Seeing Red (17 page)

THIRTY

It's midday and we're relaxing on patio chairs overlooking a beach on Lake Huron. Neither Karen nor Charlie ask me about my swollen eye upon meeting me. Maybe they think it's a birthmark. Charlie barbecues hamburgers and hotdogs on the deck and offers me a beer, but I decline, opting for water instead. Doc happily takes the beer. We also snack on a bag of cheese curds we bought from a farm and they're so fresh they squeak against my teeth. Charlie asks us about our drive to the cottage and we make small talk about how great the weather is and how the Blue Jays have been playing this season; Karen tells us their son Jacob is napping, but he'll soon wake up and come say hello.

Charlie is older than I thought he would be. Karen looks mature, even though she's only thirty years old, but he must be on the other side of forty. His hair is long and beginning to grey and his face appears tired and worn. When he speaks, his voice is calm and assured, but there's a listlessness in his eyes, like a light that's been extinguished. Still, he's friendly and talkative and seems fairly well-read. He helps us unload the car and bring our bags into the guest rooms and the inside of the cottage is larger than I imagined. There are hardwood floors and big windows and the smell of old wood and nature permeate the place. In the living room, several pieces of dusty furniture are situated around a neglected television and a few bookshelves, one of which is stacked with board games. The three of us sit at a table outside and play a game of cribbage with an antique pegboard and I manage to squeak out a victory in the first round, but Charlie wins the second round handedly. Frustrated, Doc knocks over all the pegs and refuses to partake in a rubber match. Then, in an act of defiance, he breaks the board over his knee and tosses it into the lake.

Later, while Doc is napping in his room, Charlie and I have a smoke outside on the deck while staring at the scattered waves. He's got a bottle of beer in one hand and a perfectly rolled joint in the other and he asks me if I want to partake with him.

“Thanks, but I'm alright,” I say. “I'm still recovering from last night.”

He lights the joint with a match and inhales before asking, “So, how'd you get that shiner?”

“Got punched in the face. But you should see the other guy!”

“Yeah?”

“He looks
great
.”

Charlie laughs. “You didn't get him back, huh?”

“No. I had him by the collar, but for some reason I held back.”

“Hmm. Probably for the best. It doesn't look too bad.”

“Yeah, it should heal pretty quick, maybe in a week or two.”

A few moments pass and then Charlie, perhaps in an enlightened state of mind due to the cannabis, says, “If I asked you about a midlife crisis—what do you think that is?”

Initially, I'm staggered by the question, but I can see in his eyes that he's earnest for an honest conversation. People rarely try to initiate a real dialogue with me, so I'm pleased whenever it happens. “I guess it's about regretting the decisions you've made.”

“Karen . . . she complains I'm not the same guy she married. The guy she met six years ago.”

I can't think of anything to say, so I just nod and listen.

“Let me prepare you for the midlife crisis,” he says calmly, exhaling smoke. “When you're twenty, you really don't know what you're doing. You go out, you try to have fun, you meet people, but it's all pretty aimless until you reach thirty. Then it hits you, and you start to figure it all out—who you are, what you want, where you should be. But you only
really
know for sure around the time you turn forty. The sad reality is, by that time, you're too old to act, to take advantage of what you've learned. You're kinda . . . at the mercy of the life you've already created for yourself. And
that's
where the frustration comes from. You finally know what you want, but you're no longer in a position to get it. So, do I regret the decisions I made in my twenties? No, not really. Because the truth is . . . I never really made any.”

At that moment, Karen walks through the sliding doors holding three-year-old Jacob by the hand. “Somebody wants to say hello,” she says as Jacob runs at us and leaps onto his father's lap. Charlie quickly snuffs out the joint into a nearby ashtray and cradles his son in his arms.

“Did you meet Ethan yet?”

I smile and wave at Jacob. He gawks at me.

“What happened to your eye?” he asks inquisitively.

“I got hit with a baseball.”

He points at my eyebrow.

