The Adjustment League

by Mike Barnes

  But not this sheer disgust swamping me, oozing like cold black gel between me and the targets.

  Adjustments have ended badly for lots of reasons. Never by out-repulsing me.

  I close the cupboard door and rise on creaking knees to check the medicine cabinet.

  Pills. A lot of them. Bottles and bottles. I flush the toilet again, run the water while I bring them out of the cabinet. Antidepressants, a couple of kinds, doctors’ names on the newer ones with drugstore labels. Sedatives, various benzodiazepines. Scrips with lots of latitude: 1-3 pills at bedtime, enough for three months, a couple of repeats. Older pills, or at least older bottles, behind them. No labels, or scurf of labels torn away. Pink pills. Yellow pills. Orange pills. Beige ones. No names on any of them. Lots of obliging doctors. Two less now though. I peer at one pill, then another. They’re just colours.

  No way to tell, really. I take what I think I’ll need.

  §

  Go back in, take my seat. Sandor doesn’t look surprised when I set the pill bottle on the table in front of me. Take my cutter out of my pocket, open the blade with a snick. He doesn’t look remotely drunk either. He watches me alertly from his corner, his mouth looking like it wants to smile. The eyes black and baleful, far past grief.

  “Is this the part where you use your knife, make me swallow a bottle of my own pills? Force me to tell you what you think I know. Make me do something. Sign something. Take care of Judy,” he says mincingly.

  “No, you goddam pussy. This is where I show you the easy way out and see if you follow form and take it.”

  “Ah, right. Follow my goddam family down. People would believe it.”

  A caving in my head. Like an anthill collapsing, sand and tiny scrambling bodies. Except it keeps going on. Not an event. The way it is.

  I swallow the first handful of pills to stop seeing it. Uncap the bottle and tap half a dozen into my palm, swallow them with what’s left of the Coors. Open another can.

  “What the fuck?”

  Shake another handful into my palm. Pause. Cock my head, trying to catch up to what’s happening. There was something else, another plan, I’m sure of it, but whatever it was, if it was, it’s whooshing into the past like a bullet train and I can’t catch it now. The new thing that replaced it is waiting, just ahead, for me to catch up to it. When I do, my lips will move and sound will come out of them.

  I swallow the pills with a long chug of Coors.

  “Stop! That’s enough! We can talk. I’m not gonna let you do this.” But he doesn’t get up, doesn’t move except to raise his hands. This dance is paralyzing him.

  I shake out another handful.

  “HOLD IT! You can’t do this here!”

  “Lynette and your book have got me half-believing you’ve got a heart. The start of one anyway. Now we’re going to see if you’ve got any balls to go with it. A heart without balls is nothing but a curse in this world. You’re Exhibit A on that score.”

  I still don’t know what I’m doing, can’t go fast enough to catch up to it. I barely hear what I’m saying, though I follow it and it sounds like me. What I know: I am the adjustment.

  Down go the pills. Fifteen or more in me now.

  “Now listen. We can talk. We can go somewhere, talk to someone. This is not happening. You can’t just come in here and off yourself. It’s too fucking crazy. Way too fucking crazy. You’re crazy if you think—”

  “Of course I am. So is Judy. You’re so busy cataloguing your own blues, you can’t see conditions that make yours look like hiccups. Not even when they’re right in front of your face. You think you’ve come close to the edge? Touched the void? You haven’t gone near it.”

  My voice high in my ears, climbing toward shrill near the end.

  Not my voice. Crazy for real.

  I ready the next handful, take a gulp of beer and a deep breath before swallowing them. I want to get the next part out clearly while I can. Make sure he gets it all.

  “You’ve got two choices. You can let me die here, which will take me out of your hair for good but will also give you something difficult to explain. At a time when your family’s doing nothing but explaining. How did a man happen to O.D. in your home, in front of your eyes, without you stopping him? Or you can do the safe thing—call it in—which is going to keep me in your life, knowing the secrets of your filthy family, badgering you to take care of Judy. I’m betting you’ll pick safe, for all its aggravations, but you’re weak enough and privileged enough, with just enough dumb cunning, to feel you might just want to take a chance and clear the slate. But understand this: if I wake up, I’m hounding you until Judy gets her due. You know me enough to know I won’t stop. If I’m here tomorrow I’m on your case.”

