Sweet Affliction

by Anna Leventhal

  “Yeah,” said Marcus, “something like that.”

  “Poor little guy.”

  “Mmm.”

  On the other side of the fence a voice said “Here comes the cheese!”

  Sally led a monthly workshop in something she called Aromemorial Therapy. She invited participants to bring an object with strong ties to a personal memory. Using a combination of distillation and alcohol infusion they created an “essence” of that object, which they bottled in brown glass containers. Uncapping the bottle releases an aroma which, Sally believed, accesses hidden memories and heals trauma.

  Sally’s room was full of these bottles, ones she’d made herself and ones left over from workshop participants who never came back for the second day. There were teddy bears, old shoes, notebooks, mittens, coffee mugs, all varieties of mundane knickknacks, made mute and nostalgic by the brown glass, like sepia-tinted photographs. She called it the archive of trauma.

  As Alex walked down Champagneur toward the tracks, he saw the guy who panhandled in the neighbourhood race by, dragging his plaid granny stroller behind him. Alex noticed he’d gotten a haircut—a good one, in fact. Where does a homeless guy go to get a haircut? The guy reached the fence, lofted the stroller over, and took the chain-link easily, hopping it in a couple of fluid thrusts. He picked up the stroller from where it landed and sped over the tracks, repeating the movements on the opposite fence.

  Alex set the box down and adjusted his shoulder bag, in which he carried a rusted trowel and a bag of seeds. It still got hot out those days; only at night did the wind sometimes carry that smell of cold glass and dead leaves. Alex picked up the box again, trying to ignore the shift of weight inside it.

  Hall had died early that morning, while Alex was asleep. Around five a.m. exhaustion had overtaken his vigil, and Hall had used that opportunity to slip the surly bonds of earth, collapsing, as Alex saw when he woke up, half inside his food dish, his back feet poking straight up in the air. Alex had lifted him from the cage, cleaned him up, and wrapped him in a handkerchief. He set off for the burial on foot. Lynnie had offered to come with him but Alex declined her company. Marcus had said nothing.

  In an alleyway Alex saw a woman in niqab, the shape of a narrow archway, playing soccer with a little boy. She lunged gracefully, blocking his arcs. Behind the pair a billboard showed a black and white photo of a man in his underwear. He lounged in a posture of tensed repose, like a jungle cat. Alex remembered another time in this alleyway, walking with Sally and talking about a guy they knew who took all his conquests on the same date, a tin-can barbecue and bottle of wine by the train tracks. Alex had lived here long enough that his memories had memories.

  When Alex reached the hole in the fence behind the auto shop, he ducked through. The train tracks stretched in either direction. The sky here looked bigger somehow than other places in the city. The tracks were bushy with weeds, thistle and lamb’s quarters and small doomed trees. He put the box down, took out the trowel, and started to dig.

  “Every morning I wake up at three a.m. on the nose,” Sally said, “even though I stopped bartending six months ago. That job reset my circadian rhythms to give me a boost of adrenalin in time for closing, when I had to throw everyone out, wash a bathtub’s worth of dishes, put the chairs up, sweep the floor, lock up The Miracle and bike home. And now I can’t stop waking up. I just lie there with my heart pounding, telling myself to go back to sleep.”

  The wind shifted, bringing with it the smell of Vietnamese food. The house was located at the crux of several local updrafts and the housemates could tell the direction of the wind by the smell it carried.

  “A full night’s sleep is an invention of capitalism,” Marcus told her. “Before factories, before electricity, before industrialization, people would sleep in shifts called first sleep and second sleep. In between there is a period of wakefulness that belongs only to you. It was valued as a time of reflection and creativity. It’s when peasant couples would talk to each other and fuck, and monks would pray, and poets would write.” He had read this somewhere.

  The back gate creaked open, and Alex came up the small path through the backyard. He looked tired, and there was a smear of dirt across his forehead. He carried a small shovel, and his empty satchel hung from one shoulder.

  “Yo,” said Marcus. “Got a beer for you.”

  “I gotta go inside,” Alex said. “Oates—whatever.”

