The Journey Prize Stories 30

by Sharon Bala

  You need someone, he wrote. You’re no good on your own.

  The gall of this man! But she knew that he only meant that he was lonely, that he was no good on his own, that he needed someone.

  “Maybe he wants to live in the desert with you,” Natasha said later, during their phone-call debriefs. “Or it’s just Tom being Tom. Some men enjoy knowing that women are talking about them, calling them asshole.”

  (Tom had once called Natasha a “femme fatale.”)

  “I think he’s just immature. But he won’t be gorgeous forever.”

  “He has a man-bun,” Natasha said. “And he knows exactly what he’s doing.”

  * * *

  —

  3:18. Steven Vandersteen had not yet shown. Natasha had not replied to Evie’s message but had replied to various fawning comments to her photos, all variations of “what a babe,” with the obligatory “aw, you guys are sweet” in response. They all pretended that this wasn’t the game, this vanity, that the photos’ sole purpose wasn’t to attract envy and admiration.

  Evie should know. She had not become threatening but more attractive to men since winning the position. Men turned around her like spokes around a hub. She had started wearing daring shades of lipstick—reds and neon pinks—and to admire herself in reflective surfaces when she passed them. She could not distinguish the feeling of attraction from the feeling of being attractive, her desire from her vanity. The better things seemed to get the worse they were: this was the hard truth.

  * * *

  —

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s prosperity was a curse. Three of his brothers committed suicide, while the fourth, a pianist, lost a hand. Ludwig threw himself into the battles of World War I, spent his life plagued by the puzzles of philosophy and by his fortune, which he kept trying to give away, an incurable virus of wealth. The Nazis came and the Wittgensteins fled. Between the wars, Ludwig abandoned the work that made him famous and moved north to teach schoolchildren. As a young man, his aptitudes had been mechanical and he had worked on hot-air balloons as an engineer. The schoolchildren tromped behind him in the woods while he told them the names for things. He was an expert whistler.

  He worked as a medic during World War II and tried to avoid his fans. By then, a circle of believers had formed in Vienna around his philosophy, and he had earned the raving admiration of Bertrand Russell. Ludwig hit the schoolchildren with a ruler.

  “About which one cannot speak thereof one must remain silent,” he wrote in the trenches of World War I. All purists wish that a word was a clean window, a direct line. All purists like stillness and singularity. In the preface to his final work he expresses his frustration at his results being “variously misunderstood, more or less mangled or watered down.” This “stung my vanity,” he wrote. As for his vanity, he “had difficulty quieting it.”

  * * *

  —

  At least she liked her office. The palm trees were not so bad from afar, the vista a postcard cliché, though she had since learned from her landlord that they were full of rats. “They live in the palms, honey,” he’d said after she saw a dishearteningly large brown rodent on her balcony. “The palms are filled with ’em.” Now she could see that their plaits of woven bark must be easy for a rodent to climb. And of course everyone talked about the smog. The dirty air—who knew on the particulate level what it really was?—blotted out, some days, all proof of mountains. Or created cotton candy skies at sunset.

  Everyone back where it still snowed and rained in reasonable intervals believed she had won a jackpot, and now she needed to figure out how best to manage the envy of others. But Southern California was just like everywhere; people hated their lives here as they did everywhere else. She had opinions about the sky. Grey weather had not been the cause of her gloom, but had carried it like vapour. Gloom had a pressure system, too, and the blue sky was a taunt, cheerful as a sixties housewife. She longed for a downpour.

  The glamour of philosophy, its sheen and its thrill, would soon dull for these students. It happened to everyone, except for madmen, maybe: the first dose of philosophy, which seems to question everything you thought you knew, is actually heady with illusions. A year or two of undergrad, three if you were lucky, and then you hit peak illusion, believing as you did that these thoughts mattered, that you were doing something both deep and important. But the end result was predetermined. What you thought was freedom landed you in an air-conditioned office somewhere, no better than a clerk. Type, type, tap. A person struggled to get up a mountain and, well, you know the rest. You can tire of a view.