  He sits there, shocked. Mouth and eyes sex-doll wide. I swallow the handful. Then two fistfuls after it, enough to make me gag a bit, even sloshing down beer.

  The bottle’s empty.

  Sit there, waiting. For the second time in three days, I feel myself beginning to go numb, my head emptying and coldly fizzing from Wyvern drugs, while a Wyvern watches me quizzically. Not the drugs, not yet. Though it means the drugs will work even faster. Christ, how I hate their faces: Max, Vivian, Sandor, that ancient ghoul… Judy too. Just for ridding me of the sight of them, death will be a blessing.

  Not here. Another plan forming. Still catching up to it.

  I stand up.

  “What’re you doing? What’s going on?” Sounding panicked, boyish. Hey, guys, wait up. Gu-ys!

  “I’m leaving. I need to get home.”

  “Wait.” He reaches the door as I do, grabs my wrist. I stare down at the hand encircling me. It’s enormous: these massive fingers, black wires coiling from them. He removes it.

  I slide the door open. Step out into cool air, sunlight. Turn back.

  Sandor in smudgy dark. This huge mess, staring back at me. Petrified.

  “Do you eat other animals?” I say, and slide the door closed.

  §

  “Good girl,” I say to Daisy, still hunkered in the shade. Something I don’t recall ever saying before, I’m not a dog person. Not a pet person in any sense. Cage creatures for cuddling? If she comes at me I have my blade ready.

  §

  Walking down Shields. Walking slower than I should. My legs rubbery, not quite there. Gliding a hair above the sidewalk. Faraway dark oblongs make slow-motion leaps across the cracks, land fizzing on the square beyond. That long moving walkway they used to have at Spadina, transferring people from one line to another. Some strode beside it, impatient: when they matched its pace you both stopped moving and just hung there, side by side. Some people walked on the belt, adding muscle to machine, brief superheroes. But most just let themselves be carried along. Moving without moving. Horizontal balloons. Sailing…

  Right at Crestview. Then the jog, past which the sidewalk disappears. Curb and grass. Crossing Castlewood. Lynette up there. Crying. Phoning. Doing the dishes to distract herself. Giving up, hammering on his door. Crying.

  All just the same. Exactly equivalent ways of doing exactly the same thing.

  Things look large and wonderful. Enlarged. Their outlines sharp, their colours rich and so deep.

  Also faraway. Behind something. Like things coated in clear plastic. Paperweights. Souvenirs.

  A maple key. A yellow leaf. A black ant, stopped on the sidewalk—encased in clear.

  Except the people. Raking lawns. Shooting baskets on the driveway. Coming up Latimer with their bags. These stay free of the clear, it can’t coat them. Because they’re moving? No, this old man too—planted in a lawn chair, striped blanket over his lap. He too has scratchy, shifting edges—duller, hard-to-make-out colours. He and what he touches: chair, blanket, newspaper under his hands.

  His zone. His human sphere.

  Closing window permit. Before all clarit
y disappears, allowed to step for a moment outside the room you’ve been so busy in, and there, in thickening mist, rub a circle with your fist on the pane and peer inside, understanding the mess and order you see within the room, the patterns of the person living in it, what set him going and what accelerated him to fever pitch.

  Or—since likeness is a queen that must lay eggs—say you tinker with a watch that’s breaking down. It keeps bad time and soon will stop altogether. Opening the face, picking gingerly at the gears, you find, in tiny letters scratched inside the cover, the initials of the watchmaker, and know—a calm recognition—who first wound the mechanism and set it going.

  Back up. Old man’s eyes widen in fear as I come up his lawn, but it’s not him I’m after. It’s what stares up from his lap. Vivian’s head. What I glimpsed, floating past. Her face covering the front of the Sun.

  She’s banged up bad. Eyes just slits in blue-black mounds. Puffy blue on one cheek near her jaw, scrape down the other like she’s been dragged. No make-up. Her hair limp, unwashed.

