by D. D. Miller
So much about Brie seemed young. She was enthralled by the fact that I’d (until very recently) been in grad school at U of T. I didn’t tell her how much I’d hated it, how much the accumulated loans were ruining my life. She’d received a scholarship to attend there the following fall. “But I don’t think I want to go,” she said. We’d been sitting away from her friends for quite a while and a few had begun to disperse.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I don’t know what I want to do.” She rolled her eyes. “Okay, I’ve got some ideas about what I want to do, but there is no way my parents will let me. It’s so typical, right? I’ve got to be a doctor or something. As long as it’s got something to do with science.” She sat back, her arms extended behind her and stared straight ahead. “My parents are such stereotypes that it’s almost racist.”
I laughed and managed to ask her what she wanted to do.
“Philosophy. Fine Arts. English. Something that will make me think about stuff.”
I’d done an English undergrad because I liked to read and lacked the desire to do anything else. Pretty flimsy reasoning.
“Science will make you think,” I said, remembering the wonder of Grade 10 Biology, of cutting open a frog and seeing innards that looked remarkably like miniature human innards and how that awakened in me an awareness of the interconnectedness of things.
“Oh shit!” She checked her watch and began to scramble. “Curfew.” She kicked off the pair of flats she’d had on and crammed them into her backpack. “Gotta get home in like fifteen minutes.”
“What’s your name?” I asked. She had long, slender toes that were active in the grass: they stretched and grasped as though they were just unbound from some tight wrapping. Her toenails were unpainted and the pale whites glowed in the night.
“Brie,” she said, sliding her foot into one of her roller skates.
“Bri, like Brianna?”
“No. Brie, like the cheese.” With her skates secured, she pulled a small notebook and pen out of her bag. She tore out a piece of paper and scrawled her real name on it.
“Find me on Facebook,” she said, scampering across the grass as if she didn’t have eight wheels strapped to her feet. When she finally hit the paved path, she leapt once into the air for momentum and, with smooth crossovers and long deep strides, was very quickly gone.
There’d been a delay on the subway that had left the train stranded in a dark tunnel and made me late for Mi-young’s session. It almost didn’t matter anymore; I could summon her image at will. There wasn’t a centimetre of her body that I didn’t feel I knew. An orifice that I hadn’t peered into. I got home ten minutes into the session.
Mi-young was fondling herself with a tiny, buzzing machine that slid over her finger. She got an almost goofy smile on her face when she was pleasuring herself, almost like she was on the verge of laughing. Then I saw her look off-screen and smile.
“It looks like our special guest has arrived,” she said.
And then the body of some guy entered the screen. His head was above the shot, cut off from view, but his body was not. He was young, also, and naked. He stood next to Mi-young.
I was baffled.
She rested her cheek against the guy’s thigh and flitted her long, thin fingers over his penis. Horrified, I reached for the mouse to close the window. I tried not to, but glanced at the screen long enough to see her take him into her mouth.
Even if it was just for one summer, it’s almost inexplicable that Brie and I had managed to get along for as long as we did.
I didn’t have any friends and hadn’t had a girlfriend since high school. We spent a lot of time together, mostly in High Park, sitting under trees smoking pot while she rambled. She was young, healthy and excited; had just finished high school and felt like she could take over the planet. While we did fool around – in the park, on the saggy couch in my musty basement apartment – it seemed forced. She was exceptionally pretty – certainly more so than any other girl I’d ever spent time with – but was young and awkward. She had a thrilling body from a lifetime of sports that she didn’t seem to know what to do with. She lacked confidence about her looks, seemed clueless about her sexuality. She’d been a gangly, awkward, tomboyish kid who’d sprouted up in her late teens and had filled out into an attractive young woman.
Usually, after she went home, I’d lie in my bed masturbating and thinking about her. Thinking about the things we hadn’t done.
But after meeting those roller girls, Brie went to a roller derby bout, purchased brand new roller skates, and I didn’t see her much anymore. I tried texting her a few times, but she’d always text back much later, apologetic. She’d tell me that we’d get together soon, but we never did, and eventually the texts stopped. On Facebook, I saw that she’d started to train. Pictures started to pop up of her in derby gear, skating around a track in an old military hangar north of the city; then, eventually, photos of her in a team uniform and playing in games. It was hard to put these images of her next to those I had in my memory. There was a gap there somewhere.
The first thing I did on the morning I decided to kill myself was turn on the TV. There was just something about the silence in the room. I didn’t check the channel. I don’t even remember caring. It was just noise.
With the TV in the background I took about fifteen minutes to screw the bike hook into the ceiling. The package said it was good for ninety kilograms or two hundred pounds. Then I tied a fresh noose. I had to untie the one I’d tied the day before. I’d been practicing for a week at that point, every morning without even thinking why.
I attached the rope to the hooks, dragged over the chair from my computer desk and stood on it. It was in the kitchen, the only part of my apartment tall enough to allow for this. I poked my head through the noose. My left hand was over the top of my head. There was a moment there, when I paused.
