by John O'Neill
Leonard slept that entire Sunday, drained by the previous day’s events. At 6:30 a.m. on Monday, as he was staring at it his alarm clock sounded. His eyes had been moving back and forth from its plastic curve to Alison’s bicycle wheels, their outlines slowly becoming more distinct. He’d set the alarm for an early wake-up, unsure how long the drive to school would take him from his new residence. The traffic was a snarl, so he changed his original plan; this took him past the street of his former house, his former wife. He worried that she might also be on her way to work, might pull into traffic next to him, and might glean, somehow, that he’d used his car to commit a crime. As he passed the old neighbourhood, where he and Cynthia had gone for countless walks, he pressed his foot down. At the same time, a long, doglike animal trotted out from the shadows and across the road in front of him.
He applied the brakes softly, as there was distance between his car and the animal. And, because the traffic here was light, he slowed to watch the animal vanish into the undeveloped, treed area to the east, a parcel of land that backed onto his former street and ran parallel to the railway lines to the north. This was part of the city’s hydro corridor and he’d heard that coyotes used it as a natural pathway from city to suburb, staking out all the best access points for garbage, restaurant leftovers, and thick delectable outdoor cats. And this, Leonard was sure, was a coyote: its snout was blunt, its ears were sharp, and its paws were large, though it was emaciated, ridiculed from the inside by bone. He thought, immediately, of an accordion, and even imagined, as the animal loped over the curb, tail between its legs, that he heard an accordion wheeze, an elongated, tortuous note. Its gait, too, was strange, implying a background of smeared, wintry trees, of blurred, cold lakes. And though he had plenty of space between himself and the coyote, his heart had jumped and forearms hardened against the steering wheel, as he was reminded of Cynthia’s dream. But this was not the fulfilment of her dream, wasn’t even a close call. He longed for the melodrama of his own death, how Alison would be wracked by guilt, would be forced to re-evaluate their last night together, and be compelled, if he survived, to straddle him in his hospital bed, force him to rise within the bandages.
31
SPORTS
That week, Leonard visited his mother. He visited his father too, which meant both of them sitting in front of some sports event on TV and resolutely not talking about Mom. This day, late afternoon, his dad was watching an NFL game, caught up in the fourth-quarter drama, the underdog team on the verge of kicking a field goal and defeating their nemesis rivals for the first time in some 15 years. His dad, ever on the side of the underdog and familiar with that team’s unlucky history, broke into expletives when the kicker inexplicably flubbed the easy field goal and bounced the football off the side of the post. His dad’s invective was no match for the reaction of the coach, who proceeded to curse and throw his team’s bench in the vicinity of a television crew who had just finished interviewing a member of his team about how it seemed inevitable they would finally erase the jinx. After the coach had calmed himself and the colour commentator shared his astonishment over the missed opportunity, James informed Leonard that the game was from the day before, that he’d taped it and already knew the result. They spent the next 15 minutes with the sound off, watching the dire pantomime, the despondency of the losers and the back-thumping, grandstanding celebration of the winners. Leonard did not ask his father why, since he already knew the outcome, he’d reacted with such anger at the failed field goal. And why, yesterday, he hadn’t watched the game when it was live.
After an hour with his father, Leonard made his way to the nursing home section of the facility, steeling himself for unpleasantness, for the pantomime of mortality that was playing out every minute in nursing homes around the country, a sort of slow-motion, drug-addled descent into feebleness, a drama that was like a demonic parallel to the seemingly purposeful universe of athletics, in which people let themselves believe in the body’s sovereignty.
32
SONGS OF THE BIRDFACE
His mother was in the third floor common room, a square, bright space with green tiled floors, a long table, drifting chairs and in the corner, a fat television. Two antique women watched from wheelchairs, and, just inside the entranceway, was a man flat out on a stretcher, unable or unwilling to prop himself up, but augmenting the soundtrack to the sitcom with a constant, low-level moan. Another man, his back to the TV, leaned on a walker, one hand propping him there, the other engaged in a furious patting motion.
