Boy Lost in Wild

by Brenda Hasiuk

  My dad holds up his hand at my mother, part wave, part message: settle down. “We ate. She’s like you, no onions on her burger.” He looks sad and uncomfortable under the massive, shedding elms.

  That night, I don’t hear Fen snoring. I can think of Ping only as Fen now because Gordon has said it so many times that it’s stuck. Do you understand, Fen? You must wait for the light. The walking little man, Fen. You must wait for him.

  Fen is crying a quiet e-soos-me cry, but it’s unmistakable. She is crying.

  Dear Frida: Why is Fen crying? Unrequited love? Homesickness? Sore toe?

  Dear Frida: I don’t think Dad avoids Gordon because he’s gay. I think it’s because Gordon won, and Dad lost—lost his girls to Gordon, and to the city.

  Dear Frida: Once upon a time, there were three star-crossed lovers asleep on ancient rocks. The tide rose up, washed two away, and then there was only one.

  As usual, just writing these pointless words makes me feel better.

  Blood

  Four Facts and a Few Last Words

  1. During the height of the North American fur trade, many British and French fur traders married First Nations and Inuit women, and their offspring became known as the Métis. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Red River Métis fought eastern-based Canadian government forces to retain the rights to their traditional trading routes, which led to the government’s creation of the Province of Manitoba.

  2. Throughout the twentieth century, countless Métis were assimilated into European Canadian populations, making Métis heritage more common than is generally realized. Between 1996 and 2006, however, the population of Canadians who self-identify as Métis nearly doubled, to about 390,000.

  3. The Greek word “autós” means self, and the word “autism” was first used by psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1908 to mean morbid self-admiration and withdrawal within self.

  4. Temple Grandin, an American autistic and inventor, created the first “hug box”—a metal enclosure that can provide the comforting pressure and closeness autistic people crave, without the over-stimulation of human contact.

  An excerpt from Métis leader Louis Riel’s last words before his execution by the Government of Canada: I am no more than you are. I am simply one of the flock, equal to the rest. If it is any satisfaction to the doctor to know what kind of insanity I have, if they are going to call my pretentions insanity, I say, humbly, through the grace of God, I believe I am the prophet of the New World.

  * * *

  In one terrible moment, Marc throws their mother across the room. His sister Monique has just walked in the door from day camp, where a helpful counsellor informed her that she is too fat and that she is Métis.

  Their mother sits where she has fallen, leaning against the bookcase filled with Marc’s collectors’ cards, cradling her elbow, staring at nothing. Marc sits round-shouldered on the bunk bed, rocking a little, and Monique stands frozen in the doorway. It’s as if they’re afraid to approach their own mother, afraid if they get too close she’ll start to wail and wail and never stop.

  Monique is fourteen, big for her age but a pixie compared to her thick-chested brother, and the first to speak, as usual. “What the hell?”

  Marc strokes his scraggly beard like it’s a pet. “Don’t come in here.”

  “What’s the matter with you?” Monique asks.

  Their mother gets up slowly, straining like she hasn’t been to a yoga class in months. “Leave him be.”

  Monique looks from one to the other. It’s dim in Marc’s room, only skinny blades of sun escaping from the roller blind drawn all the way down.

  “Leave him be,” their mother says again. She’s still bent at the waist as if she has PMS cramps. She grabs Monique by the arm and shoves her into the hall. “He’s not himself. Just leave him.”

  “What’s going on?” Monique asks.

  Their mother opens her lips in what Monique thinks might be a smile, but it’s not. She’s gritting her teeth. “I said just leave him be.”

  Marc strokes his beard—purposeful, repetitive, like a cat cleaning itself. Without warning, he flies at the door and slams it with enough force to seal a bank vault. What he would give to find himself in just such a place—dark, silent steel hugging him in from all sides. What he would give to find himself immune to those voices—their mother’s softly clinging and relentless, his sister’s booming and unpredictable. Each haunts him in its own unique way. Monique’s presence is about small oppressions: the way her thighs brush together in jeans, the way she huffs through everyday tasks, the way she chews, her peanut butter breath, her flowery lotions on top of body odour; the way she will appear, huffing, demand something of him he knows not what.

