Chris Eaton, a Biography

by Chris Eaton

  ***

  It sounds like you’re at a party.

  A bus just drove by, he said.

  ***

  I could really use another week of work, Mrs. C.

  I’ll see what I can do, she said.

  ***

  Another month went by. Her father was getting better, to be sure, but the doctors still weren’t sure what was a result of the original illness and what was merely a side effect of the medication. I’m sure you can see how difficult this might be, the doctor’s assistant – also from Phoenix, but not originally – said. Treatments like this can be highly toxic. It’s not easy.

  He broke his hip tripping over a dodgeball, her principal said. We could really use you for the rest of the year, at the very least.

  I’m sure you understand our dilemma, St. Hecarion said. Good luck in all of your future endeavors.

  This has been so hard on both of us, her sister said.

  I’m sorry, Julian said.

  Neither of us meant for this to happen, he said.

  I’m sorry.

  ***

  Three weeks later, the doctors said the infection was gone. Within a week of being released from the hospital, however, Chris Eaton’s father died of severe nephrotoxicity and acute liver failure. She was so alone. And the loneliness felt like a hole she had to fill however she could.

  The romance novels she wrote were based on the idea of an innate emotional justice, the notion that good people in the world were rewarded and evil people were punished. For example, in a historical romance like her own Crystal Angel, what they called a yearn and learn in the industry, the lovers who risked and struggled for each other and their relationship were rewarded with emotional justice and unconditional love. Her hero was a government bounty hunter in the frontier territory of Colorado in 1868. Her heroine went dressed as a nun. And she’d literally embodied this sense of right and wrong by writing the point of view of a guardian angel, which originally had taken the shape of a watchful grey fog but had later been altered by her editor to be more like ice. But was that the proper arc of life? Was that how we could all expect to live? Where did that place all the other stories? The ones with people who weren’t perfect? The ones with their beautiful endings of death and disaster? Was there anything more romantic than death, especially when it kept two lovers apart? That was simply the way things happened sometimes.

  The Prince Charming she eventually ended up marrying wasn’t even a cowboy, or a burly gardener, or even a stockbroker with a passion for painting. He was a crop insurance adjustor for an agency based in Saskatchewan but covering large portions of the American Midwest like Wisconsin, specializing in grain varieties not traditionally covered by core multi-peril crop insurance, like red clover, borage, rye grass, hemp and millet. His name was Jones (the name she would publish under), with hair as black as charred meat, and a bottom lip you could swing off. She loved him despite the fact that he ate most things with his hands. His favorite thing to do was watch tennis on television. He could spend hours talking about the potential risk of an early frost to Wisconsin millet crops. Ascochyta-resistant chickpeas, were they possible? And sometimes, after a night of drinking, he would get up and pee in the corner of the room or, if he made it to the washroom, on the bathroom scale.

  He was the one who sat by her – or near her, rather, playing Risk with strangers online – as she marked her territory around the dining room, was her moral support, as she worked, scattering gnawed pencils and shavings around the couch. She found the idea of writing a novel with pad and pencil suitably romantic, feeling it connected her with the writers of the past, at least those who wrote between the decline of quill and ink and the ascension of the typewriter in the late nineteenth century. She tried a typewriter for a short time, but it jammed so frequently, and changing the ribbons left her fingertips in a constant blackened state. Plus, it made her feel like a man, like someone writing stiff, logical, hard-boiled detective novels rather than something of real personal value. Her longhand was also so abysmal, more like letters dying of some debilitating disease than the words that are actually coming to life within them, so she never had to fear anyone else reading the text until it was done, not that her husband would ever present such a threat.

