“Whatever it is, we’ll get through it,” she says. She rolls off and looks at him. His eyes are spilling over kind of messily. He doesn’t cry in drops but with an all-over seepage, as if the water table in him is rising.
He sighs shakily then, and takes Abby’s hand.
“Remember my old friend Sally?”
She nods. Oh yes. Simultaneous to the memory of this friend is the remembrance of the fact that cicadas can live underground for up to seventeen years.
Marcus swallows, then takes a breath. “She had a, what… A brain scan, I guess. And it came back irregular, and I guess it’s MS. The doctors say.”
“Multiple sclerosis?” Abby says. He just looks at her. Then he moans and covers his face.
“Oh sweetie,” Abby says, “oh babe.” She is surprised at how normal he looks when he cries. Abby tries to cover his body with hers, and thinks Thank God, thank God, thank God. That that’s all it is. Thank God.
Frenching the Eagle
We close our eyes. It is important that our eyes stay closed for the duration of the talk, because this is about finding a special space, and our special space is not outside our faces. So we keep them closed until the facilitator says we can open them. The facilitator is me. Now we put our minds in our bellies. What does that mean? It means be present in the centre of your body, because that is where the breath begins. In our bellies. We put our mind there. What do we see? Not a lot. That’s right. That’s because we’re not practiced. We are amateurs at belly vision, and we don’t know how to see from the inside. But we don’t worry. We are here to learn.
We relax every muscle in our bodies. We see each muscle as a shape made out of jelly, a moulded pudding pop, and we allow it to dissolve into the sea of consciousness. We breathe. We become aware of how our bodies are in contact with the floor, all the aches and pains we hold in our muscles, and then we let them go. We see our aches and pains as butterflies that we are releasing into the sky. They flutter upwards, and some are eaten by birds. We let them go. We understand our conscious mind as a sheet flapping on a laundry line,
somewhere far in the distance. We let it flap.
Now we picture an object for each colour of the rainbow.
For instance, red might be an apple, a sunset, a spot of blood.
What might orange be? Yes, an orange, that’s good. Or maybe an orange ball, or an orange cup. Yes, or a sunset.
Yellow: a banana, ripe. Yes, or a sunset.
Green: a banana, unripe. Yes, or for red we could see one of those red bananas from Panama, but let’s stick with green. A blade of grass, a forest in the unfurling of summer.
Blue: the sea, in which our muscle-shapes have dissolved. The sky, in which our aches and pains have fluttered away.
And last is violet. What do we see for violet? A flower, or a silken violet robe. A velvet cushion with deep and lustrous pile.
Now we see ourselves in a hallway. We don’t name the hallway, but we see it. Once we can see a place without using words, we will be able to leave our bodies behind. We walk down the hallway, over the carpet, passing many doors on our right and our left. Which door will we choose? We choose a door. We place a hand on the knob and open the door. We go through the door.
In front of us we see a large marble staircase leading down. There are twenty-one steps. When we have stepped off the last step, we will be in our special place. We count together.
Twenty-one.
Twenty.
Nineteen.
Eighteen.
Seventeen.
Sixteen.
Fifteen.
Fourteen.
Thirteen.
Twelve.
Eleven.
Ten.
Nine.
Eight.
Seven.
Six.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
We are ready to enter our special place.
One.
Now, we put on our high heels.
We put on our high heels because we are becoming something else, and to become something else we need to change the way we stand. Here is some pertinent information: personality begins at the sole. We understand this on the level of the animal within us, but our human bodies forget. It is an interesting fact that in French, the heels are called “les talons.” Talons. Does that make us think of anything? The French understand the relationship between the animal self and the human body. That is why they are the most sensual people. Why do you think they call it
“frenching?” The eagle is a bird with chronic halitosis, because it eats mainly raw meat. Not many veggies on the mountain cold and craggy. But we are not here to judge or comment. We are here to be. We are here to embrace the eagle, to french it. Until we become it.
Becoming. It’s a beautiful word, isn’t it? It’s what we say of a girl who is turned out just right, just the cat’s pyjamas: Isn’t she becoming? Soon, that’s what they will say about you.
Good.
We notice how the shoes change the organization of our bodies. How many of us suffer under the impression that our bodies are imperfect communication devices, that they speak to us in a language we do not understand? We observe the increased arch in the back, the way the hips and breasts form a balance on either end, like dumbbells. It doesn’t matter what we’re wearing. Any outfit will do. Even in a baggy jumpsuit we can assume a certain degree of physical intelligibility, just by paying heed to how we stand. Even if we were in a straightjacket, even if we were swathed in canvas like a boat, our arms all twisted behind us, we would say, Okay, how can I turn this situation to my advantage? The answer is: elegance. Elegance is our sorcerer’s wand.
The heels are not elegance. The heels are the container for elegance. The rest is us.
