Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  “Dad?” He and Zane fanned out, room-to-room. “Dad?”

  He looked dead. Matt found him floating face-up in the bathtub, the better part of his head submerged. He had a flashlight burning faintly on the back of the toilet, a tube of oxygen propped up against the tub. When he finally opened his eyes and saw Matt he should have had a fit, some kind of coronary catastrophe, but he didn’t. He rose, weirdly serene—a craggy old Venus or Ursula Andress rising up out of the sea. “Hello, Matthew.”

  Matthew. “Hey, hi Dad.”

  And he was so tolerant. He permitted Matt to dress him, endured his son’s ministrations with what amounted almost to tenderness. Had Matt ever seen him in the buff before? The odd changing-room glimpse when he was a kid, nothing since. A sight both harrowing and grand, the McKay flesh wearing the impress of going-on ninety years of history.

  Serena had left a precooked casserole, so the three of them shared it cold. The fridge clicked and dripped as the freezer unfroze. What would you call the natural light at this time of day? Gloaming, good word. Matt scrambled back down to the car for the provisions, and for Zane’s gear. He left Erin locked in the trunk, disturbed to find that this disturbed him. Back upstairs he set up candles in strategic locations throughout the condo—best to save the batteries for late-night trouble. Flames flapped in the breeze coming through the windows, thrown wide for the first time, one imagined, since the place was built.

  As for the Dadinator, he was preternaturally well behaved. Nothing overtly critical or quarrelsome, he just kept asking benign questions and nodding at Matt’s replies. The job? Fine and dandy, just got an offer to move into a whole new area. The shack? Looking great, we’ve done a few things. Mary? Mariko, Dad. She sends her love. The blackout was clearly pleasing the guy, serving as proof of some larger pattern unfolding as it should. He’d totter to the window now and again, blink up into the blackness, come back grinning.

  And then off to bed. No tube, Matt couldn’t fall off the wagon even if he wanted to. He gave Zane the couch, and jerry-rigged a mattress for himself out of extra cushions. They gabbed awhile.

  “Godard,” said Zane at one point. “Truffaut. Some pretty amazing filmmakers were critics first, eh?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Hey, about the fame thing? It’s something you’d really have to be ready for. If you were to do this.”

  “Yeah?”

  “This would be big, Matt. And it would be yours.”

  He seemed to be building towards something, Zane did—a retraction? a reaffirmation?—but then the Dadinator reappeared. He was in his PJs, dragging his oxygen tank on its little trolley. He had his pillow with him, held aloft like a sword or sceptre. The pillow was on fire. The general effect was of a superannuated saint or prophet, flames halo-ing his wispy head. By the time the boys got the pillow tamped out, and soaked down the Dadinator’s smouldering temple (no harm done), the chance for sleep seemed to have passed them all by.

  If this were a DVD Matt could try all three endings.

  When he finally got through to the airline just after dinner (his finger blistering on his dad’s old rotary phone, the only one that worked) the folks were happy to cancel his ticket for tomorrow. They were happy, too, to hold off on rebooking, since of course a zillion other panicky travellers were trying to get through to check their flights. But it raised the question, what next?

  In the theatrical release Matt would stay on for a couple of days, then race home to the west coast. What with Sophie straying, he and Mariko would have another chance. They’d go for the fresh start, take the defib paddles to their arrested love. They’d move back to the big city, back to the way it originally worked for them, save nature for weekends. He-She? A hit, Matt and Mariko sharing the Oscar for their sweet yet incisive script. What a pair.

  Click here, though, for two alternate endings. In one, the wackiest, Matt heads the other way. He heads east. After sorting out River (Matt’s a virtual black belt, having seen Billy Jack five times plus all sixty-odd episodes of Kung Fu), he finds Kate and commits himself, willy-nilly, to the new life kindling inside her. His baby? Another man’s? No matter. In this version Matt’s bigger than that. He’s outgrown “mine” and “yours.” He’s everybody’s. Everybody is his.

