The Journey Prize Stories 22

by Various

  I escape downstairs for a cigarette. Out on the street, I realize that I left the pack in my jacket and that I’m locked out of the condo. Locked out of my own party, surely my last.

  Eventually, three young men exit the building. I’m grabbing for the door when one of them tells me who I am. A fan that had tickets to the cancelled reading. “Remember when Dumbbell Moynihan called in the bomb threat at his orthodontist’s office?” he says. As if it’s possible to forget any of your characters.

  He lights up a large joint and proceeds to tell his friends the tale of Dumbbell at the prom, in his too-tight yellow tuxedo with his “big fat date.” He exaggerates, skips and skews a number of important things, but I’m too busy sucking in huge drags to fact-check. I even laugh along with them until he calls Dumbbell’s math teacher “Mrs. Asslicker,” and I have to break in and say, “Mrs. Aisslicher.”

  That just makes them roar harder, and it suddenly smacks of a sitcom laugh track. Is my life’s work just puerile stoner comedy, like so many sad clowns pouring out of a tiny car? And why drag poor Dumbbell and his childhood sweetheart into it? She wasn’t fat, just big-boned! Oh, you ridiculous old cretin, exploiting everyone and everything that is good and sincere for the entertainment of complete strangers.

  I can’t even trust my fans. I might even hate them.

  Back upstairs, I’m very stoned and very paranoid, so I get into the food, mostly just broccoli stems left for me – at my party! Then the last box of wine, and soon I’m babbling and snorting, flirting with the one other drunken person in the room: a cashier from the bookstore with a slight moustache and long, fake white fingernails.

  Lana, meanwhile, sits statue-straight in the corner, sipping water, stifling yawns. Why doesn’t she go home! I don’t need a babysitter! Then there’s a window-shaking blast and I flinch and duck, thinking, the bombers have found me! But it’s just the fireworks starting, and I’ve spilled red wine all over the place, which has the impact of a bloody explosion and the scene goes into crisis mode.

  On the way out, the irate hostess shoves the box of wine at me and slams the door in my face as I mutter apologies. Lana tries to take the wine away, but I’m not having any of it. I’ll carry this albatross! The fresh air and the boom of fireworks sobers me up enough to realize how utterly fucked-up I am.

  “I drank too much. I’m sorry.”

  “No, please. That was awful. We had such a nice party planned at an Indian restaurant near the original venue.” She senses this could be my last.

  “Why do you do this PR job?”

  “I’ve been told I have the right personality for it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m not really interested in celebrities, to tell you the truth. Which allows me to be professional and gives me a necessary hostility towards the media.”

  Yes, the protectiveness. It’s not for us, per se, it’s against them.

  “Of course I always read up before a job. I couldn’t put your book down.” She throws me a between-us look, but it strikes me as a much darker, more intimate collusion that sends a chill up my spine. We’ve reached the hotel lobby and the front-desk people are eyeing us.

  “What did you think?”

  “I think I’ll walk you to the elevator and say goodnight.”

  I don’t care if I wake her. “I heard that they closed the beaches here.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “Why take it personally?”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “Two summers ago.”

  “It’s late.” She’s not even trying to hide her irritation.

  “I woke you.”

  “Yes.”

  “So you can tell the truth.”

  Silence at her end. She should say, “Fuck off old man.” She could say anything to me.

  “You despise me.”

  “I don’t.”

  “What if it had happened to you?”

  “Look, this isn’t appropriate.”

  “Please. Oh god, just never mind. I’m sorry. Good night.”

  My hands are trembling so much that I can barely hang up the phone. Everything good is lost and I shall surely die alone, unloved and undeserving. The phone rings.

  “It did happen to me. I was twelve. Years younger than Sibby.”

  It’s a shock to hear the name out loud.

  “My parents had just divorced. He was my mother’s boyfriend.”

  “Did you tell your mother?”

  “I’ve never told anyone.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. It was a long time ago. My life is more than that. It has to be.”

  “Did you hate him?”