  But these are things he has learned to master, by and large. When he was younger, he would stack things, sort his cards, write down the sports stats, backwards and forwards, drown his senses with order of his own making. It is other things, more recent, less easy to pinpoint, to sort and name, that seem to defeat him these days.

  There was a time, when he was still a child, that his mother’s steady weight on his shoulders could be actually calming. But no longer. Day in, day out, she hovers patiently, gently, suggesting he should shower, and he wants to smash her face in with the amethyst paperweight on his desk. The jagged purple would chew through her pale, tiny-pored skin with just one bite. She has no idea how much the pounding hurts—how the new water-saver showerhead feels like beach pebbles hurling against his skin. How the reek of dandruff shampoo leaves him weak. How her body lotion reminds him of school, of the others brushing past him in the hallway, their exposed arms alarmingly soft, their teeth enamel so white, their toenails painted with tiny, taunting flower designs. They all close in on him and he feels the need to run, to smash through, a bull set loose in the Spanish streets.

  He can hear his sister breathing. She is standing behind the closed door, in defiance of their mother. He waits, pets his beard, one hundred strokes, two hundred, but the breathing continues. Does she assume he knows she’s there? Monique has never had any idea what he can and cannot do. He opens the door.

  “She’s in the backyard,” she says. “Weeding.”

  Marc waits. Her breath smells like cheese.

  “Did you know we’re Métis?” she asks.

  “What?”

  “Métis,” she says. “We have Aboriginal blood.”

  A few years ago, Marc delved into chemistry, and blood chemistry in particular. Before that, it was astronomy, mapping the constellations with pins on his ceiling, recording both astronomical and, when applicable, mythical identifiers: Corona Australis = centaur shooting arrows; Vulpecula, the fox. Then it was geography, this time drawn in notebooks: Chad bordered by Libya to the north, Sudan to the east, the Central African Republic to the south, Cameroon and Nigeria to the southwest, and Niger to the west. Fiji = 18.1667° S, 178, 4500° E. Then the blood—glucose, potassium, bicarbonate, sodium, creatinine, chloride—only one little ingredient amiss and let’s count the ways the body goes into revolt.

  “She’s from Iceland,” he says, as if that’s the end of the story. He does not add that Iceland is unique in the world, an isolated, nearly homogeneous population with meticulous genealogical records.

  She stares, a long-lashed beef cow trying to decipher genetic code. “I know.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Whatever,” and closes the door in her face. He likes this word—whatever—says it often, because it is dismissive and also the kind of thing a young man like him might say.

  The next day, just after supper, Marc walks out and does not come back. Not that night, or the next one. Their mother heads whole hog into the search, keeping in constant touch with police, making their father drive her around the streets until they both look as stinky and dishevelled as Marc himself.

  “He’s eighteen, Stef,” their father says. “There’s only so much we can do.” He’s rubbing the bridge of his nose where his glasses sit, day in and day out. Monique has a na
me for this that she’s only shared with her friend, Del. It’s the I’ve been designing motors more complex than your brain all day, leave me the F alone rub.

  Their mother looks at him as if he’s retarded, not a big-time engineer and the missing person’s dad. “He’s special needs, Wayne.”

  “You’re the one who resisted the label,” her father says.

  Their mother glares, says nothing.

  Monique insists Del talk on the phone rather than text—anything to avoid the shitstorm at home.

  “I’ve got more in common with someone in Mongolia than my own brother,” Monique says.

  It’s not a complaint, simply an observation, and one of the things Del loves most about her friend. She is not a whiner.

  “Where do you think he is?” Del asks.

  Monique hears the counsellor’s sing-song voice from the other day chime in from nowhere. We all have to love our bodies, which means we need to treat them with love. It’s the only one we’ve got and we’ve got it for life.

