Losing It

by Alan Cumyn

  In the guest bedroom she dressed quickly and watched her child sleeping in such peace. He was exhausted, poor thing. He’d been so good in spite of all the disruptions. She couldn’t hear Brenda and Doug now. Her own breathing sounded harsh and unpleasant. As she pulled on her things she had the unreal feeling that she might never be back. She might never see her child again. She didn’t plan on leaving, but the whole universe was off its moorings. Nothing could be counted on, houses burned down, people lost their minds. Husbands changed their skin and absconded with sexual anthropologists.

  Julia was walking quickly, grinding her teeth, trying not to think. The frigid wind blasted her face, cut through the flimsy defences of her borrowed coat, sought out her fingers, which were plunged deep in her pockets. She wanted every step to hurt just a little, to stab this is real, this is real. Because she’d been living in a haze for years, she knew it now and wanted nothing more of it.

  She approached the house with trepidation. She hadn’t meant to walk this way, but wasn’t surprised in the end when her legs took her there. The sky was cloudy in patches, the wind pushed the clouds along at a terrific rate. They weren’t keeping their shapes, either, but were rolling and changing like an avalanche in the sky, burying one another, reappearing, hurtling past. Some stars poked through the empty spaces: she could see Orion’s belt, and the bottom of the Big Dipper, but not the handle.

  The house looked dark as a tomb, sombre, desolate, a black shadow compared to most of the other houses on the street, whose porch lights were still burning even though it was past midnight. New boards were up on the remaining broken windows – Donny had come; she’d forgotten completely that she’d asked him. The wood was bright and new, a contrast to the dark, soulless eyes of the undamaged windows. Ironically, the house now looked as if it were undergoing a renovation, as if it would be transformed into something fine and beautiful in just a short time.

  As if the family inside hadn’t fallen in upon itself.

  She walked closer and was so preoccupied with the house that she didn’t notice the black car until she was just about next to it. It was nearly lost in the gloom cast by the neighbours’ Manitoba maple, but when she saw it the cold wind faltered a moment and a surge of heat and anger – and strange relief – ran through her. Bob! But he’d taken the van. What was his car doing here?

  She approached the house, listened intently. Was he in there? What was he doing? Was Sienna with him? It didn’t seem possible, yet all kinds of unbelievable things had happened. She stood still on the front porch, strained to hear anything unusual. Then she tried the front door – still locked. She took the key from her pocket and opened the door, peered into the darkness.

  “Bob?” she called out. “Bob, are you there?” Her voice sounded strange in the altered house, larger than usual though edged with fright.

  No reply, just the complaint of charred rafters, the dripping of water somewhere. She reached to pull the door closed again – her house was scaring her like this. But she heard a noise that made her pause.

  “Bob?”

  “Julia. It’s me!”

  Oh, thank God, she thought. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine. Really, I’m all right,” he said, but he sounded far away, she could barely hear him. “I’ve had a bit of a fall.”

  “Where are you?”

  “Down in the basement, almost directly under the back door. The landing collapsed. I’m going to need a little help.”

  “Stay there,” she said. “I’ll go around.”

  And she closed the door, her mind storming as she walked to the rear of the house. She took the key from her pocket, slotted it in the back-door lock, opened the door, and, standing on the sill, tried to see him.

  “What the hell have you been doing?” she demanded. It was all blackness.

  “I’m all right,” he said again, sounding much closer now. “It’s nothing major. But you’re going to have to get help. Someone’s going to have to lift me out.”

  She waited for further explanation and to gather her own thoughts, to let her heart stop galloping, trampling her brain. But he didn’t say anything else. He was a long silence somewhere down there in the black.

  “How bad are you really? Are you bleeding?”

  “No,” he said after a time. “A bit maybe, it’s hard to tell. My leg is twisted. I can’t get up.”

  “Why in God’s name are you here in the middle of the night? Didn’t you get my messages? Where did you go?”

