Bad Things Happen

by Kris Bertin

  When he showed up to drop off our pay, he’d have a chain wrapped around his forearm with a pair of pitbulls he called Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck at the end of it. I don’t even think he knew which was which, and they definitely weren’t pets. When he’d come over to my apartment, he’d let them go and they’d run around, smelling and chewing on anything in sight, barking and fighting each other. I got the idea they weren’t even his.

  They’d always end up at my bathroom door, sniffing and growling. He’d always ask what I had in the toilet and every single time I had to tell him it was the rabbit and there’d be a moment where he looked like he didn’t believe me, like I had a SWAT team waiting in there for him. Then he’d go over how much money was in the envelope and why, one Italian loafer on the coffee table, leaning over me while I tried to act like I wasn’t scared shitless of him and the dogs and his huge fucking arms.

  When Tan was there, he’d be almost sweet. She’d pet the dogs and give them treats that were supposed to be for her rabbit and they’d talk like they knew each other. For all I knew, he was her boss, too.

  Keep it up, he’d say, and smile, then stuff the cash into the envelope and hand it to me.

  When she was out of my life, he’d chuck the money and still said keep it up, but it never sounded encouraging—never added or else onto the end, but it didn’t need to be. He’d look around my apartment for a bit, look at the different messes growing in different corners, then leave. I got the idea that quitting was probably not an option, but that only made me want to quit even more.

  One time I forgot to put the rabbit in the bathroom when he came for a visit. Once I realized it, I rushed around the house looking for its little broken body, but I couldn’t find it anywhere. I just assumed the dogs ate it whole or carried it out of there, but then the next day it came out of some incredible hiding place and hopped around like it was no big deal. It occurred to me then that hiding is all it knows how to do. Hiding and staying completely still for long periods of time, if it’s required. Have you ever seen a rabbit staying still? It’s amazing. The whole of its being is capable of just sort of stopping. It occurred to me that the whole of my being is probably suited to doing nothing, or at least nothing meaningful. When faced with a predator like Marcel, all I can do is work at the little tasks he needs done in hopes that he realizes I’m worth slightly more alive than dead.

  I quit because I didn’t know what to do with my money.

  My first four-grand payday, I went and bought the stuff I thought I always wanted: a leather jacket and nice clothes, badass cowboy boots, one of those cool driving caps like mobsters wear. When Tan was still here, she said I looked like a sucker, and I thought she meant my fashion sense was for shit. Later, when I was on the toilet at the McDonald’s on St. Catherine’s and someone stuck a pistol under the stall door, I could see what she was getting at.

  The gun wasn’t even aimed at me, and I could’ve even reached over, with my pants down, and grabbed it. But I didn’t. I took all of the money out of my wallet and gave it to the hand waiting patiently next to the little gun.

  Les bottes aussi, he said. Et le manteau.

  And I spoke enough French to know that I was going to be walking home in my socks. On the way I got some velcro shoes and a windbreaker from the Salvation Army and didn’t put on anything nicer after that. Tan said she liked my new look, but said it in a way that told me she probably knew what had happened. But that was Tan. I always had the idea that she was one step ahead of me, even if she wasn’t. That she knew what I was doing even if there was no possible way she could’ve found out.

  So instead of buying clothes and nice things, I started buying really expensive food for us, as if you could eat the money, get it into you that way, consume it. All of our labels were green or light blue, and they all said Healthy or Natural or Organic or Whole Wheat. They said Hand-Made and Fair Trade and even Good For The Planet. Even our beer. Even our toilet paper. They had smiling people on the box and spiralling, tribal fonts, or else were completely minimalist and mostly white.

  Once she left I stopped buying it, but my cupboards were still full of packages of Pure Quinoa and Organic Falafel Mix and vacuum-sealed bags of Jasmine Rice with “freshness windows”. All the fresh kale and bok choy and eggplant and litchi fruit stayed in the fridge and rotted down to nothing until I just didn’t open the door anymore. My freezer remained full of fresh cuts from the deli, frozen in the plastic bags they came home in.

  My money piled up.

  I couldn’t look to the guys at work for answers on what to do with it. Eric and Teddy were doing the kind of stuff everyone says you end up doing with a lot of money, probably because they thought they had to. Booze and clubs, drugs and gambling. Women. And by women, I mean the kind that were in the back of the free newspaper, the ones you could order over the phone like a pizza.

  Eric would brag about them when we were in the office, brag about all the fucked-up shit he’d get them to do. How he’d order two and get one to sleep on the floor while he had a go at the other one, then get them to switch. He’d say he was benching them, like they were his own little basketball team. They were there at every party he threw, and Rashad said he got them so high they’d stand around and let you do anything to them.

  He made one of them act like a coat rack, Rashad said. And made her stay that way. Holding our coats. He made sure we were there when he got her to do it, though. That’s the thing about Eric. He does it for us, not himself.

  The thing about Rashad is that he’s a manic-depressive college dropout. As awkward as you could get in real life, but something between a hypnotist and a used-car salesman on the phone. A good used-car salesman, I mean. He was both the best con-guy in the office, and the one who missed the most days. Made more money than all of us, but every dollar went towards his life coach and psychiatrist and gestalt therapist and personal trainer. Every now and then he’d place a call on his cell phone in the middle of the day, and leave for the rest of his shift because he was all shook up.

