I stood him in the bathtub, naked. My fingers went wherever ivy lurked: toes, thighs, belly. Felt odd doing that but he was so trusting. I worked lotion into his back. Cleft of his bum. I felt so close to him. A casual intimacy I thought could go on forever. To this day I’ll feel it: a phantom thack-thack on my bare palms. My fingertips so close to his heart.
Only Danny and Cassie Mulligan show up to my Bullying Symposium.
Mulligan had sat down with Trupholme’s class to talk about Internet predators. Sadie in particular. One of the more awkward experiences of his life, he told me. “Soon as I spoke her name, this eerie stillness. Like that movie, Village of the Damned. Kids with glowing blue eyes and test-pattern faces.” Afterwards he’d handed out invitations to this Symposium, which had been my idea.
My son’s school days have since turned hellish. He was the one who ratted out “Secret Sadie” to the grownups. Now he was being teased mercilessly in the insidious ways modern technology affords: IMs, text messages. Someone spat in his pencil case. When I picked him up yesterday he had a wad of grape gum stuck in his hair. It took half a jar of peanut butter to untangle it.
During recess I’d idled in my car overlooking the playground. Dylan ate Nerds alone on the teetertotter. Behind the fence stood a woman. Rainboots and an umbrella on a sunny day. A man dressed like that you’d think was a molester. Could be her womb was barren. I trailed her down the street before recognizing her as Patience Nanavatti, the fireworker’s daughter.
On the day of the Symposium I lead the Mulligans into my family room. Finger sandwiches in a ruffled plastic tray. Dylan’s on the sofa. No cape. The other day I asked after his new persona. He said, “I’m nobody. Just stupid old me.” His mother’s looking into having him finish the school year in Toronto.
“You should’ve called everyone’s parents, Nick, to make sure they got the invites.”
Mulligan’s the sort of guy who, you’re waiting for an elevator, he’ll push the button again. Even though you’ve already pushed it. Even though it’s lit.
The DVD I’d taken out from the library is called: Bullies: Pain in the Brain. The cast is comprised of little Aryans. An omniscient narrator asks questions:
“Jonathan, is your gang fun?”
Jonathan: “It’s super. I used to be in a different gang but they started bullying. I didn’t feel right about that, so I left and started my own gang!” Calliope music kicks up.
Jonathan dances with the members of his new gang. They sit down to read books quietly.
”What do you know about bullying, Amy?”
Amy: “I was in a gang that started bullying. It was hard not to join in when they picked on others.” This hardened ex-gang member is a seven-year-old in barrettes and a turtleneck sweater. What gang could she possibly belong to? The Thumb Suckers? The Bedwetters? After thirty minutes the ex-bullies and ex-victims form a conga line and dance off the edge of the screen to “Islands in the Stream.”
Afterwards Mulligan shoos Cassie and Dylan outside. We head upstairs to Dylan’s computer. He surfs to Youtube. Types ‘Trupholme Joke’ in the search box. One result. He clicks the video. It’s Dylan rubbing against his teacher. A bundle of pixels available to anonymous eyes. Mulligan scrolls to the comments.
I hate u, dylan! looozer!
He should die . . . lolz!!
And, from SECRETSADIE:
Omg! what a total drip! if I wuz him, i’d kill myself and get it over with!
It wrenches my heart to see such hatred. So bloodless. Cowardly. I want to seek out their fathers. Those who’ve fostered under their roofs such horrid monsters. Bash them to bone paste.
“I sent it onto the Internet crime division. How’s Dylan’s frame of mind?”
“He’s ten, Dan. Overweight. Picked on in cyberspace. This one.” Pointing at the cutesy moniker of SECRETSADIE. “Is encouraging him to . . .”
Out in the backyard Dylan pulls the padded seatcover off a lawn recliner. Earwigs scuttle into patio cracks. Cassie shrieks. I should have put the patio furniture in the shed by now. My wife usually reminds me.
Dan clicks on SECRETSADIE to open a fresh window: Clips viewed by this poster. He clicks the only other video: Colin “Brink Of ” Hill NF Stunt.
