The Glass Harmonica

by Russell Wangersky

  The RCMP officer who came in to see me at the hospital said I’d been in “a trademark moose/vehicle accident,” and he slapped his black notebook closed when he said it, like he was disciplining an inattentive student. “Nothing you could have done about it probably. Just bad luck.”

  Small consolation, that. Especially with the way he left the “probably” just hanging out there, like there was always the chance it was all my fault after all.

  The moose slid straight across the hood when I hit him, breaking in through the windshield with his back and then sliding right over me into the back seat. Make yourself comfortable, Mr. Moose. Make sure your seat belt’s on—mine was, and that didn’t make anything any easier.

  The moose was panicked and dying and trying to get away, and it started kicking out wildly, its hooves tearing out the ceiling of the van, tearing into the seats. The police officer showed me pictures of it, sure I’d be interested. The hoofs were tearing into me—into my back and neck, while I was safely pinned in place by my seat belt and all the bent metal.

  And three other cars stopped right after the accident, even before the police got there, but the drivers couldn’t even get near me until the moose was finally dead and not jerking around anymore.

  They needed a tow truck. Not just for my car, but to haul the moose carcass back away from me, and I could smell blood and shit and blown-apart moose guts for most of the time I was awake. I was slipping back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. Luckily, the consciousness part didn’t continue when they were taking the car apart to get me out.

  I woke up later in the hospital, not even sure at first how I got there, and by the time I’d really figured it out, really started to remember things and join them up with the scraps that people were telling me, they’d shifted me out of what they call “acute care” and into the much more slow-motion kind of thing, long-term care, the kind of place where the doctors come by every week or so to measure your incremental progress instead of coming in every day to check how you’re doing. You work real hard, gain an inch here and there, and they write it down in your file and nod a lot.

  They tell me there’s six months ahead of me in a wheelchair anyway, best-case scenario, and I can’t shake the clear feeling that I’m just some poor slug who met a moose on his way back in from Clarenville, the latest unlucky one of the collection of unlucky they’re more than used to seeing in here. This is the last refuge for the winners of the losers’ lottery, accidents and strokes and the whizz-bang aneurysm patients who started off with a massive headache because a vein let go up there in their head somewhere, and now they can’t pull up their pants. We’re all in here, dribbling and moaning on cue.

  In here: here is a rehabilitation hospital called the Miller Centre, where some people come to try to recover and others come simply to give up and wait for the regular small thrill of a tepid dinner and fresh linen. It’s a place for the terminals and the slow-movers—the slow-movers being the ones who recover but who are recovering nowhere near as fast as they’d like to.

  Luckily, I think they’ve got me classed as one of the slow-recovering ones. They keep telling me it’s going to be a real long time, and they’re pragmatists about it. Like, “You’re going to be here long enough that pretty much everyone’s going to stop visiting you. So, you should get ready for that.” It comes out like they have a program, and the very first item on the agenda is making sure I don’t think I’m just going to get up and walk out of here any time soon. Tamp down the expectations good and hard, it’s better for everyone later if no one’s expecting anything good.

  It’s tough-love kind of stuff, and fair enough for them. I mean, how many people are they supposed to put up with, sitting around and just blubbering away instead of getting down to business? It would drive me mental to have to put up with that, the blubbering. But the slow progress is driving me mental anyway. Some of my day is spent in rehab, but the rest is just plain waiting—holding the television-channel changer buttons down while it cycles through channels I don’t want to watch, or else being pushed from spot to spot so that the scenery changes but your perspective doesn’t. Three and a half feet high always, upper body fixed in a brace, wheels out on both sides of me. Roommates who are stroke victims with blank looks on their faces, so that you look at them and think, “Who knows what’s going on inside that melon?”

  The staff are evil enough here in rehab that, as soon as they could, they arranged a blanket over my knees and lugged me out into the cold of May-month, so that I could see beyond a hospital room, and see all the other stuff I’d been trying to forget that I was missing. I think of them all back there at the desk, coffee breaks all around because the crips are out for their little look at what they’ve lost and what they should be trying extra-hard to get back. Like the sun on your face, the first of the spring leaves coming out, that rain-metal smell of the spring air. They were wheeling me out and then just stopping wherever they liked, like I was due for my regular three-quarters of an hour of sun, or like they were practising their parallel parking so they could get it right for another patient who really counted.

  Always parking us in the same place, for the same small collection of minutes every single sunny day.

  And they never, ever, ask if this is where I want to be.

  They don’t know that I’m looking straight across at the flat black roof of the house where I grew up, right down there at the corner of McKay Street, number 2. It used to be a kind of ochre-red. I don’t think it is anymore, but I mostly see the roof from here. And what a small town this really is: after they’d been bringing me outside for two weeks, I found one of my fellow sun worshippers is Evelyn O’Reilly, and she’s lived at 32 McKay Street for just about forever. Except this is just a husk of her, her mouth all caved in like they took all of her teeth away and she can’t remember how her mouth is supposed to work.

