Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  “It shouldn’t have been enough to hold her down,” Julia said. “It was horrible.”

  And while she was talking, Bob was reminded of the thousand chains holding him in place – and how wonderful they were, how lost he would be without this woman holding him to a semblance of normal life.

  “What’s happened with your mother?” he asked.

  “She’s all right,” Julia said, and she explained it all: her mother wandering in Hog’s Back, the ricer in the water, how she was sedated in the horrible hospital room. “There were scratch marks on the walls,” she said, “and it smelled like old urine, my God, you’d think they never cleaned the place. It would drive anybody crazy to be there. And Fallowfields is so incompetent …”

  There was a sound at the door, someone fiddling with the handle then a quick knock. “Housekeeping!”

  “Oh no. Excuse me, Julia,” Bob said, and draped the skimpy towel over his middle. “Please come back later!” he shouted in the direction of the door.

  It opened anyway and a sturdy-looking Latin American woman poked her head in.

  “Please come back later!” Bob repeated.

  “Oh! Yes, sorry!” she said, and took a good look nonetheless.

  Sienna was right behind her in the hallway, evaporated the thousand chains in a single glance.

  “Julia, listen!” Bob said quickly into the phone, panicked and almost dropped the towel as the door closed. “My colleagues are here and I have to get going. I’ll call you, all right?”

  “Oh,” she said, an ocean of disappointment charged into one syllable.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry!” Bob said, and had the phone halfway down before he pulled it up to his mouth again and said, “I’m so sorry about your mother. I’ll call you later!” But the line was already dead.

  “Sienna!” Bob took two strides towards the closed door then turned to the dresser and threw on a pair of pants and a shirt before sticking his head out in the hallway. She wasn’t there any more. The cleaning woman was halfway into someone else’s door, her vacuum and cart behind her. Bob walked down the corridor in his bare feet, looked around the corner, saw the elevator waiting area was empty. He pressed the button to go down. He waited, and in the hall mirror he saw an unshaven, aged, hungover-looking man in shirtsleeves and pants with no shoes or socks. His hair was wet and uncombed, his face looked ghastly.

  Before the elevator arrived he turned and walked back to his room. He felt a momentary surge of panic when he realized the door had closed and locked behind him. But his card key was in his pocket from yesterday. I’m lucky, he thought. Despite myself, someone is watching over me.

  Bob made it to the conference hall just as people were getting out of the panel discussion on Poe as critic. He scanned the faces emerging from the auditorium: mostly greying, time-worn men and women like himself, talking in clumps of twos and threes, conference binders clutched to their sides.

  “So,” a voice said behind him, and he turned to see someone familiar, but whose name escaped him. “How is the conference treating you?” what’s-his-name asked. A very solid, pear-shaped man with drooping jowls and a shiny pink scalp.

  Davis, that’s who it was. What’s-his-name Davis. Who taught at –

  “I’m fine, fine!” Bob said, shaking the man’s hand. Penn State. Penn State? Or was it Arizona?

  “Started to lose me, I’m afraid,” Davis said, shaking his head. “Once we get post-postmodern I have a hard time keeping up. I thought Lewis was right on, though, when he talked about our culture’s mortal fear of primordialism.”

  “Gosh, it’s been a long time,” Bob said.

  “It certainly has. I’m sorry I missed you yesterday,” Davis said. “I heard you got a little flummoxed by the slide machine. Are you still – where are you, anyway? You’re way up in -”

  “Ottawa, yes,” Bob said. “And you’re -”

  “Rice, still. Assistant head of the department, actually,” he said, and made a little noise in his throat, a trumpeting burp as if to make it sound at the same time insignificant and monumental. “I’ve published a new book, as it turns out,” Davis said, and while he explained Bob didn’t listen. He was scanning the crowd for Sienna. Minutes later he was aware of Davis still talking about his book. “I see it as a real bread-and-butter, middle-stream reassessment. You might think about it for your freshmen.”

