The Journey Prize Stories 30

by Sharon Bala

  “Come forward,” calls the county volunteer.

  They walk until they hit an incline. The second sandbar. The water level drops to their ribs now. Jackie keeps her eyes fixed on the floating thing. If it’s actually part of a body, wouldn’t the helicopter have spotted it, protruding from the water like that? It catches the sunlight, slick and shining.

  “Stop. Let’s reform the chain.”

  Anna extends her hand. Jackie hesitates, takes it.

  “Should we say something?” asks Anna.

  Before Jackie can answer, they’re moving forward again. It’s just a piece of wood, she tells herself. Likely blew in with the storm. So why isn’t it drifting closer? It disappears, resurfacing in the same place, about twenty feet away, a moment later.

  She finds herself thinking about the man. His poor family. Are his loved ones out searching? There are times when she wishes her own father had stayed lost. Her mother would have called off the search. Fifteen feet now. She is almost sure—it isn’t. Him. But the way it moves. Fluid-like. Not bobbing. Not like driftwood. Ten feet. Jackie tightens her grip on Anna’s hand. The women on either side tug her along until she stops, digging her heels into the sand. The chain bows around her. At last, she sees the illusion. It’s just a branch. A piece of driftwood masquerading as a man’s arm.

  GREG BROWN

  LOVE

  We agreed as a family that the only thing to do was to bring Mom home for the next few months or weeks, whatever it would be. It’ll be hard, Dad said. But maybe it can be fine, too. Denisa was suspicious about the cost of it all—like the private nurse we’d have to pay for, where at the hospital it was free—although she didn’t put it like that, said that we’d be crazy to bring Mom into a place where there wasn’t any immediate care, because what if there was a problem like before, the thing with her stent that plugged up and caused some internal bleeding that almost wasn’t staunched in time?

  She could’ve, Denisa said.

  The oncologist had said October, and the late pale fog had come and now the sky was mostly dimmed and gone by suppertime.

  I said that I would only do it if we agreed that Pastor Karen would not come to the house; I was not comfortable with Pastor Karen coming to the house. Jon and Dad looked at me a moment and said, Okay.

  Denisa said, I don’t get what you don’t like about Pastor Karen.

  And I explained why I didn’t like Pastor Karen.

  And Denisa said, Well, I don’t think it’s really fair to call her a liar.

  And I explained why I thought it was fair to call Pastor Karen a liar.

  And Denisa said, Well, by that standard they’re all liars. And then we’d all be liars, too. The whole thing would be a lie. We don’t need lies right now.

  And I agreed with Denisa, especially about how we didn’t need lies right now.

  And Denisa said, It doesn’t matter, because who cares what we know and don’t know. If Mom wants her to visit, then she visits.

  I said, I care.

  And Denisa said, You’re unbelievable.

  The family counsellor in the palliative care ward arranged for the hospital to loan us one of their extra beds, and then one of the RNs in the palliative care ward arranged for a delivery service to bring the bed by and for the ambulance service to drive Mom from the hospital. We watched, standing far clear of the foyer, uncertain about how wide a berth to give, as the ambulance attendants bounced the gurney over the uneven tile in the kitchen.

  You’re home, Dad said, as the attendants rolled Mom from the gurney into the special hospital bed. Mom looked up and smiled and didn’t say anything.

  She passed very early the next morning, and Dad woke us up to tell us what had happened. That he’d gone into her room to help her with her bedpan and that he’d found her very still, nothing going into her and nothing coming out. I don’t know why he said it like that: “Nothing going into her and nothing coming out.” Then he said that he’d already called the hospital and spoken with Dr. Halford and that Dr. Halford said that the hospital would send over the ambulance and he reminded Dad about the paperwork that he would need to have at hand because the coroner would also be over with the ambulance because it was protocol for the coroner to check in to make sure that we had the right kind of permits for the deceased. I don’t know why Dad told us all of this, we didn’t need to know it.

