by Amy Spurway
“Sure, what the hell.” I’ve got nothing better to do, and being all grinched-up hanging out with a rather hot-for-an-old-guy Buddhist monk playing toss the lobster on New Year’s Eve makes for an interesting story. More interesting than sitting in a snowbank squawking at crows, or hanging around the trailer by myself trying to figure out how to re-shave my own head. “I hate those crusty little cocksuckers, too.”
Sure enough, the monk is from the hideaway monastery that clings to the edge of a cliff above the jagged and merciless ocean shoreline Down North. He introduces himself as Brother Gyaltso, but I will call him Hottie McMonk Pants when I tell Char and Allie about him and his rugged Harrison Ford-ish charm. I tell him my name is Crow. A warm beatific smile offers up a stark contrast to his cool, devilish eyes.
“That’s an interesting name,” he says. “In Tibetan Buddhism, crows are a symbol of protection and great auspiciousness.”
“Yeah, well I’m a cautionary tale. If it weren’t for bad luck, I wouldn’t have any.”
I give him the Coles Notes version of the brain tumours. His lips scrunch up like he’s got a mouthful of piss or wisdom, something that he wants to spit out, but can’t. He turns toward the water and slowly fills himself with salt air and serenity.
“You are working with some very profound truths and teachings, then.”
“Not really,” I say, unsure if it’s him or the water that’s lulled me into confession mode. “I came back looking for some kind of grand farewell or deep truth or something. But mostly I’m just discovering that everything is a wreck. Including me.”
“Ah. Sounds like you are studying teachings from the Kick Your Own Ass Sutra,” he says, still gracing the water with his intense gaze.
“Are you guys allowed to curse?” I have to ask.
“Yes, but only after we’ve studied the Curse Your Fucking Head Off Sutra. The Cape Breton translation.” He flashes a smile and winks at me, and I can’t tell if he’s trying to be flirty or fatherly.
With the last lobster liberated, I wait for my share of the Buddhist benefits to come raining down. Instead it starts to snow. The monk picks up his bucket, gives me a pleasant nod goodbye, and starts to shuffle away to the rusted and duct-taped station wagon that somehow carried him over the string of icy mountains between here and the monastery.
“Hey, wait,” I say, the words squeezed out of me by some impulsive urgency I didn’t know was there. “Can you give me . . .” I don’t even know what to ask for.
“Need a ride somewhere?” he offers.
“No, not a ride.” I take a deep haul of breath. “Can you give me some, I dunno, guidance? The spiritual kind. I can’t live like this. Or die like this.”
He comes to stand beside me, and gestures toward the water, sweeping his arm to the place where Great Bras d’Or opens into the Atlantic.
“There is a Sufi chant,” he says, almost in a whisper. “The ocean refuses no river. Look at these waters. It’s choiceless. Shit and garbage and pollution flow in, and nothing is refused or denied. The ocean takes it in, and does its best to integrate and purify whatever comes. I offer that to you as a contemplation.” He shifts his gaze from the water to me. “We are all dying. You’re fortunate enough to know it.”
“Yeah, lucky me,” I say.
“May I give you something else that may be of benefit?” he says. Without waiting for an answer he does a slo-mo rummage through the folds of his robe and pulls out a pocket-sized book and a little black business card emblazoned with a white lotus flower. “My dear friend and colleague. You might find her offerings useful on your path.” He presses the business card into my palm. “And this.” He extends a tiny book with an overexposed picture of his own handsomely beatific face on the cover toward me, “is my first book.” I look at the title, Living and Dying: You’re Doing it Wrong.
“Gee, thanks,” I say.
He smiles, does a weird little half bow, and shuffles off to the station wagon, chased by a wave of cloudy white curls and electric blue beads that only I can see.
I close my eyes to steady them as he drives away, then reset my vision by reading the card pressed into my palm: “Wendy MacDermid, Holistic Death Doula & Facilitator for Crann Na Beatha Eco-Burial Innovations.”
The Wendigo.
