The Adjustment League (25 page)

In a short time, without any sign of anger or protest from the guy, they hug and kiss, mostly air, and he goes to his car parked a little way up, gets in and drives away. She waves from the front step as he leaves, then enters her, perhaps formerly their, home.

I stay a little longer by the maple, liking it there. Spying what we called
good climbers
just above my head—stout horizontal boughs arranged in comfortable rungs—and wishing I had the spryness to ascend.

Wrapping my head around the fact—which feels like unsettling confirmation more than news—that I'm less than a five-minute walk from where I was twenty-four hours ago, sitting with my back to a gravestone—and about the same distance from home.

16

8:30. Green light
blinking when I come in from the balcony. Chill hours out there felt endless. No sleep, no stairs. Dawn finally grudging a view of Latimer brick, the brown-orange of a scab. The firehouse door, the sun finding it from over Shoppers, the bright red that wells when the scab's torn off. But not flowing—halted instantly at the moment of trauma's gush. No scabbing, healing over, scarring—just an ever-fresh picture of bleeding. Never opening, not once through the long night. No sirens. I plug in and listen.

“Dr. Wyvern will see you at his home at—”

“No, Gwen, fucking hell, not this—” The voice continuing imperturbably through my outburst. I'm growling at a machine. I play it back again, holding the receiver out from my face, the woman's voice issuing from the top bulb. End it, and jab the first six numbers of the office, before I stop and slam the phone into the cradle. Bang—plastic hurting plastic.

Dunbar Road
. The address fits. A bit rich maybe for a normal dentist, even a busy one, but not for one flipping condos since his twenties, and with who knows what family money on top of that. An inheritance from his father, gifts before… Normally, one might think, the husband of a woman institutionalized with a chronic condition would leave all the funds for her unforeseeable care costs, let the children wait and split what's left when she passes. But “normal” goes out the window when the husband's willing to pack his wife away after a suicide attempt. A man like that—good at putting awkward things out of sight, paying for quality locks to keep them there—might just decide her care was worth exactly so much, set it aside for Max and Sandor to mind, and let the kids play with the rest.

Not the kids. The boys. Judy was packed away long ago.

The Wyverns, through their mouthpiece Gwen, sending me down another false, if more plausible, trail? I decide not. It feels right. Sweet Rosedale scent. Ivy-coddled brick and cocktails on leather loveseats. Lois's roots. And a neighbourhood I got to know so well in the first couple of years alone, creeping up and down its streets on my searches, sensing she and Megan would heal awhile in the family nest before venturing further, that I half-believed I lived there. A sense of borrowed home even last week, stopped on one of those leafy streets for the first time in ages.

A city of neighbourhoods
. More than an empty civic slogan once you know Toronto. Forest Hill, Davisville, Rosedale, Riverdale, The Beaches. Regent Park, St. James Town, Chinatown, The Annex. Yorkville, Koreatown, High Park, Bloor West, Corso Italia—just a smattering, and you haven't even left Old Toronto. Etobicoke, Scarborough, York, North York and beyond… all subdivided into their own enclaves, each with its characteristic look and feel, customs, ethnic make-up, architectural styles, street life or lack thereof, languages, codes of conduct, levels of income and aspiration. Fitted close together, some as small as a few blocks long and wide—a few steps and you're in a new zone, no passport needed.

Except—you're always stamped with where you really belong. You can visit anywhere, but any neighbourhood not closely resembling your own will clock you as an outsider. No passport is asked for because you're wearing it, speaking it, doing it. Displaying it with every move you make and don't make.

No job is truly local. All adjustments occur on foreign ground.

§

Snag's in a place I've never found him before, the corner of Dundas and Ossington. I'm a while tracking him down, following some false steers from other vagrants. He's sitting with his legs outstretched with his back against the wall of the TD branch across from St. Christopher House. People have to step around or over him, but he hasn't got his baseball cap or coin can out. His gaze looks glazed and muddy, his thick hair matted and greasy. Snag goes through long periods where someone meeting him might well ask why he has to be homeless. No one would ask that today. Beside him, Sammy is curled but not tightly, ears pricked, hardly shivering. A plump woman with rosacea covering her face and patches of her bare, goose-bumped arms is sitting beside them. Close enough that I assume they're together, though they don't exchange a look or word while I'm there. She's sitting cross-legged, the crotch of her gray sweat pants stretched to make a little triangular table. On it she's fiddling with a key chain, trying to fix it maybe.

