The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  §

  Danika, Jade, Amrita. Meeting people who loved and cared for Maude Wyvern, held her close right till the end, but none of them related to her by blood. Unless I make an exception for Judy, and, as always with Judy, I’m not sure I can.

  Hand on the car door handle, I turn for a last look up at the window I—we—looked out of. Just yesterday. The curtains move, and then two people are looking out. A third shape behind them.

  Not a wasted day for Nicole after all. Unless it’s an internal move, which would presumably kill her commission.

  6

  What’re you dicking around like this for?

  Sometimes you have to dick around while you’re waiting for instructions.

  Stone and I have this little exchange while I watch the sign carrier at work across the street, humping the sign from the lights at Eglinton to up past Indigo and back again. Holding down my window seat in the Duke of Kent, first with a meditative glass of water, and now, since the waitress planted herself with her arms folded, with a three-dollar Tropical Green Tea. Mid-afternoon, the place is dead, and I’ll be gone long before the cocktail crowd.

  He’s doing well. Attracting little knots of people who poke each other and point and laugh, snap a photo with their phones. An added bonus I hadn’t foreseen. Get it up on social media where a friend or foe—a busybody, any link in the chain—might send it back to the office. He’s perfect. Everything that made him wrong as a burger shill—the hangdog face, slump-shouldered shuffle, the random hand passes over his knees like a brain-damaged Charleston dancer—makes him perfect as a disaffected dental client. Someone pissed and crazy enough to schlep a homemade sign below the office tower where he got screwed. He’s even got a gold front tooth, black spaces behind it.

  An Indigo manager comes out, hands on hips. Relaxes when he sees it’s nothing to do with scented candles or meditation pebbles. Snaps a shot with his phone.

  It’s basically the same message coming and going, in my black magic marker.

  Looking for PAIN?

  HIGH PRICES?

  COLD IMPERSONAL SERVICE?

  See Max Wyvern, Dentist to the Daft, Suite 1203 above

  When it comes to your MOUTH

  why skimp on TORMENT? Go to

  Dr. Maxwell Wyvern, Oral Sadist Extraordinaire

  “You’ll beg for dentures or your money back.”

  After twenty minutes someone from the office appears. I wasn’t sure it would happen at all. What’s the point of a tower if you can’t disconnect from streetside? Facebook and the rest must have helped.

  Middle-aged, short. Glasses and a cap of gray hair. She berates him, growing red-faced when he won’t stop shuffling. Heckling just bad weather to him. More people gather. Start taking shots of the two of them. Street theater. Maybe a ninety-second bit on YouTube, “Signs of Stress.” When she realizes, she advances on the camera-wielders. Face cherry, hands pressed together in a weird wedge, like she means to dive into the little lens and yank her image back. Which is already flying around the world. They step back expertly, keep snapping. Everyone a half-assed Arbus now.

  After a last blast, long, fifteen or twenty seconds, she throws up her hands and stalks back to the glass doors of the office tower. As soon as she’s gone, the pedestrians start dividing around him in a smooth stream, only a few looking back to read his other side. Solo and duo shots, he’s done. Used up as a subject.

  Go on, I’m thinking. Scram. Just ditch the sign and vanish. What I told him on the drive over. You’ll have a couple of minutes before they arrive.

  But he just keeps walking. Slower, bent lower, like he’s carrying bricks instead of weightless Samsung panels. And those maddening hand passes, dream-like crossovers. A weird power, the senseless. A brainworm once you let it in.

  The cruiser arrives. Pulls over going south and the passenger-side cop gets out. Says something and waits while he takes the sign off. Clumsily, half-strangling himself with the plastic collar. Cop opens the back door of the cruiser, slides the sign inside. Motions the carrier in after it. In less than a minute, they’re off downhill, catching the green light.

  A drive and dump, most likely. Barring a super-slow day or super-bad mood, just take him to some distant neighbourhood off the bus routes, keep the sign and cut him loose. But they’ll talk a bit along the way. By habit cops are info-hounds. Tapping any walls to find the spaces between the studs.

  Not much to find, probably. On the way over, I asked him if he could describe who had hired him. Out came the perfect phrases, no coaching required.

