Luck

by Joan Barfoot

  Caught up in her ardent intentions, she lost track of actual meanings. This has happened to her before. Now she hears autopsy again, and is frightened. Phil will not be Phil. There’s that difference again between knowing abstractly and realizing. Next will come seeing.

  She is different now, though. For one thing, she is no longer addicted to virtue, obsessed about the goodness of each tiny act—at least she hopes she has broken out of that trap, with thanks to Phil for the large last step in the process. It’s the powerful kind of thing that starts young and sneaks up, though, and who knows how thoroughly it’s been threshed and ploughed under? It may have only been biding its time for a vulnerable moment.

  How does this happen, how much is nature, how much nurture? Eventually, what does it matter?

  A childish aversion to pain begins with picking stranded snails from sidewalks and lifting toads from the paths of lawnmowers. How eccentrically sweet, and hardly unusual: there is potential for pain, and one can act to prevent it, what could be more straightforward?

  A child’s logic is blunt and untwisted.

  The tendency then blooms at the dinner table as youthful ears take gravely to heart stories brought home by parents who are, as it happens, partners in a legal firm specializing in immigration and refugee law. Their conversations add wraiths to the table in the form of mysterious hard-working men with false papers, women tortured in ways so unspeakable they can only be specified by grim tone, not detail, and blank-eyed, or sad-eyed, scary children—all needing rescue, all needing Sophie’s mother or father to speak for them against the disbelief of immigration officials and refugee boards holding tight to the view that people must contrive these stories for shady purposes, that such lives could not be entirely true because if they were, what sort of world was this and what sort of person could bear not only being alive in it but making these life-and-death judgments?

  Sometimes, too, the stories were not true; a fact that caused its own troubles.

  How are parents to know which random gesture or unconsidered comment or fierce interest of their own can knock a child silly? How were Sophie’s to know she was locking like a laser on to their dinnertime conversations while her eyes skipped right over their many indulgences: big house, large lawns, fresh flowers, real china, genuine crystal glasses? How were they to know that rather than the moderately well-behaved and respectably kind-hearted person they intended, they were raising a zealot?

  “We’re so lucky,” her mother said, and Sophie certainly saw this was true. Her father was uninjured, her mother untortured, she herself had personally witnessed no particular sorrows, and also possessed everything she could want. Whereas misfortunes great and small were on display at the refugee centres and multicultural agencies patrolled by her parents, sometimes with Sophie in tow. How brightly those places were lit by fluorescence, how clean they were despite chipped paint and bare floors, how bustling with very busy people counselling, organizing language classes and medical treatment, filling out forms. In contrast how worn out the clients, even other kids, often looked; as if the strength and courage they’d used to get to those brightly lit places now had to stay focused on simply stopping them falling down onto those floors.

  What a lesson in good luck and bad luck: Sophie’s good, theirs bad; although in the future, with the help of all their good helpers, their luck would possibly be good also. Meanwhile—meanwhile, what? Meanwhile she might—more of the inexorable logic of the child—ease, even fend off, misfortune with sacrifice.

  Which meant a deeply desired and most fashionable doll went, within a week of her seventh birthday, to a baffled child at the refugee centre, who received it from Sophie’s reluctant, determined hands as warily as if its blonde curls might be explosive. Clothes, too, even favoured outfits—especially favoured outfits—off they went to donation boxes at the cultural centre. Just because among the many luxuries of Sophie’s family was the very real one that they had enough to give away. And that some form, however small and hard, of balancing things out might prevent a reversal, an upside-downing of events that could put her in their place, and so she gave and gave, more and more frantically: clothes, toys, games, pity. What insanity! Did nobody notice?

  “You’re an awfully good kid,” said her father. “We’re really proud of you.” He and her mother must have considered her blissfully untroublesome, a miracle of good fortune.