  “C’mon, sit for a minute. We haven’t hung out in forever.”

  “Yeah,” said Sally, “like forever.”

  Alex looked toward the house, then folded himself in front of the mildewed sofa and leaned back against Sally’s legs. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he sighed.

  “Get ’er done?” said Marcus.

  “Yeah. No big deal. It’s over, at least.”

  “Cast a cold eye on life / on death; Horseman, pass by,” Marcus said, quoting Yeats’s tombstone. Alex nodded. He looked up, then reached over and grabbed onto Marcus’s fingers. Marcus squeezed back, and their hands remained there, suspended, until Alex let go and picked up a beer by its neck.

  Marcus told Alex about Abby, the girl he liked.

  “She’s in my Shakespeare class. She said her favourite part in Hamlet is when Hamlet says ‘Woot weep?’ to Claudius over Ophelia’s grave. She said it makes Hamlet sound like a really upset owl.”

  “Cute,” said Alex. “Did you touch her perfect body with your mind?” This was code for thinking about someone while you masturbate. I am so going to touch that perfect body with my mind, they had said to each other a million times.

  “Gross, Alex,” Marcus says, looking at Sally, then back to Alex. He wondered when the last time Alex got laid was.

  They all watched as the shrimp-smelling wind took a plastic bag off the porch and whipped it over into the neighbouring yard. Alex stood up and slapped at his jeans. He picked up his half-empty beer, saluted them with it, and went inside.

  “Do you think,” Sally said, “that by letting our garbage pile up on the balcony like this we’re just making more work for our neighbours?”

  “Probably,” said Marcus.

  Sally nodded and began stuffing things into other things; paper into boxes, bottles into cans and cans into bags. Later, even when he could barely stand to be around her, Marcus would remember this image, the tendons in her neck and the clomp of her rubber boots and the careless and efficient way she handled herself, the wind making a fan of her hair.

  Marcus turned to see Alex standing in the doorway. His head was tilted to one side.

  “How—” said Marcus. Before he could finish Alex’s hand came out fast as a snake, whipping a projectile straight at Marcus’s head. It hit the side of his face and dropped into his lap. The impact was dull and wet, as though Alex had flung a soaked wad of cotton.

  Marcus put his hand to his jaw and looked down. In his lap was Oates, dead, his eyes and mouth open, teeth bared in a last grimace. His testicles were bluish and touching the inside seam of Marcus’s jeans. He had not gone gentle into that good night.

  “Jesus fuck,” Sally said, dropping the box she held in her hands. Alex pushed past her and ran down the porch steps and through the yard, skidded on patch of wet grass, then corrected and flew past the fence. He turned down the alley and kept going. Sally took a few steps toward the fence, then turned back to Marcus.

  “Well that was majorly fucked,” she said.

  “Yeah,” said Marcus, who now held the rat loosely in one hand. “Poor guy.”

  “Him or the rat?”

  “Yeah,” said Marcus.

  What happened after that was mostly unremarkable. The two of them unlatched smoothly as a key leaving a lock. Marcus moved into a bachelor apartment in a different neighbourhood, one that smelled of croissants and smoked meat. Alex stayed on at the house, converting Marcus’s old room into a workshop. Marcus k
ept up with the house for a while; there were bonfires, there were Sunday potluck dinners. And then, eventually, there weren’t. In retrospect Marcus saw a kind of beauty in their separation, a graceful parting of ways, like a river forking in two. It was how things were meant to go. There may have been a quote about it somewhere, but Marcus couldn’t remember what it is.

  —

  The loose end of the toilet paper in the bathroom is folded into a sharp triangle. Marcus gets no small amount of pleasure from this. It’s not just an aesthetic thing. The triangle’s point is a guarantee of safety and cleanliness, a little contract between the hotel and the client, assuring him that his will be the first hand to touch the dangling end of the roll after the excretory act. It’s a reassurance, a promissory note.

  Marcus loves hotels. Since tenure-track he’s discovered in himself a capacity for leisure he never knew existed. He enters a state of near-hibernation in these rooms, leaving only when required by work, venturing no further than the vending machine down the hall for sustenance. Room service, even better.

