The Adjustment League (29 page)

And here, ah, yes—an addendum from 1989: Sandor, in his twenties, named Judy's alternate POA. In case the patriarch's immortality ever proved to be a myth. Maude left out of it even then.

I fold the document and put it in my pocket. Only to realize, a second later, that that changes nothing. Another copy sits in a lawyer's office. Probably in a safety deposit box as well. No matter. I want to have it.

In some way, reading it brings a bitter relief. A kind of vindication even. It demonstrates, in the only slightly faded black ink of a 1972 typewriter, what I have always known and understood perfectly. Judy forfeited her right to family membership by becoming mentally ill. She forfeited her right to citizenship by the same mistake.

Upstairs, looking down again at the dead man, a surge of the bad rage, the fogging kind.

You got off too damn easy
. Maude losing her mind slowly, in a series of institutions. Like being eaten alive by ants. Likewise Judy, starting long before. Max and Vivian, who deserve no pity, facing a long battle to keep their sanity in a prison cell, after a long and costly battle to stay out of one. And Sandor—as always the question mark, the one I can't decide about. His role in all this? The grieving eyes above the glass say victim more than perp to me—though no law says you can't be both. Either way, wherever he finds himself, he'll go on being swamped. Will break down and rally, break down and rally. What did he call it?
Death by a thousand paper cuts.
One of the many entries where Maude's plight segues quickly into his own. Whereas you, the author of so much harm—what happened to you? No perp walk, no public vilification, no class action hatred, no cell rot. You went on doing exactly as you pleased, exactly as you'd done for ninety-four years, right up to the moment your daughter slit your throat.

Your carefully curated public self will be smashed to pieces posthumously, but you won't be around to see the demolition.

I drop the satchel in his lap, wishing, too late, I could slip Judy's POA papers back in. It might help in her defense: how can a non-person consciously kill a person? It would keep her in the kind of facility she's used to instead of prison.

And then remember, again, it doesn't matter. There are other copies, in all the right places.

Not thinking straight, still. His drugs as good as his word. Time to go.

A last look back from the door. The curled figure sunk further into the chair, a wet pulpy outgrowth of its leather and brass buttons. Stained a deep red, looking small, almost fetal. Cradling his satchel.

Another voice in the Wyvern chorus
. Their mix tape from hell.

§

A brief stop to try the Honda. Not a cough or sputter. I wonder what he planned to do about my car. He would have had it covered.

As it is, it will be towed away soon after 10 a.m. The parking regs odd on Elm. You can park all night and most of the day, but not between 8 and 10 a.m. But parking regs tell a story, if you listen. In this case, no hassle for lines of friends at dinners and other do's running late into the night. And no hassle for busy people needing lots of road to wheel big cars to work.

Someone will be on the blower by 10:01.

And that, with luck, will be before Iris returns from Mississauga. And before the police open their mail, and Max, panicking, starts calling Home Office.

Who—
you hope
—amidst all the kerfuffle to come, will recall the junker briefly disrupting the melody of a Rosedale morning?

I won't be picking it up anytime soon, if ever.

Walking. The pre-dawn air cool, not cold. Making my slow way home on drugged and battered bones. Stopping for frequent rests on curbs, benches.

4:10 by the clock tower on UCC, staring from atop its column down Avenue.

When and how did the watch disappear?
Image now of it on my wrist, glancing at it soon after I arrived. It can only have been Judy. Odd to think of her close to me, unclasping and removing it. An oddly delicate action amid the night's carnage. But no bloodstains on my wrist. I stand under a streetlight checking. Another unanswerable adjustment mystery.
Closing windows thick with them.

Scary thought: Judy the sanest, least spooky member of her top-end crazy, top-end spooky family.

Sane enough to get out for good.

No, not scary. Nothing is that clears your head. That lets you breathe.

Wherever Judy is gliding in the city, I know that in some sense she is right here beside me and always has been. In our very different ways, through twenty years apart, we've always been on the same unending path: ignoring red lights to cross deserted streets in the middle of the night.