I wasn’t thinking anything. Nothing. Nothing at all. But I paused. The whole thing had taken about one hour. It was Saturday. I’d woken up at seven. I’d made coffee and taken about five minutes to drink a cup while I reminded myself of everything I’d planned to do. I pissed, and then I started. The hook, the noose. Ready. I was ready.
I don’t know why I paused. But I did. And for the first time, I heard the TV. It was on one of the news channels.
“Some sad news this morning,” the female anchor said. “Noted novelist, essayist and humourist David Foster Wallace was found dead last night at his home.” A pause. “The forty-six-year-old writer, best known for his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest, reportedly hanged himself during the evening. He was found by his wife at 9:30 p.m.”
I pulled my head out of the noose, stepped down from the chair. My heart wasn’t necessarily racing, but it was beating very hard. It was only the second time I’d been aware of my body the whole morning. The first time was after the coffee, when I’d had to piss.
David Foster Wallace.
Dead.
Hanged himself.
From where I was standing – in the kitchen next to the chair I’d dragged from my computer desk – I could see my fiction bookshelves. There were two of them. Side by side. About six feet tall, made of that faux-oak Ikea “wood” with books stacked on top that touched the ceiling. On the bottom shelf of the second were the books by David Foster Wallace, including the ugly piss-yellow edition of Girl With Curious Hair.
I knew it couldn’t happen like this.
“You hear that Greg Postma killed himself the other night?” I could hear the people I’d met at grad school saying. “Remember, the drop out,” they’d say. And Karen Sears. I could hear her too. She’d be the one who’d make the connection if and when she ever heard the news. She’d be the first one to call me tacky. A copycat.
I looked back up at the rope hanging from the ceiling. Getting the rope down wouldn’t be a problem. The hook, though, might.
I slumped down on the floor, feeling oddly hollow. Not particularly disappointed, just empty. Just s
omething else I wouldn’t be able to finish.
For days afterwards, I kept myself in motion by riding the subway for hours at a time. Sometimes from early in the morning until the sun went down.
Exiting the subway one day, I walked by Zed’s Books and the burned-out building next to it. It still sat there, virtually untouched in the months since the fire. The plywood that covered the door and had been spray-painted with “dont PANIC!!!” was now covered in posters. I almost walked by without even giving the posters a thought until I noticed the roller skates.
On the poster, two stylized female cartoon characters glared at each other: one was decked out in leopard print, the other in a green, sailor-style uniform. The Toronto Roller Derby Championship was happening that weekend.
I crossed the street and entered the subway. As usual I sat in the first car at the front and stared out the window. Waiting.
The Toronto Roller Derby League played its games north of the city in the hangar in Downsview Park. It was a massive space, with huge windows that spread the late-evening summer sunshine across the hard concrete floor and the round track in the middle. Metal bleachers lined the track and they were full of a strange mix of people: punks and jocks and grandmothers and children, hipsters, nerds, a whole posse of women on a stagette. Loud rock and roll music blared from speakers sprinkled among the bleachers, and a mohawked man in a slim suit and skinny tie prowled the zone between the track and the seats, stepping over and around the people who sat on the floor lining the track. He yelled into the mic, his face beet red and eyes gleaming: I could barely make out what he said. The louder he got, the louder the crowd got.
I managed to squeeze my way onto the edge of a bleacher as team announcements were made and the two teams skated onto the track.
When the team clad in leopard print – The Gore-Gore Rollergirls – were getting their specific introduction, they huddled in a massive ball in the centre of the track and skated slowly, bobbing slightly. When one of their names was called, that skater stood and waved. I couldn’t quite make out Brie in the mass of skaters, but when her name and number – Asian Sinsation 1953 – were called, she stood out wonderfully, taller on skates and more muscular than I remembered her. She stood and blew a kiss to the crowd. She really hadn’t changed that much physically, but something had. Something made her almost unrecognizable.
While it seemed more organized and athletic than the ’70s version of roller derby I had in my head, the game, nonetheless, looked like little more than barely controlled chaos. Brie was a phenomenal skater. Her years of figure skating making her look so comfortable on the track. She was a “blocker” from what I could gather by the announcer’s ragged explanation, and her job was to hit. And she did it with a near recklessness that got her sent to the penalty box a lot yet didn’t seem to affect her team: I didn’t understand the scoring, but I could see on the scoreboard that her team was running away with it. The bigger the lead, the harder Brie – Asian Sinsation – seemed to hit.
At one point she took a run at an unsuspecting opponent: she caught her looking the other way and crushed her, sending her flying into the aptly named suicide seats that lined the track. The crumpled skater landed on the laps of a bunch of spectators and the crowd roared.
Brie began to skate to the penalty box when, after some discussion between her coach and one of the referees, she was thrown out of the game, the announcer explaining that she’d fouled out. On her way out she skated slowly around the edge of the track, blowing kisses to the crowd. She had a wild, gleeful expression on her face. When she skated passed me, she was so near I could have reached out and touched her. She even blew a kiss my way. But she never saw me. As she was about to exit, she stopped, turned around and made a graceful bow to the crowd.
