Ian’s mother had died first. At the end, she was not much more than a stick drawing of herself, wrapped up and lost in the coiling hospital blankets in a too-big bed in palliative care. Her husband — Ian’s father — watched with what seemed like a permanently dazed expression on his face. It was like she dissolved furiously from within, her limbs in constant writhing motion, burning far more calories somewhere in her body than she could possibly take in by eating. Every day, she was a bit more manic: every day a little less of her there, until, when she died, she was just bones papered with loose skin. Her eyes hard like bright brass beads.
Ian’s father burned up more literally: he died in a fire two weeks after Ian’s mother died. The investigators told Ian the scorched cupboards pointed toward something — they had no idea what — forgotten on the back left burner of the stove overnight. But they didn’t say “forgotten,” Ian realized all at once. They said “left on the stove,” a description that opened another door he wasn’t keen to think about.
Ian, an only child, found himself caught up in the complications of two parents and their estate — along with the complications of what he felt, and what it was he felt that he was supposed to feel. Through it all — the legal work and the probate tangle left by neither parent having an official will — he stayed on the road, refusing to even take the eight days of bereavement leave, “four days for the death of a parent,” times two, that his company’s human relations policy spelled out. An HR officer named Susan seemed to feel it was her responsibility to bring him into the office and tell him that directly.
Susan didn’t seem to understand his reply — that he wanted to keep on working, that he wanted to stay out on the road, that, despite all the things that had to be worked out, all the decisions that had to be made, all the paperwork that had to be filled out and signed and taken to the next place, he just wanted to get back to his usual routine.
Ian wanted work — just work — to stay the same, so that there was at least one thing, anything, that was exactly, precisely the same as it had been before. It anchored him to a world that, otherwise, he would have felt he had lost.
He drove his car down Columbus, his hands loose on the steering wheel, feeling the ridges on the underside of the wheel bump on his fingers as physics pulled the wheels back toward straight with no effort from him at all. Being in the flow of the traffic, he thought, was the way a platelet must feel inside an artery, speeding through to the next valve, pushed by the flow from the heart, no sliding backwards, out around the big circle, down through the small arteries and the capillaries and then back again, lungs and heart and everything else, touching every cell eventually, feeding, supplying oxygen, even to the damaged cells. Going, slowing, stopping even, and going again. Just like driving, the way there could be roadwork here, construction signs there, and everyone passing through the bottlenecks slowly and then speeding up again, everything controlled by outside, immutable rules.
At the last traffic light before the right turn for home, he caught a yellow and slowed to a stop. Ian watched the rear-view as the car behind almost hit him, coming up close enough that the headlights vanished from his mirror. Then the car let out a long, impatient blast of horn. The driver had obviously expected Ian to run the yellow light and had expected to dovetail tight in behind, darting through the intersection as well. Ian could make out only a few parts of the other driver’s face in the mirror. Ian reached down and put the car in park, while his other hand unbuckled his seat belt.
He got out of the car and for a moment wondered what the intersection would look like from space or even from an airplane, a tableau fixed and flat under the pale late August sun with all its little pieces whirring and moving, so far away that every scrap of purpose would be too far away to be seen or understood. It would look like the seething world of pond water under a microscope, all sorts of life juddering in and out of the frame without any real reason at all.
Ian left the door of his car still hanging open so that it looked like a bird with a broken wing, the way he often passed a road-struck seagull or crow, looking dazed and trailing one wingtip along the surface of the asphalt.
He could hear the horns, and Ian thought that everything at the intersection looked cooked, baked down, the sunlight too harsh and battering down on him.
He walked back to the car that had pulled up behind him, a low-slung four-door, blue, its stereo pulsing fatly out through the open windows.
“What is your fucking problem?” the man in the car said to him. Ian felt detached as he looked in the window at the man in the driver’s seat. The man had his legs spread wide apart, blue jeans, and a shirt open wide at the neck, as if he was absolutely comfortable there behind the wheel, as if people got out of their cars and walked back to confront him all the time. As if this was nothing in the least bit new or surprising.
