Westlake Soul

by Rio Youers

  Dude, you didn’t know?

  Hell, no.

  What, exactly, do you use that superbrain for?

  I’ve been . . . I trailed off, feeling tears sting my eyes, even though they remained dry, didn’t so much as blink. Fat Annie was my caregiver, and had been for eighteen months. She was stern (given to occasional acts of sweetness) yet undeniably effective, like Mr. Miyagi. I had the deepest respect for her. And yeah . . . love, too. Given the nature of our relationship, it was impossible not to form a bond. She came in most days for three hours—checked my vitals, maintained my PEG tube, took care of my toileting (by which I mean she changed my diapers and wiped my ass). She would sponge bathe me with a tenderness that sent shivers of goodness rolling through my body, massage my limbs to promote circulation, and do (painful, but necessary) assisted range of motion exercises to keep my joints flexible. She’d also administer my tinzaparin shot—a blood thinner that prevents deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolus. Ten thousand units injected into my abdomen (I have a neat little hard spot where the needle keeps going in—yeah, it’s fun being me). If the weather was nice she would transfer me to my wheelchair and take me around the block, sometimes to the library, where it was quiet and the smell of books inspired daydreams. If it was too cold out, she’d sit me in my chair and read to me. After changing the sheets, she’d lift me back into bed, placing small pillows beneath my elbows and heels to prevent decubitus ulcers. And all the time—through all this care—she would talk to me. Normally. No baby-talk (you’d be surprised how many of my visitors revert to baby-talk: Hey, Wessy . . . you feewing all wight? Awww, he’s got an ickle bit of dwool on his chinny-winn). No dumbing down or awkwardness. She spoke to me the way people should: like I’m a human being.

  Yeah, I loved Fat Annie.

  Her name wasn’t even Annie. It was Georgina. Hub and I called her Fat Annie because she looked and dressed like Kathy Bates in Misery. We kept expecting her to call one of us a dirty bird, or walk in carrying a sledgehammer. Just our little joke. No malice intended. Fat Annie was the best. And now she’s gone.

  What the hell is going on? I said. Why’d she quit?

  Hub frowned. I love that the superbrain is asking the dog the questions.

  This is not good, Hub. What’s my new caregiver going to be like?

  I watched the rain hit the window.

  I tell you, man, Hub said. There’s an uncool vibe in the air, and I don’t like it.

  No, I said. Me, either.

  Dad came in then, his face crossed with anger, his eyes little beads. Hub leapt to his feet and dashed from the room, his paws skating on the hardwood for a moment, like Scooby-Doo running from a ghost. Dad growled and aimed his foot at Hub’s ass but missed.

  ¡Viva la revolución! Hub shouted over his shoulder, then was gone.

  Dad paused for a moment, just looking at me, and I saw his eyes mist over. He blinked and a solitary tear toppled down his cheek and disappeared into the fuzz of his beard. Then he pulled back my bedsheets and dressed me in my pyjamas, saying nothing, not as gentle with his hands as Fat Annie. He transferred me to my chair and wheeled me into the living room. No TV or radio on. Only the sound of the rain.

  Dad sat on the sofa and we watched it come down together. Swags of deep grey, like stained lace, rippled past the window. Kiss of lightning.

  “We love you, Wes,” Dad said. “You know that, right?”

  I imagined the rain reflected in my unblinking eyes.

  “We love you so much.”

  Then Dad sort of flopped out of the sofa, dropped to his knees, and rested his head in my lap. He curled his arms around my waist and wept silently, as if he didn’t want me to know that he was crying. But I could feel his shoulders rocking, his hands trembling, the uncomfortable warmth of his tears.

  6. On Love.

  Can be confusing. Often overwhelming. Rock stars don’t help; The Beatles sing, “All You Need Is Love,” while Pat Benatar insists, “Love Is a Battlefield.” And what the heck is with The Four Aces gushing, “Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing” in one ear, while Def Leppard are belting, “Love Bites” in the other? Doesn’t make sense, right? Are we so obtuse when it comes to the sensibilities of the heart? Is love so complex an entity that nobody can fully grasp it? But we are the modern Homo sapiens. The theory of relativity. Man on the moon. PlayStation 3. The emperor penguin has a brain the size of a peach pit, yet their species know how to keep the love light burning. Don’t believe me? Just watch March of the Penguins. Or Happy Feet. Why is it that Chilly Willy can ride the love train, when even the most intelligent among us are like fifth graders when it comes to hopping on board?