  Marcus unfolds the local paper. By the time he gets to World News he’s aware that he’s no longer paying attention to the stories. His attention has turned wholly inward, to the process of his bowel, which seems Machiavellian as any government.

  He keeps seeing the same, he hopes, silverfish running the baseboards of the room. Its head turns left and right, looking for an opening. Something so small making a decision. He folds the paper, wipes, flushes.

  Standing in front of the mirror, Marcus opens a container of dental floss and reels out a length. It is dry, like a bit of tendon. Not waxed. He looks at the packaging, which is clearly marked Waxed. He winds one end of the floss around an index finger, and the other end finds its corresponding digit. The floss goes in between the two front teeth, the pearly whites, the all-I-want-fors, putting him in mind of sticking a hand between two sofa cushions in search of lost change. A ginger rummaging, wary of the sticky, the soft, the yielding. Give us hard and smooth only, no weak spots or cave-ins of the flesh. The floss is arid and crisp; he feels as though he is playing his teeth with a violin bow. The tune: “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” In G major. If the package is marked Waxed and the floss is palpably unwaxed, there is an alarming slippage between the sign and the signified. What could it mean?

  After the bathroom ritual Marcus flops onto the bed, which is strewn with papers from the conference, and lights the second cigarette of the day. The second is always the best. The problem is the first, which is invariably awful. The difficulty is how to get to the second without the first.

  He once asked Alex how he quit after a ten-year, pack-a-day habit. “Well,” Alex said, “I stopped having cigarettes.”

  Marcus flips on the TV. He’s in the mood for something that will relax him, his head chirping after a day of unlimited drip coffee, small talk and panels where colleagues ten years his junior presented papers whose brilliance made his own work seem rote. He runs his hands through his hair a few times, grateful that he still has all of it and that at thirty-seven he is still trim and energetic. So many of his fellow academics have become badger-like, soft-bellied creatures squinting behind their wire-rimmed glasses.

  He finds a rerun of ImmigRaces, an old favourite at his former house. Part gladiator-style sporting event, part reality show, part helpful civic contribution, ImmigRaces took place on the grounds of the old closed-down Hippodrome. Illegal immigrants discovered by undercover police squads would be turned over to the producers of the Races, where they would be housed in barracks underneath the stadium and made to participate in a series of challenges. These ranged from obstacle courses involving pools of oatmeal and grease-coated rope swings to the devouring of live insects to recitations of hour-long oaths of allegiance from memory, in both official languages. The winner of each season’s competition was granted citizenship for himself and his family. Second prize was a ticket home.

  “This show is so formulaic,” Alex once said. As though it was a bad thing. But the best stories are the formulaic ones, the ones where you know what’s going to happen next but you watch anyway, to have that itch rubbed out, to pour full the empty glass in your head.

  The show cuts to commercial. Marcus watches as a bumbling dad forgets his kid’s birthday, accidentally beheads her stuffed teddy, and shrinks her blanky in the wash. When it looks like things are about to go completely off the cliff, he grinningly pulls a bag of cotton-candy-flavoured chips out of a grocery bag. There is a joyous reunion, with hugging and giggles and one well-aimed shining wink at the camera. Marcus stares at the TV, and then at the bag of cotton-candy-flavoured chips beside him. If he needed confirmation, this is it. He is the centre of the universe.

  Marcus opens his phone. It’s two hours later where Abby is so she should be just getting into bed, wearing her long blue cotton nightgown with the lace around the neck. She’ll be reading something, a biography of an old film star maybe. Her face will be damp and sticky with night cream, her skin warm, except for her feet, which even in the July heat will be cool and dry to the touch.

  “Hi babe,” she says in his ear.

  “Hey,” he says, sighing more than he intends to.

  “Go okay today?”

  “Yeah, you know how it is. Another day, another dollar.”

  “Fourteen hours on snowshoes and wish you had pie?” She completes the Dillard quote for him.