Ian’s sleeves had slid down to his wrists, so he slid them up past his elbows again, baring his brown skin before drawing his arm back and hitting the man full in the mouth with a suddenly formed fist.
And while it was happening, he thought of his arm, and of telling it: “See? That’s what you’re supposed to do. You do exactly what I tell you. When I tell you. And that’s the only thing you do.”
Ian felt the sun piercing his skin with every moment, like it was throwing out a million flaming pins, each one digging, seeking. His arms kept swinging, long after the horns stopped and drivers started climbing out of their cars.
Armenia
Tom got a bizarre and almost disturbing pleasure in sliding his hand along the rough and always-growing hair on her legs, but above the towel rack in the bathroom, there was a map of Armenia drawn on the wall in mould — small knots poking outwards above what would be the cities of Yerevan, Gyumri, and, down at the foot, Kapan — and Ray wouldn’t let him wipe it away with something as simple as an old dishcloth and a good healthy dose of bleach.
She won’t let him do anything about it, because she said it was a living thing. She told him that it was because she was a Buddhist, but he knew that was a lie, that her family was Methodist and she was, too, because she’d let it slip once in a lunchtime conversation. There were four of them at the table, and Tom sat silently listening, keeping the information to himself, not letting on that he knew.
The drain in the tub was so plugged he couldn’t decide whether he was having a bath or a shower anymore, and what he really wanted was for her to be gone for an afternoon, just one single afternoon, so he could power a whole bottle of drain cleaner down there, then open the bathroom window wide and turn on the fan to waft away the smell, because no one should be forced to stand up to their ankles in soap scum every time they wash.
Then, if she asked him if he’d done anything to the tub, he could just shrug and say, “Something down there must have decided to go ahead and let go,” and go back to reading, which was just about the only thing left to do in the house, because she had cut the cable off and the television only got one station and acres of grey-blue static on all the other channels.
Unplugging the drain would be fine, he thought. But if the map were to disappear, it wouldn’t be that simple. Tom knew there would be no way to deny that he’d had something to do with that.
When they first met, she had said her name was Raisa, Raisa Grant, but she liked it when he shortened it to Ray. No one had ever called her Ray before, and she said she liked the way it sounded like she’d come from the sun. He didn’t tell her it happened accidentally — that, all at once, it was like the last syllable of her name had simply fallen off his tongue. It was like his mouth had just seized up solid all at once and halfway through, unable to move.
Tom had met her at a film festival screening one night. She was taking ticket stubs and dropping the ripped halves into a small, overflowing wicker basket for the door prize, and he had asked her out right away, thinking there was no way that she’d ever say yes.
She had a raft of fine blond hair on her arms, the kind of slender, thin
hair that seemed to move away uniformly, as if afraid, if you did as little as breathe on it. Cilia, bending and swaying like the heads of a field of wheat swept by wind. (Tom wasn’t sure if there was ever going to be a right time or place to mention that. He was sure that there were things that you weren’t supposed to notice, that, if you did, they would only end up being an unseemly fragmentation of the whole. High tits. Nice ass. Cilia.)
Their relationship wasn’t complicated at first. There were no second thoughts, nothing held back. He had felt a kind of surge he wasn’t used to, a confidence he couldn’t claim as his own. She told her friends that they had just clicked, that they had shifted from acquaintances to a couple in a single night. He found he couldn’t tell anyone about that without feeling a little embarrassed, as if it had all been too easy, too carefully un-thought. But she told the story more than often enough for both of them, told it easily in a this-was-always-meant-to-be way, as if the two of them were important enough that even destiny found the time and interest to get involved.
Tom felt differently, though; if asked, he might have said that they were like two cars colliding at an intersection and ending up inextricably knit together, a tangle of bumpers, engine parts, and steel. Two becoming one through brute force and physics.
