The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life

by Camilla Gibb

  Blue likes to be crude and provocative here because it fits and fuels his tough-guy image. He obviously aspires to be white trash, and he does a fairly convincing impression. His tattoos have started to creep up his neck, past the collar of his black T-shirt, threatening to strangle his face like jungle vines wrapped tight around a tree. But somewhere in that dense mess of colour Emma can still picture Blue as small and tender; treated badly and misunderstood. She can still see them crouched beside the furnace, or holding hands at school; catching rain on their pink and vulnerable tongues stretched out under an ominous, brooding sky.

  She can picture them when they were little, but she’s the one who feels smaller now. She imagines herself a barnacle stuck to his leg; a fly on the brown back of a wildebeest. She imagines Blue carrying her around like that, around and around the shop where he is posturing and tattooing and piercing and avoiding paying government sales tax and doing the occasional drug deal on the side. Emma watches him operate. She marvels at the way he talks savvy and lucrative street talk and uses just the right combination of charm and intimidation to develop a reputation for being the maker of cool in their sleazy summer town.

  “Dude, that’s my sis,” Blue yells at the greasy-haired biker standing at the counter. “She’s doin’ her fuckin’ B.A., asshole, so treat her with a little respect,” he says protectively.

  Emma’s happy to let him play the big tough guy because the whole place scares her. She’s sitting in a purple plastic dental chair, fiddling with the lever and clasping a Diet Coke between her thighs. “Do you think I’m making a mistake pursuing archaeology?” she asks him. She’s obviously having her doubts. She just doesn’t feel the sense of hope or motivation she felt a year ago. She feels disillusioned, almost betrayed. She still doesn’t know that there’s a compromise to be made between a dream and a reality, a distance to be navigated and negotiated; that it really is those petty day-to-day details, the good, the bad, and the ugly, that add up to make the dream. She cannot see the failure of the earlier summer as a china doll that simply needs its arm gluing back on: she sees it as a Ming vase that’s been thrown onto concrete and shattered irreparably into a thousand tiny pieces. The end of a dynasty.

  “That’s not for me to say.” He’s not going down this road with her. She seems depressed, and this is usually a sign that she’s going to run off and do something totally unpredictable. “You’ll get it back,” he tries to reassure her.

  “Whatever it is,” she drones.

  “Well, if it’s what you really want, then maybe it will come back to you.”

  But she’s not sure how much she cares any more. All she cares about at this moment is the fact that Blue’s going to give her a tattoo. She’s relieved he’s here, and she wonders if all that has happened has happened for this reason: to bring them back together.

  “Let me ID you,” Blue’s been saying. She’s never outright refused, it’s just that she hasn’t put her mind to designing anything. “I haven’t got a brain left to produce an image,” she tells Blue.

  “Come on, Em, get a grip, okay? Just concentrate,” Blue says, his patience fading.

  It has occurred to Emma that if she does this, she will be giving up the right to die anonymously. She will, with a tattoo, have an identifying mark on an otherwise unremarkable body. If she chooses to disappear or do herself in, she will thus be branded as herself rather than one of the more glamorous selves she invents in some of her most elaborate fantasies. A sacrificial virgin who has just escaped near death at the hands of her tribesmen. A minor movie star whose meteoric rise to fame and fortune is struck down with the prognosis of a fatal illness. With a tattoo, her death will never provoke a nationwide search, her death will never be an unsolved mystery. She will never be able to disguise herself again.

  “Okay,” she finally says. “How about a cool Celtic band just above my bicep then.”

  “Not cool,” Blue says, shaking his head. “Stupid cliché. And besides, it’s gonna look real stupid when you’re an old lady and your arm is all saggy. It’s not going to look like a circle any more.”

  It’s never occurred to Emma before that she’s going to be an old lady one day. She can’t really imagine racking up enough birthdays to technically be considered old. But Blue is saying, “Remember the old lady next door? Remember the underneath bit flapping like chicken skin?”

  “Okay, Blue. So do whatever. Okay? Whatever.”

