The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  Ken, my advisor at CIBC: Hi, Ken. I’m into something here that’s going to need a few extra funds. Not a lot, I don’t think. And, yes, I do want you to do the drill. Standard operating procedure.

  The office of Dr. Max Wyvern, though I almost give up at the interminable preamble that’s designed to make me do just that. Hello, you’ve reached… and then later, We are located… and Our business hours are… and only then, We are presently closed and will reopen at… and then, with sadistically slow enunciation, an advisory that any emergency situation should be dealt with at a hospital… until finally, after a minute that feels like a day, the voice conceding to any masochist still on the line, If you would like to leave a brief message and your number, please do so after the beep. Um. I don’t know if you’re accepting new patients, but one of my teeth broke apart just now. When I was eating some nuts. Lower tooth, on the left side. I’m not in pain, it just sort of crumbled away around the fillings. There’s a back tooth loose too. Wiggling. Neither is an emergency, but, um, it doesn’t seem like something I should wait on. Could you phone me at this number if you have any openings? Thank you very much.

  Lure of crowns, extractions, likely canal work. Like dangling a square of red rag on a hook in front of a bullfrog. The huge mouth drops open and the great legs uncoil in a coordinated lunge. One foster dad an outdoorsman. Not with them long.

  §

  “Green tea or black?”

  A new question. Black, I decide.

  “What kind?”

  Also new. Previously it was just Red Rose on offer, stale bags in a jar beside the till.

  “Do you have Earl Grey?”

  “We have. With milk?”

  “Just black, thanks.”

  Other than expanding the tea selection, the new Korean owners haven’t messed with the Queen’s Arms’ modestly winning formula. Same TV screens with sports and news so nobody has to feel they’ve left home. Pool table at the back. Just enough stains on the carpet and faint fumes of draft and puke to keep it real. Our dingy, grotty local.

  Family run, at least this time on a Sunday. Mother behind the bar. Daughter in hot pants handling the three guys in sports jerseys at a table. Kidding with her as they wait for a game, any game. Father’s role at the moment working through a stack of Scratch ’n Win at the end of the bar.

  “Straight to the hard stuff, eh?” says the guy two stools over when Mother brings my tea.

  “Straight to the source,” I say, weirding him back to his pint.

  But he’s a talker, wants contact, and a couple of minutes later he taps the Star on the bar between us. Hizzoner spread over it in close-up, pig-eyed, ranting at a scrum. The mics black bulrushes he’s peering over.

  “The Big Man’s quite the distraction, isn’t he?” says my neighbour.

  “He is that.”

  “Distracting us from the city’s business.”

  “Distracting us from himself.”

  “How’s that work? You can’t get away from him. He’s everywhere.”

  “Exactly. He is. Not his policies. Listen to these stories enough and you might start to believe he’s a civic-minded gent whose outsize appetites led him astray. But he couldn’t be civic-minded if you dried him out and slimmed him down and locked him in a room with Thomas Merton for a year. An alligator doesn’t lose his taste for meat if you starve him.”

  That restores the silence between us. He pulls the paper over and starts leafing to find more the kind of thing he’s looking for.

  A UFC cage match takes place on the main TV. A two-minute flurry capping a half hour of build-up, clips and commentary by three talking heads. The jerseys at the table cheer the jabs and kicks that connect, then, when the wiry fighter trips the bulky one, they pound on the table in sync with the face punches to the tap out. Father doesn’t pause in his lottery mining, rubbing just enough with his dime to verify a loser then dropping it in the trash and starting on another. As bloody and brutal as the mayhem in the octagon is, it’s also far more graceful and choreographed than any real-life fight I’ve seen. And far briefer and more decisive than what must be occurring in kitchens and bedrooms within a short walk of us.

  Public horrors. Never as raw and terrible as the private kind. But only a gruesome enough spectacle lets us forget that.

  “When’s Sandor usually show up?” I say to Mother Barkeep. “I’m supposed to be meeting him here.”

  After a deft Face-over, almost delicate, she says, “If you sit where you’re sitting, you’ll see anyone who arrives.”

