Seven Good Reasons Not to Be Good

by John Gould

  There’s a faint clamour outside the door of Matt’s suite, a cart creeping past with Starlight-type discretion. Everything’s hushed here, muffled by the inch-thick underlay, the acoustic wizardry of the walls. There may be a couple squabbling or screwing a few feet in any direction, but how would you know? Even the jets angling in and out overhead do so with decorum, their intermittent thunder like distant surf. Canned, the sound could be used for hypnosis, for guided meditation, for white-noising an oncologist’s waiting room.

  Matt shudders, tugs tight his robe. He’ll move tomorrow. He rolls his cursor across the TV screen, hits Reply.

  Dear Mariko,

  Insofar as I had a plan when I left you yesterday, it’s shot.

  Poor me!!!!

  I seem to have come down with something, so I daren’t be dropping in on Mr. Immuno-Deficient, or on Dad either. I’ve hunkered down at a hotel to wait it out. Oh, and last night I got it on with this amazing woman I picked up in the elevator. She’s a total genius, and she gets me, and she’s got this body, so round and womanly.

  What a rush. The power to impart truth, the power to withhold it. Did Mariko get this same bracing jolt the day she dropped her Sophie bomb? “She’s so young, Matt. She’s so full of hope.”

  Matt lets his revelation scintillate on the screen awhile, then deletes it.

  Please don’t call Zane’s place, I still aim to surprise him. My flight back isn’t till Friday, hopefully I can pull myself together by then.

  Hey by the way, I read She on the way here. I loved it.

  This is Matt’s first lie. His first lie today, that is—he’s lied plenty to Mariko in the past, generally in this same strife-avoiding kind of way. No, he didn’t read her screenplay on the flight, he read it in her office one day last week while she was working in town. He’d uncovered it (a fist-thick sheaf of printed pages defaced with frantic edits) during a feverish Sophie-sweep of her desk. And no, he didn’t love it.

  But why not? Granted it’s no masterpiece, not yet, but it’s bizarrely good, far better than it has any right to be. Its author isn’t even a writer, for pity’s sake. Mariko has a quick and ludicrously far-ranging mind, but sentences are most definitely not her thing. This is good news for Matt, since it affords him a role in their relationship, a “job” as editor of her websites. The thing is, though, words don’t actually matter all that much in the case of a screenplay. What matters is pace and structure. She? She’s got both. She moves, She gets somewhere. How is this possible? Mariko doesn’t even like movies.

  She does have one major flaw, or at least one odd feature a kritik could sink his teeth into. She’s got no protagonist, no single figure who monopolizes our attention. So what to do with the star? Whither Sigourney? Whither Nicole?

  Trouble is, even this feature kind of works. The script’s theme (in which it’s soused like a Christmas cake in Cointreau) is collectivity. Nobody ever says me or my or I in Mariko’s imagined world, it’s all us, our, we. We in this instance is a mini-society rebuilding itself on a rugged patch of Canada’s west coast after some unspecified global calamity. Mariko’s been boning up on the Great-Goddess thing of late, the idea that there was once, before everything went sour—before men declared war on womanhood, on nature, on one another—a better time, an idyllic, gynocratic era in neolithic Europe. Egalitarian. Peace-loving. Goddess-worshipping. Mariko’s books are replete with photos and drawings of goddess imagery, figurines that are all boobs and butt and belly, divine incarnations of deer and bird and bear. It’s all quite staggeringly raw and beautiful, a blessed past that’s clearly reincarnated in Mariko’s dreamt-up future. When She gets made—why not, Mariko’s got good karma up the yingyang—it’ll be dubbed an “ecofeminist utopia.” Something along those lines.

  What kind of world is this? Strictly non-hierarchical. Everything’s done through collaboration, consensus. Nobody’s ever in charge, though a woman will reluctantly take the lead, in a pinch, with a lofty disavowal of power. Women are valued, children are valued, hell, even men are valued, with their throwback bouts of anger and ego. Conflicts do crop up, but each is firmly and lovingly sorted out, the way schoolyard scraps are sorted out in conflict resolution videos. Planet Earth goes by the name of Gaia, and is spoken of with giddy intimacy, like a new lover who’s just slipped off to the loo. All the sex is Sapphic, and salacious in an adolescent kind of way, with many a “teasing tongue” and “dewy bud of love.” The hetero sex is all off-screen, but its fruits are constantly manifest in the form of ripe tummies, apple-cheeked tykes and toddlers.

