Consumption (31 page)

AMANDA WAS SUPPOSED TO MEET LEWIS
at the North Garden Mall in South Newark, at the food court, in front of Lung Fung Wok. He was waiting there, sitting at one of the table installations, as he referred to them, reading
The Lord of the Rings
, when she walked up. She touched his shoulder and slid into the seat opposite his. “Hey,” she said.

“Hey to you.” He brightened when he looked up from his book. “You look great.”

“Thanks.” She was wearing acid-washed jeans and a cropped jacket over a tie-dyed T-shirt. She did look pretty good. “Whatcha doin’?”

“Reading
Lord of the Rings
again.”

“How many times is this?”

“I lost count.”

“You should check the
Guinness Book of Records.”

“There would be a fair amount of competition for that particular honour.”

“But would they be the sort of people who’d be checking the
Guinness Book of Records?”

“Meaning?”

“You know, über-nerds.”

“Uh-huh…”

“Not that you’re one, exactly…”

“Uh-huh…”

“Or, if you are, you are in a totally different way.”

“What is it, exactly, that you’re trying to say about me?”

“I mean, uh, sexy, gorgeous, brilliant.”

“Shaddup.”

“You shaddup.”

They walked to the Cineplex.

After the movie, they made their way down the escalator with the rest of the afternoon movie-going crowd, sweatsuited and moonfaced. They stood blinking in the abruptly bright light and dispelled the images of spurting mayhem from their retinas. They did not talk for a long time, and were comfortable in this silence, as the escalator rumbled down and people all around them made small talk.

They had nothing to do with other people; they lived a separate, purer life. They saw more clearly and would not lie to themselves about stupidness everywhere. Lewis knew what she meant. She knew what Lewis meant. She leaned against him and he rested his fingers on her bony hip.

“I don’t know when things went wrong with us,” Matthew said, leaning forward on his chair, hands clasped between his knees, eyes on his feet. “I think maybe it became obvious when we moved here from California, but the trouble started before that.”

“What do you mean, Matthew?” Dr. Kernaghan asked. There was a long silence as Angela looked steadily at her husband, whose breath was coming to him in short, barely audible gasps.

“I mean, from the beginning, even before Amanda was born, I knew I would be the subordinate parent, just like I was the subordinate earner, the subordinate everything. I feel like the role I play in the family is more like an older son, or an uncle. I don’t make any decisions, I just reassure Angela that she’s not neglecting Amanda, or me, that she keeps a well-run house, that…” His voice had
grown hoarse and strangled, and he stopped talking. His mouth opened a few more times, like a fish gulping water, but no more words emerged.

Angela didn’t wait for Dr. Kernaghan to respond. She spoke rapidly and evenly, with measured logic. “Matthew, your passivity is why I make most of the decisions. I ask you what colour of wallpaper you prefer, and you just shrug. Pizza, Greek, Chinese—you’ll eat anything. You
want
someone to take the lead on everything. And when you’re with Amanda and she’s acting up, your only response is to tell me about it. What do you expect from a situation like that?”

“I think we should take a moment here and try to think of what it is you both really want,” Dr. Kernaghan offered, but Matthew had found his voice.

“The problem is, whenever I
do
voice an opinion, if it’s not exactly what you want or believe, there’s an instant explosion. There’s no such thing as a conversation. If I insist on any point and you do give way, which hardly ever happens, then you punish me for three weeks. But usually you just dig in, say anything you think will help you win the point, draw on any ammunition from past arguments that have nothing to do with the one at hand. There’s no such thing as seeing my point, there’s only victory or defeat. And you find defeat humiliating.”

“We need to remember that both points of view are valid,” the therapist said.

“You
imagine
you’re this man of opinions and positions.” Angela was glaring at him. “And that if only I wasn’t standing in the way of you, you’d be doing all these things, making what you want happen. But if I wasn’t around, you’d still be living in that squalid college student’s apartment you had when we met.
I’m
the reason we have a house, a daughter, a life. I carry you through it. And all you do is resent me.”

“Let’s try to concentrate on our own feelings, and let one another describe theirs.”

“And all you feel for me is contempt.”

“Maybe this would be a good time to take a break, collect our thoughts for a moment.”

“But I didn’t use to.”

“Me either.”

“We can’t fix this.”

“I know.”

“I have an opening next Monday afternoon. I have some exercises I’d like you to try out.”

“This is going to be awful, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

Later Amanda and Lewis sat in an all-night pizza joint on Garden Avenue and Lewis talked about the conventions of slasher movies, about how they all depicted sex but punished characters who actually did it with wicked vengeance.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween
, it was a constant theme—the Devil will make you pay for your sins. Amanda was delighted by Lewis’s impish curiosity, by the irony implicit even in the notion of considering Freddy Krueger as a literary figure. Much later she would understand how hard he had been trying to seem smart, but for now she felt like she had been released out of her house of old angry people and tossed into another place, where people made jokes and thought hard.

“Remember the concert where we met—was that your all-time favourite?” she asked, stirring the crushed ice around in the bottom of her paper cup.

“With GN’R, if the show does actually go off, you know it’s gonna be great. It’s all a question of how much Axl and Slash have had to drink, though.”