“You're cut!”

“It was a
sharp
baseball.”

He grins and hops onto the grass and starts running around.

“Hey, Jacob, show Ethan your exercise program,” says Charlie.

Jacob looks at me with a stern expression on his face while puffing out his cheeks and extending his arms as far as they'll go. Then he starts spinning around in a circle like a top. After three seconds he gets dizzy and goes completely limp and collapses face-up on the ground. He lies there motionless a moment and then begins to giggle and we all laugh.

“Very nice,” says Charlie as he casually applauds. “He's a great kid.”

Jacob stands up and runs over to me, jumping onto my stomach and nearly knocking the wind out of me. Then he puts his arms around my neck and gives me a big hug. I don't know how to act around children; they typically make me uncomfortable because you can't swear or smoke around them and they're always noisy and shitting everywhere, but this kid seems alright. He has a nice personality and great parents and a decent chance of turning into a normal, well-adjusted human being. With his arms still gripping my neck, I give him a pat on the back and say, “Thanks, buddy. You're alright.”

He smiles and hops off my chair and runs inside.

“He's a real great kid,” Charlie repeats. “Tons of energy. Happy and smiling all the time. Never whines. The people at the daycare just love him.”

“Yeah. He's gonna do fine.”

THIRTY-ONE

I'm crouching at the edge of the guest room bed, rummaging through my backpack in search of my phone. When I find it, I'm dismayed to see the battery is nearly empty and I forgot to bring the charger. I decide to scroll through the contact list and scribble a few numbers into a notebook in case I need them later. Then I come across a new entry from last night: Sofia. I stare at it a moment and wonder who the hell Sofia is before the clouded image of her face reappears in my mind. While the memory is obscured, I can barely recall the colour of her hair and the sound of her voice and standing in front of her building as we parted ways in the early hours of the morning.

I turn off my phone and walk into Doc's room and ask him if there's a landline I can use.

“Only if it's a local call,” he answers. “I don't want my parents getting any long distance charges. They'll blame me and that's the
one
thing I stand against. Is it a local call?”

“No.”

“Fuck!” he says. “Alright.”

He shows me to an old rotary phone on a nightstand in the corner before leaving the room and closing the door behind him. I push my finger into the metal circle and turn the dial and let it roll all the way back into place and then repeat the process for ten more digits. The phone rings. Adrenaline kicks in and I'm scratching at the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Sofia? This is Ethan. I know it's kind of a weird time to call, but—”

“I'm sorry, who?”

“Ethan. From last night?”

Her voice sounds tired and desiccated, as if she's still lying in bed half-asleep. “Oh, right. Ethan.”

My initial enthusiasm begins to shrivel. “We met at that after-hours bar, I think? Then I walked you home.”

The line is silent for a moment. “Oh, yeah. I drank so much. I'm sick now. It's hard to know what I was doing.”

Well this is ironic. She barely remembers me. I guess it would be hypocritical of me to get upset. I never should have called. We'd never work in the real world anyway.

“It's cool,” I mumble nonchalantly. “Happens to me all the time. You should, uh, drink some water and sleep it off. Hopefully you'll feel better soon.”

“Okay. I'm sorry. Call me again some other time, okay?”

“Will do.”

I slowly hang up the phone. When I walk outside to the back of the cottage I find Doc sitting on the beach by himself. He's squinting at the lake and casually sipping a bottle of beer while occasionally skipping stones across the water. Heavy clouds have temporarily blocked out the sun and it looks like it might rain. I light a cigarette and take a seat on the sand beside him.

“Hey.”

“Yo. Who'd you have to call?”

“That girl from last night.”

“Oh yeah? How'd it go?”

“She's still asleep.”

“Shit, I don't blame her. We were out pretty late.”

We fall silent a moment. Doc keeps skipping stones, and they bounce once or twice along the surface of the water before getting lost in the waves. I hunch forward so that my arms are resting on my knees and say, “I was thinking about what we talked about earlier. You know, about high school.”