But destiny or collision, they hit hard.
A mediocre meal at a vegetarian restaurant — cold spanakopita, the spinach reminding him of wet leaves just waiting for a rake — and a bottle of particularly resinous red wine led them back to her place. Her apartment was the upper floor of a downtown house that had been unceremoniously torn in two, renters top and bottom, with a shared front hall full of all the shoes and boots from everyone in the house.
Tom wasn’t ready for the sheer physicality of Ray: he’d never been devoured before, but that was the only adjective he could come up with on the morning after their first date, the sun cutting in through the blinds in the clothing-strewn disaster that was her bedroom.
She’d been lying naked next to him on top of the covers, stretched out like a cat, the radiators pinging as the heat came on, the winter sun bright and staring, and he hadn’t decided to move in as much as he’d simply stayed on.
She told Tom she’d had roommates, but they’d moved out a week before she’d met him. Raisa flatly refused to talk about them, except to say that it was good riddance. Later on, the timing of that departure would trouble him more than a little: what sort of “needed” had he been? But those thoughts came later. She didn’t talk about her family, either. She told him she’d moved from Montreal and that things at home had been “more than difficult,” but he’d mentioned that to some of her friends, and several of them had given a strange look, saying they’d always thought she’d grown up in Halifax.
His clothes and the few pieces of furniture from his apartment straggled in after him, a few at a time as they were needed, gradually settling into any open spaces at Ray’s apartment. Tom hadn’t intended to let his apartment go, but the lease came up for renewal two months after he met Raisa, and he realized all at once that the only things he still kept at his small one-bedroom were things he didn’t use and didn’t really need. His only stop there had become a weekly checkin to see that the pipes hadn’t broken and a quick rifle through the mostly-junk-mail mailbox. It meant that giving the place up was less like making a decision and more like simply letting go of an old and under-maintained friendship.
No one ever said, “We should move in.” It had been organic, natural, Ray insisted, like the mouldy map of Armenia.
Tom wasn’t the one who noticed the Armenian shape of the spot. They had been having a party — red wine, lasagna, and weed — and Pavel, an Eastern European grad student, zipping up his fly coming out of the bathroom, had mentioned it: “Did you ever notice?”
Fascinated, Tom had taken a high school atlas into the bathroom the next day. It was Armenia, all right, only about the size of Tom’s hand. Exactly Armenia, right down to a darker smear that corresponded with the massive Lake Sevan. He read more about Lake Sevan, about how it had changed after massive engineering attempts to both reduce and then rebuild its size and depth.
He learned the word “eutrophication” and read that it meant a massive growth and then death of plants, a rapid decay that starved the lake of oxygen. Stagnant water, so successful at growing that it actually killed its own surroundings.
For a while, he had an almost protective fondness for the mould spot himself, especially through the winter, when the central heating kept the air dry and the map dependent on the frequent mist from hot showers. Raisa liked long, hot showers, especially bent forward with Tom behind her.
But spring was wet. Very wet.
March ended with a heavy, endless slog of slushy snow and fog, and April and May were variations on the same theme. By the time June came, the front porch of the house smelled less like shoes and more like a heavy-skinned animal had crawled in under the bench and died, and now was progressively decaying. None of the shoes ever fully dried, and it was well past the point where anyone could blame it on another resident’s foot problems.
The humidity was thicker upstairs: Raisa’s apartment had no working kitchen vent, and Tom was pretty sure that some historical mistake in remodelling meant the downstairs tenants’ kitchen vent actually ended in their kitchen somehow. Raisa could be cooking her garlic-laden spaghetti sauce, and still the kitchen would smell strongly of someone else’s fugitive roast beef and gravy. She had insisted he at least try being vegetarian, too, but the smell of gravy was like torture, a constant reminder of what was now out of reach. The dryer vent leaked, and the space behind the dryer was draped with folds of grey, fibrous lint that had escaped past the lint filter and out the split side of the vent pipe, the moist vapour adding to the damp. All over the apartment, the windows fogged and then wept droplets of condensation, and the line of black mildew along the bottom of each pane of glass grew thicker with every day. But the bathroom was worse.
