by Alan Cumyn
“Oh, baby. Oh, baby, I’m so sorry!” she said, and cuddled him, smothered him against her, held his struggling head away from the monitor. “Turn it off!” she howled. “Please, Brenda, get rid of it!” and she ran with Matthew out of the room, the plastic bulldozer bumping behind as the boy held on, craning his head to see what was so interesting.
34
Bob felt his vision narrowing, a circle of blackness closing in, everything else superfluous except for what was on the screen. Helen’s fingers did not let any single picture dwell for long. They flitted by with just enough force to shatter his life. One, two, three – by the fourth one he had to turn away, reeled against the window frame, against the figure standing there.
“Whoa! Hey!” the man said. It was Gerry Calcavecchia – Bob knew it was, but it didn’t look like him, his face was so distorted and blurred. Everything at once was different. Bob felt awash in malfunctioning sensations that turned the air grey and the floor blood-red, that squeezed all meaning out of sound.
He cried out something anyway and would have hit the man, the hand that was leaden on his shoulder. But he spun instead, heard his name strangely, found himself in the hall lurching like a madman, bouncing off one person and another, then running, running …
Where?
He didn’t know.
Outside. Fleeing, stumbling on, for how long he couldn’t tell. He glanced around in a panic, found himself inside again, somewhere, he wasn’t sure how he’d got there.
“The last days,” Bob said. It was later, but how much later he couldn’t say. He didn’t even know where he was, if it was the same room he’d crashed into or a different one, if he’d been there an hour or a minute. He stumbled on the little platform but kept his feet. The lights were on now. They must think I’m drunk, he thought. Whoever they were. The empty faces, the generations, such a sorry lot, a tiny blur of them in the large lecture hall.
“The last days,” he said again, louder, because they weren’t listening. They were whispering amongst themselves and looking at him. Mocking him, he could tell. The bloody ingrates. “In the last days,” he said, and then he became very still, waited for the rest of the words to come. He felt his back bump rudely against the green chalkboard at the front of the lecture hall and bounce away; he staggered towards the lectern.
“Excuse me, sir, this is Biology 211,” someone said. Bob stared at him until he shut up.
“Poe knew,” he said gravely, trying to get them to understand. “He knew that the marriage to Elmira Royster was never going to happen. He knew that he’d be selling out his soul. You can see it in his face in the last portrait – Excuse me, do you have a problem?” Bob boomed out.
Whoever it was said, “No, sir, no,” and shut up.
Such a stupid, cloying clot of sheep, huddled, heading for the door.
“He was damned and he knew it!” Bob yelled. His fist slammed the lectern. “He was dishevelled and baggy-eyed, his clothes were a wreck, this fastidious man – What are you laughing at?”
“Nothing. Nothing, sir.”
“Are you laughing at me?”
“No. No, sir. It’s just that this is Biology …”
“I will not tolerate snide remarks!” Bob said, and his hand slipped from the side of the lectern. He hadn’t realized how much weight he’d put on it because he started to fall over and had to catch himself. There was a gasp from the students.
“Have you never seen a man in desperate straits?” he asked quietly, and sat on the edge of the platform, put his face in his hands. They were deserting him, nervous little lemmings. He straightened and sat back, his head now against the base of the lectern. They were leaving and others were coming in but stopping at the door when they saw him. Stopping the way you do on the sidewalk when you come across someone stretched out and filthy, lost in the bottle.
Lost in the bottle. Such an evocative phrase. Bob hurled it at the ones by the door. “Lost in the bottle!” he said, and laughed. They didn’t get it, of course not. Students now, they are blank fucking slates. Little sheep people who have no idea. Astonished, uncomprehending faces. Of course they couldn’t know. Poe spent at mid-life, exhausted, reeling about in the rain, lost in the bottle in Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore, dressed in a vagrant’s clothes, staring out at nothing with blank stupidity. A last sensible thought in the hospital, to ask his friend to blow his brains out. Bob looked up. Some bespectacled man in a tweedy jacket was approaching, white hair sprouting from his nose and ears, a look of idiocy in his eyes. “Dr. Sterling,” the man said, smiling like a caricature, a demented professor. “Can I help you? Maybe you need some rest.”