  She says nothing for a long time. I feel as if my entire being exists only as energy that will be snuffed out as soon as the connection is broken.

  “Sometimes, later, I wished I had hated him, but I liked his attention. I wanted to see where it would go. It was my curiosity I kind of hated later. He didn’t force me to do anything.”

  “How do you know that? They say that …” I can’t say it. It’s too awful.

  “They groom you. Yes, he probably did and I’m certainly not excusing him. But I groomed him too. I could sense it in him.”

  “Sense what?”

  “That he was vulnerable.”

  I don’t want to hear anything else, but she’s right about curiosity. Once it starts, it can’t easily be stopped.

  “His attention was sort of repellant, but I liked it. I felt powerful for the first time in my life. Later, my views changed. But you can’t rewrite the way you feel. Not even with fiction.”

  “But that’s why it’s such a terrible crime. You could still do something about it!”

  “It would be easier if it was black and white. But that doesn’t change anything for either of us, does it? I’m not going to say any more.”

  The line goes dead.

  I want to cry, and not being able to makes me feel oddly emasculated, impotent. I go outside to pace the beach. In the dark, the mountains dance with lights and seem restored, at least until sunrise. The moon is a bright yellow crescent hanging over the yacht-littered water. It looks like a movie prop.

  A man wearing a T-shirt emblazoned “The One & Only” approaches and asks, “Spare five bucks for the house lottery?”

  “Do you swim in the bay?”

  “Never learned how, buddy.”

  “I’ll give you $20 if you wade around in it for a while.”

  “Go fuck yourself, you old perv,” he yells and stalks off.

  I go to the water’s edge, trying to will myself into the water. But even my desire to enter it has become utterly embarrassing. I just can’t swim with me there watching, judging, taking notes, ruining everything.

  Even sleep abandons me, and who could blame it? I wait in the lobby for the clothing store to open. Lana was right about the meagre selection of swim trunks. I choose long Hawaiian shorts in garish colours. They bulge under my pants but give me a semblance of courage to face the last day.

  Here she comes, in a white suit and such precarious matching shoes that I tense up watching her approach. Her face is mask-like with heavy makeup, which makes her look older, more weathered somehow. Or maybe it’s the new knowledge weighing down my impression. She’s already accompanied by the day’s first reporter, so there’s no small talk about sleep, no consolatory attempts to fend off the latest onslaught of media hate, no room for my lame apologies. For the final inquisition, she even leaves me in the hot seat for an extra twenty minutes, my mesh-ensconced scrotum sweating profusely and the plastic-knobbed price tag knifing into my side.

  “You’re done,” she says afterwards, meaning who knows what.

  “I’m going to swim in that bay. I want to go to Spanish Banks.” Where my life began, with such joy and promise.

  “Fine.” She doesn’t believe me. “We’ll stop en route to the airport. I’ll handle the checkout while you get your stuff.”

  Ten minutes
later, I barely have a chance to close the passenger door before she starts driving. She drives too fast and I feel a paternalistic desire to scold her.

  “Why did you take this gig? I’m not a celebrity.”

  “You’re listed on Celebrity.com.”

  What kind of a world put me there? But my disgust is overwhelmed by smug, unstoppable vanity.

  “Nobody swimming. As usual.”

  She doesn’t respond, just starts marching towards the shoreline.

  “Look at all the brown froth.”

  “Well?” She crosses her arms and glares at me with unfettered hostility. Oh, Lana, it wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  “I don’t think I can.” It comes out barely a whisper.

  “This is ridiculous,” she says. She drops her bag, unbuttons her suit jacket and tosses it to the sand. She kicks off each shoe, then unzips her skirt and lets it drop down around her feet. Her underpants are white.

  “Stop,” I say, but only part of me wants her to stop. Next she removes her white camisole and flings it sideways, but it’s so light that it gets caught in the breeze and takes forever to land, too close to the dirty tide. Her bra is white too.

