by John Gould
Mel sighs, slumps back.
Ed steers hard into another curve, lets the last of the sun come at him. “For a little while, you can do that.”
Frantic
My ex-boyfriend’s favourite book was Dead Souls. Sounds dead serious, but I’ve read it and it’s actually funnier than you think, kind of like him, like Mike. This guy’s going around Russia buying up dead souls, meaning dead serfs who still exist on paper. It’s eighteen something-or-other. I already forget what he plans to do with them, but it’s hilarious and also smart because he’s dead too, the guy is, like living dead, corrupt and empty and everything. I wish I’d read it last year, when I was still going out with Mike. It might have helped.
At first you thought Mike was serious, then you realized he was funny, then you realized he was serious. What got him about Gogol, the guy who wrote Dead Souls (I used to say it google, just to bug Mike, but it’s actually goggle), was he wanted to be taken seriously, but everybody just thought he was funny. He had these big religious ideas about his book, even though it was a riot. So he started writing a part two, where the soul-buying-up guy gets enlightened. He gets a soul, basically, but Gogol had a hard time with it, part of which was that he realized he had to get himself a soul first, so he started to pray and not eat, which kind of messed with his writing. Plus he had this priest telling him his stuff was satanic, which didn’t help either. Eventually Gogol burned part two, so he wouldn’t go to hell, and starved himself to death.
Reading it probably wouldn’t have helped, but who knows. I’d still have had to break up with Mike, but he might have thought better of me afterwards. I might have thought better of myself. How can you not read the favourite book of somebody you’re so into? How spineless do you have to be? Mike didn’t read my favourite book either (I never told him my favourite book, I was too embarrassed), but he watched my favourite movie, and listened to my favourite band. He told me the lead singer of Formerly Known As Formerly Known As Frantic was gay, which maybe should have been a clue. Mike was always telling you who was gay, politicians and profs and everything (he was already in first year, which was part of the turn-on for miss goody-two-shoes here). Mike’s theory was that Gogol was gay, that was the real reason he starved himself. So then Mike started starving himself too, which suited him, those cheekbones. Dead smart, and dead beautiful. Which makes you think, what was he doing with me in the first place? And who really broke up with who? When you keep catching your boyfriend staring at your Frantic poster, and everybody in Frantic’s a guy, are you really the one who called it off?
Also, where’s Gogol now? Can you save yourself by killing yourself? Mike didn’t think so, so he stopped not eating and let himself fall in love with one of his profs. That didn’t work (Mike isn’t all that good at knowing who’s gay, it turns out), but it got him going. Whereas I’m in first year now, and I’m totally stuck. I have no issue, no problem. I’m not gay or anorexic or anything, I’m just alone, and that’s a lame reason for feeling like this. I’ve cut myself a few times, but who hasn’t? I started to carve “Mike” into my arm one time, but I only got as far as “M.” I’ve been trying to think, what else does that stand for? What else could I say?
Canoe Lake
Sal says I was dead for a bit there — I passed out in the men’s room at Panic, end of a decent night of partying, and she had to come get me — but she’s wrong. I know she’s wrong because what I had wasn’t a near-death experience. I didn’t feel peace and contentment. I didn’t hear a whooshing sound. I didn’t enter a dark tunnel, and I didn’t look back down on my body as it went cold. Nana wasn’t there to greet me, and neither was Weeze and neither was Spongebill, neither were any of the people I’ve known well enough to be messed up now that they’re gone. My past didn’t flash in front of me like the trailer for some sorry-assed film, thank Christ.
Pretty much the only thing that fit was the Being of Light, and even that, she wasn’t light so much as pale, the goth sort of pale that’s sexy on a certain kind of woman. But on Ms. Wadzinski from elementary school? And it wasn’t love and acceptance coming off her, at least not at first. Disappointment? Something like that but stronger, stranger.
I was supposed to do Tom Thomson — this is in real life, this is what happened to me back in grade six — his art and also his thing with the Group of Seven and the mystery of his death by drowning in Algonquin Park. Was there foul play involved? What were his artistic influences? All that.
