The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  At least it made it easy to check that we were alone. As did the sparse furnishings—which seem almost mandatory in a modern condo, totally unlike those richly cluttered and dusty New York apartments in old movies. Nowadays, any clutter is electronics or fashion-related. No overfilled bookcases or dishevelled stacks of magazines. No linen-draped tables crammed with tiered miscellanies of inherited antiques and knickknacks. From where I sit, I can see every object in the room, which, with its monochromes of glass (clear and frosted), polished metal, white pressed-wood and black leather, could serve as the developer’s display unit or a contemporary, high-end hotel room awaiting its first guest. Even the two table accents—the jewellery, mostly silver, in a glass dish on the coffee table; and the artificial ikebana on the dining table where we sit, purple and yellow synthetic blooms spiked in a shallow black porcelain bowl—qualify as standard grace notes by a competent home stager.

  The bathroom and bedroom show more signs of life. The former from the sheer number of tubes and bottles and jars of personal hygiene and beauty products, and the number of fluffy white towels hanging and stacked—small as the space is, it seems the warmest, most inviting room in the residence. The bedroom has outfits in dry-cleaning cellophane lying on the bed, and, behind a sliding door, a closet stuffed with clothing and footwear options. Multiple reflections in ceiling and wall mirrors make the space seem antic, if not as lived-in as the bathroom.

  A minute’s tour assures me Max is alone. There’s nowhere for anyone to hide. Not unless they can fold up to gnome size and slide into the cupboards above the microwave, or curl inside the washer-dryer wombs stacked in the closet beside the entrance.

  §

  I push Play and thumb the volume wheel to midway. Max starts reading after twenty seconds or so, first moving his head about in that bird-like way, trying to find a crack of less-smeary goggle plastic, then, when he’s got it, keeping his head at that tilt, like a robin listening for a worm under the earth, probably keeping his other eye closed to tighten the focus on the sliver of relative clarity. A smart guy. Quick on the uptake, and resourceful in a pinch.

  “To Waken an Old Lady

  Old ape… Old age… is…

  a fright of small”

  He waited a second before the second line, making sure he had it, then delivered it in a rush. Already realizing, after the mistake in the first line, that a quick run at the line gives him better odds against the blurs and the noise. He makes another mistake—an interesting one, like the one he caught, reading “flight” as “fright”—but I don’t stop him. I thumb the volume to three-quarters. He squints against it, holding the focus-tilt he’s found, but delivers the next line inaudibly, moving his lips but unable to hear himself over the din in his ears. I stop the player, and lift a headphone clear.

  “What? You said one read-through. One read-through to the end.” He says this without altering his head-tilt, which is away from me, as if he’s objecting to a shape near the bottom of the door I came in.

  “One correct read-through is what I said. Mangling doesn’t count.” Disable yourself with these artificial impairments and try to perform adequately an everyday task, reading an address or telephone number, for example, or completing some simple arithmetic. “Here’s what we’ll do. One tap on your arm will mean you’ve got a word wrong. Go back a couple of words and try again. Two taps will mean I can’t hear you. Repeat it louder.”

  “Whatever.”

  And we get through it that way, with Max shouting to get over the screaming in his head, or when it falls away to mumbling before he can adjust. And shouting when he has to repeat something he thinks he got right the first time. And, increasingly, shouting whenever I touch his arm, for whatever reason. The effect is that of William Carlos Williams, the old man in straw hat and glasses on the cover of the book, becoming enraged as he declaims his quiet and beautiful poem at a complacent audience, screaming it finally into their stupidly nodding faces.

  “To Waken an Old… TO WAKEN AN OLD LADY”

  Old age is

  a flight of small

  cheering… chirping… CHEEPING BIRDS

  skimming

  bare bees… TREES

  alone… ABOVE… a snow grave… A SNOW GLAZE.

  Draining and flailing… GAINING AND FAILING!

  they are buffets

  by a park…

  THEY ARE BUFF-E-TED

  BY A DARK WIND—

  But what?… WHAT?