Leonard found his mother out of the television’s range, in a chair against a wall. The chair was a clinical apparatus, thickly padded with a tall back and, in front, a crescent-shaped metal tray, locked in position so the occupant was unable to rise or fall. When Leonard walked close, the pride he’d felt on discovering that his mother was beyond the ring of TV viewers gave way to distress.
She looked unhappy, one of her hands twisted awkwardly behind the tray, the other clutching a child’s plastic cup with straw and lid. Her legs were twisted too, pressed up against the tray bottom. Before he spoke, Leonard pulled up a chair and sat. In response, his mother managed to sit up a little, drop her legs and extend her cup toward him. But no recognition altered her expression and he had the feeling she repeated this gesture to anyone who ventured near. When he spoke, though, her face brightened, and she said: “Hi, hi.” She’d recognized him but he wasn’t sure how specific her recognition was. “Hi Mom, how are you?” he asked as he helped her free her hand. It took concentration to stop himself recoiling at her bony, waxy fingers. Then she said: “Leonard.”
She continued smiling but he couldn’t think of what to say, nonplussed by the way her eyes searched his face. He had the sense that, moment to moment, she was forgetting who he was. He suddenly saw himself as an apparition, receding high into a corner of the room, then drawing close again, receding, and so on, a ghost his mother strained, minute by minute, to identify. And this was precisely what she was to him: this waxy, pale, collapsed and collapsing woman kept alternating with the mother he used to know, vibrant, dark-haired, with dark curious eyes, but even in his happy memories with circles under them. But he didn’t allow this younger version to remain for long. He kept dismissing her, as if her reality was a lie, an invitation to anguish. Focusing on the old woman allowed him to spurn the motion of time, its enervating cruelty. Its hunger. He felt some solace in imagining that his mother had always been like this.
Close by but also outside the television circle, a portly woman in a too-tight brown track suit stood erect behind her walker. Her face was parrot-like, chin and mouth jutting out below a small nose and recessed eyes. As he watched her – it was hard not to stare at these people, each one his or her own unique disaster zone – her eyes bulged.
She began to sing a song Leonard didn’t recognize, and his mother said loudly: “Oh, here we go again.”
And as if in contrapuntal response another woman, in a wheelchair across from the vocalist, emerged from her blur of infirmity to shout: “Oh, that’s really good, I was hoping you’d sing that again, beautiful. We all love hearing your road kill voice, we’re hoping you’ll sing the score of Oklahoma, or maybe Kismet, if you’re not in a cornfield mood. Just be sure you pass out the strychnine so I can kill myself first, you whore. You ain’t no Edith Piaf.”
Leonard laughed, but had to stare hard to see the source of the voice.
“Oh, shit, I don’t need poison; I’ll just listen closer.”
She was tiny as a doll, her pale legs like two loose threads, running shoes dangling at the ends. Her night-gowned torso was so shallow that it looked like a pattern on the chair’s back. Her whole head was spotty, an unscrubbed potato; she had glassy eyes and a little tuft of white hair above her brow.
“Keep singing, bitch, the day’s not shitty enough.”
And there was a festering strip of red between her chin and nose, thin slice of meat: her mouth.
“How about The Sound of
Mucus ... I don’t mind if you wreck that shit ...”
But her voice was clear and loud and, as she ranted, Leonard had trouble placing the powerful voice with the ruined body.
“Oh, Jesus on the bleeding tree, make it cease.”
Leonard could tell that her spirit was all irony, that her wit required no wheelchair. He took some comfort in the idea that this duet went on every day and noticed that the other patients didn’t react. Over the next few weeks, Leonard saw that signs of life and exuberance were ignored as much as signs of death and decay, as if the evidence of former passion was, in the current environment, too much to bear. Even members of the nursing staff hardly blinked when the potato-head woman went into one of her tirades, as if this show of vitality was just so much spittle, another drool chain.
