by Mike Barnes
J visits now, according to Jade. Has all her life equipped her for this? Prepared her to be the one who accompanies her on this final, darkest leg, when no one else can?
Yesterday she had another old woman down on the floor, slapping her in the face and head. Was taken to ER for tests and observation. Results negative, as expected. Around 4 a.m. they phoned to advise me that they had given her Haldol and she was being returned by patient transport.
All the reasons she has had over eighty-two years to beat on someone—for whatever they did, whatever she knew. And yet she served dutifully. Only to now assault a sweet and balding old woman, as frail and lost as herself.
Ah, Sandor. Omissions are your signature, the secret of your mystery. You trail off sprinkling them like bread crumbs. Let the reader follow if he will. If he reaches the hut in the forest, you won’t be home. Critical reflection all through on your care of her, hard questions put to yourself—only to clam up at the starkest juncture: In the four months since I agreed to lock her into… Judy visits now because forty-five years of wandering wards and alleys have “equipped” her for it? Maude’s demented battery now an echo too late of real punishment due. …for whatever they did, whatever she knew. Casually mentioned, never followed up. Why allude to what you won’t explain? In a purely private journal, yes…
Writing: a wily weakness. Seducer, pander, dodger—will-o’-the-wisp. Confess on a cross to duck the resurrection entirely. To do your bit, to be seen doing it, to have done with it…
I’ll meet you, Sandor. We’re not done yet.
And on the day goes, endless and instantaneous.
Through cuttings, re-readings, cuttings. Aimless drifting spells. Vigils among the far cors.
Fire trucks go out sometimes, not as many as usual and not for long. They come back soon, the helmeted men looking bored as they halt traffic while the driver backs in. The angels must be keeping ashtrays closer, elements more distant.
The honking from below swells to a minor frenzy and levels off.
And then I see a tall man standing in the window looking back at me, and know it’s night.
19
…something you forgot… something you’ve forgotten…
All night long, in whispers, instead of sleep.
Saturday morning, early. Sitting in the armchair by the window, the streetlights still on. Back it comes. Two weeks ago, sweeping up the night’s trash in the lobby. Paper peeping from the mailbox. An address and three letters. TAL.
An acronym, an old joke. A thread dropped. An itch you forgot to scratch.
From Judy, you told yourself, before you forgot to ask. But when did Judy ever leave a message someone else could understand? From a location they could reach? And how, and when? Judy in bed beside her dead and cooling mother.
You chase through an adjustment to find out how it starts.
A mother’s voice, decades ago. Grateful, confiding. Speaking to the window mesh so your face won’t make her lie. All girls sob, hug stuffed animals. It’s that darn Scribbler I worry about. Scribble, scribble, scribble. Who knows what comes out of that?
But you don’t say. Still a long way, most days, from speaking.
Memories: addresses from the future. Smells from rooms you’ll live in, to help you settle in.
Strange reversal, sorcery of a process unwinding. My head getting clearer, drop by drop, like a bone in Jared’s dungeon, when it’s got no business doing anything but raving or sleeping.
Dark lightens, more gray seeping in. Fire door an ember filmed by ash. Whispering why the adjustment that should be over, isn’t. Why the window so ready to close—can’t quite bang shut.
Still some people to see. One, two. Two at least.
Clarity. It comes sometimes as a window closes. Like a circle that needs to find its start to seal itself. To be complete so it can end.
Comes from how a window closes. Not by sliding down, across—not that kind of window. By fogging over, and then the fog goes dark. But rub a patch of the fog, you might catch a detail skipped past when you were busy scoping a larger scene. Scanning to find an adjustment which soon swept you away, until its closing almost-end, when you glimpse the thing skipped past again, and know.
Know who wound you up and sent you ticking after Wyverns. Know where they live.
Even have a glimmer of why.
