The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  I fold his arms across his chest, hands at his waist. When I bind his wrists together, wrapping loops of tape around them, it’s the shearing sound of the tape coming off the roll that brings him fully awake, like ice water splashed in his face. Like the snick that jolted his brother.

  “What are you doing?” he says as I push up under his waist to get the bag over his hands. Barely slurring, but still not moving. He looks like a male model decorating a tomb.

  “Taking out the trash. I’m the super here.”

  “You’re insane.” Wide-eyed with it.

  “Just a bit of a neat freak. I’ll cop to that.” Tugging the bag up higher.

  Suddenly, as if a key’s turned in his brain, he’s all action. A mad flurry of it. Kicking at the bag to get clear of it, pumping his bound hands in the air, then rolling to push with them off the floor. Dancing inside the bag, stamping to get it off. Scrabbling at the knob with taped hands, he can’t get it to turn. Kicking at the bottom of the door. “Hey!” he yells through it. “HEY! HEEEEYYYY!!!”

  “Here. I’ll get that for you.”

  And he’s through the crack so fast he bangs his shoulder on the jamb. Staggers with bound hands, kicking the bag from one foot, toward the red Exit sign. Straight-arms the door and is gone.

  Three of the other four doors open, faces peering out. As the steps die away, they look down the hallway at me.

  A bouncer in Hamilton, where I lived for six months, had a saying at closing time. Motel time, people! he’d call out, Motel time! But I can’t say that to these people. They live here.

  “Hard to convince some people No Vacancy means just that. You didn’t really want him as a neighbour, did you?”

  The doors close, one by one. After the last click, I close mine.

  Who says it’s hard to make new friends?

  §

  Around midnight, I unroll the sleeping bag in Big Empty. Not remotely tired, but knowing it’s time to simplify the sleeping quarters. Bed to couch. Couch to floor. There’s a schedule for meeting what’s coming towards you. A time to wait and let it approach, a time to meet it halfway.

  Thoughts like fireflies in my head, a swarm of them, random blips and veers of light, here, there, dead black, then another—though at some point I must drift off, because I’m on the stone steps again, descending to the level of the Empress. Am I imagining that she’s managed to turn ever so slightly in my direction, a minuscule inching by sheer force of will, that shows me a fraction more smooth skin, a touch more streaming yellow hair? The lashes of the far eye?

  The little mouth thin and set with determination in the wizened profile facing me.

  Like a loop in a movie, I keep going down, keep finding myself halted at her niche.

  The descent happens swiftly, as if I’m gliding on a rail, but also in a kind of slow-motion, a step-by-step slog downward. The impressions alternate, overlap. It hardly seems possible that such incompatible motions could be occurring simultaneously.

  TAL in my mailbox six days ago. Six days that feel like six months.

  Thinking clear waking thoughts even in a dream…

  And seeing Maude’s shadowy things. The dark gray, flickering window.

  And the Empress straining in her niche.

  Eyes open… closed…

  Doesn’t seem to make a bit of difference.

  Sometime in the middle of the night I put one of the sticks 303 copied inside a Ziploc baggie which I put inside one of the vegetable bags in the fridge, shaking gai lan, bok choy, and carrots all around it. Push it two thirds of the way back among the other bags. I can’t see Peach and Lemon coming back, but Max—or Vivian more likely—might upgrade to more capable models.

  12

  Not much to clean up in the lobby. No broken bottles, no vomit. Just a couple of chip bags crumpled by the garbage can and three jumbo Coke bottles lined up on the ledge in front of the mailboxes. It could almost be an art installation: Finale, Friday Night. I’ve never seen this crew, but to choose this shabby little lobby two steps up from the street for their party room—they have to be very young.

  Halfway up the stairs, a spot of red on the wall. Coin-sized, bright. Two steps above it, a bigger splotch right in front of my feet. Harder to see against the flecked tile—still, I don’t know how I missed it. I made a thorough pass last night, down and then back up, stopping on each step with Fantastik and a rag. Lemon leaked like a haemophiliac. But the intermittent sprays of dots suggested mental disturbance more than clotting problems. Pressing a hand to the oozing cheek, flinging it out in dismay.

