The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  My head is woozy, soaked in sense. It’s late in the window to be sorting so much.

  Her garbage bags around, and a few items swept into them to get me started, Jade plants herself in front of me and speaks with deep feeling, with expansive hand gestures and without expectation of reply.

  “Oh, oh, oh, I’m missing this gal. Lovely lady. Always such a big, bright smile. Never temper. Almost never. Oh, she can fool me. Fool me! The tricks she can play sometimes! She makes me think, Why are you here? I’m so tired, I should be here, you go home, Mama, and take care of my own kids. Nice voice, she has. Singalong, we always get her first. ‘Where’s Maude?’ Anyone will say that. Baking activity. Movie night. ‘Maude, c’mon girl, this is not your nap time. Sleep later. We need you!’ And she’ll be feisty too. Some lady she doesn’t like, make her fist up at her. I love her, this lady. How is her daughter?”

  It takes me a second to realize I’ve been asked a question, and I have to backtrack to find the four words. When I do, the lack of a first name, even if she simply doesn’t know it, seems strangely respectful. I raise my palms. How is Judy?

  Jade nods, tight-lipped. “Not easy for that girl, wake up like that. But I’m happy for Maude. Not to be alone when her time is come. When the Lord calls her home.”

  “She wasn’t alone?”

  Jade rears back, wide-eyed. Speaks to the room at large. Half-deaf or not, Maude needs to hear this. “Sometimes she likes to, we call her landlady. Against the rules, but on weekends sometimes I allow. Sleep with Mama, why not? What harm? Good for Mama, good for daughter too.”

  Which explains how Judy beat me up here yesterday, though I hadn’t wondered, assuming GO started running early even on weekends. But another unasked question tugs at me now, distantly, I can’t place it or slow it down to look at it. It wings past in a blur. Last night’s sleep no worse than the others lately, a patchy four hours, but the accumulation of them beginning to take its toll. I ask instead about Maude’s recent health.

  “Pretty good on her last review. August, I think. Summer sometime. Physical, not bad. Little heart problem, but with her pill and puffer, she’s okay. But her brain”—she puts her hands up beside her own head and mimes a falling motion, little waterfalls out both ears. “She has it many years, the Lord gives her a long trial.” Good-natured scowl at the ceiling. “But these old ones—they go when they have to. They know best.”

  She steps away from me, turns her back, and makes what seems a ceremonial facing of the window, the wall with the call string dangling, the short wall the headboard abutted.

  “Ohhhh,” she says, a deep groan, and strides out the door.

  Silence. Deeper without Jade, as if she took something with her.

  For an absurd moment—if it is absurd—I want to move into Vivera. Right now. Drive home and get my things. Have Jade and Amrita and Meru look in on me. Remind me of mealtimes and activities. Help me dress on the worst days. I can’t see the punishment I’ve taken letting me reach that stage, but who knows? Sometimes it’s the most spindly, grub-hollowed tree that hangs on through the storm, bushy-leaved saplings blown down around it…

  Wishing Judy would come back, I get busy on the bureau to liven up the room. Jade’s advice helps. Old cards and torn-off calendar pages, balled-up single socks, the detached blades of a pair of scissors, sweets wrappers of all kinds—gums, chocolates, mints, caramels, half a rock-hard cookie, papers torn from notepads, many with cross-outs or illegible scrawls. Playing cards, some with a third ripped away, a half.

  And a scrap that stops me cold. On a square of white paper, a series of lines that look like the birth of language. Squiggles at the top, a bumpy graph from some primeval experiment. Which separates in the next line into four bumpy strands, like cells dividing. Loops protruding above and below, scrawny, crabbed—trying to become limbs. Then a couple of cross-outs, aborted words. Feel, clearly—but a heavy stroke through it. Then a small word with a tail—mud? rod? And then, after a space, the tiny, wobbling sentence, terrible and achieved:

  I am feeling sad.

  Everything I know about Alzheimer’s, which is not much, upended by this. People speaking of it with a terror almost fond, the loss of memory, of self—but peaceful, like a cloud dissolving, a slate wiping itself clean. Which is nothing like what I’m seeing here, nothing at all. Everything ripped, broken. All this evidence of a pitched battle filled with violence and pain. Chaos, yes—but not raw chaos, pure. Dirty, sorrowful chaos. A person steering through it.