  A brother did her up right. Just right. Lots of colour and ugly, but no cuts to leave scars.

  Homolka’s gambit, with her raccoon eyes. The same exit strategy. What, twenty years ago? How many will remember in the Age of Amnesia?

  Sun-blared caption at the bottom: FACE OF A VICTIM.

  Old man’s eyes staring up. Wide, watery, unblinking. No, I’m not Death yet. Enjoy the autumn light a little longer.

  Moving off, I think I may have to exempt Vivian from my Wyvern hate-on. Reserve a special place for her.

  Vigil under the scorched and decomposing parents. Airlift to the land o’ plenty. Glitterville. Where aunts and sisters vanish. Where brown-skinned dolls get passed from lap to lap, playthings for old men and teenage heirs.

  Just keep crawling out from under. Out and over and up. Out.

  §

  At Eglinton, by Tuscany Cleaners. Stopped near the corner, leaning against the wall of the Latimer. The brick cool against the back of my head, a strip of shade. A cool hand, almost.

  Looking straight across at the red door. Sign beside it: 641. High, wide doors, big trucks blurry behind the glass. The old brick fire station. Brand new EMS down right, pie-slice corner of Chaplin. You take it in, but your eyes come back.

  Red door. 641. Loaded trucks, bulging behind glass. Fire Station 135. These things, they have a meaning—something to tell—but you can’t make it out. Can’t see, can’t hear, clearly enough.

  More than help. But what more is you can’t decide.

  And then I do know, for an instant anyway. Staring at the red door, I see the facts behind it. The truth visits me like a lonely comet from deep space, crosses my sky for a few seconds, and carries on towards some distant star.

  Vivian. She set up my meet with Dr. Wyvern. Max knew nothing of it. Wouldn’t have the stomach for where it would go, and anyway, wouldn’t want to cry for help from daddy yet again. For a serious threat, all right—but not for “Judy’s friend.” Not yet. But Vivian knows people. Has had to learn to read them since squirming out from under her parents’ broiled bodies. She made the call—or had Gwen make it. Dear old Gwen, half-mad with loneliness and dyke-mom yearning for this “fox” she’s always “admired.”

  And then the helpless call to her other lovelorn guardian. Her sponsor. Her foster-father. Who had the run of her girl’s body all his late watch, sweet ripening years of retirement. Maybe she had to seal the deal with a nostalgic hand job. Or maybe just her voice with the right note of promissory pleading and gratitude was as good as a tug through flannel. Who knows what it took to move him? The mention that this annoying person was a particular friend of Judy’s?

  Maybe, not having bodies delivered to him on stretchers anymore, the mere thought of a live one walking in his door unsuspecting was enough.

  Vivian would have told him what he needed to hear. And would have been prepared for how it went, either way. Not many left Dr. Wyvern unscathed—as she had cause to know. Still, ninety-four being ninety-four, if someone did get the drop on him—well, in a world with one less father, she’d be that much better equipped to handle things her own way. Take the next step needed, do what she required—all she’d asked from life, from earliest memory.

  I see it all, so clear, and then it’s gone. The big red truck goes wailing down the street without the red door ever opening.

  §

  Moving farther down. The end of the Latimer. Moving even slower, step by step slower, though I know I should speed up.

  Looking up at the balcony. 501. Straight above. Fear plunge. My insides lurch with it. No one’s at the railing, looking down. He’s inside, arrived already, I see him moving from room to room, uncertain where he should be. Where he should sit or lie. Mattress? Armchair? Floor in Big Empty? Among the far cors?

  No place seems right, seems his, and so he paces between them guiltily.

  You’ve checked out.

  Get inside.

  But no. I don’t. So goddamn stubborn, even now. Picking my way down the short bumpy slope to parking. The garage door standing open for some reason. Only Lucius and I key it open, air it out. No rain for days.

  Tagger’s kraken just as it was. Thrusting black bulbs, thrashing tail and jaws. Never came back to add to it, though I kept expecting him to. No Owner-ordered gray goo either. Stasis. Status quo.

  Stalemate. And both know it.

