Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  “Not really.”

  “So I’ll show you,” and he does. There’s a wallet-sized screen that swivels out from the side. There’s an intricate console of buttons that Zane advises him to leave alone for the moment. All he really needs is the little rocker on top for zooming in and out.

  “And … action,” says Matt, and he thumbs the red button. This feeling, with the camera in his hands.

  Penetrating? What does that even mean when applied to eyes? One blue, one brown, both of them biggish. Zane’s cheeks (which fill the screen when Matt goes all the way in) are sheened with sweat. They really have lost their bulge, and are betraying the bone structure that’s supposed to be so beautiful.

  “Hey, it’s weird over here,” says Zane. “On the other side of the lens.”

  Matt crazy-zooms in and out, bobs and weaves rock-video style. Zane obliges with a standard aren’t-we-wacky face. Then, “Day one seventy-two since I refused the antiretrovirals.” No beat, no break. “My viral load is up, my T cell count is down. Well under two hundred now, that threshold. And there’s this.”

  Matt zooms out as Zane bunches the sleeve of his T-shirt and tugs it up to reveal his shoulder. It’s still a meaty thing but detectably leaner, and graced now with a mini-bruise or tattoo. The size of a bottle cap, not even. Mandala? “Mother”? Matt zooms back in. It’s an elongated circle, a lozenge. It’s a galaxy, a thousand billion stars circling the bowl, the black hole at its heart. Reddish purple, purplish red.

  “My first cancerous lesion,” says Zane. “My first definitive sign.”

  A flash of sky, a zig-zag across Zane’s body and then Matt’s back on target. He keeps shooting, keeps watching through his tiny window.

  “I have to assume further opportunistic infections will soon follow,” says Zane. “Unless, of course … Lots of people have been cured by crop circles, after all. Arthritis, insomnia, impotence …” He spreads his arms, performs a little dance, a sombre, solo version of the one he did all those years ago with Brad. You could believe he’s waiting for something.

  “Right,” says Matt. “I get it.” He’s breaking the rules here, inserting himself into the scene. Edgy stuff. He finds himself searching for a better angle. Watch the glare, mix up the framing, close-up, medium, full. “This is the real movie, right? You doing this, you dying?” He starts to circle his subject, some ancient film-school instinct kicking in. He orbits, Zane his still centre, his sun. “The whole crop circle thing was a hoax.”

  “Wrong,” says Zane.

  “A cute way to get your cameraman out here.” Don’t forget frame balance. Resist the facile symmetry.

  “Wrong. The crop circle thing’s for real, I want to do it. I want us to do it together.” He turns as he speaks, in sync with Matt—a plastic bridegroom on a wedding cake. “But yeah, I want this recorded, I want this to count. That’s why I’m shooting Nico too.”

  “Because he’s on the cocktail. You’re Shanumi, he’s …”

  “Ola. Olatunji.”

  “One lives, one dies.”

  “But I can’t shoot myself.” Just over Zane’s shoulder a bird appears in the middle distance, some soaring bird—another of those hawks, presumably, riding the air without a flap. Matt widens his frame a touch, allows the bird to eerily hover there. “And once it’s done I won’t be around to shape it, make it matter.”

  “Ah.”

  “I wasn’t going to ask you, Matt. But you’re good, and you’re here.”

  “I’m here, so what the hell.”

  Zane grimaces. “I told you it was too much,” he says. “But these people, Shanu, Ola. You think anybody will actually see them?”

  “And they’ll see you?”

  “If you make them.”

  How to end the shot? Extreme close-up—the lesion, the look in his eye? Or maybe swing off across the field, allow it all to be absorbed by the landscape? How do you decide?

  Weird to see white up there after so much blue. Can these really be the first clouds Matt’s glimpsed all week? Cotton balls, like the little ones they tape to your arm when they’ve taken blood.

  “John Belushi,” says Zane.

  “John Barrymore,” says Matt. “Now that’s odd.” He’s creeping his way past a dead traffic light, the second one they’ve hit since making it back to Canada. There was a kerfuffle at the border, grumpy guards barking into cellphones. And now this.