  And then the third version. He stays put. He crashes with his dad for a few days (healing, while he’s at it, a lifetime’s worth of hurt) and then settles into Zane’s spare room. He puts out feelers job-wise. To hell with Nagy, he goes big league, the Globe and Mail or Premiere. Best to stay kritikal. Meanwhile he’s McEye again, meticulously documenting his friend’s path from life towards that other thing. It nearly kills him but he crafts, from his rage, a redemptive vision for the world. His work matters again. Even if Zane pulls a switcheroo, even if he gets it in his head to live, they’ve still got the crop circles, the whole trilogy of films based on his fakes. Oh, and India. They’ve still got India. Tigers and cobras, Shivas and Buddhas …

  But a DVD it isn’t. So what to do? WWZD? Better yet, WWMD, what would Matt do?

  The whole thing was Matt’s idea. Jumping off the cliff at Georgian Bay that summer, he came up with that all by himself. He was looking for a chance to impress his dad (he’d tried chopping wood, nearly amputated a foot), and maybe to take the pressure off Erin for a bit, let the old man obsess about his son for a change.

  But he couldn’t do it. “Watch me!” he shouted down to his dad, who skeptically raised his movie camera. But then he froze, Matt froze. Erin stood murmuring encouragement, but couldn’t bear it for long and went on ahead. Matt watched her from above, all that red hair swept upwards in flight like the hair on one of her dolls. What were they called, trolls? Like the shocked hair of a shaken troll. And then she was gone, received by the water like a sliver received by flesh. Matt eventually followed, when the fear of humiliation overcame the other one, the fear of the fall.

  Whereas tonight, up here in the humid heavens, the challenge is quite the opposite. The challenge here is not to jump. You peep over the precipice (one, two, three, four barbecues flaring down there on the condo’s lawn) and it tugs at you, tempts you, all that space. There’s nothing there, and the nothing leaves you weak, willing. You want this barmy thing, this goofy oblivion.

  “Does he know, your. Friend there?”

  Matt shudders, swivels to face his father. Zane’s gone in, it’s just the two of them. “Know, Dad?”

  “Hardly a secret, I guess. All he has to do is look. Me in the eye.”

  “I’m not following you, Dad.” Matt settles back into his deck chair. The balcony gazes south and east, out over the cemetery and the ravine. And then the real city. During the day it looks like a motherboard, chunks of linked gadgetry bleeping and blooping towards some prodigious calculation. Here and there you’ll glimpse, too, the flatline, the silenced heartbeat of the lake.

  The Dadinator reprises his scowl. “This glint.” He leans in, but the moonlight is too dim to furnish the effect he’s going for. “The way. The pupil reflects.”

  Ah. “Well, right. But isn’t that … I’m pretty sure your eyes have looked that way ever since you had your cataracts done, Dad. I think what happens is they replace—”

  Oh dear. The Heimlich laugh has grown even more intense, a paroxysm that has you clutching at your own chest. This one’s punctuated by a dismissive batting at the air. “She’ll get a kick out. Of that.”

  She? “Say, that reminds me, Dad,” but Matt draws a blank. Oh wait, what about the universe? That’ll distract the fellow for a bit. “Quite something tonight, eh? The moon I mean?”

  “Saturn five,” says the Dadinator.

  “Pardon me?”

  “Multistage. Liquid-fuelled.”

  “Oh, a rocket. Hey, was that Apollo 11? The moon landing?”

  “Seven and a half million. Pounds of thrust.”

  “Sea of Tranquillity,” says Matt. “One small step. One giant leap.” He’s on the floor at his father’s feet. The TV in the living room
crackles, it crepitates with news from out there. “Remember, Dad? It was just the two of us then, too.”

  “Your mother never. Believed in any of it.”

  “No.”

  “And Erin.”

  Well now. Here’s something you don’t often hear the man say—his daughter’s name. Could this be an invitation? Maybe it’s time for Matt to open things up, make the first—

  “Erin’s gone,” says his dad.

  Son of a gun. “Yes, she’s gone. Do you miss her?”

  “Miss her? It’s only been. A few days.”

  “A few days, Dad?”

  “Checked the cabinet Monday. Morning and there she was. Gone.” He cranks his head back, peers fiercely skyward. “Got away!” If there’s a sign up there, a trace or trail, you have to believe he’ll find it.

  So. Matt really is free now, to deal with that box of bones. Invent a ritual, an un-ritual, an anti-ritual. “Hey, Dad?” he says. “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  “Yes?”

