by Kris Bertin
I know you’re not a stupid person, Jack tells me, but you sure act fucking stupid sometimes.
I work hard to keep Jack out of the house, but then the only reason to go anywhere is the house itself—to buy new trim for the upstairs hall, paint, new pendant lights to hang over the new counters. When I try to come up with something else to do, he laughs at me—like I’m insane to want to go for a walk or to a movie or a bar. Whenever he’s home, he’s in the kitchen, staring at that black, metal door with his blacked-out glasses, thinking black thoughts.
I know I’m going to get it—it’s just a matter of time until it comes my way.
One day, Jack catches Morgan sitting in the empty kiddie pool in the backyard, his head in a bag of some solvent or another. So he gets a baseball from the trash piles near the basement windows and whips him in the temple with it. J.J. and I watch this through the sliding doors. Other than the big red lump that grows slowly from his serene beauty, nothing is changed.
There’s a long talk about what the next step should be. Jack’s driven around looking for the Champ, checked out all his old haunts and bars, but he’s not anywhere to be found. At the grocery store, they say he’s quit, and we don’t see him jogging in his too-short sweatsuit, those big hands sticking out from sleeves that stop at the middle of his arms. The idea is we can pay him to oust them, but he’s nowhere to be found. I realize it was a fatal misstep to get rid of him first, but like every other thought I have, I can’t safely express it to him.
The long talk takes us in and out of rooms, from the kitchen to the bedroom to the shower, where I sit and watch his vague shape behind the mottled-glass door. I drink from my mug and imagine him as a different man back there, and then I imagine myself as one. One who might go in there, bounce his head off the new tiles a half-dozen times, and be a man for once. A guy like the Champ, who might be able to take all this away from him, a guy who gets to say no at least some of the time.
The irony of taking Morgan to get help isn’t lost on either of us. On our way to the addiction centre we stop at Wendy’s, where I fill an empty cup with Iceberg. Jack and I share it for the rest of the drive, and a few times he even smiles at me for having brought it along. Using a straw makes it go faster, and soon everything is soft and light and easy to handle.
Jack and I had agreed once that being drunk in the daytime was like being on another planet. He said: a planet almost exactly the same as this one, but a little better. A little more colour, a little more fun. I liked that. That stuck with me.
The night before, he had said something like tomorrow’s our visit to the dog pound and I got upset. Paced around, hid in the bathroom. Whisper-screamed shit to myself. Slept downstairs-downstairs, through the steel door and into the smell, where I shared the shredded couch with Morgan himself, who kissed my neck all night but was a soft nothing when I reached behind myself for his dick.
But today I’m leaning back to the seat behind me, and petting Morgan like he is a dog, careful to avoid the plum-coloured growth on his noggin. And I’m doing the same thing to J.J., too, so it’s almost like we have two pets back there. Today, I’ve decided that Jack is right, and that I’m going to be good and do like he says from now on. Today, I feel more guilty than usual, and he’s being nicer than usual. His eyes are hurting less today, I think, and on top of that, we’re one step closer to the end.
Somehow, before we come to the stone walls and line of pine trees that surround the Addiction Centre, we lose Morgan. We lose him and end up driving in circles, taking the same off-ramp and looping around the same stretch of highway near a truckstop, over and over again. We hang our heads out the window to watch for him, and it’s funny, because if Morgan were a dog like Jack said, this is exactly what we’d be doing if he’d jumped out a window. We’d be wringing our hands and shouting his name, watching for any sign of him, describing him to people at the gas station and leaving telephone numbers.
Eventually, we have to give up.
He’s not our problem anymore, Jack says. What the fuck else can we do?
I don’t look at him, do my best to agree, which I do by keeping my mouth shut and staring straight ahead for the hour-long drive home. It’s the exact same thing I have to do when we get home and we can see that something’s wrong even before we come to a full stop in the driveway. It looks like the door and windows are all open. But they’re not.
