by Mike Barnes
“That seems… reasonable.” Trying out his trading floor voice.
“In this neighbourhood it’s a lot better than that. Ask the Owner.”
He nods, scoots back to her. My mouth, like my face, will be a carrying cost.
The Owner can’t do math. He can’t even do basic arithmetic, since he won’t put a minus sign on any side but yours. He yowled at the hundred bucks the Old Man knocked off my rent for the help I gave him: shovelling snow, cleaning and painting vacated apartments, caulking, unplugging toilets, showing units when he was sick or just too tired. We worked in speechless synchrony, super and protegé. I’d reached an eerie, afterlife-ish calm, where I knew I’d never be Admitted and wear a plastic bracelet again, because the ward was something I carried wherever I went. I just needed to rack up living arrangements. When I took over from the Old Man—still in ICU, but headed for a home—I was told by the voice on the phone I was only entitled to free rent in the dinky first-floor unit. For the two-bedroom I was occupying, I’d have to settle for half off. But half off doesn’t equal the one-bedroom rent, I said. And eventually got him to see, or agree at least, though I had to rub his face in it awhile.
We do the same dance with every vacancy. The Owner hyped to jack the rent, it’s his only redress for the socialist crime of rent controls. And I have to explain, each time, that the “market value” rents he’s barking down the line won’t bring in the “better class of tenants” he’s dreaming of—with these halls? that vertical coffin lift?—they’ll just force the unit-sharing, two students, two waiters and a cook, divvying up the rent. Which means more parties. Which means more noise. And which also means more vacancies, since sooner or later one finds a girlfriend, or a boyfriend, or they argue. And they leave.
Or don’t leave. And I have to make them. Like the cruise ship musicians in 305. Nice when they’re gone, but when they aren’t, they think midnight is a good time to start wailing. Off key, too. Though quality hardly matters when you’re punching a 6 a.m. clock—the guy in 205—or nursing nerves so tender an elf fart wakes you—either of the couple in 405.
The Owner’s all for evictions. But though he may rule Bay Street, he can’t see that rent jacked two hundred dollars will mean eight months to recoup his losses if the unit stands empty a month. Almost a year and a half if it stretches to two. He can’t do math.
So he grumbles and fulminates and finally sticks a dial tone in my ear.
The couple comes back. She leads with the line they’ve decided on. “It seems to be in… fairly decent shape. The apartment, at least. We do have some questions about the building. But we like the neighbourhood.”
“We all do. We’re poaching on Forest Hill, basically. This row dates from the forties. North of the mansions then. Then the second-tier burghers caught up and built in around them. You can use the services they require—good restaurants, cafés, all kinds of shops—without paying their property taxes. Or their mortgages.” They exchange a glance they think I don’t catch. Who in their right mind would delay buying a house a second longer than they had to? No need to hype them to my view. To rent is to live a little longer. To own is to die. A baby rents its patch of flesh. A corpse owns it.
“You may be wondering”—the guy again—“why we need three bedrooms, since we don’t have kids and aren’t planning on any for a while.”
I wasn’t wondering. They need house space while they’re saving house cash. No downbeat scrimping like their parents did. But I stare above them at a blazing maple while he lays out how she needs a studio for her painting, watercolours mostly, and he, he’s developing a software project, early days of course, but some promising offers…
They’re almost touching, this new breed of birds. Us-triches, with plans so long-range subtle they assume they’re invisible to the guy slicing their sashimi or unclogging their drain.
“It’s long-term rental we’re thinking of.” She cuts into his rap, which has gone meandery. “Three or four years minimum. Five, maybe.”
A lie, clearly. These two will treadmill toonies into their mutual fund. But they’ll be quiet at least. Sipping fair trade lattes while they split the Post Financial.
“Short-term’s what I’m thinking of. It’ll be vacant at midnight on the thirty-first, occupied at 12:01 on the first. Right now, that minute’s up for grabs.”
As they leave clutching the Owner’s application, I can hear the dilemma that will envelop them two steps out the door. Decent place, lotsa’ room. Great location! Not a bad rent. But that guy!
