Holding Still for as Long as Possible (19 page)

I stood there, grinning like a moron.

She looked at me. “I'm going to finish these cards. Call me next week, then.”

“Okay, sure.”

Billy closed the door and for a while I just stood there, legless, armless, in the hallway.

Book Three

[ Life 3 ]

11:30:05 p.m. Delta seizure, M, 40, hx of same.
11:30:20 p.m. Fell from standing, active seizure, hx of possible brain tumour.

It was a party like a lot of parties held in loft apartments rented by couples in their mid-thirties before they have kids. Looking down on it from above, you'd see some confident poses and some insecure hovering, hear a burst of too-loud voices, see the blink of a laptop screen displaying the cover art of the album that's playing. Music by a band from somewhere in the Midwest.

The host, Carla, was standing by the Ficus tree in the front window, pretending to talk to her boss, a mid-fifties pothead and publisher of the magazine where most of the attendees worked. He was so repetitive she wanted to gouge her eyes out, but was compelled to stay by the good view she had of Christyn, the leggy blonde her boyfriend Jim had fucked a few months back when they went through a brief “open relationship” phase. Carla was obsessed with keeping Jim and Christyn at opposite ends of the loft. She would never have invited Christyn but for the fact that Christyn was now dating Ted, the music editor, and Carla had felt obligated.

Christyn, meanwhile, was pulling at her thumb with her teeth. She liked to bite the skin all the way around the nail. Ted called it vile, so she tried not to do it around him, but he wasn't paying attention. He was talking wine with the twenty-something girl in brown corduroys who had given everyone at the party a flyer for her “improvised sound poetry installation and social experiment.” The flyer had a photo of the girl with her top off. Christyn thought she vaguely recognized her as one of the waitresses at a coffee shop on Queen Street she frequented on Sunday mornings. Christyn stood by Ted and the intern, occasionally feigning interest or nodding, but not really paying attention.

Nothing is more boring than talking about wine, Christyn thought. Wine all tasted the same to her, and only functioned as a way to get her clothes off. She liked wine's transformative quality, but that was it. She continued to chew at her thumb, and covertly slipped her pinky finger into her ear and then smelled it. This was also one of her gross but very satisfying habits.

Besides Ted, whom she'd been dating for three months, Christyn knew one other person at this gathering: Jim, the boyfriend of the host, Carla. Most attendees worked at
Yes Magazine
, the city's biggest arts weekly, as journalists, editors, or designers. Except for Jim, who was a bartender, and Christyn, who ran her own jewellery business. The corduroy girl was the new intern, and she wore thick-rimmed glasses and a tight Journey baseball shirt, although Christyn knew that Journey had been popular way before said intern was born.

The intern was having, possibly, the most exciting night of her twenty-year-old life, drinking free Pabst Blue Ribbon from a can, and talking wine and David Byrne with Ted, the music critic she'd been reading since junior high.

Ted had just turned forty, and Christyn knew he didn't think he had many years left of fawning interns and impressive indie-rock credential carry-over. If Christyn weren't present, she surmised, he'd have put a move on the intern for sure.

Carla crossed the room and, smiling, offered Christyn a refill on her glass of wine.

Christyn was blissfully unaware that Carla knew about her and Jim; Ted certainly didn't know about her and Jim — their one-nighter had happened a week before Ted had asked Christyn out for the first time. Christyn assumed the invitation to Carla's meant that all was fine.

All around Christyn was talk of ironic viewings of the R. Kelly “Trapped in the Closet” video, ironic love of hair metal, eye-rolling obsessions with Kelly Clarkson and
Laguna Beach.
Christyn often wondered what this crowd sincerely enjoyed, besides pretending to like low-brow culture, going to yoga class, and watching
The Wire
or
The Daily Show.
She was bored, and so she walked to the kitchen to get another drink. She thought about how a few lines of coke might make this party fun, if only she hadn't given up the drug, with firm resolve, last year when she'd turned thirty-five. She missed it, though, the feeling of being interesting and interested and unaware of time.