All the windows are smashed. The walnut-panelled door is gone.
We find it in the living room, where it’s come in through an obliterated side-window. The cream-coloured rug is smeared with shit, actual human shit, and I can see that it was smeared with actual human hands, too. Everything that can be smashed is smashed. Anything that couldn’t be destroyed is covered in shit, or red paint, or both. There are holes in every wall, and all the wires are torn out, hanging like dead snakes from the ceiling and walls. The banister is completely ripped off the stairs and is now hanging out the back window. The stairs themselves are pulled up like fingernails. The concrete counter where I used to make bread has been smashed haphazardly, like the surface of the moon. If I were to roll dough there now, it would come away with wild tumours from the craters and rise up in the oven like some deformed baby. The walls leading upstairs have a message for us—written with ball-peen hammer—dozens of black holes leftover from dozens of separate swings. We have to connect the dots:
F.A.G.G.O.T.S
J.J. is screaming, his voice rising and falling, the same sound over and over again like an ambulance.
If Morgan had stayed in the car, we would’ve been here to see it. We would’ve found them with hammers and buckets of paint and a crowbar, and maybe a chainsaw, from the looks of the couch. Maybe we would be in pieces, too. Maybe they would’ve cut me right in half and vodka would have gone everywhere. Maybe they’d have stomped on Jack’s head so hard his eyes would’ve popped out of his skull and he’d finally have ocular relief. Maybe they would’ve taken J.J. and thrown him out the window rolled up inside the rug.
But Morgan did not stay in the car.
I made the mistake of asking him if he was ready to go, and he said where, and I said to detox, and that was it. He’d said no. Said it by opening the door and falling outside, rolling out of a moving vehicle going so fast we didn’t even know he was gone. It was only when we took a turn off the highway and the door shut that we even realized it had been opened in the first place. As well as I can figure, he went into a ditch and through a drainpipe or something. Into another dimension, maybe.
When it’s clear that we’re not going to find him, and I start to cry, Jack tells me to stop. He says it immediately, at the first sign of tears, and says it with a hand cocked back, all ready to go, right into my mouth or my eye or the side of my skull. I try hard, but there’s something that keeps catching, something about it that keeps on coming, so my chest heaves and hitches and I keep making little noises that make Jack’s face red and furious. But I know he can’t help it.
I think of the conspiracy Jack’s already imagined, where I roll away from his innocent body and sneak into the night. Open that metal door and let those ghouls in one by one so we can plan his downfall at the kitchen table. I picture us as he must, as every kind of monster—a Dracula and a Frankenstein and a Wolfman and a Mummy and a Swamp Creature. I can feel how much he hates us, hates everyone that isn’t himself. But I put those thoughts away.
Instead, when Jack looks at his house, covers his face and starts to cry, I go to him. I could hide somewhere, under the porch, or maybe in the rubble. I could run away, take the car and drive away, drive and go find Morgan and take the two of us to detox, but I don’t. I have no choice but to go to Jack.
I know just what I’ll need to say and do to get him through this. I’ll tell him right away that we need to get out of here, that we should get a hotel and get drinks, relax and just not think about it right now. I’ll tell him that this will all b
e better tomorrow and that insurance will take care of it. I’ll tell him that the sun’s gonna go down tonight but it’s gonna come right back up tomorrow and the good stuff we got coming to us is gonna come—it’s just gonna be a little bit late, that’s all. In the meantime we got each other and we got J.J. and everything’s going to work out, you’ll see.
I put my arms around him and press his head to my chest, same as when J.J. has his fits, same as my father would do when something scared me, same as his father did with him, and so on, all the way back down the line to the very start of everything.
YOUR #1 KILLER
He’s smiling, but smiling too hard, like his teeth are going to shatter.
