Things Go Flying

by Shari Lapena

  When the paramedics arrived, Harold recalled that this was the second time in just over a week that men had come for him with an orange stretcher, and everybody knew things happened in threes.

  Now a fire truck was careening down the street, lights flashing, siren wailing, and if anybody in the neighbourhood hadn’t noticed he was lying flattened beneath a tree on Hampton Avenue, they would now.

  As the firefighters consulted about removing the branch, a paramedic squatted down close to Harold and asked him a few questions. Satisfied, the man stood up and talked to the firefighters. Then the branch was off him and they were lifting him onto the stretcher.

  “Doesn’t look like anything’s broken, but you’ve got a nasty bump there,” the paramedic said sympathetically. “Better get it checked out. You probably have a concussion.”

  Harold felt his forehead gingerly. His hand came away sticky with clotting blood. He didn’t protest as they hoisted him into the ambulance. He’d never ridden in an ambulance before. He wondered if he would be billed for it.

  “Is there anyone you’d like us to call?” asked the paramedic.

  Harold nodded, which made his head spin. “My wife, Audrey.” But then he forgot about Audrey as it dawned on him where they were going.

  “Where are you taking me?” he asked.

  “Toronto East General. You’re lucky—it’s a quiet night. Still early.”

  Harold remembered hearing something about—hadn’t Toronto East General recently had a case of flesh-eating disease? “I’ve changed my mind,” Harold said, sitting up suddenly and trying to reach for the back doors of the ambulance.

  “Whoa, buddy,” the paramedic said, pushing him gently back down.

  Harold, overcome with dizziness, saw that resistance was futile.

  • • •

  HAROLD WAS SITTING in his old bathrobe and battered slippers in his La-Z-Boy chair. It was the first sick day he’d taken in years. Even on doctor’s orders, he still felt mildly guilty, like he was trying to pull a fast one.

  Harold made a point of reading the Darwin Awards every year. They cheered rather than entertained him. He would never, for example, tie a plastic bag tightly around his head to avoid a bee sting and die of asphyxiation, or stand directly under a heavy branch he was cutting with a power saw. He wasn’t that lame. But there was no question he was bewildered by modern life.

  Today, at home recuperating, he was reading a newspaper account of a man who’d been arrested by Toronto Police for driving the wrong way down a residential street, pants down around his ankles, and using a laptop computer to steal wireless signals to anonymously download child pornography. Harold had to read the article three times to follow what was going on, but once he figured it out, he was fascinated. Not so much by the depravity of this “hacking and whacking,” but by its sophistication.

  He couldn’t even program his vcr, which was now virtually obsolete anyway, and there were people, Harold marvelled, who had the ingenuity—not to mention the confidence—to drive the wrong way down a one-way street (pants down!) and use a laptop, a networking card, and some software to steal signals out of thin air. It boggled his mind. He was incensed to read that when the police cracked down on users of child pornography, the trail would lead back to the person who owned the network, oblivious inside his house—perhaps reading the paper—and not to the sleazeball who had been downloading it from his car on the street.

  At least that hadn’t happened to him. It couldn’t have, because he wasn’t sophisticated enough to set up a wireless network in his house in the first place. Harold thought about it for a moment—his name wrongly plastered in the newspaper as a consumer of child pornography, his life ruined—and felt spared.

  It worried him though, his failure to adapt. He was most comfortable with the tangible; he liked to work with his hands. He could certainly use a computer, he knew the basics, but it was the people who knew how to grasp stuff right out of the air—they were the ones, Harold thought, who would inherit the earth.

  But he was wrenched abruptly out of his thoughts.

  “I couldn’t reach your father.”

  It was his mother’s voice, speaking quietly. It was as if she was standing right beside him. Harold turned his head, but no one was there. Well, of course not. His mother had died years ago.

  The overworked doctor in Emergency had told him he’d suffered a mild concussion, that he might have headaches for a few days, and to go home and take Advil. He hadn’t said anything about hallucinations.

  “I couldn’t reach your father.”

