The End of Me

by John Gould

“It’s fine, Mum.”

  This is a worry for me, a trivial enough one that I can say it out loud. Joni’s got a lovely voice, but what she does for the band is a sort of guttural roar. She has to sound like that or the band won’t be taken seriously as death metal — it’s incredible how fussy and elitist some of these little drips can be. My brother used to be able to say “cruisin’ for a bruisin’ ” with one burp, and that’s kind of what this is, belching more than singing. What will it do to her vocal chords?

  She can see I’m still unsure. “Really, my voice is fine,” she says, and impromptu she gives me the first few bars of “Blue,” my favourite Joni Mitchell song.

  It’s beautiful. It’s so beautiful I could burst, I could die, but I don’t. I don’t even cry. “Pretty Dead?” I say.

  “What?”

  “For your band name. You’re all pretty, so Pretty Dead?”

  “Colleen’s not pretty.”

  “Oh. I suppose not. Okay, but you’re all good kids. Good and Dead?”

  “Meh.”

  “Or hey, how about just Dead Girls? Keep it simple. An allgirl death metal band — Dead Girls.”

  Joni gets a look. “Mum, nice one. Dead Girls. Dead Girls. Dead Girls.”

  And then I do start to cry, and I have to come up with a reason. “Your grandma,” I say. “She’d have been so proud.” My mum died a year ago, in gentler times, back when Joni was still into plain old thrash metal, and had one steady boyfriend and maybe three piercings in her face. Mum might have called it “a mercy,” a favourite expression of hers. As in, it’s a mercy you’re burping instead of singing so people can’t make out what you want to say to them.

  Joni stretches out and gives me a little shove with her bare foot, an act of great intimacy for her these days. “I miss her,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  “Do you think she’s …?”

  “Do I think she’s what, honey? Still around in some way?”

  “Still mad at me.”

  “Mad? Why on earth?”

  Joni shrugs. “Just everything. We need a band photo too, for the gig. Can I borrow your big camera?”

  “Sure. But —”

  “Or would you maybe even shoot it for us?”

  “Joni. I’d love to.”

  She halfway smiles. “We’re gonna do it on the church steps.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “And we’ll have, like, crowns of thorns. Except barbed wire. Viv’s making them.”

  “Right.”

  “And we’ll be dry-humping our instruments.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She peers at me again, still not convinced. “You’re okay with all this?”

  “Of course, honey. Absolutely.”

  Faithful

  The last time I ever saw him, my dad made a confession to me. He’d just had his bath, and was sitting on the edge of the tub while I patted him dry. It was an intricate business — he’d lost almost half his weight over the last couple of years, so that his skin was now rumpled up like a hairless cat’s.

  “Ouch,” he said, though I couldn’t possibly have hurt him. “There’s something I need to say to you.”

  “That’s okay, Dad. Let’s just get you into your jammies.”

  “I’m not … I haven’t always been a good man,” he said.

  “Me neither. Other leg.” I was speaking to him the way Tanya would have been doing if it weren’t her Friday night off. Tender but taking no guff. Not us at all.

  “A faithful man,” Dad went on. He took his big bald head in his hands and gave it a squeeze, a gesture he’d recently improvised. “I wasn’t always … I failed to be faithful.” His eyes went wide at this turn of phrase. “I failed to be faithful, Son. To your mother.”

  I gripped him under the arms, hoisted him to his feet. My bad shoulder gave me an irritable ping. No, it was my good shoulder. Bloody hell. “Ups-a-daisy,” I said. I steadied him, knelt to pull up his bottoms.

  “Her name was … her name was Lorna.” He choked off a little gasp of grief.

  “That’s okay, Dad.” I pulled his drawstring tight around his waist — everything was giant on him now, even the nearly-new stuff — and tied it in a bow. “It’s all okay. Arm.”

  He stuck it out and stared at it mistrustfully. “She got pregnant. Lorna. A little girl. You …” He paused, working it out. “You have a sister. You have a half sister. You’ve never met her. I’ve never met her.”

  “Dad —”

  “A woman by now.”

