Congratulations On Everything

by Nathan Whitlock

  The man started shifting around and getting nervous, and Jeremy knew immediately that he’d fucked up by mentioning the alarm. Especially since it was a lie – he hadn’t activated the alarm.

  “Just take the bottle and go. Take two bottles, I can buy more. No harm, no foul.”

  This is new, Jeremy thought. After decades of working in bars and restaurants, he’d never encountered this exact situation before, and had no basis on which to decide how to respond. He was in entirely new territory. It was a strange comfort, and the very kind of thing he tried in vain to make people understand: boredom was an impossibility when you did what he did. There were no ruts to get stuck in. A place like the Shack would always find ways to pull the rug out from under you. It was only certain kinds of people, like Jeremy and a few others, who knew how to keep their balance when that happened. And that’s all he had to do: keep his balance.

  “Look,” he said, taking a step forward, “a friend of mine died last week, and today was the funeral. I’m a little shook-up, so I promise that if you go now, I won’t report it or call the cops.”

  Wanting to make sure that the cash-out from the previous few nights was in a black zippered bag behind the bar where the bartender would have left it for him, Jeremy took another step toward the man.

  “Fucking back up.”

  “Okay, I’m staying right here. I promise I will not take another step if you go right now. You are in the position of power here. Seriously: take the bottles, take more if you want. I’m not moving. You’ve got the power, I have none. This is my place, I’m the owner, I built it, but you switched it around with one move, and now you’re in charge – one hundred percent. No one else is here. You can walk out and I will never see you again, swear to God. Just take the bottles.”

  Instead of a bottle, the man reached over and picked up something else from behind the bar: the cash-out bag. He’d probably known it was there the whole time. Or else Jeremy had given himself away by trying to get at it. It was heavy with three nights’ worth of credit card receipts and cash – losing it would mean the bar was truly fucked.

  Carrying the bag and the bottles, and still pointing the tip of the knife at Jeremy, the man began to cross the floor toward the exit. He was wearing construction boots that were too large for his feet and made a resounding clomp like Frankenstein’s monster. As the man passed in front of him, Jeremy lunged forward and made a grab for the bag, thinking he could get it and run into the kitchen and out the back before the creep had a chance to react. Instead, the man took a surprised step back, dropped everything except the knife, and pushed the blade hard into Jeremy’s outstretched hand. Before he even had time to scream at the lightning bolt of pain that came shooting up his arm, Jeremy’s foot came down on the rolling vodka bottle, and he spun in the air. He saw the ceiling slide past his vision, and the doors to the patio, which were still open, before dropping back down and cracking his head hard on the floor. Something large and pointed dug hard into his hip: a clump of wild keys, splayed out like an anemone. The man grabbed at one of the bottles, but left everything else and clomped out the front doors. Jeremy held out his hand in front of his face, trying to take in the fact of the knife wedged in so deep that the blade, now blackened with blood, stood proud in the centre of his palm. He fought to get his lungs to accept air, his heart to unblur.

  * * *

  Two ambulance attendants stood just outside the emergency room doors, leaning against the unoccupied stretcher and talking about something that one of them found disturbing, the other amusing. Nearby, a police officer stood looking at his phone with confusion. Inside, Jeremy sat next to Charlene on the hard plastic chairs at the far end of the room, away from the triage nurses who, when they were not dealing with new patients or with doctors, were exchanging stories of difficult pregnancies. It had been Jeremy’s idea to move to the corner: the nurses’ voices were making his headache worse. Above their heads, the TV had been muted after repeated requests from Jeremy and was replaying scenes from an earlier basketball game in which one of the players, viciously fouled by an opponent, had fallen sideways and snapped his oversized ankle. They kept zooming in on his agonized face while the other players stood around him like sheep baffled by a wolf attack. The two police officers who had already interviewed Jeremy twice that evening were standing near the bathrooms, talking to a nurse who, as far as Jeremy could tell, had nothing whatsoever to do with what was going on. He was still wearing his suit, which was awash in blood. His hand was lost in bandages.

  Charlene had shown up at the Shack as they were loading him into the ambulance. She’d gone to her mother’s apartment after the funeral and immediately taken off her heavy dress and the rest of her clothes and climbed into her mother’s bed. She slept for three hours straight. Her mother woke her up when she got home from work. Charlene lay there and listened as the older woman moved around the apartment, picking up her daughter’s clothes and exclaiming at the state of the bathroom. Later, the two of them sat on a small couch in what had once been her childhood bedroom and they ate dinner while watching a show about women who’d had too much plastic surgery. Her mother tsked at the sight of these women and their fright-mask faces, and said she could not understand why anyone would do such a thing. Charlene understood: these were people who hated themselves, and who thought the only way to find happiness was to keep carving themselves up, as if joy lurked somewhere beneath their old cheekbones and their old noses and had to be dug out. She left her mother to watch the rest of the show, while she did the dishes. Kyle had left a series of new messages on her phone; she gave up after the third and deleted the rest without listening to them. As she put away the dishes, she remembered that she had once watched the same show with him, and had told him her theory that addiction to plastic surgery was the result of deep self-loathing. He only said that it had more to do with being so rich you lose all sense of perspective.