The surreal duet between the two women (snatches of warbling melody, explosions of profanity) upstaged Leonard’s visit with his mother, for which he was grateful – mostly, his mother didn’t speak and he could never think of anything to say. He could have wheeled her back into her room, avoided the potato-head rants, the songs of the bird-face, but the prospect of silence was worse. After half-an-hour of grinning and holding her hand, Leonard pecked her on the forehead, and said goodbye.
He told her he’d see her in a couple of days, to which she replied: “Okay.”
His sadness was mitigated by the knowledge that the hour was approaching when all the residents of the nursing home would be put to bed, and he feared that if he stayed too long he’d have to help. He didn’t know this for sure, but assumed this place, like most nursing homes, was understaffed, and that there might be a tacit understanding that any relatives present during feeding time, bathing time or bedtime, would be expected to pitch in. Leonard couldn’t.
As he made for the elevator, he didn’t look back, refusing another glimpse of his mother marooned in her chair, one of her hands on top of the restraining tray, the other behind it again, twisted.
33
HEADLESS
“So, what’s the difference between a symbol and a motif?”
Leonard sat on the edge of his desk, reminded of his visit to the nursing home the night before as his students resembled the residents there, most of them slumped or slouched or almost completely absorbed by their desks, a similar vacancy in their eyes. No sign of youthful vitality here, thought Leonard. Except of course for Jessica Stiles, who sat upright in the middle row directly in front of him, and whose hand invariably shot up at the mere hint of a question. She was blonde, thin, sharp-featured, her hair teased upward. He always had a sense she was trying to compensate for the class’s indifference but her perkiness and obsequious enthusiasm made Leonard slouch a little himself. He found himself wishing she were more like one of her peers – lights off, nobody home.
“Yes, Jessica, go ahead,” he said.
“A motif is something, a symbol, that repeats over and over, in a story.”
He was surprised she hadn’t gone further. “Yes, but why? What is the writer doing through this repetition?”
She answered so immediately that he realized that she’d probably held back, taking some pleasure in the back-and-forth of their discussion. As she spoke, half rising from her seat, Leonard had a vision of her in later years, unlucky in love, frustrated at the simplicity of men, lonely in her need to be engaged, tasting bitterness rather than the grand tartness of words, clean argument.
“I think he’s telling us something about the continuity of life, of describing a certain image through time while the world around it changes.”
“Why ‘him’?” Leonard asked, being perverse. “Why not ‘she’?”
Jessica’s brow wrinkled. “What? Sorry, what do you mean?”
“You called the writer ‘he’. Why assume the artist is male?”
Scowling with her face and shoulders, she said: “Because in this case he is. We’re talking about a specific author, aren’t we? J.D. Salinger? We’ve been discussing a particular book. What are you talking about?”
“Well, I thought I was referring to the use of motifs by writers in general, so why assume ...”
Then the squawk box crackled so loudly that everyone jumped, the first real wave of life in the classroom. After the blast of static, the students slumped again. Then, the voice of Dolores, the gruff school secretary, buzzed the room.
“Mr. Edison, sorry to disturb, there’s a parent here wants to see you.”
He had to suppress his annoyance, though the only one paying attention to his reaction was Jessica, who was scowling more completely, lifting her pale knees against the bottom of her desk, anxious to resume their discussion.
“That’s dandy,” Leonard said. “I’m in class. Teachers do teach in this school. Tell them to make an appointment, unless they can wait for two hours.”
There was a moment of silence, then a humming of voices, a scraping as if someone was moving a chair, a crinkling as if someone was opening a gift, a coughing as if someone was dying. Then Dolores’ voice again.
“Never mind. Sorry to bug you.”
The PA crackled and boomed. Leonard had lost track of what they’d been discussing, looked at Jessica, asked her where they’d left off. She folded her hands over her notebook, pursed her lips and tilted her head to one side in a stagey pout. They’d been talking at cross purposes. Then he remembered; she saw this, and began.
“I’d never assume any artist was a man. I’m not being sexist. I thought we were discussing the specific details of ...”