  “Yes. It sounds good,” Bob said.

  “I could send you an order form,” Davis pressed.

  She wasn’t anywhere. Bob saw Suddle-Smythe, but he was talking with some other woman, a tall brunette with black horn-rimmed bifocals that she kept on a neck-strap, somehow making them look elegant.

  Bob relinquished his business card and clapped Davis on the shoulder as he took his leave.

  “We’ll have to have you down to give a talk,” Davis said. “I heard you were working on the Eureka theories.”

  “Just some preliminary thoughts,” Bob said.

  He stepped among the bodies, strained to see. She would stand out in a crowd like this. Suddle-Smythe approached him and introduced the tall brunette, Elizabeth Jersey, a nineteenth-century specialist from UCLA. Bob shook her hand pleasantly and asked Suddle-Smythe straight out if he’d seen Sienna.

  “She was here this morning,” Suddle-Smythe said, looking around. “That stunning undergrad,” he explained to Elizabeth. “She has a first-rate mind,” he said to Bob.

  “She was here but then she left?” Bob asked.

  “She can’t have gone far,” Suddle-Smythe said.

  But she was nowhere to be seen. Bob waited in line at the cafeteria for lukewarm soup and plastic-wrapped crackers, and sat through a dreary meal with a stolid grey-suited man from somewhere in the Midwest who’d thoroughly researched Poe’s periodic bouts with plagiarism, and with a tiny woman in an olive-green dress and with a terribly receding chin whose father had read her “The Pit and the Pendulum” every night for a year as her bedtime story.

  “He worked on an assembly line. He liked to do things over and over,” she said. “He could recite whole paragraphs feverishly. I think he would have done well in amateur theatricals. Are you looking for someone, Bob?”

  “No. Yes,” Bob said, caught out, reddening slightly.

  She wasn’t there in the cafeteria, and she wasn’t in the afternoon seminar on Poe’s tortured relations with his sometime-wealthy adoptive father, John Allan. Bob felt himself grow more agitated and restless as the afternoon wore on. Elizabeth Jersey approached him in the break and asked if he was all right. “You look quite pale,” she said with concern, and he did feel that way, sickly, nearly faint.

  “No, no. I’m fine,” he said. “I’m just, I’m fighting something. I think it was a bit of food poisoning from the airplane yesterday.”

  “Maybe you should sit down,” she said, but he insisted that he was better off on his feet for a while.

  “There’s a very pretty atrium down this way,” she said, and so he went with her, along a corridor and up some stairs and then around a corner. It wasn’t a large space, but there was room for a stand of tropical trees, some marble benches, and a glimpse of now-grey sky.

  “The secret police in Canada are called CSIS,” Bob said as they sat on one of the benches, which was much warmer than he expected, passively heated by the morning’s sunshine. “Canadian Security Intelligence Service. They have a beautiful new building in east Ottawa, out in the country, and they put up a very impressive central atrium around some trees that were there. But they paved around the roots, or something, and the trees died, so they glued on fake leaves. You have to get pretty close to tell. A friend of mine from political science was doing some work for CSIS and he couldn’t help himself, he jumped up and grabbed one to get a good feel.”

  “These are real,” Elizabeth said, and closed her eyes for a moment, breathed in the warm air. She had very large hands, a bit bony now; they would have been elegant in her youth. Most of her fingers and both thumbs were ringed, except
for the fourth finger on her left hand. She caught him looking and said unexpectedly, “Yes, that’s right, I am newly divorced.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said.

  “Never marry an academic,” she said, smiling sharply. Her eyes were painfully bright and she held herself unusually straight.

  “Your ex-husband’s a professor?” Bob asked.

  “He’s a serial philanderer,” she said. “He cannot resist young skin. At one point he actually made reference to himself and Clinton. You know how Clinton claimed he was the chubby one in school, never popular with girls? And so when he got in a position of authority and attraction he couldn’t help himself.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said uncomfortably. The air seemed much warmer suddenly, his tie too tight.

