The Dead Husband Project
Page 18
The voice was whispering again. “Laughing. At us. And you can bet your last ounce of gold that they’ll be laughing harder as they watch us try to peeeeeeel our flabby bodies off the couch when it comes time to fight back.”
Pause.
“To fight the New World Order.”
Pause.
“If, that is, we ever open our eyes to what is happening. To what—really—is happening.”
Longer pause.
“I’m Moonman and this is The Age on the Striker Radio Network.”
I burrowed deeper to where it was hardest to breathe and decided that when Moonman came back from commercial, I’d focus on the silence between his words. It wasn’t hard to do. I knew if I listened hard enough, that I could hear my mother in that silence, that I could hear her breathing. She was always there in the soundlessness. Quiet on the board signalling to Moonman to break, quiet in the kitchen packing our lunches for school, quiet with Alice asleep in her arms through the crack of the bedroom door.
I tuned in to Moonman under my blankets every night she was gone. I listened to him talk about the Illuminati, about life in other galaxies, about Area 51 and what really happened to JFK. I learned about the symbols of the New World Order, the secret histories of world leaders and the imminent End of the World As We Know It. Moonman knew more than anyone I’d ever met, and every night I felt like he was sharing secrets of the universe with me alone.
If I wanted to, I could blame him for what happened. I could say that he planted seeds of curiosity about the world at night, that he inspired me to explore the dark, that listening to him made me feel intelligent and brave and old enough to creep down the stairs past sleeping Aunt Audrey, into the garage and out onto the street with my bicycle.
But, really, I think it was rage that sparked it. Rage or insomnia or just the plain white terror of being left alone in the dark. Or some of all three.
I rode off into the starless city night, pedalling hard and fast, cutting through streets and laneways toward the main road. Darkness rustled the leaves high overhead and I was breathless with adrenaline and the metallic taste of the night air that in no way resembled that of the day. I knew where my dad was. He’d pointed it out to me one afternoon when he picked me up from school—the pub where he played his music.
I had to blink against the bright street lights when I turned onto the main road, standing up as I pedalled along the wide sidewalk, zipping past people out for a nighttime stroll or huddled in dark doorways smoking cigarettes.
“Hey—kid!” someone yelled. “Little late for a bike ride!”
I slowed down and rode close to the storefronts as I approached the pub, slipping into the shadows of the awnings that lined the way. I heard music. A man’s voice singing something familiar. Chris Coates tonight 9 p.m., written in pink chalk on a sandwich board outside. I hopped off my bike and leaned it against the window of the shop next door. When I was sure no one had seen me, I crouched down beside the planter box in front of the pub and peeked into the window.
He was right there, sitting on a stool with his back to the street. His feet were perched on the lowest rung, his heels bouncing up and down, keeping time. A column of sweat soaked through his shirt along his spine. On the small stage floor beside him was a bottle of red wine and a half-empty glass, and everything was hued pink and green by the lights cast from the ceiling above. My father strummed his guitar while he sang hard and loud into the microphone. Even through the glass I could hear that his guitar sounded more alive and desperate than it ever had in our living room.
I looked past him into the pub where candles pocked the dark like grimy stars. A group of college kids were making their way to the pool table at the back, the girls stirring candy-coloured drinks with tiny straws. Two men in plaid shirts drank beer and ate nuts at the bar while they watched hockey on televisions hung from the ceiling, and three young women sipped white wine and looked around the room without talking to each other. One couple sat facing my dad, a blond woman leaning back into the man she was with, a number of shot glasses and beer bottles on the table beside them. The man seemed to be having a hard time keeping his head from bobbing around. The woman was staring at my father. When the man said something in her ear, she swatted at his face with long fingers and didn’t take her eyes off the stage. I looked around for others listening the same way, but outside of a few people nodding to the music now and then, no one else seemed to be paying much attention.