In Native American myth, the Wendigo is a gaunt, holloweyed humanesque monster with a grotesque odour and a taste for human flesh. At Loch Bhreagh Rural High School, The Wendigo was a skeletal girl a grade behind me, who smelled like BO and gnawed at the skin around her fingernails until it bled. From her Down North rumoured to be part-something-exotic mother, she’d inherited charcoal black hair and eyes and a stare that drilled holes in souls. And from her American backwoods, crunchy granola, hippy father — who worked as both a veterinarian and a pet cemetery keeper — she got a pasty complexion, an obsession with dead animals, and a nerve-jangling laugh that was seldom contained by decorum. Rumour also had it that she collected roadkill from the side of the highway, and once ate a raccoon eyeball. All I know for sure is that she submitted a heap of “artistic” photos of the grade ten biology class fetal pig dissections to the yearbook that year. She also rode the same bus as Allie. By all accounts, Wendigo Wendy was a weirdo. Judging by her business card, she still is.
I stuff the card in my pocket, plunk my arse down at a snow-covered picnic table, stare out at the grey expansiveness of the horizon, and decide that “horizon” must be Latin for “gaping maw of nothingness.” I think about dying. About heavens and hells and the spaces between. About last breaths and good deaths and what it will feel like to slip from existence. For a minute or ten, I even wonder what it might feel like to drown. Or freeze to death. I hear both are pretty peaceful, once you get to a certain point. This is what Hottie McMonk Pants and my fake friend Ami and every other Woo Woo Guru hack would call “contemplation,” I guess. Maybe the Universe is speaking to me. Maybe I met Hottie McMonk Pants here today for a reason. Maybe that reason was so he could give my dumb ass a ride home, so I wouldn’t have to trek through the snow in my lime-green parka and silver moon boots.
[…]
By the time Mama gets home from work, I am in bed, and not dead. Without a knock, she lurches into my room, plunks down beside me, and reaches to stroke the side of my head like I’m a pitiful old cat. Her hand rests on the thick forest of mouse-brown scrub brush. She starts laughing.
“Ahhh, remember the time you shaved off your eyebrows and cut your bangs an inch long and they stuck straight out? So ya drew new eyebrows on with a piece of charcoal and glued your hair down with egg whites? What was that, the first day of grade six?”
Grade seven. My first day of junior high in Loch Bhreagh. Char and Allie were strangers, but they saved me that day when they overheard Marcus King call me Oscar the Spunk Can before the first bell rang. Despite the eyebrows, the bangs plastered down with what looked like dried semen, and the obvious social liability I represented, Allie came and sat by me. Gently, diplomatically, she offered me her new headband to make my bangs look almost normal. Then she led me to the girls’ bathroom, where Char was waiting with a brow pencil and a copy of Seventeen magazine. By lunchtime, I’d begun to successfully fade into the Loch Bhreagh junior high scene. Until Char grabbed Marcus King by the nuts and told him if she heard anyone call me Oscar the Spunk Can again, she’d castrate him with a badminton racket and an emery board. It was harder to blend in after that.
I can’t be bothered to tell Mama any of that now. I just want to lie here like a bump on a log and listen to her voice.
“Mama, sing me a lullaby, wouldja?” I mumble.
For a minute, she looks as if she has forgotten that Sarah Spenser is selling our home out from underneath us. That money is tighter than ever. That word is going around the Gale that she got caught drinking on the night shift. That her only child is dying. For a minute, Mama looks almost happy as her voice lilts into song, her foot gently tapping out the tune of the only lullaby I can ever remember her sin
ging to me.
There was liquor on the barroom floor,
And the bar was closed for the night.
When out of his hole came a little black mouse,
And he sat in the pale moonlight.
He lapped up the liquor on the floor,
and on his haunches he sat.
And all night long, you could hear him sing,
“Oh bring out the goddamn cat!”
Her hands linger on my head for a few moments after she finishes singing, and I can’t help but laugh at the fact that this is what passes for soothing comfort now. Gnarled, calloused hands on my throbbing, shaved head, and an off-key foot-stomped song about a drunk, fearless mouse in a bar.
“Now, get to sleep,” Mama says. “So you can get your own boney arse out of bed. I’ll be too knackered to kick it out.”