Well, everything comes at a price, my dears. But I hope they take it, they’re not bad little strivers compared to some.
And will inherit what’s left of the earth, no question.
§
The soup down, the jazz still ticking. Nothing takes long enough. Not in hyper.
3 p.m. Not a time of day for reading. Not morning, not night. Halfway House.
I move around the premises. The faded IKEA furniture Lois’s father bought us. Her parents playing house, fixing it up for the kids who would give them grandkids. After twenty years, it looks like the Goodwill gear they wanted to save us from. They did save us. It’s just me using it. Living room. Bedroom.
Building a life from other people’s lack of imagination. Jordan and Melanie unable to picture their twenty-three-year-old daughter living in a shitty apartment. “Starving artist,” all right, but please, at least a decent sofa, Queen bed… And when pregnancy surprised, utterly unable and unwilling—no wiggle here—to imagine their grandchild living much past infancy in rented rooms. Gifting us the house down payment. And all predicated on their greatest failure of vision: to see no reason why a thirty-five-year-old shipper-receiver with “brains to burn” couldn’t scale the heights belatedly. Lois, smart as she was, inherited this blindness—or love dimmed her sight, made her a dreamy myope. Because she’d met me in a quiescent phase that might be mistaken for the ups and downs of a “moody” person, calm of the Island she helped create, she heard my stories of the Hurricane Years as just that, stories. And she loved stories. Imagination feeding lack of imagination. Murmuring to Terror, “It’s only a dream…”
I avoid opening the second bedroom door until avoiding it’s all I’m aware of doing.
Absence, empty space, has its own life stages. Like a series of ugly worms that can become a butterfly—given enough time and the right conditions.
Starting as sheer torture, as it must, absence modulates to a trial. That’s when most people rush to fill it, stupidly, since the filling is often worse than the hole. Hang on through that, though, and gone—the clinging, hanging sense of un—can become a habit. A nagging one, to start with, then just habit: mindless non.
From there—in special cases—it may evolve into positive need, a nutrient approaching pleasure.
Vacuum become oxygen. Black space spreading and drying its wings in your lungs.
Big Empty looks like it did twenty-three years ago. The Old Man gave us the ten days before move-in to clean and paint. It was the first room we did.
Windexed the big, south-facing panes. Patched and painted the white walls and ceiling. I give them a fresh coat every few years, otherwise just wipe them down with a damp cloth when they look dull, maybe four times a year. Mr. Cleaned the parquet squares up to shine. I still do that at least once a month, oftener than they need. Liking the pine-honey gleams.
Sanctum. Sitting room. And many nights—every night as a window closes—my lying room. The last place I can chase sleep.
Smelling the subtle aromas of time and space in a vacant room. Scents that never cloy or tire.
It brings you things, Big Empty. Never what, or when, you expect. News on its own schedule.
Today, just two memories. Lois and I making it on the bare wood floor. Laughing afterwards. Lying on our backs, seeing a spot we’d missed. Late August. Traffic sounds in the claggy air.
/> Her father handing me the cheque in Sunnybrook. Not quite twenty-eight months—lifetimes—later. Waiting there—how long?—in the lounge outside ICU, to make sure I got no further. A shock to realize that. With conditions and lawyer-drawn papers—going to his partner, no less—to make sure they stuck.
A shock in stages: the elevator, the parking lot. The bus, going home. No snow yet, but lights on trees and window frames.
Someone willing to spend a fifth of a million dollars to keep you clear of Lois. Clear of Megan.
Of all the names you called him down the years, bad father never among them.
§
That is not what killed my mother.
Force it down. Not now, not now, no time. Stone saying it to me, or me saying it to Stone? Does it even matter anymore?
Adjustment more than drooping blood sugar. Afternoon sag of sleep-poor nights. Four hours, five—how many weeks now?
Open Mr. Noodle, pitch the chemical flavour pack. Boil three minutes, drain. Warm up a container of the fresh stock. Four more in the fridge, the rest in the freezer, two older to the front. Discipline. Add a baggie of vegetables. The noodles.
4 p.m.
Nothing takes long enough.
