Man Descending (14 page)

Marvin settled in real quick. He tugged the brim of his Massey-Ferguson special a couple of times, got his dukes up and started to hop around like he’d stepped right out of the pages of
Ring
magazine. He looked pretty stupid, especially when Gene just looked at him, and kept his hands rammed in his jacket pockets. Marvin kind of clomped from foot to foot for a bit and then he said: “Get ’em up.”

“You get first punch,” said Gene.

“What?” said Marv. He was so surprised his yap fell open.

“If I hit you first,” said Gene, “you’ll charge me with assault. I know your kind.”

Marvin stopped clomping. I suspect it took too much coordination for him to clomp and think at the same time. “Oh no,” he said, “I ain’t falling for that. If I hit
you
first, you’ll charge
me
with assault.” No flies on Marvin.
“You
get the first punch.”

“Fight. Come on, fight,” said some ass-hole, real disgusted with all the talk and no action.

“Oh no,” said Gene. “I ain’t hitting
you
first.”

Marvin brought his hands down. “Come on, come on, let fly.”

“You’re sure?” asked Gene.

“Give her your best shot,” said Marvin. “You couldn’t hurt a fly, you scrawny shit. Quit stalling. Get this show on the road.”

Gene uncorked on him. It looked like a real pansy punch. His right arm whipped out of his jacket pocket, stiff at the elbow like a girl’s when she slaps. It didn’t look like it had nothing behind it, sort of like Gene had smacked him kind of contemptuous in the mouth with the flat of his hand. That’s how it looked. It
sounded
like he’d hit him in the mouth with a ball-peen hammer. Honest to God, you could hear the teeth crunch when they broke.

Big Marvin dropped on his knees like he’d been shot in the back of the neck. His hands flew up to his face and the blood just ran through his fingers and into his cuffs. It looked blue under the parking-lot lights. There was an awful lot of it.

“Get up, you dick licker,” said Gene.

Marvin pushed off his knees with a crazy kind of grunt that might have been a sob. I couldn’t tell. He came up under Gene’s arms, swept him off his feet and dangled him in the air, crushing his ribs in a bear hug.

“Waauugh!”
said Gene. I started looking around right smartly for something to hit the galoot with before he popped my brother like a pimple.

But then Gene lifted his fist high above Marvin’s head and brought it down on his skull, hard as he could. It made a sound like he was banging coconuts together. Marvin sagged a little at the knees and staggered.
Chunk! Chunk!
Gene hit him two more times and Marvin toppled over backwards. My brother landed on top of him and right away started pasting him left and right. Everybody was screaming encouragement. There was no invitation to the dick licker to get up this time. Gene was still clobbering him when I saw the cherry popping on the cop car two blocks away. I dragged him off Marvin.

“Cops,” I said, yanking at his sleeve. Gene was trying to get one last kick at Marvin. “Come on, fucker,” he was yelling. “Fight now!”

“Jesus,” I said, looking at Gene’s jacket and shirt, “you stupid bugger, you’re all over blood.” It was smeared all over him. Marvin tried to get up. He only made it to his hands and knees. There he stayed, drooling blood and saliva on the asphalt. The crowd started to edge away as the cop car bounced up over the curb and gave a long, low whine out of its siren.

I took off my windbreaker and gave it to Gene. He pulled off his jacket and threw it down. “Get the fuck out of here,” I said. “Beat it.”

“I took the wheels off his little red wagon,” said Gene. “It don’t pull so good now.” His hands were shaking and so was his voice. He hadn’t had half enough yet. “I remember that other guy,” he said. “Where’s his friend?”

I gave him a shove. “Get going.” Gene slid into the crowd that was slipping quickly away. Then I remembered his hockey jacket. It was wet with blood. It also had flashes with his name and number on it. It wouldn’t take no Sherlock Holmes cop to figure out who’d beat on Marvin. I picked it up and hugged it to my belly. Right away I felt something hard in the pocket. Hard and round. I started to walk away. I heard a car door slam. I knew what was in that pocket. The controversial four ball old Gene had palmed when he pretended to put it back. He likes to win.

I must have been walking too fast or with a guilty hunch to my shoulders, because I heard the cop call, “Hey you, the kid with the hair.” Me, I’m kind of a hippy for this place, I guess. Lots of people mention my hair.

I ran. I scooted round the corner of the supermarket and let that pool ball fly as hard as I could, way down the alley. I never rifled a shot like that in my life. If coach Al had seen me trigger that baby he’d have strapped me into a belly pad himself. Of course, a jacket don’t fly for shit. The bull came storming around the corner just as I give it the heave-ho. I was kind of caught with shit on my face, if you know what I mean?

