Sometimes, when he passed a place where a car had left the road on ice, even in summer his vision would fill in from the edges with the white dazzle of fresh snow, until the road was reduced to twin wavering wheel marks that ended with a memory of torn brush and battered metal.
There was the place where the orange van had pitched end-over-end, racing without headlights in the dark, throwing mechanic’s tools around inside like hard metal rain before they sprayed out the burst doors and scattered, all silver and red on the pavement under the flashing emergency lights.
And the spot where a car rolled off the road in slushy snow, stopping upside-down in a flooded ditch, and they had all gotten soaked feeling around under the cloudy water for the missing driver, trying to find her by touch in the murky grey-brown silt. They’d searched for fifteen minutes before a neigh-bour told them the woman was inside her house, trying to warm herself in the bath. They put a neck brace on her while she sat naked in the bathtub, shivering, and Hennessey couldn’t help but feel like they were intruding, the three firefighters in their bulky yellow coats, dripping wet themselves and speaking in soft, clipped sentences devoid of verbs.
“Scissors.”
“Tape.”
“Blanket.”
Or the house where a woman named Beth had fallen first asleep, and then unconscious, and quietly bled to death hours after dental surgery, a nurse five feet away and knitting, the television remote control in her lap. And they had yelled at the unconscious woman and pinched her arm while her jaw yawned loose, trying for any sign of life, and the noise rattled around all out of place in a country kitchen with dark wood cupboards and a dirty bread knife on the drain-board, its blade streaked with butter.
The paramedics had tried desperately to find a vein, any vein, but her eyes had rolled away into her head for good while they worked and scattered medical scraps – torn gloves, syringe packages, the useless iv tubing – around her on the floor and the television chattered happily. And it was unnerving how much the mess bothered him – how much it bothered him while she lay dead, flat on the floor, arms spread when the paramedics stopped.
Skin as white as eggshells, he would think when he had to drive past her house, skin as white as eggshells, and her back – when they rolled her sideways to put her on the stretcher – was already starting to blossom purple, what little blood she had left pooling under her alabaster skin. Trying to revive her, he had felt the warmth of her bare skin through the gloves, and the familiarity was unsettling.
New points on the map would come on him unbidden, like a cold breath of wind off the water, when he hardly expected it.
Driving past the foundation of an abandoned house, he remembered the fire that had burned there late at night, spattering his helmet with black specks of flaming roof tar. They searched the basement for drunken teenagers until a refrigerator – and then the chimney – crashed through the kitchen floor and joined them in the basement, where they were scrabbling, nearly trapped, among flaming mattresses, boxsprings and stacked, broken furniture.
Or the drunk-driving accident that had wrapped a car tight around a librarian, and they had cut and pried for over an hour while she alternately screamed and cried, and it was all he could do not to put down the tools, press his gloved hand over her mouth and hiss, “Shut up!”
It rang in his head: “Shut up! Shut up!” And he could feel his hands on his ears, the unfamiliarity of the latex pressed against his own skin, the strange touch halfway between antiseptic and intimate. And he could remember looking at Jodean, seeing her as the woman in the car, full of horror at his thoughts.
“Just shut up. Just stop. Stop.”
But he had said nothing, watching the planes of her angry face, the way her cheekbones stood out, long lines slanting downwards, the way her eyes looked at his for only an instant before flicking away, unable to hold his gaze.
Still, he couldn’t argue with Jodean when she said that things had changed, couldn’t explain to her that what had been so simple before had been subtly altered. That when he reached out to touch the side of her face, she moved away with a practiced, almost studied ease.
It all seemed just beyond the edge of his reach, as if he were short one crucial piece of information, had arrived one careless moment too late.
And still the map grew. He added each event – sometimes new, sometimes dredged up from scattered memory – without thought, his mind somewhere else until the geography became fixed in place and hardened there. Each instant as significant as the corners where two roads meet, as rigid as a street address. He bought a road map and started to draw in each small dot, yellow for fires, sharp bright red for accidents, black for deaths, threading thin lines between them. But it became obvious the map wasn’t big enough – the lines ran together, and instead of helping him keep track, they confused him.
So he made a bigger one, blowing up sections on the fire chief’s photocopier. The new map was grainy and grey, but had far more space for each mark, each small handful of careful, crabbed notation. He kept it in his dining room, spread on the big maple table, the dark, empty tall-backed chairs standing motionless, silent observers. Soon, he had to stop eating there. He found the map overpowering, his eyes drawn to it, and away from his plate.
And sometimes, he found himself avoiding the room entirely, as if the map had taken on a life of its own in there. Instead, he’d sit in the dark in his truck near the fire station, the red coal of his cigarette the only light except for the dancing numbers on the department radio, numbers that skipped up and down the scale and stopped when nearby departments went out on calls.
His pickup sat on the shoulder, but Hennessey was moving down the road in his head, counting off landmarks along the way. Four doors up and five months back, a hose had burst on a propane barbecue, and the dancing flame wrote a cryptic, blackened script message across a cream-coloured garage door.
