Nothing Looks Familiar

by Shawn Syms

I yell into the kitchen, “Kath!”

  Big Kath gets up from her chair, lifts Rhonda like she’s a toothpick, and efficiently transports her to the bathroom. I watch her nude form shake as she babbles in the older woman’s muscular grasp. “Am I gonna die?” she sputters.

  Christ, not again. Stupid bitch. I step behind them, look Rhonda in the face, and say in a loud voice, “You’re not going to die, honey.” Kath will make sure she cools down and doesn’t drown or convulse. We’ve been through this twice before with Rhonda.

  Lise carefully lays out washed cheques on the paper towels next to the trays. She looks closely at one of them and puts it back in the wash. I’m impressed. There’s a light thud from the bathroom, then the sound of the running shower. The phone rings. Zeke sounds wired. “I’m coming home.”

  “You got mail?”

  “Yeah, I almost lost Duarte though.”

  “What?”

  “He was taking a piss behind the Cash Money on Portage. Standing at the dumpster with his rod hanging out, a bag of their garbage on either side of him when this blond Nazi cop shows up. Duarte talked his way out of it, but we took the long way home in case they were tailing us.” Paranoid as usual. I can’t wait to get away from him.

  “We’re coming home,” Zeke repeats himself. “Got lots of stuff. Everyone still working?”

  “Rhonda’s having an OD in the bathroom. Kath’s taking care of it.”

  “Good. Lise there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “See you in ten.”

  I hang up and head back to the can, hoping Rhonda hasn’t turned blue. She’s sitting naked in the shower, head lolling to one side. Hosed down, she still smells. “She’s asleep,” Kath tells me, washing her hands in the sink.

  “Thank fuck.”

  The apartment door rattles and pushes inward. Zeke and Duarte barge in with goofy grins on their faces. At six-five, fair-haired Zeke has to duck his head to get through the door. Swarthy, bearded Duarte is shorter than me. They each lug big garbage bags in both hands.

  “It’s Christmas, kids!” Zeke drops the bags off in the kitchen, giving Big Kath that three-part macho handshake I’ve never been able to get straight.

  “Ho ho ho!” spouts Duarte, slamming the door with his foot. They must be drunk and high. Zeke heads my way.

  “C’mere, baby,” he says. Is he talking to me or Lise?

  I never find out because he doesn’t make it across the room. The front door—which the guys didn’t lock behind them—slams on its hinges, kicked open. Two police officers: a short, black woman and a tall, blond male.

  “No one move!” the man bellows.

  “Fuck—not you!”

  In a minute they’ve got both the guys on the ground. The male cop bellows at me and Lise. “Back on the couch. Sit down and shut up!”

  “Shit—the kids!” Whispered through clenched teeth.

  Lise grabs my hand and squeezes. “I’ll protect them,” she hisses, slipping toward the back of the apartment. The cops, subduing Zeke and Duarte, don’t notice.

  The black officer leans down and twists Duarte’s arm behind his back. “Lay off, cunt!” Duarte shouts.

  She pulls out her nightstick and gives Duarte’s ass crack a vicious thwack, then smiles. He shuts up. She leans down in his face, all teeth. “Like that, you greasy, fucking faggot?” Duarte mutters in Spanish. She puts him in handcuffs to match Zeke’s and kicks him in the side.

  Sammy runs into the room, followed by Lise. She tries to scoop him up in her arms, but trips and falls instead, banging her forehead on the edge of the coffee table. She’s down. I watch as she starts to bleed from the head. Sammy lunges forward.

  “Baby, stop!” He ignores me and heads right for the male officer. Before the cop can react, Sammy reaches up and slams him in the nuts with his fist. With a surprised, angry yelp, he grabs his groin. Sammy throws his arms around the cop’s right leg and bites into his flank through the dark blue pants. “Jesus, fuck!”

  His partner reaches over and yanks Sammy by the shoulders, pulling him off and holding him in the air, away from her body. He continues to kick and yell. “If you send my mom to jail, I’ll fucking kick your fucking asses!”