The door to the loft opened, and Jim walked in with a case of beer. Christyn went to greet him by the kitchen island. This was the first time they had seen each other since the night they'd slept together.

Jim worked at a bar down the street from where she lived, and she used to notice him when she ordered drinks. His cute scruffy face, the way he looked in faded vintage cowboy shirts. How grumpy he was. She liked it. He was a challenge.

And now, here he was in his kitchen, putting bottles away and preparing to slice up limes at the counter.

“Hey, honey,” he said over his shoulder.

Christyn put her empty glass down and placed her hands on his hips. He dropped the knife and turned around to look at her. They hugged the way people do when they still want to sleep together, and kissed lazily on the mouth a few seconds longer than friendly. Christyn wanted nothing more than to drag him outside and make out covertly, as if they were still in high school.

“You smell great,” she said. “How are you?”

“Bored to death.”

He smiled. But he had a strange look in his eye, an absence. He steadied himself against the counter. His face grew pale.

“Are you okay?” asked Christyn, as Jim's right arm began to twitch, then his left.

At first, she thought he was kidding her. She had a hard time understanding what was happening. When it sunk in, she yelled, “Carla! Jim is having a seizure!” But Carla was there, kneeling beside Jim, before she'd even finished her sentence.

Christyn had no idea what to do
. Aren't you supposed to put something in their mouths so they don't bite their tongue
s?
she thought, calling 911 on her cell.

Carla tried to keep Jim from injuring himself while his limbs flew here and there. It was over in moments, and then he just lay on the kitchen floor. Christyn brought pillows from the couch. A small group of friends had gathered in the kitchen area, while others had moved farther away to give Jim some privacy.

Finally, Jim looked at Carla.

“How you feeling, Jim?” she asked.

“Well, I'd like to grow some cauliflower in the backyard,” he said.

“He's had these before,” Carla said to Christyn and Ted, who were leaning against the kitchen counter. “It takes him a while to make sense. I think it's best if everyone just leaves, guys. I'm sorry.”

When the paramedics arrived, Christyn and Ted put their coats on and walked to the car, not talking. Christyn wished she had a reason to stay, but it seemed invasive.

“I wouldn't want people around if it was me,” Ted said when they reached the car. “We'll call in a few hours and make sure he's okay. Just give him some privacy. Apparently he's been having seizures a lot.” Ted rubbed his cold hands together. “Rumour is he has some sort of brain tumour. It doesn't look good.”

Christyn chewed and chewed at her thumb, and realized that in their haste to leave, she had left her purse inside.

When she went back into the loft and extracted the purse from under the side table in the living room, she heard Jim telling the paramedics, “This is a really good soundtrack, right?”

“Do you know where you are, Jim?”

“Yes, I am at the carnival, and this is the best party of our lives.”

Christyn was at the age where she was starting to lose friends. Breast cancer, overdoses, freak aneurisms, suicides, and car accidents. In her twenties it had seemed as if only grandparents died. Now there were fewer and fewer peers with both parents alive, few who hadn't had a personal cancer scare or a serious injury. She didn't like those odds. She shivered on her way back to Ted, who was sitting in the car, listening to Yo La Tengo on the stereo.

Inside, one of the paramedics — Dave — listened as Carla tried to convince Jim to go to the hospital. Jim didn't want to go. Still postictal, he moved in and out of lucidity.

“What are they going to be able to do anyway, the doctors? They won't know what's wrong any more than they did last time.”

“What happened last time?” asked Dave. He was taking Jim's blood pressure again.

“This music is for spring. Don't you think? Spring,” Jim said, “and I thank you for making the awesome soundtrack.”

Dave liked seizure calls for their absurdity, but it was frustrating that the patients were usually reluctant to go to the hospital. So Dave and his partner, Josh, made themselves comfortable in the kitchen, wanting to stick around and make sure Jim was back to normal before he signed the papers refusing service.

Carla looked at Josh a little closer. “Amy's boyfriend!” she announced.

“Uh-huh.”