§
Shoppers not open for another hour, 9:00 on Saturdays. I buy the Star at the Convenience on the corner. A place I usually avoid, for the surly eyeballings the Asian owner gives the Face. A mixture of truculence and suspicion, as if he wants to give it a preemptive whack. Which makes me want to give him one. Which is just too many mental beatings for a paper or a litre of milk.
But he opens early. Closes late. Sleeps who knows when, if at all. Maybe we’re just too much alike.
Walking up the street, I scan a front page that’s all-Wyvern. For the time being, the Big Man and his Brother are banished to Local, strictly small-time sleaze. They’ll have to ramp up their act past crack, lies, and denigration if they want back in the limelight.
The dead man’s photo still central, as befits a murdered king. But around him have sprouted pictures of Judy, Max, Vivian—daughter, son, foster-daughter. As if the family is growing in death, giving birth to itself in posthumous scandal.
There’s no mother for the brood—no photo of Maude, thankfully. Nor one of Sandor, yet. Just a quote near his name, asking the media for “privacy during a difficult time… dealing with difficult issues.” Instead of a mother, there are broken white lines, interrupted by white question marks, connecting the dead ruler with his offspring and foster-offspring. The white lines, nicely stark on black, remind me of Creation graphics in mythology books. All of these children springing from the head of Zeus, with roles and relations yet to be defined. Happily, the Star has included wavy lines to blank white boxes with black question marks inside them—their graphics department has obviously had a blast with this—to signify suspected but still-to-be-identified peers and partners. These are the boxes I hope to see proliferate and fill in.
It’s the nest I’ve envisioned all along. A hive with secret chambers and cells, various humid tunnels connecting them.
The headlines evoke the same excitement and uncertainty. TRAGIC PLOT THICKENS. Sex Crimes Investigation Joins Murder Inquiry. A Family’s Woes Multiply. Sadness and intrigue vying for precedence—with disgust pacing in the wings, awaiting its cue.
“Alleged” and “allegedly” sprinkled throughout, fairy dust to keep the lawyers happy and let the readers know it’s all true.
Judy, picked up early yesterday while I was cutting myself and reading by flashlight, hasn’t yet been formally charged. Like Max and Vivian, she’s being “held for questioning… no further comment at this time.” It was just wishful thinking to hope she’d ghost past the police. Apparitions are their business, after all.
And I don’t seem to be their business whatsoever. No uniforms in sight. No spinning lights on cars. Not even a green light blinking on my phone.
Max not fingering me? Vivian not fingering me? And Judy not—well, only Judy’s no surprise. Assuming she thought of me at all, they’d have as much luck getting a statue of Kali to come clean. I saw her on the ward. The shrinks, nurses, social workers, occupational therapists—all the professional talk-jocks that took cracks at us… when it came to Judy, they looked like big flies trapped in a room, batting themselves against a tiny pane of glass.
Along with puzzled relief, I feel a twinge of disappointment. Part of me was ready to head back to the small room and wire-mesh window. Head home, set up camp, and take stock from there.
They’ve got one nut. One nut coming home. Maybe that’s all they need.
Sitting on the steps of Shoppers, I spread the paper open to follow the stories to the inside pages, forcing the line-up to swerve grumbling
around me. But my eyes focus poorly through the swirling grains, I can’t take in more than isolated words and phrases. It’s just too late in the window. Or past it, more like: window overtime.
I flip to Births and Deaths, where side-by-side photos of Max and Maude—in smiling middle age, on vacation maybe—warn me to expect an incongruous obituary, with no connection to their obliterated family on Page One.
Near the end of A Family’s Woes Multiply, a fragment pops out at me, Maude’s name in a wistful windup: “…perhaps a blessing that she died too soon to know…”
Which is a question—how deep the hell of her marriage?—for despair and kindly oblivion to debate to an eternal standoff. Though the driver of a car on Bloor, slamming to a stop at a sickening thump, will always give the nod to despair.
The doors unlock, the line shoves in, a voice says, “Next time find a Starbucks for that.”