  Lou Gramm—lead singer of the rock band Foreigner—once sang, “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Well, I hope Mr. Gramm is reading this, because I’m going to tell him:

  Love is simple. It is not a battlefield, and it doesn’t bite. It is not cruel or blind. It is simply an emotion. The complexities and imperfections are not love’s; they are our own. Strip away the frustrations of living. Cast aside contempt and remorse. Make joy and anger walk the plank. Ditto optimism and trust. When you are left with nothing but love, you will see something breathtaking.

  Now, I’m not telling you anything new here, and no doubt Mr. Gramm will be less than satisfied with my response. But bear with me, brotherman . . . this superbrain shiznit is useful for more than just astral projecting to Leafs games or watching Angelina Jolie take a shower.

  The challenge isn’t in understanding love, but in—to borrow from William Blake—cleansing the doors of perception . . . to see love how it truly is: a miniature sun. It provides heat and light, and the energy we need to survive. It may help, Mr. Gramm, to know that, like the sun, love needs a constant supply of fuel. I’m talking about fusion reaction, baby . . . the thermal collision of protons—BAM!—that sustain this brilliant source of energy. In other words . . . you stop throwing coal on the fire, and it’s going to go out.

  Corinthians 13 says that love never fails. This isn’t true. Even our own sun will burn itself out one day (there are 5,766,923,227 years before you have to worry about that, though, so go ahead and buy that flat screen TV you were looking at). Love can fail, regardless of how much fuel there is to burn. We can’t stop the wind from blowing, or the rain from falling. Sometimes the fire just dies. And fate . . . well, that’s another subject.

  But love is a miniature sun.

  You want to feel that heat right now? Find a loved one and throw your arms around them. They’ll do the same to you, and—BAM!—protons collide, baby. It really is that simple. A science so elementary that penguins can understand it.

  I know this not because I found love, but because I lost it.

  Let me tell you what happened with Nadia.

  7. Our Song.

  My Bond girl, remember? I want to be your Soul, she had said.

  She came to see me twice when I was in a coma. The first time she sat in the chair next to my bed, her hand clutching my fingers, occasionally stroking my hair. Her touch had always sent unreal sensations through my body, like threads of light in a plasma globe. Easy to imagine the fine hairs on her arms stiffening. But on this occasion, I had no light to give. I lay numb and unresponsive. A marionette with tubes for strings, waiting for someone to make me dance. Nadia leaned close enough to kiss me, whispered in my ear.

  “Wake up, baby. Wake up for me.”

  She thought she could do it—that her voice, her touch, was like fairy dust, and would wake that deeply sleeping part of me. That it didn’t happen changed something inside her. Very subtle, but enough for her to question our harmony. Enough to set a cool wind blowing across her miniature sun.

  “I’m here.” Her fingers tying bows in my hair. Unravelling them. Tying bows. “Wake up. Come back to me.”

  Tears had no effect on her beauty. In fact they enhanced it, the way imperfection can make a portrait more real. She would stop crying, eventually, but at that moment she was hurting. A ninetee
n-year-old raincloud. She curled her hand around my wrist and felt the vague tick of my pulse. It was all I could give her.

  She visited again five days later—the day before she left for Toronto. Her hair was tied back, her face exposed. The lines of her cheeks seemed sharper, and her eyes too big. A sallow bead of light played on her brow. She kissed the bridge of my nose, delicately, before sitting down. Her hand looped into mine and for a long moment she sat silently, gazing at my sleeping face, listening to the chirp of the cardiac monitor.

  “We were supposed to be at the beginning,” she said. Her lips tightened. She looked away from me. The light through the window struck her glistening eyes. Not pink sunshine, but the pale silver of a Vancouver afternoon. “I had it all planned, baby. We were going to get married somewhere uncomfortably hot, then honeymoon until our bodies were shattered. You were going to open a surf shop while I deejayed. We’d have two children: Marvel and Calypso. A dog called Jesus. And we’d live happily ever after in a place where you could hear the palm fronds whisper, and where our garden was made of sand.”