  This was new, the sister. Most times Dad made his confession, Lorna — she was sometimes Linda — terminated the pregnancy. If she gave birth, the baby never made it.

  There were other differences too. There were always new developments when Dad revisited his tale — willful fudgings, no doubt, in concert with a faulty memory — but on this occasion they were particularly dramatic. In most versions the affair lasted months, for instance, but in this one it was years. In most versions Dad and the woman agreed to end it, but in this one he broke things off himself. And then the kicker.

  “It was you,” he said.

  “What? Pardon?” I’d given up trying to get him into his bathrobe, and simply maneuvered him over to his recliner. If he got cold I could always crank up the heat. It was time for his nightly read. Of late Dad had reverted to kids’ books, not books from his own childhood but from mine — the books he’d read to me, or might conceivably have read if he hadn’t been out on the road most of the time, providing. Mum had given the books their own shelf in the living room when I moved out, and after she died, many years later, Dad took an interest in them. He wasn’t capable of keeping track of a story any longer, but he seemed to enjoy the sentences, the shape of certain scenes. We’d been through The Hobbit, a whole stack of The Hardy Boys. His eyes were poor, so it was Tanya or I who did the reading, perched on a little stool next to his big chair. Dad and I were on the Narnia series now, near the end of book three, where the lamb turns into a lion and tells the brother and sister to return to their own world and search for him there. The lion stood for Jesus, as Dad had taken to reminding me. Tanya’s influence. I kept meaning to speak to her about it.

  “It was because of you,” said Dad. “That’s why I didn’t leave. For Lorna. She wanted … But you.”

  This was the most distressing new twist to Dad’s story, distressing in part because it demonstrated how resolutely blind I’d been of late. Dad might actually have bailed on us, walked out on Mum and me back when I was a boy. How had I failed to acknowledge this? Dad had been breaking the news of his infidelity to me every week for the last few months, yet it had never dawned on me that our family had been in danger. I’d somehow assumed that his regret, the regret he expressed each and every time he tore the tale out of himself, was for having strayed. Now it struck me — it was mostly my dark mood, I think — that what he really regretted was sticking around.

  I opened our book — The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, a too-lovely title — and closed it again. “Was that a mistake?” I said. “Letting her go?”

  Dad stared at me, startled.

  “And why are you telling me this now?” Another question that suddenly felt urgent. Why had it not felt that way before? The first night Dad confessed to me I’d been shocked stupid, and I guess I’d never quite snapped out of it. What he most wanted me to believe on that occasion was that my mother never knew. And I did believe it. Mum had become touchingly frank near the end of her life, and wouldn’t have kept such a traumatic bit of history to herself. As far as I could recall there’d been no particular Lorna or Linda in their lives. Dad’s mistress would have been somebody he ran into on his sales circuit, a ladies’-wear buyer or shop girl looking to be bamboozled by a big galoot from elsewhere.

  I didn’t challenge Dad that first night, press him with any questions. My goal was to reassure him, keep him calm, and I stuck to that approach with each repetition of the scene. The prospect of Dad getting hysterical was more g
hastly than anything I could imagine him dredging up from the past.

  “The lion is Jesus,” Dad said. He’d worked his way forward on his recliner, and was pointing at the illustration on the cover of the book in my lap.

  “Yes, Dad, I know.” How was it possible he remembered this, and not the name of my ex-wife, or, many days, the name of my son, his own grandson? How was it possible he remembered he had something to confess and not that he’d already confessed it?

  I fished out my reading glasses, turned to our page. “Maybe you should have gone, Dad. Maybe you’d have been happier with her.” I was finally accepting that I could say anything to him. He’d almost certainly forget it. What I forgot was that I wouldn’t. “We can say whatever we like to one another, right? Make up stories? Make them up again next time? Lulu and I are getting back together, Dad. Lulu, my wife?”

  “Lulu,” he said, nodding gamely. “Wonderful.”

  “And Caleb’s back in school.”

  “How about that.”

  “Caleb? My son?”

  “Of course.” Some conviction here.

  “What was your daughter’s name, Dad? Did you give her one? Did Lorna? Maybe we could look her up.”

