Extraordinary (5 page)

“Really?”

“Because—because then you think, I never go
there
anyway.”

“Did you think that when the Air France plane went down last summer?”

“I did. I thought, Well shit, they were going to São Paulo. As if going to São Paulo had anything to do with the cargo door falling off over the Atlantic.”

“Did you feel that way about my accident? That I had it coming?”

“Never. Not for a second.”

“I wonder why not.”

“Because I love you.”

It didn't make any sense, it didn't follow anything, but I've always been glad I said it, always been glad it just blurted out.

The telephone rang. The purring kind.
Purr.
Pause.
Purr, purr.

“Let it go,” she said. “I'm having too much fun.”

Like waiting for a waiter to finish pouring the wine and leave the table, we waited for the phone to stop.

“Did you have anything in your hands?”I said.

“What?”

“When you tripped on the carpet in Mexico, did you have anything in your hands?”

“That's a question no one's ever asked me.”

“Perhaps it's not so interesting a question.”

“Why do you ask?”

“I have often wondered why you didn't throw your hands up to protect your face. Or was it all too fast?”

“No, it wasn't too fast,” she said in the tones of one who is deciding whether or not to pursue a subject. “You know why I didn't throw my hands up? I didn't throw my hands up because I was born with an eccentric deficiency. Move a little closer to me.”

I hesitated. “Is this going to be something that hurts?”

“I don't do things like that. I hate people who do things like that. But come a little closer.”

I got up and stood above her.

“Bend down a bit.”

“Sally.”

“Trust me.”

I bent over. She took one of my hands and moved it toward her face. She did it the first time slowly, the second time a little faster. “When I was born, I was born without a reflex to protect my face. I wore glasses in high school and when I was playing sports. I didn't need them, but if something lurched at my face, I didn't react.”

Then she took my hand—her hand was very warm, the fingers curled inward but her fingernails were beautifully maintained—and moved it slowly toward my face. I think it was more of a reason to touch me, to have me touch her, than to illustrate what she meant. But I was glad to do it. Glad to touch her. I thought to myself, Am I the last person who will ever touch you? Is mine the final human contact? I let her hand rest on my face.

She said, “Whereas if I make a motion toward your face, you'll put up your hands, you'll blink.”

I pulled my eyes away from her. I could feel my chest tighten. I said, “You never told me that before.” I sat back down.

“Where was I?” she asked.

“You were lying on the dining room floor of Freddie's house.”

“A local doctor arrived. He gave me a shot. I woke up in a helicopter. It took me from San Miguel to the ABC hospital in Mexico City.”

“Didn't you have to pee by then?”

“Everything had shut down. From my neck downwards. It was like waking up in somebody else's sleeping body. You want to move your arm, but your arm won't obey, as if it has forgotten the language the two of you spoke and all it hears now is gibberish.

“Three or four doctors came in. They spoke only in English, even when they were talking to each other. A very classy gesture—they didn't want me wondering what was being said. Still, I did have the feeling that I had become somehow the object of a Martian science experiment. A doctor brushed the sole of my foot with what looked like a Popsicle stick. ‘Does that tickle?' he said. And I kept saying, ‘Have you done it yet, have you done it yet?' And then they switched to my other foot, same business, and there was something about the matter-of-factness, the
professional
matter-of-factness with which they responded to my question
Have you done it yet?
that filled me with a kind of dull fright, as if the fright itself was a piece of lead in my body.

“I asked them a question.
The
question. But they wouldn't answer it. They put me in a long metal tube with lights inside and a round window. Like a small spaceship. Sometimes I was looking at the ceiling tiles, other times I was looking at the floor tiles. Like a human sausage on a rotisserie.

“The next day or the day after, a doctor came in to see me. He was a lanky man with thick grey hair, like a movie star playing a Mexican doctor. Dr. Philippe Ortoya. He flirted with me. Maybe it was therapy. While he was checking my pupils, I said, ‘I want you to tell me the truth, Doctor. Will I ever run down the street again?'

“‘No,' he said.

“‘Will I ever climb the stairs to my bedroom on the second floor?'

“‘I'm afraid not,' he said.

“‘Will I ever be able to go to the bathroom without a bag on my leg?'

“He said, ‘It's too early to tell.'

“I said, ‘Is that the best news you have for me?'

“Dr. Ortoya seemed to understand what I was thinking, because he said to me, ‘We get used to situations.'

“‘Not this situation.'

“He said, ‘Do nothing rash. Wait.'