  Like many utopias, this one is voice-overed by a visitor, a puzzled bloke who’s drifted in on a log (downed power pole—subtle, sweetheart) from what’s left of the city. He’s wry, hip, handsome (you’d want John Cusack for the part if you could get him), a bystander who never quite sinks into all the hereness and nowness on offer. She’s finest stroke of sophistication is that this narrator is unreliable. His vision of things is detectably cockeyed—you get that he never gets it. Hunched guiltily over the script there in Mariko’s study, Matt could see through the man’s cranky take on events, recognize his critical stance as self-defeating. As he reviews it all in his head today—his fever swinging to the sweaty end of the spectrum, the cursor blinking irritably at him from the hotel’s TV screen—he twigs for the first time to the fact that those objections would be his objections. Yep, he’s the clueless stranger. Mariko won’t have meant this, not consciously—that’s more Matt’s style—but still.

  Truly, Mariko, your script is terrific. It makes a few things clear to me, things I should have seen ages ago. Isn’t that the function of great art, to reveal what’s been latent in our lives all along? Or whatever. The point is that the world you want is one of connection, integration, harmony. It’s exactly what you should want of course, and of course there’s no room in it for the likes of me, the krabby kritik. Eunuch in a harem, right?

  That’s one thing I’ve figured out. Here’s another: I’ve read the two of us all wrong. Ever since we met I’ve conceived me as the intellectual-slash-creative one, you as the worldly one.

  Also not true. Matt started out conceiving things this way—that Mariko was the plodder, leaving him free to play the incorrigible genius—but the migraines have already forced him to rethink. Migraines, to Matt’s mind, are an upscale affliction, indicative of intensity and a too-fine intelligence. So he should get them. It was Mariko, though, who started up five years ago (about the time they moved from the city) with the “aura,” one of the condition’s most irksome affectations, the coruscating lights that signal the onset of the attack. Matt’s role is to rub Mariko’s feet, the only bit of her she can bear to have touched. Sometimes she’ll beg for a “blow job,” in which case Matt will take a couple of her toes into his mouth and suck—something about the shift in blood flow. Matt offers up these ministrations willingly, indeed adoringly. There’s a bit of him, though, that persists in believing he’s the one who should be prostrate. He should be blinded by the effulgence of his own brain, and Mariko should be bent shushingly over him, taking him into her mouth …

  The truth of course is the inverse, the reverse. You’re the brooding mastermind, I’m the competent drudge.

  Matt stands, strides around the room in an effort to siphon off a little of his agitation. He takes another shot of OJ, does a whisky-wince—all that citric acid is eating away at his mouth. He reseats himself, rereads his message. He backs over his words with the cursor, deleting right up to “I read She on the way here. I loved it.” To which he adds,

  Or anyway I will when I get back from the ashram, when this ego thing is over and done with.

  Hey, I once asked you what matters. We were in bed at your place, remember, before it was our place? And I all of a sudden had that sad feeling you get when you’re too happy, when things are too good and you get scared. I wanted you to say something so I said, I wonder what we are? and you said, What? and I said, I wonder what matters? and you said, Making. Tha
t’s what matters, you said, making love, making sense, making good, you had this whole list. Making babies probably, I’m not sure. Anyway, my point is, you’ve made something.

  Keep me up-to-date on the real estate stuff. xo M

  And hits Send.

  There’s a wedding on today. The lobby’s lousy with men in suits, women in don’t-spill-on-me gowns, little girls in taffeta dresses. A bunch of teenage boys stand together, ridiculous in their blue blazers, each nodding to a different tune—white wires trail down their necks, earphones to iPods. About half the guests wield cameras, and film each other filming. In the old days Matt was the only one with a movie camera, now he’s the only one without a movie camera. What’s with that?

  He pushes through the crowd, muttering apologetic “I do”s, and revolves out the door.

