The Occult Persuasion and the Anarchist's Solution

by Lisa de Nikolits

  The trouble with thinking was that once you started, you couldn’t stop. I was hit by a flash flood of memories and the car was filled with ghosts of old, and they were all talking at the same time. Blowing open this hive of wasps wasn’t what I’d had in mind when I abandoned Margaux. In fact, I had been seeking the opposite. My past had been chasing me and I turned and fled unknowingly right into its waiting arms.

  I flicked on the radio station, but there wasn’t anything I felt like listening to, so I returned to the annoying barrage of memories and unwelcome thoughts.

  I had wanted to be an artist when I grew up. I had worked with ink and watercolour but I was also proficient in graphic illustration and I was convinced I would be able to earn a living in an agency, making the time to work on my personal projects at night. But my father had told me in no uncertain terms that my idea was rubbish. However, he said, there was a future in journalism and if I was intent on picking one of the airy-fairy ways to make a living, then at least I’d be assured of a job as a writer.

  “Newspapers will always be around,” he’d said. “You don’t really want to be a starving artist, trust me.”

  It wasn’t that was I was so under his sway that I couldn’t fight back, but I heard the logic his argument offered and I had no counter-defense.

  I ditched my little sketches and studied the ins and outs of editing and writing, and it all came so easily to me. As did Margaux. I met her when I was twenty-four, we got married when I was twenty-five and she was twenty-three, and we immediately started a family. Back in those days, it wasn’t as unusual as it is now, to marry that young and have kids. I had a family. I wanted the warmth and comfort that I had never been afforded and, with Margaux, I set about making that happen as quickly as I could. We had our two kids, we saw the seasons come and go, we put up and took down the appropriate decorations, and I mowed the lawn and shovelled the snow, and I never thought about anything in any greater context than that.

  But now, here I was, driving a stolen Jeep, a top-of-the-range stolen Jeep and what was more, there was a cat in the back, a cat that was worth a bunch of money, and I had stolen her and I wasn’t sorry, not one little bit.

  How had it come to this? I’d like to say it was Margaux’s fault, but that was not strictly fair. Things had started to unravel in earnest when I turned sixty and I lost my job, the latter preceding the former, by mere days. You would think they would have had more tact than to fire me a week before such a terrible birthday, but corporations didn’t really give a hoot about tact or life-changing birthdays, did they? I wasn’t overly surprised, but I was horrified nonetheless. It was like one of those things that you see coming, and you think you are prepared, but you aren’t, because you simply can’t be.

  Like losing your hair. Mine suddenly thinned out—wasn’t it supposed to happen sooner or with more fanfare? Mine had waited until I was complacent, certain that I wasn’t going to go bald in my later years. But days after my fiftieth birthday, the great recession started. The epicentre was the invisible bull’s eye target at the top of my head, which I only knew it was there because of a picture Adam had taken—the first of many pictures in which I simply didn’t recognize that man who had once been me. Who was that ordinary-looking middle-aged white guy? He looked so average, so generic, so old. Oh my God, that man was me, and he had a balding crop circle on the back of his head that spread outwards daily like the ripples of a pond. And where had the bags under my eyes come from? I had always pitied people with bags under their eyes. Get more sleep, look more chipper, do something about it, I silently urged them. And my chin…. My jawline had softened into a second tier; meanwhile sharp lines cut a parenthesis on either side of my mouth. And I had been a handsome man. Something I hadn’t realized I’d needed to be grateful for. I inwardly panicked when I realized that what I had always thought would be there was going, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it.

  I had told myself I should start working out. I could get a membership at the gym at work. Andy, my associate editor, kept telling me how all the higher-ups went to the gym, that it was a great place for networking. I wanted to tell him that I was way past the need to network, but when he was given my job and I was shown the door, I was glad I’d held my tongue.

  Wait until you’re sixty, I had wanted to snarl at him, but I consoled myself with the thought that by the time he was sixty, magazines would be long-dead and he’d most likely end up working in a McDonald’s or a big-box hardware store. I did wonder if networking at the gym would have saved me, but in all likelihood, not.