  Watch yourself today. Not firing on all cylinders. Shredded nights below ground coming home to roost.

  I have to read over my note to Ken a dozen times. So simple it’s hard to screw up, but not trusting myself not to get a detail wrong. When the content doesn’t wobble on repeated readings, I feel more confident it’s stable, no matter how wobbly the writer.

  Ken, unless you hear back from me within a week, could you mail the enclosed? ExpressPost packages pre-paid and addressed. Just drop them in any mailbox. Thanks.

  Poor Ken. Sitting at his desk, staring at padded envelopes addressed to the police and the Toronto Star. Catching not a whiff of interest rates or portfolio diversification from either of them. The coffee in his mug growing cold, the screen saver of grandkids evicting his pie chart.

  Yet he’s the only person who entered my mind as certain backup. Interprets the role of financial advisor broadly, willing to accent the advisor part. Maybe a little bored after thirty years of bond yields. And just a good guy, basically.

  Sorry, Ken, I murmur silently, sealing envelopes and note in one of the large banking envelopes he gave me. I walked two hundred grand through your door, but it came with some weird carrying charges. Par for the course, I hope.

  Up the street, the suited rep who accepts the package for their inter-branch courier service tries to convince me of the large misdeed I’m committing in not opening a line of credit in addition to my savings account. It must have been seeing Financial Services Advisor below Ken’s name that got him thinking I might be receptive. I have a brownie and a tea from his Welcome table while he lays it out.

  §

  Phone light blinking green. A familiar voice with a new message, proposing a meet.

  Bad cops didn’t pan out, now they’re trying with the good. Trouble is, their bad cops were a couple of cadets and their good cop is an aging desk sergeant. They definitely need to do some new hiring.

  And you definitely need to be ready when they do.

  §

  I’ve learned to set up early, even at a public meet, so I’m at the corner of Yonge and Chaplin Crescent by 10:30, an hour ahead of schedule. Spend a few minutes under the overhanging roof by Avis, scoping out the four corners of the intersection. Davisville Station, IDA Pharmacy, Timmie’s on my side and Starbucks right across. I’m not expecting Peach and Lemon—they’re on couches with ice bags on their faces—but there’s no sign of their replacements either. Just a smattering of sleepy Davisville types, yawning as they make a croissant and caffeine run.

  Inside the Starbucks, I take a tea to a back table where I can see the room. Take out Around Toogood Pond from the lower jacket pocket. I’m re-reading by intuition, hopping back and forth between entries. Trying to spot something I might have missed. An angle in.

  Photograph 10 August

  An early Christmas. J in her dress, M and I flanking her in suits and bowties. The shining drizzles, which must be tinsel reflecting the flash, make for an effect of blackness rent by ragged silver. Darkness raked by talons of light. Or snail trails of light sliding down a black windowpane—

  Poetic memory lane definitely my least favourite of Sandor’s modes. It feels like stalling. What he does when he wants to avoid facing something while assuring himself he’s tackling it head on.

&n
bsp; A lucky girl 20 July

  Yesterday in the Food Court. Her wide-eyed pleasure in the (now) always-new: “This is a good drink!”—KFC’s iced tea to go with her snack pack of popcorn chicken and fries. She eats with the pincer-picking slowness of a child, selecting a piece of chicken or a fry like a chocolate from an assorted box—learning food, marvelling at it, as she eats it.

  A sense that she is looking up and out at the world. She has shrunk, and walks hunched over her walker, but it’s more than that. As if she is seeing bright things from deep inside a well, or as a child again.

  Back in her room, 7:20 p.m. “I’m a lucky girl.” Something she says often these days.