Though speed the perfect weight-loss regimen. Twenty waking hours to burn off calories, ten hours between meals.
Look around. Too early to leave. Too late not to.
Out the door.
Killing time, I walk books up the hill to the library, pick out another stack from the shelves. Sitting by the windows with the pensioners and a pair of teen snugglers, I flip through the weekend papers. Freak pics of the Big Man crowding wars and famine off the front page. When the branch closes at five, I walk the books back down to the car. Still nowhere near dark. I head up Chaplin to Memorial Park and make slow circuits of the track, joggers lapping me, a soccer team passing and booting on the inner grass. Finally the sun, long gone behind the wide apartment blocks, surrounds their bases with orange flame. The air begins to gray and clot with grainy flecks, and I feel the vampire’s relief at the turn into dusk.
I never imagine I’ll find what I’m looking for by day, but despite all history, I sense it around every corner in the dark.
§
A taxi driver’s grid on my brain, squares and zones I troll up and down. Two weeks ago, in Indian summer, I made a rare daylight sortie out to Woodbine Beach. Cruising the strolling latte sippers north and south of Queen, then along the boardwalk of saunterers, power walkers flexing arm weights, joggers, volleyball players, even a few charred sunbathers, a fireball turning the lake to blood. I watched through mesh as the slender ones in tennis whites thocked lime balls across the nets. It all felt rich and low percentage even as I did it—but who knows what a kid becomes in twenty years?
Megan, my undone child. Where and who—and what—are you now?
Tonight’s route a more regular one. Down through the glass canyons of Bay, layer-lit by cleaners, then back up and down the streets through the university, ending at Queen. Her grandparents rich and smart, her mother talented and funky-chic. And well-fixed now, too—Jordan would see to that. Grumbling, she’d buy in. Past their twenties few spurn what they’re used to.
I take it slow, ignoring the honks and pissy swerves, peering ahead, to either side. Swivelling sharply at a wisp-haired forehead asleep on a shoulder. Then again, ten blocks on, at a profile with fine blonde hair brushed to her waist. Time mirages. I know it and keep looking. Sighting what I knew and is gone, sighting what I can’t know and is here. Black hair? Brown? Red? Purple-yellow? It only takes bottles of dye.
A face half melted, graft-helped and wig-sheltered? Or skin new-grown, a triumph of resilience and state-of-the-art scalpels—leaving just faint lines, a mosaic of seams? I can’t decide, and opt for half-views in profile. Unnerved by full face scans.
Halfway up the east side of Trinity Bellwoods, I pull over and cut through the park to Queen. A district primed for ghost encounters with Judy and myself. Brad. Lynette. But I don’t meet them, not as more than normal memories. Why would you? Sickness starts anywhere, but its essence is roaming. Station to station.
Group homes. Rooms. The basement apartment. Offices: doctor, social worker, Manpower counsellor. Parole officer, when it takes that turn. Riding the TTC to subsidized jobs here, there. Here again.
“Hey, buddy. Spare some change?”
A group—four, five—around a bench. Approaching them, I open the pocket with the rolls of loonies. Hand a coin each around.
“Thanks, man.” “God bless.” “Got another to go with it, any chance?”
“Hey, man, any of those little jobs kicking around?” Snag. His huge hairless dog curled shivering on the bench, taking up most of it. Nervous, with bulging wet black eyes, it shivers through all seasons.
“Not right now. Soon, maybe.”
“Gettin’ chilly, man. Winter’s coming. Ask Sammy, you don’t believe me.”
Wet, phlegmy laughter at the cur’s expense.
“Like I said, soon.”
I walk a few blocks up the strip, slowly, handing out a loonie or two a block. Call it a tithe. Everything going, an autumn Saturday night.
Oyster Boy. The Drake. Beaconsfield. Beaver Café. The Gladstone. Hipsters near each door, smoking, being seen. Tipping beers, waggling glasses. Young, warm-blooded—even the ones in shirt sleeves or skirts shiver less than Sammy.
I want to hit something. Someone. Not to do damage, though it will. More just to make contact.
But not with these. Would be like hitting air.
