by Joey Comeau
When he smiles like that, I get a sick feeling in my stomach, like he might hurt them and there would be nothing I could do. I wouldn’t be able to stop a man that large. But the nurses just laugh and give him his cookie from behind their station and pat him on the arm.
He stops all the female patients in the hall. There’s a thin woman with grey hair and glasses who stands staring at the locked door all night. She just stands there — perfectly still except for her eyes. Her eyes follow you, back and forth, every time you near the door. She’s like one of those paintings in a haunted house: a shrivelled old widow holding a candle that flickers in the wind. You can feel her watching.
Every time Dave sees her, he grabs her by the arm and pulls her close.
“Hello!” he says excitedly. “Hello!”
And Dave’s married. There’s a Post-It note on the wall over his phone with his wife’s number on it. In case he wants to talk to her. The phone rings at 2 a.m. and the man you loved is there in your ear, laughing and incoherent. That’s what being haunted would be like, I think. Your husband is gone. You wake up to the phone in the middle of the night, and before your head is clear, you’re talking to him. It’s only after a minute that you’re awake enough to realize what’s going on. You try again and again to talk to him, to touch some part of the man you loved, but all you get is, “Yep!”
When my first break comes, I go downstairs, out the front door into the fresh air, and I call Clay. He sounds wide awake when he answers, but I don’t ask him why he’s up.
“I love you,” I tell him. “I love you. I wanted to tell you that I loved you the other night, but it seemed too perfect, which sounds stupid when I say it now. I didn’t want to just tell you because it seemed like the perfect moment. I like how excited about things you get, and I like the weird way your brain works, and I do want to learn how to knife fight with you. And judo. We can take judo lessons if you want. Karate, I don’t care.”
“I love you too,” he says. You really can hear the smile in a person’s voice over the telephone.
“I’m worried I’ll have to fight my patient,” I tell him. “It doesn’t even matter that he’s huge. I’ve only ever been in one fight in my life.”
“The greater part of valour is running like hell,” Clay says. There’s a pause, and then he says, “That guy from the other night lodged a complaint. The one who had the nail file that he was waving around like a knife. He complained that I used unnecessary force.”
“He lodged a complaint against you?”
“Because I kicked him in the back of his knee to knock him down,” Clay says. The smile’s gone.
“Is that why you’re still up? You’re worried? You didn’t do anything wrong, Clay. He had a knife!”
“He had a nail file,” he says. “I don’t know. We’ll see. They just told me about it tonight. My supervisor thinks it’ll be fine. She said not to worry about it. But I could have got those cuffs on him without kicking him. She didn’t say it, but I could have. I overreacted. I just thought it was more badass. He was hollering and waving that nail file around. When I showed up, he ripped his shirt open, tearing the buttons off, and I actually stopped in my tracks and thought, This is awesome.”
“No,” I say. “It was a crazy situation. Think about how that dealer felt. She’s just doing her job, and some guy starts threatening her? Waving a knife around? You stopped him. They’re not gonna fire you over that.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Clay says. “But I wasn’t thinking about that.” He sounds tired. “Like the other day, I would have gone down there and broken your homophobic manager’s nose. I was so angry. I just wanted to hurt him. And I probably would have, if you hadn’t stopped me. And then what? I’d have been arrested, and nothing would be solved. You’re smarter about these things than I am. You’re reasonable. You think things through.”
“I’m not reasonable — I’m a chump,” I say. “He pushed me down the stairs, and I just cried a bit in the bathroom and went home. I didn’t hit him back. I didn’t even report him. Why — because I felt sorry for him? Because I understood he made a mistake? Fuck that. I think there’s such a thing as being too understanding. People who shove me down the stairs when they find out I’m gay should probably be exempt from understanding.”
“You’re not a chump. I don’t want someone who solves problems with his fists. I want a goofball who wakes me up on Saturday mornings to watch cartoons, and then talks for half an hour about how there should be a Nobel Prize for good-natured children’s programming.”