Now a guy with half a brain could have talked his way out of that without too much trouble. Even a cop understands how somebody would try to help his brother. They don’t hold it too much against you. And I couldn’t really protect Gene. That geek Marvin would have flapped his trap if I hadn’t. And it wasn’t as if I hadn’t done old Gene
some
good. After all, they never found out about that pool ball. The judge would have pinned Gene’s ears back for him if he’d known he was going around thwacking people with a hunk of shatter-proof plastic. So Gene came out smelling like a rose, same suspended sentence as me, and a reputation for having hands of stone.

But at a time like that you get the nuttiest ideas ever. I watched them load Marvin in a squad car to drive him to the hospital while I sat in the back seat of another. And I thought to myself:
I’ll play along with this. Let the old man come down to the cop shop over me for once. Me he takes for granted. Let him worry about Billy for a change. It wouldn’t hurt him
.

So I never said one word about not being the guy who hopped Marvin. It was kind of fun in a crazy way, making like a hard case. At the station I was real rude and lippy. Particularly to a sergeant who was a grade A dink if I ever saw one. It was only when they took my shoe-laces and belt that I started to get nervous.

“Ain’t you going to call my old man?” I asked.

The ass-hole sergeant gave me a real smile. “In the morning,” he said. “All in good time.”

“In the morning?” And then I said like a dope: “Where am I going to sleep?”

“Show young Mr. Simpson where he’s going to sleep,” said the sergeant. He smiled again. It looked like a ripple on a slop pail. The constable who he was ordering around like he was his own personal slave took me down into the basement of the station. Down there it smelled of stale piss and old puke. I kind of gagged. I got a weak stomach.

Boy, was I nervous. I saw where he was taking me. There were four cells. They weren’t even made out of bars. Just metal strips riveted into a cross hatch you couldn’t stick your hand through. They were all empty.

“Your choice,” said the corporal. He was real humorous too, like his boss.

“You don’t have to put me in one of them, sir,” I said. “I won’t run away.”

“That’s what all the criminals say.” He opened the door. “Entrez-vous.”

I was getting my old crazy feeling really bad. Really bad. I felt kind of dizzy. “I got this thing,” I said, “about being locked up. It’s torture.”

“Get in.”

“No – please,” I said. “I’ll sit upstairs. I won’t bother anybody.”

“You think you’ve got a choice? You don’t have a choice. Move your ass.”

I was getting ready to cry. I could feel it. I was going to bawl in front of a cop. “I didn’t do it,” I said. “I never beat him up. Swear to Jesus I didn’t.”

“I’m counting three,” he said, “and then I’m applying the boots to your backside.”

It all came out. Just like that. “
It was my fucking ass-hole brother Gene
!” I screamed. The only thing I could think of was, if they put me in there I’ll be off my head by morning. I really will.
“I didn’t do nothing! I never do nothing! You can’t put me in there for him!”

They called my old man. I guess I gave a real convincing performance. Not that I’m proud of it. I actually got sick on the spot from nerves. I just couldn’t hold it down.

Pop had to sign for me and promise to bring Gene down in the morning. It was about twelve-thirty when everything got cleared up. He’d missed his shift and his ride in the cage.

When we got in the car he didn’t start it. We just sat there with the windows rolled down. It was a beautiful night and there were lots of stars swimming in the sky. This town is small enough that street-lights and neon don’t interfere with the stars. It’s the only thing I like about this place. There’s plenty of sky and lots of air to breathe.

“Your brother wasn’t enough,” he said. “You I trusted.”

“I only tried to help him.”

“You goddamn snitch.” He needed somebody to take it out on, so he belted me. Right on the snout with the back of his hand. It started to bleed. I didn’t try to stop it. I just let it drip on those goddamn furry seat-covers that he thinks are the cat’s ass. “They were going to put me in this place, this cage, for him, for that useless shit!” I yelled. I’d started to cry. “No more, Pop. He failed! He failed on top of it all! So is he going to work? You got the boots ready on the back step? Huh? Is he going down in the fucking cage?”

“Neither one of you is going down in the cage. Not him, not you,” he said.

“Nah, I didn’t think so,” I said, finally wiping at my face with the back of my hand. “I didn’t think so.”

