Paul Is Dead

by C. C. Benison

“Let’s buy it.”

  There’s a pause, a beat. Sound—water lapping, gulls crying—fills the void, and when Mark’s voice intrudes, it’s—not unpredictably—bemused:

  “This place?”

  “It’s quaint.”

  “It should be curated.”

  “Lydia said there’s been some attempt to declare Eadon Lodge historic.”

  “Why would you be interested in a cottage here?”

  “What we’ve been talking about—the sun, the heat, the blue sky.”

  “But—” Objections fire along Mark’s synapses. He rises on his elbows and pushes his sunglasses to his forehead. “You’re not interested in this part of the world.” He studies Dorian’s profile for some clue. Finds none. “I know you were born here, but you’ve never had anything nice to say about it.”

  “I’ve come in the winter a time or three for a role in a play. You don’t want to be here in the winter, if you can help it. But the summers are different.”

  “I can’t take two months off.”

  “Neither can I.”

  “Then what’s the point?”

  “Well, we could have a few weeks here in the summer, and then rent it out.”

  “Rent that out? Who would rent it?”

  “All kinds. Lots of people want an authentic cottage experience—screen doors, wood stoves, that kind of thing.”

  “I think people would rather rent a cottage with a dishwasher. You’re from the olden times, Dorian. Besides, what?—how many weeks a year could you rent it out? It’s not winterized—ten weeks of rental income? It doesn’t make sense. What’s she asking for it?

  “Low six figures-ish. Cheap compared to B.C. prices.”

  “Yeah, but still …” Mark frowns. “And what’s with the ‘let’s’? Let us? How much would you put in?

  “I’m not sure, really.”

  “You mean you want me to buy it?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “Then what do you mean?”

  “Never mind. It was just a thought, a whim, a mere bagatelle.”

  “Come on, Dorian. What’s going on?”

  “Lydia needs a quick sale, that’s all. I thought I might be useful.”

  “You know, the two of you are acting just plain weird. And that ugly lamp or whatever it is over there: You can’t tell me she didn’t toss it in the lake. In my profession, we refer to that kind of behaviour as ‘crazy’.”

  “Do you? Well, I have no idea how that would have got into the lake. I doubt a woman could ‘toss’ it in anyway.”

  “It’s not that heavy. And if you look farther down the beach you can see the remains of gouges in the sand where someone dragged something into the water—recently.”

  Dorian doesn’t care to revisit the electrolier. He sighs and says:

  “Look, I was just wanting to help out an old friend.”

  “By making a six-figure land purchase? That’s some old friend. If you’re that devoted to her, then you buy it—borrow the money, take out a mortgage … a second mortgage. You’ve got that house in Toronto.”

  “Rachel owns half of it.”

  “Then borrow against your half, I don’t know. You must have some money. You came from some wealth, didn’t you?”

  Dorian’s not having this conversation twice in one afternoon. “I guess I’ve been a grasshopper, you virtuous little ant. It’s a fable,” he responds to Mark’s puzzled expression. “Never mind.”

  Dorian plays out the first of two possible endings to this exchange: He appeals to Mark, entreats him. Please will you do one thing for me. I’ll get the money back to you somehow. No, I can’t tell you why. You’ll have to trust me. But it’s vitally important.

  Mark drop his sunglasses and settles back onto the blanket. Dorian looks down at him, seeing his own funhouse reflection in the lenses. The virtuous little ant remark was a mistake. Mark hasn’t a trace of real cruelty. He’s just sensible. And that makes sense. He thinks about Lydia’s entreaty: he could, he must, somehow (how?) raise the dough, buy Eadon Lodge himself, and force himself to do something that will plunge him past the edge of horror. Then, and only then, he can pass Eadon Lodge on to someone else.

  “I guess,” he says to Mark, feigning petulance, “Lydia will just have to find a buyer.”

  And I, he thinks with dread as Mark grunts his assent, will have to find a shovel.

  23

  Lydia’s fingers knead the ground beef, but her eyes remain on the lawn past the kitchen window, fixed on the split clothesline, now two pale and flaccid snakes on the grass. She barely notices the southern sky darkening into thundercloud towers. The meat is refrigerator-cold, gelatinous, disgusting in its squishiness, and despite the Worcester sauce and onion, stinking of carnage. To look down at the bowl—past her bandaged finger—is to look at raw flesh, pinky-red as a wound, Paul’s wound. Her gorge rises. She suppresses it. What else can she do?