  “Mmm, pie,” he says. “Yeah actually it was good. About a dozen people showed up, including the chair of the cultural studies department. She came and talked to me after, said she thought my work showed promise.”

  They talk more about his presentation, he asks after the kids, who are fine and asleep, and then Abby says she has to go, there’s a segment on CBC’s Ideas that she wants to listen to.

  “’Night, love,” she says.

  “Don’t forget about me.”

  “Jamais.”

  He rolls over onto his stomach, brushing crumbs from the broadloom comforter. He opens the phone again.

  When Sally answers she sounds less than thrilled to hear him.

  “Have you been watching the Moving Day coverage?” she says.

  “Yeah,” Marcus lies. “Crazy stuff.” He might not have watched this time but he knows the drill, it’s regular as payday.

  “So you saw Alex,” she says. Marcus sits up. “When,” he says, “on TV?”

  “Yes, on TV.”

  “I must have missed that part.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Sally. “Anyway he’s in detention, me and some others are going to the solidarity demo tonight. You should come.”

  “I’m in Alberta,” he says.

  “Oh, well never mind then.” As though he’s told her he’s at the grocery store.

  “Sally,” he says.

  “Yeah?” Something in her voice, some tone beyond generic encouragement makes him go on.

  “How’s your. You know, the…”

  “Multiple sclerosis?”

  “Yeah, sorry.”

  “Slowly eating away at my nervous system,” Sally says. A puff of air comes out of Marcus’s nose. “No, sorry,” she says, “I’m a jerk. It’s fine. No new lesions. I’m not a babbling mess yet.”

  “No more so than usual, anyway,” says Marcus, and Sally chuckles.

  “Remember that time we dressed up as zombies and tried to get kicked out of the bank?” he says. “Alex was screaming ‘class war,’ but instead of arresting us they just laughed and said we were right?”

  “Yeah,” she says, distant. “That was nice.”

  “We should do that again sometime.”

  “Sure.”

  What was it Alex had said when Sally was diagnosed? “It’s pointless to think about people as healthy or sick. There’s only the sick and the not-yet-sick.” “That’s pretty grim,” Marcus had said. “I actually fin
d it quite freeing,” said Alex. “We’re all in it together.” But Marcus would take solitude over that kind of company.

  “Sally, how is he? I mean actually?”

  “Oh you know. Fine. Depressed. Fine. Still working at the call centre. Dating a teenager.”

  “Really?”

  “Well he’s twenty-one.”

  “How come gays can do that and no one bats an eye,” says Marcus, “but if I did it I’d get in trouble?”

  “It’s called patriarchy, Marcus.”

  “Yeah yeah yeah,” he says. He sees the silverfish, or one of its relatives, circling the rim of the light fixture. “Sally,” he says, “just because I’m not calling doesn’t mean I’m not thinking about you.”

  “Okay. I gotta go.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Bye.”

  Depression has no needs, Marcus thinks. It makes no demands, requires nothing. All it wants is for you to stay in bed, staring at the light fixture in a hotel room. It is the opposite of hunger, the opposite of addiction. The more powerful it is the less it asks of you.

  The phone rings. Marcus flips it open. “Hello,” he says, “hello, hello.” But all he hears is the sound of the inside of Sally’s pocket. He listens. It sounds like the ocean.

  He hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary, he knew this. It was rather a kindness, a favour to an old friend. If Alex didn’t understand at the time then surely he did now. And any bad feelings he harboured must be diluted by the sea of time that had passed, a sea that had carried Marcus here, to this hotel, this room, this bed. He knew that there was no such thing as wrong and right, only content and less content. And he was content. Content enough.

  It hadn’t taken long to find a good recipe. CO2 could be created with baking soda and vinegar, and according to the website it was effective within twelve to twenty minutes. The subject sleeps, and after that his heart and respiratory system go dark.

  Using a shoebox, some duct tape, and a long twirling gag-straw he found at the dollar store, Marcus had constructed an airtight chamber, except for the straw, which piped into a Mason jar with a hole punched in the lid. The whole works looked like it might have been created during a game of Hangman of the Absurd.