  There isn’t a lot of time, Dad said, before they’ll be here to take her, and I think you should each take a moment.

  We would take turns sitting with the body in the bedroom—if it was just that, a body—where it was still prone in the borrowed hospital bed, where nothing was going into it and nothing coming out.

  First, it was Jon’s turn since he was the youngest and that seemed fair and important to honour. The rest of us sat in the living room where we hadn’t yet taken down the Christmas decorations and listened, but also did not listen, to the sounds that were coming out of the bedroom. We looked at the Christmas tree because there was nothing else to look at and because it was there and because we’d forgotten to take it down. We’d done a very good job decorating it, even though we’d used many homemade decorations—gingerbread men with purple silk looped through their head-holes and chains of old popcorn threaded with green fishing line. I don’t like homemade decorations because they look sloppy and cheap and often like they are made by children, as these ones were, since of course we’d made them as children many, many years ago. But I thought the tree looked almost fine.

  We could hear Jon speaking, but I tried not to hear it and I clenched my jaw just tightly enough to aggravate the ringing in my left ear. But the tree looked fine even with the ringing in my ear and Jon’s quiet noises, and my only real regret about the tree was the winged, brass treetopper—which actually was store-bought, not handmade by us as children—which was canted at the top of the tree either because the last tree spoke or whatever you call the top branch was bent or because Jon, who’d been the one to put it on top of the tree, had put it on in a hurry, although that didn’t seem very likely, he was careful mostly.

  Jon came out and he was wiping his nose with the collar of his shirt. He sat down beside Dad, and Dad put an arm around him and then they leaned their heads together, almost like they were in love.

  Then Denisa stood up and said, There’s no way.

  And Dad said, You won’t get another chance.

  And Denisa said, I don’t want to remember any of this. And then Denisa sat back down and covered her face with one of the Christmas throw pillows.

  In the bedroom, there was the body still in the bed, nothing going into it. Her eyes shone brightly, still full of wet surprise and I wondered if she was actually. I stood beside the borrowed hospital bed that had been brought into our house and I stood and looked down at her, the body. There was nothing to do or to say. I remembered that before, when she was in the hospital, she wasn’t always lucid. She dreamed while she was awake—that’s how Dr. Halford explained it—and talked through the dreams as they appeared to her. I remembered that in one dream it was like she was a small child. It seemed like somebody was angry at her, like she’d done something wrong. I stood and listened for a while.

  I won’t say it, she said. It’s poison to say it. Jon is sick because he said the words. He has a fever and I don’t want to catch the fever. This school is a bad school. This school makes you sick if you say the words.

  I became scared and left the room and found one of the nurses and told her what was happening. When we got back to the room she was still talking, but she seemed better.

  Would you put another log on the fire, dear, Mom said. It’s very cold.

  The nurse said, Of course, darling, let me see what’s left of the cord out back. And then Mom was quiet for a while and the nurse said to me, I hope you don’t mind about that. And even though I was angry because I don’t believe in lying, I didn’t say anything.

  And weeks later—she was in the hospital for so long—she woke up in the early ev
ening and she said to me, Oh, there are angels outside the door. I hear them. They’re saying that they’re here for me. They’re here to heal me. To make me better. They say that I’m cured. And I said, Mom, no. And she said, Open the door. And I said, Please, stop. And she said, You’re not listening to me. The angels are here, you’ve got to let them in before they leave. Stop, I said. She said, You don’t make them wait. And I said, Look, the door is open and where are the angels? She leaned out of her bed, wincing or searching I couldn’t say. Her body was so small and yellow and slow. She stared at the empty doorway and then lay back down. You’re right, she whispered. There’s nothing. I’m sorry.

  It’s fine, I said.

  LIZ HARMER

  NEVER PROSPER

  One day, when Paul was practicing at one of the seven grand pianos in their winter home, the Palais Wittgenstein, he leaped up and shouted at his brother Ludwig in the room next door, “I cannot play when you are in the house, as I feel your skepticism seeping towards me from under the door.”