  She’s not hungry. Her stomach’s in a knot. And why wouldn’t it be? But for chance, she would be staring out the window into the aftermath of a scene of real carnage, a darkening yard filled with serious men, police ... and more police, waves of them. One future ended, one future ruined, four futures blighted. The brutal final scene of Bonnie and Clyde, seen at the Capitol last January with Ross on what would be their second-last date flits through her mind. She had to close her eyes and press her face into his shoulder.

  Bibs flits through her mind, too. How will he react, if he finds out? He mustn’t find out.

  They fall back to their earlier tasks, some of them, as if preparing the meal or having a nice drink can send them back to an hour before. Alan is returned to the coals in the barbeque, a beer in hand, which he is swiftly downing. He and Alanna are having a low conversation that is only a murmur to Lydia’s left ear. (Treachery?) Another conversation drifts into her right ear, though the words are clearer. Briony, who has cleaned and bandaged Paul’s upper shoulder, is insisting he remain shrouded inside a Hudson’s Bay blanket she pulled out of the corner cupboard. For the shock. Lydia removes her hands from the cold goop and leans back to see past the door frame into the dining room to Paul in a chair. The blanket is a rich purple. He looks like a caped young warrior king enthroned. He catches her eye and smiles the smile of one tolerating the ministrations of a body servant. He knows she is a princess cast into the kitchen by some evil spell and she knows, despite hands chilled by cold meat, that she could better minster than Briony. She wishes all of them would go away, back to the city, and leave her alone, with Paul. She didn’t want all these people here in the first place—which isn’t true, but Lydia is moving swiftly away from a denial of feelings, several of them.

  Lydia briefly wonders where Dorian is. He’s slipped off to the beach, where he is weeping helplessly.

  Paul flashes the peace sign. Alan receives the gesture gracelessly. They are not eating indoors at the dining room table, as they have been doing, mostly at Briony’s insistence. They’re scattered on chairs of various sorts—Adirondack, folding, chaise lounge—on the front lawn or, in Paul’s case, on the cottage front steps, which has the odd effect of placing him facing the others, like an actor on a stage. The evening seems suddenly dying: long accordion streaks of shadow and light play over the grass. At some distance to the southwest, which only Paul can see, a ribbon of lightning flares from massing clouds; a rumble of thunder follows, but the others pay it scant attention. Between bites of hamburger, Briony is blitherblathering about Gestalt therapy, which she only faintly understands. Let’s work through it! is the distillate. But the others, shattered still by the near shattering of their young lives, crave the therapy silence affords—or at least desultory elephant-in-the-room-disguising chitchat: Finished that Nabokov novel yet? So, half a million turned up at Woodstock, wow. Life’s done a spread on Sharon Tate’s murder. Saw it in the drugstore. But below the brittle
iceberg tip, some are planning their exodus. Some are thinking how they will keep news of the episode from their parents, whom they might flippantly refer to by their first names but who still loom large like punitive superegos. Alan, who is on his fifth beer now and simmering with humiliation and anger over the near end of a bright future and new, dark one begun, tells Briony to shut up.

  “Is this the kind of crap you’re going to feed your clients when you graduate?” he says

  This is when Paul raises his left hand and parts his fingers. A glint of sunlight catches the ring, itself stamped with the symbol of peace. Lydia is intrigued that he, who came so close to being tragedy’s victim, should appear the least troubled. In that same glint of sun, she notes his crooked smile and a flash—what is it? glee? delight?—in his baby blacks, and she feels pulled toward it, wants to bask in its radiance.

  “And you can fuck off, too.” Alan’s face darkens. “Back to wherever you came from.”

  “That would be Toronto, Alan,” Paul says smoothly, swaying a little, like a toked-up boy at a love-in. “If you’re ever in town, look me up.”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Hey, man, be cool. It was a water pistol. I’m not mad that you tried to kill me.”

  “I didn’t try to fucking kill you.”

  “Ah, but what would Sigmund say?”

  “Freud? There are no accidents? That’s bullshit. I did not know that gun was loaded.”

  “You didn’t know that gun was not not loaded.”