  Mr. O’Reilly keeps coming in to see her, and he recognized me. “Keith,” he says sharply, sticking out his hand at me and just letting it hang there, like I’m supposed to reach up from my swaddling and grab it, and since I don’t, he’s confused about what the next step is supposed to be. His name stuck out in the air too, final, like it always has to have a period on the end of it, big and black and obvious. There’s a lot of him like that—stuck out in the air, like he’s always known exactly what it is he was supposed to be doing, but now that’s all shot to hell and none of the pieces make sense anymore. He’s always moving her chair to keep her in the sun every time the shade moves across her, like kindness in overdrive, caught up in doing every little thing right because the big ones are so far out of his control. And there’s something about his mouth too, something wobbly, like he’s trying to find words that aren’t there anymore, as if he’s moving his tongue around in there and finding spots where molars are suddenly missing and he doesn’t know what to do about it.

  My mom knew Mrs. O’Reilly, but she always said she wasn’t easy to get to know well, that she had a way about her, “like she was always thinking of something way up over my head,” my mother used to say. I think Mrs. O’Reilly seemed that way to everyone—like she was slightly higher in the air than everyone else. My mother and her would see each other on the mornings when the city was picking up the garbage, each of them out to the curb with that same last bag, the stuff their husbands could never catch on to getting. With Mom, it was always the trash can in the bathroom; it was like Dad had a blind spot, could never figure out there might be trash in there too. And it was like Keith O’Reilly had the same disease.

  The first thing Evelyn said to me at the hospital was, “I was going to be a teacher.” She said it as clear as that, too, clear as glass.

  The only other thing she said was once when Keith O’Reilly was there and he picked her hand up off her lap, and she pulled her lips right back from her teeth and said, “Don’t ever touch me again, Glenn,” and it sounded nasty, like when a strange dog curls its lips right back when you reach down to pat
it. Keith dropped her hand like it was burning hot.

  “I didn’t have a choice. Maybe I should’ve . . .” Keith said, the words running out of him quick and trailing off at the end like they lost all their pressure, just hanging there like a balloon low on air, and then he didn’t say anything else. She didn’t move. There was no sign that she heard him at all. I watched him leave soon after, and I remember that he just looked small, like a few inches had come out of the middle of him somewhere.

  The way she said, “I was going to be a teacher”—that stuck with me. She said it with the sentence rising at the end like she regretted it. Except I knew she had never been a teacher, had never been anything at all other than Mr. O’Reilly’s wife and Vince’s mom. Vince who got away—it’s strange, but that was the way I always thought about him. Everybody on the street fixed in place, like this was where we came from and this is where we were meant to stay, but Vince had found a way to jump on a plane and not even get dragged back by the phantom homesickness that’s really a kind of sideways slip in confidence.

  I didn’t—I didn’t get away, that is—but there it is; to each his own, everyone’s different, even if they plunk us all down in a wheelchair eventually and treat every one of us like we were absolutely, precisely identical. We all want plastic bowls of vegetable soup, and we all want those soft little balls of barley with their stiff little spines hiding in there. Fuck, I hate barley.

  We’re like checkers, we are, all lined up somewhere while the people who play the game are back there getting themselves coffee and Danishes and complaining about how tough they’ve all got it, humping us out of bed day after day while they’ve still got two good arms and two good feet and they get to walk around without even thinking about how much we’d like to be doing exactly that. What I wouldn’t give to be able to be changing some old-timer’s diaper right about now.

  It’s the same row of us every day, and most of the time the only ones I recognize are Evelyn and a guy who was my roommate for a couple of weeks before surgery. Something happened in the operation: sorry, drew your ticket and, guess what, you lose again. Something went wrong and it didn’t fix anything. He’s in pain all the time now, so he’s got his own room where the constant moaning can’t get on anyone else’s nerves. Even the nurses can’t handle it, they’re always slapping his door shut and keeping their faces down at the desk.

  They never take us out when it rains, because I guess we might melt in the rain like the Wicked Witch of the West or something, or else because we’re not really supposed to know that it ever rains, because we’re just too damned fragile to be able to take anything like that on top of everything else we’ve got to deal with.

  But I’m a lot less fragile than anyone thinks. I’m pretty sure that, by now, I can put up with anything.

  Anything but him, anyways.

  The problem is that, when they’ve got me outside, I keep seeing him. There he is again, every single day, boiling around the corner on his springy, stringy legs.

  Him: he’s some fifty-year-old bastard in flippy little dark blue running shorts and a tight T-shirt, bald as an egg in front, and where he’s not bald, his hair is shaved down into a perfectly formed grey fuzz. He waves to us every single time he goes by, the same condescending little half wave, like, “Sorry you’re so wrecked up, but look, I’m not,” or maybe, “Sorry, you pathetic potted plant, but at least you’ve got someone to turn you around towards the sun.”