  When I arrived she was up on the secure floor, a place I’ve never found her before. I squeezed in back of a crowd of residents listening to John play his rambunctious piano—jazz, blues, show tunes—“I know six hundred songs,” he said, and never missed on a request. I watched her a while before showing myself. Sitting on a chair near the front, twisting her fingers in a nervous gesture, though her feet were tapping. Huge, pop-eyed smile when she saw me. I sat behind her, singing along—“Roll Out the Barrel,” “Mairsie Doats and Doesie Doats,” “Bye Bye Blackbird.”

  “I wasn’t sure you’d show up.” Gwen sets down her coffee, then a stack of library books. Alice Munro, Maeve Binchy, Peter Robinson, New Yorker issues—an assortment for long evenings.

  “A reader,” I say. “An endangered species, I hear.”

  She colours slightly. “My library life. Load up on Saturdays. Sometimes mid-week too. There’s an e-reader book club I’m thinking of giving a try. I guess you’ll laugh at that.”

  “Nothing funny in it.”

  “Well, you’re full of surprises,” she says primly. Primly and tartly—any casting director would grab her for the homeroom teacher. A tremor in her hands—slight but continuous. “But this is the first pleasant one that I’m aware of.”

  Touché, Gwen. Sent out to clean up messes—though seldom fully briefed about the nature or extent of the spills. Certainly not this time. Barring Maude, who is dead, I like her better than anyone I’ve met on this adjustment—at least on the Wyvern side.

  She sips her coffee, clears her throat, and gets right down to it.

  “Dr. Wyvern says you’ve got some information that belongs to him. Not very important information, he says, but you’re trying to hold it over his head. He says that’s what’s behind all the… unpleasantness you’ve been causing.”

  “If I held something over your ex-husband’s head, it wouldn’t be anything as soft as information.”

  She smiles wanly. “My husband’s no saint. After eighteen years and no kids to distract me, I’d be the last to claim that. But he’s no devil either. Not the kind you seem to believe he is. All in all, he’s just like his father. I saw that long before we were married. I was just too young to pay attention at the time.”

  Meaning—what, exactly? You’re fine with diddling your computer while your ex and his psychopathic girlfriend drug and pose women you bill for the privilege? Or you’re honestly so out of it—pining or duty-bound or just habitual and lonely beyond words—that you’ve bought whatever venial sins he’s confessed to cover up his cardinal ones? Tapping and mousing and recording phone messages, with nary a wonder why some dental procedures, especially with nubile women, require a closed door. Totally complicit or oblivious beyond belief—either way, it’s going to be a challenge to keep liking you.

  “You can tell him that I’m ready to give him what he wants. But I need to visit him at home. I want to see him where he lives.”

  “Oh, that’s not possible. Max—Dr. Wyvern—only takes appointments in his office. But if you want, I can—”

  “You’re not going to do that. Not really, are you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Bar the master’s door, protect whatever he’s got going behind it. Fetch when he says fetch. For what, old time’s sake? For a Davisville apartment? Which you’d have coming to you for enduring him eighteen days, let alone years.”

  “Are you done?”

  I take a sip of tea.

  “You don’t know anything about me. About him. About us. Judy’s filled your head with one of her wild fantasies, and now you’re off on this… tear.”

  No fear, no anger—no strong feeling of any kind coming from behind her glasses. Just shrewd appraisal. Sipping her coffee. Her hands steadier now. Though she keeps them around her cup. A gripper of things.

  A long silence, the two of us sipping our drinks. Nothing unpleasant in it.

  “I don’t hate Vivian,” she says at last. “I guess you’ll laugh at that too.”

  “You keep wanting me to laugh at you. But you’ll have to say something funny first.”

  “It’d be hard to hate someone I’ve known since she was a little girl. Helped her with her homework. And getting over crushes on boys. Which started pretty early in her case—and really, it was generally the boys who needed more help getting over her.”

  Gwen in a mood to talk. And me certainly in one to listen. We seem to have begun our own library club in the corner of Starbucks.