  Hating yourself was not a matter of perspective, she’d said.

  She got dressed and went out, telling her mother not to wait up. There was a bus that would take her past the Shack, but she decided to walk – she didn’t feel like being thrown around inside a bus, and felt even less like waiting for it. Seeing the flashing lights outside the bar, she’d run the last two blocks. She saw the dark smear of blood and the chairs and tables that had been knocked over. There was a lone bottle of rye in the middle of the bar floor. One of the police officers gave her a ride to the hospital. They followed the ambulance in silence, never using the siren.

  “What a fucking mess,” Jeremy said. He didn’t even know where his phone was.

  Charlene held out an unopened can of Diet Coke she’d bought from the snack machine. She had already offered it twice already.

  The ambulance attendants broke the blade of the steak knife and unstuck the handle from the back of his hand. Once they determined that nothing serious had been severed – he could still wiggle his fingers, and the rush of blood had been stopped – it was as though he’d done nothing more serious than cut himself shaving. They hadn’t even taken him straight into the room beyond the triage station, but told him to wait. One of the attendants asked if he wanted to keep the broken knife.

  “A few dozen stitches and you’ll be fine. No concussion, either. You’re lucky.”

  “Luck has nothing to do with it,” Jeremy told them.

  He wished the display in the corner of the TV were not so diligent at letting him know the time: he wanted to forget how late it was. On the screen was the fouled basketball player again, the ankle, the look of unbelievable pain. His own leg was sore, and he could feel a lump the size of an avocado pit on the back of his head. His keys were gone – the attendants had stripped them off him before lifting him into the ambulance. The adrenaline was draining out of him, and he worried he might pass out – that, at least, might get the nurses and the doctors to move a little faster. How many steak knife injuries were they dealing with tha
t night?

  He sat down again on the other side of Charlene so he could not see the TV. She looked exhausted, too. He liked the outfit she was wearing, which wasn’t the same one she had on at the funeral.

  “I must’ve done something really shitty in a past life,” he said.

  “You don’t deserve any of this.”

  “I don’t know if deserve has anything to do with it. I think I’m just always in the wrong place, wrong time, wrong life. Sorry, I’m whining.”

  “I think you have a good excuse.”

  She reached over and held his uninjured hand.

  “There was a guy I worked for, when I was maybe 20 or 21,” he said after a while. “It was at this place that just could not seem to make money, no matter what the poor fucker did. He was a nice guy, he was trying, but something about where it was, or the look of the place – I don’t know. He did all kinds of shit: changed the menu every few weeks, brought in bands, did all these dumb contests that never worked. I was working bar.” He winced at the throb that had started again in his hand. The painkillers were evaporating from his system, and soon he’d have to ask for more. “So people started to leave, all these people who’d been there from the start – gone, one after another. He kept asking me if I was planning to quit. Sometimes it was like he was begging me not to, sometimes he was mad and seemed like he was ready to fire me on the spot.”

  “Did you quit finally?”

  “I never got the chance. I came in one morning to get my paycheque, before the place opened, and there was nobody there. I had keys, so I let myself in and went behind the bar to get a coffee. I’m standing there, and I hear this moaning – scared the absolute shit out of me. I don’t even believe in ghosts, but hearing that made me jump. So I go look, and there’s my boss at the bottom of the stairs. He’d been in there all night by himself, drinking his face off, and then fell down the stairs. There was blood coming out of his ears.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “I know. So I call an ambulance, and I’m down there trying to keep him awake, talking about whatever shit comes into my head – I think I started telling him about Ghostbusters, because I’d just seen the movie. I’m like, There’s these three guys who fight ghosts. They have these packs on their backs, and laser guns, and they hire a black guy and drive a cool, old car. I think he actually got interested at one point. Who knows what he was thinking.”

  Charlene had to push her fist into her teeth to keep herself from laughing. “I think you told me this one.”

  “I probably did. So that was it, my last day. The crazy thing is, which I didn’t remember until just now – honestly, just as I’m sitting here – is that when I asked him how he fell, he told me he didn’t. He said he jumped. He was trying to break his neck, and he almost did it. I don’t know, I must’ve blocked that in my mind.”

  They sat in silence for nearly a minute. Someone turned the volume back up on the TV, and from it came the cry of the fouled basketball player.

  “I remembered to hide the cash-out bag, at least,” he said. “That would’ve been perfect, losing that.”

  She squeezed his hand.

  “I never jumped. Congratulate me.”

  She did.

  “APOLOGIZE FOR WHAT?”

  – Theo Hendra, quoted in USA Today

  In the middle of a cold snap, Jeremy got a call from an OPP officer saying his cottage had been broken into. Of course it had. He nearly laughed. The officer told him he’d been doing a regular patrol along the lake roads when he spotted boot prints in the snow, then broken glass and discarded bottles. The front door had been forced open, and there was mud all over the floor inside, cupboard doors almost snapped right off their hinges, cigarette burns on the counter. This kind of thing happened every once in a while, he assured Jeremy: kids drove out looking for televisions, stereos, and liquor. Some places got nailed two years in a row. If they didn’t find anything, they partied and smashed the place up. Once he’d found a kayak out on the ice. Jeremy realized later the officer had been trying to make him feel better. He wondered if the dragons were still intact. The officer didn’t mention them, which was strange. You would mention something like a pair of plaster dragons.