  It stokes me with a cold fury, puts me on notice that there may not be any choice about an adjustment. Maybe there never is.

  Which only intensifies drawer by drawer.

  Judy come back. The bureau is a pure bitch.

  Pictures in a jumble in the third drawer. Eras mixed and overlapping, snaps taken from many albums. Many folded, torn at the corners. Pieces of photos, torn to bits. But plenty to see Jade’s lovely lady—smiling, smiling under a changing hairstyle. Pictures of friends, classmates. Husband and children through decades. Parents—sun-dark couple in a field. Others who might be siblings, nieces, nephews. So where are they? Why are you alone in the room with me?

  Some pictures with notations beside the faces, or above or below them. Names legible in a couple of cases. But usually the ink blurry, flaking off, registering poorly on the photo plastic despite repeated shaky over-pressings.

  One photo, though. A class reunion, looks like. Late-middle-aged ladies, arranged in rows. X’s through some of the faces, check marks over the rest. The living and the dead. X means dead. X means gone. Her own face—middle row, left of center—the only one without a sign.

  Cards scattered throughout the drawers. Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Birthday. The message half torn off many of them, leaving just pictures: a wagon approaching a log cabin on a frosty night, a basket of coloured eggs tied with a pink ribbon, a Beatrix Potter rabbit wiping her baby’s muzzle with a cloth—a lot of flowers. Here and there, a card left whole—from Sandor, from Max, even a couple from Judy. From others too, notes from friends, though none more recent than two years back, when Judy said she’d moved to Vivera.

  One in the bottom drawer still in its envelope. A Mother’s Day card with embossed roses, rhyming sentiments inside. Love, Max in a quick hand. But a different hand, a woman’s, entering the name and address on the envelope. In the top left corner, a tony address sticker, black italics on gold: Dr. Max Wyvern, with an address at Yonge and Eglinton. Franked stamp on the right.

  A story in a card. Mother’s Day, but he mails it from the same city. Gets his secretary to fill it out, present it to him for signing. She would have bought it too, hitting the lobby pharmacy on her way back from lunch. The doctor my son.

  A keeper. I put it in a coat pocket.

  Another keeper a photo of mother and father and sons. The family minus Judy. Maybe ten years old, but the most recent group shot I can find. In the white border under each person, an identification in the shaky blue over-pressings. My husband me (Maude) son Max son)Sandor The dead-X firmly through the husband’s face.

  There’s one more object that, on instinct, I pocket. A little box of unfinished wood, maybe two inches by three, with a plastic top window and a cheap clasp, I’ve seen them in Dollarama. “Precious Things” printed neatly in blue ink above the window—not in Maude’s hand anytime lately, and probably not ever. Something mannish, almost Roman, in the firm strokes. Though the quote marks an odd touch. Whimsical? A bit fey?

  Inside the box, a balled-up nylon whose cheesy smell wafts out when I open it. It’s stuffed in, almost filling the small box. Uncoil it, though, a limp snakeskin, and underneath are a pair of nail clippers, two bobby pins, and a USB stick with a self-adhesive label cut to fit on the side, titled “Christmas Music.” Same quote marks and neat blue letters, though perhaps a different hand. It can be hard to tell with printing.

&
nbsp; With a silent apology to Maude, I stow her “Precious Things” in a pocket too.

  Standing in the stripped room, boxes around me. Bureau, bed, chairs. A couple of small tables. Feeling tired by it. And feeling the other presence fainter now. The parts left in her things detaching, beginning to float free.

  What did you do to earn this neglect? The answer not far to find. Staring anyone who looks in the face. You got sick.

  §

  The Strongbacks men waiting by their truck, outside. Why, I have no idea. Do they need our permission to do their job? Judy with them. The square-bodied young guy leaning against the passenger door, smoking. The seedy older guy chatting Judy up, smiles and gestures. Judy nodding. Flirting? Nothing’s impossible—she must cycle through every drama eventually—though it’s a vice with men to mistake vacant for coy.

  Are they wrong? She can’t object if she’s left the premises.