  She and Del could talk about that, about how the voice keeps playing like a catchy tune you don’t really like, but won’t go away. How she could still feel the hand squeezing her shoulder in sisterly assurance: I’m Métis, too. That’s why I do this. I’ve had diabetes for seven years and my mom lost a leg to the disease. But you still have a chance to change things, to love yourself, to be healthy and strong.

  I do love myself, Monique had wanted to say. I think I deserve everything. I deserve meatball subs, mozzarella sticks, chocolate chip banana bread, garlic toast, burgundy cherry gourmet frozen yoghurt. I deserve it all.

  This is something else Del also loves about her. She comes over to Monique’s place to escape her highly programmed life—competitive jazz dance, private oboe lessons, tae kwon do, musical theatre. Del’s mother is addicted to schedules, has been known to do the treadmill on Christmas day.

  “Monnie does her own thing,” Del likes to say. “And that is cool.”

  The truth is, however, Del has no idea what food means to Monique. It’s not that Monique doesn’t care that her entire wardrobe is made up of large T-shirts and larger yoga pants, or that people call her fat behind her generous back. She does care—just not enough. For as long as she can remember, nothing makes her feel as good, so instantly, obviously, accessibly good, as a snack.

  “You’re too critical of yourself, Del,” Monique likes to say. “You’re going to end up in therapy.”

  This was the kind of stuff they talked about all the time. It was almost a schtick. They’d met when they were eight, on the beach in Grand Marais, where their families both had cabins. Monique’s one-room cabin, which sat on a precariously sandy cliff overlooking the shallow lake and her mother called “The Shack,” was a hand-me-down from her father’s long-dead paternal grandfather, whereas Del’s father had recently purchased a “move-in ready” A-frame nestled in the trees with a new tin roof and vinyl siding. Del is as muscled as Monique is plump. Del is an only child and Monique definitely is not. But they made their pact during a drought summer, when it seemed like the blazing days would go on forever. When heat hung in the night air as if it couldn’t bear to let go. When Marc was “coming into his own,” as their mother said, becoming an eccentric darling of teachers and able to visit the cabin with minimal “stress-related behavioural incidents.” During a sunset made more beautiful by the haze of forest fires to the north, Monique and Del had pledged to be real friends. Not BFFs, not soul sisters, just real, no matter what.

  Now, Del is confused by her friend’s silence. It’s not like Monique at all. “Hey-ho,” Del says, good and loud into the phone. “You there or what?”

  I can help you come up with plan, a weekly menu. It won’t be that hard, I promise. Next year, you’ll probably be a junior counsellor yourself. Don’t you want to pass on healthy habits to the kids? Be a role model? Our people need role models.

  Monique is confused. Our people? Did the counsellor mean fatties or the Métis? Did she really think Monique was going to spend her summer, the summer her brother finally went psycho, eating lentils and carrots?

  “Mon?”

  “Sorry,” Monique lies. “Gotta go. My dad’s hovering. I’ll keep you updated.”

  This is what Marc knows. He no longer has any control. The old tricks have lost their magic. So he keeps on the move, counting light standards, passing buses, reciting the constellations spelled backwards, in alphabetical order.

  He knows people no longer crowd him. Not like when he was younger, when he was quiet and tall and clean, the school novelty with the eerie memory and stubborn mother. They move around now, part the sea, even the ones with suntanned legs bared all the way up to their cracks, moon-like breasts stuffed high, a pair of udders in a bra. So he keeps going, keeps muttering until he has no choice but to collapse in a park, pungent and spent.

  When they track him down at the shelter for street youth, he knows what to say. I am of age. I am safe. I choose to be here.

  He does not say that he has lost control. That he has stopped stroking his beard and is instead making fists, digging his uncut nails into his palms, waiting exactly five seconds, then repeating.

  This is what Monique knows. Her mother’s grandparents on both sides came from Iceland. Her mother’s father set himself up running a gas station and car dealership in the Interlake.