  She turns and strides into the water, puts her arms above her head and dives under. I feel so proud of her and my body contracts like a runner at the starting gate, ready to bolt in as well. But I hesitate. My feelings turn to envy, which fills me with shame and roots me down, leaving only the aching, useless longing to go backwards in time and make everything right. I close my eyes and there, waiting for me, are the brilliant greens and blues of such a long, long time ago.

  KRISTA FOSS

  THE LONGITUDE OF OKAY

  The tone sounds and Katrin turns to the class.

  “That fire?” she asks, squishing her brow in bewilderment.

  “No, Miss. Fire’s a beeping one.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think that’s the intruder tone,” says Cody – Co-deeee, as he pronounces it – from the back row. She raises an eyebrow. Listens.

  “Should have read the memo, Miss.”

  Every class has a smartass. Hers comes in a T-shirt, tight as a leotard over his bench-press chest, that reads Ultimate Fighting Champion, Southwest Regionals, Kick Ass ‘08. Katrin cannot gauge Cody’s cheekiness. He has a lazy eye. She never knows whether to smile or call him out.

  She peeks. The hallway’s empty but for Slobo, a math teacher. His face, prairie dog – curious, bobs out from the frame two doors up. A fellow memo truant. Katrin offers a sheepish wave. He smirks, shrugs, and pulls back into his classroom. She lingers a second longer. With Slobo’s head out of the way, she catches something that doesn’t fit by the vending machine at the end of the hall – a crouching nimbus unfurling like bad weather. Katrin watches with queasy fascination. The dark blur becomes a figure; then the figure comes into focus. Five feet eight inches of stooping, luckless boyhood made tall with adrenaline turns towards her. In black combat boots, no less. Her first feeling is irritation. The horrid familiarity of it all. His right hand hangs heavy with the dull glint of metal.

  Katrin’s knees go weak. He’s moving. She shuts the door, flicks off the lights, waves at the students. Her voice comes out as a pant, tentative and thin.

  “Get down. Get back.”

  Somebody snickers. For a moment, she feels the concavity of her will; she wishes one of the boys with good shoulders – Cody? – would step forward and take charge, so she could crumple. This is not who you are, Katrin. You don’t save the day.

  Nobody moves. Her glance fastens on a roll of Scotch tape and that’s enough to forestall her panic. She grabs it, runs back to the door, slaps an uncollected test – it was a pass – over the small window, and fastens it down with the tape. One defensive step, and there’s no turning back.

  “It’s for real,” somebody whispers. They stand up, chairs screech along the tiles.

  “Push the desks back. Everybody in the far corner. There. Go!”

  Now her voice is stronger, gale force even. There is swearing, jostling. She hears cellphones open. Click. Click. Click. Like a dog’s toenails on ceramic tiles.

  “No!”

  She gestures – slapping her hands shut. Then she’s pointing like a drill sergeant. I don’t know who you are, she thinks. I don’t know who this is.

  “One person dials security. One person calls 911. The rest –off.”

  She’d read that memo after all. So why pretend? She glanced at it really, but didn’t pin it primly to her cubicle like her colleagues, hurling it instead into the recycling bin, her one small rebellion against scare-mongering and bureaucracy.

  The door won’t lock. The bolt moves but won’t catch in the frame. She tries once, twice, three times. Why didn’t she think of this earlier? Of all things, how could she make the door an afterthought?

  In her head, she hears Ariane’s laughter – the true kind, straight from the belly when she plays with the dog – so unlike the helium twitter she uses with friends. How good, how right, some sounds seem.

  The PA repeats its old news in long tones: a melancholic war drum. It is violated with a crack.

  Peter’s lips vibrating on the back of her neck, his horny humming of the CBC morning show jingle, as she breaks from sleep – how she’d miss such waking.

  The taut spring releasing the hammer. The cartridge’s back end slammed. Friction. A chamber-fed explosion, its wretched propulsion. Pow. She resents the intimacy of this new sound, the space it claims.

  The shot rings near Slobo’s class. She hopes his door is locked. Two girls are whimpering in the back of her room and another student says, Shut the fuck up.