Bob looked at him, waited for him to start to shimmer and then melt, disappear. Waited for everything to disappear. Waited to wake up and find it had all been a gut-wrenching dream that now was over. Julia would be beside him, Matthew sleeping nearby, and it would be summer, no classes, the air would be warm and in the light of day all the ugly details would evaporate into groundless little fears.
Bob waited but the professor with the white hair in his nose kept leaning over, his hand beckoning, smile cracked and almost maliciously innocent. “Just a bit of rest,” the professor said like some kindly, rumpled old children’s-show host. “Just a bit,” the professor said, and took his arm so gently.
Bob was resting. He was sitting alone in a nursing station he hadn’t even known existed. It was a closet-sized space with no windows, just barely enough room for a single bed, made up severely, with starched white sheets and a thick green blanket, a pillow too fluffy and white and perfect for someone’s head. There was a locked cabinet with first-aid supplies, mostly triangle bandages and little packets of disinfectant. A safe-sex poster was yellowing on the wall. It showed a cartoon packet of condoms running along, huffing and puffing, with a message balloon overhead saying, “Don’t forget me!” There was a dispenser for condoms on the wall but it appeared to be empty. Bob imagined the room overwhelmed with young couples ducking in for an afternoon quickie until the unionized care staff, or whoever, complained about the constant upkeep: the sheets to be changed, the condom dispenser to be refilled.
They were already locking the toilet-paper rolls in the washrooms. It didn’t surprise Bob that this nursing station was kept such a dark secret.
They were coming for him and he had to wait where he was. There was going to be herbal tea in the morning and a ruddy-faced eighty-five year-old was going to teach them Tai Chi and someone else was going to do flower-arranging and at night people would scream in the dark. It would be bedlam, but most of the staff would be home in their own beds trying to forget.
There was nothing to do but wait.
He felt terrible. He felt shocked and numb and exposed, blown apart. He felt like he couldn’t move. What was the point? The whole world knew, or thought they knew, his most private thoughts and yearnings. There was nowhere he could go. This was the safest place for now, this airless, sterile little nursing station with the huffy-puffy condom cartoon. He was exactly where he needed to be. He didn’t feel like he could move a limb to help himself. He was just supposed to wait.
He imagined the ambulance roaring along the main routes, the impatient drivers pulling over, wondering what was the disaster this time. Those efficient, smart, strong men and women in white. Coming in great haste to clean him away, wipe up all traces of this messy personal meltdown. They were coming and he was waiting and it was simply a matter of time.
Just to experiment, though, to try something out, he got off the edge of the bed and went to the door. He turned the handle to see if it was locked. It wasn’t. He opened the door an inch, and then he shut it and went back to the edge of the bed, sat down again. The men in white were coming. It would be a relief, no more explanations. He felt so tired anyway. He didn’t want anyone to look at him, much less ask him a question.
He should have seen what Sienna was up to. What had she done, really, to earn his trust? But on the other hand, how could he have been expec
ted to know what she was capable of? And why him, of all people? Why?
How had she seen through him in this way? She must have set out from the beginning to take away everything of value in his life. First his home had been ruined, now his reputation, his career, probably his marriage – of course Julia would find out about this; everyone in the university knew. And he remembered now with a dull, drumming ache that he had left the remnants of his female clothing in the basement, where Julia and the insurance man, what’s-his-name, were probably picking over them this minute. Because everything wasn’t burned. With his luck, the red dress, the incriminating underwear, would probably be among the most prominent surviving items. So if Julia didn’t know now, she would find out very soon.
And why had this all happened? The Sienna he knew was a caring, decent, sensitive person, not a sexual predator, this monster of the Internet. He had denied her nothing. Why would she possibly want to destroy him?