“Judy?” Snag says. Seeming to come to my question, to me, from a long way off. “You mean Sandy? There's a Sandy who does hand and mouth in the park sometimes.”

Sandy
? The only connection I can make is with The Sandman, Judy's anaesthetist father. But why would Judy, who barely inhabits one name, need another?

“When I say small, I mean tiny. Four foot eleven maybe. Ninety pounds. If that. Quiet little voice, whispery—when she does speak—and almost never any expression. Moves like a ghost, sort of gliding. Spooky.”

“Yeah, I heard you the first time,” Snag says. “And spooky covers a lot of people. Including you.”

No light in his eyes, neither of hostility nor humour, and no hint of smile or challenge in his mouth, which moves like a puppet's. Dead man and straight man worlds apart.

“Strange dresses. Too long or too short.” Snag's mouth moves around the words as if he's chewing them. As if he can't quite feel his lips. “And loads of make-up. Heavy.”

“Maybe, yeah.”
In certain phases
. “It sounds like it could be.”

Snag shakes his head heavily, like it's filled with sand. “Don't think so, man. Your girl hasn't showed up.”

A bank employee opens the glass door and approaches, timidly but with obvious intent. I don't stay to watch.

§

Lucius knocks on my door at 6:00, just as I'm about to go down and ask if we can move Jared's session up a bit in view of my appointment at 8:00.
The car
, I think when I open the door, but Lucius looks too uncomfortable.

“Jared doesn't feel well. Maybe getting a bit sick. He says they give him a lot of homework today. So maybe better skip tonight. Okay?”

Unpracticed at lying, Lucius gives me both excuses he and Lucy considered, forgetting to run with just one. But the glances he flicks at the splintered jamb tell me the real reason he and Lucy would rather keep Jared at home and away from me.
Only yesterday you let creeps in to harass people and break things
. Time plays ever more fantastic tricks when you stop sleeping. Everything happens in the same instant, an instant that can last eternities. Yesterday morning, later tonight, finding Maude and Judy eleven days ago—these don't stretch out on a string in sequence, but jumble and compress into something more like an atom, elementary particles zipping and jumping shells, trading places and energies, popping into and out of existence in a mostly empty zone of forces and probabilities.

§

Leaving just after 7:00, I find Jared waiting for me on the third-floor landing. Lucy is doing the laundry down the hall. Jared pretends he was just doing his homework while waiting to help her fold. He's a demon folder, able to turn fabrics of any size and shape into perfect rectangles.

“Don't you want to know how a prisoner escapes?” With his squinting frown, as if
I
cancelled the lesson.

“Of course. Have you figured out a way?”

“I
always
knew the way. I created the dungeon.”

He hands me his writing book and pencil and we finish “The Bone Dungeon” that way, sitting side by side on the top stair. This time, I refrain from asking questions until the end.

if you follow the trails made by the birds long enough you will hear a strange scrunching sound it is a very strange sound of quiet munching and also soft slithering like a snake but much slower and heavier like something very big and wet moving slowly over the floor you may also notice that the floor of the cave is wet and sticky with a kind of slimy clear glue under your feet this is from the snail who you will now meet he is in a clearing with many broken bones he is very large about the size of a lion or small bear he looks like a normal snail with horns and little eyes and stripes on his neck but what is very peculiar is that he has no shell his back is the same as the rest of him the snail lives on tiny green lichen that grows everywhere on the walls and floor of the bone dungeon the lichen is microscopic that is why everyone just sees bare stone and is starving or else breaking clear bones to drink drops of nourishment it is also why everyone is trying to escape but the snail has never tried to escape and has lived there forever when he hears you approach he will stop feeding and ask you one question do you eat other animals if you say yes he will lower his head and start feeding again and you will wander forever and never leave the cave if you say no he will show you the way out and you can return to where you live

“Are you going to give some more details about the escape? How the prisoner gets out? Where he has to go or what he has to do?”

Jared looks pained. He always does, more or less, even when he's smiling, but certain questions seem to intensify his suffering.
Disabled
, or
learning disabled
, is a strange term to apply to him—a crude approximation at best—when his difficulty seems more like one of translation, not just of words but of thoughts and feelings. Of constantly meeting people from another world, or many other worlds, and struggling to find crude signs and gestures that will allow some sort of rudimentary exchange.