  And so Blue tells her about the band of thorns he’s going to draw around her wrist. She doesn’t care really. She doesn’t care what he does. It’s sort of not the point. The point is she is his sister and he’s going to mark her in his particular way, he’s going to give her a permanent identity, take away her anonymity and her transience, and pin her down in the world. He’s going to carve his initials into her arm; give her a life where she is forever branded as the tribe of Blue.

  Capital D

  She has her band of thorns, at least she has that, and that gives her guts enough to let Blue drive her back to Toronto in his pickup truck and help her move into her new single room in residence. They dump all the boxes in the middle of the floor. “You going to be all right?” Blue asks her as he’s leaving.

  Emma nods, but she doesn’t want him to go. It has taken considerable effort to come back to the scene of humiliation, particularly this late into the start of the term. She hasn’t dared to look anyone in the eye, she’s heard only grunts in response to her attempts to say hello. She’s avoiding strict archaeology this fall, focusing on related subjects taught by unrelated professors—physical anthropology, evolution, osteology, disease.

  “You’re depressed,” Ruthie tells her, ten minutes after being reunited. “You’re a casebook classic. All the signs are there.”

  “Depressed” sounds like an awfully bland description for what Emma is feeling. Like a hollow carcass. Like roadkill. Stuck somewhere between nightmares and daydreams. Like the world keeps dividing in two. Into discrete halves. Split like apples by a swift axe. Intimacy becoming repulsion. Lies becoming truths.

  She feels as if she’s lost any conviction that archaeology can provide answers, but she’s still reaching out for ruins, not out of discipline, but out of fear.

  “You’ve got to pull it together,” Ruthie tells her. “Fuck what anybody else thinks. It’s your life.”

  What precisely she is supposed to do with that precious pearl of wisdom escapes her. She tries her hardest to conjure up suicidal thoughts but she’s not particularly good at it. She gets distracted. There are the remains of a chocolate cake in the fridge down the hall still to be eaten; there is the appointment to get her wisdom teeth out the following week.

  In her room, she paces back and forth trying to memorize terminology. It seems to be the only way anything will stick these days. If she pounds out terms with her feet, or sets them to music, she has a rhythmic association, which is better than no association at all. But the terms exist in isolation. They don’t seem to amount to anything. They don’t contribute to a big picture, they don’t even seem like parts of any whole.

  She used to have a goal. She was going to be something. Now she can only dream of being a headless horseman or a pumpkin carved out for Hallowe’en. Somebody seems to have emptied out the contents of her head and either baked them in the oven, mashed them into a pie, or just thrown them, ever so unconsciously, into the garburator. Maybe she really is destined for a life of scooping ice cream. Maybe Oliver was right all along.

  Her fantasies are getting the better of her. Her doctor prescribes Prozac and tells her she might think about taking a little trip. “Sure,” she nods. “I’m sure there’s a hotel room available in hell,” she says to him with all the sarcasm she can muster.

  “Just try the drugs,” he says, not amused. “And come back in a month.”

  Wired

  Blue is finishing up the last of the drywall. He who could never get a grip on a circular saw seems perfectly competent when it comes to building his own
empire. With the help of a small business loan he’s transformed the tiny, dank basement shop into something colourful and inviting. He cranks up some metal death thrash, cracks open a beer, and toasts the acoustic tiles of the ceiling. It’s his big day.

  Amy arrives after her shift, carrying a giant pumpkin and bundles of flowers.

  “We’re not girlifying the place, okay, baby?” he says to her.

  She gives him a mock sulk, and he’s forced to relent. She arranges bunches of dogwood in clay pots while he tattoos the pumpkin.

  Blue’s got the same metal death thrash in his truck. Emma can’t stand it, but she turns up the volume anyway because the music reminds her of Blue on those rare occasions when he’s happy. She’s driving his truck to the brewery to pick up beer for the grand opening of Dyeing Arts. She doesn’t drive like a girl, despite what Blue says, but she admittedly doesn’t drive well. She chain-smokes in order to calm her nerves.

