’s no telling how many men she’s infected, especially since she can charge double for condomless sex. She has also, of course—by giving birth to them, by feeding them at her breast—infected her children. There’s a brief reality-TV routine as her youngest goes in for his test. You’re never shown the follow-up, never get the thumbs-up or -down. You’re left to wonder, if you want. You’re assured that the household’s oldest girl, Rinsioluwa (“soaked in the Lord”), is negative so far, and that it will be her job to care for her dying siblings, and for her mum’s mum, who has TB. At one point Rinsioluwa lulls the younger kids to sleep with a story, a Yoruba fable about a child trapped in a tree being chopped down by a demon.
In shape the film coincides with the trajectory of a life going ballistic, giving up its propulsion, acquiescing to the draw of gravity. Shanumi is more and more confined to her shack. Zane clearly didn’t want to intrude, so he set the camera up on a tripod and let it intrude for him. There are extended sequences of stop-action—Shanumi, in her first-world castoffs, gives you a bizarre parody of a webcam girl, half-aware of the gawking lens. Various people are caught tending to her, her mum, her kids, the handful of friends who’ve resisted the pressure to shun her.
Intercut with Shanumi’s story is the story of Olatunji (“wealth woke up again”), a woman of the same age from the same area who lucked into a trial drug program, generic antiretrovirals from India. Her treatment starts when it ought to be too late. You watch her bounce back, flesh reappearing on her bones, just like Shanu but with the hourglass tipped up the other way. You watch her belly swell—she was already pregnant. You watch her being dosed with a drug that prevents transmission during labour and delivery, and you watch her googoo-talking to her healthy, negative newborn. Then you switch back to Shanumi, who’s being buried by her dwindling mum and her oldest baby. Credits.
Say it would kill you to reveal such a vision. Might dying be the thing to do?
Zane emerges from the can looking spruced up but spent. For PJs he’s got on a furry green sweatsuit, U of T. “Do your worst,” says Matt, passing him the remote. “Hey by the way, when does the Shanumi thing air?”
“No word on that yet.”
“Whipped. Or stoned maybe, or tossed in jail.”
“Huh?”
“That’s what would have happened to you in Nigeria, right? If they’d caught you with a guy? I looked it up, you probably did too.”
“Yeah. Thanks though.”
The loo’s still steamy, despite the growling labours of the fan. Matt’s stunned to discover how much of the countertop Zane has already hogged. He’s refused treatment and he still has to take all this crap? The names are Greek to Matt—okay, Latin—but the instructions give him the general idea. Take one tablet daily on an empty stomach. Apply three drops in each eye twice daily. Apply topically to affected area as needed. Take two puffs three times daily. Take one tablespoon immediately after each meal … Or maybe just shoot yourself. Matt reviews the catalogue of pharmaceuticals he’s got stashed in his own kit back at the hotel. Tylenol. Extra Strength Tylenol. Ex-Lax.
Again, isn’t it cheating? Did Shanu get to drop or pop or puff any of this stuff?
When Matt emerges, showered and moderately refreshed (Derek at the front desk spared him a toothbrush), Zane sets up a gentle din of catcalls and hubba hubbas. Matt’s jammies consist of plaid boxers and an orange Rub-My-Buddha-Tummy T-shirt plundered from Zane’s bag. Zane’s got himself all tucked in, ready for his goodnight kiss.
Matt did kiss a guy once, sort of. It comes back to him now with a hallucinatory sting. It was gym class, they were in the pool working on saving lives. When it came time for mouth to mouth everybody paired off. Zane, for instance, got fricking Winnie Fulton, with her cappuccino cleavage and her plump, permanently balmed lips. Matt? Matt got Mark “Midget” Vogler, the giant rugby guy. He lay there poolside on the puddled tile, Matt did, Midget hunched over him like a cougar over its kill. Tuna? Salmon? Midget’s lunch was very much with them. What Matt recalls most vividly, though, is the feel of the guy, the brush of stubble against his own downy face, not yet shaven …
He flips back his comforter. It’s the thickness and consistency, it occurs to him, of one of Mariko’s panty shields. He slithers his feet between the sheets. Zane’s got Seinfeld on, no Frasier, no Friends. He looks weary but wide awake.
