Al hangs up his jacket and makes straight for the liquor cabinet, pouring himself two fingers of Grey Goose. He takes a quick nip before going to the kitchen and opening the only cupboard with a solid door. From the second shelf, he removes a plastic pill tray and flips the top. He checks that he is on the right day before downing his usual dose: two reds, one chartreuse, one blue.
In the living room, he gives up his stiff body to the loving embrace of his La-Z-Boy, kicking up the footrest. A bluebottle slowly drones across his field of vision, just out of reach. He hasn’t put much of his personality into decorating the place. His style is the generic style of hotel rooms. Only the temporary gives him a sense of continuity and permanence. Too many years on the road. His condo looks more or less the same as it did on the day he bought it, the day he christened the place.
He can still picture the foolscap-size purchase agreement on the kitchen counter. Beside a bottle of Henkell-Trocken and two glasses, courtesy of the real-estate agent. “It was the least I could do,” she said. He had taken the place unseen, while giving her the impression that the speed of the transaction was due wholly to her abilities as a salesperson. He signed on the dotted line. She popped the cork. They drank. They talked about his profession—she was a golf enthusiast. Perhaps she could take a lesson from him sometime? Next thing Al was behind her guiding her arms through the motion of a perfect golf swing. He looked down at the nape of her neck, thought about all the times he had fastened the eyelet clasp on a lover’s necklace. He could still do that. He was sure of it. She leaned all her weight against him. He kissed the sweet spot between her shoulder and neck. A minute later he was fucking her from behind while she leaned on the sparkling stove top. She smelled gamey. He liked that, read it to mean she was acting on pure impulse, that she had not planned on dropping her drawers that morning. She was funny, too, “cracked,” as Newfoundlanders would have it. It was all he could do not to laugh as she began to chant “aha” or “oh-ya” with every thrust. It was a quickie, a Hamburg knee-wobbler, nothing more. And what a gal, he would have said afterwards, a real team player. She even made it look like she came, repeatedly slapping her hand hard on the stove top, leaving a fossil record of overlapping palm prints.
“What kind of stove top is that?” he asked her as he tucked himself in.
“Ceramic,” she said, pulling down her skirt. She turned and kissed him. After, when he pulled away, she looked hard at him, her eyes calculating something she ultimately decided not to voice.
Easy as breathing, he thought as he watched her walk out. What a gal.
He sits up a bit straighter in his chair. The only thing he likes about the condominium is the view of downtown from the living room: descending tiers of black tar-paper roofs and beyond them the harbour, ringed all around with rocky hills. He traces the ragged ridge west to east, to where it dips down to Fort Amherst and the concrete bunkers the Americans built during the war. The entrance to the harbour, the Narrows, gives him a crotch-shaped view of the ocean. Look at it for longer than a few minutes and it turns two dimensional, the pencil-line horizon between the grey North Atlantic and the cloudy sky disappearing.
He is getting a vodka headache, the adult version of an ice-cream headache. His left shoulder feels warm, like he has ripped a muscle. He thinks about the real-estate agent again, his wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am fantasy come to life. It had taken all of five minutes and yet the memory of it stayed fresh. He’d had whole relationships he could barely remember. There were women who wanted to move in with him whose names he now had to struggle to recall. But that red-headed real-estate agent, Mandy, had stayed with him. Her slim waist, the swell of her hips, the tiny stretch marks that were like fine quillwork on her white skin, her bottom fat rippling with each thrust, the slapping sound as they pushed against each other in the final stretch, all of it was on high rotation in his memory. Hyper-sexuality was supposedly a side effect of the medication he was on, as if he needed a boost in testosterone. Truth was, he hadn’t noticed a significant increase.
He watches an arm of fog reach in through the Narrows and another one circle around Cabot Tower. Soon there will be nothing to see but the orange glow of the shipyard floodlights through cotton wool.