“What about it?”

“It was all bullshit, wasn't it? I wish I'd known. If only I could go back and tell myself, ‘Look, here's how it is. As soon as you leave this place, you'll never see any of these people ever again. They'll forget about you and you'll forget about them, so focus on what you want to do
after
school instead of wasting time worrying about girls or grades or any of that shit.' They tried to make it seem so much more important than it really was, y'know? I mean, I remember when I used to watch TV shows about kids in high school—they were all played by actors in their twenties and they hung out in restaurants all day and there were never any scenes where they were
actually
in class 'cause that'd be boring. Nobody ever had braces or breakouts or looked awkward like they do in real life and then, on Sunday mornings, they'd play those teen movies from the eighties with the sappy soundtracks. And so, after years of watching all that, I remember when I actually got to high school, I expected it to be so much better than it really was. Instead, it was just fucking
boring
. I spent most of the time staring at the clock and waiting for the day to end, or sitting on the goddamn floor
in the hallway between classes. Even on weekends we'd just drive around drinking beer and smoking cheap cigars in parking lots until one day, just like that, it was over. We graduated and we had the prom and it's supposed to be some big deal, the most important night of our lives, but Rachael and I had an awful time and it was over and done with before I knew it. We all said we'd keep in touch, but everybody kinda forgot about each other as soon as we left. I bet most of them wouldn't even remember me now. So now I'm thinking, ‘Why the hell did I care so much in the first place?' Later, I go to college, and I think, ‘Well, it's gonna be like
Animal House
,' y'know, with drunken toga parties and that song ‘Louie Louie' and all that kinda shit, and I remember I showed up at the residence on the first night, and it's a Friday night, and so I expect everybody to be getting drunk and being social, but when ten o'clock rolls around they're all just sitting in their rooms talking to their friends back home on their computers. Shit, we weren't even
allowed
to drink legally until we were nineteen, so I usually had to pay an older kid to buy me booze so I could chug two-dollar tall-boys of this disgusting ten-percent beer in my shitty dorm room, which was barely big enough to fit a mattress. So then I go looking for something better, and I move onto different cities and go to different schools, but the story is always the same, and I always end up drinking at a bar by myself. I finally get my degree only to find out it's not worth the paper it's written on because nobody gives a shit about a bachelor of arts anymore—you need a masters degree or a PhD and even
then
they might not care—they give away bachelor degrees to anyone who's got the time and money and can answer a few multiple-choice questions. So then I try to go out and get a regular job, like normal people, but nobody will hire me because I don't have any experience 'cause I just spent the last six years of my life in school trying to figure out what the hell I wanted to do. I can't even get a monkey's job at the mall because, for some reason, the piece of shit manager doesn't like the way I look, or the way I talk, or he would rather hire a pretty girl 'cause he's never been laid and he figures he might get lucky if she works for him—and he won't, by the way. Then, one day, the entire economy fucking
tanks
because some greedy assholes in the United States who I've never even met before decided to gamble with other people's money and lost it all and caused a goddamn
global
recession. Yet
those
assholes get to keep their jobs and give themselves million-dollar bonuses while I can't even get a job at the goddamn mall! Then the older generation looks at you, and they're like, ‘What's wrong with this kid?' because back in
their
day the unemployment rate was three percent and there were opportunities everywhere and you could throw a dart out a window and hit a fucking job—there was no competition from China or India and you could support an entire family on a single assembly-line income. Now, the price of gas and food and rent and tuition is, like, four times higher than it was before, while wages have flatlined for decades and yet they can't understand why we have such a hard time making it. All they care about is lowering their taxes so they can drive big SUVs and go on luxury cruises and live it up before they die. I mean, seriously, if they had just
told
us to get a degree in, like, human resource management or computer sciences or something like that, I would've fucking done it! Instead they coddled us, told us we were all special, and said ‘follow your dreams' and ‘you can be anything you want to be' so go out there and be a rock star or an actor or an astronaut and it was all fucking
bullshit
! I wish one person, just one, would've taken me aside and said, ‘This is how it is. The world's different now.' So no, I don't give a shit about my ten-year reunion. I don't need to know what my friends from high school are doing because I already know
the answer. They're doing nothing. They're doing fuck-all. Nobody is. Everybody knows there's a problem, everybody knows we're heading off a goddamn cliff, but they do absolutely nothing about it. I mean, I keep waiting for something,
anything
, good to happen, but . . .”