  I had listened to the woman from human resources explain the unfortunate situation, as she put it, and had nodded agreeably. These were tough times.

  “It must be pretty awful, having your job,” I told her. She was new. The human resources people I had known had been axed several weeks earlier, and I should have taken that as a sign that my days were numbered. But, with the passage of time, one became arrogant and numb to the idea that all things end for you. I took my severance package—it was a good one—and shook the woman’s hand.

  I went home to our paid-off, empty nest of a detached Victorian-styled house, and I waited for Margaux to come home from wherever she was, so I could break the news to her. She responded by telling me that we should have a party. A huge, Around-The-World-For-However-Long-We-Want party. It was clear that Margaux, unlike me, had been expecting and preparing for this moment for quite some time.

  She had it all mapped out. We had options, we had money, and we were young and healthy. Nothing was tying us down. It was time to live and explore and have fun.

  I agreed to everything she said. I couldn’t think of a rebuttal, not even to myself, so I went along with all of it.

  Adam and Helen thought it was great. We were so bold! Such adventurers! Our friends had also joined the clamour, wistfully saying they wished they too could do such a thing. But they hadn’t invested as well as we had; too, they had debt and obligations and responsibilities.

  “How long will you be gone for?” was the foremost question and Margaux’s answer was always the same. We had no idea; we were travelling lightly and freely, and we would play it by ear.

  Margaux threw an enormous going-away bash at Casa Loma, with Adam and Helen’s help. Adam had it catered by some famous chef, and he footed the fill. He was such a foodie, my son, I never really understood it. Food was function for the body: eat, nourish, maintain. That was all. But not so for Adam. Even when the kids were young, we’d go on holiday and all he’d see was the food: breakfast, lunch and supper. I was happy with a can of pop and a sandwich or something pedestrian that would do the job, but Adam was into fine dining, from the time he was a toddler. As he grew older, wine began to factor into the occasion. He was a wine master or something; I never really paid much attention. On the odd occasion, when he would insist on taking us out, Adam would list, with unwavering attention to the very last detail, all the things he loved or hated about each dish and the accompanying libation. I tried to pretend to be interested, but I just didn’t care. It was hard to pretend otherwise.

  When it came to the world’s biggest bon voyage party, Margaux and Adam and Helen had invited the whole world. I was astounded by all the people who were there. They had been told not to bring presents, since we didn’t have a house to put them in anymore; so they were just to bring themselves and their good wishes. I wandered around like a castrated rooster in a crowded barnyard, trying to escape the hordes who wanted to tell me how much they loved this bold, free idea, and how they wished they were me. Perhaps I would write a book, many of them commented. Didn’t most editors secretly want to be authors? No, I said, that may be the assumption, but it wasn’t true. Not for me, anyway. But I could see them, playing out their own dreams in their heads. They wanted to be authors. None of it was about me. People’s conversations were always only about themselves, even when they pretended to be talking about you or w
orld politics or religion or love.

  I got mildly drunk, and then Adam found me and took me aside and told me he had fallen in love with a man, and that it was the first time in his life that he’d really been in love, and he hoped he wasn’t shocking me or disappointing me, but he wanted to tell me. He needed, he said, to finally come out. Those were his words. He added that he was happier than he had ever been in his life. Happy and free.

  “Okay,” I said. “Sure, that’s fine.”

  Such a response sounded feeble, even to me, but I hadn’t known what else to say. I had been too tired to think of what it was I was supposed to say in this situation. In the past, I had always known what I was supposed to say, but that certain knowledge had vanished. Perhaps it was in the ether, along with my lost hair and firm jawline. My son had realized he was gay, and I had realized I was exhausted.

  I had no idea how I was going to survive this marvellous around-the-world adventure. I hadn’t even known how depleted I was until I looked at Adam’s face, at his earnest, still-handsome face, and I dug inside myself to try to say something, anything, but really, I didn’t care one way or the other if he was gay or not.