  He must be hallucinating. This would surely pass. Harold wondered if he should call Dr. Goldfarb.

  “You wanted to know if I contacted your father on the other side. I tried, Harold, but I couldn’t. I just thought you’d like to know.”

  Shit! That was no hallucination—that was his mother! Harold felt the panic rising in his throat, the weirdness flooding over him, the alarming palpitation of the heart, the difficulty breathing. He wanted to flee, but he was afraid that if he got up suddenly he might collapse, like he had at the funeral, and that would surely bring Audrey running. So he tried to ignore his mother and buried himself—practically entombed himself—in the newspaper instead. He forced himself to remain still and tried to control his breathing.

  But he could feel her presence, and she wouldn’t stop trying to get his attention.

  “Harold, dear, it’s your mother. Listen to me.”

  From the kitchen, through the doorway, Audrey was keeping a discreet eye on Harold. A couple of times she saw his head jerk up from his newspaper, his face pale and startled, and look uneasily around the living room before going back to his reading. It was odd behaviour for Harold, who generally ploughed through things slowly and methodically, undistracted.

  Well, he had been hit on the head, Audrey told herself. Twice. Three times, if you counted the fact that he’d also smacked the front of his head on the pavement when he got whacked on the back of the head by the tree. That had to do something. Just so long as it wasn’t permanent.

  The doctor in Emergency had instructed her to keep him home for a couple of days and to keep an eye on him, and that’s exactly what she was doing. If he started to show odd symptoms, she’d take him back to the hospital whether he liked it or not.

  Only he hadn’t really been himself even before he’d hit his head the first time, on the coffin, and it was hard to be sure what was from whatever had been bothering him before, and what was from being whacked a couple of times in the head.

  But she was pretty sure this was new, she thought worriedly, as Harold’s head shot up again and he hissed, “Go away.”

  What the hell was she to make of that? Anxiously, Audrey threw down the dish towel and hurried to his side.

  Harold saw her coming for him, swooping upon him like a valkyrie, and said defensively, looking up at her from his chair, “What?”

  “Who were you talking to?” Audrey asked, the crease between her eyes deepening.

  He wanted to deny he’d said anything, but she’d obviously been spying on him. It was only his first day at home, and already he longed to go back to the office. “Just a fly,” he said, swatting at the empty air around his head for authenticity.

  He could tell she didn’t believe him. But he wasn’t going to tell her that his dead mother had just been trying to speak to him; Audrey was just looking for some reason to take him back to the hospital. He stared her down, and watched her return to the kitchen, her back stiff.

  He didn’t want to let Audrey take him back to the hospital, because he didn’t want to be labelled insane. He wasn’t hallucinating, he was communicating with the dead, like his mother before him. Perhaps the knock on the head had precipitated it, but he doubted it. It probably would have happened anyway, the way it had happened to his mother—out of the blue. He had her gift, and if there was ever a gift he wanted to return, it was this one.

  He was terrified.

  “Haro
ld, phone for you,” Audrey called from the kitchen.

  “Who is it?” Harold pretended to be put out, but really, he was grateful to be hauled back into the land of the living. He’d even talk to a telephone solicitor right now, given the chance.

  “I think it’s about the car.”

  The car.

  The car, last he’d heard, was still lying in pieces all over Jimmy’s shop floor. Apparently, like all hostage negotiations, these things took time. The insurance company had agreed to pay Jimmy for his estimate— his time and his storage fees—and to pay for the approved auto shop, Al’s Auto, to tow it back to their place to do their estimate.

  “We didn’t get it,” Al said.

  “What do you mean, you didn’t get it?” Harold knew that Al had gone over that afternoon with his tow-truck to pick up Harold’s car, which had been hastily slapped back together, he presumed, by Jimmy, in order to be taken apart again and fixed by Al. Harold began to understand why insurance was so expensive—the whole system ran a lot like the government, with the vast pool of numberless individuals paying in the end. So really, there was no upper limit.