  “River Phoenix.”

  “W. C. Fields.”

  They’re doing movie stars who’ve OD’d. After an hour or so of dense silence between them, Matt offered up the idea he’s had for a review of the new movie, his new movie, the one in which Zane dwindles and dies. Can you be both kreator and kritik of the same kreation? Time’ll tell. Matt’s thought is to open with a list of movie-types who’ve killed themselves with meds, then segue to the story of a filmmaker who’s killed himself by refusing meds.

  “Bela Lugosi.”

  “Marilyn Monroe. Bloody hell, here’s another one.”

  People are being good. They take turns, pretend it’s a four-way stop. Down deep maybe that’s what people really are, is good. How would you know?

  “Judy Garland,” says Matt. And it occurs to him, man, if this were a movie, it sure would’ve picked up over these last couple of days. Chase scene, road trip, reams of startling revelations. The protagonist’s under a whole new kind of pressure, implicated in the crime he’s been trying to prevent. And now …

  EXT. RURAL ROADSIDE—DAY

  An aging sedan pulls up to a convenience store—we glimpse an unlit “E-Z Mart” sign. The car brakes in a dry CLATTER of gravel.

  MATT and ZANE, two casually dressed men in early middle age, climb out into the torrid afternoon and, SLAM-SLAM, start towards the store’s entrance. Matt glances up.

  MATT

  Mart? What the hell’s a mart?

  Zane smirks, but offers no reply. We form the impression of an easy intimacy between the two, a timeworn jocularity that’s under an unaccustomed strain. Both men are on alert.

  As the pair approaches the store’s propped-open door an ELDERLY GENTLEMAN exits. He totes a crate of bottled water.

  ELDERLY GENTLEMAN and MATT

  (in unison, as they nearly collide)

  Sorry.

  (in unison)

  That’s okay.

  MATT

  (chuckles)

  Can I help you with that at all?

  ELDERLY GENTLEMAN

  No, I believe that’s the last of it.

  Wearing puzzled expressions—and still busy trying to read one another—Matt and Zane step into the store. Through closeups we register further bemusement on their faces as they note, along with us, certain unexpected elements of the scene within. There’s a crepuscular silence, in stark contrast to the truck-whooshed brilliance outside. The place is humless, buzzless, tickless. Nothing works.

  At the counter an Asian man—MR. E-Z, we presume—tinkers with a boombox surrounded, Christmas-tree fashion, with savaged wrappers. “Energizer,” we read. “Duracell.”

  Mr. E-Z spins the dial. BLURTS OF WORD erupt, as though doors are being rapidly opened and shut on a dozen conversations. We catch snippets: “… transmission grid … cascading collapse … Toronto and Ottawa, as well as New York, Detroit … that terrorism may be …”

  UNIDENTIFIED VOICE

  (off-screen)

  Goddam A-rabs. They can kiss my A-ass.

  Matt glances up. Matt’s point of view: we witness the scene reflected in the convex surveillance mirror at the back of the store. Various customers patrol the dim aisles, hurriedly chucking provisions into their baskets and mini-carts.

  MR. E-Z

  They say fifty million people.

  A burly, BUZZ-CUT young man approaches the till with a basket of canned goods. He’s the source of the unidentified voice we’ve already heard.

  BUZZ CUT

  How could anybody not see this coming? Where else are they going to hit us? Powerless people, right?
So they knock out our power.

  He produces his debit card and offers it to Mr. E-Z, then remembers. He sheepishly returns the card to his wallet, starts rummaging for cash.

  A woman in TRACK PANTS and sweat-mottled T-shirt steers her cart into place behind him. She’s opted for dry goods—crackers, chips.

  TRACK PANTS

  Yes, and I’m afraid it’s only going to get worse. Those people have finally realized they have nothing, and we have everything. And now they’re going to come and take it from us.

  BUZZ CUT

  (with hushed bravado)

  They can try.

  Matt and Zane exchange a glance. Matt moves towards the wall of fridge units at one end of the store, browsing the still-chilled bottles.

  ZANE

  (addressing the room at large)

  Right, but whoever they are, are we sure they really want this?