  “I was too long at the university, I’m sorry. When I got back you weren’t here. So I just wandered in and then -”

  “What do you take me for? How stupid do you think I am? I know all about it.”

  That stopped him. She could hear the panicked intake of breath.

  “What do you know?” he asked flatly.

  “What I know half the fucking world knows,” she said. “But perhaps you can start by telling me about Sienna Chu.”

  “It was a prank!” he blurted. “There’s going to be a retraction. Sienna has a jealous boyfriend, he did the whole thing. He went on the Internet and found all these photographs and then he substituted my face. But they confessed to the dean -”

  “Bob. Stop it!” she said. “You know you’re lying to me. I won’t have it any more. You’re living another life I know nothing about. How do you expect me to trust anything you say? You took her to New York, for Christ’s sakes!”

  She knelt down on the door sill. Her body felt tired and heavy and part of her was yearning to just step over the edge, follow him to wherever he’d plunged. Another part wanted to close the door, abandon him to his fate.

  “This is awful,” he said. When she started to tell him how bloody awful it really was, he said, “Just be quiet, please, and I’ll tell you. Please.”

  So she stayed quiet. She sighed, shifted so that she was sitting now, most of her body huddled out of the direct wind, the backs of her thighs resting against the ragged ends of what used to be the landing, her calves and feet dangling in mid-air.

  “I was smitten by Sienna,” he said. “I will tell you freely, I was dazzled and confused. But nothing happened, not really. She did come to New York, but she stayed in her own room. There were a few … embraces, it was heady and stupid, but I’m now over her, irrevocably. Apparently she’s telling people she’s overdosed – she’s in the hospital, but is all right. God knows what the truth is with her. But I will not be seeing her again. And what I said about the dean was no lie. There is a retraction coming, if it hasn’t been sent already. The Web site has been shut down. So the only wound left, I suspect, is with you and me. It’s a terrible one, I know. I regret everything that happened.” He was silent for a time, and she was about to tear into his pitiful excuse of a story when he said, “I need to tell you something else, I’m sorry. I came back here this afternoon in a panic to try and retrieve some things I’d left. Some … incriminating things, which I was trying to hide from you. No one was here. I have a … kind of a … fantasy. It’s a … private thing.”

  “Oh my God!” she wailed.

  “Shhh. I need to say this.”

  She went rigid, trying to stay quiet.

  “It was something that I’ve held inside and kept all to myself. It should have stayed that way. I was perfectly happy. Except someone stumbled on it -”

  “What do you mean private?” she asked. “How about me? How could you keep something like that from me? You think you can just go around trying on ladies’ underwear and -”

  “Shhhh! Shhh!” he said.

  “What, you don’t like me saying it out loud? Who’s going to find out who doesn’t already know? It’s been broadcast across the fucking planet!” She tried to calm down but she couldn’t. It was outrageous. He was down there still trying to hush everything up, to prevaricate like a bloody politician caught with his cock up his secretary’s skirt.

  “Shhhh,” he said. “This is very difficult for me.”

  “What do
you think it is for me?” she said. “This was no prank really, was it? How could you let this happen?”

  “It was meant to be private,” he said again. “And I was weak, vain, stupid, I have no excuses. I was in a daze, I let her lead me around. I don’t know what I was thinking of to trust her and not you with my secret, if I was going to trust anyone. But I was afraid of how you’d react … needless to say.”

  He sounded subdued, defeated. He said, “I am so sorry. I would give anything – anything – to be able to rewind this week. Just wipe it out, try it again.”

  “Do you really want to go around wearing women’s clothing?” Julia asked. She felt sad, low, still.

  “I don’t want to go around at all,” he said, almost dispassionately. This flat voice in the darkness. “It’s just a quirk of my wiring. I don’t like to think about it even, it’s not for public consumption. I know, I know, it is public now, but I never gave permission. I don’t know why I let her take the pictures. I was in a state of … temporary insanity.”

  “So they weren’t fakes?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, Bob,” she said.

