What is Going to Happen Next

by Karen Hofmann

  Oh, then maybe he can give some of my friends a lift.

  I’m not sure, he says.

  You have invited him? This, whirling around, looming, so that his back’s against the stove where a vat of chili bubbles.

  He hasn’t invited Ben. But he says, yeah, of course. He’s really excited about it.

  He’ll have to invent a good reason for Ben not to show up.

  He has to leave. He’s become a liar.

  She kisses him, then, and his body responds on its own accord, like a big untrained dog.

  At work, pushing the mower, he thinks: He could take the afternoon off work, tell Ray he’s sick. He’ll pick a day when Loretta is at her part-time job. He’ll have a taxi waiting. It’ll take him probably four trips. And then there’s Sophie. He might have to leave the stuff in the basement.

  Where will he go? He’ll have to go to a motel, which will be really expensive.

  He has a little bit of money. Loretta had said to close his bank account and just put it all with hers, it would work better that way. But he hasn’t done it yet.

  The motel will be expensive and he’ll have to find a place to rent quickly but he can’t do it from here because they always want a phone number. It’ll clean him out.

  He could hawk his TV.

  Yes, he will do that.

  At home, though, he thinks of Loretta’s panic, her terrible shock at coming back and finding him gone, all of his stuff, just a note. What kind of person would do that to her?

  He will have to tell her. After the party.

  He reminds himself: Logically, she can’t stop him from leaving. He’ll call a taxi and he’ll leave. She can’t really stop him.

  It’ll be tough but he’ll have to do the right thing. If you don’t do the right thing, what are you?

  CLIFF’S HE ARTIS jackhammering away in his chest. He comes up the stairs into the main room, where she’s sitting with a magazine and a glass of wine. He doesn’t take off his jacket, and when she looks up, he says it, all of it, reminding himself as if he were a child: Get it over and done with and it won’t be so bad. He wishes he’d thought to pick Sophie up in his arms first.

  Loretta comes at him so enraged that he is given the gift, for that moment, of complete certainty that he is doing the right thing. She rises up from the armchair with a sort of scream, her face turning purple. Comes at him. Then she hits at him, and then hits him. He can’t hit back. He tries to catch her wrists, to step away. She screams again, and it’s a sound like an animal’s, a scream of rage or fear or threat, straight from the animal part of the brain. And then she lunges at him with both of her big arms thrusting forward, her hands splayed out, and shoves him down the stairs with all of her weight. He can’t believe it, at first, that he’s falling. His sense of balance tells him; the drop in the floor of his stomach tells him; the surge of adrenalin through his veins like a flush through a pipe tells him, but he can’t believe it. Midair, for so long that he thinks he’s flying. Then the impacts, the first and then the subsequent, which he feels only as impact, not pain, and then pain.

  He can’t move. He thinks: My back is broken. He can’t draw in a breath. Then the pain starts in: head hip knee elbows wrist back, each place clamouring. He must get up but his muscles won’t move. Loretta is still roaring, looming above him on the landing, her face still distorted and discoloured. No sound from the main floor: Is that good or bad? Good; they’d call the police, surely. Bad; there’s no rescue. He finally starts to roll over, gather himself onto his hands and knees. He can’t stand, but he begins to crawl backwards toward the outside door, a sidling, whimpering thing. He doesn’t care.

  Then there’s an even louder crash than he had made, a hard sound of shattering and crunching and tinkling. The missile strikes him on his shoulder on the way past him, on its last bounce, then stops. His TV.

  He thinks now, Sophie! and hears Loretta say, and your dumb cat, but Sophie’s too smart; Sophie hisses, he hears her hiss, and then the lunge at the window, the table banging against the wall under Loretta’s weight. Another roar. Sophie has got out. The thought gives him a zap of energy or something, and he scrambles for the door. And he grabs his TV on the way out.

