The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  “Ken, I’m sorry about the mystery packages,” I say when he picks up the phone. His voice in my machine was ominously solemn, asking me to call him at my earliest convenience. “Let’s move up the timetable a bit. If you hang on to the envelopes two more days, you can return them to me using the inter-branch service. Or else just drop them in a mailbox yourself.”

  Since I may not be able to pick them—or anything—up myself, is what I mean by making my voice lean towards option number two as the best one for both of us. Silence from the other end. I can see the two envelopes with my handwriting on his desk, his hands beside them—as clearly as if I’ve crawled down the line and taken up a perch behind Ken’s eyes.

  “I assume the contents of these envelopes are… dangerous somehow. A risk to someone.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Otherwise,” Ken goes on as if I haven’t said anything, as if he’s talking to himself, “they wouldn’t be in my hands for safekeeping. Of course, what are the chances of an anonymous package addressed to the police being utterly harmless?”

  “Also true, Ken. And again—”

  “Remember how things ended last time,” he breaks in. Which last time? I’m wondering. A lot of adjustments have ended messily, and of course they all end with Stone. Though Ken doesn’t know about Stone—not in specific detail, and not by that name. What have I told him? I’m tripping over my own loose history. Fugue states and episodic amnesia no help in a long-term relationship. But in any case, Remember-how advisories at this stage are like Mind your step to a parachutist who’s left the plane. Still, Ken needs some reassurance. And deserves it.

  “I know it’s an imposition, Ken. But it’s for something that matters to me. Matters a lot. A question of clearing house.”

  “Whose house?”

  I see, in rapid succession, Maude lying dead on her side in bed, Judy sipping cocoa on the porch on Selkirk Street, faces and other body parts of nameless girls and women in Max’s chair, the Empress straining to break her tiny face free from stone, and, for some reason, Jared. They flip through my head like cards in a riffled deck.

  “Your house. My house. Everybody’s house.” Too late, I realize I’ve gone too far. “It’s always my house, Ken. Ultimately, that’s what it comes down to.”

  “That’s my thought too, ” Ken says. Heavy-voiced, like a father laying down a Sorry son, but line. “That’s why I’m sending them back via the inter-branch courier. You can pick them up where you sent them from. Tomorrow, or Wednesday at the latest.”

  “I should’ve asked you first, Ken. But you’re involved now. They’re in your hands.”

  “Yes, they are. And yes, I am. So the best I can do is limit my involvement. After I put them in this morning’s out-box, I can truthfully say—to whoever asks—that I received packages from a client without having a clue what was in them, that since the client’s instructions fell outside my area of service I didn’t want to keep them, that I notified the client of that, and returned them immediately via the same route by which they arrived.”

  I hang up feeling like I’ve just played a game of speed chess against Garry Kasparov. Reminded that any game between the two of us could only be speed. Ken’s moves as crisp and prudent as you could wish from an experienced banker. But with a hint of ice in his voice I’ve never heard before.

  Damage control now. Best spin possible? The package stays at the branch up the street until you pick it up. A safe drop box. Almost a safety deposit box. And if you don’t show up to claim it? If you can’t?

  After a while someone at the branch phones Ken. Your client never…

  And Ken—a good citizen, a good guy—calls me all the names I’ve earned and delivers a police matter to the police. Probably in-person, so he can explain in full his involvement.

  Sorry, Ken.

  §

  Gwen’s voice in my ear: “Dr. Wyvern can meet you tonight at 9 p.m…”—with an address and unit number on Bayview. The condos at Bayview and Sheppard, I’m guessing.

  And my voice back in hers: “Hello, Gwen. I asked for a home meet but you didn’t give me that, did you? You didn’t mention home at all. Which was cute. But we both know that thirty years of ‘Family & Cosmetic Dentistry’ buys you more than a balcony overlooking Loblaws. Or even the penthouse facing south.” And of course Sandor helped me to that, telling me of the family’s condo-flipping proclivities—but better you assume I’m a master of deduction. “So I’ll think about going to this meeting, which is not the one I asked for. But in the meantime—Gwen—could you please quit dicking me around?”

  And—when she’s brought her tremulous hands under enough control to move on to the next message—there, instead of matters dental, I am again: “You know, Gwen, up till now I’ve been trying to hold to the idea that you’re somehow clueless about what’s going on. What’s been going on a long time. Which, when the shit hits the fan—very soon now—would be the only way, if there is a way, you’d avoid going down with the others. But you’ve got me wondering. When you pretend you can’t hear a simple message—I have to visit him at home, I said—then I’m tempted to bump you up to the fully knowing and willing category. Which is a different brand of coffee altogether. Have a nice day.”

  §

  And since you’re yammering to people about complicity, how about the complicity of seeing Christmas Music Wednesday and on Monday its makers are still running free? Normal office hours again today. Assuming they restrict themselves to office hours.

  With a wrench of her stem-like neck, the Empress jerks her furthest fraction free yet. Muscular effort passes like a shiver through her shadowed far side. More smooth skin, yellow hair. And welling blood. Blood?

