Mad Hope

by Heather Birrell

  Some honking had begun; there was a holdup. An eighteen-wheeler was cornering badly, redressing errors with minute adjustments of its wheels. Outside the bus, doors slammed, cellphones were proffered to waiting ears and unripe advice was hurled at the trucker, who kept on with his conscientious cornering, trapped in his mission. Inside the bus the passengers had succumbed to a solemn intoxication. Across from Jeremy a woman was dabbing her finger to her tongue in her quest to turn the slippery page of a magazine. The truck finally freed itself, the whole lot of it bulking into the intersection, then rumbling off to its destination. But no one outside seemed happy with this; they shook their heads and wearily flipped each other the bird. A tall man wearing a khaki hunting vest over his three-piece suit shook his fist like a thwarted revolutionary in the direction of the retreating truck, then folded himself angrily and efficiently into his eggplant-coloured SUV.

  On a nearby building, artists had been at work. An eagle soared in a pink and blue sky, a thick peach-skinned boy with jowls and vacant baby eyes leapt from his airborne skateboard. Mushrooms sprouted in technicolour beneath him. Green bubble letters outlined in purple floated in the wall’s foreground. Bye Bye Flangle Nuts, the puffy message read. Jeremy lifted his hand to wave.

  ‘Don’t move, squirm bucket. You think this job is easy?’ Rosa smoothed Jeremy’s hair behind his right ear. This was not part of the process, he knew. This was how humans sometimes made it through. ‘You’ve got good cheekbones, though, glamorous for a guy.’ How much flak would he get from the guys at the steel mill – a whole eighteen-wheeler full, stacked to the gills – if they could see. How little, how meanly, he cared.

  The night he knew, he’d had a final pint by himself after his buddy Al left. A Miller as per uszh. It went down easy, helped him wind his scarf around his neck, zip his coat to the top, roll the rim of his toque down over his ears. He stamped his feet with certainty inside and outside the bar. It was a winter thing. It was possible it helped, or at least provided a comforting physical script. ‘Fucking February,’ he said to a snowbank as if naming, furiously, a poem. It was cold. The sidewalks, painstakingly cleared, had slicked over with a hard hybrid of ice and snow. But where his sober self might have integrated this, shortened his stride, his drunken self, an oblivious monarch, noted it only in passing. The air around him warmed infinitesimally and large flakes began to fall, with nasty purpose, from the top of the night. He felt fine. Not warm, but fuelled and rhythmic, his mind narrowed to a gleaming metal tube. One foot, then the other, hands fisted in pockets. My father will die, he thought. It was not a pleasing thought but it did little to interrupt. In fact, it floated right up into the forest of snow. And then he was sad, as if sad for a far-off country’s strife and pettiness, its people’s lack of true solace.

  ‘Stop making that face – all bunchy and shit. Like a bulldog swallowing a wasp.’ Rosa was Italian but never flaunted it, instead plucking expressions jauntily from the air as they went flying past her. She knuckled Jeremy’s chin gently. He tried to relax while she used her thumbs to knead magic into his cheeks. ‘Translucent,’ she was saying. ‘This new product. Everything is so much less 2-D now, y’know. They use reflections and molecules and the true inner glow of your skin. Of your self, I guess.’

  Don’t you dare say soul, Jeremy thought. Don’t make it about soul. What he understood now, what he had perhaps always understood, was that life was about instinct.

  His friend’s mother, Mrs. Henley, had met him at the bus station, tapped him on the back, sniffed six times in rapid succession. ‘Your mother and sister,’ she said. He allowed himself to lean into her, but only slightly. Jeremy had been close to her son, Richie, when they were teenagers, but had not spoken to Richie for years. It was how he liked it.

  ‘Yes,’ said Jeremy. He knew she was thinking of her own stark, scooped-out existence. ‘Yes,’ he said again.

  ‘He loved you.’