“Well, I could go down to Switzerland and use my fists to arrange for that Nobel Prize,” I say. “I’d bring you along, but you sound like a bit of a loose cannon.” Clay laughs, and he sounds less tense now. “What if you hit the wrong Swede? We want justice, not a war!”
After we hang up I sit down on the grass, looking up at the stars. There are streetlights and parking-lot lights everywhere. I don’t want to go back inside. I want Clay to show up and drive us out to the middle of nowhere so we can watch the meteors rain down. I want to rest my head on his shoulder.
I like the way Clay gets along with my mother. It bugged me at first. I’d never had a boyfriend or girlfriend who liked to talk to my mother on the telephone. Why would you even ask to do that? But he asked one morning, and so I gave him the phone. And they talked. Not for very long, but he introduced himself, and they talked for a couple minutes. And then again, a few days later.
So I call him back, just to say, “I think you’re a good person, Clay. I don’t think you did anything wrong, but I’m glad that you’re worried about it at all, and you have a beautiful cock.”
Back at work, I watch the clock, and try to keep Dave happy. I just want this night to be over. I can’t sit with people like this every night. I don’t know how Ed does it. He makes a joke out of it, I guess. But how do you make a joke out of somebody? Dave used to know how drains worked. He could fix a toilet. I don’t even know what plumbers do, but Dave knew, and now that’s all gone. Working with Dave isn’t fun. I follow him around all night. I wish he would sleep. It’s four in the morning and all he wants to do is shadowbox. He walks from room to room and punches the air.
One of the other patients stops me in the hall to ask if I have any cigarettes. She has bags under her eyes and looks way older than her voice sounds.
“I don’t smoke,” I say. “Sorry.”
“Listen,” she says, reaching into her bathrobe. She pulls out a folded piece of paper. “I need you to call my friend for me. He’s a cop, and I just need you to tell him where I am. They won’t let me use the phone, okay? I need you to do this.” She pushes the paper into my hand, and I don’t know what to do or say. She’s looking around for a nurse, scared.
“Okay” is what I tell her, and she turns and almost runs back to her room. I know the number isn’t really the number for a cop. I know that she’s here for a reason, but I feel bad about not giving her the benefit of the doubt. I look down at the piece of paper in my hands again. When I turn around, Dave is right there in my face.
“PLAY?” he says, stepping toward me, with his fists up.
He swings at me. “PLAY? PLAY?”
I stumble backward, trying to smile at him. I’m hoping that smiling will calm him down, but he keeps coming. Is he mad that I was talking to a girl?
He falls toward me, never quite losing his balance, his fists swinging. He keeps saying, “PLAY?” over and over again. His smile is broken.
He keeps coming and I keep backing up, not wanting to turn and run. When we pass the flight-risk woman’s room, her door is open. She’s standing there staring at us.
“Look!” I say to Dave, hoping to distract him. “Look!” I point at her and it works. He turns his smile on her, and he lowers his fists.
“Hello!” he says, grabbing her. “Hello!” and she starts screaming. I’m so relieved.
When the nurses ask me what happened, I don’t tell them I threw her under the bus, sacrificed her
to save myself. I tell them that he moved too fast for me. They nod sympathetically. Then they sit Dave down and explain that he can’t go into other people’s rooms.
“If you do,” the nurse says, “you won’t get the rest of your cookies for today. Okay?”
“Okay!” he laughs. “Cookies!”
The flight-risk woman is looking at me from her room. There’s a clock above her door. Three more hours. Do security guards have to deal with people like Dave? I’m pretty sure if I were a security guard at a bank, and Dave came in wearing a ski mask, swinging his arms around and yelling “Cookies! Cookies!” I would be hiding under the table with the customers. There’s no way security guards make enough money for that sort of thing.
Still, it has to be a better job than this. Dave has a big smile on his face, and I wonder if later tonight he’s going to call his wife. I can’t handle this. When my shift is over, I am going downstairs and out that front door — and then I’m throwing these scrubs in the garbage. I’ll go be a security guard.