  On hard beef… ON HARSH WEED-STALKS

  the shock… FLOCK has rested,

  the snow… THE SNOW

  is coored… CORED… COWERED… COVERED! WITH! BROKEN!

  SEED HUSKS

  and the wind… AND! THE! WIND! PEPPERED! PEEPERED! TEMPERED!

  BY A SHAWL!… KRILL!… SHILL!…

  BY!!! A!!! SHRILL!!!

  PIP!!!!—ING!!!! OF!!!! PLEN!!!!—TY!!!!!!!”

  §

  A knock at the door. I answer it, Max throwing his gear off behind me. A guy in a Nickelback shirt, braces on his teeth though he’s in his thirties.

  “Whoa, listen man, I know it’s only nine o’clock, but…” Peeking around me. “Is everything all right?”

  “Absolutely.” I lean out and down, lower my voice. “A poetry lover. Got a little carried away. Sorry about that. Won’t happen again.”

  “Whoa. Sure. Thanks, man.” With a couple of slow blinks he shrugs off. A new kind of screaming from his occasional neighbour.

  Max fixing his hair where the headphones flattened it, his fingertips hovering, air sculpting until a uniform soft hemisphere meets them. He’s balder than I realized. It takes skilful sessions with a blow dryer and light gel to train outposts of fluff into that golden halo. Rings around his eyes left by the tight-fitting goggles are slowly fading. He adjusts his round glasses, which still sit slightly askew, one wire arm bent a little. Despite his dishevelment, he looks defiant. Or perhaps just businesslike and alert. A little impatient. Anxious to get on with it.

  “I hope that’s brought us back to where we left it Friday night,” he says. “You keep returning us to the starting line, underlining it with heavier and heavier strokes. You can make my life inconvenient, even miserable—all right, you’ve made that clear repeatedly. Why do you think I agreed to your so-called ‘exercise’? There was no need to display your box cutter. I’m quite aware—very aware—of what you’re capable of doing to people. I get it. Okay? And it’s quite beside the point when we both know you’ve got something I need and that I’ll have to do what you ask—if I can—to get it back. You know what I want. But we’re still waiting to hear what you want. And when, and how, we make the exchange.”

  His chatter like his haircut: skilful and elaborate, to cover up bald spots. But what if the bald spot’s in me, not him? What makes him most nervous—makes him fear something he’ll have no idea how to deal with—is the possibility that I don’t want anything rational. Nothing a normal person might want, nothing that can be reasonably accommodated. Or accommodated at all. A friend of Judy’s.

  Vivian comes in. She closes the door behind her and sets down Loblaws bags. With a brief, incurious glance at the two of us—which must take in the headphones, goggles, oven mitts, paperback, CD player, and the Shoppers bag it all came in—she goes into the kitchen and starts unpacking the bags. Max doesn’t watch her and they don’t exchange a word. Not for the first time, I’m struck by the aura of telepathy that cellphones give people, especially couples, who use them habitually. Appearing and disappearing at prearranged times, performing scripted actions, speaking or not speaking on cue—all from a sequence of short calls and texts, invisible to the one not in the loop. It must be one of the technology’s major attractions.

  “I want,” I say—and realize I have no way to finish the sentence I’ve started. What do I want? And how can I be asking that now, at this poi
nt, at this table? Have I forgotten what I planned, or was there no plan to forget? Either possibility is frightening. Dangerous to begin an adjustment late in a window. Yes, Stone, yes.

  What I want. To acquaint Max with pain, bring him the world—which I’ve done only in minor ways, hassles he’d put in the category of nuisances, maybe even the “price of doing business.” And beyond that—way beyond, it should’ve been—take him down. Them down. Off the street, out of business. Bringing in the cops would do both, and right away: close down Christmas Music and bring them all the world they can stand. World without end, amen.

  Vivian crosses the room and enters the bathroom. I half-expect her to emerge with a weapon, a gun she keeps behind her face creams. Part of me hopes she does. But there’s a click as she locks the door, and almost right away, the sound of the water running in the shower.

  Max is right. I’m a guy at a starting line. Stamping his feet to show he’s there.