18

Hallowe'en is the
usual lumpish modern affair, limping remnant of a rite that must once have had real verve. I set up around 5:00 on the landing at the top of the stairs. Half blocking the buzz-in pad—visitors have to reach awkwardly around me, or I key them in—but there's nowhere else to sit without blocking the door. Dusk has barely begun, twelve steps down people are passing back and forth from work and shopping, but this is the time of highest traffic in a neighbourhood of young couples, who walk the little ones around between school and suppertime.

Most of my gear borrowed. Lucy's kitchen chair. Her largest mixing bowl, with the assortment of Shoppers candy bought from the tenants' donation box, topped up by Ken's almost-empty fund. My Mayor Mask came from 303, who bought it for a party but decided to stay home and game instead. It's hot inside the cheap latex. And it doesn't bear much actual resemblance to His Worship—just a hairless, jowly orb that could belong to any old, fat man who eats and drinks incessantly. It's a glutton's version of the Face, I realize, minus the scarring and perched bizarrely atop an anorexic body. Not many kids brave the trip up to it. They hesitate on the threshold, peering up at the vision, elongated further by their low-angle perspective, of impossible stretch topped by a blob of sickly white. Parents murmur them back, but they're already retreating. Would more, or fewer, make the climb if I took it off?

It's mostly teens who empty the bowl. Later on, when the little kids are done and the ritual is all but concluded. Costumeless, elbow-dared by a friend, one mounts the steps, attempting some sort of hard but wheedling face, grabs a fistful of candies and jumps back down to guffaws. Part of the joke seems to be that I don't move or speak at all. Wax dummy.

§

Nichols' Variety was about a mile's walk from my foster parents' home. My second or third set, I must've been about seven. It was a new subdivision, filled with vacant lots and houses under construction, with dirt mountains and excavated pits and concrete basements with rooms but no doors, perfect for fantasy explorings. Mr. Nichols was tall and bald, with sad eyes and a pot belly, the image of stern authority to a kid. His wife was a mass in a flowered dress filling an armchair in the shadows while he worked the counter. Big glass jars of candy along a board in front: jujubes, gummi worms, raspberry dollars, lemon chips, licorice strings, black balls, peppermints, sour balls—three picks for a penny. It changed the way you walked, ignoring what's ahead to inspect the curb and gutter for glints of copper. The day before Hallowe'en, I snuck out of the house after dark and broke the windows in Nichols' with a metal rod from one of the homes-in-progress. Climbed through and smashed the candy jars, after filling my pockets with a few handfuls. Sat on the curb in front of the store, ringing rhythms on the road with the bar.

“Don't you like Mr. Nichols? Did he do something to make you angry?” I can't really remember the cop except for an impression of solemnity and weariness, mostly from his voice. My foster parents, faceless, standing behind him—one very still, one shifting nervously.

“I like him. He's a nice man.”

No shock like the truth
. Not a phrase yet, but a fact flaring in the old cop's eyes.

Grounded on Hallowe'en, which I'd planned to skip anyway. Few adults, then or later, able to guess what might actually constitute punishment to me. They'd have to be bent themselves.

§

Dr. Wyvern stares up from my lap, having pushed the Big Man off the front page for the first time this month. The
Star
and the
Sun
both used the same photograph. Not one from his self-tribute gallery and not one he would have approved. He's smiling blandly, a little vacantly, perhaps on a public panel. He's in his sixties, no doubt at the height of his influence at the university and hospital, his opinions sought and courted. The
Globe
went with one more suitably sombre, but with his mouth partway open, as if a question has stumped him or he's been caught between expressions. All are obviously photos on file for a public figure, rather than a shot selected by a family who has more than enough on its hands today.

ROSEDALE RAMPAGE!
screams the
Sun
. The
Star
only slightly more subdued:
Rosedale Slaying Shocks Community
. The subheadings differ slightly, but use variants of the same key words: “prominent,” “respected,” “doctor,” “professor,” “dead,” “murder.” No sign of “victim,” curiously. Is it only for the poor?

