by Mike Barnes
“It’s none of my business, but do you really need this particular job, or is it just a way of keeping close to him? Hanging on to whatever’s left of your place in his life.”
“You’re right, it’s none of your business.”
But then, a minute later, she says, musing to a space beside my shoulder, “I do worry about Max. He’s too intense. Like his father. And he’s never learned healthy ways to release the pressure of his work. A Type A, but without any—”
I cut through the pop-psych blather. I have to, I can’t help myself when it starts.
“Other than with some Christmas music, you mean?”
A look of utter confusion—or is it panic?—in her face. She stiffens, draws back a distance behind her skin.
“You don’t know what I mean. Or what I want.”
This is how it happens. Especially late in an adjustment, especially in a closing window. Things trigger me and I go off. And I see it for a moment—like a lightning flash—and keep going off, as if self-knowledge were no more than a storm in the distance.
“Yes I do. You want to gossip, trade jargon. Maybe dance a pinstep this way, a pinstep back. Consider each person’s ‘unique journey’ through a picture window. Whereas me, I want to learn what’s what and act on it.”
“So you can do what? Barge around and break things? Hurt people?”
Maybe. “You need to stop drinking decaf. Or start drinking it, I don’t know what’s in your cup. The bulls are already loose in the china shop. I’m trying to put them down.”
“That sounds plain crazy. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it does. Max warned me to expect a rant. Asked me to hear it out. But I’ve heard enough.”
She stands up. When I reach out and put a hand on her arm, I feel the trembling all the way up to her elbow. I don’t think it’s just from my touch.
“There’s one more thing.” She’s not looking at me, she’s facing the barristas working like four-handed monkeys to serve the waiting line. “Nothing to do with you, I promise. Ever since I re-entered the Wyvern fold, there are two things I’ve heard more than any other. ‘You don’t know anything’ and ‘You’re insane.’ Crazy, lunatic. Whatever. You said them yourself in our visit here.”
“Yes?”
“You tell Max and anyone else that’s listening that in both cases it’s pure wishful thinking.”
Big purse in one hand, library books against her chest, she frees a couple of fingers to carry her cup to the garbage, push it through the recycle hole. I like her still and wonder why. Half wish I didn’t. It seldom helps in an adjustment.
§
After she leaves, I stay a while longer. Treat myself to a Venti chai latte. Spicy-sweet, whipped milk froth—more than the price of two dinners. Not every loonie can go to the homeless, Ken. A few of them have to find their way home.
Islands 23 July
Getting into the car, she told me she wanted to talk about something. Fearing by her serious expression it would be her desire to leave—“to go home… back to the farm”—I distracted her with other topics and she didn’t find her way back to it. Using Alzheimer’s—when I have to.
The usual calming, pleasant time at Toogood Pond, splitting an oatmeal-fruit cookie, her beloved mocha frappuccinos. Her intense interest in all the birds as one big family, blurring their species differences into variations within one category. The geese… “the smaller ones” (ducks)… “the little one, so white!” (seagull). She sees bird-ness, in all its forms. But she still knows the robin, Robin Redbreast, the first one learned the last to go. She kept thanking me for staying “so long… all day”—two and a half hours—and expressing her love of nature, the breeze “heavenly.”
The closed snack shop with the blue window coverings across the pond. It hasn’t changed since our first visit in April, though there are plenty of strollers to sell ice cream or pop and hot dogs to. Something in transition? “They closed that house. No one lives there now. They’re closing up every home around here.”
She can’t walk far now. To the first bench—then, after a while, to the next—back. Her knees. But also, she often presses her hand to a pain under her ribs—the right side today.
As I’m reversing out of our spot, she says beside me, “You like making them… All those ones…” She can’t find the words. A look both sly and desolate on her face.
“Shh,” I say, “shh.” Using Alzheimer’s again. No, worse. Praying for it.