The smell of mould in the air was like a solid wall in the bathroom, and Tom was sure it must be getting a foothold back in behind the wallboard and finding a way onto all the surfaces in the bathroom itself. He was sure there must be spores falling like microscopic snow onto the wet towels every day after they hung them up to dry, like seeds falling onto fertilized ground.
It choked Tom up every single time he went in the bathroom: allergies he didn’t know he had poured mucus down the back of his throat as soon as the smell of it hit. And he thought — he knew — that the mould was spreading.
In the bathroom, Armenia had arbitrarily moved outside its borders. On the left, it was invading what would be Turkey. It was, almost imperceptibly, heading toward Iran. Tom was sure Azerbaijan and Georgia would be next, if it hadn’t happened already.
And still, Raisa had no interest in cleaning it up or having him clean it up. She did buy candles, fat candles with wicks that flickered at the centre of vast pools of molten wax, but the smell of the candles only lay over the top of the mildew. He didn’t come out and say it to her, but he began to think her opposition to cleaning had nothing to do with the mould, and much more to do with keeping a tight grip on their relationship.
He hadn’t noticed it when they first met, but she liked to be in charge. She had to be in charge. Sometimes, her need for control was subtle, but the longer they lived together, the less subtle it became. And it wasn’t by sheer force of will: sometimes, it was more wheedling. A tone she had mastered that made him simply go along with whatever she wanted.
He stopped playing rec hockey on Saturdays, stopped the obligatory sports-bar restocking of the few calories he’d burned off on the ice. His hockey gear went down into storage in the shared basement. Now, Saturday nights were for book launches, film society movies with subtitles, and wherever else Raisa wanted to go. He was sure Ray’s friends thought he was an idiot: he hadn’t read any of the right books, hadn’t seen any significant and important films. And when he talked about Raisa to any of her fr
iends, he’d get quizzical, confused looks back.
Once, prying thick hummus from a plastic container with a failing cracker at a book launch in a dark bar, he’d talked to a bearded friend of Raisa’s named Tony — a short, slight man who always wore a black and white kaffiyeh wrapped around his neck like a scarf — about the international work Raisa had done in her early twenties when she was volunteering with a children’s aid agency.
“Raisa help kids? I’ve only ever seen Raisa help herself,” Tony snorted before walking away.
Tom was beginning to think he’d never get the smell out of his nose.
He was in the apartment more than she was. He had a regular job doing clean-up for a construction company, seven to four, but she was working all that and more: a daytime job at a coffee shop, then some nights there as well, and often volunteer work. Maybe, he thought, she just wasn’t there long enough to really notice the smell.
Once, when they were making love, he thought all at once that he had caught a hint of it on her skin, just on the inside of her elbow, where the skin was so soft that any sliding touch seemed to drag it into small, gently gilled chevrons — like sand swept into rills by waves — but the soft folds vanished as soon as he took his finger away. He pulled his head away from her quickly, but when he moved back in close and tried to smell it again, it was gone.
“What are you doing?” she said, going suddenly rigid.
“Nothing,” he lied.
“It’s like you think you’re going to find some guy’s cologne on me or something.”
He didn’t explain, didn’t think he could explain. But a week later, he did smell something on her skin that wasn’t mould. It was a sharp, almost salt-air smell, a deodorant that neither of them used. Then he remembered what she had said.
At night with the windows closed, Tom started dreaming about drowning, about someone holding the hair on the back of his head tight in their grasp, his face pushed down into a stream, so that there was nothing he could do but take great rasping deep breaths of water — water where there should really be air instead.
The Path of Most Resistance Page 2