Someone came to the door. Bob watched dully as the handle turned. He was expecting people in white and so sat fooled and stunned for a moment when no one in white entered at all. It was a square woman: she was wearing a dark-blue suit, her head was square and topped in square grey hair, her glasses were heavy and square. And he knew her. It was Dean Rudd. She said, “Bob, this is most upsetting. How are you feeling?”
Bob said he was fine, he was really quite well. He said, “I had no idea this room even existed. How long have I been teaching here?”
“Yes,” she said. The dean looked at him as if she wished she were wearing a white coat and could lead him out the back way to the waiting ambulance. She said, “Bob, some very serious things have happened.” He nodded his head. “Have you heard at all from your student, Sienna Chu?”
The dean had fat legs and was a leading medievalist now turned to processing forms, trolling for endowments, managing student flow, and coping with disasters. Bob had never been a disaster before. Even when he was breaking up with his wife in order to be with his student, Julia, he wasn’t a disaster. He’d been on top of the situation, a consummate professional. Whole sections of the department had had no idea that anything out of the ordinary was happening.
“I think probably the whole school has heard from her,” Bob said. Listless and exhausted as he felt, he still had a hard time keeping the anger from his voice.
“Bob,” the dean said, carefully, like someone chewing a mouthful of fish bones. “Sienna tried to kill herself. She’s resting now in hospital. I just got a call from her parents.”
“Suicide?” Bob said. Now the room seemed criminally small, like some tiny cell reserved for the most repulsive offenders. The walls themselves seemed to be squeezing out the remaining air.
“There were drugs involved, an overdose. She appears to be all right. Most of the problem seems to have been caused by an admirer, a Ricky, who did the number on you on that Web site. Sienna has confessed that the photos were fakes.”
“Fakes?” said Bob numbly.
“Taken from transvestite home pages,” the dean said. “There are thousands of them, apparently. Middle-aged men who dress up and post pictures of themselves. This Ricky combined images from those pages with scanned pictures that Sienna had taken of you in your office. Do you remember her photographing you for the yearbook?” Bob nodded automatically, tried to understand the improbable words, the enormity of these new lies. “They can play amazing tricks with photos these days,” the dean said. “We’re still trying to track down this Ricky. What you need to know, Bob, is that there is a very good chance of a full retraction and apology here. I know you’re probably eager to see your student, but I think it would be best for now if you held off until this is all cleared up. Are you following me?”
Bob blinked, tried to think of what his reaction ought to be. “An admirer … decided to make a fool of me on that Web site?” he asked.
“A jealous computer-science whiz,” the dean said. “All we have is a name, Ricky. But we’ll find out more. I can’t have my staff feeling this vulnerable. But it does seem to be a student prank, if you want to think of it in that sort of category. You know,” she said cautiously, shifting gears, “this stuff, it’s not so unheard-of any more. I’ve already had the campus Gay, Lesbian, and Transsexual Society contact me about your rights. So if you were -” She faltered, seemed to be searching his face for some sign as to how to continue. “I’m sure this is all the last thing you needed after dealing with the fire in your house last night,” she said finally. “I think you should take some time off, Bob. I’ll contact you later, and we can discuss whether you want to lay charges, what sort of disciplinary actions might be taken. I expect an apology will be forthcoming, and as far as I know the Web site has been taken down.”
“Is she okay?” Bob asked finally. “Is Sienna really okay?” It was hard to know what to believe. If she could lie this elaborately about the photos, then the suicide attempt might simply be a ruse as well. But why? All this just to damn then save him?
“She seems to be resting. Again, given the circumstances, Bob, I have to feel that it would be imprudent for you – Bob?”
“I need to go home,” he said.
There was a crowd outside the nursing station, a thicket of heads gathered to watch the continuing collapse and self-destruction. He pushed through them. There was something he desperately needed to do: return to his basement and collect the only physical evidence of his old, irrational, deluded self.