  It went on like this for a while, me spewing all sorts of bitter nonsense, Dad doing his best to make it a conversation. Eventually I just ran out of material to riff on, and took up the book again. We were almost finished. The children returned to their world through a door in the sky, left and stayed gone.

  Wayner110

  For his profile on UniT, Wayne had put “long walks in the woods,” more beguiling he figured than “binge drinking” or “crying jags.” So here he was in his brand new hiking boots, which he’d vigorously defiled in the muddy lane around back of his apartment building, pretending at first and then actually being a little blissed out by all the nature. There were leaves through which a warmish wind blew, and amongst which birds hopped and twittered. And there was Lara72 (he was sticking with her online name, though she didn’t seem to find this quite as charmingly nutty as he’d hoped she might), a bit of wildlife too he supposed, in her leggings and almost peasant blouse. Everything she wore was some shade of purple, which presumably said something about her, but what? Holly had been more golds and browns, but Holly (and her new guy Hank) was exactly what not to think about right now.

  “The store’s just my day job,” Lara72 was saying. “I teach yoga out of my house. That’s what I really love.” She was precisely the right amount of pretty, from Wayne’s point of view, and she was maybe good or something. Warm in a deeply unselfconscious way. The yoga thing was intriguing, but scary. Wouldn’t she expect him, too, to be peaceful and fit? This was his first date in however long. His plan had been not to care, but he did. He already did.

  “Yoga, eh?” he said. He sought to strike a pose he’d seen on a yoga poster — they were everywhere these days — in which you went into a deep knee bend with your legs out wide and raised your hands as though to surrender. But the position was impossible to hold, plus it put him in mind of those Maori man-dances you saw in anything about New Zealand. Going with it, he set about stamping his feet and slapping his body, also managing the grunts and the big eyes and the lizardy tongue. He kept at this until Lara72 gave him a hesitant half-laugh, the kind of laugh you bestow on an offensive joke told by somebody of whom you want to keep thinking well.

  “No, just kidding,” he said. “Yeah, yoga.” He nodded as though to acknowledge an insight at which they’d arrived after much mutual soul-searching.

  Lara72 led the way on down the cedar-chipped path. “What about you, Wayne? What do you …?”

  Indeed, thought Wayne. What do I? “Oh, a little of this and a little … Actually, I’m learning to cook.”

  Until this moment, Wayne had thought of his new hobby as a capitulation — to singleness, to the need to be, probably forever, self-sufficient. With Holly he’d been the attentive helper. He’d chopped, stirred, scrubbed, but he’d never taken the lead. It was only because he was alone now that he’d consented to learn a little. Was there a chance, though, that he’d inadvertently made himself interesting?

  Lara72 wasn’t looking bored, exactly, so he plowed on. “It’s like some kind of, I don’t know, alchemy?” he said. “You put these different ingredients together, and …” He did a thing with his hands meant to evoke a merging and transcendence.

  “Like yoga!” said Lara72. “Which means yoke, the word yoga. So union.” She gestured at the world around her, the chaotic woods and also an elderly couple striding past with those ski poles serious walkers were suddenly using. “Body and mind but also, you know, yourself and everything else.”

  “Exactly,” said Wayne.

  Lara72 reached out and plucked a leaf from his hair — a few trees were already autumn-red and shedding. Wayne startled, but recovered with a self-deprecating smirk.

  “What’s your specialty?” she said.

  “Oh, I don’t know.” Mango margaritas? “My parmesan sage pork chops usually turn out okay.”

  “Yum,” said Lara72. “You’re making me hungry.”

  A minor miracle, this. She did yoga. Shouldn’t she be vegetarian? Vegan? “I’m going to learn how to forage, too,” said Wayne. He peered about. “None of this looks like food, right? But I mean, people have lived here for thousands of years. It’s probably all food.”

  Perhaps because this was his last thought before the raccoon appeared, Wayne first saw it as quarry. If he’d had a spear he would have slung it. Almost immediately, though, it became clear that the raccoon had already been wounded in some way. Half its body, the right half, was malfunctioning, so that as it ran it skidded along the ground in a clockwise arc. It crossed the path and crashed into the woods, reappearing another twenty feet on. It completed this circle twice more before either of them spoke.

