The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  THE ADJUSTMENT LEAGUE

  File 1: The Boiled Child

  BIBLIOASIS

  WINDSOR, ONTARIO

  Copyright © Mike Barnes, 2016

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  FIRST EDITION

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Barnes, Mike, 1955-, author

  The Adjustment League / Mike Barnes.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-082-3 (paperback).--ISBN 978-1-77196-083-0 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8553.A7633A35 2016 C813’.54 C2016-900904-1

  C2016-900905-X

  Edited by Daniel Wells

  Copy-edited by Natalie Hamilton

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Gordon Robertson

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

  for Heather

  1

  Saturday morning, early. Sweeping up broken glass and litter on the lobby stairs, I catch a peep of white from the mailbox below. Inside, a line in blue ink on a folded sheet of paper. Handwriting I don’t recognize, though a wobble in the letters tugs at me. An address up on Highway 7.

  Then the three block capitals: TAL. Which I do know.

  An hour later, up in Markham, I pull over on the long drive opposite the covered entranceway. Sitting in the Honda, I take it in. The sign flanked by junipers behind a low rock garden: VIVERA: A Helping Community. Below, in smaller letters: With Special Assistance For The Memory Impaired. Words to hang on City Hall.

  Two stories in brick and wood, spacious, with long side wings. Fresh white trim around picture windows. Shrubs and flowers rising from raked wood chips beside the walkway. Gourds and ornamental grasses in big ceramic urns leading to the double wooden doors.

  Vibe of an old-time farmhouse or plantation manor. Rambling as generations add on wings. The gray McHomes stretching to either side a jarring note. Ditto the four lanes of traffic. But the low-lying woods to the north, aflame now with scarlets and yellows, work perfectly.

  Inside, old people. Women, mostly. In armchairs, on couches. Two in wheelchairs helping an Asian girl put creamers in bowls. A woman gripping her walker, another inching hers ahead. A ginger-spice smell that’s hard to place. Apple cake? Sunday pot roast? Slow, savoury hours. A gray terrier and a calico cat mooching about.

  “Judy Wyvern,” I tell the young black receptionist. She looks up from her magazine, frowning at what she sees.

  Remembering, she gentles her face. “Family?” The phone rings and she holds up a finger. Behind me, I hear “Just a minute,” but am halfway across a livingroom-like space towards the door marked Director.

  Older than the receptionist, mid-thirties, palely pretty with long black hair. Gray business suit and slacks over a ruffled white blouse. She extends a hand at Judy’s name. “Family?”

  I give her the slip of paper. “I’m sorry,” she says. Her eyes stray up me without a flicker. Why she’s not answering phones. She pulls a file over the form she’d been filling in. “Come with me.”

  People’s assumptions will carry you a long way. If you don’t force a scene, their own hunger to find one will take you a few steps further than you were meant to go.

  §

  First, see it plain.

  The soldier and the bride, bodiless costumes facing each other across the shallow alcove. Sunlight slicing between pulled drapes, pooling on the stained carpet. The soldier hanging on one wall, low, the cuffs of his dress khakis almost touching the floor. Spikes under his shoulders, elbows and wrists make his arms seem to rise in a welcoming embrace. Opposite him, the bride in her white gown, pegged and cinched to a wooden frame. A corner of her veil tacked loosely above one shoulder, as if swept there by an errant breeze. Between them, on walls and tables, pictures of the times they lived through. The War and After.

  The bubble woman following us steps cautiously toward the soldier. Stops, turns, approaches the bride. Her hand rising to touch the fabric. Down. Then up again to take a bit of the silk between thumb and forefinger. Rubbing gently as if to test it. She opens and closes her mouth several times. Finds her bubble sound of surprise. Puh.

  “Does she see that she’s headless?” I say.

  “Maybe, maybe not,” says the Director. Studying my face, the side I’m giving her. “Touch means most to them at this stage.”

  “They don’t frighten her?” The alcove seems stretched just then with a terrible vulnerability, a skin of ultimate exposure that a glance might shatter.

  “Does she look frightened?”

  No. Or no more so than when the elevator doors opened between us. Pale creature in a flowered housedress, dandelion fluff hair. Her eyes a thin, brilliant blue, magnified by thick glasses. Open as wide as eyes can be and stay that way. As if witnessing a tremendous and unending marvel. She stays at my side, and halfway to the alcove, I feel her touch my sleeve. A graze like a moth’s wing. Stop, look her in the face. Same wide, unblinking blue. The high sky just before space. And her lips part to make her wonder sound, a puff of air.

  Puh.

  “Where’s Judy?”

  “It’s down the hall.” The Director’s voice cooling, spine stiffening as she leads me on. Who or what I might be a growing question. Wrong scene, voices are whispering to her. But how to change or end it?

  Lamps, warm yellow, in sconces spaced above the carpet. Movie posters: Rebecca. High Noon. And pictures, pictures, pictures. Landscapes, pleasant scenes, in oil and watercolour. Photographs. A smiling man. Two women. Sisters? Families.