Not the way it works anyway. You don’t look for opportunities. You realize you need one, and wait to see what’s delivered.
Curling down Sudbury. The Center for Mindfulness Studies. Nothing to hit there.
Sighting up Abell, some kind of blockage, something half-built rearing to the side. Up Lisgar back to Queen. Over to Abell and down the short side.
Where I find it.
Across a space of churned-up mud, rutted by big treads, brownwater puddles jagged with wire, broken pipes and brick. Refuse from the condo pit behind the hoardings and bent mesh.
Two of them going at it hard. Her on the ground, swinging wildly. Him aiming short, sharp kicks everywhere he can.
Just beyond a zone of heavy dark, a lighted cube with paintings, people clustered near the doors with drinks.
Maybe they think it’s a performance piece. Maybe it is.
I pat the coat’s pockets, then decide against it. Need to feel it.
Wade into it bare-handed.
§
He’s tall and skinny, rigged as a taller dead man. Dark suit from the forties or fifties dragging past his heels in the mud. Hard sinew through the cloth when I grab his upper arms from behind and shove him at the hoarding. His weight surprises. Fire shoots through my shoulder joints. High-pitched yelp and he hits the plywood and falls, crumpled.
I bend to help the one he was kicking, but she’s still flailing wildly from her tuck, screaming hoarse bloody murder. “Fucking bitch cunt I’ll kill you cocksucker!” Lover boy took all the style, she’s left with shapeless khaki and a plaid jacket her bushy hair’s tucked into.
One of her paws catches my left knee—another wrecked joint, another fiery stab. And then a much more searing pain across the backs of both knees and as I fall and twist back, bringing my arm up over my face, I see the bar backswung over his head like a golfer. Cackling through a spittle-strung black hole, dark stringy hair trailing into her suit collar.
Her. Not his. Thin hairless ruin of a woman’s face.
Too far to kick. And no time. Just enough to tuck and start to roll away from the swing, which comes down on my upper arm, trying for my head. I hear the crack inside the whump a microsecond before I feel it.
And see, my eyes and mouth shocked wide, the flailing in front of me
stop and a bushy brown beard come up out of its turtle tuck, sunk eyes glittering.
A hand comes up out of the mud with surprising speed and pushes a jagged stone or brick into my cheek. A back tooth gives, spurting blood. My eyes fasten on a milky skin of congealed plastic leaked from the construction site, a tumour of glowing white leather.
After that it’s just tuck and take it. Twisting side to side to confuse the bar’s aim, then throwing out a lucky kick that sends it ringing off somewhere. Kicks from either side, from everywhere. Gleeful curses, united now. Catching a foot and upending someone with a heavy crash. Afterward the sharp stone driving down into my forearms, trying to get at my face.
Then the other—she—drops to her knees to join in the close work.
Snorts and grunts, high-pitched and low, like pigs closing on truffles.
It feels like years before the artists from the opening jog shouting across the black space to pull us apart.
§
On the balcony, one of the frozen soup containers against my face. Forehead, cheek, chin—they caught me everywhere. Back of the neck. Goose eggs coming up like tumours. Crusted mud and blood melt and drip in red-brown rivulets off the soup container when I hold it away. Wait to try the mirror.
Stabbing in the joints. Knees, shoulders, elbows. Hips. Ankles. Like a doll with gone stitching. Wide darkening stripe across the upper arm, doesn’t feel broken.
Three slabs down, the girls in 504 passing an orange glowing tip. Cupping hands for each other, a wind coming up. They see me and scoot inside. A buzzkill if they knew how little I care.
Straight south over the fire station, the CN needle, blinking a programmed pink, lime, red.
The street so dead. Saturday, not much past midnight. One car, another, then a long gap before the next. Presbyterian speedway.
Sunday my least favourite day and this one starting early. Sabbaths, Days of Rest: a feel like choking, someone holding a pillow over the world’s face. The deadness builds through fifty-two weeks to bottom out at Christmas. Super-Sunday.
Yet just across a slice of air, the wall of the Latimer. Chipped red brick, no windows. That helps you breathe, loosens your chest. There are blanks and blanks.