  She puts Sammy face down on the floor between Zeke and Duarte. The male officer steps forward and stomps his foot onto Sammy’s back, immobilizing him. He keeps yelling. The officer kicks his kidneys. Sammy shuts down, but I can see his body heaving like he’s going to hyperventilate. I feel numb.

  The female cop, weapon drawn, heads back to scope out the rest of the apartment. Lise rouses on the floor, wipes her bloody face, and crawls over to join me at the couch. Rhonda walks into the room, head down, and sits next to us. The tip of Lise’s syringe pokes out from underneath a pile of cheques on the coffee table. Rhonda can’t take her eyes off it.

  Big Kath sits in the kitchen and fixes the male officer with a surly stare, her large hands trembling in her lap. He surveys the contents of the kitchen table. Next to a stack of cheques sit a half-dozen baggies of speed. Putting on a latex glove, he slips the drugs into an evidence bag.

  Lise leans in toward me. “Cindy is safe,” she whispers.

  I stare at her, uncomprehending.

  “I hid her in the laundry hamper. They won’t find her.” She grabs my hand. “I put all her blankets on top of her. They’ll never find her. She’ll be safe.”

  The female officer’s voice calls out from the back bedroom. “Jackson, call an ambulance. Now!”

  The psych ward at Johnson Memorial isn’t quite by the water’s edge, but I can still see Lake Winnipeg from my room. I’ve slept through the past three weeks.

  I could say a bunch of other stuff, but fuck it. Mom told me everything. Cindy stopped breathing but was revived. She’s in the hospital back in the city. Zeke and Duarte went to jail. Sammy’s in a foster home. Mom said she’d look into adopting Sammy and Cindy. I told her don’t bother. They’re better off with someone else. After all, I did what I planned to. I got them out of there.

  Snap

  The glowing tube in the fixture above Jake’s head bathed his cubicle in a green-tinged hue. Fluorescents wouldn’t be so bad except for the intermittent buzzing noises they emitted. The same moment the phone rang, the light flickered for a few seconds. Ghostly intervention or electronic glitch—he didn’t know which, but he was used to it by now. Jake reached over and picked it up after the second ring.

  “Social Services, Jake Wharton.” Gruff, tired.

  “Oh, hey, babe,” he said. Relieved, smiling. It was Lara. He glanced over a precarious pile of green file folders toward a framed photo of the two of them, taken last year at Canada’s Wonderland. Like the rest of the items on his desk, the picture needed to be dusted.

  She wanted to know if he was up for drinks over at their next-door neighbours’ after tonight’s meeting. Jake thought it best to decline.

  “A new guy in group is turning out to be a real asshole.” These meetings were draining; Jake often came out of them depressed and moody. He liked their neighbours, Fausto and Reg, well enough; they were the first male couple he’d really gotten to know, but later tonight he might not be the best company.

  “You go ahead. I’ll probably hit the sack early. It’s been a week.” He promised to keep the bed warm for her, then ended the call. With him out of the picture, maybe they’d end up at that male peeler bar again. Jake found the idea of male strippers hard to comprehend. He couldn’t imagine himself on a stage jiggling his buttocks, he knew that much. He didn’t even especially care to watch women do it either.

  It was five-thirty. In another hour, his weekly counselling session with the sex-offenders group. Some Friday night.

  Jake surveyed his desk: an inbox stacked with papers imprinted with letters like swarms of tiny black ants. Every stapled set of sheets required a piece of him in some form or another; casework needed updating or sorting—echoes of people’s pain converted into tidy reportage and shovelled back into musty folders. Each o
ne bore a man’s name written with a black Sharpie. Because therapy wasn’t equally successful with all offenders, some files were much thicker than others. Half the crap on paper also had to be typed into the fucking computer. Jake hated it.

  He wasn’t looking forward to tonight’s session, thanks to Steve Woodruff, whose folder sat at the top of the pile. Three years ago, Steve anally raped a woman he’d met at a nightclub. It had been his first offence—as far as the authorities knew. Just out of jail, tonight would be Steve’s third session of court-mandated group therapy. He delighted in riling and antagonizing the others. At his first session, he seemed drunk. The next week, he issued a racial slur to the man sitting next to him and later made a lewd comment about another man’s daughter, almost causing a pair of fist fights. Jake had fought the urge to punch Steve’s face himself, to wipe away his perpetual smirk.