  It wasn’t so bad at first, because he’s just such a strange-looking guy that you could almost laugh out loud. Long shanks on him, that kind of stretched-out, extra-long build, long, flat muscles and businesslike tendons as fat as rope in the backs of his legs holding the whole assembly together. And he runs with a stride that has something like a little hop at the end of it, like there’s an instant in the middle of his step where nothing at all is even touching the ground, like he is defying gravity. “Look, I’m doing all this running and I’ve still got energy to spare, more energy than you’ll ever have again.”

  And that was the start of it. Like I don’t know all about energy.

  When they get me propped up between the goddamn parallel bars, I’m like some kind of crip Olympian, I’m sweating like a racehorse after even the first couple of steps, just trying to get my legs out in front of me one at a time, and it’s the hardest work I’ve ever done in my life. And Mr. Runner-man doesn’t have someone half a room away all the time barking at him, “Keep it up, keep it up, Robert, that’s good.” And I keep hammering away, the sweat pouring down off me in streams, stinging my eyes because I can’t let go of the bars to wipe it away without running the risk of falling flat on my helpless ass. “Good boy, Robert. Good boy. Keep it up, you’re doing great.”

  Yeah, doing great: all of point two on a scale of one to ten.

  I don’t even know the guy’s name. And fuck, I hate seeing him. I hate seeing him more than any other single thing alive.

  109

  McKay Street

  EDYTHE PURCHASE

  JULY 15, 2006

  EDYTHE PURCHASE remembered the outside of her house best, remembered it brightly, precisely, like she had simply willed herself never to forget it. White siding, small sliding windows, the number in black on the right-hand side of the door. Even the little glowing orange eye of the doorbell.

  She practised every day, remembering it as if she were in the process of focusing her eyes and staring right at it, trying to draw it up sharp in front of her and fix it in her memory with glue. They can’t take that away, she thought. They can’t take that away, even if the law seemed to let them take everything else.

  Edythe knew she would remember the inside of the house better if she’d had the chance, if she’d even guessed for a moment that they were coming. I could have used my eyes like a camera, she thought, just like I did outside, snap, snap, so that it was all safe and locked away in my head perfectly. She’d done the outside of the house while they were trying to put her in the car, and she was proud of that, proud of remembering to take a crucial few moments and get a clear, solid image.

  Inside, she could remember the living room and the kitchen, but not as well as she would have liked: she couldn’t open the drawers, and her only memory of the backyard was with it always in bloom, as if winter never ever came. She tried hard not to think about the other parts, about being loaded into the car and taken away like a sack of potatoes, the woman in the car calling her Mom and telling the doctors that it couldn’t go on the way it had been going.

  “She’s calling the power company ten or fifteen times a day now,” the woman had said while Edythe looked around the room—a waiting room, she decided, or an examining room, and there was a man in a white coat, all dressed up like a doctor, although you couldn’t be too sure. People can pick any getup they like, Edythe knew, passing themselves off as anything at all. That’s why you have to be careful at the door, she thought. Just close it quickly—or don’t even answer it at all.

  She looked at the man in the white coat again. Anyone can nod and take notes on a clipboard, she thought. You don’t need a medical degree for that.

  “She tells them that there’s a problem with the electricity, and they have to come, even if they’re sure it’s going to be nothing.” The woman stopped talking, looked at Edythe and then leaned in close to the man in the coat. As if I’m hard of hearing, Edythe thought, and I most certainly am not. “The power company guys have taken to pretending they’ve found something and tell her it was a good thing she called. Otherwise she just keeps calling them back, over and over, all night long, saying the problem’s come back and they have to check it out all over again. And then, if that doesn’t work or if they don’t come fast enough, she calls the fire department.” The woman shook her head. “That’s only part of it. She’s told the police everything under the sun, they don’t believe a word she says anymore. The police say they’d charge her except that it’s not really her fault, the way she is.”

  What is sh
e talking about? Edythe thought. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, and that’s why you need the fire department. You don’t just wait to die there in your bed. But Edythe didn’t say anything out loud, and the man in the white coat wasn’t paying attention to her anyway.

  Edythe hated it when people did that: when they talked about you and all around you, and if they ever got around to speaking to you at all, they either yelled or treated you like you were a complete simpleton. And you call the power company when there are electrical problems—you’re supposed to, she thought. They have advertisements on the television telling you to do just that, for God’s sake. And when you hear buzzing and crackling sounds in the wires, there are obviously serious problems. There is such a thing as a short circuit. They are the kinds of things that start electrical fires and burn you to death in your sleep. Not a day goes by, Edythe thought, when you don’t hear about a fire somewhere in the city started by an electrical problem. Old houses, old neighbours.

  “She doesn’t remember my name or Bob’s, or Dennis, and she looks at us like we’re total strangers,” the woman said.

  “Tests first,” the doctor said to the woman while he wrote in a file. Edythe noticed how the heavy paint was bubbling up at the tops of the walls, as if there had been a leak that had been painted over instead of being fixed. A large poster of a man on one wall, stripped away to his arteries and veins. A blood pressure cuff hanging from a box on a wall. One of those lights for looking in ears. So it’s an examining room after all, she thought. Or it’s supposed to look that way.