  “Never said his name. But little guy, short. Kind of little bit fat. Lotsa’ hair. On his head, on his face. Monkey man.”

  I looked over at him, surprised. Morning meds wearing off?

  §

  Up in the office. The usual smell of Listerine and boiled rubber. Gwen, her nameplate says, still looking flustered, staring at her computer screen without tapping or mousing. Pinpricks of pink at the base of her neck, a slowly vanishing collar.

  “How’s Monday treating you?” Hands on her counter, wall of coloured files behind her. Tooth-shaped fridge magnets with the office info beside her keyboard, washroom keys attached to pink and blue toothbrushes.

  “Have a seat. You’re a few minutes early.”

  Sorry. Next time I’ll come an hour late.

  “Fill out one of the new patient forms. Please.”

  In a plastic basket on a corner table are several clipboards, each with a pen on a string tied to it, a paper under the clip. An empty basket labelled Completed Patient Forms beside it. I take a clipboard to a seat, check every box on the double-sided questionnaire and write N.A. beside every question without a box. On the lines under Additional Comments, I write the first two verses of “Sittin’ in the Sun,” which Satchmo was singing on CJRT recently:

  Sittin’ in the sun, countin’ my money

  Fanned by a summer breeze

  Sweeter than the honey

  Is countin’ my money

  Those greenbacks on the trees

  Comes a summer shower, drops o’ rain falling

  Sweeter than Christmas chimes

  Hearing those jingles upon the roof shingles

  Like pennies, nickels and dimes

  After returning it to the basket, I follow the next step indicated. An office a deaf-mute would have no trouble in. Please Select a Video to Watch During Your Appointment on the cover of a big three-ring binder, DVD covers under plastic on each page. Tabs to help you find TV Series, Movies, Concerts. In Documentaries I find No Direction Home, a Scorcese Dylan bio. Bob in shades and wild hair, looking skinny and fierce, on the side of a road in bare flatlands. A ways behind him, a guy leaning against a sixties-era car with the driver’s door open.

  Perfect. Pit stop on the way to nowhere.

  3:14, the door opens and the previous patient comes out, goes to the counter to be processed. The dental assistant comes through the door to Gwen’s space with the file. Then opens the door to the waiting room and calls my name. 3:15 on the dot. Why there was no one else waiting. The place runs like a Rolex.

  She motions me into one of the rooms, into the chair. Clips the bib on. A strip of caramel skin, almond eyes and fringe of black hair between her cap and mask. Starts setting out instruments on a tray. A nice figure, slight but curvy, even in the baggy greens. Vivian, says the bar above her left breast. “It’s your first time with us, I know,” she says. “When was the last time you saw a dentist?”

  “Years ago, I’m afraid. Maybe decades. My mouth and I are barely on speaking terms.”

  Two-note chuckle behind her mask. She pauses, half-turns to glance at me. “Well, relax. You’re in good hands here.” Not giving it much, but pleasantly enough. Having a face like the Face makes you something of a connoisseur of the economies of human warmth. Banter, mild flirtation, a part
of medical sedation. Some assistants exude it naturally, democratically. People persons. Others have an instinct for exactly how much, and on whom, to spend.

  Max comes in. Dr. Wyvern. I hear him behind me first. No greeting. He comes around to where I can see him, still no eye contact. “Did you pick your video?”

  I tell him. He looks at Vivian and she leaves the room. Above me the TV screen waits on a hinged arm, earphones on a cord embracing it.

  Max moves in the small space around me, readying his things. No cap, his mask down around his neck. He looks like his photos, but different too. Maybe just life-size. I’d probably think the same meeting Dylan. Short fluff of hair, fine and thinning in the gentlest way, a golden cloud dissolving on his scalp. Round, gold-framed glasses. Long thin nose, thin lips—Swedish comes into my head—but all well-shaped, this side severe. Doesn’t look at all like Sandor and not much like Judy. Like they were hatched from three different nests. Little hole in one earlobe, I notice. Takes it out at work. Cream pants, pale blue shirt, gray loafers.

  “Does it feel like rain out there?” he says with his back to me.

  “It feels like hell.”

  “Well, they were calling for showers, not typhoons.” Mr. Smooth. Dr. Smooth. Who cares what kind of nut case you’ve got in the chair, as long as his teeth are falling apart and his plastic still goes through?

