by Kris Bertin
But there is no Marcel when I get downstairs, no Marcel at the bank or the corner store or the bus stop. No Marcel crouched behind Canada Post mailboxes or in behind the sculptures and paintings in the art gallery windows. No Marcel behind the row of condiments at the hot dog vendors. No Marcel in the storm drains.
I do get to see my homeless guy. After I’ve gone past his empty bench in the park and decided I’d probably never see him again, and after I’m on the bus, heading for the subway station. I see him through the window of the bus, a tiny shape inside the reflection of my face.
He’s in a stand-off with the cops, holding a huge rock over his head. There are flashing lights and four cop cars pulled onto the sidewalk, and our route is being re-directed. He’s in front of a barbecue restaurant called BARBIE-Q, with a sexy looking cow on the sign. The window’s smashed out and there’s blood all over the sidewalk and I can hear, even over the sirens, that he’s making that trumpet sound, like he’s already won. It’s a sound like a horn coming down a high mountain, and I can feel it vibrating in my hands, vibrating in my cereal box.
There is absolutely no way of knowing how directly connected I am to him and the blood and the rock, if my actions led him here, but it doesn’t matter. I realize this is another of those things that I’ll always see, like the blue kid, or Eric smiling with his wrecked mouth. Or Tan, in her one-piece bathing suit at the YMCA pool, her chin and elbows propped upon the edge, water dripping off her skin. It makes me want to get home, get into pajamas or a sweatsuit or something soft, get into the bed that I slept in when I wasn’t ready to be on my own yet. Get back in there and stay there.
Everyone’s laughing and pointing and talking about him when I put my cereal box down and pull that yellow cord hanging above all our heads. Before I switch buses, I line up the rabbit’s cage with my homeless guy. I open the gate right in the middle of the street, and it leaps out, runs past everything. Past me and the cops and under cars and through traffic. It shoots down the pavement until it becomes nothing more than a white ball, bouncing along in the distance. It folds in on itself and disappears without a sound, like it had never been here to begin with.
THE STORY HERE
I have the End of the World dream a lot.
So often that I don’t really wake up from it with a sense of relief or joy that I’m still alive like I used to do. For a long time I’d wake up and do some real soul-searching and hug my kids and cry a little on my own. Or I’d think about the details of the dream and try to match them up to all the different elements in my life, track them back to their points of origin. An unfilled bird feeder. Spare-room linens gone unwashed for two years straight. That I haven’t switched from the old-style light bulbs yet.
Now I just wake up. Look at my husband. Look at the ceiling. The clock. Listen for any signs of the kids doing anything they’re not supposed to be doing. I learned to think of the dream not as something that comes to me, but as something that I have. An organ that inflates when my head is on the pillow, fills up the chambers of my mind, and takes over for the last hour before my alarm goes off.
In the dream, there’s no comet or atom bomb or alien invaders. No catalyst, just a mindset that we’re all in. It’s just the end and everyone knows it. The only thing that gives it away is how the other people are acting. Cars are clogging the streets, guys with huge crucifixes and torches and Bibles and robes are on the sidewalk, or even on my lawn, and everyone else is just going crazy, screaming or crying or pleading with the sky like something’s listening up there. A lot of people on their knees.
When I was waking up three and four times a night over it, I went to a doctor. Right away he said this sort of thing was almost always related to stress, anxiety.
Depression, he said, is often coupled with some pretty bad dreams. He asked about crises, about mental stressors, deaths in the family.
Divorces, anything like that? Divorce can be as bad as death.
No, I said. Which was a lie. But also true.
A lie because yes, we were having tons of divorces (and engagements, marriages, flings, and half-romances), but true because those things didn’t mean anything to us anymore. Dad and Mom got divorced from each other twice, then proceeded to marry and divorce other people for the next two decades. Only Mom stopped trying at some point. Dad gave it another go and got a third wife. Then a fourth.