The scene opens on the Falls. Grainy footage of Wesley Hill in his boat. The angle zooms out to spectators clustered along the railing. In the left corner, fleetingly, I catch sight of myself and Abby crossing the road. The viewfinder sweeps Goat Island and the Skylon Tower. Pink flakes congest the air. The lens climbs Clifton Hill to zoom on a construction site. I see Dylan in a mesh of raw girders on a concrete foundation slab. He’s ripping with his bare hands at a giant plastic-wrapped insulation brick. He is joined by Jeffrey, Mama’s boy. Together they tear at the bricks. The camera captures the steel filigree of a knife in Jeffrey’s hand. My son is obscured by pink. The vantage returns to the river, where Colin Hill’s barrel goes over the cataract. The camera pans the basin, shifts abruptly to the barrel floating past the spume. It’s broken open. Colin’s arm is a white branch crooked over the rim. Wesley Hill enters the frame. He lays his son’s body in the belly of the boat. Whatever clothes Colin was wearing had been sucked off by the water. A thatch of dark pubic hair and the rest of his body is whitish-blue. His legs are all twisted together like a figure skater’s in midSalchow.
“Criminal mischief,” says Mulligan, I guess in reference to Dylan’s fibreglass-ripping. “Not that your son’s old enough to be charged. It just doesn’t seem something a well-adjusted ten-year-old would do. You know the man he’s with?”
“Jeffrey, yeah. He used to live down the street.”
“From here?”
“No. As kids. On Sarah Court.”
Back downstairs Mulligan tells our kids they have to stick together. Rough lately, he knows, but your Dads will fix things. Cassie asks if we’ll come to school and beat up the bullies. Dan places a hand atop his daughter’s head. His fingertips pulse like a heartbeat.
“What’s this?”
Cassie grits her teeth. “What?”
“A brain sucker. What’s it doing?”
“I dunno.”
“Starving.” He kisses her head where his hand had been. “Beat them up yourself.”
That evening I take Dylan to his grandfather’s house. I find him on the back porch with Fletcher Burger. The two of them could’ve crawled out of the same bottle. Despite their drunkenness there’s evidence—a bodily gravity between them—of a serious conversation having taken place.
“The champ!” Fletcher rocks boozily to his feet. “And the little champ!”
I hug him. It comes as a surprise to both of us. That he’s sitting here, drunk, while his daughter’s in the hospital . . . this enrages me.
“What are you two talking about?” I say.
“Well,” Dad says, “Fletcher here has just finished giving me an object lesson in cowardice.”
Fletcher heads home shortly after this. Dylan goes inside to watch television.
“He’s not wearing the cape.”
“He’s quits with that.”
“Weird habit. That girl folded him up like a K-Way jacket in the ring.”
I’m amazed at my father’s ability to link unattached grievances into a single incoherent insult. No use getting my dander up. Arguing with him is like eating charcoal briquettes: stupid, pointless, and ultimately quite painful.
“Fletcher and I were talking about being fathers,” he says to break the silence. “How hard can it be, you know? The butcher’s a father. The plumber. Mailmen.”
“And, what—you failed?”
Now it’s Frank Saberhagen’s turn to wallow in silence.
“My last fight I lost to a pipefitter from Coldwater,” I say.
“Didn’t have to be your last.”
“We fought at the Lucky Bingo. The whatever it is, scoreboard, was still lit up from the last game that afternoon. B-17. I-52. He drove up on a Saturday. No cutman. No cornerman. By himself. K
nocked me out Saturday night and drove home Sunday. He was back fitting pipes Monday morning. I was never going to be the middleweight champ. Not of the world. Not of anyplace.”
“You’ll never convince me of that.”
Ride the horse until it dies. A phrase you’ll hear around clubs. It’s often spoken by trainers behind their boxers’ backs. Ride the horse until it cannot prove its worth or meet its stable costs. If it’s not dead, cut it loose. The bloody unvarnished truth of what happens everyday in many walks of life. You wish that horse no ill will but business is business.
Truth is, I could accept and even get behind that reasoning. But it’s nine shades of brutal when your own father’s your jockey.
“I was a boxer like the guy who strums guitar Monday nights at Starbucks is a musician.”
“You’ll never get me to see it that way.”
“Yeah, Dad. I know.”