  Ah, the heat. He’d forgotten about the heat, hunkered down (hunkered up?) all goosebumpy in his air-conditioned tower. When he arrived yesterday the sun was already knocking off, kicking back, but today it’s most definitely on the job. Well hey, that’s fair. Matt’s come out for a stroll, and if he has to take it on the surface of some other planet—Venus, say, where the greenhouse effect is said to be pretty intense—well, so be it.

  He shuffles down the Starlight’s circular drive, chooses a direction, or tries to let it choose him. Can you call a place a suburb if it has no homes? Nowhere, that’s where Matt seems to have found himself. Overhead there’s the sound of labouring jets, sheet metal being shook hard. A stinky wind chucks bits of trash around. Nobody else seems to be in the mood for a constitutional on this fine Saturday, so Matt has the place pretty much to himself. The odd car whizzes past, but the drivers are far too city-savvy to risk an open window. Their machines are all hermetically sealed, each passenger a King Tut or a Mona Lisa.

  The shitty air out here—what if Matt were to make it his thing? Zane’s already grabbed AIDS, what if Matt were to take air? Breathing, we’re going to miss that, aren’t we? The way the Dadinator must miss it already? So yeah, something for Matt to go justifiably crackers about. He’ll need a good stunt, of course. Zane’s refusing to take his pills. Matt will refuse to breathe.

  Hey, what’s this now? A patch of, for want of a better word, “nature.” It must be ten feet by twenty, all green except where it’s gone brown in the heat—which, okay, is pretty much everywhere. There’s a juniper bush with a jay-sized bird hopping around in it, picking bugs off branches. It’s one of those birds that looks black but isn’t—when you get up close you see that no, it’s actually an iridescent purple and bronze. Green, even. Grackle? The suburban bird par excellence, a bird that must have spent its whole evolutionary history praying for the bulldozers to get started. It’s beautiful, it’s maybe the most beautiful creature Matt’s ever seen, or at least it’s the most beautiful he can see at the moment, and the moment’s all he cares about just now. Why is that? Why is this ludicrous bit of creation, this parody of the living world more compelling to him than the verdant paradise in which he’s most of the time condemned to live?

  The grackle tips back its head, emits its cry—squeaky clothesline. Come fight me? Come fuck me? Hey!

  The last time Matt saw his sister alive it was on an urban nature-walk like this one. Erin was extra-agitated that day, so Matt hoisted her into her wheelchair and steered her out into the mild June afternoon. Down the block from the hospital they happened on a patch of grass, in its centre a budding fruit tree encircled by one of those spiky iron fences. Erin signalled for Matt to stop. She slipped her bony arm between two bars, fiddled with the tree’s gnarly bark. This was the moment he decided to have one last go at her.

  “What about me?” he said. “What am I supposed to do?” It was meant to be a subtle argument concerning compassion and interconnectivity, the deep interdependence of all sentient beings. It came out as a whine.

  “That’s easy,” she told him. “You know what you’re supposed to do. Don’t let anybody stop you. Don’t let Dad, don’t let me. Don’t—”

  Which is when the pigeon crapped on her. A single slash, a single glistening streak down the front of her gown. They both laughed, giddy with relief that the real conversation was over. Erin said, “Pigeon.” The word sounded impossibly odd—the way it must have sounded to Adam back in Eden as he set about naming the creatures. Matt remembers thinking the same of good when he first inscribed it on a postcard to Zane, murmuring it out loud to himself, good, good, not to be good. Ungainly word, down so deep.

  “Pigeon,” Matt replied to his sister that day. In assent, and perhaps also in prayer.

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  “Pigeon.”

  Allowing for brief breaks (giggling, weeping) this exchange went on for another ten minutes or so. Then he rolled her back up to her ward and helped her into bed.

  In an experimental movie Matt saw once—brainy, black-and-white, governed by the nauseating logic of the nightmare—there was a tiny homunculus in a glass jar. The protagonist’s twin brother, this little chap had failed to be born and had been mummified in his mother’s belly. She’d lugged him around like that for twenty years or so until he turned up in a routine X-ray. Shrivelled, lightly fuzzed, thinly haired on top, this was Erin at the end. A creature from a book of medical curiosities, a book of weird world records. Skinnier, somehow, than a skeleton.