  “Fuck off.” Alan points his mayonnaisey knife at Paul. “There are accidents. What our dog does on the kitchen floor is an accident.”

  “I thought you were a determinist? Aren’t Marxists determinists? Isn’t history—”

  “Freud didn’t say humans weren’t exposed to chance. You think a sperm meeting an egg is predetermined?”

  Paul doesn’t stop his swaying. “Look, man, something may look like an accident, but if you were able to unravel all the threads, to trace back through all the moments leading to an event, you would see how inevitable it all was.”

  “Then you must have a death wish.” Alan barks. “All of life’s little fucking moments have brought you here … to die.

  “Or you have a death wish against me.”

  The gainsaying continues. Lydia, barely touching the food on her plate, wearies of it, blocks the words, attunes to the tone—Alan aggrieved and aggressive, Paul cool and just-fucking-with-you-man, but not without counter-aggression. Hornlocking. Male conversation. These baritone rumblings are the very air of the student lounge at University College when she passes through to another class. One more year of this sophomoric nonsense and she is on her way to her own perfect future—a good grad school in Toronto or Vancouver, maybe even the States. She would like to tell the boys to shut up. Can we have some peace? She dreads a fight. Could there possibly be one, after what’s happened? Alan is gripping his dinner knife threateningly, isn’t he? The atmosphere seems to crackle with new tension. Or perhaps it’s the electricity in the approaching storm. Lydia’s eyes pass to the leaves on the ash in sudden rustle, the willow branches in sudden animation. She feels cool air now brushing her back through the slats in the chair. Her nostrils detect ozone atoms, sharp and fresh and clean. She is conscious, for the first time, that the thunder is not distant. They will have to herd into the cottage before very long. She does not want this.

  And she is lucky. Or perhaps it is no accident. All the intertwined causal threads of the universe, however remote in origin, large in number and complex in interaction have knotted together to give them leave to finish their meals at the very moment the rain, hard and cold, crashes down. And do they rush into the cottage? No. As if by unspoken agreement, they splay: Alan and Alanna race for their tent, Paul and Dorian for the Petit Trianon, Lydia and Briony for the cottage, where they will remain until the morning. Dishes and glasses litter lawn and chair arm, receptacles for fat rain drops, pools for birds and dragonflies.

  Only later did Paul and Alan’s argument—the no-accidents, the death-wish—return to Lydia, seeping into thoughts already transformed by horror’s long half-life. Did it affect Dorian? In retrospect, did he find their clashing words as premonitory as she? She didn’t ask him. She never had the chance. She could ask him now. He’s standing right in front of her, on the lawn at Eadon Lodge where thirty-nine years earlier they sat before the rain came, back from the beach, where he left Mark to continue sunbathing. But she won’t ask. Good god, meaning-of-life sophomorics are as long gone as warming your bum on the radiators at University College. It’s the stuff of youth. And perhaps old age. She is not there yet. She is middle-; late middle- and life in the middle, as someone once told her, is a practical task. Mark, though he doesn’t know it, has narrowed their options. But the option Dorian presents to her is the stuff of nightmares.

  “No,” she tells Dorian. “No,” she says again. “You can’t. It’s terrifying. You can’t.”

  “Can you think of another option? Whether I buy it and flip it or someone else buys it, it has to be done.”

  “The real estate agent will find the right buyer.”

  “Who? Who, Lydia? Who will want this old cottage? You’ve seen the building development around—”

  “Come around to the back lawn,” Lydia interrupts him. “If you think you can bear it. Can you?” she asks, noting him hesitate. “It’s hard, Dorian. This is hard. It seems unimaginable we’re here … now … doing this.”

  “It wasn’t my idea then.”

  “Dorian …?”

  “I’m sorry. That was unfair. I lost my wits that night.”

  They round the west side of the cottage, the bedroom side where, Lydia remembers, she listened to Alan slamming his car door and his footfalls that last morning. Lydia was around this side once, only once, with Carol Guttormson, the real estate agent, on the requisite tour of the property. She was transfixed by the transformation time had wrought.

  “There.” Lydia points toward the northwest corner of the property.

  “Oh.” The word comes out like a little whimpering sigh. Dorian sees what Lydia saw and, for a moment, the sigh connotes relief. This pit of his worst memories, of his worst nightmares, has vanished. This cursed plot is no longer trampled grass and muddy scars. It is a tangle of scrub and shrub and trees he can’t identify—ash? willow?—rising to the sky, scintillating in afternoon sun, as benign and picturesque and vaguely English as anything in a city park.