“I said to him, ‘Is there anything to wait for?'

“‘Are you religious?'

“When I heard that, I thought, Boy oh boy, am I ever going to kill myself! Suddenly, there was a real urgency to do it—to do it quickly, before anybody could read my mind and stop me. But that's the problem with being crippled: You can't kill yourself. The best you can do is fall out of your bed and bang your head on the floor. But that's not going to kill you.

“And you can't ask a friend to roll you to the edge of a cliff and look away for a second. Because even then, you can't get out of your fucking chair. You have to have someone
tip
you. And, you know, finding someone to tip you over the side of a cliff, that's a tall order. Those kinds of friends are hard to come by.

“One night, as I lay in my hospital bed in Mexico City, I watched a romance start up in the building across the street between a man with a mop and a bucket—he must have been new on the job—and a woman in a blue apron who was going from office to office emptying the wastepaper baskets. It was the middle of the night, just their floor was illuminated, and you could see them working their way toward each other. The one thing that nothing, not even gravity, can stop: people finding their way to each other even in a dark building. It went for a week like this, the two of them meeting in the brightly lit office and talking. And then one night I saw the man get up and go over and turn off the lights. Just for a half-hour or so. And I wondered if, in my condition, I would ever be part of that world again. Would I––” Here she paused, as if the instant in which the original thought had first occurred to her reopened like a seed in her memory. “Would I ever be attractive to the opposite sex again?

“Sometimes, when I opened my eyes, I expected to discover myself back in Toronto. As if Mexico and Freddie Steigman and my patio looking at the mountains and the party and the limes on the cutting board and the knock at the door and the carpet and the voices going silent were the kind of unhealthy fog you drift around in when you have slept too long. A progression into staleness.

“But then I'd glance around my room, I'd hear Spanish voices in the hallway, and I'd think, This can't possibly have happened to me. You go to a party, you cross the room, you trip on the carpet. Do you know how many coincidences have to happen for you to arrive there? But there is no reward in figuring out the statistics, is there? Because it all returns you to here and now.

“I woke up once after midnight. My legs were on fire. Some terrible, insistent pain, like an animal staring at me from the doorway. I lay there listening to the soft swish of white shoes outside my room, back and forth, back and forth. I thought, I'm going to lie here very still and this thing will go away; it'll get bored and go away. But it didn't. It just sort of flopped itself across the doorway with a grunt and waited. Pain, I'm telling you—pain and the things that come with pain—it's such a horribly
private
business. I'm sure for some people that the actual act of dying is a relief. If only to extinguish those monotonous, incommunicable, repetitive cartoons.

“I pushed a button on a cord and an angel appeared at the side of my bed. She gave me a fat pink pill. It left a bitter taste at the back of my throat, even with a glass of water, but I suspected that good things would come with that taste. And they did. I couldn't tell if I was asleep or awake, but I could actually
watch
my thoughts take on a physical shape, even colour, like people in a novel who suddenly forget they're characters and start moving around on their own. Pursuing their own concerns.

“I buzzed the nurse. I asked her to raise up my bed as high as it would go, to prop me up on pillows so that the whole of Mexico City lay below me. It must have been a Saturday night. The town was lit up like a pulsing Christmas tree, and I felt like something very good was just about to happen to me. Somebody was playing the piano. How perfect, and yet how odd—a piano on a hospital ward in the middle of the night.

“I thought about Dr. Ortoya in his crisp linen jacket, about the angel in the whispering shoes, about all the life in Mexico City. In the bars, in the streets, in the cantinas, in the houses—all this glittering, energized life. I thought of Chloe, smiling in her sleep. And I thought, This is a good deal, being alive. Life is a good deal.

“But the next day, things didn't seem so cheerful. And even in that clear sunlight, the banality of the world seemed like the dominant chord.” Here, Sally paused for a moment. “Or perhaps
because
of the sunlight,” she added privately. “Do you understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Perhaps it was my third day in the hospital. A grey day outside my window. The city flat, lifeless. All night long, a man across the hall with a bullet wound in his thigh had been groaning. I didn't hear him come in. I was dreaming about lying on a dock at the edge of a country lake. You were there. So was your older brother, Jake. We were all tanned. Tanned and skinny. I could hear the wind passing through the pine trees on the shore. You know that sound it makes, that swish, the pine needles rubbing their hands together.

“I was lying face down; I could smell the sun-bleached wood; I could hear the water lapping under the dock. Little by little, the groaning of the man in the hospital bed across the hall began to mingle with the sounds I could hear on the dock: a boat crossing the bay, the water lapping under the boards, the wind in the pine trees, a man groaning with a bullet in his thigh.