“Beef Jerky,” was the phrase that came to Al the first time he laid eyes on little Meth. His caddy was thin and weathered, also sickly looking. He looked like the kind of man who had always done the kinds of jobs no one else would do. But appearances were deceptive. Meth was strong as a horse and had the manners of a gentleman. And he certainly knew the game of golf. There was no one like him on the bag. He could read a fairway and judge the pace of greens better than most professional golfers. Best of all, he was inspirational. Al played better with Meth at his side; something about the little man gave him confidence. The same could be said of their relationship off the course.
When Al had a decision to make, he talked to Meth. It was true when the man was alive and it is still true now.
Meth enters Al’s mind and asks him what he really knows about Freddy. Not much, he has to concede. Their few meetings came about through Lila’s father, Llewellyn. Llew was a big believer in his son-in-law. But Al couldn’t see it.
The word that consistently comes to mind when he thinks about Freddy is “dork.” A classic introvert, Freddy is awkward in social situations, but off-beat enough to be interesting to some, especially those with intellectual pretensions. Freddy is all tangents. His thinking can go in any direction and once he has a few drinks, he tries to be funny. He fails. He doesn’t have the delivery, at least in person.
Freddy is book-smart, at the opposite end of the spectrum to street-smart. Freddy told Al it took three to four years to write a book that the average reader could get through in about ten hours. As far as Al is concerned, this can mean only one thing: real time will always overwhelm a mind like Freddy’s, presenting him with too many variables. Reality is a whirligig of facts, some of them not true. Truth is a feral hog moving fast through the underbrush. Freddy wouldn’t be able to see the trees for the woods, the hog for the hogweed. He doesn’t have the instinct, the gut-sense to separate what is important from what is not. By the time he has figured out what needs to be done, the chance to act will have passed.
At his most cynical, Al thinks Freddy is one of those guys who thinks the world only exists because they think it exists. Al knows the best way to disprove this worldview. A surprise crack from a two-by-four in the back of the head. There are times—as he lies next to Lila—when Al thinks about Freddy and actively plans for that eventuality.
He finishes his glass of Grey Goose and pours another. He promises it will be his last for the evening. Returning to his chair—there’s that damn bluebottle again, this time on the windowsill—he reaches into the side pocket of his recliner and pulls out a pack of cigarettes. It is a recent habit and one he indulges only in private. He hates the chemical taste and the heavy feeling in his lungs. He hates that the first smoke always makes him want to take a shit. He read somewhere that Parkinson’s is less common in long-term smokers than in any other definable group. There is something in cigarettes that protects the group of brain cells the disease targets. He reasons that if smoking can prevent the onset of the illness, it may also retard its development. He pictures his doctor’s disapproving frown and inhales.
The vodka is starting to make him philosophical. If change is the only constant—and he wouldn’t have it any other way—then recently it has begun to happen at Preakness pace. He has read all the pamphlets about his degenerative disorder. He knows he is in the early phase and that things are progressing as expected. He knows there is no cure. His days are numbered, even if that number is still relatively large. The drugs are keeping things under control, but soon they will become less effective and then they will have no effect at all. He will begin to tremble uncontrollably, stumble around, fall over. He will break bones, give himself concussions. A few years of this and he might become desperate enough to go for su
rgery, the kind where they open the top of his head like a hard-boiled egg and probe his brain while he is still awake. The pamphlet says the brain has no pain receptors. How ironic, he thinks. The seat of all feeling can’t feel pain. He pictures himself lying on the table, his head pinned in some kind of medieval hamster wheel. “Doc, touch that spot again, it’s giving me an existential boner.” The thought of being conscious while being operated on is more frightening than the thought of what is to come. He reads this as an indicator that he is still of sound mind.