One Christmas my brother Francis and I made a chart of all my father’s marriages, known and assumed infidelities, steady girlfriends, and one-offs. Frank even drew a lovechild off to the side, a little goblin baby with a line pointing to one of the girlfriends that Dad may or may not have gotten pregnant. A question mark on its forehead and in her belly. We put it all together as a diagram on a whiteboard in the basement, and even made a timeline, colour-coded it:
Dad and Mom marry in ’75, get divorced in ’93. Three kids; me and my brothers Francis and Allan. We draw pictures of us (and them).
From ’93 to ’94, Dad dates one of his students (who we weren’t ever allowed to meet). I like to imagine she’s a mature student returned to school after some other career, but she definitely wasn’t. She was a capital-S Student. A kid that liked Dad’s history lectures. Frank claims to have spied her and Dad eating ice cream (using Mom’s bird-watching binoculars) at the park across the street.
Dad dates his colleague Carol from ’95 to ’97. Carol is well over 200 pounds and has severe physical disabilities. Teaches philosophy at the college with the aid of a microphone hooked up to a massive sound system. Is unhappy about her disability, and highly vocal about it. There was a theory going around Dad was with her to efface all prior hound-doggery. A person he can point to and say I loved her for her mind, goddamnit. Dad makes all of us (including Mom) go to Christmas dinner at her wheelchair-accessible place where he announces their engagement, two weeks before my wedding. Carol doesn’t let us have seconds. We see her put the leftovers into Tupperware, and then into the fridge.
Spring 1998 Dad marries and divorces Carol. Or it might have been an annulment, I’m not sure. A ramp, half-built, remains on one side of the house like a broken waterslide. Our little brother Allan smokes cigarettes on it, dangles his legs over the edge.
Dad and Mom reconcile spring 1998; remarry fall 1998. Frank and I place bets on how long they have. We call it The Sequel. They decide this time they won’t fight. They just won’t. Mom smiled and told me:
When we feel like fighting, we take a walk, or else go for a long drive.
Dad and Mom divorce Christmas 2000 within days of my first child being born. Frank wins an easy twenty bucks.
Dad marries a former mistress named Seline in ’03. Seline is a close friend to the student we weren’t allowed to meet. Her and Dad supposedly ran hot and cold during a ten-year period with brief encounters throughout. Her engagement ring is Big Carol’s, banged down to almost nothing. Seline dedicates herself to becoming my best friend. Seline is a year younger than me. Seline babysits my oldest and newborn on and off, and though at first I can’t stand her I come to tolerate her because I really need the help.
Our mother marries her probably gay best friend Marcus in ’05. Marcus teaches poetry at the same university as Dad. Dad and Seline manage to finagle their way into being best man and maid-of-honour. My brother and I get astoundingly drunk at the wedding. Our little brother has dropped out of college and is somewhere in Mongolia during this time. He sends them a bone with Ghengis Khan’s face carved into it as a wedding gift.
Mom and Marcus get divorced that same year. In ’06 he moves in with her and they become roommates, nothing more. Marcus seems gayer than ever.
Dad divorces Seline the same year as if to one-up Mom. Seline is kicked out of the house and Dad immediately starts dating his fourth wife, Ronette. Ronette is the owner of a business called Clean Sweep, which specializes in the post-mortem or post-divorce removal of a loved-one’s (or not-so-loved)
stuff. After Seline is ejected from the house, Ronette transforms the house from Boho Chic to Pyrex-and-Doily in two weeks flat.
The chart was just something we were doing to be jerks, for a laugh. We ended up forgetting about it, and never even wiped it off when Christmas was over. When Allan took that room as his own, Francis said the whiteboard was still there, over his desk. There were a few smudges and a layer of dust, but our diagram was there, suspended over his books and homework and out in the open for everyone to see. Frank said it was untouched except for a new section that Allan had added. Documenting all the newest developments.
This is how our family works.
I am prescribed Valium.