  Show who?

  Rapidly, with a lucidity more frightening than any nightmare, a voice inside me ticks off a checklist of mental disintegration. Catnapping two, three hours a night. Merging of sleep and waking, neither complete. Disruptive, obsessive images. Focus slipping, forgetting. Judgement—reeling. You’re a day or two, a few at most, from total collapse. From Stone.

  And with a whirling sensation behind my forehead, a kind of cosmic cashier turns to me and looks up, I can almost see her face, her startled eyes—

  Was there something else?

  §

  It is the Empress who gives me an answer to Max, lets me finish what I’ve started saying. She doesn’t speak a word herself. Her thin lips have never once moved on my visits—she won’t do anything that lessens her struggle even for an instant. But I find myself beside her on the dim stairs. Pinned in her raised niche, she is at eye level as I stand on the step. I don’t lose the sensation of my hands flat against the cool glass of Vivian’s table, or the sight, a background I can easily bring into sharper focus, of Max’s impatiently waiting face. She has wrested herself further around. There is blood flowing from the far side of her face, which shows, beyond a curve of plump cheek, chewed-up skin flecked with grit. Like the cheek of a motorcyclist after a spill on gravel. Some of the blood flows down her neck into the shadows, becomes a dark line before it disappears. A thinner, brighter thread trickles out under her chin and down her thin neck, staining the high collar of her white shift. It is a bright, fresh red despite the grainy light.

  Seeing it, seeing her, puts words in my throat. I think them as I hear them.

  “I want,” I say, “Judy taken care of. Taken care of for life. You’ll set up a trust fund of two hundred thousand dollars. We both know that isn’t much to live on, for however long she lives. But she’s used to making do, and it will be enough. You’ll invest it with a man I’ll put you in contact with. He’ll see that it returns at least five percent annually, maybe a bit more on average. That will give her eight hundred dollars a month. Together with her disability benefits, plus old age security in a few years, she’ll have enough for what she needs. A small apartment, even. Maybe shared. We’ll see. There’s a lot to work out, including a reliable POA. But your part is the two hundred thousand, set up in a legal trust fund with all the necessary papers.”

  Max shaking his head slowly back and forth, starting from the first mention of Judy.

  “You don’t know what you’re asking,” he says. “It’s not possible.”

  “I know exactly what I’m asking, and it’s dead easy.”

  “Now, if you were to ask what I assumed you were going to ask,” he goes on, as if I haven’t said anything, “I could make out a cheque directly to you. Not for that amount, obviously, but for whatever figure we arrive at.”

  “Nothing’s coming to me. And I’ve just told you what’s coming to Judy.”

  The bathroom door opens. Vivian, dressed again, drying her hair with a towel, crosses the short distance to the bedroom, closes the door behind her. Max doesn’t turn. Again I expect her to emerge pointing something at me. Instead, I hear the thunks of drawers opening and closing, the chings of hangers on rods. Sounds of a woman changing her clothes.

  “You don’t know anything,” Max says.

  That sentence again. Old Faithful. “I know that two hundred grand is chump change to you. A rock bottom rate for Christmas Music. It wouldn’t even add up to Judy’s share of the estate, though I’m sure there’s nothing coming to her there. The family’s done too good a job at keeping her from money all her life to mess up now. So consider it a piece of her share, which went to you instead. Or take it out of your own petty cash. Streams from dentistry, from real estate, from other investments, from God know’s what—and now, some huge chunk from your mother. C’mon, Max. It’s coins under seat cushions to you. You won’t even miss it.”

  Shaking his head again. His lips set. “That’s off the table. We’ll have to come to another arrangement.”

  “You’re out of arrangements,” I say, getting up. “That’s the thing you people can never believe. That there isn’t another option to click. If that’s off the table, I’m off the table. And out the door.”

  I scoop the gear into the Shoppers bag. “I did what you asked,” Max says. “Crazy as it—”

  “You didn’t do shit. I said your home, not your fuckpad.”

  Silence for a moment from the bedroom, then the dressing noises resume.

  “What is this obsession with where I live?”

