Wandering the Earth: A Selected Stories Sampler

by Michael Bryson

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Tell me.”

  She crossed her hands on the bar, leaned forward on her elbows. Pushed her face toward him.

  They met at university. They were friends before they were lovers. He was studying to be a teacher, but dropped out before he finished his degree.

  He grew up on a farm, the grandson of Russian immigrants. His parents were deeply religious. After high school he spent a year in town living above a convenience store, working odd jobs, and trying to bed the girl his landlord hired to work at the store on weekends.

  “I felt free for the first time in my life,” he told Cynthia, “but I had no direction.”

  He enrolled in university. Two‑and‑a‑half years later he ran off to Prague. Barriers were falling. Commentators proclaimed “the end of history.” The Berlin Wall, reduced to fragments, was stuffed into two‑inch square boxes and sold to tourists. Everything, anything, seemed possible, and he felt sure he would find his new self in the ruins of the Old World.

  “I met this girl. She worked at the hostel where I first stayed. She was wonderful, beautiful, articulate, talented. She seemed to know everything. I was wide open for new experiences, and I fell hard for her. She was like no one I had ever met.”

  “Who was she?”

  “If I knew, I’d tell you.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Do you believe in love?” he asked.

  “Love at first sight you mean?”

  “Total blinding dependency.”

  She laughed. “Not if you put it like that.”

  “That’s how it was with this girl in Prague. All I knew was I needed her, and I didn’t know who she was or why she ought to be so important to me. I didn’t know if it was her or if it was me. So when it didn’t work out, I fell apart. My insides burned, just raged. I spent seven days in my room and drank sixteen or twenty bottles of wine. Then I came home and married my wife.”

  “For the safety,” Cynthia said.

  “Something like that,” Jerome agreed.

  “You still haven’t told me why she left.”

  So he told her. He told her, and asked for his bill, and she slipped him her phone number.

  “Call me,” she said. “You tell interesting stories.”

  Jerome entered the bar. It was early yet. The room was barely half full. He found a table with a view of the door and a view of the bar. He lit his cigarette and tried to imagine the scene at home: his father in the hospital; his sister and her husband; his brother. So it’s almost over, he thought. His father had asked for him, his sister had said. The order had been given: Tell Jerome to come. The prodigal son. Come, Jerome. He wants to see you. I can’t. I have nothing to say.

  Two weeks earlier his sister had called. They had argued.

  He said: “He always needs to be right. I can’t breathe in that house.”

  She said: “He isn’t any more righteous than you, Jerome. Think about what it’s like to be between you.”

  He couldn’t. He couldn’t bend. He couldn’t imagine reconciliation, only recapitulation. He could not — would not — give up his self‑respect, his dignity. The conflict itself. He was who he was because he had flown out of that house, and he would not go back. He would not go back across that barrier, that line.

  “It isn’t possible to say something that is fair to both of you,” his sister had said.

  He said: “Martha, please. Don’t try to guilt me.”

  But she wasn’t. As he sat in the bar, he marvelled at her insight. No one is right. It’s not possible to be fair to both sides at once, when both sides refuse to include the other. Both sides own a portion of the truth, what is real.

  He thought of Dorothea. They had married young, younger than mosT. Her family had been happy with the match, his pleased he had chosen a sensible girl. But had he chosen her? Or had she chosen him? It was true she hadn’t given up on him when he returned from Prague. She had missed him. She saw, he thought, a chance to tame him. In her eyes he was wild. He saw himself as losT. He could not be tamed, only found. Dorothea had found him, and for a while calmed him, but when the shock of failed love wore off, his restlessness returned and grew.

  “I feel like your prey,” he told her in their third year of marriage. They owned a house, two cars, a pool table, and a parakeet.

  One night he drove around the city until dawn, then parked in the corner of an arena parking lot, watched the sun come up, and fell asleep. They tried counselling. They tried pornography. They talked about children, but Dorothea thought children deserved a stable family and told Jerome she was losing confidence in his ability to provide one.

  “Do you still love me?” she asked.

  “It’s not you,” he told her, though increasingly she seemed foreign. He didn’t want the house, the cars, the bird.

  When she moved out, she said, “I don’t understand you anymore.” He put her bags in the car and waved as she drove away.

  He told Cynthia that Dorothea had left because she wanted “the whole middle class schtick, and that kind of life felt like crap to me.” This made sense to Cynthia since she was running from something similar. As he sat at the bar waiting for her, he realized it was the closest thing to a bond they shared — this sense of life being meant for something beyond the world as it had been handed to them. Dorothea, he knew, felt it too, though to her it meant rising above the slings and arrows of every day sadness, protecting your island of self‑constructed perfection. To Jerome it meant finding gold in the dung heap; beauty in the dark tremors of humanity’s struggle. It meant celebrating life as it was — life as it could only be.

  On his first date with Cynthia — the first time they got together away from the bar — she told him what it meant for her: The New Age. An era governed by the Rule of Love. An era dedicated to the worship of Gaia, our mother, the Earth.