“I woke up. Rain splattered on the hospital windows—fat, dull-witted drops.
Splat, splat, splat,
not like regular rain, but like transparent jelly thrown at the glass.
Splat, splat, splat.
The pill had worn off, leaving behind a sort of flatness like a winter field that stretches all the way to the horizon. And I thought that this is what life is like without my pill, this field that you walk across forever. Yes, I'm going to use all my intelligence, all my creativity, to put an end to this. I was, at that very second, wondering how to get more pills out of my angel when a girl as thin as a pencil appeared in the doorway. It was my daughter, Chloe.

“‘How are you feeling, Mama?' she said, and the sound of her voice, with its tiny, uncertain wobble, broke my heart. It just cut me in half, and within seconds I realized that all my plans, my schemes, my scenarios for killing myself, were suddenly in the back seat, suddenly in the past tense. Inconceivable. Like a drunken fantasy from whose grips you awake thinking, What in Heaven's name was all
that
about?

“If grown-ups can get used to new and dreadful circumstances fast, children do it with a speed that's breathtaking. They really
are
built for survival. It was like watching an eyeball come into focus, the way Chloe accepted the new version of me—the neck brace, crabbed hands, the motionless legs.

“There she was, perched like a bird on the side of my bed, talking about a red-haired girl at the American school she attended in San Miguel, about why so many boys liked her. What is it about some girls that boys like? she wondered. And I could see that she was completely absorbed by the red-haired girl. The sun came back out and transformed the city into a dazzling foreign port.”

 

 

E
ighteen floors down from
S
ally's
apartment, a car alarm went off in the parking lot.
Honk, honk, honk, honk.
We both listened to it involuntarily. Then it suddenly stopped and the room again filled with silence, a more profound silence, it seemed, both of us privately aware of where we were and why we were there. In only a few hours, we had grown so enthralled with each other's company that the third person in the room had disappeared.

“I wrote the note,” she said.

“What's it say?”

“Just to call the police before coming into the apartment.”

“Okay.”

“I don't want to make any troubles for you,” she said.

“Okay.”

“Just stick it to the door when you leave.”

“Are you sure you want to do this, Sally?”

“It's not complicated,” she said evenly, and I had the feeling she had said this before, but only to herself, in preparation for this very conversation. “I'm not depressed, the world isn't grey, I don't want to punish people, it's just that this”—she gestured toward her body in the green dressing gown—“has become less and less manageable. I don't want to go into physical details, but you understand. And it's only going to get worse. And soon—not tomorrow or even next year, soon though—I won't have even this much control over what happens to me. And then there's you,” she added softly.

“What about me?”

“One of these days, you might go away. Or you might change your mind.”

“And?”

“And then I wouldn't have anyone to help me.”

“Is there no one else?”

“I can't imagine there would be. Could you?”

“How did you know I wouldn't tell someone?” I said.

She was looking right at me now. She waited a moment. “Because I know what you're like. Because enough is enough.”

The phone rang.

“Do you want to get that?”

But she didn't answer. She had retreated into herself, and I suddenly had the feeling she was thinking about her son, Kyle. But I didn't want to bring him up. Not tonight. She seemed to read my thoughts, though, and taking a deep, involuntary breath as one does before beginning a task that has been done before but needs to be done again, she began. “About six months after my accident, I got a letter from my ex-husband, Bruce. Chloe and I had moved back to the house in San Miguel. I was in a wheelchair, but managing.”

The phone stopped ringing.

“It was a disturbing but not a surprising letter, something I had expected for some time. Kyle, who was seventeen, had gotten himself into trouble. Teenage trouble. But from the lugubrious and self-satisfied tones of his father's letter, you'd have thought it was murder. None of which would have happened, it implied, if I hadn't
whored
off to Mexico.”

“Did he use that expression?”

“No.” Pause. “That's mine.”

“Go on.”

“Kyle and a couple of his goony friends from the neighbourhood got drunk one night at some girl's house—her parents were away—and broke into their own school. Their
own
school. They wandered around the halls, trashed a few lockers, pissed in the water fountain, smashed a mirror in the girls' washroom and then drifted downstairs into the basement. There, at the far end of the school, they found themselves in the music room. The door was unlocked. Inside, they came across five electric guitars that had been rented for an upcoming student performance. Somebody said, ‘Are you thinking what I'm thinking?' So they stole the guitars, slipping out the tradesmen's entrance.