Like father, like son. Gwen’s words more or less. Vivian’s aunt and sister going away, going off the rails. Judy gone at fifteen. Vivian posing, helping to pose. How far back did the Wyvern rot start?
Don’t laugh 30 July
Went with her into Harmony Nook. A place we’ve never sat before—we always had Toogood Pond. High white fence. White bench under an apple tree, birds visiting a bath and feeders. A burnt-red Japanese maple opposite us, other parts unlandscaped yet. Mick’s “work in progress.” Mom liked it, but perhaps found the fenced enclosure eerie, kept asking “Who is that? What are those voices?” of people passing on the walk beyond. A refuge only peaceful if you understand it as such. She does better in open places where she can see who’s coming and going.
After a time, she took her walker and circled the space with a quizzical expression, then crossed a patch of grass to the white fence slats and murmured, then called, to the people beyond. Bent over, eye to the crack. She looked like a madwoman peering from a cage.
Back in her room, Ivy came in to invite her to the social. She was reluctant to leave “Max,” though I reassured her I’d just water her plants and follow right behind. But she halted beyond the door every few steps, looking back. Then she moved in an extraordinary way. She hurried with small steps, almost a run (though she hasn’t been capable of one in years), towards me in her doorway. “Max… are you coming?”
I felt myself smiling. “I’m your son, Mom. Sandor.” Usually that’s enough.
But disquiet darkened her face. And something else—something wrong etched deep that wouldn’t come out.
“Don’t laugh,” a staff member standing by said to me. Not sharply, but firmly. A large woman, pleasant face. No name, but I’ve seen her before.
Was I laughing? I must’ve been. Must’ve looked like I was.
I was only trying to jolly us back to recognition. I’ve done it often enough before.
Today was different, though. She seemed disturbed when I left her in the bistro. Said of the runny peanut butter on her fruit plate: “It looks like what I find in my underwear.”
And now, a few hours later, the rebuke hits home and stings.
Don’t laugh.
I did laugh, damn it. A craven social reflex to defuse a tense situation. Helplessness no excuse. Laughed at someone losing the ability to tell son from son, son from husband, keep her nearest and dearest straight.
§
Someone vacates a nearby table, leaving newspapers behind. On my way out I check the Globe and Post obituaries. Nothing in either of them. Only the Star’s sports section is in the pile, but the Star wouldn’t be the Wyverns’ paper anyway. They’d hold their noses and vote for Hizzoner, but not follow the scat trail of his takedown.
Nothing to justify your paranoia, Judy. No slighting mention, not this time. No mention of anybody.
Could’ve been in another day, of course. Though Saturday the standard—the most-read—especially for a society family. Writer another question mark. Max obviously with his hands (and eyes) too full. Judy—ah, Judy… Sandor the family scribe, her POA through the years. But writing takes real writers longer—they respect the work. And with the beer, the post-breakdown blanks, flesh into smoke tar pits… He might be a while getting it done.
Assuming it’s to be written at all. You disappear someone who commits the booboo of stepping in front of a car—vanish her so successfully the neig
hbours have trouble recalling where she went. Do you want to reanimate her when she commits the bigger booboo of dying alone?
§
Mrs. Rasmussen knows how to bar a door. Not that I would have expected anything less from her. “Judy’s not available. She’s having a bad day.” Arms folded, standing on the steps.
So that’s that.
I don’t hate everyone who blocks me, I’m thinking as I three-point on Selkirk. Depends on why they’re doing it as much as how.
Strange, the court of self. When and where it convenes, when and where it calls a recess. Spells in the waiting room. Bawling clerks suddenly calling you back in to testify, prosecute, defend, pass judgement, sentence… in proceedings that never end.
§
Cantonese Chow Mein at Shanghai Food Gallery shouldn’t really taste that different from my veggie-noodle bowl. They’re variations on the same simple theme. Theirs has more meat, though—shrimp, pork, beef—and slices of chicken, not shreds. More tasty grease, and much less water. And then, too—the main thing—occasionally you just need a break from your own cooking.