When he came out of baggage claim and rolled towards me with his luggage, I noticed it right away. He seemed frantic, and his eyes and head kept darting around like a lizard’s. Even when we hug, I can feel him vibrating, his heart pounding and his temple throbbing against my head. He doesn’t calm down in the car, either. He drums on the dash with his hands, fiddles with the vents. Opens the glove compartment and stares inside. We talk and he says he’s missed me so much. He kisses my shoulder so hard I swerve a little. I imagine drugs in his luggage or bloodstream.
Then he reaches over and cranks up the radio, covers his mouth, and starts bawling his eyes out right next to me. He turns his head away (like if “You Can Go Your Own Way” is turned up loud enough, and he’s looking out the window, I won’t notice).
Chris, I say. Oh Chris.
Then and there I pull over on the highway and wrap him up in my arms. He balls himself up against me so small it’s like he’s turned back into a little boy again. It feels like years ago, when an icicle fell off an overpass and smashed against the windshield and cracked it down the middle on our way to Grandma’s. His body hitching against me with the hum of the engine, his wet face on my neck. It feels exactly the same, but it’s been eighteen years since I’ve held him and two years since I’ve even seen him so I’m not sure exactly what to do. I don’t know what’s wrong, why he’s come back home, and he hasn’t told me anything about it that isn’t clearly a lie.
I take the safe bet and say the exact thing I did when the icicle almost killed us:
It’s all right, and it’s all over.
At home he does nothing, or at least nothing worthwhile. He sits around a lot, usually on the carpet, or else upright in bed, watching TV or reading something or digging through old boxes of his stuff. It’s either that, or he’s in bed with all his clothes on, just staring. He claims that his girlfriend—a person I’ve never met—is dead and I can see that he’s scared or embarrassed or regretful of whatever the truth of the situation is, so I don’t press him, don’t do anything that might set him off.
It’s two months before he actually accomplishes something beyond looking out the window, eating corner-store candy or diving for the phone when it rings. He digs out the Nintendo Entertainment System I bought him for Christmas in 1989, and he takes it apart and spreads it all over the living-room carpet to try to get it going. He wipes the stuff down, vacuums it, but it takes him a long time to put it all back together, and I have to step around the green electronics and chips and wires for days. After that, the sound of him sighing or coughing or smoking is replaced with the sound of skeletons and werewolves getting beaten to death by a beefy guy swinging around what looks like a boat rope.
I hear myself ask him:
Why don’t you do something with your friends? I even add, pathetically, that maybe they could play a two-player game.
I don’t have any friends, he says, making the little man jump around some steps.
He says it like I’m insane for suggesting it, like his friends have all died off, and I just haven’t heard about it. For all that he’s chosen to share with me, they could have.
So I don’t say anything.
I leave him alone.
And I end up letting it go on for too long, mostly because I’m worried that if I say anything it’ll be like the car again. I let him stay right there in the living room, a grown man surrounded by cups of juice and cereal bowls. I deliver takeout food to him, I clean up after and around him, around the spot where he kills giant bats and mummies and makes the basket of potpourri work overtime just to cover up his stink. Before I know it, he’s been home for three months and we haven’t spoken more than a handful of words to each other. He tries not to look at me and I try not to look at him, and the two of us do our best to pretend like there isn’t something crazy going on.
When he was twelve, and he found out I was seeing a man, Chris stood on the kitchen table and demanded I bring him over. He swung a glass ketchup bottle around and said he wanted to give him what for. Shouted it like he was Yosemite Sam, his tiny eyeballs bulging out of his head, his crooked teeth flashing. He acted like he really meant it.
This time, if he’s noticed I’ve had a man in the house for the past two years, he doesn’t say anything. Nothing is brandished, not by anyone other than the little man in his video game.
I worked hard to wipe away any sign of Andrew: two whole days of cleaning to get everything squared away and how it was before. I got rid of extra food, the dog food, extra coat hangers, moved the TV back to the living room, gathered up and hid all of Andrew’s shirts and shoes and Economist magazines. It’s like I killed someone but forgot to hide the evidence for two straight years. Neighbours watched me with the boxes.