Matt says, “I’m thinking India.”
“Pardon? Oh my God, they’ve resurrected this one?” I Dream of Jeannie, Barbara Eden still hot in her belly-dancer getup.
“For your next doc. And I’m coming.”
“Oh.”
“Mumbai.”
“Mumbai.”
“And we’re focusing on a man this time. Shanumi and now, I don’t know, Shankar or somebody. A gay man. A gay married man. Half the gay men in India are married. Man-on-man’s illegal there too.”
“That so.”
They fall to silent tube-watching. Jeannie does her thing—crosses her arms in front of her, nods her head and boingggggg, she’s out of trouble.
Matt laces his hands behind his head. “Does it bother you at all?” he says. “That this is what you’re supposed to do, that you’re doing exactly what they want?”
“They?” says Zane. He mutes it for the ads.
“Hollywood, everybody. The gay guy’s meant to kill himself at the end, right?”
The lamp on the bedside table has erected a little teepee of light between them. Zane peers through it. He says, “Have you always known you were straight?”
“Don’t be an idiot.”
“I’m not, I want to know. Was there ever a moment … Like those times down in your parents’ basement. Did that ever make you wonder?”
“No.”
“Oh. Okay.” He sits up, gives his pillow a whack, settles back down. “And by the way, idiot isn’t all that bad. Idiot isn’t as bad as moron, for instance. Or imbecile.”
“It’s worse, actually,” says Matt. “It goes, from stupidest to not quite so stupid, it goes idiot, imbecile, moron.” He’s doing Jatinder here, he’s doing Mr. Kumar.
“No, it’s imbecile, moron, idiot.” Zane’s Indian accent has always been better than Matt’s. His French too, his German, his Spanish—he’s better at the whole world.
“No, it’s imbecile, idiot, moron.”
“No, it’s moron, imbecile, idiot.”
“No, it’s idiot, imbecile, moron.”
“You already said that one,” says Zane. “Moron.”
“Idiot.”
“Imbecile.”
The AC unit clicks, whirs, keeps the world away. Just faintly, the whoosh of passing trucks. American whooshes, you can tell. Cocky? More like wistful. Wishing they were still cocky, as they were not so long ago.
“He was my first crush, you know,” says Zane, back to his own voice. “Mr. Kumar. Not crush, but … It was different. It was something new.”
This must be another tricky area for two guys living together. Who gets the remote? Zane’s clicked all the way back around to the munchkins again, who’re gamely croaking out a few lines of “The Lollipop Guild.”
Matt says, “He was brown, for instance.”
“He was beautiful. He was the first man I ever looked at and thought, beautiful.”
“Spooky. That must have been spooky.”
&n
bsp; “Not really. Not yet.”
“Right. Hey, remember chess? Remember how he’d set up all those chessboards in the cafeteria?”
“And he’d take on all comers. And he’d destroy us so sweetly, all at once.”
“Amazing.” Matt rolls onto his side facing Zane’s way, goes fetal.
“I wonder what happened to him?”
“Oh jeez. He’d be old.”
“Everybody’s old.” Zane clicks off the lamp. They’re left with just the bluey light of the tube.
Matt says, “Did I ever tell you about my first crush?”
“No.”
“It was your mum.”
“Oh, gross. Don’t tell me this, McKay.”
“She was a babe, Zane. Face it, your mum was a babe.”
“You are so weird.”
“Yeah, well. How is she these days, anyway? And how’s your dad?”
“Not so bad.”
“Good. And how do you think they’ll take this new thing?”
Zane shuts tight his eyes.
“Do you think they’ll survive it? Do you think any of us will?”
“Matt.”
“Okay, but—”
“Please.” And then he slips into his cartoon snooze, snort-whistle-we-we-we-we-weeee. He’s always been good at this—he used it routinely in the old days, to get out of dealing with anything difficult. How does Nico handle this? How does Mercedes? Matt lets Zane go for a while, then leans across the space between the beds and kablams him with his pillow.