by Mike Barnes
Sean, who had the paper now, said, “Hackneyed title as usual. ‘Death of a Dilettante’ might have been closer to the mark.”
I turned to him. “Isn’t there a limit to cynicism?”
Sean answered calmly, in his own world even now, and disarmed by the quietness with which I’d spoken. That was the way it always started: quietly. Quietest of all before the worst times. With just this inner hum I could barely make out, like a turbine starting.
“Dostoyevsky’s ‘Dream of a Ridiculous Man’ also comes to mind.”
“This isn’t a Russian novel, asshole.” Too late, I saw Sean’s eyes bulge in fright, eyebrows scooting up into the blotchy, reddening dome. He was not oblivious, could never be – why else did he need to take perpetual flight into literature? But the turbine merely gathered these thoughts into its whipping speed. Sluggish to start, it was much, much slower stopping. Everything that occurred, anything that was said, just multiplied its power. “And if ridiculous men are going to start dropping, who’s next? Eh? How many of us will be left?” I took a step toward him, fists clenched.
“That’s enough, Paul,” said Bud, who had suddenly appeared. “You’re relieved.”
The military phrase, which would have been absurd on any other occasion in the gallery – sub-commander dismissing the hothead private in the garrison – somehow fit the present situation perfectly. Bud had found the right words somehow. Plucked them out of the charged air.
“We’re all feeling the stress of the situation. We need to – ” But these more conventional Bud-offerings were already behind me, bouncing off my back like Nerf darts. And Ted buzzed me out so briskly that what we needed to do got snapped off by the click of the door.
8
Pinball. Pinball machine. The ball lolling, falling to a flipper, whacked spinning again. “Pinball Wizard”. The chords simple, but way too fast.
I walked down King Street to the Tim Horton’s at the corner of Caroline. Sat at a corner table by the washrooms and the newspaper shelf, with the usual coffee and cruller. The coffee fine (though hardly what I needed), but the donut centre gooey, undercooked. I flipped through a copy of the Sun – the Sunshine Girl a slippery brown, oozing out of her bikini like molasses, but her hobby: “sketching and drawing”. I couldn’t get away from it. Across the street was The Sheik restaurant. Excellent falafels and shish tarwoo, Angela and I went there sometimes. The Arabic lettering on the sign: interesting squiggles and lines, deep blue like ocean waves on a silver background. There had been an exhibition of paintings by a local artist who did “colour field” canvases (Walter said he had the name wrong), like these telegraphic jots and dashes and sudden turns. But no curlicues, all straight lines . . . and the colours precisely reversed, metallic silver squirts on a background of airbrushed blue. He visited the gallery every day, coming in faithfully to catch the reactions to his work. There were none. Working eight hours a day, I rarely surprised a patron doing even a walk-by of “Signals” in the Pettit Gallery upstairs. I doubt he ever came face to face with a viewer. One day I asked him about his technique. It was “no great mystery,” he confessed. He drew grids of lines in pencil, then used the eraser to rub out some of them at random, making the templates for his silver jots and dashes, which went from near-mazes to just remnants of a maze, bits and fragments. It sounded like a depressing procedure. The procedure a depressive would invent. And he did seem depressed, standing there with me in the empty room, surrounded by his labours of the past two years. Raised out of his funk a bit by my interest but not really cheered. Not confusing the curiosity of a suit (the brown one then) with that of a real patron.
Up the street ran a row of small businesses. The new café, Bauhaus, like the band, with an opaque black window and, inside, uncomfortable tubular chairs in a mostly bare room, okay espresso but bad desserts, Xeroxes of Joy Division covers hung in a crooked grouping on one wall. Next to it the shabby little insurance office I’d always wondered about. Little white clapboard bungalow in need of a paint job. How could insurance – which I’d always taken to be the easiest, most foolproof of legal scams – not afford a better building? How did you fail at no-fail? And then, up at the corner of Queen, Déjà Vu. Where I’d bought some shirts. Where Robert might have picked up the trench coat, I’d never asked him.
And never will. Death was a nag with a mouth full of clichés.