  Blue’s giving away beer and condoms and free tattoos as door prizes that night. The place is smoky, booming, and Elaine is there, sporting the blackest clothes in her wardrobe, doing her maternal best to cope with the situation. Her son is turning out to be a bit of a local celebrity. The Niagara Falls Herald ran an article about local artists on the weekend, and among them they featured her son—spray-painting “Dyeing Arts” across the window of his shop. She is proud, but she’s a little alarmed by the sight of Blue’s new friends. His friends are new, and so is his confidence.

  Blue is soaring above the crowd, waving his arms in the air and laughing as if he’s just discovered how good it feels to do so. Emma is too naive to realize this is not just the exhilaration of the opening, but a good two hundred dollars’ worth of chemicals. Amy is playing cocktail waitress in a transparent black tank top and army fatigues. Her hair has started to grow in and is an altogether arresting shade of orange.

  At the end of the night, Amy and Emma pick up plastic cups and mop the floor while Blue stands on the dental chair and tells them his theory of earth’s place in the universe. All they catch is something about cupcakes. They’re ready for bed, but he’s still wired. He’s off with Billy to an after-hours club to drink tequila.

  Amy sprays disinfectant on the countertop and says, “You know, it’s getting kind of heavy.”

  “What’s that?” Emma asks her.

  “The coke.”

  Emma is stunned. Feels like an idiot. Wonders what else she’s been missing. “Seriously?” she says, looking at Amy.

  “It’s not good. I mean, it’s okay at the time because he’s on top of the world, but then he gets so depressed the next day. Beats himself up, says he’s worthless.”

  The word kicks a hole in Emma’s stomach. “Worthless” was a word Oliver was fond of using—a vast, catch-all word like a pit into which Blue often tripped and fell.

  “And things are really just beginning to happen for him,” Amy sighs.

  Far and Wise

  The drugs help—they lay down wooden planks over the gaping abyss beneath her. The drugs help, but bigger help comes in the form of vindication.

  “Courier dropped this off for you earlier today,” says Ruthie.

  Emma’s never seen herself as someone grown up enough to receive a courier package so she thinks it must be a mistake. But no, that’s her name there, and the return address is somewhere in Peru. Could Oliver be in South America?

  “Why don’t you stop agonizing us both and open the sucker,” Ruthie says.

  Emma tears the envelope open. It’s a handwritten letter and a map. The letter is signed Nick. “It’s from Professor Rocker,” she tells Ruthie.

  “Oh no,” Ruthie groans.

  “But listen to this—he’s writing to apologize.”

  “Get out.”

  “Here,” Emma says, starting to read.

  After you left, I was never completely satisfied that there wasn’t, in fact, something there. I knew it couldn’t be an ossuary, and probably wasn’t anything of archaeological interest, but it continued to bother me. So I took a look at what techniques had been employed in the original survey. They were, as I suspected, the most basic.

  Then, because I was still unsatisfied—and now, Emma, I’m telling you this in the strictest confidence because they’d throw me out on my ass for not following procedure—I hired a private company (my own money) to come in and do a scan with ground-penetrating radar when the course was finished. And wouldn’t you know it—they found something—an old well, and the rocks had obviously been moved to cover it up, probably for safety purposes.

  All this is to say, I owe you an apology. You were correct—at least to some degree. There was something there that had been missed on the first go around, although it’s not really of any relevance. But you were right to raise the question. Where you were wrong was to jump to conclusions—and they were pretty far-fetched conclusions, you have to agree. I do think you’ll make a wonderful archaeologist if you take that curiosity, that ability to raise questions, and temper it with a greater degree of caution and patience.