“I don’t have to answer to you,” he said. “You just can’t get inside his head. You were always the smart one. I didn’t have to worry about you. You always knew what to do. But Gene …” He pressed his forehead against the steering-wheel, hard. “Billy, I see him doing all sorts of stuff. Stuff you can’t imagine. I see it until it makes me sick.” He looked at me. His face was yellow under the street-light, yellow like a lemon. “I try so hard with him. But he’s got no sense. He just does things. He could have killed that other boy. He wouldn’t even think of that, you know.” All of a sudden the old man’s face got all crumpled and creased like paper when you ball it up. “What’s going to happen to him?” he said, louder than he had to. “What’s going to happen to Eugene?” It was sad. It really was.

I can never stay mad at my old man. Maybe because we’re so much alike, even though he can’t see it for looking the other way. Our minds work alike. I’m a chip off the old block. Don’t ever doubt it.

“Nothing.”

“Billy,” he said, “you mean it?”

I knew what he was thinking. “Yes,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

Going to Russia

“A
NOTHER
of your letters arrived at my house yesterday,” the doctor announces. “That makes four now.” He says this in a colourless, insipid voice, in the way he says most things.

It is only the significant pause which follows that alerts me I am expected to respond, and distracts my attention from the scene outside his office window. For several minutes I have been watching two children as they tramp stiffly off into the distance. They lead me to think of my daughter, and to wonder if she misses my visits.

Here, we are on the outskirts of the city, where the new suburbs dwindle into prairie, and prairie into winter sky. The children, stuffed into bulky snowsuits, totter along, their arms stiffly extended like tiny astronauts foraging on the frozen cinder of a spent star.

Suburban tots often come to explore these splendid spaces. I have navigated them too, in my imagination, warm behind a double pane of glass. I find it strange that this blank sweep of land terrifies some of my fellow inmates and that they feel the need to keep their blinds down night and day. I like it. It makes me think of Russia.

“Yes?” I say finally, a little late, but nevertheless meaning to politely encourage him.

“Mr. Caragan, I thought when we met last Wednesday we agreed there would be no more letters.”

The man has me there. But I am an impulsive fellow and that was Wednesday. By Thursday I felt I owed him some kind of explanation as to what had moved me to write the first three letters. “That’s true,” I admit, “that was the understanding.”

“But?”

I shrug.

Dr. Herzl spreads a sheet of paper on his desk. His fingers rub diligently at the fold marks. When he is satisfied everything is shipshape, he begins to read to himself. I note a barely perceptible flicker in his upper lip. When he finishes, he looks up at me sharply. An old tactic that I recognize immediately. “This doesn’t make much sense to me,” he says.

“No?”

“Excuse me,” he says, pausing. “I’m not a critic.…” The doctor smiles to signal me that this is an offering from his store of inexhaustible wit. “But I find your language rather … formal, stilted,” he says at last, finding the words he wants. “As if you are under great strain, as if you are trying to keep a lid on your feelings when you write me these letters.” He searches the page. “For instance, there’s this: ‘I answer in writing because my thought will thus be more fully expressed, and more distinctly perceived, like a sound amid silence.’ Doesn’t that sound a bit unusual to you?”

“There’s quotation marks around that.”

“Pardon?”

“I didn’t write that. There’s quotation marks around that.”

“Oh.” The doctor hesitates. “Who
did
write it then?”

“Mikhail Osipovich Gershenzon.”

A doubtful look passes over his face. He suspects me of pulling his leg. Dr. Herzl considers me a great joker, albeit an unbalanced, a lunatic one.

“It’s true,” I assure him.

“I am not familiar …”

“So who is? But then, you don’t need to be,” I say. “I explained it all in the letter. It’s all in there. I used Gershenzon as an example. I was trying to help you see why I write –”

I am interrupted. “Yes, I’m sure. But you understand – fourteen pages in your tiny handwriting – I only skimmed it.”

“Of course.” I don’t know whatever led me to believe he would profit from the story of the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence. Or that anyone else would, for that matter. When I told Janet, who is young, an artist, and believes herself to be in possession of a sensitive soul, about the series of letters exchanged between Gershenzon and Viacheslav Ivanovitch Ivanov while they recuperated in a rest-home in Russia, she said: “I don’t get it. What’s a corner-to-corner correspondence?”

“It was called that because each of the correspondents was in opposite corners of the same room. That’s why it was called the Corner-to-Corner Correspondence,” I said, ending my obvious explanation lamely.

“They couldn’t talk? What was it, throat cancer?”