  Sophie’s secret was in the guilty, momentary hesitation, the persistent, sly sentence in the back of her head: But I like that, I want it, I don’t want to give it away, diluting, if not actually nullifying, her intentions. Selfishness was bad. She could never quite catch up to genuine generosity, the kind that appeared spontaneously and flowed without resistance like honey.

  In high school she joined and eventually ran the club that organized food and clothing drives for the poor of the city. So much macaroni and peanut butter! She herself took cans of asparagus tips from her parents’ shelves, and added bags of expensive, weighty, nutritionally balanced breakfast cereals. Why should the poor have to eat dreary or unhealthy, sugary foods? Equally, why did she deserve them more than anyone else? Not that she would go without; her parents simply bought more. Was that cheating?

  She was red-haired and lissome and clever and kind—how could she not be popular, well liked? So she set out contrary-wise to cultivate outcasts, befriending not so much those who were eccentric but the dull or unpleasant. Often enough they were outcasts for a reason; bad hygiene, say, or stupidity. They could make dull company and Sophie was depressed, if not discouraged, for most of her high-school years. And, too, that sardonic, unkind voice in the back of her head kept piping up, silently complaining, For heaven’s sake, take a shower! Wash your hair! Read a book!

  When she took her huge, confused, compulsive heart to university, it was to study political economics. In place of the step-by-step, case-by-case benevolences of her parents, and for that matter herself, she had a new, easier, more sweeping aim: to help repair the world’s economies, and therefore its politics, and thus its problems of violence, poverty, hatred and suffering; possibly poor hygiene and stupidity also.

  Another mad goal.

  Not such a lonely one, though, but one miraculously shared—what were the odds?—by slim and fervent, dark-haired and electric Nick, who also wanted to turn the world over.

  Of course they found each other.

  Nick said, raising his head from between Sophie’s thighs—another happy revelation, oh, yes!—that it was just her sort of marginal do-gooding and patronizing, prideful sacrifice of overflowing possessions that “lets war and suffering go on and on. People like you just put on bandages, you won’t rip them off. You don’t do anything about real wounds, all you do is cover them up.” He could be awfully eloquent in that unlikely position, he was frequently, if intermittently, at his speech-making, rabble-rousing best down there.

  “I do not,” she protested. He had no idea; how could she explain herself to him, much less prove herself? “I do so want to help.”

  “Exactly,” he replied, satisfied.

  As was she.

  “Talk’s cheap,” he said when they were upright. Her sofa was as worn as any newcomer refugee’s, her secondhand Arborite-topped kitchen table as pathetically servile. They ate beans on toast and drank cheap red wine and were gratified by these tinges of volunteer poverty. Too, there was sometimes an element of tender self-regard in their love-making. At least there was when it wasn’t accusatory or challenging. “It’s arrogant to dip in and out of people’s lives giving a little nod here and there to what they need once they’re here. How about taking a look at origins, how about helping them get the power to change their own lives in their own countries in their own ways?”

  What if she didn’t like their own ways? What if their own ways happened to be vicious and brutal?

  Never mind.

  They went on, she and Nick, to postgraduate work since as he said, they would need unassailable credentials for their revo
lutionary future. That further long period of study felt like time bought, or maybe stolen, but of course the day had to come when he put his hands on her shoulders, his head tilted back slightly so he could look her in the eyes, and said, “Okay, what do you think about this?”

  His proposal sounded brilliant. She was suitably thrilled.

  “We’ll sign up for two years. We’ll get a good look at the real thing, we’ll do on-the-ground, flat-out, stay-alive stuff while we see for ourselves and make contacts and get an idea how basic systems need to be fixed. It’s just a couple of years, for a grounding. Then we can start our real work.”

  Our real work. They would come home not only improved and more purposeful human beings but bound and twisted together as thoroughly as ancient tree roots.

  So romantic. Young love’s young dream. Although they were no longer quite so young.