  “You don’t remember me,” she said softly, and Bob was gripped with a terrible thought – did I sleep with her? It might have happened years ago, in the wild days. She must’ve been a beauty. But no, he would’ve remembered.

  “Have we met?” he asked haltingly.

  “It was in San Diego. You brought your wife, Julia. I got to know her better than I did you. She and I had some wonderful long chats, walking in the evening. I remember she was so nervous about her paper. What was it on? Poe’s sense of the feminine, I think.”

  “Oh, yes,” Bob said, brightening, and he almost said, “She wrote that for me, I was her supervisor,” but caught himself. Instead he said, “I think I remember you.”

  “She has something, you know,” Elizabeth said. “A real spark. Well, you know. She has so much energy and passion, she must be doing wonderful work now. Did she finish her Ph.D.? Is she teaching somewhere?”

  “She’s taking a break,” Bob said, looking around to see if there might be a means of easy escape. “We have a child now, a little boy,” he explained. “And she’s completely into it, as you might expect.”

  “Oh, congratulations!” Elizabeth said. A warmth flooded her eyes and seemed genuine. “You must be so proud!”

  “Yes. Yes,” Bob said.

  “We never had children. Burt didn’t want them, he thought they’d take up too much time, destroy our careers. Then I found out what was taking up all of his time.”

  “I’m sorry,” Bob said yet again and he looked at his watch. “Probably we should -”

  “I understand you’ve come to this conference with a stunning undergraduate,” Elizabeth said then, dangerously. “Can I just ask you something?”

  Bob’s eyes jumped. “Uh, probably we should be heading back-”

  “Just for my own edification. For my own struggle with truth,” she said. Her lips were pulled tight now and she was suddenly working hard to maintain her composure.

  “The next session is just about to start.” He glanced wildly at his watch and started to rise, but she jerked him back down by the tail of his jacket.

  “I’d just like to know, would you ever consider driving over Julia with your car?”

  “What?”

  She was furious now, her eyes hard buttons of accusation. “I mean, you are heading out of your driveway and there she is, standing with her back turned. Would you ever consider just ploughing her over?”

  “No!” Bob said. He did get to his feet this time, stepped away to look at her in surprise. She was crying now, holding herself, her thick brown hair mopped across her face.

  “Would you ever … take her by the throat and throw her down the stairs?” she asked.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” she said, not looking at him. “You just don’t want to think about it!”

  Bob turned and fled. He didn’t know where he was walking, it was just away, anywhere away. Along the hall, down the stairs, turn the corner, along another hall, up some more stairs … Not to the conference room. It was some kind of academic wing, lecture halls to the left and right. The air was draining away and the centre of his vision was filled with a bright, hard light. He stopped to rest against a pebbly, painted wall, tried to gather himself. What was happening with the air? He loosened his tie, sank down to a squatting position, closed his eyes, but the hard brightness only seemed to grow, and now someone was pressing a needle in his chest, a sudden hot point of pain, and he felt his left side grow numb. Not now, he thought. No. And struggled back to his feet.

  Relax. Relax! He puffed his cheeks and blew out, out, out. Shook his shoulders, rubbed his eyes till the brightness subsided, the needle receded. This had happened before. It wasn’t a heart attack. It was anxiety.

  He massaged up and down his left side, stretched his leg, stepped tentatively down the hall and took a series of deep breaths.

  It was all right. Everything was fine.

  13

  “I don’t understand why you’re holding me here.” Lenore couldn’t remember being angrier. She was belted into bed in a filthy room that smelled of urine and had nothing else, nothing, besides the bed, a barred window, a hideous door, and walls scratched with disturbing messages. Die, You Fuckheads. Why are you persecuting me? See you again in hell. And, strangely, I love you Loxi. She had a sharp pain in her bladder and the doctor, a young man she’d never seen before – his eyes were magnified enormously behind thick glasses, she would have remembered that – was spending more time looking at her chart than he was at looking at her. He was a tall man with sloping shoulders and a goatee. Why couldn’t men shave any more? “The operation is over, isn’t it?” Lenore asked. “You are going to let me go to the bathroom, aren’t you?”