  She can’t wrench free and stay whole, both. It’s fused or damaged. Either or.

  §

  the birds in the bone dungeon walk about looking for food they are always moving since they are always hungry there are no seeds and no farmers pellets and no kernels of corn the dungeon is a starvation chamber as the birds

  “Can you remind me what they look like? Sometimes that’s a good—”

  which are hollow and have no necks and big heads walk around looking for food they break some of the bones by pecking at them and trying to squeeze through them this makes pathways that other prisoners can follow most of the paths are very narrow only the size of one bird but sometimes a path gets wider where several birds have been pecking and moving around in a circle

  “Do they also get wider if they fly? Do they break bones by flapping their wings?”

  the birds can’t fly they are flightless birds like an ostrich but with big heads and no necks they have little wings but even if their wings were bigger they couldn’t fly because they have no feathers instead the bone dungeon birds have little dark stubs sticking out like broken pencils

  “Broken pencils?”

  as everybody knows when pencils break off there are dirty little ends that are dark and shiny the hollow birds have these dirty stubs poking out all over through their skin when the birds peck at a bone that has become clear sometimes it breaks off if it is a thin bone and they peck hard enough inside a clear bone are drops of liquid that the birds catch in their beaks and swallow this is how they stay alive even though there is nothing else to eat they suck on the broken clear bone to get all the drops out one time one of the smartest birds pushed his body under the broken bone so that it would pierce his skin and all the drops would run into him after they saw that all the birds copied him even though some of them only did it once because it hurt too much the birds still peck at the old yellow bones not just at the clear ones even though the old yellow bones don’t have any nourishing drops in them the hollow birds have very small brains when they swallow the drops they don’t get smarter but their dirty skin stubs start turning soft and white and fluffy

  “Are they turning into feathers?”

&nbs
p; these are flightless birds so they don’t need feathers also their wings are too small to fly even with feathers also there is no room to fly in the bone dungeon this is their home and they have lived there forever there is no reason for any bird to escape and no bird wants to they peck to collect drops for nourishment but they are glad when the dirty stubs turn white and soft the white is very white and there is no other thing that is white in the bone dungeon since the bones are yellow or sometimes clear and the walls of the dungeon are gray and the hollow birds are pinkish brown so white is a very nice colour to be and the birds are very glad

  §

  “Is this going to hurt?” Max says, looking in the direction of my voice.

  “It shouldn’t. Not really.” I pause, the headphones in my hand. “There’ll be some discomfort involved, but it won’t last long and the freezing will block any stronger sensations. Isn’t that what you tell them, a dozen times a day?”

  “Who?”

  “Your patients.”

  “I guess so. Something like that. But we’re not in my office.”

  “No, we’re not. We’re in mine. Still, it’s the truth. You’ll experience some unpleasantness, but not for very long, and it won’t be nearly as unpleasant as it would be for a normal person.”

  “I’m normal,” he says.

  Which can’t help but sound odd coming from someone wearing safety goggles smeared with Vaseline, and oven mitts with which he’s awkwardly holding open a book of poetry. He keeps shifting the big padded thumbs along the edges of the paperback, trying to get a better grip. It must feel constantly as if the slim book is sliding shut or about to fall, since he can’t feel it clearly through the mitts. He moves his head about in a bird-like way—which I don’t think he’s aware of, since it would offend his vanity to show me this—trying to get a clear view of me through the unsmeared, or less smeared, slivers in the goggles. Like shards in a kaleidoscope, but worse, since almost every bit is blurred, and they don’t repeat in any regular pattern.

  Without answering his claim of normalcy, I put the headphones on him. 303 wouldn’t lend me his iPod and ear buds, but I didn’t want anything so sleek and contemporary anyway. He rummaged in his clothing piles and came up with an older-model player, slightly clunky-looking, and these big headphones that make the ears disappear completely and block out all outside sound. Perfect, I told him. I start the first of the two songs he downloaded for me.

  Max starts tapping his foot at the sound of Stiv Bators’s “Evil Boy.” It’s partly pure relief, no doubt, at finding something familiar in the sea of strangeness I’ve concocted for him. That sense of safe ground will vanish when I crank the volume to a painful screech—then abruptly drop it to a whisper like dead leaves—twiddling the wheel either way. Still, I realize I chose the wrong music. The Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” follows “Evil Boy.” Max would have heard both songs in his early twenties, just as I did. And a return to punk rock sentiments, at any volume, is bound to stabilize him—any original venom long leached out to the man in the Clash shirt sampling Ukiyo-e sushi. It was stupid to think otherwise. I let myself be seduced by lyrical content—trying too much to make a poem of the scene, forgetting that the essence of successful rock is to devolve quickly to a danceable beat, minimizing all elements that distract from the groove. “Bitches Brew,” my other choice, would have been perfect. Those random honks and squirts of disconnected sound, the ominous drums like geiger counters—what was I thinking? Miles might have composed that fearsome weirdness expressly for this smug white dude.

