The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

A deep draft, half the remaining.

  “Teachers have creamy pensions, but you took yours early. And pension is as lifestyle does. Max should certainly be well-greased, at least by any normal standards. But even on first meeting he strikes me as someone with expensive tastes.”

  “Have you met Vivian?”

  “I’ve had that pleasure.”

  “Well, you can cross money off your notepad. I own my house outright and have two condos I’m renting out. One I’m getting ready to sell for thirty percent profit. Max is much more diligent, he must have five or six going. Dad started flipping them as a retirement project and he gave us each a starter. That was thirty years ago, but he saw exactly where things were headed, housing-wise. As a graduation gift, it was pretty generous. Does that clear things up?”

  “Not really. Not very many things. Housing-wise, I’m still left with a tiny woman curled in a single bed, her group home daughter arranging small objects in a crossing ceremony.”

  The bottom of the glass. Sandor raises two fingers to the bar. “This round’s on me.”

  “That’s good. Otherwise we’re buying it with pocket lint.”

  “Sounds like you’re the one with money motivations.”

  “And you’re the one sounding like he doesn’t know anything.”

  Claps his hands once. “Good. No sense drinking together if we’re not equally out of it.” Then remembers I’m not drinking. “Don’t worry, we’ll keep your phantom glass full. The Kims wouldn’t like you nursing an empty.” And then seems to deflate. “It’s all academic anyway.”

  “What is?”

  “The autopsy, toxicology screen—whatever you think is coming next. My mother was cremated this afternoon. I was writing about that in my journal. Trying to describe how strange it felt, not knowing the exact moment she turned to smoke.”

  §

  “Two Double D’s for my regular. Pint of hot air for Scarface.”

  Perfect delivery by Ella as she sets them down in front of Sandor and swings away. Sandor turns far enough to watch her in her hot pants and heels. He starts on a new beer, in a new rhythm. Frequent small sips, keeping it close to his lips.

  It’s awkward not having a drink. The body bobs like a helium balloon without plausible action. Napkin to tuck. Fork to jiggle. Cup to place, glass to grip. Nicotine choreography.

  It’s Sandor’s turn to take us forward. Time for me to shut up and stop feeding him lines. Especially since he’s out ahead of me in some way. I sense it without understanding what I sense. He seems to know me, know about me. From whom I can’t imagine. Judy the only person that comes to mind. But she doesn’t talk about real people—not in the info-trading way most people do. But who else? All I’m left with is the sense that he’s primed somehow to meet me. A stakeout with Double D’s and journal—and I’m the gumshoe?

  Funny, though. I don’t have the impulse to hurt him I feel with Max. Or I do, but it’s hazy, complicated somehow. Not a good sign in an adjustment—melting when you need to freeze solid. Max encased in so much metal I just want to bang on him with a pipe, break his eardrums at least. Sandor, for all his size and secrets—it would feel like stepping on a snail.

  “So the premise you came in with is gone,” he says finally.

  I lace my fingers, lean forward to lay my arms on the table. Greater contact doesn’t slow, though. Hyper-time closes off as many options as it opens. Silent waiting being one of them.

  “Three days. There’s a handy proof of not mattering. Not being able to become a suspicious death. You can’t become a question, let alone a lingering one.”

  Sandor appears to consider it. Swishes the last of this glass in his mouth, like a taster.

  “Are you finished?”

  “Until I think of a new way to start.”

  There. That dark, determined thing rising in him again. What I saw surfacing the other night. Not grief exactly. Not just. Or not new grief. Maybe what grief becomes if it lingers, finds a silty habitat and fattens patiently, hugging the bottom, opening its mouth at what it needs.

  “You really don’t know anything, do you?” he says. For what, the third time? Not meanly, though. Ruefully, more like. More moxy on my end needed to grease—what?

  “I wouldn’t be much of a detective if I did, would I?”

  An inspired non sequitur that arrives out of nowhere to save us. Sandor relaxes visibly. Inflates that big chest and gut, lets it out slowly. Lifts the fifth glass and fingers for the next two.

  §

  We’re there. We’ve reached it: the infinite spigot of self-pity where your work is done, just sit back as it cranks wide, nod when necessary, and do nothing to impede the gush.