  After we’re loaded up, I tell them I need to go back for a minute, one last thing I need to take care of. The young guy has his pack out before I’ve turned.

  §

  1111.

  A skeleton confronts me a few steps from the elevator. Socket eyes, lips skinned back from yellow teeth, a thin glaze of skin over planes and scarps of bone. The instant I return his gaze, he drops his eyes, fusses with the ties of his housecoat. Turns away.

  Some kind of baking activity at a long table in the kitchen. A staffer passing the mixing bowl to a resident, lifting his fingers to the handle of the wooden spoon. A bridal dress, even earlier, it seems to come from Depression films, hanging on the wall in another alcove. A WWI soldier’s uniform. Fathers, uncles could be that old. More photographs, war medals. A tuxedo and an emerald dress on adjacent dressmakers’ dummies. Like stiffened ghost dancers. While I stand there, waiting for I don’t know what, two residents shuffle over and touch the fabrics. The bubble lady stands by a window near the uniform, blowing her slow soundless pops. With each generation, they’ll have to update the memory aids. Twenty years from now, it’ll be jeans and peasant blouses and an Abbey Road poster. Then what? An iPhone and a Gap T-shirt? Time not only moving more swiftly, but also becoming more insubstantial. Leaving flimsier traces. For those losing their minds in the Information Age, there’ll be few spars to cling to. You’ll just eddy in the data, dissolving in bits.

  In the middle of the torn-down room, head cocked. On alert. Hungry for orientation, scoping the human terrain. Are you on an adjustment? Tinglings of a familiar space opening up between my brain and the top of my head, a fizzing lightness that in time will turn murky, as if a swamp is releasing bubbles of gas that have nowhere to go and so build up in pressure. And the sense, basic—something wrong here. Something not right. Itchy, pre-twitch crawlings between my shoulder blades, the muscles there preparing to announce their need to lash out and hit something, grab it and shake hard. Rage heralds.

  Which yield to, or become, a feeling of utter peace. Cool fingers cupping my skull. Hand cap of calm.

  At moments it makes me wonder about myself, this peace I feel with the dead, with empty rooms. It isn’t morbidity, or not just, because at moments I’ll find it with the living and with fully furnished spaces as well. That’s rarer, though, more elusive. Usually the living are like the mall seething around Judy and me yesterday—an insane noise and welter of aimless movement, a ceaseless surf of scams, fool’s errands, and skulduggery.

  Opening the sheers, I stand with Maude at my side—her head coming to just below my shoulder—staring a last time at the trees rising from the swamp, half bare, stretches of dark bark between their coloured flags.

  Searing endless blue. Ash heaps of cloud.

  §

  At the storage place off Laird in Leaside, Max has left “oral instructions” that “family only” are to accompany the movers inside. Not a man slow to avenge a dial tone. “Sorry, sir, but direct authorization is part of our security package,” says the balding, Brit-accented manager, his voice strong for the stacked receptionist he goes back to ogling. Who by her revolving gum and glazed eyes couldn’t possibly be interested in any package he might produce.

  It’s fine by me. Over their shoulders, I see, on the first of a row of black-and-white screens, Judy and the Strongbacks men unloading the elevator. Tiny Judy float-walking ahead of the two men pushing dollies as they exit through the edge of one screen and appear on the next, walking in light towards carpeted dark, ceiling strip lights coming on ahead of them. Turning corners, more corridors, dark doors to either side, the lights quivering on. Like a girl in a spacecraft’s corridors, her beefy astronaut sidekicks. Like something from 2001. Or Solaris, the mind-planet plucking people from memory and setting them to run down corridors, sit weeping in metal compartments.

  And takes me back, too, to my four months at U of T. The similar lights in the stacks of Robarts Library. Fort Book. Automated cameras, light strips going on as sensors pick up your approach. All that knowledge sitting waiting in deep dusk the rest of the time. Just four months. September to December. Time enough to awe Lois’s parents, nourishing wild dreams. Lois a bit awed too by the A+ papers and tests coming in on schedule, though she’d never admit it, went catfish-jawed and shook her head, insisting she’d known it all along. Time enough to awe, time enough to appall. What goes up must come down. At least at certain velocities.