I didn’t stay for the end of the game. Downsview Park was at the northern end of the subway line. At the time, Downsview was the last subway station before the transitless sprawl beyond the city. The subway station was a major transfer point: a modern, glass-walled station ringed by bus stops. It was cavernous with the subway line deep underground. It took a long escalator ride, then another, before you got to the platform.
I was in a daze as I descended, trying to merge this new Brie with the one I’d known so briefly but – I’d thought – intensely. She’d been so naive before: a raw, unshaped human.
I’d wanted to stick around and talk to her after the game, congratulate her. But I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t think I’d know what to say to a woman like that, so I just slipped out while the fans counted down the final moments of the game, left with that image of her final bow and the look of pleasure on her face as she’d done it.
The subway was already pulling into the next station before I was even fully aware that I was on it. I glanced up and around me when the recorded voice came on to announce the next station. The car was almost empty. A man in steel-toed boots and paint-splattered coveralls was dozing in the far end of it; a woman in a dress suit read a paperback. I glanced forward and then back, slowly realizing that for the first time in a long time, I wasn’t sitting in the front car of the train; instead, I was buried somewhere safely in the middle.
hey’ve spent the whole day walking through malls and packed streets. They’ve come all the way into town, sifted through sidewalks full of strolling tourists and rushed locals, all for a new set of Tupperware. After reading an article online about the toxicity of cheap plastic, she had concluded that all of their current plastic containers were inadequate. It’s his day off, it’s hot, and he wants nothing more than to sit in front of a fan with a cold beer.
The sun is glaring down at them relentlessly. People roam the streets in shorts, tank tops, almost naked, but he wears a suit because it’s what she expects. He wears shoes she bought for him only two days before: black leather with pointy tips and small laces that wrap his foot tight. She wears a sundress with an elaborate floral design and thick-soled sandals. They are both thirty-four, have been married seven years and have one daughter, five, who is spending the day with her grandparents.
They finally sit down at a table outside of a café. He reaches without her seeing to adjust his shoe. He tries to loosen the laces but they are thin and hard and will not unfasten.
“I’d like an iced latte,” she smiles softly. “And perhaps some carrot cake.”
He forces a smile, stands, loosens his tie and wipes his forehead with his arm. He can feel a blister forming at his heel and can’t move his toes.
“Jesus, it’s hot.”
“What was that?” She looks up at him, shielding her eyes against the glare of the sun.
Inside the café it is much cooler and the cold sucks away his sweat. Fans turn rapidly on the ceiling, and an air conditioner rattles in an open window. The interior is a vibrant mix of colours and on one wall a mural depicts dazzling yellow birds sitting in a lush green forest. The place is full of an indistinguishable mix of tourists and locals, couples and groups. Many fan themselves with pamphlets or street maps. The two teenagers behind the counter – one a blond, ponytailed girl in a short, black denim skirt with her shirt tied in a knot above her small belly – work efficiently with deadpan stares; little drops of sweat form on their faces near overworked espresso machines and small pastry ovens. The girl takes his order.
“Must be some hot in that suit,” she says. When she smiles, her skin, which is bronzed from days at the beach, crinkles around her lips and chin.
He watches as she moves behind the counter. She is athletic. A soccer player, he guesses. Her legs are brown and muscled, tight raindrops for calves, funnelling down into slim, but strong, ankles. The small of her back is equally browned and a tiny valley is formed there by toned muscles. Her tan is accented by the small tattoo of a butterfly. It sits left of the centre on her back, a mix of turquoise and yellows and reds bleeding into one another on outstretched wings. As she bends and the muscles on her back contract, it gains the illusion of flight and seems beautiful to him.
> When she turns back with that same sympathetic smile, he wants to tell her he thinks her tattoo is beautiful. But he feels prematurely old and restrained and embarrassed for having stared so intently so just says thank you and leaves. Outside, he is immediately overcome by the sun. The heat causes waves of distorted air to rise from the street. There is a haze embracing the downtown core that gives everything a dull, uninteresting cloak. In this part of the city – and at this time of the year – there are usually flowerpots hanging from street posts, but there have been water restrictions imposed and now the pots hold only grey and crumbling soil.
“We’ve got one more place to go,” she says.
“Can’t we just call it a day?” He sits down and slides her drink and cake across the table.
“Oh no, we’ll find something.” She sucks her latte through a straw.
“I’m fucking dying in this suit.” He has brought his coffee to his lips, and with one sip knows he doesn’t want it. It is too hot and too strong and sucks the remaining moisture from his body.
“What’s that?” Her head is down as she works a white plastic fork into the cake.
He bends over with a grunt – feels the blood run to his face, his collar tighten around his neck, sweat form at his hairline – and tries once again to loosen his shoes. The laces are so thin he manages only to tighten them. “Goddamn these shoes.” He wants to yell, but can only mumble under the strain.
“You’re mumbling again.”
He sits up and stares hard. His breath quickens. The tip of his left shoe works at the back of his right. He wants to tell her he’s going home for God’s sake. He’s hot and tired, it’s his day off, their daughter is with his parents, and he doesn’t want to spend it wandering around the city looking for Tupperware.