“Getting out is easy,” he says. “There is nothing hard or interesting about it. The only difficult thing is answering the snail's question.”

§

On Elm, half a block before Dunbar, the Honda quits on me. There's no warning, no sluggish churning, the engine just stops and I coast to a spot at the curb. I try several times but can't restart it. There's a brief buzzing sound the first time I try, and then no sound at all, just a click as I turn the key in its slot. I sit there, sighting down a double colonnade of old shade trees, their massy tops halfway to meeting above the street. Streetlights peeping companionably through them, like the warm yellow eyes of animals through ivy and sculpted shrubbery.

Peaceful. Nobody on the street. Occasional surf of cars from Sherbourne behind me.

What do I want? What can I get?
Sitting in the dead car, I try to arrange the answers in my head. But they keep sliding out of sight—I'll think I have a firm plan and then it will slither into shadow, its edges running.

On the one hand, Wyvern money. Lots of it. On the other, the family's determination not to let Judy get her hands on any of it. The family, or just Max? He's the one with women problems—stick-fuls proving that. His balk at the figure of two hundred thousand—more than bargaining incredulity, it seemed. Would rather go to jail than enrich his sister. Of course, he doesn't know jail. Still…

Fifty thousand, I think finally. A cheque to Judy tonight, which I put in an account for her tomorrow. Salt it away before he's in stir. But how does Judy keep it—
or you keep your
freedom
—when Max, with nothing more to lose, starts howling extortion? Unknown.
But if you can…

Set it up with Ken so she draws down two hundred and fifty a month, say. Not much, but a lot to Judy. Better food, some treats.
How does a ghost treat herself?
Or maybe siphon off a bit of the principal, enough to kick it up to five hundred—until her OAS starts, five years or so from now.

Maybe—the best idea yet—get it in your name and parcel it out to her. Regular cash gifts. Keep it from queering her benefits. Avoid mad splurges.
How does a ghost splurge?

Which means you keep on looking after her. An adjustment that keeps on adjusting. Commitment, people call it. Relationship.

There's a thought
.

§

Flagstone walk—worn, with grass-moss strips anchoring the irregular shapes, like lead in stained glass—between neat hedges and flower beds. That warm yellow light flowing out from behind curtains through diamond-mullioned panes. Dark beams in stucco facing. The roof's low-slung, generous overhang completes the home's secluded, cottagey feel. Classy but understated. Cosy. I could be arriving for scones with Bilbo Baggins, rather than to shake down a perverted dentist who drugs young women and poses them in freak-porn shots.

I ring the bell beside the blond oak door.

“Dr. Wyvern?”

“No other,” says the very tall, very old man with his hand on the jamb. Thin, distinguished-looking: dark slacks, cream shirt, gray cardigan. No glasses, despite his age.

“That's funny. You're the second one I've met this week.”

“Max Junior is a
dentist
.”

“Someone should tell him. He's got
Dr.
on his office door,
Dr.
on his business cards.
Dr.
on his bills, no doubt.”

A long stare of appraisal ends in a thin smile. “Come in. I think we might be able to reach an understanding.”

“I'm sure of it.”

We're involved in a courtly dance from the start. Max Senior is a charmer, he makes it seem natural. Knows the steps and knows how to lead without insisting. Without any feeling of oddness or displacement, I find myself being welcomed by a man I never suspected was alive until a minute ago. Shrugging out of my coat, which I seldom remove outside No Name, watching him hang it in the front closet. Removing my shoes and sliding my feet into a pair of soft slippers waiting in a row of different sizes. When I straighten, he's eyeing me somewhat quizzically, with what may only be the mild puzzlement the wealthy sometimes feel in the presence of the poor. He's extremely tall. It's rare for eyes to meet mine straight on, unless they belong to a professional basketball player. I'm sure it's never happened with someone in his mid-nineties. Without apparent effort, he stands erect, shoulders back, no stooping. A Nordic face. Long and lean as the rest of him. Max von Sydow in
Three Days of the Condor
, except Max Wyvern Sr. still has a full head of hair, blond gone white, with platinum gleams in places, combed back with water. He doesn't look like any of his three children. Max Jr. would come closest, but besides having a more powerful build, the old man has stronger features, dominated by a Roman nose that would do a senator's marble bust proud.