I look up into the stupid eyes and immaculate coats of two large black poodles, chained to the wheelchair ramp railing. Their thighs and groins and rumps have been shaved, accentuating their calf muffs and fluffy erect tails and the curly matted hair covering their backs and faces. They stand alert, blocking the ramp entirely. I return their spoiled black stares, wishing an obese paraplegic with a power cart would flatten them.
When that doesn’t happen, I take their meaning and move on.
§
Lynette’s kitchen is cosy, light-filled. Varnished pine-slat table in a glassed-in eating nook, cushioned banquettes on three sides around it. Trays of herbs and flowers inside the windows, a more ambitious rock garden in the small backyard. High, narrow bookcases built into brick walls, dividing the nook’s airy spareness from the cluttered kitchen where she’s fixing our teas.
This is the other side of Forest Hill, the side I tend to forget exists. The Good Life, gracious and tranquil. It may be only the more discreet and thoughtful sibling of Fuck-You-I-Got-Mine—but discretion and thoughtfulness count. Especially when, apart from miscellaneous outposts like No Name, they seem to be the only two residency options available.
Watching her pick loose leaf from a jar, fill the kettle, get down mugs from hooks—I have the strange sense I’ve lived here a long time. It’s nothing like anywhere I’ve actually lived, and bears no relation to my present state of mind or circumstances. Yet the illusion persists even when I close my eyes to dispel it. Is joined, in fact, by an equally disconcerting, equally pleasant feeling of heaviness all through my body—as if I could actually fall asleep, if I let myself.
Milk? Cream? Some honey? I hear faintly, like wavelets lapping deep inside myself.
So much to say, we don’t say anything for a while. Just sit and sip our teas, a little too regularly, on either side of the pine table, uncertain where to begin. “You look good,” I say finally, repeating what I said at her door.
She colours a little, murmurs, “Well…” She can hardly repeat her own first words: “Oh, dear.” Which popped out of her when she saw my eye, the fresh cuts rayed around it, but seemed to mean more than that or than the Face in general or the beat-up body attached to it. Maybe just the fact of these physical things she’d passed so often finally being on her front step, ringing her doorbell. Though she had to have been expecting that, sooner or later.
Her eyes, now that they’ve broken out of the Infinite Tunnel to meet mine, are hazel. And familiar. They’re a deeper green-gold now, and seem bigger in her thinner face, but they’re the eyes I remember from the ward. In almost every other way, she’s changed. Slim and self-contained, deft in her movements; not farmgirl-plump and clumsy, hugging her flannel-nightgowned body, knocking things over. Chic blonde bob; not wheat-brown braids she did herself and sucked or chewed when upset. Strong cheekbones, chin, a speedwalker’s spring and slimness. Her breasts smaller but sitting higher—they sagged back then. Anyone looking at her would see miraculous transformation, all for the better. A metamorphosis from lumpish depression to mature beauty. So why on earth do I feel something has been lost?
Twenty years ago, Judy and I were nearing forty, confirmed in our insanities. Lynette was twenty-three? twenty-four?—on the cusp, basically unformed, in a bad way but still capable of becoming anything, including something very different from what she’d been up till then. Are you regretting she had to become anything definite at all?
She raises her hands and holds them flat above the table, as if to rescue me from my dilemma or to confirm her identity. They shake. A fine constant tremor, not so far from Judy’s.
“Still?”
“There’s no Botox for bad nerves. No surgery either.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t find me sooner. I thought TAL would be a dead giveaway. I mean, how many people could it be, right? And back then, I don’t know, I guess I thought of you as someone with special powers, sort of.” She says it around her mug, blushing a bit. “I needed to think there could be someone like that, especially there. You were older too. I might’ve had a bit of a crush. Back then. And when I started seeing you around the neighbourhood, and hearing some stories—it came back a bit, I think. I mean that sense that you were someone who knew things other people didn’t—almost that you could see through walls. It sounds so silly to say. Little Lynette. But I’ve been afraid for two weeks you’d knock on my door, walking around on pins and needles. It’s a relief you’re here finally. Really.”
