Guide to Animal Behaviour (10 page)

Well, I try to explain it, and she pushes me out of the head-injury ward, shushing me, whispering angrily for me to shut up, tears like jewels on the pillows of her cheeks — she has her point of view, too.

This is in Saint John on the Bay of Fundy, with its Loyalist graveyard in the centre of the city, moss covering the bone-white stones under the dark elms. City of exiles dreaming of lost Edens, it carries its past like a baited hook in its entrails. The O'Reillys, the Shaheens and the Pyes are descendants of Irish immigrants, survivors of the Potato Famine and cholera ships; Earl Delamare is the grandchild of American slaves. Beneath the throughway bridges, on a swampy waste next to the port, lie the ruins of Fort LaTour, scene of an even earlier betrayal. It's no wonder these people see themselves endlessly as victims.

The place where we live, Sgt. Pye's ageing apartment house on Germain Street in the South End, lies between the dry dock and the sugar refinery. We can hear the boat sounds, bell-buoys and foghorns in the night. When a fog blows in, as they often do, the streetlights look like paper lanterns hanging before the houses. Afternoons, when I finish work, I sometimes climb to the rocky summit of Fort Howe to watch the mist nose up through the port, threading the streets of the city like an animal trying to find its way in a maze.

Best of all is springtime, when the freshets swell the river, flooding Indian Town and Spar Cove above the falls. Television cameras mounted in chartered helicopters transmit aerial shots of a strange, watery landscape upriver. When the land dries, children set grass fires in railway cuts and vacant lots. Saint John is a wooden city, rebuilt hastily by ships' carpenters after an earlier fire. So this is always dangerous; the whole place could go up. These are the brilliant spring days after the freshets, when I take my position on high ground and watch smoke drifting over the sagging, pastel-coloured houses and hear sirens snaking through the streets and dream that everything man-made is being scorched clean, reabsorbed into rock and air.

Aiden is in St. Joseph's, dying of his head. This has been going on for three months. Annie, his sister, and I are breaking up. We are in the midst of the painful process of tearing down the lines of communication. Every time we talk it is like a fresh storm blowing a tree across a telephone wire, ice forming on the transformers, a flood washing away a cable. We are disentangling. Until all that will remain is the silence blowing like a cold wind against our faces. This is all right. You needn't worry about me. When I feel that wind, I know who I am.

Aiden is dying. He is asleep (in a coma) in St. Joseph's. He always seemed like a jerk to me, so it doesn't bother me much that he is dying. Except that his dying is contributing to our breakup. (Yes, I am jealous of a dying brother. God, how he used to irritate Annie. Once we had to rush to his girlfriend's apartment after she took an overdose of sleeping pills. We spent the night, brewing endless cups of coffee, walking her up and down. Annie swore she'd never speak to Aiden again — now, he has all the glory.)

He's suddenly moral. He's suddenly okay, with a ready-made excuse for missing mass. (Hell, they bring mass to Aiden. Those women have him right where they want him.) The story is that he got drunk (as usual) at a campus party in Halifax, tried tightrope-walking on a balcony railing and fell three storeys onto concrete slabs. The impact crushed the left side of his skull, but a surgeon kept him alive by cutting away the bone and draining the fluid build-up. That first week he nearly died a dozen times. (I was there. I was a tower of strength, escorting his mother back and forth from their hotel, playing cards and word games with his brothers and sisters in the waiting-room. Briefly, I was forgiven for corrupting Annie.)

I recall the surgeon coming to tell us pneumonia had set in, that the case was hopeless unless he suctioned Aiden's lungs hourly through the night. It was clear, from the doctor's tone, his kindness and the set of his eyes, that he was telling Annie's father: “I can let him die tonight, which would be better for everyone, or I can prolong this.” But you only had to glance once at the father's face to know what his answer was. These people are Catholic; they have met the Pope. On top of their upright piano, which stands next to the TV and the police-band radio in the living room, there are back-to-back photos of John Paul II and John F. Kennedy. They toe the party line. Whatever happens, they come down blindly on the side of life.