I don’t have any badass experience, but I’m sure they’ll teach me. I’ll explain to them that I’ve only ever been in one fight in my life. In the sixth grade, I fought my friend Michael. I lost, but I probably would have stood a better chance if I had any idea what we were fighting about.
Michael and I used to pin the doors behind the gymnasium so we could sneak back into the school after it closed. This was in the last year of elementary school. Michael helped me to figure out how to pin the doors, and together we came up with the coil-notebook method of bypassing locks.
First we tried plastic knives, which were okay on some doors, if you worked at it. You would slide the knife in and wedge open the part that clicks into the hole.
The knife didn’t work on doors with metal plates guarding the clicky part though. The wire from a coil-bound notebook was perfect. You’d push it down behind the guard plate, get hold of the bottom, and pull it tight while Michael pulled on the door. Click!
We never stole anything. We did it for that wonderful feeling you get when you’re somewhere you aren’t meant to be, somewhere nobody is meant to be. A school hallway after dark. It was easy to feel like we owned the place. We walked right into the girls’ washroom and there was nobody to stop us.
We pulled the wire out of coil-bound notebooks and slipped the latch to the library, to the janitor’s closet, to the gym office. We couldn’t go into the main buildings, because of the motion sensors, but the hallways around the gymnasium were ours, as were any doorways leading off them.
We tried to beat the motion sensors, but it was impossible. During school hours we practised walking as slowly as we could in the hallways, to see if the motion sensors would make that little click that meant they’d seen you. We were trying to get good enough to sneak past them after hours, when they were armed.
We were junior hobbyist burglars, and we spent all our time together that last year in elementary. But when I showed up for school, the first day of junior high, Michael and I were suddenly different. He was wearing jeans. He’d been wearing jeans all summer, but it hadn’t occurred to me that it meant anything.
In junior high everyone wore jeans. I was the only one still in sweatpants. To be honest, I probably wouldn’t have noticed this myself, but others were quick to point it out, and Michael laughed just as loudly as any of them.
I was completely unprepared for junior high. I wasn’t expecting the scrutiny. Nothing slipped past my classmates. I had never given much thought to how I talked, but everyone had a good laugh about the way I repeated everything under my breath. I’d always done that. I did it without really thinking. I would answer a question in class, and then repeat my answer quietly to myself. I was just checking to make sure it had been okay. People laughing at me only made it worse, of course.
I was used to spending most of my time reading too. In elementary school it hadn’t been a problem. Teachers were just happy to see a student reading so much, and it hadn’t bothered my friends at all. In junior high it made me a target. I read while I walked home sometimes, which was awkward but doable. So when the school’s biggest asshole followed me one day, I did not see him coming. When he slapped the book out of my hand, I was so startled that I yelped. There were three of them and they all started laughing at me. I tried to laugh it off with a clever insult, the way the hero in the book would have.
That probably would have been okay if I had come up with a good insult — things might have gone better. I would have got beat up, but that was unavoidable. The problem was that I tried to laugh it off with a specific clever insult, an insult that the hero of my book had actually used. Word for word. Now, this was a high-fantasy novel, with trolls and wizards. So I called him a knave or a braggart or a foul wench maybe. I can’t remember the exact wording, and thank God for that. I called this junior high bully a “foul knave” and then I smiled smugly.
One day in school Michael came up to me in the hall and called me a shithead. This was after months of no communication. He had a half-dozen people all crowded around him, watching. He called me a shithead and an asshole, and I probably said nothing. He suggested we meet at three-thirty at the bus stop — to fight.
I felt all wound up and half-crazed for the rest of the day. I felt crazy right up until I met him at the bus stop and then suddenly I was just tired. We were surrounded by a huge crowd, and they were all chanting, Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! There were never usually this many people at the bus stop.