As the disease enters its later stages, he will be unable to sleep. His face will become a rubber mask. No woman will want to look at him. His speech will become slurred and his ability to voice his thoughts will decay. His talk will become thin and punctuated by long staring silences. People will grow impatient with him. They will start to treat him like a dummy, or worse, they will start to treat him with pity. Maybe he can use this as his final piece of leverage to prise sympathetic women out of their panties.
He is between a rock and a hard place, the rock being his escalating condition, the hard place being surgery. Whenever he thinks of this final option, he pictures a massive poster he saw in the London underground of a cat with a large electrode protruding from its head. The electrode looked like a lawn-mower engine. The cat did not look happy.
Perhaps he should just let the disease take its course. Maybe the end will not be as bad as it looks from the outside. What’s so terrible about forgetting? There are memories he’ll be happy to lose. There might be an aggressive phase as well—perhaps he can use it to settle a few old scores. Assuming, of course, he can still remember who he’s angry with and why. Parkinson’s will make one hell of a defence attorney. Al rocks in his armchair and laughs.
He is drunk. He gets drunk faster these days. He makes a mental note to watch his intake, especially in public. I hope I remember that, he thinks. He stops to consider whether he is mixing up the symptoms of Parkinson’s with some other disease. He had read a bunch of pamphlets all at the same time. Maybe memory loss will not be a factor. Where had he put those pamphlets? Al rocks in his armchair and laughs out loud again.
The room has a slight echo, a sound he always thinks of as the soundtrack of the single life. But this is no time to feel sorry for himself. No time is ever a good time for self-pity. He has much to do if he is going to feather his nest suitably, if he is going to live the dream before it all comes crashing down.
Lila is the ticking time-bomb, the faulty motherboard in the computer. If she gets straight, she will call a halt to everything. Who knows where the bottom is for any addict? Al knows that for him it is way down, the tiny silver trickle at the bottom of the deep gorge. For Lila, it might be the ground under her feet. She was nutty from way back. He knows the job has to go down soon.
“What do you say, Meth?” Al asks the no-one-there. Meth says nothing.
Al drains his vodka and reaches for Freddy’s book, flipping open the first chapter. Better than a sleeping pill, he thinks.
14
THE WEEKS FOLLOWING Lila’s death are hallucinatory: shadow police mooch around my living room, trying to act professional, all the while looking at our stuff, our pictures, and making silent judgements about what they see: the chief officer’s whiskey face in front of mine, his mouth moving as he runs through preliminary questions, the same questions asked over and over again in slightly different forms, as though I were the subject of some marketing survey; the photographer crouching to take closeups from various angles, each blue flash blowing my mind; Lila covered with a sheet—more of a tarp, really, something easily sponged clean when returned to the police station; my nosy bastard neighbours gathered on the street, some of them even following the ambulance crew up the front steps to get a better look. More concrete is the gouge in the wall by the porch door where the trolley-stretcher failed to make the turn cleanly on the way out, the additional weight making the ambulance crew miscalculate. To be in my house is to have these pictures forcibly enter my mind.
So I get out of the house. I walk around the historic part of the city seeing everywhere older streets inside existing streets, house shapes inside existing houses, whole shadow communities lurking in the shade of office towers. Sometimes, majestic shapes from the past, architectural glories bleed through to show the indignities of contemporary design and make short work of the notion that history is a progression, that the generations only improve, that life today is better than it was at any time in the past.
I stumble around the city as though deeply hungover, as though in a fog that has condensed to the point where it is viscous. When people speak to me I experience a sensory disruption that can best be described as a time-delay or echo. Those addressing me have to repeat what they have just said or they grow uncomfortable while they wait for me to answer.
It gets even worse when I am in a public place. I can’t stand to be in crowds, especially indoors where the wash of conversation and laughter induces an anxiety bordering on shock. The bad news of my loss is delivered again and again. In my loneliness and isolation, I can’t believe life is going on all around me, that my personal tragedy means little or nothing to other people, that for some, my sorrow might even be seen as retribution, as payback for the way I have lived.