  “You’re going to be a grandpa.”

  The old man eases his gaze back down to earth.

  “Yep, you’re going to have a granddaughter.” Or grandson. And he may be black, and unrelated to you. Still.

  “Well I’ll. Be damned.”

  And then Zane is back. He steps from the condo’s flickering gloom out onto the balcony, video camera in hand. He takes hold of a chair, drags it in between father and son. “Mr. McKay?” he says. “You’re a crop circle guy, is that right?” He flips open the camera’s little screen.

  “Hey, you know what?” says Matt. “It’s been an awful long day. What say we all just—”

  “I’ve got some footage here I’d like you to see.”

  So what they do is they settle in. The three of them huddle around this tiniest of TVs, this puny box of light in a night suddenly grown monumental. If it were a fire, this screen, it would be three or four twigs on a curl of birchbark. Zane’s got his footage cued so it starts with the flattened stalks of corn, the minutiae, and then pulls back to give you the big picture. He pauses here and there to permit the Dadinator a better look at some particularly uncanny detail. The old man’s rapt, there’s no other word for it. Rapt, rapture—he’s ready. His breath is a crazy code of gasps and sighs, of dots and dashes …

  And now Matt. He rises up out of the earth, gambols about in the far circle, gesticulating at the sky. He fits right in with the crop—long and lean, bowing under the weight of the blue above him.

  Look. He’s a figment, is what he is, an artifact of light. He pushes his way through the corn, sucked in by the vortex of the camera’s lens. Just before he fills the screen Zane pauses, rewinds and lets him go again.

  EPILOGUE

  FRIDAY

  The lights of the marquee flicker. On-off, yes-no, could he be imagining this? Mid-morning out here on the sun-soused street, hard to say. But there they go again, toggling as though some brat’s found the city’s master switch and wants to get a bit of a strobe going, send everybody epileptic.

  The Italian Job. Shaolin Soccer. Daddy Day Care. Look out, Hitchcock!

  Finding Nemo. Hollywood Homicide. Rugrats Go Wild. Look out, Fellini!

  Might there be a message buried in these trite-sounding titles? First word of each one maybe? The Shaolin daddy finding Hollywood rugrats …

  It’s a no-go on the grid. The lights have fizzled again, leaving Yonge Street to the dazzle of its natural light. Matt stands his ground, a deadhead for which the flash flood of earthlings reluctantly parts. Yeah, his very own Crowd Scene. It’s a truly cinematic mob, the sort of mob into which a hero might dissolve as the music rises, redeeming and being redeemed by the collective. Is this what he’s missed, this crowd, these people?

  A pair of cops creak past, blue on black leather, looking alert but sheepish. Shouldn’t things be hopping today? Shouldn’t there be hooligans about, squads of smash-and-grabbers?

  Matt tries out further decodings and decipherings of the marquee, but nothing. This is a job for a hardcore paranoid. Where’s the Dadinator when you need him? Where’s DennyD?

  Of the six movies on offer here, Matt’s reviewed only two. The Italian Job … Right. Nagy approved of that piece, never a good sign. Matt recalls riffing on the heist genre and its various conventions—the mystical unity of cop and crook, the thief as symbol of metaphysical freedom, that sort of nonsense. These maunderings left only a paragraph or two for the actual movie, so it got off easy. Matt barely made mention of the emotional sterility, the pizzazzless script.

  Come to think of it he was a touch warm and fuzzy, too, with Finding Nemo. “Everybody’s a Critic,” he called his piece, and he opened with the query, “What sets us human beings apart from the rest of creation? Let’s look at answers offered up by some of the Great Big F#@*ing Thinkers.” And he did. Humans are the only animals who talk, who tell time, who decide how to die. Humans are the only animals capable of ruining the planet, of leaving the planet …

  “I don’t mean to be overly critical,” Matt wrote, “but these folks are all missing the point. The point is that humans are the only animals who criticize. Humans are the only animals who turn on themselves, who shame themselves into being other than what they are, wondering what they might become.” From there he segued to the issue of anthropomorphism, and ended up getting all gushy about Nemo, the sad little clownfish who falls, finally, into the open fins of his dad. Did Matt snark, even briefly, about the odious Universal Truths, the painfully predictable arc, the pushy ending? He did not.