  “You don’t know what it’s like. No one could who hasn’t been through it. Max was POA, yes, but only for finances. Personal Care was me. Dad was cagey, see. Setting it up at the first signs, though he had most of it in place already. Dementia wasn’t going to cramp his style any more than depression had. But he divvied it up. Didn’t trust anybody. Or trusted bits of different people. Max handling the money end, me looking after her but submitting the receipts to Max. Except that Max was too lazy to keep tabs. Piles of little slips—PSW hours, incontinence pads, bras, sockettes—not his thing at all. So he worked it out with the banker, not sure how exactly, probably a stack of well-chosen samples, that since expenses averaged ten thousand a month, why not just transfer that regularly to her account, let me spend as needed. I came close to screaming when people said how lucky Mom was to have a POA who didn’t scrimp, who trusted his brother, the stories they could tell… As it turned out, there was a surplus in the Rosewell years, it piled up steadily. And then went down just as steadily at Vivera, down to almost nothing by the end. Max was always great with numbers. Not so great at visiting. Maybe twice a year in the early years. Pop-ins on his way somewhere. Occasional meal out when she could still cut and chew a steak beside him. Not at all when the going got heavy. Judy about the same. Except she popped up for a few days at a time, then gone. Popped up most near the end. Which was a blessing really, because I’d hit a wall. Hit a series of them, but this one was the last. I could feel that. The weeping, the panic calls at 3 a.m.—Where am I? How did I get here? Where is everybody? What am I supposed to do?… I can’t describe it. Every kind of breakage and loss. Memory’s just the tip. Who you knew just eaten, bit by bit. But the bits don’t smile vacantly, nod away. They scream. Accuse. Beg. Weep. Concoct schemes while they’re still able. Gouge their faces, yank out their hair. I don’t know why I’m telling you this, and I don’t care if you believe it, but it broke me. Broke me many times and I kept patching myself together and going on. My doctor said, ‘What’re you trying to be, the last caregiver standing?’”

  “I’m sure there was never much danger of that.”

  “Could be you’re underestimating me.”

  “Not much chance of that either.” He’s stopped drinking.

  “It wears you down. Like a grinding machine. The other visitors, the regular ones—we all looked old, older than some of the residents. I did it until I couldn’t any more. And a little past that. My mistake. There was no one left who knew me. No one I could talk to even a little. I was just a nice man who brought chocolate bars. Often less than that. And I stopped. And I guess, from the reports I got from Vivera, that’s when Judy started turning up. She always surfaced at weird times. Who knows why? Maybe she was after something. She’s cunning in her way. Has had to be, I guess. Or maybe just more used to talking to someone who isn’t there. Pathetic, but that may have been the size of it. A job she was actually trained for. So I sent her some of Danika’s pay. Not as much, of course—she was hardly Danika—but I compensated her for whatever she was able to bring. Max never knew. No reason for him to sweat these little payouts, but he might’ve. He always hated Judy. Not just fed up, but pissed. Always predicting the day she’d come ‘sucking back a
round,’ and always standing guard to prevent it.”

  “Goo goo ga ga. Moo goo guy pan.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means how scintillating a conversationalist were you your first three years?”

  “Three…?”

  “Of your life. Let me guess. For the first nine months you had as much to say as a tapeworm. And behaved pretty much like one, a barely moving parasite sucking the host dry. And then you spent a year shitting yourself and howling when you wanted food or felt the slightest discomfort. And then learned a few monosyllables so you could command more accurately and babble bad imitations of human speech.”

  “That’s a pretty cruel parody of human infancy.”

  “Is it? We begin as bedridden invalids requiring total care. Don’t you think a lot of people stuck in a room with this gibbering thing might want to stick a gun in their mouth?”

  “You’re the one who’s babbling.”

  I am a bit. No question. But not as much as Sandor thinks. Adjustment radar is taking me somewhere, sensing what I need to find so I can blunder towards it.

  “I knew my mother,” he says. “Even as a child, I knew her.”

  “Did you? Knew her dreams and hopes? Her secret history?”

  “Not as I came to later. But yes. She was always a person to me.”

  “You must’ve been a prodigy then. Most infants know a tit and a diaper changer. If those vanish, they won’t lose any sleep, as long as the milk and fresh linen keep coming.”

