The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  §

  Christ, the joints. The two Advils from an hour ago aren’t touching it, I drop another pair on top of them. Throbs and needle spikes—wherever bone meets bone.

  The cause a cold case. Presumed fractures and dislocations, long before memory. An early pair of foster parents—dogged, dim moon faces—took me round to doctors, trying to explain the gaps and cracks on X-rays. Right baby finger skewed to an angle, years before it became an alien tip-off on The Invaders. “Unspecified early trauma” the most any of them would say.

  Which doesn’t age well. As tonight’s shit-kicking reminds. A throwback to Hurricane force, before the brief spell of the Island, and before the long years of adjustments and arrangements that have shaped Off Island time. Flailing years, throwing punches, kicks, spitting teeth and laughing at the sight of blood, your own and others. Lashing out with bone, glass, blades. With anything. Rusted pipes, nail-studded boards. Trying to make outer weather match the inner, so the world and you inside it could make a little sense at least, a conjoined chaos.

  Before the time of adjustments, when you learned how a little wrench to the larger wheel could ease the small wheels’ spinnings…

  Pacing slow circles, waiting on the Advil, I see, just inside the door, the slip of paper I missed when I stumbled in.

  The best tenants bitch the least. Take it past all reason, then ask with an apology.

  Sorry for desturb but its waking Jared.

  The shoulder screams, but I pound to get over the din and start us off. 305 pops the door breezily, ready for it. What the hell. An eviction party, we used to call it.

  Nothing to lose. Except there always is.

  “Tell Skeletor it’s Saturday night,” shouts a voice from down the hall. Sounding like one of the funeral home boys, brash on a double shot of ginger ale. “Tell him to fuck—”

  Then comes up far enough to see the Face. Sometimes it does half my work for me. All of it when it’s been alley-painted with war.

  “Turn it down a coupla notches?”

  “Turn it off.”

  I close the door for them. Slow-motion to the click.

  Halfway to the elevator—two flights too much just now—the drug dealer in 303 cracks his door, smirking. Wisps of peat and dirty socks float out at me.

  “Same deft touch with humanity, I see.”

  “As long as humanity keeps using the same deft touch on me.”

  3

  Judy’s group home on Selkirk Street east of Pape. The number hard to see from the street, or else missing. Then I realize I don’t need it. At the dead end of the street is a straggle of people, six or eight, outside a weather-beaten two-story house. Standing on the lawn, sitting on the curb. One guy slumped on an overturned milk crate beside a rusted bike missing its chain. As if the rest of the street, trim and Lord’s-Day-void, is tilted to flow down to this drain.

  Judy’s waiting at the end of the walk, dressed as if for Grade Eight graduation. Red jumper with a frilly white blouse that flutters like a sea animal at her throat. Feet in black pumps primly together, nylons. Red lipstick, dark eyeshadow. Yesterday’s gray jacket over her arm, though the wind’s gone raw and blustery, blowing scraps about. And a little gold-strapped turquoise handbag that goes with none of it.

  While she’s buckling up and I’m three-pointing us the other way, her landlady comes out the front door with a broom. Doesn’t sweep the porch or steps with it, but descends halfway and points at the loiterers in turn, jerking the bristles sharply sideways. Move on! The pair on the lawn shift to the sidewalk. The one on the sidewalk shuffles a few feet farther along it.

  Now she advances on the car, peering in at us with an ugly scowl. Broom still semi-rampant. She’s peering past Judy to get a look at me, which takes me back a thousand years—a thousand seconds—to a conversation in the rotunda’s sagging fart-catchers.

  Judy telling me—calmly and clearly, her head all glass for once—of the tricks she sometimes turned to supplement her disability cheques. Me asking about her scars. The ward a place where, if you could talk at all, you might talk about anything.

  I just use my hand. Or my mouth. They are usually in a hurry.

  We might have been any two workers discussing an occupational drawback and remedy.

  All glass—or all brick? Glass lets anyone see in—or out—but shatters easily. Bricks are solid facts you can build with, if you don’t mind living in a bunker. Judy’s half-glass, half-brick gets it better. As some of her pronouncements do, turned over patiently enough. Curious pebbles. Wave-worn.