Work keeps me on the road. I fly to Hawaii to watch fifteen rust-acned fishing trawlers get dynamited off the coast to serve as fish habitats; it earned the cardholder several million points when written off as a charitable donation. To London for the sale of Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”—a thresher shark preserved in 4,666 gallons of formaldehyde—at Harrod’s. To Florida to cut up Conrad Black’s card. I take exquisite joy in this. When American Express dispatched me to hand-deliver his card years ago, Conrad held it against his chest. “Black”—tucking it into his shirt pocket—“on Black.” I laughed, as I’d assumed was his expectation. He told me not to act like a “jumped-up little twerp and sycophant.” I was later dispatched to oversee his purchase of Bonkers, a Glen of Imaal Terrier that cost 750,000 British pounds. Conrad bought it for his second wife, who fussed over it all of three weeks before offloading it on one of the Puerto Rican housekeepers at their Palm Beach estate.
Diverse legal imbroglios prevent Black being present to hand his card over. I cut it in half in front of his assistant, a wet-behind-the-ears Vassar grad— then into quarters and eighths and sixteenths until it looks as if it passed through a wood-chipper. An act which I find insanely gratifying.
Next I see my father we’re faced across his kitchen table. I’ve come directly from the airport spurred by his strung-out voicemail message. Between us: a styrofoam cooler with ORGANIC MATERIAL on the lid.
Black rings like washers circumference Frank’s eyes. I’d guess he’s been crying but I’ve never actually seen Franklin Saberhagen cry.
“It showed up this morning. I decided I’d better drive Dylan up to his mom’s for the weekend.”
“You better not have been . . .”
“God damn, Nick.” Running a hand through the wet ropes of his hair. “A little credit?”
“You’re sweating—”
“I haven’t touched a drop. That’s why I’m sweating.”
I lift the cooler lid. A cloud of dry ice vapour. I see what’s inside. I close the lid.
“Sensitive biological material,” Dad says. “They’ll degrade shortly.”
“For . . . ?”
“Yeah. They’re from the Eye Bank . . . an anonymous donor. You drive.”
Streetlights strobe the car windows to illuminate the contours of Dad’s havocked face. The cooler sits in his lap. I cut through the orchards. At a pumpkin stand a woebegone Canada goose stands like a sentinel on a frozen squash.
“OR room four,” he says as I drive. “Teaching lab. We’ll put on scrubs, wheel her in ourselves—”
“Ourselves?”
“You’re my assistant.”
“If we get caught?”
“Seeing as I’m suspended? Jail. I was probably going, anyway. You’re that worried?”
“Who are you all of a sudden, Montgomery Clift? Just shut up.”
Service elevator to the fifth floor. When I try to pull scrubs over my street clothes my father tells me it’s not a bloody snowsuit. We wheel a gurney into the elevator and on into Abby’s room. She’s sleeping. Dad injects her with ketamine so she won’t wake up. I grasp her feet, Dad under her armpits. An awful smell, which Dad identifies as burst bedsores.
Up in the OR, Dad runs instruments through the autoclave, fills a syringe with local, selects suture thread so thin the plastic pouch containing it appears empty. The ticking tinnitus of strange machines. An acrid undernote my father says is burnt bone dust. He dons glasses I’ve never seen him in: Buddy Holly style, magnified lenses screwed into the lower hubs.
He removes the eyes from the cooler. White balls threaded with burst capillaries, ocular stems attached, in a vacuum-sealed bag. They roll into a surgical tureen. With a dexterity I’ve rarely seen, he slices round their base and tweezes up the topmost layer. He holds one up on the scalpel’s tip: invisible but for their rainbow refraction in the lights. Inserts the tip of a syringe below Abby’s eyes. Bubbles where local collects beneath her skin. Further injections behind the cups of bone holding each eye. He has me hold her eyelids open while inserting ocular spreaders.
With a cookie-cutter instrument he traces the circumference of Abby’s eyes. “Sweat,” he says. “Damn it, Nick, sweat.” I dab his forehead with a swatch of surgical gauze. He tweezes out Abby’s destroyed corneas. Deposits them on her cheeks. The blue of Abby’s eyes too blue: this quivering naked vibrancy. He shapes the donor corneas until they are of acceptable size. Lays them over her eyeballs. Stitches fresh corneas to the edges of old. Gently clears away the blood occluding her eyes. The useless corneas are still stuck to her cheeks. He pinches them between his fingers. When they stick to his fingertips he blows as one does at an eyelash to make a wish. Twin scintillas land on the floor, lost on the tiles like contact lenses. Dad grins. Walleyed and a bit batty-looking behind those giant lenses.