  Maybe it really is time for a break.

  “Sorry, sorry,” says Matt, to a guy who’s just gouged him in the back with a briefcase. Cripes, he sure could use a Coke. No coffee this morning, though he reflexively filled the carafe and hit Brew before he clued back in. Losing a limb must be like this too, or a loved one—you’d just keep forgetting to believe it.

  The two lunks were still comatose when Matt set about girding himself for this morning’s expedition. His dad’s bedroom door was ajar, so Matt eavesdropped for a while on the stentorian riot of his sleep. Zane was more serene—the odd puppylike snuffle, otherwise silent. He had his arms drawn up and folded at both joints, like the front limbs of a praying mantis; with his feet he made twitchy frog kicks beneath the sheets. His T-shirt was bunched up to reveal the lesion on his shoulder. His belly button too was on display (oh yeah, an outie), and the thatch of damp hair canting into his boxers. Beautiful? Ugly? He had that human thing of being both at once. Matt stood over him awhile, watching him dream and—his latest spiritual practice, initiated just last night—trying to see him dead. Zane with all the Zaneness leached out of him.

  He’s going to need some time with this one.

  Zane snorted, smacked his lips. Matt pussyfooted over to the jumble of bags at the door and dug around for the camera. “Day one seventy-three,” he murmured once he had it up and running. There’ll be scads of this sort of footage, Zane lying around the place. How to keep it fresh? Matt fiddled with his angles, endeavoured to catch a bit of morning light as it burnished the visible bits of Zane’s body. That schnozzy silhouette against a patch of skyline, and then a very cool close-up of his left eye, his blue one, which frisked under its lid like Toto under a blanket. “Dream on.”

  The notepaper by the hall phone gave Matt an unexpected little frisson, a funny nudge from the past—he’d ordered a whole whack of these pads for his mum one year. At the top of each sheet, a tipsy-looking St. Bernard exuded this thought bubble: “How am I supposed to save you if I don’t first save myself?” Collar undone, keg empty.

  Dear Zane,

  Live to be orphaned. Don’t leave them alone.

  Love,

  Matt

  He’d been hanging onto this one, holding it in reserve. Maybe, for now, he’d keep on holding it, give the guy a break? He read the note over a few times, folded it and slipped it into his pocket.

  Dear Zane,

  Back soon, avec goodi
es with any luck. Check on Dad when

  you get up, will you? Help him switch tanks if he needs it?

  Merci,

  Matt

  Thank Christ for the Kwikee Mart. Matt’s got a bagful of provisions to lug back to the lads, the spoils of a fearsome hunter. Granola bars. Chips. A trio of blotchy bananas. And get this, Wagon Wheels, Ding Dongs—some things really do last forever. He’s guzzled about half his lukewarm pop. He’s got the instant gratification of the throat-burn, and still to look forward to the tickle, the nerve-tingle of caffeine.

  Oh, and this is a weird feeling. The guy at the phone store back in Vancouver must have set his cell on vibrate—here at last, Matt’s very first incoming call. He powered the thing up this morning, planning to try Kate at the hotel—and maybe Mariko at home?—and neglected to shut it off when he found the system was still down.

  But he’s too slow. By the time he fumbles the phone out of his pocket and pries it open it’s quit humming. Message, maybe?

  Matt squints at the gizmo’s teensy monitor, scrolls trepidatiously through various menus. “6 new messages”—sheesh, he’s pretty hot stuff. A couple from Zane no doubt, from the other day. Who else knows the number? Kate. Mariko. How do you get them back?

  Matt’s engulfed, just as he glances up, by a gaggle of very young women, a whole tribe of umgirls. Most days he wouldn’t dream of bugging them, but today? The laws of the cosmos have been suspended, is what it feels like. Things are possible now that normally, no.

  “Excuse me, miss? I’m wondering if you could just show me …”

  Boyfriend? Sibling? Each girl chatters urgently into a phone, communing with some absent other. Mum? Dad?

  “Miss, could I possibly …”

  Never mind. He’d have to call them both back, and what’s he really got to say?

  Kate? Matt. Listen, I’m thinking Billie. Boy or girl, it’s a great name. Billie Burke, right? She played the good witch.