  “I don’t trust what I see anywhere else. With anyone that’s true, but especially with you. I have to see home base, or else I don’t see anything. What are you out here anyway? Credit card trails, fine dining experiences. Your professional life. Parking garages, ready-to-flips, fuckpads. Put it all together and it’s nothing but smokescreen, squid’s ink. I need to see the rock you flatten under at night, the crack you peer out from, before I can even believe in you.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. It sounds—”

  “Insane. I know.”

  “All right. We’ll do it at my place, if that’s what it takes.” Saying it in a tired voice, but sitting up straighter, as if energized by the thought of another round. In some ways I’ve underestimated him. He’s like a slim reed. Easy to bend over, bend double. Hard to break.

  “No, Max. We already did it—you did it—right here. The package is on its way.”

  “You lied to me.”

  “And you lied to the girls in your chair. They thought they were getting their teeth cleaned, not starring in your wank gallery.”

  “But… but…”

  “You do a pretty good stalled engine. Keep practising it while you wait for the knock on your door.”

  §

  Stupid. Stupid, as I’m going down in the elevator. You surrender any leverage you had without getting anything in return. Vivian your best hope now. Vivian and Max together. Unwilling to believe they’ve really run out of rope. It’ll take a flash argument, followed by meandery seeping debates, but they’ll get to where it’s just my latest move, my starkest-seeming yet, the supposed last straw that announces the start of the endgame of real negotiation. They have to, they have no choice.

  And have just about convinced myself when the elevator reaches the lobby.

  A huge pale guy is filling the small couch opposite the security desk, a cellphone to his ear. He’s enormous—the biggest brother. Somewhere between lineman and sumo-in-training. The phone a canapé in his palm. I sit down in the armchair kitty-corner to him.

  “Uh huh,” he says, after listening for a minute. Then says it a few times in succession, with pauses in between, as if confirming a series of instructions. “Uh huh… uh huh… okay… uh huh…” Midway through, he becomes aware that I’m just sitting here looking at him, and he stares back at me, his expression darkening.

  After another long silence, he begins r
epeating things for the person on the other end, speaking slowly and louder than normal, as if to someone elderly.

  “Red peppers… zucchini… kale… no, the other kind, I got it… mixed beans… brown sugar… Dad, hang on a second, will you?” Holds the phone out from his head, like a rock he’s going to throw. “Excuse me,” he says to me. “Do you have a problem I can help you with?”

  “No, I don’t. I thought I did, but it’s gone. Have a nice evening.”

  15

  Sitting in the graveyard with my back to a headstone, waiting for them to stop breaking things. The air strangely mild for the end of October, almost sultry, as if summer has forgotten its window closed five weeks ago and we’re halfway to winter. Still. The closed-down way things get during scrambled interludes, when animals large and small stay hunkered in the nest, wary of pleasant conditions that make no sense. No stars at all, though the clouds are sparse and thin. Just thick layers of whitish mist that the streetlights turn in places to glowing cotton.

  The heavy dew brings a chill. Quickly soaking my jeans and coat, releasing mould and caramel apple smells from the fallen leaves. Forming little clear beads on polished marble.

  How long to wait? Till dawn would be prudent, let night’s predators sign off—but my bones and joints are aching, muscles stiffening and cramping around the old injury sites. Shifting about, I can’t get comfortable in any position for more than a few minutes at a time.

  Upgrades to Peach and Lemon will wait a while, maybe quite a while, for me to return. But not as long as they should—which is as long as it takes. ADHD endemic to the breed.

  It’s the sluggard and the fool who counts the enemy’s failings and calls that strategy.

  Still, it’s far from daylight, the slide and swing set just gloomy shapes beyond the gate, when I get up stiffly and start limping along Roselawn and down Latimer home.

  Halfway down the first floor hallway, Mrs. Xue is standing outside 103, washing her door. Her door and the frame and a precise-looking foot of wall around the frame. She’s fully dressed, although it’s dark outside, her kerchief knotted under her chin. Bending to rinse her wash rag in a bucket of soapy water, standing much closer to the door than most people would.