Blind Spot

by Laurence Miall

  The next day, I went to Julianne’s to apologize. But the conversation swerved awkwardly to the subject of Mike. It really hit the ditch, and there was no getting out of it. I could not disguise my disgust for Mike. He was, and always would be, a snake, in my opinion. Before I knew where I was, we were arguing again. I stormed back home. That night, I called, full of regret. But she was just cold.

  I called the next day. She didn’t want to talk. I called the day after that. She still didn’t want to talk. And slowly, there was resistance building on my side too. She was being this difficult because of Mike, a mere snake?

  We had not been together long enough to sustain this. In the good times, you pay into the bank for the bad times when you’ll need to make hefty withdrawals. Unfortunately, we had not been paying for long enough into that goodwill account. There was nothing to draw on.

  But don’t think I squandered all my time moping about that. I was busy making a mess out of other aspects of my life.

  I called Laura and we met at a little café not far from her office downtown. Before we could even approach the subject of Jacob’s affair with our mother, she wanted to talk about Stephie. In her opinion, I had been really horrible to Stephie. Downright mean, in fact. That poor girl didn’t deserve that kind of treatment. None of this could be refuted. I simply shut up. I still had an ugly bruise on my face from Sharon’s fist, so I knew I was hardly a hero. It is easy to accept people calling you a jerk if you know this about yourself already. I am convinced that our psychologies are endlessly adaptable. Serial killers have to live with themselves, too. When they are finally caught and a judge delivers a quadruple life sentence and thunders with outrage, “You have committed some of the most heinous, appalling, and shockingly violent crimes of our times,” does the serial killer suddenly sit up and realize, “Man, he’s right”? No, the serial killer is quite aware that he was raping virgins and eating their kidneys all along.

  So I took my lumps from Laura about the Stephie travesty. Then I dropped two inches of heavy paper onto the table, letting her know that these were emails between Jacob and our mother, proof of the secret affair that they had conducted since 1995. She gawked at me, and it was at least satisfying initially that she was shocked. Then, as she leafed through the papers, I filled in more of the details. I told her how Jacob had first obfuscated and claimed that Mom and Dad were swingers. Then I told her about the final showdown. Then I told her about the crazy old woman who had seen our father crash the car into the train.

  She started crying. But these were not the kind of tears where an arm on the shoulder and a soft voice offer consolation. She didn’t want me anywhere near her. She wanted me to stop it, stop it. Stop ruining everything in our family. Because that is the way I had always been. I was a vicious son, an ungrateful son — never around the house except to cause mischief.

  I could not accept this. On the table, almost a hundred pages of evidence — the truth — and I was the one causing mischief? These were not lies. This was not the old Luke lying because he needed money to buy a carton of cigarettes. This was the truth speaking for itself.

  I moved out of the old house so that she wouldn’t have to concern herself with me anymore. We had one brief meeting with the lawyer. The house was put up for sale, and a few months later, I received an obscene payment to my bank account. I had long ago quit my job in Vancouver — had not even paid a visit to Vancouver, in fact, just faded quietly out of everyone’s frame of reference — and I was well ensconced in a modest apartment not far from Calgary Trail and Whyte Avenue. With spring well underway, I thought I’d try with Laura again. I called her and she was civil, but that is all. We exchanged small talk — her telling me about her job and me telling her about mine (not that there was much to tell, I had been working as a desk jockey for the city, facilitating the work of a couple of planning committees, taking minutes, placing catering and venue orders, and I’ll stop with that now, I’m boring myself). I tried to subtly move the conversation to less cautious territory — asking her if she had heard from the Brookfields — and that is when the conversation died. She simply clammed up. She didn’t want to talk about that, she said.

  Christmas had come and gone. A Christmas without a family. And it was dawning on me that I really was becoming a lone wolf. I didn’t think I deserved this. Not this much. Dreary February and March passed, and the break in the season was heralded only by sleet and more loneliness.

  One night in early April, a huge snowstorm hit the city — right at the very moment when Edmontonians thought they’d seen the last of winter. That’s how the city is; I shouldn’t have been surprised. My spirits sank dangerously low, and as I fought against a howling wind, walking from the bus stop after work, I thought maybe this was the storm that would finish me off. It was sandpapering my face. My throat was closing against the cold. I hadn’t experienced anything like this since I was a teenager. Vancouver had softened me. I started to wonder if, even if I wanted to get home, would I make it? There were two long blocks ahead, and not a soul in sight, not a car on the road, not a sound except the incessant wind. I stopped. I remember thinking that there were no good choices for me. I was paralyzed. I couldn’t think of a single thing that would make me happy.

  Then I got angry at my self-pity. Screw being happy. I just had to get home. That’s all. Snowstorms happened, winter happened, those were facts of life. Get the hell on with it. About as gracefully as a sack of flour, I stumbled and slipped the rest of the way, struggled with the lock on the outside of the apartment building, and once inside, stopped to relish the blast of warm air hitting me. I loved it. Just the existence of warm air brought at least a small measure of happiness to my life.