  It was ironic, she supposed, to be inventing tragic flaws when her husband was such a wayward home for them. Why would anyone want to overcome these things? Why not embrace them? But her editor would never let it pass. There had to be a single obstacle of character. Someone had to improve. Then her husband leaned back, placed his head in his hands and whispered a single word, Indonesia, which set her off on so many tangents she could barely sit still. Tunisia, Silesia, Dyonisia, amnesia… Its opposite, hypermnesia? Perhaps. Amnesia had been done to death, obviously: man meets woman; man gets in car accident and can no longer remember who she is; woman must make him fall in love with her all over again. But hypermnesia? A character who remembers everything? Including things he has not lived? It was like tapping into a group consciousness, what’s the word, existing in such a state of constant sadness at remembering things like Hiroshima, the concentration camps, Lady Diana’s death, what’s the word, telaesthesia? There was promise there. Analgesia: same man gets in car accident and she must nurse him back to health until he can walk again, or with a heart so broken that only drugs can mask the pain. Ecclesia, she’s done that already. And framboesia was a possibility, set the story somewhere tropical and let the environment wreak its own havoc; but with symptoms so close to syphilis it was, perhaps, not very appropriate for a romance.

  Even the way they met would not have been considered romantic to anyone other than herself, living down the street from each other that whole time? She and her husband should even have been in the same class during their final year of high school, an advanced curriculum they introduced to allow the smarter kids to graduate a year earlier, but she got pneumonia at the beginning of Grade Eleven, and was unable to keep up from home, so they held her back. She attended the local state college for a standard BA. He went to the University of Missouri to do a BSc in Agricultural Economics. After they had both graduated from university (at the end of the summer, he was essentially drafted into the insurance business by an uncle and whisked off to Necedah to learn the ins and outs of seeding, water management and crop chemical application, while she was three hours away in Milwaukee trying unsuccessfully to become the Journal Sentinel’s book reviewer), their mothers made them go out on one date. They were engaged within a year.

  She still has the ticket stub.

  After their wedding, before political upheaval transformed the region, they honeymooned all through Central America, snorkelling in both oceans and hiding in the shrubs in fear one night as they watched a group of poachers dig thousands of turtle eggs from the sand in what they thought was a private, secluded cove. On a hike through the mountains of Costa Rica, they nearly spotted a quetzal, although really all they saw was an eruption in the foliage around them and brief flash of colour before it disappeared.

  On one of their last days before their planned return to the UK, they ate undercooked burgers and yucca fries at a barbecue stand in Panama City. As the city was already a global banking centre, most shrewd businessmen spoke near-fluent English, and while she was in the washroom, Walter struck up a match (for a cigar) and a conversation with the stand’s owner, who as a younger man had made his fortune selling propane and propane barbecues in America. The first propane had become commercially available there in 1922, and backed by multiple articles in the New York Times, its popularity grew almost exponentially. Within five years, sales were in the millions of gallons. Within ten, it had topped fifty million. But it was the creation of the railroad tank car in the thirties that allowed this man to make his fortune and return to Panama as part of the new upper class. Transportation was the secret. It didn’t matter what the cargo was, everyone had to get something somewhere, particularly in America after the Second World War, when the whole country just fel
t the inexplicable need to keep moving around, as if dodging bullets in the trenches had become a frame of mind.

  The more they talked, the more Walter began to see the advantages of the transportation business in general. Private combustion engine automobiles were catching on like the plague, and there was certainly more than enough need for cartage in the more removed areas of America that the regular rail lines could not service. Plus, the U.S. federal government had budgeted over $81 million for the improvement of cross-country highways and interstates, which would practically act as a subsidy for a new business like his. By the time they had reached the end of their honeymoon, Walter had already made some calls to banks in the UK and the States, an old friend in Sheffield he thought might be interested in a potential partnership, a few manufacturing companies, immigration lawyers. They could buy a respectable fleet of used, gas-powered flatbeds in New England and specialize more in the short-haul business rather than compete with the big boys who had sprung up during the war effort. They could call the company CARK, after the Imperial unit of measure equaling three to four hundred-weight but also after its more popular usage which meant simply “a burden,” as well as being a town near his birthplace in Grange-over-Sands in Cumbria, and they could start by delivering produce from local farmers to the new supermarkets for resale.