  “You’ve got a dark view of things. An ugly view.”

  “It’s been said. Many times.”

  “Look. There’s no need to get all inhuman about this. We’re not talking about abstractions, and we’re not talking about infants. Every person—every adult person—needs to be recognized. Known for who they are. Or do you want to tear that down too?”

  I don’t. Or I do, but only because it makes me see things—a little storm of pictures, like a paperweight blizzard—I can’t stand to see.

  “You’re walking with a friend,” I say. Channelling a philosophy TA I recall with sudden vividness, a bright figment from my nine weeks as an undergraduate. He liked to launch his thought experiments abruptly, though he marred the effect by smirking, a mistake I don’t repeat. “Someone close to you, an intimate, who suddenly loses consciousness. Falls down from a stroke and just lies there. Not responding. Eyes rolled back, tongue lolling. Do you walk away because they’re no longer aware of precious you?”

  “Of course not. You’re being silly again.”

  “Am I? You’ll help someone in a coma if they get there suddenly. But your mom entered a coma gradually, over years. And there you draw the line.”

  The black eyes, and the thing that rises in them. Not anger so much as knowledge he absolutely can’t accept, can’t let close or look at even momentarily.

  “No, I draw the line here. At talking to you anymore. That was my mistake.”

  I stand up. Stay with fingertips grazing the table until his eyes come up from his empties.

  “It was, you know. For once we’re in perfect agreement.”

  §

  All the Kims mobilized for my departure. Ella looking past me at poor Sandor. Father off his stool, cards set aside for his sorrows-of-the-world face, fingers lightly curled, like he might have to dial up an early lesson and knock me on my ass. Mother out in front of the bar, between me and the door, reminding me of a promise not kept.

  Back at the table, I extend my hand.

  “What’s this?” Sandor says.

  “I promised we’d end amicably.”

  He shrugs, reaches across.

  “Not like you’re grabbing Ella’s ass. I want to feel it.”

  He clamps down hard, I feel plenty, then tries to withdraw his hand. I hang on to it. He’s strong all right. Shoulder. Chest. A lot of weight.

  “That’s enough now. We’re done. I’m not playing—”

  “Shut up and squeeze. Give it to me. And listen.”

  He does. The thing in his eyes comes up, actually swirls at the surface, rippling the black, and he crushes my hand in his, putting everything he’s got behind it. Two, three seconds. Then we both hear it. Muffled pops, like sticks snapping in a wet sack. Not loud, but making it over the TV and voices in the front room. He drops my hand. “The hell was that?”

  “My little finger. Maybe the one next to it too. You are strong, you know. Though they’re pretty primed.”

  “You fucking lunatic.” Slurring finally, drunk all at once as the reservoir floods his brain.

  “Right. That’s something to keep in mind. Along with this: Did you see my face, what it did?”

  “I’m not blind. I didn’t see a fucking thing.”

  “That’s the other thing you need to remember.”

  Heading out, I sneak a peek at the hand. The fingers straight and normally aligned. I’ll pop the baby one back to skew as soon as I get home, maybe tape its neighbour. The kitchen counter edge the usual popping station. Start the heat-ice cycle. A costly demonstration. Stupid probably, though it took shape faster than thought.

  The old battle-axe has left with one of the boys, her first night’s sacrifice. The six that remain, three on a side, are talking in low voices, subdued by his departure and the start of their short lives’ ceremony. Above them, the hockey players have hit the showers and the Big Man is spinning slowly under splintered light, a pale sweating mass, maudlin as a hog’s head scalded and oiled to hang swaying above the parsley. Headline margined by Hizzoner: Mad Monk Rides Again. “Next time po-lice,” says the lotto-monk as I open the door left-handed.

  8

  5:30 a.m. Another complete protein breakfast after another shredded night. Courtesy of another Ugly Dream. Plus coffee. Call it a tie, Stomach versus Mind.

  The Ugly Dreams get tedious fast. Such relentless variation within such a narrow range. A robot shuffling an endless pack of snuff pics.

  Look closely! Be a miner. Study a rock face long enough and it’ll show you its glints—copper, nickel. Aluminum. Iron. Silver, who knows? Whatever it’s got. Fool’s gold even.