  “Do you feel like getting up?” the doctor asked.

  “Well, if you must know, I’m ready to burst!” she said. “Untie me, for God’s sake!”

  The doctor looked at her curiously, made a note on the chart – he had to hold it quite close to his face to be able to see it – then undid her straps.

  “Where are my clothes?” Lenore demanded.

  “You should probably stay in your gown while you’re here,” the doctor said.

  “What’s your name, by the way?” Lenore asked. She sat up briskly.

  “Dr. Halloway. Are you feeling better, Mrs. Carmichael?”

  “I’m in considerable pain. Please turn your head if you won’t give me my clothes.” There was no curtain, even. This was the oddest sort of hospital room.

  Dr. Halloway blushed suddenly, hesitated, then turned his head. Lenore struggled out of the bed, pulled off a blanket and wrapped it around herself, then hobbled to the door. She was so stiff and sore! It must be from the operation.

  She tried the handle.

  “Why have you locked me in? Do you want me to wet myself? No wonder it stinks in here!”

  “I’m sorry! Of course!” Dr. Halloway said and hurried to unlock it with his key. “You’re feeling … quite a bit better, then?” he asked.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, I have to pee!” Lenore said. “Which way?”

  The young doctor led her down the hall. It was a madhouse. A ghastly relic of a man with vacant eyes and a permanently opened mouth – and no teeth, for that matter – sat in a padded chair repeatedly tapping the floor with his cane. A young woman in a stained, torn yellow sweatshirt twisted her hair around and around a pencil, appeared completely and lumpishly bound to her wheelchair until she turned to look at Lenore, then got up suddenly and disappeared into a room. A boy, barely a teenager, with a shaved head and sunken eyes, was staring gloomily at the wall of his room.

  “I have private insurance, you know,” Lenore said to Dr. Halloway. “You didn’t have to bring me here.”

  “The bathroom is this way,” he said.

  “This is what health care has come to?” Lenore asked. “It was a success, wasn’t it?”

  “Uh, health care?” the doctor asked.

  “My operation!” Lenore said.

  Dr. Halloway looked at his chart again. He doesn’t know what I’m in for, Lenore thought. They’ve bungled my file.

  “You didn’t have an operation, Mrs. Carmichael,”
the doctor said uneasily. “But you do seem to be much better than you were last night.”

  They found the washroom then and Lenore hurried in. It had a single toilet and a sink but no lock; she was sure one of those psychological patients was going to burst in on her at any moment. So she hurried, felt great relief when her bladder released.

  “Is there someone I can talk to?” she asked politely, when she got out. “Somebody who has some idea about what’s going on?”

  “I think I can fill you in,” Dr. Halloway said. He started walking back towards the prison room, but Lenore stopped. She didn’t want to go anywhere near it again.

  “You’re obviously very junior,” she said, trying not to be cutting. “You don’t even know about my operation, and you seem to have me confused with someone else.”

  “I actually admitted you late yesterday,” Dr. Halloway said. “And I have consulted with your regular physician, Dr. Beamus. He was here last night to examine you. Do you remember that?”

  Lenore bit her lip and tried to remain calm. He towered over her, it was unsettling.

  “I came in last night with my husband,” she said firmly. “The operation was this morning. I do remember that very clearly. I counted backwards from one hundred, got to ninety-six before the gas took effect. Dr. Beamus did not perform the operation – he’s not a surgeon, is he? It was a different doctor. I’m afraid I can’t remember his name at this exact moment. But Dr. Beamus recommended him. When my husband comes back he’ll straighten you out. In fact he’ll probably want to pop you on the nose for your impertinence. Can you please get me my clothes? I really feel I should go.”