  He even spent two weeks in Massachusetts scouting the region. But very quickly the local pronunciation of the name – and the ridicule that would have grown with it – drove him insane, and he tossed it all and went back to being an insurance adjustor in England.

  Back in the UK, she returned to her Master’s thesis, through the University of Lincolnshire and Humberside, studying packaging literacy in America and the UK after the First World War. In the early-1900s, the American Food and Drug Administration began cracking down on pharmaceuticals to remove false claims from packaging. It was in the fundamental rights of every man, woman and child, President Roosevelt himself declared before Congress on June 30, 1906, to know exactly what was going into their bodies. Congress agreed. (In fact, they took Coca-Cola to court over it, accusing the soft drink manufacturer of false advertising because the product contained neither coca nor cola, and also had way too much caffeine. In The United States vs. Forty Barrels and Twenty Kegs of Coca-Cola, the Supreme Court eventually decided Coke had the right to add as much caffeine as it saw fit, but not before the fledgling company ran out of money and had to settle out of court by agreeing to lower the amount, anyway.) The pharmaceutical companies fired back by using names no regular person would ever understand.

  Of course, the upshot was that people did eventually learn to understand them. Especially when they were also forced to introduce the number of calories. Today her paper would have been even more fascinating, as literacy levels have significantly climbed in the past ten years. It took a bit longer, but people finally began to realize that monosodium glutamate was the same thing as the MSG they’d been warned about at Chinese food restaurants for so many years. Then they realized it was a kind of salt. It became apparent that something as innocent as corn sugar, found in most pre-packaged foods, could be contributing to increased obesity levels. And with the proliferation of organics in most of the big chain stores, and a trend towards more local produce, some food producers had begun adding information that was not yet required by national food and drug acts, leading the way in furthering the language, creating certification boards to indicate lower levels of pesticides or bovine growth hormone, or listing locations where the ingredients were grown and harvested. One company from Sheffield was even printing the distances that each ingredient had to travel, placing an entirely new focus on the carbon and energy cost of the food we eat. The small paragraph on the back of a frozen lasagna is now like the shortest of short stories.

  Laurent traveled on business. And she always found it hard to sleep when he wasn’t around. Sometimes she felt like every sleepless night she’d ever had, even before they met, was because he was awake somewhere else in the world, and her body wanted to be awake for that too. In his absence she crawled around the house on all fours, picturing how their children might injure themselves: split lips on table corners, hanged on the cords from blinds, electrocuted by dangling stereo wires. And when he returned they talked about it, and he agreed that it might not be the perfect time but what time would ever be perfect? So she took notes of when she figured she’d be ovulating and even started eating lots of folic acid supplements because she’d read on the Internet that it would help prevent birth defects, like being born with an incomplete spine or thinner skin around the neck. But nothing seemed to work. And after four months, she began to worry that being on the pill for so long had made her infertile. She’d been on it since she was fourteen, when her doctor prescribed it for monthly pains that kept her from going to school. (Now, off the pill again, her periods were so strong that she was throwing up from the pain, unable to sit still or move around, or even lie down and cry softly.) Her doctor tested her blood for LH, FSH, estradiol and testosterone. Also CA-125. And she recommended an ultrasound, just to make sure.

  The technician said, “You’re not a virgin, are you?”

  “I’m married.” Her feet were already up in the stirrups and she had to strain her neck to see anyone.

  The technician said, “I never assume any more.” The chemicals they rubbed on her stomach were cold and smelled like glue. “Once, I tested a woman who was thirty-five. I didn’t ask, and it was horrible.”

  She had trouble imagining this as the transducer was inserted.