  Which sounds close enough to a perfect koan that I order another tea to keep my seat.

  §

  Sandor’s party sweeps in on a gust of talk—seven of them, different conversations going—and take their seats around two tables pushed together near the pool table. The pretty brunette beside Sandor not saying much, concentrating on smiling at the right lines, especially his. Another couple, longer-term, beside her: the blonde a stunner, her husband, balding over wireframe glasses, looking like polished intelligence has lifted him somewhere high. The other three singles, a man and two women, younger outriders—students or assistants maybe. I’ve seen some of them at Shoppers, where all of the neighbourhood shows up eventually. The blonde for sure. Her fluffy white dog waiting chained to the railing, gray streaks in its fur like a dirty snowbank.

  Watching them through the first round, sipping my tea. Sandor not loud or pushy. But commanding without effort. Getting the biggest laughs. Oh you! pokes from the ladies.

  My neighbour tries a last time. He can’t be alone.

  “I gotta ask about the tea. Curiosity and the cat, I know. But I don’t see someone sitting here as long as you have if they were in 12-step, really following the program. Or being in here at all, really. So?” He gestures at his tall glass of yellow, gliding a hand alongside it like a salesman in a showroom.

  “It makes me see things I can’t see.”

  “Heh heh. Why we invented the stuff, wasn’t it?”

  Which sounds so stupid that I decide to let him have it. Though probably it has nothing to do with him at all. Locking onto his eyes, I stare through them at a kitchen six long blocks away.

  “One drop and I see a crazy man grabbing a woman boiling water for spaghetti, trying to get her to dance. She just wants to cook, see. But he’s a dancing fool. Grabbing at her waist, trying to twirl her. Her pushing him away. Their little girl with her face raised, laughing at them.”

  The guy has his beer up—mouth open, ready to laugh at the punchline, puzzled when it doesn’t come. I go back to my tea and leave him with it.

  After a bit I hear him chuckling softly—now he’s got it, so subtle he missed it before. Then falls silent. There’s just no stopper like the truth. Hand it to people and they’ll never believe it. Will pronounce you a clown, a raving lunatic, or a complete shit—will do anything except sit still and look at it.

  Though who in hell could look at the fright-pic you’re peddling? Toddler scalded head to hips because her lunatic dad just had to boogie.

  Eventually he says, “What happened to the little girl?” Not sure how he should deliver it, straight-man-firm or sombre-gently. It comes out an awkward mix.

  Sip of the Earl’s black.

  “Just because I invited you in for a kiss doesn’t mean I’m going to let you fuck me ragged.”

  Instantly, Father pauses in his dime-rubbing and Mother in her counter-wiping—their heads come up and they look at each other, not at me. Perhaps as much notice as they ever have to give in the place, it’s a pretty placid neighbourhood for all the posturing. My Grand Inquisitor settles up and leaves.

  §

  The daughter flinches at my touch on her arm. For all the skill a barmaid—any maid—hones at forcing down distaste, she can’t keep all of it out of her face.

  “This round is on me.” I give her t
hree twenties. All I got out of the ABM on the way here, all I was sure the account would cover. Ken will have to come through tomorrow. “Be sure to tell them it’s for the Wyvern wake.”

  When she heads back with their tray of pints and wine glasses, I order my third tea. Mother sets this one down with a clatter. Looking up, I see a shaven-headed monk whose zazen is dime-rubbing, regarding me with mild regret.

  Strange how just being in a bar induces drunkenness. Prepares the way for it—opens some kind of loose-hinged door and invites it in. Even on a string of teas. Memories, of course, but not just. Something more like spectral auras housed in wood, glass, upholstery, carpets, cushions. Even in sinks and toilet bowls. Spirit armies fighting to leave the body, face-punch free of its good sense.

  When the touch on my shoulder comes, it’s light, almost apologetic. So is the voice—deep, but quiet. “Look, I don’t know what the idea is exactly. We’re just trying to have a few drinks and a conversation.”