  He effects a sarcastic arm-sweep, taking in the junky contents of the mart.

  MR. E-Z

  I’m sorry, no trouble please. We close in five minutes.

  ZANE

  There must be something else to want, mustn’t there?

  He shakes his head, starts for the door. Matt—grinning broadly—squats and peers through the frost-rimed door of the cooler. Close-up of his face as he ponders his choice—pop or juice? what brand? what flavour?—as though the fate of the human race hangs in the balance.

  The political debate, reduced to an angry murmur, continues at the till.

  FADE TO BLACK

  Back out on the road the boys sip their root beers. Root beers? A retro impulse on Matt’s part, school trips and birthday parties.

  “I thought you were going to start a fugging riot,” Matt chuckles. “No wonder you’ve been packing heat.”

  “Morons,” says Zane.

  In the back seat they’ve stashed two racks of fizzy water, a twelve-pack of squat white candles, E-Z’s last pair of batteries. Matt knuckled under, at the last moment, to the prevailing panic.

  But things have already calmed down. By the time Zane got the CBC tuned in they’d ruled out terrorism. Americans are blaming Canadians (a transmission gaffe in Ontario), Canadians are blaming Americans (lightning in New York, fire in Pennsylvania). All’s well.

  “People do weird stuff for God though, don’t they?” says Matt.

  “Yep.”

  “Kill and stuff.”

  “Yep.”

  “And die. Do you think there’s a God?”

  “How should I know?” says Zane. “I think there’s something.”

  “Something? Is that what you’re doing this for? Are you doing this for something?”

  Zane shrugs.

  “If I thought there was something, would I be good too?”

  “You are good, Matt.”

  “Nah.”

  They’re on the superhighway now, everybody howling along at the usual DOA pace. This time Matt’s passing. Eighth floor of a condo, how does that work without power? Matt’s tried his cellphone but it’s dead. That whole system seems to be down. The matrix, the great vibrating web has gone still.

  Serena leaves at noon. The Dadinator will be alone. Will he have the wits to switch over from the electric concentrator to the portable oxygen tank? Will he get flustered, make some childish mistake?

  “Hey,” says Matt, “if there really is something, do you think it’s a he or a she?”

  “I’m not sure it works that way.”

  “But say it did, say you had a choice. Male or female.”

  “I’m gay,” says Zane. “I’m not stupid.”

  “Right. Make it a chick.” Matt weaves over a lane, weaves back. “Mariko’s into the goddess thing, did I mention? She’s even written a screenplay about it.”

  “What a woman.”

  “Mother Earth and all that. Kind of annoying. Kind of cool.”

  “… have declared a state of emergency,” says the radio.

  “Are you … This is going to sound strange,” says Zane.

  “Okay.”

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “That what?”

  “That it isn’t terrorists. That this isn’t it. The relief of that, everything being over.”

  “Hm,” says Matt. He scratches at his stubble. “Suffocate or burn to death.”

  “What?”

  “Get shot or get mauled by a grizzly.”

  “Oh,” says Zane. “Like when we were kids, which would you rather.”

  “Get stabbed or get suffocated.”

  “Get strangled or get brained with a big rock.”

  “But the thing is, I don’t think about that anymore.”

  Zane gives his pate a pensive rub. “Get bitten by a rattler or get struck by lightning.”

  “I don’t think about how I’m going to die anymore, I think about how everybody’s going to die.”

  “Get trampled at a rock concert or get stung by killer bees.”

  “I mean bombs? Weather? Plague?”

  “Get lynched or get fried in an electric chair.”

  “But maybe everybody’s like that,” says Matt. “Remember disaster movies when we were kids? It was a shipwreck or something, maybe a burning building. Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine. Now it’s a meteorite or whatever and the whole world’s done in.”

  “Get caught in a wood chipper or get swept over Niagara Falls.”

  Matt will be dead before long. Zane may beat him by a few months or years or decades but in the big world—the world Kate conjured for a bit there, the world of big bangs and missing dimensions—that’s bupkes. That’s nothing. So what’s the big hairy deal?