  It seemed Jimmy had refused to release the car anyway—probably out of spite for having lost out on the work—shutting up his doors for the day just as the tow-truck arrived. “We’ll go back tomorrow,” Al said, like he did this all the time, “but you better come down.”

  When Harold hung up the phone, annoyed at having to go to the garage in the morning—and frankly alarmed at the thought of a spiteful mechanic having his hands deep in the guts of his car—he saw Audrey hovering, eyes wide, as if she expected him to collapse from the stress of the phone call.

  That was it, Harold decided—he was going back to work tomorrow. Maybe it was Audrey that was making him crazy.

  • • •

  BY THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Audrey was ready for Harold to go back to work too. He insisted he was fine, and he seemed fine, physically, anyway. He was eating and walking normally—no signs of staggering, no evidence of dizzy spells—and his eyes tracked her finger the way they should—a test she’d seen the Emergency doctor do and which she insisted on performing three times a day, even though Dylan rolled his eyes whenever he saw her do it. And she hadn’t caught Harold talking to himself again after that first time.

  The truth was she needed him functioning. She’d begun to reclaim his identity, following the instructions in the helpful pamphlet What to do if you’ve been the Victim of Identity Theft, which the banker had left with them, while Harold struggled manfully with his newspaper. She’d contacted the fraud departments of the major credit bureaus and requested that a fraud alert be placed in Harold’s file; she’d ordered copies of his credit reports; she’d contacted the credit card companies again, the phone company, and everybody bloody else she could think of. She’d filed a police report. But this was going to be a protracted process—she couldn’t do it all by herself.

  Also, she had to get Harold out of the house. She had things to do, and she needed to think, and she could never think unless the house was empty.

  So she executed the usual essentially thankless and hectic morning routine, waking everyone, putting the coffee on, preparing healthy lunches and packing them in brown paper bags—the boys would probably throw theirs in the trash and buy french fries, but she couldn’t think about that, it made her just crazy—putting a reasonably nutritious breakfast on the table, going back upstairs to wake Dylan a second time when yelling at him from downstairs didn’t work, stopping on demand to locate John’s homework, and running downstairs to the basement between bites of toast to take Dylan’s basketball shirt out of the dryer, all while making a mental note to get milk, pick Dylan up after the game, and—there was something else she had to do today, but she couldn’t for the life of her remember what it was.

  Sometimes, to keep herself together and serene in the mornings, she would put the small, tinny radio in the kitchen on to a classical station while she performed her menial but nevertheless important and carefully timed tasks, and if the kids were annoying her—if they weren’t getting up, or if they left wet towels on the bathroom floor— she would turn the music up a little. It was her way of refusing to be drawn. She’d think about her beautiful, functional ballet—Audrey adored classical music—and flit about the kitchen in her invisible musical bubble, twirling from counter to fridge, pirouetting with a full coffee pot, shutting a bottom cupboard with a pointed toe. The rest of the family found this embarrassing.

  Today the music was especially loud, because she’d lost it after all and finally stormed up the stairs and hauled Dylan’s blankets off and told him that if he didn’t get up right now he could just forget about getting picked up after his basketball game.

  When Dylan finally came to the breakfast table, Harold and John were already eating their toast, Harold reading the obituaries, and John catatonically studying the back of a cereal box. The music was sufficiently loud that conversation was impractical. Nevertheless, Audrey distinctly heard Dylan mutter, “Nurse Ratched’s at it again.”

  Nobody touched the fresh fruit she’d put out. Why did she bother?

  She remembered the other thing she had to do today—find a birthday present for Harold. She’d gone off the power tool idea completely.

  • • •

  AUDREY WASN’T A computer whiz, but she wasn’t a complete Neanderthal either. She knew how to do a basic Google search. Once she was alone in the house, Audrey went downstairs to the basement and got on the family computer and looked up “ecstasy.” No one would ever know. An hour later, she was more informed—and more worried than ever.

  She decided things couldn’t get much worse so she typed in “paternity tests” and hit Search. And while she was waiting for the results (but really the results were instantaneous, so it was more that she was procrastinating about reading them) she remembered how she’d allowed herself to be seduced by Tom Grossman. How weak she had been!