  “It’s so simple,” she said. “Let your Spirit Self become your guide.”

  “Is that what you do?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Ever since she was a child she had been working to align her Spirit Self with the natural world. “Of course, when I was younger, I didn’t know that’s what I was doing. I just thought that I liked plants, you know. My mother said I had a green thumb, but I always knew there was more to it. So when I was in high school, this girl explained to me how organized religion was responsible for this belief we have, you know, that humanity is here to control the animals, to exploit nature for its personal gain, and how people are killing the planet; how it’s suicidal, because if we kill the planet then, like, where will we live, right? And now we have global warming, and the ozone hole, and all that, right, but people still don’t get it. They still don’t understand. All things are connected, and it starts with your Spirit Self. Getting yourself right with the universe is the first step. You know what I mean?”

  Jerome nodded. “I think so, yes.”

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  He tried to smile. “I wish I had your conviction.”

  “Do you believe in God?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said, “but not in salvation.”

  “I believe in salvation,” she said, “but not God. Not really.”

  “You’re like my wife,” he said. When she asked him what he meant, he paused, not sure what to reveal. “Dorothea believed in heaven without the judgment, and I suppose I believe in judgment, but not heaven. She left because I couldn’t make her happy, because I couldn’t accept living happily ever after. She thought I was having an affair, but I wasn’t, so I was suffering for something I hadn’t done. Then I said I didn’t see anything wrong with adultery anyway. How can love be love if it’s confining?”

  On the television over the bar, Steve Yzerman scored, pushing the Red Wing
s to a 2‑1 lead over the Maple Leafs. Jerome ordered a beer and asked for a newspaper. He watched a couple of college students play pool. A Pink Floyd song blared out of the juke box. When he was a child, his father read the newspaper aloud at the dinner table. Jerome remembered his father’s clear syllables rising above the clatter of the cutlery: the certainty in his father’s pronouncements about the events of the day, the sharp edges of the old man’s view of the world, and his mother attempting to draw her children into conversation.

  His grandparents came to Canada after Lenin’s revolution. They were thrown off the land by the Bolsheviks, broken in spirit. When they came to the New World, they withdrew from life, tried to lose themselves in God. An immigrant family develops its own myths, Jerome thought, about themselves, the past, their neighbours, the world at large. His father talked about the generous wheat fields of Russia as if he had been there: “The land was golden until the Communists burned it.” His brother found redemption in the cross. Jerome sought something he felt was more important: freedom.

  His beer arrived. He skimmed the newspaper. Stock markets were soaring to record levels. Trouble continued in Iraq, Serbia, the Congo. A two‑year‑old girl had been found wandering the streets of Saskatoon in the middle of a snow storm.

  “Hey, buddy.”

  Jerome looked up. It was one of the college students.

  “Want to shoot some stick?”

  Jerome folded his newspaper, glanced behind the bar for Cynthia. She wasn’t there. Detroit had taken a 3‑1 lead.

  “Sure,” he said, and stood. “Your partner take off?”

  “He has an exam tomorrow.”

  Jerome picked up his beer and followed the student. The table was already set up. Jerome broke. The student won the first game. Jerome won the second. The tie-breaker ended when Jerome sewered with one ball remaining. “Now you owe me a beer,” the student laughed. Jerome waved to the waitress for two more. He sat at the student’s table with his back towards the bar.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Why not?”

  “My father is dying. He’s in the hospital. I came to convince my girlfriend — ex‑girlfriend, really — to come with me to see him. She works behind the bar. What do you think?”

  “She’ll come,” the student said.

  “She won’t.”

  “Why not? It’s an emergency. If she doesn’t, forget her.”

  Jerome said: “The thing is, she left me.”

  “And you want to know why.”

  “I want her back.”

  “For a couple of days.”

  “For a couple of days,” Jerome repeated. Their beers arrived.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” the student agreed. “But what the hell? You got a right to ask.”

  Jerome picked up his glass. “Cheers.”

  “I don’t want you to remember me,” Cynthia had said to him once.

  “What are you talking about?” They were in bed. Heavy rain pounded on the windows.

  “I don’t want you talking about me to other people, other women.”

  “There are no other women.”

  “Not now. Later.”

  It was the only hint Jerome could drag out of his memory that she had moved beyond him. He did not promise to forget her, nor did he probe to find out the source of her comment. What anxiety had provoked it? What fear? What suspicion? What history?

  She had practically moved in with him after their first night together. She brought her books, her candles, her incense. She filled his refrigerator with soy milk and yogurt, his cupboards with lentils and beans. She threw out his bacon, his hamburger, his steaks. He had been in no condition to rebuff her influence. She was in ascension.

  At sixteen, she had left home and moved to the city with her boyfriend. She took the first job she could find, babysitting a neighbor’s kids — Timmy and Sabrina, six and eight. The kids watched television when they weren’t at school. Toys, clothes, old news papers, dirty dishes, video cassettes, and self‑help books filled every corner of the apartment. Their mother was a waitress at a local steakhouse. Soon after Cynthia started watching the kids, their mother began sleeping over at her boyfriend’s.