  Much later, during and just after Mariko’s pregnancy, this image would revisit Matt in his nightmares. In tandem with these nightmares came almost ecstatically sweet dreams in which Matt would mother (it’s always felt this way) a little red-haired infant, a sort of proto-Erin who loved to be tossed into the air time and again, tossed and caught, tossed and caught. Something would distract Matt, and he’d startle awake as she tried to slip from his grasp.

  It isn’t even a sound, what jets emit. It’s a deeper frequency, subsound, something you pick up with your skeleton, most acutely with your skull. It’s as though somebody’s been rolling a great rock across a hardwood floor upstairs the whole time Matt’s been asleep, ever since he crawled back into the Emperor for a sickguy snooze. Two hours, three? Sisyphus maybe, practising up for his time in eternity.

  Is this what bombs sound like too, when they come angling in? At the Baghdad Hilton, say, is this what you’d hear? These jets are bombs in a way, bio-bombs detonating on impact, sapiens sharding off in all directions. At least one of those folks is bound to have picked up some ingenious new strain of something and before long you’ll have it too, some madly mutating little mother that’ll flood your lungs, make your heart beat backwards, trick you into rejecting your own spleen. We’re all connected now. We’re all going to die of the same thing …

  What’s with this new fixation, this ecstatic fear? It seems to have arrived with the fever, with Matt’s heightened awareness of his own body. Finite. Fated. Or maybe it’s like this: the fever is fear. His wonky new life, the twisted rescue mission into which he’s pressed himself, these things are broiling him alive. Mid-snooze Zane was there again, so Matt went at him with his words. None of them worked, partly because they were in some foreign tongue (Hindi maybe, but with a Québécois accent?) which neither of them understood. Matt kept sidling closer—they were in the woods out back of the Lair—until he was pouring his nonsense directly into Zane’s ear. At a certain point the whispering transformed itself into a kiss. A chaste kiss, yes, lips to cheek, but painfully hot. By the time Matt drew back Zane was wrecked, whittled down to the body of the disease itself …

  Matt shoves himself out of bed, shuffles over to the coffee table. He glugs the remaining glass of tepid OJ, chances a nibble of cold toast. Then he sets about poking through his suitcase, its vicious scarring of zippered pouches. He’ll need his cellphone for this one—Zane and Mercedes have call display, and this has to look long distance.

  “Yup.”

  “Oh, hi, M
ercedes.” Cripes. This is the risk you run when you ring up Zane. “Matt here.”

  “Matt. What’s new?”

  “Not much. Well actually, this might interest you. Looks like my wife’s gone gay on me.”

  A gratified chuckle from Mercedes. “Zane mentioned. Good for her.”

  “Yeah, thanks. What about you?”

  “I’m still a dyke.”

  “Right. Hey, I don’t suppose Zane’s—”

  “Did you hear Bush today?”

  “Yeah, about Schwarzenegger.”

  “What?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Freedom and peace my ass. Grab the oil before the Chinese get it, more like.”

  “Yeah, really.”

  “Hey, funny you calling today,” says Mercedes. “I’ve been thinking about you.”

  “I know,” says Matt. “I’m psychic.”

  “Mmm, I don’t think so,” says Mercedes. “I’m psychic, so I’d know.”

  Lordy. It’s always like this with Mercedes, the painfully jovial sparring. “Busted. Guess you’ll have to describe your fantasy for me, then. Is it the usual? You, me, a bucket of Cool Whip?”

  “Whip being the operative word?” She faux-guffaws.

  A couple of years back, when Zane first announced his plan to shack up with Mercedes, Matt was volubly broad-minded about it. Really though, how nutty could the guy get. Zane had only met her a few months before, while he was cinematographer for Slap, a documentary on the S/M subculture in Toronto. He’d described it as one of those instant recognition things—they were mother and child in a past life, or brother and sister, master and slave. In this life they were both looking to buy a house, but were nervous about mixing real estate with the already fraught business of romance. Zane was between men—between Nico and Nico, off-again between two on-agains—and Mercedes was between women. They found a brick semi-detached off the Danforth and snapped it up. So’s not to be living in sin (is there no limit to Zane’s capacity for irony?) they got married. A complete ceremony in synagogue, despite Mercedes being unchosen. And then the bouquet, the garter belt, the whole kit and caboodle.