“Is the old man cooking tonight?” I ask the boy at the till. “Can I see him for a second?”
The boy says something in Chinese into the kitchen behind him, gets something shouted back. The old man sticks his face out of the steam, sees me, and mutters at the boy. Disappears.
“It’ll be ready in a few minutes,” the boy says, cancelling the order.
Compensation on completion, unless the adjustment is ongoing. As with Jared and Lucius and Lucy. A principle to adhere to, I think, sitting on a stool by the front window beside two girls showing each other pictures on their iPhones.
Two years ago, the old man was overjoyed to have his granddaughter’s boyfriend adjusted out of her life—“gangster boy… no good, NO GOOD,” with sideways cleaver motions—and bowed with gratitude at the modesty of the terms. Now, though, as the adjustment recedes, fixing me a free dinner once every month or two has begun to seem onerous.
It’s while I’m looking out at the street that she returns. Not a dream, not a hallucination, not even a waking vision. More like an overlay. I don’t stop seeing the street—still bright, it’s not even 5:00 yet. I don’t stop hearing the girls, the cooking sounds behind me.
But I also see what I saw intermittently all night long. That unrelenting struggle to free her face from the stone it’s glued to or grown to be a part of. Turning to me, I thought at first—but maybe I’m just the one standing in the same direction as freedom. And she’s succeeding, too. The wizened, wispy-haired half of the face now has almost a quarter of the plump, golden-haired side forced round… the profile getting on toward three-quarter view.
Such energy in the eyes! The eyeball rolled into the crevice of the far one shooting beams of intent where it means to go—but also in the outward one, sunk in veiny wrinkled folds. Shining out of both of them, a baby’s clear, implacable determination to move from where it is.
“Order ready!”
The three of us turn. He points at the two girls, then at me.
“Yours almost.”
13
Driving up the 404, I feel the engine sticking again. Like it’s revving through wet sand. Do open stretches, higher speeds bring it on? But it was tooling down Kennedy when I first felt it, the Saturday Maude died, when I mentioned it to Lucius. Something that comes and goes?
Or you do? Mind on, then off. Aware, then in the dark. Present and accounted for, then AWOL.
§
Toogood Pond the nicest park I’ve found in the city. And Unionville’s Main Street the perfect lead-up to it. Cafés, shops and restaurants, pubs, even an ice-cream shack (closed in October), hanging flower baskets—gracious old homes, Maude’s “likable houses,” down the side streets. Worth well over a million each, no doubt, but the owners in agreement—for property values if not for good taste—to keep an old-time, small-town vibe. Like Niagara-on-the-Lake in a way. But doing a much better job of keeping it real.
The parking lot full on a Sunday. I get the last spot and start up the dirt-and-gravel path on the left-hand side of the pond. Big willows overhanging the water. Trees on the grassy slope further to my left, screening the road above. Quiet. Fall colours. Wine reds, golds, straw yellows. Browns in all shades coming forward, green dropping away. Dissolving like a scrim.
Strollers, joggers. Couples, kids, families. Old people, alone or with a middle-aged child, usually a daughter. A bench now and then, someone resting on it. Most people offering a greeting, unless too deep in the iWorld.
Midway up the side, I step into a patch of strong déjà vu. Like I’ve stepped into a painting I know, or a scene from a movie I’ve watched countless times. Been-hereness. My head swims woozily, and I have to sit down on the bench to get my bearings.
As soon as I do, it comes clear and I can account for it.
An oval of grass, a stubby curving peninsula. Willows to either side, but a clear view across the pond. Right in front of me, by the water, the long irregular clump of thistles, milkweed, tall grasses and wildflowers Maude stood in front of. The sun that’s warming the back of my neck the sun that was shining on her face, glinting off her glasses. I don’t have the photo with me today, but I don’t need it. This is the spot.
