* * *
At the very least, Jeremy felt, there was nothing seriously wrong with him. No big threats on the horizon. He had reserves of energy, and could ride hard on the stationary bike in his office for a half-hour without feeling as though he might topple over. Sleep wasn’t always the easiest thing to negotiate, but he was still able to function just fine on five or six hours of the stuff per night, as long as he gave himself one night a week in which he went home early and fell asleep right away.
The worst that had been happening lately were the panic attacks, which had started around the time the Shack went into a long dry spell that was particularly long and particularly dry. Most of the attacks were fairly mild – just a sudden thudding of the heart and an unaccountable surge of breathless terror that went away after a minute or two. Sometimes they came in the middle of the night, when he was already asleep. Dreaming of lava pits, he would jolt awake, face down in his pillow, already covered in sweat and unable to breathe, tinsel swimming across his field of vision. Not even a long, territorial session on the toilet and an extra-hot shower could dispel the lingering sense of unease. One afternoon at the Shack, Tyler, of all people, found Jeremy sitting on a beer keg in the downstairs fridge, trying to calm his heart. Jeremy had come down to check the draft lines, and had been overtaken by fear.
“You okay?” the cook asked him. There was some graffiti on the wall, just past Tyler’s head: Ozzy Rules, in red marker. Someone had added the word football below it in black marker. Jeremy had seen those words thousands of times, but it wasn’t until that exact moment that he got the joke.
“We have some real smartasses here, dude.”
Tyler nodded, and filled his apron with lemons from one of the cases stacked in the corner.
Charlene came to Jeremy the next day, looking worried. “Tyler says he saw you having some kind of attack.”
“It’s amazing how chatty that guy can be when he feels like it. Really amazing.”
“What’s going on?”
It was nothing, he told her. He just hadn’t been sleeping well lately, and was a little worn out. Which was true: every day, it seemed, more trouble came down on his head. Someone had stuffed an entire roll of toilet paper into each of the men’s room toilets in the middle of a busy Friday night, flooding the basement and forcing Jeremy to spend a messy hour down there with a mop and bucket. A week later, a hose split in the kitchen’s walk-in fridge during the night, spraying everything with water and ruining hundreds of dollars’ worth of food. Everywhere in the Shack, little things kept failing or breaking. For a while, Benny became a near-permanent fixture in the bar. In the morning when Jeremy arrived, he would already be there in the parking lot, sitting in his truck, drinking coffee mixed with whatever else out of a plastic travel cup.
“Another day, another dollar,” Jeremy said.
“Better be more’n that.”
He did what he could to swim through those rough waters, to stay as cheerful and confident as possible, to maintain his Personal Power, but he felt as though all of his instincts were abandoning him. He was stumbling. One night he asked a regular how his wife was doing – he didn’t see her around much anymore, was she avoiding the place? – only to be reminded, with some irritation, that the poor woman had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier. Another time, he laughed out loud at a woman who kept putting her head at a strange angle whenever he spoke to her. “You’re like a bird!” he shouted, before being told, angrily, that she was deaf in one ear.
He took a succession of women to dinner, but it never went anywhere. It was like trying to start a campfire in a rainstorm. When he finally convinced one woman, a teacher who dealt with special-needs kids, to come home with him, he ended up locked in his bathroom, trying desperately to catch his breath, caught in the sharp talons of a panic attack, flushing the toilet and running the water to cover up the sounds of his struggle. She waited almost 20 minutes, then said through the door that she was calling a cab. He cursed his body for its treachery.
His new doctor, whom he’d started seeing after the one he’d been going to half his life finally retired and died, was young. He always mentally registered her youth when he entered her office, the way he might note her height or her hair colour. Officially, she was Dr. Harwood, but Jeremy sometimes called her Christine, which he was fairly sure she had told him to do on his first visit. On her desk there were framed pictures of a little boy and a little girl at various ages. She sometimes referred to someone named Michael who liked to do something with the kids – Jeremy couldn’t remember what. Go fishing? Take them out to dinner? She didn’t wear a ring. He figured she took it off while she was working. Either that or she and Michael had kids but weren’t married. That arrangement, his mother said, was like turning on the furnace and leaving all the windows open. He didn’t see it as a big deal, however. They had the relationship they wanted. So long as they were happy, what did it matter? She was undeniably cute, however, and he stayed alert to possible openings.
Dr. Harwood was attentive, solicitous, and always greeted even the smallest problem with an overabundance of concern. She never dismissed anything Jeremy said, never told him not to worry. She moved in on him right away like he’d scraped his knee on his first day of school. He wanted to be thinner for her. He didn’t like having to reveal the bulk of his belly every time he took his shirt off in her examination room. She had a big poster on the back of her office door, showing the tall, thin one from Monty Python in a black suit and a bowler hat carrying a black umbrella and suitcase and walking on the sidewalk as if to an important job. He was photographed in mid-stride, with his knee at the same level as his shoulders – he seemed about to step directly up into space and out of the picture. At the bottom of the poster, written in marker, were the words Make Excuses to Walk: her motto, and something she tried to drill into all her patients.