  “Your dad had a hick French accent,” her mother liked to say, one of those jokes that Monique never quite got. “But they forgave him because he had a degree and would look after me in the style to which I’d become accustomed.”

  She knows her father spoke French before English, that he grew up fishing on Lake Winnipeg. She knows his father, Monique’s grandfather, died when he was five, his mother when he was at university.

  She knows her mother blogs about all of them, but mostly Marc and his autism. She rarely reads the entries because they’re usually something like this:

  Wayne set up a man-cave for himself where he fixes old cars he can never bring himself to sell. Where is my escape? Perhaps this is it. My daughter, still so young, doesn’t seem to need one. She’s always here, so affable, so available, as if compensating for her brother’s absent presence.

  Monique knows she is the easy one. She knows this is not a good time. She knows Del loves her for who she is, blubber and crazy brilliant brother and all, but Del cannot help her with the counsellor’s chirp-chirp-chirping voice.

  While Monique is lying to her friend for the very first time, Marc counts the steps between garages in an inner-city back lane. The lanes are quieter, darker, simpler, than the streets, and at times, he feels capable of roaming and breathing at the same time. At this hour, not long before sunset, everything—the relentless chain-link fences, the winter-ravaged driveways and sagging garage doors, the sharp thistle emerging through every available crack and crevice—seems to lose its edge.

  Marc does not like movies, not the horrific surround sound or rows upon rows of invisible munching mouths, not the in-your-face faces and droning music montages, but one time his father made him sit down at home and watch something called My Winnipeg, and Marc watched it again and again. It was as if its crawling images and meandering, undemanding voice spoke to him, and only him, like nothing before. In it were the unmarked back lanes of Winnipeg—snow-grey, moon-lit, fogged with exhaust—and he felt a kind of familiarity utterly new to him.

  He was twelve years and three months old the day it hit him that he was a freak when it came to language. Other people did not hear the word attitude and see a plaid fedora perched atop a faceless, genderless white mannequin. Or hear the name Monique without seeing the enormous, sad-eyed dairy cow, patiently putting up with the milking machine at the dairy farm they’d visited on a school field trip. Dad was a ’71 Camaro, steel blue, with worn sheepskin seat covers and its hood up. Peace was a perfectly round, perfectly pink-frosted birthday cake cut in eight identical-sized pieces. After the movie, Winnipeg became their potholed back lane in
the depth of January. Only the word mom remained imageless, was simply an everyday sound, like bang or pop.

  This summer night, the garbage is a distasteful mix of sweet and sour, but there’s a breeze and it doesn’t linger. There are no street numbers on the garages, but Marc has counted from both the beginning and end of the block and can recite each address as he passes. He knows he must do this until he’s spent, can do it no longer, before returning to the shelter to pass out. Otherwise there might be trouble. He knows this, he can feel it, but cannot explain it. The girls there—girl = the bodiless doll head Monique once had for playing hair stylist—came too close with their wrinkled, low-slung skirts and diamond-studded belly buttons.

  “It’s okay,” one had said. “We’re all freaks here, sweetie.”

  And he ran like she’d tried to bite him, because he wanted to take her tiny bird head, covered in blonde hair so thin you could see the sun-burnt scalp beneath, and crush it in his grown-man hands.

  134 Gertrude. 137. 138. 141, Marc counts. Freak is his word, not hers. From the first time he heard it, on the history channel, during the show about the man long ago who travelled around drawing perfect architectural reproductions of cathedrals after seeing them once, he loved it. He loves the softness of the f followed by the k’s punch, would repeat it just for fun even when his mother asked him to stop. It didn’t matter when he learned the word savant. Freak = a cathedral and he can’t shake it.

  A garage door begins to rumble and Marc nearly buckles to his knees. Brake lights glow angry red in the dying light and he ducks in behind a recycling bin at 147, tries to hide his bulky self as best he can. He watches the gravel give way beneath the tires, counts those that bounce free as the wheels grind and straighten, does not notice the black dog until its nose is directly under his elbow.