  One time, I heard him say I’m entering Crisis Mode, John. Then he listened for maybe two minutes to some kind of motivational guy on the other end, got a serious look on his face, said All right, and hung up. That was the day he broke the record for most numbers nabbed in a single shift (a record he set three years before).

  I quit after I accidentally gave a homeless guy a box of cereal with fifteen hundred dollars in it and realized it meant nothing to me after it was gone from my life.

  He was this guy I always saw in the park near my house. He’s such a mess that he didn’t even have shoes on most of the time. Had one of those down-filled coats, blown open and leaking feathers, tear-away pants overtop of coveralls and all of it frayed and faded a filthy brown like he’d washed it in a puddle. During the day, his bags and stuff were spread out over an entire park bench and he was up and about, doing this sort of fitness routine for money. Jumping jacks, push-ups, squats with his hands held over his head. He was deaf or crazy or something and couldn’t talk—just made sounds—these roars and honks while he gestured with his open hand. He was so messed up it was impossible to guess how old or young he was. Most people couldn’t even look at him. Of all the homeless people we’d see on a regular basis—the young punk ones with dreadlocks and well-fed dogs, or the bag ladies in thick, long coats, or the middle-aged guys with bad attitudes who otherwise seemed perfectly capable of working—he was the one I always thought about.

  I thought to give him food because I figured he wouldn’t know what to do with money. When I gave him money anyway it turned out he did, and the next time I saw him he had on new clothes. Or clean clothes, anyway. Work pants with the crease still in them, a warm ski jacket and hat. When he saw me, he blew out his cheeks and raised his arms over his head in a bodybuilder’s pose. Made a sound like a trumpet, like maybe this was his greatest moment.

  I felt good for a while until Tany
a pointed out he was still living in the park. He was clothed and fed, but the third thing you need to survive—shelter—was the one he just couldn’t manage to put together.

  She leaned out the window in a tailored, low-cut black thing and asked if I really thought money would change anything. I went over and looked where she was pointing. Saw him on that bench in the rain, with the box of Ancient Grains All-Natural Granola with Real Fruit bloated and falling apart at his feet. I wanted to explain that I only gave him money by accident, but that seemed too stupid to believe. It wasn’t like he had bowls or milk or even teeth to eat cereal with, so I said nothing.

  If you believe in this kind of stuff, why not work at a shelter or something? She asked.

  She always said just because she did skeezy stuff it didn’t mean I had to. It was her favorite thing to say to me. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. Do anything, she would say. She said it a lot my first week, when I actually wasn’t sure about what I was doing, but I could see that I needed to be the same kind of thing as her or else it wouldn’t work.

  There’s lots of soup kitchens in the city, she said, but it didn’t mean anything when she said it.

  I quit because there weren’t people in the city that mattered to me, and I didn’t matter to anyone there either.

  Once Tan was gone, it was me, the rabbit, and the guy in the park. And Mom, on the other end of the phone. I took my on-the-books job with MCGI global and ran with that story for her. So she thought I was contracted to raise funds for Stop African Poverty, a charity I made up. When she’d call, I’d invent a whole list of accomplishments just for her, like getting promoted to floor supervisor, and hint towards a possible trip to Sudan with the company.

  Would you take Tanya with you? She would ask, sounding excited.

  And I would say something like, It might be the place to pop the question, don’t you think?

  And then she’d be happy for a while, and everything we talked about was the engagement. I’d done the same thing before by hinting about a possible grandchild in the future, by implying she’d get to meet Tan in the new year, and by flat-out lying and saying that I already had a ring and was waiting for the perfect moment.

  When Tan was gone, the only sign that she had left willingly and wasn’t kidnapped or murdered or sold into slavery was that all of her shoes were gone, and everything else was left behind. I was on par with her Blend-Tech blender, her yoga mat, her ten-inch dildo. Nice to have, maybe, but you can always get another one. I appreciated, at least, that she knew when to cut her losses.

  Rashad was the closest thing I had to a friend in the city, and though we never did anything outside of work, he was the person I went to talk to once she was gone. I went to him because he seemed like the only one who would even listen to the things I had to say without making fun of me.

  If I would have gone there when he wasn’t at a low point, gone when he was at the top of his game, I could’ve maybe walked out of his ultra-modern death-star condo with something useful in my head. Instead all he could say to me was shit like that’s life and I don’t know what else you were expecting. His weight had yo-yoed again, so he was bloated and tired and sweating too much. I needed to know if he thought I should go after her or not—if I should try to get her back, or if I should just finally let her go once and for all—or do something else entirely.

  When I gave him a play-by-play of the night before and how normal everything had seemed, how we’d gone swimming at the YMCA and got drinks like every Friday, he pointed out that none of it was about me. She probably didn’t even leave you, he said. She was leaving something else. I said Yeah, but it hadn’t even occurred to me until then.

  The best piece of advice Rashad could offer was to take stock of how much of a fuckup I was.