  I let him finish before I turn. Then we both see what there is to see. From my side: thick, curly hair tumbling to broad shoulders. Only a little silver in it yet. Fleshy, well-formed nose. But reddening with alcohol use, hairline red vines scrolling out into the cheeks. Not yet the ruddy blasts of the lifelong drinker—but a start on them. Dark, sad eyes which would attract many women, some kinds anyway. A taller, darker Roger Daltrey gone to seed. The kind of guy women, if they go for him, don’t say I like him or I’m attracted to him. They say I’m smitten, maybe with a girlish hand twirl recalled from Drama Club. He’s honey to that kind of fly.

  “There’s no idea,” I say. Oddly enough, it’s the truth. There isn’t. The procedure is to toss out actions in advance of the idea, see if you can tempt it to show itself. It passed this way, you sense, too swiftly to catch. Bits of its own scent may bring it back around.

  “That’s good, because when the round came with a mention of a wake I wondered—”

  “Oh, no need, no need. Never wonder. It’s exactly the way to do it, I think. And what Maude would have wanted. Celebrate the life, don’t dwell on the passing.”

  Something turbid comes twisting up slowly in his dark eyes. Really dark, brown where it verges on black. Something muddy, something glum, something heavy and inertly strong and barbed, comes spiralling up slowly from its home, like a catfish dragged up from the bottom of a pond. It wants to thrash at something. Which isn’t me, though I may have to do.

  “Whatever it is you’re implying… Who are you anyway?”

  “Nobody. A friend of Judy’s.”

  The thing at the surface sinks back down, not all the way. Hovers at a depth. The blue cable-knit sweater he’s wearing makes him look huge.

  “A friend of Judy’s. That would explain a lot. My brother said she had a new one sniffing around.”

  “You can’t help it when you catch some smells.”

  And go back to sipping my tea. Trying not to tense my neck, though I see it through those black eyes, a pale twig at the end of big arms and shoulders.

  And then I feel him leave.

  From the door, two minutes later, I look back and see him sitting on the other side of the table, his back to where I was, his head down, the blonde woman sitting beside him rubbing his sweatered back in slow circles. Her husband and Sandor’s date, the brunette, shooting death rays at me from the other side of the table. The other three clueless but obscurely roused, busily settling jackets and drinks in their new seats. Musical chairs.

  §

  A mangy mood blows me further east, down the hill past Sleep Country to Shoeless Joe’s. The air around the Oriole intersection always heavy and tainted, Burger Shack venting soggy charred fumes, doused carcass breaths the morning after the slaughterhouse fire. Some of it oozes in with me through the door. Some of it always inside Shoeless Joe’s, where it hovers rancidly amid the TVs bringing us football, hockey, soccer across continents and time zones. Not so dead on a Sunday. More screens.

  I order a three-dollar cup of Red Rose to claim a seat. Food for a day and a half. Ken groaning in his sleep somewhere. Leave it untouched. I’ve had enough for one night.

  Before long another lonely guy barnacles to me. The Face draws some types like a centerfold’s. Someone who’s been there. Or with no choice but to listen. Starts right in on the atrocities of his ex-wife, this super-bitch, not divorced yet but she’s lawyered up, separation papers coming out his ass already… continuous war crimes of this cunt, sorry but no other word for some of them, not the girl I married or maybe it was hell we were both kids… working my balls off for her and the boys, ten years fifteen twenty, and all of a sudden it’s sheer neglect if I relax for a few hours gaming, it’s fucking adultery, psychic adultery I guess, when she finds an online porn payment on the card… little titty site, tame, I drop in at the end of the day who’m I sposed to get it from, HER?… but no, her skinny ass is stomping up and down stairs at the thought of it, suitcases, clothes in Glad bags, screaming and crying the twins trying to do their geography project… but wait, here’s the punchline, it turns out—she’s so fucking over the top she can’t stop herself from screaming it—she’s fucking this guy… so lonely I drove her to it… right… she’s out banging a live asshole while I’m at home in the office one hand on my mouse and she’s the one being neglected?… keeps telling me I need to get a lawyer, apparently they’re Siamese twins one can’t talk unless it’s attached to another… greedy whining selfish supercunt, she’ll be sorry when I do…

  It takes a long time to get through, and we never leave the one chapter. A man spinning in a small whirlpool of shit, reporting all he sees. But relaying it slow, jerky, piecemeal—it comes at me in variable chunks and speeds, depending on the screens. Full-face Uzi bursts when they go to commercial, dribbling out the side of his mouth when the play sputters midfield or between the blue lines, stopping entirely for a big play or goal, roaring and slamming his hand on the table, his home life incinerated in his joy. Then back to me after the replay…

  “How about you?” He juggles half a beer down his throat. “You got a warm one waiting to welcome you home tonight? What’s your story, man?”