  A part of me knew that this was a great opportunity for Adam and me to bond and hug each other and maybe even cry a bit. But I just stood there, thinking about how my feet were hurting from all the standing and how was I going to manage exploring the whole world when my feet hurt like this?

  “Do you want to meet Rick?” Adam asked and I nodded, thinking he meant in the future, in some distant future, but he told me to stay where I was and that he’d be right back.

  But I couldn’t stay where I was. I escaped into a small alcove, thankfully furnished with a chair. I sat down and untied the laces of my shoes and leaned back and closed my eyes. I only meant to stay there for a moment or two, but I must have fallen asleep—that’s my excuse anyway—because when Helen finally found me, the party was over and my family was clearly unhappy with the manner in which I had conducted myself.

  “Sorry,” I said to Adam, and I patted his shoulder. “Next time. I’ll meet him next time.” What next time? What did that even mean?

  “Sure, Dad,” he said, but he didn’t look at me.

  “Thank you for the wine and food, Adam,” I said, clumsily trying to make amends. “And to you, Helen and Margaux, thank you all, it was a great send-off.”

  “Well, we had fun,” Helen said pointedly, and we drove home in silence—home being a pullout sofa bed in Helen’s condo, with our suitcases on guard, ready for the flight the next day.

  I had lain on the sofa bed, listening to Margaux sleeping. So what if Adam was gay? It was hardly news these days. Come out, stay in, do whatever you wanted to do; honestly, the whole thing was tedious. Would I have preferred it if Adam weren’t gay? Yes, simply because I couldn’t be bothered to listen to the saga of self-discovery that saw him summit his Everest. I had steered him through adolescence and into adulthood. I had made sure he got an education and found gainful employment. I had done what I was supposed to do, so I could check successful parenting off the list. Wasn’t that the unspoken agreement? That Adam could, should, and would handle things from there? I’d had a tough and nasty old son of a gun for a father, but I had dealt with it, moved on, and taken charge of my life.

  I turned over on the sofa bed and studied Margaux’s face in the never-quite-dark city glow. She was so lovely. Aged yes, but lovely. Where were the bags under her eyes? Her face had a slightly creased look to it, like a paper bag gripped too tightly then released, but her beauty was still evident. At least I thought so.

  I turned and rolled onto my other side. I called up a picture of my son’s face and he gazed at me, his expression unchanged. He was earnest, anxious, eager for my approval, and pathetic with need. If there was anything I disliked in this world, it was a whiny adult with Daddy issues. How had he not dealt with that yet? And why was it my problem? And if he hadn’t dealt with it, then at least he should man up and shut up because the world was not interested in his diaper dilemmas.

  My anger had startled me, and I wanted to turn on the light and make a cup of tea and change the direction of my focus. But I hadn’t wanted to wake Margaux, not right before the start of our big adventure. So, I stayed awake all night, shadowboxing with furious arguments that led to nowhere.

  5. MARGAUX

  “YOUR FATHER HAS STOLEN a car with a cat in it,” I told my children. I had gathered them on Skype. It was nine a.m. my time, seven p.m. the previous day their time.

  “What?” They were incredulous.

  “It’s true. He ran off a ferry and left me. He turned off his phone. I haven’t heard from him all night. We went and had dinner at Anita’s and you know how much he hates her. He was furious with me for that. But he’s been behaving weirdly the whole time we’ve been gone.”

  “Slow down, Mom,” Adam said. “You aren’t making any sense. I thought you guys were having a great time.”

  “I just told you that so you wouldn’t worry. Your father has been behaving very strangely, even for him. He wouldn’t do anything with me in Vancouver. He said he needed to walk and think, and so I went and shopped and did my own sightseeing, and then he asked me why I was buying things since we didn’t have a house anymore, and I told him I was sending the stuff to you, Helen, because one day we would have a new home. And then he got drunk, and the next morning he said we had to leave Vancouver because it was making him feel trapped. So, we went to Hong Kong and that was even worse. He wouldn’t leave the tiny room that was about the size of our pantry at home. He said he had flu, but I think he was depressed. I couldn’t get him out of bed.”

