Sweet Affliction (8 page)

“Jesus
fuck
,” Sally said, dropping the box she held in her hands. Alex pushed past her and ran down the porch steps and through the yard, skidded on patch of wet grass, then corrected and flew past the fence. He turned down the alley and kept going. Sally took a few steps toward the fence, then turned back to Marcus.

“Well that was majorly fucked,” she said.

“Yeah,” said Marcus, who now held the rat loosely in one hand. “Poor guy.”

“Him or the rat?”

“Yeah,” said Marcus.

What happened after that was mostly unremarkable. The two of them unlatched smoothly as a key leaving a lock. Marcus moved into a bachelor apartment in a different neighbourhood, one that smelled of croissants and smoked meat. Alex stayed on at the house, converting Marcus's old room into a workshop. Marcus kept up with the house for a while; there were bonfires, there were Sunday potluck dinners. And then, eventually, there weren't. In retrospect Marcus saw a kind of beauty in their separation, a graceful parting of ways, like a river forking in two. It was how things were meant to go. There may have been a quote about it somewhere, but Marcus couldn't remember what it is.

—

The loose end of the toilet paper in the bathroom is folded into a sharp triangle. Marcus gets no small amount of pleasure from this. It's not just an aesthetic thing. The triangle's point is a guarantee of safety and cleanliness, a little contract between the hotel and the client, assuring him that his will be the first hand to touch the dangling end of the roll after the excretory act. It's a reassurance, a promissory note.

Marcus loves hotels. Since tenure-track he's discovered in himself a capacity for leisure he never knew existed. He enters a state of near-hibernation in these rooms, leaving only when required by work, venturing no further than the vending machine down the hall for sustenance. Room service, even better.

Marcus unfolds the local paper. By the time he gets to World News he's aware that he's no longer paying attention to the stories. His attention has turned wholly inward, to the process of his bowel, which seems Machiavellian as any government.

He keeps seeing the same, he hopes, silverfish running the baseboards of the room. Its head turns left and right, looking for an opening. Something so small making a decision. He folds the paper, wipes, flushes.

Standing in front of the mirror, Marcus opens a container of dental floss and reels out a length. It is dry, like a bit of tendon. Not waxed. He looks at the packaging, which is clearly marked
Waxed
. He winds one end of the floss around an index finger, and the other end finds its corresponding digit. The floss goes in between the two front teeth, the pearly whites, the all-I-want-fors, putting him in mind of sticking a hand between two sofa cushions in search of lost change. A ginger rummaging, wary of the sticky, the soft, the yielding. Give us hard and smooth only, no weak spots or cave-ins of the flesh. The floss is arid and crisp; he feels as though he is playing his teeth with a violin bow. The tune: “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window.” In G major. If the package is marked
Waxed
and the floss is palpably unwaxed, there is an alarming slippage between the sign and the signified. What could it mean?

After the bathroom ritual Marcus flops onto the bed, which is strewn with papers from the conference, and lights the second cigarette of the day. The second is always the best. The problem is the first, which is invariably awful. The difficulty is how to get to the second without the first.

He once asked Alex how he quit after a ten-year, pack-a-day habit. “Well,” Alex said, “I stopped having cigarettes.”

Marcus flips on the TV. He's in the mood for something that will relax him, his head chirping after a day of unlimited drip coffee, small talk and panels where colleagues ten years his junior presented papers whose brilliance made his own work seem rote. He runs his hands through his hair a few times, grateful that he still has all of it and that at thirty-seven he is still trim and energetic. So many of his fellow academics have become badger-like, soft-bellied creatures squinting behind their wire-rimmed glasses.

He finds a rerun of
ImmigRaces
, an old favourite at his former house. Part gladiator-style sporting event, part reality show, part helpful civic contribution,
ImmigRaces
took place on the grounds of the old closed-down Hippodrome. Illegal immigrants discovered by undercover police squads would be turned over to the producers of the Races, where they would be housed in barracks underneath the stadium and made to participate in a series of challenges. These ranged from obstacle courses involving pools of oatmeal and grease-coated rope swings to the devouring of live insects to recitations of hour-long oaths of allegiance from memory, in both official languages. The winner of each season's competition was granted citizenship for himself and his family. Second prize was a ticket home.