“Bruce was out of town, working with a highway crew up near Lake Athabasca, so they took their loot back to his house. Kyle was a lot of things, but he wasn't stupid, and when he woke up hungover the next morning, he realized that he was in real trouble, that he had to do something to fix it.

“His friends had stayed overnight, but they were morons—Kyle's friends generally were—and when he asked them for help, they sat with their fingers up their asses and then buggered off. So there was Kyle, with five stolen guitars heating up his bedroom like a hothouse.

“What do you do? He came up with an idea. He found the vice-principal's number in the phone book and called him at home. He claimed that a buddy of his—he couldn't name him—had gotten drunk, broken into the school and stolen some stuff. Now, in a fit of remorse, he wanted to return them, with Kyle as the intermediary. Could this be arranged discreetly?

“The VP said sure. But when Kyle arrived in a taxi half an hour later, the five guitars stacked like corpses in the back seat, he found two plainclothes detectives waiting for him on the front steps of the school. They took him downstairs into the music room and grilled him. No windows, just the two cops, the vice-principal, and Kyle reeking of gin. A cop with a shiny, fleshy face started things off. It was pretty obvious, he said, that Kyle was a prankster who'd gone on a toot. He could smell it from here. But there was no way that his so-called ‘buddy' had got these guitars out the door, up an embankment, across a playing field all on his own. Not unless he was ‘a fucking octopus.'

“So he must have had some help.
Kyle's
help. So why didn't Kyle just come clean and help everyone ‘straighten this out' so they could close the book on it. No harm done. Just kids being kids.

“But Kyle, having already been lied to once that day by the vice-principal, wasn't buying. He stuck to his story. He didn't know what happened, didn't know how they got the guitars out of the school, he was just there doing a favour.

“Consulting a notebook, the fleshy cop said, ‘It says here a Hammond organ was stolen as well.'

“‘There was no organ,' Kyle said.

“‘Are you sure?'

“Kyle didn't see the trap. ‘Yes, I'm sure.'

“‘Well,' the cop said, ‘if you weren't there, how would you know that an organ wasn't stolen too?'

“His partner stepped in. ‘Listen, fuckweed, if I don't have the name of the thief on this piece of paper in thirty seconds, I will charge
you
with grand theft, possession of stolen property, intent to traffic, and you will, I promise, go to jail.' He gave him a good poke in the chest with his finger just to show he meant business.

“‘Arrest me, then,' Kyle said. ‘Arrest me and fuck you.'”

“He said that?”

“That's what he said he said.”

“Ballsy little guy.”

“The police must have thought so too, because they let him go. For the moment. The fleshy cop said, ‘I'm going to give you twenty-four hours, Kyle. Then I'm going to come to your house, and I'm going to arrest you in front of your parents and your neighbours. I'm going to put you in handcuffs, and I'm going to take you to jail.'

“His partner said, ‘You ever hear of grand theft, you little fuck? That's theft over a thousand dollars. You're in the big leagues now. You can thank your buddies for letting you take it in the ass for them. Because that's where you're headed. You know how long a kid like you will last in jail?'”

I'd forgotten what a skilful mimic Sally could be. She didn't do it very often; it wasn't her style, too attention-getting a number for her. But as a child, those times I saw her do it, saw her cut loose some night and “do” a neighbour talking to herself while gardening or our soused uncle saying good night but not leaving, I'd find myself staring at her as if I were watching a chair levitate.

She went on. “Kyle went home. He didn't tell his father, nor did he sleep that night, not a wink, just a tumble of awful imaginings. Exactly twenty-four hours later, he sat by the front door with his night kit packed—pyjamas, hairbrush, toothpaste, toothbrush—and waited to be taken to what he imagined was some kind of Russian gulag.

“The appointed hour arrived. Five o'clock. Then five-fifteen. Then six o'clock. Kyle walked down to the sidewalk and peered up and down the street. Nothing. No one. They never came.

“But after, he refused to go back to school. To
any
school. That's what Bruce's letter was about. He suggested that Kyle come down to Mexico and live with me. Asked me to take some time to think about it. I didn't need time. But I pretended to, pretended that I had reservations: the wheelchair, not being up on crutches yet and so on. In fact, what I didn't want was for Bruce to realize how
thrilled
I was to have
both
my children down there with me. I thought if he even smelt it, something would go tight in his chest and he'd snatch it away. But I don't know. Maybe I was doing him a disservice. Now that he's gone, he seems like less of an asshole and more a product of growing up in a small town.