“What’s that about?” she asked, worried by how straight she sounded. “Why are they so messed up on drugs—why aren’t they just enjoying their success?”

He leaned on his hand and mused. “Part of what we’re buying is the repudiation of our parents. If our parents disapprove of drinking a lot, you know that the bands we like will do that.”

“That just sounds juvenile.”

“That’s the point,” Lewis said and leaned over to kiss her, the smell of pizza all around, fluorescent lights flickering overhead. The short bored man behind the counter turned his back to them to watch ethnic television.

Seventeen-year-old Terry Umiak was walking in the alley behind the Northern Store, late for his shift at the Red Top Convenience. He looked where he put his feet, avoiding the late-autumn proliferation of puddles and new snow.

When he slipped and fell over the body, he landed in an ice-limned puddle, mud splashing up over his arms and face. He blinked the water away and saw that the man was still alive, gasping for breath. A rivulet of blood was running into the puddle now occupied by the boy. Terry Umiak looked quickly around, to see if there was anyone else who could help, someone who had seen this happen, or made it happen, but there was no one. He tried to lift the man but couldn’t. He had never heard of anything like this happening where he lived. He tried to lift the man again and dropped him. He had blood all over his clothes and he tried to wipe it off. The man on ground blew blood out through his cut throat like a lung-shot
tuktu
.

Terry Umiak ran to the nursing station.

Susan Pazniuk was there, peering at a wee child’s bulging eardrum, when the boy burst in through the heavy metal doors. Everyone inside—the child and her adolescent mother and father, the supervising grandmother, and the other children and parents scattered around the waiting room—looked up at the boy who seemed to have just cut apart and crawled inside an
iviaq
, finding something horrifying in there.

Pazniuk called Balthazar at home and told him to come immediately. From the tone of her voice it was clear that something terrible had happened. The first thing he asked her was whether there were any other doctors in town. “If there were, I wouldn’t be calling you,” she snapped back. “I need you now.”

When he arrived, there were RCMP standing around the entrance of the hospital and bystanders gathered at the steps. As he puffed his way through the front door, the second on-call nurse gripped his elbow and propelled him into the emergency room.

The man lay on his back, thrashing and spraying blood in a scarlet mist from his throat. He made no sound but gurgling. Pazniuk and the ambulance attendants had an oxygen mask over his face and were bagging him, trying to drive oxygen into his lungs. Balthazar pushed himself to the head of the bed. When he recognized the man as John Robertson, he felt for a moment that he himself could not breathe. Then he lifted the laryngoscope. He passed the endotracheal tube between Robertson’s vocal cords without difficulty, and exhaled with relief as he reached for the ventilation bag. But when he squeezed oxygen down the tube a brisk bubbling appeared at the front of Robertson’s throat, where his neck had been sliced open.

Balthazar watched fascinated for a moment as the bubbles rose through the myriad of tendons and nerves and vessels, all emitting dark purple blood in a slackening stream. A part of his mind started to identify the structures lying before him: the sternocleidomastoid muscle, the hyoid, the thyroid isthmus, the trachea, the common carotid, the internal jugular vein, the vagus nerve somewhere in all that, the platysma muscle, and the scalene too. Then he noticed the impatient faces around him and he gripped the endotracheal tube and tried to push it deeper down the trachea into the lungs, below the laceration. He deflated the balloon cuff that sealed and fixed the tube inside the trachea and attempted to advance it. He pushed a little harder and it moved down. The nurse attached the ventilation bag to the tube and then tried to squeeze air into Robertson’s lungs. The tube curled upward out of the front of Robertson’s throat,
blowing bits of fat and cartilage as it did, like a surfacing sea mammal. Around the tube, they could hear Robertson breathing, sucking in blood and exhaling noisily. And then he stopped.

Balthazar sat down heavily on the chair in his office. His spectacles were spotted with blood. He breathed in and out and then he called Victoria.

“It’s your husband, Victoria,” he mumbled.

“What?” she said, wondering who this was.

“He’s been stabbed.”

“Who?”

“We don’t know, he was just found a few minutes ago behind the Northern Store.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I know it’s hard to believe.”

“Who is this?”

“Balthazar.”

“Keith, what the hell are you talking about?”

“Robertson.”

“Okay, speak louder. What about him?”

“You better come to the hospital.”

“Okay… like right now?”

“Yes.”

When Victoria arrived she pushed through the crowd of people who had gathered around the place, standing silently in shocked horror. Since the community’s inception forty years earlier, there had been fights and stabbings and a few shootings, but this was the first murder. Death was common here, and everyone who descended from the land lived by its dealing, but murder was a thing that happened, singularly, in old stories, or with extravagant multiplicity in action movies—but not at all in the intimate confines of small Arctic hamlets, where people were vastly more likely to tie extension cords around their own necks as an expression of their anger.

Victoria took the stairs two steps at a time and when she burst in through the front door, the nurses and the RCMP and the ambulance attendants and Balthazar all turned to look at her and then quickly away. She walked up to Balthazar and grabbed him by the arm. “Where is he?”

He took her into the trauma room and together they surveyed the gruesome sight before them. “Oh my, Funny we’ve spoken” Victoria said in a little girl’s voice. She walked over to her husband and picked up his hand and held it. Tears ran down her face in a steady sheet.