Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  Allan then fell quiet, and said that they don’t have to talk about it, that he was thinking about it and maybe this wasn’t a good idea. She laughed at him.

  “It’s too late for that,” she said. “Go. Say it. What happened.”

  The circumstances surrounding his crisis involved a volunteer program called Practicing Friendship, where he and another person (a girl of course, named Irma) helped socialize the mentally handicapped. Allan, still fluent in the nomenclature, said they were neurodiverse, and each had a particular configuration of disabilities, clustered around some central shortcoming. Said they were good kids—interrupting himself to say that they were actually adults, a crucial point to his story—and that he loved them. Really, truly loved them.

  “They were such beautiful little guys, Maggie,” he said. “I can’t even explain how good they were.”

  There was something about the way she had forced him to talk about it that had also ruined things, Maggie understood. She had broken this ritual, too. She was now an inquisitor instead of counsellor. Hearing him struggle to begin made her feel sick, and sad.

  When he told the story, she saw it, clearly:

  Allan and this girl—who Maggie cast, in her mind, as one of his exes, the really skinny one with jet-black hair, the one even she hadn’t liked—sitting at a restaurant opposite two kids with Down’s syndrome, talking with them in full, clear sentences, helping them learn what it was like to have friends outside of their caretakers and parents. Though he didn’t mention them right away, she envisioned the parents, too. Ordinary people, just like her and Michael, struggling with a child who had ended up so different from what they had imagined, and these two college kids, Allan and Irma, showing up to their house to take their son or daughter away. They did this for an entire semester, not for any kind of extra credit or anything, but just because Irma said it was a good thing to do, and convinced Allan to take part.

  He explained that the lives of the two kids were happy, that they were well taken care of, but that the things we all take for granted were closed off to them. Getting and keeping a job was so difficult and required so much effort on behalf of their parents that it seemed like it was never going to be a reality. Simple things, like the freedom to move through the world like anyone else, on their own, going here or there, was impossible.

  “And the most important things, things that are so easy for the rest of us,” he said. “Or, well, pleasure.”

  When he said this, Maggie felt her stomach turn. Briefly, for a moment, she really hated him. Hated him for bringing this to her.

  What did you do, Allan?

  “Do you want to tell me this?” she asked instead.

  Allan had thought about it, then answered after a moment. This was before Maggie had decided to speak frankly with him, before she thought she could make a change in him.

  “I want to tell you, or else I wouldn’t have said anything,” he said. “But if you don’t want me to talk about this, I won’t anymore.”

  Something about this had sounded like a threat, an end to things. This also took place during the period when she believed these calls could revert back to what they were before, just quick pleasantries to maintain some tenuous connection between them. She saw then that she might need to take all of it, or none at all.

  “No,” Maggie said, smoothing her pant legs, “go ahead.”

  The rest of the story wasn’t as bad as she’d allowed herself to imagine, but it was bad.

  On one of their outings, they had taken the boy and the girl, Roberta and Joey, to their school. They had been asking, for weeks, about what university was like, and Allan and Irma had promised to show them. They showed them Irma’s dormitory, the classrooms, the student union building, the elevators, the cafeteria, and, in a moment of youthful joy, Allan had taken them to some weird, secret place he had found. A section of the school, an underground passage from one building to another that was going to be transformed into something else, some big idea by the new university president to bring them into the future. It had been reduced, temporarily, to a locked set of doors (which could be yanked open with the right amount of force) leading down to a grey cement passageway. There was nothing remarkable about it, Allan said, except that it was forbidden, and dark, and lead to an old security door which wasn’t supposed to open anymore.

  When they were underground, walking carefully out of the daylight and into the dark, the girl had remarked that she was scared, and the boy said he would hold her hand, then asked for permission from Allan to do so. Allan and Irma said they could, and then, after a moment, the girl asked if they could kiss each other.

  Allan summarized it:

  “We didn’t do anything,” he said. “At most, we helped them do what they already wanted to do.”

  Maggie took a short breath and struggled to imagine what precisely this meant.

  Allan’s failure to elaborate made it worse.

  She imagined all degrees of it, from the two of them acting as lookouts while the pair went at it, to Allan and this girl she didn’t know helping them out of their clothes, all the way to some instruction, the unrolling of a condom and lining up of male and female parts. Maggie exhaled forcibly.

  Allan clarified that they were in love, that he and his volunteering partner had noticed it the first time they got together, the way they looked at each other, the way they each asked about the other when they were absent.

  “That’s important,” he said, “that wasn’t us putting it on them either.”

  “I see,” Maggie said.

  She could. She imagined this coupling on a dirty floor, amongst dry leaves and beer bottles, graffiti, construction dust blotted on bare asses, grime on knees.

  Allan cleared his throat.

  He forgot to add that they were there during a rainstorm, that there was an inclement weather warning, and the power had been cutting in and out at the school. It was the weekend and no classes were in session, but the weather meant the school was going to shut everything down, lock everything up. They were caught when, as part of the routine security duties, a guard unlocked the door, stepped over the caution tape, and checked in the little bunker.