So I did him, but half-assed. Wad was counting on me, and I let her down. I had like one piece of Bristol board with a copy of a painting in the middle, a rocky point with a pine tree crippled over in the wind. I had a photograph of Tom Thomson and his canoe, and a map with an X marking the spot on Canoe Lake where his body was found corking around with a ding in the skull, and a couple of paragraphs of bio copied onto a sheet of foolscap. “Accident? Murder? Suicide? We may never know.” Pathetic. The kind of thing Cody Scott might have handed in, but from Cody it would have been okay because that’s what he was capable of. Wad knew that, so she wouldn’t have been sad, whereas when I handed in my effort I honestly thought she was going to cry. One crappy project and I broke her heart.
So there she was in my vision or whatever — this is last Friday when I passed out at Panic and didn’t die — pale and pretty and for some reason sitting on the high windowsill in the boys’ room down in the basement of the old school, which is gone now, in real life, just an empty lot. Sun was coming from behind her so I suppose you could see that as angelic, but the setting pushed it the other way, the pee-stink from the trough mixed with the bleachy smell of the janitor’s mop. Juvenile hell.
Wad was still grieving, there in my head. She was dead and everything (she died for real when I was in high school, which freaked us out because she was so young and almost hot), but what was still destroying her after twenty years was my Tom Thomson project. “How could you refuse that opportunity?” she wanted to know. “Tom Thomson, and you with such an eye for colour. You really were good, you know.”
“Me?” I said. “Good?”
She ran a hand through her hair, which was seaweed. “It would be one thing if I’d assigned you the parliamentary system, or the water cycle, or even beavers. But Tom Thomson? Why would you settle for such a perfunctory job?”
You could take that as a sign, I suppose. Perfunctory is a word I know, but just barely, and I could go a billion years without using it. So maybe it really was Wad talking, and not just my fainted-guy fantasy of her. Maybe she really came to me.
I had no answer to the perfunctory thing, the question of why I’d failed her, so she moved on. She talked about Tom Thomson’s crazy way of seeing the world and what might have granted him that vision. “He must have been on something, I suppose,” she said. “No way a person could just be inspired, right? Bud, do you figure? Shrooms? Goofballs? Special K?”
“Lay off,” I said. She was trying to make me feel like garbage, and it was working.
“Oxy? Mesc? Horse? Rock? Robo?”
“Robo?” I said. “You’ve got me chugging cough medicine? That’s your opinion of me? I’ve never done that, I’ve never done most of that crap.” Which was true, as long as you took “never” to mean “not for a while.”
Wad grimaced, the way she’d grimace at Cody or some kid like that before she handed out a detention. “Xylophone,” she said.
“Z-y —”
“Incorrect.”
“I was messing with you. X-y.”
Wad exhaled. “Was his painting musical, would you say? Tom Thomson’s? He came from a family of musicians.”
Which is another weird one, because there actually were musicians in Tom Thomson’s family, but I didn’t know that till I looked it up after the night at Panic. So maybe that’s another sign that she really was a spirit or whatever, not just a blip in my head. Or maybe it was just a fluke, a detail my imagination made up that happened to be true. How would you know? How would you ever know anything?
“I find Tom Thomson’s paintings intensely musical,” I said. “Rhythmic. Harmonic.”
Wad shook her head, unconvinced. She invited me to look at the pine tree painting again — she’d somehow got my Bristol board with her up on the bathroom’s windowsill by this time. “Look carefully,” she said, and I did. There was something about it, no question. “Are you in this painting?” she said. “Are you the wavy lake? Are you the rocky point? Are you the bendy tree?”
“I’m all of them,” I said, just a wild guess, and she laughed as though we both knew this couldn’t be true. She was busty just like I remember her, and wearing one of those tight sweaters, and after a while two circles of wet formed around her nipples, pasties of milk. If I told this part to Sal she’d say it was a rebirth symbol and it proved I was dead, so I’m not going to tell her. She keeps looking at me to see how I’m different since that day, and I’d like her to stop.