  Two weeks later, the tests revealed she had developed cysts on her ovaries. Apparently one was the size of a golf ball, on a part of her body that was only the size of an almond, which made her consider if it were the cyst that developed the ovary or the other way around. It didn’t necessarily mean anything, the doctor tried to reassure her. Ovarian cysts were a natural bodily function. It was how the ovary actually released the egg in the first place. Sometimes these cysts would even remain for a short time. Mostly they went away on their own. And so she spent a month crying softly on the edge of the bathtub, afraid to tell him, afraid to say it out loud because somehow that might make it come true. She hadn’t even wanted to ask the doctor about it, to take it seriously in any way, because she didn’t want to hear her say that she wouldn’t be able to have kids. It obviously meant so much to Laurent. To her.

  And when they re-tested a month later: nothing to worry about, the cysts were gone.

  And at last they had a baby. At the time, he was in love all over again, and the city planner had either abandoned the other man or the pretense of the other man and they had moved in together, whereby he had the opportunity to see what was hers and what had once belonged to the other man. The Verda CD was gone. But she claimed that was only because it had been stolen from her car on a trip to Miami. He attended several of the appointments with the midwife, even though it terrified him to put the trust of his unborn child into the hands of this woman who didn’t even wear a stethoscope, or carry popsicle sticks in her pocket. She just stared at the centre of his forehead as she spoke, almost as if he weren’t even there and she were just practicing, speaking in a tone so soothing he could never pay attention to the words. At nine weeks and five days, he heard the heartbeat, like galloping horses, and nearly cried. And he was present for the birth, although he nearly missed it when the nurse told him to get something to eat, that it would be some time before the baby actually showed itself and he should save his own energy. When he returned, with the sounds of the Super Bowl half-time show spilling from a television in the lounge, she’d suddenly gone from two centimetres dilated to one centimetre short of pushing, her arms around the midwife’s neck, who appeared to be helping her back into the bed as if she’d fallen out of it. “Everything’s gone wrong,” she cried to him. And he wondered: Where are the doctors? And: Is there a button to press that will call the doctors? And also: Should he go into the hallway and call the doctors? And the midw
ife tried to stay calm, but it was clear that she didn’t have enough hands for this. Or a stethoscope. She called her back-up, trying to speak softly. “Well, how soon can you make it, then?” he heard her say. And also: “Well, go as fast as you can.” Taking her cues, he told the city planner not to push. It was too early. And she said, “Not gonna push.” But as she said no, she was nodding yes. And Chris Eaton said, “This is it, lover. This is what we’ve been waiting for. This little baby. Nine months of waiting. We can wait another while longer.”

  And once again she said, “Not gonna push.” Again, nodding yes.

  At first, the most difficult thing was just staying awake, and for nearly two months, he just held the boy as close as he could, often falling asleep with his son on his chest. The first time the boy reached for him, he nearly cried again.

  Then he began to worry: about the baby’s development, that maybe he should be reading to him more, setting the stage for him to be literate before he entered the Florida school system. The boy began laughing, and walking, and looking so much like his mother that spending time with him was, for Chris Eaton, a double kind of joy.

  He had never realized it before, but this was all he had ever wanted. He considered putting off the campaign until the next election. He was so happy.

  And then he blinked.

  PART 8

  Chris Eaton was not hurt. He was not even emotionally distressed, particularly. He simply felt disassociated from himself, from the rest of the world, as if perhaps he had even died in the accident, and now he was simply witnessing the rest of his life through the eyes of his ghost, or worse, some stranger. Every inconsiderable thing he did in the course of a day, from cutting his eggs to wiping his ass to counting his change for the bus, none of it seemed real. Even when he spoke to Julie about it, he got caught up in listening to the specific words, and mere seconds after they had left his mouth he was already trying to understand what they were saying, most times second-guessing them, realizing immediately that he was lying, or maybe, at best, that the words this man had chosen had been selected so poorly, that they didn’t even come close to what was going on inside of himself, this confusion and distance between his thoughts and actions, and maybe, and this is where the real problem lay, was that, even in trying to understand it, he was being so hypocritical, because really, he didn’t feel like the words were even coming from himself, so that most times he would just trail off in mid-sentence without having made his point.