  This was less comfort than statement of fact. There were fathers who loved – no matter how falteringly – and those who could not. Richie’s stepfather could not. All through high school, there were marks on their bodies, mother and son, that corroborated this truth. When he was seventeen, Richie had beat the crap out of a guy, killed him with a baseball bat and his own willing fists and feet. He was in jail. (Still, after so many years, it sounded tabloid cowboy, untenable.) Richie’s father took off with the shooter girl from the local bar and only came back once, to retrieve his key-chain collection.

  Mrs. Henley was a good driver, which surprised Jeremy. Whatever quaver he observed in her personality was missing from her firm turns and casually assertive shifting of lanes. He sat back in his seat and did not speak.

  Maddie was at the door before he had a chance to knock, her hug man-like, even her chest, with its new woman’s breasts, unforgiving.

  ‘I’ve been phoning,’ she said, and held up her finger like ET. ‘People need to know.’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Where’s Mum?’

  His mum was in the back room. He sat next to her on the couch and she patted his knee. When Maddie came in and saw them just sitting there she looked perplexed, then purposeful. She took her place on Mum’s other side and the three of them stayed like that, as if posing for a portrait at Sears, the background liable to slip up and scroll away without warning.

  Later, people made them eat, and they found they were hungry, and later still, that they were sleepy. But so lonely! So fundamentally unable to see their way clear to the morning. Jeremy’s bedroom had been remade: a sewing room full of spools and swatches, his KISS poster rolled tightly, red rubber bands circling either end. Maddie knocked on his door. ‘We shouldn’t leave Mum alone,’ she said.

  And Jeremy knew what she meant: she might die too.

  They walked together to their parents’ bedroom, pushed open the door without knocking and stood breathless, watching their mother. The three of them slept together, that night and the next four, gathering like tribe members, tugging the covers politely, judiciously, to the edges, and making sure, at all times, that they were touching.

  This was instinct: it was puppies or baby snakes even, skin to skin, next to a rock, in a cave, the corner of a barn, hidden and ­cosseted against the rawness of the world. How long could they have stayed like that – dreamless, drugged by closeness?

  But one morning they woke up and counted each other’s white hairs, and their mother was angry. ‘You’re too young,’ she said to Maddie. She pulled tweezers from the bedside drawer and began to pluck roughly at her daughter’s temples, holding the silver pincers up to the light with each success. Maddie’s eyes reddened with every yank, but she did not cry.

  ‘Get out, both of you,’ Mum said. ‘Sleep in your own beds.’

  ‘I’m finished with the base now. It’s like being a painter, only you start in the negative. You have to create a clean canvas before you can start.’ Rosa had stopped touching him, but he did not open his eyes. He preferred the puzzle of not-seeing, envisioning her bustle as she tidied one set of tools, dragged out another. So resolute now. But it hadn’t always been this way. There had been times, deep in the winter months, January mostly, when she’d been all raw eyes and odd rashes, lumpen under the covers on the couch. ‘I just can’t,’ she’d say, like every word was its own heavy sentence. ‘Why can’t you,’ he said. She had taken his face in her hands. ‘It’s not that I want to sleep like this, like a stone, or like I’m stoned, or even that I want to die. It’s that I don’t not want to either. It’s like a laziness that’s been ramped up and made muddy by all the things that can’t be fixed in the world.’ He nodded, held her warm hand for a limp moment and went out drinking.

  Jeremy loved the funeral, and not because it was like a party or a solemn ritual, although it tried to be both of these. Everyone kept saying how important it was to celebrate his father, to remember him when he was alive, as if they could recall h
im any other way. The service was in a church – United – which was not so much Jesus, really, as school lunchroom, that same institutional feeling, safe and staid, with adult secrets and stale smells around the periphery. There was a minister but it was a woman. No, not a party or a service, but a distraction, almost a holiday, with a whole circus of people and an itinerary. Rosa was there with Carol, but they hung back like bridesmaids, ceded the spotlight. And friends he had not seen in years came forward one at a time, shook his hand and sought out his eyes with their own, nodding in a kind of awe or acknowledgement. He could not remember the speeches – every single one like a momentarily hypnotizing, forgettable song. His father’s coffin, closed and sleek, shone like the mahogany inside a yacht, and Jeremy was only really jolted awake when one of the speech givers – Mike Elton, a retired cop – rapped on it on the way back to his pew. It made Jeremy so proud, that knock. It was a closed-mouthed, puffy-chested sign of respect, and he felt it deep in his breast, could still call up the tone and timbre, the one, pause, two, three, pause rhythm of it. Afterwards, back at the house, he parked himself in a corner and tried for inscrutability. Rosa had left – a practical at the Sally Caponi Institute that would determine her mark for the semester. He was glad to see her off. Someone had to have appointments to keep. He had booked two weeks off work and still had six empty squares on the calendar to wander through. He was not afraid of time and space. It was his version of Rosa’s muddy not-caring that terrified him.