These are the late afternoon editions. It was still just the Big Man on my first trip to Shoppers. Either because the body hadn't been discovered yet, or because the police were giving themselves time, before an official announcement, to search for the “person of interest” both articles refer to.

Run, Judy
, I think. Though it's not really how I imagine her—not as a person fleeing, a fugitive. More as a force pervading the city, a wild but diffuse radical element, beyond pursuit or capture. Bizarre as she is, she might seem hard to miss, an easy target for trained detectives, but they won't find her quickly, she lives too far underground. Learned invisibility is the deepest disguise. A cicada is a big, odd-looking insect, but when it burrows under the earth for its seventeen-year sleep, no one scouring the surface has a chance of seeing it.

Other than the fact of a homicide, and its characterization, perhaps by a junior officer caught off guard, as “gruesome,” the focus of this first coverage is on the status and achievements of the deceased, and the shock and dismay of his neighbours, granted disproportionately lengthy quotes. The paucity of detail, along with the scant mention of the rest of the family, gives me hope that the murder has already been folded into a wider investigation, with multiple arrests made or forthcoming.

Eventually including—to dig a little more greedily in the candy jar—others from the same social echelon who enjoy the Wyvern holiday classics. Connoisseurs willing to pay for special, hard-to-get bootlegs from a special, hard-to-locate source. Without ever having seen them or any evidence of them, I sense these others, a complexity in the Wyvern aroma, a deepening of its stink.

It starts, I assume—this special new smell—with a change in Max's status with the police. Summoned, the shell-shocked son, sometime between this morning's lattes and lunch, from his routine Thursday office to the scene on Dunbar Road. Standing near where Judy and I sat, staring with a white and frozen face at the bloody ruins of his father. The Sandman by then a curled small castle, locked in rigor, red paint thrown down its walls.

Max standing in that special cleared space granted the bereaved, from custom if not respect, and, especially in the case of cops, to see what he'll do in it. A space, a little stage on which to do and say wrong things, while cop eyes note the flicker of false gestures and expressions from the wings.
Family kill each other, every day. Don't look far until you have to.

Is Sandor there?

No, not yet. Max at the top of every list the cops turned up: Executor in the suede packet in the corpse's lap, first name on the list beside the phone, in the Contacts book. The name the funeral home card in the deceased's wallet has on file. Max has to get there first, remove the pictures, pictures, pictures.
Yes, Dad, yes…

So, a little disconcerted, eyes flicking from the thought-tumble behind them, when he's stopped from reaching for the blood-soaked suede packet. “…my father's will… I'm his…” “I'm sorry, sir, but that was found with your father's body. It's evidence at a crime scene at this point.” “Of course, I understand. I'm sorry, it's just all so…”

Is that when it first flutters into Max's big brain that I might, for the moment, have my uses? He sent me to the old man—like a weak teacher referring an incorrigible student to the principal—to get disappeared. Which still has to happen. My eviction from Planet Wyvern is long overdue. Meanwhile, though, if I was greedy dolt enough to abscond with all the family pics, well, at least that's one way of keeping them from the cops.

If he could just X-ray through the suede and confirm they're missing. Relief tingling as conviction gains, delicate tendrils twining around dread, that I wouldn't have left without grabbing the extra leverage. All my threats of disdaining a payoff and sending Christmas Music to the cops just self-righteous shtick and bluff. Holier-than-thou crapola from a classic friend of Judy's. Embarrassing, really, these clowns she hooks up with. Just as he and Vivian decided the other night, after the poetry-and-dementia farce.

Vivian. God, he'd like to see her—
needs
to see her—now, and from the gurgling in his stomach it's got to be past one—but you don't check your watch or take a sec to call your girlfriend, not with your father bled out three feet in front of you. Not with several pairs of cop eyes fastened to you, none of them even pretending to roam.

Steadily, the scene becomes more crowded.

Forensics. Tech guys, photogs. Funeral home people, called by someone, told they aren't needed yet. Print dusters. Juniors outside to secure the scene, fend off neighbours, media as they twig.