  He was quiet for a time. The wind now was worsening and Julia could feel on the back of her neck the first wet, miserable flakes of snow coming down. She didn’t want to be there. She felt disoriented. It was some sort of answer to have everything out in the open. But what was she supposed to do with it?

  “I know you feel bitter,” he said after a time. “But please don’t abandon me. I will be lost and worthless without you.”

  “You mean if I divorce you over this, the whole world’s going to know for sure.”

  Another silence, and Julia felt as if she’d ground her heel into his wound, but she couldn’t help it. She felt as if she’d been wounded, too.

  He said, “Julia, try to be reasonable. That’s not what I meant. And anyway I don’t care about the whole world.” His voice was finally rising with a sense of purpose. “I care about you and Matthew.” He fell silent again.

  “It’s going to take time for me to absorb all this and figure out where we are,” Julia said at last.

  “Yes. Yes!” he agreed.

  “All right then.” She suddenly felt how cold her hands were, how uncomfortable it was on the perch. “All right,” she said again, as much for herself as for him. What’s next? “Bob, I’m going to go across the street to ask Ray to call an ambulance,” she said.

  “Good. Thank you.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yes. I’m just – I seem to be bleeding a little more than I thought.”

  “Oh, Bob! Hang on!” she said and turned quickly to go. Her legs were stiff and she felt shaky, cold to the core. She started to run. Snow filled the air now, was melting on the ground. She pounded along the driveway and across the quiet street, forced herself to focus on getting to Ray’s door.

  39

  Bob suddenly felt flushed, as if some block in the radiator pipes had given way and now he was wrapped in liquid warmth. Yet it wasn’t liquid, turned as in a dream to heated sand, to something he loved – that was it, the warmth of familiarity, as if he had walked back into his childhood home, miraculously restored, unseen and yet preserved all these decades later.

  It was brown – not the home, which he couldn’t visualize so much as sense somehow in his blood and bones – the feeling was brown, was comfortable, soothing. And she was there, so close now he had a hard time seeing her; she was out of focus, a blur of brownish skin. She’d been lying in the sun, that was why she was so warm and brown. He saw her in a vague way, her nose, the curve of her eyelids, the haze of her hair. His eyes were so close he was conscious of the shadow of the end of his own nose, would pull away in a moment to see her better. But it was fine too to breathe together like this.

  How long had it been? He couldn’t remember, but it felt like centuries, slow accumulations of time, of not recognizing each other. “Hello, you,” he said tenderly, but she didn’t reply – didn’t look quite at him, but didn’t look away either. Their bodies were very close. Of course, they’d been making love, they were still immersed, it was hard to know where the one ended and the other began. That was an important part of the feeling, Bob thought, this comfortable, easy joy of knowing, of not really being separate. And so you are this and we did that.

  She turned then, rolled like an ocean wave, and they were quiet spoons in the soft, warm sand. Her hair smelled of salt and wind, of sweet sweat, of the remnants of desire. She closed her eyes and Bob could feel her almost immediately settling into sleep, the way that she did, holding his hand over her breast, which was as perfect as it was ordinary. It was as familiar as his own body, might have belonged to him at another time, he thought. They’d been together, possibly even been one another in different ages. The idea seemed quite natural, something known but sometimes forgotten, the way that so many important things are forgotten in the mists of living.

  “Stay with me here,” he murmured, trying to make it into a little song, something that might slip through, last somehow. “Stay with me here.”

  In a moment she was on her feet, was brushing the sand off her perfect, her ordinary body, and walking away. He propped himself on one elbow to watch her, and she knew, so let herself sway a bit more than she would have all alone. It was this dance they did. He thought of calling out her name but stayed silent, watched her instead as she waded into the water, not slowing for the first bite of the waves, not speeding up either to put distance between them.

  He wanted to see her face. He knew who she was, of course he did, her hair fluttering now in the breeze, golden brown, down her backside. But he wanted to see her, to memorize her; he wasn’t sure how long it would be until he saw her again. Turn, turn, he thought. He held his breath, waiting.