I am suddenly conscripted into a hidden network, a far flung community of the suffering and the half-dead, the imprisoned and tortured, people for whom time moves at a different pace, who are the emissaries of death among the living.
I can see the dead walking the streets. They are like glass negatives, white in outline compared with the darkly outlined living. The dead always seem to be laughing. As I walk, I have a sense of the past generations, the great mass of them, the once inhabitants of these blueprint buildings.
As the weeks go by, my vision becomes more caustic: trees and rocks bleed through into the urban landscape as shades of greyscale, hills and valleys are revealed, the landscape as it was before the natives and the first white settlers. Below this again is whiteness, like a perpetual winter storm, and under that is a deep calm, like the day after the storm, when the world is virgin white and virgin blue, when the sun is illuminated in gold and casts a glitter over everything.
I have entered a place where what is real and what is unreal make for a single category, a space where illusion and delusion are indistinguishable. Strangely, in this alienating world, I am more at home than I have ever been. My psychologist—whom I will soon meet—will tell me that this is just my mental enactment of a death wish. Left hanging in the air is the thought that I have always been half in love with death.
I do what I usually do when in need of answers; I look to the literature. To categorize my mental state, my bible becomes the Diagnostic Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, Text Revision (DSM-IV-TR).
Am I delusional? If so, are my delusions bizarre or non-bizarre? The non-bizarre variety are characterized as delusions about situations that could occur in real life, such as being followed, being loved, having an infection, or being deceived by one's spouse. Perhaps these are the delusions I have been having all along, which recent circumstances have tipped into the realm of the bizarre—my vision of cities within my city, streets where ghosts walk with the living. Are these visions clearly implausible, not understandable? Are they derived from ordinary life experiences? Is death not an ordinary life experience?
Clearly there is proof that my psychological condition has at least some basis in reality—I need only look at what happened to Al, at what happened to Snuffy, and of course what happened to my poor, unfortunate Lila. Actions were taken. These actions had, and continue to have, consequences. It was not and is not all in my head.
Then again, this may simply be proof of delusional disorder as opposed to psychosis, the former characterised—according to the DSM-IV-TR—by the fact that many of my psychosocial abilities remain intact, as if my delusions were circumscribed.
Is my writing life entirely delusional? And where do empath
y and sympathy fit? How can I state with any confidence that prison life isn’t the nightmare that Snuffy thought it would be. In his first week, he meets a few of his old friends from Brother Rice Junior High. The guards sell him soft drugs. And no one tries to bung-hole him in the shower. His problem—if it can be called that—is the same one shared by every prisoner: he has too many hours to lie on his bunk and think.
I write these lines and the shadowy world bleeds away a little, while the real world gets more vivid. I dip into my store of maxims, the only wealth I carry with me from my childhood: to go through is the quickest way back to health, and to go through, I must walk a mile in everyone’s shoes, beginning with Snuffy.
Like many first-timers, Snuffy makes the mistake of using cell time to reflect obsessively on just how he came to be locked up. The obvious reason—that he was arrested for beating Al Calhoun unconscious, leaving him moaning and twitching like a poorly gaffed seal in the back parking lot of the Harbour Lounge—does not seem to Snuffy to be the real reason. The real reason, he decides, is much bigger, much more mysterious. The job he had planned with Gosse and Al, and everything that came after, these were just recent pieces in the puzzle. The bigger question was why he had become a criminal in the first place. The more he thinks about it, the more he’s convinced there is a single driving motive behind everything he has done.
He considers signing up for PWIR classes.
This year’s Penitentiary Writer-in-Residence is none other than my novelist friend, Ted Gushue.
Snuffy stands before the cork notice board and reads the author’s promotional pitch. Gushue has won a string of awards and one of his books has even been made into a movie. He is also known on the street. As far as Snuffy is concerned, the fact that the writer is a one-time jail bird, a former coke-head client of Gosse only adds to his credentials.
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