That fall, Jack got a part-time job putting furniture and stereos together for floor displays in a department store. Christmas was over and they wouldn’t need him back until New Year’s Day. Every penny he made went toward paying for gas and dating Diane.
On Boxing Day, Jack picked her up in his mom’s car and drove her to Yorkdale Mall. She wasn't happy with many of the Christmas gifts she had received that year and was hoping to return a couple of books. She had no use for books. Jack hated Christmas because his parents’ fights were always worse around holidays. He didn't want to go to the mall, either, but if he could make her happy, maybe Diane would be "nice." That's what he called it. Jack thought things would even out.
I went to Yorkdale on Boxing Day with my future wife. She was reluctant because she knew what the crowds would be like. I usually avoid crowds. I should avoid crowds, but I wanted to get out. Her house was beginning to feel like jail and shopping for bargains on Boxing Day seemed like something ordinary people do. I want to be like ordinary people. The mall’s wide corridors were full of them. Everyone took baby steps forward and most everyone seemed to be looking but not buying much. Diane and Jack were baby stepping directly behind us.
"I hate being behind slow people!" Diane wailed. I looked back and shrugged at them. No one was traveling fast because we were in a slow current in a sea of humanity. It's a law of physics applied to malls: You can't go faster than the people ahead of you. Jack caught my look of irritation at his girlfriend. “Go to hell!” he said. I gave him a thousand watt smile and said brightly, "Merry Christmas!" so Jack felt the urge to repeat himself, with even more venom this time. The current shifted at that moment and we came apart as the crowd moved forward.
He cursed me in his way and without another thought I cursed him in mine. I can't tell you exactly what happened next. I won’t tell you much about myself. I don’t want to be tracked. I will say that my job is not to do what I did to Jack and Diane. I'm actually a healer. I use my gift to help sick people most of the time. I’m not a bad person, though in the ways that matter, I’m not really a person at all, strictly speaking. I don’t believe in bad. There is cause and effect. That’s all there is.
There is an power in each of us, a remembering of the place we all come from. This place holds dark power and I reach into it deeper than you can. I eat starlight and feel the crackle of vibrancy that hatred can bring if focused just so. A muddying of auric fields is involved. In another age, what I do would be called rewriting Akashic Records or casting the evil eye. Unfamiliar with those concepts? Good. You and the world are better off.
What I did was basically an intervention in their energetic fields, like dipping your hands into warm water to stir the current counterclockwise. I reached into their etheric energy, looking backward to see where the energy had gone. That’s how I know all I’ve told you so far. In an instant I peered forward to see where the energy could be directed. A true curse is quantum physics, but applied to your world in ways your science doesn’t yet understand. When that knowledge is understood widely, that will be the end of everything.
I cursed them and moved away, the damage done in a moment. For the sake of the continuation of the species, I'll say no more than that. This energy has nearly wiped out the world's population at least once before. The agent of the curse last time was the bubonic plague.
An avalanche starts with a subtle shift you can’t see before it builds to deadly momentum. Fate is patient because it is an amoral witness. It’s all about the physics of the dance to gods and things like me.
Diane dumped Jack the night before Valentine's Day, 1988. She did so at about the exact moment he saw her climbing out of the back of another guy's van in the school parking lot at lunchtime. Humiliated, Jack took a swing at the guy, a rugby player on the school’s team. Jack thought himself a tough guy, but that perception was based on beating up kids a year or two younger than he with the help of his friends. The rugby player was Jack's height, but forty pounds heavier, much of it muscle. Jack bounced up from the pavement with a bloody nose. Each time he was knocked down, Jack came back from the ground a bit slower. His punches became more wild and desperate. Finally, Jack went down, went limp, stayed down.
Jack and Diane spoke to each other only once after that in the hallway outside of the Home Economics classroom. Two weeks remained till their graduation from high school. Jack smiled and asked if he could sign her yearbook. The caption under her class picture listed no clubs. It read only that Diane was voted “most likely to appear in films.” This was a cruel joke among the kids who edited the yearbook. The English teacher, their yearbook advisor, insisted they change it to “films” from “porno.”
Jack grabbed her yearbook and therein wrote the word “bitch” in a large looping red scrawl across her face. Jack handed back the yearbook with a look that conveyed an unearthly contentment. Diane’s mouth dropped open when she saw what Jack had written across her picture, her perfect face forever marred. She slapped Jack across his left cheek so hard she left the outline of her hand burned in red. Their paths have never since crossed (unless you count this confession worming its way into your brain.)
Throughout her life, Diane’s yearbook was stowed in a box or on a bookshelf. The two insults, both crude and secret, were kept static and pristine. Meanwhile, my intervention was gathering steam, whittling away at her cells. The subtle shift of the avalanche gathered weight and potential energy.
They both turned 36 this year. Diane had a succession of boyfriends and then two husbands, not any of them much good. The second husband is staying with her, hoping against the lessons of experience that things will get better. It's the second marriage for both of them and they are staying together because they both suspect they can't do any better. They're right.