I turned back to the people in Tim’s, my fellow patrons. Tried to focus on their faces, wonder about their lives. Angela called herself a people person, and was. Which meant, I thought, that she had the ability – which I envied at the moment – to enjoy people as a passing spectacle. I wasn’t a people person. People’s mysteries got under my skin and crawled around, if I let them. That was why I often preferred to let them remain blurs, smudges spinning around my own orbit. Onstage was good for that. It might have been the thing I missed most about it.
I couldn’t escape the image. It was there whenever I stopped thinking for a moment. Sometimes it elbowed its way right to the front of the queue. Robert flailing, the trench coat a collapsed umbrella, belt ends spoking up, down into the sludge of the harbour, smashing into water like concrete, filled with toxic chemicals, huge cancered carp moving sluggishly away at the splash. Then, as fright dissipated, turning to move back.
I imagined his reaction to appearing in a news story for the first time as a security guard who had died a pathetically stupid death. I imagined deep embarrassment. The irony set too deep to laugh or formulate away.
I left Tim Horton’s and went up Bay, past the New and Used car lot. Across Main Street. Past Jackson, Hunter. The big Bay 200 building, posh and high-gloss by our standards, doorman in uniform loitering behind the lobby glass. Up on the twentieth floor, Neale must have felt he was almost back in Toronto. Odd, though, that he didn’t think almost almost mocking. Close but no cigar. A room over The Running Pump would have made a better statement.
Pinball thoughts. Lolling, falling to a flipper, getting whacked spinning again.
When I turned down Bold, out of the businesses and the city buildings, passing small old houses, I began to relax. Deep breaths of lilac, spring finally settled in after a fitful start. Warm sun.
I dropped into The Bookcellar for a few minutes. Looking at the rows of coloured paperbacks I rarely bought, I read them too fast. I was a library man. But the old stone library at the corner of Main and James was closing. Too expensive, the story went, though they had a hole dug behind Eaton’s for a new one. I’d never seen that incongruity debated in the Witness. It was mostly just which bank had the inside track on buying the old building from the city, and occasionally, where the temporary library would be in the interim that the books were homeless.
On impulse I ducked into House of Java a few doors farther along James. Just long enough to get a head full of coffee smells, rich jagging dusts I didn’t need. Nor the real coffee and another donut – cooked this time, but dry and stale – I had at the Donut Castle at the corner of Duke Street. People skills – even in my sense – definitely faltering when I couldn’t tell the customers from the ones I’d left in Tim Horton’s. Features I snagged on looked exactly the same. Eerie.
The chords in “Pinball Wizard” easy, but way, way too fast.
It wasn’t until I reached the Sunshine Restaurant, my old dim air-conditioned basement, light seeping in through slits near the ceiling, that I felt myself begin to settle. And ordered appropriately for the first time: a beer and western sandwich. The waitress knowing me again, no recognition trouble since the episode of the suit. She was young and kind of brainless. Sometimes we exchanged a few words about the weather or her day. Today she just set down the order with a reflex smile and went back to her magazine in the corner.
After another beer, it was getting on to six and I had a simple decision to make about direction. I could go up the street and around the corner to the apartment. Angela had probably read the paper today or heard it on the news. Or I could head back downtown for the usual
Monday night chess club at seven. Angela would understand my need to distract myself from Robert. She understood the need for solitude – more so since the start of her painting classes – as long as it didn’t go on too long. “Sharing” was a legacy of Sociology, or maybe just Angela. But the fact was – not a pleasant one to face, and trailing clouds of guilt – though we lived together, Angela wasn’t always the first person I wanted to share bad news with. And not this news especially. If I couldn’t tell her all of it, and I couldn’t, then I felt better telling her nothing. For as long as I could. For now anyway. In the end it really was a simple decision.
