The ends justified the means. It was a terrible thing Tom was contemplating, he knew, but if the family were disturbed enough to want to protect themselves, then Tom had done his job. More than that, he went beyond the call of duty to perform his duties and inform the client. If it went as planned Tom would want to tell Wally what he had done. But he knew he couldn’t. If only he could tell someone. Rebecca, sure, but someone in the office. Let them know he wasn’t a lightweight. He would swoop in like a guardian angel and save the family from future and certain financial devastation. He would be invited, the next time around, to macaroni and cheese with the children.
Next, Tom tried to disguise his voice and practiced a menacing glare in the mirror, though he knew he could never let Joe see his face. He tried the Darth Vader voice, but it sounded too much like Darth Vader. He tried Clint Eastwood and that seemed menacing enough. He tried an evil laugh that ended up sounding like a demented Peewee Herman giggle so he scrapped this idea.
The main problem would be how to get Joe out of his house and into Tom’s car. Tom did not have a gun, did not even know where to get a gun. Besides, he did not want to use a gun. He did not want to hurt the man. With a gun anything could go wrong. The point was to disturb, not destroy.
Then, later, he drove out to the billboard and began to make his notes. Under that beautiful watchful eye blinking languidly, he and Rebecca’s plan formulated and took on a life its own. Now, it became no longer a means to Tom’s end, but the very end itself. The kidnapping had to go so smoothly; Tom could not afford the luxury of celebrating the perfect sale. The endeavor would create so much goodwill with the victim. They would be grateful, downright fucking grateful to sign a paper that guaranteed them financial security for their family. Now that they knew how easily it could happen, at any moment. At. Any. Moment. Tom was already practicing the sales pitch once the client was found and returned safely to his home. He rehearsed moving his face around in the side mirrors of the car. He imagined not only the fat commission on the sale, but the adoration of the people in his office. Respect. He wondered if maybe he wasn’t gaining weight and shifted uncomfortably against the seatbelt.
When he had scratched ideas down and brainstormed until he was having trouble with his vision, he hid the folded sheets of paper between the cover of the seat in the passenger side. He couldn’t help smiling a little as he reclined back and pushed the steering wheel as far as it would go away from him. His eyes adjusted, and he gazed at the billboard. The glasses faded in and out three times as he let his mind wander. We help you look better. See? Yes, he did see. Rebecca had cleared it all up for him. The glasses came off. You get a different chick. See?
He was gaining weight. He could feel his stomach straining against the restraint. He shifted comfortably and traced his thumb along the polyester until he found the latch. Just a tiny pressure there and, snip, the belt slurped away. Tom opened his pants to adjust his underwear. Seriously, a little paunch happening there. He pulled up his shirt and moved around until his pants were out of the way. There did seem to be a slight camber in the hairline from his belly button to his pubic hair. He would have to straighten out more to be sure. If the pants were off he would be able to stretch right out in the car, enough to see if he was getting a little pot-bellied. He wiggled his pants and underwear to his knees. He levered the steering wheel as far up as it could go and hoisted his hips to the ceiling.
His plans were suddenly interrupted by flashing in his rearview mirror, lighting up the car interior with red and blue lights, waning and waxing frantically. Aware of his surroundings once more, he tried to stuff himself back into his pants. There were three sharp knocks on his window and then a flashlight beam directly in his face when he turned his head. A muffled voice said something about rolling down the window or getting out of the car. Given the circumstances Tom suspected it was one of the two. And while he preferred the former, the officer was already opening his door.
Tom recognized the officer who stepped back to let him climb out of the car. He pulled up his pants just as the officer recognized him. It was Constable Thorpe. “Holy shit,” he said, and turning to his squad car waved to the driver. “It’s Tom Ryder and he’s jerking off in public.”
“Allegedly,” came a muffled reply, but the good-looking officer stepped out and came over slowly. “What are we up to tonight, Mr. Ryder?”
“It’s not what it looks like,” Tom stammered and could not find the hole in his belt loop. “I was just feeling my body.”
“Ha!” Thorpe shouted.
“No, I mean, my gut. I think I’m getting fat!” Tom said as if he were proud.
The good-looking cop shined his flashlight so Tom could get his belt on properly and then said, “Mr. Ryder look, I think you’re a decent fellow, and your girlfriend is very nice.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t want to have to be a part of an embarrassing situation.”
“I don’t either,” Tom reassured him.
“No of course not.” The good-looking officer went on, “I want you to do me a favour, ok?”
“Me?”
“I want you to go down to a mental health clinic, the one on Queensway. I want you to talk to someone there. If I let you go tonight, will you do that for me?”
“Yes, sure. I mean, yes. Yes,” Tom said, “I will.”
“I am going to check up on that, Mr. Ryder,” the good-looking officer said, already retreating to his car. He was smiling broadly, “We have a deal now.”
“We do.” Tom waved and smiled as cheerfully as he could. As the squad car pulled away the siren let out a quick, deep ‘whoop’ that sounded eerily like laughter from inside the car.