  No sounds. None at all.

  A man standing before one grouping. Fit-looking, short brown hair, dark pants, check shirt. Looking. Seeing?

  And then the Director is opening a door, and for the second time in twenty years, Judy and I face each other on a locked ward.

  Only this time you can leave.

  §

  The Director hangs back, lets me go in first. Respectful. And wanting to see what kind of greeting Judy gives… whoever I might be.

  Not much. A look up from the bedside, a tiny lengthening of her lips that is the faintest smile. Twenty years twenty minutes perhaps in the spooky theater of her mind. Her strange agelessness. A child-crone then. A crone-child now. Fine, dry, center-parted hair, gray-brown, falling to her shoulders. Fine lines in her small-featured face, cracking like a doll’s in an attic.

  What she sees in my face as much a mystery as ever. Her eyes don’t linger on the most obvious changes. Other people no more real to her than in those days, it seems. Or fitfully real. As real as she can let them be, as they need to be, in her private drama.

  “I got your message.”

  “Yes.” And goes back to what she was doing. Placing something near the feet of the other person in the room. The one who not only can leave, but has. Death has unlocked the door. “This is a crossing ceremony.” Soft wonder colouring her hollow voice.

  A small mound under the orang
e blanket. Sprigs of silver hair on the pillow.

  “I thought you were…” The Director comes round to face me. “I assumed you were family. If you’re not, I’m going to have to ask—”

  “Leave,” I say quietly. A scene ends when you take sides. And she’s the one with the keys. Or codes now—numbers that unlock doors and elevators. That much has changed in twenty years.

  “There’s a protocol we follow. Friends are welcome at the family’s invitation, but until all the family’s been notified—”

  “Out.” In the hush of final notice.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  “I know you will.”

  §

  I watch as Judy proceeds with her crossing ceremony, which she now calls a protection ring. Or a protection ring is part of a crossing ceremony. She doesn’t say. She told me once her head was half-glass, half-brick.

  “You’re looking for the next object in the series,” I say, as she opens bureau drawers. My voice-over part of our old ward style.

  “The talisman, yes.”

  I step closer to the single bed. See a bit more of Mrs. Wyvern. Age-spotted brow, closed eye, curving nose. A wrinkled, sunken cheek. Curled on her side under the orange blanket, as if seeking warmth at the end. Propped against her back, a single monarch butterfly wing float-mounted in a dark frame. By her feet, the talisman Judy was placing when I arrived. Black and white photo in a gilt frame of a pretty young woman at a desk. Eighteen, nineteen.

  Judy brings a soft green sweater with big buttons. More warmth. “Up by her face, please.” I reach across to place it. Judy five foot nothing.

  I stay beside the bed. Judy behind me rummaging in the drawers and closet. Murmuring. The sense, uncanny, that the woman in the bed is not dead. How can she be since the three of us are performing her crossing ceremony?

  Madness is contagious. Something in sanity wants to undo itself. Drop free and scatter.

  She brings things, places them. Sometimes takes one back. As always, her rites proceed by secret rules but falter even at those. Placing one object at her mother’s feet and one at her head, one midway the far side, but as I’m thinking now this side, the cardinal directions, the next one goes below her knees, too close to the one at her feet and too far from anything else, destroying the symmetry. As if she loses sight of, or interest in, her own guiding stars. Tunes out the angels she said advised her. Though she never had a deaf ear for the devils.

  She stops without warning. Breaks off the crossing ceremony—which even I can see is unfinished—and sits in the plush armchair by the curtained windows. Hands folded in her lap, looking about at the photographs on the walls. More than anything so far, it takes me back to the ward. Back to the dozens of people I met there. And the hundreds of outpatients since. People forever battening down hatches against a flood, but never completing the job, as if to prove that some waters won’t be stayed.

  The furniture, this place. Snaps of home and cottage. Judy comes from money.

  A thought to shock, since I never saw the ghost of it in her life.

  §

  Two young guys from the funeral home in the doorway. Their collapsible cart discreetly between them. Who let them up? Judy at her most wraith-like slips sideways past them, they don’t even seem to notice.

  Stocky, crew cuts, suits. Like Mormons. God’s marines. And sounding a bit like them, too. The softly brazen tones of young men schooled to make nice when they want to mix it up.

  “How are you, sir?” The front guy extending his hand.

  “I’m all right. But I’m not the one you’re picking up.”

  The face darkening before it summons a sad smile.

  “You might want to wait outside, sir. It’s not usually recommended that the family watch the removal.”

  “I’ve seen it before. More than once.”

  “Well, it’s up to you, sir, of course. But I just want to caution you that, depending on the time of passing, it’s possible we might have to…” Trailing off to let me imagine what I’ve just told him I’ve seen. “And there are fluids in the remains that, not always, but quite often—”

  “Get on with it.”

  I won’t leave the weak with strangers. And there’s nothing weaker than the dead. And nothing stranger than the young with too much muscle for their task.