When he stopped playing, the blond woman was the first to clap. She sat up straight and pressed her elbows against either side of her chest. A few others turned to applaud as well, but none as vigorously as she did. I heard my dad say something about taking a break and I dropped down as he slid off his stool.
I looked one last time and saw him standing in front of the stage, pouring more wine into his glass. He was talking to the woman. She smiled with big white teeth and tossed her blond hair when she laughed. The man she’d been sitting with had fallen asleep with his chin on his chest and was being nudged, hard, by a chubby waitress as she cleared their empty bottles into a black dish tub. Dad walked to the bar, the woman chatting close beside him. He smiled at her in a way that was moist and young, a smile that bared too many teeth and a hunger I couldn’t recognize.
I rode home. Fast. The wind felt colder, harsher, like it was scratching at my throat with sharp fingernails. I was suddenly very tired and I wanted my bed. My radio, my blankets. My mother’s inaudible breaths in Moonman’s pauses. I stood on my pedals and pumped hard, turning from one street to the next in wide arcs. A block from my house, I took a corner too quickly.
I remember headlights.
—
Nauseous in the aluminum lighting.
Thick throbbing in my ears.
Mom and Dad shadows cut out against a white ceiling. Alice’s singsong voice at the end of a long, warbling tunnel.
Can’t talk. Can’t move.
Nurses checking tubes and dials, stroking my forehead, looking down from far up, into my eyes. A dull faraway inescapable pain.
Dad somewhere in the room with his guitar once. Or always.
Mom hovering in the quiet spaces between.
—
I left the hospital near the end of autumn. The surgeon came down to see me on my last day. He tousled my hair and told me to buy a lottery ticket on the way home. When my mother wheeled me through the front door I knew right away that our house was not the same: a new emptiness in the hallway, the coat rack gone, the spider plant no longer trickling its spindly leaves from a stand by the stairs. I was lifted (“Careful! Careful, everyone, the scar on his back still hasn’t healed…”) to a hospital bed wrapped in Star Wars sheets in the middle of the living room. The television that had been on a console against the opposite wall was now on a chair by my bed between stacks of comic books and bouquets of helium balloons. The couches and armchairs had been pushed to the dining room, the table itself nowhere to be seen. New drapes had been hung on the big window overlooking the porch and the street, silky sheaths that let the sunlight in while hiding me from curious neighbours; my experience of the outside world, in turn, reduced to dreamy, shimmery snatches of ordinary life.
There were pictures missing from the hallway. For days I stared at an edge of wallpaper that was lifting near the railing, trying to remember which one had been there.
A steady stream of assistants paraded through the door, nurses and therapists checking scars, lifting arms, bending legs, taking measurements. (“He’s progressing well, Mrs. Coates. Kids have a tendency to bounce back.”) I asked for a radio. Mom was always home now, but on wide-awake nights, when everyone was sleeping, I still listened to Moonman in the dark.
Since he was usually swept up in the current of nurses and therapists and caregivers, it took a while before I realized that my father didn’t live with us anymore. Huddled under a blanket on the porch one afternoon, still feeling achy and watery from an infection, I watched my parents talking by my
dad’s parked car across the road. Mom crossed her arms over her chest and looked past him far down the street. He fiddled with the keys in his fingers. She said something and nodded a few times before heading back up to the house.
He opened the car door and was about to get in when he looked up at me. I pretended I couldn’t see him. Drugged, groggy, it wasn’t hard to stare out at nothing. My mother came up the steps and with the back of her soft hand touched my forehead, then my cheek, and kissed me before going inside, the door banging shut behind her.
“See ya in a bit, soldier,” my father called out.
“Oh,” I said, acting like I had just realized he was there. I lifted my arm, held up my hand. “Okay.”
He slid into the driver’s seat and unrolled his window. The radio blared. He flicked it off and lit a cigarette. For a moment he sat there and then drove off with his hand out to catch the wind.