Chapter 11
Tom’s only experience with psychologists was from TV. He was strangely unnerved to find himself in a doctor’s office that resembled any other doctor’s office he had ever been in. There was still a medical examining table with all the accoutrements. There were maps of the human bodies’ various structures: nervous, skeletal, and circulatory. No photos of Freud or Einstein, which always seemed to adorn the walls in Tom’s imagination or an evening program, sitcom or drama.
On the drive over he played out a whole conversation with the doctor in his head:
“Tell me about your mother. Do you love her?” And he even had a Freudian accent. Or one that Tom imagined Freud having.
“Of course, she’s my mother.”
“Did you have a long attachment with her? Let’s say, nursing?”
“What? No! I don’t think so. I mean, I don’t remember it....”
“Hmmm.”
“What are you trying to say, here?”
“Why did they call you Tommy Titsucker in school?”
“What?”
“Everyone has a sexual attachment to one’s mother.”
“Get out of here.”
“After all, she was the first woman to ever spread her legs for you.”
There was none of that. The ensuing session or interview was not what Tom imagined. Mostly the doctor asked him about his sleeping and eating habits and looked him over a bit. It felt like being at the regular doctors, except with more conversation and questionnaires.
“Tell me what happened on the highway the other night, Tom,” the doctor said.
“Nothing much to tell.” Tom felt flush.
The doctor shrugged and held his arms in this position as though he had been frozen that way. And would he ever be back to normal? “There must be some story to tell,” the doctor said, “Otherwise why would Officer Coxcomb suggest you come talk with me?”
“I don’t know, really,” Tom said. “It was a mis- understanding. I was looking at my gut to see if I was getting fat.”
“But you’re not fat, far from it.” The doctor spoke softly and let go his shoulders so he once again looked like a person, a person with a neck at least.
“I know that,” Tom said. “I was hoping I was getting fat, I thought I felt a paunch.”
“You would like to
gain weight,” the doctor seemed to assert.
“So I could feel like I fit in, maybe.”
“Fit in to what? Pants? Are you are looking to gain weight to find a new wardrobe?”
“No, fit in at work,” Tom said, shaking his head.
“You want to fit in at work?”
“No, I don’t really care.” Tom knew he had stumped the doctor. He had stumped himself. The reasonable explanation, once it came from his lips, did not sound so reasonable after all. Why had he been looking at his stomach? At that particular spot. Oh, God, does the doctor know about the billboard?
“Why at that particular spot, any reason?” the doctor said and pretended to be interested in Tom’s blood pressure reading. “That’s an attractive young woman.”
“Look,” Tom said in his sternest voice, “I know what you are getting at, and no, I was not masturbating to the billboard. I pulled over to talk on my cell phone.”
“And look at your belly,” the doctor added.
“Sure,” Tom said. There was no use explaining; these were the basic facts. Perhaps he would have started to masturbate if he hadn’t been arrested, but at the actual point of contact between Tom and the officers, Tom was not masturbating, nor thinking about doing so. Much.
“Do you think there is anything interesting about sitting on the side of the road looking at your belly button, Tom?” the doctor said.
Tom flinched visibly. “Not my belly button!” he shouted, “My belly. Now you’re putting words in my mouth!”
The doctor quickly jotted something down in Tom’s file and then smiled graciously. “Tom, please, let’s not get excited. I’ve hit a nerve and you don’t want to discuss that subject.”
“I don’t really want to talk about it anymore, either,” Tom said and tried to relax. It was like talking to a child, he thought.
“So we won’t talk about it anymore,” the doctor agreed and still smiled. The beard had a streak of silver down the center and added a distinguished flare to the man’s face, so that when he smiled it could easily elicit a smile from Tom or at least put him at ease.
“Alright,” Tom said, “it is a little odd, I can see that. But it’s nothing like the police are making it out to be.”
“Do you often feel people are out to get you in this way?”
“What?”
“Can we talk about the lawn ornament incident?”
The gnome. “I’d rather not,” Tom said. “How do you know about that?”
“Relax, relax.” Calming smile again. Hmm, hmm. “There is no secret plot against you.”
“Ok.”
“But if you did feel that there were, how would it manifest itself?” the doctor said. “Do you think people speak to you through, I don’t know, perhaps the radio?”
“People do speak through the radio,” Tom said flatly.
“Really?”
“Sing too. It’s radio.”
“No, no.” The doctor leaned forward. “What I mean to say is, do you feel that people speak to you personally and directly through the radio.”
“Of course not,” Tom said but felt as though he were lying. Just then, when the doctor asked him that question, Tom’s mind flashed back to the night at the billboard. He had heard his name spoken through the radio. It was no accident and it was no mistake. When the good-looking officer was standing back at his car, Tom could hear the conversation between the officer and his dispatch. The good-looking officer spoke Tom’s full name into his mic and dispatch repeated it back. “Tom Ryder” crackled through the officer’s radio. Tom heard this, but knew that was not what the doctor had in mind at all, so he chose to say nothing about that. It would only confuse the issue. Tom felt he knew what the doctor was trying to do. Tom knew his defects, and psychosis was not one of them. High strung in high school, maybe. There were his pills for that. Depression? Over the years doctors and family had hinted this. Tom did not believe himself to be clinically depressed.