  It was then that Mrs. Henley had sought him out, found her place by his side.

  ‘A lot of people,’ she said.

  ‘How’s Richie?’ he replied.

  She took his hand. ‘You know, he told me once about the mushrooms. How you knew them all by Latin name, would point them out like some professor when you two went riding in the ravine. There was one, he said, called the ear mushroom. He always liked that one.’

  Jeremy smiled at her. Auricularia auricula. Or, not so operatically: tree ear. In less language-conscious, perhaps more clannish times: Jew’s ear. Smooth, fleshy to the touch. As unlikely as ears themselves, whorls of skin and soft cartilage stuck arbitrarily on the sides of heads. The mushrooms had a shellacked newborn look, more purely ear-like than their namesakes.

  He had done a speech in Grade 4 about mushrooms, mycology. How many hours had he spent examining – memorizing! – the striations, shapes, smells and unexpected qualities of chanterelle, agaricus, cremini? How he had fallen into it! As never before and never since, roaming backyards and dim places in parks, plucking his specimens easily from the soft rotten places they sprouted. With the aid of his mother, who helped him see words whole, line up sentences so they meant something, he gathered enough material – genealogy, geography, curative properties and cuisine – to speak for a good forty-five minutes, and was forced to cut it down to twelve. It almost made him cry – the lore and science that fell away as he trimmed and tucked, practiced speed-speaking to squeeze in an extra sentence or three. But when he was finished, a shroomy essence remained. He rehearsed it for his mum and dad, knowing it was inadequate, but reasoning that the passion he felt for his subject would come through in his celebratory enunciation, his unintimidating, helpful physical stance.

  When he finished, he looked at his parents not for approval or admiration but with a confidence he had never felt before, a knowledge of having made himself bigger without having to posture or puff up physically. It was power he felt, and it warmed him. His mother had been staring fixedly at him the entire time he spoke, and now she tried out a word he had used, mycelium, but without sound. Then, with the same relative soundlessness, she brought her hands together in a heartfelt, if meek, fluttering of applause.

  ‘You’re a champion mushroom expert,’ she said.

  ‘Mycology,’ he half-whispered. ‘Mycologist.’

  ‘And what a speaker!’

  ‘Mushrooms,’ said his father. ‘I never would have guessed it.’ He pronounced this not to Jeremy but as if to another, avuncular self looking on. Then he closed his eyes reflectively. When he opened them, they were glassy with unshed tears. ‘I’m proud of you, son,’ he said.

  So it was no wonder, really, when Jeremy was advanced to the school speech finals, chosen as one of ten to hold forth for an auditorium full of ladies and germs, ha-ha, fellow students, distinguished teachers, ha-ha, and honoured judges. It was just the universe, which Jeremy was sure now lived comfortably inside him, making its grand design known. It was fate. No, not fate: biology. He had a strategy for the day. He would focus not on the people themselves, or even the back wall of the room, covered as it was with yellow felt banners proclaiming victory, but instead on the spores he imagined emanating from each audience member, their chairs rich in compost, disdainful of chlorophyll. He would speak to their mushroom selves. This worked. The opening – What living creature, neither plant nor animal, grows without roots, seed or leaves, always wears a cap and has never been afraid of the dark? – slid out easily. He didn’t even have to count out the pauses, they just breathed themselves into being. And the first third worked too; he was nervous but combatted this with a charming overemphasis of the facts. Thirty-eight thousand varieties! Of course not all of them edible! It was halfway through the second third that he faltered. He was talking about shiitakes (having avoided the obvious pitfall in pronunciation here), and had loosened up considerably. He was even using hand movements to mime the harvest, or to imitate, in a facile manner, the various ways in which spawn could spread and shift and float in the forest. And the spore people were enthralled; they were listening as one.