Armin never sat in the middle of the room. He occupied a little table against the wall, but it always felt like he held sway in the centre. Partly it was because the other players kept looking over at him, and not only when a “BOOM BOOM!” signalled a checkmate. The chess nerds who vied for primacy at the centre boards loved the game too much not to acknowledge, however sourly, who the best player really was. They might deplore Armin’s gloating commentary and his lethally chaotic style of play, but no one could beat him except by a fluke blunder. He cursed these rare losses viciously, being almost as bad a loser as he was a winner. There seemed an essential Balkan unruliness about him, some foundational distemper and disarray, from the flyaway white hair to the matted, jam-and-tobacco-flecked beard, coarse unwashed layers of clothes – always many layers of clothes, no matter what season. Poverty by no means the cause of all of this, though it might well be incorporated as a keystone. But it was the deep-rootedness, more than the number, of these eccentricities that rankled the younger players – all of whom affected peculiar habits, oddball tics inseparable from excellence in the game – and was another reason, besides the blitzkrieg humiliations, that many players refused to play with him. As a result, he often played against an imaginary, perhaps a remembered, opponent, checkmating himself or this projection with no less fury than he turned on any other enemy.
He finished me off swiftly in our first game, dispensing his usual post-mortem advice, which may have been merely generic. “You know how to wait, not make mistakes . . . but you need weapon too – BOOM ! BOOM!” He flourished his queen in a short arc, swinging her base rudely against my bishop and king, knocking them flat. Sometimes he pissed me off as much as he did the other players. He was a nasty piece of work really. To be treated to the brilliance you had to eat a lot of shit.
I bore down harder in the second game, trying the trick of piling on complications that I had used with Robert. Enough of them so that I made the big scabbed hands hover for a moment, then some long moments, before diving down at a piece. Things got gnarled and knotty for a few minutes. But eventually the solution he discovered was as brutal a refutation of Robert’s floundering as the bridge that morning had been. Turning away from the trade-offs I was forcing in the middle, Armin plunged down one side, risking all, letting me strip off pieces in the process like so many booster rockets he was jettisoning. And then I was cornered and it was done.
Afterwards, mollifed perhaps at being stretched more than usual, Armin accepted my homage – “You’re a great player, Armin” – with more than his usual snort. He shrugged. “I know some openings. Good endgame maybe. But I study” – tapping his head – “the people.” That was news: he treated us like fodder. He swept a hand, knuckles bristling with pieces, out at the heads bent over boards, hands spanking their time clocks, all concentrating too intensely of course to be aware of our little corner. “Look at these guys, memorize Nimzo-Indian. Twenty moves deep. They should be watching each other.”
Our third game reverted to the blitzkrieg norm. Slashing attacks along several fronts at once, shattered defenses. Surrender.
“What’s wrong with my game, Armin?” I asked, not caring if it sounded pathetic. Sometimes, if you have a real mind handy you have to consult it, no matter how noxious its answers are likely to be. Armin kept setting up the pieces, the new game almost ready. “How do I get beyond the snake-in-the-grass stage?”
But when he looked up, eyes clouded with confusion, I realized that I’d forgotten to factor in simple craziness. He didn’t seem to recognize me, though we’d played dozens of games together. And the “snake-in-the-grass” idiom was probably alien to him, too. A badly executed gambit.
Armin bent his head, hand over the king’s pawn. “Is your game,” he said softly. “Get better at it.”
For some reason the words brought Robert back more powerfully than had any other reminder all that long afternoon and evening. He could have written his symphony some day. Or done something else. Anything. He was twenty-two.
When I looked back from the door, Armin already had his invisible opponent thrashing, grasping for an honourable endgame.
Walking. Not paying attention to the street names. Evening cooler now. Filled with scents of grass and flowers and, with the wind from the west, not much smoke. I put my hands in my jacket pockets. Found the Holst tape, which had been forgotten in the circus of the night before. Knowing I would never listen to it again, I decided to return it to its present owner.
Piccone’s pissed-on sign had already been replaced with a fresh one. The new stake pounded deeper into the ground. Prompt attention, even to a sagging property.
Claudia’s face, parts of it, appeared in a crack of doorway, eyes over the chain. Eyes narrowed in suspicion but not reddened. Hers wasn’t a face that would change much in grief. Pale. Gaunt. Unkempt hair. It seemed to have been prepared for grief already.
I pushed the tape up toward the crack. “I borrowed this from Robert. I’m very – ”
“Don’t want it.” And shut the door.