His mind working furiously, he raced down to the parking lot, but the van was gone – towed. Of course it was. He ran back to the department, burst in on Helen, demanded the extra key to his office, which he hadn’t collected before in the shock and confusion of first seeing what Sienna had wrought. Barbara Law was standing by Helen’s desk, the two were deep in conversation when Bob arrived. They looked up, startled, guilty. “It wasn’t me,” he sputtered when he saw their looks. “I need my key,” he said. “Immediately!”
Helen was flustered, took too long trying to find it. Barbara didn’t seem to know where to aim her eyes. It didn’t matter. It would all be cleared up. Bob grabbed the key from Helen when she finally produced it and as he was turning away she proffered a note – a phone message. “Please call your wife,” it said rather baldly, and there was a phone number underneath that he didn’t recognize. It must be Brenda’s, he thought. Julia has probably gone back there. And probably she has heard. She has heard, but there’s no proof. He sprinted to his office, fought the door open, burst in upon his clothes rumpled on the floor. He didn’t care who was looking from the hallway. There were no female things in sight. It could all be explained. He grabbed his wallet and keys from his trousers pocket, didn’t change into his own suit, there wasn’t time, but bundled the clothes under his arm. He rushed down to the parking lot again, and into his car.
Home, home. It was only a five-minute trip. He hit all the lights, changed lanes at exactly the right moment to avoid someone plugging traffic by turning left, sped through a section of construction without slowing. He swerved to avoid a young man who was crossing four lanes of congested traffic on foot like an unshaven immortal, his jaw slack, his lips turned up in a dopey half-grin, and he saw himself, his old self, whistling on the edge of disaster.
No one was at the house. Both the insurance man’s car and the fire-department official’s vehicle were gone. The yellow hazard tape fluttered in the chilly wind. Bob parked on the street and walked to the porch, called out but got no reply. “Thank you. Thank you,” he said softly, and let himself in. It was so much darker than just that morning. It was afternoon now, the sun had moved around to the other side of the house. He entered the hallway carefully, had to wait for his eyes to adjust.
In the kitchen the floorboards protested under his weight and he imagined himself falling through, getting skewered on some blackened rafter. The basement stairs looked shaky too, possibly a bad bet. So he turned around. He had a safer route, the same one he’d taken at the height of the blaze.
> He walked out the front door again and was headed towards the backyard when he caught sight of his neighbour, Ray Little, standing on the edge of the hazard tape, looking at him.
“How’s it going, Bob?” Ray asked. He was a fortyish man, soft-spoken.
“Okay,” Bob said. He wanted badly to just head for the back window, to complete his mission. But now that Ray had seen him he had to walk over and chat. “I haven’t had a chance to thank you for the clothes, Ray,” he said.
“Yeah, sure. Hope they’re not strangling you.” Ray attempted a laugh. “Hell of a blaze.”
“We were lucky,” Bob said. “Lucky we all made it out.”
And they talked about it for several minutes, Ray asking about the support beams and the wiring, and whether the insurance company was being decent about it all, and he mentioned that his parents’ place in Bells Corners had burned down four years before. “That house had been in the family for four generations. It had to be gutted. All the old furniture was ruined. We had letters that were over a hundred years old, pictures. It doesn’t matter how much money you get in settlement, you can’t replace those memories.”
“That’s so true,” Bob said, and he felt it in his bones. And how good it felt too, to stand and have a normal neighbourly conversation.
“My mother and father never recovered, really. I mean, they were safe, but the shock of it, the stress. Their health started to go almost immediately.”
“That’s awful. Just terrible,” Bob said.
“But you know those insurance guys, they’re just trying to rip you off most of the time. The one who handled my parents’ file, you won’t believe this, he insisted -”
Bob cut in. “You know, I have … I have a thing I have to do,” he said vaguely. “In the back. But I’ll catch you later.”