  Today’s make-up a pulp moll muddle. Lips a perfect cherry pout, despite her shaky hands. Mauve eyeshadow the colour of last night’s bruises. Orangey blush patched in, mostly in two cheek circles.

  Her moving day rig. For the funeral she might find dirty overalls and gardening gloves.

  She’s chattery as we make our way onto the DVP and join the stream north. Mostly making good sense, too—though sometimes you have to peer around a moony murmuring to see the truth it’s shining on. Which strikes me—and always has—as exactly opposite to the case with most people. Where lunatic bullshit lurks behind the supposed straight facts they’re peddling.

  Mrs. Rasmussen a decent house mother, one of the best she’s had. She rousts them between meals to clean the place, but lets them stay on the porch in bad weather. Won’t tolerate bad language. Calls it streetmouth. Or barnyard humour.

  “How many people are living there now?”

  “Six in the basement. Six on the first floor. Mrs. Rasmussen lives on top. She calls it her egg carton.”

  A nicer name than fire trap.

  Judy stares straight ahead out the windshield, hands folded in her lap. Yet I never lose the sense that she’s watching me closely. Glancing at her, I see how faded the jumper is, scuff marks on the bag and pumps. Goodwill gear. But her tiny size gives her more choice, able to pick from the kids’ racks and the ladies’ petite.

  “Half-packs stack better if you are feeding one.”

  §

  A break at Vivera—a different receptionist on the desk and the Director not in either. I make a mental note that she’ll probably be off tomorrow too, having worked Saturday. Something to try Monday, my last chance here. I don’t know what it is yet and don’t need to wonder. It’s out a little ways ahead of me, preparing itself. The way it happens this deep in hyper.

  In the lounge, staff and a couple of volunteers are bringing chairs from the dining room to augment the sofa and armchairs. Lectern in place in front of the flatscreen TV, youngish white-collared priest arranging his papers on it. An old man opening a hymn book at the piano. A few residents already in their places. Not talking, hands in their laps. A lesson locked in for eighty years, since the first knuckle raps—hands folded! not a peep!—which might outlast memories of homes, families, careers, selves. Might outlast speech and movement.

  Hands folded. Not a peep.

  Yesterday’s savoury smell sweeter today. Oranges and cloves? Nut bread? Something twigs, and I look up into the high corners for air fresheners. Vents exhaling a comforting chemical mist. Nothing. Nor, sniffing under it, the odours of stale bodies and incontinence that need masking. Vivera very good. Right up to the mark. Details.

  A pointed glance from one staffer as we head to the elevator, but nothing more. Plenty of scenes to witness—plenty to keep shut about.

  Judy punches in the code to the secure floor: 1111. Which seems cruelly simple. Insulting, too, as it always is when you stop believing people can surprise you. For a few seconds, I envision a mass breakout. Tunnels, shorted alarms, ropes of knotted sheets, night staff duct-taped. Just the cat and dog wandering free when day shift arrives. I watch it all, an ultra-absorbing ten-second movie, and then the screen goes black and it’s gone, the celluloid crisped.

  §

  Flattened moving boxes are already
in the room, leaning against the wall in the hallway and stacked in the bedroom. STRONGBACKS… Lets YOU Relax! over a graphic of what appear to be two gorillas in jumpsuits hoisting a sofa beside a pencil-necked guy in a La-Z-Boy.

  Someone in a big hurry. Someone organized. Nailing down who my first priority.

  Which takes all of twenty seconds. The phone on a small, marble-topped table in the corner rings. I’m closest to it.

  “Yes?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Judy’s friend.”

  “Hello, Judy’s friend. Would you put my sister on?”

  No, that’s your job. Judy watches the receiver approach her through the air as if she’s tracking a super-slow-motion missile. “For you,” I say while it’s between us. “A telemarketer, I think. Maybe someone who bothered your mom.”

  Then watch while Judy gets the earful meant for me. Nothing new to her, I’m sure, or I’d feel more guilty. She listens in silence, nothing in her face, then starts saying “Yes” at intervals to what I assume is a list of instructions. “Yes. Yes. Two o’clock. Yes.” After listening again for a long time, a minute or two, she passes the phone back to me. “Max wants to talk to you.”