  Then he noticed his father. He had locked on to his son with a resolve Jeremy had not seen on any other occasion, no matter the ceremony or circumstance attached to it. It was not – no, never! – that his father wanted him to fail. In fact, Jeremy saw in that instant that his father thought this impossible, could in fact envision the multitude of mulchy paths his son would tread, eyes trained to seek out the inflated parasols – with their delicate spokes and crenellations – that represented his very livelihood, his life. At nighttime, Jeremy’s step would be less sure, but no less focused. He’d carry a torch to stab, épée-like, through the dark and illuminate the crooks of living things – knobby trees, right-angled deer, the raven’s wing. And there, in the places these creatures had fled or rooted, would be the prize. A whole clan of amanita muscaria, their red caps gleaming, or albatrellus ovinus, practically weeping, definitely perspiring, in anticipation of his arrival. Back in his office – an oak desk, wheelie chair and two filing cabinets in the corner of his lab – the phone would be vibrating insistently in its cradle. He was an expert; people were always wanting to talk to him.

  All of this passed between Jeremy and his father in less time than it takes to identify a morel.

  Jeremy blinked and continued talking, but he could not stop looking at his father, who was now channelling a crystalline stream of loving envy. My father knows I’m good and he wishes he were me. This thought slid under the words Jeremy was speaking like a mechanic glides himself, smoothly, wheeled and jumpsuited, under a car. It would be melodramatic to say the thought broke Jeremy’s heart, but it severed something irrevocably in him; it crippled him. He finished his speech, but without conviction. A girl who had researched the origins of the wristwatch came first, the runner-up a boy with a talk-show shrug and a T-shirt emblazoned with Here Comes Trouble in purple sparkle paint. Jeremy went home to his bedroom, flushed his harvest, a few at a time, down the toilet and stacked his books on the landing at the bottom of the stairs. In the morning he returned them to the public library on the way to school. They slid easily through the drop slot, but landed in broken stages on the other side. He did not become a mycologist.

  ‘You should visit Richie,’ said Mrs. Henley, without commitment. ‘I brought some strudel.’ She pulled it from her bag. The dome of the plastic lid was dented. ‘I’ll put it away.’ />
  Jeremy bit his lip and inclined forward in assent. Who could chart the course of a life? Not Mrs. Henley, with her strudel and steadfast sorrow. Not even Rosa, with all her miraculous, face-saving tools.

  His father was gone and so was Richie, and now Mrs. Henley, off to open cupboards and find space for provisions. I should go home. Home to Rosa.

  ‘All right, champ, this requires some poise on your part. What that means is if you move I’m fucked. Got it?’ He nodded. ‘No moving!’

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’m using the liquid eyeliner for a cleaner line. We wanna open things up a bit, almost make you look a bit shocked at the state of things ... ’

  She wasn’t talking to him, but he made a sound like he bought what she was selling. She pulled the skin of his left upper lid out towards his temple with the pad of her middle finger. ‘Raise your eyebrows up.’

  He complied, and felt a wet, delicate coolness trailing across his skin like a miniature slug. Her hand was so steady!

  ‘Okay, open. Let’s do the other one.’

  She was pleased with him, he could tell by the plumminess in her voice. He was unaccustomed to this – pleasing people – and if anyone had thought to ask, he might say it was why he loved Rosa. She dabbed an old-fashioned shaving brush into a pearlized palette in her palm. ‘Head back, and suck in your cheeks, but just a bit. Like you took a shot of tequila and it hasn’t hit you yet.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t smile,’ she said. ‘Close.’ The brush came skimming over his face, across the chin, up the cheekbones, left, right, quickly down the ramp of the nose. He would have rolled over, exposed the soft part of himself where all the vital organs lived, if Rosa asked.