The couple has one child together and each have a child from a previous marriage. Child Protective Services counsellors knows this family well and the kids don't know whether to pray that their parents will get along or just get the screaming over with and break up. For the record, I had nothing to do with this part of the disaster which is Diane's life. That's all her. Her energy told me she would make plenty of disastrous choices without my mucking about. True, I could have helped her with that, but inducing illness is my peculiar specialty.
Diane still dresses like she's twenty and her blind sense of fashion leads her to wear belly tops long past the time she should. She also thinks that using the whole can of extra hold hairspray is a look that will return any moment now. She's still demanding and vain, but as each year passes, she's got less with which to trade. She looks much older than she is and all the cigarettes and tanning are making the clock spin even faster. She coughs up black stuff into the toilet each morning. She should see someone about that but she will wait for a long time because, for some reason, she thinks nothing really bad should ever happen to her.
A double radical mastectomy will save Diane’s life for awhile. She won't be sure if it's part of a blessing or a curse when her husband finally leaves. Her kids will grow up and move away, except for the youngest, who will live less than a mile away but will never call or visit. Diane will become lonely, fading to invisible in the slipstream of other people’s lives. She will be a pale cloud in peripheral vision. She has had more focus than she deserves, so she will draw no more.
When Diane’s long list of choices reaches bottom, she’ll be 68 years old. It will be cool rainy May, late in the afternoon when the low-slanted light in her gray hospital room will suggest to her that she will live for one more day. She’ll be wrong about that. Her last wish will be that the doctors and nurses would just let her go and stop beating on her once-fabulous chest. No choice then, of course. Just a rising up as I finally release her from my physics lesson.
Her children will gather. They won't say so, but they'll be relieved. They won't be relieved because she will be at rest after a long battle with lung cancer. Remember what Jack scrawled in red ink in her yearbook so long ago? He was right
about that. On the day of the funeral, Diane's youngest daughter, the smartest one, will leave a bouquet of flowers. Not for nothing, they will be Impatiens.
And Jack? Jack has worked as a roofer, pumped gas and took some training in auto bodywork. What he really wanted to do was race stock cars. He didn't know how to get into that so he raced his third-hand Toyota for a while until he put it into the ditch one rainy night after drinking too much. He rolled it, but got out of the accident without a scratch. He stumbled up the embankment and back onto the road, cursing his luck. It was the first passing car that shattered his jaw, his pelvis and his right leg. Since the accident — he was just 23 then — Jack often speaks of himself in the third-person. He calls himself "The Gimp."
Jack has drifted from job to job and place to place, driven by his needs and the discovery by a series of employers that he's a petty thief. He falls in and out of favor with a series of drinking buddies, driven together and apart by Jack’s urge to fight when drunk. He's lame and still just 141 pounds, so the fights rarely end well for him. Marijuana helped with his aching leg each morning. Then it seemed stronger drugs were necessary to make it to Happy Hour. After several years of experience, Jack finally noticed that no one looked very happy around Happy Hour.
Six years ago, when Jack turned 30, the people in his family who were still talking to him held an intervention. His little sister, Tracy, stuck by him and defended him from the family as he had once defended her from school bullies. She spoke of Jack’s potential. She believed. She pushed the idea so hard the family believed. Even Jack almost believed it. Tracy paid for Jack to go to rehab and Jack tried to turn his life around. He thought he could become a youth pastor to counsel kids. It sounded like easy work so he grabbed at the idea. Jack got things together. Part of the dance is that things come together and apart.
One year into Jack’s hard-won sobriety, a friend from rehab showed up to celebrate his chemical-free anniversary. They’ll start the evening talking about the healing power of Jesus working in Jack's life. The assertion feels comforting at first. Then needing Jesus to tell him what to do makes him feel weak. Jack blew his life apart. He and his friend share a vial of crystal meth around dawn.
Jack will be suffocated slowly by crystal, his small life force guttering in a high wind of pain and hunger and panic that will hold him too tight to draw a deep breath. He will be so weak and close to death so often that he will be blind to what’s going on around him. He’ll be so muddled, images from that time are blurred even to me.
One morning Jack will wake up in jail with no memory of how he got there. I helped the life force muster just then to let Jack have his head. When he is released he’ll go to a halfway house and then a homeless shelter. My hook is in him deep. I’ll let my fish have some line before I beach him. The fun is in the play.
Jack will try to get his life back together again. It will be Tracy who gets him turned around to the life of a citizen. He’ll find the determination to stop his old habits when she stops sending money or answering his pleading phone calls. By losing his only ally, Jack will succeed for a time. People who have hope fall farthest and hardest.
He's never been much of a reader but that will change. He’ll go to the library often and not just because it’s warm and safe. Jack will grow a new addiction. He will read more and more. He’ll like fiction, especially Stephen King. He will resolve to read all of the author’s work. When he reads Carrie and The Stand and Misery, he'll begin to see he’s been running through dark narrow tunnels with his head down. Books will be escape hatches. The books he hasn’t read yet are waiting for him to disappear into them.