“Film-fest stuff,” Carla half explained. “I know Amy from the festival.”

“Small world.”

The three of them talked until Jim came around completely. As the medics prepared to leave, Carla assured them she'd watch Jim closely.

Josh repeated three times that Carla should take Jim to the hospital if anything else happened. He felt odd being on a call that involved proximity to people he knew in his non-work life, a party filled with familiar faces from the neighbourhood.

As Dave and Josh walked down the hall towards the front door of the building, Jim stood in the doorway of his loft and waved.

January to May 2006

[ 17 ]

Billy

My New Year's resolution was to stop being afraid.

It was January second, and the resolution wasn't working.

The leader of the Morning Meditation! group was urging me to picture my lungs and give them a colour. I pictured both, hanging like socks on a line, disembodied, floating in front of me. I saw my hand reach out and grab them. I imagined they'd feel like those stress balls you squeeze to relieve tension. It was a long way down to the alveoli.
C'mon, oxygen
!

I sat cross-legged on my mat, a dusty thin carpet sample that smelled of mould.
I'll go home unenlightened and with bedbugs.

Both the group and my resolution now seemed ludicrous. We were a dozen stressed-out Toronto residents sitting around in a church basement like checkerboard pieces with no game plan.

Okay, start paying attention. The leader is noticing you're far from centred. Breathe.
I inhaled and held my breath. Then I exhaled fast and gulped, which made me dizzy, which made me panic. I thought about how having a panic attack in the middle of a meditation group would be a little embarrassing. Then I giggled because I was being competitive about meditation. I made it through the next forty-five minutes by taking about seventeen successful deep breaths, and decided that was good enough.

On the streetcar later, I felt like a frantic hummingbird, a starling with a half-wing walking around itself in circles. I willed myself to feel like a stone on the red-upholstered seat, solid, but my brain kept chirping. I caught my reflection in the window. Starling-faced. Panicked.

Having a panic disorder means you're way too alive, as if someone has turned up your volume button to deafening. Somewhere inside, the real you lies dormant, asleep for fear of having to live like an electric current, a lightning bolt, a bottle breaking into shards. I'm a jack-in-the-box that won't stop jumping out, an uncontrollable, hiccuping heart.

I noticed the snow piled up on the sidewalks. The world was carrying on, even without me noticing. Depression and anxiety made people — me — so self-centred.
Good Will. Good Will. Good Will.

I texted Maria.
Want 2 come over later
?

She must have been drunk. Her response:
J
ust thnking bout u, how we belong 2gethr, the way it's sposed to be
.

I turned off my phone. Later, at home, I texted her back:
This is something we should talk about in person. I'll call you tomorrow
.

Sometimes I did want to go back in time and fix it all with Maria. But in calmer, stronger moments, being single was a kind of freedom I'd never felt before. It was really good when it wasn't catastrophically terrifying.

If we were able to select our moods from a menu every morning, I'd pick “Four Drinks In” every time. After four beers on my first date with Josh, I started feeling fine. We were at a pool hall on Queen Street near Bathurst populated by suburban commuters and the occasional table of tired tourists. It was January third, one of Josh's few days off in weeks. I was so tired of the holidays, having spent mine between the house my dad lived in with my grandmother in Hamilton and Roxy's week-long holiday festival at the apartment.

I looked at myself in the pool hall's bathroom mirror and smiled wide, swallowing the small fluorescent room. My teeth were calming white jewels. I lined my lips in a sheer gloss with tiny sparkles. I looked good. The anxiety was thinning out my face. I felt great.
GREAT
.
God, maybe I should just drink more
.

Back outside I sidled up to Josh at the table, pushed my hip into him. I placed my hand on the small of his back while he tried to sink the eight ball, distracting him so he missed. “Some shark,” I said.

Josh had been talking to me about his job. Earlier in the day a woman had made naked snow-angels in front of a daycare. Then a thirty-year-old guy had told the paramedics that he had a bad headache, and they thought he was a bullshit call, but then he started speaking nonsense, projectile vomited, and died before they could do anything. Aneurism, Josh supposed.