  She paused, dipped her shoulder as if to do it then, to plunge, but straightened instead and turned to meet his gaze. His smile was reflex, was out of the cage before he could withdraw it. Something was wrong. Her hair was quite dark now, a trick of the light perhaps, but black, actually, and her face, her eyes … her eyes wouldn’t meet his, one went this way and the other was …

  Then she disappeared without a ripple. The water betrayed nothing, no churning of strong legs and feet, no trailing bubbles. He stood then and watched, but the sand, the water, the sun were all harsh as glittering diamonds, and the wind told him nothing. He ran to the edge of the water, felt the splash on his legs as he ploughed forward – cold, but not impossible. A wave hit and he fell, was soaked now, taken by surprise by the saltiness. He tried to gain his feet but where were they? It was hard to know where the beach was, the sky, the world had turned to a turmoil of pounding surf. He spat out a mouthful of water, coughed.

  He kicked his legs – what should have been his legs – felt himself rolling, sinking, changing. The whole world was pulled inside out like an animal being skinned. He felt the corkscrewing, yearning tug of the air, scanned feverishly to find where he’d last seen her …

  There she was in the corner of the room – it was a room, a grey box with a bed and a window, a table, a clock – she was sitting up in the gloom and he could see her from inside. That was the bizarre thing, how normal it felt, to look out through the eyes of Sienna Chu and to think: that man slumped in the corner chair with the balding head, the wisps of black hair, snoring in Chinese – that must be my father. And that woman in the cot next to me, curled in her sweater, the wild white mane, pale complexion – there is my mother. He saw the room from outside and from within her, as if he had stolen into her mind, was tiptoeing around as a burglar might in a sleeping house in the minutes before dawn.

  He tried to poke into her thoughts, as if slowly and silently opening a door in the murk. And immediately he was aware of a strange dust, like eggshell rubbings, or as if she’d spent half a summer grinding pencil shavings into tiny particles then absorbing them into her bloodstream, the lead and the wood together, a soupy glue limping through her body. Alive but dragging, suf
focating, like a huge snake that’s eaten a water-buffalo calf and is bloated in the shade, stuffed for weeks now, not wanting to move, unable.

  And then it was later. Through Sienna’s eyes he could see half a field out the window. Half a grey field between her father and her mother. The tops of traffic, a bit of a light: grey-red, grey-yellow. He could see her parents’ coats piled on a small chair, and grey flowers balanced on an absurdly small bedside table, and one-third of a doorway and a sliver of hall, fractions of people waiting for an invisible elevator to take them away in clumps.

  He hadn’t noticed before, but now great bricks of words lay in rubble in the room: helpless, shattered, dusty, cracked, with broken clinging bits of mortar. Words thrown at moving targets, words stuck together to try to stand up to the winds and rain, words piled in approximations of this and that: this wall will stand for that thing, that act, and over here, this section will be that person, and here is what certain thoughts look like, explanations, and over here a doorway through which we might pass. As if.

  Her mother woke up, looked lost, disoriented for a moment, then the whole history of the current disaster booted up in her mind, took over her features, and she said, “Oh sweetie. Is there anything we can get you? What would you like?”

  What would I like? What would I like? Here I am inside the mind, the body of Sienna Chu, Bob thought, and the world is unbearably heavy, is sad beyond measure.

  “Nothing. Nothing,” he heard Sienna say – a strange version of her voice, heard like this from the inside.

  “Ah!” Bob said, and opened his eyes. Julia was there. She looked tired, devastated, vulnerable.

  “You’re awake,” she said. She turned to the driver – there was a driver, Bob could see and recognize it all in an instant. There was a driver and an attendant and the lights going by were streetlights. “He’s awake,” Julia said to the ambulance attendant. “Lie down. How do you feel?”

  How did he feel?

  He couldn’t say. The moment felt crammed beyond belief, as if it could not contain one more ounce of anguish, joy, relief, fear, anticipation.