When Michael came close enough I grabbed on to him before he could punch me and I pulled him to the ground. This was the strategy I had come up with while I was sitting in class and worrying. I wanted to believe that he would have appreciated it. It was a pretty smart strategy. It was the kind of thing we might have come up with together. We rolled around in the mud, getting filthy, but nobody got any real punches in. And then the bus came.
When we stood up, I stuck my hand out to him to shake. This was something else I had come up with while sitting in class.
“Good fight,” I said, and he looked at me, confused and with pity in his eyes. Maybe it was disgust, but probably it was pity. Then he turned around and got on the bus without shaking my hand or saying anything. Everyone was patting him on the back. I sat at the front of the bus, all wet and muddy, and a girl asked me why I had stuck my hand out like that. She said it was stupid. I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like the right thing to do. I wasn’t mad at him. I didn’t even dislike him, but how could I explain that? So I said, “It was just a trick anyway. If he tried to shake it, I was going to punch him in the neck.”
Chapter 6
Clay gave me the security-force recruitment flyer last night. It said they pay above industry standards, and that they have an extensive training program for new recruits. That sounds promising. I don’t particularly want to be a security guard, but if I’m going to be one for a while, I don’t want to have to rely on my “Hug ’em ’til the bus comes” fighting strategy.
Also, is it silly to hope there are training programs that teach you to handle being pepper-sprayed? In my imagination, this training basically consists of being sprayed over and over until you’re used to it. I like the idea of being used to pepper spray, I think. It’s kind of glamorous. You’ve got one of your friends over, and she goes to get her lip balm out of her purse, and accidentally sprays you full-on with her pepper spray.
“My God, I’m so sorry,” she says, her hand going to her mouth in shock.
You give a nonchalant little chuckle.
“It’s cool, baby. I’m used to it.”
Will I learn how to tell if people are lying just from their body language? From facial micro-expressions? Will I learn to defuse a bomb while making witty banter with the sinister villain? Will they show me how to look good in sweat-stained clothes? Is this my chance to become an action hero? Does Clay already know these things? He’s pretty mysterious and dangerous-seeming. I bet he does. Are there any buddy-cop movies where the tw
o cops make out?
There will be.
It’s all I talked about in the car.
“There’s no extensive training,” Clay said.
“You don’t think I’m tough enough? You don’t think they’ll take me aside because I match a certain psychological profile and teach me to kill?”
“I think they show you a lame marketing video and make you pay for your own uniform,” he says. “But it’s a paycheque and it’s easy work.”
But he probably just wants it to be a surprise. He wants to lower my expectations so that when they first put a machine gun in my hand, I get the proper thrill of excitement. And then we will both be dangerous and exciting. We could become vigilantes! We’ve read about violence in the news — teenage boyfriends being attacked at their proms down in Texas; lesbians having their houses vandalized in Saskatoon — and instead of feeling frustrated and helpless, like usual, we could buy plane tickets. We could each pack a small bag with just the essentials. You don’t want to take weapons through airport security. Any weapons we need will have to be attained through on-site procurement.
And they had better hope the law catches up with them before our plane touches down. Prison will be a slap on the wrist compared to our unhinged, dark-as-night vengeance. I think it would be cool if we wore suits while we committed these violent acts of retribution. Not fancy suits. No, cheap suits that we won’t mind ruining. Then if we’re caught by the police, well, think how amazing we’ll look! All bloody and torn and grizzled.
Plus, suits look official. They would add an air of credibility to our campaign of blood-drenched disproportionate responses. The average citizen will take us more seriously. That’s right, ma’am, I’ve got a licence to open a twenty-four-hour ass-kicking delivery service in your neighbourhood.
While I finish the security-guard employment application, Clay is playing chess on his cellphone beside me. This is something else he’s been trying to get me to learn with him. In case we ever become criminal masterminds, he says. We don’t have to become grandmasters or anything like that. It is Clay’s thinking that we just need to get good enough for undereducated cops to think we’re geniuses when they find our half-finished chess games. “They’re criminal masterminds!” they’ll say. “They’re always one move ahead!”