Several tries to reach Sandor, his phone ringing off the hook. Finally a constable is sent to rouse and inform him. Reports back. A weeping wreck. Drinking all night, looks like.

Another constable sent to inform the sister. Who has no telephone of her own? A mentally unstable person, very fragile, Max informs them solemnly. Back now, alone. Apparently she's AWOL, the landlady at her group home hasn't seen her in two days.

Oh, really? A person of interest.

And Max, overhearing while a cop with slow handwriting asks him questions he's already answered, feels relief like elation, these little gas bubbles collecting on the inside of his chest, hollowed like a drum by fear.
See, Viv,
he imagines telling her later,
the nut jobs do have their uses occasionally. My sister a placeholder for her friend. Until we get what's ours. And then he can get what's his.
Feeling more than a little giddy—freaked-out giddy—at how they might just have walked right to the edge of a crumbling cliff and still jumped back in time.

And later, back home finally, giddiness persisting—though mellowed a bit, wine and a pinch of something harder with Viv—when a rap on the door startles. Trick or Treat? Not even gray yet.

Two men. Big. Suits. They'd have got here sooner, except the brass insisted on mapping out a careful approach, given the reputations of the people involved and the possibility, a hunch gaining in some minds, of a large, far-reaching investigation. And, too, a few of the usual turf squabbles between Sex Crimes and Homicide, even though Homicide has priority until their part is down. There was that, as usual, too.

“We have a few questions we'd like to ask you, Dr. Wyvern.”

“Questions? I think I answered every possible… It's been a terribly long and difficult day, as I'm sure…” It's upsetting how thoughts trail off and die in front of the butcher's block faces. “Um… here?”

“Unless there's somewhere else you'd like to talk?”

It's pleasant not to have a clue how things went down, when any way they might have gone down is pleasant.

And when even clueless speculation stops you thinking how your own day's gone down.
And down…

I woke up a couple of hours after returning home, cored. Not from real sleep, but from a mud-like stupor that was only partly a madman's chemicals seeping slowly out of me. I lay on the mattress a long time, staring at the ceiling.

Eyes open or closed, I saw no stairs. No Empress. I couldn't reach them, or her. I felt unspeakably alone. As if the planet had been blasted into dust and I'd been left behind as its janitor to sweep it up.

This is the last adjustment
, said the voice, the one I'd heard last night.
But it has to finish first
. And I had a premonition I've never had before, not just of an adjustment that isn't finished but of an adjustment that won't ever finish, it can't. It brought me to the point of shaking all over. My hands, my arms, my feet, my legs, my chest, my back, my head, my neck—all of me. Like leaves in a wind that won't stop. Except I had no trunk or branches. Just leaves.

And still now, replaying the day as I sit on Lucy's chair and dole out Smarties and plastic-wrapped suckers, every moment I find again in memory feels stale and unreal—like loops of waking dream I sleepwalk through, and sleepwalk through again remembering. Until, at last, I find the only place—I reach it—that's dark enough to wake, and know myself awake, in.

Gwen's voice when I call, around noon: “Hello, you've reached the office of…” No change.

But when I call again, a couple of hours later, a new voice, young and crisp: “We are sorry but the dental office is closed due to urgent family circumstances. We apologize for any inconvenience. The office will reopen at a date yet to be determined. Patients with issues of urgent concern are advised to…”

The Wyvern dismantling underway.

No sense of triumph, not even of satisfaction.

Don't feel anything
.

It all—the whole adjustment—feels like something that happened a long time ago, helped along by hands unrelated to my own. Something that had nothing to do with me.

“I have something to atone for,” I say to Stone. Standing in Big Empty, my shirt off. Hearing the formality, a ceremoniousness, that always comes into my voice when a window's almost closed and our meeting is drawing near.

You need to pay
, says Stone, who never lies.
Yes you do
.

Using the fine-tipped X-Acto, which has the sharpest blade, I score a series of parallel horizontal lines in my chest, beginning just below my shoulders and ending just above my navel. Six lines in all, about an inch-and-a-half apart.