I shake my head and look down at my feet and they're burrowed into a mound of dark brown sand. Doc peers at me with a concerned look on his face for a long time before finally saying, “Shit, dude. You want a beer?”

I pause before answering, “Yeah, I'll have one.”

He walks up the grassy path to the cottage, returning a minute later with two bottles of beer. He twists them open and tosses the caps into the sand and passes one to me.

“I was at a pub the other night talking to Nikki's friend,” I continue, “and things got a little heavy, right? And then she asked me about the meaning of life.”

“So what'd you say?”

“I told her there was no meaning. That this was all one big accident. But I've been thinking about it, and, I mean, it's true, there's no real meaning to any of this, but you can't look at it that way. You have
to create
some
kind of meaning for yourself. You need something to work toward, a reason to get up in the morning, because without one . . . you'll slowly drive yourself crazy.”

Doc nods, and then skips another rock across the water.

“Anyway, I've gotta get out of the city for a while,” I say. “I might even move somewhere else.”

“Really? What about your apartment? And school?”

“I don't think I'm gonna stay at Ryerson. Let's face it, I'm not gonna be a journalist. Nobody reads the papers anymore anyway. And as far as the apartment goes, I only have to give them two months' notice.”

“But where would you go?”

“I don't know. Maybe I'll just buy a car and live in it for a while.”

“Hmm. Like
The Road Warrior
.”

“Exactly.”

“That movie's awesome.”

“I know.”

“I love movies that are set in a post-apocalyptic world.” Then he does an impression of the deep, authoritative voice used in old action movie trailers: “
This summer
. . .
in a post-apocalyptic world
. . .
.
”

“I think it'd be kinda fun to live in one.”

“Hell yeah! You wouldn't have to do laundry anymore.”

The conversation falls silent for a moment as I snuff out my cigarette in the sand.

“Hey, Doc, let me ask you something.”

He takes a sip and waits for the question.

“What if I said I wanted to buy my car back?”

“What? Why? That thing's a ticking time bomb.”

“I know. But I need a car and—”

“No, literally, it's gonna explode. It starts to overheat anytime you go past a hundred-and-twenty. Not to mention the brakes lock up, the cigarette lighter doesn't work, and the window's broken now, thanks to you.”

“Still . . . I thought you wanted to get a new one?”

“I will. Soon. I'm trying to convince my parents to help me pay for it. I don't make enough burn money with my coffee man salary.”

“Okay, so I sold it to you for a thousand—”

“Way too much, by the way.”

“—and I'll give you eight hundred for it now.”

Doc looks at me skeptically. “You serious?

“Yeah. I need a car. And that thing's got sentimental value.”

He sighs. “Okay. Eight hundred. Deal.”

We shake hands.

“Cool. Mind if I take it for a test drive?” I ask.

“What, right now?”

“Yeah. I need to clear my head.”

He exhales slowly. “Alright,” he says reluctantly. “I'll go get the keys. Just . . . gimme another minute here.”

A few minutes later, I follow Doc across the yard and onto the gravel driveway where the Widowmaker is parked. He approaches the car and grabs onto the windshield wiper and moves it up and down, as if he were shaking its hand, saying goodbye.

“Why do you call it the Widowmaker anyway?” he asks.

“Because it's not a very intimidating car,” I say with a grin.

“This isn't official until you actually
pay
me, by the way. And you've gotta drive me to the doctor sometime this week.” He tosses me the keys. “You gonna be back in time for dinner?”