Jeremy got points for having quit smoking, at least. Of all the terrible things a person could do to himself, smoking and drinking were the real bad guys, she told him.
“Well, I’m halfway there, then.”
“Halfway.”
After his first appointment, she sent him to a clinic downtown to get some blood work done. A woman in a white jacket who looked as though she’d been born in an age before happiness gave him a jar with a cap and told him to go make a pee. When he got back, carefully holding his little jar, she made him sit in a straight-backed chair, leaned over him so far that he thought for a moment she was going to mount him, then tied off his arm and jabbed it. He watched blood as dark and red as nail polish fill three or four thin glass tubes. There were plants all over the woman’s office, all harsh cacti and twisted green things with serrated edges. This woman had seen what people were made of, so no flowers for her. Nothing that required care.
“You have a low platelet count,” Dr. Harwood told him when the results came back.
“That sounds ominous.”
“There are red blood cells and white blood cells and platelets. They’re like the army and the navy and the air force – they all work together, but they each have their own job. You always hear about white cells and red cells, but hardly ever about platelets. Yours are a little low.”
Jeremy wondered how things would’ve gone had the tests brought some darker news. It had been years since he’d heard about anyone, anywhere, dying of AIDS, but he assumed it was still out there, like some dark rider killing hitchhikers in the dead spaces between towns. What if he’d caught it from the blood of a customer with a nosebleed? Or from cutting his arm on a broken pint glass? Or from unblocking the toilets with his bare hands? He was dimly aware that the process of becoming infected was a little more complicated than that, but didn’t want to look it up in case he was wrong. He didn’t want to put a white flame under his paranoia. As it was, the missing platelets eventually returned in full force.
“You don’t hear much about AIDS anymo
re,” he said to Tyler one morning while the cook was sitting at the bar, looking at basketball scores.
Tyler’s arm froze as he was lifting his coffee to his mouth. “Should I?”
“Not at all. And that’s a good thing. People always say things are shitty these days, but they’re wrong: this is an amazing time to be alive. Maybe not the best, but getting there. Never forget that.”
* * *
Once a year, Dr. Harwood gave Jeremy a full physical, which required that he strip right down to his underwear and sit on cold, crinkling paper with his sock feet dangling. On those days, he would mentally transport himself into a state of being in which erections, the very possibility of them, did not exist. She always asked his permission before telling him to lower his underwear so she could press two no-nonsense fingers against the underside of his crotch. The blood usually began to arrive in his wild-eyed cock just as he, almost sighing with gratitude at the narrow escape, was pulling his underwear back up.
A new wrinkle had recently been added to his annual checkups: after a lifetime of being rewarded for its diligent service by being left utterly alone, Jeremy’s prostate had become an area of interest, like a tract of unspoiled land suddenly getting noticed by developers. Dr. Harwood had warned him that this new interest was coming, giving him lots of time to prepare for the fact that he would one day have to accept her curious, lubricated finger into his unwilling rectum. But it still came as a shock when she told him there was a new item on the checklist as of that day, and that it was important that he be relaxed. He tried to remember something he’d read in a Theo Hendra book about managing fear by envisioning the worst, most catastrophic outcome possible. Instead of some small measure of social embarrassment, imagine cascading disasters on the scale of a total organ failure, the collapse of the building, a new ice age arriving overnight. The idea was to overdose on fear, to get your mind to the point where it could no longer believe in the scenario, allowing you to laugh it off. It had never worked for him – his mind was always able to stay fully engaged with the original, wholly rational fear. The true fear stayed visible like a bright beacon in a storm.
He asked if the procedure could be deferred to another date, and she seemed amenable, but said he probably wouldn’t feel any better about it next time. It had to happen eventually, and it was better for everyone if he just took a deep breath and got it over with.
“It’s not like I’m all into doing it, you know.”
“I hope not. Can you give me, like, five minutes?”
It all went just fine in the end, and was over much more quickly than he’d expected – in some of his nightmare scenarios, she’d found it necessary to root around in there, going up to the elbow like a country veterinarian trying to inseminate a cow. The reality was quick, painless, and efficient. Going through it brought the two of them closer together, he felt. The examinations eliminated the need for dishonesty; they were like a couple who’d managed to stay friends after the end of a wildly sexual but unsustainable relationship.
“If you didn’t know me, and I just walked into your office, how old would you think I was?”
“Such a loaded question!”
“But how old?”
She sat back in her office chair and gave him an amused look. “I don’t think people always look an age.”
“If you had to guess.”
“I know how old you are – it says so right at the top of your file!”
“Just guess.”
“If I really had to guess, I’d say . . . 40? Or just a little over?”
“That’s what I would guess, too!” he said, relieved. “The thing is, I can still remember a time when I would’ve been so pissed off if anyone had ever said I looked anywhere near 40. Now it’s a compliment.”