—
My mother married Stephen when I was fourteen. Their ceremony quiet, silvery, cozy with night. He was a gentle but faraway man, a serious look in his pale eyes behind the small round glasses that he was always adjusting. His long, thin hair was tied in a ponytail that curled down his back, grey wisps framing his bony equine face. When he moved in, he brought heavy boxes filled with books, two lamps, a pair of jeans and three black T-shirts. He bought a globe at a garage sale to show me how countries were drawn in the decades before the First World War. He touched my mother whenever he could.
One evening on the porch when he was writing notes, I asked him if what he talked about on the radio was true. Without looking up, he said he didn’t know what truth meant anymore. I liked when he responded that way.
“I mean, are those things really happening?” I asked.
“Some of them already have,” he said, consulting one of the open books on the table beside him.
“But I mean, the really bad things, like the end-of-the-world kind of stuff.”
“It’s cyclical, Simon,” he said. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. His voice bent in the direction of his on-air delivery. “And it’s relative. There’s a rhythm and a plan. Most is beyond our control.”
“But I mean—”
“Simon,” he said, looking straight at me. “Are you asking if I believe there will be change, even significant change, in our lifetime?” He held his breath and held my gaze as though expecting some deeper understanding to reveal itself in my eyes, some realization I would come to that would prevent him from having to say what he really thought. But I was long accustomed to his pauses by then and thrilled to be his private audience for what felt like a particularly omniscient insight. I leaned toward him, blinking.
After a moment, he released a lungful of sour air.
“Yes,” he said, returning to his books and jotting down a note. “I do.”
—
You call and tell me how you remember the salespeople and middle managers and secretaries and vice-vice-presidents chatting about weekend plans as they descended the windowless concrete silos of office building stairwells, cell phones in leather holsters, name tags swinging from lanyards around their necks. All the sheep, you say, but not without pity. You gave them a quick smile of reassurance because that’s all you could do as you and everyone else poured out onto the sidewalk. The grid of city streets locked with idling cars, drivers leaning out of their windows, squinting at the horizon, nearly decapitated by bicyclists whizzing past. Everyone with phones to their ears, looking east, then south, then west, then north, then at the useless phone in their hand as one network went down, then the next, then the next, and then all we had left were the people in front of us, people slowly being covered in ash and soot that fell from the sky like black snow.
It was so much like how Moonman said it would be. He’d warned us. He hoped that we’d fight back in time enough to prevent it from happening, that we’d Wake Up and See Through the Lies, the attempts to tranquillize us. But his was only a voice in the night. And half the time, when you were tuned in, listening under the covers, it was impossible to tell if you weren’t just dreaming.
—
On spring and summer weekends, Stephen rose early and drew a map of the garage sales in the neighbourhood that had been advertised on handmade signs taped to lampposts, charting the most efficient course from one to the next and home again. He rarely returned with anything. He said to me once that buried treasure was hard to find.
On winter weekends, he sat in the worn wingback chair that he had dragged to the living room window, flicking the newspaper from page to page, raging under his breath at our collective blindness in the hazy, dusty light.
Now he’s on an island with my mother. I think. I like to think. Somewhere where an evening sun glistens orange and gold off the sea as they sit watching it on a mat she wove from palms, her head on his shoulder. Alice in a tree house nearby yelling “Big money! Big money!” at an old TV set that washed up to shore.
My father went back to the car dealership to pay for my treatment that the government wouldn’t cover, and moved into an apartment above a drugstore nearby. He set up a bench press by the living room couch, his guitar in its case in the bedroom corner where it remained partially hidden by an Ikea wardrobe. When I went to visit him, he’d chain my wheelchair to the bike post out front and carry me up the two long flights to his door, holding my chest close to his. He took each step slowly. We didn’t speak as he ascended, so the journey felt long. I once broke the quiet by telling him that he didn’t have to be so careful, that I wasn’t made of glass, but he still went slow. Another time, during my grade twelve exams, I was exhausted and let my head drop on his shoulder, nearly drifting off as we went up and up and up. I heard his heart beating faster, and sounds of broken breathing. When he sat me down on the plaid chair, he said he was going to order a deluxe pizza and went over to the phone on the wall with tears in his eyes.