  She now had to manage the students’ illusions. Wittgenstein thrilled them because of his renegade personality. He was a Jesus figure, toppling tables. So she told them his biography, she laughed over gavagai, she said, “What, we may ask, is a number?” and she did not tell them when they came to her office for advice about switching their major to philosophy that you only ended up becoming a desk-jockey if you were one of the lucky ones. She would not say to them, Look, you are headed to loneliness. If you even get a job, you will have to move far away from everyone you love.

  Tom had once told her that he adored her strangeness, but she thought he only found her strange because he was prejudiced against blond women. But, then, being a genius often makes a person an asshole, and she pointed this out in lectures when she wanted a laugh. During his tenure as an abusive schoolteacher, Ludwig wrote in a letter to Russell, “I am still at Trattenbach, surrounded, as ever, by odiousness and baseness.”

  * * *

  —

  3:23. She refreshed the feed. Nothing from Natasha, but a new photo from Tom. Tom Abstract (he had of course invented a bullshit name)—with Natasha Balay. It was a picture of the two of them fairly close up—definitely he was holding the phone that took the picture—in Queen’s Park, surrounded by trees gone gold, dropping leaves in a glitter. Their faces were nearly touching. “Philosophers in Autumn,” he’d titled it. She cringed at the attempt to be ironic that read as gravely sincere. They think that they’re philosophers, she thought. It was like calling yourself a poet when you’d never published a thing. But after her cringe came another set of facial expressions, which she did not see in the reflection of her screen, because she was so focused on the photo. The Likes were pouring in. Someone had commented: look how cute you are together.

  * * *

  —

  Eight months ago, she’d been checking into the hotel here and saw Tom coming out of an elevator with his duffle bag. She looked away, since she often hallucinated familiar faces while travelling, but he spotted her and came right to the front desk and watched the concierge give her a key. “It’s a beautiful hotel,” Tom said. “Quite a town.”

  The hotel was built to look like an old mission (she’d thought it was an actual converted mission and was not disabused of this until after she’d accepted the job), and the cool Mexican tiles alone were enough to convince a person that this would be a wonderful place to live.

  “What are you doing here?”

  They were frozen in the lobby, staring at each other. A breeze from the bronze, old-timey ceiling fans tossed his shoulder-length hair. He was looking craggier every year, long lines where his dimples used to be, eyes a bit bloodshot, though through the alchemy of his charm all of this made him seem more beautiful.

  “Did you think you were the only big shot with a campus interview?”

  It was then she understood what was meant by the phrase I was floored. She gathered herself and tossed back to him: “Oh, you have a secret interview. You must be taking this very seriously.”

  He liked it when she hit him with things she herself would have hated to hear. The meaner she was to him, the warmer he was to her. “Let’s have a drink. I’ve got a few hours before I have to catch my flight.” He led her to the bar, which, since it was the middle of the day, was mostly empty. She was still crumpled as the clothes in her suitcase. “Pretty soon they’ll know everything about you,” he said
.

  “Just like you do, I guess,” she said.

  “I do know everything about you.”

  She sipped her old fashioned through the tiny straw. “What do you think I want to do right now, if you’re so smart?”

  In the hotel room, in bed with him, she felt as she always had in all those years of letting this happen. It had happened a thousand times; it had been six months since the last time; it was always the same: just at their moment of greatest intimacy, his warm flesh against hers, absorbed by hers, his moaning and sighing marks of vulnerability, she felt that she could not trust him. His mouth was on her until she couldn’t bear it, until she was almost in a trance, hallucinating a third party as though her suspicions were made flesh. So, now, against the door, lifted onto the bathroom counter, him pulling her open with his hands, and then on the bed, distrust flicked through her. “What are you doing?” she cried out as she came. He wanted to distract her before her interview.

  “You romanticize my despair,” he said. But the magic had gone out of him. In all those years, Evie hadn’t slept with anyone else, as though a silent commitment could stand in for monogamy. He said, “Let the best man win,” before letting himself out the door, and she nodded, decided that though he’d hoped to throw her off her game she’d use the fuck to her advantage. She was desirable, powerful, the sort of person who could shake off an intense encounter and go into a room full of strangers and charm them with her poise.