“This show is so formulaic,” Alex once said. As though it was a bad thing. But the best stories are the formulaic ones, the ones where you know what's going to happen next but you watch anyway, to have that itch rubbed out, to pour full the empty glass in your head.

The show cuts to commercial. Marcus watches as a bumbling dad forgets his kid's birthday, accidentally beheads her stuffed teddy, and shrinks her blanky in the wash. When it looks like things are about to go completely off the cliff, he grinningly pulls a bag of cotton-candy-flavoured chips out of a grocery bag. There is a joyous reunion, with hugging and giggles and one well-aimed shining wink at the camera. Marcus stares at the TV, and then at the bag of cotton-candy-flavoured chips beside him. If he needed confirmation, this is it. He is the centre of the universe.

Marcus opens his phone. It's two hours later where Abby is so she should be just getting into bed, wearing her long blue cotton nightgown with the lace around the neck. She'll be reading something, a biography of an old film star maybe. Her face will be damp and sticky with night cream, her skin warm, except for her feet, which even in the July heat will be cool and dry to the touch.

“Hi babe,” she says in his ear.

“Hey,” he says, sighing more than he intends to.

“Go okay today?”

“Yeah, you know how it is. Another day, another dollar.”

“Fourteen hours on snowshoes and wish you had pie?” She completes the Dillard quote for him.

“Mmm, pie,” he says. “Yeah actually it was good. About a dozen people showed up, including the chair of the cultural studies department. She came and talked to me after, said she thought my work showed promise.”

They talk more about his presentation, he asks after the kids, who are fine and asleep, and then Abby says she has to go, there's a segment on CBC's
Ideas
that she wants to listen to.

“'Night, love,” she says.

“Don't forget about me.”

“Jamais.”

He rolls over onto his stomach, brushing crumbs from the broadloom comforter. He opens the phone again.

When Sally answers she sounds less than thrilled to hear him.

“Have you been watching the Moving Day coverage?” she says.

“Yeah,” Marcus lies. “Crazy stuff.” He might not have watched this time but he knows the drill, it's regular as payday.

“So you saw Alex,” she says. Marcus sits up. “When,” he says, “on TV?”

“Yes, on TV.”

“I must have missed that part.”

“Uh-huh,” says Sally. “Anyway he's in detention, me and some others are going to the solidarity demo tonight. You should come.”

“I'm in Alberta,” he says.

“Oh, well never mind then.” As though he's told her he's at the grocery store.

“Sally,” he says.

“Yeah?” Something in her voice, some tone beyond generic encouragement makes him go on.

“How's your. You know, the…”

“Multiple sclerosis?”

“Yeah, sorry.”

“Slowly eating away at my nervous system,” Sally says. A puff of air comes out of Marcus's nose. “No, sorry,” she says, “I'm a jerk. It's fine. No new lesions. I'm not a babbling mess yet.”

“No more so than usual, anyway,” says Marcus, and Sally chuckles.

“Remember that time we dressed up as zombies and tried to get kicked out of the bank?” he says. “Alex was screaming ‘class war,' but instead of arresting us they just laughed and said we were right?”

“Yeah,” she says, distant. “That was nice.”

“We should do that again sometime.”

“Sure.”

What was it Alex had said when Sally was diagnosed? “It's pointless to think about people as healthy or sick. There's only the sick and the not-yet-sick.” “That's pretty grim,” Marcus had said. “I actually find it quite freeing,” said Alex. “We're all in it together.” But Marcus would take solitude over that kind of company.

“Sally, how is he? I mean actually?”

“Oh you know. Fine. Depressed. Fine. Still working at the call centre. Dating a teenager.”

“Really?”

“Well he's twenty-one.”

“How come gays can do that and no one bats an eye,” says Marcus, “but if I did it I'd get in trouble?”