“No, as I said before, these guys were poets, philosophers, men of letters. Remember?” I prodded. “It was just that they felt more comfortable, surer of themselves, when writing. They had time to reflect on what they wanted to say, to test their ideas. To compose.”

“That’s the weirdest thing I ever heard – writing to someone in the same room,” she said. “That sort of thing just gets in the way of real feelings. It’s a kind of mask to hide who you really are, and what you’re all about.”

That was her final judgment, and from Janet’s considered decisions there is no appeal, as I have learned to my sorrow. Still, I was almost in love, and at that precarious point one imagines it is important to be understood. So at our next planned meeting, two days later, I took along with me a passage I had copied from one of Gershenzon’s letters. It was to demonstrate to her the subtleties which are the province of the written word, and, more importantly, to signal her what was going on in my mind.

“You see, honey,” I said, trying to explain what Gershenzon meant to me, “he felt out of step with things going on around him. He might have said to old Ivanov: ‘Viacheslav, what’s the matter with me? I don’t feel I belong, I don’t feel right. Why is it I don’t think what other people think, or feel what other people say they feel?’ He could have put it that way. He could have, but he didn’t. What he did do was write:

This is the life I lead by day. But on a deeper level of consciousness I lead a different life. There, an insistent, persistent, hidden voice has been saying for years: No, no, this is not it! Some other kind of will in me turns away in misery and distaste from all of culture, from all that is being said and done around me. It finds all this tedious and vain, like a struggle of phantoms flailing away in a void; it seems to know another world, to foresee a different life, not yet to be found on earth but which will come and cannot fail to come, for only then will true reality be achieved. To me this voice is the voice of my real self. I live like a foreigner acclimatized in an alien land; the natives like me and I like them. I diligently work for their good, share their sorrows and rejoice in their joys, but at the same time I know that I am a stranger, I secretly long for the fields of my homeland, for its different spring, the smell of its flowers, and the way its women speak. Where is my homeland? I shall never see it, I shall die in foreign parts.

Of course, when I looked up from the page, it was only to discover that Janet had gone to the bathroom to apply her contraceptive foam.

“I hear that you’re still refusing to see your wife,” says Dr. Herzl, introducing a new topic.

“That’s not entirely true. I said I wouldn’t see her alone. If she brings our daughter with her, well, that’s a different story.”

“Why won’t you speak with your wife alone?”

“I explained that in my second letter –”

“Why don’t you explain it to me now. Face to face, without the pretences of these letters.” There is a measure of asperity in the good doctor’s voice. From the very beginning I knew he didn’t like me. I do not have a confessional nature and he holds that against me.

I stare back stolidly.

“Is it because you’re ashamed? Is that why you won’t allow your wife to visit?”

“Yes.” There is little harm in agreeing with him. He has made up his mind on this point long ago.

“Ashamed of what? Your affair? Or what you did at the gallery?”

Why not? “Both,” I affirm, blithely shouldering a double load, the tawdry fardels of sexual guilt.

“Speaking of the gallery,” says Dr. Herzl, “your wife agrees with me. She believes that the depiction of the penis was what triggered the incident there.”

“She does, does she?”

“She thinks you felt it was undersized. She says you’re prone to read a disproportionate significance into that sort of thing.”

This is so like Miriam that I offer no complaint against this preposterous interpretation of my actions. I had my reasons.

Dr. Herzl clears his throat. “How am I to understand your silence?”

“The suggestion is too silly to grace with a comment.”

“How did you feel when you did it?”

“Cold.”

“I see,” says the doctor, letting his fingers wander through the paper on his desk. “Well, I believe we’ve made some progress. We’ve begun to talk to one another, at any rate. Now is as good a time to stop as any.” He closes my file. Perhaps the fact that it bulges with my correspondence reminds him. “You do see that writing letters is a way of avoiding the problem?” he asks hopefully.

“I want to see my daughter. You tell Miriam to bring Cynthia here.”

“I’m sorry,” says Dr. Herzl. “Mrs. Caragan says that would be impossible.”

In my room I lie down on my bed and speculate how Miriam is making out. I know she is not starving. I am on full salary while incapacitated. The teachers’ federation knows how to negotiate a collective agreement, and insanity is paid its rich deserts.

As far as the other things go – the neighbours’ whispers, the long, woeful faces of acquaintances – the proud prow of Miriam’s clipper can cleave those mundane waters. And her real friends, the ones that never liked me, will be intent on keeping her busy, or, as they would prefer, “involved.”