  “When Sabrina asked me to sign a permission note so she could go on a field trip, I knew it was out of control. My boyfriend was angry, because he never saw me. One day I came home and he was gone.”

  She got a job at a book store, then the job at the bar. Jerome never questioned her interest in him until it was gone. The weekend before the last time he spoke to her, he took her to a play. Students at the university were performing Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? They sat in the second row to the left of the stage. It was the first time anyone had taken her to a play. Midway through the first act she started crying. Jerome noticed this when she reached over and covered his hand with hers. Two lines of tears streamed down her face. When they got to his car, she bit his ear. “I want to fuck you, fuck you all night,” she said. He slipped his thumb inside the back pocket of her jeans. He wanted to believe explanations were unnecessary for them. He wanted to believe they had moved beyond the game.

  Jerome looked up. There she was, her hand on the student’s shoulder.

  “Can I get you boys anything?”

  “No, thanks,” said the student.

  Jerome said: “Cynthia.”

  “How are you doing, Jerome?”

  “I was waiting for you.”

  “Evidently.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing to talk about.”

  “My father’s dying.”

  She bit the end of her pen. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  She paused. “Later,” she said. “Okay?”

  “Okay.” She left.

  Jerome knew it wasn’t much — what Cynthia could do for him — but it was all he wanted. He was glad he came. He closed his eyes and tried to find the dark centre in the vortex of his mind.

  ###

  Watching the Lions

  Maury’s mother called us the “One‑in‑Three.” Inseparable, like the Holy Trinity. One organism with three bodies. United in spirit, united in purpose. We shared all things equally: our love of hockey; a taste for vodka; that warm, tight place Maury’s sister sheltered between her legs.

  For years I did what I could to forget the events of that Sunday afternoon — even when Maury’s sister (Gloria was her name) drifted silently out of this world, out of her pain, after swallowing more than the required dosage of her mother’s tranquilizers just three days before her sixteenth birthday. I was gone by then, out of town, out of province, studying economics, a set of laws I believed were rational; a set of principles I believed had weathered the storms of time.

  Maury informed me of Gloria’s suicide in a letter. “I got her diaries,” he wrote. “They’re gone. Destroyed.”

  It was the only letter he ever wrote me. For years I hid it with my university papers which I kept stacked in a closet, until I dumped them in a recycling bin five years ago. About to get married, I wanted to rid myself of any evidence of my former life. My former lives.

  Maury and I met as children. We lived across the street from each other. Our mothers would pass us back and forth, back and forth, trading diaper duty, nap-time, and mid‑afternoon shopping. When I was old enough to walk to school and my mother returned to work, first as a secretary at our parish, and later as a librarian, I would take myself to Maury’s for lunch and after‑school television. Bob came into our lives a few years later when his family rented a house down the street. His father was a plumber who was perpetually unemployed. His mother worked for the federal government. Bob propelled himself through school on a bevy of scholarships, then landed a tenure track position in the depths of the recession. My mo
ther has never tired of talking about Bob. He had a book out last year about the history of happiness as a philosophical idea. About Maury my mother hasn’t spoken in years.

  Maury dropped out of high school a month into grade eleven. By then he had a steady income selling and supplying drugs to his friends and Junior High kids. He played bass in a band, too, until he tried to organize a coup to remove the singer and found himself tossed out on his ass instead. Our coterie had fallen apart two years earlier. Bob had moved to Toronto to live with his uncle and attend the high school affiliated with the university there.

  After Maury dropped out, he hooked up with a punk band from Halifax who needed a driver for their cross-Canada tour. When he turned up on my door step the following summer, sporting a moustache and beard, cigarette in hand and grinning wildly, he looked ten years older.

  “I’ve been to the mountain top,” he said. “I have been delivered.” The phrase came from Bob. It had been part of our code. The speaker had gotten laid. The speaker had gotten drunk. The speaker had had a cool time. Listener be jealous.

  “Like the mail,” I responded. The standard comeback, though the truth was, Maury’s reappearance made me uneasy.

  The previous week I had run into a girl I knew. Lisa. I ran into her at the mall. She had a job selling popcorn at the cinema. I hadn’t seen her in about six months. She had dropped out of school just before the Christmas exams. I thought maybe she had moved away, but when I saw her in the food court sipping coffee she told me a different story. Hadn’t I heard? That friend of mine, Maury, had made her pregnant. But Maury hadn’t told me. No one had. Maury was known as an easy fuck, and he boasted about many of them, but I had never heard anything about him and Lisa getting together.

  “You’re a mother?” I asked her.

  “No,” she said.

  The next question never left my lips.

  That Sunday afternoon.

  Maury’s parents were out. We were in their basement. Drinking. Gloria sat watching us. She started wrestling with Maury. He held her down. Then it happened.