  No tears. Maybe she was all cried out, or had found a ridge of inner strength, shaped like a saddle horn, that she clung to as the life she knew bucked and reared. With her hair drawn back she appeared austere. Harsh, almost. The effect of cooling winds. Still beautiful, but different from the girl who had sat in that seat five days before, her pieces held together by the weak glue of disbelief.

  “Come back to me, baby,” she said.

  My IV line dripped saline.

  Nadia let go of my hand. She reached into the beach bag she had brought in with her, took out her iPod and the Allen & Heath headphones she had been wearing when I first saw her. She leaned close and looped them over my ears, making sure they were comfortably placed. Then she plugged them into the iPod and found our song.

  You may think—with us being so young, sexy, and kick-ass—that our song was something contemporary, blazing hot. Armin van Buuren, perhaps, or deadmau5. Maybe even one of the classics. “These Eyes,” by The Guess Who, or just about anything by Bob Marley. Yeah, you may think that, but you’d be wrong. Nadia was a deejay, and her appreciation of music ran deep. Thus, our song was a l’il something from the nineties.

  The seventeen nineties.

  Beethoven’s Sonata pathétique. The adagio movement. Special to us because that was when our protons first collided. Another memory I relive often, regardless of hurt. Every sweet sound. The smell of floor polish and lavender. My heart suddenly feeling as if it were filled with helium, climbing in my chest, wanting to carry me away. It was our third date. We’d done the SuperPoke thing on Facebook, I’d taken her to the movies and out for dinner. We’d kissed a few times, nothing more. But for Date #3 she’d invited me to her house (her parents were away for the weekend) and I knew that our relationship was about to hit the next level. I’d expected deep respect and intimacy—thinking, sensibly, that we were still a few dates away from falling in love.

  I was wrong.

  BAM!

  Her parents own a kingly, neo-Georgian home in Rosedale (Daddy was—still is—one of the big wheels at CBC). Nadia kissed me at the door, made me feel welcome, but I still felt—coming from our modest home in small town Hallow Falls—out of place. Not uncomfortable with the splendour . . . just unfamiliar with it. I’d never been in a house that had a statue in the hallway before. A frickin’ statue.

  “This is the shit,” I said to Nadia, and imagined the house shuddering with disdain. “I better not touch anything.”

  “Only me,” Nadia said with a smile.

  I kicked off my sneakers, dropped my backpack, and followed Nadia on the obligatory tour, which concluded not in her bedroom, as I had hoped (why delay the inevitable?), but in a room resplendent with funky artwork, sprigs of lavender, and a grand piano. An 1896 Steinway Model B, to be precise.

  “The music room,” she said brightly.

  How could I resist? I stepped to the piano and tinkled a few of the high keys, matched the notes with a warbling false. Nadia looked at me, one eyebrow raised.

  “What do you get when you drop a piano down a mine shaft?” I asked.

  She shrugged.

  “A-flat minor.” Tinkle-tinkle!

  “Funny,” she said. “You get that joke from a Christmas cracker?”

  “The great Fozzie Bear,” I said. “Wocka Wocka.”

  Half a smile. “You’re playing B-flat, though. Now C . . . now B-flat again.”

  I stopped tinkling. “You play?”

  “A little.”

  “Show me what you got.”

  She considered for a moment, biting her lower lip, looking from my expectant face to the piano’s immaculate keyboard, then back to me. I thought a little shyness was creeping in, but this wasn’t the case; she was actually afraid I would think her uncool. All I had really seen of Nadia was a hottie who could kick the decks and kiss like a soul-breaker, but now I was going to see the flip side. The rich man’s daughter, who sat with her knees together and her chin high. Montessori schooling and tennis trophies. Piano lessons from the age of four . . . continuing until she was old enough to rebel, get a tramp stamp, and play music of a different kind.

  “I don’t know what to play,” she said, hesitating.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “Play anything.”

  She sighed and looked at me, her eyes deep and warm. This is who I am, that look said. Take it or leave it. I replied by touching her cheek, curling a wisp of hair behind her ear, making her smile. She sat at the piano, her back straight, her small feet poised above the pedals.

  “Okay,” she said.