“It's called patriarchy, Marcus.”

“Yeah yeah yeah,” he says. He sees the silverfish, or one of its relatives, circling the rim of the light fixture. “Sally,” he says, “just because I'm not calling doesn't mean I'm not thinking about you.”

“Okay. I gotta go.”

“Yeah,” he says. “Bye.”

Depression has no needs, Marcus thinks. It makes no demands, requires nothing. All it wants is for you to stay in bed, staring at the light fixture in a hotel room. It is the opposite of hunger, the opposite of addiction. The more powerful it is the less it asks of you.

The phone rings. Marcus flips it open. “Hello,” he says, “hello, hello.” But all he hears is the sound of the inside of Sally's pocket. He listens. It sounds like the ocean.

He hadn't done anything out of the ordinary, he knew this. It was rather a kindness, a favour to an old friend. If Alex didn't understand at the time then surely he did now. And any bad feelings he harboured must be diluted by the sea of time that had passed, a sea that had carried Marcus here, to this hotel, this room, this bed. He knew that there was no such thing as wrong and right, only content and less content. And he was content. Content enough.

It hadn't taken long to find a good recipe. CO2 could be created with baking soda and vinegar, and according to the website it was effective within twelve to twenty minutes. The subject sleeps, and after that his heart and respiratory system go dark.

Using a shoebox, some duct tape, and a long twirling gag-straw he found at the dollar store, Marcus had constructed an airtight chamber, except for the straw, which piped into a Mason jar with a hole punched in the lid. The whole works looked like it might have been created during a game of Hangman of the Absurd.

In Alex's room, Marcus saw that Oates had pushed all of his wood chips up against one side of his cage. He was crouched atop the beige heap, his disproportionately large balls pressed up against the wire. His sides pulsed minutely as he breathed. Marcus stuck a finger through the cage and touched his nose. Oates didn't move. Marcus squatted down so he was level with Oates' snouty face. He reached around and poked the rodent's bald sack with a fingernail.

“Neep,” went Oates.

“Neep,” went Marcus.

He opened the cage and reached in for the small white form, withdrew his hand, careful not to press too hard against the throbbing sides. In the warmth left by the rat's body he put a note, next to which he would lay poor Oates when it was over and the rats were joined again:

Cast a cold Eye

On Life, on Death.

Horseman, pass by!

But that was so long ago.

Maitland

Yes, Frieda had met Maitland before. Or she knew his name. He was one of those men who was always called by his last name, probably even as an adolescent. In some cases this is done out of respect, in others out of condescension; occasionally the name just seems to fit. His first name was something forgettable and childish, like Kevin or Matt. So he was Maitland.

His two-year-old daughter straddled his neck, playing with his tufty black hair. He was plump and squinted, his hair receding but not thinning. A decent-looking man, one who would never run the risk of ugliness or beauty with some strong, striking facial feature. He would pass gently into middle and old age, Frieda thought, his round, somewhat sly face a reassurance to his wife and friends, who would always see the Maitland they knew in it.

He had spoken directly to Frieda only once during the Seder, to make a comparison between the
afikoman
, which is split in two, and the holy trinity, which is split in three but still indivisible.

“See, what my family did,” Frieda said, “our tradition was for the
kids
to hide the matzah and the
parents
to look for it.” This as Maitland's son Maurice was being coached to find the hidden afikoman with cries of “warm… warmer… warmer… cold! Freezing cold!”

“And every year we'd spend ages finding the perfect hiding spot. Once we wrapped it in a sandwich baggie and put it in the toilet tank. I can't remember where else,” Frieda said. “Anyway, every year the same thing happened, which was that when it came time for them to look for the afikoman, our parents would just pay us off to go find it for them.” A round of clapping and cheers went up as Maurice tentatively grasped the edge of the cloth that held the afikoman, which was poking out from under a sofa cushion.

“I just thought it was funny,” Frieda said, “that every year we acted like this time really for real the parents were going to look for it, even though we had absolutely no evidence they would.”

“Such is the nature of belief,” Rachel said.