Two weeks after I start my treatment, Dad tells us he needs to hunker down at our place while his latest divorce blows over. Even though the pills are making everything kind of dull and blurry, I know I would feel the same way regardless. It’s not a surprise, and I don’t care.
Of course, he doesn’t actually ask to stay with us, and doesn’t tell us in person, either. When my husband, two kids, and I are coming home from the movies, we find a note taped to the door, and I know what it is right away. Writing notes is my father’s primary mode of communication. He left my mother with a note, moved away from us with a note, even gave me one instead of showing up at my wedding. I imagine Ronette got a note.
We stand at the front door, by the magnolias, and read it:
I left Ronette. I “need” to stay here for a while. I’m at the grocery store.
Dr. Benjamin Chesterfield.
Dad puts quotation marks around words for emphasis. He’s always done this, despite a lifetime of writing papers and journal articles. When my husband reads it out loud, he says need like it’s urgent, like Dad’s dying of thirst or starvation and we’re his only hope.
It means he has nowhere else to go, I tell him.
Probably, he says. He says it with all the disdain I would have for Dr. Benjamin Chesterfield if Dr. Benjamin Chesterfield weren’t my father. If I were outside myself, I know I would say it exactly the same way with the exact same look on my face.
My youngest, Emma, doesn’t have the wherewithal to know what’s going on, but Kelly, she knows something is happening.
Who is that? She asks, reaching for the note.
I don’t let her have it, but she’s probably read it. She’s an astoundingly good reader already. She probably read it backwards through the wrong side of the paper. She’s like that.
It’s your grandpa, I tell her.
If she can hide or control her emotions, she isn’t any good at it yet. She instantly lowers her head and says no, like he isn’t coming, like we’re playing a prank on her. Mike looks at me, like I’m the one who’s done something wrong. I can’t tell him to put Kelly to bed because she’s too old and it isn’t bedtime yet. I tell him to put Emma to bed instead, and Michael just looks at me, trying to figure out how to keep me from picking up my father. One time he said he didn’t like us being around him. Us, as a couple.
I’m worried we’re going to catch divorce, he said.
The other dream I have is the rockslide dream.
It’s a little more inconsistent than the End of the World one. Sometimes I’m in the house when everything collapses, when the house itself slides down the embankment behind our yard, and I can watch everything go by out the side window like I’m on a country drive. Other times I see the house from a distance and it looks like a scale model—like a bad special effect from a 1950s movie—a tiny household tumbling down with a sea of Styrofoam rocks. One time a man with a clipboard showed up in the dream and asked me if I was interested in having our house destroyed. My mouth didn’t move right and I couldn’t give him a straight answer, so he checked a couple of boxes and leaned in and said he’d just go ahead with it anyway. He walked away from the front steps and made a hand gesture to someone or something and that same THX-quality rumbling started up.
In the End of the World dream, it’s just a normal day, except we’re all going to die and there’s not one thing I can do to stop it. I’m usually cooking our last meal ever, or going to sleep with everyone—all of us in one big bed like a medieval family. But the landslide one is different because I’m not really me. I’m someone who looks like me, and talks like me—but I’m someone else. I know this because when I move in the dream and when I make decisions in the dream, all my actions and thoughts are so full of purpose that they’re almost heroic. I grab and carry the kids in my hands like they’re a couple bags of groceries, try to get them out the door and to safety.
The other difference between these dreams is that when I wake up from the end of the world, it’s over. But the rockslide dream is always followed by the actual, louder-than-you’d-even-think sound of rock blasting, or stranger, more disorganized sounds of heavy machinery eating the earth. My husband is a civil engineer and can identify each of their sources. He’ll roll out of bed and tilt his head towards the window, where it sounds like a choir of air-raid sirens is rehearsing, and say something like:
Industrial vacuums. That’s all.
Michael’s body language tells me he truly believes he’s being reassuring, as if naming a sound negates how deafening and awful it is. I tell him, with my head still under the pillow:
Yes, just hearing loss. That’s all.