His father, after all, was depressed; his mother and Uncle would admit it without reluctance now, years after his death. He did not take a real interest in anything. It was hard to comprehend his father’s depression, however; Tom remembers the man having hobbies and smiling a lot. He had friends. There was a favorite picture of his father Tom kept. His father has on a hat a la Frank Sinatra, tilted at an angle, smirking. Not the look at all a man who was depressed and had nothing to live for. A man who could have used a tan, perhaps. Maybe a membership to a gym. A fellow that might have looked good in a suit and tie; he had that smile. Or whatever kind of suit. Space suit. Why not? Why not to the moon? One of those men that knew mathematics so well, perhaps, that they knew satellites were the ultimate goal, not a trip to the moon (fly me to the moon).
Tom recalled verbatim his last conversation with his father. He was at university and he called his father on a pay phone down the hall from his dorm room. His father was drinking because Tom could hear Andre Ethier and the Deadly Snakes playing on the stereo in the background. One: His father was so house trained he would have never played his music too loud in the house, not even in the basement, Tom’s mother would not stand for it. Two: Tom’s mother, if she was home would have been swaying to different music upstairs, casting shadows on the things up there and would have certainly been on the phone as well. Three: his father was slurring a little and seemed talkative. Still, Tom liked his father after he had a few drinks. The man loosened up and talked to him as he did when Tom was smaller.
“How’s the dorm?” His father asked for the third time. This time Tom expanded as both he and his father knew he would. Or was it the propensity for drunk people to repeat themselves? Either way it worked, and Tom told his father:
“There is this guy down the hall that’s totally, like, he wants to instill laundry etiquette on, like the whole floor, maybe even the whole dorm....”
“Haha...”
“I know, right. He tells me and anyone that will listen....”
“Which isn’t for probably very long.”
“No, you’re right. But he tells everyone ‘if you have two or three loads that you need to wash, what you should do is wash one load and put it in the dryer but not wash the second set of clothes until half hour later. The washer takes 30 minutes and the dryer will run on the same coinage for 60 minutes. So, your clothes will sit in the washer for an unnecessary 30 minutes while some other fellow could have been utilizing the washer. If, at the end of the first 30 minutes, the washer is still empty you may start your second or third load, whatever the case may be. Even if the next fellow is only 1 minute behind you and puts his clothes in the washer, you both have utilized the washer, the water, and both your expenditures. If you happen to come out on the bottom of this transaction it will not matter, because the law of averages dictates that you will come out, if not on top, then at least even.’ And all that shit.”
“It makes sense.”
“I guess.”
“No, it makes sense.”
“Sure, but the problem is, this guy, the guy with the etiquette capitalist theory, gets extremely angry if he sees a washer and a dryer going at the same time if he is trying to wash clothes. Especially if he finds out it’s the same owner of both the clothes in the dryer and the clothes in the washer. There have been two or three occasions of vandalism and they blame this fellow, that’s what I hear around the dorm. So he flips out and starts doing shit to people that won’t buy into his theory.”
“Which is a good theory.”
“It is a good theory.”
There was a long sigh.
“Why are people like that, dad?” Tom asked.
“I don’t know what to tell you my son,” his father slurred, and his last meaningful words to Tom were: “People are fucked.”
Another memory from when Tom was eight. Four? He must have been six. It came back to him there in the psychologist’s office. His father and mother in the car. Small Tom propped in the middle. No seatbelt, it was the late 80’s. It was some
how different then, there were not enough pictures on the news of children like Tommy lying in the road having been flung through the window of a car. Hit by a drunk driver, which was somehow more accepted then, as well. His father and mother were joking around. They had just been to a garage sale in which, even though Tom was small he sensed his father had been humiliated, and he could sense too that his mother was disgusted by the whole affair. Yet they were trying to keep things light with barbs back and forth, and Tommy sensed the tension and the fun and sat giggling between them.
“It must be so hard to walk upright with no bloody spine,” his mother said, and his father smiled and shook his head. “I mean really?”
“It was only two more dollars.”
“The price said $5.”
“Seller’s remorse,” his father said.
It was a fondue set, presumably in the family for over half a decade. Tom’s father took it to the man with the cash box set up on a wooden table near the garage door. He produced his five dollars and said: “I’ve been looking all over for one of these.”
“Oh, wow!” the man said placing his hand over the cash box and eyeing the five dollars suspiciously. “How did that get in here? This must be a mistake.”
“Someone put a price on it.” Tom’s mother said, suddenly appearing at her husband’s side, Tom felt his father stiffen a little.
“Well,” the man said slowly, “the wife and I really do like the fondue. And it’s been in this family for, shit, I don’t know, years at least.”
“Oh, well, that’s too bad, we have been looking at getting a set.” Tom’s father placed the box holding the fondue set on the table. The box showed many people smiling and sticking forks of meat into boiling chocolate/cheese/whatever your imagination wants! Try fruit for a fondue.
“Yeah, I know, but...” The man rubbed the back of his neck and grimaced long and hard. “Ah, hell, I tell you what. Six bucks and it’s yours.”
It's Called Disturbing Page 12