  Over Jake’s head, the fluorescent flickered again. He ran his fingers through his long black hair. Jake felt older than thirty-three. He’d been running the sex-offenders group for three years, but it felt much longer. Before Steve’s arrival, the group had finally reached a certain level of serenity—as much as that was possible among a gang of eight men whose sole common denominator was the fact that they’d sexually forced themselves on others.

  He’d dealt with jackasses before—the nature of the job—but Jake felt ground down tonight. Hoped he had it in him to wrangle with this dick Steve, to defuse him somehow. The guy possessed a sly, devious intelligence—and disruptions like his could have a poisonous effect on the rest of the group. A few guys had been in the program for two years, had not re-offended, and were ready to graduate. I don’t want anyone to screw this up for them, Jake thought. He wondered if he should consider returning to his previous field of expertise, crisis counselling for suicidal youth. Or maybe he just needed a vacation—some place quiet, where no one had any problems.

  The joys of social work. At least he wasn’t involved in the initial intake work for sexual offenders in the therapy program. That involved confirmation of their attraction to sexual violence or underage victims by placing a ringed device at the base of the men’s penises and measuring the flow of blood to their members while showing them snuff images and kiddie porn and playing them audio tapes of women screaming or the voices of young children. Yes, his job could be worse.

  But they were successful at least part of the time; had the stats to prove it. He’d seen more than one profound transformation—and more than one lapse with tragic consequences. Some days he was moved by the thought of helping people change for the better. Other days, it was just a job. And a really draining one at that.

  “How do you think it made your daughter feel when she was alone with you, and you touched her where you did?” Jake posed his question to Roger Collins, who sat across from him in the semi-circle of folding chairs in the basement of the Catholic church. Jake affected an inquisitive but neutral tone. “Try to put yourself in her shoes,” he added, prodding Roger. The thirty-something fidgeted in his metal folding chair, causing it to creak. He opened and closed his mouth, pushing stringy black hair over a sweating forehead and adjusting thick, black-framed glasses. Roger had spent three years genitally fondling his daughter, who was now twelve. He ceased once she’d started to menstruate—and confided in her gym teacher after starting to cry in the middle of her first sex-ed class.

  Roger was tentative. “I love Sarah. She’s still my little baby,” he said. “I never actually hurt her. I thought we could make each other feel good in a way that wasn’t … ” He paused. “Complicated.”

  “But Roger, Sarah missed the rest of the school year. She may not have said anything at the time, but that doesn’t mean that you didn’t hurt her or violate her trust. Wouldn’t you agree?” Though Roger had made progress in individual therapy and was no longer denying what he’d done, this was the first time he’d spoken up in group.

  The bespectacled man stayed stock still, completely mum. Over in a corner, Jake’s boss Herschel Weiss scratched his beard and made a few scribbles in his notepad. Herschel sat in on counselling sessions at least once a month, sometimes accompanied by a parole officer or the woman from the victim advocate office. Most of the men were used to speaking about their actions in front of others; according to the dictates of the program, eschewing secrecy was an important part of the treatment process.

  Sitting next to Jake, Desmond Jones spoke up. A very tall man with dreadlocks tucked inside a black woolen tam, he cut an imposing figure even when seated. In contrast to Roger’s stuttering chirp, Desmond’s deep voice was measured.

  “Roger, you weren’t even thinking about how your child felt. When you hurt her, you were only thinking of yourself. Like you were on a train headed straight for her, like she was tied up on the track. What you need to learn now”—he paused to cock his head at Roger and smile—“is how to stop the train before it’s too late.”

  It was hard to believe Desmond was only twenty-two. His calm demeanour made him seem like the “gentle giant” of the group. But Jake was sure that in Desmond’s past that same quiet self-assurance and magnetic personality had been used to win the confidence of young boys. Desmond and Roger were the only two child abusers in the group; the other six men preyed on adults. Jake was pretty confident about Desmond’s future; for Roger, however, the jury was still out.