[…]
Winter descends into a sort of perverted beauty. Once we chucked out the Christmas tree and burned the remnants of reindeer wrapping paper and made peace with the fresh evidence of our familial dysfunction, I settled into the desolation. The doldrums. The depression. The disappointment. All of the neurotic afflictions that start with the letter D. There is comfort in all that, and in the pristine whiteness that envelops the land. Everyone and everything is silent and slow now. There are also big icicles forming along the busted eavestrough of the trailer that look like penises. Perverted beauty. I want to snap one off and bring it to Char because I know she’d make a comical show of eating it, but I can’t because she’s too much in her madness. I want to smoke a joint and call Allie to tell her about the valance of phallic formations so we can both laugh and come up with other half-baked ideas for what to do with them, but I can’t because they kept her in the hospital once she admitted that she was scared she’d hurt herself. And misery doesn’t really love company. I want to talk to Willy so he can tease me and make me laugh, but I can’t because he has his own life and drama that doesn’t include me.
The fleeting appreciation of snow blankets and silence and dicksicles is no match for the quagmire of coldness and sickness and stuckness. I’m tired of trying to laugh but wanting to cry. I’m tired of hosting the relentless head-pounding, gut-turning, limb-numbing party that Parry Homunculus, Ziggy Stardust, and Fuzzy Wuzzy are throwing in my head. Mostly, I’m just tired.
February looms. I shuffle around the trailer looking for distractions. I stare out the window at the snow, at the trees, at anything my lazy eyes land upon. Which is pretty much limited to snow and trees. Every now and then, a crow or a chickadee or a blue jay comes along, scrounging for something to sustain its fragile winter existence. But when there’s nothing to be found, they fly away, and I’m back to staring at the inertia of nature. Nothingness is a shitty diversion. So I stare at my phone a lot. Rereading old text messages. Scrolling through Facebook posts of people I don’t care about, as if relationship statuses going from “in a domestic partnership” to “it’s complicated” matter. As if sexy filtered pictures of Asian fusion ab-buster kale noodle salad bowls for breakfast matter. As if memes for “classy ladies who drink and say fuck a lot” matter. The noisy static of other people’s fake lives in motion is a pretty shitty diversion, too. So I shuffle, stare, and drink tea. Shuffle, stare, drink tea. Maybe I’m already dead and just don’t know it yet. This seems like the kind of shit a ghost would do in limbo.
[…]
While Daktari Christ MacIsaac learned to crawl and babble, his mother learned how to get herself thrown in solitary. She claimed that another patient was plotting to assault her in the dining room, and told her doctor that she could hear his children crying because of the things he says to their mommy.
Meanwhile, Peggy heard that they just punted Allie out of the General Hospital and into the fumbling hands of her father and brothers. “But don’t worry,” they said. A “Rural Community Mental Health Team” will be there to answer her questions and support her wellness plan for recovery on Mondays or Wednesdays from nine a.m. to one p.m.
Whenever my phone sings The Bangles’ “Hazy Shade of Winter” at me, I brace for bad news. About Allie or Char or Willy or myself. Or maybe somewhere deep down in the abysmal pit of my winter-numbed soul, I’m wishing for it. Anything to break up the monotony, the bleakness, the darkness, the cold. But there are only ever two kinds of calls:
“Hello?”
“Hello, Stacey Fortune?”
“Sure.”
“I’m calling on behalf of Allied Collections regarding —”
Click.
But I have to make the click sound myself. Which I do.
And the other kind of call goes like this:
“Hello?”
A rustle, a faint buzz, a pause, and then the sound of a foghorn blasts me in the ear.
“Congratulations! You’ve won a cruise!”
Click.
And when the house phone rings, there are only two kinds of calls: one is Peggy calling with the latest dirt I pretend I don’t want to hear. Allie Walker, out of the hospital and spotted hanging around Down North with The Wendigo. Duke the Puke and Becky Chickenshit’s marriage is on the rocks over him being a philanderer. Sarah Spenser’s picture in the paper, snuggled up next to some oily-haired suit from Alberta. Chrissy Parsons had a miscarriage.
And the other is Dr. Divyaratna’s office, calling to schedule MRIs. Or cancel MRIs. Then rescheduling the cancelled MRIs. Cancelling the rescheduled MRIs, and looking to re-reschedule. Asking if I’ve made up my mind about chemo or radiation.