Wad kept on laughing even though I wasn’t saying anything else funny. Her laugh started out cool but got warmer and warmer till it really did start to feel like love or something, and at a certain point it turned into my name. Then Sal was bending over me, there in the bathroom at Panic, not shaking me but calling my name right into my face. Her breath was like cloves, or at least I think that’s what cloves smell like, and I had a hard-on which I hadn’t had for a long time.
The thing is, I’d popped maybe forty mill of oxy that night with a couple of beers. Does Sal really think that would kill me? I could have had that tonight and no one would know. Actually, I have had that tonight. Also, if I was the one dying and Wad was there waiting for me, shouldn’t it have been me asking the questions? Like what do you mean musical? What do you mean good?
Shrub
Most times, when Ron’s father was about to die, Ron and Cate would both go. They’d take sick days, throw a couple of bags in the old Subaru and embark on the five-hour ferry-and-highway trip to Ron’s home town. There, by the metal-barred bed at Arbutus Manor, they’d commence their vigil. Within hours, a day or two at most, Ron’s father would rally. His vital signs would stabilize. He’d regain a sort of breathy simulacrum of speech, and would ask, with admirable courtesy and composure, as he retrieved his hand from Ron’s, who his two visitors might be. They’d pass an uncanny hour or so with him, then start the trip home, or, if it was too late, spend another night at the Ramada or the Travelodge or the Best Western. On the road they’d talk about what they should wish for. Was it okay to wish for somebody to die, when it was clear the life ahead would be increasingly impoverished and painful? Was there any way to be sure what portion of this wish was for the sake of the other person, and what portion was for you?
But this time Ron drew the line. Cate had been saddled with an extra course this term, and now her neck was acting up. No need for them both to endure the stress yet again. Cate protested, but in the end acquiesced.
So it was that Ron found himself solo on the ferry for the first time in many years. He treated himself to a few rounds in the dollar-a-shot massage chair — not something he’d do if Cate were along, though she’d probably get a kick out of it — and blew his heart-smart diet with the Big Man’s Breakfast in the cafeteria. Outside on the upper deck he sipped coffee from a paper cup, let the wind whap his hair around. Gulls hovered like angels, like drones. Sheltering it with his body, he read through the little stack of pages he’d printed off before he set out. He’d found the material online a week or so ago, in the course of a panicky search for scraps of wisdom about death and how to deal with it. Back in the day, Cate had hauled around a copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead — Ron could still call to mind its cover, a gaudy mandala grasped by a sharp-toothed deity. What he’d printed off this morning was a spoofy new angle on that book. Ron liked it. Whimsical as it was — perhaps precisely because of its whimsy — he believed it possessed the power to change him, to benignly mess with his notion of what it was to be him in the first place. He believed it had already done so.
O nobly born (insert name), let not thy mind be distracted.
This would have been lifted directly from the Tibetan original, making the text a pastiche, Ron supposed. A playful takeoff. The idea was to recite it out loud to the dying person to help him or her let go.
O nobly born, that which is called death being come to thee now, picture this. You’re in a futuristic gismo, kind of like that one in Sleeper, the Woody Allen movie, except instead of giving you an instant, effortless orgasm it teleports you to someplace else. Warsaw, say, unless that’s where you already are.
Ron’s father wouldn’t get the Woody Allen reference. Would he get any of it? Would he pick out the word “Warsaw,” which (Ron couldn’t resist the tickle of this coincidence) happened to be Ron’s father’s mother’s birthplace? Probably not. Still, it would be better than silence. Better to be reading out loud than to be stuck listening in on the rude anarchy of his father’s respiration. And who knew, some trace of the meaning might thread its way through.
The gismo scans you, and replicates you in Warsaw. A perfect copy, down to the atom, the electron, the quark. There are two you’s now, but only for a short time, because the old you has been fatally damaged in the course of the replication. The old you lives just long enough to see the new you onscreen, and maybe compare a thought or two. “Are you me?” you say to the new you, and the new you nods. The new you believes he or she is you, which is what being you means. When you die, you don’t die. There’s nothing tragic here, nothing that needs to be clung to.
People had gathered at the ferry’s railing. A woman gestured out to sea; phones were trained on some photo-worthy apparition. Orcas? Porpoises? Amazing what lived and died right here, within one’s ken.