  Some ear-benders, the cannier kind, will share the stage at strategic moments when a sixth sense tells them it’s time. Surrender a quarter of the airtime to hog the rest and make it last longer. His shit eddy will still be there.

  The tea has little whorls of gray oil on its surface, roughly concentric spirals as if droplets of the burger grease have settled and aligned to simulate a Caribbean storm forming on the Weather Channel. I pick it up, it smells like a gym bag. Set it back down.

  “What’s my story?”

  Let him have it. Has worked so far tonight.

  “I’ve no idea who or what my parents were. I went from home to home as a kid. Foster parents coping as long as they could or would, then passing me on. Some good people. Some the other kind.

  “I dropped out of school halfway through Grade Eleven. About two years too late probably. Bad moods, fights. The first of what I called spells—what shrinks call fugue states, I learned later. Being someplace and not knowing how I’d got there. Minutes missing at first. Then hours. All the storms I conjured as a kid—people shouting and screaming and crying, me among them—were sideshows to what was really brewing. I only realized a long time later. Maybe ways to let a bit of it out, maybe just ways to forget for a few thrashing moments—who knows? After school I lived on the streets and people’s couches where I could find them. Lots of drugs, it goes without saying. Stints in detention, hospitals. The first treatments: A to L, let’s say. I don’t really remember that much. A couple of dozen scenes standing in for several years. The spells getting longer. Plus the drugs. The last of my foster parents finally packed it in. Good people, who wouldn’t let themselves off the hook. I was twenty-one, a legal adult. Childhood was over.”

  Marital Breakdown is staring at me with a stun
ned, solemn expression. Like a beef cow grazed by the bolt. Maybe it’s my flat delivery that’s throwing him, so different from the melodrama he’s spewing. Deadpan synoptic swathes to his shitspin. But they’re made for different purposes, our stories. I settled on my five-stage potted bio a long time ago. Five paragraphs that don’t change, lashed together to make a raft in heavy seas. Like someone charged with crafting an encyclopedia entry, I assembled what I knew beyond question in my head. Cut out anything extraneous or debatable. Just the facts, Jack. I don’t need to hype my story, just keep it straight. I give him till the end of the next chapter to make his exit.

  “Next came the Hurricane Years. Fifteen years, or one minute repeated over and over. The same scenes looping—different actors, different sets. Longer lock-ups, no longer a juvenile. And hospitals: M to Z, then start from A again. Every kind of temporary room. Short-term jobs as janitor, dishwasher, coat-check attendant. Then subsidized positions, Goodwill the longest. Then full disability—the 5 circled at the top of the list. A lot of travel mixed in at times. To Europe, parts of Asia, Mexico, Costa Rica. Big enough winds blow you everywhere. Sometimes on a girlfriend’s dime. But I’d learned to save like a demon—my most unquestioned skill to this day. And most places are cheap if you’re willing to live rough.”

  “Hold that thought, can you?” he says, right on cue. Soft pink palm up, gold wedding band. “I’ve got to take a wicked shit.”

  And he’s gone, hitching up his cords, for the back stairs. He got fixated during the Hurricane Years on a particular patch of my right forehead. The scars are a palimpsest, one coming forward from the mix one time, another time another, but I knew what was trapping his gaze just now, it used to trap mine when I still did mirrors, before I learned to shave and brush seeing just the patch under repair. A hashtag, faint but deep, once you spot it it keeps coming at you. Like a tic-tac-toe grid cut on a diagonal into flesh. Though the truth is far stranger.