  —from Anthony Gottlieb’s “A Nervous Splendor”

  Of course there was no end to the cheaters. Evie prepared for the meeting by looking over the essay, which was so poorly cut-and-pasted that it contained several different font styles and sizes, and then the final sentence just ran off a cliff, no period, no final payoff to the opening promise: After all it is clear that Wittgenstein believed. She had now read the paper more times than it deserved, though it did have a strange beauty. We have so far said nothing whatever: a direct quote from the text itself but unattributed as such. Still, it was incredibly to the point.

  She knew the name but not the face of the student who had produced such a mess. She had interacted with Steven Vandersteen only via email, emails that were also syntactically odd and sometimes even offensive in their illiteracy. Be there at 3, he had written, and despite the strange command of its phrasing, its keenness to keep her in this office chair, waiting, she knew that he really meant that he would be there at 3. She was sure she had never seen him. She knew the names of the twenty-seven who bothered to attend class regularly, and she knew the faces of those who never showed but sometimes came to her office hours as though their smiling manoeuvrings would earn them the grade they wanted. Steven Vandersteen, whose name had a performative quality as though invented for the sake of sound, belonged to a third category.

  Teaching was a useless activity. Like torture as an interrogation technique, it did not produce the effect it was meant to. Torture never delivered the truth, and teaching never delivered knowledge, regardless of methodology. Evie’s disillusionment was nearly complete. I am receiving a salary, she told herself. I have an office and prestige. Meanwhile the students received the grades they needed, learning nothing. Only those already inclined to understand something did. She swivelled in the chair she’d picked out in the office furniture catalogue in a swell of optimism in August, and looked out at the few bobbing palm leaves along the parking lot. She hated palm trees now more than ever.

  Cheating did not give her hives, but she was required to investigate and perhaps to punish those who plagiarized or stole. As someone who had never cheated—who had not even taken a shortcut or skimmed a book!—Evie had the illogical intuition that the principles of order in the universe would justly punish such people with or without her intervention.

  It was ten after three. Steven Vandersteen was late. She left all the windows on the monitor open, each of her papers an attempt to untwist an elaborate knot, like a cop in those detective shows pinning up photos and strings to connect them on a board. Instead of working, though, she logged in to Facebook, where she saw that Natasha had just posted a few photos of herself in Queen’s Park, and near Robarts Library, and in front of the Humanities building. Toronto with its trees flaming into colour and the olive green scarf Natasha wore loosely over her sweater were autumnal, and homesickness pricked Evie. She clicked Like on the photos—they weren’t selfies but there was no word on her companion—and then messaged Natasha: Since when are you in TO? Natasha seemed to be logged in but did not respond.

  * * *

  —

  Natasha was the only one Evie could talk to about Tom. Evie had known him now for twelve years, since the Philosophy of Language class they’d both taken. He’d criticized her after the first session for nodding too much. “Your nodding does nothing to humanize you,” he’d said outside the building in a drizzle, with a cigarette pinned to his mouth. His squint had a James Dean quality, but Evie thought she was immune to this, never having cared for James Dean. She blushed. Her nodding during class was a private movement cruelly exposed. To seem unperturbed she bummed a cigarette and smoked with him in the rain.

  Later she discovered that she was exactly his type: straight blond hair, the body of a high-school athlete. He liked to make women blush; the other philosophy majors knew him well. The professor in that class, an eccentric whose glasses would often fly off his face by the force of his gesticulations, adored Tom. Tom got the only easy As in the class, drinking all night and then tossing off essays a few hours before class began in the dim lamplight of his dorm room desk, on a typewriter that he used instead of the computer labs like everybody else. Tom and that professor—Dr. de France—had a Wittgenstein/Russell dynamic. Bertrand Russell had once said of Wittgenstein admiringly that he was “destitute of the false politeness that interferes with truth.”