  “Walk into a helicopter blade,” says Zane, “or choke to death on your own vomit.”

  Chances are Matt’ll get stuck with the eulogy. When I think of Zane today, here in the presence of those he most loved, I recall the time … Insert epitomizing incident. Another of those early filmmaking crazinesses, maybe?

  Matt’s only had to speak at one funeral so far, his mum’s. In Erin’s case the whole ceremony was handled by a minister. Matt recalls stirring briefly from his zomboid state to sob at the expression “lost soul”—a deplorable cliché, a formula made wretched by its ghastly accuracy. When his mum died, his dad asked Matt if he’d be willing to say something on behalf of the family.

  Finally, Matt’s way with words was to be of use to somebody. He laboured over those paragraphs on the plane, and in his old bedroom at the McKay house. What did he focus on? His mum’s sly humour, which so few people ever really got. Her painstaking intelligence, which remained almost entirely unexpressed (those twelve years at Timely Temps not quite the career she deserved). Her tenderness in the home, which was twisted out of shape by the loss of her daughter. It was only afterwards that Matt recognized, and lamented, the fact that he’d spoken mostly about what his mum hadn’t done, about the life that had never made it out of her body and into the world. He added this blunder to his burden of grief, which threatened to break him right open.

  Mariko, that plane trip, was the very next day. Anguish transformed, presto chango, into ardour.

  Zane says, “Fall down a well or smack your head on a diving board.”

  Or it could go the other way, Matt could be the first one out after all. DROO or FYNC or KSKS could turn out to be a wickedly swift-acting virus. A few days of fever, a few weeks of dormancy and your brains melt, puddle on your pillow. In which case it’ll be Zane who has to dream up something tender yet refreshingly irreverent to say about Matt.

  Zane says, “You know what? I’m not actually sure I can do this.”

  “That’s okay,” says Matt. “That’s cool. I’ll scoot you straight to your place, then whip back to Dad’s.”

  “No, that’s not what I mean. I mean I’m not sure I can do this.”

  Oh. “Oh. Well, me neither.”

  Look, the universe is back tonight. The city-static, the fog of light that normally blots out the night sky has evaporated. Toronto itself s
eems to have been snuffed out—the blinking beacon of the CN tower, the office blocks with their intricate geometry of lit and unlit windows, the pulsing logos … Poof.

  “Oh, Zane,” says the Dadinator. He’s just now realized who’s been hanging around his condo these past few hours. “You were the peculiar. One, yes?” Can it be worse already, the breathing?

  “That was me.”

  Smear of baby barf is right, the Milky Way. It’s beginning to fade now, what with the moon on the rise. The moon has finished its wax since Matt last noticed it—that first night on his way in from the airport—and started its wane. One side’s been squashed, a tennis ball flattening on contact. And could that maybe be Mars, just up and to the right, reddish and not winking? So many lights, so many possible patterns—might there be a message up there, some star-scrawled augury visible just this one night?

  “And what do you. Do now?”

  “I make movies.”

  The Dadinator favours Zane with one of his patented scowls—Toto working at the peanut butter on the roof of her mouth. It’ll likely be the last thing to go, that scowl. Just now the old man looks pretty good though. He’s skinnier of course, but still heftier than Matt if you factor in his swellings back and front, his hunch and his paunch. He’s tricked out in his usual blue track suit, though it’s plenty warm out here on the balcony.

  “Two perfectly. Bright kids.” The Dadinator toys glumly with the singed hair on the side of his head. “What a waste.”

  It’s been an adventure. The trip into town was slow but surprisingly steady. Civilians played traffic cop here and there, that helped. You thought of London under the Luftwaffe, everybody in it together. Streams of pedestrians headed north out of the city centre, a weird, white-collar exodus. Best image so far: a derelict streetcar, its juice shut off before it could creep for cover.

  The radio said to expect at least another day.

  At the condo, emergency lights had turned the halls and stairwells sepulchral. Eight flights, Christ. The boys had to stop at every landing, Zane gasping for Matt to go on up alone. By the time they made the Dadinator’s floor Matt had his buddy draped over him, a fireman dragging a last survivor from the fumes and flames.