  I thumb the volume up to maximum. Max squints at the pain in his ears. I can’t see his eyes through the Vaseline, but deep creases appear below the goggle arms, his cheeks rising into his temples, his lips wide around clenched teeth. His hands come up to remove the headphones. I grab one wrist, reminding him of our deal. But I turn the volume back to midway—I can still hear it crackling from around the headphones—and then down to a mumble, a nasal mosquito whine only Max can hear.

  And then off. A test.

  “When does it start?” says the man in the cane back chair beside me. He’s lifted the headphone away from one ear. He looks silly and helpless, and, with his shoulders slumping from humiliation and vulnerability, small. Much smaller, with an almost-sixty’s inevitable pot belly that was not visible on the tall, trim-figured man I’ve seen till now. He received my condition of a little demonstration coldly—“a demand before the demand,” he managed to sneer. But the altered and unpredictable state of his perceptions have sucked all the haughtiness out of him, reducing him to nervous dependency in less than a minute. Just as the book promised.

  “Start reading when you hear the music come back on. Read the title and keep reading till you reach the end. Then we’re done. This part anyway.”

  He sits there, waiting. Thinking it’s not a bad idea to prolong his apprehension, I review the elements of the perception-skewing interventions recommended by the author of More Than Memory. An empathy-enhancing exercise, he called it, a way for caregivers and other loved ones to experience, safely and briefly, something of the totality of Alzheimer’s. Max is beyond empathy, of course, but parallel experience falls within the realm of what I can arrange.

  Blurred and narrowed vision—a “dimming tunnel, startled by strange sights.” Check. Loss of motor control, dimming of peripheral sensations. Check. Auditory instability—abrupt bangs and crashes, weird whisperings—making noise of normal sounds. Check.

  No way to mimic the sheer number and randomness of perceptual distortions actually comprising dementia, all exacerbated by diminishing powers of focus and attention, not to mention the cognitive inability to transform the incoming chaos into an even rudimentary order—but a start. A window, however unsatisfactory, into the other’s lived experience. Check.

  I look around the condo’s main room. Dining alcove, where we’re sitting. Kitchen. Small square living room with a window south—the CN tower off to the right.

  §

  “The Ship” the nickname people gave this condo, even before it was fully built, based on the artist’s renderings mounted on the construction hoardings. The company probably encouraged the identification on its website. It looked most like a ship before it was finished—a hull with many of its glass plates missing and a skeletal, scaffold-draped superstructure, dotted inside and out with tiny workers—rising out of a messy, half-invisible berth in dry dock, poised on the crest of a concrete wave set to plunge down Bayview through the ripple of the 401. Its likeness to a ship is pretty rudimentary: slim, longer than it is wide or high, with a built-up section near the “bow” descending in stages to the “stern.” Still, most times I pass it, driving up Bayview or along Sheppard in either direction, I think, obediently, ship. Not a cruise ship or even a freighter, but some kind of stubby glass tug. It’s more imaginative and better executed, at least, than its older condo cousins clustered a little east across from the Bayview Village entrance. Those are ghastly. Bland, almost instantly shabby towers surmounted by pseudo-art-deco topknots that look like forty-foot-high hood ornaments—cold, bleak monuments to expensively senseless living. Still, they answered a question about fifteen years ago, when, for a couple of years, my roamings took me around North York. At that time, nearing the century’s end, Bayview Village was a mall visibly in decline. Empty shops vacated by high-end tenants, Book Sales with remaindered paperpacks stacked on trestle tables spilling out of temporarily rented spaces, black holes like missing teeth between basic outlets like Timothy’s Coffee and Shoppers. Shrinking numbers of people wandering around looking for bargains or having a donut on a bench beside an unwatered tree. The whole Village flapping like scrap plastic after the carnival’s departed. And then—it happened within eighteen months—a turnaround began. Chapters moved in to peg down one end, construction started on a giant Loblaws at the other. A big new LCBO. Glittery women’s fashion and shoe boutiques. A brightly-lit Asian r
estaurant. An Oliver and Bonaccini. And on the streets nearby—where the condos would go—bungalows dotted with Real Estate faces, and fenced off when sold, at prices that quickly encouraged their neighbours to follow suit. It was like watching a documentary film on urban development and the wages of inside knowledge. For a time, the decay and renovation happened simultaneously, proving that not everyone was seeing the same future, or at the same rate. Small retailers, made skittish by ignorance, saw a mall on its last legs making spasmodic efforts to revive itself, and continued to desert it, helpfully depressing prices for the speculators. But the sureness with which the largest bettors acted made the truth clear. Somebody—some people—knew things. Money in envelopes—or e-transfers by then—had changed hands. The fix was in.

  Inside, Max’s unit hews to basic condo design. A little lighter and airier thanks to more generous windows—the glass of the hull. And with a good view, since it’s two floors below the penthouse. Otherwise, the standard cube of living room with kitchen and dining alcove extension. And the strange cramped sensation produced by eliminating corridors. No wasted space of halls at all—just a door in one wall to the bathroom, a door in the other to the bedroom. You realize the function of hallways when they’re gone. Without them, you’re always more or less stationary. Doing everything in one spot, right beside anyone else who occupies it.