  For all her perky nodding, Evie really had to work in that class. Her notes included the sentences of encoded formal logic that Dr. de France scribbled on the chalkboard, muttering that the students wouldn’t understand these but really they ought to be able to, and she sat there writing until her wrist hurt, hating de France and Tom both. Her ambition was as big as theirs was, but her naivety disguised her. That she liked Gottlieb Frege for asking the question they were all thinking: What is a number anyway? That she liked the verve of a philosopher called Quine, who said that if we see a person pointing at a rabbit and saying “gavagai,” we don’t know if “gavagai” means “rabbit” or “undetached rabbit part” or “time-slice of a rabbit,” and to assume that their language disclosed the same conceptual scheme would be shameful, despite the silliness of the example. By then, she had become utterly conscious of her every movement in the class (Tom sat two rows over and one back, and she felt the heat of his looking at her on the back of her neck), and soon afterwards she was sleepless in his bunk listening to the anachronistic type-tapping of his genius through the night, the dings and rolling, the chatter of keys a soundtrack so particular to their romance that whenever she heard it she rushed with feeling for him, like a person accused of nodding stupidly.

  Her only contact with him now was on Facebook or over text. Men believed themselves to be unsentimental, but they were the worst of all. Sometimes he would text her, just: the present king of France is bald. It was a reference to this class, where they’d met and first read these essays by Russell to do with truth-claims and sentences that seem to have no meaning. He would text it only if they hadn’t talked in a while, and it meant: I miss you, don’t forget about me.

  So she and Natasha talked too much about him. Natasha had appeared in grad school the way a fairy does in a tale. Evie had followed Tom to U of T, and he’d acted surprised that she’d gotten in on the same level of scholarship that he had. His disdain was almost as good as being treated roughly in bed.

  Natasha was dark-eyed and sleek with makeup, black hair long and shiny with care, and Evie was sure that Tom would sleep with her. Natasha’s look of arrogant self-certainty and the intelligence in her eyes were, to him, nearly an invitation. A seminar they all took became an occasion for the two of them to engage in foreplay while Evie watched. Blowjobs came up as illustrations of Hegelian dynamics more than once. Evie prepared herself for it, expected to find them in his bed, or to find one of Natasha’s scarves hanging over a piece of his furniture. It wasn’t as though Evie and Tom were together; it wasn’t as though she hadn’t found out he was s
leeping with another woman before. But for about a year, her heart would race every time she had her hand on a doorknob for fear of what lay behind it.

  “I don’t like women who try so hard,” Tom told Evie when she brought up Natasha, early on.

  Years later, Natasha said, “I don’t know why you like him. He’s not likeable.”

  “It’s not that I like him. It’s force. Animal attraction.”

  “You want to be pushed around, but you should find a better man than Tom to do it,” Natasha said. Grad school didn’t turn Natasha’s looks; not only did she not go ragged but her nails were still done. Evie became wan and cowed, blond hair limp, going brittle like an old book.

  Natasha was now living in Germany on a fellowship. They were geographically triangulated, one on either side of Tom and Toronto. Evie relished any contact with him, which, at this point, tended to be criticisms of her Facebook posts. He was a man who had come of age in the nineties and still thought like Kurt Cobain, or like Ethan Hawke’s character in Reality Bites—that one’s every action must be perfectly consistent if one is to have dignity. He still believed in the concept of selling out. Smiling at a customer at the Gap or at the Dean who might give you a job when you do not feel like smiling is thus a form of lying. It was a maddening but deeply attractive quality, though now that he was on Facebook he was disappointingly knowable. He always liked her pictures, always criticized her for complimenting someone else, and could be counted on to message her whenever she complained about Southern California. These were Tom bait—she posted such updates when she craved an argument with him.

  I’m not obligated to find this place beautiful, she told him. It’s a desert.

  You have everything you ever wanted, he wrote. It’s ridiculous for you to complain.

  I don’t have everything. And I’m entitled to my feelings.