He should hurry, maybe take a speed reading course. Jack will wake one morning on a December 26 around 11 in the morning — an anniversary of our encounter in a mall so long ago. The room will spin. Every time he opens his eyes, the room will spin so badly he'll want to throw up. It will be Meniere's Disease, a rare inner ear disorder. He'll take drugs that won’t work. He’ll have several operations which won't work. He'll live a long time, but it'll seem much longer. Just before he dies, a memory will come to him. He’ll remember me. He’ll know he was a fool who became a puppet and a slave. He’ll try to tell people about me, but by then, no one will listen to the shrinking, bedridden, crazy man.
I'm telling you all this because I took my kids to a festival in the park last Friday night. My wife had gone to a movie with her sister and I felt too restless to stay inside with the kids and watch television. Despite the thunderstorm that had swept through in the late afternoon, the park was very crowded along the paths. I pushed the double stroller ahead of me and tried to block out the chatter of the crowd’s noise. I averted my eyes from their pretty, fragile, tempting auras.
My nine-month-old twins, a boy and a girl, silently watched the masses moving before them like a tall, colorful curtain blown by lazy but ceaseless breezes. They see what I see, but they won’t learn how to use their gift until their late teens. The people crowded around small booths buying trinkets from smiling vendors are still safe from my children for years.
It was comfortably cool. The air was cleansed from the hard rain. I planned no work for the weekend. I had no plans at all.
Stephanie, a wide middle-aged woman with dead cow eyes, lumbered behind me. She said to her companion, "Move around on the grass, Trish! These people are too slow!"
I’m sorry, Stephanie. It's a reflex.
CUTHIAN'S WAKE
From Sex, Death & Mind Control, this story was written shortly after my mother’s death. The jokes and macho control fantasies are mine. In the end, this is a tribute to my parents’ romance. She was terrified of dying in a hospital. He was utterly devoted to her and saw her through to her death at home. ~ Chazz
The night before I got the phone call, I was in a girl’s apartment listening to her life story. The rule is, if you can listen long enough, or look like you’re listening intensely enough, you’re in. This time though, my patience wasn’t paying off. It was past one and she yawned. In another minute or two she was going to say she had an early morning or that I should get going since the subways would shut down in an hour. Toronto’s late November wind was whipping up outside. I’d be walking in another minute. It was time for one last pitch — The Pitch.
“I’m feeling really close to you,” I begin, like I always begin.
“Yeah?”
Shut up and listen, I thought, you’ll throw off my rhythm. “I’d like to share something with you.”
“Yeah?”
She looks at her fingernails, evaluating whether to paint on another layer of polish, maybe. I’ve got to work fast, but I keep my tone smooth. “I’ve never told anyone this before and I want to get it all out. It’s…heavy.” She nods her blonde head like a teacher giving a student a moment more after the bell has rung before dismissing the class.
“My mom was studying to become a librarian in London when she met my father. He was a barrister,” — always say “barrister.” It impresses North American girls much more than “lawyer.”
We’re sitting on her living room floor and she fidgets, shifting her weight off her knees. She puts her head on her arm like a pillow as she leans on the seat of her sofa. I’m losing.
“Anyway, my parents were married a long time. She quit her studies to follow my father back to Ireland.” I subtly jig my Irish deep into greener territory. Toronto girls love the accent. By the end of the story, I’ll really pour it on so thick it’ll be cartoony. Fancy tricks with vowels is what they expect instead of the clipped words and flat tones of a true Irish accent. I blame those stupid leprechaun cereal commercials.
“Me mother had me brother and me Da worked and worked,” I say. Mother and brother comes out mudder and brudder, just for her.
“Mother took care of us and that was her whole life until later, when we were in our teens. She ghosted a couple cookbooks by a famous English actor. She had won a few writing awards when she was young but didn’t pursue it again until we w
ere pretty much raised. Dad was away a lot working, but we had Mum and a house full of books. Our bookshelves reached from the floor to the ceiling and the books were two rows deep.”
“Which actor did she write books for?” (They always ask.)
“I’d tell you if I knew, but she kept that secret her whole life. She’d only say that the contract stated that if she told me, she’d have to murder me with a wooden spoon.” Mystery and a dash of humor. That hook has a shiny lure.
“My father worked for the Irish government. He was always fuzzy about what he did for them.” More mystery. Tell a girl your father’s a spy and she’ll giggle and kick you out. Let her figure it out for herself and you’re closer to your destination.
“Where was this?” she asks. I tell her Dublin. Sometimes I say Belfast. They’re the only two Irish cities anyone in North America seems to know.
I pause here, like I’m gathering my thoughts for the final push to unburden myself. I believe in method acting, so I method act and picture myself on the toilet squeezing out huge bran muffins. “I…ah…maybe I should just go.” It’s not even a gamble. I’m a human being in pain.
“No, go on,” she says. She’s not yawning now. She looks alert.
“A couple years ago, Mum started getting sick. The doctors did some tests but messed up the diagnosis or screwed up some lab work or something.” The tragedy is in the details.
“She was dying, but the worst thing was that first she was slowly going blind. Reading and writing were her life and when that began slipping away from her, she wasn’t Mum anymore. She got depressed. Trying to read the newspaper gave her headaches. Large print books were okay for a short while, but in a couple of months she couldn’t read at all.”
Murders Among Dead Trees Page 3