But flung it open again before I’d quite turned away. Jeans and T-shirt in the open space, as if to demonstrate that the chain hadn’t been fear. “And hey,” she said. “Fuck off, why don’t you?”
This time the door slammed.
When I’d gone about half way down the hall, I heard a door open behind me. She was leaning out of it. “If you’re looking for company, why don’t you talk to your friend from the gallery?”
“What friend?”
“Yeah, right.” Sneered. “Whoever phoned my brother last night.” She disappeared back inside and the door shut, but softly this time. One of those safecracker-like turns of the knob when you’re so angry you don’t want even the intimacy of a shared click.
I was still holding “The Planets” in my hand. The plastic tape case actually felt hot between my fingers, I wanted to get rid of it so badly. Down in the lobby, I tried to fit it in the Jongkinds’ locked mailbox, but the slot was too narrow. Peering through it I could see a number of uncollected envelopes, bits of Robert’s name on the nearest one. Death’s stale jokes to go with its nagging: the postcards, bills, subscription offers still arriving, even as the embalmer is doing his best. I left the tape on top of the box, hoping Claudia would find it before one of the neighbours did.
Rick, last night’s drowsy exercise, entered the building just as I was heading out the door. His eyes flicked to mine, a recognition without a greeting, and then he bumped me heavily in the chest, lowering his shoulder like a hockey player making a check. It was a casual move, but the impact sent me thudding against the wall, the back of my head cracking painfully against the plaster. It happened too fast and unexpectedly even to produce an adrenaline rush, though I felt the rage chemicals begin to mobilize as his sheer mass moved away.
He didn’t look back. That was important, I knew: show that you can hurt easily, thoughtlessly. And with no fear of retaliation: the unprotected back the aggressor’s display, just as the exposed belly was the victim’s. I thought of Claudia standing in the wide open doorway. A circle of displays. And watching Rick’s bulk move slowly up the stairs, black pointed boots sliding out to ten and two o’clock to grant his thick thighs more leeway, I thought that grief could be expressed by more than reddened eyes. Certain late-night lumbering visitors might capture it even better.
I relaxed against Angela�
��s soft body, my nose in her caramel-smelling hair. Feeling the muscles I’d held stiff without knowing it begin to loosen, letting myself sag. Angela had begun to use words like “supportive” and “nurturing” far too often, but she actually was those things. It was partly why I loved her. It was also why I hated to hear her talk that way. And if it was true that her tenderest sympathies usually found their way back round to herself, was she any different from the rest of us in that? From me? At least her feelings made the outward journey first.
Turning her head from side to side against my chest, like a medic catching a fading heartbeat, she said, “How can I feel happy about some crappy little picture, with Robert. . . .”
“You can. You have to, actually.”
It’s me, I thought, whose instincts are in doubt. Never mind direction. Next move, even. And why did absolutely everything now have to come packaged with that tinge of shame, that creep of guilt? If I hadn’t confided in Angela now, I never would. She was inside the gallery now in ways I never could be. That meant she had to stay outside whatever had happened. Was happening? Would happen? Among other things, it was a compact I had – unspoken, binding – with dead Robert and his still-alive sister. And when had that deal been signed?
After a few minutes we made love. Still the best consolation in a crisis, the best antidote to the sad stress of events. And something which by now we could, and mostly did, do entirely with our eyes closed.
Afterwards Angela, though I hadn’t known her to think of Robert other than as a foppish pretender, cried for him. No maudlin reversals of opinion, no exaggerated intimacy. But tears freshened her eyes at just the waste of death. I envied her the release and the generosity of this, but knew I couldn’t match it. Terrible losses and hurts were necessary to wrench tears from me – falls much greater and more personal than this weird squalid drop. Even then tears usually had to ambush me, jerking and spurting up out of me long after the events I grieved. Television was often the nearest cause. Some sentimental set-up on M*A*S*H, or even a phone commercial yanking the heart-strings by means of a senior and a child, might be the proximate goad that bucketed the pain up from some deep inner well. All I felt now was something like a white dot in the centre of my chest, near the spot where Rick had thumped me. A tiny white dot of fury that couldn’t help but expand into a fireball.
