As soon as I hear her voice, I regret the decision.
“Hello? Who is this?” The vague brogue and forty years of cigarettes and whiskey painted over with a fresh coat of schoolgirl giggle. “Marvin? Is that you?”
“It’s me, Ma.”
“James?” Here it comes. “Ohhhh, Jimmy! I’ve been sooo worried about you, son.” So much sickly-sweet syrup hiding the arsenic in the words.
“I’m fine, Ma. How are you?”
“Oh, I’m just fine, Jimmy. Your Uncle Marvin is taking me out dancing, so I can’t talk long.” Like I’m still seven years old and believe every skeezy married car salesman who bends her bedsprings is some mysterious “uncle”.
“I don’t have an Uncle Marvin, Ma.”
Pause. Disappointed glare telegraphed straight across the continent via the utmost in telecom technology. Wearied sigh.
“Fine. My friend, Marvin. Did you call me just to spread your misery, James? I don’t have time for your attitude.”
“Nice to hear your voice, Ma.”
Click. Thanks, Ma.
I can hear through the walls, everything around me like I’m inside some glass bowl with everything reverberating. The couple fighting next door; the people on the opposite side having a quickie in the bedroom closet, while their friends are watching Friends in the living room. The old man at the end of the hall with his ugly, groaning, slapping, and screaming pornos constantly playing. Every few hours he grunts something in German, opens a new bottle of vodka.
At least it’s Friday. I get to spend two more days and nights sitting here with my swollen brain and my slow right hand.
4
DRESSED OF FUR
“Run!”
Fierce of tooth
“Run home and hide!”
I’M AWAKE.
Awake, and I still hear the screaming.
A shroud of whiskey sleep and black morning clog my eyes, and I’m still hearing the screaming.
Black shapes bouncing and hopping in front of me. Screeching. Screaming.
“Get out of here! Get! Goddammit!”
I blink the confusion away and am unsurprised to find my face in the grass.
The birds are running, bouncing, hopping away. Jumping into the air as shiny black boots stomp around in the dirt.
I roll onto my back and look up into the accusatory glare of Officer Friendly’s flashlight. I don’t know what his name is, but he knows mine. We must be pals.
“Hey! You! Get up. What did I tell you about sleeping it off in the park?”
“What? Lemme just . . .” I feel a squirt of bile hit the back of my throat as I twist and contort to put my arms underneath me. I roll back over to help the process, steadying myself for the first push-up of the day.
“Get the fuck up!” Friendly’s boot under my ribs doesn’t help me.
Instinctively, my hands go up, and my face comes down, back into the grass, which is much less comfortable from a one-foot drop.
“Fuck!”
“Come on, pal. What’s it gonna be?”
I’m up. Half-sitting, legs still splayed out into the wet grass. Or maybe it’s just my pants that are wet. At this point my senses are all shades of messed up, and I can’t tell if the urine tang is coming from me or from the alley forty-feet away. The birds are still winging around my periphery. Always with the goddamn birds.
“I warned you before,” Friendly says, struggling to get a grip under my armpits and haul me to my feet, “you can’t keep passing out in the park.”
Before? Keep passing out?
My knees are wobbling. They just keep hitting snooze and rolling over. None of me wants to cooperate.
“What’s it going to be? You only get one warning and you used that up last night. So . . . Drunk and disorderly? Or were you on your way ho—”
He half tosses me up off the ground, spinning me to face him. The sudden change of direction leaves my stomach a half-step behind, and I retch, bile-flavoured whiskey and tepid soup bursting out of me like a swollen rain pipe, straight into the air like a goddamn fountain.
Friendly’s face is dripping. His hat is raining slop onto his belly. He is no longer friendly.
“You asshole!”
Two thick hands hit my chest, full force, releasing another geyser of gruel straight into the officer’s face. I’m tripping over my own feet, stumbling back, one foot coming down on top of the empty whiskey bottle and rolling underneath me. I feel my feet and my arms running in different directions, the momentum flinging me back onto the concrete where I land on already bruised ribs and wail like a kicked dog. The birds come swarming down around the bastard, and he swats them away with his puke-laden hat. It would be comical if he wasn’t so pissed off.