“Sorry, dear, you’re right. I was assuming ...”
“Dear? Isn’t that sexist?”
Leonard contemplated the PA interruption. This rift in the pattern of things, this untimely parental visit, seemed ominous and Leonard had the impression that Jessica’s annoyance had something to do with it, as if she sensed that things weren’t quite right with him, with her teacher; that it was a portent of something that might compromise his teacherly responsibilities and by extension the sense of self she was constructing in his class. He was concerned and cornered.
But he managed to say, the strangled quality of his voice causing some of his students to look up: “You’re right again, Jess, it was sexist. I apologize. Now, let’s do some reading, shall we? Some silent reading, on from chapter 12.”
Leonard noticed that some of his students had already gone away; white wires trailed from several pairs of ears. He did a little dance to get their attention, told them they needed to turn off their iPods.
“I’m not speaking to hear my own voice,” he said.
A cell phone trilled the old Hockey Night in Canada theme and Leonard watched as Tanya Tumampos, a Jamaican girl with beautiful cornrows and somnolent eyes, wrestled the silver slice from her pack, began to speak into it.
“Tanya, turn that off, we’re in the middle ...”
“Me mum, sir, an emergency.”
“If it’s an emergency, she can phone the office.”
She turned away from Leonard, hummed into her hand: “Yes, yes, yes, I’ll pick him up, Marvin’s no business dare today, but I got da rugby mom, ah, ah, shit, yes, yes, I come right in when you dropped me, why you don’ believe? Yes, yes, later.” She clicked it off, hid it again. Sat for a moment staring at Leonard, then said: “Sorry sir, mum needs ta know I’m safe.”
Leonard, imitating, poorly, a Jamaican accent, said: “Better phone her back, ten, ‘cause ya teacha’s bout ta strangle ya.”
“Haha, funny sir, but funny more ‘tis Jimmy dere. He’s filmin’.”
Leonard turned to see Jimmy Gallagher, a red-haired ADHD kid who was usually, and mercifully, heavily sedated, replaying the scene on his cell and happy to share it. Leonard watched a headless version of himself threatening a student, in a faux Jamaican accent, with death. But what disturbed him wasn’t his words or tone, how they might be taken out of context, but how in profile, his stomach protruded above his belt.
“Clearly the man is violent and racist.”
“Hey,
Jimmy, you can’t even see my face. At least get my name right when you play it for your parents.”
34
SNOW
After class ended, and after Jessica had left the room without saying goodbye, unusual for her, Leonard hurried to the main office to get more information about the parent who’d visited.
“I knew you were in class, but he was insistent,” Dolores told him. “I gave him my best dirty look. Then he said he had to go. Wouldn’t say what it was about. He left a note; I put it in your mailbox.”
There was a hard hieroglyphic on the post-it note, a tiny scrawl that resembled a crushed insect, pressed almost right through the paper: Frank Corvu. 531-2223. Don’t ignore this.
Alison’s father had come to Leonard’s school. To his place of work. Whatever had been said between father and daughter seemed to have inflamed things. The man was upping the ante, coming to the place where Alison had first met Leonard, as if returning to the scene of a crime. How appropriate that he sabotage Leonard here, perhaps suggesting to Leonard’s employers that the liaison between his daughter and Leonard pre-dated Alison’s graduation from high school. Leonard knew that, with these kinds of accusations, there was often an infernal logic of where there’s smoke, there’s fire. But Alison’s father had left without confronting Leonard or speaking with anyone, so it was easy to conclude he was bluffing, trying to raise the level of his opponent’s discomfort. Leonard couldn’t know how far he’d push it.
After his final class of the day, Leonard ran into Mavis Grace in the English office, where she was photocopying an Escher image of a hand drawing itself. They had the room to themselves, the sound of the photocopier to mask their voices.
“Mavis, Alison’s father came here today ... to the school.”
Mavis dropped the pile of Eschers, stepped closer and put her hands on his arms.