  Sophie had to shade some facts and tell a few outright lies to get through the aid agency’s interviews, tests and training sessions, since doing good was evidently considered the most dangerously unstable motivation, with fomenting revolution or even storing up economic and political ammunition for future crusades scarcely more highly regarded. Sophie said, “I have experience with refugees because of my parents’ work, so I would not be surprised. It will be an adventure, and a kind of experiment, and a test of myself, and a learning experience.” Evidently that was the right sort of responsible goal for a practical, low-demand, energetic, good-willed but not crazy young person.

  When she and Nick got their assignment, it came with pages and pages of background, advice, photographs, accounts by their predecessors and a video, all of it thrilling, unreal, unimaginable. They were going to a refugee camp in a central African country at the time much in the news due to massive brutalities. “We’ll get you out if things take a turn for the worse,” agency managers told them. “Conditions are bad enough now, but if you can hack it, we need all the hands we can get on the ground.”

  Even at the time Sophie wondered if hack wasn’t an unfortunate slip of the tongue; much less hands on the ground.

  Now her parents took notice of how far virtuous impulses—compulsions—may travel, now they were worried. “We wish you wouldn’t,” they said. “We really do wish you’d think it over.”

  “I have thought it over.” And over and over. “We’ll be fine.” More than fine. Fiery, passionately burning-eyed Nick, clear-eyed, hard-working, brave, adventurous Sophie, two years far away, sacrificing wonderfully to good purposes—what, in every possible way, could be better?

  Three weeks before they were to leave, Nick once again put his hands on her shoulders and cast his eyes upwards. “I’m sorry, Soph, but it turns out I can’t go after all.”

  What?

  He was taking instead ill-paid but highly principled work—who knew he was looking for work?—with a relatively radical environmental organization. He would be involved in saving trees, lakes, oceans, the air people breathed; although, having left her gasping, he didn’t seem to care much about the air Sophie might be breathing. “When you think about it,” he said, “the environment’s at the root of every kind of exploitation there is, people using other people to get the most for themselves and ruining it all while they’re at it.”

  Speaking of ruining, “What about us?”

  “I see it as a pincer movement.” How happy he looked, how enthusiastic and far worse, relieved. “We’ll be tackling the issues from two directions instead of just one. Like a battle. A revolution. Which it is.”

  Oh. Okay.

  She could have backed out, of course she could have, but then what? If she did, would she not spend the rest of her life smelling blood on her hands? So off she went, clueless, and by the time she came home she barely remembered Nick and exactly how he’d been so compelling, and certainly did not care if he’d spent those two years underwater testing the purity of the oceans or perched in a tree fending off greedy loggers. Just the thought of buttocks, penis, that clever tongue, those fierce eyes—his or anyone’s—made her skin feel shot through with needles.

  Men and their bits and pieces, their occasional grave allures, their evidently permanent vanishings—what an expert she ought to be, and therefore detached and accepting. Instead, here she is, following an undertaker through a funeral home on her way to view the body of her ex-employer, ex-lover, her diploma in bad behaviour arduously achieved.

  Autopsy: another sort of comparative luxury, really. Look at it that way.

  There will be the difference today, too, between a singular man and torn humans en masse. The acres of boggy tents when Sophie rolled by truck into the camp, that was—well, it was a vista to start with. Almost scenic. The orientation officer back in the capital city, hours and miles distant, had advised, “You’ll probably feel overwhelmed at first sight. Take care not to get swamped.” He meant that these were people blown out of their homes by rampaging militias, thugs and mobs see-sawing through their lives until they gave up, or were forced out, and fled. They were starved, they were wounded, they were the lucky survivors. Some were guilty. “There’s relatively few able-bodied men, but there can be problems.” Getting aid past them, he meant.

  There was other corruption as well. Heartlessness; he did not mention heartlessness.

  Smells hit first, wiping out vista. Newspapers, TV, training films, websites, orientation sessions, none of those carried the reek of thousands of human bodies and open waste trenches and dampened cooking fires and a kind of rotting she couldn’t identify. Sophie took a first deep breath and threw up.