I still answer both those phones every damn time they ring, hankering for a scrap of something new, something nourishing. Something with a dash of flavour, even.
Be careful what you wish for.
My phone sings. I answer. But this time, it’s Dave. Talk about nerve.
“Hey. Sorry to bug you,” he murmurs. “You were the only one I could think to call.”
Ami left him. Already. For her yoga teacher. And her yoga teacher’s wife. Because polyamorous yogic orgasms are the new kombucha-flavoured artisan glass dildos, apparently.
“You were right. About everything,” he says. And then he starts to sob. “I’m a pathetic piece of shit. Ever since we split up, my life has been a disaster. I never should have . . .”
And on and on he goes about what an idiot he was to ruin our beautiful life. How, deep down, he always felt like he didn’t deserve to be happy, to have a woman like me. How all his dysfunction springs from the distant superficiality of his own mother. And I just listen. By the time he gets around to asking about my shitshow of a life, a solid year of stony resentment feels like it has been dampened and softened by his tears. His honesty. His vulnerability. He asks me how I’m doing. I tell him.
“I’m getting sicker. I’m all alone. Everybody here’s fucked. And there’s a For Sale sign planted at the bottom of our driveway.”
“Wow,” he says, “that’s awful. Do you think maybe you made a mistake going back?”
Like a sad, lonely, hungry fish, I take the bait. “I make a lot of mistakes. This was probably one of them. But whatever, it will all be done soon.”
“Stacey, I can’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“Let you live like this. Or . . . or —”
“Die like this? It’s okay to say the word, Dave. That’s where this is going.”
“Do you remember my buddy Wes? The doctor?” he says.
“The one whose wife curated the art show of placentas?”
“Yes! Remember that! God, we laughed so much.”
Of course. I remember everything.
“I ran into Wes the other day,” Dave goes on. “He asked about you, so I told him. Turns out, there’s some clinical trial on a new tumour treatment here. Really promising stuff.” Dave pauses. “Maybe Wes could pull some strings . . .”
“Dave, I —”
He jumps in before I can finish the thought, which is good because I don’t know what that thought was going to be. “You could live with me .
. .” He hesitates, then hurries, “have your own room. I’ll hire a cook. Round the clock nursing support. Whatever you need. No strings attached.”
“There are always strings, Dave.”
“Then maybe that’s the risk you’d have to take,” he says. “I want to help. Make amends. Life is too short. What have you got to lose?”
I tell him I’ll think about it. And maybe I will.
[…]
Two cups of tea and a dozen trailer-length shuffles later, Dr. Divyaratna calls, the smooth precision of her Indian accent cutting through my newest daydream: the one where I am anywhere but here, with anyone but myself. My MRI appointment was booked for next week. And now it’s cancelled. My blood work from last week came back. There’s something new to worry about.
“When can you come into the office to discuss the results?” Dr. D. says.
I tell her I don’t know. Her office is over an hour away. It’s frigid and icy and there’s a snowstorm every second day. Mama’s working like a madwoman to keep us afloat, I am not allowed to drive, and all the people who usually drive me places are currently busy being disasters, dickheads, or both.
“Can’t you just tell me?” I plead, staring vacantly out the window, down the driveway at the For Sale sign as it clatters back and forth in the bone-chilling wind. I wonder what the weather’s like in Toronto right now.
Dr. Divyaratna sighs, deep and heavy. Then she rhymes off an alphabet soup of blood test names and the elevated numbers that came back with them. All meaningless.
“Is this good news or bad news?” I ask.
She clears her throat. “It appears that you are pregnant.”
Fragments of words crackle through the phone after that. Ultrasound. High risk. Decisions. Soon. But I can’t piece it together coherently because the voices of everyone else are swelling in my head.
Every flock of old hens from here to Loch Bhreagh to Town, tsking and clucking: There’s Crow Fortune, havin’ a baby for that other druggie fella, after him already gettin’ the Parsons one in trouble. And her with them tumours. And her mother back on the bottle. And the Spensers taking their home. Baby’ll likely be born handicapped, eh? What with the father and whatever made him all gimped up like that. And the grass smokin’ down there at The Wharf all the time. Her, sick and pregnant. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Them Fortunes. Makes ya wonder how much of it they bring upon themselves.