Then I told Andrew that we’d have to slow it down for a bit, which he didn’t like at all. He’s divorced after two decades of marriage, and I’ve been mostly single for just over ten years, so we are used to and expect different things from one another. We’ll still see each other here and there, on dates or at his house, but this, he says, isn’t enough.
I, on the other hand, feel fine about it. In the small rock garden in his backyard, Andrew tells me it’s important that he meet my son, and that it isn’t fair that I keep them apart. I tell him life isn’t fair, which marks the first mom-ism I’ve used since Chris packed up his things and left years ago. After looking at an inukshuk he’d set up back there, and thinking about what I’ve said, Andrew tells me we’re all in this together.
So I explain to him about the ketchup bottle and he scoffs. Says hormones like it explains everything. But he didn’t see Chris’s face that time and hasn’t seen what it’s been looking like these days.
I go about it the wrong way the first time around.
I decide if Chris gets a job it’ll get him out of the house, get him doing things and saying things again. I don’t really know what else to do, and when I talk about it, I can’t really give him any incentives to go to work at Subway or KFC or Rogers, so he just looks at me with dead eyes when I bring it up. All I can say are wimpy things about doing something with himself and meeting people and making friends, obvious lies that mean nothing to either of us. Plus, I know from his bank statements that I can’t even bring up money since his drug dealing or gambling or whatever scared him back home has left him pretty comfortable. He’s labelled his online accounts, something I see people do at the bank every now and then—spouses divvying up accounts with their names, or with something they’re working towards like CUBA or COLLEGE or CAR LEASE—but Chris’s is something less ambitious:
SAVINGS $18,961.22
SMOKES $1,020.90
Why do anything if that’s what your bank statement looks like?
The first time around I find a bunch of jobs and go get applications for him and they stay on the table next to his game cartridges and get shuffled under comic books and pizza boxes and motorcycle magazines in a matter of days. They sit nestled in his mess, and when I ask him about it, he makes up lies or excuses, anything to keep from doing what he needs to.
He doesn’t have his computer anymore, so his resume is gone. And the word processor on the one in his room is fucked.
Fucked how?
&
nbsp; It doesn’t work. And the margins are all fucked up too.
So go to the library. Use the computers there.
That place is haunted, he says, which is the same thing he said about university when he dropped out two years ago. It’s the way he talks about anything he doesn’t want me to know about, including his ex-girlfriend, his last five or six jobs, and what’s actually going on in his head. A joke and a lie mixed into one thing, shorthand for fuck off, mom. It’s been like this since his first growth spurt put us eye to eye when he was fifteen and there was no one else taller to help out.
When he was eight and was asked to draw a picture of his family, he drew me and himself twice. Didn’t even bother to change his size. When the teacher asked, Chris said it was because he didn’t have a dad. So I have to raise myself, basically.
I have to wait for days and weeks for the next job-seeking step to happen, and when it does, it’s a struggle for him to get his newly drafted resume on a disk. And then printed. And then attached to the applications. And then put in an envelope. A struggle to go get new applications because the old ones have pizza on them.
I get a pamphlet called MENTAL HEALTH: You and Your Family from my doctor. It talks about the importance of being able to differentiate between dangerous and normal behaviour before you decide to seek help for a family member. It tells us that it’s both Mom and Dad’s responsibility to watch for red flags—it even has a picture of a happy couple peering into a doorway together. It tells me to watch for other things too, like the big bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol in his room. It isn’t exactly right next to the quart of rye that’s been on his windowsill for the last five years, but it’s close enough. And similar enough to the pamphlet’s drawing of a bottle of beer, a joint, and a mirror of cocaine, that I feel a hot flash of panic standing in his room. Maybe this time it won’t be like with the ketchup. Maybe he’ll want to give himself what for.