“Every single day you deal with things I spend a lot of my time worrying about happening to me,” I told him. “Do you know how often I worry about getting meningitis or an aneurism?”

Josh laughed. “Well, you can't dwell on it, right?”

“I do the neck-check constantly,” I continued, pressing my chin to my chest as an example.

“You can't control what fate has in mind.”

I laughed and shrugged, took a sip of my drink. If only he knew how much it consumed me. All those random variables. The pointlessness of being human.

“Billy, you scare the shit out of me
,”
Josh said, all of a sudden.

“As if,” I said.
As if
as if
was a response!

Right before he kissed me he blinked his eyes, and I noticed his hands shaking. With a few drinks, his shyness had almost faded.

After the kiss, I asked him, “What are you most afraid of, Josh, for real, besides scary ol' me?”

“I don't know.” He paused. “I guess I get really afraid of social situations sometimes. Like, even though I see you quite often just hanging around your place, I was really freaked out about this date. I changed my shirt about eleven times.”

I was wearing the dress I'd had on all day. Other than washing yesterday's mascara off my face, I hadn't stressed out about meeting him. My biggest fear had been whether or not I'd catch whatever had made Roxy puke all yesterday. I'd checked for signs of nausea all the way to the pool hall.

The game paused. I touched Josh's arms, the taut cluster of muscles. Suddenly I wanted to know all about his childhood. When he knew he was a boy, or that he wanted to be a boy. I was shy to ask. I wondered if it was too typical a question. Was it offensive? I didn't get a chance to ask anything, though, because Josh kissed me again, hard against where the table jutted up to the edge of the sofa.

Over the next couple of hours the bar emptied of most people except the bartenders, but Josh and I continued to drink as if we were navigating a river of apprehension. One minute I was playing pool, and the next I was making out against the pinball machine in the back corner. I felt like I was on a new planet, a strange paradise. Josh's breath quickened and I bit his neck. I felt the kind of drunk you feel when you close your eyes and are lost in your inhibited limbic system, responding only to immediate emotion. Your memory and sense of how time works are disturbed. There was skin and cotton stretching, the blurred muscular fabric of our lips, air exchanged. My eyes opened to see the lights of a passing taxi in my damaged periphery, the streetlight moon falling down on us. I felt the sky take our pulse: heart rates high.

Eventually I walked Josh west along Queen and through the park to his place. We kissed timidly outside his apartment, as if we hadn't just brazenly created our own porn installation.

He didn't invite me in, but I didn't expect him to. If Amy was home, it would be awkward. We hadn't talked about negotiations, the practical elements of respect, honesty, boundaries, making sure everyone felt okay.

I glided home, stopping to take off my impossibly high heels and walk barefoot down Argyle Street. I paused outside my old apartment, the one I had shared with Maria, and noted the new curtains, the toys in the yard. I cut down to Queen Street, and smiled at the guy panhandling outside the bathtub store. I even smiled at the assholes outside the Social and the jerkfaces lined up to get into the Drake — everyone got big grins from me. I stopped to pet small dogs on leashes. I felt light light light.

I woke up the next day with a dry mouth, a scalpel scraping against my skull, inside a coma of fear. I couldn't face the phone or the cursor. Maria texted me again, this time to say she needed space from me, needed to figure things out. I turned the phone off.

“
Hangxiety
,” noted Roxy, placing a cup of coffee on my bedside table. “Hangover and anxiety combined. A potent, horrible thing.”

[ 18 ]

Josh

I tried to kill myself as a teenager. I know: What lonely teenaged small-town outcast didn't, right? But I didn't really want to die, I wanted to be reborn. My Aunt Lisa understood that, and she's probably the reason I'm still here.

Aunt Lisa was the one person I considered my real family when I was a kid. Sure, my grandmother was pretty amazing, but there were too many years between us. Aunt Lisa was my father's sister. Whereas my dad was self-destructive, Lisa was a gardener, a community activist. She built things everywhere she went. She drove a pickup truck and had once organized a group of women who taught one another how to perform abortions when it was still illegal. She lived on women's land outside town, near Algonquin Park, and she drove to Guelph to help me out when I needed it.