O nobly born, now imagine there’s a glitch in the gismo. The eyes of the new you are slightly paler than yours. At first you think it’s just the light in Warsaw at whatever time of day it is there, but no, the eyes are wrong. The new you isn’t you, not exactly. Is this tragic?
Ron tried to picture himself at Arbutus Manor, actually reading this stuff out loud to his dad. Actually sharing it. If the old man were even marginally conscious it would take all Ron’s courage. He couldn’t possibly have done it back when his dad remembered who he was, and was still able to produce a cool, disparaging silence. He couldn’t do it even today if Cate were there in the room with him. Strange. He’d always been like this, without ever quite noticing it before — he’d always carried on as though there were some vulnerable bit of him that needed to be cloistered, closed off.
Now imagine the error is a more significant one. The new you has darker hair. The new you responds, when you risk a little joke, with a laugh that’s definitely goofier than yours. Is this tragic? The new you can name three more kinds of berry than you can name. The new you forgets the lyrics and resorts to humming along to “Who’ll Stop the Rain,” whereas you can sing it right through to the end.
Ron started to skim here — a recorded voice had announced that they were nearing the terminal. Over the course of a few paragraphs, the dying person was invited to envision a replication process that was more and more fundamentally flawed. The new person was less and less like the old one. Was there any particular stage at which the alteration became grievous? Was there any particular stage at which death became something that mattered? The tempo of the text gradually picked up, crescendo-ing. In the end the new person wasn’t a person at all.
The new you is a leopard. The new you is a seagull. The new you is a shrub.
It was at this point, on his first reading, that Ron finally got it, finally felt it all the way down. Here on the boat, the impact proved less potent. Perhaps it was the rush. Perhaps it was that he no longer felt needy enough. Perhaps you only got the full effect in a moment of desperation.
People were starting for the stairs — the ferry slowed for its contact with the dock. Ron folded up his papers and stuffed them away.
It was a sublime day for a drive. Lightly overcast
, hardly another soul on the road, coniferous forest flashing inexhaustibly by on either side. Ron rolled down his window and cranked up his tunes, louder than he’d normally allow himself. Coleman Hawkins, Lester Young, a shuffle of all the great sax players he’d first encountered in his father’s collection.
O nobly born Benjamin. Maybe if he boiled the thing down. What was the key, the kernel? What simple incantation might crack open the shell of his dad, incite in him the same inexplicable lightness, the same sense of liberation that Ron himself had experienced, however briefly?
Shrub. That was the word that had done it for Ron. Shrub. And there it was again, a flicker of the feeling. Shrub. Just a flicker, which Ron endeavoured not to lose even as the breath left him and the car swerved out of control. The thing was to submit. The thing was to surrender to the hard fact of the hand on his chest, the great hand that held him now and squeezed.
Stage
Oscar’s just had his after-dinner dump so I’m juggling his leash and the loaded plastic bag when my cell phone rings, no chance to screen the call.
“Hello, my name’s Annika. I’m calling from the Diabetes Association. How are you this evening, sir?”
It’s tricky to isolate any one thought from the torrent of dreck that is my inner life, but I somehow latch onto the notion that I’ve got diabetes, and that this pleasant lady has rung me up to tell me so. It happens that I’ve been peeing a lot of late, plus there’s Auntie Kay who’s diabetic, the bad kind. There ought to be a whole other grief stage, call it Diagnosis, which is that you believe everything is wrong with you and with everybody you’ve ever loved. Since Jerry died I’ve had ulcers and bone cancer. Dad’s had lupus. Butcher Bob’s had emphysema.
Not that there even are stages of grief anymore, but Jerry drummed them into me back when Doctor Deb was helping him get over his mum. Now that I’m seeing Doctor Deb about Jerry she says it was all bull. “We fell in love with the stages,” she says. “How they neatened everything up. Grief was something you chugged through, chug chug chug. The stages were … the stages were a stage. But we’ve learned a lot since 9/11. There’s no right way to grieve.” I said to her last time, “So there are only wrong ways?” and she laughed, convinced that this was a good sign, my sense of humour coming back. For a shrink, she’s really very poor at reading people.