They would have stopped here, for a rest. Shared the cookies or sandwiches often mentioned in the book, the mocha frappuccinos. The photographer—who else but Sandor?—maybe staying on the bench, zooming in on her. Or, more likely—her unsteady walking—leading her out by the flowers and backing off a few paces for the shot.
It’s eerie to be sitting where they sat, and to know it for certain. And to see other things not in the photo but in the book, like peering around the glossy borders of the frame. The closed-up snack shop with blue tarps over the windows on the other side, overhanging the water. To Maude it was another shuttered home. The birds dotting the water, dozens of them—geese, ducks, cormorants, gulls. Gliding. Flapping in short flights. What she thought of as one big family of bird, coming in different sizes and colours.
One glowing success as a writer, Sandor—if you’ll take it. Your subject more vivid than her describer. The dead more present than the living.
The son’s reflections and recriminations fall away, detaching like the dandelion filaments, leaving just pure glimpses of the gone.
For a few moments it’s just Maude sitting beside me on the bench. Staring out at plants and sky. Same as we did from Vivera’s window a week ago.
§
I move on. A full circuit of the pond is a kilometer, I hear one power walker inform another. Already a few have lapped me a couple of times.
A sign with pictures and the names of fish species living in the lake. A log covered with sunning turtles. Heron stalking the weedy shallows behind them. Then the path ducks into trees, comes out on a wooden bridge over a swamp dense with bulrushes. Flattened path through them, muskrat probably, leading to some splashing amid waving stalks.
A shady section then over the stream that feeds the pond. Cool and covert-seeming. Trees interlacing overhead to form a tunnel, it must be nearly opposite the end I came in. Leafmeal, stick bits, swirling along. Fall rains lately, the water rising.
Leaning against the bridge railing the spot to pull out the book, let it open where it will.
Little birds 31 July
Something I forgot about yesterday. Mom kept coming back to a part of the Chinese lunch they’d had. “Little birds,” they’d been served, she said. How big? She made a circle the size of a toonie with her thumb and forefinger.
They couldn’t have been that small, I said with a chuckle, trying, again, to jolly it away. I seemed to have been trying to do that all day.
“These little birds,” she insisted. Thumb and forefinger again. They’d cooked them. She couldn’t get over it. She seemed partly admiring an
d partly horrified at the ingenuity of it.
“Noisy to eat.” Crunchy? I suggested. “Yes, crunchy. With little bones.”
She always had transformative vision. Leaves that formed families and whispered their histories, insects that carried on quirky arguments, a corner of unstained board that protested its neglect. She was a wonderful mimic, and when someone took root in her brain, she magnified them into a caricature that surpassed the original, becoming, like a Dickens character, something strange and indelible. Under her gaze, everything alive and interacting—how it delighted us as kids. (Dad laughing along, chiding when she “went too far.” His boundaries to the real not too elastic—just ask J.)
People with imaginations lose their minds differently than people without imaginations. I think they suffer more. Whatever got added to sane contemplation—depth, layers, richness, intricacy—now gets added to insane obsession. Fancies, whimsies, gorgeous visions now turn vicious, ugly, cruel, grotesque—horror’s gallery. It gives me a preview of myself with dementia.
Maybe, Sandor. And maybe not. It’s not just strength of imagination. It’s also how outward-facing it is. For all your sympathy for Maude—who seems to have brought out the best in you, no question—you seem pretty stuck on yourself. I know, I know. I may be underestimating you. I heard you in the bar.
High thresholds 1 August
These were (these are?) my family, and yet I can’t easily imagine anyone else, even strangers, hearing me call out in distress so loudly and so often without offering some aid. In them I sense what I have always sensed and feared: a cold it is dangerous to stand close to.
What you thought, J? Mother? As you cut yourself with blades? Offered your body to a car?
What crimes have I conspired in? How far, how deep, do they go?
“Beauty and gentleness.” Where did I read that? That no matter what someone’s cognitive ability is, they still respond to beauty and gentleness. What further guide is needed?