Afterwards I idle on the sidewalk. Smoker’s row: patients, orderlies, nurses filing a concrete abutment. In wheelchairs and hospital blues, dragging vital sign monitors and oxygen tanks. A snatch of a song comes to me: The saddest thing that I ever saw / Was smokers outside the hospital doors.
A guy stands in light shed by the ambulance bay. Shuffling along the halogen-lit brickwork. His fly is unzipped and his shirt’s buttoned all wrong. His hair—long, the last time I’d seen him—was razed to the scalp. I walk over.
“Hey, how are you?”
Colin Hill offers me the most open, beatific smile.
“How do you do?”
He speaks as if a baffler down his belly prevents him from raising his voice. Slack features. Shaving cream crusted in his ear-holes. His smile goes on and on and on.
“We lived on Sarah Court,” I tell him. “As kids.”
He rubs a palm over his scalp as you do a foot that’s gone to sleep. The muscles mooring his jaw tense. The frustrated noise he makes is, I’m guessing, laughter.
“I remember.” He extends both hands in front of him, palms facing me, touching his thumbs then spreading his arms to their furthest ambit. The sort of panoramic gesture a shady condominium developer makes to encompass vacant swampland where he plans a timeshare resort. “I remember . . . everything.”
My euphoria sours. Colin faces the wall again. He hunts until he finds what he’d lost: a ladybug crawling in the grouting. He slips a pinkie finger into the gap. The bug perches on his nail. We’re approached by an old man in a housecoat and winter boots.
“You got matches?” he asks us.
“Would you like a cigarette?” Colin says.
“Did I say cigarette? I said matches.”
Colin’s expression is wounded. The old man intuits things.
“I got a briar, son.” He pulls a pipe from his housecoat. “Bastids at the home won’t let me buy matches.”
“But they let you roam around at night?”
“Roam?” he answers me. “What am I, a cow?”
He takes Colin’s Zippo. We stand in fragrant cherry smoke, which must bother the ladybug as it lifts off from Colin’s fingertip. “Oh, pooh,” says Colin.
Our fat
hers have met in the hospital foyer. Wesley shakes my hand with a tired smile, then zips up Colin’s fly. It’s decided we’ll go for a drink.
“I can drink a damn beer,” declares the old man, as though one of us had challenged his ability to do so. Wesley asks his name.
“I’m Lonnigan,” he says, and when he smiles his face is vaguely familiar—but in this city everyone’s face seems vaguely so.
“Mr. Lonnigan—”
“Who said mister?”
“Okay, Lonnigan, come on.”
Wes takes his son’s hand to guide him down the sidewalk. Lonnigan lifts the odd car door to see if it’s unlocked. At the Queenston Motel the Hot Nuts machine remains empty. Charred peanut specks stuck to hot greasy glass. Colin cadges a handful of loonies off his father and makes for the Manx TT Superbike video game. We take the window booth. When beers arrive, Lonnigan tells the bartender to put his on our tab and joins Colin at the video game.
“Your son . . .” Dad asks Wes.
“Barrel couldn’t cope, Frank. They who built it said it’d been tested to so-and-so many psi but that water’s a beast. Seals burst. Colin died a bit down in the dark. But I think he’d probably do it again. Just how he’s made. When I baled him in he reached for my hand. Instinct? I don’t know. He did reach. They did one of those—stuck him in a tube and went at his head with magnets . . .”
“MRI.”
“Right. Black specks. All over his brain. None of the major neural centres.”
I ask can it be fixed.
“No more than you can fix the rotten spots on an apple,” Dad says.
“Jesus, Dad.”
“I don’t know it’s the worst thing,” Wes says. “Hope this doesn’t come off bad, but I understand him again. For so long he was alien to me.” He stares into his glass. “In some ways he’s back to the kid I taught to shave before he had hairs on his face. Standing next to me in the bathroom, shoulders barely clearing the sink ledge. I lathered him up and he shaved with one of his mom’s old pink leg razors. Thing is—and Frank, you’d know it—even as your kid gets older there’s something of that child about their faces.”
Sarah Court Page 16