  “A car,” said Lara72.

  Indeed, Wayne was aware now that he’d been hearing traffic all along. They hadn’t left civilization so far behind after all. “Crud,” he said.

  “Poor thing.”

  Well, he’d have to kill it. You couldn’t let a fellow sentient being suffer, not on a first date. And if there was killing to be done, surely that duty fell to the man. There was no way to be certain he’d be doing the creature a favour — running around in painful circles might turn out to be far better than being dead — but you couldn’t risk saying that. What if there’s a hell? What if the Babylonians were right, or maybe it was the Mesopotamians, what if we’re all going to spend the rest of forever in the dark eating dust? Not a suave rejoinder, no. There were so many things you were better off keeping to yourself.

  Wayne stooped and picked up a rock from the edge of the path. It was the size and shape of a squished cantaloupe. He trod gingerly forward so’s to be in a position to intercept the raccoon, aware that Lara72 was treading with him. Without looking at her, he said, “How do we decide?”

  “I’m not sure,” she said. “Maybe we don’t.”

  Wayne nodded knowingly. “Wait, what do you mean?”

  “Well, maybe we don’t decide. Maybe it’s all decided for us.”

  “I see.” The raccoon was coming around again, thrashing through the bushes towards them. If something other than Wayne was going to make this decision, it’d better make it soon. The raccoon emerged, and Wayne raised his rock. Before he could even think about bringing it down, though, the creature had scooted past them and back into the woods. Even on two legs it was wicked fast.

  “Holy shit,” said Lara72, quite sublimely.

  Next time he’d be ready. Rock aloft, Wayne called to mind what his Little League coach had taught him, or tried to. You couldn’t wait for a good pitch and then swing, you had to start swinging and stop if it was a bad pitch. You had to be in motion already.

  The rock was on its way down as the raccoon broke through the underbrush again. One of Wayne’s problems as a Little Leaguer had been that he tended to close his eyes at the start of his s
wing, and this is what he did now. His follow-through was good, though — the rock hit the ground with a solid thud. The ground, and a little bit of his foot.

  “Oh my fucking God!” he shouted. He wanted to collapse, but willed himself to stay upright.

  “Yes!” shouted Lara72. She had her hands clasped together, and was gazing rapturously down the path after the raccoon. It was at a full gallop, all four legs going hard. It didn’t slow as it crested and disappeared over the next hill.

  “Huh,” said Wayne, fighting the urge to sob.

  Lara72 sighed. “See? Everything happens just the way it’s meant to.”

  Wayne made do with bending over in agony — perhaps it would look like some sort of ecstatic fit. Walking wouldn’t be easy in the near future — it seemed likely he’d never walk right again — but Lara72 was oblivious to his blunder, and he aimed to keep it that way for as long as possible.

  “Wayne?” she said.

  “Yes, exactly,” he said, shoving himself upright. Sure, there were silly, smug ideas in this world — meant to happen? and you’d know that how? — but what if you just went along with them? What if you pretended to believe? What if you actually did believe? Might you end up with a woman as fine as this one?

  Wayne took a deep breath — a brief numbness in his foot was giving way, once again, to excruciating pain. “Everything,” he said, “is perfect.”

  Elephant

  It’s weird how even if you have no choice about something, you still want to choose. Like for instance it’s not up to me if I get born as a girl or a boy next time, but I’m still going to hope for one or the other. But which?

  Last time I was a girl and it didn’t last long, not nearly long enough. My mother wouldn’t nurse me, hardly even peeped at me before she handed me over to the woman next door. The oleander flower is pretty, but its juice tastes like … like what? I can’t even say because it’s the only thing I ever had in my mouth, except for the bit of water the woman used to wash it down. Like hard with sharp in it. Like cold with loud in it. Like a mother’s milk must be, but the exact opposite of that. My heart bumped inside of me, fast and then slow, slow. Strange to have it inside when all those months it had been outside, my mother’s heart, thwushhh, thwushhh, everywhere always.