  “But you loved Hong Kong,” Helen said.

  I nodded. “I did. But your father didn’t even see it. I brought him back all kinds of food, but he would only eat bread and chocolate, and drink Coke. Then he watched TV he couldn’t understand for hours on end. ”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Adam asked again.

  “Because of course I was hoping that things would get better. So I said let’s move on to Sydney and things did improve for a few days. We had a lovely, long walk along the coastline from Coogee to Bondi, which was amazing. I thought your father seemed happy. But then we had dinner with Anita, and it all went wrong from there.”

  “Anita. She’s like a Mac truck hitting you in a dark tunnel a hundred miles an hour,” Adam commented.

  Anita had come to stay with us a few years back when her marriage was in trouble, and she’d brought a whirlwind of anger and discontent with her. The vortex of her fury had been so intense that Adam and Helen had refused to visit us during her stay, and Lyndon started leaving for work at seven a.m. and coming home at midnight, just to avoid her. After she left, the family made me promise to never let her stay with us again. Her visit hadn’t been easy on me either, and I happily agreed that there would be no return stays, but I hadn’t thought that one dinner could have such disastrous consequences.

  “I thought why not? It was a single dinner, one evening,” I told the children. “I thought maybe Anita might snap him out of his funk. But it worked the opposite way, which makes all of this my fault. Everything is my fault.”

  “No, Mom, it’s not,” Helen said. “Dad was ready to snap. We were just trying to help, coming up with this idea. What else could we have done? We couldn’t let him rot in his study. We had to do something. The trip made sense.”

  “Wait, back up,” Adam said. “You said he ran off a ferry at some random stop and left you?”

  “Yes. Exactly. And then he turned off his phone. I’ve no idea where he is.”

  “But why do you think he stole a cat and a car?”

  “Because that was where he got off. In Kirribilli. How coincidental is that? He goes missing and next thing someone takes off with a car that has a cat in it?”

  “He probably had no idea the cat was there,”
Adam said. “If it even was him. I mean, who knows? Maybe it wasn’t him? You’re making a big assumption here. Did he hot-wire the car? I can’t see Dad knowing how to hot-wire a car.”

  “I think Dad has many skills we don’t know about,” Helen commented.

  “The car was running when he took it,” I explained impatiently. “The cat was on its way to daycare and it likes the air conditioning on full. The woman stopped to get a coffee. She was hysterical.”

  “Hysterically ridiculous, if you ask me, to bow to a cat’s demands like that,” Helen said. “Well, good luck to Dad if he stole such a high maintenance pet. It will be hilarious when he realizes what he’s done.”

  “MooshooBear,” I sighed. “That’s the cat’s name. It’s a very beautiful cat. Worth thousands, the woman said.”

  “Does she have a chip in the cat?” Helen asked. “A cat like that, you’d think she would have a chip in it. Or the car, can’t it be tracked?”

  “Obviously not, or she would have said,” I replied, tired of the conversation. “They put the number of the license plate on the news.”

  “Did you fill out a missing persons’ report?” Adam asked.

  “I can’t because he’s not missing. He got off the boat. You can see it on the video. I watched it about a hundred times. And he wasn’t deranged or in any distress. He was fine, absolutely fine. He looked normal.”

  “Did you tell the police you think he took the car and the cat?” Adam asked.

  “Of course not. I don’t want to incriminate him. And anyway, there’s no proof except that it makes sense to me. Oh God, what if he gets arrested for stealing a car with a cat in it?”

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Adam said, in an effort to calm me down. “We don’t even know for sure that he took the car and the cat.”

  “What are you going to do?” Helen, always practical, asked.

  “I have no idea. Wait, I suppose. Wait for him to contact me.”