  Lubberly. I hold the receiver at my side, like a lunchbox handle. Max already someone I want to wind up. Someone maybe worth winding up. The crisp, prep school voice—Hello, Judy’s friend. The tickety-boo Strongbacks arrangements. I dangle the phone over the cradle, let him listen while he checks his watch, then drop it clattering down. Unplug the jack before he can redial.

  Judy is sitting on the bed. Not looking sad. Looking lost. Hands flat on a rose-patterned duvet where the orange blanket was yesterday.

  Turning my head slowly, I breathe in the slightly stale smells mixed with sweeter scents of lotions and floral detergents, until I’m sure of it. Three of us. That relief, each time you learn it, that whatever the soul might be, it won’t be bum’s-rushed like the body.

  §

  Judy dithers about, picking things up and putting them down, assembling little piles and then abandoning them. I take care of my mother. Meanwhile I take out my X-Acto knife, slice the plastic strapping and set up the first box.

  The normal contents of the coat pockets: two cutters, a Classic Fine Point and a heavier blade, a short-handled finishing hammer, multi-head screwdriver, three rolls of loonies, duct tape and clear tape, paper pad and pen. Special circumstances sometimes require another tool, but these cover almost any everyday situation. My everydays anyway.

  I start with the photos on the walls, planning to work down to the floor. Lots of pictures of the whole family in the early years—cottage, home, beach getaways—but none of Judy past her mid-teens. What I noticed yesterday. As if she died at sixteen. And notice something else today, like a bookend: nothing of Maude beyond about age seventy. One of the last a group photo in a restaurant, leaning in with her husband to blow out candles. Anniversary? Maude still with a little dark in her hair, Dr. Wyvern white-haired, trim but in his eighties. No Judy, but a brother to either side, smiling and clapping. Both good-looking, but in opposite ways. The thin, fine-featured one with round glasses, a fluff of fair hair—that would be Max. The other burly, with a strong large nose, long rock star ringlets of dark hair—Sandor, Judy said the youngest was. And then Maude’s photo record goes as blank as her first child’s.

  Rough times not welcome in the family. Non in absentia or dementia.

  Looking around at the photographs, even hung out of sequence as they are, I can easily see the formation and cresting and devolution of a family in time. Husband and wife meeting in black and white, the mid- to late-forties from the car they’re standing beside. Him a good ten years older: handsome, assured, angular intelligent face. His arm encircling the waist of the petite, pretty young woman looking up at him adoringly. What would he think of the hash presumably made of caring for her after he’d gone? The promises, deathbed ones perhaps, broken every day? Then the years of kids. A Christmas portrait in front of the tree: Judy in a green dress, green-bowtied brother to either side. Vacations: tropical rentals, the family cottage. A graduation picture for the second child, the first son, at a fancy restaurant—Judy absent now, her career as a mental patient underway. A gap then, curious—no pictures of the Wyverns’ middle years, their children grown and out in careers. We don’t play with the kids away?

  I try again to remember Judy’s visitors on the ward, if she had them. Butter tarts. And fleeting images of a woman walking the halls with her—but it’s no good, it could have been anyone. Or no one at all. It’s like trying to pin down details in a blender filled with fog.

  It’s not until I’ve got most of the pictures in boxes that I identify another blank, another absence tugging at me. No third generation. No grandkids. Not breeders either.

  Strange for money. Which sometimes breeds more slowly, but usually more surely. Making sure to send fresh roots down into the dark.

  Amrita, the young caregiver who teared up for Maude yesterday, comes in and starts taking out Maude’s clothes from the closet and folding them on the bed for us to pack. Her sure, gentle movements tell she knows these clothes, knew the woman she dressed in them. Judy states, her voice loud in the silence, that her mother does not like her clothes folded like that. But offers no other way, so Amrita, after a pause, keeps on folding. It’s so rare to hear an unambiguous emotion from Judy—jealousy in this case, possessiveness—that I watch her for a bit, taking down the last photographs. Same painted statuette standing by the window. As if the Easter Islanders turned in the end to doing little girls in jumpers and frills staring out at sixty.