  The camera can’t quite see into the Wyvern unit they unlock, roll up the door and start unloading into. Just corners of boxes and totes, a lamp. Probably waiting many years now in the dark, presumably from when the family home was dissolved.

  Alzheimer’s, old age by any name, a retreat under fire, finding smaller and smaller refuges as the enemy advances. Until the last cave, where they find you with your back to the wall, out of ammunition. Butch and Sundance. But Newman and Redford white-haired, supported by walkers? Would never work.

  A better fantasy starts to form but pops when the manager says into the phone, “Another thing you need to know, it’s in our contract, is that all units are for storage purposes only. No business can be conducted from them.” Chuckles at something the caller says. “No, that’s right, you’ll need a proper office for that. And of course”—he waits until he’s got the girl’s eye—“no living in one either.” Gets a skimpy smile and raised eyebrow for the hundredth time.

  I fish-hook us over to Laird via the faux-fronted shops of a new Village. The usual suspects: Home Depot, Best Buy, Starbucks, LCBO. A “retail community” that went from hoardings to gala opening inside six months, thrown up like a Hollywood wild west set, minus the wildness and the west. Immense yawning asphalt instead of a muddy street between the town’s opposing storefronts, so huge it makes even Home Depot look dinky. Everything looking like the first November blow will knock it down.

  “Who is your mother’s Power of Attorney?” I say, waiting for the light. A slump-shouldered man wearing an ad board doing a faint shuffle in front of Five Guys Burgers and Fries, moving his arms back and forth in slow passes that obscure the words on his chest. Either from the chill or from some profounder misunderstanding of his role.

  “Max,” Judy says.

  “And Max pays you to look after your mom.” Chancing it a bit, following it as it arranges itself out ahead of me like the strip lights in the storage vessel.

  “Yes. I look after her.”

  She lapses back into silence. Hasn’t said much since leaving Vivera, when I asked her for a basic rundown on her brothers.

  “I hope Sandor mentions that in her obituary. Probably no one will think of it,” she says just before we reach Selkirk.

  The comment reminds me why, for all we went through together, living across the hall through months of siege, I haven’t looked her up in twenty years or ever felt inclined to. No one else can ever really be real to her. And such a person is an active danger to one aspiring to escape the ghost world and put on solid flesh again. Who prayer-folds ac
tions like a thousand paper cranes to that end.

  4

  What have you got?

  Sitting in the armchair overlooking Eglinton, I consider it. Money-man Max, his chequebook grieving. The place to start, but no dentist reachable on a Sunday. Playing golf or watching it. Sandor, a retired English teacher and “a kind of writer”—a sly jab in another mouth, but Judy’s flattens it to a ledger entry. Sandor the youngest, fifty or thereabouts—retired? Can be found, according to Judy, most nights at the Queen’s Arms. Show her arms, hide her charms. Which, unless she’s got it wrong, is only a few blocks away, a five-minute walk to just past Avenue. Max, when I get to him, pulling teeth at Yonge-Eg. What started way up in Markham shaping up as a local job after all.

  The last thought pulls me up like a pinch. You’re not considering an adjustment, you’re in one already. Well in. I could feel it watching the grainy floating scenes on the storage monitors. The two goons pushing piled dollies behind their ethereal little captain. Wanting to pull what I was seeing apart. Rearrange it.

  At dusk I head out, after leaving messages on four machines. I like setting them out like bait after business hours, plug in my own phone in the morning and see what’s in the net. I’ve never felt the need to be more closely connected. Hours already seem a fast turnaround, I don’t need seconds. And there are enough people camped out inside my skin.

  The Owner: 305’s rented. They dropped off the lease and first and last. You’re going to love these two. They’ll never bounce a cheque or make a peep. Maybe the occasional muffled scream when the markets fall. But only during business hours.

  Nicole, the Move-in Coordinator from Vivera’s menu: Hello, I’m wondering if I could arrange a tour. I don’t know if you have any vacancies, but I have a family member who needs, uh, placement—it’s my wife actually—and, well, I’m afraid we’ve hobbled along until things have become urgent. If you have no space available, I understand. We’ve got a short list we’re working through. But if by luck I’ve caught you at the right time, is there any chance we could meet tomorrow morning?