  Strange, how Lois’s voice lives on in my head. Saying things she never said or could have, since they apply to circumstances I’m living now. Her voice then. Who knows what she sounds like now? Maybe her paints and easel are long gone and she lives for home decor, sharing a giggle with Megan as they stretch Daddy’s Platinum at Au Lit followed by a sushi lunch. (Megan never got a voice I can hear, though her mouth flies open in what looks like a laugh and she leans to whisper in her mother’s ear. Even the fluent prattle she’d worked up to is gone. Nothing before or after that last, earsplitting wail.)

  My own voice, then. Lois-in-me.

  Just because something’s ugly doesn’t make it interesting. Tedium’s not a mask for meaning. (Though perhaps a privileged upbringing helps you believe so.) Sometimes it’s just being stuck in someone’s grotty TV room, watching looped torture trailers while he fiddles in the kitchen fixing something to eat.

  No, stick with it. Look!

  I start in on a second coffee. Feel its acids push breakfast on its way. 6:10. Stomach’s got a long haul before the supper screw arrives with a bowl of veggie-noodle broth.

  But then, after a while, dammit, I do begin to see. Lois smarter than me, always. Her parents just too dumb to realize it. Especially Jordan. Too impressed by Jeopardy-like mental stunts, prizing them over true insight. The flash of quick-draw over slow, bull’s-eye aim.

  Seeing comes gradually. Like the lightening of the fall sky. 504’s dragging steps to the elevator, an early shift. But as I replay what I can retrieve from last night’s dream—they’re hard to recall as separate episodes, they blur into one über-spew like the Saw films—I begin to see a difference. Feel it, sense it, more than see. Not in the elements t
hemselves, which are as repetitive and loathsome as ever. Body parts, turdwater sludge, wrecked and seeping passageways. Low-budget slasher set in derelict septic station, backup generator gloom.

  The difference is in me. Pursuer and pursued. But neither diving through the blood and shit nor rising above it—instead, becoming one with it, dissolving my boundaries from it, realizing it was me all along. I was it. Or whether it was or wasn’t me or I was or wasn’t it makes no difference and never has.

  Once I am part of it, then—then—the next thing can happen.

  I will pass through.

  That hair-thin glint shining in the rock face.

  Before I leave, a short communion with Maude’s artifacts in Big Empty. Not expecting much, which is exactly what I get. It feels like a duty call. Surely, since she is smoke and ash, these paltry things—all that is left of her—will want to speak to me. To someone.

  I sit awhile on the floor in the middle of the room, where, with small shifts of my head and eyes, I can take them all in. Nothing. Then move closer, sliding along the floor. Pick up a couple of them. The butterfly wing. Max’s card. The “Christmas Music” USB.

  Nothing’s changed. Which tells you something, I realize, heading down in the elevator. Whatever set you going wasn’t affected by Maude’s hasty cremation—no hastier than any other aspect of her death. Murder had only flickered as a possibility—one form, not the most likely, what you sensed might take. A shape, a face, it might wear.

  What might wear?

  The Wyvern bad smell. Something off. Which floated reeking on a breeze.

  Found its way to my nose.

  §

  The white dog’s in its usual spot, chained to the railing of the wheelchair ramp outside Shoppers. It’s had a shampoo, its white hair brushed and silky, the gray streaks silvery. A Samoyed, I thought, the first time I saw it, though its tail is not so bushy and arched, it hangs down normally, and its eyes are not the black I’m used to in that breed. Icemelt eyes of palest blue gaze up at me. The Forest Hill crowd are “dog people,” self-described—every kind of breed and size, except mutts, often pulling a Filipina maid who has two or three leashes wrapped around one hand, turned-out plastic bags at the ready in the other. A half hour later she’ll pass going the other way walking the kids, again juggling multiples, maybe a toddler on a tether and twins in a double stroller. And the dogs’ bright coats and milk-white teeth and shiny clipped nails—one little Scottie has its facial hair shaped once a month, beard and eyebrows trimmed, and wears tasselled vests in varied plaids at any hint of a chill—convince you that personal grooming has reached its acme with these pets. Until you meet their owners.