  Amrita leaves and shortly after a maintenance man with a wispy moustache arrives. Again, that sense of a well-oiled operation: help arriving in small, unobtrusive doses. “How you folks doin’? Not so good, I guess. I’m sorry for your troubles.”

  A young guy, early thirties at most, yet sounding wise and old-timey, the way the simple-minded can.

  “There’s no hurry, you know. I just want to make sure you know that. This place has a five-day compassion window. Longer than some places, that’s for sure.”

  Longer than Max’s. “Thanks,” I say. “Do you need to do some work?”

  He raises and lowers his tool box. A blush seeping out from his ginger hair, as if an old scalp wound has opened. “Well, I just thought I’d see if I can get her toilet moving better. I had it on my list for yesterday, before…”

  “It’s all right. Go ahead.”

  I follow him into the bathroom and, while he’s down on his knees opening up the tool box, ask him what the problem is. His hands sunk in tools and oddments, he speaks more comfortably.

  “Well. It happens sometimes around here. The ladies—not the men that I’ve seen—they start putting a lot of things down it. Papers, socks. Underwear. Even slacks and blouses. Sometimes cut up some, if they get ahold of some scissors or a knife. Confused, I guess. You can’t blame them. But you don’t want to be putting those things down pipes, do you?”

  You might if you couldn’t fit yourself.

  He’s got a big wrench out and is reaching behind for the valves. “You folks okay without this for a bit? There’s the little sink by her fridge, that still works. And there’s a bathroom down the hall if you need it.”

  “We’ll be fine.”

  On the metal frame of the mirror above the sink, two photos under butterfly and beetle magnets. Pictures of Maude, unlike any I’ve seen. Tousle-haired, a wind pushing her perm around, broad smile. The sun full in her face, sparking off her glasses as she turns up into it. Who took these? Just behind her, thick autumn colours: tall white flowers, blue ones, yellow goldenrod, big purple thistles, milkweed—a wild beauty in the disordered clump, bumblebees sunk in blooms or fat blurs lifting off or landing. This time of year—though not this year, surely. Water in the background, blurry dots that might be ducks or geese. The same day.
Reaching out a hand toward a bumblebee on a purple thistle—smiling, unafraid. Alone again with nature, the photographer forgotten—the miracles of growing things and small animals she reached out to first, sitting on the ground, before she could walk. Who? Someone she trusted. Probably the same person who added tape behind the magnets. These ones should stay. These ones she should see, morning, night. I slide the magnets aside and peel off the shots. Pocket them.

  §

  1:00. Small as the room is, we’re going to have to pick up the pace to be ready for Strongbacks in an hour. I decide to break down the bed to give us more room. I look around for Judy, thinking this part might be difficult for her to watch, but she’s gone.

  Bathroom break? She always seemed to recall the needs of her body suddenly, as if it were a mostly silent companion who sometimes tapped her on the shoulder to make a request. There’s no telling. She’s always taken powders. Ghosting in and out of rooms and scenes. Not her rooms, not her scenes. Drug itch? Drug bladder? Beyond those, just an inability to situate herself anywhere for very long. A psychic vagrant. Long before she was a physical one.

  Strange, how work goes faster when the one not working leaves. Non-help not just failing to add but subtracting from what’s there. Sinkhole of inaction…

  Five minutes and the bed’s apart and leaning against the wall. Bedclothes folded, box spring, mattress. Scarred and sticky wooden frame unscrewed and wrenched free—headboard, foot, metal side slats. Scrubbed-at rust and ochre stains splotching the mattress, both sides. Faint in places—caregivers and cleaners doing their best, plus the rubber sheets and incontinence pads shelved in the closet—but multiple and dark in the central combat zones, rising to the eyes like aerial views of an ancient battlefield, nightly skirmishes with Bladder and Bowel spilling ineradicably into the ground.

  A heavy black woman, Jade on her name tag, comes in with garbage bags. Puts them in places around the room. “Things too old, no good anymore, or broken maybe”—she leans close and says in a low voice, Maude nearby but still hard of hearing—“or things that are too dirty, who can wear them now? Just throw them quietly”—with a downward pushing of her big hands to show me. “It’s not disrespect. Is what she wants.”