  He found them, Allan said, as they were finishing up.

  Maggie could contain nothing.

  “Fuck, Allan.”

  “I know how it sounds,” he said.

  They weren’t caught then, he explained. They left quickly with the guard trundling after them as they made their way to the car. They went to the mall, instead, where the power was still on, and tried to pretend the day was still an ordinary one. The trouble came to them later, over the course of weeks, after the guard announced what he had seen; his supervisor decided to look into it, and a whole series of events came together. Allan said that the thing he thinks about now—the funniest thing—is that fucking happens on a university campus all the time. Everywhere. That if they had stumbled across he and Irma mid-act, it would be something they received a stern warning about. They would have been shooed away, and there would have been laughter, blushing. It wouldn’t have meant a thing, he said.

  “But the people who don’t get to do something like this,” he said, “the people who deserve to do it most. If you let them, if you help them, suddenly it’s wrong.”

  Then it was Maggie’s turn to say nothing, to sit stiffly in the closed-off section of her world and wait for more. She understood what he meant, intellectually, but her reaction was visceral. She was repulsed, not even by his actions but by his lack of remorse for it. She imagined the parents again, sitting in their homes, waiting for their special, needy children, unaware of what her brother had them doing. Did none of it seem wrong to him, in the least?

  Of course it doesn’t.

  It all came together when the university identified Irma, and then Allan, and then contacted the parents, who got the truth out of the kids, and th
en the police got involved. No charges were laid, and so they occupied no courtrooms over this, but expulsion, from school, their volunteer program, and from the lives of Roberta and Joey, was automatic.

  More silence on the line. Both Allan and Maggie’s.

  “Well,” she said finally. “That’s really something, Allan.”

  Her compassion, the kind she had put on and worn for the first big call, was gone. She couldn’t hide it. In his silence, Allan was sensing it. Then he said:

  “Sorry.”

  In Maggie’s mind, the story ended there, with the secret becoming known, punishment and lifelong consequences for Allan. She even saw, then, that this was what all the freewheeling, travelling bullshit had been about. Running away from things. But Allan had some other epilogue to the story, some part that he had been telling himself, or thinking about, for ages. It actually made Maggie think of the woman and her suits. He had been building a structure around this part of himself, a vantage point he could stand on to regard it from.

  The epilogue was that after they were underground, when they went to the mall and were all sitting together at the food court, Roberta and Joey wandered off while he and Irma sat worrying about what had happened. They weren’t paying attention for a moment or two, he said, and when they did, they saw the two returning from Dairy Queen, each holding something. Hot dogs, each of them adorned with their particular favourite condiments. Just mustard for Allan, sweet relish and ketchup for Irma. This was Allan’s takeaway from it.

  “They had gone up there, recalled and discussed what the two of us liked based on some other time we had hot dogs, and got it right. Ordered, paid for it with money their parents gave them, then brought them over.”

  More silence, then Maggie spoke.

  “Well, what does that mean, Allan?”

  Allan sounded as if he was beginning to become frustrated.

  “It means that they saw we were sad, and they tried to make us happy. And that they managed, immediately after having this—whatever it was—this experience, to do something they had never done before.”

  A pause.

  “So it was a breakthrough,” she said.

  “It was a breakthrough,” he said. Now he really was frustrated.

  “Because of you.”

  “No, not because of me. Because of it.”

  It, she supposed was sex. The thing they deserved, or that Allan thought they deserved, as if the act alone was a purifying. She thought, one more time, about the parents, and what that must have been like. Sitting with the boy or the girl, looking at their faces and making them say what had happened. She imagined tears. There must have been, she thought. How could there not be? She saw, immediately, that whatever he was doing now, whatever this new job was or wasn’t, was a continuation of this same impulse. To fix others, somehow, with sex or love, or some imitation of it.

  She wanted, when this call was done, to do like he did, and say she had to go, to leave abruptly, to stab him with her disgust. She wanted, suddenly, to yell. She had questions, and accusations, too many to list. If he had been even a little repentant, maybe there would be acceptance. But he had none, and so she had none.

  After a deep inhale and a trembling exhale, she managed to stay the course and declare what she had declared before. Her gratitude to him. This time it wavered.

  “Thank you for telling me that,” she said.

  After they said their goodbyes and she brought the phone back to the cradle, she stood before the phone, feeling empty. No one was around again, except for the dog, who looked at her, side-eyed, then circled away.

  ***

  The call about the older woman—about Allan and their neighbour—had elicited sympathy from Maggie at a pivotal moment, just as she was settling on just how disturbed her brother was, when she was building a case inside herself for why she could no longer keep his story to herself. She was imagining a debrief with her husband, a sober tell-all at the kitchen table where it was finally her turn to confess, to him.