When I complain about any of it, he makes a careful assessment before speaking. He is sympathetic about noise complaints, and about the loss of nearby wilderness where only months before we used to take the kids for walks, but only to a point. He sees himself as a champion of logic and reason, and can tolerate very little sentimentality from anyone. He said to me—when things really got rolling and I was horrified by the dry, bare earth that was left behind after the forest floor was ripped out like an old carpet—that I was wrong:
It was the same way here, right here, he said, pointing at our kitchen floor. Three years ago, this looked like that, but they developed it for us and now they’re doing the same thing, right there, for other people who aren’t here yet. But will be.
Yeah, I know, I tell him, I know, but it still really sucks, doesn’t it?
He doesn’t answer. Inside him, there is no instrument to measure this sort of thing.
The neighbourhood really does sit up on an embankment, and all of our backyards really do run right to the edge of a steep cliff. But a rockslide really is impossible, Michael insists. He goes back to the numbers, back to the physics and the geology. When our neighbours talk of cracked foundations from drilling, of eroding lawns, or, god forbid, a large-scale collapse of some kind, all their fear is met with a passionate resistance bordering on fervour. Said, over the fence to our neighbour, Mr. Fry, who claims his lawn is sinking:
You’d need three-digit amplitudes for any of that sort of thing, and we just aren’t damn well getting that much, Gord. It is simply impossible.
Said to Mrs. Fry (who claimed a basement wall has begun to bulge, ever so slightly), in a tone just below a shout:
There is no dynamic amplification response in below-ground structures, regardless of vibration.
Said to me, after I mention the word “rock-slide” for a second time in one day:
That’s about as likely as if we turn on our taps and snakes come out instead of water, Margie. Do you understand? Rock failure does not work like that.
Despite all of this, when the first blast occurred, and both of us jumped out of bed and didn’t know what to do for a moment, he had a look on his face like I’ve never seen before, that something beyond his comprehension was taking place. An indignant fury under that shallow panic, one that came back to us when we found the letter from the developer in our mailbox. Despite the warmth of the logo with the family and dog standing together, the sun shining behind them, the letter is little more than an afterthought:
ATTN: Residents
Please be advised t
hat blasting for the new subdivision commences today. It may be very loud. We apologize for the inconvenience.
I see Dad’s RV in the parking lot, his cat Suzanne—who was given the title The Only Woman Ben Never Left by Frank and me—in the passenger seat. Of course, the first Suzanne, the one we grew up with, is dead. This one is Suzanne II, but she’s at least twenty years old, if not more.
Dad’s in the grocery store, having a Coke and a snack in the little café tacked onto the side of it. When I see him, I can tell he’s been on the road for days just by how oily his skin is. He’s wearing shorts and sandals, a t-shirt that can barely contain his gut. It would be impossible to guess from the warped WEST COAST CHOPPER logo on his chest and the big sandwich he’s plowing through, that he’s a tenured professor of military history. There was a time when he looked like George Clooney with a big beard, but to see him here like this—on the too-small-for-him wrought-iron chair—is like looking at a different person.
Most of our memories aren’t fair, and don’t necessarily show us anything meaningful or true about the person we’re thinking of. They’re usually just a few moments that we just can’t get rid of. For me, Dad will always be Young Dad, with a navy beard and a big smile. Dad with me in his arms, his body nice and cool against mine. Kissing my head and neck and face and carrying me down the stairs saying let’s get away from those gross boys. Him putting on his Beach Boys-style captain’s hat and taking me out in his professor buddy’s little motorboat—the one he was allowed to take out when the guy was on vacation—saying that it was our secret. The three of us burning across the harbour, him with a cigar in his teeth, the first Suzanne curled into a terrified ball, and me holding his can of Guinness between my knees so the coast guard wouldn’t see.
And likewise, even though she’s always smiling, my mom will always be Sad Mom to me.