“I can remember being a little girl and asking my mother how old she was, and she told me 30, and I thought that was ancient. Now I’m almost 35, my god.”
As always, he did some quick, frightening calculations in his head.
When he finally told Dr. Harwood about the panic attacks, she put aside her files and asked him to describe them in detail. She gave him another examination, sent him to the cactus lady for more blood tests, and spent five minutes making him breathe in and out while she probed his bare chest and back.
“It’s not physical,” she told him. “And there are no respiratory problems that I can find. Which is a relief, though I’m going to keep an eye on that, just in case – these kinds of things can be serious if you don’t pay attention to them. For the moment, let’s focus on calming back down when they happen, okay? That should be the most important thing: just getting everything back to normal. Breathing. Let’s work on that.”
He loved how she made his problems her problems, too. Whatever was wrong with him, they would find a way to fix it. They were a team, they’d get through this.
He told her about Phil’s heart attack and his falling down in the middle of a class. He didn’t want to suddenly drop while talking to some group at the bar or hauling some kegs around. She said that was always a remote risk, given his age, but not likely. And his panic attacks were nothing like what had happened to his friend, who sounded like someone who had been abusing his body for too long.
“He’s a big boy, he makes his own decisions.”
“That’s right. We all do, especially the really bad ones. How much time do you spend at your bar?”
“All of it.”
“Maybe you need to slow down a little.”
“You first,” he said, and basked in the laugh that followed.
* * *
At their next shared birthday, Glenn and Phil were subdued. Phil’s daughter had not called him to wish him happy birthday as she usually did. All night, he kept pulling out his phone to check. His doctor had given him strict instructions to stay away from alcohol, so he was sticking to beer. Glenn was not drinking much, either: he had gone home late a week earlier and nearly fallen backwards down his stairs. His wrist was in a cast, which he had to stop himself from banging on the bar as he complained, with less fire than usual, about the carelessness verging on maliciousness of the people who’d designed and built his building. He used his good arm to demonstrate the impossible steepness of his stairs.
Glenn’s flame sputtered out a few times, leaving him quiet and grumpy before his pint glass, which he barely touched. At around 9, he got off his stool and called it a night. Phil lasted another hour before announcing sadly that he had an early department meeting the next day that he was not looking forward to but could not miss – he’d skipped the previous two, and had found himself in the Dean’s office, being spoken to like a misbehaving student.
“Well, happy birthday anyway, buddy.”
“We made it through another one,” Phil said as he put on his coat.
“Jesus, don’t say that. We’re not a hundred years old.”
Phil stopped for a moment to think, then smiled. “Add us together and we almost are!”
Not quite ready to give up on the night, Jeremy wandered through the Shack, looking for distractions. He talked with two older women who were playing hooky on their book club, which had once been a perfectly good excuse to drink wine and gossip in someone’s living room, but had lately been taken over by an abstemious and self-important former elementary school librarian who insisted they wait until after the conversation was over to open a single bottle, and who prepared actual discussion notes in advance, which she emailed around to all the other members. Sitting at the other end of the bar was a silver-haired man with a phone clipped into a leather case on his belt. He had a South American accent and two small scars on his neck. When asked where he got the scars, he told Jeremy that, as a teenager, he’d fought in the streets against the police in his home country, standing with gangs of other kids, throwing stones and flaming bottles until the government was toppled. Now he was a web developer, and pre
ferred to talk about the blazingly obvious superiority of open-source programming codes to the kind developed and sold by rapacious tech corporations, his new and more formidable enemy. Each time Jeremy tried to lead the conversation back to exploding bottles and clubs crunching skulls, the man shook his head with a slight, impatient smile – all that was ancient history – and would begin again to explain how grotesque profits were being made by selling weak and buggy operating systems.
After checking that the kitchen had been shut down properly, Jeremy called Charlene, getting her voice mail. He called again. This time, she picked up, and less than a half an hour later, she appeared in the bar, a little breathless. “I got you this,” she said, smiling and handing him a plastic ring topped with a giant candy jewel. “Nothing’s open. It was this or some licorice cigars. Would you have wanted those instead?”
“Maybe, but you know what? This is great. Order yourself some wine. On the house.”
She was wearing a dark green dress that looked like velvet. It clung tight to her all over. He wished he were wearing something a little smarter than khaki pants with bleach stains around the ankles and a golf shirt he’d been given by a wine rep – little bunches of grapes were stitched around the breast pocket. She touched the grapes and said they were cute. She didn’t appear to be wearing a bra. The silver-haired web developer caught his eye and raised his glass. Jeremy nodded, but did not smile.
“Where did everybody go? Glenn and Phil?”
“See, this is the problem: those two keep getting older, while I keep getting younger.”
“You definitely look like you are.”
“You don’t have to be sarcastic. I just bought you wine.”
“I was being serious! You look better than ever, I think. I would never guess you’re that old.”
“My doctor said the same thing. And she’s seen me at my worst.”
Congratulations On Everything Page 12