Jodean had packed that day, while he was out, taking her things and some of theirs, leaving the packing tape and knife on the counter next to each other, as if she had stepped out, halfway through something, and might be right back. He had wandered through the house later, trying to make sense of the language of what was left and the text of what had been taken, trying to read something out of absence.
Five houses further down the road, and a seventy-eight-year-old man had cut a tree down on himself, one bone-white branch stabbing into his back and pushing his shirt out in front slightly, just above the chest pocket, and the man tried to explain how it had all happened through a froth of pink bubbles that gathered and burst on his lips. Hennessey remembered that, for some reason, the man was wearing a white dress shirt, speckled with sticky, aromatic spruce chips from the chainsaw, and leather work gloves stained black with chain oil. Trees one, loggers zero, he had thought, and he knew they’d laugh at that back at the fire hall. And he could see the sky and the white wood chips flying, while he held a pressure dressing against the old man’s chest to slow the bleeding and the other firefighters carved the tree apart.
His mind seemed to skip ahead, bouncing from place to place, faster and faster as the spaces between events narrowed. Where two lost boys had walked out of the woods; the path where a dog had fallen from a cliff, chasing the fast shadow of a jinking black mink. A chimney fire that had burned like hell’s breath, showering him and another firefighter with clinkers and flaming chunks of soot, the heat of the fire eventually lighting the walls inside the house right through the brick confines of the chimney.
He found a pair of shoes later in his closet, one lone pair of strapped sandals in the back of a closet, pressed tight together, as if they had been placed there to be found.
Soon he could close his eyes and move along catastrophes connected by geography and disconnected from time, so close together that the map was almost unnecessary, each event like a rosary bead on a long and unforgiving thread. But still the calls came, and he charted out disaster’s course, looking for some sort of order in the clustered dots
that sprang up. Sometimes he would find himself staring down at an empty spot, wondering whether something was out there, waiting, like a flipped coin finally falling towards heads. It was, he thought, a complex calculation, a message in a foreign language. If he could somehow grasp the sense of it, find the order in it, he would know where to be, and maybe when.
He found a half a grocery note in a drawer, her handwriting, the list of what they needed abandoned after apples. He started driving to places where nothing had yet happened, sitting in the dark in the truck, breathing in the summer night air, listening keenly to every sound while the trees rattled. He found excuses for not eating anything that needed to be cooked, throwing apple cores and the stubby remains of pears out the truck window, and some nights the cab of his pickup smelled like a mix of cider and old cigarette smoke.
And one night he stood in his living room, looking out at the dark shadows of the trees across the road but seeing a Volkswagen lying on its side, the driver’s door ripped off and a front-seat passenger lying on the yellow line in the middle of the road, mewling, his leg pointing south but turning dramatically and unnaturally east just below the knee. The driver in the ditch, face-down and quietly drowning in three shallow inches of water.
Then someone was talking to him, standing behind him, so close he felt the touch of her breath behind his ear, and for a moment, he thought he was listening to Jodean.
“Am I cut bad?”
But there was no one there, at least, not at first, and then, like being pushed into the wind, he was back again, back in the ditch. It was like the dreams where he would sit up gasping, images still sucking at him while he pulled – willed – himself awake, the sweaty sheets bunched around him.
He could spread his first two fingers apart on the map and span the space from the girl in the ditch to a spot where he became sure there would be a farming accident that involved hands and sleeves and a drive shaft, an accident so graphic he knew he would remember it mostly in the abstract, working on autopilot. Once there, he knew there would be bursts of colour and fear, and each step would be by rote from his training, without ever thinking of the difference between a hand and what he was holding. It was like that, the memory often more a collection of shapes and colours, of texture and warmth, sound and smell, than it was of any ordered reality.
“Cut bad?” he heard. “Am I cut bad?”
Then the night came when, all at once, he was fully dressed and standing at the end of his driveway with his hand on the door handle of his truck, already picturing a van on its side with someone thrown clear and then pinned underneath the vehicle, but his pager was silent and the night was warm on his skin. There were no sirens – there had been, he realized, no call at all – and the moon was edging up over the hill, backlighting heavy grey clouds and edging them yellow-white.
And he decided he was done with maps. Done.
The smell of heavy rain coming hung in the air, tasting like tin at the back of his throat, and there was a tang of crushed juniper close around him. The night was still and breathless, and there was no need anymore for any event to anchor his memory. He felt almost light then, and he sat near the edge of the road and watched the moon trace its gentle arc, felt the heat running out of the ground below him, and watched the rain coming west to east until the clouds overcame the moon.
The next morning, he cleared the dining room table, balling up the great grey map and stuffing it into the garbage in the kitchen. He tied the bag, and took it out to the edge of the road. He backed the truck down the gravel lane and drove to work. Then he was humming, the truck trembling slightly as it sped up on the narrow rural road. Small trees were in bloom on both sides of the road, and the air was fragrant with the must of dogberries, the fresh and sharp smell of the spruce trees warming.