  “Whatever you do, don’t drink, no matter how much you want to,” her advisor had told her. She downed a black coffee and then another. She rinsed out her mouth with tepid water and brushed her teeth. She zipped on her nicest pencil skirt.

  * * *

  —

  Now it was Evie who’d started drinking. She was not an alcoholic and could admit that she was drinking excessively, watching bad reality TV and Dr. Phil and going through a twenty-sixer of Wild Turkey every week. This is not the outcome we expected, she thought he’d say if he were here with her and not with Natasha in Toronto. Now it was Evie who was drinking and Tom who was in love. There was a language to these photos. She knew it was post-coital and then also pre-coital. Now, 3:29, Natasha had finally replied. Yes! I’m in Toronto! Then, How are you?

  Go fuck yourself, Evie thought, trembling like a palm. Before she could think better of it, below the photo of the two of them, she copy-and-pasted a quote from the lecture she’d been writing. “I know that human beings are on the average not worth much anywhere, but here they are more good-for-nothing and irresponsible than elsewhere.” Take that! The slim moment of triumph was followed by terror, but before she could figure out how to delete it, Steven Vandersteen walked in.

  * * *

  —

  Well, it turned out that Steven Vandersteen wore a top hat. She was in no mood to laugh, and, trembling still, Evie looked calmly at the hat and the bearded face beneath it and gestured at the chair for him to sit.

  “I assume you are Steven Vandersteen,” she said. “Nice to finally meet you.”

  He smirked at her. Then, he lifted his finger and thumb to the brim of the hat and tipped it at her. “Likewise.”

  “So, I’ve got your essay here, and I just wanted to consult with you before I send it down the channels.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I mean, you didn’t write this, right?”

  “I wrote it.”

  “You arranged it.”

  “If you think about it,” he said, with such an emphasis that it was clear he thought she hadn’t thought about it, “that’s all every essay is. An arrangement of various invented words.”

  “I have to disagree with that,” she said.

  “There is nothing new under the sun. Who said that?”

  She stared at him. Men always taking it upon themselves to teach her.

  “Marcus Aurelius,” he said.

  “Actually, it’s from the Book of Ecclesiastes.”

  “I can guarantee you,” he said, seeming not to have heard her, “that Wittgenstein wouldn’t care one way or another whether he received attribution. He was purely interested in the truth.”

  He pronounced the W in Wittgenstein as a W, and for a moment she felt sorry for him. He was the sort of kid who thought that genius was worth something, the sort of kid who wants to find out that he is a genius, or, rather, the sort of kid who is certain that he is a genius and is just waiting for someone to discover it. Like a tall, thin woman waiting for a modelling agent to come along.

  “You never come to class, and you’ve committed several shades of academic dishonesty. Not just misattribution but outright plagiarism. And regardless of the possibility for novelty on this Earth, there are rules and consequences in the university, and—”

  “Man, I feel sorry for you,” he said.

  She was still trembling. She took a deep breath. “What are your plans? I saw that you’re a philosophy major.”

  “Yep.”

  “Well, you’re wasting your money and your time if you don’t bother learning the ropes here. You want to just think your own thoughts, might as well drop out.”

  “Yeah, I wish,” he said.

  “Guess what?” she said. “The world’s your oyster. You can just drop out and work with your hands and learn how to build hot-air balloons or whatever. Spare the rest of us this nonsense.”

  “What the fu…? Hot-air balloons?”

  “You aren’t a child,” she said, though he was, though he looked like one. “You like the truth so much?” (I’m not a liar, I’m just kinder than you are, she had told both Tom and Natasha, who thought she was soft just because she was pretty, because she was blond.) “You want me to tell you the truth? If no one else will?” He’s a cheater, she thought, but he’s also a child.

  “Lay it on me,” he said.