  “Do you see?” Lydia asks.

  Dorian sees. Relief passes to disbelief. He realizes what he has proposed to Lydia is as staggering in labour as it is in imagination. And then a cloud, one of few this peerless summer day, crowds the sun and casts Eadon Lodge into shade and he is thrust back to that calamitous night like a cross-cut in a film. He is peering into the abyss of a black and stinking hole and to his surprise he is blinded by tears.

  24

  Dorian gags. His stomach lurches. Acid soars to sear his throat and only the force of what’s left of his will keeps a torrent of spew from splashing on the grass. He has already pissed himself, but his mind barely registers it. It seems one minute he was naked, the next partly clothed, the next with wet running down his leg to pool on the living room linoleum. But Lydia had neither seen nor heard. She was backed into the sideboard, screaming.

  Now they are outside, lifting the plywood barrier off the privy pit, releasing the filthy reek of a dozen summers, suppressing their heaving guts. The plywood sheet is awkward, heavy. They stagger over the grass and upend it against a pine. The evening is drawing in. The eastern sky is nearly black, the surround of bushes and trees merging into a mass of grey-purple, the colour—in the dying light—the same as the blanket rolled and tied on the lawn.

  Tears stream down Dorian’s face, though he isn’t howling as before. That remedy he’s exhausted. But he can no more stop the flow than he can
stop the rain from falling. He puts the crook of his arm to his nose to wipe the snot and it blocks, mercifully, the wafting stink. He and Lydia return to the pit edge, stare down. There is blackness. It is bottomless, an abyss.

  Dorian feels his legs buckling. If they are to do this terrible thing, they must do it soon. Now. Too much time has gone by. If they change their minds now, how would they explain to others the time passed, the body moved, the opened pit—on top of everything else? A groan rises from his chest and a word forms on his lips:

  No.

  It was Lydia who recovered first some sensibility, some capacity for reason, some ability to speak. It was her idea. Burying him.

  There was already a grave dug—the old bog pit.

  How long do they stare into the hole? Not long, but long enough for the western sky to purple, the leaves to blacken, the moon to climb above the lake, the cottage to fall into silhouette and its windows wax gold. When Dorian carried Paul in his blanket-shroud out the cottage and down the steps, lurching, crazed with fright and grief, Lydia followed with one of the gas lanterns. Now it sends flickering shadows along the grass and in that moment Dorian sees movement within the blanket, an awakening, a struggle to be free. He’s alive. He falls to his knees and sets his scrabbling, shaking hands to working the knots of clothesline binding the blanket, weeping, and grunting Paul’s name.

  But Lydia is beside him, pulling at his hands, her eyes blinded now in tears, unmoored by his panic. “Stop it, Dorian. Stop it! He’s dead. Paul’s dead!”

  This time Dorian’s “no” is not silent. He howls the word into the silent night and collapses onto the blanket.

  It is Lydia who retches.

  Dorian strains to lift Paul’s body, to rise with it, to deliver him—it—into the grave, in some valedictory fashion—god knows what he’s thinking—but his strength, or perhaps his will, is sapped. He pushes his sweat-slicked forearms under the blanket. The grass is cool, the floppy weight of the blanket still—god, how can this be?—still warm, still limp. Struggling, he collapses again on the shrouded body, his head pitching toward the black gap, and he screams. Lydia pulls him back. Dorian falls on the grass, his back pierced with pain, and looks at, but does not see, the indifferent sky. He struggles to his feet. Wordlessly, gasping, he and Lydia each take an end of the blanket, but it offers poor purchase and slips from their damp fingers. They try again. And again. And then, possessed by this terrible reckless task, all thought of elsewise vanished, they surrender to an indignity: they fall on their knees and roll the thing, like a log, over the grass and tip it past the hole’s soft edge, where it seems to suspend in air for split second, a purple roll, before disappearing into the void. No sound like what follows will ever intrude on their lives again, but it will seep into their dreams. Not quite a thud, not quite a plop, the je ne sais quoi of an unstoppable mass meeting an immovable surface defies their powers to describe it, ever, even to themselves—and never to others.