  Soon, though, he has to put the TV down. It’s only adrenalin that has let him carry it down two alleyways. But the screen is shattered, he sees that, and the plastic casing broken in at least three places, and things rattling around inside. He can’t move quickly enough to look for Sophie, either, with the TV. He puts it down gently, marking the spot in his attention so he’ll be able to find it again. He understands that it is irreparable, but he does not want to just abandon it. He keeps calling Sophie in a hoarse whisper, doesn’t dare to yell.

  His knee doesn’t feel right. He can hardly put weight on it. He has to hobble. His wrist and his skull are sending sharp staccato distress messages. His ankle and hip complaining, too, when he steps. But it’s his back that’s the worst. He can’t draw a full breath. He tries to breathe through the pain but he can’t breathe properly.

  Blood in his eye, his mouth, the salt taste. He touches the side of his head, feels wetness. Blood on his fingers now, so much that his heart gives a lurch.

  Sophie, he calls, low. Sophie. He circles the alleys and side streets around the house, staying out of view of the house and of other pedestrians.

  Now dizziness and nausea: the alley going black for a few moments and then he leans forward to vomit on his own shoes.

  He needs help. Sophie has gone to ground somewhere. He will find her but he needs to stop bleeding, to stop reeling and retching. Emergency room, he thinks. But if they call the police?

  He lies down for a moment, not realizing he has done so, wakes to darkness and the night sounds of the city. Sirens. Traffic quieter. He doesn’t know where he is at first and when he moves to stand up, his head spins and his back is a jolt of agony. He’s thirsty. But his head is clearer. He needs to call for help. He’ll find a pay phone.

  He tries Mandalay first but gets her answering machine. Who next. Cleo? But she’s an hour’s drive away, probably in bed. And he’s not sure he remembers her number. He has only one more quarter, will have to go into a store to get change, and there’s so much blood and vomit on him that he is avoiding even the more lighted parts of the street.

  He calls Ben. He remembers his number, and calls him, and Ben answers.

  Ben says, I’ll be right there, man! Stay put!

  An accident, he’d said. He needs to sit down but there are no benches near the pay phone. It’s inside the door of a bar, the lower floor of a cheaper hotel, and he can’t stay in there with the throb of the music like someone banging on his head. Outside of the bar there’s no bench. He thinks there could be something, a planter box or a bicycle stand or something but there isn’t. Only the street and the lamppost. He has to stay here because Ben is coming, now, but he wishes he hadn’t said here.

  A narrow metal signpost at the sidewalk’s edge. He moves to it, sits. No cars here so the sign probably says no parking. He leans on the metal rail that is the post but it is very narrow, with sharp edges. There is no place on his back that can lean against these sharp metal edges. And yet he cannot stay vertical now.

  His feet over the curb, so he can hunch over his knees. Better: the back better.

  Flashlight in his eyes, now, blinding him except for the sense of the blue and red light strobing very near but in the street. Cop car. Therefore, cop. He tries to sit up and the pain in his back forces out of him a deep, animal groan. One of the cops putting his hands on him, not ungently but touching all of the sore spots, nevertheless. His old fear pulsing in his throat.

  One of the cops, and he’s not aware till she speaks that she’s a woman, says, Jeez Louise, looks like someone threw you down some stairs.

  They want to see his ID which he gives them, and to ask if he has been drinking, and if he can count to ten. He can count to ten but his tongue is thick and he’s gagging again, the flashlight somehow makin
g him sick. His mouth full of blood. The cop shines the light into his mouth as if holding a glass for him to drink, and says, you’ve bitten your tongue. He has not noticed before. She’s calling for an ambulance on her radio. He spits, his blood and saliva too thick to expectorate cleanly, and says, My brother’s coming to get me. He’s coming from West Point Grey to get me.

  Yeah? she says.

  I don’t need an ambulance.

  We’ll see, she says. The other cop has come back with his driver’s licence and hands it to him and with great concentration he extracts his wallet from his pocket again and puts the licence back in and puts the wallet back into his pants pocket.

  Do you want to make a complaint? the male cop asks.

  Do I what?

  Make a complaint. File a report. Who beat you up.

  Something is pecking around at the edge of his consciousness but he can’t pluck it up. Something about his licence, that the cop was going to do something that was dangerous. He wants to look at his licence now to see if it’s alright, but getting it out of his pocket again seems too much effort.