  It was weeks after the stuff about the school and the kids, when it felt like maybe he was all out of things he needed to break to her. Instead, she was learning things, strange things, about her brother. That he sometimes, rarely, saw auras around people. Most, he said, were brown, or brown-green.

  “Cool,” she said, unable to come up with anything else. “Awesome.”

  Schizophrenia?

  She also learned that when he was with his neighbours, the people who occupied the place below his flat, he had gotten into their books about cutting-edge science, and now held strange beliefs about diet and exercise, that all he ate was fat these days. He had some ideas about gut flora and the microbiome, and said that your stomach has the second most neurons in the body after the brain, and that your gut really can think, and think good things when you’re not. He said that it felt like his insides were sparkling, like biolumenscent lakewater, which made her think again of the dead pedestrian’s insides. He said that when he started getting really healthy it was because he was letting go of things, and that when he let them go, he could feel it in his microbes.

  “Letting go of them,” she said. “More like giving them to me.”

  She was also no longer able to contain her questions or thoughts, and they came out of her as they appeared in her mind, in real time. Her glibness was a defense against him, a way to criticize him and protect herself from her own worry, which was suffocating. He took this change well, however, and even seemed to appreciate her for it. He laughed at that one, and she frowned.

  It was this same glibness, looking again at the junk cluttering the space over the stairs, that brought on the admission about the neighbour. He was talking about a seventy-year-old client and she wondered out loud:

  Are you even attracted to these old women?

  His answer was that it didn’t matter. Some of them were going to die, and soon. He was being good to them, he said. He also said that he had always been attracted to older women. That was when she learned that the first woman he was with was three—no, four—times his age.

  Maggie felt her stomach tighten again. This was a trespass, she understood, well beyond the boundaries she was comfortable with. If sex had become work, that was fine, but the other kind, the private kind, wasn’t something she needed to know about. This was like his other story, she saw:

  We’re going under the school again.

  “I do not want to hear about that,” she said. “Jesus Christ, Allan.”

  “Okay,” he said, and laughed.

  Maggie felt her cheeks flush, and she squeezed the phone cord as if it were his throat.

  “Are you just fucking with me here? What’s the point of saying this to me?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess this stuff’s been building up inside of me for I don’t know how long.”

  All at once she felt crushed by him, by the weight of his demands for her, and her anger came back again. Then she said another thing that she had only thought before.

  “You should see someone,” she said. “Have you ever thought about that? Someone to talk to about this stuff? It sounds like there’s a lot.”

  “There is a lot,” he said, “I never talk to anybody about this.”

  “That’s my point,” Maggie said. “That’s exactly my point!”

  Then, Maggie thought about all the women, all the older ones, who were around when he was younger, and what he’d said about age. His statement had become a math problem her brain tried to solve without her knowing, and she realized her curiosity had overpowered her disgust.

  “Who?” she asked.

  “Linda,” he said. “Mrs. Field.”

  Then came the sympathy. Mrs. Field, with her pushcart she took to the groceries and her little smashed-faced dog strolled past the window of her mind. However old she was when he lived in the neighbourhood meant he was talk
ing about being fourteen or something. If the thing with the kids at the school wasn’t quite a crime, this one was, but she saw that Allan had been the victim.

  “That’s…not okay, Allan,” she said.

  Now she was thinking of her own daughters and worrying, once again, that they might have somehow heard their uncle say this. She was also thinking about them and the neighbourhood, and the distance between them and neighbours. A small distance with only glass and doors and cheap Gyproc walls separating them.

  “It’s not what you think,” he said, which was stunningly similar to how he had talked on the college call.

  “I’m sure it’s not,” she said, then felt heat come up from her stomach and into her face. “I’ve got to go.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  She hung up without having to hear more, and decided that this was the end.

  She completed the laundry, swept and mopped the kitchen floor, walked the dog. She thought about her brother, but also the dead person again. Then, hours later, she prepared dinner with her feet still in her pantyhose, still in the wrinkling dress she had worn to the sermon, still thinking of the same picture in her mind, of an old man’s open mouth, and open body.

  After dinner she drew a bath, drank wine in the tub, and went to bed at seven. Later she woke up with the lights still on, and Michael standing in the doorway of the bedroom.

  “I thought you were going to fix this,” he said.

  “I am,” she muttered.

  They looked at each other, and he shut off the lights.

  ***

  The next week, she picked up and stood in the hallway near the stairs, in full view of everyone.

  “There’s going to be some ground rules to this,” she said. “You can talk about your life or your work or whatever, but I can’t keep hearing this shit.”

  On the other end, she imagined Allan shifting uncomfortably. She imagined him in his apartment, which she had never seen. Instead, she saw his room, the one he’d had as a child. She remembered his drawings, on the walls, of superheroes he had come up with. A quiet place, filled with Lego men, standing proudly on the dressers, the nightstand, his desk, and shelves. A yellow-headed army holding spears and swords and rayguns and banners. She imagined his face, like theirs. A blank stare and a line for a mouth.