  I didn’t know what to expect. As I’ve said, the Nadia I knew was punkier . . . wilder. This was a different version, but—as I was about to discover—no less alluring. She placed her fingers on the keys and they suddenly looked more elegant. Those fingers had tousled my hair and set turntables on fire, but now they were as light as motes of dust. This wasn’t the only change. A calm had fallen across her face. Her whole demeanour settled. She went from a river, tumultuous and white, to a lake, serene and blue.

  And then she started to play.

  Within moments, everything inside me lifted, teased into flight by notes as delicate as the fingers that played them. My skin flushed with sensation. My mouth dropped open. Heart floating in my chest as I breathed shallow sips of air. I’d never known anything so beautiful. Not just the melody, but to see Nadia so transformed, and to feel her oneness with the music . . . it was astounding. And as those notes tiptoed in the air, coalescing with the lavender to kiss my senses, I felt it—beauty and euphony activating gravitational collapse, the build-up of heat, a chain reaction. It was happening, beyond my control. Nuclear fusion. My sun forming.

  Nadia played the final note and it faded from the air, leaving something behind. An intangible. A kind of . . . sweetened silence. She stood up and stepped toward me. Punky again, but different. Chewing her lower lip. Dark eyes shimmering. I took her hands, touched her fingers, as if they couldn’t be real.

  “Beethoven,” she said.

  I nodded hopelessly.

  “Sonata pathétique,” she added. “Second movement. Adagio cantabile.”

  “Yeah,” I said, as if I knew that. I stroked her fingers, expecting them to fade perfectly, like the music.

  “It’s pretty,” Nadia said.

  “Breathtaking,” I said.

  Another sweet silence while we stood beside the grand piano, hands clasped, looking at each other. The heat was suffocating. We kissed, eventually, and then consummated the moment. Not the fumbling, over-excited coitus of youth, but a considerate union. Two mirrors facing one another, reflecting to the point where light ran out.

  Thirteen months later, with a cardiac monitor ticking away my broken life—a clock with no hands—Nadia placed her headphones over my ears and played Sonata pathétique’s second movement . . . her final, desperate attempt to reach me, and to rescue a future with Marvel and Caly
pso—our garden made of sand.

  “Come back,” she said again.

  I gunned the Soulmobile through the rain-slick streets of my coma. Lightning in the sky and Dr. Quietus in my rearview mirror. I screeched onto the Ego Ideal, where blank towers loomed above me and the traffic signals were caught between stop and go. Dr. Quietus put his foot to the floor and closed the distance between us. His voracious engine howled.

  I’ve got you this time, Westlake Soul, he said, and cackled.

  I tried to go faster . . . to get everything I could out of my failing machine. I took a hard left turn onto Preconscious Boulevard and Dr. Quietus was right behind me. His headlights filled the Soulmobile with dreadful light.

  There’s no getting away.

  In the rearview mirror, I watched missile launchers unfold from his fenders, hood, and roof—each one loaded with a 15-Megaton WS Heart Stopper. He cackled again. More lightning in the sky, illuminating empty sidewalks, the falling rain. I crushed the accelerator, knowing there was no way out . . . and suddenly the Auditory Cortex light was flashing in the HUD. I hit the button and several thousand decibels of Sonata pathétique shook my comatose world.

  Nadia, I thought.

  The music gave the Soulmobile a boost. Rainwater fanned from the rear tires and Dr. Quietus’s headlights shrank to pinpricks. My heart cannoned as the windows of dead skyscrapers blew out. Deep cracks raced through their structures, weakening them. I saw one building—I think it was the Arbor Vitae Exchange—sag like a tired muscle, and then partially collapse as I raced by. I looked for Nadia. Her face on a billboard. Her name on a street sign. Nothing. Only the music, inciting emotion. Notes leading me like small men running on a track. I took an exit to the Pleasure Principle and caned it at unspeakable miles per hour.

  Where are you?

  I imagined delicate fingers touching piano keys. Those same fingers touching me.

  NADIA!

  No sign of her. I smeared tears from my eyes, and then Dr. Quietus was behind me again. His machine purred, smooth and efficient. Missiles locked on. He fired—cackling wildly—and arrows of light bloomed in the rearview mirror, shooting toward me, trailing smoke.