  Were you hit by a car?

  He says, Fell down some stairs, and then has to vomit again.

  Have you had anything to drink?

  No. He hears a siren now. The ambulance? He says, My brother is coming to get me.

  Okay, the female cop says.

  People coming out of the pub, stopping. Holy fuck, look at his face, one of them says. There’s murmuring. They move off, he can hear them, and then one of them yells back, Pigs! Police brutality.

  He vomits again. Now he remembers. The databank. They have a big computer somewhere, and when they put his name in, off his licence, it would show. His record. They haven’t said anything, though. Maybe just waiting.

  We need you to make a statement so we can make sure this doesn’t happen to you again, the male cop says, squatting down next to him. He’s wiping Cliff’s face, somehow.

  The woman says. He can do all of that later. He’s not in shape.

  The ambulance and Ben pull up at the same time, Ben trying to park in the place the ambulance wants, the woman cop directing him — Away! — with an impossibly loud sharp whistle blow, a chop of her arm.

  Ben is beside him, his hand on Cliff’s shoulder, saying Jesus, man! in a shocked voice, and then, sounding very young, his voice squeaking up a slide, asking the cops: What happened to him?

  Overnight in emergency, with curtains, sleep and vomiting and some rousing him at intervals to take his blood pressure and shine a little light into his pupils. In full daylight he wakes again, sees Ben asleep in a chair beside his bed, head back, mouth open, arms thrown out. Then Ben in a split second on his feet, blinking. Then grinning at him, his wide-open, no-holds-barred grin.

  Six weeks of rest, the doctors say. In a dark room.

  Wreck

  MANDALAY ASKS, Will we miss our flight? But he says that he has built an extra day into the trip, and they can take a more direct route back, cutting off the last leg. Thanks for being such a good sport about the weather, he says. You’ve been an excellent travelling companion, my dear. He folds her into his arms more tightly, but it is somehow a letting go. In his words something ebbing. But she won’t pursue it, try to pin it down, not when they are both cold and wet and cramped.

  In the night the rain stops, and she hears now only the dripping of the cedars, and then at dawn, the bird chorus. When she wakes again, it’s light, the sun sparkling on a calm, limpid sea, and Duane making coffee over the little stove.

  It will be a longer day of paddling today, to get back to the village, but they take a break in the early afternoon to spread their clothes and sleeping bags out on a beached tree and to make love on a carpet of moss. Mandalay wants to sleep, after, to stretch her limbs out naked in the sunshine, but Duane puts on his shorts, says he’ll go exploring. Then he comes back for her: Come, I want to show you something.

  Down a trail is another small cove, and lying on the beach the wreck of a small fishing boat. Not much remains of it but the bowed shape of the hull. The wooden planks have been mostly pried off, and the boat’s ribs can be seen, like the ribcage of a whale, beneath the lattice of planks that remain.

  She walks into the shell of the wreck. Come in, she says, but Duane does not. She sees him standing a little away, on the beach, through the slats and gaps between the ribs, the lattice of planks, his hands in his shorts, his face in the shadow of his hat.

  Now he holds his fingers and thumbs at right angles, makes a rectangle at his face. I wish I had brought that camera, he says. He has not regretted the camera the whole week, even when the humpbacks surfaced only a dozen metres from them.

  Why? she asks.

  It’s a perfect photo, he says. You look as if you’re in a bird cage.

  THEY PADDLE SIDE BY SIDE; it’s their last stretch. They’ll reach the docks in the evening, before dark, have a meal, sleep overnight again at the bed and breakfast inn, and catch a ride back to the airport at Sandspit. Duane says, I’m really looking forward to a hot shower and a real bed. I bet you are too.

  He says, You’ve been great. This has been great.

  And so have you, she says. Thank you for taking me on the trip.

  My pleasure, he says.

  Is this how they will finish it? The sudden distance he has created; what is it in aid of? She feels it drag at her, a current.

  We make a good team, she says.