  Back when Audrey still had legs like a dancer’s and her head was full of romantic, fanciful ideas, she’d fallen, very temporarily, for the particular appeal of Dr. Tom Grossman.

  She was just under thirty, the mother of a toddler. And that was probably part of it too, the child being as good a constant reminder as any that her girlhood—the time before anything had been decided— was over.

  They’d have dinner, Tom and his wife, Adele, and she and Harold, at each other’s houses—in this very house—enjoyable dinner parties when everything still seemed possible, before everyone’s lives seemed to go down certain paths, before, in Tom and Adele’s case, way led on to way. They’d sit at the dining room table, the lights low after a good meal, the wine flowing, while Tom entertained them—talking in grandiose terms (the world was always his oyster), making them laugh with his outrageous anecdotes—and then she’d look across the table at Harold.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Harold was at Staples after work, staring sightlessly at a bunch of shredders, thinking instead about what had happened at the garage that morning.

  He’d arranged to meet Al at Jimmy’s East End Auto at 8 am. Harold had been early and had sat in his parked rental car outside on the street, reluctant to go in before Al arrived with his tow-truck. The garage looked the same as every other garage Harold had ever seen that wasn’t part of a chain—run down, with old tires everywhere, and hand-painted signs. He could see a mechanic in a jumpsuit moving around inside one of the bays. Harold kept his eyes open for Roy’s tow-truck—it was black and shiny, he remembered, with the Playboy symbol in white on its mud flaps.

  Al hauled up in his tow-truck and pulled into the yard. Harold knew it was Al because “Al’s Auto” was painted on the side. Harold left his car on the street and crossed the road to join Al as he got out of his truck. Harold feared that his car really was still in pieces and that Al wouldn’t be able to tow it away, and then what would he do?

  But he drew strength from Al immediately. He was a big man, with dirty jeans and a
cowboy’s swagger and dark grease so deeply embedded in his fingers that Harold was grateful that he didn’t offer to shake hands.

  “Harold?” Al said. Harold nodded. “Let’s go get her.”

  Al slammed his truck door and headed straight into the garage. Harold followed behind him and a little to the left, sheltering behind Al’s bulk.

  “Hey, Jimmy!” Al yelled.

  “Jimmy’s not here,” said the lone mechanic, who was tinkering with a car on the hoist.

  “No more bullshit,” Al said, pleasantly. “We’ve come for the Camry.”

  “She’s out back,” the mechanic said, and turned back to the car overhead. “Get her yourself.”

  “That was almost too easy,” Al muttered to Harold, as they turned and headed for the fenced yard in the back. Harold glanced back over his shoulder at the mechanic and saw that he was grinning.

  It took them a few minutes to locate Harold’s car, because it was boxed in on all sides by junked trucks, vans, and SUVS, all of which were taller than Harold’s less fashionable sedan.

  “Jesus fuckin’ Christ,” Al said, when he’d climbed up onto the hood of a Jeep and from there to its roof and stood looking down at the car. “They went to a lot of trouble.”

  Harold stood on the ground looking up at Al and had to see for himself. He began to climb up beside him, careful not to split his pants. He was dressed for the office. Al had to give him a hand up, and it was awkward, but finally he stood on the Jeep’s roof beside Al.

  Al snorted out his nose. “At least it’s in one piece.”

  But Harold was horrified. He looked down at the twisted wreckage, the front of his car all smashed in, fervently grateful that he still had his son.

  Al began to rant that it would take him a goddamned half-hour to move all the vehicles to get at the goddamned car, and that he sure as hell hoped Jimmy would show up by then, and Harold decided to flee, saying he had to get to work.

  Now, Harold hesitated over his choice of shredders. The crosscut shredders were best, he’d been told. But which one? The bigger the better? He thought of Darwin, thought of getting his hand caught in a crosscut shredder and bleeding to death in the basement . . . but no, look, there was a safety shut-off.