  At my apartment, I found another positive sign. There were three beers left in my fridge. I had the freedom to knock them back, one after the other, without worrying about dinner, and without worrying about anyone nagging me about chain-smoking one cigarette after another. There was a local alternative magazine on the table which I’d not really looked at before. I leafed through it, and arriving at the back, started having ideas. There were photos of women with their faces blurred out. I wanted to see what they looked like without the blurring. I had a lot of money in the bank; I could’ve met every last escort in the city.

  I dialed the service; they thought I was crazy. I wanted the girl right away. I didn’t want time to lose my nerve. The woman on the line, who clearly was not the talent but merely the business end of things, found my haste hilarious.

  “Now?” she said. “You think we can do ‘now’ in this weather?”

  “Well, as close to now as you can manage, weather permitting.”

  “The weather’s not gonna permit much, sir, I’m sorry. Look out the window.”

  “I’ll pay double. I’ll pay danger pay.”

  “She’ll get there when she gets there.”

  Those three beers on an empty stomach hit me hard. I flicked on the TV and watched it for a while, but then I must have drifted off to sleep. When I woke up, somebody was ringing my buzzer. For a second, I was disoriented. I ran to the intercom and pressed the button. “Who is it?” A girl’s voice answered. “Ally. It’s fucking freezing. Let me in.”

  I remembered now… Ally was my escort. Suddenly, I was beside myself with excitement. When I opened the door, the girl in front of me was bundled up in a parka and thick leggings. There was a dusting of snow on her dark brown hair.

  “Just so you know, my driver’s parked outside,” she said.

  She stepped inside, bristling with toughness.

  “This is going to cost at least five hundred,” she continued.

  As soon as she took her parka off, and I took a good glance at the shape of her, she could’ve said it would cost a thousand bucks, I wouldn’t have cared. I was fascinated by the prospect of what would happen next.

  “How old are you?”

  “I’m nineteen,” she said. “I’m in my second year of education at the university.”
r />   After I signed a Visa slip and she had called for an authorization number, we were down to business, not bothering with my bedroom, which would’ve been too much like a real date. After we were finished, she got up from the living room couch and pulled her bra back on, then returned to the subject of school. It was an obsession of hers.

  “What did you take at university?” she said.

  “I didn’t go on past high school,” I confessed to her.

  “You missed out,” she said. “I love school.”

  On the strength of unlikely statements like these, I became a repeat customer. Ally’s enthusiastic yet pragmatic approach to life was intoxicating. “School’s not cheap. Doing this, I can pay my bills working just one night a week.”

  Recently, I have permitted myself the indulgence of seeing Ally every two weeks.

  I tell myself that this current mode of existence isn’t forever. I’m stuck, spinning my wheels, but eventually I’m going to find something to give me a big push out and set me off in a new direction. I don’t know what that something will be. The challenge in the meantime is simply to keep hanging on. Some days, I’m even quite content, especially walking into my stuffy office the day after a night with Ally. I look at all those grey faces, starched collars and Harry Rosen nooses, and I think, “I had sex with a call girl last night.”

  Yesterday, I took a walk past the old house. It was the first day in weeks that was warm enough to spend any time outside. I stood on the pavement while the branches of the elm tree scratched at the sky and the neighbour’s cat strolled down the way to see what I was up to. In the mild weather, the snow was melting and dripping from the eavestroughs. There did not appear to be anyone home. I stared at the house where I had grown up.

  I noticed that some of the paint that I had applied was starting to peel off. It’s not my house. The family that lives there does not know that it is my paint job that is coming undone. But none of that provides any consolation. On the first genuinely bright day of spring, the sun is going to fall across the fascia and the window frames, and the place will look shabby. There will be nothing I can do about it. I do not know what I did wrong. I thought I was following the instructions on the pail to the letter.

  I bent over to give the cat a little pat on the head. He immediately flopped at my feet. There was a patch of pavement from which the snow had entirely retreated. This is where the cat rolled around, seeming almost to smile, without a care in the world.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My beautiful and brilliant wife, Monika Sawka, for everything. Teena Apeles, for wise words and author-solidarity. Early readers and supporters of this project: David Reddall and Robert Sproule. Jenna Butler, for her poet’s eyes for the details. Thomas Wharton, for sage advice and support. Todd Babiak for leading the way in E-town. And my loving parents, David Miall, Sylvia Chard, and Valerie Kennedy (R.I.P.).

  Laurence Miall is a Montreal-based writer who spent his childhood in England before emigrating to Edmonton at the age of 14. Miall has contributed to the Edmonton Journal and his short stories have been finalists in the Summer Literary Awards contest and Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers. Blind Spot is his first novel.