  Roger looked Desmond in the eye and sparked a thin smile before looking down at the floor and sinking into his chair. Then Steve Woodruff turned abruptly toward him, his posture electric. Steve was lean with blond hair and a very trim beard; his blue eyes narrowed, making them seem almost black.

  “I know what it feels like to get fucked,” Steve spat at Roger. “It hurts. You bleed. How can you pretend that it didn’t hurt your daughter? Did she ask for that? Fuck no, you pig. Just how disgusting are you?” He stared Roger down, poised spring-like on his seat’s edge.

  Roger sputtered. “I … I … I … never did that to her!”

  “But you would have started to soon if she hadn’t ratted you out—and you’ll always be waiting for your chance now, right?” Steve let the suggestion hover in the air. “You’ll never change,” he pronounced, looking away from the group and toward the black wooden door that marked the room’s exit. From around the circle of seated men there were grunts of agreement.

  Roger sank back further into his chair, crumpling into himself.

  Jake’s professional calm disappeared. “And Steve, how do you think the woman you assaulted felt while you were violating her?” he asked pointedly.

  “Not as bad as when it happened to me,” Steve snarled in retort. According to his file, there was no history of sexual abuse in his own childhood—but Steve had claimed during his intake assessment that he’d been raped in prison by a gang of men. Steve looked Jake directly in the eye, his facial expression somewhere between a self-satisfied smile and a confrontational leer.

  “She had a nervous breakdown, Steve. She had tremors and diarrhea for a year straight. You took something away from her, Steve, and you didn’t even know her name.” Jake’s face was bright red. In the far corner of the room, Herschel stared.

  Steve’s eyes never left Jake’s. “Her name was Liz, Jake. And your wife’s name is Lara.” Steve smiled, then looked around the room at the other men in the circle.

  Jake was startled into a moment of silence, after which he brought the meeting to a close. He left the room, and the other men quickly followed suit, a few of them pulling cigarette packs out of their pockets as they climbed the stairs.

  Minutes later, Herschel barged into the men’s room, where Jake stood at a urinal relieving himself. The dimly lit basement restroom was old and grimy. Dank and musty, the air was filled with the scent of urine-splashed mothballs.

  “Jake, what the fuck was that? You know how to do this. If your temper ever comes into play, you’ve lost control. You were right to confront someone who tries to deny his culpability, but you have to do it calmly.”

&n
bsp; More social-worker bullshit. I hate this crap, Jake thought. He shook off, zipped up, and then walked over to wash his hands in the yellow, cracked sink.

  “I’ll keep it in check.”

  “You better, Jake. I had confidence in you when you first took over the group, but I don’t know what’s up with you lately.”

  “Did you hear how he brought up Lara? He also mentioned he knew I live in Little Italy during our one-on-one last week. He’s trying to spook me.”

  “Jake, there are ways to deal with intimidation tactics—rational ways. You know this,” Herschel replied. “I’m worried you might need to take a bit of a break. I’ve talked with Maureen Dixon about it.” Herschel’s supervisor, the district manager.

  Jake was silent.

  “We’ll talk again Monday morning. First thing. Got it?” Herschel left the washroom and Jake heard footsteps recede as his boss walked down the hall and ascended the staircase.

  The carpaccio was moist and salty. “You gotta try this,” Jake said, pushing the appetizer plate in Lara’s direction. He watched as she speared a slice of the meat with her fork and brought it to her lips. “Tasty,” she concurred with a nod and a smile, helping herself to another piece.

  Jake thought Lara was more beautiful now than she was when they had met six years ago. Curly red hair framed her lightly freckled skin, and her face was graced with expressive, thoughtful eyes. Behind her, just beyond Marinella’s sidewalk patio, the springtime lunch-hour bustle of their neighbourhood was on parade. An old Italian man shuffled along the street with slow determination, propelled forward by a hand-carved wooden cane. A plaid-jacketed kid with a fauxhawk and an iPod manoeuvred past him with a look of impatience on her face.

  Jake’s nostrils widened at the earthy smell of the wild mushroom risotto that sat in front of him, its steam rising into his face. Caught up in his surroundings, he hadn’t even noticed when their entrées had arrived. The service here was discreet and efficient; he looked down and saw his wine glass had also been filled.