  “It’s certainly your decision.”

  “That’s certainly true.”

  With a glance back at his buddy, he comes on, hoping to give me some of his shoulder in the narrow hallway. Me wanting it too. This far into hyper-black, it will taste like a kiss.

  “Stop right there. Hold up, everybody.”

  A cop. The Director beside him. Suddenly the death scene is crowded, almost lively. Five of us in or near the doorway.

  “You.” Cocking a finger at me. “Out here with me.” Jerking a thumb backwards. “You guys.” Two fingers. “This lady needs a word.”

  I don’t like cops, it would be strange if I did, but I have to admire the way he clears the snarl. I’ve done the same, not so neatly, with tenants squabbling in the halls.

  §

  The cop and I sheer opposites. Him: short and pumped and smooth-skinned, cropped fair hair, spotless uniform. Staring up through clear gray eyes at six and a half feet of bone and swollen joints, Reaper skin stretched over them, the topmost foot an El Greco egg, bald and pitted and lushly scarred. Wearing a shapeless knee-length trench coat, frayed jeans and sneakers—about right for late October, though it doesn’t change in July or January. The coat dark-splotched and wrinkled, like a giant old dishcloth, but fronted with four big pockets with brass buttons that snap shut—useful, like wearing four carry-cases on your chest. Standing by the bureau—where I’ve backed to monitor the scene around the bed—we make a comedy duo. Fuzz and Scuzz.

  “I’ve asked you politely to leave, sir. Don’t make me ask you again.”

  “No, don’t. Because I’ll only give you the same reply.” Which was nothing. The worst thing you can say to a cop.

  His jawline hardens. I look away from him, through the crowd of three, at the mound under the covers with its splayed sprigs of silver.

  “Taser me or cuff me or frog-march me out—whatever your next move is, get on with it. It’ll upset some of the residents, but most of them won’t remember it long.”

  In silence he considers it. A care facility. A death scene. The Director’s voice comes back. She’s placed herself between the bed and the funeral heavies, hands flat in the air. I like that. Her.

  “As I said, I understand the family’s made arrangements.”

  “Pre-arrangements.”

  “Yes. Which you can follow as soon as you leave the property. But this is… a different kind of residence.” She might be explaining to children, though the boys seem oblivious. “And we have a protocol whenever possible for daytime removals.”

  “When the family notifies us, we check the instructions on file—”

  “Shh. You can watch the whole thing. Help if you want. Asmita, Meru.”

  Two East Indian women come out from behind the cop, the younger brushing at her eyes. Move silent as deer to the bed.

  Shh. The word we were missing.

  Such silence and stillness, a suspension, in rooms with the dead. Even with this crowd the aura of it lingers. A feeling that superfluities have been carved away and, for a moment, a door is ajar between the worlds of the present and the gone, a crack that reveals them to have been one world all along, separated by no more than a filmy membrane. Dual sense of a hollowing of the everyday, a going out of some part of it, and at the same time a sense that something new and formerly missing and powerful is rushing in—or no, not rushing, but coming in steadily as on a tide. The crack, or door, will only stay open a short time, since people will rush, with forms and ceremonies, to close it tight and pretend it never existed. A pr
ivilege to stand near it, dare yourself to go where it beckons.

  §

  “How’d you get that? Looks like somebody did a number on you, bud.”

  Cop’s eyes at my temple, the particularly nasty webbing around my left eye.

  “It’s one thing you can always count on. Numbers.”

  A low sound. “I’m guessing he got what was coming to him.”

  “He did. Most definitely.”

  And then Maude Wyvern is making her last trip down the hallway of her home. On her back on the stretcher, her head on her pillow and her orange blanket tucked around her. Her slightly parted eyelids emit moist gleams. She looks deathly ill, not dead. Her caregivers walk on either side, one hand guiding the stretcher, one hand on her. The Director going ahead to run interference. Maude’s not well. We’re taking her to the hospital. Not even a lie required.

  The funeral boys and I trail behind. Along with the cop, looking bored. A shit call.

  No interference needed, as it turns out. Breakfast is over and the residents are gathered in a large room for morning stretches. Sitting on chairs, or in wheelchairs, in a circle. A show tune bounces from the ghetto blaster. The physio, a young Asian man, stands in the middle and, turning, exhorts the residents to follow his movements. Lift your right arm. Now your left. Now waggle your fingers, give a good shake. Like this. That’s it! Some try to follow. Caregivers bend to offer encouragement, start a hand upward. The caregivers all dark-skinned: African, East Indian, Filipino.

  The nighttime drapes are open and October light blooms through the sheers in a fuzzy cloud. Luminous drifting dust makes the physio and the torsos of the residents seem to float, swaying like stalks in a current. The bubble woman, standing at one side, never takes her eyes off the leader. Sometimes brings an arm up partway, regardless of what he is doing. The eddying light dissolves her filaments of hair, makes her round scalp glow a profound pearl. She opens and closes her mouth. Over the warble of the music, I hear it deep inside.

  Puh.