All of us have done things that make us unable or unfit to walk amongst the majority of people. Some of us are thieves. Some of us—many of us—are whores. Some of us are murderers, child-killers, father-killers, lover-killers, husband-killers. Man-eaters. That is a joke, though most of us have tasted man-flesh in one form or another. Some of us did it out of necessity. Some of us did it out of sadness, or loneliness, or temporary insanity. Some of us did it because the voices wouldn’t stop. Some of us were too poor to be able to buy food for our baby, so we went out one night and shot a bank manager, just because. Because that’s what happens when you interfere with the natural order of womanhood. We are not talking about hunt and gather here, tend and nurture. We are talking about the mountain cold and craggy. We are talking about frenching the eagle. We are talking about a woman’s natural predisposition toward preservation of the integrity and beauty of the self. Another word for this is: elegance. Do you see where we’re headed here?
Our crimes are pitiful. But they are not us. We must remember to separate the crime, which is a product of the human body and its reachings and failings, from the animal self, which is us. When we feel fear, we repeat our mantra:
We are safe. We are loved. We are precious and above all elegant.
Our mantra, if said correctly, can reverse the order of things. It is like an earthquake that happens backwards. Vases fly up onto tables and heal themselves, two broken slabs become a bridge, children emerge from piles of rubble. Our mantra is our defence against everything that threatens to undo us, to uglify us, to make us into cattle. Have you ever seen a cow you could describe as elegant? Exactly. We repeat our mantra, as needed.
Don’t be afraid if it doesn’t come right away. Elegance is not easy. It is about staying loose while maintaining the strictest discipline, holding tight while letting go. Like so many things. We know a person, a man, who once fell two storeys off a roof and came away with no more than bruises because he had enough presence of mind to go completely limp as he fell. It sounds easy, but you try it—relinquishing control as
the ground rushes up and the wind hoots past your ears. It is the opposite of easy.
Here is a useful tip. Many of us are haunted people. If we see a ghost, if we are afraid of ghosts, we must eat a piece of meat in front of him. Raw meat? It doesn’t matter. Any kind of meat. A chicken leg. Why is this? Because ghosts don’t like to be reminded of the world of flesh. And to eat meat is to show a ghost that you are a master of the world of flesh. After that, he will show you some respect.
How did we get here, to this point of pain and antagonism, to these jumpsuits which are orange, orange like a cup or a ball or a sunset. To these smallish rooms, each smaller than the last, to the bus that takes us not like a lover but like a heart attack. From the bus we watch Harvey’s roll past us and Wendy’s and Timmy Ho’s, all the familiar names of our childhood, now gathered here to say goodbye to us on our final journey, though it is possible they have been saying goodbye to us all along because the more we think about it the more we realize we have always been on this bus. From when we were crapped ungloriously out into the world until now, and we will stay here evermore. It is a kind of death, this bus.
We must calm ourselves. We are in our special space. We are safe. We are loved. We are precious and above all elegant.
The bus rolls on. Out the window we can now see the white marble stone of the courthouse, the house of court, of courting, of courtship, which is another word for dating, a coincidence that strikes us now as funny, since we only have one date left and we think there will not be roses for us.
We are working now to expel a memory. Time is short. We thought we had all the time in the world, but now we see that time is almost up. There has been so much waiting, so much killing of time, we have become experts at killing time, but now we see we have moved through time like a cigarette’s cherry, blasting matter into energy, and there’s no going back. So we must hurry to expel the memory, to blow it out through the mouth and nose and pussy and asshole, all the points of exit of the body.
The last memory, the one that will accompany us as we make our peace with the needle, or the current, or just the eternity of the rooms, the jumpsuits, the ever-loving bus, is the memory of the dark moment when we made our little slip. Anyone could do it, and anyone did do it at least once or maybe even more. And what ultimately turns out to matter, against what we thought we may have believed, what in the end influences everything we will become, is what we were holding when that moment came. Was it someone’s hand or a sandwich or a paintbrush or a gun? Where we were standing, what we were holding—these are the important things. More important, as it turns out, than life.
We must turn inward to that memory, the one of the bank manager, who may not in fact have been a manager, he may have been a janitor or a truck driver or nothing at all, just a man, but he would do. He did. And we realize, those petals of blood we plucked from him, those are our roses.
We will soon have to leave the bus. We take one last look in the window’s reflection, a pale simulacrum our face, with some blowy trees behind. How becoming we look, how precious. Orange may be our colour after all.
Now we are ready. No one, not one of you, will ever be this elegant.
We hold tight. And then we let go.
Glory Days
Things are different now that you’re in Grade 5. In Grade 4 everything was simpler, and brighter, and you had a crush on Optimus Prime. You drew hearts and kisses all over the Transformers colouring book, the ridge of your drawing hand stained ballpoint blue. If anyone came into the room you would slam the book shut, quickly but not too quickly, because the important thing about crushes is that someone knows you have one, but not that you want them to know.
Optimus Prime: sort of a man, sort of a truck, but neither one exactly, which made it okay. You knew what they meant when they said more than meets the eye. It meant he would know when to hold your hand, when to admire your drawings of him, when to make Brian Freeholt, that snot-nosed little bully, explode in a violet spray of gore during recess after he pantsed you and called you king of the gaylords. Which you knew was a pathetic insult because gay means happy and what’s the difference between a king and a lord? Nothing. But that was Grade 4, and now it’s Grade 5, and Grade 5 means Bridge to Terabithia and owl pellets and Western dancing and a new kind of geometry—the geometry of Bruce.