For a number of years I was “involved” too. Miriam demanded it. She was terribly concerned that we didn’t trade our ideals for a mortgage, that we didn’t become ordinary people. The flight from ordinariness kept me on a pretty strenuous schedule. I’d get home from the high school where I teach something called social studies just in time to grab a cheese sandwich and receive a briefing while the paint dried on my placard. Then we’d all load into a Volkswagen van owned by a troll with a social conscience, a short, hairy guy who made pieces of knotty-pine furniture capacious and sturdy enough to stand up to hard use by the giants I assumed were his clients, and drive off to let our opinions be known.

But about four years ago, when Miriam and I were fighting about Cynthia, and I was drinking even more than I was just before I got tossed in here, I gave up being involved and began my own journey; and there is no way that I’m going to give Miriam the chance to coax me back to Canada, now that I’m safely here, on the borders of Russia.

There’s an irony, too, in how my travels began. They commenced at one of Miriam’s protest rallies. About a dozen lonely souls were picketing a Liberal Fund-Raising Dinner – the reason why I now fail to recollect. It was the usual dispirited occasion. I was a little drunk and bored. The cars kept pulling up to the front of the hotel and discharging Liberals who slunk tight-lipped through our righteous gauntlet. One particularly incensed woman of our number kept demanding to know whether the Liberals were dining on macaroni and cheese that night. “Are you?” she shrilled in their faces. “Are you eating macaroni and cheese tonight?” The implication being that her own feisty spirit was sustained solely on that starchy, plebeian fuel.

It was all going more or less our way until a large, ruddy, drunk, middle-aged Liberal turned a passionate eye on our assembly. He was very angry. He seemed to have missed the point about macaroni and cheese. He thought we were objecting to our country! “Hey, you bastards!” he bellowed, while his wife tried to drag him into the lobby. “I love my country! I love Canada!” he yelled, actually striking his chest with his fist. “And if you don’t, why don’t you get out!
Why don’t you go to Russia if you don’t like it here?”

The poor man’s obvious sincerity touched me as much as his logic bewildered me. Why did he presume those people had any interest in going to Russia? Didn’t he know it was
Sweden
they wanted to get to? Volvos, guiltless sex, Bergman films, functional furniture. Hey, I wanted to shout back, these people would prefer Sweden! And realizing for the first time where my wife and her friends were bound, I admitted I didn’t want to go along. I was the one the gentleman was addressing. Although at the time I didn’t know my longing was for Russia.

Oh, not the Russia he meant. Not Soviet Russia. But nineteenth-century Russia, the Russia of Dostoevsky’s saintly prostitutes and Alyosha; of Tolstoy’s Pierre; and Aksionov, the sufferer in “God Sees the Truth But Waits.” A country where the characters in books were allowed to ask one another the questions: How must I live to be happy? What is goodness? Why does man suffer? What is to be done?

I had set a timid foot on that Eurasian continent years ago when, as a student in a course on European literature in translation, I had read some of the Russian masters. I returned because I was unhappy and because I sensed that only in Russia does unhappiness find a meaning. Like Aksionov, who suffered in place of the real murderer and thief, I felt a hundred times worse, a hundred times more guilt. I don’t suppose I let it show much. I punished Miriam by putting our daughter’s framed photograph on the end table, by drinking too much, and by being rude to people she wished desperately to impress.

Still, I was faithful to her in a purely technical sense until I met Janet several months ago. Janet is a young artist who supports herself as a substitute teacher; we met in the staff-room of my high school. At the end of that particular day, a bitterly cold one late in November, I spotted her waiting at the bus stop, looking hypothermic in the kind of tatty old fur coat creative people buy at Salvation Army thrift stores. I offered her a ride. She, in turn, when I had driven her home, offered me coffee.

I think it was the splendour of the drawings and paintings lending life to her old, decaying, high-ceilinged apartment that attracted me to her. Perhaps I felt she could salvage any wreck and breathe life into it, as she had that apartment.
Here
, I thought, gazing at the fire on her walls,
is a Russian soul
.

I asked if I could come back another day to make a purchase. She assured me that I could, that she would be delighted. I returned, bought a drawing. Returned again and carried away a canvas. Simply put, one thing led to another. We became lovers. Regularly, on school-days between three-thirty and four-thirty, p.m., she screwed me with clinical detachment. If I close my eyes I can see her hard little jockey-body rocking above me, muscles strained and taut (I could pluck the cords on her neck) as she mutely galloped me hither and thither, while I snorted away under her like old Dobbin.