And perhaps, he thought, it wouldn’t really be so hard to go out, if the other guys asked again. Downtown for a beer, not that much to ask. Maybe it wasn’t too late to go back to the easy good nature there had been in the fire hall, when they would make bitter and cruel jokes about the things they had seen, and then almost fall down, they would be laughing so hard.
A bumblebee, its legs wrapped in pollen, hit the windshield. And another. Two great, flat, yellow-white dots. And his chest felt tight, as if his body was suddenly being wrapped in tiny, tiny taut strands of string.
Still driving, without breathing, he reached out and, with the tip of his index finger, traced a thin line between the dots on the inside of the glass. Just like that, it all came back in a rush, the cold realization that there is no forgetting – ever – what you already know, that worlds undo and lives unravel. And it was Jodean and a ditch, and crashed cars and hands and people who could no longer summon the strength to even bleed.
“Am I cut bad?”
And for the first time, for the very first time, he realized how deep, how very deep, the cut had been.
Perchance to Dream
WHEN IT STARTED, I HOPED IT WOULD BE just a couple of nights, that it was something I wouldn’t really have to worry about. Because what do you do when you’re afraid to sleep with your wife? When you’re terrified of what might happen there in the bed between you?
You know how it is: I had a dream where someone handed me an old two-dollar bill, the kind that’s out of circulation now. Then, the next morning, buying coffee, the man in line in front of me handed the clerk just that kind of bill – I haven’t seen one in years, and maybe you can say that’s all coincidence. And really it is – the first few times. Then, it begins to seem like a message – and after that, you get afraid, wondering just what it is that’s going on in your head.
I’m forty and happily married – we’re among the lucky few, the kind of couple who, when we have people over for dinner, realize afterwards that one of the guests has moved things around in the medicine cabinet, searching for dirty secrets. But we don’t have any. Twenty years in, happily married, and wondering why we’re the ones who get to be happy. And worrying, too, worrying about whether it all will turn on a dime – whether we could find a way to mess it up. Until then you trust, and hope. We’ve got two kids old enough to have their own lives, old enough to ignore their parents, anyway. David, the youngest, is about to turn fourteen; his older sister, Rachel, sixteen, is caught up in a world where parents inhabit the fringes of the universe.
“Do you have to go now?” Anne asked while looking away, something she didn’t realize was always a hint that she knew the answer already.
I’d been planning since two in the morning – a bunch of places I could go, but nothing pressing. Nothing except the dreams. I manage money for a bunch of clients, most of them pretty well off, so I set up meetings and I fly out to see them. Most of the time, the meetings are really formalities – they nod and try to listen, and then I keep them ahead of the taxman and any ex-spouses.
“Yes – no choice. Clients pay the piper, so they call the tune.” The words sound hollow the moment I say them, trying to keep my voice jaunty.
Truth is, I’m on the road on a made-up errand, and I hope to keep going until the dreams stop. The first one was bad enough.
A dream about knives – just knives. The way their handles looked, black and rough and wound with something that looked like tape – I knew I was supposed to pick them up. Pick them up – and the dream was packed with such incredible dread that I knew something else was going to happen if I did.
I woke up staring at Anne’s naked back, at the point of her shoulder, her skin dark against the backdrop of the cream-painted wall, thinking for some reason that pushing a knife through flesh couldn’t really be that hard. And I was shaking.
The sensible thing would be to try and get some formal help, I suppose, but how do you explain to anyone that you keep dreaming about killing your own family? It’s only dreams, after all, and that’s what any reasonable professional is going to tell you. And what kind of help do you get? I don’t know how anyone else would feel, but I think it’s a little stupid to r
ush off to the doctor right away, when it’s something that might just cure itself.
Still, maybe there’s something in there – something in my head, I mean, like some sort of chemical imbalance or a tumour or something. That would be a simple explanation, but it’s hard to believe because there’s nothing else wrong. If a doctor were to ask, I’d have to say no problems with appetite or desire, no weakness or pain or anything. Normal bowel movements, for Christ’s sake, as if that mattered at all. At first, I was afraid of just how stupid I’d feel, trying to explain this to someone else.
Then, the next night, when I did sleep, I was putting burned bodies into body bags in a burned-out basement – I remember, because I was having so much trouble with the zippers. And it was important that it be done fast, because the bodies had to be moved quickly. All three of them.
And those dreams, as unsettling as they were, marked only the beginning. Now, they seem almost trite and under-done, as if their author hadn’t completely thought them through. Luckily, by the time the really terrifying ones started, I was already on the road – I’m sure I made the right decision about that.
First, to Nova Scotia, to a client who lives in his own small cove – he’s bought most of the land around him and I have the feeling that I really only handle a small part of his portfolio, that there is a legion of other managers out there just like me, facelessly competing for our slices of the pie. His name is Art, and he dismissed me with a wave of a hand in a huge, wood-lined living room with massive windows looking out over the salt water.
The Hour of Bad Decisions Page 9