“Drunk tank it is, shithead,” Officer Used-to-be-Friendly says, laying another boot into my side before he grabs my collar and drags me, like a bag of garbage, toward the cruiser.
5
OFFICER FRIENDLY’S NAME turns out to be Whitfield. That’s what it says on my paperwork, anyways.
I’d call him an asshole, except I would have done the same. I would have done worse. I would have wanted to kick the stupid drunk’s head into the curb. He would have been doing me a favour. I’m the asshole.
The papers I sign have lot of complimentary terms like intoxicated, belligerent, and resistant. Repeated issues. Recommend psych eval. That means they’ll forward a copy to good ol’ Doctor Rhodes. Which means my mother will hear all about it by lunch. Why the fuck did I tell them about the doctor? Why did I tell them about the smells, the noises? Why can’t I just keep my goddamn mouth shut? Maybe I do need to be locked up. Taken care of. Kept safe under lock and key. That’s the curse though, isn’t it? They can’t save me from myself, and they’d only lock us up together.
This is how it always starts. Even when I was fourteen. The first time I woke up, face down in the grass, covered with somebody else’s blood. Even then, it would have been a favour to stave my head in, teach me a lesson. Then I was twenty, maybe twenty-one, floundering in University, drinking, fucking anything that moved. Then it happened again, six or seven years ago. Wild, drunken bar fights, blackouts. Those days, those mornings, waking up confused and drenched in red. No Officer Friendly that day. I panicked and ran to the only people I trusted.
Like an idiot.
My mother treated me like I was some kind of sideshow freak. She refused to talk to me until I got help.
My doctor, good ol’ Doctor Rhodes, the man I’d talked to every week since I was seven years old, he’d put me in the hospital. Again. Only it wasn’t really a hospital, was it? It sure didn’t seem like they were out to really help anybody, just lock up the nut bags and the troubled teens. I was dumped off like a bag of trash, piled in with cutters, and drug fiends, and people that were so strung out on crack, or so out-of-touch with reality that they were little more than toddlers in overgrown bodies. Defective pod people. There was a guy that fucked holes in the dirt. There was a skeleton with skin, a woman who cut off her own labia because she thought it made her look fat. There was a man who had eaten his own fucking foot. And me, confused and angry. A sad, alcoholic kid with abandonment issues, turned sad, alcoholic, should-have-learned-his-lesson-by-now man. Broken. Wrong. No damn good.
IT’S SIX IN the morning. Monday morning.
I have to be at work in an hour and a half, and I smell like Officer Friendly’s hat.
The rest of the world smells like campfire, and the city has fallen into the clouds. I knew it was coming. I’ve been smelling it for a week, while everybody I mention it to looks at me like I'm having a stroke.
One thing about living in the shade of the Rocky Mountains. Mid-August to early September, without fail, the smoke comes down from the mountains like a death shroud for the end of summer. And it came fast. The last glimpse I’d had of the moon—while being shoved sour-head-first into the back of Friendly’s cruiser—the sky was clear, and black, and full of stars.
Four hours
later and the city is a ghost.
Athwart the gloom
Where the hell did that even come from? Some snippet out of my deep dark memory? Some morbid fairy tale when I was a kid? Something my mother used to say?
How much forest was burning out there? I wonder. How much forest can there be?
The mist is somehow calming to me. It dilutes the evidence of my own self-abuse and hides me as I stumble through the street, dodging in and out between the spotlight arcs of the streetlights cutting through the thickening smoke. Everything’s turned black and white. Sepia tone, like some old Orson Welles movie with weird angles and crazy shadows. Shadows that move as if they’re following me. Swooping from corner to corner like liquid crows. That sledgehammer stench of sulfur comes with it. Maybe I am having a stroke. Maybe I am crazy.