You could see it: Bruce coming home all sweaty and tired, an argument over who was going to make dinner, hurt feelings, and then maybe a make-up hug, and after that you weren’t sure what would happen but just thinking about it would make you squeeze your thighs together until a strange feeling rushed up your spine.
During the height of your Optimus Prime obsession, your mom asked you one day if you wanted to see a Transformer in real life. You nodded, wondering if she could see your heart speeding up right through your shirt. She took you into the basement and showed you your grandmother’s ancient sewing machine, which was bolted to a dark wooden stand. “Look,” she said, lifting a flap and dropping the black iron machine into the centre of the stand, “it transforms… into a table. Pretty cool, huh?” You stared at her, considering that maybe your brother was right and she really did hate you for coming out her butthole and not her belly button the way he did.
Now you remembered that moment with affection and regret. You wished you had taken her hand and said, “Gee Mom, that is neat. We should spend some more time together.” After all, you understood her better now—you too knew something of the desire for men.
Your newfound relationship with Bruce wasn’t something you felt you could share, with your mother or any of the various men she brought home to meet you, or with your brother and his banger friends. Especially not them. They considered Bruce old-fashioned and kind of wimpy, preferring instead the strutting attitude and choir-girl-on-drugs shrieking of long-haired bands like KISS and Alice Cooper. The one time you tried to impress them by casually dropping the needle onto Darkness on the Edge of Town while they sat around the kitchen table, they snorted like pit bulls and poked fun at the album cover.
“Did this guy just fall off the back of the ugly truck? He looks like a short-order cook.” Your brother snatched the needle off the turntable, tossed the record onto a bar stool, and hastily fumbled Master of Reality out of its sleeve. “Sorry guys, next time I’ll keep the door closed.”
You didn’t understand what the metalheads saw in these guys—they seemed like girls dressed up for Halloween. And they weren’t even pretty girls. And even if they were, what was so manly about that? Bruce wasn’t pretty either, but he was something more than pretty. He reminded you of a sip of wine you had tasted from the dregs of a glass your mother left out after one of her dates. At first it made your tongue curdle in its pink bed, and you nearly spat it onto the kitchen floor, but then abruptly it changed in your mouth, ripening and spreading, until it was almost unbearably rich and full. It was nothing like the sweet, syrupy fruit drink its colour had led you to expect. It was better.
You listened to Bruce and wondered how it was possible to have already made enough mistakes to set your life growing slowly but unavoidably off-kilter, a tree planted too close to a fence, bark oozing inch by painful inch through the painted slats. That Saturday you lay on the cool floor of the basement, telephone pressed to your ear, when one of your brother’s friends, a lanky kid named Aaron, passed by on his way to the downstairs bathroom. A year older than your brother, Aaron was practically an adult—he had just started Grade 9 at the school where kids smoked on the lawn, flicking ashes at cars through the wire fence. You liked the way he always wore a different brand-new Maiden shirt, as though he had an endless supply of them in the back of a truck somewhere. And maybe he did. He came from that kind of family.
You dialled the number on the back of the Smarties box, underneath where it said Call for more information, while listening to the water running in the bathroom and Bruce hollering about the highway and where it was going to take him
.
“Nestlé Corporation,” said a voice with a southern drawl.
“Hi,” you said. “I’m calling for more information.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Well, I’d like to get some more information. It said I could call for some on the box.”
“Huh. Well is there a product you’re especially interested in?”
You blanked as Aaron came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on his jeans, and saw you lying on the floor, carrying on a senseless conversation with a call centre in Arkansas or Bangalore. Aaron winked at you, then flicked some loose drops of water from his hand onto your face. “Hey fag,” he said, not in a mean way. Get a life, you mouthed, and he smiled and blew you a kiss.
“Hello?” said the receiver, as Aaron’s acid-washed-
denim butt disappeared up the stairs. “Is there something in particular you’re interested in?” You thought about that question until the line went dead, and after the record had spun itself out you were still there on the cool cement floor, the phone resting on your crotch and the small windows darkening.
A few weeks later you were walking down Ethelbert toward the river when you saw Aaron sitting on a bench by a bus stop. Next to him was a man about the same age as your father was the last time you saw him. He had smooth grey hair and a square, bristly chin—what your mother would call a silver fox. You lowered your eyes and kept walking, but Aaron called out to you.
“What’s up?”
“Nothing.”
“Just walking around?”
“Yeah,” you said. The truth was you were going to look for buried treasure in the thick sticky mud-carpet the river had left after the spring flood, but somehow that wasn’t something you wanted to share with Aaron.
“Cool. I like walking around too. You meet all sorts of people.”
“Yeah.” You looked at the toes of your sneakers, wondering when it would be okay to leave.
Sweet Affliction Page 9