“A few weeks later, Kyle arrived on the afternoon bus. It was spring now, the days very hot. Freddie Steigman and Chloe went down to the depot to pick him up. On the way home, Freddie read him the riot act. He said, ‘You have no idea what trouble is like until you've been on the inside of a Mexican jail.'

“It must have been three or four nights later when Kyle and an American kid went into a cantina and drank a half-dozen rounds of mescal. Around midnight, they dropped in on a girl they'd met that morning. But the girl's father answered the door and, seeing that they were drunk, sent them packing. Here the story gets fuzzy. Kyle always claimed his friend did it, his friend said Kyle did it, but somebody threw a brick through the girl's window. The police were called. They picked up the two boys in a cantina down the street. At four o'clock in the morning, there was a knock on my door. There was Kyle. They'd roughed him up a bit. He had a black eye and a loose front tooth. Luckily, he had mentioned Freddie Steigman's name.

“The next day, I made my decision, and I've been living with the consequences of it since then. I packed up his little suitcase and put him on a bus back to the airport. I've often thought about it—maybe I should have kept him. But I was too vulnerable, too weak to deal with a six-foot-tall teenager crashing around town and getting in trouble and maybe, just maybe, getting us all thrown out of the country. Was I a coward? Was I using the wheelchair as an excuse to not deal with a troubled—and more to the point, trouble
some
—teenager? Did I abandon my son? Was I playing the ostrich when I sent him back to his father? Am I responsible for what happened afterwards?”

“Probably not,” I said.

“It doesn't change anything anyway. Things went the way they went.”

“And how was that?”

“You know the answer to that,” she said flatly.

“Yes, but how did they get there?”

“Kyle got a job in Toronto looking after senior citizens in a Jewish retirement home. He'd take them out for walks, wheel them around the block in their wheelchairs, talk to them on the bench in front of the home and read their granddaughters' letters aloud to them.

“He was a prince, everyone loved him—until they discovered he was stealing their medication. Librium, Valium, Seconal, Mandrax, Dilaudid, even cough medicine—anything he could find. They were seniors. Have you ever seen the medicine cabinet of a senior?”

“Yes, I have, in fact.”

“Then you know. The pickings are good.

“The police were called in. They installed a hidden camera in the bathroom of one of the most frequently hit rooms, and waited. Sure enough, while Mrs. Cornblum was downstairs enjoying Shabbat dinner with her son and her grandchildren, Kyle was systematically going through the prescription bottles in her medicine cabinet. All on film. The police turned up at his house with a search warrant. They found jewellery, a necklace, even a silver pocket watch, very old and valuable, which had been stolen that same morning. A few pills, but not many. Kyle had taken them or sold them.

“The judge was a softie and handed down a conditional discharge. Kyle walked out of the courthouse with a slap on the wrist. Bruce threw him out. He flopped here and there, always with these losers. Kyle had a knack for attracting dumb-guy groupies. A string of arrests followed: shoplifting, breaking into cars, selling phony prescription pads, phone scams. One time he even got caught for stealing purses from cars in a cemetery parking lot while their occupants were paying graveside respects.”

“A perfect little scumball.”

Sally frowned; it hurt her to hear that. You can say bad things about your own child, but you don't want someone else doing it.

“Sally, I apologize. I was just getting into the spirit of things.”

She went on. “He landed in the hospital a few times. A furniture mover caught him breaking into his rig, this big-bellied, thick-armed ape who made his living driving to Mississippi and back on three hundred cigarettes and a handful of Dexedrine. Wrong guy to rob. Wrong guy to get
caught
robbing. He found Kyle sitting behind the wheel trying to snap off his ham radio. Kyle got so frightened he threw himself over a ramp. But it was a drop of two storeys. He broke his arm in four places. The truck driver took his time getting down to him, then gave him a couple of boots, one in the kidneys, one in the face, and left him lying in the street.”

“Nice life.”

“That February, he had a Methedrine overdose, his heart stopped beating on the operating table. All this got back to me in Mexico. I was torn: stay or go home. But go home and do what? Hobbling around on crutches. Shouting from the sidelines. At some point, you're reduced to being an impotent cheerleader for your children's lives. Or is that just more bullshit? I don't know. I still don't.

“I began to prepare myself for his death. I began to imagine how the phone would ring one night, or maybe Bruce's hangdog face would appear at my door in Mexico. I knew it was coming. It was the Jerry Malloy business that brought me home.”