  She flips the teacher’s desk at the front of the room so it is on its side, and shoves it against the door.

  “The door won’t lock.”

  She’s not looking at them when she says it.

  But when she turns, Warbly, a tall and awkward boy with a flutter of vestigial adolescence in his speech, is beside her. Him, of all people? He shoves another smaller desk against the door, nesting inside the larger desk. And then Ole Bill, an injured steelworker taking her class for disability retraining, is up. She can’t waste a second on surprise. He stacks four chairs and pushes them against the flipped desk, dragging his bum leg with every step.

  The first thump. Ole Bill drops to his knees. Warbly flattens himself against the whiteboard. Katrin scrambles under the smaller desks, so her weight pushes against the flipped desk and the door. Leaning into her shoulder, she sees Esam, her quietest student, stand up quickly, remove the belt from his jeans, loop it around the doorknob, and pull it tight into a slip knot. The doorway juts out slightly into the classroom, and Esam pushes his body into the corner the door’s depth creates with the adjacent wall. He sits down, pulls the belt taut, braces his feet against the floor, so his entire body anchors a vector of opposing tension. Katrin is eye level with him. She can see the distended veins on his brown forearms, the weird calm of his face.

  The thump repeats, more insistent. The doorknob rattles. She absorbs the small agonies of the huddled students, stifled cries, tight-throated inhalations, and a whiff of heartbreaking shame – somebody has shit. Katrin pours all her weight against the desk.

  “Open up!”

  Katrin imagines the fixed-eye vacancy of a video game shooter. The voice is loud and young. Impossibly young. And then, freighted with menace and cortisol, all of him heaves against the door. The thump smacks hard against Katrin’s shoulder, the desk’s underbelly scrapes her cheek. Rough wood. Ole Bill’s stack of chairs tumbles. He sprawls out under them with a small groan. She kicks at them with her feet, digging him out. Warbly slides down the wall, wiggles Bill free and gathers him into the huddle. Esam yanks harder on the belt.

  “Don’t fuck with me.”

  Katrin hears the vocal cords ragged with rage and regrets again that she is middle-aged, that she is not strong, that she has let disappointment chip away at the better part of herself.

&n
bsp; She thinks about the fulcrum of Peter’s elbow, his knee, resting her head in the hinges of his body, feeling quiet and safe with her nose pressed into the spice of his unworried warmth.

  She has never seen a semi-automatic. Yet Katrin instinctively knows the sound a handgun slide makes – the queer metallic sibilance – when it’s pushed back, the hammer cocked. What she doesn’t know are the physics of a propelled bullet – whether it can penetrate the thin metal and Styrofoam sandwich of the door plus her laminate desk before reaching her shoulder’s tight, acidic flesh.

  She wonders if Ariane will arrive home from school on the verge of tears again today – the small humiliations of phys. ed. and recess, the snubs on the bus ride home, her own reflection in passing windows building into a low pressure system that bursts in the vestibule by the coat hooks and the refurbished deacon’s bench. Katrin wishes for a good day. Let someone – anyone – say something nice to her. The lustre of her hair. Her perfect homework.

  It doesn’t matter. He is already shooting. The bullets make a pinging thud against the door metal. Two. Three. Four. Five. She is a thickness of skin, sinew, and bone between the bullets and her students, without understanding her own risks. She regrets this. She is unfit for selflessness. She’s all self – except that it’s frozen in place.

  Katrin is suddenly full of a hard aching for sweetness – her mother’s pear pie with its buttered pastry, warm sugary fruit, a hint of cloves in the syrup. One bite, held against her teeth, left only room for pleasure in the world.

  The small rectangle of glass. Katrin hears the smash of his handgun against it, followed by a shot. The glass shatters and tremolos like a harpsichord. Tinkling. Tinkling. Tinkling. Katrin watches the test she’d pasted to the door drop like Victory Parade flotsam. Warbly pulls the students, crawling and crab-walking, tears streaming down hunted faces, to the wall flush with the door.