  “Open your mouth.” Turning, mask up now, and bending with a pick in his hand.

  “That’s funny. I was about to say the same thing to you.”

  It never gets old, never loses its lustre—finding the phrase that stops smooth in its tracks. Makes the quick, assured eyes go blank and swimmy.

  “Ex-cuse me?”

  “I don’t see how. But I would like to hear about your family.”

  “My…?” The eyes above the mask flicking at the door, they don’t settle on me again after that first frozen stare. “You called about your breaking and loosening teeth. I imagine you’re in a fair bit of discomfort. As soon as I do a preliminary—”

  “Fuck my teeth. And jam that nose-picker sideways up your ass.”

  His eyes all over the empty door. Where’s Vivian??!! She’s supposed to hand him what he needs, suction up messes.

  “You can start with your mom. You’re obviously not taking a bereavement day. I’m sure your patients appreciate that. But if that subject’s too raw, I’m interested in Sandor too. Judy. I’m all ears for any of—”

  He’s gone. From the hall come the sounds of the tantrum he’s pitching. Chewing out Gwen and Vivian—these women whose job it is, like the videos, to deliver acquiescent mouths detached from the heads they’re stuck in. The voice a high-pressure hiss, outraged but trying to keep it low, inaudible to the ears in other chairs. “…totally unacceptable…” all I catch clearly.

  Seems we got typhoons after all.

  And then Vivian is standing beside me, her body still and quite unafraid. A deadness in those choice almond eyes that would do a loan shark proud.

  §

  Hanging around the Yonge-Eg corner for a while. No reason to linger, but unwilling to quit the scene where my sign carrier and I poked two sticks into smoothly spinning Wyvern wheels. Strange, how he didn’t recognize your voice from yesterday. Not even with the Judy reference. No, not strange. People see what they expect to see. Today, a customer with a bad mouth. Yesterday, just another piece of Judy’s lunatic baggage, forgotten once disposed of.

  Hello, Judy’s brother.

  I cross the street, head up towards the Duke of Kent. Retracing my steps, knowing where I need to go without thinking about it. It’s the usual cure after close proximity with Indigo and the mall. Three little holdouts of personal retail facing the conglomerate, crowded dens where you can find a much deeper and more varied collection of music, films and books without ever having to look at a placemat or candle snuffer. The first two are up long, creaky flights of stairs. Vortex Records: vinyl and CDs in all genres, DVDs too, though no cassette tapes any more. I flip through the New Arrivals, see some amazing stuff. Wish for a moment a management monk’s audio system might be upgraded a little. But only for a moment. I know the radio on the counter is perfect. One tuning dial, one volume dial, one ON/OFF switch. And I listen to other people’s choices, not run my own rat-wheel of favourites.

  Two doors south, Upstairs Video. I was never a frequent renter, even with Lois—she was usually painting and I was reading, and latterly studying. When we did rent, in that window between Nirvana and the Internet that seems much more than twenty years ago, we liked movies most people didn’t: Barfly. Naked Lunch. Bitter Moon. Jacob’s Ladder. Along with the ones everyone loved: Reservoir Dogs. Terminator Two. Surprisingly, for a rich man’s daughter, Lois never succumbed to snobbery or a willed anti-snobbery. She liked what she liked, and never tried to be different. The different don’t have to. I always knew our choice before dropping in, but liked picking up the various boxes, moving slowly along the display wall. Later, the VCR and TV gone with the rest, I knew why. The box with cover graphics, actors’ names and faces, back summary and blurbs—each one half graphic novel, half celebrity mag. A little Hollywood vignette. A minimalist Sunset koan.

  BMV is the last bead on my retail rosary. Just a few doors north of Eglinton. Street level entry, sci-fi and comics and textbooks on the second floor. At BMV I started as a seller, not a buyer. Bringing in the box of books Lois had left inexplicably, I learned a little about the used book trade. Most of the high-end art books the counterman refused, except for a couple of standard overviews, which he flipped through rapidly to make sure they were pristine. Nor did he want any of the hardback novels, even the award-winners by famous authors. “Once the paperback comes out, I can’t move them.” What he took at a glance—which I’d been least confident about, since they were in fair but not mint condition—were her paperback memoirs and thrillers. The rest I took to Goodwill.