Sgt. Pye evicts Earl Delamare. It's my fault, too, because I was taunting Earl, playing on his fantasies. It's possible I have driven him mad. One night he came to my door, first listening, then mumbling, then beginning his litany of wild accusations. Instead of responding with my usual silence, I put
Night on Bald Mountain
on the stereo. As the music rose, I began to intone the French advertisements on the backs of cereal boxes in my kitchen cupboard.

The music gave Earl fits; he practically howled with rage.
“Numero Cinq! Numero Cinq!”
he cried. I played John Cage on the stereo and began to read the cereal boxes backwards, imitating several voices at once. Earl began to beat the door with his fists, perhaps even his head. I could see the panels giving with the force of his blows. In the midst of this I heard Sgt. Pye climbing the stairs. When he came into my apartment, he found me sitting in an old Morris chair, eating a bowl of Rice Krispies, with the stereo low. He had a face like a yellow skull. Earl had retreated to his room, like a mole going underground. But I could still hear him shouting
“Numero Cinq! Numero Cinq!”
When Sgt. Pye let himself into Earl's room, the black man went through the window and down the fire escape.

After Earl's things were moved out, I sneaked into his room to look around. There were five bags of empty Molson's bottles in the kitchenette. His closet was papered with cut-out magazine ads for automobiles. On the bare hardwood floor of the bed-sitting room, under the single, naked light bulb, I found the photograph of a young black woman.

One afternoon, I stop by the library. I am on my way to Connor Street to have dinner with Annie and her family. Oddly enough, I think her father is trying to patch things up between us. Lyn Shaheen is pleased to see me. We chat by the record collection, then we meet again in the stacks, near philosophy where no one ever goes, and kiss. When I look up, I notice we are next to the Ms for Mortality, Metaphysics and Man. She has strange lips and a tongue that she runs over my teeth. I stroke her long breasts beneath her sweater. Her hair smells like old books.

I wait for her to get off work, then, for a while, we snuggle together in the front seat of her Volkswagen. I undo her pants and masturbate her with my fingers. Outside, a blizzard whirls around us, obscuring the Viaduct and the bridges across the river. Her Volkswagen is white; in all that snow, we are invisible. Without saying a word, she takes my cock in her mouth. She is the keeper of the words. She is the beast in the labyrinth. When I come, I am, briefly, nowhere, lost, swirling in a semantic ocean. Then she drops me a block from Annie's house.

There is no fiction in this story. I have, on the other hand, like any author, permitted myself occasional legitimate assumptions. I am the obituary writer. I do other things as well. But mornings I begin the workday by typing up the form obituary notices dropped in the night mailbox by representatives of the local funeral homes. The format is pretty much set in stone, and I have little leeway in the manner in which I choose to present my material. Nevertheless, I try insofar as I can to add some colour and meaning to the bare facts I have to work with.

Let me tell you, it makes all the difference in the world if you can say so-and-so died “suddenly” and “at home.” Age can be a factor. From a human interest point of view, the younger the deceased the better. Death at an advanced age, say, past a hundred, elicits only a mild exclamation from the bored reader. But give me a little girl, who dies at three, and I can bring tears to the eye. Personally, I enjoy the stories of early retirement deaths. A welder, say, works all his life for a single firm (I bring in such telling details as his union affiliation, his membership in the Knights of Pythias, his forty-five year watch), then retires at sixty-five, only to die a few months later “after a brief illness.” What I feel is that the obituary writer is a moralist, a prophet. Everything I type tells the reader, “All is dust; all is vanity.” A salutary message in this age of rampant materialism.

Soon I will be typing Aiden's obituary. The thought, I am sure, has crossed Annie's mind and makes her uncomfortable. But these days everything I do seems to make her uncomfortable.

Aiden is in St. Joseph's, dying of head injuries. Annie shaves him, washes him, rubs salve on his bed sores, feeds him (I find this amazing — a man in a coma can be made to swallow a little Jell-O from time to time), changes his catheter bag, plays him music on the radio and reads him his favourite science fiction novels — Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov and Wells. Sometimes, when Annie cannot be there, I go and sit with him myself.