I needed it a lot.

Aunt Lisa was the first person to call me Josh after I changed my name. She said that from the age of four onwards, “I always thought you should've been born a boy.” She never, ever called me by my birth name. Instead, I was always Tiger or Captain or Son or Darling Little Shit-Disturber.

Aunt Lisa died of breast cancer in 1999. About a year before she died, she drove to Guelph to visit me because she knew I was in rough shape. I'd taken a bottle of pills, and was basically waiting to die, one way or another. She said, “This isn't gonna kill you, kid. Just you wait until later. There's worse stuff to come, but you'll be able to hack it. I can tell.”

“How?”

I expected her to offer me some sage advice. Instead she lit a smoke and said, “Move to Toronto, there's lots of other folks like you.”

She gave me a pamphlet about a youth group in Toronto for people who wanted to transition. At first I would call the number and hang up. Eventually I went online and met other kids on the discussion boards. It saved me.

I think about Lisa almost every day. My first tattoo says her name across my chest, a banner flapping over a fresh red heart.

The last time I saw my father was at my aunt's funeral. He was out on parole, and when I saw his tattooed face I felt a lurch of nausea. My mother sat on one side of the church and he sat on the other, and my sister and I hovered in between, like bouncers.

“Does that mean he killed someone?” I asked my sister during the hymns. She was a hundred times more “street” than I would ever be.

“Sometimes it just means you've been in jail. Sometimes it means you've killed people in jail, or lost someone while you were in jail.”

“Well, which one is it, for him?”

“Fucked if I know.”

My father left before the mingling, telling my sister it was because of his curfew at the halfway house in Toronto.

“He's in Toronto?”

“I didn't want to tell you about that. Apparently he wanted to be closer to Grandma in Guelph. She comes to visit.”

Every time we get a call at a rehab centre or a halfway house, I prepare myself to see him. Of course, it usually doesn't occur to me that my father might not recognize me any more. At the funeral, I had been on T for about one year, was still mid-transition. Now, when I run into old classmates or co-workers I know they wouldn't recognize me from a foot away. It's like I've got a free pass and I don't have to deal with those people any more. I like it that way.

My dad may be only half dead to most people, but he's completely dead to me.

[ 19 ]

Billy

Something is wrong
. My face rested against a bare chest. Inhaling sharply — a mixture of rye, sandalwood soap, and a peppery cologne — I identified Josh. I moved my drool-heavy mouth from his skin, eyes adjusting. I could see his chest in the grey-blue light of the window. My window. Josh and I had been going out a lot since our first date two weeks ago. Starting the nights out slowly, shyly, mumbling polite things and small-talking until we'd had enough drinks to exclaim, ask probing questions and kiss without worrying about our breath.

Josh had a tattoo on his chest that said
Lisa
inside a heart. Who was Lisa? I asked this question the first time I took off Josh's shirt. No answer. Shrug. I concluded Lisa must be dead. I stared at his tattoo and then at the clock that read 4 a.m. The room smelled funny. Like gas. The room had a pre-sunrise glow, as if it were the moment in a movie before the cavalry arrived to save the heroine. My skin was beaded, my throat was dry. I was suddenly sure I'd woken up in the middle of an emergency.

I sat up, making out the shapes of the room vaguely. I smelled the cup of mould that was last week's double latte on the bedside table. Josh snored lightly, his hand inside his boxers. I stood up and wobbled over to him, my foot pressing into a pink high-heeled boot turned on its side.
Fuck.
He didn't wake up.

I pushed open my door, passing Roxy's empty room. Her
TV
was paused on a scene from
The Goonies
. I could still smell the chemical, or gas, something foreign and frightening. Sliding open the patio door, I could hear sirens screaming close by. A raccoon wandered away from the recycling bin like a drunken homeless dude, turning back as if to shrug.