  Finally, I owe you some thanks. As you can see, I’m sending this from Peru. I’m here, in part, because of you. You were out of line to imply that I was bitter and had lost my ambition—but you weren’t entirely wrong. What this whole thing has taught me is that it’s much more about the search than it is about the find. I had resigned myself to the reality that it’s unlikely I would ever find anything of value in my career. What I lost in the process of that resignation, though, was the belief that the search itself has intrinsic value—that that is where the real rewards lie. And so I’ve come here, on a one-term sabbatical, to do something I’ve always wanted to do—work on an Incan site in the Andes. Gracias, Emma.

  Nick

  Red Button

  Blue seems to be retreating from the material world. There is material all right, and money, but what he doesn’t spend in the dental supply store he seems to be spending on coke. The more success he is having with the shop, the more whacked out and inaccessible he’s becoming.

  He doesn’t see it that way. He’s floating on chemicals and relative success. It’s a disembodied reality: Big Lou and Baby Blue and the angry guy in the middle who disagrees with them both. But the guy in the middle’s got his finger poised on a red button. He’s ready to blow them all up. He’s waiting for the right moment. He’s waiting until Blue’s got more plates stacked up before he trips him. Blue never looks in the mirror now. The image he sees is a fireball of nervous energy, electric yellow, emitting bitter shocks like bee stings. “Fuck off, man,” he says to himself.

  At night, Blue brags that people all the way across the country have heard of Dyeing Arts, but during the day, he is irritable and withdrawn. When Emma visits him on weekends, she tries to talk sense to him, but it only seems to make him more sullen. Mentioning the drug use just makes him angry. He tells her to get off his back, stay out of his business, chill out, get a life. It’s not easy holding it together. He doesn’t need the added pressure of his sister’s moralizing. What does she know? The drugs are part of the territory. Using, selling, tattooing, it’s all one and the same.

  To Emma, though, it seems like Blue doesn’t care about anybody but himself at the moment. There are the depressing daytime visits with him, but there are also the wild nights. Nights when he calls her at 3 a.m., coming down from whatever planet he’s just visited, and cries, “Em, Em, I love you so much, I’m so awful, everything’s so awful,” into the phone. She tries her best to comfort him, tells him he’ll feel better in a few hours, but he drones on and on without interruption; without the possibility of taking in anything another human could offer. It usually ends up in the same place, with Blue talking about Oliver, calling him a fucking bastard and coward.

  Emma agrees.

  Blue even turns up at her residence more than once in the middle of the night—having run or flown or however he gets there from Niagara Falls—laughing or crying, or most often both, prattling on, sad and angry. It�
�s monologues he spews. They’re all in his own voice, but in his head there’s a three-way conversation happening. His father telling him he’s a loser and a fuck-up, the baby boy who’s cowering under his blows, and the angry guy in the middle who tells Oliver he wants to kill him but turns around and punches the baby boy instead.

  Blue needs an audience, but he won’t speak when he’s sober.

  “Blue,” she has to say to him more than once, “please don’t smoke that joint in here. Come on—you know I could get chucked out for that.”

  The third time she says it, he puts his steel-toed boot straight through her door.

  “That brother of yours is a fucking asshole,” Ruthie says in no uncertain terms when she sees Emma taping a pad of paper over the hole in the door the next day.

  He may well be, Emma thinks, but that doesn’t give Ruthie the right to say anything. That’s Emma’s right—family privilege.

  “He needs some help. He’s gonna blow,” Ruthie continues.

  “Ruthie!” Emma shouts from the floor. “Quit it, okay?” she says in exasperation.

  “Well, you’re the one who’s going to end up with a whole lot of lava in your lap,” Ruthie says.

  “But what am I supposed to do? You mention getting help, you mention the drugs, and he goes ballistic!”

  “Don’t indulge him.”

  “Indulge him?”

  “Tell him you won’t listen to his shit.”

  I can’t do that, thinks Emma. If I did that, I might lose him. But what else can she do? She can’t force him to get help, she can’t threaten him. She can’t get Elaine involved because Elaine’s busy having her own crisis. Seems things with her man Richard weren’t as peachy as Elaine made them sound. Seems he cut off the support he was giving Elaine because he was going to have to pay alimony. Seems he’s leaving his wife—but not for Elaine.