It is curious how involved you can become in gauging his level of wakefulness. I tell jokes, insult him, instruct him to blink an eyelid, yes or no. I tell him secrets, shameful facts about my relationship with his sister, just to get a rise out of him. But Aiden is unflappable, and I quickly grow tired of the game. I recall a religious (though not Catholic) friend of mine, describing her mother's death: “The last week was difficult, you know, the terribly difficult time when the soul is separating from the body.” Something like this is happening with Aiden. His existence is entirely passive, and he has lost even the sense of the sense of loss.

(It is during one of these clandestine visits that Annie suddenly appears and, in a fit of pique at finding me there — somehow this confuses the pristine relationship she enjoys with her brother, implying that, even as a vegetable, he might have a life of his own — she reveals that she has learned “everything there is to know” about my affair with the librarian.)

Two things drew me to her at the beginning: the way she blushed when she failed to pronounce Dostoevsky correctly in my literature class, and the way, once, in an unguarded moment, I saw the pink band of her underwear show above the waist of her jeans. These images of self-betrayal, Annie's tiny pratfalls, are the imperfections in the other we attach ourselves to and which they strenuously deny and hide. These are the buds of conflict, the rifts. I have not loved Annie for that for which she desires to be loved.

I find out from Sgt. Pye that Earl is staying at the Sally Ann. In a few weeks, a judge will hold a hearing for his committal to the Provincial Hospital on the other side of the river. I buy a six-pack of Molson's and go down to see my former neighbour. He doesn't recognize me, but the beer is a fine introduction. We walk through King Square to the Loyalist Burial Ground to sit amongst the stones and drink and talk. Earl used to be a checker at the port before the new container terminal and his chronic back injury forced him out of work. He once owned a house in West Saint John, near the Martello Tower. Now his family has all moved to Halifax; his wife is dead. He's actually a good-looking man, with that dusty skin and his woolly, white sideburns.

When we finish the beer, I take a deep breath and hand him the photograph. It turns out, as I had begun to suspect it would, to be a photograph of his dead wife, a woman he loved deeply but who betrayed him with another man. I tell him I am researching a newspaper story about a secret terror organization called the
Numero Cinq,
that I'd appreciate him telling me anything he knows about it. Earl is silent, but tears come to his eyes. I say, “I don't know much. I've been tracking them for years.” Earl nods vigorously. “But they're everywhere,” I say. Earl hides his face in his hands. “Everywhere,” I say, “and we're doomed.”

2

I will tell you now that Aiden dies. Perhaps you have already guessed it. Annie and I finally will have separated for good. I will have gone away to another city and another newspaper job. I will fly back for the funeral. I do this only partly because I hope to patch things up between us. Mostly it is because I like her family, her mother and father, who have often been kind to me, especially when Annie no longer loved me, and all the countless little O'Reillys. (There will, it appears, be new additions — Annie's sister, Amelia, a soft, kind, simple person, has fallen in love with a dreamer who will never support her, but has made her pregnant.)

I fly back for the funeral and book myself a room at the old Admiral Beatty Hotel. I recognize one of the bellhops, a homosexual classmate of Aiden's. I invite him for a drink in the bar when he goes off work and he tells me how the other boys used to tease him for being a sissy. In those days, Aiden was the only one who stuck up for him. Sometimes, he tells me, he thinks Aiden was the only person who was ever decent to him. I am shocked and chastened. I do not like to think of Aiden as a hero, but life always has a way of complicating itself.

I will fly back for the funeral and my faint heart will ache for the beauty of the New Brunswick forest as we descend through its autumnal aura. I will see the pulsing veins of its rivers and the gashes of civilization and the encroaching, all-blessing forest, and know that I too am only temporary, that this fever will pass, that the universe is only a bubble of my dreams.

I will take a taxi to the funeral home. I will see Aiden cradled in his coffin, so very thin and frail, not at all the laughing boy I remember, not mischievous at all, but thin and gaunt, with his skin sunk down into his cheeks, and so small it seems even his bones have shrunk. Eleven months he will have been dying, eating Annie's Jell-O, listening to her lover's words.