  Vivian a child refugee from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991. Superheated ash buried her parents, who managed to pull her underneath them in the instants before they died. Four years old, she stayed alive three days under their bodies. Rescue workers heard mewing sounds, like a cat. Dr. and Mrs. Wyvern sponsored their move to Canada. Vivian, her sister Betty, and their aunt Paula. Dr. Wyvern had been retired a few years, a little at loose ends even with his real estate hobby, so he was able to devote a lot of time to getting them settled. Their own kids were long out of the house—the boys done university and settled in careers. Judy long gone too, of course—in a different way. The aunt, Paula, they hired as a live-in housekeeper. Betty, who was fourteen or fifteen, and Vivian they set up in a nearby apartment. Betty worked at the home on Paula’s day off, and other times they needed her. But Dr. Wyvern was a stickler about school coming first. He made sure they got a proper education.

  The Sandman. “What did you mean when you said Max took after his father?”

  “I didn’t say ‘took after,’ I said he was like him. I don’t know what I meant exactly. Don’t most children resemble their parents in lots of ways? Some obvious, some more subtle. Different people, but from the same stock. Anyway, I’ve already said more than I intended too. Too much probably, for someone sent to deliver a simple message.”

  “Well, the trouble was, your message wasn’t simple enough and my reply was too clear.”

  “I’m not sure I follow…”

  “They told you—”

  “He told me.”

  “He told you I had something he wanted back. I already know that, so that isn’t a message. The real message was to make me give it back, but he didn’t tell you that or how to do it. He doesn’t know himself, so he sent you out to fish a bit while he thinks of something. And I told you I’ll give it back, but only in a meeting at Max’s home. So that’s how we got onto other topics so quickly. You never asked what it is Max wants back so badly. But I guess handling files discreetly gets ingrained in a secretary. What happened to Paula and Betty?”

  “Pardon me?”

  “Vivian’s sister and aunt. They’ve been in Canada twenty-two years now. What’re they doing?”

  The Venti cup goes up to her mouth and stays there through a couple of sips. Fewer people smoke all the time, but we have these big paper cups—to give our hands something to do, to hide parts of our faces behind.

  “Paula just disappeared one day. Poof! Off like that. No notice, no anything. No one had a clue where she went, or why. Everyone thought it was incredibly ungrateful. Dr. Wyvern never used that word, but you could tell it hurt him a lot, for a long time. Betty was a sadder case, and in the end a mystery too. Towards the end of high school she started g
etting these moods. Then started drinking. Not just with friends, at a party, but on her own. At sixteen, seventeen. The Wyverns stuck by her, even got her some counselling, even after she was in their house obviously under the influence. And after a few things had disappeared, valuable things. Things got pretty tense and messy—and stayed that way a long time—but in her first year of college, she met a boy and moved away. Suddenly, just like her aunt. I don’t think even Vivian’s heard from her since. It’s an off-limit topic.”

  “Sounds like they went back to being refugees. Or else never stopped.”

  Gwen puckers her mouth. “That’s a queer way of putting it.”

  A small mouth, even unpuckered, with fine age lines radiating around her lips. They make her mouth look more, not less, attractive—like cross-hatching, they add dimension. Like her slight overbite, they make her believable. An actual body. A lived-in person. When did that become something to notice, if not exactly rare? Early Saturday, an errand to a known freak, but she’s put on pale pink lipstick, washed and brushed her cap of salt-and-pepper hair.

  “And her brothers?”

  “Brothers? I never said she had brothers.”

  “No, you didn’t. I heard it from someone else.”

  She looks blank for a second, then laughs suddenly. A real laugh, showing crooked teeth she puts her hand up to cover. “Oh my God, I haven’t thought of this for years, but she had this trick she discovered in high school, maybe even middle school, of keeping a jealous boyfriend in the dark by referring to her ex-boyfriends as her ‘brothers.’ They went to different schools—already she was pulling them in from a distance—so they weren’t likely to find out the truth. ‘And who knows,’ she said to me once, ‘if I keep them in the family, maybe they’ll be around when I need them.’ At that age. What a little fox.”

  “You admire her.”

  Her face serious as a judge’s, just as suddenly. “I can appreciate qualities I’ve never had, even if I’d never want them.”