  They arranged a time to meet to inspect the damage, the officer assuring Jeremy that no one would be going inside the cottage before they got there. It was sealed up with police tape, and he was personally doing a drive-by each morning.

  The news came as Jeremy was arranging to sell a bunch of the bar equipment in his garage – replacement parts for draft systems and that kind of thing. Someone came out to take away all of it. As he was handing over the cash, he spotted a box full of Theo Hendra books. Jeremy said they belonged to an old girlfriend.

  “The guy makes a few good points, actually, if you ignore the wackier stuff. You know anyone who might want them?”

  “Not anymore!” the man said, and laughed.

  Jeremy nodded. It had come out a while ago that Theo Hendra had been having a long-term affair with his children’s nanny. There were rumours of a child that had been kept out of sight and paid for through a secret slush fund of millions that Hendra’s accountants had established somewhere. There were further rumours about Hendra forcing his nanny to have multiple abortions, and about whether their relationship had been completely consensual. Hendra’s wife, the same Dominique to whom so many of his books were dedicated, was suing him for millions in child support and a generous share of the business. She gave multiple interviews in which she claimed that he’d been an absent father and a neglectful husband, and had furthermore suffered from impotence for most of the past decade. Jeremy saw, read, and heard all of it, and what he didn’t see, read, or hear, he was told about by people he knew, who were only too happy to pass it along. His sister kept sending him links to stories. It was all he ever got from her, other than lawyer’s letters.

  He ended up promising the Theo Hendra books to the woman working the front desk at Stuart’s law firm. He was there for a meeting – one of many – and had spotted one of his books on her desk. It looked new. She said she knew about all the shit he’d been up to, but had been thinking for a while about opening her own business one day, and was curious to see if he had any good advice.

  “I know there’s a lot of tax-type stuff you have to figure out.”

  “It’s about more than that,” Jeremy said. He opened his arms, trying to think of a way to explain the breadth of ideas Hendra had to offer, and found he had no words. So he let his arms drop and offered to give her the entire box of books, no charge.

  Stuart met with him in the firm’s boardroom. It had one long window and a dry-erase board mounted on the wall at the far end. On the opposite wall was a flat-screen TV. The sky outside the window was bright and innocent and blue. On the dry-erase board someone had written the word capture in capital letters, plus a bunch of random numbers. There was a framed cartoon on the wall with a smiling man in a suit and a caption that said: “Being a lawyer is as easy as one, two, fee.” Stuart offered Jeremy coffee.

  “How’s the hand?”

  “Fine. A little sore, but fine.” He forced a smile. “They’re calling me Half-Jesus.”

  He rubbed at the scar. Somehow the blade had gone clean through without cutting a tendon or chipping a bone, so it healed clean. But it hadn’t stopped hurting. The throb woke him up in the night; he would lie awake, riding it out.

  “I’m sorry, Jeremy, this has all been so crazy. This isn’t how I wanted things to turn out. Nobody did.”

  “It’s fine,” he said again, not knowing what else to say.

  Stuart talked for a while about how he, like the others, had been mad at first, but eventually he calmed down and came to see it from Jeremy’s perspective, at least a little. Not to say that they weren’t right to be angry – it had been more than a little underhanded, what he’d pulled, and beyond murky, as far as the
law goes – but in the end, it wasn’t like he had pocketed the money and run off.

  “Or at least,” Stuart said, smiling, “you didn’t run very far. Brian and I went out to see the cottage, by the way.”

  “And?”

  “And, it’s a nice spot. I can see why you picked it. Brian thought it was a little too buggy and rustic, but I kinda liked it. Reminded me of the place my parents rented as a kid.”

  “Glad to hear it. So what’s happening with the bar?”

  Stuart’s smile disappeared, and he explained there was an offer on the table, but that it wasn’t even worth talking about just yet. Once they really got into it, he’d be able to make them go higher.

  “Let me see it.”

  “It’s just an opening offer. It’s barely even formal. I just wanted to let you know that we are going ahead with this, and that I plan to get as much as we can. For everyone’s sake.”

  “I want to see it.”

  Stuart reluctantly pulled a sheet of paper out of the folder he had in front of him and handed it over. Jeremy took the paper and held his breath before reading the number. The sheet was a printout of an email exchange between Susan Toller and Stuart. There were all kinds of friendly jokes and references to things that had nothing to do with the Shack. It was almost flirty. And there it was: even lower than the worst-case scenario he’d imagined. Not just a boot to the balls, but a total boot-focused castration.

  He handed the paper back across the table. Stuart ges­tured that he could keep it. It was left orphaned between them.

  “I’m honestly a little shocked she would even send this to me,” Stuart said. “They know they’ll have to go up.”

  “Tell them yes.”

  Stuart seemed to relax a little. He’d obviously been expecting a fight. “Well, I’ve already said we’re interested, in theory,” he said. “I had to, to get them to make an offer at all.”