  Obviously, he said, lying on the couch, if you’re here, at this point—you probably can’t do anything right.

  I know I can’t, he said.

  Yeah?

  All we can do is play catch up. So she’s probably better off.

  And that was just the way he talked sometimes. Other times, grabbing numbers was the greatest thing you could possibly be doing in the world. Sometimes he talked about it like it was a career, like he was a stockbroker or hedge-fund analyst or something. Talked about it like I should be proud to be invited to a party put on by our murderer boss where you can fuck the waitresses carrying around platters of free cocaine.

  I quit because two men came into the office to see Eric.

  He was doing his thing, going back and forth between calls and talking about what he did last night. Got two hookers to wrestle in his living room while him and his buddy watched and gave a colour-commentary play-by-play. I didn’t have to look at him to know it was a lie.

  It was hilarious, he said.

  Before he got to the end of his story, the two men, who didn’t look particularly menacing—they were wearing colourful ski jackets and Adidas trackpants and jeans—started getting in Eric’s space and talking quietly to him in French. We all just sat there and watched him try to play it cool, watched him call them pals and make like it was a social visit, not business. They even put up with it for a little while.

  They got him while he was showing them around in the little kitchenette in our office, showing what beverages were available in the fridge and cupboards. Got him when he leaned over to show them how the water fountain worked, which was half-insult, half him stalling for time. That’s when one of them punched the back of his head mid-sip, so that the metal spray-guard around the spout was driven into his mouth and gums and destroyed four or five teeth from one side of his mouth in one swift motion.

  He didn’t scream. He just covered his mouth with his hand, and crouched down by the water fountain while they left. Made a continuous “mmm” sound and kept his eyes shut like he could meditate them back into his head.

  The invisible hand of the market, Rashad said later. Gambling debts.

  And I didn’t need to know who he was in debt to. Marcel came in not five minutes later with a big fruit basket. He didn’t say a word about the blood everywhere, the brown-and-red balls of paper towel, or Eric’s wrecked face. He just sat in the middle of the room and spun around in an office chair, whistling “Sweet Caroline” and eating an apple. And Eric kept his eyes on the floor and his hand in his mouth.

  Rashad, who I kept looking to when the thing was happening, hadn’t even lifted his head to watch. He’d kept dialling and was still dialling at the end of it. He didn’t even need to call his life coach about it.

  I quit after I scammed this one woman.

  She was so moved by my performance that she called me a saint. By God, a hero. You’ve saved us, she said, you’ve saved the whole family.

  Then she told me about her medical bills for her son, the ones she can’t pay. About how he was healthy for his whole life, but then he drowned at the pool. Drowned and was saved. She told me when they dragged him out he was blue. And in my mind I saw him as being completely blue, like something from Star Trek. We’re trained to roll with any crazy thing the targets say over the phone, to take it and run with it, and I do my job perfectly, not trying to think about her blue kid in a wheelchair, and all the things his brain and body can’t do anymore. I’d heard a lot of fucked-up stories from targets—plenty of sad ones—and this one was no more meaningful than the cancer victims or abuse survivors or sweet old ladies who were so lonely they maybe didn’t even care about being robbed.

  It was just the image that did something to me, that fit into the right place in my head. The image and the way she said it with her down-home folksy Texas accent. I liked to think that everyone in the office had someone like her, someone who could put the perfect combinations of words together to break the spell. They just had to hear it, and it would make them realize who—and what—they were.

  It synched up perfectly with the thing Ras
had said, too. I could see how everything guys like us touched—even with our voices, even with a telephone—was destined to turn to shit.

  I still went through the whole process with the lady, except I wrote down a bogus bank-account number, and waited until the end of the day to file it so I didn’t get an immediate bounce back email. All at once I’d made up my mind, and I was leaving.

  I call my mother after that, and tell her that I’ve got good news.

  I’ll be coming home soon, maybe in the next couple days.

  It’s been six months since Tan’s left me, and two years since I’ve been home, but she doesn’t know that.

  Did you get fired? She asks.

  I tell her yeah! I did!

  It’s a great lie. It’s believable, and disappointing enough that she won’t be suspicious about what I’m doing. Will ask questions around my job, like it’s something that might explode if she mentions it.

  Are you bringing your girlfriend with you?

  No, I tell her. Tan died!

  My mother replies:

  Did she now.

  I quit by loading my stuff into the elevator and pressing the up button.

  Then I take a cereal box and go down the stairs. It has odds and ends and could be anywhere between fifteen hundred and maybe five thousand bucks. I have the idea that maybe some of it could be useful, that my mother might like having a box of money in her life for makeup or movies or her mortgage. At first I’m okay with leaving Tan’s rabbit up there but then I realize there’s a really good chance it could starve to death. I get the stupid thing, and it bites me twice before I get it in the cage.

  I’m terrified Marcel’s going to see me, that I’m going to run into him in the lobby and that will be that. That he’ll know I ducked a perfectly good number grab from the Texas woman, and I’ll have to answer for it. I imagine my lie, that I must have written it down wrong, and imagine him seeing all the falseness in the sentence, like dark spots on an X-ray. Then he’d pull my head off my body right there in the street like Conan the Barbarian.