“Why afraid? You left the note.”
“I did. But I was desperate. When you got the idea to give that awful nurse all those pills, did you have any idea what they might do to him?”
“Not a clue. None of us did.”
“True. But we were basically just following your lead. You sounded so sure of things. And like I say, you’ve got kind of a reputation now, whether you know it or not. People tell stories. You may not hear them.”
“You know about Brad?”
“Yes, I heard it from someone. Very sad.”
I sip my tea, trying to piece it out. Just two weeks ago, but it might as well be two years, and it’s hard to get back to anywhere near the beginning of the adjustment, see where I might have dropped the thread. Even to remember what happened, in the order it happened. What I was thinking, or might have been.
“You’re right,” I say after a bit. “It should’ve been obvious. You gave me all I needed. But I got distracted. These Wyverns…” She nods, but that blush comes into her cheek again, a teenage tell she hasn’t lost. “I told myself it had to be Judy.”
“Judy!”
“I know. Leaving a note I could understand? With an address I could get to?”
“Besides, Judy was up with her mom. All night that night.” She plays with her spoon in the mug. “I’m saying too much probably. But you know I know Sandor. You’ve seen us in the writing group. And maybe you know I published his book. He told me he signed your copy.”
I let the part about Sandor go for now. It’s coming back to me, my thinking that first day. Blurry but I can make it out, like pieces of a wreck I’m seeing underwater. “It was a choice between you and Judy, in my mind. But—” Trying to get it straight for myself. “Judy and I are lifers. Different kinds, but lifers. That adjustment wasn’t my first—I realized that on the ward—and later, over time, adjustments became a pattern. And Judy has adjustments too, her own kind. By whatever rules go on in her head. You? I thought of you as passing through the ward, Lynette. I assumed—I hoped—you’d moved on, like from a bad dream. So I didn’t think you’d remember it.”
“TAL? You don’t forget the things that kept you alive.”
“Did it really?”
“Did it? Am I talking a bunch of shit?” She tilts her head and asks it in a different voice. Like a drill, a reality check, she’s learned, or been taught, to put herself through. “Yes. Yes, it did. For five hundred and forty days.”
“You counted them?”
“Afterwards I did.”
/>
“That was a short-stay unit. Where’d you get sent for a year and a half?”
“Oh, home. But I kept getting re-admitted. And coming back for ECT series. Drug trials. One way or another, I was on more than off.” She pauses, and the drill person, the word checker, comes back, her face goes stern with it. “I don’t like the word lifer. It’s too negative. Defeatist.” And then the checker, having done her job, leaves the room and her face relaxes again. “But I was pretty full-time for a while, back then. And still, even now”—she holds up her quivering hands—“I might be full-time. Like you.”
Like you. Not like you and Judy.
“Full-time? Everything a manic-depressive does is part-time. Or rather, double-time and stop-time. Maybe that averages out to full-time. It’s a nice thought anyway.”
“Manic-depressive,” says the drillmaster, frowning. “You accept that label?”
I shrug. “I’ve got my own.” Though we’ll leave windows out of it. “People can put anything they want on the treatment package. It doesn’t matter if I’m not buying it.”
“You’re not in any treatment? You haven’t been?” She says it with a hint of awe, as if the special person from the ward just flew back into the room with his cape and all his powers.
“Just my own. But that takes in a lot.”
“How ’bout some coffee cake?” she says. “Apple. I made it last night. And it looks like we could both use more tea.”
And I hear myself answer yes, in a quiet murmur not quite my own voice, an underwater voice from the dream life I sensed before in the nook. Life that might have been.
She stops, hands on our mugs, about to rise with them. Rolls her eyes up to a place above my head. Trying to remember something, place something, her face blank with it. Then smiling as it starts to come to her. “You had someone, though. Not a therapist, not a doctor. But someone… this person, I’m trying to remember what you called him—”
“My case officer.” Stone.