  She has always had a delicate stomach.

  It will be important not to get sick around Hendrik Anderson.

  She is unsurprised that after they pass through a solid, dignified door to the left at the end of the entrance hallway, they enter surroundings that are entirely different. Now they are indeed in unpublic space, although by no means private space. They are descending a wide bare staircase, between walls that are drywalled and painted pale green, not panelled and wallpapered. Light bears down clear and bright from the ceiling, not from muted, soft-coloured, up-tilted lamps. And there is a smell. Not a bad one, but slightly acrid and sharp. She would say medicinal if this weren’t a place where it’s far too late for medicines.

  There is a corridor in the basement with two wide blank metal doors leading off it, and at the first one he says, “I’ll step ahead for a moment. If you’ll wait, please.” She obeys, because down here there is something different about Hendrik Anderson, too; something scalpeled or chemicaled or otherwise scientific, expert and remote.

  He slips through the door, closing it quickly behind him. Rather than yield to a fresh temptation to bolt, she stares at her hands. They are real and calming, if also alive enough to be trembling.

  Not as she can expect Phil’s to be.

  Hendrik Anderson reappears looking reluctant again as if his doubts, too, have resurrected. “I really don’t know about this.”

  “It’s fine,” and she puts a hand once more on his arm, looks sincerely again down into his eyes. “Truly. I’m fine. Believe me.”

  “Well then,” he says, and steps back.

  Isn’t it amazing, that he would do this?

  Once through this last door, she finds the real chill of the place. “This isn’t where we do our work,” he says, close behind her. Embalming and make-up and so forth, he must mean, and it’s obvious this can’t be where anyone could do any work, their fingers would freeze, they’d be clumsy and make garish mistakes. No, this is a meat locker of sorts: a small, steely, preservative anteroom. No hooks, no dangling corpses, but a single metal gurney bearing a long lump that is Phil, mostly covered by plastic.

  Most of that plastic is covered in turn by a black and green plaid blanket; the sort of blanket that might be packed up for a picnic, or to shelter a pair of lovers on a porch, on a beach, in the woods. On a wicker sofa, on a patch of lawn behind a workshop. Here in this spartan space is a blanket so incongruous and discord
ant Sophie feels tears rising up, clogging her throat, blurring her vision. Because the blanket is so homey, domestic, warm. Sexual. Because this man Hendrik Anderson has thought it might camouflage mortality and also comfort her. A sweet, heartbreaking, erroneous notion.

  “Thank you. You’re very good.” And then, “Could I be alone now?”

  Here come his doubts again, showing up in a quick, distressed frown. She imagines him imagining her falling into hysteria, howling, screaming, tearing her hair. Or weirder, that she has in mind chopping off some of Phil’s hair, or scraping skin, or cutting fingernails, gathering ingredients for a nasty witches’ brew, or a huge, disastrous curse. Not that he would believe in that, but he might believe Sophie does. Or he might be leery of more luridly personal acts: initials carved on Phil’s dead chest; Phil’s deceased penis sliced away.

  He must at least assume she has something to hide.

  As she does.

  It’s also possible that he basically thinks, if Phil’s own loved ones don’t care what happens to him, why should a mere mortician? “For a few minutes, then,” he says. “But if you need me, I’ll be right outside the door. Just call out if you start feeling upset or queasy.” She hadn’t thought of that: that part of his concern might be for her well-being, not his own. In that case, what a nice man.

  “I’m all right. Don’t worry. No harm will come. But thank you. I won’t be long.”

  She’ll be as long as she wants. When he has gone, she turns her full attention to the gurney, the blanket, to Phil. “So here we are,” she says aloud. “Alone at last.” Kind of a joke; Phil might have smiled. It’s stupid, though, and embarrassing to hear her own lonely voice in this metallic, echoing room.