  It would feel good to punch a person in the face. Sometimes it would. “Everybody is putting up with you. You think you’re a renegade surrounded by phonies, but those phonies are just being kind. Wearing a fucking top hat.”

  Now she felt breathless, as though she had run into him and beat at his chest with her fists. She laid her hands palm down flat on the desk to stop their trembling. Out of the corner of her eye she could see that her phone was flashing with a message, but Steven Vandersteen showed no sign of getting out.

  “Whoa, lady, I don’t know what your deal is, but—”

  “You are supposed to address me as Professor.”

  He stared at her, eyes banded by shadow below the brim of the hat.

  “It’s very disrespectful.” She thought maybe he’d take the hat off and clutch it to his chest in apology and humility.

  “So, what do you want me to do about this essay?” he said.

  “You’re going to take this home and you are going to rewrite it.” He nodded at her. “If you don’t want to fail,” she said, and he continued to nod. In this case, nodding did a great deal to humanize him. “You think you’re such a genius?” She smiled at him. “Okay, then. Prove it.”

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  Shashi Bhat holds an MFA in fiction from Johns Hopkins University. Her stories have appeared in The Malahat Review, PRISM international, The New Quarterly, Grain, The Dalhousie Review, Journey Prize Stories 24, and other publications. She has twice been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and was a finalist for the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers. Her debut novel, The Family Took Shape (Cormorant, 2013), was a finalist for the Thomas Raddall Atlantic Fiction Award. Shashi is the editor of EVENT magazine and teaches creative writing at Douglas College.

  Greg Brown is a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro’s MFA program in Creative Writing and Memorial University of Newfoundland’s MA in English Literature. He is the recipient of the UBC English Department’s Roy Daniells Memorial Essay Prize, and his fiction and essays have appeared in Paragon, Postscript, Pulp Literature, RS500, Tate Street, and elsewhere. He teaches at the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop an
d at the Creative Writing for Children Society of Vancouver. He lives on Vancouver Island and is presently working on a short story collection.

  Alicia Elliott is a Tuscarora writer from Six Nations of the Grand River living in Brantford, Ontario, with her husband and child. Her essay “A Mind Spread Out on the Ground” won Gold at the National Magazine Awards in 2017. Her short story “Unearth” was selected for Best American Short Stories 2018. She was the 2017–2018 Geoffrey and Margaret Andrew Fellow at UBC, and was selected by Tanya Talaga as the recipient of the 2018 RBC Taylor Prize Emerging Writer Award. Her book of essays, A Mind Spread Out on the Ground, is forthcoming from Doubleday Canada in the spring of 2019.

  Liz Harmer was born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, and currently lives in Southern California. Her essays and stories have appeared in The New Quarterly, The Malahat Review, Hazlitt, Literary Hub, Grain, PRISM international, This Magazine, and elsewhere. She won the Constance Rooke Creative Nonfiction Prize in 2013 and a National Magazine Award for Personal Journalism in 2014. Her first novel, The Amateurs, was published as a New Face of Fiction title with Knopf Canada in 2018. She’s at work on a number of new stories and essays, as well as a second novel.

  Philip Huynh‘s fiction has been published in EVENT, The New Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and The Malahat Review, and has been cited in Best American Short Stories 2015. “The Forbidden Purple City” is his second story to appear in The Journey Prize Stories. His debut collection of stories—coincidentally entitled The Forbidden Purple City—co-won the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop Emerging Writers Award and will be published by Goose Lane Editions in the spring of 2019. He lives in Richmond, B.C., with his wife and twin daughters.

  Jason Jobin grew up on an acreage in a Yukon forest. He did a BA and MFA in writing at the University of Victoria, where he studied fiction and screenwriting, and developed his own course on how to rap. His fiction has won The Malahat Review’s Jack Hodgins Founders’ Award and has been longlisted for The Fiddlehead Prize. For him, writing is a place to show the fallout of people in suddenly new situations, the moments that wake you up and that you think back on when falling asleep. He currently lives and writes in Victoria, and is working on a collection and a novel.