At least the acrid smoke cuts the stench I’m carrying all over me. There’s precious few people out here with the dawn, to stare at what’s left of a blood red moon, and wonder at the blanket of grey. I’m inside my building, up and out of the elevator before anyone passes close enough to turn up an offended nose.
“Jesus!” the old man from 3312 croaks as he elbows past me.
I might say the same for him. The stories my sensitive ears could tell. The nasty words and ancient German salutations he grunts into his pillow as his television rumbles with turned-down screams of agony and lust. Some of those voices too high and too terrified. Too young. I can smell the lube still dripping in his jockeys. I’ve seen the red flag waving from his wall as I pass his open door, heard him moaning “Sieg Heil” in his sleep. None of these people keep their secrets from me. Or maybe I’ve just imagined it all. I don’t even know anymore.
I’m locking my door before the elevator closes. I hear him whisper.
“Schweinhund.”
THE SHOWER IS hot and fast, scraping the foul taste of a cell full of drunks and hobos off of me. The foul taste of me. I’m scrubbing. Brushing. Clawing away the night. The skin itches and burns, but I keep scrubbing. The clean, fresh smell of Irish Spring. Ridiculous, and cliché, right? Jimmy Finn uses Irish Spring, for that ol’ wholesome smell of home on the Emerald Isle! Faith and Begorrah! Somehow, it’s the only thing I’ve found that smells clean and doesn’t give me a headache after five minutes. The only soap or shampoo or cleaner that doesn’t overpower me to tears. Fucking ridiculous. That’s me.
I let the heat and the water pound into the back of my head, like a torrential downpour, masochistically trying to hit that wound from the photocopier, maybe bust it open and bleed a little restitution. The water can’t find it. Neither can I. My fingers fumble and claw and stab at the spot, but there’s nothing there. Not a scab, not a scrape, not even a bruise.
I rest my forehead on the cool, hard tiles. This is how it always begins. I’m going to lose my mind again. I try to focus on the water, on the sound of the artificial rain. I try to turn it real in my mind, falling hard on the ground, through the trees, turning that solid earth into something soft, thick, and free. My feet sink in, and my toes shorten, pulling in to the pads. My spine straightens, my shoulders rotate forward. I’m breathing deep the smell of pine and cedar and wet earth. I open my eyes to see it, the green. What I see is claws. Hair. Fur. My feet turned to something alien and wrong. Wet fur and black claws. I fall back screaming and land hard against the edge of the tub, cracking my ribs so hard I see stars. My eyes go straight, and my feet are where they should be, pale and long and full of toes. I close my eyes and weep. What the fuck is wrong with me?
Dressed of fur
NOW I’M LATE again. Pulling myself together. Fingering the back of my head, still looking for the gouge I was missing. I stand for twenty minutes staring out across the divide at the woman in the opposite building. I can smell her from across the street. I watch her move graceful and quiet through her morning routine. Transfixed. Mesmerized.
Then a drink. Four drinks.
The bottle is clanging around in my bag as I jog to the train, each bouncing step pounding in the back of my head like too much bass, then reverberating through my sore ribs like a knife twisting in my side. This is how it always begins.
The smoke clings to me, swallowing me up. There’s something comforting in it, something familiar. I want to run. Instead, I climb into a packed train, shoved and muscled and pressed by the mass of humanity into a corner by the door. There’s some oblivious haircut in a suit, drenched in body spray, absently sticking his elbow in my face so that he can get his phone to his ear. I’m trapped. Cornered. I feel the panic growing. The wide-eyed demon of proximity is bulging at my seams, ready to explode. This was a bad idea. A very bad idea. Babies are screaming. Who the fuck brings babies on the train at 7:30 in the morning? There are a hundred clashing conversations—phones, friends, strangers making small talk, bums harassing teens with blaring headphones. The wheels are screaming, and the joints between cars are creaking with the weight of all this madness. The late-summer heat, already stifling, is a good ten degrees higher now that the smoke has pressed its way in. The inside of the train car has to be in the high thirties, with no air circulating, other than the hot, stale breath of every person in there. I can taste eighteen different types of perfume, cologne, somebody has a tuna sandwich. Somebody smells like they’ve shit their pants. The baby spews. The bum is pissing down his leg. All these people, all this madness. Concentrated city. I’m choking. I’m dying. I’m going to explode. Or I’m going to crumple, like an old tin-can under foot. My eyes are clenched shut against the spattering lights, the strobing images out the window, the snarling faces and nervous eyes. I feel weak and overwhelmed, but that demon is there, so close, springing his heels, ready to pounce.