  I got into a habit for a while of visiting two or three times a week, even after Ken and I had worked out my remit schedule and I was learning to live within a budget that I knew these visits violated. Not that my BMV purchases were large—but anything not bone and sinew was fat. I treated the shop as a kind of lending library charging a nominal members’ fee. BMV would buy back its own books for half the price you’d paid—once the hawk-eyed clerks had ascertained you hadn’t abused it overnight. Buy a book for four bucks, return it for two. Buy another for six, return it for three. It wasn’t much, all the books I wanted for ten to twelve bucks a week—but Ken’s face hovered wincing over every transaction, however small, and if I was looking to pare expenses to the minimum, this was one that could go—especially since, on top of the forty to fifty bucks a month for books I read and returned, there were occasional purchases outright, books I couldn’t part with. Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night. Knut Hamsun’s Pan and Hunger. Lichtenberg’s Waste Books. Gray’s Anatomy (hardbound, but discounted for a page ripped out of Urology). Luria’s two great studies: The Mind of a Mnemonist and The Man with the Shattered World. Unable to choose from among them, I sold them all back and started going to the library. Since then, I’ve been a pure browser. The bane of the book trade, though on slow days your sequential book in hand simulates traffic.

  Today, though, I see a book on the front table of publishers’ overruns. More Than Memory: What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Alzheimer’s. Hardbound, new. Sixteen bucks, even at half price. Another phantom groan from Ken.

  Still, I have to pick it up. Have to know just what it is—besides suicidal urges that make you step in front of cars—that the Wyverns can’t stand looking at.

  “Not to pry, but I hope it helps.” The guy behind me at the cash, fiftyish, fit-looking. “Despite all the talk, it’s hard to get straight information. But I’ve heard good things about that one.”

  “You’re going through this?”

  “I was until last M
arch. It took five years to see Dad through to the end, but it aged me fifteen. I’d catch sight of myself in slivers of glass and think, ‘Who’s that poor old bastard?’”

  “It’s not for me. It’s for a family I know.”

  “Let me guess. They just got the word.”

  “That’s right. Just yesterday.”

  “On a Sunday? Well, they’ve got a decent doctor, that’s something. Do they have any idea what they’re up against?”

  “They’re beginning to, I think.”

  “Well, good luck to them. They’re going to need it.”

  “Yes they are.”

  §

  I’m too full from lunch to bother with dinner. The stomach trained to do a ten-hour stretch, now bloated with samosas. One missed meal a sop at least to Ken, a toonie tossed back in the pot. Sitting in the armchair with a mug of Luck Yu, hearing rush hour crest below, I think of the story of Diogenes breaking his last possession, his wooden begging bowl. “At last,” he cries, “I’m free!” Probably apocryphal, though with good stories what does it matter?

  The chair under my ass annoys me. The cushion behind my back. The sofa. The low, scratched table I set my mug on. Even the mug. I wish I could find a spring of lukewarm tea, cup my hands under it when thirst comes over me. To most people’s eyes, the meagre furnishings here would look like someone just moving in or almost finished moving out. But sometimes—often—I look at them and see the crap heap of the world. An attic stuffed with clutter I can’t move or think straight in. I long to make it all vanish. And come close to doing it sometimes, step right up to the edge of free, feel the cold rushing air I long to let go and topple into—when practical consideration, like a strong hand, grabs me by the belt and pulls me back, just as I’m closing my eyes and leaning.

  What floor-sitting does to a body your age. To a body with multiply broken bones and dislocated joints…

  The Diogenes itch. It gets stronger in hyper-time. Stronger still during an adjustment. I feel, like a pillow clamped over my face, the space taken up by the spoons in my drawer, the kettle crouching like a mutant mushroom on the counter, the box spring and the pegs that keep it off the floor, giving dust a home. By every concept and assumption heaped in my head, turning it into a sluggard’s crammed garage. How the crap I’m hanging on to, buried under, makes me stupid. Makes me dull. Makes it that much harder to think a clear thought, feel a strong feeling. The crowdedness. The clutter. You don’t live with it. You force a dribble of living through it.