I’d like to think he’s on an island somewhere too, playing Bowie songs to a ragtag commune of tanned and shaggy octogenarians who listen and bob their heads as they sip hooch out of coconuts. But I can’t picture it, as much as I want to. He was the first person I thought about when the ash clouds rolled over, but I’m still not sure if it was because I wanted him to save me or if it was the other way around.
—
My producer, Cal, says the lines are already lit up. He says we’re on in two. I glance up at the old digital clock counting down on the wall of the studio, then return to highlighting my notes and stacking them in three piles. Hour one, hour two, hour three. All twelve lines on the phone are blinking in front of me.
Cal stands at the control board with his left hand on the fader, the fingers of his right hand counting down in silence.
Five. Four. Three.
Two.
One.
My theme song comes up. It’s a song my father wrote a long time ago. It’s not even that good, but it’s been shared millions of times since I started playing it off the top of the show. I let it play for a while, then click on my mic.
“It’s Wednesday,” I say, pausing as the music comes up again. “We’re all still here,” I say. “For now.”
You tune in from all over to find out how to survive. You think I’ve got the answer. You say I’m the only voice you can really trust now, and you whisper it over the line as if I’m the only one who can hear you, as if the quiet dark around you isn’t rustling with perked-up ears. You think I’m genetically predisposed to outlive everything so you buy my duplicate genes by the ounce and inject them into your veins, not even waiting for the zone nurse to come around and help. You press your radio to your ear to hear what I will say next and panic when the signal is lost. You know but do not care that as we rebuild our cities, our countries, our continent, I’ve built an empire on you.
You do not know that when the sky went black I went nowhere. That the elevators stopped working and I watched everyone cluster to the windows then file toward the stairs, looking at me sympathetically as they pas
sed. Someone will be up soon, they said, squeezing my shoulder. You do not know that I was alone in the dark when my phone rang and it was my mother telling me in a low, quavering voice to go into the washroom and lock the door. She said she had Alice. She said don’t worry, just go. Then the network went down and that was that.
I don’t tell you that I didn’t make it out that day. I don’t say that I rolled my chair into the washroom and breathed in recycled air and drank toilet water in the blackness, the blankness, of the days or weeks that followed. I don’t tell you that I was rescued by a man in a makeshift haz-mat suit who was pulling the building apart for wires and copper and wood. I don’t tell you that I was nearly dead. You don’t even know that I can’t walk. That is no way for a hero to be.
I’ve told you elaborately concocted tales that even I believe half the time. I run through them again in my mind before I say, “Let’s go to the phones.”
Cal says, “Chris is on line one.”
“Chris,” I say, “welcome to The Seed.”
“Simon,” he says.
I don’t say anything. No one knows my real name.
“Simon,” he says. “It’s me.”
My finger hovers over the drop button on the phone. I push it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you to Kiara Kent, whose passion for the collection and preternatural gifts as an editor lifted each of these stories (and me) to a higher place. To Melanie Tutino and Shaun Oakey for their hawk eyes and surgical red pens, and to Martha Kanya-Forstner, Amy Black and Kristin Cochrane for their enthusiasm from the start.
To my agent Martha Webb for her years of patience and support as progress on this book was stalled by day-job demands and the birth of children. To said children for inspiration that far outmeasures the interruption. To Mary Sirk, Harlene Jeffrey, and Mike and Kelly Meehan, who care for said children (and me) so I can do this. To Mike Jr and Emily Meehan for the encouragement. To Jillian Thorp Shepherd, Stephanie Matteis, Tara Marshall and Raizel Robin for their honest reads on this and everything else. To the lingering influence of John Vervaeke, Asli Gocer and Beth Kaplan, and to writer RS Croft whose stories about being a dancer stuck to the bones and partially inspired “Dreams”. To Dave Richards for his mentorship, and for championing my work along the way.