  Yep, he says. Is it her imagination, or has he speeded up his paddling? She feels she is paddling harder to keep abreast.

  Are you really tired? she asks.

  I am, he says. But it’s a good kind of tired. Mentally, I feel refreshed. Ready to get back to work. What about you?

  In his voice, the cheerfulness, the politeness, of a stranger. She reminds herself: Intimacy is a dance of closeness and distance. And he might just be steeling himself against their return, against his return to that other world of work and conflict.

  She is sure that if she were to ask, what is wrong? he would not know what she was worried about. She must let go of her anxieties, have more trust. After this week of emotional and physical intimacy, of complete mutual reliance, of the breaking down of all boundaries, of the sharing of intense discomfort — and awe — they can hardly go back to the way they were. They won’t slip back into their previous routine of shared meals and entertainment and sex. It’s not possible. She must trust this.

  And yet, she is not being honest if she doesn’t admit that she wants some acknowledgement, some small sign that their bond has deepened. She says, I’ll miss waking up with you every morning.

  Really? I didn’t think you were the kind of woman who wanted to be together 24/7.

  It’s not her imagination. She’s having to paddle very hard to keep up with him. Don’t react, she tells herself. Let it go.

  He says, then, Yeah, I’ll miss it too. You were really great.

  She can’t do it anymore. She slows her paddling to let the muscle fatigue in her shoulders and back and arms subside, and is quite quickly left behind the other kayak in the couple of moments it takes him to notice she’s not with him anymore. When he does, he turns the craft and waits for her to catch up, and then paddles beside her more slowly.

  You knew, he says, the distance gone from his voice now, it wouldn’t last. The intimacy, the excitement. It doesn’t last. If you try to hold onto it, it slips away. And then you try to turn it into something else: You look for a bigger house, or you take salsa lessons together, or you bring home a bag of handcuffs and paddles. But you’re just replacing it. You’re not reviving it. You can’t. We’re not capable of sustaining pleasure or interest in each other that long. It’s so bound up with novelty.

  Maybe it isn’t, always, she says. Maybe it can deepen. Maybe it can turn into something better, not cheaper.

  No, he says. It can’t. This week was amazing, Mandalay. It really was. It was one of the best weeks of my life. And I feel it’s brought us cl
oser too. But our relationship isn’t going to change now. It’s good, being companions, isn’t it? Do we really want to change that? We have the best of each other, this way. We get to put into our careers and the other aspects of our lives all of the energy and attention we need to, and then when we’re together, it’s always fresh and new and enjoyable.

  She thinks: There is something wrong with this, but I can’t put into words what it is. There’s something missing, some flaw.

  Everything okay? he asks.

  Okay, she says.

  As they paddle now into the bay, the water around them is suddenly full of sleek round heads. A party of seals is hanging in the water all around, just watching them.

  We have no fish for you! Duane calls to them. No handouts!

  The seals’ dark round eyes and whiskered muzzles regard them gravely, questioningly.

  WHEN SHE GETS BACK to her apartment, messages on her answering machine from both Cleo and Parvaneh: Call me as soon as you get back. And from Bodhi: Yo. Ben here. Call me.

  Parvaneh isn’t in. She calls Cleo, who asks her about her trip, listens, asks the right questions, sighs, and says, I’m so envious. Trent would never consider doing something like that.

  Then Cleo says, Cliff’s staying with me for a few weeks. He’s been hurt. . . .

  In a bike accident, Mandalay says. Suddenly, she can’t breathe.

  Cleo says, carefully, I think he was beaten up. He won’t talk about it.

  He’s badly hurt, then? She’s thinking of Che; they both are, she knows.

  Skull fracture, Cleo says. A couple of broken ribs. Otherwise I think just bruises. He’s told Bodhi more. But there’s something else going on, I think. Did you know he had moved?

  She had not.

  A couple of months ago, Cleo says.

  But he loved his apartment so much. He was so happy there. Did he get evicted or something?

  I think he moved in with a girlfriend.

  Cliff? Oh, dear.

  He’s not that low-functioning, Cleo says. I keep telling you this.