  Why not send Judy too? Cosy threesome. Throw her into the mix like an unguided missile. Primed with a tale of Dad and Super chumming up, making deals? Nonsense may prevail—better than even odds with Judy, always. On the other hand… only blood and good can come of it.

  Vivian the survivor.

  I stick two fingers as far as I can down my throat. Retch up a brown froth flecked with grit. Not much left of all Sandor’s pills.

  Too late. Behind the play on Wyvern dope, again.

  §

  Stepping inside. Stepping gingerly. Sensation from below all but gone now. The concrete gouged and pitted. Lunar lot.

  Cars in their spots. One to twenty-one. Two between each pair of pillars.

  Mine in number six. Beside Lucius’s pickup.

  Mine?

  Step closer.

  No, not mine. Close, though. Another Honda, gray. Even older. Rust around the wheel wells. Punch-size pockets, scalings along the side panel. The licence dirty, road-bleared.

  Stoop to read it better.

  How—

  White in the corner of my eye. Bandaged face, stepping to me from behind the pillar.

  Big backswing, greedy for it. Get my hand up to catch some of it.

  Crack! Fingers break, my head rocks back with it.

  The hand falls, a shot bird, swoop down after it.

  Whump! Small of the back, the other side. Pain roars up my neck and down my legs, rockets around my head trying to get out. Sink to my knees, then all the way.

  Tucking, curling weakly, trying to keep an arm over my head, but it doesn’t matter, they’re not looking for an open spot, just blasting away, pounding like apes with clubs.

  Amateurs.

  Their bats descend like rain.

  Gray swirls, darkening.

  Mud red.

  Black.

  §

  Waiting for me on the stairs. Just sitting there with her hands in her lap. First kid at school before the bell.

  No memory of coming down. Just got here.

  Wasn’t then was.

  Am.

  Inside’s out now. Facing me. Long cornsilk hair. Bandage where the blood was, shining white. Big bandage on little face: temple to chin, cheek to ear. Some of her hair shaved for it. Stub of nose poking out.

  Doesn’t smile. Or else just faintly, with her eyes. Reaches up her hand. I have to bend to take it. Cool and firm, makes me think of a fish. But
dry. Like talcum.

  She leads me further down.

  One flight. Turn. Another. Our feet padding on the stone. I look down. Mine bare too.

  Nobody in the lower rooms. They only roamed when she was pinned.

  She got free, wrenched herself unstuck, to bring you here.

  Three flights down, she stops. Looks away. The back of her head, corner of the bandage.

  Doesn’t say anything, she can’t, but I understand.

  This is as far as she can go. As far as she can take me.

  A step or two myself. Slowly. Pricklings in my gut.

  Quick pattering. Turn, and she’s running up the stairs. Tiny figure in a white shift fleeing, hard to see already.

  The ground shaking up above me, where she’s gone. Dark slidings, back and forth. Except it isn’t ground. Is your body, being hit. You just can’t feel it anymore.

  Peer down into the gloom, thicker now. Or seems so, since I know how deep I am.

  One step at a time, descend. A long way down but no more turnings. And no sound—none not my own. Soft footfalls.

  Until I reach the bottom.

  Rooms lead off, black. Black openings in stone. Jelly-like, bulging.

  Four, five, six… lots of them.

  A bad smell. Old toilet smell.

  Going back. Can’t go back.

  Keep going. I look up but can’t see her. I’ve never heard her voice before. Didn’t know she had one. She must save it for emergencies.

  Gray fluttering in a room to my right. Not there before, or else my eyes have changed.

  I follow it. The light gains feebly, shows what’s glimmering in silver-grays.

  Which changes once, abruptly, as I near.

  Looking up. Way, way up. Big man, big lady—sky faces—looking down. Smiling.

  Laughing! Mouths wide with it.

  Looking down then, and in. At a scene with three, not two. The picture a dark box. I am the light that opens it. Man sitting cross-legged, woman kneeling beside him. Good-looking people. Man raw and rangy, daredevil smile, dark suit and tie. Woman softly pretty in a tight gray skirt and black sweater, string of pearls. Meek worried eyes.