I’m two stops away from work, when I’m rocketed back into the Plexiglas barrier. My eyes open, and there’s a face, inches away. Some hipster kid with a shave-side barber cut and a twirly-fucking moustache. I feel something press against me. I look down at the tightest pair of baby blue chinos that have ever been. Pointy leather shoes. The train bounces again, and his balls are in my hand.
“Dude.”
I snap.
I shove this creep back the few inches of free space that are left in the car. The domino effect takes three people with him. The hipster loses his footing and topples over into the lap of some woman with a face full of paint and the smell of lavender all over her. She screams. The car comes to a shuddering stop at the station.
I shove past the screaming faces, past the nineteen or twenty people trying to force their way into the six square inches of free space left in the train. I fall past them, doubling over the railing a few feet away, and gasp for air, sucking in the smoke and thanking whatever-gods-may-be for it.
6
THE PHONE HASN’T stopped ringing all goddamn morning.
The split in the middle of my cranium is throbbing, teaming up with the stabbing pain in my side, humming with the overhead lights, buzzing down the middle of my brain like a circular saw, sitting in one place, carving an endless spray of torn grey matter.
The first four times, it was that nimrod Kari—Kari with an i—wanting “an updated ETA on that TPS report”.
The fourth time, I bark at her, “It’s not going to be any fucking sooner than the last three times you fucking asked me!”
The next two calls are from H.R., followed by a call from Margaret.
She warns me, for the last time, for the first time today, “Get your shit together, Jimmy!”
The next two calls are from Kari. Asking again about the TPS.
By ten-thirty, the mickey is out from the bag and I’m flavouring my coffee.
Irish. Just like me.
When the phone rings again, I’m ready to throw it out the window and into the street, and I’m ready to throw myself out after it. I’ll chase it straight to hell. At the very least, it might kill the headache.
“Jimmy dear?”
“Fuck.”
Now I’m wishing it was Kari with an i.
“What’s that, Jimmy?”
I reach back down under the desk for the bottle.
“Nothing, Ma. What do you want?”
“I just wanted to make sure you were all right, honey. We didn’t really get a chance to speak the other night. Dr. Rhodes said . . .”
“No. You were too busy with Uncle whatever-the-fuck-his-name-is. And why are you talking to Rhodes? Isn’t that against the shrink code or something? Why the hell is he still talking to you?”
“I’m your mother!”
“And I’m thirty-five years old.”
“I’m still your mother.”
Today she’s my mother. Three days ago she couldn’t give me two minutes. I splash liquid into liquid in the white porcelain mug in front of me. It’s more whiskey than coffee at this point. Fuck it. I pour it straight into my mouth before replacing the cap and clumsily dropping it between my legs. It clatters against the side of the desk. I swing around too fast, trying to make sure nobody is watching, but only making my head swim.
“What was all that noise?”
“Nothing,” I sputter, coughing up a hot mouthful of whiskey into my lap. “Shit!”
“What are you doing, Jimmy? Are you drinking?”
“I’m at work, Ma.”
“Jimmy!”
I tug the sweatshirt away from the back of my chair and stuff it down between my legs to mop at the puddle of liquor there. The smell of it, always overpowering, makes me woozy.
“Fuck! I’m not drinking, Ma!” I whisper. “Why are you calling me at work?”
“Doctor Rhodes said that you were arrested.”
“Detained. Not arrested. And that was three hours ago! Do you two have some fucking Batphone emergency line or something?”
Goddammit. What if somebody overhears? They listen in to everything. A bunch of little field mice, swarming and digging and nipping at every little scrap they can sniff out with their little rat faces.
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